The Ministry of Minor Perfidy

Ministers

Chairman, Ministry Blue-Ribbon End-Times Parade Committee

Media whore

Director, Perfidy Institute of Armageddon Studies

The Pink Lion of the Ministry Voltron

Very pretty...but can she fight?

Chess Hooligan

Minister Emeritus

Windy City Mike
social democrat, ca. 1930 trade-unionist, and professor of alleged history

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Thursday, June 19, 2003

From Lileks

"We wish the French the best. But their days as the moral avatar, the champion of humanity, are long gone. That reputation—unearned for decades—will die in the Congo, where French troops are behaving as effectively as, well, French troops. The painful fact is that no one expects much of them anymore beyond good food, bribery and honeyed hypocrisy.

One liberated Iraqi summed up the American promise like this: “Democracy, whiskey, sexy!” One could say that beats Liberte, Egalite, Fraternite.

One might suggest that it already has.”

Posted by Buckethead on 06/19/03 at 06:33 AM
Perfidy Attacks • Permalink

Wednesday, June 18, 2003

Orrin Hatch Can Have My Computer When He Pries It Out Of My Cold, Dead Hands

I’m sure you’ve all heard about this already, but I’m all for kicking someone when they’re down. From CNN: Your News Source:

During a discussion of methods to frustrate computer users who illegally exchange music and movie files over the Internet, Hatch asked technology executives about ways to damage computers involved in such file trading. Legal experts have said any such attack would violate federal anti-hacking laws.
“No one is interested in destroying anyone’s computer,” replied Randy Saaf of MediaDefender Inc., a secretive Los Angeles company that builds technology to deliberately download pirated material very slowly so other users can’t.
“I’m interested,” Hatch interrupted. He said damaging someone’s computer “may be the only way you can teach somebody about copyrights.”
The senator, a composer who earned $18,000 last year in song-writing royalties, acknowledged Congress would have to enact an exemption for copyright owners from liability for damaging computers. He endorsed technology that would twice warn a computer user about illegal online behavior, “then destroy their computer.”
“If we can find some way to do this without destroying their machines, we’d be interested in hearing about that,” Hatch said. “If that’s the only way, then I’m all for destroying their machines. If you have a few hundred thousand of those, I think people would realize” the seriousness of their actions.

I see… so if his dog takes a dump on my lawn, I will have the right to kick the fuck out of it, to teach him a lesson in turn, right?
[moreover] Dude… when word of this gets around to the script-kidz, Orrin Hatch’s site is gonna be sooo 0wn3d.

[moreover once over]... So what about THIS, Mr. Senator Man?

Posted by Johno on 06/18/03 at 08:11 PM
It'll Be a Cold Day in Hell • Permalink

Love Above The Law

This is just weird.

The Missouri Supreme Court struck down the state’s “alienation of affection” law, saying that “stealing” the love of a married person is an arcane legal doctrine.
The court, in a 5-2 decision Tuesday, agreed with a woman accused of marital infidelity that alienation of affection is an antiquated cause that has no place in a modern legal system. The justices struck down the law and overturned a lower court’s $75,000 judgment against her.
The woman, Sivi Noellsch, was sued by Katherine Helsel for allegedly having an affair with Helsel’s husband, David, who eventually filed for divorce. Helsel cited alienation of affection as the reason for her lawsuit. . . . .Alienation of affection is grounded in the outdated idea that married people have property interests in each other and its present-day interpretation does nothing to preserve marriages, Judge Richard Teitelman wrote for the majority. . . . “Most lawyers would have predicted this,” Ken Jones, editor of Missouri Lawyers Weekly, said of the decision. “It really brings Missouri into the 21st century.”

Nooo… It actually brings Missouri into the nineteenth century, when the laws of coverture were eroded by a rising class of property-owning women, but close enough. It’s nice to see 500-year-old English common law can still exert a pull. The article also notes that a similar bill banning “alienation of affection” in North Carolina is not likely to pass into law. Heh.
In other news, the love you take is still equal to the love you make. George Harrison: economist!

Posted by Johno on 06/18/03 at 08:09 PM
Darwin Award Contender • Permalink

Attempted synthesis

If I feel better tomorrow, I will attempt to fuuuuse together Mike’s and my two threads into one beautiful Gordian knot of logical syllogism. In brief, it’s the damn hippies who got us in this postmodern crisis of academia, and Generation Y are the first wave of students who may never have been exposed to any other pedagogical method.

I would like to go further into this, but I am tired. I didn’t sleep much last night, and when I did sleep, I dreamt that I had been abducted and was being given a tour of the mansion-cum-abbatoir where I would soon be killed and eaten. I was just being shown the hook from which I would be hung to be tortured, die and age before being made into a variety of supposedly delicious dishes, when I woke to my alarm. So I’m really damn tired.

More Perfidious Goodness...

As a result, the best I can do in the way of synthesis is this link via Eric Muller, On the Couch With Beavis and Butthead. Besides being hilarious, it sums up perfectly why a little theory in the wrong hands can be a dangerous thing. Let’s excerpt, shall we!

During the video viewing segments of Beavis and Butthead, they are shown sitting on a couch at Butthead’s house. Our viewpoint is as if we are staring out from inside the television which they are watching. However, the possible mise en abyeme effect of Beavis and Butthead watching the television viewer watching them watch television, the feedback loop of (virtual) camera and screen evoking Lacan’s Mirror Stage, where the child learns to watch himself watching himself, is not exploited here. Instead, Beavis and Butthead are positioned as analysands. They sit on the couch, in the state of regression described by theorists of the cinematic apparatus (Baudry 698-699), and free associate in response to the music videos, a genre which Marsha Kindler and E. Ann Kaplan have both closely connected to the dreamwork (Kinder 12-14; Kaplan 28). . . .
The single most jaw-dropping moment for the psychoanalytically informed viewer in all the Beavis and Butthead episodes comes in the episode entitled “Steamroller.” Our heroes are watching a music video by the eccentric Scandinavian singer Bjork when Beavis blurts out: “I heard Bjork has a schlong.” Butthead stammers, and asks where Beavis heard this. Beavis claims it was “the guy in the bathroom.” After a few more questions, it becomes clear to everyone except Beavis that “the guy in the bathroom” is Beavis’ own reflection.
It is a cliche of Lacanian cultural criticism that any appearance of a mirror must evoke the mirror stage, but surely Beavis’ failure to recognize himself, coupled with his reflection telling him that Bjork (a small woman) has a “schlong” (a word chosen, surely, over all other possible penis euphemisms for its incorporation of the word “long"), deserves such analysis. It fundamentally ties Beavis’ incomprehension of sexual difference to anality (as described in the last section) to his failure to accept the boundedness of his body. In the mirror stage, the infant recognizes that subjectivity is limited to the surface of the body and agency to the reach of its limbs and voice. Previously, the child has no sense of a world outside, but is total ego, thinking of itself as the entire universe, understanding existence only as immediate sensation. . . .
The threat of castration, represented by Woman’s lack, is essential to subject formation, and Beavis is clearly outside of this system. Not only does his reflection tell him Bjork has a “schlong,” but when he and Butthead watch another video, which features a (supposedly) nude woman in a bathtub, Butthead expresses the hope that the woman will stand up, revealing her body to them. Beavis thinks that she will not, speculating that “she’s embarrassed because she has a stiffie.” Butthead attempts to explain that women cannot get erections, but the existence of humans without penises is unimaginable to Beavis.

Indeed! Read the entire thing!

Too Goddamn Much Perfidy...

Posted by Johno on 06/18/03 at 07:49 PM
Darwin Award Contender • Permalink

Tuesday, June 17, 2003

Zig now for great justice

A federal appeals court has ruled that the USDoJ acted correctly in detaining hundreds of people in the wake of September, 2001. Story here.

I’m going to break with long-standing J2C tradition and not work myself into a frenzy over this decision. I still think it’s a bad thing, just no more nefarious than any other of the hare-brained schemes we’ve seen recently. On one hand, the people detained (for the purposes of this decision) were illegal aliens, who were in the country, um, illegally. That needs checking out. But that fact must be balanced by two considerations: the DoJ’s abysmal record of late regarding full disclosure, honesty, and moderation; and the fact that this is the USA and we don’t treat people this way (that golden rule thingy). Here’s the part that has always troubled me.

More Perfidious Goodness...

Posted by Johno on 06/17/03 at 07:39 PM
Lead Pipe Cruelty • Permalink

Education

While all of you are flapping your gums about generational divides, when everybody knows that everything that’s really worth learning on that subject comes from TV’s “The Wonder Years,” I’m going to re-address Brookheiser’s remarks on the teaching and learning of history.

I’m going to start with a discussion that has been ongoing over at Critical Mass. Though the discussion started with a piece on the decline of graduate study in the humanities, reader responses touch on Brookheiser’s point.

More Perfidious Goodness...

Let me excerpt one reader comment here in its entireity:

I have been teaching at [Prominent Private University] for the last two years, and I have been able to see the effects of this relativism on the undergraduates here. They are genuinely bewildered about what, if anything, counts as knowledge. One example that stands out for me: I taught a “Topics in Theory and Criticism” course this last quarter. The usual approach to such a course here is to pick a flavor (Marx/Marxism, Queer/Gender, New Historicism/Foucault, Cultural Studies/Raymond Williams, etc. etc. etc.), read a series of that flavor’s theoretical/critical texts, and then read a more traditionally literary text or two through the lens of the chosen flavor. It seems more than a bit template-driven. I tried to do something different—though hardly groundbreaking—with my course: take an historical trip beginning with Plato and working through the various paths that begin there and have ended up here (in the various flavors). I had to adapt the course on the fly, because I was supposed to be teaching a flavors course of my own, so I created a Classical vs. Renaissance theory course into which I snuck all kinds of other stuff “off-syllabus.” I thought the class was going miserably—it was sometimes quite difficult to get students to talk about the material we were covering—and I was sure that the approach I was trying was failing. On the last day of class, I got an ovation (there’s something that’s never happened before).
I didn’t understand what was going on until a few days later. Several students came to see me during office hours to tell me that they had never taken a course quite like this one before. What they had expected was a template-driven, “here’s how we apply ****ist theory to texts” approach, because that is how all of their classes are taught in the English department here. I still have a little trouble believing this, but according to my students, this course was the first time they had been asked to analyze the intellectual and/or historical bases of the critics themselves. They had gone into an English major thinking that it was going to be something about literary knowledge, aesthetics perhaps, maybe even history and social context, but none of the ones who spoke with me had been prepared for what you describe as the framework of “deconstructing race and gender, critiquing the concept of subjectivity, and theorizing culture.” Not a single one of these students had ever read a piece of “theory” or “criticism” earlier than the 1960s (with the exception of one who had been asked to read a short excerpt from Marx). They simply had never been asked to do anything other than “imitate without understanding” (to paraphrase your post).

Some of these students will enter PhD programs next year. [PPU] is quite fond, in fact, of taking people straight from a BA into its own PhD program (I was an exception to the general trend). The just barely-post undergraduate students who come here are then immediately put through an Introduction to Graduate Study class that is essentially no different from the template-driven “flavor” courses I describe above (my own here was Marx and Marxism). It is painfully obvious to me now that such students are simply not prepared to do much of anything but accept what they are given (or reject it without knowing exactly why or how, or even what the myriad alternatives are). Graduate “education” in a humanities discipline like English seems to be primarily about indoctrination and self-replication. By the time these students are ABD, knowing Foucault backwards and forwards while knowing almost nothing at all about Nietzsche or Plato (not to mention Shakespeare or any number of other “canonical” figures) is not at all uncommon in my experience. Grandiose maneuvers without any background for them—that’s the graduate (and undergraduate) “education” I have come to know.

Sound familiar? Sure does to me!! An English student who does not read Shakespeare, or a History student who does not read Gibbon (or, if you like, Foner, Hofstadter, Elkins & McKitrick, Levine...), is like a physics student who can’t add two numbers. The humanities in general are suffering terribly from an overuse of postmodernism, and it’s turning out a generation of students who are functionally illiterate in their chosen fields. Rather than learn the generalities and overarching themes, students skip straight to what Brookheiser in another context calls “units, floating in ahistorical space.” After all, it’s much easier to use Foucault to rip an article to shreds than it is to develop a nuanced, deep understanding of the history and traditions you are a student of.
We all know what happens when college students get ahold of Big Ideas That Explain Everything. For a padawan learner such weapons are not, only for a Jedi are they. Mmm, yes. If you give a student Foucault, Hamlet is only about sex. If you give a student Marx, King Lear is a parable of Capitalism. These tools are powerful, but they are also crutches, and in the wrong hands lend themselves easily to arrogance, narrowness, and false first principles.

I must applaud Mike, a real, working teacher of History, for successfully working actual stories into his coursework. That should happen more often. Of course, since I am advocating a “first A, then B/ first walk/then run” approach to education, I suppose I have not sufficiently interrogated the linearity of my pedagogical ideology. Or something.

All three of us here are former students of Wilson Hoffman. Three cheers for Wil Hoffman! Huzzah!

Too Goddamn Much Perfidy...

Posted by Johno on 06/17/03 at 07:26 PM
Just So You Know • Permalink

Generational Definitions

Since there have been quite a few comments on the Generations discussion, I thought it might help to expand the discussion in another post. First, some definitions. People disagree as to the exact lines between generations, and pinning down exact years is difficult. It is also quite possible that in such a format as this, people will argue ad infinitum about when a generation begins and ends, who their children are, etc., etc. Generations, after all, are not defined only chronologically but also by the events and times through which they lived.

So I’ll offer this scale of American generations. The World War II generation constitutes people born between about 1910 and 1926; those who were old enough to serve, for men. For women, those birth dates put them about at the right age to work in a munitions plant, doing difficult industrial labor.

Boomers are typically the children of the World War II generation. The term baby boomer, after all, refers to the population explosion that occurred during the post-war period and was at least in part the result of G.I.s returning home from service. They were born, about, between the years of 1946, and I would argue, until about 1959 or even 1960. Members of this generation were not necessarily, “hippies,” a media invention that constitutes a less than apt term. People describing themselves as “hippies” were probably not actually the kind of person many think of when the think of the Sixties generation, or Sixties people, or Sixties this, that, or the other. The Baby Boomer generation was divided, to put it as simply as possible, between Freaks and Straights.

More Perfidious Goodness...

Posted by Mike on 06/17/03 at 06:02 PM
Just So You Know • Permalink

A bit more flapping about generations

So, as my generational delineations (not perfect with overlap) have not yet been challenged in the comments field, I’ll continue.

Let’s give the benefit of the doubt to those who use the term, “hippie,” and what they mean by that. Let’s say they are applying the term to that small segment of the Boomer generation who were Freaks, actively involved in counter-culture activities. People who were actively involved in counter-culture might have been less likely to inculcate their children with a sense of entitlement, so the notion that Freaks gave their children a sense of entitlement is incorrect.

Without going into details about the chaotic and somewhat unorthodox (by traditional definition) circumstances in which I was brought into the world and raised, I was ultimately raised by an early Boomer very much involved in counter-culture and political activism during the late 1960s, and a pre-boomer who was of course, not. The early Boomer to which I refer made his position clear. When I came home with a story of some injustice perpetrated against me by the evil teachers, fellow students, and/or school administration, ending with the phrase, “and that’s not fair,” the response was, “Who the hell ever told you life was fair? Your mother? She’s wrong. Get used to it.” [There’s some poetic license here, but the gist should come across]

Now I realize this is anecdotal, and a small sampling group to say the least, clearly, this was one Boomer who did not choose to inculcate the child he raised with a sense of entitlement. I think those who were involved in counter-culture actually walked away jaded, disappointed, and ultimately, pessimistic. The vast majority of Boomers who didn’t have the guts to take a stand, or took one against those who did, are the ones who I think came away with more of a sense of entitlement.

As I wrote before, Gen Y has demonstrated a sense of entitlement, and I think one reason is that in a lot of cases, their parents have inculcated them with it. But that
s not the be-all-end-all. So did children’s television programming, and the other things I discussed (please see previous post). Nothing is monocausal. Hell, being Americans has inculcated a lot of these kids with a sense of entitlement. As to whether or not Boomers are still raising kids, if Gen Y has been in college for a period measured in years, they’re not really being raised now, are they?

Finally, unlike Scarborough, who wavers between making me laugh and raising my blood pressure exponentially, I have no hatred for people previously involved in 1960s counter-culture. Quite the opposite. I grew up idolizing one of them, and still do to this day to a great extent. They tried to change the world. They didn’t succeed, but the deck was significantly stacked against them. But I think they fought one helluva good fight, and my hat’s off. Matter of opinion, of course, and that’s mine. I’ll smile and nodd at others.

Power to the People.

Posted by Mike on 06/17/03 at 05:36 PM
Just So You Know • Permalink

Rumbles from the Lumpenproletariat

I’ve been hearing rumblings recently about an impending worker strike at Verizon here in New England. The Boston Globe has the story. Fairly unremarkable as strikes go: copayments and worker insurance payments will rise; layoffs are expected in the same year that Verizon executives gilded their parachutes; and the workers feel they have been subject to unreasonable demands in negotiation.

Through sheer coincidence, I have been privy to some great conversations on both sides, worker and management, in the course of my daily commute. I guess I’m just lucky. Seen on the commuter train, on the back of an IBEW worker from Verizon: a Contract Negotiation 2003 Commemorative T-shirt with the union logo and local on the front, and on the back the best slogan ever: “Can You Hear Us Now??”

Union, yes indeed!

Posted by Johno on 06/17/03 at 02:31 PM
Darwin Award Contender • Permalink

Monday, June 16, 2003

Is It

just me, or has the National Review Online really gone to the dogs recently? It used to be that I could read (if not agree with) most of the pieces posted, and at least find substantive points to hang a rebuttal on. Recently, the editorial tone has become approximately 45% snarkier and 20% screedier, at the expense of substance, humor, and equanamity. It’s too bad-- the NRO used to be how I took the measure of what intellectual neoconservatives were thinking.

In the meantime, check out this half-decent and well deserved parody of NRO’s “The Corner” that got Jonah Goldberg all cheesed off.

Posted by Johno on 06/16/03 at 08:24 PM
Lead Pipe Cruelty • Permalink

Net

Calpundit has an interesting post up, about just what are the Republicans up to?

A while back I had an email exchange with another blogger who said that the problem with Democrats is that they’re under the misguided impression that their social policies are actually popular. So they keep banging away on guns and abortion and gays and they don’t realize that the country just isn’t with them.
As it happens, I don’t agree with most of that, but let’s leave it alone for now and apply the same thought to the Republicans.Every party in power eventually overreaches, and I think the Republicans are on the verge of doing this right now because they keep fooling themselves into thinking their economic policies are popular. But they aren’t. Sure, no one wants to pay taxes, but eventually we’ll have to make a choice between cutting taxes and cutting Social Security and Medicare and other programs, and Republicans are going to learn what they know in their hearts already: these programs are a lot more popular than tax cuts. When that day comes, the Republicans will be out on their ears.

I know conservatives hate to face up to this, and libertarians hate it even more, but the social safety net is really, really popular. You screw with it at your peril, and sometime soon it’s going to become clear that Republicans have no support for a policy that’s designed to cut back on them. The only question is, is “sometime soon” 2004 or 2008?

What he said. Times are hard. Don’t try to BS me on this one: times are hard. Tax policy is only sexy until people need to go the emergency room, or go on disability, or lose their job. Then the social safety net suddenly becomes really, really important. (This fact is what blocks me from becoming a true fiscal conservative. The outer reaches of that philosophy are a bit more social-darwinist than I can stomach.) Depending on how the next few months go, this fact may become the deciding issue of the ‘04 election. That is, unless Buckethead’s Chicago-school economics are right. We shall see. We shall see.

Posted by Johno on 06/16/03 at 08:06 PM
Partisan Politics • Permalink

Apologia

Sorry folks. “Life"* intrudes. No substantial posting today.

Of course, the foregoing assumes that anything I post on a theoretically average day is actually “substantive,” when in reality even the most disinterested observer would have no recourse but to conclude that, nine times out of ten, a KitchenAid stand mixer has a better chance of producing intelligent commentary on current events than I do on my best days.

The foregoing assumes that you are willing to humor me.

Go read Critical Mass (in the blogroll to left).

In other news, cars cost a lot of money. In other other news, Jonah Goldberg can bite my shiny metal ass.

*In this case “life” refers neither to medical emergency or Star Trek Convention. I don’t got the SARS.

Posted by Johno on 06/16/03 at 07:07 PM
Just So You Know • Permalink

Saturday, June 14, 2003

Brookhiser

I’d rather go this route than the comments field. Brookhiser is clearly discussing secondary education, but there is an even greater problem in the universities. Many U.S. courses in the IT have also abandoned politics whole-hog. Having taught U.S. history for the first time this past spring, I did find that a social and economic focus with a dash of culture was more suited to the subject, because it’s meatier. American political history can get pretty boring. I would have to disagree with Brookhiser specifically as it relates to U.S. history, that students prefer a poltical focus. My most popular lectures are those that deal with popular culture and the social implications of the industrial revolution. It says so in my evaluations.

More Perfidious Goodness...

Posted by Mike on 06/14/03 at 01:00 AM
Just So You Know • Permalink

Generations

Boomers have exhibited some sense of entitlement, as Steve correctly argues. I would say, though, that Gen Y has the biggest sense of entitlement I’ve ever seen. As we three are members of Gen X, I don’t think we ever really expected easy and rich lives. Prophetic in my case, to say the least. We were born amidst the Vietnam war, the subsequent economic collapse, including an energy crisis, and a general spirit of malaise. We were the first generation raised by single mothers. We were the first latchkey kids. We lived with the constant threat of a nuclear holocaust that could potentially have wiped out all life on earth. We were told by media, teachers, and our parents, “You’re screwed,” in so many words. What media, teachers, and our parents specifically told us was, “You will be the first American generation to do worse than your parents.”

More Perfidious Goodness...

So why is Gen X an aggregate ranging from ennui to nihlism while Gen Y thinks the world owes them a living? Like any historical explanation, it’s multi-faceted. Gen Y knows little of hard economic times. They know nothing of the Cold War and the threat of human extinction. If you say the words, “the wall came down,” they think you’re referring to, “that old band? What were they called? Purple Frood?”

But for the issue at hand, Gen Y are the children of boomers. Gen X are the children of pre-boomers, those born not after World War II, but perhaps during. Or, we are the children of people born during the Great Depression. The message from our parents was, “Life isn’t fair. Suck it up.” Boomer parents have communicated to their children, “The world is your oyster. You are special. You can be anything you want to be.”

As a result, while teaching Gen Yers at a certain Jesuit institution, I was confronted with rage and tears whenever students received Bs or even B+s in lieu of As. One student called me an asshole, in front of the class, because I gave her a B on a paper despite carefully explaining what was required for an A, and that what she did merited a B. But according to the Gen Y folk, when I did grant As (grant hell, sometimes I hand them out like lollipops; I’m a grade inflater), I still failed to recognize their special contribution to the human race.

Some of my current students, however, at a city college, have criticized me through course evaluations for being too easy on them. They don’t have the sense of entitlement. Why? They’re at a city college. Life has not been so kind to them. I see my role as a corrective to that, but not to toot my own horn. Most of my current students aren’t Gen Y either, but a little older. The bottom line is that Boomers have inculcated their children with the notion that they are perfect, special, and oh so precious. A former mantra of our generation was, “Life’s a bitch. Then you die.”

Too Goddamn Much Perfidy...

Posted by Mike on 06/14/03 at 12:35 AM
Just So You Know • Permalink

Boomers

Buckethead writes:

“Mike and I may differ on what services should be provided to the poor, but I think he’ll agree that we should not be giving handouts to people who own their homes, have investment portfolios, and a pension.”

Damn straight.

Posted by Mike on 06/14/03 at 12:14 AM
Just So You Know • Permalink

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