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Thursday, November 01, 2007

Today's Random... Atrios

Duncan Black: "[O]nce upon a time the Glenn Reynolds types wished they were Captain Kirk. Now they wish they could live on the holodeck."
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1 comment:

jimf said...

From
In the Shadow of Mt. Hollywood
John Bruce's Observations on
Education, Epistemology, Writing, Work, and Religion

http://mthollywood.blogspot.com/2006_03_01_mthollywood_archive.html
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Friday, March 24, 2006
I Really Hate To See The Same Dumb Mistakes

. . .

The one thing nobody else is pointing out is that
[Glenn] Reynolds [author of _An Army of Davids_]
http://www.amazon.com/Army-Davids-Technology-Government-Goliaths/dp/1595550542
is what this site ( http://world.std.com/~mhuben/libindex.html )
might characterize as a “libertarian evangelist”.
We do great damage to our society when we allow religious
and philosophical tinhorns to dominate middlebrow discussion
without adequate counter-argument. We’re still suffering
from the likes of Alan Watts. Generations of bright kids
have been wasting some or all of their time, energy, and
youth on the idealized, highly selective, and heavily
sanitized versions of mysticism that he and others began
to promulgate in the 1950s.

Outside of the Weekly Standard review that I’ve mentioned a
couple of times here, nobody has even considered the possibility
that there are philosophical implications in Reynolds’s
arguments that we might want to take seriously. And nobody's
said that there might be a hidden agenda. But libertarians
are dominated by the thinking of Ayn Rand, a true cultist.
It’s a completely materialist philosophy, as many critics have
pointed out, and in this sense Reynolds is a true adherent.
As he sees it, in some near future, we’re going to live for
many, many years, if not forever, and we’ll have bionic this
or that to compensate for whatever wears out. iPod implants,
presumably.

The vision he offers is of infinite consumerism. I’ll have
infinite time to struggle with Microsoft support to fix
XP registry bugs so I can install my printer. It’s taken
Level 1 more than a week to decide I’m not just an incompetent
customer, but that’ll be OK in the future. Down the road,
if my iPod implant interferes with my pacemaker’s access
control, even if I die temporarily, they’ll wake me up so
I can talk to iPod support about the problem via my telepathic
cell phone implant. Even if it takes 75 years to get iPod
support to acknowledge the problem, no biggie – I’ll still
be older than a giant tortoise.

I don’t buy this as a philosophy of life, but this is what
Reynolds is peddling – in fact, it’s all he’s peddling.
In the Western tradition, our time is valuable. The psalmist
says teach us to number our days. That’s because we die.
It’s fine to prattle on about how modern medicine is going
to fix this, but you’re gonna have to show me the money.
Even giant tortoises eventually kick off. Nobody’s even
gotten to a 50 year old lab rat. But everyone’s bought
Reynolds’s line of nonsense here. OK, everyone was buying
Alan Watts 40 years ago. I really hate to see the same
dumb mistakes.

. . .

Not To Open A Can Of Worms. . .


When I was working on my posts about An Army of Davids
over the past week, I started poking around the web for sites
dealing with libertarianism, because, like most people,
I’ve been exposed to it now and then, and I became more
and more curious about how much of Reynolds’s views are
libertarian, to what extent they might be characterized as
cultist, and how much they influence the opinions he expresses
or endorses on his blog. . .

So it’s worth noting that Reynolds frequently discusses
science fiction and links to his favorite science fiction
writers. Can these favorite writers be characterized as
“libertarian”? I’d be interested to hear opinions.

One issue I’m inclined to pursue is whether Reynolds
appears to be a mild-mannered law professor with a Yale
degree, but in actuality expresses orthodox, cultist,
libertarian views much of the time. (Actually, I would
say that anyone who graduates from a top-5 school and
is able to say with a straight face that he or she is
a libertarian – i.e., a cultist -- would be a serious
indicator that education is not taking place at said
top-5 school.)
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Tuesday, March 28, 2006
Canary In A Coal Mine

Whew! At least The General Secretary shares some of my frustration
with the blogosphere, or perhaps the human race. . .

I do have some difference with the General Secretary’s views on
Glenn Reynolds. If Erin O’Connor has been an early-warning signal
for what’s wrong, Glenn Reynolds to my way of thinking is das Ding an sich.
The General Secretary says, though,

"I don’t especially respect the Instapundit, but I do like him.
He seems to be genial, sunny, and very polite, and his is one of the
few politically oriented blogs that can justifiably be called
'cheerful.'"

I just don’t see sunny and cheerful. I’ve never seen him in person
or heard him speak, but I somehow get the impression he’s one of
those guys who’s always wound just a little too tight, always speaking
with the voice of a TV host, just a little too composed, a little
too bright-eyed and bushy-tailed for the real world. You know the
kind of guy I’m talking about, right? Stands up in the meeting to
say his piece and always goes on just a little too long.

Here are the issues I see. First, the hyperactivity. Half the fawning
book reviews of An Army of Davids ask how he does it all. That’s easy,
he’s one of those guys who’s got the permanent fidgets. I’d hate to
be trapped next to him in an airplane seat, he’d never stop fussing
around with his laptop, his carry-on, his PDA, his iPod. The constant
plugs on his site to pick up the odd penny on the click-throughs
to Amazon are part of this, as are the radio interviews, the podcasts,
the pieces for Popular Mechanics. He needs to take his Ritalin.
This is not sunny and cheerful. If you can’t calm down, something’s missing.

Second, the truly weird beliefs. He describes himself as a transhumanist,
a fringe, cultish pseudo-religion whose core believers apparently number
about 3500. Even transhumanists themselves refer to the “yuck factor”
that prevents their views becoming more popular, and in an e-mail
correspondence with the Executive Director of the World Transhumanist
Association, I found him evasive and weasel-wordy in discussing key tenets
of the faith, such as cryonics and the Singularity. If you’re a
cultist, something’s missing.

Third, the narcissism: the constant photos of himself on his blog,
the constant retailing of trivial events in his life, the need to
publish every extravagant purchase, the constant need to link to whomever’s
said something about him (though never anything really bad, of course).
I suspect that there’s a deep sense of insecurity at the root of
all this, and frankly I think he probably has much to be insecure about.

Fourth, all the other wrong notes. The wife with her own remarkably
vapid blog, with a glamour photo that’s just slightly out of kilter for
a PhD psychologist. The strange, spacy, but also ferret-like expression
on his face in his own photos. The attorney who in his spare time
touts for a pseudo-religion that’s riddled with fraud. This isn’t a
happy person, Mr. General Secretary. And if he’s the personification
of blogging, blogging’s got problems. On the latter, we surely agree.
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Monday, June 19, 2006
I Have A Used Batman

Last week I said my views on the blogosphere aren’t fully
formed, but that doesn’t stop me from saying that as far as
I can see, in the marketplace of ideas, the blogosphere is a
used comic book boutique. Via Cold Spring Shops, I learn
first, that Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie have been mooting
a film ( http://www.jsharf.com/view/2006/06/who_is_brad_galt.html )
of Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged, and second, that there
are bloggers who think this is a good idea. As Joshua Sharf
says in the link,

"I am heartened to see that Miss Rand has made fans with this
kind of star power even in the Heart of Darkness, er, Hollywood.
At least, if the main movers and shakers have the right motivation,
there's a chance that they'll make the right compromises rather
than the wrong ones."

A devotion to Ayn Rand isn’t the only litmus of emotional,
intellectual, and cultural immaturity, but it sure is an important one.
Sharf is worried, though: “I have no idea if this can be done well,
and it would be better not done at all than done poorly.” My goodness –
what would we get if Atlas Shrugged were done well? As Whittaker
Chambers wrote when the book came out,

"The news about this book seems to me to be that any ordinarily
sensible head could not possibly take it seriously, and that,
apparently, a good many do. Somebody has called it: 'Excruciatingly awful.'
I find it a remarkably silly book. It is certainly a bumptious one.
ts story is preposterous. It reports the final stages of a final
conflict (locale: chiefly the United States, some indefinite years
hence) between the harried ranks of free enterprise and the 'looters.'
These are proponents of proscriptive taxes, government ownership,
labor, etc., etc. The mischief here is that the author, dodging into
fiction, nevertheless counts on your reading it as political reality.
'This,' she is saying in effect, 'is how things really are. These
are the real issues, the real sides. Only your blindness keeps you
from seeing it, which, happily, I have come to rescue you from.'"

Chambers, a grownup whose emotional, intellectual, and cultural maturity
was bought rather dearly, goes on to discuss the similarities of Rand’s
materialistic ideas to the Marxism she ostensibly detests – rereading his
essay, I see again how easily libertarianism – which even its supporters
acknowledge ( http://www.cato.org/special/threewomen/rand.html )
is another name for Ayn Rand-ism – can coexist with quackeries
like transhumanism.

That it’s so easy to scratch a blogger and come up with a John Galt
or Dagny Taggart wannabe is a real problem for the blogosphere. These
people are, deep down, simply not serious adults. The educational process,
insofar as it exists, hasn’t had an effect. Chambers rightly likens
Atlas Shrugged to patent medicine, the claims for which, in a bygone era,
liberal education was said to enable its products to evaluate.

In short, Atlas Shrugged, done well, with accuracy and sensitivity,
would be a close cousin of Battlefield Earth
( http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/battlefield_earth/ ),
another turgid cultist vanity project.

Now, it appears that I’ve incurred the Superintendent’s ire
( http://www.haloscan.com/comments/shkarlson/115065680339975847/#199153 )
for having the temerity to call Rand cultist Glenn Reynolds “overrated”
in a comment on his site. If that were the only thing I’d done, the
implied threat of banishment would seem an overreaction. But in the
same comment, I referred to the Whittaker Chambers review of the Rand
magnum opus, and I suspect that was my real offense (not to mention
my disrespect for the Wabash, though I think that could have been
tolerated as well were it not for the Chambers issue). I think, though,
that what’s happened is that we’ve scratched another blogger and found
a Randian just beneath the surface, which is a little surprising,
since the Super strikes me as something beyond a grownup – he’s perhaps
even older than his years.

What, indeed, are we to make of the exhibit below? The Superintendent
appears to have adopted it for use in his Atlas Shrugged post with
considerable enthusiasm. It’s another of those cheesy paintings from
the Cordair gallery that the overrated Reynolds used to plug on his
blog ads. This one is a Bryan Larsen painting that purports to be o
Ms. Taggart herself [She looks a little like Melissa Gilbert.
http://www.cordair.com/larsen/motivef.php ].

The Superintendent, normally quite the authoritarian in the matter
of railroad rules ( http://www.sdrm.org/faqs/rulebook/general.html#1.1.1 )
observance, is silent on basic questions like what
on earth is Dagny Taggart doing in that peculiar pose? I hate to say
it, but is she peeing on the track? As far as I can see, this piece of
“art” depicts several violations of basic railroad rules, including

1.20 Alert to Train Movement

Employees must expect the movement of trains, engines, cars, or
other movable equipment at any time, on any track, and in either
direction.

Employees must not stand on the track in front of an approaching
engine, car, or other moving equipment.

1.24 Clean Property

Railroad property must be kept in a clean, orderly, and safe condition.
Railroad buildings, facilities, or equipment must not be damaged or
defaced.

1.29 Avoiding Delays

Crew members must operate trains and engines safely and efficiently.
All employees must avoid unnecessary delays.

Whoever wrote the General Code of Operating Rules likely did
not foresee the Vice President of Operations on the John Galt Line
squatting on the track. Ms. Taggart, as far as I can see, may have
stopped the train so she can walk out in front of it simply to strike
a pose, or perhaps even to pee. This is the sort of thing that usually
brings on a reaction resembling a hysterical Donald Duck on the
part of the Superintendent – not here. It’s an image inspired by
the sainted Ayn Rand, apparently. I make this point partly from
lightheartedness, of course, but it's also worthwhile to point
out that in the real world, things don't -- or at least ought not to --
come to a halt simply because someone thinks they'll look good
right here. This is something that the artist, and a good many
other people, seem to gloss over.

All this, it seems to me, is part of what one blogger has
called academic imperialism
( http://chocolateandgoldcoins.blogspot.com/2005/05/academic-imperialism.html ),
a mindset to which he feels economists are particularly susceptible.
In the case of the Superintendent, it manifests itself in the view that
I’m a professor of Economics, thus I know everything, not just about
supply and demand, say, but about literature. Prof. Karlson won’t agree,
but I think outside observers will liken his views on Ayn Rand to the
average English professor’s views on welfare economics.
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Monday, May 07, 2007
I Just Flew In From Greensburg, Pennsylvania. . .

I was at the annual meeting of the Pennsylvania Railroad Technical
and Historical Society. . . One big impression that I came away with was
how many of the 300-plus people in attendance (mostly guys, of course,
and mostly well over 60. . .) were motormouths. Screaming bullshitters. . .

A lot of these guys were the worst sort of motormouth, in fact, the
kind that always sounds like a slightly off-kilter DJ, even when they're
just saying it's raining outside or something. Actually, I think a lot
of bloggers are like this. If you meet them in person, they're motormouths,
but you don't quite pick up on that in a blog. That's probably the way
they like it, no nervous tics for people to spot, no singsong tone to
turn people off.

It's interesting that so many model railroaders are also this way.
I may begin writing a new essay, "The Psychology of Model Railroading".
I enjoy the hobby -- and I often enjoy blogging -- but model railroaders
and bloggers are basically nuts and jerks.
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10:33 AM

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