With the End Days upon us (finally, right?), I really wish I had found the time to finish this book. I hope you have your affairs in order.
I.
Make a joke about Nietzsche and the eternal recurrence. Problem: surely it’s been done before.
II.
Make list of possible farewell sayings. “Better to burn out than it is to rust.” “So long, and thanks for all the fish.” “Here’s looking at you, kid.” “It’s been emotional.” “Thumpity thump thump look at Frosty go.” Problem: there’s too many.
III.
Have another cup of coffee.
IV.
Play around with formal ends of letters like in days of yore. “Remember, gentleman, as you hit refresh, that I am pleased to remain, Yours, &c.” Problem: would have to compose the rest of the letter, too.
V.
Go on mad hunt for fugitive Christmas cookies.
VI.
Search wildly for an appropriate poem to parody. Candidates: Hyperion, A Funeral Elegy, the Aeneid, the Odyssey. Problem: pretentious, also “blogga feminaeque cano.”
VII.
Plainly: I’d rather take a break before it becomes a chore or I start posting pictures of cats. Thanks for reading; see you around some time maybe.
On he flared….
I think what Vance says clearly goes for most of us here. It’s for many and various reasons but things have slowed nearly to a stop, and they might as well go all the way. Maybe there’s no point in saying so; by custom there’s nothing to spur a poster to action like declaring a hiatus. But there it is. We associate the West with new beginnings, but also the end of the day, and maybe we have got there.
On November 7, 1962, Richard Nixon conceded his loss to Pat Brown in the race for governor of California, saying famously, “You don’t have Nixon to kick around any more, because, gentlemen, this is my last press conference.” In 1963, after the assassination of President Kennedy, the Beat poet Bob Kaufman (pictured) took a vow of complete silence, spoken and written.† And in 1982, after four years as governor, Pat Brown’s son Jerry decided not to run for a third term, instead running for the Senate, losing to Pete Wilson, and withdrawing to study Buddhism in Japan.
In that spirit, it’s time for me to sign off. This has been a marvelous blog, and I’ve been happy to contribute to it. Cheers all, and see you in the ether.
—
† Which he kept until 1975, when he walked into a coffeeshop in North Beach and recited a poem.
In Britain, a rise in university tuition sparks riots.
So tonight President Obama appeared on Mythbusters, asking Adam and Jamie to revist the Archimedes death ray, which they had tested and busted twice before.
Which is to say, Barack Obama got some of the country’s coolest and most creative people to implement a policy that had already, for known and well established reasons, failed. Twice.
I’m sure it wasn’t meant as a metaphor.
Roger Ebert writes about the patriarchy.
I am not concerned so much with Church teachings, but with the way men’s minds work. To put it bluntly, I believe the world is patriarchal because men are bigger and stronger than women, and can beat them up.
And he watches the Blair/Hitchens debate.
The most stimulating thing about the debate was that it was held at all. How often do we ever hear fundamental questions debated in a civil manner between intelligent speakers? Would there be an audience on cable for weekly debates between college teams? In America, debating was the leading intercollegiate sport before the introduction of football.
Blair and Hitchens made points one might agree with, and points one might not. At one point, Hitchens asked Blair a question that hung in the air for a second and went unanswered, because Blair must have had no answer. This was the question:
“Is it good for the world to consider women as an inferior form, as all religions do?”
Of course the “we” who held the debate are Canadians.
Sometime commenter and we hope still friend of this blog zunguzungu has an extended analysis of Julian Assange’s stated motives for building WikiLeaks (and on twitter) (which Joe Lieberman may have got kicked off Amazon’s servers). It was well worth my time to read the whole thing, but in brief Assange sees the US government, or large parts of it, as a conspiracy that depends on the secrecy and integrity of its communications to function. Leaking therefore need not disclose any particularly valuable piece of information to render the conspiracy vulnerable.
You destroy the conspiracy, in other words, by making it so paranoid of itself that it can no longer conspire….
zunguzungu points out that Theodore Roosevelt might have approved. Of WikiLeaks, that is; not of Lieberman.
… this isn’t actually true. The federal government requires lots of things to prove that a foreigner wishing to qualify for a spousal visa is in a legitimate marriage, but there is actually no requirement to prove that you’re having sex. Shared finances, yes. Shared residence, yes. Tax returns, yes. Proof of a commingled life, yes. Letters of support that you present yourselves as a married couple, yes. Sex tape? No.
(It’s not cynical if you think about it. It is compatible with a fraudulent marriage that the two people could be copulating like rabbits; but it’s less likely if the two are sharing their money.)
This is not a defense of DOMA; people arguing that gay people could always commit immigration fraud to get a green card are making an exceedingly stupid argument. Any marriage would have to be entered into for bonafide reasons to qualify for a green card, i.e., excluding immigration benefits. So the argument has to be that DOMA’s effect on immigration policy is fair, because gay people could always… commit fraud to get around the exclusion.
This is far from the usual remit of this blog, but that remit, indeed the blog in general, seem to be in abeyance, and I don’t have another outlet for such trivia.
Eliza Griswold writes, warming up to praise Gjertrud Schnackenberg as highly as she can:
Despite this atmosphere of youth and mirth, there were a small handful of things about which the editorial staff was deadly serious. Language, the rigor and talent to wield it, was tantamount.
But not, evidently, the rigor to look in a damn dictionary to check that words mean what you think. And indeed, Schnackenberg’s poetry, by the examples given, appears to measure up perfectly to such proud but fallible praise.
(Photo by Flickr user M.V. Jantzen used under Creative Commons license.)
It wasn’t two years ago, or on Thanksgiving, but this song is a Thansgiving song, so it makes sense to re-post it on Thanksgiving … anyway. Happy Thanksgiving, all.
Unfortunately, there have not been enough submissions for Military History Carnival #26, so I’ve cancelled it. Sorry!
At least a lot of people do.
I think there’s near-universal agreement among philosophers (!?) that the online job postings could be much, much better, e.g. easily searched by areas of specialization and competence. As Geoff Pynn snarks in comments: “But how ever could it be done? What great Secrets must Nature yield before we can harness her Powers to such wondrous ends?”
Does anyone have a lot of experience with teleconference-style interviews? Phone interviews are terrible, I think, but we’ve never done video interviews, and if it’s even close to as good, and if we do them uniformly (i.e., all candidates do their interviews this way, rather than only some), it could save everyone an undesired hassle. It really would be a great thing, especially for candidates, if the trip were no longer necessary.
Am I understanding this right? A teacher starts talking to a guy in a bar, tells him a story about how another teacher used the word “nigger,” and this results in the storyteller getting into trouble?
The intuitive sense of unfairness comes from the fact that we all understand the difference between genuinely asserting and using the same language in a way that doesn’t assert. You might overhear me utter the phrase “Ari is so handsome” as I’m in the midst of saying “Only Mrs. Kelman could think that Ari is so handsome,” for example. While the phrase itself retains its meaning in the two contexts, the sentences mean very different things.
As I recall, Frege’s general point about this is that there’s no operator that indicates what follows is being asserted. Phrases like “I’m genuinely asserting that….” are themselves subject to the same problem– they can be put in contexts where they aren’t asserted. Geach seizes on this to develop a really interesting objection to expressivism, the thesis that moral judgments are expressions of noncognitive states such as emotions, rather than statements of (moral) fact.
On the expressivist view, “lying is wrong” is doing the work of “boo lying!” But notice how “lying is wrong” appears in contexts where it’s genuinely asserted and in contexts where it isn’t. Canonical example:
1. Lying is wrong.
2. If lying is wrong, getting your little brother to lie is wrong.
3. Hence, getting your little brother to lie is wrong.
This argument looks good (by which I mean deductively valid). In order to be good, though, “lying is wrong” has to mean the same thing in (1) and (2). Wrinkle: in (1) it’s being asserted, in (2) it’s not. Even if (1) makes sense as the expression of a boo-attitude toward lying, (2) doesn’t. You’re not booing lying because you’re not saying lying is wrong, when you assert (2). So it looks like the expressivist is stuck. (Stuck in two related ways: first, it’s a problem that the expressivist hasn’t given us an account of (2), and second it’s a problem that, whatever an account of (2) would be, it won’t preserve the meaning of “lying is wrong,” and that’s needed to make sense of the validity of the argument.)
Simon Blackburn has a go at this by trying to understand (2) as something like “boo for the following conjunction of attitudes: booing lying while not booing getting little brother to lie.” Not really convincing, but a nice attempt.
There’s lots more to say, but now you’re equipped to utter “The latest O’Keefe shenanigans got me musing about old Gottlob Frege” and that will make you sound erudite.
The Chronicle has an interesting story about a guy who ghost-writes term papers.
You’ve never heard of me, but there’s a good chance that you’ve read some of my work. I’m a hired gun, a doctor of everything, an academic mercenary. My customers are your students. I promise you that. Somebody in your classroom uses a service that you can’t detect, that you can’t defend against, that you may not even know exists.
You know whose fault it is? The system, man. (I was hoping he’d turn out to make incredible money this way, but he says this is his best year yet and he’ll get about $66k.)
I’m sure most of you have seen this. What’s curious is that Chambers wasn’t convicted of making terroristic threats; he wasn’t even charged with that. Instead he’s a “menace”, convicted for roughly the equivalent of making prank telephone calls. I’m not quite sure how that works, largely because he didn’t send the tweet to the airline. It looks like that first they overreacted to a tweet and then they punished him for causing their overreaction. Stephen Fry has offered to pay the man’s legal bills, but the mark on his record is standing for now.
Anyone know anything about British law and why this conviction isn’t obviously insane?
Not that I’d want to rain on the parade of the little tin god, but don’t most children’s sports have a league for the competitive types and a recreation league for learning to play, getting exercise, and having fun? If the fate of western civilization hangs in the balance, perhaps he should encourage his son to try out for the competitive league.
It wouldn’t excuse his behavior, of course, but at least he’d be around his peers. I mean the dad.
via.
Tom Levenson:
Those final six hours of the war were surreal. The news of the cease-fire order passed swiftly down the line, but the fighting did not stop. U.S. Army captain Harry Truman, commanding an artillery battery, fired under orders until 10:45 a.m. British troops were ordered forward, with instructions to achieve their objectives by eleven. German fire persisted too. Among those killed were British soldiers wearing the Mons star, veterans of the first battle of the war. Within the German lines, troops waited for news of the negotiations in the midst of preparations for a last battle. Early that morning Georg Bucher went to his company commander to beg for more machine gun ammunition. At 7:15, an attack came; Bucher’s machine guns broke it up before the Americans facing him reached his barbed wire. His company’s casualties were light. One new recruit went down with a chemical burn. Bucher comforted him by telling him how much worse it could have been, how he could have lost his leg. “The youngster seemed, God knew why, to find comfort in my words,” Bucher wrote. At that moment, Bucher’s company commander returned, leaping along like a mad man, shouting “Cease fire at eleven a.m.. Pass the word along, cease fire at eleven.” ….
There was one incident that captured the essence of war on the western front, the distillation of its arbitrary violence. At two minutes to eleven in the vicinity of Mons a Canadian private named George Price was hit by a sniper’s bullet. He died instantly. The man who killed him remains unknown. That man made a choice. He was a marksman, a skilled soldier. He had just moments remaining in which it was legal for him to kill. There was no need to fire, no purpose, and some risk at least to himself and any comrades near him. If he waited until eleven, and then put his gun down, the only consequence would be that a young stranger would go home. Instead, the shot rang out. Two minutes ticked past. The war ended. George Price lay dead.
(More on Price.)
Look, not my bag, but none of the professionals were talking.
Glad this clown is gone. Is it new to claim that stalking and harassment is protected by the First Amendment? Sneaky penumbrellas.
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