I GET KNOCKED DOWN BUT I GET UP AGAIN. YOU'RE NEVER GONNA KEEP ME DOWN.
I get knocked up, but I get down again. You're never gonna knock me up.
Still better than "everything happens for a reason".
"Everybody gets knocked down...it's whether you choose to get back up again!"
If the fall injures your spinal cord, you may not have that option.
A colleague in his late 60's was on his bicycle and hit by a car, and in the hospital after gigantic back/neck surgery. The woman who hit him came to visit and said "Everything happens for a reason".
We visited him right after, and he really unleashed his inner sailor at her. That part was totally awesome.
(A year or so later he walks with a cane. So he wasn't paralyzed or killed, but still.)
I definitely saw more of that sort of stuff when I lived in Texas than in other places.
Also, the slight change in wording from the Chumbawumba song makes a real difference in the meaning of the slogan. Chumbawumba does not assign blame, talk of internal vs. external causes, or any stuff like that. As a result, it can't get any of that stuff wrong. It just says that you can recover.
(I sang Chumbawumba to myself a lot when I was on the job market.)
Chumbawumba also has useful advice about the utility of whiskey drinks in motivating oneself to get up again.
I wouldn't rule out regionalism in how frequently or fervently sentiments like these are expressed, but I think it's a big part of our culture broadly.
Vaguely related: have people seen this paper associating, with multiple measures, 1920's and 30's anti-Semitic activity and Nazi voting with locations of 14th-century pogroms? Rather chilling if true, but maybe there's something invalid about it.
Likely related here before, but I once saw a bumpersticker in rural OH that read "Talk to the Hand." The hand in question (as illustrated)? The crucified hand of Christ.
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This student clearly seems to have thought "Maybe if I arrange random logical symbols into two columns, I'll produce something that is close enough to a logical proof to give me some partial credit!"
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Holy shit, Brietbart is using his crappy edited videos to force adjunct professors of labor to resign.
Fuck you Brietbart. Fuck you for lying. Fuck you for attacking the weak. Fuck you.
Fuck.
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How is anyone stupid enough to keep listening to that man? Christ, what an asshole.
10 is as awesome as 5 is appalling.
How come everyone gets "asked to resign" these days instead of fired? Just once, I'd like to see someone say, "hell no, I ain't resigning."
How come everyone gets "asked to resign" these days instead of fired?
You can still get fired if you try really hard or aren't of the right socio-economic strata.
8: OTOH, if the narrator spends all his time drinking whisky, lager, vodka and cider drinks, and singing songs that remind him of the good and bad times, it's no wonder people keep knocking him down.
Clear eyes. Full Hearts. Can't Lose!
:@
I have tried to tell my awesomesauce spouse before that emoticons are deprecated here.
11: Isn't that how everyone gets a "Pass" grade in Logic 1101?
17: But whats really amazing is that he's capable of getting up again.
Just once, I'd like to see someone say, "hell no, I ain't resigning."
Last I read, that's what the professor is now saying.
It's all about taking individual responsibility of failure. It's really internalized capitalism. It's kind of sad how few pep-you-up messages you see that reflect community and cooperation, and how everyone must support everyone.
I would cheerfully demolish not just my own, but every, high school and high school football field in U.S. territory, because I typically associate them with this message (although Nike runs ads with a similar message on a three- or four-year rotation cough Kobe Bryant a couple of Finals ago cough), but I question the identification of "individual responsibility of failure" with capitalism. I cannot be alone in associating leftist political articulations, from the consciousness-raising groups of the '70s to the reeducation camps of the Cultural Revolution, with precisely the sort of individualized sin/collective salvation gospel underlying every gym teacher's speech that I've ever ignored.
6: Chumbawumba does not assign blame, talk of internal vs. external causes, or any stuff like that.
"Alcohol, testosterone and ignorance and fists"
"Beware the holy trinity: Church and State and Law"
(I know, I know, different song)
I did not enjoy high school at all.
22: Good for him. I'd also like to request that the professor sue the crap out of Bribart for defamation of character, or for slander/libel, or for being a jackass, or something like that.
I have tried to tell my awesomesauce spouse before that emoticons are deprecated here.
He's got enough awesomesauce to pull it off!
I cannot be alone in associating leftist political articulations, from the consciousness-raising groups of the '70s to the reeducation camps of the Cultural Revolution, with precisely the sort of individualized sin/collective salvation gospel underlying every gym teacher's speech that I've ever ignored.
I think sports is the only place the left-leaning type pep talk occurs in otherwise conservative places.
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If you were M to Joanna Russ, and you didn't stop already because she would not have approved of it one little bit, you should stop now.
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I have to say, I much prefer people who place the locus of responsibility for failure internally and for good fortune externally to those who blame someone/thing else for everything bad that happens and take individual credit for anything good.
Bummer. Not that I was, but I'm sad she's dead.
On Thursday, however, Gail Hackett, provost of the University of Missouri at Kansas City, issued a statement denouncing how the videos are presented on Mr. Breitbart's Web site, based on the campus's continuing review of the raw classroom footage used to make them. "From the review completed to date," her statement said, "it is clear that edited videos posted on the Internet depict statements from the instructors in an inaccurate and distorted manner by taking their statements out of context and reordering the sequence in which those statements were actually made so as to change their meaning."
meet
top officials at its St. Louis campus have asked an adjunct faculty member to resign
Honest to god I don't understand how these two quotes can exist in the same article without an attempt to reconcile them, or even note their fundamental irreconcilability. Why the hell was he asked to resign, if the tapes appear to have been deceptively edited?!?
(And surely the deceptive editing comes as a surprise to no one at this point. Genuine question: has Breitbart released a video yet, ever, that hasn't been shown conclusively, almost immediately upon release, to have been deceptively edited?)
Of course, I buy all my motivational gear here.
The success of a tiresome, transparent blowhard like Breitbart depresses me. Among other things, people who repeat themselves like bridge-and-tunnel mooks trying to intimidate bouncers ("Do you know what Obama has done to Medicare/the Naval Observatory/Fort Knox/the Keebler elves? Do you? Do you? Do you? I do and it pisses me off!") are just jackasses.
"Do you know what Obama has done to ... the Keebler elves?
Rule 34 means I don't want to know.
37: "That's just what my cousins and me'll do to you if you don't let us back in and get our fuckin' jackets, yo Obamacare will do to your public schools!"
Honest to god I don't understand how these two quotes can exist in the same article without an attempt to reconcile them, or even note their fundamental irreconcilability. Why the hell was he asked to resign, if the tapes appear to have been deceptively edited?!?
Because he's attracting unwelcome negative attention to the university, whether it's his fault or not, and the primary mission of all universities everywhere is to enforce the status quo and avoid taking risks?
My comment didn't post, but I have always sort of liked the Japanese saying about falling down 7 times, getting up 8. I hope that's not bad in the same way that this one is.
41: Same thing, I'd argue, not least because it's the text/narration in at least one Nike commercial.
39: Does asking him to resign in any way diminish the attention given to the story? Seems to me, the better risk management response would be to ignore the video completely and, if any direct response is compelled, to say, "It's a Breitbart video. We have better things to do than pay attention to that shit."
41: Right, but it looks so beautiful in Japanese.
Norman Dixon, in "The Psychology of Military Incompetence" noted that the phrase "personal responsbility" was more or less invented by the army, with a meaning close to "not complaining about unfair treatment".
46 confirms my existing world-view perfectly.
41: That saying bothers me because you only need to get up once for each time you fall down. That means it's really an exhortation to lie down of your own volition and get up again for every seven times you fall down, which is not particularly inspiring just kind of weird.
As a general moral rule about assigning responsibility, the t-shirt's slogan is lame, for the reasons HG gives. But as a maxim for the individual, it's kind of what you have to believe to get through life. If you want to keep going, you have to think, every time you're knocked down, that you can damn well get back up and keep going. If you lie there and think it's the community's responsibility to pick you up - even if it really is or should be! - your odds of success are noticeably less.
An accurate description of the world, or a healthy prescription of what the moral state of the world should be, isn't necessarily the same as the maxims an indivdidual should use to succeed in any given situation. Maybe this is just another way of repeating the old chestnut about how optimistic people are more likely to achieve their goals, but pessimistic people are more likely to have accurate views about what's actually going on.
Another linguistic gift from the military:
41: No, it is totally different because it acknowledges the legitimate problems of those who have fallen down at least eight times.
51: We call that, "Box Wine Night."
48: I'm pretty sure (G = get up, F = fall down) it's GFGFGFGFG. The first "get up" could be as in out of bed in the morning. (I can confirm the character used has both meanings.)
GFFFFFFFFFFFG is why I don't live in a tree house anymore.
If you've fallen down seven times, you should probably just find a way to get comfortable down there on the floor.
If you've fallen down seven times, you should probably just find a way to get comfortable down there on the floor.
Maybe you've finally reached the bottom of the stairs, smart guy. Didn't think of that didja.
I can confirm the character used has both meanings.
I wonder if it's the same one used to translate "turn" in Pete Seeger's setting of Ecclesiastes.
49:
GODDAMMIT WHY WON'T THESE BRAKES WORK? I'VE TRIED TO STOP THIS TRAIN SEVEN TIMES ALREADY!
23: I question the identification of "individual responsibility of failure" with capitalism
The operative word in the t-shirt slogan is "choose." The t-shirt doesn't say "it's whether you get back up again", but whether you choose to, the implication being that if you didn't get back up again, it must have been because you chose not to, which, yeah, assumes at least in part that you had the means at your disposal to get up again; it's not inherently capitalistic, but US-style capitalism, at any rate, does also like to make the assumption that overcoming any form of adversity is a matter of sheer will, because we have a level playing field here, goddammit, and don't you try to say otherwise! And by the way, you'll be fine without health insurance, unless you choose not to be.
Ahem. I believe I've gotten that out of my system.
Heebie U is really weird. I can't imagine seeing a student where something like that on a shirt. The closest would be those crappy No Fear shirts.
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This Yglesias post is a little old, but "is laid bear" cracked me up.
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I hate to keep interrogating Flippanter's comments, but I don't fully follow this:
23: I cannot be alone in associating leftist political articulations, from the consciousness-raising groups of the '70s to the reeducation camps of the Cultural Revolution, with precisely [this] sort of individualized sin/collective salvation gospel
I'm not really familiar with the sports-related pep talk. If I understand it correctly, no, you're not the only one who associates leftist political articulations with etc. etc.: it's of a piece with the view that leftist, or liberal, ideologies embrace, say, welfare-statism as salvation for all and sundry, no matter how much they may be guilty (guilty, I tell you!) of individual failure. The latter narrative is usually employed as a means to deprecate leftism; it paints adversity suffered by an individual as a function of his or her personal failure from the get-go, and is not necessarily the leftist perspective, but the anti-leftist one.
That is: really? You don't think there are leftist political articulations that, say, acknowledge collective sources of failure [e.g. institutionalized racism, sexism, xenophobia, homophobia, for a start] as well as, say, collective forms of salvation?
60: A lot of people buy the cheapest t-shirt without giving it a close reading.
Yeah, sure, and given that it's Heebie U, it's a generally christianist message emphasizing individual getting up as the answer to individual falling down.
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Anybody remember which recent thread had a link to some British comedy sketches, and what the name of the actors and/or programs were?
Thanks,
BG
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Probably That Mitchell and Webb Look with David Mitchell and Robert Webb, available on streaming Netflix and (for now) YouTube.
63.last: Not to mention left political formulations that assert collective failure (capitalism, the state) and individual redemption (vanguards, propaganda by the deed).
And by the way, you'll be fine without health insurance, unless you choose not to be.
Not that this is exactly on point, but I suffered my first (to my knowledge...) FB unfriending today over just such a sentiment. (I'll admit, my response was a bit less than temperate, but you know, screw you Dr. The-Lawyers-Are-to-Blame-for-Everything, but thanks for the validation that I didn't miss out when I chose UNG over you.)
Ahem. I believe I've gotten that out of my system.
Indeed.
"I think sports is the only place the left-leaning type pep talk occurs in otherwise conservative places."
I'm not sure "rah-rah arbitrary grouping of people who are going to go do mock battle with the other arbitrary grouping, all for other's entertainment" really counts as not-conservative
"I have to say, I much prefer people who place the locus of responsibility for failure internally and for good fortune externally to those who blame someone/thing else for everything bad that happens and take individual credit for anything good."
I much prefer to, everynight, say that I am the Cosmos
even if that doesn't get you back again.
"An accurate description of the world, or a healthy prescription of what the moral state of the world should be, isn't necessarily the same as the maxims an indivdidual should use to succeed in any given situation. Maybe this is just another way of repeating the old chestnut about how optimistic people are more likely to achieve their goals, but pessimistic people are more likely to have accurate views about what's actually going on. "
I would like to come up with a good phrase to describe the malthought underlying this.
"equivalence/unity of fault" isn't really catchy enough.
That for every problem, there is exactly one person to blame. If a meteor falls on my head, lets make up a God who did it. If you can't find a job, it is your fault, and thus not bernake's. Complex webs of causation aren't an option.
67: everybody who likes Mitchell and Webb need to look at Richard Herring and Stewart Lee and their Fist of Fun and This Morning With Richard Not Judy (TMWRNJ!) and see it done properly.
66: ttaM shared with us the joys of Burnistoun recently, and Bill Bailey and David Mitchell were mentioned. Among Brits, it seems comedic talent is inversely related to proximity to London.
You don't think there are leftist political articulations that, say, acknowledge collective sources of failure [e.g. institutionalized racism, sexism, xenophobia, homophobia, for a start] as well as, say, collective forms of salvation?
Of course, and at tedious, repetitive length, but the OP struck in me a chord with the left tradition of making people eat shit for their own good.* Perhaps we can achieve comity by assigning the tendency to ideology generally, as per yoyo's 71?
* "My eyeglasses are decadent and counterrevolutionary, bob Brother No. 1. Ballpoint pens are rootless and cosmopolitan, comrade. May I return to the collective lichen scraping now, for the glory of the revolution?" Alternative: every doughy, goateed, thirty/fortysomething white male magazine writer's contribution to Tales of Latter-Day Uxoriousness: Or, How to Submit to One's Wife as Ostentatiously and Obnoxiously as You Do Everything Else.
This time, they know to get everybody wearing glasses and squinting. To catch the cheaters.
Hey, I was the first one to link to Burnistoun (the elevator scene). Also Rab C. Nesbit. And the Utica Club Natural Carbonation Band theme song.
I'm getting very little out of Burnistoun, including where I can understand the words.
75: Damn, Flip, I confess I don't really know what you're talking about. Do I take it from your asterisked examples that "the left tradition of making people eat shit for their own good" imagines a (caricatured?) left which preaches a sort of Luddism as counter to perceived instances of privilege, sloth and/or complacency? Something like that?
I'm not scoffing. I just don't immediately recognize a "left tradition" of the kind you refer to -- I don't have an "Oh, yeah, sure, I know what you mean" reaction.
(The reference to ideology does little for me, I'm afraid; the term's been subjected to too many manipulations over the decades to be of much use, and while I recognize that it's supposed to be bad -- declaring someone to be an "Ideologue !!" is supposed to be a devastating attack -- it's become a fairly empty term in the absence of a definition of the term in any given discussion.)
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"the left tradition of making people eat shit for their own good"
I just don't immediately recognize a "left tradition" of the kind you refer to -- I don't have an "Oh, yeah, sure, I know what you mean" reaction.
OK,Okay. You're sitting in the living room of a good friend, his wife and three small children. Nice guy asks for a knife. You give the one in your pocket because you don't know what he is going to use it for. He ties up his wife and children in a position where they can watch and starts slowly on the three year old...
You don't stop him cause he is bigger than you and has a knife. You look away and think pretty thoughts because you are not a ghoul...
...such are the citizens of Empire. When in Rome...
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the term's been subjected to too many manipulations over the decades to be of much use, and while I recognize that it's supposed to be bad -- declaring someone to be an "Ideologue !!" is supposed to be a devastating attack
If I may carry on in this vein: we're all aware that certain terms have been successfully rendered Bad Words, have become terms of disapprobation or vilification, over the years: "liberal" is of course a bad thing (as this blog mentioned to itself just recently). "Socialism" is of course bad.
More recently, "partisan" is bad, and "bipartisan" or "nonpartisan" is good -- and this may be related to what Flip's saying about "ideologue." Centrism is good (roughly) while being "far" anything is bad.
This evening I listened to 15 minutes or so of a speech by Rick Santorum on CSPAN Radio, a speech before the think-tank of which he's a part, and left it on because hey, I've never heard the guy speak, and it might be interesting to hear some of the thinking he's professionally hired to do. He was taking Obama to task for the President's confusing foreign policy stances (for example, are we, or were we, not an ally of Mubarak's Egypt? So like then why didn't we stand by him? This kind of thing from Obama is confusing the world! And Obama failed to fully endorse American exceptionalism, but said that all countries consider themselves exceptional! Like, what? The world believes in American exceptionalism as much as Americans do, and looks to us for leadership, so what is the President doing casting doubt on our moral authority in this way?!)
It occurred to me that we're inches away from a revival of that old bogeyman: relativism. It wouldn't surprise me if Obama, or liberals in general, are accused of being relativists, such that "relativist" joins the ranks of the Bad Words. It's been done before, after all. It would in this case be a way of saying that elitist liberals are too nuanced.
79: The last sentence is his own inimitable way of imitating, but the killing people with glasses was Pol Pot. I don't know how he felt about ball point pens.
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OT:
The case of the Harvard student forbidden from graduating because of her role as accessory after the fact to murder has moved along quite a lot since we first discussed it.
See also: Satirical post from Jack & Jill Politics.
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79
I'm not scoffing. I just don't immediately recognize a "left tradition" of the kind you refer to -- I don't have an "Oh, yeah, sure, I know what you mean" reaction.
There are at least two such traditions. Self criticism as in the Red Guard period in China or eating unattractive but allegedly healthy food.
Anarchists like flip and natilo are sweet, and I have much affection for them, but as the story of Chile (Spain, etc) shows, they don't have, can't have, are incapable of having...
...an army. Just bandits and terrorists.
They will get smashed when they are no longer amusing to the Robot Carnival.
82: Huh? Is that to say that it's a traditional leftist move to be like Pol Pot? Or, is Flip considering Bob to be the quintessential leftist?
86: No idea. I just thought that "luddite" was going in the wrong direction.
I'm interested to understand what I don't understand about what Flip's saying, but one last contribution to my train of thought in 81 (which I realize was long).
Jon Chait had this recently regarding liberalism's bumper sticker problem, on what I would consider to be the non-ideological nature of liberalism. Chait doesn't use the term "ideology" in the way I might tend to, though, and instead says that "Liberalism is a more complex ideology [than conservatism]." Ideology: what does it mean?
Of tangential interest, the Chait piece links to this (really weird and dumb) WaPo thing by Dana Milbank on how Obama is a complex thinker, which sucks for him. Jonathan Haidt, quoted there, and occasionally discussed here, doesn't recommend himself well, I don't think.
Anarchists like flip and natilo
Huh? How are people getting the idea that Flippanter is an anarchist?
Oh, flip has a kind of point. I am mostly not an anarchist.
With capitalist armies coming from all compass points, Lenin and Trotsky didn't need this fantasy bullshit. They needed an army.
All tragic and horrible choices when the pigs are coming.
But then there are the silly delusional ones.
89: All lawyers are closet anarchists.
How are people getting the idea that Flippanter is an anarchist?
No idea. No, more than that: I think Flippanter is not remotely an anarchist! I think he may feel that they should cut their damn hair. I don't know why he feels that way.
I'd guess that a real anarchist would have short hair so that they could have more time to subvert things.
I think maybe people are still confusing Flippanter and Frowner. Just look at the name and see F-er, I guess.
Real anarchists don't even have hair. That way they're not oppressed by Big Shampoo.
You need some hair our you can't get out from underneath Big Hat.
Nah, you just wear a hoodie. A black hoodie.
85: As I've said before, the one thing that the Spanish experience tends to prove is that War Anarchism is just about as bad an idea as War Communism. Obviously, the Spanish revolutionaries had some terrible choices to make. But frankly, the fact that the rest of the so-called "democracies" turned their back on Republican Spain, allowing totalitarians of the right and left to become ascendant is a much greater indictment of bourgeois democracy than it is a reflection of any sort on the merits of anarchist organization.
I would be more sympathetic to Lenin and Trotsky's plight in the face of White opposition if it wasn't the case that even before the revolution the Bolsheviks has behaved in inhumane, oppressive ways whenever they could. And after the revolution, their calumny seemingly had no bounds. Read Alexander Berkman's The Bolshevik Myth and Emma Goldman's My Disillusionment in Russia to get the full story of Leninist perfidy. Yes, Stalin was much worse than either Lenin or Trotsky, but there's no way he could have murdered tens of millions if they hadn't murdered millions first. Dzerizhinsky was, after all, purged by Stalin.
But who's on the dustheap of history now? Anarchism is still waiting, impatiently, to organize humanity in a free society. State socialism has had dozens of chances and has crashed and burned every single time. Even leaving aside the outright psychopaths and cynical totalitarians, you still have a history of ineptitude and banal repression that should be more than enough to convince any sensible person that this theorem deserves no further experimentation. Certainly not with human subjects.
92: I think Flippanter is not remotely an anarchist! I think he may feel that they should cut their damn hair. I don't know why he feels that way.
Amusingly, at a gathering of anarchists this afternoon, I learned that one of our companeras has decided to open her house once a month for a DIY hair salon/general style consultancy, with proceeds to benefit a variety of radical causes. Stand up, all victims of bad haircuts!
99: See? Flippanter is totally confused about what leftists are like.
Anarchism is still waiting, impatiently, to organize humanity in a free society.
That is because you about as much a threat to bourgeois capitalism as the Amish and Mennonites. Stick to a neighborhood or city and you just save then money.
You are not in the way. See what happens if you take a state.
The real threats didn't fail, they were murdered.
101: The real threats didn't fail, they were murdered.
Yes, by the Red Army, at Kronstadt and in the Ukraine.
The case of the Harvard student forbidden from graduating because of her role as accessory after the fact to murder has moved along quite a lot since we first discussed it.
The forces of cynicism claim victory!
Just look at the name and see F-er, I guess.
F-ers of the world, unite!
Stand up, all victims of bad haircuts!
"Throw off the yoke of supercuts. You have nothing to lose but your..." it occurs to me I'm not even aware enough of haircuts to know what can go wrong with them. I can tell when my hair looks good, but I just throw money at the problem and expect the person wielding scissors to do a decent job without any prompting.
As far as these motivational statements, I find I often identify with them even while recognizing they are very limiting. Sometimes it really feels like life has knocked me down and I need to pick myself up and go on even though I don't really feel like it.
They also seem like an extension of Foucault's theme of internalizing the disciplinary impulse because modern, industrial institutions depend on "docile bodies".
With all this talk of standing up and falling down, anyone here played QWOP?
They also seem like an extension of Foucault's theme of internalizing the disciplinary impulse because modern, industrial institutions depend on "docile bodies".
I haven't had a haircut this century.
I won't trust most liberals because their hair is too short and beards too trimmed. Dead serious.
Further to some of the thoughts expressed here thus far, a Republican House member on the circumstances of those who are down.
"We've gotta, you know, nobody wants to starve anybody. Everybody wants to help folks out. But we've got a system where you can stay on unemployment for an awfully long time. And I think we need to create a system of decreasing benefits over time to encourage you to get a job. I think anybody who's had an alcoholic in their life or somebody with a drug problem, realizes that until things get bad enough there's no incentive to change."
The punishment model astounds me, and spaz's link to Foucault is entirely relevant.
The punishment model astounds me, and spaz's link to Foucault is entirely relevant