Diary: Which One of You Is Jesus?
In 1959, Dr Milton Rokeach, a social psychologist, received a research grant to bring together three psychotic, institutionalised patients at Ypsilanti State Hospital in Michigan, in order to make a two and a half year study of them. Rokeach specialised in belief systems: how it is that people develop and keep (or change) their beliefs according to their needs and the requirements of the social world they inhabit. A matter of the inside coming to terms with the outside in order to rub along well enough to get through a life. As a rule people look for positive authority or referents to back up their essential beliefs about themselves in relation to the world: the priest, imam, Delia Smith, the politburo, gang leader, Milton Friedman, your mother, my favourite novelist. It works well enough, and when it does, we call ourselves and others like us sane. When it goes awry, when people lose and/or reject all positive referents in the real world for the self inside, we call them delusional, psychotic, mad.
The Non-Scenic Route to the Place We’re Going Anyway
Instead of the surge of rebounding growth which historically accompanies successful exit from a recession, we have the UK’s disappointing 0.2 per cent growth, the US’s anaemic 0.3 per cent and the glum eurozone average figure of 0.2 per cent. That number includes the surprising and alarming German 0.1 per cent, the desperately poor French 0 per cent and then, wait for it, the agreeably frisky Belgian 0.7 per cent. Why is that, if you’ve been following the story, laugh-aloud funny? Because Belgium doesn’t have a government. Thanks to political stalemate in Brussels, it hasn’t had one for 15 months. No government means none of the stuff all the other governments are doing: no cuts and no ‘austerity’ packages. In the absence of anyone with a mandate to slash and burn, Belgian public sector spending is puttering along much as it always was; hence the continuing growth of their economy. It turns out that from the economic point of view, in the current crisis, no government is better than any government – any existing government.
Bravo l’artiste
If we follow the logic of Fredric Jameson’s Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, we could say that Rupert Murdoch is not so much a man, or a cultural force, as a portrait of the modern world. He is the way we live now; he is the media magnate we deserve. It is almost impossible to say a single conclusive, summing-up thing about him.
Gutted
In the past, a weak stomach and poor digestion was recognised as one of the diseases of philosophers, scholars and the learned. There was a finite quantity of vital spirits in the body: if they were called on to power digestion, they would not be available for the demands of deep thinking, and, conversely, philosophising interfered with the stomach’s duties. In the late 15th century, Ficino wrote that ‘it is bad to strain the stomach with food and drink, and worst of all, with the stomach so strained, to think difficult thoughts,’ and early in the 18th century the author of a treatise on occupational diseases noted that ‘all the men of learning used to complain of a weakness in the stomach.’
Cartwheels Over Broken Glass
That is the essence of Morrissey: his brand of loneliness and longing and hopelessness (all the stuff he sings about) is that of a person who finds it natural to have relationships with the unreachable – that’s to say, with images and works rather than people. Nostalgia is the be-all-and-end-all of pop, and Morrissey is the king of all that, so when he became a star himself (and began featuring his own mug on his record sleeves) he had succeeded in creating an audience literally after his own image, a tribe inured to the modes and manners of heightened fandom.
Why Reality Shows Failed on Russian TV
For the Russian version of “The Apprentice,” Vladimir Potanin, a metals oligarch worth more than $10 billion, was recruited to be the boss choosing between the candidates competing for the dream job. Potanin goaded, teased and tortured the candidates as they went through increasingly difficult challenges. The show looked great, the stories and dramas all worked, but there was a problem: no one in Russia believed in the rules. The usual way to get a job in Russia is not by impressing at an interview, but by what is known as blat—”connections.”
‘Damn Right,’ I Said.
“Decision Points” holds the same relation to George W. Bush as a line of fashion accessories or a perfume does to the movie star that bears its name; he no doubt served in some advisory capacity. … As a postmodern text, many passages in the book are pastiches of moments from other books, including scenes that Bush himself did not witness. These are taken from the memoirs of members of the Bush administration and journalistic accounts such as Bob Woodward’s Plan of Attack and Bush at War. To complete the cycle of postmodernity, there are bits of dialogue lifted from Woodward, who is notorious for inventing dialogue.
Let Us Pay: On the Future of the Newspaper Industry
I feel equally certain in saying that what the print media need, more than anything else, is a new payment mechanism for online reading, which lets you read anything you like, wherever it is published, and then charges you on an aggregated basis, either monthly or yearly or whatever. For many people, this would be integrated into an RSS feed, to create what amounts to an individualised newspaper.