On Rarity and Scarcity and Happiness

by Tom Jacobs

ScreenHunter_15 Aug. 13 13.45This last weekend I went on a two-day sailing expedition with a friend. I took the subway from Brooklyn to Grand Central and got a train to Connecticut and, it must be said, had no idea what I was doing or in for (thank god my friend did—an expert sailor, this guy). In the following days I felt as close to death or at least profound suffering/drowning as I’ve ever felt, and also experienced something close to the kind of sublimity that is only afforded when one is willing to enter those places that are decidedly not welcoming, that are not our home. This means the wilderness, those places that used to be “beyond geography” but which now, while mapped and navigable via GPS, refer either to mostly unpeopled, wooded, waterless places or that, as in this case, to the sea. I had a vague sense that I had no business being out there in a motorless sailboat, left to stasis or to the insanity of unpredictably wind gusts or counter currents or unfriendly waves, all depending upon the vagaries of the wind and weather, and in this I was quite correct. To be out in the open ocean on a sailboat is to realize that our everyday lives are wildly and ridiculously shielded from what used to be called “nature,” that slippery pre-modern concept that both calls to and repels us.

As I lay next to my friend under a canvas tent that we (or “he,” really) erected on the boat that just barely accommodated both of us, cheek by jowl, and just as a massive thunderstorm passed by in the late afternoon, many things crossed my mind.

The most crucial of these was: “This is a rare experience.”

In an essay exploring the idea of rarity, Nicholson Baker speaks of the experience of having to write down a phone number on whatever surface presents itself at the moment as eligible for inscription—in his case, the blade of a Rubbermaid spatula (one could just as easily substitute the experience of listlessly doodling on the rubber midsole of one’s sneaker in mid-afternoon study hall in high school). He speaks of the incomparable pleasure of pressing the ballpoint of the pen against the yielding and squishy rubber of the rubbery blade (or shoe) and wonders whether this is the kind of shared experience that is rarely spoken of or even observed but that might provide some kind of tenuous community: “Infrequent events in the lives of total strangers are now linked; but the pleasure itself is too fragile, too incidental, too survive such forced affiliation undamaged.” In other words, as soon as this experience is discussed and made public, its rarity immediately departs.

What occurred to me as I drove home from Connecticut, however, is that this feeling of rarity was not, for once, connected to an object, but rather to an experience. That there is an important distinction to be made between rare experiences and rare objects or things.

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Monday, August 6, 2012

Joanna Demers, “Listening Through The Noise”

by Dave Maier

Joanna Demers – Listening Through the Noise: The Aesthetics of Experimental Electronic Music (Oxford University Press, 2010)

DemersWhen I tried, in 1981, to interest my undergraduate music professors in progressive electronic music, they didn't get it: anything with notes was “harmonically simple” (“it hess to do with analeetical levelss”, explained one prof), and anything without notes left them completely at sea. Apparently “musicology” meant the theory, not of music generally, but of Western classical music in particular. For anything else you want “ethnomusicology”, which turned out to be basically a subset of anthropology, dominated by scrupulously objective descriptions of Javanese gamelan, Ghanaian drumming, and so on (worthy music all, but not what I was talking about).

I guess that's not too surprising. If you are trained from the age of five to think about music solely in terms of melody and harmony, or at least pitch and duration, then you should be equally flummoxed both by music which lacks these things entirely, and – perhaps even more – by that which subordinates them to other things, like sound texture and spatial location. So I have not been expecting much analytic help from musicological quarters. However, I am pleased to report that Joanna Demers's recent book displays an amazing degree of familiarity – for an academic musicologist at any rate – with the full range of contemporary electronic music and sound art.

Listening Through the Noise is not a work of criticism, but of aesthetic theory, and the discussion is a bit abstract at times, perhaps in order to avoid drowning the reader in technical detail. However, as appropriate to the subject as this abstraction is, Demers renders her subject approachable through the analysis of a wide-ranging array of examples, and her writing is clear and accessible. This is partly because she is laying the groundwork for future elaboration rather than making a definitive statement, but as a level-headed introduction to this difficult topic, this book is hard to beat.

Yet I think we're still talking about baby steps. Impressed as I was to see approving references in an academic book to the likes of Celer, Basic Channel, and Tetsu Inoue, a quick look at the discography and index reveals huge, gaping holes. Some are excused by the focus on aesthetic theory rather than history or criticism, but to see what progress has actually been made here, we need to take a closer look.

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The Value of The Legend of Pradeep Mathew

by Hasan Altaf

Legend-of-pradeep-mathewThe cards are laid on the table right away in Shehan Karunatilaka's stunning debut novel, The Legend of Pradeep Mathew (Graywolf Press). The narrator, W. G. Karunasena – an aging, alcoholic former sportswriter, who has just been handed what amounts to a death sentence (if he limits himself to two drinks a day he can hope for one or two more years) – takes a moment to respectfully rebut the criticism that sports, in this case cricket, have no use or value: “Left-arm spinners cannot unclog your drains, teach your children or cure you of disease. But once in a while, the very best of them will bowl a ball that will bring an entire nation to its feet. And while there may be no practical use in that, there is most certainly value.”

Pradeep Mathew is in some ways like the great rock novels, the great books about Hollywood: From a specialized world, in this case that of cricket, it's adopted a jargon, a built-in store of legends and myths and stories. It's also very much in the vein of Moby-Dick or Don Quixote, a quest book – Wije's attempt to give the world (before liver and family fail him) what it really needs, “a half-decent documentary on Sri Lankan cricket,” and his obsession with the titular Mathew, whom he considers the greatest bowler of all time, are a kind of reversal of Ahab's hunt for the whale, Don Q. fighting for the honor of Dulcinea. Wije has his own Sancho Panza in his friend Ari, and for tilting at, the windmills of Sri Lankan TV, the mysteries and bureaucracies of power political and athletic, the bottle and the family (in particular, his son, Garfield – named for a cricketer and not, unfortunately, the cat; the depiction of this mostly nonexistent father-son relationship is among the finest I've seen in fiction recently: one of the final scenes in the novel, as Wije lies in the hospital, is absolutely perfect and perfectly-rendered).

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Monday Poem

Limbo

big moon sky dish Amber moon
amber as a goldfish
late summer, duskish,
mirror of our sun disk

cherry tree in our yard
many limbs akimbo
holds you in its trellis

as you wax in heaven
and
we wane in limbo
.

big moon at night is
a bubble in a jinn fizz,
the genie in a quiz that
trumps the ciphers of a math whiz

shuffles shadows in our yard
while we muse but who knows
what holds us in its trellis

as we burn
in
moon glow


by Jim Culleny
8/5/12

Requiem for Roscoe

by James McGirk

BlackbirdsThere is a junk store a few doors down from my house. Actually it isn’t even a store; it is just an alley with a tarp stretched over it and a chicken wire gate in front to protect the merchandise, which is mostly old furniture and baby things.

There used to be a guard dog chained to the gate. His name was Roscoe. I detest dogs, for the most part, but Roscoe wasn’t bad. He was beautiful. A pit bull with a pink muzzle and fur that was mostly white but had a faint orange hue. Roscoe was ferocious; terrifying, the streetlamp was out on his side of the street and at night he would hurl himself against the fence if you so much as looked in his direction, let alone walk past him.

During the day he was kept chained beneath a shady tree beside the gate. For three years he would snarl and bark at me every single time I walked by past him. If he was on his chain he would all but choke himself to snap at me. But I grew accustomed to the treatment and seeing him and there were times, admittedly not many of them, but when it was really hot and he was splayed out and panting or when his muzzle was protruding through the wire when I felt sorry for him.

And then one day he was gone. There was big piece chunk of plywood where he used to sit and the fence had an ominous gouge in it. I asked the owner what had happened to Roscoe. He was stolen. Someone had come by and snipped open the fence and pulled the howling, snarling, snapping thing out and stuffed him into the back of a van. They had it on tape. The police were called and they couldn’t do a thing. Roscoe was gone and considering what usually happens to stolen dogs in a rough neighborhood, he probably wasn’t alive for more than a couple of days.

To me dogs are disgusting, I think they are servile and slobbery and in a city like New York, something that should have been banned before something like bucket-sized orders of soda pop or shortening. But I felt awful passing by the junk store and knowing my noble, beautiful, if rather truculent neighbor Roscoe would never bark me at again. So, as a way of channeling my grief, I suppose, I resolved to catalogue the other creatures I interact with in my very urban environment.

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Footprints and Debt

by Kevin S. Baldwin

With the recent global economic troubles, bail-outs of various kinds, and hand-wringing about passing financial debt onto future generations, it seems like as good a time as any to think about other debts that may be at least as important. Don't get me wrong: I too am concerned about the long term implications of deficit spending by national, state, and local governments, but believe these may be overshadowed by what we are doing to the natural world.

BiocapacityNearly 20 years ago, Mathis Wackernagel and his collaborators began formulating a measure of human impact on the earth's ecosystems. Eventually they arrived at an index called the “ecological footprint,” which summarizes food and fiber production, animal feed, timber harvest, fishing, infrastructure, and fossil fuel consumption and expresses this in “global hectares.” Thus a typical American would require nearly 10 global hectares in order to be supplied with all goods and services (Note how this compares to the global average of nearly 2.0 gha ecological footprint).

Using the index of ecological footprint, Wackernagel et al. 2002 estimated that humans crossed the threshold of sustainability into unsustainability around 1980 (see figure).

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The Dark Knight Decides: Sovereignty and the Superhero, Part I

by Ajay Chaudhary

The-dark-knight-risesHave you finally learned to do what is necessary? – Ras al-Ghul, Batman Begins (2005)

Oh, you. You just couldn't let me go, could you? This is what happens when an unstoppable force meets an immovable object. You truly are incorruptible, aren't you? You won't kill me out of some misplaced sense of self-righteousness. And I won't kill you because you're just too much fun. I think you and I are destined to do this forever. – The Joker, The Dark Knight (2008)

Don't talk like one of them, you're not! Even if you'd like to be. To them, you're just a freak, like me. They need you right now. But when they don't, they'll cast you out, like a leper. See, their morals, their code… it's a bad joke. Dropped at the first sign of trouble. They're only as good as the world allows them to be. I'll show you, when the chips are down, these… these civilized people? They'll eat each other. See, I'm not a monster, I'm just ahead of the curve. – The Joker, The Dark Knight (2008)

Bane: Leave, you. Daggett: No, you stay here. I’m in charge. Bane [gently places his hand on Daggett’s shoulder]: Do you feel in charge? Daggett: I’ve paid you a small fortune. Bane: And you think this gives you power over me? – Bane and Daggett, The Dark Knight Rises (2012)

When Gotham is ashes…then you have my permission to die. – Bane, The Dark Knight Rises (2012)

Tell me where the trigger is…then you have my permission to die. – The Batman, The Dark Knight Rises (2012)

Sovereign is he who decides on the exception. – Carl Schmitt, “Definition of Sovereignty”, Political Theology (1922)

The pivotal moment in Christopher Nolan’s recently-completed Batman trilogy arrives in the second movie. The Batman is riding a rather ominous motorcycle of monstrous proportions at the Joker, who is armed with a gun and a bad suit. But the Joker is not shooting at the Batman. Instead, he squeezes off a few rounds into the ground and repeatedly mumbles, “Come on, I want you to do it, I want you to do it. Come on, hit me.” It’s iconic, it’s deeply disturbing, and there is a wonderful ambiguity to the statement. Is the Joker trying to make the point that he extols throughout the movie? Are order and morality – any morality, including Batman’s one rule against killing people – a bad joke? Or is this an inward, psychological self-hatred exploding outwards as rage? Does the Joker merely want an aggrandized, but surely final, death? Suicide-by-Batman? The horror of Nolan’s version of the Joker as portrayed by the late Heath Ledger is that we simply can’t know. It’s a lingering and terrifying vision. However, Nolan clearly communicates to us via his prologue, Batman Begins, and his conclusion, The Dark Knight Rises, that he is primarily interested in the first question: is order a bad joke? If not, how and why? This is the question that these three films tackle and, ultimately, the one they seek to answer. So it is something of a puzzle as to why so much critical writing on the most recent film has focused on questions of explicit economic theories and American partisan politics. I will attempt to explore this puzzle here.

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How the Islamic World Gave Us Coffee and Democracy

by David Alvarez

Coffee_cupJuan Valdez notwithstanding, coffee is an Islamic invention. According to the most popular story about its origins, sometime in the fifteenth century a goat-herding monk named Kaldi discovered coffee in the Kingdom of Ayaman (Yemen). His goats were staying up all night, “frisking and dancing in an unusual manner.” The Prior was informed, the goats diligently tracked, and the cause of their rambunctious insomnia identified: red berries from the “kahwa” tree.

The Prior, apparently a curious and practical type, tried the berries himself by boiling them in water and drinking the brew. It kept him awake all night. To help his monks with their nocturnal devotions, he shared his concoction with them. They declared it a gift of providence, and coffee soon spread “throughout the whole kingdom” and “other nations and provinces of the East.”

The Islamic world gave us not only coffee but also something else rather important: democracy. Popular histories of coffee are wrong in two big ways. If you thought the Kaldi story was too enchanting to be accurate, you are right. That story is mostly bunk. But an even bigger story we tell ourselves about coffee is just as fantastic. The most celebrated institution of the European Enlightenment is the English coffeehouse. As “seats of English liberty,” where all were welcome to discuss the news and criticize art and politics, the English coffeehouse gets lots of praise for promoting modern democracy. But this coffeehouse ideal as a space of debate and political dissent comes not from the European Enlightenment but from the world of Islam.

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Remembering Kashmir

by Majid Maqbool

ScreenHunter_09 Aug. 06 12.29On days when I’m alone at home some vivid images and memories of my childhood rush back. They arrange themselves in disturbing ways, unsettling previous memories. Sometimes these memories write themselves in solitude. Sometimes they are forgotten, only to return later from the oblivion: in the middle of some conversation, for example, while travelling, or at night, in the dreams. Sometimes it’s too painful to write down compelling memories. Sometimes remembering them is the only way of making peace with them. And all these memories are unforgettable, lingering in some corner of mind, waiting to be summoned.

I write because I remember. Because what I remember makes me who I am.

I remember, for example, those military crackdowns that loomed large over my childhood like black clouds: people ordered out of their homes early in the morning by the Indian troops, and assembled in open fields and playgrounds. And then that fearful wait for the next order of the troops. The troops lining up people, one frightened person after another, in front of that dreaded army gypsy. And whenever a masked mukbir (informer) seated inside the guarded army vehicle made a particularly shrill signal or a coded gesture, the person paraded in front of him was immediately frisked away by the troops. Often, he never returned home.

In my school days I remember the Indian army convoys driving past our school bus made us to wait till all the army trucks drove ahead, first, always. Often that meant waiting for hours, and getting late for school. To pass those uneasy hours, I remember counting the army trucks that made up that long and uninterrupted line of that dreaded army convoy. I remember the games we would play in the school bus: How many military trucks went past us today? 50? 100? 150, 200….? We would often challenge each other with the count. I remember the small bets we had kept for successfully predicting the number of army trucks that drove past our school bus. Quite often, I lost count of them…

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Monday, July 30, 2012

The Immutable, Dusty Path

by Gautam Pemmaraju

He felt closer to dust, he said, than to light, air or water. There was nothing he found so unbearable as a well-dusted house, and he never felt more at home than in places where things remained undisturbed, muted under the grey, velvety sinter left when matter dissolved, little by little, into nothingness.

6a00d83451bcff69e2012875a9ed93970c-300wiThe narrator of WG Sebald’s The Emigrants informs us that the lonesome painter Max Ferber, worked in a studio in a block of ‘seemingly deserted buildings’ located near the docks of Manchester. His easel, placed in the centre of the room, was illuminated by “the grey light that entered through a high north-facing window layered with the dust of decades”. The floor, the narrator observes, was thickly encrusted by deposits of dried up paint that fell from his canvas as he worked, which in turn mixed up with coal dust, and came to resemble lava in some places. Thinking inwardly that “his prime concern was to increase the dust”, the narrator watches Ferber over the weeks working on a portrait, ‘excavating’ the features of the posing model. The melancholic painter’s tenebrous kinship with the accumulative debris of his days strikes him as profoundly central to the artist’s very existence, for as Ferber says to him, the dust itself “was the true product of his continuing endeavours and the most palpable proof of his failure”. Ferber had come to love the dust ‘more than anything else in the world’, and wished everything to remain unchanged, as it was. In the neon light of the transport café bearing the unlikely name of Wadi Halfa, Ferber’s haunt, and where the two often met after the day’s gloomy exertions in the ‘curious light’ of the studio that made everything seem ‘impenetrable to the gaze’, the narrator observes the dark metallic sheen of Ferber’s skin, particularly due to the fine powdery dust of charcoal. Commenting on his darkened skin, Ferber informs his companion that silver poisoning was not uncommon amongst professional photographers and that there was even an extreme case recorded in the British Medical Association’s archives:

In the 1930s there was a photographic lab assistant in Manchester whose body had absorbed so much silver in the course of a lengthy professional life that he had become a kind of photographic plate, which was apparent in the fact (as Ferber solemnly informed me) that the man’s face and hands turned blue in strong light, or, as one might say, developed.

Atmazagaon1In Carloyn Steedman’s Dust (2001), an intriguing collection of essays on a most curious set of concerns, she writes that in the early 19th century “a range of occupational hazards was understood to be attendant on the activity of scholarship”. She makes clear the distinctions between Derrida’s seminal meditations on Archive Fever (see some interesting entries here, here & here), the febrile “desire to recover moments of inception; to find and possess all sorts of beginnings”, from Archive Fever Proper. There was a specific attention to dust and the ill effects it had on artisans and factory workers, during the 19th century and the early 20th century. She points to Charles Thackrah’s investigations into the occupational diseases arising from various trades, particularly in the textile industry, wherein the employments produced ‘a dust or vapour decidedly injurious’. In John Forbes’ Cyclopeadia of Practical Medicine of 1833, Steedman writes, there was also an entry on ‘the diseases of literary men’, a subject of interest among investigators, albeit, for a short thirty year period between 1820 to 1850. In Forbes’ view, the ‘brain fever’, no mere figure of speech as Steedman points out, was a malaise of scholars caused predominantly “‘from want of exercise, very frequently from breathing the same atmosphere too long, from the curved position of the body, and from too ardent exercise of the brain.’”

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Monday Poem

There is no defense for a man who, in the excess of his wealth,
has kicked the great altar of Justice out of sight. —
Aeschylus


Drought

3974135479_9fbc4386efHaving done their green work
the grasses say to the sky,
We thirst

The sky is blue and silent,
clouds tease. They slide
silently under a brilliant sun
hoarding their wealth

they are the Himalayas of heaven
cold and distant,
imperious,
proud of their majesty,
their volume,
joining and unjoining their vapors
among their kind alone
holding it to themselves

they are vacant
as an empty page
void
while the grasses
need psalms of moisture

they billow above dry prairies
counting their vaulted droplets
saving whole seas for their own
rainy day

by Jim Culleny
7/29/12

America Must Lead

by Akim Reinhardt

Hillary ClintonI had come to suspect that Hillary Clinton was betraying us. That she was in fact a foreign agent, in service of a rival power.

And those poor fools who think Barack Obama was born in Kenya? It’s a red herring! Why couldn’t they see that? Clinton herself was probably behind it, a brilliant ploy to throw us off her tracks. It was all part of her master plan.

No doubt she sandbagged the 2008 primary, which was obviously hers for the taking. Come on now. Do you really think some skinny, inexperienced black kid could beat her if she didn’t let him?

But why did she do it? Wouldn’t a foreign agent like Hillary Clinton be in a position to destroy America after achieving the presidency? Maybe.

Maybe.

But she’s smarter than that.

By deftly placing her stooge Obama in the White House, the controversy of his foreign birth, which she herself had manufactured, would soak up the spotlight while she went about her nefarious business of taking down America by trotting the globe and hatching her evil scheme with various world leaders.

It was diabolical. It was brilliant. And the evidence seemed so convincing. After all, “Barack Obama” just isn’t an American sounding name. And, you know, there’s that whole thing about him not being white.

Well, his mother was white, and he largely was raised by white people, but they were just a sleeper cell. That’s all you need to know, really. The best conspiracies are the simplest ones, and the rest of that story just kind of writes itself.

And we all bought it, fools that we were. God-fearing, hard-working, America-loving fools. But damn us all to hell, I thought. Clinton was the rogue all along. And I had stumbled upon the evidence by chance, while doing something that rarely yields any new information: reading.

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The Gaffe that roused Blighty

by Sarah Firisen

With the Olympics coming to town London-Olympic-Logo
The British started to frown
The construction, the cost
The traffic lane lost
Our economy's already so down

You know it'll just get rained out
They've done what with the cycling route?
And the summer looks glum
Because tourists won't come
It's a fiasco without a doubt

Just as the grumbling built to its peak
And national spirits seemed bleak
The Olympics were given a lift
A real PR gift
An external, unwelcome critique

Yes, Mitt landed on Blighty's shore
With concerns and questions galore
“Is Britain prepared?”
The Romney declared
“How dare he!” the populace swore

And suddenly the people united
Everyone of them thrilled and excited
And they made clear to Mitt
We're all proud to be Brits
And the whole nation feels we've been slighted

As the sounds of Jerusalem swell
We're so proud of the land where we dwell
Just look at our Queen
And we love Mr Bean
Such a great show should all doubt dispel

Yes the Olympics have now come to town
And nothing will get the Brits down
It may rain, it may pour
But we know shore to shore
British pride never will drown

Cosmopolitanism and the Colonial Imagination

by Leanne Ogasawara

6a00d834535cc569e2016768d6e2fb970b-320wiThe other day on Facebook, I posted an article from the Atlantic, A Land Without Guns: How Japan Has Virtually Eliminated Shooting Deaths.

In the wake of Aurora, I thought there was a lot that was of interest in the article. But almost immediately the first comment I got was the old “same-old” about how “different” the Japanese are and that, “Holding up Japan as an example of how the US should handle guns is quixotic in the extreme, as nice as it may sound.” He explained, “Japanese are raised to be docile subjects of their government while America is based on the idea that the citizens can rise up against a tyrannical government and overthrow it. Distrust of the government is as American as apple pie. To do that, you need weapons.”

Setting aside what I think is a really unfair characterization of Japan, I wondered why people are always so quick to think that there is nothing that could be learned from other countries. I am not speaking about my friend on Facebook but rather about a pattern that I have seen again and again after returning from two decades overseas. Granting that there are indeed different cultural approaches to issues of authority that would make passing gun laws more difficult here than say in Japan; but let’s face it; the right to bear arms doesn’t include the right to bear grenades, military drones or anti-aircraft, so why couldn’t assault weapons also be regulated? Of course, they can and to wit, they already have been regulated in the past by law. But perhaps more to the point, I think the Japanese case does have much to offer in terms of gun license procedures and accountability that we could learn from—different culture and history notwithstanding.

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What A Country: After Wall Street Screws Us, 45% Of Americans Want A Wall Street Guy To Be Our Next President

by Evert Cilliers aka Adam Ash

RomneybainHere comes Mister One Percent. Mitt the Twit Romney. He used to be a leveraged buyout specialist, which was what these private equity guys were called before they got ashamed of the name.

Leveraged buyout means you put a company in debt, and use the money you extract from it to partly buy the company. You also use this debt to pay yourself huge fees and get tax benefits. Basically you're looting the company, which is why many leveraged buyouts end in bankruptcies. The excuse these guys use for what they do is that they bring “efficiency” — one of those meaningless hide-my-hypocrisy phrases like “free market” and “collateral damage.”

So Mitt Romney is a dyed-in-the-wool Wall Streeter, engaged in one of its most egregious practices. He also has money stashed away in the Cayman Islands, may still have a Swiss bank account, has helped export jobs overseas, and is building an elevator for his cars. His wife drives a couple of Cadillacs, and he pays 15% in taxes.

He is what one may safely call a caricature of a Wall Street fraudster. The perfect plutocrat. So obviously slumming among us hoi polloi that he comes off as awkward. And he also happens to be a serious serial liar.

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Monday, July 23, 2012

The Argument from Ugliness

by Scott F. Aikin and Robert B. Talisse

Kinkade Disney BambiThe theistic argument from beauty is an instance of a broader class of arguments for God’s existence known as teleological arguments. The basic form of this kind of argument is as follows:

1. The universe (or parts of it) exhibit property X.

2. Property X is usually (if not always) brought about by the purposive actions of those who created objects for them to be X.

3. The cases mentioned in Premise 1 are not explained (or fully explained) by human action or non-intentional events internal to the universe.

4. Therefore: The universe is (likely) the product of a purposive agent who created it to be X, namely God.

The variety of teleological arguments is as broad the range of properties one can reasonably substitute for X. Traditional teleological arguments plug in for X the claim that some feature of the universe is fine-tuned for life, or that the universe has whatever is required in order to support creatures capable of consciousness, or moral responsibility. The argument from beauty, by contrast, begins from the premise that the universe exhibits beauty. This, the argument runs, entails that the universe must have been created by God, and thus that God exists. But teleological arguments have what we call evil twins. These are arguments that are teleological in structure, but proceed from premises concerning the imperfection or nastiness of the universe to the conclusion that there is no God. The universe, after all, is a mixed bag. Thus, for every theistic argument from, say, fine-tuning, there’s an atheistic challenge beginning from the observation that precious little of the universe is inhabitable and that living creatures are actually poorly designed. Similarly, for every theistic argument from consciousness, there’s an opposing atheistic argument that contends that consciousness deeply flawed and in any case not much of a boon. And for every theistic argument from the fact of moral responsibility, there’s an atheistic argument from immorality. This is what we call the evil twin problem: if theists contend that teleological arguments are valid in their logical form, then they must confront the atheist versions.

Here we will pose the evil twin problem for the argument from beauty: the argument from ugliness.

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The Hungry Games

by Misha Lepetic

Success comprises in itself the seeds of its own decline
and sport is not spared by this law.
~Pierre de Coubertin

Tae_kwon_do-AthensAs we helplessly hurtle towards the next inflammation of the Olympic Games, some notes on the effects of the Games on the built environment might be in order.

The Olympics may pretend to be the premier competition among nation-states, but their physical manifestation is always sited within the city. Given that cities are, by their very nature, already crowded places, something must give when, to paraphrase Joseph Conrad, the immovable object of the city meets the irresistible force that is the Olympic Games. Furthermore, once the Olympic hurricane blows through town, what are the long-term consequences?

This can be divided into three fairly discreet phenomena: the forced relocation of populations that suddenly find themselves “in the way” of breathlessly ambitious master plans; the design, construction and fetishization of dozens of state-of-the-art facilities for a few days’ worth of competitions; and the long, drawn-out consequences of deciding (or, more accurately, not deciding) what to do with these facilities once the athletes, media and sponsors have moved on to pastures greener.

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Stripped chinar and charred roof: a requiem for Ziarat Dastgir Sahibun

by Vivek Menezes

You won’t find the Truth
By crossing your legs and holding your breath.
Daydreams won’t take you through the gateway of release.
You can stir as much salt as you like in water,
It won’t become the sea.

(by Lal Ded, translated by Ranjit Hoskote)

3q9My journey to Ziarat Dastgir Sahibun in Sringar began on a cool, cloudy afternoon in Goa last December at the annual Arts + Literary Festival, when Ranjit Hoskote finally released a master-work after two decades of labour, ‘I Lalla: The Poems of Lal Ded”.

Like many here, no doubt, I’d encountered the writings of this revolutionary fourteenth-century mystic earlier. But the preternaturally brilliant Hoskote has completely re-cast her in a new light. I dare say most of those present when he talked about Kashmir (with Bilal Tanweer and Jerry Pinto) became as immediately hooked as I was. This is when I started to seek out more information about the unique, confluential Sufism that came to prevail in Kashmir, without much effacing the Shaivism, Buddhism, and indigenous nature-worship that preceded it.

And so a family trip to Kashmir this May, which readers of 3QD already know about.

As described in that purposefully touristic post made from Srinagar itself, there is a bizarre gulf between Kashmir’s very real status as a tourism destination with near-limitless appeal (and demand to match), and the quality and quantity of reliable information available to travelers.

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Ultrasound Technology Can Impede Informed Consent

by Evan Selinger

UltrasoundEarlier this year, controversy surrounded ultrasound legislation in Texas, Virginia, North Carolina, Texas, and Idaho. Lost in the critical commentaries on abuses of patients’ and physicians’ rights was concern over a fundamental violation of liberty. This issue hasn’t gone away, even though sonogram coverage isn’t currently grabbing headlines.

Medical experts routinely use ultrasound technology in ways that favor the Right to the Life agenda, even in states that don't have mandatory ultrasound laws. This problem goes unnoticed because the potential harm caused by the medical community is not the result of political ideology. Rather, it arises from inadvertent exploitation of patients’ natural human weaknesses and cognitive tendencies. To understand why, we need to grasp how typical conversations about ultrasound images can impede rather than foster informed consent.

In cases where advocates pushed for mandatory ultrasound, proponents insisted that women considering abortion should be subject to robust informed consent policy. From this perspective, ultrasound technology looks like a perfect tool for ensuring women understand the profound ramifications of using surgery to terminate a pregnancy. Unfortunately, discussions of what ultrasound images reveal isn’t limited to objective medical facts.

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Burmese Days

by Maniza Naqvi

“… How does our affair progress? I hope that, as dear Mr. Macgregor would say—U Po Kyin broke into English—eet ees making perceptible progress?”

Burmese-Days-3Burmese Days by George Orwell remains relentlessly relevant and a touchstone for cynics eight decades after it was written. The novel opens with U Po Kyin at age 56 thinking of his achievements with satisfaction—and plotting intrigue to further his interests. He thinks back to his first memory of the British troops with their weapons entering victoriously into Mandalay in 1885. “To fight on the side of the British, to become a parasite upon them, had been his ruling ambition even as a child. He does this by playing one side against the other, planting intrigues and solving them, always putting himself in the position of the problem solver, the loyalist to all—taking bribes and ruthlessly controlling everyone.” U Po Kyin's memory of British troops marching into town is set in the moment in which the oil company Burmah Oil is born in 1886 and when Burma became a province of Imperial India. (here, and here and here.)

George Orwell was in Burma in the Indian Imperial Police from 1922-1927 Eric Arthur Blair or George Orwell was born in India, on June 3, 1903 in Motihari Bihar (here). Orwell’s novel follows the trajectories of the ambitions and the psyches of Imperial administrators, their military officers, wives, concubines, their merchants and those who served them. The title of “U” has been bestowed on U Po Kyin for his services enroute his own trajectory from a lowly clerk to a minor official to a Sub divisional magistrate, through planting seditious activities and creating rebellions and quelling them himself so that he can demonstrate his loyalties to the Imperial masters by jailing adversaries while havig his fingers in every pot in his subdivision for personal gain and pleasure.

His good works of building Pagodas will ensure his next life. But in this life his most ardent desire is to be a member of the British Club:

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