Acephalous

The fact that Hawaii still exists proves global warming is a hoax.

When I mentioned to a friend I was writing a post with that title, he responded by betting his mother's life that someone had already made that claim and set out in search of that idiot. That was five minutes ago but have no fear his mother can breathe easy. Only now I'm not sure what to do with the rest of the post I'd planned to write. I thought it'd be amusing to demonstrate how the deliberately (and defiantly) uninformed worldview of those who think scientific progress is teleological (for example) creates an environment in which any failed hypothesis represents further proof of gross negligence or professional misconduct. But it isn't amusing: it's depressing.

Because of these pig-ignorant people, any scientific finding that doesn't correspond to the dominant scientific paradigm becomes "another nail in the coffin" for that paradigm. That the tsunami that struck Hawaii didn't manifest as a 300-foot-tall wall of water is, for such luminaries, further proof that scientists simply suck at predicting anything that involves heightened sea-level. They leap from a televisually disappointing tsunami to stock global warming denialism because they believe a single failure undermines an entire enterprise, i.e. they have no understanding of or investment in the scientific method.

Like I said: it's depressing.

"I am never wrong about anything, and all the pains I have taken to verify my notions have only wasted my time."

I'm no G.B. Shaw, as my previous post makes plain.* But since it turned into a version of Humiliation, I say we all should play. What lesson drilled into your head by someone you trusted later turned out to be hilariously misguided? I can start the festivities again by pointing you to an account of the undergraduate honors seminar in which I learned to never trust the Jews.

*The quotation is from a letter to H.G. Wells in which Shaw chided him for being too sanguine about the future of Stalinist Russia.

Dear Conservative Blogger who wants a picture of me,

In case you're wondering why you haven't heard from them, the Facebook friends you contacted recognized your name and knew you didn't need a head-shot of me for the reasons you stated.  (Which were, to be frank, quite lame considering how extremely difficult it is to figure out when my birthday is.)

Also, let me save you some time: not a single one of the results of a Google image search for my name is a picture of me, so you can stop clicking through every image of a person that search returns in the hopes that it'll be me.  (Although I am flattered you clicked through to this one.) 

If you would like a picture of me to deface in what you mistakenly believe will be a hilarious fashion, contact me at myentirenamesquisheduplikethis (at) gmail (dot) com and I'll send you a couple. 

Update: if you're so inclined, feel free to scroll through those results and comment on which one you think I should be.  Given this post (and the general tenor of the events chronicled here), I know what I'm voting for.

Outliers to the fore!

Because I teach rhetoric, not statistics, I chose not to have my students run standard deviations and what-not on the results of their final surveys.  (Discipline-specific research classes further down the line will teach them the correct arcane maths to perform upon their data.)  Instead, I thought I'd teach them how to present their oversimplified results in a professional manner, i.e. how to couch the results of their small surveys in language that acknowledges the limitations of generalizing from scant data.  Since the majority of their citations came from the Ed Diener-edited Journal of Happiness Studies, that seemed like the best place to filch examples from.  But what I found there dismayed me as both an academic and a former baseball player. 

My baseball career was not illustrious: I was a defensive specialist whose slugging percentage mirrored a batting average that occasionally threatened to break the Mendoza line.  Despite rarely making contact and having no power to speak of, during the summer of my junior year I slugged a Ruthian .640 and flirted with a .500 batting average ... for 52 non-consecutive at bats against pitchers whose deliveries I knew intimately from having played behind them for three seasons.*  To extrapolate my true talent from that five-game series would be the height of folly for the simple reason that the sample size would be hilariously small.  Even for something as statistically quantifiable as hitting ability, a data set of fifty-two captures nothing of statistical significance.

Or does it?  Because today I learned that I could have been the greatest hitter in the history of the game: the aforementioned journal considered the results of a survey of fifty-two people important enough to warrant publication.  If that's all that's required to establish statistical significance in academia, it should be more than enough to demonstrate the same in a silly children's game.  By those standards, proof of the illustrious career I would have had can be derived from the self-reported data above so long as I include a paragraph like this one in the "Discussion" section:

The study has limitations which must be taken into account when findings are interpreted.  According to common statistical guidelines, the present sample size was small, resulting in modest effect sizes, so the findings should be viewed as preliminary, and requiring replication in a larger sample.  Interpreting this evidence is by no means straightforward, but the way we interpreted our findings were consistent with the theoretical position we entertained.  In sum, preliminary investigation indicates that Scott Eric Kaufman likely would have been the best hitter in the history of professional baseball.

So my assignment for my students is to isolate ten examples of the rhetoric of dubious-but-professionally-acceptable hedging in the Journal of Happiness Studies and employ them in their discussion of the results of their surveys.  If their pool of 52 students happens to contain two homosexual women of African-American descent who are also on the dean's list, they can generalize about the academic achievement of all African-American lesbians so long as they couch their conclusions in the speculative rhetoric found in the journal.  This may seem irresponsible of me, but remember that my purpose here is to teach them how to write well and read critically, and if they're parroting the prose of established scholars and learning to mistrust certain rhetorical tics, I've done my job.

*I went something like 26-52 with 10 doubles, all of which were pulled down the line.  They tipped the breaking pitches they couldn't throw for strikes, so I sat on the two-seamers that never really sank, started swinging outrageously early and yanked them down the line. 

Update: Read the comments before you decide to SMASH.  Apparently my undergraduate statistics teacher pushed the anecdote-is-not-data argument a tad too enthusiastically, so my annoyance with a sample size of 52 is unjustified.  Fortunately, as they say: Blogs is for learning.

I now expect to be the Arthur Bellow-Goode Distinguished Chair in Funny Book Studies someday.

Rob Farley might not have been born to burgle, but perhaps what we study influences what endowed chair we earn. Consider the curious case of Dr. Ed Diener:

Professor Diener is listed as one of the most highly cited psychologists by the Institute of Scientific Information, with over 12,000 citations to his credit ... [His] research focuses on the measurement of well-being; temperament and personality influences on well-being; theories of well-being; income and well-being; and cultural influences on well-being. He has edited three recent books on subjective well-being, and a 2005 book on multi-method measurement in psychology. Diener is currently writing a popular book on happiness ...

What endowed chair does this expert in psychological metrics of happiness hold?

Ed Diener is the Joseph R. Smiley Distinguished Professor of Psychology at the University of Illinois.

Of course he is.*

*I'm sure this joke has been beaten into the ground in the circles in which Diener runs, but those circles are neither these circles nor my circles.

Esteemed architecture critic Warren Ellis on the new US Embassy in London

I think perhaps this building says a little more than it was intended to. In fact, let’s admit it. IT’S A FORTRESS WITH A FUCKING MOAT. It doesn’t say "welcome to a little piece of America, one of the best ideas the world ever had and a country that welcomes the tired and poor and afraid." It says "if you even look at us funny we’ll pour boiling oil on you from the roof. Raise the drawbridge! Release the Mongolian Terror Trout!"

(via)

Congratulations! Friday Night Lights has leveled up.

I have no actual proof that Peter Berg, Brian Grazer and David Nevins—the production team responsible for the NBC drama Friday Night Lights—play role playing games, but having watched the first season of their show, I have a hard time believing that they don't. Solid narrative involves character development, that's a given; but rarely is that development so abrupt that it seems as if the characters have reached a new level. For example, when the paralyzed former quarterback, Jason Street, teaches the new quarterback, Matt Saracen, a fade pattern that Saracen insists he lacks the arm strength to throw, his first two attempts prove that he does, in fact, lack the arm strength to throw that outside fade. Then, as if throwing it two times earned him enough experience points to level up, Saracen hits his receiver's outside shoulder not once, not twice, but consistently, and for the remainder of the season.

I initially thought this phenomenon was limited to the acquisition of greater physical gifts, and chalked it up to the production team's desire to show improvement without having to regularly resort to montages; but as the season progressed, it became clear that this logic also applied to the character's emotional and intellectual development. For example, when the wildly irresponsible Tim Riggins first encounters the annoying son of the single mother who moved in next door, he treats the child like all wildly irresponsible teenagers treat annoying third-graders; then, on a day when he is spectacularly hungover, Riggins converses with the boy and temporarily fortifies his Intelligence attribute enough to provide him the mana required to cast an ensouling spell, which he does, resulting in a permanent +1 bump to his total magicka.

Has there ever been another series in which character development was this aggressively tiered? 

Great Moments in Misprision; or, Why I always thought Lost in Translation was an anti-racist film, not the other way around.

I'm having one of those moments in which I wonder whether I was watching the same movie everyone else was.  At Racialicious, Thea Lim discusses Complex Magazine's list of The 50 Most Racist Movies You Didn't Know Were Racist, and while the majority of the list disappoints (on account of me already knowing the overtly racist films listed were racist), some of the entries simply baffle me.  Foremost among them is Bulworth, Warren Beatty's film about the centrist penchant to use blacks as electoral pawns—Bulworth won't die in defense of his principles, but he will commit suicide for a lobbyist payday, at least until he realizes that black people are really people, at which point American political logic demands he be assassinated—but not far behind is Sopphia Coppola's Lost in Translation, which Lim glosses thus:

[T]he whole point of the movie disgusts me. As in, the nauseatingly self-indulgent focus on the deep, brooding subjectivity of two Anglo-Americans, against a backdrop of depthless Japanese people who, with their hilariously absurd subcultures, bizarre language and affinity for bowing, are all exactly the same.

Lim then quotes a section about self-involved white cluelessness from Restructure!:

[W]hat disgusts me about Lost in Translation is that it centers on the lives of white people in a country where they are the minority, and it suggests that the social isolation that comes from being a minority is something that could only happen to white people.

I'm not sure why either writer assumes that the experience Coppola describes in the film is something that can only happen to white people, because to me, the film seems to do the exact opposite: it demonstrates that white Americans are emotionally and intellectually unprepared to understand the non-majoritarian social experience.  So maybe it does describe an experience that can only happen to white people—but only because white people are alone in being unable to recognize their privilege for what it is.  Neither Bill Murray's "Bob" nor Scarlett Johansson's "Charlotte" have given a moment's thought to the plight of non-whites in American society, so the events of the film represent their first encounter with any form of double-consciousness—even one in which their whiteness still affords them privileged social stature.

The film begins with caricature and absurdity because these characters are incapable of understanding Japanese society, or their roles as others in that society understand them to be; e.g. Bob is baffled by the arrival of an escort because he is unfamiliar with the sexism endemic in traditional Japanese business culture.  Charlotte knows one of her roles—that of the tourist in exotic Japan—and indulges in some Orientalist fare, visiting a temple to watch some monks chant.  Their relationship, such as it is, is only possible in an environment in which their previously stable and unquestioned identities have dissolved in the face of their own otherness.  I took this to be a criticism of American insularity and arrogance, not an assertion of its eternal provenance.

To an American audience, it may seem as if the Japanese in the film are the foreigners; but from the Japanese perspective, the film registers as a story of two unmoored Americans bumbling through a culture they can't understand on its own terms.  Unlike most films in which the white interlopers have adventures with the natives, Lost in Translation never demands its audience believe that white culture is inherently superior.  Bob and Charlotte are not bequeathed the preternatural ingenuity or Rooseveltian ruggedness so common among American characters abroad; they are, in fact, technologically illiterate representatives of an ostensibly superior culture who, in a reversal of the minstral trope, sing the songs of their ancestral homeland, England, from whence Brian Ferry and Roxy Music came.

All of which is only to say, I never realize how contrarian my reading of the film was until I read the Racialicious and Restructured! posts, because I had always thought Lost in Translation a remarkable feat: for white audiences, it only works as a film if they force themselves to imagine a subject position in which they are foreign but not superior—a situation in which white characters are not there to civilize noble savages or ravage native cultures with tongues, guns, or both.  These are privileged white people who are, to quote "More Than This," "hopefully learning" that their identities are contingent upon a social structure and that that social structure is different, but not superior, to the one in which they currently find themselves.  For non-white audiences, I can understand why this revelation would feel underwhelming; after all, Bob and Charlotte are learning late in life what they've known, exquisitely, for the entirety of theirs.

The Japanese in the film are depthless, but only in the first act—as the Americans learn more about Japanese culture, these characters become slightly less inscrutible.  Were this the sort of film in which the white anthropologists almost instantly acquire intimate knowledge of the primitive culture in which they're immersed, the film would have closed with scenes of Bob and Charlotte conversing with three-dimensional characters in fluent Japanese; but because the pair's otherness and ignorance is so great, it ends with Japanese characters who are only marginally rounder than they were when it began.  Put differently: if we were to impose this narrative onto, say, The Last Samuri, Tom Cruise would have arrived in Japan, been thoroughly confused by what he found, then fled the country feeling alienated and unconvinced of his cultural superiority.

Which, I think, would have been a good thing.  In all seriousness, how many movies subvert white America's innate sense of superiority on the sly?

You folks are the greatest, you know?

The comments on this post are too rich to digest quickly.  More from me on this front soon.

We is a serious news organization what demands you retract tweets now.

The following sentence actually appears in a post on the site of a darling of conservative media:

We have identified yet another tweet we would like [Roger Ebert] to retract[.]

The "yet another" is delicious, as it indicates that Andrew Breitbart has initiated a campaign to compel people to retract their tweets. The vicious slur of a tweet in question reads:

A technical question about cameras, film, and 30 Rock.

After a trying week of marking papers, teaching, and generally being run ragged, I spent far too much time last weekend watching 30 Rock.  As to the content of the show, all I can say is that I find it remarkable that a program dedicated to the inside baseball of running a network variety show is even intelligible, much less popular.  Then I remember The Muppet Show exists or watch episodes of Saturday Night (not yet Live) from the year I was born, realize how old the trope is and find it remarkable that 30 Rock managed to enliven it.  If pressed, I'd argue that its success has something to do with the meaningful inclusion of the network brass, which is in marked contrast from Lorne Michaels playing himself on SNL, but tonight I'm more interested in why the cast seems to have such huge heads:

In this frame, the camera and lighting conspired to make Tracy Morgan's character, Tracy Jordan, look like something the first 10,000 fans under the age of 13 receive when they come through the gate.  How did this happen?  I don't know for sure, but thanks to an article [.pdf] in the Spring 2009 issue of Exposure magazine, I think I can make an under-educated guess. 

In it, chief cinematographer Matthew Clark says he employs wide-angle cameras to create a shallow depth of field in order to "lend a sense of immediacy to what's going on," which is all well and good, except that wide-angle cameras do the opposite.  He also notes that because the sets are so small, they are warmly and dimly lit, so in order to create any contrast, he has to shoot with a wider iris to allow in more light, and doing so diminishes the depth of field. 

It would seem that balance is struck: wide-angle creates a greater depth of field, the low-lighting and wider iris shallow it out.  The only problem, as evidenced by the frame above, is that the balance is frequently out of whack, and because wide-angle lenses exaggerate the distance between objects, whenever a character leans forward, their heads appear much bigger than the bodies they're attached to.

I think. 

I welcome those of you who know more about cameras, lenses, lighting and film stock to correct me.

The sort of cultural criticism you notch all the way to the top.

(Can you guess where this was originally posted?)

We here at Lawyers, Guns and Money are solidly in the Roman Polanski belongs in prison camp, but we are also rank pedants, and the following sentence is something up with which we shall not put:

When Franz Kafka wrote “The Metamorphosis” he may have had someone like Roman Polanski in mind.

Because Jeffrey Jena is a very serious thinker who "has been seen on Murder, She Wrote, Hunter, appeared in shows with Jenny McCarthy and Weird Al Yankovic and in several films including Raising the Dead with Allison Eastwood," we must consider the implications of this literary reference very seriously, as there is no chance he inserted it solely to make people think he reads important books.

Jena's complaint is that, much like Gregor Samsa in Kafka's novel, Roman Polanski rapes children—only Samsa did nothing of the sort. Let us try again: Jena's complaint is that, much like Gregor Samsa in Kafka's novel, Roman Polanski awoke one morning to find himself transformed into einem ungeheueren Ungeziefer, a monstrous vermin—only that would absolve Polanski of moral responsibility for his crimes, as he had no hand in his transformation and, more importantly, no one expects monstrous vermin to abide by human law. Jena's complaint must be that, like Gregor Samsa, Roman Polanski is not being treated by the Swiss courts in the manner their American counterparts treated John Wayne Gacy, who murdered thirty-three people—only that makes no sense at all. We are officially stumped. We have no clue what Jena hoped to accomplish by dropping that reference. Unless:

[Pierce] Brosnan went on to say that in order to work with Mr. Polanski, “You have to know your onions.” I am not really sure what that means but it tells us two things about Mr. Brosnan, he’s not great with metaphors and he may be a little dense. Brosnan is the poster boy for the term “limousine liberal.” He claims to have become an American citizen during what he terms “the atrocity of the Bush years” to help his family “endure the hypocrisy and stupidity of the man’s power.” His power is stupid? His power is filled with hypocrisy? How do you figure that?

Of course! Jena was priming the Pump of Irony. Had he not dropped in a completely random, utterly irrelevant reference in that first sentence, readers may have breezed over his criticism of Brosnan without realizing how ironic it is when someone with Jena's linguistic facility criticizes someone else for mouthing an infelicitous metaphor. We're not sure whether we should thank him or file this away with all the other examples of cultural conservatives whose knowledge of the culture they aim to conserve is as wide and deep as a playa lake.

Rhetoric amounts to more than what you advocate.

The title should go without saying, but even among intelligent conservatives, sometimes it doesn't:

The fact that a homicidal maniac shares your goals doesn't make you responsible for his methods.

I never claimed otherwise.  In point of fact, I didn't say that the ideological brethren of homicidal maniacs are responsible for the actions of homicidal maniacs.  Quite the opposite.  I claimed that there exists "a non-incidental relation of particular ideologies with acts of violence," a fact no one who's ever opposed Islamic fundamentalism can deny.  I further claimed that:

conservatives do inspire those on their fringes to engage in politically motivated violence. The politics of the George Tiller murder are an indictment against conservative rhetoric because that rhetoric made Tiller a target[.]

So as to this:

Is it fair to say that I "inspired" Scott Roeder's actions if I have engaged in full-throated condemnation of partial-birth abortion (and I have)? If I accurately describe the horrific acts of violence involved in that monstrous process, does that rhetoric "make" an abortion doctor a "target"?

My question would be, "Have you, Patrick Frey, ever said anything like the following from mainstream conservative figure Rush Limbaugh?"

One of the things I strongly believe is that we are not going to, as individuals, erase evil from the world. That is God's task. But we can be soldiers in that process, and we can confront it when we see it. Now, is child abuse an evil? Of course it is. Child abuse is an evil, and we confront it, and we take children away from parents who are abusive all day, do we not? Well, if child abuse is evil, as Mr. Morrissey points out here, then infanticide is even more evil.

In this comment, Patrick notes that both of us can point to cases on the right and left in which fringe figures "advocate" violence, and I'll concede that.  But openly advocating violence isn't the issue here (if only because those who do so are immediately dismissed as the cowardly cranks they undoubtedly are).  The issue is the rhetoric of violence, and I don't think anyone will deny the violence inherent in Limbaugh's rhetoric there.

The phrase "soldiers in that process," in which that "process" is stopping "infanticide," is not neutral language.  Envisioning opposition in martial terms encourages the mentally unstable to think of themselves in grandiose terms, e.g. as God's soldiers.  Is Limbaugh encouraging people to murder abortion providers?  Not directly.  (Plausible deniability is the order of the day.) Is he encouraging those people invested in the cause of stopping infanticide to imagine that they’re "soldiers" in a "process" who should "confront [evil] when [they] see it"?  Of course he is.  How do I know that?

Because that's what he said.  He may not have meant it that way, but that's what he said.  Trace the logic of his comment:

God's task is to erase evil from the world. We can be soldiers in the process of erasing evil from the world. We should confront evil in the world when we see it. Because abusing children is evil, infanticide is more evil.

What conclusion might an unstable person draw from it?

Which graphic novels would you teach in a visual rhetoric course?

The plan for the visual rhetoric book I'm co-authoring is to have three or four substantial chapters focusing on 1) rhetoric generally, 2) the history of the medium, 3) the mechanics of comics, and 4) the rhetoric of comics, followed by ten chapters devoted to particular novels that instructors compel their students to purchase.  The problem, as you can probably guess, is deciding which ten books should we subject to sustained close-reading.  We're going to be leaning hard on McCloud's Understanding Comics throughout, but as for the ten other books, the list we've compiled so far includes:

• Alison Bechdel, Fun Home
• Kohta Hirano, Hellsing, Vol. 1
• David Mazzucchelli, Asterios Polyp
• Frank Miller, 300
• Hayao Miyazaki, Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind, Vol. 1
• Alan Moore, Watchmen
• Marjane Satrapi, Persepolis
• Gene Luen Yang, American Born Chinese

The idea is to provide a wide variety of central texts to teach—as well as a template for doing so—which is why we have American comics, European comics, and manga; autobiographical works and books decked in tights; novels with readily available film adaptations (300, Watchmen, Persepolis) or companions (Miyazaki's Nausicaä and his animated features like Howl's Moving Castle or Spirited Away); etc.  In short, our concern is not to represent the best-and-brightest the medium has to offer, but to offer a selection of novels that will be useful to the greatest number of potential teachers.

For example, this list lacks an overtly political book like Joe Sacco's Palestine; Gaiman is absent, as the narrative complexity of the Sandman trades would force him to be represented by a minor work like Black Orchid; Batman is nowhere to found, as we already have a Miller and a Moore, so The Killing Joke and The Dark Knight Returns are out, which means the Nolan films have no natural pair; etc.  

In an ideal world, what other works would you like to see us cover?

This is how we frame the narrative.

The Other Scott already noted Glenn Reynolds's tendentious link and Steven Taylor's pithy rebuttal of its underlying "logic," but I wanted to focus on the quotation from Reynolds's reader in the update, because it points to a fundamental disconnect between the rhetoric of the right and the left:

I'm guessing the "she's a socialist" part won't get talked about much in the MSM. But if she had been a conservative it'd lead every evening news cast for two months.

The crucial difference between this mass-shooting and other recent ones is that, for example, Nidal Hasan didn't consider himself a liberal, nor did he devote himself to liberal causes—he was, it seems, someone with pretensions to Islamic jihad. Scott Roeder, however, shot George Tiller in the service of a mainstream conservative cause. The difference, obviously, is not in the media's furtherance of a narrative, but in the non-incidental relation of particular ideologies with acts of violence.

Conservatives complain 1) when liberals ask that any brown person with a funny name not be labeled a jihadist until evidence of such is unearthed, and 2) when mainstream news outlets link the murder of prominent abortion doctors to conservative causes. They fail to see the lack of equivalence: liberals don't espouse jihad against the United States, but conservatives do inspire those on their fringes to engage in politically motivated violence. The politics of the George Tiller murder are an indictment against conservative rhetoric because that rhetoric made Tiller a target; whereas the personal politics of Amy Bishop are utterly irrelevant in the absence of a vocal and sustained opposition to the existence of the university and the tenure system among liberals.

That conservatives are working a false equivalence is made evident by Reynolds's pathological desire to find evidence that will allow him to turn this tragedy into mere political gamesmanship. Unlike his acolyte Althouse, whose affected contrarianism runs so vast and deep she'll write anything if she thinks one rube will do a double-take reading it, Reynolds plays politics to win. He wants to own the narrative, and because his platform trickles up into all the right places, he mostly has a legitimate claim to it. In this case, he hikes over to RateMyProfessor.com—a site that allows angry students to vent anonymously after they receive grades they deserve—and finds a comment in which an undergraduate calls her a "socialist" and before you know it, all the usual suspects are employing "socialist" as an anarthrous occupational nominal premodifier, e.g. "socialist Alabama professor," "socialist serial killer," etc. On the strength, then, of a single comment by an upset undergraduate, conservative hacks are folding socialism into what they imagine her profession to be—be it a professor or a serial killer—in an attempt to create the impression of equivalence between ideology and act where none actually exists.

At least not yet. (The day still being young and all.)

But I distinctly remember being told that on the internet, no one would know I'm a dog!

Another illusion shattered. I am, in fact, "an ugly little twerp, and [Donald Douglas doesn't] mean that figuratively."  He means that literally: the average height of American males is 5'10", so people who are 6'1" like me are literally little.  We are literally dwarfed by all those people three inches shorter than us.  As to the rest, Douglas declares his intention to "eschew substantive comments on [the argument I] posted" in favor of unadulterated ad hominem:

"He doesn't share the epistemology of the father!"

Take my word for it: you do not want to watch this exchange between Ron Reagan and Pamela Geller. In it, Geller argues that she knows what Reagan Sr. would have thought about Sarah Palin because she agrees with his politics whereas Reagan Jr. does not. Because she agrees with Reagan Sr., she knows him better than his son:

Geller: I don't think you can speak for your father, because you—you don't even espouse—

Reagan: Pam, did you ever meet my father?

She didn't have to. As per the title of this post, her claim is an epistemological one: knowledge acquired via telepathy with dead political allies is superior to knowledge acquired by actually knowing someone. When she declares that Reagan Jr. "doesn't share the epistemology of the father," she's making a strong philosophical claim: because Reagan Jr. believes that knowledge acquired by actually knowing someone is superior to posthumous telepathic communication, Reagan Sr. did not. How does she know this? Her telepathy affords her access to documents unavailable to philosophical rubes:

Geller: Did you ever meet the Founding Father? I've read everything he said.

She has read the Complete Works of the Founding Father and you didn't even know they existed. Or that he did for that matter. But he did, they do, and she read them all despite never having met him, meaning she knows the Founding Father very well. Because she chose to read the Complete Works instead of communing with the Founding Father telepathically, she must believe that knowledge acquired by reading what someone has written is superior to posthumous telepathic communication. This points to a potential problem for her epistemological position: were Reagan Jr. to read a book written by Reagan Sr., Geller would be forced to claim that knowledge acquired by reading that is supplemented by actually knowing the author is superior to posthumous telepathic communication; but that cannot be true, as she earlier held that knowledge acquire by actually knowing someone was inferior to posthumous telepathic communication.

She further complicates matters by asserting that actually knowing someone is a valid means of acquiring knowledge about them so long as that person also agrees with the person he or she knew. Her philosophy must therefore be one that only superficially embraces paradox—or the word "epistemology" is not one Geller actually knows, and she said it because she thought it would make her smart.

She failed.

Then she doubled down:

Geller: You never met [Reagan Sr.] either. You know, you never met him either.

Wishing someone was not who they are so they can't know what they know doesn't make for a sound epistemological foundation. It doesn't even make any sense. In all seriousness, she actually is claiming that people who agree with a person are better able to speculate about that person's beliefs than people who merely knew him or her. That, obviously, is nonsense: I'm on the opposite end of the political spectrum from my father, but if you wanted to know what he would think about a given topic, you'd be much off asking me than Pamela Geller.

Just because he hates feminism and festoons his virtual office with photographs of naked women doesn't mean he makes female students uncomfortable.

On Monday at 3:09 p.m., Donald Douglas belittled Roy Edroso's feminist credentials for publishing at the Village Voice alongside a link to a bikini burlesque slide-show that a web-editor had slapped on half the site. Edroso is a hypocrite, you see, because he claims to be a feminist and someone else created an active element that appears on his page.

On Tuesday at 12:41 p.m., Donald Douglas wrote a post about the new Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue in which he complains that "Photobucket deletes any bikini images I've ever saved from SI, and it took practically no time for their prowling image-hawks to delete the brand new cover shot of Brooklyn Decker." Because Douglas never claimed to be a feminist, his saving bikini photographs to Photobucket for future use and prominently featuring an image of a topless woman on his blog is not hypocritical.

It is, however, extraordinarily odious and, in all seriousness, absolutely unprofessional. Many have been fired for less.

Imagine, for a moment, that you are a female in one of his classes who is having trouble with her assignment. He tells you to come talk to him during office hours, and when you do there are posters of women in various states of undress covering his walls. How comfortable would you feel? Would you consider his office a safe place, or would you be worried about where his eyes wandered when they broke contact with yours?

I only ask because a blog functions somewhat like a virtual office: it is a private space that the public, including students, can access. It functions as an extension of your professional persona. I could understand if it transpired—as it often did when I taught literary journalism and had issues of Rolling Stone, GQ, and the like in my office—that a magazine on your desk contains provocative advertisements that are visible when you read the articles on the pages opposite them. This incidental appearance of contemporary marketing tactic would be the equivalent of Edroso's post at the Village Voice.

I cannot, however, understand the rationale behind plastering the walls with images of objectified women approximately the same age as the students you teach. This deliberate decision to decorate with photographs that stimulate him would be the equivalent of the seventeen posts Douglas has devoted to what he himself calls "fawning" this year alone.

"If you don't like my fawning," he writes in that post, "don't read the blog."

Which is fine for readers of his blog—but what if you were a financially strapped female student in his course at Long Beach City College? What if you were searching for course materials and stumbled upon American Power—a blog written by the very person you needed to impress—and clicked through only to find countless images of objectified women and your professor complaining that the copyright holder of others prevents him from saving and displaying more? How comfortable would you feel sitting their in during office hours?

Would the intensity in his eyes indicate an earnest and abiding commitment to teaching, or merely how far he had undressed you with them?

Update. In his defense, Douglas offers a link to a post in which he claims:

This is a private blogging matter. American Power is hosted on Blogger. None of my college identification pages link to my blog. I recommend my blog for students to read, on a voluntary, non-assignment basis. Occasionally I'll pull up an academic post in class as a lecture launcher -- and actually, THAT'S A GOOD TEACHING THING!

Translation: "This blog is a private, unaffiliated entity that I recommend students read and display in class."  The mind boggles.

Inelegant integration and my discontents.

Tomorrow morning, I will again try to teach my students how to integrate quotations into their prose.  Since the last lesson failed to stick, I think I'll use one this time instead of that damnably ineffective carrot.  The passages they will be trying to integrate will, therefore, not be randomly selected from books and articles relevant to their research, but passages from my dissertation which, should they mangle, will lead to their mangling.  (Or so I'll say.  I only hope they haven't taken my oft-repeated mockery of the thing too much to heart.)  For example, I will present them with a sentence from page 94 of the dissertation, followed by four possible ways of citing it:

Paris Hilton : Bruce Wayne :: Roosevelt : The Bat-Man

Timothy Burke's post on how characters who originated during a particular cultural moment in the first half of the Twentieth Century are incapable of escaping it is compelling:

Batman (and most other comic-book and pulp characters from the time of his original appearance) draws a lot of his basic storytelling and setting from a moment when middle-class and working-class Americans were enmeshed in a complex national encounter with crime, law enforcement, corruption and Prohibition: a helpless frustration that the state couldn’t control organized violence and illegal commerce combined with a thrill at the lurid spectacle of gangster criminality and in more than a few cases, direct participation in an illicit economy of leisure that exposed the ludicrousness of middle-class respectability. One of the commenters on the Varney article very incisively observes that the result is that the Batman character is forever trapped fighting “Italian-American gangsters in pinstripe suits and crazy circus folk.”

However, drawing on expertise I can't legitimately claim, I think it's wrong. "The Bat-Man" (as he was then called) first appeared in Detective Comics 27, published in May of 1939, six years after Prohibition had been repealed, but two years before military mobilization would help the American economy recover the losses of the Recession of 1937.  The economic situation was bleak, but the violence associated with Prohibition had so abated that even Dick Tracy was being re-purposed to fight threats abroad.  The pulp aesthetic still appealed to the popular imagination, but its villains had become more myth than menace, which is why I would argue the appeal of Bruce Wayne in 1939 had more to do with the "helpless frustration" created by the depressed economic climate.  Wayne is, after all, introduced to the reader as that most pointless and contemptible of people:

He may be the dullest socialite ever, hanging out with Commissioner Gordon deep into the night, but he still represents the only upper-class figure commonly reviled by anyone with any political affiliation: the idle rich. Even the feigned ennui in these panels is designed to play upon a deep annoyance with people who have no cares and care about nothing:

Did the Bat-Man become a popular character because the largely middle-class children who read comics wanted to see a wealthy man beat up, down, and upon common criminals?  Not really.  I don't think we can underestimate the potential appeal of believing that the Paris Hiltons of the Great Depression secretly deserved the air they breathed.  Roosevelt's popularity was due, in part, to the image of him as a patrician who cared.  He could have weathered the Depression on the strength of his family's fortune, but he believed in social responsibility (or so the story went).  The socialite-as-secret-hero narrative almost reads like a deliberate attempt to cure a literary-naturalist hangover: the robber barons and their idle children had been savaged for the better part of three decades, but with the Roosevelt's rise to national prominence, a new mode for what had become an archetypal villain became possible. 

But something would have to motivate this rehabilitation, and in this case, that something was the scion of one set of villains being victimized by the figure of another: for these models to pass into history, they would have to be dispatched.  So while Bruce Wayne's parents were shot by a gangster, we first learn of that in a brief flashback in Detective Comics 33, an issue in which the majority of the story concerns the Bat-Man destroying a laser-armed "Dirigible of Doom" that killed thousands of New Yorkers (i.e. one stock villain guns down another in order to cultivate narrative space for weaponized blimps).  Five issues later, the Bat-Man acquires a Boy Wonder and begins his long descent into Adam West. The dark, brooding figure from the early issues would not return until Dennis O'Neil and Neal Adams took over Detective Comics in January of 1970, so it seems strange to ascribe, as Timothy does, the 30 years of popularity enjoyed by the character's camp incarnation to "the lurid spectacle of gangster criminality."

In fact, the deaths of Thomas and Martha Wayne are, for long stretches, the only lurid spectacles associated with the character; but they are, I would argue, the enduring source of his appeal.  Every time the franchise enters the doldrums, Thomas and Martha are dug up and shot down again, because their deaths are the Greek tragedy responsible for the character's malleability.  Although we speak of the character in the singular, as Warren Ellis demonstrated via Planetary in 2000, doing so makes little sense.  The only thing all these characters have in common is a pair of dead parents; other than that, each iteration is retrofitted to suit the particular needs of a particular historical context.

All of which is only to say that while the criminals he fights may still look like gangsters, they only do so superficially.  As to Timothy's larger point:

So where is our contemporary Batman or Shadow or Doc Savage or Dick Tracy to counter Dennis Kozlowski, Kenneth Lay, or Joseph Cassano, our 21st Century Prunefaces and Jokers, a character born not from the trauma of a street crime mugging but of a family or town destroyed by unaccountable individuals and institutions? It’s time for a new cycle of mythmaking even as we continue to enjoy the recycling of old ones.

I think someone really needs to start watching Leverage.