Lazy rascals, spending their substance, and more, in riotous living

Omg is Like Britney Spears Like Okay

The disadvantage of not posting anything for a while is that whatever post you write inevitably takes on the mantle of being a post worth breaking your silence for. Luckily, this problem was solved for me by finding something I couldn’t not post: a preview of the tATu film.

Watch: Finding tATu trailer

Aside from that, I’ve been:

  • Worrying about Britney Spears. Everything I saw about the VMA performances was talking about if Britney is fat or not (she isn’t), which misses the more serious point. Britney Spears the supposedly “real person” seems to be having a bit of a tough time, but it’s not like any of us know her, so any sympathy is pretty abstract. More worryingly, the VMA performace was so uninspired in terms of coreography, design, costume; it suggests a serious crises in the Britney Spears machine. Further evidence: she has an album coming out soon, and her website is still totally insane.
  • Studying for an exam in contemporary political theory, which has persuaded me of the deep wrongness of political philosophy. Attempting to come up with a philosophical explanation of why certain political disagreements are invalid is not politically useful. See also this post in which Brian Leiter quotes the excellent Raymond Geuss on Rawls, and a number of people miss the point spectacularly in the comments.
  • Posting stuff on Twitter. Those of you who read this site via RSS may not have seen the twitter posts in the top right. You can read those via RSS too, if this blog isn’t trivial enough for you.
  • Inventing a song about Max Shachtman to the tune of awful Beatles record “Taxman.” My favorite couplet so far involves rhyming “Fourth International schism” with “bureaucratic collectivism.”