Octopus escapes! Everyone cheer!
We caught this Octopus in a shrimp trap here in Alaska. It had crawled in through a 3 inch opening and terrorized our catch of spot prawns, killing and eating several of them, and then, attached itself to the bait jar and unscrewed the lid to open for dessert of prepared shrimp bait pellets! We decided to let this brilliant creature go (option was to eat it! …yum!) as I respected it’s intelligence and genius. We set it on the deck and let it “escape” on it’s own… Cool fun with a sea creature!
Episode CCXCVI: Cowboys & Creationists.
Where is everyone?
bacon
Nerd of Redhead – from last thread –
Hiya hugs to ya and for the Redhead. I am OK, just hacked at circumstances right now. Cogito vent, ergo vented.
Woot. How intelligent. I couldnt eat it after that
Fuckin’ awesome. I watched it twice.
Jeffrey, so sorry to hear about the diabetes, I hope this latest turns out to be a minor blip.
I know it’s early in the thread, but.
GAAAAAAAAAH.
Obama. Don’t. Just don’t. Please?
Woo Hoo! After years of writing, having no support from my department for the project, suddenly being required to cut 100 pages, arguments with the editor about the level of the information being too high, and spending the last few months working with copy editors and typesetters who are non-scientists and were just assuming that the words they didn’t recognize were misspelled, the galleys have been proofed, the index is done and the book is going to press this month!!! It is showing up on Amazon for pre-order. Wiley-Blackwell even decided to do both hard and soft cover, with a epub version coming out later. I can go visit it and silently gloat. My first scholarly tome!
It even has a nice section and paleontology, index fossils and the like.
For the longest time it has been like the skit from Monty Python and the Holy Grail where the knight keeps running at the camera from a distance. I finally know that I not going to end up getting my head chopped off. The feeling of relief is incredible. I will have a life again. I can get some research done. Hell I can start breathing again.
Yay for the octopus – I’d have let it go too.
pHred, congratulations!
Re “Over de smaak valt niet te twisten.”
Valt is not likely IMO* to be related to Latin valere. That’s a concept of worth, related to “value”, while vallen means to fall and probably comes from the same proto-germanic as English fall. But it’s also kind of like “happens”, “is possible”. Dat valt niet=that can’t happen. It’s one of those very multi-use words with lots of relatives. Befallen, vervallen, val, meevallen, geval.
Ack, nearly lost this. Rather apropos – de valpoort is gevallen!
(*I am not a linguist. Nor am I still fluent in Nederlands, though I was once.)
I hear you loud and clear.
Sometimes you can either laugh or cry. Laughing at the situation is usually more fun.
The Redhead is concerned as one of the blood pressure meds she is on can induce diabetes. I haven’t done any research, but from listening it seems the older diuretics are the primary problem.
Caine, Fleur du Mal – Thanks :)
Conga rats, pHred! Nicely done.
Jeffery, there are some diabetes-safe brownies due to be coming out of your usb shortly.
Bacon? Where?!
Usually, when I see an octopus this red, it is lying on my plate. Remarkable colour.
I often can’t help but wonder that if these creatures had been lucky enough to live as long as we do, they would probably have extinguished us a long time ago.
Jebus pHred, conga rats. Have some grog on the house. *hands over a tankard of fuming seven day old grog*
Caine, Esteleth – thanks folks. Just needed to vent.
Nerd – hope diabetes is not in the Redhead’s future. I am just pissed that for once in my life I am trying hard to live healthy and it is (maybe) not working. ;^)
pHred – Congratulations!
Grumble grumble grumble.
One of these days, I’ll go and give a podiatrist a huge chunk of money.
But for now, I just cut the fucking callouses off my feet so that my toes can bend.
Pardon me, I’ve got 6 band-aids on my feet.
Walton, from various comments in the last thread:
Yet, presumably, you wouldn’t say an illiterate four year old is as qualified as a thoughtful, experienced literature professor. You’ll have to qualify what you mean by “qualified” if you want this to express anything meaningful.
The more experience one has with art, the better one is able to think critically about it. One’s opinions or personal taste can of course be all over the map, but those are irrelevant to what makes someone better able to understand a work’s qualities.
Or one has absorbed more literature, not just borrowed the preferences of the “élite” for one kind of literature over another. Tastes differ, but so does experience and understanding — though related, we should try to keep these distinctions in mind.
Is that so? Please tell me what you have to say about any of Schoenberg’s works from a music theory perspective.
Who said disliking a work or an artform can always be ascribed to ignorance? Anyone?
Then could you explain why so many of these “cultural élites” have spent so much time studying folk art? Or is this caricature just your mistaken impression? Maybe “élites” means something different than “elites,” so perhaps we’re not talking about the same people.
walton: When one is considering if one thing is objectively better than another, criteria always apply. Otherwise, the word “better” is meaningless. Better in what way?
When discussing the literary meriit of a work we could assess all kinds of things that are general and allow easy comparison*. I have talked about some of these qualities. As an aside, it isn’t at all uncommon for people to discuss whether writing was effective…did it achieve it’s purpose? Lit classes often have discussions along that lines of “In this passage, what is the author trying to do? How effectively has this goal been achieved?”
This kind of criticism carries over into creative writing classes. If merit were entirely in the eye of the beholder, in what sense could an aspiring writer be said to be getting better at their craft?
*We are a little far afield in that criticism is almost always comparative, but rarely addresses how one work is better than another…rather more often how they are related.
From being portcullised, (tho is still contend it’s more of a sally port):
Nerd, that is both heartwarming and sad. I would fix it for you but my meatloaf … isn’t. It’s like the simplest recipe in the world and I actually can ruin it to where even I won’t eat my own cooking.
One step at a time, eh? (There’s supposed to be a bunch of hearts here, with an ironic symbol, but I’m not even good at that.)
++++++++++++++++
IRT arts appreciation?
Ah, my friends are arguing instead of fighting, I like that.
++++++++++++++++
Still listening.
Coincidence: I just finished putting the daughter to bed, Tolkien being the reading for the night. My Gandalf comes out sounding more like Wilfred Brimley, and my dwarves all have very poorly imitated Scottish accents.
Elves sound like Samuel Jackson.
Thank for grog. I shall use it to clean my pipes. I better go to sleep now. Something else that I can now do again ;)
AE-“My Gandalf comes out sounding more like Wilfred Brimley, and my dwarves all have very poorly imitated Scottish accents.
Elves sound like Samuel Jackson.”
Oh, you wish! and now I want oatmeal and that someone would get these goshdarn snakes of this goshdarn plane.
Shall I photograph my feet and post the photo?
Best version ever
Jeffrey, sorry about your bad labs. *hug*
–
pHred: *confetti*
–
I am reliably informed that my meatloaf sucks, with great enthusiasm and attention to detail.
–
AE, please tell me there is a recording of this version.
*imagines Samuel L. Jackson intoning Namarie*
…
*falls over laughing*
cicely – Thanks and hugs in return. And so to bed.
No, I’m listening to the grumbles, but probably not for too much longer tonight. The 3:30 am wake-up-couldn’t-get-back-to-sleep the night before last is still affecting me. Getting older is hell, but it beats the alternative.
pHred:
First, congratulations!
Next…
What, no linky? Not even a title so folks can look it up? I, myself, am probably not in the market for a “scholarly tome,” but I bet there are more than a couple folks here (including lurkers) who are!
Finally have the latest puzzle framed. My first 3,000 piece.
This is missing the point entirely.
My argument is that there is no external objective standard of what constitutes “good” or “bad” writing. When someone says “this is a bad novel”, the only thing that can reasonably be meant is “I don’t like this novel”. It’s an expression of personal taste or distaste, which is something that cannot be objectively “wrong” or “right”, any more than it’s objectively “wrong” to like bananas or objectively “right” to hate peanut butter.
If this is so, it doesn’t really make much sense to suggest that some people are “more qualified” than others to say whether a particular novel is “good” or “bad”, because it’s merely an expression of one’s personal reaction. (The only qualification that might be genuinely prerequisite is having actually read the book in question, much as it would be odd for me to say “I don’t like peanut butter” if I had never eaten peanut butter: so your illiterate four-year-old child probably wouldn’t have much meaningful to say about a book.) Personal tastes are not susceptible to any kind of rational dispute.
This does not mean that qualifications in literature are irrelevant to the ability to make meaningful statements about literature. I didn’t make such a claim. As Antiochus quite reasonably pointed out, there are all sorts of factual observations one can make about a work of literature: its historical context, its influences, its historical importance, its innovativeness, its influence on subsequent writers or on the broader culture. All of these are obviously entirely-legitimate subjects of empirical study, and all of them are obviously things on which experts are best-qualified to pontificate. And all of them, indeed, might very well be relevant to one’s appreciation of a novel; KG is clearly right that learning more about a work or its context can change one’s personal feelings about it, for better or for worse.
But none of this means that there are objective criteria for what constitutes a “good novel”, or that I am in any objective sense wrong to select certain criteria over others according to my personal taste. I call a novel a “good novel” if I personally find it entertaining, enjoyable, and stimulating to the imagination, much as I might call a foodstuff “good” if I personally enjoy the way it tastes. I reject the claim that these are the “wrong” criteria, or that I am “wrong” to say, for instance, that I consider Tolkien to be a better writer than James Joyce because I find his work vastly more enjoyable to read. It’s a matter of personal taste. Someone else may have different criteria and different tastes, and that’s fine.
Nothing, because it was years ago that I last listened to one, I remember almost nothing about the subject, and I couldn’t care less and am not interested in discussing it. (Especially as I don’t doubt that you know far more about the subject than I do.)
The point is that the whole construction of “High Art” versus “low popular culture”, the idea that some works and genres are objectively better than others and that some tastes are more “sophisticated” than others, has its roots in class and status inequalities. The fact that art forms developed by and for ordinary people may later become fashionable among the elites, as they often do, is entirely irrelevant to my point. (Just as fashion trends that start in youth subcultures may be adopted by mainstream fashion, but that doesn’t change the role of fashion and of dress codes generally as class and status markers.)
(I’m happy to use whatever spelling of “elite” you prefer, although I prefer the original, since it’s a French loan-word.)
Aragorn: Legolas, what do your elf eyes see?
Legolas: The Uruks turn northeast. They’re taking the hobbits to Isengard. Motherfuckers!
I have had it with these motherfucking Balrogs in this motherfucking mine!
For Saruman, just think Richard Nixon. You’ll be fine.
As a one-time music theory major, I’ve been trying to think of what I would say regarding Schoenberg’s serialism from a music theory standpoint. And all I can come up with is “theoretically, it’s music.” But I’ll try (I don’t like Schoenberg either).
I and at least a couple of my professors regarded serialism as “something that happened.” I think, ultimately, that a lot of what music is comes down to pattern recognition, which basically makes the brain happy. We sort of resonate with these temporal patterns, so to speak. And shared recognition with other humans enhances the effect, and each culture develops its own patterns.
Music education enables one to perceive and recognize deeper, more complex patterns. But Schoenberg’s patterns, while they exist, do so on a more abstract level and seem more like mathematical curiosities on paper than anything the brain can really recognize upon listening and resonate with.
There. At least that’s what I would have written, more or less, on an essay question. Were it a term paper, I would have fleshed it out a bit with disguised repetition and such, and tried to sound more scholarly.
pHred–conga rats!
jeffreyD–sorry to hear about your numbers. Any possibility you’re sick, ie cold, belly upset, something that could make your body stressed?
Nerd–your meatloaf comment made me blub. I hope your love returns to you soon.
Just saw this: http://islamineurope.blogspot.com/2012/01/hague-muslim-party-denies-dog-ban.html. In case anyone was following that story.
Walton:
To the extent that I’ve been following your argument about art and taste, I generally agree, but…
…I think “this is a bad novel” could alternatively reasonably mean “this is a poorly crafted novel” or “this is a novel that promotes bad ideas,” neither of which is quite the same as simply “I don’t like this novel.”
As I said to KG, I think there are elements of art — mostly having to do with technical issues of skill and craft — that can be discussed in essentially objective terms… but they don’t add up to “good” or “bad,” except as part of a subjective synthesis.
And I completely agree with you (assuming I’m understanding you correctly) that whether art is important or influential or culturally relevant are distinct questions from whether it’s good art.
walton: Your not wrong to say that you enjoy Tolkien better than Joyce. You are wrong to say that Tollkien is a better writer than Joyce. Your personal enjoyment is not a criterion for judging writing; it says much more about you than it does about the writer.
Tolkien. Damn this tiny ass keyboard and the tiny ass type.
Yes, but you’re still missing my point: I am denying that any book can be objectively better than another! Yes, you can (and have) come up with reasonable criteria by which you, personally, judge writing to be good or bad; other people may have other criteria, or may have similar criteria but apply them differently. My point is that there is no single, objective set of criteria for what constitutes a “good novel”. It depends on one’s individual personal tastes and what one personally considers to be important.
:-) :-) :-) :-)
This makes me happy. If only because it’s reminding me of how much I loved Tolkien stories in my own childhood.
(It brings back an odd memory I hadn’t thought about for years. When I read The Hobbit as a small child. I often sang some of the songs to myself – Far over the Misty Mountains cold, and so on – using hymn-tunes that I’d heard in church, or other tunes I’d come across, that happened to fit the metre. A few years later, I came across an audiobook version of The Hobbit in which, obviously, the songs were sung to different tunes from those I’d used; by then I knew the book so well that this was slightly disconcerting, at first.
…Yeah, that probably wasn’t exactly the most interesting anecdote I’ve ever told. But still.)
My personal enjoyment isn’t a criterion either. And really good writing is not necessarily really appropriate writing. For instance, I don’t put my five year old to bed with Finnegan’s Wake.
I am tired of these motherfucking orcs on the motherfucking plains!
Caught the early plane back to London
Fifty acrons tied in a sack
The men from the press
Said, “we wish you success
“It’s good to have the both of you back”
Whether or not what we experienced was an According to Hoyle miracle is insignificant. What is significant is that I felt the touch of Sauron. Sauron got involved.
can i tell you how mother fucking good this motherfucking was?
*hands janine a shiny new internet*
Earbug infection alert; prior exposure to Parappa the Rapper increases susceptibility.
Can-Turtles Have Short Legs
I need to pass it on so it will leave my brain.
If you have an earwig, sing Private Dancer as loud as you can.
Yeah, that’s a good point. I suppose “good writing” could be understood to refer to technical skill in the use of language, which does have some objective component, as “good painting” or “good cooking” does. Clearly, some people are more skilled cooks than others, in an objective sense; someone who knows how to use an oven or chop vegetables, say, can be said to be a better cook than someone who lacks these skills. The same can obviously be said of writing: someone who knows how to structure sentences coherently, for instance, is objectively more skilled at writing than someone who doesn’t. (Though I’m not sure where this leaves those fashionable writers who know perfectly well how to structure sentences coherently, but wilfully choose to write incomprehensible nonsense in order to impress other pretentious arty people.)
I should have distinguished more clearly, perhaps, between “skill at writing” and “a good novel”. This is really more like the difference between “skill at cooking” and “a good dish”. It’s certainly reasonable to say that Delia Smith, annoying as she is, is objectively more skilled at cooking than I am; but it would be meaningless to say, for instance, that profiteroles are objectively a better dessert than cheesecake. I’m thinking more of the latter. I suppose this could account for the fact that Antiochus and I seem consistently to be on different pages in this discussion.
Your other point – about promotion of bad ideas – is also interesting, and it’s why I deliberately didn’t use Twilight as an example, for instance. But I don’t think that really cuts to the heart of the debate here, since moral considerations are usually separated in the discourse from artistic ones; it’s very common for people to describe a novel as a great work of literature but nonetheless concede that it promotes bad ideas.
DDMFM: I used to do the same thing. I also referred to my parka as a cloak.
I’m making a mess of things. Personal taste isn’t an important criterion for judging ethe merit of a work (or better, for discussing it) precisely because it is personal. Minimally, one should be ale to articulate why they like a thing…by what criteria they weigh it’s merits…before it can be discussed. “Better” has no meaning outside of the context of “better how”.
So Tolkien might be a better writer if the only criterion under consideration is “making walton happy”. But then we’d be talking mostly about walton and not Tolkien and Joyce.
I’m pretty whooped and getting stupider. I’ll lurk and read a few minutes more. Then it’s off to the grey havens.
There is a queen
Of six sevens and nines
Dust in your garden
Poison in your mind
There is a king
That will steal your soul
Din’t let him catch you,
Don’t let him get control.
Yep. I think that’s the essence of my argument against Antiochus’ position.
I am going to shove a point object into my ear! It’s so itchy! I’m going to have to go to the clinic tomorrow because I can’t stand this. I’ll be surprised if I can even get to sleep tonight!
[/rant]
I read the Foundation Trilogy and The Lord Of The Rings Trilogy and others to my kids at bedtime. They preferred me to their mother who didn’t put any emotion into her characters. I worked hard on Gollum’s speech and the Mouth of Sauron’s too.
Elvish, motherfucker! Do you speak it?!
My point is that there is no objective criterion for “judging the merit of a work”.
Exactly! That’s what I’ve been saying all along! To call one novel “better” than another, in itself, without qualifiers, is a meaningless statement. You can certainly say that some novels are more historically-important, more innovative or more influential than others, and those are all objective factual claims; but it does not follow that novels which possess these qualities are “better” than novels that don’t. “Better” is a subjective value-judgment, and there is no reason why one specific set of criteria as to what constitutes a “good” or a “bad” novel should be accepted as objectively correct.
Umm, Caine? Wow!
+++++++++++++
AE? Finnegan’s Wake puts me to sleep, maybe it’ll work on a 5 yr old.
+++++++++++++
Um…ná. Quenten Quenya.
*sniff* That was my lunch. :-(
Goodnight. I, too, will bow out at this juncture (because it feels like the conversation is going round and round in circles, and I have a paper to finish by tomorrow morning).
(Which, I should clarify, is not your fault in any way. I just don’t think there’s much more that can be said on this subject.)
““Better” has no meaning outside of the context of “better how”.”
“I like it” is good enough. People don’t have to defend what they like. They might want to explain it, but they don’t have to defend it.
My last comment, and I’ll shove off.
My point was that there are lots of objective criteria. The only one that we have discussed that isn’t objective is personal taste. This would seem to be the one that is the poorest arbiter of quality.
It’s been fun talking. I’ll read whatever else happens in the morning.
Also, I have laughed audibly at any number of Samuel Jackson’s interpretation of Tolkien.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=WwLs_KvoAvI
Good old fashion nightmare fuel here
@janine #50 earwig? Or earworm. I was always told that the Murder She Wrote tune would wipe out all other earworms. Of course then you have to get rid of the Murder, She Wrote theme.
Thread bankrupt yet again, and this happened a few weeks ago, but I wanted to share some good news: I won my company’s site version of the “employee of the quarter” award. An accomplishment considering that there are over 300 people at my site.
Peter Singer on why ethics is amenable to rational argument (Practical Ethics, p. 9):
I’m not drawing any parallel between aesthetic judgments and ethics (or even between expressing aesthetic judgments and ethics), but I think this is relevant. You can say you like something but be unwilling or unable to “defend” your preference, but then you’re having a different conversation from one about aesthetics (or, really, no conversation at all).
Here, Walton, you said:
I’m not wedded to the idea, but I’d tend to think that in that “However” lies the difference between the realms of personal taste and aesthetic judgment.
No sir, I don’t like it.
I maintain that there is a sense in which a work of art can be said to be better than another. In depth, complexity, breadth of vocabulary, verisimilitude or character, rhythm of sentences, arc of story, and many other reasonably objective characteristics. If it’s elitist, it’s only that of education – which is something everybody could in theory have if we didn’t live in a fucked up world.
Are you seriously going to say that some mass produced boyband pop album is artistically equal to a Beethoven symphony? No difference between Twilight and Hamlet?
Orwell promoted the idea of a “good bad book” – very roughly, a book that isn’t deep but is fun. Lots of genre novels fall here – cliched and shallow but great for relaxing with. Entertainment rather than art. What I like, and what I think is good, are almost orthogonal measures. If it gets *too* bad, it will fail at likability. But many technically good artworks also fail at likability for me.
I think you’re conflating these concepts. I also think that for some reason you’re equating art with snobbery – perhaps this is because of British class idiocy. Agreed, they’re twits. These people snicker at “Australian Ballet”, as if it were some oxymoron and only the veddy veddy British upper crust could possibly appreciate such a thing. And so are you, if you think working class people can’t appreciate art and literature.
In the last 20 minutes, Esme has attempted to steal lip balm, a small silver tin, rolling papers, sewing scissors, a sharpie marker, a pack of embroidery needles and a nail file. Busy girl.
Also, I have found out that rats will do anything, go to any length to acquire caramel candy. It’s proved to be waaaaay more popular than chocolate chips. Little heretics.
Sailor:
Yeah, this one’s a bit daunting. Might take two weeks. Finished this one last week, it went pretty well. Eventually, I want to do this one, as a wall covering for one wall of my studio. It’s only 32,000 pieces. :D
Jessa, congratulations!
From a Facebook wall post by a friend: the Bible supports paying teachers a crappy salary.
Not really. To say that it’s a bad thing for a TV series to recycle the same plots over and over again is itself a matter of personal taste. It may be a taste that’s generally shared by most people,* but that doesn’t make it an objective criterion of quality.
(*Though not universally. People complain that Garfield comic strips recycle the same jokes over and over, for instance. This is entirely true, but personally I see this as a feature, not a bug, for the highly personal and idiosyncratic reason that it reminds me of my childhood.)
I’m not really sure what it means to say that something is or is not “artistically equal” to something else. I certainly have preferences, but of course I also can’t know to what extent my own preferences are subconsciously shaped by cultural programming and expectations.
I haven’t listened to any mass produced boyband pop albums recently, nor have I read any of the Twilight novels or seen the films, so I won’t comment on my feelings about your specific examples.
I really can’t entirely understand this separation between “what I like” and “what I think is good”, because it presupposes that art is supposed to serve some external purpose, and meet some external standard, beyond what we as individual human beings want from it. This seems strange: art is a human endeavour, created by and for human beings. So surely a “good” piece of art is one which satisfies some human need, in you or in someone else?
Where you add the qualifier “technically good”, it makes a little more sense: a painting might be objectively “technically good” if it exhibits skill and dexterity with a paintbrush, regardless of whether one likes it or not. But when people talk about “good” or “bad” art or literature, they don’t usually limit their analysis to something so technical as this.
That wasn’t entirely what I was thinking of, although I agree that it’s a real phenomenon.
I hope I’d never make a claim so crude and patronizing as that. Of course they can. My late great-grandfather was a Welsh coal-miner who became a self-taught painter (yes, I know this sounds like a stereotypical feel-good anecdote, but it’s actually true; he died when I was very young, but we still have some of his paintings at home).
However, what is also true is that prevailing standards of “High Art” are generally not determined by, or by reference to, the prevailing preferences of ordinary people in a given society. Rather, they’re typically determined by the preferences of elite actors. Art and entertainment have always been used as class-status-markers, just as fashion and language have been. I didn’t think this was a controversial observation. :-/
I concede to evilisgood.
Ariaflame, people from the indie rock realm should know where I stole my suggestion.
I am now picturing elves with Jheri curl.
I have read nothing in this Incarnation but from the Previous I have a profound need for a loaf-pan in the shape of a groundhog.
Nerd?
[previous version TET]
@ sisu
Exaaaactly.
*sniggers*
…
@ Alethea
Damn! There I was, savouring every moment as I read through the thread, waiting until I could finally correct David Marjanović on something. (Here the meaning of “valt”). And you beat me to it. *sobs*
I’m sorry, didn’t run away, I just finally got some sleep! YAY!
Anyways, AE, I know you weren’t attacking me personally. I did not write that last comment very well at all. I was agreeing with Walton but did it in a bad way. Yes, unfortunately, the other thread influenced it because it wasn’t yesterday for me, it was the same day. My apologies, I could have expressed myself better.
@ Nerd
*hugs*
…
[prejudice]
Does lower cognitive ability predict greater prejudice? Read on:
Linky also provides free download of report.
JeffreyD, I hope all goes well at the doctor’s. Good luck.
Caine:
=^_^= I would love to see Esme in action, but caramel preferred to chocolate. Unthinkable. Heretic indeed.
Nerd, I’d make you some meatloaf, but it doesn’t do well when passed through a USB port. Also, I can’t possibly match the Redhead’s cooking. *hugs*
Finally, congratulations to Jessa and pHred .
Conga rats, Jessa.
Speaking of which, do I understand Esme to be a rat? My niece has a rat named Amy; no end to the Buffyverse humor I get when I visit.
Catching up as I go.
walton:
Nononononono.
Ok, upfront, let me say this: I am not a literary critic’s bootlace. My terminology and theoretical understanding is necessarily that of an interested amateur. However, if I may hold forth for a brief moment, and ask your indulgence for a generous reading of the following poor analogies and metaphors:
Think of it, perhaps, like the difference between architecture and engineering. Both are necessary to construct any significant building. You are correct to say that the particular stylistic choices of a piece are subject to the whims of taste; however, the structure of the building has to have a certain integrity to be able to carry that particular stylistic expression and not fall down in a heap. The former is subjective; the latter objective.
I have read enough, and studied enough of the structure of language, to recognise that Twilight is composed of painfully awful, clunky, clumsy, jarringly arrythmic, repetitive sentences; her use of language is … just … argh I can’t even. * (Though I have not read enough of the series to comment on her skills as a storyteller, which is at another scale altogether) Twilight is objectively bad writing in that sense, whereas one’s feelings towards the sentiments carried by the work is another matter. (On the other hand, I acknowledge that she must be doing something right, merely to be able to sell such stupendous numbers of her works.)
Or consider a piece of legislation you have been asked to examine. You have the training and hard-earned experience (which I do not) to say whether a law is well or badly drafted; whether it has massive loopholes, ambiguities, interactions with the existing body of law, etc – which leave it open to unintended consequences. This is quite separate from whether you find the intended consequences favourable to your ethical standards or not.
My purely personal and idiosyncratic understanding of the objective measures which can be teased out of media such as music and the written word are:
* Information density (difference)
* Internal consistency (self similarity and self reference across scales)
* A vague value I am still trying to elucidate which for the moment I will call measuredness: a sense of rhythm and balance across the work.
Having read a bit o’ linguistics and history here, and a bit o’ information theory there, and a bit o’ conspiracy lore everywhere, I can see plainly that, for example, the Illuminatus Trilogy is trumped on information density by a country mile by Foucault’s Pendulum, to take two works which cover similar thematic territory.
Eco has a way of condensing so many references and in-jokes and erudite asides (and in a sense, all language, all communication, is reference) into a single paragraph – a single sentence even – that the information density – the ability to transmit meaning – is astonishing. The fact that he is able to do so while at the same time telling a rollicking good page-turner of a shaggy dog story, *and* maintain a lyricism and rhythm across scales (phrase, sentence, paragraph, chapter, book) – the “measuredness” value I’m still working to understand – is a sign of simple good craftsmanship elevated to the point of art(isanship).
In the same way, I can recognise that craftsmanship-to-art(isanship) transition in, say, fine cabinetry vs. mass-produced particleboard furnishing. This has *zero* to do with whether I prefer minimalist modernist aesthetics in my furniture to neo-Georgian/rococco pastiche. Either aesthetic can be executed objectively well or badly.
On the other hand, for example, there are entire art-forms (which has been pointed out elsewhere, are not the same thing as genres) which I am completely baffled by, and singularly unable to determine either my own aesthetic preferences or whether a piece has objective merit. Dance, for example – simply because I do not have the experience, exposure and understanding of the form required to engage with it.
(With profound apologies to any writers, architects, engineers and cabinetmakers in the audience)
* there is an altogether different style of writing which uses jarring arrhythms and repetition to effect; that, too, can, in my assertion, be reasonably objectively judged as to whether it is done effectively or not. Twilight is not that work.
** I also acknowledge the aesthetic judgement that what I consider astonishingly clever, erudite and beautiful information density (in Eco), someone else may consider wanky academic knob-polishing. OTOH, someone without a smattering of a background in the things to which Eco is referring would not be able to say “Ah, I see what you did there…” – and thus, necessarily be able to form no judgement about how well or badly he did what he did there.
Phledge:
Yes, she is. The studio crew consists of Chas, Esme and Rubin.
drbunsen:
I agree. We really don’t need yet another incarnation eaten alive by this old, already hashed, rehashed and rehashed yet again argument.
That’s not what you meant? Oh darn.
Another point of reference: The muddy, badly distorted garage band four track cassette * recording of “Hey, that’s actually a pretty cool song (or not), where you can make it out” vs the crystal-clear, sculpted to perfection multi-million dollar digital multi-track studio recording of “Hey, that’s a pretty cool song (or not)”
* Yes I am that old.
Um, Walton, you may hate me for this but…
…Having some analytical writing knowledge actually makes Twilight WORSE once you see just how awful it really is. To witness this phenomenon in action, I give you: Reasoning with Vampires.
A sentence (and monstrosity) from Eclipse
main site: http://reasoningwithvampires.tumblr.com/
Caine:
As much as I’m trying to put forth a position, I’m also trying to work it out for myself, as far as humanly possible, as I go along.
Also, Crommunist did a takedown of that conservatism-prejudice paper:
https://proxy.freethought.online/crommunist/2012/02/02/stupidity-conservatism-and-racism-more-than-meets-the-eye/
Basically, they’re not really measuring what they think they’re measuring.
drbunsen, pardon me for seeming to jump on you, I did use you as a convenient stepping stone for a grumble from the gallery. As Classical Cipher said in the last incarnation, the whole gallery is not amused.
It’s not like this subject hasn’t already gone ten rounds, it ate more than one incarnation back on sciblogs.
Anyway, apologies are proffered, may I get you a drink from the bar? You’ve been away quite a while, what’s been happening?
One can promote bad ideas badly (Twilight, Atlas Shrugged) and one can promote bad ideas beautifully well (Triumph Of The Will).
…also, xkcd forever. I’m’a sleep now.
http://xkcd.com/1012/
I like how everyone’s go-to example of bad writing these days is Twilight; noted American novelist Dan Brown should be happy that Stephenie Meyer has taken the mantle away from him.
Apologies accepted Caine dear :) As you say, I have been away a long time, so I in turn apologise for rehashing themes that may have been well and truly hashed while I was absent. I can only hope that I am hashing them in some slightly meaningfully novel way.
I lost Teh Thread, so to speak, many moons ago – I embarrassed myself with a needlessly vituperative attack on an erstwhile comrade, around the same time as experiencing what I considered a similarly needless attack directed towards myself (not by the same comrade). The combination of irritation and shame led me to spend a little time licking my wounds under a rock somewhere and recalibrating my fangs, and my arguments.
A drink? I’d be delighted :) I don’t know if there’s a name for it, but for some reason I’m craving a measure each of Amaretto, Kahlua and Bailey’s, on the rocks. Thanks kindly.
And everyone’s go-to for not closing his tags properly should be me.
drbunsen:
Well, whatever it was, I don’t remember and a whole lot of us have embarrassed ourselves here, for what it’s worth.
I think that might make me pass out, but I’ll happily make one up for you. :D
Caine: SQUEE for itty bitty hands. I fostered a rat while her owner was in hospital, and the next morning I woke to find her pulling strips of my pillowcase between the bars. Last time I’ll ever put a rat cage on the nightstand by the head of the bed.
Good morning
That’s true, but it still means that I can say whether something is a good cheesecake or not, and apart from personal taste, there are objective criteria for that.
If the crust isn’t crust but mash, it’s not good. It can be savoury, but if it has 5 tablespoons of salt in it, it’s bad. And there’s no such thing as a vegan cheesecake.
Same applies to literature:
I can, as a literary scholar (and partly as a layperson), criticise the merits and shortcomings of a book.
I really enjoyed the Harry Potter novels, but man, from a literary PoV, they suck. They require more suspension of disbelief than Narnia (where Fauns living in a pre-industrial world of permanent winter have tinned sardines, toast and marmelade), because JKR tried to give to wizarding world an inner structure and logic and failed miserably. Also, there are too many plot-lines hastily wrapped together in the last book and the solution to the wand-scenario makes no sense if you think about how often “Expeliarmus” is thrown around in those novels. On the other hand, her egocentric teenage Harry Potter in the Order of the Phoenix was a very good character portrayal.Most “historical novels” are crap because they fail at the things they claim to do, which is to represent a historical world instead of just going for fantasy.
Those are objective criteria to judge good or bad writing. Style is another one.
Using only three adjectives can be a means and it can serve an end. Only if the effect and the intended effect are not the same, it’s bad writing.
To go back to Tolkien: his language is archaic. It was not what people in England spoke when he wrote the novels. It was a means to create an idea of age, of olden times. It works. Therefore translations that modernize that language (the newer German one is such a translation) are crap.
Oh, and Christopher Lee will always be Saruman to me. I love his voice, I fell in love with it when I first watched the Last Unicorn as a child (he spoke the part in German, too. His German is near perfect, yet the slight accent made King Haggard all the better.)
Jessa & pHred
Congratulations
kristinc
I’m sorry to hear, but thanks for the warning.
Consider, if you will, the Bullwer-Lytton Prize: inspired by an author earnestly endeavouring to write well, and failing, it now attracts writers earnestly endeavouring to write badly. It would appear that there is now a form, or genre, of bad opening sentences for novels: within that form, is the winning entry an example of good, or bad writing?
Ow, my brainmeats.
Wowbagger:
As bad as Dan Brown is, he’s not hefting that mantle alone. There are a lot of bad writers out there and unfortunately enough readers who keep them writing.
The last few times I’ve been to B&N, they’ve had a table out, pushing a certain type of teen fiction – all of it crap like Meyer’s. They can’t even give the stuff away.
Cheers, Caine. Ah, perfectly prepared. Chin chin.
Yes, and I think that where Antiochus fucked up was in saying that cheesecake is an inherently superior dessert to cupcakes. Or whatever the sweetmeat metaphor is. There are good novels and bad novels; there are good comic books and bad comic books. I would offer up The Photographer as an example of the pinnacles of artistic expression that can be reached by the comic book (or graphic novel, if you prefer) form.
Or, in this case, a graphic documentary.
*blink*
This is disturbingly relevant to something I have been vaguely, half-heartedly working on for a while now. I think I shall have to order that, when finances allow. Thanks :)
YOU LISTEN GOOD MUSIC NOW.
(Disclaimer: the appellation “good” is based purely on subjective criteria. Those criteria being: a weakness for so-called “fusion” projects which incorporate non-Western scales and unite electronic beats with traditional acoustic instruments, a lack of interest in lyrics, and a passion for strong danceable hip-hop influenced beats. Classical music and classic rock fans can probably skip this one.)
How is it possible that we are more than a month into The New Year and I haven’t vacuumed yet?
Phledge:
Hee. Rats are social critters, utterly brilliant and highly resourceful. We started out with a rescue, had never once thought about a rat when it came to pets. Ash, our rescue, completely changed our minds and hearts.
Chas, Esme and Rubin have free run of my studio and the upstairs bathroom. They do have a condo. :D
Cheers, Dr. Bunson. I’d be curious to know more about whatever it is you’re working on, whenever you feel like sharing.
Sally Strange
Yep, this.
Judge an art form by its standards (and the ones they self-claim to posess). But don’t judge novels for their lack of pictures (unless they’re graphic novels, of course.)
And if you compare them, you need a different set of criteria.
For example, feminist criticism can clearly be applied to comics and novels and I can compare both within that frame, especially if I’m talking about the adaptation of a certain plot, story etc.
But it’s not that A is better than B because A is a novel and B is a comic.
beatrice,
thanks for coming over and playing, appreciate it ! That crowd is well and truly testing my patience.
Sally: I like teh funky. I’ve been a classically trained pianist for over thirty years but I have a huge appreciation for unique music, especially that with pentatonic scales and heavy beat. Don’t know why–it’s not like it’s better or anything.
*ducks and runs for cover*
rorschach, you’re getting some great atheist responses, so I think it good that you didn’t close that thread.
Phledge,
I’d rather you linked to an example of such, you’ve piqued my interest.
Hekuni Cat:
They excel at being heretics. Chas is sitting on my shoulder eating caramel right now.
I think the Redhead used a Gingerbread Man pan.
chigau:
My view is that nature abhors a vacuum, and who am I to go against nature?
Glad the octopus was set-free. What a beautiful creature.
Doonesbury does a good.
For those who may have been reading it (and I apologize if this is taken as blog-whoring, but it’s not actually attached to my name,) I put up a new post on my non-ranty blog about my stories, and I’ve introduced the second of the four primes – the elves.
Read here!
Katherine Lorraine, Chaton de la Mort:
Nice! I wasn’t aware at all. Thank you. I’ve read it all now, I’m intrigued. Book? Stories? Anything else? Because I’d seriously love to read it.
@Just a Lurker:
I’m in the process of editing my fourth draft of my first novel – which is hard because it’s got to be re-written in several places, so it’s almost like a first draft again (well, first and a half cause I change none of the characters.) In the meantime, since I have between fifteen minutes to a half-hour to kill every morning before I work, I do those little posts on that blog about the world itself.
Oh YAY! Congrats. That’s just awesome. I’m following the blog now. I love new books.
Good morning. Thanks for all the conga rats – they make a terrific conga line!
I didn’t put a link or anything because I wasn’t trying to plug the book. I just needed someplace to give a shout out that it was done where I wouldn’t get snarky responses like, “Well, books are easier then articles.” Or other garbage like that. PZ is very luck to be able to let his hair down without using a pseudonym.
Totally thread bankrupt, what a busy week!
@opposablethumbs (599 previous),
Many thanks for signing.
The greatest tragedy for me is that Alan Turing simply wasn’t worldly enough to be a gay man in the 1950’s – he actually “incriminated” himself to the police when he reported a burglary. The stupidity of the laws at the time and the simple ingratitude of the government of the day robbed us of a mathematical genius.
I doubt that anyone could get UK law reverted to that of the 1950’s but there are ongoing grumbles against gay people. These days it seems to reference marriage which is always phrased in a manner that puts a clear message that gay is abnormal.
I am totally bankrupt so it’s time to catch up…
@Kat (605 previous),
I suspect that you will get the ultimate blame! Commiserations.
Here’s a newspaper headline from today which shouldn’t exist: Romney boosted by Trump backing. It’s a crazy world if endorsement by Trump is seen as a positive thing.
Moggie@129,
Yes, my first thought was “I wonder how much Newt paid him to do that.”
So, what you’re saying is that a work with “literary merit” is one that takes intellectual effort to understand fully? That’s fine – it’s as good as any other criterion – but you haven’t explained why this should be accepted by people other than you as some kind of objective, universal definition of the phrase “literary merit”. You’re doing the same thing that Antiochus did upThread: he explained some criteria for what constitutes a “good” novel – being “effective”, “innovative”, “transformative” and so on – but didn’t explain why the whole world is obliged to consider these criteria more important in evaluating “literary merit” than, say, how readable or entertaining a work is. You’ve just settled on some criteria that you, personally, consider to define “literary merit”, and are pretending that these have some sort of objective force. I’m sure that your view is popular in the world of literary criticism, but that’s exactly what I meant when I called these élite standards. It would be just as coherent to say that a book’s “literary merit” is measured by its capacity to be comprehensible to, and to entertain and amuse, a particular reader – in which case, for plenty of people (though by no means all), Tolkien probably comes out better than Joyce. But my point is that all of these are just benchmarks that we’re selecting arbitrarily; none of them have objective force.
====
Yes, I think that’s right – and it’s what I was getting at above, in talking about the difference between a “good novel” and “technical skill at writing”. The latter is obviously to some extent an objective concept, just as some people are objectively more skilled than others at cooking or at painting.
So it’s reasonable enough to say that, say, Stephanie Meyer is not very good at writing (I don’t know if this is true because I haven’t read the Twilight saga, but many people say so), regardless of what one thinks of the subject-matter of her novels. But I don’t think that this translates to “literary merit”. A book could exhibit great technical skill at writing and yet be mind-numbingly dull, just as a dish could exhibit great technical skill at cooking and yet taste disgusting. Those who talk about “literary merit” normally mean something other than mere technical skill: they would normally regard a book as having little literary merit if it were executed skilfully, but were designed to be unchallenging and straightforward, without any hidden layers of meaning.
This is the crux of the argument I’m having with KG. I disagree with him that there is a concept of objective “literary merit” beyond mere personal taste. He’s asserted that a work has real merit if “appreciating it fully takes a lot of time and effort,” but hasn’t explained why this should be so, nor why I shouldn’t adopt entirely different criteria of “literary merit”. Likewise, your own preferred criteria of “merit” are as good as any others, but this doesn’t mean that they have objective force, or that someone who rejects those criteria and substitutes others is objectively wrong. (I know you weren’t necessarily asserting this, but others were.) And so no one has yet shown me that I am objectively wrong to say that Lord of the Rings is a better novel than Ulysses, because it’s enormously more entertaining and interesting to read, and these are the criteria by which I choose to judge the “merit” of a work.
I quite liked Name of the Rose, FWIW. I haven’t read anything else by Eco.
How strange! I hadn’t seen Ariaflame’s #67 when I mentioned Murder, She Wrote. Two independent references to Murder, She Wrote in the beginning of one thread has to be Statistically Improbable.
***
But my point wasn’t that it or anything else is an “objective” criterion of quality. My suggestion was that with the “However” you entered the intersubjective realm of aesthetic judgment, which can’t be reduced to personal taste.
And now you’ve left it again. Because you recognize, I’m sure, that this can’t be justified or defended to others as a general criterion of comedic merit, and you wouldn’t try (and if you did, you’d again be moving beyond personal taste). (Of course, I’m not making a more general claim about artistic attempts to evoke nostalgia.) You’ve left the conversation about aesthetics just as you would leave the realm of ethics if your argument consisted entirely of “I just enjoy kicking puppies.”
Playing catch up while waiting to head to the witch doctor.
Hekuni Cat – Thanks. Will advise if/when I know something.
Phledge – It may be stress from bronchitis, but more likely is that my insulin production is staring to fail. I can live with needles if it becomes necessary.
drbunsen:
Welcome to the club. I left for similar reasons for quite a long time.
Caine – love the puzzles. I do not have the patience. Still love the ratkins. I should commission daughter to illustrate the new pair for you.
Back to catching up. Apologies if I missed any well wishers.
Now that’s an extremely interesting question. I think it may very well be the case that moral value-judgments have no objective force. However, this doesn’t mean that rational debate about moral questions is entirely impossible, because some basic moral values and judgments are accepted by a broad consensus of people. Much debate about moral questions thus turns on empirical questions, insofar as we are debating how to achieve particular goals in the real world, rather than whether those goals are desirable in the first place. So if I propose that we should adopt Economic Policy X because it will lead to greater prosperity, or abandon Economic Policy Y because it is causing needless suffering, my critics may very well dispute my claims because they think I’m empirically wrong about the real-world effects of policies X and Y; but they’re not likely to dispute the value-judgment that prosperity is good or suffering bad. And because we’re discussing a question of fact – “what are the effects of policy X in the real world?” – there is scope for rational debate.
All the same, we do sometimes run into situations where rational debate about morals is impossible, because the participants in the debate simply don’t start from the same basic assumptions about what the goal of morality is. This often happens in debates between humanists and traditional religious believers, for example; where one person in a debate believes that morality consists in upholding the word of God as taught by a particular religious sect, and the other believes that morality consists in maximising the freedom and happiness of human beings, they are going to run into irreconcilable disagreements. For this reason Piltdown and I are unlikely ever to come to a consensus about, say, same-sex marriage; because we are starting from entirely different ideas about what morality is and means, and the scope for reasoned debate about moral questions is thus limited.
Or, to take another example: I can’t prove the objective truth of my moral belief that all human lives are of equal value. I can, and do, argue with those who think that some are more “deserving” of life than others. But I can’t, in the end, prove to them that my values are right and that theirs are wrong; nor can they prove to me that I am right and that they are wrong. We’re just working from different moral assumptions. And I can only say that I don’t want to live in a society governed by their principles.
So, according to you, having read the book might or might not be a genuine prerequisite to knowing what if anything is “good” about it, but nothing else is. I don’t know what to say, really. How do you come up with this shit?
It’s hard to say, actually. Keeping track of all the ins and outs of your sweeping and convoluted claims takes too much time. Sure, the “elites” can make meaningful statements, lots of them; but apparently you insist there’s some elusive, subjective stuff left over when you say you think something is “good,” which those despicable “elites” can’t possibly explain. Nothing makes your value judgments what they are, right or wrong. They just are, existing in a formless void in your mind. That’s as close as I can get to understanding your position, because that’s how little sense it makes to me.
If you call something a “good novel” because you think it tastes good, then you have no idea what it means when almost everyone says something is a “good novel.” This is one of the more ridiculous examples that came to mind; but generally, you are objectively wrong if your criteria make no sense with respect to what you’re criticizing. It’s not everyone else who’s wrong, because you think it’s just a subjective matter and you get to define the terms which no one else has any chance of comprehending.
So that was bullshit. I figured as much.
Did either one say those were supposed to exclude how readable or entertaining a work is? And since you wouldn’t accept them as “objective,” why bother offering alternatives if you think those are also irrelevant?
Cheesecake may be good… but is it evil?
— — — — — — — — —
“My Gandalf comes out sounding more like Wilfred Brimley, and my dwarves all have very poorly imitated Scottish accents.
Elves sound like Samuel Jackson.”
-Maybe you should let your daughter watch a recording of the Ricky Gervais Show. The voice of Carl Pilkington explaining his ideas (“insects have it worked out”) is hilarious.
— — — — — — —
Bad writing: Twilight.
If the TV companies had only hired some goos author like Charlaine Harris…wait! They did! “True Blood” is based on the books by the perfectly competent Charlaine Harris.
And there is other good stuff about blood-drinkers gathering dust on the shelves. Why do the TV companies usually run away from proven good fantasy to let cheap hacks write the scripts? Do they think teenagers cannot handle complex characters and good dialogue?
“Too much complexity, not enough romance, we cannot accept Sesame Street unless you change Big Bird into a sexy vampire”
— — — — —
18 below zero in Umeå today. Saturday it will be something like 23 below (sigh).
So are some aesthetic values. You acknowledged this above with regard to recycling plots in TV series. Even if it weren’t true, rational debate would still be possible, because it consists of making, justifying, and defending arguments, which can be done about values themselves. As Singer says, that’s what ethics is about. I think you’ve acknowledged here that aesthetics can’t be reduced to personal taste.
So does much debate about aesthetic questions, insofar as people are debating whether a given work actually does meet the criteria. So some people could argue that a TV series really isn’t recycling plots but doing a variation on a theme or making a meta-statement about plot-recycling or whatever. And attempt to justify or defend their position with evidence from the work.
People, including religious people, can rationally debate both means and values themselves. The problem with religious believers is that they bring to a rational debate an irrational (and unethical) commitment to a belief in a set of falsehoods that corrodes attempts at rational debate. But this doesn’t say anything about the possibility or usefulness of rational debate about ethics itself – just that some people can’t fully participate in it. It wouldn’t really be possible to have a rational discussion of aesthetics with people whose primary criterion of artistic merit was whether it pleased the Leprechaun King.
Made me laugh.
OK, I’m out for a bit.
[I think] The Name of the Rose is brilliant (the murder mystery, the period philosophy and politics all overshadowed by the church, the characters – everything is coherent, everything works both jointly and severally. Took me ’till the second time I read it to realise that William of Baskerville has actually reasoned his way all the way to atheism, though of course he could never come out and say so). [I think] Foucault’s Pendulum is an irritating rag-and-bone shop of incoherent, disconnected odds and ends all rammed in together under a veneer of erudition. I just wonder how Eco wrote two such apparently comparable books and ended up with one so enjoyable and successful (I mean, at achieving what it sets out to do, not commercial success though of course it has that too) and the other … not.
I am more than prepared to consider the probability that I don’t like FP because I don’t get it.
I regret having nothing to contribute to the actual discussion, I just wanted to say that. I’m going to jump back behind the burladero at the edge of the arena now ::runs away and hides again::
No, I’m not. What I’ve said repeatedly, and you’ve repeatedly ignored or misrepresented, is that the dichotomy objective/just personal taste is not exhaustive. As SC says:
It can’t be so reduced because it can be rationally debated, and one person can persuade another to change their mind by rational argument, and in particular by bringing to the other’s attention both aspects of a particular work they had not seen, and whole criteria by which to judge works, which they had not appreciated, but can come to appreciate. IOW, in areas of esthetic judgment (and ethical judgement), people can educate each other and moreover, one person can be more educated and skilled than another. So saying you are uneducated in your literary tastes is no more an insult, and can be no less a statement of fact, than you saying I am uneducated in jurisprudence would be.
Exactly. Early on I stated that if someone insists that the criterion of literary merit is how many copies of a novel are sold, or how little concentration is required to read it, I can’t prove them wrong. I’ve said similar things several times, but (presumably because this doesn’t fit with your idea of what I must be saying), you’ve ignored it.
Now, when you say as you did above, that:
1) No, it wouldn’t, because practically the only people who talk about “literary merit” except in meta-level discussions like this are those who would, broadly, agree that my definition was closer to what they meant than yours; so you would be misusing the term.
2) Setting that aside, there’s a distinction between saying simply “A good book is one I enjoy” – which is what you have mostly been saying – and choosing a different set of criteria by which to judge from those of “literary merit” in my sense, such as breadth of popular appeal – which still refers to something other than what you like, and in fact is arguably more objective than my “literary merit” as you can approximately measure it by sales figures. It’s parallel to the difference between comparing you and Pilty – you both try to judge on criteria that do not reduce to your personal preferences, but the criteria are different; and comparing you and a frank egotist who says “Good is whatever suits me best.” In both cases, it is reasonable to say that the “Good is just what I happen to like” people are not discussing esthetics or ethics at all, precisely because they are trying to reduce the whole field to personal preference.
However, if that is a secondary criterion, or if their allegiance is to the Troll Tyrants or other potentates, all bets are off. That is, of course, an exhaustive list of the possibilities.
[meta]
consciousness razor: I won’t be offended if you don’t answer this, but are you an OM under some other ‘nym? If not, an oversight exists.
[/meta]
“Hand me my sword. It’s the one that says BAD MOTHERFUCKER on it!”
Jeffrey: I’m sorry to hear you’re having health issues.
pHred: Congratulations on your book!
Jessa: Congratulations on your award!
Giliell:
I think this is sensible.
For anyone who was following l’affaire Slacktiverse on B&W… awwww, Mmy’s so cute.
And by “cute,” I mean nauseating.
I think I’ve made my argument extremely clear. All I am arguing is that there are no objective criteria of “literary merit”, and that an opinion as to whether something is a “good novel” or a “bad novel” cannot be objectively right or wrong, any more than it is objectively right or wrong to think that peanut butter tastes good. If you can’t understand this, then I don’t know how much clearer I can make it.
It is possible to make factual statements about a literary work, which can be objectively true or false. If I said “Lord of the Rings is an allegory for the rise and fall of Genghis Khan”, this would be objectively false, and anyone who is an expert on the work and its history would be easily able to correct me. Similarly, one can make objectively true or false statements about a literary work’s historical significance, its differences from earlier works, its influence on other writers or on the broader culture, and so on. These are all factual claims about reality. And obviously people who are experts in the field of literature are more likely to be qualified to pontificate on these questions. No one denies this.
Those questions are, however, completely and categorically distinct from value-judgments about how good a literary work is. Because the question of whether a work is good is not a question of objective fact. It’s a question of personal opinion. Is it really that difficult to understand the categorical difference between these two things? Of course people can
===
I don’t know what the “intersubjective realm of aesthetic judgment” might be. It’s obviously true that most people, as a matter of personal taste, happen to prefer a TV series that does not recycle the same plots again and again over one that does. But there is no reason why this need be so for everyone; if someone said “I think the best TV series are those which recycle the same plot in every episode, because I like my TV to be predictable”, xe would not be objectively wrong, nor would hir position be any less intrinsically reasonable than that of the majority. I don’t see anything beyond personal taste here; insofar as it is possible to have discussions about the artistic merit of a work, it’s only because certain personal tastes happen to be widely-shared.
I’m denying that there is such a thing as a “general criterion of comedic merit”. That’s my point.
Yes.
No; if I’m understanding you correctly (and I may not be), I don’t think this really follows from your previous sentence, nor from anything I’ve said. I think you’re conflating two types of debate here.
If two people agree on a set of values, they can argue rationally about how to apply those values to reality. For example, if two people both agree that reducing the suffering of poor people is an important moral objective, they can debate rationally about which policies will, in fact, best achieve the goal of reducing the suffering of poor people. But if someone rejected entirely the assumption that reducing the suffering of poor people is an important moral objective, there would be no possibility of further rational debate on this subject.
This, though, also illustrates the difference between opinions about morals and opinions about art; the former tend to have a much graver effect on others’ lives than the latter do. If someone opined that the suffering of poor people is unimportant, we’d probably consider that person scary and dangerous. (And we have good reasons to do so, because people with that mindset, if given power, are obviously likely to contribute to others’ suffering.) By contrast, if someone opined that TV shows ought to recycle the same plots over and over because the best TV is that which is predictable, most people might consider that person’s view rather odd and idiosyncratic, but there would be no particularly good reason to condemn or criticize them for it; it’s not as if a person’s taste in TV shows has any great impact on others’ wellbeing.
Again, yes. But they wouldn’t be having a debate about values; they’ve already agreed on the criterion of what makes a “good” or a “bad” TV series (in this case, that of not recycling the same plots over and over), and are simply debating whether a given work in fact meets that criterion. They would have no answer to someone who simply chose to reject that criterion entirely. In that circumstance, they’d simply have to agree to disagree.
Sorry janine, drawing a blank, the nearest I get to the indie rock scene is reading questionable content.
I’ve seen you say that before, yes; but I can’t figure out how it fits in with everything else you have been arguing. Surely, if you accept that you cannot prove one set of criteria of “literary merit” to be objectively the right ones, then this disposes of the entire argument?
This again conflates the difference between arguments about facts and arguments about values. If I were to say “Joyce’s Ulysses is a bad book because it’s incomprehensible”, then a literary scholar might be able to address this by explaining to me things I previously hadn’t known about the meaning, subtext and historical context of the work, and this might cause me to change my view of the work; because my previous view was premised on a lack of knowledge of the relevant facts. That isn’t a debate about values, it’s a debate about facts. But if I were to say “Joyce’s Ulysses is a bad book because the style of writing is ugly”, this would not be susceptible to any kind of rational debate; it’s purely a personal value-judgment.
John Morales@ 115, here’s a list: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Funk_Brothers#List_of_.231_Songs_on_which_The_Funk_Brothers_played
++++++++++++
Caine, the 32k piece puzzle looks amazing, and amazingly expensive. How do you keep the rats from stealing pieces?
Popping back in for a moment with BREAKING NEWS:
There are reports that Komen is reversing its decision about funding Planned Parenthood.
Heck, at this point, I’m not sure I’d TAKE Komen’s help.
Money>>>Morals
Selling Pink>>>Pro-life
So what this decision if true says is that the people at Komen believe abortion IS murder…but are ok with it if it helps their bottom line.
It will be interesting to see what lasting effect this will have on Komen’s reputation. They’re continuing to deny that it was a political decision, which still leaves a lot of us distrustful, but since they are making PP eligible for grants again, anti-choice conservatives will continue not to donate to them. And in the coverage of this story, all of their dirty little secrets have been given massive attention.
So in the end, they pissed off everybody. They’re going to have a really hard time recovering from this fiasco.
David M,
They most certainly do not vanish magically. Someone like me who finds that habit abhorent either picks, sweeps, or vacuums them up. Gross.
___
Chas,
I want to add an expansion on this notion. Most of my recreational time is tied up in a highly technical activity that really doesn’t fall under the term art: I mountain bike. Now, much of the terrain that I prefer to traverse on my bike is considered challenging and requires an investment in skills just to travel from one end to another without needing to walk or stop. An mtb novice wouldn’t even be able to ride some of the places that I prefer and likewise, there are places where I cannot ride that others who have a larger investment in their skillset can.
Is a trail that I prefer better than one that a novice will find enjoyable? That would be farcical to suggest, one may be better for me while another better for a neophyte. However, it can also be that some aspects of what I enjoy about a more challenging trail can be incorporated in a less threatening fashion into a trail oriented towards a wider audience with more limited skillsets. It’s at this point that one could argue that a more challenging trail has extra merit: it doesn’t just increase how it is enjoyed, but also permits or inspires features on other trails that are enjoyed by more riders.
Now the question becomes: is it really that hard trail, or just the aspect that gets mimicked that has that extra merit. I tend to the techniques as merit, and originators as being historically interesting, but not elevated beyond that. I do not believe that techniques have a one time only opportunity for creation any more than I think scientific ideas need a specific scientist to be envisioned.
___
Jeffrey D,
Oh shit. I hope you don’t have to go to needles. Take care.
___
pHred,
How exciting. Have a breath or three.
___
Jessa,
Congratulations.
___
SallyStrange,
Beats Antique was a welcome diversion. Good indeed.
___
Katherine,
Thanks for the update.
Thanks, SC.
I’m glad PP will get the funding and poor women won’t have to do without exams, but I’m also glad SGK has gotten a lot of highly negative PR this week, with lots of attention to where its money goes and how they harass smaller charities with lawsuits.
(As you’d expect from an org run by far-righties, they also treat their lower-level employees like shit and pay them “25-40% below competitive wages,” according to someone who’s worked with them before.)
Ing: Yeah, pretty much. Then again, forced-birthers claim to believe abortion is murder, but most of them balk when you ask whether women who get abortions should be prosecuted.
While I’m glad to see that Komen has reversed course, I’m not certain this is going to help them long-term.
In the past two days, they have:
(1) Pissed off pro-choice men and women
(2) Pissed off people who are anti-abortion but favor women’s health otherwise
and now,
(3) Pissed of wingnuts.
Lose-lose.
No, this is my only pseudonym here. Thanks, I’m flattered.
———
It couldn’t be in any case, because no one will ever be in the exact same situation as someone else. That doesn’t really matter. The fact is that there are conditions which govern what people’s personal tastes are, and that these are explicable in terms of objective facts. If it isn’t a fact, then it isn’t anything, but our problem here is that we don’t know all the facts. If we could explain a person’s psychological state well enough, we could explain how well a work satisfies that person’s criteria in those conditions.
The point is that we can study how people respond to different things and use that information to produce the desired response (which in this case would be “thinking this is a good artwork”). In some sense, artists have been doing that for millennia, but not at all scientifically. Anyway, there’s no reason to think it means anything to say something is “subjective” if that’s supposed to imply it can’t be true or false and is completely off-limits from the outside world. Subjectivity in this case is generally an epistemological issue. I think you’d agree that it’s not as if “subjects” are in a separate ontological category from the rest of the world.
Why is “ugly” so different from “incomprehensible”? Can’t we ask for more information? What makes it ugly to that person?
Regardless of Komen’s decision (I know why it was made) I’m still never donating to them. Planned Parenthood deserves every donation they receive, and I’ll certainly be happy to donate as well.
Organizing a group trip is difficult and stressful, especially when everyone in the group is a poor college student. Freethinkers is keeping me very busy.
Totally agreed, Katherine. I sent PP some money yesterday. I’ve budgeted for regular donations.
Fuck Komen.
Jessa, congrats! Is it bragging rights only, or are there perks?
–
“I don’t know art, but I know what I don’t like.”
–
Hi, drbunsen!
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I hope Bloomberg is still matching donations.
Komen just said that PP would be eligible to apply for grants. I doubt they’re ever going to award them any grant money as long as the current head is there.
I made a kale-blackeyed pea-tomato soup the other night. Just now got brave enough to taste it (I’ve never put tomato in it before), and it is YUMMY!!! Woo-hoo! Go me.
Because donors may have offset the Komen money this year, but could they keep doing it year after year? As tempting as it is to tell Komen to fuck off…
Now this is very interesting, although I think you’ve also shifted the goalposts slightly. If I’m understanding you rightly, you’re no longer asking “is this work good or bad?”, you’re asking the somewhat-different question of “what makes people think that this work is good or bad?” Obviously, the psychology behind people’s reactions to art is a subject of empirical scientific inquiry (albeit one which is far outside my field of knowledge). But this doesn’t have anything much to do with the question of what “artistic merit” means. Indeed, surely an enquiry of the kind you describe could just as easily be applied to understanding the popularity of a work which is widely perceived as lacking artistic merit, such as the Twilight saga?
Why don’t printer work? Like any of them? Why do they just stop and randomly decide not to print documents
It’s funny, though. Before this whole blowup, I didn’t even know that Komen supported Planned Parenthood. I doubt that many people knew. Yeah, Komen isn’t going to recover easily.
Jeez, not two minutes after I posted that last comment, the dang site logged me out.
It is my hope that the actions that SGK has done causes enough people to turn to other charities. Enough that that SGK withers on the vine.
And fuck their pink gun!
https://proxy.freethought.online/singham/2012/02/03/atlas-shrugged-ii-more-trains/#comment-13504
Apparently when your first movie bombs your response is to double down!
More action sociopaths!
There is a law that states the likelihood of a printer working is in inverse correlation to the urgency of getting a documented printed.
As you’d expect from an org run by far-righties, they also treat their lower-level employees like shit and pay them “25-40% below competitive wages,” according to someone who’s worked with them before.
They also appear to pay their female VPs less than their male VPs (and similar level execs). (Source: http://butterbeliever.com/2011/10/22/i-will-not-be-pinkwashed-why-i-do-not-support-susan-g-komen-for-the-cure/)
Yes, I know all those numbers are high, but note that the female VPs tend to have salaries where the first digit is one, the males 2-4.
Speaking of bad art. I Think I can safely say Atlas Shrugged is only good from an ideological POV. You really can’t get it on technique or pacing or plot or characterization now can you?
Komen also engaged in some really disingenuous lying about it, saying how PP didn’t “provide mammograms”. No, they provided breast exams, and then gave people lab orders to get mammograms at certified facilities, and then paid for the damned mammograms. I think it was Jen at Blaghag who said that’s like saying that someone who buys you a gift certificate for a massage didn’t provide you a massage, because they didn’t personally lay hands on you themselves.
You think the female VIPS get pink paychecks?
Argh. Fucking italics, how do they work?
Also, there’s the fact that the Komen top executive pay is close to half a million dollars a year. So the amount they’re punitively holding from PP isn’t much more than what they give to a single person as an annual salary. A single, nonprofit executive. Half a million dollars.
Or how Santorum totally didn’t have an abortion…just a procedure to save a woman’s life that terminated a pregnancy.
Are they also given a bonus for turning up and actually doing their job ?
Hm, that chart from dianne doesn’t show the numbers I saw, which was $459,000 to Nancy Brinker. I’m not sure of the provenance of that number; it was repeated in several places but they all trace back to the same original.
How to rock a lesbian’s world.
Involves Jesus and breeding.
(I miss the Gumby script.)
Let’s just get them all out and over with
Nailed. Wood. Body of Christ. Come To the Lord Save Through Me.
I miss any?
Via Shakes: Hmmmmm.
Komen’s $7.5 Million Grant to Penn State Appears to Violate New Policy
@176: The link I gave is to the tax return for SGK for 2008. When did Brinker become president? She’s not listed on their return in 2008, as far as I can tell. (Though I haven’t done a thorough eval.) The complete tax return is at http://ww5.komen.org/uploadedFiles/Content/AboutUs/Financial/Komen%20Parent_990_3-31-09_PIC_Delivered_CD_01Dec09.pdf
On looking at the original tax return, I notice that two people are listed with the title “VP” (no other qualifications) from 4/08 through 11/08. One is a Peter Williams, the other a Diane Balma. Peter’s compensation appears to have been about twice that of Balma’s. Despite their having the same title and working the same period of time. Don’t we have laws about that sort of thing?
I just got my tax refund. $1,500. What shall I do with it?
While I could always use new shoes, I was thinking of doing something more worthwhile with it.
Hmm.
Suggestions? I’m seriously asking.
I apologize for getting involved in a conversation that some find annoying. In my defense, I’m relatively new here, and didn’t realize this was a topic well-worn around these parts. Also, I had to speak up about W.S. Burroughs, because he’s a favorite of mine, and there was a huge court case involving the merit of his work (which he won). So, sorry about all that. We can talk about other stuff. Who here likes doggies?
Oh! Thank you, janine! That was really nice to wake up to this afternoon. Yours made me giggle out loud.
A puzzle with 32,000 parts!?! I must tell my grandma. Or not tell her and wait for her birthday in August. Hmmm.
That’s directed to SC. What about me?
I don’t think that’s quite as crazy as it sounds, actually. It’s just easy to exaggerate.
Algernon? Unpopular? I mean, I’m certainly better at missing such developments than most other people… but… ~:-|
Could this be related to auditory illusions? There are places in eastern Africa where such phenomena are deliberately used – for instance two people play scales, and you hear a tune that nobody’s playing.
~:-| Would “panties in a punch” mean anything much?
Yep.
GAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH!!!!ELEVENTYELEVEN!!!
I think this opinion is unfortunately wrong. Crichton’s books are having a lot more influence on currently widespread opinions, and thus politics, than Dostoevsky’s.
*hulk smash*
Could you give us directions to the book? :-9 And are the cut 100 pages going to appear elsewhere?
That’s what I thought (also German: fallen), but couldn’t get it to work, while the French ça ne vaut pas [verb] “this isn’t worth [verb]ing” would fit precisely. I just had no idea of…
Oh! Now it makes sense, thank you!
Ooh. Big can of 3 m long, 3 cm thick Australian earthworms.
:-D Day saved!
But that’s it! The people in this discussion are talking past each other, because they’re meaning completely different things by “bad”! I’ve been waiting all the time for somebody to notice!
I once put my sister to bed with Lenin’s Collected Works. It worked – quickly.
“Artistically equal” doesn’t even mean anything outside of one person’s personal taste.
For instance, if you happen to like danceable beats, Beethoven is an utter failure. If you happen to hate danceable beats, like I do, Beethoven wins.
If you want to say that Beethoven’s works are probably more complex than anything ever sung by a boygroup, go ahead and do that. And if you then happen to like complexity, good for you!
…while I sit here, trying to catch up while mostly putting off meatspace stuff like… oh… opening a bank account, getting a cell phone, and getting Internet at home. And then there’s the talk I have to put together till Wednesday, and I won’t have much time from Sunday onward.
*sigh*
Four thousand throats can be cut in one night by a running man.
– Klingon proverb
*hugs*
Time zones.
Hasn’t it been years since we had the last one? Wasn’t the last one the one between then-Sven and me on jazz?
Weaksauce. That sentence is practically straightforward. The silliness lies entirely in “my former best friend (and [my former best] werewolf)” and its repetition with “my […] vampire”. There’s only one, count it: one, box-within-the-box, the part helpfully marked by a dash on each side.
Seriously, you call that a monstrosity? You ain’t seen nuthin yet !!
(…I did stumble over “informed on me”. Is that some regionalism for “informed me”? Something like “hate on me” perhaps?)
Scrolling down a little, I find the quotes “My voice and eyebrows shot up.” and “My jaw and respect for Charlie dropped.”. That’s called a zeugma, it’s clearly deliberate both times, and I find it funny, though I’m sure translators must hate its guts.
O hai! I maded you an Internets out of lavender cookies. And I did not eated it.
Unless you actually like it that way.
Unless you actually like it that way.
There’s also no such thing as a good cheesecake, because cheese is not good.
When people say “good morning” to me, I usually say “good, or morning?”.
In a thread of infinite length, everything happens.
And not just once, but infinitely often.
Your use of “knowing” implies objectivity. Stop that.
If my criteria for liking books are simple enough, a detailed review can be enough to demonstrate that I won’t like a particular book. I’ve never read Twilight, but what I’ve read here about all the Mormon imagery in it (and what I’ve seen in the one movie I’ve watched of it) makes me sure enough that I wouldn’t like the book if I read it.
He’s not offering alternative objective criteria.
Some places in Austria are already there, and some of those are only 500 m above sea level.
That would be awesome.
I don’t think so. I think they believed claiming that abortion is murder would help their bottom line, were shown to be wrong, and have now abandoned that claim because they now think that will help their bottom line.
It’s the bottom line all the way down to the bottom.
I fail to understand how something hard, odorless and sickle-shaped can be gross… but, just to make sure, I was talking about how it appeared to me as a child. If there’s any structure on the bathroom floor, let alone any kind of carpet, nail clippings are quite difficult to find again. When I have a bathroom of my own, I do occasionally clean it.
And by “clippings” I mean “cut off with nail scissors or just with the nails of the other hand”. Nail scissors are stored in the bathroom.
I think there’s lots of stuff I find beautiful that I don’t understand.
I cannot say that I am a big fan of William S. Burroughs, I do find that the Dr Benway segments of his novels to be very funny in an extremely disturbing way.
What shall I do with it?
You should not spend it all on shoes. $1500 worth of shoes would be excessive. You could save it in case of shortfalls next year. Or clear credit card debt if you’ve got it. Or donate it to one of the better breast cancer charities mentioned on recent threads if you’re into that. Or blow it all on a trip to Guadalupe or Isle de Reunion if you’re into that.
In short, what do you want to do with it?
Saw this and had to give my own Unicorn-love. It’s one of my favorite animated movies. But of course, when discussing it with other guys IRL, they just hear the word ‘Unicorn’ and dismiss the whole idea.
I try to explain “Yeah, it’s got a unicorn, but it’s also got a giant bull made out of fire. It’s got a fucked up monster bird with tits killing an old lady. And Christopher Lee!” But they just stop listening at the word ‘Unicorn’. Because unicorns are for GIRLS.
There’s so much to like in that movie though. Favorite elements of mine are The Harpy (probably my favorite creature from that movie, I like the senseless mix of avian and mammalian features), The Pirate-Talking cat, the laughing skeleton (Do you figure he was some guy that King Haggard had crucified? Or was he the fourth ‘man at arms’ King Haggard said his court consisted of?) and the scene with the boob-tree always makes me laugh.
Regarding the Komen Foundation: As a young guy who’s just started learning about this stuff, I’m finding this very instructive. Back when I didn’t think too much about these things, I wouldn’t have got what the big fuss was… I mean, curing cancer, that’s good right? What’s everyone complaining about?
I have a feeling many people probably go the same route I did… just assuming it’s a good thing because it’s an organization that claims to be seeking a cure for cancer. I also have a feeling if I try to explain what I’ve recently learned here to others, it’ll be dismissed as Old ‘Cale bein a cynical asshole again.’
Yeah, I’ve always been a cynical asshole… it’s just that now I try to be cynical about the ‘right’ things.
And you think that’s less controversial around here? :-)
$1500 buys two pairs of Manolo Blahniks!
Maybe? I’m not sure, for me $150 is a lot of money to spend on shoes.
I was thinking of tossing it towards a good breast cancer charity, or maybe to Thyca (the thyroid cancer survivor’s org), as I’m a survivor of thyroid cancer.
Or, maybe just give it to a local charity, like a women’s shelter.
*throws up hands* I really dislike getting nice pots of money, I go into panic mode.
My thoughts exactly. Surely there’s more worthy stuff to criticize Twilight on. Then again, I suppose all that territory has been mined to the bedrock by now.
maybe to Thyca (the thyroid cancer survivor’s org), as I’m a survivor of thyroid cancer.
Thyroid cancer gets a lot less money and attention than breast cancer. It sounds like a good fit, especially since you’re a survivor yourself. Local charities tend to be more efficient (spend more of their money on what they claim they do and less on administration) than larger charities, so a good local charity might be a good choice too.
Really, short of giving it all to the Elect Santorum campaign or Focus on Family, I don’t see how you could go too far wrong in giving it to charity, but I also suspect that your income level is such that spending at least some of it on yourself would not be exactly indulgent.
Who here likes doggies?
Me! I want a dog and so does my kid. But neither of us want to wake up early enough to walk one before work/school.
I like to visit doggies, or even have them visit me, but a week or two is my maximum.
___
David M,
Nail clippings aren’t something I want to step on when walking into a room, nor do I want to see them and avoid doing such. Given the ease with which they can be counted while producing them I see no reason why the person who produced them can’t ensure they all end up in the trash.
No, no! The phrase “informed on [person]” means “acted as an informer about [person] to others (presumably authority figures, but not necessarily) that [person] would rather not have been informed because said authorities/informees could and/or did get [person] into deep trouble”.* See also: tattle-tale; stoolpigeon; etc.
______________________________________________________
*: English can be remarkably compact sometimes
You may be underestimating the ricochets.
dianne,
Thyroid cancer does not get very much attention or funding, true. It also tends to fall into two categories: the super-treatable with few long-term consequences and 99% cure rate, and super-untreatable with a less than 5% cure rate. I lucked into the first category (and I’m coming up on 5 years post-treatment, so I’m pretty stoked).
Thyca is mainly an org for survivors and for supporting current patients, but they also toss money towards research. If I donate to them, I can specify that I want my donation to go to that. I’m not deluded that $1500 is going to accomplish a whole lot there, but every little bit counts.
Local charities also are tempting. The area I live in is pretty economically depressed, and there’s any number of worthy causes.
That is not exactly wrong. My income has doubled since I started a new job in January. This refund is based on my old income, which put me near (above, but near) the poverty line. I’m now living comfortably, and don’t have any glaring needs that need attending to. If I spent it on myself, I’d do things like buy shoes or maybe a new sofa, as my futon is rather sad.
Nail clippings? Seriously?
Would anyone like to talk about the earwax I find on my Q-tips? Or how about an ode to a small lump of green putty I found in my armpit one mid-summer afternoon?
Janine,
You can wax poetic on this topic all you like, if you will permit us to sneer in a very Vogon-ish manner.
Boiled or fried?
That did not take long.
I fucking love The Last Unicorn! And yes, I hate the “it sounds girly” dismiss it shit. Sexism. GRRR.
Same thing with Sailor Moon.
It’s why I am a pegasister and love the bronies. /)(\
Searching through the last several subthreads, I can’t find exactly what happened to the Redhead. A right-side stroke? If you think I can provide anything more than Internet hugs, please do tell me.
I also found the Amtrak Route Atlas that Jadehawk posted. WTF. I knew it was bad, but that bad?
Antiochus, I’m basically continuing my thesis, just with a lot more fossils this time. Casts of some natural molds* I need to look at are being made right now!
* The bones must have dissolved in acidic groundwater, so the fossils are impressions. Because of this, and because the rock consists mostly of coal (so that you can only see shadows on black), all details are much easier to see on a cast.
I dunno Janine, do you leave it on the counter and claim you don’t notice doing so because it’s a similar tone to the countertop?
I’ve been working on the assumption that it’s developmentally normal for teens to feel, at least sometimes, that they hate their parents. And then it struck me that maybe I should double check it, in case it was something else my mom fucked up when *I* was a teen. So is … is that normal?
Oh.
Just_A_Lurker: No apology necessary. If I wanted to avoid an argument I would keep my yip shut or frequent the Intersection. I like getting beat up a little.
Also: Dogs are not good pets…[some normative statement about what kinds of pets people should have]
[This was intended as a joke at my own expense]
Kristinc: I think it’s normal. Considering my childhood, I certainly HOPE it was normal.
DDMFM: Fantastisch! I’m glad that you found a way to continue. I don’t know how it is over there, but both the funding and job environment in the USA are abyssmal.
…by “bad” I mean there are holes you can put… oh, look, the entire states of Wyoming and South Dakota are in such a hole. And almost all of Tennessee and Kentucky is in another. Madness!
Makes more sense. :-)
Usually, the act of cutting catapults them out of sight – apparently, they magically aggregate in corners or at least near walls; that’s why the danger of stepping on them hasn’t occurred to me.
Oh. “Treacherously informed the authorities about [person]’s rule infractions”, like “told on”? I suppose that fits the “on the sly” part, thanks.
Won.
I do get the impression that the Humboldt Foundation is the last organization in all of Europe that still has money. And this time, “all of Europe” includes Switzerland.
Mine certainly fucked up, but given her personality and mine, there just wasn’t and still isn’t a way to avoid that.
No. You are refusing to understand what my argument is. I will repeat the key point one more time: the dichotomy objective/just personal taste is not exhaustive.
Wrong: it would be subject to rational debate. Because what I would do (if I had read and enjoyed Ulysses – as it happens, I’ve made two attempts on it and failed to get past the first chapter) is to first ask you for more detail:
In what way do you find the style ugly?
Can you give me examples of the ugliest and least ugly bits?
How would you change the most ugly bits you have picked out to make them less ugly, while preserving as much of the meaning as possible?
Having elicited answers to these and other questions, I would then explain, if I could, why I thought Joyce had used the particular style he did – what I thought he intended to achieve, and why your suggested amendments would not do. Now surely you can concede that it is at least possible that this would change your evaluation of its ugliness?
dianne – Brinker is the founder; I’m not sure what her title is (Susan Komen was her sister).
Someone tried telling me today that if the current process of obtaining research funding gives pharmaceutical companies too much potential for profiting off work they didn’t do, the PI’s should do a better job negotiating their grant contracts to reflect the amount of work done by labs. I have a pretty good handle on the inventory in my lab, but I don’t think we’ve ever had bootstraps in here.
If anyone is looking for an equivalent to taking a hammer to one’s own brain, here is Gary North on Victoria Jackson’s Politichicks.
Would ‘Tis dare comment on this? I would not blame him if he wants nothing to do with this.
To clarify, I definitely hated my mother because I had good reasons to hate her, but I was assuming that although she used “it’s normal for you to feel like you hate me, you’re a teenager” to invalidate my justified anger and hatred, it was still a statement that was true for non-abusive parent-teen relationships.
And then I thought that I should probably not assume things about non-abusive parent-teen relationships because I have little to no experience with them.
Kristinc: As a teen I occasionally felt like I hated my parents, but I’d always think otherwise once the storm of whatever I was currently angry with them about went away.
I think, in the non-abusive model, it’s a normal but transient thing. And it kinda makes what you describe extra insidious… using it to explain away and invalidate actual issues someone may have with their parents. Because it just sounds so ‘reasonable’, and for most of us it’s probably accurate.
Cross-posted from PET:
Posting this here and also on TET: my daughter, for her senior college project, needs info (books, interviews, whatever) with French natives who have immigrated to the USA. If you can help, please email me at triskele the cat at gmail dot com. (remove spaces, use symbols – you know the routine!!)
I’d give more information about what she needs, but I don’t really have any. I will forward any contacts to her and let you know she’ll be reaching out to you. I figured TET/PET would have enough readers that she can get some help with this. Thanks!
Yep, it affected her left side. First announced here, description here. Much progress has been made, but much more is needed for her to come home.
I’m not sure if I would say that I ever really hated my parents, but I definitely had my moments of teenage drama and “You’re so unfair!”
I think the teenage years are rough for everyone in a family, and it’s probably worth saying to yourself as a parent “S/he doesn’t actually hate me; this is a teenage phase; s/he’ll be an adult soon.” Actually saying that to the teenager really seems like it’s invalidating the way they feel, and I really hate when people do that. Even if teenage angst is a phase you’ll grow out of, everything you feel is still real to you at that time.
A quote from K. Popper:
How we want to define a word like “good” or “better” is, of course, subjective. However, once we agree on a definition the discussion of merit is not subjective (given a coherent definition). This would apply to any proposition that a thing is “good”, whether it be a work of art, and action, a cheesecake, or a book.
This simply means that there are as many ways that a thing could be considered “good” as there are contextual definitions for that word. If we limit our discussion to the simple definition of “good” as “enjoyed by Antiochus”, that is also something that we can discuss objectively. I have much more expertise in this discussion than anyone else, obviously, but there isn’t any reason that KG and Walton couldn’t have a rational argument about what I like given what they know about me*.
We don’t have to agree about the best definition of “good” to understand the discussion.
I think it is entirely accurate to say that under the concept of good=correlating with walton’s personal taste, that LoTR is better than Ulysses. However, under most more general concepts of the word “good” as applied to literature, LoTR doesn’t hold a candle to Ulysses.
This is an entirely objective statement.
*That I am a fucking idiot.
However, under most more general concepts of the word “good” as applied to literature, LoTR doesn’t hold a candle to Ulysses.
I realize that I’m stepping into an ongoing argument and being lazy by not reading the earlier thread, but why? What is it about Ulysses that makes it better literature than LoTR? What makes something “good” literature at all?
…Oh.
David M:
I’d say that describing a snide remark made about a couple of absent people, one of whom has a long record of bullying others here, as “evil” and nearly “bullying” is, honestly, risible.
I’ve seen worse go down in TET with less condemnation — including SC’s hounding of Josh for two days, demanding he answer her for a remark he left on a different blog — and I’m not inclined to retract or apologize. At all.
Skeptifem has a bug up her ass about porn and will miss no opportunity to talk at people about it. LM will miss no opportunity to police people for supposedly having said something “wrong” and harangue them until they “admit” it. I don’t feel the need to defend this as if I were defending a doctoral thesis, so future demands that I do so will go unanswered.
And that’s all I have to say about that.
kristinc, I hated my father when I was a teenager because he was an abusive drunk (we’ve mended our relationship since then, but that’s a whole different discussion), but I did not hate my mother, who was (and is) a kind and thoughtful person. So, although I can’t speak to whether it’s “normal” or not for teens to hate their parents, I can say that it’s not universal. Hope that helps a little.
I agree. When my son’s said “I hate you!” the neutral response I’ve settled on is “I expect you to feel that way sometimes”. I felt like this was reassuring in the midst of his intense emotion without being dismissive of, well, his intense emotion.
And it does seem transient for him like TLC said, and more of a way really for him to express “I am very very angry at you right now”. Then he cools down and becomes a reasonable person and apologizes and hugs me.
I hated my mother. It wasn’t transient, although I felt guilty about it often because everything I was allowed to see as normal told me she was being reasonable. I spent years convinced I was crazy simply because I was so angry but didn’t have a worldview that permitted me to think I could be angry for a reason.
regarding teens hating their parents, I think there might be a bit of a difference between actual hating, and moments of feeling like you hate them.
Trust me, it’s better if you go back and read it all.
Short answer: apparently it’s only today dawning on the participants that they mean different things when they say “good”.
DDMFM: No. That came up yesterday as well. I’m not sure much of what has been said today is conceptually novel.
eh, disregard my last, I think Kristinc said it better.
Tu quoque.
Tu quoque.
That’s all true. Why did you bother bringing it up? That’s what I don’t understand.
If they’re not here, they can’t learn anything from your reminding them.
If they’re here (which, in hindsight, evidently isn’t the case), you’d trigger two flamewars for no reason, just “oh, BTW, I don’t like you” out of the blue.
Why?
That seems like a reasonable response. It hints at the fact that he won’t always feel that way without actually invalidating what he feels. It seems like your son is going through normal teenager stuff, and not the kind of justified hatred you felt toward your own mother.
Trust me, it’s better if you go back and read it all.
Awww! But that’s WORK!
Short answer: apparently it’s only today dawning on the participants that they mean different things when they say “good”.
I’m intrigued because I read a bit of Ulysses (we’re talking Joyce here, not Homer, right?) and found it pretentious and boring. I found LoTR pretentious but interesting. I am vaguely aware that Ulysses is considered the better piece of literature, but have some impression that it is, in some senses, more a ground breaking book than a “good” book. That is, it is interesting because Joyce was playing with words and writing in new ways rather than because he wrote in a particularly effective way. However, having never finished the thing, it’s hard for me to say much about it.
KristinC: My mother was abusive and I hated her until the day she died. I think it’s possible that she thought I hated her because ‘that’s how teens are’ but really didn’t do anything to address the fact that I hated her at 27 too. Now, there were times when I felt a lot of anger and frustration with my dad, but I never hated him. YMMV.
I am not a “dog person” but I like big dogs; small dogs, not so much. They’re called land sharks for a reason. When I wanted to be a veterinarian I often joked that I would not treat small dogs.
Regarding Ulysses: I was a literature major in undergrad and to this day I could NOT stomach Ulysses. I read Portrait of the Artist with great relish but feel like a failure because I haven’t gotten through what numerous professors told me was THE pinnacle of English literature. So I sorta have a grudge against it, lol.
Oh, yes. No predicting what direction or distance any given trimming may go. My theory is that the slivers are like small, annoying leaf-springs that have suddenly been unleashed to wreak havoc on unsuspecting feet.
–
Sure. Runny, or flaky?
Groop, I implore thee my foonting turlingdromes!
–
Lint collects in my belly-button.
Didn’t Joyce say that he wrote Finnegan’s Wake specifically to ‘keep the professors busy’ or something like that?
Groop, I implore thee my foonting turlingdromes!
I like it! It’s brilliant! Really brings the Voganity of your soul into sharp relief.
Disclaimer: I have never read Ulysses or anything else by Joyce.
I think it is beyond debate that Ulysses was important, historically speaking, in establishing new norms and inspiring other authors. It is also regarded as a “good” (or even “great”) book in many circles. Others deny this and decry it as unreadable dreck.
Lord of the Rings was also important, established new norms and inspired other authors. It is frequently regarded as frivolous, low, trash, etc. by some. Others vehemently deny this and hold it up as an example of great literature.
Now. An important question must be answered: what makes a book “good?” Some say that the key is readability and ability to speak to the reader. Other say literary merit is based on tight plot lines and clean, tight language usage. Others say that the test is impact, on both society as a whole and/or on other writers and the genre.
Speaking for myself, I’d say that the answer is “yes.” That is, all of these things are important, but their relative importance can and does vary for the individual reader over time. I mean, there are times when I want to read a tightly written tragicomedy. I’ll reach for Fun Home. Other times I’m in the mood for a thrilling adventure with a serious creep factor, so I’ll pick up The Bone Doll’s Twin. Or maybe I want a snarky takedown of a genre, so I’ll read Northanger Abbey. Are all these books objectively “good”? No. I can easily point out flaws in all of them. Are all of them regarded highly? No, at least not in the same way. If I think about it, the only thing all three have in common is that they were written in English and they have female authors. That’s about it.
While we can make judgements about applicability, or about impact, “good” is subjective. It depends on the reader at a specific point in time.
I think I’m largely content to endorse Esteleth’s analysis at #237, and am not sure that much more can now be said on the subject.
http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2012/02/03/orrin-hatch-obama-thinks-hes-jesus-christ/
False. I didn’t hound Josh for two days, or one day, or one minute. Josh jumped into an ongoing argument about an important subject that some of us were having with Ophelia at her blog and which I’d said I was leaving (though a parallel conversation was happening here). He supported her post, containing a homophobic screed, and insulted KG and me in the process. lm commented shortly after Josh had at Ophelia’s expressing his surprise and asking Josh to explain his support, and received no response there. If our roles had been reversed he would damn well have been shocked by my comment and asking me to explain my apparent and uncharacteristic approval of bigotry, and he knows it.
Josh eventually showed up here and immediately launched into the drama about how awful I was for mentioning my surprise at his support of that post and speculating – because I couldn’t imagine why he would take that position about her post – that he might have been blinded to some extent by his friendship with her. Rather than simply saying that he hadn’t really read enough to know what he was commenting about, or – heaven forbid! – actually going back and finding out right away (which I’d think I’d want to do if I’d supported or condoned homophobia), he chose to make this all about me and how I routinely insult and attack him (demonstrably false, and I’ve in fact come to his defense many times at her blog), knowing full well that this would lead to the sort of ridiculous ganging up it has in the past.
That speculation was a “libelous” attack, but I was expected instead to “charitably” assume that he had left his comment without knowing what the argument was or who she was arguing with, and hadn’t actually read the post with which he was expressing his agreement or the previous 11 or 12 comments. We were also supposed to know that he didn’t stick around to read any responses to his own comment.
When I took the time to say this to Josh, he killfiled me. That his yet again turning an argument over an important topic into a rant about me had the predictable effect of bringing out the usual crowd of bullies (who weren’t involved in the original discussion and couldn’t be bothered to familiarize themselves with the actual facts) to tell me that I should just go away because no one here likes me and announce to me that they’re not going to read my comments, continuing in the form of sniping from at least one person several days after the argument, does not speak well of those people (you). It’s childish and pathetic. And it doesn’t speak well of him that he deliberately created that atmosphere.
I’m pointing out that comments like yours, about people that aren’t directed to them in any way but obviously to a particular crowd of regulars who can (and often do) then join in the bashing, are creepy. But I don’t expect much from a person who posted on a thread in which I had made a factual case about the failure of the serotonin “hypothesis” a bizarrely irrelevant, well-poisoning ad hom about my “also” being an “animal rights zealot.”
The Sailor sends me to Orrin Hatch *ugh*: “Someone needs to remind the president that there was only one person who walked on water”.
Pick me! Pick me! I know this one!!
Pythagoras?
It’s always amusing when the self proclaimed anointed start chastising the plebeians for their arrogance.
It’s a long time ago, but I can’t remember ever hating either of my parents: anger, frustration andor resentment, sometimes, but not hatred. The adult I came nearest to hating as a teenager (probably, now I think about it, the individual I’ve actually known personally that I’ve come nearest to hating) was the headmaster of my first secondary school – I had persistent fantasies about beating him up, which I don’t remember having about anyone else. Ah, no, I’m wrong: my elder brother was also the target of such fantasies, but that was considerably earlier – by the time I reached my teens, we were getting on quite well, and by my mid-teens, very well. But I’ve been very lucky, in that no-one has seriously abused me. I’d also be astonished if I discovered my son has ever hated either me or Mrs. KG – if he has, he’s been very good at concealing it. So from personal experience, hatred, even of a transitory sort, is not an invariable component of parent/teenager relationships.
No – and I think that’s one thing both sides would agree on!
Thank you for providing (what appears to be) an example of what I was talking about.
…with the added benefit of being utterly vague. Who’s this comment about, and what behavior does it refer to specifically? Is its point defensible? It seems it doesn’t really matter, because your purpose isn’t actual engagement or rational discussion, but something else entirely.
lol
I don’t think anyone has yet (in the course of this subthread) said they actually enjoyed Ulysses! I’ll give it another try sometime.
I don’t understand why you think I’ve shifted. I’m not interested in “what makes chimps, sea cucumbers, gray aliens, robots, etc., think a work is good or bad,” and I hadn’t assumed we were talking about good and bad as if they were independent of humans or whichever set of critters you have in mind.
Why not?
Yes, you could describe what makes something a success or a failure. So? There’s no reason to think aesthetic theory or criticism could or should only address positive aspects of a work.
———
That’s what I thought Walton was conceding as a possibility. But either way, you’re right. “Evaluating” would probably be a more neutral term, since no one here seems to be saying we can’t do that.
Then you aren’t evaluating your experience of a book, because you haven’t had one. You’re predicting what it might be like. I don’t have a problem with doing that, but it’s not the same as actually reading a book (or looking at a painting, listening to an album, etc.) and evaluating it.
That’s apparently his claim, but I still don’t understand the point if there is one.
I’ll give it another try sometime.
Me too. I never really got very far in it. Maybe it improves.
re hating: For what it’s worth, I haven’t yet managed to properly hate anyone who’s abused me, not even when I consciously decided that I’d kill to defend myself if I had to; and I should have – learned to hate, that is. I get the feeling that hate’s highly variable… and does a lot of splash damage.
Re sudden pots of money: might I suggest, hoarding a percentage of it for the next ten or so instances where someone or something needs a donation? I know it drives me nuts when the call goes out and I’ve already blown the few bucks I can spare for donating.
DavidM quotes me: “voiced/unvoiced plosive thing” “~:-|”
Don’t worry, I was being confusing. It should have been un-v/v. I think there’s a certain tactility* to some words/phrases that makes them pleasing. That was one.
“Micraster‘s migrating anus” is another, for the alliteration, the k->g shift, and the paleontological relevance. ;)
*”Tactility”. Mmmmm.
I just googled Micraster and I’m not sure if I’d be able to recognize the anus on that thing even if someone pointed it out to me. My mind keeps wanting to put it right in the middle of that vague star shape.
You know, like a chocolate starfish.
There’s a difference between “this is bad, because…” and “people think this is bad, because…” The former is a value-judgment, the latter is an empirical observation.
Fig. 2c
“the PI’s should do a better job negotiating their grant contracts”
What color is the sky in this person’s world?
+++++++++++++++++
I’m not sure I ever hated my parents, but I did say it (and when I hear other children say it it bothers me to the core) and I think it was rage and frustration, not hate. IMO kids feel like adults feel, they just don’t think the same way.
That’s why I try to talk to kids like they’re adults, but I don’t expect the same things from them that I do from adults.
(BTW, the story about the parents threatening to kill the horse when the child misbehaved, makes me really glad the person who wrote that saw the over-the-top nature. Threatening a child’s pet is a severe form of child abuse.)
++++++++++++++++++
“Outside of a dog, a book is man’s best friend. Inside of a dog it’s too dark to read.” Groucho Marx **waggles eyebrows and tilts cigar**
++++++++++++++++++
Esteleth, maybe you should read Cracked’s http://www.cracked.com/blog/the-5-stupidest-habits-you-develop-growing-up-poor/
It’s been mentioned here before, that’s how I found it.
It helped me realize some stupid thoughts I have about me new found median- wealth.
Do whatever you want with the money, of course, but IMHO: The shoes you mentioned are well made but extremely expensive, and subject to style changes. How many places can you wear them, and for how long before they’re outre?
1) I’m not saying buy ugly practical shoes, tithing to one’s self is a very reasonable thing when one gets a windfall. (I save up my change and every time a couple of coffee cans get full I can buy
*a new leather jacket
*a biminy for my boat
*diamond earrings for an SO, just because.
2) Giving it away to charity is very noble, and I recommend a local shelter or food kitchen. But I selfishly save a good chunk because I’ve been poor before and I would prefer not to stay at a shelter or eat as a food kitchen again.
I’ve foolishly thought before the $$ would keep coming in, this isn’t always the case.
3) Put it into a savings account and make the decision(s) later. Money has all the patience in the world.
These are just suggestions, and worth every penny you paid for them.
walton:
You don’t think that “this is bad, because…” is a short form for expressing the sentiment “I think this is bad, because…”?
(After all, you belong to the set of people)
Yes, of course it is. But there’s a difference between, on the one hand, expressing one’s own opinion that something is bad, and, on the other hand, observing that other people, or some particular subset thereof, think that something is bad. One can make the latter statement without implying any value-judgment on one’s own part about the thing to which one is referring. Surely this is so obvious that it doesn’t even need saying?
Thank you, Chas.
TLC, it’s a classic of evolution. In layer upon layer of chalk, you can see Micraster* changing from its initial, symmetrical, sea-urchin form (which wanders around on the seabed, and poops out of the top of the shell (test) (the mouth is on the bottom where the food is, after all)) to a burrowing form in which (since it’s moving forwards, forwards, forwards) the arse migrates towards its newly-discovered, erm, derriere.
http://www.chalk.discoveringfossils.co.uk/irregular%20echinoid%20terminology.htm
*I realise I shouldn’t use the singular. But you get the drift.
Changeable Moniker: Now that IS interesting. I love evolution, but like a boring ass I spend too much time focusing on tetrapods.
Anyway, the Walton is sleepy and hungry (from having actually been to the gym and exercised, for a change; something of which he has been doing far too little lately) and lacks the intellectual energy for further philosophizing.
Jeffrey:
Puzzles, I have to be in the mood. I tend to do them when I need to be away from people and social situations, recoup my energy.
Ah, another illustration…I’ll need to see if I can get them in some good poses! Your daughter’s work is so good, she deserves the best poses I can catch.
The Sailor:
Actually, it’s pretty cheap in terms of a wall covering. The bigger problem is rigging up a table large enough to construct it on! Alfie was the only rat who had an interest in puzzle pieces. The current crew find them uninteresting. Anyway, I have the puzzle laid out on a table they can’t get onto, so that’s not a worry. They are allowed to come up and hang out on the table when I’m working on it though. Chas always does pick up one piece, gently bites it and then lays it down, in remembrance of Alfie.
David:
Definitely birthday. You don’t get that many chances to give such an awesome gift.
Sailor, for what it is worth, the reference to Manolo Blahniks was sarcastic. I have never bought shoes that expensive and I don’t intend to start now.
The shoes I wear tend to the “$100 pair of sneakers” or “$25 ballet flats” variety, though I have a serious thing for cute fashion boots. On occasion (like, every few years) I splurge on a nice pair of sturdy boots for the winter. I make a point of getting sturdy, solid, well-made ones, which makes them $$$ (but they LAST).
I saw the Cracked article, and there is a lot of truth in it. I didn’t grow up poor. My previously restricted income was due to graduate school, where my income was for all intents and purposes a joke. I managed to live off it, but it took some doing (and more than a few phone calls to my parents).
My main splurge expenses are books and knitting stuff, neither of which are particularly expensive (but get so if I’m not careful).
I did decide what to do. I did the math, and if I take $25 (easily doable) out of my next paycheck, I can pay off my credit card after I get paid next week. So, that’s what I’m going to do. It would have been nice to do something else, but (1) this means that my card is freed up to use if I need it suddenly and (2) debt going bye-bye is an unvarnished good, IMO. I also crunched the numbers and have figured out how I can pay all my major expenses (which at the moment are chiefly rent and a car payment), set some aside to accumulate a cushion (the paid off card helps here too), and begin paying down my student loans, which are coming out of deferment in October. The more I can pay up-front on the principal, the less I have to pay interest on in 10 years. I have enough to cover living expenses and incidentals, so I’m budgeting to start donating on a regular basis to shelters, etc. Now that I can, I’d like to.
Re: student loans, it struck me today when I was doing the math that I have $20,000 in loan debt, at 5% interest. I am LUCKY that I have only that much and that my rate is so low. I know people who have five times that much.
___
On hating: it is complicated. In the past few years, I’ve come to the realization that I was abused (emotionally and physically, but not sexually) as a child. My parents were not involved, except in the “failing to prevent, recognize and stop” manner.
The thing is? Realizing this enabled me to stop hating my abuser. At the time, xie was self-medicating with various illegal substances an untreated mental illness (xie is now doing much better). When I learned that xie had been finally diagnosed and was getting much-needed help, I was torn. When I recognized that what xie did to me does in fact count as abuse, I felt free somehow. I dunno. Like, I can blame the illness and the drugs, recognize that xie is not the person xie was then, and accept the (I believe genuine) amends xie has made towards me. We are not close, and I doubt we ever will be, but I do not feel hate. Regret, remembered pain, anger, yes. But not hate.
Of course, part of me wonders if I’m just in denial or am making myself feel this way because it is wrong somehow to feel otherwise. *shrug*
OK, survived doctor, once again – (actually, I adore her). We are going to try raising my oral meds, doubling them in fact. However, insulin injections are probably only a year or so away. Also, thyroid meds appear to need increasing. Thyroid has been well balanced since I had it radiation killed in 2008, but diabetes can affect that as well.
Bottom line, I am fine and will be fine. Lots of people on here have serious problems. Just needed to vent and whinge.
Time to read and catch up.
John Morales:
Not sure if you’ve ever heard of General Semantics, but you might want to look into the subject. The concept led to the development of E Prime, primarily to avoid exactly the confusion between subjective opinion and objective fact that those two statements can cause if conflated. In E-Prime, most (if not all) statements should be made in a manner as to convey subjectivity.
As everyone knows, the third anniversary of the Thread is fast approaching, so I thought I’d get a jump on updating the Count. That’s how I know that comment # 454 on this subthread will be Threadwise comment # 222222. Very exciting.
It wasn’t vague unless you haven’t been following comments that weren’t about you.
It had nothing to do with you. FFS, SC, give it a goddam rest, not everything is about you. It was about Sen Hatch chastising Obama for using babble passages at the fucking National Prayer Breakfast. Try to keep up, that Molly you earned is starting to have a past due date. JMHO.
random:
Glacier thief arrested in Chile
…I was wondering initially, who he stole this ice FROM. I guess if it’s a national monument, it’s from the nation, or some such.
So I was wondering, what if ‘privatization’ were a crime in and of itself? As in, claiming or polluting natural resources, copyrighting open-source or public documents and so forth – at least by default? Why does there NEED to be a previous owner for ‘theft’ to apply?
(feel free to ignore if stupid)
Jeffrey:
Oh Dearest. I’m glad you’ve avoided the needle dependence for now, here’s hoping that day simply won’t arrive. Whine all you need.
Chas:
That is exciting. I wonder who’s going to get it? Pretty sure it won’t be me, I’m just about set to go back to puzzling.
******
Oh FFS. People are such idiots.
Walton,
I note this distinction between oneself and other people was not present in your original formulation.
How it relates to the putative distinction between value-judgements and empirical observations is beyond me, alas. :)
—
Richard, I am familiar with those.
“Sailor, for what it is worth, the reference to Manolo Blahniks was sarcastic.”
sorry, my meter was broken and I’ve known people who did something similar.
I call it “2 hookers and an eight ball”. (not original).
++++++++++++++++++
JeffD, there are new treatments coming out everyday, or at least soon. It sounds like you have a good doctor, get your eyes checked. (Sorry about that last, but I work in retinal imaging and I don’t want to see yours in my lab.)
Caine –
I am sure she would love to do another illustration for you. She is now working full time and has two rats, err, children, so time is not always available, but she loves doing the work. Let me know, plenty of time. I will pass on your praise to her again. All the kid’s talents for art, music, drama, etc., came from their mothers. I taught them how to mix drinks and advised on things their mothers would have shat about.
Back to trying to get up to current posts.
Yes, it was.
Please point out where I said it was about me. I’ll wait.
I was saying it appeared to be an example of what I was talking about. Only a fraction of such comments refer to me, and I find all of them creepy. As difficult as it may be for you to understand, I object to creepy behavior even when it’s directed against people I don’t even like (not that I’m saying that’s the case wrt to any of the people targeted of late).
Since you personally have made such comments about me in the past few days, though, it’s pretty rich for you to be objecting to my general observation – which was instigated, you might recall, by a comment about two people who are not me – on that basis.
This is interesting, eBay might just force Utah legislators to do what they should have done long ago. And it will be the almighty power of the dollar that brings the mostly-mormon legislators to their senses.
Link
Caine – thanks, love. I will whinge as needed.
Sailor – I do my eyes every six months minimum. I do it more often if there are big changes in med dosages or in my general health. I had excellent diabetes training and followup. The diabetes trainer calls every three months or so and is always willing to schedule retinal scans and podiatrist visits and etc.
Again, thanks for any well wishes I may have missed. Kind of a disjointed evening while trying to read.
It would be truly difficult to put into words how little I value your esteem. And frankly, you seem a little too interested in me for someone with whom I’ve had so little interaction.
“Only a fraction of such comments refer to me, and I find all of them creepy.”
OMG, GET OUT OF THE HOUSE! GET OUT NOW!!!!
Seconding SC. Not cos I wanna pile on Ing, but because I’ve been lurking this whole thread (I admit I did a little scrolling past bits of the long art posts) and I had no idea what it was referring to. So, Sailor, your criticism of SC there is misplaced.
It was pretty Vague, but I pretty much instantly guessed that Ing was referring to that Orrin asshole.
Do you have an actual argument to make? Because this is pitiful.
CC, the comment was made about “Sen Hatch chastising Obama for using babble passages at the fucking National Prayer Breakfast.”
The comment had nothing to do with SC.
Not a comment,
not a whit,
not nothing
and I’m a Honey Badger
Ah. That could well be,* in which case it wasn’t an example of what I was talking about. If so, apologies to Ing, though the confusion was understandable.
*I hadn’t seen that link because I ignore The Sailor’s comments, for obvious reasons.
I did not say it had anything to do with me, fool.
Five days to paper submission, and then I get to have a life again! If anyone reading this is a reviewer/editor, please be nice to papers with new first authors next week. We really did do all the revisions you wanted, and more, and more.
*****
There’s been gorgeous hoarfrost here for several days, and I’ve been stuck at the university. If I’m lucky, I’m going to get out tomorrow and take some pictures. I haven’t been spending nearly enough time outside lately, so I hope my co-authors don’t throw me a curveball and force me to spend all weekend at the computer.
I’m REALLY looking forward to doing things outside again. My fall was occupied with a dying dog and family drama, and the last two months have been entirely devoted to this paper. I need to go geocaching and take pictures of hoarfrost, and then maybe I’ll feel like a human being again.
*****
Had a really interesting speaker at the departmental seminar this afternoon. It’s nice when you want to leave in the middle of a talk not because you’re bored, but because you want to go look things up and apply them to your research.
Creationists are really missing out on all the cool parts.
I thought you guys might be interested in this: http://cohe.humanistinstitute.org/introduction-to-humanism/
It’s a free online course about humanism. I’m sure most of you here know a good deal about humanism, but there might be some stuff in there that you didn’t know. I’ve found it pretty interesting so far.
Oh, Sailor, it made sense after you explained that, but in fact it was quite vague, and people can fairly be confused by it even when they’re not reading only comments pertaining to themselves. (Or comments pertaining only to SC.)
You write, as if I were an interloper who insinuated himself somewhere he wasn’t invited.
You forgot to note that I disclosed I hadn’t read the comment carefully, and that I did not, in fact, condone the homophobic sentiment. As for feeling insulted, well, I suppose we’re even. There’s nothing quite like your brazen and hostile inability to acknowledge when you’ve insulted someone else. Especially when you continue to revel in ignoring it. And you do.
Kisses.
Thanks, CC. But of course The Sailor’s purpose isn’t to make an argument about the obviousness or lack thereof of the referent, but to snipe at and troll me. Now that that’s been established, I’ll go back to ignoring him.
Josh:
And bless her little heart, too.
Drivin’ by to say auurrggh, the curtains in Wild Strawberries Orchard are making me crazy.
JeffreyD:
I know you’re nervous about the insulin, and I know I’ve said this before, but I hope you can try to see it as not such a bad thing. Maybe even a good thing. The injections are hardly painful, and the monitoring isn’t really that difficult. My mother has type II as well, and she’s been so much healthier and has felt so much better since she added insulin injections to the medication that just simply couldn’t control the glucose. The longer you go without keeping your blood sugar close to normal, the more it will incapacitate you. Had my mother started insulin years earlier she wouldn’t have the permanent neuropathy that’s left her with numb feet. At least she’s started early enough to save her eyesight.
I’m hoping for the best for you.
What? What the hell did I even say?
Um yeah….I’m sorry I didn’t think it was vague. It was right after I quoted his bit about Obama needing to remember only one man walked on water glurge.
Yes I was referring to mormons/any religious group of chosen people (the for-mentioned self declared anointed) talking down to people about humility.
[rant, no need for response]
Dang, the Redhead was in a Gloomy Gussie mood tonight, which put me into almost a Hulk Smash Mood. I think the impeding change of venue scares the hell out her. Her transfer has been approved by the receiving facility, and the insurance has OK’ed the transfer on a week by week basis, but that appears to be her problem. I see nothing out of line there, but it scares her. She was raving like she wanted to come home and do rehab at home. That is not feasible or productive at her stage of recovery. I spent most of evening explaining her improvement, and that further in-house (not home) rehab is needed. I can’t get through since she stopped listening to anything other than her paranoia. SIGH.
Tomorrow’s another day. Maybe she’ll listen.
[/rant]
JeffD, thanks for knowing that, and keep it up. (sorry, you knew that.)
My lab is working on a retinal imaging device that will diagnose incipient diabetes before it’s presented or discovered by other means. But people usually don’t get eye exams as often as visits to MDs.
We are trying to make the device so inexpensive and ubiquitous that it’s part of every physical. (Turn your head and cough, now look into this hood.)
No offense SC but I really wasn’t paying any attention to you or Sailor arguing.
That isn’t what I intended. It’s just a way of expressing that I didn’t go there and report back on something you’d said in a situation in which I wasn’t involved, which was the impression some people seemed to have.
No, I didn’t. I thought that would be clear from what I said about your expecting people to know you hadn’t read the post or comments and criticizing us for not having assumed that (especially in the context of previous comments).
If I had commented on one of Kagin’s post-snakebite-joke posts saying “Right on, Edwin. I don’t know what’s so hard to get about this,” you would have expected me to explain, and I would have wanted you to so that I could correct the impression I’d given and apologize for the inadvertent insult (and for commenting ignorantly).
You keep saying this, but you’re not explaining what you’re talking about. The fact that you thought it was “libelous” for me to suggest that your friendship might have colored your judgment* (as opposed to assuming that you uncharacteristically jumped in to voice your support ignorant of a huge amount of context, including the post itself, which would have been complimentary, presumably) suggests to me that we probably have different notions of insult.
*Which I by no means consider a horrible thing. People do it all the time here, and neither doing it nor pointing it out come in for any big criticism, as they shouldn’t.
Now there‘s an example.
We got a puzzle for xmas.
It has (wait for it…) 1000 “extra large” pieces!!!1!1!
I haven’t opened it yet because I cannot find a flat surface that is 24″ by 30″.
Oh, Nerd. It is a scary situation, I understand where The Redhead is coming from. It’s bad enough being away from home for so long, especially when that’s where you want to be, but I’d be very unhappy with a “week by week” approval too. There’s a chance someone somewhere will get stroppy and decide to stop approval right in the middle of recovery.
Let her rant for a bit, she probably has plenty of stuff she needs to get off her chest, so to speak. Take good care of yourself, too. This is tough on everyone.
@Sailor, thank you in advance.
Sorry to hear that. These things are scary – especially dealings with insurance companies – and it often takes some time to reconcile yourself to the new (even if temporary) reality. Best of luck to both of you.
On a happier note… so I’ve been thinking a bit more about the role of social class and classism in Lord of the Rings, following my discussion with KG on the subject yesterday. (Those here who hate LOTR should ignore the rest of this post; but I’ve always loved it and can’t help geeking out from time to time when it comes up.)
It does seem to be very much the case that the Shire was a society in which wealth and social status were based on land ownership, and certain of the families in LOTR – the Bagginses, the Tooks, the Brandybucks and so on – are undoubtedly what we might call “landed gentry” or “squires” (by analogy with real-world English history), being ancient families of high status and owning substantial amounts of land. (The office of Thain, nominal representative of the King’s authority in the Shire, was hereditary in the Took family, as I recall.) Sam and his father Ham Gamgee, by contrast, are portrayed as coming from a lower social class, Sam being originally employed as Frodo’s gardener. Education also seems to have been predominantly the privilege of the landed families, since it is explicitly stated that “by no means all hobbits were lettered”, and Sam’s ability to read and write do not seem to have been typical for hobbits of his station. Though at the end of the book Sam acquires land in the Westmarch and later becomes Mayor of Michel Delving, suggesting that the class divisions between families were not fixed or impermeable.
This is consistent with what we know about Tolkien’s outlook (having recently re-read Humphrey Carpenter’s biography of Tolkien – thanks again, triskelethecat); he was what might be termed an eco-primitivist by inclination, although I doubt he’d have described himself thus. He disapproved of industrialization and urbanization, and had a strong romantic attachment to rural life and the countryside. He was also a devout Catholic from an early age (his mother having converted to that faith when he was young), a monarchist, and had quite a traditional outlook on social values. But he certainly didn’t look down on people from more working-class backgrounds; far from it. He said once “My Sam Gamgee is indeed a reflexion of the English soldier, of the privates and batmen I knew in the 1914 war, and recognized as so far superior to myself.” (Tolkien served in WWI briefly as an infantry officer, shortly after taking his finals at Oxford.) I think the reality is that he was rather naive about social realities; intellectually, he spent his time immersed in the distant past, and paid very little attention to contemporary politics or social issues.
Apologies for the aimless ramble… it just got me thinking about one of my favourite topics. The Hobbit is literally the first novel I can remember reading, and Tolkien’s books really shaped my childhood, probably moreso than any other single cultural influence. In a very profound sense, I wouldn’t be the person I am without him. (And this perhaps explains some of my idiosyncrasies, such as my love of monarchy and my occasional feeble attempts at writing poetry.)
*hugs* for Nerd and the Redhead.
Chigau:
You can get puzzle roll-ups now, so you can do a puzzle on a table, desk, floor, whatever, then roll it up until you want to work on it again.
My apologies JeffreyD, you have your own troubles and I failed to acknowledge them. Hang in there. Growing old is hell, but it beats the alternative.
Thanks for the encouragement SC. I think she really wanted come home when released from acute care rehab, but her condition at the moment just can’t allow that. I suspect she understands intellectually, but not viscerally, hence tonight.
Back to your normal programming…
Noble savage.
Caine
Thanks for the puzzle roll-up link.
It could work if I kick aside some of the
crapimportant soon-to-be-used items covering the floors.——
Nerd
More *hugs* for you and The Redhead.
Can you retro-fit your house?
Hand-rails and ramps?
Who lives near Nerd and knows which end of a hammer to hold?
Though at the end of the book Sam acquires land in the Westmarch and later becomes Mayor of Michel Delving, suggesting that the class divisions between families were not fixed or impermeable.
Well, Sam did save the world. If that doesn’t get you admitted into the ruling class, what does?
Nerd, I’ve been thru part of it on your side, a little bit of it on my side. The Redhead will come back to you.
In our TET community we have carpenter skills, time off, a few bucks, nursing, doctoring, mad skillz, and we can help.
I would certainly volunteer my labor to help out Nerd of Redhead, provided it was a: Needed and b: Somewhere I could actually physically get to.
Nerd of Redhead @ #304 – Good gravy no! I was apologizing for my complaining about my minor issues while you and the Redhead and others had what I consider serious problems. Really. And you have never been less than supportive about anything troubling me. Hugs for you, brother. Let me know if I can help in any fashion.
We have the skills to help re-fit a house, but we aren’t close enough to da yoopee. Well, at least, we don’t have the time to both travel and work.
Nerd, I don’t know if this helps, but am I right in my memory that the Redhead had a stroke? Paranoia is pretty common after a stroke and often resolves as people start to feel better. Further unasked advice: has the Redhead had a hypercoaguable workup? She might benefit from one if she’s not the classic stroke profile person.
Save me!
I googled “da youpee” and the top result was “do you pee in the shower?”
I need a drink.
I feel like I explained it ad nauseum in that thread, and that there’s no way to have a productive conversation about it. We two seem to talk past each other. Probably better to leave it alone.
Chigau, eeek. It’s the U.P., Upper Peninsula in Michigan.
@theophontes: I’m glad I did it right, then!
@Dr Bunsen – o hai! That mix seems to go by B52 or 747, if my google-fu works. Though the B52s of my memory contain cointreau instead of amaretto, and were shooters instead of for sipping’ on the rocks. Seriously dangerous.
@Janine, go for it. I’ll help by appreciating the counterpoint to the surrealism of the underlying metaphor.
@Walton: conflating education with snobbery is a standard right-wing trope that I really, really hate. You can’t trust them elites. Chardonnay/latte/arugula-consumers. What do those professors know about the real world? We should drink cheap beer, eat Maccas, watch Fox and vote for a shrub, and none of that elitist crap.
This conflation comes from both kinds of right wing: the good ol’ boys “we don’t need no education” Republican style, and the “oh, we are so superior and we know better than you peons” Tory style. Both flavours are bullshit.
It’s just as bad an idea when it’s about art as when it’s about global warming or creationism. There simply are things that you need an education to understand and appreciate. Whether it’s the literary structure of Beowulf, or stellar nucleosyntheis, or developmental biology, the fact that you have to put time and effort into learning it does NOT make it dismissible as elitist.
Also, please get over insisting on objective ultra-real non-human definitions for everything or else it’s meaningless. That’s not how language works. Literary merit is a term reasonably well defined by the canonical academic approach. That’s why it’s literary merit, not just plain unqualified “merit”. A work can easily have other merits.
*nucleosynthesis. Prase Tpyos.
Oh, and Nerd, I’ve been so inconsistent on TET that I may have forgotten to tell you I appreciate the updates on the Redhead and I’m pulling for you both!
A (un)used temporary ramp is being considered from one of her acquaintances. The FIL sent a link to a catalog that has a nice shower chair with an extension the might be high enough to fit over our bath tub side. So yes, this is in the works. A stairway chair lift needs a power upgrade (from 60 to 200 amps) to be installed (the power upgrade was on next summers agenda, and I would prefer to avoid it in cold weather if possible). I suspect a rental hospital bed and commode could be obtained on a couple days notice.
A couple of items were in the Redhead’s paranoia. No improvement on her part with further therapy, and just plain fear of making a bad decision on the extended care rehab place. (Never mind it was the best rated one in our PPO network, hands down.) But, it is far enough away I can’t visit every day and still work/maintain the house. Somehow the last may be the straw the broke the camel’s back. The trick in being supportive is not to hurt yourself in the process…
And I feel like you just kept asserting it, and trying to make it the topic of conversation, and referencing vague examples from the past in which I was allegedly mean, nasty, and awful to you.
But no, I don’t want to have a conversation about it. I hadn’t originally mentioned your (as it turned out, and as I acknowledged, inadvertent) insult of KG and me, because I really wanted to discuss Islamophobia and the relationship to homophobia and not this stuff. It’s a distraction, and better to discuss by email so the gang isn’t encouraged to pipe in with personal attacks.
In any case, I’m not sure why you periodically seem to read my comments in this way. I remember linking once to some good dance routines from SYTYCD, and you initially seemed to view this as something hostile or insulting (I might be misremembering, but I recall being perplexed by your response). I have genuinely been under the impression that we had a friendly relationship, and these episodes in which you talk about how much you hate me and how we just rub each other the wrong way are difficult for me to understand.
Caine
After more wikipffting, I understand.
Were They™ drunk when they drew those state boundaries?
It is very, very far from here.
It’s Dah YooPee. Been gone for 20+ years and miss the place. Good, honest snow filled winters, cool summers…but five weeks of thaw…
I feel exactly the same way, which is why there appears to be nowhere to go, and why I think we should just let it lie.
Nerd, I thought you were still in Dah Yoop, where are you now?
Chiwaukee, in the Chicago-Milwaukee corridor. Northeastern Lake County, IL (lower rent district) to be more precise. Lived in Dah Yoop for 15 years. Honorary local (you can only be considered a real local if you were born there).
Given that I’ve spent my entire adult life in institutions of higher education, and would undoubtedly be branded a “liberal elitist” by the kinds of right-wing idiots to whom you refer, it would be rather surprising if I espoused such a ridiculous view. And in fact I do not, nor have I ever said anything of the kind.
What I find objectionable, and a sign of snobbery, is the idea that certain works of art or literature are objectively inferior to others, and that those who enjoy and praise such “second-rate” or “inferior” works are displaying a lack of understanding of True Literature™. I don’t think that most people on this thread were expressing such a crude view (and I know you were not), but it is one I’ve frequently come across. (Not least, from the committee responsible for awarding the 1961 Nobel Prize in Literature.)
Sure. But there’s a difference between understanding the literary structure of Beowulf, and claiming that Beowulf is better than other works of literature that other people enjoy.
You seem to think I’m claiming that the academic study of literature is a waste of time. I did not say that, nor anything close to it; indeed, I’ve repeatedly and expressly disavowed such a view.
But while I don’t dispute that this distinction is important in scholarship, it’s not usually distinguished thus in the general discourse. Those who disparage Lord of the Rings or Harry Potter as inferior or second-rate works, say, don’t usually take care to distinguish between “literary merit” as a scholarly term of art, and their overall judgment of the quality or value of the work. When Philip Toynbee sniffed haughtily at Lord of the Rings as “dull, ill-written, whimsical and childish,” or when Anders Österling claimed that LOTR “has not in any way measured up to storytelling of the highest quality”, they didn’t draw the kind of careful distinctions that you’re drawing.
Nerd:
Ah. Yep, we’re far from one another.
I am getting a workout on Murcan geography tonight.
I have umpty tabs open on my teensy netbook
I’m trying to understand doyoupea/dahyoopee/Chiwaukee by using my teensy netbook (umpty tabs open)
when suddenly a voice in my head says, “Use the fucking atlas, you doorknob!”
And it was so.
Paper still works!
Nerd: You’re far from me as well (and unfortunately I’m entirely lacking in useful skills), so I can only send best wishes and hugs. Keep us updated as to the Redhead’s situation.
====
I, too, was originally confused about Da UP the first time I remember Nerd mentioning it, though that was some years ago now.* Of course, I’m not exactly well-travelled in the interior US. I have, very briefly, been to Chicago – by which I mean that I had an hour-long stopover at O’Hare Airport on the way to Texas – but other than that I’m rather clueless.
(*Wow… I’ve been on Pharyngula quite a while. Four years this May, come to think of it. Some of the people here have, almost literally, watched me grow up. But I digress.)
Jebus, ordered some knitting DVDs/CDs (for guess who) about a month ago (just before the incident). Finally got notice of partial shipment tonight. I was definitely worried that the folks at work threw them out while I was busy. They are a little cavalier with “junk” US mail.
Speaking of my SYTYCD links, one was to this, which is beautiful, about love and post-surgery rehabilitation, and makes me think of Nerd and the Redhead.
I still remember your very first thread.
Chigau
The Brule River and the Montreal River forms most of the border between Michigan and Wisconsin. The oddness of the border is partially due to the original boundaries being based on inaccurate maps. There were some politics involved and a thing called the Toledo War
Dangit, how many frickin’ wars ARE there? Every time I learn a bit of history there’s another war involved…
I got sent this, after finding out about the Kennedys last week.
http://www.egscomics.com/?date=2008-01-18
Well, I’ve only skipped like a stone over the stuff since my last posts last night. I certainly haven’t read the ongoing stuff about art (though, obviously, I at least noticed that it was ongoing), but I’ve been musing about it all day.
It seems to me that there are essentially objective things you can say about how well a work is executed (the stuff I tend to call craft), and there are things you can say about a work’s place in its cultural context — its popularity, its reception by knowledgeable experts, its influence on other artists, its historical importance, etc. — that are more or less objective. But there are other things — is it edifying? is it ethical? is it thematically important? is it beautiful? — that are mostly, if not entirely, subjective. And on top of that, there’s whether you understand it (which may depend on how much you know about the aspects that are objective), and whether you likeit… which may or may not correspond to your answers to any of the other questions, and which is, in any case, totally personal.
I think the short answer anyone gives to whether a work of art (or a genre) is “good” is really a synthesis of all those more-and-less subjective threads… and the synthesis itself — how you weight the various aspects, and why — is also personal and subjective.
The reason I’ve been turning this over in my head is that I had instinctively agreed that whether art is good or bad is subjective, and I’ve felt insulted when others have implied that my opinion about the quality of a work was objectively false… and yet, how do I account for the fact that I can say some things about artistic quality — “William Faulkner was a better writer than JK Rowling is,” for example — with a fair degree of confidence that my opinion is correct.
So I’ve been trying to understand how I can think my opinion is right, and still not feel that (or act like) the opposite of my opinion is wrong.
“Waiting is, until fullness,” I suppose.
***
While we’re on the subject of great art, you should leave your keyboards right now and run, don’t walk, to see Hugo. Yes, it’s 3-D; please don’t let that stop you. It’s beautiful.
IMHO, of course! ;^)
@Walton, I didn’t think you had the Republican version of education/elitism misidentification. I think you have the Tory version.
Plus an infuriating obsession with definitions. Look, when most people say “X is a good book” they mean either in literary terms or in entertainment terms, or both. They almost certainly don’t mean good to wear, good to use as a missile, or good for composting. They might even, if they’re an insufferable snob, mean good for showing off with. Just ask them, if clarification becomes necessary.
Also, I note that mostly you just want to say that LotR is a good book, and disagree with what you see as snobbish dismissals. (I agree.)
You can do this in two perfectly good ways:
1. It’s good entertainment and I don’t care about the rest.
2. They’re wrong, it does have literary merit. It may have tissue-thin characterisation, but that’s normal in the mythic genre, and has the effect of making the characters less specific and more universal, and then there’s the extraordinary depth of the world building and the epic nature of the storyline blah blah blah etc etc etc as you wish to argue.
A Creationist troll from El Paso
Thought he’d catch him a squid with a lasso;
But it grabbed his first throw,
And then took him in tow,
And left him adrift in Sargasso.
[rant] So, in the lot next to the property adjacent to my backyard there is a radio tower, and on this radio tower lives a family of hawks. This afternoon, one of the hawks swooped down into my backyard and stayed there for a while. My youngest dog, a 5-year-old pit bull, noticed the hawk and zoomed out after it. The hawk flew away, of course, but left behind its lunch, which was why it was hanging out in my yard to begin with.
Because my husband is in a wheelchair some of the time, this afternoon included, it was up to me to dispose of said lunch, before my dogs could roll in it, finish it off, or probably some combination of the two. It was a squirrel, y’all. An eviscerated squirrel, with a sweet squirrely face and a big bushy squirrely tail, and I had to don latex gloves and carry it away. Today was not the best day. [/rant]
Nerd, we don’t know each other, but your Redhead is lucky to have you. She is afraid now, and that’s totally natural, but with you in her corner, I believe she will move past that fear. All the best to you.
dianne:
Depends. Sometimes saving the world just pisses the ruling class off: After all, who do you think is so busily fucking the world up in the first place? </snark>
evilisgood:
My sympathies. I didn’t have a great day when I found one on my kitchen floor with its face eaten off.
evilisgood
Do you have children?
I cannot think of a better lesson-plan than;
hawk:squirrel:pitbull:rubber gloves
@ Pteryxx 91
Thanks for linky *. I also found the discussion on conservatism interesting. I get the impression that conservatism in America has grown into a very different animal over the years. IIRC, it was the conservatives that actually pushed, inter alia, for nature conservation. I cannot really imagine the so called “conservatives” of today ever embracing anything but the opposite agenda. (“Drill baby, drill!”)
* I always intended to read more of the Crommunist posts. Unfortunately I have too little time to even keep up here properly.
@ walton (&KG et al) 131
“When I use a word,’ Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, ‘it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less.”
“The question is,” said Alice, “whether you can make words mean so many different things.”
“The question is,” said Humpty Dumpty, “which is to be master— that’s all.”
(Pictorial evidence.)
@ Carlie 161
Kale
Omnomnom: You should try to make a traditional “boerenkool stamppot” recipe during the winter. (I swear there is nothing better for keeping the cold at bay.)
Boiled potatoes mashed with steamed kale (3/2 ratio by weight. add butter and a splash of vinegar), serve with smoked sausage, pickles, mustard. The picture says it all.
@ David Marjanović 183
It falls ([the hypothesis] falls as opposed to stands) to reason that one cannot argue over tastes.
Three long hours. (Alethea usually beats me to it on many comments I would otherwise have wanted to make (hivemind?). Fortunate for the horde, in that they generally get more articulate commentary.)
How to create a falling-rising tone in Chinese? Lower and raise your eyebrows when you say it. (Try this, it works: hun hao)
@ Chris Booth
XDDDD
Hey Nerd, so sorry for the situation you and the Redhead find yourselves in.
Y’know, my 2 cents worth, when you’re really sick, really suddenly, when you’re not the person you knew yourself to be, then the fucked-offedness extends to just wishing it wasn’t real so badly, you kind of carry on, part of you, making out as if it wasn’t. I think I know, because it happened to me.
One of the most helpful things that was said to me, and my partner, was, “Of course you’re fucking mad – this just stinks.”
So hugs, support, booze, whatever you need, and an acknowledgement – if it helps – that both of you have the right to be pretty pissed right now.
I once accidentally… I repeat… ACCIDENTALLY… surprised a red tailed hawk off of a freshly killed bunny.
It was quite delicious roasted in tinfoil with butter and onions.
Caine:
Squeee.
Nerd, please remember to take care of yourself too; it’s extremely important in matters requiring long-term care-giving. More virtual hugs for both of you. I’m too far away to provide anything else.
TLC
You took the the hawk’s lunch??!!??
The last time I saw this, it was a sparrow-hawk and a sparrow.
I left hir to it.
On the whole I seem to have managed to live most of my life without hating anyone. I may have been angry and resentful of my parents at times during my teenage years, but that was not common as I wasn’t that standard a teenager.
Hate requires too much energy. Now there are some people I loathe. That’s a different thing. I don’t think about them apart from occasionally working out how to avoid being near them, but hate is a bit too active.
Chigau: Well, realistically, the hawk wasn’t coming back for it.
I never would have disturbed a feeding bird of prey on purpose. Carnivorous therapods are best left to their meals.
Birds of prey:
We had a Great Horned Owl kill a rabbit at our bird-feeder once. The owl got spooked off and left the rabbit there. When we went out again in the morning to look, something had gotten it. I don’t know if the owl would have come back or not. Maybe we should have taken the rabbit, but my mom probably would have objected.
Last year, I went out in the morning to find that a Saw-whet Owl had gotten trapped in our garage overnight. It was a tiny little thing, not very shy, and I got several photos before I opened the garage door and it flew away. The coolest thing was that it was flying around with a House Sparrow it had killed. The owl wasn’t a whole lot bigger than the sparrow.
Was it a “gift” from a pet? I, too, have been presented with similar “gifts.” Thank you for understanding, Caine. I keep dwelling on it obsessively, so I’m watching the Lansbury/Hearn Sweeney Todd to take my mind off it.
No kids yet, chigau, but if I did, zie would would be on dead squirrel duty for sure.
There just wasn’t enough squirrel left. Not speaking from experience here, Coyote, but head, tail, spine, and feet probably don’t make a satisfying meal. Well, maybe a stew?
Evilisgood:
Yeah, that’s what you call ‘survival food’.
The windfall bunny I got was young, tender, complete, and the Red tailed hawk had even begun the process of cleaning it for me.
So even though the little guy was trapped in your garage and probably a little bit freaked out, it still refused to give up its prey?
That’s pretty awesome.
Sally Strange:
Well, a story which may or may not end up as a graphic novel, where the main character begins his arc as a burnt-out war photographer. Different century, same region.
Still catching up.
walton:
And it’s an argument from ignorance – a particularly boneheaded one, seeing as people keep pointing out the existence of objective criteria to you. Repeating it won’t make it true, any more than saying “There is no evidence for evolution.”
evilisgood:
No. It was a young squirrel, who managed to get into the cat kennel (the panels are chain link) and from there, into the kitchen. One or more of the cats got it and killed it. Happened while I was sleeping, otherwise I would have heard all the fuss and been able to rescue it.
Also, I note that mostly you just want to say that LotR is a good book, and disagree with what you see as snobbish dismissals. (I agree.)
You can do this in two perfectly good ways:
1. It’s good entertainment and I don’t care about the rest.
2. They’re wrong, it does have literary merit. It may have tissue-thin characterisation, but that’s normal in the mythic genre, and has the effect of making the characters less specific and more universal, and then there’s the extraordinary depth of the world building and the epic nature of the storyline blah blah blah etc etc etc as you wish to argue. – Althea H. Claw
The first of these is fine, as long as one admits that there are other criteria, and caring about them isn’t simply snobbery. The second is interesting, and its true that LotR should be compared to the works most similar in aim and format to assess it fairly – not myths in the narrow sense, which have no single author and are primarily intended for recitation, but classic literary versions of them, and similar modern works. Homer is probably the most obvious of the first (bringing us back by “a commmodius vicus of recirculation” to Ulysses), and I don’t know either the Iliad or Odyssey at all well, even in English. Beowulf and Mallory’s Le Morte d’Arthur would be others, and again, I don’t know more than the outline of the stories, although Tolkien would certainly have known Beowulf at least inside out. Of modern works, you could compare LotR with reworkings of myths such as Mary Renault’s The King Must Die and The Bull From The Sea, reimagining the Theseus myths – which I would say are considerably superior to LotR in vividness of language, the evocation of a fundamentally non-modern culture, and the depiction of both action (notably Theseus’s wrestling match with Kerkyon, and the scenes in and around the Cretan Bull Court), and relationships between characters (particularly those of Theseus with his father and his sons). Or you could compare it with works like the Gormenghast trilogy of Mervyn Peake, which similarly constructs an entire world. That is much less easy to read than LotR, the language is often over-elaborate, and some quite large bits could be cut out and improve it, but it does have much more interesting, psychologically complex characters – Steerpike is a far more realistic and therefore frightening evil character than any in LotR (particularly as the reader is likely to sympathise with his rebellion a good deal), and Dr. Prunesquallor and Muzzlehatch much more convincing good ones. It lacks the structural unity of LotR, partly because Peake was suffering from Parkinson’s disease when he wrote the third part (Titus Alone), which was reconstructed after his death and in any case wasn’t intended to be the end of the story. There are plenty of others, of course, but I admit that as soon as I see “The Seventh Part of…”, I leave the book on the bookshop shelf. I have, I’m somewhat ashamed to admit, read several of Jean M. Auel’s paleolithic saga, beginning with The Clan of the Cave Bear. That has some interest in the attempt to imagine the Neandertals as human-but-not-like-us people, but the sequels are just modern Californians faffing about dressed in animal skins, and definitely inferior to LotR.
Totally TET bankrupt — I’ll need several years to pay off the debt — but I just wanted to pop in and wish the very best to the Redhead and her Nerd.
Hoi SQB!
(And I second you.)
walton:
This seems a very limited definition of “technical skill”. I don’t expect mind-numbing dullness or disgusting flavours from any skilled artisan.
Furthermore; you are willing to accept that qualities and relationships entirely external to the text exist in the real world, and are amenable to objective analysis – its historical and contextual importance, for example; why not qualities and relationships entirely internal to the text?
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Hi, cicely!
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Hmm, strike-through appears not to have worked. Must use (strike) instead of (s).
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Belatedly but sincerely, all the best of science and good wishes to you and Redhead, Nerd. I agree with the assessment of others; she has a powerful advocate by her side.
Nice one by Bill Maher on unbaptising Romney’s dead father-in-law, I can only embed the vid, not sure how to link to it here. Here’s the link from FB, if it doesnt work, I embedded it at mine.
No. No, it’s not, and that’s a ridiculous characterization of my argument. I am not denying that many people have criteria in mind when they talk about the “merit” or “quality” of a book. I am not ignorant of what those criteria are. I am denying that they have any basis for claiming that those criteria are objectively the “right” ones. Because it’s not a question of fact. It’s a question of personal opinion. The idea that certain characteristics are a measure of the “quality” of a book is not an objective fact about reality; it is a personal opinion, and it is not capable of being objectively true or false.
People can assert all day long that a novel has to be “innovative”, “transformative”, historically-influential, and so on in order to have great “merit”, but they cannot show me that I am wrong to reject these as the most important criteria, and to say, instead, that a good novel is one which entertains the reader and inspires the imagination. I don’t see why my criteria are any less legitimate than anyone else’s.
Almost everyone here who has read both books, including those who otherwise disagree with my position, has said that they find LOTR more entertaining than Ulysses. They simply deny that a book’s ability to entertain is an important criterion of its merit. From where I’m sitting, the purpose of art is to make people’s lives better, and a book that actually entertains the reader fulfils this purpose far better than a book full of bizarre, incomprehensible, pretentious prose accessible only to those with an advanced literary education. Of course, you may disagree; it’s not inescapably true that the purpose of art is to entertain the reader. It may be to challenge the reader. It may be to expand the reader’s mind. My point is that these are all statements of personal opinion, not of objective fact, and none of them is any more objectively true or false than any other.
That’s a complete distortion of the position of those you were arguing against. First, your argument for the most of the time was that “good” is wholly a matter of personal taste. That’s different from saying that a work’s general ability to entertain is a criterion of its merit; and the latter is not a matter of the personal taste of the person making the judgement – you can measure it by survey and approximate it by sales. Second, I for one explicitly allowed, several times, that if someone was using that as their criterion of merit, I couldn’t prove them wrong – but did and do say that that is not what the term “literary merit” is ever (outside meta-discussions) used to mean.
Third, the point I most wanted to get over is that objectively true / simply a matter of personal taste is not an exhaustive dichotomy, and that esthetic (and ethical) judgements are neither.
Are we using the term literary merit as it is generally understood, like one does with, you know, words, or are we using your particular and private meaning of the word?
*
wordphraseYes, that’s true: I should have been more precise.
I believe I answered this in my reply to Alethea above. Whether or not it’s true that “literary merit” has a specific meaning as a term of art in scholarship, most people who talk about the merit of books, in the ordinary discourse, don’t take care to draw such a distinction, and pretend that their conception of what makes a book “good” is some sort of an objective standard.
And now I really do want to stop talking about this, because it’s going round and round in circles (and I’ve tried to bow out of the discussion several times already).
I didn’t know Improbable Research had a store!
(I should have known. Everyone has a store.)
*cough* somewhat relevant: MLP episode just premiered in which Rainbow Dash reads a book, gets sucked in and goes “Oh no! I’m an EGGHEAD!”
Clip: here
Discussion: here
The community is rendering it as we speak. ♥
“Bucking books, how do they work?”
When someone makes a general statement like “I think this artwork is good,” that’s generally not a very useful statement. (In some contexts, I guess it could be useful, but probably not in the sense of its usefulness in evaluating the work as I mean here.) It is objectively true in the trivial sense that they’ve put it in terms of what they think and because (assumed in this hypothetical example) they are correct about what they think.
However, this isn’t a valid “measurement” of its qualities on an objective scale which is independent of that person. Their thoughts on the matter may be wrong, irrelevant, based on false or incomplete information, and so on. We could probe further about what makes them think it is good. They could cite any number of things about it which lead them to this evaluation, and these may either be true or false. That’s the sort of information I’ve been talking about, and to discuss that we need to get specific. But again, there’s nothing particularly useful or interesting about a vague statement like “I think this is good.” That is not something I’m claiming is an objective claim about a work, because it clearly doesn’t even contain information about the work itself.
If lots of people think something is good, it’s more likely that there is something of value (to those people at least) which is validly about the work and which is supported by the evidence from the work itself. We can try to figure out what those evaluations have in common: maybe they all think X is good because of property Y. If X does have Y and if it makes sense to say that Y is what the general population means by aesthetic value, then X is valuable for that reason (if not also for other reasons). That determination doesn’t reduce to simply my personal opinion, or the collective opinions of those people. It’s a fact insofar as there are facts about human psychology and behavior.
If this group were a cult and their evaluations are based on false beliefs about a work which aren’t verifiable by the rest of the population, then their evaluation probably didn’t have anything to do with aesthetic value anyway, but in any case it obviously doesn’t apply to those outside the cult. And since I’m not in a cult, I just don’t give a shit.
I think we should consider all of those criteria as legitimate, assuming (as I said before) they are relevant to the work(s) and don’t contradict themselves or the evidence from it (or “them,” if we’re comparing). It isn’t clear what it would mean to say one criterion is “more legitimate” than another, if it doesn’t mean the other isn’t legitimate at all. Has anyone here said the ability to entertain and readability aren’t legitimate or that they’re less legitimate?
So to be clear, you’ve given up the claim that saying a book is good is just a matter of personal taste? If so, the discussion is not going round in circles – it has achieved a significant result.
It is.
Such discourse, as I pointed out, very rarely uses the term “literary merit”, or even “merit”, so it’s misleading to talk as though it does, and as though “literary merit” could refer to popular entertainment value. It’s also misleading – and I’d have to say at this point perversely and even dishonestly so – to go on claiming that those you have been arguing with are arguing for there being an objective standard of literary merit, let alone of what makes a book “good”.
@ Pteryxx
Didn’t you mean to say: “Wucking Fooks, how do they bork?”
Even the Pffft of All Knowledge is trying to get on board.
Does anyone here know anything about electronics? Specifically how to remote control stuff via mobile phone and/or internet on a smartphone.
My sister and brother-in-law are interested in turning on and off water for their cattle in different fields and perhaps check on the status of the electric fences from afar. Preferably by text message, since that’s dirt cheap. But I can only seem to find expensive systems online. Is it possible to kludge together a cheap solution?
Rorschach already noted this @362, but here’s another link to the video of Bill Maher unbaptizing Mitt Romney’s dead father-in-law.
http://gawker.com/5882215/watch-bill-maher-unbaptize-mitt-romneys-dead-father+in+law
“I call upon the mormon spirits to leave your body the fuck alone…”
The opening monologue for this video consists of Mr. Maher destroying the false equivalence of reason with unreason, of science with religion.
Pteryxx
Oh my bucking god! I missed PONIES! Damn, body needed sleep, should live on just ponies >.<
To the Internets!
Thank you my brony. /)(\
No, but there clearly is a distinction between saying “I think this book is good”, saying “Many people think this book is good”, and saying “Most professional literary critics think this book is good”. And the standards applied might be different in each case. You’re right that I should have differentiated between these things, and failed to do so in my post above (largely because of writing my post in a hurry).
*birdhoofs J_A_L*
/ε (\
One last attempt… no, it’s not. Because you claimed (for instance, at #622 on the last thread) not only that you think Tolkien is a bad writer, but that I was actually wrong to call him a good writer: “…if you think LoTR is good writing, you’replain uneducated in that particular domain, just as much as someone who thinks creationism is good science is in biology.” When we talk of “good science” or “bad science”, we have an objective benchmark: a scientific claim is “good” if it accurately corresponds to our empirical observations of reality, and “bad” if it fails to do so. Your comparing this to “good writing” suggests that you think some such external standard exists for judging the quality of literary efforts; I have been arguing, all along, that it doesn’t. That’s all. And that’s all I will say, because right now I feel like I’m just restating the same things over and over again and being misconstrued every time.
Sili: with a bit of research, it certainly is possible. A commercial solution -may- be more reliable, and come with support, but cobbling something together that one understands and can maintain oneself – as farmers often do – is not out of the question.
My first question would be – is there sufficient cellphone coverage that every location on the farm will have signal? There are kits out there that connect to the cellphone network, and can turn relays on and off (which can be used to control pumps, etc) in response to SMS, as well as sending periodic logging data (yup, fence is still working) or event-driven data (onoes, fence broke) back as SMS.
They exist: you regard them as invalid. That’s not the same thing.
Yay! Eggheads unite ^_^
That really made my day, mlp fim always does. Thank goodness for the community otherwise I’d be bucking screwed.
Sorry, I can’t figure out how to do birdhoofs =(
Sili:
This thread contains much relevant information:
http://forums.whirlpool.net.au/archive/1414272
If cellphone coverage across the farm is not available, then you would be looking at an RF (radio frequency) system, with a central command transceiver possibly itself hooked up to the cellphone network, or the internet. Internet you can either do directly from the command unit (onboard ethernet or WiFi and a TCP/IP stack, to a modem/router) or via a physical connection to a computer (USB or serial/RS-232).
For that approach, I would suggest browsing sparkfun.com and checking out their range of devices and modules.
Yes, I interpreted you as meaning that his work had high literary merit, whereas what you meant was (at that point) that you enjoyed his work. I considered (and consider, although Althea H. Claw raised a point I need to think about further) this to be wrong in the same sense as you consider a claim that restricting immigration is justifiable is wrong – by which you do not mean that there is some absolute objective moral standard, but nor, I think, do you regard this simply as a matter of personal taste. Rather, you mean that the claim is badly founded, and you try to persuade and educate people out of it by detailing the grounds on which you disagree with them – as I did with your claim about Tolkien.
Apropos of the art discussion, I just got home from the local Goodwill store, where I went with a friend who enjoys browsing thrift shops, and I ended up coming home with a biography of the artists Christo and Jeanne-Claude. Here’s a case where I used to think it was just silly to call wrapping stuff in fabric “art”… but over time, as I saw more and more photos of their installations, and read more and more about their work, I began to get it, and now I find it truly wonderful. I’m still kicking myself for not making the 3-hour trip to Central Park back when The Gates was up.
I had a similar sort of personal evolution with the paintings of Mark Rothko, in which my evaluation gradually changed from utterly dismissive to admiringly positive.
In each case, though, I would shy away from declaring my earlier opinion to have been objectively wrong, and I would definitely not declare someone else who feels no as I formerly did to be incorrect.
For whatever that little anecdotal nugget might be worth.
Mom had to visit the hospital again late last night with severe pain in her leg. The working diagnosis so far is sciatica, possibly due to a herniated disc. She’s got some Percocet and will be doing a lot of resting/sleeping for today and tomorrow. Both my brother and SIL rushed down when we called them to tell them what was going on, so I think they’re currently sleeping off the train ride and the worry. The dogs have been curled up on the bed with Mom, keeping an eye on her.
I hardly got any sleep myself until Mom was home and brother and SIL were here and settled in. Her new doctor, the one she got when she had that bout of vertigo, will be called. Presumably she must also examine Mom before we can be sure it’s sciatica, and if so, at least that’s something that can be dealt with.
———————————————-
art: No real hard and fast rules here, aside from whether something appeals to me or not, and does it seem like shoddy work compared to what the creator was aiming for, or does it go beyond what was expected. For instance, I never thought porn could be even a tad artistic until I started watching more closely. Then I discovered X-art, and that was it. I’m now convinced that porn can indeed be art, although the line between that and merely being . . . porn, I suppose, isn’t easily defined IMO.
————————————————
All right, threadrupt otherwise, and can’t think of anything else to say for now.
drbunsen le savant fou says:
Yes, this is a teensy tiny country, not Australia.
Bill Dauphin,
You describe the kind of educative (in this case, self-educative) experience that can change a person’s esthetic judgements. You would not describe your previous opinion as “objectively wrong”, and nor would I, but might you say that it was ill-founded, or based on insufficient grounds?
Walton,
To take the example of immigration further, you might try to discover why someone who disagreed with you did so. This might be because they felt that taken all in all, the consequences would lead to more human suffering rather than less, in which case you could say OK, we disagree about a question of fact, and try to argue that they were objectively wrong about the facts. (although in doing so, you might well find that the disagreement was not simply about facts, but concealed different attitudes to risk, or evaluations of how serious particular consequences would be if they occurred). Or it might be that they believed something like: “We should look after our own people first.” Now at that point you might shrug your shoulders and say “OK, we have different values, no further discussion possible”, but I doubt that you would, in general. The alternative would be to probe into why they held this value: what, if anything, it was based on. It’s quite possible, in such a case, that they had simply never questioned this assertion, or thought that the division of humanity into nations was somehow inevitable or natural or right, and that the preference for the interest of co-nationals followed from this; in which case, you would surely ask them to justify this view, and explain why you held the contrary view. Esthetic judgements are similar – they involve both facts and values, the two are not easily separated, and rational argument can change values as well as beliefs about the facts.
*checks link*
Ack!
That’s … quite a bit more than I hoped for.
Dammit! My laptop battery life has just dropped from 2 1/2 hours to 1 1/2. Stupid thing. I have had no end of electronic problems with this laptop – the last battery died entirely, possibly due to a bad reaction with Windows 7 (according to the internet), I’ve had to have the power jack resoldered twice and it’s loose again, and now the power jack on the docking station is loose too. I don’t mistreat it, I swear! And now this battery life is going low. Stupid thing.
The new kitty seems to have a real thing against paper. I’ve had cats like to lay on paper, but she likes to destroy it. Right now she’s trying to chew apart a newspaper, and every time I have a book or notebook in my lap she goes after it. Something about stacks of papers seems to be irresistible.
The WTF of the week: I was at a nearby Salvation Army store yesterday, and saw a tie that, judging by the fabric and style, was late 70s. It had a repeating comic on it, with only two panels. In the first, a guy is crying, stepping up on a stool to a noose, and looking back at a picture of a woman on a desk. In the second, he’s walking away, whistling happily, while the picture of the woman is dangling from the noose. What. The. Bloody. Hell. A woman jilts you, causing you to try to commit suicide, and then you hang her in effigy, and this is a good comic, to put on a TIE???? There is not enough what the fuck in the world.
Holy fuck, so threadrupt I missed the news about Redhead. best wishes to you both, Nerd. I hope she comes home safe and sound.
so um…has anyone else noticed that youtube is damn near unusable now?
Yes. I can’t enable a single video anymore; it’s making me script-enable the entire frickin’ site on every frickin’ tab. Screw’em, I’ll futz with it later.
When trying to add to play lists the lists are sorted by date with no option to sort by name.
Interface is cluttered.
It seems, what to me outside of the techfeild, looks like a bunch of amateurish and fundamental errors
play lists that are not public are hard to find even for the owner of them. Near as I can tell you have to go to manage play lists in order for them to be listed. WTF happened?
Hugs for JeffreyD, Nerd and Redhead.
In the depiction of the final battle of the Trojan War, the Aeneid mentions glomerati Grai.
Some Englishman translated that in the 17th century (IIRC) as clusters great of Greeks in throngs.
(The stuff I learn on language blogs…)
Just wrote to mom + sister. :-)
Awesome!
Also awesome!
My grandma uses huge fiberboard plates that she can move around but can’t roll up.
Twelve years later, and it’s still funny. *headshake* Wonderful. :-)
They either mean “I personally like it” or “it’s good by some objective criterion” or both, and usually they don’t mention which objective criteria, if any, they have in mind – usually they aren’t even aware of which of the two basic possibilities they mean.
It’s like “species”.
I always must take care not to use my entire head instead.
I expect disgusting flavours – along with others – from every skilled cook, because there are so many ingredients I find disgusting in the first place!
Why shouldn’t metaphorical taste be similar?
Capitalism! Yyyyyyyeeeeeeeeeaaah.
– Austin Powers
one more for the rage-file:
https://proxy.freethought.online/almostdiamonds/2012/02/04/catholics-still-trying-to-kill-the-indian
Is this or is this not the frickin’ 21st century, people?
Sili:
That was just the first example that floated to the surface on Google. There are others.
Connecting to the GSM network is probably the expensive part. A central SMS handler with RF links to outlying nodes would probably be cheaper.
David:
You can also make your own, if you need one that is larger than what’s available. All you need is felt and an art mailing tube of the right size.
Pteryxx,
The what in the who now?? Jesus fucking Christ, when will it end?
I read that at first as “clusters great of Greeks in thongs“. Which I think produces a much more vivid mental image.
Pretty sure we can’t do RF without a license.
The prefect solution would be something that plugged into an old phone for the GSM bit.
No, you can do RF stuff without a license – in the “Industrial, Scientific and Medical” band, around 2.4GHz, and a couple of other bands set aside for this exact type of use case. That’s where wifi lives, for example – and many of the little radio remotes on sparkfun. Just need to mix and match range, features, budget and ease of set-up, and away you go.
I’ve seen projects that do that (in Silicon Chip, for example, a local (Australian) electronics mag that is also available online) but I’m not aware of any readily available kits or modules. NB, that’s not to say they’re not out there
I fucking HATE comcast.
1) we have to pay for a landline we don’t want because if we don’t our internet doubles and thus the bill is even larger by trying to get rid of services
2) 5 dollar fee for paying by phone. Paying online is free
3) You can’t pay online. It keeps rejecting my perfectly fine card.
I’m too sleepy and faint to say anything very intelligent, but I’ll try anyway.
Indeed, that’s true. In my experience, many people who espouse support for immigration restrictions do so on the basis of ignorance or of inaccurate factual beliefs. For one thing, they tend either to be unaware of, or to underestimate, the devastating impact of existing immigration enforcement, detention and deportation on migrants and their families, as well as the indirect impact on those migrants who receive little or no protection against exploitation and abuse because of their undocumented or temporary status. (Talking about the actual lives and experiences of individual people in these situations can be very powerful in encouraging greater empathy and a more positive view of immigrants and immigration, and can help to counter the inaccurate portrayal of immigration by racist groups like FAIR and MigrationWatch and by the tabloid media.) On similar lines, people who espouse anti-immigration views often tend to buy into myths, such as the false claims that immigrants “sponge” from the societies to which they migrate (promoted, for instance, by a recent thoroughly-misleading headline in the Telegraph), or that immigrants are responsible for increases in crime, unemployment or social problems. As such, educating people about the realities of the immigration enforcement system, and debunking anti-immigration myths, is an extremely useful endeavour.
Yes, I’ve come across something of this sort on occasion when people defend immigration restrictions on the ground that we need to protect “our culture”, and that rapid mass immigration will lead to the traditional values of “our culture” being swamped and eroded. (I’ve often heard this kind of nativist view from conservative Christians like Piltdown, but also on occasion from xenophobic authoritarian secularists of the Pat Condell school of thought, who typically claim that “Western culture” needs to be protected from “Islamification” by restricting Muslim immigration.)
In this case the disagreement is not so much about the facts of the situation; I certainly do not dispute that large-scale immigration tends to produce cultural change. Rather, I just don’t understand why this should be seen as a bad thing. I can’t see why we would want to segregate the planet artificially into culturally-homogeneous regions, or why an influx of people from another cultural background should be something to be feared. Having grown up in a diverse, multicultural community myself, I honestly regard such fears as simply irrational xenophobia. (Note that this needs to be carefully distinguished from legitimate concerns about discriminatory cultural norms and their implications for human rights; though you and I have talked about this before in the context of Islamophobia, and generally tend to agree on that subject, so it’s probably not necessary to expand upon it now.)
(Probably the best example of such bizarre fears being given the force of law was the Immigration Act of 1924 in the US, which, in addition to being racist – Asians were almost completely barred from immigrating, consolidating the explicitly-racist policy of the earlier “Chinese Exclusion Acts” – also implemented “national origin quotas” based on the composition of the population at the 1890 census, in an attempt to keep the ethnic and cultural composition of American society as consistent as possible with that in 1890. Of course, this xenophobic legislation led directly to countless tragedies – not least, the refusal of the United States to provide a haven to many refugees fleeing Nazi persecution in Europe in the 1930s and 40s.)
That’s true up to a point. I often query why so many people seem unthinkingly to assume that “our people” and “our country” are of greater importance than the rest of the world. For instance, I find it bizarre and irrational to argue that immigrants’ access to the labour market should be restricted in order to “protect jobs for our people”. To arbitrarily exclude a group of people from the labour market on the basis of their birth and ancestry, in order to guarantee preferential access to employment for those who happen to have been born on one particular part of the Earth’s surface, seems no less discriminatory and unjust than, say, excluding racial minorities from the labour market in order to protect full employment for white people, or excluding women from the labour market in order to protect full employment for men.* Of course implementing a policy of compulsory discrimination against a particular group may work for the advantage of another group, but that doesn’t mean it’s just, reasonable or defensible to do so.
(*A parallel which isn’t farfetched, insofar as forcibly excluding women from the workplace has been advocated by social conservatives in the past for precisely that reason, and was an official state policy in some countries until fairly recently; until the 1970s women in many occupations were required to leave their employment when they married, for instance. Today we recognize this as ridiculous and unjust; I hope that in some decades’ time we’ll be able to look back and say the same about today’s protectionist immigration restrictions.)
But there are some people who simply maintain resolutely that “our country” and “our people” are of paramount importance, that “our culture” needs to be protected, and that “cultural pluralism” is a bad thing. I regard that view as irrational and destructive, but I cannot prove it to be wrong; if someone simply asserts this as a basic value-judgment which does not depend on any facts, I can’t do much more to argue with them.
I’ve numbered these points because I think they’re three separate claims. [1] and [2] are obviously correct. Where I think we are in partial disagreement is on point [3].
Insofar as I think rational argument can change values, it can do so only with reference to other values. To run with our immigration example above: I might be able to persuade someone of the arbitrariness of protectionist immigration restrictions by drawing parallels between such restrictions and, say, the idea of forcibly excluding women or racial minorities from the workforce. Similarly, I can also point out that many of the justifications for restricting immigration have their roots, implicitly, in racism and xenophobia. But in making this argument, I’m assuming that my interlocutor also holds several other values: I’m assuming that xe thinks that unjustified and arbitrary discrimination is generally bad, and/or that xe opposes discrimination against women and against racial minorities. These values are by no means universally-espoused, nor would I have an answer to someone who chose to reject them.
As a separate point, I also think the analogy between moral values and aesthetic values, while I agree that it has some use, should not be taken too far. The fundamental difference is that moral values are couched in much more clearly normative terms. If I call a practice morally wrong, I am not saying merely that I dislike that practice and choose to refrain from it; I am saying that people in general should refrain from that practice, and that someone is in some sense behaving wrongly if xe engages in that practice. By contrast, expressing an aesthetic taste does not have to have any such normative or universal application. This doesn’t, of course, contradict any of your points about the parallels between moral debate and aesthetic debate, and I agree that such parallels are useful to draw. But I would point out that, because of the normative and general character of moral statements, we are in practice obliged to engage in moral debate, because others’ moral views affect us directly, and because our silence in the face of moral assertions may be taken as assent. Which is why I have no choice but to engage in moral discussions regularly, even while being deeply uncertain as to the meta-ethical assumptions underlying debates about morality. By contrast, there is no such necessity when it comes to debates about aesthetics; we could simply choose to abandon any attempt to talk objectively about art or literature. (And, indeed, unless directly provoked, I generally prefer to avoid making any statements about art or literature beyond “I like it” or “I don’t like it”.)
(Many apologies for the ramble. And I can’t believe this took me over an hour to compose. I didn’t set out to write this much.)
ZOMG, there’s an inch-and-a-half of snow!
Expect a national emergency to be declared in England by tomorrow. :)
—
The subthread made me reread Ulysses. Ch 1, Telemachus:
LOTR has its attractions, but not this insight.
…I don’t know if I even have the stomach to look this up today.
Also, your discussion reminded me of this:
Better watch what you say.
Ari Fleisher is part of the SGK clusterfuck.
Try to deny this was not political.
North East has about three inches, sadly it is powder and zero use for making a snowman.
changeable moniker:
You’re impressed by that?
Some disagree about either or both. What makes you think this is “the fundamental difference”?
We could? Do you think art is necessary or useful for anything?
(By the way, I think it’s more useful to consider aesthetics as relating to our experiences of nature as well, not just the arts.)
Well, that’s only you. What about everyone else?
I’ll add that one important (and obvious) difference is that ethics is basically about what people should do to reduce suffering or enhance personal fulfillment in some way. Aesthetics is similar, but the things we should do is limited to what gives people satisfying perceptual or conceptual experiences.
@Morales: which insight are you unimpressed by?
FWIW, *sigh*, that Stehpen Daedalus might, you know, being an athiest raised Catholic, have refused to pray for his dying mother.
It’s not like this is a central theme of of the the book or anything.
Serendititydawg, it may not be snowball snow, but it’s borderline sledging snow.
I’m just grumpy about it.
That is how literary criticism should be done.
*The Fish License sketch – http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pnq96W9jtuw
cm: Snow makes you break out the big-ass hammer?
cm: Alternately, “You leave Percy out of this!”
changeable moniker, what part of that tiresome drivel about imaginary characters contains this alleged insight which is purportedly lacking in LOTR?
What part of your tiresome drivel about the inferiority of other people’s tastes contains insight that makes it worth posting?
Changeable Moniker: I reiterate John Morale’s question, but in more polite terms.
1: I’ve read LOTR and enjoyed it. 2: I haven’t read this Ulysses.
That said, for the life of me I couldn’t see anything remotely deep or profound in that little snippet. Maybe I’m missing the context. Maybe this is one of those things one requires a bit of an education to appreciate. In fact, LIKELY one of those two things.
But I saw nothing but… well…
crap.
@TLC
I got it I just didn’t find it that mind blowing
I have nothing further of significance to add to this conversation. In lieu of any attempt at intelligent comment, here is the world’s first “asparamancer”, so called because she can, allegedly, predict the future using asparagus.
And, on an unrelated note, here is a picture of Her Royal Highness Princess Eugenie of York wearing an extremely unusual hat. (The link is to a blog which, I gather, is devoted entirely to pictures of royal headgear, from the Queen of Brunei to Princess Caroline of Hanover. Truly, with the Internet all things are possible.)
That’s all for the day. Goodnight, world. *waves*
Is it to do with context? How shocking would it have been at the time it was written?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UWXwcmve-v8&feature=g-vrec&context=G29c6801RVAAAAAAAACA
Coffee sprung from my nose to the screen at the salt and pepper scene. It’s a miracle.
Sloww night.
Yep.
yup
Where is everybody?
Unless it’s not night where y’all are to.
Then it’s a slow day.
I’m watching the Nevada caucus news trickle in to my aggregator. I’m thinking I’ll throw my asparagus sticks and predict Romney for the GOP candidate and Paul as his running mate. They’re friends, they keep defending each other, and Paul could actually pull some (albeit misguided) Liberals away from Obama.
Nevertheless, my (Republican) husband grumbled to me tonight that it “didn’t matter who won in Nevada because Obama has this one sewn up.”
Eh, I’m here, more involved in the Anoka thread. Getting cranky.
Spears. Asparagus spears. Not sticks.
I just put a rainbow cake in the oven, for my son’s birthday party tomorrow. It was fun to make.
My cat is screaming at me for the fish he knows is defrosting on a high shelf where he can’t reach it. He keeps running to come get me, and if I follow him he looks back and forth from me to the shelf and howls. “What the hell is wrong with you, you stingy bag?”
I must to bed.
Looky at the Ron Paul thread!
https://proxy.freethought.online/pharyngula/2012/02/04/say-what-ron-paul/comment-page-1/#comment-258689
Chigau:
I looked. Two fists full of ugly and no brain. Ugh.
walton, your 406 was in fact very well written and argued, particularly your last main paragraph. I admit to skimming the rest, regarding immigration, where we are substantially in agreement.
–
Misread:
–
There are no atheists in
foxholesMordor.I want a rainbow cake.
I’m translating my Latin, y’all! Everyone be proud of me!
Yes, I’m extremely snarly today. I’m not sure why, except perhaps that I woke up to a shitty comment from a godbot on a post on (my best friend’s) Facebook and a text from aforementioned best friend warning me to “be nice.”
So maybe I’ll explain gently how she’s wrong, then very politely warn her that this is not a road she wishes to go down with me.
Or maybe just fuck it.
CC:
I am proud of you. Always. And you’re beautiful when you snarl.
I like this option. I’ve been feeling less and less merciful towards the religious. They may claim to love me as christians, but they still think it’s right and just that I burn in hell.
This is often a nearly surefire way to get me to UNLEASH THE BEAST. Though that’s just me.
@ Caine
I read that Rolling Stones article and still feel a bit shellshocked. The situation described is just so incredibly depraved. What did those idiots expect to happen with their stupid policies? That their hatred wouldn’t seep into the next generation of bigots? Or poison the waters for everyone?
I also get the impression that it was not such a large group of adults who where the main instigators. We really must fight back fast and hard when people start with this kind of shit. (The surreptitiousness around the whole sad affair also betrays that this is those goddists feared.)
If it cheers you somewhat, Spawnphontes schoolmates where all totally open about their sexuality and got on really well together. It was so totally different an experience, that it is hard to imagine they share the same planet with the kids in Anoka.
@ CC
Cat and mouse rather than “UNLEASH THE BEAST”?
*sigh*
I tend never to get such opportunities.
Have a “what” in my above screed.
Theophontes:
Exactly. That’s why we must be noisy about such happenings and refuse to back down. The goddists do not like looking like immoral scum to the rest of society, they prefer to be considered pillars of da community and all that. Still, we’re starting to see the rise of those who are utterly shameless (Bachmann & husband, frinst.) and manage to be proud of being immoral scum. *sigh*
Yeah, that’s what really gets me, that there are a lot of places where this simply doesn’t happen and it wouldn’t be tolerated. Sometimes I really despair when I think of the U.S.
I see my question @420 remains outstanding.
—
Classical Cipher @421, what are you on about?
Unfortunate poll on the use of fluoride in drinking water.
http://www.bozemandailychronicle.com/
walton@406,
There’s little I disagree with there. The only point I’d question, at least on first reading is:
Here I think you overestimate how far most people think about their values, and how far those values are actually articulated at all, rather than remaining in the realm of emotional reactions (which indeed underlie values, but are not identical with them – in particular, they don’t have logical consequences). You can, for example, draw out the implications of a stated value, and perhaps lead someone to realise that it has consequences they had not appreciated and do not like. You might say this will only lead to them changing that value if it conflicts with another value they already hold, but I’m not convinced this is the case, just because many people are unreflective about their ethical judgements – they may find they just don’t like the consequence you have drawn out, although they have never thought about such a situation before. So the process is not simply a rational one, but it includes rational debate as an essential part.
Similarly (and I appreciate the distinction you draw about the much greater necessity for ethical than esthetic debate), many people are unreflective about their esthetic judgements – and in this case, though certainly not the ethical one, I think that includes you. I posed a scenario earlier that (unless I missed it) you did not respond to: you say Joyce’s style in Ulysses is ugly; a Joycean scholar (not me!) asks you to detail in what ways you think it ugly, which bits you think are most and least ugly, and how they could be improved; you reply in detail (conceding that you may not want to and are not obliged to); the Joycean then explains why they think Joyce used the stlye he did, and why your proposed amendments would not work. Now would you concede it is possible this would change your esthetic judgement? That you would come to appreciate and apply esthetic values you had not done before? Again, as in the ethical case this would be a process that is not purely rational – your esthetic judgement is still based in part on an emotional or sensuous response – but rational argument is an essential part of it and can actually lead to a change in that response.
@ Caine
I don’t even know if this is the case or if it even matters (I strongly suspect the school would step in to rectify matters if it did though) … it is more that the kids themselves simply don’t go down that route. There is snapping and sniping, but not bigotry. You really need a culture of intolerance to get that ball rolling IMO.
I am amazed at how mature, well adjusted and level headed Spawn and all her friends have turned out. I wish I had gone to a school like hers.
I think a big solution to this kind of problem is human rights based legislation – as I have often argued. But how to get there? It seems the US is heading in the opposite direction. I feel a vicarious sadness about the situation there. Other than fighting trolls,lending moral support and sharing ideas I don’t know what to do. I do know where it should be headed, as I’ve experienced this myself here.
In case you missed it: I gave an example on TET a few months ago of a rugby player who finally came out. He had put it off for years, worried of how his friends, colleagues and especially team-mates react. He finally summoned the courage. And the reaction? Everybody was welcoming. Everyone placed his love and friendship above anything so trivial as discriminating on such an unimportant issue. I wish this could be the case in the USA – think how healthy it is for everyone to live in such a society. The few bigots would then be the one’s hiding their shame and embarrassment.
Though the US seems so back-to-front, I simply cannot believe that we are all fundamentally very similar in our natural proclavity to be sociable.
Sorry:
Should read:
Though the US seems so back-to-front, I simply cannot believe that we are NOT all fundamentally very similar in our natural proclivity to be sociable.
Hi there
Mostly bancrupt, weekends are busy time.
kristinc
I think that hating one’s perfectly non-abusive parent is part of growing up. After all, they need to find their own identity apart from you and a very good reason to do so is because they hate you.
I mentioned Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix before. I think that JKR did a perfect job at portraying the teenage Harry who thinks that everybody is mean to him and nobody loves him.
Worst thing is that you can’t help them, because if you should mention that this is a normal phase of growing up and that you understand and everything, you’Re just another one of those evil adults who think they know everything and who think that they have a clue about you when actually they know nothing, especially not you.
Nerd
Best wishes for you and the Redhead. We had to fit my grandparents’ flat to be wheelchair-friendly and a hospital bed (my kids love it, we only have to stop them from shaking grandma out of it with the remote control) and a tub-lifter.
BTW, something we discovered when my grandpa broke his femur was that often local smithees will make you a better price for certain things than the big players specialized in such things.
puzzles
I remember they were a fun to have with my grandpa. We’d have a bazillion of cups and dishes to sort all the pieces by colour.
The Last Unicorn
Don’t forget the soundtrack!
And the book. I enjoy Peter S. Beagle’s books imensely. The Innkeeper’s song is one of my favourites and I think that he did an extremely well job in He! Rebek!, especially given that he was very young at that time and portrayed mostly elderly people.
Oh, gosh. I should not have read Chas’s comment about comment number 222222 coming up. Now I imagine a whole fleet of Pharynguloid dinghies * tacking back and forth along the starting line waiting for the gun (magical comment 454 on this version of TET). I must have a competitive streak after all… Aaaaaargh! **
* All crew dressed as pirates of course.
** Cry of exasperation, not a pirate greeting.
My husband, Mr evilisgood, is now on an agnostic kick. 6 months ago, he thought he was Christian, until I calmly explained to him that you really shouldn’t claim to be Christian if you think that Jesus was a philosopher rather than the son of god and that the resurrection was a fairy story. He’s not a stupid man, just confused.
Tonight we got into it because we saw Bill Maher’s most recent “New Rules,” and Mr evil was all, “Atheism is too a religion.” At which point, trying not to tear my hair out, I tried to explain that atheism was a position on one point, the existence of deities, and nothing else. His argument was that if you proselytize or preach or try to convince others of your position then it was a religion. I said, “So what am I supposed to do? Just shut up about it? Because that’s not going to happen.” And he said, “No, you’re not religious. You’re just expressing your opinion.”
GAHGLAGHGAGAGGGHAAAA
Whoops! Wrong thread. Sorry about that.
What? Post #454 is 222222 of TET? We’re close you talky bunch.
And the winnnaaaaah is…..
Nerd of Redhead!
Step on down and receive your prize! It’s probably just some boring old internetz made of cookies or something.
{theophontes pulls in the sheets and heads upwind}
…
Oh Noez! Teh Catamaran “Nerd of Redhead” has taken the lead…
@changeable moniker,
We still have a measly 3″ though it is still getting somewhat wetter. As usual, at the first flake, the airports and railways virtually shut down and the roads become their usual nightmare.
One of these years we will actually cope with a little bit of snow. In the meantime, my Norwegian friends will continue to regard the chaos that greets the slightest frozen precipitation here with mirth and merriment, so it isn’t all bad.
This isn’t a patch on last year’s 36″ that we had on our road, I am almost tempted to go and drive on it now, because it’ll probably be gone by tomorrow XD
{a wicked gleam comes into captain theophontes’ (unpatched) eye.} Aha!
“Wrong thread”. … So we can strike comments 452 & 453 …
{taps on calculator} 456 – 2 = 454!
{thinks}I must launch a protest with the race committee
… in the meantime evilisgood, you best do a 720.
All is not lost.
Mwahahahahahaha.
/[flagrant case of wishful pedantry]
Linky to MP3 of David Attenborough’s Desert Island Discs from last week.
I missed the actual programme so I haven’t heard it yet… I am eager to know whether he baulked at being automatically given the bible. I would most definitely take the bible as long as it was printed on fairly soft paper, preferably in roll form.
What’s a 720?
Turn your boat around twice before preceding with the race. ie 720°
Used to handicap boats that post comments in the wrong threads, thereby depriving the true winners (TM) of TET “round the bouys” of their magnificent prize.
@ Serendipitydawg
Is not Teh Interwebz munificent? Ask and ye shall recieve: Bible toilet paper.
@theophontes,
What a pity that they will never ask me on XD
Attenborough declared himself an agnostic rather than atheist early on, possibly putting the topic to bed to concentrate on areas that are of greater interest.
Good selection of music though.
Katrina, you have a Republican spouse too? I have to say, it’s kind of hard not piling on them right now, but the party is doing a pretty good job disgusting them all by itself.
Nah, I can’t see it. If only because Ron Paul is 76, and completely unable to keep his trap shut.
Yes, I think that’s right.
Yes, but surely the fact that they “just don’t like the consequence [I] have drawn out” is itself dependent on values, albeit that those values are not necessarily conscious or articulated? If, for instance, I illustrate to someone through rational argument that consistent adherence to their proposed moral values would inevitably lead to thousands of people from Country X being killed, this might very well convince hir to change hir moral values; but it will only do so if my interlocutor already believes both that killing people is a bad thing, and that the lives of people from Country X are of equal value to those of people in the rest of the world (the latter being an assumption that a white supremacist might reject, for instance). Some moral values are so widely-shared, of course, that we generally assume that people hold them; but it is still conceivable that someone could reject those basic values.
Other than that – which is largely a point of terminology rather than substance – I think we’re probably in agreement as to the nature of ethical debate. I certainly don’t disagree that rational argument can cause people to change their values, notwithstanding that values themselves are not based purely on reason.
Yes, that’s all perfectly possible. It’s obviously true that learning more about a work and its context can radically change one’s opinion of it.
My only point is that – as you acknowledge – there is an irreducible element of emotional and personal reaction involved which is not susceptible to rational dispute, and not everyone applies or need apply the same criteria to judging the quality of a work. But I don’t think we’re really in disagreement on that point.
I doubt it. I shouldn’t think Paul wants to be VP. He’s an ideologue, who really does care about the beliefs he espouses; I can’t see him wanting to serve in an administration under Romney, particularly in an office that carries status and perks but very little actual political power. In an interview last year (sorry for the link to Fox), he said:
I agree that Romney will get the nomination, but I don’t have any clue who will get the VP slot. It presumably won’t be Gingrich, seeing as the two of them hate each other, and Gingrich would be a huge electoral liability (he has a whole army of skeletons in his closet, as we’ve already seen, and the Republican establishment loathes him). I guess it could be Santorum, or maybe someone who hasn’t been running, such as Mitch Daniels or Chris Christie. But this is purely speculative.
We have far to go to get to
buoycomment 333333 and so I add some padding that resonates with so much on the TET (whether it is good or not, I leave to others to decide):Happy Monday, all. Wife and I plan to get drunk tonight (one small bottle of Patron silver, some ice cubes, some margarita mix, and a blender. With football.
(from previous thread)
Er, bacon is sliced hog. Not suitable for Ground Hog Day.
(this thread)
Wife and I just got some bacon (well, yesterday afternoon). Four slices of Hartmann’s smoked bacon. Came in at a little over a pound. The slices are 1/4 inch thick.
No grumbling!
I don’t have my Tolkien’s Bestiary here,, but if I remember correctly, Balrogs were created, not bred. So I think motherfucking may be a metaphysical impossibility. Unless it is someone else’s mother. In which case, as long as there is enthusiastic consent, go for it.
Book or song?
do I understand Esme to be a rat?
Damn. I thought Esme was a witch. Now I have to read Wyrd Sisters again. I think I failed to grok with fullness (which is not at all unusual).
Of course it is positive. After all, one company-destroying corporate raider multi-millionare can always appreciate the skill and ruthlessness of another company-destroying corporate raider, right?
Is that in real temperature, or that Celsius abomination?
US railroads were chartered as common carriers with the added necessity of supplying passenger service in return for the right of eminent domain. Basically, if the railroads agreed to carry anything, and anybody, they could gain their right-of-way through the courts.
As long as the US railroads had a virtual monopoly on passenger service, this worked. With the post-WWII interstate highways sytem and, even more so, the advent of cheap air travel with the development of jet turbines, the railroads found themselves saddled with an expensive (it took three crew to run a 50-car freight train, it took five to run a three-car passenger train (not including station agents)), but legally required, service.
By the late 1960s, railroad losses on passenger service (along with labour troubles, managerial incompetence, odd state taxing, changes in the business model, an overbuilt physical plant, and lots and lots and lots of branch lines serving one or two small businesses) were becoming unbearable. Amtrak was formed to relieve the railroads of their passenger requirement. And the creation of Amtrak was odd.
Some in congress saw passenger railroad operations as a relict of an earlier day which should go the way of the horse and buggy — if people wanted the service, it would be profitable. Some saw passenger railroading as essential to preserving (insert a local industry, business, or other special interest) in their state. Conservatives voted for Amtrak with the understanding that it would never break even and would be phased out and disappear. Liberals voted for Amtrak with the understanding that it would never break even and that the federal government would subsidize rail travel.
The initial route map was a reward to the politicians who had spearheaded the project (this is why West Virginia still has so many Amtrak routes). Since then, Amtrak has been a political football. The profitable routes (especially the Boston-Washington corridor) are seen by liberals as proof that Americans want rail passenger service. However, the fact that a route makes money means that people want the service (and are willing to pay for it) so, to a conservative, the government should have nothing to do with it and should sell it to a private entity. The unprofitable routes (and just how unprofitable is something we still don’t know — accounting for actual and avoidable costs for passenger railroading is a fucking nightmare), to liberals, are worth keeping because the traffic is there. To conservatives, it is proof that people are not willing to pay for the service so it should be discontinued (unless that service is in the congressperson’s home district, in which case it is essential).
Amtrak is in a tough situation. Save for the norheast corridor, Amtrak operates on privately owned railroads and has to dodge freight trains. Since Amtrak trains operate at different speeds than freight, it is a scheduling problem for the railroad. Additionally, the railroads and Amtrak have always disagreed regarding trackage fees.
There are places where it is working, and working quite well — North Carolina pays for additional trains to create a statewide system. California does the same. However, until Amtrak can create a national system (as opposed to the current skeleton), it will be unable to compete effectively with air travel for the number one traveling group today — business travelers. But to create that national system would require a massive infusion of capital, and tens of thousands of new (union) workers, which will not fly in today’s political climate.
So the current Amtrak route map is a result of railmandering and the difference in ones view of the role of government between liberals and conservatives. And, to add one more layer of absurdity, intercity passenger rail service is viewed the same way that commuter rail and other mass-transit programmes are viewed — they are used by poor people (or worse, it is European!). And since poor people have shitty lobbyists, they get they shit end of the stick every time. From both parties.
(Sorry ’bout the tl/dr.)
A few years back, we were down in Florida visiting the inlaws. Girl needed new flip-flops (cheap sandals). We walked into one of the stores at Disney Marketplace (inlaws like to go there; I enjoy the boatrides one can take for free), MIL shouts out, “K—-, they have thongs over here!”
Girl took her aside and explained the modern difference between thongs and flip-flops. MIL laughed loud and long.
A bit less than a 721.
Epic Pooh by Michael Moorcock
Now that’s what I call lit crit.
walton, I invite you to read it in toto, if (like me) you have not encountered it before – if for no other reason, because he articulates an opposing viewpoint far better than I am able. It goes some way to illustrating the argument that aesthetics, ethics and politics are not non-overlapping magisteria, and why it is an argument from privilege to maintain that they are.
A few choice nuggets:
He doesn’t like C.S. Lewis much either.
Ogvorbis:
On the contrary, that was fascinating and illuminating.
I didn’t say they were, nor do I think so. It would be very strange indeed to claim that our aesthetic tastes are entirely uninfluenced by our moral and political convictions or by our cultural backgrounds.
I don’t really agree with Moorcock about Tolkien, nor indeed about A.A. Milne; even if I thought LOTR were “Winnie-the-Pooh posing as an epic”, I wouldn’t call that much of an insult. And I think it’s important to avoid eliding the differences between Tolkien and Lewis, who, though close friends, were very different writers and wrote for very different purposes. Lewis, as Moorcock correctly observed, was an intentional propagandist: almost all his novels are meant to illustrate religious and moral points for the reader, like sermons in literary form. Although he was a talented writer, his books are rather irritating to read as an adult because of the constant sensation of being preached at, especially when one vehemently disagrees with him. Tolkien, by contrast, didn’t do that, which is why I find him far more pleasant to read than Lewis. Of course his work was influenced by his outlook and his values, as every writer’s is; but he told stories for their own sake, not to convince the reader of anything.
I think this:
…is an unfair reading of the text. I think Moorcock is assuming without warrant that the hobbits’ tastes and inclinations entirely represent Tolkien’s own. Of course it’s true that Tolkien deliberately characterized most of the hobbits as inward-looking, parochial, deeply conservative and afraid of the world outside their borders, almost in a caricatured fashion; but his heroes are those who either overcome this inclination (Bilbo, Sam) or who do not share it (Frodo), and who develop a taste for Adventure and for real experience of the wider world. To perceive LOTR as an isolationist middle-class warning about the necessity of keeping The Mob out of our peaceful suburban gardens seems as strange to me as to perceive Garfield comic strips as an instructional tract about the importance of eating lasagna and getting plenty of sleep.
That said, of course it’s also true that Tolkien was, as I have said, someone who was deeply nostalgic for an idealized rural past, who distrusted industrialization and who bemoaned the loss of the old rural landscape; the Shire is in part based on the village of Sarehole in the West Midlands, his childhood home, which was later overtaken by suburban development, to his great sadness. And perhaps Moorcock finds that distasteful. That’s his prerogative. But nothing was further from Tolkien’s mind than the idea of writing a work of conservative political propaganda. He was deeply uninterested in contemporary politics (and displayed extraordinary naivete on the rare occasions when he did comment on the subject), and certainly had no desire to write any kind of political tract. His stories were intended to be a mythology of a whole fictional world, complete with histories and languages; it was world-building that he really enjoyed.
Though I agree with Moorcock that Alan Garner, whose books I also enjoyed as a child, is a great writer; so of course is Ursula Le Guin. I also agree with this:
Indeed, many of the slavish Tolkien-imitators in the world of popular “high fantasy” are very poor. (I used to read much in that genre as a teenager, and found lots of writers who tried and failed to match LOTR in style.)
Hi all!
Interesting night tonight – the vote count starts in three hours, and Finland will have a new president! (please let it be Haavisto, pleeease let it be Haavisto…)
FYI: Ulysses is probably the most brilliant piece of art ever written in English language. My stance on this is definite, anyone disagreeing will have their bacon rights provoked immediately.
Also: Theophontes @468: Yeats? Really? Do you have any idea what Yeats does to me? You keep up with this, young man, and soon you’ll have your very own stalker minnie :P
I also think this…
…is unfair on another level. Tolkien experienced the horrors of war (and not just any war, but one of the most terrible in all of history) at first hand. As he wrote in the foreword to the second edition of LOTR, in explicitly countering the false claim that the novel was some sort of allegory for WWII:
Well, in that case it’s a good thing I’m vegetarian. :-p
walton: in that case, watch your USB port, there’s bacon coming your way ;)
Or if you could convince them of that through rational argument.
Miles adrift of the timing as usual, but a very happy Rainbow Cake day to spawn of kristinc
and
ongoing well-wishes to the Redhead and her (TET-ley victorious 222222 or however many times-over it was) Nerd.
Ugh, been looking on-line at stairway lifts for the Redhead. The one good thing is that most run off 24V batteries, only needing enough current for recharging. That we can handle, as the stove probably won’t be used much with me cooking. Then we can upgrade our service next summer as planned when I wouldn’t have to worry about trying to run the furnace off the generator.
To expand on this a little further: of course they aren’t “non-overlapping magisteria”, of course a writer’s ethical and political convictions influence hir writing, and of course our tastes in literature are influenced to some degree by our own convictions. I don’t know of anyone who denies this.
Rather, the difference to which I was referring earlier is that expressing an aesthetic taste does not, of necessity, have the same normative implications that expressing a moral or a political conviction does. If I announce that I like Tolkien, I am certainly not implying that everyone else should like Tolkien, or that those who do not like Tolkien are “wrong” in their personal tastes. It follows that I do not feel any particular responsibility to defend or to justify my taste in literature to anyone else, since I am not seeking to impose my predilections on anyone but myself. Obviously, the same is not generally true of statements about ethics or politics; which is why I think it’s generally fair to demand that people justify and defend their ethical and political opinions, but generally unfair to demand that they do the same with their tastes in art, music or literature.
But white supremacists can, and some do, come to change their values and leave that ideology behind. People develop new values all of the time based on arguments they’ve found convincing.
See? :)
Nerd: I join the others in wishing you and the Redhead a speedy recovery and all the best.
Walton, you misunderstand. Your ‘bacon privilege’ is your privilege to either welcome or unwelcome bacon.
Luckily, there is tofu ‘bacon’.
FWIW, I think the comparison between Ulysses and LoTR seemed clunky, but has become more apt to the discussion. I need certainly to re-try Ulysses. I’m wondering if anyone read LoTR for the first time as an adult, and if their impression of that trilogy is quite different from those who read it as children.
Anecdote: My grandfather died very slowly and with a great deal of suffering in a hospital when I was aged 24. He was in no great danger when he entered the hospital, and my mother had brought him a short stack of books to keep him occupied, including the whole trilogy. He worsened, was moved to the ICU, and the family thought it was important to have someone on site around the clock, even if we couldn’t be in the ICU with him. I got the graveyard shift. I read the trilogy for the first time since I had been 15…my enjoyment arose not at all from the writing, or the story, but more from nostalgia. I think had a picked it up for the first time in that hospital, I would have put it back down quickly and went to the commissary for a newspaper.
Interestingly, though, you recently posted something handwringing about your liking and wanting to post about old films that has racist and sexist elements. So it seems you do recognize that saying “personal taste” or “I just like it” doesn’t magically erase all social implications of patronizing or promoting artworks.
@ Brogg
You mean ts/dr … (to short, definitely read)
That is both interesting and bizarre.
As you know, the rail network is seen as key infrastructure in China and a huge boon to the economy (in spite of some unfortunate incidents last year). I do not think Hong Kong can function without its rail, both over- and underground. It is such an important component of the transport system. (It could function without private cars on the other hand.)
I almost get the impression that short term political expediency overides sanity in the US situation. And it appears to have been like that for a long time. Way back when Mark Twain wrote a lot about railmandering.
And yet you’re dismissing those very concerns, about the social implications of patronizing or promoting artworks, as “handwringing”. So I don’t know what you’re expecting from me.
@ Minnie
I am closer to a tattered coat upon a stick than too a young stalk.
If ever I was to see something in spirituality it would be in this vein * (or at least my own,partial, interpretation of the poem). The feeling is just so very different from what one sees in the religions of today. Well, at least in the Abrahamic religions.
*Whether we get taken up into the material or ethereal. We can do this even as atheists.
theophontes: my sentiments, exactly. As an atheist, I can still find ‘spiritual’ sense in a work of art. We just don’t have a proper word for it that doesn’t smack of theism or woo. I believe some philosophers call it ‘the sense of sublime’.
Yeats does that to me. Also, for a good cry, I suggest Oscar Wilde’s Ballad of Reading Jail, accompanied with a pint of the best Guinness available in your neighborhood. Soppy and romantic, yes, but such a strong poem.
Intent: it’s fuckin’ magic.
No, not the basic concerns themselves, but your presentation of them over several posts, which was totally handwringing and leaning toward “But who’ll think of my hypothetical future children!!!” Sorry if that was unclear.
I’m not expecting anything. I’m pointing to what I see as an inconsistency.
Sorry! – I have some things to do and then I’m off to watch the game (recording the Puppy Bowl, of course*). Probably shouldn’t have jumped in so briefly.
*Colbert’s remark about “Did you know they have a version of the Puppy Bowl, but with humans?” was adorable.
To be fair there could be instances where someone just wanted to tell a story and misaimed fandom props up or it has implications they didn’t think of.
That’s not to say it doesn’t have those implications, just that you can’t really call it propaganda because propaganda WOULD imply intent.
For example, as much as it’s called abstinence propaganda I don’t think it’s a fair literal criticism to level on Twilight since I don’t believe it was actually intended to promote any values, it’s just reflecting the values of the authors extremely limited world view.
Wall-E to use another example is, if we can believe the creators, first a story about a robot. The ecocollapse background was added to make the story work. It isn’t green propaganda although it winds up having a green message.
The Golden Compass and Left Behind for contrast are explicitly clearly propaganda
I did my best not to present my concerns that way (since it wasn’t even close to what I meant), but was brusquely informed that I was doing so anyway, as a result of which I decided that the conversation was a waste of time and so dropped the subject. My concern was about whether I was inadvertently promoting racism by liking certain works. I don’t know how else I could have expressed that concern.
(And for the record, I don’t intend ever to have children. Not that that’s relevant.)
It might well be an inconsistency, but of course there’s a major difference of degree; I don’t think even Moorcock would claim that anything Tolkien wrote is on a par with, say, the blackface scene in Holiday Inn, which is unambiguously racist (and which is one of the works I was talking about in that earlier discussion).
In this case I think intent is relevant, because a novel intended expressly as a work of propaganda of some description (be it The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, Atlas Shrugged, or the Left Behind series) is a very different thing from a novel which has no such purpose, but which unconsciously expresses some of the author’s values. The reality is that pretty much every novel expresses the author’s values and worldview to a greater or lesser degree; few of us would want to vet all our reading on that basis or to limit ourselves to reading novelists who happen to agree with us politically. But when the author gives up real storytelling and decides to lecture the reader about politics or religion instead, it just becomes annoying. (The latter is why, for instance, I find Tom Clancy’s last three or four novels virtually unreadable; of course he’s always been conservative and authoritarian in his outlook, but over time it seems to me that his novels have taken more and more the form of right-wing political action hero fantasies, with less and less pretence at plausibility.)
Here is Santorum-For-Brains taking part in the latest fundy craze, imitating a young man who has nothing to say.
As the pre-vote results are out, I’m sad to tell that it seems very unlikely that the next First Lady of Finland is a male hairdresser from Equador :(
Coalition (conservative) party candidate has 65 % of the votes, and while it still remains technically possible for the other guy could reach the gap, it is well nigh impossible in practice.
Interesting article I came across that ties the freezing conditions in Europe to the lack of sea ice in the Barents. Or, how global warming can make things colder for people.
seconding thanks to Ogvorbis for that compact, erudite summary of Amtrak. I learned more there than ever.
—
Partner gave me this yesterday, to try and counteract all the awful history:
youtube: How one old black guy beat the KKK
Text article
Coming in late with congrats to those that deserve them; commiseration for those where it’s appropriate (esp. Nerd).
walton,
The same thing that she wants in every "discussion": total and abject capitulation with a grovelling apology from the interlocutor for being so crass as to disagree in the slightest.
Sorry, perhaps that’s marginally over-the-top, but SC has said some things over the last few weeks that reminds me of every one of her often played, extremist take-no-prisoners tactics. And reminds me why I stopped following comments here at Pharyngula. But at least I’ll cop to being nasty here, unlike:
I am not utterly nasty in conversational rhetoric, and I have not been nasty to you in this discussion; […] which made me laugh (twice, once for each part), and not in a good way but due to the obvious intellectual dishonesty of even trying to claim that, when I read it. I’m also naming names so as not to be "creepy" <eyeroll>.
‘Tis,
Carrying over from the “say-what-ron-paul” thread: I can tie a bowline behind my back (impressed the judge at a Boy Scouting jamboree 35 years ago) and I can tie one one-handed. I’m not sure though whether I can tie one one-handed behind my back. The trick for both of them is in the wrist action to create the small loop and push the free/working end through it all ready for go around the standing end. And, no, I can’t do it right based on the rabbit/tree “algorithm”, it’s a learned kinesics thing. I’m too dyslexic for any any other approach to knots — for instance, I know if I’ve tied a square knot incorrectly (cf. my shoes most of the time), but I can’t promise to get it right the first, second or third time.