Fragments of Varro

Satire and questions

2012-01-18T08:59:00.004-06:00

Great satire has not only a primary target but a secondary one. The primary one being the obvious object of satirical invective. The secondary, though, being the obvious beneficiary of satirical invective. Id est, in A Modest Proposal, swift satirizes folks concerned with hunger and over-population by showing how callous they can be with the barely absurd proposition of killing off children (It is barely absurd because it is a simple, logical extrapolation instead of a non sequitor). This is funny, but it also doesn't let the other people off the hook because it is so logically compelling that a good reason why we shouldn't eat old people must be produced. Hence, the primary and secondary targets.

Another example is in a recent issue of the Onion about Alabama winning the national championship. Here is the headline: Unpopular BCS Crowns Alabama National Champions, Endorses Rick Santorum, Spits On World War II Veteran, Pushes Elderly Woman Down Flight Of Stairs, Wishes Osama Bin Laden Were Still Alive.

The article follows through, showing that not only is the BCS absurd, but people who complain about the BCS are absurd. In fact, the true satirical target are those people who think the premise to the article matters. This gets to my main paint: great satire addresses how we ask questions more than it addresses how we answer them. In, A Modest Proposal, the way we talk about overpopulation is the ultimate subject of ridicule; not specific answers. Cheap satire, then, exists where someone accepts the premise but merely disagrees with another. That's why satire around abortion never really works but it does around presidential debates.

Dr. King and Figures

2012-01-16T10:14:00.001-06:00

Martin Luther King, Jr., was not born Martin Luther King, Jr. but Martin King. As a young boy, his father, Martin King, travelled to Germany and saw Wittenberg and the lands of the reformer, Martin Luther. He was so enraptured by the idea of Luther that he took that name for himself and for his son. It was what Luther represented (defiance, faithfulness, action) that caused Senior to change his name.

Dr. King always represented. Rosa Parks was chosen to not go to the back of the bus because of what she represented, too. Basically, that was always a part of who King was. He was never important as a man; always as a metaphor.

The key here, though, is that that is not a bad thing. Metaphors are not hollow, nor are symbols. It is the nominalism of daily life which tells us to distrust metaphor, to distrust symbol, to distrust representation.

The nominalism of daily life rejects explicit symbols but does not reject symbol. We have figurehead's everywhere and don't look past them: presidents, managers, parents. It rejects talking about Dr. King as the symbol of the Civil Rights Movement (and thus talking about racism today, other figures of the movement, his own peccadilloes, etc.) instead of the fact that he is the symbol and that's okay. He can be a symbol and a man. He can be a symbol and a sinner. He can be a symbol and a preacher. And this, dear friends, is the cruelest aspect of the nominalism of daily life: whenever a symbol is allowed, it isn't allowed to be anything else. Binary thought pulled through.

You see, even talking about complexity usually works in a binary system because complexity is often enough spoken of entirely in generic forms. Things are complex or simple. Not complex and simple. Not 400,000 words and simple.

So Dr. King is a symbol and a human and a churchman and a sinner and a marcher and many other things. Dr. King represents the Civil Rights Movement and you can see him that way without missing out on all the other nuanced aspects of his life or the lives of Bob Moses, John Lewis, Ralph Abernathy, Ella Baker, Fanny Lou Hamer, etc..

The act of tokenizing Dr. King is a moral failing on an individuals part. It doesn't come from symbol but from laziness.

On Ron Paul

2012-01-06T10:42:00.002-06:00

To those who dimly perceived something wrong, something that could not be put on a placard, or could not move the party machine, men such as this become something more than political operators, they become symbols. Substantive charges against them, no matter the reasons, are dismissed. The movement they represent means more. But as sure as the followers of Farrakhan deserved more than UFOs, anti-Semitism and conspiracy theories, those of us who oppose the drug-war, who oppose the Patriot Act deserve better than Ron Paul.

It is not enough to simply proffer Paul as a protest candidate.One must fully imagine the import of a Paul presidency. How, precisely, would Paul end the drug war? What, exactly, would he do about the Middle East? How, specifically,would the world look for women under a Ron Paul presidency?

And then the dispatches must be honestly grappled with: It must be argued that a man who could not manage a newsletter should be promoted to managing a nuclear arsenal. Failing that, it must be asserted that a man who once claimed that black people were knowingly injecting white people with HIV, who fund-raised by predicting a race-war, who handsomely profited from it all, should lead the free world. If that line falls too, we are forced to confess that Ron Paul regularly summoned up the specters of racism for his own politically gain, and thus stands convicted of moral cowardice...

...I do not mean to be unsympathetic here. It is regrettable to find ourselves in this untenable space, where all our politicians cower and we are bereft of suitable standard-bearers. I would like nothing more than to join my friends in support of Paul and exhilarate in a morality unweighted by the ugly facts of governance and democracy. But the drug war is not magic. It is legislation passed by actual politicians, themselves elected by actual by Americans. Unbinding that war demands the same.

The fervency for Ron Paul is rooted in the longing for a reedemer, for one who will rise up and cut through the dishonest pablum of horse-races and sloganeering and speak directly to Americans. It is a species of saviorism which hopes to deliver a prophet onto the people, who will be better than the people themselves.

But every man is a prophet, until he faces a Congress.

TNC from last week

Old Post on Iowa Politics and Comment on Today's Caucus

2012-01-03T10:26:00.001-06:00

This is from last year on the Farm Bill. It is still a propos for today.

Old people vote. Farmers vote. This is why social security and medicare are golden cows that can't be touched. This is why the Farm Bill is a golden cow that can't be touched.

I was thinking this morning about how I should start writing letters about the Farm Bill, and I may do that, I don't know. The most problematic aspect of it has nothing to do with America's health or economy but the export subsidies given to cotton, rice, and other farmers to send crops to developing countries. Like Wendell Berry says about a lot of ag-related policy, we had a solution and created two problems. By sending cotton to Africa, for instance, we not only deflate the possible local production of cotton (problem), but also we claim it as aid (problem). Instead of aiding Africans, we are aiding Arkansans who may need help and support but that need not come on the backs of Africans or Haitians or where ever we send our cotton.

The Farm Bill is problematic in so many ways, but farmers vote: especially in Iowa.

* * * * * * *

The politics of Iowa are "different". Huckabee won four years ago. The politics of Iowa are different because, as far as Republicans go, they don't matter. People spend all day talking about how they don't matter, but politicians and news-makers refuse to believe their own words. Huntsman believes Iowa doesn't matter but so did Rudy Giuliani.

The past decade, Iowa has mattered tremendously to Democrats and indifferently to Republicans.

Maybe this tells us more about the difference between Republicans in Iowa than Republicans nation-wide than anything else. Maybe it doesn't tell us anything at all.

Anonymous and Tenth Innings

2011-10-28T09:13:00.003-05:00

Two things:

* Shakespeare wrote Shakespeare (this regards the wretched looking Roland Emmerich film). The only counter-argument is entirely based on classism and educational determinism. Everyone who goes to Harvard isn't brilliant. Everyone who doesn't graduate high school isn't stupid. Argument destroyed.

* Game 6. I think Ron Washington is try to take away overmanager of the year from La Russa. Basically, managers this postseason have had a WAR of like -25. If none of the teams actually had managers (and remember, Washington did say that he hasn't met with his position players since June), these games might have been decided on the field instead of in the heads of crazy people pulling (or not playing) awesome pitchers.

The Faith of Steve Jobs

2011-10-25T12:16:00.004-05:00

Even though they were not fervent about their faith, Jobs’s parents wanted him to have a religious upbringing, so they took him to the Lutheran church most Sundays. That came to an end when he was thirteen. In July 1968 Life magazine published a shocking cover showing a pair of starving children in Biafra. Jobs took it to Sunday school and confronted the church’s pastor. “If I raise my finger, will God know which one I’m going to raise even before I do it?”

The pastor answered, “Yes, God knows everything.”

Jobs then pulled out the Life cover and asked, “Well, does God know about this and what’s going to happen to those children?

“Steve, I know you don’t understand, but yes, God knows about that.”

Jobs announced that he didn’t want to have anything to do with worshipping such a God, and he never went back to church. He did, however, spend years studying and trying to practice the tenets of Zen Buddhism. Reflecting years later on his spiritual feelings, he said that religion was at its best when it emphasized spiritual experiences rather than received dogma. “The juice goes out of Christianity when it becomes too based on faith rather than on living like Jesus or seeing the world as Jesus saw it,” he told me. “I think different religions are different doors to the same house. Sometimes I think the house exists, and sometimes I don't. It's the great mystery"

From the Walter Isaacson Biography.

The funny thing about pluralist religious philosophies is how self-centered they are. It is about you finding yourself, finding your own way into "the house". You are the center of the universe. If it is intuitive to you, it is right.

The 14 year old Jobs outsmarted the Lutheran pastor not because of a Lutheran lacuna he had uncovered (like the perfect size for the iPad), but adolescent petulance.

Perhaps that is the untold story of Apple: it is a company that has succeeded because it never challenges the impulses of adolescence. It complexifies life by simplifying the unnecessary.

Isn't that every teenage romance?

Good is not an Economic Category

2011-10-20T11:09:00.000-05:00

Ten years ago, when Time magazine felt obligated to include a theologian on their list of bests, somehow they found Stanley Hauerwas. He responded, in part, by saying best isn't a theological category (the whole escapade I find comical because Stanley and Duke and Duke grads like to joke about it but they also like to reference it (see above). It is pure false humility. If it is truly irrelevent than it never need be mentioned again. But it is relevant. It is relevant to show the ignorance of Time magazine and people like them...I am getting off my point).

Okay, so this morning I was reading Tyler Cowen's Great Stagnation a little bit and thinking about his presentation of the testability of the market and then the obvious sprung up: good is not an economic category. Better is an economic category. Survival is an economic category. Good isn't. This is the absurdity of Colbert saying that Global Warming exists because Al Gore's movie made a profit.

Capitalism isn't bad because it doesn't have a good. The problem is when it is used to find the good. Like so many intro-economics books that begin with the morality of capitalism, how it has helped the world.

The market is like the scientific method: it is a tool not an answer. When it is used as an answer, the question itself must be challenged.

More Messianic Steve Jobsese

2011-10-19T11:29:00.000-05:00

And it was about the sixth hour, and there was a darkness over all the earth until the ninth hour. And the sun was darkened, and the veil of the temple was rent in the midst. - Luke 23:44-45

Though where, in the Apple cosmology, is the veil?

A Methodist wins the Nobel Peace Prize

2011-10-07T12:46:00.000-05:00

She spoke at the last General Conference in 08.

More thoughts to come...

Design, Creativity, and the Death of Steve Jobs

2011-10-06T11:59:00.001-05:00

Having technology around was always important in my family. Not in the showy way of keeping up with the Joneses, but in the way of exposing us to what is both the present and the future. It was important for my parents to buy computers in the early 80s and to get the internet in the early 90s (I found out about Kurt Cobain's death on AOL). I remember the Apple IIe and the first Macintosh and then the second gen one that I inherited whenever our personal computer became a 486.

I knew the story of the founding of Apple from an early age as well. Since, when I came to technological awareness in the early nineties, Jobs was still in exile, the Woz was my hero. He is the one who invented the first Apple. He was the brains. Jobs was the face. I didn't, at that time, know the importance of the face.

* * * *

For much of my life, the behind the scenes worker has been an ideal. The artist, the mason, the laborer who doesn't get credit but does the real work. The reality is that being the face is work. Knowing that something is great is almost as tricky as creating something great. By that logic, it is more impressive that Jobs knew how amazing the personal computer was than it would have been if he had created it.

This, if you recall, was the genius of Thomas Edison. Edison had a lab of nearly a hundred people working for him and he would get credit for their inventions because he would know which inventions one should put forward in order to get credit.

* * * *

Charles Eames defined design as a plan for arranging elements in such a way in order to achieve a particular purpose. Design is use. Use means someone needs to want to use it. Having a baseball cap made out of thorns may help block the sun, but it wouldn't be very useful.

That is all that Steve Jobs brought back to Apple when he returned. Use is about getting people to use something as it is being specifically useful.

Another quick point has to do with branding: branding goes from the bottom to the top. There is nothing about a company that does not effect the brand and the brand leads directly to a commodity's usefulness. Branding and design are creative enterprises as well as feats of engineering.

* * * *

But what does it do is always the wrong question. But what does it mean is always the wrong question. Perhaps, in a funny way, that is how Steve Jobs is an artist. He knew that kneejerk question is always wrong. We ask it out of insolence. How dare you add something to my world!

There is a lot of crap being produced. Costly crap, yet that is not the issue. When you seek beauty sometimes you have to run through a swamp. Mostly, though, it takes simply noticing a tree or a house, all the beauty constantly around. That sort of curiosity never asks what does it do and would never have been surprised by the iMac or the iPhone or anything else Steve Jobs helped create.

Roger Angell on last night

2011-09-29T16:10:00.002-05:00

These appalling, glorious details will fade a bit in the next few days, as the playoffs and the World Series take over, but not of course, in New England. “This is one for the ages, isn’t it?” Boston General Manager Theo Epstein said about the Sox’ defeat. “We can’t sugarcoat this. This is awful. We did it to ourselves.” BostonGlobe columnist Dan Shaughnessy wrote, “This goes right up there with Denny Galehouse, Bucky Dent, Mookie Wilson, and Aaron Boone,” identifying disasters from 1948, 1978, 1986, and 2003 that are better known in the New Haven-to-Eastport axis than any mere hurricane. Nothing can help this pain—it’s as if the World Championships of 2004 and 2007 no longer quite mattered—but at least the commissioner is going to try. Within the next week or so, it seems certain, he will announce that starting in 2013 there will be two wild-card teams in each league, instead of one, and that post-season play will begin with a single-game elimination playoff between them, before the regular Divisional Series round begins. This means that this year’s Braves and Red Sox teams would still be around, instead of dead the way they are.Well, thanks, Bud. More games and a little less caring is one way to go, all right. Anything you say.

The New Yorker

A few notes on the Economy

2011-09-28T22:49:00.001-05:00

I was listening to the audio podcast version of Fareed Zakaria's CNN show this morning (the show itself is excellent while Zakaria's Post-American World is disastrously benign) and a consultant from McKenzie spoke about the economy in that the last decade or so was about efficiency whereas the 70s and 80s were about innovation. This is a separate argument from the bad one Obama has made concerning the economy in which the recession is so deep because of productivity increases.

The capitalist love of innovation comes from the expansion of markets. Innovation breeds new entirely new markets. Not new geographies, new markets. Globalization breeds new geographies and that is what the last decade has been about and why efficiency has been the cornerstone of growth. New geographies allow for older ideas.

Of course, some new geographies turn from manufacturing to design (hello, Taipei!) and this is possibly the direction of globalization.

The difference between innovation and efficiency is the difference between the Macbook and the iPad. Of course, Apple long ago realized that being first isn't as important as being right, but that is a separate issue entirely.

Troy Davis and the Surreality of Twitter

2011-09-22T10:12:00.003-05:00

These are simply some selected screenshots of my Twitter feed last night. Most of the comments are retweets related to the execution...or related to sports.

I still see twitter mostly as an avenue of indifferent amusement, but there is some great cognitive dissonance in the space between sports tweets and and the news about a man's death. The leep between severity and banality is hard to take yet all I have to do is scroll a bit and there it is and scroll a bit more and it is gone and we are back to people complaining about nothing or talking about currency rates and the decline of the Red Sox.

A History of Copyright

2011-09-20T09:33:00.001-05:00

Games and Studies and the Power of Crowds

2011-09-19T10:08:00.001-05:00

What is interesting? How is your interest held? Once you've thought of one or two things, let us move on to games. What is the difference between a game and problem? A game and story? What is the difference between a game and science?

Now, connotatively it is simple to see games as somehow irrelevant to reality but functionally these distinctions are hard to make. What is the difference between the Texans beating the Dolphins this recent biophysics discovery that took place thanks to FoldIt?

There is a famous apocryphal line by Wellington which says that the Battle of Waterloo was won on the playing fields of Eton (it was actually won by a rain shower which prevented any repositioning of Napoleon's artillery). Yet on a very real level, there is no distinction between the playing fields of Eton and Waterloo.

It is this false distinction that impairs further discovery and this false distinction which FoldIt eliminates. One is serious. One is not. Yet seriousness is not a categorical form of distinction. If I am driving seriously or casually, I am still driving.

FoldIt discoveries have been published in Nature, but that doesn't legitimize them as such. It is the same sort of deferment of agency that causes people to call the principle when they find sexts on their child's phone instead of calling the parents of the child who sexted them.

So yes, by the distributive rule, I just related the Houston Texans to sexting via the journal Nature.

2011-09-15T09:57:00.002-05:00

People who talk of primarying Obama need to pick smaller targets--and thus elicit bigger results.

But being taken seriously involves actual work. It means a poverty tour that doesn't just bark (Obama the black mascot) but bites (voter registration in swing districts.) If you don't like the current iteration of America, you need to remember that you are America. The failure to build a more progressive America isn't merely a testimony to dastardly evil, it's a testimony to the failure of progressives.

Matt again: "If you're a progressive and you feel that the political system isn't doing what you want, it's misguided to look at this as a personal failure of elected officials. It's, if anything, a personal failure of you and people like you. Justice and equality doesn't just happen because it's nice, people need to make it happen. If it's not happening, then its advocates are failing."

Somehow we got in our head that the Civil Rights movement happened because Martin Luther King was a really nice guy. We don't really talk about the movement as an actual force, as applying force. We don't think about what SNCC was really trying to do when they were risking their lives to register voters in the delta. When we think about people trying to kill them we think about evil, but we should think about power and fear.

-Ta-Nehisi Coates

Heath Care, Politics, and the Right to Fail

2011-09-14T11:58:00.001-05:00

Two nights ago, Wolf Blitzer had a line of questioning for Ron Paul about Health Care and about an uninsured man (in his 30s) in a coma. The questions got to the point of asking whether we should let him die on the street.

As far as rubber meeting road moments, that is it for any Health Care questions. Personal Responsibility is wonderful but to the point of dead bodies on the road it is anarchy. Supporters of the ACA have often been to slow to remind people of that, as have single-payer proponents.

Health Care is about not having people dying on the streets. People used to die on the streets in America. In many places in the world, it still happens. People are thrown out when they can't pay or not even allowed in.

It isn't a scare tactic to talk about dead bodies in the street, it is the rubber of personal responsibility. You are responsible for your self, for your health, etc., but even Rawls and Nozick can agree that people shouldn't be killing themselves in the middle of rush hour.

But we get back to the point of the question about the uninsured man in a coma: how much space should society save for death drives. The libertarian may say that it is someone's right to take his own life or that euthanasia is a personal decision, but is it so in public? Some drives and desires cross against liberal and libertarian concerns of freedom and that is where dialogue should take place.

It is also where Christians and Jews and Buddhists should be able to draw on their traditions most effectively in the public square. It is the borderlands of libertarian thought, the borderlands of liberal and traditional conservative thought, these are the places that contemporary political discourse rarely treads save in "Gotcha" moments. Supporters of Health Care gleefully talk about bodies on the street (see above) in order to prove other people wrong. Good for you!

So what then? Is our political discourse dead filled only with ideologies? Only if politics exists simply on the macro level. Instead, it is the day to day politics of lived life where in dialogue, conversation, communication, all these things take place.

It looks slow and awkward and there aren't great payoffs, but it also looks like building a society where nobody wants to see dead bodies on the street, and that isn't just rhetoric but a mutual quest in the preservation of the Common Good.

Disaster, Pain, and Other People

2011-09-09T10:02:00.003-05:00

Philosophical Ethics has since the pre-socratics been mostly a question of: what on earth do I do with other people? I am not an other person. I am not really an I. The simplicity of pronouns hides the reality of communities, stories, networks, histories, desires, shames, et cetera. There are multi-layered connections between the 'I', the 'We', and the 'They', as well as the most weighted pronoun: 'You'.

How to treat other people, how to think about others comes to the forefront when thinking about the problem of pain. Said problem makes up a central part of Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations. How do we know that another person is hurting? Phenomenologically this comes to judgments about our perceptions. She is wincing and holding her leg that is covered in blood. Probability suggests that she is in pain.

Yet life is not found in the black-in-white but in the day-to-day where most bleeding is internal or metaphorical.

Endemic suffering is sporadic in a literal sense. Over a wide enough population base, murders, robberies, car-wrecks, etc., these are going to happen and effect most people. A friend of a friend or the cousin of a neighbor. Endemic suffering numbs unless there is a personal connection. Hospital emergency rooms are full of emergencies. Millions of Americans are unemployed. Billions of people are starving. The stalin line of one death is a tragedy, a million is a statistic.

Yes, yes. We all know this.

* * * *

The three thousand killed on the eleventh of September ten years ago Sunday (it was a Tuesday) do not represent. This is the problem of Stalin's line and common thoughts on mass suffering: death and suffering does not represent death and suffering. A child dying every ten seconds represents death. The child who dies does not represent anything. The family that loses their house to a wildfire does not represent nor does the mother who loses her son to a drunk-driver. These are not representations.

* * * *

Well, toward morning the conversation turned on the Eucharist, which I, being the Catholic, was obviously supposed to defend. [Mary McCarthy] said when she was a child and received the Host, she thought of it as the Holy Ghost, He being the 'most portable' person of the Trinity; now she thought of it as a symbol and implied that it was a pretty good one. I then said, in a very shaky voice, 'Well, if it's a symbol, to hell with it.'

* * * *

Suffering is not a metaphor. The problem of pain is not metaphorical. However, joy is in the deepest sense. To the Christian, joy represents and does not deny. It speaks truthfully both of suffering and redemption. Joy is the Triduum. It is God's redemptive work presented again and again, represented. Because Easter Sunday comes after Good Friday, suffering is not forgotten, but it loses all meaning in the ultimate sense. Death has no victory.

Death seems to, though. Towers fall down. Waters rise. Families break. Cancer spreads. Seems is not is. That is Christian faith. The seems represents nothing. The is represents joy and the power of God to redeem even the worst nothingness. Mourning with those who mourn, as the Christian is called to do, does not mean telling them to not mourn or to perk up. It is to stand with the suffering knowing that suffering does not win so we need not seek petty triumphs. We can build hospice and go to war zones and stay in the most dire situations (which should mean those close to where you are not romantically apart from everyday life) and not try to win but love.

The Hierarchy of Victimhood

2011-09-06T12:37:00.002-05:00

Fires to the left of us
Fires to the right of us...
Rode the six hundred...

The fires around Austin are dying down because the wind has died down because the storm near Louisiana has died down. Yesterday was the coolest day Austin has had since the spring. In the city, it was refreshing and breezy with a pleasant sunshine.

Austin was the headline yet everywhere hit by fire was miles from the city. Miles of mostly clear-cut landscape that could not catch.

The next bit of news to flash was "Two dead". Mortalities depict severity. We need severity to pay attention.

It is the same thing when you watch a movie. What is at stake? How much are you invested in the characters? The more far-reaching national news from the Central Texas fires consists of Rick Perry coming back to Texas to 'take charge'. His first acting of taking charge? Commenting on how striking a visual forest fires are.

What is the proper response to a fire? More specifically, what is the proper response to a fire as opposed to a car crash? Other than geographic scope, is there anything different going on?

On first instinct, the distinction seems to be that a car crash involves willful agents whereas a brushfire does not. It is nobodies fault, et cetera. This black-and-white way of looking at evades all responsibility. Unless it is perfectly clear to everyone, nobody is responsible for anything.

My point is not that people should start blaming themselves for their house burning down, but that losing a home and losing a car in a wreck: these are not qualitatively different losses. Losing a loved one to a fire and losing a loved to a wreck or to a hurricane: these are all the same sort of loss. It is our hierarchy of loss that is problematic: judging some victims more than others (or more moral victims, et cetera).

The hierarchy protects us from loss and allows for layers of judgment that evade personal confession.

The Age of Incidence

2011-09-01T10:10:00.001-05:00

I have been writing in this space for a long time. To go back through the archives is to go back to a time before the iPhone. What has been consistent throughout has been the incidental nature of whatever I chose to write about. I took pride in the eccentricity of it, in my lack of need of direction. It was what it was.

It is what it is.

No.

* * * *

I have scratched the surface for years. The surface no longer itches.

* * * *

Blogger changed its dashboard format this week. It is also time to change the format of Varro, both in content and in presentation. The subjects I cover will be very similar: Politics, Religion, Music, Culture. My posture, though, will change. Having a space to speak is rare, no matter how small. Having something to say is rarer still. I am no longer going to waste either of those qualities or be ashamed of them and ashamed of writing here. Digital writing is writing. Digital reading is reading. I have done this for a long time and I know what I am doing. Now I am going to do it well instead of pretend like it doesn't exist.

Thank you, gentle reader, for sticking with the decline of postings. And for coming back here again and again. If you read something you like, please share it. If you don't like it, please comment and put me in my place. Writing should only be about the incidental when it points to the real. Otherwise it is just another ego-massage, and we already have enough places for that in this world.

Football, Conferences, and Ideology

2011-08-31T21:14:00.001-05:00

Texas A&M has decided to leave the Big 12 (10 schools) to try and join the SEC (12 schools). Colorado has already left the Big 12 (10 schools) to join the pac 12 (12 schools) as Nebraska has left to join the Big 10 (12 schools).

Here we have a wonderful example of ideology and arithmetic. The Big 10 has had 11 schools since 1990 yet it doesn't go to eleven.

Numbers do not represent, they "represent". The number is not a mark of how things are but either how they used to be or how they can be. The Big 10 will never change yet the Pac 12 changed immediately. Football conferences in the east don't have numbers. They have no need to count just like Harvard has no need for majors.

All of this gets back to the not so old saying, whoever frames the question wins. Thus competitive situations end up being a number of parties fighting over who gets to frame the question instead of bothering to wonder whether the question they are asking matters. Nobody asks to enter the Ivy League. It isn't even a question. They won. What does a school with a 6 Bil endowment care about football revenue? Cornell probably gets comparable funds from NIH, DoA, and DoD to more than equal the money the University of Texas makes on football (over 100 mil, if you are counting). College football is a big business, but only insofar as it is a function of brand-management.

Thus we get to the rub. Numbers only matter as a function of branding, which usually means as a function of focus groups.

Branding isn't a bad thing. Too many undergraduate radicals high on Adbusters, Naomi Klein, and Mary Jane make this mistake. A brand is a short answer to a question people want to ask. A brand is a history, an experience, it is relatable and enviable. In may legitimize the means of production which marginalize workers, yet anyone or any group that does anything in this world is a brand. Brands are ubiquitous. They are how we process reality.

Yet ideology is here, as powerful than ever. Ideology maintains the brand. It maintains the lie. It speaks of everything but reality and makes the actual pursuit of reality a quest or a conversion, not simply looking at from one's bedroom window.

2011-08-31T17:25:00.005-05:00

Quarterly GDP data don’t, on the whole, tend to make the person studying them laugh out loud. The most recent set, however, are an exception, despite the fact that the general picture is of unrelieved and spreading economic gloom. Instead of the surge of rebounding growth which historically accompanies successful exit from a recession, we have the UK’s disappointing 0.2 per cent growth, the US’s anaemic 0.3 per cent and the glum eurozone average figure of 0.2 per cent. That number includes the surprising and alarming German 0.1 per cent, the desperately poor French 0 per cent and then, wait for it, the agreeably frisky Belgian 0.7 per cent. Why is that, if you’ve been following the story, laugh-aloud funny? Because Belgium doesn’t have a government. Thanks to political stalemate in Brussels, it hasn’t had one for 15 months. No government means none of the stuff all the other governments are doing: no cuts and no ‘austerity’ packages. In the absence of anyone with a mandate to slash and burn, Belgian public sector spending is puttering along much as it always was; hence the continuing growth of their economy. It turns out that from the economic point of view, in the current crisis, no government is better than any government – any existing government.

John Lanchester in LRB

The Google+ Conspiracy

2011-08-18T09:28:00.000-05:00

Every time I check you face now i get a headache. Not only from the drivel people post about, but because of the interface. It is like MySpace circa 2006 minus the sparkles and gif walls.

I like Google + because it doesn't give me an anxiety attack and it has clean lines (never underestimate the importance of clean lines in all media).

So here is the conspiracy. Google Buzz sucked. Orkut sucked. Google has tried this before and failed miserably. What lowers expectations more than multiple failures and a quiet launch?

Basically, what if Google+ had been the plan all along and Google's other attempts at social were pushed out precisely in order to fail because Larry and Serge knew that only the right design could take any bite into Facebook's market share?

Why Obama Doesn't Vacation in Detroit?

2011-08-17T19:10:00.000-05:00

Do you know why Presidents go to super swanky locations to vacation?

Because they are better than everyone?

No

Because they simply want to schmooze with the rich and famous?

No, but closer.

Because super-swanky locations have the infrastructure and exclusionary practices to sustain a prolonged Secret Service presence?

Yes.

Whatever cost savings are found in a location are immediately lost by the cost of adding and sustaining infrastructure. It is one thing to drive into a city and make a speech. It is another to stay 10 days.

The other unspoken thing about Martha's Vineyard is the island's historical relationship not only to rich white people but to middle class African Americans (cf. The Emperor of Ocean Park).

There are plenty of arguments to make against Obama. This is not one of them.

Watch the Throne

2011-08-17T09:21:00.000-05:00

I had high hopes for this album. They were dashed. Instead, I have a short review. The two words I can think that describe the lyrics of the album are vapid ostentation. The most annoying part is that the music and the beats are incredible, inventive, almost moving, and yet we are back to talk of Givenchy designs.

It is like Jay Z and Kanye made an album out of that one annoying track they had on their previous albums. Frankly, it is like the emo music of rap. Emo was taking Radiohead's Fake Plastic Trees and turning it into a genre. Listening to Fake Plastic Trees is great. Listening to 10 songs that sound just like it is literally mind-numbing and stupidity inducing.

Watch the Throne is like an album of "Run this Town".

Now, swagger filled lines are a large part of the hip hop tradition, but before, neither Jay Z nor Kanye have had to be reduced to such consistent drivel. They are arrogant narcissists, don't get me wrong, but still, I wasn't expecting this.

Ah well, burn outs are inevitable. Like much of pop culture, the true sadness is not in the artists themselves but in the audience who think that this is a life worth living.

Rick Perry and the Future of America

2011-08-15T10:35:00.000-05:00

Rick Perry is the worst public speaker I have ever seen. He spoke at my high school in 2001 right before I graduated and I was among the student team delegated to prepare for the speech. He was awful: incoherent, blabbering, self-satisfied.

He has also destroyed education in Texas (both higher ed and basic public ed).

So why am I excited about him running for President? First, because national media scrutiny will quickly reveal things a lot of funny things about him and it will be great for a laugh. Second, by focussing on national issues, it will be harder for him to continue to mess up Texas. Third, for a number of reasons, it is looking like the office of the President of the United States is very, very weak with only a few limited foreign affairs powers so if Perry (or Romney) win, nothing much is going to happen in the country.

America isn't at a crossroads, it is on a boring stretch of Highway 21 between Crocket and Alto. Sure there are hills and woods, but there are also a lot of funny things to look at.

Riots in Tottenham

2011-08-08T22:46:00.000-05:00

And it has nothing to do with soccer.

I was unaware of the violence until this evening, violence that has at least three sides: the rioters, the cops, and the locals.

Sure, there is the violence against public property (though the Apple store in Oxford Circus is amply protected). People work at businesses that no longer exist. People work at insurance companies that insure those locations where purses will soon be tight. Consequences are present, but the riot is the third level of violence.

The second is the Metropolitan Police. The reality of what happened during the instigating shooting will never be widely known. Inquests will be made, et cetera. Riot police; an odd phrase. A riot is by definition un-policeable, so riot police function as the literal reality of the state of emergency. They only exist when someone else starts a problem, yet you cannot have a riot today without riot police. There couldn't be the news story, "Riots broke out in East Austin. Normal police arrived on the scene and calmed everyone down". Riot cops function to both provoke and to alienate responsibility from those enforcing the peace.

The third violence is the one that was present before the riots started and the one that will still be there whenever the violence stops.

This doesn't happen to be your typical pinko-analysis of blaming the system and absolving all non-state actors of responsibility. You are still responsible for your actions even if you are right to take them. The person who yells at the police because her brother was shot is different from the thief (looting is a terrible word filled with class and racial connotations. Hell, maybe even denotations).

Easy Politics and Prophecy

2011-08-08T10:35:00.000-05:00

A prophet is not welcome in her hometown. The distortions of this biblical phrase are manifold. To some, it can be a criterion of prophecy. If I am not welcome in my hometown, then I am a prophet. This is the same distortion many Christians make about the sermon on the mount. Blessed are the persecuted. "Hey! I'm a white male in America. I can't own slaves anymore. I'm persecuted. I must be doing the Lord's work."

It is an inverted and self-justifying logic but it is a prevalent one.

However, let's think through hometown again and make it a little richer than just the place you are from. Your hometown is where your home is. Where your people are. Most importantly, where you are. What this means is that a prophet speaks directly to where she is. That is the criterion. In the Hebrew Scriptures, the prophets spoke in Jerusalem and in the countryside and they were heard in Jerusalem and the countryside. They weren't heard at home because their words cut too deep.

To rephrase: if you are a prophet, you can never preach to the choir.

* * * * *

Since the Civil Rights movement and the popularization of the Black Church's appropriation of the prophetic school (There is a reason why Heschel marched with King), most large political movements have tried to appropriate for themselves the mantle of the prophet. The mantle of the one crying in the wilderness, the one preaching truth to power. It is easy to run to capital hill and through paint on someone. False persecution is the political posture of the day. Everyone wants to be a martyr. Nobody wants to die. This is prophecy. This isn't politics. It is egomania.

Who is better at covering Al Green: the Fleet foxes or me?

2011-08-02T12:49:00.000-05:00

The answer to the question is obvious. The question itself is the amusing part.

Follow this link to hear the Fleet foxes version.

Next, witness the atrocity that is my completely sober* rendition of the first verse a few years ago in Colorado. The tuning issues I blame on the altitude (funny how everything on this site comes back to an insecurity about intonation problems).

Seriously. The video is bad. Not ironically bad or self-effacing bad. Just bad. If you don't want to listen to something bad, do not listen to it.

If you go to the actual youtube site, only six people clicked dislike out of 1400 views and I don't have any racist comments. It is quite disappointing.

Cognitive dissonance and music

2011-07-28T11:37:00.000-05:00

Some metaphors are so powerful that we forget that they continue to be metaphors. Cognitive dissonance is one. It is musical, incredibly musical, but actually not musical enough. Dissonance in music is explained usually in relation to consonance. Consonance usually exemplified in a triadic chord structure (C-E-G, etc.). It feels good. It works. People like it. Dissonance, then, would be something like C-C#-D. It reminds of tense moments in suspense films. That would be a technical side of dissonance.

There is also the practical side of dissonance: people are out of tune a lot. If you are trying to play a C major and you play the C a quarter tone down and the G a quarter tone up, it will sound off (this doesn't work on a properly tuned piano, but what are you doing, rich boy, with a properly tuned piano?)

The exciting thing about both technical and practical dissonance is that neither is general. If you are out-of-tune, you are either flat or sharp and once you realize that you can adjust. If you are trying to play a C major and instead you play C-C#-D, you can be corrected. The issue is that you both have to know what you are trying to do and what said action properly so called should said like.

The problem with the metaphor cognitive dissonance is that it represents something either accidental or self-deceptive, neither of which relates well to the musical root of the metaphor. Sure dissonance can be accidental and self-deceptive, but it never is generally so. Dissonance is never a general phenomenon and that is what those who use the metaphor should also understand. Cognitive dissonance is never general. Or to restate, cognitive dissonance is only general out of pride or laziness.

All that is assuming the dissonance is unintentional which is where allowing for another person's subjectivity must come into play. Sometimes I like to play on out of tune guitars. Not because I don't know how to tune or hear the issue, but because I like the sound. When I do this, I have often been stopped and told I was out of tune because (and I am generalizing here) they assumed that I wanted to be in tune. It is assumptions all around and being human often means not answering questions people don't ask. I didn't ask whether I was in tune, but the people thought I did. They spoke for me thus silencing me thus adding dissonance to us instead of allowing the dissonance in the music.

Unemployment, the debt ceiling, and intention

2011-07-26T09:29:00.000-05:00

People care about what they care about. It is redundant yet important to say. Unemployment, for instance, only effects the people it effects. Or the war in Iraq. If your brother isn't over there, bringing him home or giving him bullets: these are not big issues.

This is why Tip O'Neil said that all politics are local. If the power went out on Lamar in Austin and I couldn't get around to the places I want to go, that would be my issue. Not war or death or poverty but getting the damn power back on.

And no, this isn't Maslov.

The problem is not that people are selfish and self-involved but that politicians pretend like we aren't and that issues are completely generalizable beyond the selfish and the self-involved. There is no central issue in America. There is no dealbreaking issue. There is "I need a job" and "turn the power on" or "send me my check" or "send me my farm subsidy", beyond which the government has very little relation to the lives of Americans.

Intention

I had a poetry teacher in undergrad who, in workshops, would have you read your poem and then have everyone else talk about it. You could not respond. It didn't matter what you intended. It mattered what you said. If the people listening to you didn't get what you meant, you should have written it better. Don't blame others. Get better.

This is the kind of advice politicians should hear. It's not fair. Blah. Four year olds can say it's not fair. Get over yourself. Do your job. If people don't care about the debt ceiling, than maybe they need to learn a lesson or maybe you need to learn a lesson. If people don't care about unemployment or do care about it, do something. Don't talk about owning the story. Own the story.

The Curiosities of Customer Service

2011-07-21T10:47:00.000-05:00

In college, I once spilled water on my laptop keyboard. Instead of repairing I taught myself ASCII numbers in order to keep typing papers without the use of B, N, P or D. I don't like calling customer service people. Waiting on the phone is a pain no matter because of how nobody really wants to be there, everyone is fake, and you can't even see who you are dealing with.

I preface my post with that to talk about how wonderfully delightful a recent customer service experience was for me. I used the Time Warner chat function and it was actually enjoyable. Instead of being transferred from line to line and typing in random numbers, once the chat client opened I moved seamless from the general question desk to the desk of my specific question and worked through the problem swiftly and productively. Sandy, the tech who helped me, would type "Hold on a second" or "Let me check this out" and I would be fine with it and go back to reading the news until she typed again. If I had been on the phone, I would have spit peanuts at being asked to hold again.

The issue is one of control. When you are waiting on the phone, the call-center person is in control. On chat, like everything else online, you possess the illusion of control. You can always shut down the chat client. And computers crash all the time, so it wouldn't even be considered rude.

Or to rephrase, the power dynamic is quite different. On chat, both of us have the freedom to speak in ways that the rolls of a service call do not allow: the ignorant and indignant customer; overworked technician used to answering the same stupid questions 40 hours a week.

It is a useful intellectual exercise to think of how this power dynamic works here and how the basic, ordinary structures of life push and pull us in certain directions sometimes for not good reasons. The goal of a call center is to make people feel supported and solve problems, not alienate them, yet it usually is the location of alienation. This is sort of logic and investigation could be pursued in most ways of life.

Fantasy and the Game of Thrones

2011-07-15T11:40:00.000-05:00

The Fifth Book is on its way to my apartment as we speak. There is a curious sense of anticipation running with it akin to how I felt hours before the first prequel came out.

I read Game of Thrones while the Varro lawyer was still in undergrad and I just wanted to be like him and so I read whatever he recommended (Camus, Sartre, and Fantasy Novels). It was a ratty paperback. I don't think there was an original run hardcover. I read it in a weekend. This was back in the time when I bought every Star Wars and Dragonlance novel that came out and ravenously bore through Tom Clancy and James Clavells. I really like Game of Thrones. I liked the characters and the settings and the politics and the action and the mythos, the story beyond the story.

Since then I have bought and read each book the week they come out and read them usually within 24 hours. I have also reread each of the previous ones before the next one comes out. This last reread took two weeks of may out (including a stretch where I was throwing up on city buses) and I found that the books stand up well.

Fantasy novels are consumptive fiction. They draw you away into another story, into another world. Good fantasy novels aren't escapist as much as they are dialectical: you push and pull against the mythos, you react and imagine but you are still you. Bad fantasy (like all bad fiction) doesn't want you to be you. It wants you to be Bella or Edward or a princess or stable boy.

What stood up for me most this last reading is the mythos. It is the story before the story. The story of Rhaegar Targaryen and Lyanna Stark, Eddard Stark and Arthur Dayne at Starfall. Jon Snow. This story is the story and it is only hinted at and glimpsed and alluded to. The action is gripping, the plotting steller, the characters mostly well rounded, but the mythos pulls me back and will until the full story is told.

Brief Postscript: I watched the first few episodes of the HBO series and I'll watch the rest, but my problem with it is the smallness of everything. The smallness of the set design. The smallness of the landscape. The smallness of the Wall. Maybe that lacuna can be overcome. Hopefully, that is.

2011-07-15T11:22:00.000-05:00

The Genomic Revolution and Race

2011-07-14T09:52:00.000-05:00

In genome-wide association studies, known as GWAS, researchers compare the genomes of hundreds or thousands of people, looking for differences in DNA. It’s hoped that GWAS will explain what’s known as the missing heritability: Scientists have so far been able to explain biologically only a small fraction of disease risks known to be hereditary...A 2009 review by Duke University geneticist David Goldstein found that 96 percent of all GWAS genomes came from people of European ancestry. Into that remaining 4 percent is crammed every other racial and ethnic group, though in absolute numbers they represent the vast majority — roughly 80 percent and growing — of humanity.

“Additionally, studies of other populations have generally included smaller sample sizes than those of participants of European ancestry,” wrote Goldstein in 2009. “Moreover, only a few studies have even included, let alone focused on, subjects with African ancestry.”
The National Institutes of Health mandated diversity in federally funded genetics studies in 1985, but the requirement hasn’t been followed. To an extent that’s understandable, as most genomics is conducted in the United States and western Europe, where most people have European ancestors. They’re a conveniently accessible study group. But with genome sequencing costs plummeting, there’s no excuse for remaining exclusive, write Bustamante and colleagues.

“It is tempting to focus on populations that are motivated, organized, medically compliant and otherwise easy to study,” they write. “We risk perpetuating the health disparities that plague the medical system. Those most in need must not be the last to receive the benefits of genetic research.”

from Wired

17th Century Decolonial Art

2011-07-12T11:14:00.001-05:00

In case you were wondering where the previous image came from, there's this hot new tumblr out there with exclusive images of 17th century decolonial art aimed at illustrating for Phillip II of Spain why the Spanish were foreign invaders to Peru and why God's plan does not include raping priests (the gerund is in use here, not the verb. Big difference in this case.).

http://17thcenturydecolinialart.tumblr.com/

El primer nueva corónica y buen gobierno

2011-07-12T10:54:00.000-05:00

brief announcement

2011-07-11T11:37:00.000-05:00

The diminishing volume of this curiously prolific space had been caused by falling in love and engaging a lovely woman who recently agreed that marriage would be beneficial for us.

Rates of blogging should increase soon, unless the rapture happens after the debt-ceiling collapses (that's what everyone means by apocalypse, right?).

And for the record, the female in question was the cause of last week's anticipation.

Thank you.

A True accomplishment

2011-07-06T12:53:00.000-05:00

I am grateful, as the final Harry Potter gets close to release and I get close to not paying to see it, that one of the recent ways someone has found this little site is through searching for the words 'arry po'er. If we here at Varro can add to the promulgation of bad cockney transcription, our job will be well done.

Sex Selection and Population Control

2011-07-06T09:45:00.000-05:00

The problem with population control is that once you start being concerned about populations, it is the marginalized who are seen as expendable. The fear of over-population is the most selfish of fears: instead of changing our life we should destroy the possibility of others' lives. When you start selecting, you start selecting against the disabled and then against women.

Foreign Policy magazine has a gripping article on how "The U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), the World Bank, and the Rockefeller Foundation were among the organizations that poured money into stanching the birth rate abroad, while the International Planned Parenthood Federation (IPPF) and the Population Council helped coordinate efforts on the ground."

It is a story I had never read before but one that is not surprising. The logic of population control currently practiced especially in India and China in ways that limit the possibility of female births comes out of the West. It was another wonderful gift. Thanks, world.

But most surprising of all for me is that the story puts the Mexico City Policy into a different light. As it is now practiced, I think the policy is complete political fearmongering, but the UN and World Bank and other orgs getting federal funds were doing serious population control endeavors, not just family planning. Or, family planning to the next level. Which means planning for a family without women.

Anticipation

2011-06-30T10:07:00.000-05:00

Waiting for something good to happen is a strange phenomenon. It is both active and passive. It can be entirely active in that it overwhelms all of your other functions. I could simply pace for a number of hours or go to sleep or find another method of avoiding reflection on the precise time between now and said event (in this case, a reunion).

The normal human state is not anticipation. There isn't a continuous assumption that something good is going to happen soon (I use good in the transcendental sense). Ordinary life functions on a focus of the now: filling up the car, getting groceries, changing diapers, doing your job, etc.. Tomorrow has worries of its own.

Yet anticipation is not worry. Or, how is anticipation not worry? That is a difficult question to answer. Perhaps in its more consuming phases, more active phases it is. Anticipation becomes the worry that the good may not indeed take place. There is plenty of time left for things to go wrong. You don't have to grit your teeth and say 'worry, worry, worry, worry, worry' in ordering to be worrying or avoiding the present.

The way that anticipation is not worry concerns fittingness. To use myself as an example, the reunion that is coming up today will make life more fitting, joyful, etc., due to the return of a certain wonderful person and the difference between ordinary life at the moment and how life will be in 13 hours is striking. Anticipation becomes, then, an annoyance with a present lacuna and a longing for its closure (can you close lacunae? I would assume so but I've never tried it myself. Filling it up until it is no longer present, et cetera).

Whatever it is, anticipation is not straightforward or tremendously manageable. As a Christian, there is a great anticipation acted out weekly at the Eucharist but aimed for the eschaton. Perhaps a strong way to think about eschatology is by thinking about times you have waited for loved ones to return. This is how the early Christians felt and it seems, scripturally speaking, to be the sentiment that contemporary Christians should feel as well.

Concerning Free Shipping

2011-06-29T12:30:00.000-05:00

Some things I am more likely to buy with free shipping than other things. Books, for example. When I decide to spend more on a watch (when, not if) than most people make in a year, I am probably not going to fixate on the shipping costs.

Activism and Passivism

2011-06-29T10:08:00.000-05:00

A basic rule of political analysis is to look at a position someone takes by trying to imagine the opposite of that position. Like pedophiles. Nobody is going to say that we want more pedophiles teaching in our schools. Someone may say a convicted pedophile deserves the chance to reform his life.

A lot of the tricks of modern politicis (as George Lakoff has helpfully pointed out) consist in framing as many issues as possible around positions that nobody can possibly avoid. Republicans have been very good and diligent about finding these positions. Tax hikes, for instance. It is simple, deceptive language that defines away any conversation. Are you pro-tax hike? Are you pro-kicking kittens?

That's all fine and well, but I am more interested right now in how these same tricks are used linguistically in the word 'activist'. What precisely is an activist? One who is active? No. So the literal meaning doesn't work. Activity is a state. Passivity is a state. Activism is a common word. Passivism is not. What is the point of claiming a word whose contrary does not exist?

If I say that I am an environmental activist or a civil rights activist or a feminist activist, what precisely am I saying?

Nothing. Or, more to the point, you want to be associated with those words. That's it. If you are protesting against the war, then you are a demonstrator or a protestor, not an activist. An activist isn't anything. I can be be an environmental activist by recycling a can of soda, or I can canvass an area for a petition against aluminum companies and spend 100 hours a week. Both could be considered activists. One is a douchey activist, but still.

A Moral Critique of Natural Law

2011-06-28T10:30:00.001-05:00

My case is short, mostly phenomenological, and quite unoriginal.

The existence or non-existence of a natural law, a particular order in which all life finds true flourishing, is a very different issue from the practice and argument of proponents of natural law philosophy or ethics. Arguments, though, rarely make this distinction. However, pointing it out doesn't matter much to me because it avoids the larger and more problematic aspect of Natural Law theories: practice. Id est, what do they look.

Most of the time (and I think this is a fair generalization), natural law arguments defend the status quo. They aren't conservative as much as reactionary. Natural law defended Jim Crow.

But let us jump forwards and backwards: the test of an ethical theory should be found in those it produces. What theories produced civil rights? What theories produced Indian independence? Or, to not be so heavy handed, what clear moral good has natural law theory produced?

There is a rationale that can be found to support natural law, a tempting one, like Calvinism, yet the human life and human flourishing stand on more than rationales.

Anthony Lane on Bad Teacher

2011-06-27T10:06:00.000-05:00

There are few genres that I dread more than the teaching movie. This is because, more often than not, the mechanics of actual teaching are sidelined in favor of a public lecture on Ways to Inspire. I still recall the wrath with which I simmered through “Dead Poets Society,” “Dangerous Minds,” and—heaven preserve us—“Mr. Holland’s Opus,” all of which left me with a renewed respect for Mr. Gradgrind, the stony tyrant of the schoolroom in Dickens’s “Hard Times,” described as “a kind of cannon loaded to the muzzle with facts.” The heart sinks in inverse proportion to the eagerness with which such movies command it to soar, and there is a wild relief to be had in seizing upon the exceptions, like “Rushmore” and “Election,” which politely inform Mr. Holland where he can stick his opus.

The New Yorker

Stephen Colbert vs. Jack White (of the White Stripes)

2011-06-24T20:36:00.001-05:00

It's a Catholic Off

The Colbert Report
Tags: Colbert Report Full Episodes,Political Humor & Satire Blog,Video Archive

NSFW language

Drafts and Brand Management

2011-06-24T09:17:00.000-05:00

A few years ago, New York Times Sports columnist Bill Rhoden published a book called Forty Million Dollar Slaves about the history of the black athlete.

While I mostly disagree with the premise (Bill James's piece a few months ago in Slate hammers this point home. It is not the fault of competitive sports that they integrated faster than other enterprises and thus provide enormous opportunities to urban kids. Yes, odds are against them and yes, the NBA is not the only way out of the ghetto, but it is not the NBAs fault that society hasn't given more ways out of the ghetto. Baseball integrated because winning became more important than racism.

People in the sporting world in 1950 were just as racist as people in other parts of society—but people in the sporting world got over it a hell of a lot faster, because we cared more about winning than we did about discriminating. Because the sporting world was always ahead of the rest of the world in breaking racial barriers, black kids came to perceive sports as being the pathway out of poverty. For this we are now harshly and routinely criticized—as if it was our fault that the rest of society hasn't kept up. Some jackass Ph.D ex-athlete pops up on my TV two or three times a year claiming that a young black kid has a better chance of being hit by lightning than of becoming a millionaire athlete. This is nonsense as well as being a rational hash.

Look, it's not our fault that the rest of the world hasn't kept up. It's not our fault that there are still barriers to black kids becoming doctors and lawyers and airline pilots. Black kids regard the athletic world as a pathway out of poverty because it is. The sporting world should be praised and honored for that. Instead, we are more often criticized because the pathway is so narrow.

Yes, this is still a parenthetical.)

Yet it is here at the draft where Rhoden is right and where, probably, Bill James would agree with him. What is going on? Why on earth are exclusive rights to individuals divied up in such a fashion? American sports are the only enterprise in the world where certain people can buy and trade the rights to certain people based on collusion.

The rightness or wrongness I am not so much concerned at as the oddness of it all. This is odd. This is not how humans normally operate. The draft is not a triumph of capitalist freedom (that is free agency) or of institutional stability. No. What the draft is a triumph of is marketing first and foremost. This is the reason why it has survived in the age of free agency. If American sports contracts were had like European ones, we couldn't have this big event and build up. European sports don't compete at the level of imagination and idolatry as American ones.

The result, though, is that the young boys rights are bought and sold arbitrarily. They compete to be a number. They are measured and picked and they piss in cups and instrumentalized to a tremendous degree because of marketing. There are advantages to be had on both sides, don't get me wrong, but the sheer strangeness of it all should be unsettling to self-deceivers like me who still follow sports rabidly.

Oh, and I don't know what to make of the Rockets draft. We already have three power forwards and Morris isn't that fast to play the three. Well, Dork Elvis, please prove me wrong.

Living Arguments

2011-06-23T09:35:00.000-05:00

Most of human life centers around working theories. I want to focus on city buses and assumptions today, but I think the working theory holds of working theories holds true (boom, redundancy!). When I wait for the bus, I assume the bus driver will stop if he or she sees me. It is a healthy assumption, but the knowledge is still, epistemologically speaking, assumed rather than certified. Many situations could exist wherein a bus driver passes someone at the bus stop. Many of them valid. All of them rare. Rarity and validity, though, are not mutually exclusive as we some time make it out to be.

In random number generation, one of the tricks to know that numbers are truly random is that some numbers are repeated. If I asked for twenty random numbers between one and ten I could get twenty threes. That fact itself does not create a pattern; the occurrence is simply rare.

To move from both random numbers and city buses, let us say you are cut off in traffic by a BMW convertible. The first and most likely cause of being cut off concerns the character of the driver and how he is unable to understand the existence of other people besides the ways in which he can use them.

How important is it for you or I to judge correctly in this case? Does it matter whether the BMW driver is a selfish prick or what if his wife is in labor or his mother fell or some other altruistic cause is at the heart of the matter?

And so I return to the title of this post and the living arguments we have, the working theories and assumptions which guide our day-to-day practices. The act of deciding whether the BMW driver is a douche or a hero functions in the form of a basic syllogism in need of evidence and demanding and resulting conclusion.

Many people look at the BMW driver is the same way they look at politicians or new neighbors or a new brand of milk. If the only BMW drivers I've ever known are douchies, my conclusion after seeing this new one is that he is most likely a douche.

My point is not that these judgments are good or bad but that we rarely are aware that these judgments exist and so either affirming them or denying them is besides the point. The immediate need for approval is one of the reasons these judgments, these arguments are hidden.

Physically, we can't go into every situation and respond to it in a discreet manner. But that doesn't matter, either. We are responding. We are living arguments out. What we do, what we assume, this is not what people do generally but what we do, and it is personal in every case. Sure, it is culturally formed, yada yada, but I don't think the BMW driver is a douche entirely because I have been culturally formed to think that. Like in most other cases, seeing judgments and arguments in binary forms simply replicates the problem.

The problem, as usual, is lying to yourself.

'Just Like Heaven' covers go in different directions

2011-06-22T09:29:00.000-05:00

Well, after Dinasaur Jr., they mostly just go in lame acoustic/easy listening direction.

White Tiger

2011-06-21T09:49:00.000-05:00

Novels of India inhabit a genre almost as imaginatively expansive as the American Western. By quantity, there is no comparison of course. However, by trope and immersiveness, the comparison is apter than it seems. While Americans had the West, the Amerindians to go forth and space and settle, the British had India and Africa. Both 'dark' places where spirits dwell and adventure can be had.

Relating these tales to colonialism is an easy trick for today. The romantic way to see these locations (and genres) is as a proving ground for the inevitable bildungsroman. They are places for someone to come-of-age, yet they are also places that are coming of age.

White Tiger is a novel set mostly in the State of Bihar, Delhi, and Bangalore. The novel is most assuredly coming-of-age, but the conceit and anti-hero narrator make the story far more interesting, engrossing, etc., than standard find-yourself fair ("But he was always trying to find himself. He'd go out every night looking for himself and on the way he found Ruth, Gladys, Rosemary and Irving.")

The conceit is that Balram Halwai is an entrepreneur in Bangalore writing to the premier of China trying to explain India and what it means to be a modern entrepreneur. The power of the book is found as much in the detailed descriptions of the life of the lower castes (the two worlds of modern India) as well as the dreadful tension and restriction of the social binds which so many Westerners find romantic in places like India. The great villain of the story could very well be a grandmother.

India's rise (and Balram's rise as well), this isn't a story of a nation undoing the shackles of Imperialism. The insidiousness of native authority and exploitation do not exist in a vacuum. Looking for one person's fault or another is playing the game of binaries (far less interesting than the game of thrones).

White Tiger is a good read, a good story, and a source for reflection about the hidden ideologies located around the world but also the ways we mask our own ideologies. It is what a novel should be.

One last note. As a white American male sometime-aspiring novelist, there is a twinge of jealousy about the fact that I couldn't write this story. Jealousy in this case (like in all cases) is a mask for laziness. I have other stories to tell. You have other stories to tell. Tell them.

Happy Bloomsday!

2011-06-15T11:02:00.000-05:00

Today is the day uber-English nerds everywhere celebrate the novel, Ulysses (it all takes place on June 16, 1904).

In honor of this day, and because Ulysses is public domain (you can get the kindle or epub version here), here are the last lines which caused Ulysses to be banned in this country. It is an extended Molly Bloom stream of consciousness, so the quote will begin arbitrarily.

that was why I liked him because I saw he understood or felt what a woman is and I knew I could always get round him and I gave him all the pleasure I could leading him on till he asked me to say yes and I wouldnt answer first only looked out over the sea and the sky I was thinking of so many things he didnt know of Mulvey and Mr Stanhope and Hester and father and old captain Groves and the sailors playing all birds fly and I say stoop and washing up dishes they called it on the pier and the sentry in front of the governors house with the thing round his white helmet poor devil half roasted and the Spanish girls laughing in their shawls and their tall combs and the auctions in the morning the Greeks and the jews and the Arabs and the devil knows who else from all the ends of Europe and Duke street and the fowl market all clucking outside Larby Sharons and the poor donkeys slipping half asleep and the vague fellows in the cloaks asleep in the shade on the steps and the big wheels of the carts of the bulls and the old castle thousands of years old yes and those handsome Moors all in white and turbans like kings asking you to sit down in their little bit of a shop and Ronda with the old windows of the posadas 2 glancing eyes a lattice hid for her lover to kiss the iron and the wineshops half open at night and the castanets and the night we missed the boat at Algeciras the watchman going about serene with his lamp and O that awful deepdown torrent O and the sea the sea crimson sometimes like fire and the glorious sunsets and the figtrees in the Alameda gardens yes and all the queer little streets and the pink and blue and yellow houses and the rosegardens and the jessamine and geraniums and cactuses and Gibraltar as a girl where I was a Flower of the mountain yes when I put the rose in my hair like the Andalusian girls used or shall I wear a red yes and how he kissed me under the Moorish wall and I thought well as well him as another and then I asked him with my eyes to ask again yes and then he asked me would I yes to say yes my mountain flower and first I put my arms around him yes and drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes.

This is what a teaser trailer looks like

2011-06-13T12:04:00.000-05:00

I saw this right before X-Men: First Class last week (short review: good acting, well plotted, very nice wardrobe, racist). It saves the reveal for the end and paces in such a way to remind you how awesome David Fincher is at movies not staring Brad Pitt. And yes, that is Trent Rezner and Karen O (from the Yeah yeah yeahs) with the Immigrant Song cover.

Lebron Lost! Victory for Young Adult Novels Everywhere!

2011-06-13T10:17:00.000-05:00

I wanted Lebron to lose. I wanted to Dallas to win. I was elated and screaming when, with a minute left, Miami gave up. I mean, in all seriousness, they gave up with forty minutes left, but still.

Last week in Slate, Josh Levin (host of the entertaining Hang up and Listen! podcast from Slate) wrote a clever article on the problem of Jordan/Lebron comparisons with this wonderful sentence: "For sportswriters, an athlete's ideal career path is indistinguishable from the plotting of a young-adult sports novel." This is what Jordan gave us: struggle, success, time in the wilderness, then success again. Lebron, instead, has done exactly the opposite: success, struggle, Miami, struggle. He also has the following quality (Levin's words again): "LeBron James has long had the peculiar ability to make us believe his legacy is about to be determined."

Lebron went from sportswriter hero to villain and finally then did he occupy the niche of the easy story. He has been defeated. Not valiantly, though, pathetically. He has lost in the coward's way, the way of the blame of others.

Lebron is annoying. He teaches kids how to drop acid. He doesn't remember that he is always better than everyone else (Lebron constantly shooting threes is like Eric Clapton only soloing on the accordion from now on.). He fits the villain so well, yet that is what sits so uncomfortably for me. Why does he have to make the story-lines so easy? Why he can't he add a little complexity to it?

One of the most enjoyable moments (not ecstatic, simply enjoyable) of my life as a sports fan reminded me of how utterly boring many moments in sports are. Game six was as anti-climactic as the rapture. The Heat lost in the worst way possible. They didn't lose to a better team, simply a team that cared.

But sports isn't about morality but possibility and the possibilities turned up lamo because the players turned up lamo. However, there's always next season. The Cubs still suck. Life is good.

The Last Psychiatrist on The NYRB Article on Mental Illness

2011-06-10T10:56:00.000-05:00

Two gems.

If money is what pushed psychiatry down the road of unproven pharmacology, then what pushed psychiatry away from those drugs is also money. That's all. With Pharma gone, the only game in town for psychiatric research and academic tenure is the government, so you better have a generic medicine in your clinical trial or say something nice about CBT, capisch? Or TMS, and don't make me come down there. Psychiatrists aren't moving away from Eli Lilly because they got ethical; they moved away because they got a new treasure map.

You think the government money is free of agenda? The new decade of psychiatry is all about prevention, but how can you prevent disorders that you said were genetic? Or, how do you prevent a disorder in a kid whose parents are drunk, neglectful, or just plain mean? Damned if I know. But there's a lot of money in pretending to try.

and then, the big finish

SSI hasn't tripled because more people are disabled; SSI tripled because more people have no other source of income. That's not my fault, but it has most decidedly become my problem. I don't mean they're faking, I mean it is in the government's interest to promote the "awareness" of "mental health" so that people have a place to go to get services while being removed from the rosters of ordinary people. "Wow, the unemployment rate is falling!" You don't say.

It's a carny act, and Angell is part of it. Is Big Pharma responsible for the explosion in child psychiatry? Really? So it isn't anyone else's fault, I guess. Those diagnoses are sufficiently vague that when the kid starts fighting in school or getting in trouble with the law, the solution is assumed to be psychiatric. The government wants us to believe Ritalin can fix this, and Ritalin, BTW and FYI, is generic. If you abolish psychiatry you won't reduce the SSI at all, the masses will move to whatever the government next creates as a conduit for social services; a conduit that is sufficiently separated from itself so as to offer plausible deniability. "What the hell do we know about Detroit?" one G-man says to another. "It's a medical problem."

If, however, you abolish SSI then you will reduce psychiatry to the size of neonatal endocrinology. If you uncouple social services from "medical disability"-- not abolish them, just find some other, better, more logical way to distribute them-- you'll change America forever. Stop promoting a culture of disability.

Psychiatry serves at the pleasure of the government. If Dr. Angell and the good folks at the "Department of Social Medicine" [sic] want to help people, they should work on that. But they won't. Because, quite simply, there's no money in it.

White People Love the Cubs

2011-06-10T09:30:00.000-05:00

Incumbent white person of the decade, Dave Eggers, has a piece up in the new white-backgrounded ESPN site, Grantland, on the whitest team to follow in all of sports, the Chicago Cubs. (In the previous sentence, "whitest" refers not to the team of players but the followers of said team). Although, battle for whitest followers of a team has increased with the Mavericks run against the Heat.

I am actually fairly optimistic about the Grantland possibilities. Eggers, Klosterman, and Gladwell writing about sports should usually be interesting and the other pieces I have read at the site have been readible enough to finish (my minimum standard of excellence for the internet).

However, waxing on about the chuminess of Wrigley sounds more like George Will or George W. Bush than someone as "respected" as Eggers. The world needs no more additions to the Cubs mythos. The fans are already insufferable. It is as equally annoying to listen to someone talk about the clubs as it is to watch them play (because they are bad at baseball).

Some of my best friends are Cubs fans, but (Overwrought and wretched cliché alert) the truth hurts.

Songs composed swiftly on the Google homepage today

2011-06-09T12:38:00.000-05:00

"The Sun Fades Fast When Night is Near"

"That Tuesday Morning Love"

"When the Road No Longer Winds"

"Can the Hard Places Soften?"

"At Least Better than Cumbersome"

There are no slippery slope arguments

2011-06-08T13:40:00.000-05:00

Because every argument is a slippery slope. No argument cannot be extended ad absurdum so that merely saying that an argument can is NOT SAYING ANYTHING AT ALL.

Thank you, Ross Douthat, for ticking me off and reminding me I shouldn't be trolling the internet looking to be ticked off.

Music and the transformation of desire

2011-06-08T10:36:00.000-05:00

A music camp is currently taking place at the location of my employment. Ten young cellists are currently scraping away at transcriptions of Tchaikovsky and Ravel and they are getting better. The desire to do something well is not foreign to humanity (understatement alert). Given the choice between avoiding traffic while driving to work or getting into a wreck, most people would choose the former. I give this example because it is at the very basicness of human life that our practices mold us. Driving to work is like playing the cello like forming an argument like cooking like eating like running like basketball like chess like gardening like Spanish like dropping a deuce. Yes, dropping a deuce is a practice in which we, humans, can excel and flourish.

Back to music. Music is how I understood all of this. It wasn't reading Aristotle or Thomas Aquinas but simply practicing my bass over and over again until I realized both what excellence looked like and how far I had to go. What I also understood was how my desire for excellence in music is much more concrete than "I like it". Music, practicing music, listening and thinking about music transforms how I see the world and live in it on the basic level of how I drop a deuce among other things. A big part of this is the transformation of desire, of what I want to get out of the world/my life/my actions/etc.

Back to the camp. This is why music should be taught and children should practice and play and live musically. Not because it makes them "smarter" or looks good on an app or socializes them but because it helps to transform their desire. That is what education is, at its heart, about. That is what growing up is about. The desire of infancy are not the desires of youth are not the desires of adulthood. These desires change not through age but edification. The breaking down of the body is an excuse. It happens, but it is not the reason why forty-year olds need not party till dawn every day of the week. Partying till dawn is both radically self-absorbed and boring. There is more to life than one good night. Music teaches this, in part, because one night never really does much. You need a thousand good nights to be a musician. You need ten thousand to be an adult.

Joe Posnanski on Rafa Nadal and Federer

2011-06-06T12:22:00.002-05:00

There is a romance to Federer that Nadal has always found Rafa wanting. David Foster Wallace killed himself and yet Federer plays on so literate folks must root for Federer. Yet, still, he is not who we think he is. Here is Posnanski on the French Open final and how he realized that his romanticism (my word, not his) for Federer is misplaced.

So I was rooting for Federer, as usual, and there was this point during the French Open Final ... it was pretty clear by then that Nadal would win. There had been some hope for Federer in the first set when he broke serve and had a few chances to win the thing. But the truth is that when they are both right, Federer cannot beat Nadal. It has been talked about time and again: Federer is the greatest player of all time. And he's not the greatest player of his own time. This was the 25th time they faced each other, and Nadal has won 17 of those matches. It was this way from the start -- Nadal beat Federer the first time they played in 2004, and then after losing a five-setter to Federer in Miami (he actually led two sets to love), Nadal won the next five.

It should be said that there was a brief time, from Wimbledon 2006 through 2007, when Federer won five out of seven matches against Nadal. He even beat Nadal on clay during that stretch -- he's only beaten Nadal on clay twice through the years. But excepting that stretch and the odd upset or two in Madrid or London, the best Federer can hope to do against Nadal is extend him. Federer's game is scissors. Nadal's game is stone.

The Rhetoric of D-Day

2011-06-06T09:49:00.000-05:00

So strategically, the Normandy invasion was not that important. Operation Bagration (one of the most despicable things the soviets ever did. After defeating the Germans, they sat on the banks of the Vistula to allow for the Germans to slaughter Jews and partisans as they retreated) and the Battle of Anzio (all taking place at the same time as the planning of Italy) did much more for the collapse of Germany during World War 2. Normandy was Churchill saving face for Dunkirk (where he didn't want the British Expeditionary Force to retreat but die on the sands. He tried to send the boats back to England but it didn't work and thousands were saved).

D-Day is about glorious remembrance, not military effectiveness. Anzio was a bold invasion. Inchon (a few years later) was a bold invasion. D-Day was rhetoric. It helped solidify Eisenhower in the world's imagination and helped some French people, but it was not the ultimate sacrifice. The defenses were nothing like those the Marines faced in the Pacific.

So as far as military remembrances go, D-Day celebrations hide the greater history of the war in favor of. hagiography (thanks Steve Ambrose). It is necessarily bad to remember, but it isn't what Spielberg and others have made it out to be. Nor was the Second World War about liberating concentration camps, but that is another post all together.

What wikileaks did

2011-06-03T08:46:00.015-05:00

Steven Levitt wrote yesterday on the Freakonomics blog about what little impact the wikileaks cables actually had.

That, in short, should be seen as the most important discovery for Americans: the federal government is phenomenally boring. The state department is filled with people doing their job, sometimes well and sometimes poorly, but that is about it. The conspiracy is that there is no great conspiracy. Transparency doesn't mean anything interesting is going to appear.

For the world, the most important discovery from wikileaks was how tenuous America's relationship to the Tunisian and Egyptian government truly was which gave confidence to the protest movements.

The search for conspiracy is a moralistic quest. We assume the problem is that the people in power are bad not that the power structure itself is bad (A lot of left-leaning folk talk about structure and superstructure, but they still mostly mean moralism, "we need to get the bad people out and the good people in"). Everyone I've ever met in government work has been decent. Sure, there is an occasional prick, but prick's can't run vast conspiracies.

3quarksdaily on Louis Menand on the value of college

2011-06-02T14:09:00.000-05:00

Like everything Menand writes, his article on the purpose of a college education was informative and even-handed (by 'even-handed' it seemed that he thought people whom he disagreed with were human. One of the great errors of 'political' writers is constant dehumanizing. Other voices aren't really voices that should be heard. If someone should not be heard, they are not quite a someone.).

Menand's conclusion was not that intrusting or novel, but in the article he set up a typology of higher education that divides theories of higher ed into meritocratic ones and democratic ones (he adds a third at the end of the article, but it isn't worth mentioning). Now, the interesting part.

3quarksdaily, a science/literature filter site with a large following published an excerpt from Menand's article. The site publishes tons of excerpts each day. However, what is funny about this one is that they publish the typological description of the meritocratic view of higher education in full without acknowledgeing that it is simply a type instead of a description of ought or something to that effect.

Here it is:

Society needs a mechanism for sorting out its more intelligent members from its less intelligent ones, just as a track team needs a mechanism (such as a stopwatch) for sorting out the faster athletes from the slower ones. Society wants to identify intelligent people early on so that it can funnel them into careers that maximize their talents. It wants to get the most out of its human resources. College is a process that is sufficiently multifaceted and fine-grained to do this.

College is, essentially, a four-year intelligence test. Students have to demonstrate intellectual ability over time and across a range of subjects. If they’re sloppy or inflexible or obnoxious—no matter how smart they might be in the I.Q. sense—those negatives will get picked up in their grades. As an added service, college also sorts people according to aptitude. It separates the math types from the poetry types. At the end of the process, graduates get a score, the G.P.A., that professional schools and employers can trust as a measure of intellectual capacity and productive potential. It’s important, therefore, that everyone is taking more or less the same test.

From the excerpt, it seems as if Menand is trumpeting for the meritocracy, but that is not the case. Menand explicitly calls himself a Theory 2 person (the democratic theory) and the entire article is structured around the different ways the two types interact and challenge each other.

You can tell a lot about a person by what they deem important and you can tell a lot by 3quarksdaily by how they saw these two paragraphs as the most important part of Menand's article. Even though taking the words out of contexts does violence to the text, the point of a filter site is not to display other people's thoughts as honestly as possible but to filter out everything but what people want to see. They can still be provocative, but only in a manageable way. It is not the sort of provocation that makes someone change their life but the kind that makes someone feel like they are challenged instead of challenging them.

Online Gaming Fans in Korea

2011-06-02T12:27:00.000-05:00

"For example, the fan Web site with the most members (more than 600,000 [more than 1,000,000 by now]) in Korea is not for a sex-symbol pop singer but for Yo-Hwan Lim, a pro-gamer. For comparative purposes, the number of pro-gamer fan clubs is far greater than those movie, music, and sports stars in Korea...Corporations naturally plan to increase the visibility of their brand names among increasing fan club members and general audiences watching game shows on television by aligning their companies with pro gamers."
- Dal Yong Jin, Korea's Online Gaming Empire, (107-8)

Trump, Palin, and New York Pizza

2011-06-02T11:28:00.000-05:00

I am in full on avoidance mode so expect heavy output on random things. I will try to get some book reviews up soon (I have six sitting around, include the Alexander book, The New Jim Crow), but we shall see. Hopefully I can just do what I have been avoiding and everything else in my life will fall into place. Speaking of falling into place, here is Stewart in his wheelhouse (NSFW language).

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart

Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c

Me Lover's Pizza With Crazy Broad

www.thedailyshow.com

Daily Show Full Episodes

Political Humor & Satire Blog

The Daily Show on Facebook

Books and Television

2011-06-02T09:20:00.000-05:00

30 Rock has, to my knowledge, never been in the top ten of the weekly Nielsen ratings. Tina Fey's book, Bossypants, has been near the top of the New York Times Bestseller list for 7 weeks. One of the books in front of her is by Chelsea Handler, an unfunny late night talk show host. Another is by Stephen Tyler, who is only "relavent" now because of a TV show. One of the books right behind Fey's is by Rob Lowe, who is having a comeback of sorts do to his work on Parks & Recreation.

Now, American Idol gets serious ratings, but the other shows do not. Why are the stars of not very popular TV shows the stars of the Nonfiction book world?

I think that there are two answers to this questions: 1) an answer of methodology or 2) an answer of scale.

1) Methodologically, the issue is found more in Nielsen than in the New York Times. While the Times' method is not perfect, compared to Nielsen it is a double-blind gold standard study. The incredibly problematic bias and limitation of Nielsen means that we honestly don't know who watches what. It is a system designed for a world of three channels. There would be easy ways out of this. Cable companies could track what is being watched in real time without adding anything to the system, yet privacy concerns are drummed up by Nielsen to keep their TV cartel alive and allow for the reality that people watching television have little or no influence on the success of a show. If you buy a ticket to a movie, that ticket is recorded. If you watch a show but someone with a Nielsen box doesn't (Futurama anyone?), then it does not matter unless you and your cultish buddies make enough ruckus to bring the show back.

The answer of methodology is that 30 Rock and Chelsea Handler could be much more popular than people realize and it is in books that that popularity is actually able to be recorded.

2) The answer of scale is much simpler. Let us assume both Nielsen and the Times have accurate data. The picture we get then is that the book world is much, much, much smaller than people have allowed for. To be a bestselling author, all you have to do is move 100,000 units (I am making this up, but if you moved that, it would be great). To be a TV star, you have to have millions of people watch your show and come back again and again and again. Jon Stewart's books sold a lot not because Stewart is popular, but because most books are so phenomenally unpopular that it just takes a little name recognition to shake the system.

Jobs numbers and generalizations

2011-06-01T14:13:00.000-05:00

Or the curse of narrativity...or what about prisons?...or something else snarky.

Unemployment as (a general statistic) is not very helpful. If you contextual to the state level instead of the national one, the numbers fluctuate dramatically. If you limit demographics in any way, the numbers fluctuate dramatically. I'm sure there is a term for this, but the people who talk about unemployment don't invoke technical statistical terms (by 'the people', I refer to myself).

Narrative is one of the curses of empiricism. Data doesn't tell a story. If it tells a story, it isn't data. Quantitative analysis only gives you quantities.

The most interesting aspect of the jobs picture in the United States is the prison picture in the United States. A number of people have commented about this, but it still seems to be absent from common debate over how to create jobs or sustain jobs. The California case about forcing the release of prisoners is a good example of how prison does not simply alter our statistics (id est, if we added 2.5 million people to the rolls of the unemployed, that would shoot the percentage up a point) but reify unemployment. It is hard to get a job as an ex-con. Suddenly services that are nowhere near as well funded as prisons become strained to try and support people whom society does not wish to hire or house directly (as in, by hiring them) so the government deals with them. That is, hospitals, cops, and social workers deal with them. Deal. Because as a society, this is how we view ex-cons: people to be dealt with. Problems to be solved. We don't see Dominique Strauss-Kahn as a problem to be solved, yet soon enough he will be in prison and soon after that an ex-con.

Franzen on how to love

2011-05-31T09:30:00.000-05:00

From the Commencement he gave at Kenyon College, as published in the New York Times. The full thing is worthy of a read and thought. This isn't your typical "kids these days" screed. Something else is going on here. The headline is: "Liking is for Cowards. Go for What Hurts."

If you dedicate your existence to being likable, however, and if you adopt whatever cool persona is necessary to make it happen, it suggests that you’ve despaired of being loved for who you really are. And if you succeed in manipulating other people into liking you, it will be hard not to feel, at some level, contempt for those people, because they’ve fallen for your shtick. You may find yourself becoming depressed, or alcoholic, or, if you’re Donald Trump, running for president (and then quitting).

Consumer technology products would never do anything this unattractive, because they aren’t people. They are, however, great allies and enablers of narcissism. Alongside their built-in eagerness to be liked is a built-in eagerness to reflect well on us. Our lives look a lot more interesting when they’re filtered through the sexy Facebook interface. We star in our own movies, we photograph ourselves incessantly, we click the mouse and a machine confirms our sense of mastery.

And, since our technology is really just an extension of ourselves, we don’t have to have contempt for its manipulability in the way we might with actual people. It’s all one big endless loop. We like the mirror and the mirror likes us. To friend a person is merely to include the person in our private hall of flattering mirrors.

I may be overstating the case, a little bit. Very probably, you’re sick to death of hearing social media disrespected by cranky 51-year-olds. My aim here is mainly to set up a contrast between the narcissistic tendencies of technology and the problem of actual love. My friend Alice Sebold likes to talk about “getting down in the pit and loving somebody.” She has in mind the dirt that love inevitably splatters on the mirror of our self-regard.

The Champion's League Final and Control

2011-05-28T06:52:00.001-05:00

Manchester United vs. Barcelona. For quality writing on the teams and the match, here is Brian Phillips, former editor at Poetry Magazine turned sportswriter.

For self-absorbed analysis and strained humblebragging, here is my take.

I will not be watching it live due to previous commitments. I may not watch it recorded due to my anxiety level.

This is what I discovered three years ago when Man U beat Chelsea and two years ago when Man U lost to Barca: final matches are horrible, horrible things. They are not worth it. The extreme elation I felt with John Terry missing his penalty (tool. why don't you go adulter some teammate's wives?) was not comparable to the depths of irrational misery of losing the next year. When the Astros were in the world series, I was a miserable, barely functioning human.

The issue is that in sports one lacks completely control. I have no control over the game. To me it is basically a deterministic event because whatever is going to happen is going to happen whether I watch or not, whether I care or not. I am entirely indifferent to the outcome, thus, since the outcome matters so much all I have left to do is worry.

When I am climbing on the top of a mountain with severe exposure (as in, with stakes much higher than any sporting event), I am calm and purposeful. I am acting and there are consequences to my actions. In sport, there is no consequence for the fan beyond anxiety, misery and elation. Like Darrel Royal said about the forward pass, there are three options and two of them are bad.

SNL being funny because saying it hasn't been funny in years is lazy and stupid. Comedy is hard. Filling sixty minutes in a week is hard and going to be hit or miss. It has always been hit or miss. There are some painfully unfunny moments with Belushi et al. so step off your high-horse and laugh at something funny.

2011-05-27T17:38:00.006-05:00

Milton Friedman on Slavery and Colonization

2011-05-27T12:00:00.013-05:00

The Gilroy video led to this one thanks to YouTube recommended and so I felt obliged to post it for a sort of point counterpoint. The first few minutes is occupied by a hippie questioning Friedman, then he responds.

What is interesting about the response is threefold (and this is me not being hyper negative). First, He distinguishes Capitalist economies in such a way as to bracket-off distortions (thus, Pinochet torturing people is not quite competitive Capitalism). Second, his history of slavery illuminates the economics of it. As in, the colony had no effect on the metropole. Third, his only response is to say your facts are wrong and then not give bad anecdotes. The problem here is a profound historical poverty, and you don't need Marx or Black Studies to see that. Hayek would have pointed it out.

While I am understandably more sympathetic to Gilroy (a scholar I respect) than to Friedman (a scholar I associate with Pinochet), Friedman does not present the strongest argument here. What free-market ideologues need to do is write history with an understanding that slavery is at the heart of the development of capitalism but also at industrial expansion. The structure of the plantation does not work in the factory. The factory needs a different form of labor.

The last point I will make about slavery and Capitalism is that when slaves were freed in the south, that was the largest single loss of Capital in world history. It was the ultimate economic bubble bursting. Slaves were investment property as much as labor property. Slaves were wedding presents and forms of inheritance and with the stroke of a pen, slave-owners lost all of that value just like the owners of pets.com stock. That is what is crushing to think about: it isn't the comparison of blacks to whites, but slaves to tech stocks.

The system adapted without slavery. That should also be said, but the history is still there and cannot be denied (unless you live in your own ideological bubble).

Paul Gilroy on the End of the Slave Trade

2011-05-27T09:53:00.000-05:00

The slaves were property, let's start from that. The slaves were pieces of property, and their sufferings and their resistance offer, I would say...a deeper commentary on the idea of private property than the one that comes out of the Marxist tradition.

The New Farm Bill and Activism

2011-05-26T09:40:00.000-05:00

Old people vote. Farmers vote. This is why social security and medicare are golden cows that can't be touched. This is why the Farm Bill is a golden cow that can't be touched.

I was thinking this morning about how I should start writing letters about the Farm Bill, and I may do that, I don't know. The most problematic aspect of it has nothing to do with America's health or economy but the export subsidies given to cotton, rice, and other farmers to send crops to developing countries. Like Wendell Berry says about a lot of ag-related policy, we had a solution and created two problems. By sending cotton to Africa, for instance, we not only deflate the possible local production of cotton (problem), but also we claim it as aid (problem). Instead of aiding Africans, we are aiding Arkansans who may need help and support but that need not come on the backs of Africans or Haitians or where ever we send our cotton.

The Farm Bill is problematic in so many ways, but farmers vote: especially in Iowa.

Crime, Statistics, and the Economy

2011-05-25T10:00:00.000-05:00

Yesterday, a number of theories popped around about why crime rates are falling as unemployment maintains a high level. The elephant in the room seems to be an assumption about the accuracy of these crime rates. Theories are provided for data that is provided (mostly) by police departments to the FBI or by the National Crime Victimization Survey (a large sample survey of households to determine reported or unreported crimes). Both methods reek of bias like a fishmonger reeks of, well, fishiness.

Yet like the PISA international Education testing, accuracy is assumed once the data reaches the mainstream press and people act like they are dealing with empirical reality. How much of this data is connected to police chiefs trying to win the war on crime? How much is connected to federal funding?

Oh. And rape rates have been stable in recent years. Good to know that rapists haven't been effected by the economy either.

NOTE: I am being sarcastic. This is not something that is good to know. It is good that rape statistics haven't increased, but rape is probably the hardest violent crime to get accurate data on because of reporting issues, so even this doesn't tell us much.

SECOND NOTE: Look at this! An entire post dedicated to statistical analysis. Who would have ever seen this coming two years ago?

Happy Birthday Bob Dylan

2011-05-24T12:59:00.000-05:00

Top Eleven for today (it will be different tomorrow)

11. I Shall be Released
10. Don't Think Twice, It's All Right
9. Simple Twist of Fate
8. Oxford Town
7. Highway 61 Revisited
6. Like a Rolling Stone
5. Song to Woody
4. Boots of Spanish Leather
3. Maggie's Farm
2. A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall
1. Girl from the North Country

Also, finding Dylan on youtube is a mondo crappy task.

Good writing and the challenge of where it can be found

2011-05-24T09:52:00.000-05:00

The reader will excuse us for so often introducing the thoughts and words of others. We do so not only for the sake of their authority, but because they express our own thoughts better than we can express them ourselves. In truth, we deal out our thoughts, facts and arguments in that irregular and desultory way in which we acquired them. We are no regular built scholar--have pursued no "royal road to mathematics," nor to anything else.

We have, by observation and desultory reading, picked up our information by the wayside, and endeavored to arrange, generalize and digest it for ourselves. To learn "to forget," is almost the only thing we have labored to learn. We have been so bored through life by friends with dyspeptic memories, who never digest what they read, because they never forget it, who retain on their intellectual stomachs in gross, crude, undigested, and unassimilated form, every thing that they read, and retail and repeat it in that undigested form to every good-natured listener: we repeat, that we have been so bored by friends with good memories, that we have resolved to endeavor to express what was useful out of facts, and then to throw the facts away.

A great memory is a disease of the mind, which we are surprised no medical writer has noticed. The lunatic asylum should make provision for those affected with this disease; for, though less dangerous, they are far more troublesome and annoying than any other class of lunatics. Learning, observation, reading, are only useful in the general, as they add to the growth of the mind. Undigested and unforgotten, they can no more have this effect, than undigested food on the stomach of a dyspeptic can add to his physical stature. We thought once this thing was original with us, but find that Say pursued this plan in writing his Political Economy. He first read all the books he could get hold of on this subject, and then took time to forget them, before he began to write.

This passage is from a book-length defense of slavery published by George Fitzhugh in 1857 and was plucked by Ta-Nehisi Coates and published on his blog. Here is what Coates says about Fitzhugh, et al.

The really disturbing thing about George Fitzhugh, the antebellum's South cantankerous defender of slavery, is that his manifesto is genuinely provocative. This is not the fake counter-intuitive weak-sauce we see masquerading under the mask of political incorrectness. This is the profound site of a man who sincerely believes in a system, a system the present reader knows to be discredited, ardently and honestly stating his case,

And because of that ardent honesty, there are these dangerous moments where you find that this dude is actually dropping gems.

After

2011-05-23T09:16:00.000-05:00

I think what annoyed me most about all the rapture coverage this past weekend was just how boring it was. A very small number of people marketed a certain event and the entire media landscape decided to jump on board to talk about it. It was like one of those biography-clips during the olympics about how some synchronized swimmer overcame some obstacle in order to live her dream in the olympics. By that, I mean it was an easy story to tell with an easy punch-line, easy targets, and an easy pay-off. It was lazy comic-news, perfect to make people feel good about themselves because of the idiocy of others (the easiest way to feel good about oneself is in direct comparison to another: "At least I am not so-and-so." It is also the most insidious way.)

What is an interesting story, though, is the Family Radio people today and for the next few weeks. What do they do? How do they live? How do they respond and find their lives again? The apocalypse did come for them because it was revealed (that's all apocalypse means) that Jesus did not come and that the way that they saw the world is not the way that the world is. That part was revealed and the foundations of their world have been shattered. Uncovering what happens next is an interesting story that will take a good writer to tell it and I hope someone is up for the task.

Silencing by "Conspiracy"

2011-05-20T09:08:00.000-05:00

The DSK sexual assault case is rather fascinating in many ways. One way in particular is how any notion of non guilt is taken as claiming conspiracy. Id est (and at a basic level), to say that he is innocent until proven guilty is to be a conspiracy-monger.

Now DSK, he will do okay. If he did and is guilty, he can go to prison, get out, and his life will be fine. He may even still be elected president of France (they elected Mitterand, mind you).

What is interesting is thinking of most of the people arrested in this country: young Black or Latino males from urban areas. Now most of these people end up pleading out through the PD office and taking as short of a sentence as possible, etc.. But, for many people, to say that the sentence is screwed up when most people arrested and tried are of a certain race and economic background reeks of conspiracy. I mean, these cops aren't just driving around looking for black males, right? They are looking to "prevent crime". Or trying to smell some weed so they can break down the door.

You know where you can smell some weed in order to get PC? College dorms. Why don't you break down those doors and arrest some people who can afford lawyers.

Sorry. I've gotten on a hippy rant. My point is that innocence until proven guilty is a myth. It doesn't functionally take place. It only ideologically takes place within the practice of law. This is exactly how Jim Crow wasn't explicitly racist. Colored people wanted their own water fountains. And don't you come down here, Yankee, telling us how to run our town. The way things are is the way things are. And that boy had no business riding his bike near my daughter. He had what was comin' to 'em.

Conspiracy's don't need secretive, puppet-masters. They need a bunch of people willing to deny others voices and go with the status quo until disagreement because grounds for excommunication.

Stuff I've been listening to recently

2011-05-19T09:25:00.000-05:00

Happy Mahler Day!

2011-05-18T17:13:00.000-05:00

If it is true that Mahler's music is worthless, as I believe to be the case, then the question what I think he ought to have done with his talent. For quite obviously it took a set of very rare talents to produce this bad music. Should he have written his symphonies and then burnt them? Or should he have done violence to himself and not written them?
- Ludwig Wittgenstein, Culture and Value (67)

Oh. Hmm, that's not a very positive quote. Wittgenstein. Idiot. Why don't you ask your brother to play a concerto for you? Oh yeah? Ravel wrote one specifically for him because he can only use his left hand? And that is still an awesome piece? Well, you probably hate it because it isn't your precious Brahms. Brahms. Brahms. Brahms.

On Judd Apatow and Chick flicks

2011-05-18T10:28:00.000-05:00

Bridesmaids just came out and opened decently. I will see it soon, but this isn't about Bridesmaids, it is about the strange world we live in where a movie staring women about women is seen as an aberration of form yet also as seriously deficient. Basically, why don't women write and direct and act in more good chick flicks? What happened to the romantic comedy, etc.?

The classic response, as found in The Awl, is to find fault with Bridesmaids for falling prey to old tropes about weddings and dresses and weight (etc.). I don't want to say the author just blames Apatow, but I guess I will just say it: the author blames Apatow. Fine. If the Jezebel critique is solid, Apatow destroys every female character he touches. Good. I like scapegoats as much as the next person. (I wonder how he is going to destroy Lena Dunham's new TV show that he is producing. Somehow, though, he will be at fault and she will be blameless no matter how awesome the show is)

But here is the deal. Let us assume all these things (which I disagree with, but will assume because like most feminist arguments my penis kind of takes me out of the discourse). What should the response be? Response A) is to complain about portrayals of women. Response B) is to write a good movie, get a produced, and become the next Judd Apatow. He wasn't always in power. He made movies that people went to see. That's how the system works. The great conspiracy of capitalism is that there is no great conspiracy. There is no man behind the curtain. There are simply a bunch of men who keep the door almost closed but who would open that same door to a bunch tranny albinos if that got butts in seats. The sacred cow is the golden cow. That's the system.

Apatow may be sexist but he is a capitalist first (as are all the people in pinko commie hollywood). He makes movies he thinks people will like. He thinks people like fart jokes and that women relate to concerns about weight and dresses and weddings. As do Kristen Wiig and her co-writer who put there names on it (they could have vetoed anything. They are not pawns in the hollywood game. To say as such, as Jezebel and The Awl and Slate have done, is to challenge their own agency in a dangerous way. ). Every movie is not going to transform society's notions of what it means to be a woman. If you want it to, work your butt off and start making those kind of movies.

On speaking or thesis statements

2011-05-17T09:35:00.000-05:00

The hallmark of bad writing is hollowness. A bad writer doesn't say anything. The problem with bad grammar is not that it is the institution telling people what to do and what not to do but that when you use bad grammar, when you forget subject-verb agreement or the right apostrophe or their/they're it is harder to say something, to communicate, to write.

The female is teaching a quick lesson on thesis statements today and so the utter simplicity of it all has been on my mind. A thesis is simply what you want to say. It can be provocative or boring or profound or mundane but a bad thesis statement is simply not saying anything.

The odd thing is how hard this is to get across. How hard it is to teach people that making an argument is not about being smart or using the right words or impressing your teacher but saying things and then backing those things up.

Bad writing is like a bad sitcom. It is like sitting through Two and a Half Men and wondering where your last thirty minutes went.

Thesis statements themselves are more helpful than necessary. They remind you that you should say something and if you can't fit what you want to say into at least two sentences, maybe you should figure out what you want to say.

For those of you non-writers out there, good writing still matters tremendously because it is also how we interact with each other. The best conversations are the ones where we don't contradict ourselves (bad writing tic), open ourselves up to obvious rebuttals (bad writing tic), make wrong assumptions of our audience (bad writing tic), act like a douche (bad living tic), or not use words (bad writing tic).

Teaching kids how to write is about teaching them how to be a friend as much as anything else. This is why adults should still write and care about writing and reading. To not be boring. Stop being a boring person and write more and learn what it means to say things and to stop not-saying-things.

The Congo, Rape, and our Imagination of Africa

2011-05-16T12:17:00.000-05:00

HT texasinafrica

Sports and Militarism

2011-05-16T09:00:00.000-05:00

Beyond pure idolatry, my biggest problem with professional sports (and I include college sports as professional here) is the rampant militaristic patriotism of the thing. Most baseball games I go to play God Bless America during the seventh inning stretch, which is not only a wretched song musically, but a troubling one morally. Connecting 'God' and 'America' never ends up well. I could understand it (again, bracketing off the fact that it is a wretched song musically) were the posture of those singing one of humility. Like Episcopalian Democrats who prayed for George W. Bush in the Great Litany. You don't just pray for people you like. You pray for your enemies to be blessed because a blessing is not a bunch of money or success in the world. Not praying for your enemies shows belief in a quite material God whose concerns are the concerns of self-serving people.

But that isn't how the song is sung nor why it is sung and GBA is only the tip of the militarist iceberg. The last UT football game I went to was attended by General Tommy Franks, a UT drop out who rose to head the Iraq War Invasion and write the plans that so bungled the last decade. He is not a war hero. He should be a pariah yet the uniform masks that because militarism isn't politics.

This isn't about disrespecting the troops (whatever that means). Why were Chris Douglas-Roberts's comments about Osama's death lumped in with Rashard Mendenhall's truther allegation? All criticism is anti-American. And I know about how sports replaced pure militarism and in that way they are good, but the spectator is still washed in Old Glory and fed drivel about protecting freedom without going into what that means. It's like a bad junior high social studies class in Texas (thanks state school board).

At least watching games at home, all I have to deal with is stupid commentators whom I already mock too much for the stupid things they say about the game. It does, though, make me second guess going to sporting events. Not only do I have to pay money, but I have to witness children being catechized into a system that quite possible could be morally destructive.

Ah well. Heat lost last night, so that's something.

Shostakovich and the Iron Curtain

2011-05-12T09:40:00.000-05:00

Stravinsky grew old state-side in the sun of California with Schoenberg and Mann and other refugees around him of a broken Europe. Shostakovich grew old in Russia under Stalin and Khrushchev and Brezhnev. Alex Ross, in is wonderful The Rest is Noise attempts, in part, to rehabilitate Shostakovich from criticisms ranging from "it is too tonal" to "he is too complicit with the party." Many people see an either/or between the two great Russians of the last century (Prokofiev and Rachmaninov are only steps behind, and after some vodka, they often are in front) but like nearly all binaries, it is lazy and false. No one would accuse Stravinsky of radicalism after hearing the Classical symphony and no one would accus Stravinsky of romanticism after hearing this

The New York Times Book Review has a review up of a book on the Shostakovich quartets that looks well worth reading (remember, following links slips you past the pay wall). Even if you don't care about classical music (which I hope is not the case. So much beauty is lost without good music), the article is worth a gander to refresh some history and some of the hardship about working under totalitarianism.

And in case you are wondering if Classical Music is dying, do not fear. It is alive and well and simply reducing to the mean. The only difference is that the next generation of classical music supporters are not simply going to be the rich. They are going to be people who like good music. Hopefully, that can only make the product better. I have hope, but I doubt. We have too many people trying to make "careers" instead of trying to make music. We need more Charles Ives's and fewer endowed chairs. We need uncomfortable composers who have to make music and who find ensembles where ever they can like Messiaen with the Quartet for the End of Time. Unnecessary music is decidedly unnecessary. Bach and Beethoven are beauty enough if we simply write or play for the kicks of it.

Health Care and Agency

2011-05-10T10:15:00.000-05:00

I just got back from the pharmacy where I purchased my favorite drug in the world, loperamide hydrochloride (look it up). Speaking of which, the only two drugs you ever need to take hiking with you are loperamide and oxycontin. And I guess, you should only take oxy if you have a 'prescription'. Advil or tylenol are pretty much useless. The only minor pain that can actually immobilize you is nausea, where loperamide comes in. Even if you break a foot, the adrenaline will mask some the pain. And you don't entirely dehydrate while walking on a broken foot like you do with other ailments.

So as I was walking back from the pharmacy, I thought about how easy it was for me to purchase medicine and then take it and move on with my day. Then I thought about people without easy resources to go purchase medicine and this logic trail sprung up.

Over-the-counter medicine is fairly cheep; usually under ten dollars. If I was living on the street, coming by ten dollars (or five dollars which is what mine cost) would not be terribly hard. In fact, there are probably a number of day shelters in the area that can give some one over-the-counter tylenol or loperamide or pepto.

But here is the catch. Day shelters can turn people away. Stores and homes and police stations can turn people away. You know who can't? Emergency rooms. They have to triage you. They will avoid trying to admit you, but it is a long weight in air-conditioning and maybe, if your symptoms persist, you will have a bed and some real drugs.

Emergency rooms are the only places be law which have to accept people as they are. Churches turn people away. Businesses love to find a reason to get homeless folk out of the building. ER workers probably hate it and try to do whatever they can to get people to not come, but they have to deal with them. This is where the people society rejects can't be rejected without due process of some sort.

I think that says at least one thing good about our society, but it challenges the rest of it. And especially churches. We don't do a good job of truly saying come to me, all who are weary and heavy-laden. And I will give rest. To be the people of a God who says such things and to not be able to say such things because it isn't practical or it is hard or poor people are assholes, is to say a lot about the kind of people we are and how much faith we really have.

Which is more redundant?

2011-05-09T12:51:00.000-05:00

Saying 'In my opinion'
or
calling anyone 'the famous...'

If something you say isn't your opinion, that itself is radically strange and deserves qualification.

If someone is famous but needs to be called famous in order for other people to realize she is famous, she isn't famous and shouldn't be called famous.

American Justice

2011-05-06T09:37:00.001-05:00

Is the US legal system just? Actually, I don't think that is the most interesting question. Let us simply assume that it is for the sake of argument. What precisely would it take to make the system unjust? How many unjust actions turns the tide of description?

I've thought about this this week as I read The New Jim Crow (review coming shortly) and saw every person on television celebrate Osama's death as justice. Then a majority of the people I know I facebook quote bible and such and say we shouldn't celebrate. And then a backlash to the backlash of people saying, basically, that any pause at celebration is sanctimonious hand-wringing and is bad too. Another Network fallacy moment. Just because all the people you read think a certain way, that doesn't make you a rebel to disagree with them.

At a basic level, I don't think the system is just. I don't think the protection of property rights is the most important concern of a body politic. I think the "system" is virulently abusive towards the urban poor both out of mandate and because it is easier for them to be that way. The drug war itself, from the beginning, has been a cruel farce that would be funny were it not for all the lives destroyed and lost. The Crusade on Terror, Guantanamo, taking shoes off at airports, these are more farces that Becket would have called overwrought.

I don't think we can reach a procedural moment when "America" calls itself unjust. There can't be a tipping point. Thus, justice is ideological. It is a belief, a faith in the country and the system. It is not a judgment based fact, observation, philosophy, etc.

The struggle for me is seeing this, seeing the futility of Rawls on one side and Mill on the other, the futility of the Federalist Papers and Jeffersonian theory, the outright crazy political heritage of Wilson and Eisenhower, seeing all of this and not washing my hands of it and saying, "It isn't my system. I didn't choose it." As a Christian, I am a citizen of a pilgrim city, but that does not deny my material reality in the city of the pagans and my continuing complicity in the injustices done in my name.

It is my system. We dance with the one who brought us, no matter how ugly. Choosing has nothing to do with it. I may disagree with the ideological foundations of American justice, but I still get frustrated when they are abused and forgotten. I think, "If this is who you claim to be America, be who you claim to be." When the system falls short, when people fall short, I am not surprised, but I am sad. Because falling short usually means someone dies or sent to prison for something stupid or the subject of assassinations (which are only rationally justifiable to Machiavelli).

Justice isn't about feeling better about yourself. That is the ideology that we can't challenge. People need America to be just because if it is not, what is it? And more importantly, who are they? If you have a competing ideology to latch on to (Marxism works well here), it isn't a big deal and those assassins are just bourgeoisie tools trying to protect property rights and capital accumulation. That, too, though, is more about self-preservation than seeing the world rightly.

Hmm. Just watch a baby monkey riding a pig. That's a nice way to end this post.

Pregnancy and Education

2011-05-05T08:55:00.003-05:00

Rick Perry says that the reason why teenagers in Texas get pregnant so much is because of bad teachers and bad practice. What are they practicing poorly? Abstinence, of course. The only method that makes voters feel good about themselves.

In a way, though, support for abstinence-only curriculum is a similar sort of narcissism that makes people pay whatever it takes to live in the right neighborhood to send their kids to the right schools. It is the narcissism that says my child is the only one who matters. My child is the only person in this world. This last sentence can be rewritten and mean the same thing this way: I want only the best for my child.

It is what people do when they can and the sort of white guilt slumming that seems the only inverse does not solve the world (and like all inverted narcissisms is itself the same self-obsessive coin).

In part, this means liberal parents shouldn't get on their high-horse about abstinence-only education because sex-ed is only one of the ways in which systemic forgetfulness concerning the needs of others expresses itself in American education. Self-delusion is the issue. All expenses are justified. Mentioning condoms causes kids to have more sex (or even sex at all).

It is easy for me to talk about such things now. If I have kids and they reach school age, I will probably do the same things and justify them for the same reasons. That doesn't mean I won't be lying to myself.

Wales and Kings and stories told

2011-05-04T09:44:00.000-05:00

Anthony Lane has a brief piece in the New Yorker about an event going on in a small town in Wales.

This is Port Talbot, on the south coast of Wales: a tough, unbeautiful place, sliced by the freeway that runs all the way to London. From that road, the first thing you see is a tall pipe with a single flame, which burns above the glare of the steelworks. To anyone who thinks of Britain as a place of royal weddings, and of those who attend them, the streets around the Social and Labour Club would come as a shock. Tonight, residents have gathered in the adjoining car park, with a merry but apprehensive air. Inside, the m.c. declares, with sadness, that the club will be closing down. Calls of defiance greet this announcement, not least from a bunch of drinkers on a dais at the side of the room. One of them, a tall fellow with curly hair and a beard, taking sips from his pint of beer, looks familiar. When a tray of sandwiches is brought to his table, he tears each one in half and hands a chunk, in turn, to each of his mates. The room goes still.

But what is going on here?

At last, with a flourish, the m.c. brings on what he calls “the house band.” This is a joke, because the curtains part to reveal the Manic Street Preachers—local lads, formed not far away, in Blackwood, but one of the great bands of the age, with fans around the world. They rip into a three-song set and lash the place into a rampage, and then, as the final number fades, the doors are flung wide, to reveal a squad of cops. Not just any cops, but riot police, some armed with rifles. The Manics—as they are fondly known—are arrested and marched out. The mood brims with anger and complaint, but subsides as another band takes over. Soon, the joint is jumping again, with the bearded guy, grinning broadly, in the role of jumper-in-chief. Yes, sir, he can boogie.

Next, everybody troops outside, and there he is again, perched alone on a dumpster. Hooded kids race around him on bikes, with wheels on fire. His friends have fallen asleep on the curb. For a while, he talks to an older man, who is stationed on scaffolding nearby. Then the police turn up again; clearly, they have some grievance against the bearded guy. Trouble seems to dog him. This time, they haul him away, as they did the Manics, and stand him in the bed of a truck. The locals take his side and cry out, but to no effect. The head of police pummels him with questions. “What are you?” he asks. “Are you a king?” The guy says nothing, which only inflames the cops. They bundle him into the back of a car, and leave. He will spend the night in a police cell. He is tired, having spent the previous night on a mountain, but he needs the sleep. Tomorrow, he is due to be crucified.

Finally the reveal and Lane, perhaps the best English prose writer today, explains the situation.

The bearded guy is the bright-eyed Michael Sheen, best known for playing Tony Blair, in “The Queen,” and David Frost, in “Frost/Nixon.” He grew up in Port Talbot, as did Richard Burton and Anthony Hopkins. It must be something in the steel. This evening is a chapter in “The Passion,” a theatrical event conceived by the National Theatre Wales and a company called WildWorks. Sheen is the star and creative director of the project, which is, in part, a tribute to his home town: just the kind of place, the production suggests, where Christ would come again. Not that Jesus, or even God, has earned a mention; Sheen’s character is known merely as the Teacher. The event stretches over three days, beginning down on the beach, where the Teacher appeared on Friday afternoon. Later, he stopped a suicide bombing. Tonight was the Last Supper. That is why the Social and Labour Club claimed to be shutting down. The sandwiches and beer were bread and wine. The dumpster was the Garden of Gethsemane. The man on the scaffolding was the Almighty. The crowd was not acting. On Sunday, the Teacher will be tried at the civic center, beaten up, led down Station Road, and raised on a cross beside the seafront. Thousands will follow.

The Noonday Demon

2011-05-03T09:32:00.000-05:00

"There is a moment, if you trip or slip, before your hand shoots out to break your fall, when you feel the earth rushing up at you and you cannot help yourself, a passing, fraction-of-a-second terror. I felt that way hour after hour after hour. Being anxious at this extreme level is bizarre. You feel all the time that you want to do something, that there is some affect that is unavailable to you, that there's a physical need of impossible urgency and discomfort for which there is no relief, as though were constantly vomiting from your stomach but had no mouth." (50)

I hate memoirs. I hate the utter self-involvement of the genre. Dr. King should have written a memoir. Fanny Lou Hamer should have written a memoir. Beyond that, I guess I don't get it. Is it voyeurism? Is it sympathy, emphathy-mongering? Am I sanctimonious prick?

The Noonday Demon is not quite a memoir. It is about depression. It is about trying to explain, trying to understand depression from the position of a man rising out of and falling back into it from time to time. Instead of just talking about "how it felt" he seriously investigates the scientific bases and the limitations of different therapies for depression. He also covers the history of the disease (which is the weakest section) and interviews and follows up with a number of different people who have different experiences with depression and with conventional or unconventional therapies.

One of the nuanced ways in which he covers the issue is by talking about hard it is to define depression. The DSM lists 9 or so criteria and if you have five of the nine, you are clinically depressed. There isn't a chemical test done to confirm this finding. It is subjective for the clinician. Someone with only three symptoms could be extraodrinarily severe while someone with six could be mild.

Influenza is straightforward: one day you do not have the responsible virus in your system, and another day you do. HIV passes from one person to another in a definable isolated split second. Depression? IT's like trying to come up with clinical parameters for hunger, which affects us all several times a day, but which in its extreme version is a tragedy that kills its victims. Some people need more food than others; some can function under circumstances of dire malnutrition; some grow weak rapidly and collapse on the streets. Similarly, depression hits different people in different ways: some are predisposed to resist or battle through it, while other are helpless in its grip. (22-3)

The clear medical problem, though, is that "depression is not the consequence of a reduced level of anything we can now measure" (22). Certain medication is effective at controlling or tempering the symptoms of depression, but there is nothing with specific affinity for a depression virus or gene or bacterium because we have not located such a thing. This does not mean that medication are ineffective. It simply means we don't exactly know why they work.

He talks about the personal effect of a pill regimon in a way that I have not read before.

Taking the pills is costly--not only financially but also psychically. It is humiliating to be reliant on them. It is convenient to have to keep track of them and to stock up on prescriptions. And it is toxic to know that without these perpetual interventions you are not yourself as you have understood yourself. I'm not sure why I feel this way--I wear contact lenses and without them am virtually blind, and I do not feel shamed by lenses or by my need for them (though given my druthers, I'd choose perfect vision). The constant presence of the medications is for me a reminder of frailty and imperfection; and I am a perfectionist and would prefer to have things inviolate out of the hand of God. (60)

The odd thing about Solomon (a Yale grad who has written for the New Yorker and wrote a book about Russian literature in the 1980s) is that his father founded and runs Forest Laboratories. Forest distributes Lexipro now (among a few other anti-depressent or anti-psychotics) but they were nowhere close to being active in the anti-deppresant market before Solomon was diagnosed with depression and began to take his own Selective Seratonin Reuptake Inhibitors.

SSRIs are where this wonderful book is mostly out of date (and I will say why it is wonderful in a second). Prozac hit the market in the late 80s. Noonday Demon came out in 2001. We've had ten years since then. Ten years of market expansion. Ten years of bad science drowning out the good in many cases. We are also in the middle of the DSM rewrite which is most assuredly going to change the face of depression for the worst (or the better if you are the drug companies lobbying the authors at the APA). Ten years is a long time in psychopharmacology and that time is missed.

However, for a book that is out of date in some respects, the honesty and intensity of thought, the humanity of description is still relative, interesting, and important. I read about 40 pages in the library edition and then I had to go to the bookstore to buy because this needed to be a book I had on my shelf for a time when the question what is depression? comes up. In being out of date, the Noonday Demon, in a way, is more free to describe the situation because depression looks differently in the 90s than it does today. (par example, one of the most common side-effects of the first SSRIs was impotence and there weren't ED drugs until the late nineties. I know that only effects men, but it is a not very minor effect for one going through the rest of the symptoms. Today, doctors feel more free to prescribe drugs with those sorts of side-effects because they can add viagra (or another similar compound) to the mix. This is seen as a solution).

As I have said before (maybe a long time ago), I think drugs and therapy are helpful for taking a person from a negative state to a neutral state. Psychological assessment is one particular form of assessment, of description of a situation. It is not unitary or total, but it can be helpful and Solomon, I think, sees that as the point, as well. Solomon brings us to this world and maps it out, as the subtitle alludes to it doing.

The opposite of depression is not happiness but vitality. This is why depression is not sadness. Putting on a smile is not a solution. Figuring out how to live your life, when that seems harder than a camel going through the eye of a needle, is.

2011-05-02T15:46:00.001-05:00

As noted earlier, at least 10 percent of Americans violate drug laws every year, and people of all races engage in illegal drug activity at similar rates. With such an extraordinarily large population of offenders to choose from, decisions must be made regarding who should be targeted and where the dru war should be waged. From the outset, the drug war could have been waged primarily in overwhelmingly white suburbs or on college campuses. SWAT teams could have rappelled from helicopters in gated suburban communities and raided the homes of high school lacrosse players known for hosting coke and ecstasy parties after their games. The police could have seized televisions, furniture, and cash from fraternity houses based on an anonymous tip that a few joints or a stash of cocaine could be found hidden in someone's dresser drawer. Suburban homemakers could have been placed under surveillance and subjected to undercover operations designed to catch them violating laws regulating the use and sale of prescription "uppers." All of this could have happened as a matter of routine in white communities, but it did not. Instead, when police go looking for drugs, they look in the 'hood. Tactics that would be political suicide in an upscale white suburb are not even newsworthy in poor black and brown communities.
- Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow (121).

A few more Osama points

2011-05-02T11:32:00.000-05:00

Distinguishing between 'Justice has been served' and 'America, Eff Yeah' is nearly impossible to do in this case. Bringing up the victims of 9/11 does not clarify the situation but uses people who have been hurt by violence. If the issue was simply one of justice, it would look different.

Also, it may not have been practical to extradite bin Laden and then try him for crimes against the United States. That is the price of being a just society. Justice is costly. Assassinations are easy and quick and celebratory. Justice sometimes doesn't turn out how you want. Assassinations do.

I don't begrudge people for being excited or happy or relieved. I don't judge them as indecent or morally inept (those judgments are reserved for myself and my own failings). I simply hope people realize his death is not the mark of any justice nor the sign of any victory.

A sad day to be American

2011-05-02T08:53:00.000-05:00

My Morning Edition was preempted again, this time for a radically different reason.

I think, more than anything, the jubilation here over the death of a human being (a particularly nasty one, but a human nonetheless) shows how in line the War on Terror is with a crusade.

I suppose I am happy that a man directly involved with the deaths of many people is no longer able to be directly involved in the deaths of many people. This is a proximate good.

All death, though, is tragic. Joy in death is a hatred of life, not the defense of it.

Ugh. Feel free to think me a pinko-hippy for being depressed today. Plenty of people have

Alex Ross on Wagner

2011-04-30T17:36:00.001-05:00

Because it is behind the New Yorker paywall, I copied out the section where Ross interviews Bonhoeffer's nephew and former Cleveland Orchestra conductor, Christoph von Dohnanyi. This is what music criticism can be about. Wagner is a touchy subject and it is handled here masterfully.

"It's not a nice thing to discover that you don't have power anymore," the German conductor Christoph von Dohnanyi told me, poring over the score of "Walkure" in a hotel lobby on Central Park South. At the age of eighty-one, with a shock of white hair framing a hawklike face, Dohnanyi looked like the embodiment of prewar German Kultur. It has been some years since he conducted Wagner in the opera house, but the music is still on his mind. "This is the Wendepunkt, the turning point," he said, examining the passage that I had singled out. "Fricka makes Wotan see the future."

We moved past the Fricka scene to the first part of Wotan's monologue: the clawing lines of bassoons, bass clarinet, and cellos evoking Wotan's sensations of humiliation and dejection, the jagged falling intervals—octave, major seventh, minor seventh—to which the god sings his rage and grief; the extreme dissonances that erupt over an abyssal C. (If you shrank one of those harmonies to minumum space on a piano keyboard, it would contain a four-not cluster—what you might get if you tried to hit a C with your fist.) And this fortissimo freak-out is just the beginning. The fundamental note keeps moving down, one false bottom giving way to another, until we reach the basement of the world. Wotan proceeds to retrell the story of the "Ring" with a clear view of his own guilt: "I longed in my heart for power….I acted unfairly….I did not return the ring to the Rhine….The curse that I fled will not flee from me now….Let all that I raised now fall in ruins!" Finally, he emits two cries of "Das Ende!"—the first loud and the second spookily soft, like a negative epiphany, a shuddering acquiesence. The soliloquy undercuts everything that is popularly associated with the term "Wagnerian." It is a deconstruction of power, a dismantling of grandeur.
Dohnyanyi brought up a contradiction that every historically aware operagoer must register: the "Ring" delivers a sweeping critique of the urge to dominate others, but it was the creation of a domineering man, and it drew the worshipful admiration of Hitler, the most frightening of megalomaniacs. The main point of contact between Wagner and Hitler was, of course, the composer's anti-Semitism, which disfigures his writings and lurks behind his later operas. Wagner once called the Jews "the plastic demon of the ruin of mankind"—a line that Joseph Goebbels used many time in his speeches.

"If you have experienced recent German history, you must think about it," Dohnanyi said. "Was Wagner somehow the source, or one source, of what happened?" I sought out the conductor in part because he had experienced that history at close range. His father was Hans von Dohnanyi, a lawyer and military-intellegence officer who played a leading role in plots to assassinate Hitler. In 1943, Hans von Dohnanyi was arrested, alongside his brother-in-law, the theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the two men were executed in April, 1945.

"I don't blame any Jewish person, not any, who would say, "Wagner's music might be great, but I don't want it,'" Dohnanyi told me. "My father was in a concentration camp, and they played Wagner when they put them in the gas chamber. And even before, many gebildete people—educated people—did not care for Wagner because he stood for something ugly. My family loved Bach, Beethoven, Brahms. When I dirst conducted Wagner, my mother said, "I only come because you do it!"

Dohnanyi paused. "But when I really think about Wagner I don't discover anything that had to lead to Hitler. And what happens here"—we were looking at Wotan's cries of shame—"is not something that any Fascist could have written. Because it is not simplifying. It is a 'giving up' thing. Wagner abused power but hated the state. And that hatred is at the heart of this huge intellectual conception of absolutely Shakespearean genius."

Why Americans Love the Royals (even though our constitution explicitly decries them)

2011-04-29T08:58:00.000-05:00

(note: the above claim is based entirely on twitter, facebook, and my anger at the fact that Morning Edition was stupid interviews on the streets of London about a skinny woman's over-priced dress).

Aristocracy is not based on any rational claim. At least in the Republic (and in Mussolini's Italy) there was an attempt to rule via philosopher-king. James Stuart was fairly brilliant (his back and forths with Grotius on predestination are rather interesting) and Eikon Basilice is the only work I know of that makes a work of Milton's seem weakly thought. However, since 1688 and all the other reforms since then, the British monarchy and aristocracy has just been a bunch of rich snods (I don't think that is a word) who are famous for being famous.

Welcome to the world of tabloid's! Kate Middleton doesn't represent anything. The Queen doesn't represent anything. They exist to remind the world how hollow most symbolism is. Occam, dealing with the War of the Roses, makes a little more sense. Kim Kardashian (sp? actually, I don't care how she spells her name) makes more sense than the Windsors. At least she has to deal with interviews every once in a while. Prince William only exists to watch how male pattern baldness functions in a 28 year old.

Isn't celebrity the opiate of the masses? Isn't the aspirations of the American dream or marrying a prince far more intoxicating and ultimately suffocating than chiliasm?

All of this is obvious and probably the only reason why I am talking about it is because Rowan Williams is the only person I can do a decent impression of and now people are going to know about him because of this extraordinary waste of funds and stupid dreams.

I hope the republicans in England (no relation) win soon and dismantle this silly thing and end Henry VIII horrid destruction of the monasteries (which were one of the few locations in 16th England where the poor were fed. Do you think the new landlords, whose loyalty was purchased with former churches, enjoyed giving alms?).

Nobody puts Pops in a corner...

2011-04-28T09:38:00.000-05:00

The Spurs won last night when they should have lost. They executed on their last three possessions of regulation; all inbounds plays. Two were executed perfectly while one broke down but was salvaged due to that crazy Argentinian who has been the NBA X-factor for the past eight years.

The first was a quick inbounds for a two to Manu.

Then an apparent three attempt that breaks down but finds the ball in Manu's hands again with a disputed two-pointer. His toe was on the line, but I think for awesomeness sake they should have given it to him.

This is where I gave up on the game. However, I should have remembered: nobody puts Pops in a corner. If Gregg Popovich still can draw up a play, he can still win. That's it. Guess what happened.

Spurs ain't done yet. I'm not really a Spurs fan, but this was flat out good basketball and I appreciate that, especially when it is not done by Lebron James.

(For in depth analysis of the three plays in question, here is play one, play two, play three)

Knowledge, Beliefs, and Anthropology

2011-04-27T10:33:00.001-05:00

John Wilkins, a Philosopher of Science and very interesting blogger, wrote today on knowledge and belief.

Religion is not, in general, knowledge of that kind. Its beliefs are stances which satisfy some criteria other than environmental success. Perhaps we can say they are coordination successes – they rightly allow agents to interact in a society. But that is like knowing that the way to avoid head-on collisions in the United Kingdom is to drive on the left hand side of the road. It is a knowledge of convention, of arbitrary things. It is worth knowing this, but it is not knowledge of the world, but of ourselves. And that knowledge is highly contextual and relative. If you want beliefs that are in some sense “true”, and knowledge in view of that, then religious beliefs do not qualify, at least not in the mundane and temporal world in which knowledge ordinarily applies. Nobody can speak to the transcendental knowledge of God; success criteria are not yet forthcoming.

Wilkins has an admittedly pragmatist epistemology, but the distinction he makes here I find interesting, especially because I come out of a school of thought as heavily influenced by Wittgenstein as he seems to be. Knowledge is the community of knowledge while belief is personal. Beliefs are, in short, pure anthropology. This is Feuerbach resurrected.

But I think a key issue to this is who qualifies to speak of how knowledge ordinarily applies? What is excluded from that and who gets to exclude?

The other key is the individuality of how he sees religion. It is what, in the States, we see as the Spirituality situation. People say they are spiritual which means they can believe whatever they want. If a church is not a community, I don't know what it is. If it is a community of liars or self-deceivers or war-mongerers that is one thing (and all of those could have been used to describe scientists at some point). If the way they speak about the world does not live up to your standards of truth, that seems fairly individualistic. But, oh, it isn't your standards, right?

But whose are they? Where do all the pragmatist scientists go to be a part of a community?

Up from Prostitution or the New Old Economy

2011-04-27T09:00:00.000-05:00

Many economists recently have studied the economics of the drug trade and black markets in general. Many of these analisyes fail for the simple reason that the foot soldiers of black markets are not hedge fund managers and so do not function as economically rational agents. Drugs aren't expensive because they are dangerous but because they have inelastic demand (Come on Economists!) and they have an army of young boys who think that this is the only world they can live in.

The same, I would imagine, goes for prostitution. Prostitutes only see street walking as the best option because the rest of their options are so limited. Also, drugs. The legalization of prostitution is not going to "solve" the problem of underage girls running away, getting hooked on crack, becoming slaves to a pimp, and dying when they are 23 and look 48.

NPR's Morning Edition has had an amazing three-part series on prostitution in Nashville (first part here) going and a center that tries to help. The story is, frankly, radio at its best. We hear the voices of these battered (three meanings: by men, society, and drugs) women struggling to understand where they have been and if there is still a place for them. We hear the graphic nature of these stories, but they are completely unsexualized since there are no visuals. It is stark in the brutality of the situation but also stark in that it allows for us to glimpse Magdalene house and how this program is not about easy glory. Because, when you care for prostitutes and addicts and alcoholics, there is no easy glory. This isn't rescuing puppies from ditches. It mostly feels like digging a ditch and then having to dig another ditch and another and every once in a while someone gets out of the ditch and that is a joy and a blessing, but you keep digging.

Magdalene House provides employment for some of the women in the program in the form of Thistle Farms, which makes bath oils, etc. This is the future of urban ministry, I think. A reappropriation of labor and capital to sustainable means. Providing training and employment for the purpose of sustaining employment. Having jobs that exist to give people jobs. The only growth that matters is the possibility of employing other people, of giving others the chance to not turn tricks.

I have thought a lot about stuff like this and different ways to go about it. Part of it, I think, has to be providing employment where people can feel and not be rejected. Where people can show up late or drunk or high or go on benders and still have a place. Where ex-cons are not abused and given slave-like jobs and where human dignity can be respected. This need not be an ideal and it is found in small pockets here and there. It is not an ideal because it is not a stab at perfection but at a workable solution. It is a stab at a life not of hand outs or hand jobs (sorry, I had to go there) but of humanity.

We are stuck with the markets but we don't have to admit their logic in every way.

The Courage of Pop-Psychology

2011-04-26T09:20:00.000-05:00

Analyzing someone's motivations is the new ad hominem. It basically functions the same way. If I can say for what reason (other than reason) someone does something or believes something, I don't have to take that person seriously. Their words are suspect. This is exactly what happens with an ad hominem argument. You have lie consistently, so why should I trust you now? As an example, here is James K.A. Smith on Evangelical Universalism and the courage of damning people:

No, the motivation for evangelical universalism is not really a close reading of the Bible's claims about eternity. Instead, it seems that the macro-motivation for evangelical universalism is less a text and more a hermeneutic, a kind of "sensibility" about the very nature of God as "love" (which includes its own implicit sensibility about the nature of love).

Okay. So when people quote scripture they are proof-texting (Dismiss!) and when they don't they are simply using a hermeneutic (Dismiss!).The funny thing is that this motivational talk is exactly how people speak of Calvinism. Calvinists love a system. That is what they desire in Reformed thought. They don't like to deal with ambiguity. Oh, wait! Is that not a fair assessment? But if I can say these things, that means I don't have to listen to Calvinists and that makes my life easier. Same thing with universalists. It is also how most atheists see religious folk. They are irrational for believing something irrational. Thus they should be completely ignored and dismissed.

To talk of an other person's motivations is lazy and is not built on a foundation of dialogue and communication, an assumption that other people actually have things to say and different thoughts may not be insane (or juvenile, which is the impression Smith makes of universalists. They need to grow out of this sentiment, etc.).

NOTE: I keep on criticizing Smith because I actually respect him as a theologian. However, I shall refrain for the time being due to the First Things rule, as in, it is no longer edifying to read him and my criticism only functions to make me feel good, which is never a good reason to take someone down.

A Poem for the day

2011-04-23T11:35:00.001-05:00

Sepulchre

O Blessed bodie ! Whither art thou thrown ?
No lodging for thee, but a cold hard stone ?
So many hearts on earth, and yet not one
Receive thee ?

Sure there is room within our hearts good store ;
For they can lodge transgressions by the score :
Thousands of toyes dwell there, yet out of doore
They leave thee.

But that which shews them large, shews them unfit.
What ever sinne did this pure rock commit,
Which holds thee now? Who hath indited it
Of murder?

Where our hard hearts have took up stones to braine thee,
And missing this, most falsely did arraigne thee ;
Onely these stones in quiet entertain thee,
And order.

And as of old, the law by heav’nly art,
Was writ in stone ; so thou, which also art
The letter of the word, find’st no fit heart
To hold thee.

Yet do we still persist as we began,
And so should perish, but that nothing can,
Though it be cold, hard, foul, from loving man
Withhold thee.

- George Herbert