Teaching, ISA’s and the Pedagogy of Alienation→
A really wonderfully insightful post over at Larval Subjects. I highly suggest anyone reading this blog to check it out. While the particular contents discussed deal with the issue of pedagogy, I think there is definitely a universal quality to the post. Here’s a short excerpt:
Back in 2002 when I was still a graduate student, I won a teaching fellowship that provided a healthy stipend and gave me additional teaching experience. Among the requirements of this fellowship, I had to attend a weekly seminar with other recipients where we discussed issues pertaining to pedagogy and the aims of teaching. We had endless discussions about the humanist tradition, the liberal arts tradition, and the aim of cultivating the person intellectually, civically, ethically, artistically, and spiritually.
Among the things I found most frustrating about these discussions was the way they seemed to disavow the institutional structure of contemporary universities, failing to acknowledge the place of the university in the contemporary capitalist world. It seemed to me that these discussions functioned as a sort of alibi, a certain willful blindness, a certain disavowal of the role universities serve vis a vis capitalism. And in being willfully blind this way, in telling ourselves nice, narcissistic stories about our aims, we perhaps end up reinforcing these very structures.
Bryan Klausmeyer Q&A: Seu Jorge→
How would you describe the people of Rio?
Seu Jorge: The people are happy sometimes and sometimes not so happy. Sometimes they’re sleepy and sometimes they wake up. I like the Brazilian people in general and especially these people as Rio de Janeiro is my home. Especially the simple people. They have many troubles and problems but they have more sentiment. People here fight every day for survival with a smile, survival with a samba, survival with your family. Sometimes they don’t have enough to eat but everybody helps each other. It’s a great inspiration and the greatest culture. It’s a good life.
Mark Elliot Cullen 
Like many wonderous things, I first stumbled across Lasagna Cat on youtube. Here is the first video I saw that made me fall in love.
Lasagna Cat is a hilarious parody/tribute to Garfield and Jim Davis. These bizare videos all basically follow the same formula:
- Comic Reinactment
- Musical Number
- Creepy photo of Jim Davis
Give these videos a look. You can find the original website with the videos in Quicktime here or the youtube profile here.
Zach Cullen Hugo Chávez: Stalinist Totalitarian Part II→
I love this new Times article on the Chávez diaspora:
The Dunaevschis are part of a wave of Venezuelans, mostly from the middle and upper classes, who have fled to the United States as Mr. Chávez has tightened his grip on the country’s political institutions, imposing his socialist vision and threatening to assert greater state control over many parts of the economy.
I think the last line is a wonderful bit of FUD on behalf of the corporate media. Why does this insane, John Birch Society bullshit continue to manifest itself, despite the fact that Chávez not only LOST the last referendum, but ACCEPTED that loss without declaring himself Premier (despite the claims of the media in the lead up to the referendum). And since when is expanding state power such a problematic issue? Is it only problematic if its a socialist doing it? It’s fairly evident that the U.S. political establishment cared very little about it with the passage of the PATRIOT Act… or its renewal…
“The principle reason is fear of change of daily life, the loss of private property, loss of independence from the government, fear of the loss of constitutional rights and individual liberties,” said Mr. Corao, who relocated permanently from Venezuela in 1996 and runs Venezuela al Dia, a thrice-monthly tabloid with offices in Doral, a Miami suburb where Venezuelans have settled.
What the media fails to understand is precisely the difference between political versus social democracy. While political democracy involves institutions, authority, party politics and bureaucrats, social democracy involves the equitable distribution of resources. The contrast between Florida and Venezuela in this regard is comically delightful.
Web Site Assembles U.S. Prewar Claims→
Students of how the Bush administration led the nation into the Iraq war can now go online to browse a comprehensive database of top officials’ statements before the invasion, connecting the dots between hundreds of claims, mostly discredited since then, linking Saddam Hussein to Al Qaeda or warning that he possessed forbidden weapons.
A highly recommended read for anyone who wants to take a second look at the whirlwind of propaganda, sponsored by the White House and endorsed by the major media networks, in the lead up to the war on Iraq.
Big Brain Theory→
Interesting post over at the Times, though often painfully dumbed down:
If true, it would mean that you yourself reading this article are more likely to be some momentary fluctuation in a field of matter and energy out in space than a person with a real past born through billions of years of evolution in an orderly star-spangled cosmos. Your memories and the world you think you see around you are illusions.
I suggest reading the entire three-page article. There’s no good paragraph that summarizes the article.
The Left and Huckabee
Posted at 11:43 PMTwo conflicting opinions on Mike Huckabee:
Stay Classy, Huckabee by David Sirota:
Personally, I want to believe Obama’s vision of America as a class-free utopia where change comes without rancor or division. But history shows that most positive change in America has been about class and conflict — whether it was the battle for basic labor laws or the fight for Social Security.
That’s why, whoever wins the primaries, the more class forces its way onto the presidential stage, the better.
In short, stay classy, Mike Huckabee.
Huckabee as Laibach by Jodi Dean:
The sincere, believing Huckabee, by identifying with their words, forces the obscene supplement to the fore—the Republicans have to distance themselves from their own slogans and claims, their compassion. They try to stain him with the l-word, liberal. But that’s a hopeless gesture.
Does this mean that leftists should support Huckabee? Of course not. It means that the Republicans can destroy themselves and that leftists should pursue the hard task of bringing something new into being (a task perhaps made a bit easier by the fact that over 40% of the people in the US claim to want major, substantial change).
I think I have to side with Dean.
Beyond “the Moral Instinct”
Posted at 11:34 PMAfter reading an eight-page tract on “morality” in today’s Times, I feel as if much of the recent scientific literature on subject matter typically associated with the humanities is not only incredibly predictable, but also attempting to hide its preference for closet essentialisms. Now we have “God genes” and “love genes” to explain socially-constructed concepts—a return to phrenology.
Steven Pinker:
The idea that the moral sense is an innate part of human nature is not far-fetched. A list of human universals collected by the anthropologist Donald E. Brown includes many moral concepts and emotions, including a distinction between right and wrong; empathy; fairness; admiration of generosity; rights and obligations; proscription of murder, rape and other forms of violence; redress of wrongs; sanctions for wrongs against the community; shame; and taboos.
We see right away that this initial derivation already contains all the typical characteristics of the idiosyncrasies of English psychologists—we have “usefulness,” “forgetting,” “habit,” and finally “error,” all as the foundation for an evaluation in which the higher man up to this time has taken pride, as if it were a sort of privilege of men generally. This pride should be humbled, this evaluation of worth emptied of value. Has that been achieved?
Now, first of all, it’s obvious to me that from this theory the origin of the idea “good” has been sought for and established in the wrong place: the judgment “good” did not move here from those to whom “goodness” was shown! It is much more that case that the “good people” themselves, that is, the noble, powerful, higher-ranking, and higher-thinking people felt and set themselves and their actions up as good, that is to say, of the first rank, in contrast to everything low, low-minded, common, and vulgar. From this pathos of distance they first arrogated to themselves the right to create values, to stamp out the names for values. What did they care about usefulness!
It is amazing to think that after over one-hundred years of thought, mankind still lives in the wake of the rebellion against institutionalized Christianity. Rationality, for all of its merits, has produced little to instill hope in civilization. The coming ecological crisis will be its ultimate test. If the pursuit of “reason” fails us, what will emerge in its wake? Will there be something to emerge, pre-supposing our own survival as a species? If post-modernism constitutes such a manifestation, how can it offer itself to an imminent critique of reason that, following Marx, allows us to actually pursue a progressive, pragmatic alternative?
But what am I talking about here? Enough, enough! At this stage there’s only one thing appropriate for me to do: keep quiet. Otherwise, I’ll make the mistake of arrogating to myself something which only someone younger is free to do, someone “with a greater future,” someone more powerful than I—something which only Zarathustra is free to do, Zarathustra the Godless…
These are the goals of a new “superman.”
The American Office Has No Class→
Yes, Steve Carell is hilarious and the writing is probably the best of any network sitcom, even if it is a little broad, but the American version of The Office has no class. I would be shocked to see Ricky Gervais or Stephen Merchant doing in-show product tie-ins, or this latest campaign to help Amazon sell tax software:
It’s also nice that the ad has reduced the characters to labeled (tax-related!) cliches, that’s a great way to maintain the integrity of your show.
Wired’s Crystal Ball→
In a few years, Wired will laugh at this prediction:
Verizon, one of the most intransigent carriers, declared in November that it would open up its network for use with any compatible handset. AT&T made a similar announcement days later. Eventually this will result in a completely new wireless experience, in which applications work on any device and over any network. In time, it will give the wireless world some of the flexibility and functionality of the Internet.
Take Your Blimp and Shove It→
The Weblog, in reference to Ron Paul’s endorsement of the gold standard:
In my experience, this is the sort of phony nonsense that libertarians love to spout off. There is often a variable left out or a logical step omitted that makes their arguments seem sound in quick conversation (in the short run?) and obviously erroneous after thoughtful deliberation.
(Via Gizmodo.)
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