The pond returns, having missed so much, yet not having missed anything worth the missing ...

 

The pond missed many things on the break but not for a nanosecond did the pond miss the reptiles of lizard Oz, or the pond's struggle to keep up its herpetology studies.

The pond missed the Matildas missing out, but more importantly missed dear old Barners watching the wrong game and boasting about it. The pond also missed the immortal Rowe joke about it ...

The pond missed Mark Latham falling out with Pauline, a measure of how far he's fallen and not much else, and the pond also missed the Wilcox joking about it... 

The pond missed the latest arraignment of the mango Mussolini and an assorted mixed box of co-conspirators.

Speaking of that, the pond missed Charlie Sykes jabbing away at a festival of hypocrisy, including but not limited to the immensely stupid Ben Shapiro in our summer of hypocrisy:

...even the editors of the Encyclopedia Britannica would quail at the prospect of compiling all of the instances of two-faced sanctimony in our political/cultural/media universe:

• The moralists who insisted that “character matters,” and then embraced Donald J. Trump.
• The party of “law and order” that rationalized and downplayed the attacks on Capitol Police and now wants to DEFUND THE FBI.
• The folks who chanted “lock her up,” who now clutch pearls over the “weaponization” of the justice system against their felonious cult-leader.
• Lindsey Graham on any day that ends with -y.

Look down the page a little further to catch Shapiro's astonishing stupidity.

The pond also missed Marina Hyde delivering several decent hydings, but the good thing is that you only need to follow her tag to do catch up, though it's a bit like having too much pudding at Xmas:

As Rishi Sunak tooled around Disneyland last week on his family holiday, I tried to imagine his government as a theme park. Instead of a rollercoaster, there would be a sign reading “Keir Starmer doesn’t want you to have a rollercoaster”. Instead of a log flume, there would be an artlessly defensive attempt to convince you that “the blob” says you can’t even not have a log flume any more. There would be no foot-long churros; foot-long churros are woke. The wrong type of visitors would be invited to “fuck off back to Disneyland Paris”. I know what you’re thinking: “Ooh, where is this place? Take all my money right now! Oh, wait, you already have.” But fun-wise, we’re looking at an empty field round which various off-brand cartoon characters (the cabinet) are stumbling ineffectually in search of today’s slogan. In short: imagineers wanted.

Speaking of imagineers, the pond also missed Ron DeSanctus and his war on Disney and the woke, and didn't miss it in the slightest.

The pond thought about making a comeback late in the day yesterday, but decided it would also miss petulant Peta yesterday and Mr Potato head ...

 

Not much to miss... and more importantly the pond missed the news that the randy old goat known as Chairman Rupert was back in the dating game. Dear sweet long absent lord, that the dating habits of a nonagenarian should be considered newsworthy ...

Speaking of depravity, the pond missed the Crikey tale of the IPA and the Daily Terror getting into bed with each other, a sight too depraved to imagine, but outlined in ‘Selectively misquoted’: IPA and Daily Tele distort ‘woke’ university policies. (paywall). 

The lede said it all: A Daily Telegraph article highlighting an IPA report on censorship in universities is filled with easily debunked claims — and contradicts News Corp's own internal policies. Then Stephen Mayne followed up with tales of the dirty digger and son's looting in Murdochs delay disclosing their bloated pacy packets, after reaping more than $1bn. (paywall, but just a lot of looting going down).

It's always the way - the bandits make off with the money, the peons diligently work to produce Chairman Rupert approved corn, and there's no sign of a magnificent seven arriving to save them ...

On the other hand, the pond missed the cartoons, and genuinely regrets the miss and has them standing by for a game of catch-up ...

Meanwhile, the pond woke to the news of the Canadian wildfires ... a compelling story elsewhere... google if you will ...

Of course they were disappeared by the reptiles of the lizard Oz. Anything to do with climate or crisis routinely gets disappeared to the cornfield ...

Not a word, not a mention at the top of the digital page ... and yet there was an infallible Pope that the pond had missed, only then it was Hawaii, and now it's Canada ...

The pond also missed the Kudelka ...

As for the digital offering this day, the pond shuddered. Not nattering "Ned" at the top of the page, and the meretricious Merritt still rabbiting on about the voice below? Was there some way to miss it all?

And lo, there in the comments was our Henry, still parading his bigotry, dressing it up in finery ponce words, but bigotry all the same ...

The pond admits that it felt a wave of nausea. There was simplistic Simon, "here no conflict of interest", still plugging away.

There was cackling Claire, and no doubt her solution to those living in remote locations was to pack people into urban gulags. 

And there was the lizard Oz editorialist railing at Facebook, while the cancer known as Faux Noise rode the bandit highway to profit ...

That took the pond back to the big item it had missed, celebrated by the AJC, but disappeared by the lizard Oz this day ...

What a rogues gallery and the AJC's Luckovich was in good form ...

The immortal Rowe was also in on the game, and the pond had missed that one too ...

It took Lawrence O'Donnell to remind the pond of eerie memories ...

It reminded the pond that over the break the pond had caught up on the White House Plumbers. Woody Harrelson overdid the jaw jutting, but how could you possibly send up G. Gordon Liddy? Justin Theroux tried, and it was an enjoyable ride ... and oh the memories ...

What's that you say? Not a single reptile thus far?

Here's a confession. The pond came prepared for sanctimonious, routinely up himself Henry. Over the break the pond read some back issues of The New Yorker and came across this ...

If you haven't used up all your clicks, you could find Nikil Krishnan's piece here. What beguiled the pond was the way it opened ...

The Internet has no shortage of moralists and moralizers, but one ethical epicenter is surely the extraordinary, addictive subreddit called “Am I the Asshole?,” popularly abbreviated AITA. In the forum, which celebrates its tenth anniversary this summer, users post brief accounts of their interpersonal conflicts and brace themselves for the judgment of online strangers: usually either YTA (“You’re the asshole”) or NTA (“Not the asshole”). A team of moderators enforces the rules, of which the most important, addressed to the supplicant, reads “Accept your judgment.”
A few recent ones: Am I the asshole for “telling my brother that he is undateable?” For “asking my girlfriend to dress better on a date night?” For “refusing to resell my Taylor Swift Tickets?” Some posts have become famous, or Internet famous, like the one from a guy who asked an overweight seatmate on a five-hour flight to pay him a hundred and fifty dollars for encroaching on his space. The subreddit promises, in its tagline, “a catharsis for the frustrated moral philosopher in all of us.”
What’s striking about AITA is the language in which it states its central question: you’re asked not whether I did the right thing but, rather, what sort of person I’m being. And, of course, an asshole represents a very specific kind of character defect. (To be an asshole, according to Geoffrey Nunberg, in his 2012 history of the concept, is to “behave thoughtlessly or arrogantly on the job, in personal relationships, or just circulating in public.”) We would have a different morality, and an impoverished one, if we judged actions only with those terms of pure evaluation, “right” or “wrong,” and judged people only “good” or “bad.” Our vocabulary of commendation and condemnation is perpetually changing, but it has always relied on “thick” ethical terms, which combine description and evaluation.

Perfect. AITA is exactly the way to approach our Henry, because ... He'sTA ...

Here we go ... the pompous prick heading back to the middle ages ...

The pond was ready for that old trick ...

...For first-time readers of the Nicomachean Ethics, though, the treatise is full of disappointments. It is not, strictly, a book by Aristotle; a later editor evidently stitched it together from a series of lecture notes. (Aristotle’s father and son were named Nicomachus; the title may have honored one of them.) There are repetitions and sections that seem to belong in a different book, and Aristotle’s writings are, as Meyer observes, “famously terse, often crabbed in their style.” Crabbed, fragmented, gappy: it can be a headache trying to match his pronouns to the nouns they refer to. Some of his arguments are missing crucial premises; others fail to spell out their conclusions.

Aristotle is obscure in other ways, too. His highbrow potshots at unnamed contemporaries, his pop-cultural references, must have tickled his aristocratic Athenian audience. But the people and the plays he referred to are now lost or forgotten. Some readers have found his writings “affectless,” stripped of any trace of a human voice, or of a beating human heart.

It gets worse. The book, though it purports to be about the question of how to flourish, is desperately short on practical advice. More of it is about what it means to be good than about how one becomes it. And then much of what it says can sound rather obvious, or inert. Flourishing is the ultimate goal of human life; a flourishing life is one that is lived in accord with the various “virtues” of the character and intellect (courage, moderation, wisdom, and so forth); a flourishing life also calls for friendships with good people and a certain measure of good fortune in the way of a decent income, health, and looks. Virtue is not just about acting rightly but about feeling rightly. What’s best, Aristotle says, is “to have such feelings at the right time, at the right objects and people, with the right goal, and in the right manner.” Good luck figuring out what the “right time” or object or manner is.

And virtue, his central category, gets defined—in a line that Meyer’s abridgment culls—in terms that look suspiciously circular. Virtue is a state “consisting in a mean,” Aristotle maintains, and this mean “is defined by reference to reason, that is to say, to the reason by reference to which the prudent person would define it.” (For Aristotle, the “mean” represented a point between opposite excesses—for instance, between cowardice and recklessness lay courage.) The phrase “prudent person” here renders the Greek phronimos, a person possessed of that special quality of mind which Aristotle called “phronesis.” But is Aristotle then saying that virtue consists in being disposed to act as the virtuous person does? That sounds true, but trivially so.

To grasp why it may not be, it helps to reckon with the role that habits of mind play in Aristotle’s account. Meyer’s translation of “phronesis” is “good judgment,” and the phrase nicely captures the combination of intelligence and experience which goes into acquiring it, along with the difficulty of reducing it to a set of explicit principles that anyone could apply mechanically, like an algorithm. In that respect, “good judgment” is an improvement on the old-fashioned and now misleading “prudence”; it’s also less clunky than another standby, “practical wisdom.”

The enormous role of judgment in Aristotle’s picture of how to live can sound, to modern readers thirsty for ethical guidance, like a cop-out. Especially when they might instead pick up a treatise by John Stuart Mill and find an elegantly simple principle for distinguishing right from wrong, or one by Kant, in which they will find at least three. They might, for that matter, look to Jordan Peterson, who conjures up as many as twelve.

Treated as a serious request for advice, the question of how to flourish could receive a gloomy answer from Aristotle: it may be too late to start trying. Why is that? Flourishing involves, among other things, performing actions that manifest virtues, which are qualities of character that enable us to perform what Aristotle calls our “characteristic activity” (as Meyer renders the Greek ergon, a word more commonly, but riskily, translated as “function”). But how do we come to acquire these qualities of character, or what Meyer translates as “dispositions”? Aristotle answers, “From our regular practice.”

In a passage missing from Meyer’s ruthless abridgment, Aristotle warns, “We need to have been brought up in noble habits if we are to be adequate students of noble and just things. . . . For we begin from the that; if this is apparent enough to us, we can begin without also knowing why. Someone who is well brought up has the beginnings, or can easily acquire them.” “The that,” a characteristically laconic formulation of Aristotle’s, is generally taken to refer to the commonsense maxims that a passably well-parented child hears about not lying, fighting, or talking with food in one’s mouth.

A search for what we might call “actionable” guidance will yield precious little. The text yields just enough in the way of glancing remarks to suggest that Aristotle may have been the sort of man who gave good advice. He says, for instance, that people in politics who identify flourishing with honor can’t be right, for honor “seems to depend more on those who honor than on the one honored.” This has been dubbed the “Coriolanus paradox”: seekers of honor “tend to defeat themselves by making themselves dependent on those to whom they aim to be superior,” as Bernard Williams notes. Replace “honor” with, say, “likes on Instagram” and you have a piece of advice that works as well now as it did in the fifth century B.C.

Aristotle suggests, more generally, that you should identify the vices you’re susceptible to and then “pull yourself away in the opposite direction, since by pulling hard against one fault, you get to the mean (as when straightening out warped planks).” Only the vivid image of the warped planks keeps this remark from being the type of sententious counsel that Polonius might have given his son.

Stick that up ya woolly jumper, and see if it itches, you pompous, pretentious old clown...

At this point the reptiles had decided they'd had enough and stuck in the first of three huge snaps, but as it had become the pond's custom, here they are all lumped together, so that the absurdity of running Marcia Langton and John Locke together might be better appreciated ...

Then it was back to the waffle factory for more undiluted waffle ...

What a tedious, pompous old bigot he is ... time to match him at his game with some more Aristotle ...

..Aristotle had little hope that a philosopher’s treatise could teach someone without much experience of life how to make the crucial ethical distinctions. We learn to spot an “asshole” from living; how else? And, when our own perceptions falter, we continue to do today exactly what Aristotle thought we should do. He asserts, in another significant remark that doesn’t make Meyer’s cut, that we should attend to the words of the old and experienced at least as much as we do to philosophical proofs: “these people see correctly because experience has given them their eye.”

Is it any surprise that the Internet is full of those who need help seeing rightly? Finding no friendly neighborhood phronimos to provide authoritative advice, you defer instead to the wisdom of an online community. Its members help you to see the situation, and yourself, in a different light. “The self-made man,” Oakeshott wrote, “is never literally self-made, but depends upon a certain kind of society and upon a large unrecognized inheritance.” If self-help means denying the role that the perceptions of others play in making us who we are, if it means a set of rules for living that remove the need for judgment, then we are better off without it.

We have long lived in a world desperate for formulas, simple answers to the simple question “What should I do?” Some of my contemporaries in graduate school, pioneers in what was then a radical new movement called “effective altruism,” devised an online career-planning tool to guide undergraduates in their choice of careers. (It saw a future for me in computer science.) I’ve had bemusing conversations with teen-age boys in thrall to Andrew Tate, a muscled influencer who has as many as forty-one “tenets.” My in-box is seldom without yet another invitation to complete an online course on the fine-grained etiquette of “diversity, equity, and inclusion.” (Certificate awarded upon completion of multiple-choice test.)

But the algorithms, the tenets, the certificates are all attempts to solve the problem—which is everybody’s problem—of how not to be an asshole. Life would be a lot easier if there were rules, algorithms, and life hacks solving that problem once and for all. There aren’t. At the heart of the Nicomachean Ethics is a claim that remains both edifying and chastening: phronesis doesn’t come that easy. Aristotle devised a theory that was vague in just the right places, one that left, intentionally, space to be filled in by life.

Or perhaps by tedious assholes, thereby making it easier to spot one in the future, as life and the lizard Oz fill the pond in?

All those rhetorical flourishes and yet when you boil them all down, you come to this ...

What a contemptible man, or more simply, using high flown Aristotelian concepts, what an ahole ...

Dear sweet long absent lord, he even pillaged the pond's favourite book. But then the pond realised that only a Nobody could have spent this much time scribbling Nothing ... if he'd only had the courage, he could simply have scribbled, "I'm a bigot, and 'no' is all I need and all I've got" ... and what tedium it would have saved the pond ...

And so to "Ned's" natter, but relax. For a moment, the pond thought adding "Ned" to the hole in the bucket man would make for an unendurable first day back ... but "Ned" had run out of puff ...

Sure it was the usual pomposity, as "Ned" divinely divines everything ... but it turned out it was a very short divination by "Ned's" usual prolix standard, and the pond could slip in an infallible Pope on the topic ...

Then it was just a short sprint to the finish line ...

And that was it, and the pond had done the hard yards, and could finish off proceedings with an immortal Rowe ...