Steven Douglas Maloney

Archive for the ‘Blogging’ Category

Sigh… major crash happened.  Recovered what I could… missing about a year.  Found a nice template generator, can’t afford the money to register it.  For now, suck it up and deal with the stuff that says “Trial” on the borders.  Bear with me on this stuff.

Have people made good use of the similarity in ridiculous formulation between Cap ‘n Trade and Cap’n Crunch?  Yes?  Oh good.  

What think you of the new layout?

This is one of those awkward, personal blog posts.  I have not been blogging regularly for some time.  While my life has been fantastic the last two years, the trajectory of my blogging has, in general, been heading in the other direction.  What has caused the decline?  Several major events.  I have lived in three different cities, I got married, I finished my dissertation, I produced five articles for publication.  But I think that the most devastating blow was that when the halcyon days of Nashville is Talking gave way, I lost my sense of community as a blogger, and I haven’t really recovered.  

There are not really many blogs that I read that read my posts in return.  I’ve lost that sense of reciprocal exchange through blogging because I read blogs that are above my station as a blogger.  And the less I blog, the worse the problem.  There are some exceptions of course. Flattered doesn’t begin to cover having David Estlund and Peter Levine post comments on my site.  But overall, I have felt lost.  

I don’t really have any conception of where I live, my career is in limbo, my friends are all far away, and I just have not felt like I knew what direction I wanted to go with this blog.  Should I specialize more? Professionalize?  What should I be conversant in?  

Well, here it is.  Despite the irregular postings, and the rough couple of years, I think I have come back around in my aims for Cows and Graveyards all the way back to where I started.  I don’t want to be conversant about any one particular thing, I just want to be conversant.  I want to share what I’m thinking and seeing with you, dear reader, and I want to hear from you also.  I have missed blogging like the way I did two years ago, and I sat here this morning and said to myself, “all in, or all out: which is it?”  It’s all in.  I’m back in business.

Alright, due to the problems I’m having running my own site (I don’t want to get into them), I’m back on wordpress.com. I’m going to import some of my more recent posts from there to here, and then I’m just not going to bother with the old site.  Update your feeds accordingly.  

I hadn’t read anything off of aldaily lately, and wow, there are some curious articles about.  There’s one about Bono at the G8 summit, here’s the argument:

1. Bono’s band is overrated
2. Bono is a self-obsessed pop star
3. Bono acts like he’s an important world leader for his own ego (I can only assume that Angela Merkel rose to the German Chancellorship on an elevator of compassion and charity)
4. Bono pretends to speak for Africa,  but the writer did some research, and it turns out that Bono is Irish
5. Bono portrays Africa as a place that needs a handout when it does not.  The writer doesn’t specify, but it seems to be implied that Bono’s claims about AIDS infection, Denghy Fever, and Malaria are at best overstated and at worst… not even true.
6. Bono cares about poor people but makes a lot of money. One either likes ending Malaria or money, not both.

We are to conclude from the article Bono=Bad.  We are to conclude from Africa policy, the reasonableness of the positions of the G8, and what critical analysis of Africa in terms of its humanitarian status, its political stability, and its future potential security threats to the West that in short… well, that Bono is a preening jerk and can’t be trusted.  Also, I hate to say it, but if you really think that U2′s best album since The Joshua Tree is All That You Can’t Leave Behind, you have NO U2 hating street cred and apparently missed the entire early 90′s when MTV was practically certain to have something from Achtung, Baby!  pretty much every hour.

If only that were the end of it.  But nooo.  I also unfortunately clicked on the Philadelphia Inquirer’s review of The Atheist’s Bible and finally, a New York Times piece hitting Rorty’s “postmodernism.”  The last one actually seems to take on the following narrative structure:

1. I was reading this book about this Brazilian tribe by Levi-Strauss
2.  I heard that Rorty died
3. Rorty believed in a broad relativism, a liberal ironism if you will.
4. These people I’m reading about, they don’t actually practice things that Rorty would approve of, but I think Rorty has to approve of them.
5. Without Natural Law there is only relativism.
6. Therefore Rorty believes chopping peoples heads off is okay.
7. The Brazilians perished because they didn’t procreate much, and they didn’t procreate much because they didn’t have natural law (!?!!?!)
8. This is what will happen to postmodernism too.

To all who still cling to the desperate hope that natural law is either a.) real or b.) important; please note the following.  Atheists, phenemenologists, pragmatists, whatevers, don’t all think that life is meaningless and useless just because there is  no natural law.  We that this is what YOU think already.  If you didn’t already think that, you would not constantly elide the fact that you think natural law is important with evidence that it is in fact real.  However, Rorty’s decision to believe that liberalism is justifiable without natural law has been done very smartly by pragmatists, phenomenologists, absurdists, analytic philosophy, and epistemology.

In the face of all of this work, those who argue such positions are apparently not owed reasons according to the natural law that natural law theorists cling to, because they respond to the attack on their slippery elision by simply repeating it.  At which point the only thing that is apparently natural about the natural law is man’s tendency towards ideology for explanation.

Why not spice it up and respond to your critics like so: “The interpretation of Your Mom as the horizon of every possible attempt to understand Being is its provisional goal.” It has every hint of the reasonableness of your current position, plus its got that modern day, in-your-face attitude of a Robert George or a Roger Scruton.  And if your called juvenile, one can always fall back on that great Orwellian Natural Law move: All can understand some parts of the natural law, but some can understand more parts of the natural law better.  Then simply inform the conversant that you are, in fact, one of those privileged few, and your colleague who is calling you out is simply a sorry simpleton who does not know any better.  Hence anything you say is right, anything that anyone who disagrees says is a Godless, groundless imbecile, because of the rules that are universally true, that I just arbitrarily picked as so.  See.  That would be much more fun than claiming that atheists have no purpose or that Rorty has no justification for his liberalism without consulting their views on such matters.  It would, at least, make links from aldaily more readable.

Three cheers for Nashville Blogging, former NYU debaters, and reflected glory from this piece by Forbes.

I’m sorry for those who watched the test of my webcam, I meant to take it down before anyone saw it, I just needed to put it up to see if the audio worked and then I forgot to take it down.  The offending post has since been removed.

Brittney Gilbert at NiT has announced that she is leaving the blog. I literally cannot imagine anyone else running the site, and although I have never met Brittney, and have really only talked to her over email about getting a check from WKRN, it certainly feels like a big loss to know that she will not be running the site anymore. I hope that your writing career will be able to take off in another direction after the work you put in for WKRN and for the Nashville community as a whole.

I decided to add the Becker-Posner blog to my Google Reader list. Let the poetic contemplation of life’s meaningfulness begin! Already, I have been treated to a couple of existential gems:

Becker on Immigration:

Under this plan illegal immigrants already here could legitimatize their status, but they would be subject to an additional penalty by being forced to pay a fee, or fine, to the federal government. The exact amount would have to be determined, but suppose it would be $10,000-$15,000. Any illegal immigrant who could pay that fee would be granted immediate legal status similar to that granted by the Senate bill to those here five or more years. If ten million illegal immigrants each paid $10,000, that would aggregate to $100 billion, or about 5 percent of the total federal government budget.

Posner on Military Compensation for Military Deaths:

This is an expected cost of military employment and in a competitive labor market will be reflected in the wage. That is, the wage rate in a competitive labor market will compensate a worker for any risks that the particular employment can be expected to create–a proposition that goes back to Adam Smith. If the risk materializes, the employee has no cause to complain, provided it was the risk that he understood the job involved or should have understood it involved when he signed up for it, because he was compensated in advance. Yet that is not how the public views our military casualties. That is the economic puzzle which I address.

Richard Posner, believer that there are “wolves and sheep” in the world, and his definition of wolves are people who manipulate market positions to get low-wage labor to go hunt down one’s enemies for them. Honestly, good for him. I’m glad that he’s not deterred by the fact that we all stopped listening at “baby market.” This stuff is better than the Comics page (apologies to Andrew).