I found this floating around Facebook:
Consider also this classic from the Pastafarians:
And of course Randall Monroe reminds us, “Correlation doesn't imply causation, but it does waggle its eyebrows suggestively and gesture furtively while mouthing ‘look over here’.”
My blog post RPG cultural appropriation has been reprinted in RPG Review #17 (PDF). I'm sharing a table of contents with Sandy “I created Call of Cthulhu” Petersen.
I feel awesome.
It appears that the most awesome thing on the entire Internet was created before it was even really the Internet. In 1976, the ARPANET people set up an online chat between the puppeteer Jim Henson, the artist Yoko Ono, the painter Sidney Nolan, and ... wait for it ... famous psychopath novelist Ayn Rand.
Apparently this is a real thing that really happened.
The resemblance to conversations you may have had yesterday on Facebook is not coïncidental.
JIM HENSON
I think Ms. Rand and my character Oscar the Grouch would have a lot to talk about actually. I am laughing out loud at this idea.
AYN RAND
Why would I want to talk to him. What has he achieved or trying to achieve.
JIM HENSON
He has achieved what I think is the ultimate goal of your way of thinking.
This may be true, but it's not factual, mind you.
I'll let Charles Pierce at Esquire explain.
One of my primary criticisms of Tiger Beat On The Potomac has been that the entire enterprise has been dedicated totally to gossip, triviality, and Drudge-baiting to the exclusion of what's actually going on in the country to the people these politics are supposed to serve. Alas, today, the two presiding intellects of the publication put their watery heads together to discuss “bold” policy choices. I hereby take back everything I wrote in the former vein. If this is their idea of discussing policy, I wish to the god that gave me breath that they'd go back to who's zooming whom at some lobbying shop.
I also have Krugman talking about the same piece.
Google 60 shows us Google as it might have been implemented by Grace Hopper.
So you may recognize these song lyrics. But have you thought about them?
Just a small town girl
Livin’ in a lonely world
She took the midnight train goin’ … anywhere.
Just a city boy
Born and raised in south Detroit.
He took the midnight train goin’ anywhere.
A singer in a smokey room.
A smell of wine and cheap perfume.
For a smile they can share the night
It goes on and on and on and on ….
Strangers waiting
Up and down the boulevard
Their shadows searching in the night.
Streetlight people
Living just to find emotion
Hiding somewhere in the night.
Working hard to get my fill.
Everybody wants a thrill.
Payin’ anything to roll the dice just one … more … time.
Some will win, some will lose,
Some were born to sing the blues.
Oh, the movie never ends,
It goes on and on and on and on ….
Strangers waiting
Up and down the boulevard,
Their shadows searching in the night.
Streetlight people
Living just to find emotion,
Hiding somewhere in the night.
Don’t stop believin’.
Hold on to that feelin’.
Streetlight people ….
Don’t stop believin’.
Hold on
Hold on
Hold on
Streetlight people ….
Don’t stop believin’.
Hold on to that feelin’.
Streetlight people ….
Strangers? Midnight trains? Smokey rooms? People searching in the night under the streetlights? Roll the dice one more time?
“Don’t Stop Believin’” is a noir. I want Tom Waits to do a cover version.
For fun: a capella, the Glee pilot, and the ending of The Sopranos (explained!).
So my alma mater has just introduced a re-branding which includes this breathtakingly crappy new logo.
There's an expensive-looking brand introduction video that only succeeds in making me like the original more than ever.
If you must go for some slick, contemporary new version of the university seal — which I don't think you should — I could make a better one in fifteen minutes.
Update: After another fifteen minutes, it's looking actually kind of good. Maybe the University will buy an hour of my time.
Update: Aaron Bady at The New Inquiry has a terrific long meditation on the change which indicts the UC leadership in profoundly misjudging the meaning of the university in our current social and economic moment.
This new logo is absolutely ridiculous. Not only is it called a logo, but it is EVERYTHING our school is against. Might as well have slapped a McDonalds “M” on top of it and call it a day. It looks so corporate, and it looks CHEAP.....
Not only is the experience itself being devalued (by changing a seal into a logo), but commodifying the degree actually reminds people of the thing they went to school to get away from: the dehumanizing effect of a dehumanizing labor market, and the fear of social death that the specter of unemployment represents. Without a degree, you’re just a pair of hands, a unit of “work,” and since respectable blue-collar jobs are disappearing faster than the polar ice caps, education becomes the fetish object that will save us. If you have a degree from Cal, after all, you have a network, a place, a status, or at least that’s what you hope to acquire there: you hope to become a person who doesn’t have to worry about being left behind.
....
But the UC administration thinks about their university like upper management thinks about corporate assets, and they’re threatened when other people claim to have a right to speak for and to represent it, when other people claim to have an ongoing stake in what the university is. That’s why they call the cops on protesters and make you get off the grass, and beat you if you don’t. They want to cut that cord.
Dave's Mapper is a very cunningly executed tool for making dungeon maps in the style of old-school Dungeons & Dragons adventures. Even if you don't share my nostalgia for a geeky wasted youth, you may admire the design of the different sketch styles.
Paul Krugman provides an implicit critique of capital, talking about the Rise of the Robots
Robots mean that labor costs don’t matter much, so you might as well locate in advanced countries with large markets and good infrastructure (which may soon not include us, but that’s another issue). On the other hand, it’s not good news for workers!
This is an old concern in economics; it’s “capital-biased technological change”, which tends to shift the distribution of income away from workers to the owners of capital.
....
If this is the wave of the future, it makes nonsense of just about all the conventional wisdom on reducing inequality. Better education won’t do much to reduce inequality if the big rewards simply go to those with the most assets. Creating an “opportunity society”, or whatever it is the likes of Paul Ryan etc. are selling this week, won’t do much if the most important asset you can have in life is, well, lots of assets inherited from your parents. And so on.
I think our eyes have been averted from the capital/labor dimension of inequality, for several reasons. It didn’t seem crucial back in the 1990s, and not enough people (me included!) have looked up to notice that things have changed. It has echoes of old-fashioned Marxism — which shouldn’t be a reason to ignore facts, but too often is. And it has really uncomfortable implications.
But I think we’d better start paying attention to those implications.
T. Thorn Coyle reads this and asks “Whatever happened to Brautigan's ‘machines of loving grace’?” She's referencing beat poet Richard Brautigan's vision of a post-Singularity green utopia.
I like to think (and
the sooner the better!)
of a cybernetic meadow
where mammals and computers
live together in mutually
programming harmony
like pure water
touching clear sky.
I like to think
(right now, please!)
of a cybernetic forest
filled with pines and electronics
where deer stroll peacefully
past computers
as if they were flowers
with spinning blossoms.
I like to think
(it has to be!)
of a cybernetic ecology
where we are free of our labors
and joined back to nature,
returned to our mammal
brothers and sisters,
and all watched over
by machines of loving grace.
That is to say, what is wrong with us that the ability to make enough of the things we need and want with very little human effort is an economic problem? We need to find a way to make our technology into the blessing it should be.
To that point, a friend reminds me of this from Buckminster Fuller:
We must do away with the absolutely specious notion that everybody has to earn a living. It is a fact today that one in ten thousand of us can make a technological breakthrough capable of supporting all the rest. The youth of today are absolutely right in recognizing this nonsense of earning a living. We keep inventing jobs because of this false idea that everybody has to be employed at some kind of drudgery because, according to Malthusian-Darwinian theory, he must justify his right to exist. So we have inspectors of inspectors and people making instruments for inspectors to inspect inspectors. The true business of people should be to go back to school and think about whatever it was they were thinking about before somebody came along and told them they had to earn a living.
I first heard this thought about superintelligent AIs voiced by Ray Kurtzweil, but it turns out that Marvin Minsky said it back in 1970.
Once the computers got control we might never get it back. We would survive at their sufferance. If we're lucky, they might decide to keep us as pets.
That sounds a little horrifying — and obviously it's meant to — but that's basically the situation in Iain M. Banks' science fictional anarchist utopia The Culture, and I would move there tomorrow if I could.
Frank Miller’s comic The Dark Knight Returns is a masterpiece, and an essential reason why we have Batman movies and half of the good superhero stuff we have today.
His followup The Dark Knight Strikes Again is bad beyond description. But there’s one bit in it that I love. Here’s Batman narrating C-list superhero The Elongated Man (whose secret identity is Ralph Dibny) rescuing another superhero.
Dibny doesn’t have a chance. Not a chance.
Not against him.
He could kill us all. For him, it would be easy.
He could kill us all.
It’d be easy.
There’s no end to what he can do.
Whatever he imagines--
-- whatever flickers across his subconsious --
-- he becomes.
Eel O’Brien.
Plastic Man.
Immeasurably powerful.
Absolutely nuts.
I love the idea that Plastic Man, the silliest and most innocent superhero published by DC Comics, absolutely terrifies Miller’s vicious, super-competent, paranoid Batman. That’s the irony and satire that Miller does at his best.
I first learned it as one of those things attributed to Picasso that he probably didn't really say.
Talent imitates. Genius steals.
Nancy Prager does some detective work and finds out the real story of this comment. She traces it to T. S. Eliot.
One of the surest tests [of the superiority or inferiority of a poet] is the way in which a poet borrows. Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal; bad poets deface what they take, and good poets make it into something better, or at least something different. The good poet welds his theft into a whole of feeling which is unique, utterly different than that from which it is torn; the bad poet throws it into something which has no cohesion. A good poet will usually borrow from authors remote in time, or alien in language, or diverse in interest.
That nicely sharpens the sentiment that I always took to be lurking in the bogus Picasso version: the best way to steal is to do it so gracefully that nobody could tell that you've done it.
Stifyn Emrys has a blog post Pagan Atheists: Yes, We Exist going around Facebook and getting a some traction with Pagans in my circle.
In fact, a survey I conducted online last summer found that the vast majority of respondents identified the most important element in Paganism as “reverence for nature.” Given three possible responses, a whopping 87 percent chose this answer. In second place, with just 10 percent of the vote, was “worship of the gods.” (The third option, “practice of magic(k),” received a paltry 3 percent.
That's interesting but unsurprising.
Emrys doesn't call up pantheism by name, but he does blur the lines between pagan and pantheistic sensibilities in his post. That's not a knock against what he's saying at all; I think that he is describing a blurring which is common in modern Pagan culture worth talking about. One Of These Days I need to write something sharpening the distinction between the pagan and the pantheistic, but mostly in service of solve et coagula — so that one can talk more precisely about what it implies when they get tangled together.
Emrys' piece resurfaces an old favorite of mine, Rhett Aultman's Yes, Virginia, I am an Atheist Pagan, a piece which parallels my own conception of deity (and not just because he borrows from my rap about how I believe in Santa Claus).
All of this is to say that I find the question of the gods being “real,” and indeed discussions of their ontological nature in general, somewhat silly. It doesn't matter if they're “real” if they're meaningful. So, yes, I am an atheist because I don't believe in the existence of a deity. I'm also, however, a Pagan, because I have a personal relationship to the same things that Pagans have relationships to.
I was a hard atheist for a good long time, and that perspective still has a key place in my epistemic toolkit, though I'm now a couple of notches closer to “believing in” the gods than Rhett is. But I share with him a radical disinterest in the question of to what degree the gods are materially “real”.
To borrow an analogy from the natural sciences, I still “believe in” Newton's Law of Universal Gravitation. If you know your physics, you know that Newton's understanding is very close to correct in its predictions, but not quite, leaving the space into which Einstein's relativistic physics slips. And the quest for a unified field theory — a Theory of Everything — reflects how even relativistic physics is a tiny bit incomplete.
I love Einstein's famous comment that the most incomprehensible thing about the Universe is that it is comprehensible. I'd add that the sciences are predicated on the baffling and amazing pattern that the Cosmos offers a kind of ladder of better and better near approximations of how it works for us to discover. There's no particular reason why the relationship between the Universe and the human capacity to apprehend it should work that way, but it does.
Though the ladder does make me wonder if a true Theory of Everything is available to human understanding; it may be that Einstein's quip is wrong, and that the Universe is ultimately not comprehensible, but that we can get a wrong understanding of it that is very, very close to correct. A ladder without a top end. And a strange one, since each rung takes us to a seemingly very different place. Newtonian dynamics and relativistic dynamics describe worlds that are radically different in their fundamental structure, saying different things about the fabric of space and time themselves.
That leads me to a kind of doubled consciousness: Newtonian physics is wrong but still true. You can conduct an experiment in which Newton's theory gives you the wrong answer. But for most things that actually happen, Newton's theory is so very close to right that you may as well treat it as the truth. You can launch a probe all of the way to Jupiter and hit your planned mark within a few yards using Newton's theory, and most of that drift will be from the limits of your engineering abilities and not the inaccuracies of Newton's mechanics.
So too the gods are patterns in the world as apprehended by human experience. The god I call “Hermes” is one such pattern, and the underlying reality is no doubt radically different from Hermes as I apprehend him. But he's still as real as Newton's Laws.
Geekdad Ben Kuchera plays the old Dungeon! boardgame with his kid. The addition of a little house rule makes this boring game fun.
You can simply pick your character and start rolling against monsters, but that’s not getting into the spirit of things. I asked my son to name his character, and tell me why he had that name. “Now, why do you need the money?” I asked. The game may task players with exploring a dungeon and escaping with a certain amount of gold, but why are they in there risking their lives? With a little bit of back and forth we both had names for our characters, and a little bit of back story.
Next was the decision that you couldn’t just roll, you had to call your attack. “I smash the goblin with my shield!” my kid said, and we rolled to see if he was successful. If he failed his roll and the monster fought back I acted that out as as well. We didn’t just collect the treasure from the fallen enemies, we had to describe where it was hidden. “I grab some of the Mummy’s wrapping, and spin him around!” I said, and rolled. I was successful.
“Okay, so he’s unraveled, and there is just bones and dust and this necklace inside!” my son said, handing me the treasure card.
The words “gateway drug” come to mind ....
At one point he caught on that the names and motivations we talked about at the beginning of the game didn’t really matter to the mechanics. “The thing is, when you play a game like this there are two things you have to decide: what you’re doing, and why you’re doing it. To me, the why is usually just as important,” I explained. He asked if there were games that allowed him to make more of a difference in the world.
Yes, yes there are.
Ariel Meadow Stallings of Offbeat Empire is frustrated with her social justice allies and attempts to describe the problem in her post Liberal bullying: Privilege-checking and semantics-scolding as internet sport.
I love learning new things about how cultures are defining themselves. I love that people take the time to try to improve my publications by sharing the latest language that communities are using. I love that readers feel safe enough to voice their concerns. I love this shared concern for sensitivity around language. I love the social justice motivations, and the encouragement that we all be self-aware of how the language we use has powerful, sometime unexpected impacts on the people around us.
BUT. But. Seriously, I'm just not down with:
- The derailing of conversations to debate semantics
- The need to process it all publicly (look at me look at me look at meeee! I am the very MOST aware of my privilege and am therefore the very BEST progressive on the entire internet!)
- The righteousness
- The intolerance and inability to respect that those who share your values might not share your opinions on this particular subject
This is where this kind of conversation begins to feel more like liberal bullying, where the only correct response is agreeing and acquiescing. Any other response is seen as ignorant at best, hateful at worst.
My priorities with online discourse are dialogue and respect. In my little corner of the online world, I keep my focus on constructive critique and articulate, compassionate communication. Shouting down people who disagree with you (even if I agree with your argument!) simply doesn't feel productive or helpful.
I've been trying to find a way to talk about this thoughtfully for years. I still don't have an answer that I'm happy with.
Update: A friend points me at a strong critique of how this piece falls into classic patterns of defense of privilege.
For future reference: Doug Muder at The Weekly Sift explains how the Republicans went from being the party of Lincoln to the party of racism in America.
So until 1944, there is no doubt that the Democrats are the party of Jim Crow. National figures like FDR may not be actively racist — and blacks benefit from the general anti-poverty provisions of the New Deal — but Democrats are not going to rock the boat of Southern white supremacy. Republicans, on the other hand, have nothing to defend in the old Confederacy, so it costs them nothing to champion civil rights.
....
Southern delegates respond by walking out of the convention and establishing the States’ Rights Democratic Party, a.k.a. the Dixiecrats, who nominate South Carolina’s Democratic Governor Strom Thurmond for president and endorse “the segregation of the races and the racial integrity of each race”.
....
Through the 60s, moderate Republicans like Nelson Rockefeller and George Romney push to uphold the Lincoln-Dewey-Eisenhower civil-rights tradition and compete for black votes. But they lose. The 1964 Republican nominee against Johnson is Barry Goldwater, one of the few non-Southern senators who voted against the Civil Right Act.
....
But Nixon understands that Republicans have to pick up what the Democrats have dropped. His “Southern Strategy” (with Thurmond’s endorsement) captures the upper South in 1968, which is his victory margin in a close election. His long-term vision is for Republicans to absorb the Wallace vote into an unbeatable conservative coalition ....
I was just reminded of an old favorite blog post, Brad DeLong’s 2004 Tale of the Serf, a riposte to glibertarians. I’m posting it entire here, because DeLong’s website is so screwy that one can only see it in the Internet Archive.
Here are two situations:
- In the first, you are a free and independent peasant living in a village. Your field is your own. Your crops are you own. After working, you huddle before the fire in your peasant hut until you fall asleep. A smallpox epidemic comes. You, your spouse and your children all die.
- In the second, you are a peasant living in a village. Once a year a thug with a spear — Sir Pierre de Bois-Guilbert, say — comes and takes 10% of your crop. He uses his takings to live well in the castle up on the hill. He also employs a troubadour who comes and entertains the peasants nightly in the village square, singing, juggling, and telling stories. He also employs chirurgeons who undertake research into the balance of the four humours. One day, the chirurgeons come with their knives: they cut the arms of you and your family, and insert some cowpox-infested tissue. When the smallpox epidemic comes, you and your family (and the other families in the village) survive.
In which situation are you “freer”? Do you really care whether you are “freer”?
It is worth contextualizing DeLong as an economist well known as one of the chief proponents of liberal-neoliberalism as practiced by the Democratic Party during the Clinton-through-Obama era … and he also offered a famous 2019 admission of the limitations of that movement:
⋯ I think it is fair to say that the already-broken American political public sphere has become significantly more broken since November 8, 2016. On the center and to the left, those like me in what used to proudly call itself the Rubin Wing of the Democratic Party—so-called after former Treasury Secretary Bob Rubin, and consisting of those of us hoping to use market means to social democratic ends in bipartisan coalition with Republicans seeking technocratic win-wins—have passed the baton to our left. Over the past 25 years, we failed to attract Republican coalition partners, we failed to energize our own base, and we failed to produce enough large-scale obvious policy wins to cement the center into a durable governing coalition.
We blame cynical Republican politicians. We blame corrupt and craven media bosses and princelings. We are right to blame them. But shared responsibility is not diminished responsibility: We ourselves cannot escape all blame. And so the baton rightly passes to our colleagues on our left.
We are still here, but it is not our time to lead.
Readers may know me to be a big fan of Thomas Jefferson, but that includes me having read enough of his writings to know just how bigoted he really was.
Corey “The Reactionary Mind” Robin digs into the roots of the racist ideology undergirding American slavery and finds some troubling connections in his long essay Thomas Jefferson, American Fascist? The title is deliberately provocative, of course, but it proves to be only a modest overstatement of his thesis. Robin connects the dots between Jefferson's ideas about race and the ideology which would come to animate the Confederate contention that slavery was a positive good, and then in turn to the racialized nationalism that would manifest in fascism. The argument is pretty involved, but I found it discomfortingly persuasive.
Jefferson’s race theory—along with that of such men as Thomas Dew, James Henry Hammond, and William Harper, who feature prominently in my discussion—points not only to the eighteenth century (he was much more than a man of his times) and not only to the categories of liberalism and republicanism, which are so familiar to US intellectual historians. It also points, albeit only in a suggestive way, to the future, to the twentieth century and European doctrines of racialized fascism.
Jefferson, I would submit, should be remembered not only as the writer of the Declaration of Independence and owner of slaves, but also as a contributor, along with his successors, to a doctrine of race war and what Hannah Arendt would later call, in another context, “race imperialism”—which would find its ultimate fulfillment a century later, and a continent away.
Update: Robin has a follow-up on Jefferson.
It's been a few years since I have gone to Burning Man, and I'm getting old enough that I wonder if I'm ever going to motivate to return. But I move in Burner circles and I still have a keen interest the event. Indeed, my very first post on this blog was about Burning Man. When the Burning Man Organization announced the 2013 art theme Cargo Cult, I was immediately drawn into discussions of the choice and what it signified, and wanted to set my thoughts in order and blog them so they would be available to folks.
For the reader unfamiliar with cargo cults: they are an amazing phenomenon. The story goes that during the Second World War the US built airbases on numerous small islands in the Pacific, many of them places with paleolithic civilizations which had experienced little or no contact with technological society up to that point. After the war ended, Americans abandoned the islands ... but the islanders then built fascimiles of airbases out of local materials, in hopes of luring the airplanes, with their useful cargo, back to the island. There's a lot more to it than that, of course, but that's the core of the tale.
It's a story that makes a good symbol. I've alluded to it myself at work, talking about “cargo cult design”, borrowing from a talk by the physicist Richard Feynman, Cargo Cult Science. He used cargo cults as a metaphor for the kind of pseudoscience which offers charts and numbers and impressively scientific-sounding language without doing real science.
they follow all the apparent precepts and forms of scientific investigation, but they're missing something essential, because the planes don't land
Similarly, the organizers of Burning Man are turning to the cargo cult as a metaphor, offering a sly critique of technocratic consumer culture.
Like the islanders, most of us are many steps removed from the Cargo that entirely shapes our lives. We don't know how it's made, where it's made, or how it works; all we can do is look beyond the sky and pray for magic that will keep consumption flowing.
....
We feel sure our theme will attract many alien Visitors, and hope this will stimulate our planet's faltering economy.
That has some bite, no?
The theme description leans heavily on the image of John Frum, the mythic figure from the original island cargo cult who the legend holds will eventually return bringing gifts from the sky. The description begins with the question ...
Who is John Frum?
... and that has a lot of bite as well; I cannot resist a dark little chuckle at that one.
But notice how the cargo cult story provides such a seductive parable of the encounter between the modern and the paleolithic. We want this story so we can use it as a metaphor.
We need to stay wary of how the story of the cargo cult is a little too appealing. I'm told that there's a school of thought among anthropologists which holds that the formation of cargo cults in the first place springs in part from performing for the anthropologists who find it so fascinating. Plus the story connects to a bunch of stories we want to tell ourselves about the encounter between very different societies, stories we want to tell ourselves about Exotic Primitive Native People, stories that easily slide into racist ooga-booga cartoons.
When does talking about cargo cults cross the line into ho ho, let us now laugh at those colorfully-dressed islanders with their silly superstitions, too stupid to know that you cannot make an airplane out of coconuts like Gilligan and the Professor, with all of the ugly bigotry that implies?
The Burning Man Organization seems incautious about this element lurking in the theme. Consider this quotation offered in the theme description, from a “Melanesian informant” describing John Frum:
’E look like you an’ me. ’E tall man. ’E live long.
That's a little too close to the minstrel show for comfort.
Now I don't want to suggest that Burners are a bunch of racist bigots who think Al Jolson performing in blackface is okay. That's obviously untrue. But Burner culture does include a lot of culturejamming remixing symbols from other cultures.
Many folks would call that cultural appropriation. I'm a little wary of using that term, because some folks attach it to a critique which presumes that some groups “own” some manifestations of culture. That risks sliding into the Preservation Of Cultural Purity and I do not want to go there. If that Hello Kitty icon is wrong, I'm not sure I want to be right; I include it in this post because it gave me a big smile when I first saw it on the playa.
But many Burner examples of cultural appropriation are not as innocent or witty as that Hello Kitty icon. Consider the story of a Burners' event gone badly wrong just a few years back.
Visionary Village — a loose group of artists and other young people who enjoy the annual Burning Man arts festival in Nevada — began routine publicity for a Burning Man-style “private event” at the Bordello on E. 12 Street in Oakland. The online flyer circulated on Tribe.net read: “GO NATIVE” in an Old West font set against a desert sun, and the dance party was advertised as a “fundraiser for the Native American Church.” Native-rights activists got wind of it and publicized additional text from the VisionaryVillage.org web site indicating four “elemental rooms” would be themed: “Water: Island Natives (Maori); Air: Cliff Natives (Anasazi); Earth: Jungle Natives (Shipibo); Fire: Desert Natives (Pueblo).” Ravers were offered a discount off the $20 door fee “if you show up in Native costume,” and the money would fund “neurofeedback research demonstrating causality between medicinal use [of peyote], improved brainwave patterns, and heightened mirror neuron activity in users.” The 140-year-old Bordello property abuts Interstate 880 and an ancient Ohlone Indian site dated to the 12th century B.C., which was also promoted.
Native American activists showed up to that event, and there were some rightly embarassed White people.
The Burning Man Organization does not have responsibility for that event. But it does present a notorious example of how Burner culture can be tone-deaf about these questions and present a face that people of color rightly regard as insulting and unwelcoming.
So the BM Org needs to act responsibly in the context of that unwholesome aspect of Burner culture, a context which costs Burning Man the benefit of the doubt on the Cargo Cult theme. The Burning Man Org needs to respond to the way that Cargo Cult plays on a racist narrative about Primitive Natives and can be read as an invitation to a minstrel show.
I feel certain that the Burning Man Organization doesn't mean it that way. But if they know that the theme will be read that way, as they should, then they are giving offense intentionally. If you give offense intentionally, that's an insult. It says to people of color that the Burning Man Organization does not care if Burning Man feels hostile to them.
Burning Man is already overwhelmingly a White People Thing. The insult to people of color implicit in cultural appropriation is one of the big reasons why. That's a problem for an event which counts radical inclusion as the first of its foundational Ten Principles.
I have to ask the Burning Man Organization, what's the plan? What do you intend with this theme? There are some pointed questions we could ask.
Is the Burning Man Organization hinting that an icon of Ganesh at the front of a Burning Man theme camp is cargo cult Hinduism?
Is the Burning Man Organization hinting that its own Cargo Cult theme is itself cargo cult anthropology?
Update: Caveat Magister on the Burning Blog has a long examination of the trickiness of the theme, Cargo Cult is a daring – and dangerous – theme. Get it right. It includes this telling aside.
Burners who take “Cargo Cult” at its easiest, laziest interpretation – look at those crazy people who have bizarre beliefs and perform useless rituals – are inadvertently putting themselves in the cross hairs.
My point precisely.
Infamous Brad describes an argument over fundamental ethical principles.
And the thing is, in the immediate aftermath of that screaming match, my parents said something to me that took me decades to even grudgingly accept the possibility of: they told me that both he and I are completely insane on this subject. Someone who can never accept another person’s moral authority when that person is in authority is just as crazy as someone who can never question it, they told me; the sane course is to know when the other person’s moral authority is more trustworthy than your own, and to know when to question it. Some days, I can even intellectually accept that. But I cannot make myself actually believe it. [⋯] But here’s the thing I notice, every time he’s in the news: he’s gotten another promotion. Every couple of years, he moves up in rank, moves to a more prestigious department, or both. My particular insanity on this subject has rendered me unemployable, made enough actual and potential employers and co-workers uncomfortable as to have explicitly cost me three jobs, for not being unethical enough. Even when I was willing to go along to get along, people felt judged. His insanity, on the other hand, has been steadily lucrative for him, a lifetime source of satisfaction and prestige. And that makes me uncomfortable in ways I can’t even begin to express, not all of which I even understand myself.
I presume that you can guess where I stand on this one.
If nature has made any one thing less susceptible than all others of exclusive property, it is the action of the thinking power called an idea, which an individual may exclusively possess as long as he keeps it to himself; but the moment it is divulged, it forces itself into the possession of every one, and the receiver cannot dispossess himself of it. Its peculiar character, too, is that no one possesses the less, because every other possesses the whole of it. He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me. That ideas should freely spread from one to another over the globe, for the moral and mutual instruction of man, and improvement of his condition, seems to have been peculiarly and benevolently designed by nature, when she made them, like fire, expansible over all space, without lessening their density in any point, and like the air in which we breathe, move, and have our physical being, incapable of confinement or exclusive appropriation. Inventions then cannot, in nature, be a subject of property. Society may give an exclusive right to the profits arising from them, as an encouragement to men to pursue ideas which may produce utility, but this may or may not be done, according to the will and convenience of the society, without claim or complaint from anybody.
I really ought to pick up Chrystia Freeland's book The Plutocrats: The Rise of the New Global Super Rich and the Fall of Everyone Else because everywhere I see her talking about it is terrific.
I first caught on to her through that New Yorker article that a lot of folks forwarded a little bit ago which centered on billionaire Leon Cooperman's long open letter to Obama. Then I saw a lively roundtable with Freeland, Matt Tiabbi, and Bill Moyers about plutocrats.
And now I'm thinking of her again because I just found her talking to Ezra Klein in the Washington Post and it's full of great stuff. It starts out with her saying interesting stuff about the election.
There’s a great joke on Wall Street which is that the bet on Romney is Wall Street’s worst bet since the bet on subprime. But I found the hostility towards Obama astonishing. I found the commitment to getting him out astonishing. I found the absolute confidence that it would work astonishing.
Then she goes on to talk about the mindset of the zillionaires.
First, they’re absolutely convinced that they’re not asking for special privileges for themselves. They’re convinced that it just so happens that their self-interest coincides perfectly with the collective interest. That’s where you get this idea of the “job creators”. The view is that to seek a low tax environment or less regulation, that’s not special pleading for yourself, it’s not transactional politics. It’s that this set of rules is the most conducive to economic growth for everybody. It will grow the pie. Now, it also happens to be an incredibly convenient way of thinking.
Then she goes on to examine the implications in detail. Great stuff.
It's a real font, and the best solution I've yet found to the problem of making text in sketchy sketches look, well, sketchy while still legible. Honestly, I wish there were a bold and italic version available.
I think Inglorious Basterds is a demonstration of Tarantino's genius and relevance. It's a great film, period. There's a lot to be said about the picture and maybe someday I'll say it but at the moment I'm thinking about the scene which I think is the heart of the film: Eli “Hostel” Roth as Sgt. Donny Donnewitz, “The Bear Jew”, threatening the German captives with his baseball bat.
It's a powerful scene in part because it very deliberately plays with the relationship between the cinematic violence as a source of cathartic pleasure, cinematic violence as source of cathartic horror, and the enjoyment of cinematic violence as a politically troubling aspect of culture. The sequence very deliberately takes an audience back and forth between pleasure at let's beat up the Nazis and discomfort with the callous nihilism that implies. The scene is by turns scary, exciting, and disgusting, shifting tones more quickly and more often than I would have believed possible. Amazing enough that it takes us from horror, to excitement, to horror again ... but it actually brings us back to pleasure and excitement again repeatedly, dragging us back there from disgust, and then once more back to disgust, again and again. Tarantino manipulates the hell out of the audience with an unmistakable purpose. Watching it made me discomforted by my own reactions.
Which is the point.
Not for nothing does that scene end on a horrifying note. Is this what you want? Tarantino asks us. Because I will give it to you. The movie in the movie theatre at the end makes the indictment of the audience's complicity even more explicitly, but it's there throughout the film.
This gets an added frisson from knowing that Tarantino and Roth have both made careers of making films that appeal to our bloodthirstiness.
So we were talking about movies over lunch at work the other day.
I'd been talking about how Punch-Drunk Love makes explicit the strange rage and frustration which drives Adam Sandler's screen persona, and then a bit later was describing my theory about Basterds. Some wag suggested that Tarantino should have cast Sandler instead of Roth as Donnewitz ... but as we talked about it, we concluded that this wasn't just a silly idea, it would have worked.
Well guess what? In an interesting interview, Eli Roth let slip that this actually was the original plan.
FILM CRIT HULK says something a little bit similar (at astonishing length) about Kingsman: The Secret Service.
Over on Twitter, I returned to this topic, saying —
This thread and replies are fascinating because I both understand this reading and think it is profoundly wrong
Something I really appreciate about Inglorious Basterds and Django Unchained is that they are a very rare species of Hollywood cinema that understands that half-measures in the face of fascism don't work and doesn’t try to equivocate about the morality of its political violence
tl;dr Nazis and slave-owners getting absolutely Itchy & Scratchy wrecked is good
Like, Quentin isn’t a Marxist or anything but it’s hilarious when people call him a reactionary. Absolutely no conservative on planet Earth would take this much joy from depicting jackboots and slavemasters getting turned into torrential streams of uncanned Chef Boyardee
Basterds and Django call shenanigans on cathartic movie violence. Both say hey, in the world we portray in movies, slavery and WWII would have been over quickly with victories over evil. So movie logic is bullshit.
I don’t see how one can watch the Bear Jew sequence in Basterds and read the movie as just a cathartic good time killin’ Nazis. It drags us back and forth over the line of I Want To See It Happen / Oh Gods No I Don’t.
Tarantino marshals every bit of cinematic vocabulary he can — framing, music, editing, et cetera — to give this guy a Stoic Heroic Sacrifice at the hands of cruel maniacs.
That's a Wehrmacht soldier who expresses his antisemitism directly. Tarantino gives us this not in defense of Nazis but in critique of cinema.
Understand, I love a cathartic good time killin’ Nazis. My favorite scene in all of cinema — Magneto confronting escaped Nazis in Argentina in X-Men: First Class — is exactly that. So I am not above enjoying Inglorious Basterds that way as well. It invites us to! But in service of trying to get us to examine why we like it.
Tarantino gives us a theater full of Nazis gleefully enjoying a movie depicting pointless nihilistic violence. He asks: “What the fuck is wrong with me and my audience?”
Not for nothing, the logic of cinema reverses at the end. The Action Heroes’ plan fails, while the the Nazis are defeated by ordinary people, a Black man and Jewish woman, by those ordinary heroes burning their back catalogue of films.
Django Unchained has its own ambivalence about the fantasy of cinema projected onto real historical horrors. Yeah, it feels great to unleash Black Cowboy Murder on slavers, and movie logic lets Django and Broomhilda get away. But slavery is not defeated, is it? Literally as I was walking out of the theater, it was clear to me that Django was not about slavery but about movies about slavery, about making it impossible to watch Gone With The Wind uncritically.
If you want a Tarantino film that actually grapples with the hard question of What Do We Do With Fascists, he did make one: The Hateful Eight ....
A friend recently pointed me at the kickstarter campaign for Saint Harridan, a project to start up a line of suits for dapper women.
Saint Harridan is of the community, for the community. We listen. We developed our designs using a focus group; we work with real-life models. Going forward we want to hear from you. Should our next item be a vest? A suit with a different cut? Casual dress pants? Sweaters? But, FIRST, we must hear from you that this is a good idea. If we don't meet our Kickstarter goal, we won’t have enough evidence that this business can work and we cannot produce the suits. We believe Saint Harridan’s time has come. If you agree, don’t wait. Pre-order your suit today!
I'm not in their demographic. (Okay, I'm a Dapper Q reader, but I'm a fella and I already have suits I'm happy with.) But admiring the project and being a sucker for a kickstarter, I threw them a couple of shekels and linked the project on Facebook, knowing I had friends who would be interested.
On Facebook Whiskeypants, a friend of a friend, objected.
I have a bone to pick with them. They aren't getting a cent from me.
- They claim that they want to make suits for all body types, but they really only wanted women who looked like men. It didn't even occur to them when looking for community models to measure breast size.
- They never admitted that they only had two suit patterns and lacked the capacity to make more. Those suit patterns only work for women who are shaped like men.
- They rejected more femme looking women because of some really fucked up views about what role femme women play socially, and because they didn't want press to focus on “pretty”.
So basically all they are doing is making suits that their models could already have found everywhere, while totally neglecting the people who really do need suits made for their body types.
I saw all of this firsthand. Also, my friends were involved in the model search.
Had they owned it from the beginning and just said, “we have limitations, this is what we can work with right now as the start for what we hope will be X thing”, I would have had much more respect for them. Instead, may I suggest you support Tomboy Tailors.
You can also, if you like, quote Mary Going from St. Harridan, who — in an email — said stuff like “Frankly, women have been portrayed as feminine. They have not been portrayed like we're portraying them. We didn't want that to get watered down.” —which not only completely destroys the spectrum between so-called “butch” and so-called “femme” women, it completely ignores the multitude of reasons that “femme” women might want to wear a suit. I know some very femme women who look amazing in drag, for example.
I don't want to stick my nose into a question I don't have a real stake in, but my nose is already interposed by virtue of having spread the link. Vexing.
So I offer this with the caveats I don't know either Whiskeypants or the Harridan folks, though I can report that Whiskeypants is the trusted friend of a stylish friend. On the other hand, a friend I know to have good judgement is acquainted with the Saint Harridan crew and reads the project more positively.
Apostate conservative Bruce Bartlett has a piece up on The American Conservative, Revenge of the Reality-Based Community, about how movement conservatism has become detached from facts. It's a good description of the phenomenon by an insider.
Make no mistake, Bartlett is a real conservative.
My first real job out of graduate school was working for Ron Paul the first time he was elected to Congress in a special election in 1976. (He lost that same year and came back two years later.) In those days, he was the only Tea Party-type Republican in Congress.After Paul’s defeat, I went to work for Congressman Jack Kemp and helped draft the famous Kemp-Roth tax bill, which Ronald Reagan signed into law in 1981. I made important contributions to the development of supply-side economics and detailed my research in a 1981 book, Reaganomics: Supply-Side Economics in Action.
....
I went to work for the Heritage Foundation, but left in 1987 to join the White House staff.
....
Afterwards I worked for the Cato Institute and the National Center for Policy Analysis, a conservative think tank based in Dallas. I wrote regularly for the Wall Street Journal editorial page, National Review, and other conservative publications. For 12 years I wrote a syndicated column that ran in the Washington Times, Investor’s Business Daily, the New York Sun, and other conservative newspapers.
The article is interesting all around, but I'm blogging it because of a striking observation in the middle. Again, recall that this is from one of the architects of supply-side economics.
I thought I had two perfect examples that fit my model of the rise and fall of economic ideas: Keynesian economics and supply-side economics. I thought at first I knew enough about the former to say what I wanted to say, but eventually I found the research I had previously done to be wanting. It was based too much on what academics thought and not enough on how Keynesian ideas penetrated the policymaking community.I hit upon the idea of ignoring the academic journals and looking instead at what economists like John Maynard Keynes, Irving Fisher, and others said in newspaper interviews and articles for popular publications. Recently computerized databases made such investigation far easier than it previously had been.
After careful research along these lines, I came to the annoying conclusion that Keynes had been 100 percent right in the 1930s. Previously, I had thought the opposite. But facts were facts and there was no denying my conclusion. It didn’t affect the argument in my book, which was only about the rise and fall of ideas. The fact that Keynesian ideas were correct as well as popular simply made my thesis stronger.
I finished the book just as the economy was collapsing in the fall of 2008. This created another intellectual crisis for me. Having just finished a careful study of the 1930s, it was immediately obvious to me that the economy was suffering from the very same problem, a lack of aggregate demand. We needed Keynesian policies again, which completely ruined my nice rise-and-fall thesis. Keynesian ideas had arisen from the intellectual grave.
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For the record, no one has been more correct in his analysis and prescriptions for the economy’s problems than Paul Krugman.
Emphasis mine.
Via Christina Wodtke I find Daniel Cook's article My Name is Daniel and I am a Genre Addict. Wodke gives us a provocative quote from it.
Let's be blunt. Games are drugs.
His point is that most computer games deliberately generate an addiction response, and he's right. When I was in the biz myself people routinely talked about addictiveness as a positive good and a sign of quality.
I would argue that a significant dose of game addictiveness is part of the cocktail that makes a good game good. Last year I went through a Plants vs. Zombies phase, and the addiction response to my progress at learning the skill of the game was part of it. But the addiction of PvZ isn't the only good thing about it; there's also the charm of the art, the pleasure of developing an understanding of the game, the progressive reveal of little puns and jokes, and more.
Plants vs Zombies isn't quite great art, but it's very good art. I notice that my niece loves it despite being too young to actually understand the game. She's not having an addiction response, she's just enjoying the animations and the sensual satisfaction of the interactivity. And I submit that computer games are a medium capable of great art, though the examples are precious few.
So I don't want computer games reduced to and defined by their addictiveness. That's at least a waste of the artistic potential of the medium and at worst a real social problem. That's why I object to games of the Zynga model, which are designed to be not fun but nothing more than addiction triggers, as Ian Bogost tried to show with Cow Clicker, his game satirizing Farmville. (Jason Tanz has a terrific long Wired article about Cow Clicker, and Bogost mocks “gamification” with a recent post about cow-clickification.)
Unhappily, the addition factor is arguably the main force shaping the computer game industry. Cook offers a really illuminating discussion of the business and artistic implications.
Corey Robin has a terrific post at Crooked Timber about problems with Steven Spielberg's film Lincoln, primarily the absence of Black characters with their own voices. Where is Fredrick Douglass?
Toward the end of the post, Robin brings up something else which I've never quite understood and brings it into focus.
It was not the constraints of history or genre, in other words, that produced this film; it was the blinkered vision of Steven Spielberg.And, I’m sorry to say, the blinkered vision of [screenwriter] Tony Kushner. If you think my pre-Civil Rights claim above is unfair, consider this statement that Kushner gave to NPR, which Aaron also found and pointed out to me:
The inability to forgive and to reconcile with the South in a really decent and humane way, without any question, was one of the causes of the kind of resentment and perpetuation of alienation and bitterness that led to the quote-unquote ‘noble cause,’ and the rise of the Klan and Southern self-protection societies. The abuse of the South after they were defeated was a catastrophe, and helped lead to just unimaginable, untellable human suffering.I have to confess, I was truly shocked by this comment. Though it points to events after the Civil War, it reveals a point of view that I had thought we abandoned long ago: the Dunning School of American historiography, which essentially holds that Reconstruction was a “tragic era”—and error—in which a cruel and unforgiving North decided to wreak havoc on a victimized (white) South, thereby producing Jim Crow and a century of southern backwardness. When I was in high school—in 1985!—we were taught the Dunning School as an example of how not to do history, a way of thinking about the past that was so benighted no one could possibly believe it anymore.
Yet here we have one of our most esteemed playwrights—a Marxist no less (and whose effort to reclaim an honorary degree from CUNY, which he had been denied, I steadfastly organized for)—essentially peddling the same tropes.
Whoa. I've heard echoes of the Dunning School reading of Reconstruction before, but didn't know much about it. In the comments, Robin follows up on a commenter who rises to Kushner's defense.
Here’s what you wrote:I rather agree with Kushner: part of the outcome of the Civil War and Reconstruction was to produce a society of three castes with mutual hatred for one another: White Americans, Southerners, and Negroes. It was about the worst way one could have proceeded to get rid of slavery and reincorporate the South, short of killing all the Negro slaves (or all the Southerners). Kushner’s remarks, as quoted above, have nothing to do with Dunning and company’s romantic claptrap. Rehabilitating the Southerners and ex-slaves would have been very expensive and tedious; much more fun to exploit them in their weakness. The Klan and so forth were the natural result of wrecking the South and then leaving its people mostly to their own devices as long as they formed no political threat to the national ruling class of the day.Starting with the last sentence: the Klan didn’t result from the North leaving the South to its own devices; it was the cause of the North leaving black southerners to their own devices. Reconstruction lasted 11 years, officially, and longer, unofficially. From the very beginning white supremacist terror groups formed (as early as 1865/66) in order to stop blacks from exercising their newfound political agency, which they did. Because of the costs that the Klan imposed upon the project of black equality, the white North eventually gave up. It was in fact an extremely expensive effort, and not all white northerners were behind it. But it was an effort that was made, and the white racist south made it all the more costly. The recriminations and hatred that resulted were not because a real Reconstruction wasn’t tried; it was because it wasn’t allowed to succeed. You want to bake that failure into the design but it really was the outcome in which white racism, especially though not exclusively in the South, must bear the lion’s share of responsibility. But that last sentence of yours is a real howler. That’s why I suggest you read the scholarship.
I wish I had known this.
And behold, it's another demonstration that one should reflexively doubt any reading of history that tries to salve the hurt feelings of the South.
Cory Robin also recommends Aaron Bady's article about Lincoln over at Jacobin.
A set of nifty maps on the web designed with a range of visual styles for a range of purposes. The watercolor style is particularly lovely.
Greek text in Greek! Handy for interface mockups where you want to make clear that you're not showing sample text.
Update: Greek text also available in excited Latin, Nietzsche, Riker, William Gibson, industry bullshit, hipster, whiskey, Whedon, Lovecraftian incantation, and postmodern, Back to the Future, online dating, plus a tool that will provide techobabble, marketing speak, and more. Plus a huge variety of other variations.
I will never need ordinary lorem ipsum again!
Update update: MeetTheIpsums.com is an even bigger collection of greek text solutions!
