Look Like Flies

Sometimes Amazon makes me offers I find it quite easy to refuse:

Katherine Rampell takes note of a Pew poll result. Respondents were asked whether they agreed that ‘success in life is determined by forces outside our control’. Only 32% of Americans agreed, whereas, for example, 72% of Germans did. I suppose this question is as bad as it is by design. (Pew pollsters aren’t stupid, I think.) It’s a kind of dog whistle values question, since it’s too imprecise to be anything else. It basically says: if you had to pick one of two statements that you don’t actually believe, to say you believe, by way of signaling your attitudes about social justice and the value of hard work, which would it be – that everyone determines their own destiny %100 or 0%? (True, there might be a few considered fatalists out there, who sincerely believe the latter. But few enough that they should hardly register. And obviously no one would sincerely go for the former option, despite the fact that most Americans did.)

That’s why it’s a values question. Even so, wouldn’t it be better to conjoin this values dog whistle with some non-dog whistle questions in the topical vicinity? I mean: obviously yes. More is better. But more specifically: it would be interesting to try to determine to what extent people actually think, practically, about their own lives and those of others, in such extreme, total voluntarist-or-fatalist terms, when not dog whistled into picking one or the other extreme. To what degree, and in what cases, do people believe themselves, and others, to be in control of the course of their lives? My empirically unsupported suspicion is that people would turn out to be pretty similar in their beliefs, across partisan lines and cross-culturally, if you took care not to blow the dog whistle.

What do you think?

No, I’m not thinking about our Daniel. I’m working up to a proper follow-up to my conservative cognitive dissonance posts. This isn’t really it, alas, but it’s a start.

It makes no sense for conservatives like Jim Geraghty to express this sort of concern about the booing of Stephen Hill at the GOP debate. (Hill is, as you probably know, the gay soldier who asked about DADT):

Rereading the transcript of last night’s debate, I am struck that Rick Santorum did not thank Stephen Hill, a gay soldier in the U.S. Army currently in Iraq, for his service. Nor did anyone else on that stage.

Whatever you think of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” or homosexuality, Hill is risking his life on behalf of his country.

And for sure it doesn’t make sense for Santorum himself to have responded to subsequent questions about the booing, like so: [click to continue…]

I remember back when it seemed like, maybe, in the future everyone would get paid in whuffie. If we all worked together. Now I think I know better. In the future, everyone will get paid in ukelele covers of pop songs from the 80’s. If we all work together.

I just pledged $40 to kickstart LINDA, ‘a hollow earth retirement adventure in 23 singing, illustrated installments’. I am very far from saying you should do the same. Daniel Davies, just for instance, is sure to find the artist’s vocal and instrumental stylings intolerably twee. He will prefer to spend his money on Budweiser. But if none of you do as I do, I am perhaps going to keep my money and not get any adventure or singing. But it’s up to you. (The story is going to run on hilobrow.com, whose editors are my friends. They aren’t your friends, I assume, so that may weigh in your calculations.)

In related news, I see on boingboing that someone else is trying to Kickstart “a huge 20-foot-tall kinetic sculpture with a 25-foot long spinning painting in the center, which include a zoetropic animation.” I think I might chip in $11 so I can get the coloring book.

But this is unrealistic, you say. In the sense that it is not a model for a barter economy based on ukelele covers and giant zoetropes (which would, after all, make using giant stone discs with holes in them as your currency seem comparatively sensible.) No no no. This is just the first stage. Next, we build a kind of cross-kickstarting platform on which the people trying to kickstart their crazy art follies do so via complicated latticeworks of artistic cross-commitments. ‘I’ll cover a song of your choice on the ukelele, and knit you a badge, if you build a 20 foot tall zoetrope in Michigan, and send me a coloring book.’

Next, we get Wall Street hipsters to pool all the Kickstart projects, slice them into tranches, resell these collateralized aesthetic obligations to … oh wait.

Lots of folks are bemused by Joly’s apparently critical statement that New York justice “doesn’t distinguish between the director of the I.M.F. and any other suspect.” Obviously there is a natural presumption in favor of equality. But the Times article also contains a video link to the full interview in which Joly’s own next words are something like, ‘this is the idea of equality before the law, but clearly for a director of the IMF …’ and then, clarity be damned, my ear is incapable of catching the bit that finishes the thought. What does she say?

UPDATE: Obviously feel free to discuss Joly’s ideas more generally. The argument against a perp walk, because it is inconsistent with presumption of innocence, is cogent. And obviously famous/powerful people like IMF directors are the people who risk losing their presumption of innocence in this way. So we have that rare case in which formal equality amounts to effective bias in favor of the weak and powerless. But it seems like a big mistake to say it is all just Big Apple barbarism – or, rather, Rome-style triumphalism, the defeated Gaul chief paraded in chains for the populace to see! The wealthy and powerful are not exactly without power and wealth, after all, so the prosecutor’s office, in a town full of rich, influential people, should ideally have effective general strategies they pursue, as a matter of course, to make sure they aren’t steamrollered by that. What do you think?

Despite having recently co-edited a book on Moretti’s work [free! free download, or buy the paper!], I haven’t yet commented on his Hamlet paper, which Kieran brought to our collective attention. Because I only just now got around to reading it, and sometimes it’s good practice to hold off until you do that, even though this is the internet and all.

First things first: if you can’t access the LRB version, there’s a free, longer version available from Moretti’s own lab.

Right, the whole thing reminds me of that memorable scene in the play in which Hamlet puts on a PPT presentation, representing social networks in The Marriage of Gonzago nudge nudge wink wink. (Apparently he’s been working on this stuff at school for years.) And Ophelia doesn’t really get it and Hamlet helpfully explains: “Marry, this is miching mallecho; it means mischief.”

But seriously, folks. I like the paper, and I don’t like it. On the one hand, I wholeheartedly endorse this bit. Or at least I would very much like to be able to. [click to continue…]

Matthew Yglesias points to this Arthur Brooks piece, “Obama says it’s only ‘fair’ to raise taxes on the rich. He’s wrong.” Brooks says he’s shifting from the usual perverse consequences argument – if we tax the rich it will actually cost more money – to a fairness argument. But really it’s just a twistier iteration of the perverse consequences argument.

Basically the first part of the argument goes like this. [click to continue…]

So I had the flu. Then, a different flu. As to that thing Belle is down with now? I dunno. Something new has been added. But we got to the Joanna Newsom concert, between sneezes. That was great! My brother-in-law asked what she’s like, because he hadn’t heard of her. I said she’s a cross between Bob Dylan and Glinda, the Good Witch of the North. Do you think that was strictly accurate? Maybe just: a cross between Kate Bush and Arcade Fire, plus harp? (What, you’ve never heard of her? Well, check it out. And this. I was hoping she’d do a live version of that last one, as she does here. No dice. But she did a great version of “Have One On Me”, which is otherwise not one of my favorites.)

The world is so messed up these days that I feel I should be publicly expressing my opinion about that. But instead I’m escaping into an old, wonky-academic philosophy-literary criticism essay that I’ve never managed to get published anywhere. It’s been out of, then back into, the ‘reject’ pile for years. Title: “Ways of World-Breaking and Ethical Escapism”. The question: is there morality fiction? That is, fiction about morality itself being different than we take it to be. No, no, not whether people can disagree about morality, or write about immoral people, or seek to shock, or any of that obviousness. Does anyone write fiction in which they imagine that the world works, morally, a different way than they (author and anticipated audience) take it to work? Or is it rather the case that when we find a ‘deviant’ moral perspective in fiction we either reject it or accept it. And if we do the latter, we export it to the actual world, as part of an expanded moral horizon? So our actual moral horizon and our fictional moral horizon never mutually deviate? Or they sometimes go their separate ways? That’s the question. I say they go their separate ways all the time, so it’s interesting that some folks have denied it. I am responding to some analytic-type philosophers – Kendall Walton, Tamar Gendler, and our own Brian Weatherson – who have taken various positions on this question, the so-called ‘puzzle of imaginative resistance’.

I’ve got the latest draft posted here, for the edification of the interested. I’ll just post one bit from it. I call it “Morality Tale”. I guess I just missed the Hugo Awards nomination deadline. But you can tell me whether you like it. Certainly it goes a long way towards explaining why I can’t publish the whole essay. (Who do I think I am?) [click to continue…]

Over at his “other blog-digs”:http://orgtheory.wordpress.com/2011/01/11/two-syllabuses/, Kieran is looking for suggestions for a course syllabus on Markets and Moral Order. By sheer coincidence, when browsing Daron Acemoglu’s “web page”:http://econ-www.mit.edu/faculty/acemoglu/paper today, out of curiosity to see how many new papers he had written this month, I noticed that Acemoglu, Johnson and Robinson apparently had a piece that was directly on topic. It’s entitled a ‘Reply to the Revised (May 2006) version of David Albouy’s “The Colonial Origins of Comparitive Development: An Investigation of the Settler Morality Data.’ Sadly, the link seems to lead to a quite different (and rather duller) piece about death rates. Nor, despite some efforts, have I been able to establish precisely which instrumental variable Acemoglu, Johnson and Robinson are using as a proxy for the morality of European settlers in Africa during the colonial period – presumably, this time it isn’t “mosquitoes”:https://crookedtimber.org/2007/11/13/one-economics/, despite the tempting analogies. Suggestions for possible such variables gratefully received in comments.

A stray note on the history of science fiction, in relation to theatrical absurdity qua independent but relatable phenomenon, via the intermediation of McGuffins, actual and potential, scientifical, metaphysical and occasionally fistical, and suchish chickenegg castings of shadows …

The note is: Beckett’s 1930 poem, “Whoroscope”, seems like an interesting work to think about.

It also seems worth chicking and eggsamining how Beckett and co. came close to satirizing, avant lalettre, Gernsback’s glorious goose egg of a golden coinage, ‘scientifiction‘. But I see that Gernsback actually proposed the term a few years earlier, in 1926. So that would be upsetting the eggcart before the chicken. And we wouldn’t want to do that o no.

Why am I thinking these thoughts? In part because I’m reading Martin Esslin, The Theatre of the Absurd [amazon] – on the iPad! It’s interesting. And it’s just what I wanted my iPad to do for me. Old good books re-released in inexpensive e-book format.

Couple quick thoughts about that. [click to continue…]

I like the fact that the engraving on Jim Woodring’s Nibbus Maximus is so clearly influenced by my own recent work (via boingboing): [click to continue…]

I’m preparing to teach philosophy and film again and I’m looking for examples of films that hinge on more or less bald stipulations of metaphysically preposterous states of affairs. That is, cases in which something impossible happens, and it isn’t identified as science or magic. It just is. Examples:

The Exterminating Angel (hey, Criterion Collection has it out since last year! good!)

Groundhog Day

Being John Malkovich

In each case, it’s not hard to think of other films that are clearly sf or fairy tales/ghost stories, but that are more or less the same story, in terms of set-up, general mood and themes. [click to continue…]

I got an iPad for X-Mas so – finally! – I can get in on this e-book thing. I bought Quiggin’s Zombie Economics. Also, Mieville’s Kraken. Now I’m thinking about writing: Krakenomics: How Really Big Things Can Drag Down You, And Everyone You Love, To The Very Bottom, And There’s Nothing You Can Do About It, Probably. “Chapter 1: Shit Creek and the Paddle – Learning To Love Learned Helplessness”. Or something like that. But I’m too lazy to write it, so you write it. Also, I haven’t even read the Mieville yet, so what do I know?

But I’m thinking about quoting our John in something I’m writing (yes, on Zizek). But I can’t footnote a Kindle edition. No pages. What will the world come to? Bibliography has gotten a bit old and odd in the head in the age of the internet, but the existence of pages themselves is kind of a watershed. On the one hand, there’s really no reason why a text that can be poured into a virtual vessel as easily as it can be inspirited into the corpse of a tree should have to have ‘pages’. Still, it’s traditional. Harumph. I suppose I’m going to have to use Amazon’s ‘search inside’ or Google Books and pretend I read the paper version, as a proper scholar would. Or just email John Q. and ask.

I always figured that great scene, and great line, from “The Hep Cat” was some sort of early 1940’s pop culture reference. Now I know.