quote out of context
The world is, in fact, a much better place than the optimists allow: and that is why pessimism is needed.
Media Cyborgs
A must read for media junkies:
It’s not just people with, you know, gun-legs; it’s anybody who uses a cell phone or wears contact lenses. It’s anybody who brings a tool really close in order to augment some capability.
Aren’t there people who have brought media that close? Aren’t there people who manipulate it, in all its forms, as naturally as another person might make a phone call, or speak, or breathe?
When you think of someone like Kanye West or Lady Gaga, you can’t think only of their brains and bodies. Lady Gaga in a simple dress on a tiny stage in a no-name club in Des Moines is—simply put—not Lady Gaga. Kanye West in jeans at a Starbucks is not Kanye West.
To understand people like that—and, increasingly, to understand people like us (eep!)—you’ve got to look instead at the sum of their brains, their bodies, the media they create, and the media created by others about them. All together, it constitutes a sort of fuzzy cloud that’s much, much bigger than a person.
Quote out of context
This made me wonder whether nudists have a recurring nightmare in which they show up in public with their clothes on.
Theatre of Great Discomfort
from the comments
What I object to, perhaps, is the charade of it all. I resent the feeling that I must get “made up” for men, and I know many women love to do this for themselves, but for me, I don’t even like shaving my legs much less going through the complications of lipstick. Or blush, ugh, don’t get me started on blush. What makes me even more upset is people will ask after my health if I don’t wear make up but when I do wear make up I get hit on and people tell me I am so beautiful. I don’t know quite what to make of that except it makes me see the entire enterprise as a very particular sort of fraud. But fraud that I will commit nonetheless when there is a handsome gent in the offing.
Fashion’s always a bit behind, a bit of a regression, a bit of a return, an homage. Everyone I know looks like they’re living in a weird mixture of the 70′s and the future. I could take a series of pictures for you that would look like they were taken back then, but part of it has to do with actual film stock I think. I can almost always place a film movie to within a year of its actual release or production, based on the look of the film itself.
Philip Selznick, 1919-2010
Philip Selznick is dead:
Selznick was considered a founder of the institutional perspective in organization theory.
“He showed that organizations are living institutions imbued with cultural and informal characteristics that can constrain and also enhance rationality,” said Lauren Edelman, associate dean of Berkeley Law’s Jurisprudence and Social Policy Program and a professor of law and sociology.
Addicted to Clusterflock?
Increasing numbers of things we like will be transformed into things we like too much… At the extreme end of the spectrum are crack and meth… Checkers and solitaire have been replaced by World of Warcraft and FarmVille. TV has become much more engaging, and even so it can’t compete with Facebook…
I’ve avoided most addictions, but the Internet got me because it became addictive while I was using it. Most people I know have problems with Internet addiction.
Paul Graham as quoted by Felix Salmon.
regarding prop 8
I have been making a similar argument to my fellow Christians for years:
The point of this [traditional] ideal is not that other relationships have no value, or that only nuclear families can rear children successfully. Rather, it’s that lifelong heterosexual monogamy at its best can offer something distinctive and remarkable — a microcosm of civilization, and an organic connection between human generations — that makes it worthy of distinctive recognition and support.
Again, this is not how many cultures approach marriage. It’s a particularly Western understanding, derived from Jewish and Christian beliefs about the order of creation, and supplemented by later ideas about romantic love, the rights of children, and the equality of the sexes.
Or at least, it was the Western understanding. Lately, it has come to co-exist with a less idealistic, more accommodating approach, defined by no-fault divorce, frequent out-of-wedlock births, and serial monogamy.
In this landscape, gay-marriage critics who fret about a slippery slope to polygamy miss the point. Americans already have a kind of postmodern polygamy available to them. It’s just spread over the course of a lifetime, rather than concentrated in a “Big Love”-style menage.
If this newer order completely vanquishes the older marital ideal, then gay marriage will become not only acceptable but morally necessary. The lifelong commitment of a gay couple is more impressive than the serial monogamy of straights. And a culture in which weddings are optional celebrations of romantic love, only tangentially connected to procreation, has no business discriminating against the love of homosexuals.
Incidentally, some guy gave a neat little speech about stuff like this a long time ago.
I wonder how this is related to the rotation of the Earth
“Pormpuraawans, we found, arranged time from east to west. That is, seated facing south, time went left to right. When facing north, right to left. When facing east, toward the body, and so on. Of course, we never told any of our participants which direction they faced. The Pormpuraawans not only knew that already, but they also spontaneously used this spatial orientation to construct their representations of time.”
(via Chris Muscarella)
White men can’t jump and black men can’t swim…
…but it’s not quite because of race:
Our approach is to study phenotypic (somatotypic) differences … which we consider to have been historically misclassified as racial characteristics. These differences represent consequences of still not well-understood variable environmental stimuli for survival fitness in different parts of the globe during thousands of years of habitation. Our study does not advance the notion of race, now recognized as a social construct, as opposed to a biological construct. We acknowledge the wide phenotypic and genotypic diversity among the so-called racial types.
The “social construct vs. biological construct” approach, though deceptively simple, could be profoundly important in advancing how we think about race and gender.
The Politically Incorrect Guide™ to the Civil War
The Politically Incorrect Guide™ to the Civil War is a joyful myth-busting rebel yell that shatters today’s Leftist and demeaning stereotypes about the South and the Civil War — and shows why, in the words of G. K. Chesterton, “America and the whole world is crying out for the spirit of the Old South.”
Do we need a not a spoof category?
What Would the Number Be Today?
I have been reading Stephen Dunn’s poems for many years, and his book of “prose pairs,” Riffs & Reciprocities, is a favorite (perhaps because I am also fond of prose poems). One of the pairs of brief prose pieces is titled “Scruples / Saints” (it originally appeared in The Georgia Review). Here’s the start of it, and a link to the remainder of the “Scruples” half of the set, which is interesting on its own:
Since the early eighties more students in my Literature & Ethics class, a freshman seminar, say they would press a button that would kill a nondescript peasant in another land, for which they would receive one million dollars and the guarantee of never being caught. They respond anonymously and must give a reason. Four out of twenty-five would in 1982. Eleven out of twenty-five in 1995. Reasons: Because it would set me up for life. Or, It’s just a one-time thing. And once, Because it’s a doggie-dog world.
What I imagine the values of clusterflock to be
Yesterday I asked a serious question about something I’m very interested in: how would we describe the culture of clusterflock? The post didn’t get much traction, at least for the question itself. That’s no big deal–as Cindy said in channeling Bad Santa, “they can’t all be winners”.
That said, though, I’m still pretty curious. If culture comprises values and norms, what might those be? To satisfy my curiosity (this may be technical onanism, by the way), I started scribbling out what I thought some of the values might be, on the assumption that the norms would probably match up to them. Here’s what I came up with for what I imagine some of the values of clusterflock to be:
- Participation
- Honesty
- Inclusion
- Integrity
- Creativity
- Humor
- Respect
- Sense of intelligence (walt)
- Sense of curiosity (walt)
- Seeking (CeCe)
- Mutual affection despite differences (CeCe and Sheila)
- Collaboration (fuz)
- Love for language (Luke)
- Loyalty (Daryl)
- Maturity (Cindy)
- Thoughtfulness (Cindy)
What do you think? Hits? Misses?
UPDATE: This is a fascinating list for me given that it communicates so much about who we are and who we think we are. Once they’re back, I’d be interested in what the travelers think.
The Slanguage Dictionary, Variety style.
This is super geekdorkginricky. Sadly, I find myself referring to this list a few times a month. Boy, those people at Variety sure are wicked full of themselves and their purported power over the lexicon. A fine sampling:
chopsocky — a martial arts film; “Chopsocky star Chuck Norris will make a guest appearance on ‘Seinfeld’ this season.”
tubthump — to promote or draw attention to; from the ancient show business custom of actors wandering the streets banging on tubs to drum up business; “Disney is planning a big parade to tubthump the opening of its new release.”
Q rating — ad research rating that gauges how easily a celebrity is recognized — and how well the celebrity is liked
nut — operating expenses to be recovered; “On Broadway, most shows need to operate at 60% of audience capacity to cover their nuts.”
infopike — information superhighway (Internet); “The studio has formed a new division to develop projects for the infopike.”
-Ronya
Jimmy Dean Sausage Complaint Call
Jimmy Dean sausage is for Southern people to eat.
Also, I think he forgets to hang up at the end.
A Lover Scorned
J.M. Bernstein, Professor of Philosophy at The New School for Social Research, aims to explain the Randian impulses of the Tea Party and ends up finding a jilted lover:
My hypothesis is that what all the events precipitating the Tea Party movement share is that they demonstrated, emphatically and unconditionally, the depths of the absolute dependence of us all on government action, and in so doing they undermined the deeply held fiction of individual autonomy and self-sufficiency that are intrinsic parts of Americans’ collective self-understanding.
[...]
[The] rage and anger I hear in the Tea Party movement; it is the sound of jilted lovers furious that the other — the anonymous blob called simply “government” — has suddenly let them down, suddenly made clear that they are dependent and limited beings, suddenly revealed them as vulnerable. And just as in love, the one-sided reminder of dependence is experienced as an injury. All the rhetoric of self-sufficiency, all the grand talk of wanting to be left alone is just the hollow insistence of the bereft lover that she can and will survive without her beloved. However, in political life, unlike love, there are no second marriages; we have only the one partner, and although we can rework our relationship, nothing can remove the actuality of dependence. That is permanent.
Someone send these people an anonymous carnation, for God’s sake.
The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work as a Middle Manager
I rarely mention my work on the flock, primarily because some of it would at turns horrify and dismay. That said, there are some interesting and positive dynamics, which is why organizations and groups fascinate me (even as I am often tone-deaf as a member). This missive from one of my sometimes-favorite blogs is equal parts hope and despair:
Quy Nguyen Huy reviews Paul Osterman’s book, The Truth about Middle Managers: Who They Are, How They Work, Why They Matter, in the latest issue of ASQ. Huy and Osterman both believe that middle managers are understudied contributors to the business world, given their closeness to the actual work, innovation, and productive efforts in our economy. Huy’s own work suggests that middle managers play an important role in sustaining the emotional energy of an organization. Their ability to cultivate positive emotional states has a big impact on an organization’s abilit y to facilitate successful change. When middle managers resist change and fail to attend to the emotional states of employees, organizational change tends to produce resistance and a lack of commitment. When middle managers attend to the emotional states of their employees, radical change is embraced and is more likely to produce positive outcomes for the organization.
So research indicates that middle managers are critical components to some of the most important organizational outcomes, like innovation and change. This intuition makes it all the more surprising that most organizations have tended to de-prioritize their investment in middle management. Businesses increasingly see middle managers as expendable.
Ouch. Still, the glimmer of hope is in the denouement of the first paragraph: radical change is possible if we attend to the emotional states of those around us. Something to ponder.
Still the hottest chuckle on radio.
A fantastic interview with Ira Glass. Yet unknown: is he a distant cousin of Ida Twahte?
One of the reasons I was interested in doing this interview is because I feel like being wrong is really important to doing decent work. To do any kind of creative work well, you have to run at stuff knowing that it’s usually going to fail. You have to take that into account and you have to make peace with it…
…I feel like this is a really weird example to bring up, but he interviews me and Errol Morris about interviewing. It’s a really funny chapter because I give all of these totally Pollyanna answers—I mean, things I really believe, but I’m like [here he goes into an earnest falsetto, like a very sincere Chipmunk] “I just think that people open up because they sense that somebody’s really interested. It’s just a natural human thing.” And Errol is like “I DOUBT WHETHER WE KNOW OURSELVES, AND THE ACT OF BEING INTERVIEWED IS AN ACT OF ASSERTING A SELF WHICH WE HOPE IS TRUE.” Seriously, every answer is like this. I’m like, “I just think it’s really swell being interviewed!” And he’s like “THERE IS NO SELF.”
quote out of context
[In] some respects, depression and anxiety are the supreme negative externalities of consumer-oriented capitalism, generating capitalism’s latest contradiction – that we can drag ourselves outside to shop, but not to produce or co-operate with one another.
Bill Moyers Interviews David Simon
In April of 2009, Bill Moyers sat down with David Simon, creator of HBO’s The Wire, to discuss the creation of his series, the failures of modern journalism, the economics of drug culture and the worldview that informs the show’s unblinking gaze at West Baltimore and its crippled institutions. The interview lasts a shade over 50 minutes, but I can’t help but feel like this is one of the most important and informative conversations I’ll yet witness.
We are ready to die protecting the honor of our beloved Prophet
Yesterday, Andrew posted the Everybody Draw Mohammed Day contest. Today Pakistan blocked access to YouTube and FaceBook.
Andrew is very powerful.
Doomsday Protection Under a Desert
BARSTOW, Calif. – A company with a doomsday plan is taking money for what it promises will be a comfortable, nuke-proof bunker under the Mojave Desert, with an atrium, gym and jail, and sloppy joes and pearl potatoes on the menu.
See here. What would we want in a clusterbunker? Probably not sloppy joes and pearl potatoes.
the library of congress will archive every public tweet
The U.S. Library of Congress, which archives many forms of media for their cultural and historical significance, has announced it will keep a digital archive of every public tweet that has been broadcast on Twitter since its inception in March 2006.
from the comments
I saw this kid on South William street in Dublin, he was walking faster than the other kids in his group. They were all about 16. And he stops, and turns around, and says “where are we going?” Man. I shuddered. But really, that’s more of a drag than anything. There are different kinds of conflict and prescribed agreement. There’s that one you describe, where you take a deep breath, because you are about to become the pariah.
Clusterflockstock advance team: dinner with Josh
Josh and Grace, serial Denver residents, joined Ronya and me (not “I”) for a lovely dinner last night. Topics discussed:
- Dream jobs
- Couch surfing
- Arrogant homeless people
- Artisanal cheese
- Haircuts
- Critical theory in communications
- Jamaica Plain
- The Brendan Behan pub
- Frank Patrick
- Path to Clusterflocking
- Conspiracy theories about the sinister inner group of ‘flockers
- Pescatarianism
- Fashion
- Breast augmentation
- Cheeseburgers
- Career ennui
We have threatened to repeat such a gathering. I rather enjoyed it. As a bonus, Grace asked (snidely, if you ask me) if we would be geeky enough to blog about it.
How ya like me now?
