“When a Man is a Concept … He Will Tell You the Distance Between Heartbreak and Rage”

by Joseph Shieber

One frustrating aspect of the problem of police-enforced repression of Black people in the United States is how timeless it can seem.

Consider this real-life example:

An up-and-coming musician, only days away from releasing his breakthrough album, was finishing a two-week engagement at a famous club in Midtown Manhattan. He was on a break; he had just escorted a young white woman to her cab and was smoking a cigarette before returning to the club for his next set.

A white police officer was walking by, saw the musician, and told him to “move on”. The musician replied that he was playing at the club, and was only outside smoking a cigarette on his break.

The officer wasn’t happy with that response, saying “I don’t care where you work, I said move on! If you don’t move on I’m going to arrest you.” As the officer reached for his handcuffs, three police detectives joined in and began beating the musician bloody.

The story made national news, but the account in the local papers — one that contradicted the testimonies of literally scores of eyewitnesses as well as of photographs taken on the night of the incident — seemed to suggest that the musician himself had been violent, perhaps even grabbing for the policeman’s nightstick.

Care to guess the name of the musician, or when the incident occurred?

Before you hazard a guess, consider the fact that many municipalities still have statutes potentially making it a crime to walk on a public street outside of a designated crosswalk or even just to spend time in a public place without an apparent reason.

Walking on a public street — even on a street that lacks sidewalks! — constitutes “jaywalking”. But of course, not all instances of jaywalking are criminalized by the police. For example, just in the first three months of 2020 alone, 99% of the jaywalking tickets issued by the NYPD went to Blacks or Latinos/Latinas. Read more »

Work: the thief of time

by Emrys Westacott

The coronavirus pandemic has massively disrupted the working lives of millions of people. For those who have lost their jobs, income, or work-related benefits, this can mean serious hardship and anxiety. For others, it has meant getting used to new routines and methods of working. For all of us, though, it should prompt reflection on how we think about work in general–both as a curse and as a blessing. Here, I want to focus on how work relates to time.

In ‘The Superannuated Man,’ Charles Lamb writes,

that is the only true Time, which a man can properly call his own, that which he has all to himself; the rest, though in some sense he may be said to live it, is other people’s times, not his.

This is a basic and obvious reason that many people resent having to go to work. Work takes up time, and time, as many sages have observed, is supremely valuable, irreplaceable, priceless. It is precious because we each know that we are granted only a limited amount of it.

Time is, in the words of Ben Franklin, “the stuff life is made of.” So insofar as work consumes your time, it consumes your life. If your work is what you really want to do, this is not a problem. But if much of the time when you are working–whether you are selling your services to someone else for an agreed number of hours, or drudging away at home–you would really prefer to be doing something else, then your working hours represent an enormous sacrifice. You are using up your supply of a decidedly finite, non-renewable resource. Read more »

What Does Beauty Demand of Us?

by Dwight Furrow

Beauty has long been associated with moments in life that cannot easily be spoken of—what is often called “the ineffable”. When astonished or transfixed by nature, a work or art, or a bottle of wine, words even when finely voiced seem inadequate. Are words destined to fail? Can we not share anything of the experience of beauty? On the one hand, the experience of beauty is private; it is after all my experience not someone else’s. But, on the other hand, we seem to have a great need to share our experiences. Words fail but that doesn’t get us to shut up.

Perhaps communication about beauty is not hopeless; we do after all share some responses to beauty. Most everyone agrees the Mona Lisa is beautiful (if you can actually get close enough to enjoy the diminutive painting amidst the hordes at the Louvre). Most everyone agrees that Domaine de la Romanée-Conti makes lovely wine if you can afford a taste. Who would argue with the spectacular coastline view of Cinque Terre from Monterosso?

However, in matters of beauty, disagreements are just as common. As Alexander Nehamas argues, beauty forms communities of like-minded lovers who share an affection for certain works of art and who do find it possible to communicate their obsession. Something escapes the dark tunnels of subjectivity to survive in a clearing where others mingle. But this process excludes people who don’t get it. We are often bored to tears by something that fascinates others. Across that barrier of incomprehension words may well fail. Beauty forms communities of rivals as the scandal surrounding the first performance of Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring exemplifies. The contretemps between conventional and natural wine is the latest to divide the wine world. May it not be the last because these conflicts matter and are a symptom of the fundamentally normative response which beauty demands of us. Read more »

Monday, June 22, 2020

Are we obligated to be vaccinated?

by David Copp and Gerald Dworkin

In a survey released at the end of May by the AP and the NORC Center for public affairs research, 49% of Americans said they intended to be vaccinated against the new coronavirus, 31% said they were unsure, and 20% said they would not get the vaccine.

The Supreme Court (Jacobson vs. Massachusetts) has ruled that mandatory vaccination was a legitimate use of State police powers. Justice Harlan wrote “There are manifold restraints to which every person is necessarily subject for the common ground.”

Whether that legal ruling would stand up in the current political situation, and this particular Supreme Court is an open question.

Some more background. We know that vaccination rates for measles and chickenpox have declined in recent years. We know that there is a growing and vigorous anti-vaccination movement in the US.  We know that New York State allowed exemptions for religious or personal reasons and that at least partially as a result, New York had the largest measles outbreak in 25 years. As a result the legislature removed its exemptions, the removal was challenged and the State court dismissed the challenge.

However interesting the legal issues are, in this blog we  are interested in examining the moral or ethical considerations which bear on the issue of whether, if ever, and if so, under what conditions, people are morally required to accept vaccination, even if they object to it.  Read more »

In The Name Of My Father

by Eric J. Weiner

Now I saw his lifeless state. And that there was no longer any difference between what once had been my father and the table he was lying on, or the floor on which the table stood, or the wall socket beneath the window, or the cable running to the lamp beside him…And death, which I have always regarded as the greatest dimension of life, dark, compelling, was no more than a pipe that springs a leak, a branch that cracks in the wind, a jacket that slips off a clothes hanger and falls to the floor. ―Karl Ove Knausgård, Min kamp 1

After two days of celebrating my 40th birthday in Atlantic City, I barely could put two words together. I slumped over my sunny-side up eggs in the Continental diner across the parking lot from the Dunes motel. Battered from salty air and indifference, it was the perfect place to crash when you knew you wouldn’t be getting much sleep. The year was 2007 and the end of history was bleeding into tomorrow like a hemophiliac walking across a field of broken glass.

I poked my fork into one of the yolks and watched it slowly creep across my plate toward the enormous pile of canned corned beef hash. I gratefully sipped the hot, black coffee while choking down a slice of buttered rye toast. Paul, one of my oldest friends, sat across from me, stoned and chill, staring into the white and silver-speckled formica tabletop, looking for answers to questions only he knew. I rarely smoked weed, but his state of placid contentment was a good argument to start smoking more. The sound of eggs, green peppers, melted cheddar, and onions mashing and churning in his cottony mouth made me shiver with nausea and want to kill him with my butter knife. I ground the base of my hands into my eye-sockets trying in vain to quiet the hive of hornets that tore through my brain. My heart hammered against the back of my chest and even though the diner was ice-cold, I was sweating like a mule. My clothes still smelled of smoke, gin and Paco Rabanne cologne. My bloodstained eyes betrayed my desire for more of everything. Read more »

Monday Poem

Authoritarian

if hubris were astronomical
it would appear as a black hole
at the center of its galaxy
in tie and suit
which would not be seen,
but whose influence,
its dragging presence,
would be known
by the stars around it
that vanish into its maw
—would not be seen
because its mass’ draw
would snuff their heat and light,
would distend and bend them,
crush their radiance, their potential,
in the sphere of its gnawing vacancy
—would not be seen, but known
by its constant crushing,
the mastication of its
insatiable jaw
—but hubris is not astronomical,
is earthy, insistently visible,
and routinely crushed in turn
by natural law

Jim Culleny
6/21/20

Native Lives Matter

by Akim Reinhardt

U.S. Soldiers putting Lakota corpses in common grave
Burial of the dead after the massacre at Wounded Knee, Pine Ridge Reservation, SD. U.S. Soldiers putting Indians in mass grave (1/1891).

Two months ago, a college student in my Native American history class was perturbed. How it could be that during her K-12 education she never learned about the 1890 massacre of nearly 200 Native people at Wounded Knee? She was incensed and incredulous, and understandably so. It’s an important question, a frustrating question, and a depressing question. In other words, it’s the kind of question anyone who teaches Native American history is all too used to.

My students typically begin the semester with a vague sense of “we screwed over the Indians,” and are quickly stunned to discover the glaring depths of their own ignorance about the atrocities that Native peoples have endured: from enslavement, to massacres, to violent ethnic cleansings, to fraudulent U.S. government actions, to child theft and the forced sterilization of women, to a vast, far-reaching campaign of cultural genocide that continued unabated well into the 20th century.

I started slowly, explaining to her that one problem is the impossibility of covering everything in a high school history class. Even in a college survey, which moves much faster, you just can’t get to everything. There’s way too much. A high school curriculum has no chance.

But, I said, that begs the question, both for college and K-12: What gets in and what gets left out? Read more »

When Freud met the Antichrist in Orvieto

by Leanne Ogasawara

Built at the beginning of the 15th century on the place of sacristy of the Orvieto Cathedral.

1.

I had been in Orvieto about a week, when a young American woman came up to me in the painted chapel and said, “Excuse me, do you speak English?”

Not waiting for my answer she continued, “Do you have any idea what these paintings mean?”

Looking at her astonished face, I gestured toward the eastern wall and whispered, “Well, over there is the Antichrist.”

Her friend joined us. They turned toward the wall where I was pointing and squinted.

“But he looks like Jesus Christ,” she said.

Fresco 1500

I handed her friend my fancy bird-watching binoculars and said,“Yes, but look at his face. See how Satan is controlling his movements? Like a puppet master.”

“What is this place?” Her friend with my binoculars asked.

“It is the Last Judgement, painted by Luca Signorelli in 1500.”

“It looks like a war.” She said.

“It is a war,” I responded. Read more »

Perceptions

Patrisse Cullors. A Prayer For The Runner, June 2020.

“Patrisse Cullors, the performance artist and activist best known for co-founding Black Lives Matter in 2013, unveiled a new work on Saturday in collaboration with UCLA’s Fowler Museum. The performance piece, A Prayer for the Runner, honors the life of Ahmaud Arbery, a 25-year-old who was murdered in Georgia this year for the crime of jogging while black.

Conceived during our era of social distancing, A Prayer for the Runner debuted on a Zoom webinar as a two-channel video. On one side of a split screen, Cullors appeared in a candlelit room, barefoot, dressed in a gauzy emerald robe and silver metallic pants, the words “BLACK POWER” written across her black t-shirt. Writing in black marker on a knee-high stack of blank paper, she presented “LAPD BUDGET” to the viewer as a sacrificial offering, then fed it through a shredder suspended from the ceiling. One by one, as she shredded “JAILS,” “PRISONS,” and “POLICE,” the sheets momentarily held their shape in midair as they fell out of the machine, shattering to pieces as they landed on the growing mound of shreds below. In the background, a pair of outstretched wings hung on the wall.”

More here, here, and here.

134 Days

by Michael Liss

Had enough of the 2020 election? Take heart, there are just 134 days left until Vote-If-You-Can Tuesday. That’s less time than it took Napoleon to march his Grande Armée into Russia, win several lightning victories, stall out, and then retreat through the brutal winter, with astronomical casualties, all the while inspiring the equally long War and Peace and the 1812 Overture. 

Who will win? My renowned tea leaf collection seems a little wilted today, but it still says that absolutely nothing is out of the realm of possibility. We really could go anywhere from a 2016 redux to a Democratic sweep. Given the vintage nature of the two candidates, you can’t even rule out a variation on the West Wing Leo McGarry scenario. Expect the asymmetric.

Under any circumstances, the electoral math would have been fascinating. Conventional wisdom has always been focused on the six Obama 2012 states that Trump flipped in 2016 (Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Florida, Ohio, and Iowa). A key portion of the “Biden Electability” argument was based on his presumed appeal in those states. They would be the battleground because that’s where the winner would be determined. Read more »

Note to Steve

by R. Passov

During my third year as an undergrad — I took six+ years in all — I ran into an old friend (cocaine) and failed all of my classes. Failed by not taking my finals which proved a blessing. After recovering from the shock of having done something I had sworn many times I’d never do again, a kind counselor offered to change my F’s to incompletes. 

And, she suggested filing a ‘petition 631’ which would allow me to gain credits through negotiation with a willing professor. The hope was that with a little direct supervision, I’d finish college.

I was a (lapsed) physics major at the time, working in the laboratory of Dr. A. Theodore Forrester (formerly Finkelstein.) Alongside an ex-tank commander from the Israeli army, I labored on a containment device for a plasma from which an ion beam was to be focused toward hydrogen, inside a tokamak, so as to create enough pressure to induce fusion. Or something like that.

But I didn’t comprehend the physics and was even further away from understanding how to use the lathe with the tolerances prescribed by Dr. Forrester and so asking him to act as a personal guide seemed more than a long shot. Read more »

On the Road: Kathmandu to Lhasa in a Bad Mood

by Bill Murray

Banepa, Nepal

While everybody dreams of getting out of town, here’s the story of a mostly hapless road trip my wife and I took several years ago:

Ashray Raj Gautam waited in the dark before dawn. Men worked under the hood of his Toyota Corolla while we stuffed our things in its trunk. We pushed the car down the hill to get it started, and little Gautam took us to a town called Banepa, north of Kathmandu. Mirja bought junk food, I bought cheap Indian whiskey, and Gautam disappeared. When he came back he had a confession. He did a sheepish, dusty little shuffle.

“We came here with no fan belt.”

He was sure we could get one in Banepa but he couldn’t find one.

“Excuse me sir, we have to wait for new car from Kathmandu one hour.” He went to find a phone.

So we were off, sort of, driving from Kathmandu to Lhasa. Our Tibet travel permits would be waiting at the border. The fellow who booked us said don’t bring pictures of the Dalai Lama (I had five), and don’t be surprised if the police follow you – they’re not too used to private visitors. Read more »

Home From Home

by Rafaël Newman

Wem gehört dieses Home Office?

A friend of mine, a retired Swiss high school teacher and an aficionado of American culture, has been compiling a list of “Pseudo Anglicisms”, words of evident English origin used in contemporary colloquial German (especially in Switzerland) which often have no actual correspondence in English as commonly employed by native speakers. His list includes Beamer (meaning a digital film projector and not the German automotive brand), Oldtimer (a vintage car and not a human veteran), Body (an undergarment), Handy (a cell phone), Mobbing (on-the-job harassment) and Talkmaster (an emcee), among many others. The database is currently being enhanced by his colleagues, who have recently proposed anomalies like Shootingstar (up-and-coming talent) and Tumbler (a clothes dryer).

Such borrowing from English is, unsurprisingly, particularly prevalent in the German-speaking business world, where Top Managers attend Trainings to be enriched by Learnings, receive Feedbacks and lament Pain Points at Briefings, and – last but not least, a peroration favored among Swiss rhetoricians – determine their company’s Purpose by Brainstorming to prepare themselves for an upcoming Challenge. This last term – Challenge – is ubiquitous in Helvetian business, advertising, and sports, driven in part by a spate of wacky fundraising dares on social media in the past years, and encouraged perhaps by the fact that the perfectly good native German equivalent – Herausforderung – is a less than sexy mouthful. Read more »

From Progress Studies to Progress: Through decadence and beyond

by Bill Benzon

How do we get there from here? Evolution, revolution, or revolution through evolution? I don’t know, but as the smart kids are saying these days, I have my priors. As does everyone else.

A movement begins

Back in July 2019 Patrick Collison and Tyler Cowen called for a science of progress in an article in The Atlantic. The article generated a fair response, some in favor, some pushing back – Collison has collected some of the responses here – and people have begun conversing and gathering around the idea of progress studies. The purpose of this post is to take a quick look at what has been going on and a somewhat

more considered look at what needs to happen if an interest in progress studies is to yield discernible progress.

Let’s begin with a passage from Collison and Cowen, “We Need a New Science of Progress”:

By “progress,” we mean the combination of economic, technological, scientific, cultural, and organizational advancement that has transformed our lives and raised standards of living over the past couple of centuries. For a number of reasons, there is no broad-based intellectual movement focused on understanding the dynamics of progress, or targeting the deeper goal of speeding it up. We believe that it deserves a dedicated field of study. We suggest inaugurating the discipline of “Progress Studies.”

Before digging into what Progress Studies would entail, it’s worth noting that we still need a lot of progress. We haven’t yet cured all diseases; we don’t yet know how to solve climate change; we’re still a very long way from enabling most of the world’s population to live as comfortably as the wealthiest people do today; we don’t yet understand how best to predict or mitigate all kinds of natural disasters; we aren’t yet able to travel as cheaply and quickly as we’d like; we could be far better than we are at educating young people. The list of opportunities for improvement is still extremely long.

Mark their reach: cure all diseases, solve climate change, world’s population live comfortably, predict and mitigate natural disasters, travel cheaply, educate all young people well. The words are easy to comprehend, and those two paragraphs are relatively short. But they are talking about human life on earth, all of it, going forward. Can you get our mind around it, your hands? Really? It’s beyond my grasp.

They go on : “Progress Studies is closer to medicine than biology: The goal is to treat, not merely to understand.” Given their reach, if not their grasp, just what would treatment, the laying on of hands, entail? Read more »

Jon Hassell Tribute, Part 2: Jon’s Influence

by Dave Maier

Last time I posted a mix of Jon Hassell’s music, a little under his own name and a lot of collaborations. This time we’ll look at (my take on) Jon’s influence on others; but we’ll hear a bit more from Jon himself as well. 

Before we start, let me remind you (one reason) why we’re doing this: Jon is ill and needs your help. Here is the gofundme link; as you can see, there’s quite a ways to go: https://www.gofundme.com/f/jon-hassell-fund

Also, some good news: Jon has a new album for us! It’s available for pre-order now and will drop on July 24.

At that link, interestingly, we find stated flat out what I’ve taken for granted in making this second mix:

“The impact of Jon Hassell on today’s generation of electronic and ambient artists is immeasurable” – Paste Magazine

How exactly Jon has influenced his devotees naturally varies but we can identify a few main features of his music which people picked up on. First, perhaps most obviously, is his use of pitch shifters or “harmonizers,” especially Eventide’s high-end rack-mount effects unit of that name, which allows even a monophonic instrument such as a trumpet to play multiple parallel melodies simultaneously. Read more »

Monday, June 15, 2020

Against Contrarianism

by Tim Sommers

Philosophy’s original contrarian hero was, of course, Socrates. He believed in Truth and the Good and refused to back down from the pursuit of the these – even when his life was on the line. He had no patience for ‘just whatever people tend to say about such and such’. The unexamined life, for him, was not worth living. And that examination requires being ready to question even your most cherished beliefs.

Socrates also hated democracy and was against writing.

If you haven’t heard that second bit before, it’s not a euphemism. Socrates opposed reading and writing – the things that we are doing right now, you and I. Writing was the new big thing at the time. Their internet. Or to put it in more scholarly terms, Athens was transitioning from being primarily an oral culture to a literate one. But writing fails to capture the truth, Socrates said. It leads writers and readers to be forgetful and to “be tiresome company, having the show of wisdom without the reality”. (Which does sound a lot like the internet, come to think of it.) Anyway, presumably, this  is why Socrates didn’t write anything down, and why we have had to learn most of what we know about him from Plato – who was also against writing, but then wrote a lot anyway. Really. A lot.

Although I haven’t done a scientific survey, academic philosophy still seems to have more than its fair share of contrarians. This is not an unmitigated good. Sure, when they are relentlessly pursuing what you think is the truth, contrarians seem great. But when they are arguing that we shouldn’t read and write, or that democracy is bad, well, maybe, not so great. Read more »

Empowering Civilian Review Boards

by Anitra Pavlico

Some police officers are not above bad behavior, even as they work to eradicate and punish it in civilians. It is painfully clear that some of this bad behavior amounts to murder. Civilian review boards are a tool that could punish and deter police misconduct, but they need to have the ability to carry out independent investigations, subpoena documents and witnesses, and issue binding recommendations for discipline. As of a few years ago, only five of the top 50 largest police departments in the U.S. had civilian review boards with disciplinary authority. Newark, New Jersey has recently established such a review board after decades of efforts. While many activists have lost faith in civilian review boards, ACLU director of justice Udi Ofer argues that many of these boards were “rigged to fail.” He says a weak civilian review board is arguably worse than none at all, because it “can lead to an increase in community resentment, as residents go to the board to seek redress yet end up with little.”

Ofer says review boards should have a fixed budget, not subject to politicians’ whims, and a majority of board members should be representatives of civic and community organizations. Of the top 50 police departments, 26 have no civilian review board in place at all. Of the remaining 24, all but nine are overseen by a board majority nominated and appointed either by the mayor, or by the mayor in conjunction with the head of police. This hampers the independence of the board when it comes to making disciplinary recommendations. Read more »