Category: Uncategorized

David Brooks writes an uncharacteristically funny column in the New York Times:

All my life I’ve been a successful pseudo-intellectual, sprinkling quotations from Kafka, Epictetus and Derrida into my conversations, impressing dates and making my friends feel mentally inferior. But over the last few years, it’s stopped working. People just look at me blankly. My artificially inflated self-esteem is on the wane. What happened?

It’s quite amusing; I particularly liked his concept of the early discarder. I have to confess that I’ve always been somewhat mystified by the concept of an intellectual vogue since I like what I like and it doesn’t trouble me at all that some of my favorite writers, formerly names often heard dropped by the sort of meme lords Brooks mocks, are now passe. There are few things I despise more than a pretense that one has experience of things that one actually has not; it’s amazing how much posery one inadvertantly uncovers merely by happening to live in Europe.

Do tell me again how very European it is to live in Quebec, mon ami….

Spacebunny is always amused when women of a certain age and income level are so good as to tell her what Italy is like, based on the two weeks they spent three summers ago traversing Florence, Venice, and the Cinque Terre. I once nearly had to kick a guest out of our house when he furiously insisted that as an experienced international businessman, he did too know how to make European phone calls, the fact that every time he tried to dial a hotel in Venice he reached someone who spoke only German notwithstanding.

It’s certainly pleasant to know things, but knowledge doesn’t actually make you a better person. Everyone is ignorant of many things, since it’s not possible to be a true polymath in the Age of Information. For all my extensive knowledge of World of Warcraft and Age of Conan, I don’t know much about Vanguard – which is fine – or Everquest – which is not – or Ultima Online – which is really reprehensible. I’m also shockingly ignorant of American Idol and a whole host of pop cultural items, but to be honest, with regards to this sort of thing there’s a good case to be made that ignorance is bliss. I certainly wouldn’t sneer at those who don’t keep up on the state of NFL salary caps, unless, of course, they’re trying to tell me that the Jets are going to keep Chad Pennington and Brett Favre. And I don’t care if Hesse has been out of fashion since the ’70s, I love his novels anyways.

But if it’s pleasurable to be a quote-spewing pseudo-intellectual, it’s even more pleasurable to puncture their pretensions of knowing that which they pretend to know. For example, I would guess that for every 20 people who bring up Euthyphro in a discussion about morality, only one has actually read it… and only one in one hundred of those who have read it understood it well enough to recognize what a dishonest sham it is. That being said, my experience in the response to my last novel has taught me that from the writer’s perspective, it’s more important to create the illusion of brilliance than to create something genuinely brilliant* on a wavelength that no reader can reasonably be expected to detect. I expect the more alert regulars will understand the implications of this lesson….

Speaking of non-pseudos, it is my pleasure to declare that the following individuals have demonstrated that they do actually know their Thucydides and may henceforth feel free to drop quotes from The History of the Peloponnesian War in very good conscience. The three individuals named in bold merit particular distinction as Grand Thucydideans, as they tied for the high score on the final at 96 percent. DocBrown also merits GT status as the Most Valuable Commenter throughout the course of our collaborative reading.

zeno
jSinSaTx
John**
repomanuel
SGTGideonsDad
Ian.yclept
Scott
Art
WLindsayWheeler
Wendy
Galactus
Connor
DocBrown
Jack
rdkraus
Giraffe
Rusty
SandmansView
MikeLaRoche
AWiserManThanI
Somboed
JK
Nate

*I’m not claiming to have written anything brilliant; it’s not for me to judge. But no one can have judged that aspect of Wrath at all, as said wavelength has remained undetected to this point.

**John scored 23/25 but was awarded an extra point for catching my error in conflating Demosthenes and Nicias in the question about “the brilliant Athenian general” on the final.

I noticed Mr. Dr. Helen, aka Instapundit, is running a U.S. presidential poll, so I thought it might be interesting to compare the results of VP readers with Instapundit readers. Here are the results of the two polls:

Instapundit
7,978 votes
82% – John McCain (R)
09% – None of the Above
05% – Bob Barr (L)
04% – Barack Obama (D)
00% – Ralph Nader (I)

Vox Popoli
1,022 votes
52% – None of the Above
21% – Bob Barr (L)
13% – Barack Obama (D)
13% – John McCain (R)
01% – Ralph Nader (I)

There are three interesting things to observe here. First, VP readers appear to be significantly more active on this blog than are Instapundit readers; if the VP readership was 12.8 percent of Insty’s total, it would average 30k daily readers, not 4k. Second, VP is very clearly not the Republican haven that it is commonly supposed to be by liberals and unlike most blogs it is not read only by the echo chamber. I was extremely surprised at how Republican-heavy Instapundit turned out to be. And third, for all its radical libertarian extremism, VP is arguably more in tune with the mood of the general public than most political blogs, including Instapundit, as it’s quite possible that at least 52 percent of the American electorate will join the 534 readers here – and me – in refusing to vote for any of the declared candidates referenced in this poll.

But it was very, very wrong of me to do so:

A British commuter was thrown on to a railway line after she told two youths to stop smoking on a station platform on Wednesday. The woman, whose identity is not known, suffered burns and a suspected broken collar bone and was taken to the hospital after the incident, at Farningham Road station in Kent during the rush hour shortly after 7a.m.

This is amusing for several reasons. First, despite not being a smoker myself, I loathe all anti-smoking puritans. I’m not saying these busybodies all deserve to die, but the obnoxious way they often confront smokers makes me want to punch them in the face. I can’t imagine how the smokers themselves must feel. Second, it’s such a completely absurd escalation of the situation. Nine times out of ten, a polite “would you mind not doing that, please” will be well-received by most people; if a person doesn’t accede to such a reasonable request, it’s not very wise to press further. You’re making a request, not a demand, after all. If, on the other hand, you’re actually making a demand, then you’d best have the means to back it up.

Third, given how I suspect the situation developed, it’s a cogent illustration of the impotence of female reliance upon the law. I suspect we’re going to be seeing more and more of this behavior as it becomes eminently clear to younger men that the law is becoming ever more hostile to their sex. One can just picture the woman imperiously making her righteous demand of the two young thugs in the full confidence that the law is not only on her side, but protecting her, then finding herself sailing through the air as her position and her misplaced confidence are met with a speedy and forceful rebuttal. In these decadent overlawyered days, many of us have forgotten that the law is little more than a mirage of mutual consent; as that consent is withdrawn by more individuals, the essentially immaterial nature of the law becomes increasingly apparent to everyone.

Fourth and finally, it is such a perfect example of the progression from a once-civilized equalitarian society into the feral society of the future. The equalitarian society capable of conceiving and constructing a world that removes from the individual the ability to decide what substances he is allowed to put in his own mouth is precisely the sort of society that is very likely to produce barbarians of the sort that were smoking on the platform in open defiance of that dictate.

The joys of staying home with nothing to do:

Dr. Scott Haltzman, author of “The Secrets of Happily Married Women,” says stay-at-home wives constitute a growing niche. “In the past few years, many women who are well educated and trained for career tracks have decided instead to stay at home,” he says. While his research is ongoing, he estimates that more than 10 percent of the 650 women he’s interviewed who choose to stay home are childless.

Daniel Buccino, a Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine clinical social worker and psychotherapist, says stay-at-home wives are the latest “status symbols.”

I’m of two minds about this supposed trend, or more likely, this latest media attempt to spot a trend in the making. While it’s certainly not my business how married couples choose to order their lives, while I’m very much in favor of stay-at-home mothers, and while I have in the past pointed out how the realities of the income tax and day care expenses render the net income and opportunity cost of the average working mother to be negative, I’ve also been witness to the very real downside of the completely unoccupied woman.

Now, it’s one thing if the woman is a genuine homemaker or seriously devoted to some creative endeavor such as writing or painting. My grandmother never worked after my mother got married; she was a painter and if her landscapes were largely unremarkable, they were both competent and visually attractive. She and my grandfather also maintained a garden and courtyard that bordered on the spectacular; the sheer aesthetic pleasure of visiting their house remains one of my favorite recollections. And, of course, one must remember that not all couples voluntarily elect evolutionary dead-end status; blaming the barren for their childless state is simply piling on.

But it’s another thing altogether if the wife’s idea of homemaking is “managing the help” and her real occupation is bitching about acquaintances at the local coffee shop with her similarly unoccupied friends. Anyone who has grown up in a sufficiently wealthy community will know what I mean; a group of such women gossiping away are like a poisonous swamp giving off a toxic miasma capable of polluting relationships two and three steps removed. It’s little wonder that so many of them end up divorced; there is truth in the old adage about idle hands.

I wonder, too, how many wives would be pleased to support a husband in his decision if he came home and declared that staying home and allowing her to support him was something that he wanted to do? I find it very hard to imagine any normal woman simply smiling and saying, “Why, yes, of course, darling, whatever makes you happy!” Now, the vagaries of the current economy being what they are, there will certainly be times when a couple with children will determine it to be advantageous for the family if the mother works and the father cares for the children. I certainly can’t cast any stones in this regard, as I’d always planned to marry a high-paid international model myself and had in fact made significant progress along those lines when I happened to meet this gorgeous blonde who looked like an Eddie Bauer model doing the whole look-I’m-wearing-an-Irish-sweater-and-walking-a-dog-on-a-cold-Atlantic-beach thing. As it turned out, she was actually a nanny. Whoops… and therefore in the place of a decadent life of writing jaded accounts of the existential ennui that results from living a five-star lifestyle in London, Paris, and Rome, I was forced to come up with some other means of avoiding a commute, an office and obscenely early Monday morning meetings.

The danger for married couples is that what makes an overwhelmed 25-year old woman happy and content may not necessarily do so five or ten years in the future. It’s boredom that makes the housewife desperate. Still, money isn’t even close to being the most important thing in life, so if you can afford to live a life of lehzhure instead of grinding away in pursuit of someone else’s dime, that’s great. But one must have a purpose in life; you can live very well without money or a paying job, but not without a definite reason to get up in the morning.

Or, the crack of noon, as we civilized men of letters prefer.

BKM dared to doubt:

is it possible? Vox could be proven wrong on two major predictions within a span of two months?

inconceivable!

as i remember, you were fairly emphatic that Favre would never wear the purple.

“The Jets, once the team of one of football’s most charismatic quarterbacks, now have another one. They acquired Brett Favre from the Green Bay Packers late Wednesday night in a deal the Jets hope will ignite excitement for a team that struggles to remain in the headlines in the same city with the Giants and struggles for competitiveness in the same division as the New England Patriots.”
– The New York Times, 8 Aug, 2008

ProFootballTalk adds: “Adam Schefter of NFL Network reports that, if the Jets were to trade Favre to the Vikings, the Jets would owe the Packers three first-round picks.”

So, yes, I remain entirely comfortable in my emphatic prediction that Favre will not wear the Purple in this or any other NFL season. And although I would have vastly preferred to see #4 instead of the continuation of The Tavaris Jackson Experiment, it’s completely appropriate that Favre never will. Here’s hoping the Vikes go after Pennington as a solid backup in case the Experiment reverts to form. A fourth-rounder for #4 with conditional boosters is an excellent deal for the Jets; I don’t think there’s any fear they’ll end up giving up the first-rounder. Given Chuckie’s predilection for collecting quarterbacks, I’m amazed that Tampa didn’t match or better the offer, but then, I haven’t been keeping track of the salary cap issues and it’s not difficult to imagine that adding a $12 million salary might have been problematic.

As for that other prediction, I’m not exactly the only one who isn’t sure that it’s as over as its said to be:

“Sen. Hillary Clinton told a gathering of supporters last week that she’s looking for a “strategy” for her delegates to have their voices heard and “respected” at the Democratic National Convention — and did not rule out the possibility of having her name placed into nomination at the convention alongside Sen. Barack Obama’s.”
– ABC News, 6 Aug 2008

Respect is just another word for never having to say surrender.

UPDATE – I see from Football Outsiders that Spacebunny’s mother must have made it to the stockholder’s meeting after all:

“Bring him back!”
– A lone woman among the shareholders

The murderess gets custody of her victim’s kids:

Mary Winkler–who shot her husband in the back and then refused to aid him or call 911 as he slowly bled to death for 20 minutes–walked away a free woman last year after serving a farcically brief “sentence” for her crimes…. Mary Winkler was granted supervised visits with her daughters last year. Now, sadly, she has gained back custody of the three girls….

It won’t surprise me in the least if one or more of those girls eventually elects to avenge her father’s murder. The situation certainly seems to cry out for that sort of remorseless Greek nemesis. And why shouldn’t the girls feel free to take justice into their own hands, when being female grants a license to kill in Tennessee?

The Mary Winkler case is one of the many reasons I reject the “equality before the law” argument that is often invoked to defend women’s suffrage and other equalitarian concepts. “Equality” simply does not exist; there is far less material evidence for equality than there is for God. In fact, there’s more material evidence for the existence of Zeus than there is for equality.

Dr. Helen says: “I have no words to describe how unfair the justice system is towards men who are slaughtered by their wives.”

This “women walk free” concept is extraordinarily short-sighted on the part of those administering the “justice” system. They are leaving the relatives of those men with no choice but to take into their own hands the retribution that is being denied by the legal system. Such avengers should be punished, of course. I suggest a just sentence would be precisely the same punishment previously meted out to the murderess.

It’s absurd, what passes for the “mainstream media” spends most of its time covering deaths, car chases, celebrities, and missing children in strange lands because they think that’s what people want them to cover. But when they get something that is both scandalously juicy and relevant to American politics, they sweep it as far under the table as they possibly can.

I’ve gotten notes that Jay Leno joked about Edwards last night, saying something to the effect of: “The National Enquirer reports that John Edwards’ mistress is receiving $15,000 a month in hush money. No word on how much the mainstream media is getting.”

No wonder newspapers are going out of business; they’re quite literally a joke.

Narrowing the range or falsifying string theory?

Scientists working on the CDF and DZero experiments at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory are entering Higgs territory. On Sunday, the two groups reported at a conference in Pennsylvania that for the first time their results directly restrict the allowed mass range for the elusive Higgs boson. The results show that the CDF and DZero experiments are sensitive to Higgs signals that may show up as the two collaborations gather and analyze more data.

One of the interesting contrasts between science and atheist logic is the way the two distinctly different methods of thought regard range restriction. For the scientist, the restriction of the allowed mass ranges for the Higgs boson is interpreted as a helpful means of identifying the correct properties of the Higgs boson. While this ongoing search may eventually eliminate the possibility altogether, the basic assumption is that the boson exists and any restrictions discovered will aid them in finding it.

Atheist logic, on the other hand, interprets the restrictions on God’s perceived actions as evidence of His nonexistence. The fact that God does not [fill in the physical action of your choice] as was previously believed is logically extrapolated to the extreme in order to allow for the conclusion that God does not exist. But, as the Higgs hunt shows, this is not only an unscientific way of thinking, its assumptions are precisely the opposite of those made from a scientific perspective.

I’m not into political activist posery, as a general rule. But the decision to hold the Olympics in the People’s Republic of China is an appalling decision that stinks in the nostrils of every decent human being on the planet, particularly in light of the brutal oppression that has characterized the Chinese occupation of Tibet.

So, don’t look for any discussion of the Olympic Games here. This blog will be ignoring them and flying the flag of a free Tibet for the duration of this farce of an Olympics.

In which single childless women belatedly realize they’re not necessarily quite as strong and independent as they’d previously imagined:

As a single childless woman, I share the fear of my readers, above, and no amount of financial preparation for a prolonged old age calms me…. [H]aving witnessed the “new old age’’ from a front-row seat, I’m haunted by the knowledge that there is no one who will care about me in the deepest and most loving sense of the word at the end of my life. No one who will advocate for me, not simply for adequate care but for the small and arguably inessential things that can make life worth living even in compromised health.

I realize that there are some men and women who really wanted very badly to get married and have children, but were unable to do so. But, in my experience, every single unmarried man and woman I know had many opportunities to marry. In every case, they elected not to do so. That’s fine on an individual level – although not necessarily so from a societal perspective – but why should anyone feel sorry for those who are now worried about experiencing the entirely predictable consequences of leading an entirely self-focused life?

If we don’t pity those who smoke like chimneys and eventually get lung cancer, a relatively far less certain outcome, then how can we possibly be expected to concern ourselves with those who are belatedly coming to realize that choosing to rely only on yourself means that you cannot reasonably depend upon anyone else? Why should anyone care One reaps what one sows; if one does not sow, one will not reap.