#noah millman

[st-just]

What interests me primarily about the collapse of FTX is this business could ever have been idealized. The premise behind FTX is that, even though nobody is totally sure what crypto is ultimately good for, people love to trade it, and to concoct ever more elaborate schemes for leveraging waves of investor enthusiasm. Someone in a position to feed that beast could make a whole lot of money, and FTX aimed to be that someone. Which is to say, FTX’s business model depended on crypto being ripe for bubbles, and even for scammers. If you read or saw The Big Short, you may recall the point where the “heroes” of the story meet one of the guys who is one of their biggest counterparties, who has been taking exposure via derivatives to the most toxic mortgages, and securitizing them for investors who care only about yield. Through sheer transaction volume, he’s been making them more liquid, and therefore more attractive, than less-toxic stuff, and thereby driving the market to greater and greater heights of insanity, making a killing all along. That’s akin to what FTX’s legitimate business was, and who SBF was, before he drove himself to bankruptcy and the possibility of prosecution for fraud. There have always been guys like this, but how did this one become any kind of culture hero?

-Noah Millman, Altruism Wrap

[totheescapement]

Be Like the Past

You can’t just hate the present and long for the past, any more than you can make the future better by demanding of some nonexistent authority that they make it so. To make the future, you have to actually learn about the past, its glories and its follies alike, its conflicts and its contradictions. If we want to be like our forebears who successfully made it new, we have to, you know, be like them. We have to mine the incredibly rich resource of our past, and use that resource in whatever way we need to create new forms of art and politics, forms that are relevant to us. And then we have to hope that the future will treat us the same way, because then it will be alive. 

~Noah Millman, quoted by Alan Jacobs here

See also Josh Gibbs constant refrain: We learn history so that we can repeat it.

[rodgermalcolmmitchell]

A wonderful article that makes two points the American politicians do not understand.

A wonderful article that makes two points the American politicians do not understand.

The two points the American politicians (and much of the public) do not understand are:

Monetary Sovereignty can prevent and solve any financial ill, any recession, any depression, any inflation, any shortage, almost any national need.

Donald Trump, by intent or ignorance, is destroying our American way of life and attempting to install a dictatorship.

An excellent article by Noah Millman…

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[shakespearegif]

Has Shakespeare conquered so thoroughly in the four centuries since his death in part because he did so little to promote his own work?

If that supposition is correct, then perhaps Shakespeare thought his art was deeply serious – but also essentially ephemeral, like a sand mandala. That may or may not account for certain qualities of his language – but, unintentionally, that attitude may have had another effect. I’m going out on a bit of a limb here, but I think that the peculiar authorlessness of Shakespeare is part of the reason why his art has proved capable of conquering the world the way it has.

[theamericanconservative]

Noah Millman on Shakespeare:

Are Shakespeare's characters "relatable"? Can you "identify" with them?

“Relatability” is a quality imputed objectively to the object. The reader or observer is cut entirely out of the equation. You can’t do that with “identify” – you wouldn’t say a work was “unidentifiable” (or, you might, but you’d surely mean something like “unattributable” or something nothing to do with “relatability”). If I say that “I can’t identify” with Humbert Humbert, I might be admitting to my own lack of empathy – or I might be proud of that fact, convinced that anybody who could identify with H.H. must hare his pathology. It’s a question; it can be debated. But if I say he’s “not relatable” then I’m saying that it isn’t reasonably possible to understand him, empathize with him. The question is closed.

That’s what’s horrible about the word – not that it blames the author or performer (sometimes the failure really is their fault), nor that it demands a place for the self (we’re the only ones who can feel our feelings; “empathy” fundamentally means feeling someone else’s emotions as our own – there’s the self, right there), but that it involves a definitive closing of doors on experience. A conviction that I already know all that I need to know. About the world. About other people. About myself. And I just want to see that knowledge affirmed.

Was Shakespeare conservative?

A vision of politics that says that legitimacy is important, and that without it it’s harder to rule peacefully, may well be called conservative – but if so, we’re setting the bar for conservatism pretty low. (Am I supposed to believe that anyone who denies, or even qualifies, Mao’s dictum that “political power grows out of the barrel of a gun” is now a conservative?) What you can’t say is that Shakespeare wrote plays that blithely assume a world in which right ultimately triumphs, authority must be respected, and the most important thing is for everybody to know his place, and stay there. The very plays that grapple most directly with these questions portray a very different vision – a much more realistic, pragmatic and complex one than Berlatsky implies.

Why can't we teach Shakespeare better?

More than anything, it seems to me, teaching Shakespeare requires love of Shakespeare, more than many authors, because Shakespeare’s greatness looms over him like an intimidating proctor, making us feel that if we don’t “get” that greatness then we’ve somehow learned nothing, prompting us to cut him down to our own size. None of that is necessary. Shakespeare comes in all sizes, rewards just about every level of engagement. That should mean shallower students come away with some emotional and intellectual experience that is meaningful, even if they never understood what the big deal was, while students capable of plumbing the depths get a glimpse of an author proper likened, like Julie’s love, to the Bay of Portugal.

[theamericanconservative]

...let your own discretion be your tutor: suit the action to the word, the word to the action; with this special overstep not the modesty of nature: for any thing so overdone is from the purpose of playing, whose end, both at the first and now, was and is, to hold, as ’twere, the mirror up to nature; to show virtue her own feature, scorn her own image, and the very age and body of the time his form and pressure. Now this overdone, or come tardy off, though it make the unskilful laugh, cannot but make the judicious grieve; the censure of the which one must in your allowance o’erweigh a whole theatre of others. O, there be players that I have seen play, and heard others praise, and that highly, not to speak it profanely, that, neither having the accent of Christians nor the gait of Christian, pagan, nor man, have so strutted and bellowed that I have thought some of nature’s journeymen had made men and not made them well, they imitated humanity so abominably.

...yeah, Shakespeare sucks.

(Hamlet, act III, scene 2)

[theamericanconservative]

It’s not that we need to get rid of cash to usher in utopia. We may need to get rid of cash just to get back to adequate management of monetary policy. We may need to run faster just to stay in place.

Noah Millman, on our eventual cashless future.

[carlsensei]

It’s useful, I think, to imagine the Book of Job beginning with an argument between, say, Zeus and Hera. We have no expectation, reading stories about Zeus, that he will be portrayed as primarily concerned with our welfare. The Greek gods were jealous, petty, capricious, vain. But they are also powerful, and noble. If they made a bet about a mortal, and put him through numerous trials, just to see if he could overcome them, that would make perfect sense. They wouldn’t worry about whether they were being fair. They would be giving the mortal a chance, by passing the test, to earn their favor, and thereby become a hero – because that’s what a hero is: someone who passes these kinds of arbitrary trials. In the Greek value system, the worship of gods who behave in this fashion makes perfect sense. The Greek gods were not worshiped because they were good, or because they loved us. They were worshiped because they were powerful. In the Israelite framework, though, and in the subsequent Jewish and Christian traditions that spring from it, this is inadequate. In monotheism, the character of God determines the character of reality itself. A monotheist who worships God simply because He is powerful is, effectively, worshiping power itself, in a kind of spiritual fascism.

Noah Millman - Weekly Double Feature: Tree Of Life and A Serious Man (Why did the tower of Siloam collapse? This is a good reflection on the anti-theodicy of Job, but I think it would be better if it were pushed a little further in the direction of Easter… Via Ross Douthat.)