I'll be here for a while beginning in September.

4 or 5 birds with one stone

Here’s another interesting tangent. What’s the relation of the armed forces to the civilian leadership? If the soldiers are technicians, the suits are the philosophers. And what happens when things get confused?

Philosophy like politics is comparative. “Expertise” is problematic, if not in fact dangerous. Brian Leiter is friend and defender of Richard Posner and both defend experts over amateurs and generalists. Both defend “technical” knowledge and expertise as wisdom. But I would not ask a philosopher of automobile mechanics for his objective opinions on public transportation policy. He wouldn't have one. So, responding to Neil, if philosophy has become atomized is it not therefore weakened? Posner can’t think of man outside the categories he's created. Tomasky [and, man, is he not alone in this!] can’t think of politics outside of the categories he's grown up with, which are those of American exceptionalism and American intellectuals' capacity for “reason.”
What Tomasky describes is the experts’ failure to communicate with and their contempt for the masses. That's what Posner and Leiter describe. That’s what the experts of the military say when they overthrow their civilian leadership: “Let the experts take control!”

Experts are the new reactionaries. And amateurs are the only ones left observant enough to notice.
Stewart and Colbert are amateurs too.

LOS ANGELES, May 7 — ABC announced on Monday that it would broadcast three more seasons of its hit castaway mystery, “Lost,” ending the show in 2010 after a run of six seasons.

The announcement has been expected since January, when the creators of the show told a group of television writers that they wanted the network to set a definitive end date for the series.

Such a date was necessary, they said, so that they could begin planning how to unravel the multiple mysteries that beset the fictional survivors of Oceanic Air Flight 815, which crashed on an uncharted island en route from Sydney, Australia, to Los Angeles in September 2004.

But the move by ABC is nevertheless unusual because networks usually try to milk profits from their successful series as long as possible, a strategy that often results in convoluted story lines, shake-ups among production staff and dwindling fan bases.

That is exactly the situation that Damon Lindelof and Carlton Cuse, two of the show’s executive producers, said early this year that they wanted to avoid. When they announced their desire to set a specific end date to the series at a January meeting of the Television Critics Association in Pasadena, Calif., they surprised even the ABC executives who were attending.

“We have always envisioned ‘Lost’ as a show with a beginning, middle and end,” Mr. Lindelof and Mr. Cuse said in a statement, which was re leased over the weekend to The Hollywood Reporter and to the rest of the news media on Monday. “By officially announcing exactly when that ending will be, the audience will now have the security of knowing that the story will play out as we’ve intended.”

From comments on another site. I'm proud of this one.

"He's like the minister who is loyal to the despotic ruler through thick and thin, while decrying as a decent liberal must, not despotism but its necessity!"

nothing new:

“Painter” is a descriptive term, like “writer” or “filmmaker.” I’ve always been envious of filmmakers since they don’t get called “artists” until people decide they are good enough to warrant the term. All painters get called artists these days and that’s done no one any good. My father was an “english teacher.” He published a few things, one or two well known, but he did not refer to himself as a “literary critic.” He never had “a project” or let anything other than his students take priority. He was not a genius and did not pretend to have an original mind though it could be argued that in some ways he had one. An unimaginative chemist may do research that has value, a “philosopher” with a mediocre mind should stick to teaching philosophy. But the logic of hypertrophied individualism and the need to compete with the hard sciences has created a culture of literary conceptualism and pseudoscience that in the form of “tenured radicals” gives cafe revolutionaries like me a bad name. “Yummies” Young Upwardly Mobile Marxists as an old family friend named them. I doesn’t matter if it’s literary theory, chicago school economics or linguistic analysis, it’s the same fucking thing: rationalist conceptualism, of by and for the academy and meaningless outside it.

The humanities are a function of the social. They are linked to the world through the study of the history of perception. We are made by language and by culture and are not independent of it. It used to be that there was a reciprocal relation between those who followed their sensibilities and those who came by afterwards to find out what honesty had made that intellect could not. That reciprocal relation still exists, but not in the academy (and not nearly enough in the ghetto of the art world) In the world at large all is if not well still much much better. By and large it’s still assumed by people who are bright enough to think about such things that Eastwood is better than George Lucas -and these days better than Scorsese- Pynchon is better than Tolkien and that Ayn Rand simply sucks. In the academy however all bets are off. Libertarianism is little more than a cult in the outside world, but has a place of importance in academic culture. And rationalism (about everything) reigns. Rationalism predicated on what now? On what? ON WHAT?
These days every idiot with a PhD wants to be an intellectual.
Talk amongst yourselves.
---

What does it mean that “nerds” now run humanities departments?
What and why is a literature geek? And how and why did people, so unwilling or unable to situate themselves socially or historically as products of linguistic and cultural community take over departments dedicated to the study of language, culture and community?
Nerds separate intelligence from perception, from the body. Nerds fear history and context. The hate instability. It makes them nervous. Posner is a nerd.
Everything I’ve read here over the last few years; the language the tone, the arguments, are specific to the culture and times that produced them.

“Professor Franco Moretti argues heretically that literature scholars should stop reading books and start counting, graphing, and mapping them instead. He insists that such a move could bring new luster to a tired field, one that in some respects is among “the most backwards disciplines in the academy.”

What’s the difference between and expert and a connoisseur? A connoisseur pays attention to his tastes, his surroundings his responses to them and those of others An expert doesn’t think he has tastes and thinks his surroundings don’t matter. He thinks he’s interested in the outside world. Americans are experts. They neither know nor care how others perceive them. You follow me now?
I’ve spent the last few years arguing with experts trying to explain that expertise is not enough. I’ve failed.

Cubans in Miami, Jews in New York

"Moral seriousness is not moral responsibility. Manners are not actions."

As'ad AbuKhalil

"In Arab (Saudi-funded) media, they never stop referring to the "wisdom" of the Saudi king. Wisdom? I would settle for his ability to read one sentence in Arabic, I swear. Spare me the wisdom. And does he still keep the Hitler dagger (given to his father by Hitler) in his private desk (a former US ambassador to Saudi Arabia told me that, and told me that he smokes in private--contrary to Wahhabi rules and regulation). Don't you like Wahhabi rules and regulations, especially whey they are enforced on everybody in the kingdom except the House of Saud?"

So fucking glib.
Josh Marshall:

"Regarding when the bombs might start falling in Iran, a few different pieces of evidence point to a time frame in early March. More on this later this evening."

As if this is were simply a matter of American politics.

Tony Judt:

If... the United States of America is to resume its lost leadership of the world community... then it will need to begin by recognizing, in Eisenhower's words, that "with all the defects, with all the failures that we can chalk up against it, the UN still represents man's best organized hope to substitute to conference table for the battlefield." In Europe this realization only took root after Europeans had spent 30 years torturing and killing tens of millions of other Europeans; so long as they were merely killing colonial "natives," attitudes changed little.

Here in the US, at the time of writing, the death of more than three thousand American soldiers in Iraq has registered with the public; but the killing of hundreds of thousands of Iraqis hardly at all.

Political ground starting to shift in Iraq ?:

Al-Hayat calls attention to the formation of groups originating within the Iraqi Accord Front (Sunni) and the UIA (Shiite) respectively, by parliamentary representatives who in both bases say or imply that they are unhappy with the prevailing sectarian polarization. The reporter introduces the story this way:

In an important sign of the beginning of the dismanteling of the political blocs that formed as a result of the American occupation, several deputies have started to break with traditional alliances, in favor of forming small groups, within the main blocs that have a sectarian model.

more

Josh Marshall: "Complimenting Anthony Shadid's work is almost redundant. But he's got a wonderful piece about a not very wonderful subject in tomorrow's Post: the growing Iranian ascendence in the Middle East."

That Wonderful piece includes gems like these:

" 'The United States is the first to be blamed for the rise of Iranian influence in the Middle East,' said Khaled al-Dakhil, a Saudi writer and academic."

"Added Eyal Zisser, head of the Middle Eastern and African Studies Department at Tel Aviv University in Israel: 'After the whole investment in democracy in the region, the West is losing, and Iran is winning.' "

"In an attempt to contest Iran's influence, the United States has sought to form an axis among Sunni Arab states it considers moderate: Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia and smaller countries in the Gulf. "

So the US has invested in democracy in the region by supporting Israel, the Egyptian dictatorship and Saudi monarchy.

New York Times

WASHINGTON, Jan. 29 — European governments are resisting Bush administration demands that they curtail support for exports to Iran and that they block transactions and freeze assets of some Iranian companies, officials on both sides say. The resistance threatens to open a new rift between Europe and the United States over Iran.

Regarding Iran -as regarding the Chinese "threat"- I'm with Europe and the rest of the world. Josh Marshall the American 'internationalist" is with America, Israel and a few of the most reactionary anti-democratic governments on the face of the planet.

Max Sawicky, amici e famiglia, on Milton Friedman.

Ideas are never subtle.

Arab Links
last paragraph:

In other words, what the opposition paper Al-Akhbar is saying is that the proponents of violence and fitna are the gangs that constitute the governing coalition, and they have motives both local (recovery by Jumblatt and Geagea of complete control over the Druze and Christian areas respectively) and non-local (since they can't put down Hizbullan on their own, they need to get the region and the US involved by turning this into a Sunni-Shiia conflict).

read the whole thing

The height of hypocrisy.
follow the links

There's a bit of an annoying focus on process here: if Webb is right about Iraq, who the hell cares if he gave his address in scuba flippers, a fruit hat, and a Dennis Kucinich mask? Right is right, especially in matters of life and death, right?"

Wrong.

Non-Arab Arab on US support for reactionary governments in the middle east and the logic of the impending US attack on Iran: On Anti-Shi'a Prejudices

And more on our friends in Pakistan

Dennis of Arabia

Note taking: a comment (mine) at Maxspeak (rough)

Social democracy is generated by community not by individuals and certainly not by a teleology of "progress." Delong defends forward motion as its own reward and then pretends to be a man of the world.
In the history of the planet there's been a division always between self-interest, the search for filthy lucre, and the life of the mind. This country has redefined the latter as the philosophy of the former. That's a perversion of the intellect.
Delong believes in scientific progress as moral progress. He thinks there's no difference between a bakery run by one family for 3 generations in a small town in italy and the yuppie "artisanal" bread shop in the mall. In social democracy the family bakery is in the mall. Social democracy isn't about progress it's about stasis and complacency. And it sure as hell isn't about the intellectual avant-garde bringing knowledge to the masses (or atheism mixed with contempt). After all the popular aspect of the 60's political movement was led by ministers. And they weren't white, and with apologies to Amanda at pandagon they didn't drink Martinis. The peasant rebellion was the best most important part of the thing. It went downhill from there.

The strength of what's been happening recently is that the people who claim to be it's leaders are nothing but empty suits. They may pretend to be otherwise but they're not. Kos is a loudmouth and putz. MyDD is liberal pamphleteering by slackers gentrifying a poor neighborhood with a lecture and a smile. The poobahs at TPM Starbucks have their asses handed to them by the readership on a daily basis.

The real change, the change that I take seriously and that I respect is not the "movement" but all the people who follow along and now ask questions: the middle-american housewife with the gay neighbor a taste for ethiopian food, a rudimentary knowledge of spanish, and whose husband just bought her a vibrator as an anniversary present. This average and unintellectual woman, neither brilliant nor dim, is pissed off and with good reason. I like her.

It's not about leaders and progress and forward motion but about hobbies and community and curiosity. But it's also not about communes and kumbaya: the over-determined denial of the individual in service to the ideal. It's not cult-like or monastic. It's not opposed to capitalism but it's in defense of everything else that makes life worthwhile. It's not against economic activity, it's against the definition of all activity as economic in principle. It's about the defense of leisure not made by intellectuals as revolutionary program and pedantic tract, but by average people who've decided that it's nice to take a walk sometimes, in no particular direction, and for no particular reason. That is the "movement" that interests me. And its real.

If you want to take the L train into Williamsburg to yell at slackers go ahead. I did that for 20 years. As long as I've been on the web I've done it. No one listened, here or elsewhere. I was in a bar there recently; the place was done up in a production designer's idea of a dive circa 1940. I overheard opinions on various topics, all based on recollections of experience and little else. Art began with Warhol but politics began in 1975. Movies began with MTV except Star Wars and the Godfather and maybe The Wizard of Oz. It was clear that most of the people there thought of themselves as idiosyncratic in one way or another, and liberal.
Leaving later the friend I was drinking with commented on what he liked about the lounge cafe we go to in our neighborhood. You need to dress up a bit to go there, look nice at least. The girls are pretty or they can make themselves look pretty. The boys are the same. They sit and smoke and drink. various languages come and go. "The people in the neighborhood know what they are" my friend said. In Williamsburg they have no idea. I'm told Zadie Smith riffs on that in a Williamsburg section of a recent novel. The oblivious self-absorption seems to have horrified her. Just look at the Pic of Mat Stoller at Starbucks, it's all in that smile.
In my neighborhood, at whatever age, and from whatever country, the people have seen more politcs and more war than anyone born here. They still come and go. Two languages is universal. many know three or four. People know what money is and they work for it, but money isn't the point. The point is to have time to sit and drink with friends. They're worldly and unpretentious. They can talk about Athens, or Bucharest or Saint Petersburg or Rio or Miami. Two blocks away they can talk about Marrakesh or Alexandria or Beirut. I like all these people, for for the same reason I like that middle American housewife.
Yell at the slackers if you want, but make sure you know why you're yelling. There may be better ways to get things done, and there are certainly better ways to waste your time.
Change is slow, but change is real.

The avant-garde is dead.