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No truth-handler, you
Feb. 21st, 2006 11:59 pm
High today, here: -2. Dewpoint then: -6. High dewpoint: -5.
High today in TO: 1. Dewpoint then: -5. High dewpoint: -4.
Low today on the balcony: -6. High: -2.2. Currently: -6.
This month's Harper's and Atlantic have shown up in the library. The only thing that seemed particularly worth bothering with in the Atlantic was Hitchens's review of the new book by The World's Most Important Marxist, which I had to look at immediately to find out who The World's Most Important Marxist is. Turns out it's Perry Anderson (editor of the New Left Review, a new issue of which, incidentally, has also just shown up in the libarary; it leads off with a short essay by Baudrillard, which has a lovely opening, counting down the numbers of cars burned per night until it reaches the number that "gentle France" (like many around the world, I'm sure, including me) was disconcerted to learn is the number of cars normally burned per night in France, namely, 90--the rest of the essay proposes that the problem with the idea of assimilating newcomers is that there's no longer anything for them to be assimilated to (not even a simulacrum?)).
The review is a fairly interesting read, insofar as Hitchens, being a former, and not entirely unrepentent, Marxist himself, shares something of Anderson's trajectory away from orthodoxy, and hence is rather more sympathetic that he generally is to leftists these days--until, of course, it comes to the matters of the former Yugoslavia and Iraq, in which instances Anderson's positions are, IIRC, "disgraceful" and so forth. It is, at least, evidently possible in Hitchens's universe for intelligent and honourable people to disagree with him on Iraq, but one does wonder whether it's possible to disagree with him intelligently and honourably.
Next: Lewis Lapham (who, come to think of it, is both aggravating and interesting in much the same way as Hitchens, from the other side), in this moth's Harper's cover story, lays out the case for impeaching Bush. It starts out with, basically, a condensed version of Rep. John Conyers's report on the, let's say errors in the Bush administration's case for war in Iraq, which is all very familiar and no more or less convincing than it ever was. What's kind of interesting to me about it, though, seeing it all laid out neatly over a few pages, is the sense I got that the administration went about building its case in the same way you'd expect a prosecutor to--start out with a presumption of guilt, construe every bit of evidence you can to support that presumption, ignore, minimize, rationalize away any bit of evidence undermining the presumption. There's nothing of lying in that. But the problem is that no defence gets a chance; it just goes straight from prosecution to judgment and execution.
Then Lapham moves on to the wire-tapping thing, which I haven't really been paying attention to, and which, the way Lapham presents it, really is the real deal. There's a curious sort of tension, though, between the Bush character in that story--who openly admits, if not proudly proclaims, what he's done--and the Bush character in the Iraq story.
Finally, I read the second half of a long article in Harper's re-presenting the HIV-does-not-cause-AIDS case. This was kind of dismaying, in that this was something that had seemed pretty convincing--certainly convincing enough that everyone ought to stop just assuming that Science Has Proven that HIV causes AIDS--to me a number of years ago, but it's an extremely unpopular view (which is a large part of what the article's about), and those who hold it tend to be thought of as dangerous, frivolous cranks who either have ulterior motives (see Thabo Mbeki) or are just irresponsibly being contrarian for the sake of being contrarion. Then it seemed to go away, and I was assured in the interim that they're now doing HIV testing in Africa such that AIDS at least can be correlated with HIV infection, whether or not it actually is--but the way this article tells it, we've never left square one on the whole thing, and there's no real evidence that the high-powered drugs aren't doing more harm than good. One interesting fact (at least, one presumes it's a fact): the majority of Kaposi's sarcoma sufferers are users of poppers. (I see there's a lot on the net about this.)
I suppose, someday, somehow or other, someone will get to the bottom of it, though with so much political and ethical interference in the science of it, it may be a very long time. And I learned yesteday that no one knows how Venus flytraps close. (There are two theories, both of which may be wrong.) We're far from knowing how much we don't know.
High today in TO: 1. Dewpoint then: -5. High dewpoint: -4.
Low today on the balcony: -6. High: -2.2. Currently: -6.
This month's Harper's and Atlantic have shown up in the library. The only thing that seemed particularly worth bothering with in the Atlantic was Hitchens's review of the new book by The World's Most Important Marxist, which I had to look at immediately to find out who The World's Most Important Marxist is. Turns out it's Perry Anderson (editor of the New Left Review, a new issue of which, incidentally, has also just shown up in the libarary; it leads off with a short essay by Baudrillard, which has a lovely opening, counting down the numbers of cars burned per night until it reaches the number that "gentle France" (like many around the world, I'm sure, including me) was disconcerted to learn is the number of cars normally burned per night in France, namely, 90--the rest of the essay proposes that the problem with the idea of assimilating newcomers is that there's no longer anything for them to be assimilated to (not even a simulacrum?)).
The review is a fairly interesting read, insofar as Hitchens, being a former, and not entirely unrepentent, Marxist himself, shares something of Anderson's trajectory away from orthodoxy, and hence is rather more sympathetic that he generally is to leftists these days--until, of course, it comes to the matters of the former Yugoslavia and Iraq, in which instances Anderson's positions are, IIRC, "disgraceful" and so forth. It is, at least, evidently possible in Hitchens's universe for intelligent and honourable people to disagree with him on Iraq, but one does wonder whether it's possible to disagree with him intelligently and honourably.
Next: Lewis Lapham (who, come to think of it, is both aggravating and interesting in much the same way as Hitchens, from the other side), in this moth's Harper's cover story, lays out the case for impeaching Bush. It starts out with, basically, a condensed version of Rep. John Conyers's report on the, let's say errors in the Bush administration's case for war in Iraq, which is all very familiar and no more or less convincing than it ever was. What's kind of interesting to me about it, though, seeing it all laid out neatly over a few pages, is the sense I got that the administration went about building its case in the same way you'd expect a prosecutor to--start out with a presumption of guilt, construe every bit of evidence you can to support that presumption, ignore, minimize, rationalize away any bit of evidence undermining the presumption. There's nothing of lying in that. But the problem is that no defence gets a chance; it just goes straight from prosecution to judgment and execution.
Then Lapham moves on to the wire-tapping thing, which I haven't really been paying attention to, and which, the way Lapham presents it, really is the real deal. There's a curious sort of tension, though, between the Bush character in that story--who openly admits, if not proudly proclaims, what he's done--and the Bush character in the Iraq story.
Finally, I read the second half of a long article in Harper's re-presenting the HIV-does-not-cause-AIDS case. This was kind of dismaying, in that this was something that had seemed pretty convincing--certainly convincing enough that everyone ought to stop just assuming that Science Has Proven that HIV causes AIDS--to me a number of years ago, but it's an extremely unpopular view (which is a large part of what the article's about), and those who hold it tend to be thought of as dangerous, frivolous cranks who either have ulterior motives (see Thabo Mbeki) or are just irresponsibly being contrarian for the sake of being contrarion. Then it seemed to go away, and I was assured in the interim that they're now doing HIV testing in Africa such that AIDS at least can be correlated with HIV infection, whether or not it actually is--but the way this article tells it, we've never left square one on the whole thing, and there's no real evidence that the high-powered drugs aren't doing more harm than good. One interesting fact (at least, one presumes it's a fact): the majority of Kaposi's sarcoma sufferers are users of poppers. (I see there's a lot on the net about this.)
I suppose, someday, somehow or other, someone will get to the bottom of it, though with so much political and ethical interference in the science of it, it may be a very long time. And I learned yesteday that no one knows how Venus flytraps close. (There are two theories, both of which may be wrong.) We're far from knowing how much we don't know.
