“Glenn Beck ?!!???”:http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/10/01/AR2009100103889.html?hpid=opinionsbox1. Truly, these are desperate times for conservative would-be intellectuals (n.b. also the defence of Jonah Goldberg’s _Liberal Fascism_ as a ‘serious work’ that will stand the test of time).
From the category archives:
Just broke the Water Pitcher
I decided just to boost this comment I made in the thread below about Dr. Kealey’s failed attempt at humor. (My sexism. Let me show you it.) I considered removing the bad words, but then decided, fuck it. If Panera bread is banning CT from its wireless for you right now, sorry hypothetical Panera-eating CT readers. Who can’t read this apology.
I’d like to share a little anecdote from my college years. I had a Roman History prof who would frequently make comments on my appearance, in front of the gathering class, as I made my way to my seat in the front row (because I was a very diligent student!). And at a gathering of students and faculty I decided to leave and put on my coat, but then got sidetracked into a discussion with him and said I needed to take my coat off. And he said, you can do that but if you do I’m going to stare at your breasts—but you knew that when you got that tattoo there. (The tattoo is like 3 inches below my clavicle anyway, thank you.) He actually said that to me! And then, when I was applying to graduate school, I had to approach my advisor with a problem, because normally I would ask this prominent scholar who gave me an A+ (which, I may say, I thoroughly deserved) in Roman History to write a recommendation, but I knew from previous experience that I didn’t actually want to be alone with him in his office. And so my advisor had to convince another professor, of equal status, to write me a recommendation that was somewhat fictional, on the assurance that when I did have a class with him that term he would find me everything promised, etc. He kindly did so and didn’t regret his decision. So where I’m going with this is, that fucking sucked and was a terrible experience for me, and Dr. Kealy is a fucking asshat who is even now making the lives of his attractive female students needlessly miserable. And just FYI, dsquared’s reliable, not-making-a-big-deal-out-of-it, stand up feminism makes him infinitely more sexually appealing to the leftist ladies of the world. That shit is like catnip. It is only the strict, sex-hating conventions of Crooked Timber, under which fraternization between co-bloggers is totes banned, which keeps us apart right now. And the happily married thing.
Just adding, it was particularly irritating about the grade, because I really did deserve an A+ in that class, but it was impossible to know whether my grade was influenced by my breasts. My boyfriend at the time, for example, questioned it on this basis. I doggedly went on earning the same grade in other classes until at one point my GPA was above 4.0. But the tarnish never really went away. And all of this fell under the look but don’t touch rubric, while still being humiliating and awful.
Particularly humiliating and awful in light of the fact that a teacher at my middle/high school “fell in love with me” on the first day of 7th grade (when I had just turned 13) , and proceeded to have a protracted–I don’t know what you would call it, affair, maybe–which he carefully avoided consummating until four weeks after I reached the age of consent in Washington D.C. The schmuck wrote a book about me, in addition to taking approximately one billion pictures of me (he was the photography teacher, natch.) I mean really, a whole novel. What a pitiful, yet shitty thing to do. And then I finally told my mom about it, and he got fired from the school in my senior year, and then almost all the girls at my (all-girls) school turned uniformly against me and treated me awfully for “ruining his life.” So think how happy I was to get to college, where there would be real scholarship and adults who behave with minimal decency! Hollow laughs ensue. Now I’m not writing this so you can all say, poor Belle, that’s really awful. I’m fine now and that’s not the point. But there’s a reason all those annoying strident feminists go on about how the personal is the political. Kealy doesn’t know the personal histories of the female students he’s ogling. And they deserve to be treated like human beings, not fresh-faced dollies to use as mental props during masturbation.
Martin Bright in the New StatesmanSpectator
bq. Incidentally, I now think the invasion was indeed an error: carried out at the wrong time, by the wrong coalition for the wrong reasons. But where I do agree with the “decents” is that those who opposed intervention in 2002/3 were arguing for the murderous Baathist regime to stay in power. This should remain on their conscience just as the murderous consequences of the invasion are on the conscience of those who supported the war.
(via comments at “Aaronovitch Watch”:http://aaronovitch.blogspot.com/ .)
I just got Masterpiece Comics
UPDATE: Before accusing me of misreading Fish, please consider whether this comment satisfies you.
“This”:http://yourmonkeycalled.com/post/185927647/book-titles-if-they-were-written-today , via _Making Light_, is pretty awesome.
Book Titles, If They Were Written Today
- Then: The Wealth of Nations
Now: Invisible Hands: The Mysterious Market Forces That Control Our Lives and How to Profit from Them- Then: Walden
Now: Camping with Myself: Two Years in American Tuscany- Then: The Theory of the Leisure Class
Now: Buying Out Loud: The Unbelievable Truth About What We Consume and What It Says About Us- Then: The Gospel of Matthew
Now: 40 Days and a Mule: How One Man Quit His Job and Became the Boss- Then: The Prince
Now: The Prince (Foreword by Oprah Winfrey)
Further suggestions solicited in comments.
You are all wondering what Kieran is so damn sorry about (in his characteristically sociological and defensive way.)
Well. Here is a picture of our orbiting server, taken around 1910 A.D. (common era, if you prefer, you atheist.) An estimable flying fortress – sort of a cross between a siege engine and a bat. That’s to keep out spam. (Since siege towers were once called belfries, I deduce that this is a belfry bat.) No doubt it performed excellently in wind-tunnel tests. But, to make a long story short … over the weekend it crashed. And comments were, as it were, ‘crushed’ under the ‘weight’ of all that ‘wood’ and ‘canvas’. (source: Flickr.)
But if that’s what our server looks like, you ask: Whatever does the internet as a whole resemble, eh, riddle me? It is, now that you ask, a sort of ‘City of the Future’, circa 1925:
Now get back to work! All of you!
Yglesias and Drum had a back-and-forth about the constitutionality, morals and manners of the filibuster. I think more hay should be made of the fact that ‘filibuster’ does not, as one might expect, derive from the name of some thoroughly American, corn-stuffed, long-winded Senator from a nigh-unpopulated state. (‘The Senate now recognizes the honorable Horatio Wheatbender Filibuster, from the great state of …’) No, as wikipedia explains: “The term filibuster was first used in 1851. It was derived from the Spanish filibustero meaning pirate or freebooter. This term had in turn evolved from the French word flibustier, which itself evolved from the Dutch vrijbuiter (freebooter). This term was applied at the time to American adventurers, mostly from Southern states, who sought to overthrow the governments of Central American states, and was transferred to the users of the filibuster, seen as a tactic for pirating or hijacking debate.”
I think it’s remarkable that the name basically derives from a word for a crime. So I think the thing to do is tar the Republicans as soft on piracy. Basically.
On the other hand, here are some further literary notes on the wanderings of this word. El Filibusterismo is a famous novel by José Rizal, a 19th Century literary hero of the Philippines.
Here’s another quote from Wikipedia. Rizal explains what it means.
Rizal had to define the word filibustero to his German friend Ferdinand Blumentritt, who did not understand his use of the word in Noli Me Tangere [Rizal’s first novel]. In a letter, Rizal explained: “The word filibustero is little known in the Philippines. The masses do not know it yet. I heard it for the first time in 1872 when the tragic executions (of the Gomburza) took place. I still remember the panic that this word created. Our father forbade us to utter it, as well as the words Cavite, Jose Burgos (one of the executed priests), etc. The Manila newspapers and the Spaniards apply this word to one whom they want to make a revolutionary suspect. The Filipinos belonging to the educated class fear the reach of the word. It does not have the meaning of freebooters; it rather means a dangerous patriot who will soon be hanged or well, a presumptuous man.” By the end of the nineteenth century, the word filibustero had acquired the meaning “subversive” in the Philippines, hence the book is about subversion.
This is subversion with a positive connotation. I am sure we can all agree that sometimes this or that existing political order needs a spot of undermining. Still, it is at least a mild paradox that, in the U.S. Senate, subversion – the filibuster – is, technically, part of the established order of things. (Like in that Powerpuff Girls episode, “Bought and Scold” in which Princess gets her dad to buy the whole town, then makes crime legal.) Ah well.
Now, on to self-promotion. As you may be aware I just published an intro to Plato book, which (joy of joys!) you can read and download for free here (free! free!) I mention this in part just to beat the point to death, but in part to inform you that – although apparently Reason & Persuasion: Three Dialogues by Plato
In other self-promotion news: if Plato isn’t your cup of tea, then maybe you would like this J&B post about the sexy sexy fonts of Squid and Owl. I think fonts are very sexy.
I’m enjoying our George Scialabba event, and I enjoyed George’s book. My contribution will be up tomorrow, or thereabouts. But I want to ask a separate question of our author: what has he changed his mind about? Which of these pieces look, to him, dated or short-sighted? I assume he declined to reprint anything he now thinks is just not worth reading anymore, but I suspect some of this stuff looks critically mixed in retrospect. [click to continue…]
Lemme horn in on Quiggin territory here. I just flew home to Singapore from New York and read about a third of Justin Fox’s The Myth of the Rational Market: A History of Risk, Reward, and Delusion on Wall Street
For his doctoral thesis [completed in 1893] he devised the most sophisticated mathematical treatment yet of economic equilibrium, and he also designed and built a contraption of interconnected water-filled cisterns that he described as “the physical analogue of the ideal economic market.” Many decades later, economist Paul Samuelson judged this work to be “the greatest doctoral dissertation in economics ever writter.” It launched Fisher into a leading role among the world’s still-sparse ranks of mathematical economists. (10)
I want to hear more about his bold, pre-20th Century design for a compucistern system. [click to continue…]
Having knocked Mark “digital barbarism” Helprin around in a trio of posts – in one of which I remarked that the guy should probably listen to EconTalk to learn that libertarians are actually skeptical about the merits of copyright extension – I am duty-bound to report that Helprin was just a guest on EconTalk. [click to continue…]
Whether or not Theory jargon incapacitates humanities folks, communication with regular folks-wise, I think it might provide a leg-up when it comes to understanding Republican governor infidelity pressers. Here’s Mark Sanford: “And the biggest self of self is indeed self.” True, untrue, or neither? Discuss. Defend your answer on the grounds that it is necessary for the progress of World-Spirit.
Here’s the context:
But I’m here because if you were to look at God’s laws, in every instance it is designed to protect people from themselves. I think that that is the bottom line of God’s law. It is not a moral, rigid list of do’s and don’ts just for the heck of do’s and don’ts, it is indeed to protect us from ourselves. And the biggest self of self is indeed self. If sin is in fact grounded in this notion of what is it that I want, as opposed to somebody else.
What do you make of this?
To punish myself for panning Helprin’s book without reading, I decided to go back and reread the excerpt at least. And that old op-ed. And I’ve decided: there’s more merit here than I had realized. Let me lay it out for you. (But first, ask yourself: wouldn’t you rather be reading Squid and Owl? Isn’t that a more healthful use of your time?) [click to continue…]
But it is more or less along the same lines. “Inside Higher Ed reports”:http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2009/06/23/elsevier
Elsevier officials said Monday that it was a mistake for the publishing giant’s marketing division to offer $25 Amazon gift cards to anyone who would give a new textbook five stars in a review posted on Amazon or Barnes & Noble. … Here’s what the e-mail — sent to contributors to the textbook — said:
“Congratulations and thank you for your contribution to Clinical Psychology. Now that the book is published, we need your help to get some 5 star reviews posted to both Amazon and Barnes & Noble to help support and promote it. As you know, these online reviews are extremely persuasive when customers are considering a purchase. For your time, we would like to compensate you with a copy of the book under review as well as a $25 Amazon gift card. If you have colleagues or students who would be willing to post positive reviews, please feel free to forward this e-mail to them to participate. We share the common goal of wanting Clinical Psychology to sell and succeed. The tactics defined above have proven to dramatically increase exposure and boost sales. I hope we can work together to make a strong and profitable impact through our online bookselling channels.”
.. Cindy Minor, marketing manager for science and technology at Elsevier … called the request for five star reviews “a poorly written e-mail” by “an overzealous employee.”
Matthew Yglesias goes way too easy on Ross Douthat’s book review of Mark Helprin’s Digital Barbarism: A Writer’s Manifesto
Let’s start with the book itself. It is, I gather, a grossly metastasized, page-wise, rewrite of his shockingly ignorant (it was widely and correctly noted at the time) NY Times op-ed from a couple years back, “A Great Idea Lives Forever, Shouldn’t Its Copyright?”. And why exactly does it follow that terrible ideas deserve book deals, one might ask? (Here’s the exhaustive wiki-buttal that op-ed inspired.)
Larry Lessig wrote a long review of Barbarism last month, which he followed up here. Having not read Helprin’s book – and I even read Jonah Goldberg’s book, sweet heaven help and forgive me! – I’m not in a position to add anything except that Lessig’s response leaves me in little doubt that Helprin has contrived to learn nothing from that initial op-ed debacle. He still has no idea whatsoever what the other side’s views are, let alone what the grounds for them might be. (I guess there’s something inadvertently apt about the ‘barbarism’ in his title, if it’s true that the term derives from some Proto-Indo-European speaker’s sense that foreigners are just going ‘bar-bar’, not actually saying anything.) [click to continue…]
Thanks for those podcast links to the talks from the Cohen conference, Harry. Very interesting. Let me talk briefly about one. David Estlund’s paper on “Utopophobia” – which, I see, is also available as a PDF download in draft form. The title gives you the right general idea about the topic: why are people hostile to utopian thinking – to ‘ideal theory’ in political theory and philosophy? To what degree is such hostility justified; to what degree unjustified?
It’s a good paper.
Let me begin with a mild expression of total difference of opinion. Estlund naturally addresses the concern that ideal theory is a waste of time because it’s useless. ‘It’s never gonna happen.’ He makes a comparison to higher mathematics, which is also generally acknowledged to be pretty inapplicable to anything that might be empirically real. He doesn’t push this analogy, so it’s not like weight is resting on it. Still, it seems to me so much more natural to say that ‘ideal theory’, if useless, is probably useless in the way a painstakingly-constructed model train system in your basement is useless – or that writing Mary Sue-style fanfic about the Form of the Good is useless. That is, it’s a rather indulgent, mostly harmless private make-believe sort of affair, but really not much like higher mathematics, honestly. I guess I’m impressed that you could be enough of a Platonist about it to presume the higher maths angle, in passing, with all the attendant implications of precision and purity and truth. (As someone who just wrote a book about Plato, part of me is happy that the old ways never die. But the part of me that is a die-hard later Wittgensteinian can only shake its head in wonder that the old ways never die. Back to the rough ground!)
Right. That’s out of the way. (You can’t refute an incredulous stare, nor does one count as an objection. We’re done.) Overall, it seems to me that Estlund says a lot of smart stuff that is relatively small-bore – stuff about how certain applications of ‘ought implies can’ can be fallacious. I found myself nodding and saying: ‘yes, I never noticed that before. It seems right.’ So: good. But these generally good points don’t feel large enough, in the aggregate, to cover the grand area staked out by the title: “Utopophobia”.
Estlund makes one good point that might be grand enough. But I think it needs amplification. And he leaves a really big point out. I’m going to use that as an excuse to tell jokes. [click to continue…]