It's History!

But in spite of Said's insistence on a reading of Michael Foucault that situates discursive formations in historical processes of institutional domination and hegemony, much recent critical theory has merely gestured toward history -- no sooner completing the gesture than appropriating history to support ahistorical -- and even antihistorical -- readings of texts.

What is this shit? Nonsense Marxist poststructuralist garbage, that's what; I'm so tired of this pseudo-intellectual "historiography" business. Such readings go on endlessly about these ridiculous theories that are so evidently irrelevant to objective history -- shut up already! Study history, not historiography! Study society, not sociology! Of course bias exists -- it's hardly news. The best we can do is to try to surmount it as far as we are able, not to write ceaseless diatribes about how it renders any proper study of history impossible. And don't you dare tell me there is no such thing as history: Things happen in the past. Your task as a historian is to record them as best you can. Do feel free to add a little flavor, though. Call me old-fashioned, but I miss the days of flagrantly racist and gleefully partisan history books; they're a blast to read! This trash? Not only is it completely unrelated to history or anything else, it's also extremely tedious and not worth anyone's time. I'd take Nicolás Monardes over Foucalt any day of the week:

[...when they wished to] make themselves drunk and [...] out of judgment [they chewed a mixture of tobacco and coca leaves which ...] make them go as they were out of their wittes [...]

Fun, fun, fun! See why people did history once? There was no "history" -- history was a doctor writing about coca chewing, a missionary writing about his travels. I think a good bit of contemporary drivel of the type above can be traced to the academization of history, for when your job is contingent on how seriously you take yourself and how much you publish (and how many "novel theories" you can come up with), the incentives to create pretentious noise greatly multiply.

The Middleman Fallacy

Obama said he wants to eliminate the "middle men" lenders that he says add inefficiency to the system — "that's a premium we cannot afford, not when we could be reinvesting that same money in our students, in our economy and in our country."

This is what I call the middleman fallacy, which has led again and again to the persecution and murder of such economically successful groups as the Jews and the Armenians. People resent success, but more than that, they resent those individuals that serve as middlemen. As the argument goes, these people are barriers to direct exchange, and they hike prices to take a cut off the top, becoming fabulously wealthy by doing no real work at all. Of course, it's complete nonsense; the role of middlemen is critical in any modern society. Experts at getting goods from place to place and identifying demand and supply (the efficient allocation of resources), they free producers from worrying about efficiently transporting items and consumers from seeking out distant sources. In short, they reduce costs for both parties involved.

But the argument is not just wrong, it's dangerously wrong, and it's a shame to hear it from Obama.

Expensive Waste

My new piece runs in the Maroon today.

Chinese On The Internet

On the one hand we have this:On the other we have this:Despite the fact that only 10-20% of Chinese use the internet, the language is its second most popular. With China's increasing modernization, these figures are set to explode, and I predict with some confidence that within twenty years Chinese will become the internet's #1 language.

Conclusion: Although I am decidedly reserved about the prospect of Chinese overtaking English as a global lingua franca (in fact, I do not think it will ever happen, for reasons I make clear here), I think learning Chinese is a solid investment if only for the reason mentioned in this post.

"I Never Thought He Would Do Something Like That..."

You know how it works. Someone shoots up a school/classroom/office building for no apparent reason, and police interview people who knew the person. They usually give variations on "he was the sweetest guy; I never would have imagined he could do this". So it was a total shock to read this in an AP story about a man who murdered seven residents and a nurse at a nursing home today:

Griffin said Stewart had once been a painter. She said she had no idea whether her ex-husband was somehow connected to the nursing home or why he would shoot people there.

"He did have some violent tendencies from time to time," Griffin said. "I wouldn't put it past him. I hate to say it, but it is true."

You wouldn't put it past him to go into a place reserved for sick octogenarians and kill them all?! What kind of a man is this?!

NYLC

Listening to this is like listening to this.

"Umm, so, and I think, such as, because, but, umm..."

It's kind of like a bloody car accident. You know it's terrible, but you just can't stop watching.

The Pedagogical Purpose Of Text Memorization Finally Revealed!

In Chinese, we are given substantial passages of text to memorize each week. I always wondered what the purpose of this was. It seemed terribly silly, really; I did not understand how my Chinese could possibly improve by reading passages over and over again. Possibly, I thought, they were targeting pronunciation, and I still think that this is the primary purpose. But what a waste of time for just pronunciation, right? Well, I realized just now that there is another, much more important reason for them -- they give you prepared, rapidly usable phrases. Think about it: Generating sentences with grammatical structures you haven't used in a while is hard enough in English ("umm, umm, but, umm, like"), and so it's naturally even harder in a foreign language. Dialogues and narratives effectively serve contextualize words and grammar, such that if you're in a conversation and you need to use the word "progress," but forget how to say "progress very quickly," you're in luck; when you think of the word, your brain searches that memorized lexical database you've stored up and brings back phrases that contain the word. In other words, you don't have to think about how to say "progress very quickly," because you have a freeze-dried phrase that will do it for you.