The kids got a toy food set and … well, here it is:
Click for a larger image. ‘Cleanlily’. Use that in a sentence. ‘The nurse employed the sterilized instruments cleanlily, but her smile said ‘naughtily’.’
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John Holbo
My last Plato bleg was a success, so I’m going to try another. Everyone has read Euthyphro, so you remember that the dad allegedly killed the guy who allegedly killed the other guy. And so Euthyphro is prosecuting him for murder. And so here we are, on the steps of the King Archon’s court. Fair enough. But it happened on Naxos. So why is it being tried in Athens? Obviously Euthyphro and his dad are Athenian citizens who happen to own land on Naxos. I can see various possibilities. If it happened at the height of Athenian imperial power – say, at the time that Naxos attempted to withdraw from the Delian league and got stomped for it by the Athenians – I would presume the Athenians had at some point asserted extraterritorial legal jurisidiction at least in cases involving its citizens. But the trial of Socrates happens in 399 BC, a few years after the restoration of democracy. Athens is hardly the empire it was. So why does its court have extraterritorial authority in cases concerning people who die of exposure in ditches on Naxos? (If you commenters know the answer, I will be impressed.)
I vaguely recall an anecdote about Reagan (?) meeting with Brezhnev/Gorbachev (?) and amiably suggesting that the US and USSR would easily set aside their differences, fighting shoulder to shoulder if aliens invaded the earth. Can anyone give me a cite? I’m writing something about Carl Schmitt, friend/enemy, you understand.
I’m teaching “Recent Continental Philosophy” next semester. What would you do, if you had to do that? Recent is relative, of course. I’m thinking: Kant. No, seriously. I want to start by having the kids read Kant, “What is Enlightenment?” Then Foucault, “What is Enlightenment?” I want to make that a bit of a theme, yes. What texts would you weave around that red thread? I’m going to do some Foucault vs. Habermas (obviously.) I’m thinking about having them read bits of Robert Pippin, Modernity as a Philosophical Problem. How would you structure the course to suit my theme? There is a real problem with taking the ‘recent’ seriously. If the kids don’t really know Hegel and Nietzsche and Kierkegaard and Heidegger, what’s the point starting them out with Badiou, eh? I’m thinking of having them read a few of the short, intro chapters from the Critchley, ed. Companion to Continental Philosophy. I am also going to do a couple weeks on Zizek, because I know his stuff rather well at this point. In teaching a new course, I figure you should make sure to have at least a couple weeks on something you have down pretty cold. By the by, I’ve got a pretty good and funny Zizek post up at the Valve, if you like that sort of thing.
A couple weeks ago Matt Yglesias noted the peculiarity of ‘unapologetic liberal‘. (File under ‘catechism of cliche’, ‘what sort of liberal is he?’) I thought I’d dredge up something from the files:
I’m writing up a set of explanatory notes to go with Plato’s Republic, Book I. And I find myself unable to fact-check something I found on wikipedia – namely, Cephalus, the old guy we meet right at the beginning, is “an elderly arms manufacturer.” Arms manufacturer? How do we know? And how much do we know? Ship-building, sword-making, what? It would be interesting to know more for a couple reasons. First, it casts Socrates’ whole ‘would you give a madman his weapons back?’ question in a slightly more personal light. Selling weapons to madmen – hey, a deal’s a deal – is the modern complaint about arms dealers, after all. Also, it is ironic that, in just a few years, the war will be lost and Cephalus will have his fortune seized by the Thirty Tyrants; his son Polemarchus will be dead, executed. (This whole war business is a double-edged sword. Profitable, but tricky to handle safely.)
Can any intrepid classicists get me a source for the Cephalus-as-arms-manufacturer fact?
Kieran thinks that’s bad? (And that?) Jonah Goldberg gets letters, one of whose authors he adjudges “ain’t altogether crazy.” From the mailbag:
and it hit me…Holy cow. The global warming alarmists KNOW the earth is going to begin cooling in a few years – and their alarm is that they have to have Kyoto-like programs in place that they can point to as the cause of the cooling.
If they can succeed at this – they effectively control the world. In a few decades they can revive the “earth is cooling and there’s an ice age coming” alarmism – and prescribe policies that ensure they have the power they want to manage that impending climate disaster.
You must now fill the comment box with your best Hollywood pitch/screenplay treatment for this sophisticated conspiracy flick. Bonus style points for Ludlumesque title.
In response to our poll, the people have spoken. It’s pensive rhino by a 3-to-1 margin, over bird on a stereo.
Following up last night’s post, I’ve constructed two more little Tom and Jerry appreciation sites – for “Pencil Mania”; for “Piano Tooners” [fixed!] You can also download the cartoons themselves here and here. I’ve incorporated my expert commentary into the sites themselves. Are you like me? Do you find these things just weirdly beguiling?
That reminds me. One of the finest graphic novels you’ve (maybe) never heard of is Kim Deitch, The Boulevard of Broken Dreams
Here’s a short bio piece on Deitch, who really deserves to be as well known as Spiegelman and Crumb.
Matt Bai in the NY Times, “Can Bloggers Get Real?”:
The Chicago Reader, an alternative weekly, recently profiled a 23-year-old law student who writes on Daily Kos’s front page under the pseudonym Georgia10, positing that she may well be the most-read political writer in the city, even though few people know her real name. (For the record, it’s Georgia Logothetis, and she lives with her parents.) In this way, Daily Kos and other blogs resemble a political version of those escapist online games where anyone with a modem can disappear into an alternate society, reinventing himself among neighbors and colleagues who exist only in a virtual realm.
Bai needs an additional, ontological premise. Perhaps: the size and reality of an audience are inversely proportional. Also, this is an unfortunate sentence: “She says she hopes the convention will show politicians that the bloggers are just ordinary Americans — and vice versa.”
A week or so ago I noted the availability of absurdly cheap 50-movie DVD packs – SF, mystery, so forth. And this 100 Cartoon Classics
This afternoon Belle and I ran a double-feature matinee. First, a Tom and Jerry cartoon, "A Spanish Twist". No, not the stupid cat and mouse. The originals. Read about them here. Now visit the wonderful little site I have built just for you. Wonder of wonders! It turns out you can download the whole cartoon here.
Right. Now take the survey under the fold. But only if your intuitions are untainted by first viewing the image at J&B. (We want to be scientistic about this.)
The Who, “Won’t Get Fooled Again.” Conservative rock anthem. File under: complex irony, I guess.
Will someone be so kind as to email or post the whole list? Also, is there significant, er, hermeneutic analysis, above and beyond the short bit Adler quotes, or is it just the list? Also, this is funny:
Listeners get to decide what the song means, not the creator. The audience got Springsteen’s “Born In The USA” was pro-America, even if Bruce was too dense to figure the matter was out of his hands.
Never mind that concern for the plight of the working man need not be anti-American, I think liberals should push back against rampant conservative ‘lyrical activism’, running rough-shod over the original intentions of our nation’s founding playlists.
I assume “Okie From Muskogee” made the cut. Also “Sweet Home Alabama”. Lots of country music. (I’m reading a book about Laibach. Maybe some Rammstein?) “Material Girl”. Any number of bling-themed songs? The Smiths? “Shoplifters of the World”? Something by Stryper?
Ah! Turns out Bruce Bartlett did his top-40 a couple years ago. The criteria are debatable, as ‘religion’ is deemed an “unambiguously conservative value”.
Just so Henry does not have to doing anything undignified, like remind you all again that he’s over at Firedoglake later today, discussing Perlstein’s Before the Storm
Here’s a fun bit from p. 372. It’s time for the Republican National Convention in 1964, at the Cow Palace, in SF:
Across town, at the intersection of Haight and Ashbury streets, a new kind of bohemia was taking shape, although many of its most flamboyant representatives were occupied with a cross-country trip on a bus called “Further,” whose riotous exterior decoration included a sign reading, “A VOTE FOR BARRY IS A VOTE FOR FUN!” A stop along the way was the commune of former Harvard professor Timothy Leary, whose The Psychedelic Experience had come out that year. These were Ken Kesey’s “Merry Pranksters,” later to be immortalized as the first hippies in a book by New York Herald Tribune writer Tom Wolfe. The delegates, mostly gray old factory owners and club women – the butt of cabbies’ jokes that San Francisco banks were running out of nickels and dimes – would have been altogether disgusted by the goings-on at the Haight, were they aware of them; but the folks who would fill the Cow’s spectator galleries – the YAFers and Young Republicans – might have been amused. They were packing North Beach nightclubs dancing the swim (some might have taken in the country’s first topless dancing act), snapping up comic books lampooning such trendy dances by inventing new ones like the “Eisenhower sway” (“sway back and forth. But end up in the dead center. Do not speak while performing this exercise.”, and heckling lefty comedian Dick Gregory at the hungry i when they weren’t laughing at his cracks at the expense of Scranton (“He reminds you of the guy who runs to John Wayne for help”). They did think a vote for Barry was a vote for fun. They exulted in each other, rejoiced, felt an electricity they would not experience again in their lives; it was their Woodstock.
I think it’s rather interesting the way conservatives – particularly movement conservatives – have gotten so adept at being both the party of fun and the party of traditional moral values; while managing to tar the left as both too relativistic and hedonistically permissive (take that, you big hippy!) and too morally authoritarian (politically correct). It’s a good trick when you can make the opposition carry the weight of your own contradictions, as it were.
And then the bard says: “I warrant you, mistress, thunder shall not so awake the beds of eels as my giving out her beauty stir up the lewdly-inclined. I’ll bring home some to-night.” And then the bawd says: “Come your ways, follow me.”
I think it means that I just realized this really great Eels track, “Jelly Dancers”, is available free here (mp3). It’s off Dimension Mix [amazon]
For example, here’s the Beck track. Someone did it up as a Monty Python video and everything.