John Gray in the New Statesman.
Islamist movements fill this gap by combining hatred of the West with Leninist methods of remodelling society by force – a mix that some on the left evidently find appealing.
Peterson + Rogan: Dream Team
I’ve listened to pretty much all of Joe’s podcasts as I have to Jordan’s: independently they are superb but together they bring out the absolute best in each other. I didn’t think that anything could top their first meeting but they did exactly that in this their second. They are the instantiation of Oakeshott’s metaphor of conversation as an unrehearsed intellectual adventure with no cheap rug-pull arguments and to no extrinsic or instrumental purpose. I’d love to see Joe and Jordan together biannually — what an unlikely combination! If you are looking for something educational in the deepest sense of the term, listen to these two elegant, critical, humane and playful minds: in three hours you’ll have learnt more about the world and yourself than in all of your three years regurgitating the infertile spoon-fed tripe of your gender studies/sociology/anthropology courses. There are so many memorable and eminently quotable phrases — I hope to compile some of them when I next listen to this conversation again but here are two of them: “The rational mind likes to fall in love with its own creations”. This is as deep and snappy an explanation as I’ve come across for the rationalist’s psychology. (The Tower of Babel!). And speaking to the fuckwittery of the SJWs: “You want all the benefits of having all the benefits and you want to have all the benefits of having none of the benefits” — a quote worthy of Chesterton! Thank you so much to the University of Toronto for bringing Jordan to the world’s attention — unintended consequences, eh? As Joe rightly said, they chose the wrong person to fuck with!
Every entrant is taken at its face-value and everything is permitted which can get itself accepted into the flow of speculation. And voices which speak in conversation do not compose a hierarchy. Conversation is not an enterprise designed to yield an extrinsic profit, a contest where a winner gets a prize, not is it an activity of exegesis; it is an unrehearsed intellectual adventure. It is with conversation as with gambling, its significance lies neither in winning nor in losing, but in wagering. Properly speaking, it is impossible in the absence of a diversity of voices: in it different universes of discourse meet, acknowledge each other and enjoy an oblique relationship which neither requires nor forecasts their being assimilated to one another.
This, I believe, is the appropriate image of human intercourse, appropriate because it recognizes the qualities, the diversities, and the proper relationships of human utterances. As civilized human beings, we are the inheritors, neither of an inquiry about ourselves and the world, nor of an accumulating body of information, but of a conversation, begun in the primeval forests and extended and made more articulate in the course of centuries. It is a conversation which goes on both in public and within each of ourselves.
Walker Percy Wednesday 135
But what has been called into question in these and like experiments is the use of words such as language, symbols, sentences to describe this kind of communication. Investigators such as Terrace and Sebeok have shown that such communication does not bear the test of language in the human sense, e.g., having a rule-governed syntax. One of the weaknesses of semiotics is the all-too-frequent use of words like language and sentence in a loose analogical sense.
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It has been called variously triadic behavior, thirdness, the Delta factor, man’s discovery of the sign (including symbols, language, art).
This phenomenon occurred in the evolution of man. It may have occurred elsewhere in the Cosmos, or it may have occurred in other creatures on earth. We do not know. But it is not known to have occurred elsewhere in the Cosmos and it has not been proved—despite heroic attempts with chimps, gorillas, and dolphins—to have occurred in other earth species.
The present argument does not require that triadic behavior be unique in man. Perhaps it is not. Semiotics proposes only that where triadic behavior occurs, certain new properties and relationships also come into existence,
Triadic behavior is that event in which sign A is understood by organism B, not as a signal to flee or approach, but as “meaning” or referring to another perceived segment of the environment:
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Certain new properties appear. For example, all triadic behavior is social in origin. A signal received by an organism is like other signals or stimuli from its environment. But a sign requires a sign-giver. Thus, every triad of sign-reception requires another triad of sign-utterance. Whether the sign is a word, a painting, or a symphony—or Robinson Crusoe writing a journal to himself—a sign transaction requires a sign-utterer and a sign-receiver.
Other new properties appear, such as the relation between the utterer and the receiver, which are subject to such familiar variables as “intersubjectivity” (I-thou) and “depersonalization” (I-it).
A particularly mysterious property is the relation between the sign (signifier) and the referent (signified). It is expressed by the troublesome copula “is,” when Helen said that the perceived liquid “is” water (the word). It “is” but then again it is not. Herein surely is the root of all the troubles Stuart Chase spoke of when he said that his cat had no dealings with such a relationship and therefore was smarter or at least saner than humans.
Another unique property of the sign-user, of special significance here, is that as soon as he crosses the triadic threshold, he not only continues to exist in an environment but also has a world.
The world of the sign-user is not identical to its environment or the Cosmos.
Jane Jacobs Special Issue
- Editor’s Introduction – Sanford IKEDA
- Jane Jacobs as Spontaneous Economic Order Methodologist: Part 1: Intellectual Apprenticeship – Pierre DESROCHERS & Joanna SZURMAK 3.
- Jane Jacobs as Spontaneous Economic Order Methodologist: Part 2: Metaphors and Methods – Pierre DESROCHERS & Joanna SZURMAK
- Experimenting in urban self-organization: Framework-rules and emerging orders in Oosterwold (Almere, The Netherlands) – Alessandra COZZOLINO et al.
- Modern Cities as Spontaneous Orders – Wendell COX & Peter GORDON
- NIMBYs as Mercantilists – Emily HAMILTON
- A city cannot be a work of art – Sanford IKEDA
- The State of Indian Cities – Shruti RAJAGOPALAN
- The Kind of Problem Gentrification Is: The Case of New York – Francis MORRONE
- Review: Lawrence N. Powell: The Accidental City: Improvising New Orleans – Leslie MARSH
The Road to Serfdom or Dhimmitude
Marking the birth of Hayek and the dispiriting sense that we are well on the road to a new serfdom brought on, yet again, by the regressive left but this time in cahoots with Islamofacism. The marriage of cultural marxism with its first cousin, Jihadism, is continuing exactly from where the Nazis left off. With this unholy trinity we have the makings of a perfect storm, the likes of which history has never seen with the regressives now fulfilling the role of willing collaborators. At the Nuremberg Trials, Eichmann’s deputy Dieter Wisliceny said:
The Mufti was one of the initiators of the systematic extermination of European Jewry and had been a collaborator and adviser of Eichmann and Himmler in the execution of this plan. … He was one of Eichmann’s best friends and had constantly incited him to accelerate the extermination measures.
Dalida & Alain Delon
Conversation Piece
Over the past few months I’ve been listening closely to Heathen and haven’t tired of it at all, despite some minor annoyances. Echoing many others, the interesting thing about this album is that Bowie, finally and for once, consistently makes good on closing out the amazing legacy of his golden years (1970-1980). Heathen (see a couple of reviews: AllMusic, The Guardian) ripped Bowie out of the doldrums of the 80s and 90s, his “Phil Collins” years (punctuated with some brilliance), but now finally displaying a Bowie comfortable with himself, i.e. not having to put any heightened effort or trendy contrivance into being ahead of the curve — something that became irksome to his longterm listeners and I think tiresome to Bowie himself. He could now stand back and draw upon other marginalized musical geniuses such as the Popul Voh (Florian Fricke)-inspired “Sunday” the album’s opening track. The music was therefore bound to be philosophical and meditative (“a rumination on death, loss and lack of belief”/”This would be a century of a cold, refined barbarism, a world fit for fanatics of all stripes”) interlaced with much tenderness, nostalgia, wisdom, and most eerily striking, is counterposed with a palpable sense of foreboding and unease (much ink has been spilt about the album’s relationship to the events of 9/11). Aside from the obvious gems “Slip Away“, “Slow Burn“, “Everyone Says ‘Hi’” the biggest surprise of all is the very low-key bonus “Conversation Piece”, a reworking of a song originally from a promising but ultimately middling 1969, on the cusp of greatness, i.e. 1970’s The Man Who Sold the World. Here’s the very excellent Chris O’Leary’s explication of the song (the recording below is a superior version to Chris’ link):
The flailing scholar of the original recording at least had energy in his desperation; here, all is resigned, empty despair.
The grim reality for those living the “life of the mind” anticipates the professionalized resentment, disappointment and nihilism so characteristic of current academia’s inauthenticity, pockmarked by fanaticism, pseudo inquiry, authoritarianism, epistemic arrogance and entitlement. Here is maestro Mike Garson’s brief thoughts on this song. High praise indeed from someone so vital to Bowie’s career.
It’s in my top 10 of David’s songs
Here too is an academic piece entitled “The Light that Shines Above the Grocer’s Store: David Bowie’s Domestic Spaces” written by Meagan Wilson.
Heathen is an immersion into the last gasps of one man’s spiritual search, a search that seems fraught from the first.
Dialogues in Scrutopia
Scruton conveys a world where the ideological “lie” reigned and where brave souls successfully resisted it. He also captures that in-between world between moral integrity and open collaboration that was the fate of so many in a decaying yet frightfully repressive ideological regime.
Daniel J. Mahoney in New Criterion
It was Roger who inspired me to go to the then Soviet Union in the mid-80s to bring in vital supplies (medical, news, educational) to refuseniks — from cab drivers to concert pianists and much in between. So fuck these academic and other regressives who are whining about the state of things in liberal democracy: they are no more than disingenuous cowards with no skin in the game.
State-sponsored segregation
From the very party that brought you the KKK and eugenics. Richard Rothstein chats about his new book The Color of Law. The publisher blurb here. (Unusually, it’s the subtitle that is more illuminating).
Stigmergy-based modeling to discover urban activity patterns from positioning data
New working paper freely available for download here.
In this paper, we present an innovative approach based on stigmergy that aims to handle both complexity and dimensionality of these data, providing an analysis of urban crowds dynamics by exploiting taxi GPS data.
