beforeness asked: Caro is a really good writer and is brilliant at tying in the broader political context of a given moment and historical detail, but I think the LBJ ones in particular you'd enjoy as containing a lot of "#quotes" type material.

Cool!

beforeness asked: Have you read any of Robert Caro's Lyndon B. Johnson biographies?

Nope.  Should I? (I have had The Power Broker recommended to me but the length in conjunction with my limp-and-tentative interest in the subject pushed me away, and that’s the extent of my experience with Caro)

beforeness asked: RE your post about the enemy on social media, Dan Brooks wrote a little about this in sports media combatblog[.]net/tag/egg-manning/

Oh, interesting, thanks – he is talking about the very same concept, although he has another name for it.  (“Egg-manning,” as in straw-manning but for sentiments that some random person on twitter with the default egg avatar is saying.)

beforeness asked: I saw you were reading The Devil's Pleasure Palace - does it argue that critical theory is literally satanic? It seemed to be that way from the summary on Amazon, but then he was getting interviewed in National Review etc. and it seemed that theory would be a bit far for them to entertain.

I’ve only read a few small portions of the book, but from what he says at the outset: he thinks that the Eden story of Genesis is a kind of “ur-Narrative” that captures deep, universal elements of the human experience which are always at work in any historical moment.  Sort of like Campbell’s monomyth (which he mentions and treats as equivalent) – except it’s not just “people universally see their experiences in these terms” but “these are the correct / most useful terms for understanding human reality.”  So when he says “Satan,” he doesn’t (necessarily) mean a literal guy so much as “the thing currently ‘playing’ Satan in the latest iteration of the universal human propensity to re-enact the Genesis story”

But then, the author is a believing Christian (I think?), so presumably he thinks this correspondence is not a coincidence – that it’s the result of the Bible being right about stuff – and so he may well believe that this Satan is also a literal guy?  He doesn’t say that, though, and does include phrases like “Whether one views the combatants in the struggle between God and Satan ontologically, mythically, or literarily […]”

beforeness asked: Just realized I've been misreading Yudkowsky as Yudfowsky for years - re: that great Dril/Yud post & the thing he says about the big problem in AI research, do you know if he's seen the film Her or what he thinks about it?

I dunno – I don’t get the impression he sees many current movies, or at least he doesn’t talk about them.  I do know that a lot of transhumanists expressed interest in the recent AI risk-themed movie “Transcendence” (and most of them disliked it, I think).

beforeness asked: I didn't know he had anything to do that, I meant his own sketch show, it seems it might be up your alley www youtube com/watch?v=tJCd-F4VDaU (I also just saw the Irigaray stuff, I'm really curious if any "sex realist" types have ever cited her as proof of how basically true their views are "even this feminist sees it")

Oh, OK, I’ll check it out!

I really wouldn’t be surprised if someone had cited Irigaray in that way.  I keep getting the sense that a lot of these people like Irigaray who write in really obscure, confusing styles actually have very conventional (even reactionary) views about a lot of things, and are essentially using novelty of style to make up for banality of content (in an academic atmosphere where novelty is valued).

beforeness asked: Have you ever watched the Armando Iannucci Shows?

I’ve watched the first episode of I’m Alan Partridge and thought it was pretty good, but didn’t feel like watching more.

beforeness asked: Oh I wasn't really complaining, I just thought it was funny (I also underestimated how long that passage is)

Oh okay, cool.  I figure I’ll leave it hidden anyway because I could imagine it annoying other people on mobile.

beforeness asked: Before I looked up the context on that dinosaur quote, I thought it was saying that all plots in literature were variations on dinosaurs

In theoretical simplicity, if not accuracy, the Dinosaur Makeout Reduction beats the Seven Basic Plots by a factor of seven

beforeness asked: Your racehorse name crashes my tumblr app I try to scroll past it so fast

Sorry, I forgot that readmores don’t work on mobile apps.  I’ll go back and hide the post since I think most people have seen it at this point anyway