Having it all meta open Friday thread

by liberal japonicus

I don't know if it is time, or my age, but it feels like everything I want to post is an obituary or something related to obituaries (cf this). Clearly, it is time to get back to how I got into all this, which was doing meta.

And there can be no better place to start then to open this up to the meta discussion that has emerged around Sheryl Sandberg's book about with suggestions to help women break the glass ceiling, Lean in. In the best traditions of meta, I haven't read the book either (pointing to the excuse that my meta is a geographic condition), but this New Yorker piece should get everyone up to speed. 

Comments

[Laura Koerbeer]

I'm at that age, too. I will be sixty next fall. I find myslef thinking about remembrance and the passage of time a great deal. Thank you for the first link That is a very moving piece of writing.

The second link I find hard to relate to. It seems to be about somethig that was written about somethig that someone wrote, which I find hard to follow.

[bob_is_boring]

lj: "doing meta" - "meta discussion"

I'm afraid I don't understand.

You want to have a discussion about discussions? This is what you seem to be saying (which is fine, nothing wrong with that) but I'm not sure it's what you mean.

Or maybe it is. Perhaps I just haven't had enough tea yet.

[hairshirthedonist]

It seems to be about somethig that was written about somethig that someone wrote, which I find hard to follow.

It was actually about someone who wrote something, what that someone wrote, what other people wrote about what that someone wrote, how those writers used each others writings to write about what that someone wrote, and a little bit about what was written in response to the stuff people wrote about someone who wrote something and what that someone wrote.

But I may have missed something.

[liberal japonicus]

Well, since I can't easily get the book, I can really only have a discussion about how some people who actually can read the book but didn't are screwing up. Actually, that applies to about 90% of the discussions I have on the internet.

[Slartibartfast]

I've been thinking about having a meta-discussion about that book, but have been putting it off. If there isn't a word for that, we should make one up.

[Countme-In]

premature procrastination

metaborgesia

metainterruptus

I've been thinking about discussing the novel I haven't written, but I don't want to talk about it, because you might have already read it.

It's like John Cage's "Silence", but quieter.

[Hartmut]

It's one of the basic requirements of critics to be able to review books, films etc. without actually reading or watching them, ideally before they are even finished. If their reviews are totally off, this is of course the fault of the reviewed materials. It's a sad fact that some reviews are based on the title alone and often include a basic misconception of what the title means. There are still critics today that complain about "The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp" because no character in it has that name, the main character is not a colonel on screen and [spoiler] does not die [/spoiler].
Iirc there are actual manuals (and not all of the satirical) of the type "How to review a book/film without having read/seen it"

[ral]

Having read neither the book nor the review, I offer you the Critic.

[hairshirthedonist]

ral, I remember that from the early days of cable TV. I think it was HBO that showed shorts between features, and that was one of them. I was probably 12 when I saw it. To this day I occasionally use, in character, "This is cute. This is nice. What the hell is it?"

[Harald K]

It's one of the basic requirements of critics to be able to review books, films etc. without actually reading or watching them, ideally before they are even finished. If their reviews are totally off, this is of course the fault of the reviewed materials.

This is unfortunate, but fortunately for critics they are also a subspecies of pundit, and the pundit class is mostly immunized from negative consequences from being wrong.

[von]

From nothing, of nothing (de nada), figured I'd check in on this thread and mention the obvious: I miss being young. Dealing with kids growing up too fast and just feeling old for the first time. I just don't spring back like I used to. And then I saw this:

(http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GFKtnU7YrCQ)

Damn, wish I made it to that show.

Anyhoo, no real point, save that I saw and open thread and I miss the old blog.

p.s. Save your sympathies; I'm "only" 39. I'm just so vain and self centered I figured that the ordinary effects of aging affected other people, only.

[Countme-In]

I'm "only" 39.

I'm Jack Benny.

[Marty]

I still only 39

[Slartibartfast]

I am 51, and my next goal is to break two boards using the tips of extended fingers of one hand.

I've got the one board thing down.

Then it's on to concrete, I think.

Probably I can do this because most of my nerve endings have died of old age.

Mellow greetings, von. Stop by and say hi every now and then.

[hairshirthedonist]

Once one of the Beastie Boys dies, all bets are off. All our fates are sealed.

[hairshirthedonist]

Since this is an open thread and things have been really slow around here lately, I offer this for discussion, with an excerpt below. Even if you disagree with some or most of it, it's interesting to read. If you disagree with all of it, you have a problem, because at least some of it is purely factual.

Government Debt and Deficits Are Not the Problem. Private Debt Is.

A Keynesian economist would point to excess saving as the problem. But debt repayment has changed the character of saving in today’s debt-ridden economies. In the 1930s, Keynes pointed to savings being a leakage from the economy’s circular flow. What he meant by “saving” was mainly non-spending – keeping income in bank accounts or other liquid or illiquid financial investment.

But savings rates have risen since 2008 for quite a different reason. America’s recovery of savings rate from zero in 2007 is not a result of people building up saving for a rainy day. What the National Income and Product accounts report as “saving” is actually paying down debt. It is a negation of a negation.

This is what debt deflation means. The antidote should be more government spending and larger deficits – as well as debt forgiveness.

Bank lobbyists are urging just the opposite set of policies. They have implanted a false memory and a false economic theory blaming hyperinflation on deficit spending. The reality is that every hyperinflation in history has come from paying foreign debts, not domestic debts.

Keep in mind that what "foreign debts" means in this context is debt denominated in foreign curreny or some commodity (usually gold), not debt that is simply held by a foreign entity.

[Laura Koerbeer]

Only 39? I will be sixty next fall. I think about death on a daily basis.

Hiashirt, I read your article. I also read the intor comment about it being factual--as if that would make a difference to those who chose not discount the thesis of the article. Then I did a little mental jump to a Facebook photo of Krugman in front of an exploding car with the caption "I'm tired of reasoning with you people".

It is remarkable how rarely facts change minds.

Of course there's facts and there's "facts". But even real verifiable freakin' obvious facts (like the failure of tax cuts to produce jobs year after year, tax cut after tax cut) don't change minds easily at all.

Which isn't to say people can't change their minds, but even being slapoped up side the head by reality often won't do it.

I'm involved in a gated co0mmunity controversy in my little micorcosim of America, a tempest in a teapot. It is interesting to watch how people fomr opinions. Facts don't have a lot to do with it. Emotion is a big motivator., Personal friendships seems to make a difference. Once people get fearful, they stay fearful and become fact-phobic. Reasonalbe people are seen as tiresome and annoying. Reasonable people see other peple as tiresome and annoying. The peiple who care about facts do so becaues a fact fits with a consruct in their heads (other facts are disregarded).

In short the only people who seem capable of just thinking logically and factually andd openmindedly are the ones who don't care and aren't participating int he concversation.

I tend to not care myslef until an ethical issue gets involved and then I care very much.

Anyway as we lurch toward the sort of catastrophe scienc fiction writers ahve been wrting about for years I have come to too coclusions: I'm glad I'm old and humans are not rational or even reasonable most of the time and have no business claiming to be an intelligent form of life.

[hairshirthedonist]

I'm involved in a gated co0mmunity controversy in my little micorcosim of America, a tempest in a teapot. It is interesting to watch how people fomr opinions. Facts don't have a lot to do with it. Emotion is a big motivator., Personal friendships seems to make a difference. Once people get fearful, they stay fearful and become fact-phobic. Reasonalbe people are seen as tiresome and annoying. Reasonable people see other peple as tiresome and annoying. The peiple who care about facts do so becaues a fact fits with a consruct in their heads (other facts are disregarded).

I could have written the same thing, nearly word for word, regarding my place of work these days. I, too, blame humans.

[Countme-In]

"I think about death on a daily basis."

I try to skip Wednesdays, but now you've ruined it. ;)

I don't know what I think about death except nullity. It's the dying that freaks me, and as Woody Allen said, I don't want to be there when it happens, especially in America where life is so sacred that one's creditors hover like angelic loan sharks counting the cost of every drop in your drip-feed, applying a multiplying effect, and calculating the compound interest, to be quoted to you during phone calls late at night should you live, because, remember, life and an income stream and are sacred, and austerity is a virtue.

I don't mind humanity. It's the individual instances of it that I can't stand who try to rationalize the above-cited behavior, for instance, as an incentive for one to volunteer to limit one's own access to the drip-feed.

There's a great cartoon in this week's New Yorker that shows a couple of hit men about to deep-six a guy off the boardwalk. The victim has both feet in cement, his mouth gagged and his hands bound.

From stage left bestrideth Death, berobed and bescythed, down the boardwalk towards the three.

The look on the victim's face says "This is all I need now", but one of the tough guys tries to wave off Death, saying "We've got it."

But does he? Maybe a tsunami wave is about to lick all three off the end of the pier. Maybe the victim goes in, but the exertion of pushing him causes cardiac arrest in one of the henchmen?

Maybe Death is a cop and the sting is going down.

Maybe Death is suicidal and will stride past the three of them and take a swan dive off the end of the Boardwalk because it's the first of Spring.

In the "Death" segment of Monty Python's "The Meaning of Life", a group of poncy, yuppy Brits, and an American, are dining and Death shows up. After some oblivious, understated small-talk, which pisses Death off, including the question of how can it be that all of them can die at once, Death points a skeletal finger at the salmon mousse, which had gone off.

Everyone at the table dies and turns into a shade and as they rise to depart, one of the guests (Michael Palin, I think) protests (very politely as if he might be ruining all the fun) that "Hey, I didn't even have the salmon moose" .... to no avail.

And, so it is.

Pass the mousse.

[hairshirthedonist]

when you think about death
do you lose your breath
or do you keep your cool?
would you like to see the pope
on the end of a rope?
do you think he's a fool?

What with all this thinking about death on the same day as a new Pope is elected, why not a little Sabbath?

[wj]

HSH, perhaps it come sup because of this little item from the new Pope's past: " the Argentine navy with the connivance of Cardinal Jorge Bergoglio, now the Jesuit archbishop of Buenos Aires, hid from a visiting delegation of the Inter-American Human Rights Commission the dictatorship’s political prisoners." (source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/belief/2011/jan/04/argenitina-videla-bergoglio-repentance )

Granted, no man is perfect. But this is hardly a sign of exemplary moral character, in a time when the Church's moral standing needs all the help it can get.

[Countme-In]

"Granted, no man is perfect."

This is true.

Bergoglio didn't wear a condom or countenance birth control as he helped heave-ho political prisoners out of airplanes to the fishes below, so he followed some doctrine perfectly.

Man is fallen and he'll especially want to watch that first step while disembarking.

From Wikipedia:

'Two weeks before the military coup d'état of March 24, 1976, Luis María Mendía gathered naval officers on March 10, under the orders of General and head of military forces Eduardo Massera, to prepare the repression against subversive delinquents. On March 24, the day of the coup, he held another meeting, at which he theorized about the tactics used during the Dirty War, including the use of torture and of death flights. He also theorized the theft of babies, taken from their mothers and given to military families.[3] Mendia was known as "The Christian," as he liked to say to his colleagues: "Struggle against everything which is against western and Christian ideology" '

It's O.K. though because Church and State and Ayn Rand were inseparable.

Mendia received house arrest for his crimes, but I understand he was instrumental in helping Paul Ryan, the Catholic Objectivist, craft the House of Representatives' ideological austerity budgets from his confines before he died.

[Countme-In]

O.K., so he was complicit in human rights violations.

This, from a link at Sullivan:

'5.24 pm. This Pope will give Paul Ryan heartburn:

Francis also seems to be an opponent of austerity, most notably during his time as spiritual leader of Argentina when the country defaulted on its debt in 2002 … When the debt crisis hit in 2002, the church called in strong terms for a debt restructuring to take place which privileged social programs above debt repayment. They argued that the true problems in the Argentinian economy were, in their words, “social exclusion, a growing gap between rich and poor, insecurity, corruption, social and family violence, serious deficiencies in the educational system and in public health, the negative consequences of globalization and the tyranny of the markets.'

No man is perfect.

Unfortunately, there are 232 and 45 perfectionists in the U.S. House and Senate, respectively.

Will the new Pope be invited to sit in the "jump" seat next to the airplane door on the next CPAC retreat?

[wj]

Of course he won't be invited to sit in the jump seat. He won't even be invited to speak. Way, way too liberal for CPAC.

[ral]

"I love mankind, it's people I can't stand"
Linus">http://frabjousdays.wordpress.com/tag/charles-schulz/&docid=rbt9W066cyTsfM&imgurl=http://frabjousdays.files.wordpress.com/2008/07/mankind.gif&w=600&h=145&ei=OilBUazMJuaqywHfi4CIAQ&zoom=1&ved=1t:3588,r:3,s:0,i:91&iact=rc&dur=1543&page=1&tbnh=69&tbnw=288&start=0&ndsp=18&tx=137&ty=41">Linus van Pelt

[Countme-In]

Since the thread had opened a bit this, via Balloon Juice, in which a North Carolina State Republican says it right out so we politically correct liberal socialists don't have to:

'Rep. Kris Crawford, a Republican from Florence and also an emergency room doctor, supports the expansion but expects the Republican caucus to vote as a block against the Medicaid expansion.

“The politics are going to overwhelm the policy. It is good politics to oppose the black guy in the White House right now, especially for the Republican Party,” Crawford said.'

They are perfect, they can't be talked to in a civil manner in a civil society and every one of them carries heavy-duty weapons in case compromise with gummint is threatened.

All governance is blockaded, like Fort Sumter.ed.

These vermin are as ready for war and killing in this country as the Confederate vermin were the day after Lincoln was inaugurated in 1861.

I SO want a piece of about 20 million of these anti-American filth who somehow have been permitted to sh*t in the country's water supply for far too long.

These ilk are what drones were invented for.

[Countme-In]

In honor of the new Pope, the Capcha read "canonization SToxi"

[Countme-In]

It was SOUTH Carolina.

Which figures, and also doesn't matter because the cool thing about drones is that they can be redeployed with a touch on an IPad.

Copy that, and, uh, send FEMA into NORTH Carolina to tidy up that mess THEY were probably asking for.

[hairshirthedonist]

wj, I don't understand your response to my quoting Black Sabbath.

[wj]

HSH, it's just that I'm so removed from popular culture (of any decade since about 1970) that I didn't recognize the quote. (It's hard to make a relevant response to a quote that you don't even know is a quote, let alone the context.) Sorry.

[hairshirthedonist]

Missed you by a year. That song came out in '71.

[fake]

I'm in a rehabilitation hospital recovering from a stroke. Is it just me or is everyone here old and disabled last week i beat the pants off of some old guy playing Sorry. I kept calling him russell, but that wasn't his name.

[Countme-In]

More on the Pope, when he was young and in free fall ..... ible.

http://dish.andrewsullivan.com/2013/03/14/bergoglio-and-torture/