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2004-10-08 15:10
�1. Austro-Yorkshirean Empire, communication difficulties
in:
A group of foreign doctors left baffled by South Yorkshire slang are
being taught the local dialect so they know when their patients feel
"champion".
The seven Austrians are fluent English speakers but were left confused
by patients feeling "jiggered" or "manky". But now doctor-patient
relations in Barnsley and Doncaster have improved after the local NHS
trust compiled a special Yorkshire language guide.
In a German-speaking country, I think, such a problem could not have
arisen. The excellent Kauderwelsch �berphrasebooks are available in a
a series of volumes covering the dialectal variations of the language.
(I myself intend to acquire at the first opportunity a Berlin accent
you could cut with a knife.)
�2. Elfen Elfreide sells out!
N�r Aftonbladet bes�kte Akademibokhandeln i Stockholm fanns inte en
enda av hennes b�cker kvar.
- Vi hade tre b�cker av henne p� tyska och en p� engelska, men dom tog
slut direkt, s�ger Mats Eriksson p� Akademibokhandeln.
When Aftonbladet visited the Akademibookshop in Stockholm there wasn't
a single one of her books left.
"We had three of her books in German and one in English, but they went
immediately," said Mats Eriksson of the Akademibookshop.
The Akademibookshop, incidentally, is the bookshop in
Stockholm; it is where this 'bladet also seeks literary sustenance
when it is in town.
�3. Boring is the
new interesting
The European commission yesterday recommended that Britain's model of
corporate governance, including a powerful role for non-executive
directors and a fully-fledged remuneration policy, should be extended
to all listed companies in the European Union.
The transparency of directors' pay may not be the most glamorous
cause, but boring is what the EU does best. (The reason that the
French have always been in the vanguard of lobbyistes for closer and
deeper union is by no means because they desire any such something;
they simply get bored out of their Gallic minds with all the small
print and seek to liven things up with a Big Idea or two. It may be
silly but it's basically harmless. Now, Jacques, let's get back to
the draft of subclause 17.2.3.iii(b) in the framework document on
tractor inspection protocols. Yes, Jacques, we do have to.)
[Permalink]
The fantastique What
says a cow? is a superb resource!
We learn that Finnish sheep say "M��", and German ones "M�h", while
Polish sheep say "bee bee" and French ones "Bee-bee".
It is absurd to argue that this degree of similarity across such an extensive region could have arisen by chance, and it is well-known that
livestock vocabulary in general is strongly resistant to loans - when
English adopted French "mouton" as "mutton", it applied it only to the
meat and retained "sheep" for the animal itself, and it is surely
unreasonable to think that the sheep themselves would be more
receptive to loan words.
It is hardly to be disputed, then, that when Sheepkind first arose and
acquired the gift of bleating their first words must have been taken
the form CV, with a bilabial consonant C and a
front, unrounded vowel V of mid-height, and that this form, passed down from
sheep to lamb, has maintained an unbroken continuity through countless
generations.
* This paper was originally intended for inclusion in a Feindschrift in Honour of Merritt Ruhlen
[UPDATE: What says a cow? needs you! If you can fill in gaps in their database, and supply sound files of your pronunciation of the onomatopaeic text in your language, why not nip over and help them out?]
[Permalink]
2004-10-08 10:00
John von Johnenbelle brings
to our extensively unsought attention an interview with Janet
"Ring-a-ding" Radcliffe Richards ("Is it really she?" you ask or
enquire, and I have the pleasure to assure you it is), laboring under
the headline "Bioethics,
Darwin and Clear Thinking". (Again with all these
clarities! It is the Applehood and Mother Pie of
neo-scholastiques, is it not? I am rapidly approaching the point
where I feel a need for a genealogical enquiry into the discursive
functions these such words play in neo-scholastique texts.)
Anyway.
She has a theory, which is hers, that ethical claims should be
investigated by seeking a premise from which they rationally follow.
Here is an example, pertaining to the prohibition of abortion:
'Now the good clear reason sounds easy: you can say the foetus is a
full human being with a right to life. But although some people do
consistently hold that position, it can't justify the the abortion law
in countries like this one, which allow some abortions but not
others. So I set about trying to work out whether there was any
coherent principle that could justify half-and-half laws like
ours. And the only one I could find was punishing women for sex. It
sounds preposterous - but I didn't come to this from any feminist
intuition. It just seemed to be the only principle that came anywhere
near giving a coherent basis for the present law.
(The Argument From Imaginative Poverty, hoorah! Shall we prove that
p?
Now, p implies q, which is clearly true, and I can't
think of any other reason why q. Thus p.)
This such theory belongs to a class of theories, including those of
Freud and Marx, for example, in which the
ostensible explanation that persons offer in order to account
for their opinions and actions, is claimed to be false and rejected in
favour of a hidden, true esoteric* explanation in terms of
machinations of the id or the dialectical unfoldings of the class
struggle or whatnot. (Brian Leiter, in particular, likes to refer to
such approaches as hermeneuticses of suspicion.)
And, of course, a common way to counter such a proposal is to invoke
empiricisme in an attempt to reject the ontological status of the
whatnot in question, and I was just dusting off the Popper bat in
preparation** when it suddenly occured to me that Radcliffe Richards
hadn't actually proposed any such whatnot.
It is presumably this feature that entices Johnenbelle into calling
this - with apparent approval! - a "moderate" hermeutics of suspicion,
but we have no particular enthusiasme for such a Slight Readjustment
Of Some Values. Luckily Radcliffe Richards goes on to provide a
get-out clause that I, for one, could smuggle Belgium through:
'We know that there are lots of good reasons for limiting choice. It
needn't be anti-liberal, because it's often rational to choose to
limit choice. Given that it seems to be very deep in our nature to
look for people to blame when things go wrong, I think we might well
decide as a society that there were certain things we should put
beyond our choice, because the problems caused by our being
responsible for too much would be greater than the problems that came
in the natural course of things. I suspect in the long run those are
going to be some of the reasons we have for limiting choice.
'This is where a potentially good argument for not allowing too much
genetic manipulation comes in, even though there's nothing
intrinsically bad about trying to improve your children. One worry is
the obvious one of creating too much inequality. But another is that
children would be able to blame their parents for too much, and
parents able to blame other people too much for their children. Women
feel guilty enough when their children turn out wrongly as it is. So I
think we're going to have to think about restraining choices, not
because it's hubris or against the will of God, but because we may not
want to cope with having so much freedom.'
Now, bear with me just a moment, Varied Reader; I need to be
uncharacteristically precise: blame is not simply an
attribution of causal responsibility; it additionally involves
adopting an emotional attitude.
So, we might rationally wish (can you rationally wish, by the way? I
can't) to limit freedom precisely because persons are intrinsically
irrational and may react in undesireable, emotionally conditioned,
ways to the consequences of their or others' actions. As a
(malicious) example, we might impose restrictions on the way wimmins
should be allowed to dress, because otherwise men's passions may
become irrationally inflamed and they may not only behave improperly,
but also blame the wimmins for this. (Since this is the Interweb, I
should state explicitely that I do not endorse this argument: I do not
endorse this argument.)
In fact, once you accept that your the real (dare we say esoteric? We
do dare!) purpose of your ethical system - or if you insist
on being "moderate", a very strong constraint on it - is to serve as a
homeostatique mechanisme for a society of fundamentally irrational
persons then the wheels have pretty much come off the Rationaliste
Ethics project.
(We nonetheless look forward very much to Radcliffe Richards's
forthcoming moderate masterpiece Civilisation and the Persons Who
Are At Least Occasionally Less Than Entirely Content In It, should
she choose to write it, or her A Handbook of Polite Conversation,
As Related To The Author By Mr Zarathustra.)
* We acknowledge a (purely terminological) debt to to Leo
"String-along" Strauss for the latter term. We have never read
anything by Strauss, which is by all accounts plenty, but "esoteric"
is lots of fun to say.
** This would indeed be against my principles, if I had any.
[Permalink]
2004-10-07 (utc+1)
�1. I like the wikipedia
Anent, as we say these days, Wilhelm von
Humboldt:
The great work of his life [...] was interrupted by his death
Bulwer-Lytton, eat yer heart out!
�2. The Nobel prize for writing about prinsessor
It has been won
by "Elfen" Elfriede Jelinek for her nice play "Prinsessdramer".
�3. Giving and taking away, a bi-handular approach
The Interweb German dictionary we used was obliterated into tiny
fragments when Collins concluded that giving things away for free was an
unsatisfactory business model, and we have been without one for a
while but now we have a new one.
Say hello to Leo, everyone.
[Permalink]
2004-10-07 samwidge (utc+1)
Oh, Denmark!
Denmark hopes to claim the North Pole and search for
oil in high Arctic regions, the Science Ministry has said.
It announced that the country would send a team to try to prove that
the seabed beneath the North Pole was a natural continuation of
Greenland.
Just for that, I'm now backing the Gr�nland independence campaign, and
don't think I'm not. (This story is also available
in Danish.)
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2004-10-07 morning (utc+1)
We certainly disapprove:
Det danske ukebladet skriver i morgendagens
utgave at kronprins Frederik (36) og kronprinsesse Mary (32) venter
barn.
The Danish trashbladet [Se og H�r] writes in morningday's
edition that Kronprinsessmary is expecting a child.
We're treating this as just a rumour, for sure, and one other than in
the best of taste, although we are not currently backing the invasion
of Denmark to confiscate Se og H�r's biscuit stockpiles, we
shall certainly be imposing a set of sanctions to prevent them from
acquiring biscuits, or the materials required for their
biscuit-construction programmes.
[UPDATE: According
to Aftonbladet, that most excellent of 'bladets, the Danish
court's custom or habit is to announce such happy somethings at the
17-week stage, and not before, whereas the kronprinsess is allegedly
at 14-weeks.]
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2004-10-06 tea (utc+1)
Lib�bladet:
L'Internet a instaur� une forme de d�mocratie participative entre les
�jihadistes� et leurs sympathisants. La Toile a aussi acc�l�r� la
diffusion d'id�es, de rituels et de pratiques d'un bout � l'autre de
la plan�te. Ses vid�os sanglantes, qui n'�pargnent aucun d�tail, sont
autant de modes d'emploi. �Il y a une surench�re de la violence et du
spectacle de la violence�, selon Anne Giudicelli. Ce n'est sans doute
pas un hasard si l'essor du virtuel a suivi la chute, en novembre
2001, du r�gime des talibans en Afghanistan. D�territorialis�e,
Al-Qaeda est devenue une id�ologie et des m�thodes � t�l�charger. Plus
besoin de recruteurs dans les mosqu�es : le Web s'en occupe.
The Internet has inaugurated a form of participatory democracy among
the "jihadists" and their sympathisers. The Web has also accelerated
the diffusion of ideas, rituals and practices from one end of the
planet to the other. Their gory videos, which spare no detail, are at
the same time instruction manuals. "There is an infatuation with
violence and the spectacle of violence," according to Anne Guidicelli
[formerly with the French foreign ministry]. It's surely no
coincidence that the expansion into cyberspace followed the fall, in
November 2001, of the Taliban regime in Afghanistan.
Deterritorialised, Al-qaeda has become an ideology and some
downloadable methods. No need for recruiters in mosques these days:
the Web's taking care of that.
Briefly: Al-qaeda is a brand, not an organisation; only terroriste
information wants to be free in these enlightened days; unconstrained
democracy is not panacea among horrible persons (see also the
Switzyland).
(BTW: You know how washing up becomes insanely attractive as an
essay deadline approaches? This is called
displacement - "A psychological defense mechanism in which
there is an unconscious shift of emotions, affect, or desires from the
original object to a more acceptable or immediate substitute." If I
still believed in causality, and especially geopolitical causality,
this would be how I would explain Iraq.
Altogether now: "What do you mean 'fail'? I suppose you'd rather the
dishes were still dirty, wouldn't you? I suppose you'd rather I died
a slow and lingering death from poor crockery hygeine?")
[UPDATE: Compare the Beeb's dossier on the
Jihadiste Web, which is as inane as only one prepared by professional
analystes could be.]
[Permalink]
2004-10-06 samwidge (utc+1)
�1. Get 'em while they're cold, they're luvvly
Yummy seals, again. But this time, even the German trashbladets are
taking the
opportunity to claim the moral high ground:
�Pervers ferie: Seldrap for 165 euro� het det i g�r i den st�rste
tyske avisen Bild-Zeitung.
I dag oppfordrer avisen alle tyskere til � ringe den norske
ambassaden i Tyskland eller fiskeriministerens kontor i Oslo.
"Sick holiday: Kill a seal for 165 Euros", wrote the biggest German
'bladet Bild-Zeitung yesterday.
Today the newspaper suggest that Germans should ring the Norwegish
ambassador in Germany or the Fisheryminister's office in Ooshloo.
So, essentially, some touriste organisations are pointing to the bad
PR as a reason to forgo the yumminess of seals, but I for one am not
expecting such an argument to easily prevail.
�2. Prinsess A hatcheck
Yup.
�3. It isn't cheap being a prinsess!
Let alone a kronprinsess, of course. Mette-Marit (sadly hatless)
is getting a pay-rise of 100,000 Norwegish zloties. Buy yourself a
bonnet, Mette-Marit, you know you want to! With that kind of cash,
you might even have enough left over for a glass of whiskey or a nice
seal hunt.
[Permalink]
2004-10-06 morning (utc+1)
I am making progress in German, although I am still very much a
beginner. But I was all sulky the other day, for reasons that do not
concern my Varied Reader, and decided on a little retail therapy, so
I immanentized the actuation of the Quadrophonique Nietzsche Project:
- Frenchy-French.
(I went with Livre de Poche based on a good experience with their
edition of Descartes' Discours. And also because it was cheapest.)
- Tysky-Tsk
in Reclam's iconic yellowjacket.
- Svenska
(It's the only one in a svenka "Pocket" edition, and I am not made of
money.) and
- Silly Engleesh
But the Silly Engleesh gives me pause - I was going to buy the Penguin
edition, to match some other volumes of Laughing Boy's that I have
accumulated over the years, but I have lately taken a dislike to
Penguin's new policy of shameless price-gouging, and as it turns out there
isn't a Penguin edition anyway.
So it's either the ugly
American edition of the Kaufman (why so ugly, Random House?) or
the irritatingly
smug new Oxbridge translation which bills itself Nietzsche:
The Gay Science - With a Prelude in German Rhymes and an Appendix of
Songs and features significantly more text by Bernard Williams
than I had anticipated ever giving house-room too.
I was leaning, nonetheless, towards the Oxbridge, until I went to
Borders to check it out. It is so annoyingly big! Not a full
'Merkan-style bloatiback, admittedly, but definitely, and quite
gratuitously, larger than a paperback book needs to be. So I'm
putting the decision off. Maybe I'll just decide to work with
Triphonique and limit myself to languages that haven't
institutionalised suckitude at all levels of their philosophical text
dispersal industry, and Anglophonia will tremble before my principled
boycott. (It worked for Nelson Mandela, after all.)
[Permalink]
2004-10-05 16:42
They reinvent themselves as Interweb start-ups, instead. Search
engines have been a particularly egregious tar-pit for disenriching
the underclued, and here's another
one:
"We want to build a system that understands language and connections
between words," he says. The baseline of authority this will be based
on is a dictionary.
"It is the most objective source we have and it's where we can get all the rules that govern language," says Mr Gardner.
Mr Gardner of Kozoru (for it is he of it!), your project is so
spectacularly doomed that it was, in fact, endorsed as an example of how
things could be worse at the last Emergency General Meeting of the Dinosaur Prophets' Society when
the full implications of the impending comety kaboom had sunk in.
A terrine of doom in a doomberry sauce served with a coulis of
doomfruit and some lightly-steamed doomsprouts is less doomed than
your project. HTH
[Permalink]
2004-10-05 15:03
Worry not and have no fear
It's never too soon for Yuletide cheer!
- Blind Spacefish Santa
Says Woolworths:
The Christmas shopping season is about to begin again. Woolworths is
getting ahead of its High Street rivals by starting three weeks
earlier than last year - with plans to get its seasonal stock on the
shelves by mid-October.
Slackers! Borders has had its obstruction ("special offer") tables
piled high with grotty plebian junk (parodies and humourous tidbits
for the middle-aged gentleman who might conceivably think he already
has enough ties in your life) for a couple of weeks now.
Personally, I am very fond of Twinkletree, but I do not especially
wish to feel under seige from it. Twinkletree season at the Ch�teau
von Bladet starts with the first festive sn�kaos of the season, and
not before.
[Permalink]
2004-10-05 10:20
Un fardeau aussi lourd qu'inutile
We are having computer issues, of which my contribution to their solution is to sit downstream of responsibility, whining.
While we're waiting, how about a nice story?
Det var en g�ng en prinsessa som bodde i ett land l�ngt, l�ngt borta. Hon hade l�mnat allt bakom sig. Sin karri�r inom finansbranschen, sina v�nner och till och med sin religion.
Hon l�mnade allt med ett glatt hj�rta, eftersom hon hade tr�ffat en prins. En alldeles egen dr�mprins, som var v�rd alla uppoffringar.
Men pl�tsligt en dag uppt�ckte prinsessan att dr�mprinsen bara var en grodprins.
Once upon a time there was a [beautiful] prinses who lived in a land far far away. She had left everything behind her: her career in financial business executry, her friends, and even her religion.
She left them all with a joyful hear, since she had met a prins. A dream prins of her very own, who was worthy of all these sacrifices.
But suddenly one day the prinsess realised that the dream prins was only a frog prins.
It's frogprins Joaquim from now on, for sure.
2004-10-04 tea (utc+1)
�1. Pig fat, yum yum
Ukrainians celebrated their love of pork fat at the weekend by
consuming a giant sandwich filled with 40 kilos of the "delicacy"
called salo.
�2. Elisabeth Tarnished-Washboard speaks!
We are longstanding fans of Ms Harrassed-Washstand, the doughty
spokesperson of the court, but in this instance the focus or limelight
is for once on the Treehouse-Wobbler herself. (What is a
hovmarskalk anyway, you ask or enquire? It means, quite
simply, that she is chef f�r Kronprinsessans hovstat tillika
hovstat hos Hertigen av V�rmland och Hertiginnan av H�lsingland och
G�strikland. Several of those such persons, we may suspect, are
the lovely kronprinsess Vickan.)
�3. Bier
Two of the world's largest brewers have gone on fresh spending sprees.
Inbev, the world's largest beer-maker has bought Germany's Spaten
Brewery; while rival, and global number three, Heineken has purchased
Russia's Sobol.
We like bier ("�l")!
�4. An upper bound on the number of Nobel laureates in economics
There are no (0) Nobel prizes in economics, and therefore there are no
laureates in the discpline. Capische?
You can send my Bank of Brunei Prize for Countning in Memory of A J
"Freddy" Neaubelle (no relation) to the usual address.
[Permalink]
2004-10-04 samwidge (utc+1)
I'd ask "Why?", but we'll settle for some what at a
pinch:
What is analytic philosophy? One familiar answer contrasts analytic
philosophy with so-called Continental philosophy, whose major figures,
in addition to Hegel, include Schopenhauer and Heidegger. But the
labels probably hinder more than they help, not least because the
study of Continental figures by card-carrying analytic philosophers is
a thriving contemporary concern.
Says them. (They are Alex Byrne and Ned Hall.)
Another answer is that analytic philosophy is a body of theory or
doctrine, but disagreement between analytic philosophers is
widespread, and there is no substantial common core. If anything
unites those who today would label themselves "analytic philosophers,"
it is a method - one that stresses the importance of clarity and
rigorous argument and sees as its end product truth and knowledge, not
harmony with the universe or promotion of the good.
You hear a lot of this "clarity and rigour" malarkey if you get
within earshot of neo-scholastiques during the rutting season, for
sure. I suppose "dessicated inanity" doesn't have quite the same ring
as a battle cry, isn't it?
The article eventually concludes that analytique philosophes have
achieved approximately nothing (in particular, its contribution to
knowledge and truth conspicuously lacks extensiveness), and (rather
less compellingly) that this is compelling evidence of just how clever
they are. Well done, neo-scholastiques!
[via]
[Permalink]
2004-10-04 morgen (utc+1)
The Desbladet yummy seal of approval:
Nu provocerar Norge hela v�rlden igen - och lockar turister med
s�ljakt. - De g�r precis som vi g�r med v�ra �lgar, s�ger Jan
Guillou, en av f� svenskar som sj�lv jagat s�l.
Now Norway is provoking the whole world again - and luring touristes
with seal-hunting.
"They're just doing what we do with our yummy mooses," says
[popular novelist] Jan Guillou, one of the few Swedishes who hunts
seals himself.
I love the bit where it says "Norwegish fishermen have been
complaining for ages about the yummy seals coming over here, eating
all our fish." The shame!
[Permalink]
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