Back before we divided off into people who think it was founded on the Bible and people who think it was a tax evasion scheme, I was taught that the United States of America was founded on rational debate. Citizens in a democracy disagree about stuff, and the only way to figure out who’s right is to put our ideas in a metaphorical marketplace and start convincing one another. Of course, the democratic process doesn’t actually determine who’s right; it just identifies the most appealing argument. This wrinkle could potentially give an unfair advantage to those unscrupulous arguers willing to employ sophistry and fallacies, but fortunately our populace is too well-educated for that to work. I’m fucking with you—our populace is home watching Man Versus Food and coming up with race-based theories of identity. The dirtiest argumentative tactics you can imagine are on proud display in contemporary discourse, so that any particular argument is now subsumed in the larger argument between Deductive Reasoning and Whatever. It’s us against them, deductive reasoners, and they’re winning. This week’s link roundup is about winning the argument, even at the expense of obvious considerations of true and false. That’s the beauty of a democracy: if you can put some destructive idea into other people’s heads—optimally one that puts the very people who believe it at a disadvantage—you become more powerful yourself. It’s like the way Renfield keeps eating spiders in Dracula. Won’t you choke down a couple of tarantulas with me?
Category Archives: Friday Links
Friday links! Life of the mind edition
I was maybe eleven years old when I first heard the phrase “life of the mind.” Up to that point I had been living the life of the sweatpants, so the possibility of doing all the same things I had been doing—Dungeons & Dragons, Isaac Asimov novels in which one of a roomful of robots has committed a crime, math—but with the imprimatur of stately pursuit seemed hugely appealing. At school, I calmly announced that I would be living the life of the mind from there on out. Obviously, that would exempt me from life-of-the-school activities like hitting, although I recognized that it also would require certain sacrifices, like never overcoming my fear of talking to girls. Twenty-three years later, the life of the mind is going strong: strangers still express an inordinate desire to hit me/continue to not meet me, depending on gender, and I know more about robots than anyone except people who have actually worked with them. It’s not easy, but it’s worth it. This week’s link roundup is about those intellectual pursuits that make even my life worth living: history, books, awful movies about books, and awful people who wrote plays, which are like movies that have been ruined by books. Won’t you live the life of the mind with me? Or at least keep an eye peeled for jocks while I do?
Friday links! Dumber and dumber until everybody’s dead edition
One of the great vexations of the modern age is trying to figure out whether we’re actually experiencing the dumbest generation in human history. Logic would suggest that previous generations were much dumber than us. We have ready access to iodine, for example, and we do not believe that flies emerge spontaneously from rotting meat. We all use computers. If you put Julius Caesar in front of a computer, he would have no idea whether to give it some sheep entrails or what, and he was one of the smartest dudes of his millenium. Yet the catch of the modern perspective is that we know only the most clever people from history, whereas every jackanapes currently alive is, you know, right here. The internet only magnifies this effect. It’s hard not to despair when you have real-time access to the fervently professed opinions of people who know not a goddamn thing and couldn’t put the first thing with the second if they knew two, but who can say? Probably, we’re all smart enough to know that we only seem dumb because we can see ourselves so clearly. Still, there has to be one dumbest generation in history. Maybe it’s us.
Friday links: Is this ironic? edition
Almost
Oh, irony. You are everywhere, according to certain people and pop songs, and yet you are so little known. While the strict definitions of irony remain cleanly delineated, popular usage now refers to any experience of bitter recognition as “ironic.” The expansion of the term tells us much about contemporary America, or maybe contemporary Americans. Like its mildly retarded cousin “sarcastic,” “ironic” has become a mode of being, a way of protecting oneself from the absurdity of This Modern World via a general disdain. That’s great for the lady in your office who just discovered Failblog. For those of us who are lifelong, committed ironists, however, the expansion of “ironic” is an infuriating appropriation. It’s like how Chuck D felt about Vanilla Ice. This Friday, we present the thin edge of the wedge: stories and situations that seem almost ironic but not quite, whose categorization as “irony” moves us one step closer to the dream of considering everything ironic and thereby eliminating irony altogether. Won’t you turn human experience into a uniform putty of bland derision with me?
Friday links: Let’s be real edition
Skin tone comparison! President Obama v. John Boehner v. leather chair (control group at left)
If you accidentally turned on football early, you might have seen President Obama rocking a joint session of Congress with his jobs speech last night. Here I should point out that I am not a trained economist. I am not even a gifted amateur. But regardless of whether the President’s jobs plan will actually create jobs, he finally put it in terms America needs to hear. Speaking of his, um, differences with the Republican party:
Maybe some of you have decided that those differences are so great that we can only resolve them at the ballot box. But know this: the next election is fourteen months away. And the people who sent us here—the people who hired us to work for them—they don’t have the luxury of waiting fourteen months.
Shit just got real. The rhetorical centerpiece of last night’s speech was “you should pass this bill right away.” It’s no Yes We Can—it’s not even a Win the Future—but it challenges the House and Senate in a way that foregrounds their intransigence. It also maybe acknowledged Obama’s willingness to be a one-term President. I’m still here for another year, he said like Dad when you are seventeen. The implicit threat was that, with less and less to lose, he is going to become a meaner adversary. And Boehner wept held his face completely motionless.