In Tenure Veritas: Libations From The Ivory Tower

 Once upon a time, there was a silly party game called "Scruples."  A player would draw a card, posing a moral or ethical dilemma in order to amuse party-goers.  You attempt to weasel around supposedly sticky wickets.  The idea was nothing new, or at least if there was anything new to it, it was the trivializing structure of certain specific and mostly trivial questions.  Yet moral philosophy is only important in the interstices, when one principle or goal conflicts with another.  If you believe that you hold a rule to be absolute, I search for a circumstance, however extreme, in which you would violate it.  The threshold for killing is high, for what should be obvious reasons, yet for most people that does not mean that it is an inviolable rule.  Whether that is the death penalty for the most heinous crimes, killing in self-defense, or even some absurd variation of the trolley problem, unless you are the weirdest of the weird, a Jainist, or something of the sort, I can poke

 I have gotten better about putting down bad books, but I still have room for improvement.  This book irritated me, and so I shall grumble, yet here is the meta-irritation, if I may conjure a hyphenation.  What can keep me reading an artistically mediocre book is style.  In the same way that slick guitar solos can convince me to listen to music that is otherwise uninspired or cliche, a writer with style can keep me reading even if the plot, characters and world are ultimately uninspired.  Some writers just have a way with the word, and I admire them, I wish that I could write like them, I know that I cannot, and I read their books even when I recognize that all I am reading is stylized inanity.  I suck.  Then there are books like Sensation Machines , by Adam Wilson.  What is truly frustrating is that Adam Wilson can write .  The man has style.  In musical jargon, we would say that he has "chops."  One of the main characters in the book has an unfortunate fascination with rap,

 The proverbial "grumpy, old man" is forever decrying the moral decline of civilization, and I do not know the precise age at which I earn the temporal right to make such declamations without the attendant dismissal, dismissal by lack of authority being as fallacious as argument by authority.  Yet, something is rotten in the states of America, and indeed, beyond.  We held the kabuki theatre of the New Hampshire primary this week, and afterwards, I indicated that my thoughts have turned in this direction.  Yesterday, we saw a verdict that Donald Trump must pay $83 million to E. Jean Carroll.  He won't pay, but the verdict is something of a moral victory, amid such moral rot.  Amid widespread moral rot in the body politic, what is the proper rhetorical response?  My appeal to the proper, translation issues notwithstanding, is itself an indication of philosophical schools of thought, but let us take at least a brief moment to consider the rot, itself.  My purpose is not a fu

 Amid the other news yesterday, you may have missed this tidbit.  For quite some time, it has been clear that a UN agency called UNRWA was complicit in October 7.  For those who haven't been following the anti-Semitic and terrorist-supporting agency, UNRWA, it has been running schools that teach Palestinian children the glories of martyrdom and murdering Jews for years, and indeed, its employees provided direct material support to Hamas for the October 7 attacks.  Indeed, an UNRWA employee probably held hostages for Hamas in his attic.   That's old news.  On the same day that a UN kangaroo court warns Israel  against "genocide," for acts of self defense against a truly genocidal force, in which Israel warns civilians in advance, telling them to leave the area so as not to be harmed, the UN finally admits that actually, yes, UNRWA, which is part of the UN , participated in October 7, and collaborated with the truly genocidal force.  They are firing some employees, inve

 Donald Trump is in full Trump rage mode about the $83 million verdict, but he seems not to be talking about Carroll, herself.  Interesting.  Picture a debate stage.  If I'm Biden, I hit the Carroll verdict hard , and watch Trump try, and probably fail to control himself from lying and defaming Carroll again.  I run ads about the verdict, and Trump cannot respond, legally.  Will any of this make a difference?  Not likely, but it is something.

 Senate Republicans had been negotiating with Senate Democrats on a deal that would have added border security, and changed immigration policy, in exchange for continued funding for Ukraine, along with additional funding including for Israel.  In politics, one negotiates with those with whom one must.  It is the art of the necessary, not the art of the ideal.  The southern border is a disaster, Ukraine needs help, Israel needs help, the details are less important than the broad strokes.  The House was always going to be a problem, but Senate Republicans are now backing out of negotiations, with Mitch McConnell seemingly saying that the GOP should refuse to deal so as to ensure that Trump can point to the border disaster and the lack of any policy resolution for a campaign issue.  No one should be surprised. There is an obvious solution.  Biden should move unilaterally on all issues, including the border.  While Mayorkas has done nothing even remotely resembling "high crimes and mi

 Yesterday, New Hampshire held the formality of its primary, and while Nikki Haley currently seems as though she wants to play the role of Bernie Sanders, asserting the viability of her campaign, that leaves me in my scornful moments deliberating which Monty Python reference to make.  Sanders was the Black Knight, from The Holy Grail , hacked to bits and refusing to admit that he had been defeated with ever more absurd denials of the severity of his injuries.  The problem with that analogy would be that Sanders faced honorable opponents who tried to give him face-saving exits, like Arthur.  Perhaps we go back to the beginning of the movie.  "Bring out your dead!"  She denies that she is dead, but of course, she will be soon.  Perhaps we go with the parrot sketch.  That is an ex-campaign!  Lovely plumage, though. Is there anything within scorn beyond the Trump-like bile inherent in its expression?  If not, therein lies a problem because the expression of the scorn would warran

 Meatball Ron.  Actually, if we're honest, it has a nice ring to it, doesn't it?  If anyone remembered All In The Family , one could even give a half-nod to the notion of Trump as Archie Bunker, but either way, he did get the nickname, and I'm sticking with it.  Most Trump nicknames are silly and childish, but "Meatball Ron" actually works.  Yet Meatball never had a chance, and he finally admitted it.  Consider, if you will, my feeble attempt at a sport analogy, keeping in mind that anyone who drops the final -s is both pretentious and ostentatiously ignorant of all things "sport."  Nevertheless, I shall brave my own ignorance.  I am a professor, after all, and it is my job to claim knowledge regardless of qualification. Suppose you are entering a combat sporting match against a competitor who has the favor of the judges.  The fight will be decided by the judges.  There are no knock-out or submission rules.  The judges pick the winner.  If your opponent

 It is time, once again, to revisit Stanislaw Lem.  This morning, we consider "One Human Minute."  You can find the short in a compilation of the same name, with several other pieces that are not quite as good, although still worth reading.  There is a reference here, which is Lem's A Perfect Vacuum , in which he compiled essays he wrote as fictional reviews of books that do not exist.  "One Human Minute," the titular piece in this compilation, is an essay in this form.  It posits something like an Almanac or Guinness Book of World Records , using tables of statistics to describe what happens during one minute across the globe, noting that the rotation and tilt of the globe will create all times of day and the range of seasons simultaneously (that latter is not quite  right, but go with it), so an examination of one minute, across the globe, is a snapshot of humanity.  Let us consider. Lem uses two writing devices.  The first follows from the simple observation

 When you hear no barking dog, there are many possible explanations.  The most obvious explanation is that there are no dogs in the vicinity, but of course, you mostly do not notice the sound or lack thereof, unless you obsess over references to books you have not read.  Truthfully, I do not even remember if I have read this one, but if I did, it would have been so long ago that I only know the reference anyway.  Such is life.  Anyway, a thing didn't happen this week.  Or rather, a thing did happen, stopping another thing from happening.  Congress-- both  chambers, no less-- passed stopgap spending measures, preventing a government shutdown.  Obviously, nobody reads my ramblings, but those of us with integrity go back and check our work.  Mike Johnson, you may recall, was not the first Speaker for the 118th Congress.  Kevin McCarthy provided us with a theater of the absurd as he and the House Republicans went through vote after vote, before McCarthy finally got the most useless gav

 Um... that came out wrong.  Perhaps I shall rephrase.  Nevertheless, nothing happened yesterday.  Regardless of your news feed, regardless of your watching/listening/reading habits, there is no news.  Nothing happened.  There were no events yesterday, so nothing could happen.  There are, and have been for many years, some boring, square-ish states in the middle of the country, where nothing ever happens, and every four years, the country pays disproportionate attention to one of them.  It never really matters.  Just ask Mike Huckabee, and all of the others who got nothing out of the nothing that happens there, but yesterday, really , nothing happened.  Remember, Donald Trump won the Republican nomination in either November of 2020, or January of 2021, depending on how we assess such things.  There is no race going on right now.  None at all.  There is nothing happening.  I haven't been watching polls, or anything.  Journalists ask me questions, and my response is that there is a 1

 I swear, I had no idea that this one was going to be a stolen land narrative when I picked up the book.  The novel was published in 2019, by a Kiwi author, it has been on my stack for a long time, I picked it up randomly as my next read, and there it was.  Given Knox's home in New Zealand, her introduction to the stolen land narrative was likely the Maori, or perhaps aboriginal variation, and while the main character is a Brit (with a Kiwi father), and the narrative actually does delve back into the various aspects of British history that one might call land theft, including the Saxons, Viking invasions and so forth, those are not quite developed into the stolen land narrative that one could fit into the ancient history of the British Isles.  Did the Anglo-Saxons steal the land from the Picts?  Have fun with that.  Instead, I'm going to argue that Knox has the wrong moral perspective on her own story.  I have done this before, including with Sylvia Moreno-Garcia's Gods of