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Sunday, Mar 06, 2005
slap fight
"Confession: I used to find it exhilarating to read James Wolcott when he was writing in his fresh, careful, smart and unpredictable fashion about TV for the Village Voice and the exigencies of the cultural moment for Vanity Fair. But during the last few years, once he discovered his own simple, predictable, self-righteous, driving political convictions and decided to give them endless, repetitive vent, I have found myself wondering what ever happened to the terrific cultural critic he once was. Rage is easy. Preaching to the choir is easy. "Spouting the same old tailpipe exhaust," as he remarked recently about Charles Krauthammer, is easy. What Wolcott used to do is hard."
Thursday, Mar 03, 2005
god help us
"To be sure, neither document leaves any doubt about evangelicals’ opposition to high-profile issues like gay marriage, abortion, and stem-cell research. But what the essays in Toward an Evangelical Public Policy also suggest is that there are many evangelicals in the country who have looked at conservative Republicans’ co-opting of Christianity in recent years and found that they didn’t particularly like what they saw. Anyone uncomfortable with biblical justifications for public policy will find a lot to squirm over in the book -- but Democrats will also find many ideas that they can wholeheartedly agree with on a policy level."
Wednesday, Mar 02, 2005
el metrix
“Say hello to Omar."
Saturday, Feb 26, 2005
game, set, match
"Beyond a certain hour, the only games worth playing are those amenable to game theoretic models. Lo and behold, I should be up teetering near the crack of dawn with an economist intent on applying the stag hunt dilemma, a kind of assurance/trust/coordination game, to the rigors of modern dating. Far from being an expert, in fact, rather more of a dating dilettante for whom even the word seems like a slip of the tongue, I listened to his explanation in the hopes being struck by lighting or, at the very least, an appropriate revelation."
Friday, Feb 25, 2005
lancing, misperceptions
i had avoided lance mannions blog because his name reminded me too much of race bannon but i can ignore it no longer despite my johnny quest flashbacks.
toolsy mctoolserson
james wolcott is the ichiro suzuki of the blogosphere. he ought henceforth be referred to merely as "Wolcott!". discuss.
condi must be crushed
i hear theyve registered at halliburton and plan to honeymoon in the green zone. what could be more romantic than bullets over baghdad?
horrible witz
the scouts love berubes early returns in the bigs versus the serially unserious kulture warriors. his strikeout to balk ratio is quite impressive. id liken him more to a young greg maddux than a rude pundit though. hes always nibbling around the corners of an argument, picking out the holes in your swinglines. yet hes old school enough to come inside with some heated debate, if necessary, when served up rehashed boiler-plate presumptions. five tool blogger, for sure. expect to see him in the rotation for years to come.
reality trip
"Later, I began to wonder far more about the ways in which orientalist images and representations were understood to be straightforward contributors to racist or imperialist ideology. The functionalism of Said’s original analysis became more and more urgent, demanding, and simplistic. To some extent, critiques that followed in the model of Orientalism began to presume, with increasingly less and less explicit theorizing, that not only were such images incorporated into racism or colonialism but were explanatory or causal to it. Eventually, the scholarship decomposed into a narrative of activism and an off-the-shelf theory of cultural interpretation. At that point, the mirroring of the cultural right and cultural left matured. Though drawn to very different texts or images, both groups in the United States shared an understanding of culture as cipher or code, that almost-subliminal references to past tropes or images or stereotypes somehow transmitted the entire history of associated ideologies and systems to later generations, that even a subtle incorporation of historical misrecognition or misrepresentation contaminated the whole of culture."
founding fodder
"We were discussing notions of individual and group rights, and how defending the rights of the former can involving infringing upon the reigning conceptions of the latter. But where does that leave the group out from which the rights-bearing individual emerged in the first place? (The specific context of the discussion was Iraq, and whether one can coherently speak of fighting against some portion of the population of a state in the name of providing "rights" to another, in some ways indistinguishable portion of the population.) With a little bit of guidance from Rousseau, we gradually came to talking about the political problem of beginnings. Figuring out how to legitimately initiate a political project is a central, perhaps the central, preoccupation of political theorists, and takes us far beyond Iraq; it haunts Locke's theory of property rights, is echoed in the fears of ancient Roman republican thinkers, and animates the argument in Plato's Republic, the touchstone of all philosophical literature in the West. The crux is always the same: as Juvenal (and then Alan Moore) put it, Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? Who watches the watchmen? Or, more relevantly, who makes the rules for the rule-makers?"