What are you currently reading?

[bwv 1080]

so far, an engaging novel about the French defeat in 1870

[Fëanor]

Fox is about as far right as PBS is to the left--not much.  MSNBC, on the other hand, is probably so far left that it would be banned in the PRC.  ...

Part of the problem is the so many American have no concept of Left-wing, so for example, Obama gets call socialist -- which is an absurdity.  American politics is atypically weighted to the Right vs. most of the world.

The PRC isn't the issue here. 

...
Yes, Fox is biased to the right--slightly--but since you seem to be such a frequent viewer you must know that--unlike the three major commercial US networks (but just like PBS)--they often conduct live interviews with politicians from all points on the spectrum and allow them to present their own views so they can be heard intact, instead of edited into soundbites that distort their comments by decontextualizing them.

Finally, that you claim--and seem to really believe--that "knowledge & reason" are exclusively leftist provinces, and that "egregious nonsense" belongs solely to the right, is a clear statement of your prejudices--and of your pride in them.

No, Fox is very Right-wing in the populist, social/religious, ideological sense. (Some people would call that "Fascist" -- not me you of course.)

It isn't my contention that knowledge & reason is the exclusive province of the Left; I'm specifically say that egregious nonsense is what you get from Fox.

[Fëanor]

I suspect what you mean by "left" here is "not directly supportive of movement conservatism."

My main objection to Fox is not that they are "far right", but that they are essentially a GOP propaganda outlet and that they constantly make shit up.

As for PBS being "left", perhaps you could you give some specifics. 

http://www.thedailyshow.com/watch/mon-november-7-2011/npr-vs--conservative-talk-radio
...

Yeah, good one on the Daily Show, (which I watch, uhmm, daily).  For my part I didn't mean to imply that PBS was Left-wing, only that was mostly rational and knowledge-based, (unlike, say, FOX).

Actually FOX is a Rupbert Murdoch propaganda outlet.  Ironic that there is so much vacuous US flag waving on FOX being owned by an Aussie, eh? FOX/Murchoch has cynically adopted the Republican Party as being closest to its globalish/corporatist, greed-centric agenda. For it's part the GOP has co-opted social/religious conservatism to sucker gulible Americans to vote for globalist agenda.

[marvinbrown]

 
Last night I bought the following 2 books in French:

  [asin]2070349578[/asin]

  and

  [asin]207036805X[/asin]


  I first read Albert Camus L'Etranger (The Stranger) in French and I was drawn to existentialism. This whole idea of the absurdity of existence, the idea of trying to find oneself and survive in an uncaring emotionally detached world (and let's not forget the inevitability of death and its meaning to our very existence) I found all too profound.

  I am very fortunate to be able to read these works in their original language. This is philosophical literature at its finest. 

  Both Camus and Sartre received the Nobel Prize in Literature.  Sartre refused to accept his.

  marvin

 

[drogulus]

     Why is liberal or conservative bias interesting? I don't find it so. The problem with Fox is you have to be an idiot to watch it, which is much less true of the anti-Fox like MSNBC, though all the haranguing at high volume gets tiresome after a bit. I care more who is right, which needs facts, or who presents an interesting analysis, which requires intelligence, which Fox suspects is a liberal plot. They're right, it is a liberal plot to be smart. It's a big part of why liberalism exists, as well as why it's resented.

     That leaves Fox the dumb franchise. They know their audience and are more consistent in satisfying it than their counterparts on the left. But denying bias as a way of agreeing with one side is not very convincing, and unimportant. What difference could it possibly make? Everyone complains about it, so it's discounted already. The thing to notice is when a biased person says something true and salient. Biased people do that all the time.

     

[Elgarian]

I'm not sure that there's anything more satisfying in the arts than pushing through one's own prejudice and being rewarded by the discovery of something life-enhancing and new.

I looked at this in the bookshop. Put it down. Picked it up again; admired it as an artefact - approached just as a piece of book design, it's brilliant, even dazzling; but again I put it down. Picked it up again; it had been signed by the author, which just gave it an edge, and it didn't cost much. So I bought it after all, thinking it would likely end up in a charity bookshop somewhere.

I started reading it; wasn't at all sure about the author's excessive use of the short paragraph for highlighting. It just scraped through the 50-page test (that's where I usually decide whether it's worth continuing or not). By 100 pages I was up and running. By the time I completed the book I was enchanted, charmed, and fully persuaded, against all my initial misgivings, that this book made the world a better place by being in it. I suspect it's a love it or hate it book. If you want a novel with some basic sense of realism, with characters that develop along with the plot, then forget it. This isn't for you. (I'm not sure it's a 'novel' at all.) But if you want to suspend disbelief and enter a world where one delectable vision after another is opened up, a world which will leave you haunted by mental images of great beauty despite their dark side, then you could do worse than this. For all its faults (to list them would miss the point), it's the most memorable fiction I've encountered in the last five years.

[I gather it's received enormous publicity in the US - I didn't know about any of that when I bought it, or when I read it. For me it was just another book.]

[Ataraxia]

Thanks for the rec, my good man.

Me? This:
[asin]0312877153[/asin]

Welcome to the territory. Leave your metal behind, all of it. The bugs will eat it, and they'll go right through you to get it...Don't carry it, don't wear it, and for god's sake don't come here if you've got a pacemaker.

The bugs showed up about fifty years ago--self-replicating, solar-powered, metal-eating machines. No one knows where they came from. They don't like water, though, so they've stayed in the desert Southwest. The territory. People still live here, but they do it without metal. Log cabins, ceramics, what plastic they can get that will survive the sun and heat. Technology has adapted, and so have the people.

Kimble Monroe has chosen to live in the territory. He was born here, and he is extraordinarily well adapted to it. He's one in a million. Maybe one in a billion.

In 7th Sigma, Gould builds an extraordinary SF novel of survival and personal triumph against all the odds.

[Elgarian]

I can't be sure because I haven't done an actual count, Dave, but I think there are more mechanical metal-eating insects in your book than mine.

[Ataraxia]

I can't be sure because I haven't done an actual count, Dave, but I think there are more mechanical metal-eating insects in your book than mine.

No doubt.

It's off to a fine start by the way. 

[DavidRoss]

     Why is liberal or conservative bias interesting? I don't find it so. The problem with Fox is you have to be an idiot to watch it, which is much less true of the anti-Fox like MSNBC, though all the haranguing at high volume gets tiresome after a bit. I care more who is right, which needs facts, or who presents an interesting analysis, which requires intelligence, which Fox suspects is a liberal plot. They're right, it is a liberal plot to be smart. It's a big part of why liberalism exists, as well as why it's resented.

     That leaves Fox the dumb franchise. They know their audience and are more consistent in satisfying it than their counterparts on the left. But denying bias as a way of agreeing with one side is not very convincing, and unimportant. What difference could it possibly make? Everyone complains about it, so it's discounted already. The thing to notice is when a biased person says something true and salient. Biased people do that all the time.

Your expression of extremely biased opinion as if it were fact is an old story and I learned long ago not to expect better--from you or most folks who repeat the same mantras: Conservatives are stupid, Fox is for idiots, liberals are smart.  If "liberals" were smart, they would recognize their own biases and would actually apply reason to examining issues instead of simply assuming that their biases already tell them everything they need to know.

There's no point in going over the same ground again and again, so I won't.  But you do raise a new issue that deserves to be addressed:

  What difference could [bias] possibly make? Everyone complains about it, so it's discounted already. The thing to notice is when a biased person says something true and salient. Biased people do that all the time.

The difference media (and other) bias makes despite "everyone discounting it already" is that the bias is far more pronounced than "everyone" recognizes, so they fail to "discount" enough.  If people believe, as many do, that the NY Times tilts slightly to the left, then they will compensate slightly for the bias.  But the NY Times does not tilt slightly left; its editorial stance is pretty far to the left, so all those folks who think they're compensating by discounting the Times slightly are misleading themselves, for after applying the discount they are still seeing an interpretation that is at least center-left, but now believe that it's centrist, fair and balanced.

You can see this same sort of thing manifested in the tiresomely repeated leftist mantra to the effect that:

...so many American have no concept of Left-wing, so for example, Obama gets call socialist -- which is an absurdity.  American politics is atypically weighted to the Right vs. most of the world.

Yes, I would agree (because I believe the statement consistent with reality) that "American politics is...weighted to the Right vs. most of the world." But this is not the statement about "how far to the right America is" that its maker imagines.  Rather, it is a statement about how far to the left "most of the world" has drifted.

Although the American welfare state is hardly as extreme as, say, Great Britain's, it's still a welfare state that post-War has shifted so far leftward that moderate, non-partisan, truly democratic principles like "government limited by the rule of law (not men)" and "government serving the will of the people (not an elite imposing its will on the people)" are regarded in our civil discourse today as expressions of right-wing extremism!

Why is any of this important?  Well, it's not--at least, not if you have no children or grandchildren to care about and believe that your job in life is to get everything you can for yourself and screw everyone else.  But otherwise it matters very much, because we want our choices and our actions to make things better not just for ourselves, but for our children, our friends and colleagues, our communities, our nations, and our world.  And if we really want them to be better, we cannot escape the moral imperative to cast off the shackles of lazy bigotry and make the hard effort to open our minds and see things as they really are, lest our uncritical acceptance of the status quo lead us to behave as agents of our own destruction rather than as agents of healing, growth, and rebirth.

And the great irony, of course (giving Olympian Gods no end of chuckles, no doubt!), is that even as the great socialist experiments of the 20th Century have all crashed and burned, and the more modest socialist accommodations of Western Europe are even now crumbling into disorder and ruin, the glassy-eyed true-believers in America still cling to their discredited faith, while denying that it really is their faith and denying the great historical lesson of the 20th Century that was written in the blood of millions. 

[Karl Henning]

I can't be sure because I haven't done an actual count, Dave, but I think there are more mechanical metal-eating insects in your book than mine.

Cannot have too many of those, I think. I know they improved Coriolanus.

[DavidRoss]

Cannot have too many of those, I think. I know they improved Coriolanus.

Flesh-eating zombies, too.

[Elgarian]

Cannot have too many of those [mechanical metal-eating insects], I think. I know they improved Coriolanus.

Agreed. Though I always felt that they were something of a facile intrusion in A Tale of Two Cities - I mean the bit at the end where when Sydney Carton escapes because the guillotine blade gets eaten on its way down.

[Karl Henning]

Flesh-eating zombies, too.

Wasn't that Lear? . . .

[Karl Henning]

Agreed. Though I always felt that they were something of a facile intrusion in A Tale of Two Cities - I mean the bit at the end where when Sydney Carton escapes because the guillotine blade gets eaten on its way down.

What hath Ken Russell wrought?

[Fëanor]

...

Although the American welfare state is hardly as extreme as, say, Great Britain's, it's still a welfare state that post-War has shifted so far leftward that moderate, non-partisan, truly democratic principles like "government limited by the rule of law (not men)" and "government serving the will of the people (not an elite imposing its will on the people)" are regarded in our civil discourse today as expressions of right-wing extremism!

Why is any of this important?  Well, it's not--at least, not if you have no children or grandchildren to care about and believe that your job in life is to get everything you can for yourself and screw everyone else.  But otherwise it matters very much, because we want our choices and our actions to make things better not just for ourselves, but for our children, our friends and colleagues, our communities, our nations, and our world.  And if we really want them to be better, we cannot escape the moral imperative to cast off the shackles of lazy bigotry and make the hard effort to open our minds and see things as they really are, lest our uncritical acceptance of the status quo lead us to behave as agents of our own destruction rather than as agents of healing, growth, and rebirth.

And the great irony, of course (giving Olympian Gods no end of chuckles, no doubt!), is that even as the great socialist experiments of the 20th Century have all crashed and burned, and the more modest socialist accommodations of Western Europe are even now crumbling into disorder and ruin, the glassy-eyed true-believers in America still cling to their discredited faith, while denying that it really is their faith and denying the great historical lesson of the 20th Century that was written in the blood of millions.

Nice rant; it really does have its moments of profundity.

But It's not true that all "the modest socialist accommodations of Western Europe are even now crumbling ...". Scandanavian coutries are doing pretty well and are rated pleasanter places to live than the USA.  A principal thing in their case is that they believe that nation can achieve things as a community, that these things have cost the individual must pay, and that payment in the from of taxes is reasonable and basically good value in terms of delivering a civil society.

I'm not going to -- nor do I need to -- justify a country like Greece where people demand much but aren't willing to pay for it.  That's a untenable situation.  Actually it reminds me of the California situation I've been reading about in ...

Michael Lewis: Boomerang: Travels in the New Third World



Come to think of it, I guess Lewis is saying CA is really part of the 3rd world.

[DavidRoss]

Nice rant; it really does have its moments of profundity.

But It's not true that all "the modest socialist accommodations of Western Europe are even now crumbling ...". Scandanavian coutries are doing pretty well and are rated pleasanter places to live than the USA.  A principal thing in their case is that they believe that nation can achieve things as a community, that these things have cost the individual must pay, and that payment in the from of taxes is reasonable and basically good value in terms of delivering a civil society.

I'm not going to -- nor do I need to -- justify a country like Greece where people demand much but aren't willing to pay for it.  That's a untenable situation.  Actually it reminds me of the California situation I've been reading about in ...

Michael Lewis: Boomerang: Travels in the New Third World



Come to think of it, I guess Lewis is saying CA is really part of the 3rd world.

Rant?  My statements have been calm and temperate.  For an example of ranting you had better look elsewhere...some of your own statements on this thread will do for a start.

Interesting that you mention Scandinavia.  People always seem to insist on equating very small homogenous countries whose people enjoy a shared language and culture and genetic heritage--in other words, nations--with the very different set of social and cultural factors, not least of which is sheer numbers, prevailing in the United States.  Rather like equating the audience at a grammar school dance recital with the crowd at a Manchester United football match.

And if you haven't noticed, lately Scandinavia has been backing away from socialism.  Sweden, for instance, is reducing business taxes and privatizing medicine, public employee pensions, and many formerly state-owned industries.  They've seen the shortcomings of socialism and have been wise enough to take steps to make a relatively painless transition to a more sustainable market-oriented political economy--unlike those Mediterranean states to the south that seem determined to prolong and expand  their suffering until it wreak havoc on the entire continent.

[Daverz]

Fox is for idiots

Are you actually a consumer of Fox News yourself?

EDIT: that seems to be a snarky question, but it isn't meant as one.   I was merely curious whether David actually watched the network with any regularity, because I can't imagine that someone as cultured as he seems to be actually does.



I told myself I wasn't going to get sucked back into the A Song of Fire and Ice series, but I my resolve didn't hold out.  I'm actually reading it on my iPod Touch, which is barely usable for the purpose.  Now I'm thinking of getting a Kindle.

[Fëanor]

...
Interesting that you mention Scandinavia.  People always seem to insist on equating very small homogenous countries whose people enjoy a shared language and culture and genetic heritage--in other words, nations--with the very different set of social and cultural factors, not least of which is sheer numbers, prevailing in the United States.  Rather like equating the audience at a grammar school dance recital with the crowd at a Manchester United football match.

And yet Amercians like to brag about the "great melting pot".

...
And if you haven't noticed, lately Scandinavia has been backing away from socialism.  Sweden, for instance, is reducing business taxes and privatizing medicine, public employee pensions, and many formerly state-owned industries.  They've seen the shortcomings of socialism and have been wise enough to take steps to make a relatively painless transition to a more sustainable market-oriented political economy--unlike those Mediterranean states to the south that seem determined to prolong and expand  their suffering until it wreak havoc on the entire continent.

Yes, true, from time to time this or that Scandinavia country backs off this or that socialist or welfare measure, depending on the government in power.  However it's not accurate to imply that they are rejecting socialism, (i.e. what you refer to as "socialism" which strictly speaking it is not).  In any case, they remain a long, long way ahead of the USA, (or Canada for that matter), in health, education, and delivery of community services.

I can understand the angst of Americans like yourself when you look at your own, current situation.  Permit me to observe that the US does much more resemble southern Europe than Scandinavia in the way that people want stuff but aren't willing to pay for it.  Of course the stuff you want is a little different: you want to invade courtries rather than provide healthcare for your own people, but the financial consequences are similar.

[Florestan]

Interesting that you mention Scandinavia.  People always seem to insist on equating very small homogenous countries whose people enjoy a shared language and culture and genetic heritage--in other words, nations--with the very different set of social and cultural factors, not least of which is sheer numbers, prevailing in the United States.  Rather like equating the audience at a grammar school dance recital with the crowd at a Manchester United football match.

That's indeed the crux of the matter. How anyone can seriously believe that a country's social, political and economical order that evolved from, and is based on, centuries upon centuries of specific ethnic, cultural and religious homogeneity can be translated tale quale to another, whose ethnic, cultural and religious background is completely different on all accounts, is beyond me...

Personally and theoretically I admire the Scandinavian model more than the US one but I am fully aware that neither the former nor the latter have any chance of materializing on Romanian soil. I want my country to progress not by a servile - and futile - import of foreign models but by a pragmatic fusion between modernity (about which both Scandinavia and US offer valuable insights) and our national traditions (which in their turn can offer valuable insights to a modernity that more often than not seems to have lost its spiritual compass).