Neoliberalism at Crooked Timber again. Another nudge.

Farrell is moving away from the celebration of specialized expertise (including his own) and towards the notion of fostering an educated electorate. Less "research" more "teaching".

related: note taking. Last comment in a series, posted elsewhere.  [I removed it. I didn't like the way it was written. I'm leaving it up here.]

Your paper refers to a "science of science communication". Shorten that to a science of communication, and see where it takes us.

Civil rights movements, of women, ethnic, and sexual minorities were led by members of those groups, not by intellectuals and certainly not scientists. Members of the majority (or in the case of feminism, men) did not change their minds by way of reason; their minds were changed by the sometimes forcible presence of members of those subject groups in their own lives. Those who were spoken about, demanded to speak. This is the case now with the Palestinians.
Who observes the professional observers, and what status do they have? The student's paper quotes you as referring to "pathologies". That's a dangerous word.

From your own paper

We assume (again, unheroically) that a self-governing society is more likely to secure its members health, safety, and prosperity when it adopts policies informed by the best available scientific information. This state of affairs is most likely to occur when such a society’s citizens uniformly and rapidly converge in their recognition of the best available scientific evidence reveals about risk and risk abatement. Cognitive dynamics that systematically impede such convergence are, from the point of view of such a society, a form of irrationality.

That sounds like Stephen Walt writing about the politics of Israel.

The top right is a model of collective assumption; the top left is a model of actors and observers in reciprocal relation; the bottom is a model of normative language over time, of change without foundation.

These are questions dealt with in the sociology of science, but I would prefer an anthropology, since sociology is too "scientific" for my tastes. And this ties to my recent comments on the reception of Eric Posner's new book, critical only in the polite terms of the academy, when in deserves something stronger.

That authoritarianism has become normative may be a scientific fact, but that does not make authoritarianism itself a scientific truth.

A graph from the paper. The Tragedy of the Risk-Perception Commons: Culture Conflict, Rationality Conflict, and Climate Change"

The Cultural Cognition Project

From two commenters on two posts at NewAPPS.
Brad

[Breivik's Manifesto] p. 1435:
"However, I remain a staunch anti-Nazi and I blame NSDAP for the situation we are in. Hadn’t it been for the actions of the cultural right wing extremists known as the NSDAP our Western European countries would not be dominated by the cultural Marxist extremist regimes we witness today. If the NSDAP had been isolationistic instead of imperialistic(expansionist) and just deported the Jews (to a liberated and Muslim free Zion) instead of massacring them, the anti-European hate ideology known as multiculturalism would have never been institutionalized in Western Europe, because the Marxists would never have been so radicalized to begin with".

Karen Margrethe

John,
You write, "He didn't target Muslims, he targeted Labour Party kids, social democrats, whom he saw as the next generation that would continue the multi-culturalization he hated." It is true that Breivik didn't target a mosque or a part of Oslo with many Muslims; however, if you look at the names of the victims and survivors at Utøya, you'll see that many were Muslim. Among the dead or missing are Ismail Haji Ahmed (19), Gizem Dogan (17), Jamil Rafal Yasin (20), all members of the Labor party youth organization. Among the survivors whose testimony appeared in the media immediately after the massacre are several Muslims. For people who share the paranoid concerns about multiculturalism, the fact that young Muslims are in fact politically active in mainstream organizations, and successful in many areas of Norwegian society, must have been a source of great anger.

I have noticed that many foreign media have accepted Breivik's description of Norway as a state where multiculturalism has somehow failed. That simply isn't true - and it is also stunning that the label "multiculturalism", which can mean anything from multiethnic society to a society where people of different faiths or ethnicities are subject to different laws, is being bandied about as if it meant one thing. Norway has never been "multicultural" in the second sense, and has always - for hundreds of years – been multicultural in the first. The cliches about Norway's supposed ethnic homogeneity are false - even before the arrival of Pakistani immigrants and and Vietnamese refugees in the 70's, Norway had sizable ethnic minorities (Sami, Roma, etc). members of these groups have had to endure atrocious repression and violations at the hands of the Norwegian state, but the problem has most definitely not been that these *minorities* somehow pose a threat to the state. If anything, Norwegian society has become much, much better in this respect over the past two decades. But of course, for right-wing extremists, racial and cultural purity is what matters (concerns that are frequently masked under labels like 'tradition' "Christianity' etc).

If we look at Norway's Pakistani minority, most arrived in the 70's from an extremely underdeveloped region called Kharian; city slickers from Karachi would certainly think of them as "hicks". Despite the existence of gangs and problems with crime, the sons and daughters of the first arrivals have done very well for themselves as a group. Where their parents had hardly any education, they are now quite visible in all areas of society. It just goes to show that when you give youngsters from unprivileged backgrounds access to education and allow them to grow up in a society characterized by stability and the rule of law, most will do very well. Of course, this would be another source of frustration for people who think that ethnic and religious diversity necessarily lead to strife. If there is only minimal strife, and the problems Norway faces are of the sort that can be dealt with through ordinary democratic processes and democratic decision-making, then these right-wing extremists will create strife.

On the issue of drugs, former classmates of Breivik have claimed that he used anabolic steroids from a pretty early age. Naturally, that by itself is not in any way an explanation of what happened (the main factor appears to be hatred of Muslims and the politicians who, in Breivik's warped logic, were dismantling some imaginary mono-cultural society). It is ironic that many people (myself included) have always blamed the Labor Party for speaking with two tongues on immigration. In the 90's, Labor - and Gro Harlem Brundtland – were employing a pretty off-putting nationalist rhetoric, some of it presumably intended to stem the flow of voters from Labor to the right-wing Progress Party. It now seems clear that Breivik did indeed intend to kill Harlem Brundtland - under interrogation, he has said that his attack failed in this respect.

It's also pretty horrible to learn that Anti-rasistisk senter, an NGO, had been monitoring Breivik online for quite a while before he struck. Janne Kristiansen, the leader of PST (the police's intelligence arm), is on record stating that "one would need an intelligence organization like Stasi to have picked up on this guy". They were probably way too busy looking for Islamic terrorists. People involved in monitoring right-wing extremists and Islamophobes online have been sounding the alarm for a while. In the past, acts of terror and political violence in Scandinavia have predominantly been perpetrated by far-right extremists. These people have thrived in the climate of fear and anti-Muslim hate-speech after 9/11. There most certainly is an object lesson here for the US and the rest of Europe. Once hate-speech goes unchallenged, there will always be some people willing to act on what they see as socially acceptable and wide-spread concerns. As a Norwegian married to a Pakistani-American, I am only too aware that Islamophobia has become perfectly respectable - even among people who would otherwise call themselves progressive and liberal – and that goes for Norway as well as the rest of Europe and North America.

Anders Breivik

Were the majority of the German and European Jews disloyal? Yes, at least the so called liberal Jews, similar to the liberal Jews today that oppose nationalism/Zionism and support multiculturalism. Jews that support multiculturalism today are as much of a threat to Israel and Zionism (Israeli nationalism) as they are to us. So let us fight together with Israel, with our Zionist brothers against all anti-Zionists, against all cultural Marxists/multiculturalists….So, are the current Jews in Europe and US disloyal? The multiculturalist (nation-wrecking) Jews ARE, while the conservative Jews ARE NOT. Aprox. 75% of European/US Jews support multiculturalism while aprox. 50% of Israeli Jews does the same. This shows very clearly that we must embrace the remaining loyal Jews as brothers rather than repeating the mistake of the NSDAP. Whenever I discuss the Middle East issue with a national socialist he presents the anti-Israeli and pro-Palestine argument. He always seem unaware of the fact that his propaganda is hurting Israeli nationalists (who want to deport the Muslims from Israel) and that he is in fact helping the Israeli cultural Marxists/multiculturalists with his argumentation.

I know that tens of thousands of brothers and sister all over Europe are fighting the good fight every single day. Fighting the cultural Marxist/multiculturalist alliance every single day. Many have sacrificed everything already; many are incarcerated and some have even martyred themselves. The media never write about their courageous and noble acts and the great majority of us are unknown to most people. The current Western European multiculturalist regimes are doing everything in their power to suppress our actions. Silencing us is their weapon of choice. They systematically and deliberately attempt to blackout everything so that as few people as possible know that there is an ongoing civil war. They do this to prevent recruitment. As history has shown so many times, the tide will turn in our favour when people least expect it. I salute every single brother and sister who contributes day in and day out! You are the true heroes of the conservative revolution! You inspire an increasing number of Europeans to follow in our path. Hadn’t it been for the brave and selfless actions of these European heroes, me and people like me would not have been inspired. I heard your calling and as a result I did my duty as many more will continue to do. Hopefully, I will be able to contribute and inspire others. We will experience many failures and it will get a lot more ugly before it gets better. However, never forget that thousands of brothers and sisters are doing all in their power to ensure our success every single day. We will succeed eventually as multiculturalism is a self-defeating ideology.

Dec 20 2010 - Reuters

Far-right political parties in Europe are stepping up their anti-Muslim rhetoric and forging ties across borders, even going so far as to visit Israel to hail the Jewish state as a bulwark against militant Islam.

National Front leader Marine Le Pen has shocked the French political elite in recent days by comparing Muslims who pray outside crowded mosques -- a common sight during the holy month of Ramadan -- to the World War Two Nazi occupation

July 4 2011 - YNET

BERLIN - Deputy Minister Ayoob Kara met with Swedish-German millionaire Patrik Brinkmann who has ties with German neo-Nazi groups in Berlin over the weekend, Yedioth Ahronoth reported.

Brinkmann, who is trying to establish a far-right anti-Islamic party in Germany claims he is not an anti-Semite, however his previous close contacts with the German neo-Nazi party (NPD) and his past membership in another neo-Nazi party raise questions regarding his ideology.

FP - The Manifesto was also published at Stormfront.

The guilty conscience of a some-time neoliberal: Krugman on Obama

Tragic Day for Norway; Shameful Day for Journalism: Jadaliyya

Libertarianism, anarchism and morality: discussion of Aaron Swartz at Crooked Timber.


Two years in the pen bunking with car thieves would wipe the smirk off his face. [update: I was right. Sadly he couldn't deal with even 6 months]

And a new tag: Futurism and Data Culture. I've added it to older posts as well.


"In 1955 , a man got an idea…"
Wired:"Mark Zuckerberg Doesn’t Believe In Privacy"

Zuckerberg

"When I got started in my dorm room at Harvard, the question a lot of people asked was 'why would I want to put any information on the Internet at all? Why would I want to have a website?'
"And then in the last 5 or 6 years, blogging has taken off in a huge way and all these different services that have people sharing all this information. People have really gotten comfortable not only sharing more information and different kinds, but more openly and with more people. That social norm is just something that has evolved over time.

"We view it as our role in the system to constantly be innovating and be updating what our system is to reflect what the current social norms are.

"A lot of companies would be trapped by the conventions and their legacies of what they've built, doing a privacy change - doing a privacy change for 350 million users is not the kind of thing that a lot of companies would do. But we viewed that as a really important thing, to always keep a beginner's mind and what would we do if we were starting the company now and we decided that these would be the social norms now and we just went for it."

Sun Microsystems

"You have zero privacy anyway," Scott McNealy told a group of reporters and analysts Monday night at an event to launch his company's new Jini technology.
"Get over it."

I said this years ago, and I'll say it again: downloading is theft. The fact that it's ubiquitous means models of distribution have to change, a decision based not on idealism but realism. But idealists call it "progress".

A commenter at CT

I wouldn’t steal a pair of pants. But if my computer could make free duplicates of pants I wouldn’t feel the least bit guilty about copying my friend’s pants and then passing along more copies to friends and strangers.

So if I spend 10 years of my life writing a novel, the difference between the expense of printing it and the ease of uploading changes my relation to it as the author.

None of this is a defense of endless copyright and the corporate dominance of information. But the answer is not the anarchism of a leaderless Borg.

Summer repeats: two on mash-ups.  Click through to read Ursula Le Guin on plagiarism.

note-taking/posted elsewhere. Brad DeLong lets one in, unedited.
And then he removes it a week[?] later. Stupid.

You argue that the urban poor (or non-rich) are up shit's creek as far as access to decent tasting vegetables is concerned, and that this is more or less a truth of nature. If it weren't for the fact that you're a competent economist I'd put you with Henry Farrell's ex-copain, Tyler Cowen: "Don't blame me blame the value free market. Blame reality!"

Bertram of course argues directly from "values"


The right frame, in my view, is to think of the state as “we, the people” and to ask what conditions need to be in place for the people, and for each citizen, to play their role in effective self-government. Once you look at things like that then various speech restrictions naturally suggest themselves.

Ian Whitchurch above: "Can we all please accept that right now the main enemy is on the right..."
Read the quote from Bertram and tell me if it's left or right. Then I'll answer.

Neoliberalism sees the market in its adversarialism as foundational to social life. But by that logic the market itself has no adversary, no opposing partner. That's the mistake. You call yourself a social democrat but you're not, because you can't imagine or at least you refuse to calculate with forces other than the market. And social democracy is founded on those forces (family, community) as much as on capital. Its strength is in the adversarial relation between the individual and collective life, collective life without which the individual wouldn't even exist.

As an economist you focus on the lowest common denominators of human interaction, and focusing on universals can strengthen their position. "Everyone's greedy" sounds like encouragement. And like Bertram you argue from values. Optimism is a value, not a truth, and in the time-honored American tradition you do your best to turn the old realist assessment of the ubiquity of avarice into an affirmative defense, to which Bertram responds like a schoolmarmish authoritarian. There are a few of those at "Crooked Timber". You'd think they'd pay more attention to their tag line. But your "nature" is as artificial as their moralism.

All of you focus on ideas and rules, as if they were more important even than people. Ideas, rules, and laws are formal generalizations, by necessity non-contradictory. Individual experience is specific, and the obligations that accrue to people in social life are prone to conflict and contradiction. We live most of life informally, each of us as individuals negotiating informality. Yet informality is the one thing you, Bertram and the rest ignore. And you model the world as dynamic but yourselves as static. Your individualism is textual originalism read into yourselves as authors and actors. You all claim to write as Scalia claims to read. But you're creatures of your time and place. If Elizabethan England made Shakespeare, what made you? Because all of you write as if it's the other way around.

Discussions of neo-liberalism at Crooked Timber. Henry Farrell

Doug Henwood has a go at Matthew Yglesias.

Duncan Black, in a game of telephone, linking to someone linking to CT.

Leaving aside policy disagreements, and for sake of discussion assuming good intentions, I think the group being discussed are basically not fans of democracy.

Atrios seems not to understand they're talking about a friend of his.
Posts continue with Henry again, responding to Yglesias, and then Bertram

Well not content with his inaccurate digs at Henry, Brad DeLong is having another go at me.

For discussions of Crooked Timber as neoliberal, go here, and here and (why not) here
Chris Bertram from the second of the three above

The right frame, in my view, is to think of the state as “we, the people” and to ask what conditions need to be in place for the people, and for each citizen, to play their role in effective self-government. Once you look at things like that then various speech restrictions naturally suggest themselves.

Various references to Yglesias on this site over the years

My inbox (email): "And for the record (don't post this), Yglesias as an individual has a great, self-aware sense of humor and is much more starkly honest (if also unapologetic) about his own elitism than most liberals. Take him out for a beer and I think you'd find that."

Yglesias: "At the appropriate level of abstraction, the neocons couldn't be more right about this stuff, but when it comes to actually getting it done their policies have been a miserable failure."

Yglesias: "After the last depressing news from the Middle East I think we have to start asking just how inhumane it would be for Israel to just expel the Palestinians from the occupied terroritories. [sic] The result would probably be out-and-out war with the neighboring Arab states, but Israel could win that.
All forced population transfers are humanitarian disasters, of course, but so is the current situation. It's not like there's not any room in the whole Arab world for all these Palestinian Arabs to go live in, it's just that the other Arab leaders don't want to cooperate."

Doug Henwood recently (facebook)

There's a Marc Jacobs boutique in Ho Chi Minh City??

20 years since I first quipped that Nike won the Vietnam War. Henwood's ignorance surprised me. It shouldn't have.

The choices above are between the authoritarianism of the market, the authoritarianism of intellectuals, and utopian fantasy.

Tyler Cowen and DeLong are no longer favorites at Crooked Timber, though they were once. Allegiances have drifted, as they have for Duncan Black, but though there's change, most of them don't acknowledge it and none of them are capable of describing it.  They'd put it up it to a reasoning process, but the data isn't new, even to them. Change in their awareness came slowly because they had to acculturate to the data, and that takes time. Liberalism, neoliberalism, and modernism itself have no concept of time, more specifically of its effects. Authors may model the world as dynamic but they model themselves as static. As I've said, individualism is textual originalism read into the self, as author and actor, and read forward. They all claim to write as Scalia claims to read.
---
Someone googling "academic neoliberalism" found this: the jackass Bourdieu. Click through to T.J. Clark.

All summer repeats. And repeats of repeats.

'The Fall of the Faculty' [From Leiter]
They needed a political scientist to tell them their own recent history.

etc.

"...a university should seek to promote work that will give that university prestige..."

The logic of capitalist expansion, mixed with a pre-modern fixation on glory.

etc.
"A Philosophy Blog"

how condescension became contempt

Chavs
Is it the book, or the review? I don't know

Here’s how Mr. Jones sets the scene. “Sitting around the table were people from more than one ethnic group. The gender split was 50-50, and not everyone was straight. All would have placed themselves somewhere left of center politically.” Each guest “would have bristled at being labeled a snob.” Disaster arrived, as it always seems to, with the black currant cheesecake. That’s when the talk turned to the economic crisis. One of the party’s hosts joked: “It’s sad that Woolworth’s is closing. Where will all the chavs buy their Christmas presents?” The other guests tittered. Mr. Jones stewed.

The word chav, if your subscriptions to British periodicals have lapsed, is a noun that essentially means “ugly prole”: loutish, tacky, probably drunken and possibly violent. The stereotypical chav is a hormonal 20-something lad in an Adidas tracksuit, sideways Burberry baseball cap and bling, but women can be chavs, too. Think of Snooki with a cockney accent.

What angered Mr. Jones about the dinner party comment, he explains, is that the joke could easily have been rephrased thus: “It’s sad that Woolworth’s is closing. Where will the ghastly lower classes buy their Christmas presents?” This got him thinking. “How has hatred of working-class people become so socially acceptable?” he asks.

... How this came to pass in Britain, which has long revered its stalwart working class, is Mr. Jones’s primordial subject in “Chavs.” The book poses this principled question: How did the salt of the earth come to be viewed as the scum of the earth?

"Long revered." "Stalwart working class." "Salt of the earth."



The Reformer.


"He said: I want to help the common people..."
Thatcher didn't invent the British Class system.

This is a modern world - This is the modern world
What kind of a fool do you think I am?
You think I know nothing of the modern world
All my life has been the same
I've learned to live by hate and pain
It's my inspiration drive -
I've learned more than you'll ever know
Even at school I felt quite sure
That one day I would be on top
And I'd look down upon the map
The teachers who said I'd be nothing -
This is the modern world that I've learnt about
This is the modern world, we don't need no one
To tell us what's right or wrong -
Say what you like 'cause I don't care
I know where I am and going too
It's somewhere I won't preview
Don't have to explain myself to you
I don't give two fucks about your review

Punk wasn't a rebellion against capitalism. It was capitalism, rebelling against the hereditary aristocracy. Today's snobbery is the snobbery of the nouveau riche, the multiculti new bourgeois.
Margaret Thatcher didn't invent the fucking British Class system.

It's called Fascism. [Lawfare]

[Balkinization] The unhappy byproduct on the academic model of collaborative reason: if we all agree, it must be true and good. But it's not good when defense attorneys collaborate with prosecutors, so why should it be good the branches of government are joined? Why is unity under demagoguery a good? There are rules mandating adversarialism in law; there are no rules mandating the same for branches of government. Maybe there should be. Democracy is the rule of form, not content. It's relativism, but so what? Relativism, or Plato and the Pope, the choice shouldn't be that hard to make. There is no more truth to dictatorship than there is to democracy, but democracy if we choose it, is founded in mandated formalized conflict. Jack Balkin may want to consecrate the proceedings with the language of redemption, but that's unnecessary. Or rather it's no more necessary for the United States than it is for the World Series or the World Cup. There is no truth in sport, yet people dedicate their lives to it. The politics of truth is Fascism, always. If you don't want that, then shut up and play ball. And if you think what I've written manifests perversity, read the post and the review of Posner's fascist book.

Late to the game

Reckless Endangerment of the Truth: If we want to minimize the chance of another financial crisis, it’s important for us to understand how it happened. If we get the causes wrong, our attempts to fix the problems in the financial sector are unlikely to be successful.

That’s why I was so disappointed to see the new book by Gretchen Morgenson and Josh Rosner, Reckless Endangerment, blaming the financial crisis on Fannie, Freddie, and Democrats. The book has been highlighted recently by George Will and David Brooks, and it joins a chorus of conservative voices promoting the idea that government policies to encourage home ownership among middle and low income households is at the heart of the financial crisis.

The dispute over the cause of the financial crisis breaks down along standard ideological lines. ...

Back to the square

Jack Balkin, Lawrence Tribe, Bruce Bartlett [PDF]

Law and Philosophy
note-taking (posted elsewhere): two comments at Balkinization, repeating a comment at NewApps

There's a difference between intellectualism and street smarts but there's also an intellectualism that engages experience, and the skill of reading situations on the fly. The humanist academy has insulated itself over the last decades, in the name of objectivity, reason, and science (often as pseudo-science) in what seems like a continuation of the "Two Cultures" debate. The model of intellectualism not founded rightly or wrongly in natural science is founded on the model of philosophy and academics as philosophers. This ties indirectly to the European model of inquisitorial justice and not the Anglo-American model of adversarialism, which is chaotic by comparison, but more founded in the vulgar practice of democratic debate. I think I'm reading a defense of that here now.

It's always amused me that Brian Leiter held the "Joseph D. Jamail Centennial Chair in Law", at UT Austin. Here's a clip of Joe Jamail in action.
---
I want to continue a bit because the subject has begun to come up in academia. Professional philosophers are beginning consider something they call Embodied Cognition. It's a problem that they're fundamentally opposed to the practices they're trying to understand. It would be a mistake for law professors to insulate themselves in this way.

The following is something I posted on a philosophy page where embodied cognition is a popular subject. The link to SSRN is courtesy of a commenter here:

"Embodied knowledge also includes the interpretation of embodied knowledge: the skills both of the craftsman and the critic. Expertise by way of embodiment is called connoisseurship. The contemporary model of naturalist epistemology dismisses it out of hand, as philosophy has always opposed rhetoric, while indulging it as we all must.

Trial lawyers are connoisseurs, as legal performers and critics. Lawrence Solan, "Lawyers as Insincere (But Truthful) Actors" SSRN. Solan underestimates the role of insincerity in daily life and of the common requirement to recognize it, partly I think because as a liberal, he wants to see himself as sincere. But we live our lives following performances as texts and subtexts. The ability to read subtext is one aspect of the ability to read embodiment. The only way to escape liberalism is to acknowledge embodiment not as worthwhile subject but as method and to trust no one, not even yourself."

Lawyering is an art, and in our system it's vulgar. Academia is caught up now in a cooperative, collaborative model of study, of "research", that then sends out opinions written in the form of judicial decisions. Moral Hazard seems to apply to everyone but economists, and "liberal" politicians foist illiberal policies on the electorate with no change to the self-designated labels. Sandy Levinson has already gone over the Yalies in the White House legal staff.

"Could you elaborate on how a Ph.D would mitigate the problem of results-oriented scholarship?"
Again, mls, [Michael Stern-Point of Order] your arguments here have been more founded in rhetoric than anyone's.

"Like Professor Tushnet, I don’t claim that the mere fact that no one has raised the argument before means it is meritless. But it is pretty evident that any merit it may have is, shall we say, coincidental."

That's not criticism of an argument it's criticism of an attitude. I don't care that you did it, it's a lawyers' trick and tricks are legit: you fight with what you have. But if your moralism is rendered false by your technique, it's the moralism that's the problem.

see previous post

Law and Economics.
Krugman Krugman links to the WSJ

The U.S. and Europe are set to grow at an anemic pace for the foreseeable future unless the government can step in with an enormous fiscal stimulus, according to a veteran investor.

Speaking exclusively with The Wall Street Journal, Barton Biggs, managing partner at multibillion dollar hedge fund Traxis Partners, painted a bleak outlook for the developed world with only huge government intervention likely to improve things.

…Mr. Biggs, former chief global strategist for U.S. investment banking powerhouse Morgan Stanley, demanded the U.S. government temporarily return to ideas used in the Great Depression as a way to get the country back to higher growth.

“What the U.S. really needs is a massive infrastructure program … similar to the WPA back in the 1930s,” he says.

The plan would be to employ some of the many unemployed people, jump start the economy, as well as help catch up with Asia, which is building state-of-the-art infrastructure from new mechanized port facilities to high-speed trains.

He suggested financing such building through the sale of U.S. Treasuries.

The general problem of the legal debate between American "liberals" and "conservatives" over economic policy [see earlier post] is that the majority of both are in favor of the economic power that came about only as the result of the unification of social and economic life that in different situations each decry. If conservative arguments had won consistently in the Supreme Court over the past 100 years, we wouldn't have troops in 150 countries around the world.

"Philosophy is predicated on a dogma. The dogma is reductionism: the belief that each meaningful statement is equivalent to some logical construct upon terms which refer to immediate experience. That dogma I shall argue, is ill founded. One effect of abandoning it is, as we shall see, a blurring of the supposed boundary between philosophy and other forms of description and imaginative literature. Another effect is a shift toward pragmatism."

The above is Quine, rewritten.

Experience is constitutive of consciousness. Well... Duh.
That's why a republic is defined as representative government and not the government of experts.

Academic philosophers, if they're concerned about the under-representation of women and minorities, prefer to be concerned as a matter of fairness, when they should be concerned as a matter of substance. Democracy isn't better because it's fair, it's better because more than any other form of government it's founded on the prerogatives of curiosity and free enquiry.

Fairness is a gift from the powerful (see Derrick Bell's dissent in Brown v. Board of Education).

Curiosity is to see not the other in yourself but to see yourself as other.

All literature deals in perspectives. Philosophy is a branch of literature, and one of the humanities, not one of the sciences. Philosophy as science is theology. Storytelling as storytelling is democratic.

"Society is always changing and representational systems ossify into formal systems that outlast their role as representation. Forms are still used even as they become brittle."

People always remain loyal to the forms of discourse that they know, or the social world they're a part of. Philosophers are becoming amateur psychologists while calling what they do a branch of philosophy.

Philosophy as an independent subject is dying, but not fast enough.
---

8/04. One more and out.

This discussion is concerned with finding a way to preserve philosophy as a model of objective processes and objective knowledge, combined with the anxious desire that all people -or subgroups by any definition- have the capacity to access these "truths". If that capacity is equally distributed then all that's needed is a concern for "fairness". The concern is that if that capacity is not equally distributed then the model of liberalism and equality as you define it is founded on a falsehood. But the discussion is centered on philosophy not mathematics so what capacities are we talking about?

Most of what I read on this page -not just this post- argues though a mixture of language cribbed from the sciences and terms of abstract theology; that combination is the language of pre-humanist scholasticism.

The more scientific practice undermines claims for an objective knowledge of, or through, sense, the more desperate philosophers and theologians become to preserve their place in the imagined hierarchy. The Bible, must stand above secular literature; Plato must stand above Homer, and Kant above Proust. There must be a great truth of experience accessible to all. So every time science gives us more evidence of multiplicity you struggle to fit it into your model of unity.

In fact the proportion of biology to culture is secondary. The central fact is multiplicity, and the question is how we come to terms with that. Science tells us that we are creatures first of sense and as such are storytellers. You are storytellers from on high and the most important thing to you, though you struggle to deny it, is your imaginary altitude.

"Fairness" is a gift from above; curiosity needs to be multiform, and from below. Your politics are the politics of liberal superiority and condescension.

Hegel was not "right" and Jane Austen was not "wrong". Continental philosophers, to their credit, see themselves at least in part as literary critics. In the interest of your own self-preservation you're returning us to the moral universe of the 14th Century.

Jack Balkin writes a masterly defense of a position while claiming not to be making one. It's an object lesson in the high politics of legal argument. Here's an introductory paragraph and the last

This essay does not attempt to answer these questions in detail; I leave that to a future discussion. My goal here is to offer a basic account of the legislative history of Section 4. This discussion, I hope, will be of interest both to originalists and to non-originalists who believe that text, structure and history matter, even if they are not always dispositive of current constitutional questions.

...Like most inquiries into original understanding, this one does not resolve many of the most interesting questions. What it does suggest is an important structural principle. The threat of defaulting on government obligations is a powerful weapon, especially in a complex, interconnected world economy. Devoted partisans can use it to disrupt government, to roil ordinary politics, to undermine policies they do not like, even to seek political revenge. Section Four was placed in the Constitution to remove this weapon from ordinary politics.

Slick.

As I wrote in 2003 "The debate between liberals and conservatives, and between all parties in any sort of structured proceeding, is over where to draw the line beween civil argument and civil war."

Posts at Balkinization on Section Four of the Fourteenth Amendment.

Another discussion at NewApps on textbooks in the classroom and whether Philosophy can be called "a 'normal' science." Begun in response to a post on Leiter's page.

The Constitution is a text. Much of analytical philosophy is written in a way so as to pretend that the resulting texts are not texts, or that they follow other rules, but an argument is not an equation. The corollary of a living Constitution is a living Tractatus or the living works of Nietzsche. Leiter writes ex-cathedra as an academic reactionary.

Philosophy is not a natural science and it is not a formal science. All these problems would go away if professional philosophers stopped referring to formal logic as philosophy. It's tempting to say logic is to philosophy as engineering is to architecture but I'm not sure even that holds up.

EUobserver

BRUSSELS - EU and US intervention in Syria is designed to harm Iran and to protect Israel and Lebanese Christians, not Syrian people, according to Robert Baer, a retired CIA officer with experience of the region.

..."We've taken sides in the Middle East. We've taken sides with Israel and with the Sunnis, from the US to the Dutch and the French. It's part of our cultural and historical background," he said.

Baer added that France, the former colonial power in Lebanon and Syria, is mainly interested in protecting its old friends, the Maronite Christians in Lebanon: "They don't want to see the roof blown off Lebanon because they still feel responsible for the Maronites. They are tightly wrapped up in Lebanon."

...An EU diplomat backed up some of his analysis. ..."We have reports that Wahhabists [radical Sunni Islamists], who are not necessarily controlled by any state, are coming into Syria from Iraq and from Saudi Arabia to create chaos. Inside Syria, there are snipers shooting at demonstrators who are not controlled by Assad but by the deep state, and other snipers who are shooting at both demonstrators and police."

Landis

Art Market Monitor

Sometime in 2011, Philip Hoffman of the Fine Art Fund became the voice of the art market, the go-to interview for journalists on the state of things. Here he speaks to Bloomberg touting his fund’s purchase of Chinese vase for £600k that the fund is looking to sell for £2.5m after holding it only 3 years. Hoffman says there are only 3,000 works in the world that have sold above a million (£ one presumes but possibly $) but far more than 3,000 persons looking to buy works at that level.

Update here, on the "Knobe effect."
I didn't give the new research the credit it deserves. Neither did the researchers.

Also rediscovered the line below, from my comments here

If philosophy is to be more than the philosophy of knots, it has to include the philosophy of knives, the philosophy not only of untying but of cutting.

Found after someone googled the phrase: ended badly. why? "she was a monarchist." here

Chris Marker. And Alexandra Stewart's voice.

Landis/Syria Comment

Serendipity I guess. The "Knobe effect" again.
And previously.

The older post connects the discussion to rationalism in philosophy and art. The one correction I would make to it would be to add that the meanings of words change not just over time but from one person to another. As I pointed out in my comment linked above, "Intention" is not the best word to use to capture the motivations for people’s response. It’s the word researchers chose and subjects used the words given them to describe their reasons only as best they could.

Questions of cause were translated by the subjects into questions of morality. That translation is performed every day in daily life. The structure of law is that intentions are secondary. "Ignorance of the law is no excuse." Intentions play a role only in punishment: it's the difference between murder and manslaughter, of degree not responsibility as such.

If by accident you invent something valuable people will give you less credit than if you'd worked to achieve it. They may even begrudge you your newfound wealth, but in the US at least they won't say it should be taken from you. But still the road to Hell is paved with good intentions. See the last post on Syria.

The really idiotic, morally sleazy aspect of the focus on intention is that it focuses on the desires of the actor, his sense of his own emotional state, his "sincerity", rather than the outcome. From the post.

Yet it’s natural to think that our moral judgments about the outcomes of people’s actions are themselves sensitive to whether or not those outcomes were intended or mere side effects. There’s a world of difference between me walking up to someone in the street and punching them square in the face, and accidentally hitting someone in the face as I’m trying to provide directions to another passerby (a feat I once achieved on London’s Tower Bridge). In the first case, my intentions would be bad, and so the outcome is judged as a moral offence; the latter was an accident, a side-effect of trying to help someone else, and therefore not morally blameworthy. It seems that judgments about intentionality should come first, with the moral judgment deriving from that.

The definition of liberal moral self-regard.

In common morality people are held responsible for thoughtlessness that results in a bad outcome while not being given credit for thoughtlessness that results in a good one. Thoughtlessness is thoughtlessness. It is not something we the community should encourage. And as always the answer to the trolley problem, which the author calls the "Footbridge dilemma", is the example of the utilitarian military, where actors, as officers, are kept at a physical and emotional remove from those they send necessarily to die. The answer in other words is the choice between the ambiguities of democracy, where meanings and intentions are judged to be private (if not incommunicable), or the rule of universal meaning: fascism.
---

update 6/29
My responses were too focused on Knobe, even though this paper takes his arguments in a much more interesting direction. I ignored the difference, which was sloppy, and stupid, especially since the research behind the paper confirms something I've argued for years, in fact confirms my arguments more than those of the the authors. Again, my comments, posted here.

I want, or need, to add something else, since my response was too directed at the origin of this discussion, in Knobe's claims. I haven't changed my mind about them, but this paper deserves credit for making something interesting out of what I still think of as banal. What it shows -and I'm relying on the synopsis here- is not how decisions seemingly based on normative belief are based on a search for consistency, but how much we mask our moral assumptions in logic. This ties into my response above to claims about what is and is not "morally blameworthy" but its clear that Sripada and Konrath have given us new information about why Dan Jones would make that claim, and why they make the claims they do about data that shows them to be wrong.

"The basic idea is that when we encounter cases like Knobe’s Chairman scenario, we make two different judgments: one about his attitudes and values — is he anti- or pro-environmental? — and another about whether the outcomes of his actions are consistent with those attitudes. Neither of these judgments is normative; they are descriptive judgments about the facts of the case."

But "logically" the response would be to take the chairman at his word and say that he was neither pro or anti environmental. According to his statements, absent perceived moral implication, the question would be the equivalent of whether or not a pebble would end up on his desk or a glass would contain water or seltzer. The responses documented in the paper are based on assumed and implied values, but only after being shrouded in logic; shrouded to a degree that the authors, like the subjects*, like the author of this post, saw the logic but not the moral foundation. This, with the discussion of the ventromedial prefrontal cortex, makes this paper much more interesting than anything by Knobe.

*More sloppiness on my part. I tossed that in without thinking; as far as I know the subjects weren't asked. A group of non-participants were asked later to offer an explanation: "The vast majority cited normative factors — precisely the explanatory factors that the structural path analyses undermine."

Adam Curtis on Syria

What is happening in Syria feels like one of the last gasps of the age of the military dictators. An old way of running the world is still desperately trying to cling to power, but the underlying feeling in the west is that somehow Assad's archaic and cruel military rule will inevitably collapse and Syrians will move forward into a democratic age.

That may, or may not, happen, but what is extraordinary is that we have been here before. Between 1947 and 1949 an odd group of idealists and hard realists in the American government set out to intervene in Syria. Their aim was to liberate the Syrian people from a corrupt autocratic elite - and allow true democracy to flourish. They did this because they were convinced that "the Syrian people are naturally democratic" and that all that was neccessary was to get rid of the elites - and a new world of "peace and progress" would inevitably emerge.

What resulted was a disaster, and the consequences of that disaster then led, through a weird series of bloody twists and turns, to the rise to power of the Assad family and the widescale repression in Syria today.

I thought I would tell that story.

Link from Issandr El Amrani/Arabist

The Punching Bag: Thoughts on cultural heritage, cultural economics, and cultural politics. Lawrence Rothfield

SAFE: Saving Antiquities for Everyone.

Oligarchs bidding on mediocrity.
£17.9 Million (including premium)

From the Beyeler Estate (see earlier post)

Art Market Monitor

The friday edition of The Times traditionally has the bulk of the the week's art reviews. It's not clear online but in the print edition the friday fine arts section shares space with style pages under the heading "Weekend Arts: Fine Arts/Leisure" Today it came to 10 pages. On the first page, above the fold was a review of Ryan Tricartin's exhibition at PS1.

“Am I overexisting or am I overexisting? That is my inner joke.” These words — evoking a doubt-free Hamlet unfazed about whether or not to be — bounce forth from the tumult of video, furniture, music, extreme makeup and insistent jabberwocky that form “Any Ever,” Ryan Trecartin’s game-changing exhibition...

His PS1 spectacular is his first major museum show in New York; it reveals an immense but not fully developed talent that seems bound for greatness.

Below the fold (but listed online under Travel) is "Where Lone Stars Don’t Feel So Alone"

“TEXANS make the best New Yorkers,” Robert Leleux says loudly. “It’s because we’re bred for size. New Yorkers appreciate that — our extravagance. We wouldn’t play so well in Indiana.”

...He guides me over the wooden floors to the shoe department (“The holiest of holies!”), where he pronounces Christian Louboutin’s red-soled architectural marvels to be the most Texan of footwear. “Animal hides! High heels!” he says. “They’re just like cowboy boots! Texas is the only place in the world where men’s footwear costs as much as women’s.”

Beginning above the fold, on the left in a single column is a review of Art in Cameroon: Sculptural Dialogues, at the Neuberger.

To fit African art into Western art history, we had to contain it, tame it. One way was by sorting the art into so-called tribal styles, in much the way we split up the continent into countries. Sure, the divisions were fake, but they gave us a feeling of control.

All the articles are continued inside the section.

Weekend Arts: Movies/Performances is 24 pages. Page one begins with a review of The NY Philharmonic's production of Janacek's Cunning Little Vixen

Yet “Vixen” is a more elusive and complex work than its story might suggest: a fable about an impish vixen who is captured young by a forester, laments her fate as a pet, makes an escape, mates with a fox, raises a brood of offspring and is killed by a poultry dealer. The human characters are troubled souls, especially a drunken priest who has never lived down the false accusation that he seduced a woman in his youth, and a mopey schoolmaster who loves a villager from afar.

What’s more, the glowing, urgent performance that Mr. Gilbert drew from the Philharmonic brought out all of the music’s modernist touches, with whole-tone scales that recall late Debussy; modal melodic writing that evokes Moravian folk music; and the extensive use of repetitive figures that lend the score a ritualistic strangeness.

Below it is an article is on the response to The Normal Heart of gays and lesbians too young too have lived through the period the play describes.

Daryl Roth, the lead producer, said she decided to try to bring “The Normal Heart” to Broadway during a conversation last fall with the actor David Hyde Pierce, who had attended a staged reading of the play. “David brought two young friends,” she said, “and he told me afterward that the two knew nothing of the history, the legacy of AIDS, the struggles that people had just 30 years ago.

At the bottom of the page, on the left hand side, is a review of TV shows made by self-described urban sophisticates describing, and indulging the eccentricities of "the sorts of people and places most would overlook."

“Rhett & Link: Commercial Kings” is based on the pair’s “I Love Local Commercials” Web series, in which they make medium-concept, no-budget ads for small businesses with a taste for risk, and also kitsch (though that last one might be involuntary).

...These ads are presented as acts of charity, more or less, but they come with consequences. Rather than being elevated to something beyond their means, the subjects are instead trapped in the amber of their own quirks, or the ones Rhett and Link would like them to have.

Rhett and Link don’t do this with malice, per se, but rather with a narrow set of ideas about presentation; they want to direct the commercial of their own dreams, not the client’s.

As I've said, questions in what are now defined as the philosophically engaged fine arts are fading into questions of style. The review of works by Lee Ufan, on the 9th page of the same section asked that question directly. [see below] The assumed authority of "art" means that those considered to be trained in it as "artists" are given the benefit of the doubt to a degree no critic of "entertainment" would allow. Entertainment critics responding less on reflex engage what's put before them not objectively, since that's not possible, but much more honestly.

Ken Johnson review of the Lee Ufan exibition at the Guggenheim: A Fine Line: Style or Philosophy?

...A much published philosopher as well as an artist who divides his time between Japan and Paris, Mr. Lee has enjoyed considerable recognition in Europe and in the Far East. Last year the Lee Ufan Museum, a building designed by Tadao Ando, opened on the island of Naoshima, Japan.

But Mr. Lee’s reputation has not extended to the United States. This exhibition, his first in a North American museum, gives a sense of why. His art is impeccably elegant, but in its always near-perfect composure, it teeters between art and décor.

Soren Melikian in the IHT: When Catalog Descriptions Dictate Value

LONDON— An entirely new approach is determining buyers’ decisions at auction. Abstract considerations such as the artist’s name or the previous owners’ celebrity are now the prevalent criteria, while visual achievement becomes almost irrelevant. At this week’s sales of Impressionist and modern art, this had a dramatic impact on prices.

Christie’s experts, vividly aware of the changing attitudes in the constituency they cater to, cleverly pressed all the right buttons in their catalog presentation.

The estate of Ernst Beyeler, one of the most influential 20th-century art dealers, had consigned 41 works of art ranging from Impressionism to post-World War II avant-garde movements. The proceeds of the sale were to benefit the Beyeler Foundation set up by Mr. Beyeler in his hometown, Basel. The museum, erected in Riehen, needed the cash to finance its exhibitions program and its acquisitions fund.

Christie’s made sure that the Beyeler theme, spun in reverential tones, was widely dealt with in the media. Potential buyers were made to feel that acquiring a Beyeler picture amounted to securing a badge of cultural honor.

It worked brilliantly right from lot one, a 17th-century Spanish trestle table that Mr. Beyeler used as a desk in his office until his death in 2010. The printed estimate for the table was £8,000 to £12,000, or $12,000 to $18,000 plus the sale charge. It ended up at £289,500 — setting a world auction record for banal Spanish provincial furniture.

This kind of fetishism sent many of the 41 pieces of Beyeler memorabilia to levels that bore little relationship to the art.

...Picasso’s “Couple, Le Baiser” dated Nov. 28, 1969, so sloppily dashed off that it seemed hopeless, realized £6.53 million, courtesy of a lone telephone bidder.

...The corollary of the almost exclusive attention now accorded to abstract considerations is that the most beautiful pictures often fetch comparatively modest prices. Cézanne's “La rivière,” a pure masterpiece of 1881, made only £2.5 million.

Not "an entirely "new approach" but it's gotten worse. Monets are worth more than Cezannes because they're prettier, not more important. Markets are based on greed and desire for what others desire. Scarcity means "insufficient for the demand": outside of necessities the application becomes fluid. That a Bernini modello sells for a fifth of the auction price of a Giacometti is both predictable and absurd (so therefore not).

I was talking to video editing tech yesterday about the new Final Cut X and he said what Apple has been dumbing down their product line because they make more money in the mass market than the market for professionals. Towers now have slower processors than IMacs and with the new changes in Final Cut professionals are talking about going back to Avid.


Craft is a social activity. Craftsmen take pride in their abilities, defined as something other than acquiring wealth, because their audience respects them for their skills and at their best for their refusal to pander. The integrity of craftsmen relates to the integrity of those who respond to them. Structural integrity is "the state of being whole, the condition of being unified, unimpaired, or sound in construction." But this isn't absolute, since absolute integrity would mean indifference, so the result is a divided consciousness, integral but looking outward. And the relation of craftsmen to their craft and to their audience becomes the model for lawyers' relation to their clients and the bar, and by extension again of individuals to one another: loyal to themselves but responsive to others. Laws are formal in the sense that democracy is formal, and structural integrity becomes a form of moral integrity. The rule of law is the acceptance by individuals of their being bound by social process and through that to each other.

John Quiggin: You say you want a revolution

As promised in my previous post, I’m setting up a separate thread for discussion of my premise that a socialist revolution is neither feasible nor desirable. ...

Update: I’ve updated to link to the earlier post remove an unjustifiably snarky reference to aristocratic sentiment and to include a para from the previous post, on situations where revolutions are likely to turn out well.

the offending paragraph:

At a deeper level, the appeal of revolution has a substantial residue of aristocratic sentiment. In the course of the last 200 years, and even allowing for the defeats of the past 20 years or so, the achievements of the Left have been impressive, starting with universal suffrage and secret ballots, going on the creation of the welfare state, continuing with progress towards equality without regard to race, gender and sexuality, preserving the environment from the disastrous impact of industrialism and so on. Yet most of this progress has been achieved in a thoroughly bourgeois fashion, through long agitation, boring committee reports and so on. Gains that are ground out in this way, with two steps forward and one step back, are not noble enough for an aristocratic sensibility: far better to fail gloriously.

The logic of bourgeois liberalism, and liberal intellectualism specifically, results in the monetizing of all social relations. Desire is simplified in the interest of clarity and the interest of self-interest: Apple, no matter how successful, is doing what it "needs to" or "should" do. Methodological and ideological individualism are born twins, one of the reasons that modern art, as modern craft, even in its most radical (leftist) moments, is shaded by the sentiments of equally anti-bourgeois aristocratic conservatives. But as technocrats have become the new aristocrats aristocratic art has divided into the decadence of luxury and the decadence of technocratic scholasticism. It's left for the majority as bourgeois, as even the working class define themselves now, to argue for craft, for sociability and for "the social" against technocrats, philosophers, and the defenders of the false aristocracy of economic oligarchy.

Amr 7a7a

As in Greece...
Denied Right to Vote in Michigan: “Democracy Emergency”

Someone posted a link to this. I've added to it a bit. And I'll add to it here too with a passage from something written elsewhere.

Antonin Scalia in a dissent from 2009

This court has never held that the Constitution forbids the execution of a convicted defendant who has had a full and fair trial but is later able to convince a court that he is ‘actually’ innocent.

Scalia says this because the Constitution refers to due “process” not to outcome.

No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.

The letter and the spirit of the law. The phrase itself undermines the claims of naturalist epistemology. What is judging? Who’s to judge? Here we get back to the relation of art and law and of abstraction to representation.

On the letter of the law Scalia is correct. To argue from the spirit of law or language is subjectivism, and subjectivism is inarticulate, in-formal, isolate: the end of the social. But to argue only from the letter is cold, inhuman, unjust.

“He’s just a boy! He didn’t mean it! It was an accident! He’s my son!”
“Okay Let him go.”

“He’s just a boy! He didn’t mean it! It was an accident! He’s my son!”
“It doesn’t matter. It’s the law.”

Does it matter that he killed five people?
Who’s to judge?

Formal logic in the world of experience is pedantry, and military pedantry in civic life is fascism. Pedantry will always become hypocrisy. Policemen enforcing law will always tend to identify themselves not with its enforcement but its embodiment. “I am the law.” And by identifying themselves with law the law's authority will become theirs. St Paul says: "To the pure all things are pure.” That’s the pull of the short circuit, of identification. [I am the law/I am the social/I speak for you/I am you]

"Democracy is the culture of language in use." It's the rule of multiple experiences not of reason. It is and needs to be the rule of process. Assemblies and law courts are fora for collective decision-making; the only truth is the truth of process. Lawyers in practice as "practitioners" understand this. Legal philosophers, as philosophers, as "theoreticians" do not. In democracy, as in the arts, as in language, practice precedes theory. Laws do not make democracy, people make democracy. The laws are written after the fact to codify formal relations among people who agree as to values: collective subjectivity, collective preference.

All so fucking obvious.

Syria Comment

"Jisr al-Shaghour – the Government Story as told by a Foreign Member of the Organized Press Visit"

“Where is the Truth in Conflicting Reports? Not in the Middle but at the Extremes,” by a Foreigner in Syria"

"The chief defect of all hitherto existing materialism – that of Feuerbach included – is that the thing, reality, sensuousness, is conceived only in the form of the object or of contemplation, but not as sensuous human activity, practice, not subjectively."

I'm not a fan of Diller and Scofidio; and the High Line is full of mistakes, if you can call them that. It's an elevated boardwalk, over-designed in the name of art when simple responsiveness would have been enough. The design, from the furniture and railings to the direction of the decking, has been built and installed to accentuate it's structure as a stripe. It speeds you up when it should slow you down; the northern half is reduced to a scenic highway to nowhere. On saturday it was crowded so stopping for a moment caused a traffic jam.

Benches and rest areas aligned at an angle mimicking exit ramps, again "flowing" in the direction of the walkway. The rhetoric of foreward motion even at rest.

Foliage locked off, to be looked at.

One of two sets of risers, group seating facing outwards, for people observing but not communicating. The second is on an overpass; you can sit and watch the cars slide under you.

Once of the few times I saw people facing one another in a group.

It's not a question of whether it should have been done or not, though even at that level there's a lot that I doubt has been thought through. Or maybe it has. An architect I know is betting that the southern half at least will be private or semi-private in 10 years, with 24 hour direct access from hotels and buildings, but not from the street.

note taking posted elsewhere. It didn't make it.

The problem isn't the just the ignorance of craft, it's the focus on "creativity". The psychiatrist who called the girl a dancer was observant. He paid attention to her. Proust was observant and articulate not creative.

"most serious dance they see on television has more in common with a strip tease than Alvin Ailey."

The girl grew up to become one of the people who choreographs Walt Disney rather than striptease, G Rated rather than R rated banality. Black Swan is striptease and ballet; the irony is too much for Andrew Lloyd Weber or TED.

"...just what American culture hopes for. Creativity. Individuality. Authenticity. Opposition to Convention. Wealth. Success"
Narcissism

This goes back to my old comments on MIT and Grant McCracken TED is neoliberalism as culture. If the men behind Grand Theft Auto are TED's optimist "Creatives",  what are the singers of Narcocorridos? People go to museums to see paintings by Velazquez not pictures of his client, Philip IV. Velazquez' works are incredibly skilled but pessimistic if not tragic. The specifics of that tragedy are what his skill describes. The description is compelling, not the skill.

Education should focus less perhaps on rote learning, but definitely less on "creativity" as a respite from grunt work. Schools should try to foster skills of observation and judgement. At 14 they should still be teaching you how to read, but no longer how to write. In the same sense they should teach the basics of reading and performing music, the foundation for a possible later hobby, but not more. More literature classes, more art history. Creativity as an ideology dumbs down the humanities and makes them palatable for people such as those at MIT who like their values prepackaged.

It's a real advantage (one of many) that films schools are still treated as trade schools while art schools are swamped by intellectualization. There should be a moratorium on the academic teaching of the contemporary arts. We'll never understand ourselves as well as our children will. False objectivity is less than counterproductive: it's destructive.