Month: September 2021

The Enduring Power of Muhammad Ali

Posted on by Morgan Meis

Eric Wills at The American Scholar:

There’s power in watching Ali exact his revenge against Ernie Terrell, who had refused to call him by his Muslim name prior to their fight, punishing Terrell in the ring as he repeatedly taunts him: “What’s my name?” As the essayist Gerald Early says, “It was a sign that a new kind of Black athlete had appeared, a whole new kind of Black consciousness had appeared—it was a whole new kind of Black male dispensation that had come about as a result of that fight. That fight to me and I think for many other young Black people such as myself at the time was a turning point.”

And there’s power in remembering that Ali sacrificed the prime years of his career and untold millions in earnings when he refused to be inducted into the army after he was drafted during the Vietnam War, saying, “I don’t have no personal quarrel with those Viet Congs.”

more here.

The bigotry of being beautiful

Posted on by Azra Raza

James Innes Smith in The Spectator:

It’s National Inclusion Week when we all come together to ‘celebrate everyday inclusion in all its forms’. This year’s theme is ‘unity’ where ‘thousands of inclusioneers worldwide’ are being encouraged to ‘take action to be #UnitedForInclusion.’ In the bewildering world of identity politics, however, there is one group of excluded individuals you won’t be hearing much about. As a demographic, they suffer from all kinds of discrimination and yet social justice activists seem uninterested in their plight. Unlike oppressed minorities, this particular group may be in the majority and yet they garner little in the way of sympathy from anyone, barring their mums, perhaps.

As with race, gender and disability, physical attractiveness is an immutable characteristic born out of biological happenstance; unless we decide to go under the knife there is very little we can do about a wonky nose, droopy shoulders or a weak chin. A study has found that employers tend to assume that attractive people make better workers. The so-called Halo Effect implies that we subconsciously assume a person’s appearance is an accurate reflection of their overall character; we say they have ‘kind eyes’ or a ‘charming smile’ as though looks were a window into the soul. Is it any wonder then that those blessed with ‘good looks’ – even the term sounds supremacist – are viewed in a more favourable light?

According to evolutionary biologists, attractiveness may be linked to healthy genes, which is why we are so drawn to it. Anyone who has signed up to a dating site will know how brutally shallow the whole business of pairing off can be – looks are the first thing we notice and the main reason we flick either left or right. Imagine if we were as openly hostile towards people because of their skin colour.

Nor is beauty really in the eye of the beholder; our view of attractiveness tends to be exceedingly narrow, ensuring that only a few gain from the privilege. Linda Evangelista has learnt to her cost what happens when that privilege is taken away. The ex supermodel has spent the last five years living as a recluse after a cosmetic procedure left her face permanently disfigured and unrecognisable. No longer able to work and afraid to leave her house Evangelista claims the experience sent her ‘into a cycle of deep depression, profound sadness and the lowest depths of self-loathing.’ The model intends to sue the company responsible so that she can move ‘forward to rid myself of my shame.’ Losing her most prized asset has come at a heavy price.

More here.

Why These Children Fell into Endless Sleep

Posted on by Azra Raza

Suzanne O’Sullivan in Nautilus:

People who have psychologically mediated physical symptoms always fear being accused of feigning illness. I knew that one of the reasons Dr. Olssen was desperate for me to provide a brain-related explanation for the children’s condition was to help them escape such an accusation. She also knew that a brain disorder had a better chance of being respected than a psychological disorder. To refer to resignation syndrome as stress induced would lessen the seriousness of the children’s condition in people’s minds. It is the way of the world that the length of time a person spends as sick, immobile, and unresponsive is less impressive if it doesn’t come with a corresponding change on a brain scan.

Not all the medical interest in this disorder has focused on blood tests and brain scans. More psychologically minded explanations have compared resignation syndrome to pervasive refusal syndrome (also called pervasive arousal withdrawal syndrome—PAWS), a psychiatric disorder of children and teens in which they resolutely refuse to eat, talk, walk, or engage with their surroundings. The cause is unknown, but PAWS has been linked to stress and trauma. The withdrawal in PAWS is an active one, as the word “refusal” suggests; it is not apathetic. Still, as a condition associated with hopelessness, it does seem to have more in common with resignation syndrome than other suggestions.

The resignation-syndrome children became ill while living in Sweden, but most had experienced trauma in their country of birth. It seems likely, then, that this past trauma would play a significant role in the illness. Perhaps it is a form of post-traumatic stress disorder? Or could the ordeals suffered by the parents have affected their ability to parent, which in turn impacted on the emotional development of the child? One psychodynamically minded theory is that the traumatized mothers are projecting their fatalistic anguish onto their children, in what one doctor described as an act of “lethal mothering.”

There is clearly much of value in investigating the biological and psychological explanations for resignation syndrome, but even when taken together they fall short. Psychological explanations focus too much on the stressor and on the mental state of the individual affected, without adequately paying attention to the bigger picture. They also come with the inevitable need to apportion blame, passing judgement on the child and the child’s family. They risk diminishing the family’s plight in the eyes of others. Psychological distress simply doesn’t elicit the same urgent need for help that physical suffering does.

More here.

Tuesday Poem

Posted on by Jim Culleny

Young Bull

The bronze ring punctures
the flesh of your nose,
the wound is fresh
and you nuzzle the itch
against a fence post.
Your testicles are fat and heavy
and sway when you shake off flies;
the chickens scratch about your feet
but you do not notice them.

Through lunch I pitied
you from the kitchen window—
the heat, pained fluid of August—
but when I came with cold water
and feed, you bellowed and heaved
against the slats wanting to murder me.

by Jim Harrison
from Selected and New Poems
Delacorte Press, 1971

Of Small Nations: An Interlude

Posted on by David J. Lobina

by David J. Lobina

Last time around I said I would bring this series on language and nationalism to an end by considering an actual example: the case of Catalan nationalism, a discussion likely to be testy. I still intend to do that, and to be a bit argumentative about it to boot; however, it has occurred to me in these last four weeks that the follow-up between the first three posts and the case study of Catalan nationalism is not as smooth as it should be. This is because of an issue I brought up in the last post, where I rather briefly mentioned that the Catalan case exemplified what is sometimes called a peripheral nationalist movement, in contrast to core nationalist movements. To this I should have added that in the case of peripheral nationalisms the historical process that turns a state or a country into a nation-state is slightly different to what is the case for core nationalisms – additional factors are involved – and this point deserves to be spelled out a little bit. I shall do just that this week, and I will come back to the Catalans, finally, in the next post.

As explained in the previous three posts, it is certainly noteworthy, though not at all surprising, that the word nation seems to have been initially used in history as a place name and only much later did the politically-laden term of nationalism actually appear. The feeling of belonging to a particular place, after all, has plausibly been a feature of human gatherings for centuries and it is not intrinsically tied to the concepts of “nation” or “nationalism” per se.

In medieval Europe at least, the village where a person was born was typically that person’s “country”, as the historian Henry Kamen has chronicled, and this sentiment was still present in many parts of the world well into the 20th century. For instance, the Belorussian-speaking people of Polesia, a historical region stretching from modern Poland to Russia, simply replied ‘from here’ when asked about their nationality in a 1919 census, and even as recently as the 1950s, we have the curious case of captured Egyptian soldiers during the second Arab-Israeli war who seemed to know very little about their own country, instead identifying more strongly with their local villages.[i] Read more »

The Monty Hall Problem and a Covid-19 Precaution

Posted on by John Allen Paulos

by John Allen Paulos

The well-known counterintuitive Monty Hall problem continues to baffle people if the emails I receive are any indication. A meta-problem is to understand why so many people are unconvinced by the various solutions. Sometimes people even cite the large number of the unconvinced as proof that the solution is a matter of real controversy, just as in politics an inconvenient fact, such as the ubiquity of Covid-19, is obscured by fake controversies.

This analogy is a bit deeper than it may seem. So, first the original problem, which arose because of a television show, “Let’s Make a Deal,” that was popular in the ’60s and ’70s and has been resurrected in one form or another since then. In the show a contestant is presented with three doors, behind one of which, he or she is told, is a new car. The other two doors have nothing behind them.

“The Let’s Make a Deal” host, the eponymous Monty Hall, asks the contestant to pick one of the three doors. Once the contestant has done so, Monty opens one of the two remaining unpicked doors to reveal what, if anything, is behind it, but is careful never to open the door hiding the promised new car. After Monty has opened one of the two unpicked doors, he offers the contestant the chance to switch his or her choice. The question is: Should the contestant stay with the original choice of door and hope the car is behind it or switch to the remaining unopened door? Read more »

Justification and the Value-Free Ideal in Science

Posted on by Fabio Tollon

by Fabio Tollon

One of the cornerstones good of science is that its results furnish us with an objective understanding of the world. That is, science, when done correctly, tells us how the world is, independently of how we might feel the world to be (based, for example, on our values or commitments). It is thus central to science, and its claims to objectivity, that values do not override facts. An important feature of this view of science is the distinction between epistemic and non-epistemic values. Simply, epistemic values are those which would seem to make for good science: external coherence, explanatory power, parsimony, etc. Non-epistemic values, on the other hand, concern things like our value judgements, biases, and preferences. In order for science to work well, so the story goes, it should only be epistemic values that come to matter when we assess the legitimacy of a given scientific theory (this is often termed the “value-free ideal”). Thus, a central presupposition underpinning this value-free ideal is that we can in fact mark a distinction between epistemic and non-epistemic values Unfortunately, as with most things in philosophy, things are not that simple.

The first thing to note are the various ways that the value-free ideal plays out in the context of discovery, justification, and application. With respect to the context of discovery, it doesn’t seem to matter if we find that non-epistemic values are operative. While decisions about funding lines, the significance we attach to various theories, and the choice of questions we might want to investigate are all important insofar as they influence where we might choose to look for evidence, they do not determine whether the theories we come up with are valid or not.

Similarly, in the context of application, we could invoke the age-old is-ought distinction: scientific theories cannot justify value-laden beliefs. For example, even if research shows that taller people are more intelligent, it would not follow that taller people are more valuable than shorter people. Such a claim would depend on the value that one ascribes to intelligence beforehand. Therefore, how we go about applying scientific theories is influenced by non-epistemic values, and this is not necessarily problematic.

Thus, in both the context of validation and the context of discovery, we find non-epistemic values to be operative. This, however, is not seen as much of a problem, so long as these values do not “leak” into the context of justification, as it is here that science’s claims to objectivity are preserved. Is this really possible in practice though? Read more »

Monday Poem

Posted on by Jim Culleny

Looking Up

the horizon circle,
past which I can see no further
in any direction other than up,
hems me in,
but looking up I can see forever
or as far as lightspeed allows
or until more time passes
or, more truly,
until now shifts again,
but by then I will have passed,
whatever that means,
since to pass is merely a term
proffering a hint of understanding
without understanding,
but there’s so much hint in being alive
the truth of our metaphysical deficiencies
has become second nature, acceptable,
we’ve become creatures of sacred
misunderstandings,
we live by them
never silent
looking up

Jim Culleny
9/21/21

Re-Wild Thing

Posted on by Deanna Kreisel

by Deanna K. Kreisel (Doctor Waffle Blog)

It had been a long time since I thought about lawns. I don’t mean in a grand philosophical sense, or the stoned contemplation of a single blade of grass. I mean thought about them at all. Before moving to Mississippi we had lived in Vancouver for 13 years, where we felt lucky to have a place to store our toothbrushes and maybe an extra pair of slacks; we really hit the jackpot when we acquired a postage-stamp-sized balcony on which we could murder tomato plants. Actual yards were out of the question for anyone who hadn’t bought a house on the west end of town 30 years ago; by the time we moved to Vancouver in 2006 as a tenure-track assistant professor and a trailing-spouse adjunct, it was already clear that we would never own a lawn.

And yet here we are: the proud owners of nearly an acre of chemical-soaked herbage dotted here and there with scrubby flowering bushes native to an ecosystem half a planet away. Or at least that’s what came along with our new house in Mississippi, which was the main attraction: a 1962 bungalow with two fireplaces, built-in bookcases, arched doorways, and mellow hardwood floors. To be honest, I didn’t want the lawn—or the yard at all, really. If it had been possible to purchase a mid-century gem with a porch swing and seven ceiling fans that was floating on a gossamer cloud in mid-air—basically a house from The Jetsons—I would have done so.[1] I took one look at that expanse of greenery, factored in the whole located-in-the-Deep-South element, and saw nothing but a never-ending round of backbreaking chores. And boy, was I right. But not for the reasons you might think. Read more »

Ode To An Old Lump Of Coal

Posted on by Mike O'Brien

by Mike O’Brien

Some readers, having a particular taste in humour, will guess the subject of this piece from the title. “Just an old lump of coal” was a favoured expression of self-reference for the recently deceased comedian Norm Macdonald, who died on September 14th. It was typical of the archaic and self-deprecatory style that marked his career, a poetic and perfomatively (though not necessarily substantively) confessional body of work that seemed sparse in volume but rich in depth. I say that his confession was not necessarily substantive because I didn’t know him, and am not privy to the facts of his life and the contents of his heart. He may have been affecting an unaffected style for dramatic effect. Or he may have been baring his soul earnestly, while allowing his audience to laud him, mistakenly, for so artfully feigning candour. I don’t know which is the case. Nor, it seems, do many who did know him, if not intimately than at least closely and with ample time for exposure. A formidable trick, that, to keep secrets in a business where self-exposure is considered the primary means of production.

Much has been made of the fact that he had cancer for the last nine years, a fact he kept private for fear of polluting his audience’s reactions with sympathy, or worse, pity. Or maybe he just didn’t want to be bothered by well-wishers and news hounds. Or, more maybe still, he just didn’t think anyone needed or was owed any information about his life beyond what he chose to share or fabricate. Read more »

Then and Now: Reading Siri Hustvedt’s Memories of the Future with My Mother

Posted on by Nicola Sayers

by Nicola Sayers 

What is it to be twenty? Forty? Sixty? Eighty? These points that mark the four quarters of a life — fifths if you’re lucky, larger portions if you’re not. 

*

We read the book together, my mother and I. The book, a work of autofiction, is Siri Hustvedt’s Memories of the Future, and it tells the story of a twenty-three year old (S.H.) arriving in New York in 1978, and of the same woman in 2016, aged sixty-one, as she discovers her old journals from that earlier time. As we read, I am forty and my mother over seventy, although how much over I cannot say. I have learnt that there are those who treat you differently when they know your age, regardless of your health or vitality. That age is a signifier that in the end betrays you. 

*

‘Then’ and ‘now’. Hustvedt draws attention to these words, these perspectives, again and again as she sets her reader up. Her central concern is with how a person changes between then and now; her central question, what remains of that girl? 

*

The young S.H. could be any young, reflective woman setting out to soak up what the world has to offer. I admit to feeling a particular affinity with Hustvedt: Scandinavian roots, Jewish husband, PhD in literature before focussing on her own writing. But her story is in truth an archetypal one. She could be Felicity from the eponymous 90s TV-drama, going to New York in search of her crush Ben and of herself; or Jo from Little Women, heading off with pen and persistence to discover, write and right the world. 

And so, I arrive in the city I have seen in films and have read about in books, which is New York City but also other cities, Paris and London and St. Petersburg, the city of the hero’s fortunes and misfortunes, a real city that is also an imaginary city.

I am reminded by Hustvedt’s prose of Joan Didion’s famous essay ‘Goodbye to all That’ about her experiences as a young person in New York, and about leaving it all behind. For both Hustvedt and Didion the defining experience of youth is of life as a field of possibility: Who will you meet? What will you do? Who will you love? What will you be? Read more »

43 Reasons To Go For A Walk

Posted on by Mary Hrovat

by Mary Hrovat

1. The public library is holding a book or DVD for me.

2. I’m going to see my older son and his family.

3. It’s dusk, and I love to walk in the twilight.

4. It’s late in the evening, a few days before Christmas 2019, and my younger son has just arrived from out of town. He’d like to drop off his rental car, and I decide to go with him to the rental lot so we can walk back to my house together. We stride through the chilly hush of a college town on Christmas break, past colorful lights and down dark familiar streets, talking and laughing.

5. The dew point is below 60°F, and it’s not too hot. I might as well make the most of this break from the heat and get out for a bit.

6. The university library is holding a book for me.

7. I want to see the ginkgo trees in the park in all their autumn glory.

8. It’s been raining heavily all day, and it’s still coming down pretty hard. But I’m out of lettuce, and these library books won’t return themselves. Also, I’m curious about whether the creek running through campus has overrun its banks. (It has.) Read more »

Go ahead and speak nonsense

Posted on by Charlie Huenemann

by Charlie Huenemann

Edward Lear, A Book of Nonsense

In discussion with Moritz Schlick and Friedrich Waisman in 1929, Ludwig Wittgenstein said he knew what Heidegger was getting at in his murky assertions about Dasein and Angst. The only problem, Wittgenstein thought, was that humans just cannot speak intelligibly about the highest or deepest things. Not even Heidegger.

“Think, for instance, of the astonishment that anything exists. This astonishment cannot be expressed in the form of a question, and there is also no answer to it. All that we can say can only, a priori, be nonsense. Nevertheless we run up against the boundaries of language. Kierkegaard also saw this running-up and similarly pointed it out (as running up against the paradox). This running up against the boundaries of language is Ethics. I hold it certainly to be very important that one makes an end to all the chatter about ethics – whether there can be knowledge in ethics, whether there are values, whether the Good can be defined, etc. In ethics one always makes the attempt to say something which cannot concern and never concerns the essence of the matter. It is a priori certain: whatever one may give as a definition of the Good – it is always only a misunderstanding to suppose that the expression corresponds to what one actually means (Moore). But the tendency to run up against shows something. The holy Augustine already knew this when he said: ‘What, you scoundrel, you would speak no nonsense? Go ahead and speak nonsense – it doesn’t matter.’”

In this discussion, Wittgenstein was still operating mostly in his Tractatus mode —  the one in which he imperiously scolds anyone who fails to assert a meaningful proposition according to the Seven Canonical Assertions carved into his monolithic Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. But we can sense in these remarks that a shift is taking place, as Wittgenstein is no doubt growing up and realizing that the main business of life is filled with nonsense. The meanings of our assertions, as he claimed later in the Philosophical Investigations, are inextricably tangled up with getting things done and living with others. A group of philosophers bound solely to the dictates of the Tractatus would be a sorry, feckless lot — like the logical positivists. Read more »

Revisiting the Old West: The Corral is not OK

Posted on by Mark Harvey

by Mark Harvey

Sergio Leone

It’s hard to know what the old west was really like as we’ve been so inundated with Hollywood films depicting the west as an eternal gunfight between good guys and bad guys, cowboys and Indians, and the unshaven versus the upstanding townsfolk. Westerns have had an outsized impact on our understanding of the times and just a few directors shaped our grasp of that history more than any books ever written. In fact, some of the most popular and influential western films were directed by an Italian named Sergio Leone who was born in Rome in 1929, about 6,000 miles from where the fight at the OK Corral took place. Leone directed A Fistful of Dollars (Per un pugno di dollari, in Italian), For a Few Dollars More, and The Good, the Bad and the Ugly. Leone’s films popularized “spaghetti westerns,” so named because so many were being produced in Italy where it was cheaper to make movies. By some sort of alignment of the stars, Leone happened to be a childhood classmate of the great composer Ennio Morricone, who wrote over 400 movie scores. Morricone wrote the scores for several of Leone’s films, including the Dollars trilogy, and his music with the haunting, menacing whistles and twangy guitar guided Clint Eastwood on his adventures of killing lots of bad guys with greasy faces and half-chewed cheroots. Read more »

Blithely Sailing On Alien Seas

Posted on by Thomas O'Dwyer

by Thomas O’Dwyer

Stanisław Lem. Photo: PAP/Jacek Bednarczyk

In the new Apple TV series, The Foundation, based on the novels of Isaac Asimov, two mathematicians, an old man and a young woman, wrestle with the concept of psychohistory and what it means for the future of the Imperial Galaxy. Psychohistory combines history, sociology, and mathematical models to predict the future behaviour of very large groups of people. The girl, Gaal Dornick, generates a holographic model designed by her mentor Hari Seldon. She sees a swarm of particles representing trillions of people forming patterns of growth and decay across thousands of millennia, predicting the looming collapse of civilisation. It seems the grand ideas of the classic science fiction writers are back among us after decades of wandering lost in the intellectual deserts of Hollywood, where the clash of alien cultures often became thin remakes of American cowboy and Injun battles of yore. The intelligent swarm of equations in Foundation immediately brought to mind the restless, mysterious, sentient ocean of the planet Solaris in the novel by the Polish author, Stanislaw Lem. The Polish parliament has officially declared 2021 to be Stanislaw Lem Year in honour of its native genius, 100 years after his birth. Read more »

Monday Photo: Hot Sauce Test Drive

Posted on by S. Abbas Raza (Monday Photos)

I’ve been buying and trying out some new hot sauces recently, in this case with my lunch of khichri (red lentils and rice cooked together) and a chicken seekh kabab. Here are my brief ratings of these fiery condiments (from the left) on a scale of 1 to 5 stars:

  • El Yucateco Habanero Black Reserve: ★★★, not much flavor, lot of heat.
  • La Meridana Mango Habanero: ★★★★, nice combo of sweet mango flavor and heat.
  • El Yucateco Chipotle: ★★★★★, tastes like a hot tamarind chutney, v. good.
  • Cholula Chipotle: ★★, too watery, not enough flavor or heat.
  • Clemente Jacques Chipotles Molidos: ★★★★, excellent and second only to freshly blended chipotle peppers in adobe sauce.