Thomas Kincaid – Rule Follower

Vanity Fair has the list of “16 Rules to follow for the Thomas Kincaid look.”  I cannot help but be reminded of the existentialist complaint that strict rule-following only gets you elementary knowledge and not mastery.

The Quantum of Fitness

No, this is not a post about Daniel Craig’s abdominal muscles.  I’m about three or four hours from seeing the new Bond movie for my birthday.  I was reading Nietzsche today, looking, to pile on the word plays, for a quantum of solace of my own after attending a rather shocking lecture on bioethics, Christianity, and the liberal citizen.  I got what I was looking for, which was mainly insight into my own foolishness, but I also stumbled upon an interesting turn of phrase in Walter Kauffman’s translation of “Twilight of the Idols.”

 

The new Germany represents a quantum of fitness, both inherited and acquired by training, so that for a time it may expend its accumulated store of strength, even squander it.

Later in the passage, he writes,

One will notice that I wish to be just to the Germans: I do not want to break faith with myself here. I must therefore also state my objections to them. One pays heavily for coming to power: power makes stupid.  The Germans–once they were called the people of thinkers: do they think at all today? The Germans are now bored with spirit, the Germans now mistrust the spirit; politics swallows up all serious concern for really spiritual matters.  Deutschland, Deutschland, uber alles– I fear that was the end of German philosophy.

 

And now to return to matters that lack seriousness, let’s watch the fake Quantum of Solace Trailer again!

UPDATE:  Another quote a couple of pages later that I missed originally:

In the end, no one can spend more than he has: that is true of the individual, it is true of a people. If one spends oneself for power, for power politics, for economics, world trade, parliamentarianism, and military interest–if one spends in this direction the quantum of understanding, seriousness, will, and self-overcoming which one represents, then it will be lacking for the other direction.

“Quantums”-a-plenty!

Economic Man?

I made a mistake in presuming that the self-interests of organisations, specifically banks and others, were such that they were best capable of protecting their own shareholders and their equity in the firms — Alan Greenspan (2008)

 

The outstanding discovery of recent historical and anthropologicalresearch is that man’s economy, as a rule, is submerged in his social relationships. He does not act so as to safeguard his individual interest in the possession of material goods; he acts so as to safeguard his social standing, his social cliams, his social assets. He values material goods only in so far as they serve this end. Neither the process of production nor that of distribution is linked to specific economic interests attached to the possession of goods; but every single step in that process are geared toward a number of social interests which eventually require that the step be taken. These interests will be very different in a small hunting or fishing community from those in a vast despotic society, but in either case the economic system will be run on noneconomic motives.”  – Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation (1944)

Way to not legislate from the bench…

“Even if plaintiffs have shown irreparable injury from the Navy’s training exercises, any such injury is outweighed by the public interest and the Navy’s interest in effective, realistic training of its sailors,” Roberts wrote.

From The Washington Post.

It would please me greatly to say this get reversed by an executive order early in the Obama administration.

“Against the Day” at 225 pages…

Traverse.  They are the family that seem to connect the stories of everyone else.  Telling last name.  I just learned from Reef Traverse, that his father, named Webb Traverse, was in fact the famed Western Outlaw, The  Kielseguhr Kid. As Reef is taking Webb home for burial, he passes time reading  The Chums of Chance at the End of the Earth– a dime novel version of a Chums of Chance story we read “for real” about through Pynchon’s narrative.  

Something else I have also noticed.  Webb Traverse, as the Kielseguhr Kid, was being pursued for a while by Lew Basnight, a detective who met up with the Chums of Chance at the Chicago World’s Fair, where they met Dr. Heino Vanderjuice, who met with Scarsdale Vibe — a shadowy magnate to whom Kit Traverse is now possibly heir to the empire.  

Lew was taken by a pair of English adventurers back to England after they found Lew surviving a dynamite attack.  While attending a meeting of an English society known as T.W.I.T., it was suggested to Lew that it was possible that the dynamite attack may have knocked him through to a different dimension/timeline.  Obviously, the speaker is a member of a society called TWIT, yet we see that Lew knows the Traverse family AND he knows the characters in a children’s adventure novel series.  So far I would say that this is the most beautiful playing with reality that I have ever read.

Snow!

Since it is snowing in the Twin Cities, (though it doesn’t look like the picture in the paper this far south) I am using my personal authority to declare it acceptable to listen to The Nutcracker out of season.

I think I’m going to have a heart attack and die from not surprise

It turns out that professors have little influence on the political views of students.  Parents, on the other hand, have an incredibly strong pull, which is why they are so good at convincing their children that Professors make people “more liberal” even though there is not a shred of evidence.  

 

Also lovely is the lamentation by George Mason economist, Dr. Daniel Klein:

The real issue, said Mr. Klein, who calls himself a libertarian, is that social democratic ideas dominate universities — ideas that play down the importance of the individual and promote government intervention.

Such “academic groupthink” means that the works of such thinkers are not offered enough, he argues. “A major tragedy is that they’re not getting exposed to the good stuff,” he said, citing the works of John Stuart Mill, Adam Smith, Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman.

 

First, where did you go to college where you weren’t exposed to those authors?  Second, there’s nothing like lamenting about a political theory curriculum whose problem is that it thinks government does something that economic theory doesn’t render superfluous.  I’m sure a psychologist would also lament the seminal works of political psychology not getting enough attention, etc.  

And finally, an amen to the following observation:

K. C. Johnson, a historian at the City University of New York, characterizes the problem as pedagogical, not political. Entire fields of study, from traditional literary analysis to political and military history, are simply not widely taught anymore, Mr. Johnson contended: “Even students who want to learn don’t have the opportunity because there are no specialists on the faculty to take courses from.”

 

The Empirical Presidency?

Many people have already infused their hopes and wishes into the soon-to-be Obama administration.  Let me add my wish:  I wish for a return to a re-professionalization of our Federal Administration, the free and full access of government scientific studies, and a foreign policy done wth full and open consultation with military experts and regional foreign experts who will have open discussions that take into account the full range of relevant information before crafting further policy.

I consider myself somewhat conservative-minded in that I believe that there are certain habits and traits that make people more self-sufficient, free, and happier.  I consider myself someone liberal-minded in that I believe that society is best conceived as a fair system of cooperation and that the fact of a plural society entails certain obligations between citizens.

Above all, I believe in pblic reason.  I think that inclusiveness is most important because it seems the best possible chance to include the best possible ideas and energies that may be put to the use of our personal and collective prosperity.  I could live with an administration that holds political views different from my own so long as they take public reason seriously.  I’m not sure when we will be able to know whether the Obama administration matches up well with this ideal, but I wish for them, and for us, that they live up to their deliberative democratic rhetoric as best as they can.

The Aftermath…

Another reason to oppose electing judges… over half of my paper ballot was circling votes for incumbent judges who ran unopposed.

Professional Conduct…

I am taking the Volokh Conspiracy off of my feed.  This post is the reason.  It is NOT acceptable for a Professor to talk in such casually degrading terms about academic colleagues.  Professor Zywicki’s comments, if they were at a job talk, or at a dissertation defense, or were makng the comment in print during an exam — it would be a disqualifying statement about his fitness to be a professional academic.

For the record, I have taken the course that Professor Zywicki thinks is so baffling, and I can assure you that if the course is baffling to Professor Zywicki, the fault lies not in the course.