Padd Solutions

Converted by Falcon Hive

What do people who go to clubs a lot do in the club?

12:33 • , , • 0 comments



Unrelated to politics, history, philosophy, economics. Unrelated even to what's been the spirit of this blog - that spirit being "nothing", ("aether"?) since I never update the thing - since these are words and they exist. (Blogito ergo sum!)

I'm going to structure this post as a classical, Logic 101 piece of argumentation with the twist that after drawing a simple conclusion I'll be asking questions and maybe guessing answers. Even though I'll be talking about clubs, cholos, South Beach, and things that are scary and unfamiliar to me, I'll attempt to redeem myself in my own eyes by at least sounding hoity-toity and elitist while I do so.

Premises:

1. Miami has a very lucrative club (disco) scene.
2. Clubs make money by
2a. packing lots of approved people into a dark, loud, room of varying size and little furniture
2b. selling those people drinks at high markup.
3. To do this, clubs depend, to a greater or lesser degree, on promoters to spread the word about them.
4. Promoters know lots of people / Promoters have lots of friends.

Inferences:

5. After doing it for a while, a promoter finds there are certain people he knows who consistently show up to the club or clubs he promotes.

Conclusion:

6. These people form a sub-scene within the larger club scene: people who go to clubs frequently, or PWGTCFs

Questions:

7. If clubs are loud and dark and are often filled to capacity - and thus either preclude or hamper efforts at socialization outside of dancing/dry-humping - what do PWGTCFs do in clubs week-in, week-out?



A problem of how we speak about politics

14:09 • • 0 comments



I'm listening to Tony Judt's 2009 NYU/Remarque Lecture right now, and he's making an extremely good point: we don't know how to talk about politics any more, aside from being able to ask "is [a given policy] efficient [eg cheap]?" Rather than: Is it good? Bad? Fair? Right? Wrong?

More on this later.



Pretty Words

15:14 • • 0 comments

Nice phrases and sentences:

bricks made of mist


Hey There, Smart Guy

11:29 • , , • 0 comments


Richard Holbrooke is not only a badass, he's a smart badass. Which is why this post in Harper's is so very thought-provoking. What the hell does calling someone "smart" mean anymore?

Computers: Plug In, Learn From A God

12:13 • , , • 0 comments


Right, so Dave Van Ronk is the Bob Dylan your ex-hippie-turned-banker father never told you about 'cus he was never really that into the music anyway. Van Ronk was actually Bob Dylan's first New York City mentor/guru/object of worship. That should tell you something.

It won't tell you everything, though. For that, you should listen to his music. Here's him giving a guitar lesson on the old song "Green Green Rocky Road." Do your psyche - your soul, really - a favor and pick up a fifty dollar guitar and learn this.


Normative and Analytic, Continued

21:36 • • 0 comments



Right, so back to this topic.

Lying awake the other night thinking about it, I remembered something Michael Oakeshott said about something like this in a characterictically more elegant and approachable way (though he was talking about something else at the time, namely university education). Instead of using clunky terms like normative and analytic to describe something like Marxism being simultaneously a

- concept and

- a way of looking at concepts,

he employs the metaphor of a "literature" and a "language" to say the same. So as for dreary old Marxism, it's both a vast and often dry literature (what's with big philosophers being horrible writers?) as well as a very popular and in many cases useful language. What Robert Gilpin is talking about in the IPE book I'm reading is the latter being used to speak about the world and surviving well past 1989 because it does that fairly well.

***

Incidentally, what Oakeshott was describing in the aforementioned essay on education were vocational schools and universities -- each being valuable as teachers of literatures on the one hand and of languages on the other.

A school for plumbers, for example, is going to impart to its students a body of knowledge about plumbing - pipes, leaks, floods, and the behavior of water; in short, a literature - but it is not going to teach them a corresponding way of looking at the world.

A university, according to Oakeshott, is a "place apart" from the routine of practical life whose central task is to bring together and impart not just literatures but languages: there is a biological way of looking and talking about and solving problems in the world. A poetic one, too, and philosophical and mathematical and chemical and sociological ones as well.

It's a fine way of looking at education, even with its shortcomings. (Namely, one could argue that plumbers have a language all their own, and that they learn to speak and think and look and walk and talk - live, basically - with it. It would be difficult, but you could do it.) At anything, really. Another tool to put in your mental toolbox.

Normative and Analytic

12:40 • • 0 comments


I'm currently reading an interesting survey of international political economy by a Princeton scholar whose name slips my mind right now. It's a very well-written and seemingly balanced look at things; the author gives due weight not only to liberal and neoliberal political economy, but to the Marxist and nationalist varieties as well.

I want to talk about this book a little more, but an interesting way of parsing a particular theory came up in the man's discussion of Marxist political economy. That is that a given theory can and often does have normative parts - what "should" happen in a given situation - as well as analytic parts - "how" we approach a given situation.

Vis-a-vis Marxism, the author introduces the subject by way of its early-nineties downfall as the underpinning of large economic and political systems -- its normative aspect. But, the author continues to say, as long as economies undergo fast and unmerciful boom-and-bust cycles, or massive income inequalities exist between haves and have-nots, then Marxism and Marxists will continue to exist as purveyors of an analytical tool capable of asking questions about a given subject.

I found this very interesting, and it's a clean and simple way to look at - and crucially, to explain to others in conversation - a theory or document or ideology or set of ideas.

More on the IPE book later.

Knowing & Doing: Oakeshott on Plato

12:40 • • 0 comments



"In Plato's view of things, knowing and explaining are joint with making and doing. [...] What joins them is this belief that both knowing and doing are impossible without reference to the 'idea' [archetype or model] of what is to be known and the 'idea' of what is to be done."

(MJO, Lectures in the History of Political Thought. Imprint Academic: 2006)

Comments on this later!

American Holy War

19:39 • • 0 comments


Also, this:

The president of the United States, in a top-secret phone call to a major European ally, asked for French troops to join American soldiers in attacking Iraq as a mission from God. Now out of office, Chirac recounts that the American leader appealed to their “common faith” (Christianity) and told him: “Gog and Magog are at work in the Middle East…. The biblical prophecies are being fulfilled…. This confrontation is willed by God, who wants to use this conflict to erase his people’s enemies before a New Age begins.”

Armchair Judgment of Extremely Uncivil Healthcare Protests

19:35 • • 0 comments



I don't know what's really on the minds of the citizens currently ransacking their local congressperson's town hall meeting or office the country over. Some say they're little more than actors (scripts provided) paid or encouraged by special interests who seek to preserve the status quo of "no healthcare for one sixth of the population, poor healthcare for fourth sixths of the population, and good healthcare for rich people."

Others insist that despite whatever "astroturf" machinations behind the protests, there are genuine concerns amongst the citizenry that health reform - or health insurance reform, as the White House now bills it - would...what? Do something bad, probably.

Whatever the case, I'm surprised by the fickle nature of citizen protest in a country so in love with its freedom (something it behaves as if it invented and deserves eternal groveling for). Thousands of lower class American children are dead in a war - the Global War on Terror - that is now proven beyond even the tiniest sliver of doubt to have been a lie. Not an accidental white lie, mind you, but a grand deceit. Blood has been spilt, those who spilt it admit as much, and they sleep well at night.

And here you are, then, waving swastikas - swastikas - at the proposition of reforming citizens' healthcare. A bewildered semi-outsider asks "why this, and not that?" and further considers declaring the American Experiment a walking corpse being propped up and dragged around left and right in the hope of finding some gold (oil; LCD TV). Not unlike the plot to Weekend at Bernie's, now that I think about it.