Acephalous

Blog it like it's 2006!

Adam Kotsko writes like ain't nobody's in a business:

Yet it occurs to me: is anything inherently a business? We normally think of a bakery as a business, for example, but isn’t it actually a place where people bake things? One can imagine a bakery operating under many different economic systems. The examples multiply. A clothing retailer is a place where people come to get their clothes. A convenience store exists to provide people with easy access to frequently used items. A car factory exists to make cars. Even a bank exists primarily to intermediate between people’s different financial priorities (e.g., saving vs. spending), rather than to make money as such. All of those things are typically “run like a business” in Western countries, but that doesn’t mean that they directly “are” businesses.

Only one type of pursuit is inherently a business: hedge funds. Hedge funds avowedly exist for no other purpose than to turn money into more money. They are indifferent to the means by which that is accomplished — they will buy and sell anything, from an oil drum to a government bond to a complex bet to pay out if a certain asset reaches a certain price. For all the advanced math and physics deployed, the basic logic is simple. Buy low, sell high — minimize your costs while maximizing your revenue. That’s what it means to run something “like a business.”

John Holbo appreciates the overkill:

Defenders of ‘traditional marriage’ insist 1) that their position is, well … traditional; wisdom of the Judeo-Christian tradition, the history of Western Civilization, etc. etc.; 2) they are not bigots. They are tolerant of homosexuality, and the rights of homosexuals, etc. etc. Maybe they watch the occasional episode of “Will and Grace”, in syndication (even if they didn’t watch it back when it started.) They are careful to distance themselves from those Westboro Baptist Church lunatics, for example.

It’s gotten to the point where one of the main, mainstream arguments against same-sex marriage is that legalizing it would amount to implying that those opposing it are bigots. Since they are not just bigots (see above), anything that would make them seem like bigots must be wrong. Ergo, approving same-sex marriage would be a mistake. Certainly striking down opposition to it as ‘lacking a rational basis’ would be a gross moral insult to non-bigoted opponents of same-same marriage.

This ‘anything that implies we are bigots must be wrong’ argument has problems. But that’s old news. Here’s the new argument. Grant, for argument’s sake, that contemporary arguments against same-sex marriage have been scrubbed free of bigotry. Doesn’t it follow that these arguments must not be traditional but, somehow, quite new?

Some days I'm reminded of why I started blogging by the very people who encouraged me to do so. This is one of those days.

Is it even possible to have this conversation ...

... without proving Kathleen wrong?

Bloggers who have been at it for a while have noted a recent decline in commenting, and while that decline may have begun with the popularity of RSS feeds (which abstract the content of blog posts from their web presences, encouraging reading without interaction), it has accelerated with the privatization of discussion on platforms like Facebook. When a friend shares a link there, it’s only natural to discuss the link with that friend, in that environment, rather than discussing the text with the author, on the author’s site.

I'd start it, but I'm not a commenter, strictly speaking, so I don't know. (Or am I one? I try to "tend the garden" beneath my own posts, but I don't comment on other sites all that often anymore.) One thing I will note is that both Kathleen's post and the one to which she links have a slightly melancholic tone, and it's understandable why: once upon a time bloggers measured their worth by their ability to generate comments. (And mostly still do.) This worth doesn't accrue when accomplished cheaply -- as through deliberate provocation or daft contrarianism -- but when a blogger invests five or six thoughtful hours in a post, seeing comments snaking below it makes the investment feel worthwhile.

This isn't the case so much anymore, though, because the conversation's have disappeared: if you link to something I write on Facebook, the uptick in traffic alerts me to the fact that I've written something that's being read, but I can't participate in the conversation, which not only strikes me as a strange -- inasmuch as I'm being excluded from conversations I've started -- but also creates an occasionally inhibiting paranoia. I know people are talking about something I've written, but I'm structurally excluded from that conversation. I like to imagine that if I wanted to join it, I'd be welcomed, but only because it's a comforting thesis that I can't disprove.

But this post is about commenters and I'm a blogger, so I'll stop yammering and concede the floor to you.

Happy Birthday, Acephalous.

Sure, I forgot to celebrate your seventh birthday, but baby, I still love you. We've been through a lot, and things have changed, I admit, but don't worry, baby, I've got this covered. It's just you and me, babe. You ... and the very, very creepy version of me who's writing this post. 

The Donalde rings in the new year...

...by encouraging people to commit crimes:

Keep those cards and letters (and fake Craigslist listings) flowing!

He claims that the fact that I taught a college freshmen who is currently projecting his or her issues onto me reflects my abilities as a teacher, and then includes my name in the title of his post in a deliberate attempt to undo the good deed I attempted to do -- which was to make it possible for people who were contacted by the person committing identity fraud to discover the fact that I wasn't the one who contacted them before, as happened earlier this week, that person takes a day off work in order to meet "me" so "I" could inspect the truck "I" expressed interest in buying. 

The Donalde, it follows, hates working class people who are trying to sell their trucks to make ends meet.  He sincerely hopes men whose trucks I have no interest in buying continue to risk their jobs by taking days off to meet me.  For the sake of all working class people, I sincerely hope his plan fails and that people find my post before they risk losing their jobs.

Keep those cards and letters (and fake Craigslist listings) flowing!

Important Facts about Scott Eric Kaufman

(If you ventured here from that odious place, you may want to read this before you leave a comment I'll delete.)

Because I have someone—likely a former student using a pseudonym or a random troll—by the name of "Eric Oden" signing me for mailing lists (Military.com and American Intercontinental University Online in the past hour) and creating an alternative email address that looks like mine and then doing generally untoward things (like making false promises to people on Craigslist).   To that end, I thought I'd at least put this information out there for anyone who searches for my name:

My email address is scotterickaufman (@) gmail (.) com.  If someone claiming to be me contacts you from any other address—no matter how similar it is to that one—it is not me and you can either ignore it or forward it to my actual email address so I can keep it for my records.

This link takes you to my Facebook account.  (Feel free to friend me if you so desire.)  Should someone claiming to be me contact you from any other account—no matter how similar it is to that one—it is not me and you can either ignore it or forward it to my actual email address so I can keep it for my records.

This link takes you to the Twitter account I only ever use to alert readers to new blog posts.  Should someone claiming to be me contact you from any other account—no matter how similar it is to that one—it is not me and you can either ignore it or forward it to my actual email address so I can keep it for my records.

Sorry to write such a boring post, but because I just received an irate email about never showing up in Pomona to inspect a truck that "I" had expressed a strong interest in purchasing, I'm thinking prudence is my best option here.

The Bestselling Items of 2010

According to the end-of-the-year statistics the Amazon Affiliates Program just emailed me:

1. Everything You People Only Purchased One of (2,107)
2. Asterios Polyp (79)
3. War is Boring (48)
4. Spike Lee Joint Collection (21)
5. Amy Brown Fairy Divas Figurine (11)
6. A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History (7)
7. Born Free 9-Ounce Wide Neck Born Free Bottles Twin Pack (5)
8. Hearth and Garden Patio Chaise Lounge Cover (3)
9. Vector 5-LED Alkaline Powered Flashlight (2) 
10. Xbox 360 250 GB Console with Kinect (one at $399.99, another at $584.39)

I'm sure there's a moral here, just not what it is.

How not to help your cause

Turns out one of Goldstein's brood took exception to my previous post and attempted to refute it by making a series of patently idiotic claims.  For example:

But Scott could at least have had the sense to not admit profound ignorance on what Beck ever says. I’m not surprised, though, because I know that for Serious People like SEK, admitting that he pays attention to the likes of Glenn Beck would collapse any credibility he may have among those whose good graces he desires to be in.

Your eyes don't deceive you: the argument is, in fact, that criticizing Glenn Beck would "collapse any credibility [I] may have among those whose good graces [I] desire to be in."  Because we all know left-leaning academics who criticize far-right lunatics are shunned by their colleagues.  Further depressing my credibility is my intellectual honesty, which here takes the form of my admission, up front, that I'm not a regular viewer of the show.  Note, though, that the claim is that I admitted a "profound ignorance on what Beck ever says," which is strange because I did no such thing.  I wrote:

I try not to pay attention to Glenn Beck, but even when I have, I never really paid attention to him.

That's "passing familiarity," not "profound ignorance," and the difference between the two should be obvious, and is, unless your refutation of my post continues thus:

You see, all of the topics that Glenn addresses–the dots that Scott attempts to connect–are topics that Glenn has has talked about at length in the past, so when he mentions this or that, he’s harking back to discussions he’s already had, discussions that most of the people watching have already heard.

Translation: "All the dots Scott connected have been connected in the past, and this refutes his argument somehow."  How exactly?  Like so:

Dead Speak

More and more often these todays blogs that were once one thing are now another.  They are concept vehicles for speaking from the beyond death of a blog.  The new blind spot, the methods and the materials of its posts, contain the magnetic allure of a beloved URL but the soul of avoiding triggering spam filters for SOA by emphasizing things which resemble luxury sentences.

A unique feature of these zombie blogs is that they are designed to stand out further thanks to mentioning items like Monaco Red Leather accents and a starting MSRP of convertible, so they will not kill your bank account.  That they will not kill your bank account is obvious because blogs with such a convenient starting MSRP is a nonsense that nonetheless is factored in by discriminating consumers of SOA.

Performance: these posts will continue to offer since the 2005 when I opened a rear suspending internet blog with a graceful level of quality.  Should you ever read actual posts that perform at the high level of quality that this one does know that would not be indifferent or apathetic unless I no longer had any use for a car, which to me is more than a mode of transportion.

[Note: I'm not going to link to any of these Google Reader zombies for the obvious reason that that's what they want me to do.]

Fare thee well, Dr. B...

This saddens me, because back in the day, when I was a nobody, she helped make me an extremely minor somebody. (She also got me into the best parties. Was the Internet just that much different then, or is it just me?)  So, best of luck to Dr. B. and her fellow travelers, all of whom will be missed.*

*Except for the ones who post elsewhere, as they’ll just be missed by virtue of not all being in the same place.

Please make with your congratulations, already.

I failed to notice that I wrote my 2,000th post a week back ... which means that since February of 2005 I have sat down and composed something I thought unawful enough to share with the world at least 2,000 times.  Talk about quantifying a life ...

Learn from Fone Bone's mistake and...

...and never underestimate the stupidity of stupid, stupid rat creatures:

Trolls are no smarter.  I've scrubbed all the comments this "Master of Proxies" left while I was in Kings Canyon National Park living the kind of life someone like him can only envy, but if he leaves any more, don't bother to respond.  They too will be scrubbed tomorrow as soon as I'm awake enough to "Censor" his "First Amendment Right" to deface my property. 

We interrupt this blog for an important announcement about spam...

...namely, that the uptick in it recently is not my fault.  It's the Internets.  In another shining example of the inability of blog-aggregator algorithms to parse original content—the champion in this regard still being the utterly useless thing that is Technorati—this somehow happened:

I can't believe I wrote all that last year.

Because I've been grading all damn day and am as tired as a Swearengen of hearing other about the finished semesters of pretty much every other academic blogger, I thought that it might be best to avoid jealously lashing out and scribble a "Best of Acephalous 2009" post.  However, when I started looking through my archives, it occurred to me that my output this year defines me much more sharply than in years past.  What do I mean? 

The posts I consider foundational to my current professional identity all seem to have been composed in 2009.  Granted, the likelihood that I'm suffering from the identitarian equivalent of presentism is awfully high, but I honestly thought I'd written some of the posts from early 2009 in 2006 or so.  (It may also be that I remember the scene of their writing, which would have been in the old apartment, i.e. the place I barely remember ever having lived in anymore.)  If you have absolutely nothing better to do on a Friday night, feel free to scan through my 2009 archives and tell me what you think should be included in the "Best of" post. 

If you do have something better to do, though, by all means do it. 

This is excellent news!! For Palin!!

For whatever reason, Google Reader’s “Explore” option recently started lumping all political sites together irrespective of orientation, which means that even time I try to find new, interesting voices, I’m bombarded with new, interesting-for-the-wrong-reason-but-potential-blog-fodder voices. For example:

We believe the TV show [Sarah Palin]’s producing with Mark Burnett on the wonders of Alaska will be Reaganesque in its reach of regular people.

For something written by “such good writers,” that sentence is uglier than it is stupid. The majority of Americans won’t appreciate a show about “the wonders of Alaska” for the simple reason that Americans only watch things about Alaska when its bears eat tourists. Don’t believe me? Consider Christopher Nolan’s career:

Batman Begins: $205,343,774
Insomnia: $67,263,182
The Dark Knight: $533,316,061

When his films take place in Alaska, their domestic gross drops, on average, very large numbers because Americans don’t believe that states whose moose-caribou population density (1.11/sq. mi.) outstrips its population density (1.03/sq. mi.) count as America. The idea that a successful Palin campaign could be initiated by a show about 700,000 moose and caribou picked to live in a state and have their lives taped to find out what happens when they stop being polite and start getting real—there’s wishful thinking, then there’s whatever that is. This too:

If [the show is] informative, well-produced, and showcases Palin’s Alaska, we believe it will become a cultural phenomenon. We foresee Alaskan imagery everywhere in 2011. Which is a wonderful setup for the Palin brand in 2012. Late 2010-early 2011 is also when Palin’s next book is due: a policy book on American Virtues. That will be coupled with a book tour that should end round about February 6th, 2011, the day we believe Palin will announce her presidential run. Essentially, the tour bus she uses for the book [American Virtues] will just be slightly rebranding as PALIN 2012, instead of American Virtues. Chances are, “American Virtues” will actually be her campaign motto. We can see the branding and marketing already at work.

These people should not be mocked for claiming 1) that Palin will write a book by her lonesome, 2) that it will be policy-oriented, or 3) that people can write policy books about virtues: they should be pitied for the wistful tones in which they imagine the subtle repurposing of a tour bus in terms of branding, because people who daydream in ad lingo about campaign slogans are the saddest people in the world. Then there’s the fact that, on principle, dreamers this dumb deserve pity:

Palin’s playing 11th dimensional chess that RedState’s not seeing, because it’s so focused on Romney, or dazzled by his Mattel-produced hair. She’s operating a fully-formed multimedia strategy designed to counter Dr. Utopia’s razzle dazzle and media darling status.

Follow that RedState link and you’ll find a discussion of a post at the Daily Caller that warms my heart:

[I]t is very important to point out that something like this may already be Palin’s plan (for the record, I have shared almost all of these thoughts with her via her personal e-mail but have received no response). So far, I have not seen one shred of legitimate evidence indicating that she has decided to run and some serious indications that she won’t.

Wait—Palin decide to ignore this asshole? Excellent. Anyone with any sense would distance herself from people like him, wait—did I just suggest that Sarah Palin is a person with sense? Maybe she is playing 11th dimensional chess.

"I would like to thank everyone without whose support I never could have become a little Asian woman."

Because when I catch a glimpse of myself in what you bought me, I look like Noodle.*

*This is one of those posts, in which I'm genuinely thanking you for coming here and clicking on things.  I don't blog for the swag, but when swag happens, I know who to thank.  (That would be you.)**

**Because I hate Reynoldsian product-drops in which he masks bragging about the awesomeness of his traffic with a "Heh" and a "Huh."  I don't deny that it's awesome to walk all the way the dumpsters or the complex gym without a service interruption, but I know that I owe my ability to experience that awesomeness to you, and I want to thank you for that.***

***This post is symptomatic of how uncomfortable I am with having an audience I can't count on my phalanges, i.e. larger than a classroom.  You folks frequently make my life far more interesting than it has any right to be, and I want to thank you for that.

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.

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.

Lurker Amnesty Week 2010

Just because I like to have a sense of who exactly I'm writing for, I'm declaring  what began this morning at 12:01 a.m. to be Lurker Amnesty Week 2010. 

If you're reading this and comment all the time, skip the rest of this post.

If you're reading this and have never commented, feel free to leave a comment. 

If you're reading this and have never commented and would rather not comment, feel free to send me an email at allmynamessquishedtogether at gmail dot com.  

If you're reading this and have never commented and would rather not comment and don't do email, then I'm not even sure how you're reading this, but feel free to contact me via whatever medium is valued by your people.

Because as someone who spends his working days stressing the importance of knowing (and knowing how to manipulate) (not that I would) the audience one addresses, my ignorance of you is more than a little disconcerting.  You need not use your real name or even your regular pseudonym, but please do give a sense of who you are, how you got here and why you've stayed, so that I might make this place more hospitable to good folk like you.

"Just take a left after the big black Mammy."

Those would be directions given to me the first time I tried to visit my in-laws without the wife there to navigate.  I hadn't a clue what he meant.  Then, as I crested a hill south of Natchez, I suddenly did:

Texas advertises itself as a "Whole 'Nother Country," but that's only true if you live off a farm-to-market road.  Houston's sprawl is as uniformly bland as the city that extends from Los Angeles to San Diego; but in the actual South, even the metropolitan areas surprise you. 

This is my way of saying: as I'm writing from a location where the power—much less the internet—is intermittent, I'm not going to be able to address the arguments in Avatar thread for a couple of days.  I will do so soon, though, as I value your new low opinion of me. 

If you don't take the shovels away from those racists, they'll never quit digging.

Should you like more proof of the dynamic I described in the previous post, you can find it (and my substantial response to it) here.