Just in case you thought I was joking,




The expression on the face of the Viking before he starts to sing is hilarious.
[From the series of ads for Snickers, "Feast". The song is Greensleeves. Files come and go; you can find it.]

This ties into earlier comments, and responses to McCracken, among others,
here, and here.

As I said in the earlier posts: instead of the piggybacking on half or one hour television shows, the product pitch is now piggybacking on 20 second narratives. Advertising now deals in McGuffins. That's new. And the implications are the opposite of what MIT and Grant McCracken would say they are. Instrumentalism is undermined, made obvious and also mocked, even in those forms developed to serve its purpose.
While discussed by its intellectual defenders in terms of objective reason and science, in the eyes of the world Capitalism has simply -finally- replaced the Church: it's omnipresent but subject to mockery.
It's progress. And I'm not joking about that either.

Atrios

Middle Class
It's true that given Manhattan's extremely high housing and other costs, "middle class" people are going to make a bit more money than they do in other places. But it's kind of weird how the WaPo quickly slips between "middle class" to "affluent" in describing this group of people.

Once upon a time, Manhattan was an island of adult thrills and vices. In the national imagination, it was a place of artists, musicians, socialites, Wall Street bankers -- or of hustlers, runaways, addicts, murderers. But it was not on the radar of the typical white, middle-class couple as a place to raise children.

Now demographers say Manhattan is increasingly a borough of babies, and more and more of them are white and well-off.
---
Indeed, according to Andrew A. Beveridge, a demographer at Queens College, the median household income for this group of children was $280,000 in 2005.

In a reversal of a decades-long trend of flight to the suburbs, affluent couples are deciding to stay, at a time when crime is low, some schools have improved and urban life has a new allure, said Kenneth T. Jackson, a professor of urban history at Columbia University.

Ultimately, though, the article isn't so much about class as it is about race. It's about white people. Which makes it quite a bit weirder.

It's about race and class and culture, and the wealthier siblings of Duncan Black.
More of the same:

Fast Company
The Convergence Culture Consortium
This Blog Sits at the Intersection of Anthropology and Economics

Grant McCracken makes DeLong seem like Tiresias

Intellectual complexity is the complexity of relations among various perspectives. Intellectual complexity to those who see marketing as a philosophically rewarding activity is the complexity of myopia and narcissism: the collapsing of the interplay of formal and emotional relations in language and communication into the "reciprocity" of a moving fan.
All curiosity is curiosity regarding "X." How to perform the necessary actions more quickly and cleanly? The definition of thinking only and always inside the box. Manic functionalism and unquestioned values.
We don't look at Giotto because of how well he branded the Catholic Church but because of how well he described it and his world: well enough that we who have little relation to either still imagine we have some understanding of both. We're more interested in Giotto than in the men who told him what to paint.

In LA, the Madison Avenue intellectuals are laughed at by the men and women who bring their dreams to life. What McCracken and the others listed above don't realize is that it's the theater that will be remembered long after they're forgotten.

As Atrios would say: please, make it stop!

I had in mind experts of many different types, not all specialists in a particular field. Following Plato, I envisage people trained in all subjects relevant to politics--history, geography, philosophy, psychology, etc. These would be the "philosopher kings" (though not our narrow sense of "philosophy"). They could have advisors in a specific field, if necessary, but they would be broadly educated. These experts would work with some democraticlly elected leaders to make policy--but not merely in an advisory capacity.

Can there be such a thing as the rump avant-garde?

The scientific work of our countrymen has probably evoked less scepticism on the part of foreign judges than their achievements in other departments of cultural activity. There is one obvious reason for this difference. When our letters, our art, our music are criticized with disdainfully faint commendation, it is because they have failed to attain the higher reaches of creative effort. Supreme accomplishment in art certainly presupposes a graduated series of lesser strivings, yet from what might be called the consumer's angle, mediocrity is worthless and incapable of giving inspiration to genius. But in science it is otherwise. Here every bit of sound work… counts.

From Civilization in the United States: An Inquiry by Thirty Americans

George Santayana responds in his review, published as Marginal Notes on Civilization

It counts in art also, when art is alive. In a thoroughly humanized society everything -clothes speech manners, government- is a work of art, being so done as to be a pleasure and a stimulus in itself. There seems to be an impression in America that art is fed on the history of art, and is what is found in museums. But museums are mausoleums, only dead art is there, and only ghosts of artists flit about them. The priggish notion that an artist is a person undertaking to produce immortal works suffices to show that art has become a foreign thing, an hors-d'oeuvre and that it is probably doomed to affectation and sterility.

Among other things the above counts as my review of the Biennial

More note taking from Colin McGinn's blog.

I've argued for years that the politics of academic rationalism is implicitly reactionary, but I'm still surprised how far this has come. I'm a bit shocked that the sort of discussion above is left without comment [other than by a semi-retired carpenter] and that those arguing for an intellectual authoritarianism are so unaware of the history of such ideas, and of their history of failure.
If all the issues left are "technical" then of course the technicians should rule, but the important issues in society are never technical.

"As has already been said, politicians need to actually listen to experts."
They did. But they listened to rationalists. Read Rumsfeld's CV.

Who represents modernity in Turkey at the moment, the secularist military or the Islamists?
It's an easy question to answer if you're willing to go where the data takes you. But data has a tendency to undermine formal rigor and in philosophy, and economics, and these days even in war, formal rigor takes precedence. I guess it's just a matter of esthetics.

The level of thought on that site is just embarrassing. I'm repeating myself, but why not? Idiots.
---
A rotating electric fan is the objective correlative of precisely what!?

When Israel was established in 1948, most of the indigenous Palestinian inhabitants were driven out or fled from the area that became Israel. Approximately 150,000 Palestinians remained behind. Until 1966, these Palestinians lived under martial law. Today, having increased in number to approximately 1.3 million or about one fifth of Israel's population (not including the Palestinian population of Occupied East Jerusalem), they are citizens of the State of Israel and can vote in elections for the Knesset. Despite this, most view themselves as second-class citizens. As indigenous non-Jews in a self-described Jewish state, they face a host of systematic social, legal, economic and educational barriers to equality. Israel lacks a constitution and has no other basic law guaranteeing equal rights to all citizens regardless of religion, race, ethnicity or national origin.
more

Those who’re always seeking a Palestinian Mandela ought to take notice of the latest survey results of Palestinian public opinion, that show the only candidate capable of beating Hamas in a free and fair election is the imprisoned Fatah leader Marwan Barghouti. The problem, of course, is that Barghouti — far more popular in Fatah than is Abbas — is an Israeli prison. And more importantly, he has no intention of playing the Palestinian Petain role that has been created for Abbas.

The paragraph appears on the front page at Tony Karon's Rootless Cosmopolitan (scroll down) but not in the text of the post that follows.

I wrote this elsewhere so I may as well do it here:

Maliki=Abbas

Badger

Angry Arab versus Gen. Richard Myers. Part I. Part II. On Al Jazeera

Sinan Antoon on Charlie Rose.

"I myself see a close link between democracy as a dogma and the idea that everyone's opinion is as good as anyone else's: that is, between equality in respect of voting power and forms of relativism about truth. For if people's opinions do not have equal value, how can we justify giving their votes equal power? "
---
Which is to say that bullshit and democracy are natural partners, born of the need to have an opinion when not in possession of the necessary knowledge.

I don't have it in me at the moment...

Two from the archives 2 years ago on a job site. Memories.

1
"It's Adolf Hitler and his faithful West Indian companion!"

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

2

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

Every god damn day is like this.

I still have nightmares about the Jamaican killer (ex "Seaga Boy" from Tivoli Gardens) trying to say "tuchus."
"Tukush!"

Laura Rozen links to this

A new poll shows that an overwhelming majority of Palestinians support the attack this month on a Jewish seminary in Jerusalem that killed eight young men, most of them teenagers, an indication of the alarming level of Israeli-Palestinian tension in recent weeks.
The survey also shows unprecedented support for the shooting of rockets on Israeli towns from the Gaza Strip and for the end of the peace negotiations between Palestinian and Israeli leaders.
The pollster, Khalil Shikaki, said he was shocked because the survey showed greater support for violence than any other he had conducted over the past 15 years in the Palestinian areas. Never before, he said, had a majority favored an end to negotiations or the shooting of rockets at Israel.

As'ad AbuKhalil links to this

Israel's Jewish community increasingly supports the delegitimization, discrimination and even deportation of Arabs, found a report on racism in Israel, set to be released Wednesday.

The report, to be presented at a press conference in Nazareth by Mossawa, the Advocacy Center for Arab Citizens of Israel, states that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has clearly impacted public opinion, and warns that ideas such as population exchange and racial segregation are gaining ground. It also warns that several Jewish politicians are gaining influence based on a platform of racial hatred.

I suppose all things being equal I should hold both AbuKhalil and Rozen accountable for bias, but Rozen denies being an advocate while AbuKhalil even arguing from a position is more honest. Rozen shies away from details about Gaza and her soft line on Hamas comes only after the attempted coup. Also the recent attack was not on any seminary but on the religious and intellectual center of the settler movement. The settlers are simply fascists.
---
And of course Rozen links to the NY Times, while AbuKhalil links to Haaretz.

What does integrity mean?

It means the willingness to admit to an opinion, and an opinion is a bias. Readers will trust you more if they know you're telling them what you think, not what you think they should know. The article discusses a piece by Walter Pincus. You can read it here.

Again and again:
Objectivity being impossible but engagement a requirement, it's simplest to say that the job of the press is to dig for everything. It should be less their job to discriminate as to what they're digging for than to specialize as to who is digging for what: a political hack has neither the time nor the connections to cover movie stars. But If the press had shown as little respect for George W. Bush as it has for Britney Spears we'd all be better off. It should never be a question of demanding seriousness when the institutional rules for what defines seriousness always lag behind the reality. That's how culture works. You could say it's a matter of economics, that there's money in gossip and the press should choose money over high principle (and that's true), but it's more complex than that. Vulgar economism says the adversarialism of the market is foundational, but won't accept that society demands the market itself have an adversary, a counter-force to the economic telos.
There can be no single telos in democratic society, but greed is an astringent. It serves a purpose other than the one it defends. That's the most important detail.

Notetaking from Colin McGinn's blog again (see March 13th):

American "experts" are little better on the issues in the middle east than the amateurs, but the experts think they have reason on their side, and are unwilling to admit that their logic and their pathologies go hand in hand. On the subject of Zionism Steven Weinberg, an atheist (but self-confessed Platonist[?]) is irrational, and a Christian (a Quaker) among others is not.

Arguing that an "unprejudiced and altruistic" demos is central to democracy is absurd: an argument not from the history of the world but from the history of a dream.
The failure of this country is a failure to respect the formalisms of representative democracy and law. The legislature does not stand in defense of its prerogatives, and the press does not do the same for its own. The people cower before experts whose expertise is not questioned. Arguments from authority are everywhere, stated as arguments from reason. Do you understand the moral pessimism that lies at the foundation of the rule of law and of divided government? Do you know how far the legislature now lags behind the desires of the people... to get out of Iraq? to fund a national health service? The list goes on.
You criticize a form of order you do not understand and want to undermine it by the application of one you do. Your "logic" is founded in ignorance.

Colin McGinn: "Seth, I've warned you repeatedly about ad hominem remarks. I must now ask to desist from contributing to this blog (see Blog Guidelines)."

McGinn on Honderich

This book runs the full gamut from the mediocre to the ludicrous to the merely bad. It is painful to read, poorly thought out, and uninformed.
...Is there anything of merit in On Consciousness? Honderich does occasionally show glimmers of understanding that the problem of consciousness is difficult and that most of our ideas about it fall short of the mark. His instincts, at least, are not always wrong. It is a pity that his own efforts here are so shoddy, inept, and disastrous (to use a term he is fond of applying to the views of others).

In my first comment I asked McGinn if he was stupid. The post was offensive, but that insult was unnecessary.

What better way to describe it?

The plan hatched by Condi Rice and Elliott Abrams to train up a Palestinian 'Contras'-style force under the auspices of Mahmoud Abbas (Abu Mazen) has fallen into a significant degree of chaos.

Girolamo Francesco Maria Mazzola, known as Parmigianino (1503 – 1540),
Antea, c. 1531–34, oil on canvas, Museo di Capodimonte, Naples
At the Frick


An unsure amalgam of observation and idealization. The accompanying text says that the viewer in receiving her gaze stands in for her lover, but that's mistaken. Her gaze and posture are defensive: her lover is someone else.

Musical performance from a score is not rule following, at least unless the performer wants to get booed off the stage. But the performer is not free to interpret the score any way he pleases or he risks the same fate. The same is true with law in a republic.

Contra Posner, a judge is an interpreter and explicator of law, to a public audience. And he is also a member of that public, just as a performer and interpreter of music is a member of the community: of musicians, aficionados, critics and passersby. Any individual is an example -characteristic of his kind and of his age- in most ways, even men as arrogant as Posner or Colin McGinn. To claim the authority to command law from outside the community is to be a threat to that community. To lead you have to cajole and not coerce, this is one of the principles of our form of government. And even coercion when it is permitted is mandated by the community and not an individual. But understanding that one is a product of a community, of a culture, a place, and time, means understanding how one's thought and ideas are not entirely one's own. To have ideas requires no second-order awareness. To watch yourself as you inhabit and live through them is its definition.
Awareness is the struggle against the inertia of assumption. Determinism is the baseline, not freedom. Pessimism, as a value, is the foundation for the rule of law.


This goes back a few years
and then here

More from Colin McGinn

Successful democracy depends upon an adequately educated electorate, unprejudiced and altruistic: but these conditions are not always satisfied by the voters out there. In fact, there is no requirement in the US political system for a president to have even a minimum of education, or even to be able to read and write. Maybe if recognized experts, unelected, were given some political power, the current ills might be mitigated.

amazing.

note taking:
"unprejudiced and altruistic"
I would add that on any university campus in the US, there's a department operating under rationalist principles nearly identical to yours, engaged in the same arch mimicry of science, as if mimicry conferred authority [consult Nietzsche about that one, or maybe Shakespeare]. That department is called the economics department. But where you begin with assumptions of altruism they begin with assumptions of self-interest. Maybe you should walk on over and have a chat. You can't both be right.

This country has always been run by experts. As far as domestic policy goes the last 8 years have been a disastrous exception to the rule (and the rule was never much to begin with). As for foreign policy, it's been run by experts all along, even under Bush. But the neocons are fanatical rationalists: they never let data get in the way of their dream of reason.
Rationalism began as theology, and divorced from empiricism that's where it stays. You're not helping much.