cheese it, the cops!

things i wrote this year

I reviewed a couple of books for the Times Literary Supplement: John Kaag's wonderful Hiking with Nietzsche, the incomparable James C. Scott's Against the Grain

For the New York Times' "Stone" series (the thing cannot possibly be described as a 'blog') I wrote on The Oscars and the Illusion of Perfect Representation

I haven't been rolling the opinion section of the Wall Street Journal quite as heavy as I had been the previous couple of years, but I notched a few: Mark Zuckerberg or Xi Jinping? Russian memes didn't steal the election, rural voters' pride and left's prejudice, the opposite flaws of trump and mueller, hatred enhaces your self-esteem

I had a couple of essays in the Los Angeles Review of Books' Philosophical Salon: western philosophy as white supremacism and before and beyond left and right (in early 19th c america)

For Times Higher Education I did an essay on some of the difficulties i'm having in teaching today's undergrads

For Standpoint I recapitulated my ridicule of Ludwig Wittgenstein

 

I must be getting toward two hundred columns for splicetoday over the last few years. In praise of my outlet I want to say that splice gives you some of the liveliest and most various and fun writing you'll find. Some 2019ly items:

I solved Brexit through the miracle of mereology

refuted Fukuyama and identified the actual end of history

narwhal horns and moral scorekeeping

mass shootings and the stories we tell ourselves

the powerlessness of positive thinking

male aging memoir: short version

reviewed or discussed visual art, as Pat Steir at the Barnes Foundation, arte povera at the Philly Museum, art and capitalism in Bentonville (Crystal Bridges), the art of suiseki landscape stones

i began a series of resoundings or recoveries of somewhat-forgotten recording artists, or lost-and-found musical loves: The Bellamy Brothers, Augustus Pablo, the Kendalls, Blue Angel (Cyndi Lauper), and Ann Peebles. There will be more of these as time unfolds.

i covered country music from time to time (and see above): steel blossoms, the highwomen, self-dramatization in cody jinks and miranda lambert, 2019 top ten

wrote about race, gender, identity politics, pc, free speech: break the glass floor; sexual abuse and political power, apologizing for whiteness; white guys: collectable, electable; his pronouns are 'they' and 'them'; trump, tropes, and the jews, 

masculinity, psychology, and servility

higher ed, which is struggling these days: hunting humans on campus, mandate campus free speech with a new title IX;  the ridiculous state of campus journalism

i covered some of the debates and impeachment developments and, in general, politics: joe biden rattletrap, intel will pick the next pres, the wrong word, whatever you do, don't elect the unelectable, there's no such thing as electability, 2020 will make 2016 look like a more innocent time, how elizabeth warren started her slide, (maybe this wasn't so prescient): biden and sanders are fading, trumpism after trump

media and such: against copyright, the wrong word is the least of our problems, yo, opinion editors, stop this practice immediately, the conspiracy theory is fake news

 

some piecey blog entries: how thoreau became a radical, ragging mr. rogers, 'ok boomer' and the fiction of generations, mao meets macklemore, quotations from chairman joe, masculinity, psychology, and servility, i just can't get no reception, the washington post opinion page and the cia: no distance, nicholas sandmann and nathan phillips (remember them?) both did well, homo economicus replaced by saints

On Sophia/bloggingheads I argued with Dan Kaufman about wittgenstein, the western phil as white supremacism essay, realism anti-realism and g.e. moore, the analytic/continental split, TRUTH

I think early in the New Year I'll have long pieces in Reason and Quillette, among others. I'm working through Robert Brandom's unbelievable book A Spirit of Trust (750 pages on Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit, but also about everything else; it is itself a philosophical system) for the TLS right now.

2018 sartwelliana

oops here are my last few splice columns. today's tries to figure out how or why some words are 'bad.' (and why people are acting like little prisses about 'shithole.')

social media, the mysterious force that explains all

the new york times wants to be breitbart. cnn wants to be fox.

text me

as classical greece was the golden era of sculpture, the italian renaissance the golden era of painting, and 2016 the golden era of pharmaceutical advertising on television, this is the golden age of the written word. it's like living with horace and virgil, i mean living with them. 

i know people who have spent decades bemoaning whatever the media situation was at the moment, often in apocalyptic terms. really, we've been declining since 1952. y'all need to love the world a little as it stands right now, alright? 

my splicetoday column this week is so good, so right, so true. or is it?

 

bully for you

missouri auditor tom schweick commits suicide. the daily beast speculates that he was 'bullied to death'. but now, i want to say that it would take a lot more than a 'whisper campaign' hinting that i was jewish to make me bite the cobain stick or do that virginia woolf doggy paddle. don't believe me? go ahead and whisper. but we live in an era when people plunge into incurable depression or hang themselves because someone made a nasty crack on twitter, and also in an era where people just think that's obviously how you'd respond. instead of trying to keep facebook free of negativity, perhaps we should concentrate on helping people - even teenage girls, for example - realize that it doesn't much matter what some anonymous chump, or indeed some nonymous chump, is saying about you. one problem is social brutality, another is absurd social dependence, where my sense of self hinges on every single person approving of me unconditionally, or at least on keeping them from saying it if they don't. this is the other side of the self-esteem industry that infests everything from schools to oprah. on this account, self-esteem comes from people telling you how great you are all the time. that there is a crazed formula for self-loathing as soon as the bullshit stops, though. without just a hint of self-reliance or independent thought, no one is really going to be able to fend off despair, i think. then again, if you're this socially dependent, there isn't much left to preserve; you're redundant.