Posted Saturday, June 21
Miéville's Das Silmaril

Henry Farrell writes:

I’m re-reading China Mieville’s rather wonderful fantasy novel, ‘The Scar,’ and noticing (as I didn’t the first time around), how much work Mieville has put into the economics of his created world. Now this is hardly surprising; he’s a committed Marxist, who has written a very interesting Ph.D. thesis on the roots and form of international law. Mieville is a historical materialist, and pays a lot of attention to the economic fundamentals underlying his created societies. But he’s very nearly unique among fantasy authors in so doing; most of them prefer to sweep the dirty business of material accumulation underneath the prettily woven carpet of chivalry, noblesse oblige &c.

Much of this can be traced back to Tolkien of course …

Now Henry and I have gone round about this before, via email. I blogged at length about Miéville a couple months back, promising but not delivering more on the theme of anti-Tolkien animus. Today I’ll take a stab. (Really the general subject requires, and deserves, a book.) Mieville has described Tolkien most colorfully: ‘a wen on the arse of fantasy’. But he is only the latest in a long, anti-Tolkien line. It all goes back to Edmund O Wilson’s (in my opinion idiotic) essay, “Oo, those awful orcs”. And David Brin has recently written (much more sensibly and plausibly) in the same vein, “We Hobbits are a Merry Folk”. Michael Moorcock has been saying such stuff since the 60’s. Henry mentions Dianne Wynne Jones. I Haven’t read her critical writings, but it sounds like she may be semi-allied with the anti-Tolkien party (I could be wrong).

But let’s just stick with Miéville for starters. Henry concludes :

You may agree, or disagree with Mieville’s political analysis as you like (in any event, he never lets it get in the way of telling a good story). But one of the reasons why his fantasies are subversive is precisely because they reintroduce the economic and the political into a genre that sometimes tries to run away from them. Fantasy all too frequently harks back to a never-never land in which exploitative economic relations, clashes of interest and the like, never take place, or are airbrushed out of the picture. This isn’t an unmitigatedly awful thing; a bit of escapism here and there is quite harmless. But fiction that takes society - and the forces underlying different kinds of social organization - seriously, is fundamentally more interesting . At least to people like me, who study this stuff for a living.

Let me divide Henry’s point in two, amplifying one half, politely dissenting from the other.

First, let me say that the Miéville's fantasy world is so well and fully and thickly and lovingly and ingeniously and beautifully and hideously and originally rendered that, in all seriousness, the story-telling – good as it is; and it is good – positively gets in the way of the backgrounds. I'm not kidding. Several months after reading Perdido Street Station and The Scar the sets have really stuck with me; the actors – even the stories – are starting to fade. (And the bits about the characters and action that stick are all rooted in the background.) Even while I was reading, I remember having a distinct ‘can we just slow down this exciting chase scene so I can take in the scenery?’ reaction.

Miéville should seriously consider writing a thumping great historical political economy of his world – Marx's Das Silmaril, if you will. It would be huge fun to read. It should be a multivolume affair that, ideally, he never manages to finish. ( ‘What I have to examine is the magical mode of production, its supernatural laws and tendencies winning their way through and working themselves out with necessity as hard as mithral.’ A long and careful analysis would follow of how power in Middle Earth is a function of - and race relations are inescapably mediated by – silmarills and, in later stages, ring ownership; value and use-value; importance of control of the means of ring production. “A spectre is haunting Middle Earth – no, really, a spectre!”)

OK, flogged that one dead. And it’s been done before. Lord knows the world does not lack for Tolkien parodies. But I’m not exaggerating when I say Miéville’s sets are far, far better than his characters, even his stories. Which really is sort of interesting. I can explain a bit more fully by moving on to the second point.

I honestly don’t find Mieville’s novels subversive in any significant sense. Miéville himself pushes this line; Henry takes it up on his behalf. But I think it is sort of – well, not quite it.

The rest I make a Giant Thought:
Posted Friday, June 20
Ad Hominid Arguments

I owe some folks some thoughts but, man, am I tired. Here's a thing. I was reading some stuff - bad evolutionary psychology 'just-so' stories about how it was on the veldt, way back when.

Those, my friend, are (drumroll pleeese) ad hominid arguments.
Posted Friday, June 20
Little Jack Horner

I don't know why we haven't already linked to the Poor Man's pitch-perfect Corner parody. Sample:

WILL LIBERAL EURO-APPEASING ECO-FEMINISTS EVER STOP BEING TRAITORS? [Trevor Shropshire]

No.

THIS IS THE LIFE! [Wilfred F. Bumpley]

Good Lord I'm drunk. Here it is, 11AM on a Tuesday, and I'm completely legless. If anyone ever tries to tell you that money can't buy happiness, I suggest you pour a full bottle of 15-year-old scotch over their heads; and if you ever have the opportunity to be born into wealth, do. No regrets, no regrets at all.

Go ye forth, and read of the whole thing. Especially timely as the Cornerites are just winding up a nightmarish pledge drive (following close on the heels of Andrew Sullivan's), about which the Poor Man correctly points out:

It's really not very punk rock to ask people for money to keep up your vanity site. It's not, and it's not because I just said it's not in a very authoritative manner, and that's the method by which things like this get decided. And if anyone thinks they can be more punk than punk by asking for donations just to spite me, I'll just cast you a withering glance and say "oh, how anti" and your shaming will be abject.

Yeah. I think the whole thing is pretty Emo, when you get right down to it. And as that punk-rock chick said after she got in an unsucessful fistfight with my sister, "We'll get you at the next show, you fucking Emo kids!"

It's almost hard to parody the Corner; consider the following:

A DONATION, AND A NAME [Kathryn Jean Lopez]
Matt Grills writes:
I visit NRO probably 20 times a day and am responsible for getting others hooked as well. I credit NRO with renewing my interest in politics and helping me decide where I stand on the important issues of the day. You can't beat the staff - I have never met them, but they are like family, in a strange, "cyber" kind of way. I even named my son after Jonah Goldberg. Thanks, NRO, for being there for me.

Now, aside from a certain reluctance to go on family cruises, I guess there's nothing wrong with being named Jonah. But naming your child after a magazine editor..it's so creepy and weird. John already nixed my plan to name our next child Bonnie, after Bonnie Fuller, editor of US Weekly magazine.
Posted Thursday, June 19
Of the Standard of Distaste

I'm an analytic philosopher. But I never blog about analytic philosophy. (Well, we've all got little things we do that show how we aren't perfectly happy with our jobs.) But today ... I'll bring my work home.

Brian Weatherson's various postings (here's the latest; it contains this link to his draft paper on the subject) have gotten me interested in the alleged problem of 'imaginative resistance'. Let me just give you Tamar Gendler's formulation, from her Journal of Philosophy (Vol. 97, 2000) paper, "The Puzzle of Imaginative Resistance," (which you can schlepp on down to the library and read on icky old slain trees, or not at all, thank you very much, J Phil luddites!)

The puzzle of imaginative resistance: the puzzle of explaining our comparative difficulty in imagining fictional worlds that we take to be morally deviant. (p. 56)

Not a world in which people behave badly, mind you. (That's easy. Our own will do.) Rather, a world in which things that are bad in our world are good, and/or vice versa. (And not just a world where people think different things about ethics.) Weatherson elucidates variations on this theme in terms of the so-called 'principle of poetic license': for any proposition, there are techniques by which an author can make that proposition true in her fiction. Imaginative resistance to immoral worlds may constitute a counter-example.

If you aren't getting the problem yet - think this. We can imagine worlds in which the laws of physics are different, perhaps even in which mathematical truths are different. But we can't imagine that wrong is right. That is, if the narrator says, 'Sally killed her baby, and that was a good thing,' we will insist (unless extenuating circumstances are forthcoming) that the narrator is morally unreliable. We will resist the thought that we are talking about a world in which different moral truths obtain. I think there is something correct and interesting about this observation. But (being a philosopher) I think absolutely everyone but me, me, ME is at least a bit confused about what's REALLY going on.

Let me start in today, then, by making a strictly historical point - which is strictly extraneous to the conceptual point, but sort of interesting - and which, if I keep up my interest in all this, I will tie back to the substantive issues at some later point.

For all our sakes, I'd best make this a Giant Thought:
Posted Thursday, June 19
Singapore Philosophy

UPDATE: Didn't mean to imply, as I do below, that Junius is responsible for Ten's interview being on the web; he is only responsible for drawing attention to it, obviously. (Don't suppose I actually managed to confuse anyone about that elementary point.) I also talk as if Junius criticizes Ten, which he really doesn't. (And now he praises him in an update to the original post.) Anyway, just wanted everyone to know the haphazard circumstances of the thing's production.

Junius links today to the Radio Singapore philosophy page. The latest entry is Ten Chin Liew's talk on Locke. (He's my department head at NUS.) Thus, this story. Get up. Read Junius over coffee. Go to work. Knock on Ten's door. Tell him that, thanks to an acquaintance of mine in England, his interview - which he granted lightly and gave off-the-cuff on the seemingly sensible assumption it was going straight down the memory hole of radio - was on the web forevermore and would be listened to and/or read by scores, perhaps hundreds of people. Some of them professional philosophers. Apprised of this state of affairs, he gave me a look vaguely reminiscent of Brian's, when he throws open the window in that unforgettable scene in Life of Brian.

His bad luck, the interviewer focuses on epistemology, and Ten's a political philosopher, a philosophy of law guy. So he was not really in training to emit coherent paragraphs, extemporaire, on tabula rasa and all that. (Thus do I come to my esteemed colleague's defense. He is an extremely sharp and articulate guy, and a fine lecturer. And, actually, he does an OK job with the epistemology - otherwise Junius probably wouldn't have linked at all.)

I actually gave a Plato radio interview under similar seat-of-the-pants circumstances back in December. (You can go find it if you want. I won't help you. Thank the Dog the audio is no longer available.) Like Ten, I said, 'yeah, sure', then did it without a moment's prep, thinking no one whose opinion I cared about was remotely likely to cast it back in my face later. And, after all, it wouldn't see print. Of course, then it went on the web. Google is a harsh mistress. It's remarkable how hard it is to speak well enough that a transcription is better than just dragging your nails along the chalkboard. Also, the transcript in my case is garbled, now that I look at it. I'm sure I said something like: 'Plato is like us in that he dislikes the Matrix. He is unlike us in thinking we actually live in it.' Google now thinks I said : 'Plato is like us and he likes the Matrix ...' Doh! Also, the interview went on for 20 minutes and you get maybe 20% of that. It's a highlight reel. And a graceless, mildly mistranscribed point made, with implicit reference to another point that didn't make the final cut due to its yet more gracelessness, is ... a bad thing. Almost enough to make you feel sorry for politicians, to whom this presumably happens all the time.

And of course Singapore Radio is not wholly to blame. Zeus knows, this city-state could do with more classical liberalism and philosophy streaming through it's major media outlets. I laud the efforts of those responsible. I think the moral of the story is: we NUS philosophers should start preparing for our Singapore Radio interviews a bit more seriously, now that we know off-the-cuff is forever.
Posted Wednesday, June 18
Remember How Their One Red Eye Would Just Sort of 'Pong' Back and Forth? No Wonder They Couldn't Hit Starbuck and Apollo!

I'll just share this site, which arrived via electrolite. (Has God jumped the shark? Patrick Farley certainly seems to imply this is so.)

Mr. Hayden quotes this endearing passage from Mr. Farley's LiveJournal.

Last night was good for me. I went to watch The Animatrix with Kristen B. and a housefull of nerds. That’s right, not just geeks—nerds. The conversation before the movie turned to the gender politics of Dune, (how, I don’t know. It just did.) then the merits of Gene Wolfe’s Torturer novels, and then I hurled out the name of Octavia Butler just to see who would bite. Almost immediately, a nerd feeding-frenzy erupted. Names ricocheted around the room: Iain M. Banks, Bruce Sterling, Vernor Vinge, and a bunch that I didn’t even recognize. Soon it was like that old joke about the prisoners shouting out the numbers to their jokes—people were just screaming out the names of science fiction authors, and others would gleefully shout, “Oh yeah! He/She kicks ass!” Somewhere in there, a conversationlet fractal-branched off the main conversation, and a small knot of people began furiously deconstructing Melkor’s revolt against Aule in The Silmarillion while names of SF authors flew over their heads.

Hell, the only thing missing from this scene were a few good Cylon jokes. What can I say; I was among my people. *sniff*

(Bought my copy of The Animatrix today. But Belle wants to watch Burt Lancaster first in The Rose Tattoo. Very well. We shall take in his virile, manly, masculine toothy glory tonight, after tot sleeps. I fear it will be no Sweet Smell of Success. Please, God, let it be no Crimson Pirate.)

As I was saying, I know just how Mr. Farley feels. [Cue wibbly-line memory-lane camera effects.] Seems like just yesterday - but it must have been more like 1980. Walking down the street with my good junior high buddies, Jon and Eric. Suddenly Eric chirps brightly. 'Hey, guys, did you notice? We're in cylon battle formation!' (Maybe you remember how there are always three cyclon saucer thingies - oh, never mind about the tactical details.) Eric was a real geek. I think I gave him a healthy thwak with my Monster Manual at that point to make him act more - you know, normal. (And Jacob Levy says I'm a geek. Sheesh. But I do admit to enjoying their company.)

And while I'm in the neighborhood, let me mention that - while I was on that little Thai island last week - I read and greatly enjoyed Mr. Hayden's sci-fi anthology, Starlight 3. It contains the tremendous Ted Chiang novella, "Hell is the Absence of God", which I had already read. But the rest of the entries are very strong as well. My favorites were "Wings", by Colin Greenland, and "La Vie en Ronde", by Madeleine E. Robins. The thing about good short sci-fi is that - well, every piece is a little gem of a thought-experiment. That is too faint praise. But I hear Belle coming out of the tot's room ...Good night.
Posted Tuesday, June 17
The Matrix: Reloaded (Contains Third-Party Plot Spoilers)

Brian Weatherson writes:

Inspired a little by this post on the 617 blog, I was discussing at a party the other night whether Neo should have taken seriously the possibility that he's in a second-level matrix. There was some consensus that this would be a reasonable worry for him to have, when next he gets the chance to think about it.

The 617 post in question (permalinks bloggered; it's from May 28) concludes:

... And he ought to be nearly certain that he's in a two-layer Matrix at the end of Reloaded, when he stops the killer drones the way he stops bullets in the 20th century.

My fellow philosophers! I call upon you to acknowledge a triumvirate of self-evident truths: 1) The architect repeatedly implies that Zion is outside the Matrix, and that (for example) Trinity 're-entered the Matrix' to save Neo; 2) Neo is just now becoming aware of what he has taken away from his exchange with Agent Smith; Smith is mysteriously free, and able to enter the human world; Neo is mysteriously able to command the machines. (No doubt when he emerges from his coma, this awareness will increase.) 3) It will be annoying if it turns out to be a two-layer Matrix.

If you object to 1, on the grounds that the Architect may be lying, recurr to 3 until convinced. 2 admittedly requires development but, on reflection, has much to recommend it.

Alas, I find someone else has scooped me (more or less), scholastically interpolating these and other findings into a transcript of the Neo-Architect scene.
Posted Tuesday, June 17
More On The Unrest In France
From the NY Times:

"There's nothing false about him," said Daniel Beux, a 55-year-old Parisian in a blue blazer, as he left Mr. Hallyday's fireworks-spangled spectacle at the capital's Parc des Princes soccer stadium on Saturday night. "He's a myth," he added.

Belle and I had this very problem in Italy. A teen mag (Top Girl) with the screaming headline, 'Ronan Keating, tu sei un Mito [you are a myth]!'. That had us scratching our heads until we figured it out.

France's prime minister, Jean-Pierre Raffarin, even invoked the aging rocker's name recently in urging striking state workers to accept the government's pension reforms, which will require them to stay on the job a few more years than is required now. If Mr. Hallyday can keep working, Mr. Raffarin seemed to suggest, why can't everyone else?

And here, for more on unrest in France.
Posted Tuesday, June 17
What Famous Blogger Whom My Husband Was Imitating in the Previous Post Has Lost His Ever-Lovin', Cotton-pickin', Blue-eyed, Tennessee Mind?

Lately I've been wondering, has the Instapundit been losing it? Or is it rather the case that he's always had a vein of unpleasant right-wing flackery and I didn't notice at first because I was caught up in the magic of blogging? Now, I feel kind of sacreligious saying bad things about the Professor, what with me reading his site every day, and his working his carpal-tunnel stress-addled fingers to the bone blogging for us during tornadoes and all - not to mention his having kindly linked to our site before. John might not even let me post this [Git back in the kitchen. woman! Git me another beer 'for I smack your - Oh, wait. No, it's OK to post, honey. -ed.] But.

Three times in the past few days he has posted crazy things. I thought about blogging the first two, but decided against it. This, however, is insane. I'll just replicate the post in its entirety.

DR. MANHATTAN IS CALLING an unintentional irony alert. Heh. I noticed the same thing.

Dr. Manhattan (if that is his name) is claiming that in this post Josh Marshall is unaware of the irony.

Seldom, I think, has a country undergone such a subtle, textured, distinction-granting debate about lying and truth-telling.

Josh goes on to say, for the benefit of his particularly thick readers:

Washington's newfound appreciation of the 'subtleties' of truth-telling and lies is, well ... what shall we call it?, a revealing contrast to the common-sense definitions bandied about through 1998.

So, a reasonable conclusion to be drawn here is that Josh Marshall is unaware of the fact that some debate about the nature of lying - perhaps some national meditation on the very nature of being (it all depends on what your definition of "is" is) took place during the Clinton years?

Even some of the comments at Dr. Manhattan's site seem to be aware that this charge is idiotic.

This Josh Marshall should be taken as seriously as one would take J. Garofelo or Tim Robbins. Everything I read from him (usually prompted by an Andrew Sullivan or some other blogger) suggest that he is a wet boy with a view of himself that is at an asinine level of vain probably inplanted by some excessive praise from some equally dim professor/mentor or God knows what.

Oh, wait, no; that was just an idiotic comment. My mistake. I meant things like this:

I rather think the irony was intentional. Marshall may be a bit too wedded to DNC talking points (thus the name, but of course!) and he tends to be excessively impressed by the blovation of low-wattage functionaries with axes to grind, but he isn't an idiot. He's just inside-the-Beltway.

I'm waiting for a retraction from Mr. Reynolds.

And now that I'm on the subject, here are the other things (and I'm just ignoring the "massive drop in trade with France" post).

The Instapundit linked to an interesting article in Fortune about how white collar techie jobs are now being subjected to the same pressures from cheaper foreign workers that blue-collar jobs were in the past few decades. Thanks! I wouldn't have read it otherwise. But then he inserts a comment which is, as far as I can tell, both partisan and totally baseless:

What's funny is that it's lefties -- who are supposed to be in favor of helping people in poorer countries, at the expense of better-off people in richer countries -- who seem most upset by this job-export stuff.

Nothing in the article he links to suggests that this is so. He does not offer other links which illustrate this nefarious tendency. Unless there is some well known, lefties-hate-IT-jobs-moving-to-Bangalore Zeitgeist that I've just missed out on [we are way out in Singapore, honey. - ed.], I think we have to say this is a cheap shot. Yes, there is a protectionist strain in American left politics. But, guess what? There's also a protectionist strain in American right politics! And if we look at actions rather than words (textile protectionism by Republicans in the Southeast, grotesque farm subsidies supported by Republicans in the Midwest) I think we can fairly say both parties come off equally badly in this unedifying contest. Heh, indeed.

Finally, there's this bizarre slap at Matthew Yglesias(seconding, while somewhat misrepresenting, a post by Steve Verdon).

And Steve Verdon wonders why lefties are condescending to America's youth. "Don't trust anyone under 30?"

What Steve Verdon is actually wondering is how Matthew Yglesias could be so cruel as to make fun of Kyle Williams wihout adressing all his well-reasoned arguments (though he does also muse on the non-topic topic of why liberals are so threatened by young conservatives. You know. How they're always so threatened by that.). First of all, this is a stupid thing to wonder about so ripe a target. Follow the link and look at that kid's picture. Next people will be saying that I shouldn't be able to make fun of Wil Wheaton for being a big wuss. If it's against the law to make fun of little kids who are big dorks on the internet, well, Choire Sicha is probably going to have to go to jail someday. But, honestly, Yglesias' main point was that it's eerie to hear such a young person parrot these ideas; sort of a stupid human trick. That's perfectly fair.

Secondly and more importantly, for the Instapundit to link to the post in this misleading way is just sloppy. Given Yglesias' age it also seems to impute to him grave self-doubt. I'm feeling all disillusioned over here. Maybe I should cheer myself up by buying Strongbad's new Ab-Abber 2000. Then at least "they'll be all up ons."
Posted Monday, June 16
What Famous Blogger Am I Imitating?

My new column is up over at tech central station.

Indeed.
Posted Monday, June 16
In Memory of Bernard Williams

I knew him at UC Berkeley, but only well enough to smile and nod in the halls. Seems to me his chief virtue, as philosopher, was the ability to split hairs to a nicety while keeping track of the big picture. Which is to say: he really was a philosopher. And a wit, which I suspect was a not unrelated talent. And a cheerful man, even in his last years when he was very ill and knew he didn't have long. A nice little memorial quotation, then - the opening from an essay of his entitled, "The Makropolos Case: reflections on the tedium of immortality."

This essay started life as a lecture in a series 'on the immortality of the soul or kindred spiritual subject.' My kindred spiritual subject is, one might say, the mortality of the soul. Those among previous lecturers who were philosophers tended, I think, to discuss the question whether we are immortal; that is not my subject, but rather what a good thing it is that we are not.

Junius has links to obituaries.
Posted Monday, June 16
Brown Study

Matthew Ygelsias points out that the NYT is, inexplicably, editorializing about the possibility of a Beckham trade. This is silly, as he says:

I understand that the Times is trying to position itself as a national newspaper, but the nation it's a national newspaper of is still the United States of America where no one cares about soccer.

I think the real question is when the Times is going to weigh in on the bitter rivalry between Gordon Brown and Tony Blair. I read the whole Economist on Friday afternoon, when it comes (because I am both a speedreader and very lazy, if you see what I mean: too lazy to do anything more useful with my time.) As a result I know all sorts of things about, say, Scottish devolution, that I don't really need or even want to know. (Less so now that they skimp on the Britain section and make you log on to see more.) But somehow I am unable to wrap my mind around the whole Tony Blair/Gordon Brown thing. It's like in an SF book when the characters try to look at the alien technology and their eyes keep sliding off it in incomprehension. No, even better, it's like Blair and Brown together have plateau eyes!

I mean, Bagehot says this is "the central relationship in British politics." And they, like, hate each other, or something? And it has something to do with the euro? And...what was I saying? Ah yes, the Economist is open on the desk here. People in Britain openly speculate that the euro disagreement between the Treasury Secretary and the Prime Minister is "a quarrel over the terms of Mr. Gordon's accession to 10 Downing street"?! Isn't that sort of shocking? And somewhere within the government there is apparently a web of Brown supporters plotting to depose Blair in his favor? I don't know; it all seems awfully dramatic.

When this came up at their amusingly strained joint press conference this week - rictus smile meets dissertation tending to infinity [what?] - Mr. Blair said he wanted to talk about "substance not soap opera."

When I first saw Gordon Brown in some representation other than the hideous Economist caricature I had grown used to, during the British parlaiment debates on Iraq, I felt a veritable frisson. He was lurking threateningly over Blair's shoulder. I felt like shouting at the screen: "Tony! It's Gordon Brown! He's right behind you!!" Honestly, what is the deal here? And will anyone in America ever know of this epic struggle? Sadly, no.
Posted Sunday, June 15
Please, Please, Please, Let Me Get What I Want

I am not alone, I trust, in my bemusement at the Taki/Buchanan collaboration that is The American Conservative.

How to put it?

It's like one of those odd Marvel supervillian team-ups - one of the really incongruous ones, like: Galactus and the Kingpin! Or: the Red Skull and Loki! Just because they're BOTH sinister, doesn't mean it makes narrative sense for them to work together.

So it seems to me. (Well, OK. Seriously, if you read it The American Conservative turns out to be not half as weird as you'd think. Which is still pretty weird. So let me finish my joke.)

And, like surly teamed-up villains, Bully Boy Bucky and Taki are often talking about themselves.

To commit the self-same sin (strictly for illustrative and entertainment purposes, I assure): I have, of late, been reading reprint volumes of old issues of the Fantastic Four. These are, perhaps over-optimistically, marketed as 'essential'. Be that as it may, they are fun. Way back when, the FF spent a lot of time fighting the Frightful Four. And, I swear, Sandman just can't go four frames without reminding Wizard, Trapster and Medusa he's made of sand! His partners are no more gifted raconteurs. Medusa, always talking about her hair; Wizard, his brain; Trapster, his traps. If they'd started a magazine, Frightful Quarterly, it wouldn't have been much fun to read. (Not that they ever beat the FF either, but it was close, man, always close.)

I imagine that a typical scene in the editorial offices of The American Conservative unfolds somewhat like this:

Buchanan: With my powers of irate, pugnacious nativist jingoism, I will rule the -

Taki: Never forget, my American friend, that it is I, Taki, Greek Eurotrash, jetsetting shipping magnate libertine extraordinaire, who -

Ah, hell with it. (You want to read more? It writes itself!)

Anyway, I'm not going anywhere with this, obviously, except here. Latest issue (June 16): Buchanan has a piece about how the neocons have hijacked conservatism. It's partially about the author himself. Taki has a piece about Taki. Par for the course, then. But also an article that is print edition only. I quote all I am able to extract from the website:

The Smiths: A Conservative Rock Band
By Anthony Gancarski
Their back catalogue is more relevant than anything on radio today.

I really want to know what a Taki, Buchanan, Morrissey super-team-up (with Marr on guitar?) would look like. Can someone find a copy (I am sure they are not available on the stands in Singapore) and at least bullet-point the highlights for me? Inquiring minds want to know.

And now google informs me Gancarski has written for Counterpunch. There's an American Conservative-Counterpunch axis? The anti-war thing, I guess. I'm too tired to research this matter further. I'm going to bed.

UPDATE: Welcome, visitors via Volokh! Fairness in parody. It occurs to me, on reflection, that Pat Buchanan does not always talk about himself; yet, as the years pass, one finds it is only with reference to his (er) distinctive personality and temperament that one can stitch together his various claims into an (er) coherent whole. (So we read him as if he is talking about himself.) Taki talks about himself endlessly, and gets up to the most astonishing hijinx; but not (except on occasion) in the pages of The American Conservative. It's still weird that they've teamed-up. But mostly what I'm regretting is this: a Loki-Red Skull team-up actually would make a sort of sense. (That whole Norse/Nazi thing? Duh.) Galactus-Kingpin is unimproveable. Perfect incongruity. Other candidates, loyal readers? The Dread Dormammu and Magneto? The Mandarin and the Salem Seven? Start here for ideas. (And I still want to know what's in theat damn article!)
Posted Sunday, June 15
The Blind Swatchmaker
I'm not one for the word 'meme'. Good old-fashion 'idea' is usually what you are groping for at that point. (I read that somewhere and it's oh-so true.) But there are times ... for example, on vacation in Thailand, confronting a mass of obviously mostly pirated and otherwise suspect goods ... well, I'll just show you.


Exhibit A: 'Bananas in Pajamas, call your Lawyers in Pajamas!' It's a backpack. Here's a close-up of the zipper pouch characters:


Above the pouch, New Wave penguins w/ aviator goggles:

Now the thing about this - the endearingly inexact 'carrot fruit' designation, the disconnect betwixt juxtaposed bicycling veggies and rocking flightless fowl - is that it appears to have been generated, quite literally, at random. Getting back to 'meme', it has all the marks of a biological mutation as opposed to a cultural development.

How do successful organisms come to be? They are blind, genetic variations on other successful organisms. No telos, no design, no intention behind it. Just shuffles of the deck, until something works; then lots of that. We all know this, of course. Darwinism 101. But looking at such stuff as this backpack in a Thai market full of such stuff, I cannot help but think 'meme' may have a use after all. Cultural material is transmissible, imitable, copiable, experimentally variable, in the absence of any understanding of what is being copied, transmitted, imitated, varied. Someone is throwing stuff together blind, then throwing it out there, hoping it sells, and folks are buying it. The Thai market is a 'meme pool', not a market of ideas, or an art market, or any other kind of standard cultural-type thing you might call it

Well, probably that's a load of hooey. But I thought the backpack was pretty funny.

Zoë LOVES her new backpack.