Via Arms & Influence, a passage from that Thomas Ricks book [amazon] everyone has been reading (my copy isn’t here yet): [click to continue…]
From the category archives:
Just broke the Water Pitcher
… The Rolling Stones weren’t original. Bach wasn’t original. Einstein wasn’t original. Show me someone who is original, creative, self-expressive, and I’ll show you someone who is boring.
Originality, creativity and self-expression dumb people down. Platonism dumbs people up. Platonism is the biggest dumbing-up exercise in the history of civilisation.
Think in terms of the Platonic Realm. Say you are painting a picture. The picture exists in the Platonic Realm. It is a perfect picture, and it is beautiful. Your job is to depict it as best you can. For you to do this demands that you be a technician – you must know how to use paints, know about perspective, and so on.
It demands that you paint selflessly. It demands that you paint objectively. Originality doesn’t come into it. The picture was there before you existed.
I don’t care if Platonism is metaphysical moonshine. The point is that all human achievement revolves around Platonism …
I’m late to the party, but that doesn’t mean I haven’t enjoyed it. Chris "Day by Day" Muir has been mocked round the blogs on account of an incandescently ignorant pair of strips he perpetrated about ‘Kantian nihilism’. Muir made it worse with an egregious, homophobic follow-up. (Honestly, you’d think someone who had just been so roundly spanked could come up with a better a posteriori proof joke.) Then, bless him, he tried to figure out some way to mock Hilzoy at Obsidian Wings. I think: "Way to miss the entire point, cretin," was his most devastating jab. People started to feel a bit sorry for him.
Ouch. This is getting to be like watching a cat toying with a still-living mouse. – Gromit
No, it’s like watching a still-living mouse pretend to be a cat and kill itself. – Hilzoy
Back to ‘Kantian nihilism’. A few commenters – starting at Yglesias’ site, I think – have scrupulously noted that ‘nihilism’ was a charge first lodged against Kant by Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi. There’s quite an extensive entry on the man at the Stanford Encyclopedia. I happen to have just read Andrew Bowie, From Romanticism to Critical Theory [amazon]. I’ll quote a few bits about Jacobi, because who doesn’t love a bit of esoteric piquancy with their transcendent absurdity?
[click to continue…]
Today’s NYT runs an Associated Press story headed Farmers Use Bull Semen to Inseminate Cows, which reports, as news, the fact that dairy farmers use artificial insemination on a large scale.
Next they’ll be telling us that milkmaids face unemployment due to the introduction of milking machines.
Since I’ve given the setup, feel free to lower the tone in comments.
Jim Johnson “summarizes the argument”:http://politicstheoryphotography.blogspot.com/2006/07/architecture-of-authority.html of one of his more provocative papers on the way to making some points about photography, architecture and Guantanamo.
In my dialect of English, shared living arrangements (normally non-familial) can be described by three terms.
A housemate (or flatmate) is someone who shares your house (normally not your room, but this is open)
A roommate is someone who shares your room (normally not your bed, but see above)
A bedmate is self-explanatory.
In US English, “roommate” seems to cover all three, but US English speakers seem able to infer which is intended from the context. Can anyone help me with a usage guide?
The first episode of the new series of Doctor Who was screened in Australia last night, and the preview of coming episode showed our old friends the Cybermen. As my son observed, they’re the least satisfactory of the Doctor’s enemies because they are just second-rate Daleks. Today, I opened my copy of the London Review of Books, to find the exact same observation from Jenny Turner, reviewing Kim Newman who objects to the cliched, but apparently universally true, observation, that children watched the series from ‘behind the sofa‘. Support for Rupert Sheldrake, or just evidence that the series reliably produces the same responses in lots of viewers?
Also in my mailbox, after a return from travel was an issue of the Scientific American with the front page headling Do Stem Cells Cause Cancer ? (answer, apparently, yes). My immediate thought was to wonder how long this will take to turn up as a talking point in the Republican alternate universe.
I’ve been listening a lot to Si Schroeder’s _Coping Mechanisms_ over the last couple of weeks, and wanted to recommend it, although I can’t really describe it very well. My Bloody Valentine is the closest comparison, but it’s still not very close. There’s a free MP3 “here”:http://www.trustmeimathief.com/gallery/sounds/schroedersound/02%20Si%20Schroeder%20-%20Lavendermist.mp3, and you can buy the album as a CD, MP3s, Ogg Vorbis or whatever you like “here”:http://www.trustmeimathief.com/. Full disclosure: I used to know Simon in Dublin, but I haven’t seen him in over six years.
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’.’
As a young girl I was an avid reader of Stephen Potter, especially the peerless Lifemanship. I also re-read Thackeray’s Book of Snobs many times, for the not particularly compelling reason that it was the only interesting book in my brother’s room at my grandmother’s house. (I say “not particularly compelling” in spite of the manifest excellence of the book, which is hilarious, but rather because we had a library on the second floor.) These two books did much to make me the cynical, frivolous person I am today. The thing is, I was convinced, at an early stage, that there really was a Lifesmanship organization at 681 Station Road, Yeovil, and it was a hazy dream of mine that I might travel to England and join at some time in the future. By the time I was 10 I think I was starting to suspect this was never to be (and, in my defense, I never imagined that I might actually meet, say Odoreida.) But I have always wondered, is there supposed to be something particularly funny about Yeovil? I gather that it’s a real place and everything. Is it a really boring place? A thrilling town full of laffs and hilarity? What?
!http://www.utsc.utoronto.ca/~farrell/octopus.jpg!
All I can say is wow. “David Brooks”:http://select.nytimes.com/2006/06/25/opinion/25brooks.html?hp channels “Jeff Minter”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revenge_of_the_Mutant_Camels in the _New York Times_ today.
bq. The Keyboard Kingpin, aka Markos Moulitsas Zuniga, sits at his computer, fires up his Web site, Daily Kos, and commands his followers, who come across like squadrons of rabid lambs, to unleash their venom on those who stand in the way.
Squadrons of rabid, venom-spitting command-lambs. As I said. Wow.
(thanks to bad jim for alerting me to this in “comments”:https://crookedtimber.org/2006/06/24/blogofascism/#comment-160958).
According to the _New Republic_, the threat to the Republic isn’t Islamofascism any more, it’s “blogofascism”:http://www.tnr.com/blog/culture?pid=22271. Lee Siegel explains:
THE ORIGINS OF BLOGOFASCISM
At the end of my post yesterday, I wrote, “The blogosphere’s fanaticism is, in many ways, the triumph of a lack of focus.” … All these abusive attempts to autocratically or dictatorially control criticism came about because I said that the blogosphere had the quality of fascism, which my dictionary defines as “any tendency toward or actual exercise of severe autocratic or dictatorial control.” … insults, personal attacks, and even threats. This truly is the stuff of thuggery and fascism. … Two other traits of fascism are its hatred of the processes of politics, and the knockabout origins of its adherents. Communism was hatched by elites. Fascism was born along the drifting paths of rootless men, often ex-soldiers who had fought in the First World War and been demobilized. They turned European politics into a madhouse of deracinated ambition. … In a 2004 article in The San Francisco Chronicle, Markos Moulitsas Zuniga told a reporter …
bq. “I believe in government. I was in El Salvador in the late ’70s during the civil war and I saw government as a life-and-death situation,” he said. “There was no one to root for. The government was a corrupt plutocracy and the rebels were Maoists. The concept of government is important.” …He also remembers watching footage of the Solidarity movement in Poland. He was 9, and he asked his father what that was all about. His father, a furniture salesman, said, “It’s just politics.” The future blogger said, “Tell me all about it.”
So he loves government, but hates politics. There’s something chilling about that.
This was silly enough when it was just a back-and-forth of insults and recriminations. But Siegel actually seems, unless I’m misreading him completely, to be advancing a _serious thesis_ about the linkages between leftwing bloggers and fascism. That the netroots crowd are the equivalent of the deracinated young men of the Weimar Republic (note, by the way, the rather unpleasant snobbery of the “knockabout origins” crack), and that Kos has “chilling” autocratic tendencies. I really don’t know what to say in response to this. It’s almost magnificent in its crackpottery. The _New Republic_ used to be a very good magazine back in the day – one of the “little magazines” that really brought literature and politics together. It hasn’t been that for a very long time now, but I still feel a little sad every time I’m reminded of what it’s become.
When I was first told by my wife about this story, I expected it would turn out to be an Internet factoid, probably much-circulated, melding the old stories of paintings hung upside down, works painted by ducks and hailed as masterpieces, and so on. But the Independent’s account gives chapter and verse. The Royal Academy, having received a sculpture by one David Hensel with the plinth packed separately, decided to reject the sculpture and exhibit the plinth.
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:
With today (6/6/6) bearing the number of the beast, my thoughts went back to the most recent scary date 1/1/00 when we were promised TEOTWAWKI thanks to the famous Y2K bug.
Oddly enough, although we seem to be overwhelmed with alleged sceptics on other topics, only a handful of people challenged the desirability of spending hundreds of billions of dollars to fix a problem which was not, on the face of it, any more serious than dozens of other bugs in computer systems. Admittedly not all the money was wasted, since lots of new computers were bought. But a lot of valuable equipment was prematurely scrapped and a vast amount of effort was devoted to compliance, when a far cheaper “fix on failure” approach would have sufficed for all but the most mission-critical of systems.
As far as I know, there was no proper peer-reviewed assessment of the seriousness of the problems published in the computer science literature. Most of the running was made by consultants with an axe to grind, and their scaremongering was endorsed by committees where no-one had any incentive to point out the nudity of the emperor.
Why was there so little scepticism on this issue? An obvious explanation is that no powerful interests were threatened and some, such as consultants and computer companies, stood to gain. I don’t think this is the whole story, and I tried to analyse the process here, but there’s no doubt that a reallocation of scepticism could have done us a lot of good here.