“People have, oddly enough, found something interesting to say about the essence of Force and the definition of “number.” They might have found something interesting to say about the essence of Truth. But in fact they haven’t. The history of attempts to do so, and of criticisms of such attempts, is roughly coextensive with the history of that literary genre we call “philosophy” – a genre founded by Plato. So pragmatists see the Platonic tradition as having outlived its usefulness. This does not mean that they have a new, non-Platonic set of answers to Platonic questions to offer, but rather that they do not think we should ask those questions any more. When they suggest that we not ask questions about the nature of Truth and Goodness, they do not invoke a theory about the nature of reality or knowledge or man which says that “there is no such thing” as Truth or Goodness. Nor do they have a “relativistic” or “subjectivist” theory of Truth or Goodness. They would simply like to change the subject.”

— Richard Rorty’s Platonists, Positivists, and Pragmatists (Introduction to Consequences of Pragmatism)

9:42 am  •  8 January 2012

• Now is not the time for austerity, which is what sweeping cuts to government would be. I do not believe in the Austrian prescription of “the beatings (economic pain) will continue until morale (the economy) improves.
• Austrian economics has little empirical evidence behind it. Worse, Austrians explicitly privilege reasoning from first principles over empiricism. I think that’s wrong. As an example of the consequences of that sort of thing, Paul has been predicting hyperinflation for *a long time*, yet I see no willingness to change his mind or learn from his mistakes. 
• It seems to me does not support individual liberty so much as he supports States’ Rights. States’ Rights allows State authoritarianism. As someone who follows Radley Balko, you surely understand that small governmental units can be just as oppressive as larger ones. (Historically, I suspect they have a worse record.) It is not the *size* of the institution, it’s the *nature* of it.
• Given his positions on immigration, abortion, and separation of church and state, I suspect his libertarianism is focused on people like him, not on the people as a whole. 
• He’s said global climate change is a hoax. Even leaving aside that that’s another example of his apparent tendency to find conspiracies by *them* everywhere (the UN is coming to take your guns!), I think that must lead to bad policy decisions. I suspect he is the sort of “free-market environmentalist” who completely ignores the reality of externalities.
• This “no bills but what’s explicitly called out in the constitution” is silly. There are problems that a bunch of bright guys 200+ years ago didn’t anticipate, and the constitutional amendment process is too slow, especially in an era where the informal institutions of government have broken down. (I wouldn’t mind folding the constitutionally-unjustified Air Force back into the Army, though.)  
• His conviction that the Market would enforce civil rights is ahistorical and flies in the face of what we know of Homo sap as a social animal different from H. economicus. 
• I think it’s fairly clear that health care isn’t a normal market. A free market in health care won’t produce the optimal result that a market in wheat does. And I think it’s wrong to let people die because they’re poor.

4:38 pm  •  2 January 2012

I liked Bleach in the first story arc and part of the second. The mythology was interesting. I liked some of the animation and use of backgrounds. I liked some of the characters, and they actually changed. It was an OK way to spend some time with Paul. However…

Since Ichigo got really powerful, it’s gotten really boring. Episodes are structured somewhat like Pokemon or Yuh-gi-oh: There’s a powerful guy who we know won’t fail. There’s a boastful opponent. There’s a big setpiece battle. This is all against a background of, well, nothing. Apparently no one ever does anything but prepare to fight, and then fight. (Doesn’t the Soul Society have things to do other than chase around after Ichigo and company?) What differs from episode to episode is pretty much just the weaponry: different sorts of monsters in Yuh-gi-oh, different kinds of zanpakutō in Bleach. 

So are there anime that are somewhere farther away from Yuh-gi-oh, but with still enough blood-n-thunder for a 16-year-old boy? 

Oh, and fewer of the really stupid bit characters.

9:58 pm  •  26 December 2011

Frank Crumit

Gene Vincent 

Sam Cooke 

Lindsay Lohan 

Rene Hall and his band (instrumental)

Johnny Cash  

Versions mentioned on Twitter: 

Big Bill Broonzy: 

Darby & Tarlton

Lonnie Donegan

1:53 pm  •  24 December 2011

11:35 pm  •  19 November 2011

Lear has given over his kingdom and his power to his daughters, retaining the services of 100 knights, who are, basically, old drunken comrades who have no particular value. After a time, Lear’s daughters try to talk him down from 100 knights to 50 to  25 to… Well, here’s the last bit, which I’ve always found gut-wrenching:

GONERIL 

Hear me, my lord; 
What need you five and twenty, ten, or five, 
To follow in a house where twice so many 
Have a command to tend you?

REGAN 

(Read that last slowly, with pauses between the words, because you and your sister know this is not a question but an ultimatum that the powerless old man must accept.)

Lear replies (and goes mad), with a speech that’s relevant, I think, to today’s Regan-esque claim that poor people aren’t really poor if they have x-boxes:

O reason not the need! Our basest beggars
Are in the poorest thing superfluous.
Allow not nature more than nature needs,
Man’s life is as cheap as beast’s. Thou art a lady:
If only to go warm were gorgeous,
Why, nature needs not what thou gorgeous wear’st,
Which scarcely keeps thee warm. But, for true need—
You heavens, give me that patience, patience I need.
You see me here, you gods, a poor old man,
As full of grief as age, wretched in both.
If it be you that stirs these daughters’ hearts
Against their father, fool me not so much
To bear it tamely; touch me with noble anger,
And let not women’s weapons, water drops,
Stain my man’s cheeks. No, you unnatural hags!
I will have such revenges on you both
That all the world shall—I will do such things—
What they are, yet I know not; but they shall be
The terrors of the earth. You think I’ll weep.
No, I’ll not weep.
I have full cause of weeping, but this heart
Shall break into a hundred thousand flaws,
Or ere I’ll weep. O Fool, I shall go mad! 

“King Lear,” Act 2, Scene 4, lines 263-285

9:20 pm  •  7 November 2011

1. Brooks is taking advantage of the always-convenient Red State / Blue State “divide” by saying the 0.1% live in the blue states. But that doesn’t mean that their money comes from only the blue states. And it doesn’t mean that the political access and influence their money buys them affects only the Blue states. 

The financial crisis affected homeowners in Arizona in a big way, despite its Red State cred.

2. Brooks is strongly implying that the existence of the college-educated Red State elite is the cause of their neighbor’s problems. It’s not, for example, that manufacturing jobs went overseas in the 80’s. (Consider: you could use his same numbers to say—as many do—that the college graduates are doing fairly poorly and those who didn’t go to college are doing much worse. What would be the different effect of a column written that way?)

3. He shifts attention from a problem that is growing increasingly worse, especially over the last decade, to one that stopped growing worse well before the last decade. 

4. The tax money that could come from increasing taxes on those who’ve done so well (helping with one problem) could be spent on increased access to college (helping with the other). But he presents them as an exclusive choice: “you have a much bigger and different agenda” (my emphasis).

5. He lumps together the Red State economic and social problems into one big pile. He needs to do this in order justify calling the thing he’s pointing at while saying ignore the problem behind the curtain a “much bigger” problem.

Now, I bet sending more people to college would help with the Red States’ moral decline, but it’s exceedingly odd to find someone who professes to be a Burkean conservative weighing in on the side of economic determinism. He sure doesn’t do that when talking about inner city problems. And I strongly suspect that if OWS fizzles, we won’t see David Brooks taking a stand with actual concrete proposals to help the Red State losers. Instead, their usefulness as foils in one particular diversionary argument over, they’ll be back to representing the virtues of the Real America and Small Towns and the Heartland.

——-

Brooks is the go-to guy when you need a defense of the status quo or Republican policy presented in a way that appeals to the NPR tote-bag set. Need to stop OWS, a movement that’s about solidarity (“the 99%”)? You divide them. It’s not 99% - it’s Blue State people stealing attention from Red State problems. Or it’s about those income-sucking college graduates. And, as always, we can’t forget that any protest is by definition dominated by dirty hippies. 

12:58 pm  •  1 November 2011

The argument is that “thank you” and “obrigado” and “merci” are all ways of saying “I am in your debt”, which is a way of stating a position of inferiority. Saying “my pleasure” is saying “why no, you couldn’t be in debt to me because I did it for my own pleasure”. Saying “no problem” is saying “It cost me nothing to do that, so your debt is likewise nothing”. I don’t know if I believe this, mind you. But I’ll remember it every time I get a flash of “no problem” annoyance.

4:41 pm  •  21 September 2011

Extra dollars come from two places:

1. Specialization. Michael Jordan would be better off hiring a neighborhood kid to mow his lawn, even if he’s better at it. He shouldn’t do everything for himself; he should concentrate on things that he’s exceptional at. (This is called comparative advantage.) Similarly, you’re better off doing whatever you do than, say, inspecting your meat or ensuring the pills you’re buying from the drugstore are actually the pills they said you were getting.
2. Trade. When I was a kid, I wondered why cave men had so little and we have so much. It seems like magic. Where did it all come from? It’s because when I sell you some corn I grew, it’s a better than even trade. I value the money you give me more than I value having the corn. But you value the corn more than the money. We both win. 
   
   Now, for most things, markets work best. But for some, they don’t. For example, markets have negative externalities. A polluting company costs people downwind to suffer, but there’s usually no way for those people to present the company with a bill. They could band together, storm the factory, and burn it down, but it seems to work better overall if they create a government that can pass and enforce laws either regulating the pollution or requiring compensation. 
   
   You, ideally, are paying the government $X to get things you value more than the $X, just as if it were selling corn. The complicating thing is the only way to get a government worth paying (one that, when it comes down to it, has the guns to enforce the laws) is to band together with a bunch of other people who value different things in different ways. For the mythical average person, this is less efficient than if the factory just wouldn’t pollute, and more efficient than everyone having to suck it up and live with rotten air. But for someone who doesn’t live near the factory, it seems crazy to pay government to get the factory to stop polluting - unless you’re sure that it’s fair: that the government’s doing something good for you that someone living downwind of the factory doesn’t care about. And it’s also something of a gamble: some people are just going to flat-out lose on average, across the board, on all the issues they care about. You just have to wonder whether it’d be a better gamble that a radically reduced government wouldn’t end up like 1890’s USA, which was pretty unpleasant for average people, certainly in comparison to today.
   
   

The Republican Party’s current approach is to engineer the mindset that:

1. You, personally, are losing.
2. There is an easily identifiable group of people (*them*, the people who aren’t real Americans, those shiftless unemployed) who (a) are getting more than they deserve and (b) don’t have much political power, so…
3. The money being spent on *them* should be taken away. Once that happens, it’ll be spent on you, or left in your hands. 

I’m kind of dubious about all three. I prefer a conservative approach of being cautious about changing what’s working OK. Since WWII, people in the USA have gotten remarkably well off. The middle class, in particular, was practically *created* by government programs: the GI Bill, VA loans, huge expansion in availability of college, the Interstate Highway System, etc. We could be doing a lot worse. I’m pretty sure we will be.

12:00 pm  •  6 August 2011

“Nope. Milk components are mainly synthesized in epithelial cells and secreted into luminal spaces where they combine with fluid and electrolytes to make milk. It has a lot more and varied components than mucus does. Mucus is much more boring.”

6:57 pm  •  27 July 2011