feliz

Happy New Year, y'all. Try to be properly festive and eat too much for me, okay?

thank you Netflix

Top Ten Movies I Saw for the First Time
Amores Perros
Shaolin Soccer
Spellbound
In America
Zatoichi: The Blind Swordsman
Bus 174
The Triplets of Belleville
To Live
Osama
American Splendor


Top Ten Movies I Saw Again
Citizen Kane
On the Waterfront
Singin' in the Rain
Nine Queens
Dr. Strangelove
Stalag 17
The Manchurian Candidate
Three Kings
The Nutty Professor
Yojimbo

Top Ten Movies I Couldn't Finish For Whatever Reason
Ballad of a Soldier
Red Beard
Blow Up
City of God
One Day in September
Nowhere in Africa
Through a Glass Darkly
Europa Europa
Capturing the Friedmans
My Son the Fanatic

Movies I Shouldn't Have Finished But Did, Often Under Duress
Blazing Saddles
A Midsummer Night's Dream
The Green Berets
Death to Smoochy
The Goonies
Equilibrium

Reasons Netflix Kicks Cable's Posterior
Arrested Development
Mr. Show
The Office
Penn and Teller: Bullshit!
Curb Your Enthusiasm
The Twilight Zone

we love lists

Yes we do.

David Edelstein's is up

Any year that produces Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind is a great one for movies. In fact, I'm a little dismayed that not everyone shares my conviction that this is an inexhaustible masterpiece and, by a wide margin, the best film in many years... If you didn't get it, see it again. If you didn't like it, I am so, so sorry—for us both.

as is The Onion's

Keith Phipps on Arrested Development: Seen in bulk, all the warm, merciless, restlessly inventive comedy confirmed that creator Mitchell Hurwitz might not have planned on making a classic, but he ended up with one anyway.

(More of mine will be posted soon.)

foam

One thing is certain: the ACLU must be stopped. They consistently undermine religious freedom, and, what? Facts? Don't interrupt me, I'm working up a good lather.

always right?

Joe Carter links to Stuart Sims's purported find about California taxes supporting the Center for the Study of Sexual Minorities in the Military. Sims's comment:

You've got to be kidding me! California taxpayers are financing a center for "the Study of Sexual Minorities in the Military"? I don't know whether to laugh or to cry. Thank the Lord that I don't live in California - as if those loons don't support enough weird things already - now this?

Carter's addendum:

The fact that California taxes go to fund the Center for the Study of Sexual Minorities in the Military rather than for, oh let’s say, a “Center for the Study of Virtuous Heroes in the Military” doesn’t really surprise me. Still, I think it’s a sign of our nation’s misplaced priorities that we spend more money and attention on the role of sexual identity than we do on understanding the importance of virtue and character in our military. Perhaps, though, I’m simply out of touch. Maybe in focusing on such core values as honor, courage and commitment I’ve missed the significance that transgender tolerance plays in virtue ethics.

Many bloggers, of late, are gleefully denouncing the bias and shoddy research of the Mainstream Media (MSM). But what about shoddy blogging? Sims baldly states, and Carter echoes, that California taxes fund the Center--without a shred of evidence. Let's dig a little deeper.

Below the Center's Mission Statement, we find: The Center is an official research unit of the Institute for Social, Behavioral, & Economic Research of University of California. (See the handy organizational chart here.) Where does its money come from? I decided to take the time to actually find out, and contacted the program. Their funding is extramural, from private grants or donations.

But that doesn't sit well with the "easy" story--the one that took about ten seconds to coagulate on one blog, and a couple weeks to spread to another, and who knows where it'll go from here. My hope is nowhere, because it's a non-story. The moral: don't look to bloggers as a model for good journalistic research; oftentimes, we wear our biases like pajamas.

[Note: an important quote was removed at the request of its originator. I'm not a professional journalist, so I won't bother to use anonymous sources.]

Morton Brilliant ain't

Gregoire is officially the governor-elect, but Rossi won't pull up his tent stakes and go home, threatening to contest the recount results in the courts. So how does Gregoire's camp respond?

"This ain't golf. No mulligans allowed here, folks," Gregoire's spokesman, Morton Brilliant, said Wednesday. "It's irresponsible to spend $4 million in taxpayer money on a new election just because you don't like losing this one."

Let's go back over history.

1. Gregoire loses the first count; the margin prompts an automatic machine recount, at taxpayer expense.

2. Gregoire loses the machine recount, and, with the help of the Kerry Campaign and MoveOn.org, ponies up $730,000 for a manual recount riddled with controversy and court challenges--a heck of a gamble.

3. Gregoire wins the hand recount, and, by law, the state will have to compensate the Democrats to the tune of at least $730,000.

And that, friends, is a perfect "mulligan"--and hypocrisy in action.

the end is near, part 342

Whilst in Utah, the "Alliance Defense Fund" advocates unreason, an Arkansas state court follows the evidence where it leads.

shoe-horning

Gregoire won the recount; Rossi wants a revote. Whee! More democracy!

good words

I don't know how I missed James K. A. Smith's tribute to Jacques Derrida, but here it is. Worth quoting, too:

Jacques Derrida took up with vigor the Socratic vocation of philosophy as a kind of dying. Notoriously linked to discourses on "the death of the author" (and almost universally misunderstood on this score), Derrida's work was regularly haunted by ghosts. Death inscribed itself in his corpus and has now left its mark on his body, and we are left to mourn. But that is only to say that we are left with the task of deconstruction: what Derrida described as the work of mourning. It is not without reason that some of his most powerful meditations—on Levinas, de Man, Deleuze, Lyotard and others—come to us in the form of eulogies and memorials.

It has been the mistake of his critics—both in the academy and media—to conclude from Derrida's preoccupation with death that deconstruction is simply the next nihilism. And so Derrida has been vilified as the enemy of truth, justice, the university, and many more of our cherished institutions and values. The myths and lies—yes, lies—about Derrida persist even in his death (Jonathan Kandell's obituary in The New York Times was a travesty).

But this is a picture of Derrida and deconstruction that one could maintain only by failing to read him. For in the end—or better, from the beginning—deconstruction is a work of love. Far from being a mere "method" for critique, Derrida was at pains to demonstrate the essentially productive aspect of deconstruction. "It is not negative," he once commented, "For me, it always accompanies an affirmative exigency. I would even say that it never proceeds without love."

I was in the midst of writing up my own thoughts on Derrida (as always, prompted by a conversation with my younger brother). Jacques Derrida is philosophy's Stephen Hawking: as many people have read his works as have finished A Brief History of Time. This might explain, partially, why reactions to his thought are so disparate; contrast Adam Shatz

Derrida took play seriously; it was a synonym, really, for the unexpected reversals of history with which he was intimately acquainted. Even at his most somber, this spirit infused Derrida's work, whether he was writing on Plato, Heidegger, Stéphane Mallarmé, Freud, Artaud or the American Declaration of Independence. In his writing he developed a voice as original as Jean-Luc Godard's--alternately inspired and maddening, animated by a similarly Joycean predilection for puns and collages of association, and a melancholy fascination with specters of the past that haunt the present, or "traces," as Derrida called them. The two men also shared an interest in the French-Jewish philosopher Emmanuel Levinas, whose ruminations on the dialectic of Self and Other figure prominently in Godard's latest film, Notre Musique, a beautifully fractured meditation on the wars in Bosnia and Israel-Palestine.

with Brian Leiter

...overwhelmingly those who engage in philosophical scholarship on figures like Plato and Nietzsche and Husserl find that Derrida misreads the texts, in careless and often intentionally flippant ways, inventing meanings, lifting passages out of context, misunderstanding philosophical arguments, and on and on. Derrida was the bad reader par excellence, who had the gall to conceal his scholarly recklessness within a theoretical framework.

What of Derrida's "relativism" and "nihilism?" Simon Glendinning:

"Well, it is very difficult to summarise Derrida's thought... It, like any serious and penetrating thought, even resists summary - any philosophy that can be summed up in a nutshell belongs in one. People are troubled by a form of critique which challenges our most cherished assumptions - and so they want a caricature."

In the end, Derrida was no Nietzsche, either in scope of thought or power of prose, but his personal humility in the quest for philosophic truth is certainly worth imitating.

lazing a trail

I had a brilliant idea last week: how about linking to all the thought-provoking articles or blog posts I had read over the past year, as a way to not only chart my own intellectual path, but to broaden others'? Sadly, Christmas interfered, and it's still a work in progress / pipe dream. In the meantime, love-him-or-hate-him, David Brooks has done exactly that. (Registration required; use bugmenot.com if you must).

(Thanks to Arts and Letters Daily.)

pack up your toys and go home

Thanks to Slate's great "recycled" feature, we get to read William Saletan's smackdown of Intelligent Design again. Best snippet:

A theory isn't just a bunch of criticisms, even if they're valid. A theory ties things together. It explains and predicts. Intelligent design does neither. It doesn't explain why part of our history seems intelligently designed and part of it doesn't. Why are our feet and our back muscles poorly designed for walking? Why are we afflicted by lethal viruses? Why have so many females died in childbirth? ID doesn't explain these things. It just shrugs at them. "Design theory seeks to show, based on scientific evidence, that some features of living things may be designed by a mind or some form of intelligence," says one ID proponent. Some? May? Some? What kind of theory is that?

the quotable Cure

Who'd guess that The Cure would have the final say in a philosophical conversation about representation and reality?

I've been looking so long at these pictures of you
That I almost believe that they're real
I've been living so long with my pictures of you
That I almost believe that the pictures are
All I can feel

the quotable Popper II

"We have seen that theories cannot be logically derived from observations. They can, however, clash with observations: they can contradict observations. This fact makes it possible to infer from observations that a theory is false. The possibility of refuting theories by observations is the basis of all empirical tests. For the test of the theory is, like every rigorous examination, always an attempt to show that the candidate is mistaken--that is, that the theory entails a false assertion. From a logical point of view, all empirical tests are therefore attempted refutations." (Conjectures and Refutations, p. 260)

the grinch comes 'round

Today: off to my folks' place. Tomorrow: up to my wife's folks'. Then onward, all celebrating the Christian appropriation of paganism (to syncretism in general, I say: huzzah!). Blogging as usual resumes soon. I leave you with beautiful Yuletide thoughts by everyone's favorite Irish poet.

the quotable Popper

"Democrats who do not see the difference between a friendly and a hostile criticism of democracy are themselves imbued with the totalitarian spirit. Totalitarianism, of course, cannot consider any criticism as friendly, since every criticism of such an authority must challenge the principle of authority itself." (The Open Society and its Enemies, Vol. 1, p.189)

end in sight?

The Court says "count 'em" and Gregoire is up eight votes, but Republicans promise to continue the fight in other counties... After this, an election without a recount just won't seem like a real election.

Update:Now it's a ten-vote lead, and the only sure thing: Gary Locke is our governor.

the mother of all top ten lists

Lists are good for only one thing: provocation. Oh, and if you're counting, not every list comprises ten entries. Take it up with Management if you must.

Top Ten Top Ten Lists
Top Ten Most Annoying People of 2004
Top Ten Spyware Threats
Top Ten News Stories of 2004
Top Ten Game Show Winners of All Time
Most Dangerous Cities in the U.S.
Ten Most Wanted Fugitives
Top Ten Chinese Cities With Noiselessness
Top Ten Recalled Toys
Top Ten Bushisms
Canada's Best Blogs


Movies I Didn't See But Will Probably Netflix
House of Flying Daggers
Sideways
The Incredibles
The Five Obstructions
Bad Education
Maria Full of Grace
The Story of the Weeping Camel
Garden State
Tarnation
Control Room

Bonus: Elbert Ventura trumpets others I'll probably queue up.

Songs I Had To Listen To In Their Entirety So They Wouldn't Get Stuck In My Head
"Boulevard of Broken Dreams," Green Day
"Float On," Modest Mouse
"Ocean Breathes Salty," Modest Mouse

Ways To Describe the Gregoire / Rossi Debacle
A Triumph for Democracy
The End of Democracy
The Battle of Seattle, Redux
Count Every Vote
Don't Change the Rules
Tie Goes to the Republican
The Great Suffrage Telethon
The Rise of the Libertarian Swing Vote
Damn You, Ron Sims
Dino Who?

Top Ten Top Ten Lists That Don't Exist on Google
Lego Sculptures
Scientific Conundrums
Voles
Blog Addicts
Ways to Pronounce "Chthonic"
Supercars You Can Actually Afford
Spirochetes
Policy Wonks
Ways to Avoid Carpal Tunnel
Stupidest Moments of 2004
Reasons to Stay Inside

Top Ten Ways To Wish Someone Well This Holiday Season
Happy Hanukkah
Happy Chanukah
Happy Chanuka
Happy Hanuka
Happy Channukah
Happy Hanukka
Happy Hannukkah
Happy Hannukka
Happy Chanukaa
Happy Chthanukah

once more into the breach

Jeffrey Dubner sits down with Thomas Keck to discuss "judicial activism":

The phrase “judicial activism” is a frequent whipping boy, but what does the phrase actually mean?

The epithet essentially means “a judicial decision I disagree with,” but there can be some content to it. The definition that makes the most sense to me is that an activist court is a court that is relatively willing to assert its own power over and against the other institutions of government....

Can you give us some examples of particular topics that they’ve been activist on?

Of the liberal activism, the most noted example is the continued reaffirmation of Roe v. Wade. Another great example is the area of gay rights, where it’s been the Rehnquist Court that has for the first time extended constitutional protections to gay and lesbian rights -- in 1996, with Romer v. Evans, and then again in 2003, with Lawrence v. Texas. And there are a lot of examples in the areas of free speech, freedom of religion, and other rights in the liberal, Warren Court tradition.

On the conservative activism side of the fence, perhaps the best set of examples are the cases regarding federalism, a whole bunch of separate sets of cases whose overarching theme is the revival of constitutional limits on federal government power. It’s not like these decisions have gone that far; they haven’t tried to strike down the New Deal. But the implications of them are potentially sweeping, were they to carry them as far as the rhetoric suggests.

Keck's new book, The Most Activist Supreme Court in History, looks like it merits a read, especially considering its Shakespearean-sounding title.

the matriarch was victimized by a hit-and-run caribou

Thank you, Julian Sanchez, for every unminced word, a welcome addition to the backlash backlash.

no really

Our Daily Rag takes another bold stand.

Coming soon in the series:

• Floss Daily
• Look Both Ways Before Crossing Street
• Yellow Snow is Not For Eating
• You Can't Beat Gravity For Long
• Don't Scratch That Itch
• Yield to Buses, Dammit
• Drugs are Bad 'Cause, You Know, Drugs are Bad