John Holbo

I’m curious. How much music do you have on your computer? I just passed the 75 gig mark. iTunes informs me that is 49.5 days worth. That seems like a lot. But I don’t feel that I have too much. How much does the average blog reader have?

In case you don’t have enough music, I kinda enjoyed Grizzly Bear “Two Weeks” (live on Letterman) – downloadable from Stereogum here.

It’s the time of year when I teach Plato’s Meno. As I wisely explain to my students, there are two things that they are going to find off-putting and even incomprehensible about the dialogue. [click to continue…]

Calling her ‘Lying Sarah‘ is all well and good. But we need something snappier. How about Sarah Prevaricuda? You know. Sung to the tune of Heart? (I know, I know. It’s got the same problem as that Savage Dragon endorsement. Too je ne sais quoi for flyover country.)

You lying so low in the weeds
I bet you gonna ambush me
You’d have me down down down down on my knees
Now wouldn’t you, Prevaricuda?

Come to think of it, what is that song even about?

No right no wrong, selling a song-
A name, whisper game.

If the real thing don’t do the trick
You better make up something quick
You gonna burn burn burn burn it to the wick
Ooooooh, Prevaricuda

OK, that part describes standard Republican operating procedure. What Henry calls ‘the mechanisms of Nixonland’. So I get why they play that part.

But what about this?

Back over time we were all
Trying for free
You met the porpoise and me

And:

Sell me sell you the porpoise said
Dive down deep down to save my head

So if she’s the barracuda (prevaricuda), then that makes … McCain the … porpoise? (Or is Obama the porpoise?) Either way: it’s ok to call McCain (or Obama) a porpoise, but not ok to call McCain an old fish? (I think I read something about that at the Corner today.)

Or maybe it’s some sort of commentary on Rick Warren, ‘the porpoise-driven life’? Is the song saying that, after Saddleback, McCain needs Palin?

Who writes this stuff? I mean: who gets paid to think it up? Not me, clearly.

Comics! That is to say, TopShelf is having their annual $3 sale! You can get some good books, man. I just loaded up. I’m especially looking forward to: Scott Morse, The Barefoot Serpent. (I really like Scott Morse’s art.) Tim Sievert, That Salty Air, and Dan James’ Mosquito (check out the preview.) I loved James’ The Octopi and the Ocean. You should pick that up, too, while you are at it. Hell, you might even buy stuff that’s not $3 but merely on sale! Like Jeffrey Brown’s Incredible Change-Bots.

In other news, the Savage Dragon has endorsed Barack Obama for President. Good for him! But maybe he’s too metrosexual for this to make a big difference.

“[T]he court made no distinction between what needs were reasonable, given the age of the children, and what simply amounted to a ‘fourth pony,'” wrote Parker, who was joined by Judges Rudy Coleman and Thomas Lyons.

Link.

It’s good to know that this old post has had so much influence on the legal community.

link thanks to.

Related topic for discussion: Tolstoy’s classic pious fable, “How Many Ponies Does A Man Need?”

On the strength of my mighty “Back to the Futura” post, I got an offer from the Prospect Magazine to review Font. The Sourcebook [amazon]. And so I have. Alas, it is not available to non-subscribers, but you could always run to your local news vendor and clamor for it. Or subscribe. Writing the piece was an amusing sort of pin-the-tail challenge because I wasn’t quite sure what the editor wanted. So I just did my usual la-de-da look-at-me Holbo-style thing. Which, of course, was very sensibly stripped away. No, really. It was for the best. (When you write brief journalism about language in that style, you end up sounding like William Safir.)

The review got entitled “Building A Better Futura”, so I’m maxed-out on Futura-future puns for the rest of the month. I concluded the review by squeezing in a quick note on my ongoing would-Obama’s-poster-have-been-illegal researches. (Executive summary: the Nazis were crazy.) Now I’ll just sweep together a few other bits and scraps that ended up on the cutting room floor. [click to continue…]

I have a suggestion regarding this whole ‘you have to be very careful about criticizing McCain because of the POW thing‘ thing. The next time someone suggests it is inappropriate to say McCain messed up/is confused about X, because this is a man who etc. etc., someone ought to ask whether this will continue to apply in McCain’s Presidency, if he is elected. If he exhibits bad judgment, if we lurch from foreign policy crisis to crisis, if unwise domestic policies are pursued, will there continue to be an unusually high bar against holding McCain responsible for his words and actions? It’s hard to know how to refute a ‘yes, all is excused’ answer, if people really believe he’s got that much credit in the bank, going forward. But if it is ‘yes’, then that seems like a good reason not to vote for McCain. Because we obviously don’t want a President who can’t be held to account for any potential failings or weaknesses.

What this shows up is the rather significant difference between ‘because of what happened to him then, he must be right now’ and ‘because of what happened to him then, we can’t blame him for what’s happening now’. Obviously I’m being all elaborate about it, but it’s the sort of thing that would be easy to implement in sound-bit sized pieces. Just ask Brokaw what he’s actually saying. That McCain must be right? Or that McCain can’t be held responsible for being wrong? If Brokaw responds, as he probably will, that he thinks he’s just commenting on public sentiment – the public will react badly to criticism of McCain – then ask again: does Brokaw think the public thinks McCain must be right? Or that McCain can’t be held responsible?

Well, at least Ponnuru admits he’s not making any counter-argument to the Holbo-Yglesias-Drum line. But if he wants to start saying that people who oppose the Patriot Act must think terrorism is ok, he’s going to need to find some standards of his own. Ours – which he proposes to borrow – are not up to the job.

What can I say to make it clearer? It is possible, I suppose, that McCain opposed Ledbetter because he wanted to see Title VII enforcement enabled in some completely different way. But, absent evidence of this, isn’t it more plausible that McCain – just like some of Ponnuru’s colleagues at the National Review – is ok with least some portions of Title VII being rendered dead letters (the letter ‘k’, at least. As in: “(k) The terms “because of sex” or “on the basis of sex” … ) [click to continue…]

Ramesh Ponnuru:

Hillary Clinton on McCain: “In 2008, he still thinks it’s okay when women don’t earn equal pay for equal work.” Right: Opposing the Lily Ledbetter Act means approving of unequal pay for women. What a disgusting comment.

But what’s disgusting about it, from a conservative perspective? She seems to be making a point of being scrupulously accurate. In this context, saying ‘it’s okay’ amounts to saying that the thing in question is maybe a little bad, but it doesn’t matter much, so you needn’t – therefore shouldn’t – do anything about it. As in: ‘do you need a band-aid for that?’ ‘No, it’s ok.’ A sense that unequal pay for women ‘is ok’, in this sense, is precisely the reason one would oppose the Lily Ledbetter Act. It’s an attempt to solve a non-problem. There will be costs associated with the legislation, in the form of lawsuits. And there will be no significant benefits. This does indeed seem to be the position, at least at the Corner. Reading up and down: [click to continue…]

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.

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…]