Alan Jacobs

Morozov’s essay eviscerates O’Reilly’s career in order to out him as a fake progressive who confuses entrepreneurialism with political freedom. In this story, O’Reilly is the indie rocker who sold out — or maybe the hipster marketer who induced other indie rockers to sell out. Either way, O’Reilly’s foundational crime is taking something radical and transformative like free software and mainstreaming it by making it palatable to entrepreneurs and consumers. And this is the kind of mainstreaming that also turns participatory, responsible governments into pathetic tools of crony capitalism and (in a worst-case scenario) privatized military forces.

As I said, the essay must be read as an allegory about a set of memes, not as a profile of a man. But Morozov is correct to identify a disturbing slipperiness at the core of the “open government” meme. It sounds like freedom but is really just another way of turning you into a passive data point, easily mined by the highest bidder.

Some form of détente in the culture wars might once have been possible, recognizing that neither gays nor conservative Christians are going away anytime soon (or are entirely mutually exclusive), when the fight was more evenly matched. But a defeated group of traditionalists who evinced little concern for prerogatives of their opponents won’t be in much of a position to make bargains.

Which brings us to what might be the biggest political miscalculation of the Christian right: entering politics to make sinners virtuous rather than to defend their own freedom of conscience.

So remember: 12:01 a.m., May 26. The schedule after that will be approximately as follows: the first animated GIFs from the first episode will appear at 12:01 and a half, people will complain that Netflix is down at 12:02, spoilers will begin appearing on Twitter at 12:03, angry tweets about spoilers at 12:04, think pieces about how this distribution model affects spoilers at 12:05, think pieces about how this distribution model might result in the return of Firefly at 12:06, listicles of 10 more shows that Netflix should revive at 12:07, complaints that these episodes “suck” at 12:08, complaints about haters at 12:09, questions about why people who are so into Arrested Development refuse to watch Community at 12:10, and 25 pictures of cats watching Arrested Development at 12:11.

I wish that I could be as charitable as you are and say that Morozov is raising good questions. He could be, but he works so hard to make dialogue impossible that he actually impairs discussion of the questions he purports to raise. And his misrepresentations, accepted by those who don’t know much about the topic, do harm the work of people who happen to fall in the crosshairs.

It would be terrific if Morozov were saying that there are people co-opting the idea of open government, or web 2.0, or open source, or whatever, and rendering these terms less useful, pointing back to their original impulse and real meaning, but instead, he uses the presence of pretenders to deny that there was ever any merit to the movement in the first place.

I find it rather sad that the kind of attack media that has degraded our politics is now being unleashed on the technology world. We’ve now got our own Rush Limbaugh or Ann Coulter. I don’t think public discourse about important topics is improved by any of these figures. Polarization is their game.

The terrible news that Iain Banks is officially very poorly arrived today. Unlike others on these pages, I don’t know him personally, but his books have been a source not only of delight, but of inspiration.

I’m not a literary critic, so I won’t say any more about the writing style than that it makes me want to read more of it. Also, while I do (mostly) love the Iain Banks books, it is the Iain M. Banks version, and particularly The Culture, which has had the most impact on me, and which makes me want to write something, having heard that news today. In his Culture novels, Banks has created what as far as I know is the only convincing utopia in print.

poetrysociety:

Baseball Season: Marianne Moore throwing out the first pitch 1968.

davidjphooker:

(via No.9 | An Artist’s Journey)

As an alternative to National Poetry Month, I propose that we have an International Anti-Poetry month. As part of the activities, all verse in public places will be covered over—from the Statue of Liberty to the friezes on many of our government buildings. Poetry will be removed from radio and TV (just as it is during the other eleven months of the year). Parents will be asked not to read Mother Goose and other rimes to their children but only … fiction. Religious institutions will have to forego reading verse passages from the liturgy and only prose translations of the Bible will recited, with hymns strictly banned. Ministers in the Black churches will be kindly requested to stop preaching. Cats will be closed for the month by order of the Anti-Poetry Commission. Poetry readings will be replaced by self-help lectures. Love letters will have to be written only in expository paragraphs. Baseball will have to start its spring training in May. No vocal music will be played on the radio or sung in the concert halls. Children will have to stop playing all slapping and counting and singing games and stick to board games and football.

Watching a Twitter conversation unfold today, I was reminded for the hundredth time that debates about same-sex marriage tend to be so fruitless because SSM doesn’t really mark the point of disagreement. There are already preceding disagreements about what marriage itself is and is for, but even those are not foundational. People disagree about all these things because they disagree about what human flourishing (eudaimonia) is, about what kind of life is generally speaking best for human beings to live.

For instance, if you’re a libertarian you will ipso facto have a high regard for personal autonomy and will be willing to pay a pretty heavy price in other goods — family stability, for instance — in order to preserve and extend autonomy. That won’t be your only value, but you wouldn’t be a libertarian if it weren’t near the top of your list. And the emphasis on autonomy will have a major influence on what you think marriage fundamentally is and on the rules you’ll be willing to accept for getting into and out of it.

Conversely, if you’re a traditionalist Christian, who thinks of the summum bonum as life lived in imitation of Christ and in communion with God, all pursued within a uniquely constituted Christian community, then your account of flourishing will derive from that. And you will think of marriage as an image of the union between Christ and his Church, and child-bearing in terms of raising vibrant members of the body of Christ. (Marriage and child-bearing won’t be wholly constituted by those goods, but they will be irreplaceably foundational to your picture of marriage and child-rearing.)

This isn’t the whole story, of course. In practice things get more complicated: for instance, a traditionalist Christian might become a contingent libertarian because he or she thinks that in a libertarian society the Church is most likely to be left alone to do its work and to be what it’s called to be. (I.e., In the secular realm y’all can call marriage anything you want as long as you leave us Christians alone to define it as we wish within the Church.) But if you’re arguing about SSM, or any other deeply controversial moral issue, and you’re wondering how someone else can read the situation so differently than you do, then the answer is likely to be found by digging into one another’s deepest beliefs about what makes for a really good human life. In light of those beliefs many other beliefs can become far more understandable.

Dream Vision (Apocalyptic Dream): Albrecht Dürer, 1525. Watercolour on paper, 30 x 43 cm. Text written by the artist beneath the watercolour: “In 1525, during the night between Wednesday and Thursday after Whitsuntide, I had this vision in my sleep, and saw how many great waters fell from heaven. The first struck the ground about four miles away from me with such a terrible force, enormous noise and splashing that it drowned the entire countryside. I was so greatly shocked at this that I awoke before the cloudburst. And the ensuing downpour was huge. Some of the waters fell some distance away and some close by. And they came from such a height that they seemed to fall at an equally slow pace. But the very first water that hit the ground so suddenly had fallen at such velocity, and was accompanied by wind and roaring so frightening, that when I awoke my whole body trembled and I could not recover for a long time. When I arose in the morning, I painted the above as I had seen it. May the Lord turn all things to the best.” (Kunsthistoriches Museum, Vienna)

All this via Tom Clark, who provides commentary on Dürer’s dream by Marguerite Yourcenar. David Dark on Twitter pointed me to this.