Canadian commentator Colby Cosh calls attention to the way the word “drifter” is used in news reports. A “drifter” is always up to no good, usually a serial killer. “Here’s a headline you will never see: “HEROIC DRIFTER SAVES FIVE FROM FLAMING BUS”.” Someone who performs an admirable deed ceases to be a drifter and becomes a passerby.
Posted by acilius on December 18, 2008
https://losthunderlads.com/2008/12/18/drifters-vs-passersby/
Posted by CMStewart on December 17, 2008
https://losthunderlads.com/2008/12/17/about-last-thursday/
George Frost Kennan, by Ned Seidler
Several pieces this time despair of any prospect that traditionalist conservatism will reassert itself as a force to be reckoned with in American politics. What, then, do the writers for this traditionalist publication believe is to be done?
At least two of them seem to think that the time may have come to give up on the USA altogether. Bill Kauffman writes an admiring piece about Kirkpatrick Sale’s Third North American Secessionist Convention, singling out for praise the doughty Yankees of the Second Vermont Republic, who want to break away from the continental Leviathan in the name of Ethan Allen, Robert Frost, and maple syrup. A review of Lee Congdon’s George Kennan: A Writing Life includes remarks on Kennan’s argument in his late work Around the Cragged Hill that the USA is too big for anyone’s good and should be broken into smaller constituent republics.
Elsewhere, a letter to the editor takes issue with those who claim that neoconservative advocates of the 2003 invasion of Iraq could have been so foolish as actually to have believed the sorts of things they said in public at that time. The correspondent asks the magazine to “spare me the ‘neocons were dumb to believe Iraq would turn into Ohio’ nonsense. These grown-up guys, smart enough to become advisors to the political leadership of the most powerful military on the planet, weren’t convinced of something a 10-year old knew? Please. It’s nice to imagine that some massively dumb, partially blind, amazing social phenomena led us into this debacle, but the truth seems simpler and more banal: the neocons didn’t care and neither did we.”
The fallacy here seems obvious. “These grown-up guys, smart enough to become advisors to the political leadership of the most powerful military on the planet”- that’s an impressive description. The correspondent is right to be impressed, we should be impressed as well. But keep in mind, every one of the members of that group was at least as impressed by his or her colleagues as we are. Sitting at a table surrounded by such people, who would dare be the first to say something radically different from what the others were saying? Unless someone goes first and breaks the spell, a roomful of extremely competent people can march blindly into mistakes any well-informed individual, sometimes any normal 10-year old, could have warned them against. Many policymakers are acutely aware of this danger; indeed, when President Truman made George Kennan head of policy planning at the US State Department in the late 1940’s he explicitly defined Kennan’s job as speaking up against the preconceptions under which others were laboring and breaking the spell of those preconceptions.
Posted by acilius on December 17, 2008
https://losthunderlads.com/2008/12/17/the-american-conservative-15-december-2008/
At Language Log, Arnold Zwicky has posted two remarks about expressions of the sort “x virgin,” meaning someone new to x, whatever that x may be. In his first post, Zwicky gives some examples, some very incongruous such as “Pippi virgin” meaning “someone has has not yet read the Pippi Longstocking books.” He first defines “x virgin” as “someone who has not yet experienced x,” then immediately concedes that this definition is not adequate. “An Astaire virgin, for instance, is not really someone who hasn’t experienced an Astaire, but refers to experience with something involving a particular Astaire (Fred and not Adele), namely the experience of watching movies starring Fred Astaire.” The expression “x virgin,” Zwicky explains, is like other noun-noun compounds in that the relationship between the two nouns can be quite complex and indirect, a topic dealt with elsewhere on the same blog. In his second post, Zwicky asks whether we would expect this profusion of virginities to give rise to a retronym, “sex virgin,” and does in fact find a few examples of this expression in use.
Posted by acilius on December 17, 2008
https://losthunderlads.com/2008/12/17/virgins-of-various-sorts/
Author Peggy Munson is interviewed by Susie Bright on BoingBoing about an erotic stories of hers involving disabled characters. Munson has a mobility impairment herself, but doesn’t go into depth about it in this interview. Asked whether she’d any disability anti-defamation groups had accused her of representing these characters in an insensitive way, Munson reports that “Disabled folks never get enough recognition to even arrive on the p.c. radar… Disabled people usually don’t get worked up about radical sex because they’re used to their bodies being put under a microscope- poked and prodded and subjected to telethon-esque social freak shows… Even conservative disabled bodies are, on some level, living a queer sexuality.”
Posted by acilius on December 17, 2008
https://losthunderlads.com/2008/12/17/disability-visibility-ii/
Nakheel Development via AP file
Custom-made for balmy-weather loving billionaires: Global warming not happening fast enough? Run out of outrageously frivolous ways to spend your tons o’ money? Try Dubai!
Posted by CMStewart on December 16, 2008
https://losthunderlads.com/2008/12/16/dubai-leader-in-promoting-global-warming/
rssfabriek.nl
Crikey! FaceBook is now a legitimate legal tool in Australia. This could lead to the virtual freezing of My(pedophile)Space!
Posted by CMStewart on December 16, 2008
https://losthunderlads.com/2008/12/16/legal-notices-via-social-networking-sites/
In this issue, Patricia Williams rakes up one of the celebrities made by Campaign 2008, claiming that in the gap between the actual Sam Wurtzelbacher and the imaginary Joe the Plumber lies the deadliest part of the American Dream. Joe the Plumber is a man who labors ceaselessly, gets his hands dirty, is looked down on by the people who rule the country, and earns over $250,000 annually. Sam the non-Plumber is a man who labors ceaselessly, gets his hands dirty, is looked down on the people who rule the country, and can barely pay his bills from month to month. Americans work the longest hours and enjoy the fewest social protections of any industrialized population. The “Joe the Plumber” story is the myth that keeps us from supporting reforms that would help us get rid of this system.
An editorial urges readers to support Stanford University Professor Linda Darling-Hammond for US Secretary of Education. Currently head of President-elect Obama’s working group on education policy, Darling-Hammond is identified with a group of educational thinkers whom The New York Times calls “professionalization advocates, ” believers in the idea that “the policy emphasis should be on raising student achievement by helping teachers improve their instruction.” The school of thought which opposes the professionalization advocates, and which has in fact claimed a virtual monopoly on the title of “education reformers” in recent years, are called “efficiency hawks,” who want ever more emphasis on standardized tests and centralized bureaucratic control of schools. The editorial starts with an irresistible quote from Darling-Hammond: “If we taught babies to talk as most skills are taught in school, they would memorize lists of sounds in a predetermined order and practice them alone in a closet.”
A short piece details anti-Russian bias at the Washington Post. There’s also a review of a couple of new slang dictionaries.
Posted by acilius on December 16, 2008
https://losthunderlads.com/2008/12/16/the-nation-29-december-2008/
Cover
In this issue, Virginia Postrel reports on the rising discipline of “experimental economics.” The experiments are similar to those to which psychologists routinely subject their undergraduate students. A group of test subjects plays a game that is supposed to simulate a market phenomenon. The experimenters then analyze the results. (As it happens, I recently posted a link to a discussion of the theoretical limitations of this sort of attempt to translate one game into another.)
The studies Postrel discusses deal with the origin and nature of speculative bubbles. Even games in which players are given perfect information from the outset regularly generate bubbles. Experience matters; repeat players generate smaller bubbles. One point particularly arrested my attention. When teams of players have gone through a trading game often enough that they no longer generate ruinous bubbles, experimenters sometimes rearrange the players into new teams. These new teams, even though they are composed of experienced players, then proceed to behave just as wildly as the teams had at the beginning of the game. Postrel quotes one of the founders of experimental economics, Caltech professor Charles Plott, to the effect that the experience that matters is not at the level of the individual trader, but at the level of the organization through which that trader operates. So the key thing about experience in particular and information in general may be how the organizational principles of a given group allow that information to be deployed.
Disgraced stock analyst Henry Blodget gives a first person account of the way the organization of his former employer, Merrill Lynch, guided his deployment of information.
Posted by acilius on December 15, 2008
https://losthunderlads.com/2008/12/15/the-atlantic-monthly-december-2008/
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