TV Hurts

A new study discussed on Slate.com shows a significant connection between early TV-viewing and the development of autism. TV makes kids autistic. The writer of the Slate.com article, Gregg Easterbrook, also cites studies connecting early TV-viewing to ADHD.

Kill your television. Unless you use it to watch The Wire. I hate these fucking dilemmas. But for God's sake keep it away from your kids.

In other news, I finally finished Pratap Chaterjee's solid but slightly boring expose of profiteering, corporate malfeasance, and neoliberal business-of-government-is-business politicking in Iraq, Iraq, Inc. It's great, and an important resource for looking at how how the Iraq War shaped up in the first years.

Heidegger Heideggerizes his Heideggericity

Finished Being and Time, and I feel no smarter for having done so, nor do I feel like I understand the world or myself much better. Maybe I do, though my hermeneutic situation discloses the question of the meaning of Being and Time. Already being “thrown” into “Being-in-the-world” in its “historicality” which is in its “factical being” post-Heideggerian, and reading much of the view of the book as an ontologizing, conceptualizing, and socializing of Nietzsche, I am left with a slight feeling of accomplishment, a great sense of relief, and some taste of disappointment. This is all you got, Heidegger? Fallenness? Guilt? Resoluteness-toward-Death? The “stretchiness” of Dasein’s Being? Meh. Maybe I missed something. Although I can’t say that “the worldhood of the world,” the “present-to-hand / ready-to-hand” distinction, and the idea of “care” as the structure of the Being of Dasein aren’t interesting and useful, I’m still struggling to see what fundamental insight Heidegger might “disclose” into the “clearing of Being” that is in any way not merely a subtly-constructed (and subtly-deformed) rewriting of Nietzsche. What he does give us back is self-identity, e.g., the primodiality of the existential-ontological analytic of Dasein, which makes “Philosophy” possible again, but this, it seems to me, is an unfortunate misstep. We can ask about the meaning of Being all day, but until we divest ourselves of an attachment to the Being of Being, we’re only fantasizing or treating the fantasies of others. Which I have no problem with, so long as we recognize that we’re telling myths. Heidegger seems aware of his myth-mongering, but I cannot be sure. Moreover, his myths have a distinctly troublesome character, resting as they do on the kriegsideologie of post-WWI Germany and attaching as easily as they did (and he did) to National Socialism.

But in any case it’s done. I also finished The Stranger in English, in the efforts to help me keep my head in the French, and Chris Ware’s Jimmy Corrigan, which is unbearably depressing and mind-blowingly accomplished. It’s so beautiful and pathetic, I wanted to kill myself. Also read Jeanette Winterson’s Sexing the Cherry, which started out by annoying me with its tweeness but as it went on grew on me. It was pretty good.

Watching too much TV. It’s too hot to think.