K. Lo, at the Corner: “Conversations with random liberal strangers in New York City often descent into anger, bitterness, and crazy theories that cannot be argued with.” Yeah, I can see how that might be the case.
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John Holbo
This is a follow-up to this post from Chris B., about “wanting not to get what you want”. I want to consider the converse (inverse, whatever it is) per my title. A paragraph from the Stanford Encylopedia of Philosophy entry for “Punishment”:
“To seek to be punished because one likes it, is pathological, a perversion of the normal response, which is to shun or endure one’s punishment as one might other pains, burdens, deprivations, and discomforts. (Only among the Raskolnikovs of the world is one’s deserved punishment welcomed as a penance.) To try to punish another without first establishing control over the would-be punishee is doomed to failure. But the power to punish—as distinct from merely inflicting harm on others – cannot be adventitious; it must be authoritative and institutionalized under the prevailing political regime.” [click to continue…]
From Powerline: “Being consumed by hate is damaging to your sense of humor.” Well, I have to admit it. I didn’t get the joke myself. Go ahead and read hindrocket’s original post and his somewhat petulant (so it seems to me) update.
I’m trying to figure out the joke’s nub or ‘cracker’ (I’m using humor lingo here!), the necktie-house analogy – which the author now claims was obviously supposed to poke fun at “how weird it seems, to us non-rich people, for someone not to know off the top of his head how many houses he owns” – can simultaneously obviously function by poking fun at the very idea that it seems weird not to know off the top of your head how many houses you own. This is some superfine complex irony conservative minds can parse with ease, which is lost on the plain people of liberalism, e.g. me.
But seriously, folks. I can at least analyze what properties the joke must have, even if I don’t get it: it is some sort of superpositional quantum irony, which depends for its appreciation on a given proposition P – in this case, P = it’s weird not to know how many houses you have – being self-evidently true and absurd at the same time. This superposition can only be maintained so long as the joke is unobserved (except by its author, who does not count as conscious – otherwise why would he have written such a thing?) Once conscious observers, e.g. liberals, took a look-in to see what was going on, the superpositional irony was bound to collapse into a state of grievance. And bob’s your uncle.
I have been obliged to invent a new blog category to cover this circumstance. I apologize for the complication this entails, but the universe is a rich, strange place.
UPDATE: Hey, categories aren’t showing any more, are they? (Am I missing something? Kieran?) Anyway, the category was supposed to be: ‘the water pitcher is both broken and unbroken.’ Get the picture?
Man, what if McCain gets elected? (Also, I listened to a Jonah Goldberg bloggingheads thing and it was terrible.) Oh, but I a had great idea for a superhero duo. There’s a terrible accident – a tornado rips through a trailer park – and this is, for some strange reason, the origin story for Double-wide (he’s a bruiser type) and Airstream (his sexy, flying partner). They fight crime in a small town in Georgia. Who should their arch-enemy be?
Right. The Dark Knight. My Valve colleague, Bill B., points me to David Bordwell grousing about superhero films, and generally saying smart things. Oddly enough, given my love of superheroes, I agree almost right down the line. Oh, I enjoyed Dark Knight well enough. But the ending was dumb, the Harvey Dent subplot handled clumsily. The only reason it made sense to me that he was Two-Face was that he was clearly named Harvey Dent and had half his face melted off. Other than that, I didn’t see the resemblance. Ledger’s Joker was, as all sensitive souls agree, vastly entertaining. I would have watched him read the phonebook. Well, for a few minutes anyway. But, while I doubt anyone else would have been better for the role, I don’t actually think it was such a tremendously impressive outing. it isn’t that hard to prance around in clown make-up, barking mad. Insane clowns could be the new Rain Man prestige role. Oh, it takes physical presence and a certain bone structure and face-to-lip ratio. I’m glad someone finally decided to put Frank Miller’s joker up there on the screen. And, of course, the Dark Knight is Miller’s, too.
Everyone knows that. But certain things follow which, it seems to me, have not been noted. First, the praise of Nolan has been a bit off-target. [click to continue…]
Quiet around here. Alright: about that Britney/Paris ad. First, I take it to be obvious the dog whistle ‘he’s coming for your daughters’ subtext was, if not expressly intended, then well appreciated by the ad’s producers. But here’s something else about these ads in general. McCain is an old man without a lot to say, policy-wise, running against a charismatic younger man in an environment that favors the younger man for a lot of age and charisma-independent reasons. There is really no choice but to go for the ‘but he’s too young’, ‘he’s not ready’, ‘he’s all smile, no substance’ line. Obviously there isn’t really any reason to think so, and obviously the Republicans don’t actually think so. This isn’t their reason for voting McCain – namely, they’ve thought hard about the age issue and concluded it favors McCain. It’s just: what else are you going to say? Joe Lieberman: he’s a “good young man.” Who calls a 46-year old man ‘young’? Lieberman just called Obama ‘boy’, in effect. Is Lieberman racist? I doubt it, so why did he do it? Because there isn’t anything else for him to say that would make Obama sound bad, in a general sort of way. He would have done the same for John Edwards, if Edwards had gotten the nomination.
But: there’s no way for old white men to call a professionally accomplished, intelligent, articulate, younger – but not actually young – black man ‘boy’, in effect, without it being heard as racist. There’s no way for an old white man to drop hints that such a man might have a certain animal magnetism, might be qualified to be an entertainer, but should hardly be placed in a position of professional responsibility. (Perhaps someday, but for now, people like this ‘aren’t ready’, for obscure and unspoken reasons.) Again, Edwards would have gotten the same treatment: he’s a blow-dried lightweight. But the race angle changes it. And there isn’t any way for the attackers to convincingly deny they were making a racist attack because the true defense, if any, would be: ‘I wasn’t making a totally baseless attack on his race, I was making a totally baseless attack on him personally.’ That’s a funny corner to be driven back into. Hence the rather strange ‘these ads are just fun, sit back and enjoy it’ defense. But what’s the alternative? ‘What’s the country coming to when an honest man can’t unfairly attack another honest man, personally, without that other man saying the unfair attack is against his whole race, which is just plain an unkind thing to say and drags our political discourse through the mud? This is where Political Correctness has gotten us!’ [click to continue…]
My friend Doug Wolk just won an Eisner for best comics-related book for Reading Comics
In other news, somehow I missed the news a few weeks ago that long-lost footage from Fritz Lang’s Metropolis had turned up in Buenos Aires. That’s almost as good as when they found a nice print of Dreier’s The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928) in a Norwegian insane asylum, eh?
Although the new material is in a terrible condition, according to the first appraisals by the German film historians, including Rainer Rother, the director of the Deutsche Kinemathek Museum in Berlin, the newly discovered scenes give a surprising insight into the characters’ motivation. They finally give “Metropolis” a coherent story-telling rhythm, whose absence was often criticized. For example, characters who were practically extras in the shorter version, such as the spy Schmale or Josaphat, Freder’s friend, actually had significant supporting roles and the original dramaturgical concept, which before could only be reconstructed using textual sources and photographs, is now apparent on film for the first time since 1927.
I don’t think we even knew the spy Schmale’s name. He’s always just been ‘the thin man’, right? And he’s onscreen for all of 3 seconds, looking very tall and sinister. I’m looking forward to seeing a bit more. Here’s a YouTube video that includes tidbits of the new stuff, starting with Schmale, I presume, peeking over a Metropolis newspaper:
And, in other German typeface-related news, we are finally going to get to see the lost Yoshiwara district scene.
So, about that Obama-in-Berlin poster.
No, I’m not going to make fun of the small handful of right-wing blogs that got fake-alarmist about it, hinting that it kinda sorta looked Fascist. My question is related, however. Being a sensible and knowledgeable sort of person, as opposed to some sort of crazed wingnut, when I look at the poster I see not Fascist art but an homage to German modernist styles of the 1910’s and 20’s. Being the sort of person who futzes with fonts, I also see an example of art that would have been actually illegal under the Nazis. Quoting from German Modern
“Mr. Marks, by mandate of the District of Columbia Prepardon Division, I’m placing you under acquittal for the future murder of Sarah Marks and Donald Dubin that was to take place today, April 22 at 0800 hours and four minutes.”
I like the way in which, thanks to Bush, Republican government inevitably entangles us in serious moral dilemmas: “Wait—can a president really pardon someone who hasn’t even been charged with a crime?”
And you thought that Republican science fiction was all about Intelligent Design.
UPDATE: In my defense, I didn’t really think this could work. I just wanted to call the post that.
Matthew Yglesias was kind enough to link to my Necrotrends post. In comments over there I explained that, in all false modesty, I actually hadn’t worked out whether I thought it was a seance story or a zombie story. Is it Mark Penn as the kid in “Sixth Sense” – ‘I poll dead people’. Or is it William McKinley stashed in a shed like the former roommate at the end of “Shaun of the Dead”? Unclear, is all I can conclude. (One commenter suggested BOTH: si se puede! Fair enough.) But mostly I bring this up because Bruce Bartlett showed up in comements over there. As there was considerable speculation in comments to my original post as to whether the man could say such things with a straight face … I report, you decide: [click to continue…]
Bruce Bartlett has a piece in the WSJ. His thesis statement: “Historically speaking, the Republican Party has a far better record on race than the Democrats.” Here’s the antidote. You can guess how this sort of thing is going to go:
In 1900 (under President McKinley) and again in 1922 (under Harding), Republicans tried to enact an antilynching law. Coolidge asked for legislation again in his 1923 State of the Union message. Unfortunately, Southern Democrats in the Senate routinely filibustered every Republican effort to aid African-Americans.
Thus: “[McCain] should explain that African-Americans will be much better off in the long run if they are receptive to candidates of both parties instead of being virtual captives of only one, which is then free to take them for granted.”
But surely if African-Americans feel the need to be specifically receptive to long-dead candidates of not just one but both parties, then a oijia board, not a ballot box, is the appropriate medium.
It would be kind of fun to flip this Bartlett logic over and sort of cross it with Mark Penn microtrends. You could have necrotrends: McCain needs to reach out to recently deceased left-handed soccer moms. Or: Obama needs to be sensitive to the concerns of long-dead jai alai dads. So forth. So long as political considerations are divorced from concerns about biological vivification, the possibilities are endless. If some politician is caught with a ballot box stuffed with the names of the deceased, he could defend himself on the grounds that only letting the living vote is sheer ‘animism’.
Bartlett does not even claim, in the op-ed, that there are living Republicans who deserve the support of African-Americans, due to their support for civil rights. The most recent instance he cites is Richard Nixon, who supported affirmative action as a way of busting racist unions. He is, apparently, seriously arguing that African-Americans should consider voting for dead people.
In short: these attempts to argue that McCain can’t be running for Bush’s third term because he’s running for McKinley’s second are getting a bit far-fetched.
This line is nice (paging Rick Perlstein): “Richard Nixon is said to have developed a “Southern strategy” of using racial code words like “law and order” to gain votes in the South.” Yes, that certainly is said.
UPDATE: I almost forgot. I sort of wrote this post two weeks ago, reviewing a Michael Swanwick story about democracy among the undead. “Salem Toussaint stood in the doorway, eyes rolled up in his head so far that only the whites showed. He held up a hand and in a hollow voice said, ‘One of my constituents is in trouble.’”
PZ Myers has a hilarious post about an I.D’er who failed to understand a particular scientific paper because, apparently, he thought ‘eponymous’ was the name of a particular class of bones.
OK, lemme follow up on my Talking Heads thread, in which I was fairly decisively refuted. [click to continue…]