Thomas Nagel reviews Scott Shane's Objective Troy: A Terrorist, a President and the Rise of the Drone, in the LRB:

Pacifists are rare. Most people believe that lethal violence may be used in self-defence, or the defence of others, against potentially lethal threats. Military action is justified by a collective institutional version of this basic human right, which sets an outer limit on the right to life. Lethal aggressors who cannot be stopped by lesser means are liable to lethal attack, and this does not violate their right to life so long as they remain a threat. Killing in self-defence is distinct from execution, the killing of someone who is no longer a threat as a punishment for past conduct. It is also usually distinct from assassination, which can be carried out for a wide range of reasons: revenge, political or religious hatred, nationalistic passion and so forth – though occasionally someone who is a lethal threat to the assassin or his community may be targeted.

The development of drone warfare has put these distinctions under strain, and that helps to explain the visceral reaction many people have against it, in spite of its being much less destructive than more traditional forms of military violence. Drones, or UAVs (unmanned aerial vehicles), are more selective in the killing of enemies, produce less collateral damage to non-combatants and impose no physical risk to those who pilot them, since they are sitting in a control station thousands of miles away. Who could ask for more?

In Objective Troy, Scott Shane explains why Barack Obama, when he became president, favoured drone warfare as his chief anti-terrorism tactic over the conventional wars of his predecessor:

The number of al-Qaida plotters whose aim was to attack Americans was in the hundreds. Yet several hundred thousand Iraqis and Afghans, and some four thousand American troops, had died in the two big wars since 2001 … The drone, it seemed, if used judiciously, offered a way to scale the solution to the problem, picking off America’s real enemies one by one.

‘Let’s kill the people who are trying to kill us,’ Obama would say.

More here.

Julia Felsenthal reproduces Harper Lee in Vogue:

Many years ago an aging member of the House of Hanover, on learning that the duty of providing an heir to the throne of England had suddenly befallen him and his brothers, confided his alarm to his friend Thomas Creevey: “ . . . It is now seven-and-twenty years that Madame St. Laurent and I have lived together; we are of the same age and have been in all climates, and in all difficulties together, and you may well imagine the pang it will occasion me to part with her . . . . I protest I don’t know what is to become of her if a marriage is to be forced upon me . . . .”

Amused by the Duke of Kent’s predicament. Mr. Creevey recorded the incident in his diary and preserved for us a timeless declaration. The man who made it was not overly endowed with brilliance, nor had he led a noteworthy life, yet we remember his cry from the heart and tend to forget his ultimate service to mankind: He was the father of Queen Victoria.

What did the Duke of Kent tell us? That two people had shared their lives on a voluntary basis for nearly thirty years—in itself a remarkable achievement; that they had survived the fevers and frets of intimate relationship; that together they had met the pressures and disappointments of life; that he is in agony at the prospect of leaving her. In one graceful sentence, the Duke of Kent said all there is to say about the love of a man for a woman.

And in so saying, he tells us much about love itself. There is only one kind of love—love. But the different manifestations of love are uncountable:

At an unfamiliar night noise a mother will spring from bed, not to return until every corner of her domain is tucked safely round her anxiety. A man will look up from his golf game to watch a jet cut caterpillar tracks through the sky. A housewife, before driving to town, will give her neighbour a quick call to see if she wants anything from the store. These are manifestations of a power within us that must of necessity be called divine, for it is no invention of man.

What is love? Many things are like love—indeed, love is present in pity, compassion, romance, affection. What made the Duke of Kent’s statement a declaration of love, and what makes us perform without second thought small acts of love every day of our lives, is an element conspicuous by its absence. Were it present, the Duke of Kent would have left his mistress without a pang; the sound barrier breaking over her head would not rouse the mother; sinking his putt would be the primary aim of the golfer; the housewife would go straight to the store with no thought of her neighbour. One thing identifies love and isolates it from kindred emotions: Love admits not of self.

More here.

Richard Marshall interviews Thomas K. Metzinger over at 3:AM Magazine:

3:AM: You’re interested in the philosophy of consciousness and the self.

TM: Yes, it is true that I have had a long-standing interest in consciousness. In 1994 I founded the Association for the Scientific Study of Consciousness together with Bernard Baars, the late William Banks, George Buckner, David Chalmers, Stanley Klein, Bruce Mangan, David Rosenthal, and Patrick Wilken. I hung around in the Executive Committee and various committees of the ASSC for much too long, even acted as president in 2010, but a couple of thousand e-mails and 19 conferences later it is satisfying to see how a bunch of idealists actually managed to create an established research community out of the blue. The consciousness community is now running perfectly, it has anew journal, brilliant young people are joining it all the time and my personal prediction is that we will have isolated the global neural correlate of consciousness by 2050. I also tried to support the overall process by editing two collections, one for philosophers and one of an interdisciplinary kind: Conscious Experience (1995, Imprint Academic) and Neural Correlates of Consciousness (2000, MIT Press)

In the beginning of the ASSC, foundational conceptual work by philosophers was very important, followed by a phase in which the neuroscientists moved in with their own research programs and contributions. Observing the field for more than a quarter century now, my impression is that what we increasingly need is not so much gifted young philosophers who are empirically informed in neuroscience or psychology, but more junior researchers who can combine philosophical metatheory with a solid training in mathematics. The first formal models of conscious experience have already appeared on the horizon, and as we incrementally move forward towards the first unified model of subjective experience there are challenges on the conceptual frontier that can only be met by researchers who understand the mathematics. We now need open minded young philosophers of mind who can see through the competing formal models in order to extract what is conceptually problematic – and what is really relevant from a philosophical perspective.

In the early Sixties it was Hilary Putnam who, in a short series of seminal papers, took Turing’s inspiration and transposed concepts from the mathematical theory of automata – for example the idea that a system’s “psychology” would be given by the machine table it physically realizes – into analytical philosophy of mind, laying the foundations for the explosive development of early functionalism and classical cognitive science. One major criticism was that some mysterious and simple “intrinsic” qualities of phenomenal experience exist (people at the time called them “qualia”) and that they couldn’t be dissolved into a network of relational properties. The idea was that there are irreducible and context-invariant phenomenal atoms, subjective universals in the sense of Clarence Irving Lewis (1929:121-131), that is, maximally simple forms of conscious content, for which introspectively we possess transtemporal identity criteria. But the claim was shown to be empirically false and nobody could really say what “intrinsicality” actually was.

More here.

Jeffrey Brown at The New York Times:

In a Paris Review interview in 1993, Logue did not have good things to say about Lattimore and other “professors” who had taken up Homer. “They are the translation police,” he said. “It is easy to see why: It keeps Homer in their hands.” Perhaps the Uzi was excessively warm against Logue’s hip that day, for this is far too harsh. He had his own “professor,” after all, in Carne-Ross, who provided word-for-word translation, a “crib,” as needed. As for the rest of us, we who lack the language — and I lost my ability to read Greek at Homeric level long ago — we rely on the professors. We choose our favorites and set aside others. Mine was Robert Fitzgerald. Many years later, I still grasp Zeus by the knees and ask that he bless the translators.

And Christopher Logue, among them, bless him highly, Zeus. We can judge a translation or an “account” (the word Logue preferred) by its own intent and then by its impact on us as readers. How does poetry move from one language to another? Count the ways: Through the precise meaning of the words, the truth of the story. Through the sound or music of the language. What about other, mistier qualities — a poem’s “feel,” the “strangeness” it once had for its readers in the original? In his introduction to the popular “Iliad” translation by Robert Fagles, the classicist Bernard Knox writes that the language of Homer was “brimful of archaisms — of vocabulary, syntax and grammar — and of incongruities: words and forms drawn from different dialects and different stages of the growth of the language.” Homer, that is, was strange from the beginning, wonderfully, heroically strange. And Logue, in turn, is wonderfully, Homerically strange.

more here.

Walter Biggins at The Quarterly Conversation:

Most of us don’t know much, even into our thirties and forties. In our teens, though, the ratio of what we don’t know vs. what we think we know hovers somewhere around 100 to 1. Adulthood is largely about closing that gap, doing so by learning how to think beyond our immediate experiences, and to empathize with unfamiliar people.

Part of what makes Guadalupe Nettel’s The Body Where I Was Born work so well is that, though it’s so autobiographical in nature that its protagonist has the same lazy eye that’s apparent in Nettel’s author photo, the Mexican writer treats herself as a stranger. Nettel’s life seems alien to herself as she tries to recall it accurately, and to convey it diligently to otherss. To a large degree, it’s a novel precisely about this alienness, and the emotional wooziness that can cause. The Body Where I Was Born is then a novel rooted in, but wary of, the memoir form.

That’s true to life. We’ve all looked back at our childhoods and wondered, “Who the hell wasthat guy?” Those of us who have gone through therapy realize how much we bury our past selves, and how those parts can claw back to the surface in discomforting, confusing ways. In order to see our past selves in our present lives, counseling helps us to see our thoughts and actions from the outside.

more here.

Laurence Scott at The Financial Times:

In a recent interview, the Norwegian writer Karl Ove Knausgaard said that “a [romantic] relationship is based on lies and lies and lies . . . If you don’t lie it collapses.” His relationship with his readers, on the surface at least, depends on an opposite pact: that he will lie about nothing.

Knausgaard’s intensely autobiographical six-novel cycle, My Struggle, has become a literary monument to the aesthetic value of tactlessness. Across its thousands of pages he explores his feelings towards his loved ones with brutal candour. This commitment to the truth not only challenges the mutual illusions of family life, but also deprives his prose of the traditional novel’s formal excitements: narrative pace, suspense, symbolism. Most of our days are not, in reality, the stuff of page-turners. His characters walk around nude, stripped of all their novelistic vestments; their only meaning comes from the fact that Knausgaard has experienced them. And yet, the charisma of these books, a combination of critical acclaim, commercial success and the strange brilliance of their form, has made being hypnotised by their extensive descriptions of ordinary Norwegian life a sort of cultural obligation.

more here.

Can Poetry Matter?

Heart feels the time has come to compose lyric poetry.
No more storytelling for him. Oh, Moon, Heart writes,
sad wafer of the heart’s distress. And then: Oh, Moon,
bright cracker of the heart’s pleasure. Which is it,
is the moon happy or sad, cracker or wafer? He looks
from the window but the night is overcast. Oh, Cloud,
he writes, moody veil of the Moon’s distress. And then,
Oh, Cloud, sweet scarf of the Moon’s repose. Once more
Heart asks, Are clouds kindly or a bother, is the moon sad
or at rest? He calls scientists who tell him that the moon
is a dead piece of rock. He calls astrologers. One says
the moon means water. Another that it signifies oblivion.
The girl next door says the Moon means love. The nut
up the block says it proves that Satan has us under his thumb.
Heart goes back to his notebooks. Oh, Moon, he writes,
confusing orb meaning one thing or another. Heart feels
that his words lack conviction. Then he hits on a solution.
Oh, Moon, immense hyena of introverted motorboat.
Oh, Moon, upside down lamppost of barbershop quartet.
Heart takes his lines to a critic who tells him that the poet
is recounting a time as a toddler when he saw his father
kissing the baby-sitter at the family’s cottage on a lake.
Obviously, the poem explains the poet’s fear of water.
Heart is ecstatic. He rushes home to continue writing.
Oh, Cloud, raccoon cadaver of colored crayon, angel spittle
recast as foggy euphoria. Heart is swept up by the passion
of composition. Freed from the responsibility of content,
no nuance of nonsense can be denied him. Soon his poems
appear everywhere, while the critic writes essays elucidating
Heart’s meaning. Jointly they form a sausage factory of poetry:
Heart supplying the pig snouts and rectal tissue of language
which the critic encloses in a thin membrane of explication.
Lyric poetry means teamwork, thinks Heart: a hog farm,
corn field, and two old dobbins pulling a buckboard of song.

by Steven Dobyns
from Pallbearers Envying the One Who Rides
Penguin Books, 1999)

Ira Berlin in The New York Times:

Without question, the most important liberation movement in American ­history — from Jacksonian democracy to gay rights — was the long struggle against slavery. Abolition established the principles and rhetoric, while setting the strategies and tactics, that have guided all subsequent reform movements — even those that have stood opposed to one another like prohibitionism and antiprohibitionism, or pro- and anti-abortion rights. Recently, historians have been taking a new look at the struggle against slavery as a way of examining contemporary movements for securing human rights, expanding democracy, liberating colonials and criticizing capitalism. Manisha Sinha, a professor of Afro-American studies at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, is one of those historians who are trying to connect the war against slavery to other liberation movements. She is the author of previous studies of slaveholders and their ideologies. In “The Slave’s Cause: A History of Abolition,” she turns her attention from the slave masters to their greatest opponents, and her new book is an encyclopedic survey of the movement against slavery in the United States from its first stirrings before the American Revolution to the institution’s final demise in the ashes of civil war. It is difficult to imagine a more comprehensive history of the abolitionist movement.

Sinha’s work is also a biographical dictionary, naming practically every individual and group that struck a blow against slavery. She tells us that “The Slave’s Cause” can best be appreciated as an interpretation of abolition’s long history, though the seemingly endless detail presented over the course of nearly 600 pages of text and another 100-plus pages of notes frustrates her effort to present a clear alternative narrative to the familiar one.

More here. (Note: At least one post will be dedicated to honor Black History Month throughout February)

Peter Dreier in American Prospect:

I don’t know if there is a statute of limitations on confessing one’s sins, but it has been six years since I did the deed and I’m now coming clean.

Six years ago I submitted a paper for a panel, “On the Absence of Absences” that was to be part of an academic conference later that year—in August 2010. Then, and now, I had no idea what the phrase “absence of absences” meant. The description provided by the panel organizers, printed below, did not help. The summary, or abstract of the proposed paper—was pure gibberish, as you can see below. I tried, as best I could within the limits of my own vocabulary, to write something that had many big words but which made no sense whatsoever. I not only wanted to see if I could fool the panel organizers and get my paper accepted, I also wanted to pull the curtain on the absurd pretentions of some segments of academic life. To my astonishment, the two panel organizers—both American sociologists—accepted my proposal and invited me to join them at the annual international conference of the Society for Social Studies of Science to be held that year in Tokyo.

I am not the first academic to engage in this kind of hoax. In 1996, in a well-known incident, NYU physicist Alan Sokal pulled the wool over the eyes of the editors of Social Text, a postmodern cultural studies journal. He submitted an article filled with gobbledygook to see if they would, in his words, “publish an article liberally salted with nonsense if it (a) sounded good and (b) flattered the editors' ideological preconceptions.” His article, “Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity” (published in the Spring/Summer 1996 issue), shorn of its intentionally outrageous jargon, essentially made the claim that gravity was in the mind of the beholder.

More here.

Gregory Chaitin in Inference:

Between the physics of the very small (particle or high energy physics) and the physics of the very large (cosmology) lie complex systems like us. In this essay, my subject is conceptual complexity, the complexity of ideas. The main application of these concepts is in meta-mathematics, where one deals with incompleteness and the limits of pure thought.

Mathematics contains a great deal of complexity. In this area, as in so many others, Gottfried Leibniz put his finger on the basic issue.

He did so before anyone else.

Hermann Weyl was both a mathematician and a mathematical physicist. Weyl wrote on mathematics, general relativity, and quantum mechanics, as well as on art and philosophy. His smaller book on philosophy is entitled The Open World. It is made up of lectures Weyl gave in 1932 at Yale University.² In the philosophy of science, according to Weyl, complexity is essential in understanding the concept of a law of nature. If laws of nature may be arbitrarily complex, he argued, the very concept of a law becomes vacuous. What difference would remain between complex phenomena and the laws meant to explain them if the laws meant to explain them were as complex as the phenomena they are meant to explain?

Laws of nature must be simple.

A good point.

But Leibniz made the same point three centuries before.

More here.

Thomas Frank at Harper's Magazine:

That was my first experience of the microclimate of goodness that always seems to surround Hillary Rodham Clinton. The mystic bond between high-achieving American professionals and the planet’s most victimized people, I would discover, is a recurring theme in her life and work.

But it is not her theme alone. Regardless of who leads it, professional-class liberalism seems to be forever traveling on a quest for some place of greater righteousness. It is always engaged in a search for some subject of overwhelming, noncontroversial goodness with which it can identify itself, and under whose umbrella of virtue it can put across its self-interested class program.

There have been many other virtue objects over the years, people and ideas whose surplus righteousness could be extracted for deployment elsewhere. The great virtue-rush of the 1990s, for example, was focused on children, then thought to be the last word in overwhelming, noncontroversial goodness. Who could be against kids? No one, of course, and so the race was on to justify in their name whatever your program happened to be. In the course of Hillary Clinton’s 1996 book, It Takes a Village, for example, this favorite rationale of the day—think of the children!—was deployed to explain her husband’s draconian crime bill as well as more directly child-related causes such as charter schools.

more here.

Thomas Nagel at the London Review of Books:

Pacifists are rare. Most people believe that lethal violence may be used in self-defence, or the defence of others, against potentially lethal threats. Military action is justified by a collective institutional version of this basic human right, which sets an outer limit on the right to life. Lethal aggressors who cannot be stopped by lesser means are liable to lethal attack, and this does not violate their right to life so long as they remain a threat. Killing in self-defence is distinct from execution, the killing of someone who is no longer a threat as a punishment for past conduct. It is also usually distinct from assassination, which can be carried out for a wide range of reasons: revenge, political or religious hatred, nationalistic passion and so forth – though occasionally someone who is a lethal threat to the assassin or his community may be targeted.

Philip Hoare at The New Statesman:

The city is lonely because it is so full of people. For Laing, Andy Warhol epitomises the idea that the very act of looking is an expression of that alienation. From his immigrant background, born in Pittsburgh, the misfit boy moves to Manhattan and uses art as a social disguise. He hides behind his tools: from the tape recorder that he calls his “wife” to the Polaroid camera whose pictures don’t even have to go to the chemist to be developed. In his paintings, involving photography and silkscreen, Warhol developed perhaps the most distanced practice of any artist of the 20th century, and in so doing augured the art of the 21st. He wanted to be a machine, and he became one at the expense of his self. Narcissism – even in a person as unsure of his body as Warhol – binds itself with loneliness. “I like being in a vacuum; it leaves me alone to work,” he said.

All that changed when another loner, Valerie Solanas, took a gun to Warhol’s Factory and shot him. As Camille Paglia wrote, the shooting left Warhol “unable to advance beyond his set formulas”; it arrested his ­already arrested development. Although he survived the assassination attempt by Solanas, he retreated further into his own world as a result. I don’t think I’ve ever seen anyone look so ill or so alone as when I met him in 1986, despite or even because of his status as the cynosure of a glamorous art opening. He had become so pale that he seemed to recede into the background.

more here.

Kareem Abdul-Jabbar wrote on March 5, 2015 in Time:

It’s either a sad irony or a fitting tribute that the end of Black History Month dribbles right into March Madness. No sooner do we finish celebrating significant African-American contributions to American culture than we get to see some of our finest young black competitors perform amazing feats of athleticism. Seems like even more cause for celebration. Except that a 2012 University of Pennsylvania study concluded that 64% of basketball players in the six top teams in American college conferences are black, though only 3% of the entire student bodies are black. Are colleges exploiting young, black athletes when they’re good for their sports franchises, and ignoring their educational needs otherwise? It certainly looks that way, by the numbers. But who’s manning the watch for African Americans? When it comes to education, when it comes to employment opportunities, when it comes to systemic civil rights violations by police departments like those uncovered this week by the Department of Justice report on Ferguson, Mo., who is willing to take on this intense and often contentious responsibility?

…Where is today’s Dr. King? I’d argue it’s the wrong question. In the act of canonizing Dr. King, we’re forgotten that no movement is ever advanced by one voice alone. This country wasn’t founded by a single person, but a group of visionaries who didn’t always share the same vision. Dr. King’s voice was lifted by many others — Malcolm X, Bobby Seale, Angela Davis — who may have marched to a different drummer but marched in the same direction. Bringing about change requires, as Liam Neeson might say, “a very particular set of skills.” Leaders have to notice subtle shifts in the political landscape that threaten the rights and standing of blacks in society. They have to analyze complex information and question even more complex motivations. They have to be socially responsible in not attributing every societal stumble to racism. They have to have a clear and articulate voice in explaining when injustice occurs, and they must have the courage to tell the world — even when the world doesn’t want to hear it. Finally, they must be able to offer practical solutions to specific problems and have the drive and charisma to inspire people to participate in those solutions.

More here. (Note: At least one post will be dedicated to honor Black History Month throughout February)

Ali Minai in Barbarikon:

With a deep understanding of the zombification of the Republican electorate, and with the financial resources and the ambition to act on this knowledge, Donald Trump has gone about the business of systematically pressing every button that the Republican Party had built so carefully into their system – except that, in signature Trump style, he has pressed each one ten times as hard as the delicate hands of any Republican political consultant would ever have dared to do. Where a Karl Rove or Lee Atwater might have run a subtly racial campaign commercial or pushed a little xenophobia, Trump has promised high walls, carpet bombings and full-blown torture. He is offering far-right voters trained on little pieces of candy a whole chocolate factory, and they’re eating it up. The Republican elites have been disarmed because Trump is using their own arms to steal their electorate. And the reason they can’t do much about it is not that they haven’t recognized their predicament, but that they recognize it all too well. Their problem is that, to stop Trump, they have to disown the very “ideas” on which they have built their own electoral successes. At best, all they can say is that their wall would be a bit lower, the carpet of their bombing a bit smaller, and their torture limited to waterboarding. That’s a lousy argument to be stuck with!

More here.

Mobius Strip

The track I'm running on
Won't be the same when I turn back
It's useless to follow it straight
I'll return to another place
I circle around but the sky changes
Yesterday I was a child
I'm a man now
The world's a strange thing
And the rose among the roses
Doesn't resemble another rose.
.

by Robert Desnos
translated by Amy Levin

Caperton in Feministe:

When I was a little kid, I eagerly awaited 2016 so I could have my chance at being the first female president. I don’t begrudge Hillary Clinton the fact that she may end up beating me to it — my political ambition has faded over time. But the prospect of Madame President still makes me smile. I haven’t seen anyone — anyone of real influence, at least — say that voters should support Hillary Clinton solely because she’s a woman. But the concept of A Female President — not specifically President Hillary Clinton, but simply a female president, as in The Importance Of A Female President, or how It’s Time For A Female President — has come up numerous times throughout election season in support of Clinton’s candidacy, and that’s just not a good choice of selling points. From a marketing standpoint. I say all of this not as someone with a specific political preference (I do have a candidate of choice, and it’s hardly a secret, but it’s inconsequential for current purposes) but as someone who deals in message strategy for a living, and who can tell when a value proposition isn’t going to get the job done. Here’s where the weakness comes in:

Too many counterexamples. Once upon a time, when the Democratic Party was the only party of the Big Two to have the oves to try to run a woman for president, this could have been a more compelling argument. But with the past few years bringing us the specters of Vice President Sarah Palin, President Michele Bachmann, and President Carly Fiorina, “We need a woman in the White House” requires a little more qualification, and an asterisk and fine print really take a lot of impact out of a marketing message.

More here.