the usual
I made the usual comments:

The absurdity of analytic philosophy as philosophical act is that it operates under the illusion that one can analyze language and experience seemingly from outside of both. It may be possible for computers to describe computation, but consciousness can not describe consciousness apart from acting it. We are creatures of sense before logic, and we must try each day, without ever succeeding, to pick one apart from the other. Analytic philosophy does not teach self-awareness, claiming it is unnecessary. It is the philosophy of autism.

Derrida wanted to argue the primacy of craft and of description- as a novelist would- while maintaining the authorial certainty of the man of ideas. His works fail as philosphy because they fail as literature (and “do as I say not as I do” is no longer accepted as a valid argument) Judith Butler is a student of the moral success of his intellectual failure, but she doesn’t get the point. Still, to say [quoting Jason Stanley] that a university “should seek to promote work that will give that university prestige” either now or in the future sounds so ridiculously anti-modern that I don’t know what anyone has to complain about with either of them.

We separate science and law. We defend the rule of law over the rule of ideas [without thinking!] and then turn around and defend the rule of “truth” and science over the absurdity of “fiction”.
Derrida’s mistake was clumsiness, but what he represented in his clumsy way was a return [in the academy, and years behind the culture at large] to premodern now post-modern acceptance of the primacy of description.

The rule of law is the rule of language not of truth; and narrative is the order of the day, and will be for the forseable future.
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I was first introduced to modern analytical philosophy in the mid 1980’s when a friend who worked at the Journal of Philosophy gave me a subscription. I remember an article on “morality and self-other asymmetry” that relied entirely, and seemingly as a point of ideology, on absract logic unaided by empiricism.
Why is it permissible to sacrifice one’s own life to save others but not to sacrifice another person’s to obtain the same result? The next question might have been: “why is the militry an exception?” but it was never asked. Questions as to anthropology or history were deemed irrelevent. More recently, on this site, I’ve run into discussions of Donald Davidson and references to his ‘On the Very Idea of a Conceptual Scheme’

The Oxford Dictionary of Philosophy, Simon Blackburn writes this about Donald Davidson:
“Davidson is also known for rejection of the idea of a conceptual scheme, thought of as something peculiar to one language or one way of looking at the world, arguing that where the possibility of translation stops so does the coherence of the idea that there is something to translate.”

So if it is impossible to translate the finer points in Mallarmé, then no finer points exist.

There is a form of intellectual life that is indebted to people and to forms that are not strictly speaking intellectual, even more than it is those that are. Mozart was not a philosopher, and he is more important than most of those who were.
I prefer craftsmen to philosophs as I prefer lawyers to philosophers of law (and defense attorneys to prosecutors). But if the main question of philosophy remains the relation of action to reflection, I’ll still think it my right to demand of those who call themselves intellectuals that they have an understanding of the importance of craft, action and performance to their ‘intellectual’ preoccupations.
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Just to wind this up on my end…
john halasz,
My argument is not with analytic or continental philosophy but philosophy itself. The continentals, unlike the analytics, refer to literature as a model but they undermine it by rationalizing it, dealing in a conceptualization of thought that in this country has been used to academicize the arts in ways that I think are absurd.
The question is still: how does one act ‘within’ or through a philosphy? What is the relation of action to reflection?
Academic philosphy is defined by the culture of academe, and exists inside it; but what is the relation of a lawyer in a courtroom, to law, and to society? That relation is not the same as that of a speaker to a language, but a lawyer acts within law in a similar way. A lawyer acts, must act, within a system only as a part; he/she is required not to be fully conscious. But the system itself is considered philosophically valid. Again: the rule of law is not the rule of science. but I’ve gone through this before.

I defend the arts (my chosen field) as a function of culture that similarly is philosphically valid, in that each form is simultaneously a questioning and a documentation of itself and its surroundings, both formal and reflective. Continental philosophy values the arts for this even as it undermines them [artists and critics etc.] Analytic philosophy in it’s latent or not so latent positivism, thinks this is all bunk or otherwise hides from it, and therefore from the most important questions of philosophy.

I hate academic rationalists. I only defend theory to the acolytes of analytic philosphy because at the core of either is the same scholastic formalism. Like I said: the usual. Intellectual ghetto motherfuckers.

a good one

Henry Siegman on Hamas.
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quibbling
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fucking idiot

And another, but not my copy

No weathermen no PL (Progressive Labor)!*
*(everybody else welcome)
from the family archives

What's next?: Passivity and fatalism.
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More of Dear Leader's contempt.
Power corrupts.
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I phoned Schumer's office in DC and was told "We have oversight."
I read something today about the lawsuit to stop the bombing of Belgrade (I'm trying to remember where).

I was wrong. Now he gets it (sort of).

I'd like to hope with Chris Nelson that the Pentagon's on the side of sanity, and that they're gaming the president. But the president and his crew aren't smart enough to game Iran and Ahmadinejad is no smarter than they are; though I'd have to say he's probably less of a dry drunk. I'm sure Ahmadinejad's minders are worried as well.

It amazes me that people can write about this as if it were a baseball game, played by other people. In a well run democracy we are the players.

Early Warning

Posted by Domenico Ghirlandaio @ 09/19/2002 10:35 AM EST

"I'm still amazed at the degree to which the American press and punditocracy, even in the liberal wing, and including it's junior league in blogistan, can spend so much time debating the usefulness and value of the antiwar American left -often attacking it as being made up of "19 year old anarchists, old quakers and Trotskyites"- when as far as American policy is concerned, the majority of the citizens of the planet seem to agree with its position. And the liberals who are suspicious of our government's 'analysis' feel forced by their own squeamish impotence to look to the Realist school of the American right for confirmation of their doubts, the Realists being the group that more than any other does not care what foreigners think of us unless they pose a danger to what they consider our interests.
I am more interested in the philosophical 'realism' of the members of the european populace who are shaking their heads in disbelief. This is not a debate over farm policy, but over the proposed invasion -proposed apparently by idiots- of a country in the most contested region on the face of the earth.
This debate is shameful."

Early Warning
indeed

Laura Rozen forwards tonight's Nelson Report:

Every paper and magazine of national stature has pieces with increasingly anxious quotes from past and present US officials, increasingly frank about their fears for the future.
Step back, and think about what we are really hearing from the US intelligence and military community: on one level, sure, there is a big psy-war operation being conducted by both Washington and Teheran (see today’s Washington Post) as each seeks to influence the sanctions debate at the United Nations, and whatever comes next.

But if you look at the pattern of stories in recent weeks, examine the details of both anonymous and on-the-record quotes, you see that there’s another game underway, and our sources say it’s called “pre-empting Bush” by laying out contingency plans, including the most bizarre, such as using tactical nuclear weapons on the Natanz reactor complex.

The rising drum beat of revelations, our sources argue, can have only one serious meaning: US military leaders want to force a public debate which makes it difficult for the President to talk himself into ordering a military solution to Iran’s nuclear ambitions. [...]

What terrifies serious US military, intelligence, and diplomatic players is how this Administration can turn a tactical military victory into strategic catastrophe.

Hit Natanz...then what? That’s the big question our sources are asking. After any US air strikes, does Iran meekly fold its nuclear tent and bow to the all-mighty will of George Bush? Or does Iran escalate its intervention in Iraq against US troops and interests...then Jordan...then Turkey...and, always, Israel...not to mention the Asian and European oil lifelines in the Gulf?

It would be nice if this were thing to crush George W. Bush. He deserves it. But the democratic party won't have anything to do with it.

Finally: News of the Late in the Day
JMM gets it.
As does Max (but I'd expect no less)

Marshall pulls this quote from Hersh:

There is a growing conviction among members of the United States military, and in the international community, that President Bush's ultimate goal in the nuclear confrontation with Iran is regime change. Iran's President, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, has challenged the reality of the Holocaust and said that Israel must be wiped off the map.? Bush and others in the White House view him as a potential Adolf Hitler, a former senior intelligence official said. That's the name they're using. They say: "Will Iran get a strategic weapon and threaten another world war?"

I'll blame the liberal foreign palsy types if this thing hits. Cheap and cynical nationalism fueled by ignorance and stupidity abetted by thoughtful [sic] nationalism fueled by ignorance and cowardice.
Lunacy and cowardice. Fucking idiocy all the way around.

A new link: Dean Baker's Beat the Press

(still working on it)
Apropos any discussion of 'enlightenment' and multiculturalism:
Arch defenders of the Enlightenment are most often those who defend the rule of ideas as if it were synonymous with the rule of law and as if both were equally opposed to romanticism. But while the rule of law has never been a romantic ideal, the rule of ideas is little else.

If maintaining this blog has done anything it's giving me a way to work through the defense of my sensibility and give its defense a logical form: The rule of law is the rule of form, not of ideas, and therefore not of any ideal of truth. Scientists tend towards optimism, as prosecutors tend towards moral absolutes. By this logic poets and trial lawyers argue complexity (by description) against the desire to simply name. Science gives us the only valid description of material fact, but is a simplified and vulgar description of experience.
That even scientists agree on the necessity of a rule of law means that they accept its premise.

The historical role of religion was as law. By religious logic -and now by secular legal logic- law must trump science as a description of experience. The recent misunderstandings between both sides of the creationism debate is that the creationists, in defense of the primacy of law (as God's law), are attempting to fight scientists on their own terms. They fail. What PZ Myers et al. fail or refuse to understand is the reason for creationist desperation.
Creationists see scientists equating the rule of science with the rule of law. And as long as defenders of secularism defend the rule of ideas rather than of law, the creationists are right to worry.

So it's nukes and this is the only detailed response I've found.

People must not get the point.

The Fuckers are going to Bomb Iran

Reductio ad Dictatorem

Jack Balkin:
"This theory, taken to its logical conclusions, gives the President the ability to treat anyone living in the United States, including particularly U.S. citizens, as wartime enemies without having to prove their disloyalty to anyone outside the executive branch. In so doing, it offers him what can only be called dictatorial powers-- that is, the power to suspend ordinary civil liberties protections on his say so. The limits on what the President may do under this theory are entirely political-- the question is whether the American people will stand for what the President has done if they discover what he has done in their name. But if the American people don't know what their executive is doing, they can hardly be in a position to object. And so the President has tried to keep secret exactly what he has done under the unreasonable and overreaching theory of Presidential power that his Administration has repeatedly asserted in its legal briefs and public statements.

Attorney General Gonzales' latest admission should hardly surprise us once we understand how much power the President actually thinks he has. Given that we will probably never know what the President has been doing in our name, we can only hope that he has not actually tried to exercise all the power he (wrongfully) thinks he possesses.

Michael Froomkin has more

A comment at Discourse.net

Shyamalan is a lousy filmmaker (and I'm far from alone in thinking that) but what is interesting if only in a small way is that the advertisement is now the tag-line at the end of a 60 second movie. Ads, via the form of rock videos, have become a new form [format] for art. It's not a big move, just a slow evolution (and not an advancement). I said the same thing in a comment in the post you linked to the last time. McCracken tries to make more out of it but there's not much more to say.

Art and economics even as partners are opposed. Art offers description before definition. it doesn't name experience, it merely describes it (though every description has bias) Advertising as illustration names before describing, so that the audience is led passively to a conclusion. That's why TV ads run "between" episodes or scenes. Now that ads have developed their own formal independence, the advertising 'content' comes at the end of 'ads' that have become plays within plays. It's interesting but a new format is not a new kind of art. Old wine in new bottles, no more no less.

Prosecutors and philosophers of law don't understand art but defense attorneys do. Philosophers and prosecutors say" "The accused has committed murder"
The defender says: "What do you mean when you say 'murder'?"
Some may hate them for it but they get people off that way. And McCracken doesn't understand what they do or how they do it. He has engineers' disease: the assumption that all communication, and therefore all art as a subset, is a series of statements and propositions.
And that kind of Posnerite crap pisses me off.
Like all good philosophy, art undermines propositions and then walks away.

explanation later.

And the Burger King ads are much more complex, and much more interesting.

Here's the new Amnesty International report: Below the Radar

My old roommate emailed me to say he's going to be on Charlie Rose tonight.
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update:
A teacher's authority is naturally self-subverting: teaching is itself the transferral of authority as knowledge.
A doctor retains authority after a patient is cured.

I'm not an anarchist but I'm sympathetic (more some other time).

"For months, I have told interviewers that no senior political or military official was seriously considering a military attack on Iran," Joseph Cirincione, director for non-proliferation at the Carnegie Endowment, writes in Foreign Policy magazine. "In the last few weeks, I have changed my view." Cirincione says his shift was partly triggered by "colleagues with close ties to the Pentagon and the executive branch who have convinced me that some senior officials have already made up their minds: They want to hit Iran." The ramifications of such an attack could be disastrous. Not only would it likely "rally the Iranian public around an otherwise unpopular regime, inflame anti-American anger around the Muslim world, and jeopardize the already fragile U.S. position in Iraq"; most importantly, a military strike would "almost certainly speed up" Iran's nuclear weapons development by sparking a "crash nuclear program that could produce a bomb in a few years." (Longtime U.S. counterrorism chief Richard Clarke also spoke out yesterday against military action in Iran.) Cirincione advises that the key now is to get as much information about the status of Iran's nuclear program "on the table for an open debate."

The link is to Laura Rozen. Her source is here.
I'm speechless.

Direland: On the Thai elections, Polish politics, and Berlusconi.

sin titulo:

I first read Crunchy Cons, by way of Russell Fox. I wouldn't have bothered to if he hadn't mentioned it.
I smiled when I found out that Bill Kauffman writes for Counterpunch. Alex Cockburn is one of the few people who has actually paid attention to the red state anger and more importantly given it the respect it deserves. David Brooks' secret is that he feels as much contempt for people of small town america as the average urban and demi-urbane liberal; but unlike them, he's guilt-ridden and self flagellating. I've always found Atrios' Bobo's World posts offensive.
It's been commented upon often enough, but the perverse populism of Jerry Springer's trash TV show was rooted in the political populism of his past. "Our father the left-handed transvestite dwarf is having an affair with the family hog... We still love him but we still need our bacon and eggs." Springer at his worst was never putting himself above his guests, he just wallowed in the same mud. A child of the Holocaust trying to love and be loved and make a very good living in a world where events are lost to memory after half an hour. There are worse things.

The opinions or red state conservatives are no more or less symptomatic, reactionary in the strictest sense, as those of the majority of liberals. The thought that "we" need to worry about China or the Iranian bomb strikes me as odd; the world needs to worry about Pakistan, and the only reason to worry about Iran isn't Iran, it's Israel and our client state's culture of paranoia. I'm amazed that Brad DeLong and others can go on about logic and rationality, raging against obscurantism and religious gobbledegook while arguing from nationalism as if if were as self-evidently an objective truth as the earth revolving around the sun. But nationalism, like religion, is objectively a political truth. Why secular technocrats can't see faith in their own assumptions I can't claim to know, but it seems to me that like conservatives they prefer their answers neat, tidy, and with a ribbon on top. Maybe that's why they all read science fiction.
Having to decide whether or not to turn in a contractor who brings a crew of 15 and 16 year old Ecuadorian laborers to a job site in Manhattan; wondering whether they're better off here, living without their parents in an apartment in Williamsburg, or if they'd be safer back in the villages they spent so much time and money and blood to escape.
That's not economics or science fiction, that's literature.

And the convergence of Counterpunch and the Crunchy Cons may be seen as relevant to this.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/venezuela/story/0,,1745707,00.html

Henry Farrell quotes the Financial Times quoting Haaretz:

“It would in fact serve Israel if the open and critical debate that takes place over here were exported over there [the US].”

(the Yglesias bit is silly)
And I didn't lnk to this earlier but I'm with Max and Noam on this one.
And of course, here too

I was there for the afternoon session. It was interesting to watch.
note
note.

The interesting question raised by the second piece regards the debate between intellectual history and connoisseurship. I don't pit one ideal against the other (and I don't defend people who own enough to start their own museum). I defend both connoisseurship and history against intellectual ideals of synchronic analysis that render the meanings within rather than behind formalized communication as secondary elements.
There are no ideas outside form.

It's hard to say what work functions as art and what merely as illustration, but it should be easy enough to understand that they do different things.

For the archives:

"I could argue all over the place about any number of comments made here, since I think the most important problems are avoided by assuming that ideas can not be contradictory in themselves.

There is a difference between the authoritariarnism of people and of ideas. Plenty of people are comforted by the thought that God is in control. But they might rise up in arms if a mere person were running things. It mght make sense to think of the relationship of creationism to science as similar to the rise of plain spoken protestantism against the obscurantist ritual of the Catholic liturgy. Why should people trust what they can’t understand?

Also this is the country of Fordism and the myth of mechanics and science: of equating technical and moral progress (and in the silliest possiible ways). And as far as biotech is concerned the fear is the result of memories of that arrogance more than anything, of the fear of unpredictable consequences.
Modern biotechnology is not the same as cross fertilizing corn. What we live with today are end products of evolution over millions of years, of a cone of experience and time narrowing to a point in the present. The desire to expand from a point is one of the most famous fallacies of modernity,”The Year One” being a famous early example.
Modernity prefers theory to history. The recent religious revival is the unintellectuals’ anti-intellectual defense of the moral primacy of history over theory.
The humanities at their best represent the intellectuals’ (secular) defense of the same thing.

And especially in this country people can be on different side of the argument at different times of any given day."
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I said this before:

Q: What's the best description of constitutional change?
A: 1 is 1 less than 2, which 1 less than 3, which 1 less than 4, which 1 less than 5.
So 1 is 1 less than 5.

"The price of freedom is eternal vigilance," because freedom is not measured in mathematics but in language, and not in language as idea but as speech.

The EPA, trichloroethylene, and the Pentagon.

What the fuck: [a reply to Todd Gitlin at TPM. Link now to archive.org]

I was more saddened by my mother's death than I would be when I read about a stranger's death in a newspaper. This is not an acknowledgment of any moral difference between the two, there is none. The difference is only in the physical and emotional fact of proximity: we care more for what we know. A philosophy of patriotism is the ideology of the morality of proximity, of US and THEM.
Patriotism may be a political necessity of weak states. It is not a moral value, let alone an intellectual one.
And are we weak?

This country has been dealing knowingly with Wahhabism for decades. The world did not change on September 11th. I have no friends who did not expect something to happen at some point in the near future. Airplanes were a surprise. And nobody assumed the terrorists- the neo-Jacobins would be Islamic (or even that they would be neo-Jacobins). But I was not surprised to hear after the fact that a million were cheering.

I was not cheering. Watching the second tower fall, from the Pulaski Bridge between Long Island City and Greenpoint -and thinking the towers were falling together- I thought I was watching the death of 50,000 people. My knees gave out.
I'm sick of protestations of wounded ignorance. I'm sick of the passivity of the morally superior. Gitlins' post is ludicrous.
Think how to communicate to the citizens of the most powerful nation in history that they missed an opportunity when the vast majority of the people in the world were on their side and wishing them well after 9-11. How do you describe the stupidity in the arrogance of the wounded giant, to the giant himself?

If you want to be an intellectual, think.

Imagine how working class people in Brooklyn associate liberals with respect for the working man as idea but contempt for him as flesh, as the workingmens' homes are sold out from under them to gentrifying democrats. Modern liberals are the velvet glove on the iron fist of Reaganomics. Do you think Gitlin's dreamings are any better- to paraphrase the title of a chapter in a book I have not read- than the anti-politics of any professor of cultural studies? 

The American left is made up of priests who talk only to priests, or to the most committed of the faithful. That's nothing more than another form of anti-politics.

I'm sick of idiots.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/worldlatest/story/0,,-5715289,00.html

http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/0,,1741014,00.html

The government of this country is run by people who once thought Francis Fukuyama was a sage, abetted by others who are afraid to admit to each other that they always knew he was an idiot.

I'm beyond amazed. I'm bored.

To the Editor:

The call to Samaritan disobedience in "Called by God to Help" may soon apply to more than Catholic workers. We are on the brink of becoming a nation where torture is legal and helping the needy is not. Disobeying the law may become a moral imperative for all of us.

Glenn Cheney
Sprague, Conn., March 22, 2006
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Nice comment by someone on NPR this afternoon, comparing recent immigration from Mexico to the "Great Migration".

Michael Lind is an asshole
and here

What is the relationship between this:

A crowd estimated by police at more than 500,000 boisterously marched in Los Angeles on Saturday to protest federal legislation that would crack down on undocumented immigrants, penalize those who help them and build a security wall along the U.S.' southern border.

and this?:

The First Employment Contract - CPE, as the French call it - has triggered a wave of protests spearheaded by the students it purports to help.
Polls suggest that 60% of the population at large opposes it. But one group clearly backs the move - employers.
"It is a good thing," Jean-François Roubaud, president of the French federation of small and medium companies (CGPME), told the BBC News website.

Think fast.
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And I just found out I've been banned at 2 sites. First DeLong and now Long Sunday. I'm almost proud.

Here's the post; my comment was a link. And here again is the Russell Jacoby piece from this morning.

Sunday, March 26 2006
Laura Rozen reads this shit so you don't have to.
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This is funny

William Edmundson@Leiter Reports.
Balkin and Levinson
The Puritan fades into the politician technocrat and anti-politics becomes the political defense of democracy.
Next thing I'll be making an intellectual defense of V for Vendetta.
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Laura Rozen

The Guardian: "United Nations nuclear and health watchdogs have ignored evidence of deaths, cancers, mutations and other conditions after the Chernobyl accident, leading scientists and doctors have claimed in the run-up to the nuclear disaster's 20th anniversary next month. In a series of reports about to be published, they will suggest that at least 30,000 people are expected to die of cancers linked directly to severe radiation exposure in 1986 and up to 500,000 people may have already died as a result of the world's worst environmental catastrophe."

We are at war. Every other function of government is and should be ancillary to the obligations of our national defense. The President in his capacity as commander and chief of the armed forces is our leader in this defense and should face few constraints.

The DoJ:

The Constitution is the supreme law of the land, and any statutes inconsistent with the Constitution must yield. The basic principle of our system of government means that no President, merely by assenting to a piece of legislation, can diminish the scope of the President's constitutional power. . . .

Just as one President may not, through signing legislation, eliminate the Executive Branch's inherent constitutional powers, Congress may not renounce inherent presidential authority. The Constitution grants the President the inherent power to protect the nation from foreign attack, and Congress may not impede the President's ability to perform his constitutional duty.(citations omitted).
From Glenn Greenwald

War is our foreign policy. It is our domestic policy.
1 is 1 less than 2, which 1 less than 3, which 1 less than 4, which 1 less than 5.
1 is 1 less than 5.
It doesn't work with numbers but how about shades of gray?
Black becomes white, freedom becomes slavery, and we have to destroy democracy in order to save it.

Balkin and Levinson
"The New Constitutional Order and the National Surveillance State"

William Arkin will be on "NOW" tonight on PBS.

I agree
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Lawbreaker. Again.
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And again!
William Arkin

Current and former members of the 902nd Military Intelligence Group, come forth.

I believe your unit is spying on anti-war, anti-military and environmental organizations under the guise of "force protection."

Ever since Pentagon domestic spying was revealed by yours truly in December, the Defense Department has aggressively tried to assure Congress and the American public that it is not another agency breaking the law.

Tonight, his majesty of force protection David Burtt, Director of the Pentagon's Counterintelligence Field Activity (CIFA), appears on camera for the first time on the PBS "Now" program. He would like to assure America that his agency is purging improper information from its databases.

But Burtt also speaks of the "dots" and of the real world work going on today to find terrorists in America.

902nd warriors: I know you are out there on the front lines, collecting and analyzing dots to find a terrorist enemy. It is activity that on the one hand is less intrusive and politically motivated than anything in the past. Yet, at the same time, it is more diabolical because of its very pervasiveness and promiscuity.

Link from L.R.

Peter Brandt/The Art Workers Coalition, 1970, Photograph by Ronald L. Haeberle

Atrios and others miss the point. Objectivity isn't a sham only because people aren't behaving the way as they should -though that's true enough- but because it's a fantasy. Objectivity is a sham and consensus isn't enough. That's why prosecutors don't double as defense attorneys.

I have little doubt that Liasson thinks she's being "objective", and she may be right that people give the president of the benefit of the doubt in any showdown with the press; but it's not her job to reinforce that behavior. It is, or should be, her job to defend the necessity of debate: to be biased in favor of the principle of adversarial relations, not only in relations of the press or the people to the government but among the people themselves.

The institutional leadership of this country, politically and culturally, Democratic and Republican, left and right, both corruptly and not, believes that democracy is as simple as giving the people what they want. Demagogues want the people ignorant; idealists assume the people already know the truth but are only kept silent by malign forces (Chomskyism is not Chomsky's invention).  Neither people nor politics are so simple.

It's the obligation of every citizen of a democracy to have opinions. Not having any is irresponsible, pretending not to is betrayal.

Laura Rozen

Anton Henning, Interieur No. 287, 2004, Oil on canvas, 30 x 40 cm.

Domenech/Augustine

Pile on ...and on
...and on.
Atrios for March 22 2006 is pretty much all Domenech all the time.
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"An echo chamber of our own."
The wonks and the populists, two versions of the political class are battling it out.
The popular American political tradition is largely anti-intellectual and anti-political. Activists and political intellectuals mirror this indifference with a commitment to themselves and their own ideas.
Feingold hit the goddamn pitch. Run!

Feingold
And here.
And here.

This too was predictable.

The Guardian A powerful new militia dubbed "the Pakistani Taliban" has effectively seized control of swaths of the country's northern tribal areas in recent months, triggering alarm in Islamabad and marking a big setback in America's "war on terror". The militants are strongest in North and South Waziristan, two of seven tribal agencies on the border with Afghanistan. Strict social edicts have been handed down: shopkeepers may not sell music or films; barbers are instructed not to shave beards. Yesterday a bomb blew up a radio transmitter in Wana, taking the state radio off the air. Militants collect taxes from passing vehicles at new checkpoints, and last week an Islamic court was established in Wana to replace the traditional jirga, or council of elders. Rough justice has already been dispensed elsewhere. A gang of seven alleged bandits were executed in Miran Shah in December and their bodies were hung from a post in the town centre. The violent puritanism is spreading. On Sunday a remote-controlled bomb ripped through a police vehicle in Dera Ismail Khan, near South Waziristan, killing seven people. More than 100 pro-government elders and politicians have been killed in the past nine months, said a diplomat. The Pakistani military deployed 70,000 troops to Waziristan two years ago to rein in the militants. But the campaign is faltering. An army assault against an alleged al-Qaida training camp outside Miran Shah on March 1 left more than 100 dead.

I've never worried about Iran getting the bomb; I've always worried about Pakistan having it. so fucking stupid.

Black Bag Jobs.
link from Laura Rozen.
Jack Balkin's commentary.

And more from Balkin, Lederman and Tamanaha.

In describing or communicating anything beyond brute fact you need to generalize. Ideas are generalizations, and the conflict in any philosophy of action begins with the necessary but troubled equation of ideas and objects. For liberalism, predicated on ideas of individual liberty, this conflict becomes almost a paradox; that my mother, as a reader both of literature and law, could shrug off John Rawls as being "more interested in ideas than people," was not something I took lightly.

Still the desire was not dishonorable in itself, not nearly as much as the claim of success.

Can there be a human being more small minded, vulgar and anti-intellectual than Tyler Cowen? He makes DeLong look like the font of wisdom. What a pathetic little fuck.

On the same theme:

Indecency, as Janet Jackson showed, is all in the context. People complained to the Federal Communications Commission about the performer's wardrobe malfunction because it happened during a Super Bowl halftime show — viewers don't expect lewdness until the commercials.

And fans of procedural crime dramas like CBS's "Without a Trace" expect to see sexual depravity and abuse only in dead people. When an episode showed graphic images of seminaked, promiscuous teenagers who were actually alive, it was something of a shock. It certainly fired up the F.C.C.: that guardian of network morals fined 111 stations that aired that episode a record $3.6 million.

And probably rightly so. For reasons that baffle the rest of the world (in this case, they don't hate us, they pity us), the United States is far more prudish about sex than violence on television. But as long as sexually explicit material is officially taboo, then the episode did seem to meet the test: the scene of teenagers holding an orgy in a suburban house was quite blue. The camera lingered on writhing bodies and sweaty threesomes just a little longer than was strictly necessary to make the point that sexually transmitted diseases are a growing problem in high school.

CBS defended the episode, saying that it had redeeming social value since the story was a cautionary tale about parents who fail to adequately supervise their children.

CBS's defense is no more absurd than Lindsay Beyerstein's earnest attempts to rehabilitate the authors of Go Fug Yourself.

Nice bit of humor in the last line of Jim Hoberman's review of trash cinema of the week, V for Vendetta:

This hero not only has no name but also no actual personality. (Why hire Weaving? The role could have been played by a computer program.) At a key moment in V for Vendetta, the Negri-Hardt multitude—mysteriously networked and absurdly masked like their faceless non-leader—takes to the streets and waits expectantly. Their patience is rewarded by a superbly irresponsible finale that conflates the "1812 Overture," the Rolling Stones, Malcolm X, and Gloria Steinem. Absorbing even in its incoherence,V for Vendetta manages to make an old popular mythology new. Impossible not to break into a grin: It's the thought that counts.

It's the thought that counts. I'm not even sure Hoberman gets his own joke.

"But you have this thing to go to. A fundraiser. For AIDS. And sure, you're totally f'ing depressed and you really don't want to leave the house because, for one thing, there are all those people outside and you know they're all going to want to talk to you and shit, but you're can't ditch an AIDS fundraiser because even though you're really depressed and you just want to stare at the wall and maybe watch a little of the Tyra Banks Show before burying your head in the pillows of the sofa and crying because you're at home watching the Tyra Banks Show, at least you don't have AIDS and you know rationally that you ought to be happy about that, so you manage to get upright and wrap yourself in a sheet you bought at a recent prison auction and go out and try to act like you don't want to die every moment of the day.
Sigh."

A question for Lindsay Beyerstein (comment deleted by her)

How does your appreciation of GFY square with your broader philisophcal viewpoint? Your 'about' page used to make reference to your discovery of Susan Haack, etc. Given that I'm surprised you didn't agree with Ann Bartow.
GFY is basically articulate witty commentary on crap. The 'content', following a form and content divide, is absolute and total dreck. The bitching and insult are predicated on the logic of triumphalist sexism, and as a discourse on sex it's the equivalent of the banter of two drunken drag queens, with all the reactionary implications. 

But here's the question: The history of literature as opposed to philosophy is the history of writing as craft What's the moral or philosophical value of articulate speech as such? 

I added my comment before reading others'. The point is wasted.
The moral and philisophical value of literature and art is that they don't obey the law of contradiction. LB is unwilling to admit that her tastes contradict her ideas. [She's a moralist except when she's not. Rationalists rationalize. Moralists are hypocrites. GFY is honest]

Beyerstein

Feminist law professor Ann Bartow can't understand why anyone is amused by Go Fug Yourself, the celebrity fashion snark blog.
Ann writes

One of the many reasons I’m glad that I am a law professor rather than an actor or musician is that I don’t have to worry much about my hair, make-up or clothes; I’d be unemployed if I did. I grieve for the talented performers who spend inordinate time and money on dieting, plastic surgery, hair styling, and cosmetics applications, and still fall short of “the celebrity look” that must be portrayed before their acting or musical abilities will even be considered by their industries. The most I have to fear is “feedback” on my appearance by students who make observations about my legs, hair and sartorial selections in their course evaluations. Occasionally harsh and inappropriate, none has risen to the level of abject meanness and misogyny I perceive at “Go Fug Yourself,” although the goal of putting the dumb girl in her place is probably the same. I just don’t understand how anyone who identified as a feminist could endorse “Go Fug Yourself” even as a “guilty pleasure.” Maybe this is evidence of my own internalized biases and intolerance, I don’t know. Has my sense of humor atrophied?

Last month, I was walking down the street in Amsterdam with my American blogger buddies and our new Dutch friends. We were talking about whether there were any blogs with truly global appeal. Someone suggested "Go Fug Yourself." We laughed at first, but gradually it dawned on us that there was a lot of truth to that statement. Its appeal transcends age, gender, and sexual orientation. You don't have to follow high fashion or care about celebrity gossip.

Some GFY fans I know: a married Dutch socialist organizer, a Canadian geekboy and fashion agnostic, a bunch of jazz musicians, uber-trendy New York account executives, barely legal DC policy wonks, feminist bloggers from red and blue states, Williamsburg alt culture types, random Brooklyn subway riders ... Basically everyone I know. The fact that the site is popular doesn't mean it isn't misogynist. However, I think the diversity of the site's audience suggests that there's more going on that simple-minded anti-celebrity sniping. First off, the authors, Heather and Jessica are good writers with sharp eyes for absurd detail. They also have good taste in clothes. They don’t just criticize, they inform. They tend to focus on pictures of potentially trendy outfits turned monstrous because of miscalculations in color, cut, fit, or accessories.

This was predictable:

TEHRAN -- Iran's clerical and business establishments, deeply concerned by what they see as reckless spending and needlessly aggressive foreign policies, are increasingly turning against President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

Republicans are the stupid ones...
Right?

Senator Feinstein Proposes Censure.
Link from Atrios

Spring repeat
---
And Glenn Greenwald send us on a trip down right wing memory lane

Forgive me if I laugh (or don't): Are the Israeli's ready to lose a PR war with Hamas?

Jack Balkin is a smart man.
fig.1

"During the hearing Mr Abbasi, originally from Croydon, south London, said he should be accorded prisoner of war status, and demanded his rights under international law and the Geneva conventions. The tribunal president, not named in the documents, says: "Once again, international law does not matter here. Geneva conventions do not matter here. What matters here ... [is] your actions while your were in Afghanistan."
The clash continues, with Mr Abbasi trying to raise the issue of his rights under international law. He and the tribunal president are recorded speaking over each other, until the latter says: "Mr Abbasi, your conduct is unacceptable ... I don't care about international law. I don't want to hear the words international law again. We are not concerned with international law. I am going to give give you one last opportunity..." Mr Abbasi was later removed and his case considered behind closed doors."

"Bush has all along made the mistake of playing to Muslim leaders rather than to Muslim publics. Yet he has at the same time undermined authoritarian leaders with his talk of spreading democracy. So a military dictator like Pervez Musharraf, who intervened to corrupt the 2002 Pakistani parliamentary elections, lacks legitimacy according to Bush's rhetoric even as Bush pals around with him and makes him as an individual the cornerstone of US policy in that part of the world."

What an idiot

Daniel Dennett

Dennett thinks that when we imagine ourselves acting in sympathy with logic we become logic. Such Nietzschean analogical rhetoric endears him to Brian Leiter, but when physics answers Steven Weinberg's final questions life will go on as before.
We are sensory beings; logic may 'make sense' but it has none.

File under: minor coke habit.

"My Pet Goat II" etc.
Dan Froomkin

I quit the job yesterday.
I got a call from F. this morning. He put me on speaker phone and told me that he'd just thrown my super off the job for the third time and told my boss not to, in his words, "mistake my generosity for weakness." Cowboy had been yelling at one of his own carpenters, and F. lost it. I heard laughter in the background; everybody was in the room listening in.

I feel guilty for leaving but at the the same time this is when our boss is going to start asking us to cover our tracks, and I don't really want to have to play the adversarial role with F. He wants us out of there as much as we do and all the shop has to do is build to the right dimensions and out of the right materials. It's a quarter million dollar contract, and the shop work isn't that complex. It's more embarrassing to install something and lie than it is to say "take it back and build it right!" It's also cheaper in the long run, since sooner or later we'd have to rip it out again. At the same time I don't think my boss will ask me back again since he doubts he can trust me to be loyal. Nobody is, but I was the only one left on the crew who could afford to walk away. A luxury I'm grateful for.

"I bought my first fucking building at 17. I got three apartment buildings and a net worth of 3.5 million... and I still work like a pig!. Why!? I don'fuckingknow!"
F is worth more than three million dollars, and he doesn't wear a dust mask on the job. He'll be coughing blood in 20 years.
He's been offering me references to other contractors and I've been turning him down. I tell people I could maintain a low grade coke habit and take a year off without a problem. But I've been sick since the first week; it's the dustiest job I've ever been on. It's a fucking dustmine. And again I'm not like F, I live a different sort of terror.
He says: "Stay Kosher."
"Happy Good Friday, Motherfucker."


One should always try to pay attention.
---
Marine Corps block internet access, including email.
And 85 percent of the troops say a major reason for the U.S. mission is "to retaliate for Saddam's role in the 9/11 attacks."

Read this.
The link is from Michael Froomkin who says:

David Howarth is an old friend, one of the smarter lawyers I know, and definitely one of the smartest politicians around (he's a Reader in Law at Cambridge and Liberal Democrat MP for Cambridge). David is currently the campaign manager for one of the two leading candidates in the Liberal Democrat leadership election.

So please do not dismiss what follows as some weird backbench conspiracy stuff.

Who wants the Abolition of Parliament Bill?:

Last week all eyes were on the House of Commons as it debated identity cards, smoking and terrorism. The media reported both what MPs said and how they voted. For one week at least, the Commons mattered.
All the more peculiar then that the previous Thursday, in an almost deserted chamber, the Government proposed an extraordinary Bill that will drastically reduce parliamentary discussion of future laws, a Bill some constitutional experts are already calling “the Abolition of Parliament Bill”.

A couple of journalists noticed, including Daniel Finkelstein of The Times, and a couple more pricked up their ears last week when I highlighted some biting academic criticism of the Bill on the letters page of this paper. But beyond those rarefied circles, that we are sleepwalking into a new and sinister world of ministerial power seems barely to have registered.

The boring title of the Legislative and Regulatory Reform Bill hides an astonishing proposal. It gives ministers power to alter any law passed by Parliament. The only limitations are that new crimes cannot be created if the penalty is greater than two years in prison and that it cannot increase taxation. But any other law can be changed, no matter how important. All ministers will have to do is propose an order, wait a few weeks and, voilà, the law is changed.

Good one by Jason Stanley at Leiter's World. At the bottom he links to a post by his brother (one I missed). Also good.
Here's my bit.

This began as a question about what kind of specialist is better equipped to handle a specific instance of a medical and moral dilemma. J. Stanley responds by arguing commonsensically if in unphilosophical terms that specialists are not often capable of being specific enough when dealing with real world issues.
Specialists are only specialists within the context of the wider pool of knowledge: they are by necessity generalists concerning their fields themselves. Doctors know diseases more than patients just as generals know warfare more than soldiers [enlisted or inductees]; though good doctors and good generals know both. Still, in our democracy we don't let generals decide when to go to war.

"The people I would turn to for aid in such a decision are those friends of mine whom I regard as having a certain kind of wisdom and insight about the human condition"

That begs a lot of questions.
A 'humanist' education, referring to M. Stanley's post, has less to do with knowledge per se -and less with teaching than with learning- than with the appreciation of these varieties of scale. Works of art are works of articulate hyper-specificity, mapping out not rules but exceptions. They refer to one instance of an act, or to one response: that's why literature is forever offering up strangely sympathetic murderers. It's also why artists' attempts at philosophical generalizations are generally laughed at, as much as philosophers' attempts at art. A humanist education is the learning not only of medicine but of a bedside manner. That's not as simple as learning how to be nice and it's something worthy of philosophical discussion. (Good lawyers have good bedside manners too )
But that discussion would not be one from specialization but merely concerning it.

The unsmiling Russian who runs the freight in the afternoons turns back to us as he closes the door.
"Whites in the front, Niggers to the basement."
I'm in the elevator with the electricians: two Puerto Ricans and a Pole.
"So how do you get out?"
The Russian pauses.
"I'm Superman, I leave from the roof"
In the basement he shakes hands with each of us before we walk towards the steps up to the street.
---

The Nazi put in a good word for me with my boss. He knows that I know the easiest way to get out of there is to play an open hand, at least with him. The Gay Cowboy is gone, thrown off the job for the second time, and for good reason: everything he touched turned to shit. It got to the point that I would check with F. [the Nazi] before following his instructions, and today F. told my boss point blank that I'd done the right thing. As it is Cowboy cost my boss thousands of dollars in damaged woodwork so I didn't need the defense, but I appreciated it.
The older non-whites, the lead electrician and the carpenter W. don't like F. much, but they work with him. The kids just roll with it. He's a racist who makes an open secret of the fact that he's not trying to fight a lost cause. When his daughter grows up and brings home a black man, he'll laugh. [I think the kids get this] It may not be a happy laugh, he's not a happy man, but he'll laugh. In any event, he's fair and he makes no one miserable (unlike Cowboy).
No one hates him.

The plasterers and painters are Mexican, Ecuadorian, Puerto Rican and Dominican. The one framer I met was Polish. The electricians are Puerto-Rican and Polish. The laborer is Trinidadian. [The building employees are Hispanic, Irish and Eastern European.] The Cabinet and Millwork crew I'm on is made up (at the moment) of me, one Granadian, two Puerto-Ricans, and one slacker-assistant. Also coming and going are two art school drop-outs from the old school, both in their 50's, and both very skilled. They're getting sloppy in their old age but what I'm learning I'm learning from them. And there's also something else. It took me a full day on the job before I caught D[2] out.
We're the college-boys.
---

I should add that having done a lot of skim and plaster I've picked up a few tricks from the crew on this job. They're very good. Three skim coats polished and sanded before applying a heavy vinyl fabric, followed by 3 more coats. Nice work. And this is only the second time I've seen thinned out compound applied with a heavy nap roller and then skimmed out with a broad knife. It makes sense; it's much less tiring and you have more control.
It's still basic wall repair, but it's nicely done.

More fun

I'm not going to ask my landlady why she's crying when I know her mother's just died.
I could of course say that since she's Catholic and goes to mass 4 or 5 days a week I'd have thought she would be happy, since her mother has certainly gone to heaven. If I were an android of the sort so many Star Trek watching technogeeks pretend to be, I would just stand if front of her impssively and tell her I was confused. Of course if I were human I'd probably be laughing to myself: passive aggresives enjoy that sort of cruelty.
I don't argue with the faithful because I know that at any given moment I might become one of them, by making an assumption based not on logic but my wishes. None of us can escape the tendency to believe, though I suppose autistics might come close.
Dennett's defense of the 'Brights' is predicated on the assumption that this is possible, and even, I gather, on the assumption that someone's already done it.
Who, Joe Stalin?
(see: 'rule of law' above)
---
R- "Yet, for the most part, science fans remain cheerful and uncomplaining..."

Scientists do tend to be optimists. But they also tend to use words like 'truth.' as in 'ultimate truth' but truth is a term of metaphysics, and science is not concerned with truth but FACTS; facts which are mundane until someone has the desire to discover them and then revert to it after the post coital glow of discovery has faded.
---
There's another comment I didn't bring over. It's wasn't worth it.
---
Today at work?
Gefilte Fish and Biggie Smalls.
The other electrician showed up today. Walter. A round little Polish man who yells at everyone, then smiles, then goes back to yelling. Last year I remember he showed us a picture of his wife on his cell phone: a round little polish woman with a warm lascivious grin on her face. He flashes it around and winks.

In order of appearance (but not in the order I found them, via Atrios):

Anne Lamott's OpEd in the LA Times, Mark Joseph's annoying three sentence response, and Jane Smiley's "Tolerance" or Social Control?

I said this below and it seemed obvious but it isn't, or at least it's not seen as obvious, though logically it should be [got it?]

The rule of law is not the rule of reason: our choice of the former is predicated on our acceptance that the latter is unattainable.

A nation of puritans and drunks.

A little fun with a high school science geek. It's rough but WTF (update: three comments for my records)

I wish Wieseltier had done a better job but Dennett's a purblind fucking idiot. With that in mind:
Why do you insist on arguing logic with priests? Priests begin from their definition of all meaning being social. They argue not only from tradition but from the moral imperatives of tradition: you arguing that blood cannot become wine is irrelevant. And yet you and Dennett wonder why you can't convince the faithful? That's simply illogical.

You're more interested in the world than in perception, but then perception is how we experience the world. Computers don't perceive, animals do, and you're an animal. Those of us who are observant animals- who do not therefore pretend to be machines- pay close attention to and question ourselves, our motives and intentions. We try to remind ourselves to doubt, lest we begin to respond only out of reflex or habit. Scientists are not science any more than policemen are the law. Dennett doesn't understand that simple fact and Wieseltier doesn't respond to that arrogant stupidity clearly enough. But he's right.

Science does not explain Brian Leiter's fixation on academic social status or his unwillingness to respond to the blatant contradictions between his semi-leftist politics and his dedication to the academic priesthood. He's a Nietzschean snob. His tastes and manner define him more than his 'philosophical ideas.'
Why is Brad DeLong so god damn phobic of anything that has to do with Noam Chomsky, when the have so much in common? Delong's responses are frankly irrational. He goes off like a loon. Science can't explain that. Or perhaps it can, but it's not a science that we have access to.

Try to explain out loud to yourself why we defend the rule of law and not of men. Laws are nothing but traditions written on parchment. Why not just have people like you or Dennett make decisions for us? Why go through all this absurd ritual? Since lawyers are nothing but amoral craftsmen (and con men) why not have scientists debate among themselves to resolve court cases?
Think about what the rule "of law" means and why we have it.
Then go back and take a high school literature class.
Philosophy is for adults son. Grow the fuck up,
and we can talk.

two

John C. Halasz "[Religion is] a socio-cultural phenomenon and it's not obvious that it requires or is amenible to natural-scientific explanation."

All functions of society are socio-cultural phenomena and one cannot simply use one such function to analyze another. Or rather one can argue for a scientific explanation of religious belief but that will never eliminate its roots in our animal tendency to pattern thought based on previous experience. My point about Leiter is that the tastes and manners that precondition his contradictory arguments are the equivalent of faith.

The laws of science are not socio-cultural phenomena, but the uses to which science is put are. What atheist humanists and religionists both are offended by in Dennett's form of secular anti-humanism is the putting forth of the tools od science as themselves answers to questions of morality. But his claims to observational clrity are belied by the fact that he can't realize that religion only concerns itself marginally with the study of the world: it's primary interest is in law and social order. To hear him lecturing the faithful is akin to listening to a mathematician lecture fans of literature for reading lies.
"What's with you people. Don't you know, stories aren't real!!?"

The defense of religion is the defense of social order. Dennett argues that science can displace that order- displacing an order of language with one of number- and be both moral and just. But the activity of scientists- as opposed to the "laws" of science- is a social activity and as much an order of language as is religion or a court of law. Human beings experience life as a function of a social reality. We do no experience the world as number and computers do not 'experience' the world at all.

Religion is not the problem, it is those who claim unmediated access to the 'real' world whether the world of numbers or of gods. Dennett makes Nino Scalia's arguments for clarity and order but bases them on science rather than Catholic doctrine.

three

The myth of a unipolar consciousness "I say what I mean and I mean what I say" is as American as Henry Ford and 'can-do' anti-intellectualism. And of course, the parallel to Dennett is not Scalia but Posner's Law and Economics. And Posner and Leiter are buddies of course.
But the rule of law is not the rule of reason; we choose the former because the latter is impossible. Dennett attacks not only religion but language itself; language which can not escape ambiguity.
Under the rule of reason, if it were possible, no one would ever get off on a technicality.

I looked up the Dr. Seuss reference just to make sure I was right, and look what I found: "A plea for the Humanities." by another Seth too!
I guess god must be smiling on me today.

---
update: DeLong eliminates comments on this item.

"It's Adolf Hitler and his faithful West Indian companion!"
---
"I'm just flabbergasted by the antiquity of this shit"
"What?"
---
"I want to talk to you for a minute. I just want to say that D. sent me up here as the site supervisor. D[2] is still here, he's not going anywhere, but that wasn't his job anyway. But I want you to know that I'm the one who's going to be running this job now, and I'm the one to talk to if you have any questions. It's down to the wire, but it's a job and we're all here for the same reason: to get this job done and get our money and get out. And that's what we're going to do. Now if... [this goes on for a bit]
...Any questions?"
" Yes I have one...
"Are you a faggot?"
Everyone's running for the door trying not to fall on their faces. No one can tell if W. is serious or not. His brow is furrowed and he's staring intently at our new foreman, who has become flustered. He was trying put the bridle on the horse and the horse is not so much resisting as responding with incredulity. He calls us back and no one goes, so after beginning "what do you want me to be?" he cops out and proclaims his heterosexuality in no uncertain terms, and continues to do so loudly for the next 5 minutes. After a while I see W. back on the ladder with his assistant, and he's laughing.

"Yella!... Yella!"
"Arabic? You're a spic!"
"Yo! my sister's Jordanian."
---
"I'm from Austria, motherfucker!. I'm from Graz! Arnold Schwarzenegger's hometown!"
"No wonder you sound like a Guinea."
"Yeah! We're right on the fuckin' border"
---
"Edenbaum"
"A good Irish name."
"Nazi"
...
"You're alright for a Jew!"
---
"What's the difference between a nigger and a pizza?"
"There's a black man in the room!"
"I don't care! What's the difference between a nigger and a fucking pizza?
"I don't know."
"A pizza can feed a family of four!"
[The black man looks at the ground shakes his head slowly and laughs]
---
"How many languages do you speak?"
"I can say "pussy" in 12 languages!"
---
Flipping open a cell phone to show a photograph.
"She's hot"
Where's she from?"
"Damn"
"Russia. Buying her first Range Rover next week!"
What's she do?"
"Real estate.
"Money."
"Why d'you think I'm with the bitch!?"
"So why's she with you!?"
...
"How old is she?"
"23" [he's 27]
---
"I saw Maurice- we went to the same Church- and I asked him, which way are you taking us? People are worried. And he says, we are a small country, a poor country; all we have is agriculture, but we need to modernize. We need to build infrastructure and to expand trade. We need education. We can learn from both sides..."
[Maurice is Maurice Bishop.]

Every god damn day is like this.

Stanley Fish is "The Stupidest Man Alive".
Read the list of questions in the Times and see if you agree.
---

I spent some time in Spain a few years ago. While I was there I stayed with some friends for a few weeks in a small town helping out in a woodshop. One hot day as I was working outside painting some shutters a German tourist came by and began photographing me. There was a sign on the side of the building in Spanish and German "no cameras" and we pointed to it and gestured for the man to stop. He looked out from the behind the camera for a moment, with a quizzical expression, then went back to taking picures.

"When the author of a children’s book about Mohammed, Kåre Bluitgen, sought illustrators for his book...".

[Twice in my life I've been photographed by Germans while yelling at them to stop. The first time the photographs ended up in an exhibition in Frankfurt. Kasper Koenig was a fan and a supporter of the photographer. She exhibited a series of prints of me avoiding the camera or trying to block it with my hand. I wasn't joking. I almost hit her,]
---

Fish:

If you want to understand what is and isn't at stake in the Danish cartoon furor, just listen to the man who started it all, Flemming Rose, the culture editor of the newspaper Jyllands-Posten. Mr. Rose told Time magazine that he asked 40 Danish cartoonists to "depict Muhammad as they see him," after he noticed that journalists, historians and even museum directors were wary of presenting the Muslim religion in an unfavorable light, or in any light at all.

"To me," he said, this "spoke to the problem of self-censorship and freedom of speech." The publication of the cartoons, he insisted, "was not directed at Muslims" at all. Rather, the intention was "to put the issue of self-censorship on the agenda and have a debate about it."

Fish is a troublemaker. He gives Flemming Rose the benefit of the doubt, and I doubt if mattered to him whether Rose deserved it or not.

So with that in mind, and with DeLong calling Fish's philosophy "antimoral" here are a few questions:

Were the photographers who took my picture being antimoral?
"When the author of a children’s book about Mohammed, Kåre Bluitgen, sought illustrators for his book...."
Was the man who wrote that bizarre sentence being antimoral?
What does DeLong believe in? His rationalism has a foundation in his assumptions. What are they?
Are lawyers antimoral for following a code of ethics that supercedes common morality?
Is craft antimoral?

Fish isn't that smart and he likes to cause problems, but he likes to think. DeLong isn't that smart and likes to solve problems. Those he can't solve he ignores or ridicules.

The answer to Fish's problem -or question- is twofold: first is to say that craft precedes truth as a value (Fish would agree). Second is to say that if we must have a theological truth it would consist in curiosity itself, in inquiry and doubt. The critique of reaction and the critique of liberalism are therefore and thereby related. Fish doesn't go that far. He's too busy causing trouble.
---

I wrote a shorter version of the above on DeLong's post but it's was rejected. I've been banned.  "You are not allowed to post comments."

And I'm still amazed how few people complain about DeLong's habit of adding his own bracketed comments on readers' responses. He doesn't even acknowledge them in the text, which causes confusion. It's hard to tell who's writng what. I respond to arrogance in kind. DeLong is a technician who doesn't comprehend the difference between technics and philosophy.
And he's an asshole.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/israel/Story/0,,1709278,00.html

Brad DeLong thinks he's smarter than Stanley Fish. He's wrong.
I'll come back to this (maybe).
---

LR again.
And Glenn Greenwald is having a little fun.
The problem I think is that so many people have abrogated their responsibility to democracy for so long that they stick with their leader not because they trust him or believe him, but because they're to ashamed to admit they fucked up.
Americans don't like having their mistakes pointed out to them.

"Opinions are like assholes; everybody's got one." etc.

Dean:
"Iran is a terrorist nation"
"Should not be allowed under any circumstances to have nuclear arms"
"No option should be off the the table"

what fucking Idiots.

Ditto
(Via L. Rozen)
---

Ran into "Uncle" John Cohen at The Photography Show yesterday. We chatted for a while.
He taught at Purchase for years. Go through the whole page.

Two from Laura Rozen

Liberals hold others up to the example of their own pretensions: they pretend they're as rational as we all want to be.

"Why are the muslims behaving like barbarians?"
We're all barbarians.

The evangelical right meets Opus Dei.

"Communists use cells as their basic structure," declares a confidential Fellowship document titled "Thoughts on a Core Group." "The mafia operates like this, and the basic unit of the Marine Corps is the four-man squad. Hitler, Lenin and many others understood the power of a small group of people." Under Reagan, Fellowship cells quietly arranged meetings between administration officials and leaders of Salvadoran death squads, and helped funnel military support to Siad Barre, the brutal dictator of Somalia, who belonged to a prayer cell of American senators and generals.

...They were striving, ultimately, for what Coe calls "Jesus plus nothing" -- a government led by Christ's will alone. In the future envisioned by Coe, everything -- sex and taxes, war and the price of oil -- will be decided upon not according to democracy or the church or even Scripture. The Bible itself is for the masses; in the Fellowship, Christ reveals a higher set of commands to the anointed few. It's a good old boy's club blessed by God. Brownback even lived with other cell members in a million-dollar, red-brick former convent at 133 C Street that was subsidized and operated by the Fellowship. Monthly rent was $600 per man -- enough of a deal by Hill standards that some said it bordered on an ethical violation, but no charges were ever brought.

...The most bluntly theocratic effort, however, is the Constitution Restoration Act, which Brownback co-sponsored with Jim DeMint, another former C Streeter who was then a congressman from South Carolina. If passed, it will strip the Supreme Court of the ability to even hear cases in which citizens protest faith-based abuses of power. Say the mayor of your town decides to declare Jesus lord and fire anyone who refuses to do so; or the principal of your local high school decides to read a fundamentalist prayer over the PA every morning; or the president declares the United States a Christian nation. Under the Constitution Restoration Act, that'll all be just fine.

Just a note: I'm tired and still covered in dust.

I've been thinking about why I've been spending so much time with the crap in the last post- and one I just took from the 'drafts' pile- as opposed to recent events: I watched some of Abu Gonzalez' un-sworn testimony yesterday when I came home from work. The answer is so obvious I've never bothered to acknowledge it. At least that's my excuse.

Our President is saying nothing more than that he needs to be free to innovate, to create new templates that allow him to govern in this time of crisis. Defenders of the rule of law point to words on paper as if they were priests defending a sacred text. President Bush is a free thinker by comparison.

Law in it's formal rigor is a mediating force, but it's the mediating force of history and custom. As people have pointed out, even if FISA were unconstitutional, it wasn't the administration's decision to make. Odd as it may seem, only the courts make such decisions. That's how we do things around here.

The rule of science by comparison is the rule of scientists. As I think I made clear yesterday, Cosma Shalizi is intelligent but not very observant and not self-aware. Indeed he seems opposed to it. His enthusiasms and presumptions get the better of him. If he understood that this was so and why, he would have a better understanding of people and of culture and of politics.

As it is he and others while they may defend the concept of the rule of law- and I include DeLong in this- make arguments against our need for it.
It's the same for those who defend the goal of objective reporting. But the press is an advocate for the people, separate and apart from those advocates we elect, and advocates aren't supposed to be objective; just ask a lawyer.
The problem did not begin with bias but with attempt to eliminate it: institutionalized moralism is institutional hypocrisy.

The single greatest error of Modernism was the claim that those who could grasp the complexities of history would be able to transcend it. The people I piss on in this diary are those who continue that absurd romance with their own imaginations.

Continuing from here.
This [archive.org] is Cosma Shalizi's article on Franco Moretti. Here's the link to Shalizi's footnote on Elif Batuman's review. That review itself is here. I've said I find the whole thing revolting. Shalizi's piece reads as if it were written by a 14 year old prodigy and Star Wars fan, in which case I'd be impressed but unconvinced.
Read the footnote first.

Why is it that some people will argue against the notion of great art by referring to the work and ideas of those they consider great thinkers?
Batuman:

The most liberally construed canon of Victorian English novels, Moretti continues, runs to about two hundred titles: yet “there are thirty thousand 19th-century British novels out there, forty, fifty, sixty thousand—no one really knows.” Ars longa, vita brevis—and, even if we lived forever, it still wouldn’t be a good use of our time to closeread every book ever written, because literature isn’t “a sum of individual cases” but “a collective system,” and we can’t grasp it by simply doing more of the same thing.

How, then, are we to obtain, given our meager human life spans, a godly cognizance of every last, lost Victorian novel? Moretti calls upon comparativists to practice “distant reading,” elsewhere “the quantitative approach”: a form of collaborative scholarship relying on giant utopian repositories of shared information, such that the study of literature will eventually be conducted “without a single direct textual reading.” Instead of theology, we need “a little pact with the devil”; we surrender the reading of individual texts, and in return we will get: “concepts.”

What's the point of studying the reproductive life of mollusks? It's a rhetorical question; there are plenty of answers, the most basic of which is the mere fact of curiosity, and this has a lot do with the logic of those who actually do the work. Science at close quarters is a metaphysical exercise, otherwise Steven Weinberg might have become a lawyer. As I've said, a preoccupation with "the unending search for facts" seems rather odd. Replace "facts" with "truth" and it becomes something else (or at least it seems to).

But why treat literature or painting like clams and scallops? Why treat acts of human imagination, not entirely unlike the acts of scientists, as the equivalent of natural phenomena? And is there another way to learn from such activity and from the records of such activity than to treat them and therefore in a sense ourselves as so much rock and foliage?.

As I said, begin with the footnote.
Shalizi is the kind of man who doesn't know when he's being an asshole. He begins with faint praise: “Adventures of a Man of Science", Elif Batuman’s wonderfully-titled review of Graphs, Maps, Trees in n+1 magazine, is a quite nice essay..."
Then after a long quote from the review he continues:

"First of all, it seems bizarre to say that Britain was being conquered by “industry and rationalism” in the 1890s, long after the scientific revolution, the Enlightenment, the Industrial Revolution and all its social consequences, utilitarianism, etc. (Indeed, Mr. Lecky might want to have a few words...)

The links—in the original—make for an unnecessary, and nasty, bit of piling on. He goes on about the her unscientific observations and closes: "But it doesn’t seem to worry Batuman that there is no support for this idea (yet). — Let me repeat that I like the essay." [italics in original]
The whole thing is an exercise in the badly veiled contempt of a confused schmuck.

This is something I dropped into a note in an exhange with Brian Leiter over the weekend

In the five lectures on psychoanalysis Freud says that as the result of a successful treatment repression is replaced by 'a condemning judgment'. He doesn't explain the difference between the two. What's the difference between "I don't want to kill my father and sleep with my mother" and "I don't want to kill my father and sleep with my mother?"

Is the first louder and more nervous? More declarative? More cocksure? I don't know but it's a question conceptualists can't answer. Concepts can't remove the need and the responsibility of individual judgment.In response briefly to the criticism itself: If Shalizi were more interested in culture and less in concepts he would know that the the final conquest of the world by “industry and rationalism” was a 20th century phenomenon. Ideologies are no more than the transformation of thoughts and ideas into the language of pure concept; and the 20th century was the first, hopefully the last, century of ideology.

Shalizi is not interested in people, in what they are, what they think, or how they desire. He clearly has no interest in himself, and yet because he is uninterested in himself he is unobservant of himself. As to whether cognition is computational—or whether that is simply an argument made by men with Asperger's syndrome—though I've done it before I'll do it again, some other time.

Stephen Bainbridge

(1) belief in a transcendent order and natural law; (2) rejection of egalitarianism and utilitarianism; (3) support for class and order; (4) belief in the linkage between freedom and private property; (5) faith in prescription and custom; and (6) recognition that change is not necessarily salutary reform.

I'd written another comment, but it's just not worth it.

"I am... interested in theorizing and rhetoric."
Yes you are.

An old friend of my father ran into T.J Clark on the way to an anti-war rally a year or so ago. Clark had made a little sign to take along.
"Reverse because Obverse: He tried to kill my daddy"
Tim's also on good terms with an old client of mine, an art collector and a member of one of the families Bush relies on for money and support. And Tim writes books and chats with Jeff Wall, someone whose politics and intellectual perversity rivals his own. But Clark and Wall are both brilliant men, and their perversity is as complex and fascinating as it is compromised.
And hey, Clark gave us the Mekons and the Gang of Four!

You fucking Jackasses. You'd never know Marx was a pamphleteer who actually spoke at working men's organizations.
You describe yourselves honestly not by choice but by default.

When does speech become incitement? It depends on where you live: Brooklyn, Portadown, or Quebec in 1970.
Do we live in a free society? I'd say in this country yes, at the moment, and even these days the occurrence of anything that could be called incitement is minimal. But America is not Europe, and muslim immigrants are not living here in isolated racial pockets to be mocked by condescending white boys with fountain pens. Freedom of speech is the result of a very specific sort of social contract. Does the European contract include the muslim population? I don't know.

Josh Marshall misses the point twice, the second time in a link at the bottom of the post. I'm not a fan of Hamas, but neither am I a fan of Israeli generals; and the former are more capable of pragmatism, or of being made to undertand it.

"In a startling revelation, the former commander of Abu Ghraib prison testified that Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, former senior US military commander in Iraq, gave orders to cover up the cause of death for some female American soldiers serving in Iraq.

Last week, Col. Janis Karpinski told a panel of judges at the Commission of Inquiry for Crimes against Humanity Committed by the Bush Administration in New York that several women had died of dehydration because they refused to drink liquids late in the day. They were afraid of being assaulted or even raped by male soldiers if they had to use the women's latrine after dark."
continued...

A reminder to myself in re: my little exchange here with Brian Leiter.
Also because I'm geting some hits from this (scroll down to trackback listings).
I have no problem with Brian. His ideas piss me off, but he doesn't. There are others who annoy me as much as their ideas do, in fact much more. I can say quite literally that I hate them.
Why is this?
I guess that's my next post.

From dust to dust, with a vacation in between.

Back on the job. Park Ave. Very modern and stark. Ebonized Walnut floors and Wenge molding and trim, also ebonized. I'll be there for 3 or 4 weeks. After that there's more work but I'm getting used to laziness (or to working on other things.)

I think I may have a little fun here; I haven't written any architecture criticism since my 'think piece' -as the editor called it- and an assigned book review were both rejected by the Architect's Newspaper.