The article Are translation apps making the learning of foreign languages obsolete? by John McWhorter (NY Times) discusses the idea of a language monoculture, playing with the idea that, if a language can be translated to any other language, what is the need for learning the target language?

“In Europe, nine out of 10 students study a foreign language. In the United States, only one in five do. Between 1997 and 2008, the number of American middle schools offering foreign languages dropped from 75 percent to 58 percent.... [More]”

The article Is It Time To Embrace “Opinion Fatigue”? by Kate Lindsay (Bustle) writes,

“In April 2022, creator Paulomi Dholakia had some thoughts about Disney. Specifically, she was upset the company didn’t seem to be promoting the Ms. Marvel series, which features the franchise’s first Muslim superhero, as much as it had promoted its other series, like Hawkeye. She first posted this opinion on TikTok, and after people agreed with her, she brought the same video to Instagram.

““It went viral in a very bad... [More]”

The post Nostalgia curdles by Ryan Broderick (Garbage Day) writes,

“I can’t think of anything more ugly and insane than combining American media’s desperate obsession with Trump and the era of politics he created in 2010s with American media’s toxic obsession with high-profile court cases. In fact, right-wing media is already pushing for Trump’s trial to be televised. So if you ever wondered what the Johnny Depp/Amber Heard trial would have been like if Depp became president at the end, well, now you might have a... [More]”

The article The Age of Average by Alex Murrell writes,

“[…] while yet another places subjects in front of faux scenic backdrops reminiscent of a low-budget Sears photo studio. Each of these distinct setups is utilized broadly and across industries, with the same composition and concept seen on the Instagram feeds of a major beverage syndicate and an indie skincare brand alike.””

Oh, man, I am of a generation that got its pictures taken at Sears. Those were the family photos for years. We had one shot at a... [More]

I just saw the following meme, What the hell even is a dream job? by PrecisionAcc (Reddit), which highlighted the picture shown below.

What even is a dream job?

Wait. I know that this was picture was just to snark about the term “dream job”, but it also highlights an interesting divergence of opinion about what work is.

I thought antiwork was about being against the drone-job work culture, not against being useful at all.

I understand that it’s hard to even conceive of a world where jobs don’t suck when you have a shitty job. But isn’t... [More]

I just saw another article about Why the right is always wrong … and how both-sidesists help to ensure this by John Q (Crooked Timber) arguing against saying that both sides are just as bad because we have to look at the policies. Fair enough, fair enough.

“Biden’s infrastructure package included provisions for multi-family housing to be erected in traditionally residential zone. These provisions were vigorously resisted by Republicans, following the lead of Donald Trump, who used racist scaremongering to mobilise... [More]”

The article Measurement, Dataism and Post-Truth Ideology: The Good, The Bad and The Ugly by Luca Mari; Dario Petri (IEEE) is quite an interesting description of the state of philosophy vis à vis data science.[1] You can find the original, in Italian, at Tutto_Misure n.4 − 2021 (Issuu) on pages 103 and 104. Or you can just download a PDF of that article here.

“Dataism, at least in its most radical position, sees the universe as a gigantic computation system, whose state transitions are in fact “embedded” computations, so that empirical... [More]”

From Roaming Charges: Railroaded, Again by Jeffrey St. Clair (CounterPunch),

Whitey on the Moon: Gil Scott-HeronI don’t know when Gil-Scott Heron wrote this, but it was probably around the time he wrote Whitey on the Moon, The Revolution will not be Televised, or Home Is Where the Hatred Is. Whereas he wrote and spoke about his home country, I can’t help but think that what he said resonates for... [More]

Or, perhaps better: let’s not allow the elites the luxury of thinking that we believe that they have principles. We have to make it perfectly clear to them that we do not believe the fairy tales that they tell about themselves.

The article The World Cup Should Make Us Rethink Our Understanding of Human Rights by Neil Vallelly (Jacobin) writes,

“Whether spectators care or not is a different question, of course. But the signs are that most football fans would prefer that the World Cup was not taking place in a country... [More]”

A friend of mine quoted Bill Burr from a recent podcast,

“I read a lot of unsavory things have been coming out about that organization and about all the money that has been going into some new tiling for their olympic-sized pool rather than into their breast-cancer research. And by a lot of things, I mean the one article I read on one website online.”

“Something i overheard in a bar and have taken as a fact for the past 20 years.”

To which I responded,

“Something my Dad told me ONE TIME 35... [More]

I was just reading The Greatest Evil is War and read Chris Hedges’s statement that bombing Nagasaki and Hiroshima were war crimes. They certainly were, especially in light of the admitted history and reasoning behind it.

Anyone who’s read the actual history pretty much accepts that the U.S. bombed these cities because (A) there was nothing else left to bomb because cities like Tokyo had already been firebombed beyond recognition, but also that the U.S. was (B) already gearing up for its next... [More]

I think most people’s experience of propaganda is best defined as,

“Information that one has not yet heard enough times to believe.”

As long as one doesn’t believe it, information remains propaganda. After that crucial repetition, it crosses the threshold into established fact and deeply held belief.

This, all without any change in evidence, believability, deniability or plausibility.

We have arrived at a point where “making money” has become completely unmoored from “performing a societally useful task”—so much so that the previous sentence will make no sense to most people.

The will ask: What does doing something useful have to do with making money? You need money to live; ergo, you come by it any old way. Whether you “deserve” it doesn’t enter into it.

An obvious and egregious example is the exponentially increasing “hustle economy”, featuring “influencers” whose... [More]

I think I’m a good person relative to what society expects of individuals, but I’m not a very good person on an absolute scale.

I understand what is required for me and mine to live out a comfortable life within the bounds of the system we have—and I work within the bounds of that system to obtain it, as ethically as possible.

Everyone else tries to do the same, with varying levels of success—and varying ethics.

I understand that most people’s rate of success will not match either their... [More]

The way of our world is this.

Suppose we have, on the one hand, someone who watches a couple of hours of Pentagon propaganda and comes to their deeply held convictions that way, slapping a bunch of Support Ukraine stickers on their car (for example).

On the other hand, we have someone who spend hundreds, if not thousands, of hours over several months, collecting information and ideas from dozens of authors and forming a more nuanced and historically “true” opinion and ideas about how to end... [More]

We seem to be doomed to ride a pendulum of

1. Build a useful societal benefit (USB)
2. Have the USB be coopted by vultures and con-men
3. Organize regulation to prevent abuse of the USB
4. Have the USB get mired in regulation and become less obviously useful—because things get complex, especially with pressures from con-men that cause a constant papering over of holes in the regulations until they’re so large and complex that no-one understands them except for a cottage industry of experts that has... [More]

The article ‘What-aboutism’ and the Universal by Chris Horner (3 Quarks Daily) provides an example of an atrocity—the bombing of a school—that people would see the need to tell the world their opinion about. He writes of the hypothetical commentator,

“It is a war crime and you name it as such[,] as an evil, criminal thing. Soon after the words leave your mouth, or get posted online, someone responds with something along these lines: yes, that’s all very well, but why just condemn that? What about..? They then name... [More]”

As in 2020, this year COVID prevented my wife from spending the holidays with our family overseas, So, over the holidays, I was once again made to partake in a smattering of Christmas classics, of varying quality. Most of these stem from the late 60s and 70s and were already classics when we were growing up. Like watching Dinner for One in Switzerland, they are a tradition, regardless of their objective quality.

One of the newest in the stable is The Christmas Chronicles. That movie is more... [More]

Those who most easily deem something to be “fake news” are often the same people who can’t see the falsity in the news that they consider to be non-fake. They shout “conspiracy” at everything, except when a cabal of extremely wealthy people conspire to manipulate entire nations to keep money flowing upwards.

• They believe that that financial system is a free market and that it works for everyone.
• They believe that the rich pay too much in taxes.
• They believe that the military budget is... [More]

From the article Against Intelligence by Justin E.H. Smith (Hinternet),

“Our default folk-theory of the sky and its objects, as a vestige of the closed world cosmology, is one in which distances between star systems is not significantly different from those between the planets of our own system.”

And even those distances we grossly underestimate. The planets are light minutes if not light hours apart.[1] Months and years of even the most optimistic feasible journey time. But this lack suffuses most of how most humans—most... [More]

The article «Dummheit hat Hochkonjunktur»: Interview mit Psychiaterin Heidi Kastner by Nadja Pastega (Der Bund)[1] discusses the term “Dumm” (dumb, as in stupid). It’s always been a bit difficult to nail down what it means to be “dumb”, once you start to think about it. You can have smart people who act dumb. You can have smart people with no experience, so they’re intelligent, but not wise.

Then there’s the difference between “book smart” and “street smart”—they’re both useful in certain situations. If you don’t have... [More]

This was a great interview with John McWhorter: ‘The Idea That America Is All About Despising Black People? That’s Fantasy.‘ by Nick Gillespie (Apple Podcasts) He recently wrote a book called Nine Nasty Words: English in the Gutter: Then, Now, and Forever. I haven’t read it, but I’ve read several essays of his. In one of his essays, he named “The Elect” as the keepers of a new religion online.

The interview was illuminating, with a lot of it transcribed below. Gillespie is a good interviewer, preferring to get out of the way... [More]

The following video is an excellent interview by Chapo in which they just let him talk. The documentary they discuss is his most recent one, Can’t Get You Out of My Head (the link is to a YouTube playlist of all 4 hours in 4 videos. The videos were published by “Adam Curtis Documentary” and were aired on the BBC, so there’s a good change that they’ll survive.

502 − Units of One feat. Adam Curtis by Chapo Trap House on March 03, 2021 (YouTube)

Curtis did another interview in Can’t Get You Out of My Head w/ Adam Curtis by Red Scare that was just as good. The discussion were similar—they... [More]

Just one day later: another interview with Slavoj Žižek; another wonderful, intelligent, open, wide-ranging, and funny/friendly interview. It’s about 140 minutes long. Ariella Thornhill and Nando Vila did a great job, with Ariella in particular “translating” some of Slavoj’s more convoluted formulations with aplomb and accuracy.

Slavoj Zizek on Biden, Race, and What It Will Take to Stop the Pandemic by Jacobin: Ariella Thornhill & Nando Vila (YouTube)

“Žižek: Did we notice how the fight against racism is usually in the liberal center, reformulated in the terms of tolerance, which I think is already an... [More]”

This is a wonderful, intelligent, open, wide-ranging, and funny/friendly interview. It’s about 100 minutes long.

The Pervert's Guide to Podcasting w/ Slavoj Zizek by Red Scare Podcast (YouTube)

Anyone who disparages Žižek doesn’t listen to him or doesn’t understand him or misunderstands him or deliberately misunderstands him or is incapable of understanding him. He has no pretense; he’s honest. He’s brilliant, he’s well-read, and he draws often-brilliant connections between philosophies, modern media, history, and current events. His insight is always interesting. You... [More]

The article Shakespeare Matters (And Always Will) by Scott H. Greenfield (Simple Justice) discusses the idiotic-sounding question of whether it’s OK to read books written by people without considering their identities. That is, the books should stand on their own. We can, of course, consider whether we’ve historically ignored some good books because of racism—and dig these books back up. But there is no reason to discard existing books because they were written by white people (i.e. “switching the signs on the drinking fountains”).... [More]

I’d never heard of Robert B. Talisse before. He expresses himself well in describing an imminent problem with American culture. People are so invested in their polarized roles that they no longer know how to interact with anyone who doesn’t already hold their worldview in nearly all things. If they disagree with someone on any of myriad issues, then they can’t even consider them human, to say nothing of bridging the gap to find common ground.

The problem he describes doesn’t apply just to... [More]

A good friend of mine is going to be teaching a course on “Media & Society”. We’ve had a few interesting discussions on how to be a discerning consumer of information and how to build a stable of reliable sources.

As an avid follower of myriad topics, I’ve spent decades doing just this. As an avid writer on this blog, I’ve spent decades[1] trying to create content that presents information in a way that doesn’t come to unwarranted or unreasonable conclusions.

YMMV, of course, but I’m assiduous... [More]

Richard Wolff is the gift that keeps on giving. He’s just as brilliant talking into a laptop camera as he is giving lectures. I mentioned him recently as one of my favorite economist. The video is 75 minutes, but well-worth the time.

Richard D. Wolff − Is the Coronavirus the end of Capitalism & the Revival of Socialism? by AcTVism Munich (YouTube)

The following citation/transcript is from about 55 minutes, when the interviewer asked him what he thought of Biden vs. Trump..

“Biden is better than Trump, that seems clear to me. But, it’s almost meaningless because that’s such a low bar that the statement is,... [More]”

Bernie Sanders is doing extremely well in the campaign for presidential election in the U.S.

And he should be doing well. His basic message is:

Lets stop fighting over table scraps; instead, let’s get a real meal—take it, if we have to—stop being dicks to each other for four years, and see what happens.

There is still almost a year to go until the election in 2020. The campaign is already more than a year old. I can’t think of another country that starts campaigning more than a couple... [More]