And yet … and yet … a student in rural Iceland, of sheep-farming stock, had her guard down, or didn’t yet have a guard. She didn’t know how to talk to foreigners, or perhaps felt there was something she had to get across to foreigners, or to this foreigner, who showed an interest in her country. She said, in the hope of conveying to me the whole ethical-spiritual outlook of her country in a single concrete example: In Iceland we are taught not to smash rocks. Anyway, the next day I gave a talk in NYC for a crowd of people who, I sensed, did not grow up on sheep farms. After the formal talk, the informal talk drifted to the matter of moral status, or, more precisely, of what species of animal we may appropriately eat. There was broad interest in episodic memory as marking a cut-off point on the scale of being: animals that have a conception of self, and of having a past that is their own, are not to be eaten, whereas the others may be eaten. According to this way of thinking, a cow is not really an individual cow with a memory of its own cow youth (let alone an idea of its own impending cow doom), but rather is only a series of succinct time intervals of cowhood. Cowness? Cowhood? Well go with cowhood. Thus to kill it is not to deprive some particular integral cow of its life, but only to terminate one series of five-minute-long-or-so cow intervals. Or so goes the prevailing theory, the theory that is most in keeping with what we know about nervous systems. Should I bring up the Icelandic student with the rocks?, I wondered. Yes, I said, nervous systems and episodic memories, fine. But don’t we also see, in the world, evidence for something that our predecessors might have called ‘conatus’? Is it really such a stretch to suppose that this tendency reveals to us a sort of integrity in things that need not be justified in terms of neurophysiological structure or of the conscious states that are thought to be uniquely grounded in this structure? And isn’t it a transgression to violate this integrity? Or maybe I didn’t get that far. Maybe I held back. I know the usual replies too well. But that would mean we’d have to stop eating plants too. We’d all die. That’s extreme. That sounds like Buddhism. It also sounds like 12th-century compassion theology, and, I suspect, like what pretty much everyone understood about the world for the vastly greater part of human life on earth, but ‘Buddhism’ is invoked here as a rhetorical strategy to cause one’s deepest truest commitments to come out smelling like a mere dusting of Oriental spice. Somewhere Liz Harman gives an argument about abortion in which early-stage fetuses are shown to be no more morally relevant than are plants. But that hardly settles the matter, if you are not starting out from the premise that moral relevance flows from what is going on ‘in there’, let alone that what is going on in there can be simply and uncontroversially read off of physical structure. Plants are morally relevant, and to deprive them of their integrity and their thriving is not a morally insignificant matter. What gets eaten, what gets aborted, what gets smashed, will never be decisively resolved by an inspection of internal structures and capacities of a given candidate for destruction. Even smashing a mere chunk of solidified lava – evidently purely passive, and homoeomerous from one end to the other – can be experienced as a transgression by the person who is properly sensitized, for whom the chunk shows up as salient within her ethically charged environment. Are fetuses morally relevant? Yes, they are. So are chunks of lava. Does that mean you mustn’t destroy them? Not necessarily, but you shouldn’t suppose that the way to gain license to destroy them, whether this license is conceived cosmically, socially, or individually, is to produce arguments that cut them off from the sphere of moral relevance. The prevailing ethical theories suppose that there must be an ethical subject in some bit of matter in order for ethical commitments toward that bit to properly obtain. Parallel to the partial rise of environmental ethics, there is a metaphysical view that is perhaps slowly recrudescing, pananimism, which holds that all of nature is imbued with mind or mind-like powers. There are variations on this; Galen Strawson for example argues that some form of panpsychism is entailed by any realistic physicalism, and in this he is restyling an old argument of the 18th-century materialists, such as Diderot, to the effect that even marble can think – it simply has to be ground up and sprinkled on grass that is eaten by a cow that is in turn eaten by a thinking human. Many philosophers have understood that to attribute mind-like powers to all of nature logically compels one to adopt the view that every bit of nature harbors an actual subject – thus we find Ralph Cudworth arguing in 1678 that hylozoism (the view that all matter is alive) entails the ‘clubbing together’ of infinite minds everywhere (Cudworth saw this as a reductio ad absurdum of hylozoism, just as more recently John Searle has argued against pananimism on the grounds that there must be an individual mental subject wherever there is mental activity). A few years after Cudworth, we find Leibniz working out the elements of his own theory of monads, which holds precisely that the world is entirely constituted from the activity of infinitely many nodes of perception. This is what Heraclitus has in mind when he says that gods dwell in his stove; it is what preoccupies the Inuit when they suppose that in eating walrus meat they are eating the souls of ancestors; and it is the way of thinking that informs Virgil’s poetic account of the Zephyr’s power to impregnate mares. There are souls, gods, ancestors (whatever!) all around us; they are in evidence in the structure and cohesion of nature; and it is a transgression against them to needlessly violate this structure and cohesion. This is the sort of thinking in which ethics originates. So what’s that humming sound? The so-called outside. External labor, then, labor in which humans alienates themselves, is a labor of self-sacrifice, of mortification. It’s a grayish-blackish gunkishness that tends towards a yellowish mass of pulverized [commodity-] objects, of meanings that are smashed, rotten, softened, and compressed. Fragments of instruments and concepts; stellar dust, cosmic foam, meteorite lava. Fountains of jets tho the motion is slow like the catastrophic motion of figures bathed by the black light of billions of shadow years, dry slap on hardness, sticky powder. It is the velocity we find when moving away from the mirror. When we watch a banana rot. Black sculpture of figures dipped in tars. Too large a hand, too small a shoulder. Squalor on the mica square. The rejection by a cubic meter. And the giants in stages under the dome of each temple, twisted figures gnawing their own skulls. From the window of a racing train we see the hedge passing at a dizzying speed, the houses further on are the minus objects, a swift verifiction. Then the slower hills in the distance and far away the motionless mountains. Mountains as you know are verbs. In a way this is a way of asking: tell us your worst moment (which may have been your best moment) (tell us about how you broke – broke might mean just went home and cried a bit, or threw that tear gas canister back at the cops knowing you’d get beaten to a pulp for it, or how you had to give up drinking, or how you felt when that tumor grew back, or when you realized there would be no revolution, no cure for the climate, and and and or or – tell us how no one attended your reading, tell us how you had to kill your art to make better art, or how you had to “transcend” art all together) (this list is NOT meant to be exclusive). How you were reborn or not. Or tell us why this whole idea is wrongheaded and / or stupid. Any form of textual response (something that can be put in a book) is appropriate, whether it be an essay with footnotes to the collected works of Lenin, a personal tale, a class analysis, some intersectional writing, something asemic, a collage, some uncreative writing (a reissue of the collected works of Lenin!), a rant, tears on a page, etc etc etc – that’s what we want.
I mean, you know as well as I do that the cephalophores may be reconciled to their saintly martyrdoms but none of them decapitated themselves, unlike Chinnamasta, the self-decapitating Tantric goddess. The most common images of her show her sitting or standing on a copulating couple while blood from her neck spouts into the mouth of her severed head and the mouths of her attendants, Dakini and Varnini. In other depictions she goes for a walk or a ride on a lion. But really.
We’re talking the color of
wind planted artlessly in a
garden on a bright winter morning, tho it’s August,
right? That’s what kind of weekend it
was. J was high and not too talky;
G was all like “you guys are the
greatest!” and of course he
was right. Coming in to work I saw
… the heavens black & red …
… a mighty Childs head gaping …
… a black man in a bright …
… a whyt horse …
rantiro ranterat vendeo vitelat
vernethat cernelo hurott morsheno
rungothon rungonor cuporor
untonor un signytus rolcon
etc. Nothing dark in that.
And the program notes were
elegant. A long silence. He continues: -
In any case, thirty-six years later, whatever
we don’t have, we do have a “body
of work”, and, well, storage
problems. That’s right. The square of
its weight, plus his prick minus
eight, equaled Pi times the cube of
fuck all. Proof of this apparently simple
assertion is difficult to achieve. Data are so
meagre that the outcome
must remain in the realm of philosophy.
I remember bright orange canned peaches,
I remember the horse lady at the fair,
She didn’t look like a horse at all.
Which may be, at least in part, why Jigger Cruz said, “I want to forget about analysis, forget about art history, forget about the politics … stop thinking about the past and future, forget about deconstructions, forget about words, forget about aesthetics, forget about dialogues … forget about pain and euphoria … forget about consciousness, forget about sounds, forget about the audience, forget about abstraction, forget about cultures, forget about conceptual art.” – and why Eileen, at more or less the same moment, wrote
[1]
I forgot I yearned for amnesia— I yearned for amnesia when I saw dragonflies off-kilter, shoving through air like husbands with bruised eyes— I forgot centuries of woodcarvers immortalizing stigmata on the limbs of virgins and saints, eyes wide and white in exaltation— I forgot your reputation for waking at quantum velocity…. I forgot the green stalks holding up ylang-ylang orchids—how their thin limbs refused to break from the weight of lush petals and overly fertile stamen…. I forgot how to italicize the word God…. I forgot possessing money for perfect hems consoles like martyrdom…. I forgot schools of fish dispersing to reveal the undulating sea floor as “suddenly flesh, suddenly scarred, suddenly aglow”…. I forgot “Geisha” lipstick clung to nights jousting at the West End Bar (New York City) when jazz still rained and reigned…. I forgot radiance must penetrate if it is to caress, and its price can never reach blasphemy…. I forgot commitment costs.
[2]
I forgot I yearned for amnesia— I forgot centuries of woodcarvers immortalizing stigmata on the limbs of virgins and saints, eyes wide and white in exaltation— I forgot how to long for rose petals yawning like little girls, like the daughters I never bore…. I forgot possessing money for perfect hems consoles like martyrdom…. I forgot schools of fish dispersing to reveal the undulating sea floor as “suddenly flesh, suddenly scarred, suddenly aglow”…. I forgot my heartbeats succumbing to radiance after curiosity taught me to bait handcuffs and whips…. I forgot radiance must penetrate if it is to caress, and its price can never reach blasphemy…. I forgot “civilized satiation” are words, not existence, though I had peeled away years to narrow the mutuality of our gaze into this moment when I finally ask, “How long must the sunrise remain between my thighs?” I forgot the fraying edges of fabrics still mustering to cover the shoulders of non-retired warriors.
[3]
I forgot the thermodynamics of farewells wherein exhaustion yielded the scent of armpits until sight clung to a riding crop, suddenly admired for its stiff leather spine— I forgot those days of unremitting brightness from ignoring all ancestors to stare directly at the sun, only to discover myself clasped by the cool dimness of a cathedral where hands penetrated marble bowls for holy water whose oily musk lingered on my filigreed fingers as if to sheathe my flesh— I forgot your reputation for waking at quantum velocity…. I forgot where bones erupted mountains in Guatemala and Peru…. I forgot no metaphors exist for genocide. I forgot my heartbeats succumbing to radiance after curiosity taught me to bait handcuffs and whips…. I forgot radiance must penetrate if it is to caress, and its price can never reach blasphemy…. I forgot commitment costs…. I forgot “civilized satiation” are words, not existence, though I had peeled away years to narrow the mutuality of our gaze into this moment when I finally ask, “How long must the sunrise remain between my thighs?”
[4]
I forgot where bones erupted mountains in Guatemala and Peru…. I forgot no metaphors exist for genocide…. I forgot possessing money for perfect hems consoles like martyrdom…. I forgot the scientist-poet who cautioned against “enhancing music” as more would trip “the fragile balance between sterility and sensuality”…. I forgot diving so deeply into salty seas I witnessed coral form skyscrapers upside down as they narrowed towards the molten center of earth…. I forgot schools of fish dispersing to reveal the undulating sea floor as “suddenly flesh, suddenly scarred, suddenly aglow”…. I forgot “Geisha” lipstick clung to nights jousting at the West End Bar (New York City) when jazz still rained and reigned…. I forgot commitment costs…. I forgot “civilized satiation” are words, not existence, though I had peeled away years to narrow the mutuality of our gaze into this moment when I finally ask, “How long must the sunrise remain between my thighs?”
[5]
I forgot I yearned for amnesia— I yearned for amnesia when I saw dragonflies off-kilter, shoving through air like husbands with bruised eyes— I forgot the thermodynamics of farewells wherein exhaustion yielded the scent of armpits until sight clung to a riding crop, suddenly admired for its stiff leather spine— I forgot centuries of woodcarvers immortalizing stigmata on the limbs of virgins and saints, eyes wide and white in exaltation— I forgot whether Love was relevant…. I forgot your reputation for waking at quantum velocity…. I forgot the green stalks holding up ylang-ylang orchids—how their thin limbs refused to break from the weight of lush petals and overly fertile stamen…. I forgot how the mountains of bones shared the pallor of thick, white candles burning in helplessly tin candelabras…. I forgot how to italicize the word God…. I forgot possessing money for perfect hems consoles like martyrdom.
[6]
I forgot black dimes interrupting the sun’s glare, an experience familiar to travelers visiting “Namibia in search of pure light”— I forgot the thermodynamics of farewells wherein exhaustion yielded the scent of armpits until sight clung to a riding crop, suddenly admired for its stiff leather spine— I forgot centuries of woodcarvers immortalizing stigmata on the limbs of virgins and saints, eyes wide and white in exaltation— I forgot those days of unremitting brightness from ignoring all ancestors to stare directly at the sun, only to discover myself clasped by the cool dimness of a cathedral where hands penetrated marble bowls for holy water whose oily musk lingered on my filigreed fingers as if to sheathe my flesh— I forgot where bones erupted mountains in Guatemala and Peru…. I forgot how the mountains of bones shared the pallor of thick, white candles burning in helplessly tin candelabras…. I forgot how to italicize the word God…. I forgot how to long for rose petals yawning like little girls, like the daughters I never bore…. I forgot diving so deeply into salty seas I witnessed coral form skyscrapers upside down as they narrowed towards the molten center of earth…. I forgot schools of fish dispersing to reveal the undulating sea floor as “suddenly flesh, suddenly scarred, suddenly aglow”…. I forgot radiance must penetrate if it is to caress, and its price can never reach blasphemy.
[7]
I yearned for amnesia when I saw dragonflies off-kilter, shoving through air like husbands with bruised eyes— I forgot the thermodynamics of farewells wherein exhaustion yielded the scent of armpits until sight clung to a riding crop, suddenly admired for its stiff leather spine— I forgot those days of unremitting brightness from ignoring all ancestors to stare directly at the sun, only to discover myself clasped by the cool dimness of a cathedral where hands penetrated marble bowls for holy water whose oily musk lingered on my filigreed fingers as if to sheathe my flesh— I forgot whether Love was relevant…. I forgot the green stalks holding up ylang-ylang orchids—how their thin limbs refused to break from the weight of lush petals and overly fertile stamen…. I forgot how to italicize the word God…. I forgot diving so deeply into salty seas I witnessed coral form skyscrapers upside down as they narrowed towards the molten center of earth…. I forgot my heartbeats succumbing to radiance after curiosity taught me to bait handcuffs and whips…. I forgot the sun hid from what I willingly bartered for Lucidity.
[8]
I yearned for amnesia when I saw dragonflies off-kilter, shoving through air like husbands with bruised eyes— I forgot where bones erupted mountains in Guatemala and Peru…. I forgot the green stalks holding up ylang-ylang orchids—how their thin limbs refused to break from the weight of lush petals and overly-fertile stamen…. I forgot how the mountains of bones shared the pallor of thick, white candles burning in helplessly tin candelabras…. I forgot how to long for rose petals yawning like little girls, like the daughters I never bore…. I forgot possessing money for perfect hems consoles like martyrdom…. I forgot “Geisha” lipstick clung to nights jousting at the West End Bar (New York City) when jazz still rained and reigned…. I forgot radiance must penetrate if it is to caress, and its price can never reach blasphemy.
OK.
So here’s a Ferguson syllabus suggested by Sociologists for Justice:
Rios, Victor M. 2012. “Stealing a Bag of Potato Chips and Other Crimes of Resistance.” Contexts 11(1):48-53. Available online: http://www.broomcenter.ucsb.edu/files/publications/pdf/rios1.pdf
Rios, Victor M. 2006. “The Hyper-criminalization of Black and Latino Male Youth in the Era of Mass Incarceration.” Souls 8 (2): 40-54. Available online: https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B8eBQGZrG7BFdnhWRzNNNl9ZOHM/edit
Gerke, Markus. “Want to Help Marginalized Students in Schools? Stop “Stop and Frisk” and Other Punitive Practices, Too.” From SocImages. Available online http://thesocietypages.org/sociologylens/2013/11/07/want-to-help-marginalized-students-improve-in-schools-stop-stop-and-frisk-and-other-punitive-practices-too/
Robinson, Amanda L., and Meghan S. Chandek. 2000. “Differential Police Response to Black Battered Women.” Women & Criminal Justice 12(2-3):29-61.
Epp, Charles, Steven Maynard-Moody & Donald Haider-Markel. 2014. Pulled Over: How Police Stops Define Race and Citizenship. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
Warren, Patricia Y. 2010. “The Continuing Significance of Race: An Analysis Across Two Levels of Policing.” Social Science Quarterly 91(4):1025-1042. Available online: https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B8eBQGZrG7BFYVZ2Zlpzb1IxWVU/edit?usp=sharing
Kirwan Institute for the Study of Race and Ethnicity. 2014. “State of the Science: Implicit Bias Review.” Available online: http://kirwaninstitute.osu.edu/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/2014-implicit-bias.pdf.
Mansbridge, Jane J. and Aldon Morris, eds. 2001. Oppositional Consciousness: The Subjective Roots of Social Protest. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
Additional Readings
The following is a list of additional recommended readings submitted by commenting sociologists.
Alexander, Michelle. 2010. The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness. New York: New Press.
Barnett, Ida Wells B. 2002. On Lynchings. Amherst, NY: Humanity Books.
Correll, Joshua, Bernadette Park, Charles Judd, and Bernd Wittenbrink. 2002. The Police Officer’s Dilemma: Using Ethnicity to Disambiguate Potentially Threatening Individuals (PDF). Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 83(6):1314-1329.
Ferguson, Ann. 2001. Bad Boys: Public Schools in the Making of Black Masculinity. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. (Especially chapter 4: Naughty by Nature. Google link: http://books.google.com/books/about/Bad_Boys.html?id=3YMDorLC-cQC)
Linnemann, T., Wall, T., & Green, E. 2014. The Walking Dead and Killing State: Zombification and the Normalization of Police Violence. Theoretical Criminology, 1362480614529455. http://tcr.sagepub.com/content/early/2014/04/04/1362480614529455.abstract
Martinot, Steve. 2014. On the Epidemic of Police Killings. Social Justice 39(4):52-75.
Richie, Beth E. 2012. Arrested Justice: Black Women, Violence, and America’s Prison Nation. New York University Press. http://www.amazon.com/Arrested-Justice-Violence-Americas-Prison/dp/081477623X
Wall, T., & Linnemann, T. 2014. Staring Down the State: Police Power, Visual Economies, and the “War on Cameras.” Crime, Media, Culture, 1741659014531424. http://cmc.sagepub.com/content/early/2014/04/28/1741659014531424.abstract
Wood, Lesley J. 2014. Crisis and Control: The Militarization of Protest Policing. Toronto, ON: Between the Lines.
And here’s one by philosophers:
The Wretched of the Earth, Frantz Fanon
Black Skin, White Masks, Frantz Fanon
The Souls of Black Folk, W.E.B. Du Bois
The Racial Contract, Charles Mills
Are Prisons Obsolete?, Angela Davis
The Colonizer and the Colonized, Albert Memmi
Visible Identities: Race, Gender and the Self, Linda Martin Alcoff
The Social Contract, Jean-Jacques Rousseau
Discourse on Colonialism, Aimé Césaire
Justice as Fairness: A Restatement, John Rawls
The Colonization of Psychic Space, Kelly Oliver
Writing Beyond Race: Living Theory and Practice, bell hooks
Race: A Philosophical Introduction, Paul Taylor
The Epistemology of Resistance, José Medina
Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness and the Politics of Empowerment, Patricia Hill Collins
Society Must Be Defended, Michel Foucault
Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, Michel Foucault
Critical Race Theory: The Key Writings That Formed The Movement, Eds. Kimberle Crenshaw et al
Race and the Enlightenment: A Reader, Emmanuel Chukwudi Eze
Blackness Visible: Essays on Philosophy and Race, Charles Mills
The Idea of Race, Eds. Robert Bernasconi and Tommy Lott
Critical Race Theory: The Cutting Edge, Eds. Jean Stafancic and Richard Delgado
Race, Ed. Robert Bernasconi
**UPDATE** (The following texts are collected from readers' suggestions in the comments selection below. I will continue to update this section as more titles are submitted.)
Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America, Saidiya V. Hartman
Racecraft: The Soul of Inequality in American Life, Karen Fields and Barbara Fields
Look, A Negro!: Philosophical Essays on Race, Culture and Politics, Robert Gooding-Williams
Warfare in the American Homeland: Policing and Prison in a Penal Democracy, Ed. Joy James
On The Postcolony, Achille Mbembe
The Reorder of Things: The University and its Pedagogies of Minority Difference, Roderick Ferguson
Justice and the Politics of Difference, Iris Marion Young
In the Matter of Color: Race and the American Legal Process, Leon Higginbotham
Pursuing Trayvon Martin: Historical Contexts and Contemporary Manifestations of Racial Dynamics, George Yancy and Janine Jones
The Condemnation of Blackness, Khalil Muhammad
Racism and Sexual Oppression in Anglo-America, Ladelle McWhorter
Sara Ahmed, On Being Included: Racism and Diversity in Institutional Life.
Roderick Ferguson, The Reorder of Things: The University and Its Pedagogies of Minority Difference.
Stefano Harney and Fred Moten, The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Study.
Jodi Melamed, Represent and Destroy: Rationalizing Violence in the New Racial Capitalism.
Lucius Outlaw, On Race and Philosophy.
Pretty much anything by Hortense Spillers or Sylvia Wynter.
“Then a dark explosion sounded, a light flashed in the middle of the tube scaffolding, a cloud boiled up, some invisible power exploded the scaffolding, easily raising its first level, and the tubes flew up thick from the construction, higher and higher, and when the power which threw these spears started to weaken, the tubes waited in the air, then fell back, and poured down on the area, and the spears became branchy trees, and half of the construction collapsed, and the other half separated from the statue, standing like a ski-jump, it hesitated for a while, and it did not fall down just then. And the statue now stood stripped, stronger and more powerful than ever, it bent forward a bit, as if threatening the city, above whose rooftops now the pressure of the explosion rolled along, easily ringing the bell, and waving the mason’s clothes like a flag.” But now for the important news. Hello Kitty is not a cat. She’s a cartoon character. She is a little girl. She is a friend. But she is not a cat. She’s never depicted on all fours. She walks and sits like a two-legged creature. She does have a pet cat of her own, however, and it’s called Charmmy Kitty. Mickey Mouse is not a mouse. If you look very closely at him, you can see that he wears gloves. Mice do not have the capability, nor the desire, to put gloves on their hands. He also is depicted wearing a pair of shorts with large buttons, which a mouse would be unable to fasten given its mental limitations, not to mention the fact that it has claws without opposable thumbs. Furthermore, the viewer should not be misled into thinking that Mickey is a mouse because he uses the name “Mouse.” This is merely Mr. Mouse’s surname, and is not intended to confer any mouselike qualities upon him. If you met a man who was named, say, Alan Bird, you would not assume that he was a member of the avian family, even if he happened to have a beak instead of the traditional mouth-and-nose combination seen in most humans, would you? Scooby-Doo is not a dog. Granted, he does have the comportment and vocal characteristic of a canine, but this is, in fact, the tragic consequence of a botched elective surgery that Scooby underwent at the hands of his friend Shaggy, who was briefly enrolled in a plastic-surgery program at a medical school that he no longer attends. Winnie the Pooh is not a bear. Winnie is actually a young man who dresses up as a bear in order to humor his friend Christopher Robin. The most conclusive evidence for this is the fact that Winnie is capable of speaking fluently in the English language, which has, thus far, eluded the grasp of the entirety of the bear population. Winnie’s contemporaries Eeyore, Piglet, and Tigger are all part of the same role play that was created for Mr. Robin’s sake. Why exactly these four men choose to wear these costumes for Christopher is unclear, but it has been speculated that they may owe him money from gambling debts. Those were glamorous days. Some of them are the most powerful figures in our industry, people who can call up Barack Obama about the dangers of nanotechnology, and Obama has to say “Michelle, I need to take this.” “Barack, it is three o'clock in the morning." “I know, but this guy is scared of sentient artificial intelligence and he's a huge contributor.” And then Obama just has to sit there and listen to this shit. Yes, those were glamour days.
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