Like the attacks of 9/11/01, the recent terrorist atrocity in Russia has been so shockingly evil in character and scale, that most of us are still left in choked silence about it. Sometimes it feels like our hearts and souls might finally be damaged beyond repair. But like last time (and every time), we must overcome our grief, once more gather our courage, regain our resolve to prevent such enormities, recover our hope, and again try to make sense of a stunningly senseless act of the most extreme barbarity possible. As the usual sensationalistic replay of the footage of the tragedy dies down, a few brave souls have taken up the challenge of bringing reason to bear on this calamity, and I salute them. Every decent or even normal human being knows that those who prepetrate these acts are vile monsters, but all too often our hatred for them and anger at them gets turned toward other decent and moral people who might disagree with us about why these things happen or how to prevent them, thereby poisoning rational discussion of the issues involved. Let’s see if we have learned anything from the recent bitter past.

Here are a couple of starting points in the blog world to look at, and you’ll find more things from there.

A new article by Naomi Klein in The Nation, entitled “Bringing Najaf to New York,” has sparked debate and condemnation from corners inside and outside the magazine.

“Before Sadr’s supporters began their uprising, they made their demands for elections and an end to occupation through sermons, peaceful protests and newspaper articles. US forces responded by shutting down their newspapers, firing on their demonstrations and bombing their neighborhoods. It was only then that Sadr went to war against the occupation.”

Christopher Hitchens, unsurprisingly, has this to say about it.

“When I quit writing my column for The Nation a couple of years ago, I wrote semi-sarcastically that it had become an echo chamber for those who were more afraid of John Ashcroft than Osama Bin Laden. I honestly did not then expect to find it publishing actual endorsements of jihad. But, as Marxism taught me, the logic of history and politics is a pitiless one. The antiwar isolationist ‘left’ started by being merely ‘status quo’: opposing regime change and hinting at moral equivalence between Bush’s ‘terrorism’ and the other sort.”

But responses have also come from Marc Cooper from The Nation.

“I find these assertions, simply, astounding. Al Sadr’s group are, indeed, terrorists. Maybe not ‘generic’ ones,. But certainly ultra-fundamentalist gangs. There is, in fact, no evidence whatsoever that they represent the ‘mainstream sentiment’ in Iraq. If so, then why has none other than Ayatollah Sistani (who now outflanks Naomi Klein on the left!) negotiated their disarmament? Most disturbing is the last line of this graph. Al Sadr’s ultimate goal, Klein concedes, is a ‘theocracy’ but ‘for now’ his demands are democratic because he’s for elections and he’s against the U.S. occupation. These twin assertions are so blatantly self-contradictory that it would be overkill to say anything more about them.”

and from Doug Ireland.

“It is useful to remember that the deeply flawed logic of ‘The enemy of my enemy is my friend’ motored US policy in the Cold War, driving it to embrace all manner of repressive regimes and dictators from Franco to Pinochet to Suharto. That’s why it’s sad to see Klein engage in the same sort of thinking in her column justifying the depradations of the so-called ‘Mahdi Army’ as somehow expressing the desire of genuine Iraqi democrats. Muqtada al-Sadr is a sanguineous religious fanatic, whose thuggish followers engage in the slaughter of the innocents.”

As interesting are the debates it has sparked in the comments. Decide for yourself.

Well, a number of models by Americanists (people who study the United States) suggests that Bush will win the November presidential election.

Predictions in Short:

Alfred Cuzán and Charles Bundrick predict that George Bush will win with 52% of the vote.

Ray Fair predicts that George Bush will win with 60% of the vote.

Allan Lichtman predicts that George Bush will win but gives no forecast of the share of thevote that he’ll receive.

Michael Lewis-Beck and Charles Tien believe that the election is too close to call.

Brad Lockerbie predicts that George Bush will win with 57.6% of the vote.

Helmut Norpoth forecasts that George Bush will win with 54.7% of the vote.

Wlezien and Erikson predict that Bush will get 52.5% of the vote.

I guess we’ll see in November whether any of this is worthwhile.

The Guardian has this extract from Richard Dawkin’s latest book, The Ancestor’s Tale: A Pilgrimage to the Dawn of Evolution.

“The Ancestor’s Tale is cast in the form of an epic pilgrimage from the present to the past. All roads lead to the origin of life. But because we are human, the path we shall follow will be a human pilgrimage to discover human ancestors. As we go, we shall greet other pilgrims who join us at a series of rendezvous points, as we encounter the common ancestor we share with each of them.”

“Frank Kermode salutes the bleak virtuosity of Julian Barnes’s new collection of short stories, The Lemon Table.” More here from The Guardian, and more reviews here.

“For quite a while now, those who knew Czeslaw Milosz couldn’t help wondering what it was going to be like when he was gone. In the meantime he more than held his own, writing away for all he was worth in Kraków, in his early nineties, in an apartment where I had the privilege of visiting him twice. On the first occasion he was confined to his bed, too unwell to attend a conference arranged in his honor, and on the second he was ensconced in his living room, face-to-face with a life-size bronze head and torso of his second wife, Carol. His junior by some thirty years, she had died from a quick and cruel cancer in 2002, and as he sat on one side of the room facing the bronze on the other, the old poet seemed to be viewing it and everything else from another shore. On that occasion he was being ministered to by his daughter-in-law, and perhaps it was her hovering attentions as much as his translated appearance that brought to mind the aged Oedipus being minded by daughters in the grove at Colonus, the old king who had arrived where he knew he would die. Colonus was not his birthplace, but it was where he had come home to himself, to the world, and to the otherworld; and the same could be said of Milosz in Kraków.”

More here from The New Republic.

“A well-known Yale economist has written a book using the mathematical technique of regression to predict the outcome of presidential elections. Ray C. Fair’s Predicting Presidential Elections and Other Things grew out of his 1978 paper that provides quite accurate descriptions of these quadrennial elections dating back to 1916. Before getting to his very surprising prediction for this November (with which I disagree), let me sketch the idea behind the technique.” That’s John Allen Paulos writing in his regular column at ABC News. More here.

Natalie Angier reviews The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason, by Sam Harris:

It’s not often that I see my florid strain of atheism expressed in any document this side of the Seine, but ”The End of Faith” articulates the dangers and absurdities of organized religion so fiercely and so fearlessly that I felt relieved as I read it, vindicated, almost personally understood. Sam Harris presents major religious systems like Judaism, Christianity and Islam as forms of socially sanctioned lunacy, their fundamental tenets and rituals irrational, archaic and, important when it comes to matters of humanity’s long-term survival, mutually incompatible. A doctoral candidate in neuroscience at the University of California, Los Angeles, Harris writes what a sizable number of us think, but few are willing to say in contemporary America: ”We have names for people who have many beliefs for which there is no rational justification. When their beliefs are extremely common, we call them ‘religious’; otherwise, they are likely to be called ‘mad,’ ‘psychotic’ or ‘delusional.’ ” To cite but one example: ”Jesus Christ — who, as it turns out, was born of a virgin, cheated death and rose bodily into the heavens — can now be eaten in the form of a cracker. A few Latin words spoken over your favorite Burgundy, and you can drink his blood as well. Is there any doubt that a lone subscriber to these beliefs would be considered mad?” The danger of religious faith, he continues, ”is that it allows otherwise normal human beings to reap the fruits of madness and consider them holy.”

More here from the New York Times.

“It’s hard to imagine a better time or place than this election year and the Contemporary Arts Center in Cincinnati to mount the exhibition ‘Crimes and Misdemeanors: Politics in U.S. Art of the 1980’s.’ What more symbolic venue could there be for a show about yesteryear’s culture wars? It was the Contemporary, after all, that was besieged in 1990 when its then director, Dennis Barrie, was hauled into county court for ‘pandering obscenity’ after showing Robert Mapplethorpe’s homoerotic photographs. Cincinnati remains a conservative redoubt in a battleground state. But the selection of paintings, sculptures, videos and photographs in this show — on view through Nov. 21 in Zaha Hadid‘s acclaimed new building — feels like a brave attempt by a rejuvenated institution to confront its local audience, and perhaps at the same time begin to repair the city’s reputation for cultural provincialism.”

More here from the New York Times.

To the extent that a person’s cultural value is increasingly defined by his or her ability to circulate widely as an image, I find my failure to identify so few of the mugs found in this overwrought face-book of contemporary thinkers reassuring.

“When you factor in wealth, population size and levels of totalitarian zeal, Team GB performed relatively poorly at the Olympics. Azeem Azhar does the maths.” Interesting article here in The Observer.

Michael Williams has kindly pointed out to me that the link to a review of Everything and More: A Compact History of Infinity by David Foster Wallace at Seed Magazine which I had posted some days ago, no longer works. But he has also pointed out another excellent and very thoughtful review of the book, by Michael Harris, here.

Following on Morgan’s post, from NewScientist.com:

“A nuclear reactor that can meet the energy needs of developing countries without the risk that they will use the by-products to make weapons is being developed by the US Department of Energy.

The aim is to create a sealed reactor that can be delivered to a site, left to generate power for up to 30 years, and retrieved when its fuel is spent. The developers claim that no one would be able to remove the fissile material from the reactor because its core would be inside a tamper-proof cask protected by a thicket of alarms.”

A thicket of alarms, eh?

Perry Anderson bemoans, er, looks at France’s decline.

“The current scene is as good a place to start as any, since it offers a pregnant example of the illusions of familiarity. Newspapers, journals and bookshops brim with debate over French decline. Gradually trickling to the surface in the past few years, le déclinisme burst into full flow with the publication last winter of La France qui tombe, a spirited denunciation of national default – ‘the sinister continuity between the 14 years of François Mitterrand and the 12 of Jacques Chirac, united by their talent for winning elections and ruining France’ – by Nicolas Baverez, an economist and historian of the centre-right. Rebuttals, vindications, rejoinders, alternatives have proliferated. Baverez looks at first glance like a French version of a Thatcherite, a neo-liberal of more or less strict persuasion, and the whole controversy like a rerun of the long-standing debates on decline in this country. But the appearances are deceptive. The problem is not the same.” (read on)

Via Brad de Long, FraudFrond.com:

“There are 130,000 cel towers in the USA alone. A whopping 25% of these are ‘stealth’ towers — i.e. Lying Lumber — so that’s over 32,000 fake trees.”

This year’s American Political Science Association conference had a panel on “The Power and Politics of Blogs”, featuring Daniel Drezner from the University of Chicago and danieldrezner.com, Henry Farrell from George Washington University and Crooked Timber, Mark A.R. Kleiman from UCLA, Andrew Sullivan, Antoinette Pole from CUNY, who (with Laura McKenna) writes the blog 11d, and Ana Marie Cox, aka wonkette and formerly of Suck.com, and Cass Sunstein of the University of Chicago and author of Republic.com.

Farrell presented a paper that he and Drezner co-authored. Its basic claims:

“(1) Blogging is politically important in large part because it affects mainstream media, and helps set the terms of political debate (in political science jargon, it creates ‘focal points’ and ‘frames’). Note that we don’t provide an exhaustive account of blogs and politics – some aspects of blogging (fundraising for parties, effects on political values in the general public), we don’t have more than anecdotal data on. There’s plenty of room for other people to do interesting research on all of this.

(2) Incoming links in the political blogosphere are systematically skewed, but not according to a “power law” distribution, as Clay Shirky and others have argued of the blogosphere as a whole. Instead, they follow a lognormal distribution.1 We reckon that the most likely explanation for this is that offered by Pennock et al. – they argue that not only do the ‘rich get richer’ (i.e. sites that already have a lot of links tend to get more), but that link-poor sites stand a chance of becoming rich too. Late entrants into the political blogosphere can do well as long as they’re interesting and attract some attention – bad timing isn’t destiny.

(3) Because of the systematic skewedness of the political blogosphere, a few “focal point” sites can provide a rough index of what is going on in the blogosphere – interesting points of view on other sites will often percolate up to them as smaller blogs try to get big blogs to link to them, by informing them of interesting stories. Thus, we may expect that journalists and other media types who read blogs will tend to all gravitate towards a few ‘big name’ bloggers as their way of keeping up with what is going on in the blogosphere as a whole.”

Reports from the panel suggest that it was a lot of fun. Apparently, witty wonkette stole the show by bashing the tendency of blogs to overblow their own importance. (Andrew Sullivan, perhaps the blogosphere’s equivalent of those guys (Galssman and Hassert) who wrote Dow 36,000 in the late 1990s, didn’t show up.)

Sunstein is well-known for being skeptical about the web’s promise. Republic.com in brief:

“See only what you want to see, hear only what you want to hear, read only what you want to read. In cyberspace, we already have the ability to filter out everything but what we wish to see, hear, and read. Tomorrow, our power to filter promises to increase exponentially. With the advent of the Daily Me, you see only the sports highlights that concern your teams, read about only the issues that interest you, encounter in the op-ed pages only the opinions with which you agree. In all of the applause for this remarkable ascendance of personalized information, Cass Sunstein asks the questions, Is it good for democracy? Is it healthy for the republic? What does this mean for freedom of speech?”

Is that the future of the a world remade by the web? (Too bad there’s not as of yet a comparison of fMRI images of those who will read newspapers, blogs, etc., of those that disagree with them with the images of those who do not, just so we can continue with neuropolitics.)

I’ve been interested in mapping the traffic on the blogosphere to see whether links and movements are between like minded blogs (for the former) and blog readers (for the latter). Can we just reinforce what we believe by reading only those blogs and web press that agree with us, up to the point where our beliefs cascade away from any doubts and are reinforced? Long ago, Jack Snyder and Karen Ballentine argued that pathological politics (in their paper, an aggressive nationalism) was enabled by a segmented media market and poor or absent norms in the press.

Historically and today, from the French Revolution to Rwanda, sudden liberalizations of press freedom have been associated with bloody outbursts of popular nationalism. The most dangerous situation is precisely when the government’s press monopoly begins to break down.(4) During incipient democratization, when civil society is burgeoning but democratic institutions are not fully entrenched, the state and other elites are forced to engage in public debate in order to compete for mass allies in the struggle for power.(5) Under those circumstances, governments and their opponents often have the motive and the opportunity to play the nationalist card.

When this occurs, unconditional freedom of speech is a dubious remedy. Just as economic competition produces socially beneficial results only in a well-institutionalized marketplace, where monopolies and false advertising are counteracted, so too increased debate in the political marketplace leads to better outcomes only when there are mechanisms to correct market imperfections.(6) Many newly democratizing states lack institutions to break up governmental and non-governmental information monopolies, to professionalize journalism, and to create common public forums where diverse ideas engage each other under conditions in which erroneous arguments will be challenged. In the absence of these institutions, an increase in the freedom of speech can create an opening for nationalist mythmakers to hijack public discourse.

Jack Snyder and Karen Ballentine, “Nationalism and the Marketplace of Ideas,” International Security, Vol. 21, no. 2 Fall 1996

Unlikely in the US is my guess, though I do have some pro-Hindutva family members who seem to read only the muck of the Hindu right to reinforce their views.

But read the accounts of the meeting here, here, here (scroll down to September 3rd, 2004), and here.

Via Easily Distracted, Ngugi wa’ Thiongo, the author of novels such as The River Between and Petals of Blood, was assaulted upon his return to Kenya from a tour. His wife NjeEri was raped. Ngugi has been an outspoken critic of the Kenyan government and a dissident.

“Violence is one theme of his books, which explore Kenyan society from colonialism to independence and the corruption and disappointment that followed.”

Ngugi had been in exile for 20 years after having been imprisoned for a year. The assault may have been an act of politics intended to intimidate and humiliate a dissident, instead of a random act of violence. The African Literature Association has issued this condemnation, which clearly sees the act, among other things, as an assault on free expression.

“The African Literature Association therefore strongly condemns these acts of violence on Ngugi and Njeeri. It is a travesty of all the fundamentals of human rights, including freedom of expression, to be subjected to these violent acts upon returning home after twenty-two years of promoting Kenya internationally.”

One Kenyan commentator has linked this to a wider attitude of corruption and social decay.

“The fact that it happened is not so much an indicator of how crime-ridden Nairobi is, but how much the political problems and economic deprivations of the past two decades have destroyed social order. In other words, blame politics. . .

[I]t’s very frustrating doing research in the vast library at Makerere University in Kampala. The few good books that haven’t been stolen have many of the pages ripped out. The story is much the same in the Dar es Salaam and Nairobi university libraries, I am told. It is in places like the libraries, not so much on the streets, that you get to best measure how much damage has been done to our psyches by the difficulties that have battered our societies in recent years.

Societies where someone like Ngugi is attacked in the way that he and Njeeri were, begin to rot by tearing a page out of his book in the library – or not reading him altogether.”

The destruction of knowledge and the hostility to open expression and inquiry is not peculiar to Kenya, to places where authoritarian kleptocracy is the order of the day, or even new. In one sense, the Lysenko affair may be a sad paradigm of one common type of relations between modern politics and scholarly knowledge. In India, this politics is not born of an authoritarian clique but of a large populist and fascistic movement in a democratic society.

Martha Nussbaum offers this example in her recent Boston Review article on the mutilation of Muslim women in Gujarat.

“[T]he historian James Laine of Macalester College impugned the purity of a prominent woman of the past by mentioning in his biography of the 17th-century Hindu emperor Shivaji that, because Shivaji’s father traveled for most of his life, there were jokes that the son was the product of an adulterous liaison of his mother’s. Laine did not even credit the allegation; he merely reported it. Nonetheless, the mere mention of a slur against the reputation of Shivaji’s mother brought an attack on Laine’s Indian collaborator, who was physically assaulted and his face painted black. Part of the institute in Pune where Laine did his research was burned; the book was banned by the state government; and its Indian edition was promptly withdrawn by a timorous Oxford University Press. Laine has been charged with a crime against public order, and Prime Minister Vajpayee himself (now ex–prime minister), on campaign in Maharashtra, has suggested that Interpol ought to go to the United States to arrest Laine. “

The attack destroyed 30,000 ancient manuscripts including a clay tablet dating to 600 B.C. The Indian government’s response has not been heartwarming.

‘The Congress-led Democratic Front (DF) is seeking expert legal opinion on whether action can be initiated against American author James Laine for his ‘negative portrayal’ of Chhatrapati Shivaji in his book A Hindu King in Islamic India.’

Butterflies and Wheels offers many links and insights into the general assault on scholarship and science underway in India.

On the theme of neuro-social-science: I regularly go off these days about how we are on the cusp of a revolution in the social sciences. In my more hyperbolic moments, I go on to insist that this revolution will be similar to the one staged by Newton in physics. The social “sciences” will become more scientific as new technologies such as brain imaging lead to better understandings of intentional behavior. (I myself don’t think that results ushered in by these changes will be necessarily all good for politics.) Below, I mentioned one study that had gone a long way to explain why punishers are willing to punish. Here’s another which offers evidence of the neurophysiological mechanism that makes social exclusion very effective.

A neuroimaging study examined the neural correlates of social exclusion and tested the hypothesis that the brain bases of social pain are similar to those of physical pain. Participants were scanned while playing a virtual balltossing game in which they were ultimately excluded. Paralleling results from physical pain studies, the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) was more active during exclusion than during inclusion and correlated positively with self-reported distress. Right ventral prefrontal cortex (RVPFC) was active during exclusion and correlated negatively with self-reported distress. ACC changes mediated the RVPFC-distress correlation, suggesting that RVPFC regulates the distress of social exclusion by disrupting ACC activity.

Eisenberger, N. I., Lieberman, M. D., & Williams, K. D. (2003). “Does rejection hurt? An fMRI study of social exclusion.” Science, 302, 290-292

“Psychopharmaceuticals and brain imaging could make prisoner interrogation more humane. Should we use them?” Harvey Rishikof and Michael Schrage write more here in Slate.

We have had neuroeconomics and neuroaesthetics recently, now the logical next step, neuromarketing: “Could brain-scanning technology provide an accurate way to assess the appeal of new products and the effectiveness of advertising?” Article here from The Economist.