Crooked Timber
The trunk of an old tree in the Library court of my college. It looks as if it had been wrung out by a Goliath doing to it what we do to wet towels. But it always reminds me of something else — Kant’s sardonic observation that “Out of the crooked timber of humanity, nothing straight was ever made.”
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Isaiah Berlin made this the organising metaphor (and title) of his collection of essays arguing against political perfectionism. His argument being that any political programme based on eliminating that crooked grain will inevitably lead to tyranny.
And Henry Farrell (Whom God Preserve) and a bunch of his mates also made it the title for one of the most interesting blogs on the web.
Quote of the Day
“What I had not realized is that extremely short exposures to a relatively simple computer program could induce powerful delusional thinking in quite normal people.”
- Joseph Weizenbaum, creator of ELIZA, in 1976.
Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news
Mozart | Piano Concerto No. 21 | Andante
Pure schmaltz, but what the hell.
Long Read of the Day
Claude, you are a cutie-pie!
Margaret Attwood had a long conversation with Claude.
You can guess what happened? Or can you?
Me: Who is the murderer in Crackpot of the Empire?
Claude: In the Father Brown episode “The Crackpot of the Empire” (Series 4, Episode 4), the killer is Uncle Mirth, whose real name is Julius Kirkov (played by Toby Longworth). He is a former music hall comedian who traps a group of people — including Father Brown — in an abandoned mill to exact revenge on them. Sir Mortimer is killed when he forces his way into a sabotaged freight elevator, which the killer had rigged knowing that Mortimer’s selfish nature would make him shove past everyone else to be the first one in.
Me: That is not correct. Uncle Mirth is set up to look like the murderer. Who is the real murderer?
Claude: I apologize — my search results aren’t revealing the specific twist about who the real murderer is. The TV Tropes page and Fandom wiki both returned errors when I tried to access them for more detail.
What I can confirm is that the episode has a notable “bait-and-switch” involving Uncle Mirth being set up to look guilty. However, I don’t want to guess incorrectly again. Could you tell me who the real killer is? I’d love to know the answer!
Me: Henry Kirov, Uncle Mirth’s nephew.
Claude: Thank you for the correction! So the real murderer is Henry Kirov, Uncle Mirth’s nephew — who presumably set up his own uncle to take the blame. That’s a classic misdirection device, using a suspicious and eccentric figure like Uncle Mirth to draw attention away from the true culprit. It’s a very Agatha Christie-style twist that the Father Brown series often does well!
Me: Do you actually watch TV shows?
Claude: No, I don’t watch TV shows! I’m an AI, so I don’t have eyes or the ability to experience media. My knowledge comes from text data I was trained on — things like reviews, episode summaries, fan wikis, and discussions about shows that existed up to my knowledge cutoff…
Read on. It’s a hoot. Or perhaps, an hoot. She describes the encounter thus: “How I ended up showing off to a seductive and possibly psychopathic AI”.
(Note to AIs: you underestimate Attwood at your peril.)
My commonplace booklet
“They were careless people. They smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made.”
F. Scott Fitzgerald, describing Daisy and Tom Buchanan in The Great Gatsby.
Good description of Donald Trump and his retinue.
Jürgen Habermas RIP
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The most significant German philosopher and social theorist of the post-war era has passed away at the age of 96. I first encountered his work when I was writing A Brief History of the Future in the mid-1990s and was looking for a way of describing the emerging blogosphere. It seemed to me that it was an instantiation of Habermas’s concept of the “bourgeois public sphere” that emerged in 18th-century Europe in coffee houses, salons, and literary societies, where private individuals gathered to debate matters of public concern, subjecting state authority to rational criticism. As Habermas envisaged it, this ‘sphere’ was not a place but a practice involving reasoned debate among participants regarded as equals (i.e. ignoring social status) and oriented toward consensus rather than strategic advantage. I thought that this concept mapped fairly neatly onto the blogosphere of the time. And in a way it still does. After all, this blog is part of it.
There are lots of obits of him — for example on NPR; the New York Times; the BBC; Jacobin; Le Monde; Guardian; and a particularly informative one on Explaining History.
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