Thursday, September 30, 2010

Unlicensed Metastasis of Zizz

Walter Benn Michaels has raised some hackles by stealing chunks of Zizek's Liberal multiculturalism is the Hegemony – it’s an empirical fact… routine:


Zizek:

Furthermore, when we talk about anti-imigration measures, about the diferent forms of immigrant exclusion, and so on, we should always bear in mind that anti-immigration politics is not directly linked to capitalism or the interests of capital. The free circulation of labor is, on the contrary, in the interests of big capital, since cheaper immigrant labor will put pressure on "our own" workers to accept lower wages. And is outsourcing not also now an inverted form of employing immigrant workers? Resistance against immigrants is primarily the spontaneous-defensive reaction of the local working classes who (not wholly unjustifiably) perceive the immigrant worker as a new kind of strike-breaker and, as such, as an ally of capital. In short, it is global capital which is inherently multiculturalist and tolerant.

...
You cannot have a living democracy in this pure multiculturalist liberal dream.


WBM:

First of all, neoliberal economists are completely for open borders, in so far as that’s possible. Friedman said years ago that, “You can’t have a welfare state and open borders,” but of course the point of that was “open the borders, because that’ll kill the welfare state.” There’s a good paper you can get off the web by Gordon Hanson, commissioned by whoever runs Foreign Affairs, and the argument is that illegal immigration is better than legal immigration, because illegal immigration is extremely responsive to market conditions.

So it’s quite striking that you have all this protesting against illegal immigration, and especially at a time when it’s down. So why are people so upset about it? They are upset about it not because it has gotten worse, it hasn’t, but because they somehow recognize that one of the primary sort of marks of the triumph of neoliberalism in the U.S. is a very high tolerance of illegal immigration, and that illegal immigration is the kind of ne plus ultra of the labor mobility that neoliberalism requires.


Note the difference between Zizek's pseudo-argument by racist innuendo which delights his audience and Walter Benn Michaels' structural analysis which infuriates them. In Zizek's rant, "immigrants" are just cheaper, by nature, cheaper even in conditions of "free circulation of labour". These "immigrants" are everywhere immigrants, even when living and working in the country of their birth. That is "immigrant" is serving as at once description and euphemism - we are to understand the cheap immigrants do not include Zizek himself. These cheap immigrants are simply a vision of a lower race, a cheaper people with a culturally lower standard of living no matter where they are or what their situation - primitives in comparison to the "white working class". In contrast, WBM argues that it is the condition of illegality, imposed on people - that is, not the free circulation of labour that Zizek fatuously evokes as preferable for capital, but the restrictions on labour movement while capital freely circulates that really is to the advantage of capital - with all its insecurities and pressures, that makes immigrant labourers cheaper. Moreover, Zizek is stressing, with appeals to emotion, a competition between these cheaper foreigners and the "white working class", emphasising the threat and damage the former - figured as scabs - pose to the latter. WBM, in contrast, does not even concede this mechanism, a fantasy of Zizek's xenophobic mythology, but is instead describing the way capital uses illegal immigration to regulate its supply of labour. That is, WBM foregrounds the conflict between labour and capital, while Zizz in his neofascist manner foregrounds one between natives and immigrants, racialised, and asserts, in the tradition of political anti-semitism, the existence of an alliance between immigrant workers and capitalists against "our" "local working classes".

WBM's taking up of a similar topic but making a crucially distinct point - which additionally is stated with clarity and precision (so that he cannot evade responsibility for his assertions and for the considerable quantity of simply unfactual history embedded as assumptions) - threatens to disturb the function of the minstrelsy of Zizek's racist, pseudo-leftist rant, which relies on a confusion of the reality WBM refers to (the uses of illegal economic immigration to capital) and on the increasing acceptability of the prevarication and equivocation of propagandistic discourses as practised by the Zizz. The very existence of WBM's remarks, in which he can be specific and clear, and distinguish legal immigration from illegal, threatens the Zizzian project which involves naturalizing a style of punditry whose cageyness and evasiveness is seen as a merit, allowing the author to refuse all interpretations and all responsibility both for her enunciations and for their implications. WBM writes in an adult and educated style which assumes responsibility for its content. The principle project of Zizzianism is to popularize a style which allows for the propagation of odious and patently fallacious content with the provision of various built-in alibis such as "sloppiness", ambiguity through vagueness, and floating "irony".*

Zizek:

Today’s celebration of “minorities” and “marginals” IS the predominant majority position. … take those critics of patriarchy who attack it as if it is still a hegemonic position, ignoring what Marx and Engels wrote more than 150 years ago, in the first chapter of The Communist Manifesto: “The bourgeoisie, wherever it has got the upper hand, has put an end to all feudal, patriarchal, idyllic relations.” – is still ignored by those Leftist cultural theorists who focus their critique on patriarchal ideology and practice. Is it not the time to start to wonder about the fact that the critique of patriarchal “phallogocentrism” etc. was elevated into a main target at the very historical moment – ours – when patriarchy definitely lost its hegemonic role, when it is progressively swept away by market individualism of Rights? What becomes of patriarchal family values when a child can sue his parents for neglect and abuse, i.e., when family and parenthood itself are de iure reduced to a temporary and dissolvable contract between independent individuals? (And, incidentally, Freud was no less aware of this: for him, the decline of the Oedipal mode of socialization was the historical condition of the rise of psychoanalysis.) In other words, the critical statement that patriarchal ideology continues to be today’s hegemonic ideology IS today’s hegemonic ideology – its function is to enable us to evade the deadlock of the hedonist permissiveness which is effectively hegemonic.




WBM:

There is almost a kind of liberal nostalgia for the time in which anti-racism wasn’t so mainstream in American society. Today we’re living in a deeply anti-racist society ... officially committed to anti-racism ... which you can tell when Glenn Beck thinks it’s a good idea to couch his criticism of Obama by calling Obama a “racist.” It’s the killing word to say to anyone. That doesn’t mean that there isn’t still racism, it means that there is an important sense in which anti-racism is absolutely the official ideology because no one can imagine themselves to be committed to racism.


A further difference is that after delivering the old Golovinski-Schmitt "critique of liberalism" which Zizz has attempted to brand as his nostrum, WBM issues plainly sincere calls for a renewal of militant working class praxis aiming at redistribution of wealth which he in his bigotry and ignorance imagines to be obstructed or distracted from by feminism, anti-racism and other concrete working class struggle** while Zizek, with his Goebbelsian cynicism and cunning, his propagandistic weave of innuendo, insinuation and provocation, is only trying to recharge stereotypes and reactionary mythology***, defame leftist public intellectuals, incite/justify pogroms against Roma, and perhaps convince his privileged white male audience to assert their supremacy harrassing women and calling their African-American colleagues by the n-word. Or at least to dream and now and then boast of doing so. And sell all this processed as naughty titillating entertainment commodities to a slice of clerks.



_______________________________________________________________________________

* compare:

Traditional:

In 1947—seven years before the Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board of Education, sixteen years before the publication of Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique—the top fifth of American wage-earners made 43 per cent of the money earned in the us. Today that same quintile gets 50.5 per cent. In 1947, the bottom fifth of wage-earners got 5 per cent of total income; today it gets 3.4 per cent. After half a century of anti-racism and feminism, the US today is a less equal society than was the racist, sexist society of Jim Crow. Furthermore, virtually all the growth in inequality has taken place since the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1965—which means not only that the successes of the struggle against discrimination have failed to alleviate inequality, but that they have been compatible with a radical expansion of it. Indeed, they have helped to enable the increasing gulf between rich and poor.


Zizzian:

The mass entry of women into the workforce has corresponded with an overall stagnation or diminution of wages. It is as if employers have taken the very worst aspects of women's work in the past – poorly paid, precarious, without benefits – and applied it to almost everyone, except those at the very top, who remain overwhelmingly male and incomprehensibly rich.

This is equality as a race to the bottom.



Not only does the Zizzian author refuse to articulate unequivocally the relationship she evisions between the phenomena she presents in proximity as somehow linked (to enable later refusal of responbsibility for implying any connection between women in the workforce and the stagnation or diminution of wages that "correspond"), we are even invited, by the adolescent, silly, faintly sarcastic tone, to excuse the fallaciousness of the concluding assertions regarding this connection on the grounds that we must suspect the author doesn't know what a "race to the bottom" is but is just parroting some authority she has not understood.

** And, second, multiculturalism and diversity more generally are even more effective as a legitimizing tool, because they suggest that the ultimate goal of social justice in a neoliberal economy is not that there should be less difference between the rich and the poor—indeed the rule in neoliberal economies is that the difference between the rich and the poor gets wider rather than shrinks—but that no culture should be treated invidiously and that it’s basically OK if economic differences widen as long as the increasingly successful elites come to look like the increasingly unsuccessful non-elites. So the model of social justice is not that the rich don’t make as much and the poor make more, the model of social justice is that the rich make whatever they make, but an appropriate percentage of them are minorities or women. -

*** "Furthermore, the liberal-multiculturalist’s opposition to direct racism is not a mere illusion whose truth is the protection of racism: there is a class-coded dimension in it ... directed against (white) working class fundamentalism/racism/antifeminism."

29 comments:

  1. "In short, it is global capital which is inherently multiculturalist and tolerant."

    Oh yeah, brother.

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  2. "Meta"-"stasis":

    including cancer associations, that's a fine, fine word.

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  3. the striking thing is the only difference between WBM's "critique" of "liberal multiculturalism" and "identity politics" and that offered by Zizz, his flying monkeys, Badiou and the rest is a) unlike zizz and his flying monkeys, WBM does not revive crude abusive racist and misogynist language as daring political incorrectness and does not peddle slanders out of whole cloth and b) within the frame of his nonsense he makes basic sense and offers a good description of the class politics of culture industry clerk "left" in the US.

    so the reaction to him, so out of proportion to the reaction to these ideas when they are accompanied by stories of tamed "n--g--s" and "half-ape blacks" and "witches" and "bitches" and "unsightly, disgusting" "milkless" "contemporary breasts" of "evil" trans women and sarcastic ebonics and "equality as a race to the bottom" - when not accompanied, that is, by the whole phantasmagoria - suggests that the problem WBM's left critics have with him is his actually his anti-capitalist class politics and not his patriarchal white supremacy.

    There is some resemblance to the different strains of right wing anti-liberal politics of the early 20th century, ant-semitism, fascism and national socialism...the populist (WBM, Gentile, Schmitt, Hitler) and the elitist (Zizek, Marinetti, Mussolini, D'Annunzio, Maurras, Junger, Ayn Rand).

    WBM and Zizz share the basic foundation for their reactionary urgings - the pseudo-history, the revisionism, based in these caricatures of feminism, of African-American politics, anti-racism, anti-imperialism and anti-colonialism. Zizz' flying monkey's work mainly on this (their riffs and opinions are just pretexts for the reiteration of these revisionist pictures, providing opportunities for the constant reference - in passing, unchallenged, assumed - to this false history).

    The image is really captured in Miss Power's bell hooks sock puppet, whom she speaks through in her joke ebonics at the climax of her "multicultural and interspecies communism" lampoon. WBM offers the same vision, but with less racist and misogynist venom. (And thus with no need for recourse to the "just a joke! lighten up neeegro!" alibi) But WBM' shorthand, his ability to refer to a fictitious history of anti-racism and feminism and LGBT left cultural politics and be instantly understood - relies on the existence of the Zizzian caricatures with their baroquely exaggerated monstrous figures of poc and woc. Of course WBM's discourse relies on conditions created by others, these figures of contempt and loathing and fear - Zizz and posse's "hedonist" "naked, greedy" women who have "cats lick their genitals" and who are fixated on their "vibrators and booze", "expensive handbags" and "egotism" and "pernicious consumerism", the "queers" with their "fuck pads" and the "evil" trans women whose "fake" "milkless" breasts are "perverse" and unnatural, the "crystalline simplicity" of the black woman nobelist, the "half-ape blacks" and "big, black guy" with the prehensile penis who is mastered by Hegel and ends admiringly grinning like a klansman's fantasy bell hop in the Jim Crow south begging to be called "n---r" because "when blacks tell you “you can call me a nigger” means they really accept you", and of course, Malcolm X, or rather Denzel Washington, cured of his racism and fetishism according to the program of human perfection from negro to aryan in Hegel's Philosophy of History.

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  4. WBM's assertions, I mean, say about feminism and what it is:

    And, second, multiculturalism and diversity more generally are even more effective as a legitimizing tool, because they suggest that the ultimate goal of social justice in a neoliberal economy is not that there should be less difference between the rich and the poor—indeed the rule in neoliberal economies is that the difference between the rich and the poor gets wider rather than shrinks—but that no culture should be treated invidiously and that it’s basically OK if economic differences widen as long as the increasingly successful elites come to look like the increasingly unsuccessful non-elites. So the model of social justice is not that the rich don’t make as much and the poor make more, the model of social justice is that the rich make whatever they make, but an appropriate percentage of them are minorities or women.


    would simply make people laugh and think he was a sad alter kacker who just couldn't understand more than a soundbite were it not for the tireless work of imaging feminism and feminists across the whole culture industry, from Hollywood romcoms to Wendy Brown's lambasting of Women's studies and Nina Power's "polemic" against something no one now cares to name. If "consumerist feminism" that is "too happy" about sinking wages for most women because of the prominence of some in roles once reserved for men doesn't really exist, if WBM is making it up, if there is no feminism that "neoliberalism"/capitalism/global capitalism/contemporary capitalism/late capitalism has a commitment to and that is "complicit" with or indistinguishable from neoliberalism and neoliberal individualism, if there is no labour market "race to the bottom" involving women as a bloc, if there is no feminist dream of emancipation through work, what is the complaint? What are women and feminism being berated for?

    If there is in fact no "remarkable similarity between 'liberating' feminism and 'liberating' capitalism", why these attacks on women and feminism for precisely this? If in fact it's just the oldest misogynist chestnut that women's expressed "desire for emancipation" is nothing but a mask for their depraved "desire to buy more things", their egoist insatiable "consumerism" cloaking a ravenous greed for "chocolate" "expensive handbahs" "jobs" "flats", sex and "pole-dancing" in the alibi of feminist struggle against oppression and exploitation...if that is just the oldest misogynist lie on earth, as we can see when WBM even very obliquely evokes it, then why does the "left" which champions and promotes this nonsense in its most flagrant form find it distasteful in its drab version attached to some accurate observations about the rift between progressive bourgeois dissident politics and revolutionary communism?

    If that evil feminism that is consumerist, egotist, a "barrier to any genuine thinking" about politics and work, is a mirage, as now when WBM evokes it we discover all agree it is, then what has all this crusading against women purportedly responsible for it been about?

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  8. oh well patrick i concede everything. don't even know why i bothered to post, just up late and wasting time, and avoiding thinking about important and difficult things through periods of waiting...

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  9. I know, I'm sorry if I was hurtful, you know maybe no matter how far we think we've gone into new cultures and ways of thinking, it may be that that UFO Breakfast Recipients person that used to write at Roger's was right: We have our politics based on our parents. At least maybe that's right to a great degree. I guess sometimes we all go crazy. Sometimes I just can't get some of it, and maybe we're all that way.

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  10. I don't know, I think it's perfectly reasonable to question the latest brand of backlash that's being packaged and marketed as "critique". I'm not involved in much activism at the moment, but it still troubles me that *this* is what's passing for intellectual and political progress.

    "In short, it is global capital which is inherently multiculturalist and tolerant."

    It's funny, because reading Zizz et al you find that, ultimately, they can't make up their minds on this very point. One moment, it's capitalism-cum-feminism-cum-multiculturalism that's responsible for anti-immigration policies, the next it's the working class that is legitimately angry about losing their job security who are driving policy, the next it's neoliberal elites pulling all the strings. There's no internal consistency to their arguments, because instead of looking at historical *circumstance* and making out the causal chain of events that led to globalization (quite a complex set of relations, and probably chaotic in the mathematical sense), and eventually to outsourcing and multinational corporations, they seem to be lazily flinging random accusations at the wall to see what sticks.

    They take a kitchen sink approach to political scapegoating, that's for sure.

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  11. Perfect example of their strange logical contortionism:

    "So the model of social justice is not that the rich don’t make as much and the poor make more, the model of social justice is that the rich make whatever they make, but an appropriate percentage of them are minorities or women."

    This right here is what you'd call a "false dichotomy". There's no reason why you can't simultaneously hold the position that it's a positive indication for society when women hold increasingly powerful positions, are increasingly independent of men financially, AND that the wide stratification of society and economic inequity need to be remedied on a global scale. The reason why they misread and mischaracterize the thinking of the people they're calling "multiculturalists" is because they can't make this very simple distinction. They don't understand that women are themselves an economically oppressed class, and an older one than the working class- women are, in fact, the original "working class".

    And the anti-trans bashing- just, uck. Typical. So many men have a knack for finding novel and innovative ways to loathe and revile women (and their sexuality) even when they share both chromosomes with them.

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  12. thanks anodyne

    small clarification, the trans bashing is Nina Power not Zizz, and the word is "malevolent" not "evil"...

    the passage is:

    It is as if plastic surgery and the concomitant bloodletting did not expunge a malevolent spirit, but insert one. The thing to say upon first glance is not "you look nice" but "are those real?"

    trans women are not the only unnatural women out there possessed by malevolence, but unlike cis women, of whom there remain a large population of the pure and intact like Missy Power, nearly all trans women number among them.

    WBM is certainly wrong and purveying pseudo-history. But one can at least bring that objection to his assertions, and be assured he must recognise its legitimacy (even if he might, and dishonestly, dispute the validity). This really contrasts to Zizz and the Zizzbunnies, who do not accept the legitimacy of objections of this sort - that Zizek purveys lies, about Haitian history, say, or invents a "Viennese Jewish writer" to peddle and exploit a stereotype, or invents Enron whistleblowers, is not recognised by his appreciative audience and allies as flaws. He and his posse are all about legitimizing this very incoherence you mention, this profoundly reactionary Nietzschean project of the disabling of rationality and the indispensible social functions, and of selling (white supremacist) pseudo-history as not merely as good as but better than legitimate history. They have a handful of alibis and excuses for this, (that they really are referencing ideology not history) but the goal is really obvious.

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  13. They don't understand that women are themselves an economically oppressed class, and an older one than the working class- women are, in fact, the original "working class".

    exactly - the whole discourse reproduces the abjection of women and their expulsion from the working class. But also by never including, by assuming white male figures and evoking them unquestioned, refining and reinforcing this image of the working class through the description of what is not them.

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  14. Walter Benn Michaels is certainly loathesome, that's not in dispute.

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  15. "women are, in fact, the original "working class". "

    Almost as grotesquely stupid as many other things you've said--but there are definitely dumber ones, although it is 'interdit' to publish those. Who ELSE will you succeed in dumbing down?

    "So many men have a knack for finding novel and innovative ways to loathe and revile women (and their sexuality) even when they share both chromosomes with them."

    Oh, the CHROMOSOMES! And certain women do nothing but loathe and revile men, and apparently the 'vice-versa' about the chromosomes is true. Well, I'll tell you what, honey, you definitely have a way of making men loathe and revile you, and I won't even delete this out of respect to you the way I did Arpege, who is just under some pressure. Maybe one of the reasons men 'loathe and revile you' is that you are just as dishonest as Mary McCarthy said Lillian Hellman was.

    For the nonce, I've copied those remarks I deleted out of basic affection yesterday, but an edited version may yet be re-pasted.

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  16. "Almost as grotesquely stupid as many other things you've said"

    no it isn't. - "Labour". The whole idea of labour (creative work) is based in labour (reproducing the species itself).

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  17. but i don't want to argue now.

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  18. ""Almost as grotesquely stupid as many other things you've said"

    no it isn't. "

    I was talking to Anodyne, even if you agree with her. You will not distort what I'm saying about other things she's said, and they are fucking stupid. Let her defend herself, since she LOVES to argue, and endlessly.

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  19. What in the world...?

    I don't particularly care who reviles me, Patrick.

    Ask any living anthropologist who the original economically oppressed class was in human history, and they'll all say the same thing: women.

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  20. So it was a woman saying that about transwomen's breasts? So much the worse. There's a pretty virulent strain of trans-hating feminism in the U.K. represented by the likes of Julie Bindel. You don't really get that over here as much.

    Wouldn't have surprised me to hearing coming from Zizek, though.

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  21. sorry, meant to say "to hear that coming from Ziz"...

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  22. yes it's a zizzizm, but a knock-off

    not only trans women, but every woman who has had mammoplasty or any kind of cosmetic surgery evidently is an abomination.

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  23. "it is global capital which is inherently multiculturalist and tolerant"

    Is it even worth addressing a conclusion as nonsenssical as this? Only in as much as there are people who seem oblivious to theobvious - that it bears not the least resemblence to Marxist reasoning.

    For instance, is there an entity "global capital"? Does it have "inherent" features?

    might we consider that relaively unrestricted movment of capital in its human form movement of serves the interest of some capitals when the movement is accompanied by chauvinistic prejudice among workers?

    Are the only alternatives chauvinism or multi-culturalism? Could we develop conscious solidarity in opposition to spontaneous chauvinism?

    Or am I just too old-fashioned?

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  24. And could I possible learn to pause and proofread before I post a comment?

    Apparently, not.

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  25. thanks chuckie, you said it.

    and this

    "the only alternatives chauvinism or multi-culturalism? "

    really captures the general technique of which this is one instance; all the clichés are bolstered in the guise of some critique that says no we cannot conemnd the immigrants for ruining our livelihood because it is our fault they have to come and destroy our livelihood! this is how the bullshit is established as fact, by being required in passing, required for the sense, and you have to pass over it, let it slide, to address whatever is offered for your attention. And zizz packs bullshit in so densely that one can either spend years picking it apart and be subject to ridicule as obsessive and using minute textual analysis to witchhunt ilportant leftist thinkers, or you could reply as if to an honest person just to the highlighted posture and thus participoate in the naturalisation of the bullshit assumptions in which it is framed.

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  26. "And zizz packs bullshit in so densely that one can either spend years picking it apart and be subject to ridicule as obsessive and using minute textual analysis to witchhunt ilportant leftist thinkers, or you could reply as if to an honest person just to the highlighted posture and thus participoate in the naturalisation of the bullshit assumptions in which it is framed."

    Ugh, exactly. And either way, you lose- both options are downright exhausting and wear down any ambition you might have to steer the discourse in other directions. It almost seems as if Zizekian "critique" is meant to function this way, to buffer itself from sustained criticism.

    But, I suppose, as you've said before, this is how any well-oiled propaganda machine works...

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  27. yes that exhaustion, and how it inures. i think SRIs are like this - someone said with welburtrin or zoloft, you still see the spiders crawling on your interlocutor's face but you don't feel its worth mentioning.

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  28. SRIs = "Serotonin Re-uptake Inhibitors".

    They don't generally just induce numbness. Point taken, though.

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    ReplyDelete