G as in Good H as in Happy

Driven Underground and Into Corners, but not Gone

Even when things are normal, and especially when things begin to tilt topsy-turvy [as in the rapid disappearance of free speech in Canada under "Human Rights Commissions"], it's useful to estimate the probability of "who" is "where." See David Warren:

My own political education was provided in part by several impressive Czech exiles from Communism, with whom I fell in as a young man. What I learned from them is that under an ideological regime, the best men live in jail, or are assigned to work in tanneries and collieries, where other good men may be found. The worst men live in luxury and power.

Graphic on the subject of the Winter Olympics and deplorable goings-on in British Columbia.

Courtesy Maggie's Farm.

Sharia Law as a Real and Coherent System of Law

June 1, 2006

Dr. Sanity points to the transcript of a Bernard Lewis talk on the cartoon controversy as not only orchestrated, but nonsensical under the law it invokes. And in service of other masters than just an Arab prophet. Tangling minds is not a holy or lifegiving enterprise.
Update:
Rich expansion of the arguments. Courtesy Relapsed Catholic

Just to be Clear about Islamicist Outrage

Danish cartoons generating the [deliberately scheduled] current crisis were originally part of a Danish newspaper's experiment resulting from an effort to recruit reluctant [ed.: Reluctant, huh?...] illustrators for a book on Mohammed, intended to "create understanding," gentle, multi-culti-toned, education for non-Muslims. The author "hoped Danish children would be in a better position to understand their Muslim counterparts."

boyz 2 men: cathexis

February 3, 2006

Shrinkwrapped today posts on the subject of where a man invests his treasure, and how difficult and rewarding it is to dig it up and hand it over to Life. As the comment indicates, we liked it a lot.

Missing a Mark

Merton sees “sin” not as transgression but as soul sickness; not, in other words, a matter of doing this or that that one must atone for, but rather the being radically out of sorts with one’s essential humanity.

Either way, the chicken, the egg...

Quine, Grammar, and Other Philosophy Wonk Reflections

March 21,2005

Right Reason is a kind of [capital-R] Right-thinking open pub table, where no punches are pulled, political correctness isn't even on the menu, and all the while so far the conversation is civil, if unbuttoned. A lot of the fun is in the comments, here, a Monty-Pythonesque minuet around a point of grammar/vocabulary in Beowulf, following on a discussion of the relative stability of the perceptual and theoretical and Quine's model of human knowledge.

Conversations at Chez Dilys sometimes circle nervously around the analytical philosopher W. V. O. Quine, fascinated in horror by his offhand doctrine regarding imaginary friends.

That they do not exist is the linchpin of his epistemology.  How to explain so Existocentric a monster here to our not-yet-extinct soft and suede-like Pink D. family...?

Brilliant, Positioned to Ask Hard and Basic Questions

Via Sunday's hop-skip-and-jump through Marginal Revolution...

We're in awe of what is revealed in the NYTimes profile of Roland Fryer, a sometime collaborator with Steven Levitt, and a fresh voice beyond the barren conceptual loopings that have bounded  America's coversations on race. Makes us proud of our attenuated antediluvian association with a great university, when it can keep its mind on its business.

He never wanted to score any sympathy points, nor did he want to give his colleagues the opportunity to dismiss him as a freak accident, an exception to the standard rules of academic success -- which might imply that Harvard is not a normative goal for a young black man in the first place. There is also the fact that Fryer's particular science places a high premium on avoiding the personal, the anecdotal. The data are what matter in economics, and the more ruthlessness that an economist can summon to make sense of the data, the more useful his findings will be.

May the principle of Veritas protect this young professor in his independence, honesty, enthusiasm, and breadth of feeling. Definitely not part of a problem.

Update: Stephen J. Dubner reports on the fallout

After I wrote about Roland Fryer, he was assailed by fellow black scholars for having underplayed the degree to which racism afflicts black Americans.

He says that he (Dubner) particularly enjoys writing about economists, since they like data at least as much as they like posturing.

Kenneth Minogue in The New Criterion

Excellent discussion late yesterday over at Jay Rosen's PressThink ("a weblog in an obscure corner of the publishing world." Heh.) on Journalism: Power without Responsibility, the article by Kenneth Minogue that is a liberal arts education on the attitudinal roots of modern journalism.

Jay's comments were clogged with 127 responses, so, well, our own lair is roomy, n'est ce pas?

So many intriguing comments, Robin's about entering the space of kairos at Eastern Orthodox services seems to tie in with Minogue's journalistic "culture of scepticism," one that exhibits a visible hatred of the readers' state of perhaps ignorant reverence, at least reverence for the conventional objects and subjects.  If the journalistic goal is to strip away the veil on the back story of hitherto admired subjects, perhaps subjects that are not evil, just imperfect or complex; and if that goal perceptibly informs the theory and policy, the result is experienced as systematic psychological humiliation. And yes, the audience that reveres, admires, or loves these things will be furious unless the vile truth is so horrible it must be exposed.

Paul L.'s comment about the relentless activism of press stories, the woven threads that "something must be done (or sustained)," and "on the national level" is also important. The purpose of those  exhortations is to deprive the reader of comfort, trust, and contentment, to stir him/her to action. This may seem a very good thing to the writer, who is already in motion and either cynically or sincerely agitated.  The reader not in fervent agreement with the journalist's POV may not welcome agitation on someone else's agenda,* unless, again, the stakes are high enough to justify his being poked with an insistent rhetorical stick. Many journalists feel they produce what readers "need to know." More readers read looking for what interests them or contributes to their needs hierarchy (Maslow). "Being informed" must, in that scheme, somehow contribute to physiology, safety, belonging, esteem, or -- at the rare peak -- self-actualization. But that study is another post.

We here loved the Minogue article, thought it described very well the sense and objections of readers for whom liberation into zipless coupling, drugs, rock&roll, and anti-conservative activism is not demonstrably the rainbow's end. Those not temperamentally inclined to sympathize can nonetheless mine it for its information at many levels, without having actually to talk to us at boring and infuriating [as I think our obduracy must be to you  : )  ] length.   

*We're reminded of a Ziggy cartoon, in which multiple rabbits are shaking our hero awake at dawn, shrieking in distress, "Get up RIGHT NOW! There are mealy bugs on the lettuce!"

That's how some of the activist demands sound to the opposite side of the aisle.

Update: Of course, we now remember, the culture of scepticism finds its flower in Paul Ricoeur's hermeneutic of suspicion. The depth of the impact of the clash between the hermeneutic of suspicion, and the approach of trust and curiosity (which does not require gullibility) is explored in a particular context here. Method is not neutral.  It "tends;" it "leans;" it predisposes.

Rhetorically, these differences reflect the shifting of the burden of proof, a device intentionally imposed in the legal context, bleeding over under cover to mechanically determine the outcomes of discourse.

Update:  We notice Jay's association of Minogue with Ortega y Gasset's Revolt of the Masses, and suspect that the comparison is injudicious and perhaps unfair. We'd have to do some study, but don't want to swallow it whole.

Since Ortega said, As the masses, by definition, neither should nor can direct their own personal existence...this seems rather to tar Minogue with a serious anti-democratic brush, implying that the default attitude of suspicion is somehow more democratic than that of, perhaps, esteem for the processes of the polity.  No, preference for suspicion is the revolutionary mind-set, not the  stably democratic one, it is the perspective not of seamless change, but of overthrow and churn for its own sake.

Probably not a fair attribution, in our estimation, rather a lumping of "non-progressives" into a great disdainful mass.

Pierre Fermat and Jane Marple

March 16, 2005

Drawn back there by a link from a brand-new baby-steps super-senior blogger, we remember that the source of our recent blogging-for-the-brain post is Drs. Fernette and Brock Eide, two physicians in the State of Washington with a particular interest in what they call neurolearning, that is, brain-based learning and education involving learning differences and learning disabilities. Their rich website offers a dense set of references to studies in the neurology of learning.

The first post that caught our attention explains that problem-solving that is Aha! based (which they call "easy"), and that which surfaces after wrestling with a many-faceted problem (which they call "hard"), invoke two very different patterns of brain operation.

The first is, let us say,  Agatha Christie's Miss Marple remembering someone from her youth or small village, and applying it by analogy to illuminate character in a mystery that comes to her attention.

The area that lights up is that dreamy area of the right temporal lobe that might access more personal knowledge and experience - or 'autobiographical' memory. It might be that right analogy or metaphor is struck, the pattern is recognized and... Aha! The problem is solved.

The second pattern typically arises in solving elaborate engineering or mathematical problems, those who tackle Fermat's theorems, for instance.

A picture from a mathematical calculating prodigy... requires huge areas of cortex, both sides of the brain, and conscious manipulation of lots of facts, relationship and data. It looks like you might expect for a heavy bit of number crunching.

There is a whiff here of "feminine" and "masculine," landmarks and vectors, the intuitive and the rational, instant grasp and the stamina for digging through irrelevance and ambiguity to a robust outcome. Problem-solving and brainstorming sessions should be assiduously balanced, or weighted for the nature of the problem being addressed, rather simply fitting the proclivities of a leader or consultant. It's probably also valuable to be trained and challenged in whichever type comes less naturally.

And for a blogger who enjoys the kinesthetics of the keyboard and the moving letters on the screen, there's confirmation in another of their observations, that the activity (and perhaps sociability) of computer games can stimulate children reluctant to fulfil writing assignments.

Our professional colleagues agree. Multi-media features would improve most law-office tasks of not-so-briefs or memoranda, lend a spring to the step along the corridor toward the long night of "therefore"s and citations.

"like Tammy Faye with a law degree"

February 25, 2005

...well, that's got to sting. Or at least it's supposed to.

But from our vantage, what's so dismissable? Improvisational hair, plentiful cosmetic assistance, independent opinions, provincial accent, theological bricoleur, toughing it out through disgrace and near-extinction, a bit boundary-impaired...Sounds pretty human to us, and no more ridiculous with additional education than a number of folks who, in different circumstances, might be a bit less glib'n'glossy, a little more grating.

Years ago, a columnist wrote in a national newspaper that contempt toward women per se would not have been demolished until a plump woman in ruffles named Arabella could plausibly rise to the executive ranks in a major corporation.

Then, Tammy Faye wisecracks might be funnier, without the sting.

Though Noonan's body language analysis is interesting, given the panache and attention to style that prevails these days.

Via Betsy Newmark.