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John Howl-Boo Profile picture
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23 Oct, 5 tweets, 1 min read
It's too bad Buster Keaton never made a film about time travel. It would have been good.
Maybe we could make a movie about someone traveling back in time, trying to get Buster Keaton to make an early time travel movie.
I thought about this because "The General" is sort of like a time-travel movie, insofar as people are stuck on this track, chasing along. Obviously that's sort of thin. But, more generally, there is a laterally (left-right) fixed quality to a lot of Buster's physical comedy.
Real humans live in a 3D world. Buster's world is often more 2D-seeming.
It would be funny to try to raise the level of that, metaphysically. Kind of a Billy Pilgrim-Tralfambadorians pathos. All these pratfalls but you are still on the same line. The aliens find us funny the way we find Buster funny. Just a thought.

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More from @jholbo1

John Howl-Boo Profile picture
24 Oct
Kevin Drum, somewhat to my surprise, mildly pooh-poohs the @ezraklein / @AdamSerwer 'democracy itself is on the line this election' line. 1/ motherjones.com/kevin-drum/202…
Worth distinguishing a couple of lines.
1) D's are screwed if we don't expand the SC and add a couple states, like, now.
2) D's shouldn't try to expand the SC/add states if they win.
3) R's haven't been trying to undermine democracy, it's just politics, which ain't beanbag. 2/
Drum argues against 1, but also for 3, and I'm not sure where he stands on 2. I am agnostic about 1) but the fact that I'm far from sure 1) is false means I believe 2); and 3) is obviously false. (That things have been worse in the past is true, but doesn't change matters.) 3/
Read 6 tweets
John Howl-Boo Profile picture
24 Oct
I'm on the fence about this. Part of me thinks Tabarrok is exactly right. If the US had a 'normal' center-right party, it would dominate. But Matt's counterpoint is compelling as well. The ingredients needed for a winning right-wing coalition are volatile. 1/
There is an irony in this. Politically, 'conservatism' is hard to stabilize. I'm only sure of this much: it won't be easy for Josh Hawley or Tom Cotton to step into Trump's shoes and build up a 'proper' authoritarian, minoritarian ethno-statist party, American-style. 2/
You need charisma plus will-to-power plus organizational skill and dedication to the cause. Trump has the rarest bit of that, not all of it. Cotton & Hawley lack the Trump lightning-in-a-bottle charisma. But it IS possible to imagine a right-wing demagogue pulling it together. 3/
Read 9 tweets
John Howl-Boo Profile picture
24 Oct
This is good. There ought to be a word for this genre. It's non-argumentative but non-hortatory; confessional merely by way of efficient summation. It's a form excluded by academic conventions, yet highly complementary to it, by design. 1/
I've thought about writing something of the sort myself, tricky though it is just to say what one thinks (not eve why). Were every philosopher to write something of the sort, on every major topic, it would be of considerable, navigational assistance, in staging our arguments. 2/
On the subject of Great Books programs, I went to the University of Chicago back in the Allan Bloom days, and the funny thing was: there are too many anthropologists around that place. I was supposed to be set to reading Thucydides, Smith, the Federalist Papers and Plato. 3/
Read 10 tweets
John Howl-Boo Profile picture
17 Oct
I would like a better theory of the psychic appeal of Qanon and, in general, right-wing nuttery. I suspect - but this is admittedly off-the-cuff analysis - it is guilt and resentment rooted in the following manner. 1/
American pop culture seems 'liberal'. That is, the media is liberal. That is, with the exception of "Sweet Home Alabama", the left has the good, political songs. And TV and movies are 'liberal', too. We'll see about "Hillbilly Elegy" but it ain't no "Birth of a Nation". 2/
That is, we don't get major, right-tilted media products that express - forthrightly - the view that American is going to hell in a hand-basket because sexually loose black people are taking over, due to communists like Martin Luther King, Jr. 3/
Read 19 tweets
John Howl-Boo Profile picture
29 Sep
theamericanconservative.com/dreher/trump-t… One of the problems with the 'live not by lies' frame is that Dreher uses 'lie' for any case in which there is a policy or norm he feels is not deferential to his religious outlook. 1/
So 'live not by lies' translates as: don't settle for less than spiritual hegemony. But seriously, let's start with the case and what ought to be the norm here. How do we generally address people? Other things being equal, we address them in the manner they wish to be. 2/
We call them by the name they prefer. We don't presume to name them ourselves. We call them by the titles they assume - like Mr. or Mrs. or Ms. Sometimes they have professional titles like 'Dr.' or 'Major' or 'Senator' or 'Director'. 3/
Read 25 tweets
John Howl-Boo Profile picture
28 Sep
Let me qualify my argument that D's should not attack Amy Coney Barrett.

P1 Horrible as he was, Scalia had the paper qualifications to be an SC judge and R's loved him for his relentless, results-oriented, activist jurisprudence.

P2 On paper Barrett isn't worse than Scalia. 1/
C Barrett is qualified to sit on the SC, if R's really want her.

C is true. R's have the right to inflict Scalia-grade damage on the republic by appointing bad, unprincipled judges. It's bad! They should be ashamed. It shocks the conscience. But that's the system. 2/
So D's should not die on the hill of the argument that no one like Scalia should ever be an SC justice. Scalia WAS a justice. He served. He is lionized on the right. Thus, there is precedent that his level of shenanigans, from the right, is acceptable SC jurisprudence. 3/
Read 17 tweets

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