A Quick Twirl
Another miscellany, because there is an ever-growing backlog of items I want to point out and perhaps say a few words about – and I only have six hands you know. Be reasonable. I’m going as fast as I can, here, but I can’t do everything. And besides I have this mosquito bite or spider bite or moth bite or whatever the hell kind of bite it is just right at the bend of my elbow, on top where it gets maximal chafing from my sweatshirt, and it itches, dammit! It’s been itching for days and days and days and days. Normally bites stop itching after a few days, am I right? But this one just keeps on going, like the Eveready battery rabbit. Nasty thing. So naturally this interferes with my ability to write an individual N&C for every item I see. Besides I have burnout. No I don’t, that’s a joke. P Z Myers mocked bloggers who whinge about blogger burnout at Pharyngula yesterday.
There is another excellent post at Black Triangle on quackery and suckery. Anthony also quotes from an article which is one of the items in that backlog I mentioned, about Prince Charles and his presumptuous advice on medical matters. The doctor who gives the Prince what-for makes exactly the point I made about both P.C. and Juliet Stevenson a few months ago – the fact that they and people like them abuse their fame and influence. They ought to recognize that they are famous out of all proportion to their actual importance, for one thing, and that they are famous for things that are entirely separate from any kind of medical expertise, for another, so they really ought, morally speaking, to use immense caution before making the world a present of their opinions on such subjects. In cases where people can do real harm by getting things wrong, celebrity non-experts ought to think and think and think again before going on Radio 4 or talking to journalists about what vaccinations to get and how to cure cancer.
Your power and authority rest on an accident of birth. Furthermore, your public utterances are worthy of four pages, whereas, if lucky, I might warrant one. I don’t begrudge you that authority and we probably share many opinions about art and architecture, but I do beg you to exercise your power with extreme caution when advising patients with life threatening diseases to embrace unproven therapies. There is no equivalent of the GMC for the monarchy, so it is left either to sensational journalism or, more rarely, to the quiet voice of loyal subjects such as myself to warn you that you may have overstepped the mark.
Exactly.
And speaking of Stevenson, it was the MMR ‘debate’ she was opinionating on, and Harry’s Place has an interesting post on a Washington Post article on that subject. There’s a fair bit of silly verbiage at the beginning of that article, talking about Wakefield’s charisma and so on, but it settles down after awhile, and it does make the point that media coverage of this kind of thing tends to be grotesquely distorted – to pretend that it’s a 50-50 thing, that expert opinion is split, when that’s not the case at all.
And finally I thought this post at Brian Leiter’s about the state of Nietzsche scholarship was worth a read. I haven’t the slightest idea whether he’s right or not, but the look at the way institutional necessities can distort things is interesting.
Leiter thinks I’m a prat, by the way. But I’m not sure he’s chosen a very good example of my prat-hood. He just doesn’t like an article I linked to in News, that’s all. But I didn’t write it, after all, I only linked to it, and I don’t invariably agree with every single word of every article in News. If I had to go by that standard, our front page would be a tad dull.
So why are they posting prominent links (this used to be on B&W’s front page) to tabloid trash like this, which misstates Foucault’s views from top to bottom, and offers no rational criticism of any view he actually held, while offering up a series of fallacious arguments (ad hominems primarily–you would think Ms. Benson of B&W might notice that references to Foucault’s homosexuality do not refute his ideas).
Huh? Of course they don’t, but who says I think they do? The author of the article itself doesn’t even think they do, as far as I can see, and even if he did it wouldn’t follow that I do. A small point, but then I specialize in making small points.
The trouble with Foucault – and I speak here having actually read most of his stuff (unusually for me!) – is that he says so many different, confused things that it will always be possible for someone like Leiter to say: “Ah, but that is to misunderstand him”.
Discipline and Punish, for example, just does smack of lazy, moral relativism.
Actually, come to think of it, the funniest thing I remember from my days of Foucault exploration was in some collection of his interviews, letters, etc: at one point, he was burbling about the death of the author, autonomy of texts, etc. Then about six pages further on he was complaining bitterly that his critics had misunderstood him (which, needless to say, I thought, in my no doubt unsophisticated way, fairly hilarious)!
Personally, I think we should post more tabloid trash on our front page. It’d be a nice counterbalance to all the broadsheet trash which most bloggers reference.
Having said that, Leiter does a good job debunking all that creationist nonsense; and I’ve been told he’s a pussycat in real life. (Not literally a pussycat, I ought to add).
Whereas I, as you know, have read very little Foucault. But then I don’t restrict News links to subjects of which I have an exhaustive knowledge – good thing, or News would be empty.
Yup, that’s hilarious all right! (I’ve just been laughing a good deal at much the same kind of contradiction: Ross and Robbins of ‘Social Text’ in their response to the Sokal Hoax, one minute talking about the mystification and prestige of science, and the next minute talking about how unknown and unhip Sokal is. Pretty funny!)
Okay, more trash it is then.
Oh yes, Leiter does an excellent job. He pounced on that business of Harvard Law Review publishing creationist nonsense. I actually only mentioned his comment because I wanted to mention the Nietzsche post and didn’t want to seem stupidly unaware of his criticism of me.
Let’s put this all together. You have claimed, in the past three weeks, to be:
Six years old.
2 feet tall (or was it 3?)
And now, 6-handed.
Positively Lovecraftian.
I am having difficulty correlating all of this.
Insects have the proper number of limbs. There are very few insects which live 6 years, but none of them reach anywhere near 2 feet in height.
My next best guess is some sort of cephalopod, but perhaps that’s just my fondness for those clever invertebrates. You said ‘six hands’ so perhaps you have (at least) ‘two legs’ to qualify safely here. 6 years and 2 feet in height fit within constraints.
So, am I close? You have any other useful morphological facts (say, a beak?) to help out?
Upon futher consideration there’s always the robot possibility to consider.
Yes, I’m terrifying!
Difficulty correlating is it? Well what makes you think you’re supposed to be able to correlate it? Hmm? Your bourgeois hegemonic positivist scientistic discourse? Is that it? Think you’re supposed to be able to ‘classify’ me as a member of some ‘species’ or ‘phylum’ or ‘order’? To label me and name me and figure me out in your Western imperialist reductionist deterministic way? Eh? Eh? Well lots of luck! I don’t fit in all these foundationalist essentialist ‘categories’. I’m unique, I’m the quintessential Other, I’m sometimes a caterpillar and other times a mud puddle.
Mark, you’re so Western and ‘either/or’ in your thinking, when you should be Eastern and ‘both/and’.
Ah! Thanks, PM, for the key, and OB, for the added data! How could I have been so dense? I’ll have to up the voltage on my electroacupuncture device and perhaps increase my dosage of echinacea extract.
Cnidaria! It has the lovely metamorphic qualities of insecta with the morphological freedom of cephalopoda! It can encompass caterpillar and mud puddle, arms, height, and age! See, ‘both/and’! So, ‘medusa ophelia’, it all works out.
(It must have been very satisfying to write that, OB, with complete quotational inversion. Did you use cut and paste to get the word… scientistic…in there, or did you manage to type it?)
Oh, I managed to type it. What with the six hands and all.