“Repeated, long-term exposure to standing also has been implicated in the development of serious health problems.” Exposure to standing? Like, being in the same room with a standing person?
The Constitution Is Broken and Should Not Be Reclaimed:
Americans could learn simply to do politics through ordinary statute rather than staging constant wars over who controls the heavy weaponry of constitutional law from the past. If legislatures just passed rules and protected values majorities believe in, the distinction between “higher law” and everyday politics effectively disappears.
Hard to see what could go wrong! No Constitutional guarantees for freedom of speech, freedom of the press — heck, no Constitutional prohibition of slavery! Let whatever “values majorities believe in” reign! I mean, come on, when have majorities ever believed in unjust things?
What logicians used to call the “planted axiom” — the fundamental unstated assumption — is pretty obvious here: People who agree with me will always be in charge. So if there’s no freedom of the press, how is that a problem? We’ll just use our power to shut down Fox News, not any of the networks we approve of.
As I’ve been saying for many years, I am always fascinated by the number of philosophers who habitually consider political questions from the position of power. They never seem to imagine what the situation might look like if their enemies were the ones in charge.
taste and judgment
Re: Freddie’s post on the various ways you can like or dislike something, I wonder of this from Auden’s “commonplace book” A Certain World might help:
As readers, we remain in the nursery stage so long as we cannot distinguish between Taste and Judgment, so long, that is, as the only possible verdicts we can pass on a book are two: this I like; this I don’t like.
For an adult reader, the possible verdicts are five: I can see this is good and I like it; I can see this is good but I don’t like it; I can see this is good and, though at present I don’t like it, I believe that with perseverance I shall come to like it; I can see that this is trash but I like it; I can see that this is trash and I don’t like it.
I’m borderline-obsessed with these differently-angled straight lines.
revisiting Saul
After further reflection: I’m the mark. The easy mark. It pains me to say so, but I fell for it. Jimmy didn’t change — didn’t change at all; but he made me think he did. You got me, Jimmy. You’re good, man.
You have to play the cards you’re dealt, and Jimmy was dealt some very bad cards. But in the end, during that final courtroom scene, he played them beautifully — he worked a simultaneous double con.
Con one: To make the court — and ultimately the public, when the news is out — believe that he was the real mastermind behind the Heisenberg drug empire. Sure, he could’ve taken the seven years in cushy prison that he negotiated: but that would have meant being portrayed as a small-timer, a minor player in a game full of bigger players (Walt, Gus, Lalo). Not the deal he wants. So he trades in those seven years for a life sentence — but a life sentence in which he is forever known as the genius, the power behind the throne, the Big Player who had simply been disguised as, in the words of Betsy Kettleman, “the kind of lawyer guilty people hire” — and poor guilty people at that.
Con two: He makes absolutely certain that Kim is there, because at the same time that he is testifying to his own artistry and skill he also works to convince Kim that he has been moved by her example to become a brave truth-teller. (With the Sphinx-like Kim you can never be sure, but I’m inclined to think that she buys it. I don’t think she’d have visited him in prison otherwise.) Note that this idea — that Kim’s courage in making her affidavit stung his conscience and impelled him to reveal his real importance — also works for the public narrative: it makes his claim that he was the real mastermind feel like a confession rather than a boast.
Anyway: it’s fabulous! — the two parts moving in opposite directions, like a complex mechanism that opens one door even as it closes another. He cons the court and the public in one direction while conning Kim in the other. And life in prison is just the price he has to pay for executing that brilliant move. His satisfaction is in knowing that he is the absolute master of his chosen craft. That’s something he can meditate on for the next forty years or so. With or without ice cream.
Lambeth
Whither the Lambeth Conference 2022? I’ve been turning that question over and over in my mind, and I’ve finally realized what I think.
Imagine a married couple. The wife is dynamic, energetic, involved in the community and the pillar of the household too. The husband doesn’t do much, but he does love his weekly poker night with his friends. One afternoon he returns home after buying some beer for his poker buddies and discovers that his wife is gone. He has no idea where she is or when she might be coming back. But, you know, it’s poker night, so off he goes to Bill’s house.
That’s what I think Lambeth 2022 was. Poker night at Bill’s house, while one’s spouse is missing.
