They are mostly to blame because they were unwilling to compromise with the other groups, thus forcing things closer to the wire and making the whole institution seem even more incompetent.
There are other parties to blame, of course. The line about not raising taxes at all, for example, was an equally pigheaded move, as was the decision (by both the Republicans and the media) to characterize it that way, when a large portion of the tax code is just entitlement spending in the tax code. Refusing to collect a dollar because someone meets your criteria is the same as spending a dollar because someone meets your criteria.
I also think it's not true that the tea party is the only group that wants to seriously cut spending--everybody wants to cut spending. They just can't agree on what to cut.
Unfortunately, too, the market collapse makes spending cuts especially harmful right now--at least the wrong spending cuts. Entitlement programs and a bigger EITC would actually help the economy and probably produce a net tax benefit right now. (Money you put into the economy, if it actually gets spent as it does if you give it to people without adequate resources, turns over a few times in a year, getting taxed in different places as income).
You are sitting on a multi-billion dollar fleet of F-22's that have been GROUNDED (google it).
We stopped ordering new ones, though, despite the original orders being for a lot more. Once you have a couple dozen F22s, you have air superiority if needed. We simply haven't faced an enemy we need to use them against yet, so when a bug cropped up, we suspended the program and slowly began an investigation, but we still have the planes.
I assure you, if we go to war with a major modern power, the F-22s will be back in service within a day or two. They are not a bad thing to have around.
I wrote a response to this, but I think Slashdot ate it.
Has anyone done good empirical work on similarities and differences in perceptions of literature, according to cross-cultural, demographic, or other factors?
I don't know of such work, but I'd be interested to see it. I think it would fall more under sociology than anthropology than under literary criticism, though.
The greatest weaknesses I have seen in the litcrit I've been exposed to have been the lack of empiricism
There is empiricism. For instance I did a term paper that did a statistical analysis of the verb forms used in texts identified by literary pundits as either "showing" or "telling", and found a statistically significant difference (which I then applied to some texts I'd held back, and it classified them in the same way as the original pundits). That sort of application of computational linguistics to litcrit is quite a young field, though.
Interesting. I rarely saw even a hint of that kind of work in undergrad, but I suppose it was a combination of the newness of the subfield combined with the delay in exposing undergraduates to real academic work.
the lack of taste
You mean disagreement with your taste?
Yes. Effectively, I believe that English can be a beautiful language. Most Criticism I have read has been written quite poorly, using a large quantity of words to say things that could be said more quickly and that are not particularly insightful. Hence the perception by most people that much of it is contentless.
and the lack of ability to write well (in fact, the propensity to write quite poorly, despite the use of jargon).
Firstly, academic litcrit is a specialised register, and I doubt any of us here are in a position to judge how well a text conforms to that register. Secondly, even if some critics don't write well it's not necessarily any reflection on their skill at analysing texts (not least because some modern critics, following Derrida, actively try to subvert language; one wouldn't condemn all coding just because of the existence of the obfusticated C contest.).
The problem is that the "register" is in such great opposition to both taste and effectiveness, so far as I have seen. Perhaps I am wrong, and these arguments are better made by someone part of the field. But the issue is that the field, as written, drives away many people, probably even most people, who love literature, because of the horrid patterns that it uses. Mere inability to write, I agree, does not necessarily reflect inability to analyze, but it does not help, and is at times used to obfuscate the simplicity of a point.
I would like to see some good literary criticism. But I don't recall ever reading any--at least not from the last century or so. And pretty much every piece of criticism that was assigned in undergrad was repugnant to me, so much so that it offends me that people were paid to write it. We have a language that can and should be beautiful. The idea of writing horribly because you can is not cute and is not a sign of maturity, but is a sign of childish snobbery. Perhaps a little bit can be fun, but for it to seemingly be the cornerstone and hallmark of a field shows a deeply troubling disrespect for education and the advancement of the appreciation of the arts.
That being said, I suspect there is good criticism out there.
Interesting. I agree with your notion--as described, it is one of many ways to draw insights from or about a text, but does not convincingly devalue other ways.
The part I am most skeptical of is the notion that the expert must be an expert at literary criticism for the criticism to be valid. Not only is it a field where separating wheat from chaff is nontrivial, with no clear metric, but it defies logic to suggest that an expert literary critic will necessarily draw more valid conclusions about a work than, for example, someone who grew up listening to stories about the time from his or her grandparents. And that person would not even be a historian, merely a layperson with a sense of the time.
1) It does not punish people who take harder courses or courses which are graded more harshly. 2) It keeps people from failing (incredibly important when school costs as much as it does). 3) It limits grade inflation (mostly a red herring that people use to justify grading on a curve).
Normative statements about the particular criticism, you mean, rather than normative statements about criticism itself or about schools of criticism?
Is "New Criticism" essentially the idea that all criticism is valid, kind of like a view of literary criticism through a lens of complete moral relativism, where no critique is better than another?
There are plenty of times you can identify what Shakespeare is doing. You just have to keep in mind he may have been doing other thing as well, and probably was. In the Tempest, when he's mocking his audience and saying goodbye to them, is he also mocking you for thinking you know that?
I wrote a response to this, but I think Slashdot ate it.
Has anyone done good empirical work on similarities and differences in perceptions of literature, according to cross-cultural, demographic, or other factors? The greatest weaknesses I have seen in the litcrit I've been exposed to have been the lack of empiricism, the lack of taste, and the lack of ability to write well (in fact, the propensity to write quite poorly, despite the use of jargon). But perhaps my exposure has not been broad enough.
Seems kinda ridiculous. You're the one reading the book. You get to decide what you do with it. You can read it as a reflection of the author, or as a commentary on a time, or as a story reflecting on itself, or any other way you'd like.
Good literary analysis is having fun with one or more of those ways, hopefully in a way that lets the reader learn something. Bad literary analysis is worth less than bullshit, because bullshit can fertilize plants.
The other bug, of course, was putting the future of the Linux Community in the hands of Grand Admiral Thrawn, with the Emperor's storehouse on Wayland. Have we truly chosen to go with the Empire, in the hope of developing a new clone army and ruling the known galaxy?
I thought Linux was more about being the fastest hunk of junk in the Galaxy, about tearing the droid's arms out of their sockets if they win but being willing to put them back together (backwards) and carry them on your back, about shooting Greedo first and stepping on Jabba's tail?
When copyright terms are again 30 years or less with no exceptions...
That would be better, but not ideal. Books should be longer, because they make so much less money. And any work that earns more than a certain profit should have its copyright term shortened, because the purpose of incentivizing production no longer exists after, for example, you have a 200% return.
It also doesn't take into account non-civilian ownership, which is going to push US numbers much higher. (Not that it matters ordinally, since it's at the top of the list already.)
I'm surprised it's that high in the US. We have two, but they were my grandfather's, and almost nobody I know owns a gun. I wonder how the ownership is distributed socioeconomically and demographically.
Aside from the fact that the US is spending way more than it takes in (and has been for decades), the simple fact that the US top insitutions use the default threat as a political argument to suit their own agenda should be enough to lower the rating.
"If you don't take it seriously, we'll grade you down"
It should be enough to get those institutions fired.
What people forget is that they elected their Congressperson, and their congressperson is responsible. Congress as a whole is guilty of putting politics before the good of the nation, and though the blame may primarily lie with the tea party at the moment, they all failed, and they all should be sacked. The problem is that people always say "but my individual congressperson is different!"
I have a radical idea: hold both them AND their parents responsible for all of their criminal acts.
It's an interesting idea, but it won't work, and it may increase the amount of abuse among poor families. (Where abuse is already a massive problem.)
Learning is environmental. Parents CAN make a huge difference, but sometimes the best parents in the world will have kids who learn the wrong things because of friends or environment, and sometimes there really isn't anything they can do. The entire notion of blaming parents for the wrongs of their children is relatively new in our culture--forty or fifty years ago, a kid could turn out wrong even with good parents and it wasn't the parents' fault. That's still true, but we're less forgiving now. But if you've seen a big family, you *know* that some kids turn out better or worse than others along certain metrics (such as ability to handle money, to support themself, to communicate, to deal with a difficult situation, etc...)
What would make a much bigger difference would be parenting lessons. The state should *require* every parent to take a class in parenting, that should be freely offered, maybe even electronically with a test they have to sit for. This should be like a vaccine program. Someone can disagree, but they should at least learn what to do and what not to do, based on the experiences of experts who have lived at their socioeconomic level.
SSL is useful for defense in depth, but should not be used as a catch-all.
What *should* happen is that a minimum level of certificate should be available, and cheap, that allows secure connections to and from a particular site. A medium level of certificate should be available for e-commerce, and cheap enough for mom-and-pop e-commerce, and should require that all information necessary to identify and report fraud or theft be displayed--even if in small writing--together with a link to reporting instructions on a government website. A high level of certificate should further require the electronic signature of the seller's bank and of the insurance company, at which a seller should be required to maintain a dollar amount of insurance to cover damage to the purchaser due to shoddy seller security or fraud.
Banks which routinely allow fraud use should have their access to the monetary system revoked.
In addition, any company that claims your transaction is secure because of SSL should have their SSL certificate revoked by the certifying organization. SSL makes the connection more secure; it does not make your credit card transaction necessarily safe--but the latter impression is what millions of e-commerce sellers effectively claim.
Slashdot Mirror
They are mostly to blame because they were unwilling to compromise with the other groups, thus forcing things closer to the wire and making the whole institution seem even more incompetent.
There are other parties to blame, of course. The line about not raising taxes at all, for example, was an equally pigheaded move, as was the decision (by both the Republicans and the media) to characterize it that way, when a large portion of the tax code is just entitlement spending in the tax code. Refusing to collect a dollar because someone meets your criteria is the same as spending a dollar because someone meets your criteria.
I also think it's not true that the tea party is the only group that wants to seriously cut spending--everybody wants to cut spending. They just can't agree on what to cut.
Unfortunately, too, the market collapse makes spending cuts especially harmful right now--at least the wrong spending cuts. Entitlement programs and a bigger EITC would actually help the economy and probably produce a net tax benefit right now. (Money you put into the economy, if it actually gets spent as it does if you give it to people without adequate resources, turns over a few times in a year, getting taxed in different places as income).
You are sitting on a multi-billion dollar fleet of F-22's that have been GROUNDED (google it).
We stopped ordering new ones, though, despite the original orders being for a lot more. Once you have a couple dozen F22s, you have air superiority if needed. We simply haven't faced an enemy we need to use them against yet, so when a bug cropped up, we suspended the program and slowly began an investigation, but we still have the planes.
I assure you, if we go to war with a major modern power, the F-22s will be back in service within a day or two. They are not a bad thing to have around.
Excellent.
I wrote a response to this, but I think Slashdot ate it.
Has anyone done good empirical work on similarities and differences in perceptions of literature, according to cross-cultural, demographic, or other factors?
I don't know of such work, but I'd be interested to see it. I think it would fall more under sociology than anthropology than under literary criticism, though.
The greatest weaknesses I have seen in the litcrit I've been exposed to have been the lack of empiricism
There is empiricism. For instance I did a term paper that did a statistical analysis of the verb forms used in texts identified by literary pundits as either "showing" or "telling", and found a statistically significant difference (which I then applied to some texts I'd held back, and it classified them in the same way as the original pundits). That sort of application of computational linguistics to litcrit is quite a young field, though.
Interesting. I rarely saw even a hint of that kind of work in undergrad, but I suppose it was a combination of the newness of the subfield combined with the delay in exposing undergraduates to real academic work.
the lack of taste
You mean disagreement with your taste?
Yes. Effectively, I believe that English can be a beautiful language. Most Criticism I have read has been written quite poorly, using a large quantity of words to say things that could be said more quickly and that are not particularly insightful. Hence the perception by most people that much of it is contentless.
and the lack of ability to write well (in fact, the propensity to write quite poorly, despite the use of jargon).
Firstly, academic litcrit is a specialised register, and I doubt any of us here are in a position to judge how well a text conforms to that register. Secondly, even if some critics don't write well it's not necessarily any reflection on their skill at analysing texts (not least because some modern critics, following Derrida, actively try to subvert language; one wouldn't condemn all coding just because of the existence of the obfusticated C contest.).
The problem is that the "register" is in such great opposition to both taste and effectiveness, so far as I have seen. Perhaps I am wrong, and these arguments are better made by someone part of the field. But the issue is that the field, as written, drives away many people, probably even most people, who love literature, because of the horrid patterns that it uses. Mere inability to write, I agree, does not necessarily reflect inability to analyze, but it does not help, and is at times used to obfuscate the simplicity of a point.
I would like to see some good literary criticism. But I don't recall ever reading any--at least not from the last century or so. And pretty much every piece of criticism that was assigned in undergrad was repugnant to me, so much so that it offends me that people were paid to write it. We have a language that can and should be beautiful. The idea of writing horribly because you can is not cute and is not a sign of maturity, but is a sign of childish snobbery. Perhaps a little bit can be fun, but for it to seemingly be the cornerstone and hallmark of a field shows a deeply troubling disrespect for education and the advancement of the appreciation of the arts.
That being said, I suspect there is good criticism out there.
Interesting. I agree with your notion--as described, it is one of many ways to draw insights from or about a text, but does not convincingly devalue other ways.
The part I am most skeptical of is the notion that the expert must be an expert at literary criticism for the criticism to be valid. Not only is it a field where separating wheat from chaff is nontrivial, with no clear metric, but it defies logic to suggest that an expert literary critic will necessarily draw more valid conclusions about a work than, for example, someone who grew up listening to stories about the time from his or her grandparents. And that person would not even be a historian, merely a layperson with a sense of the time.
... And if we aren't 1000%, absolutely, positively reliable may God Strike Us... BLAM!!!!!!
Sorry sir. The thousands place is the sign bit in our percent calculations.
Sephiroth is rumored to have been stuck in the middle.
The work you produce continues to cost you time. The movie that was produced has its entire cost as a sunk cost.
Grading on a curve has three purposes:
1) It does not punish people who take harder courses or courses which are graded more harshly.
2) It keeps people from failing (incredibly important when school costs as much as it does).
3) It limits grade inflation (mostly a red herring that people use to justify grading on a curve).
Normative statements about the particular criticism, you mean, rather than normative statements about criticism itself or about schools of criticism?
Is "New Criticism" essentially the idea that all criticism is valid, kind of like a view of literary criticism through a lens of complete moral relativism, where no critique is better than another?
True. But sometimes people are just plain wrong. Romeo and Juliet is not a play about donuts.
Nominal Sexuality? What an interesting idea. Sexual nominality might be more fun.
There are plenty of times you can identify what Shakespeare is doing. You just have to keep in mind he may have been doing other thing as well, and probably was. In the Tempest, when he's mocking his audience and saying goodbye to them, is he also mocking you for thinking you know that?
Isn't the question more how much of Shakespeare was written by Shakespeare, rather than whether someone else of the same name wrote Shakespeare?
It seems unlikely there's a Shakespeare playwright who wrote a play about Hamlet and death after Shakespeare's son Hamnet died.
I wrote a response to this, but I think Slashdot ate it.
Has anyone done good empirical work on similarities and differences in perceptions of literature, according to cross-cultural, demographic, or other factors? The greatest weaknesses I have seen in the litcrit I've been exposed to have been the lack of empiricism, the lack of taste, and the lack of ability to write well (in fact, the propensity to write quite poorly, despite the use of jargon). But perhaps my exposure has not been broad enough.
Seems kinda ridiculous. You're the one reading the book. You get to decide what you do with it. You can read it as a reflection of the author, or as a commentary on a time, or as a story reflecting on itself, or any other way you'd like.
Good literary analysis is having fun with one or more of those ways, hopefully in a way that lets the reader learn something. Bad literary analysis is worth less than bullshit, because bullshit can fertilize plants.
The other bug, of course, was putting the future of the Linux Community in the hands of Grand Admiral Thrawn, with the Emperor's storehouse on Wayland. Have we truly chosen to go with the Empire, in the hope of developing a new clone army and ruling the known galaxy?
I thought Linux was more about being the fastest hunk of junk in the Galaxy, about tearing the droid's arms out of their sockets if they win but being willing to put them back together (backwards) and carry them on your back, about shooting Greedo first and stepping on Jabba's tail?
When copyright terms are again 30 years or less with no exceptions...
That would be better, but not ideal. Books should be longer, because they make so much less money. And any work that earns more than a certain profit should have its copyright term shortened, because the purpose of incentivizing production no longer exists after, for example, you have a 200% return.
Dear Internetz,
I promise to make it up with lots of Kara/Lee fanfic.
Kisses,
OCL
It also doesn't take into account non-civilian ownership, which is going to push US numbers much higher. (Not that it matters ordinally, since it's at the top of the list already.)
I'm surprised it's that high in the US. We have two, but they were my grandfather's, and almost nobody I know owns a gun. I wonder how the ownership is distributed socioeconomically and demographically.
Of course it's not safe to open the document. It could be a "Starbuck should be a dude" rant.
Aside from the fact that the US is spending way more than it takes in (and has been for decades), the simple fact that the US top insitutions use the default threat as a political argument to suit their own agenda should be enough to lower the rating.
"If you don't take it seriously, we'll grade you down"
It should be enough to get those institutions fired.
What people forget is that they elected their Congressperson, and their congressperson is responsible. Congress as a whole is guilty of putting politics before the good of the nation, and though the blame may primarily lie with the tea party at the moment, they all failed, and they all should be sacked. The problem is that people always say "but my individual congressperson is different!"
I have a radical idea: hold both them AND their parents responsible for all of their criminal acts.
It's an interesting idea, but it won't work, and it may increase the amount of abuse among poor families. (Where abuse is already a massive problem.)
Learning is environmental. Parents CAN make a huge difference, but sometimes the best parents in the world will have kids who learn the wrong things because of friends or environment, and sometimes there really isn't anything they can do. The entire notion of blaming parents for the wrongs of their children is relatively new in our culture--forty or fifty years ago, a kid could turn out wrong even with good parents and it wasn't the parents' fault. That's still true, but we're less forgiving now. But if you've seen a big family, you *know* that some kids turn out better or worse than others along certain metrics (such as ability to handle money, to support themself, to communicate, to deal with a difficult situation, etc...)
What would make a much bigger difference would be parenting lessons. The state should *require* every parent to take a class in parenting, that should be freely offered, maybe even electronically with a test they have to sit for. This should be like a vaccine program. Someone can disagree, but they should at least learn what to do and what not to do, based on the experiences of experts who have lived at their socioeconomic level.
SSL is useful for defense in depth, but should not be used as a catch-all.
What *should* happen is that a minimum level of certificate should be available, and cheap, that allows secure connections to and from a particular site. A medium level of certificate should be available for e-commerce, and cheap enough for mom-and-pop e-commerce, and should require that all information necessary to identify and report fraud or theft be displayed--even if in small writing--together with a link to reporting instructions on a government website. A high level of certificate should further require the electronic signature of the seller's bank and of the insurance company, at which a seller should be required to maintain a dollar amount of insurance to cover damage to the purchaser due to shoddy seller security or fraud.
Banks which routinely allow fraud use should have their access to the monetary system revoked.
In addition, any company that claims your transaction is secure because of SSL should have their SSL certificate revoked by the certifying organization. SSL makes the connection more secure; it does not make your credit card transaction necessarily safe--but the latter impression is what millions of e-commerce sellers effectively claim.