Critiques reconsidered

Do I see anywhere an appropriate excuse?

No.

Has he read a definition of totalitarianism in the meanwhile?

Doesnt seem so.

Yes, he has removed some of his old BS. But he adds new BS:

http://bilder.bild.t-online.de/BTO/news/2004/10/03/hartz__prominente/sz__gross__pic,property=Bild.jpg

Grass is a supporter of Hartz IV.

BTW. I am german and it is still may. Prolly DeLong reads this so I should add the word jew here now.

J Bradford “Crypto-Stalinist Filth” Delong has “updated” his post, huh?

Any apology is a sign of maturity.

But I dont agree with this:

“There is something very wrong with claiming that that the decision of the Social Democratic Party to push Harz IV is not a mistake, but rather a reflection of the Social Democratic Party’s subservience to multinational capital.
Chancellor Schroeder is working for the interests of the German people as he sees them, and deserves a better quality of critic.”

I agree with the first poster above: the subservience or otherwise of SPD to international capital is an empirical question which should be argued or investigated. “Chancellor Schroeder is working for the interests of the German people as he sees them” is a ridiculous response to this suggestion. It’s a question of what factors are internalised or not in German government decision-making and how/why these have changed over the years. If you think the claim that the decision-maker is a person of good faith ends this sort of questioning, critical analysis is out the window.

Tom Delay/Howard Dean/Paul Wolfowitz/George Voinovitch/Richard Perle/Al Gore are all working in the interests of the American people as they see it. Having got that out of the way, let’s have some analysis about how and why they are influential and whose interests (including MNEs or hedge funds) they support.

because most of them never get re-printed in the ny times, so delong isn’t reading them. of course, grass was printed in the times because of *who he is*, and delong may not have been aware of who he is (i.e., huge figure in german artistic life much of whose work has wrestled with fascist past).

i agree with the original ct poster that the reconsideration is a positive sign. i still don’t think delong understands, or perhaps is not able to acknowledge, grass’ stature as a politically engaged artist, which is unfortunate, but ultimately delong’s loss.

Angry German, you beat me to it. I’ve just posted that bild page about Grass’s support of Hartz IV on DeLong’s thread. Would you go over there and check my translation?

Bob McManus, he slams Grass for opposing a reform that Grass actually supports. This combination of ignorance and arrogance is what we ridicule when we see it from the wingnuts.

Unbelievable how DeLong goes from error to error, without a break.

DeLong becomes unhinged at the mention that there’s an alternative to capitalism, or at the mention even that one would like to wish there were. Chomsky brings out in him the same response as Grass has (and Chomsky annoys me almost as much)
There’s an emptiness at the center of all DeLong’s arguments, one that he refuses to acknowledge though at some level he’s aware of it. He wants the benefits of community- the grandmother’s bolognese, challah, or ceviche, but he refuses to admit that such things were the product not of individuals but of communities, and that communities and the restrictions they impose have a value. He wants his individualism and the opposite; to defend gentrification – the ‘Haussmannization’of the world- and neoliberal policies and still to think of himself as representing something more than vulgar materialism.
DeLong is shallow and he knows it, but that makes him nervous.
I wouldn’t give a shit if he weren’t in a position of some authority and if so many others weren’t surprised at his recent stupidity.
It was all utterly predictable. More than that he poses as if his actions are independent, as if his tastes and manners weren’t scripted by history. DeLong’s as much an open book as any drooling klub kid, wholly he product of his culture. If he thought that that were even possible- if he were capable of the smallest amount of skepticism regarding his own logic- he would be less of a cookie cutter technocrat, but he isn’t.

I hate him.

Wow, that’s sounds like a different Bob McManus. I should look at that paper more carefully.

But DeLong’s objection seems now reduced to “I don’t like being called a bad person.” So what? And guess what — flawed analyses can lead to very bad outcomes. I don’t know that DeLong is a standard bearer of totalitarianism, but it’s not out of the realm of possibility that his talk of how much he wants the people of India and China to prosper will lead to free trade agreements that allow for no such thing to happen.

And he does seem to go around the bend occasionally, just to make sure he’s no leftist. It’s an older and more technocratic version of the “I didn’t like the hippies so I supported the war” argument.

All that said, he’s got a good weblog going. If the first post on Grass was Volokh-on-torture bad, this is something of a better apology.

Wow. Why would Brad apologize? None of you are Guenter Grass. He said some pretty objectionable things about Grass, and then he took them back, and admitted he was wrong to have said them. That’s good enough.

It might be good to summarize what has not been retracted, as of Thursday afternoon:

> [Grass] claim[s] (…) that we and I are the standard-bearers of a new totalitarianism.

> These rhetorical moves by Grass strike me as (a) very false, and (b) very ugly

What I see is a shifting to a new, equally untenable, position rather than anything resembling an apology.

“Wow, that’s sounds like a different Bob McManus”

It was the section on Argentina. Now I know very little about Argentina and Peronism, save that it is a nation with great potential unfulfilled. DeLong’s analysis can be wrong, but it made me think that small policy or ideological decisions can lead to long-term underperformance and a generally unsatisfying std of living.

I am very open to Grass’s arguments , and would love to see a US that looked more like France or Germany in many ways. I am not certain their systems are sustainable in today’s global environment, and I do worry that any transition contains dangers of overreach.

However those would be questions for a moderate or neo-liberal policymaker, none of which have any power or influence in the US today. The radicals are taking us over a cliff, and setting the stage for a revolution, farther to the left than DeLong will be at all comfortable with.

Oh come on, it’s an apology just like Blair’s on the WMD screwup, only more irrelevant because well he’s not a politician. He sounds like a spoilt little kid – “shouldn’t have called him that but I’m still right and he’s still an asshole”. But mommy, he started it!

And this:
Chancellor Schroeder is working for the interests of the German people as he sees them, and deserves a better quality of critic

So DeLong, living in California, thinks that he has more of a say in current German political debate, that he has proven to know nothing about, than anyone, novelist or not, Nobel Prize or not, who’s lived in Germany all their life and doesn’t see the current Chancellor as ‘working in the interests of the German people’ just because DeLong says so.

The level of arrogance here is revolting.

Hah, hah, Bob Mcmanus, certainly you’re being facetious here, right? Most of your comments have more common sense, decency and historical perspective than anything any of the blogging professors post. Don’t let them intimidate you by their ‘nonlinearity’ bullsh*t. Cheers, man.

“…and still to think of himself as representing something more than vulgar materialism. DeLong is shallow and he knows it, but that makes him nervous. … I hate him.”

Ah, well, I hate you. (Not really, but let’s say I do for the sake of the argument. I do hate what your comment here represents.) Your reasoning is shallow, your resulting conclusion is shallow, and the morality and social policy that follows from it is therefore shallow, and you are thus shallow. You are morally shallow; perhaps enough so that you make the world a worse place through your actions regarding your beliefs. You perhaps are a bad person, deserving the exact sort of condemnation, with exactly the same sort of moral smugness, you heap on DeLong.

And I’m not being facetious. As I said, I don’t hate you for this because, unlike in your case with regard to DeLong, I don’t think your shallowness arises from bad faith or bad character or even laziness. I reserve my hatred for those whose badness arises not from a somewhat common and reasonable yet incorrect (and shallow) analysis but from exceptional vice. You think DeLong has a great deal of vice—but, if so, he surely cannot be that exceptional, can he?

Well I do sort of hate you for your smugness. At the very least, the hypocrisy of it. It seems in your view, being smug is itself a vice when DeLong is smug. Being morally outraged to excessive rhetoric is a vice when DeLong is morally outraged to excessive rhetoric. Not so in your case. In fact, it seems to me that your smugness is so great that it is impossible for you and those like you to grant that DeLong’s moral outrage could be valid (though wrong). No, in your view, his moral outrage is necessarily invalid—it’s a facade, a defense mechanism, an absurdity, a self-serving rationalization. In contrast, you are deep; you are caring; you are thoughtful; your views are valid. Or so you believe.

But I can’t see how that’s the case. Because reading DeLong it’s apparent to me that all those things are true in his case…even if his argument is ultimately flawed and his conclusions wrong. He writes about expensive rice cookers. Looking at your commenting and blogging history, I won’t find anything similar? Hmm. But he also writes passionately about the situations surrounding human physical misery and how we might alleviate it. He writes about these things grounding them in well-regarded ideas in moral philosophy; he writes about these things with almost certainly a stronger expertise in the relevant history than you; he writes about them with expertise I know you don’t have and which is well-regarded by his professional peers. I see in his writings reasoned moral outrage channeled into what he believes are practical and urgent solutions that are the result of a lifetime’s hard professional work. This is all the stuff of someone very far from “shallow”. Your evaluation of him, however, is not. And lest you attempt to turn my argument against you against DeLong, note that he didn’t assert that Grass was morally or intellectually “shallow”. He asserted that Grass was wrong, dangerously wrong. Which isn’t nearly so smug as your accusation against him.

Then, being a coward as well as lazy and shoddy, DeLong, instead of standing by his original post or explaining it, backed down. But dishonestly, without really retracting the important bits or discussing what the person he was talking about was really saying.

I agree DeLong’s “reconsidering” is still sloppy and tendentious and doesn’t begin to address his actual mistakes. It’s certainly an instance of his being caught up in the very worst habits of off-the-cuff polemic and general smallness that are the common drawbacks of the “blogosphere,” where the standard posture on being caught out in a moment of weakness is a defensive crouch (or just ignoring the critics).

I’m not sure I would disqualify him from being an academic on the strength of this alone — sad though it is to say, I’ve seen even worse nonsense than Brad’s post that actually got published in peer-reviewed journals. But this little incident certainly doesn’t cast him in the best light.

I’ve seen even worse nonsense than Brad’s post that actually got published in peer-reviewed journals

Okay, on second thought, maybe not “worse.” But almost as bad.

“Yes, but Brad didn’t call him ‘shallow’. ‘Shallow’ is over the top, have to draw the line somewhere.”

Did I compare the severity of the accusation of “shallow” to the severity of the accusation of being a “crypto-nazi”? Nope. I compared the two accusations with regard to their “smugness”. There is an implicit comparison of DeLong to Seth, a self-aggrandizement of Seth, in Seth’s accusation of DeLong that isn’t in DeLong’s accusation against Grass. DeLong’s acusation against Grass is really a garden-variety “this person is a bad person for believing these things” rant. Seth’s has a different character and this character is best revealed in the implicit “I hate DeLong because I am Deep and he is Shallow”…most especially because Seth’s accusation itself is not “deep”—it is almost a cliche, it is unsupported. The most charitable thing that can be said of it is that it willfully misreads DeLong as badly as DeLong misread Grass—a remarkably hypocritical error for Seth to make in this context. A shallow error. A lack of moral seriousness within a charge of a lack of moral seriousness.

Perhaps his current post on Grass is incredibly wrong-headed, but it’s not out-of-bounds. His previous post was.

Not that I’m eager to dwell on this or anything, but since a good chunk of his previous post reamins unretracted (much of which was out-of-bounds or at least over the top even without the “crypto-Nazi scum” reference), his current post is still freighted with that context.

Oh, please. A “deflective apologia”? Hmm. Because you’ve defended Grass does that mean that what you’ve written could be (must be!) characterized as such as well? No, my comment arose because Seth is full of shit and unbearably smug about his fantasy that he’s not. That annoys me on its own merits. As for you, you’ve posted about thirty comments too many on CT in these two threads, almost all of them beating a drum as if it were you who is calling the hordes upon a crypto-nazi scum, in this case DeLong.

Every damn day here on CT (in comments) and at DeLong’s and other left-of-center sites people use hyperbole and angry, even vicious rhetoric in denouncing writers who, via only minimal familiarity and because of a knee-jerk (and often understandable) response, are assumed to be crypto-Nazi scum, or otherwise fascists, or bigoted/racist warmongers, or potentially violent homophobes, or whatever it is that these commenters perceive as quite dangerous to themselves and the people they love and the world in which they wish to live. Just as similarly occurs on the right. And on both sides of the aisle, vicious rhetoric is seen as righteous and necessary when it is felicitous to one’s point of view but dangerous, excessive, ill-considered, poisonous, hateful, self-serving when it is not. More to the point, the voices are raised against it for being all these things, not merely that the point of view expressed with such viciousness is wrong. And so we get the spectacle of people like yourself going apeshit against DeLong because he went apeshit against Grass. In both cases, the denunciations are that the accused are crypto-antiliberals. Can the irony be any thicker?

I’m not defending DeLong’s outburst either in its substance or in its character. I think it is in its substance false; I think DeLong badly misread Grass; and in fact I think Grass is attacking someone who is ultimately a powerful ally of the same values he holds (assuming he’s truly a liberal/progressive, which I think he is). But more significant to my posts in this thread, I am very critical of the character of his post. It reveals exactly why why vicious rhetoric is more poisonous than it is righteous…even when it is righteous. Because it is self-indulgent, because it breeds smugness and more of the same. Brad has indluged himself by living by the rhetorical sword in his blog—now, to a degree, he’s dying from it. He’s hurt his credibility among a great many people that are naturally his allies, and who have wanted to be his allies, and who had been his allies but with reservations. A great many people that practically worship at the feet of Paul Krugman these days should recognize that this is a mistake that Krugman may very well have made himself. In fact, Krugman’s many fans of his pugnacious NYT column would be as shocked to read his (in that case, as they’d surely believe) “distorted” and “irresponsible” and “propogandistic” polemics he’s written against the antiglobalization movement. But Zizka, and others, praise Krugman’s NYT anti-Bush admin stuff. “He’s just what we need!”, they say. “Yes! Speak truth to power!”, they say. “No more of this liberal pantywaist equivocation!”, they say. But that’s basically what DeLong thinks he’s doing in his posts against Grass. No mamby-pamby ambiguity for him! And he’s not really backing down, either! Today, that’s a sin. Tomorrow, when his critics agree with DeLong, it’ll be a virtue. And, as Zizka wrote to me on DeLong’s blog, “Duh”. “Duh”, that he only supports vicious rhetoric when the rhetoric is truthful. Because, I suppose, in his world he’s never wrong and no one he agrees with is ever wrong. That resolves the contradiction. Well, not the contradiction that that’s delusional. On the other hand, it feels damn good, doesn’t it?

I don’t get it, keith. You want the discussion to be who’s more “smug”, Brad DeLong calling Gunther Grass ‘nazi scum’ or an angry admirer of Grass calling DeLong “shallow” in response?.

And for a “smugness” vigilante, you are not doing too bad yourself:

“Seth is full of shit and unbearably smug about his fantasy that he’s not.”
“you’ve posted about thirty comments too many on CT” [to ogmb]
“in his world he’s never wrong and no one he agrees with is ever wrong.” [about zizka]

If not “deflective apologia”, at least “apology by dilution”.

Why exactly am I ‘full of shit?’ You don’t like my manner? Ignore the insults and respond to the rest.
And don’t toss me in with everyone else here. I wish it weren’t the case it makes no sense to do do. I’m aware of Krugman’s record more than I am of DeLong’s, and both of them impress me with their skill with numbers. But I’m not defending the White House I’m atacking the people who will be responsible for making policies once those idiots are gone. Read Pankaj Mishra on William Pfaff in the NYRB and get back to me on whether or not DeLong’s intelligence is ‘shallow.’

“You’re a fascist twat, keith m ellis. You’re also ugly.”

This is supposed to be self-parody, right? Right? Someone tell me that it is. It’s just barely possible that ogmb has a very clever, self-deprecating and conflict-defusing sense of humor. On the other hand, everything else he’s written would indicate he’s deadly serious in this quote. Which is really, really damn depressing.

DeLong should have stopped and considered possibilities other than his quick jump to the assumption of very bad faith on Grass’s part.

DeLong, IME, has used the most hyperbolic terms to describe those he disagrees with (and yeah, on brief and sometimes ill-considered skim-throughs) more often than I’d like. That is, by my count, Grass wasn’t the first.

I really don’t have any more energy for this, especially since I disagreed from the first with both DeLong’s post and how he wrote it.

A few years ago, I was involved in an argument with a fellow alumnus of the peculiar college I attended which includes a great deal of study of western moral and political philosophy. And I was arguing, as I always do, the moral necessity of taking the fallibilist position. “Why”, this woman asked me, “Should I need to constantly consider the possibilty that I’m wrong when, almost by definition and necessity as a thinking person, I already ‘know’ that I’m right insofar as I’m thoughtful?” And I wondered, did she read different books than I read?

I argued in the other thread that at some level I essentially agree with DeLong about something deeply implicit in this controversy. And that is that there is an almost unrelenting attack on the idea of economics as a branch of moral philosophy. The attack isn’t even, mostly, explicit. It needn’t be explicit because, for most people left-of-center, the subject of the study of economics (unless it is a sort of descriptive repudiation of it in moral philosophical terms) is prima facie assumed to be essentially immoral—it is the leftist, secular version of the Money Lenders in the Temple. The idea that social justice could be furthered via the activity that economists study is, at best, a sort of unfortunate present failure of the imagination and, at worst, a complete contradiction in terms. And thus it is oh-so-easy to jump right to the “DeLong is an evil, selfish, anitcommunitarian materialist who represents a sort of force of entropy against the Good” point of view. See Seth’s, and others, diatribes against him and neoliberal economists for examples. Hardly anyone left-of-center even begins to take seriously the possibility that Brad could be deeply, honestly, thoughtfully angry from what is, at root, a generous, communitarian, and nonmaterialist ethos that is expressed via his advocacy for neoliberal economics. If such people could imagine such a thing, they’d be able to see the possiblity that Brad may have reacted badly out of haste and ignorance but from the best of intentions…not unlike all of us do from time to time. No, because they cannot see this, they (like Brad with regard to Grass!) are quick to assume that this angry voice which advocates a point of view in opposition to their own must, by necessity, be ill-intentioned. Or willfully ignorant. Or subconsciously malicious. Or shallow. Or a crypto-fascist.

Brad’s reaction and conclusion about Grass were wrong, but not in bad faith. Not with general malice against the general principles that both he and Grass claim to support. Similarly, I think that Seth’s reaction and conclusion about Brad (in this context, from what I’ve read from Edenbaum in this context) are also wrong but not in bad-faith. That’s why I said I do not hate him. The failure of Seth, or others, to be similarly generous toward DeLong—or, hell, to me—only underscores how very sad it is in a sense that their complaint is that DeLong failed to be so generous with Grass.

Mr Ellis, you miss my point (again)
“Helbronerian” economics may be a branch of moral philosophy but “Longian” economics most certainly is not.

–“Why… Should I need to constantly consider the possibilty that I’m wrong when, almost by definition and necessity as a thinking person, I already ‘know’ that I’m right insofar as I’m thoughtful?”—
What. You Quoting DeLong?
I didn’t accuse him of having dirty hands, I’m accused him of having no sense of moral ambiguity, or of his own culpability in anything. I compared DeLong to Chomsky for christ’s sake, in his obliviousness to the ins and outs the flaws and fuckups of human behavior. You accuse me of moralizing? I don’t give a shit. All my friends are stockbrokers. But hypocrisy I can’t stand. And DeLong’s mechanized logic is absurd and hollow, and he knows it. Why the hell else would he go so nuts over one stupid article?

He wants to pretend he’s a moral philosopher, but he’s not. He’s a number cruncher and that’s all. He should stick to Tolkien and leave Chaucer and Proust and Billy Wilder to those who like stories for adults.

People, you post too long. Be less self-indulgent if you want to be read.

Keith M Ellis, Brad certainly was in bad faith. He’d never heard of Grass (he calls him “this Nobel laureate” with a sneer). He doesn’t know anything about German politics but writes about “Hartz IV” as he hadn’t first heard of it 2 days ago. He’s pretending to knowledge he doesn’t have in order to smear someone who’s ten times the man he is.

That’s what they do over at the Corner, and it’s bad faith from a liberal just as it is from a wingnut.

the keith m ellis smug-detecting action figure drones on:
in a way I can’t completely articulate

THANK GOD for that.

It’s not so clear from that piece that Grass doesn’t sympathize with a generic “these foreign/alien influences, related to capital and its cabals, are what ails Germany” echo of Nazi antisemitism

Note to Germans: please abstain from making any kind of political debate and criticism which, though entirely legitimate and within the bounds of democratic discourse (as opposed to neo-nazi racism and incitement to violence) can be read as directly or indirectly echoing, in a totally de-contextualised manner, some of the rhetoric that was used by a dictatorship.

Otherwise some professor in America who doesn’t even know what you’re talking about or what he is talking about will get mad at you! and you don’t want that, because American companies invest in Germany, and you see where this is going. Less jobs for you! We’re going to China, nar nar nar.

(Note to anti-war people: please stop protesting the war in Iraq, you’re echoing the terrorists).

Note to Germans again: in case your country ever gets invaded by Russia, please abstain from complaining about it because the nazis did it before.

Note to Iraqis: you too, are forbidden to complain about foreign invaders, because, you know, very bad people have done it. This is the standard of debate in a democracy, brothers and sisters! Learn and take note. Ah, but no complaining about democracy not working properly, either, because only crypto-baathists do that. In short: everyone shut up and spend more money, because capitalism needs you. Geld macht frei, ja.

Note to Germans:

Well said, Moni. I’ll add one more, courtesy of Prof. DeLong: “If you refer to ‘Jews’ in any context whatsoever, you are an anti-Semite. If you fail to refer to ‘Jews,’ you are an anti-Semite.”

While we’re at it, today’s news brings up one more:

Note to Uzbeks:
You want freedom? You can’t handle freedom!

The issue for Grass as it was for Sebald was the German inability to mourn their own losses, the point being that only by doing do will Germans begin to understand their crimes. Read ‘On the Natural History of Destruction.’ Grass and Sebald describe and by describing argue against the autism of postwar German culture, the emotional deadness that was the corollary of the productivism of the economic miracle. Read Boll, watch the New German Cinema of the 70’s, consider Richter and the Bechers and all their students. DeLong can’t accept the ambiguities of such an argument, that emotion inflects all consciousness. He knows nothing about art (and as i keep reminding most of you reading this, you’re not much better off.)

You can say you believe anything you want: you can sit at home in a your silk pajamas and smoking jacket claiming to defend world revolution or pure economic logic and sounding like an ass, or you can describe yourself, your house, your friends, you politics and your silk pajamas with care and detail, and your description may allow others to understand how and why you exhibit such odd behavior, all without making an ass of yourself except to those like DeLong who just yell back at you that you’re being illogical. But everyone’s illogical (Just ask an anthropologist.) Another reason I’m sick of people who shake their heads over the persistence of religion.

Well, DeLong takes his faith a lot more seriously either Günter Grass or I do. And Grass in his novelist’s indulgence in his own subjectivity is a hell of a lot more objective in his analysis. Score one more for literature against political ‘science.’

Hung over on a saturday morning.

I feel like I’ve been kidnapped by an alien and analy probed. Actually, it doesn’t feel as icky as I thought it would. Seth, however, may need another drink.

W/o delving into the minutia, I find it incredibly ill-informed and hypocritical for DeLong to take on Grass on the issue of fascism.

The USA has no obligation to to surrender democratic decision-making mechanisms to the WTO. Nor does Germany, or any other sovereign nation, have any obligation to knuckle under to international capitalism. To follow orders.

Anything short of democratic, sovereign decision-making is indeed totalitarian in principle, and in fact.

Re the quote below: recall that John Bolton repeatedly told the nation, the world, and Schroeder that he, and Germany “should just shut up and follow orders!”

Bolton said this in the run-up to the invasion of Iraq, on national TV, while Germany and France were resisting he U.S. rush to war.

It’s a clear reference to the Holocaust, reminding Germany of the past (as though it were still 1960), and pointedly, explicitly telling them that Germany and its “good Germans” had “followed orders” once (i.e. in carrying out the Holocaust) — and that they
would follow orders again.

But this time the USA would be giving the orders.

> Grass’s scorn for the “Federal Republic’s almost unconditional subservience to the United States” echoes Nazi demands for a Germany freed from the chains and limitations of the Treaty of Versailles.

DeLong is profoundly wrong on this issue, factually, and in principle.

And riddle me this: If Gunter Grass is really so wrong, then how come is it that John Bolton gets to “give orders” or even assume such a role?!? Even rhetorically?

Ane why, pray tell, can the USA be subservient to the WTO when no democratic decision allocated such power to them, and no WTO decision has been democratically approved w/in the US??

The issue for Grass as it was for Sebald was the German inability to mourn their own losses, the point being that only by doing do will Germans begin to understand their crimes.

Regardless of what the issue for Grass was, this is silly. The German people have been beaten over their heads regarding their crimes for sixty years. And as a result have largely come to ignore them.

Have you read Crabwalk? Have you read Sebald? Do you know anything about the recent arguments in Germany about history and memory and the ‘right’ to mourn? [that’s for you too raj] Have you read the piece on Pfaff in the NYR? Do you understand the argument?

And this?

“…art remains sheer illusion, whether beautiful or “ugly”, whether high or low, and literature pure rhetoric.”

Your rhetoric is empty because it is nothing but assertion, and inane at that. One studies baroque architecture to understand the formal rigor of the produced by and within the idea of the baroque. What ideas were central for the period; what were the tastes and manners; what were the modes of thought, the philosophies? How are they manifest in brick and stone?
This is history. To respect history is to respect art.

Signal to noise? Noise was all I had left, dealing with all this arrogant, illiterate, uneducable stupidity.
I’m arrogant for a reason. I’ll assert that now

In language nothing is pure.

Do you know anything about the recent arguments in Germany about history and memory and the ‘right’ to mourn? [that’s for you too raj] Have you read the piece on Pfaff in the NYR?

Um, no. I’ve talked to actual, you know, Germans. In German. Auf Deutsch.

I stand by my comment.