I want to say something here about Kamala Harris: not only as an almost perfect example of an empty signifier in politics, but also as a perfect embodiment of what we could call POSIWIS politics – the politics of a system in which “the purpose of the system is what it says, not what it does”.
Kamala Harris is (all but) what the radical theorist Ernesto Laclau called “an empty signifier”. An empty signifier is a word which is an empty vessel: which is available for use. It is a word which can mean more or less anything. Or, if I suggest that an empty signifier could be a thing or a person, it would be a thing or person which could be made to stand for more or less anything, especially if it has an appropriate appearance: which, in this instance, because woman, because black, is something that can be aimed at the double-glass-ceiling. (Glass ceiling: another empty signifier.) At the moment, Kamala Harris is in the enviable and very unusual situation of having been a black hole which has turned supernova: dragging all the light into its apparent emptiness only to explode suddenly in a great glaring star which lights up the entire Democratic universe. And, across the Atlantic, the people who are always wrong are also transfixed at the fireworks of joy streaming across from America. It is inspiring, it is wonderful – it is absurd.
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Laugh Laugh Cuddle Laugh Cuddle Smile Smile Laugh Cuddle Laugh Cuddle Laugh Laugh Laugh Wave Wave Smile Wave Smile Wave Laugh Cuddle Cuddle Cuddle Laugh Laugh Laugh Wave and Laugh Wave and Laugh. ——–There you go that about covers the content and substance of the next president of the USA. —–Oh and I forgot, in between laughing and cuddling she will take half the profit from the sale of American’s houses and hand over America’s wealth to the UN. That is what Laughing Cuddling Communists do.
Personally I think these ‘ladies’ would do a way better job than the dreadfully cringe cackling Kamala when it comes to giving speeches and engaging with people in an intelligent manner during interviews, but definitely when it comes to an improved performance in a Trump debate;
https://x.com/OliLondonTV/status/1827805058719002906
Super impressive.
https://www.scmp.com/photos/china/3275799/world-robot-conference-ai-powered-products-steal-show-beijing-china?page=4
And don’t forget cackle, it’s her trademark, nervous cackling when she has to face real questions!
OK Laugh Cuddle Smile Cackle and Talk Shit
Don’t forget the….Thankyou, thankyou, thankyou!
O/T
A big shout out to Toby and Andrew Doyle on GB News last night taking on Sam Fowles. If you have teenagers this would be a clip that you should show them to start a discussion on ‘Fake’ news.
Harris was and is a whore. The perfect standard for the un Democratic Communist cult. A person who has never worked in the real world and has no qualifications whatsoever. Stupid as a door. An apt replacement for a money laundering child sniffing election stealing half wit.
How anyone could support these bastard totalitarians is beyond my ken. RFK jr was quite clear about the inherent corporate fascism of this cult. But in a world where most people support Medical Nazism and believe in fake flying viruses I would not be entirely surprised if Harris, who constitutionally cannot be Prez, wins in a country where mostly everyone believes their idiot box and that Drumpf, a guy they tried to murder and put into jail, is the threat to their non existing ‘thriving’ democracy.
For Harris the retard to win they will need to pull another 2020 steal premised on the correct assumption that most Americans are stupid and will believe the result.
“Harris was and is a whore”
That’s offensive, FerdIII – offensive to whores.
I said the same about Theresa May on Twitter once, before she was PM. Must be why I went through so many accounts. 2TK wants to make that illegal it seems.
The trouble is she is a woman and that guarantees her a very high level of votes – no matter what she says. She will now have better script writers, which will also help a lot. And she is not Trump, and the Democratic Party has successfully managed to convince half the world that Trump is Satan in human form. So the elections will be very interesting and skewed. Finally, she is not black but light brown, not that skin colour matters, or should matter, in the slightest.
I didn’t realise Meghan Markle was black until she said that she was. My girlfriend is more ‘black’ than her…..But my GF is not obsessed with skin colour.
Do empty signifiers make the most noise?
James’s last paragraph was enough !
I did once talk online with someone young who seemed to think that the main purpose of politics was “the optics” and that making good law was a subsidiary part.
PS James, why don’t you quote from an updated bible version so that:
“Why beholdest thou the mote that is in thy brother’s eye, but considerest not the beam that is in thine own eye?” becomes:
”Why notice the splinter in your brother’s eye but ignore the plank in your own?”
Because the utilitarian mindset which seeks to abolish poetry and tradition on the grounds that they’re believed to be incomprehensible to present-day simpletons considering TV talk philosphical is a disease. It would be much better for those (hypothetical!) simpletons to learn how to understand it than for the imagined overseers of their playpens to bore everyone to death with their trite prose.
A centuries-old fundamental religious text shouldn’t read like the warranty leaftlet of a washing machine.
Yes, the AV does possess a majesty of language which is part of the history of English literature, but it seems a shame to lose comprehension when quoting. Who will take the time to look up “mote”? I did read an amusing miscomprehension the other day when someone commenting on conscience wrote, “Why are you kicking against the goats?”
They used Greek as the comprehensible language of the first century when most of the writers spoke Hebrew and Aramaic. So, I think accuracy and comprehensibility are the important things.
I don’t consider myself to have an exceptionally wide vocabulary and I know what a mote is without having to look it up.
Downvote for the PS.
As usual Dr Alexander makes some interesting points but as usual his piece rambles on and on and is close to unreadable – far too academic!
It was quite readable to me and it seems others in this parish. Maybe it’s not his writing that is the problem?
Kamala is a glass fully empty type.
Check out the Hitler Rants Parody on youtube, where Hitler phones kamala.
Remark abouf ‘natural blame avoidance of decision-makers in systems’: I’ve just read (for the second time) a detailed account of the battle of Lodz in November 1914. This started with the German 9th army under general-field-marshall v. Mackensen advancing from the north against numerically much superior Russian forces with the intent to cut off one of the Russian corps and destroy it. Another body of German troops, a makeshift corps made up of Landsturm (conscripts older than 38 or without any military training) was moving in from the west. Two corps of the 9th army attacked from the north and an encirclement group composed of the XXV. reserve corps, made up of untrained men who had volunteered for military service in August 1914, the 3rd guards division and two cavalary divisions, was sent to the south of the city to surround it completely.
The Germans walked into a well-laid trap which saw the two northern corps and the Landsturm corps to the west being blocked by superior forces while Russian troops were closing in from all sides on the encirclement group. Nevertheless, AOK 9 (army high command 9) and the leader of the XXV. reserve corps, general v. Scheffer, pressed forward with the concentric attack on Lodz until the southern group was really completely cut off from the other German forces and supplying it with munitions and food had become impossible. Then, the attack was called off and the troops were ordered to try to break through to the north or perish in the attempt. The Russians had meanwhile already started to move empty trains into the area to transport the large number prisoners of war they expected to take.
In a surprise move in the night, the 3rd guards division, a semi-independent formation, forced its way fighting through a dense forest and captured the Russian-held town of Bsheiny behind the Russian lines in the north. On the next morning, the guards division attacked southward from there while the two divisions of the XXV. reserve corps, the 49th and 50th reserve division, continued to press northward, ultimatively breaking the Russian troops between them which fled disorderly to the east. Thus, the encirclement group was saved although more than ⅓ of its soldiers were lost in action.
This suggests that it’s only certain kinds of systems whose member priorize blame avoidance above anything else. Or maybe, that only certain people, ie, civil servants and ‘democratic’ politicians, whose own ass is never in the firing line, act in this way after they became members of the (political) system.
The Left: abstractions, generalities, conclusions without supporting evidence, defamation, vilification, demonisation, low grade thinking, weak intellect. Incapable of reason or debate.
Another brilliant ‘takedown’ by James. He has managed to capture the essence of this useless politician who is behind a facade of reasonableness when she is anything but. I was a little surprised that James did not mention OBama who I think is the ultimate Empty Signifier who managed to con the US public and the world.
He was probably the worst President in my lifetime – since the 1940s – and yet he has been lauded by the US and world media.