Metablog

The moth Darwin predicted must exist, Xanthopan morganii praedicta, using its preternaturally long proboscis on the orchid Angraecum sesquipedale, pollinating it, via Encyclopedia Brittanica.

This is in reaction, I'm not sure it qualifies as response, to comments from Thornton on yesterday's Douthat post, in which he suggests I should stop arguing with Douthat (admittedly not a very dignified position), mentioning Marx, or being "ideological". I think. And some other stuff.

I'm so sick of idiots tied to masts: the First Amendment Liberals obsessed with Antifa, the Socialists obsessed with single payer health care (now that the economy makes it harder to obsess about nationalizing the banks), and the Conservatives convinced that they have to come up with some deeply principled reason for everything they do. Because trying stuff and seeing what works is just so... unprincipled.

Well, there you go. "What works" at accomplishing what? What do you want to get done? That's a question of principles, which don't necessarily have to be based on a big philosophical system. I want cops to stop killing black people, and I want the government to make sure everybody in the US gets good medical care as is done without too much fuss in other countries, because duh, or because I'm a Rawlsian, or because I'm an unbelieving Jew, or whatever, or because I picked a goddamned side from my Democrat parents. But the other side won't let me, for reasons I consider specious and unprincipled indeed, and on the basis of arguments made in what I call "bad faith". That's my problem, Republicans, Not being tied to a mast, though I understand how one gets annoyed with the one-issue hobbyhorse who won't even allow you to agree with him if you don't use the magic words.

Reality that politics is about identity and that ideology is just identity for educated elites from the majority race.

So really, he's a Marxian thinker himself, this being the fundamental point of the manuscripts Marx and Engels assembled in 1845-46 but couldn't find a publisher for, that came out at last in 1932 under the title The German Ideology. Blindness to the identity origins of one's ideology is where bad faith comes from.

En route

Yastreblyansky is going on a short Asian vacasian. At the moment in the Cathay Pacific terminal at JFK near the M&Ms shop (pictured). There will be no WiFi on the plane I believe (difficult negotiations with the Chinese authorities as yet not concluded). So blogging will be not merely light but, between this afternoon and sometime in Singapore on the other side of the International Dateline, as it were lighter than air. God Jul and Buon Natale to all!

Housekeeping

If anybody's wondering about the Dynamic View out the window here, that's a Blogger alternative that has not been adopted by any of the bloggers I read—I have a hard time finding any at all—that has some childish and perhaps not so childish advantages over the normal formats.

One thing is that it blows one's reader numbers sky high, at least in its own Blogger world. I do not actually believe I have that many readers (normal blog statistics counters indicate that it has a real effect,  but not like this). But even though I think the charts must be fictional I love looking at them. The other is writerly vanity: I like the display of old posts all the way back to forever—the little literary bits that could have had a better audience than they did at the time they were written and are now more accessible to rediscovery.

The last time I tried it, though, it would not work with the StatCounter device (which gives me a truer picture of what a tiny, select crew you really are) and I hated the way the individual posts looked, with a wide page and tons of white space, like twee remarks on very expensive notepaper, simultaneously amateurish and unbloggy. But the StatCounter problem has now been resolved and I find that this particular Sidebar view narrows the page to make it look more like a blog in the traditional sense, so I'm trying it again.

If you hate it, you know where you can say so—here's some thread:

Aaron Swartz Memorial Library of the News

Uncredited photo from Our Daily Bleed.

This is a pretty serious idea. I started thinking about it while reading my paper New York Times, which ran a story this morning on page 1 below the fold, while it's somewhat buried in the online edition, claiming that all newspapers are retreating behind paywalls and before you know it there'll be nothing left but the Guardian.

So, I'm not merely willing for newspapers to make lots of money, I really want them to (though when I say that I mean writers and editors, not shareholders demanding a psychopathic 20% ROI), but: only under the condition that there's a public library of some kind. That is, there needs to be an online public library, a virtual place where you might put yourself to some inconvenience to go and where reading your Washington Post or your Haaretz or your Welt am Sonntag is perhaps not as comfy as reading your subscription copy, but where this essential citizenship information can be found without too much difficulty and with no expenditure beyond that of getting online in the first place.

What I thought in the first place is that all of us—bloggers and commenters—could be contributing to the construction of a volunteer periodicals collection.

Everybody could belong to some bibliography-sharing program like Zotero; then, whenever you read an article from a subscribers-only source, you copy its metadata into the Zotero-like program: title, author, date, publication name, and permanent URL; along with a few index keywords, or maybe even a 20-word abstract of the article.

Then, all these accounts would be synced with a central account from which a newspaper-like front page can be published as with paper.li (or for that matter RawStory, but better if it's laid out more or less automatically), but with archive and search boxes.

Stories ranked as with HuffPost, but on the basis of how many readers have submitted them.

And topical subject front pages (business, sports, international...) or self-generated front pages out of the keywords (France, Vietnam, tar sands, baking...).

Perhaps it could be done through Twitter, though 140 characters isn't enough for bibliographically good entries, I wouldn't think.

Or on the other end of elaborateness it could be a Wikimedia project: the idea has a lot of Wiki ethos to it, I think, the reverence for text edited by somebody else. Remember, it's not a publication, just a catalogue of URLs. Or the door to a library that already exists, though in fantastical concealment like a virtual Easter egg hunt, in the cloud. Above all it's a volunteer thing, an opportunity for everybody to participate in making our imaginary environment a better and friendlier place, which is what makes me so bold as to suggest naming it after everybody's dear lost friend, the good, mourned, Aaron Swartz.

I wouldn't have the time or the techitude or indeed the leadership quality (i.e. sociopathy) required to plan and implement such a thing, but I'd certainly give it some grunt time. I hope some smarter body will see this and think about making it happen—I'm going to post it chez Booman and Kos, and you readers should feel free to copy and paste it wherever you see fit, or for that matter rewrite the whole thing if you like (be nice and link me though).

Can't credit this--dead link to the UK Independent.

All'improvviso

Blogging really is an art form, or able to be an art form, an improvisatory one, and risky in a figurative way--verbally acrobatic: you go up without a net, you may lay a net down while you're in the air. I felt this with what started out to be a shallowly clever post about Clinton the black president and Obama the Jewish president. I wanted a nice link for the Clinton part, found Toni Morrison, and saw something that wasn't shallow, the idea of defining Clinton's metaphorical blackness in terms of his metaphorical persecution, which then applied pari passu to the metaphorically Jewish, persecuted Obama.

None other than Thers, as it happened, was thinking about a related issue, the distinct kinds of hatred projected by right-wingers on the First Ladies, Hillary Clinton and Michelle Obama, and these fit a kind of mirror image of the schema: Michelle is hated with the classical anti-black racism, in exclusive terms of her body, and Hillary in the pattern of anti-Semitism, in terms of her supposedly calculating and conspiratorial mind. Now the idea starts to get pretty serious.

A famous idea from structural anthropology is that of the floating signifier, the sign-object detached from its meaning but still pregnant with a kind of meaningfulness that you can't grasp, like the figures in surrealist painting, or clever advertising. Is this a case of a floating signified, a content wandering from expression to expression, racism from race to race?