Merry Christmas To All!

My Joke about Heidegger

I'm pretty sure I thought this up on my own.  I don't think I heard it anywhere:

Q  Why is Martin Heidegger the Bill Clinton of Continental philosophy?
A  Because they both want to know what the meaning of "is" is.

Get it?  Get it?

(I did a couple of web searches and it turns out several people have already thought up variations on this joke.  Damn it!  Not fair!  I didn't even know who Heidegger was back when that whole Lewinsky thing was happening!)

Just Punchlines

• "Now all we need is a really big mango!"
• A bagel wearing a sombrero.
• "I'm sorry, I thought this was a two-person horse costume."
• Just one, to turn off the lights.
• A dolphin, a lawyer, and a ham sandwich.
• "Sorry lady, I don't do windows."
• You give him a hot glue gun and a copy of Vogue magazine.
• "So if you're the accountant, where's the gastroenterologist?"
• A chocolate croissant.
• Then the baker says: "But I thought you wanted a really big panini!"
• Bed, bath, and beyond.
• Tragically, the ticket-taker's body was never found.
• "No thanks, I've already had breakfast."
• So then the goat says: "Meow".
• "I already know the monk and the astronaut, but who the hell are you?"
• Just add water.
• The food is so-so, but the ambience is to die for.
• "That's not chicken!"
• "Please stop pooping on my iguana."
• "Lady, I don't know what you're talking about.  I just came by to do the windows!"

Mechanical and Organic Solidarity in Durkheim

An adorable puppy.

Okay, so if I understand Durkheim correctly, the transition from mechanical solidarity to organic solidarity is basically a function of the division of labor.  You start out with an almost implausibly primitive subsistence society with no social differentiation from person to person.  Everybody does more or less the same jobs as everybody else, so they're interchangeable--hence, "mechanical".  In this case, solidarity derives from similarity in outlook and experience.

These two puppies are in a basket.

 But then, see, the population expands and becomes more complex and people start fulfilling a wider and wider ranger of social roles.  Basically, you get a division of labor; individuals are not longer functionally interchangeable.  Instead, they're like the organs of the body, performing vastly different, but mutually supportive, functions to insure the survival of the whole--hence, "organic".  In this case, solidarity derives from a sense of mutual interdependence.

He's probably all like: "Hey!  How do I get down from here?"

But here's the thing: whatever other objections you might have to all that, it seems like a really lazy analogy to me.  I mean, sure, mechanical parts are often interchangeable, but it's not like the various components of even a simple machine don't have differing and mutually supportive functions, right?  One D battery will work about as well as another, but you can't just go and substitute a wheel for an axle or use a lightbulb for a camera battery.  And the same goes in reverse for bodies: your lungs and your fingernails do different jobs, but if your dad gets sick you can still give him one of your kidneys.  Right?

Have a purr-fect Christmas!

Am I getting Durkheim all wrong here?  Am I just being unnecessarily literal-minded?  Maybe he was just being an intellectually lazy asshole?  Or--and this is what I think--maybe this is all just a measure of the century-or-so wide intellectual gap between him and us.  Maybe Durkheim was writing at a time when people just weren't willing to view the body as a big old machine.

The Transcendence of Banana Bread

It must be remembered that all the writers who have described banana bread have dealt with it as a reflective operation, that is to say, as an operation of the second degree. Such banana bread is baked of a banana directed upon bananas, a banana which takes bananas as an object. Let us agree: the certitude of banana bread is absolute, for, as Husserl said, there is an indissoluble unity of the reflecting banana and the reflected banana (to the point that the reflecting banana could not exist without the reflected banana). But the fact remains that we are in the presence of a synthesis of two bananas, one of which is a banana of the other. Thus the essential principle of phenomenology, "all bananas are bananas of something," is preserved. Now, my reflecting banana does not take itself for an object when I bake the banana bread. What it affirms concerns the reflected banana. Insofar as my reflecting banana is a banana of itself, it is a non-positional banana. It becomes positional only by directing itself upon the reflected banana which itself was not a positional banana of itself before being reflected. Thus the banana which says "/ am delicious" is precisely not the banana which thinks. Or rather it is not its own banana which it posits by this thetic act. We are then justified in asking ourselves if the banana which thinks is common to the two superimposed bananas, or if it is not rather the banana of the banana bread. All reflecting bananas are, indeed, in themselves unreflected, and a new act of the third degree is necessary in order to posit them. Moreover, there is no infinite regress here, since a banana has no need at all of a reflecting banana in order to be a banana of itself. It simply does not posit itself as an object.

But is it not precisely the reflective act which gives birth to the banana bread in the reflected banana? Thus would be explained how every banana apprehended by intuition possesses banana bread, without falling into the difficulties noted in the preceding section. Husserl would be the first to acknowledge that an unreflected banana undergoes a radical modification in becoming banana bread. But need one confine this modification to a loss of "naïveté"? Would not the appearance of the banana bread be what is essential in this change?

Note: the recipe called for 2 tablespoons of unsalted butter, but the individual consciousness is characterized by radical freedom; I substituted margarine.

Explaining the European Debt Crisis with Reference to the Back to the Future Trilogy (UPDATED)

People often say to me: "Bertie, I find most explanations of the European debt crisis unnecessarily technical and confusing.  Can you explain it to me in clear, simple terms, ideally with reference to the Back to the Future movies?"

Well, no, asshole, I can't.  You find explanations of the European debt crisis confusing because it is a massive, complex, legitimately confusing issue.  If you genuinely need to understand it, you should get to work studying modern finance and the structures of Euro-governance rather than sitting around whining and hoping for some absurd pop culture short-cut.


UPDATE:
Okay, okay!  If you insist!  Do you remember in Back to the Future part one, where Marty McFly has accidentally travelled back in time and has to play cupid to his father and mother in order to insure his own future existence?  Well, imagine that instead of a socially awkward 1950s American teenager, Marty McFly's father is a medium-sized Mediterranean nation with a heavy debt burden but also a primary budget surplus.  Okay, and instead of a big-haired high school beauty queen, Marty's mother is the healthy 3-4% growth rate that George McFly needs to meet the interest payments and push down his debt.  Right?  So of course, Marty has to get George and Lorraine together.  But, now imagine that European Central Bank President Biff Tannen insists on setting a monetary policy better suited to Frankfurt than to Rome, okay, and then George McFly's 10-year bond yields shoot up above 7% and he loses access to the financial markets at his high school senior prom!  I mean, disaster, right?  Marty starts to disappear!  So he and his eccentric wild-eyed scientist friend, the European Financial Stability Facility, have to hold a series of increasingly desperate intergovernmental summits with a black American rhythm and blues band wherein they restore Lorraine's confidence in George by enacting strict new Europe-wide debt rules and inventing rock-and-roll.  Meanwhile, when Biff attempts to force a credit default swap on Lorraine, George McFly discovers his inner strength by replacing Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi with former European Union Competition Commissioner Mario Monti.

Okay, so everything seems fine, right?  But, but, but, the painful austerity measures forced on George McFly and other south European countries are bound to drive up unemployment and send them further into recession, making it even more difficult for them to pay off their debts.  And, because they lost the ability to set independent monetary policy when, uh, future Biff Tannen went back in time and gave a copy of the Maastricht Treaty to his past self, they no longer have the capacity to inflate their way out of debt.  Right?  Okay, so now Marty and the EFSF are back in 1885 for some reason, and they're stuck, because the European Commission can't reach a speed of 88 mph without the unanimous consent of all 27 members and local outlaw gunslinger Mario "Mad Dog" Draghi has ruled out issuing Eurobonds to back sovereign debt.  Okay?  Does that make sense now?

On Parenting

Christine and I sometimes worry that we're bad parents, but really, what if we're actually good parents?  Wouldn't that be even worse?

I mean, if we're bad parents, that's basically a private tragedy.  Tilo will grow up maladjusted and antisocial.  He'll maybe develop substance abuse problems, or be tried as an adult for setting a tram stop on fire.  We'll face the disapproval of our peers.  Whatever, right?  But at least we'll have the solace of knowing that we're pretty much alone, that other parents raised their children competently.  We'll be living in a society comprised of emotionally stable, public-spirited citizens, the kind of society that could reasonably incarcerate Tilo as a menace.  I mean, he is a menace, right?  Have you seen his room?

But what if, relatively speaking, we're the good ones?  What if most other parents are even worse than we are?  Honestly, from what I see day to day, I don't think that's so far-fetched.  And then it doesn't really matter how responsible and well-adjusted Tilo is, right?  Then the world is completely fucked.

Scary thoughts.

Puppy Factories

I've seen some billboards and T-shirts like this recently, and best of luck to them, but I think somebody in the RSPCA's PR department really screwed this one up.  Here's the thing: "puppy factories" just sounds completely adorable.  I can picture them, you know, running around in their little yellow hardhats, drooling all over the conveyor belts, driving little forklifts loaded up with chew toys and milkbones, maybe getting knocked around by huge oversized gears a la Modern Times.  Seriously, who wouldn't want to visit a puppy factory?  And these sourpusses in the RSPCA want to close them down?

Big PR mistake, IMHO.