cheese it, the cops!

bully for you

no walk of life is more subject to fads and sudden profound bland moral commitments than education. this year, it's bullying. it is a very slippery notion of course, though there are egregious cases about which any institution would want to do something. but no one can make even a decent notion more meaningless or irritating than a school administrator. my daughter jane (who started middle school today! first two days canceled by power outages in baltimore) is so tired of the whole thing that the mere word or any sort of depiction on a tv show or the psa's make her actually angry, as many a student in the previous cohort was mighty tired of drug education. her objection is simple: it's everywhere, all the time; it's insanely repetitive; it's an obsession; maybe we could talk about something else for a bit? her school is wallpapered in anti-bullying posters. there are assemblies. every teacher talks about it etc etc. that's the only idea these folks really have about changing the way kids behave: a barrage of non-stop propaganda until you can't hear it anymore, or are tempted to bully someone or do drugs just to defy these people who so evidently despise your intelligence and moral insight. this is no way to approach or persuade human beings; it's more like training pigeons. i tell her not to worry. by the time high school rolls around there'll be another obsession.

strictly relevant

bashar al-assad's regime tortures children to death. now before you reply that barack obama is a war criminal, you might want to ponder whether that's strictly relevant.

damning with high praise

i don't know anything about wendy wasserstein. well, i wasn't her intended audience. but i can tell that the biography of wasserstein by judith salamon is a hagiography that would do anything to try to inflate wasserstein's importance. unfortunately, salamon keeps inflating it until it pops. so try this:

Years before Facebook existed, she “posted” updates on her life in essays published in newspapers and magazines. Before the concept of Internet identities existed, she created a public persona that seemed intimate but was carefully controlled.

yes, and two hundred years before that charles lamb did the same, and three hundred years before that, montaigne. between lamb and wasserstein, thousands. one of the most amazing achievements of montaigne was that he anticipated facebook. what appears most remarkable about wasserstein is that she anticipated sex and the city. by almost ten years. oy, the art! what remarkable prescience: like nietzsche, she was a premonition of the future. that the future sucked and was devastatingly conventional and superficial, and has now been canceled, makes no never mind. you might want to think for a second whether anyone had ever dealt with smart successful women in fiction before. judith salamon appears not to think so.

at any rate, in trying to sell her book by puffing up wasserstein, salamon issues a devastating indictment of wasserstein's work, and of salamon's own education and good sense.

brood of monsters

you know, dictator's families don't always consist of the most admirable people (see: baby doc). but gaddafi's brood of monsters takes the damn cake.

 

amazon.rape

it's easy to dismiss gaddafi as a buffoon or just giggle at the tastelessness. one thing i always thought was hilarious was his dozens of female bodyguards: his 'amazonian brigade.' but that was only funny from the outside. you start to get the picture of what gaddafi did to and how he thought about, the women of libya. arwa's piece today was an interview with a 19-year-old woman who said she was forced by gaddafi's men to execute rebels.

 

arwa damon reporting

it would surprise me if exxon-mobil operated facilities like this. one can only hope that khamis gaddafi did not die with inordinate speed or insufficient pain.

a touching faith

bill mckibben argues - as always - that the hurricane is caused by global warming. i just want to note that irene is the first hurricane to hit the u.s. in three years. now let's say we get five severe hurricanes in rapid succession. if that leads you inevitably to the conclusion that climate change is a catastrophe, then the previous couple of years lead inevitably to the conclusion that it's not. if absolutely anything - including nothing at all - confirms or even is compatible with your belief that global warming is a catastrophe, i'm going to argue that it's a matter of faith, not evidence.

any sort of intellectual hygiene demands that if more severe and frequent hurricanes or tornadoes or floods etc constitute evidence of climate change, then less severe or frequent events like that constitute evidence against it. every time there's a weather problem, the post gets mckibben to blame it on warming. i demand that every time there is no such event they get him to say that shows that it's not so bad after all.

honestly it really is religious: we are being punished for our sins, and the world is coming to an end. however, i argue that religious faith is a perfecty defensible epistemic attitude, so i say let's celebrate the irrationality as enriching the human experience.

plus they're so cute!

did you know that sex with neanderthals boosts the immune system? you're gonna be ok after all!

irene

one can only hope that irene scrubs the island of manhattan clean of any sign that it was ever inhabited by human beings. (er, without harming anyone of course.) we could leave the whole area to the giant gambian pouched rats.

bye, flanny

it's weird how you can feel like you know someone without ever meeting him. i've got to say i was shocked by the death of mike flanagan, the orioles pitcher/exec/announcer. i saw him pitch many times, particularly in the o's world championship season of 1983, when i lived a few blocks from the old memorial stadium. he was a sort of neighbor, or at least he lived (and died) rural halfway between here and baltimore. i loved him as a color man on o's broadcasts; he was very funny, laconic, low-key but also sharp. one sad fact about us people: a lot of times you really can't see that anything's wrong. he shot himself in the face, making the body hard to identify, and apparently was in despair about money. fuck.

there is too much death.

piston rods and cones

i dig this idea of the cone of uncertainty, the basic mode of hurricane forecasting. now it seems like there could be many a joke using and many a profound application of this concept: will i re-marry, get a guggenheim, die of cancer? well are these things in the cone of uncertainty? new freedom, pa certainly is in irene's. i'd really riff (you know: the universe is a cone of uncertainty, fanning out from a perfectly real, totally specific point, etc) - maybe i will - but i have a headache and my car and my dryer more or less died today: i shoulda consulted the cone before deciding to get out of bed.

 

roll

new blogroll item: the excellent possible experience (by a fearsomely sharp philosophy prof).

kickass

arthur silber kicks my ass on libya. but let me assay a couple of responses. now, maybe you could constitute an argument in pictures; maybe not. at any rate, pictures can certainly constitute evidence. indeed, direct visual or other sensory experience doesn't itself constitute an argument; it's just the kind of thing you can't make any sort of non-apriori argument without, and which might count for or against your premises etc. now on the other hand italicizing the word murder is not an argument, or for that matter evidence of anything. it might be worth asking how many people gaddafi murdered. you might ask the international criminal court.

now, maybe oil companies are happy to get rid of gaddafi, though they had been dealing with him successfully. on the other hand, gaddafi took roughly all of libya's oil wealth and deposited it in offshore family accounts. that is going to make capitalism look pretty good, and honestly though i might hate exxon-mobil, i'd rather have them controlling my oil resources than a kleptocrat. i actually think that's liable to benefit me more: exxon-mobil at least has some pr-type exigencies to consider. they even answer to their shareholders etc to some extent. admittedly, this is not the best choice one might face. 

media heroine

for the last few days, sara sidner's (and her crew's) reporting from libya for cnn has been astonishing. she rolled into tripoli from zawiya with the rebels and straight to green square when the rebels reached it. today she was actually reporting from inside the gaddafi compound as the rebels took it, right inside the firefight, chaos, and celebration. now she's back in green square. really, amazing, not least for extreme composure under fire.

and byebye jerry leiber

geez we seem to be in a die-out phase in the music biz. how about the writer of 'stand by me.'

so long nick ashford

you'd have to say that nick ashford had the best process - it might be an insult to call it a a jheri curl - of the 70s.

(that's george benson and stevie with nick ashford and valerie simpson.)

obviously, he wrote some great songs: start with 'ain't no mountain high enough.' also some turkeys, for my money: 'i'm every woman.' chaka is a particular woman, i believe, but nick not.

 

lay back and listen as i catch up on my pimpin

and freak this duet just like ashford and simpson.

(listen to the baddest

rhyming apparatus)

preparing all america's children for a future bright with promise

teach me to cheat.

a little intro to the kendalls

over or not

the picture of tripoli right now seems contradictory. the headlines indicate that tripoli has already fallen to the rebels, basically without a fight. ok but gaddafi has not been captured. on cnn, matthew chance is in the media hotel, and he says that region of the city, including the hotel, is still in the hand of gaddafi's forces. something very bad might still happen.

even buckets of scum are right twice a day

now, eric cantor sets my teeth on edge. his whole demeanor seems to scream 'scumbucket.' he's my mother's congressman, and possibly her least favorite person ever; i'm kind of surprised that the look that crosses her face whenever eric cantor's name is mentioned doesn't itself seek him out wherever he may be and crush him like a grape. not only that, but it is ridiculous to publish op-ed pieces by politicians. it is to be presumed that they did not write the stuff that appears under their by-line, and in any case they are not sincerely expressing their actual opinions, but engaging in manipulation. nevertheless it is hard to quibble with this:  "Why does the president insist on higher taxes? Behind the rhetoric lies a desire to permanently increase the size of government." really, for the left, an ever-growing state is self-evidently desirable in itself, because it is a way we are all unified into a single being. as cantor points out, public opinion seems to have swung the other way.

for the left (as, i should say, for extreme nationalists and other rightists of various stripes), the state is the collective agent: it is our unity, and our transcendence of our isolation. or it is (as in hegel, e.g.) really our human essence or nature, because we are together a single thing or agency. if you actually spent a minute looking at the fact that the whole thing rests on coercion - every day in every way - you would understand that your own data refutes your theory. it's as if you claimed that the nature of every human being was to be rational, and then put an army into the field to force people to be observe modus ponens. maybe that would be groovy, maybe not. it would certainly show that you actually did not believe what you were saying about human nature.

truancy would be the only rational approach

so let's say i kidnapped and detained you. then, when you got pissy and insulted me, i called the cops, and the law was such that, in virtue of these insults, you turned out to be the criminal. that is what we call 'education' or, alternately, 'investing in america's future.'

stay human

look. you may be unhappy with the u.s. record of international intervention. you ought to be. maybe things will now descend into more disasters in libya: a new civil war, even. but right or left, black or white, straight or gay, capitalist or communist, you've strayed too far from your basic human responses and your basic opposition to oppression - if any - if you do not feel exhilarated as you watch the people of tripoli celebrate the end of their dictatorship. there were nato airstrikes. fundamentally, though, this was something that the people did themselves, as they did in tunis and cairo, as they will do in damascus and sanaa. that's one reason this isn't vietnam or iraq. the u.s. government has a rich record of pretending that people want us there, that we are liberators, etc., while engaging in massive (though usually completely incompetent) disinformation in the service of such claims. now, does anyone believe that the situation in libya is like that? then i want some evidence, and some explanation of what we're actually seeing.

thin line between victory and summary execution

saif al-islam (gaddafi's son): "we are winning every battle." he's reported to have been captured by the rebels.

prepositions

one sign of the profound decline of our society - and of course the most important one - is that people just continually use the wrong prepositions. i don't remember this as a pervasive problem up until the last few years, and i'm not sure how to explain it. i see it on student papers, more or less in every sentence. but you see/hear it all the time in the msm too.

but: try teaching it; there are no general principles, just common sense, sensitivity to context, and relentless literacy. so i'm gonna start pillorying mistakes here, i guess. "egypt says israel apology of troop deaths is insufficient" (cnn screen scroll). 'for,' not 'of,' surely. if that's one too many characters for your scroll, 'on' is ok.

the first thing you cnn interns should do is start trying it in somewhat different constructions. 'i would like to apologize to you of that," e.g. but maybe that sounds right to a cnn intern too. basically, these are esl-type problems; perhaps we are raising a generation of white korean-americans. on the other hand, to apply a test like this, you'd have to suspect that you might have it wrong, which you can't if you've got no frigging idea, and no frigging idea that you've got no frigging idea, due to pathological self-esteem.

austerity and unrest

so government austerity programs lead to unrest. conclusion? government should keep providing increasing benefits to everyone forever, or face the firebombs. sadly, this entails that the only way to avoid rioting in the end would be never to start on the dolestate. too, too late. 

now there are perfectly good objections to specific austerity programs: that they increase income inequality, for example. but the basic dilemma is shared by any government that responds to popular will. consider for a moment the model of human behavior on which we all basically act in our own self-interest (your basic 'economic' model). ok: i vote in my own economic interest. this means that i want ever-more benefits and also ever-lower taxes. good luck.

this dilemma may actually provide the end of the political state. in the end, it cannot possibly do what people want it to do, because what people want it to do is a sheer cosmic impossibility: a miracle.

humbled by power and fame

extremely nice piece by frank bruni. sometimes, the most subversive thing to say is the most obvious thing: the thing everyone already knows.

book of the forest path

more adventures in e-publishing: book of the forest path. up for kindle and nook, also smashwords. (on the other hand it's already up for free). there seems to be a trickle of interest in my work on the tao te ching, the producet of many a long year of work on the text; i got a note from some high school teacher in cali working up an electronic version for students.

on the other hand, kuo hsiang, of whose chuang tzu chu i translate pieces in the book of the forest path, is little known, but i think gives in some ways the best formaulations of philosophical taoism, a picture of the universe as in a continual process of spontaneous or improvisational self-creation, an atheistical or even materialistic sense of wonder.

out: autocracy

i guess after all the sarcasm, i'd be remiss not to acknowledge that assad finally lost his legitimacy. for some people, that's a very hard job. meanwhile the turnaround in libya would i suppose be encouraging to those of us who called for intervention. i like the notion of gaddafi in the bunker in the last stand, still basking in the adoration of his people to the last breath.

sucking issues: catcher in the rye

thank you. it might be some comfort to you that j.d. salinger - a grotesque fuckhead - is not as good a novelist as everyone choruses that he is. you know, taking down someone like salinger is one of life's simple pleasures. first off, no one is as good as people think salinger is. second, saying he sucks hurts no one, since he's already full up with fawning claptrap. at any rate, i know that generations of quasi-literate american adolescents have found their experiences vividly mirrored in the catcher in  the rye. let me just say that i'm not one of them, and i emerged from my 15-year-old reading of the thing wanting to pistol-whip holden caulfield.

what did you do during the bachmann administration?

i buy the conventional wisdom that obama's best chance to get re-elected is the nomination of rick perry or michele bachmann. the best analogy would be to 1964 (in which the incumbent was elected). it's not that things were going so terribly well; it was (partly) the fact that goldwater was too radically conservative. 

on the other hand, you don't know what might might happen should things get that far; say that we've slipped deep into a second recession by next summer and fall: unemployment rises to 10. then we'll all be praying with and for president perry. the perry presidency won't be as bad as you're expecting: it won't be a sheer theocracy. still it will be very very irritating.

power does not corrupt

we corrupt power. it attracts and rewards the corrupt. ok here is a nice little anarchist argument, to the effect that people who rise into leadership are on average much morally worse than those who do not: more narcissistic, less empathetic, more hypocritical, and so on. though the piece is on cracked, it appears to be linked to real research. the 'social science shows x,' assemble-the-studies opinion piece is the specialty of david brooks, e.g.; it's given its authority by its appeal to science.

first i might hit the obvious reservations: really if you thought about how these studies are conducted - essentially by studying the effects of role-playing - you'd have to see that their application to the real world is at best a problem. one's suspicions are augmented by the bizarrely unanimous tone of the statistical results: "Yet, while both the less-powerful and the control group gave up the responsibility 30 to 40 percent of the time, a full 100 percent of the empowered subjects chose to roll themselves," etc.

right. on the other hand, the extreme primitivism of the research does not show that the conclusion is false. i think it's true.