new cat power video

Featuring renowned boxer Manny Pacquiao hitting a ball rhythmically and with focus. It's fairly mesmerising. Thank you, twentyfourbit.com!



The song is called 'king rides by': here is the original version from 1996. Sad words!

Good Golly!

Why Little Richard became a born-again christian:

In early October 1957, on the fifth date of a two-week tour of Australia, Penniman was flying from Melbourne to appear in front of 40,000 fans in concert in Sydney. Shocked by the red hot appearance of the engines against the night sky, he envisioned angels holding up the plane. Then, while he performed at the stadium, he was shaken by the sight of a ball of fire that he watched streak across the sky overhead. He took what was actually the launching of Sputnik 1, the first human-made object to orbit the earth, as another sign to quit show business and follow God. The following day he departed Sydney on a ferry and threw his $8,000 ring in the water to show his band members that he was serious about quitting. The plane that he was originally scheduled to fly back home on ended up crashing in the Pacific Ocean, which he took as confirmation that he was doing what God wanted him to do.^[58]

Fairly understandable!

The Werewolf

By Angela Carter, which I read while having a poo the other day and quite liked:

It is a northern country; they have cold weather, they have cold hearts. 

Cold; tempest; wild beasts in the forest. It is a hard life. Their houses are built of logs, dark and smoky within. There will be a crude icon of the virgin behind a guttering candle, the leg of a pig hung up to cure, a string of drying mushrooms. A bed, a stool, a table. Harsh, brief, poor lives. 

To these upland woodsmen, the Devil is as real as you or I. More so; they have not seen us nor even know that we exist, but the Devil they glimpse often in the graveyards, those bleak and touching townships of the dead where the graves are marked with portraits of the deceased in the naif style and there are no flowers to put in front of them, no flowers grow there, so they put out small, votive offerings, little loaves, sometimes a cake that the bears come lumbering from the margins of the forest to snatch away. At midnight, especially on Walpurgisnacht, the Devil holds picnics in the graveyards and invites the witches; then they dig up fresh corpses, and eat them. Anyone will tell you that. 

Wreaths of garlic on the doors keep out the vampires. A blue-eyed child born feet first on the night of St John's Eve will have second sight. When they discover a witch--some old woman whose cheeses ripen when her neighbours' do not, another old woman whose black cat, oh, sinister! _follows her about all the time_, they strip the crone, search for her marks, for the supernumerary nipple her familiar sucks. They soon find it. Then they stone her to death. 

Winter and cold weather. 

Go and visit grandmother, who has been sick. Take her the oatcakes I've baked for her on the hearthstone and a little pot of butter.The good child does as her mother bids--five miles' trudge through the forest; do not leave the path because of the bears, the wild boar, the starving wolves. Here, take your father's hunting knife; you know how to use it. 

The child had a scabby coat of sheepskin to keep out the cold, she knew the forest too well to fear it but she must always be on her guard. When she heard that freezing howl of a wolf, she dropped her gifts, seized her knife and turned on the beast. 

It was a huge one, with red eyes and running, grizzled chops; any but a mountaineer's child would have died of fright at the sight of it. It went for her throat, as wolves do, but she made a great swipe at it with her father's knife and slashed off its right forepaw. 

The wolf let out a gulp, almost a sob, when it saw what had happened to it; wolves are less brave than they seem. It went lolloping off disconsolately between the trees as well as it could on three legs, leaving a trail of blood behind it. The child wiped the blade of her knife clean on her apron, wrapped up the wolf's paw in the cloth in which her mother had packed the oatcakes and went on towards her grandmother's house. Soon it came on to snow so thickly that the path and any footsteps, track or spoor that might have been upon it were obscured. 

She found her grandmother was so sick she had taken to her bed and fallen into a fretful sleep, moaning and shaking so that the child guessed she had a fever. She felt the forehead, it burned. She shook out the cloth from her basket, to use it to make the old woman a cold compress, and the wolf's paw fell to the floor. 

But it was no longer a wolf's paw. It was a hand, chopped off at the wrist, a hand toughened with work and freckled with old age. There was a wedding ring on the third finger and a wart on the index finger. By the wart, she knew it for her grandmother's hand.  

She pulled back the sheet but the old woman woke up, at that, and began to struggle, squawking and shrieking like a thing possessed. But the child was strong, and armed with her father's hunting knife; she managed to hold her grandmother down long enough to see the cause of her fever. There was a bloody stump where her right hand should have been, festering already. 

The child crossed herself and cried out so loud the neighbours heard her and come rushing in. They knew the wart on the hand at once for a witch's nipple; they drove the old woman, in her shift as she was, out into the snow with sticks, beating her old carcass as far as the edge of the forest, and pelted her with stones until she fell down dead. 

Now the child lived in her grandmother's house; she prospered.

Christmas Reading

This is a good time I think to recommend Rortybomb, my favourite American politics blog.

It is a superhumanly comprehensive yet accessible account of a collection of complicated but important issues - credit card charges, home foreclosures, mass incarceration, bankruptcy laws, unemployment - that dominate ordinary peoples' lives in the USA but are quite hard to get a handle on conceptually.

The author, cartoonised above, is former 'financial engineer' turned left-wing blogger/activist thingy Mike Konczal.

His blog goes right down to the details of festering foreclosed swimming pools causing disease outbreaks in Fern County California, and right up to the big historical picture of a country that suffers from an inherited Victorian/feudal prejudice against debtors, with plenty of in-between interestingness as well.

Konczal has the good habit of picturing economics, and academic theorising generally, as a useful explanatory tool rather than a deep underlying truth, which makes the blog pleasingly intellectually cosmopolitan and also less confrontationally evangelical, despite its decidedly radical political stance, than say Paul Krugman, Kevin Drum etc.

Perhaps connectedly, Rortybomb also does really well at playing the ideological Turing test game (perfected by Tyler Cowen here), where you try as convincingly as you can to defend the position of someone you disagree with. This long post about the roots of conservative radicalism  is by a guest but is typical. Here is an understanding the other side post by the main man. Here is another one asking why non-financial firms aren't pushing for bank reforms.

Why the blog is called "Rortybomb" is a mystery to me. It sounds kind of computery.

Finally, here is yet another excellent post featuring the line "there is no foreclosure Batman"(no comma).

Enjoy!

Here am I, Daniel Dennett, suspended in a bubbling fluid, being stared at by my own eyes!

Thanks be to Sarah Costrell, here is something that is both mental and philosophicalarious:

facebook is funner with folk music

If you like The Coral on facebook they send you really cool eclectic music videos such as this one:

Here are more Jonathan Wilson songs.

Hate: in my opinion it is bad

It strikes me that well-meaning people with committed heterodox political views who invest a lot of their energy and personal identity in politics tend to indulge quite a lot in words like 'despicable', 'pathetic', 'vile sewer rat' 'Maggie Maggie Maggie, die die die' etc. See this blog for plenty of examples. These are words that people use when they want to encourage hate. I don't think this is a good idea.

First a qualification. While I generally tend to think that puzzle-solving is a much better metaphor for world-improvement than fighting/struggling/resisting etc, there are doubtless a lot of hate-worthy people out there, and hate-fostering can certainly be a useful tool in some circumstances. Still, I think it should probably be done less for the following reasons:

1) It often has the wrong effect. Personal attacks generally bring everyone down, causing witnesses to lower their opinion of both the bully and the bullied party. I think there is research into US political adverts that backs this point up and will link to it if find it. Worse, hated people often become afraid of the people who hate them. This is bad on two levels: broadly, groups of frightened people often develop strong group identity, making their members less likely to change sides; narrowly, people are way more likely to be violent when they are afraid. Sometimes you want to be disliked and for people you disagree with to bond and become violent, but more often I think you don't.

2) It can be misleading. There is a part of most people that wants to solve problems by asking themselves the question 'where are the bastards and how can I hurt them?' even when asking other questions is a better idea. Maybe it is because of zero-sum game situations featuring quite a lot in our evolutionary history or something. If you spend your whole day talking about what bastards some other people are and how it's time to fucking declare war man, even if this is a good idea in terms of its effects on other people, it is likely to encourage your inner warrior and bias your thinking, making you worse at world-improvement.

3) Non-activism reasons. There are reasons to do things other than world-improvement considerations, and I think these overwhelmingly favour a presumption against hate-fostering. It is really ugly, arbitrarily limits the range of people you can interact with, causes depression and paranoia, reduces your and others' ability to think independently and most importantly is wildly inaccurate, in the sense that genuine hate-worthiness is rare and really hard to gauge. Things which make people inaccurate, non-autonomous, unhappy, isolated and ugly are best avoided.

good to have her back

From now on every political speech you see/hear will be disappointing in a whole new bunch of ways:

No drums, no "is-there-so-much-Hate-for-the-ones-we-Love?", no choreography, no Terry Wogan introduction, no frizzy-haired well-moustached balalaikists, no archery...

Downhill from now on, basically

May I have your intention please

I want to find an article that deals with the following argument:

1. The criminal law depends on folk psychology because it attaches importance to 'BDI' words like 'belief', 'desire' and 'intention'.
2. Specifically, the law says that guilty verdicts can only be given when it can be proved to a high standard that a particular intention was present in someone's mind at a particular time.
3. If we all agree to be naturalists, then we may as well accept that peoples' behaviour supervenes on the physical state of their bodies: the state of a man's mind is a fact about his digestive system blablabla 
4. Even better, folk psychology and BDI words are generally ok, because theories that use BDI words are generally good ones. People who like tomatos and believe that they are in the fridge and intend to eat them often do so and vice versa blablabla
5. Despite points 3 and 4, it is still unclear enough how to tell whether a statement of the form "Mrs R had intention S at time T" is true or not that one might say that it has never been established to a "beyond reasonable doubt" kind of standard.
6. Therefore every guilty verdict ever was wrong.

So far all the articles I can find either offer reasons why 3 and 4 are true or spend loads of time going on about neuroscience experiments that do not address the question of what the truth conditions are for single-case intention ascriptions but instead introduce new irrelevant red herrings to do with consciousness.

Philosophers/lawyers/neuroscientists/internet-users: your help is requested!

The man who wrote 'The Men Who Stare At Goats'

Thanks to Olly Wiseman's sound advice, here are a lot of documentary-like radio programmes created by Jon Ronson, whose reality-based book about the US military's investment in paranormal warriors was made into an awesome film a few years ago.

He is one of those people whose life seems to be quite like how a lot of people including me would like their life to be quite like. If you haven't seen the film version of the book, then do as it is fantastic. If you have, then you will probably want to tuck into these bad boys.

Sample quotes:

"There could only have been two possible explanations: either the maze did exist, or it didn't exist". 

"...but he had unearthed something valuable in the Loch, something just as valuable as a Plesiosaurus." 

"As a child, Danny Robbins wanted to be a detective like Sam Spade, but instead he became a humourist on the radio, which is noble and exhilarating in its own way, but then again it isn't."

Also here is Jon Ronson's website, wherefrom all these links are.

Series 1 

Jon Ronson On Amateur Sleuths 
Jon Ronson On How to Be Invisible 
Jon Ronson On Positive Thinking 
Jon Ronson On Going West 
Jon Ronson On the Comfort of Strangers 
Jon Ronson On Magical Moments 

Series 2 

Jon Ronson On Living in the past 
Jon Ronson On Irrational thought 
Jon Ronson On Lying 
Jon Ronson On Friendship 
Jon Ronson On Waiting 
Jon Ronson On Building Bridges 

Series 3 

Jon Ronson On The Worst internet date 
Jon Ronson On Waking from a Dream 
Jon Ronson On Uncontrolable responses 
Jon Ronson on Crushed egos 
Jon Ronson on Glastonbury Festival part 1 
Jon Ronson on Glastonbury Festival part 2 

Series 4 

Jon Ronson on Receiving bad news 
Jon Ronson On Being fancy 
Jon Ronson on The wrong kind of madness 
Jon Ronson On How to stop time 
Jon Ronson on Doing anything for love 

Series 5 

Jon Ronson on The Fear of Flying 
Jon Ronson on When Small talk goes wrong 
Jon Ronson on Living in a movie 
Jon Ronson on Being alone 
Jon Ronson on Ambition 

Series 6 

Jon Ronson on Voices in your Head 
Jon Ronson on Spying 
Jon Ronson on The fine line between good and bad 
Jon Ronson on Witch hunts 
Jon Ronson on Aiming low 

Wee, doobydoodoo, doobydoo doobydoobydoodoo

A funkier than normal version. This interview is also very good indeed.

UPDATE: it sounds quite like papa was a rollin stone

Something that journalists say which annoys me

I don't like the line of argument which says "since the current government's cuts are only x% more severe than those proposed in Labour's 2010 manifesto, Labour's opposition to cuts is insincere."

This argument is bad not only because the difference was actually substantial, or because the current opposition isn't obliged to agree with its previous manifesto proposals, but also because it overlooks the defining difference between the two main parties' 2010 cuts plans.

Labour's plan was explicitly to cut less if, as has now happened, conditions changed so as to make cuts more harmful. Alastair Darling et al said many times that their plan was to wait until the economy was healthy and then reduce public spending, while the Conservatives said that this was a bad idea and proposed to cut government spending as fast as feasible in a way which didn't depend on the health of the economy. Labour's plan was conditional in a way that the Conservative plan wasn't.

Whatever you think about the relative merits of these two proposals, this difference clearly shows that the argument above is wrong. Given the actual trajectory of Britain's economic health (the extent to which this has been caused by the government's bad policies notwithstanding), a Labour government could arguably have remained consistent with their manifesto without having cut spending at all.

The person who designed mac icons

She is Susan Kare, and thanks to the awesome and self-explanatory blog Doodlers Anonymous, here is her story and here are some pictures from her sketchbook in which she brainstormed icon ideas for the original Mac OS. My favourite is "auto indent". The pointing hand is pretty incredible.

The article is full of cool facts, such as that the command sign (next to the spacebar on a mac) is taken from Swedish maps indicating a castle seen from above! Basically she did what Otto Neurath wanted to do with his isotypes, really well. I think pictorial communication is really cool. Also, here is a video from 1968 of the first ever (I think?) graphical user interface with a mouse.

Blues + puddings

=

Nancy Sinatra – Sweet Georgia Brown
John Martyn – The Easy Blues
Nina Simone – I Want A Little Sugar In My Bowl - 1993 Remastered
Louis Armstrong – Jelly Roll Blues
Humphrey Lyttleton – Cake Walkin' Babies
John Brim – Ice Cream Man
Jerry Lee Lewis – Milkshake Madamoiselle
The Beach Boys – Wild Honey

human jellyfish

Clothes are so cool...

(obviously from the sartorialist)

Progress for the Poor

via Andrew Gelman, here are the main points from a book about how to reduce poverty using government policy: 

Each point has a separate detailed quantitative analysis backing it up. It sort of makes you wonder what other social scientists are doing with their time.

Flicking through on google books, I found this graph about unionisation especially suggestive and surprising:

Apparently the ones that haven't fallen are those where unemployment insurance is tied to union membership: what a good idea! I wonder if Ian Duncan-Smith will adopt it?

Also interesting:

"Despite the fall in union membership, in many countries collective bargaining arrangements have continued to keep the floor of the wage distribution relatively high. That owes to "extension practices": by agreement between union and employer confederations (and nations) or due to government mandate (France), union management wage settlements carry over to many firms and workers that are not unionised. In a number of countries the share of the workforce whose wages are determined by collective bargaining is much larger than the share of workers who are union members."

UPDATE: the author, Lane Kenworthy, has a blog!

Thank you, sergeant.

Forgot how good the Third Man is. Here is the rest if you can deal with not watching the very start. British films from the 40s-50s are so wonderful: I think what they have in common is that none of them really have heroes.

Here are some others, all of which I promise are worth your time:

A Canturbury Tale
The Fallen Idol
The Red Shoes
Kind Hearts and Coronets
Oliver Twist
A Matter of Life and Death
Brighton Rock

Toughness

In my opinion it is the most beautiful personality trait:

Also isn't the commentary fantastic?

Never Mind the Bollocks...

... Here's an account of Otto Neurath's correspondence with Hayek about the relative merits of social engineering and free markets.

If you are at all interested in politics, you have probably thought about this question in some form or other, and this version really gets to the heart of the matter in my opinion.

All of Neurath's opinions about politics (and some about science) can be found here. 


He was not only a fantastic and original philosopher, economist and world-improver, but also articulated really clearly loads of what I think are my (possibly others' as well?) intuitive opinions. For example, he thought that science, thought really great, isn't really different in kind from other day to day activities, that predicting things is hard and that it is silly to try to measure welfare with money. 


Neurath also invented the weird 'isotype' pictures that you sometimes see in European airports and maps as a way to democratise access to statistical information.


Here are some slightly Humey words of wisdom:

I even think that many people did not resist the gradual growth of modern horror, because they did not feel much abhorrence of past terrors and of terrors in countries far away, on the contrary, they had learned to call terrible periods, terrible politicians and the writers of terrible books ‘great’.

cf French Revolution/Che Guevara/Karl Marx, British Empire/Churchill/Ayn Rand or other combinations according to taste. Generally the fact that 'great' and 'terrible' are compatible is quite an important thing to keep in mind I think.

Some love and deeper understanding from the internet

Read these and you will be happier than you are now:

A treasure trove of information about lighting

A letter from Keynes to FDR featuring the following wise words about dealing with people:

Business men [aka people in general] ... are ... allured and terrified by the glare of publicity, easily persuaded to be 'patriots', perplexed, bemused, indeed terrified, yet only too anxious to take a cheerful view, vain perhaps but very unsure of themselves, pathetically responsive to a kind word. You could do anything you liked with them, if you would treat them (even the big ones), not as wolves and tigers, but as domestic animals by nature, even though they have been badly brought up and not trained as you would wish...

A Persian Poetry resource

Robert Paul Wolff's brilliant descriptions of Weber, the study of society, Hume, Marx, Afro-American Studies and violence

Pigs might fry

Ha the Sun is hilarious:

SHOCKED Dave Johnson thought he'd made one of his rasher decisions...

how to cover a song well

maths without paper

A wonderful reminder that most things people think about - even differential equations - aren't really very complicated:


Interactive Exploration of a Dynamical System from Bret Victor on Vimeo.

For more stuff like this check out the video maker's "kill math" project, which begins with the following stirring manifesto:

The power to understand and predict the quantities of the world should not be restricted to those with a freakish knack for manipulating abstract symbols. 

When most people speak of Math, what they have in mind is more its mechanism than its essence. This "Math" consists of assigning meaning to a set of symbols, blindly shuffling around these symbols according to arcane rules, and then interpreting a meaning from the shuffled result. The process is not unlike casting lots. 

This mechanism of math evolved for a reason: it was the most efficient means of modeling quantitative systems given the constraints of pencil and paper. Unfortunately, most people are not comfortable with bundling up meaning into abstract symbols and making them dance. Thus, the power of math beyond arithmetic is generally reserved for a clergy of scientists and engineers (many of whom struggle with symbolic abstractions more than they'll actually admit). 

We are no longer constrained by pencil and paper. The symbolic shuffle should no longer be taken for granted as the fundamental mechanism for understanding quantity and change. Math needs a new interface.

I found it on the computational legal studies blog, which sounds dry but is actually an awesome collection of visualisations.

I'll have none at all

The radio said that someone has recorded Sandy Denny's narrowly pre-suicide lyrics, which I find slightly weird. Nice to get a reminder to listen to her more though.

Also, I would like to encourage you to eat oranges: it is both fun and tasty.

well I never

 From wikipedia (my bold):

In 1948 the Board of Governors of the BBC asked the head of the Variety Department, Michael Standing, to devise a guiding set of moral standards and protocols for the production of all BBC radio and television programmes ... Standing took to implementing his guidance with eccentric zeal. In June 1949 he issued a memo to all staff in which he forbade BBC employees to illuminate any room with an Anglepoise lamp unless the main ceiling or wall light was also illuminated: Standing held a firm belief that a man working at a desk in a confined space with only the light from a low-wattage lamp would nurture furtive ideas and produce degenerate programme material. 

Are you sure you are the 99%?

Catchy and socially beneficial as it might be, I have a bit of a problem with this slogan.

It certainly seems that society benefits a tiny minority far more than the rest, though the real situation is probably a bit more complicated than harming 99% of people while benefitting 1%. Still, this lack of detail is forgivable: almost by definition you can't expect slogans to be nuanced, and it is probably doing enough movement-galvanising good to offset its misleadingness.

My issue is with student activists who identify as members of the harmed group rather than the benefitters: by and large I think they are wrong. It seems to me that, if you are a student at a high-prestige university, either in the UK or in America, then you are probably not in the bottom 99% for society's impact on your overall life prospects.

For one thing, you have the option of quite easily joining the financial benefitters by following some fairly simple and googleable steps. Most of the activists I know are clever, sociable and non-disabled etc enough that, with the help of their pieces of paper, they could (and who knows, maybe will) secure top-income-percentile jobs if they really wanted. In my opinion, possessing this option puts you in the top 1% whatever your actual lifetime earnings: most people don't get the luxury of choosing between tremendous incomes and fulfilling lives.

On a global level, the idea that a significant number of top-university students in the UK/USA are in the losing 99% is just silly, and when you think about countries with wars and famines, or where large numbers of people can't even afford running water or mosquito nets, it is actually a bit perverse.

More generally, I think there is a quite deep effectiveness vs beauty issue here. It is far more effective sales tactics for the spokespeople for an oppressed group to be members of it themselves, but often it just isn't the case. Being a spokesperson and a genuinely oppressed person at the same time is quite difficult as it requires lots of free time, education, charisma-development opportunities, powerful friends and other things that tend not to be available to the genuinely oppressed. This problem can be overcome by pretending to be oppressed in the style of Gandhi, but there is something really ugly about doing that I think.

Then there is the whole animal rights thing...

Some of the best bits from a wacky film

Three more things to like about Venus in Furs (which aren't obvious from the video)

1) Lines like "I was really diggin' this chick"
2) Klaus Kinski in a turban
3) Some riveting musical-sexual-paranormal revenge scenes

Also the singer is Barbara Mcnair.

If this seems like your kind of thing, then as well as watching the whole film you should also go to the portobello pop-up cinema, where you can watch more like it on a massive screen, under a bridge, while eating/drinking. In my opinion it is way cool.

Oh I did a Hamlet reference without noticing. GET ME.

activism vs autonomy

Here is the amazon link to 'The Making of Pro-Life Activists: How Social Movement Mobilization Works', a book whose review I just found really insightful. It's by a sociologist who interviewed about 100 committed anti-abortion activists to try to find out about how they got involved and what keeps them going.

The gist is, activism is more often the cause of the pro-lifers' beliefs than the result:

their beliefs about abortion became solidified, important, and fully developed during interactions with other activists after initial activism.

 Three sub things:

1) There are surprising parallels between right wing religious pro-life activism and left wing secular anti-fees activism. For example:

 Activists are also not uniform about how to end abortion; these beliefs create what Munson calls “social movement streams” of mutually exclusive individuals and organizations demarcated by their focus on how to end abortion—whether through formal politics (e.g., lobbying elected officials), direct action (protesting outside abortion clinics), individual outreach (providing counseling through crisis pregnancy centers), or public outreach (trying to teach the general public why abortion is wrong)...These streams structure and cause conflict within the movement, and activists tend to belong to the streams where their initial activism began.

2) Whether or not people join a cause seems to depend less on their pre-activism beliefs than on accidents: happening to attend a meeting, being at a vulnerable point in their life etc:

Rather than being drawn to the movement by strong beliefs about the morality of abortion, many activists’ careers began through direct and often coincidental contact with movement participants at turning points in their lives, or times of transition such as geographical relocation or assuming new roles ... Many of Munson's participants actually held pro-choice beliefs or were indifferent to the issue of abortion before becoming activists ... Even activists who were initially sympathetic to the pro-life movement only had vague and undeveloped ideas about abortion before becoming highly involved in the movement

Activism is often a really good thing - it has caused and is currently causing lots of beneficial political changes, maybe even most of them - but it also predictably reduces your autonomy to such an extent that, whatever your prior views, it is a fair bet that if you turn up at a few pro-life protests you will end up believing abortion is wrong. This strikes me as quite a big issue for movements like anarchism that encourage both activism and autonomy. Also a reason not to demonise EDL members I think: it could have been you!

Anyway I'm fascinated by the whole topic and am now reading the book on google books. Surprisingly enough LSE library doesn't seem to have it...

Also I heard about the book via Rortybomb, which is an incredible blog

An easy way to tell that a book is good

It's How the laws of physics lie by Nancy Cartwright if you're interested

deformity chauvinism

Another distressed reader, Ed Strydevog, writes in:

Dear Aunt Teddy, 

I am sorry to say that a recent quote from Guillermo del Toro has alarmed me. Here it is: 

The first thing you love is monsters. I don't like psycho killers with potato peelers; I'm a monster guy or a creature guy. I love the creature and the creation of that. I love universal monsters*, I love freaks, and I love everything that is deformed because that is beautiful for me. I cultivate my body shape through that principle. Perfection is impossible, imperfection we can aspire to achieve, and I think monsters do that beautifully... 

Phil Nugent finds this sentiment great, but to me it is troublesome. It's not the general principle of finding deformed things beautiful which riles me - that's great and possibly even necessary. It's not even with the idea of artistic expression through beautiful deformed monsters: that's great too. The problem I have is that there are many non-physical deformities, like smooth-bastardness or love-sickness, which can be interesting and beautiful but for one reason or another are hard to show convincingly in monsters, and which del Toro seems to belittle.  

My unhappy feeling is that Mr. del Toro is expressing deformity chauvinism, the awful view that physically unusual monsters are the only show in town when it comes to beautiful deformity. Physically deformed eye-handed droopy-skinned monsters good, mentally deformed psycho-killers with potato peelers bad. Needless to say, deformity chauvinism is a view that sits most ill alongside del Toro's further claim to 'love everything that is deformed', and one I cannot share. 

I write to you now proposing a more through-going way of admiring deformity. Henceforth, let us not privilege the physical. Let us instead embrace the sublter ways of seeming weird, such as dressing un-deformedly so as better to be able to display your mental disfigurement. Let monsters be monsters and psychos be psychos, each with their own contorted, unique and beautiful way of being imperfect. Let it never again be said that a potato peeler is no deformity! 

If you would only lend my cause the boon of internet promotion which you lately lent to vibes fm, the poor beautiful psychos might just stand a a chance. 

Yours in hope,
Ed Strydevog 

My reply

Ed, you have expressed your heartfelt view so cogently and passionately that I have little to add. Here, though, is a video:  

 

A Correction: some readers may have taken from my previous agony column, which included phrases like 'radio 4 in the afternoon is ... a pile of balls', the mistaken impression that radio 4 was not a good channel to listen to in the afternoon. I would like to take this opportunity to correct this misinterpretation: what I meant to say was that radio 4 in the afternoon is actually sometimes quite good because it has some interesting documentaries. Many thanks to reader Olive Grymes for pointing out this unfortunate ambiguity.

Uh oh

This article features the following:

An incredible acronym
The British Association of Static Sound-systems
An astonishing fact
The head organisers of the Notting Hill carnival for the past four years have been two unpaid volunteers.
A worrying development
The carnival might not happen after 2012 because they both just quit.

I would quite like to hear the other side of the story - ie from whoever the organisers lost the support of - and maybe a bit naively think the lack of massive corporate sponsorship might be a good thing. If anyone has other information about this then please tell.

the gravel in your guts and the steel in your eye

I like when the moral of the story is a bit off

an underappreciated tution fees argument

Rortybomb draws our attention to a point that I think was implicit in one side's argument in the tuition fees hoohah about a year ago, but which for one reason or another didn't really get across.

The idea is that although it might in some sense be fairer for those who personally benefit from higher education to pay for it, it may not be beneficial to society as a whole, because

Debt puts contraints on what people are capable of doing, and one way out of that constraint is to work in the fields that pay the most.  For those who want to see our best working in schools, government, nonprofits, taking chances starting entrepreneurial work or simply not working to replicate already existing power structures, this is a terrible arrangement.

This argument is a bit like the impossible-to-kill Laffer curve argument that has been in the news lately. It might be a nice idea for those who benefit from university to pay society back for the privilege, but it's not going to happen just because the government wants it to: if you try to claw back the nominal cost, the little fuckers will just take their pounds of flesh/public benefit in a different way, by working in the city rather than doing useful welfare-improving things.

The anti-fees people who use this argument, and I think it captures what a lot of them meant when they warned about young people being 'saddled with debt', differ from the tax-cuts-for-the-rich brigade in that they have academic evidence on their side. The paper is called Constrained After College: Student Loans and Early Career Occupational Choices, and the money quote is

We find that debt causes graduates to choose substantially higher-salary jobs and reduces the probability that students choose low-paid “public interest” jobs…Specifically, in our preferred specifications in columns 6 and 7, we estimate that an extra $10,000 in student debt reduces the likelihood that an individual will take a job in nonprofits, government, or education by about 5 to 6 percentage points.

The study was done in America, where student loans are bigger, aren't always income-contingent and generally have less favourable terms than UK ones, but in the other direction the effects on entrepreneurial work and political activism were left out. Even without taking these into account, though, this one paper provides way more evidence for lowering UK tuition fees than there has ever been for increasing revenue by decreasing income tax.

DIY thunderbolt

Got a guitar, a picture rail, a spare belt and a slight shortage of space? Not any more...

the mcgurk effect

my reaction

Tourism in North Korea

A crazy selection of photos. Brought to you by Marginal Revolution

hairsplitting

Here is a stunning and close to the bone Phil Nugent post, reminding us how naturally the art of turning substantive arguments into arcane 'to me, the word 'terrorism' is about...' hairsplitting contests over buzzwords comes to people with entrenched ideological views.


Here are some nuggets, but you really need to read it:

It's always interesting when someone, in a tone of righteous indignation, says something that's obviously the exact opposite of the truth, whether it's "My kid isn't stupid" or "FDR's New Deal programs prolonged the Great Depression." It's not necessarily the case that you're listening to the single dumbest person who's ever lived; often, someone is revealing their most fucked-up personal issues or exposing their tenderest spot...

...They think they're brave because they set off bombs and set fires, but they have no stomach for the kind of fight that tries to roll back simpleminded propaganda and heightens clarity, and they're definitely not going to take the bullet of saying "Okay, I'm a terrorist, now what does that really mean?" any more than Dick Cheney, for all his supposed indifference to the verdict of history, is ever going to just say, "Screw this shit about 'heightened interrogation techniques', I obviously support torture, T-O-R-T-U-R-E, and I'm not ashamed of it."

Also fantastic is this contemporary review, which Nugent links to, of ex-terrorist Bill Ayers's narrowly pre-9/11 'look at me I'm proud of and profitting financially from having been so into being radical in the 1970s that I set off bombs and robbed people' masterwork. 

The question is, it it worth totally avoiding emotionally laden, hairsplitting-vulnerable words like 'terrorist', 'freedom', 'racism', 'power', 'resistance', 'solidarity' etc when talking about politics?

From an aesthetic point of view the answer is certainly yes, as these words are pretty bad anyway. There is something really ugly and inelegant about the way they brazenly but sneakily put an opinion where there ought to be a fact. They are graceless in the same way as a policemen's use of 'utilised' instead of 'used' or an acquaintance who doesn't remember your name but says 'hi buddy how've you been!' before selling you something. There are far less clumsy ways of being manipulative.

There are also 'doing the right thing' reasons not to use these words, but I'm not sure they are decisive. There is the intrinsic admirableness of the straight talking the avoidance might encourage, the clearer thinking that might ensue and the pernickety arguments that would be avoided. I also think there is something about avoiding semantic arguments that makes people respect others' opinions more, at least to the extent of sometimes seeing genuine disagreement rather than misunderstanding or maliciousness.

On the other hand, maybe sometimes it's worth using these words, or even engaging in tactical hairsplitting oneself, just to be more convincing. Hmm...

Burn with fury, oh poets of the Valley!

If you haven't been following, formerly swaggering computer blog TechCrunch has been a sad but faintly amusing car crash for the past few weeks. This post by someone else has the relevant links and captures how silly all the puffed up grandstanding is:

Anyway it’s probably just as well that AOL didn’t call M.G. because those backstabbing stiffs and corporate mofos at AOL sure as hell could not handle the truth that M.G. would be firing down the line at them, all loud and upper case and shit, just bam-bam-bam oh-no-you-di’n't-oh-yes-I-did. Or maybe M.G. wouldn’t even pick up that call at all. He’d see “Tim Armstrong” in the caller ID on his swagger-ass iPhone 4 and just say, Fuck it, that corporate motherfucker can go through to voice mail and kiss my white ass on the way. Because really — think about it. Why would a bad-ass renegade writer of the Truth even pick up the phone and say hello to some suit from AOL who doesn’t know jack shit about being a bad-ass swaggering tech journalist, amiright? 

For completeness here is editor Mike Arrington's ultimatum/resignation post, and here is TC tetris, which is infuriating.

While the saga must be pretty distressing for those involved, it's a massive time-saver for those of us who unsubscribe. Time to take up knitting or something.

rage management

Mettallica have a song on this topic:

Is it a pun about cheese? Probably too soft to go round someone's neck. Maybe it's cold though? That would explain the anger as well...

Also Peter Schaeffer, whoever he/she is, uses the comments of a Marginal Revolution post to tell us a sage parable about dealing with other peoples' rage:

Once upon a time in China, there lived an Emperor who owned a majestic white stallion, the finest beast in all his Kingdom. One night, a thief tried to slip in and steal the horse, but was captured by the palace guards and thrown into the dungeon.

The next morning, he was dragged before the Emperor’s court. “How dare you,” bellowed the Emperor, “lay hand on my royal steed! Jailor, put this thief to death!” 

Immediately, the thief bowed deeply. “Your judgement is peerless and wise, O Emperor,” he calmly replied, “but my life is of little value. I should offer you a gift before I depart. Your mount is quite a fine one, but if your eminence would spare my life for just a year and a day, I swear to you I can teach that horse to sing hymns!”

The court burst in to laughter at that, but the Emperor was intrigued. After all, you didn’t get to his high position by turning down freely offered gifts, no matter how far-fetched they seem. To the surprise of all, the Emperor quickly accepted the offer.

As they were leaving the chambers, the jailor whispered to the thief, “You are a fool!”

“I am a fool?” replied the thief, smiling broadly. “Much can happen in a year and a day. The King may die. The horse may die. I may die… and maybe the horse will learn how to sing.”