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"If you skim Sunlight’s findings, and bring to them a sporting quotient of party prejudice, you might conclude that Republicans are, say, “idiots” and Democrats are, oh, “showoffs.” To use the pre-K-level idiom preferred by the biased twerp in each of us.
If, however, you listen to a sampler of speeches by various congresspeople at a range of oration grade levels, you might find something completely different."
"In his short book The Communist Hypothesis, Badiou argues that today all that remains of the ideological machinery of freedom, human rights and Western values is a simple, negative statement: communism failed. The labors of the capitalist philosophers, he says, amount to little more than the assertion that there is no choice but to consent to the capitalist, parliamentary present. But what "exactly do we mean by 'failure' when we refer to a historical sequence that experimented with one or another form of the communist hypothesis?" he asks."
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On this occasion, though, Žižek's response was serious. In speaking of a communist "we," he explained, he was not evoking an already existing political subject, let alone an inherently revolutionary sociological class. Rather, the use of "we" could best be understood as a speech act or a performative utterance – that is, as one of those utterances identified by the philosopher of language JL Austin that do not describe an existing reality but instead produce a new one. Just as statements like "I do" or "You're fired!" are themselves actions, transforming rather than describing a situation, Žižek said he hoped the act of evoking a communist "we" would contribute to bringing a collective subject into existence.
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Badiou's point is not that the participants in these uprisings are subjectively communists – indeed, after decades of successful annihilation of the left across the Middle East, this would hardly be expected. Rather the point is that a successful popular uprising points toward the horizon designated by Marx as the withering of the state, opening up a realm of non-state political action in which that elusive figure "the people" comes into being.
"Communism", Badiou writes, "here means: a common creation of a collective destiny." Such a common, he argues, is generic, representing humanity as a whole, and capable of overcoming statist contradictions between substantive identities. When female doctors from the provinces sleep peacefully in the middle of a circle of young men, when a row of Christians keeps watch over Muslims at prayer, when a group of engineers entreats young suburbanites to hold firm, these situations and inventions, he suggests, constitute the communism of movement.
"It's as a response to that cultural void that science fiction becomes genuinely interesting. In the midst of an ever accelerating technological revolution, science fiction has emerged as the literature best able to articulate the relentless pace of social change. And as that technological revolution has spread outward from the western world, so the symbols and archetypes of science fiction have become a shared language for understanding the new world we are entering."
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The geek culture that made Marvel comics part of its mythology has, like all other cultures, been repurposed by capitalism as a way of selling products to the mass market. And with an estimated 25% of under-34s self-identifying with the geek demographic, it's arguable that geek culture is really just a response to a lack of culture, a generation who have grown up alienated from any sense of cultural belonging, and are left clinging on to Hollywood product
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There may only be a small wave of translated SF reaching the anglophone world today, but the internet is quickly unleashing much more. I'm only beginning to scratch the surface myself. Who are the other international SF authors we should all be reading today?
"It’s a Google Ngram that plots the prevalence of two terms — consumer and customer — in books between 1770 and 2004."
Digital Humanities: Using tools from the 1990s to answer questions from the 1960s about 19th century America.
"This tendency means that most language that's specific to a domain will generally trend towards the usable at the expense of the learnable. The impact this has on individuals new to the domain, however, is that of a wall. An impediment. Overcoming this obstacle requires a bit of good faith on the part of the beginner; to cross quickly over the chasm between beginner and expert, they must recognize and respect this aspect of the conversations they will invariably become a part of. When faced with a term that is used in a strange way, beginners should ask for clarification, and not start arguments over semantics they don't yet even understand. Experts will recognize these arguments as coming from a place where concepts are not yet fully understood, and while they may recognize the need to help educate, if the newbie is being belligerent, they may just ignore them instead. Nobody wins; the signal/noise ratio has been decreased, the beginner doesn't learn, and everyone's time is wasted."
Philosophy professor Jonathan Lear sets out to answer this question in his new book, “A Case for Irony,” attempting to redefine and flesh out this term from the pat and the vague. In Lear’s view, irony is not just about humor: It’s meant to serve as a sobering mirror to our lives and actions, revealing and reaffirming to us our passions and beliefs. It shows how exactly we measure up to our professed ideals, all in an effort to strive for excellence – to become better at whatever it is we devote our lives to. Irony asks us, in a fundamental way, “Am I really who I say I am?”
"Price's naturalism is "without mirrors" because the rejection of representationalism is a rejection of the idea that thought or language mirrors the world in such a way that we can read off significant ontological or metaphysical truths from the structure of language or thought. Language is not a mirror of nature. Price thus stands in general solidarity with Dewey, Wittgenstein, Rorty, and Brandom."
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Suppose one has a general commitment to some synoptic philosophical program, say, naturalism or empiricism. Given virtually any such program, there will be domains of common discourse that seem to sit uneasily within the program. In the case of a naturalist or empiricist program, for instance, Price points to the 4 M's -- Morality, Modality, Meaning, and the Mental -- as particularly problematic. Representationalism assumes that if these domains of discourse make sense, if they are respectable and ineliminable parts of any adequate worldview, if they can contain truths about reality, there must be some corresponding domain of objects and properties referred to or meant that such discourse is true of. Via the representationalist assumption, a concern originally about the structure and function of different parts of language leads to a metaphysical worry about the fundamental structure of reality. Call this the "semantic ladder" that takes us from linguistic concerns down to worldly ontology. As long as one clings to representationalism, one will be committed to (or to explaining away) the existence of objects that, except to the rabid Platonist, seem admittedly queer.
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Price wants to block the semantic ladder by rejecting representationalism altogether. This move does not excuse the naturalist from worrying about how discourse about Morality, Modality, Meaning, and the Mental (and we can throw in a fifth M, Mathematics, for good measure) fits with our so-called common, 'descriptive' discourse. But these worries call for an elaboration of linguistic theory, not metaphysics, and here Price proposes his global expressivism cum functional pluralism as the proper form such a linguistic theory should take. His expressivism takes inspiration from earlier expressivist theories concerning, e.g., morality or meaning. These theories tried to avoid uncomfortable metaphysical claims about values and meanings by rejecting the notion that claims in these domains, unlike the claims in ordinary or scientific descriptive discourse, are representational. Rather, they play a distinctive, non-descriptive function in our language, and when we see them in that light, we can no longer take seriously questions about the metaphysical status of their supposed objects. Such locallyexpressivist theories reach the height of their sophistication, Price thinks, in Simon Blackburn's quasi-realism.
"We mistook Obama for a man of strong convictions. Why? Because he has an aesthetic admiration for people with strong convictions, people with names like Gandhi and King. Yet the emotion of conviction -- a feeling that will not let you go -- is foreign to him now and probably always was."
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The citizen who asked about the Tea Party must have come away thinking that the president was a nice guy whose grasp of specifics was derived from unnamed authorities. A nice guy, however, whose thinking (to judge by his own presentation) hardly rated comparison with the sharp focus and simple solutions of the Tea Party. Rather than confront an opponent, Obama treated his listeners as barely educable children, while propping himself on formulas any clever child would recognize as mere caption-phrases, scattered and unconnected. One cannot help remarking that in the debt-ceiling negotiations, contrary to Obama's expectation, the Tea Party proved eminently willing to "identify specifically" what they wanted to do. The answer was cut Medicare and Social Security rather than raise taxes. And the president was willing to grant what they asked.
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Who was Barack Obama after all? A young politician who excelled at giving sonorous utterance to prepared words (every mass address of the 2008 campaign was done with a teleprompter) and who could defend with ad-lib competence a law or program developed by a suitable conglomerate of others. But Obama lacks the ability to explain a policy or a predicament. He cannot argue. He cannot occupy a position and fight to hold it. He cannot mimic or humor or deflate, or detect those hidden points of leverage that may reshape a public discussion by the force of wit and invention. Not will not, but cannot. It is a kind of ability impossible to hide.
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"Technology is indeed our friend, but it can become a dangerous flatterer, creating an illusion of control. Professors and librarians have been disappointed by the actual search skills even of elite college students, as I discussed here. We need quite a bit in our wetware memory to help us decide what information is best to retrieve. I've called this the search conundrum.
The issue isn't whether most information belongs online rather than in the head. We were storing externally even before Gutenberg. It's whether we're offloading the memory that we need to process the other memory we need. Strangely enough, Google Book Search still doesn't display a full copy of Malton's over 200-year-old masterpiece. Let's have it online soon. But let's not forget that healthy sense of "insufficiency.""
"The Augmented Mind looks at the three eras of language (carried by the human body, then by literacy and now by electricity) and how the globalization and interconnectivity of today's world has impacted our development and growth."
"You know one thing that annoys me? The way some people on the internet use the word “curator.” People find cool stuff online and put links to that cool stuff on their website, and they say that they’re “curating” the internet. When Jorn Barger invented that kind of thing he was content to call it a weblog — a record or “log” of interesting stuff he found online."
A definition of America's war vocabulary a la the Devil's Dictionary.
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So, my point is that celebrating the awesome in popular science is in many respects celebrating the awesomeness of other people. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, maybe it’s a good thing. At best, the sense of a shared human ability to comprehend might mean non scientists feel a connection with science through invoking a sense of awe (a collective feeling of “omg, people are amaz-ing”). At worst, that sense of majesty gets carried over to the scientists, and audiences see a difference between their puny little brains and the great cleverness of others (a more divisive feeling connected to disconnects with scientific communities). I’m not sure which one wins out. My best guess is bits of both, and probably neither most of the time, entirely depends on context and individuals involved.
So, there is a politics embedded in the awesome – a story of human connection with natural objects, ideas and other people – and I think is worth bearing in mind.
"The hazardous character of technology—the word, the concept—is a consequence of the history just outlined. As I have argued, the generality of the word—its lack of specificity, the very aspect which evidently enabled it to supplant its more explicit and substantial precursors—also made it peculiarly susceptible to reification. Reification, as the philosopher George Lukacs famously explained, is what occurs when we endow a human activity with the characteristics of a thing or things. It thereby acquires, as he put it, “a ‘phantom-objectivity,’ an autonomy that seems so strictly rational and all-embracing as to conceal every trace of its fundamental nature: the relation between people.”27 In contemporary discourse, private and public, technologies are habitually represented by “things”—by their most conspicuous artifactual embodiments: transportation technology by automobiles, airplanes, and railroads; nuclear technology by reactors, power plants, and bombs; information technology by computers, mobile telephones, and television; and so on. By consigning technologies to the realm of things, this well-established iconography distracts attention from the human—socioeconomic and political—relations which largely determine who uses them and for what purposes. Because most technologies in our corporate capitalist system have the legal status of private property, vital decisions about their use are made by the individual businessmen who own them or by the corporate managers and government officials who exercise the virtual rights of ownership. The complexity and obscurity of the legal relations governing the use of our technologies, abetted by the reification that assigns them to the realm of things—all of these help to create the aura of “phantom objectivity” that envelops them."
"A new study of word frequencies in political blogs finds that equations describing earthquake evolution fit the eruption of topics onto political blogs.
News tends to move quickly through the public consciousness, noted physicist Peter Klimek of the Medical University of Vienna and colleagues in a paper posted on arXiv.org. Readers usually absorb a story, discuss it with their friends, and then forget it. But some events send lasting reverberations through society, changing opinions and even governments."
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