by John Holbo on August 26, 2006
Ann Coulter’s new book Godless: The Church of Liberalism is a rollicking read very tightly reasoned and hard to argue with. After all, the progressive mind regards it as backward and primitive to let religion determine every aspect of your life, but takes it as advanced and enlightened to have the state determine every aspect of your life. Lest you doubt the left’s pieties are now a religion, try this experiment: go up to an environmental activist and say “Hey, how about that ozone hole closing up?” or “Wow! The global warming peaked in 1998 and it’s been getting cooler for almost a decade. Isn’t that great?” and then look at the faces. As with all millenarian doomsday cults, good news is a bummer.
Worst Mark Steyn column ever. This is a job for … distributed mockery. Take it away!
by John Holbo on August 19, 2006
Tonight I got good results reading Tony Cliff’s fairy tale, “Old Oak Trees”, to the 5-year old. It’s from the new Flight 3 [amazon]. You can see a preview page here. And from there you can get to the flight blog, an excellent source for boingboing-ish things. In this case, it led me to Tony Cliff’s demo reel for season 1 of Pucca. Most peculiar. It’s Korean. More I really cannot say.
by John Holbo on July 21, 2006
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…]
by Henry Farrell on July 17, 2006
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.
[click to continue…]
by Henry Farrell on June 2, 2006
Siva Vaidhyanathan “takes inspiration”:http://www.nyu.edu/classes/siva/archives/003175.html from the recent “NAFTHE decision”:http://education.guardian.co.uk/higher/worldwide/story/0,,1785634,00.html to boycott Israeli academics who don’t disassociate themselves from their country’s policies.
bq. Please boycott me. While you are at it, boycott all other American professors. Do not invite us to conferences. Do not publish our work. Do not read our blogs (after this post, of course). We have a lot to answer for. I am an American academic who has not done enough to prevent my government from launching an illegal and counterproductive invasion of a sovereign country. On my watch, my country has also imprisoned thousands of innocent people without charge and without instigating a process for demonstrating their harmlessness. It has engaged in massive surveillance of communication both overseas and domestic without regard for domestic laws or the Fourth Amendment of the Constitution. Many of my fellow American academics have failed to prevent our government from doing these and many other bad things. So we deserve to be punished. Clearly, we are craven collaborators.
This is a far better response to the silliness of the motion than Larry Summer’s over-the-top claim that the boycott was “motivated by anti-Semitism”:http://news.ft.com/cms/s/702d69f2-f10b-11da-9338-0000779e2340.html, which grants the authors of the motion a level of world historical significance than they sorely lack. Their self-importance smacks less of Julius Streicher than the “Skibbereen Eagle”:http://www.highbeam.com/doc/1G1:142795416/Now+the+bad+news+-+its+yet+another+tsar~R~(Column).html?refid=SEO. Steven Poole’s “post”:http://unspeak.net/C226827506/E20060531171014/index.html on the sorry affair is also worth reading.
Update: as this is degenerating into the usual pro/anti Israel fight, I’m not allowing any further comments.
by John Holbo on May 26, 2006
Right. Now take the survey under the fold. But only if your intuitions are untainted by first viewing the image at J&B. (We want to be scientistic about this.)
[click to continue…]
by John Holbo on May 5, 2006
by John Holbo on April 17, 2006
Atrios used to have those fine bits of poetry, threadbare from overuse. "He draweth out the thread of his verbosity finer than the staple of his argument," etc. Now he just says ‘yeah, yeah, another stupid open thread.’ What with timezones, that’s all I ever see at the top of the page when I visit. Let’s see if memory and google can do better.
[click to continue…]
by Henry Farrell on April 3, 2006
via “Steven Berlin Johnson”:http://www.stevenberlinjohnson.com/2006/03/dan_hill_has_a_.html, Dan Hill has written a “blogpost”:http://www.cityofsound.com/blog/2006/03/why_lost_is_gen.html on the creative (but slightly creepy) ways in which _Lost_ is beginning to invade the real world.
bq. Some have speculated that the show is only being produced a few episodes in advance, as the screenwriters are wrangling the numerous ideas generated in fans’ forums into the script … But the most sophisticated tactic I’ve seen deployed thus far lasted for a few seconds on-screen, and has yet to play out fully online. In series 2, episode 13 (‘The Long Con’), the Hurley character is casually seen reading a tattered manuscript found in one of the suitcases washed up on the beach. He shows the name of the prospective book: Bad Twin by a ‘Gary Troup’, and makes an off-hand complimentary comment on the content. And the scene moves on. However, this book, Bad Twin, “actually exists in Amazon.com”:http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1401302769/102-7191170-2490510?v=glance&n=283155. Scroll down and check the ‘About the author’ section to discover that Lost’s fiction and Amazon’s facts have collided …
Time to get cracking on that essay on Sir Thomas Browne’s _Urn Burial_ methinks.
by Henry Farrell on March 22, 2006
So it looks as though John Micklethwait, currently US editor, is probably going to be the new editor at the _Economist_; the final decision is due to be announced tomorrow. It’s down to a two man race between him and Ed Carr, and not that many people are betting on Carr ( in contrast to a few days ago, but that’s a “different story”:https://crookedtimber.org/2006/03/12/hows-about-them-efficient-prediction-markets/ ). To the surprise of many, Clive Crook didn’t make it to the final two, which is unfortunate in my books – Crook is somewhat conservative for my taste, but also a good journalist who would have made a very decent editor. Ed Carr, from all I’ve heard, would be a fine editor too, but things don’t sound good for him.
I have to say that my first reaction is to wonder whether it’s too late to cancel the recent renewal of my _Economist_ subscription. I expect the _Economist_ to be vehemently pro-market, but by reading certain kinds of stories with a skeptical eye, and by skipping past certain others, you can find a lot of value in its pages. It has a clear ideological bias, but it isn’t usually actively dishonest. But Micklethwait, together with his scrofulous sidekick Adrian Wooldridge, was responsible for _The Right Nation_ which is one of the lazier and more dishonest books on American politics that I’ve had the misfortune of reading in the last few years, and for the _Lexington_ column which has shown a pretty reliable track record as a purveyor of Republican talking points. There are still a lot of very good people working for the magazine – but I worry that it’s about to undergo a quite substantial deterioration in intellectual quality.
Update: It’s Micklethwait as expected.
by Belle Waring on March 22, 2006
1. “Since he is of no use anymore, there is no gain if he lives and no loss if he dies.”
2. “I shall go on keeping score about this until the last phony pacifist has been strangled with the entrails of the last suicide-murderer.”
Easy, right? The less bloodthirsty one is Pol Pot. (As Brother Number One famously mused “Look at me now. Am I a savage person?”) It’s only fair to note here that Christopher Hitchens is not, in fact, a genocidal maniac. Well, not someone who has actually killed anyone, that we know of. It’s also nice to know that Pol Pot has a myspace profile. (His interests include taking control of Kampuchea and social experimentation. Music? DK, obvs.)
by John Holbo on February 23, 2006
A minor hermeneutic dispute has broken out concerning the proper interpretation of my last post. I hope this helps.
See now I’m thinkin’, maybe it means you’re the vicar. And I’m the second half of the show. And Mr. 9 millimeter here, he’s the Plymouth Herald protecting my righteous ass ‘like hell’. Or it could mean you’re ‘like hell’ and I’m the Plymouth Herald and it’s the second half of the show that’s the vicar. Now I’d like that. But that shit ain’t the truth. The truth is you’re ‘like hell’. And I’m the vicar. But I’m tryin’, Ringo. I’m tryin’ real hard to be the second half of the show.
by John Holbo on February 18, 2006
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.
by John Holbo on February 13, 2006
by John Holbo on January 7, 2006
David Moles has found something funny – in an ‘if a lion could speak the language of topology, we would not able to catch him’ vein:
* We place a spherical cage in the desert and enter it. We then perform an inverse operation with respect to the cage. The lion is then inside the cage and we are outside.
* The set theoretic method: We observe that the desert is a separable space. It therefore contains an enumerable dense set of points from which can be extracted a sequence having the lion as the limit. We then approach the lion stealthily along this sequence bearing with us suitable equipment.
* In the usual way construct a curve containing every point in the desert. It has been proven that such a curve can be traversed in arbitrarily short time. Now we traverse the curve, carrying a spear, in a time less than what it takes the lion to move a distance equal to its own length.
* The lion has the homotopy type of a one-dimensional complex and hence he is a K(Pi, 1) space. If Pi is noncommutative then the lion is not a member of the international commutist conspiracy and hence he must be friendly. If Pi is commutative then the lion has the homotopy type of the space of loops on a K(Pi, 2) space. We hire a stunt pilot to loop the loops, thereby hopelessly entangling the lion and rendering him helpless.
Reminds me of an old Steve Martin piece which I find here:
Soup Folding.
First prepare the soup of your choice and pour it into a bowl. Then, take the bowl and quickly turn it upside down on a cookie tray. Lift the bowl ever so gently so that the soup retains the shape of the bowl. Gently is the key word here. Then, with a knife cut the soup down the middle into halves, then quarters, and gently reassemble the soup into a cube. Some of the soup will have run off onto the cookie tray. Lift this soup up by the corners and fold slowly into a cylindrical soup staff. Square off the cube by stuffing the cracks with this cylindrical soup staff. Place the little packet in your purse or inside coat pocket, and pack off to work. When that lunch bell chimes, impress your friends by forming the soup back into a bowl shape, and enjoy! Enjoy it until the day when the lunchpail comes back into vogue and we won’t need soup folding or cornstalks up the leg.
