John Holbo

Kevin Drum noticed the same bit of this Ezra Klein piece that I did:

At this point, Romney and Obama are running almost perfectly opposite campaigns. Romney can tell you exactly what he wants to do, but barely a word about how he’ll do it. Obama can’t describe what he wants to achieve, but he can tell you everything about how he’ll get it done. It’s a campaign without real policies against a campaign lacking a clear vision.

Klein asks: when did Obama lose ‘the vision thing’? He thinks Obama had it in 2008, but it’s worth considering the counter-hypothesis that it was lost long before. Free and Cantril documented loss of liberal mojo in their 1967 book, based on survey data from the 1964 election. ‘Americans are philosophical conservatives but operational liberals.’ If that’s how it goes in 2012, that just goes to show how it goes, for the past half century. [click to continue…]

I was amused by this Tor piece: most citizens of the Star Wars galaxy are probably totally illiterate. And then life imitated art: Amazon ate Audible, that is. A while back, Amazon acquired Audible (the audiobook store) and now they have added a whispersync for voice service which, I confess, is just what I’ve been waiting for. You buy the kindle book and then, for a few bucks extra, add the audiobook. Now I can do what I couldn’t: listen, add bookmarks, and later consult/cut&paste text for the usual scholarly/bloggy reasons. Your progress point in the book is synced, so you can listen on the bus, read when you get home. I realize this post is reading like a sponsored ad for the service but, for me, it’s going to make a significant difference. I consume a lot of audiobooks, and I like nonfiction titles. But there are reasons why scholars – or just plain thoughtful people – like to work with text, not audio, for study and reference purposes. Also, if there are tables or illustrations, it’s nice to be able to see them. For our Debt event, I bought the audiobook and it really wasn’t a full enough format, on its own, although I made do.

I find myself drifting further and further from traditional print culture into a weird sort of audio-visual mix. (But, then again, I’m a professor. What’s school like, after all?) But I’ve done this, in part, as a defense mechanisms against the much-lamented distractions of hypertext. I’m a less distracted listener than I am a reader, these days. (Memo to self: someone ought to write a theory of the book along the lines of the theory of the firm.)

Death of the book-wise, I hold the line these days at Chris Ware [amazon]. Charles Burns, too. And Seth, and a select few others. Mostly I read even comics on Comixology. I’m increasingly of the opinion that comics – but only the best ones – are the last argument for the old-fashioned book. As its plain utility wanes, the swansong of the printed book will be a series of preposterously beautiful art objects.

Andrew Sullivan writes. “When you see an unexpected and sharply upward trend in inequality and want to accelerate it some more, you have ceased to be a conservative.”

As Sullivan goes on to confess, there was a time when he himself saw such an inequality trend, and cheered it on. He now wants to say this was ‘complacency’. But I don’t think he would go so far as to say that he has only in the recent past converted to conservatism, having only since 2007 or so shed a view that previously disqualified him from holding that position. So why should Erick Erickson, say, be disqualified from being a conservative? [click to continue…]

No, I’m talking about the film, not Daniel’s post (his thread, rather). Following up my bad experience with Sixteen Candles, I rewatched Say Anything and it really holds up. It’s a delight. It’s funny and sweet and sentimental, but in a good way. John Cusack is great. Cameron Crowe is the real deal. [click to continue…]

When I was in Texas I met Carl T. Bogus, law prof. and author of Buckley: William F. Buckley Jr. and the Rise of American Conservatism [amazon]. He and I turned out to have something in common: affection for Clinton Rossiter’s forgotten Conservatism in America: The Thankless Persuasion [amazon]. I was trying to baffle someone else at the conference, saying ‘Look, the thing you think conservatism should be is the thing the conservatives made a point of writing off in the 1950’s. You’re a neo-Rossiterian.’ Carl’s ears pricked up. We hit it right off.

When I got home I bought and read Bogus’s Buckley book. I liked it, and it filled in some blanks for me, history-wise. Going back and reading the reviews, I see TNR’s reviewer thought Bogus didn’t much improve on John Judis’ earlier Buckley book. I can’t say. Haven’t read it. (But Judis is a good writer so probably his book is good.) But the reviewer does grant that one area in which Bogus really distinguishes himself is in handling the dead and forgotten ‘new conservatives’ – Rossiter, Viereck and Nisbet, in particular. (Kirk was another, but not one who has been forgotten.) [click to continue…]

As mentioned in a recent post, I got to go to Texas for a conference on Conservatism sponsored by Sanford Levinson. Unfortunately, that was the day some joker decided to call in a fake bomb threat. So we ended up evacuated and reconvened in Sandy’s living room. Which was congenial, actually. But no PowerPoint, so I didn’t get to use the cartoons I whipped up that were supposed to allow me to make some basic points in admirably compressed fashion. So let me lay that bit out. [click to continue…]

Couple weeks back BoingBoing had a guestpost by Maja D’aoust, praising the undersung artistry of Wendy and Richard Pini’s Elfquest. I think this is right. Elfquest doesn’t get the credit it deserves. Proto-American manga, early independent comics self-publishing. Why doesn’t everyone who prides themselves about knowing comics feel obliged to have read a bit of Elfquest? I’m sure this is due in large part to geek culture bias in favor of fanboyish – as opposed to fangirlish – productions. (Dumb guy stuff can be the greatest stories ever told. Everyone knows that. But dumb girly stuff generally can’t catch a break. Chick lit just isn’t cool.) So I’m glad to see new Pini stuff presented on BoingBoing. More power to them!

Anyway, I bring a unique perspective to this issue because my daughters forced me to read them most of the online archive of Elfquest in nightly audiobook installments. (I think I managed to convince them to let me give up after “Two-Spear”.) I have seriously read a lot of Elfquest out loud, dude. And the main thing I learned is: it’s written quite well, as comics go. My daughters have also made me read them other comics. X-Men, Fantastic Four, Teen Titans. Most of that stuff doesn’t read out at all well, and very little reads out as well as Elfquest. Also, Elfquest is the sort of thing that you might think would be – erm – a bit inappropriate for really young children, what with high elves mating with wolves and all that. But if you’ve already read the kids Greek mythology – and a bunch of other mythologies I could mention – you know there’s no problem here, so long as you are judiciously indefinite about the mechanics of it, as the Pinis are. (There’s nothing explicit in these comics.) Little girls are uninterested in sex but are interested in babies, and animals, so stories in which strange creatures have hybrid family trees are interesting to them. It doesn’t end up being any more squicky than reading them D’Aulaire’s Greek Myths. (Not that I’m recommending you read your kid Elfquest, High Ones preserve us! That was a chore.)

It’s not the case that comics work as audiobooks to the extent that they are good comics, of course. Zoe is down with flu at the moment and I tried reading her some Tintin but it doesn’t work. Hergé is so good at storytelling in pictures that it’s hard to get the pacing right. Also, it sounds strange to read Snowy’s lines out loud. (Snowy ‘talks’ more than almost any other character, what with all those little asides.)

Atomic Robo reads out really well, on the other hand. As audiobook comics go, Robo is tops. Zoe gives it two thumbs up.

All Stan Lee stuff is just terrible. As Harrison Ford said to George Lucas: you can write this stuff, but you can’t say it.

So I click over to the Corner to see how they are spinning Romney’s fresh troubles. I like John O’Sullivan’s moxie. Basically, Romney should say 1) he’s not backing off; 2) in saying 47% of Americans pay no income tax, thereby implying they are freeloaders, i.e. pay no taxes, he was just forgetting that up is up, not down. Could happen to anyone. “We pay so many taxes that we sometimes forget how many and how much, as I briefly did.” 3) – 8) are some suggestions about how to finesse 2). We need to lower taxes on these freeloaders! Freeloaders are made of taxpayers!

But I think the really important step is probably 9). I can’t imagine why O’Sullivan didn’t give this step its own number. So far as I can tell, it’s absolutely crucial to the whole scheme not coming down around Romney’s ears. “Romney should then leave without taking questions.”

It almost seems unnecessary, but Freeloadergate opens the way for attack ads suggesting Romney is gearing up to expand the War On Women into a three-front war against Women, Children and the Elderly. (It’s like the Romney campaign is turning into one big parody inversion of the protocols for abandoning ship.) Just do a montage of pictures of smiling children – at play, in school, with their families – and nice retirees – in their homes, pictures of their younger, working selves around them – with a brutal ‘FREELOADER’ stamped across each face. And the audio of Romney over it all.

The wages of talking such nonsense really ought to be getting blasted with ads that take the nonsense at face value. Let Romney clean up the mess.

When I walked in the door, a nice lady, walking out, smiled brightly and said ‘Howdy!’ So it seems I’m in Texas – Austin, to be specific.

I’m giving a talk tomorrow, if anyone cares to come and listen. Talk title is: “Liberal, Conservative, Utopian: Political Philosophy and its Missed Contents”. Talk is based on longer manuscript stuff slated to be published eventually – one always hopes. I’ll see about posting that stuff, a bit later, in draft form. For the talk I just turned my unmanageably large ms. into a series of sub-New Yorker gag cartoons, because it wouldn’t fit otherwise. It’s a surefire strategy for talk success! (It’s not like you can refute a cartoon, after all.)

I just watched “Shane” (1953) and “Sixteen Candles” (1984). Reason: I never watched the first one before. I haven’t seen all that many Westerns and I just thought I’d try it. Result: yep, all pre-Clint Eastwood, non-John Wayne Westerns feel vaguely like “Star Trek” episodes to me. It’s like I’m caught in a nostalgia wormhole for this later thing that hearkens back to this earlier thing. I experience time in reverse! The Old West was always already nostalgic for Spock to cock an eyebrow: ‘primitive technology, captain’. And Kirk gets that rakish gleam in his eye and we’re off! Trivia: how many times does that kid yell ‘Shane!’ A lot, that’s how many. [click to continue…]

I see that the Philosophy and Popular Culture series has reached, as it must, Breaking Bad and Philosophy: Badder Living through Chemistry [amazon].

I haven’t watched the show. I’m sure I will love it when I get around to it. Everyone does, apparently. (One has to ration one’s commitments to spend dozens of hours on any one thing.) But I really think they should have included, as a stand-alone piece in the book, a few lines from G. A. Cohen’s “Rescuing Conservatism” (which we’ve discussed before around here and is still available online in pdf draft form – click link for a link – but which was also published last year in an unfortunately overpriced form.)

When people say: “If you had cancer …,” one can sometimes reply: “Yes, of course, that might unbalance my judgment.” Making people imagine that they are in dire straits in order to cause them to agree with something is an attractive resort for those whose arguments are not (otherwise) strong.

A couple weeks ago I was asking my colleague, Neil – you know who you are, Neil! – what he was teaching, and he said ‘normative ethics’. And I said I was teaching ‘abnormative ethics’, namely, Wittgenstein. I tell my students: when Wittgenstein says ‘here one wants to say …’ and other things like that, it’s important to keep in mind that the ‘one’ in question was once a one who thought that ethics demanded that he do logic, in a trench, while being shelled by the Russians. He’s valuable to study, yes, but not because he was normal. (Yes, I realize that ‘normative ethics’ is not, officially, the study of ‘normal’ ethics. But, insofar as it is intuition-driven, there is some tension. Also: can’t you take a joke?)

You could separate works of ethics in two piles: those that say what Cohen says. You want balance. Those that say ethics is a matter of induced imbalance. Having unusual experiences that induce very abnormative intuitions about Life. Philosophy of crisis. There’s a lot of that, of course. I think most of it is philosophy of extreme experiences. Obviously you could just say: good old rationalism vs. irrationalism. But that’s not quite it. Who are the normative ethicists, and who the abnormative ethicists? Nietzsche, obviously.

What do you think of ‘if you had cancer …’? Is it just an invitation not to think straight? As Cohen says “There are all kinds of awful things that I would not otherwise dream of doing that I might do if …” Or is ethics properly all about all those things that you would not dream of doing unless [insert dire strait that induces odd intuition]?

Ah, it had to happen. Mark Steyn is saying that, done right, the Afghan intervention could have gone as well as it did in the first Flashman novel, with all the insight Flashy brought to the project. I don’t have a copy handy. Perhaps I am misremembering …

Am I being uncharitable? I suppose he might be saying that, in the novel, everything would have gone right if only they’d listened to Flashman about how to do it? Some sort of heighten the contradictions wossname?

UPDATE: As some have pointed out, this post has a certain ‘we’re here in this exotic locale, hunting the wild, elusive barrelfish’ quality. But in my defense, in comments I courageously articulate a positive conception of the philosophy of Flashman’s author and the Flashman novels. That might be worth arguing about. Come on in! The water in the barrel is fine, and the fish are biting!

Bit quiet around here and I’m totally swamped, man. But here’s my one thought, after the Ryan nomination. There are no WASPS on either ticket, either for President or VP. Also, there are no WASPS on the Supreme Court. Also, the Speaker of the House is a Catholic and the Senate Majority Leader is a Mormon. It’s a political commonplace that it’s pretty damn crazy that a black man named Barack Hussein Obama got elected President. But suppose you went back in time – set the Wayback Machine for ‘Best and the Brightest’ – so you could listen to all the botheration about Kennedy running for President. Suppose you could just interject: ‘dudes, dudes, in just 50 years, a Mormon and a Black man will be duking it out for President, and that’ll be a big deal, granted. But there will be no WASPS whatsoever at the absolute top of the political system, and people won’t even notice. Get over it.’

In other news, I was recently rereading Anscombe on contraception. And really it’s just a Dan Savage column, with modus tollens in for modus ponens at every second sentence. If contraception is ok, then we are obviously thinking about sex and love in a way that makes gay marriage ok. (Obviously it’s also less fun to read than a Dan Savage column, but not as much less fun as you’d think.)

And I was recently rereading James Fitzjames Stephens, Liberty, Equality, Fraternity. Stephens is obviously the ‘conservative’, rebutting Mill, the ‘liberal’. But in a lot of ways their positions don’t track contemporary notions. For example, Stephens is very opposed to the state tolerating lots of little heterodox churches. No. The state should do its best to figure out which one is best and sponsor it. (Theological spin on industrial policy and ‘picking winners’.) The proof, offered in passing: anything else and you’ll end up having to tolerate Mormonism. Which is obviously not on.

The world does turn.

A couple weeks back the LA Times ran an article about how ‘millenials’ don’t find it as strange as normal humans do that they rebooted Spider-Man so soon after making a perfectly good Spider-Man. (I haven’t seen the new one myself. I’ve heard it’s just fine.) On the other hand, the BFI’s 2012 “Sight & Sound” critics’ Top 50 Greatest Films of All Time poll is holding the line against this sort of amnesia. They prefer if people suffer from that condition the guy in Memento suffered from, approximately. (Maybe they should rename it: ‘of all times except recent ones’?)

I made a little chart, pushing my Excel chops to the limit. It shows number of films that made the Top 50, by year. (Yes, there’s nothing after 2001, you’re reading it right.)

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