Friday, 10 August 2007

Acephalous: The Facebook

For no particular reason, I started an Acephalous group in Facebook.  I aim to net all the big theorists by next week.  Imagine the fun you'll have plastering Stanley Fish's wall with questions he already has the answers to.

If you comment here under a pseudonym, have no fears about joining: I'll privatize the group as soon as Facebook recognizes my authority over it.  (Which should be within the next hour.)

Aug 10, 2007 9:42:49 PM

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BREAKING NEWS: South Carolina GOP Shakes Up Race Candidates' strategies shift as states scramble to have the first vote and the last word in presidential nominations. WASHINGTON — Campaigning for the 2008 presidential election started earlier than any year on record. And now it looks like voting could actually have already begun, as states continue to maneuver to be the earliest to hold nominating contests. An election calender that had finally appeared settled was jolted Thursday when South Carolina Republican Chairman Katon Dawson announced that he would move up the Republican primary from early September to tomorrow afternoon. Dawson's announcement triggered a provision in New Hampshire state law dictating that its primary must come at least seven days before any other. This means New Hampshire will now have to move its primary to no later than last Wednesday. Mark McKinnon, an advisor to GOP presidential contender Sen. John McCain of Arizona, expressed concern about forcing voters to trudge to the polls in the past. "It may be recent," McKinnon said, "but the past is still the past." "You don't even have a very good sense of what the issues were when you pick the nominee last week," he continued. "The news cycle spins so fast the average American can hardly remember what was important yesterday, much less last Wednesday." Kevin Drum, of the liberal blog Political Animal, believes this decision may spell the end of the line for Barack Obama. "Last Wednesday was when Obama delivered that disastrous foreign policy speech about invading Pakistan," he said. "People may not remember it now, but everyone was talking about it last week." The Chairman of the New Hampshire Democratic Party, Ray Buckley, agreed with Drum's assessment during a press conference announcing the winner of last Wednesday's Democratic primary, Dennis Kucinich. "My chief of staff told me to go to this high school to give a speech," Kucinich said, "but when I got there, the auditorium was empty." Ten minutes into his speech, Kucinich spotted an old voting booth in the corner. "So I did what I always do," he said. "I scribbled my name on the ballot and slipped it in the slot. As luck would have it, mine was the only write-in vote." Republican officials in New Hampshire have called a press conference for earlier this afternoon. Although there has been no official announcement on who won the Republican contest, both Sam Brownback and Ron Paul canceled scheduled events and are rumored to be arriving in Concord yesterday.
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Necessarily Dull: Herbert Spencer and the Invention of Modern Life Last December, I met a couple of people from the Cato Institute and had a conversation with them about Herbert Spencer. Earlier this week, one of those people, Julian Sanchez, mentioned the publication of Mark Francis' Herbert Spencer and the Invention of Modern Life: A new book about Herbert Spencer apparently argues against the conventional wisdom that he preached "social Darwinism." I think that's right, and the association has lasted as long as it has just because it was useful to have an identifiable foil. The linked review convinced me to buy the book. The impressions Francis wants to correct about Spencer run parallel to the impressions I want to correct about the American literary and popular culture Spencer influenced. The fear of being trumped aside, I want to see whether my reading of Spencer jibes with that of someone who's done what no one's even attempted in over a hundred years: seriously studied the entirety of Spencer's massive oeuvre. I've many thoughts on the matter, some of which will go to my making good on a promise I made to the other person I met last December, Will Wilkinson. I warn you: these posts may be boring. Francis writes in his introduction: [Herbert Spencer and the Invention of Modern Life] is a hybrid between biography and textual analysis, which must achieve a precarious balance between chronicling an often-uneventful personal life and offering a substantial account of ideas that frequently seem to have no current interest. Any intellectual biography would face similar problems, but there is an extra difficulty here because Spencer's life appears especially empty. Francis then reproduces the faux-obituary Spencer's friend and former lover, the soon-to-be popular novelist George Eliot, wrote when he was thirty-four and a soon-to-be popular philosopher: Spencer, Herbert, an original and profound philosophical writer, especially known by his great work XXX which gave a new impulse to psychology and has mainly contributed to the present advanced position of that science, compared with that which it had attained in the middle of the last century. The life of the philosopher, like that of the great Kant, offers little material for the narrator. Born in the year 1820 &c.

Scott Eric Kaufman

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