Life as an Extreme Sport

Category: …and everything else

Mostly everything else in a brain-academic way.

Clifford Geertz, 1926 – 2006

...and everything else, Academics

I see, via Crooked Timber, Clifford Geertz has died, following heart surgery at UPenn. He was an amazing author, prolific and provoking, and of course, so critical to critical theory.

I think my favourite part of the obit is this:

His internship as a copyboy for The New York Post dissuaded him from becoming a newspaper man. “It was fun but it wasn’t practical,” he said,…so he switched to philosophy.

The idea of philosophy being more practical than newspaper, how can you not love it?

another bad philosophy joke

...and everything else, wisdom and folly

Another bad philosophy joke, this one courtesy the memorial blog for Mike Ford.

Werner Heisenberg, Kurt Goedel, and Noam Chomsky walk into a bar. (The bar tender is still polishing Descartes’ glass.)
They look around, and Heisenberg says, “Is this some kind of joke? And if it’s a joke, is it funny?!”
Goedel answers, “In order to know if the joke is funny, we would have to be outside the joke, but we’re inside the joke, so we can’t tell if it’s funny.”
But Chomsky says, “Oh, it’s funny; you’re just not telling it right.”

Limbaugh Goes Too Far – Again

...and everything else, Bioethics

The AJOB blog links to a Crooks & Liars post about Rush Limbaugh accusing Michael J. Fox of lying, and/or acting, in his recent advert supporting a Democrat in Missouri’s November election bid. For those of you who haven’t seen the advertisement (which can be found by following links, as I’m still too lazy to figure out embedding YouTube in this thang), it’s a short but powerful advertisement talking about the potential power of stem cell research. It’s the Parkinson’s that makes the advert hard to watch.

Now, I will admit that I’ve heard the rumour/discussion that Fox doesn’t take medication for his Parkinson’s, and this has been widely repeated since the advert started airing – the suggestion is that he doesn’t typically take the meds, so he looks worse than he is. There are, however, two issues at fault with this supposed logic. The first is simply: why would it be a falsity if he chooses to show people what the disease looks like when it’s not medicated? What is untruthful about that? That would be accurate in showing the ravages of Parkinson’s. Medications, as anyone who has to take chronic maintenance medications knows, come with side effects. Personally, it seems to run a 1/1 ratio for me – for every pill I take to control my chronic pain, I have to take another to combat side effects. The side effects are not pleasant, and I do often take a drug holiday if I know I don’t need to be terrifically functional, because for all the pain that comes from a drug holiday, I’m just experiencing that, and not the stacked effects wreaking havoc. Perhaps you have to be in a maintenance situation yourself, but it doesn’t sound insane to avoid medications because you hate the side effects. Nor does it seem like lying – in fact, I’d argue that the polite fiction is that a disease or illness isn’t “so bad” because it’s effects are being masked by prescriptions.

I suppose that ended up being both problems: what does it matter if he takes his medications or not, and why would it be “false advertising” if he didn’t. On top of that, though, there’s also the consideration mentioned in the Crooks & Liars post: the movements seen in Fox’s advert are because of his medications, not a lack of.

That Limbaugh would accuse Fox of acting “because he’s an actor” is just reprehensible. Certainly, Fox might continue to identify as an actor, and act when he can – but he retired from that years ago because the Parkinson’s no longer allowed him to do the job.