Watching Scott Alexander try unsuccessfully to grapple with Lacanian thought reminds me of the summer, many many years ago, when I made the same effort. I really did give it my best shot, but in the end decided (a) this is probably total bullshit, and (b) even if it’s not total bullshit, there’s nothing here usable by me. I think that second realization was the really important one, and one that I’ve had often over the years: Sometimes it really doesn’t matter whether a body of thought is valid or not; what matters is whether I, being who I am, placed as I am, can make use of it. And there is literally not one idea in Lacan that I can use. Which is all I need to know.
Alexander Stern on "The Technocrat’s Dilemma":
The technocratic response to misinformation and conspiracy theory only exacerbates the problem and further validates the most extreme reactions. Instead of responding with humility and transparency, technocrats and their media partners attempt to reassert epistemic control. They refuse to admit mistakes, they appeal to authority and credentials instead of evidence, and they attempt to shut down dissenting voices instead of taking up their challenges. They lump legitimate critiques together with the most outrageous disinformation, with the implicit message that more deference is needed, rather than more debate. As a result, their crusade for truth begins to look more and more like censorship and scapegoating from an establishment doing everything in its power to deflect responsibility for the cascading crises.
When technocrats construe misinformation as a problem of “information literacy” that must be solved by experts, they don’t just misdiagnose the ailment; they express a worldview that generates much of our information dysfunction to begin with. It is a view of misinformation that excuses cases where elites themselves have misinformed or lied. It papers over the ways technocrats have earned mistrust. It ignores the obvious problems with conceiving of truth as the remit of a special class. And it considers the public’s suspicion of technocrats not as an occasion for self-reflection, but only as another public policy problem to “solve.”
Elon Musk could become the world’s greatest hero by buying Twitter and then immediately shutting it down.
Seriously, it would be a revelatory moment. Ninety percent of the people who shitpost on Twitter would just start shitposting on Facebook and after a few days wouldn’t remember that Twitter had ever existed. But ten percent would have a fighting chance of finding something better to do with their time.
UPDATE: Now that the deal is done — probably? — I think one of the biggest immediate consequences is a dramatic upturn in the use of text-replacement apps by journalists. Can you imagine writing this piece if you had to type all the scare quotes around “free speech” with your own fingers? Hello RSI therapy.
I wish you all — all of you reading this — could teleport here right now, right in this very moment, and I could take you on a long walk around one of the peninsula’s towns on a Sunday morning, all blue skies and sunshine, to bear witness to the pride with which it’s all being maintained. Just a few folks left. And yet: streets swept, shop gates lifted, kissaten beacons flashing. One imagines flying carp in the spring and the last of the summer festival shrines carried on the shoulders of shirtless men in white-rag fundoshi underwear.
But you’d have to come now. Right now. Like a tiny nub of glowing charcoal, this brightness and warmth isn’t long for our world.
this and that
I am working on some things that will (I hope) be significant additions to my Invitation & Repair project, but those are taking a while to develop. It’s getting near the end of the semester and such times are always busy and stressful, so opportunity for reflection is currently a bit scarce.
Whenever I see something online that I think I want to read, I put it in Instapaper — and then I try to leave it for a while. Often when I visit Instapaper the chief thing I do is delete the pieces I only had thought I needed to read. So for me it’s not just a read-later service, it’s a don’t-read-later service. But that only works if I don’t go there too often. I try to catch up with my Instapaper queue once a week at most.
One of the most essential tips for researchers and writers: revisit and review. It’s not enough to make notes — however you prefer to make them — you have to set aside time to review what you’ve written and find the most important stuff. Some items might be recycled through several review sessions before finding a place in your writing. All serious thinking is iterative. My first task, once the current school term ends, is to revisit some of the key tags on this blog to see what connections I’ve missed, what ideas bear further development.
Late to this, but my friend Richard Gibson has a smart and provocative piece at the Hog Blog on maps, territories, and Ukraine.
“We cannot be His ambassadors reconciling the world to God, if we have not ourselves been willing to be reconciled to one another.” — Lesslie Newbigin.
I am alarmed by how dramatically the quality of writing in the New York Review of Books has declined since Robert Silvers’s death. Essay after essay seems structurally disordered or filled with confusing sentences or simply lacking in clear purpose. People always said that Silvers was an editorial genius and I’m ever more inclined to believe the praise.
The best punditry strategy: Claiming that the people you hate are scheming to destroy your audience. If they do what you predict, you rejoice in your status as prophet; if they don’t, you claim credit for having sounded the warning that averted the catastrophe.
“A leading television commentator lectured me that I presumed to judge the experience of the world from the viewpoint of my own limited Soviet and prison-camp experience. Indeed, how true! Life and death, imprisonment and hunger, the cultivation of the soul despite the captivity of the body: how very limited that is compared to the bright world of political parties, yesterday’s numbers on the stock exchange, amusements without end, and exotic foreign travel!” — Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, as quoted in a brilliant essay by Gary Saul Morson. (His excellence hasn’t been lessened by Silvers’s departure from the scene.)
Hummingbird clearwing moth visiting my patio – couldn’t get a sharp photo though.
a tiny rant
Recently I listened to a highly-regarded political podcast in which some of the participants referred to Senator Fine-Stine while others spoke of Senator Fine-Steen. I have several thoughts:
- Any journalists who plan to talk about a person for half an hour in public have a positive moral obligation to decide in advance how that person’s name is to be pronounced.
- It is not difficult to discover how Senator Feinstein pronounces her name, so what does it say about journalists’ commitment to their job when they can’t be bothered to find out?
- The mispronunciation some of them chose is not just wrong but indefensible, because the syllable -ein cannot legitimately pronounced one way in the first half of a name and a different way in the second half of the name.
- I blame Leonard Bernstein for this confusion. As far as I know, he is the first famous American with a name ending in -stein who chose to pronounce it -steen. Now it’s a question for everybody in the same nominative condition.
- Note, though, that there’s never a debate when someone’s name begins with Stein or simply is Stein.
- I think we should all pronounce names that end with -stein the correct way (the Einstein Way, let’s call it) (the Ein Steinway?) and if anyone with such a name wants to pronounce it -steen we should tell them that they’re wrong and refuse to comply.
UPDATE: Matt Stover has written to inform me that — as Tom Wolfe has informed others — Leonard Bernstein pronounced his name Bern-Stine and corrected those who called him Bern-steen. I had always heard his name pronounced in the latter way and thought him responsible. Turns out I was, unforgivably, blaming the victim. On the other side of the ledger, my friend Joe Mangina — who shall be cited in a forthcoming post — reminds me of this.
I don’t know what happened to the Future. It’s as if we lost our ability, or our will, to envision anything beyond the next hundred years or so, as if we lacked the fundamental faith that there will in fact be any future at all beyond that not-too-distant date. Or maybe we stopped talking about the Future around the time that, with its microchips and its twenty-four-hour news cycles, it arrived. Some days when you pick up the newspaper it seems to have been co-written by J. G. Ballard, Isaac Asimov, and Philip K. Dick. Human sexual reproduction without male genetic material, digital viruses, identity theft, robot firefighters and minesweepers, weather control, pharmaceutical mood engineering, rapid species extinction, US Presidents controlled by little boxes mounted between their shoulder blades, air-conditioned empires in the Arabian desert, transnational corporatocracy, reality television — some days it feels as if the imagined future of the mid-twentieth century was a kind of checklist, one from which we have been too busy ticking off items to bother with extending it. Meanwhile, the dwindling number of items remaining on that list — interplanetary colonization, sentient computers, quasi-immortality of consciousness through brain-download or transplant, a global government (fascist or enlightened) — have been represented and re-represented so many hundreds of times in films, novels and on television that they have come to seem, paradoxically, already attained, already known, lived with, and left behind. Past, in other words.
injured
My Hedgehog Review essay “Injured Parties” — on free speech, iniuria, charity, social and legal remedies, and strategic inattention — is unpaywalled, so please read!