Metastatic quote of the day

“Whatever engagements or promises any one made for himself, he is under the obligation of them, but cannot by any compact whatsoever bind his children or posterity. For his son, when a man being altogether as free as his father, any act of the father can no more give away the liberty of the son than it can of anybody else.”

-John Locke, Second Treatise on Government

Metastatic political ad of the day

Divided We Fail, an AARP front group/spinoff, is enhancing its “bipartisan” bona fides by running ads in the (generally) reactionary National Review. The text of their back page ad in the current issue is a fine example of metastatic political thought.

Imagine a world where our elected officials work as one.

Now replace “imagine” with “demand.”

That’s exactly what we intend to do — demand that our politicians work together to fix the health care and financial security crisis in this country.

We’re all hearing the campaign promises about how the candidates pledge to “work together” and how we need “change.” So what’s different this time? Divided We Fail is going to hold them to those promises.

We’ll be watching after the election, holding our elected leaders accountable and demanding that they work together to end the gridlock standing in the way of affordable health care and financial security for all.

As we all know, only faction and the ensuing gridlock stand in the way of “affordable health care and financial security for all.”

The gay penguins will return

The reactionaries are already making use of this story about the withdrawal of pro-homosexual materials from British schools due to the protests of Muslim parents.  Why, they ask, do we cater so to Muslim sensibilities while we would never countenance such objections from Christians?  All they can see is the unfairness of it, and the apparent contradiction of our logic.

But strategically and dialectically it makes perfect sense.  The metastatic project requires that what society was be destroyed.  The use of premodern means here suits postmodern ends.  Indeed, it is all the better for the contradictions.  Let the Christians sputter about consistency; they will merely realize their powerlessness all the more as they are replaced even in their role of reaction.  They’ll betake themselves to the catacombs long before we bother to consign them there.  As for our tools, they will be broken when he have no further need for them.  They have tasks yet, though, among them making piety repulsive.

Reactionary quote of the day

“The friendship of man and wife seems to be natural; for human beings are by nature more apt to join together in couples than to form civil societies, inasmuch as the family is prior in time to the state and more indispensable, and the propagation of the species a more fundamental characteristic of animal existence.  The other animals associate for this purpose alone, but man and wife live together not merely for the begetting of children, but also to satisfy the needs of their life: for the functions of the man and the woman are clearly divided and distinct the one from the other.”

-Aristotle, The Nicomachean Ethics

Metastatic quote of the day

“I would have loved my fellow-men in spite of themselves. It was only by ceasing to be human that they could forfeit my affection. So now they are strangers and foreigners to me; they no longer exist for me, since such is their will.”

-Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Reveries of the Solitary Walker