I just keep rolling, got to keep rolling
Aug. 17th, 2006 11:59 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
cincinnatus_c
High today, here: 25. Dewpoint then: 16. High dewpoint: 16.
High today in TO: 26. Dewpoint then: 13. High dewpoint: 18.
Low today on the balcony: 14.7. High: 26.1. Currently: 21.5.
For some reason, lately, on the Hamilton station that carries the Jays games (which I started listening to because the Kitchener station was running an ad with an obnoxious kid yelling "Jeter! YOU SUCK!"), they've had radio plays from the '40s on after Jays Talk. Nice idea--but they're so inane, I can't pay attention to them for more than five seconds at a time. The ads are pretty good, though. Last night, one of the shows was brought to you by Lava Soap--that's (cue bass choir) EL! AY! VEE! AY! EL! AY! VEE! AY! And another was brought to you by Colgate dentifrice, the tooth cream that stops cavities before they start. Tonight's first one is brought to you by Camel cigarettes, which your throat will love.
Read the last, Nietzschean, part of The End of History and the Last Man today, which made me feel a lot better, until I got home, listened to my answering machine, and then had to insist that, no, I don't need to think about it, I don't want a house, or a car. But that actually went over better than expected, and, apparently, that's the worst thing that's going to happen today, so, hey, that's an improvement.
If not for that, the worst thing that would've happened today would've been putting too much cilantro in Black Bean, Corn, and Avocado Salad v. 3.0. This is the first time I've put cilantro in at all, though the original recipe calls for cilantro; I'd put coriander in instead the last couple of times because I wasn't sure what thing in the grocery store was cilantro, though I did know that it was labelled "coriander"--the label just didn't point to anything in particular. Anyway, despite too much cilantro, it's still palatable, and even moderately positively tasty. In future versions, however, I'm going back to coriander.
Here is another Interesting Fact about avocados, or rather about what people think about avocados: people think that avocados evolved to be eaten by giant prehistoric herbivores such as giant sloths; the giant herbivores, they think, would eat the avocados whole, and the pit would come out, ready-fertilized, in a pile of dung. The Wikipedia page, from which, of course, I learned this Interesting Fact about what people think about avocados, goes on to state that the avocado has not had time to evolve an alternative seed-planting mechanism (or had not had time, when people starting cultivating them, or something). That kind of thing drives me up the wall--like, the avocado sees that the giant sloths have died off, says to itself, holy shit, I better think up another seed-planting mechanism, but, alas, the poor avocado isn't as bright as the other vegetables, and hasn't managed to think of anything yet ... but it's working on it.
I really wonder how many people assume some kind of agency behind what they think of as Darwinian evolution, because, from what I see, it seems like almost everyone does. (Among other folk Darwinianisms. I once discovered that a student of mine, in at least some ways a very bright guy, thought that giraffes got their long necks by stretching to reach things in trees. You know, each generation stretches just a little further, and eventually their necks are stretched waaaay out.) I suspect that far more people believe in intelligent design than think they do, including a lot of people who think that people who believe in intelligent design are idiots. If everyone was made to understand how evolution is really supposed to work ... well, I don't know what would happen. Quite possibly they'd just do their best to forget it, and go on supposing that the avocado trees saw some giant sloths in the neighbourhood, and decided to take advantage of the situation by making great big seeds surrounded by deliciously fatty fruit and a leathery skin to protect it.
Yeah, so, Fukuyama: I actually started at the beginning, and it was looking like a waste of time; there's a very crude interpretation of Hegel, and some ho-hum kulturkritikisch essaying ... flipped to the Hegelian section, where he says that his Hegel is actually Kojève (though I wonder if even Kojève interprets Hegel as crudely as to say that history begins with the master-slave struggle, which then leads to three millennia of aristocracy, before the American and French revolutions end history), so, OK, fair enough, I guess ... and then the Nietzsche section, which is, at least, stimulating, despite more essaying hand-waving. I wrote down a lot of it, for some reason, anyway.
One interesting thing he does is put the whole thing into a Platonic framework which, I'm sure, Bloom is largely if not wholly responsible for (Bloom is right at the top of the acknowledgements--toward the bottom, there is, in lieu of the standard thanks to a typist, a nod to the inventor of an Intel microprocessor--and the Straussiverse is otherwise well represented, though, funnily enough, Strauss is absent from the index, which is, I guess, the perfect tribute): liberal democracy is the triumph of reason and appetite, but has a problem with thumos; it tries to handle thumos by recognizing everyone equally. This is fundamentally unsatisfactory to thumos, which wants to be recognized as superior, but it is enough for the bulk of people, the last men, whose spirit is weak anyway. For the megalothumotic, however, liberal democracies provide outlets for thumos--competitive activities, including entrepreneurship and sports, with nothing much at stake--so that some can be recognized as superior more or less harmlessly. But this always threatens to be unsatisfactory, and so liberal democracy may, at any time, be bringing up its own grave-diggers. (Fukuyama waves his hand at May '68.)
The bit about sports made me want to get back to The Grasshopper, which I'd pretty much given up on, since, eventually, I think, it comes around to the idea that, in a perfect world, all you do is play games. In Fukuyama's post-historical world, hopefully all you do is play games. Like Strauss, he seems to think this is far less than perfect--but like Strauss's Schmitt, he doesn't want to come right out and say so. (But look, the only cure for the liberal bug is self-deception, eh?)
Eventually I will get around to saying something about the children at the zoo in the park. For today, suffice it to say that I saw a turtle in the pond. It was a large turtle, standing in a few inches of water, and at first I thought it was the backside of a goose. I was thinking, that goose has had its head in the water a long time. I started thinking: is its head stuck? Is it locked in a life-and-death struggle with a carp, which is, for some unfathomable reason, trying to eat its head? Then I realized that the goose's tail was actually the turtle's head.
High today in TO: 26. Dewpoint then: 13. High dewpoint: 18.
Low today on the balcony: 14.7. High: 26.1. Currently: 21.5.
For some reason, lately, on the Hamilton station that carries the Jays games (which I started listening to because the Kitchener station was running an ad with an obnoxious kid yelling "Jeter! YOU SUCK!"), they've had radio plays from the '40s on after Jays Talk. Nice idea--but they're so inane, I can't pay attention to them for more than five seconds at a time. The ads are pretty good, though. Last night, one of the shows was brought to you by Lava Soap--that's (cue bass choir) EL! AY! VEE! AY! EL! AY! VEE! AY! And another was brought to you by Colgate dentifrice, the tooth cream that stops cavities before they start. Tonight's first one is brought to you by Camel cigarettes, which your throat will love.
Read the last, Nietzschean, part of The End of History and the Last Man today, which made me feel a lot better, until I got home, listened to my answering machine, and then had to insist that, no, I don't need to think about it, I don't want a house, or a car. But that actually went over better than expected, and, apparently, that's the worst thing that's going to happen today, so, hey, that's an improvement.
If not for that, the worst thing that would've happened today would've been putting too much cilantro in Black Bean, Corn, and Avocado Salad v. 3.0. This is the first time I've put cilantro in at all, though the original recipe calls for cilantro; I'd put coriander in instead the last couple of times because I wasn't sure what thing in the grocery store was cilantro, though I did know that it was labelled "coriander"--the label just didn't point to anything in particular. Anyway, despite too much cilantro, it's still palatable, and even moderately positively tasty. In future versions, however, I'm going back to coriander.
Here is another Interesting Fact about avocados, or rather about what people think about avocados: people think that avocados evolved to be eaten by giant prehistoric herbivores such as giant sloths; the giant herbivores, they think, would eat the avocados whole, and the pit would come out, ready-fertilized, in a pile of dung. The Wikipedia page, from which, of course, I learned this Interesting Fact about what people think about avocados, goes on to state that the avocado has not had time to evolve an alternative seed-planting mechanism (or had not had time, when people starting cultivating them, or something). That kind of thing drives me up the wall--like, the avocado sees that the giant sloths have died off, says to itself, holy shit, I better think up another seed-planting mechanism, but, alas, the poor avocado isn't as bright as the other vegetables, and hasn't managed to think of anything yet ... but it's working on it.
I really wonder how many people assume some kind of agency behind what they think of as Darwinian evolution, because, from what I see, it seems like almost everyone does. (Among other folk Darwinianisms. I once discovered that a student of mine, in at least some ways a very bright guy, thought that giraffes got their long necks by stretching to reach things in trees. You know, each generation stretches just a little further, and eventually their necks are stretched waaaay out.) I suspect that far more people believe in intelligent design than think they do, including a lot of people who think that people who believe in intelligent design are idiots. If everyone was made to understand how evolution is really supposed to work ... well, I don't know what would happen. Quite possibly they'd just do their best to forget it, and go on supposing that the avocado trees saw some giant sloths in the neighbourhood, and decided to take advantage of the situation by making great big seeds surrounded by deliciously fatty fruit and a leathery skin to protect it.
Yeah, so, Fukuyama: I actually started at the beginning, and it was looking like a waste of time; there's a very crude interpretation of Hegel, and some ho-hum kulturkritikisch essaying ... flipped to the Hegelian section, where he says that his Hegel is actually Kojève (though I wonder if even Kojève interprets Hegel as crudely as to say that history begins with the master-slave struggle, which then leads to three millennia of aristocracy, before the American and French revolutions end history), so, OK, fair enough, I guess ... and then the Nietzsche section, which is, at least, stimulating, despite more essaying hand-waving. I wrote down a lot of it, for some reason, anyway.
One interesting thing he does is put the whole thing into a Platonic framework which, I'm sure, Bloom is largely if not wholly responsible for (Bloom is right at the top of the acknowledgements--toward the bottom, there is, in lieu of the standard thanks to a typist, a nod to the inventor of an Intel microprocessor--and the Straussiverse is otherwise well represented, though, funnily enough, Strauss is absent from the index, which is, I guess, the perfect tribute): liberal democracy is the triumph of reason and appetite, but has a problem with thumos; it tries to handle thumos by recognizing everyone equally. This is fundamentally unsatisfactory to thumos, which wants to be recognized as superior, but it is enough for the bulk of people, the last men, whose spirit is weak anyway. For the megalothumotic, however, liberal democracies provide outlets for thumos--competitive activities, including entrepreneurship and sports, with nothing much at stake--so that some can be recognized as superior more or less harmlessly. But this always threatens to be unsatisfactory, and so liberal democracy may, at any time, be bringing up its own grave-diggers. (Fukuyama waves his hand at May '68.)
The bit about sports made me want to get back to The Grasshopper, which I'd pretty much given up on, since, eventually, I think, it comes around to the idea that, in a perfect world, all you do is play games. In Fukuyama's post-historical world, hopefully all you do is play games. Like Strauss, he seems to think this is far less than perfect--but like Strauss's Schmitt, he doesn't want to come right out and say so. (But look, the only cure for the liberal bug is self-deception, eh?)
Eventually I will get around to saying something about the children at the zoo in the park. For today, suffice it to say that I saw a turtle in the pond. It was a large turtle, standing in a few inches of water, and at first I thought it was the backside of a goose. I was thinking, that goose has had its head in the water a long time. I started thinking: is its head stuck? Is it locked in a life-and-death struggle with a carp, which is, for some unfathomable reason, trying to eat its head? Then I realized that the goose's tail was actually the turtle's head.
