Kevin Drum mocks Hugh Hewitt for his ‘it was in a PDF file that we were only able to read after downloading a new version of Adobe’ defense. But the proper pop cult reference is not Perry Mason. Allow me. Look to the man’s own site: "Hugh Hewitt is the Jack Bauer of talk radio and the blogosphere." This is actually a good idea for a show. ‘In the next 24 hours, terrorists will make a major strike against an American city. The only thing between all of us, and just a few of them … is a complacent, partisan hack.’ In 90 minutes or less you could play it strictly for Man Who Knew Too Little laughs. Subtler and ultimately more satisfying would be a genuine, 24-karat gold-plated imitation 24. In the first episode, "Download PDF For Murder", terrorists have encrypted their plans in an email attachment that can only be read using the latest version of Adobe Reader. Sweaty ‘which wire do I cut?’ tension as the heroes race against time to crack the main Adobe site. ‘This mouse has TWO buttons!’ ‘Just PICK one!’ [Adobe Acrobat Reader starts dowloading, to the "Hackers"-inspired strains
From the category archives:
Intellects vast and cool and unsympathetic
A local vicar wrote in today’s Plymouth Herald that the second half of the show, which is set in hell, made him feel like he was “in hell” …
(link via Neil Gaiman)
I was gonna complain about a post that was up … on this blog … about Democrats are traitors. Hell with it. It went like this.
Yep, that’s how it went. I nabbed the graphic from ‘dial B for blog’. Which is good, but not as funny as this, on a day to day basis.
Steven Landsburg, perennial bete noire of people who want to say that economists aren’t an entirely baleful influence on public debate, is doing his poor man’s version of Freakonomics again over at Slate and attracting an entirely fair amount of opprobrium for doing so (via Matthew). This week, we have the “counterintuitive” “result” (note two different flavours of scare quotes here; the first set are mocking Landsburg for constantly referring to things as “counterintuitive” when they are actually just silly, while the second set is there in order to indicate that his argument is intended to resemble a result from economics, but is no such thing) that turning off the ventilators of patients too poor to pay their medical bills is the right and even the moral thing to do. I don’t think anyone was ever likely to have been convinced by this, but below I present an argument which might help to sort out cases in which economists might have something useful to add to a debate of this kind, from cases like this where they probably don’t.
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“Tyler Cowen”:http://www.marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2005/12/should_christma.html links to “Leonard Peikoff”:http://www.capmag.com/articlePrint.asp?ID=2254, suggesting that”a bracing Randian approach is needed” to the commercialization of Christmas. But why settle for an epigone like Peikoff, when you can get the Randite vision of Christmas “straight from the horse’s mouth?”:http://www.nationallampoon.com/nl/08_features/xmasspecials/xmasspecials.asp
*Ayn Rand’s A Selfish Christmas (1951)*
bq. In this hour-long radio drama, Santa struggles with the increasing demands of providing gifts for millions of spoiled, ungrateful brats across the world, until a single elf, in the engineering department of his workshop, convinces Santa to go on strike. The special ends with the entropic collapse of the civilization of takers and the spectacle of children trudging across the bitterly cold, dark tundra to offer Santa cash for his services, acknowledging at last that his genius makes the gifts — and therefore Christmas — possible.
bq. Prior to broadcast, Mutual Broadcast System executives raised objections to the radio play, noting that 56 minutes of the hour-long broadcast went to a philosophical manifesto by the elf and of the four remaining minutes, three went to a love scene between Santa and the cold, practical Mrs. Claus that was rendered into radio through the use of grunts and the shattering of several dozen whiskey tumblers. In later letters, Rand sneeringly described these executives as “anti-life.”
(nb – I “linked”:https://crookedtimber.org/2004/12/02/xmas-specials/ to this last year when it lived on its author, John Scalzi’s, “blog”:http://www.scalzi.com/whatever/003030.html). As a result of which people promoting Christmas specials like the “The Happy Elf”:http://movies2.nytimes.com/gst/movies/movie.html?v_id=334196 seem to have become convinced that I’m a valuable target for their marketing efforts).
David Glenn has written an entertaining and interesting piece of “intellectual history”:http://chronicle.com/free/v52/i12/12a01501.htm on sociologist Philip Rieff, perhaps best known these days for having once being married to Susan Sontag. While Rieff hasn’t had a lasting impact on his field, he’s inspired the fierce loyalty of a coterie of former students, and appeared as a supporting character in various “works of fiction”:http://chronicle.com/free/v52/i12/12a01601.htm. It appears that he’s returning to the field after thirty years away, with no fewer than four books on the verge of being published. It’s unclear whether these will be important and influential works or intellectual curiosities.
Rieff sounds to be full of high sentence, but a bit obtuse; still he seems to be a very interesting and sympathetic character, and an academic type that’s vanishing rare these days. Once upon a time, sociologists and political theorists used to be able to get away with speaking to literary types on their own terms; while they produced a lot of guff, they also sometimes drew some very interesting connections. Rieff’s a sort of academic Rip van Winkle, emerging from a long sleep over decades during which the world has changed. It’ll be interesting to see whether he’s able to reconnect.
My last post was about E.S. Turner‘s Roads to Ruin, the Shocking History of Social Reform. One of the chapters is about daylight savings, a timely topic, so I’ll make it a two-part series. Here are a few choice samples of arguments against the pernicious practice.
Either my charitable nature has overwhelmed me, or my desire for someone to fight with whose arms I don’t have to prop up and swing around myself. It is easy to pin straw men to the mat, but it lacks something, somehow. Anyway, I have written the most convincing anti same-sex marriage post I could muster on my personal blog. Please comment there.
The FP/Prospect poll on top public intellectuals “has been published”:http://www.foreignpolicy.com/story/cms.php?story_id=3260 . Not much there that is worthy of comment. Nearly everyone on the list has made a contribution which is either totally ephemeral, or which will simply be absorbed into the body of human knowledge without leaving much trace of its originator. Ideas from Sen, Habermas or Chomsky will survive in some form, but nobody will read _them_ in 100 years. And the rest will be utterly forgotten — or so I predict. Anyway, without further ado, I invite comment on who were the top public intellectuals of 1905. You can comment on either (a) who would actually have topped such a silly poll in 1905 or (b) with hindsight, who turned out to be the top public intellectuals.
Just to get us started — and to cross reference “John’s post”:https://crookedtimber.org/2005/10/17/the-winter-palace-and-after/ earlier — “Trotsky”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trotsky has to be a strong contender under both (a) and (b): Chairman of the St. Petersburg Soviet, a major contributor to subsequent events, and still very very readable (My Life, 1905). Over to you …
We have a troll at the Valve, the Troll of Sorrow (among other aliases). I know, I know; just one. But that’s like having just one case of herpes. (Not that I would know, please believe.) We caught him from Adam Kotsko. I don’t blame Adam. We’ve tried the patent remedies. Deleting, IP blocking. A touch of disemvowelment. Nothing seems to reduce the unsightly swelling permanently. It’s an unusual strain, a platypus you wouldn’t believe in if it weren’t plainly real: antisemitic, homophobic, Quine, Russell and logical positivism-fixated. It’s strange that someone should be obsessed with providing slightly mistaken, severely tourettes-afflicted readings of the intricacies of the early 5’s of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus. [click to continue…]
A few days ago I finished The Right Nation
One of the reasons the GOP manages to contain Southern theocrats as well as Western libertarians is that it encourages arguments rather than suppressing them. Go to a meeting of young conservatives in Washington and the atmosphere crackles with ideas, much as it did in London in the heyday of the Thatcher revolution. The Democrats barely know what a debate is.
Well, the book is not such a polemical and high-handed affair as that portends. Mostly. [click to continue…]
The “Rousseau Association/Association Rousseau”:http://www.rousseauassociation.org/default.htm , which is a very fine bunch of scholars and a nice crowd of human beings, has “a new website”:http://www.rousseauassociation.org/default.htm thanks to Zev Trachtenberg at the University of Oklahoma. It is still in development but when finished it should be an important resource and marks a distinct improvement on the last version. Visitors can dowload works by Rousseau, follow links to other sites of interest, browse a selection of images and even “listen to some of the music”:http://www.rousseauassociation.org/aboutRousseau/musicalWorks.htm Jean-Jacques composed. (Full disclosure, I’m currently VP of the Association.)
bq. Every day, though, I see in the faces of men around me the longing that led me to the reservoir that night, and every day I shudder at the thought that one of them could have been sent to further my indoctrination. I turn away from their stares, I do not return their kind words, and I petition people in power to recognize the grotesque threat among us.
“Matthew Cheney”:http://mumpsimus.blogspot.com/2005/06/indoctrination.html stakes a strong claim for the office of Elder Tentacled Abomination in the Order of the Shrill.
Harry’s piece on Christopher Hitchens prompted me to collect some thoughts about him. I briefly reviewed Letters to a Young Contrarian a few years ago (along with Lilla’s “The Reckless Mind: Intellectuals in Politics) and found plenty both to like (the gadfly’s unwillingness to accept evasions and easy answers) and to dislike (the tendency to vendetta, epitomised by his campaign against Clinton).
That was when he was still on the Left. Having signed up with Bush, Hitchens has found his talent for vendetta in high demand, but the Bushies aren’t too keen on hard truths. So we get pieces like this one on the Bush Administration’s backing for the Uzbekistan dictator Karimov, notable for the observation
The United States did not invent or impose the Karimov government: It “merely” accepted its offer of strategic and tactical help in the matter of Afghanistan
This phraseology is, or ought to be, familiar – it’s virtually identical to rhetoric defending or downplaying the Reagan Administration’s embrace (metaphorical and, in Rumsfeld’s case, literal) of Saddam during the 1980s, when his foreign wars and internal oppression killed vast numbers of people (Google “US did not create Saddam” or “Did not install Saddam” for examples)[1].
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I’ve been puzzling about Hitchens recently, partly as a result of listening to his session at the Hay On Wye festival with the Greatest Living Englishman on blasphemy (courtesy of Norman Geras). He veers in that debate between inspiring brilliance and unfunny rudeness — I cannot imagine what the GLE made of it. I disagree with him about the war in in Iraq, and find myself wondering how he squares his support for Bush with many of his other apparent beliefs. He often sounds shrill in his attacks on the left, even when he can beat his immediate opponent on reason and evidence alone. I thought, for example, that he got the better of Chomsky by a mile in the polemics over Afghanistan, but was taken aback by the energy he put into alienating himself from the left in general. Maurice Isserman quotes one of the Socialist Party leaders who negotiated the merger with Max Shachtman’s group in the late ’50’s as saying something like the following “as soon as it was over I realised that this guy was going to move as far to the right as fast as he could” and that was certainly how Hitchens seemed at the time. He hasn’t exactly fulfilled that promise (nor, IMHO, did Shachtman), though he certainly tries to give that impression from time to time. But I still find his prose, almost always, compelling; I’d certainly sooner read almost anything by him than anything by any other journalist working today. Norm quotes Ophelia Benson (with permission) as follows: