Just broke the Water Pitcher

Our 5-year old, Zoë, is very bad at losing at games. Today she wept copiously, following a painful defeat in tic-tac-toe. (In her defense, she was exhausted and feeling frazzled for independent reasons. But really: one should chill, when it comes to this game.) Zoë: ‘It’s not FAAAAIIRRR!’ Daddy [against better judgment]: ‘Why isn’t it fair?’ Zoë: ‘Because I tried my very best, but I still didn’t have fun.’ There is something to that, as a theory of justice.

This survey says I’m an Internet Omnivore, but reading the descriptions I’m more of a Lackluster Veteran. I don’t like mobiles/cellphones much, because they’re fiddly and unintuitive, and I only rarely send text messages – I keep forgetting where the space bar is. However, once the iPhone comes out, I expect to be properly omnivorous. (H/T Edumacation* – Also an Omnivore)

* While I’m at it, can anyone point me to the origin of constructions like Edumacation, Journamalism and so on. Wikipedia isn’t much help, and Uncyclopedia’s entry, while edumacational, gives no etymamology.

Thanks to dr slack and other well-read contributors to this comments thread, I found an early version of the drunk/lamp-post/keys joke commonly directed at economists in which the role of the drunk/economist is played by a figure from Afghan (or maybe Iranian or Turkish) tradition, Mullah Nasruddin (scroll down or search for basement).

I tend to regard myself as Crooked Timber’s online myrmidon of a number of rather unpopular views; among other things, as regular readers will have seen, I believe that the incitement to religious hatred legislation was a good idea (perhaps badly executed), that John Searle has it more or less correct on the subject of artificial intelligence, that Jacques Derrida deserves his high reputation and that George Orwell was not even in the top three essayists of the twentieth century[1]. I’m a fan of Welsh nationalism. Oh yes, the Kosovo intervention was a crock too. At some subconscious level I am aware that my ideas about education are both idiotic and unspeakable. But I think that all of these causes are regarded as at least borderline sane by at least one fellow CT contributor. There is only one major issue on which I stand completely alone, reviled by all. And it’s this; Budweiser (by which I mean the real Budweiser, the beer which has been sold under that brand by Anheuser-Busch since 1876) is really quite a good beer. I have been threatening this post in comments for a while now, and here it is:
[click to continue…]

And the nominations for ‘best performance as a concern troll of the week’ go to – aw, hell with it. I clicked a link, taking me to this Michael Medved column. Don’t get me started. But then I did actually go to find the Rasmussen results he was citing. They are here:

Democrats in America are evenly divided on the question of whether George W. Bush knew about the 9/11 terrorist attacks in advance. Thirty-five percent (35%) of Democrats believe he did know, 39% say he did not know, and 26% are not sure.

Republicans reject that view and, by a 7-to-1 margin, say the President did not know in advance about the attacks. Among those not affiliated with either major party, 18% believe the President knew and 57% take the opposite view.

Back to Medved: he is wringing his hands about the Dem numbers. But it is actually quite astonishing that 1 in 8 Republicans are, by implication, supporters of an organization that they believe significantly sponsors terrorism, since it sponsors Bush. (Knowing in advance and doing nothing would be aiding and abetting, at best, I take it.) By contrast, presumably the 35% of Dems who think Bush was in the know at least disapprove of the 9/11 attacks?

The meta point here is that I never post about numbers stuff because I have no expertise. It seems to me it is always the case that at least 20% of respondents have very strange views, or must have failed to understand the question, or – perhaps most likely of all – were taking the occasion of being asked the question to vent angrily.

What do you make of these poll numbers?

UPDATE: It seems like a significant problem with the question that ‘incompetently failed to act on warnings about the possibility of’ could be construed as ‘knew about in advance’.

For I was not an aging, racist shock-jock.

Then they came for the ones who had ‘lost’ all that email, and I said nothing. For I had not ‘lost’ all that email.

It seems to me this has been a weak week for Republican push-back.

And now, back to your previously scheduled comics blogging.

Jonah Goldberg is now grumbling that people are calling him stupid. But, to be fair, the upshot of Goldberg’s indignant response to Henry’s post would seem to be that Henry was actually too charitable to Goldberg’s original post. But I’m getting ahead of my story. Goldberg complains: “Any fair reader of my post (hint, that excludes Henry) would see that I was criticizing liberals and conservatives for not taking culture into account enough.” Now what would that too low accounting value be? “My point was not that culture is everything, but that government isn’t everything.” That is, Goldberg is claiming that the assignment of a non-zero significance to culture is bold contrarianism that places him at odds with both left and right. Of course, far from being a bold position, the claim that culture is not nothing is something everyone would grant freely, if it seemed to anyone worth mentioning.

To put it another way, Goldberg is making a standard rhetorical move which has no accepted name, but which really needs one. I call it ‘the two-step of terrific triviality’. Say something that is ambiguous between something so strong it is absurd and so weak that it would be absurd even to mention it. When attacked, hop from foot to foot as necessary, keeping a serious expression on your face. With luck, you will be able to generate the mistaken impression that you haven’t been knocked flat, by rights. As a result, the thing that you said which was absurdly strong will appear to have some obscure grain of truth in it. Even though you have provided no reason to think so.

Over at his “other digs”:http://www.artsjournal.com/quickstudy/2007/04/depth_takes_a_holiday.html#more, Scott responds to Ann Althouse’s YouTube video of herself watching American Idol, by Youtubing a video of himself watching Ann Althouse watching American Idol. Ladies and gentlemen; place your bets on how close we can get to infinite regress before it’s all over …

Update: “Tim Lambert and his dog respond”:http://scienceblogs.com/deltoid/2007/04/i_join_the_vlogging_craze.php.

The construction of the rightwing parallel universe is going on apace. In the course of an otherwise unremarkable whinge over errors in Wikipedia, Brent Bozell of Townhall.com, invokes the parallel-universe Conservapedia as an authoritative source.

Certainly, if you want info on the baraminological status of kangaroos, you’ll find it in Bozell’s preferred source and not in the liberal-controlled Wikipedia, which characterises the whole business as a pseudoscientific theory.

All of this, and the continuing sales of the Left Behind series, lead me to wonder if this construction effort will actually be successful. Maybe with sufficient will, the wished-for universe will be brought into existence, and the entire Bush support base raptured into it.

In anticipation, I’ll say farewell and good luck. Just don’t expect me to feed the cat.

Late last year, I had <a href=”http://chronicle.com/free/v53/i16/16a00801.htm”>lunch with David Horowitz</a> on the <i>Chronicle of Higher Education</i>’s dime, and this world-historical event was noted on <a href=”https://crookedtimber.org/2006/12/05/horowitz-v-berube/”>this very blog</a>. Alas, not everyone understood what I was trying to do in that little encounter. Moreover, those who did understand my approach, including various CTers, disagreed as to whether I did the right thing. <a href=”https://crookedtimber.org/2006/12/05/horowitz-v-berube/#comment-181414″>Harry</a> thought I pretty much blew it, whereas <a href=”https://crookedtimber.org/2006/12/05/horowitz-v-berube/#comment-181433″>Henry</a> thought I took exactly the right tack. Which is fine, really, because as you’ve already gathered, I seem thoroughly incapable of winning universal assent to stuff I say. I’m tempted to blame this on <i>the very structure of language itself</i>, but much of the time it’s my fault; my tactics misfire, I misgauge the occasion. And sometimes people just disagree with me.

But here’s what I was thinking at the time: OK, I’ve agreed to meet David Horowitz. In this context — the <i>Chronicle</i>, as opposed to <i>Hannity & Colmes</i> — this grants Horowitz, and his complaints about academe, a certain legitimacy. My job, therefore, is to contest that legitimacy, and to model a way of dealing with Horowitz that does not give him what he wants: namely, (1) important concessions or (2) outrage. He feeds on (2), of course, and uses it to power the David Horowitz Freedom Center and Massive Persecution Complex he runs out of Los Angeles; and most of the time, we give it to him by the truckload. Liberal and left academics need to try (3), mockery and dismissal, and thereby demonstrate, as I put it <a href=”http://www.michaelberube.com/index.php/weblog/its_just_lunch/”>on my blog</a>, that when someone tries to blame tuition increases on Cornel West’s speaking fees, that person needs to be ridiculed and given a double minor for unsportsmanlike bullshit.

[click to continue…]

I’m in very irritable humour and an occasional annoyance has just breached my tolerance threshold. Reading a friend’s copy of last weekend’s Sunday Independent (Of course I’d never buy the worthless gossip rag myself. I just like reading it.) I counted THREE instances of the term ‘passing on’ to describe death. It’s clear from the articles that the journalists are paraphrasing the words of interviewees who would probably be mortified to hear their alcoholic, wife-beating father had simply ‘passed on’ after several years of poisonous decline.

The Sindo is an Irish newspaper, and Irish people do not use the euphemism ‘passing on’ for ‘dying’. The preference in speech has generally been for the more brutal ‘he/she died’. The passing off of ‘passing on’ as the polite way to describe death is starting to creep in to written language. Not that the Sindo is any model of the written language; it’s a flag of convenience for some decent and mostly average clique of writers to pen gossip pieces about their buddies.

Now, I understand that Americans prefer to say someone passed on than to say ‘they died’. Just as they prefer to say someone went to ‘the rest room’ than to the toilet. I expect that in a multicultural society that has nonetheless a quite puritanical aversion to the acknowledgement of bodily functions, a certain amount of stylised nicety is needed for everyone to get along and not constantly embarrass or offend each other. But the use of this term in Ireland is a purely aspirational adoption of others’ sensitivities. In a country where funeral-going is a national pastime, there’s nothing refined about dancing around death.

Not to mention that ‘passing on’ implies a belief in some sort of after-life, which seems a bit presumptious seeing as for many being dead means simply ceasing to exist.

When Rip awoke from his 20-year sleep, he had a beard a foot long, and had missed out on some big political events. I’ve been paying attention to politics for the past 30 years or more, but events in the world of shaving have mostly passed me by. I was aware that it was no longer possible, as it once was, to get a shave and a haircut for two bits, but I was surprised to discover that you can no longer get a shave at all, at least, not at a barbershop – perhaps a long-delayed reaction to The Man from Ironbark.

Instead, having had my hair trimmed and my beard clipped down to Number 0 (as shown here), I was left to rely on my own devices to remove the stubble. Of course, I had no such devices, but I thought that the relevant technology would be fairly much as I remembered it. On the contrary, shaving now appears to require five blades and a power supply. Actually, I did read about this in one of Maria’s posts a while back, but of course skipped over it as being of no relevance to me.

I’m slightly bemused by it, but I’m the ideal target market for this kind of thing, since the only memories of shaving that have survived three decades are the painful ones. So, I’m now on the bleeding edge of technology, literally, but hopefully not bleeding as much as I would be if I stuck with the old gear.

On a more serious note, my appeal for the Leukemia Foundation raised over $A6000, more than any of the charitable appeals I’ve run in the past. Sincere thanks to CTers who contributed (I’ve tried to email people where I had an address, but inevitably missed some).

“The problem with espousing hatred of gay people and darkly suggesting they “shouldn’t exist”? It creates problems for homophobes.”

Full explication/evisceration at Julian Sanchez’ “place”:http://juliansanchez.com/notes/archives/2007/02/whys_he_gotta_go_making_life_h.php.

So this is a mild and modern dilemma. I have received from two sources an email notification urging me to take part, at 19:55 my time tomorrow, in a “mobilization of Citizens Against Global Warming!“.

All I have to do to be part of a this manifestation of people power is to turn off my lights and electrical appliances for five minutes. I’m as worried about climate change global warming (thanks, Steven Poole) as the next person. And this is probably a nice little gesture. So why do I feel so grumpy about it?

Well, first of all, it’s obviously useless as a way to save energy. Even more so than getting every German to stop using the standby on their tellies and ‘save enough energy’ to close down a nuclear power station. But that’s fine. I get it. We all understand that mass political acts are expressive rather than instrumental. So a little well-intentioned onanism to make an entirely rhetorical point is still in order.

And the organisers are quite up front about that:

“This is not just about saving 5 minutes worth of electricity; this is about getting the attention of the media, politicians, and ourselves.”

The mass action is tied in to the anticipated publication of a UN report on global climate. A visit to the UNEP website this morning already shows a sufficiently frightening report about glaciers melting. So as long as UNEP actually publishes its report on the right day, the whole thing could be the media event its organisers dream of.

“If we all participate, this action can have real media and political weight.”

Except. Who’s to know if I participate or not? I mean, practically. At 19:55 tomorrow night, I’ll be in the office, no surprises there. I’ll be alone, and most likely the only person on my floor. And I’ll be preparing for a conference call at 21:00, and meantime on the phone to people in different time zones. (And no, I will not tell them I’m sitting in the dark. I have some pride.) So there will be no raised consciousness here. I won’t be sitting around with my flatmate, discussing energy policy.

Can we use battery operated devices? Or should I turn off my mobile phone? What about my laptop – can’t I just put it to sleep because it’s a 2 year old Dell that takes 11 minutes to boot. Can I use a normal phone? After all, it doesn’t get its power from the same mains.

Many, many questions. Much resistance, very little of it related to this mass action. Perhaps I’m too prideful to participate wholeheartedly in making up the numbers. Mostly I’m just annoyed because I’ll still be in work.

Update Well, it looks as if the manifestation resulted in the lights of monuments like the Eiffel Tower and other European monuments being turned off – a very effective symbolic act.