“On Bullshit” discussed

Posted on by

My thanks to commenter Billjac for bringing up H. G. Frankfurt’s On Bullshit. I found an excerpt (right here; warning, it cuts off in midsentence) and someday I may read the whole book. The excerpt, at least, is very good and taught me a lot.

First thing, I’d said that Frankfurt, in giving his concept the name “bullshit,” simply  “slapped on” the term. No! “Bullshit” is most often used to mean something very broad, namely wildly and obviously false statements, but it is also used often enough to mean exactly the concept that Frankfurt has in mind. As far as I can tell, no other word is used for that one idea, so what can you do? Out of stubbornness, I’ll refer to the Frankfurt-identified style of bullshit as “b.s.,” but no, he was not at all arbitrary in saying “bullshit.”
More later, I guess, but I’ve got to run.

Bad job on Palin

Posted on by

That Vanity Fair article on the Gal was pretty lame. (Mentioned it here.) It was notable mainly for two giant holes: nothing about the $150,000 shopping spree, nothing about “Africa is a country/who’s in Nafta?” and the other imbecilities Palin was supposed to have committed during her debate prep. Those were major stories: if a really plugged-in behind-the-scenes tell-all piece about Palin comes out, I want to hear anything I can about whether those allegations are true.


All right, the piece mentions the shopping spree, a one-time passing mention, and refers to it as if spree and pricetag were established facts. But no details and no presentation of evidence. At the time of the original stories, some paper or web site reported that one of the stores in question said it had no record of the purchase allegedly made there. One hopes a big-deal piece like the Vanity Fair article would help us wade into questions like that. But the best we get is the forlorn hope that the spree story must be true because the article acts as if it were. Ah well.
(update, The corollary of that last point: the “Africa is a country/who’s in Nafta?” stories are probably not true. If the article could have used them it would have, especially since it makes so much noise about the problems between Palin and McCain’s staff during the runup to the debate. Now I get to play told-you-so because I warned friends when the stories came out. Never believe a story sourced to a Republican political operative, especially when he/she is anonymous. It’s a measure of GOP flacks’ moral standing that they are more dishonest than Palin is stupid.)

Another big gap: the fiasco over her nominee for Alaska attorney general. The guy got voted down — “the first time in Alaska history that a cabinet nominee was rejected.” Sounds major! But why did the guy get voted down? The article mentions that he has said dumb things about gays and that he is against “subsistence hunting preferences for Native Americans.” That’s it? That’s enough to get you voted down in Alaska? Well, okay, I guess it’s possible, but sounds like there’s something missing.

Another: Palin’s communications shop. The article says it’s lousy, but everyone has heard that already. How about some examples, or something about the background and style of the shop’s allegedly incompetent director? How about a concise summary of the back-and-forth over whether Palin would speak at the Senate-House fundraiser? That was a damn mess, a great chance to watch her staff’s incompetence in action. Nothing.

The article is just all the usual stuff everyone knows, most of it mentioned headline fashion (did you know Levi Johnston did some tv interviews?), plus a few bits of new material as garnish. The Palin-as-God email, a couple of poignant blind quotes by McCain advisers about what a jerk Palin is, nothing else.

Fuck, what a disappointment. 
update, Now this looks promising. A CBS.com story headlined “Palin E-Mails Show Infighting with Staff.” Something to check out. 

Horrible

Posted on by

This weekend I accidentally clicked on a mention of smallpox in Wikipedia. That landed me on Wiki’s smallpox page and I saw the photo there. I was going to link to it, but I find I can’t bring myself to go back and get the url.


Let me stress that what I saw has not inspired me to give money or even to think a humanitarian thought. I hope that somewhere down the road I will send $50 to an organization that helps victims like the girl in that picture. But my point for now is that I have never seen anything so horrible and never expected to.

The closest I can come to describing the picture will sound flippant. The day I saw it I had eaten an almond croissant. The girl’s face looked like a face almondine, with the almonds the size of an adult’s thumbnail — not the rim, the whole nail. The almonds are set one against the other, no space between them, and their narrow end points up. Together they’re like the scales of a pine cone, or giant almonds arranged like the scales of a pine cone. They’re white and glossy, which is why a straight comparison to a pine cone wouldn’t work.

The girl’s eyes are still there, you can see them looking out. But otherwise her face is a cluster, a rigid and severely arranged cluster that presents regular lines and not a sign of flesh as we understand it. I guess I assumed that smallpox would look like a mass of sores hanging off of a face, like exaggerated acne; you would be looking at a face that had been wrecked and spoiled.  Instead there is no face, and that is very disturbing.      

… this just in: I googled smallpox and found this sentence in the page of links: “The world’s last known case of smallpox was reported in Africa in 1977.” That’s from kidshealth, and I guess they’re right. Of course there are plenty of other diseases that need fighting, and I could give money to one of the relevant groups. 

update, I start by saying that “face almondine” is the closest I can come to describing the girl; then I finish by saying she has no face. Damn. I guess I just liked the phrase. One reason: it makes it easier for me to mention the almond croissant I’d eaten, and that brings the reader’s mouth, mentally, into close contact with the girl’s face; the resulting disgust is intimate and ups the description’s emotional effect. Also, “face almondine” is just snappy. I can say apologetically that it sounds flippant, implying that the flippancy was not intended, but I’m still turning a phrase about a horror and a tragedy. Flip a turtle on its back and its legs keep going; overturn me psychologically and my joke reflex keeps twitching. At least if the source of my overturn is a picture; if it’s a horror and tragedy that has hit me personally, I’ll probably skip the jokes for a while.

Who the fuck would trust this guy?

Posted on by

I don’t mean anything against him, he might be perfectly honest, but come on.

Rod Beckstrom
He’s the new chief executive of ICANN, the International Corporation of Assigned Names and Numbers. The group’s name sounds like it came from the Onion, but the place is real and plays a crucial part in running the market for domain names.

Michael’s post-Michael story

Posted on by
[update, An article by the journalist with the inside track to Michael apocalypse stories.]

I’m back in Montreal and just ran into Griffy, the highly strung, sixtyish intellectual who works as janitor for the building where I live. He’s always watching cable news and he loves to pour out his thoughts, so he gave me an earful about developments in the Jackson story. And I must say they sounded great. Well, not “great,” because they’re kind of horrible, but fascinating and therefore the elements of a great story. MJ weighed 112 pounds, was covered with needle tracks, and had lost all his hair [update, no it was “thinning” and “greying,” per Ian Halperin], and there’s likely to be a custody fight over his kids, who are white because Michael not only hired a mother to have them, he also hired someone to provide the seed (what?). And Michael’s mother was asking an au pair or someone where MJ hid cash around the house. Somebody bought Neverland a while back and renamed it, but now is renaming it back in hopes of creating a Graceland-style tourist shrine and … all sorts of things. Amazing things. [update, MJ selected his kid companions from the snapshots sent in by hopeful parents across the country. Staff would pick likely photos and send them on to MJ; they threw out all the shots of girls. Source here isn’t Halperin, just Griffy and his tv viewing.] As tabloid/cable news spectacles go, this is l’edition supreme, a specimen so gorgeous it makes all others look like dim preparation. A great story, or a conglomeration of great stories, each one ready to hatch progeny that will continue until there’s a cable network dedicated to covering nothing but MJ fallout.

Assuming that Griffy got all the above right. But nothing in memeorandum about it, so I’m a bit at sea.  

“Does any of this really matter?”

Posted on by

The new Palin profile in Vanity Fair. Haven’t read it yet, just bumped across a significant passage. A rival candidate for governor speaks:


Andrew Halcro later remembered that he and Palin once compared notes about their many encounters, and she said, “Andrew, I watch you at these debates with no notes, no papers, and yet when asked questions, you spout off facts, figures, and policies, and I’m amazed. But then I look out into the audience and I ask myself, Does any of this really matter?”

 If true, very suggestive for a point raised in comments here. We were talking about Palin’s notorious scoffing at a research project involving fruit flies. Billjac  said the governor didn’t care whether or not her point was true. Looks like he has some good ammunition for his claim.
update, Andrew Sullivan makes this point about Palin’s lying:

the same classic pattern of categorically denying things that are categorically and patently and verifiably true. This is not, as this blog noted in the campaign, the typical political lie, the Clintonian parsing of truth or lying when the truth cannot easily be discovered. It is the statement that it is night when it is clearly, by universal aggreement, three o’clock in the afternoon. 

I expect that’s different from the question of whether Palin cares about the untruth or truth of her statements. 

You got to see it

Posted on by

I’m going to link to a web site where you’ll see photos of Bill Clinton, Henry Kissinger, Prince Philip, George W. Bush, etc. One man keeps showing up in all those photos, someone you have never seen or heard of. I know that man and I have good reason to think the pictures are genuine. He is a visionary of sorts. To fully appreciate him you must also check out the site’s captions, especially those below the photos of crack executives arriving on scene to deal with life-or-death etiquette crises. All in all it’s a hell of a thing.

My linking approach here is roundabout. First you go to a page of Google results, then you click on the top link. I’ve got my reasons, okay?