My Prizes

Scott Esposito in The Quarterly Conversation:

Bernhard-mirror Writers are a notably sensitive lot, ever-susceptible to flattery, dying for recognition; it is a significant moment in any writer’s career when they are singled out for high praise.

Any writer except for Thomas Bernhard, that is, at least according to the accounting he gives in My Prizes. In this slim collection of nine essays, each essay detailing one prize he received, Bernhard raises his disdain for all literary prizes to an art. (I do note, with some pleasure, that the author’s note at the end of this book states, “the winner of the three most distinguished and coveted literary prizes awarded in Germany . . .”) Bernhard rarely forgets to remind us that anything to do with prize-giving is beneath him. Again and again, he declares that all those unfortunates who would honor him with a literary prize are blockheads worthy of only the most tightfisted gratitude. In fact, in most cases Bernhard claims that the only reason he bothers to pick up the award is so that he can grab the prize money, which is immediately plugged into some debt or other.

Despite the titanic displays of thanklessness in My Prizes, Bernhard makes no secret of the important roles many of these prizes play in his life; perhaps this is his way of acknowledging that, whether or not he takes them as an honor, they are meaningful to him. One prize, for instance, allows Bernhard to buy his first home. Another gives him the means to own his first car.

More here.

A Garden In Shigar

A nice film by young Pakistani film maker Mahera Omar:

A Garden in Shigar from Mahera Omar on Vimeo.

A note from the film maker:

I have a special request. Please vote for my film “A Garden in Shigar” which is competing at the Women's Voices Now film festival in Los Angeles, USA. . It will only take a nanosecond, I promise! Many thanks if you've already voted, but do share with others and encourage (or threaten) them to vote too.

Click on the following link, choose a rating and press the “submit vote” button. You DO NOT have to enter name, address, email, what you ate for breakfast or anything like that at all.

http://womensvoicesnow.org/watchfilm/a_garden_in_shigar/

Enjoy the film, and please do leave a comment, even if it's just a “gr8 (or terribly bogus) effort”. Longer sentences will be better as all of this will be used by the judges to do their judging.

Some facts about the importance of your vote:

  • Although the teaching garden has been designed, it hasn't been built yet due to a lack of funds. Your vote could help the film win prize money which would be put towards completion of the garden.
  • The publicity from the film winning an award will help generate additional funds for the next two planting seasons.
  • An added bonus: the winning filmmaker and the subjects of the film (the only five working women in Shigar) will be flown to Los Angeles, USA for the screening in March 2011. It's a once in a lifetime opportunity for these women to visit a foreign country.

Baby aspirin linked to reduced cancer deaths

From LA Times:

Aspirin-colon-cancer A daily dose of baby aspirin may reduce mortality from a range of common cancers by an average of 21%, with the reduction persisting for at least 20 years, British researchers reported Monday.
Deadly cases of stomach, colorectal and esophageal cancers all declined among people who took low-dose aspirin for 10 to 20 years, according to a study published online in the journal Lancet. The chewable tablets also were linked to a reduced risk of death from adenocarcinoma and from lung cancer in nonsmokers. The results were based on an analysis of more than 10,000 people who participated in seven clinical trials designed to test whether baby aspirin could reduce the risk of heart disease.

“We already had strong evidence that low-dose aspirin could reduce deaths from colorectal cancer by as much as a third, but this provides important new evidence that long-term aspirin use can provide protection against a variety of other cancers,” said epidemiologist Eric Jacobs of the American Cancer Society. However, he added, “it would be premature at this point to recommend that people start using aspirin specifically to prevent cancer.” For the millions of people who are currently taking low doses of aspirin to protect against cardiovascular disease, “the findings suggest that they should have some additional benefit for cancer,” said Dr. Lori Minasian, who is in charge of large cancer prevention trials at the National Cancer Institute.

More here.

Researchers question the science behind last week’s revelation of arsenic-based life

From Nature:

Bugs Days after an announcement that a strain of bacteria can apparently use arsenic in place of phosphorous to build its DNA and other biomolecules — an ability unknown in any other organism — some scientists are questioning the finding and taking issue with how it was communicated to non-specialists.

Many readily agree that the bacterium, described last week in Science and dubbed GFAJ-1 (F. Wolfe-Simon et al. Science doi:10.1126/science.1197258; 2010), performs a remarkable feat by surviving high concentrations of arsenic in California's Mono Lake and in the laboratory. But data in the paper, they argue, suggest that it is just as likely that the microbe isn't using the arsenic, but instead is scavenging every possible phosphate molecule while fighting off arsenic toxicity. The claim at a NASA press briefing that the bacterium represents a new chemistry of life is at best premature, they say. “It's a great story about adaptation, but it's not ET,” says Gerald Joyce, a biochemist at the Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, California.

More here.

Wednesday Poem

The Gist of the Matter

Apple peelings
red and moistened
slide from the knife
onto my calico apron
in a large, curly heap.
I listen to the chatter of
my family around the table.
Over and over,
I slice pieces from my apple,
and eat them from the knife
like my father before me,
until nothing is left but the core.
That’s where I like to begin
my story.

by Glenda Barrett
from When the Sap Rises
(Finishing Line Press, 2008)

the Hide/Seek show

ID_IC_MEIS_HIDE_CO_002 With all the recent controversy over the Hide/Seek show in DC, I thought I would post my own commentary on the show from before the excitement started….

I never would have thought that the problem of gayness in America could boil down to something so simple, that it could be, simply, Frank O’Hara. But Frank O’Hara stood before us as a gay man in a way that no one before him had. One painting in the show, by Alice Neel, is nothing more than Frank O’Hara’s profile as he sits alone at a table in a baggy sweater in front of some lilacs. His nose is extraordinary and rather beakish. Alice Neel called it “falconlike.” You sense, looking at the painting, that this is a man who knew who he was. Something in the straightforward nonchalance of Frank O’Hara says that he is willing to be gay in the same way that another man is willing to be a Democrat, or an Episcopalian. He isn’t putting on a show. He isn’t masking himself in layers of false identity. He isn’t engaged in the game of hide and seek any more than he has to be. He just wants to be Frank, a human being who happens to love men. Another painting in the show, “Frank O’Hara Nude with Boots” by Larry Rivers, says roughly the same thing, if with a little more attitude. In this painting, Frank is to be found staring out at us with his head cocked slightly to the side, naked, wearing boots. His penis hangs like a warning, neither explicitly erotic nor willing to be ignored. Frank’s penis is telling us, none to subtly, that he, Frank O’Hara, is a man, and that his maleness is an ineradicable function of who he is.

more from me at The Smart Set here.

last ditch with the Rosenbergs

659px-Julius_and_Ethel_Rosenberg_NYWTS

Finally, the truth that still escapes Navasky is that these Soviet spies were recruited out of the U.S. communist movement, whose leaders knew of and covered up the Rosenbergs’ espionage, and, when they found out that those arrested would not talk, waged a worldwide propaganda campaign to portray the Rosenbergs as victims of America’s imperial thrust. The Rosenbergs’ belief in the Soviet Union and communism was the motive for their actions. Julius began working for Soviet foreign intelligence during the time of the Nazi-Soviet Pact, when Stalin and Hitler were cooperating in the brutal division of Eastern Europe. Hence, the notion that Julius was simply working to oppose fascism is baseless. As in so many other episodes of this era, it was the anti-communists, and not the apologists for communism, whom history has proved correct.

more from Ronald Radosh and Steven Usdin at TNR here.

suicide bombers just want to die

BomberIdeas__1291391882_6557

Qari Sami did something strange the day he killed himself. The university student from Kabul had long since grown a bushy, Taliban-style beard and favored the baggy tunics and trousers of the terrorists he idolized. He had even talked of waging jihad. But on the day in 2005 that he strapped the bomb to his chest and walked into the crowded Kabul Internet cafe, Sami kept walking — between the rows of tables, beyond the crowd, along the back wall, until he was in the bathroom, with the door closed. And that is where, alone, he set off his bomb. The blast killed a customer and a United Nations worker, and injured five more. But the carnage could have been far worse. Brian Williams, an associate professor of Islamic studies at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth, was in Afghanistan at the time. One day after the attack, he stood before the cafe’s hollowed-out wreckage and wondered why any suicide bomber would do what Sami had done: deliberately walk away from the target before setting off the explosives. “[Sami] was the one that got me thinking about the state of mind of these guys,” Williams said.

more from Paul Kix at the Boston Globe here.

Tracing the Spark of Creative Problem-Solving

From The New York Times:

Puzzle-sfSpan The puzzles look easy, and mostly they are. Given three words — “trip,” “house” and “goal,” for example — find a fourth that will complete a compound word with each. A minute or so of mental trolling (housekeeper, goalkeeper, trip?) is all it usually takes. But who wants to troll? Let lightning strike. Let the clues suddenly coalesce in the brain — “field!” — as they do so often for young children solving a riddle. As they must have done, for that matter, in the minds of those early humans who outfoxed nature well before the advent of deduction, abstraction or SAT prep courses. Puzzle-solving is such an ancient, universal practice, scholars say, precisely because it depends on creative insight, on the primitive spark that ignited the first campfires. And now, modern neuroscientists are beginning to tap its source.

In a just completed study, researchers at Northwestern University found that people were more likely to solve word puzzles with sudden insight when they were amused, having just seen a short comedy routine. “What we think is happening,” said Mark Beeman, a neuroscientist who conducted the study with Karuna Subramaniam, a graduate student, “is that the humor, this positive mood, is lowering the brain’s threshold for detecting weaker or more remote connections” to solve puzzles. This and other recent research suggest that the appeal of puzzles goes far deeper than the dopamine-reward rush of finding a solution. The very idea of doing a crossword or a Sudoku puzzle typically shifts the brain into an open, playful state that is itself a pleasing escape, captivating to people as different as Bill Clinton, a puzzle addict, and the famous amnesiac Henry Molaison, or H.M., whose damaged brain craved crosswords.

More here.

How Many Friends Does One Person Need?

From Scientific American:

Book If you find relationships challenging to cultivate and maintain, then you are in good company. In his new book, evolutionary biologist Robin Dunbar argues that our ability to manage such complex social connections—love lives, work colleagues, childhood buddies and friendly acquaintances—is what drove humans to develop such large brains in the first place. Dunbar finds support for this theory, dubbed the social intelligence hypothesis, by observing birds. He recently conducted studies in several species of birds and found a clear link between brain size and relationship type. Birds that mate for life have much larger brains relative to body size, whereas birds that live in promiscuous flocks have much smaller brains. Dunbar speculates that birds with smaller brains have many short-lived partners because they lack the mental prowess to form and maintain more complex emotional bonds. Dunbar finds that apes and monkeys form lasting bonds and have a particularly big neocortex—a region of the brain that regulates emotions, awareness of others and language abilities. Humans form some of the most intricate and complex relationships of all. And our brains are high maintenance, consuming a whopping 20 percent of our energy.

Judging from human brain size and complexity, Dunbar calculates that a person’s social group should incorporate about 150 people—this is the maximum number of relationships our brain can keep track of at one time. This figure, now graced with the name “Dunbar’s number” takes different types of relationships into account. On one end of the spectrum, we have a core group of about five people we talk to once a week. On the other end, we have a group of around 100 acquaintances to whom we speak about once a year.

More here.

Tuesday Poem

Madonna

I hailed me a woman from the street,
Shameless, but, oh, so fair!
I bade her sit in the model’s seat
And I painted her sitting there.

I hid all trace of her heart unclean;
I painted a babe at her breast;
I painted her as she might have been
If the Worst had been the Best.

She laughed at my picture and went away.
Then came, with a knowing nod,
A connoisseur, and I heard him say;
“’Tis Mary, the Mother of God.”

So I painted a halo round her hair,
And I sold her and took my fee,
And she hangs in the church of Saint Hillaire,
Where you and all may see.

by Robert Service

Acting Out

Karlan_35.6_roberts Pamela S. Karlan in Boston Review:

A stalled economic recovery. The airwaves filled with demagoguery about important constitutional issues. A president who chides the Supreme Court for striking down a major piece of federal reform legislation. And, in response to charges of a pro-corporate tilt on a Court with a narrow conservative majority, Justice Roberts defends the Court’s intervention with the bland claim that judges do nothing more than “lay the article of the Constitution which is invoked beside the statute which is challenged” in order “to decide whether the latter squares with the former.”

2010? 1936. That mechanistic image of the judicial process was the handiwork of Justice Owen Roberts, responding to critics who complained that the Court was overriding New Deal economic legislation on the basis of its own political preferences. Current Chief Justice John Roberts would deflect such charges of “judicial activism” —the idea that judges improperly strike down democratically enacted laws according to their own moral and political convictions—by appealing to the metaphor of an umpire calling balls and strikes.

Indeed, the phrase “judicial activist” (or “activist judge”) is so frequently used that it has come to exemplify what George Orwell described in the 1946 essay “Politics and the English Language” as a term with “no meaning except in so far as it signifies ‘something not desirable.’” Consider how it has been employed in recent judicial-confirmation hearings. Conservative senators who worried that nominee Sonia Sotomayor would be a judicial activist pointed to her appeals court decision in Ricci v. DeStefano, in which she had refused to override employment policies adopted by the democratically elected government of New Haven. A year later the National Rifle Association announced that it would oppose Elena Kagan’s nomination because she might not be activist enough—her record suggested to them that she would uphold laws restricting gun possession. Meanwhile, liberal senators spent the hearings excoriating the activism of the conservatives on the Court, who had voted in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission to strike down certain federal restrictions on corporate involvement in the election process.

Jonathan Franzen, ‘The Oprah Winfrey Show’ Book Club and the rise of the Frustrated White Male

Alg_franzen_winfrey_interviewAlexander Nazaryan in the New York Daily News:

“Patty went even more overboard with Total Jockworld than most, because she could! Because she’d finally escaped from Westchester!”

The above was written by America’s finest author, in his most acclaimed novel, which has been called “the book of the century.”

And they wonder why Americans aren’t reading.

That author is Jonathan Franzen, and he appeared on “The Oprah Winfrey Show” on Monday, nine years after she picked “The Corrections” for her Book Club. Back then, Franzen responded peevishly, claiming the mantle of “the high-art literary tradition” and complaining, “I see this as my book, my creation, and I didn’t want that logo of corporate ownership on it.”

Because redemption is a favorite theme of Oprah’s, it made perfect sense for her to give Franzen a second chance. And needing book sales, he took it.

He sat awkwardly with his hands on his knees, pretending to smile while Oprah leaned back, her legs casually crossed. She hugged him, too, though I think this was less a show of genuine goodwill than a reminder that while many thousands may read Franzen, many millions watch Oprah.

In a nod to Oprah, Franzen said he had “more respect for television” since the “Corrections” fiasco and claimed – with a straight face – that he was a “Midwestern egalitarian.” She called him “one of the best writers in the world” – a hyperbolic statement, absent of value, the kind of thing Americans have become too good at.

It’s a shame that Oprah let Franzen off so easy, without touching upon the fatal flaws in his work. Four years ago, she demolished James Frey because she discovered, after anointing his “A Million Little Pieces” to her club, that it was not a memoir, but a work of fiction passed off as truth.

3QD Politics Prize 2010 Voting Round

ScreenHunter_04 Dec. 02 20.01 Hello,

Sorry for the delay in the opening of the voting round. I have been indisposed. Thanks to Robin for putting together the list of nominees and setting up the polling software this time.

The period for nominating entrees for the 3QD Politics Prize is over.

To see a full list of the nominees and then vote, go here.

Good luck to all! The voting round closes on Monday, December 13, 2010, at 11:59 pm NYC time.

3 Quarks Daily 2010 Politics Prize: Vote Here

ScreenHunter_04 Dec. 02 20.01 Dear Reader,

Thanks very much for participating in our contest. For details of the prize you can look at the announcement here, and to read the nominated posts you can go here for a complete list with links.

If you are new to 3 Quarks Daily, we welcome you and invite you to look around the site after you vote. Learn more about who we are and what we do here, and do check out the full site here. Bookmark us and come back regularly, or sign up for the RSS feed. If you have a blog or website, and like what you see here, we would very much appreciate being added to your blogroll. Please don’t forget!

Results of the voting round (the top twenty most voted for posts) will be posted on the main page on December 14, 2010. Winners of the contest, as decided by Lewis Lapham, will be announced on December 21, 2010.

Now go ahead and submit your vote below!

Cheers,

Abbas

P.S. If you notice any problems, such as a nominee is missing from the list below, please leave a comment on this page. Thanks.

BEWARE: We have various independent ways of keeping track of attempts at voting multiple times, which I am deliberately not revealing publicly. Any attempts at fraud will be thoroughly investigated, and anyone caught trying to vote multiple times will be instantly disqualified. I don’t think I really need to say this, but there are always a couple of bad eggs who will try!

The Nominees for the 2010 3QD Prize in Politics Are:

Alphabetical list of blog names followed by the blog post title:

(Please report any problems with links in the comments section below.)

For prize details, click here.

And after looking around, click here to vote.

  1. 3 Quarks Daily, The Trappers and the Trapped
  2. 3 Quarks Daily, Who Will Be A Champion Of The Left We Can Believe In? As Bush-lite, Obama Ain’t It
  3. 3 Quarks Daily, The Revolution Will Not Be PowerPointed
  4. 3 Quarks Daily, War and the American Republic
  5. 3 Quarks Daily, A Jury of One
  6. A Collection of Selves, Specialness
  7. Accidental Blogger, What was malt liquor?
  8. Alter Politics, Israel’s Dahiya Doctrine Undermines Its ‘Collateral Damage’ Claims In Gaza
  9. Black Agenda Reporter, The Unraveling of the Empire of Finance Capital
  10. BTC News, We are shocked—shocked!—about Obama and Afghanistan, plus: Ghandi!
  11. Democracy in America, The rise (and fall?) of religious partisanship
  12. Ellen Tordesillas, Never forgetting is weapon against tyranny
  13. Farming Pathogens, The Alan Greenspan Strain
  14. Get Buckets, A Defense of Cecil Newton
  15. Huffington Post, The Two Most Essential, Abhorrent, Intolerable Lies Of George W. Bush’s Memoir
  16. Huffington Post, Haiti’s Political and Economic Earthquake “Made in the USA”
  17. Ideas in Motion, Covering Mirrors
  18. Inebriated Discourse, What Newt Gingrich Really Meant By “Kenyan, Anti-Colonial Behavior”
  19. Kamil Pasha, Jerusalem Redux
  20. Like a Rolling Stone, On Aquino’s insistence of maintaining paramilitary groups
  21. Muhammad Cohen, Twenty reasons Barack Obama stinks
  22. Naked Capitalism, End This Fed
  23. Not Rocket Science, Fake CVs reveal discrimination against Muslims in French job market
  24. NPR Check, Asymmetric Accomplices to Murder
  25. Once Upon a Time…, On Wikileaks (VII): Take Up the Wikileaks Challenge with Pride and Honor
  26. Once Upon a Time…, On Wikileaks (V): Losing Control
  27. Paul Street’s Blog, A Comeback for Chattel Slavery? Remarkable Revelations from a Top Obama Aide
  28. PH2.1, Getting to Agreement
  29. Politeia, The Poor Rich
  30. Sexy Beast, Spitzer, Stop Hiding From Your Call Girl Past
  31. Stephen Walt, Five big questions
  32. Stephen Walt, Why America is going to regret the Cordoba House controversy
  33. Stoner, Politics and National Security
  34. The Heart of the Matter, It’s Just a Leak
  35. The Philosopher’s Beard, Politics: Can’t Someone Else Do It?
  36. The South Asian Idea Weblog, 9/11: Socrates, Machiavelli, Christ and Gandhi
  37. Thought Streaming, South of the Border
  38. Triple Canopy, She Goes Covered
  39. True/Slant, Some Iran Questions Without Answers
  40. Unqualified Reservations, Democracy, cis and trans; Maine’s law
  41. Westminister Goss, Andrew Maybee Gets Elected
  42. Wisdom of the West, Politics
  43. WSJ Health Blog, Health Blog Q&A: ‘White Coat, Black Hat’ Author Carl Elliott
  44. Zunguzungu, Julian Assange and the Computer Conspiracy; “To destroy this invisible government”

Groggy Pearls of Wiseness

Me The first of these spontaneously popped into my mind as I regained consciousness after some recent shoulder surgery. As the effects of anaesthesia wore off and before the pain became a roar which drowned out every other thought, I made up the rest in the ultimately futile attempt at distracting myself:

  1. Send not to know why the bell is ringing. Curiosity has killed many a “cat,” and you could be next.
  2. The biggest philosophical problem is suicide, thought Camus. He died young in a traffic accident and as far as I know, no one thinks that that is a philosophical problem.
  3. Time is money, which cannot buy happiness, which is why the leisurely and rich are always so sad.
  4. I am told, and I have no reason to doubt it, that it is better to have a bird in one's hand than not to.
  5. If you don't really believe in God and then say, “God does not play dice,” it is a bit like saying, “Unicorns don't speak French,” isn't it?
  6. I firmly believe it is better to say “never” late than never ever to say it.
  7. “A picture is worth a thousand words” is an easy way to remember that a trillion pictures are worth a quadrillion words.
  8. Who let the cats out of the bags? Who? Who, who?
  9. If you have a terminal illness then consider Einstein's profound words to the effect that the Lord is subtle but not malicious. Try to imagine what you'd have if the Lord were malicious. Hopefully you will feel better.

The Owls | Micrograffiti by Stefany Anne Golberg & Sean Hill

Micrograffiti is a project edited by Stacey Swann for The Owls site. The writers were asked to respond with fiction to Ben Walters’ photographs of the South London graffiti tunnel. Editor's Note: These two writers responded to the same image but interpreted the text of the tag differently, one reading it as “we live to learn now to love” and the other reading it as “we live to learn how to love.” -S.S.

*

we live to learn now to love

By Stefany Anne Golberg

He had been staring at that wall for like, he didn’t know, a half hour? It was a stupid phrase. The stupidest phrase he had ever seen, just like that, spray painted on a wall. It was the kind of phrase that aimed to sell you something, but he couldn’t think what. Ice cream maybe, or lady products. Anyway, he had to get going.

What can you say to such a stupid phrase? How can you just write that, out there for everyone to look at? Someone must be really embarrassed. Anyone who writes something like that only wants one thing. And then they had to go and paint a heart in the middle.

He took off his hat and sat down on the ground. He really had to get going too.

we live to Learn ♥ how to Love

By Sean Hill

An ocean and half the country away from Bemidji, Minnesota, this bit of graffiti. It takes me back to that Sunday night in the Hard Times Saloon. You’re out of town on business. I’m beginning to feel lonely and hungry. The saloon is open late and in walking distance, and I want a beer to go with the wings I will order. The guy on the barstool to my left props his forearm against the bar, and holds his right hand in the air—swollen, oozing blood—clearly busted. After a couple wings and sips, “What happened?”

“Got into a fight with my girlfriend; she made me mad. You know, it’s not right to hit a woman.”

“Yeah.”

“I took a walk instead, but when I got to the corner I punched the Stop sign. So I came down here for some beers.”

“I see.”

“She made me mad, but I didn’t hurt something that’s alive.”

“Right.” We talk some more while I finish the wings and another beer. He seems like a nice guy; I worry about his hand. I walk home stopping at every Stop sign, in no hurry because you’re not there.

*

Stefany Anne Golberg (“we live to learn now to love”) is a founder of the nascent Huckleberry Explorer's Club and writes for The Smart Set.

Sean Hill (“we live to Learn ♥ how to Love”), author of the poetry collection Blood Ties & Brown Liquor, lives in Bemidji, Minnesota, the first city on the Mississippi River and home to Paul Bunyan and Babe the blue ox.

The Owls site is for digital writing and art projects. Cross-posts appear here by the generosity of 3QD. You can receive updates from The Owls via free email subscriptions on the site's main page.

What is Julian Assange Up To?

Julian-Assange-WikiLeaks--006Aaron Bady won the internet last week with his explication of a pair of essays Julian Assange wrote in 2006. Paddling against a vomit-tide of epithets and empty speculations that threatened to bury Assange under a flood of banalities, Bady proposed and executed a fairly shocking procedure: he sat down and read ten pages of what Assange had actually written about the motivations and strategy behind Wikileaks.

The central insight of Bady’s analysis was the recognition that Assange’s strategy stands at significant remove from a philosophy it might easily be confused for: the blend of technological triumphalism and anarcho-libertarian utopianism that takes “information wants to be free” as its gospel and Silicon Valley as its spiritual homeland. Noting the “certain vicious amorality about the Mark Zuckerberg-ian philosophy that all transparency is always and everywhere a good thing,” Bady argued that Assange's philosophy is crucially different:

The question for an ethical human being — and Assange always emphasizes his ethics — has to be the question of what exposing secrets will actually accomplish, what good it will do, what better state of affairs it will bring about. And whether you buy his argument or not, Assange has a clearly articulated vision for how Wikileaks’ activities will “carry us through the mire of politically distorted language, and into a position of clarity,” a strategy for how exposing secrets will ultimately impede the production of future secrets.

As Assange told Time: “It is not our goal to achieve a more transparent society; it's our goal to achieve a more just society.”

In his essays Assange makes no bones about wanting to “radically shift regime behavior,” and this claim to radicalism marks one difference between Wikileaks and, say, the New York Times. As Bady notes, however, by far the more important distinction lies in the way Assange wants to use transparency to cause change. The traditional argument for transparency is that more information will allow a populace to better influence its government. In this scheme, freedom of the press, sunshine laws, and journalistic competition are all useful for prizing loose information that government actors don’t want us to see, but none of them are ends in themselves. The information they reveal is ever only propaedeutic: it needs advocacy, elections, armed uprisings, or some other activity to make real political change.

Read more »

Blasphemy Law: the Shape of Things to Come

To the article below, one can now add this unhappy piece of news:

The decision of a lower court to award the death penalty to a poor Christian woman accused of blasphemy has ignited a wide debate over Pakistan’s blasphemy laws.

Pro aasia protest Liberals have asked that the Zia-era blasphemy law should be repealed or amended because it has become an instrument of oppression and injustice in the hands of mobs and gangsters (over 4000 prosecutions in 25 years with several gruesome extra-judicial executions). The religious right has mobilized its supporters to oppose any such amendment and regards these attempts as a conspiracy against Islam. Ruling party MNA Sherry Rahman has introduced a “private member bill” to amend the law and the governor of Punjab has intervened (somewhat clumsily) in the judicial process and indicated that a Presidential pardon is on the cards. The international media is arrayed against the law alongside Pakistan’s liberals and progressives, while the “deep state”, the Islamist front organizations and their mentors in the Gulf and Saudi Arabia are no doubt aligned on the other side. What will be the likely outcome of this struggle? It is always hazardous to make predictions, but let us make some anyway and try to state why these are the likely outcomes:

1. The law will not be repealed. Some minor amendments may be made (and even these will excite significant Islamist resistance) but their effectiveness will be limited. Blasphemy accusations will continue, as will the spineless convictions issuing from the lower courts. In fact, new blasphemy accusations will almost certainly be made with the express intention of testing any new amendment or procedural change (thus, ironically, any amendment is likely to lead to at least one more innocent Christian or Ahmedi victim as Islamists hunt around for a test case).

Read more »