Scholars and RoguesScholars and RoguesA diverse band of thinkers, social analysts, activists, grousers, jesters, and troublemakers. We're different in many ways, but we share a general belief in progress, a conviction that smarter is better, and a passionate distaste for convention. Articles
Pop quiz: Did you know that you may lose your television service in less th
2008-04-14 02:50:00 Is the answer to the above question “No?” Well, that’s part of the problem–millions of Americans are in the same boat, and they are equally unaware of the situation The basic gist is this: On February 17, 2009, “over-the-air” (OTA) broadcast television stations that use analog signals (which you pick up through the familiar “rabbit-ear” antennae) are switching to digital signals, which means that unless you have a strong enough antenna set and a special set-top converter box, your television will not be able to pick up the new signals. The government’s official DTV site gives a concise description of the whole event. Cable and satellite subscribers will also be unaffected, because cable systems work with analog signals and satellite programming requires its own tuner. This may lead you to think “Well, that solves the problem right there–who still watches regular broadcast TV?” The answer is a lot of peopleR... More About: Quiz , Television , Congress , Bush , George W
It?s TIME we look at advertising as a performance art. Or an act.
2008-04-13 21:04:00 by greg stene, phd We cannot continue to think of advertising as merely a print ad or TV spot. We need to include far more as advertising ? including the actions of people and corporations. Their Performance Art. And in contrast, their Performance Acts. Real Performance Art is not just some dude dancing in a street. Or some Laurie Anderson musical performance. Or some geek sitting around reciting poetry that shows up on an HDTV screen in front of him in a restaurant while he?s eating raw buffalo meat. Performance Art should also be considered the public?s encounter with the end-result of the artist?s work. The thing the academics call the artifact. It?s the Jackson Pollack painting. It?s the film by Coppola. It?s the painting by your kid on the fridge. The performance of the painting, the film ? has not become dead merely because the creation of the art has stopped. The creation of the art, the Performance Art, actually continues in true post-modern fashion, in the meaning-... More About: Advertising , Time
Saturday Video Roundup: the South?s gonna do it agin?
2008-04-12 18:13:00 I was born and raised in the South , a region that’s often misunderstood and mischaracterized by those who’ve never been there. When I moved to the Midwest for grad school I encountered people whose knowledge of the South was pretty much confined to The Andy Griffith Show, The Dukes of Hazzard and Hee-Haw. And they called us stupid. I’ve tried to live my life in a way that dispelled bad stereotypes about my home. Sadly, not everyone below the Mason-Dixon Line got the memo. Take this guy, the Pride of Kentucky, for instance. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gn8EQ0azXp Q While we’re on the subject of varmints, they’re apparently shooting the sequel to Snakes on a Plane in a Wal*Mart parking lot in Louisiana. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q9_6aFlJBC 4 If the Turtleman can afford the gas for a drive down to Savannah, his soulmate is waiting for him. (Alternate caption: Midnight in the Garden of Dat Bitch is Crazy.) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QIovbVUvf. .. More About: Video , Roundup , Saturday , Gonna
Quotabull
2008-04-11 19:26:00 This is actually a boost to remind people that we can produce this kind of journalism at any time. We’re going to have a large enough newsroom to continue to produce this kind of quality journalism. ? Leonard Downie Jr., editor of The Washington Post, winner of six Pulitzer Prizes for 2008; The Post’s front-page story by media critic Howard Kurtz did not mention the paper has endured three rounds of staff cuts since 2003, but the AP’s story did; April 7; emphasis added. I can only confirm that the route is dynamic. ? Nathan Ballard, a San Francisco city spokesman, as, said The New York Times, “The precise route remained in flux on Tuesday as the torch extravaganza threatened to become more civic migraine than celebration in the face of potential protests by those upset with China ?s human rights record and recent crackdown in Tibet”; April 9. For some members of the U.S. Congress to set aside the Olympic spirit and the principle that sports should not b... More About: Iraq , Israel , Bush administration
CU, Max Karson, JonBenét Ramsey and a sad case of catfight journalism: West
2008-04-11 16:28:00 The header on the story reads this way: CU’s Campus Press Fights for Independence. The subhead is equally on-point: A contentious faculty meeting points to independence for CU-Boulder’s student newspaper ? but at what cost? But at that point the journalism train jumps the tracks, because the first couple grafs eschew any consideration of the alleged story itself in favor of a gratuitous drive-by snarking from reporter Michael Roberts. University of Colorado at Boulder journalism professor Michael Tracey has never previously suffered from camera shyness. Indeed, back in August 2006, when bogus confessor John Mark Karr was arrested as a suspect in the JonBenét Ramsey murder due largely to comments he made in correspondence with Tracey, the prof practically vaulted into a media horde gathered at the Boulder Justice Center. But after spotting a flash during a journalism-department faculty meeting about the future of the Campus Press, an online student publication, Tracey wen... More About: Journalism , West , Case
How to win the Iraq war debate against your dumb friends
2008-04-10 23:44:00 by Lee Camp Recently I was arguing with one of my dumber friends about the Iraq war. He loves Bush and thinks bigger bombs is the answer in Iraq. I wasn?t gaining any ground in the argument until I used a simple analogy. I said, ?Your solution is like shattering an expensive vase and then saying, ?We need to keep smashing it until it?s fixed.?? I stumped him. He was silent. So here?s a brief list of other analogies you can use on your dumb friends. And the truth is, I?ve seen similar ones work on some of the smartest political pundits. 1) The country of Iraq has essentially been demolished. The right-wingers keep saying the answer is continued large-scale military action. That?s like if someone got into a car accident, went into a coma, and the doctors believed the patient could be healed by more car accidents. So they just keep putting him into cars and sending him off cliffs. 2) I?ve heard people say that being against Bush or Petraeus or the war in Iraq is equivalent to being aga... More About: Friends , Republicans , Iraq War , George Bush
WordsDay: ?The Day Daddy Died?
2008-04-10 22:06:00 It?s around 9 a.m. May 1, 1994. My stepmother, Kathie, has spent the night at Forsyth Memorial Hospital with my father, Larry, who will die late this afternoon. Their next-door neighbor, Wayne, is driving her home so she can shower and maybe get an hour or two of sleep. She hasn?t slept much in the six weeks since Daddy was admitted to the hospital with massive liver failure. Wayne has been a constant and salving presence during his friend?s illness. Ten miles, maybe, down Silas Creek Parkway, through the south side of Winston-Salem, then on out Highway 109’s low, pine-strewn roll of hills to where Gumtree Road cuts across, demarcating the northern boundary of Wallburg, NC. This is where Daddy and Kathie live, and it?s where I grew up. These are the cultural outlands of the sprawling new metropolitan South. Our neighborhood straddles the Davidson and Forsyth County lines, and stands too far out into the country to be properly called suburban. But it?s also way too close to Win... More About: Culture , Arts , Died
Obama makes Bush dog go all warm and fuzzy
2008-04-10 14:14:00 When Barack Obama was endorsed by Jay Rockefeller in late February, it was considered a feather in his national security cap because the senator from West Virginia is the chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee. Rockefeller, however, as he told the editors of the Charleston (W. Va.) Gazette Monday, has been criticized for taking sides before his state’s May Democratic primary. “But what is the value of not endorsing someone when you have a close race?” he replied. “You can make a difference.” His motives may have lain elsewhere. In her Tuesday New York Times piece, “Young Obama Backers Twist Parents’ Arms,” Jan Hoffman wrote: “The daily phone calls. The midnight e-mail. And, when college lets out, those dinner table declamations? Oh, please. Senator Barack Obama’s devotees just won’t give their parents a break.” In the interview, Rockefeller also said, “My whole family is united [behind a candidate] ... More About: Bush , Iraq , Democrats , Cain
Vampires and late-night TV spots
2008-04-09 22:42:00 by greg stene, phd Okay. It?s 3:21 in the ayem. The bright digital numbers in the dark tell you that. The generalized anxiety of impending death sometime in the next three decades or so (if the game gets played out that long and some bus doesn?t take you out while you?re on your way to the life insurance company offices to add another $50K onto the policy) ? slammed your eyes wide open and you know, like so many other nights before, that there?s no sleep coming just by hanging in bed. The only way out of this is to let the TV work its early-morning trank-effect on you with the white noise of meaningless dialog and visuals. So, you lay yourself out on the couch in front of the living room TV. Maybe sleep will come again ? if we just let some news drone on ? Youp. Look at that. It?s become 6:00 ayem, and Angel, the show about an angst-ridden vampire in L.A. has come into its second straight hour of early-morning play. Good old TNT. They?ve been running two-hour sets of this sp... More About: Night , Spots , Late , Vampires , Buffy the Vampire Slayer
Say what? A new business model for news should begin with ? profit?
2008-04-09 17:20:00 It’s the new conventional wisdom: The news biz is dying. Declining circulation. Abandonment by advertisers. Falling revenues. Cuts in staffing to reduce costs. The news biz needs a new business model, the critical harpies proclaim. But what should a new business model for an industry whose principal product is journalism look like? It would have to recognize several new ? and old ? realities. ? Any new business model must generate profit. There’s no way around this. Journalism is best sustained within a for-profit frame. A company that engages in newspaper journalism as a product is not supported by government (unlike public television) nor should it be. The same holds for commercial broadcast journalism as well. To provide news, the company must make a profit to attract investors and secure the resources to collect, report and transmit that news. A non-profit model cannot immediately match the breadth and depth of news reporting that a healthy democracy of more than 300... More About: News , Business , Amendment , Constitution , Profit
The Weekly Carboholic: Project Vulcan maps US CO2 emissions in detail
2008-04-09 15:30:00 In our first Carboholic, I pointed people at a great new tool to monitor global carbon emissions, the Carma (Carbon Monitoring for Action) website. Today I’d like to point people to a fantastic new scientific tool for monitoring the carbon emissions of the continental United States: Project Vulcan. But first, a YouTube video on the project. Project Vulcan is a joint project of Purdue University, Colorado State University, and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, and it was funded jointly by NASA and the Department of Energy. The goal was to create a map of carbon dioxide emissions that was highly detailed both in time and in space. Using other types of pollution that are monitored by the EPA, DoE, et al as proxies for CO2, Vulcan was able to indirectly monitor the concentrations of CO2 in the atmosphere on a 10km uniform grid spaced across the entire United States, and on an hourly basis. Vulcan modeled utilities, industrial sources, and transportation across the c... More About: Katrina , New Orleans , Emissions , Maps
?One last fiery hurrah?: LIFE?s final issue
2008-04-09 15:29:00 Final part in a series. How appropriate that a publication whose launch was dominated by photography of the technological wonder of the day should end its run with an equally impressive tribute to mankind?s latest technological accomplishment. As noted earlier, LIFE?s final issue was released a scant three weeks after Apollo 17, NASA?s last trip to the moon, and in the magazine?s concluding essays it found a fitting kinship with that mission. Both LIFE and the Apollo program remained physically strong to the last ? many regard Apollo 17 as the most successful of all the moon landings (12/29/72), and while LIFE was awash in red ink, its failures arguably related more to mismanagement than to substantive textual issues (in 1969 the magazine had reached an all-time circulation high of 8.5 million) (van Zuilen). Both were, in the end, overcome by financial difficulties and a lack of institutional will to carry on. The Apollo program and LIFE each accomplished their final missions with... More About: Life , Moon , Final , Kennedy , Apollo 13
S&R poll results: same old song and dance
2008-04-08 21:36:00 The results of the latest S&R poll are in. Which of the following best describes your feelings about popular music? Music goes through cycles, but on average the quality of music today is about what it?s always been. (34) Today?s music sucks ? I only listen to the old stuff. (27) I don?t listen to popular music. (21) Today?s artists are better than ever ? this is a golden age of music. (4) Thank you for voting. Our next poll, which asks you to consider bad band names, is now posted in the column to the right. More About: Dance , Song , Results , Poll
TunesDay presents our band of the week: The Birthday Massacre
2008-04-08 18:16:00 One of my top CDs for 2007 was Walking With Strangers by The Birthday Massacre . And one of the top CDs of 2005 was Violet, also by TBM. About the harshest criticism I could muster for last year’s effort was that it wasn’t appreciably better than the 2005 release, but given how great Violet was, that’s hardly a damning critique. If you’ve never encountered The Birthday Massacre before, let me see if I can describe them for you. The ’80s post-punk influences are evident and the haunted dollhouse goth edge to their aesthetic owes plenty to the likes of the late great Switchblade Symphony. Add an occasional flash of metal to lend the proceedings some aural gravity and you’re almost there. I suppose what always strikes me is how they manage to be so dark, yet so beautiful - if Baz Luhrmann were to adapt Keats’ “The Eve of St. Agnes” for the silver screen, surely TBM would be asked to produce the soundtrack. No doubt I’m biased d... More About: Band , Presents , Week
Triumph and tragedy: LIFE and the Space Race
2008-04-07 19:18:00 Part five in a series. LIFE?s portrayal of the space race represented, in most respects, a logical extension of its war coverage. Many of the space program?s early goals were military in nature, and as in World War II, technology was once again both demon and messiah, depending on whether it was theirs or ours. . . .Sputnik proved that there were great military, as well as scientific, advances in the U.S.S.R. Getting their heavy satellite up meant that Russia had developed a more powerful rocket than any the U.S. had yet fired and substantial Soviet claims of success with an intercontinental missile. Putting Sputnik into a precise orbit meant Russia had solved important problems of guidance necessary to aim its missiles at U.S. targets. The satellite could also be the forerunner of a system of observation posts which would watch the U.S. unhindered and with deadly accuracy (10/21/57, 24). Space promised many nonmilitary boons, insisted the experts (10/21/57). Satellites could a... More About: Life , Tragedy , Race , Space Race
Nota bene!
2008-04-07 15:28:00 Appearing weekly, Nota Bene attempts to provide an overview of the week’s news. Meanwhile, in its appendix, we cull trenchant comments to articles and posts, as well as those heard in person or emailed. Last week General Petraeus said, “The rockets that were launched at the Green Zone were Iran ian-provided, Iranian-made rockets.” His statement, along with testimony he’s expected to give in Washington next week, writes Damien McElroy of London’s Telegraph, “could set the stage for a US attack on Iranian military facilities, according to a Whitehall assessment.” Was kinda hoping we could dodge that bullet before Bush left office. Could Barack Obama be more liberal than he seems? Mike Vogel at the Politico: “During his first run for elected office, Barack Obama played a greater role than his aides now acknowledge in crafting liberal stands on gun control, the death penalty and abortion? positions that appear at odds with the more moderate... More About: Middle East , Iraq , Hillary Clinton
Damn, dirty aging: Screen legend Charlton Heston dies
2008-04-06 17:30:00 In an ironic twist, rigor mortis prevented removal of the gun. More About: Screen , Dirty , Aging , Damn , Legend
My god - it?s full of stars: 2001, Frankenstein and autonomous technology
2008-04-06 15:00:00 Part one in a two-part series. I used to work with a HAL 9000. Back when I was at US West in the late ’90s we had a voice system into which we would record the day’s company news so that employees without Internet access could dial in and keep up with the latest events. As with any such system there was a dial-in sequence, buttons that had to be pressed in a certain order, etc. One day, as I was working through the first stage of the sequence, our phone system apparently achieved sentience. For reasons that I still can’t explain, a decade later, and that nobody at the time had any clue about, the machine sort of … intuited what I was about to do. It performed an action or two that, put simply, it could not do. My assistant was standing beside me - we were working on speaker at this point - and all of a sudden the voice system began acting on its own. Not glitching, mind you - it wasn’t malfunctioning. It was moving merrily ahead without us. My assistant... More About: Stars , Technology , Full , Frankenstein
More than 180 youth and children removed from Texas fundamentalist compound
2008-04-06 02:20:00 Officials from Texas Child Protective Services (CPS) removed a total of 183 young women, girls and boys from the Fundamentalist LDS Church’s compound near Eldorado, TX. According to Marleigh Meisner, spokesperson for CPS, told reporters they had removed 97 girls, 40 boys and 46 young women over the age of 18 from YFZ Ranch. Eighteen of the girls removed from the compound were put legally into state custody because they appear to be “under threat of physical, mental or sexual abuse, or of neglect.” The remaining children have been taken to a local civic center for questioning and until authorities have found them foster homes. The Eldorado Success reported that the investigation began after Child Protective Services was notified by a 16-year-old girl at the YFZ Ranch who suffered physical abuse at the hands of 50-year-old Dale Barlow. Police set up roadblocks and blocked off the entrances and exits to the compound. According to the San Angelo Standard-Times, a searc... More About: Children , Youth
Review: Sharp Teeth, sharper storytelling
2008-04-05 21:06:00 by Chris Mackowski Sharp Teeth by Toby Barlow Harper, 312 pages Toby Barlow’s new book is a novel. It’s also an epic poem. It’s a love story, a crime thriller, and a werewolf story, too, Throw out everything you think you know about any of those things. Barlow’s book, “Sharp Teeth,” is nothing less than a bold literary experiment that rewrites the rules into free-verse poetry. It’s evocative, ferocious, and frequently funny–a pop-culture fusion drink that’s jacked up on its own juices. It’s a dark, compelling nightmare that reads like a gritty dream. The story’s motley cast of characters centers around Anthony, a city dogcatcher who meets the girl of his dreams. What he doesn’t know is that she’s really a dog—literally. She’s part of an ancient, secret race of shape-shifters, but she’s trying to kick the life. Her old pack has plans of its own, though, and soon she and Anthony get swept up in them without even realizing it. There’s murder, consp... More About: Review , Storytelling
Saturday Video Roundup: the Tao of T
2008-04-05 16:17:00 I pity da fool! And so do we. We pity da fool who fails to grasp the spiritual enlightenment freely available to all in the teachings of Mr. T. For starters, Mr. T has an important lesson about family. Specifically, he’s got something to say about yo mama your mother. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7_rBidCkJx o Next, Mr. T reveals that he’s the “T” in “IT.” Remember, intelligence is in the controller, never in the network, sucka. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tW1S2tsxVH g Style is central to individualistic self-expression, as Mr. T demonstrates here. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1jfBGhWo76 0 How do you say “I pity da fool” in German? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FkH8Yl6MCj w Finally, the Master offers some advice we can all use: Get some nuts! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NySN_plfiN I Got dat, sucka? Good. Now let’s go out there and virutalize some nuts for yo mama. In Deutsch. Thanks to djerrid for alerting us to t... More About: Video , Roundup , Saturday
Quotabull
2008-04-04 21:27:00 It?s a pleasure to watch Obama?s mastery of the technique. And Clinton ? and I didn?t say ?even Clinton? ? uses it much better than McCain does. And just about everybody does it better than the capering loon who does soft-shoe in the White House while young Americans are dismembered and splattered in Iraq . Sometimes when he speaks I can forget who he is momentarily and find myself actually pulling for him; probably from misplaced performer empathy. His speechifying has a strong odor of remedial reading about it, combined with an apparent fear that there might be some hard words ahead. ? from a New York Times commentary by Dick Cavett discussing President Bush’s public speaking skills; March 28. The president views the Olympics as a sporting event and an important opportunity to support America?s athletes. He has also made it very clear that the Olympics will shine a bright light on China regarding a variety of issues. ? White House spokesman Tony Fratto, responding to House ... More About: Congress , Bush administration
A memory from the day Martin Luther King, Jr. died
2008-04-04 20:29:00 When I first heard, I was jubilant. For a 10-year-old white kid living in a South we all thought was under siege, hearing that Martin Luther King was dead was like hearing that Satan had converted and joined the Southern Methodist Church. The ogre was dead. We were safe. Very quickly, we learned that we needed to fear again. My county was about 50% black, and seemingly all of them were set to converge on the courthouse square of my little town. They were then set to march down the main street and US highway that ran right past my house. My father was away from the area, working, so my mother told me to get all the guns in the house, load them, and be prepared to protect her and my sister if they stormed the house. I sat by the front door when they marched by. I sat there, trembling, surrounded by my single-shot .22 rifle with the sawed-off stock to fit my skinny shoulder, the lever-action .30-.30 carbine, and the .38 police special revolver. The safeties were off. I didnR... More About: Memory , Died
LIFE and Bikini Atoll: The Bomb as spectator sport
2008-04-04 19:28:00 Part four in a series. The terrible specter of nuclear annihilation was now clear in the American mind, a condition that LIFE acknowledged and addressed. But in the months that followed V-J Day an odd thing happened, as military testing of the new weaponry provided an opportunity for bomb-watchers to indulge their awe without having to confront the frightful context of war. In the estimation of President Truman, America was not only the most powerful nation on the planet, it was likely the most powerful nation in history (8/20/45, 32). If the bomb did possess apocalyptic potential, at least it could now be addressed within the relative calm that attends triumph, peace, and unchallenged superiority. In July 1946, the U.S. detonated a bomb over Bikini Atoll in the South Pacific, and the following issue of LIFE presented most Americans with their first images of the test. The five-page photo-essay, a marvel of symbolic complexity, begins in matter-of-fact fashion. Just before ?Mike... More About: World War I , Life , Sport , Marshall Islands
I (still) have a dream?
2008-04-04 16:24:00 Early morning, April 4 Shot rings out in the Memphis sky 40 years ago today Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated in Memphis, Tennessee. Today a black man who doesn’t want to make race an issue is running for president. He is opposed by one man who opposed honoring King with a holiday and by many more people who very much want to make race an issue. Discuss. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PbUtL_0vAJ k Never forget… http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IcGUbL6Vct s More About: Barack Obama , Dream , In The Name Of Love , Martin Luther King Jr
World?s nicest man
2008-04-04 14:16:00 How do we welcome him into the US? Why, detain him and confiscate his passport, of course. What else do you do with a Muslim , even if he is a Nobel Peace Prize candidate? The Guinness Book of World Records has no category for World’s Nicest Man. Imagine trying to create the metrics for that? But its 2000 edition features an entry that points us in the right direction. Titled “Biggest Volunteer Ambulance Organization,” it reads: “Abdul Sattar Edhi began his ambulance service in 1948 by ferrying injured people to the hospital and has since developed a service that attracts funds of $5 million per year with no government assistance.” Curious, we did some research. Turns out that Edhi’s ambulance corps is just one of a wealth of services his foundation provides. But his Nobel Peace Prize-caliber work flies below the radar of most in the US. Not that of the Department of Immigration, though, which detained Edhi when he flew into New York’s JFK Ai... More About: Islam , Pakistan , Guinness Book of World Records
WordsDay: writers who hide, hid, have hidden, or are hiding?
2008-04-03 20:33:00 Too much success can ruin you as surely as too much failure. - Marlon Brando Marlon Brando has long been considered the greatest American actor, perhaps the greatest actor from anywhere, of the 20th century. He was most famous for not wanting to act. Much of his career after his initial flurry of genius in 6 films (done from 1950-54 beginning with The Men and ending with On the Waterfront) was devoted to finding ways to occupy himself that did not involve practicing his art. He became a tropical island recluse, social activist, and inventor by turns - all to avoid doing the thing that made him famous, wealthy, and acclaimed. His returns to acting were sporadic and fluctuated wildly, sometimes brilliant (The Godfather), sometimes bathetic (The Freshman). It makes one ask a simple but profound question: What the hell was he thinking? I begin with Marlon Brando because he’s a contemporary of the American writer who has proven to be perhaps the most enigmatic of the 20th centur... More About: Culture , Arts , Writers , Hidden , Hide
War and Postwar: a look at LIFE and technology
2008-04-03 20:11:00 Part three in a series. In an age and a culture dominated by scientism, the word ?sample? tends to invoke the adjectival ?representative,? and I cannot begin to imagine culling a meaningful representative sample from LIFE?s 400-plus issues. Still, it seems important to devote a few pages to what happened with LIFE and technology between the Fort Peck Dam and Apollo 17. I will center this discussion on innovations and events that, from our perspective here at the end of the century, appear to have left significant marks on history. The Medical Morality Play LIFE?s coverage of medical technology began early and covered, through the decades, the research, development, and application of treatments for a variety of diseases and disorders afflicting humanity. Vivid, often grotesque photography illustrated everything from cancer treatment to brain and open heart surgery, and the magazine?s 1937 photo-essay on cancer demonstrated the optimism with which LIFE viewed technology of the med... More About: World War I , Technology , Life , Japan , Germany
Chaos, Complexity, Kant and Mill
2008-04-03 18:29:00 One of the great debates in the field of ethics centers around the thinking of Emmanuel Kant vs. the Utilitarians - most notably John Stuart Mill. To simplify, Kant’s philosophy suggests that the means justify the ends: we should always do the right thing and trust the results to work out for themselves. Mill, on the other hand, argued that we should do what produced the greatest happiness for the greatest number of people, and that the ends justified the means. I’ve always tried to do the right and moral thing, of course, but when push comes to shove I’ve been an unapologetic utilitarian. I might, in my brasher moments, have put it this way: what matters is the outcome, the result, and doing the noble thing when it leads to a tragic result isn’t ethical, it’s both immoral and stupid. In a sense, this might be seen as privileging pragmatism over idealism, although those things have long been at war in my soul and I can’t say which will eventually ... More About: Chaos
?Yes, Larry, I did f**k that goat?: a confessional primer for the modern po
More articles from this author:2008-04-03 02:08:00 part one of… ? New York Governor David Paterson has the kind of political acuity worth watching… and unfortunately, probably worth emulating from now on. He coolly observed his predecessor go down in flames and silicone. He stepped politely over the writhing corpse, ascended into office and promptly did what Mrs. E has been privately hoping for years a political figure would do: called a press conference, looked the American media in its bloodshot, Internet-porn-raddled eyes and said, in essence: “All right, bitches, let’s GO there,” spilling a load of personal compost over the next few days that, while not spectacular in scope, was refreshingly honest in a somewhat revolting way. Best of all, his wife did more than (here it comes) stand by her man; she added her own soiled knickers to the flurry of smudged tidy whities Dave was launching at the dazed citizens of New York. Damn. In a grave near Nashville, Tammy Wynette’s carefully embalmed nipp... More About: Larry , Modern , Confessional 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 |
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