The anti-anti-contrarian

I had an idea for a blog called the Anti-Contrarian, or something like that, which would defend the conventional wisdom from the Slate or Freakonomics sort of school of commentary, where everything is “counterintuitive” and has a “hidden side” and things are never quite what they seem. The thesis would be that a lot of things are exactly as they seem — we really do need to wean ourselves off fossil fuels, we really should spend more on foreign aid, including food (and cash) aid to deepest corruptest Africa, private for-profit insurance really is an exceptionally stupid way to fund health care. That sort of thing.

Then I went and stumbled on this profile of John Gray, who is in a lot of ways basically who I want to be when I grow up — at the age of 61 he’s retiring from teaching political philosophy at the London School of Economics so that he can write and philosophize full-time. And in the course of his conversation with the interviewer, he mentions a couple of topics on which I hold opinions that really could be considered somewhat contrarian:

There’s something a bit sinister about Scandinavia. Gray only mentions Denmark and Norway in an aside about China and Russia not being the world’s only oil-mad villains. But for me, there’s something sort of too-good-to-be-true about these forward-thinking egalitarian social democracies. Denmark, for one, is suffering from its own success: there’s relatively little inequality within the country, their standard of living is much higher than the European norm, and their immigration policies are famously liberal. One or two of these facts is going to have to change. Wealth-wise, if not otherwise, Scandinavia is basically the USA of Europe, with the far-right anti-immigrant loons to prove it. Pretty soon, if they go on being rich and egalitarian, they’re going to have to lock the doors and start drowning the refugees, Italian-style. Meanwhile they’re the happiest people in Europe, the bastards.

Nuclear power, rather than wind or solar or wishes and dreams, will be the likeliest large-scale replacement for oil and coal. Yes, this will be bad in a lot of very big ways, people will be sickened and killed and some fairly large areas of the earth’s surface will become uninhabitable. But we’ll end up reluctantly deciding that that’s better than a return to the eighteenth century. I’m not saying I like the idea of widespread nuclear power, but I think it’s inevitable.

Richard Dawkins is a cock. Gray doesn’t explicitly say so but I think he’d agree with me. I’m as irreligious as anyone, but I do recognize that people have all sorts of reasons for religious belief, many of which are a lot more illuminating than “because they’re idiots.” I don’t find any of them personally convincing, but I do expect people to differ on the matter.

Point being, go and read this guy, especially if you’re a total pessimist who sometimes wonders if you might be so liberal you’re actually conservative.

The fat panda dreams of becoming a kung fu warrior

Berlusconi is our own Kung Fu Panda. As the Marx Brothers might have put it, ‘this man may look like a corrupt idiot and act like a corrupt idiot, but don’t let that deceive you – he is a corrupt idiot.’

Slavoj Žižek in the London Review of Books

I have that pig disease

And yet for some reason I’m feeling like blogging again. It has something to do with re-reading Nick Hornby’s books of book reviews, and something to do with reading a whole bunch of old issues of n+1, and also the odd bit of David Foster Wallace stuff, both fiction and non-fiction, and thinking about how just about everything in the world ought to be examined more carefully, at least when so doing doesn’t completely take the fun out of it, whatever it we happen to be talking about here. Something to do with all that, but I’m not sure what exactly, because I can’t remember things, because I have that pig disease.

Wait, I remembered one thing: this New York Times Magazine profile of Rafael Nadal, which is an excellent counterpoint or counterpart or counter-something to the oft-mentioned David Foster Wallace thing about Roger Federer, the two of which in combination make me wish Nick Hornby liked tennis, and was my friend, so I could chat with him about what it’s like living during an era where basically if not the Mozart and Beethoven then at least maybe the Wagner and Schoenberg of tennis are both alive and duking it out on our television screens every couple of weeks. Maybe I would post snippets of our IM conversations so that you, dear reader, could chuckle along.

My Old School

Taking a spin on the trusty old Google I find my old film professor Phil Solomon has been up to something new. I knew him for films made from heavily treated and painstakingly re-printed 8mm footage, films full of magical, tactile textures, of which these jpgs are but a sorry shadow (go here to see what this sort of thing looks like in motion):

In the eight or so years since I was in school, it seems he’s gotten up to something else entirely — a series of non-narrative (and violence-free) digital videos made using landscapes and characters from the Grand Theft Auto games*:

My first reaction was that old jealous “I wish I’d thought of that” feeling. It’s a brilliant concept, and if anyone can carry it off with sensitivity, it’s Phil. I’ve spent many, many hours playing these games, often freely roaming around the landscapes, soaking in the weather, the light. I should have been capturing footage, not hijacking police cars.

The move to video is surprising enough—he, like most everyone on the experimental side of the Colorado film department, was a die-hard celluloid addict, an old-school film-in-a-bucket type. But it’s the decision to use video games as a starting point that’s almost shocking—not so much Dylan goes electric as maybe Elliott Carter making ringtones, or Gerhard Richter doing Windows desktop icons.

Here he is talking to an Ohio newspaper about a show and installation in Columbus, more or less summing up the whole series. Now all that remains is to actually go and see the things.

 

*—yes I know there’s a whole genre devoted to this sort of thing but I don’t think I’m being overly snobbish in saying this isn’t exactly Sims sitcoms or Warcraft porn.

Knowing your audience

If you, like me, are one of the approximately seven people who:

A) consider themselves unbelievers
B) find the Nü Atheism of Dawkins, Dennett, Harris et al absolutely insufferable
C) want to read about four thousand words of what John Gray has to say about it all

…then by all means go on over here and take a look. It’s pretty much the last word on the subject, plus about 4,282 others on the decline of secularism, the end of liberalism, and the death of the Enlightenment. I had it in my mind to write a pithy little post commenting on those bus ads, but he does it better than I could, which is why he’s a professor at the LSE and I’m, well, something else.

On nice things, and why we can’t have them

Imagine my despair at only finding out that Montreal Canadiens tough guy Georges Laraque has a blog now, when he’s forced by his team’s PR policy to take the thing down. Which is too bad, as “people with weird jobs” is probably one of the most inherently interesting genres of blogging.

If you’re not familiar with the concept, Georges Laraque is a man who is employed by a professional hockey team in the capacity of “enforcer”; he’s there not to score, or to defend, but to fight with members of the opposing team.

In general I’m opposed to the idea of fighting in hockey, and although that’s a very unpopular opinion among hockey fans now, I think history, eventually, will be on my side. One day in the 2040s we’ll be watching whatever the 2040s equivalent of Mad Men is, and hockey fights will be among the period-correct barbarities that we’ll snicker at, knowingly. Still, I find the concept of hockey fighting as a sport within a sport endlessly fascinating, and I’ll miss this little window into that world.

Here’s what a professional hockey fight looks like. Note the audio during the replay, where Laraque politely asks his opponent if he wants to “go,” and then wishes him luck. And if you still wonder why this sort of thing is best left to the professionals, there’s this, about which the less said the better.

Goodbye to all that

One of the best things about it being December is that there’s no need to read the political blogs anymore. If the past is a foreign country, then October is a weird place where people care what Josh Marshall and Kevin Drum think.

December is for Will Smith solving a Rubik’s Cube on television, Rod Benson cryptically twittering about whether he’s headed back to the Dakota Wizards, and me waiting around for the Premier League transfer window to open so Arsene Wenger can refuse to buy a proper wide midfielder or a center-back to replace William Gallas and thereby go on to get edged out of the top four by Villa or worse, but at a budget price (see basically six months’ worth of Arseblog for citation).

It’s also for finding your cat’s twin sister on the ASPCA website, reading about David Foster Wallace’s undergrad philosophy thesis¹, downloading On The Hour from iTunes, and buying an awesome new issue of n+1 which features an extended interview with a hedge fund manager who speaks so fluently I think he might actually be a fictional construct. It’s sort of disgraceful-slash-brilliant that the hipster press is doing a better job covering the financial world² than the actual financial press.

 

1) — obviously the theme here is the ascendancy of the timeless concerns of a Kottke over the quotidian ephemeralities of a Moulitsas or an Yglesias.

2) — see also This American Life.

Science!

If you’re going to read only one of Ben Goldacre’s excellent Bad Science columns, let it be this one.

Also: I know the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator isn’t exactly the height of scientific rigor, but I was impressed that this thing pegged me for an INTP solely based on a statistical analysis of my blogbound witterings.

Marxists under the bed

Sorry to go all Saint George on you but it just so happens I’m re-reading George Orwell’s collected journalism and I’m up to 1944:

It will be seen that, as used, the word ‘Fascism’ is almost entirely meaningless. In conversation, of course, it is used even more wildly than in print. I have heard it applied to farmers, shopkeepers, Social Credit, corporal punishment, fox-hunting, bull-fighting, the 1922 Committee, the 1941 Committee, Kipling, Gandhi, Chiang Kai-Shek, homosexuality, Priestley’s broadcasts, Youth Hostels, astrology, women, dogs and I do not know what else.

My recollection on this is probably faulty (thanks to the recency illusion), but I don’t remember the word “Marxist” being thrown about quite so loosely before about October. In fact I was still a bit worked up about “Marxisant” only about three weeks ago. But now it seems it’s absolutely commonplace to hear Barack Obama described as a Marxist. Today those who only go so far as to call him a socialist seem extraordinarily sober and measured in their criticism.

This is a helpful development in so far as it’s useful in identifying which commentators are probably best ignored for the next four years, if not forever. But it’s another useful word, one that actually used to mean something, that’s now on the verge of being ruined. I would just point out that to call Obama a Marxist is only to enrich our language with a superfluous synonym for “someone who wants to raise the top marginal tax rate from 35% to around 39%.”

Orwell again:

All one can do for the moment is to use the word with a certain amount of circumspection and not, as is usually done, degrade it to the level of a swearword.

It was already too late for “Fascist,” and now, at least in the United States, it’s too late for “Marxist.”

That’s nice

Someone has sprung another mind-leak.

Bush’s Treasury is about to open the way for sharia law to be imposed upon America’s banking system.

I’m sure that’s literally true. But apparently that’s the least of our problems.

Millions of Americans remain lion-hearted, decent, rational and sturdy. They find themselves today abandoned, horrified, deeply apprehensive for the future of their country and the free world. No longer the land of the free and the home of the brave; they must now look elsewhere.

Oh, the poor things. Meanwhile, take it from me: those of us who are weasel-hearted, indecent, irrational and flimsy, we’re fucking ecstatic.

[Via Unspeak]