cheese it, the cops!

if i were going to see waiting for superman, i think i would need to see it alone. my reaction is likely to be severe, and no one i know even vaguely agrees with any of my positions on these things. everyone operates from within the same set of assumptions. barack and bush's positions on education are identical. it's perfectly legitimate to infer from this that their position is absurd.  i believe quite sincerely that the current approach to education in a technocracy entirely justifies armed insurrection. i want you to come back from that movie and tell me it's not simply an argument for totalitarianism.

typepad's indent, font, and quote functions are completely unusable, but what follows is a quote from gail collins: "I’m still haunted by a debate I stumbled across in the Texas Legislature a decade ago in which conservatives repelled any attempt to impose accountability standards on the state’s charter schools, even after only 37 percent of the charter students passed state academic achievement tests, compared with 80 percent of the public schoolchildren. There’s something about an unfettered school that lifts the hearts of the Born Free crowd."

all i can say is that puts y'all on the other side: the born enslaved crowd, the aficionados of fetters: and standardized pre-k will soon be followed by standardized gestation. the constant resort to the terms "standards" and "accountability" pretends that the standardized testing regime measures antecedent facts. what it does is deploy culture-wide a model of knowledge (ridiculously wrong), impose a national curriculum, and institute new, elaborate, and thorough authority, wielded over everyone in the entire system. if michelle rhee or arne duncan think they are in the business of measuring facts, they are living in a world of hallucinations; they are doing all day every day the opposite of what they claim to be doing: they are not measuring anything; they are manufacturing facts. that they are accumulating for themselves an insane level of power over everyone's children is obvious.

if you are sitting here with tom friedman actually worrying that our kids have lower standardized test scores than the finns or something, i say you have floated outside the realm of actual human beings or real children or anything relevant to learning. really is this an education program, or is it a project for world conquest? these people give you the impression of each nation's children as a kind of army, in a war with all the other nations' children to dominate the future. try to become aware of how fantastical and optional that is as a way of representing reality. but try to be aware too of what a picture like that entails about how we actually treat children.

seriously the people running education are pod people. they have ceased to be human in any dimension, and they insist on manufacturing a population in their own image. for them, truth is automatism. what amazes me is that the whole culture seems to be proceeding on their assumptions. except maybe the "born free crowd." waitin for kryptonite, bitch.

helpin janie with her homework last night; she was working on the mason-dixon line, which more or less runs through my house (well a couple miles south). but the procedure was simply mechanical. the first sentence re-states the question. re-state this, fuckhead. the next three give details from the text, in support (of your restatement of the question?). she didn't actually get to compose a single sentence, much less express some sort of independent response. it has to be mechanical to be measurable: the tests seek to create their takers in their own image. illiteracy is preferable, or this just is a new form of illiteracy.

by the time i'm teaching them as freshmen, they just want to be told what procedures to follow to get their 'A.' they really are often disappointed that i don't tell them how to compose each sentence. ( a few weirdos still slip through, of course.)

cb asks "What role, if any, do you think the scientific method should play in the world?" well, actually i have respect for the scientific method, which on certain subject-matters is an excellent way to try to get at the truth. for example, is the temperature on our planet actually increasing? well i don't see how you can do anything with that question without going out and systematically studying actual temperatures. now: is global warming a bad thing? are we ill and destroying the planet? is it nature's way of telling us something's wrong? is it better for there to be a human species or snow leopards or a planet earth than for there not to be? i say science just whiffs on such questions, if its self-understanding is basically right.

think about a principle like this: "All people are created equal." now what does that mean? is science going to help you figure out what it means? and then if it did somehow, what experiments or observations would bear it out or falsify it? but, on the other hand, is it a presupposition of the social science that you're doing? if you measure the effectiveness of a policy by the increased welfare of those affected, or even just display the data you've gathered,  do you count some of these people more than others? or does each one = 1, whether they're white or black, male or female? see: a social vision or theory far in excess to anything science could pronounce on is built in at the base of every sociological study. 

this is not merely to press the fact/value distinction. what is it like to be a bat? is the principle of non-contradiction true? does 2+3 = 5? does barack love michelle? how do you throw a pot? lays or pringles? which way will the plot of this film twist next? only a complete doink takes such questions to Science.

the problem isn't science, it's scientism: "Science" as the only source of truth. the sources of truth are many and varied, from flashes of intuition to a priori conceptual exploration to aesthetic experience. i guess you could try to explain *those* things as brain states etc. that wouldn't tend to show whether what they yield up is true or false, for example, even if you could make some progress.

and the social sciences are just by and large completely disingenuous attempts to manipulate people. you can study students' progress scientifically through standardized tests. really? what do you mean by "knowledge"? an entire normative orientation is built into the very idea of a standardized testing regime, or in a diagnosis of depression, or in a model for achieving economic recovery. the facts bear on these things, but that the procedure is scientific is just wrong or a rationalization for actual exercise of power, and an offloading of it: it's not me saying this, or even doing this to you: it's...Science!

and also i would say this deal where you have to choose between science and religion, reason and faith, fact and fantasy, obama and palin, is just jive. no one gets along in this world without constantly reasoning and without constantly believing things for which he has no reasons.

what's actually disturbing is the way Science serves power: the way people purport that whatever policies they think should be in place are not their own doing but that of Reality. obama actually takes this tack constantly, like his forebears john kerry and al gore. and i think you see that it has its limits as a leadership style; where's the passion etc? hey that's not even you talking, by your own account. it's, um, experts. someone who is that incapable of taking responsibility for their own opinions and their own attacks on your autonomy should never be listened to about anything.

we had better think about the epistemic hierarchy we are constructing. if all the truth is held by harvard professors and none by persons of other sorts, then of course you could ignore tea partiers or merely ridicule them. for one thing, all the harvard professors are leftists. however, you probably have no more stable grasp on the deliverances of particle physics or brain scanning than the rankest tea partier, so you don't know anything either. all you do is recite what these people say they know. it takes a lot of gaul to go from that sort of position to the amazing conclusion that Science exclusively determines truth and all other values. but i tell you that the structure i've just described is a religion.

sam-harris-the-atheists's new book is sub-titled "how science can determine human values." determine! it's unlikely that i'll read that book, but that's a very good statement of science as a religion, and it is complete hogwash. if you think you're deriving "human values" from evolution, or from climate studies, or from psychology, or from string theory, or genomics, i say you are utterly self-deluded. by an astonishing coincidence, science will end up confirming precisely the "values" (=politics) you started out with: your mother's new deal liberalism or whatever. reality itself demands that you support obama's tax policies. these claims for science, or this revival of extreme scientism, simply make it a new scholasticism, and it is a profoundly a structure of epistemic authority, a constant bowing and scraping before 'expertise' as articulated in these gigantic institutional contexts on matters about which you can have no understanding without being processed through the institution to the ph.d. and beyond, which you must simply accept. what's obvious about these new atheists etc is that they still need a religion. someone has to tell them what values to hold or they are lost. and they are angry because they got lost. but now they've found their faith, their priesthood.

so the story of mitchell heisman and his 2000-page philosophical suicide note (he shot himself on harvard yard in front of...a tour group?) is just unbelievable. got me rethinking my ideas about the meaning of life. unfortunately i'm giving a talk on the subject next month!

the boston globe report goes above and beyond; maybe the reporter was a philosophy major or something. 

With chapter titles such as “Philosophy, Cosmology, Singularity, New Jersey’’ and “How to Breed a God,’’ and citing more than a hundred authors from futurist Ray Kurzweil to the biologist E.O. Wilson, Heisman explains how his views took shape.

“The death of my father marked the beginning, or perhaps the acceleration, of a kind of moral collapse, because the total materialization of the world from matter to humans to literal subjective experience went hand in hand with a nihilistic inability to believe in the worth of any goal,’’ he wrote.

He saw his emotions as nothing more than a product of biology, as soulless as the workings of a machine, making them in essence an illusion.

“If life is truly meaningless and there is no rational basis for choosing among fundamental alternatives, then all choices are equal and there is no fundamental ground for choosing life over death,’’ he concluded.

the closest parallel might be the unabomber's manifesto. i'm not necessarily pledging to read heisman's thing, believe me. thanks stephen.

 

so msnbc is doing their little educational summit so that everyone can come and express their agreement with arne duncan, showing our commitment to america's future by uttering the same cliches in unison. colin and alma powell were on, and expressed the basic insight that the key to education in a free society is much, much more authoritarianism. indeed, he appeared to assert, much to the enthusiastic agreement of all present, that the real key to education is inducing stockholm syndrome among all students, traumatizing them so severely that they end up identifying with their captors:

joe scarborough: so he talks about the -- the general talks about how kids need to stay still and they need to focus and they need to mind the teachers. and i think that was the greatest shock when we went up to the harlem village academy and we were telling the story yesterday to the panel. i have -- i was in congress for four terms and probably spoke to 1,000 different classrooms. i have never seen a classroom better behaved, more focused. they were required to keep eye contact, to keep their chin up. they, in fact, they did not allow them to go into classrooms for a week and a half until they learned these basic things. in football it starts with blocking and tackling. here it starts with these basics that the general just talked about.

powell: that's what we do in the army.

scar: don't let them sleep.

powell: the army is a great example. we bring young kids in. we cut their hair off. we put them all in the same uniform.

powell: strip them of everything.

scar: including their mothers and fathers

powell: including their mothers and fathers and everyone else who spoiled them during their first 18 years of their life. and then we give them a new mommy and daddy called the drill sergeant, and he starts screaming at them. and they detest him until about the 8th week and then a transformation takes place and all they want to do is please him.

scar: right.

powell: they gain his respect and he gains their respect. it's the same way you teach kids.

i just want to remark that you have precisely as much right to come seize arne duncan's children under force and re-train them as arne duncan has to do the same to yours. 

hey i just want to make clear at this moment of continuous terminal crisis and malaise etc: things really are sacred and perfect the way they are. i affirm all that is.

i think we can all throw our support behind the Nationwide Report Suspicious Activity Initiative (though let me express slight reservations about 'nationwide report suspicious activity' as an adjective of english; perhaps it reads better in the original german). the only thing more admirable than a nation of informants is a nation of bootlickers. indeed we'd no doubt create an Initiative to encourage bootlicking, were that not redundant with our very national identity. there is no more vivid lesson of history than that you can't govern anything, from a nation to a school to a human subjectivity, without encouraging each member of your population to engage in anonymous denunciations of each other member. 

funny, the other day i was driving on 83, out near the home depot at exit 4, and i saw a convoy of humvees and trucks painted in camo hauling actual missiles and stuff, no doubt destined to enhance a pakistani wedding or bar mitzvah. and you want me to report my neighbor for buying acetone? geez chill.

obviously a coup for wikileaks or anyone else would be the "trophy photos"  that american troops allegedly took with allegedly previously-alive afghan civilians. it's funny because the representation in the msm is almost all on the obvious legitimacy of repressing those photographs. look the abu ghraib shots led to a an insurgency! on the other hand, if you are doing the things that they were doing in the photos in abu ghraib, you deserve an insurgency. don't underestimate the effect of those photos in deterring whole years of monstrous abuses in a u.s.-run gulag (and insurgency and counter-insurgency without end: the release of those photos led to a profound change in strategy.). that is precisely why there is a press, but i will bet that the new york times or washington post will not publish them even if they have access. at any rate, you would think that they will leak eventualy as they will have to be discovered to the defense?

listening to an npr piece on the stuxnet worm, which is apparently tantamount to a weapon of terror. but the expert was saying: well it was a well-funded, well-organized effort. "it could be organized crime," he said, "or worse, a government." that's a pretty good representation of where the real threat comes from. then these same people will autonomically decry and suppress all "non-state actors" as obviously illegitimate, while giving more control over these networks precisely to states. (one among many reasons to line up with wikileaks.)

the piece at least presented the speculation (which surely would occur first to almost anyone) that it was built by the israeli government, or for that matter the u.s., as it appears to have been trained on the iranian nuclear program. (at a guess: um, israel.) but it left the impression that a state cyber-attack is a brand new idea. it's an open secret that the russian secret services have run attacks on estonia and georgia. you can't tell me that cheney didn't have teams working on worms, and if i know my obama he just kept right on. escape into the environment makes a nice doomsday scenario, if you're writing a film script.

at any rate, maybe the story of stux will come out or maybe not. if you could persuade the mossad that you could significantly damage or set back the iranian nuclear effort without risking any lives &c they'd be foolish not to give it a whirl before they resort to air raids. indeed for all we know this thing did do some damage.

so we've got the raving anti-islamic thing going: maybe a bit of a delayed reaction. i would build a mosque at ground zero. but it would be silly to deny that islam's history is infested continuously with fanaticism, violence, war, and extreme irrationality. they're almost as bad as papists. well just as bad or badder, really. i'll defend your right to worship how you please. only: how can you possibly believe that crap? and, how come your people are blowing themselves up in order to blow random other people up, all over the world, every single day? the evil of that is matched only by its overwhelming stupidity. really, i guess we're all just going to sit and say that islam is a religion of peace, etc. that's a bit hard to maintain in the face of reality.

middle class. middle class. what about the middle class? who represents the middle class? if elected, i will euthanize the middle class with a meat cleaver. admittedly, this will soak our hands in blood guilt. however, we won't have to hear barack obama, following the great insights of john kerry, pronounce the phrase 'middle class' every ten seconds unto eternity. got to break a few eggs etc.

i notice that, more and more, women are getting into the bloodbath biz. well this is a blow for human equality, of course: a demonstration that we're all from the same solar system. however, there will be an important difference. when men kill everybody available, it's cause we're psychotic, testosterone-laden monsters: men are lower than beasts. however, when women kill everybody, it is because of low self-esteem, a serious condition as troubling as athlete's foot. however, unlike athletes' foot, it is incurable. i would anticipate an ever-escalating cycle of total, yet completely understandable, violence. rather than execute female murderers we ought to try makeovers. good luck!

from the pledge to america: "We will require that every bill contain a citation of Constitutional authority." that's kind of interesting. maybe it comes from glenn beck or ron paul's wing. it would be damned hard to produce such a thing plausibly in many cases. it would also transform constitutional jurisprudence and interpretation: there'd be this long record of the constitutional claims of congress, over which the supreme court would still have ultimate jurisdiction? or the whole thing would end up emerging in a dialogue between congress's lawyers and the supreme court; congress would require a whole new legal staff.

well, exactly. and here is a review of 'winged migration,' from back when i was trying to use my website like a blog:

7.16.03 winged migration
this is a french documentary produced by a cast of hundreds and i guess fundamentally a product of the french government and the european union. it is ravishingly beautiful. as it follows flying and waddling and swimming and fishing and hunting birds around the world, you feel that perhaps for the first time you actually understand what bird flight is. the film reminds me of leni riefenstahl, which i mean as a compliment: much of the effect is achieved through brilliant, rhythmic editing. but i think the film is compromised fundamentally by issues with honesty. obviously, it was filmed from light aircraft, watercraft etc with amazing telephoto technology. but the conceit is that you are merely seeing the birds; the filmmakers are never present. the idea is to create a magical experience, a pure contact with birds. but had i been making the film i would have indicated, in the film, how it was made, and the presence of the planes would have been explicit. of course, first of all, the behavior of the birds was affected by the presence of the filmmakers, but that is never thematized even for a moment. and there are certainly cooked scenes; faux seasonal changes, i think, and a complete adventure near the end that purports to show a tropical bird escaping from a poacher on the amazon that is palpable jive. furthermore, obviously if you're filming birds from an airplane, you can't come up with the pure sound of beating wings in the absence of engine noise. this means that the entire sound of the movie, which obviously is intended to convey the impression that you're hearing what's happening, is an editing effect. in other words, the purity and magic that they are trying to convey are palpably false, and the magic they aimed at could only have been achieved through honest means. at the beginning, it says that the birds were filmed entirely without special effects. i have a bit of doubt about that, concerning what are apparently satellite images, some of whole hemispheres, in which birds seem visible. but either way it is supposed to convey the claim that this is the truth you're seeing. it's not.

Four years later, as the editor-at-large of STAR magazine, my boss asked me to cover fashion week.

watchin cnn yesterday, as rick sanchez interviewed someone or other about bishop eddie long. the theme was the "gospel of prosperity" and the idea of religious leaders as extreme conspicuous consumers, driving around in bentleys and wearing 5k suits etc. sanchez, believe it or not, said "maybe it's because i'm a catholic, but i really don't understand this whole thing." yes no doubt for the true catholic, the idea of fantastic wealth and homosexual child sexual abuse by the clergy are completely incomprehensible. like god. 

 

well, i think that consciousness arises within and is tangled with an environment.  i would say that veridical experience - actual experience of the world - has aspects or portions of the external world as part of its content: a position known as "externalism." it's associated with the excellent philosopher mark rowlands, among others, though i tied to contribute  to its theory too in the early 90s. or as i put it, we are "fused" to what we experience. now consciousness has representative aspects: dreams, hallucinations, and memories probably all have representational aspects. but the fundamental spur, origin, content, relation cannot be like the relation of a picture to what it's a picture of or even information to what it's information about. what you're doing is putting up a screen between consciousness and world, but you don't buy anything by this move: an "idea," "image," sense-datum" or bundle of info, requires a perceiver or interpreter precisely as much as does a world, and you end up with an infinite regress of humunculi. or at least, that's my posish! 

i might just throw in that going informational is a natural metaphor for consciousness for this era, and for scientists working on computers. or it's a natural extension of all the ai-type modeling dominating philosophy of mind since the 70s. it's also the model for understanding dna, for example, right at this moment. but we need to distinguish between useful metaphors and actually contentful or fundamental theories.

the problem with, first, the view that tononi  rejects (that "consciousness is caused by the synchronization of neurons across the brain. That harmony allows the brain to bring together different perceptions into a single conscious experience"), and with the view that he proposes (that we can understand it in terms of information theory) is that consciousness is not going to turn out to be fundamentally a representational system.

tom friedman, quoting:

“China’s leaders are mostly engineers and scientists, so they don’t waste time questioning scientific data.”

exactly. as if science itself wasn't supposed to consist of questioning scientific data. but chinese leaders treat it like luther treated scripture. while i'm trafficking in stereotypes, let me point out that that the chinese tolerate a thoroughly authoritarian government: really we don't know who's in charge. the chinese, evidently, don't care, and they display complete deference to incomprehensible authority that would persist even if there were no authority. at any rate, i strongly suggest that tom friedman is an advocate of the chinese system of government, and, like our beautifully-educated advocates of reason, he treats science exactly like a messiah, and its word as law.

this one learns during one's friedmanian education: science as a series of conclusions, starndardizedtestable; as a scripture; but to say that "science" is a varied mess is an understatement - from the most entirely speculative physics a la hawking's latest toe to the most solemn of the latest social science - in education, for example - that is deployed without knowing it as the expression of a moral system. in between there we get something a little more reliable; we are entirely - i say globally - unable to study ourselves scientifically. every study is a new rationalization, self-deception, or self-expression, self-loathing, or expression of solidarity. every study is prescriptive: it wants a policy. "science" emerges as a kind of scholasticism: something to be accepted in virtue of one's training; an actual claim of a certain class or group to have a special access that you can't have to the truth. 

ok evidently that last was a horrendous post and i've gotten some pretty severe reactions in various forms. rather than, say, yank it down in the hopes that people won't regard me as a racist moster, i'm going to try to explain it, which i realize will be of doubtful efficacy. you can't even throw out all the categories i did in some sensible way: some disabled people are white men, some gay people are white men, etc. the categories are always in a state of having already collapsed. but they maintain a social currency we might say. "white men" might just be the oppressor; and it is not without a touch of irony that i call myself white: no one is pure anything.

my basic joke was that if you portray suspicion of state power as an artifact of white privilege, then i guess that puts all the other people on the other side: enthusiasts for state power. of course sometimes they are and sometimes they aren't. but sometimes they are.

let me first state that my basic rhetorical stance is often hyperbole and provocation, and also that i delight in certain forms of transgression. "white guys rock!" is in itself a littlebitty transgression: we are the only people who shouldn't be proud of our identity. well, for very good reasons, as i indicated in the post.

at any rate, i actually do think that weisberg in that piece, as people have been doing for a year now - kind of as a sideswipe on his way to deploying the unquestionable nostrum that"anti-government" and "insane" are synonyms - was attempting to discredit the tea movement on the ground of the racial and gender composition of its participants. (of course he's wrong about the gender etc.) well, in an atmosphere where there is no argument, only insult from our beautifully-educated champions of reason, this is relatively minor, though of course it's implying that the movement is racist.

i take standpoint epistemology seriously. there are things that you can or must know from one social position that you can't and mustn't know from another. one time i spent a book arguing that black folks know stuff about white folks that white folks do not know, for example. but in my view, it would not be enough to discredit a political movement that its leaders or idea people or celebrities or activists were white men. so in the post below i was playing with the notion that oppressors can see something oppressed people cannot: that all the power is just chumps like us, soup to nuts. i don't put that forward in any serious way.

but i do put forward in a serious way  as a critique of the movements for women's rights, gay rights, and racial equality that they are far, far too impressed by and focused on state power. and i might add, cb, that malcolm made precisely the same criticism. i think part of this has been a strategic necessity: if you are fighting jim crow laws in the south, that is a state issue. as a practical matter, when you are in a condition wherein you are being oppressed or broken, you seek what help you can find, and if you can turn government bodies against each other or whatever or use them to redress injuries, that is excellent. 

but of course i would say that all these groups have experienced precisely the state as a ferocious oppressing force, the armed wing of the reactionary regime that stunts or ends their lives. hence i would be very wary of a liberation movement whose every word is a larger more powerful state. if you petition for affirmative action, and the response is an office keeping records of everybody's racial identities, you don't have to think too hard about how that's going to be used in a white supremacist administration. or a black supremacist admin. if you build a welfare state - make everyone's livelihood, housing, healthcare, dependent on the state - you'd better think about what the power you're constructing actually is. malcolm was beautiful also on the dehumanization by surveillance and institutionalization.

i think if you claim some universal vision of human liberation, you had better be suspicious of all power hierarchies. there has never been an assymmetry of power in any human realm matching the state in scope, or measuring the most against the least powerful: the man controling the world-bestriding military and the average schmoe. surely, surely, your history of being oppressed should make you worry about this, worry about it at every turn, with every issue: you want break down, not beef -up and systematize, the power of the powerful.

now if a suspicion of state power is a tradition of white men - i don't know, william godwin, thomas jefferson, henry david thoreau - i say it's the best of the things we! gave the world. if a position of privilege was necessary to generate this view (which i've often heard asserted but do deny), then a fundamentally important insight was available from that standpoint. you know there's universalism in individualism, and self-reliance is a vision of freedom, as is legal equality. see, like booker t. thought that as much as emerson or palin. malcolm preached it every day. 

so because the left wants to reject individualism, e.g., they reject the concept of individual rights to which their own movements have so profoundly appealed. i actually think that power arouses resentment wherever it appears and that rejection of political power has arisen in every society in which political power has arisen. white dudes weren't the first, even if we are the last. anyway, i'd say don't lose sight of the liberatory potential of such things and the real good they have actually done. as to white guys, i'm much more worried about our tendency to subordinate others than our preaching of the autonomous value of individual persons. that ideology was turned against slavery, against racial dehumanization, against wife as property. to the extent it emerges in whitish cultures, it is our critique of ourselves.

slate, pointing out that there's anarchism in the tea party.

a movement predominated by middle-class, middle-aged white men angry about the expansion of government and hostile to societal change.

i've got to say that white men rock. of course, we have visited upon the world its greatest horrors. now on the other hand, first of all, we have the sort of pride that a history of dominating others might inculcate. and second, as veterans, we have access to the reality of political and economic power that others might lack. so let me just admit it: black people, women, children, the differently abled, latinos, gay people, etc: they all want only to be subordinated. that's what they mean when they talk about their own liberation: they will be liberated by an infinite irresistible state power analogous to a god. that's "hope," etc. i'll say this about angry white guys: we know to much to think that being subordinated to other people is good for you, much less that it is equivalent to freedom. when we were in charge, see, we understood that we weren't really doing it for your sake. our own bullshit rang in our years. it ringeth still, now coming out of your mouth.

if the tea party wants a manifesto besides sarah's twitter account, i'd suggest h.l. mencken, "on government," from prejudices: fourth series (1924):

Dr. Johnson was perhaps justified in dismissing all of [the forms of government now visible in Christendom] as but various aspects of the same fraud. The citizen of today, even in the most civilized states, is not only secured but ineffectively against other citizens who aspire to exploit and injure him - for example, highwaymen, bankers, quack doctors, clergymen, sellers of oil stock and contaminated liquor, and so-called reformer of all sorts, - and against external foes, military, commercial and philosophical; he is also exploited and injured almost without measure by the government itself - in other words, by the very agency which professes to protect him. This agency becomes, indeed, one of the most dangerous and insatiable of the inimical forces present in his everyday environment. He finds it more difficult and costly to survive in the face of it than it is to survive in the face of any other enemy. He may, if he has prudence, guard himself effectively against all the known varieties of private criminals, from stockbrokers to pickpockets and from lawyers to kidnapers, and he may, if he has been burnt enough, learn to guard himself also against the rogues who seek to rob him by the subtler device of playing upon his sentimentalities and superstitions: charity mongers, idealists, soul-savers, and others of their kind. But he can no more escape the tax-gatherer and the policemen, in all their protean and multitudinous guises, than he can escape the ultimate mortician. They beset him constantly, day in and day out, in ever-increasing numbers and in ever more disarming masks and attitudes. They invade his liberty, affront his dignity and greatly incommode his search for happiness, and every year they demand from him a larger and larger share of his worldly goods. The average American of today works more htan a full day in every week to support his government. It already costs him more than his pleasures and almost as much as his vices, and in another half century, no doubt, it will begin to cost as much as his necessities.

by the way, prejudices has just been issued in a beautiful library of america edition. i'm assuming that the american language and a volume of autobiographical writings can't be far behind. 

exercising my popesque authority, i, too, beatify  john henry newman. specifically: the book below is a fundamental work in epistemology as well as an apology for faith. his "all-or-nothing" account of belief was fundamental for my early work in epistemology.

like all television viewers, i have become an expert on side effects. the best i've ever seen are connected to simponi, an anti-arthritis drug. sometimes it's hard to decide between the disease and the cure, but i suppose once you're dead, the stiffness in your joints, while extreme, is no longer so bothersome.

SIMPONI™ can lower your ability to fight infections. Serious and sometimes fatal events can occur. There have been reports of serious infections including tuberculosis (TB) and infections caused by bacteria, fungi, or viruses that have spread throughout the body. Other serious side effects include lymphoma or other cancers, hepatitis B, heart failure or nervous system problems.

gail collins, in conversation with david brooks.

The new right believes every new government program is one step forward on the road to serfdom. They’re winning. But I still don’t quite get it. Do they believe everybody in Sweden is a serf?

well this is in the middle of a comic dialogue, but it really does show you what american liberalism is. there is nothing in it except increased government wealth and power. and it is amazing how ideology trumps reality: ok so gail collins looks squarely at history, and cannot detect any problems with too much government power, cannot associate that with oppression. gail collins seems like a bright, informed person. so i guess we just have to diagnose psychosis: she's not trying to become utterly detached from reality; she just is incapable of reaching the actual world from inside her delusory experiences. still, she's cute and funny!

anyway, you'd think it would be impossible for the american liberal to emerge from the bush administration and not be worried about ever-more government power and its abuse. you'd think that they'd look at the history of wars and genocides and oppressions performed under the aegis of the state, and they would hesitate before deploying a program to make it ever-more irresistible. 

the position of the left with regard to the state is entirely a priori, immune to the actual world. it is - i am tempted to say literally - theological, and it laughs off the problem of evil. take a gander around you and then tell me this world is the product of a perfectly good and all-powerful being. well it doesn't look that way but let's make an incredibly elaborate, strained argument showing that it's not impossible. no amount of death or oppression is enough to make the leftist doubt the goodness of the state, or to really acknowledge that the state is a bunch of actual human beings rather than some kind of divinity: for example the consciousness of all of use rolled up together. 

i don't know. go read your i.f. stone or something. gail collins's position isn't exactly that the impulse to reduce the scope of power of government is wrong; it's that it's incomprehensible. she has no idea how anyone could think that way. in the face of the real world, we can only call a position like hers an extreme, intransigent, irrational faith. well more power to her! just don't come back at me next week with some social-sciencey bullshit or refer to your own position as reality or evidence-based. it's exactly as evidence-based, say, as a member of the taliban's attitude toward the koran.

the only thrust of a thousand attempts to explain the rage that drives the tea party etc.: no one can rationally disagree with me, the leftist commentator. obviously, what i believe is true. obviously, all people of good will and rudimentary intelligence agree with me. now on that basis let's investigate the apparently incomprehensible phenomenon of people who do apparently disagree with me. well, they believe what they believe because they are incapable of rational thought, being swamped by emotions. they believe what they believe because they are inhabited by demons - glenn beck, for instance. all i can say about a book like that is that not a word of it is about tea party. it's about the author and his friends, and this kind of incessant self-congratulation and complete failure of understanding or connection is about the overwhelming weakness of the author's actual convictions, or his faculty of conviction: his need for a thousand props, for everyone always to be saying he's right, his horrendous fear that he may be wrong, which expresses itself in an absolute assumption that he can't be wrong: a completely irrational sheer faith, a sheer kierkegaardian leap presented as empirical research.... i can't imagine being so insecure in my beliefs that i need the kind of unanimity of rational beings that will bunch and all y'all need. and you write from that need, not from some sort of facts, to which you are far more indifferent than the people you oppose.

when barack obama was elected, i - like you - knew that we had finally reached that turning point in history; now justice and prosperity would rule over the all the earth. finally we'd overcome our disagreements, because everyone would agree with barack obama about everything. finally, people would understand that there was only one legitimate opinion, supported by "science." everyone would receive a beautiful if somewhat unimaginative education, and this would help increase our unity. who could be a terrorist in such a world? does that help your productivity? or keep living in rural america, for instance? so when we didn't suddenly dive into the starbucks at the end of history, i was really disappointed. i thought obama would fix my head, change me into someone else entirely, someone who makes sense. but now i am so disillusioned. i need someone else to come along and totally transform my world and my self. because i still have ideals. i still have hope. i still live in some kind of masochist fantasy of transcendence through subordination. i still need someone to tell me what to do, what to believe, how to think. i still need, in short, someone muttering cliches in my ear all day like my own televised dale carnegie. please help me, mitt romney!

so if pastor jones was going to burn copies of the koran, and the federal government intervened, even with a pretext, i think the jurisprudence is pretty clear that that would violate constitutional protections on freedom of speech. but as i say you'd be taking federal action to prevent insult to islam. that violates the establishment clause.

watchin morning joe this morning and folks such as pat buhanan and the execrable "donnie" are suggesting that obama simply find some legal pretext and stop the dude from burning korans. we are at war! plus then he'd look decisive and get a 10-point bounce! ok think about this from the other perspective: if it's the case that he can stop it, then he is indeed responsible for it. so that if it hapens, the reaction against the american state would be fully justified. not only that but he'd be suspending the constitution in order to protect islam from insult. i don't know, might as well call that an eruption of sharia into our legal system.

"A fundamental question thus becomes why some people are willing to undertake repeated and focused practice and others aren’t. It is not sufficient merely to log 10,000 hours “practicing” a complex task; one must sustain an intensity that seems beyond the reach of most people, and that must come from loving the process. You can’t just force yourself to do it; you must somehow actually enjoy it.

So why can some people do this and others can’t? And even if the end result of purposeful practice is not always (or even usually) performance at the gold-medal level, are there lessons from those experiences that can be useful in earning the equivalent of the bronze?

Stanford psychologist Carol Dweck suggests that what she calls“mindset” (in her 2006 book of that name) plays a crucial role in sustaining the necessary type of intense practice — and that the right mindset can be quite useful even if your goal is not to win the gold. Dweck puts forward two mindsets — a fixed mindset, which occurs when someone believes that personal qualities like intelligence are immutable, and a growth mindset, which occurs when someone believes that skills and characteristics can be cultivated through effort. In the fixed mindset, success is showing you’re talented; in the growth mindset, it’s developing yourself."

now to me peter orszag might want to do more than recapitulate malcolm gladwell. the idea of "mindset" is a typical psychological pseudo-explanation, a dormative virtue : little more than a restatement of the original facts. and if you're actually asking why people don't spend 10,000 hours learning particle phsyics or computer programming, you might ask yourself, say, what it's like growing up in an american ghetto, or on a farm, or what happens when you have a kid when you're 17, or when you have to have a job to eat, etc.

in terms of things like fonts and indentation, the typepad word processor can be amazingly difficult to use.