Robert Merrihew Adams in Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews:

“Why tolerate religion?” The question is raised by someone who thinks there is something wrong about religion as such. To tolerate, Brian Leiter emphasizes, is to “put up” with beliefs or practices that one regards as “wrong, mistaken, or undesirable” (p. 8). His paradigm case of principled tolerance is one in which a “dominant group has the means at its disposal to effectively and reliably change or end [a] disfavored group's beliefs or practices, and yet . . . acknowledges that there are moral or epistemic reasons . . . to permit the disfavored group to keep on believing and doing what it does” (p. 13). Forcibly changing or ending religious belief has commonly been extremely difficult or impossible to achieve by any means short of total extermination or banishment of the disfavored group, as history shows, and is therefore a really scary project. With his stated paradigm in mind, we might think that Leiter's statement that “the contemporary problem, at least in the post-Enlightenment secular nations, . . . is why the state should tolerate religion as such at all” (pp. 14-15), would be ominous indeed if it were an accurate reading of political reality.

Fortunately and sensibly, Leiter does not hold that “the protection against intolerance [is] exhausted by a mere prohibition on annihilation or imprisonment of those with the disfavored beliefs and practices” (p. 109). The book's thoughtful and interestingly argued discussions of particular legal issues about tolerance (found mainly in the last of its five chapters) are generally not focused on questions of forcibly ending or fundamentally changing religious beliefs and practices, except for the most blatantly intolerable practices. Rather they concern public policies that (intentionally or unintentionally) limit the scope for exercise of the practices, or more generally disadvantage religious beliefs and practices or their adherents.

More here.

Over at Philosophy Bites:

Philosopher Kendall Walton argues that photographs are distinctively different from other kinds of pictures: he thinks that we can literally see through them to the objects and people they are of. He explains this counterintuitive idea in the course of this interview with Nigel Warburton.

Listen to Kendall Walton on Photography

Marco Calamai in Reset DOC:

To what point can international indifference continue in the face of such massacre? Unease within the Obama administration is growing. Uncertain about what to do after recently recognising the SNC (Syrian National Council), a body that assembles a more responsible opposition from an American viewpoint but which only represents ten political groups amongst many more which constitute the rebel front.

Understanding what to do is not easy. If the regime rests in the hands of one group (Alawite clans close to the Assad family), on the other hand opposition is divided into dozens of groups who compete against each other and hold profoundly different views of the future. There are multiple strategic visions amongst militants close to Al Qaeda and the secular who would like a State respectful of the different religious cultures constituting the Syrian terrain (Sunnites, Alawites, Druzes, Christians…). The confrontation/clash between these trends renders international political mediation, impossible so far, strenuous. This is affected in turn by diverging expectations of the main countries closely following the conflict’s evolution: the United States, Russia, Iran, Turkey and Saudi-Arabia.

Who delights in the armed conflict’s aggravation? Is the Financial Times correct in identifying the growing influence of Sunni Salafism as the most worrying political risk in the Syrian conundrum? Time is getting shorter, as the impression, of a situation more and more distant from a secure exit route is gaining ground. This could somehow avert an even bigger humanitarian crisis than the present one, which threatens to put the fragile balance of the Middle East at risk. The uncertain evolution of the situation in Egypt, permanent doubts on Iraq’s future, the uncertain internal situation in Libya, the unresolved Palestinian question along with Israel’s aggressive drive, and justified worries about Lebanon’s future do not bode well.

From New Statesman:

“Darkness at Noon” (1940) dramatises the Moscow show trials and Stalin’s “Great Purge” of Old Bolsheviks. In his review for the New Statesman, Orwell praised Koestler’s “inner knowledge of totalitarian methods”: “The common people,” argues the Party operative Gletkin, “cannot grasp ‘deviation’ is a crime in itself; therefore crimes of the sort they can understand – murder, train-wrecking and so forth – must be invented.” Many see Rubashov’s confession as a direct influence upon Winston Smith’s.

Orwell used his review as an opportunity to chastise the left-wing press in Britain for their refusal to speak up; a powerful statement made two years after Kingsley Martin refused to publish his despatches from Spain, fearing they would appear critical of Stalin, and therefore socialism: “What was frightening about these trials was not that they happened – for obviously such things are necessary in a totalitarian society – but the eagerness of Western intellectuals to justify them.”

Mr Arthur Koestler should know something about prison, for he has spent a respectable proportion of the past four years there. First a long stretch in one of Franco’s fortresses, with the sound of firing squads ringing through the walls twenty or thirty times a day; then a year or so of internment in France; then escape to England, and a fresh internment in Pentonville – from which he has just been unconditionally released, however. In no case, needless to say, has he been accused of any particular crime. Nowadays, over increasing areas of the earth, one is imprisoned not for what one does but for what one is, or, more exactly, for what one is suspected of being. Still, Mr Koestler can congratulate himself on having hitherto fallen only into the hands of amateurs. If England imprisoned him, it at any rate let him out again, and did not force him beforehand to confess to poisoning sheep, committing sabotage on the railways or plotting to assassinate the King.

More here.

From HPCWire:

A new petascale supercomputer built to study the universe is one of the fastest calculating machines in the world, and certainly the fastest of its kind. The supercomputer is part of ALMA, a new radio telescope that is claimed to be “largest ground-based astronomical project in existence.” ALMA, which stands for Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array, is an international project, which includes partners from Europe (European Southern Observatory, Laboratoire d'Astrophysique de Bordeaux), North America (National Radio Astronomy Observatory), and Japan (National Astronomical Observatory of Japan). The Joint ALMA Observatory, based in Santiago Chile, manages the project. The ALMA radio telescope is a collection of 66 high-precision antennas (parabolic dishes that act as receivers), strewn over the 5,000 meter-high Chajnantor desert plateau in northern Chile. The dry air and elevation makes it a particularly suitable spot for capturing signals from space in the millimeter and sub-millimeter radio spectrum. At those wavelengths, the antennas can detect the so-called “cool Universe,” molecular gas and dust as well as residual radiation from the Big Bang. The antennas can be set to capture signals in a variety of configurations, such that the distance between them can vary between 150 meters to 16 kilometers. That gives the ALMA telescope something akin to a “zoom” capability, as well as very high sensitivity and resolution. As a result, it should be able to produce images 10 times sharper than that of the Hubble Space Telescope. The challenge of multiple radio antennas is to make them behave as a single receiver, and for that you need some hefty number crunching — thus the need for a supercomputer. The one built for ALMA is actually a special-purpose device designed to correlate faint signals from multiple sources. Because of its function, the supercomputer is actually known as “the correlator.” The supercomputer jargon was added later by the public relation guys to bring attention to its exceptional calculating prowess.

And exceptional it is. The correlator deliver 17 quadrillion operations per second. That's 17 petaOPS (not petaFLOPS). If you discount these are not floating point operations, the system operates at a level comparable to Titan, the fastest general-purpose supercomputer in the world, and the current title-holder on the TOP500.

More here.

Aisling Dhuibhneach 2002

(for Bab Feirtéar)

Blessed is the Indian summer;
Better still, the late harvest of words.
Golden is the reaping woman
Who scythes the treasured sunlight
At evening over Ard na Caithne.
She gathers the red flush of montbretia
From speckled ditches of the neighbourhood
She binds each bounty
Into sheaves of music
To keep you company by firelight,
To banish, for you, the frost of loneliness.

Don’t be backward about coming forward!
Fall to her stook of stories
Till your eyes water;
And when you taste old family grains
In the sweet cake of ancestral blessing
You will be filled to the brim
Like a cat of nine lives
Who made a harvest of the field mouse.

You were too long abroad
In the world of rough tongues,
A wretched little changeling
Who fled the whole system,
Here is the one less vocal
Who lives in the soul’s dazzling barn:
Stay in her orbit, where she’ll lead you
On the high roads of the word –
Across the threshold of silence
Where you will hear
The heartbeat and breath
And the harmony of what is.
.
.
by Bríd Ní Mhóráin
from Síolta an Iomais
publisher: Cló Iar-Chonnachta, Connemara, 2006,

Gary Gutting in the NYT's The Stone:

What place does pleasure have in a good life? Should we, following Epicurus and John Stuart Mill, take maximal pleasure as our overriding goal? Or are there higher moral values that trump pleasure?

In a recent essay in The New York Review of Books the writer Zadie Smith suggests that joy is essentially different from and humanly more important than pleasure. In her experience, pleasure is a part of daily life, particularly through “small pleasures” (she mentions eating and people-watching) that “go a long way” in giving her satisfaction. But joy is very different; it gives “not much pleasure at all” but is rather a “strange admixture of terror, pain, and delight.” Nonetheless, in her life the joy of “true love” for her husband and child has become far more important than pleasure. It is, she says, “the only thing that makes [life] worthwhile.”

Smith’s discussion is thoroughly contemporary and hip, centered by a vivid autobiographical account of a club drug experience. But what she’s getting at resonates with a very different treatment of the topic: Thomas Aquinas’s in his “Summa Theologiae” (I-II, question 31, article 3, “Is Joy Altogether the Same Thing as Pleasure?” which I cite in the translation of my colleague, Fred Freddoso). Aquinas’ approach — systematic, abstract and tightly argued — is the polar opposite of Smith’s. But the two discussions are mutually illuminating.

Jan Breman in the New Left Review:

Slums are the habitat par excellence for a very substantial part of the world’s informal workforce. These settlements can be either urban or rural, but their defining feature at first sight is the poor quality of the housing and the paltry provisioning of basic utilities. There is no dearth of writing on slums, as Mike Davis’s panoramic survey in Planet of Slums made clear. Within this extensive literature, Mumbai in particular—where the slums that house half the population occupy less than a tenth of the land—has been the subject of a vast number of studies. Nevertheless, Katherine Boo’s chronicle of Annawadi stands out as a striking account of work and life at the margins of the urban economy. [1] Crouched in the shadow of the city’s international airport, Annawadi was born in 1991 when a gang of construction workers brought in from Tamil Nadu to repair a runway decided to stay on when their job was finished, fabricating a settlement out of a swamp; its name comes from the Tamil word anna, a respectful term for ‘older brother’. Today’s inhabitants live on the leftovers of the opulence nearby—the waste from a cluster of gleaming luxury hotels, offices and airport buildings. If not salvaging trash, they resort to pilfering material from construction sites or warehouses scattered around the airport.

The stark contrast between Annawadi and the wealth all around is one reason why Boo—previously a reporter at the Washington Post, winning a Pulitzer in 2000 for her work on mental homes, and since 2001 a staff writer at the New Yorker—chose this terrain for her investigation. Its somewhat mawkish title derives from the repeated slogan of an advertisement for Italian floor-tiles, plastered on a concrete wall that hides the slum from view. A second reason for focusing on this enclave was its small scale, allowing for door-to-door surveys and what Boo calls the vagrant-sociology approach. Over the course of more than three years, from late 2007 to early 2011, she repeatedly returned to Annawadi. Monitoring the day-to-day life experiences of the slum-dwellers over such an extended stretch of time enabled her to change her initial perspective as outsider to something closer to that of an insider. If she has to a certain extent overlooked the wider context, Boo has managed to get close to the ups and downs of a small number of households on which she has zoomed in, and their tales are extensively documented.

Meghan Flaherty in New Inquiry:

Adam in Eden is a novel about drug-trafficking that doesn’t talk about drug-traffickers. It is a novel about the Garden of Eden that hardly acknowledges God. It is a political novel free of rants and rhetoric. And it is a funny novel, with a sort of hidden poignancy: it makes you laugh until, upon closing it, you find yourself no longer laughing.

It is also the last published novel from the celebrated Mexican novelist Carlos Fuentes, a man who wrote almost exclusively about Mexico, but was once called into question for lacking a true Mexican identity. And inasmuch as all of his novels have been forays into the history of Mexico (one way or another),Adam in Eden goes the furthest, outlining in no uncertain terms the sociopolitical situation as he sees it: The country is corrupt, and only through corruption can its ills be healed. Fuentes himself called the book “novel-reportage” and “very journalistic.” Yet it reads like Vonnegut, the kind of satire-candy that bloodies gums.

The jokiness and nonchalance of tone can be a little irritating until the reader relaxes into Fuentes’s “ironic disposition.” This “paradoxical weapon” is what helps us process what the author decides we cannot deal with: truth and Mexico — or the truth about Mexico, at least Fuentes’s version of it. In lean (but often repetitive) prose, Fuentes details the commercial and domestic woes of Adam Gorozpe: prominent businessman, husband of a corpulent and flatulent ex-beauty queen, and lover of a mistress he calls L.Gorozpe is confronted with his double, a short and portly supervillain “with a face like a cooked ham” who has been put in charge of public security — “or what little remains of it.” Góngora makes love to Gorozpe’s wife and begins a reign of state-sponsored (in that he-is-the-state-and-so-can-sponsor-it) terror, imprisoning and killing at random, making arrests of innocents and small-time crooks in order to let the real bad guys, “the gang and cartel leaders, the gunrunners, and the criminals who extort and kidnap,” go free.

Adam in Eden is a portrait of a country imperiled, in which the sons of gardeners are murdered and housemaids slapped (all senselessly) to preserve an order that has given a very few possession of all the wealth, power, and pursuit of happiness. The result? “We have lost our faith in everything.”

In Outlook, an excerpt from Joseph Brodsky's In Praise of Boredom:

But should you fail to keep your kingdom And, like your father before you come Where though accuses and feeling mocks, Believe your pain…

– W.H. Auden, Alonso to Ferdinand

Known under several aliases—anguish, ennui, tedium, doldrums, humdrum, the blahs, apathy, listlessness, stolidity, lethargy, languor, accidie, etc—boredom is a complex phenomenon and by and large a product of repetition. It would seem, then, that the best remedy against it would be constant inventiveness and originality. That is what you, young and newfangled, would hope for. Alas, life won’t supply you with that option, for life’s main medium is precisely repetition.

One may argue, of course, that repeated attempts at originality and inventiveness are the vehicle of progress and—in the same breath—civilisation. As benefits of hindsight go, however, this one is not the most valuable. For should we divide the history of our species by scientific discoveries, not to mention ethical concepts, the result will not be in our favour. We will get, technically speaking, centuries of boredom. The very notion of originality or innovation spells out the monotony of standard reality, of life, whose main medium—nay, idiom—is tedium.

In that, it—life—differs from art, whose worst enemy, as you probably know, is cliche. Small wonder, then, that art, too, fails to instruct you as to how to handle boredom. There are few novels about this subject; paintings are still fewer; and as for music, it is largely non-semantic. On the whole, art treats boredom in a self-defensive, satirical fashion. The only way art can become a solace from boredom, the existential equivalent of cliche, is if you yourselves become artists. Given your number, though, this prospect is as unappetising as it is unlikely.

But even should you march out of this commencement in full force to typewriters, easels and Steinway grands, you won’t shield yourselves from boredom entirely. If repetitiveness is boredom’s mother, you, young and newfangled, will be quickly smothered by lack of recognition and low pay, both chronic in the world of art. In these respects, writing, painting, composing music are plain inferior to working for a law firm, a bank, or even a lab.

Herein, of course, lies art’s saving grace. Not being lucrative, it falls victim to demography rather reluctantly. For if, as we’ve said, repetition is boredom’s mother, demography (which is to play in your lives a far greater role than any discipline you’ve mastered here) is its other parent.

Béla Nóvé in Eurozine:

In late 1956 and early 1957, after the second Soviet invasion, some 200,000 refugees fled Hungary. These included an estimated 20,000 teenagers who left without parents or adult escort. These minors, as members of a “wartime generation” born mostly in the period 1939-1944, experienced many kinds of misery, loss and violence during early childhood. Among them were children adopted or brought up in state orphanages, a great number of industrial apprentices and peasant children from the poorest families as well as Budapest grammar school pupils with an intellectual, and – before 1945 – a middle or upper class family background. In the autumn of 1956, many of them took an enthusiastic part in the revolutionary demonstrations and the street fights against the Soviet tanks and the communist state security forces. Once they had escaped to the West, fate led them down many different paths.

The lucky ones were soon able to leave the refugee camps of Austria and Yugoslavia for one of the 36 host countries worldwide, and were received by host families or hostels for young people, learned languages, finished their secondary studies, graduated and made a decent professional career, returning to visit Hungary many years later as well-to-do and respected western citizens. Other escapees drifted for many years, wandering from one country to another often without papers, living on aid and casual work or joining the US army and the French Foreign Legion as mercenaries, only to be taken to fight in the bloodiest period of the Algerian and the Vietnam wars. However, the most defenceless, as it turned out later, were those who, after a few months or years, returned to Hungary driven back by homesickness and a naive trust in the treacherous amnesty promises. Many were put in prison or suffered harassment during the years of massive reprisals. According to the surviving files, the reorganized communist secret police after 1956 preferred to recruit its new spies from among these youngsters.

H. Allen Orr reviews Thomas Nagel's new book in the New York Review of Books:

The history of science is partly the history of an idea that is by now so familiar that it no longer astounds: the universe, including our own existence, can be explained by the interactions of little bits of matter. We scientists are in the business of discovering the laws that characterize this matter. We do so, to some extent at least, by a kind of reduction. The stuff of biology, for instance, can be reduced to chemistry and the stuff of chemistry can be reduced to physics.

Thomas Nagel has never been at ease with this view. Nagel, University Professor of Philosophy and Law at New York University, is one of our most distinguished philosophers. He is perhaps best known for his 1974 paper, “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?,” a modern classic in the philosophy of mind. In that paper, Nagel argued that reductionist, materialist accounts of the mind leave some things unexplained. And one of those things is what it would actually feel like to be, say, a bat, a creature that navigates its environment via the odd (to us) sense of echolocation. To Nagel, then, reductionist attempts to ground everything in matter fail partly for a reason that couldn’t be any nearer to us: subjective experience. While not denying that our conscious experiences have everything to do with brains, neurons, and matter, Nagel finds it hard to see how these experiences can be fully reduced with the conceptual tools of physical science.

In Mind and Cosmos, Nagel continues his attacks on reductionism. Though the book is brief its claims are big. Nagel insists that the mind-body problem “is not just a local problem” but “invades our understanding of the entire cosmos and its history.” If what he calls “materialist naturalism” or just “materialism” can’t explain consciousness, then it can’t fully account for life since consciousness is a feature of life. And if it can’t explain life, then it can’t fully account for the chemical and physical universe since life is a feature of that universe. Subjective experience is not, to Nagel, some detail that materialist science can hand-wave away. It’s a deal breaker. Nagel believes that any future science that grapples seriously with the mind-body problem will be one that is radically reconceived.

More here.

Glenn Greenwald in The Guardian:

The civil right achievements of Martin Luther King are quite justly the focus of the annual birthday commemoration of his legacy. But it is remarkable, as I've noted before on this holiday, how completely his vehement anti-war advocacy is ignored when commemorating his life (just as his economic views are). By King's own description, his work against US violence and militarism, not only in Vietnam but generally, was central – indispensable – to his worldview and activism, yet it has been almost completely erased from how he is remembered.

King argued for the centrality of his anti-militarism advocacy most eloquently on April 4, 1967, at Riverside Church in New York City – exactly one year before the day he was murdered. That extraordinary speech was devoted to answering his critics who had been complaining that his anti-war activism was distracting from his civil rights work (“Peace and civil rights don't mix, they say. Aren't you hurting the cause of your people, they ask?”). King, citing seven independent reasons, was adamant that ending US militarism and imperialism was not merely a moral imperative in its own right, but a prerequisite to achieving any meaningful reforms in American domestic life.

In that speech, King called the US government “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today“, as well as the leading exponent of “the deadly Western arrogance that has poisoned the international atmosphere for so long” (is there any surprise this has been whitewashed from his legacy?). He emphasized that his condemnations extended far beyond the conflict in Southeast Asia: “the war in Vietnam is but a symptom of a far deeper malady within the American spirit.”

More here.

Sally Davies at the BBC:

No pun is an island. Within less than a mile of my house in Brooklyn, a wanderer will find:

• Fish & Sip, a coffee and seafood joint
• Prospect Perk Cafe, an allusion to the restorative properties of caffeine and of nearby Prospect Park
• The Winey Neighbor, a liquor store that pays homage to the venerable New York tradition of grumbling about the noise from the apartment next door

Where good humour and refreshments abound, puns seem to follow.

Yet this neat little linguistic device – which exploits the multiple meanings of words or phrases that sound the same or similar – is considered by its detractors to be as irritating as it is irrepressible.

In the English-speaking world, punning is viewed as more of a tic than a trick, a pathological condition whose sufferers are classed as “compulsive”, “inveterate” and “unable to help themselves”.

The late William Safire, the New York Times’s long-time language writer, wrote in 2005 that a pun “is to wordplay what dominatrix sex is to foreplay – a stinging whip that elicits groans of guilty pleasure”.

More here.

From The Guardian:

On page 493 of William Dalrymple's new narrative of Britain's calamitous 1839 invasion of Afghanistan, he draws this present-day parallel: the west's “fourth war in the country looks certain to end with as few political gains as the first three, and like them to terminate in an embarrassing withdrawal after a humiliating defeat, with Afghanistan yet again left in tribal chaos and quite possibly ruled by the same government which the war was originally fought to overthrow”. That isn't how the government sees the situation, I tell him when we meet in London just before Christmas: the prime minister is with the troops in Helmand and defence secretary Philip Hammond has just told the Commons that the planned reduction of British troops in April “is possible because of the success of the Afghan national security forces in assuming a lead role”.

How could you write such an off-message book, I ask Dalrymple. Even though he's travelled overnight from his farm outside Delhi to his publisher's offices in Bloomsbury, and left his wallet in India, he giggles amiably. “We have a very good record of defence secretaries saying clever things about Afghanistan. 'They won't even have to shoot a single bullet' – remember that? John Reid. I was on a panel with him last year and reminded him.” He laughs again, and admits that the timing of the publication of Return of a King: The Battle for Afghanistan is not entirely fortuitous. “There was an element of calculation that this could happen – that they could withdraw some troops.”

More here.

From The New York Times:

Nobody knows how it happened: an indoor housecat who got lost on a family excursion managing, after two months and about 200 miles, to return to her hometown. Even scientists are baffled by how Holly, a 4-year-old tortoiseshell who in early November became separated from Jacob and Bonnie Richter at an R.V. rally in Daytona Beach, Fla., appeared on New Year’s Eve — staggering, weak and emaciated — in a backyard about a mile from the Richters’ house in West Palm Beach. “Are you sure it’s the same cat?” wondered John Bradshaw, director of the University of Bristol’s Anthrozoology Institute. In other cases, he has suspected, “the cats are just strays, and the people have got kind of a mental justification for expecting it to be the same cat.”

But Holly not only had distinctive black-and-brown harlequin patterns on her fur, but also an implanted microchip to identify her. “I really believe these stories, but they’re just hard to explain,” said Marc Bekoff, a behavioral ecologist at the University of Colorado. “Maybe being street-smart, maybe reading animal cues, maybe being able to read cars, maybe being a good hunter. I have no data for this.” There is, in fact, little scientific dogma on cat navigation. Migratory animals like birds, turtles and insects have been studied more closely, and use magnetic fields, olfactory cues, or orientation by the sun.

More here.

Red Glove Thrown in a Rosebush

If our bodies weren’t so beautiful.
Even rabbits are made of firecrackers
so tiny they tickle your hand.
If only the infirmities,
blocked neural pathways, leg braces
and bandages didn’t make all these bodies
look like they’re dancing.
Breathing will destroy us, hearts
like ninja stars stuck into the sternums
of granite caesars. Should I worry
people have stopped saying how skinny
and pale I am? Paul may destroy the kitchen
but he’s the best cook I know.
Seared tuna, pesto risotto – where
did he get those tomatoes? –what a war
must be fought for simplicity!
Even the alligator, flipped over,
is soft as an eyelid. Hans, the trapezist,
got everyone high on New Year’s Eve
with a single joint, the girl he was with
a sequin it was impossible not to want
to try to catch without a net.
Across the bay, fireworks punched
luminous bruises in the fog.
If only my body wasn’t borrowed from dust!
.
.
by Dean Young
from Bender: New and Selected Poems