PhilosophySquirrel Blog

I believe, my friends, that I have just written the next chapter of barbecue.

How can that be? Barbecue, and its holy trinity - Ribs, Pork Shoulder, and Brisket - are perfect already, right?

Consider this: Pulled pork - crusted Ribs.

I went to this local BBQ joint Friday, and got the Ribs and Pork platter. The ribs were full spareribs, not baby-back, not normally my thang. But these were quite good. I wasn’t too excited by the pulled pork, which was shredded too finely so that it lost its texture, and a bit dry. Also I think it needed a bit of Carolina-style mop sauce (basically cider vinegar, onions and peppers). But acceptable. Being old and all, I couldn’t snarf as much as I used to, so I boxed up the leftovers. And that’s where it begins.

The ribs, sauce and all (a very good sauce, too - tart and peppery - shout out to Williamson Brothers BBQ in Marietta, GA) wound up coated in the finely shredded pulled pork. I started to brush the ribs off, and suddenly it hit me what a genius thing had occured by accident.

Comrades, meat crusted in meat. The only possible way I could imagine toping this would be to wrap the whole thing in bacon. And I’m working on that.

Stanley Fish is at it again. Seems that recently, “Wine Spectator magazine” was the victim of a hoax designed to show that they really have no standards for reviewing restaurants (WS mag wound up giving a prestigious award to a fictitious restaurant). Fish, as ever a charlatan of the worst sort, takes the event as grounds for a defense of the journal “Social Text”, which was famously hoaxed by the physicist Alan Sokal. “Social Text” published a piece by Sokal, which he subsequently revealed to have been completely made up. It reads like farce to any serious thinker, but the postmodern quacks at “Social Text” lapped it up.

Some references are in order, I suppose:

Fish’s recent piece

The Social Text Affair (a classic piece of intellectual drama!)

Philosopher Paul Boghossian’s excellent post-game analysis of What the Sokal Hoax Ought to Teach Us

Reasonably accurate Wiki page summing up the affair (for the uninitiated)

The short version of FIsh’s defense of ST is this: They took Sokal on faith when he told them about scientific developments, as any reasonable intellectual ought to do.

“What’s the moral? The moral is not the one preferred by Sokal’s admirers – that what he did was a total refutation of postmodern arguments. . . .No, the moral is that a hoax that is sufficiently and painstakingly elaborated can deceive anyone if the conditions are favorable.”

It’s true that a clever enough hoaxer can hoax just about anyone, and that doesn’t prove much. But I urge everyone to look at the original Sokal piece. Better yet, read Boghossian’s excellent analysis, as it will speedily direct you to the relevant bits. Sokal went out of his way to leave clues that he was completely, well, full of shit. His paper is littered with absurd (and often wildly false) pronouncements about matters that any general intellectual - not just philosophers or theoretical physicists - ought to gape at. He did this on purpose, to make a point: It wasn’t just an elaborate hoax, it was actually a very transparent one. The man leads off with the claim

“It has thus become increasingly apparent that physical “reality”, no less than social “reality”, is at bottom a social and linguistic construct;”

for crying out loud, and it gets worse from there. “Liberatory mathematics”? The axiom of choice as connected to the pro-choice movement? I mean, seriously, WTF? You don’t have to know what the axiom of choice is to know that it probably has fuck-all to do with abortion. I could go on here, but really, take a look at the Boghossian piece, or better yet, read the original. It’s so transparently outragous that it completely vitiates Fish’s central claim: ST was not fooled by some master schemer with a diabolical, elaborate scheme, but rather, ST was done in by their own laziness and intellectual rot.

I don’t know why Fish feels the need to defend ST. He’s vaguely tied to their editorial board, but I believe him when he says he’s got no interesting connection to it. Perhaps it’s because he really does approve of their ricockulous postmodern garbage. At any rate, he falls completely on his face here. Yet again.

Anyway, to continue. I cross the line from Kansas to Missouri, and all of a sudden, school buses everywhere. I swear I must have passed at least fifty. And the best part - all but one or two are the short variety. So I will forever think of MO as “The Short Bus State”. My dad grew up here, so I try not to be too snarky. But it’s tough.

I cross the line into Illinois or Indiana or some such pointless state that begins with “I”. Kind of pretty actually but annoying. There’s signs everywhere saying your speed is being checked remotely. Eventually I realized that I am going to be in this state for about an hour, and I’m going to change the registry on the car anyway, so I say “Fuck it” and put the pedal to the metal. Kentucky goes much the same way. Tenessee was just a blur. I could practically hear the banjos. As soon as I cross into GA, I get a ticket. Damn.

Georgia is really pretty. I mean obscenely pretty. There are beautiful huge ancient green trees everywhere. I live next to someplace called Stone Mountain, which I’m told has a riotously funny (albeit unintentionally so) laser show celebrating the glory of the confederacy. I must go. The locals all say, “oooh, you live in Marietta? That’s next to Stone Mountain, that’s nearly five thousand feet tall!”

It’s hard to keep from laughing. Back in Boulder, when you take a leak, it falls about 600 feet before it hits 5,000 feet. But it is a pretty place. The drive to the grocery store is like you’re going through some kind of fairy tale forest. It passes by a really nice park, Kennesaw Mountain (they use that term “mountain” here very loosely), which is I gather the site where the Confederacy held off an assload of Union soldiers for thrity days or some such. (I never hesitate to ask, “so then they went and burned Atlanta and stomped the whole South, right?”) But very pretty.

I promise pics. The thing is you have to stand WAY back to really capture this house. It’s freaking enormous, with a massive yard that has several trees older than John McCain. Pecans, Black Walnuts, Hickories, and so on. In the evenings, there’s a veritable army of squirrels gathering all the nuts. It rules.

Well actually I’m off the road now. I have the bugs of six states encrusting my bumper. Colorado, Kansas, Missouri, Illinois, Kentucky and Georgia.

Crossing the CO state line was a bit bittersweet. I put the top down and drafted in behind some guy in a Chevy Suburban doing 95. Kansas is where almost all the bugs were. What a rotten flat lame state. I soent the night in Topeka, which is a pit. There’s nothing there at all! Next time, I’ll try manhattan. The collefge towns along the way seemed like the most civilized.

MO wasn’t much better, but it was very pretty. I passed something like 50 schoolbusses. The funny thing was, all but one or two were short busses. Bwahahaha. Skirting Kansas City and St. Louis (what a dive!) probably cost me 2-3 hours.

More to come, including pics.

Well, it’s all done, and I still have all my fingers.  The douchebags at the stone cutting place (Front Range Stone) dorked around so much that it took them nearly a month to cut our countertop, which won’t be ready until after I’ve moved to Atlanta. So there’s a piece of wood on the island counter instead of a nice piece of stone. Bastards. Pics of the (nearly) completed work:

Well, okay, just plain old physical foundations. Proceeding apace with tiling my kitchen floor. This replaces a vile, urine - colored linoleum (who the hell uses that crap, anyway?) and a wretched carpet that did nothing but gather stains. I don’t think the guy that built the house anticipated people actually using the kitchen.

Anyway, yeah, it’s a pain in the ass. But I did get to play with my new wet tile saw, which is an excellent and manly thing. It’s a hell of a lot better than hopping down to Lowe’s to have them saw the bastards, and hopping back when I realize it’s 1/32″ off.

I’ll post a pic of the whole thing when it’s done. For now,

Stanley FIsh’s recently made some rather astonishing claims over at his blog: To wit, he inveighs against professors pronouncing on political matters in class. Not quite: a professor may pronounce on the academic aspects of a political issue, but not on the juicy stuff, such as whether a theory is coherent, correct, plausible, and so forth.

A little back story: My current employer, the University of Colorado, wants to hire a “Chair of Conservative Thought”. This chair is supposed to not merely teach about conservative theory, but be an advocate or a pundit. in fact, he (or she) is supposed to travel around the state, preaching it. I’m in agreement with Dr. Fish that this is a colossally bad idea for a variety of reasons.

But Dr. Fish, as I pointed out, goes pretty far in explaining why he thinks this is a bad idea. Professors should argue for academic theories, he holds, but not for political ones.  For my own part I can’t figure out what the difference is supposed to be. As an example, Dr. Fish claims that it’s all right to talk about Marcuse and Strauss, as long as the professor limits themselves to “describ[ing] the positions of the two theorists, compar[ing] them, note their place in the history of political thought, trac[ing] the influences that produced them and chart[ing] their own influence on subsequent thinkers in the tradition.” But no professor - even a professor of philosophical political theory, or ethics, should “have the goal of determining whether the socialist or the conservative philosopher is right about how the body politic should be organized.”

Astonishing! This begs for the Barryesque anti-caveat “I am not making this up!” (see the original Fish blog post on the topic).

Nowhere is the distinction between ‘political’ and ‘academic’ questions clearly enunciated (what about questions like the above, which seem to me both political and academic?) And more importantly, there’s no point at which Fish actually gives any reasons why professors shouldn’t argue for political theories.

What Fish does (sort of) argue against is proselytizing. He offers examples of professors who penalized students for disagreeing with the political positions the professor endorsed. But these are two very different things.  It is of course unfair and unprofessional for any teacher to act that way - but this is so regardless of whether the issue is political or academic! If I endorse a Platonist metaphysics in a class, and penalize students for disagreeing with me, in discussion or class, I’m unprofessional (and ought to be disciplined). But of course, it’s possible to argue for (and endorse) a position, be it “academic” or “political” while being fair. You lay the position out, give the best arguments for it, show where you think it answers questions better than competitors, while at the same time acknowledging that there are some areas where legitimate counterarguments could be made. This isn’t hard - in fact, Dr. Fish thinks this is the right pedagogical procedure for dealing with so-called “academic” questions.  Why can’t the same techniques apply to “political” questions? No argument is given for this. None of the tired old usual suspects are trotted out (like the fact/ value distincion, or the public reasons / private reasons distinction). Is it because students are to emo to have their political views challenged? If that’s so, then the same should hold for religious, ethical, artistic, or really any category of view.

Dr, FIsh probably wants the same thing that we all want: fairness and evenhandedness in the classroom. It’s utterly mysterious why he thinks the only way to achieve this is to eliminate a major question - in fact, the most important question. In the end, the soundness of an ethical or political theory is what really matters. Everything else is window dressing.

Here’s a great piece on majoring in philosophy, at the NY times:

And a  great piece on the scientific worldview, also at the NYT:

And finally, an Op-ed piece at the NYT by the philosopher / economist Amartya Sen:

When he objects to Cypher

And crappy beer, who decides the calculus of utility

And the nature of objective truth?

He prefers Guinness.

-Sarah Ann Klymkowsky

Boy, am I sick of this schlub. Enough with the down-home cracker-barrel farm-boy act, already. I understand that most Americans like their news delivered with this intellectually low-caliber approach, since it serves to soothe and smooth the jagged edges off of painful reality. But enough with the crummy human interest stories and person of the week pablum. Why is it that a mainstream news show cannot ask hard questions, give in - depth discussions, and pursue stories? Don’t think I’m singling ABC out: the sad fact is that it’s the best of the mainstream lot. But watch ABC on a night when Stephanopoulos takes over: it almost starts to sound like Macniel-Lehrer, or BBC news. It’s news for adults. Gibson needs to go back to his Good Morning America fluff (or whatever wretched morning tabloid show he was on; it’s not like I’m up at that ungodly hour, anyway).