Sensible · Marks · of · Ideas

I hate those "What I Twittered" posts, but I feel myself sliding into the same slough of blog-despond. So here are some things I wrote to some people I know.

To ironed_orchid:
I'm thinking of starting a Society for the Abolition of Egregious Punctuation. This would target, not ignorant errors of the "Eats, Shoots and Leaves" variety, but the offensive insertion of slashes, hyphens and parentheses by philosophers and literary theorists.

To philosophy:
Actually, I think Randroids practice a weird kind of virtue ethics: in any situation, the question to ask is "What would John Galt do?"

To stoics@yahoogroups.com:
I agree, but also by "teleology gone bad" I was referring back to my example of Aquinas "putting the animal cart before the rational horse." If teleology is to make any sense at all (and I'm not sure that it can) it must argue from the Aristotelian premiss that as rational animals, our flourishing is dependent on the proper use of our reason. It cannot make sense when it employs a kind of proto-sociobiology; this is bad philosophy, and bad biology to boot. It is a classical/medieval equivalent of the popular modern misconception of evolution. As Steven Pinker points out, we are not "programmed" to spread our genes; we are constituted such that we feel good in situations where our genes are likely to be spread (for the obvious reason that organisms that feel this way are more likely to pass on their genes than organisms that feel bad or neutral in a potential gene-propagating situation). There is no imperative to reproduce, so it is hard to see how there can be an imperative not to engage in non-reproductive sex.

Unfortunately it looks like we'll have to give Romania a miss, since we've just found out that Bulgaria requires a visa even for Turks with a green passport (even Serbia doesn't do that!). So probably the route will be Thessaloniki, Skopje, then the overnight train to Budapest, keeping fingers crossed through Serbia. Actually, our worries are probably the result of prejudice, but it's hard not to remember the fact that (a) a number of Nalan's relatives wound up in Turkey in order to escape from Serbs (both in 1939 and more recently during the Kosovo war) and (b) my country only recently bombed Belgrade. It's going to be like Fawlty Towers: "Don't mention the war!"

After witnessing a bout of Islamophobia in, of all places, a Stoic forum, it occurred to me that Muslims today occupy a place in popular demonology equivalent to that held by Catholics in Protestant Europe in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. From popular broadsheets to Gothic novels like The Monk, Catholics were favourite bogeymen, and the popular view of Catholics had some uncanny similarities to the way Muslims are often perceived now.

1. Catholics abroad are bent on attacking our countries; Catholics at home owe loyalty to the Pope, not the King. Muslim nations are "rogue states" (unless we want to buy oil from them). Muslim immigrants are a fifth column whose loyalty is to mad mullahs rather than our democratic governments.
2. Catholics are always hatching evil plots. Guy Fawkes was the Osama bin-Laden of his day. Muslim clerics are the Jesuits of our day.
3. Catholics are simultaneously ascetic and licentious. Popular fiction of the day (either Protestant or, in the French case, secularist) often featured philandering priests, poking fun (with some justification) at the contradiction between the celibacy preached by the Church and the sensualism of some of its members. Similarly, Muslims are condemned simultaneously for restricting sexual behaviour and indulging in it. Again, Orientalism aside, there is some justification for this, but we should not forget that it is a nigh-on universal phenomenon found amongst Protestants too.
4. Catholics are irrational, superstitious and opposed to science and social progress. In the seventeenth century, science was strongly identified with Protestantism (see Frances Yates' The Rosicrucian Enlightenment) and Catholic dogma was seen as its antithesis. Now it is Islam which is seen as a dark force trying to drag us back to pre-Enlightenment days.

On this last note, here is part of what I posted to the forum. ( Read more... )

Some time back, a student once told me in shocked tones that he had just found out that Gandalf was gay. After a puzzled pause for thought, I replied, "Ah, you mean Sir Ian McKellan is gay, not Gandalf. Gandalf is not a real person, and even if he were, I don't think he has a sexuality of any kind. Sir Ian, on the other hand, is famously gay."

I had a similar moment just now when (thanks to insomnia) I found that George Takei has just married his partner Brad Altman, and my first thought was "Sulu is gay? Well I never!" Yes, I've been a Star Trek fan since the 1960s and didn't know that George Takei is gay. Shame on me. Anyway, may the happy couple live long and prosper.

One of the good things about globalisation is that, in addition to watching a dance troupe from Senegal performing Turkish folk dances on TV last week, I was able to see Jethro Tull in Ankara last night. It was nice to see that Ian Anderson, at sixty, is still too young to die and by no means too old to rock and roll—he still does his leprechaun dance and indeed looked fitter and more energetic than most of my students. Musically, it was a great performance, with a strong bias to the early stuff, with a lot of tracks from This Was, plus, of course, Thick As A Brick and Aqualung. Anderson's patter was also on form:

[Introducing "Dharma for One" ...]
"Back in the days when your parents listened to this kind of stuff, we had things called drum solos."
[Introducing "Bouree" ...]
"Unfortunately it got turned into light cocktail jazz, the kind of Bach you'd hear on a cruise ship."
[Introducing "Thick as a Brick" ...]
"Remember 1972? That was a funny year. Well, of course you don't remember 1972. I suppose some of you might have been an uneasy stirring in the womb then. Anyway, this is what they called ‘progressive rock’, but I think it's just a nice little tune."

I would really like to go to the cinema with Nalan tonght; the problem is which film to go to. Showing at our local are:

1. Indiana Jones, which would be my normal choice except that IMDB is full of reviews - well, rants - by disappointed Indy fans;
2. The Other Boleyn Girl, which looks like it has gorgeous costumes and locations (and Natalie Portman) but has also been panned by the masses at the IMDB;
3. Sex and The City, which we probably wouldn't understand because we haven't seen the TV series, or if we did understand it, would be a spoiler in the event that we watch the TV series.
4. El Cantante - hmm, not sure I like salsa that much
5. The Orphanage, described as a "Beautifully Sad Catholic Fairy Tale". Double hmmm.

From an article on Alternet (of all places!):

The Serb/Albanian conflict offers damn near perfect lab conditions to prove my case that birth rate trumps military prowess these days, because the Serbs always beat the Albanians in battle, yet they’ve lost their homeland, Kosovo. Here again, we can blame Woodrow Wilson and his talk about "rights." In places where tribes hate each other, a tribe that outbreeds its rival will become the majority, even if it can’t fight. So, after generations of skulking at home making babies, letting the Serbs do the fighting, the Albanians finally became the majority in Kosovo and therefore the official "good guys," being oppressed by the official "bad guys," the Serbs. At least that's the way the nave [sic] American Wilsonian types like Clinton saw it. So when the Serbs fought back against an Albanian rebellion in Kosovo, and dared to beat the Albanians, Clinton decided to bomb the Serbs into letting go of Kosovo, the ancient heartland of a Christian nation that had spent its blood holding off the Turks for hundreds of years.

The Kosovo Albanians proved that military skill doesn’t matter, because they tried and failed to conquer Kosovo the old-fashioned way: armed rebellion by the Kosovo Liberation Army. It was a wipeout: local Serb militias, a bunch of tired middle-aged part-timers and cops, crushed the KLA. What happened next is a beautiful illustration of the way losers win these days: the Albanians took the bodies of KLA men who’d been killed in battle, stripped all weapons and ammo from them, and showed them to gullible Western reporters as victims of a Serb “massacre.” It was a massacre, all right, but only because the KLA couldn’t fight worth a damn. Alive and armed, they were a joke; dead and disarmed, they helped win Kosovo by making their side the "victims," which led directly to U.S. military intervention.

This is not just inaccurate, it's positively evil. Let's leave aside the historical fact that Albanians are descendants of Illyrians, who occupied most of the Adriatic region some time in the Iron Age, while the Serbs only turned up in the sixth century—it's still ancient history (well, early medieval history). As Flashman says in one of George Macdonald Fraser's novels, if we'd all stayed put, Ur of the Chaldes would be pretty crowded by now. As I see it, your homeland is wherever you were born, and the idea of a "historical homeland" (or "ancient heartland"), whether it's for Serbs or Albanians or, for that matter, Arabs or Jews, is a dangerous idea.

What amazes me is that someone is still trying to portray the Serbs as victims. OK, they've had some rough times throughout history, largely as a result of being batted about between the Austrian and Ottoman Empires, but that's a bit like saying the Nazis were victims because of the Treaty of Versailles. Yes, I'm sure Serbs spent a lot of blood holding off the Turks a couple of centuries ago, but that doesn't win them any brownie points now, and it's certainly no excuse for all the "ethnic cleansing", massacres, torture and mass rape they've been up to in more recent times. Neither is there any excuse for denying it by blaming fast-breeding Muslims.

I just had a look at an online survey, which contained the following question:

What is your primary racial/ethnic background?

• White/European American
• Black/African American
• East Asian/East Asian American
• South Asian/South Asian American
• Latino/Hispanic American
• Native/American Indian
• Middle Eastern/Arab American
• Other/Can't remember (specify below).

"Can't remember?" That implies that once upon a time you knew where your roots were, but somehow you just forgot. Now I can just about understand that with a family as complicated as my wife's, which is Turkish/Kosovo Albanian/Bosnian/Kurdish (with possibly a dash of Armenian). But given that the choices there correspond pretty closely to physical types, it's decidedly odd. I'm trying to imagine someone looking in the mirror, and saying "Hmmm, so does my olive skin mean I'm Hispanic American or Arab American? Never could remember that one. Oh hang on, a lot of people from the South of Spain or Italy look a bit like me, so might that make me a European American? Damn my bad memory!"

It's a bit late to be commenting on Saturday's Eurovision Song Contest, but I was busy all day yesterday grading student participation on online forums, helping my wife write an aesthetics exam and fixing my printer. So I'll just say that

• as usual, the winning entry sucked:
• I was surprised that the Greek Britney-clone didn't win, even though she didn't suck as hard as the Russians;
• the Turkish entry by Mor ve Ötesi was excellent;
• they should have a special "Spirit of Eurovision" prize, which should have gone to those Baltic pirates;
• just like last year, the former Yugoslav countries all voted for each other, which makes you wonder why they bothered splitting up Yugoslavia in the first place—as the poet Atilla the Stockbroker said, a lot of politicians should have "Tito was right" branded on their foreheads.

The contest must have imprinted itself on my subconscious, since I've just woken up after a dream in which our very own rodneyorpheus was performing at Eurovision and blowing everyone away with multilingual techno-metal. The only thing that wasn't quite right was his hair, which made him look like one of the Goth kids from South Park.

Dear me, yet another academic has published a book complaining about how the Internet is making us stupid. I haven't had a chance to read Mark Bauerlein's The Dumbest Generation: How the Digital Age Stupefies Young Americans and Jeopardizes Our Future, but there's a summary at the Boston Globe: "8 reasons why this is the dumbest generation". It seems to be the usual stuff: young people are stupid because they can't spell, do maths or remember the name of the President, and what is making them stupid is progressive education and rock'n'roll TV soaps LSD the interwebs. Now there may be a grain of truth in Bauerlein's book (I'll let you know if our library buys it) but from the synopsis, it looks like he is simply taking a few of the skills prized by his generation, noting that the new generation don't seem to possess them to the same extent, and concluding that young people are "dumb". (By the way, is that really the sort of vocabulary one expects from an English professor?) I could use the same methodology to show that the previous generation is not that bright.

1. Computer Illiteracy

In a sample of 50 white, college-educated males* between the ages of 40 and 60, only two respondents were able to correctly explain the difference between the regular expressions "?" and "*", and none were able to read "#!/" as "hash bang slash". Similarly, in a study conducted among members of the Faculty of Humanities at Emory University, 77% were unaware that Java was not only a type of coffee or an island in Indonesia but was also a computer language, 58% thought that C++ was a grade somewhere between C+ and B-, and 18% failed to complete the questionnaire because they could not navigate to the web page.

2. Poor cell-phone skills

Most people over the age of thirty either cannot use SMS at all, or type so slowly one would think they did not have reversible thumbs.

3. Impoverished vocabulary

Large numbers of middle-aged and older people are completely unaware of words like "anime", "machinima" or "mashup".

4. Orthographical fixedness

Many older people are unable to decode even the simplest of letter-transformations, such as "teh" for "the". They also tend to be poor at phonics: in the aforementioned Emory University survey, less than half of the tenured faculty were able to read "ur" as "you're", though TAs did much better here.

5. Lack of critical thinking

Many older people are so uncritical of what they read that they send money to people claiming to be trying to smuggle funds out of Nigeria.

6. Inability to multi-task

Psychologists at the Stanford Research Institute recently conducted an experiment to measure the multi-tasking abilities of subjects aged over fifty from a variety of ethnic and educational backgrounds. In the first phase of the experiment, subjects were asked to write an essay on well-known subject; the answers were then graded by Freshman English instructors to provide a standard metric. In the second phase, a similar essay task was given, but this time it had to be performed while holding a conversation on a cell phone, chatting using IM and listening to indie rock: performance dropped dramatically.

7. Cultural sterility

Walk into any retirement community in America and you will be hard-pressed to find anyone who can name three characters from Battlestar Galactica. You might do better with Star Trek, but only TOS.

8. Ignorance of local geography

To be fair, older people often have an impressive knowledge of national and even world geography, but they are alarmingly ignorant of the geography of their home towns. In a series of interviews conducted on a typical suburban street, CNBC found that most older people were unable to give directions to well-known locations like the best park for skateboarding or a cool mall to hang in.

 

* All statistics are invented.