One of the most destructive shibboleths of our era has been the claim that a right winger is simply a lefty who had been mugged.
But I am more and more confident that the story for post Baby Boomers will be completely different. Given the policies of the parties that purport to represent left and right at this point in American history, increasingly left wingers are parents who have had children.
A stupendous, possibly canonical, recent example of this is Howard Stern's meditations on his own children, and how this has led him to much greater empathy.
[Full Disclosure: as a three-year employee in a Kmart receiving bay in my late teens and early twenties, I have a pretty good barometer of what Howard Stern used to say; I mean all the receiving rats listened to him through these boom boxes while we desperately moved merchandise back and forth in something like the Cool Hand Luke thing where you move the swamp to one side then back to the other].
The other Baby Boomer shibboleth was that if you are young and not left wing, you have no heart, and if you are older and right wing you have no brain. Again, given what the two parties represent today (both culturally and economically), this is no longer true.
That is, if you don't end up agreeing with Stern after reading THIS ROLLING STONE ARTICLE (One Town's War on Gay Teens) you have neither heart not brain. You can listen to Stern on this article, and an unexpectedly moving defense of Rosie O Donnell (whom he used to make fun of mercilessly) and Ellen Degeneres, after the jump. [If gratuitous use of the f word is too off-putting, please just read the Rolling Stone article and don't follow the jump.]
The reason I include the Stern soliloquy is that it's very existentence is extraordinarily good evidence of an advance in the moral zeitgeist, and this really is something where there are at least glimpses of the sunny side. For example, I feel slightly better about being a human being and more optimistic that other seemingly intractable cases of depraved sadism (cf. ALEC) might actually not be so intractable after all.
At the Supreme Court today there was much discussion of how getting rid of Obamacare might hurt insurance companies, and no discussion about what happens to fifteen million people who will immediately lose their health insurance at the signature of five justices.
What kind of a country do we live in? How do these people, and those who vote for them, even sleep at night? How can these people claim to believe the following:
Then they also will answer, saying, ‘Lord, when did we see you hungry or thirsty or a stranger or naked or sick or in prison, and did not minister to you?’ Then he will answer them, saying, ‘Truly, I say to you, as you did not do it to one of the least of these, you did not do it to me.’
I mean, Matthew 25 is a pretty clear instruction manual about these things. I don't get it.
THIS STORY is pretty depressing (note: it's behind the porous pay wall; if it doesn't come up then just do "Clear Recent History" in Firefox, and you'll get access to ten more articles for free, at which point, repeat).
The story is a first rate piece of reporting, with depressing statistics on employment and indebtedness as well as interviews with the people. Lots of this kind of thing:
After I applied to over 100 jobs in the first month after graduation, including white-collar and blue-collar jobs, the only places to call me back were PetSmart, Wawa and Staples. I decided to work at Wawa, as it was the closest job to my house, though I nearly didn’t get the job because they considered me overqualified. I took out loans from Sallie Mae in order to attend Drew, and now they’re charging me $1,164 a month, which I definitely can’t afford, especially now that I’ve quit my job at Wawa. I called Sallie Mae to try to change my loan payments, and they said there wasn’t much they could do, and if I couldn’t pay them, I would go into default. Because my parents are co-signers, Sallie Mae could put a lien on my parents’ house.
At this point, I would not be at all surprised if we see the return of debtors prisons in the United States in our lifetime. Too many dangerous lines are being crossed without impunity.
The sign at right was part of a protest against what out of state private education companies are getting Jindal to do. The bills would make it impossible for public school teachers to get tenure, allow companies and people to get a tax rebate on "scholarships" to private schools, and set up vouchers which, as happened in Arizona, will be absorbed by raised tuition.
And of course the private schools are completely unnaccountable. Unlike with public schools, they, nor their teachers, are assessed and graded. Likewise they are not accountable to elected officials. I used to find this kind of thing outrageous, but it no longer surprises me. As a parent it's more upsetting though.
Results be damned, Louisiana’s public education system will be radically and most likely permanently changed. The thousands of families, many wealthy, who already send their children to parochial and private schools will relish their new tax credits, while a small number of families will attempt to use their new “scholarships” (vouchers) to claim one of the few available spots in private schools.
Immediately after the legislation passes, profit-seeking corporations and individuals will rush to create new charter schools and private academies to take advantage of the taxpayer funds that will stream like water through a breached levee into the private sector. Not only that, churches and “community organizations” will follow suit in poor neighborhoods, establishing “pop-up” schools and marketing school “choice” to the local population. The motivation of easy profits with with little or no accountability other than “customer satisfaction” will fuel this phenomenon, and parents with little education themselves will be convinced to pull their children out of public schools in favor of these new neighborhood schools established by churches and other seemingly-trustworthy groups. Money will go to slick marketing with little regard given to curriculum or teacher quality.
Thousands then millions of taxpayer dollars will drain from the public coffers leaving the state with even less money to support and improve public schools. As a result, local school boards will struggle to fill holes, retain teachers, and solve problems with less funding. The already weak foundation of the Louisiana public school system will slowly erode away.
In addition, the working conditions for public school teachers will be so miserable, that they will accept far, far less pay in the charter schools, where they are not unionized and have no civil service protection. This is a feature of the legislation, not a bug.
[Update: Newapps thread on this HERE. I said my piece in the comment section and fully expect the Chomskyans to come out in force. So it should be interesting reading. My policy now with respect to that kind of debate is to say my piece and then get out, not bother responding myself to criticisms engendered.]
Anyone who has read Harris' The Linguistics Wars, or Houck's Ideology and Linguistic Theory, or Geoffrey Pullum's work, or debates engendered by computational syntacticians and semanticists completely giving up on approaches stemming from "universal grammar" will find nothing surprising in how the Chomskyans are responding the issue of whether the Piraha language involves recursion.
Three maneuvers you always see, from the Katz-Postal-Fodor hypothesis to defenses of the Khmer Rouge etc. etc. etc. to the the issue of whether generativity equals recursivity to the current issue involving recursivity and universal grammar : (1) Use institutional power to eviscerate the anti-Chomskyan scholar unprofessionally, in this case outrageously accusing the linguist in question of racism so as to get the Brazilian government to no longer grant him access to the Piraha (compare with the shameful treatment of Haj Ross during the generative semantics brouhaha), (2) alter the claim minutely and pretend never to have said what you said in print dozens of times, (3) in the process of such alterations making ones own claims unfalsifiable, and so slippery that empirical content bleeds out. Decade after decade of this third step is why almost nobody (I know of one exception) in computational linguistics uses Chomsky's theories any more.
The article is very good, especially by letting Ray Jackendoff have the last word and showing the relevance of Harris' book.
One potentially confusing thing is that when Pullum and others correctly note that Universal Grammar is dead, they in no way mean to be attacking generative linguistics. The author comes too close to opposing Universal Grammar and corpus based linguistics. But theories like HPSG are generative in the original 1972 sense and not corpus based (though unlike Chomsky, HPSGers are not a priori hostile to corpus based work) but also not transformational in Chomsky's sense.
In this respect, the only thing wrong with the article is that it is not clear that non-trasformational generative frameworks that have no truck with "universal grammar" or bizarre ways that supposed innateness is supposed to constrain syntax, but rather just try to get the distributional data correct, are far more successful at actually formalizing robust fragments of natural language than Chomsky's Minimalism or Government and Binding before that. This in spite of the fact that most academic syntactitians still follow Chomsky on these things.
For example, your grammar checker on MS Word (which, properly understood, represents a huge victory for generative linguistics) does not use Chomskyan syntax. Though it's proprietary, I do know some of the people who went on to work on it, and they all used Head Driven Phrase Structure Grammar and related frameworks such as Categorial Grammar and Lexical Functional Grammar. Minimalist syntax would not be able to succeed here. It's really quite stunning. If you travelled back twenty five years ago and showed linguistis the Microsoft grammar checker you would have been nominated for a Nobel Prize (this is not an exaggeration). But people are so wound up in the weird nativism now that they don't recognize this huge victory.
Anyhow, once we clearly differentiate "Universal Grammar," where nativist doctrines are taken to a priori constrain the mechanisms of the syntax, from proper generative syntax not so driven, the following is I think pretty obvious:
As for Universal Grammar, some are already writing its obituary. Michael Tomasello, co-director of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, has stated flatly that "Universal Grammar is dead." Two linguists, Nicholas Evans and Stephen Levinson, published a paper in 2009 titled "The Myth of Language Universals," arguing that the "claims of Universal Grammar ... are either empirically false, unfalsifiable, or misleading in that they refer to tendencies rather than strict universals." Pullum has a similar take: "There is no Universal Grammar now, not if you take Chomsky seriously about the things he says."
Gibson puts it even more harshly. Just as Chomsky doesn't think corpus linguistics is science, Gibson doesn't think Universal Grammar is worthwhile. "The question is, 'What is it?' How much is built-in and what does it do? There are no details," he says. "It's crazy to say it's dead. It was never alive."
I can't post it here; it's just too much worse than the Royal Shakespeare Company version, `a droite. Also check out Charlotte Courdet's great song at 6:40, mourning all that we once read in Rousseau.
Collins would have pulled it off if Tom Waits had organized the music. For all of Collins' mamoth skills (among other things, she discovered Leonard Cohen) the instrumentation on her cover masks over herky jerky syncopation of the original.
Anyhow, here's lyrics from the libretto, which I just ordered from Amazon.
4 years after the revolution and the old kings execution 4 years after remember how those portia took their final bow
String up every aristocrat Out with the priests and let then live on their fat
Four years after we started fighting Marat keeps up with his writing Four years after the bastille fell He still recalls the old battle yell
Down with all of the ruling class Throw all the generals out on their ass
Why do they have the gold Why do they have the power why why why why why Do they have the friends at the top
Why do they have the jobs at the top
We've got nothing always had nothing Nothing but holes and millions of them Living in holes Dying in holes Holes in our bellies and Holes in our clothes
In THIS POST I discussed reasons why conservative Christians are far more likely to have various forms of long term brain degeneration.
The video at left, with pastor Dennis Terry (from Louisiana's own Greenwell Springs Baptist Church), Tony Perkins (formerly Louisiana Representative, currently president of the hate group "the Family Research Council"), and presidential candidate Rick Santorum beautifully illustrates the dangerous pathology that is conservative Christianity.
I hate that these hypocrites get away with speaking for me as a Christian or as a Southerner. I hate that they claim to speak for Jesus.
Compare what Terry says in this video about praying in public with what Jesus says:
5. And when thou prayest, thou shalt not be as the hypocrites [are]: for they love to pray standing in the synagogues and in the corners of the streets, that they may be seen of men. Verily I say unto you, They have their reward. 6 But thou, when thou prayest, enter into thy closet, and when thou hast shut thy door, pray to thy Father which is in secret; and thy Father which seeth in secret shall reward thee openly. 7 But when ye pray, use not vain repetitions, as the heathen [do]: for they think that they shall be heard for their much speaking.
Compare Terry's "Get out!" with the parable of the good samaritan or Jesus eating with and blessing prostitutes, adulterers, pagan soldiers and tax collectors. I mean, it's simply not possible for a non-brain damaged person to read the synoptic Gospels and claim to believe them while spouting Terry's dangerous nonsense.
As far as Santorum's cafeteria Catholocism, consider THIS LIST of Roman Catholic doctrines (also cf. Bobby Jindal, whose policies on unions directly contradict no less than five papal encyclicals):
5. The bishops want welfare for all needy families, saying “We reiterate our call for a minimum national welfare benefit that will permit children and their parents to live in dignity. A decent society will not balance its budget on the backs of poor children.” Santorum is a critic of welfare.
10. The US Conference of Bishops has denounced, as has the Pope, the Bush idea of ‘preventive war’, and has come out against an attack on Iran in the absence of a real and present threat of an Iranian assault on the US. In contrast, Santorum wants to play Slim Pickens in Dr. Strangelove and ride the rocket down on Isfahan himself.
One bit of good news is that I've noticed that my evangelical students and colleagues are now actually more likely to be left wing on all of the above issues, and others such as the usury that defines our civilization as well as the so-called "right to work" laws which are necessary part of hoovering wealth from the disappearing middle class up to the .01% (these laws unconstitutionally abrogate union's rights to make contracts, a right explicitly defended in the most recent encyclical on labor). So, at least with respect to educated people of good will, it is a mistake to equate either Roman Catholocism or evangelical christianity with hypocrites like Terry, Perkins, Jindal, and Santorum. This is a huge sea change from a decade ago.
But let's be honest. The flip side of this is that most people are neither educated or of good will (we Prebyterians call this "the depravity of man" and it's true), which means there will always be marks for the kind of religiouss hypocrites that Jesus condemned in his own day.
HERE Levi gives voice to the most important existential freakout of our benighted age. Nothing compares in relevance. Key exerpt:
But generally the answer is that I’m literally horrified by the fact that collectively we have knowledge (and I’m not making any bullshit, postmodern qualifications about this) or that an argument is better than another, and the fact that changes nothing. We know yet nothing changes. It drives me nuts. We have the better argument (and no, I’m not saying I always have the better argument, though narcissistically I suffer from the flaw of thinking I do) and it doesn’t persuade. It drives me nuts. I’m horrified by this. My horror first began with how the American public responded following 9-11 (especially in the lead up to the Iraq war). It’s grown worse and worse in the intervening years as I’ve watched growing religious fanaticism (which is mainstream Christianity in the States… Sorry Episcopals, UU’s, and UCC’s, you’re the minority), as I’ve watched mainstream responses to our economic problems, as I watch the way in which environmental issues are shuffled off the table. It drives me crazy.
Me and Neal Hebert's favorite play has something to say about this too:
We few survivors We few survivors walk over a quaking bog of corpses always under our feet every step we take rotted bones ashes matted hair under our feet broken teeth skulls split open
A mad animal I'm a mad animal
Of course the inmates of Charenton (and Hebert actually hales from Charenton Louisiana, look it up) lived through the revolution and the coming of Napoleon. Levi, me, Neal, the lovers, the dreamers, Kermit the Frog, etc., and all the other prophets reading this, see what is coming and know the same despair.
Don't be deceived.
But what is clarity worth if it makes no difference? Maybe Episcopelianism or Presbyterianism or Hegelianism (assuming that Cassandra at least is part of Spirit knowing itself) maybe helps here, or maybe it makes it worse. I don't know.
It' a necessary rebuttal to the idiot with the bumper stickers.
As far as the thing with people lacking teeth-- yeah, that's true, but it's actually really sad. Most of them don't say idiotic things like the guy in the video.
Again, the problem with the Maher video isn't that it falsely portrayed ignorant poor people. The problem is that it would lead people to blame the tragic dysfunctions in the American South on ignorant poor people, as opposed to the rich people who benefit from said ignorance.
As a southerner THIS post rang the truest about the recent Bill Maher Brouhaha:
It is interesting that in response to Alexandra Pelosi's condescending video ... ,some have made arguments similar to my own—that you can be gay, lefty and Obama-loving and it doesn't make you any less Mississippian. But I know Southerners, Mississippians, who would disagree, who would take the proud version of the same position that my friend took, that to be a true Southerner, you have to love God and guns and football and sweet tea. This view dovetails with, but isn't co-extensive with, the Palinesque view that there are parts of America, and Americans, that are only technically American. They're not "real America".
A subset of this belief exists in the South—you have to be X, Y and Z to be a real Southerner. To be just born and raised there makes you only technically a Southerner. (They'd never say it to me, but I know my family in Macon thinks I'm less Southern than they are. Not because I live in New York, but because I grew up in fancy Atlanta, speak Portuguese, and wrote a book.) And so in a funny way, Ms Pelosi and the Southern rah-rah crowd are allies: they both want the South to be an essence, not a messy mix of gays and straights, Democrats and Republicans, blacks and whites, atheists and Christians, readers and football fans.
This is 100% true, though I should point out that the borders are very porous (I should maybe also point out that the Mississippi House of Representatives has a higher percentage of black congresspeople than any other state in the Union).
And there's a kind of underdetermination that goes beyond vagueness. A lot of eccentric and brilliant people I grew up with are simultaneously paradigm instances of Southerners and also paradigm instances of people who would be excluded by Pelosi and the Southern rah-rah crowd. This weird underdetermination is absolutely an essential feature of the south, and great Southern writers like James Wilcox or Mark Twain manifest it beautifully in their work.
I kind of understand this. To some extent it follows from the fact that part of the beauty of the South is that certain kinds of eccentricity are celebrated, as long as the eccentric people are either good storytellers or their eccentricities make for good stories. If your weirdness doesn't make for entertaining stories, you're on your own though.
The other important point that hasn't been made is that the poor people who say stupid and politically incorrect things, the people focused on in Maher's video, are actually almost always far, far less racist in person than the wanna-be old money set at the country clubs and various Episcopal and Southern Baptist congregations (cf. white citizens councils from the civil rights periods who were not "rednecks"). People, and perhaps especially philosophers, put far too much emphasis on what people say as opposed to what they do.
I mean the chance of any of the men in this video end up marrying a black women and having black children who are accepted by all of their friends is non-trivial. This is not the case with the country club set. I have a hundred or so stories from my youth that back this up. I wish I were a more entertaining story-teller. . . In this respect especially I am a failed Southerner.
Please click on the "THIS" link above and sign the petition.
When I was an undergraduate Limbaugh relentlessly attacked my professor Douglas Kellner (an amazing teacher; one of the three who determined my life course at that time).
Limbaugh's jihad was horrible, horrible, horrible, and Kellner's mom actually received terrifying death threats during that time as a result of Limbaugh's provocations. The closest analogue I can think of was in high school when my friend Ellie Dees' father was attacked multiple times by the Klan in Alabama for his work with the Southern Poverty Law Center.
Ironically, Limbaugh's attacks concerned a conference where Kellner had provided interesting analysis about why the Soviet Union was so horrible!
Voltaire said that his one prayer was for God to make his enemies ridiculous. And that God granted the request. I don't know if that's enough. We'll see.
Via Leiter Reports HERE, a very nice letter from Michael Della Rocca, Don Garrett, and Diana Raffman to the people in charge of obituaries in the New York Times.
Dear Mr. McDonald and Mr. Kadden,
Because time is crucial in this matter, we will be brief, direct, and blunt.
Ruth Barcan Marcus -- who died, as we believe you know, on Sunday, February 19th -- was one of the central figures in philosophy over the last 65 years. Her work advanced in multifarious ways our understanding of logic, metaphysics, philosophy of language, and moral philosophy. Her results in logic in the 1940's alone -- work whose significance is still being plumbed -- is sufficient for her to have a permanent place in the pantheon of logicians. Her discovery of the Barcan formula forever changed the way in which we must reason about necessity, possibility, and identity. The seminal essays in which she introduced the formula quite simply created a new field of logic -- quantified modal logic -- a field which continues to thrive. Her subsequent development of this work changed our understanding of the reference of words and proper names and made possible much of the most important work in the philosophy of language down to the present day. Her pursuits in moral philosophy -- embodied in what is perhaps her most widely-cited paper, "Moral Dilemmas" -- changed the way philosophers approach the topic of moral obligation. (This paper was a focus of the recent obituary in the _Economist_.) All of this is enough to be worthy of recognition in the Times.
But this brief summary of Marcus' scholarly contributions does not even begin to touch on her powerful role in philosophy and in academia general. She was one of the few women in philosophy and especially in logic at a time was sexism was rampant in the field. She persevered and succeeded not only in establishing herself in the field but in helping to bring about changes in hiring practices so that appointments in philosophy were no longer governed by the "old boys network". For this and other roles she played, the American Philosophical Association recently awarded her the Quinn Prize for service to the profession
I know that you have already received much information about Marcus' accomplishments and accolades. So we will not say more about them here. But we feel obliged to point out that the fact that an obituary has not yet appeared in the Times indicates that you have not yet decided whether to publish such an obituary or that -- absurdly -- you have already decided not to do so. This is, in our opinion, outrageous. The Times has, we are happy to note, provided timely recognition of many prominent philosophers in its obituary section in recent years. (A list of several such obituaries was sent to you by Michael Della Rocca through Yale.) None of these other philosophers has been more significant both to philosophy and to the profession of philosophy than Marcus. And many of those who were recognized by the Times were, we must say, figures who were not nearly as significant in these respects as Marcus was. If the Times were to fail to recognize Marcus, this would be not only an embarrassment for the Times, but it would reveal that the Times is woefully out of touch with what are the most significant developments within philosophy over the last half-century or more. We do not expect the Times' authors and editors to be philosophers themselves, but we -- as well as the cultural and intellectual community at large -- do expect the Times to be aware of the most basic accomplishments in central academic fields, including developments in philosophy, the oldest and most fundamental field of intellectual inquiry.
We hope that the Times has not failed in its responsibilities. There is still time to rectify this scandalous omission. We urge you to do so.
Sincerely,
Michael Della Rocca Andrew Downey Orrick Professor Yale University
Don Garrett Professor and Chair Department of Philosophy NYU
Diana Raffman Professor Department of Philosophy University of Toronto
I don't know how big a deal a NY Times obituary is. But I understand the letter writers' angst.
The thing is, Marcus just got crap from all sides. And sadly, I suspect that any woman or her overwhelming genius from that era got an equivalent amount of crap.
If you read the transcript of the classic meeting where she presented her refutation of Quine on quantified modal logic, then Kripke and Quine's pathological inability to take her seriously really do read like something out of one of the very most uncomfortable episodes of Mad Men (this is just an unbiased reading of the transcripts, maybe it was less foul in person). And she was right! I'm not claiming that Kripke plagiarized her. But the disconnect between how he and Quine treated her in the transcripts with the fact that his later work entails that she is right remains incredibly jarring.
On the other hand, there's a narrative from continental philosophers blaming her for every single aspect of the massive dysfunction of the Yale Philosophy Department during the period that led to them being put under receivership. But, again, these stories are way too convenient. In real life there's always blame to spread around for such institutional failures. The only analogue I can come up with is Roman historians (esp. Seutonisus) blaming Livia and Messalina for everything that went wrong during the reigns of Augustus and Claudius. This kind of thing was no more plausible then than it is now.
In both cases I can't help but seeing the typical sexist Catch 22 that talented women still face, how ever many decades after the Barcan/Quine/Kripke meeting. If you exhibit any greatness at all and you are female, people are so invested in you being out of line that they will treat you horribly and tell the most fantastical tales about you.
Well, Ruth Barcan Marcus was great. She has a formula, and an inverse formula, rightfully named after her. These formulae are so fundamental that one could do far worse than spending the rest of one's life thinking about the them.
Probably worth mentioning. A nice article about advertisers dropping Limbaugh, ends with the following.
Clear Channel's parent company was taken private in 2008 by private equity firms Thomas H. Lee Partners and Bain Capital.
Given that most of Romney's money is still made from dividends and capital gains (which is why he's taxed far less than anybody reading this) involvin Bain Capital, it's worth mentioning that he has a stake in Limbaugh's show.
I went to high school with Octavia Spencer, at "Jefferson Davis High School"* in Montgomery Alabama. I doubt she'd recognize me today, but we did have some close friends in common.
In my experience, it's not that uncommon that people from states who were on the right side in the Civil War can't quite understand how those of us in the crap states can possibly love (and yes be thankful to) these places.
You can see it here when Spencer thanks the state of Alabama at around the seventeen to twenty second point. A sizable portion of the audience laughs as if she'd just made a joke.
But she wasn't making a joke.**
Let me just say that there are worse places to live than Alabama.***
Pakistan is objectively pretty awful in all sorts of ways. But only complete idiots would get mad at Pakistan or begrudge the fact that, for example, many of the authors at 3quarksdaily clearly love Pakistan and all sorts of great things about it (and through this love they are able to provide some of the most insightful criticism of the past, present, and future horrors anywhere on the web).
If I had a quarter for every time a colleague from a nicer state laughingly called Louisiana or Alabama a "third world country" I'd have at least a twenty dollar bill. But the thing is, none of these people would talk about actual third world countries in such dehumanizing ways. . .****
I don't get it.
Oh well, I'm going to go back to being happy for Octavia. I'm almost certain (memory is almost precarious as justice*****) that I remember seeing Octavia perform actual magic in a "Jefferson Davis High School Drama Club" production of a really odd play based on Frank Zappa's song about Valley Girls.****** It was pretty difficult for my less dramatically talented friends acting with her in these things, because Octavia had this wonderful supernatural power to make people laugh. The biggest part of getting the play down was for the other actors and actresses to stay in role and not crack up. And during practices they'd improvise and by improvising without cracking up get themselves emotionally controlled enough to actually perform the play with someone of Octavia's talents.
I think this is one of the many things she was thanking Alabama for. . .
But, I must say, sometimes it would end up in more emotion than that scene in the Guenter Grass novel where all the post-War Germans are in a cellar bar, cutting up onions because that's the only way they can cry as the little frozen-in-time kid beats on the drum in the hope that they can weep without the onions. The weird practices and runthroughs of plays with Octavia were beautiful. . .
and I'm not a bad person for loving Alabama or Germany******* or the Dominican Republic and I hope that mandarins won't laugh at me (thinking they laugh with me) if I ever find myself in the position to thank the state of any of them.
[Notes:
*The middle school in the fantastic Danny MacBride vehicle, East Bound and Down, is called "Jefferson Davis Middle School." By using the evil name, MacBride is subtly mocking, with justification, my alma mater. Cue that one Ramones movie! Now! Dammit.
**Sorry. I'm actually getting close here to doing that weird Southern Man thing where you start talking about how wonderful your mother is, and it just gets more maudlin and more maudlin until finally a weeping Billy Bob Thornton throws a chair across the room and then everybody is hugging him and singing "You are my Sunshine" and the music and his waning tears make things seem alright in the universe for a brief time.
***I helped build a church and medical clinic in the Dominican Republic for a couple of weeks at the age of seventeen. It was surreal, and in some sense my theory of the world has never caught up to those experiences. Let me count some of them.
Outhouses!
So much of the time without power or running water in that heat and darkness.
Eating chickens you'd actually befriended over the last few days after seeing their necks broken by the old woman, and being grateful for the protein but also really fricking sad, hoping beyond all hope that that Native American thing where you thank the spirit of the dead bear works with chickens too.
A night so dark you can't see your feet as you try and negotiate a hill.
Waking up with a humongous poisonous spider on your mosquito net, and the guard (who spends thirty minutes every morning coughing up bits of his lungs into a dirty metal sink while the water isn't working) just casually going to work with his machete on the spider. You have to flip it off the net, bat it to the floor, then smash it, then casually dice it into little pieces.
Little stores with banana leaf roofs that sell rotten fruit and the flies. Does anyone actually purchase fly-ridden rotten fruit? They must for the stores to stay in business.
How overwhelmingly depressing are all aspects of prostitution (the "discos" of that era Dominican Republic).
Vaguely sinister spray painted stencils of animals for political parties on doors.
Realizing at the age of seventeen that you don't really lilke the Jesus in the Gospel of John and wondering if you can still be a Christian.
Evidence of voodoo, and what Dominicans think about it.
Dominican pride at not being as bad as Haiti.
A one armed preacher holding the Bible in his one hand gesticulating wildly, preaching in Spanish in a new, full, church of people in Sunday clothes. This isn't so different from Alabama after all.
Possibly the worst. The man in the bed in his shack, dying from an infection in his leg that would not have happened had people had shoes and boiled water before the fact or antibiotics after the fact.
Little barefoot kids in shorts, some with oozing eyes and dust caked into the ooze on their face.
How people without proper nutrition go from looking like little kids to almost immediately looking hunched over from middle age.
Finding oneself at a hotel eating goat (no Native American prayers) from a buffet, and Baby Doc Duvalier and his cortege are just pigging out on the same goat the next table over. They'd fled Haiti and were holed up in the same Dominican hotel. The evil was palpable.
All the missionaries from Central America who'd also fled to the Dominican Republic, but fleeing from evil rather than from justice. . . this in the late 80s, crushed, absolutely crushed, destroyed by Reagen era foreign policy combined with American companies that raped and killed both people and land. . .
The point is, the Dominican Republic objectively did at least in the 1980s suck a lot worse than Alabama in all sorts of ways. But I loved the people there. We played music together and without giving in to Orientalism, I could see beauty and nobility manifest everywhere and love the people who were working to make the place better. If I was a competent writer, I would provide a list of at least seventeen things that illuminate this aspect as much as that above. But I'm not , and this is not uncommon.
Many of us have madeleines that are objectively much more interesting than Proust's. But of course we're not Proust, so any attempt to present it would be pathetic. . . This in itself is not pathetic though, and I think maybe Proust shows as much?
****See previous footnote.
*****"A fickle thing! One law for the common man, another for the king."
******The most irritating drunk I knew in graduate school would never shut the eff up about the musical genius of Frank Zappa. Dude. Give it a rest already! Octavia Spencer won the Oscar!
*******Lived in a small farming village in the Rheinland Phalz in eighth and ninth grade. My dad was stationed there. I won't go on about it. Octavia Spencer won an Oscar.]
Rick Santorum just said that liberal professors desire to take religion away from students.
The thing is we're not very good at it. Americans who go to college are more likely to retain their childhood religions than Americans who don't (Charles Murray's recent book has the stats).
It's also kind of weird that Santorum calls Obama a "snob" in this context. First, Obama has been focusing on vo-tech and community colleges. Those of us at four year institutions haven't been having the best time of things these past four years. Second, if you know even just one person who teaches at a community college you realize that working class non-college educated parents desperately want their kids to get decent educations. So, again, the accusation of "snobbery" doesn't quite scan.
I think Gingrich is much better at cornpone populism than Santorum, and in fact maybe Romney's money people did the country a favor with all those millions of dollars of attack adds.
[Note:
As I wrote the above, I was not in a state of high moral dudgeon, and thus remained consistent with my Lent resolution. Bemusement fine. Indignation not.]
Breaking news from Dogs Against Romney is that Romney himself has been lying about the dog, Seamus, who actually ran away and disappeared forever after twelve hours of being strapped onto the top of the family car, during which time he was experiencing severe gastrointestinal distress to the point where he Romneyd.
Mitt responed by hosing and the car off, and then leaving him on the roof for the remainder of the trip.
It's a little unfair to judge somebody by what might be the worst thing they've done. But this isn't the worst thing Romney has done, and it's of a piece with how he his policies would treat the rest of us.
While he was often fantastically wrong whenever asserting something falsifiable (from the ship of fools all the way to statistics about madhouses in England) there was still an astounding amount of insight in those books.
I wish he had been alive to witness the Vatican's opening of the Inquisition archives. When you read something like THIS article by Cullen Murphy you realize just how much Foucault got right. One key moment:
A Franciscan inquisitor once confided to King Philip IV of France, in the early 14th century, that if Saints Peter and Paul had appeared before his tribunal, he had no doubt that the techniques he employed would be able to secure their convictions.
It all sounds very medieval. But it’s not merely medieval. Scholars may debate whether there truly is such a thing as a “totalitarian” state, and what its characteristics are, but the desire to control the thoughts and behaviour of others – joined to a belief that God or history will render an approving judgement – underlies much of the sad narrative of the past hundred years: the police states, the dirty wars, the ethnic cleansing, the internments, the renditions, the Red Scares, the fatwas, the special prosecutors, the electronic surveillance, the encroachments accomplished in name of national security.
Ouch.
I wish someone could write natural history on the view that reality itself will render an approving judgment. I know Nietzsche tried, but his history was worse than Foucault's. . .
Anyhow, it's a fascinating article and Joe Bob says check it out.
In 1996, Bain invested $27 million as part of a deal with other firms to acquire Dade International, a medical diagnostics equipment firm, from its parent company, Baxter International. Bain ultimately made ten times its money, getting back $230 million. But Dade wound up laying off more than 1600 people and filed for bankruptcy protection in 2002, amid crushing debt and rising interest rates. The company, with Bain in charge, had borrowed heavily to do acquisitions, accumulating $1.6 billion in debt by 2000. The company cut benefits for some workers at the acquired firms and laid off others. When it merged with Behring Diagnostics, a German company, Dade shit down three US plants. At the same time, Dade paid out $421 million to Bain Capital's investors and investing partners.
The companies they did this to were forced to pay off Bain dividends first while they were collapsing.
It's a shell game. Company Y buys Company X. Company X borrows huge amounts of money and gives it to Company Y. Then Company X goes bankrupt, and Company Y is not responsible for its debts.
And Mitt Romney gets over a quarter of a billion dollars out of this scam as tens of thousands of people working for the companies purchased by Bain are destroyed. From an earlier New York Post article:
Romney's Bain invested 22 percent of the money it raised from 1987-95 in five businesses - Stage Stores, American Pad & Paper (AMPAD), GS Industries, and Details - making a $578 million profit.
And every single one of the companies went bankrupt! More from the same article.
Romney's private equity firm, Bain Capital, bought companies and often increased short-term earnings so those businesses could then borrow enormous amounts of money. That borrowed money was used to pay Bain dividends. Then those businesses needed to maintain that high level of earnings to pay their debts...
* Bain in 1988 put $5 million down to buy Stage Stores, and in the mid-'90s took it public, collecting $100 million from stock offerings. Stage filed for bankruptcy in 2000.
* Bain in 1992 bought American Pad & Paper (AMPAD), investing $5 million, and collected $100 million from dividends. The business filed for bankruptcy in 2000.
* Bain in 1993 invested $60 million when buying GS Industries, and received $65 million from dividends. GS filed for bankruptcy in 2001.
* Bain in 1997 invested $46 million when buying Details, and made $93 million from stock offerings. The company filed for bankruptcy in 2003.
Anyhow, if you have the time, please watch the embedded video, if you can stomach it.
If I had to predict it would be that Romney gets the nomination and loses the election, and the Republican base responds to this pathologically by nominating someone equally unpleasant (and whom they view as even more "conservative") in 2016.
The reasons I'm betting on Obama are many: (1) Republican legislative attempts to stall the recovery and thus deny Obama a second term seem to be failing, (2) American voters are not kind to people who come across as robotic on television (Gore, Kerry), (3) Romney's business background as a corporate looter is pretty transparently evil and ended up not only being destructive to tens of thousands of lives but also a paradigm example of how we've lost our way since the 1970s, and (4) Obama's done a pretty good job, everything considered.
Of course I was disastrously wrong about Bush. It was clear to me from the get-go that he was a boiling cauldron of barely surpressed rage and resentment, which he only managed to tamp down in public via a sub-Eddie Haskell type smarmy insincerity. Everything I read about how incredibly petty and nasty he treated people personally verified that assessment, as did the kind of kiss up, kick down *&#holes he surrounded himself with (Chaney, Bolton, Rumsfeld, etc.).
But the guy did get elected the second time at least. Since his presidency failed in the exact ways you would predict from someone of his temperment, I conclude both that my *&#hole radar is more finely tuned than some non-trivial percentage of the electorate, and (more distressingly) that there are way more people out there who feel better about their own (or their spouse's or father's) masculine *&#holery when they vote for one (and this is the psychic subtext both for the Nixon "Southern Strategy" in general and in particular for much of what drove the torture policy of the Bush administration).
But again, American voters are much less forgiving of any sniff of insincerity from people who come across as robotic on the television. I don't think the Nixon/Bush appeal to unoriginal, destructive macho energy type pathologies will work for someone like Romney.
Andrew Sullivan's take on recent gutting of Habeas Corpus HERE.
We'd be governed much better if representatives were chosen randomly, maybe with some sort of reality show aspect (ideally involving cooking) involved.
This is the funnies thing I've heard since when I was a kid listening to Richard Pryor records.
It just get's funnier and funnier, until the point at the very end where Louis C.K. hypothesizes that flesh eating space-alien lizards cannot directly answer questions concerning their true nature.
[IMPORTANT UPDATE: Please go HERE to read the full text of the petitition titled "SPEP Members Against the Advocacy Committee Resolution, and if you are a member of SPEP please consider signing your name. Also go HERE where I encourage people to join SPEP (and become eligible to sign the aforementioned petition).]
I decided to take the following three posts down from NewAPPS. There is a consensus that they might work to undermine the kind of rapprochement between analytic and continental philosophy that the Newapps bloggers are trying to establish. Also, they infuriated more than one dear friend for whom I have a lot of respect and love. Finally, there's a weird dynamic that when one posts about controversial issues in a group blog, then people tend to perceive the posts to somehow be reflective of the group itself. This certainly is not the case with the three posts I've moved here, and I'm moving them in part to forestall any such confusion.
If I was writing them today I'd change a couple of things about them, but would not change the very things that have gotten me the most angry e-mail from people I don't know.
The story is HERE. It cannot be stated enough that the new Vice President Suleiman has been implicated in torture as a state policy. He was centrally involved in the extraordinary rendition program set up by Clinton and then vastly expanded by Bush. Indeed, and now even while receiving support as an "interim leader" by the Obama administration, he refuses to even countenance revoking the thirty year old "emergency law" that allows such treatment.
The four videos subtitled at NYTimes make up the entirety of the Wael Ghonim interview that was on the private Egyptian channel Dream TV last night. They are well worth watching in their entirety. At the end of the fourth video you will find yourself weeping with Mr. Ghonim. I think all of Egypt is.
Graham Harman is a wonderful philosopher, with an astonishing conceptual inventiveness, a powerful drive to expression, and marvelously witty prose. But at the moment he is one of the many bearing witness to the many, many, brave heroes of the Battle of Tahrir Square and indeed the entire Egyptian Revolution.
:'( omg I have someones child, I have a child. 2 yrs max, green eyes, says his name mahmoud. Tweet it for meMay god take your souls if this childs parents are dead, may mubarak die. Mubaral your a murderer. Allah yel3ankoun, allah la ywafi2koun
Hey you, the unfair tyrants...You the lovers of the darkness...You the enemies of life...You've made fun of innocent people's wounds; and your palm covered with their bloodYou kept walking while you were deforming the charm of existence and growing seeds of sadness in their land
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