Category Archives: Social Commentary

Political Commentary, Popular Culture, Social Commentary

We Know What We Like

1 Comment

Lileks has a meditation on modern art:

It’s not the humanism that ruined art, it was humanism that divorced itself from the possibility of transcendence. Which would be bad enough if it hadn’t decided to splash around in the gutters as well.

Ah, but why was it influential? It recontextualized the commonplace and made us see it as Art, a process that continues to this day every time you see a book with a title like “The Art of Bread” or “The Art of Toad Sexing” or whatever else has to be elevated to the status of marble sculpture to make the user feel they’re living a rarified life. It played a joke on the Stuffy Academics, which is something the adolescent temperament never tires of doing. This is not encouraged any more, since the Academics are on the side of Truth and Modernity, however defined today. Although I once knew an architecture student who took perverse and boundless glee in shocking his teacher by putting a pointy roof on the house each student had to design. A pointed roof. In other words, a useful roof, a functional roof that didn’t collect rain water. Everyone else had a flat roof, of course. Machine for Living and all that. This was just around the time Post-Modernism made it okay to quote history, as long as everyone saw you wink, or could understand that your overscaled grotesque excretions were meant ironically.

An instructor might not know what to make of a house with a point roof, but if you called it “House In The Time of Reagan” he’d understand.

Read all.

Administrative, Education, Popular Culture, Social Commentary

A User-Hostile Service

18 Comments

As one can surmise from the previous test posts, I’ve been trying (after three quarters of a year) to fix the problems with my Movable Type installation.

I went to one of the providers listed at MT as consultants, to try to get some help (unnamed, to protect the guilty). They have been somewhat helpful, in that they have eliminated possibilities of what the problem might be, but they haven’t actually determined what the problem is ($150 later, and asking for more).

But that’s not the point. The point is the (to me) user hostility of their system.

When I get an email from them, it comes in the following form:

====== WHEN REPLYING DELETE THIS LINE AND EVERYTHING BELOW IT ======

[message from unnamed service…]

In my first response, I ignored it, and just replied below (as I always do, since as a long-time emailer, I bottom post to response).

The response was:

====== WHEN REPLYING DELETE THIS LINE AND EVERYTHING BELOW IT ======

Hi

Your reply was blank. I’m assuming this is because you were trying to quote
me instead of deleting everything and then replying. Please give it a try
again by deleting all the original text.

Oh. OK.

They were serious.

They were determined to allow nothing that they emailed me to be quoted in my response. And moreover, even if I top posted, they didn’t want to see their response in my response.

Is it just me, or are they nuts?

Here was my second email in response to this absurd and deliberate policy (the first was minimal, and unreplied to):

One other point. Do you realize how annoying it is to:

1) not include my response in your response and

2) make me jump through hoops to include your response in mine?

Not to mention top posting (though in this case, it’s almost meaningless to distinguish between top and bottom posting).

WHY DO YOU DO THIS?

Do you think that it enhances the customer relationship?

This alone is almost enough to make me want to write off my current investment in you as a bad one, and find someone who can help me without being such an email PITA.

The response?

Please help us understand why you feel like you should always include our response with ours? Our web based desk records everything, including our responses so we don’t need to see it multiple times. This creates duplicate records.

We work with thousands of customers and didn’t see this as a problem before.

Here is my response:

Please help us understand why you feel like you should always include our response with ours? Our web based desk records everything, including our responses so we don’t need to see it multiple times. This creates duplicate records.
==========================================================

Yes, because bandwidth for a few lines of text is so expensive…

It is important because I would like to have some context for what I’m responding to, and you should have some context for what you’re responding to, in the email to which you’re responding. If I want to find out what we’re talking about, I have to go back and dig into my outbox, to figure out WTF we’re talking about. If you don’t find this annoying, I don’t frankly understand why. If you don’t want excessive repetition, just delete the older stuff. That’s how it worked on Usenet for years.

===========================================================

We work with thousands of customers and didn’t see this as a problem before.
===========================================================

Then you must have worked with thousands of top-posting morons raised on Outlook and AOL, and who only know how to upload to blogs with FTP, thus opening themselves to attack. It drives old-timers like me, familiar with old-school email and Usenet, NUTS.
I have never before run into a system that MADE IT DIFFICULT (AND ATTEMPTED TO MAKE IT IMPOSSIBLE, EVEN WARNED RESPONDENTS NOT TO DO IT) TO QUOTE AN EMAIL IN RESPONSE. This is a new, and infuriating system to me.

Can you point me to anyone else who has deliberately and maliciously set up their email responses this way, because it is a novel and off-putting approach, that has been making me angry with each exchange? I’ve been sort of happy with you, in that you seem to be attempting to help, even though you have made no progress whatsoever in solving my problem, other than telling me what it isn’t, but you can’t imagine how frustrating this is. Deliberately attempting (in futility, obviously) to make it impossible to include context of email responses is, to me, insane.

That’s where it stands at this point. Who is nuts?

Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Social Commentary

More Religiophobia Thoughts

5 Comments

In response to my previous post on the subject, from Eric Scheie:

If we see the two anti-freedom strains as “your money or your sex,” it becomes quite obvious that it’s easier — a hell of a lot easier — for the government to grab your money than your genitalia.

Yet even though the anti-sex people are by no means a majority in the GOP and cannot possibly implement their schemes, more people fear the Republicans.

A great con job, if you ask me.

Yup. And it continues on.

Education, Political Commentary, Popular Culture, Social Commentary

Too Much Self Esteem

13 Comments

Never before have so many been so proud of so little:

The findings, published in the November issue of Psychological Science, support the idea that the “self-esteem” movement popular among today’s parents and teachers may have gone too far, the study’s co-author said.

“What this shows is that confidence has crossed over into overconfidence,” said Jean Twenge, an associate professor of psychology at San Diego State University.

She believes that decades of relentless, uncritical boosterism by parents and school systems may be producing a generation of kids with expectations that are out of sync with the challenges of the real world.

“High school students’ responses have crossed over into a really unrealistic realm, with three-fourths of them expecting performance that’s effectively in the top 20 percent,” Twenge said.

Don’t they realize that half of them are below median intelligence? Probably not, because they got an “A” in math, even though they didn’t understand it.

One of the perverse and tragic problems with incompetence is that it generally includes an inability to recognize it.

Science And Society, Social Commentary, Technology and Society

A Hundred And Ten

3 Comments

As Glenn says, we’re going to see more people living to be this old. And as a commenter notes, there aren’t very many people left who were born in the nineteenth century. My maternal grandmother would have been two years older, had she lived, but she died at the ripe young age of ninety eight, fourteen years ago (whereupon I became a full orphan, and next in line, having no longer any living ancestors).

Of course, I take these folks’ recommendations for a long life with a healthy bag of salt. Particularly when they recommend a life of celibacy. I think that it’s good genes, and good luck, more than anything else.

Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Popular Culture, Social Commentary

Secession

11 Comments

Should American writers secede from the Nobel Prize for literature?

There was a brief moment, after World War II, when the Nobel Committee allowed that America might produce more sophisticated writers. No one on either side of the Atlantic would quarrel with the awards to William Faulkner in 1949 or Ernest Hemingway in 1954. But in the 32 years since Bellow won the Nobel, there has been exactly one American laureate, Toni Morrison, whose critical reputation in America is by no means secure. To judge by the Nobel roster, you would think that the last three decades have been a time of American cultural drought rather than the era when American culture and language conquered the globe.

But that, of course, is exactly the problem for the Swedes. As long as America could still be regarded as Europe’s backwater–as long as a poet like T.S. Eliot had to leave America for England in order to become famous enough to win the Nobel–it was easy to give American literature the occasional pat on the head. But now that the situation is reversed, and it is Europe that looks culturally, economically, and politically dependent on the United States, European pride can be assuaged only by pretending that American literature doesn’t exist. When Engdahl declares, “You can’t get away from the fact that Europe still is the center of the literary world,” there is a poignant echo of Gloria Swanson in Sunset Boulevard insisting that she is still big, it’s the pictures that got smaller.

Nothing gives the lie to Engdahl’s claim of European superiority more effectively than a glance at the Nobel Prize winners of the last decade or so. Even Austrians and Italians didn’t think Elfriede Jelinek and Dario Fo deserved their prizes; Harold Pinter won the prize about 40 years after his significant work was done. To suggest that these writers are more talented or accomplished than the best Americans of the last 30 years is preposterous.

Other than that I think Hemingway is vastly overrated, and ample fodder for parody, I agree. The Peace prizes have been a joke since Arafat and Rigoberto Menchu (not to mention Jimmy Carter), and I think that the literature prizes have gone the same way, decades ago.