If Wittgenstein Lived in the Twitter Age

...whatever a man knows, whatever is not mere rumbling and roaring that he has heard, can be said in three words.

-- Ferdinand Kürnberger, cited by Wittgenstein as the motto to the Tractatus

...whatever a man knows, whatever is not mere rumbling and roaring that he has heard, can be said in 140 characters.

-- Modern version

Two Weeks Ago I Had Jury Duty

...and I live-tweeted it.  Since (rather to my surprise) a number of people mentioned that they liked the tweets I decided to wildly overreact to what was doubtless mere politeness collect them all in one place for the pathetic gratification of my swollen ego anyone who might be interested. Think of it as a performance piece about boredom.

So here they are. I hope they are at least as a tenth as pleasant as jury duty itself w...  Nah, I can't wish that on my Noble Readers.  But click through if you're curious.

(PS: For more exciting experiences in sheer dullness, you can follow me on twitter here.)

Tidbits, Short Takes and Links

• Overall, the Obama win feels less like a glorious victory & more like a near-miss car collision that you're thankful to have walked away from unscathed.

• So if Romney *had* shown his tax returns, would he have won? Or would he have lost even bigger? We'd have to see them to know...

• LBJ famously said, after signing the 1964 Civil Rights Act, that it would cost the Democratic party the South for a generation.  Perhaps he should have added, after signing the 1965 immigration reform bill, "...and this is how we'll get it back."

• Dear students: folding over one corner does not keep two pieces of paper together. Use a stapler. Love, a grumpy teacher.

• So I understand that we're now all supposed to be interested in former CIA director Petraeus's sex life, and his mistress's enemies lover, and so forth.  My inner paranoid thinks the media's obsessing over Petraeus to distract us from the robbery of the public under cover of deficit hype.

• If you remove Jindal's "we must not be the party that" qualifiers from in front of them, then these seem like pretty accurate descriptions of the Republican party today:

• "the party of big business, big banks, big Wall Street bailouts, big corporate loopholes"
• "the party that simply protects the rich so they get to keep their toys"
• "dumbed-down conservatism... being simplistic... [and] insulting the intelligence of the voters"

Sounds about right.  In fairness, the first definitely applies to the Democrats too, albeit less so.

• NPR reporter misreads present-day novel as future apocalypse due to denial about climate change.

• Call it peace or call it treason, call it love or call it reason, but I ain't marchin' any more.

• Yglesias on the larger-picture problem with GOP poll denialism:

Common sense just turns out to be a poor guide to a lot of complicated social phenomena.... sociologically speaking, being on the same side as expert opinion is a high-status concept inside liberal and Democratic Party circles. This sociological embrace of expertise acts to temper the psychological mechanism of confirmation bias. On the right, the idea of academic expertise is held in low esteem. Conservatives accurately perceive that academia is hostile to nationalism and religious traditionalism and thus become much more prone to become out of touch with academic knowledge or to reject valid academic insights even on other topics. The same mechanism that can make you clueless about the meaning of "independent" self-identification can also lead to dangerously misleading public policy conclusions. Common sense and going with your gut are a poor way to understand the world.

• Wow. Or should I say 惊人.

• Buffy episodes summarized in limericks.  They're up to mid-season-three so far...

• I think the Walmart strikes are the most hopeful story in the news right now.

Resistance was Futile: I Have Been Assimilated

I was following the whole !@#$% election on Twitter and got tired of having ten windows open, so I signed up:
https://twitter.com/StephenFrug
I may not keep it up, but for now, I have some reactions over there.

Just call me Locutus.

Quote of the Day

Because somehow "quote" sounds so much better than "tweet" even if what I'm quoting is a tweet. Anyway, here it is:

I have developed a truly remarkable plan to save graduate education in the humanities which this tweet is too small to contain.— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) October 7, 2012

Retweeting on Blogger Because I Don't Actually Tweet

The Tweet that made me start this post (seen here):

This is a perfect representation of the campaign: an old white man arguing with an imaginary Barack Obama.

— Jamelle Bouie (@jbouie) August 31, 2012

And then the tweets that I saw while tracking it down that fall into the 'while I'm at it...' category:

Other depressing part about the GOP's "Obama hasn't killed enuf people" critique will come next week when the Dems brag about his body count

— AdamSerwer (@AdamSerwer) August 31, 2012

And

Kind of tired of everyone writing slaves out of the list of people who "built" America. nytimes.com/2012/08/31/opi…

— Jamelle Bouie (@jbouie) August 31, 2012

...and that's all for tonight.

(Why don't I tweet? I hear you cry. Two reasons, at least, each sufficient even in the absence of the other: first, a prolix fellow like myself can't hardly express himself in 140 words let alone 140 characters* -- witness this post -- and second, it'd just be another time-suck I can ill afford.)

_________________
* The Chinese have it easier. Chinese is not a primarily monosyllabic language -- each syllable is not a word (Classical Chinese was, I believe, but present-day Mandarin is not) -- but their words tend to be made up of two characters (sometimes three, sometimes one). As opposed to English. So they can say a lot more in 140 characters than we can. Maybe if I ever actually, y'know, learn Chinese I'll tweet.

If I Twittered, I'd Retweet This

You've really got to hand it to short people. Because they often can't reach it.

— rob delaney (@robdelaney) January 8, 2012

Actually, one more while I'm at it:

Funerals. RT @mcdonalds: What brings your family together?

— rob delaney (@robdelaney) July 19, 2012

...I came across this guy's twitter feed here. Most of its humor simply wasn't to my taste (some I found positively distasteful). But those two made me, as the kids say, LOL.

Truth Crushed to Earth Will Rise Again

So the bastards did it: they closed down the original occupy wall street encampment, in Zuccotti park. I hope to God this backfires on them.

Personally, I think the only adequate response would be a general strike -- probably Thursday, since that when a day of action was and is being called for anyway. But that's what should happen. They shut down the park, we shut down the city.

I only wish to God I was in NYC now so I could propose this, listen to reactions, and help.

Right now I'm thinking of breaking down and finally joining twitter, because it seems like the only way to keep up with what's going on. In the meantime, some tweets I've seen:

NYC authorities clearly feel #OWS eviction is just and reasonable. That's why they are doing it at 2am and barring all press.

-- George Zornick

Peacefully shut #NYC down #OWS! Strike! Shut it down!

-- Cooper's Hawk

NYPD Occupying Liberty Square; Demands Unclear

-- Mike Castleman

More when I can. [Update: tweet added.] In the meantime, the image below is from the official OWS twitter. Pass it on.

Update: Glenn Greenwald quotes a OWS spokesman (hey, I thought they didn't have any of those?):

A military style raid on peaceful protesters camped out in the shadow of Wall Street, ordered by a cold ruthless billionaire who bought his way into the mayor’s office.

That about covers it. Greenwald also has important points to make about the militarization of the police breaking up OWS (and similar encampments elsewhere (did you hear that they used police helicopters to ensure that no media helicopters would be able to see what they did as they broke up the protest (in conjunction with an on-the-ground press blackout, of course.)), as well as about the fact that, by ignoring the court order for him not to break up the encampment, "Bloomberg this morning has broken more laws than the hundreds of protesters who were arrested". Not that anyone will care, of course -- by which I mean, any of the 1%, who are the only people whose opinions count in this country. ("Now you're not naive enough to think we're living in a democracy, are you buddy?" - Gordon Gekko, Wall Street, 1987. Back before it was as bad as it is now.)

If I Was On Twitter, I'd Retweet These

Re-Elect Obama: He'll agree to Republican demands, but only after prolonged negotiations!

GOP held up spending cuts as core value. Obama held up compromise. So we compromise on spending cuts.

- Both from Matt Yglesias