Nassim Nicholas Taleb gives the Platonic rationalist “elites” a mega bitch slap (Original source here). Supplemented by the recent lunacy as per below, I suspect that though philosophers (rightly so) got their knickers in a twist a couple of years ago when deGrasse Tyson slammed the value of philosophy, they’d be well on board with this latest bit of fuckwittery twittery.
Supposedly being released today. I still adore the original album, the apotheosis of what was often disparagingly referred to as “progrock”. Aside from his obvious virtuosity, Rick could never be accused of having his head up his own arse. Rick saw (at the time) the excesses of the prevailing ’70s music scene; he doesn’t play the celebrity virtue-signaling game; and has always been in tune with the grumpy swell of opinion that cuts across political lines and that the ruling Platonic rationalists have been ignoring or shitting on. Stay grumpy Rick — you’re a great Briton and mensch!
The new recordings will be free of the studio limitations and single disc duration of the original and the new record will be a double album as it was originally intended to be.
Released 50 years ago. Frank would roll in his grave knowing that the Brain Police are their most powerful right now. In the ’80s they were primarily daft pearl-clutching Washington Wives (abetted by the so-called “Moral Majority”/ in the UK we had Mary Whitehouse). But thanks to Frank we had some push back because these pearl-clutchers weren’t the sharpest pencils in the box. But the baton was passed on to a much more intellectually savvy, ambitious and infinitely more disingenuous younger generation, operating within a highly camouflaged and widely distributed institution — the academy. This time they had highly sophisticated techniques at their disposal (indoctrination posing as inquiry) along with institutionalized protection that the wider world took little notice of. Trained up in their totalitarian theology, they crushed dissent at every turn (late ’90s) and then reemerged as the regressive Left or the central scrutinizers with allies in the political class and canon-fodder recruits (students) to do their bidding. If we break them now, they will be broken at the height of their power and as such they will not blight our liberal beautiful inheritance for a generation. But they will be back . . . authoritarianism lurks in the hearts and the minds of these self-styled Platonic sophisticates and are closer to their bête noire (of their own making mind you) then they care to acknowledge.
This is the CENTRAL SCRUTINIZER…it is my responsibility to enforce all the laws
that haven’t been passed yet. It is also my responsibility to alert each and every one of
you to the potential consequences of various ordinary everyday activities you might be
performing which could eventually lead to The Death Penalty (or affect your parents’
credit rating). Our criminal institutions are full of little creeps like you who do wrong things…
and many of them were driven to these crimes by a horrible force called MUSIC! Our studies
have shown that this horrible force is so dangerous to society at large that laws are being
drawn up at this very moment to stop it forever! Cruel and inhuman punishments are
being carefully described in tiny paragraphs so they won’t conflict with the Constitution
(which, itself, is being modified in order to accommodate THE FUTURE).
The only time I knew what to do was when something bad happened to somebody. Disaster gave me leave to act. Between times I didn’t know what to do. Now I know.
*****
How did it happen that now for the first time in his life he could see everything so clearly? Something had given him leave to live in the present. Not once in his entire life had he allowed himself to come to rest in the quiet center of himself but had forever cast himself forward from some dark past he could not remember to a future which did not exist. Not once had he been present for his life. So his life had passed like a dream.
Is it possible for people to miss their lives in the same way one misses a plane? And how is it that death, the nearness of death, can restore a missed life?
*****
“The trouble is,” the man said, “there is no word for this.”
“For what?”
“This.” He held both arms out to the town, to the wide world. “It’s not war and it’s not peace. It’s not death and it’s not life. What is it? What do you call it?”
“I don’t know.”
“There is life and there is death. Life is better than death but there are worse things than death.”
“What?”
“There is no word for it. Maybe it never happened before and so there is not yet a word for it. What is the word for a state which is not life and not death, a death in life?”
“I don’t know.”
“I wonder if it ever happened in history before?”
“I don’t know.” Where is the word, the girl in the greenhouse would say, and look around.
Is a group a bland puree unless it includes a “critical mass” of the targeted minorities?
Peter Minowitz’ newly published and freely available paper in Perspectives on Political Science.
. . . as if colorful skin guarantees colorful thinking and white skin precludes it . . .
Identity politics and affirmative action may well have met a vital need since there was undeniably a correlation with lived experience but now it has morphed into precisely the racist essentialism that we liberals sought to reject. Out of touch campus commissars and politicos are so wedded to this shallow notion of identity that they don’t realize (and are not interested) as to how profoundly condescending, disrespectful and insulting they are to “those of color” who want to be judged by their ideas, intellect, character, talents and insights. Instead they unforgivably hector, smear and shame those who dare stray from this oppressive ideological plantation.
Much of this state of affairs is a consequence of making the university crudely functional to the market, with academics and (the naturally inclined) statist administrators/bureaucraps in cahoots with each other. The simplistic socio-political “promise” that a university education was/is the fastest and most effective track to career success was promoted, as least in the UK, by the Right in the ’80s. This was a terrific opportunity for the “regressive left” (who already had a substantial beach-head) to quickly step in — and what we got was an uncritical proliferation of the university, filled by activism masquerading as inquiry. The upshot is that genuine liberal education, the idea to think critically and be intellectually and socially experimental, the understanding of the postulates of our beautiful liberal achievement, has been profoundly corroded. And beyond the intrinsic loss, there is the unintended consequence of pseudo-inquiry being of little instrumental value to a full range of professions, callings, occupations and trades (i.e. the market). It should be no surprise then that so many PhDs have been and are hustling to get a job in the safe space called the academy (where supply outstrips demand), and in the service of this understandably have to be parti pris, suffocating intellectual dissent (assuming they ever entertained any). Of course, there is a social status side to those who seek to enter the high church of activism in the academy. They typically view themselves as the Platonic high priests of reason and rationality in all matters (especially as it relates to the demos): this despite the overwhelming empirical literature showing this to be the grossest of psychological fantasies. But then these people are not in the knowledge business, they are in the self-preservation business — no wonder they and their canon-fodder acolytes behave as stressed bull terriers. The regressive Left and the fundamentalist Right have been complicitous in this state of affairs.
This conclusion is disappointing for those who hoped that we could argue somebody into morality. But Williams is adamant that this was always an ill-conceived hope.
The very excellent A. W. Moore taking on the devastating brilliance of Bernard Williams.
Williams wants to challenge the idea that moral notions are through and through pure . . . This purity, Williams argues, is an illusion, except at a level which those who think in this way would themselves regard as hopelessly superficial.
Among the most important of these are the ancient Greek ideas of selfhood, freedom, and shame. Williams argues that we have not, contrary to popular belief, advanced from these to a more refined conception.
I realize that Runnin’ Down a Dream is going on for a decade old, but I’ve only just been able to view it via Netflix. Reading about Petty c. ’79 when there was still serious rock journalism (Melody Maker and NME) he always struck me as a man of integrity and decency without resorting to the shallow and ubiquitous virtue-signalling of many a “name”. As with Nick Lowe, Petty is one of the few occupying a special sweet spot between the hollowed out franchises of the big “circus” acts and gameshow musical non-entities. While the documentary is itself quite conventional (the usual talking heads), its strength lies in its leisurely pace, allowing a story to be told in Petty’s own words and to showcase his amazing back catalogue. Bogdanovich to his credit (unlike Scorsese) leaves his artistic pretensions at the door and let’s the music and characters speak for themselves.
a quasi-eschatological faith in historical progress
Well put Damon! Here is one of the more insightful, philosophically literate and least hysterical or pompous analyses.
On this topic I have written the following in a forthcoming paper.
Epistemic humility is not seen as a cultural virtue: it is the zeitgeist of the modern age that we exist in a (misperceived) linear trajectory of progress, progress here taken to be coextensive with improvement – morally, socially, technologically, economically and scientifically. Progressivism thus conceived is clearly a “grand narrative” notion which on closer scrutiny is subject to all the weaknesses of such constructions. It is impossible to determine whether a change for the better in one part or aspect of the system is progressive for the system overall since there is no Archimedean point from which progress can be assessed. If one substituted “progress” for the more apt “resolving of incoherencies,” then they might not have fallen foul of this notion. Every change alters some state of affairs, destroying or modifying it – that much one can accept. Robert Musil captures this idea:
“It seems to me,” Ulrich said, “that every progressive step is also a retrogressive step.
Progress exists always in one particular sense. And since our life as a whole has no sense, there is as a whole no progress either.”
Leo Fischel lowered his newspaper. “Do you think it better to be able to cross the Atlantic in six days or to have to spend six weeks on it?”
“I should probably say it’s definitely progress to be able to do both . . .” (Musil, Man Without Qualities).
Granted we live, in some real sense, the best of times (for example, reductions in child mortality, vaccine-preventable diseases, access to safe water and sanitation, malaria prevention and control, prevention and control of HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis control and declining poverty). But we also live in the worst of times – Auschwitz-Birkenau, Holodomor, Cambodia and more besides – the dark side to technocracy and bureaucracy.
It’s very disturbing to see how the “progressives” for many years were the ones who strongly promoted democracy as a substantive theory of the good rather than merely as a procedural mechanism, Condorcet-like voting paradoxes aside. But what if even the calls for so-called “deliberative democracy” (assuming this idea is even practically feasible) delivered the same result? Now that the regressives have the result they didn’t want, their default position is akin to the “people’s democracies” of the old Eastern Bloc countries. (I even noticed this disingenuous stance to the result of a free speech debate some months ago). Switch out “The Party” for the snooty and smug intelligentsia (Left and Right) as to knowing the demos’ “real” interests and preferences. And the political establishment across the Western world wonder why things are so fucked up? All the pundits, theorists, fuck-wit celebrities are akin to the surfer or diver who is focused on the waves and not the swells or the sets. “You know when you’ve been Tango’d” (by the orange candidate) — he’s the establishment’s creation — the regressives and their complicitous conservative “cucks”, not to mention “Davos Man”. There is only one sane liberal choice now — Gary Johnson.
Sensitively directed (i.e. unobtrusively) and superbly edited documentary about the last generation of blues musicians playing the thoroughly diminished Chitlin’ Circuit — one of whom has sadly since passed on since this film was made. For me, the revelation of the film were the ladies — Barbara Lynn and Carol Fran. Catch it if you can.
