new spat over Heidegger

Philosophers in France are enraged by a scandal-mongering review of a book accusing Heidegger of having "introduced Nazism into philosophy" - but somehow I cannot see this belated prosecuting of him (along with Carl Schmitt) for "thought crimes" as more than a publicity stunt... see Paroles des Jours

nice coffee table

for those who need something bigger than a gazillion accessories for their mp3 player of choice, there's a great iPod-like coffee table, featured on The Cult of Mac blog

California's population now double that of New York

The NY Times dumps on the other coast with a piece on regionalism.

Leo loves Tina (but he prays to dinosaurs)

Need I say more? He's only four and she's older by a few months, but I think he's smitten. Of course, Leo is (still) more interested in worshipping dinosaurs than chasing girls. He told me the other night that he prays to dinosaurs. He said this in both English and Chinese. I asked him quite stupidly "What do you say to dinosaurs when you pray to them?" prompting the impatient response, "And dinosaurs pray to me."

It's not about the message, it's the medium -- an open line of reciprocal communication with creatures he believes all powerful, gigantic, ancestral and impossibly distant.

The beginnings of religious feeling....

Rummy

This looks good. I've always been fascinated by this sexy megalomaniac seventysomething whose sociopathological indifference to the human and financial costs of incarnating his fantasies of militarism begs to be thoroughly investigated. Untidy: The Blogs on Rumsfeld by Tom Sumner

the dems are no opposition party

Frankly, I don't really remember a time when the Republicans were a minority party in the Legislature, but the Democrats are proving to suck at the task of testing Republican extremism. Read about it at The Gadflyer, and at The Nation .

I try to remind myself that things weren't all so great in the Clinton years, and that Clinton himself was mightily flawed, and might have to bear some responsibility for the turn to the right that we seem destined to travel at least for the foreseeable future, but it is fricking hard to keep a balanced view of all this.

Adorno's and Horkheimer's lessons about liberalism's inevitable seduction by fascism seems to be playing itself out with a vengeance: the combination of the most powerful culture and military industries in the world have hypnotized the American electorate. The Right-wing understood how to be modern -- through commodity fetishism AND militarism -- it seems that La Haye's Left Behind series is like one long product placement for Hummers -- and that there is no juggernaut more powerful in this puritanical nation than the combination of apocalyptic violence and large gas guzzling vehicles.

The Left is really being Left behind, especially when it proves itself so spinelessly ready to compromise with the Republicans on appellate court judges who worship corporate power and scorn anyone who dares to challenge it.

Dangerous Clowns

Dangerous Clowns Part 3 describes the sad state of academic freedom with College Republicans finding themselves gleefully shouting down adversaries with the damning epithet, "Communist!" and "Liar" in no particular order.

The state of public debate has never been great, but it has probably nose-dived recently. The rate of descent into McCarthy-era witch-hunting, self-censorship that Pamela Troy describes our being driven into by David Horowitz and company is giving me nosebleed.

I don't think we're in danger of regressing, we've gone back already, and in many ways, the alliances between outraged Republicans and Democrats that brought Joe McCarthy seem to have little chance of being revived.

MoveOn Pac puts a little star wars in to the Senate

Can you Save the Republic? See the ad, feel the power?

Is this good for George Lucas and bad for politics to make everyone believe that we are all innocent little R2D2's, rolypoly Yoda's fighting againgst the dark lords of the frist?

Are we avoiding complexity and politics and history by joseph campbellizing this whole situation into a 'journey of the hero' jungian piece of seductive but empty bs? And is it giving too much charisma to the extremely banal and perhaps even more evil Frist to compare him with Anakin Skywalker, savior of the galaxy gone very, very bad?

human rights crisis and no one seems to care

So Newsweek is pummeled into submission for reporting that Korans were flushed down the toilet, but prisoners have actually been "interrogated" to death in Afghanistan . The lack of public and official outrage, or I should say the tepid American response to all of this confirms one thing: the racist legacy of lynching and torture is being revived and re-enacted in the prisons of Iraq and Afghanistan. I think it is a bunch of white underprivileged and undereducated kids who have not been taught any sense of responsibilty for the racism of the their forebears.

As long as we as a nation, condone even one secret act of torture, one lynching and one secret killing we countersign a logic of perversion -- which means that we can do to the Other if we are stronger, anything we like -- with total impunity. The Other is just an instrument in our fantasies that ANYTHING is permissible when strong meets weak. This is regression of the most brutal kind.

There are twentysomethings in Iraq and Afghanistan running wild, given free rein to act out upon the bodies of their prisoners. They have been told that "Geneva Conventions" do not apply. The superego has gone on vacation. It is the intolerable psychic price that we are paying for this war on terror and while we romanticize fetuses, we treat our fellow human beings as the objects of our sadistic fantasy.

Star Wars Politicized

Tomorrow's New York Times reports on the politicizing of the latest Star Wars bomb for all manner of causes - an amusing piece that shows the cultural hold the Revenge of the Shit with its binary stupidity holds over America.

go native go kitsch

Making native cultures cute and kitsch is just one of the tactics of modernity to domesticate the Other within while training children to perform in the spectacle of state-sponsored multiculturalism. I spent many weekends of my childhood in "traditional" Chinese costumes spinning fans and in half and full splits -- now the Chinese-American girls have moved to "native" cultures, more skin, more feathers, more "primitive."

click here to go native

Harvardland

The middle class Taiwanese parent is spending thousands of NTS a month sending their children to afterschool English classes with names such as Harvardland. Harvardland just about says it all -- it's about the brand, it's about Harvard, which is not just a university, not just an education, a standard, a campus, it is a land -- a golden land of opportunity and big bucks that will open up naturally to the English speaker. The owners of Harvardland are canny indeed. They can avoid piracy charges because of their clever generalization of Harvard over an entire land -- Harvard -- land. It's not Harvard after all.

A local kindergarten in the area is called Stanford. Not Stanfordland.

It just goes to show that in the war of international branding for higher education, my alma mater, Yale, is losing.

The greens win in Taiwan.

The ruling party wins a crucial vote, which will I hope will make one billion three hundred million people think -- yes, there is away to resist panda diplomacy.

How could the Taiwanese resist those cuddly creatures and the cuddly Communists, who really just want to be one big happy family?

Hmmm....I am no fan of Chen Shui-bian and while I don't think it was a choice between the lesser of two evils, it was a choice between the joys of bowing down to soft authoritarianism and the risk, the real danger of sovereignty.

Personally, I spent the entire in a conference about contemporary art that was a lively, but not particularly political affair and I had to deal with the friendliest Deleuzian I have ever met. But despite all their talk about singularity, incommunicability, the monad, and the infernally productive fantasy machines of anti-Oedipal assemblages, I found him rather predictable, but mostly sympathetic. He apologized for being anti-Oedipal since I represented "psychoanalysis" and we were very diplomatic. I told him that there was no account of aggressivity in Deleuze and therefore, it was a sort of metaphysics. I said, for instance, "I might want to strangle you, but I am very civilized and well behaved and I won't."

He cringed. Most Deleuzians are guys, and they're all tall and think and lanky. He told me that we were on the same side, fighting with the same gong fu, but he was using Crane Fist, and i was using Monkey Fist and I said, "Fine, I can accept that."

destroying Gehry building @ UCI

The University of California is proposing to demolish two of the most significant buildings on the Irvine campus - one by Frank Gehry, perhaps the most celebrated architect of our time, the other by his student Rebecca Binder; both are located in the Engineering-Computer Science complex.

These buildings reflect a moment when the University successfully sought to achieve the same distinction in the architecture of its physical plan as it does in its academic endeavors and they should be a source of pride to the campus and the university. To anyone who cares about the arts or about architecture, tearing down these buildings will irreparably undermine the credibility of UCI as a serious intellectual institution.

The fact sheet sent around with the announcement remarks that Gehry's building appears in several publications but is a "minor" work, and moreover would be preserved in a "paper record." It does not say that it is a part of a larger complex designed by Gehry, or that paper records are no substitute for the real building, but would only remind people of its destruction.

blogging may cost you your job!

No joke. Inside Higher Ed :: 'The Phantom Professor' makes SMU afraid -- afraid of lawsuits that is.

Leo would have voted for Bush

Something about Bush appealed to Leo, who is now four, but wasn't quite that age during the election. He would say to me, "I'm going to vote for Bush." And I would bite my tongue because I wanted, "Good thing you can't vote." Maybe it was just pure defiance -- he saw how much the whole thing meant to me and wanted to provoke me. We even watched the parts of the debates together on CNN in Taiwan. And he kept saying it, "I like Bush, I don't like Kerry." I finally asked him why. He said, "I like his smile."

I hadn't thought of Bush as particularly telegenic, but I realized that even while I thought Kerry was giving Bush a thrashing, Leo saw that Bush was somehow vulnerable and out of it. And because I am always trying to see things from Leo's point of view, I have been trying to take a look at Bush (I haven't been arguing about Social Security reform and Senate filibusters wtih Leo, or the cost of Bush's war on America's working classes), and I kind of saw what he meant. I understood why Leo liked Bush. But I am glad that I don't make decisions the way Leo does. Leo also balances on banisters and thinks nothing of sticking the bottom of an umbrella that has been scraped along the street into his mouth for fun. If he had his way, he would eat candy, Macdonald's soft ice cream cones and cookies for breakfast, lunch and dinner. I suppose I am saying something about the American electorate then more than I am saying something about Bush. But sho is going to play in loco parentis to an entire nation?

Just as I try to refrain from saying "I told you so," to Leo when he falls into a puddle I have been yelling at him to avoid, I suppose we have to refrain from screeching that to the yellow ribbon crew right now. Democracy is really f***ed if we're responding to the issues with the perspecuity of a four year old.

But the Right has been fighting for years for our right to regress in public no less. My exercise in identifying with Leo has made me see Bush in a more sanguine way, but it has also taught me one thing -- not everyone is ready to vote!

The Japanese Blood Type Hype

I had always heard about it from my relatives -- that personality was somehow linked to blood type. "Oh you're a type A" some one say authoritatively, "that means you..." I actually don't remember what blood type I am.

And now here is confirmation that many of these pseudo-scientific theories were introduced in Asia by the Japanese militarist government during the twenties and thirties. They were adopting, translating, applying Nazi theories of blood types in order to try to "breed" a better soldier. Read about the blood types in Japan.

well, I'm glad, malcolm

the newest salvo in the "culture" wars: aside from some generic plugs, steven johnson's defense of popular mind candy got the new yorker to assign malcolm gladwell for a long, glowing endorsement. I'd just like to have my magazine (and why not the book too?) in cartoon format online please - it's a time-honored new yorker tradition, it's "smart," plus surely it would save me the pain of reading, and, like, could be gnarly, right?

just don't

everyone hums along with this blog, from elvis and joe jackson to bobby pinson, the eurhythmics and billy joel... don't ask me why, because here it is - your lyrical moment of web zen

Holiday Village, ruins of modernity

This holiday village at Baishawan outside of Taipei was built and never occupied.

Haunted by the thousands of holiday seekers who would never come here, it stands as a ruin of modernity -- a truly ghostly monument to vacation untaken, plans unrealized.


(photo courtesy of Lindsay Cox.)

Professors vs. Syllabi

Remember when I blogged Against Syllabi from InsideHigherEd?

Well I finally figured out why these documents, along with course descriptions, reading lists, goals of the course, attendance policies, methods of assessments and bibliographies have become so important in today's Corporate-style University. They are the tools of management yes -- and furthermore, they do make the student-teacher relationship a legal contract to which students can hold teachers. But here is the underlying real reason why syllabi RULE -- because professors don't anymore.

In Taiwan, the professors still possess enough authority from the charisma of office to dominate, change, throw out and laugh at syllabi. Students accept this because they accept the professor to be more powerful than the syllabus.

Not so in the US, where teaching assistant, part-time lecturers, etc. are delivering undergraduate education. Administration says that therefore, we must perform "quality control," surveillance and stream-lining of this document.

status quo is not good for democracy

Everyone caves into the PRC and its charm offensive; the DPP are not my favorite people, but there is a democracy worth the fight here -- yet Panda diplomacy is working on a population that is tired of the ambiguity of neither/nor, neither a province nor a nation -- and this feeling of suspension, if prolonged will only benefit the Chinese, who are eager to fold Taiwan under the propaganda umbrella.

children's theater

Leo as a chicken, during a night of children's theater consisting of overacting adults and loud, loud music...made me realize how hard it is really to make theater for children, especially in Chinese/Taiwanese culture. No doubt about it, he is cute, but whose theater is this? How much fun did he have dressed as a chicken?

Middle class parents everywhere look to amplify, enhance and stimulate from the very first moments of a child's life. Have parents become "managers" of childhood or performance optimizers?

If so, the best we may be able to hope for is a bit of occasional benign neglect in the old chicken coop.

Toilet Bowl Restaurant

The Toilet Bowl Restaurant in Taiwan has been discovered by BoingBoing!

KMT leader Lien visits his grade school in Xian

Welcome back Grandpa Lien! Click here to see Mrs. Lien smile in a frozen way at the falsetto drama of the welcome play the children put on for her husband. Her usual gracious look is paralyzed into a rictus during the entire performance. Even Lien can barely sit still.

You probably have to understand Chinese to get the full effect, but the cutting back and forth from school play to reaction shot is pretty good.

Acceptable Risk

What is your risk threshold and how do you do the numbers for hugely profitable venture that might harm others? After Bhopal and the loosening of government regulations, Dow has developed the means to help you measure Acceptable Risk. You've heard of the golden parachute. Check out the golden skeleton!

"Tiger" (Apple OS 10.4) sucks

this so-called "upgrade" is a horrible mess. I am not surprised that
most of the apple website is incapacitated this weekend, as most
people realize their treasured computer has just been rendered lame
and numb.

1) my quicktime pro key is not accepted any more
2) my iChat (which I use daily and need every day) won't work any more
3) several apps say they cannot connect to the net (others can)
4) the machine crashes every hour or so
5) spotlight took over 10 hours to get ready
6) adobe acrobat 7 no longer runs
7) nicecast no longer runs (yes, I updated it)
8) camino crashes regularly (yes, it's updated)
9) mySQL refuses to launch, stating a Java exception...

should I go on? or should I get my money back and launch a few more
salvos to document the effects of this snake-oil product? to begin
with, let's demand that it's called what it is: a stupid downgrade.

China offers Taiwan giant pandas

Gee, thanks... are you the neighbor with the ... BIG PAWS?

asian-am

Three and a half decades ago, Philip Roth published Portnoy's complaint. Three years later, it was a movie, and needless to say, many others like it followed. - Almost a decade ago, slate.com ran this story by Nicholas Lemann, full of truths about American suburbia, about how Asian-Americans become the "new Jews". And the demographics of the northern suburbs of New York or the south-eastern suburbs of Los Angeles only buttress the point. Yet, needless to say, there are no movies reflecting those facts..

Chen Shui-Bian urges talks

CNN: No matter which Taiwan party or individuals China prefers to talk to, it ultimately has to talk to the leader chosen by Taiwan people and the government of Taiwan, Chen Shui-Bian told reporters.

looks like a must

This muckraking book says that American universities may be the envy of the world, but they are on the brink of discarding the very values and practices that have made them so successful: University, Inc.: The Corporate Corruption of American Higher Education by Jennifer Washburn. It is definitely worth a look - although, contrary to what this much-blurbed book suggests, universities were never institutions independent from business or politics; the history of the American university plainly shows otherwise, and so does the history of Oxbridge, Paris, and Bologna for instance, the longest-running modern universities. In fact, their funding history illustrates the power struggles between churches, monarchs, merchants, politicians, and administrators beautifully. The closest universities may ever have come to the oft-touted ideal of academic freedom is in 18th century Germany, where Humboldt and others were charged with a reform. And originally, the American university was of course modelled directly on this 18th century German reform model, which was dedicated mostly to creating a class of civil servants - hence the widespread right-wing loathing for higher learning. Europeans know that American universities are successful in what they do because of their clear departure from that model.