I wish people would stop being so confused all the time. If someone is “a racist” it is not because he is a like a Nazi with a uniform and everything, and pledges allegiance to the flag of racism, and goes around shouting “I hate Mexican people!” Well, to be fair, he might shout that if he were drunk and had smoked some of the cottonmouth killer, or were on MySpace. And those dudes in Stormfront exist. And racist skinheads too dumb to join Stormfront. Nonetheless, in ordinary speech one only means “hey, he said a thing that was racially prejudiced,” or “she told a racist joke,” or “he threw a crumpled-up beer can at that broke-ass African-American gentleman walking right beside the road (South Carolina doesn’t hold much truck with sidewalks) while shouting ‘f%cK you n1gger!,'” or “she collects these weird racist yam crate-labels from Louisiana in the ’30s and I am not sure her motives are entirely pure.” (May God help me on this one, a collector sells them in Takoma Park at vintage fairs and sometimes I succumb. They’re so cool! She’s a 65-year-old Black lady, so she’s off the hook. OR IS SHE?!).

Anyway, otherwise very intelligent people such as Radley Balko go weirdly off the rails on this one. (Whom you should all read all the time, even though libertarians annoy you, because he is the only person in the history of blogging to ever get anybody off of death row by blogging about it. We arrange some excellent book events, and we make nice covers and John typesets’em all purty, but I’m pretty sure Radley’s got us beat ten ways to Sunday on useful blogging and we will never recoup, not with a thousand book events. Anyway he’s not the annoying kind of libertarian. Er, rather, he’s one of the least annoying kinds. He actually cares about the rights of poor people and has noticed that corporations as well as governments can infringe upon your rights, although he doesn’t focus upon this latter point as much as a left-libertarian would. Did I mention he saves people’s lives? His blog is rushing into burning buildings and dragging people out, and then it wants to go back in, and the chief’s trying to hold it back, because it’s inhaled all this smoke and all, but it busts free and saves three more children, but it just has three cute smudges of soot on its face, and then it kisses Natalie Portman. Then maybe it links to Ilya Somin, and you think, the hell he did?! Our blog is just drinking a cup of coffee, and making plans to kiss…Clive Owen? I may need to re-do the polling on this one.)
[click to continue…]

Friday:

Daddy: What did you learn in school today?
Zoe: Some Greek guy said if he had a big enough lever, he could move the world. That’s pretty cool.
Daddy: Possibly not even the coolest thing he ever said! (Reads relevant portion of Wikipedia entry to Zoe and Violet).

Saturday [events reported by Zoe to Daddy]:

Mommy: Don’t you think you’ve been playing “Cooking Mama” on your Nintendo DS long enough [or words to this general effect]?
Violet: Don’t mess with my circles. [Bonus points awarded because play in “Cooking Mama” consists largely of making little circles with your stylus.]

Advantage: Daddy!

I have now given Zoe a harder assignment. She is to wait until life affords her the opportunity to utter “Go Tell The Spartans”, appropriately. (Per this thread, we’re working through E.M. Gombrich’s Little History of the World [amazon], which turns out to be surprisingly good and age appropriate.) This may take a while. Then again, her school has about as many silly little rules as the next school, so maybe it won’t take too long. If it works, I’m hoping the effect will be like a classic “Peanuts” strip. I feel “Go Tell The Spartans” is the sort of thing that Linus might have said, after being bossed around by Lucy.

What other sayings do you think every 8-10 year old girl should have at her disposal, to baffle and amaze those around them?

As a young Trot and reader of Intercontinental Press (I’m talking late 70s, early 80s) I was somewhat astonished when people told me about Gerry Foley, who has just died. As Jeff Mackler’s obit on Red Mole Rising says, he could read in 90 languages and was fluent in more than a dozen. There’s lots of bonus detail on the history of American Trotskyism, on McCarthy, and on the extent of FBI surveillance of far-left meetings. Worth a read. RIP.

… I guess we might as well discuss this Zizek thingy.

However, even if Lacan’s inversion [If there is no God, then all is forbidden] appears to be an empty paradox, a quick look at our moral landscape confirms that it is a much more appropriate description of the atheist liberal/hedonist behaviour: they dedicate their life to the pursuit of pleasures, but since there is no external authority which would guarantee them personal space for this pursuit, they get entangled in a thick network of self-imposed “Politically Correct” regulations, as if they are answerable to a superego far more severe than that of the traditional morality. They thus become obsessed with the concern that, in pursuing their pleasures, they may violate the space of others, and so regulate their behaviour by adopting detailed prescriptions about how to avoid “harassing” others, along with the no less complex regime of the care-of-the-self (physical fitness, health food, spiritual relaxation, and so on).

Today, nothing is more oppressive and regulated than being a simple hedonist.

This is, I take it, Goldberg’s thesis, minus the Lacan – we’ll see! Namely, the godlessness of liberalism produces an idiot tick-tock between authoritarianism and relativism. The proof: liberal bumper-stickers/slogans oscillate between fatuously broad gestures of total freedom and orthodoxy sniffery re: racism and sexism and a few other things. QED.

I predict it will be at stage two that we discern daylight between the Goldbergian and Zizekian positions: [click to continue…]

“Five years ago”:https://crookedtimber.org/2007/05/11/rupturerapture/ I linked to a “Bill Emmott column”:http://newsweek.washingtonpost.com/postglobal/bill_emmott/2007/04/not_decline_but_rupture_with_t.html on the impending election of Nicholas Sarkozy thusly:

This unashamed mash note from Bill Emmott, former editor of the Economist presents a class of a triple-distilled tincture of the prevailing globollocks on Sarkozy’s victory in France. You don’t need to read the actual column to get the gist; just the Pavlovian dinner-bell talking points that it strings together.

France … paralyzed by powerful interest groups … political elite … beholden … or … afraid … takes a brave outsider … precisely Sarkozy’s appeal … Reagan or a Thatcher … A “rupture” is what France needs … showing that his country is not doomed to decline … cadres of highly globalized managers … etc … etc

I don’t see the words “tough,” “clear-headed,” or “reform” anywhere, so it isn’t quite the full bob major, but it’s close.

Now, his successor as editor at the _Economist_ “plays the same tune again, but even more crudely”:http://www.economist.com/node/21553446, deploring Sarkozy’s probable successor.

bq. France desperately needs reform .. .neighbours have been undergoing genuine reforms … deep anti-business attitude … proposing not to reform at all … refusal to countenance structural reform of any sort … resistance to change … hostile to change … Until recently, voters in the euro zone seemed to have accepted the idea of austerity and reform. … would undermine Europe’s willingness to pursue the painful reforms it must eventually embrace.

I’ve no idea what Hollande is going to be like (except that he’s certainly going to be disappointing). But I do know that this is one of the most exquisitely refined examples of globollocks that I’ve ever seen. It’s as beautifully resistant to the intellect as an Andropov era _Pravda_ editorial. A few more years of this and the _Economist_ won’t have to have any human editing at all. Even today, I imagine that someone with middling coding skills could patch together a passable Economist-editorial generator with a few days work. Mix in names of countries and people scraped from the political stories sections of Google News, with frequent exhortations for “Reform,” “toughminded reform,” “market-led reform,” “painful reform,” “change,” “serious change,” “rupture,” and 12-15 sentences worth of automagically generated word-salad content, and you’d be there.

I wonder whether even the writer of this editorial would be able to define ‘reform’ or ‘change’ if he were asked, beyond appealing to some sort of ‘social protection bad, market good’ quasi-autonomic reflex embedded deep in his lizard brain. I also wonder whether the people in there are as cynical about their product as Andropov-era journalists were, or whether they actually believe the pabulum they dish out.

I’m reading Chesterton on George Bernard Shaw (no, I’m not really sure why either):

“A quick eye for ideas may actually make a writer slow in reaching his goal, just as a quick eye for landscapes might make a motorist slow in reaching Brighton. An original man has to pause at every allusion or simile to re-explain historical parallels, to re-shape distorted words. Any ordinary leader-writer (let us say) might write swiftly and smoothly something like this: “The element of religion in the Puritan rebellion, if hostile to art, yet saved the movement from some of the evils in which the French Revolution involved morality.” Now a man like Mr. Shaw, who has his own views on everything, would be forced to make the sentence long and broken instead of swift and smooth. He would say something like: “The element of religion, as I explain religion, in the Puritan rebellion (which you wholly misunderstand) if hostile to art — that is what I mean by art — may have saved it from some evils (remember my definition of evil) in which the French Revolution — of which I have my own opinion — involved morality, which I will define for you in a minute.” That is the worst of being a really universal sceptic and philosopher; it is such slow work. The very forest of the man’s thoughts chokes up his thoroughfare. A man must be orthodox upon most things, or he will never even have time to preach his own heresy.”

Ah, graduate school, and trying to write my dissertation. I remember it well. (Shudder.) I don’t know whether I was a budding universal philosopher, but I did commit the sin of wanting to be a multifold heretic within the scope of a single paragraph, or sentence. I’ve tried to stop doing that.

“This”:http://isites.harvard.edu/icb/icb.do?keyword=k77982&tabgroupid=icb.tabgroup143448 looks like a bombshell announcement to me (I’m not aware of the internal politics behind the announcement, but I’m presuming that Robert Darnton’s fingerprints are all over it). Discuss.

bq. We write to communicate an untenable situation facing the Harvard Library. … The Faculty Advisory Council to the Library, representing university faculty in all schools and in consultation with the Harvard Library leadership, reached this conclusion: major periodical subscriptions, especially to electronic journals published by historically key providers, cannot be sustained: continuing these subscriptions on their current footing is financially untenable. … It is untenable for contracts with at least two major providers to continue on the basis identical with past agreements. Costs are now prohibitive. … since faculty and graduate students are chief users, please consider the following options open to faculty and students (F) and the Library (L), state other options you think viable, and communicate your views:

bq. Make sure that all of your own papers are accessible by submitting them to DASH in accordance with the faculty-initiated open-access policies (F). Consider submitting articles to open-access journals, or to ones that have reasonable, sustainable subscription costs; move prestige to open access (F). If on the editorial board of a journal involved, determine if it can be published as open access material, or independently from publishers that practice pricing described above. If not, consider resigning (F).

Some of this may be hardball bargaining with the two unnamed providers (one of which, I presume, has a name starting with E). But not very much – to state the problem so bluntly, and to encourage faculty to stop publishing in, and resign from the boards of non-open access journals sounds more like pushing for system-change than for a better deal within the current system. This may be the beginning of the end.

Jonah Goldberg finds further confirmation of his views (the whole liberal fascist thing – you remember) in a 1932 Atlantic article. I must admit, I braced myself before clicking, expecting to learn that, yes, someone argued, back then, that Hitler was just FDR on stilts, or FDR was mere Hitler-lite. Turns out the author in question made the familiar and sensible point that Hitler wasn’t a socialist in any leftist sense, pace Goldberg.

But it’s true: ‘Nazi’ is short for ‘National Socialist’. So there’s that.

It’s that time of the year again – it’s been five months plus five months plus five months plus five months plus five months plus five months plus five months plus five months plus five months plus five months plus five months plus five months plus five months plus five months plus five months plus five months plus five months plus five months plus five months plus five months plus five months plus five months since Charles Krauthammer “told us”:http://www.aei.org/events/2003/04/22/iraq-what-lies-ahead-event-3/

bq. Hans Blix had five months to find weapons. He found nothing. We’ve had five weeks. Come back to me in five months. If we haven’t found any, we will have a credibility problem.

I’ll confess that I was a bit disappointed last week, when Charles Krauthammer didn’t make the cut for Atrios’ shortlist for Wanker of the Decade (he did get a nod-in-his-direction though; Fred Hiatt’s nod was intended to honor the Washington Post‘s editorial page as a whole). But having reflected a bit, I think this was the right call. To be a really first rate wanker, you have to be at least partially oblivious to what you are. I’ve always had the sense that Krauthammer knows exactly what he is – nasty and thoroughly mendacious. Not a wanker then, but rather worse than a wanker. He’s whatever it is that Karl Rove is (when rugose and squamous entities drag out their tortured forms from under rocks, to caper and desport themselves beneath the gibbous moon, they console themselves at least they’re not working for American Crossroads).

By the way, next year will be the tenth anniversary. Still writing for the Washington Post, still syndicated, still on the talk shows.

Further to Chris’s post, other recent losses merit a mention too – coincidentally, two legendary banjo players died within a couple of weeks of each other recently.

One is Barney McKenna, last surviving member of The Dubliners, whose quirky turns of phrase were almost as famous as his tenor banjo playing, the instrument which he introduced into Irish traditional music.

<iframe width=”420″ height=”315″ src=”http://www.youtube.com/embed/LM-IAlcq0uM” frameborder=”0″ allowfullscreen></iframe>

The other is Earl Scruggs, champion of the three-finger banjo playing style in bluegrass music (born in North Carolina as it happens, not far from where I am at present).

<iframe width=”420″ height=”315″ src=”http://www.youtube.com/embed/AJOIqmlI65Y” frameborder=”0″ allowfullscreen></iframe>

These two musical traditions are brought together every year in a festival in Ireland. And not coincidentally, for as Irish musician and broadcaster Philip King has documented in his TV series Bringing It All Back Home, they share common roots.