CapitalistImperialistPig

It will come as no surprise to regular readers that I like to argue - I believe that Socratic dialog is the best route to enlightenment. Brad DeLong links to Paul Graham's handy dandy guide to internet (or other) argumentation. The Lowerarchy: DH0. Name-calling.... DH1. Ad Hominem.... DH2. Responding to Tone.... DH3. Contradiction.... DH4. Counterargument.... DH5. Refutation.... DH6. Refuting the Central Point.... Sadly enough, many, including our occasional critic LM and most of the wingnut blahgosphere, are unable to get beyond DH0 with occasional excursions to DH1. Boring and useless. It's a puzzle to me how a seemingly intelligent person can be so obtuse about the uses of rhetoric.

What shapes our literary tastes? I don't know the answer, of course, but I recall that my high school senior English teacher believed that the three great novels were Moby Dick , Crime and Punishment , and War and Peace , in that order. I made a point of reading each, and they did not disappoint, though I would put Tolstoy at the head of the class. I have since read a scattering of the classics, and almost never been disappointed, but I'm not much a reader of literature. Modern literature I find a much more uncertain quantity. Some I have really liked, but there are a lot like Gravity's Rainbow out there - long, fitfully amusing and frequently appalling, but ultimately tedious and unpleasant. What literature I do read is mainly middle to low brow. I didn't learn to read until I was about eight, and the first books I read were Edgar Rice Burroughs' Tarzan novels. I can't say that at any fundamental level my tastes have evolved beyond that.

The number one most popular New York Times article at the moment is It’s Not You, It’s Your Books by Rachel Donadio. Some years ago, I was awakened early one morning by a phone call from a friend. She had just broken up with a boyfriend she still loved and was desperate to justify her decision. “Can you believe it!” she shouted into the phone. “He hadn’t even heard of Pushkin!” We’ve all been there. Or some of us have. Anyone who cares about books has at some point confronted the Pushkin problem: when a missed — or misguided — literary reference makes it chillingly clear that a romance is going nowhere fast. At least since Dante’s Paolo and Francesca fell in love over tales of Lancelot, literary taste has been a good shorthand for gauging compatibility. These days, thanks to social networking sites like Facebook and MySpace, listing your favorite books and authors is a crucial, if risky, part of self-branding. When it comes to online dating, even casual references can turn into dea...

An AGW doubter well known to many of us notes that his point of view is not much shared: ...We are so tiny, in fact, that we are almost like those who believe that the Moon landing was shot in Arizona and the world is flat... but fails to draw the obvious lesson. More interesting to me was his reproduction of a denialist bumper sticker making much of the so-called global ice anomaly. This is an amusingly obtuse combining of the Arctic and Antarctic ice anomalies, which river dwellers love because it has recently been in positive territory. Cherry pickers must pick cherries while they may, of course, but the dynamics of the North polar sea ice and that of the South are so different that the conflation is quite preposterous. I guess that it may impress those who aren't aware that the Antarctic is mainly occupied by a continent, whereas the North pole sits in an ocean.

It is said that if you climb the Pyramid of the Sun at Teotihuacán at the Vernal Equinox, you can tap into ancient sources of cosmic energy. I can't testify as to that, but I will say that when I was climbing that pyramid, on or about the Vernal Equinox, the Sun God did speak to me. He said: You really need to add some stepper work to your routine at the gym. Also: lose some of that lard. Noted.

I will be off the grid for a bit, but should be back in time for April fool's day.

I alternate between considering Hillary a moderately qualified candidate who is being crushed by a phenomenon and evil incarnate. Mostly I lean toward the latter when she pulls some of her dishonest crap. Her dilemma is that the only issue getting her any traction is race, and that issue threatens to shatter the party. She deserves a lot of blame for injecting race, via Bill and Geraldine F., but the issue is now out of her hands. The Limbaughs and Faux News bottom feeders have now decided that Hillary is a minor threat and are going all out to run racist stuff against Obama. For them it's all profit - if it works, a badly damaged Hillary will be nominated and many Democrats will sit on their hands. If it doesn't work, well, they were going to lose anyway, so why not rally the scumbag base. Note to self: Never read The Corner unless hot soapy water is handy.