cheese it, the cops!

The Sound of Silence Can Be Really a Lot Better Than the Make a Noise Approach

"We must go on as a nation, and as families. Of course you still love your uncle, even if he is bellowing about stolen elections at Christmas dinner, just as you love your sister-in-law even while she’s trying to ruin a wedding reception by holding forth on socialist saboteurs. But neither they nor the millions of other diehards deserve our engagement. The sooner we refuse to continue such conversations, the sooner we might return to being a serious nation. " -- Tom Nichols

Tom Nichols is a very interesting guy. He's a Professor at the Naval War College, writes books about things like why knowing what the hell you're doing is no longer considered important in this country, and writes for The Atlantic. He has made a point throughout his written career that he writes not in his role as a Professor at the Naval War College, but rather as a civilian-citizen who is exercising his freedom of speech. Not that what he writes is really so controversial; he just is shielding the institution and himself from people like the Trump administration.

 

He appears often on CNN, MSNBC and PBS. I caught him last night, and when this particular article was referenced in Veterans Today, I wanted to share it immediately the contrast between media makes me think it should be worth reading for everyone. . It's one of the best arguments I have seen lately for the idea of silence when talking is not a productive strategy. Or, as Marcus Aurelius puts it, "Having no opinion is always an option."

 

He acknowledges that it's probably going to be hard; we are a nation of talkers, and free expression is kind of in our DNA. Except, when there is no sense to the conversation. Should I find myself on a panel someplace discussing the election, you can expect me to be as opinionated as possible. I don't forsee that happening, by the way. But, why do I want to argue about Trump when I'm buying a cheeseburger or with my neighbor right after greeting him with "Merry Christmas?"

 

There's an old joke that's really apropos here. "Don't wrestle with a pig. It will annoy the pig, and you'll get dirty." I'm certain that many of them feel the same way about us, by the way. Silence can work for all of us here...

 

 

Damn Socrates, Wittgenstein, Authenticity and Your Own Bullshit

Farrell's Guide to Authenticity. Don't believe your own bullshit. Laugh at it...

 

The sense of the world must lie outside the world...What we cannot speak about we must remain silent about...What can be described can happen too, and what is excluded by the laws of causality cannot be described -- Wittgenstein

A good guide will take through the more important streets more often than he takes you down side streets; a bad guide will do the opposite. In philosophy I'm a rather bad guide. -- Wittgenstein

There's a great article about Wittgenstein and the problems of authenticity in The NY Times Series The Stone this morning. It got me thinking.

Damned authenticity! It roughly means, for me, the 1=1 congruence of thought, action, belief, speech, dreams and prayers. It's bloody near impossible, because nothing is really congruent. As a born, baptized, educated and apostate Roman Catholic, it is similar to things like being in a state of grace or "making a good act of contrition." If I confess the sin of anger -- a sin I'm really, really proficient at -- to make a good act of contrition requires that I be sorry for what I did, and that I intend unreservedly to never be angry again. Yeah, right...not happening, Brother Jesus, not happening.

Damned Wittgenstein, for that matter. His philosophy is so dense because he sought absolute congruence between thought, action, and belief. But one thing the universe is, and remains, is not congruent. Trying to understand it can make multiple very bright people flee to things like cultivating a rock garden, as my buddy, indicted coconspirator and practicing Philosopher as well as Philosophy Professor Crispin Sartwell has done. Or, run for Congress. Or, run to prayer.

Confession, authenticity, congruence, integrity...Damn them all, I say. And, I recommend than taking a deep breath and getting back to trying to figure it all out. It's not the job of the academic philosopher to do this; it's the job of the authentic human being.

"But one thing we can understand about Wittgenstein is that he longed to change himself; and he saw confession as a means to fulfilling this. “Nothing is so difficult,” Wittgenstein wrote in 1938, “as not deceiving oneself.”’ His vision of the authentic self is perhaps always beyond reach, like the exemplars of authenticity with which he was familiar through the writings of Kierkegaard and Nietzsche. Authenticity throughout the history of philosophy is often conceived of as an ideal to which we should aspire, but that doesn’t prevent it being a useful means for self-improvement. Confession can help remove obstacles standing in the way of our becoming our authentic selves. "If it can do that for Wittgenstein, it may do the same for us."

Or, maybe not. 

Maybe you should just not think about it all. This one is for Crispin, Jeff, James, Agi and Adam...

 

recent hits

wsj: george lakoff and the pseudo-science of neuropropaganda*

splice: we're all the same damn thing

how to be original (for real)

two (or three) kinds of honesty

 

 

 

 

Lying liars, gross incompetents, and vague lunacy

Too much Monkey Business seems equally appropriate for an article about the current state of affairs. 

 

Latest article at Vets. Not often you get to set George Will up as inspiration. I am waiting for the explosion when he realizes that Kim Jon Un punked him and when he sees the stuff about the Baby Trump the Blimp floating around London during his visit. Plus, NATO will probably just ignore him and Putin will give him orders. Sucks to be Donald Trump; sucks worse, however, to be a citizen of the country he's sort of in charge of...

 

 

little crispy tosses rotten fruit at godlike michelangelo.

the post-physical economy and the rise of trump

john ashbery is all gone, but he left us an epic pile of suck, or, really, a big bucket of meaninglessly juxtaposed words..

we're all footnotes to plato, and that really sucks. this month, the greek wise guy has undergone induction into the suck hall of fame,  joining the likes of

bruce nauman

john ashbery

the beatles

ludwig wittgenstein

kevin spacey

bruce spingsteen

pablo picasso

david bowie

stephen hawking

and bob dylan

 

 

deep deep shit

Seriously, I'd like to know who likes Bruce Nauman's work and why, or who actually gets something out of it and what. He's the latest inductee in the suckme Hall of Fame! joining the likes of John Ashbery, Stephen Hawking, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and David Bowie.

who sucks? no doubt i do. but john ashbery definitely does.

The man with the red hat
And the polar bear, is he here too?
The window giving on shade,
Is that here too?
And all the little helps,
My initials in the sky,
The hay of an arctic summer night?

It's true! The Beatles got whytheysucked. And remember to keep track of the whole roster.

genius or squirrel?

latest godling to get why-they-sucked is the astounding genius ludwig wittgenstein. true, true, i was subjected to the cult of ludwig in grad school (by people such as cora diamond and renford bambrough). he and they always put me in a hostile, teasing, and parodic mood, which went over extremely badly, as you might imagine.

here is a slice on wittgenstein and moore from entanglements. (true, true, my system of philosophy is due next month from suny.)

 

previous suckers:

bruce springsteen

david bowie

pablo picasso

kevin spacey

stephen hawking

bob dylan

2016: the year in suck

methodological treatise on suckology

Is Mike Pence the one for whom grateful I should be?

New vets posts. Gratuitous Prince Tribute. Hamilton speech. Favorite Dylan. Alec Baldwin as Trump...Siri, how do I kill ISIS? Steroids. Putin. 

http://www.veteransnewsnow.com/2016/11/21/gratitude-at-a-rolling-roil/

 

He begins to sense the walls closing in, his options limited, his power constrained. He wants to fly in his own jet and discovers that after January 20, that just isn’t going to happen. How can he be expected to fly in an airplane where his bathroom doesn’t have gold fixtures? He is no longer important; his office lends him what importance he has. It’s a different kettle of foie gras…

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mhu_Ky85t24

perhaps you already knew that kevin spacey sucks.

predicting trump withdrawal soon, btw.

bob dylan: greatest hits

anti-dylan

godbob

nobob

bd's miracle essence of america

bob dylan sucks

irrefutable proof that bob dylan sucks

 

space offal

oh no! david bowie got sucked!

i am an apostrophic volcano

helen vendler, reviewing a bio of wallace stevens in the july 14 new york review of books:

    A poet who defines himself as a a volcano and a sea has two functions: as a volcano, he addresses the upper air of the invisible; as a sea, he displays the depth and volume of things worth beholding.

    How is one to write a biography of a person composed of vertical rhetoric (Apostrophe) and horizontal sense-perception (Behold)?

how indeed?

logomachy

the proper venue for a war between myself and alexander nehamas is writing; it is what we have done our whole lives. it is with glee that i say that he not only cannot win such a war, he cannot even begin it.

i'd definitely rather play in language than in the courts, but i am not too worried about the libel suit. i don't have a job, and if they seized my assets, they would be seizing only debts, which would be a relief.

A Sad, Shortsighted Species

I've been very sick the last couple of weeks. One course of pretty nasty antibiotics and I started to feel better and then wham! Back to the local Stop&Doc where I got the first prescription and the office, which serves a couple of hundred people daily. They couldn't find a substitute to cover while the normal guy took some vacation. We commiserated back and forth, since I needed help; and they -- four people -- were waiting for the word to close shop and 3/4s of a day's pay.

While this was a personal problem, it got me thinking. I've had 2-4 cases of strep throat and associated problems every year since before Crispin was born. Had the tonsils out when I was 20 and the idea that no more sore throats was a total lie. However, there was a lot less misery. Still, when it gets full blown, I'm pretty useless. More so than normal, according to some. 

On the other hand, I've never had smallpox, tetanus, swine flu, diphtheria, thyroid, tetanus, rabies, rubella, shingles, malaria, plague, anthrax or any of the other stuff I've been vaccinated for. Made me wonder why this is so...

So, channeling Phil Ochs, I wrote about it.   

 

On the value of making it explicit as opposed to implied

 

 

I strongly recommend political junkies and philosophy fans take a look at Anat Belitzki's The Stone column in the this morning's New York Times, Making It Explicit in Israel. Excellent piece by an Israeli philosopher about the implications of the stark differences between the incoming government and the way Israel has portrayed its intentions toward the Palestinian community.  Not particularly optimistic, except that only by making underlying issues explicit can we begin to deal with them. Perhaps the reason yesterday's solutions do not work is because they never were solutions so much as bromides.

Belitzki is a professor at Quinnipiac University here in the US and at the University of Tel Aviv, and has a record of activism in Israeli civil rights. She references the work of American philosopher Robert Brandom who believes that it is possible to use language to make explicit what is real and implied in our social, cultural and political norms. For example, in Israeli-American dialogue, the two state solution is a given, and we're just discussing means and implementation and guarantees.

Bizetzki says that just isn't true, and that the most recent Israeli election shows that very starkly. She writes:

The government that will be formed this week is the most clearly articulated, narrowest, most right-wing, most religious and most nationalistic government ever assembled in Israel. A combination of the fundamentalist Orthodox clerical parties with the nationalistic chauvinism of the Jewish Home, led by Naftali Bennett who makes no attempt to hide his annexation plans, has been orchestrated by Benjamin Netanyahu in no uncertain terms. Along with Likud, Netanyahu’s home, which is the largest party in Israel today, and Kulanu (All of Us – a breakaway of Likud), this whole bloc is unambiguous in its Jewish, nationalistic agenda. (Emphasis added)

She believes that this explosion of truth into what was basically polite lies and cocktail conversation between Israel's leaders and the world was foreshadowed and made inevitable by the two month long attack on Gaza by the Israeli army in July-August 2014. The implicit issues between the US understanding of the agreed path forward -- Two State Solution, Camp David Accords, etc. -- and what Israel's government intends is pretty well illustrated by the odd mis-translation of the name of the operation. Operation "Tsuk Eitan." was announced to the world as Operation "Protective Edge" which has a somewhat defensive tone; she says that a more accurate translation would be "Firm Cliff" which has a vaguer yet more threatening tone. My use of a Google translator resulted in "A Rock"  which opens a wide range of possibilities. Perhaps "Perhaps Operation Masada" or "Operation Stoning" would have been more appropriate. 

Niche writer continued...

 

New piece over at Veterans Today. Appears I have added to the people that I am required to really piss off among our readers. People who drive Prius-es and defenders of Hobbits. Oh, and one genius said that the situation in Yemen was simple, compared to Lebanon. 

Yeah -- have you ever seen a rattlesnake nest at mating time? Thousands of the bastards, all crowded all over each other just pumping away. So, the guy appears to believe that having more snakes in the nest -- Lebanon -- is a difference in quality rather than quantity. Worth debating, I suppose. However, they are both snake fucks. Best avoided. 

 

It's not that I haven't had anything I could write about

It's not that nothing happened; it's just that everything that happened pissed me off more. However, I saw an article today in Foreign Affairs that as Kant said of David Hume, awakened me from my doctrinal slumbers. Actually, it just pissed me off some more, but...

Here's the article posted over at Veterans Today. Topic is about weasels, varmints and government staffers. 

Ever listen to one of these dweebs as they talk about stuff that they have no experience with but took a seminar from someone who had no experience with it either but had talked to someone about it, so...really made me think of this one...

 

an infinite stack of subordinations

 

 chris hayes and francisco goldman talking about the situation in mexico

goldman argues that the government and the drug cartels have merged, fully, and are dumping children's corpses into rivers. it is funny watching statists suddenly completely bewildered by the howling contradictions, infinite regresses, and so on that have always obviously been inherent at the essence of their position. oh my god! says hayes, if the government is the drug cartels, what can be done? there must be a force sufficient to hold the government to account, says hayes, as he looks completely flummoxed: the only thing this smart person can envisage is creating a new, more powerful state to control the old corrupt state. so then when all those segments in turn merge, you will be facing an even more impossible-to-constrain force. and then who will constrain it? you really do need god. after that, you're gonna need mega-god. this may well be the origin of monotheism, which never helped anything.

 

the usually extremely thoughtful goldman, too, is completely at a loss as to what even conceptually could possibly be done: someone, something, must impose the rule of law! he asserts, in answer to the question of what practically might improve the situation: he seems literally to be invoking athena, or deciding to believe in some force or other by a sheer kierkegaardian leap of faith. something, someone, somewhere help me. this, intellectually and practically, is where your own commitments led you: you have advocated the force that creates this monstrous oppression; suddenly you realize you can't even face the rudimentary entailments of your position: you started on this road by constituting a power capable of controlling the powers that existed already. that was the most general solution, and yet it entails an infinite repress. 

the conceptual and the practical problem, remakably, are exactly the same in this case. you wouldn't think someone could miss both simultaneously, but there it is.

the merging of a government and a drug cartel is a pretty typical scenario, and is just one version of squishy totalitarianism. you are not going to keep economic and political power apart, you dorks! it's quite as though the us government were not distinguishable from the oil companies, or j.p. morgan/chase, or blackwater. fortunatley, those aren't vicious or violent, unlike a drug cartel. they'd never kill you to preserve their territory or market share, or just because, would they?

seriously, a state-leftist solution - the only one envisionable in that structure of thought - would be to nationalize the drug cartels or make them public utilities: just straight-up to endorse the merger you find intolerable and are trying to solve. it is already a socialist system on the ground: that is, a merger of state and economy. that is supposed to be an egalitarian formula.

Recent visits to the Abyss Scenic Overlook...

Since I write for several sites, it can get painful to have to reformat for each site because they all use different software and variations on HTML. I guess from a Geek point of view, there are religious reasons for using Typepad over Word Press or something else over Typepad. As a guy with thick fingers and neck, this is frustrating.

  

You know what else is frustrating? People. They're also fascinating. Two recent pieces I published at Veterans Today show that the United States is in genreal not falling into any sort of standard deviation pattern in terms of populace. Nobody should claim to have cornered the market on truth, and yet I keep finding readers who do, often from a population who should understand the idea that reality is complicated. 

First piece is a pre-review of General Dan Bolger's new book on why we lost the global war on terror. You can call it whatever you want to call it, but his focus is on the actual war. Believe that the Israelis, the CIA, the Reptillians and Insectoids blew up the world trade center, fine; has to do with how we got invovled in two wars in Asia simultaneously but has little to do with why we screwed the pooch so badly. Bolger was concerned about fighting the damn war he was given based on the operational and strategic goals he was assigned. And, he's pretty sure that from an operational point of view, we screwed it all up. If the study of military disasters intrigues you, read my piece and/or the book. But, if you're curious about who the Tea Party's more disaffected constituents are, read the comments. I'm amazed.

The second piece was my post mortem on the post mortem of the post mortems of why Barrack Obama and the Democrats blew it. As they did, in great detail. The lack of moral courage, conviction and adoption of a Republican light strategy resulted in taking the US into the pits for two years while the world runs around the track. Accusations of Putin feeling up the Chinese President's wife aside, it's like the US is headed toward the height of irrelevance. Caligula famously sent a legion to the English Channel and had them invade the ocean and gather sea shells as a sign of their conquest. Obama and the Dems are marching to the sound of the Caligulan rhythm section...but, Caligula had an excuse, he was fucking crazy. If there was a way to throw out an incredible political advantage after pissing on it and insulting us all, the Dems did it. Scipio McConnell and Scipio Minor Boehner left a wasteland, but they figured to have won...whatever the hell was left.

 

 

Whadda Maroooon...Bugs Bunny

The Wascallwee Wabbit may or may not make a personal appearance in this but...

If I were Barrack Obama, I'd feel justified in asking God what the hell I'd ever done to him that merited this whirlwind of insanity. I think that smart, thoughtful presidents in the 21st Century aare at an awful disadvantage politically, and have been really since the Kennedy assassination. The guy is trying to do good things, but the world doesn't cooperate. It can't -- it's the world and consists of a lot of insane people with guns, money, lawyers, ski masks  and a mass of contradictory hidden agendas and open manifestos. In some ways, ISIL is a nice change -- they don't have a secret agenda, they're pretty open. They don't report to the same God that most of us recognize in the 21st Century. Still, they may call him Allah, but I think they worship Cthulhu or some other very dark overlord with a completely different agenda.

 

don't worry, it'll be over eventually

it is with deep sadness that i notice that woody allen is still making movies, though i take comfort in the way this one is getting hammered. i just pray he's not fucking emma stone.

unhappy until the insurrection

why might new york be the unhappiest city in america? well just speculating now, but there are way too many people there. homo sapiens has extreme sucking issues, which are hard to avoid in nyc. and of course the more people you have, the less each one counts. also the glorious human gazpacho of the world's greatest place entails way too much concrete and garbage, way too few trees. (i imagine nyc also has the country's least happy trees.) plus of course contemporary art and literature make people miserable, and there's a lot of that there.

also, clintonville is the scene of grotesque continual enactments of extreme inequality. now we're in this meritocratic phase, and the basic idea of that is people get what they deserve, and what they deserve is shown by their standardized test scores or those of their children, or what colleges they got into or graduated from. see, if we lived in a meritocracy, $$$ would be proportional to desert, which is definitely, for example, how the nypd approach the enforcement of the law. (in fact, probably there are more laws and more cops than in most places. you might reconsider your basic bloombergian view that that is itself a source of human happiness.) so when a rich person struts around new york, she conveys sort of by every movement that she deserves so so much more than you do, itself a beautiful refutation of the whole picture on which it's based. it's all very hilarious, and yet still some folks might find it somewhat irritating.

Gunfire and Gummy Bears, Hand Grenades and Horseshoes

 

I published this piece yesterday over at Veterans Today and at The Defeatists. While I get more readers at Veterans Today, the software doesn't allow for music to be openly displayed which means the pieces lose some integrity; more than that, a lot of the comments I get there are really out to lunch.

My last post about Paul Ryan the Gombeen Man got a lot of interesting responses...and then the Irish guy made it all about him and was upset because I didn't get it that the IRA bombing campaigns were bad for Ireland. He also blamed the Famine on the Catholic Church and the dumb Irish peasants who had too many babies causing the land to be exhausted. Politely told him to feck off, as they say, and tell the folks in Connemara or in any pub in Dublin about his great theories...anyway, this is about the Crimea. 

I've been searching for a metaphor, and the one that historical orientation past, present, future might go a long way toward explaining the disconnect between the Russian Federation and the rest of the world...In struggling for my own metaphor, I had thought that Barrack Obama is a digital guy dealing with a digital universe and Putin, the Tea Party, and so on analog guys dealing with reality as an analog creation. TMind over matter, you don't mind, it don't matter. In Putin world, what we can do doesn't matter because he doesn't care. Frankly, the cited article in The Guardian really added so clarity and the KAL cartoon also made a big difference. 

 

research this, bitch

i'm all up in the comments in this review of the worst line of "scientific" "research" ever pursued. you'd think it would be impossible to be as disingenuous and doltish as "scientists" of this stripe, but at least they have achieved self-fellation.

topic sentence 2

from a review by martin pugh of the fateful year: england 1914 by mark bostridge, tls january 24: "Conversely, as Mark Bostridge shows in this enjoyable tour d'horizon of the year 1914, some things were very different."

topic sentence

from g.w. bowersock's review  of the discovery of middle earth: mapping the lost world of the celts, by graham robb: new york review of books, feb. 20: "In Greek mythology Heracles was very special."