The Press of Last Resort

After 24 years of sensing exoplanets, it’s time to check our calibrations.  Astronomers look for potential earthlike planets in the “Goldilocks Zone,” often by watching for one to pass between us and its sun.  That sun’s wobble may help detect the presence of planets, but transiting allows a peek at a planet’s composition.

We think.

Venus, even if she isn’t Goldilocks, is a known quantity.  She will pass between Earth and our sun for the last time in more than a century, and comparing what we think we know about atmospheres from remote sensing can be checked against information gleaned from actually landing on that blasted rock, data that predates disco.

Don’t get me wrong:  I like Venus.  Unless we develop artificial gravity in the next few hundred years, Venus is actually a better candidate for long-term or permanent human habitation … provided you’re willing to live the Lando Calrissian lifestyle.  A balloon, at one-atmosphere pressure, would naturally float above Venus’ storms, in a region of her atmosphere that is in the upper 80′s, Fahrenheit (if memory serves).

Yes, I would go in a heartbeat.

Yes, religious authorities and “parents” (that really narrows it down) had to attack participants in a gay pride march ‘for the sake of the children.’

I know, right?  Because “children” and “gays” are completely separate categories.  There’s no such thing as children of gay parents.  And no children grow up to discover that they are gay.  Ever.  Right?

And religious people wonder why atheists think they’re stupid.

Even in the southern US, people are no longer this primitive.  I’ve marched in solidarity with my gay friends and activists several times over the last twenty years here in Texas.  The worst homophobia we encountered came in the form of scattered taunts from frightened bigots.  I’ve received worse for wearing Burnt Orange at the Cotton Bowl.  It was nothing.  We drowned them in our smiles and went on to love, leaving them to stew in the rot between their ears.

But in Georgia, violence erupted when priests were aghast that the police wouldn’t use force to stop the march:

Some priests approached nearby police officers asking them “to stop this indecency” but an officer responded that the police could not “ban them from [marching]“, according to the Civil Georgia website.

“Then we have to do that,” the priest reportedly replied.

Priests inciting violence.  Same as it ever was:  mindless fucking animals, they attack what they fear in a convulsive act.   Read more…

Really, Latin?  Again?  Is this 2nd-year composition supposed to frighten me? 

Imagine, my Real World friends, if, in every horror movie, the vampire or whatever stalks slowly into view chanting “TPS Reports!  Team building!  Going forward!  At the end of the day!”

And then, the heroine fends him off by holding up a copy of her W-2. 

Seriously, pick another damned language. 

Everything that David Mamet thinks he knows about higher education, he heard on AM radio, apparently:

Gender studies, multiculturalism, semiotics, deconstruction, video art, and other such guff, while attractive to the child, as they seem to endorse his ‘adulthood,’ are in truth, terrifying as his clock ticks on toward the school’s relaxation of its authority, that date on which it will spew the unschooled, confused, skill-less student into a world which, he must know, is uninterested in his capacity for bushwah, and wants to know what he can contribute to the common effort.

Consider college education which, in the Liberal Arts, and in the social sciences, or whatever they may be called today, is effectively a waste of money and time, and useless save as that display of leisure and wealth Veblen called ‘conspicuous consumption.’ A Liberal Arts education is essentially a recognition symbol, which, as such might theoretically facilitate entrance into a higher class, were entrance awarded on the basis solely of that passport; but see the MAs in English bagging groceries. Higher Education is selling an illusion: that the child of the well-to-do need not matriculate into the workforce- that mastery of a fungible skill is unnecessary.

If Mamet had had a Liberal Arts education, he would never have humiliated himself by writing those words, thus “removing all doubt,” right?  (What did he study at Goddard College, anyway?)  He would have consulted employment statistics. Liberal Arts’ graduates are 38% of America’s CEO’s, and that’s without much promotion and recruiting interest. Mamet could have consulted test scores. The Arts and Sciences have the highest delta in CLA scores.  Mamet assumes that if someone got a “real” education, whatever that looks like in his cartoon world, there would be a job waiting for him.  Not only does he not know, not only does he not bother to look, he’s actually proud of being this stupid, and thinks that others should follow his example.

Again, I expect Liberal Arts students (and graduates) to beware Socratic ignorance.  And I expect idiots like Mamet to flaunt their ignorance generally.  This is why he lumps together a department, a political sensibility, an archaic name for a field of study, a method of argument, and a medium, and he thinks he’s talking about the academy.  No, really.  Mamet really is that stupid.  He then passes his imaginary, fallen academy through essentializing rhetoric and comes up, not surprisingly, with a nonsensical metaphor and unsupported, teleological assumptions.  Garbage in, garbage out.  With his hypothetical as his only evidence, he is vindicated in the tiny world between his ears, the infinitely wise God of a world stunted enough for someone of Mamet’s abilities to lord over it.  He doesn’t know where “the social sciences” reside, in most institutions, and announces a proud ignorance of what they are called, since of course it must be some new frippery, right?

He knows it’s a “waste,” but is proud of not knowing what it is.  He both admits and demonstrates that he has never worked in any of these fields, that he cannot locate and can barely name, but somehow knows they’re all worthless.

Amazing.

This is the intellectual equivalent of smearing your shit on the wall.  Yes, we see MA’s in English bagging groceries.  And I see a famous playwright humiliating himself by drawing a universal inference from that.  The hypothetical MA can go on to do great things (or not), but all Mamet will do, between now and the moment he dies, is dribble nonsense that might as well have leaked out of Rush Limbaugh, another proud anti-intellectual, another proud and famous moron who is famous because he’s a proud moron.

People like that are the degeneracy they bemoan.  Should we tell them?  If we did, would they understand what we are saying?  It seems unlikely.

Ours is an anti-intellectual culture.  We treat, in some quarters, ignorance as a form of purity.  Mamet will be hailed in those same quarters, not for having produced anything new, but for being willing to repeat common nonsense that, while it flatters some people in their inadequacies, has no basis in fact and contributes to nothing except the self-congratulation of bitter old men who have outlived their usefulness, having lived long enough to see a world that no longer blows smoke up their ass.  If there is an indictment of American letters, it is that someone like Mamet is respected.

But, precisely because his is a common ignorance, he has a platform and his fantasy rants resonate widely with similar idiots.  Put a bone through his nose and dress him in a grass skirt, and he will dance you the dance of his people.

(via)

In response to this:

I teach. I’m confronted with Ms. Schaefer Riley’s askew views on the purpose/necessity/logic for Black Studies programs weekly. As a woman of color, I’m often overwhelmed by folks who need me to prove to them that my field of study is necessary. That there is a purpose for my being in their space. These confrontations happen anywhere and everywhere: most certainly in the classroom, while walking through campus, waiting to buy coffee, making copies, at the bar, on the bus, in the bathroom…It doesn’t end. My good buddy and colleague who teaches Shakespeare never has to defend his field of study. No one stops him and says, “Hey, after almost 500 years, what is there to research?” No academic would. That’s uncouth! Preposterous! After the 13th Amendment, what is there to research about Black culture? Is that not uncouth? Preposterous? Yet, Academics, people trained in thinking, demand explanation for the existence of Black Studies programs all the time.

It would be easy to dismiss Ms. Schaefer Riley dim view on Black Studies by pointing out that she is not a PhD. She doesn’t understand what it means to be an academic or to produce academic papers. But, if academia has taught me anything, is that not all who hold a PhD are smart. Like many academics, she’s confused by a field she doesn’t understand and empowered by a system that privileges her voice. Was it fair to fire her? It’s like removing a grain of sand from the beach. Let me know when the bulldozers get here.

Ignorance, in the right hands, is a way of performing status (i.e., “I wonder what the little people are doing today?”). But in this case, we’re talking about empowered Socratic ignorance, in that people who know nothing about a field still feel justified in dismissing it. Or, in the case of STEM grads, the whole of the Liberal Arts has to re-justify its existence at the drop of an unwarranted inference. Of course, this kind of sloppy thinking demonstrates how STEM grads could have benefitted from a real education, but I’m not concerned here with irony.

In the case of subaltern studies, specifically, empowered Socratic ignorance assumes an even simpler form, a polemic easily distributed through a million weaponized idiots: “you people are just complaining. What could there possibly be to study? Instead of bitching about the past, why don’t you get real jobs?”  … or bleats to that effect.

That’s an easy thing to say, which is a good thing, considering the kind of people who say it. Examining the underpinnings of both their privilege and their exploitation would take brains that they don’t have. Confronting the same would take guts they don’t have.

Or at least that’s the case made by this book.

Apologies for the lousy audio.