So Brad Bird gets bundles of Netflix cash to make his long-shelved dream animation project … and his aesthetic vision is to recreate George Lucas’s version of Coruscant from the worst Star Wars film ever made?
So Brad Bird gets bundles of Netflix cash to make his long-shelved dream animation project … and his aesthetic vision is to recreate George Lucas’s version of Coruscant from the worst Star Wars film ever made?
Ultimately I think, if given the choice, people will pick home-cooked, locally-grown, heart-felt digital meals over factory-farmed fast food technology every time.
That is Anil Dash, in “Endgame for the Open Web” (h/t: Alan). It’s a lovely sentiment and a wonderful peroration of an article, but this kicker leaves me less rather than more persuaded. After all, the analogy is to fast food versus healthy, home-cooked meals. We know what’s better. But, given the “choice,” what do people in fact opt for?
Phaedrus 253a:
ἰχνεύοντες δὲ παρʼ ἑαυτῶν ἀνευρίσκειν τὴν τοῦ σφετέρου θεοῦ φύσιν εὐποροῦσι διὰ τὸ συντόνως ἠναγκάσθαι πρὸς τὸν θεὸν βλέπειν
You could translate the bolded clause as: “an impetuous compulsion to see God.” Or in Alexander Nehamas and Paul Woodruff’s translation, “their driving need to gaze at the god.”
Socrates in Phaedrus 256b:
οὗ μεῖζον ἀγαθὸν οὔτε σωφροσύνη ἀνθρωπίνη οὔτε θεία μανία δυνατὴ πορίσαι ἀνθρώπῳ.
Jesus in John 15:13:
μείζονα ταύτης ἀγάπην οὐδεὶς ἔχει, ἵνα τις τὴν ψυχὴν αὐτοῦ θῇ ὑπὲρ τῶν φίλων αὐτοῦ.
An excellent essay in The Point by Campbell Scribner. Titled “Internal Goods,” it uses MacIntyre’s account of rationality, moral reasoning, and the university as a lens for understanding both the tragedy of Jason Arday and the response to it on the part of academics.
Quote:
In colleges of education, one often hears the slogan “all education is political,” which people repeat with the certainty of moral truth. And it is true. But it is also a truism, a phrase that one can utter without fear of contradiction: either others agree and confirm the statement, or they disagree, reveal their political bias and confirm the statement. The mistake is in the circularity. All education may be political, but it does not follow that politics is all education is, that power is the only or even the best criteria through which to evaluate teaching, learning and research. To imply otherwise is merely to beg the question. When students or colleagues inform me that all education is political, I sometimes ask whether all education is not also cultural, spiritual, artistic and moral, and why we never talk about those aspects? I have yet to receive a clear answer.
And:
Context, power, intention and articulated reasons are all important, but they can only be judged by similarly situated peers proceeding on shared norms. This is what accusations of “hounding” or “piling on” in the Arday scandal seem to miss: once one acknowledges that there are meaningful distinctions between academic critics, investigative journalists, opinion columnists and random online trolls, it becomes difficult to see exactly who is being blamed for what, and on what standard we should expect them to act differently in the future.
Yesterday on the blog I wrote about the (perhaps unwitting) heteropessimism of the Australian TV show Colin from Accounts.
Read Leah Libresco Sargeant on “anti-anti-family policy."
“The AI Apocalypse is Already Here," by Gregory Conti in Compact, is an early front-runner for essay of the year. I plan to blog about it later.
Read Caldwell on “Why the AfD Wins."
You don’t have to share Caldwell’s political sympathies to find his analysis illuminating—if every report out of Germany amounts to little more than scaremongering with euphemisms and epithets, we will continue to fail to understand what is happening right now, both there, here, and everywhere else.
This is a wonderful, carefully written theological reflection on aging, appearance, and death. Kudos to Jen Pollock Michel (and to the authors she reviews).
I laughed hysterically throughout The Rewatchables' episode about James Cameron’s Aliens. Self-recommending.
Read Adam Roberts on Philip Hensher’s new book A History of the Novel in Britain. The avoidance of all genre, general tone of condescension, and reliance on “judgment as summary” are damning indeed.
I’m not the direct audience for it, but Timothy Burke’s policing of his fellow leftists on Cold War politics and those who lived through it is both wise and laudable.
Deadline interviews Paul Schrader about his new film: come for the Calvinism, stay for the Plantinga/Wolterstorff shout-outs:
DEADLINE: I wanted to ask what by now you’ve learned about guilt and inherent vice or human fallibility? You’ve explored these themes a lot across decades. What have you learned about those qualities by this stage in your work?
SCHRADER: Yes, guilt is the gift that keeps on giving. I was raised within a guilt-driven form of Protestantism: Calvinism. The notion of total depravity is very important. “Our righteous works are like filthy rags” in the eyes of God. The TULIP represents the five points of Calvinism: Total Depravity, Unconditional Election, Limited Atonement, Irresistible Grace and Perseverance of the Saints. That gets hammered into you. I was raised to believe that we are incapable of salvation. You had to accept it by grace. It was a puzzle box of a conundrum. But it was also a great education. I’m even wearing my Calvin shirt today. Unlike many from evangelical churches, John Calvin was a hardcore intellectual. He believed you could think your way into heaven, and he constructed this whole edifice of thought, the Institutes, two volumes of it. I took it in college. It was all logic with one little pinhole of faith. But of course, a pinhole of faith is about the same size as a barn door of faith because once you let faith into the argument, all the logic and all the reasoning in the world doesn’t matter, and so that was the whole gimmick of Calvinism: to try to think or reason your way into salvation, but you need to have that little pinhole of faith…
DEADLINE: Do you resent this upbringing in any way? Given how formal and strict it sounds…
SCHRADER: Not at all. It was great. My college [Calvin College/University, Michigan] has fallen a little behind. It was a premier liberal arts Christian school, and those schools, primarily because of funding, are drifting more to the right. And so, when I went to school, the idea of liberal arts, thinking, and philosophy was very much in the Christian tradition. It’s become less so now, which is a pity. But I did not feel encumbered. A number of my professors went on to become quite famous philosophers such as Nicholas Wolterstorff and Alvin Plantinga. The whole notion of Christian philosophy was very invigorating, and I think that gets sort of short shrift by some people who just assume that because you have faith, it means you don’t have to think.
I also try to be a moral realist, in the sense that I don’t confuse expressing opinions about various evils done by foreigners with providing material assistance to the victims of those policies. Condemning Han supremacy from my desk in New York State is not brave, it involves no sacrifice or risk, and it doesn’t even take much in the way of moral acuity. At most I might be holding up norms where I have influence. At worse [sic], and when done with too much self-regard, bombastic moral pronouncements on activities over which you have no real influence is a kind of seductive substitute for real moral action. I’ve always admired more the European aristocrats who, when really scandalized by an evil in a world beyond their borders, go out and travel to it themselves and get directly involved by volunteering in some way. Some, of course, get caught up in horrible enthusiasms. But Roger Scruton actually helped to hold seminars behind the Iron Curtain. That may not be as glamorous as carrying a gun against some tinpot and his militias, but it involved real work, and potentially real danger and sacrifice.
Read Paul Kingsnorth’s eulogy for Berry: “In the end … Berry will be proven right.”
See also my 2021 essay on Berry for The Point titled “When Losing is Likely."
I’m heartbroken about losing Wendell Berry, though he died full of years, at a good old age, at the end of a live well lived. I hope to write about his impact on my life later this week. Until now: may he rest in peace and rise in glory!
Matt thinks that, given the nature of forgiveness, the act of forgiving is (a) dependent or contingent upon the repentance of the offender and (b) impossible to do for those who have wronged us if they died unrepentant. I lack the time to respond in full now, but I disagree!
Luke Burgis’s conversation with Tyler Cowen was a pleasure to listen to; it made me like Burgis more than I did already.
Tyler, convert already!
I’m sure you don’t need me to recommend that bombshell essay by Tyler Austin Harper, but do also read his interview with Len Gutkin and Evan Goldstein at the Chronicle.
Dale Coulter’s “Protestant Mind” newsletter has quickly become indispensable reading. Check out his latest on the state of Christian Zionism.
Re: JD Vance’s new book, the three reviews to read are by Kevin D. Williamson (the ugly), Matthew Walther (the mean), and Julia Yost (the meta, and incidentally the just).
On the tragic case of Jason Arday, the two best things to read are by Jesse Singal and Graeme Wood.