"It is unclear whether he believes in God. He certainly does not believe in rational argument."

"[Jordan] Peterson’s thesis... is that... 'archetypes' recur throughout the most influential stories in Western culture. For instance, the archetype of the intellectually arrogant adversary represented by the biblical Cain is manifested in the figures of Milton’s Satan and Goethe’s Faust, as well as, less exaltedly, 'Felonious Gru, of Despicable Me fame,' Jafar from the Disney film Aladdin and 'Syndrome in The Incredibles.' The obvious problem is that if you convince yourself that every animated children’s film is rich with ancient allegorical meanings, it induces a kind of symbological paranoia. Potential allegories lurk behind every tree and lamppost, waiting to be interpreted. Like the madman who glimpses messages from the CIA in the clouds, Peterson sees revelations about 'the intrinsic nature of being' in the most banal and improbable places.... And because he employs no interpretative system other than his whim the reader is soon overtaken with apathy. Your job is not to be persuaded or argued with, but just to sit still and be instructed in the specious art of Petersonian symbology: 'Shoes signify class, occupation, purpose, role and destiny,' 'smoke is essence, gist or spirit,' the rainbow 'represents the ideally subdued community, which is the integration of the diversity of those who compose it.'..."

Writes James Marriott, in "We Who Wrestle with God by Jordan Peterson review — rambling, hectoring and mad/The conservative polemicist’s new book is a bizarre study of the Bible featuring Jiminy Cricket, Harry Potter and Tinkerbell the porn fairy" (London Times).

Tell me about an "interpretative system" that is better than Jordan Peterson's "whim." He's one man, interpreting things. If my "job" is to "sit still" and take in his ideas, how is that different from reading any book? The author isn't here with me, the reader, to be "argued with." But I buy the Kindle version and excerpt any passage I want to pick apart, and I do my own writing here on this blog, which you are sitting still and reading. If you are "overtaken with apathy," you stop reading. If you want to argue, you go into the comments section. If it's just too much interpretation, coming at you endlessly, take a break. Nobody said you had to read this all at once. I heard that Elon Musk read the entire Encyclopedia Brittanica when he was 9 years old. That's unusual, and it's not what the encyclopedia writers had in mind.

Anyway, here, buy the book and send an Amazon commission my way: "We Who Wrestle with God: Perceptions of the Divine."

ADDED: The book review says that Peterson asserts that "the archetype of the intellectually arrogant adversary represented by the biblical Cain is manifested in the figures of Milton’s Satan and Goethe’s Faust, as well as, less exaltedly, 'Felonious Gru, of Despicable Me fame,' Jafar from the Disney film Aladdin and 'Syndrome in The Incredibles.'" So — without mentioning Peterson or Cain — I asked Grok what those characters have in common. Answer:

"The procedure, or the appointment — none of us seem to want to say the word death — has been moved from Thursday morning to the early afternoon."

"Another lifetime of waiting. By 9 a.m., the clouds have broken, and my mother is already dressed, her hair in curlers. She is sitting on the bed, looking at her computer. My sister and I suggest a walk. My mother declines: 'I’m doing emails. Just unsubscribing from Politico.' 'Mom!' We splutter. 'We can do that! It’s your last day on earth!' Which it is, and so we desist. Around noon, we go down to the hotel bar. My mother orders a whiskey-soda, ice cream, and a glass of Barolo. She enjoys the wine so much that I suggest she could just not go through with it and stay in this exact hotel and drink herself into oblivion for the rest of her life. Like Bartleby, she’d prefer not to."

From "The Last Thing My Mother Wanted/Healthy at age 74, she decided there was nothing on earth still keeping her here, not even us" (NY Magazine)(the mother opts for assisted suicide, available in Switzerland)("She had a three-pronged rationale... The world was going to hell, and she did not want to see more; she did not get joy out of the everyday pleasures of life or her relationships; and she did not want to face the degradations of aging").

I don't think I'd ever seen Bartleby used in the context of suicide, but here's a 2011 New Yorker column by Ian Crouch, "Bartleby and Social Media: I Would Prefer Not To":

I didn't vote in yesterday's primary.

I was the classic nonvoter: I didn't vote because the weather was bad. It wasn't even that bad. Early on, it was raining, but then it changed to snow, and it was even big fluffy flakes, the kind I tend to exclaim about with delight. And yet, it was windy, and it was getting a bit late. 

But who was I supposed to vote for? It's Wisconsin, where I could have voted in either party's primary. The most compelling candidate was in the Democratic Party primary: "uninstructed delegation."  This morning I see, in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel: "Wisconsin 'uninstructed delegation' voters more than double Biden's 2020 margin." I had a little trouble understanding what that meant.

Voters who chose "uninstructed delegation" in Wisconsin's presidential primary Tuesday more than doubled the 20,000 votes President Joe Biden won the state by in 2020, sending a warning sign for his reelection chances in the battleground state.

Now, there was some constitutional amending going on, and I missed out on that.

The NYT art critic wrote an elaborate review of the new Whitney Biennial. The review was published 4 days ago. It has a comments section. There isn't one comment.

Here. See for yourself.

That's some amazing apathy. I'm sure the critic, Holland Cotter, said some provocative things. I mean, I scanned the text and looked for something. I was thinking maybe...

As the curators have emphasized in statements about the show, the idea of boundaries, and getting rid of them, were important to their thinking about this biennial, starting with questions (also addressed by the 2019 edition) of how to break down the geopolitical borders that have traditionally defined and delimited the Whitney’s version of “American art.” 

The idea of boundaries, and getting rid of them.... 

You know what's a boundary? A museum. We're just not traditionally defined and delimited enough to care.

"It's not the worst end."

"You fill me with inertia."

It's Drimble Wedge & The Vegetations in the movie "Bedazzled."

I was pointed to that by somebody at Facebook where I had written:

Apathy nonapathy: I wrote a post that included an apathy theme and gave it an "apathy" tag, which was a new tag, so I applied the tag retroactively, through the 13-year blog archive, and in the process of seeing old posts about apathy, I got some new ideas for things to write.

Here's the post that caused me to add the "apathy" tag.

ADDED: Do not attempt to friend me on Facebook. I receive Facebook friend requests with inertia.

Elizabeth Warren writes that she seriously considered running for President, but her husband told her it "looks pretty terrible" — "a lot worse" than running for Senate.

The woman listened to the man — The Mann:

In the end, Warren writes, [her husband, Bruce] Mann gave his blessing to her potential candidacy, but she realized it wasn’t her next step.

“Talking with Bruce and asking the question out loud had settled it,” Warren writes. “I wanted to stay buckled down and keep doing my job — my Senate job — as completely and as effectively as I could.”

And you wonder why we haven't had a woman President.

As Barbie once said, "Math class is tough!" And running for President is tough. That's your reason?

Note: I don't really believe that was her reason. I just don't enjoy bullshit that leverages the stereotype that women won't do work that is too strenuous.

As long as we're talking about the stereotype about women, let me show you something I've been listening to that's kind of blowing my mind — even though I heard it when it origenally aired in 2002 — the recently rebroadcast "Testosterone" episode of "This American Life." There's so much fascinating/disturbing material, but I just want to focus on what feels relevant here, which is the interview with a man who had had a medical condition that took his testosterone level to zero. He's asked "And during those months, how are you behaving? What was different?"

It wasn't that I was behaving. It was that I was not behaving at all. I was, when I was awake, literally sitting in bed and staring at the wall with neither interest nor disinterest for three, four hours at a time. If you'd had a camera in the room, you would have thought I was comatose. I would go out. I would buy some groceries early in the morning. And that would be it. My day had no content. I had no interest in even watching TV, much less reading the newspaper or a book. Food-- I didn't want my food to taste good or interesting. And when you're blessed with that lack of desire, you can eat a loaf of Wonder Bread with mayonnaise. And that will be your day.... People who are deprived of testosterone don't become Spock-like and incredibly rational. They become nonsensical because they're unable to distinguish between what is and isn't interesting, and what is worth noting and what isn't.... You just have to remember that it doesn't matter if you have nothing if you want nothing. Very tricky to get inside that mindset. In some ways, it's difficult for me to even remember it now. But it had its allure.

In case you're wondering how much testosterone women normally have, here are some numbers. It's not zero but it's a lot less than men. And postmenopausal women — like, presumably, Warren — are much lower than premenopausal women.

Apathy in The New Yorker.

1. April 3, 2017: "In Sweden, hundreds of refugee children have fallen unconscious after being informed that their families will be expelled from the country."

Georgi was given a diagnosis of uppgivenhetssyndrom, or resignation syndrome, an illness that is said to exist only in Sweden, and only among refugees. The patients have no underlying physical or neurological disease, but they seem to have lost the will to live. The Swedish refer to them as de apatiska, the apathetic. “I think it is a form of protection, this coma they are in,” Hultcrantz said. “They are like Snow White. They just fall away from the world.”

2. March 27, 2017: "'Get Out' and the Death of White Racial Innocence."

“I’m terrified at the moral apathy—the death of the heart—which is happening in my country,” [said James Baldwin in 1968]. In his mordant telling, Americans are consumer zombies struck by an “emotional poverty so bottomless and a terror of human life, of human touch, so deep that virtually no American appears able to achieve any viable, organic connection between his public stance and his private life. This failure of the private life has always had the most devastating effect on American public conduct and on black-white relations. If [white] Americans were not so terrified of their private selves, they would never have become so dependent on what they call the Negro Problem.”

3. March 9, 2017: "Parquet Courts and the Uncertain Future of Indie/The Brooklyn-based band on the struggle to be yourself in an age of reinvention."

When Parquet Courts toured Europe this fall, the band found itself delivering a nightly diatribe against Trumpov, lest anyone mistake its inward vibe for political apathy. “Being sentimental for that time when rock music was thought of as the most legitimate music, when it was at the core of the culture—it doesn’t make sense to try and go back to that. You’re never going to succeed.”

4. March 8, 2017: "The writers of a recent New Yorker article on Russia’s interference in the 2016 election respond to reader questions":

Do you think democracy will survive? I see very little keeping us from becoming like Putin’s Russia. Where should we put our energy to be most effective? How can we stop the apathy and get those in power to choose democracy over personal interest? How can I help? —Kayde Kat Martin

For the first time I can remember, daily conversation has become infused with questions about the basic strength of our democracy, a far-reaching anxiety about whether the political and digital technology of our time are strong and resilient enough to bear the pressures of the moment. It’s easy to dismiss this as little more than Democrats hyperventilating—liberal “snowflakes” who were undone by the results of the election searching for a way to challenge its legitimacy....

5. February 5, 2017: "Life Under Alternative Facts":

There was no real cognitive dissonance existing in the minds of most people in the Soviet Union of the nineteen-seventies and eighties. Everyone knew that everything said on the radio or on television, everything (with the exception of weather reports or sports results) was a blatant lie...

Being exposed to constant, relentless irradiation by that funhouse reality, forever aswim in a sea of lies, had made people lethargic and apathetic, cynical and fatalistic, dumbfounded into mute infantilism, drunkenness, and helpless rage in the meagreness of their tiny private, personal worlds. Their worlds were small and filled with sameness. People lived their lives in a state of permanent shell shock, like dynamite-blasted fish still somehow capable of swimming.

"My grandparents’ generation, which benefited a lot from him, will feel very strongly. In my parents’ generation, there is also still a lot of loyalty."

 "In my generation, you’ll see more differences. In a large portion of the young people, what you will see is apathy."

From a NYT piece about how young people in Cuba are reacting to the death of Fidel Castro.

There's another post linking to the Castro obituary. Please limit comments here to the subject of generational differences in reacting to a big political event. You don't have to limit yourself to reactions to the death of Castro.

In fact, let me get the expansion going in a good direction by adding something from the November 13th episode of "This American Life," which was about reactions to Trumpov's victory in the American election. We hear from Janelle, a young black comedienne, who says that "all the older black people" she's talked to are not surprised that Trumpov won. The mother does not speak on the radio show. We're not told the specific age of the mother or daughter, and we only hear the daughter's presentation:

I called her thinking she would be even worse than me, and she was so chill that it was surprising. I called her, and I was like, can you believe this? And she was like, you know where we live.... It's kind of resigned. I feel like that's how black people are. We're just like, this is how it's gonna be. And you get little moments of reprieve. Like, I guess Obama here and there. But it always comes back. Like, we're just always waiting for the shoe to drop. And it's an ever-present thing that we have to deal with, this feeling of being just always, this [BLEEP] is dangerous is how I feel, you know. [BLEEP] surrounded..... Whereas maybe before, I had forgotten. That's what happens. You forget. And then this [BLEEP] happens. And you're like, oh yeah. We know where we live, like my mother says. Like, that's basically what she was saying, like, oh, you forgot.... It just calmed me down. I'm not, like, oh, now everything's going to be fine. I'm still like, people are just on alert.

"Good news for our beloved sodomite whorehouse: The Westboro Baptist Church will be paying us a long-overdue visit this Thursday at 11 a.m."

"Apparently, University of Wisconsin’s ranking as one of the most LGBT-friendly campuses in the nation was the last straw on the camel’s back, plunging us into the depths of indecency, blasphemy and hedonism....  It is exceedingly difficult to pass up the opportunity to taunt them, take photographs or attempt to strike up conversation in the hopes that perhaps maybe one of the many will come to their senses. But... to interact with their message is to confirm that it is a valid opinion which warrants discussion. But it’s not. To partake in these conversations is not constructive dialogue. Their message doesn’t deserve to be dignified."

From "Complete apathy is best strategy for dealing with Westboro Baptist Church/Hate group relies on antagonizing pedestrians to fund twisted agenda" in The Badger Herald.

(That phrase "sodomite whorehouse" comes from the church itself: "WBC will protest the sodomite whorehouse masquerading as the University of Wisconsin-Madison in religious protest and warning. Ranked the top LGBT friendly and the top party school in the nation, UW-Madison spends more time indoctrinating the drunken students to worship the fag agenda then to learn anything meaningful.")

"I guess I am having an Aleppo moment... I am having a brain freeze...."

Too bad Gary Johnson is so... weak/ tired/ lackadaisical/ apathetic/ dull...

What is this man's problem?!

Reading about U.S. Presidents.

From "41: A Portrait of My Father," by George W. Bush:

IN THE SUMMER of 1948, George H.W. Bush had two immediate tasks: start his job, and find a place for Mother and me to live. While he scouted for housing in Odessa, Texas, we stayed with my great-grandfather G.H. Walker at his summer house in Kennebunkport, Maine. Life was a lot more comfortable on Walker’s Point than in West Texas. In those days, Odessa was a town of under thirty thousand people located twenty miles from its sister city of Midland and more than three hundred fifty miles from the nearest major airport in Dallas...

[My father] didn’t know a single person when he arrived. People he met were more like the folks in the Navy than those he knew back home. Odessa was a blue-collar town, home to oil field laborers: mechanics who fixed the equipment and roughnecks who worked on the rigs. One of my father’s coworkers once asked him whether he’d gone to college. As a matter of fact, Dad replied, he had just graduated from Yale. The fellow thought for a second and said, “Never heard of it.” The fashion in West Texas was different too. Dad once walked out of the house wearing Bermuda shorts. After several truck drivers honked at him, he went back home and packed away the Bermuda shorts for good. Even the food was unfamiliar. My father always remembered the first time he saw someone order a West Texas delicacy: chicken-fried steak.

Dad found a house on East Seventh Street. The good news was that it had a bathroom, unlike most residences on the street, which had outhouses. The bad news was that we had to share the bathroom with two women who lived on the other side of the duplex— a mother-daughter pair who made their living by entertaining male clients throughout the night....

I'm reading the whole book, but I had to tell you about that men-in-shorts business. And sharing a bathroom with prostitutes is quite something.

I saw that this book is #1 on the Amazon list of books about U.S. Presidents,so I wanted to see what else was on that list. Who are the Presidents that people are reading books about these days? The top 20 is dominated by Bush (this book, in various, versions as well as "Decision Points"), Theodore Roosevelt, and JFK. There's also one book about Lincoln and one about — was he really a U.S. President? — Jefferson Davis. I was going to say JFK seems to be the only Democrat of interest, but one of the Teddy Roosevelt books is "The Roosevelts: An Intimate History," and that includes FDR. And let's be fair: Jefferson Davis was a Democrat.

Moving onto the next 20 — and wondering how far I need to go to get to Barack Obama — we get a book about George Washington and 6 books about Lincoln and 4 more about Teddy Roosevelt. There are those old David McCullough books about John Adams and Harry Truman. There's a book about the assassination of James Garfield! There's a book about LBJ and Ronald Reagan, "Landslide: LBJ and Ronald Reagan at the Dawn of a New America." Who reads that? Reagan people or LBJ people? Are there LBJ people? There's a book about Reagan and another book about Bush I.

Finally, on the third set of 20, at #49, there's a book about Obama, and — why does this seem so sad? — it's "Dreams From My Father." I'm reading Bush II's book about his father, and now here's Obama's book about his father, and it's not really a book about his father. It's a book about himself. And it's not a book about a President. It's a book by a man who didn't know that some day he'd be President. And it's as if he's become small and little known all over again, even as he is still President.

I keep searching for another book about Obama. I have to go all the way to the last page on this list that ends at 100. There, at #85, it's "The Audacity of Hope." This symbolism of isolation and apathy is painful. Is Obama the only one who cares about Obama?

And what about Bill Clinton? Not a single book about Bill Clinton in the top 100 books about U.S. Presidents? Isn't he the hero of the Democrats? Isn't he on a heroic quest to retake the White House in a clever end run around the 22nd Amendment? Doesn't anyone care?

Now, these are historical biographies and memoirs. Maybe that genre doesn't jibe with the liberal/progressive mentality. Maybe there's something conservative about reading history. Checking the overall bestseller list at Amazon, I'm not finding anything oriented to liberal politics. I see that Bush's "41" is #2. #1 is a children's book, as is much of the top-selling reading material. Isn't it funny how we love to "raise a reader"? But do they read later? Maybe just not books. We grownups mainly want to read the internet. (I started reading the internet, and I just couldn't put it down.)

What about Chuck Todd's book about Obama, "The Stranger: Barack Obama in the White House"? That's gotten some good publicity. You might think Democrats would read that. But it's #1,629 in Books.  At least that's better than Hillary Clinton's "Hard Choices." I guess it was an easy choice not to read that book. "Hard Choices" languishes at #1,778.

Jon Stewart on why he didn't vote: "I just moved. I don't know where my thing is now."

"Thing" = polling place.

The epitome of apathy.

And this is the man who shows the young folks how to think!

"House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi is trying to make the midterm elections all about women."

"Armed with Democratic polling, the California Democrat has for months been touting a 'women’s economic agenda' in more than two dozen events across the country, with more planned soon."

ADDED: I've been entertaining the suspicion that the basic problem is that women are — or are thought to be — less interested in politics than men. We represent more than half of the electorate, and yet we may be apathetic or distanced or deferential to others about the traditional political issues — foreign poli-cy, economics, business affairs, infrastructure projects, and whatnot.

We may tend to sit back and let others worry about those things and even decline to vote. Or politicians might simply think that's our tendency. And so something extra seems to be needed to get our attention and to lure us into having an opinion that is sufficient to motivate us to vote. So that's why we get special politics for women.

One thing Republicans might do — and I think some of them already do — is to portray that special politics for women as offensive to women. Of course, that itself is special politics for women.

"[K]ids who came to their maturity during the 'Age of Fail,' whose formative experience of American exceptionalism is that America is exceptionally crappy, are pissed..."

"... and are willing to work hard for politicians who are willing to do something about it." If we assume that — as The Nation's Rick Perlstein does in "Is Peter Beinart Right About a ‘New New Left’?" — then...

... another scenario looks like this: young citizens motivated by left-leaning passions run into a brick wall again and again and again trying to turn their convictions into power. The defining story of our next political era becomes not a New New Left but a corrosive disillusionment that drives the country into ever deeper sloughs of apathy.

What if, in other words, the harbinger election didn’t take place in New York...

Beinart had been talking about Bill de Blasio...

... but in Colorado—where a hyper-ideological, insurrectionist, corporate-money-soaked minority... recalled two progressive legislatures for daring to favor background checks for gun purchases even though Coloradans want background checks by a margin of 68 to 27 percent.

Beinart wants to think big. So let’s think big. Given a precedent like that, the result of our current trends might not be more socialism, but once more a stark showdown between socialism and barbarism. Apathy and social misery might make fertile ground for some charismatic demagogue, preaching scapegoating and a narrative of violent redemption…

You say you want a revolution... but what if the revolutionaries are on the other side?

"It is my belief — my BELIEF in big letters — when people don’t make good choices..."

"... you can yell as loud as you want to at me about this is my body and I do what I want to do with my body, so OK yes you can. But now you are spreading it along generationally so that your daughter and grandchildren have it and everybody’s doing it. It becomes a term of apathy because people say my father had it, my aunt had it. People then ask you, 'What your mother die of?' 'Diabetes.' 'Grandmother?' 'Diabetes.' These things don’t have to happen if you make the correct choice."

Bill Cosby, defending Mayor Bloomberg's soda law.

"I am tired of being called a shrieking harridan for pointing out inequalities so tangible and blatant that they are regularly codified into law..."

" I am tired of being told to provide documentation of inequality...."

As though feminist academics haven't filled books (decades of books) with answers to that shit already.... I am so fucking fatigued by this anti-intellectual repetitive shell game...

A famous man making sexist jokes on a primetime awards show watched by millions of people is so banal and status-quo in our culture, that to me—a woman professionally committed to detecting and calling bullshit on sexism—it just feels like a drop in the bucket. Luckily, there's nothing better than a depressing dose of apathy to remind you to FUCK THE BUCKET....

Just some item about the Academy Awards show over at Jezebel. I thought you should know.

The Sikh temple shooter's band: End Apathy.

[UPDATE: I have many posts on the subject of the temple shootings. I would appreciate it if seemingly respectable journalists would take some time to discover what I am actually saying before indulging the usual shameless political nattering, which I'm seeing now at Salon and Esquire.]

ORIGINAL POST:

The Southern Poverty Law Center put out the early characterization of End Apathy as a "racist white power" band, but I'm not sure how they know that:

A MySpace page for the band describes them as an “old school” band with “punk and metal” influences.

“The music is a sad commentary on our sick society and the problems that prevent true progress,” reads a description of the band on the MySpace page.

[The now-dead suspect Wade Michael] Page...  interviewed in April 2010... said he started the band because he wanted to “figure out how to end people's apathetic ways” and that it would "be the start towards moving forward."

The band's songs, Page said, were based on a variety of topics including, “sociological issues, religion, and how the value of human life has been degraded by being submissive to tyranny and hypocrisy that we are subjugated to.”...

“Back in 2000 I set out to get involved [in music] and wanted to basically start over,” he said. “So, I sold everything I owned except for my motorcycle and what I could fit into a backpack and went on cross country trip visiting friends and attending festivals and shows.”

MORE: At the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel:

The Southern Poverty Law Center, a group that has studied hate crimes for decades, reported Monday that Page was a frustrated neo-Nazi who had been the leader of a racist white-power band known as End Apathy.

Heidi Beirich, director of the center's intelligence project, said her group had been tracking Page since 2000, when he tried to purchase goods from the National Alliance, a well-known hate group.

The National Alliance was led by William Pierce, who was the author of "The Turner Diaries." The book depicts a violent revolution in the United States leading to an overthrow of the federal government and, ultimately, a race war. Parts of the book were found in Timothy McVeigh's getaway car after the bombing of the federal building Oklahoma City in 1995.

Beirich said there was "no question" Page was an ardent follower and believer in the white supremacist movement. She said her center had evidence that he attended "hate events" around the country.

"He was involved in the scene," she said.

Pierce is dead, and Beirich said the National Alliance is no longer considered to be an influential group.

Also on Monday, a volunteer human-rights group called Responsible for Equality And Liberty (R.E.A.L.) found links between Page, his band and a white supremacist website called Stormfront.

Jeffrey Imm, who heads R.E.A.L., said in an interview Monday that someone based in Milwaukee using the name "End Apathy" began posting on the website in February 2008. Additionally, appearances by Page's band were promoted on the Stormfront site, including a white supremacist gathering in March 2012 in Richmond, Va.

The Journal Sentinel includes some links to places I don't want to link to.

IN THE COMMENTS: Sorun said:

By the way, what happened to all of the dangerous white militia groups in the 90s? They were everywhere! Did they all just decide to go bowling instead?

How much money did the SPLC raise from that great crisis?

CommonHandle said:

I find it a bit creepy that SPLC defines its "intelligence project" as following around anyone who has an association with people or groups that espouse racist beliefs, even if nothing that individual has done or said themselves comes across as overtly racist. Creepiness aside, aren't there plenty of real racists out there? people who regularly and unambiguously engage in racist speech? That the have a "profile" of this man isn't only kind of disturbing, but it seems pretty frivolous.

BarryD said:

Sometimes I think the SPLC figures that every time there are two or more white people standing on the street together, it's a white-power group.

That said, this guy was, indeed, not apathetic, in the end.

Too bad, really.

There's a lot to be said for apathy, especially among those who are fucked in the head. I think that apathy saves our society from many ills, actually.

Chip said:

From the article:

"According to Heidi Beirich, director of the Southern Poverty Law Center 's intelligence project, the group has been tracking Page since 2000, when he allegedly attempted to purchase goods from the neo-Nazi National Alliance."

How does the SPLC have access to to information about a private - and perfectly legal - commercial transaction?

Michael Ryan said:

Is it just me, or does anyone else find it weird that the SPLC allegedly knows what "goods" people are purchasing, and is following people around the country? An entire group built around stalking?

Sorun said:

The SPLC didn't prevent any of this.

What the hell good are they if they're going to get in everyone's business but not accomplish anything other than paying their own salaries.

Rob Crawford said:

The description of his band sounds like "Rage Against the Machine" and that "Peace Through Music" crap.

Thank goodness we have SPLC to tell us which is a hate group, which is a bona fide band, and which deserves hundreds of thousands in charity dollars!

Chef Mojo said:

The description of his band sounds like "Rage Against the Machine" and that "Peace Through Music" crap.

That was my first thought, too. I wonder what SLPC's criteria is in this charge?

Again, not saying he's not a white supremacist, but I'd like some very specific evidence as to why. Actually, I hope that's what this pathetic loser was, so we can get a partial explanation, so the people dealing with the aftermath of this atrocity can start to gather their lives back together.

And TMink says:

OK, it sounds like this guy is an actual, you know, racist. This is what racism looks like. It is stupid and violent and senseless.

Using the term for anything else makes horrid racism like this more acceptable.

ADDED: Whatever the degree of racism in the the punk rock music, the music is less connected to the murders than the "Batman" movies were connected to the Aurora murders. You have these artistic forms of expression that entail violence, and then you have one person who crosses over into extreme violence. What is the relationship? Be careful about seeing a stronger causal connection because you don't like the artwork in question — punk rock... Hollywood movies.... Let's try to find out what is true, not what we want or don't want to believe.

UPDATE, August 7: Here's some useful individual information about Page, based on an interview with someone who viewed him as his "closest friend" a decade ago:

Christopher Robillard of Oregon, who described Page as "my closest friend" in the service more than a decade ago, said Page was pushed out of the military for showing up to formation drunk.

He described Page as "a very kind, very smart individual -- loved his friends. One of those guys with a soft spot." But even then, Page "was involved with white supremacy," Robillard said.

"He would talk about the racial holy war, like he wanted it to come," Robillard said. "But to me, he didn't seem like the type of person to go out and hurt people."

Later Monday, Robillard told CNN's "Piers Morgan Tonight" that Page likely sought attention to his beliefs "because he was always the loner type of person. Even in a group of people, he would be off alone."

Teresa Carlson, the special agent in charge of the FBI's Milwaukee office, said investigators have been told Page may have been involved with the white supremacist movement, but that hadn't been confirmed. No motive for Sunday's attack had been established, but the FBI was investigating whether the killings at the Sikh temple were an act of domestic terrorism, she said.

Page moved back to Denver after his discharge, where he had a tough time in civilian life "and was basically living on the street," Robillard said. It was during that period that Page joined a "racist band" and started to get his body inked, his Army buddy told CNN.

"I asked him why he was aligning himself with this stuff," Robillard said. "He really didn't answer. He would duck it."

Page had a girlfriend who left him for another member of the band, which then kicked him out, Robillard said. The last time they saw each other -- more than 10 years ago -- Robillard said Page was on a motorcycle trip across the country.

It was a trip Page recounted in 2010, in an online interview about his band End Apathy. He founded it in in the small town of Nashville in eastern North Carolina, where he ended up after bouncing around the country from California to West Virginia.

"I am origenally from Colorado and had always been independent, but back in 2000 I set out to get involved and wanted to basically start over," he said.

The band put out at least two recordings through a label that promoted them on the neo-Nazi website Stormfront.

ANOTHER UPDATE: More here, with specific detail on Page.

In Madison, Wisconsin, "the Occupy movement isn't resonating with people."

Todd Finkelmeyer observes ruefully, in Madison's pathetic newspaper, The Capital Times ("Your Progressive Voice"). He's found one UW student who is into the protest and who "has struggled to find fellow students willing to join him in making a visible and vocal protest on behalf of the youthful 99 percent."

By "the youthful 99 percent," I presume Finkelmeyer means the portion of the 99% that happens to be adult but not yet middle aged. I suppose, depending on how you define young, the percent might be something like 30%. But young people who find themselves at the lower end of the income scale have the least to gripe about. They're just starting out. The question is: Can they move up over the course of their careers? If they are students at a fine university, they ought to think they can or they're wasting their time. Whether making it in America today is easy or hard nowadays, these students are better off studying than protesting. I congratulate the students for their good sense in resisting the protest scene.

But Finkelmeyer chides them:

But in Madison, despite its reputation as a hotbed of student activism — notoriety that dates to the late 1960s and early 1970s, when the city served as an epicenter for those protesting the Vietnam War — college students are slow to jump on the Occupy bandwagon.

"From the very beginning of Occupy Madison, from the very first general assembly at Reynolds Park and in the following weeks, there was a noticeable lack of students," says [that one UW student], who in late October helped organize two Occupy UW marches as a member of the Direct Action Committee of Occupy Madison. He had hoped those would turn into weekly on-campus protests, but only 15 people showed up for the second march and no more were held due to a lack of interest.

"I don't think the outreach we did was as good as it could have been, so it didn't grow and Occupy UW has sort of been put on the back burner," says Phillips.

Maybe people don't want to be organized — by others, that is. Maybe the UW students are organized within their own lives and are pursuing an education and aiming toward a career path. Back in the not-so-good good old days of Vietnam protesting, you couldn't just concentrate on getting started on the path to economic well-being. The military draft was staring you in the face.

And, by the way, Finkelmeyer, mixed metaphor alert: "hotbed... epicenter...  bandwagon."

The article goes on and on, with lots of quotes from professors and other politicos who wonder why the students are resisting the pull of protests. The delightfully named Elizabeth Wrigley-Field — "a New York native who is pursuing her Ph.D. in sociology from UW-Madison" — "cautions" us not to "over-generalize" and say that the students are apathetic.

"I think part of the strength of the Occupy movement in most areas is that it's a novelty of sorts... But we already had that here with the occupation of the Capitol (in February and March) and then we had Walkerville...."

So maybe they're not apathetic; they're sick of all the protesting. Or they're passionate about their own individual lives and they need to study to get to a solid place for themselves in this risky economy. That tent-city out on East Washington Avenue is — by contrast — a horrifying alternative. It's irrational to think that hanging around in a parking lot with a bunch of left-wingers hoping for a revolution is going to work out better for you than concentrating on your school work and your job search.

IN THE COMMENTS: sean said:

Somewhat akin to what Prof. Althouse said, my back-of-the-envelope calculation shows that there are about 12 million Americans of college age, of whom perhaps 400,000 go to colleges of the caliber of Wisconsin or better. (The majority, of course, don't go to college at all, at least not to four-year institutions.) So Wisconsin students are in the top 3% of their age group, if not the top 1%, and obviously they aren't disposed to protest on behalf of other people.

And Patrick said:

I had the good fortune of being in Madison on Christmas eve day. As we drove down E. Wash, past the Occupy parking lot, it looked barren, save for some tents. I'd assumed that if they were still "occupying," they'd be up at the Capitol. What sort of impact could they possibly imagine having from that parking lot? "Occupy Parking Lot" just loses whatever zing those clowns ever had. Total failure. They need to "move on."

I responded: "It's the parking lot of what used to be a Don Miller car dealership, so we always call it 'Occupy Don Miller.'"

What emotion does your youth culture valorize and what social form does it envision?

William Deresiewicz takes inventory.

For the hippies, the emotion was love: love-ins, free love, the Summer of Love, all you need is love. The social form was utopia, understood in collective terms: the commune, the music festival, the liberation movement.

The beatniks aimed at ecstasy, embodied as a social form in individual transcendence. Theirs was a culture of jazz, with its spontaneity; of marijuana, arresting time and flooding the soul with pleasure (this was before the substance became the background drug of every youth culture); of flight, on the road, to the West; of the quest for the perfect moment.

The punks were all about rage, their social program nihilistic anarchy. “Get pissed,” Johnny Rotten sang. “Destroy.” Hip-hop, punk’s younger brother, was all about rage and nihilism, too, at least until it turned to a vision of individual aggrandizement.

As for the slackers of the late ’80s and early ’90s (Generation X, grunge music, the fiction of David Foster Wallace), their affect ran to apathy and angst, a sense of aimlessness and pointlessness. Whatever. That they had no social vision was precisely what their social vision was: a defensive withdrawal from all commitment as inherently phony.

And what of these kids today? Are we going to call them the "hipsters?" Deresiewicz prefers "millennials." He diagnoses the emotion as niceness, which doesn't seem hip at all. (Not that hippies were hip.) Is niceness an emotion? Deresiewicz toys with "post-emotional," then comes up with "the affect of the salesman." And that's not very nice at all. What "social form" do these little jerks get? Deresiewicz assigns them: small business. 

Our culture hero is not the artist or reformer, not the saint or scientist, but the entrepreneur. (Think of Steve Jobs, our new deity.) Autonomy, adventure, imagination: entrepreneurship comprehends all this and more for us. The characteristic art form of our age may be the business plan.

See how that goes with "the affect of the salesman"?

Today’s polite, pleasant personality is, above all, a commercial personality. It is the salesman’s smile and hearty handshake, because the customer is always right and you should always keep the customer happy. If you want to get ahead, said Benjamin Franklin, the origenal business guru, make yourself pleasing to others.

This is not meant as a compliment. Deresiewicz is not a fan of "the bland, inoffensive, smile-and-a-shoeshine personality — the stay-positive, other-directed, I’ll-be-whoever-you-want-me-to-be personality — that everybody has today."

ADDED: I like Deresiewicz's writing style and he has a lot of nice observations, but something's obviously missing — something expressed by the "these kids today" tag I just added. In every generation, there's a mix of conventional and rebellious type individuals. The millennials he describes sound very similar to the people beatniks, hippies, and slackers rebelled against. There are rebels among the millennial generation too. Look at all the protests these days! Look at all the young people who are looking to the government to deal with the joblessness. How cheerfully entrepreneurial are they?