I see that Invasion – The Complete Series is marked down 90% to only $7 [amazon]. Do you think that means I should buy it? Let me give you some context: 5 years ago it was marked down 60% and in the end I didn’t buy it. Ha-ha! My frugality pays off! Now I can get a better deal! Or can I? What if it’s bad? Help me to think this through as a rational actor.

Hayek:

This means, among other things, that even a strong tradition of political liberty is no safeguard if the danger is precisely that new institutions and policies will gradually undermine and destroy that spirit.

The consequences can of course be averted if that spirit reasserts itself in time and the people not only throw out the party which has been leading them further and further in the dangerous direction but also recognize the nature of the danger and resolutely change their course. There is not yet much ground to believe that the latter has happened in England.

There are two ways to read it. First, as Henry does: ‘danger’ basically refers to the welfare state. So when Hayek says we can still change course, to avoid the danger, that means it’s not too late to overthrow the welfare state. But there is no way to avoid the danger short of that. Henry points out that this turns out to be empirically wrong.

Vallier, I take it, takes ‘danger’ to refer not to the welfare state but to its bad effects. So when Hayek says we can still change course, to avoid the danger, that doesn’t mean overthrowing the welfare state. It might mean keeping the welfare state but avoiding the bad effects. Hayek says ‘of course’ this is possible because it’s obvious to him that the welfare state isn’t, inevitably, the road to serfdom.

Now, obviously, the second reading can’t be right. Hayek can’t be such a bland apologist for the welfare state as all that. It certainly wouldn’t help him wind his way up to the high note at the end: “the unforeseen but inevitable consequences” and all that.

Which leaves Henry’s reading.

In defending Hayek, Vallier is applying a not-very-sensible-really principle of charity, which philosophers often apply, especially when studying historical figures. His post title is “Hayek was not dumb,” which makes it sound as though Henry is being the implausible one here. But Vallier’s implied argument is more like this: “Hayek was smart, so he probably didn’t make a big mistake.” That’s not nuts, but, as a response to Henry’s “Hayek was smart, but he made a big mistake,” it hardly carries enough weight to even bother mentioning it. Smart people make big mistakes all the time.

Why do philosophers tend to apply this principle: if someone is smart (and they’re dead, and you like them) assume they didn’t make a big mistake? Well, it’s complicated, and there’s a point. But only up to a point. Charity breeds apologetic ingenuity, which breeds contrarianism, which is a good and a bad thing. Plato was a hard-nosed empiricist! Only Descartes really offers a good argument against mind-body dualism! Hayek knew that – of course! – the welfare state isn’t, by nature, the road to serfdom. It’s fine to see whether you can make the machine run in reverse with a bit of tinkering, but the interest of that sort of exercise can survive subtraction of the ‘it was like that when I found it’ flourish. I recommend omitting the schtick.

This isn’t really so much a libertarian thing, I think. It’s more an academic philosophy bug in your ear-type situation. I speak as one periodically afflicted. Occupational hazard.

We’re part way through A Wind In The Door, having finished A Wrinkle In Time last Saturday. Then last Sunday we went to see The Avengers – which was great! (did you hear?) – and Zoe was very excited that the plot was sort of similar. US government meddling with tesseract opens doorway to creepy alien forces beyond our comprehension across the universe, etc. Film was a bit more action-packed than the book.

Anyway, any Madeleine L’Engle thoughts? Religious sf (like C.S. Lewis.) Kid lit that bucks genre conventions, but that kids really like, proving that the conventions can be broken?

What should your business card say?

Take it away, Platters!

The question: should I upgrade to Lion?

Normally I would just do it. In my case I’ve been slow because I had one legacy PPC app – Expression – which I’ve used for drawing for years. It will die when Rosetta dies, leaving me locked out of all that work forevermore. I recently overcame that problem by manually exporting all of that stuff as Illustrator docs. (That was fun!) So now I’m ready. But. Reading the Lion reviews, a lot of people have had problems. Adobe CS stuff reported to run sluggish on some systems – and not just old ones. A few folks have apparently had their computers turn into bricks. It seems like I might have to do more than just back up to TimeMachine before making the shift. Maybe do the whole CC clone thing, for safety? My system is not exactly old – an early 2009 iMac. But it’s not exactly new. And there doesn’t seem to be any pattern to the problems I see reported. New systems. Old systems. Some folks have had no problems. Some folks have had serious problems and retreated to Snow Leopard.

And for what? Lion seems mostly to be geared to 1) making my iMac more like an iPad; 2) enabling easier filesharing.

Re: 1). Seems like I might need to buy one of those Magic Trackpads so I can do iPad style ‘gesturing’. That would be snazzy, I suppose. But when I bought a Magic Mouse some months ago the Bluetooth proved so unreliable – I could only make it work about 80% of the time – that it now sits in a drawer. Can I use my Wacom Intuos3 drawing tablet instead? (Will it even still work right for regular old drawing? Reports vary!)

Re: 2). I need MobileMe (formerly .mac, now iCloud) because it’s my main email address. Been that since 2003. Other than that, it’s not like I need all that much bleeding edge filesharing capability.

So I feel like maybe I’m going to spend $29, plus buy a new external hard drive to guard against the outside possibility of my computer turning into a brick, just to make sure I can keep my email running. Plus no doubt some great new features, but I’m not exactly dying for any particular thing Lion does.

I’ve been preparing to do it because I thought I didn’t have an option. But now Apple seems to be saying I can keep my email even if I’m not 100% Lion or iOS6 on all my devices after the drop dead June 30 date. I just lose MobileMe storage. Inconvenient, to be sure.

Maybe I should wait for Mountain Lion and hope at least the bug reports will be more favorable (even as the iPad-ification of the Mac proceeds apace?)

Please feel free to report your experiences with Lion, fellow CT’ers. I’m really unsure how to take the reviews in the App Store. They are like reviews of political books. A lot of five stars and one stars. It’s confusing. Obviously people who have a really bad experience are more naturally motivated to leave an angry review than are people who have a painless experience and hardly notice it even happened. So I have a hard time telling whether negative reviews are representative. All the major reviews of Lion from ZDnet, MacUser and the like have been broadly favorable. But there is an undercurrent of user dissatisfaction in lots of forums. Let’s add to that with a confused cacophony of CT comments!

Daddy: What did you learn in school today?
Zoe: Some Greek guy said if he had a big enough lever, he could move the world. That’s pretty cool.
Daddy: Possibly not even the coolest thing he ever said! (Reads relevant portion of Wikipedia entry to Zoe and Violet).

Saturday [events reported by Zoe to Daddy]:

Mommy: Don’t you think you’ve been playing “Cooking Mama” on your Nintendo DS long enough [or words to this general effect]?
Violet: Don’t mess with my circles. [Bonus points awarded because play in “Cooking Mama” consists largely of making little circles with your stylus.]

Advantage: Daddy!

I have now given Zoe a harder assignment. She is to wait until life affords her the opportunity to utter “Go Tell The Spartans”, appropriately. (Per this thread, we’re working through E.M. Gombrich’s Little History of the World [amazon], which turns out to be surprisingly good and age appropriate.) This may take a while. Then again, her school has about as many silly little rules as the next school, so maybe it won’t take too long. If it works, I’m hoping the effect will be like a classic “Peanuts” strip. I feel “Go Tell The Spartans” is the sort of thing that Linus might have said, after being bossed around by Lucy.

What other sayings do you think every 8-10 year old girl should have at her disposal, to baffle and amaze those around them?

However, even if Lacan’s inversion [If there is no God, then all is forbidden] appears to be an empty paradox, a quick look at our moral landscape confirms that it is a much more appropriate description of the atheist liberal/hedonist behaviour: they dedicate their life to the pursuit of pleasures, but since there is no external authority which would guarantee them personal space for this pursuit, they get entangled in a thick network of self-imposed “Politically Correct” regulations, as if they are answerable to a superego far more severe than that of the traditional morality. They thus become obsessed with the concern that, in pursuing their pleasures, they may violate the space of others, and so regulate their behaviour by adopting detailed prescriptions about how to avoid “harassing” others, along with the no less complex regime of the care-of-the-self (physical fitness, health food, spiritual relaxation, and so on).

Today, nothing is more oppressive and regulated than being a simple hedonist.

This is, I take it, Goldberg’s thesis, minus the Lacan – we’ll see! Namely, the godlessness of liberalism produces an idiot tick-tock between authoritarianism and relativism. The proof: liberal bumper-stickers/slogans oscillate between fatuously broad gestures of total freedom and orthodoxy sniffery re: racism and sexism and a few other things. QED.

I predict it will be at stage two that we discern daylight between the Goldbergian and Zizekian positions:

But there is a second observation, strictly correlative to the first, here to be made: it is for those who refer to “god” in a brutally direct way, perceiving themselves as instruments of his will, that everything is permitted. These are, of course, the so-called fundamentalists who practice a perverted version of what Kierkegaard called the religious suspension of the ethical.

So why are we witnessing the rise of religiously (or ethnically) justified violence today? Precisely because we live in an era which perceives itself as post-ideological. Since great public causes can no longer be mobilized as the basis of mass violence – in other words, since the hegemonic ideology enjoins us to enjoy life and to realize our truest selves – it is almost impossible for the majority of people to overcome their revulsion at the prospect of killing another human being.

Goldberg and Zizek agree that there is a problem with liberal delusions of post-ideologism. See above: the master-argument from ‘liberal slogans are not so smart’, as we might call it. But I fear that, past this point, they will no longer see eye to eye. Let’s call the master-argument, in the mouth of a conservative, ‘the goose’ and the self-same argument, in the mouth of a left-of-liberalism critic of liberalism ‘the gander’.

I predict that Goldberg will maintain that what’s good for the goose isn’t good for the gander – because that’s just cliched thinking! Like “one man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter!” Zizek will argue, to the contrary, that Lacan and Hegel showed that the thing that conservatives think is good for the goose is actually not good for the goose. (Only a perversion of Kierkegaard could make it seem otherwise., See also, this parable, perhaps.) But it would be good for the gander. Alas, there are none. Damned liberals!

But I could be wrong. Possibly I underestimate one or the other or both authors. But this much is for sure: they both have new books coming out tomorrow. Neither of which I have read, nor shall I, in all likelihood. (I’ve read a lot of Zizek, but Less Than Nothing is more than a 1000 pages. I’m off the bus.) [whoops! looks like I was wrong about Zizek’s book. Saw a ‘May’ release somewhere and assumed May Day, which seemed Zizekian. Not actually available until mid-month. Apologize for inconvenience.]

Happy May Day!

“A quick eye for ideas may actually make a writer slow in reaching his goal, just as a quick eye for landscapes might make a motorist slow in reaching Brighton. An original man has to pause at every allusion or simile to re-explain historical parallels, to re-shape distorted words. Any ordinary leader-writer (let us say) might write swiftly and smoothly something like this: “The element of religion in the Puritan rebellion, if hostile to art, yet saved the movement from some of the evils in which the French Revolution involved morality.” Now a man like Mr. Shaw, who has his own views on everything, would be forced to make the sentence long and broken instead of swift and smooth. He would say something like: “The element of religion, as I explain religion, in the Puritan rebellion (which you wholly misunderstand) if hostile to art — that is what I mean by art — may have saved it from some evils (remember my definition of evil) in which the French Revolution — of which I have my own opinion — involved morality, which I will define for you in a minute.” That is the worst of being a really universal sceptic and philosopher; it is such slow work. The very forest of the man’s thoughts chokes up his thoroughfare. A man must be orthodox upon most things, or he will never even have time to preach his own heresy.”

Ah, graduate school, and trying to write my dissertation. I remember it well. (Shudder.) I don’t know whether I was a budding universal philosopher, but I did commit the sin of wanting to be a multifold heretic within the scope of a single paragraph, or sentence. I’ve tried to stop doing that.

But it’s true: ‘Nazi’ is short for ‘National Socialist’. So there’s that.

You can read a short version of the UPA history on Wikipedia. Really short version: UPA was founded by disgruntled former employees of Uncle Walt who pioneered some simplified techniques while working for Uncle Sam, which – admixed with artistic ambition and modernist design sensibilities – led to some great animation. Then there was the Red Scare and they got into the Godzilla business and … well, more of a whimper than a bang. Ah, well.

If you google around you can find UPA-produced wartime material. For example, this classic Private SNAFU, “Booby Traps”, whose Fudd-like, Blanc-voiced protagonist anticipates the “Endearing Young Charms” gag of later, “Looney Tunes” fame. Oh, and “Hell-Bent For Election,” a UAW-sponsored, pro-Roosevelt cartoon.

Here is a bit from the Magoo Flew book. Disney was having union trouble:

Other animation producers signed with the SCG [Screen Cartoonists Guild]: Walter Lantz, George Pal, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. The trend was against the paternalistic mode of Walt Disney’s studio. So the hardscrabble Midwesterner, who had come from so little and gained so much, lent his charisma to a personal plea. Over the course of two days in February 1941, Disney stood before his employees and made a big speech. In Studio A, the 622-seat theatre on the Burbank lot, Walt recounted the entire history of Walt Disney Productions: the loss of his character Oswald the Lucky Rabbit, the betrayal by his early associates, the creation of Mickey Mouse, the reinvestment of every penny back into production. As Ward Kimball noted, many “called it a sob story.” Disney was, in turn, convivial, emotional, and blithely condescending. Dave Hilberman remembered the diatribe, rather colorfully, as the “law of the jungle” speech. Walt actually said that “it’s the law of the universe that the strong shall survive and the weak must fall by the way, and I don’t give a damn what idealistic plan is cooked up, nothing can change that.” When that line didn’t work, he threatened, “I’ll never let you swim in my pool again!” As the Nation commented, the speech “recruited more members for the Screen Cartoonists’ [sic] Guild than a year of campaigning.” (14)

But it wasn’t the first time the future UPA-founders had these sorts of problems. Zack Schwartz ended up working for Disney in the first place only after asking for a raise from competitor Leon Schlesinger.

In response to Schwartz’ request, the nattily dressed and heavily pomaded producer boasted that some people worked at his studio for as little as six dollars a week. Schwartz snapped back, “Mr. Schlesinger, if I had people working for me for six dollars a week, I’d keep quiet. I’d be ashamed to tell anybody about it.” That was his last day at Leon Schlesinger Productions (7)

Fortunately these days things are different in the American animation industry. Cartoon Brew has a series of posts about Digital Domain CEO John Textor bragging that free labor is much better than cheap labor. Best of all is getting the workers to pay to work!

Amid Amidi snarks:

Textor’s rationale for making students pay to work at Digital Domain is that he felt strongly about keeping jobs in North America. That’s why yesterday he announced a co-production deal with Chinese company Beijing Galloping Horse Film Co., Ltd. which will serve as co-producer and distributor of Digital Domain’s first feature The Legend of Tembo.

It’s easy to understand why Textor is so enthused about China. The Chinese government is giving him free land and Chinese investors are handing over $50 million for Digital Domain to build a motion capture facility. With a deal like that, students will have to pay Textor a lot more money to work for free if they want those jobs to stay in North America.

Oh joy!

Amidi’s Cartoon Modern: Style and Design in 1950s Animation [amazon] is also back in print, I see. It’s a wonderful source, if you like this sort of thing.

The paradoxical result is that a piece that begins as a criticism of anti-white racism gradually morphs into something akin to an expression of white racism. It therefore strengthens the anti-white racism it is meant to satirize which, as it happens, is a growing problem in the U.S. — not in the suburbs or backwoods but in the corporate executive suites, the media elites, the courts, the bureaucracy, and of course the entire industry of sensitivity training which used to go under the more honest title of “Political Reeducation” in the gulag. Combined with class snobbery, as it usually is, anti-white racism produces bigotry and discrimination against innocent persons too, less viciously than past discriminations perhaps, but also more unanswerably because it operates under the virtuous disguise of anti-discrimination and social justice.

Obviously there is no paradox. I wish Yglesias would get off his moneybox soap box and revisit one of his evergreen themes of yore. But I guess I can do the honors. The appeal of banging on and on about anti-white racism (anti-anti-racism), even though it’s obviously silly to suppose it’s a gulag-grade social problem that is in some ways worse than old-fashioned racism ever was, is that it is akin to an expression of white racism. Historically, expressions of white racism have gradually morphed into expressions of anti-anti-racism, as it became less and less socially acceptable to express white racism openly. Republicans stand in steady need of rhetorical forms that are akin to expressions of white racism, but that afford plausible deniability against charges of racism. Thus: anti-anti-racism. But plausible deniability requires that you get in and out in a hurry.

And that’s why, as O’Sullivan says, the real problem with the Derb’s piece is not what it said but, paradoxically, the fact that it was said at such length. If something that hasn’t quite come into clear view quacks like a duck and walks like a duck, it’s likely to morph into a duck, the longer you look at it. That’s just playing the odds. (Not really a paradox at all.)
Let me adapt a bit from comments to my other post. Here are two ‘spirits’ in which Derb could have talked the Talk:

‘Kid, once upon a time, good people had a noble, liberal dream of a color-blind society. But reality played a cruel joke on us all, and here’s the way things work and I doubt anything is ever going to change that. But anyway, you don’t want to be mugged …’ If he’d said that, he’d have kept his job, to say the least.

Here’s something more in line with what he actually said: ‘once upon a time, bad people had a warped, liberal dream of a color-blind society. And reality played a deliciously cruel joke on them. Now the rest of us have to live somewhat artificial lives, in the aftermath of this vain social engineering collapse, but at least we – who are not ultimately the butt of the joke – can derive some vicarious Schadenfreude from the sorry spectacle – which is no small compensation …’ Probably then you give the kid some de Maistre to read.

The Derb gave an interview to Gawker, in the aftermath of his firing, in which he pretty much took the mild, ‘more in sorrow than anger’ line:

Fix the schools! End poverty! Stamp out racism! Affirmative action! Fifty years ago a thoughtful person could sign on to those prescriptions. I know: I was around: I did. Yes (we said) once unjust laws had been struck down, and some social massaging of that sort been done for a few years, the races would merge in happy harmony, and the word “race” and its derivatives would drop out of the language. We all believed that. I believed it.

Plainly this hasn’t happened, except of course in the upper classes, which go by their own rules. For a thoughtful person today to believe that these social-engineering nostrums will (for example) bring black crime rates to a level indistinguishable from white crime rates, involves a strenuous act of what Orwell called “doublethink”—massive self-deception.

But plainly this isn’t the spirit of the Taki Mag piece he wrote. So what gives? You can’t BOTH think liberalism is a noble, albeit tragically failed dream of color-blind racial equality that only conservatives are keeping alive, by heroically protesting against anti-anti-racism AND be delighted by the mischievously self-delighted racism of the Derb’s version of the Talk. So will the real Derb please stand up?

Well, I don’t know. But I’ll bet they are both as real as houses. The thing to see is how easy it is for conservatives to be in this particular state of cognitive dissonance.

Accordingly, I’ve taken a flutter on this Kickstarter project that got BoingBoing’ed this morning. Seems like the right idea.

Suggestions?

Re the whole learning to like reading thing. It does seem that somehow she just outgrew or worked through whatever problem she was having, but Harry Potter seems to have played a not-inconsiderable part in the drama. I used to have a theory that the Harry Potter books just got freakishly lucky, being as popular as they were. Sure, they were good, but not that good. I thought it was more a social thing. Once everyone got into Harry, everyone got into getting into Harry and the snowball rolled down the hill into an avalanche. But my daughter is a counter-example to that. Harry Potter electrified her brain as nothing really had before, and it was nice that some of her friends liked it, too. But the books were the thing. It seems that J.K. Rowling’s formula is, simply, the perfect formula. Good to know.

I’m curious to see how comments to Lowry’s post shape up. [UPDATE: no such luck. They’re closed.] What is wrong with Derb’s version of ‘the talk’, after all? He has the courage to speak Bell Curve truth to liberal power? He has the keen-eyed discernment to see race hucksterism and political correctness for what they really are? His remedy consists entirely of the rigorous practice of freedom of association? “Avoid concentrations of blacks not all known to you personally.” I’m not seeing the problem here.

The Derb is a veritable Gandhi of passive resistance to injustice – compared to George Zimmerman, just for example. In a season in which reasonable conservatives are debating whether Zimmerman was is the right, surely they can at least come together in agreeing that the whole sorry situation – and the President’s shameful if perhaps inevitable insertion of race into the mix – could have been avoided if only someone had taken Zimmerman aside, at an earlier point in his life, and given him the Derb’s version of the Talk.

Pressing the Gandhi analogy: suppose this sort of thing were to catch on and be practiced widely. Couldn’t it have a salutary effect, embarrassing the ruling liberal elite by highlighting their hypocrisy? It’s not as though the government is going to force people not to do as Derb advises. (What are they going to do? Send in the National Guard to carry protesting white people, who have gone all limp, into the midst of crowds of black people they don’t know? It’s absurd. Even liberals wouldn’t dream of it.) At worst, then, the Talk keeps a few Zimmermans from becoming victims. At best, it might clear the air – slowly, quietly – in thousands of homes. That won’t result in a clearing of the air in the much more polluted public sphere, of course. But a virtuous citizenry is no more built in a day than Rome was. Mightn’t The Talk – at the knee of father and mother – be the first, tremulous baby step on the way to what we all always say we want: a frank, adult national conversation about race – by which liberals, of course, mean yet another lecture to conservatives about race, as if they are all a bunch of disobedient children? Give the liberals what they say they want – some Talk – and see if they like it!

What, exactly, is Lowry’s problem with that? Perhaps comments to his post will enlighten me.

UPDATE: Seems Derb’s fate at NR is in some doubt. Ponnuru and Goldberg have tweeted against him. I would be curious to hear them explain why they think this is over the line, not just that it is. To me, it looks to me like an assemblage of points, all of which are, by general and specifically Derbish precedent, accepted as mainstream conservative discourse. Admittedly, put them together and they look bad. Yes, I can see that now. (Did they never notice that the Derb thinks these things before now?)

2nd UPDATE: And he’s outa there!

Why should our capacity to reason require anything more than disinterestedness within one’s own group? Since the interests of my group will often be better served by ignoring the interests of members of other groups, the need for a public justification of conduct should require no more than this. Indeed, shouldn’t we rather expect the need for public justification to prohibit justifications which give the interests of my group no more weight than the interests of other groups? This suggestion overlooks the autonomy of reasoning – the feature I have pictured as an escalator. If we do not understand what an escalator is, we might get on it intending to go a few meters, only to find that once we are on, it is difficult to avoid going all the way to the end. Similarly, once reasoning has got started it is hard to tell where it will stop. The idea of a disinterested defense of one’s conduct emerges because of the social nature of human beings and the requirements of group living, but in the thought of reasoning beings, it takes on a logic of its own which leads to its extension beyond the bounds of the group.

I think it’s fair to say that Stanley Fish is shaky on the concept of an escalator, in Peter Singer’s sense.

Here’s a bit of Gunnar Myrdal Singer quotes. What do you think of this general line?

The individual … does not act in moral isolation. He is not left alone to manage his rationalizations as he pleases, without interference from outside. His valuations will, instead, be questioned and disputed. Democracy is a “government by discussion,” and so, in fact, are other forms of government, though to a lesser degree. Moral discussion goes on in all groups from the intimate family circle to the international conference table …. In this process of moral criticism which men make upon each other, the valuations on the higher and more general planes – referring to all human beings and not to specific small groups – are regularly invoked by one party or the other, simply because they are held in common among all groups in society, and also because of the supreme prestige they are traditionally awarded. By this democratic process of open discussion there is started a tendency which constantly forces a larger and larger part of the valuation sphere into conscious attention. More is made conscious than any single person or group would on his own initiative find it advantageous to bring forward at the particular moment. … The feeling of need for logical consistency within the hierarchy of moral valuations – and the embarrassed and sometimes distressed feeling that the moral order is shaky – is, in its modern intensity, a rather new phenomenon. With less mobility, less intellectual communication, and less public discussion, there was in previous generations less exposure of one another’s valuation conflicts. The leeway for false beliefs, which makes rationalizations of valuations more perfect for their purpose, was also greater in an age when science was less developed and education less extensive. These historical differentials can be observed today within our own society among the different social layers with varying degrees of education and communication with the larger society, stretching all the way from the tradition-bound, inarticulate, quasi-folk societies in isolated backward regions to the intellectuals of the cultural centers. When one moves from the former groups to the latter, the sphere of moral valuations becomes less rigid, more ambiguous and also more translucent. At the same time the more general valuations increasingly gain power over the ones bound to traditional peculiarities of regions, classes, or other smaller groups. One of the surest generalizations is that society, in its entirety, is rapidly moving in the direction of the more general valuations.

Then again, there’s Stanley Fish. I keep thinking he can’t get any more Stanley Fish-like than he already was. But then he goes and does it. Oh, and there’s RedState.