From 2015, because it's necessary:

Three posts from November 2008.

Time and Consensus

When my family and I ate out in the Italy of my youth and early decades of my marriage, we would look for any plain trattoria where we could find the kind of cooking that was closest to what my mother and father were putting on the table at home. The person making the meal may have been the owner or his wife or his mother, or someone working in total anonymity. He or she was never referred to as the chef, but as il cuoco or la cuoca, the cook.

This was the old world of Mediterranean family cooking, a world where satisfying flavors had been arrived at over time and by consensus. That world hasn’t disappeared, but it has receded, making room for a parallel world, one where food is often entertainment, spectacle, news, fashion, science, a world in which surprise — whether it’s on the plate or beyond it — is vital. This is the world of chefs.

see "Rules and Beer" from the 24th, and "Rules vs Trust" from the 22nd, etc.

Marcella Hazan
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Rules and Beer: Law is hard convention Convention is soft law

The connection should be clear enough.
note taking. my comments elsewhere. neatened up a bit here.

Between corporate and industrial culture and the cult of individual self-expression there's the culture of community, communication, and language. Nothing that's been made the same way for hundreds of years has actually been made the same way for hundreds of years; that applies to beer as much as law. It’s slow change. You put 20 people in a room you’ll get an argument. You put 3 people in a room followed by 3 more as the first ones leave and 3 more following again on and on for 500 years you might get something interesting, whether it’s or bread or beer or wine or cheese or Homer or the Bible.
Budweiser is not good beer. Microbrewers, by and large, miss the point. Of course they do, they’re beer geeks.

This is the critique from cultural “depth” which some conflate with mysticism or ‘spirituality.’ It’s simpler than that: subtlety takes time.

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Rules vs Trust: Language always changes, so what are rules?

Communication isn't about ideas, it's about people.
Something Leiter et. al don't understand.


[above (in case it vanishes): Brian Leiter and Scott Shapiro-Hart/Dworkin and theoretical disagreement.]

Crooked Timber and Balkin

notes:
A judge is an orator, a public speaker trying to win over his audience, or at least gain their respect for the possible logic of his decision even if they disagree.
The purpose of law is not the search for truth but for for social stability and peace.
The truth itself is unknowable.
[Maybe he killed her, maybe he didn't.]

The foundational Ideological commitment in a democracy is the commitment to getting along. Truth is a function of the social and any conclusion must be socially acceptable.
Dworkin's Hercules is a fictional character, like Socrates.
Laws must be, or appear to be, non-contradictory. Principles are under no such obligation. Legal decisions are public performances in defense of one description of an illusory seamless web: our mythmaking of ourselves and our processes.

Positivists are interested in rules, in numbers and grammar, and of course they mythologize their own positions. Anything in language will be contextualized by history. American legal realism manifests itself as a datable aspect of an era, as does post-war American rationalism. There is no equivalent in physics or mathematics and to say otherwise is to analogize words as numbers, and perception as Platonism. Naturalized epistemology is an inappropriate philosophical basis for a democracy. The only foundation in law in a democracy is theater.

Again (a reminder): If 1 is next to 2, 2 next to 3, 3 next to 4, and 4 next to 5, is 1 therefore next to 5?
No. Numbers in their relations to one another neither evolve or devolve. Language always changes. Law in a democracy is one aspect of the public marking/manifestation of change.

The question in TVA v. Hill was whether the courts or the legislature had the right to make a decision and under what terms. Is it permissible in our system, as we define it at this time that the courts have such authority?
The question is: can we as we imagine ourselves now, get there from here?
Social truth not objective truth.
The argument in law is a public argument over the definition of our language and ourselves in the present, not an argument over external objective truths. The only natural law is the law that says language is and society are artificial.

and again
On general questions: Democratic justice is not justice, but one definition of justice. Justice or law can be defined as a language structure perceived commonly as manifesting a stable order in which things and people have a specific role and place. Law is a roadway and a map to the world. There is law and justice in a monarchy as long as people perceive it. Barbarism is society without law. Fascism is society of the hypocritical pretense of law: law as kitsch. The mechanisms of such an order make it far more violent than simple barbarism.

Art and culture are the history of human self-description and self-definition. This in law [its foundation and penumbra]

This is all so basic it depresses me to need to form it as an argument.

A birthday card for a friend (he's on the left). File under visual imagination, or at least memory.

I've been predicting the future since about 1978.

NYRB: "The philosopher Ernst Cassirer’s most timely insight is that even in a scientific age, people are prone to magical, mystical thinking." NFS means No Fucking Shit

The appearance of a new English translation of Ernst Cassirer’s The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms marks the culmination of an unlikely intellectual revival. Cassirer’s three-volume magnum opus, first published in Germany between 1923 and 1929, was translated into English by Ralph Manheim in the 1950s, when its author’s reputation was in decline. For a long time thereafter, it didn’t seem the book would ever need retranslating. Interwar German thought exercised an enormous influence in the late-twentieth-century US, from Martin Heidegger’s existentialism to the critical theory of the Frankfurt School to the Marxist mysticism of Walter Benjamin. But the apocalyptic radicalism that made these thinkers so fascinating—the product of a period that felt like, and in a sense really was, the end of the world—is absent in Cassirer.

...His work found some admirers in this country, most notably Susanne K. Langer, whose Philosophy in a New Key (1941) built on his idea of art and myth as nonsemantic forms of thought. By the turn of the century, however, Cassirer had almost vanished from the consciousness of the American intellectual public—especially compared with Heidegger, who became ever more fascinating as his history of Nazi involvement came into clearer view.

Then, in the 2000s, the tide began to turn. In Ernst Cassirer: The Last Philosopher of Culture (2008), Edward Skidelsky wrote semi-ironically of the “Cassirer industry” that had already sprung up in Germany. Skidelsky’s book was followed in English by Gordon’s magisterial Continental Divide (2010), a detailed analysis of a storied 1929 debate between Cassirer and Heidegger in Davos, Switzerland. In 2013 Emily J. Levine’s Dreamland of Humanists proposed that the Frankfurt School had a rival in a “Hamburg School” centered on Cassirer and Erwin Panofsky, both of whom did research in that city’s Warburg Library.

I'm still not sure these people know what humanism was. And Kirsch is a putz. 

I've found a book on Cassirer and Arendt. I'm more interested in Arendt and Panofsky; her contempt for social science follows the older humanists' contempt for the hard sciences, something that as I've said seems to go unmentioned in scholarship in English. 

Someone needs to do a study of how the humanist contempt for the love of mechanics was redirected towards a defense of science as another form of reason against the glorification of unreason. Arendt's connection to Heidegger is Kantian, and the Davos debate was a debate over the the interpretation of Kant, not for or against him. Again, Kant and the older humanists were not optimists. And no one who defends fascism is interested in freedom, other than freedom from the burden of responsibility for their own actions. 

Erwin Panofsky explicitly states that the first half of the opening chapter of Studies in Iconology—his landmark American publication of 1939—contains ‘the revised content of a methodological article published by the writer in 1932’, which is now translated for the first time in this issue of Critical Inquiry. That article, published in the philosophical journal Logos, is among his most important works. First, it marks the apogee of his series of philosophically reflective essays on how to do art history, that reach back, via a couple of major pieces on Alois Riegl, to the 1915 essay on Heinrich Wölfflin. Under the influence of his colleague at Hamburg Ernst Cassirer, the principal interpreter of Kant in the 1920s, Panofsky from 1915 on exhibits in his work ever more Kantian thinking and language. But Logos was not an art-historical review or one dedicated to aesthetics but a principal mainstream journal of the philosophy of culture. So ‘On the Problem of Describing and Interpreting Works of the Visual Arts’ has a good claim to be the culmination of Panofsky’s philosophical thinking in his German period under the Weimar Republic.

...It is a critical attempt to ground the concepts of the discipline and an interrogation of the meanings of images in the context of Cassirer’s philosophy of symbolic forms and Warburg’s cultural history.  Alongside this synthesis, and more than in any of his other works—although with little acknowledgement or direct citation—the 1932 essay comes closer to integrating into his own project the intellectual positions of Panofsky’s prime theoretical opponents: not only Hans Sedlmayr and the theoretical position of the second Vienna school but also Martin Heidegger and his assault on neo-Kantianism and on Cassirer in particular. In this sense, at a particular (it turns out, late) moment of Weimar scholarship, Panofsky’s Logos essay makes a pitch for the high ground in the developing argument about what art history should be as a conceptual discipline. It happens that all Panofsky’s collaborators in the Hamburg scene (and most neo-Kantians) were Jews, while his specific opponents— even in the late twenties and early thirties (namely, Sedlmayr and Heidegger)—would declare for the Nazi Party as soon as the National Socialists were on the ascendant.

No one who defends fascism is interested in freedom, other than freedom from the burden of responsibility for their own actions. But science sees the world as determinist. And round we go.

The world is just a barrel-organ which the Lord God turns Himself.
We all have to dance to the tune which is already on the drum.

For those too lazy to follow the links to the end, they're the dying words of Reinhard Heydrich.

"A brilliant quip can lose its sharpness or even its intelligibility taken out of context, but that doesn’t take away from the intelligence of the gesture, only our ability to recognize it." 

I had an introduction to that quote, but it was too much. It's a hilarious "meme" the kind of thing someone would turn into an NFT. But the whole point is that it's infinitely reproducible. The age of mechanical reproduction began with Gutenberg. The cultural significance of the form–demotic commentary–has no relation to money.  

Albrecht Dürer, St. Philip 1526 Engraving, 12.2 x 7.7 mm.

The one I own, printed before final revisions, is worth a lot more than I paid for it. The dealer made a mistake. But I'll never sell it. 

While it is true that commercial art is always in danger of ending up as a prostitute, it is equally true that noncommercial art is always in danger of ending up as an old maid. Non commercial art has given us Seurat's "Grande Jatte" and Shakespeare's sonnets, but also much that is esoteric to the point of incommunicability. Conversely, commercial art has given us much that is vulgar or snobbish (two aspects of the same thing) to the point of loathsomeness, but also Durer's prints and Shakespeare's plays. For, we must not forget that Durer's prints were partly made on commission and partly intended to be sold in the open market; and that Shakespeare's plays—in contrast to the earlier masques and intermezzi which were produced at court by aristocratic amateurs and could afford to be so incomprehensible that even those who described them in printed monographs occasionally failed to grasp their intended significance—were meant to appeal, and did appeal, not only to the select few but also to everyone who was prepared to pay a shilling for admission. 

It is this requirement of communicability that makes commercial art more vital than noncommercial, and therefore potentially much more effective for better or for worse.

Switched out some files, and added a few more. Better images, still not good.

NFTs again. 3/11-Price realised: $69,346,250

He's a commercial illustrator. The pitch is the "innovation". The market is producing the artist and the art.  

The positivist definition of art is illustration. If fine art has devolved into design, it still performs the function of art: the following of sensibility, responding to experiences, perceptions. But to ad men, like philosophers, art is successful communication as seen in metrics, and is designed as computer games are in the service of “fun”. The MIT communication department model of creativity follows the enthusiasm of the designers of Assassin’s Creed, and Gears of War, blind not even to subtext but to direct meaning, a blindness matching the enthusiasts of the “formalism” of the films of Paul Sharits. For all the discussion of the delivery of content, the content itself is seen as meaningless. This is the world of ideas, the academia that claims to provide a foundation for capitalism and anti-capitalism, revolution, Wall St. and Madison Avenue.

It's all here. 

I'm leaving in all the links: telegraphing the hard sell.

As of 6:48 pm on 3/10, the bidding is at $13,250,000 

On 1 May 2007, Mike Winkelmann, aka the digital artist Beeple, posted a new work of art online. He did the same thing the next day and the next, and the next one after that, creating and posting a brand-new digital picture, or ‘everyday’ as he called it, every single day for 13-and-a-half years. Now those individual pieces have been brought together in EVERYDAYS: THE FIRST 5000 DAYS, a unique work in the history of digital art.

Minted exclusively for Christie’s, the monumental digital collage will be offered as a single lot sale concurrently with First Open from 25 February to 11 March. Marking two industry firsts, Christie’s will be the first major auction house to offer a purely digital work with a unique NFT (Non-fungible token) — effectively a guarantee of its authenticity — and to accept cryptocurrency, in this case Ether, in addition to standard forms of payment for the singular lot.

‘Christie’s has never offered a new media artwork of this scale or importance before,’ says Noah Davis, specialist in Post-War & Contemporary Art at Christie’s in New York. ‘Acquiring Beeple’s work is a unique opportunity to own an entry in the blockchain itself created by one of the world’s leading digital artists.’...

His visionary and often irreverent digital pictures have propelled him to the top of the digital art world, winning him 1.8 million followers on Instagram and high-profile collaborations with global brands ranging from Louis Vuitton to Nike, as well as performing artists from Katy Perry to Childish Gambino.

In EVERYDAYS: THE FIRST 5000 DAYS, the artist has stitched together recurring themes and colour schemes into an aesthetic whole. The individual pieces are organised in loose chronological order: zooming in reveals pictures by turn abstract, fantastical, grotesque or absurd, deeply personal or representative of current events. Recurring themes include society’s obsession with and fear of technology; the desire for and resentment of wealth; and America’s recent political turbulence. 

‘Beeple is looking at his whole body of work as it’s presented on Instagram as a kind of Duchampian readymade’ — specialist Noah Davis 

The notable differences between the early and later pictures reveal Beeple’s enormous evolution as an artist. At the project’s inception, ‘everydays’ were basic drawings. When Beeple started working in 3D, however, they took on abstract themes, colour, form and repetition. Over the past five years, they have became increasingly timely, reacting to current events.

‘I almost look at it now as though I’m a political cartoonist,’ Beeple explains. ‘Except instead of doing sketches, I’m using the most advanced 3D tools to make comments on current events, almost in real time.’  

He's an idiot. 

The seriousness of fine art is the connected to the seriousness of philosophy: an artistic and intellectual elite removed from the world through its connections to authority. People forget that fine art was also known as "non-commercial" art, money dealt with discreetly, and buying to flip looked down upon. 

Playboys didn’t buy polo ponies, or football teams, to make money off them, and heiresses collected expensive dresses. The point is the game for the game’s sake, art for art’s sake.

I've said that all before. Rich people can afford to do some things things for love. This is the equivalent of real estate prices going through the roof while the rental income stays the same. It has no foundation, not even the foundation of self-respect still associated with good publishers and movie producers.

“The potential for it to disrupt the traditional art auction model is humongous,” said Noah Davis, the specialist in charge of the first NFT auction at Christie’s. Beyond the record-setting sale of Beeple’s “Everydays,” he said, NFTs’ “lack of objecthood” meant auction houses faced no costs required for storing, handling, cataloging, photographing and insuring a physical work of art, making a “really attractive opportunity” for auction houses.

History repeats, and now no one gets the joke.  I have no problem with Klein or Manzoni.

Guardian, 2012:  The 10 Best Invisible Artworks, etc.

The Florentine intermedios of the manneristic theater (similar to the English masks) abounded in such complicated allegories as seen in the Intermedio of 1585 and 1589 where the conclusion of Plato’s Republic appeared on the stage, including the Planets, the Harmony of the Spheres, the Three Goddesses of Fate, and even Necessity, holding the adamantine axis of the Universe (fig. 40). We happen to possess the diary of a nobleman who saw this play and stated that it was very beautiful but nobody could understand what it was all about. 

I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked, dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix.

The Golden Age of Ozzie and Harriet, Ken and Barbie. The evil of banality. 

"i fucking loved TNG and how gentle and kind everyone was and how enthusiastic about my nascent Trekkie journey"

"John Quiggin dreams of Shangri-La/ Ecotopia with images of city planning for the People's Republic of China, designed by architects from Singapore."

I'm not defending the Senator from EpiPen

If we review Bentham’s contemporaries in search of a figure who might be seen as exemplifying the antithesis of the Benthamic view of life, many names might suggest themselves and might, in one context or another, be appropriate. Rousseau, Burke, Kant himself, Hegel – each of these would have a claim, though each might prove, on closer inspection, to have something at least in common with Bentham. There is, however, a figure – a man who was born less than ten years after Bentham and died less than five years before him – who may provide the requisite antithesis. William Blake, I suggest, both embodies that antithesis and proclaims the imperfection of Bentham’s understanding of happiness. Two passages may serve to illustrate the point. One is, inevitably,

He who bends to himself a joy

Doth the winged life destroy;

But he who kisses the joy as it flies 

Lives in eternity’s sunrise.

And the other is all the more telling for its expression of a view – an understanding – of life as far as possible from Bentham’s utilitarianism:

Man was made for Joy & Woe

And when this we rightly know

Through the world we safely go.

Joy & Woe are woven fine
A Clothing for the soul divine.
Under every grief & pine
Runs a joy with silken twine.

The author, J.H. Burns, was first General Editor of the Collected Works of Jeremy Bentham. 

I can't believe I've never posted that before. It's in. I read the essay years ago.

Announcing representation of Garrett Bradley

Lisson Gallery is pleased to announce exclusive worldwide representation of American artist and filmmaker Garrett Bradley. Bradley works across narrative, documentary and experimental modes of filmmaking to address themes such as race, class, familial relationships, social justice and cultural histories in the United States. Adopting archival material alongside newly shot footage, Bradley’s films exist simultaneously in the past, present and future, not only disrupting our perception of time, but also breaking down our preconceived ideas about objectivity, perspective and truth-telling. These narratives unfold naturally in both feature-length and short form, rather than being forced into a singular definition or perspective, and consequently reveal the characters’ multifaceted individual and collective stories.

Kings of Leon Will Be the First Band to Release an Album as an NFT

The band’s revolutionary tokens will unlock special perks like limited-edition vinyl and front row seats to future concerts

The band is actually dropping three types of tokens as part of a series called “NFT Yourself,” people involved in the project tells Rolling Stone. One type is a special album package, while a second type offers live show perks like front-row seats for life, and a third type is just for exclusive audiovisual art. All three types of tokens offer art designed by the band’s longtime creative partner Night After Night; the smart contracts and intelligence within the tokens were developed by YellowHeart, a company that wants to use blockchain technology to bring value back to music and better direct-to-fan relationships.

How a 10-second video clip sold for $6.6 million

The video by digital artist Beeple, whose real name is Mike Winkelmann, was authenticated by blockchain, which serves as a digital signature to certify who owns it and that it is the original work.

It’s a new type of digital asset - known as a non-fungible token (NFT) - that has exploded in popularity during the pandemic as enthusiasts and investors scramble to spend enormous sums of money on items that only exist online.

Blockchain technology allows the items to be publicly authenticated as one-of-a-kind, unlike traditional online objects which can be endlessly reproduced.

“You can go in the Louvre and take a picture of the Mona Lisa and you can have it there, but it doesn’t have any value because it doesn’t have the provenance or the history of the work,” said Rodriguez-Fraile, who said he first bought Beeple’s piece because of his knowledge of the U.S.-based artist’s work.

Rodriguez-Fraile is as bad as Felix Salmon. (two links) 

Pop music is a commodity: it's the music of commodity culture. "Punk was the revenge of pop music against the pretensions of theatrical art rock. It was made as a commodity that stated itself as such: a spike and glitter covered hand grenade, a 3 minute hate, the recorded sound of angry teenagers pressed on vinyl disks and sold back to them."

Video Art/Gallery Film: Fine art vs film; it still applies. The gallery shows are adjuncts to the "art". And museums are becoming theaters. 

If Tate Modern was Musée de la Danse?  Scroll down to May 16th

1934: "Today there is no denying that narrative films are not only “art”—not often good art, to be sure, but this applies to other media as well—but also, besides architecture, cartooning and “commercial design,” the only visual art entirely alive." etc.

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Beeple, at Christie's 

Nevada Governor Proposes Giving Tech Firms Power to Govern [He's a Democrat]

And Paul Romer, again. 

And Kate Klonick, again.

These platforms are now responsible for shaping and allowing participation in our new digital and democratic culture, yet they have little direct accountability to their users. Future intervention, if any, must take into account how and why these platforms regulate online speech in order to strike a balance between preserving the democratizing forces of the internet and protecting the generative power of our New Governors.

Balkin's not a wartime consigliere.  

Tarantino's indulgence in racism, and getting away with it, goes back to Scorsese, in a cab talking about killing his wife for fucking a black man. And then the scene above. Violence and comedy. Scorsese and Tarantino are both before anything else students of film. Not the first.  

I wish I could find a video of that included the transition to the street scene. But at the same time, since I'm still doing this, if I were a curator I would do a show of the best of YTMND

Reuters: How a 10-second video clip sold for $6.6 million

“You can go in the Louvre and take a picture of the Mona Lisa and you can have it there, but it doesn’t have any value because it doesn’t have the provenance or the history of the work,”

The provenance of a tulip. 

"Information fiduciaries" again

Wolff is a professor of economics at UMass. The post is here. I was blocked from sharing it, but not the Guardian article itself. From Doug Henwood on twitter. 

The Greyzone, Blumenthal, and Reuters 

 What's the definition of a "platform"?

In that same update about group recommendations, the product manager also explained how leaders decided against making changes to a feature called In Feed Recommendations (IFR) due to potential political worries. Designed to insert posts into people’s feeds from accounts they don’t follow, IFR was intended to foster new connections or interests. For example, if a person followed the Facebook page for a football team like the Kansas City Chiefs, IFR might add a post from the NFL to their feed, even if that person didn’t follow the NFL.

One thing IFR was not supposed to do was recommend political content. But earlier that spring, Facebook users began complaining that they were seeing posts from conservative personalities including Ben Shapiro in their News Feeds even though they had never engaged with that type of content.

When the issue was flagged internally, Facebook’s content policy team warned that removing such suggestions for political content could reduce those pages’ engagement and traffic, and possibly inspire complaints from publishers. A News Feed product manager and a policy team member reiterated this argument in an August post to Facebook’s internal message board.

“A noticeable drop in distribution for these producers (via traffic insights for recommendations) is likely to result in high-profile escalations that could include accusations of shadow-banning and/or FB bias against certain political entities during the US 2020 election cycle,” they explained. Shadow-banning, or the limiting of a page’s circulation without informing its owners, is a common accusation leveled by right-wing personalities against social media platforms.

Throughout 2020, the “fear of antagonizing powerful political actors,” as the former core data scientist put it in their memo, became a key public policy team rationalization for forgoing action on potentially violative content or rolling out product changes ahead of the US presidential election. They also said they had seen “a dozen proposals to measure the objective quality of content on News Feed diluted or killed because … they have a disproportionate impact across the US political spectrum, typically harming conservative content more.”

The data scientist, who spent more than five years at the company before leaving late last year, noted that while strides had been made since 2016, the state of political content on News Feed was “still generally agreed to be bad.” According to Facebook data, they added, 1 of every 100 views on content about US politics was for some type of hoax, while the majority of views for political materials were on partisan posts. Yet the company continued to give known spreaders of false and misleading information a pass if they were deemed “‘sensitive’ or likely to retaliate,” the data scientist said.

“In the US it appears that interventions have been almost exclusively on behalf of conservative publishers,” they wrote, attributing this to political pressure or a reluctance to upset sensitive publishers and high-profile users.

As BuzzFeed News reported last summer, members of Facebook’s policy team — including Kaplan — intervened on behalf of right-wing figures and publications such as Charlie Kirk, Breitbart, and Prager University, in some cases pushing for the removal of misinformation strikes against their pages or accounts. Strikes, which are applied at the recommendation of Facebook’s third-party fact-checkers, can result in a range of penalties, from a decrease in how far their posts are distributed to the removal of the page or account.

Kaplan’s other interventions are well documented. In 2018, the Wall Street Journal revealed that he helped kill a project to connect Americans who have political differences. The paper said Kaplan had objected “when briefed on internal Facebook research that found right-leaning users tended to be more polarized, or less exposed to different points of view, than those on the left.” Last year, the New York Times reported that policy executives declined to expand a feature called “correct the record” — which notified users when they interacted with content that was later labeled false by Facebook’s fact-checking partners — out of fear that it would “disproportionately show notifications to people who shared false news from right-wing websites.”

I have argued that the moral egalitarianism that is central to modern morality cannot be defended on any basis other than the supposition that there is an egalitarian God that invests everyone with equal moral worth. Defenders of morality argue that this aspect of morality can be defended without any theistic assumptions, even though, as I have suggested, moral egalitarianism appears to be nothing more than a legacy of Judaism and Christianity.

Counting against Nietzsche’s skepticism about the ability of morality to survive the death of God is precisely the fact that he calls repeated attention to, namely that, in the domain of moral thought “everything goes on as before” (A 38), that is, that the egalitarian moral ideals have expanded their scope rather than receding in the wake of modern atheism (cf. Leiter 2013a). Of course, the more accurate thing to say is that, for the last 150 years or so, “everything goes on as before.” Might this change in a Nietzschean direction? Of course, it could, and we cannot rule that out. But it counts against Nietzsche’s prediction that the death of God will produce the death of morality that 150 years later, it really is true that “everything [still] goes on as before.”

To be sure, to the extent Nietzsche is making a prediction—as when he says “Christianity as dogma perished of its own morality [i.e., the demand to be truthful]; in this manner Christianity as morality must now also perish—we stand at the threshold of this event” (GM III:27)—he presumably is not making a prediction about what the vast “herd” of humanity will come to believe, only about his rightful readers, that elite he imagined were predisposed for his insights--or at least those benighted atheists who have not yet thought clearly about the implications of the death of God.

And right below this, the centennial of Rawls. repeats: Rawls, Joshua Cohen and Apple University.

The absurdity of Leiter. His loyalty to the academy supersedes everything else. But I keep returning to it and the absurdity of philosophy.

A lot to unpack. Europeans are socialist in the same sense the Spanish are Catholic: ironic worship or indifferent profession in the theater of social democracy. 

Henry will never change.

I used to drink coffee with a man who sewed $100,000 furs for Dennis Basso. "Americans aren't social!" Still the best description.

I'm lazy.

FIFTH QUESTION. In which government must there be censors? There must be censors in a republic where the principle of government is virtue. It is not only crimes that destroy virtue, but also negligence, mistakes, a certain slackness in the love of the homeland, dangerous examples, the seeds ofcorruption, that which does not run counter to the laws but eludes them, that which does not destroy them but weakens them: all these should be corrected by censors.

It is astonishing that an Areopagite was punished for killing a sparrow that had taken refuge in his breast while in flight from a hawk. It is surprising that the Areopagus sent to his death a child who had put out the eyes of a bird. Notice that the question is not that of condemning a crime but of judging mores in a republic founded on mores.

In monarchies there must be no censors; monarchies are founded on honor, and the nature of honor is to have the whole universe as a censor. Every man who commits a breach of honor is subject to the reproaches of even those without honor.

Virtue vs honor in Montesquieu. My references are sloppy.

Céline Spector, "Montesquieu: Critique of Republicanism?" Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy, 6:1, 38-53

The opposition between liberalism and civic humanism has been the object of fruitful scholarly debate, notably since the work of H.Baron, J.G.A. Pocock and Q. Skinner¹ . The ambition of The Machiavellian Moment is clear: by putting to work these two distinct hermeneutical paradigms it seeks to transcend the hegemony of liberal historiography. The shortcomings of the liberal vocabulary of individualism which theorizes the possessive individual in its relation with other possessive individuals and which considers the question of justice under the guise of the protection of rights must be mitigated by the use of the language of civic humanism. Civic humanism or broadly conceived republicanism does not see the curtailing of power, the warrant of individual safety and of the right to rebel as its founding problems; but is concerned essentially with the corruption of virtue. In the writings of those authors belonging to what J.G.A. Pocock labelled the tradition of ‘civic humanism’, the corruption which threatens liberty appears when the citizen’s autonomy which is guaranteed by the ownership of arms and land is no longer secure. In these critical ‘Machiavellian moments’ of history civic virtue is not confident in its success against the forces that endanger its survival; be it fortuna in the Renaissance or finance, credit and commerce in the 18th century.

The Neo-Harringtonian continuation of the tradition of civic humanism in England, a tradition limited up to that point to the small Italian republics of the 13th and 14th century, focuses the republican fears around the new economic expansion and its instruments. Following the financial revolution, the introduction of innovative means of power, the reign of passion and imagination disintegrate the martial spirit of independence and patriotism to which the survival of the republic is identified. The mobility of ownership which dominates the new mercantile societies is detrimental to the expression of virtue and renders the ideal of the citizen/soldier defunct. In this line of thought the tradition of English republicanism is no longer associated to the restoration of the ancient republican model where the people as a body politic exercised power. Power is now subordinated to a new vision of constitutional monarchy which might invigorate civic virtue once more, a virtue without which the unceasing struggle between competing factions and interests is set to carry the state adrift towards corruption and decadence.

1.The expression ‘civic humanism’ was most certainly fashioned by H. Baron in 1928 in German as Bürgerhumanismus. A term which Baron developed in opposition to Burkhart’s notion of ‘Renaissance’ in (Baron, 1966).

"The expression ‘civic humanism’ was most certainly fashioned by H. Baron in 1928." A 20th century pedant's definition of humanism as something puritanical and brittle.

Intellectual history is not synonymous with history  

Naturalism undermines individualism, but not republicanism. It undermines philosophers' pretensions but not lawyers' trade.

For, though the word Humanität had come, in the eighteenth century, to mean little more than politeness and civility, it had, for Kant, a much deeper significance, which the circumstances of the moment served to emphasize: man’s proud and tragic consciousness of self-approved and self-imposed principles, contrasting with his utter subjection to illness, decay and all that implied in the word ‘mortality.’

…in a hospital tent at the clearing station I came across a man with a French flag wrapped around his waist; the medics discovered it when they cut his shirt away. He was a hard-looking, blondish chap with a mouthful of gold teeth and a face adorned by a cross-shaped knife scar—the croix de vache with which procurers sometimes mark business rivals. An interesting collection of obscene tattooing showed on the parts of him that the flag did not cover. Outwardly he was not a sentimental type.
"Where are you from?" I asked him.
"Belleville," he said. Belleville is a part of Paris not distinguished for its elegance.
"What did you do in civilian life?" I inquired.
That made him grin. "I lived on my income," he said.
"Why did you choose the Corps Franc?"
"Because I understood," he said.

Most arguments against mass surveillance don't respond fully substantively to claims that you shouldn't worry if you "have nothing to hide".  Defense of personal freedom isn't enough.  What's needed is an argument in defense of the need for citizens in a democratic state to be able to be all kinds of wrong, all kinds of confused, creepy, conflicted, desirous, weepy or hate-filled, so that they may be able to learn to understand and outgrow their childishness. The choice is between a community of adults with a minority of the inveterately childish and criminal or a community of children ruled by moralists and crime lords.

Republicanism is a practice, not a theory. It succeeds when people are willing to balance their competing desires; there's no rule as to when or how. 

 Leiter and "condescension from below", again, this time against Taibbi.

"Marcuse was a Millian"

I show that Marcuse agreed with Mill that free expression is only truth-and utility-maximizing if certain background conditions obtain: thus Mill argues that the British colony in India would be better off with "benevolent despotism" than Millian liberty of expression, given that its inhabitants purportedly lacked the maturity and education requisite for expression to be utility-maximizing. Marcuse agrees with Mill that the background conditions are essential, but has an empirical disagreement with him about what those are and when they obtain: Mill finds them wanting in colonial India, Marcuse finds them wanting in capitalist America.

Puritans and drunks. Authoritarian bureaucrats vs anti-political moralists. Leiter loses this one to Taibbi and anyone else who laughs at his first line. 

Taibbi: "The man who probably wouldn’t have touched a Harley, a blues guitar, a Budweiser, or  a baseball without a Haz-Mat suit..." Taibbi is an idiot.

Angela Davis with Marcuse, and Erich Honecker. I have to shrug.

Taibbi's old friend Yasha Levine

Matt went from helping set up what is probably the most radical and avant-garde American literary experiment of his generation to sounding like a caricature of a reactionary boomer, all this at the tender age of 50.

From Russia with Lust 

“People are afraid of what our paper will write about them, so they give us free shit,” Mr. Taibbi said.

They say they also take advantage of what they like to call the “white god factor” and make trips to the provinces. “Tens of millions of people live in dire circumstances, stranded in the center of the world’s largest continent, with little hope of going anywhere,” said Mr. Ames. “Which means–sexual opportunity for me.”

We walked to the Village Idiot. Beer, pool, darts. Two college girls were dancing together to Elvis, provocatively.

Mr. Ames said he didn’t like the trend toward lesbianism among American women. “Nothing coils my dick up faster,” he said. “When I was in school in Berkeley, there were dykes all over the place who hated my guts for being a tall male. They don’t like tall men, really.”

He spoke about his sex life in Moscow. “Russian women, especially on the first date, expect you to rape them,...” 

I switched out the link. Levine linked to Vanity Fair.

They're all fucking idiots. Satire is conservative and moralizing and Taibbi has aged into bitterness. That's all.

They were friends with Yegor Letov and Limonov, but the Americans were just voyeurs who could bail to the US whenever they wanted, just like every other decadent journalist partying in Saigon in the 60s. They began doing the apology tour in 2017, because someone remembered, or found out what was never secret. 

"I love the melancholy poetry of reactionary homosexual Fordist anti-humanism"

The Research Director of the Knight First Amendment Center at Colombia 

In the NYT,  @jameeljaffer  and I argue that the new Facebook Oversight Board should push FB for a full investigation of how the platform may have contributed to the Jan. 6 Capitol riots before they take up the Trump suspension question.

"Facebook’s ‘Supreme Court’ Faces Its First Major Test" 

Jaffer is the The Executive Director.  The New Yorker piece, by Kate Klonick, in context. 

Stoller is good.

“Fundamentally American”? No. Facebook represents a fundamentally un-American view of free speech. We have never had public policy to centralize control of communications and media like this before.

To be fair, both those were written before today's news. A lot of people are going to be ashamed of their earlier positions, including Balkin. This is going to hit. Palestine will take a little longer. 

But this really is becoming fun. 

Scorsese 

As recently as fifteen years ago, the term “content” was heard only when people were discussing the cinema on a serious level, and it was contrasted with and measured against “form.” Then, gradually, it was used more and more by the people who took over media companies, most of whom knew nothing about the history of the art form, or even cared enough to think that they should. “Content” became a business term for all moving images: a David Lean movie, a cat video, a Super Bowl commercial, a superhero sequel, a series episode. It was linked, of course, not to the theatrical experience but to home viewing, on the streaming platforms that have come to overtake the moviegoing experience, just as Amazon overtook physical stores. On the one hand, this has been good for filmmakers, myself included. On the other hand, it has created a situation in which everything is presented to the viewer on a level playing field, which sounds democratic but isn’t. If further viewing is “suggested” by algorithms based on what you’ve already seen, and the suggestions are based only on subject matter or genre, then what does that do to the art of cinema?

Curating isn’t undemocratic or “elitist,” a term that is now used so often that it’s become meaningless. It’s an act of generosity—you’re sharing what you love and what has inspired you. (The best streaming platforms, such as the Criterion Channel and MUBI and traditional outlets such as TCM, are based on curating—they’re actually curated.) Algorithms, by definition, are based on calculations that treat the viewer as a consumer and nothing else.

Form and Content again. Paul Schrader now has a tag.

There's a lot to argue in Scorsese's piece. Fellini was a touchstone for me for a few years as an ex-teenager, but that's it. It's not the point here. 

Algorithms for news and entertainment are both threats to democracy. The personalization of everything is the privatization of everything. It's the end of public life and "public reason". Everything becomes utilitarian with the market as the only prior, the utopia of corporate geeks. Technocratic liberals don't get the point. They don't know what they're defending.

Perfect timing: Facebook blocks news in Australia over government's payment rules.

The announcement immediately becomes the most significant and severe split between Facebook and a foreign government over growing calls for big tech to pay publishers.

The piece as written is wrong. The ban applies everywhere. It's not limited to Australian users of FB. 

It'll be interesting to find out what Klonick and Hasen and other opponents of free, and "cheap" speech have to say.

NYT 

She was 17 at the time, and had just finished her senior year at Phillips Academy Andover, a boarding school sometimes rated America’s best. She’s the kind of teenager who is excited to talk to a New York Times correspondent about public health, and perhaps to put the adventure on a résumé. She had even done the optional reading Mr. McNeil suggested, Jared Diamond’s 1997 book, “Guns, Germs, and Steel,” a Pulitzer-winning history that argues that environmental and geographic factors produced the global domination of European civilization. The book has drawn criticism for a deterministic view that seems to absolve colonial powers of responsibility for their choices.

Ms. Shepherd said she noticed that Mr. McNeil was walking alone as they left their hostel on the first morning of the trip, so she caught up with him. She asked him, she recalled, about the criticism of the book.

“He got very defensive very quickly about it,” she recalled. “It’s just a book, it’s just making this point, it’s very simple, it’s not racist.”

She said she backed down, apologized and “felt terribly guilty — like I must have come off as a crazy liberal.”

At lunch that day, she said she sat down the table from Mr. McNeil at a cafe overlooking the town’s narrow streets, where he was talking to another student when he uttered the N-word, and used the word in the context of a discussion of racism. Some of the teenagers responded almost reflexively, she said, to object to his use of the word in any context....

But Ms. Shepherd hadn’t really connected with the others on the trip either, so she kept seeking him out. A few nights later, after a hike up Machu Picchu, she sat with Mr. McNeil at dinner at El Albergue, one of several rather nice restaurants in the town of Ollantaytambo in the Andes.

On the walk over, she said, she talked about her favorite class at Andover, a history of American education that covered racial discrimination. He responded, she recalled, that “it’s frustrating, because Black Americans keep blaming the system, but racism is over, there’s nothing against them anymore — they can get out of the ghetto if they want to.”

Ms. Shepherd said she tried to argue, but he talked over her whenever she interjected, their voices getting louder and attracting the attention of other students, two of whom confirmed her account of the conversation....

His impolitic views were also hardly a secret. When he published a book on the Zika virus in 2016, a puzzled reviewer in The Quarterly Review of Biology noted passages about feminists and gay sex, and wrote that “it is McNeil’s seniority and journalistic experience that makes the occasional misstep, or indelicate deviation from the science, all the more surprising.”

The Quarterly Review of Biology

It is McNeil’s seniority and journalistic experience that makes the occasional misstep, or indelicate deviation from the science, all the more surprising: comparing microcephalic babies to Cabbage Patch Kids or Trollz dolls; arguing that “reproductive rights groups . . . exaggerated women’s helplessness” (p. 143) and suggested “all men were monsters” (p. 140), and verifying his view by consulting a panel of all-male scientists; commenting on his attraction to women he met during a Zika class in Puerto Rico; or maybe most of all, the strangely off-hand remark, “I don’t know why health agencies were reluctant to admit that gay sex could transmit the [Zika] virus” (p. 98), a comment that seems naïve to the history of HIV in the United States, a topic McNeil touches on more than once in the book. 

She's young, rich, naive, and curious; he's racist, sexist, and an asshole.  

“He wasn’t respectful during some of the traditional ceremonies we attended with indigenous healers/shamans,” yet another wrote. 

There's no reason not to believe that.

“our community is outraged and in pain.” Children using the language of adults, and adults using the language of children. 

The Times will have to navigate its identity in tandem with the next generation of its audience — people like Ms. Shepherd, who said that she was most surprised by the gap between Mr. McNeil’s views and what she’d read in her favorite news outlet.

“That’s not what I would have expected from The Times,” she said. “You have the 1619 Project. You guys do all this amazing reporting on this, and you can say something like that?”

The 1619 project was crap and it's been rewritten; the Palestinians are the new "negro problem"; the rich white kids are better than the old school bigot; the union did its job. 

And when a furious Dean Baquet, the executive editor, read the complaints about the Peru trip in 2019, he said he initially wanted to fire Mr. McNeil. But the union played its traditional role, fighting aggressively to protect him. The union, a person involved in the conversations said, was ready to take The Times to arbitration if the company attempted to terminate Mr. McNeil for his conduct on the trip. Mr. McNeil received a formal reprimand instead. 

Buppies, Determinism, Drift, Feminism and Post-Feminism, Israel/Palestine, Make it Idiot-Proof, Naturalism, Politics, Race, Sexuality, The Press

NYT: Slate Star Codex was a window into the psyche of many tech leaders building our collective future. 

Kate Klonick in the New Yorker, "Inside the Making of Facebook’s Supreme Court"

They're the same story.

Klonick previously, and Alexander.  Arendt's discussion of philosophers' love of death.

Futurism is always fascism.

Things I hadn't read. Two from 2013. No surprises 

TechCrunch: Geeks for Monarchy.

Salon: Silicon Valley Dreams of Succession.

Aaron Swartz, Fascism, Futurism and Data Culture, Law, Liberals Make Nihilism Attractive, Make it Idiot-Proof, Philosophy, Politics, Transhumanism and Transgender, Utopia and Intentional Communities

---

Alexander/Siskind's racism. And scroll here. Searching for a quote, this was always there for people to find.

Even though I like both basic income guarantees and eugenics, I don’t think these are two things that go well together – making the income conditional upon sterilization is a little too close to coercion for my purposes. Still, probably better than what we have right now.

Like Tyler Cowen's fantasies, hidden in plain sight, or just acceptable until now. 

Lone Wolf and Cub: Baby Cart at the River Styx, Kenji Misumi, 1972

Cinematographer, Chikashi Makiura. I've seen three of the series. 

The great Japanese films connect to the Japanese history of printmaking, which was always storytelling,  and so do these, but cheaper, and faster. It's not copying manga or comic books; it's the parallel.  I've never seen anything like it, but it made me think of Daido Moriyama and Willaim Klein.  

Leone is pretentious, the grandeur of Italian opera, puffed up bourgeoise melodrama. Kurosawa became arty. These feel closer to their origins on newsprint so more honest, like film noir, if cheap Hollywood producers allowed screenplays with characters spouting epigrams from Euripides, about necessity, or even from the Bible. The equipment is cheaper, the eye is better, the emotions sometimes surprisingly subtle. And they're still simply fun.  Leone's imagination is second-hand by comparison. They're all on Criterion, and YouTube. And there are other ways.

It's been years since I've seen Night of the Hunter. Something classical but not put on. 

Ozu, Late Spring, 1949. The transitions are famous and talked about enough, but watching them, it's still striking.

Found another one

He won the game, and a trip to Russia.

The loser was the "Paleo-libertarian" representative of the Dutch Ministry of Finance in the U.S.

I had some exchanges with Duss on Twitter years ago. He's an earnest Zionist. Malley's not good enough. But progress is progress. 

Everything good about this country is good about every other democracy. Everything great is tied to what others hate and fear. Taibbi writes about Americans for Americans.  So does Konczal. Farrell says "This could be seen as a reflection of the American parochialism that Konczal mentions in passing, but it is, I think, a deliberate political move."  Cooper says Taibbi "used to be really good", linking to Delong. But Taibbi is still covering YouTube's censorship. Still the closest word for it. [They reversed course]

Everything good that's been happening recently in American politics is the drift of mediocrity towards something more humane. I said the same thing 20 years ago. But I still can't have a good conversation with an American.

The machine as symbolizing its action: the action of a machine—I might say at first—seems to be there in it from the start. What does that mean?—If we know the machine, everything else, that is its movement, seems to be already completely determined.

We talk as if these parts could only move in this way, as if they could not do anything else. How is this—do we forget the possibility of their bending, breaking off, melting, and so on? Yes; in many cases we don't think of that at all. We use a machine, or the drawing of a machine, to symbolize a particular action of the machine. For instance, we give someone such a drawing and assume that he will derive the movement of the parts from it. (Just as we can give someone a number by telling him that it is the twenty-fifth in the series i, 4, 9, 16, . . . .)

"The machine's action seems to be in it from the start" means: we are inclined to compare the future movements of the machine in their definiteness to objects which are already lying in a drawer and which we then take out.——But we do not say this kind of thing when we are concerned with predicting the actual behaviour of a machine. Then we do not in general forget the possibility of a distortion of the parts and so on.——We do talk like that, however, when we are wondering at the way we can use a machine to symbolize a given way of moving—since it can also move in quite different ways.

We might say that a machine, or the picture of it, is the first of a series of pictures which we have learnt to derive from this one.

But when we reflect that the machine could also have moved differently it may look as if the way it moves must be contained in the machine-as-symbol far more determinately than in the actual machine. As if it were not enough for the movements in question to be empirically determined in advance, but they had to be really—in a mysterious sense—already present. And it is quite true: the movement of the machine-as-symbol is predetermined in a different sense from that in which the movement of any given actual machine is predetermined. 

The officer realized that he was in danger of having his exposition of the apparatus held up for a long time; so he went up to the explorer, took him by the arm, waved a hand toward the condemned man, who was standing very straight now that he had so obviously become the center of attention -- the soldier had also given the chain a jerk -- and said: "This is how the matter stands. I have been appointed judge in this penal colony. Despite my youth. For I was the former Commandant's assistant in all penal matters and know more about the apparatus than anyone. My guiding principle is this: Guilt is never to be doubted. Other courts cannot follow that principle, for they consist of several opinions and have higher courts to scrutinize them. That is not the case here, or at least, it was not the case in the former Commandant's time. The new man has certainly shown some inclination to interfere with my judgments, but so far I have succeeded in fending him off and will go on succeeding. You wanted to have the case explained; it is quite simple, like all of them. A captain reported to me this morning that this man, who had been assigned to him as a servant and sleeps before his door, had been asleep on duty. It is his duty, you see, to get up every time the hour strikes and salute the captain's door. Not an exacting duty, and very necessary, since he has to be a sentry as well as a servant, and must be alert in both functions. Last night the captain wanted to see if the man was doing his duty. He opened the door as the clock struck two and there was his man curled up asleep. He took his riding whip and lashed him across the face. Instead of getting up and begging pardon, the man caught hold of his master's legs, shook him, and cried: 'Throw that whip away or I'll eat you alive.' -- That's the evidence. The captain came to me an hour ago, I wrote down his statement and appended the sentence to it. Then I had the man put in chains. That was all quite simple. If I had first called the man before me and interrogated him, things would have got into a confused tangle. He would have told lies, and had I exposed these lies he would have backed them up with more lies, and so on and so forth. As it is, I've got him and I won't let him go. -- Is that quite clear now? But we're wasting time, the execution should be beginning and I haven't finished explaining the apparatus yet." He pressed the explorer back into his chair, went up again to the apparatus, and began: "As you see, the shape of the Harrow corresponds to the human form; here is the harrow for the torso, here are the harrows for the legs. For the head there is only this one small spike. Is that quite clear?" He bent amiably forward toward the explorer, eager to provide the most comprehensive explanations.

It feels a little cheap. I always thought it was obvious in a general sense, but reading the first tonight I saw a chance to go cute. If you don't get the joke, copy and google the two texts.