Saturday, July 27, 2019

I Am No More Evil Than I Am Talented

Road home from work:







                                 

3 comments:

  1. i read 'the way to keep going in antarctica' by bernadette meyer

    the title reminded me of

    http://mistahcharley.blogspot.com/2012/07/dont-give-up.html

    the line

    Our own ideas of food, a Wild sauce

    reminded me of tate's story of the wild cheese - annotated, compared, and contrasted under the title Parables of the Powerful and their Pawns in the comments at

    https://www.blckdgrd.com/2019/01/2019-january-9.html?showComment=1547133591624#c3210577243381945842

    and speaking of meals in the poetry of james tate - i notice canned beans appear more than once in his last collection "the government lake" - which every tate enthusiast should read

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  2. Fine art that problematically fails to address the central question: Who is the Walrus?

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  3. It's really remarkable how incapable Beltway types are of recognizing how a "case" is made by painstakingly laying out a factual "record"—"bad optics", "doddering old fool", "unclear", "I didn't understand", "Democrats didn't make a good movie out of the book" bullshit. Politics, Journalism, and Political Journalism seem to be suffering from some form of TV-itis, a kind of ADD. Legal work is time-consuming, hard, and requires a special set of skills it takes years to understand and master. Even more so in the public, political context where mass communication is involved. (The R's did a truly effective job destroying Hillary Clinton public image with the drawn out Benghazi nonsense and then the "But her emails!" refrain. They yelled and pointed fingers and falsely accused. And they had no case. The Dems have a real case, IMO. Being methodical in prosecuting it is, indeed, frustrating.)

    Speaking of how an argument is made—to wit, by adducing proofs—Crispin Sartwell knows how to make a damn good case. Interesting, though, how he skews the record and even, at the end, points out that well, maybe all those philosophers he cited weren't really white supremacists but people who perhaps misunderstood them or probably misapplied their rationales certainly were, so we should throw out the entire history of western philosophy because of some ignoramuses. Of course, his argument—persuasive on its own terms that it's always fruitful to investigate the premises of philosophical arguments—made me go back and read my own first draft of philosophical positions to try to discern my own vulnerabilities to misreading or misinterpretation or even actual biases. My points don't seem to buy into the dualisms he places at the root of the problem, a truly distinct aspect of early modernist philosophy (Descartes, in particular). Maybe that solves the problem. Maybe not. I'll have to think about it.

    Thanks for the linkage! Appreciated as ever.

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