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

they understand

i must say that one of the better developments in popular culture over the last few years, from the point of view of an ageing het dude, is that there is a lot more appreciation of the sexiness of women my age. admittedly, it's often kind of gauzy and problematic, as such things tend to be. anyway, not to butter y'all up, but women in their fifties and sixties are often very devastating. plus they know stuff.

 

have mercy! awww sweetie, painful sex after menopause? let's work on that.

 

 

 

what do women voters really want?

is anyone else sort of bothered by the idea that women just want candidates to be nice? everyone this morning is saying that maybe men liked that combative thing, but women would be disturbed bcause it was so impolite. maybe i'm just not hanging out with the extremely polite women who never want to engage in or witness a conflict. maybe that is some sort of norm from the victorian era, but for real? now, even if you had a completely retrograde interpretation of gender - or especially if you did - you could read the whole thing differently. see, women say they are looking for a nice, polite, responsible person. but who do they actually screw, eh? answer me that! oh that nasty delinquent etc. so perhaps if one of these guys goes completely off the rails into hyper-aggression and extreme rudeness and macho posturing, he'd poll extremely poorly among women, and get their votes. of course, i would myself never say such a thing, tantamount to an endorsement of manifest destiny.

i'm lord and master of a fool's taj mahal. who says you can't have it all?

can women really have it all? oh i don't know; this question, whatever it means or whyever y'all keep worrying about it, has persisted for decades. it's a sort of jingle; in fact it literally is a michelob lite ad from 1993.  possibly, you can't have it all because you can't stop saying the same things in unison over decades, whether they actually have any significance or not. i'd give you it all if i could distinguish amongst you and actually pick one of you out. you need to cultivate some verbal skills or possibly some imagination. or possibly you might want to acknowledge your own finitude, though i realize that that might slightly compromise your elephantine self-esteem. possibly not, however, because your self-esteem - as your therapist recommended - does not vary at all with your actions or any aspect of reality. in the words of ann romney: i love you women! remember, you (and here i'm using your collective 'you' that doesn't actually engage any of your particular features or qualities, of course) are beautiful, or you would be, if 'you' referred to anyone. anyway, if you really need it all, or could really make use of it all, take it all.

women's issues, women's interests

speaking of 'the war on women": even after santorum has taken a relentless pummeling on 'women's issues' (=contraception and abortion, at least at the moment), cnn exit polling in illinois shows santorum with 33% of the men, 38% of the women. that is, more republican women than men voted for santorum. your classic more or less second-wave feminism, now fully annexed by the democratic party, understandably wants to portray women as more or less monolithic (um, that's why there was a third wave): they all have the same interests: pro-choice etc. i'll just say: actual women don't necessarily see it that way.

now's the time to whip out false consciousness. awww, don't. been a long day.