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I find these all amusing, but equally, disturbing. Why would someone want to put a joke on his tombstone? I can understand telling people, “On my tombstone, there’s gonna be just two words, ‘Fuck you’!” That could be fun; all your friends would giggle and think you deliciously evil. But to actually do it? That makes no sense.
Perhaps you have to believe in God or that you will become a ghost so you can float over your tombstone and chortle over the effect your wit has on the mourners. But for someone like me, who may believe in God but most definitely doesn’t believe in a life beyond this one, it all seems pointless. I only make jokes for two reasons: to make myself laugh and to make other people laugh. It won’t make me happy for people to laugh at my wit once my wit is kaput.
I just read Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness again—the first time I’ve read it since I was forced to in college. My reason for reading it was that I had remembered that it was written almost entirely in quotes. In other words, that the story itself was the story of a guy telling the story that we know as “Heart of Darkness.”
It turns out that my memory is good. The first couple of pages talk about a couple of guys sitting on a boat, waiting for the tide to do its thing. While they wait, one of the guys tells the story of his work on a steamboat in Africa. But reading it didn’t answer my question, “Why did Conrad write the story in this way?”
Heart of Darkness is a Frame Story. This is basically a story within a story, but unlike, say, Hamlet, the story within is the most important story. From a stylistic standpoint, this structure is used to present the story as a real sailor’s yarn. It isn’t Conrad telling the story, it’s Marlow. But that strikes me as a pretty minor reason for all those paragraphs of dialog, which did nothing so much as pull me out of the narrative a few times per page.
Book Rags suggests a more believable reason for the book to be written in this way. It says, “Heart of Darkness is a frame tale, a structure that was quite popular in the last half of the nineteenth century.” I suspect that he was still looking for approval as a writer. But it is unfortunate; I really think we could edit the book into a standalone narrative and it would be much improved.
Having said that, I think Heart of Darkness is a wonderful read. I will grant that it is implicitly racist, but this is made up for by the fact that it is explicitly anti-imperialist. Although Kurtz is an interesting character, what really makes the novel work is Marlow. It works really well as a character study of him.
Of course, I have no intention of ever reading it again. It did, however, make me pick up The Confidence-Man. After only a few pages I thought, “Melville is so much better than Conrad.” And that is not any kind of a slight of Conrad.
I was just writing to Reed Richardson, Eric Alterman’s unpaid lackey over at The Nation. Without trying, I think I wrote something semi-brilliant—which is my normal approach to brilliance. Reed just wrote an article Brilliant Disguise. This in itself is a disturbing development because it means that Alterman’s obsession with Bruce Springsteen is rubbing off on Reed, but who am I to judge (other than someone with very, very good taste in music)? In the article, he points out that Paul Ryan isn’t really a policy wonk. But of course, you already know that because I’ve been talking about this for years.
Reed’s argument is that Ryan is just an ideologue. This can’t be said enough. I put it differently: Ryan’s “budget” is not a budget at all; it is just a right wing wish list. Here is where I got semi-brilliant. (Anyone noting the thousands of people who came up with this first will be banned!) I summed up his policy proposals thusly:
Cut programs for the poor
Cut entitlements for middle class
Cut taxes for the rich
This is the Holy Trinity for Paul Ryan—in more ways than one. Cut, cut, and cut: the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost of right wing extremism.
It’s true. I want to be Chris Hayes’ father. On good days (like today), I want to be Ezra Klein’s foster dad. But never have I admitted to having a man crush—until today. There are men who I think are ideals of male perfection: George Clooney and Antonio Banderas come to mind. I’d like to look like them. But if I could be someone, there would be only one possiblity: Matt Taibbi.
There are lots of things I could say about him. He’s an attractive guy—at least, more attractive than me, and that’s all that matters. And he’s smart and funny—although I won’t go so far as to say more than me. But the thing is that he’s a good package: he has it all, as far as I can tell. But the main thing is that he’s a real man without being (1) stupid and (2) an asshole.
Yesterday, he wrote an great article over at Rolling Stone: Goldman Non-Prosecution: AG Eric Holder Has No Balls. And it is here that we see Taibbi’s manliness on display. There are times when you need a man to stand up and say, “This guy’s bad!” And in the case of Eric Holder and the whole Obama “we’re too nice to hold the people who destroyed our economy accountable” gaggle, this is far past overdue:
Last year I spent a lot of time and energy jabbering and gesticulating in public about what seemed to me the most obviously prosecutable offenses detailed in the report—the seemingly blatant perjury before congress of Lloyd Blankfein and other Goldman executives, and the almost comically long list of frauds committed by the company in its desperate effort to unload its crappy “cats and dogs” mortgage-backed inventory.
In the notorious Hudson transaction, for instance, Goldman claimed, in writing, that it was fully “aligned” with the interests of its client, Morgan Stanley, because it owned a $6 million slice of the deal. What Goldman left out is that it had a $2 billion short position against the same deal.
If that isn’t fraud, Mr. Holder, just what exactly is fraud?
Did you catch that? Taibbi isn’t just angry; he cares. It matters that this great injustice has been done and that those in power stand by and do nothing. This is what men do at their best. Sure, they can be judgmental and generally pains in all our asses. But they can also make us better in a way that people like Holder and Obama (And I!) cannot.
When it comes to these banksters, as well as the torturers of the Bush administration, we need more people like Matt Taibbi and with more power. When it comes to using the power of the government to go after the weak, every administration is on board. But when it comes to the powerful, as Taibbi notes, they have no balls:
That’s how law works on Wall Street. The bank walks into the room with the sordid activity, and the law firm’s partners huddle up and whip their associates—for hundreds and hundreds of billable hours straight, if necessary—until a way is found to call stealing or tax evasion or accounting fraud or whatever legal.
That’s the way it should work on the prosecutorial side, too. You should start with a simple moral premise—this group of crooks ripped off X group of victims for fifty million dollars—and then you should bury yourself in law books until you find a way to put them all in jail. If Linklaters gets paid to be creative, well, Mr. Holder, we’re paying you to be creative, too.
Again, though, Holder didn’t need to be creative in the Goldman case. Levin gift-wrapped the whole thing for him. He could have had a dozen easy convictions just on the evidence in that report, and if he had been creative, if he had used his vast power to roll up the guilty and flip them into more revelations, then he’d have had enough cases to last the AG’s office the next decade.
But the Holders of the world do not want to be creative when the targets are politically influential rich people. Instead, they use their creativity against Roger Clemens, Barry Bonds, immigrant housekeepers, and guys who knock over liquor stores. They like to flex muscles against bank robbers, celebrity tax evaders (we can’t have Wesley Snipes on the loose!), truck hijackers, and drug dealers. As Gene Wilder would say, “You know—morons.”
Holder’s non-decision on Goldman is more than unsurprising. It amounts to an official announcement that the government is no longer in the business [of] prosecuting smart criminals. It’s pathetic. The one thing you pay any lawyer to have is balls, and our nation’s top attorney has none.
I hope Matt Taibbi runs for office soon. I want to work for that campaign!
32.Priest who administers last rites to Pope excitedly calls mother afterward to tell her how well it went.
30.Michael Jackson too broke to buy Pope’s bones.
28.Bears everywhere shitting in woods.
23.Doctors examining the body discover that the Pope was not only a woman, but also Hitler.
22.Mankind scrambles to choose new leader of inflexible, sexually morbid institutional anachronism; heretofore anonymous bureaucrat will instantly be celebrated as world’s holiest man as he travels to AIDS-stricken Africa to denounce the use of condoms. [Not funny; just true.]
21.Telltale white smoke emitting from Vatican chimneys announces a) choice of new Pope, and b) the fiery death of the 5000 back issues of Manscape and Hung Inches that had accumulated in the Vatican lobby.
11.Hello my baby, hello my honey, hello my ragtime gal…
I feel good in that I think Matt Taibbi is even more wonderful and bad because I laughed so much at the Pope’s death. With this in mind, here is the list of his riff on dead Pope in a box:
41.Humming old Polish folk song in there. That kills three minutes.
39.Can’t move. Can’t reach penis.
38.Somebody taking my job. My job!
37.Getting a little stuffy.
36.Naming all the different types of fish. Flounder, halibut, perch, goldfish, basking shark…no, do the sharks separately…really stuffy in here, gar, swordfish, manta ray, eels… No, don’t think about eels. Eels are scary. Boy, is it dark in here. Four minutes gone by.
12.Sequoia, birch, maple, willow, palm, oak, pine, fir, mapleNo, wait, I said maple already…
10.You dirty rat. You dirty, double-crossing rat… Proxima estacion: Tibidabo. Tenga cuidado de las puertas deslizantes… It means woods and blanche means white, so the two together mean white woods… L’tat c’est moi! Don’t think about eels, don’t think about eels…
Here’s another common dodge—not a dodge, a common response: “What God is, is a concept; it’s a concept in people’s minds; it’s a concept that enriches their spirits and inspires them.” If you believe this, you’re definitely an atheist. God is not a concept; the concept of God is a concept. A cup of coffee is not a concept; the concept of a cup of coffee is a concept. Elementary philosophy.
I have a term for this: it’s called a deepity. A friend of mine, when his teenage daughter many years ago—a nice smart alec girl—and dad was in the habit of uttering pronouncements at the dinner table (an MIT professor) and one day he issued forth one of these wise tidbits, and his daughter said, “Wow! Dad said a deepity.” He told me about that and I thought the term was just so great that I would appropriate it.
So what’s a deepity? A deepity is an apparently profound observation that is ambiguous. And I mean that quite literally. It has two readings. On one meaning, it’s obviously false, but if it were true, it would be very important. And on the other, it’s trivially true. And so when you hear it, you sort of see, “Oh, I think that’s true!” It is. It’s trivially true. Or at the same time, “Woa!” That’s a deepity.
I want to give you one of my favorite examples of a deepity. When I teach this concept to my students. Are you ready? Everybody sitting down?
“Love is just a word.”
Oh, wow! Love is just a word! Think about it. Whatever love is, it isn’t a word. You can’t find love in the dictionary. Put the quotation marks around it—we philosophers are sticklers about this; it’s called a use-mention error—and you get “love” is just a word. That’s true and it’s trivially true. “Cheeseburger” is just a word. “Word” is just a word. So that’s a deepity.
Now, the idea that God is a concept is another great deepity.
This video will go viral if it hasn’t already. Natalie Morales asks about releasing more tax returns and Ann Romney almost jumps out of her seat and attacks the reporter. She is clearly angry, but I don’t think this is the most important thing:
What comes across most clearly is Ann Romney’s sense of entitlement. She’s rich! She’s above suspicion! Her husband is above suspicion because she says so!
Sometimes I’m glad that I’m not rich or powerful. If I were, I would have to work really hard to not be a total dick. You just don’t come upon many rich people who think they are lucky to be rich. It is because they are smart (a gift) and hard working (a gift) and moral (a gift if it’s true). Mitt Romney deserves his quarter billion dollars! This is because he is 1000 times as smart and 1000 times as hard working and 1000 times as moral as the average American. He must be because he has 1000 times as much money. (We think.)
What is most pernicious about Ayn Rand’s philosophy is not that it is wrong; the most pernicious thing is that it tells those people who are the biggest dicks that they aren’t dicks. Only a sociopath would tell the schoolyard bully that the only thing wrong with him is that he isn’t beating up enough kids.
Ann Romney looks like she is at the end of her rope. She is the one who asks the questions, not the one who answers them!
I want to explain why conservatives want to limit the number of people who vote—and I do mean conservatives and not specifically Republicans, because libertarians feel this way too. It all goes back to Plato (or Pluto, the Disney dog—conservatives aren’t that clear on the difference). You see, democracy is a bad idea. The problem is that most people are stupid and ignorant and evil. But mostly just stupid and ignorant. Democracy is so, you know: democratic. It gives all these stupid, ignorant people an equal say in how the society is run. This is wrong!
Or that’s what conservatives tell me. Here’s the thing: most conservatives are incredibly ignorant. I won’t say anything about their intelligence—but they are also stupid. But it doesn’t matter because ignorance is the issue not stupidity. Or evil. Because they are also evil.
Let us take your average person. This gal is really smart—smarter than I am. Do you know how I know? Because she doesn’t give a damn about politics. All she knows is what she sees when changing channels between The Ellen DeGeneres Show and Judge Evil, I mean, Judy. She doesn’t know much, but what she does know is more or less true. She’s never heard of Solyndra. Fast and Furious is a movie her son likes. And she knows the Iraq War was a major mistake, but she doesn’t know fuck all about weapons of mass destruction, which means she doesn’t “know” that we found them in Iraq. But that’s about it. The main thing is that she knows enough to vote in a reasonable way.
The conservatives, on the other hand, are of two types: either they know a lot of things that aren’t true or they pretend to know a lot of things that aren’t true. The first type is much more common than the second. In fact, the first type know a lot of untrue things because of the second type. They also think they are far more informed than the average person because of the second type. And the first type more or less votes against their own interests because of the second type.
It is a, “First they came for the Jews” kind of thing. By the time the conservative masses wake up to what is happening, their votes won’t count either. And they will say what conservatives say more and more, “You mean they lied to me?”
I recently implied something about Sam Harris that I don’t actually believe. In The Atheist Libertarian Connection, I indicated that Sam Harris was a libertarian. I don’t think this is quite right. It is okay to categorize him as conservative, in the sense that he has been for a number of neoconservative ventures. And I think he was wrong about this. It is one thing to say that we aren’t going to grant legitimacy to Islamic fundamentalists. It is quite another to cheer lead for an essentially religious war waged by Christian fundamentalists. I think that Harris has erred in this regard.
Otherwise, I think that Harris’ thinking is pretty reasonable and humane. As with most things, my thoughts are complicated. You aren’t likely to get to the bottom of what I think in any given article. So now I’ve had my say. For putting up with me, I offer you the following bit of wisdom from Sam Harris in Letter to a Christian Nation:
In fact, “atheism” is a term that should not even exist. No one ever needs to identify himself as a “non-astrologer” or a “non-alchemist.” We do not have words for people who doubt that Elvis is still alive or that aliens have traversed the galaxy only to molest rachers and their cattle. Atheism is nothing more than the noises reasonable people make in the presence of unjustified religious beliefs.
Recently, I wrote about female TV conservatives who are blond. Immediately, the phone rang. It was Andrea.
“That’s not how you spell blond,” she said, but with an –e on the end of it. “It is blond without an –e for men, and blond with an –e for women.”
If it weren’t for Andrea’s large stockpile of assault rifles and Facebook page filled with violent conservative grammar rhetoric, I would have hung up right then.
“And what are you gonna do to me?” I asked.
“You don’t want to know,” she replied with a disturbing calm.
Of course: the Grammar Inquisition! A lot of good liberal grammarians were tortured for ending sentences with prepositions back in the 90s.
“Do your best,” I said and hung up the phone.
I know my days are numbered, so I need to get this out while I still can. Both blond and brunet were originally French words. As a result, when applied to females in the French language, one would add an –e or a –te to the ends of these words. Thus: garçon blond (blond boy) and jeune fille blonde (blond girl).
But I forgot! I don’t speak French; I speak English. And the funny thing about English is that we don’t do that. So the Grammar Inquisition can bite me. I won’t back down!
The –e should be dropped; the practice now usual is to retain it when the word is used either as noun or as adjective of a woman & drop it otherwise (the blonde girl; she is a blond; she has a blond complexion; the blond races); but this is by no means universal, & the doubt between blond women & blonde women (with blondes women in the background) at once shows its absurdity.
That’s in 1926, or as I say, “Almost 100 fucking years ago!”
The use of blond and brunette as nouns is also controversial, chiefly for two reasons. First, these words invariably refer to females and never to males. A sentence like That blonde is getting up from her seat is fairly common, but the counterpart usage applied to a man, as in That blond is getting up from his seat, is so rare as to sound comical. Second, the noun use reduces an individual to the attribute of hair color, as does the adjectival use applied to individuals (as in the blonde woman). Since men are not normally described in such terms, it is best to avoid these nouns and to restrict the adjective to modify the word hair: The woman [or man] with blond hair got up and walked away.
I don’t think this is bad advice, but I do use blond as a noun to describe men—admittedly, less often than I do with women.
The main thing is that using “blond” and “brunet” only makes usage more clear. There is no point in clinging to these gender signifiers—regardless of what the Grammar Inquisition has to say.
I thought this was a rather good discussion of Ayn Rand as philosopher. All you need to know about her supposed philosophy is that she claimed it could be boiled down to this:
Metaphysics: Objective Reality
Epistemology: Reason
Ethics: Self-interest
Politics: Capitalism
Perhaps you’ve noticed these kind of beg the question. Here is the video that describes this better than I can:
I was just writing to Reed Richardson, Eric Alterman’s unpaid lackey over at 
It’s true. I want to be Chris Hayes’ father. On good days (
I want to explain why 
I recently implied something about Sam Harris that I don’t actually believe. In 