Tom Gallagher review Nick Turse's Kill Anything that Moves, in the LA Review of Books:

[N]o one came away from the war unfamiliar with the killing of Vietnamese civilians, if only due to the public exposure of the March 15, 1968 My Lai massacre, where American troops murdered an entire village of 300–500 unarmed South Vietnamese, in addition to raping civilians, killing their livestock, mutilating corpses, burning down houses, and fouling drinking water. (In the official record, the Americans recorded killing 128 enemy troops and suffering no casualties.) But where My Lai, Turse writes, “has entered the popular American consciousness as an exceptional, one-of-a-kind event,” his investigation caused him to see “the indiscriminate killing of South Vietnamese noncombatants” as “neither accidental nor unforeseeable.”

For Turse, a journalist and the author of a previous book on the military industrial complex’s impact on daily life, the first glimmer of understanding came in 2001 when, as a graduate student researching post-traumatic stress disorder among Vietnam veterans, he happened upon the records of the Vietnam War Crimes Working Group. This was “a secret Pentagon task force that had,” he writes, “been assembled after the My Lai massacre to ensure that the army would never again be caught off-guard by a major war crimes scandal.” The papers “documented a nightmare war that is essentially missing from our understanding of the Vietnam conflict.”

In this book, the devil is truly in the details. There were, for instance, the military units placed in kill-count competition so that, one soldier recalled, “as you passed through the chow line you were able to look up at a chart and see that we had killed so many.” How to decide if a corpse was Viet Cong, and thus merited a chow line check mark? As the saying went, “If it’s dead and it’s Vietnamese, it’s VC.”

Ian Leslie in Aeon Magazine:

[W]hat if the problem isn't Facebook’s privacy settings, but our own?

Afew years ago George Loewenstein, professor of behavioural economics at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, set out to investigate how people think about the consequences of their privacy choices on the internet. He soon concluded that they don't.

In one study, Loewenstein and his collaborators asked two groups of students to fill out an online survey about their lives. Everyone received the same questions, ranging from the innocuous to the embarrassing or potentially incriminating. One group was presented with an official-looking website that bore the imprimatur of their university, and were assured that their answers would remain anonymous. The other group filled out the questions on a garishly coloured website on which the question ‘How BAD Are U???’ was accompanied by a grinning devil. It featured no assurance of anonymity.

Bizarrely, the ‘How BAD Are U???’ website was much more likely to elicit revealing confessions, like whether a student had copied someone else’s homework or tried cocaine. The first set of respondents reacted cautiously to the institutional feel of the first website and its obscurely concerning assurances about anonymity. The second group fell under the sway of the perennial youthful imperative to be cool, and opened up, in a way that could have got them into serious trouble in the real world. The students were using their instincts about privacy, and their instincts proved to be deeply wayward. ‘Thinking about online privacy doesn’t come naturally to us,’ Loewenstein told me when I spoke to him on the phone. ‘Nothing in our evolution or culture has equipped us to deal with it.’

Noah Feldman in Newsday:

In case you still thought Egypt's coup was leading to democracy, the violent destruction of Muslim Brotherhood protest camps and the appointment of 19 generals as provincial governors — occurring more or less simultaneously — should cure you of that appealing fantasy.

When generals come to power, even if they are initially motivated by the ideal of restoring democracy, the attraction of remaining in power for as long as it takes to establish a military order tends to be decisive. When a regime that generals have deposed was democratically elected, as it was in Egypt, the odds of restoration are even more remote.

Western democrats want to love the Egyptian liberals who bravely helped bring down Hosni Mubarak and then misguidedly followed the same playbook to sink the legitimately elected Mohamed Mursi. But the emerging reality poses a puzzle about those Egyptian liberals and their country's future: Why in the world did thoughtful believers in democracy think that it was a good idea to stage protests that would invite the army to take out Mursi? And what, if anything, can be done now to get democracy back on track in Egypt?

More here. [Thanks to Vali Nasr.]

For all their playfulness, the original ornamental hermits were not a joke. Rather, we enact our personal and societal dramas in the gardens we create, and Georgian hermits (or their spectres) were acting out their century’s preoccupation with Nature and with the great philosophical and scientific questions of the Enlightenment. Campbell’s train-spotting approach at times obscures such deeper meanings. A simpler format might have served him better, with thematic chapters followed by a gazetteer of hermits and hermitages in the style of Barbara Jones’s magisterial Follies & Grottoes (1953), which Campbell acknowledges as one of his reference sources. This is altogether a smaller book, in ambition and execution, but commendable nonetheless for Campbell’s dogged enthusiasm in assembling the first work devoted solely to ornamental hermits and their habitations, copiously illustrated with grainy black and white photographs (many the author’s own), and a handful of colour plates. I would have liked more on Thomas Wright, who straddled the worlds of astronomy, mathematics and garden design, and who might have better illuminated the shift from emblematic architectural fantasies in the style of William Kent to the blander, Edenic landscapes favoured by Lancelot “Capability” Brown, swept clean of such follies, which nonetheless crept back with the Picturesque landscapers and designers such as Humphry Repton. How garden fashions ebbed and flowed throughout the Georgian age is left to the reader to piece together.

more from Jennifer Potter at the TLS here.

There is a valuable, vital debate to be had over how much the federal government, in its intelligence programs, ought to be permitted to violate Americans’ privacy in an effort to protect Americans from a dangerous world that includes people who want to kill Americans. There are many different places where the important red lines can be drawn in this debate. It is a debate strewn with well-intentioned, conscientious people who would draw those lines at very different places. Let’s even be generous and stipulate that the question of whether the statutorily provided oversight of these programs is sufficient belongs, as well, to that debate. The terrifying thing is that we are not having that debate. As these documents are the latest things to demonstrate, the various overseers as well as the public do not have access to the information that even the current rules assert they should have. That is how I can state with certainty that we are not having that vital debate: We do not have the means to have that debate with any kind of authority; therefore, no matter how much we discuss these issues, we are not having that debate.

more from Marc Tracy at the New Republic here.

Today marks the 16th death anniversary of Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan.

From Dawn:

Khan brought to the world audience Qawwali, a form of music performed at the shrines of the Sufis of South Asia for centuries. Qawwali has a system of progression of its own when it is performed with an intricate link to rituals which help transform the experience of listeners.

The San Francisco label Six Degrees, that released the Qawwali legend’s dub-laced collaboration with London producer-composer Gaudi in 2007, says of the legend,

Dubbed by many as the “Elvis of the East” and the “Bob Marley of Pakistan” these titles are not without foundation. Some have claimed he has sold more albums than Elvis, and he has reached as many hearts and souls and crossed as many cultural and spiritual boarders as Bob Marley with his unique mix of poetic eastern spiritual and western musical themes.

Khan was one of the rare performers of an ancient musical tradition refined with delicate elements of generations of Qawwals through centuries. Taking the universality of its devotional appeal, he fused it into a style that was flexible enough to be adopted by an international audience.

He teamed with Peter Gabriel on the soundtrack to ‘The Last Temptation of Christ’ in 1985, and with Canadian musician Michael Brook on the albums 'Mustt Mustt' (1990) and 'Night Song' (1996) and with Pearl Jam lead singer, Eddie Vedder in 1995 on two songs for the soundtrack to Dead Man Walking.

Peter Gabriel said at the time of Nusrat’s passing:

I have never heard so much spirit in a voice. Nusrat was a supreme example of how far and deep a voice can go in finding, touching and moving the soul.

Khan also contributed to the soundtrack of 'Natural Born Killers'.

More here.

Laura Agustín in Jacobin:

I explained my skepticism about prostitution law at length in an academic article, Sex and the Limits of Enlightenment: The Irrationality of Legal Regimes to Control Prostitution. All prostitution laws are conceived as methods to control women who, before ideas of victimhood took hold, were understood to be powerful, dangerous figures associated with rebellion, revolt, carnival, the world upside down, spiritual power and calculated wrongdoing. Conversations about prostitution law, no matter where they take place, argue about how to manage the women: Is it better to permit them to work out of doors or limit them to closed spaces? How many lap-dancing venues should get licenses and where should they be located? In brothels, how often should women be examined for sexually transmitted infections? The rhetoric of helping and saving that surrounds laws accedes with state efforts to control and punish; the first stop for women picked up in raids on brothels or rescues of trafficking victims is a police station. Prostitution law generalizes from worst-case scenarios, which leads directly to police abuse against the majority of cases, which are not so dire.

In theory, under prohibitionism prostitutes are arrested, fined, jailed. Under abolitionism, which permits the selling of sex, a farrago of laws, by-laws and regulations give police a myriad of pretexts for harrying sex workers. Regulationism, which wants to assuage social conflict by legalizing some sex-work forms, constructs non-regulated forms as illegal (and rarely grants labor rights to workers). But eccentricities abound everywhere, making a mockery of these theoretical laws. Even Japan’s wide-open, permissive sex industry prohibits “prostitution” defined as coital sex. And in recent years a hybrid law has arisen that makes paying for sex illegal while selling is permitted. Yes, it’s illogical. But the contradiction is not pointless; it is there because the goal of the law is to make prostitution disappear by debilitating the market through absurd ignorance of how sex businesses work.

Noam Chomsky at CNN:

The Israeli-Palestinian peace talks beginning in Jerusalem proceed within a framework of assumptions that merit careful thought.

One prevailing assumption is that there are two options: either a two-state settlement will be reached, or there will be a “shift to a nearly inevitable outcome of the one remaining reality — a state'from the sea to the river',” an outcome posing “an immediate existential threat of the erasure of the identity of Israel as a Jewish and democratic state” because of what is termed “the demographic problem,” a future Palestinian majority in the single state.

This particular formulation is by former Israeli Shin Bet (Israel Security Agency) chief Yuval Diskin, but the basic assumptions are near universal in political commentary and scholarship. They are, however, crucially incomplete. There is a third option, the most realistic one: Israel will carry forward its current policies with full U.S. economic, military, and diplomatic support, sprinkled with some mild phrases of disapproval.

The policies are quite clear. Their roots go back to the 1967 war and they have been pursued with particular dedication since the Oslo Accords of September 1993.

The Accords determined that Gaza and the West Bank are an indivisible territorial entity. Israel and the U.S. moved at once to separate them, which means that any autonomy Palestinians might gain in the West Bank will have no direct access to the outside world.

More here.

Sextus Propertius

Sorry it’s taken me so long to answer, the summer passed so quickly.
Are there seasons where you are? Do you walk on sparkling and sharp
rocks? I think of you often. Tragic gestures, sunglasses,
careful deliberate steps . . . You know how it is. How all went wrong,
how stupid, how perhaps the wrong person finally went and died. All
bottoms fall out. All bottoms fall out. “Terrible!” we shouted,
“terrible, fantastic!” Right now when I’m writing it’s October with
snow in the air; saddle, bridle, disinfect wounds, state your ID number
and address, carry out necessary repair work on the south side.
Change to winter tyres. Whatever love is – no one found protection
against it. Are you together now? The clouds float slowly over the
fields, the wind is mild. I’d love to know how it ends. Is your
heart transparent like crystal? When we meet I’ll
ask about those hyacinths.

by Tua Forsström
from Etter att ha tillbringat en natt bland hästar
publisher: Söderström Förlags, Helsinki, 1998
translation: 2009, Stina Katchadourian

Sarah Waheed in HimalSouthAsian:

‘Bu’ is about the sexual exploits of a young college educated man named Randhir. It opens in Randhir’s apartment during the rainy season, explaining how he found himself with a Ghatan girl lying in bed with him, “clinging to his body”. The word “Ghatan” leaps off the page. It refers to a tribal or low-caste group of migratory laborers in Maharashtra, associated with the Western Ghats of India. Incidentally, in colonial legislation over familial litigation about intermarriage, conversion and adoption in Bombay, the term ‘Ghatan’ was also used to refer to lower-caste Hindu converts to Christianity. In ‘Bu’, the reader is told that Randhir had seen the Ghatan before, as she worked at a nearby hemp factory. Randhir is lonely, because “the war was on, and most of the Christian girls of Bombay who were easily available in the past had joined the auxiliary force, many opening dancing schools near the Cantonment where only white soldiers were allowed”. Feeling jilted by a former Christian lover who lives in his building, Randhir spots the Ghatan woman from his balcony. She is dark-complexioned and “earthy”, standing beneath a tamarind tree in the rain, and Randhir calls her up to his flat. What follows is a narration of their sexual encounter. Randhir is drawn to the woman’s odour, one that is “both pleasurable but which simultaneously disgusts him”. The story ends with another description of Randhir’s flat during the rainy season, in a jagged doubling that is common in Manto’s narratives. This time, he is not clinging to the sleeping woman lying on his bed. This other nameless woman is fair and her whiteness is revolting for Randhir. She is his newly-wed wife, “the daughter of a first class magistrate”, but Randhir has no sexual desire for her, and the story ends with him yearning for the odour of the Ghatan woman.

Manto and the editors of Adab-e-Latif first faced the proscription of the short story through the Defense of India Rules, under a clause that sought to curb publication of material against the government. The first time the short story was noticed by the state was when it caught the attention of officials in the War Department in the spring of 1944. In a flurry of memos, ‘Bu’ was deemed objectionable because of its references to the Women’s Auxiliary Corps of the British Indian Army.

More here.

From PhysOrg:

The essence of male beauty is down to the way males use their genes rather than what genes they have, according to a new study into the sexual attractiveness of turkeys. Geneticists have long puzzled over why individuals of the same sex show a greater or lesser degree of sexual attractiveness. In other words – why are some people better looking than others when they're genetically similar?

In a new study, published today in the journal PLoS Genetics, scientists turned to male wild turkeys to solve the problem. They found that among turkeys that are brothers (and therefore share the majority of their genes), 'dominant' males show higher expression of genes predominantly found in males, and a lower expression of genes predominantly found in females, than their subordinate brothers. Therefore, dominant males were both masculinised and defeminised in terms of their gene express ion. A male's attractiveness is a function of how they express their genes, rather than the genes themselves.

More here.

First from last month, Alex B. Berezow in the LA Times:

Psychology isn't science.

Why can we definitively say that? Because psychology often does not meet the five basic requirements for a field to be considered scientifically rigorous: clearly defined terminology, quantifiability, highly controlled experimental conditions, reproducibility and, finally, predictability and testability.

Happiness research is a great example of why psychology isn't science. How exactly should “happiness” be defined? The meaning of that word differs from person to person and especially between cultures. What makes Americans happy doesn't necessarily make Chinese people happy. How does one measure happiness? Psychologists can't use a ruler or a microscope, so they invent an arbitrary scale. Today, personally, I'm feeling about a 3.7 out of 5. How about you?

The failure to meet the first two requirements of scientific rigor (clear terminology and quantifiability) makes it almost impossible for happiness research to meet the other three.

Next, Ashutosh Jogalekar responds in the Scientific American blog The Curious Wavefunction:

At the heart of Berezow’s argument is psychology’s lack of quantifiability and dearth of accurate terminology. He points out research in fields like happiness where definitions are neither rigid nor objective and data is not quantifiable.

Happiness research is a great example of why psychology isn’t science. How exactly should “happiness” be defined? The meaning of that word differs from person to person and especially between cultures. What makes Americans happy doesn’t necessarily make Chinese people happy. How does one measure happiness? Psychologists can’t use a ruler or a microscope, so they invent an arbitrary scale. Today, personally, I’m feeling about a 3.7 out of 5. How about you?

This is absolutely true. But you know what other fields suffer from a lack of accurate definitions? My own fields, chemistry and drug discovery. For instance there has been a longstanding debate in our field about how you define a “druglike” molecule, that is, a chemical compound most likely to function as a drug. The number of definitions of “druglike” that have sprung up over the years are sufficient to fill a phonebook. The debate will probably continue for a long time. And yet nobody will deny that work on druglike compounds is a science; the fact is that chemists use guidelines for making druglike molecules all the time and they work. In fact why talk about druglike compounds when all of chemistry is sometimes regarded as insufficiently scientific and rigorous by physicists? There are several concepts in chemistry – aromaticity, hydrophobic effects, polarizability, chemical diversity – which succumb to multiple definitions and are not strictly quantifiable. Yet nobody (except perhaps certain physicists) denies that chemistry is a science.

Noam Chomsky in AlterNet:

According to received doctrine, we live in capitalist democracies, which are the best possible system, despite some flaws. There's been an interesting debate over the years about the relation between capitalism and democracy, for example, are they even compatible? I won't be pursuing this because I'd like to discuss a different system – what we could call the “really existing capitalist democracy”, RECD for short, pronounced “wrecked” by accident. To begin with, how does RECD compare with democracy? Well that depends on what we mean by “democracy”. There are several versions of this. One, there is a kind of received version. It's soaring rhetoric of the Obama variety, patriotic speeches, what children are taught in school, and so on. In the U.S. version, it's government “of, by and for the people”. And it's quite easy to compare that with RECD.

In the United States, one of the main topics of academic political science is the study of attitudes and policy and their correlation. The study of attitudes is reasonably easy in the United States: heavily-polled society, pretty serious and accurate polls, and policy you can see, and you can compare them. And the results are interesting. In the work that's essentially the gold standard in the field, it's concluded that for roughly 70% of the population – the lower 70% on the wealth/income scale – they have no influence on policy whatsoever. They're effectively disenfranchised. As you move up the wealth/income ladder, you get a little bit more influence on policy. When you get to the top, which is maybe a tenth of one percent, people essentially get what they want, i.e. they determine the policy. So the proper term for that is not democracy; it's plutocracy.

More here.

Liam Heneghan in Aeon:

When people ask me what experiences made me want to be an environmental scientist, I usually think first of adventures with pets, shell-collecting along Dublin’s strands, maintaining the aquarium with my father, and much later, the college summers I spent collecting insects in Ireland’s national parks. But it seems clear to me now that time spent indoors, reading and being read to, had an equally powerful affect on me. Reading introduced me to nature — the sort of ordinary but wholly involving nature I encountered right outside my door.

I’ve been thinking about the environmentally salutary implications of children’s books a lot lately, and not only for their value in minting the next generation of naturalists. Richard Louv’s Last Child in the Woods (2005) has launched a movement encouraging this more sedentary generation of children to get out of doors, but I wonder if there might also be an environmental benefit to be gained by fortifying those intimate indoor moments when parents read to their children. Are there special books that parents should choose for the Great Indoors? Are there special ways to read them?

Having now spent some time examining the content of contemporary children’s bookshelves — visiting the local library, compiling and analysing lists of children’s classics, chatting with friends and neighbours who have small children — I have come to the conclusion that reading about nature might be simply unavoidable, since it is hard to find kids’ books that are not about our furred and feathered friends, or their prehistoric ancestors.

More here.

Jerome Taylor in The Independent:

Over the past 10 years the holiest site in Islam has undergone a huge transformation, one that has divided opinion among Muslims all over the world.

Once a dusty desert town struggling to cope with the ever-increasing number of pilgrims arriving for the annual Hajj, the city now soars above its surroundings with a glittering array of skyscrapers, shopping malls and luxury hotels.

To the al-Saud monarchy, Mecca is their vision of the future – a steel and concrete metropolis built on the proceeds of enormous oil wealth that showcases their national pride.

Yet growing numbers of citizens, particularly those living in the two holy cities of Mecca and Medina, have looked on aghast as the nation's archaeological heritage is trampled under a construction mania backed by hardline clerics who preach against the preservation of their own heritage. Mecca, once a place where the Prophet Mohamed insisted all Muslims would be equal, has become a playground for the rich, critics say, where naked capitalism has usurped spirituality as the city's raison d'être.

Few are willing to discuss their fears openly because of the risks associated with criticising official policy in the authoritarian kingdom.

More here.

Tim Martin in The Telegraph:

From Smithsonian:

Not many people want to live to be 120. That’s one of the findings of a Pew Research Center report that came out last week. In fact, almost 70 percent of those surveyed said an ideal lifespan would be somewhere between 79 and 100 years.

…Which brings me to one more question: How realistic is the notion that science can one day make 100 the new 60? For starters, we’re not only living longer–life expectancy in the U.S. is now close to 79–but the period of truly dismal health before death is getting shorter. That’s one of the main findings of a Harvard University study published last month–that most people no longer are very sick for six or seven years before they die. Instead, that stretch of poor health has shrunken to about a year or so. Thanks to medical science, we are becoming more like light bulbs–we work well, then go out fast. “People are living to older ages,” said lead researcher David Cutler, “and we are adding healthy years, not debilitated ones.”

…Here’s other recent research on the battle against aging:

• Now find out something good about marshmallows: Hot cocoa doesn’t just hit the spot on a winter morning; It also may be keeping your brain sharp. A new study from Harvard University says that two cups of cocoa a day was enough to increase the blood flow in the brains of older people. It also apparently helped their memories work faster.
• Didn’t see that coming: Living through a traumatic experience may actually help men live longer. Research just published in PLOS One says that male survivors of the Holocaust tend to live longer than men who didn’t experience it. That may seem counter-intuitive, but the researchers say it could reflect a phenomenon known as “post-traumatic growth,” where high levels of psychological stress serve as stimuli for developing personal skills and strength and a deeper meaning to life. The same longevity effect was not seen in women Holocaust survivors.
• In with the bad air: A study by M.I.T. professor Michael Greenstone has quantified the impact of the heavy air pollution from coal-burning power plants in China. By comparing statistics from a more urbanized region where power was supplied mainly by coal plants with a more rural one without any power plants, Greenstone concluded that regular exposure to coal pollution can take more than five years off a person’s life.
• Now will you get your beauty sleep?: If you don’t get enough sleep, you aren’t doing your skin any favors. That’s the conclusion of a study that found that the skin of poor sleepers ages quickly and also takes longer to recover from sunburn and dirty air.
• This explains many things: And finally, researchers in Japan found that aging animals like sweets less and are more willing to put up with bitter tastes.

More here.

Partition

by W. H. Auden

Unbiased at least he was when he arrived on his mission,
Having never set eyes on the land he was called to partition
Between two peoples fanatically at odds,
With their different diets and incompatible gods.
“Time,” they had briefed him in London, “is short. It's too late
For mutual reconciliation or rational debate:
The only solution now lies in separation.
The Viceroy thinks, as you will see from his letter,
That the less you are seen in his company the better,
So we've arranged to provide you with other accommodation.
We can give you four judges, two Moslem and two Hindu,
To consult with, but the final decision must rest with you.”

Shut up in a lonely mansion, with police night and day
Patrolling the gardens to keep the assassins away,
He got down to work, to the task of settling the fate
Of millions. The maps at his disposal were out of date
And the Census Returns almost certainly incorrect,
But there was no time to check them, no time to inspect
Contested areas. The weather was frightfully hot,
And a bout of dysentery kept him constantly on the trot,
But in seven weeks it was done, the frontiers decided,
A continent for better or worse divided.

The next day he sailed for England, where he could quickly forget
The case, as a good lawyer must. Return he would not,
Afraid, as he told his Club, that he might get shot.

Sean Carroll in Preposterous Universe:

The working definition of “scientism” is “the belief that science is the right approach to use in situations where science actually isn’t the right approach at all.” Nobody actually quotes this definition, but it accurately matches how the word is used. The problem should be obvious — the areas in which science is the right approach are not universally agreed upon. So instead of having an interesting substantive discussion about a real question (“For what kinds of problems is a scientific approach the best one?”) we instead have a dopey and boring definitional one (“What does the word `scientism’ mean?”).

I don’t know of anyone in the world who thinks that science is the right tool to use forevery problem. Pinker joins Alex Rosenberg, who has tried to rehabilitate the word “scientism,” claiming it as a badge of honor, and using it to mean a view that “the methods of science are the only reliable ways to secure knowledge of anything.” But even Alex firmly rejects the idea that science can be used to discover objective moral truths — and others think it can, a view which is sometimes labeled as “scientism.” You can see the confusion.

Someone might respond, “but `scientism’ is a useful shorthand for a set of views that many people seem to hold.” No, it’s not. Here are some possible views that might be described as “scientism”:

• Science is the source of all interesting, reliable facts about the world.
• Philosophy and morality and aesthetics should be subsumed under the rubric of science.
• Science can provide an objective grounding for judgments previously thought to be subjective.
• Humanities and the arts would be improved by taking a more scientific approach.
• The progress of science is an unalloyed good for the world.
• All forms of rational thinking are essentially science.
• Eventually we will understand all the important questions of human life on a scientific basis.
• Reductionism is the best basis for complete understanding of complicated systems.
• There is no supernatural realm, only the natural world that science can investigate.

The problem is that, when you use the word “scientism,” you (presumably) know exactly what you are talking about. You mean to include some of the above supposed sins, but not necessarily all of them. But if you aren’t completely explicit about what you mean every time you use the term, people will misunderstand you.

Indeed, you might even misunderstand yourself.