Crooked Timber Look Like Flies

I m late to the party, but that doesn t mean I haven t enjoyed it. Chris Day by Day Muir has been account of an incandescently ignorant s he perpetrated about Kantian nihilism . Muir made it worse with an .

(Honestly, you d think someone who had just been so roundly spanked could come up with a better a posteriori proof joke.) Then, bless him, he tried to figure out some way to mock . I think: Way to miss the entire point, cretin, was .

People started to feel a bit sorry for him.

Ouch. This is getting to be like watching a cat toying with a still-living mouse.

Gromit
No, it s like watching a still-living mouse pretend to be a cat and kill itself.

Back to Kantian nihilism . A few commenters starting at Yglesias site, I think have scrupulously noted that nihilism was a charge first lodged against Kant by Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi.

There s on the man at the Stanford Encyclopedia. I happen to have just read Andrew Bowie, [amazon]. I ll quote a few bits about Jacobi, because who doesn t love a bit of esoteric piquancy with their transcendent absurdity?

Siva Vaidhyanathan from the recent to boycott Israeli academics who don t disassociate themselves from their country s policies.

Please boycott me. While you are at it, boycott all other American professors.

Do not invite us to conferences. Do not publish our work. Do not read our blogs (after this post, of course).

We have a lot to answer for. I am an American academic who has not done enough to prevent my government from launching an illegal and counterproductive invasion of a sovereign country. On my watch, my country has also imprisoned thousands of innocent people without charge and without instigating a process for demonstrating their harmlessness.

It has engaged in massive surveillance of communication both overseas and domestic without regard for domestic laws or the Fourth Amendment of the Constitution. Many of my fellow American academics have failed to prevent our government from doing these and many other bad things. So we deserve to be punished.

Clearly, we are craven collaborators.

This is a far better response to the silliness of the motion than Larry Summer s over-the-top claim that the boycott was , which grants the authors of the motion a level of world historical significance than they sorely lack. Their self-importance smacks less of Julius Streicher than the .

Steven Poole s on the sorry affair is also worth reading.
Update: as this is degenerating into the usual pro/anti Israel fight, I m not allowing any further comments.
via , Dan Hill has written a on the creative (but slightly creepy) ways in which Lost is beginning to invade the real world.

Some have speculated that the show is only being produced a few episodes in advance, as the screenwriters are wrangling the numerous ideas generated in fans forums into the script But the most sophisticated tactic I ve seen deployed thus far lasted for a few seconds on-screen, and has yet to play out fully online. In series 2, episode 13 ( The Long Con ), the Hurley character is casually seen reading a tattered manuscript found in one of the suitcases washed up on the beach. He shows the name of the prospective book: Bad Twin by a Gary Troup , and makes an off-hand complimentary comment on the content.

And the scene moves on. However, this book, Bad Twin, . Scroll down and check the About the author section to discover that Lost s fiction and Amazon s facts have collided

Time to get cracking on that essay on Sir Thomas Browne s Urn Burial methinks.

So it looks as though John Micklethwait, currently US editor, is probably going to be the new editor at the Economist; the final decision is due to be announced tomorrow. It s down to a two man race between him and Ed Carr, and not that many people are betting on Carr ( in contrast to a few days ago, but that s a ). To the surprise of many, Clive Crook didn t make it to the final two, which is unfortunate in my books Crook is somewhat conservative for my taste, but also a good journalist who would have made a very decent editor.

Ed Carr, from all I ve heard, would be a fine editor too, but things don t sound good for him.
I have to say that my first reaction is to wonder whether it s too late to cancel the recent renewal of my Economist subscription. I expect the Economist to be vehemently pro-market, but by reading certain kinds of stories with a skeptical eye, and by skipping past certain others, you can find a lot of value in its pages.

It has a clear ideological bias, but it isn t usually actively dishonest. But Micklethwait, together with his scrofulous sidekick Adrian Wooldridge, was responsible for The Right Nation which is one of the lazier and more dishonest books on American politics that I ve had the misfortune of reading in the last few years, and for the Lexington column which has shown a pretty reliable track record as a purveyor of Republican talking points. There are still a lot of very good people working for the magazine but I worry that it s about to undergo a quite substantial deterioration in intellectual quality.

Update: It s Micklethwait as expected.