Suzanne Schneider in The Revealer:

At first glance, it may not seem like religious freedom and religious violence have much to do with one another; indeed, they appear to most of us as antithetical. This fact makes it all the more interesting to note the way in which these concepts are historically intertwined. Briefly stated, we can trace the origin of both back to 17^th century struggles over who, or what, could exercise political authority. These conflicts (often erroneously referred to as Europe’s “religious wars”) were in fact less about dogma than the exercise of sovereignty, and more specifically, the early modern state’s attempt to wrest political control from the Catholic Church. It was only by depriving ecclesiastical authorities of their coercive powers that individual states were able to secure, in Max Weber’s famous terms, a monopoly on the legitimate use of violence within their territories.

The long and bloody process of executing this power transfer necessarily entailed redefining, or rather inventing, religion as a distinct element of human experience: simultaneously inner-facing and other-worldly, i.e. defined in terms that did not compete with state sovereignty. Martin Luther’s theological revolution became central to this process, not least because he established the principle of separation between spiritual and temporal powers and emphasized the importance of private faith over public works. A person’s inner world, still an epistemological infant in Luther’s day, would become increasingly real as the decades passed. Most importantly for our purposes, it was in this emerging realm of individual consciousness that “true religion” would come to reside.

The term appears in two important works of seventeenth century political theory: Thomas Hobbe’s Leviathan and Baruch Spinoza’s Theological-Political Treatise, published in 1651 and 1670, respectively. It may seem that these seminal texts are completely incompatible: Hobbes has often been described as a theorist for despotism, while Spinoza is regarded as a proto-democratic thinker who holds a place of privilege in the history of liberal thought. There is much nuance lost in such descriptions, of course, but my primary interest at present is how Hobbes and Spinoza thought about the relationship between religion, state sovereignty, and individual freedom. In this context, I find fascinating their respective invocations of “true religion” to mean something quite different than the actual religious practices of their time. If the reader is willing to follow me down this conceptual rabbit hole, I think we will find that their propositions regarding the nature of “true religion” are still very much in circulation.

True religion, as the concept appears in both texts, is an abstract entity that is neither the possession of any single group nor reducible to any particular form of religious practice.

More here.

From Chickenbones:

Serving as your First Lady is an honor and a privilege…but back when we first came together four years ago, I still had some concerns about this journey we’d begun. While I believed deeply in my husband’s vision for this country . . . and I was certain he would make an extraordinary President…like any mother, I was worried about what it would mean for our girls if he got that chance. How would we keep them grounded under the glare of the national spotlight? How would they feel being uprooted from their school, their friends, and the only home they’d ever known? Our life before moving to Washington was filled with simple joys…Saturdays at soccer games, Sundays at grandma’s house…and a date night for Barack and me was either dinner or a movie, because as an exhausted mom, I couldn’t stay awake for both.

And the truth is, I loved the life we had built for our girls…I deeply loved the man I had built that life with…and I didn’t want that to change if he became President. I loved Barack just the way he was.

You see, even though back then Barack was a Senator and a presidential candidate . . . to me, he was still the guy who’d picked me up for our dates in a car that was so rusted out, I could actually see the pavement going by through a hole in the passenger side door . . . he was the guy whose proudest possession was a coffee table he’d found in a dumpster, and whose only pair of decent shoes was half a size too small.

But when Barack started telling me about his family—that’s when I knew I had found a kindred spirit, someone whose values and upbringing were so much like mine. You see, Barack and I were both raised by families who didn’t have much in the way of money or material possessions but who had given us something far more valuable—their unconditional love, their unflinching sacrifice, and the chance to go places they had never imagined for themselves.

My father was a pump operator at the city water plant, and he was diagnosed with Multiple Sclerosis when my brother and I were young. And even as a kid, I knew there were plenty of days when he was in pain . . . I knew there were plenty of mornings when it was a struggle for him to simply get out of bed. But every morning, I watched my father wake up with a smile, grab his walker, prop himself up against the bathroom sink, and slowly shave and button his uniform. And when he returned home after a long day’s work, my brother and I would stand at the top of the stairs to our little apartment, patiently waiting to greet him . . . watching as he reached down to lift one leg, and then the other, to slowly climb his way into our arms. But despite these challenges, my dad hardly ever missed a day of work . . . he and my mom were determined to give me and my brother the kind of education they could only dream of. And when my brother and I finally made it to college, nearly all of our tuition came from student loans and grants. But my dad still had to pay a tiny portion of that tuition himself. And every semester, he was determined to pay that bill right on time, even taking out loans when he fell short. He was so proud to be sending his kids to college…and he made sure we never missed a registration deadline because his check was late. You see, for my dad, that’s what it meant to be a man.

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

Ethan Siegel in Forbes:

Once approximately every four years, the elusive entity that occurs this Monday — February 29^th — comes along. The historical origins and urban legends associated with it are incredibly interesting, but the reason there’s any such thing asLeap Day at all is because of the physics of planet Earth. The Earth, of course, is rotating on its axis while simultaneously revolving around the Sun. That rotation is responsible for sunrise, sunset, moonrise, moonset, the Coriolis effect, and the rotation of all the stars in the night sky about the poles. Revolution, on the other hand, is responsible for the seasons; when your hemisphere tilted away from the Sun, that’s when you have your winter (and minimum daylight), and when your hemisphere is tilted towards the Sun, that’s when you have your luminous summer.

And you probably learned that a day is 24 hours, due to the rotation, while a year is 365 days (with an occasional 366 for leap years), taking care of the revolution. It turns out it’s a little more complicated than that!

More here.

David Kyle Johnson in Psychology Today:

Dear Bill Nye

Recently, in a “Big Think” segment(link is external), you were asked about your opinion of philosophy. Your response was less than generous. This isn't the first time I've heard similar opinions from well-respected scientists and science communicators. But as a philosophy professor, it pains me awfully when I see and hear such things—and this time I felt obligated to respond.

Now let me be clear. I have nothing but respect for your work bringing scientific knowledge to the general population. In fact, I celebrate it! (I hope one day my two year old falls in love with your work.) Indeed, I love science and am well versed in it. I teach a course on scientific reasoning for our physics department, and on how to recognize medical pseudoscience for our sports medicine department. I emphasize heavily the scientific method in my logic and critical thinking classes. I have lectures on General Relativity and Quantum Mechanics in “Exploring Metaphysics” (one of my courses for The Great Courses). In my academic work, I bring scientific reasoning to bear on as many philosophical questions as I can. I couldn’t be a more dedicated advocate of science.

In other words Bill, I’m on your side. Ergo, we are on the same side. So, why aren't we working together?

More here.

Michael Fumento in Inference:

Wind and solar energy are not becoming competitive with other forms of electricity generation in the United States. Impressions to the contrary are based on flawed data. In its accounting, the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) uses what it calls levelized costs. These represent the per-kilowatt-hour cost of financing, building, operating, and maintaining an electricity generation plant over its assumed financial life.

Levelized costs were designed to permit a comparison between all forms of electricity generation, but data for wind and solar energy, on the one hand, and other sources of fuel, on the other, do not necessarily correspond.

The nameplate capacity of a plant designates its production maximum under ideal circumstances. The capacity factor of a plant, by way of contrast, designates the percentage of its nameplate capacity that it realizes in day-to-day operations. Nuclear has an impressive capacity factor of about 92 percent in the United States, more than double what it was in 1972. This improvement is one of the unsung successes of nuclear power.⁵ The capacity factors for wind and solar energy are at the opposite end of the scale. According to the EIA, wind averages about 34 percent; the Global Wind Energy Council estimates it at only between 15 and 30 percent.⁶ The EIA estimates the capacity factor for solar energy at 28 percent; the industry itself gives a lower range of between 10 and 25 percent.⁷

These are interesting discrepancies between government and industry estimates.

More here.

Michael Schaeffer Omer-Man in 972 Magazine:

In the first four episodes of what promises to be a biting satirical critique of Israeli society, Avi, whose too-bad-to-be-true persona seems to be throwing a good number of her viewers for a loop, transitions from a what-the-hell-is-going-on episode full of tips for future Birthright participants to more serious attempts at journalism. Take, for instance, the episode where she comes up with her own offensive solution for the Israeli-Palestinian conflict at Tel Aviv’s Pride Parade.

Asked to describe what the hell it is that she’s doing, Avi, who isn’t quite a real person, says: “think hard-hitting journalism with a sexy Zionist touch. I’m a cross between Oprah, Golda Meir, Fiddler on the Roof, and Bar Rafieli.” She’s also unabashedly racist, refuses to recognize the existence of the Palestinian people, and understands the nuances of Israeli society about as well as Benjamin Netanyahu understands Islam.

However, when Avi offered to give an interview to +972, I couldn’t resist. So with a healthy dose of willful suspension of disbelief, I sat down with Ms. Schwartzberger this week to discuss how she became the young woman she is today, what she hopes to accomplish with her “journalism,” and the intersectionality of indigenous struggles from Palestine to Nova Scotia.

Tell me about yourself. How did you end up in Israel and why are you making this video series?

I’m a Canadian Jewess who came to Israel on a Birthright trip and fell in love with the holy land. The guys were so hot I decided to stay.

Also, I wanted to make something viral to make all the haters shut up. So many people are hating on Israel and I wanted to show my friends, the Jews and non-Jews back home, the real Israel — not the “evil” Israel they show on anti-Semitic CNN.

More here.

Doce Mel

we were hot and thirsty
so we went into a tiny place to get an agua com gás
the place was called
Doce Mel
the woman who served us was tiny
and she wore a kind of turban hat

before we left we noticed they had
pudim and suco de açai
so we planned to come back after climbing the 1000 steps

when we came back
the tiny woman with the turban hat
greeted us like
long lost old friends
we had pudim
it was the best we’d ever tasted
we had a pitcher of açai juice
oh how we missed açai
we asked her about the other cakes in the display case
when she said, “aipim bolo com coco”
Julie nodded
so she brought us a piece
it was the best we’d ever tasted

I wanted to let her know how happy she’d made us
I wanted to tell her what a special place she made in this world
but we just smiled
and thanked her and left

by Robert Markey
from Poems from Brazil

________________________________________

doce mel: sweet honey
agua com gás: carbonated water
pudim: pudding
suco de açai: açai juice
aipim bolo com coco: cassava cake with coconut
.
.

Brittney Cooper in Salon:

President Obama gave an unprecedented speech focused exclusively on the social plight of Black women and girls at the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation’s annual weekend of events. This speech represents a moment of triumph for intersectional politics, a term Black feminist scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw invented to describe the ways that racism, sexism and classism work in interlocking fashion to make Black and other women of color invisible in the broader body politic. But Black feminists have also argued for several decades now that placing Black women at the center of political discourses about race and gender would have a positive effect on every marginalized group. Addressing the disproportionate poverty Black women face necessarily helps other women who struggle with poverty. Combating racism helps all people of color and not just Black women. And dealing with the war on women and its effects on Black women automatically improves the condition of other races of women.

As the president noted, Black women’s work “to expand civil rights opened the doors of opportunity, not just for African-Americans, but for all women, for all of us – black and white, Latino and Asian, LGBT and straight, for our First Americans and our newest Americans.” Using Black women’s narratives to highlight the struggles of other groups of marginalized Americans in the extensive way that Obama did on Saturday simply has never been done before in American public life.

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

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)