This post contains more newly translated bits of Nietzsche on Kant. (The response to my first post was good, so I am encouraged to follow up.) [click to continue…]
From the monthly archives:
September 2006
This one’s for John.
Update: The bizarrest bit of the story is at the end:
A Devon and Cornwall Police spokeswoman said: “This isn’t just a petty issue. This has been ongoing for two or three years.”
I thought I’d lost the ability to be shocked and awed by spammers’ ability to construct useless spam sites full of spammy spam. A google search for “learning and development consultancy” yields a top of the page result as follows:
“Learning and Development – consultancy and services from …
Performance By Design provides consultancy on how to increase the benefits of learning in organisations and enhance management development.
www.performance-by-design.com/Learn.htm – 38k”
Plausible tagline, plausible blurb, plausible url. But when you get there, it’s a bunch of advertising links for curtains, drapes and after-dinner speeches.
It looks like these people aren’t just busy gaming search engines for the top spot, but are putting significant effort into appearing to Internet users to be content-rich, legitimate sites. And yes, I do believe it is illegitimate to fool users into thinking they’ll find something relevant and useful when they click through, and not a page full of third party advertising, however ‘relevant’ it may be. (Parked domain monetization was a hot topic at a recent ICANN meeting. I wrote a long MBA paper about this issue a while back, and found these two papers on search engine gaming absolutely fascinating. And my colleague Dave Piscitello has rather firm views on the topic.)
In a “recent comments thread”:https://crookedtimber.org/2006/08/23/the-wealth-and-poverty-of-nations/ , I got into trouble for asserting that Christopher Hitchens had clearly never read Günter Grass’s ” _Crabwalk_ “:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0156029707/junius-20 since, in the course of “a polemic”:http://www.slate.com/id/2148094/nav/tap1/ that was nasty even by his standards, he described the book thus:
bq. suddenly there is Grass, publishing a large and cumbersome account of the sinking of a German civilian vessel in the Baltic in 1945 ….
By contrast, Dan Jacobson gives “an accurate and balanced account”:http://normblog.typepad.com/normblog/2006/09/writers_choice__1.html of the book (warning: plot spoilers), coupled with some reflections on Grass’s recent disclosures about his SS membership as part of the “Writer’s Choice” series at Geras’s site. (I wrote about _Crabwalk_ in “a post last year”:https://crookedtimber.org/2005/02/27/crabwalk/ , before the recent revelations.)
Update: Ian Buruma, in the New Yorker, has “an interesting piece”:http://www.newyorker.com/critics/atlarge/articles/060918crat_atlarge on l’affaire Grass.
The open letter on childhood written by a bunch of academics, authors, celebrities and others (including Harry’s dad) seems to me causing a bit of a stir. Why did they send it to the Telegraph I wonder, rather than the Times (the traditional place) or the Guardian (read by more people who work with children, I imagine). Perhaps they think that Cameron’s Tories are going to win the next UK election and that they might make more impact on policy via the Telegraph. Anyway, it is hard not so sympathize with their sentiments even if the list of issues is an odd assortment:
Well what do you expect? If you make a lot of noise about having to have a competitive and flexible labour force — as NuLab have — then mum and dad are going to be working all hours to pay the mortgage, and when they are at home are going to slump in front of the TV after they’ve heated the ready-meals in the microwave. It wasn’t alway like this, of course. Look at _Astérix chez les Bretons_ (1965) and you’ll see the Brits being ridiculed by the _French_ for their relaxed pace of life, for taking time off for tea, and for keeping the weekend sacred. I guess we had time for children then too.
The Netherlands is rightly regarded as one of the most gay-friendly countries. But in recent years there has been a growing concern about increased intolerance towards gays. The Dutch Parliament has therefore asked the “Social and Cultural Planning Office”:http://www.scp.nl/english/ to conduct a study on the acceptance of gays in this country, which was published last Friday. Is the Netherlands really a good place to be gay? [click to continue…]
This short Jack Balkin “essay”:http://www.thepocketpart.org/2006/09/06/balkin.html seems to me to be the best thing I’ve read on the relationship between blogging and scholarship.
Law professors now agonize over whether blogging constitutes legal scholarship and what this will do to the legal academy. They needn’t bother. The real threat to quality comes not from the medium of blogging itself but from using citation counts, links, page views, and downloads as measures of merit. People won’t just apply these criteria to judge blogs. They will also apply them to standard-form legal scholarship online. Blogging, in fact, is sui generis. It blurs the traditional boundaries between scholarship, teaching, and service because it transcends the normal audiences and expectations of legal scholarship. Over the years, legal scholarship has become an increasingly self-contained community where scholars write only for each other. Bloggers have burst out of that model: they talk to many different audiences, they teach the world about law, and they perform a public service by drawing attention to the legal and policy issues of the day. Blogging may give scholars publicity that gets their work a look. But it will not by itself generate a scholarly reputation or make a scholarly career—at least, that is, until social and technological change thoroughly reconstitute our standards of merit. … The wrong question to focus on is whether hiring committees should count blogging as legal scholarship. The right question is how we should re-imagine our vocation as professors of law in light of new online media. Should we continue to speak mostly to ourselves and our students, or should we spend more time trying to teach and influence the outside world?
I’m thinking about these questions because I’m deciding whether or not to list a very small part of my blogging – the seminars that I’ve organized and am organizing around academic books – on my cv as some form of academic activity – perhaps under the heading of “unconventional publishing.” Any thoughts?
So I’m four weeks into teaching recent continental philosophy and some things have worked. One thing I did – sort of for myself, sort of for the class – was collect all the bits of Nietzsche where he talks about Kant. The idea was to give my lecture on the legacy of Kant by bouncing off a series of selected Nietzsche bits. So I would end up introducing Kant and Nietzsche simultaneously, getting most of the 19th Century in between. (This was the theory. My mileage varied considerably.)
To get my bits I went to the Nietzsche Channel and searched likely terms, then cut and pasted. Then arranged chronologically. That was easy. Then I added bits this method missed. I ended up with about 18,000 words. It turned out to be an engrossing read when I got it all laid out, end to end. As Nietzsche says somewhere or other … damn, can’t find the quote. Something about the long logic of his thought on eternal recurrence. Anyway, there’s often a long logic to Nietzsche’s recurrent treatments of given themes. Also, he talks about Kant when he wants to generalize about broad currents in the history of modern philosophy, so in this case there’s breadth as well as length. (I would be quite grateful if someone would make neat little editions of all the bits of Nietzsche about eternal return, or about pity, or about Plato and Socrates. But maybe that’s just me.) Anyway, I made a start at my own English translations of the bits I collected. (My German is rusty and needs exercise.)
First, to propitiate the translation gods, a bit of silly poetry from The Gay Science: [click to continue…]
This post is reproduced from September 13, 2004. I don’t think I have anything better to say, but I wanted to say something. My thoughts are with the families of all those who perished five years ago. [click to continue…]
“The Path to 9/11 is produced and promoted by a well-honed propaganda operation consisting of a network of little-known right-wingers working from within Hollywood to counter its supposedly liberal bias. This is the network within the ABC network. Its godfather is far right activist David Horowitz, who has worked for more than a decade to establish a right-wing presence in Hollywood and to discredit mainstream film and TV production. On this project, he is working with a secretive evangelical religious right group founded by The Path to 9/11‘s director David Cunningham that proclaims its goal to ‘transform Hollywood’ in line with its messianic vision.”
Plenty more where that came from, here.
Two interesting pieces.
First, “Open Democracy”:http://www.opendemocracy.net/democracy-irandemocracy/jahanbegloo_3867.jsp on the release of Ramin Jahanbegloo from prison in Iran. I blogged about Jahangebloo a couple of months ago; he was finally let out, but gave an interview immediately afterwards “admitting” that foreign agents had attended his seminars, that his work could have been useful to attempts to overthrow the government in Iran etc. According to the article, the authorities threatened to confiscate his house and the house of his mother if he didn’t give an interview of this kind, supporting the authorities’ story to some extent (although notably not confessing to spying). Thanks to my friend Carl Caldwell for the link.
Second, this “piece”:http://chronicle.com/temp/email2.php?id=bgFVfxZxmvXc5pXhzpT9BTtMd2s4cHrC by David Glenn in the Chronicle on an academic who’s landed in some controversy because of her book which argues that the progressive movement’s reliance on paid canvassers is hurting it. The Fund for Public Interest Research, which is the organization described in her book, has sent a certified letter to the academic’s department, alleging that she didn’t protect the organization’s anonymity. It does sound as though the academic should have been more careful to protect the anonymity of the organization than she was (although it perhaps would have been impossible to do this properly), but it also sounds as though the Fund’s real beef with her isn’t that the book revealed who it was, but that it was vigorously critical of the organization. The Fund has a pretty dubious “track record”:http://www.inthesetimes.com/site/main/article/2787/ over issues such as allowing its staff to unionize. For more blogospheric discussion, see “here”:http://www.peterlevine.ws/mt/archives/000883.html, “here”:http://www.peterlevine.ws/mt/archives/000926.html, “here”:http://greg_bloom.mydd.com/story/2006/8/18/111159/225 and “here”:http://larvatusprodeo.net/2006/08/20/unionising-the-idealists/.
Well, now that it looks like Blair has gone, it’s a good time to look back on the performance of the model I made back in April to try and understand the dynamics of the resignation process. I chickened out of making any predictions more specific than “there is some basis for the nebulous feeling that the time has come” and “if he hangs on till September 2008 he will most likely stay on until the next election”, so I don’t think I can claim any bragging rights on the date of departure. However on the qualitative aspects, I think I can claim a decent success.
Recall that the model was based on a “marginal value of grovelling” function for backbench MPs. The idea was that grovelling to Tony might get you a ministerial prize from Tony, but might also get you on Gordon’s shit-list. So there was some time T at which it made more sense to grovel to Gordon rather than Tony, and when that time was reached, Tony would more or less immediately lose the support of the party and have to resign.
I think this fits the qualitiative facts quite well. Blair was holed below the waterline by two round-robin letters from backbench MPs and PPSs, who had been passed over for better jobs in the May reshuffle. My model assumed two possible reshuffles during the life of the Parliament and once Tony had carried out one of them, he had fewer prizes to give out, reducing the value of his grovel function. Allow that nothing happens over the holidays and the September coup can be seen as a fairly immediate reaction to the reshuffle.
But more importantly, the underlying representative agent assumption worked a treat. The final knife was placed by Tom Watson MP. He is a blogger, and thus it is possible to learn quite a lot about him by reading his blog. He has written about his reasons for doing what he did, but I am a long term reader of his blog (I used to enjoy asking questions about postal ballots in the Hodge Hill byelection to see how quickly they were deleted) and as such, I think I can say two things about him with confidence. First, he is a ferocious careerist, and second, right up until the moment he dropped “da bomb”, he was one of the most horrifically arse-kissing Blairites you could wish to meet; if he ever saw a horrific piece of New Labour crap he didn’t like, either he didn’t blog about it or I didn’t read it. In other words, precisely the representative agent of my model. Homo economicus is not aperfect assumption but you’d be surprised how many of them there are out there.
PS: Apologies to all the people I promised a copy of the spreadsheet to; the offer is still there.
PPPS[1]: I have posted a few puerile jokes on the subject on the Guardian website.
[1] There was a “PPS”, but he resigned in protest.
By chance, I had just finished rereading a famous speech by Ronald Reagan when I heard the news that President Bush had confirmed the existence of secret CIA prisons. Yesterday, while looking over it again, I heard the “Judge Advocates General”:http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/08/washington/08detain.html?hp&ex=1157774400&en=fa1da1053abb2a24&ei=5094&partner=homepage strongly resist the White House’s plan for military tribunals that would allow conviction based on secret evidence. When Reagan spoke in 1964 on behalf of Barry Goldwater, he presented TV viewers with a stark choice between those with the courage to make a principled stand for Freedom and Liberty, and those who would capitulate to the global threat of Communism for the sake of a quiet life. He didn’t pull any punches.
bq. Those who would trade our freedom for the soup kitchen of the welfare state have told us that they have a utopian solution of peace without victory. They call their policy ‘accommodation.’ … We cannot buy our security, our freedom from the threat of the bomb by committing and immorality so great as saying to a billion human beings now in slavery behind the Iron Curtain, ‘Give up your dreams of freedom because to save our own skin we are willing to make a deal with your slave masters.’ … Admittedly there is risk in any course we follow other than this, but every lesson in history tells us that the greater risk lies in appeasement, and this is the specter our well-meaning liberal friends refuse to face … When Nikita Khrushchev has told his people [that] we are retreating under the pressure of the cold war, and … our surrender will be voluntary because by that time we will have been weakened from within spiritually, morally, and economically. He believes this because from our side he has heard voices pleading for “peace at any price” or “better Red than dead” … Where then is the road to peace? You and I have the courage to say to our enemies, “There is a price we will not pay.” There is a point beyond which they will not advance! … You and I have a rendezvous with destiny. We will preserve for our children this, the last best hope of man on earth, or we will sentence them to take the last step into a thousand years of darkness.
I’ve taken up both of Chris’s recent suggestions of non-genre fiction reading, and am glad of it. I suspect I liked On Beauty (a good deal in the UK) less than he did, but I still enjoyed it a good deal (like him I’ll avoid spoilers, and ask commenters to do the same, but warn potential readers that I don’t police comments very well). Discussion on his thread focused on Smith’s ear for dialogue. The book is set in a liberal arts college in or around Boston, but almost all the characters are displaced in some way, and part of what is going on is that most of the characters are putting on a face with most of their interlocutors. So whereas some of the dialogue does sound inauthentic, it reflects the in-authenticity of the characters in the situation. And I love some of the little details – a throwaway sentence about how hard the main male character (a British émigré) finds it to take American bills seriously is exactly right – after 20 years here I am still absurdly pleased to get hold of a 20 pound note, and in my head its worth way more than one of those absurd $50 bills. Two other things to add. First is that, like all campus novels, it makes university life and university politics sound so much more interesting than they really are. Maybe I’m oblivious to this, as well as everything else, but I just never get to hear about these great rivalries and affairs that people have with each other and with their students, or attend the meetings in which people are more than mildly irritated with each other. (This is a complaint about campus novels, not about university life, I hasten to add – I’d hate it if it were the way it is portrayed – or perhaps it is like that and I just wander around with my blinkers on). Second, although Chris says it is loosely based on Howard’s End, I was put constantly in mind of The History Man, whom Howard (the central character) resembles in more than name – and in ways that cannot be accidental. BTW if, like my colleague who has read every other academic novel around, you have somehow missed Bradbury, The History Man is peerless.
The Company You Keep (UK) is, as Chris says, brilliant, and I liked it more than On Beauty.
A group of prominent American historians is calling on ABC not to broadcast The Path to 9/11. (For a quick reminder of how propaganda-rific it is, see Mark Grimsley’s recent item at Cliopatria. It quotes an endorsement by Michael Medved and provides some pertinent links.)
The list of signatories starts with Arthur Schlesinger — who, whatever else you may think of him, is pretty much the guy to have out in front on this sort of complaint, for rhetorical appeal to the center (rhetorical construct thought “the center” may be).