Does Anything Really Matter or Did We Just Evolve to Think So?

No, not me. Nor, alas, anyone related to me (as far as I know). But Mr Weinberg, a University of Michigan alumnus, has donated $7.7 million to the University of Michigan ...

“Does Anything Really Matter or Did We Just Evolve to Think So?” — an intro text version of Sharon Street‘s evolutionary argument against moral realism 

Carlin was not the first to notice hard core irony of escapes or comedy as being tragedy --Sigmund Freud wrote "The Joke and Its Relation to the Unconscious" about it. He postulated that we laugh because our subconscious desires and unacknowledged intuitions are being verified and fulfilled.² This makes Carlin more impressive, considering how far down the rabbit hole he goes. Only in the context of standup could a theater full of people be made to give an ovation for what is, essentially, a diatribe in support of humanity's greatest fear: death, and the extinction of our species. A people-less earth was his grand vision for the finale of his 1992 special, Jammin' in New York. He remarked, "I'm an entropy fan...I thought, what a wonderful thing! ...there's nothing wrong with the planet. The planet is fine. The people are f*****... the planet isn't going anywhere. We are. We're going away. Pack your shit, folks."³ In any other context, suggesting that the extinction of all humanity just might be a good thing would, safe to say, probably not inspire applause. But somehow, Carlin made even this quite literally inhuman point of view--sub specie aeternitatis--not only palatable, but preferable. Through Carlin's eyes, his fans became god-like observers of an inanimate and ego-less universe, and it didn't depress them. On the contrary, the vision was serene. They were made to grapple with an instinct that rarely comes up in the daily humdrum of conversation: maybe all this wasn't made just for us. Maybe we are not that important. This is one of the oldest revolutions in thought that we know of-- we are not the center of the universe, nor are we the point of it all, and it's kind of funny that we thought we were in the first place. Apparently if you take the heliocentric revelation of Galileo, and pepper in the word "f***," it makes people laugh. Freud from Morava

Are home pages dying? And what is the value of a shadow reader?

by Tyler Cowen on May 16, 2014 

Ezra Klein has a very good post on this topic.  He notes that for The New York Times:
…home page traffic has fallen by half over the last two years. This is true even though the NYT’s home page has been beautifully redesigned, and the NYT’s overall traffic is up.  
The value of the company is up as well.  And then:

This is the conventional wisdom across the industry now: the new home page is Facebook and Twitter. The old home page — which is the actual home page — is dying a slow, painful death. I’m skeptical. The thing about “push media” is someone needs to do the pushing. Someone has to post an article to Twitter or Facebook. That can be the media brand. It can even be the journalists. But when articles work it’s really coming from the readers.

Those readers of course are often the dedicated ones who find the article on your home page.  Ezra makes this additional point in passing, which I think is a neat example of how counterintuitive microeconomics can hold in the world of the internet:

Some of the most committed users are still clicking through the RSS feed (which is one reason Vox maintains a full-text RSS feed).

I would put it this way: the fewer people use RSS, the better content providers can allow RSS to be.  There is less fear of cannibalization, and more hope that easy RSS access will help a post go viral through Facebook and other social media.

When a blog is linked to the reputations of its producers, rather than to advertising revenue, the home page remains all the more important.  That is who you are, and many people realize that, even if they are not reading you at the moment.  I call those “shadow readers.”  For MR, I have long thought that the value of shadow readers is quite high.  (“Tyler and Alex are still writing that blog — great stuff, right?  I don’t get to look at it every day [read: hardly at all].  Why don’t we have them in for a talk?”)  In other words, a shadow reader is someone who hardly reads the blog at all, but has a not totally inaccurate model of what the blog is about.  For Vox or the NYT the value of a shadow reader is lower, although shadow readers still may talk up those sites to potential real readers.  For companies which run lots of events, such as The Atlantic, the value of shadow readers may be high because it helps make them focal even without the daily eyeballs.

What if everyone were a shadow reader?  What is the MRS between real readers and shadow readers?  And which are you?  Can a shadow reader sometimes be better to have?  After shadow readers don’t get so upset with you and don’t so much expect that you will write to please them!

Praha

Sexual intercourse began
In nineteen sixty-three
(which was rather late for me) -
Between the end of the "Chatterley" ban
And the Beatles' first LP.

~ old dragon  by Larkin


"I believe in the sun, even when it's not shining.
I believe in love, even when I feel it not.
I believe in God, even when He is silent."

But, Lord, do not be silent or allow us to be deaf...
Image by Vali Myers
I am in Prague, eating dumplings and readingGraham Greene. That is an obvious sentence because, what else would one be doing in Prague and also, one should always be reading Graham Greene, so. I am aware, though, that I am in Prague 19 years too late for that to be interesting.
(Not only do the wonderful people at Deutsche Bahn get you to and from places in Europe cleanly and efficiently, their staff includes people who will sit next to you on the bus and tell you things about the Kingdom of Bohemia, which is pretty special.)
While I'm here, Bookslut is brand new, and it's a pretty great issue. We have a piece on the artist Vali Myers, alongside a call for a radical wing of feminism, by Valerie Solanas's biographer Breanne Fahs:

Something has to radicalize you; something has to push you toward that as a political solution or identity. Valerie Solanas didn't want to be a feminist, I think, because the early feminist movement was plagued with liberal sentiments and ideologies. Early NOW did not want to deal with 'the personal is political' (a phrase which came later in relationship to radical feminism) and issues of sex, marriage, the money system, and so on; they wanted to petition and lobby and make incremental change. They were liberals, and Valerie despised liberalism. As Valerie wrote, 'If SCUM ever marches, it will be over the President's stupid, sickening face; if SCUM ever strikes, it will be in the dark with a six-inch blade.' We can read this as literal, or as a sort of mentality, a position from which she is arguing that we can't just preserve the status quo by asking for 'equality'; we have to destroy the foundations of inequality. There's a difference, and it's something we as feminists today still don't deal well with. We are very interested in what I call 'PR feminism,' a sanitized, nice, friendly, happy version of feminism that relies upon assimilation, liberalism, and openness. Valerie called it a 'civil disobedience lunch club.' While I do believe that principles of connection, friendship, and even love have a place in the feminist movement, I also believe that radical social change requires us to question everything, down to the level of how and why we connect with others, how we understand the category 'women' at all, how we imagine a place for outrageousness.

Speaking of being radicalized, this week I'll be serializing an interview I conducted with Bruce Benderson about his book Against Marriage. Prepare to be outraged.
And as the Daphne Award deliberations continue, The Forgotten Twentieth Century column talks to itself about The Sailor Who Fell with Grace from the Sea. (I'd be most likely to be found under the "Skeptic" half of that conversation.)
As always, there's lots more.

Mastermind

If you reveal your secrets to the wind, you should not blame the wind for revealing them to the trees. 

 – Kahlil Gibran, The Wanderer (quoted in Bitter Like Orange Peel) 

Jonathan Swift was an early adopter of the maxim “Write what you know.” In his case, it was grotesque displays of bodily degradation... I knew Cold River


Revolution of everyday lifewill begin with every one sleeping in.
Only when men and women
have slept in unexpectedly
will they experience
a momentary glimpse
of life outside of
spectacular society.

Stripped to its essentials, science is a four-step process: you look at something interesting in the world, you think about why it might work that way, you test your idea with further observations and experiments,band you  tell everybody you know what you found

Mastermind 

The other day somebody stole everything in my apartment and replaced it with an exact replica... When my roommate came home I said, “Roommate, someone stole everything in our apartment and replaced it with an exact replica.” He looked at me and said, “Do I know you?”

“Cry me a river,” Dennis said through his teeth.
“Beg your pardon?”
“Cry me a river, it’s an expression. Basically it means all you guys can go f*** yourselves.”
“Oh. Well. That’s awfully sentimental of you.”
– Ben Fountain, ‘The Lion’s Mouth’

Lifehacker has a list of apps it believes have the chops to help you score no matter what cliché you're throwing their way. Looking for something free of the usual on-screen distractions? Something to help you edit or write a screenplay for Cold River? They've got it.

Tips For Being A Literary Agent In An Era Of Electronic Everything

“You need to be confident, very decisive and opinionated, I’m afraid. Authors expect you to have the expertise, experience and instinct to tell them what to do and then they can decide whether they agree with you or not.

Via BBC

World’s Largest Publisher Extends A Helping Hand To Indie Book Stores

“Independent booksellers are being sent reinforcements in the battle against Amazon with a website that will support the dwindling band of high street traders, backed by the world’s largest publisher.”

Via The Guardian (UK) 

In his new collection, The Singing Bowl, poet Malcolm Guite offers this poem inspired by Dante's Divine Comedy: "Through the Gate"

Begin the song exactly where you are

For where you are contains where you have been

And holds the vision of your final sphere



And do not fear the memory of sin;

There is a light that heals, and, where it falls,

Transfigures and redeems the darkest stain



Into translucent colour. Loose the veils

And draw the curtains back, unbar the doors,

Of that dread threshold where your spirit fails,



The hopeless gate that holds in all the fears

That haunt your shadowed city, fling it wide

And open to the light that finds and fares ...

Read the rest on the poet's blog.

"My own poem," Guite says, "is written in the conviction that that there is no depth or recess, no sin or secret, in me or in anyone, beyond the light of Christ, but we have to open the gate and let him come down to our depths, let his Light reveal and name and heal what we have hidden."

Guite has written nine poems inspired from Dante's great work.

Going Down The Hill Down Under

1790 (aka 1980)
Revolution

The rest is history or will be for those who come to write it after us. I doubt they will be kind, and why would they? They will see our sins and forget out graces.

‘Every society needs that moment of outrage, that not welcomed Birthday moment ;-)’
There are three difficulties in authorship: to write anything worth publishing, to find honest men to publish it, and to find sensible men to read Cold River (sic) 

~~~~ Charles Caleb Colton

I now believe enlightenment is a simple state: it is the ability to suffer what there is to suffer; it is the ability to enjoy what there is to enjoy. ~ Richard Morais,Buddhaland Brooklyn 

Looking back through the last page or two, I see that I have made it appear as though my motives in writing were wholly public-spirited. I don't want to leave that as the final impression. All writers are vain, selfish, and lazy, and at the very bottom of their motives there lies a mystery. Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of some painful illness. One would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven on by some demon whom one can neither resist nor understand. For all one knows that demon is simply the same instinct that makes a baby squall for attention.

~ Brother George Orwell not Pell ... 

We seek the immortality of fame around the same time our bodies begin to seek the sweet peace of oblivion. Such is the contradiction of being human. – Jonathan Grimwood, The Last Banquet

There must be a million readers out there who crave boredom! Who love the dangling participle! Who wallow in truisms and fatuous theorisings! … Slap in your popular aphorisms, buddy, but don’t make ‘em think!

~ Strangers Among Antipodeans

When I was a kid in the seventies we used to telljokes about Skodas: What do you call a Skoda with a sun roof? A skip. Skoda’s answer? It made better cars. In 2010 it was voted best manufacturer in the 2010 What Car? Readers Awards, with Porsche second and Daihatsu third. That didn’t happen overnight nor can we expect self-publishing to stop being a joke overnight. It will take time. A bad reputation doesn’t go away overnight but people’s memories are short. They do forget unless we keep reminding them...

We learned your words and songs and stories, and never knew you didn’t want to hear ours  Strange Hollywood became Villawood... [sold as is]

Putting aside the need to earn a living, I think there are four great motives for writing, at any rate for writing prose. They exist in different degrees in every writer, and in any one writer the proportions will vary from time to time, according to the atmosphere in which he is living.

These four great motives are: Sheer egoism, Aesthetic enthusiasm, Historical impulse and Political purpose. He defines the first as:

Desire to seem clever, to be talked about, to be remembered after death, to get your own back on the grown-ups who snubbed you in childhood, etc., etc. It is humbug to pretend this is not a motive, and a strong one. Writers share this characteristic with scientists, artists, politicians, lawyers, soldiers, successful businessmen—in short, with the whole top crust of humanity.

The history of political blogging might usefully be divided into the periods pre- and post-Huffington. Before the millionaire socialite Arianna Huffington decided to get in on the act, bloggers operated in a spirit of underdog solidarity. They hated the mainstream media - and the feeling was mutual.

Bloggers saw themselves as gadflies, pricking the arrogance of established elites from their home computers, in their pyjamas, late into the night. So when, in 2005, Huffington decided to mobilise her fortune and media connections to create, from scratch, a flagship liberal blog she was roundly derided. Who, spluttered the original bloggerati, did she think she was? 

As Is

This is a
used poem.
It is in
good condition,
is complete and
undamaged.

No words are missing and
though they have
all been read before
the previous owner
was careful not to
read too much into them.

The poem will make sense
but it must
be said it doesn't
quite mean what it used to
and it may require
some reader attention.

What you see
is what you
get but what
you end up with
is completely
up to you.
7 ~ 7 ~ 1980  Forever Double Two ~  22 ~ XXGetting Real

Happy XXII Birthday Gabrielka

"The artist produces for the liberation of his soul. It is his nature to create as it is the nature of water to run down the hill." 

~ W. Somerset Maugham, The Summing Up

Raising a creative & moral child.( like chichi v(b)ella

The Gottlieb Duttweiler Institute (GDI) recently released its 2013 list of “Global Thought Leaders” and 4 out of the top 5 are philosophers, as  Peter Singer reports. 

“In our analysis, the importance and influence of a thinker and/or idea is measured not only by how well they come across in a particular segment or on a specific platform such as Twitter or YouTube, but also how heavily they are networked and linked. We measure ‘links and likes’ (Norbert Bolz). Unlike other rankings, global thought leaders in this study are not simply reduced to a place number: the analysis also shows how the world’s leading thinkers are networked, and which of them are relevant across countries and subject areas, which are being talked about, and which are triggering wider debate.”

Psalm of Men in 2014 - MCMXXX

I wish I took this shot ... So many strange ideas surface watching this image

When I was living in England, Australia did become much clearer to me [...] In some ways – well, I think I said it somewhere in Johnno – I really had never left Australia. And I found that I could be a long way from the actual experience – I mean, a long way in time, but often a long way in place as well – before I could work out what it all meant. I think I’m very slow about things like that.

~ David Malouf / 80 in 2014 - like John Hatton born in early 1930s and this men remember hard times ...

"We are in a time not unlike the 30's when the need for job now rises high above the faraway dream of getting the right credentials from the right places. And so with literature, where a tide will be coming from the heartland, the boonies, and inner cities of brown, black, and white America. Its authors will be without proper literary pedigrees, they will have attended but done poorly in boring high schools, maybe gone to community college for a while, did or did not graduate from a four-year Institution of higher learning. Definitely not with laurels bestowed upon them by the top-tier universities, not fairy-dusted by a so-admired writing program, they will write about the common and the poor among us, those working more hours than they want, or much less than they need. William Zink is not the first, but he is certainly among the most ambitious of them in this coming wave." ~ Dagaberto Gilb

Poems, novels, short stories, as works of imagination, are written out of inner necessity; they come to us out of who-knows-where, choosing their own time and having no existence until they are there on the page. They are entirely personal. [...] The pieces in this collection are of another kind altogether and have a different source. They were from the beginning someone else’s idea; I wrote them on invitation, or at someone else’s suggestion. [...] These pieces of writing are personal in that they have their basis in personal experience and represent personal opinions, but their purpose was from the beginning public; they belong to that part of my life that is conscious and considered rather than dreamily obscure until it demands to be expressed …

~ David Malouf 

HER WISH

If she had her wish she would be a frog or a fish,
and this lake would be her own.
She would swim each morning a fluid breaststroke,
breaking the unbroken surface
reflecting the green pines of the wood.
It is too early for swimmers yet this year,
yet she is out there alone in the morning mist.
A foghorn booms from beyond two bends,
like a bullfrog calling for a mate to her.
She loves the feel of the surrounding;
she aches for my touch to be less demanding;
I wish for the key to such understanding.
The lake does no more than provide her support,
and warmth enough to glide free for a time.
What man can purport to be this smart,
would forever win the heart of his own heart's desire.

Politics is after all the art of the possible

The Abbott Government faces months of wrangling in the Senate over key budget measures to introduce a GP fee and increase taxes on fuel and high-income earners.

TONY Abbott appears ready to risk an election over the federal budget as he warns Senators to approve deep cuts to spending despite outcries against changes to health and welfare. Spectre do Double Dissolution

The federal bureaucracy is poised for its greatest loss of staff since the early years of the Howard government. However, the Abbott government's budget will hit the public service more softly than the Coalition's rhetoric had suggested, and its spending cuts are less harsh than those the previous Labor government had planned.

Civilian government agencies will shed 7336 full-time equivalent jobs over the coming year, offset by the recruitment of an extra 2744 military personnel.

Outside affected offices in Brisbane last night, staff confirmed they were worried for their jobs and aware the Abbott Government appeared to be mirroring the actions of Queensland Premier Campbell Newman

Australian Tax Office the biggest loser as public service staff cut in budget