Eagleton again. (repeats)

repeats

repeats. from Larkin to Baudelaire.

I had provided myself with the popular books of the day (this was sixteen or seventeen years ago), and for two weeks I had never left my room. I am speaking now of those books that treat of the art of making nations happy, wise and rich in twenty-four hours. I had therefore digested—swallowed, I should say—alI the lucubrations of all the authorities on the happiness of society—those who advise the poor to become slaves, and those who persuade them that they are all dethroned kings. So it is not astonishing if I was in a state of mind bordering on stupidity or madness. Only it seemed to me that deep in my mind, I was conscious of an obscure germ of an idea, superior to all the old wives’ formulas whose dictionary I had just been perusing But it was only the idea of an idea, something infinitely vague. And I went out with a great thirst, for a passionate taste for bad books engenders a proportionate desire for the open air and for refreshments.

Hersh was right.

 

Kitsch, Politics, Philosophy, Pedants and Children, Naturalism, Determinism, Make it Idiot-Proof,

Whole hour of pure 🌅https://t.co/jHZefUSzfj

— Anton Jäger (@AntonJaegermm) October 6, 2024 

It's a good lecture: the German academy, Humboldt, Marcuse, Wissenschaften, Mill, the defense of academic freedom over freedom of speech; Leiter touches all the bases. And as always, he twists them to his preferences. 

Any defense of academia as an arbiter of truth is vitiated by indifference to genocide, as it's always been vitiated by academic, qua academic, responses to crises. But the pretensions of Modernism: positivist, radical, vanguardist, technocratic; elitism of one sort or another, has rendered academics of all stripes immune to irony. One way or another, they're all big children. 

 

[Michigan in the World features exhibitions of research conducted by undergraduate students about the history of the University of Michigan and its relationships beyond its borders.]

STATE OF MICHIGAN

OFFICE OF THE GOVERNOR 

LANSING, MICHIGAN 48903

GEORGE ROMNEY

GOVERNOR

August 9, 1965

Dear Dr. Kaufman:

Your article, "Teach-ins: A New Force for the Times", in NATION of June 21st has been called to my attention. I  admire you for the depth of your conviction that you have performed an essential service for democracy; but, I would have wished you to be more objective in your presentation. Your phrase, "But presumably in the world of Governors and auto executives, business is always business, and sacred11 , is a neat stereotype, but obviously removed from the facts of the case. It certainly does not describe accurately my response to your original teacher strike proposal.

My reaction, that of the legislature, and your colleagues, too, should have made it crystal clear that our concern was for the majority of students, faculty, and administration at the University who did not choose to participate in your demonstration. The strike would have forced a cancellation of classes, whether this was desired or not, to be made up later if schedules · could be rearranged. Certainly

you felt your cause to be important enough to warrant "a departure from work as usual". And you anticipated an audience of 700 from a student body of 30,000. Following your example, it would be necessary for the whole University to defer to any 2% of the University community which felt it had a cause important enough to bring the tight schedule to a standstill.

Someone could write a book. The relation of Florence to Venice, to modernity.  Titian admitted he couldn't compete with Florentine facility; he had to do something else. But Picasso's best painting is an anti-formalist clusterfuck that works. Panofsky said he didn't use color plates in his book on Titian because they would only be an insult. The plates “were made from the best available originals and are all in black and white, not in spite but because of the fact that Titian was the greatest ‘colorist’ who ever lived.” And he doubted the attribution  of The Flaying of Marsyas.  Picasso said "when I don't have red, I use blue."

All repeats, but I'd never put the images side by side.

The ideal of Modernism was that it was a sort of return to the Renaissance, but the Renaissance was a loosening of rules, while Modernism was a closing down. Gursky’s nihilism begins in Seurat. To see Les Demoiselles d’Avignon as the high-point of 20th century painting is to imagine a century beginning with the Carracci and Titian’s Flaying of Marsyas and fading into mannerism. The idealism of Modernism is always the idealism of a church, or the equally strict, fearful, ironic mockery of the same church.

And again.

The Atlantic, The elite college students who can’t read books

Nicholas Dames has taught Literature Humanities, Columbia University’s required great-books course, since 1998. He loves the job, but it has changed. Over the past decade, students have become overwhelmed by the reading. College kids have never read everything they’re assigned, of course, but this feels different. Dames’s students now seem bewildered by the thought of finishing multiple books a semester. His colleagues have noticed the same problem. Many students no longer arrive at college—even at highly selective, elite colleges—prepared to read books.

The Connecticut Mirror: This Hartford Public High School grad can’t read. Here’s how it happened.

When 19-year-old Aleysha Ortiz told Hartford City Council members in May that the public school system stole her education, she had to memorize her speech.

Ortiz, who was a senior at Hartford Public High School at the time, wrote the speech using the talk-to-text function on her phone. She listened to it repeatedly to memorize it.

That’s because she was never taught to read or write — despite attending schools in Hartford since she was 6.

Leiter asks a question. Read the answers.

I have gradually reduced the amount of reading that I assign in Philosophy classes and added documentaries and videos where possible. 

repeats. start here, work back to a defense of illiteracy by a friend of Henry Farrell, and then further.

addendum at the top

Smartphones are a global phenomenon. But apparently the rise in youth anxiety is not. In some of the largest and most trusted surveys, it appears to be largely occurring in the United States, Great Britain, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. “If you’re looking for something that’s special about the countries where youth unhappiness is rising, they’re mostly Western developed countries,” says John Helliwell, an economics professor at the University of British Columbia and a co-author of the World Happiness Report. “And for the most part, they are countries that speak English.”

Even the Happiness Report is an Americanism. 

repeats. Haidt is a promoter of "Positive Psychology". He teaches at a business school. 

repeats. Click on the quote from Cobb at the link.

Robert Osborn, 1960

repeats and repeats and repeats. Individualism, alienation, anomie. 

all explaining the first comment below. Ilaria Mazzocco's anxious forced expressions of happiness are like fingernails on a chalkboard.

How China’s EV Industry Got So Big Shift Key with Robinson Meyer and Jesse Jenkins

---

as a side note, the voices of of people on the podcast are unbearable.

 

The CCG launched a brutal assault on the AFP personnel aboard an AFP Rigid Hull Inflatable Boat (RHIB), aggressively ramming it and brandishing bladed and pointed weapons, explicitly threatening to harm AFP troops. pic.twitter.com/LuFgLE3WJj

— Armed Forces of the Philippines (@TeamAFP) June 19, 2024

At the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, the U.S. military launched a secret campaign to counter what it perceived as China’s growing influence in the Philippines, a nation hit especially hard by the deadly virus.

The clandestine operation has not been previously reported. It aimed to sow doubt about the safety and efficacy of vaccines and other life-saving aid that was being supplied by China, a Reuters investigation found. Through phony internet accounts meant to impersonate Filipinos, the military’s propaganda efforts morphed into an anti-vax campaign. Social media posts decried the quality of face masks, test kits and the first vaccine that would become available in the Philippines – China’s Sinovac inoculation.

Reuters identified at least 300 accounts on X, formerly Twitter, that matched descriptions shared by former U.S. military officials familiar with the Philippines operation. Almost all were created in the summer of 2020 and centered on the slogan #Chinaangvirus – Tagalog for China is the virus.

“COVID came from China and the VACCINE also came from China, don’t trust China!” one typical tweet from July 2020 read in Tagalog. The words were next to a photo of a syringe beside a Chinese flag and a soaring chart of infections. Another post read: “From China – PPE, Face Mask, Vaccine: FAKE. But the Coronavirus is real.”

After Reuters asked X about the accounts, the social media company removed the profiles, determining they were part of a coordinated bot campaign based on activity patterns and internal data.

The U.S. military’s anti-vax effort began in the spring of 2020 and expanded beyond Southeast Asia before it was terminated in mid-2021, Reuters determined. Tailoring the propaganda campaign to local audiences across Central Asia and the Middle East, the Pentagon used a combination of fake social media accounts on multiple platforms to spread fear of China’s vaccines among Muslims at a time when the virus was killing tens of thousands of people each day. A key part of the strategy: amplify the disputed contention that, because vaccines sometimes contain pork gelatin, China’s shots could be considered forbidden under Islamic law.

repeats and new.

Stuff I’m hearing about current undergrads is devastating. I haven’t taught in a few years. But the most enthusiastic, bright-eyed bushy-tailed teachers come back to say “they don’t know what a topic sentence is,” “can’t string a series of thoughts together” etc. Is that right?

— Nic Johnson (@TiltingatM3) June 12, 2024

meeting academics from virtually anywhere in the world these days: “how’s the teaching going?” [series of frustrated sighs] “none of them know how to write an essay anymore”

— csz (@cszabla) April 21, 2024

This was the most astonishing thing about teaching freshmen at Cornell this fall: students who had never read anything longer than a reading comprehension excerpt for the SAT. https://t.co/86oL8XBGje pic.twitter.com/p758WqWPxZ

— cpetersen.bsky.social (@p_e_t_e_r_s_e_n) February 12, 2024

---

jumping ahead, to October. 

You will remember that Plato said that only his body still inhabited the City and, in the Phaedo, also explained how right ordinary people are when they say that a philosopher's life is like dying.⁴⁶ Death, being the separation of body and soul, is welcome to him; he is somehow in love with death, because the body, with all its demands, constantly interrupts the soul's pursuits. ⁴⁷ In other words, the true philosopher does not accept the conditions under which life has been given to man. 

Aaron Swartz, Scott Aaronson, Milo Yiannopoulos, et al.

I think here's something to be said for returning money to the old category of "shit". 

Meatspace 

Science is optimistic, so anti-material, anti-physical idealism becomes not the monastic self-abnegation of adults who refuse desire, but the preadolescent imagination that's never felt it. I've said this all before, and I'll say it again. Altman is brilliant maybe, and an idiot. His "discovery" of human interaction, as a marketable thing, after a lifetime at the keyboard is almost funny. And his need to see himself as in control, as an agent, to the point of fantasizing panpsychism, which he's apparently never heard of. But panpsychism is as much a product as he is: it exists as an idea for the same reason he exists as a mind.

maybe I'll write more.

ChatGPT has a tag.

record keeping

Statement of the #ICC Office of the Prosecutor pic.twitter.com/Cw331pMcDm

— Int'l Criminal Court (@IntlCrimCourt) May 3, 2024

The Office of the Prosecutor is aware that there is significant public interest in its investigations, and it welcomes comments, communication of concerns, and engagement In its activities from State and elected officials, non-governmental organisations, scholars,  and activists.  

The Office seeks to engage constructively with all stakeholders whenever such dialogue is consistent with its mandate under the Rome Statute to act independently and impartially. 

That independence and impartiality are undermined, however, when individuals threaten to retaliate against the Court or against Court personnel should the Office, in fulfillment of  its mandate, make decisions about investigations or cases falling within its jurisdiction.  Such threats, even when not acted upon, may also constitute an offence against the administration of justice under Art. 70 of the Rome Statute.  

That provision explicitly prohibits both "[r]etaliating against an official of the Court on account of duties performed by that or another official" and ”[i]mpeding, intimidating or corruptly influencing an official of the Court for the purpose of forcing or persuading the  official not to perform, or to perform improperly, his or her duties."  The Office insists that all attempts to impede, intimidate or improperly influence its officials  cease immediately.

Wooooow. H*m*s released the text for the ceasefire deal that they accepted. It includes the release of ALL Israel hostages & war prisoners and all bodies of deceased Israeli hostages & war prisoners. ALL OF THEM.
Israel said no. https://t.co/rm7GAIEtrg

— Taleed El-Sabawi, JD, PhD (@el_sabawi) May 7, 2024

May 5,  "Al Jazeera condemns Israeli government decision to shut down local offices" 

Israeli cabinet votes unanimously to close the network’s operations in Israel with immediate effect.

The statement comes after Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s cabinet voted unanimously to close Al Jazeera’s operations in Israel, weeks after Israel’s parliament passed a law allowing the temporary closure of foreign broadcasters considered to be a threat to national security during the months-long war in Gaza.

Netanyahu announced the decision on X, formerly Twitter. “The government headed by me unanimously decided: the incitement channel Al Jazeera will be closed in Israel,” he posted in Hebrew.

Israel’s Communications Minister Shlomo Karhi wrote on X that he had signed the orders against Al Jazeera, which would be effective immediately.

Karhi said he ordered the seizure of Al Jazeera’s broadcasting equipment “used to deliver the channel’s content”, including editing and routing equipment, cameras, microphones, servers and laptops, as well as wireless transmission equipment and some mobile phones.

May 4th, Barrons, (AFP) 

A top Israeli official said Saturday that Hamas's continued demand for a lasting ceasefire in the war in Gaza was stymying prospects of reaching a truce. "So far, Hamas has not given up its demand to end the war, thus thwarting the possibility of reaching an agreement," the official told AFP on condition of anonymity.

The official rejected reports that Israel had agreed to end the war as part of a deal to free the hostages held by Gaza militants.

The official said suggestions Israel was prepared to allow mediators to provide Hamas with guarantees of an end to the war were also "not accurate".

The official's comments came after Hamas negotiators returned to Egypt on Saturday to give their response to a proposed pause in the nearly seven-month war.

May 5th, Haaretz

Netanyahu Hoped Hamas Would Reject the Cease-fire Offer. When It Didn't, He Turned to Sabotage

General context for this: 

 
source 

repeats

"For those of you who have been with us so far, you'll know that we've been thinking and talking a lot about how the First Amendment should adjust to the new challenges of the platform era." 

Important article by Amos Goldberg. Please note that Professor Goldberg has not had a chance to look over the translation. But it is a reliable rendition of the Hebrew original and he has allowed me to post it.https://t.co/yEge11gXMS

— Omer Bartov عومر بَرتوف עמר ברטוב (@bartov_omer) April 28, 2024

Yes, it is genocide. It is so difficult and painful to admit it, but despite all that, and despite all our efforts to think otherwise, after six months of brutal war we can no longer avoid this conclusion. Jewish history will henceforth be stained with the mark of Cain for the “most horrible of crimes,” which cannot be erased from its forehead. As such, this is the way it will be viewed in history’s judgment for generations to come.

From a legal point of view, there is still no telling what the International Court of Justice in The Hague will decide, although in light of its temporary rulings so far and in light of increasing prevalence of reports by jurists, international organisations, and investigative journalists, the trajectory of the prospective judgement seems quite clear.

The man talking above is a liar, a hack, abetting a crime. The kid below thinks he's saying what he sincerely believes, riffing with no idea beyond enthusiasm of what his words might actually mean, a spoiled moralizing brat, one of a group that now includes "African Americans".

"The cloying theatricality of American protests" etc.

'It's like pop culture, concentrated teen angst,' she said of the rally. 'The rhetoric is too heavy handed. That's the problem with American activists. They need to simplify.' Someone on the stage railed against police brutality, and she rolled her eyes."

Nicholas Christakis in 2024—

"Universities remain strikingly incurious about where all the anti-semitism (as distinct from opposition to Israeli policy) has come from? How and why have students come to think and act this way? Might the pedagogy of faculty and policies of administrators have anything to do with it?"

—and 2015: "...other people have rights too." Responding to protests about Halloween costumes, but not this one:

2015 NYT,  "Walmart Withdraws Hooked ‘Sheik Fagin’ Nose From Halloween Store"

The link (Christakis ) from 2015 includes a link to this. 

"To be perfectly clear, student journalists do have the right to take photos and protesters do not have a right to push away journalists. Students engaged in public protest, the very purpose of which is visibility, cannot credibly argue that they have any reasonable expectation of privacy."

During Jummah (Friday prayer) this afternoon, Columbia University students formed a human shield with blankets to provide privacy to those students participating in prayer after a video showing students praying on the lawn began circulating on social media

📸 pic.twitter.com/xnPllK0shV

— katie smith (@probablyreadit) April 20, 2024

The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education changed their name in 2022. The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression hasn't commented on the behavior of the students at Columbia.

The protestors are or have friends who are Palestinian, Arab, or Muslim. Any sense of principle beyond loyalty is minimal. "The fact that Bella Hadid exists is more important than anything Edward Said ever wrote." 

"This was the most astonishing thing about teaching freshmen at Cornell this fall: students who had never read anything longer than a reading comprehension excerpt for the SAT."

meeting academics from virtually anywhere in the world these days: “how’s the teaching going?” [series of frustrated sighs] “none of them know how to write an essay anymore”

— csz (@cszabla) April 21, 2024

Some can read, or at least want to, but it's a battle.

Never mind the tits.

old and new "Behind the chiliasm..." etc.

It is from this ambivalent conception of humanitas that humanism was born. It is not so much a movement as an attitude which can be defined as the conviction of the dignity of man, based on both the insistence on human values (rationality and freedom) and the acceptance of human limitations (fallibility and frailty); from this two postulates result responsibility and tolerance.

Small wonder that this attitude has been attacked frorn two opposite camps whose common aversion to the ideas of responsibility and tolerance has recently aligned them in a united front. Entrenched in one of these camps are those who deny human values: the determinists, whether they believe in divine, physical or social predestination, the authoritarians, and those "insectolatrists" who profess the all-importance of the hive, whether the hive be called group, class, nation or race. In the other camp are those who deny human limitations in favor of some sort of intellectual or political libertinism, such as aestheticists, vitalists, intuitionists and hero-worshipers. From the point of view of determinism, the humanist is either a lost soul or an ideologist. From the point of view of authoritarianism, he is either a heretic or a revolutionary (or a counterrevolutionary). From the point of view of "insectolatry," he is a useless individualist. And from the point of view of libertinism he is a timid bourgeois.

Iran informed Turkey in advance of its planned operation against Israel, a Turkish diplomatic source told Reuters on Sunday, adding that the US conveyed to Iran via Ankara that its operation must be "within certain limits."https://t.co/iG8Qr8WIYk

— The Jerusalem Post (@Jerusalem_Post) April 14, 2024

cell phone

Richard Serra from 2013, 2011, 2007, and 2003

2011

 

Richard Serra, Untitled, 1972, Charcoal on paper, 29 3/4 x 41 1/2 in.
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Gift of John Coplans, 1975
There's something very interesting about this drawing. When it was made, and why.

"Philosophy opposes fiction, and theories of modern art opposed the 'fiction' of pictorialism. The implications of that preference are unexamined."
Look at the shape. How it appears flat and then seems to recede. The beginnings of a return to pictorial art: affirmed/denied/affirmed
Richard Serra Drawing: A Retrospective

Watching Israel and Zionism fall apart. The last colonial state and the last modernist utopia but one.

The people who should look themselves in the mirror, won't. 

---

I'm watching Israel and Zionism fall apart in real time, and all I can think about is the liberal consensus that defended them. That's not a defense of radicalism—Israel and North Korea are the last utopian projects—but the role of adversarialism, pessimism, negativity, denial.

repeats 

Thoughts have become concepts.
Concepts are called objects.
Writers of financial contracts are called financial engineers.
Contracts are called instruments.
Banking has become an industry.
Politics and economics are called science.
Rationalism has become empiricism.
Metaphysics has become physics.

All that is solid melts into air, and all that is ephemeral becomes material. 

1— Coming Soon Marion Fourcade and Kieran Healy, The Ordinal Society

The shift from the sale of physical computer hardware, frst to packaged software and then to web services as the basis for success in Silicon Valley, fostered a frm belief that “code” could and should solve most problems facing society. For the region’s “technological solutionists,” disregard for legal rules, hierarchies of knowledge, and existing organizational forms was the price of progress. There were echoes of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, who also acknowledged capitalism’s astonishing power to rip up the world and replace it with something new and almost incomprehensibly dynamic. “All that is solid melts into air”: capital discards obsolete technologies and flls up junkyards; it sheds the chrysalides of antiquated social structures, leaving a trail of destruction in its wake; it mocks ideas whose time has passed and incites the laity to pray to new idols. The metamorphosis is painful for everyone, even capitalists. To survive, they too must undermine their own production base. Joseph Schumpeter, himself a fne reader of Marx, termed the process “creative destruction”: the opening of new markets, the creation of new capacities, and product innovations, which “incessantly revolutionize the economic structure from within, forever destroying the old one, incessantly creating a new one.”27 While the new revolution was made of code rather than coal, scripts rather than steam, its language and im- agery was curiously and inescapably industrial. Code was made, it seemed, in forges, with engines, through pipelines, by foundries—an entire metaphorical world of intensely physical production was conjured up to represent the activities of people who spent their days in front of screens, typing. They were not writing; they were building. Soon they would be mining also.

2—Something almost as annoying: Alberto Tuscano, "Undoing Oslo", NLR

Eid teaches English literature at Gaza’s al-Aqsa University and is a founding member of the BDS movement. He is the author of ‘Worlding’ Postmodernism (2014), a plea for an anti-authoritarian critical theory of totality anchored in readings of Joyce and DeLillo, as well as the editor of Countering the Palestinian Nakba (2017), a collection of writings by American, Israeli and Palestinian intellectuals which makes the case for one secular democratic state. As part of the systematic scholasticide visited upon the Strip – an intensification of Israel’s decades-long war on Palestinian intellectual life – Eid’s university has now been obliterated along with all other higher education institutions in Gaza. Scores of its academics and students have been murdered; all have been displaced and are now facing famine.

Decolonising the Palestinian Mind was completed amid Israel’s current onslaught, which Eid and his family were eventually able to escape because of his South African citizenship. A prologue, dated 26 October, captures the scale and ubiquity of the destruction: ‘I am standing over the ruins of a house in Gaza City, peering at the horizon. Most probably, the body of a martyr lies under the rubble. The body of someone who could not respond to an Israeli “warning.”’ In a poetic ‘out of body’ meditation, Eid surveys the pulverized landscape as if from the standpoint of a ghost. A further prologue, composed in Rafah five days later, describes his efforts to evade Israeli bombs with his wife and young children, fleeing from the razed Gaza City neighbourhood of Rimal to the north of the Strip and then down to the border with Egypt. It concludes by reiterating the demands for a ceasefire and ‘immediate reparations and compensation’, as well as one democratic state.

"'Worlding’ Postmodernism (2014), a plea for an anti-authoritarian critical theory of totality anchored in readings of Joyce and DeLillo...

Decolonising the Palestinian Mind was completed amid Israel’s current onslaught"

As I said elsewhere, if a rebel has a gun and uses it while also writing poetry I might want to read the poems. If a man with a pen and a foundation grant writes poems and calls them bullets, odds are I won't.

Mashal on Charlie Rose in 2014. Politics is a practical business. 

from 1996

This was the most astonishing thing about teaching freshmen at Cornell this fall: students who had never read anything longer than a reading comprehension excerpt for the SAT.

For all the flaws of the balanced literacy method, it was presumably implemented by people who thought it would help. It is hard to see a similar motivation in the growing trend toward assigning students only the kind of short passages that can be included in a standardized test. Due in part to changes driven by the infamous Common Core standards, teachers now have to fight to assign their students longer readings, much less entire books, because those activities won’t feed directly into students getting higher test scores, which leads to schools getting more funding. The emphasis on standardized tests was always a distraction at best, but we have reached the point where it is actively cannibalizing students’ educational experience—an outcome no one intended or planned, and for which there is no possible justification.

A Stanford professor and editor of N+1, linking idiot Adam Kotsko. 

And this, at CT. 

My blogging is about two things: (1) the radical changes wrought by modern communication technology; and (2) the inability of the epistemic technologies of the written word to understand point (1).

I find this dialectical tension to be generative, but I can see how readers looking for answers might find it unsatisfying.

A recent paper in Nature, titled “Online images amplify gender bias,” makes the point in a more familiar format. Consider the first full clause of the first sentence of the abstract:

“Each year, people spend less time reading and more time viewing images”

BOOM. Footnoted: “Time spent reading. American Academy of the Arts and Sciences https://www.amacad.org/humanities-indicators/public-life/time-spent-reading (2019).”

I’ve frequently claimed that the age of reading and writing are over,...

Maybe Kevin Munger should stop writing.

On the declining abilities, and general resilience, of students. repeats 

It took years of indifference and stupidity to make us as ignorant as we are today. Anyone who has taught college over the last forty years, as I have, can tell you how much less students coming out of high school know every year. 

The technocrats who rule our world are not going to start communicating only in memes. But the fact of fading literacy is only the problem now of how the class of designers and managers communicate with the managed. The era of "citizenship" is over.

And Farrell is as sleazy as ever

So Noah Smith has a quite negative review of Acemoglu and Johnson’s recent book, Power and Progress, a book that I myself liked very much. Before letting rip, Noah says nice things about Acemoglu and Johnson, and I’ll do the same here for him. There are a lot of people on the left who detest Noah, but I know him to be a genuinely decent person. What he says of Acemoglu and Johnson is what I’ll say about him – his heart is in the right place. Sometimes … he does not go out of his way to make himself lovable to lefties, but as someone who has been known to get involved in stupid and tendentious spats on the Internet myself, I’m in no position to heave rocks at glasshouses.

And Gaza, on actual politics (class and foreign relations, social in every sense), as always, useless: passive, hand wringing, willed ignorance and worse. Anglo-American  left liberals are unreadable. I don't even pay attention anymore. I'm not going to waste my time with CT. If you're not following opinion outside the bubble, including the bubble of the western left, and the west itself, there's not much to say. I try. I follow what I can.

Again, the importance of Palestinian political scientists and Arab academics (writing in english) is that they exist. It's got nothing to do with any inherent value in academia.

Sometimes, in his lofty condescension, a film-maker seeks to bring enlightenment to the great unwashed and force feed this or that trendy political pap to an audience which has not had the opportunity, or perhaps even the wish, to participate in either the experience or the mind of the film-maker. This, which might be called the ‘Carlos’ fantasy, suggests to the filmmaker that he is important to the world. Documentaries like plays, novels, poems – are fictional in form and have no measurable social utility.

---

update

meeting academics from virtually anywhere in the world these days: “how’s the teaching going?” [series of frustrated sighs] “none of them know how to write an essay anymore”

— csz (@cszabla) April 21, 2024

jumping ahead, June

Awakening from his dogmatic slumber. 20 years ago he would have called that unoriginal observation anti-Semitic. And it would have referred to him. He's outgrown some of the pathology. 20 years from now he'll feel some secret regret.

A lot of Israelis seem to have convinced themselves that the world is so irrationally set against them that their own conduct becomes irrelevant to how they are seen in the world, which gets them stuck in a cycle of overreach, backlash, and paranoia.

— Matthew Yglesias (@mattyglesias) March 12, 2024

---

OK

The second one reminded me of something from the past 

Coetzee likes to trespass on his own fictional territory. In Elizabeth Costello (2003) he was quickly on the scene to pause the action and deliver a little lesson in the nature of fictiveness: ‘The presentation scene itself we skip. It is not a good idea to interrupt the narrative too often, since storytelling works by lulling the reader or listener into a dreamlike state in which the time and space of the real world fade away, superseded by the time and space of the fiction.’ And so on.

The origin of all this "meta-fictional" crap isn't fiction—Shakespeare is "meta-fiction" by default. 

"The line is the thought. This is the point of iambic pentameter."

And then

The 'seriousness' of realist art is based on the absence of any reminder of the fact that it is really is a question of art. 

Tristram Shandy as literature in the Age of Reason.

Various ways to repeat myself. I wish more people got the joke

repeats, and new, with Farrell and Shalizi  All of them, so stupid. Keller's tweet is the definition of fascism. And no one gets the joke. I should write more but I'm not sure I'm in the mood.

Cosma and I wrote the article to push back against one version of the common claim that we can blame everything that is wrong and toxic with social media (and by extension, American democracy – this is a U.S. centric piece) on engagement maximizing algorithms and their cousins. Specifically, we don’t think that we can fully blame these algorithms for the kinds of belief polarization that we see online: people’s willingness, for example, to concoct elaborate justifications for their belief that Trump Really Won in 2020. 

We do this by engaging in a kind of thought experiment. Would we see similar polarization of beliefs if we lived in a world where Facebook, Twitter et al. hadn’t started using these algorithms after 2012 or so? Our rough answer is that plausibly, yes: we would see lots of polarization.

We do this by engaging in a kind of thought experiment. Would we see similar polarization of beliefs if we lived in a world where Facebook, Twitter et al. hadn’t started using these algorithms after 2012 or so? Our rough answer is that plausibly, yes: we would see lots of polarization. Following Mercier and Sperber, we assume that people are motivated reasoners – they more often look for evidence to support what they want to believe than to challenge their assumptions. And all they need to do this is a combination of simple search (Google like it used to be) and social media 2.0.

Toxicity, and hygiene, the language of liberal fascism. [more comedy]

If Farrell were a method actor, he might ask "What's my motivation?", but being one of the "big children in university chairs", he imagines his own disinterest. Weber was honest and gave the answer: the preservation of the academy.

Cultural consensus in the field of education can be justified basically only on the condition of severe self-restraint in the observance of the canons of science and scholarship. If one desires this consensus, one must put aside the idea of any sort of instruction in ultimate values and beliefs; similarly the university teacher, especially in the confidentiality of his lecture hall—nowadays of such solicitude—is under the sternest obligation to avoid proposing his own position in the struggle of ideals. He must make his chair into a forum where the understanding of ultimate standpoints—alien to and divergent from his own—is fostered, rather than into an arena where he propagates his own ideals 

Technocratic neoliberalism: Farrell, and Wendy Brown. 

and then...

So the vicious circle is first, we demand content moderation, then we get some and we're unhappy with it (because human beings are fallible, inconsistent, etc.), then we demand *less* "censorship" or *more* "moderation" or *the end of all unfair censorship/moderation*.

— Mike Godwin (@sfmnemonic) September 13, 2018

We imagine that platforms can bring the whole sprawling chaos of human behavior into compliance with the law. Make our lives policeable, and policed, to a degree no govt in history could have imagined. Not only do we seem to think it's possible– we think it's a good idea. https://t.co/7FIZvt6Uw8

— Daphne Keller (@daphnehk) September 13, 2018

Google & Facebook are moving to finish off destroying the journalism industry w ad market monopoly, algorithm & UX tweaks. Don’t care at all about annoying woke digital media — VICE deserved to die — but we’re headed to almost no media left in virtually every rural & small city.

— Lee Fang (@lhfang) February 23, 2024

One reason to care about Google eliminating the entire media is soon you won't be able to complain about media conspiracies. https://t.co/Ixt7Gu0IzY

— Matt Stoller (@matthewstoller) February 23, 2024

"We imagine that platforms can bring the whole sprawling chaos of human behavior into compliance with the law. Make our lives policeable, and policed, to a degree no govt in history could have imagined."

Sounds like Kwame Anthony Appiah

Yet Eichmann's case is different from that of the ordinary criminal, who can shield himself effectively against the reality of a non-criminal world only within the narrow limits of his gang. Eichmann needed only to recall the past in order to feel assured that he was not lying and that he was not deceiving himself, for he and the world he lived in had once been in perfect harmony. And that German society of eighty million people had been shielded against reality and factuality by exactly the same means, the same self-deception, lies, and stupidity that had now become ingrained in Eichmann's mentality. These lies changed from year to year, and they frequently contradicted each other; moreoever, they were not necessarily the same for the various branches of the Party hierarchy or the people at large. But the practice of self-deception had become so common, almost a moral prerequisite for survival, that even now, eighteen years after the collapse of the Nazi regime, when most of the specific content of its lies has been forgotten, it is sometimes difficult not to believe that mendacity has become an integral part of the German national character. During the war, the lie most effective with the whole of the German people was the slogan of "the battle of destiny for the German people" [der Schicksalskampf des deutschen Volkes], coined either by Hitler or by Goebbels, which made self-deception easier on three counts: it suggested, first, that the war was no war; second, that it was started by destiny and not by Germany; and, third, that it was a matter of life and death for the Germans, who must annihilate their enemies or be annihilated. 

general

Democratic candidates 2024, with the backup singers. The GOP is done. Coming to terms with genocide will be take decades.

The last is a repeat

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1. Can't overstate the tragic irony that untill Oct.6, 2SS was lip service. Since Oct.7, it is a policy directive.

— Nimrod Novik (@NimrodNovik) January 29, 2024

Nimrod Novik

@NimrodNovik

Special Ambassador (ret ).

Past Senior Adviser to PM Peres (RIP).

Fellow, Israel Policy Forum.

BOD, Commanders for Israel's Security (CIS). 

Senior Fellow, ECF

Fiat iustitia, et pereat mundus. It means just what it says. 

Neither party expected for the war the magnitude or the duration which it has already attained. Neither anticipated that the cause of the conflict might cease with or even before the conflict itself should cease. Each looked for an easier triumph, and a result less fundamental and astounding. Both read the same Bible and pray to the same God, and each invokes His aid against the other. It may seem strange that any men should dare to ask a just God's assistance in wringing their bread from the sweat of other men's faces, but let us judge not, that we be not judged. The prayers of both could not be answered. That of neither has been answered fully. The Almighty has His own purposes. "Woe unto the world because of offenses; for it must needs be that offenses come, but woe to that man by whom the offense cometh." If we shall suppose that American slavery is one of those offenses which, in the providence of God, must needs come, but which, having continued through His appointed time, He now wills to remove, and that He gives to both North and South this terrible war as the woe due to those by whom the offense came, shall we discern therein any departure from those divine attributes which the believers in a living God always ascribe to Him? Fondly do we hope, fervently do we pray, that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. Yet, if God wills that it continue until all the wealth piled by the bondsman's two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said "the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether."

Lincoln's Second Inaugural

keeping this one as a record.

Billionaires at Davos predicting Trump is the best indicator that Biden wins in a landslide

— Scott Shapiro (@scottjshapiro) January 21, 2024

repeat March 24, 2022, because I hear the DSA are in trouble.

It may not be done, but I think I am.

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I keep forgetting that site is a pain in the ass if you're not registered. The text is also here, or use the link on the right side of this page.