Driving Blind: Cthulhu, Piracy in Real Time and the Enlightenment
Ted Heller feels like he’s betraying someone, or something, every time he picks up his new e-reader. Maybe though he should consider more deeply the nature of this perceived betrayal before taking to the pages of Salon to write about it.
What would George Orwell think about the Internet’s effect on the English language?
This man is worried about his finances even though his gross income is over $500,000 a year. But is a $32,000 Lexus really an “average car?”
Ariel Bogle notes the rise of disreputable, “open access” pseudo-academic journals, given the void created by the slow transition to digital formats of more vetted publications.
James Kwak considers Corey Robin’s “Marginal Children” essay in light of Americans’ penchant for voting against their economic interests.
Labor is increasingly being outsourced to ever more sophisticated and cost-saving technology. How long before capitalism subdues the drones and brings them home to roost (or deliver tacos, Amazon packages, and local WiFi)?
A good overview of the debates, academic and public, surounding the Enlightment’s enduring legacy.
Cthulhu recreated in Lego form.
Even cooler: an art installation at Montreal’s Eastern Bloc gallery features a visualization of movie file sharing in real time. Nicolas Maigret devised the project and explains it more in an interview here.
Legothulu is awesome.
The piece about the “rich” doc is good. He admits to a strong drive to keep up with other “rich” folks, has investment property and an income up in the top 1-3% but he doesn’t quite get how well off he is. Equating rich with no worry is a great revelation that he misses. Worry and keeping up with the joneses are not tied to an income but are common/natural states. The rich just worry about buying different things and different levels of going without. He is still looking for money to give him a state of well being which would be life without worry.Report
Robert McCrumb-bum strikes me as an irrelevant pedant who can’t bear the fact that people who speaks English less good than he does can do so so freely on the Internet.
Yea and Verily, Orwell is fist-bumping in his grave at how the Internet has wrested English from the stultifying authority and Latinate officialdom of the one-way-communication era.Report
That was Re: Orwell.Report
Oh I don’t know. English wasn’t my first language. It’s a wretched language, really it is. English was meant to be spoken badly. From Orwell:
In our time it is broadly true that political writing is bad writing. Where it is not true, it will generally be found that the writer is some kind of rebel, expressing his private opinions and not a “party line.” Orthodoxy, of whatever color, seems to demand a lifeless, imitative style. The political dialects to be found in pamphlets, leading articles, manifestoes, White papers and the speeches of undersecretaries do, of course, vary from party to party, but they are all alike in that one almost never finds in them a fresh, vivid, homemade turn of speech. When one watches some tired hack on the platform mechanically repeating the familiar phrases — bestial atrocities, iron heel, bloodstained tyranny, free peoples of the world, stand shoulder to shoulder — one often has a curious feeling that one is not watching a live human being but some kind of dummy: a feeling which suddenly becomes stronger at moments when the light catches the speaker’s spectacles and turns them into blank discs which seem to have no eyes behind them. And this is not altogether fanciful. A speaker who uses that kind of phraseology has gone some distance toward turning himself into a machine. The appropriate noises are coming out of his larynx, but his brain is not involved as it would be if he were choosing his words for himself. If the speech he is making is one that he is accustomed to make over and over again, he may be almost unconscious of what he is saying, as one is when one utters the responses in church. And this reduced state of consciousness, if not indispensable, is at any rate favorable to political conformity.
And that’s where we are with most political bloggery these days, tomodachi. The good stuff is valuable only in its rarity. Most bloggers couldn’t fight their way out of a rhetorical paper bag. Weak thinking, weak writing, a vast, flabby, tendentious, minging herd of bad writers and worse thinkers.Report
“a vast, flabby, tendentious, minging herd of bad writers and worse thinkers”
This really should be a tag from now on.Report
In the doc column, I was put off by the hand wringing he demonstrated over the possibility that his children become teachers while also fretting that they’ll opt for a career based on money instead of passion. Ultimately, he strikes me as a guy who wants to have his cake and eat it to, unaware of the costs (not just financial) of the decisions e makes and regretting that they can’t be avoided.Report
It seems like rich dad poor dad did him a huge disservice.
If he had bought a less expensive house not only would that have lowered his housing costs it would hav saved him Joneses expenses as well.
Why on earth buy a BMW when you could save theoney from your massive income and buy security and leisure instead.Report
That piece reminds me of what I don’t like about people. Or maybe it’s just Americans.Report
In defense of the doc, I can’t think of any possible way to be interviewed on this subject and not come off as a douche, short of tithing 80% or more. I’m sure he’s not usually this awful–a large part of liking most people is knowing what to avoid examining.Report
I didn’t find him awful. Just woefully out of touch and unwilling to acknowledge certain basic truths. I know other folks with similar dispositions. Hell, I dated one. It really points out the importance and value of experiencing people who live differently than you.Report