Metastatic court decision of the day

The California Supreme Court has decided to allow gay marriage.  The progressive liberation of humanity from the bonds of convention and nature continues.  We shall be like gods.

Metastatic quote of the day

“Tomorrow, we shall achieve the victory, that the kingdom of God may come on earth as it is in heaven, and all those who love the Lord and will vote for Obama, say Amen.”

Rev. Joseph Lowery at an Obama campaign rally.

Win-win

The right-wing of the internet is all atwitter over the opinion of a Swiss ethics panel that “the arbitrary killing of flora is morally wrong.”  Needless to say, this is wonderful.  “Plant rights” would be an excellent addition to the metastatic creation of the world by man.  On the other hand, this seems to be further solidifying the gnostic stance of the American Right in regards to creation.  They’re children of the Enlightenment, enamored of domination.

As an added bonus, no one seems able to formulate moral imperatives in anything other than the language of rights.

Metastatic virtue

A Yale law student, writing for the Washington Post, notes the obvious: successful people (such as Yale Law School students) aren’t always nice.  In fact, they’re frequently jerks.  What confuses her, though, is that even those who have community service, social awareness, and activism coming out the wazoo are often rather shabby people in everyday life.

Of course, top universities accept hundreds of individuals who have demonstrated the highest levels of citizenship. These teenagers have volunteered in more food banks, sponsored more fundraisers and lobbied more officials than any previous generation. They earn, rightfully, the gratitude of their communities and the plethora of honors that come with it. Colleges at the top of U.S. News and World Report’s rankings would balk at the notion that these students are anything but the best and the brightest.

I’m not saying different. I’m saying that sometimes some of these students will denounce world hunger but be unfriendly to the homeless. They will debate environmental policy but never offer to take out the trash. They will believe vehemently in many causes but roll their eyes when reminded to be humble, to be generous and to “do what is right.”

These folks, she continues, rise to the top while shoving the genuine nice guys aside.  Her analysis ends with this, “I wonder if our society is crippling itself by subjecting its youths to an almost-Darwinian college selection process.”

Since this young lady has no idea how to analyze the problem, the metastatic overlords have asked me to explain.  Formerly, the problems of the world were thought to consist in the fallen  or  sinful nature of man.  Consequently, virtue consisted of loving God and loving one’s neighbor, the last consisting of charity toward those one encountered.  This required a constant struggle in the soul and the help of God’s grace, and even then, man’s condition could only be resolved through grace in death.

The contrasting, modern view is that the problems of the world a result of poor organization and a lack of knowledge.  With enlightenment and education man can, through world-immanent action, induce a metastatic change that will solve the problems that plague existence.  Consequently, virtue consists largely of holding the right political and social ideas and seeking to have them implemented.

Metastatic article of the day

Sex-changes, marriage and metastatic revolt, all in one short article.

Reactionary quote of the day

“To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything and your heart will certainly be wrung and possibly be broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact, you must give your heart to no one…avoid all entanglements; lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket—safe, dark, motionless, airless—it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. The alternative to tragedy, or at least to the risk of tragedy, is damnation. The only place outside Heaven where you can be perfectly safe from all the dangers and perturbations of love is Hell.”

-C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves

Metastatic quote of the day

Bear with the length (Background reading here and here if you haven’t heard about this Yale senior who tried to impregnate herself, induce abortions, and use the blood in an art project).

As an intervention into our normative understanding of “the real” and its accompanying politics of convention, this performance piece has numerous conceptual goals. The first is to assert that often, normative understandings of biological function are a mythology imposed on form. It is this mythology that creates the sexist, racist, ableist, nationalist and homophobic perspective, distinguishing what body parts are “meant” to do from their physical capability. The myth that a certain set of functions are “natural” (while all the other potential functions are “unnatural”) undermines that sense of capability, confining lifestyle choices to the bounds of normatively defined narratives

Just as it is a myth that women are “meant” to be feminine and men masculine, that penises and vaginas are “meant” for penetrative heterosexual sex (or that mouths, anuses, breasts, feet or leather, silicone, vinyl, rubber, or metal implements are not “meant” for sex at all), it is a myth that ovaries and a uterus are “meant” to birth a child.

When considering my own bodily form, I recognize its potential as extending beyond its ability to participate in a normative function. While my organs are capable of engaging with the narrative of reproduction — the time-based linkage of discrete events from conception to birth — the realm of capability extends beyond the bounds of that specific narrative chain. These organs can do other things, can have other purposes, and it is the prerogative of every individual to acknowledge and explore this wide realm of capability.

-Aliza Shvarts, in the Yale Daily News

To the average person this probably seems a bloviating morass of self-indulgent pap, but to the metastatic thinker the meaning is clear and inspiring. We do not, Shvarts declares, live in a cosmos (which is to say, an ordered existence) in which we must attune ourselves to the divine order of being. Rather, existence is corrupted. God must be murdered and the world remade–the order of being must be destroyed. This is what the railing against the normative means, that nothing outside the self is to be allowed any value or significance. External order must be swept away. All norms must be smashed and transgressed, all constraints must be broken so that humans may ascend to the role of creators, that our throne may be established on the grave of God (for it is intolerable that there should be a God other than myself).

Metastatic quote of the day

“Does it require deep intuition to comprehend that man’s ideas, views and conceptions, in one word, man’s consciousness, changes with every change in the conditions of his material existence, in his social relations and in his social life?”

-Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, The Communist Manifesto

Metastatic quote of the day

“In all matters constraint and compulsion are unbearable to me.”

Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Confessions

A word from the metastatic overlords

You go into these small towns in Pennsylvania and, like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing’s replaced them. And they fell through the Clinton administration, and the Bush administration, and each successive administration has said that somehow these communities are gonna regenerate and they have not.

And it’s not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy toward people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.

-Barack Obama

The Supreme Metastatic Overlord’s recent statement has been causing a ruckus, and therefore all agents of change are reminded to choose their words carefully, as the proles are apparently too caught in their false consciousness to recognize it as such.