From the monthly archives:

January 2004

Wittgenstein’s Poker

January 31, 2004

– Was Googling my own blog, and found this picture titled “flybottle,” which I assume is a depiction of Wittgenstein helping to show Popper the way out.

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The Choices! THE CHOICES!!

January 28, 2004

Tyler Cowen excerpts this NYT piece by Barry Schwartz on whether we have too many choices. I found titibits like this pretty damn obvious:
• Sheena Iyengar and Mark Lepper, psychologists at Columbia and Stanford respectively, have shown that as the number of flavors of jam or varieties of chocolate available to shoppers is increased, the [...]

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Hypothetical

January 27, 2004

– If today was my birthday, how old would I be?
I’m going with K-Rad, Emilicious & the D.I.K., among others, to see the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater at the Kennedy Center. Very exciting!

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Ideology is Infrastructure

January 26, 2004

– My first, and I hope not last, Tech Central Station column is now up. It was inspired by my December post on the “hierarchy of public goods.”

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It’s, like, the system, man

January 24, 2004

– Henry Farrell at Crooked Timber drips with disgust at Congressman Billy Tauzin’s whoring:
For the last couple of weeks, there’s been a bidding war between the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) and the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America (PhRMA) for Tauzin’s services. The MPAA had paid its outgoing head lobbyist, the unlamented Jack [...]

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Snap!

January 23, 2004

– Slate’s Jack Shafer gleefully rips the asshole out of the New America Foundation’s fundraising special in the New Atlantic.

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Doing it First, Doing it Best

January 23, 2004

– Gawker Media has launched a new blog devoted to gossip about the Federal City side of the District. Despite their innovative reputation, let it not go unsaid that in this instance Gawker is derivative. Swamp City has been covering the same beat for some time now, with panache. You should add it to your [...]

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Vice Ain’t Right

January 23, 2004

– Joanne McNeill has the lowdown on paunchy aging hipster Gavin McGinnes. His claim to be conservative was apparently a spoof. This supports my argument below that claiming to be conservative is likely to be cooler than actually being conservative. McGinnes does a great job of showing how very uncool conservatives are by showing us [...]

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Bush Sully-ed

January 23, 2004

– It’s not often these days that I say this, but I think Andrew Sullivan is spot on about the SOTU. If I didn’t agree entirely with Chris Sciabarra about the irrelevance of the presidency given the structural immutability of the American political system (great post, read it), then I too would be shopping [...]

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The Littlest Matador

January 22, 2004

– Let’s play a game! Guess the identity of this somewhat supercilious (but unbearably precious) bullfighter! The winner receives a good rodgering.

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Burke is the New Black

January 22, 2004

– Despite the arguments set forth by Holiday Dmitri on NRO, conservatism is not now, and never was, cool. Indeed, anyone disposed to utter “young hipublican” without scare-quotes is immediately disqualified from the cool sweeps (unless of course the lack of scare quotes is itself part of an undetectably ironic performance of earnestness, which is [...]

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Great Power, No Handling

January 22, 2004

– Nice anaylysis by Tim Lee on how the tech innovations of the Dean campaign got ahead of Dean’s capacity as a candidate.

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Leaps over Buildings in a Single Bound, Cries Like a Little Girl

January 20, 2004

– Don’t miss this bizarre USA TODAY bar graph constructed from three of Superman’s bodily fluids.

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Keepin’ it Real, but Not Enough

January 20, 2004

– I enjoyed Mia Fineman’s perceptive but careful-not-to-make-too-firm-a-judgment essay on the paintings of John Currin on Slate. I find Currin excruciatingly boring, and technically just OK. Without the funky anatomical distortion (the creepy tiny extremities!), there’s just nothing to take in. But do look at the slideshow which features some other decent neo-realist painters. Vincent [...]

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Fargo: Den of Thieves

January 19, 2004

– Since my window for interest in Iowa-themed posts is now closing, let me just point out that Iowa comes out as the 47th most corrupt state in the union in this study. When I tell people Iowa was a good place to grow up, this sort of thing is part of what I [...]

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Big Fish, Bullshit

January 19, 2004

– Galen Strawson calls out the “narrativist orthodoxy” in his review of Jerome Bruner’s Making Stories. Strawson argues, and he is right, that we are not “constituted” by the stories of our lives in which we cast ourselves as characters. While having a sense that one’s life has gone well may involve seeing it as [...]

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French Silk

January 19, 2004

– For some reason I just love the fact that they’re wearing the same socks.
[NOT WORK SAFE. Link via Fleshbot.]

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Baby it’s Cold Outside, and… So what?

January 19, 2004

Tim Graham of the NRO Corner get’s it right. Take note all you Mid-Atlantic ninnies.
UM…IT’S IOWA. [Tim Graham]
Dumbest moment of the morning came on NPR, when Juan Williams was asked if the around-zero cold would keep Iowans home from the caucuses. This is IOWA, people. They’re USED to these temps in the winter. Twenty below [...]

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In Defense of the Caucus!

January 17, 2004

– As an irrationally proud and defensive Iowan, I am annoyed by the headline of the top story on the Slate front page. It says: “The Phantom Pollbooth: Why You’ll Never Know who won Iowa.” (The headline over the story itself reads, cryptically, “The Vanishing.”)
The implication here is that there is something wrong with [...]

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Anti-Maintenance Man

January 16, 2004

– In response to my claim that men have not yet figured out how best to be men in the post-feminist world, Kim “Rifleman” DuToit writes:
Actually, we have figured it out, but I’m not so sure women are going to like the answer.
We seem to have preferred to opt out of the whole [...]

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“Stories to Masturbate to”

January 15, 2004

– I’m proud to report that the Fly Bottle is #2 in this search on AOL, just after “A Special Weekend” by D. at Spinkle’s Golden Showers! [WARNING: For the love of sweet Jesus DO NOT READ "A Special Weekend" by D. at Sprinkle's Golden Showers!!! Just don't.]
[To National Review Readers: Sorry about [...]

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State to You: “Tell me about your mother.”

January 14, 2004

This is just nauseating. The New York Times reports that the Bush administration is planning to provide “$1.5 billion for training to help couples develop interpersonal skills that sustain ‘healthy marriages.’”
This is apparently what compassionate conservatism comes to: the intrusion of the state in even the most personal spheres of life; social engineering through therapy.
“We [...]

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The New Capitalist Man

January 14, 2004

– Terence O. Moore is worried that manhood is ailing, and that our culture now produces only barbarians and wimps. While there is some truth to his complaints, my issue with this kind of conservative social criticism is its utter lack of imagination. The world has changed, and despite Moore’s loathing of whiners, all he [...]

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Giving a Whit about Convention

January 14, 2004

– Julia Magnet’s thoughtful paean to the films of Whit Stillman moved me to dwell on tensions in my own character that reflect, I think, the uneasy integration of fairly traditional (read: conservative) values and the values of the “sexual revolution.” Magnet enthusiastically approves of Stillman’s rearguard defense of traditional conventions, and his indictment of [...]

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Spread Thin

January 13, 2004

– Well, very suddenly, I am teaching an introductory aesthetics course at Howard University, not far from my digs. I’m scrambling to prepare.
In addition, I’m guest blogging over at Liberty & Power. And I’m still blogging at Radley’s until, I guess, he tells me I’m not.

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