Always with interesting links that I didn’t have time or motivation to write about!
Continue reading “Unrequired Reading: Mar. 9, 2007”
Rush ‘n’ Attack
I’ve been thinking a lot about Russian policy (domestic and foreign) lately. For my magazine this month, I tried to discuss the untenability of running a secret police state in a world where health issues don’t respect borders. I don’t think I was all too successful, but I wrote most of it at 4am before hitting the road for Seattle.
I want to write a longer piece about Russian politics, the KGB-defined worldview, petroeconomics, the meanings of Chechnya, and the question of “deep chrono” as it relates to secrets revealed during the years between the USSR’s collapse and the ascendence of Putin. That is, I could spend the rest of my days writing something that would be out of date the moment I publish it.
The engine for this whole project was my realization that, while we’re engaged in another cold war with Russia and China, this one isn’t driven by the ideological opposition of Capitalism vs. Communism. Rather, it seems to me that the policies of both of those countries are designed to assure the security of their ruling parties.
Now, you could argue that that was the “true” motivation of the cold war itself, but it strikes me as fundamentally different, seeing as how this opposition is stripped down to the concept of retaining power for its own sake. The aspects of socialism that remain in both regimes are geared to sustain autocracy.
I’ll continue ruminating on the subject and offering up occasional impressions. Meanwhile, here’s a piece (courtesy of Andrew Sullivan) from a (sorta) pro-Putin journalist who is freaked out by the number of murdered journalists in Russia.
Not just tan: Spartan
In keeping with my inner classics-geek of that previous post, here’s Victor Davis Hanson on 300, the movie adaptation of Frank Miller’s comic book
[T]he impressionism of 300 is Hellenic in spirit: its buff bare chests are reminiscent of the heroic nudity of warriors on Attic vase paintings. Even in its surrealism — a rhinoceros, futuristic swords, and an effeminate, Mr. Clean-esque Xerxes (Rodrigo Santoro) who gets his ear flicked by a Spartan spear cast — it is not all that different from some of Euripides’ wilder takes, like Helen or Iphigeneia at Taurus, in their strange deviation from the party line of the Homeric epics. Like the highly formalist Attic tragedy — with its set length, three actors, music, iambic and choral meters, and so forth — 300 consciously abandons realist portrayal.
I don’t remember a ton of the comic book. The one time I read it, I was at a friend’s house in Auckland, NZ, trying desperately to stay awake till nightfall, so as not to get wrecked by jetlag. Fortunately, he was one of the greatest cartoonists in the antipodes, and had a room full of comics that I hadn’t read.
And, yes, I’m thinking of catching 300 at the local IMAX. Sue me.
(Here are some terrible pix from the premiere.)
Giving old meaning to “homecoming”
Lately, I’ve been rediscovering my inner classics-geek. I guess it might be obvious from the contents of this blog, between those Monday Morning Montaigne snippets and my return to the Iliad
During the weekend, I opened up the Poetics
Last night, I got a brochure in the mail from my graduate school, the inestimably important (to me) St. John’s College. The college is launching a continuing education program for alumni, consisting of weekend (or slightly longer) sessions on some of the great books.
The first offering, Aristotle & Aquinas on the Unity of Intellect, didn’t appeal to me too much, but the second one, a 4-day session in June on the Odyssey
I saved the flyer. This morning, when I looked it over, I noticed something strange. See, this being St. John’s, the program is named after the port where Socrates and his buddies had the conversation that comprises The Republic
That said, the school is referring to the program as “Pireaus”, and that’s what struck me as odd. I had to run downstairs to my library to check that I wasn’t misremembering, but as far as I can tell, it’s supposed to be “Piraeus”, not “Pireaus”. That’s how Bloom has it, and that’s how Jowett has it. Unfortunately, I can’t find my Greek/English lexicon down there (I’ve got a ton of books, okay? And, yes, I do own a Greek/English lexicon), and don’t have a Greek version of The Republic around.
So, can anyone (that means you, brother) get me a ruling on why they’re called it Pireaus?
(Now if I can just make an early start on those Top Company reports. . .)
Wish your cancer away!
Good thing the British National Health Service has been trying to reduce its reimbursement for Herceptin, a very focusedly effective breast cancer treatment*. That way, they can spend money on dowsers, flower therapists, and crystal healers! Yay!
(thanks to Cato-at-Liberty for pointing this one out)
* By which I mean, Herceptin works really well against around 25% of breast cancers, but is not effective against the other types. That said, it’s a major advance in treatment. Pity that, since it doesn’t work for every case, the NHS tried to keep it off the reimbursement list.
Nachbar takes it to the snackbar
Bostjan Nachbar, a Turkish Slovenian guy, throws it down on Samuel Dalembert, a Haitian guy.
Look to the skies
If I had the patience, I’d fix up this pic in Lightroom. So you’re stuck with my attempt at catching a little bit of glory from the vantage of the Home Depot parking lot in Paramus, NJ.
When bad metrics happen to bad GMs
Anyone who’s read our VM basketball previews in the last few years knows that the Timberwolves are in terrible shape, and it’s due to the incompetent dealings of its general manager, Kevin McHale, who can also be faulted for being part of the Joe Smith debacle that ruined Kevin Garnett’s career.
So that’s why it’s really funny that when Forbes.com came up with a system of metrics to evaluate general managers across the major sports, they ended up with Kevin McHale as #1.
Given the failure of that system, I’m going to have to take any of their other rankings with a grain of salt. I think this is an instance where the metrics sounded good, but when they were applied and led to this Bizarro world where McHale’s #1 and Billy Beane is #26, someone should have said, “Maybe we need to re-weight or add some other factors.”
And ranking Billy King of the Sixers at #3 was also pretty mind-boggling.
Monday Morning Montaigne
This week’s Montaine passage comes from On the Education of Children, which was written to Madame Diane De Foix, Comtesse De Gurson, who was expecting the birth of her first son. How do we know it’s a son? Well, “[You] are too noble-spirited to begin otherwise than with a male,” Michel tells us.
Montaigne uses the occasion of this essay to praise the merits of a liberal arts education. I wish I had it on hand to explain my master’s degree to people. He’s telling us to learn how to think, and how to be curious (and also how to inure ourselves to torture in case we end up in the clutches of an Inquisition). In this passage, we find that it’s not so important to quote the great thinkers (which Montaigne still does a bunch) as it is to understand how they thought:
Let the tutor make his charge pass everything through a sieve and lodge nothing in his head on mere authority and trust: let not Aristotle’s principles be principles to him any more than those of the Stoics or the Epicureans. Let this variety of ideas be set before him; he will choose if he can; if not, he will remain in doubt. Only the fools are certain and assured.
“For doubting pleases me no less than knowing,” says Dante. For if he embraces Xenophon’s and Plato’s opinions by his own reasoning, they will no longer be theirs, they will be his. He who follows another follows nothing. He finds nothing; indeed he seeks nothing. “We are not under a king; let each one claim his own freedom.” [Seneca] Let him know that he knows, at least. He must imbibe their ways of thinking, not learn their precepts. And let him boldly forget, if he wants, where he got them, but let him know how to make them his own. Truth and reason are common to everyone, and no more belong to the man who first spoke them than to the man who says them later. It is no more according to Plato than according to me, since he and I understand and see it in the same way. The bees plunder the flowers here and there, but afterward they make of them honey, which is all theirs; it is no longer thyme or marjoram. Even so with the pieces borrowed from others; he will transform and blend them to make a work that is all his own, to wit, his judgment. His education, work, and study aim only at forming this.
Let him hide all the help he had, and show only what he has made of it. The pillages, the borrowers, parade their buildings, their purchases, not what they get from others. You do not see the gratuities of a member of Parliament, you see the alliances he has gained and honors for his children. No one makes public his receipts; everyone makes public his acquisitions.
The gain from our study is to have become better and wiser by it.
Oh, and Montaigne also offers up some advice for tutors, in the off chance this liberal education doesn’t take:
If this pupil happens to be of such an odd disposition that he would rather listen to some idle story than to the account of a fine voyage or a wise conversation when he hears one; if, at the sound of a drum that calls the youthful ardor of his companions to arms, he turns asideto another that invites him to the tricks of the jugglers; if, by his own preference, he does not find it more pleasant sweet to return dusty and victorious from a combat than from tennis or a ball with the prize for that exercise, I see no other remedy than for his tutor to strangle him early, if there are no witnesses, or apprentice him to a pastry cook in some good town, even though he were the son of a duke.
China Syndrome
This massive article on China purports to have been written by only two reporters, but its portrayal of China’s economy and social condition is so fragmented and contradictory that I have to assume at least six different writers contributed pieces to it, and that their editor was on vacation.
This piece on China’s first-strike capacity is much more internally coherent. Unfortunately, it seems to propose we return to a cold war-style arms race.
Oh, and Yao Ming is the slowest guy in the league.