There’s little doubt that George Bush looks like a broken man at this point. But the larger question remains: what will become of him when his term is over? Bush talked about making “ridiculous money” on the lecture circuit but his biographer, Richard Draper, deems that unlikely in the short term:
“My feeling is that for the first year there probably will be minimal interest in him,” said one agent who works in the public speaking business. “There have been other former presidents who’ve been unpopular leaving office, but nobody’s ever been this unpopular. After a year, though, people forget and then he’ll have a very lucrative career.”
I’m not sure people will forget within a year. And then there’s this from Stanley Fish:
How will he occupy his time? Roving ambassador? Baseball commissioner? University president? (Don’t groan; he’d probably be good at it.) I don’t know, but I do expect that one night in the not-too-distant future, some TV host will be calling for the drum roll and announcing, with pleasure and pride, “Heeeere’s Georgie.”
Let’s not forget that Fish fell for defended those who fell for the greatest spoof in recorded history. Which probably makes piece of credulity a bit more understandable:
And the fact is that he’s likable. I don’t mean on the superficial level of being someone you’d want to have a beer with. It’s deeper than that. He comes across as a basically decent man who is at peace with himself. Despite the fun poked at his verbal maladroitness, he is actually quite skillful (certainly more skillful than either Al Gore or John Kerry) in conveying his positions succinctly and persuasively. (He didn’t win two national elections — well, maybe one — by accident.) He may not be an intellectual, but he isn’t dumb and he is shrewd enough to play his “aw shucks” personality for all it’s worth. And he has a really good sense of humor (something Barack Obama seems to lack) and a comedian’s ability to make capital out of his own malapropisms. Putting aside the agendas for which he will no longer be held responsible, what’s not to like?
Comrade Dread
I’ll never forget him.
He turned me from a conservative to a libertarian to a liberal libertarian.
Another ‘conservative’ president like him and I’ll probably end up a raging Bolshevik.
As to ‘what’s not to like’, it’s a bit hard to forget or forgive a guy for taking a budget surplus and turning it into a 5 trillion dollar (and counting) debt, starting an unnecessary war that turned an authoritarian hellhole into an even worse place and resulted in the unnecessary deaths and displacement of millions; shredding the constitution; expanding the daddy state at every turn; helping turn the Justice department (which wasn’t great to begin with) into even more of a sick Orwellian joke…
I’d go on, but the list isn’t anything that John or a hundred other bloggers haven’t already said in the last four to eight years…
Josh Hueco
He may not be smart, but he’s got a great sense of humor…well, shit, what more do you need in a president?
canuckistani
The blood on his hands gets all over the furniture?
Shinobi
And then after the show they will all gather around a warm computer screen to watch their ratings plummet. (Unless it is The Daily Show, that shit I would watch.)
Shygetz
I see a big future for GWB as a highly sought-after dunking booth resident.
cleek
Bush says he’s going to write a book.
Laura W
Jesus Christ. I’m spitting my veggie protein green drink on my keyboard, here.
Slapstick v. sublime
Whacked out v. wit
Numbskull v. nuance
Deadhead v. deadpan
Obama has one kick-ass sense of humor. It’s one of the most appealing (and sexiest) things about him, IMO. And for Michelle, as I think I heard her say that on their first date one of his chief selling points that sealed the deal for her was: "he was funny!", or words to that effect.
Bush’s psychopathic snicker and embarrassing attempts at joke-making cause me to gag.
I have to stop now. My green drink is coming back up.
TenguPhule
Good, we can add its page to his effigies burning eternally in Times Square.
Josh Hueco
@Laura W:
(looks under chair) "Nope, no WMDs here!"
You’re right, fookin’ laff riot.
Capt. Jean-Luc Pikachu
Please double-check your link for "greatest spoof in recorded history".
Anna Granfors
Personally, I think he oughtta go over to the Middle East and be Joe The Reporter’s co-host or whatever.
Comrade Dread
Suggested Titles:
"Mommy! There’s a terrist in ma closet!"
"It’s not a lie, ANYONE can be president, Johnny. Even me. Twice."
"How I learned to stop worrying and love unchecked executive power… until a Democrat got elected." w/forward by John Yoo and John Bolten
Laura W
@Josh Hueco:
I believe that post of mine holds the record for most number of word edits in 5 minutes. I was so agitated I could not find words, which for me, is pretty damn agitated.
"Psychopathic" is more accurate than "disgusting", and I prefer "embarrassing" to "idiotic" because idiotic is understood and I FEEL EMBARRASSED FOR HIM WHEN I WATCH HIM.
Or embarrassed for all of us, more accurately.
R-Jud
"Snickering at your own lame jokes" =/= "sense of humor".
As for Obama, I seem to remember watching him pretend on TDS that his white half was fighting with his black half in the voting booth due to the Bradley Effect. That was pretty funny.
Josh Hueco
@Laura W:
Oh, Laura, I wasn’t criticizing you…your post brought back memories of that awful video, and like you, I got agitated!
El Cid
There are apparently a lot of high exposure ‘liberals’ who have a different notion of ‘dumb’ than I do. Not just Fish, but I remember getting routinely sneered at by Eric Alterman on what a huuuuuuuge mistake all us too-left fringies were making by calling Bush Jr. ‘dumb’.
There are all sorts of general managers across retail America who can spout off their corporate plans and their policies in great details and mix in great stories from golf trips and fishing days.
None of which means they aren’t dumb as rocks, particularly if they’re given more power than any other individual in the ‘Free World’.
Bush Jr. strikes me as a real d***-head owner or manager of a car dealership who inherited or got nepotized into his position, can talk his business up and down, makes awful decisions all the time, and just barks off inanities and stories of prejudice on anything else. A guy that ordinary employees hate, except for a few kiss-up a** holes.
DougJ
It’s correct. That’s a spoof that Fish fell for. He published that thing in Social Text.
Sam Simple
Bush will go back to what he does best – drinkng heavily and beating Laura. He will die young. Count on it.
Laura W
@Josh Hueco: No criticism perceived or taken at all. I knew what you meant. I was bearing witness to my agitation vis-a- vis perpetual word changing!
Brian J
How much is he worth in monetary terms? In 2004, it was estimated that he was worth between $9-26 million. I have no idea what it could be now, but assuming it wasn’t all blown away on mortgage securities or something, it’s still probably a substantial sum. So why can’t he just live a quiet life and invest his money, or since he’s such a bad manager, let someone help him with it? Then he could devote his time, quietly, to helping with AIDS in Africa or something. There are far worse ways to spend your life.
Joshua Norton
Well he must have done it with hula hands or semaphore, because everything I’ve seen for the past 8 years has been nothing but a hot mess of jibber jabber.
The Other Steve
Obama lacks a sense of humor?
Huh? are these idiots serious?
TheOtherMikey
I find it interesting that the American public voted a recovering alcoholic as the guy they most wanted to have a beer with.
joeyess
Baseball Commisioner??
This is a scenario in which I buy season tickets to Arena Football.
Forever.
James Hare
I don’t see where this mythic "likability" of George W. Bush comes from. I don’t think he’s particularly funny, but that’s because I’m not into folks who make jokes about death row inmates. I don’t think he’s likable and I wouldn’t like to have a beer with him. I’m not friends with torturers, and I don’t find them likable. Honestly, folks who can look past the man’s actions and see something about him that’s "likable" are truly morally deficient.
But that describes basically all of our commentators and many folks in Washington. Maybe I’m the crazy one.
Davis X. Machina
In other words, he thinks in bumper stickers.
Perfect for a shift manager at Kroger’s.
POTUS, not so much.
phasearth
Actually, this is the greatest spoof in history:
Software-Generated Paper Accepted At IEEE Conference
Because now we can snicker at those silly eggheads at IEEE, just like we did at the fuzzy-headed post-modernists! Oh, the irony..
Jennifer
As I said in the last thread, he’ll live out his life in a faceless Dallas McMansion suburb, lazing his time away. It’s the only thing he’s ever really been good at so there’s no reason to think it won’t be his "go-to" setting in retirement. It’s a totally appropriate post-presidential agenda for him.
Ty Lookwell
But he IS likable. That’s the weird, freakish thing. It’s hard to HATE him, the way it’s easy to hate, say, Dick Cheney, who just oozes pure, putrid evil. Cheney, in the history books, will be our Rasputin. Bush is a fucking sociopath, but he doesn’t seem hateable. He’s our friendly Ted Bundy president.
Comrade Darkness
Reagan made all his money post-office getting six-figures a pop (in 80s dollars, no less) to speak in Japan. Once he was out of office, he was out of here (meaning the U.S.). There wasn’t an American market for The Great Orator so Bush will have to look overseas too. He’ll find a market if only for the side-show appeal of it all.
He’s properly done the bidding of the House of Saud these last eight years, so I think he’ll land on his feet in his ongoing quintessential ram down everyone’s throat reminder that it’s who you know, not how skilled you are, that really matters to the real elites, his "base", as he calls them. Like the Bush family, the Sauds loves them some loyalty above all else.
——-~~——-
In reference to the re-animation of the Lady de Rothschild in a previous thread, I’d like to thank everyone in blog land for extending my life six-fold. I immediately imagined that all happened 2 years ago, not 4 months. Good lordy in heaven, time is a skewing.
McJulie
ARRRRRGGGGGGHHHHH
My head, it will explode from the pressure of the wrongness. One of the things that has driven me the most pointlessly insane during the Bush years is the collective media insistence that with Bush black is white, up is down, freedom is slavery and a smug, smirking, possibly sociopathic fratboy is in fact a likable everydude.
No! I don’t like him! I have never liked him! I never will like him! He is not in "fact" likable! He has a kind of smarmy, self-involved charm that some people obviously like, but I don’t! And he does *not* have a good sense of humor, unless you think a sinister "heh-heh-heh" while you’re pulling the wings off flies, or electrocuting prisoners, is completely hilarious!
If Bush seems "at peace" with himself, it’s only because of his cavalier indifference to the suffering of others.
This isn’t just a matter of policy. I disagreed with Reagan and McCain, and found both of them to be perfectly likable as people. In fact, I thought their fundamental likability served as a cover for some very bad policy ideas.
The fact is that Bush is an arrogant creep. The end.
jibeaux
What the hell, it’s been a while since I’ve put up a cute kid story, and somebody’s gotta do it. Call it the Are You Smarter Than A Second Grader edition.
We have one of those Bush’s last year in office 2008 calendars (it goes through 1/20/09, so it’s still up), full of quotes. My seven year old likes to read them and say "I don’t get that" or "What does that mean?". So this weekend he had noticed that the calendar is called "Almost Done" or something like that, and he was pointing out that it started back in January 2008 which is not exactly almost done. His dad pointed out that the last year of eight years of presidency can probably be called almost done. I should point out that although we talked about the electoral college etc. during the election, we share our political opinions with him very little, since he’s seven and doesn’t care. The only insight into GWB he has is basically from this calendar. And the response was:
"Wait a minute. You mean that for the entire time I’ve been alive, THIS GUY has been the president?"
Jennifer
People found Ted Bundy charming, too.
It’s like that with a lot of sociopaths.
magisterludi
I looked at the place W and Miss Laura bought in Dallas. It’s visible from the street, so I would expect he will spending some time supervising the erection of walls with barbed wire and gun turrets and placing armed guards at the perimeter.
Brian J
To all those who think that Bush is dumb, I have to disagree. He may not be as intelligent as a lot of deep conservatives, but I just don’t think he’s dumb, at least not in the Sean Hannity way, which is to say that Bush can process thoughts outside the complexity of a sixth-grade textbook.
I actually think he’s intellectually insecure enough not to be able to ask questions. It’s simply impossible to know all that you need to know to do the job required by being president and to not need a wide range of advisers. Everybody accepts that, but part of having these advisers at one’s disposal is using them. They served at his pleasure, but can anyone imagine Bush having a conversation that asked a lot of probing questions about any particular issue? Perhaps worse, can anyone imagine him saying, "You know, I’m not too familiar with that. Can you go back for a second?"? I’m not saying being a blank slate is acceptable, but it’s not out of the question for people to ask questions. In fact, a lot of people seem to think that part of intellectual maturity is knowing when to ask questions and/or asking them if one feels unsure of something. Along the same lines, a decent number of Bush’s advisers were very accomplished, intelligent men and women, at least in the more high profile spots. But is there any indication that he might have listened to them besides the times when they already agreed with him? And where there even enough of the people who could be classified as anything but yes men?
I could go on, but I think my point is clear.
Comrade Darkness
@phasearth, bit of hyperbola, no? Fooling three reviewers and a lazy editor is the greatest spoof in all of history?
The Cardiff Giant tops that easily.
Or, how about Joseph Smith’s Egyptian "translations"
lilly Von Schtupp
Funny? Maybe among the like minded. I always took him for mean, arrogant and detached. But funny?
May we never have a "funny" president like him again.
gwangung
On the other hand, he’d be a definite step up from the current commissioner…
R-Jud
@Comrade Darkness:
I don’t waste a lot of energy on revenge, public or private, but I do hope Bush will go abroad and get his ass arrested, Pinochet-style. The look on his face– "What, me?!"– will be priceless.
Cheney, on the other hand, would strike everyone dead with lightning and then vanish in a puff of smoke, cackling.
Ash Can
Fuck him. If he isn’t arrested on charges of treason and/or racketeering by the end of the month, he’s getting off easy. I regularly fantasize about some EU leaders offering Bush and Cheney (and maybe a few of their hangers-on as well) an all-expenses-paid European speaking and book-promotion tour, then seeing to it that they’re met getting off the plane by a few battalions of the Royal Netherlands Army to escort their sorry asses to the Hague. Hey, a girl can dream, right?
Lupin
What Bush needs now is a cute nickname, like, I don’t know, the "Butcher of Crawford" or something like that.
cleek
OT: Obama slaps the faces of homophobes everywhere by allowing a married gay preacher to speak at the inauguration.
SLAP!
Jennifer
Lupin – How about the "Disgrace of Dallas"?
Comrade Darkness
@Jennifer,
Connecticut Con Man would be more accurate on multiple counts. He played a confidence game with the entire country and gave the collected loot to his friends.
Joey Maloney
Spreading it?
…Does the baseball commissioner go to a lot of games? Because I can’t picture C-plus Augustus willingly going to venues where the crowd hasn’t been hand-picked and tested for Republican sycophancy. Having three-quarters of a full stadium booing thunderously when his smirking puss appears on the Jumbotron might puncture even his massively inflated ego.
TheHatOnMyCat
I’m sorry, I know I have missed some meetings lately.
Why in the world would anyone care what becomes of him?
Any information on this will be appreciated.
Ty Lookwell
"He thought he was the King of America
Where they pour Coca Cola just like vintage wine
Now I try hard not to become hysterical
But I’m not sure if I am laughing or crying
I wish that I could push a button
And talk in the past and not the present tense
And watch this hurtin’ feeling disappear
Like it was common sense
It was a fine idea at the time
Now it’s a brilliant mistake"
Balconesfault
Sure … him and Hannibal Lecter.
gypsy howell
It didn’t seem possible to me that I could despise him more after he leaves office than I do right now, but I’m starting to wonder if that might not be the case.
Iowa Housewife
@McJulie: amen.
Comrade Kevin
@DougJ:
The Sokal Hoax was awesome.
gypsy howell
@Brian J:
That’s freakin’ hilarious. You jest, right?
Balconesfault
@Brian J:
Ahh – but that’s just his baseball windfall money that Dad’s friends gave him. His share in the Bush Family Trust probably dwarfs that amount.
Screamin' Demon
No. Jibber jabber is the exclusive province of Mr. T. He pities the fool who steals his shtick.
I understand the title "My Pet Goat" is taken. He’ll probably have a 9/11 pop-up book ghostwritten for him instead. He’ll call it "My Finest Hour."
dr. bloor
Bush’s Interpersonal/Emotional IQ = Fail
Fish’s Interpersonal/Emotional IQ = Epic Fail
That’s because it’s not particularly difficult to articulate where you stand when your choices are inevitably limited to "black" or "white."
Fucking infants with typewriters, all of them.
TenguPhule
Because it’s hard to piss on his grave if you don’t know where to find it.
4tehlulz
I’m sure there’s some shoe salesmen in the Middle East that could use a spokesman of President Bush’s stature.
Zifnab
The criminally insane usually are.
That said, have I ever mentioned that I don’t fucking care? Because – in case you’re interested – I don’t fucking care. People read books written by historic figures because they either A) want to learn how a certain historic figure earned his place in history or B) want to learn how a certain historic figure fucked up. Bush will never admit to B) so any biography he writes will be a rather exhaustive exercise in fact checking and reading between the lines. And if you’re looking for the answer to A), you’d be much better off reading a history of Newt Gingrich, Trent Lott, Bush the Elder (or if you can really hold your nose, Karl Rove) because – let’s get real – Bush Jr rode into office on his last name, his party affiliation, and his bible – nothing more.
People will care about George Bush Jr in the same way that they care about the Vichy Regime of France, Maximilien’s Napoleon-sponsored control of Spain, or the rule of the Romanovs under the advisement of Rasputin. He’ll go down in history as one of the world’s biggest puppets, but I don’t think anyone will ever mistake him for a remarkable individual on his own.
No one gives a shit if he was "likable" or "witty" or "would have been fun to drink a beer with" because these attributes – whether real or fantasized – had nothing to do with his rise and fall. They don’t tie into any of his public policies. They don’t tell us anything about how he made decisions (or let his Cabinet make them for him). Such comments are useless when evaluating the legacy of the 43rd President of the United States.
So why mention them at all? "Kissing up to the Kardashians" comes on at 5. Just give us a recap of that instead.
Church Lady
What’s not to like? Well, after eight years, my list is just too damn long to enumerate. If we can remember the Alamo, we can remember all that George has done.
Roger Moore
Of course he’ll make a bunch of money on the lecture circuit. Or, more to the point, on the "lecture circuit". He’ll be invited to give lectures at Exxon, Halliburton, Blackwater, and every other company that’s profited obscenely from his cronyism. He’ll give a short, poorly attended lecture at each place and be given a big fat check for his time and effort. He’ll probably also get some nice, high paying sinecures on the boards of right wing non-profits, too. It’s a way of giving him a sanitized payoff for letting big corporations rip off the country for the past eight years.
Andrew
Hoaxing pompous pomos is much more amusing than tricking some engineering nerds.
ricky
Two points: 1) At this moment there is no American market period. 2) If I were Bush I would not set foot outside the Continental US for fear of citizen’s arrest.
ricky
Anyone who thinks George would be fun to drink a beer with either never spent time at a Houston Country Club or has fond memories of wearing wheat jeans with weejuns and no socks.
Waingro
Whenever wingnuts make fun of ‘liberal elite academics’, I am actually forced to remember that people like Stanley Fish actually do exist.
I’d class Alterman in the same class as Fish-cocooned and clueless. Professional liberals are just as useless as movement conservatives.
That’s exactly how I’ve always felt about him. I wouldn’t tolerate this motherfucker as my insurance agent or shift supervisor, yet I’m supposed to pretend that he’s a credible President of the United States?
Comrade Darkness
There is among the recipients of his largesse.
I hope no one makes him a martyr. That would be worse. Nothing would gain him more power among the 47%ers than a trial in Den Haag. I want his cronies in jail, make no mistake. Perp walks all around, Cheney and the lot of them. But if we can’t pull together the moral will to try Bush himself ourselves, I fear that the unifying power of the backlash against someone else doing it.
SLKRR
@ Comrade Darkness :
I’m gonna have to go with Piltdown Man on this one. The Cardiff Giant didn’t even last a year.
TenguPhule
It will amuse me endlessly if Middle East Countries pirate Bush’s features for Shoe Ads and never pay him a dime in royalties.
DougJ
True, and that Sokal thing is so over-the-top. He did it very well but Fish is an idiot for not seeing through it.
ppcli
Actually, IIRC, it was Andrew Sullivan and some other guy who published the Sokal hoax paper in Social Text. Fish was one of the people who stepped up to the plate to defend the Social Text editors on the Op-Ed page of the New York Times. Fish’s defence, like all of the others I read, naturally just dug the hole deeper. They invariably rested on a) ad hominem attacks on Sokal, saying that despite his claims to be a leftist, the hoax revealed him to really be an evil political reactionary and b) Grandiose claims to the effect that the hoax reveals how terrified The Big Science Establishment is of comp. lit. professors costing them research grants by revealing the profound secret that knowledge is all socially constructed. I think Fish also rabbited on about how Trust is a is a bedrock virtue and a necessity for intellectual inquirers – how could the poor innocents at Social Text fail to be swindled by someone like Sokal who would abuse Trust in such a shameful way.
.
Once everything had played out, the defences of the Social Text editors were generally more damning and embarrasing to humanities professors than the hoax itself.
Phoenician in a time of Romans
How will he occupy his time? Roving ambassador? Baseball commissioner?
Still hoping for defendant at the Hague, myself.
pseudonymous in nc
It’s as dry as old sticks, and the WH press pack will totally fail to get the joke. This may be because they are over-attunedto Bush’s brand of fratboy snigger, or because fratboy snigger is the only kind of "funny" they understand.
As for Stanley Fish, what’s weird is that he has a fairly dry sense of humour himself, at least from the half-dozen occasions I’ve seen him speak. Colossal ego, too, though: it’s not without reason that David Lodge modelled Morris Zapp on him.
And Bush will get five-star treatment from wingnut welfare, as a nice swaddling blanket, just as he was cushioned from failure before getting into politics.
Mike G
he is actually quite skillful (certainly more skillful than either Al Gore or John Kerry) in conveying his positions succinctly and persuasively.
Gore and Kerry are burdened with actual intellectual standards that would make them cringe with embarrassment if they articulated their positions in Bush’s mangled-syntax mumbling comic-book language.
forked tongue
ppcli: Not quite. The Andrew you’re thinking of is Andrew Ross, and he was one of two co-editors of Social Text at the time. Fish was one of the founders of Social Text, and he did defend the editors in the NYT after the fact, but I don’t believe there is any evidence that he had a direct hand in choosing to publish the piece.
Fish was a far-too-influential prof in the English Dept. at UC Berkley while I was a grad student there and he made life so goddamned miserable for anyone who wasn’t a toady that I continue to take unseemly joy in whatever woes befall him. Based on the Bush piece in question, those now apparently include senility.
Chris Johnson
Unfortunately it will star Jeff Gannon.
Fortunately, the pop-up sections will be very impressive!
Comrade Kevin
From the department of pedantry:
The book is actually called "The Pet Goat"
Objective Scrutator
I enjoyed the Sokal Hoax, myself. Although a Leftist, Alan Sokal wrote the piece to make fun of Leftists that were trying to be trendy about their bogus ‘intellectualizing’, particularly those of French heritage.
Indeed, Sokal actually showed how the Left frequently tries to take the helms of science. Once the Left obtains science (as they still have it in intellectual circles), they distort it for their own purposes. Although the Left’s misuse of science is well documented, I would like to bring up something else the article mentioned:
Leftists thrive on the ‘unknown’, and attempt to use that concept, plus their fancy-pants degrees, in order to give themselves infinite resources to create bogus theories and give themselves untouchable tenure. Thus, this is why the Left feels it necessary to destroy any mention of the LORD in our society; while theism accurately recognizes that we have the potential to know everything, Leftists need ambiguity in order for their ideas to survive.
President Bush knows no such ambiguity. He is confident of his economic and martial plans to such an extent that he will not accept other viewpoints in deciding upon policy. (He eventually caved in to the Democrats once they stole Congress, for unknown reasons. It is not our place to postulate why they did so.) From day 1, President Bush had a vision for our country: to be Christian, free, and wealthy. The media and the Leftist boondogglers did not like how President Bush was so sure of his vision for America. For that, he was persecuted; many of his efforts were sabotaged.
May Kristeva, Lyotard, and the rest of the French mathematicians burn in hell, while President Bush shall become a martyr for conservatism.
Notorious P.A.T.
Psychopaths have a kind of shallow, intense charm that certain people find magnetic. Like the old saying "well, Goebbels was charming".
Chet Scoville
No, Fish did not publish the Sokal hoax; he was not on the editorial board of Social Text and had nothing to do with it. Nor did anyone except for a handful of people "fall" for the Sokal hoax, because Sokal revealed the hoax on the same day it was published, not waiting to see whether anyone else would detect it. (It wasn’t Andrew Sullivan who published it, either). And no, Fish did not accuse Sokal of being a political reactionary or of being afraid of comp. lit.
I find Fish a problematic thinker, but please don’t accuse him of things he didn’t do.
DougJ
Yes, you’re right.
Comrade Darkness
@SLKRR, the piltdown man never made any money. Honestly, only academics would come up with a hoax without profit potential. The cardiff giant is still collecting tourist dollars (including mine). Plus, the origin of the phrase "a sucker born every minute" gives it a giant leg up, ehem.
The giant may have lasted longer but Hull already had made his point to the Fundies that inspired him to arrange the hoax in the first place. I’m sure he just couldn’t resist announcing his hoax. Especially since Barnum was drawing in the money with his duplicate.
Balconesfault
@Objective Scrutator:
Cough cough … bullshit.
TheHatOnMyCat
Yeah, as your own link makes clear in the first sentence, it is not a book. It’s a story in a book.
Repeat, book = false. story = true
TheHatOnMyCat
I always seem to miss the grave-pissing thing.
Notorious P.A.T.
According to the Bible, how does one get into heaven?
Comrade Stuck
There’s no torture in Baseball, unless of course, your a Reds or Cubs fan.
Comrade Darkness
@Notorious P.A.T.: According to the Bible, how does one get into heaven?
*Answer unclear Ask later*
—wait, I shook it again and now it says: *chances not good*
TheHatOnMyCat
Clearly you have never been a lifelong Giants or Angels fan.
Or attended a night game at Candlestick Park in July.
TenguPhule
Another Sucker swallows the spoof bait.
Reel em in and put em on the scales to weigh.
TenguPhule
It helps if you use at least one hand to aim.
TheHatOnMyCat
I’m working the Blackberry and holding a latte at the same time, I just gotta let nature take its course.
Comrade Stuck
Clearly you are correct. But i was once in San Fran in July for 3 days of cold and shaking earth. I haven’t been back.
TenguPhule
A wide stance works too…or so I’ve heard.
steve
i will not forget him…hell of a man…i thank him for his willingness to serve…
TheHatOnMyCat
Hey, it worked for Pontiac.
Loneoak
Yeah, Science Wars part elebentytrillion!
I’ve never really understood why Sokal’s actions count as a hoax. The editors of Social Text were putting together interdisciplinary views of scientific knowledge production. A quantum physicist writes to them with a paper about his own field that also mimics some of the worst of pomo theorizing. They accepted the paper on his word that his was honestly what he believed — something highly valued in academia in both the humanities and natural science, because you cannot operate without a high level of trust. Once it was published he immediately announces it as a ‘hoax’. Yet who was hoaxed? Who certified it as ‘the right’ interpretation of either science studies or quantum physics? If it had been a piece of lasting importance regularly cited for many years, you could call it hoax. As it is, it’s just academic theatre.
Sure, there are/were a lot of science studies people full of the intellectual excesses of the day just doing crappy high theory. But I’ll tell you what, as a philosopher who works closely with scientists on a regular basis, there are an awful lot of profoundly arrogant scientists who think a PhD in engineering or natural sciences gives them the ability to spout off on any issue in any field at any time for any reason and expect to be listened to. What they have to say about my field is often mind-numbingly ignorant and usually based on some 70-years-old understanding of Popper’s falsifiability theory absorbed from a textbook sidebar. The best lesson from the Sokal ‘hoax’ is not ‘pomo humanities people are idiots’ or ‘scientists are jerks’ but the need for humility all around, especially on Sokal’s part.
Chuck Butcher
While there is a world of difference between stupid and dumb (as in retarded) sometimes the results look pretty similar. I’ve spent quite a bit of my life around intellectually really gifted people and some pretty average intellects and George doesn’t finish high on that scale. It doesn’t take genius IQ to be President, in fact that might be a drawback judging from the ones I know, it does require not being stupid. Good management skills and an ability to synthesize solutions from conflicting information do require and intellectual capacity that may exceed GWB’s but I think the problem is more one of character and "philosophy" (to dignify it with that term).
I’ve known quite smart people who were entirely disinclined to curiousity or critical thinking and people of very average ability who were driven by it – I doubt it takes a lot of guess work to figure out who was good at decision making. If you start out with GWB as both average and resistant to curiousity and critical thinking and put that in the position he is in; well, the shit will hit the fan hard.
Maybe the most telling thing about GWB’s character is his propensity for insulting nicknames for associates. What this says about him and the associates is truely scarey. A lot of things start to fall into place.
demimondian
@Comrade Stuck: San Francisco isn’t such a bad place. I spent a week there one afternoon.
Comrade Kevin
@TheHatOnMyCat:
D’oh, pedantry fail.
TheHatOnMyCat
If I were the authors, I’d change the name to "George Bush’s Reader."
Heh.
Phoenician in a time of Romans
Someone who calls themselves "Objective Scrutator" writes:
Leftists thrive on the ‘unknown’, and attempt to use that concept, plus their fancy-pants degrees, in order to give themselves infinite resources to create bogus theories and give themselves untouchable tenure.
Followed immediately by:
Thus, this is why the Left feels it necessary to destroy any mention of the LORD in our society;
Spot the irony.
ppcli
Yes, it was Andrew Ross, not Andrew Sullivan. I should know better than to trust dim recollections in this age of Google. Also I was running together some of the things Fish said in his defence with some of the things Ross and co-editor said in theirs. I was remembering his harumphing about Trust correctly though. Rather than replay the whole damn thing, I’ll just mention Paul Boghossian’s TLS dissection of (among other things) dishonest piece, which hits the high points:
http://www.nyu.edu/gsas/dept/philo/faculty/boghossian/papers/bog_tls.html
.
I’m also a philosopher who works closely with scientists on a regular basis, and I agree that many of them (though not all) will say profoundly ill-informed, condescending, superficial things when they essay what they call "philosophy". (Popper remains evergreen in physics departments.) As long as they are just spouting off in the lounge, it is irritating but you learn to live with it. If they were forming journals devoted to their musings, and establishing "literature studies" programs parallel to "Science and Technology Studies" ones, training PhD students, etc. then they would deserve a higher degree of scrutiny. If their professional work was as ignorant of the putative subject matter as that of the editors of Social Text
then they should be mocked accordingly.
Svensker
@Objective Scrutator:
He is confident of his economic and martial plans to such an extent that he will not accept other viewpoints in deciding upon policy. (He eventually caved in to the Democrats once they stole Congress, for unknown reasons. It is not our place to postulate why they did so.)
The Dems didn’t steal Congress for unknown reasons. Their reasons were very well known to those of us who got the special decoder ring. Guess we know who DIDN’T get one, hmmmm?
JL
@ricky: I can actually think that a few Palestians might be able to raise some money to have him speak. Of course, they would want him to deliver his address in the middle of a square in Gaza.
binzinerator
Other than the assassination, Mrs. Lincoln, what’s not to like about the play?
Sadly, Fish may be right. And if in a years’ time the American people allow Bush to ditch his responsibility for all the disasters and suffering he created, we are well and truly fucked as a nation. We can no longer credibly claim that a majority of America was deceived by inaccurate faithless representations made by Bush; rather, Bush in fact was an accurate faithful representation of a majority of America.
To forget who was responsible for the abuse of trust and power, it seems we must also forget what we’ve learned about how that trust and those powers were abused.
If Fish is correct, we will learn nothing and sooner not later see it repeated.
ricky
Only if outlasting Oldsmobile in the GM stable qualifies as "works."
And Giants and Angels fans have nothing on Astro’s fans,
who have suffered since the team abandoned their Second Amendment mascot and organic mosquito farm field for the great indoor space capsule on South Main.
Andrew
I think that the most wonderful thing was how hoax made some pomos declare the paper to be even more awesomely postmodern.
So it would have been legitimate work if only Sokal had believed in it?
Thanks for helping us understand why the entire field is such bullshit.
Joshua Norton
Right. He’s managed to successfully master a jejune combination of being funny and loathsome at the same time. What’s not to like?
lovethebomb
Bush is smaller than life. All these words about a sociophatic, perhaps psychopatic frat boy who was an effective puppet for the corporate plutocracy are useless. He murdered a million human beings. He is a war criminal.
Anyone ever notice how he would force himself to smile or grimace after each sentence – like some school pedants would do? It was an eerie thing to watch. Did anyone actually think he felt that sinister grin, other than as contemptuous? I know he has no conscience. He has bragged about how well he sleeps. He is a hollow void.
Any more words about this tool are pointless.
binzinerator
@Davis X. Machina:
Let’s go Krogering
For the best of everything
Including the… What the fuck!
That’s Dubya over there in produce, doing his chimpy grimace and snickering and trying to surreptitiously spray Raid on the citrus to keep the fruit flies down. Lemme hit that bastard with my shoes! Take that, fucktard! And that!
You’d know it was him by the pile of footwear around him.
binzinerator
@Chuck Butcher:
That’s what surprised me when he first ran for prez. I thought, ‘Don’t people see this?’ but what the more important question was ‘Don’t they think it’s important?’.
I thought this was telling too. The people I knew who did this were insecure bullies who either were cruel and did it for kicks or, on a deeper level, wanted to deflect attention off of their own short-comings or fuckups. And I thought ‘Just the kind of guy you want to have a beer with? Are you people fucking nuts?’.
Jon H
@phasearth: "Actually, this is the greatest spoof in history:
Software-Generated Paper Accepted At IEEE Conference"
Apparently, this was a poster at the conference, where the standards of acceptance are pretty universally low across fields. Basically the author stands in front of a poster with some of their information, and answers questions from interested parties. Anyone with a career at stake isn’t going to submit a garbage paper and face that kind of scrutiny.
Basically, for posters the peer review happens in the flesh. Did the software-generated paper get that far? Did someone stand there taking questions? Or did they just get it accepted and declare victory?
Also, I doubt it’s good form to cite a mere poster, so the damage that can be done is minimal, as it won’t spread. At a minimum, readers will note by the citation that the research is unpublished, and take that into account.
I’m not sure, but I’d think poster sessions would be a good place to report on legitimate ongoing research that isn’t ready for publication. "Here’s what we’re looking for. Here’s what we’re doing. Here’s what we’re using. We’re still gathering data." In that case it would be useful for meeting people doing similar work, and exchanging tips. That seems like a valid reason to have a lower bar for posters, as opposed to presentations or papers. (However, I don’t know if this is actually what is done. I should ask my coworkers, since I work in a neurobiology lab at Havard Med.)
One of the commenters in the slashdot thread said that he used to go to astrophysics conferences, and for entertainment he and his friends would visit the nutty peoples’ posters.
Jon H
"That’s Dubya over there in produce, doing his chimpy grimace and snickering and trying to surreptitiously spray Raid on the citrus to keep the fruit flies down"
Dubya would be the guy working in the Deli, fired for jerking off into the cottage cheese.
Jon H
In terms of likeability, I find Stanley less likeable than Albert.
TenguPhule
"The Secret Sauce is made of People!"
Jon H
@Waingro: "I’d class Alterman in the same class as Fish-cocooned and clueless. Professional liberals are just as useless as movement conservatives."
I think Alterman was mostly warning the left that fully adopting the idea that Bush is dumb would lead us to make mistakes when opposing him, because Bush’s administration and campaigns don’t rely only on his brain alone.
I think Bush is dumb, mostly through disuse of his chemically-damaged brain, and a dependence on surrounding himself with yes-men, allowing him to avoid using his brain.
His staff, on the other hand, had a number of smart people whose ability was applied toward ideologically warped short-term ends, which have been catastrophic over the long term.
priscianus jr
Enough about George Bush. What about Stanley Fish?
Stanley Fish is a shmuck. I don’t say this because of his comments here. Stanley Fish has made many, many comments and written many books over a long period of time and it is clear that he has been a shmuck for quite a while. This simply confirms it once again.
robertdsc
I will say this: as much as I hate the man for what he’s done in ruining the country, when he hosted Barack and the ex-Presidents, I was glad to see them all together in one spot. He’s a part of the office now, for good or ill. I’ll take that.
Marshall
I agree with Jon @111 – I have put together some poster sessions, and generally you only look at submissions to see if they fit the required format and the subject matter for the session. Many people need to have an abstract accepted to be able to get travel money, so they put in posters. Since there is generally no shortage of room to put up poster boards, there is no reason not to generally accept them. (The quality, of course, varies considerably, but that expected.)
Marshall
W, of course, once said that he only wanted to be Baseball commissioner. I hope there is a massive write-in campaign to stop that.
What I want to know is when Jeff Gannon will feel safe enough to write a tell-all book. He had better get on the stick – his marketability will literally decrease month by month after January 20th.
El Cid
I wasn’t crazy about the Sokal spoof in Social Text because out of all the loudmouth, arrogant, nitwit in-your-face grand journals of pomo nonsense, Social Text was among the more innocuous.
I agree with the Sokal idea; I just wish he’d have chosen a more worthy victim, particularly a journal or review in which they claimed to do some sort of peer review or acceptance process, which Social Text didn’t really.
All things considered, I guess it got the message across, and that was good, but I recall that there were journals and intellectuals of the time who annoyed me far, far more, but thankfully I can no longer recall them.