With alcoholic ritual, the whole point is generosity. If you open a bottle of wine, for heaven’s sake have the good grace to throw away the damn cork. If you are a guest and not a host, don’t find yourself having to drop your glass and then exclaim (as Amis once did in my hearing) “Oh — thank heavens it was empty.” The sort of host who requires that hint is the sort of host you should have avoided in the first place.
Christopher Hitchens, Introduction to Everyday Drinking: The Distilled Kingsley Amis, 2008.
May 27, 2012
QotD: Being a good host
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May 25, 2012
QotD: Sherlock and the fickle tide of fashion
[Y]ou can see why men wanted to get the look. Perhaps they noted the effect Cumberbatch, by no means your standard telly hunk, had on lady viewers […] and decided it must have something to do with the clobber. So it is that Britain’s latest men’s style icon is a fictional asexual sociopath first seen onscreen hitting a corpse with a horse whip. Surely not even the great detective himself could have deduced that was going to happen.
Alexis Petridis, “No chic, Sherlock”, The Guardian, 2010-09-04
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May 18, 2012
QotD: The real function of newspapers
I sometimes wonder that I write for the Guardian when what I say seems to anger so many readers. Most people buy a newspaper not to be prised from their settled opinion but to find it confirmed and comforted. They would not be dragged from it by wild horses, let alone the old nag of reason. A newspaper is their tribal notice board, their badge, their identity.
Nor is that all. Tribes of left and right tend to buy the shop. They take their politics table d’hôte, not à la carte. Those on the left are for more public spending, higher taxes, no war and a tolerance of scroungers, those on the right the exact reverse. Once they have opted for Labour or Conservative (or the obscure freemasonry of liberal democracy), they surrender their political virginity to the party line, lie back and enjoy it — usually for life.
Simon Jenkins, “So, you think reason guides your politics? Think again”, The Guardian, 2012-05-17
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April 29, 2012
QotD: Bankers, Marx’s dream workers
In a way bankers are Marx’s dream, it’s the workers getting the fruits of their labours. It’s funny that the left is usually angry at shareholders, for taking money out of companies and thereby bringing down workers’ salaries. Yet with the banks they want shareholders to press the banks to do exactly that, and curb pay.
Joris Luyendijk, “External auditor: ‘Nobody at a bank can have a complete overview any more'”, The Guardian, 2012-04-28
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April 12, 2012
QotD: Atheists in America
This ongoing conflict between sectarianism and secularism is the raison d’etre for a non-theist movement, and it is why categorical disrespect for godlessness matters. The assumption that religious belief is essential to morality advances mistrust of secular governance. Of course, religious people have a right to their biases, and the irreligious have a right to challenge them. Non-theists can always voice their opinions individually, but, like other ideological and demographic minorities, they need a movement to amplify their voices. And regardless of their individual psychic needs for recognition (which do not interest me), non-theists have a collective political need for a movement that encourages openness about disbelief: The more godlessness is normalised, the less it will seem inherently immoral, the more likely the perspectives of non-theists will be considered, instead of reflexively condemned.
What should they bring to the church/state debates? As a small, disrespected, irreligious minority, non-theists should appreciate freedom of conscience. Non-theism is often associated with hostility toward religion, thanks partly to the prominence of a few ‘New Atheists’, but it can and should promote respect for religious liberty. People who believe in no religions are not apt to privilege any one of them: evangelicals tend to be wary of Mormonism, as the Republican primaries have demonstrated, but to an atheist or agnostic, belief in the resurrection is no more or less worthy of respect than belief in the Angel Moroni.
Scepticism is a great leveller; it favours extending equal speech and religious rights to all orthodoxies, which is the essence of civil liberty. Freedom of conscience doesn’t distinguish between new, outré religions derided as cults and traditional mainstream faiths, as former American Civil Liberties Union executive director Ira Glasser tried explaining to an interviewer years ago. He was asked about the chanting, saffron-robed Hare Krishnas, who commanded little popular respect. They were ‘weird’, the interviewer remarked to Glasser. ‘I don’t know’, he replied. ‘Have you taken a look at the College of Cardinals?’
Wendy Kaminer “In America, atheists are still in the closet”, Spiked!, 2012-04-11
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April 11, 2012
QotD: The silly claims about “capitalism in crisis”
Yes, times are tougher than they otherwise could be; however, to claim that the bumps in the road over the last few years show that “capitalism is in crisis” is absurd.
[. . .]
Even with the a few recessions, Real per-capita Gross Domestic Product is a lot higher than it was in 1960, 1970, 1980, 1990, or 2000. The truly unique fact about the world as it has changed in the last few centuries is that, as a number of economic historians have emphasized, we live in a world where economic growth is taken to be the norm. […]
Indeed, as the economist Joseph Schumpeter pointed out long ago, capitalism has given us the time and energy to criticize capitalism. People content themselves by being outraged at working conditions in Foxconn plants in China. However, it is the economic growth we have achieved in the western world that allows us the comfortable working conditions from which we express horror at working conditions elsewhere in the world. Further, not all the workers are greeting the reformers as saviors (HT: Doug Stuart). If people are willing to trade off longer working hours for higher incomes, I don’t see how it’s my right to stop them.
[. . .] Donald J. Boudreaux points out how we have to be very careful with income data if we are going to get an accurate picture of trends in standards of living.
If we’re going to talk about “stagnation” we also have to be very clear about precisely what we mean. Consider the near-ubiquity of the iconic gizmo of the early 21st century and its technological cousin: the smart phone and social media. My Forbes.com colleague Erik Kain reported in February that “472 million smartphones were sold worldwide in 2011.” In a world of 7 billion people, the top 1% would be 70 million people. If all the gains really went to them, that would be about six and a half smartphones each for the members of the world’s Top 1%. I’m pretty sure that isn’t what’s happening.
Art Carden, “It’s the Final Crisis of Capitalism, Charlie Brown!”, Forbes, 2012-04-10
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April 4, 2012
March 31, 2012
QotD: Conservatives
I do not doubt that conservatives are, in their heart of hearts, jugheaded buffoons who simply want to will away inconvenient truths by plugging their ears and covering their eyes when faced with cognitive dissonance. I’m confident that they argue from authority when it serves their purpose and then are muy skeptical when confronted with authority they don’t like. I’m metaphysically certain that many are repllent and repulsive and altogether awful and that they tend to love dogs and cats in the abstract more than their fellow human beings. In all this, I suspect, they are incredibly similar to liberals and, alas, libertarians and everyone else.
Nick Gillespie, “Why Don’t Conservatives Trust Scientists Like They Used To? Are They Just Anti-Evolutionary, Anti-Global Warming Jag-Offs or Could There Be Other Explanations?”, Hit and Run, 2012-03-30
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March 23, 2012
QotD: Compassion
It’s amazing to me how many people think that voting to have government take money by force through taxes to give money to poor people is compassion. Helping poor and suffering people is compassion. Voting for our government to use guns to give money to help poor and suffering people is immoral, self righteous, bullying laziness. People need to be fed, medicated, educated clothed, and sheltered, and if we’re compassionate we’ll help them, but you get no moral credit for forcing other people to do what you think is right. There is great joy in helping people, but no joy in doing it at gun point.
Penn Jillette, God No!: Signs You May Already Be an Atheist and Other Magical Tales, 2011
March 12, 2012
QotD: Corporate income tax rates
If you assume that there’s no behavioural response, then each percentage point added to the federal CIT will generate roughly $2b in new revenues. So you’d conclude that the January 1, 2012 reduction in the CIT rate from 16.5% to 15% would reduce revenues by about $3b, and increasing the federal rate from 16.5% back to (say) 24% would increase CIT revenues by some $15b — almost one per cent of GDP.
This is the the sort of answer ‘static analysis’ gives. In a world in which multinationals file 57,000-page tax returns, one can only marvel at the faith in human nature among those who would make policy based on the belief that the only behavioural change on the part of corporations to an increase in CIT rates will be to put larger numbers on the cheques they send to the Receiver-General.
Stephen Gordon, “How much new revenue will be generated by an increase in federal corporate taxes?”, Worthwhile Canadian Initiative, 2012-03-11
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January 14, 2012
QotD: In praise of memorization
I didn’t mean only memorising poetry or prose passages, but anything that requires memorisation.
Two instances to chew on.
1. To me the most crippling side-effect of “modularisation” in education — i.e. self-contained courses, no terminal examinations etc. — is that it obviates what is actually a principle purpose of exams based on several years’ work, forcing the transfer of information from short- to long-term memory. Students who take only end-of-semester course exams or write final papers retain far less of the data than those who undergo old-fashioned final exams. Methodological competence can certainly be learned in modularised systems, but detailed memory is not fostered.
2. I will never forget the candidate for Cambridge admission (15+ years ago) who had done O-level modules (9th and 10th grade) on the English Civil War and the Industrial Revolution but did not know which came first. Honest to Betsy; didn’t have a clue and couldn’t work it out either. Even before that I made my own undergrads learn a regnal list, from at least Richard III to Elizabeth II with dates, so that they had at least one continuous historical frame to which they could attach other dates they learned or came across. I wasn’t bigoted about it — it could be a list of popes, archbishops of Canterbury, or Dalai Lamas (Dalais Lama?) if they wanted, though English monarchs are more useful in English literature — but they had to know something that gave accurate chronological depth to their grasps of history, not just sit grinning ignorance on a jumble of impressions and quasi-factual fragments. They used to moan about it loudly … for a while and then start being grateful. Heh.
Memorising poems is dandy, and there’s no reason it has to be the saccharine and long-line stuff that was the pedagogic legacy of late C19 tastes and pieties — lots of good strong stuff out there that anyone’s better off knowing than not knowing — but there are bigger issues at stake.
(Excerpt from a much longer discussion on the Lois McMaster Bujold mailing list)
John Lennard, MA DPhil. (Oxon.), MA (WU)
General editor, Humanities-E-Books Genre Fiction Sightlines and Monographs
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January 12, 2012
QotD: When a figure is too high to be repaid, it won’t be repaid
It’s hardly news anymore that public-sector pension promises will be made good (or not) on the backs of taxpayers, but I still think that the average private-sector packmule has no idea of the amount they’re going to have to pony up to vouchsafe the various municipal, state, and federal pension promises. The amount required over the next several decades beggars the imagination. In fact, the amount is preposterous: there’s no way the money is ever going to be paid out as promised. Even if it were mathematically possible (which it isn’t), taxpayers would revolt over the massive increases that would be required. If I were a public-sector worker, I’d be making a point of saving every dime of my own money that I could, because that fat public sector pension is unlikely to ever be paid out in full. (And I’m not even getting into the healthcare benefits, which are even more onerous than the pension benefits.) Basically, the bedrock truth is this: money that can’t be paid out, won’t be, no matter what agreements were signed or what the courts say.
Monty, “The Daily DOOM”, Ace of Spades HQ, 2012-01-12
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January 7, 2012
QotD: Is Disappearing
To be or not to be? That remaining the question, the answer increasingly clear. The verb “to be” dying out, and the culprit? None other than TV news channels. Taking the place of such cherished words as “is,” “are,” “am,” even “were” and “was”: a new verb form that you might call the one-size-fits-all past, present, and future participle. Or you might call it the one-size-fits-all past, present, and future gerund. One of these right and one of them wrong, but which which? Nobody really knowing the difference between a participle and a gerund. Anyone claiming to understand the distinction probably bluffing. So calling it what you wish: Either label doing.
Michael Kinsley, “Is Disappearing: What TV news doing to our precious verbs”, Slate, 2001-11-01
December 25, 2011
QotD: The Prince Regent’s Christmas story
Edmund: So, shall I begin the Christmas story?
Prince: Absolutely! As long as it’s not that terribly depressing one about the chap who gets born on Christmas Day, shoots his mouth off about everything under the sun, and then comes a cropper with a couple of rum-coves on top of a hill in Johnny Arabland.
Edmund: You mean Jesus, sir?
Prince: Yes, that’s the fellow! Just leave him out of it — he always spoils the X-mas atmos.Blackadder’s Christmas Carol, 1988
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December 20, 2011
QotD: Inside the world of Kim Jong-Il
Kim Jong-il enjoyed the life of a spoiled playboy — fast cars, fast women, cellars of vintage French wines and a passion for Rambo and Daffy Duck videos. He was also said to take pleasure in caviar, Hennessy Cognac and his troupe of 2,000 dancing girls, recruited from the country’s high schools as teenagers to perform in “pleasure groups” in the dictator’s 32-odd villas and palaces — before being pensioned off at 25. Each pleasure group was composed of three teams: a “satisfaction team,” which performed sexual services; a “happiness team,” which provided massage; and a “dancing and singing team.” Visitors were treated to choreographed stripteases, though only Mr. Kim was allowed to avail himself of the other services.
Ian Vandaelle, “Inside the world of Kim Jong-il: The Glorious General and his ‘pleasure groups’”, National Post, 2011-12-20
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