Existential malaise

Existential malaise — the feeling that everything is bullshit — might be the price of peace. - это из substack с хорошим названием Everything Is Bullshit одного David Pinsof (@DavidPinsof).

забавная статья, много интересных ссылок. вот, к примеру, The Execution Hypothesis for the Evolution of a Morality of Fairness - это тот же Wrangham, что написал The Goodness Paradox. там упоминается ‘reverse dominance hierarchy’, и вот Reverse Dominance Hierarchies - review by Rob Henderson.

еще Morality and other weapons - необъятное количество примеров и ссылок (часто на самого автора, Rob Kurzban). начинается с хорошей шутки (в которой есть небольшая доля шутки):

Cynics will tell you that the Golden Rule is that whoever has the gold makes the rules.

кстати о доле шутки - это приводит на память stereotype accuracy

он написал книжку Why Everyone (Else) Is a Hypocrite: Evolution and the Modular Mind. еще в своей статье он приводит ссылку на Extract from the Speech by Adolf Hitler, January 30, 1939

но есть нюанс

Support Grows to Have Russia Pay for Ukraine’s Rebuilding Although U.S. officials have cautioned against seizing Russia’s reserves in foreign banks, others say it’s “crazy” not to after Moscow’s war of aggression. - кто эти others, хочем знать. впрочем, дальше там сказано прямо и честно: a handful of Eastern European and Baltic nations. In principle, it is clear-cut... At the same time, he noted - кто-то сказал, что everything before the word but is horseshit. там много по тексту познавательного: Other top officials, in the United States and elsewhere, have sounded more skeptical. в общем - и хочется, и колется.

more on bullshit

Well put. The guy’s got a way with words. The only thing I can’t figure out is why he says that “bull—- receptivity is not a positive thing.” It’s been good for him, no? - Thinking fast, slow, and not at all

прочел внимательно - местами очень забавно. это рецензия на Noise, довольно злобная. в частности автор рецензии наехал не по детски на одного из трех авторов, Olivier Sibony, думаю - вполне заслуженно. заслуженный буллшиттер - хороший титул.

это все через avva - что ж, и на старуху бывает проруха - есть пословица с обратным смыслом? с паршивой овцы хоть шерсти клок не совсем подходит.

this Andrew Gelman guy - professor of statistics and political science (sic!) - is wildly funny, smart and irreverent:

Anyway, that’s just a funny story, but it makes me wonder whether Roth had too much personal charm for his own good. He was such a captivating guy, it seems that he pulled lots of intelligent people into his reality distortion field. I mean, sure, I guess that Nobel Evening thing was kind of a joke in homage to Roth’s over-the-top, outrageous spirit, but still . . . maybe if he had a bit less charm, it would’ve served him better because then his friends could’ve told him to chill out about the damn prize.

Health Benefits

Drinking coffee has been linked to a reduced risk of all kinds of ailments, including Parkinson’s disease, melanoma, prostate cancer, even suicide.

...

The latest assessments of the health effects of coffee and caffeine, its main active ingredient, are reassuring indeed. Their consumption has been linked to a reduced risk of all kinds of ailments, including Parkinson’s disease, heart disease, Type 2 diabetes, gallstones, depression, suicide, cirrhosis, liver cancer, melanoma and prostate cancer.

- The Health Benefits of Coffee

Health Benefits my ass

хотел бы я знать, сколько за эту статью заплатили производители кофе

Jeff Koons MasterClass

Can Jeff Koons Teach Me to Paint? - парень решил еще немного заработать signing on as an instructor for MasterClass. заметка в nyt довольно честно говорит: bullshit

и еще не слишком комплиментарная рецензия на новый сборник эссе Кнаусгора Karl Ove Knausgaard’s Essays Struggle With Big Ideas. Elsewhere in this collection, you get the sense of a writer laboriously working out things that have been better worked out by others. бедный Уве

и еще из новостей культуры, неплохая статья The Lasting Lessons of John Conway’s Game of Life

“I used to go around saying, ‘I hate Life,’” Dr. Conway says in the film. “But then I was giving a lecture somewhere, and I was introduced as ‘John Conway, Creator of Life.’ And I thought, ‘Oh, that’s quite a nice way to be known.’ So I stopped saying ‘I hate Life’ after that.”

и вне связи «Я вижу дальше, чем другие»: о чем писал Шпенглер после «Заката Европы» - Валерий Шлыков — о новом сборнике сочинений немецкого мыслителя

между тем по Sirius XM - Violin Sonata in C minor, BWV 1017

intoxicating conversationalist

As a professor, Brickman was an affecting combination of exuberant and awkward, exacting and underconfident. He was an awful lecturer. But he was an intoxicating conversationalist, the type who’d burst into your office whenever a new thought occurred to him, eager to discuss it, even more eager to collaborate. - Happiness Won’t Save You

...
The chapter was a mess, in chips and shards, when Coates first started to assemble it after Brickman’s death.

...
Predicting who will die by suicide with any precision has long eluded mental health professionals. There are no refined algorithms for it. Matthew K. Nock, a professor of psychology at Harvard and the country’s foremost scholar on suicide, did a famous study in 2010 showing that clinicians in a large city psychiatric E.R. were no better than a coin toss at predicting who, after leaving their care, would attempt suicide.

...

Brickman’s paper had a comically small sample size, and its controls were lifted from a neighborhood phone book. Today, such a design would be laughed out of peer review.

бля, ну прямо еще один Исайя Берлин. тот, впрочем, был вполне самодовольный господин. и дожил почти до 90: no commitments is good for your health.

это Opinion piece in nyt. Opinion my ass. Fake Views ™

see also В поисках счастья

еще A Psychobiography of Philip Brickman - ну конечно Toward the end of the 19th century, the Russian Empire implemented pogroms, or the state-sponsored persecution of Jews. ясный пень, как же иначе. He [Leo Brickman, Philip's father] was fond of telling us that Jews ghettoize themselves and he didn’t want any part of it.

Normal People

Normal People (TV series)

посмотрел первый эпизод. это какой-то позор.
для тупых и пошлых детей простигосподи

кровавые коммунисты перевели и издали для советских детей Стокгольмскую историю в 1964-м, я ее читал в 14 лет или около того - разве можно сравнить

или вот повесть о первой любви

из отзывов на книжку на amazon:

Waste of time. The characters are flat, the content (there really is no plot) is boring and insipid, and the mechanics of her writing are so rote it becomes more than an annoyance. I absolutely hated this book and hated that it sucked hours of my life reading it.
...
In her new novel, NORMAL PEOPLE, Rooney is like the anti-zeitgeist zeitgeist writer, or the anti-hip hip writer. (sic!)
...
Do you ever consider the profound impact significant others have on your life?
...
I'm feeling tired just thinking about explaining myself and the annoyance, disappointment and... almost hurt I experienced while reading "Normal People". I want my money back!

see also reader's comments in The Guardian review

Hitler Studies

You are now cursed with the job the main character had in the last book you read - what is that job? - @2ndHandBookery

finishing White Noise by Don Delillo, the main character is Jack Gladney, a professor of Hitler Studies at some college.

the book is total bullshit by the way

problematizing and rethinking

The Möbius strip has the advantage of showing the inflection of mind into body and body into mind, the ways in which, through a kind of twisting or inversion, one side becomes another. This model... provides a way of problematizing and rethinking the relations between the inside and the outside of the subject, its psychical interior and its corporeal exterior, by showing not their fundamental identity or reducibility but the torsion of the one into the other, the passage, vector, or uncontrollable drift of the in side into the outside and the outside into the inside.

- Elizabeth Grosz, Volatile Bodies: Toward a Corporeal Feminism

это пишет знатная феминистка Elizabeth Grosz, professor of Women's Studies and Literature at Duke

интересно, она читала про торсионные поля, или сама придумала

название книги кое-что напоминает: Toward a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity

журнал Social Text тоже издавался в Duke University.

Это вы нарочно? - спросил Остап

жж

problematizing my ass

differently informed

My hunch is that readers aren’t less informed than before,” Pablo Boczkowski, a professor of communication studies at Northwestern University, told me. “They’re differently informed.”

- The Urgent Quest for Slower, Better News in The New Yorker

maybe alternatively informed?

думал было добавить таг bullshit - а он тут как тут

далее он пишет: subscription-based reader revenue is the only viable path for a media outlet seeking to maintain its editorial identity... ну-ну.

A central purpose of journalism is the creation of an informed citizenry. - это его глубокая мысль. how very interesting. see propagandists

Irrational Man

Inevitably, his most talented student also happens to be the youngest and most attractive woman in his class - Philosophy on film by Benjamin Poore
...
No wonder Jill can’t resist Abe, who takes regular nips from his hip flask, egregiously misrepresents Kant’s categorical imperative, and plays Russian roulette at a frat party to express his intellectual interest in chance and indeterminacy.
...
Representing people sat around thinking is tricky, but a nicely stylised setting can help.

невозможно поверить, что старый пиздобол Woody is at it again, pardon my French


see also Woody Allen’s Dark, Tedious Fantasies: Irrational Man is turgid to the point of ridiculousness...

Bad thinkers

исключительно бездарная статья Bad thinkers - о том, что сторонники теории заговора страдают когнитивными расстройствами. написал один Quassim Cassam, Professor of Philosophy at the University of Warwick. Cassam was born in Mombasa, Kenya. но это его не оправдывает.

сам Cassam же пишет:

In practical terms, one of the hardest things about dealing with people such as Oliver [straw man - vs] is that they are more than likely to accuse you of the same intellectual vices that you detect in them. ... Oliver is gullible because he believes things for which he has no good evidence, and he is closed-minded because he dismisses claims for which there is excellent evidence.

смешно. и грустно. низкий уровень всего буквально везде, включая nyrb и Harper's.

верно пишет в комментариях luther_blissett5:

Had it occured to the author that intellectual virtues such as open-mindedness, curiosity and rigour may be the characteristics which drive some conspiracy theorists? Likewise, vices such as gullability and close-mindedness may apply equally if not more to coincidence theorists or those that accept official narratives without question.

забавно, что Cassam цитирует Mandy Rice-Davies: they would say that, wouldn’t they? теперь я лучше понимаю, о чем An Education. а из фильма Scandal еврейская тематика, похоже, устранена... [In Michael Caton-Jones's 1989 film about the Profumo Affair, Scandal, Rachman is portrayed by Johnny Shannon.] hmm...

а вот нет ли тут связи: Son of Carl Sagan is a 9/11 truther, 03/13/15, дата совпадает с датой статьи товарища из Кении. хмм...

Greening of America

Reich imagined a world devoid of Realpolitik where the public at large frolics in the grass. I was delighted to discover that our public library system does not even carry this book. Good riddance! - Greening of America by Charles Reich, review by Ulfilas

Greening of America mentioned by John Pilger in War by media and the triumph of propaganda:

In the news, whole countries are made to disappear. Saudi Arabia, the source of extremism and western-backed terror, is not a story, except when it drives down the price of oil. Yemen has endured twelve years of American drone attacks. Who knows? Who cares?

God & Darwin

снова опять David P. Barash разъясняет, что бога нет.

своим студентам.

и в статье пытается привести убедительные аргументы, да.

особенно забавно звучит unmerited suffering.

ясное дело, Лейбница читать его студентам лень. да им вообще читать лень. и правильно.

nyt readers comments. people you're boring.

nobody can

Why PepsiCo CEO Indra K. Nooyi Can't Have It All

see also Why Women Still Can’t Have It All

и хорошие новости

Orwell's sensibilities

...the truly dramatic thing, about Raffles ... is the fact that he is a GENTLEMAN. Raffles is presented to us ... not as an honest man who has gone astray, but as a public-school man who has gone astray. His remorse, when he feels any, is almost purely social; he has disgraced 'the old school', he has lost his right to enter 'decent society', he has forfeited his amateur status and become a cad. - Raffles and Miss Blandish

что бы он сказал сегодня, интересно. почитав, скажем, 87th Precinct series by Ed McBain

у Оруэлла там много забавного:

... above all, he is intensively patriotic. ... According to the public-school code there is only one means of rehabilitation: death in battle. Raffles dies fighting against the Boers (a practiced reader would foresee this from the start), and in the eyes of both Bunny and his creator this cancels his crimes. ... At the front he unmasks a spy at the cost of revealing his own identity, and then dies gloriously by a Boer bullet.

выделено мной (кроме GENTLEMAN, это автор)

рекламный беспредел

"Luxuriously low in fat" yogurt

upd: заменили на "Classically low in fat" - ха-ха-ха, наверное не я один восхитился

see also What does Handmade Vodka mean? Lawsuits Alleging That Tito’s Handmade Vodka Is Not 'Handmade' Dropped

The plaintiffs claimed that “handmade” had to mean “made by hand, not by machine, and typically, therefore of superior quality,” a dictionary-based definition.

What does it mean to "hand-make" vodka? We may never know the answer to this question, now that two lawsuits that were brought against Tito's Handmade Vodka—alleging that it is not, in fact, handmade—have been withdrawn from federal court in California.

also It’s luxuriously low in fat and calories compared to a full fat cheesecake.