Latest Posts by dclcq - Page 5
You coffee shop revolutionary son of a bitch.
Felipe Andres Coronel
Let me introduce a pair of rather less admirable siblings in the relativist family. The first of these is the familiar "freshman relativist," who urges that all opinions and actions are equally good and should be equally tolerated. He has two mantras: "Who's to say?" and "That's just your opinion." The other sibling is less amiable. Instead of a grin, he wears a sneer. He takes himself to have seen through or debunked the claims of others. So when we use words like truth, reason, objectivity, justice, fairness, or progress, we may think we are putting on robes of state, dignities that with luck we have earned and come to deserve, by doing our thinking properly. But to this sibling we are doing nothing but putting on tawdry theatrical props, disguises, and masks - and what is disguised is a Pandora's box of ugly things like persuasion, rhetoric, self-deception, and ultimately power and force. So where the previous sibling was tolerant and vacant, this sibling is destructive and bitter. Standing on the shoulders of modern thinkers, he tries to crush them under the weight of contempt. But this sibling is equally obnoxious. He is oblivious to his own intellectual limitations and laziness. He could not describe a transistor, let alone make one, but he will use computers and faxes and mobile phones full of them to spread the message that "transistor" is just a construct of Western bourgeois culture. Where the freshman relativist was promiscuously vacant, this relativist is promiscuously suspicious. - We still have to make judgments and act in the light of them. We just have to make sure that we do so as well as we can. Once we have to make up our minds about something, the issue is the issue. The other siblings duck issues, either retreating to an ironic, playful, aesthetic detachment from the business of life, or substituting allegiance to a realpolitik of naked force. ...They shy away from convictions and causes altogether. They suppose they have seen through the whole business of taking issues at face value. They say that we should not and cannot judge whether Tolstoy is a more interesting writer than Stephen King, or whether there was ever a Holocaust, or whether a religion that enjoins slaughtering the infidel is worse than one which does not. Expressions of opinion on such matters would be bad form: politically incorrect, disguises for colonialism, liberal hegemony, dominations of gender, and so on. It is this paralysis of judgment that the commentators lament. You cannot drive down the freeway with a mind vacant of opinion on where the traffic is and how fast it is going.
Simon Blackburn Relativism's Ugly Siblings
In the period between the attack on the World Trade Center towers and the American response, a reporter from the Los Angeles Times called to ask me if the events of the past weeks meant 'the end of relativism.' (I had an immediate vision of a headline - RELATIVISM ENDS: MILLIONS CHEER - and a photograph with the caption, 'At last, I can say what I believe and mean it.')
Stanley Fish
She found it difficult to discuss physics, much less debate it, with her predominantly male classmates. At first they paid a kind of selective inattention to her remarks. There would be a slight pause, and then they would go on as if she had not spoken. Occasionally they would acknowledge her remark, even praise it, and then again continue undeflected. She was reasonably sure her remarks were not entirely foolish, and did not wish to be ignored, much less ignored and patronized alternately. Part of it—but only a part—she knew was due to the softness of her voice. So she developed a physics voice, a professional voice: clear, competent, and many decibels above conversational. With such a voice it was important to be right. She had to pick her moments. It was hard to continue long in such a voice, because she was sometimes in danger of bursting out laughing. So she found herself leaning towards quick, sometimes cutting, interventions, usually enough to capture their attention; then she could go on for a while in a more usual tone of voice. Every time she found herself in a new group she would have to fight her way through again, just to dip her oar into the discussion. The boys were uniformly unaware even that there was a problem. Sometimes she would be engaged in a laboratory exercise or a seminar when the instructor would say, “Gentlemen, let’s proceed,” and sensing Ellie’s frown would add, “Sorry, Miss Arroway, but I think of you as one of the boys.” The highest compliment they were capable of paying was that in their minds she was not overtly female. She had to fight against developing too combative a personality or becoming altogether a misanthrope. She suddenly caught herself. “Misanthrope” is someone who dislikes everybody, not just men. And they certainly had a word for someone who hates women: “misogynist.” But the male lexicographers had somehow neglected to coin a word for the dislike of men. They were almost entirely men themselves, she thought, and had been unable to imagine a market for such a word.
Carl Sagan, Contact (22)
“The boys were uniformly unaware even that there was a problem.”
(via varanine)
Preparations for the Coriolanus live broadcast - I can relate to this on a psychological level.
(x)
She didn’t like to be talked about. Equally, she didn’t like not to be talked about, when the high-minded chatter rushed on as though she was not there. There was no pleasing her, in fact. She had the grace, even at eleven, to know there was no pleasing her. She thought a lot, analytically, about other people’s feelings, and had only just begun to realize that this was not usual, and not reciprocated.
The Children’s Book, A.S. Byatt
Finnish bread advertisement, hinted to me by anonymous submitter. “Only in this country you can avertise bread this way.” This piece has no subtitles but here’s translation:
Father: “Well are you hungry or not?” KOVAA KUIN ELÄMÄ (HARD AS LIFE)
(And if you’re interested in the last part the guy says that you can get jälkiuunileipä or after-oven-bread in smaller bits too)
Harold Feinstein, Window Washer, 23rd st loft, NYC, 1972
Peter Bialobrzeski
I think, today's irony ends up saying: 'How totally banal of you to ask what I really mean.' Anyone with the heretical gall to ask an ironist what he actually stands for ends up looking like a hysteric or a prig.
David Foster Wallace
The reality of millions of years of adaptation to a ruggedly physical existence will not just go away because desks were invented.
Mark Rippetoe
When we live constantly in the abstract - whether it be abstractness of thought or of feelings one has thought - it soon comes about that contrary to our own feelings and our own will the things in real life, which, according to us, we should feel most deeply turn into phantasms. Living so much on one's imagination actually erodes one's ability to imagine, especially one's ability to imagine the real. Living mentally on what is not and cannot be, we are, in the end, unable even to ponder what might really be.
Fernando Pessoa Book of Disquiet
National #demo2012 #6 by Marc Fairhurst on Flickr.
Early in the 19th century, Sydney Smith, one of the founders of the Edinburgh Review, remarked that if we had made the same progress in the culinary arts as we have made in education, we should still be eating soup with our hands.
Joseph Epstein
Song of the night. A prelude to dreams.