地獄の上に

Three Word Phrase - Glory Clearly, this comic was a reference...

Mon, 21 May 2012 12:41:47 -1000

Clearly, this comic was a reference to Xenophanes:

But if cattle and horses and lions had hands or could paint with their hands and create works such as men do, horses like horses and cattle like cattle also would depict the gods’ shapes and make their bodies of such a sort as the form they themselves have.

Interestingly, Xenophanes didn’t take this as an argument for atheism, but for the conclusion that the real gods go beyond mortal form.

I’m sympathetic to his point, but no one will ever succeed in removing the anthropomorphism from the thoughts of anthropes. Quoting myself:

As super-arrogant as it is to assume the universe is like us, it’s way, way more super-arrogant to think we’re so cool that we can understand the universe though it’s not like us. Sure, horses would have a horse god, but wouldn’t we really laugh at them if they thought that god was a mouse? Or what if they thought God was algebra or something else they can’t do? It would be ridiculous of them to try to be something other than horses with horse gods. But horse gods though they are shaped like horses must go beyond the limits of horses as well, if they are to be true gods. A horse god could only be useful to horses if it surpassed the limits of horses, even as it resembled them. Maybe it could be horse-shaped algebra, but never just a horse or just algebra.

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Mon, 21 May 2012 12:21:04 -1000

"The programmer, like the poet, works only slightly removed from pure thought-stuff. He builds..."

Sun, 20 May 2012 20:28:32 -1000

“

The programmer, like the poet, works only slightly removed from pure thought-stuff. He builds castles in the air, from air, creating by exertion of the imagination. Few media of creation are so flexible, so easy to polish and rework, so readily capable of realizing grand conceptual structures. […]

Yet the program construct, unlike the poet’s words, is real in the sense that it moves and works, producing visible outputs separate from the construct itself. It prints results, draws pictures, produces sounds, moves arms. The magic of myth and legend has come true in our time. One types the correct incantation on a keyboard, and a display screen comes to life, showing things that never were nor could be.

[…]

Not all is delight, however […] One must perform perfectly. The computer resembles the magic of legend in this respect, too. If one character, one pause, of the incantation is not strictly in proper form, the magic doesn’t work. Human beings are not accustomed to being perfect, and few areas of human activity demand it.

”

- Fred Brooks, The Mythical Man-Month (via plasmasturm)

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Sun, 20 May 2012 20:28:15 -1000

Stephen Walt - Top 10 Lessons of the Iraq War

Thu, 17 May 2012 12:40:26 -1000

Stephen Walt - Top 10 Lessons of the Iraq War:

Good article, starting with point one:

Lesson #1: The United States lost.

I would correct #8 though:

Lesson #8: Counterinsurgency warfare is ugly and inevitably leads to war crimes, atrocities, or other forms of abuse.

That should be just “warfare” without the “counterinsurgency.” And this technically doesn’t count as a lesson because it was known well in advance.

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Thu, 17 May 2012 12:21:32 -1000

Waffle House Ninja - Angry at Birds Staying on the cutting edge...

Wed, 16 May 2012 12:41:22 -1000

Waffle House Ninja - Angry at Birds

Staying on the cutting edge of comedy trends is John Pading’s passion.

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Wed, 16 May 2012 12:19:31 -1000

"They tortured men at military bases and detention centers in Afghanistan and Iraq, in Guantánamo,..."

Thu, 03 May 2012 12:41:02 -1000

“

They tortured men at military bases and detention centers in Afghanistan and Iraq, in Guantánamo, and in U.S. Navy bases on American soil; they tortured men in secret CIA prisons set up across the globe specifically to terrorize and torture prisoners; they sent many more to countries with notoriously abusive regimes and asked them to do the torturing. At least twice, after the torturers themselves concluded there was no point to further abuse, Washington ordered that the prisoners be tortured some more.

They tortured innocent people. They tortured people who may have been guilty of terrorism-related crimes, but they ruined any chance of prosecuting them because of the torture. They tortured people when the torture had nothing to do with imminent threats: They tortured based on bad information they had extracted from others through torture; they tortured to hide their mistakes and to get confessions; they tortured sometimes just to break people, pure and simple.

And they conspired to cover up their crimes. They did this from the start, by creating secret facilities and secrecy regimes to keep what they were doing from the American people and the world. They did it by suppressing and then destroying evidence, including videotapes of the torture. They did it by denying detainees legal process because, as the CIA’s Inspector General put it in a 2004 report [pdf], when you torture someone you create an “Endgame” problem: You end up with detainees who, “if not kept in isolation, would likely divulge information about the circumstances of their detention.”

They managed all this, for a time, through secrecy—a secrecy that depended on the aggressive suppression of two groups of voices.

Over and over again, in Afghanistan and Iraq, in Guantánamo, in secret CIA black sites and at CIA headquarters, in the Pentagon, and in Washington, men and women recognized the torture for what it was and refused to remain silent. They objected, protested, and fought to prevent, and then to end, these illegal and immoral interrogations. While the president and his top advisers approved and encouraged the torture of prisoners, there was dissent in every agency, at every level.

”

- Slate - How America Came To Torture Its Prisoners via Eve Tushnet

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Thu, 03 May 2012 12:21:59 -1000

SETTLED: There’s no truth-or-falsity in aesthetics! The...

Tue, 24 Apr 2012 12:40:00 -1000

SETTLED: There’s no truth-or-falsity in aesthetics!

The footnote at the end really sells it for me.

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Tue, 24 Apr 2012 12:21:06 -1000

Sam Anderson - Angry Birds, Farmville and Other Hyperaddictive...

Sat, 21 Apr 2012 12:42:28 -1000

Sam Anderson - Angry Birds, Farmville and Other Hyperaddictive ‘Stupid Games’

Here is a Big Magazine Think-o about our digital rosaries.* It seems Anderson swore off games back in the ’90s because he was a-fear’d of their terrible addictive powers, but the iPhone snuck into his life and crippled him with Drop Sevenitis.

Here is an interesting observation:

Tetris was invented exactly when and where you would expect — in a Soviet computer lab in 1984 — and its game play reflects this origin. The enemy in Tetris is not some identifiable villain (Donkey Kong, Mike Tyson, Carmen Sandiego) but a faceless, ceaseless, reasonless force that threatens constantly to overwhelm you, a churning production of blocks against which your only defense is a repetitive, meaningless sorting. It is bureaucracy in pure form, busywork with no aim or end, impossible to avoid or escape. And the game’s final insult is that it annihilates free will. Despite its obvious futility, somehow we can’t make ourselves stop rotating blocks. Tetris, like all the stupid games it spawned, forces us to choose to punish ourselves.

That’s a nice metaphor, but I think that Tetris is a game less about free will than about life and the inevitability of death. All games of Tetris end the same way. All one can do is delay the inevitable by dealing with the increasingly speedy collapse of things around one and piling up detritus. A good game is one the passes well with skill and grace, but sometimes you’re just happy to be able to keep things going for a while.

I tried to think about what — if anything — I had learned from this window into my brain. Like their spiritual forefather, Tetris, most stupid games are about walls: building them, scaling them, knocking them down. Walls made of numbers, walls made of digital bricks, walls with green pigs hiding behind them. They’re like miniature boot camps of containment. Ultimately, I realized, these games are also about a more subtle and mysterious form of wall-building: the internal walls we build to compartmentalize our time, our attention, our lives. The legendary game designer Sid Meier once defined a game as, simply, “a series of interesting choices.” Maybe that’s the secret genius of stupid games: they force us to make a series of interesting choices about what matters, moment to moment, in our lives.

Incidentally, if you have a 3DS, you are required by law to purchase the best version of Tetris for it. If you just have just an iOS device, don’t buy the touch versions of Tetris, they stink.

* The author uses this metaphor, but I am pretty sure I coined it myself back in 2001. It’s also possible I stole it from a friend.

Thug life.

Sat, 21 Apr 2012 12:22:11 -1000

Thug life.

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Fri, 20 Apr 2012 12:39:27 -1000

Matt Feeny - Allan Bloom's Guide to College

Fri, 20 Apr 2012 12:21:00 -1000

Matt Feeny - Allan Bloom's Guide to College:

Allan Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind is old enough to have graduated college. Let’s talk about it.

Bloom assails relativism, then, in order to defend a way of life that relativism undermines. Moral belief is not good or true in itself. It is a means to a separate good, this beautiful life of philosophical questioning. Bloom’s claims for moral belief, then, are doubly provisional. First, the inquiry that supposedly constitutes the good life is radically uncertain in its outcome. We don’t even know if our quest has a real, or at least attainable object. Socrates’ final lesson, after all, was that he knew nothing. If our student ends up in Socratic ignorance as well, which Bloom portrays as a noble state, then that would seem to leave his specific beliefs without a foundation. One might argue that the real standard, the real hedge against relativism, is belief in this good life, the Socratic quest for knowledge. But whether this quest truly is the good life is something else we might answer, but only at the end of the inquiry. For Bloom, then, relativism is bad because it impedes an investigation that might determine whether relativism is also wrong.

I have found that cheap relativism is a instinctive habit of my students and one that promotes absolute incuriousness. As Feeny writes,

Wised-up, blandly skeptical students, on the other hand, lack any interest in distant truths, and they lack the habit of reverence that starts the great irreverent questioning on its way. Genius? Wisdom? Seriously?

It leads also to many frustrating quirks. For example, students use the word “reality” to refer not to the set of things that can affect you whether you know about them or not but to refer to their particular perspective. Hence I had a student argue with straight face, that before Columbus, reality meant that the world was flat.

Here is an quote from an online ethics class I am currently adjuncting:

I think it all comes down to whether or not someone believes that God exists because even if, say, God is not real, if someone believes He is real, then to that person, He exists and is the initiator of morality no matter what anyone else may say.

When I responded that Paul says, “If Christ be not raised, your faith is vain; ye are yet in your sins,” the point I was trying to make was completely missed. I say this not to pick on the student, but what I was trying to say was apparently so alien that it was incomprehensible.

So, on the one hand, students have an entirely incoherent view of reality. On the other, students insist very strongly on it, as though there were some other side of the debate they were arguing against. They end every discussion of ethics with the claim that “people have to decide for themselves!” as though there were any other metaphysical possibility (a decision is necessarily my decision for the decider). I am not sure what it is they are shadow boxing against yet, but I do believe I will need to be more diligent about slaying their preconceptions in the future, starting first and foremost with cheap relativism.

P.S. Eve Tushnet adds,

this phrasing is just self-parodically Straussian: “I’m not a Straussian, but I was taught by Straussians and modelled my classroom methods on theirs….”

I like to imagine that these bumper stickers are protests...

Thu, 19 Apr 2012 12:42:01 -1000

I like to imagine that these bumper stickers are protests against Canadian “country singer” Shania Twain.

The Onion - Four American Troops Tragically Killed Along With 23...

Thu, 19 Apr 2012 12:22:11 -1000

The Onion - Four American Troops Tragically Killed Along With 23 Afghanis

This is the most true thing I’ve seen in months. Watch it to the end, the final gag is great and soul crushing.

I want a tattoo that says, It does not make sense.

Always watching.

Tue, 17 Apr 2012 12:42:16 -1000

Always watching.

Madeon - Pop Culture live See also the music video, which...

Tue, 17 Apr 2012 12:26:00 -1000

Madeon - Pop Culture live

See also the music video, which follows my school of dance by prioritizing enthusiasm over grace.

Via Joshuah Bearman