Just broke the Water Pitcher

So, you’re a controller for a municipal trolley system with a perfect safety record. You’ve just been alerted that one of your tracks, serving a community of 5000 people has suffered unexpected damage which could cause a trolley car accident involving fatalities among philosophers. You have no budget allowance for this, so the only way of fixing the line is to abandon planned maintenance of another line, serving 1000 people, which would then have to be closed until more funds become available. Presumably, in these circumstances, most people will decide to fix the more important line.

Now, we change the situation. You no longer control the funds for the other line, which are within the jurisdiction of your colleague the Fat Controller, so named for obvious reasons. If you draw management attention to his obesity problem, HR will force him to take leave until he can get his weight within acceptable limits. You will then be given temporary control over his line and the associated budget, which you can divert to fixing the more important line.

What should you do?

[click to continue…]

Another follow-up on the philosophy styles and aggression issue, raised initially by Chris. I meant my first post to be a response, narrowly, not to Chris’ post but to the suggestion that sort of ate the comment thread: trolley problems are symptomatic of philosophers’ taste for intellectual bloodsport. (Not that tying people to tracks and running them over is sporting, mind you.) I didn’t mean to offer up the whimsical innocence of trolley tragedy as proof that philosophers don’t, otherwise, suffer from the sorts of problems that Jonathan Wolff alleges. But I actually do disagree, substantially, with the Wolff piece. Let me try to say how. [click to continue…]

You wouldn’t normally see those three adjectives in a line like that. And the noun they modify is an unusual one as well.

I suppose it’s fair to object that ‘exalted’ isn’t functioning as an adjective in this context. Fair enough.

I knew folks on the right were going to be upset about the Iran deal, but isn’t this a bit much? The Corner has gone Everyday-is-like-Munich full neocon.

OK, maybe there’s no point in even bothering, but just look at this post, “Munich II”, by James Jay Carafano (vice president of foreign- and defense-policy studies at the Heritage Foundation.) He is banging on about how ‘realism’, presumably in the I-R sense, opposes this deal. But, even as he’s trying to make the case, he can’t help inadvertently making the case that the other side has got the better realist case. [click to continue…]

I found comments to my Peter Singer thread – that’s what my utilitarianism thread turned out to be! – quite interesting. I’ve read a few of Singer’s books. I like The Expanding Circle, in particular. I’ve never paid much attention to the drama of his philosophical celebrity, so the thread educated me about that. What was most striking was this NY Times piece a couple commenters linked to, I think intending it as evidence of his bad character. But I had more or less the opposite reaction. I don’t know the man, obviously. I don’t stake any claim to insights into his psychology (beyond those democratically available to any other reader of the linked piece, and a few of his books) but he struck me as bend-over-backwards and turn-the-other-cheek, rhetorically. He’s apparently unfailingly polite to people who call him a moral monster, unspeakably evil, sending them books and thank-you notes and all. (And then this.) Maybe he’s just an Asperger’s case, and just doesn’t process insults as insulting. But he doesn’t seem like that, to me. That doesn’t really fit with his patience and solicitude for the likes of Harriet McBryde Johnson. I can, of course, see that the whole ‘but, captain, I’m just being rational’ Spock schtick only sets people’s inner McCoy off worse. And if you think he’s a Nazi on the merits – well, we know from the movies that the polite and polished ones are the worst ones. But seriously. What’s the guy supposed to do, given the case he wants to make? Yell at his critics? Whine that they are being mean to him? That would be a disaster. So it’s this elaborate, placid front of unfailingly polite rationality or nothing. This is not to say that he’s some great hero for keeping his cool when people insult him. But, to me, he came off not as an evil A.I. but just as someone trying to step his way through an emotional minefield, because he’s decided he really wanted what was on the other side. [click to continue…]

I’m reading David Frum, How We Got Here: The 70’s, the Decade That Brought You Modern Life – For Better Or Worse.

Why am I reading it? Oh, you know me.

But consider this bit (Corey Robin, I expect you to be particularly interested): [click to continue…]

Once upon a time, I was going to write an article with that title. Finished a draft and everything. About Zizek (duh!)

But I’ll just leave that as an exercise to the interested reader. (It’s not a hard assignment, honestly.)

Have you read The Napoleon of Notting Hill, by G. K. Chesterton? I just reread it. It’s wonderful, fabulous! It’s so utterly solipsistic, with its two half-heroes completing each other – the jester king with the fairy name, Auberon Quin; and the dead serious Adam Wayne. There is only one woman in the whole book. And it has scores of characters before we’re done. She fits, with room to spare, in a nutshell-sized morality tale:

“In a hollow of the grey-green hills of rainy Ireland, lived an old, old woman, whose uncle was always Cambridge at the Boat Race. But in her grey-green hollows, she knew nothing of this: she didn’t know that there was a Boat Race. Also she did not know that she had an uncle. She had heard of nobody at all, except of George the First, of whom she had heard (I know not why), and in whose historical memory she put her simple trust. And by and by in God’s good time, it was discovered that this uncle of hers was not really her uncle, and they came and told her so. She smiled through her tears, and said only, ‘Virtue is its own reward.'”

I call that spectacular failure of the Bechdel Test – I do. Still, it’s nice to think that about virtue.

I don’t want to give away the ending – it turns out there’s a water-tower! – but I thought about the ending during the shutdown fight. Do you think Ted Cruz is sort of like Adam Wayne? Only the ending turned out differently? Or is he like Auberon Quin? Or is half of his brain one, and half of his brain the other?

Chesterton’s characters are so wonderfully likeable, and Republicans like Ted Cruz are so loathsome, not to put too fine a point on it. It isn’t because no one gets hurt, because Chesterton is fiction; or that no one gets hurt in the fiction – they do! It’s that Chesterton makes sure that the dangerous, ‘Every Day Is Like Thursday’, signature Chesterton protagonist delusionalism is utterly innocent and childlike at the root, even if the branches whack other folks, who are almost as innocent. Imagine thinking Cruz was fundamentally good-hearted, boy howdy. Wouldn’t that be a sight to tell your grand-kids you saw?

This post is sort of a sequel.

Timothy Egan is “at it”:http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/18/opinion/egan-the-last-king-of-ireland.html?hp “again”:https://crookedtimber.org/2009/04/02/catechism-of-cliches-irish-economic-collapse-edition/ in the New York Times

Oscar Wilde still lounges, louche-like … a river crossed by bridges named for playwrights and patriots … the clamorous clans of Erin … a bittersweet anniversary. Fifty years ago the last king of Ireland, President John Fitzgerald Kennedy, came to the land of his great-grandfather Patrick. … delighted a lyrical people with his wit and his one-liners … charmed old ladies, nuns and schoolgirls …750 years of British occupation enforced by hangman’s noose and cannon. … poor island of farmers, shopkeepers and laborers … Hipsters from Google and Facebook flooded pubs in Dublin’s Temple Bar area and danced to traditional music as mournful as it was infectious. … crucifixes are gone from many homes … What remains, in homes and shops and pubs, are pictures of President Kennedy. … But looking back is always productive. Memory is embedded in every square foot of Irish sod.

It’s as if Thomas Friedman had himself decided to “follow the leapin’ leprechaun”:http://www.nytimes.com/2005/07/01/opinion/01friedman.html, hopping swiftly from one cliche to another. Only worse. I don’t know why it is that NYT editors’ critical faculties desert them every time they see a piece singing of the sweetness and the sorrows of the Auld Sod. But I do wish that they’d stop it.

So, during our latest enjoyable discussion fracas mêlée, John alluded to the fact that what I have is something more like a reading illness than a love of literature per se. I usually either walked to school or took the (very crowded) bus when I lived in New York. So I never developed the special skill, honed to perfection by my uncle, of folding the New York Times first, in half upper to lower; then, in halves again but along the central line; finally, in half again along the midline, and reading 1/8 of a page at a time. This sounds easy. But you really need to picture my uncle, a partner at Cadwalader, Wickersham & Taft, taking the subway to work down on Wall Street from the upper East side, whence he was bound to get a seat–I must note he was being rather frugal (which will seem to be belied by what follows, but having a smaller number of really well-made suits is cheaper in the long run). There he is: sitting, in a beautiful bespoke suit (I thought he would die when during a brief fever of dot.com bubbliness the firm introduced “casual Fridays,” which policy was happily discarded in 2000, as I assured him it would be), and horn-rimmed glasses, on the express, hemmed in by people, none of whom he is inconveniencing in any way by his NYT reading, because of his special, lifetime-New-Yorker ability to pick up each section, shake it into sudden crisp folds against its own grain, and repeat, as needed, until all is read and the crossword finished by 7:45 a.m. when he gets to work. (As I say, it sounds easy, but think of what happens when you must get from an article folded into the top left 1/8 of one page into the middle 1/8 of the lower part of the next page, and you may not extend it beyond your knees or your elbows beyond your shoulders.) He is a very meticulous and wonderful person, my uncle.
[click to continue…]

Erick Erickson:

Democrats keep talking about our refusal to compromise. They don’t realize our compromise is defunding Obamacare. We actually want to repeal it.

I guess the next stage is to seek compromise on what ‘compromise’ means. Conservatives want ‘compromise’ to mean: we get almost everything. You get nothing. Erickson’s planning to threaten the dictionary people, maybe? (‘Dat’s a nice language you got ‘der. Be a shame if somethin’ wuz teh happin to it.’)

A kidnapper who asks for $1 million or he shoots the kid is seeking compromise, so long as he would prefer $10 million?

UPDATE: Here’s another use of the new word from Grover Norquist:

The administration asking us to raise taxes is not an offer; that’s not a compromise. That’s just losing. I’m in favor of compromise. When we did the $2.5 trillion spending restraint in the BCA, we wanted $6 trillion. I considered myself very compromised. Overly reasonable.

‘Compromise’ means conservatives getting a lot for nothing, just not absolutely everything you might ever want, for nothing. But bottom line: if you have to give to get, that’s just losing, not compromise.

Oh, Belle. Belle, Belle, Belle. First, you told us some authors were such a bunch of sexist dillweeds that you didn’t really like their novels all that much. In a throwaway sentence! A sentence that made it clear that you in fact didn’t read such books at all, but merely checked the covers for sexist content and then threw the books away in the trash. In. The. Trash. And then John said you could read fast. Biased much LOL! Yeah, well, so fast that you stopped reading books completely after you reached a sexist sentence! Because that’s manifestly what ‘reading fast’ means. Yes, and then you had an actual man testify again on your behalf that you finished books even if you didn’t super-love them. Like–probably the only chick in the world, seriously! How was any of us to know that “reads books fast” means “reads books”? What is this, some kind of crazy advanced logic class, or a blog?

So then you explained at length, that you were only talking about this one group of male authors who wrote more or less from the ’50s on, and that you didn’t like their novels because you thought they weren’t good novels. When since is that a reason not to like a novel, I would like to know, Missy? Any anyway, Belle, your problem is that you’re reading the wrong thing. Nobody cares about these books anymore! Or, as a commenter suggested: “No. It seems your definition of ‘important’ is skewing your choice of reading, so not surprising that your results are skewed. I’d suggest that you drop everything else for a while until you’ve finished reading all of Pratchett and Banks.” [Here I must note that for whatever odd reason this rubbed me the wrong way. I have already read all of Pratchett and Banks (except maybe one Tiffany Aching one?). The knowledge that there will be no new Iain M. Banks novels dismays me. He’s one of my all-time favorite writers full-stop. WHY AFTER 500 COMMENTS WOULD SOMEONE NOT ASK IF I HAD READ THEM ALL FIRST BECAUSE YOU KNOW, I VERY WELL MIGHT HAVE? Unnamed commenter: I don’t hate on you; it was almost bad luck that you…naw, you still shouldn’t have been so patronizing. But, like, talk to me, dude, what were you thinking?]

Well, dear readers, someone does care about these authors. Someone cares very, very much, and that man is University of Toronto Professor David Gilmour. In a recent interview with Random House Canada’s Emily Keeler, he explained his teaching philosophy:

I’m not interested in teaching books by women. Virginia Woolf is the only writer that interests me as a woman writer, so I do teach one of her short stories. But once again, when I was given this job I said I would only teach the people that I truly, truly love. Unfortunately, none of those happen to be Chinese, or women. Except for Virginia Woolf. And when I tried to teach Virginia Woolf, she’s too sophisticated, even for a third-year class. Usually at the beginning of the semester a hand shoots up and someone asks why there aren’t any women writers in the course. I say I don’t love women writers enough to teach them, if you want women writers go down the hall. What I teach is guys. Serious heterosexual guys. F. Scott Fitzgerald, Chekhov, Tolstoy. Real guy-guys. Henry Miller. Philip Roth….
[click to continue…]

I don’t want to step on my husband’s post, so I am merely supplementing it, because I think there is something that deserves enough excerpts to warrant a post rather than a comment. To wit, this article from The Toast, “You Wouldn’t Like Jonathan Franzen When He’s Angry.” I am turning off comments to this post so we can talk in the thread below.

Jonathan Franzen is the angriest novelist in the world. He is the novelist who is so angry he cannot move. He cannot eat. He cannot sleep. He can just barely growl. Bound so tightly with tension and anger, he approaches the state of rigor mortis.

He is angry because Salman Rushdie uses Twitter, and nowadays people can buy books on the Internet, and the Home Depot, and he had to go to Germany one time, and also some women exist who have not had sex with him….

Think of all the women who have never slept with Jonathan Franzen. His anger must grow by the day. Soon it will envelop the world, and we will be forced to bow down in chains before it, and create ziggurats out of human corpses as terrible tribute. Some of these women who Failed To F#ck Jonathan Franzen might now be on Twitter, which is wrong because of a German essayist who is now dead.

To quote one of the most internetty minds of our generation, “heh, indeed.” Now I will speak my part, and then fall silent, except for the part about where we get into a huge argument in comments because I think pretty much all the Important Male Novelists of the mid to late 20th-century are such sexist dillweeds that it is actually impossible to enjoy the books. For me. Except William S. Burroughs, and that is because he does not want to sex chicks up. Not even a little bit. He wants us to be able to make clones, and then just go live on another planet with only men and boys and million-year-old crab creatures made of radioactive cadmium and then have gay sex there. It is astringently refreshing to have a novelist not care about having sex with you at all. It’s the best! Goodbye, poorly drawn female characters who exist as trophies for when the protagonists level up after a boss battle with Freudian analysis!

Now, dudes, part of shared bank accounts and having children and shit like that is that you can coordinate on stuff and divide responsibilities sensibly. Am I going to sit down and read about the Fourfold Root? No, I will ask my husband, “hey peaches, what’s this with the Schopenhauer here, am I giving a f*@k or what?” Then he can answer on account of having written a dissertation about it. And he arranges for everyone to go to the dentist, and parent-teacher conferences, and guy stuff like that which I as a mother, am not really into. Similarly, as John is a busy person who doesn’t have time to read novels which are both extremely long and quite bad, I can read them on our joint behalf. No, I can also read long good books on our behalf, so I can tell John crucial stuff about Proust like when the last volume opens and it seems as if all the characters have come in fancy dress but then… I read very quickly, stupidly quickly, a skill I primarily use to read the equivalent of a 500 page paperback, but made of internet bullshit, every day (I’ve checked). The Corrections, Jesus. It didn’t even have to be bad! There were many aspects of it that were very well observed and memorable. It needed an editor. It needed a nano-particle of self-awareness that was doing something other than comparing the distance of Franzen’s masturbatory ejecta to that of Philip Roth. Something that might, eventually, if nurtured in a caring bosom, maybe some kind of DH Lawrence glorying sheaf of wheat in the firelight thing, become humility. Just for like a second! It needed negative 4089 C of sexism to return to conditions amenable to reading rather than being the heart of a the giant blue-white star which is poised, even now, to go supernova in the center of the swirling storm of Eta Carinae. Let us never speak of Jonathan Franzen again.

We are bookish intellectuals here! Why then should we lack for a thread in which people can complain about Jonathan Franzen’s essay? I can sort of sympathize with Franzen’s evident desire to hit a trollier-than-thou Krausian high note. Suddenly Here Comes Everybody – and they all want be just as individual and superior as I do, the bastards.

In his defense, Franzen does seem to be aware that he looks like Calvin, complaining about the results of using the Duplicator Machine.

When Coase died I thought about penning, in his honor, a prolegomenon to a possible sequel to his Theory of the Firm. I would propose a theory of the Fall of the Book, organized around an account of precipitously falling transaction costs, sentence by sentence. Why is it ever better for an individual sentence to incorporate with hundreds or thousands of others? Why isn’t all intellectual life transacted on Twitter? (I’m busy today, so maybe you could write this theory, piecemeal, in comments, so I don’t have to.)

What happens to writing when every sentence can be – hence is under peer pressure to be – its own marketing department?

I do get why Franzen feels that he, as the serious author of big, serious books, is heroically trying to hold the line. (Full disclosure: I have never read The Corrections. I don’t have the time.) But the irony is that his Guardian essay isn’t complaining about anything for which there aren’t already perfectly good, complaining memes on Know Your Meme. Still, as Kraus remarks. “Many share my views with me. But I don’t share them with them.”

Or tea, as the case may be.

Really, it couldn’t be happening to a nicer guy. Also, this.

‘The revolution will eat its children’. But it’s interesting to think why autosarcophagarchy – that is, rule by self-cannibals – should be such a typical form of revolutionary decline. (Do you like my new word? I think I’ll teach it to my daughter.)

There’s shouldn’t be a problem in principle with being an idealist – i.e. having some vision of what an ideal state would be like that is radically at odds with actually existing reality. Whether it be True Communism or True Conservatism or what have you. Practicing revolutionaries should be able to talk the 1st best talk while walking the 2nd best walk. But there is, I suppose, something inherently maddening about that position, both to the one who assumes it and for spectators. The distance between real and ideal is so great that the practical negotiation of it can never look like an expression of what you have been talking about it, hence can’t look like prudent trimming. So it can’t help looking like rank hypocrisy to enemies and vile betrayal to friends.

This is accentuated by the rhetoric of naturalness that goes with utopianism. ‘Man is born free but everywhere he is in chains.’ Or in Obamacare, as the case may be. If the desirable state of affairs is so natural, and the actual state of affairs so horrible, it really seems the rickety structure ought to fall over if you push it. So therefore you ought to do so.

Of course, the case is a bit more complicated when the Robespierres in question were only ever recreational Robespierres to begin with. Napoleons of Notting Hill, not Napoleons. But the dynamic is much the same. (But you are bored with me quoting G. K. Chesterton, so I’ll cut it out.)