Consillyence

suffocative: Fantoft stavkirke, Norway by Erika Szabo

Wed, 24 Apr 2013 20:15:34 -0400

suffocative:

Fantoft stavkirke, Norway by Erika Szabo

amandarust: stars and ice, iceland

Mon, 25 Feb 2013 06:51:46 -0500

amandarust:

stars and ice, iceland

"Can someone else plug in the Laffster technology and drive three times the amount of videos, three..."

Wed, 02 Jan 2013 13:05:51 -0500

“Can someone else plug in the Laffster technology and drive three times the amount of videos, three times the amount of ads watched and ultimately drive revenue? Because they’re coming there, and they’re interacting. They’re engaging.”

- Laffster CEO Daniel Altman in this tedious NPR story. Pity the person who had to make punctuation choices while transcribing this soundbite.

Listening to this story made me think of this video, which made me laugh, but I guess I’ll never understand why until someone represents that association as an explicit set of repeatable procedures.

"I must confess to considerable irritation on this score. When people tell me that “Story” does this..."

Wed, 26 Dec 2012 17:26:56 -0500

“

I must confess to considerable irritation on this score. When people tell me that “Story” does this or that for us, I always want to throw up my hands and cry, Which story? Haven’t you noticed the astonishing variety of literary productions? Haven’t you noticed that some are brilliant and many are stupid and most are somewhere in between? That some are mean-spirited while others are generous-hearted? And that people don’t agree about which are which? How can anyone who has thought about such matters for five seconds think that you can say anything meaningful about an abstraction as vast and wooly as “Story”?

Christians have been guiltier than most of this tendency, arguing that people love stories because they are responding to the story God is telling through salvation history. Thus Brian Wicker’s 1975 book The Story-Shaped World; which sounds good until you ask which story the world is shaped like. The One Hundred Days of Sodom? The Tale of Squirrel Nutkin? Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen? It matters, you know. Now of course, a reasonable person is likely to reply that the gospel is the story Wicker is referring to, which is true. Why not, then, refer to “The Gospel-Shaped World”? Because, I submit, Story is a word to conjure with, as Wicker and Gottschall alike, in their very different ways, know. But it is time to stop conjuring.

”

- Me on Just-So Stories in Books and Culture — behind a paywall, though. Sorry. (via ayjay)

"You should be skeptical of Congress’s ability to develop a rational policy given the knowledge problem X presents and the public choice pressures at work."

Tue, 04 Dec 2012 12:45:27 -0500

A generalized version of a good sentence from Jerry Brito’s contribution to Copyright Unbalanced: From Incentive to Excess, found via willwilkinson.

Digging Out in the Rockaways With the Help of Military...

Wed, 14 Nov 2012 00:49:47 -0500

Digging Out in the Rockaways With the Help of Military Veterans (WNYC)

"The Framers, so often credited with farsightedness, saw no farther than the noble Washington. Only..."

Wed, 07 Nov 2012 00:01:08 -0500

“The Framers, so often credited with farsightedness, saw no farther than the noble Washington. Only the Anti-Federalists, it seems, could envision Lyndon B. Johnson or George W. Bush. Well, I hate to break it to the demigods of the Philadelphia Convention, but George Washington had not discovered the elixir of eternal life. He was not going to live forever, let alone serve as president for the life of the republic. Lesser men would come along, and be granted those same powers, and the powers would expand, as the executive branch expanded, until you have men I’d not trust to serve as Exalted Rulers of the Batavia Elks Club being serenaded by “Hail to the Chief” and sending hundreds of thousands of American boys to the other side of the world to kill and die for… whatever it was and is that men killed and died for in Vietnam and Iraq.”

- Who Needs a President? | The American Conservative (via mwfrost)

centuriespast: TURNER, Joseph Mallord WilliamSnow Storm,...

Tue, 06 Nov 2012 03:13:26 -0500

centuriespast:

TURNER, Joseph Mallord William
Snow Storm, Hannibal and his Army Crossing the Alps
1812
Oil on canvas, 145 x 236,5 cm
Tate Gallery, London

"The old pre-industrial community and culture are gone and cannot be brought back. Nor is it..."

Tue, 02 Oct 2012 12:56:26 -0400

“The old pre-industrial community and culture are gone and cannot be brought back. Nor is it desirable that they should be. They were too unjust, too squalid, and too custom-bound. Virtues which were once nursed unconsciously by the forces of nature must now be recovered and fostered by a deliberate effort of the will and the intelligence. In the future, societies will not grow of themselves. They will be either made consciously or decay.”

- W. H. Auden, Introduction to The Oxford Book of Light Verse (1938)

Life’s work as I see it, expressed concisely 74 years ago.
(via mwfrost)

"In the last culture war, relativism’s influence was evident in the stock arguments that kept..."

Mon, 17 Sep 2012 10:50:37 -0400

“In the last culture war, relativism’s influence was evident in the stock arguments that kept appearing in magazines and op-ed pages: Breaking taboos is valuable for its own sake; people have a right to make their own choices and not be judged for it; what you call a social evil is really just a cultural difference; et cetera.But those articles are no longer seen so often. Now, the most annoyingly ubiquitous genre in journalism is the social-scientific analysis, as if a person can’t speak with authority without citing economics or sociology.This is bad enough in political conversation, but it has begun to affect people’s ethical thinking. Under the new cultural rules, moral condemnation is a legitimate thing to express, but only if you can demonstrate that the sin you want to condemn makes someone twice as likely to take antidepressants or 40 percent less likely to be promoted at work. Malcolm Gladwell and the Freakonomics guys have more moral authority than the archbishop of New York. Great artists are producing movies, TV shows, and songs about tough moral dilemmas, but although liberals buy the tickets and the albums, they don’t take the art they consume very seriously. When moral questions arise, they forget The Wire and The Hold Steady and ask what the studies show.”

- Helen Rittelmeyer at The American Spectator : Moral Relativism, R.I.P. (via mwfrost)

Stanley Rosen talks about Plato for two hours on C-SPAN

Thu, 06 Sep 2012 12:22:02 -0400

Stanley Rosen talks about Plato for two hours on C-SPAN

"The other thing for which I am grateful to philosophy is that, at least in the world in which I..."

Wed, 05 Sep 2012 09:55:28 -0400

“

The other thing for which I am grateful to philosophy is that, at least in the world in which I first sought to make a name for myself, one was required to write clearly, concisely, and logically. Wittgenstein said that whatever can be said can be said clearly, and that became something of a mantra for my generation. At one time, the British journal Analysis sponsored regular competitions: some senior philosopher propounded a problem, which one was required to solve in 600 words or less, the winner receiv- ing as a prize a year’s subscription to the magazine. Here is an example of the kind of problem, propounded by J. L. Austin, that engaged Analysis’s subscribers: “What kind of ‘if ’ is the ‘if ’ in ‘I can if I choose?’ ” (Hint: it cannot be the truth-conditional “if ” of material implication, as in, “If p, then q.”)

I tried answering all the problems, and never won a prize. But the exercise taught me how to write. The great virtues of clarity, concision, and coherence, insisted upon throughout the Anglo-American philosophical community, have immunized the profession against the stylistic barbarity of Continental philosophy, which, taken up as it has been since the early 1970s by the humanistic disciplines—by literary theory, anthropology, art history, and many others—has had a disastrous effect, especially on academic culture, severely limiting the ability of those with advanced education to contribute to the intellectual needs of our society. It is true that analytical philoso- phers, reinforced by the demands of their profession to work within their constrict- ing horizons, have not directly served society by applying their tools to the densely knotted problems of men, to use Dewey’s term for where the energies of philosophy should be directed. At one point it became recognized that “clarity is not enough.” It is not enough. But the fact that it remains a stylistic imperative in most Anglo-American philosophy departments means that these virtues are being kept alive against the time when the humanities need to recover them.

”

- Arthur C. Danto (available to subscribers only, I think( (via ayjay)

"The funny thing is that, to me, it’s belief that involves the most uncompromising attention to the..."

Sat, 01 Sep 2012 11:20:12 -0400

“

The funny thing is that, to me, it’s belief that involves the most uncompromising attention to the nature of things of which you are capable. Belief demands that you dispense with illusion after illusion, while contemporary common sense requires continual, fluffy pretending – pretending that might as well be systematic, it’s so thoroughly incentivised by our culture. Take the well-known slogan on the atheist bus in London. I know, I know, that’s an utterance by the hardcore hobbyists of unbelief, but in this particular case they’re pretty much stating the ordinary wisdom of everyday disbelief. The atheist bus says: “There’s probably no God. So stop worrying and enjoy your life.” All right: which word here is the questionable one, the aggressive one, the one that parts company with recognisable human experience so fast it doesn’t even have time to wave goodbye? It isn’t “probably”. New Atheists aren’t claiming anything outrageous when they say that there probably isn’t a God. In fact they aren’t claiming anything substantial at all, because, really, how would they know? It’s as much of a guess for them as it is for me. No, the word that offends against realism here is “enjoy”. I’m sorry – enjoy your life? I’m not making some kind of neo-puritan objection to enjoyment. Enjoyment is lovely. Enjoyment is great. The more enjoyment the better. But enjoyment is one emotion. To say that life is to be enjoyed (just enjoyed) is like saying that mountains should only have summits, or that all colours should be purple, or that all plays should be by Shakespeare. This really is a bizarre category error.

But not necessarily an innocent one. Not necessarily a piece of fluffy pretending that does no harm. The implication of the bus slogan is that enjoyment would be your natural state if you weren’t being “worried” by us believers and our hellfire preaching. Take away the malignant threat of God-talk, and you would revert to continuous pleasure, under cloudless skies. What’s so wrong with this, apart from it being total bollocks? Well, in the first place, that it buys a bill of goods, sight unseen, from modern marketing. Given that human life isn’t and can’t be made up of enjoyment, it is in effect accepting a picture of human life in which those pieces of living where easy enjoyment is more likely become the only pieces that are visible. If you based your knowledge of the human species exclusively on adverts, you’d think that the normal condition of humanity was to be a good-looking single person between 20 and 35, with excellent muscle-definition and/or an excellent figure, and a large disposable income. And you’d think the same thing if you got your information exclusively from the atheist bus, with the minor difference, in this case, that the man from the Gold Blend couple has a tiny wrinkle of concern on his handsome forehead, caused by the troublesome thought of God’s possible existence: a wrinkle about to be removed by one magic application of Reason™.

”

- Francis Spufford. This is from the first chapter of his remarkable new book, which Francis was kind enough to send to me in typescript a few months ago. It is an amazingly funny, insightful, honest, and moving book, and I hope everyone with even a passing interest in the realities of religious experience will read it. (via ayjay)

Video

Sat, 18 Aug 2012 19:50:48 -0400

"This leads me to my central fixation, which is the notion that most of our political and social..."

Tue, 14 Aug 2012 16:35:43 -0400

“This leads me to my central fixation, which is the notion that most of our political and social conflicts are best understood as gang wars between people with different kinds of capital — people with cultural capital waging war on people with economic capital, or people with erotic capital deploying it to gain access to economic or cultural or social capital, and so forth. Egalitarianism in one of these spheres can have profoundly inegalitarian consequences in others. The most prosaic example is the person bereft of erotic capital who amasses economic capital in order to build a more satisfying life. One of the more commonly expressed anxieties about modern market societies is that they are defined by a successful imperialism of economic capital, which risks subordinating all other human values to the pursuit of wealth. The end result would be an arid monoculture. My own view is that this is wrong. We fixate on the imperialism of economic capital because it is a fundamentally more tractable idea than cultural or social or erotic capital, and so we underestimate the ways in which these non-pecuniary endowments shape the intellectual and social playing field.”

- Reihan Salam

"Consumerism now wants you to be single, so it sells this as sexy. The irony is that it’s now more..."

Sun, 12 Aug 2012 12:29:28 -0400

“

Consumerism now wants you to be single, so it sells this as sexy. The irony is that it’s now more radical to attempt to be in a long-term relationship and a long-term job, to plan for the future, maybe even to attempt to have children, than it is to be single. Coupledom, and long-term connections with others in a community, now seem the only radical alternative to the forces that will reduce us to isolated, alienated nomads, seeking ever more temporary ‘quick fix’ connections with bodies who carry within them their own built-in perceived obsolescence.

The solution: Get radical, get hitched, demand commitment from partners and employers. Say no to the seductions of the disposable singles market.

”

- Ewan Morrison: what I’m thinking about … why capitalism wants us to stay single (via ayjay)

"The question for an adult reader of Lewis Caroll, however, is not the author’s psychological..."

Wed, 11 Jul 2012 10:13:39 -0400

“The question for an adult reader of Lewis Caroll, however, is not the author’s psychological peculiarities, but the validity of his heroine. Is Alice, that is to say, an adequate symbol for what every human should try to be like?

I am inclined to answer yes. A girl of eleven (or a boy of twelve) who comes from a good home—a home, that is, where she has known both love and discipline and where life of the mind is taken seriously but not solemnly—can be a most remarkable creature. No longer a baby, she has learned self-control, acquired a sense of her identity, and can think logically without ceasing to be imaginative. She does not know, of course, that her sense of identity has been too easily won—the gift of her parents rather than her own doing—and that she is soon going to lose it, first in the Sturm und Drang of adolescence and then, when she enters the adult social world, in anxieties over money and status.

But one cannot meet a girl or boy of this kind without feeling that what she or he is—by luck and momentarily—is what, after many years and countless follies and errors, one would like, in the end, to become.”

- W.H. Auden, Forewords and Afterwords (via gmd)

"More and more people in this country no longer make or do anything tangible; if your job wasn’t..."

Mon, 02 Jul 2012 12:01:59 -0400

“More and more people in this country no longer make or do anything tangible; if your job wasn’t performed by a cat or a boa constrictor in a Richard Scarry book I’m not sure I believe it’s necessary. I can’t help but wonder whether all this histrionic exhaustion isn’t a way of covering up the fact that most of what we do doesn’t matter.”

- Tim Kreider’s denunciation of the cult of busyness is excellent. (via jimray)

Likewise the cult of Getting Things Done, which the rest of the world previously knew as “using a checklist.” There’s an entire subculture devoted to grafting a layer of work-like behaviors onto the tasks of post-Richard Scarry employment to make it feel more like craft. A lot of knowledge workers pursue the ideal to-do list app with a sort of sad devotion, a displaced yearning to be shopping for circular saws instead.

(via mwfrost)

mwfrost: Someone actually coded the phrase “click this balloon...

Mon, 02 Jul 2012 12:01:46 -0400

mwfrost:

Someone actually coded the phrase “click this balloon to start the wizard” into an operating system. Perhaps we should go back to flint tools and start again.

"Wired: You’ve said that you recently agreed to write a new introduction to Isaac Asimov’s Foundation..."

Sun, 03 Jun 2012 10:22:00 -0400

“

Wired: You’ve said that you recently agreed to write a new introduction to Isaac Asimov’s Foundation series. What will you be talking about in your introduction?

Paul Krugman: The background story is, I read Foundation back when I was in high school, when I was a teenager, and thought about the psychohistorians, who save galactic civilization through their understanding of the laws of society, and said “I want to be one of those guys.” And economics was as close as I could get. Those are pretty unique novels — they really are structured nothing like even the great bulk of science fiction, because they are about how social science can be used to save humanity.

Wired: In recent years you seem to have a very good track record of predicting what’s going to happen. Do you ever feel like in some way you’ve achieved your dream of becoming a psychohistorian?

Krugman: Well, no. I mean, a little bit, fine. But two things. One is, it’s a pretty limited domain. I don’t think I’ve had any great success in predicting politics or social change, nor have I really tried. In economics we do have some … you know, we don’t exactly have the laws of psychohistory, but we do have some pretty good guidelines. The other thing, of course, is in Foundation, Hari Seldon is able to put together his long term plan and actually nudge history in the direction he wants it to go, and so far I’m feeling not like Hari Seldon but like Cassandra. I keep on predicting bad things, no one will believe me, and then they happen.

”

- The conscience of a liberal, ladies and gentlemen.

http://www.wired.com/underwire/2012/05/paul-krugman-geeks-guide-galaxy/all/1