I know this is the third time (I think) I've brought it up, but since it keeps being relevant, let me once again recommend Assassination Vacation. It's basically a long essay on Lincoln/Booth, followed by two shorter essays on Garfield/Guiteau and McKinley/Czolgosz to pad it out to book length. Not that the padding isn't good reading, but it seemed clear to me that the motivation for writing the book is her interest in Lincoln far more than it is anything else.
Lincoln and Johnson illuminate the limits of the possible in presidents. They didn't hold office in spite of their, to us, timid and qualified positions and compromised pasts, but because of them.
Trying to apply this to contemporary politics, I note that the two most recent Democratic presidents went out of their way to express their homely religious fervor. The days of Lincoln's stately and non-specific civic religion are long gone. A Republican might be able to get by with vague civic religion ideas ala Eisenhower (but why take the chance) but a Democrat had better tell everybody how much he believes in Jesus.
So Barack Obama's talk about "an awesome god" may make me squirm, but he's probably on the right track. It even helps that he believes it.
There's a horribly history-changing event for you. You have to think that Lincoln would have handled Reconstruction better, and maybe we wouldn't have had to go through the whole weary process of the civil rights struggle again a century later.
The disgusting thing is that derailing Reconstruction by replacing Lincoln with the Democrat Andrew Johnson precisely accomplished Booth's goals. Serious failure of the system, and I can't help but think that the country would've been better off if Johnson had been booted over the Tenure of Office Act.
It measures internal bias - not actions but internal attitudes - by giving people association tests that require you to group positive or negative adjectives with images and words relating to groups one might have bias towards. The test measures the difference in your reaction time when you group "good" vs. "bad adjectives with blacks, bill clinton, orderly people, whatever is being tested for.
It's almost impossible to fake or rig your reaction times. Interestingly, they have at times found bias against a certain group (blacks, lesbians) even among members of that group. The person running the study has also suggested that you can affect your internal biases by trying to gradually change your set of habitual associations. Horrified that she herself had some internal bias against blacks, she has put images of Martin Luther King and Louis Armstrong in her study as well as doing other things to replace old associations with new - and apparently it helps.
Plus, the tests are interesting. For example, I learned I have no bias between Caucasians and Asians, but I have a significant bias against Protestants (vs. Catholics), for beautiful people, and towards Hillary Clinton.
I also did the IAT comparing reactions to white and black people, and I have to say that I think it's riggable. In a conscious attempt to rig it, I spent a couple of minutes before taking it contemplating images of African Americans being noble and attractive, and came out strongly biased in favor of African Americans. I don't think that's an accurate report of what's in my subconscious -- it looked much more related to what was in my recent conscious mind.
22: The test is supposed to compensate for which set you run through first. It's possible it's method of compensation is wrong. I wonder whether their adjustment factor is a constant, or whether they have some way of taking data from the individual and extrapolating something about her rate of learning. I think it may also be possible that there are multiple mechanisms that form overall feelings of attraction or dislike, and maybe Weatherson actually does have a feeling of attraction to pinstripes as signifiers of strength and success, but that's overridden at another level by the knowledge that pinstripe wearers are strong and successful people that stomp on his team.
27: You may well be right. I just took a GW Bush/JFK test, and I have to say, it was near physically painful to do the part of the test where I had to associate Bush with good and Kennedy with bad (and I'm not a big Kennedy fan). So the incredibly unreliable method of introspection + anecdote leads me to think that the test is accurate in thinking that I have a strong automatic preference for Kennedy over Bush. Goddamn I hates me some George W. Bush.
Like Tia, I came out with a slight automatic preference for white people, and like Tia, I was relieved. (I also noticed that I was likely to take longer after screwing up the one before. Also, I think the site should have said "You probably suck at video games.")
I think Booth's co-conspirators were actually planning on assassinating Johnson too, except the guy who was given that assignment got drunk and never showed up. Overall point still holds though.
That is, relieved that it was only slight. I think lots of well-intentioned people are walking around with slight implicit biases, and that's why it's a good idea to consciously fight them.
Or maybe not. House Speaker was Schuyler Colfax, who was a Republican, but apparently not a Radical Republican. Probably would have worse than Lincoln but a lot better than Johnson.
In re: Colfax, I'd say that even if Booth didn't realize that getting Johnson in office was the best way to accomplish his goals, it still was. Also, would Colfax necessarily have become President? I thought the order of succession wasn't made clear until the Twentieth Amendment and accompanying legislation.
Zell Miller possessed by the spirit of Nathan Bedford Forrest himself could not have guided Reconstruction down a worse path than Andrew Johnson. Probably the single most important decision he made was to allow white militias to organize once their members had submitted to (Johnson's lenient interpretation of) the Wade-Davis Act. There was only ever a limited window for Radical Republicans to act to implement real change after the war, and Johnson slammed it shut with that move. Ironically, the RRs thought their program fared better with the promotion of Johnson.
On the subject of the IAT, I'm with LB. I think the first time I took the white/African-American one I was slightly biased in favor of white people. The next time, though, I worked to correct it and came out heavily biased toward African-Americans. In the interim, I think I took several of the other tests and probably became better at taking the test.
When I last took the test I did fine on race, but I have an enormous bias for men in the sciences. It's not my fault that millions of years of hunting on the veldt gave men a measurable predisposition in math so long as we do not consider word problems!
I somehow don't feel that we would have gotten to a much better place, quicker, for the permanent betterment of the country, if this or that person were in charge.
I'm glad we got the civil war amendments. And the Civil Rights Act (the old one). And even with the reduction to meaninglessness of "Privileges and Immunities" by the Slaughterhouse Cases (or maybe because of that) they sat in the constitution for nearly a hundred years, until they were really used, to give us the regime we have now. Without the veneration they picked up, they might not have been effective.
And whether or not the Fourteenth Amendment enacted Mr. Herbert Spenser's Social Statics, the fact that both sides used it for their own purposes made it everybody's law.
The abuse of the fourteenth amendment in Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad may be the most far-reaching piece of judicial activism in the history of the republic, unless one counts Marbury in that group. The Warren rulings have nothing on that one.
thanks for putting up the link, LB. mine must have been mangled in 13.
they recommend you do a few other tests first to calibrate yourself/get in that mode a little, so that the bias tests on lightning rod issues like racism are accurate.
um, isn't it way more interesting to see if you *have* unconscious bias or not than to try very hard to beat the test?
isn't it way more interesting to see if you *have* unconscious bias or not than to try very hard to beat the test?
Well, if spending a minute or two contemplating a picture of MLK giving the "I have a dream" speech produced such a strong effect in me, doesn' that suggest that whatever the test measures, it isn't particularly deep-rooted or important?
I think what the test is measuring could be both important and shallowly-rooted, just as your ability to rig the test was important. I think the point of the IAT is not so much to provide an ironclad "how racist you are" verdict, despite the way we're discussing it, but more to measure the difference between manipulated populations. So you have one group read a statement about affirmative action, another group read nothing, and then measure their IAT scores. I think the the test is results *are* supposed to be manipulable.
You're misunderstanding the purpose of the test. It's not trying to trick you no matter what, and no matter what conditions you take it under.
The researchers themselves say that you can change your results if you focus on positive images of a group you have a bias against -- and they even recommend doing that over an extended period of time if you want to change your unconscious biases.
I shouldn't have said it's not riggable. But that doesn't mean it doesn't work or can't tell you something interesting you're not aware of about yourself, if you let it.
56 - It may be a symptom that you're a woman, Tia. I've read that women do that more frequently than men and that it's an unconscious way of undercutting their speech by conveying "This is just what little ole me thinks. I may be wrong". I know I do the same and have to rewrite things to take them out.
49: Not necessarily; it could be that you can take temporary measures to fix it, but in the absence of constant (I mean constant) bombardment of positive images of black people, most people's attitudes revert to a mean level.
Like: You can take temporary measures to increase your heart rate, but your resting heart rate is still deep-rooted or important.
Or, more appositely: Studies show that someone who just found a coin in a pay-phone's return slot is much more likely to help someone who has just spilled their papers in a crowded walkway. But the effect didn't last long. So a temporary hit of euphoria may change your willingness to help, but it's possible that people have different baseline willingnesses to help, and that that's important.
The coin experiment is one of the ones cited by John Doris, who's come up before -- I see, more than once (not even counting this, and see also the first! 500! comment! ever!). And I should point out that he studies this a lot more than I do, and draws the opposite conclusion: compassion is not particuarly deep-rooted, but depends on the situation.
It may be a symptom that you're a woman, Tia. I've read that women do that more frequently than men and that it's an unconscious way of undercutting their speech by conveying "This is just what little ole me thinks. I may be wrong".
I'd be wary of this explanation. I write, "I think," "perhaps," "it seems to me," etc. all of the time. Sometimes I edit it out, sometimes I forget. I don't think I'm particularly unusual for the penis-having population.
John Doris
You know, I listened to that mp3 to which you linked, Weiner. The interviewer was not good, so I'm not sure how well Doris's arguments were fleshed out. But based on what I heard, Doris is hidebound and timid.
I use "I think" more often in blog comments than anywhere else, and I usually leave it in due to so many people expecting an IMO, an IMHO, or a YMMV, which drives me crazy.
You know (the opposite of "I think"), this sentence:
"John Doris draws on behavioral science, especially social psychology, to argue that we misattribute the causes of behavior to personality traits and other fixed aspects of character rather than to the situational context."
rubs me the wrong way. Psych 1 textbooks argue we misattribute the causes of behavior to personality traits and other fixed aspects of character rather than to the situational context. I know that the new thing JD is doing is probably applying that idea to moral philosophy, but that book blurb makes it sound like that sentence is not a foundational principle of social psychology, which it is.
I was told that I have a "strong preference" for "Arab-Muslims" over "Other People" (pretty suspicious categories for comparison), and "little to no automatic preference" as between whites and blacks. This strikes me as a test equally amenable to a host of interpretations though. And if LB can influence the results so easily, then I wonder about the extent to which one's knowledge about what the test is going to measure, and how it will measure it, influences those same results. One's heartrate seems far more independent from one's beliefs about what one's heartrate should be than are the reaction-times on this test independent from one's beliefs about what they should be.
The other day a colleague pointed out to me that I say "You know" all the time, and theorized that this was part of my epistemological project to devalue the importance of knowledge. I used "You know" at least once in my response. I don't know why anyone ever gave me a job.
SCMT, I can't recommend one, in part because I haven't read that much (reading The Mind's I in high school is a big reason why I'm a philosopher now, but that's not necessarily a recommendation). Based on the excerpt I've heard, stay away from Darwin's Dangerous Idea. If I were picking one up, it'd be The Intentional Stance, I guess.
I think I was out of the room part of the time that MP3 was playing (and ogged linked it. Have we forgotten him?), but Doris definitely doesn't seem timid and hidebound in person, or even in his book. Why did you think he was?
I'm constantly using qualifiers. "Seems", "may be", "likely", "possibly", etc. It comes from the same impulse that Cala describes above, habitually wanting to include a "YMMV" in online discourse.
I've been very consciously training myself to get out of the "um", "you know" school of verbal tics lately. I'm getting better.
I use more qualifications in blogging or commenting than in other types of writing to capture the quality of speech. Not on purpose; it's what blogging sounds like to me, a conversation.
IRL, I constantly say "Do you know what I mean?" while I'm talking. People who know me well inevitably start fucking with me and saying "no," forcing me to either say, "yes you do," or launch into an entirely unnecessary explanation of my point in other terms.
Also, I never said, "like" or "you know," until, in the fifth grade, I decided it would make me cool, so I consciously inserted them into my speech. I hate fifth grade me.
I silently mocked the people in elementary school who said "like" all the time, until I woke up one day in seventh grade, and realized I had started doing it too. The repercussions have lasted to this very day. It coincided with the beginning of my self-doubting phase, I reckon.
72: When people use "like" as a verbal placeholder (or [shudder] use it in place of "said"), I react the way other people do to fingernails on a blackboard.
I am guilty of all of the above: "like", "totally", "you know", and "Do you know what I mean?", plus all of the qualifiers. I shouldn't be allowed to speak IRL.
65 says: I know that the new thing JD is doing is probably applying that idea to moral philosophy, but that book blurb makes it sound like that sentence is not a foundational principle of social psychology, which it is. Right, the blurb is annoying, his project, to the best of my understanding, is to counter arguments for virture ethics by arguing that virtures don't exist, since they are so situationally changable. Basically, knowing that someone was courageous, or exhibited some other virtue or vice in in situation X isn't a reason to expect them to exhibit it in situations A,B,C, etc. So it's usually not a good idea to ascribe characteristics like "courageous" to people. This is all based on what I remember from one class, fairly early in undergrad, so if anyone who knows more wants to correct me, be my guest.
On odd speech habits: I (purposefully, I promise) use "good" when "well" is proper. Also, "Me also" instead of "Me too," though I'm not sure that's wrong so much as unusual.
No, actually I do that too. I talk much more slowly to people who aren't New Yorkers, and something happens to my accent as well that I hope to heaven doesn't sound condescending or conspicuous.
Yeah, Bphd. And then when I tell the story, I'll be all like, "Bphd totally annoyed the apostropher! She, like, represented the California sisterhood against his North Carolina imperialism." Do you know what I mean?
84: I've read the book pretty recently and that's pretty much exactly it. The idea is that moral philosophers don't pay enough attention to these foundational principles of social psychology, which (so says JD, not I) undermine a lot of claims made in moral theory.
Doris definitely doesn't seem timid and hidebound in person, or even in his book. Why did you think he was?
I'd want to listen to it again to be sure, but I think I object to the level of the constituent parts he's analyzing. That is, I tend to think of people as a collection of tics that interact in certain, usually predictable, ways. He focused, IIRC, on the individual as a unit.
Mixing Memory has an interesting criticsm of the IATs up hereh.
BTW, it's "association". Hard to remember, but useful because we're still not sure exactly how implicit associations relate to biases, and the test is really measing association, and bias only by proxy.
</Farber>
I had a friend who, some days, would start saying "you know" a whole bunch. I would say "I do", instead of some less intrusive assent, and that served its purpose pretty well.
My big pet peeve, however, is using "have got" instead of "have". "Have got" is really only appropriate in very informal phrases (or just informal phrases, if you like to talk more informally). But it's really not acceptable in normal speech, imnsho. I know of some people that use the former almost exclusively, and it drives me nuts. I don't have any problems with the use of "like" or other Californiaisms. Could be that I'm just that young. Like, I even say "whatever" like all the time.
96: I never even thought about 'have got' as unacceptable. Sometimes I use it in 'Have you got any x?' but I think it'd be just as well or better to say, 'Have you any x?'
My pet peeve is when people say 'I'm wanting to change jobs' instead of 'I want to change jobs'. Drives me nuts.
No doubt Doris is "timid and hidebound" and some situations, and not in others.
So "SomeCallMeTim"'s attribution probably enjoys some confirming instancees, no matter how limited his evidence. That's the beauty of global character attributions, isn't it?
Pretty sure it's real, see, e.g. comments here. But I have no idea how he ended up in this thread, it doesn't come up (at least in the first couple of pages) when one googles his name. Also, this makes it the second time in two days someone showed up who was being spoken of.
"I think", etc.: My first drafts always have a lot of various qualifiers ("seems", "in a sense", etc etc). Then I go through and edit them all out, or almost. Qualifying it in the first draft makes you feel OK about writing something provocative, and then editing it out makes you seem arrogant. This is often the effect you want -- you put the other guy on the spot to agree or disagree, and your point (right or wrong) gets made. Mushy statements don't give people much to work with.
Of course, people tend not to take my shit seriously, but I doubt that mushing things up would help much.
I think Michael Jordan was the greatest, but SCMTim says he didn't work hard enough on defense. And he says that lots of times, he didn't even run down court. And that he didn't really try... except during the playoffs.
Ewan MacGregor and Clive Owen are both totally gay and have never had a sexual feeling for a woman once. If they want me to believe otherwise, they'll have to both have sex with me at the same time without getting too distracted by each other.
Can we not try to attract David Foster Wallace? I really like his essays, and hate his fiction in a way that makes me personally angry. If he showed up I'd end up being inappropriate somehow.
I have to admit to not having read Infinite Jest yet. I am dying to, but I keep being intimidated by it. However, Brief Interviews is fucking genius. Also, the short story about burned children in Oblivion.
I just read Brief Interviews, and although it often fatigued me, I really enjoyed it. At multiple points I kept thinking: "Huh, didn't we talk about just this phenomenon on Unfogged?"
Speaking of footnotes, I once saw a novel written in French (not sure if that was the original language - it could have been in translation) which consisted entirely of footnotes to a text which was not present. The footnotes were in their usual location, at the bottom of pages which were in this case blank at the top. The author had a very non-phonetic Polish last name - I think it started with "W" and ended with "man" with a lot of consonants in between. I seem to recall the title was L'Inattendu, or something like that. Has anyone ever heard of it? If so, any links or hints on tracking down a copy would be appreciated.
Actually, it appears to be L'interdit by Gérard Wajcman that I was looking for. But the clues you supplied allowed me to find it. Apostropher is the hero!
That didn't stop him from doing more for racial equality than any other white man in American history.
The number two guy in that regard was no picnic either.
Posted by Joe Drymala | Link to this comment | 02-13-06 8:43 AM
True fact. Robert Caro can develop a decided dislike for his subjects like no one else.
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 02-13-06 8:45 AM
LBJ?
Posted by Matt Weiner | Link to this comment | 02-13-06 8:45 AM
Mais oui.
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 02-13-06 8:46 AM
I wish Burke had stuck around to explain himself.
Posted by Matt Weiner | Link to this comment | 02-13-06 8:52 AM
I know this is the third time (I think) I've brought it up, but since it keeps being relevant, let me once again recommend Assassination Vacation. It's basically a long essay on Lincoln/Booth, followed by two shorter essays on Garfield/Guiteau and McKinley/Czolgosz to pad it out to book length. Not that the padding isn't good reading, but it seemed clear to me that the motivation for writing the book is her interest in Lincoln far more than it is anything else.
Posted by washerdreyer | Link to this comment | 02-13-06 9:25 AM
Lincoln and Johnson illuminate the limits of the possible in presidents. They didn't hold office in spite of their, to us, timid and qualified positions and compromised pasts, but because of them.
Trying to apply this to contemporary politics, I note that the two most recent Democratic presidents went out of their way to express their homely religious fervor. The days of Lincoln's stately and non-specific civic religion are long gone. A Republican might be able to get by with vague civic religion ideas ala Eisenhower (but why take the chance) but a Democrat had better tell everybody how much he believes in Jesus.
So Barack Obama's talk about "an awesome god" may make me squirm, but he's probably on the right track. It even helps that he believes it.
Posted by John Tingley | Link to this comment | 02-13-06 9:27 AM
Once, while playing Trivial Pursuit, I insisted on singing my answer to the question "Who was assassinated in Buffalo in 1901?"
Posted by Tia | Link to this comment | 02-13-06 9:28 AM
There's a horribly history-changing event for you. You have to think that Lincoln would have handled Reconstruction better, and maybe we wouldn't have had to go through the whole weary process of the civil rights struggle again a century later.
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 02-13-06 9:29 AM
The disgusting thing is that derailing Reconstruction by replacing Lincoln with the Democrat Andrew Johnson precisely accomplished Booth's goals. Serious failure of the system, and I can't help but think that the country would've been better off if Johnson had been booted over the Tenure of Office Act.
Posted by Matt Weiner | Link to this comment | 02-13-06 9:31 AM
Tia: To the tune of this?
Posted by Matt Weiner | Link to this comment | 02-13-06 9:33 AM
No, it already had words.
Posted by Tia | Link to this comment | 02-13-06 9:37 AM
Have any of you taken the tests run by the study on implicit bias going on at HArvard now?
It measures internal bias - not actions but internal attitudes - by giving people association tests that require you to group positive or negative adjectives with images and words relating to groups one might have bias towards. The test measures the difference in your reaction time when you group "good" vs. "bad adjectives with blacks, bill clinton, orderly people, whatever is being tested for.
It's almost impossible to fake or rig your reaction times. Interestingly, they have at times found bias against a certain group (blacks, lesbians) even among members of that group. The person running the study has also suggested that you can affect your internal biases by trying to gradually change your set of habitual associations. Horrified that she herself had some internal bias against blacks, she has put images of Martin Luther King and Louis Armstrong in her study as well as doing other things to replace old associations with new - and apparently it helps.
Plus, the tests are interesting. For example, I learned I have no bias between Caucasians and Asians, but I have a significant bias against Protestants (vs. Catholics), for beautiful people, and towards Hillary Clinton.
Posted by mmf! | Link to this comment | 02-13-06 9:38 AM
I think Tia was singing "The Ballad Of Czolgosz".
Posted by Joe Drymala | Link to this comment | 02-13-06 9:38 AM
I did the IAT for black people, and perhaps this makes me a bad person, but I was pretty happy I came out only slightly biased against blacks.
Posted by Tia | Link to this comment | 02-13-06 9:41 AM
Shoulda previewed.
Posted by Joe Drymala | Link to this comment | 02-13-06 9:41 AM
I have a significant bias against Protestants (vs. Catholics)
Are they pictures of well known Protestants/Catholics, or can you just tell?
Posted by Matt F | Link to this comment | 02-13-06 9:42 AM
Hey, even 15 was racist. I should have said, "I did the IAT that compared black people and white people."
Posted by Tia | Link to this comment | 02-13-06 9:43 AM
I also did the IAT comparing reactions to white and black people, and I have to say that I think it's riggable. In a conscious attempt to rig it, I spent a couple of minutes before taking it contemplating images of African Americans being noble and attractive, and came out strongly biased in favor of African Americans. I don't think that's an accurate report of what's in my subconscious -- it looked much more related to what was in my recent conscious mind.
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 02-13-06 9:47 AM
How does one take the tests under discussion?
Posted by Jeremy Osner | Link to this comment | 02-13-06 9:47 AM
One clicks on this link.
Unfogged -- a full service blog.
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 02-13-06 9:50 AM
Brian Weatherson had a criticism of those tests.
Posted by Matt Weiner | Link to this comment | 02-13-06 9:51 AM
Or maybe it's your mind that's riggable. Whoa.
Posted by Armsmasher | Link to this comment | 02-13-06 9:52 AM
Heavy.
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 02-13-06 9:55 AM
23: Rigga, please.
Posted by apostropher | Link to this comment | 02-13-06 9:56 AM
21 -- thanks.
23 -- heh.
Posted by Jeremy Osner | Link to this comment | 02-13-06 9:56 AM
22: The test is supposed to compensate for which set you run through first. It's possible it's method of compensation is wrong. I wonder whether their adjustment factor is a constant, or whether they have some way of taking data from the individual and extrapolating something about her rate of learning. I think it may also be possible that there are multiple mechanisms that form overall feelings of attraction or dislike, and maybe Weatherson actually does have a feeling of attraction to pinstripes as signifiers of strength and success, but that's overridden at another level by the knowledge that pinstripe wearers are strong and successful people that stomp on his team.
Posted by Tia | Link to this comment | 02-13-06 9:59 AM
27: You may well be right. I just took a GW Bush/JFK test, and I have to say, it was near physically painful to do the part of the test where I had to associate Bush with good and Kennedy with bad (and I'm not a big Kennedy fan). So the incredibly unreliable method of introspection + anecdote leads me to think that the test is accurate in thinking that I have a strong automatic preference for Kennedy over Bush. Goddamn I hates me some George W. Bush.
Posted by Matt Weiner | Link to this comment | 02-13-06 10:03 AM
Like Tia, I came out with a slight automatic preference for white people, and like Tia, I was relieved. (I also noticed that I was likely to take longer after screwing up the one before. Also, I think the site should have said "You probably suck at video games.")
Posted by Matt Weiner | Link to this comment | 02-13-06 10:11 AM
I think Booth's co-conspirators were actually planning on assassinating Johnson too, except the guy who was given that assignment got drunk and never showed up. Overall point still holds though.
Posted by JP | Link to this comment | 02-13-06 10:12 AM
That is, relieved that it was only slight. I think lots of well-intentioned people are walking around with slight implicit biases, and that's why it's a good idea to consciously fight them.
Posted by Matt Weiner | Link to this comment | 02-13-06 10:12 AM
Or maybe not. House Speaker was Schuyler Colfax, who was a Republican, but apparently not a Radical Republican. Probably would have worse than Lincoln but a lot better than Johnson.
Posted by JP | Link to this comment | 02-13-06 10:18 AM
JP, good point, I'd forgotten that.
Posted by Matt Weiner | Link to this comment | 02-13-06 10:18 AM
In re: Colfax, I'd say that even if Booth didn't realize that getting Johnson in office was the best way to accomplish his goals, it still was. Also, would Colfax necessarily have become President? I thought the order of succession wasn't made clear until the Twentieth Amendment and accompanying legislation.
Posted by Matt Weiner | Link to this comment | 02-13-06 10:24 AM
Oh yeah. In that case, I dunno. They also tried to kill the Secretary of State. I think they cut him up pretty bad, but he survived.
Posted by JP | Link to this comment | 02-13-06 10:27 AM
I guess the country might have just gone to hell, which would have been even better from Booth's perspective.
Posted by JP | Link to this comment | 02-13-06 10:28 AM
Zell Miller possessed by the spirit of Nathan Bedford Forrest himself could not have guided Reconstruction down a worse path than Andrew Johnson. Probably the single most important decision he made was to allow white militias to organize once their members had submitted to (Johnson's lenient interpretation of) the Wade-Davis Act. There was only ever a limited window for Radical Republicans to act to implement real change after the war, and Johnson slammed it shut with that move. Ironically, the RRs thought their program fared better with the promotion of Johnson.
Posted by Armsmasher | Link to this comment | 02-13-06 10:40 AM
On the subject of the IAT, I'm with LB. I think the first time I took the white/African-American one I was slightly biased in favor of white people. The next time, though, I worked to correct it and came out heavily biased toward African-Americans. In the interim, I think I took several of the other tests and probably became better at taking the test.
Posted by singular girl | Link to this comment | 02-13-06 10:52 AM
I did IAT and like everyone else was relieved to find out I'm only slightly racist! Yay!
I was surprised, however, to find that I'm really bigoted against old people. Gotta work on that one.
Posted by bitchphd | Link to this comment | 02-13-06 10:59 AM
When I last took the test I did fine on race, but I have an enormous bias for men in the sciences. It's not my fault that millions of years of hunting on the veldt gave men a measurable predisposition in math so long as we do not consider word problems!
Posted by Armsmasher | Link to this comment | 02-13-06 11:07 AM
I, like Weiner, discovered how much I hate George W.
Posted by Joe Drymala | Link to this comment | 02-13-06 11:07 AM
I somehow don't feel that we would have gotten to a much better place, quicker, for the permanent betterment of the country, if this or that person were in charge.
I'm glad we got the civil war amendments. And the Civil Rights Act (the old one). And even with the reduction to meaninglessness of "Privileges and Immunities" by the Slaughterhouse Cases (or maybe because of that) they sat in the constitution for nearly a hundred years, until they were really used, to give us the regime we have now. Without the veneration they picked up, they might not have been effective.
And whether or not the Fourteenth Amendment enacted Mr. Herbert Spenser's Social Statics, the fact that both sides used it for their own purposes made it everybody's law.
Posted by John Tingley | Link to this comment | 02-13-06 11:09 AM
The abuse of the fourteenth amendment in Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad may be the most far-reaching piece of judicial activism in the history of the republic, unless one counts Marbury in that group. The Warren rulings have nothing on that one.
Posted by Joe Drymala | Link to this comment | 02-13-06 11:17 AM
43: Wow, that secret journal stuff is pretty interesting.
Posted by Tia | Link to this comment | 02-13-06 11:23 AM
thanks for putting up the link, LB. mine must have been mangled in 13.
they recommend you do a few other tests first to calibrate yourself/get in that mode a little, so that the bias tests on lightning rod issues like racism are accurate.
um, isn't it way more interesting to see if you *have* unconscious bias or not than to try very hard to beat the test?
Posted by mmf! | Link to this comment | 02-13-06 11:29 AM
Yup. Maybe more cooked than Madison's Notes.
Posted by John Tingley | Link to this comment | 02-13-06 11:29 AM
I know, it makes my blood boil.
Posted by Joe Drymala | Link to this comment | 02-13-06 11:30 AM
I haven't read it, so can't recommend it, but Lisa Jardine has a new book out about the first assassination of a head of state.
Posted by ac | Link to this comment | 02-13-06 11:43 AM
isn't it way more interesting to see if you *have* unconscious bias or not than to try very hard to beat the test?
Well, if spending a minute or two contemplating a picture of MLK giving the "I have a dream" speech produced such a strong effect in me, doesn' that suggest that whatever the test measures, it isn't particularly deep-rooted or important?
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 02-13-06 11:43 AM
Et tu, ac?
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 02-13-06 11:45 AM
I should say, first assassination with a hand gun.
Posted by ac | Link to this comment | 02-13-06 11:46 AM
the first assassination of a head of state.
Can that possibly be? I think you must have some unstated qualifiers affecting "assassination" and "head of state". And maybe "first" as well.
Posted by Jeremy Osner | Link to this comment | 02-13-06 11:46 AM
Was typing quickly, sorry.
Posted by ac | Link to this comment | 02-13-06 11:49 AM
I think what the test is measuring could be both important and shallowly-rooted, just as your ability to rig the test was important. I think the point of the IAT is not so much to provide an ironclad "how racist you are" verdict, despite the way we're discussing it, but more to measure the difference between manipulated populations. So you have one group read a statement about affirmative action, another group read nothing, and then measure their IAT scores. I think the the test is results *are* supposed to be manipulable.
Posted by Tia | Link to this comment | 02-13-06 11:50 AM
49:
You're misunderstanding the purpose of the test. It's not trying to trick you no matter what, and no matter what conditions you take it under.
The researchers themselves say that you can change your results if you focus on positive images of a group you have a bias against -- and they even recommend doing that over an extended period of time if you want to change your unconscious biases.
I shouldn't have said it's not riggable. But that doesn't mean it doesn't work or can't tell you something interesting you're not aware of about yourself, if you let it.
Posted by mmf! | Link to this comment | 02-13-06 11:54 AM
Why is it that when I don't edit my writing I start every other sentence with "I think"? Is this a symptom of modesty or egotism?
Posted by Tia | Link to this comment | 02-13-06 11:54 AM
ideal testing conditions being 1) try a few other tests before doing the really loaded ones
and 2) don't specially prep yourself to beat the test
(but that's obvious)
Posted by mmf! | Link to this comment | 02-13-06 11:56 AM
56 - It may be a symptom that you're a woman, Tia. I've read that women do that more frequently than men and that it's an unconscious way of undercutting their speech by conveying "This is just what little ole me thinks. I may be wrong". I know I do the same and have to rewrite things to take them out.
Posted by Becks | Link to this comment | 02-13-06 12:00 PM
49: Not necessarily; it could be that you can take temporary measures to fix it, but in the absence of constant (I mean constant) bombardment of positive images of black people, most people's attitudes revert to a mean level.
Like: You can take temporary measures to increase your heart rate, but your resting heart rate is still deep-rooted or important.
Or, more appositely: Studies show that someone who just found a coin in a pay-phone's return slot is much more likely to help someone who has just spilled their papers in a crowded walkway. But the effect didn't last long. So a temporary hit of euphoria may change your willingness to help, but it's possible that people have different baseline willingnesses to help, and that that's important.
Posted by Matt Weiner | Link to this comment | 02-13-06 12:00 PM
The coin experiment is one of the ones cited by John Doris, who's come up before -- I see, more than once (not even counting this, and see also the first! 500! comment! ever!). And I should point out that he studies this a lot more than I do, and draws the opposite conclusion: compassion is not particuarly deep-rooted, but depends on the situation.
Posted by Matt Weiner | Link to this comment | 02-13-06 12:05 PM
It may be a symptom that you're a woman, Tia. I've read that women do that more frequently than men and that it's an unconscious way of undercutting their speech by conveying "This is just what little ole me thinks. I may be wrong".
I'd be wary of this explanation. I write, "I think," "perhaps," "it seems to me," etc. all of the time. Sometimes I edit it out, sometimes I forget. I don't think I'm particularly unusual for the penis-having population.
John Doris
You know, I listened to that mp3 to which you linked, Weiner. The interviewer was not good, so I'm not sure how well Doris's arguments were fleshed out. But based on what I heard, Doris is hidebound and timid.
Recommend a Dennet book for me, please.
Posted by SomeCallMeTim | Link to this comment | 02-13-06 12:26 PM
I have to go back and edit those out of my own writing quite often as well. "I suspect" is like a nervous tic with me.
Posted by apostropher | Link to this comment | 02-13-06 12:32 PM
I use "I think" more often in blog comments than anywhere else, and I usually leave it in due to so many people expecting an IMO, an IMHO, or a YMMV, which drives me crazy.
Posted by Cala is too pale | Link to this comment | 02-13-06 12:37 PM
Me too. I often worry about what I must sound like in speech, where I can't edit the qualifications out.
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 02-13-06 12:38 PM
You know (the opposite of "I think"), this sentence:
"John Doris draws on behavioral science, especially social psychology, to argue that we misattribute the causes of behavior to personality traits and other fixed aspects of character rather than to the situational context."
rubs me the wrong way. Psych 1 textbooks argue we misattribute the causes of behavior to personality traits and other fixed aspects of character rather than to the situational context. I know that the new thing JD is doing is probably applying that idea to moral philosophy, but that book blurb makes it sound like that sentence is not a foundational principle of social psychology, which it is.
/absurdly contentious and petty nitpick
Posted by Tia | Link to this comment | 02-13-06 12:43 PM
I was told that I have a "strong preference" for "Arab-Muslims" over "Other People" (pretty suspicious categories for comparison), and "little to no automatic preference" as between whites and blacks. This strikes me as a test equally amenable to a host of interpretations though. And if LB can influence the results so easily, then I wonder about the extent to which one's knowledge about what the test is going to measure, and how it will measure it, influences those same results. One's heartrate seems far more independent from one's beliefs about what one's heartrate should be than are the reaction-times on this test independent from one's beliefs about what they should be.
Posted by Andrew | Link to this comment | 02-13-06 12:45 PM
The other day a colleague pointed out to me that I say "You know" all the time, and theorized that this was part of my epistemological project to devalue the importance of knowledge. I used "You know" at least once in my response. I don't know why anyone ever gave me a job.
SCMT, I can't recommend one, in part because I haven't read that much (reading The Mind's I in high school is a big reason why I'm a philosopher now, but that's not necessarily a recommendation). Based on the excerpt I've heard, stay away from Darwin's Dangerous Idea. If I were picking one up, it'd be The Intentional Stance, I guess.
I think I was out of the room part of the time that MP3 was playing (and ogged linked it. Have we forgotten him?), but Doris definitely doesn't seem timid and hidebound in person, or even in his book. Why did you think he was?
Posted by Matt Weiner | Link to this comment | 02-13-06 12:46 PM
I'm constantly using qualifiers. "Seems", "may be", "likely", "possibly", etc. It comes from the same impulse that Cala describes above, habitually wanting to include a "YMMV" in online discourse.
I've been very consciously training myself to get out of the "um", "you know" school of verbal tics lately. I'm getting better.
Posted by Joe Drymala | Link to this comment | 02-13-06 12:51 PM
'Postropher, Tia, Cala, others: Say "I reckon". It'll make you sound folksy.
Posted by Jeremy Osner | Link to this comment | 02-13-06 12:55 PM
I use more qualifications in blogging or commenting than in other types of writing to capture the quality of speech. Not on purpose; it's what blogging sounds like to me, a conversation.
Posted by ac | Link to this comment | 02-13-06 12:59 PM
It can sound too formal otherwise.
Posted by ac | Link to this comment | 02-13-06 1:01 PM
IRL, I constantly say "Do you know what I mean?" while I'm talking. People who know me well inevitably start fucking with me and saying "no," forcing me to either say, "yes you do," or launch into an entirely unnecessary explanation of my point in other terms.
Also, I never said, "like" or "you know," until, in the fifth grade, I decided it would make me cool, so I consciously inserted them into my speech. I hate fifth grade me.
Posted by Tia | Link to this comment | 02-13-06 1:03 PM
Am I the only one envisioning (enhearing?) the title of this post read in Marilyn Monroe's breathiest-blonde diction? Yes? Okay. Carry on.
Posted by slolernr | Link to this comment | 02-13-06 1:03 PM
69: I say "I reckon" all the time, but I almost never write it. Hmm.
Posted by apostropher | Link to this comment | 02-13-06 1:07 PM
The exclamation point makes it less breathy and MMish for me.
Posted by ac | Link to this comment | 02-13-06 1:11 PM
I silently mocked the people in elementary school who said "like" all the time, until I woke up one day in seventh grade, and realized I had started doing it too. The repercussions have lasted to this very day. It coincided with the beginning of my self-doubting phase, I reckon.
Posted by Matt F | Link to this comment | 02-13-06 1:13 PM
72: When people use "like" as a verbal placeholder (or [shudder] use it in place of "said"), I react the way other people do to fingernails on a blackboard.
Posted by apostropher | Link to this comment | 02-13-06 1:15 PM
I've used "like" in place of "said" in Unfogged coments. I do that all the time.
73: I think it's funny to imagine LizardBreath in a skimpy outfit on top of a piano flirting with Abe Lincoln, so, no.
Posted by Tia | Link to this comment | 02-13-06 1:26 PM
I don't think I do "like" very much, but I totally say "totally" all the time. Sometimes I ramp it up on purpose, b/c doing so amuses me.
Posted by bitchphd | Link to this comment | 02-13-06 1:52 PM
I am guilty of all of the above: "like", "totally", "you know", and "Do you know what I mean?", plus all of the qualifiers. I shouldn't be allowed to speak IRL.
Posted by Becks | Link to this comment | 02-13-06 1:59 PM
Am I the only one envisioning (enhearing?) the title of this post read in Marilyn Monroe's breathiest-blonde diction? Yes?
No. Not that it makes sense with the post, but I was thinking Marilyn as I wrote the title.
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 02-13-06 2:03 PM
I do that all the time.
On the internet, nobody can see me cringe.
Posted by apostropher | Link to this comment | 02-13-06 2:03 PM
I also find myself modifying my diction and speech patterns dramatically, depending on the company.
Posted by Joe Drymala | Link to this comment | 02-13-06 2:04 PM
65 says: I know that the new thing JD is doing is probably applying that idea to moral philosophy, but that book blurb makes it sound like that sentence is not a foundational principle of social psychology, which it is. Right, the blurb is annoying, his project, to the best of my understanding, is to counter arguments for virture ethics by arguing that virtures don't exist, since they are so situationally changable. Basically, knowing that someone was courageous, or exhibited some other virtue or vice in in situation X isn't a reason to expect them to exhibit it in situations A,B,C, etc. So it's usually not a good idea to ascribe characteristics like "courageous" to people. This is all based on what I remember from one class, fairly early in undergrad, so if anyone who knows more wants to correct me, be my guest.
On odd speech habits: I (purposefully, I promise) use "good" when "well" is proper. Also, "Me also" instead of "Me too," though I'm not sure that's wrong so much as unusual.
Posted by washerdreyer | Link to this comment | 02-13-06 2:05 PM
It's ActorMan!
No, actually I do that too. I talk much more slowly to people who aren't New Yorkers, and something happens to my accent as well that I hope to heaven doesn't sound condescending or conspicuous.
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 02-13-06 2:07 PM
I'm, like, so totally going to, like, start ramping up my, you know, native accent, just to, like, annoy the apostropher, you know?
Posted by bitchphd | Link to this comment | 02-13-06 2:13 PM
Based on my voice, people never, ever think I'm from New York. They guess I'm from somewhere in Canada. Queens, not so much.
Posted by ac | Link to this comment | 02-13-06 2:18 PM
Yeah, Bphd. And then when I tell the story, I'll be all like, "Bphd totally annoyed the apostropher! She, like, represented the California sisterhood against his North Carolina imperialism." Do you know what I mean?
Posted by Tia | Link to this comment | 02-13-06 2:20 PM
Totally!
Posted by bitchphd | Link to this comment | 02-13-06 2:25 PM
Sports Illustrated is teh best!
Posted by apostropher | Link to this comment | 02-13-06 2:50 PM
84: I've read the book pretty recently and that's pretty much exactly it. The idea is that moral philosophers don't pay enough attention to these foundational principles of social psychology, which (so says JD, not I) undermine a lot of claims made in moral theory.
Posted by Matt Weiner | Link to this comment | 02-13-06 2:56 PM
Glad to hear my memories are reliable. Also glad you didn't point that I twice used the character string "virtures".
Posted by washerdreyer | Link to this comment | 02-13-06 3:00 PM
We are none of us in a position to cavil at the moment.
Posted by Matt Weiner | Link to this comment | 02-13-06 3:06 PM
Doris definitely doesn't seem timid and hidebound in person, or even in his book. Why did you think he was?
I'd want to listen to it again to be sure, but I think I object to the level of the constituent parts he's analyzing. That is, I tend to think of people as a collection of tics that interact in certain, usually predictable, ways. He focused, IIRC, on the individual as a unit.
Posted by SomeCallMeTim | Link to this comment | 02-13-06 3:21 PM
I was thinking Marilyn as I wrote
Which sounds vaguely inappropriate. But I'm glad it wasn't just me.
Posted by slolernr | Link to this comment | 02-13-06 3:34 PM
Mixing Memory has an interesting criticsm of the IATs up hereh.
BTW, it's "association". Hard to remember, but useful because we're still not sure exactly how implicit associations relate to biases, and the test is really measing association, and bias only by proxy.
</Farber>
I had a friend who, some days, would start saying "you know" a whole bunch. I would say "I do", instead of some less intrusive assent, and that served its purpose pretty well.
My big pet peeve, however, is using "have got" instead of "have". "Have got" is really only appropriate in very informal phrases (or just informal phrases, if you like to talk more informally). But it's really not acceptable in normal speech, imnsho. I know of some people that use the former almost exclusively, and it drives me nuts. I don't have any problems with the use of "like" or other Californiaisms. Could be that I'm just that young. Like, I even say "whatever" like all the time.
Posted by pdf23ds | Link to this comment | 02-13-06 4:06 PM
"criticism", "here", "measuring", etc.
Posted by pdf23ds | Link to this comment | 02-13-06 4:08 PM
I know of some people that use the former almost exclusively, and it drives me nuts.
Never go to Britain.
Posted by Tia | Link to this comment | 02-13-06 4:10 PM
96: I never even thought about 'have got' as unacceptable. Sometimes I use it in 'Have you got any x?' but I think it'd be just as well or better to say, 'Have you any x?'
My pet peeve is when people say 'I'm wanting to change jobs' instead of 'I want to change jobs'. Drives me nuts.
Posted by annie | Link to this comment | 02-15-06 3:41 PM
Matt:
No doubt Doris is "timid and hidebound" and some situations, and not in others.
So "SomeCallMeTim"'s attribution probably enjoys some confirming instancees, no matter how limited his evidence. That's the beauty of global character attributions, isn't it?
jmd
Posted by john doris | Link to this comment | 02-19-06 7:56 PM
No - fucking - way.... If that's for real, that is really, really amazing.
Posted by SomeCallMeTim | Link to this comment | 02-19-06 8:19 PM
Pretty sure it's real, see, e.g. comments here. But I have no idea how he ended up in this thread, it doesn't come up (at least in the first couple of pages) when one googles his name. Also, this makes it the second time in two days someone showed up who was being spoken of.
Posted by washerdreyer | Link to this comment | 02-19-06 10:48 PM
So for whom are we going to send the Bat Signal up next? We seem to be skewing "philosopher"; we should aim for breadth as well.
Posted by SomeCallMeTim | Link to this comment | 02-19-06 11:07 PM
So for whom are we going to send the Bat Signal up next?
Thomas Pynchon is timid and hidebound.
Posted by apostropher | Link to this comment | 02-19-06 11:11 PM
I note for the record that "timid and hidebound" was meant mainly to allude to Bertie, for Matt's sake.
J.D. Salinger is a total phony.
Posted by SomeCallMeTim | Link to this comment | 02-19-06 11:23 PM
I'd be careful if I were you, Tim: John Doris is very tall, taller—perhaps—than Labs.
Posted by ben wolfson | Link to this comment | 02-19-06 11:28 PM
What is with the gigantism of philosophers today?
Posted by SomeCallMeTim | Link to this comment | 02-19-06 11:37 PM
David Foster Wallace: timid, hidebound.
Posted by bitchphd | Link to this comment | 02-19-06 11:48 PM
Scarlett Johansson: those things aren't real.
Posted by apostropher | Link to this comment | 02-20-06 3:50 AM
Who was the other person who showed up recently?
Posted by Standpipe Bridgeplate | Link to this comment | 02-20-06 8:04 AM
The woman on the bus.
Posted by apostropher | Link to this comment | 02-20-06 8:06 AM
The MeFi woman. But I think, just limiting ourselves to philosophy, Unfogged's managed to pull in Leiter, Doris, and L. Paul.
MoDo is xxy.
Posted by SomeCallMeTim | Link to this comment | 02-20-06 8:11 AM
Urk. Apostropher, when the time comes, you know what to do.
Posted by Standpipe Bridgeplate | Link to this comment | 02-20-06 8:11 AM
Scarlett Johansson: those things aren't real.
Yeah. And there's no way she'd have the courage to show up in this thread and try to prove to us that they are. She's just too timid. And hidebound.
Posted by My Alter Ego | Link to this comment | 02-20-06 8:18 AM
I find it amusing that a former Ass't Secretary of the Treasury has left multiple comments here.
Posted by apostropher | Link to this comment | 02-20-06 8:21 AM
She's just too timid. And hidebound.
She doesn't have the balls.
Posted by apostropher | Link to this comment | 02-20-06 8:24 AM
Wow, that was weird.
Posted by FL | Link to this comment | 02-20-06 8:24 AM
#115: This is a good point.
Posted by bitchphd | Link to this comment | 02-20-06 8:43 AM
"I think", etc.: My first drafts always have a lot of various qualifiers ("seems", "in a sense", etc etc). Then I go through and edit them all out, or almost. Qualifying it in the first draft makes you feel OK about writing something provocative, and then editing it out makes you seem arrogant. This is often the effect you want -- you put the other guy on the spot to agree or disagree, and your point (right or wrong) gets made. Mushy statements don't give people much to work with.
Of course, people tend not to take my shit seriously, but I doubt that mushing things up would help much.
Posted by John Emerson | Link to this comment | 02-20-06 8:47 AM
Unfogged also pulled in Mangan's dad. And I must admit that I was sort of impressed when Tim Burke started commenting here.
George Clooney is fat and unattractive.
Posted by SomeCallMeTim | Link to this comment | 02-20-06 8:51 AM
I think Michael Jordan was the greatest, but SCMTim says he didn't work hard enough on defense. And he says that lots of times, he didn't even run down court. And that he didn't really try... except during the playoffs.
Posted by apostropher | Link to this comment | 02-20-06 8:56 AM
Ewan MacGregor and Clive Owen are both totally gay and have never had a sexual feeling for a woman once. If they want me to believe otherwise, they'll have to both have sex with me at the same time without getting too distracted by each other.
Posted by Tia | Link to this comment | 02-20-06 9:06 AM
Can we not try to attract David Foster Wallace? I really like his essays, and hate his fiction in a way that makes me personally angry. If he showed up I'd end up being inappropriate somehow.
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 02-20-06 9:12 AM
His fiction is enormous. You have to give that to him.
Posted by Standpipe Bridgeplate | Link to this comment | 02-20-06 9:15 AM
I'd end up being inappropriate somehow
Thank god we're at the Mineshaft.
Posted by Jeremy Osner | Link to this comment | 02-20-06 9:15 AM
hate his fiction
Huh. I really liked The Broom of the System, but then again, I'm a philistine.
Posted by apostropher | Link to this comment | 02-20-06 9:21 AM
Haven't read it. I gave up after Infinite Jest, Girl with Curious Hair, and Brief Interviews With Hideous Men.
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 02-20-06 9:24 AM
#123: Lizard Breath, you blaspheme.
Posted by bitchphd | Link to this comment | 02-20-06 9:51 AM
Erm, at least I care? No, really, I have elaborate fantasies about confronting DFW about what bothers me about his fiction.
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 02-20-06 10:00 AM
Post-worthy, yo.
Posted by apostropher | Link to this comment | 02-20-06 10:01 AM
Whereas DFW is the only person I have ever written a fan letter to.
Posted by bitchphd | Link to this comment | 02-20-06 10:08 AM
I'd have to reread stuff to reconstruct my thoughts enough to argue about it.
I do love DFW's essays an insane amount.
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 02-20-06 10:28 AM
I have to admit to not having read Infinite Jest yet. I am dying to, but I keep being intimidated by it. However, Brief Interviews is fucking genius. Also, the short story about burned children in Oblivion.
Posted by bitchphd | Link to this comment | 02-20-06 10:45 AM
I just read Brief Interviews, and although it often fatigued me, I really enjoyed it. At multiple points I kept thinking: "Huh, didn't we talk about just this phenomenon on Unfogged?"
Posted by Jackmormon | Link to this comment | 02-20-06 10:57 AM
Yes! Unfogged is the DFW of the internets!
Posted by bitchphd | Link to this comment | 02-20-06 11:03 AM
120: Yeah what, is Tim Burke's deal, always going around and writing smart things?
Posted by washerdreyer | Link to this comment | 02-20-06 12:01 PM
A New Yorker cartoonist also once commented here.
Posted by eb | Link to this comment | 02-20-06 2:54 PM
136: I get the feeling he can't help it.
Posted by apostropher | Link to this comment | 02-20-06 3:04 PM
There's a misplaced comma in 136, but I kind of like the rhythm of reading it the way it's written.
Posted by washerdreyer | Link to this comment | 02-20-06 3:16 PM
135: We need footnotes.
Posted by apostropher | Link to this comment | 02-20-06 3:19 PM
I thought Unfogged was footnotes.
Posted by My Alter Ego | Link to this comment | 02-20-06 3:29 PM
Yeah, aren't comment threads just the blog version of footnotes? Get with the program, apo.
Posted by bitchphd | Link to this comment | 02-20-06 3:40 PM
Speaking of footnotes, I once saw a novel written in French (not sure if that was the original language - it could have been in translation) which consisted entirely of footnotes to a text which was not present. The footnotes were in their usual location, at the bottom of pages which were in this case blank at the top. The author had a very non-phonetic Polish last name - I think it started with "W" and ended with "man" with a lot of consonants in between. I seem to recall the title was L'Inattendu, or something like that. Has anyone ever heard of it? If so, any links or hints on tracking down a copy would be appreciated.
Posted by My Alter Ego | Link to this comment | 02-20-06 3:44 PM
L'interdit by Martenson?
Posted by apostropher | Link to this comment | 02-20-06 3:55 PM
Actually, it appears to be L'interdit by Gérard Wajcman that I was looking for. But the clues you supplied allowed me to find it. Apostropher is the hero!
Posted by My Alter Ego | Link to this comment | 02-20-06 4:02 PM
Is it available in translation? Amazon only shows the French version, and my French isn't that good. Plus it's out of print.
Posted by bitchphd | Link to this comment | 02-20-06 4:12 PM
If there is an English translation out there, I can't find it.
Posted by My Alter Ego | Link to this comment | 02-20-06 4:36 PM
Crap. I'll have to bone up on my French.
Posted by bitchphd | Link to this comment | 02-20-06 4:40 PM
I'd like that, thanks.
Posted by French | Link to this comment | 02-20-06 4:56 PM
Merde.
Posted by bitchphd | Link to this comment | 02-20-06 5:04 PM
And you thought I was teh kinky.
Posted by Tia | Link to this comment | 02-20-06 5:06 PM
Or should I say, "la kinkée"
Posted by Tia | Link to this comment | 02-20-06 5:09 PM
Bayle's Historical and Critical Dictionary is mostly esoteric footnotes. There's a translation into English of some of the more charming entrees.
Posted by Mike | Link to this comment | 02-20-06 5:39 PM
Also, the bits of Bayle I've read, totally rock.
Posted by Matt McGrattan | Link to this comment | 02-20-06 5:46 PM