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version seven. http://demongin.org |
Well What Did You Expect from The Great Educator?
PLU annotations for the episode airing on 2012-02-02.
Friday, 2012-02-03 | On the Internet, Polemicists Like Us
| Just like you said |
| Lana Del Rey |
My notes and annotations on last night's show:
Cold Opener: Stanley Fish and IHateNYT
- Rule number one, "it's not a performance, it's a discourse": we actually do have rules. One of the rules is that we don't rehearse or re-perform any bits, routines or even conversations that come together off-air; another of them is that we don't Google anything during the show.
- Fish's comment at the end of my assignment:
While you grasp some of the relevant differences between Rorty and Rawls, this paper is very poorly written on both the lexical and syntactic levels.
This is not acceptable college writing.
See me.
D-
SF - The assignment was to take a quote from US Secretary of Education Roderick Paige(I cannot recall the quote) and explain how political philosophers John Rawls and Richard Rorty.
- Steele's WordPress blog is here: http://ihatenyt.com. His quote on Fish:
Stanley Fish is a professor of humanities and law. He's hella old, but instead of retiring to Florida, he did the next best thing: Got a job writing editorials for the New York Times. Oh, and took an academic job in Florida. Before that, he taught at UC Berkeley, Johns Hopkins, Duke and University of Illinois, Chicago. During his protracted journeyings around this great nation, he's built an intellectual reputation for advancing anti-foundationalism and extreme relativism. Not the fake kind of relativism, where it just means you like gay people and disagree with Glenn Beck, but the real kind, where you go around like a dickhead telling everyone that truth doesn't exist and human nature is just a bunch of historically contingent cultural norms.
- "Our wings take dream", is a famous Bushism.
- Fish's "Opinionator" article can be found here. His thesis:
At bottom, Pitts's case against honoring Forrest is that he was a bad man dedicated to realizing a bad cause. Just say that, and don't mess it up (and dilute it) by playing the “gotcha” card, by challenging Barbour to display his liberal bona fides and accord equal treatment to everybody. That's not what the moral life is about.
Well What Did You Expect from The Great Educator?
- Lana Del Rey (Elizabeth Grant) released a collection of songs called Born to Die (2012-01-31).
- To the point about Lana Del Rey truthers in search of the "real" story, an excerpt from the Wikipedia page:
Del Rey later released her first full-length studio album titled Lana Del Ray [sic] A.K.A. Lizzy Grant in January 2010. (The NME of 28 January 2012 suggests the album had the alternative title of Nevada). It was the singer's first professionally produced album, released under Lizzy Grant on an independent label with producer David Kahne. Del Rey stated that "David asked to work with me only a day after he got my demo. He is known as a producer with a lot of integrity and who had an interest in making music that wasn't just pop." Her father, Robert Grant, helped with the marketing of the album, which was available for purchase on iTunes for a brief period before being withdrawn. According to David Kahne, who produced Grant, Grant bought the rights back from [her label] 5 Points as she wanted it out of circulation to stifle future opportunities to distribute it—an echo of rumors that the action was part of a calculated strategy.
- "Elaine Dickinson" is the female lead in Airplane!; she was played by Julie Hagerty.
- Frere-Jones' backlash-to-the-backlash is here.
The pith:The weirder strain of criticism concerns authenticity. People seem to feel that Del Rey is trying to trick us, though it's impossible to figure out exactly what that trick would be, as we are dealing with an entertainer and her audience, not a naturally fractious relationship. Detractors cite a variety of presumed conspiracies, some involving the influence of her father, Rob Grant, who is a successful Internet entrepreneur; the rumor of manipulative managers guiding her; the reality of professional songwriters working with her; the question of who paid for the cartoons and the paparazzi footage of the actress Paz de la Huerta that appear in the “Video Games” clip; and how Grant's top lip got so big so fast. (Grant says she's undergone no surgical procedures.) Surely no equivalent male star would be subject to the same level of examination.
- LeBron James has a very short Wikipedia page, in spite of the gallons of ink spilled on his affiliations in the press.
- MentalFloss has a nice, short write-up on president Lyndon Baines Johnson, including this bit:
Once, he even relieved himself on a Secret Serviceman who was shielding him from public view. When the man looked horrified, Johnson simply said, “That's all right, son. It's my prerogative.” His favorite power ploy, however, seemed to be dragging people into the bathroom with him—forcing them to continue their conversations with the president as he used the toilet.
- Take a gander at http://ruined-nation.com for some choice images of Cleveland.
- Lex Talionis ("law of the talon") is on Wikipedia here. The Babylonian predecessor to the Judaic Lex Talionis, generally called the "Code of Hammurabi", is on Wikipedia here.
- Some contemporary representation of the Wisdom of Solomon from Bruce Feiler (writing for Slate):
Solomon is the 10th of David's 17 sons, who succeeds his father in a disputed coronation to become the third king of Israel in the 10th century B.C. With the legitimacy of his reign in doubt (Bush-like!), Solomon pleads to God for help, saying he is a "young lad, with no experience in leadership" (1 Kings 3). Immediately thereafter, two prostitutes come to the king bearing a baby. Both women recently gave birth to a son, but one of the boys died. Each woman claims the living child. "Fetch me a sword," the king announces. "Cut the live child in two, and give half to one and half to the other." Faced with this radical gesture, one woman urges him to split the baby in two, while the other pleads, "Give her the live child; only don't kill it." The king instantly realizes that the woman who wants to protect the child must be the real mother and rewards her with the baby.
And now comes the most important part of the story. Soon, in what is surely a tribute for his bold decision, God rewards Solomon "with wisdom and discernment in great measure, with understanding as vast as the sands of the seashore."
So Solomonic, it turns out, should be held up not as a paradigm of splitting the difference but of using political maneuvering to flush out posturing and do what's right. - I am referring to two points in Matt Taibbi here:
- The first is this thesis from his book, Griftopia:
As complex as all the finances are, the politics aren't hard to follow. By creating an urgent crisis that can only be solved by those fluent in a language too complex for ordinary people to understand, the Wall Street crowd has turned the vast majority of Americans into non-participants in their own political future. There is a reason it used to be a crime in the Confederate states to teach a slave to read: Literacy is power. In the age of the CDS and CDO, most of us are financial illiterates. By making an already too-complex economy even more complex, Wall Street has used the crisis to effect a historic, revolutionary change in our political system - transforming a democracy into a two-tiered state, one with plugged-in financial bureaucrats above and clueless customers below.
- The second comes from an interview he gave in support of the book at http://creditcards.com:
I talked to Harvard law professor Elizabeth Warren about credit card contracts, and even she said she couldn't understand the standard contract that most people sign for a credit card. Most people just don't know what they're getting into when they get credit cards. There has to be some kind of regulatory solution to this because it's ridiculous how they are able to nail people for fees. These same companies use the same techniques for things like municipal debt and interest rate swaps; they are constantly gouging municipalities, states, individuals, it doesn't matter. Something has to be done about that.
- The first is this thesis from his book, Griftopia:
- The American Center for Democracy on the "small penis" rule of libel (and the use of libel law to protect corporate interests at the expense of the public weal).
- Frank Herbert on the convolution of Legalisms (in Dune):
The convoluted wording of legalisms grew up around the necessity to hide from ourselves the violence we intend toward each other. Between depriving a man of one hour from his life and depriving him of his life there exists only a difference of degree. You have done violence to him, consumed his energy.
- Here's me on mimetic revenge (in 2005): Mea est ultio et Ego retribuam (II).
- It occurred to me the morning after the show that the song I was remembering was from Rise Against: "Make It Stop (September's Children)".
- "40 lashes minus one" is Biblical. It is half rhetorical and half literal: basically, this is the ancient Judaic way to say "beat him within an inch of his life." Figure that 40 lashes kills you dead: one less than that therefore brings you to Death's Door (but doesn't ring the bell).
