Posts Tagged ‘paranoia’
Tuesday Afternoon Links!
* Public showings of the Tolkien Manuscripts at Marquette, 2016-2017.
* Don’t Panic, But There’s An Asteroid Right Over There.
* Why is the keynote speech such a train wreck at most academic conferences?
* Because it’s that time of year again: my two-part piece from Inside Higher Ed from a few years back on entering the academic job market as an ABD, 1, 2. But of course:
* How to Do a Better Job of Searching for Diversity.
* How could anyone think graduate students shouldn’t have a Plan B?
* Great teaching document: Some Notes on How to Ask a Good Question about Theory That Will Provoke Conversation and Further Discussion from Your Colleagues.
* And more: Making a classroom discussion an actual discussion.
* Trump: graft :: Clinton : paranoia.
* And marrying the last two links: One in Six Eligible Voters Has a Disability.
* “Debate” and the end of the public sphere.
* Let history be our judge: Pepe the Frog, an explainer.
* If Hillary Had to Drop Out, Here’s How a New Democratic Candidate Would be Chosen. Former DNC chairman calls for Clinton contingency plan.
* Researchers at the Karadag Nature Reserve, in Feodosia, Russia, recorded two Black Sea bottlenose dolphins, called Yasha and Yana, talking to each other in a pool. They found that each dolphin would listen to a sentence of pulses without interruption, before replying.
* Ancient Black Astronauts and Extraterrestrial Jihads: Islamic Science Fiction as Urban Mythology.
* Getting Restless At The Head Of The Class.
* CFP: this xkcd.
* Demystifying the Great Pacific Garbage Patch.
* Going viral this week: extinction illusions.
* In search of the universal language.
* Reported Concussions in Youth Soccer Soar a Mere 1,600 Percent in 25 Years, According to Study.
* Nice work if you can get it: Wells Fargo won’t claw back $125m retirement bonus from exec who oversaw 2m frauds.
* Sexting in the seventh grade.
* Colin Kaepernick’s Protest Is Working.
* How the sugar industry has distorted health science for more than 50 years.
* Stories that should be more exciting than they are: We Were Wrong About Where the Moon Came From!
* I read Jason Shiga’s Demon as a crowdfunder — it’s great. Check out the first volume when it comes to print next month.
* Special providence: Catfish Falls From The Sky, Hits Woman In The Face.
* The organizing economic metaphor of all of Against Everything is artificial scarcity. The concept usually refers to the way that monopolistic sellers exploit their excessive market power to restrict supply so they can raise prices. Greif’s view is more capacious and idiosyncratic: He describes a culture where the affluent, at sea in a world of abundance, engage in the elaborate restriction of their own demand (to kitsch diners, ethnic food, inappropriately youthful sexual partners). This turns what could be unfussy gratification into resource-intensive performance. On one level, this is about making a technically meaningless life more diverting, but it also gives our atomized selves the comfort of belonging. It serves to differentiate “people like me” from those other, worse people—those without access to the most current information, say, or simply the economic means to act on it. What gives n+1’s economistic turn its authority and novelty is the way Greif and his colleagues show that the market is not, as someone like Gary Becker had it, a bazaar untainted by sinister, irrational notions (discrimination, exploitation, class prejudice), but a site where those things are given free play under cover of neutral utility-maximizing exchange. They have taught us to speak the softer insights of theory (with its sensitivity to symbolic difference and its hermeneutics of suspicion) in the hardheaded but incantatory vernacular of the powerful.
* The New Yorker remembers the Wilmington coup of 1898.
* And I’m catching up late, but man oh man, Bojack Horseman is a good show.
Evening Links
* World saved from Zack Snyder Star Wars movie.
* But it was too late for the Atlantic, powerless before Tom Cruise’s superpowers.
* 2013 in franchise science fiction, from io9. Only Brad Bird’s 1952 can save us now.
* New York Times already hyping Ender’s Game.
* The best companion says she won’t be back for Who‘s 50th.
* The Disneyland of paranoia. See also McSweeney’s:
First, they came for unregulated handguns in the possession of citizens with violent criminal records, and I said, “You know, that sounds reasonable. Someone with a violent criminal record has probably lost his or her right to possess a handgun. So, yeah, sounds good.”
Then they came to require background checks, gun licenses, and regular gun safety courses, and I said, “All of this sounds fine to me. Guns are dangerous, and we regulate every other dangerous product. So, really, whatever you want to do on this is also fine.”
Then they came for my assault rifle, and I said, “Assault rifles? You should have started with assault rifles. You’re doing this backwards. But OK, of course you can have my assault rifle. Why do I need an assault rifle?”
Then they came to guarantee mental health care to everyone, because our treatment of our most vulnerable citizens is a measure of our dignity as a society, and I said, “This one is obvious. In fact, I can’t believe we HAVEN’T been guaranteeing mental health care for everyone who needs it. Let’s get going on this.”
* And just one political link: The high price of being single in America.
Weekend Links – 2
* Stories from Newtown: Victoria Soto. Dawn Hochsprung.
* Tactical Reality: the new gun culture.
* From the reclaimuc archives: The police state in Europe vs. the police state in the US.
* A Modest Proposal for the Reform of Academe.
* Democratic Senator Compares Private Student Loans To Dickens-Era Of Debt Prisons.
* Report: Humanity Has Overshot The Earth’s Biocapacity.
* And the average age at which people reach the lowest point of happiness in their lives in various countries. I feel pretty certain mine is and will always be 31, but then I’ve always been an outlier.
Tuesday!
* The headline reads, “Babies can understand what you’re saying at just 6 months old.”
* The headline reads, “Israeli scientists develop prototype of Geordi’s Star Trek VISOR.”
* Scandalous contrarianism: Josiah Bartlet Was A Mediocre President.
* Fair Labor Association Begins Inspections of Foxconn.
“We believe that workers everywhere have the right to a safe and fair work environment, which is why we’ve asked the FLA to independently assess the performance of our largest suppliers,” said Tim Cook, Apple’s CEO. “The inspections now underway are unprecedented in the electronics industry, both in scale and scope, and we appreciate the FLA agreeing to take the unusual step of identifying the factories in their reports.”
* And the FBI says paying cash for coffee is a sign of terrorist intent. Yeah, that checks out.
Friday!
* In an anonymous industrial park in Virginia, in an unassuming brick building, the CIA is following tweets — up to 5 million a day. At the agency’s Open Source Center, a team known affectionately as the ‘vengeful librarians’ also pores over Facebook, newspapers, TV news channels, local radio stations, Internet chat rooms — anything overseas that anyone can access and contribute to openly.
* It was linked in the Adam Kotsko post from earlier, but it’s worth promoting on its own merits: Nobody Cares about Property Damage.
In both cases, the liberal position is based around a belief that we can control how we are perceived, and how the state (and its ideological apparatuses like the media) will respond to us. Or actually this could be put more strongly: the criticism reveals the liberal’s desperate need to be in control. The fact that protestors have very limited ability to prevent state crackdowns, and certainly individual protestors can do almost nothing, is scary, and it conflicts with deeply held liberal beliefs about how the state works, and how protesting can change it.
* Occupy Oakland contrarian watch: WSWS.
* The One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) project has devised a bizarre plan for deploying its new XO-3 tablet. The organization plans to drop the touchscreen computers from helicopters near remote villages in developing countries. The devices will then be abandoned and left for the villagers to find, distribute, support, and use on their own.
* From Facebook: the fifty states of paranormal horror.
* And the chart of the day: American oligarchy.
The Adjustment Bureau
The Philip K. Dick short story “Adjustment Team” that inspired The Adjustment Bureau has already passed out of copyright, so you can read it here or here. I was talking about the film a bit on Facebook earlier tonight and was forced to admit that when it comes to PKD film adaptations my aesthetic judgments are simply unreliable: so help me, I like them all, even if they’re all bad.
The film version is essentially a by-the-numbers thriller, in which our heroes are chased by a sinister supernatural conspiracy that hides in plain sight. They are functionally omniscient; they can manipulate chance events; they can travel the city using ordinary doors as wormholes. It’s all stuff we’ve seen before. In this respect the film is a bowdlerization of the paranoid logic of Dick’s original, which (true to its science fictionalization of schizophrenia) has the conspiracy operating through much more oblique means:
The dog studied the house. The shades had been let up. The kitchen light was on. Beyond the lace curtains dim shapes could be seen, stirring around the table. A man and woman. They were drinking coffee.
“There they are,” the dog murmured. “The man, you say? He’s not going to be harmed, is he?”
“Of course not. But he must be at his office early. Usually he doesn’t leave until after nine. Today he must leave at eight-thirty. He must be within Sector T137 before the process begins, or he won’t be altered to coincide with the new adjustment.”
The dog sighed. “That means I have to summon.”
“Correct.” The Clerk checked his instruction sheet. “You’re to summon at precisely eight-fifteen. You’ve got that? Eight-fifteen. No later.”
“What will the eight-fifteen summons bring?”
The Clerk flipped open his instruction book, examining the code columns. “It will bring A Friend with a Car. To drive him to work early.” He closed the book and folded his arms, preparing to wait. “That way he’ll get to his office almost an hour ahead of time. Which is vital.”
In this way apparently disparate events are revealed to be intimately connected, once the dots have been connected and the paranoid totality has been grasped: the Clerk requires the dog’s bark at a precise moment to summon the Friend, and when the dog barks a minute late a life insurance salesman is summoned instead. As a result of this misstep Ed misses the Adjustment at his firm, discovering first the Adjustment Team reorganizing the office and later recognizing the subtle (and not-so-subtle) changes:
Ed said nothing. He advanced slowly into the inner office. The office had been gone over. He could tell. Things had been altered. Rearranged. Nothing obvious — nothing he could put his finger on. But he could tell.
Joe Kent greeted him uneasily. “What’s the matter, Ed? You look like a wild dog. Is something — ?”
Ed studied Joe. He was different. Not the same. What was it?
Joe’s face. It was a little fuller. His shirt was blue-striped. Joe never wore blue stripes. Ed examined Joe’s desk. He saw papers and accounts. The desk — it was too far to the right. And it was bigger. It wasn’t the same desk.
The picture on the wall. It wasn’t the same. It was a different picture entirely. And the things on top of the file cabinet — some were new, others were gone.
He looked back through the door. Now that he thought about it, Miss Evans’ hair was different, done a different way. And it was lighter.
In here, Mary, filing her nails, over by the window — she was taller, fuller. Her purse, lying on the desk in front of her — a red purse, red knit.
“You always. . . have that purse?” Ed demanded.
Mary glanced up. “What?”
“That purse. You always have that?”
Mary laughed. She smoothed her skirt coyly around her shapely thighs, her long lashes blinking modestly. “Why, Mr Fletcher. What do you mean?”
Ed turned away. He knew. Even if she didn’t. She had been redone — changed: her purse, her clothes, her figure, everything about her. None of them knew — but him. His mind spun dizzily. They were all changed. All of them were different. They had all been remolded, recast. Subtly — but it was there.
The wastebasket. It was smaller, not the same. The window shades — white, not ivory. The wallpaper was not the same pattern. The lighting fixtures . . .
Endless, subtle changes.
Ed made his way back to the inner office. He lifted his hand and knocked on Douglas’s door.
“Come in.”
Ed pushed the door open. Nathan Douglas looked up impatiently. “Mr Douglas –” Ed began. He came into the room unsteadily — and stopped.
Douglas was not the same. Not at all. His whole office was changed: the rugs, the drapes. The desk was oak, not mahogany. And Douglas himself . . .
Douglas was younger, thinner. His hair, brown. His skin not so red. His face smoother. No wrinkles. Chin reshaped. Eyes green, not black. He was a different man. But still Douglas — a different Douglas. A different version!
Nothing in the film captures, or even approaches, the story’s wonderfully hallucinogenic sense that reality itself is slowly but surely breaking down…
This Is Why Your Parents Are Totally Crazy Now
I don’t think I’d ever actually watched a full segment of Glenn Beck before this morning. My god. My god.