John Edward Terrell in the NYT's The Stone (photo Brian Snyder/Reuters):

At least part of the schism between Republicans and Democrats is based in differing conceptions of the role of the individual. We find these differences expressed in the frequent heated arguments about crucial issues like health care and immigration. In a broad sense, Democrats, particularly the more liberal among them, are more likely to embrace the communal nature of individual lives and to strive for policies that emphasize that understanding. Republicans, especially libertarians and Tea Party members on the ideological fringe, however, often trace their ideas about freedom and liberty back to Enlightenment thinkers of the 17th and 18th centuries, who argued that the individual is the true measure of human value, and each of us is naturally entitled to act in our own best interests free of interference by others. Self-described libertarians generally also pride themselves on their high valuation of logic and reasoning over emotion.

Philosophers from Aristotle to Hegel have emphasized that human beings are essentially social creatures, that the idea of an isolated individual is a misleading abstraction. So it is not just ironic but instructive that modern evolutionary research, anthropology, cognitive psychology and neuroscience have come down on the side of the philosophers who have argued that the basic unit of human social life is not and never has been the selfish, self-serving individual. Contrary to libertarian and Tea Party rhetoric, evolution has made us a powerfully social species, so much so that the essential precondition of human survival is and always has been the individual plus his or her relationships with others.

This conclusion is unlikely to startle anyone who is at all religious or spiritual. When I was a boy I was taught that the Old Testament is about our relationship with God and the New Testament is about our responsibilities to one another. I now know this division of biblical wisdom is too simple. I have also learned that in the eyes of many conservative Americans today, religion and evolution do not mix. You either accept what the Bible tells us or what Charles Darwin wrote, but not both. The irony here is that when it comes to our responsibilities to one another as human beings, religion and evolution nowadays are not necessarily on opposite sides of the fence.

More here.

Michael Dirda at The Washington Post:

As late as the 1970s, it was hard to find Philip Larkin’s poetry in American bookstores. I remember searching all over Washington for his first collection, “The North Ship” (1945), before locating a paperback in the now long-gone Daedalus Bookshop next to the Uptown Theater. I already owned shabby copies of “The Less Deceived” (1955), “The Whitsun Weddings” (1964) and “High Windows” (1974), but I can no longer remember how I first discovered Larkin’s work. It was certainly prior to Noel Perrin’s moving essay on the long poem “Church Going,” part of the wonderful series of “Rediscoveries” he wrote for Book World in the 1980s and later collected in “A Reader’s Delight.”

Today, of course, Philip Larkin (1922-1985) is as famous a poet as any in the second half of the 20th century. In England he holds a roughly comparable position to Robert Frost in the United States — a beloved, curmudgeonly figure, with dark corners in his private life, who produced clear, accessible poetry that, once read, could never be forgotten. “Sexual intercourse began/ In nineteen sixty-three/ (which was rather late for me). . . . What will survive of us is love. . . . Age, and then the only end of age. . . . Never such innocence again.”

more here.

Anthony Domestico at berfrois:

The 1932 Obelisk Press edition of Pomes Penyeach came at a crucial juncture in James Joyce’s writing career and in the life and mental health of his daughter, Lucia. At the time, Joyce was internationally renowned for Ulysses and laboring over his Work in Progress; meanwhile, Lucia was descending into the nightmare of schizophrenia, becoming increasingly delusional and erratic in behavior. Joyce had already published Pomes Penyeach, a series of 13 poems written between 1904 and 1924, with Shakespeare and Co. in 1927. In 1931, a publisher named Caresse Crosby, having seen and admired Lucia Joyce’s designs for a musical setting of Joyce’s poems, suggested that Joyce put out a limited edition volume of Pomes Penyeach containing illuminations of the initial letters for each poem. Joyce, eager to believe that some productive work would soothe Lucia’s inner demons and lead her back onto the road to normalcy, jumped at the chance.

Joyce approached Jack Kahane, a founder of Obelisk Press who had previously produced a limited edition of Joyce’s Haveth Childers Everywhere, and the two agreed to terms. With Desmond Harmsworth, Obelisk Press agreed to print a version of Pomes Penyeach that would use Lucia’s drawings and stress the handcrafted, artisanal nature of the book.

more here.

Darrell Hartman at Guernica:

Dry Wood, Les Blank’s 1973 documentary about Creole life and music, throws the viewer headfirst into unfamiliar, almost bizarre, scenes of backwoods theater. It opens with a troupe of revelers costumed in cone hats, clown masks, and frilled jumpsuits, chasing a rooster around a yard. The camera follows their pickup trucks down a country road and into a gas station’s dirt parking lot, where they tip back handles of liquor and dance around while a fiddler plays. Someone throws a handful of pocket change up into the air; they go chasing after that, too.

This sequence of rag-tag Mardi Gras—like Rabelais with tractors and Budweiser—unfolds mostly on its own. No voiceover narrator or talking head chimes in to explain what we’re seeing—there are only the subjects themselves, accompanied by festive strains of zydeco music. Dry Wood becomes a brief immersion in that folk genre, a film that weaves the music into scenes of daily life—especially of celebration—for a dynamic, appreciative portrait of a longstanding American micro-culture.

In short, it’s vintage Blank.

more here.

Frank Rich interviews Chris Rock in Vulture:

What would you do in Ferguson that a standard reporter wouldn’t?

I’d do a special on race, but I’d have no black people.

Well, that would be much more revealing.

Yes, that would be an event. Here’s the thing. When we talk about race relations in America or racial progress, it’s all nonsense. There are no race relations. White people were crazy. Now they’re not as crazy. To say that black people have made progress would be to say they deserve what happened to them before.

Right. It’s ridiculous.

So, to say Obama is progress is saying that he’s the first black person that is qualified to be president. That’s not black progress. That’s white progress. There’s been black people qualified to be president for hundreds of years. If you saw Tina Turner and Ike having a lovely breakfast over there, would you say their relationship’s improved? Some people would. But a smart person would go, “Oh, he stopped punching her in the face.” It’s not up to her. Ike and Tina Turner’s relationship has nothing to do with Tina Turner. Nothing. It just doesn’t. The question is, you know, my kids are smart, educated, beautiful, polite children. There have been smart, educated, beautiful, polite black children for hundreds of years. The advantage that my children have is that my children are encountering the nicest white people that America has ever produced. Let’s hope America keeps producing nicer white people.

It’s about white people adjusting to a new reality?

Owning their actions. Not even their actions. The actions of your dad. Yeah, it’s unfair that you can get judged by something you didn’t do, but it’s also unfair that you can inherit money that you didn’t work for.

Read the full interview here.

Suzi Feay in The Telegraph:

The Marquis de Sade, who died 200 years ago today, lived a turbulent life. He was born into an aristocratic Provençal family, enjoying all the privileges of the ancien régime before it took against him; he kept his head through the French Revolution and died, aged 74, in a lunatic asylum. His libertarian writings alienated two kings, a revolutionary tribunal and an emperor. He spent most of his adult life under lock and key: if they couldn’t get him for being bad, being mad would do. In his final miserable years, Sade was an obese, despised and penniless social outcast. Yet soon after his death in 1814 his reputation began to climb. He was claimed as a hero by writers and artists; in 1839, he was hailed as “one of the glories of France, a martyr… the very high and powerful seigneur de Sade”. He is now a seminal (an unfortunate though apt adjective) cultural figure. In France this year, celebrations are being held in his honour: the Musée D’Orsay is currently hosting an exhibition tracing the influence of Sade on Goya, Géricault and Picasso. The manuscript of his most notorious work, The 120 Days of Sodom, has been bought for seven million euros; his Provençal châteaux is owned by Pierre Cardin and acolytes beat a path there every year.

Sade’s bizarre psychopathy and life story, as much as his gruelling writings, have inspired such disparate figures as Flaubert, Angela Carter, the Surrealists, Camille Paglia and Pier Paolo Pasolini. American Psycho’s Patrick Bateman is a descendant of Sade’s murderous protagonists; Edward St Aubyn’s Patrick Melrose grows up in the shadow of Sade’s chateau, with a violent, abusive father who could have walked straight from the pages of Sade’s 1791 novel Justine. And let’s not forget Moors murderer Ian Brady, whose youthful reading of Sade apparently inspired his fantasies of domination and murder.

More here.

Helene Stapinski in The New York Times:

Behind a black curtain in a downstairs corner of the National Museum of Mathematics in Manhattan (known as MoMath), a small group of mathematicians, designers and engineers was hard at work — laughing, shouting, clapping and having a blast, while being chased by robots. They were doing final testing on an exhibit called Robot Swarm, opening Dec. 14 and featuring dozens of glowing, motorized, interactive robots that resemble horseshoe crabs. The museum says it is the nation’s most technologically ambitious robotics exhibit. But the assembled experts, standing in stocking feet, were as excited as a gaggle of 6-year-olds. Sealed under an 11-by-12-foot glass floor, the small, colored robots swarm, skitter and react to whoever is standing on top of the glass. It is a strangely exhilarating sensation to be shoeless and have creatures — albeit human-made, computer-controlled creatures — react to your every step. “It’s cool, right?” asked a creator of the exhibit, Glen Whitney, who is also a co-founder of the museum. “It’s a feeling of power.”

Four visitors at a time will don harnesses with a small “reflector pod” on the right shoulder. That sends a location signal to overhead cameras, which transmit the information to the robots — which, in turn, move in accord with a variety of programmed settings determined by visitors working a control panel. Set the robots to “Run Away” mode, for example, and you can’t help feeling like Godzilla, stomping around the glass floor and scattering the frightened robots to the far corners of the grid. “Pursue” mode can be downright creepy, with the robots — like giant glowing cockroaches or trilobites — following you everywhere, trying to get as close to you as possible, surrounding you and then refusing to go away — until the algorithm is changed. In the more amusing “Spin” mode, the robots play a game of Simon Says, turning in whatever direction you turn, spinning when you spin.

More here.

Hello,

The editors of 3QD have made their decision. The twenty semifinalists have been winnowed down to six, and three wildcard entries added. Thanks again to all the participants. Details of the prize can be found here.

On the right is a “trophy” logo that our finalists may choose to display on their own blogs.

So, here it is, the final list that I am sending to Huw Price, who will select the 1st, 2nd, and 3rd prize winners from these: (in alphabetical order by blog name here)

1. 3 Quarks Daily: Is applied ethics applicable enough? Acting and hedging under moral uncertainty
   
2. A Philosopher's Take: Moral Resposibility and Volunteer Soldiers
3. Absolute Irony: Nāgārjuna, Nietzsche, and Rorty’s Strange Looping Trick
4. Flickers of Freedom: The Case for Libertarian Compatibilism
5. New York Times, Opinionator: The Dangers of Certainty: A Lesson From Auschwitz
6. Philosopher's Beard: The Case for Ethical Warning Labels on Animal Products
7. Practical Ethics: Why I Am Not a Utilitarian
8. Psychiatric Ethics: Anosognosia and Epistemic Innocence
9. Vihvelin: How Not to Think About Free Will

We'll announce the three winners on December 22, 2014.

Good luck!

Abbas

P.S. The editors of 3QD will not be making any comments on our deliberations, or the process by which we made our decision, other than to simply say that we picked what we thought were the best six posts out of the semifinalists, and added three others which we also liked.

Saud Baloch. Strained and Sustained. 2013.

Latex and fabric.

More here and here.

Dan Goddard in Arts + Culture:

Commissioned for the 2013 Biennial in Sharjah, one of the United Arab Emirates states on the Arabian Peninsula, Shahzia Sikander’s Parallax is a complex, shifting, morphing, evolving, abstract, animated meditation on centuries of global competition for natural resources, the history of maritime trade, foreign control of the Strait of Hormuz during the colonial era and the dramatic conflicts today over the hotly contested strait where 35 percent of the world’s petroleum shipped by sea passes.

With aerial views of the strait drawn from 17th and 18th-century maps, swarming microbe-like forms, a map of the United States with Texas plainly visible, oil gushing from rock formations, locust-like red-white-and-blue arms and shattering Christmas trees, Sikander’s panoramic, three-channel HD single-image video is based on hundreds of small drawings derived from the tradition of Indo-Persian miniature painting that have been digitally animated, accompanied by music by the Chinese-born composer Du Yun and the voices of three local poets from Sharjah, who recite in Arabic.

Making its United States debut at the Linda Pace Foundation, Parallax marks Sikander’s return to San Antonio where she first began experimenting with animation in 2001 as an International Artist in Residence at Artpace. Presented as a widescreen projection through March 7, 2015, the video is a new acquisition by the Pace Foundation.

More here.

Over at Five Books:

Your fourth book deals more directly with racism and its effects, The Dark Side of Democracy: Explaining Ethnic Cleansing by Michael Mann.

When I started my book on racism I was quite open-minded. I started with the Middle Ages, and I thought there was a good hypothesis relating racism in the Western world with the European expansion. The European expansion brought with it the need to classify different peoples of the world, the need to assert European superiority. But I didn’t know where to stop. At the beginning I thought I would stop with Darwin, but then I understood I had to include the 20^th century, because it confirmed even more clearly that racism is triggered by political projects. Michael Mann was extremely useful in my research because he made me understand better the relation between nationalism and racism. In those circumstances, in the 19^thcentury, nationalism based on democracy and citizenship triggered a struggle for territory, for the definition of new countries, mainly in central-eastern Europe and the Balkans. In that part of Europe you still had these composite, multinational empires — the Russian Empire, the Austro-Hungarian empire, the Ottoman Empire. All of these trends of nationalism — which had started at the beginning of the 19^th century in a very generous, internationalist way, with dreams of sharing and cosmopolitanism — were confronted by the revolutions of 1848. Suddenly all these political projects bumped into claims of minorities. For instance, the Czechs had to deal with a strong German minority in the territory they were claiming. The Hungarians were confronted and challenged by Croatians and Romanians in the territories they were claiming. After the failure of the revolutions of 1848, you have a different trend, much narrower, much less cosmopolitan, much more centred in this idea of nation as a collective descent. And democracy, based on citizenship, brought with it the idea of exclusion. When you claim a territory, the issue was to exclude minorities who were struggling for the same territory. So this is the dark side of democracy, and I think Michael Mann saw it very well. Michael Mann is a sociologist, he bases his work mainly on secondary literature, and I must say he does it brilliantly. I am very attracted by his theories and he has several great ideas. I would not follow the way he practices history because I prefer to work on primary sources, but his work was a great inspiration. Also, he links history with sociology. This is another inter-disciplinary approach. We always work with some theoretical framework, and I was very inspired all my life by Max Weber, another sociologist. So I am glad I can still maintain this dialogue with what Michael Mann represents, historical sociology.

More here.

Hisham Matar in The New Yorker:

Here is where the artist Adeline Virginia Stephen was born. She lived in this house, at 22 Hyde Park Gate, in west London, for the first twenty-two years of her life. The whitewashed Victorian façade holds the sunlight brightly when the weather is good. It’s a short walk from here to Yeoman’s Row, and in July, 1902, when she was twenty, she went there to have her portrait taken. She was accompanied, I imagine, by her seventy-year-old father, the noted man of letters Sir Leslie Stephen. I picture them moving side by side: she in the white summer dress worn in the portrait, and he in one of the dark suits he was often cased in, his long, unkempt beard hiding the knot of his black silk necktie. They might have gone around the giant dome of the Royal Albert Hall and into Kensington Gore. Then left on to Princes Consort Road, crossing Exhibition Road, continuing to Princes Gardens, before needling through the quiet back mews till they reach Brompton Road. Second on the right is Yeoman’s Row, where the photographer George Charles Beresford had set up his studio that same year.

It was no doubt an anxious time for Beresford. This was an unexpected turn in his career. After spending four years working as a civil engineer in British India, he had contracted malaria and was forced to return to England. He studied art, and now was hoping to establish himself as a leading photographic portraitist. He would do well. A few days from now, the grand Auguste Rodin would walk through the door and sit facing slightly up, pointing his large temple, with its clump of bulging veins, toward the light. Beresford succeeded in capturing something frivolous and majestic in the French sculptor. The following year, he photographed a somewhat bored and melancholy young Winston Churchill. The year after that, Joseph Conrad sat looking into his lens, unable to altogether conceal his quiet, exile’s anxiety. Between 1902 and 1932, Beresford photographed some of the most noted artists, politicians, intellectuals and socialites of the time. Many of the negatives are now held at the National Portrait Gallery.

What Beresford couldn’t have known that day was that his twenty-year-old sitter, Sir Leslie Stephen’s fourth daughter, was destined to become a writer without whom the pantheon of literature would be incomplete.

More here.

The new Jewish state used the legal techniques of a new Muslim state to deprive its own mainly-Muslim refugees of their properties. How ironic.

Benjamin Pogrund in Haaretz:

Mark Twain’s quip, “Buy land, they’re not making it anymore,” could have served as the Zionist motto. Starting with the arrival in Palestine of Jews from Europe in the late 19th century and accelerating in the 20th century, the drive was to acquire land: to make Jewish settlement possible, to transform Jewish existence from the ghettoes and cities into working the fields, and to fulfill the biblical promise of return to the Land of Israel.

Money was donated by Jews throughout the world and land was bought from Arab landowners on the principle of willing seller, willing buyer.

Yet with all the effort, by 1948 only 5.7 percent of the land of then Palestine had been purchased. The War of Independence that year opened the way to far-reaching changes: the land allocated by the United Nations partition plan to Jews was extended by 38 percent as local Arab militia and invading Arab armies were defeated and driven back.

The government seized the lands of Arabs who had left their homes, whether they fled outside the borders or remained inside. The new state ended up owning some 93 percent of the land, with the rest remaining as private property belonging to Arabs, Jews, Christian churches and the Muslim Waqf.

More here.

Sean Carroll in Preposterous Universe:

This year we give thanks for a technique that is central to both physics and mathematics: the Fourier transform. (We’ve previously given thanks for the Standard Model Lagrangian,Hubble’s Law, the Spin-Statistics Theorem, conservation of momentum, effective field theory, the error bar, gauge symmetry, and Landauer’s Principle.)

Let’s say you want to locate a point in space — for simplicity, on a two-dimensional plane. You could choose a coordinate system (x, y), and then specify the values of those coordinates to pick out your point: (x, y) = (1, 3).

But someone else might want to locate the same point, but they want to use a different coordinate system. That’s fine; points are real, but coordinate systems are just convenient fictions. So your friend uses coordinates (u, v) instead of (x, y). Fortunately, you know the relationship between the two systems: in this case, it’s u = y+x, v = y-x. The new coordinates are rotated (and scaled) with respect to the old ones, and now the point is represented as (u, v) = (4, 2).

Fourier transforms are just a fancy version of changes of coordinates. The difference is that, instead of coordinates on a two-dimensional space, we’re talking about coordinates on an infinite-dimensional space: the space of all functions. (And for technical reasons, Fourier transforms naturally live in the world of complex functions, where the value of the function at any point is a complex number.)

More here.

Tahir Qadiry in BBC News Magazine:

“The reason they gave me for the turmoil in their minds was the uncertainty in their lives. They had no control over what was happening to them. Everything was in the hands of their commanders. They got depressed because they never knew what would happen from one minute to the next.

“Most of them hadn't seen their families for months – they hadn't seen their children who had grown big.”

Alemi found many of the soldiers wanted to die. “They told me they [wanted] to commit suicide, but couldn't because of Islamic values.”

One said: “Every time I go to the frontline, I wish someone would shoot me and bring an end to my life. But I still survive and hate this sort of living.”

“I used to treat the Taliban as human beings, same as I would treat my other patients… even though I knew they had caused all the problems in our society,” says Alemi. “Sometimes, they would weep and I would comfort them.”

One of the main problems was that Alemi's patients were often sent off on missions and could never commit to follow-up sessions.

Consultations cost the equivalent of $1 and the Taliban sometimes sent their wives and daughters to Alemi for treatment as well. “They too were suffering depression, because they wouldn't see their husbands, fathers for a long time and they didn't know what the future held for them.”

Read the rest here.

Samira Shackle in New Humanist:

In Arab countries, openly declaring a disbelief in God is a shocking and sometimes dangerous thing to do. In his new book, “Arabs Without God”, journalist Brian Whitaker looks at the factors that lead people in this part of the world to abandon religion, and how societies dominated by faith deal with them. The book is available here. There is a Kickstarter campaign to translate the book into Arabic, which you can donate to here.

Is Arab atheism growing, and if so, why?

Arab atheists have become much more visible as a result of social media. There are numerous Facebook groups – some public, some private – and others make videos of discussions which they post on YouTube. Mainstream Arab media talk more about atheism too, though it is usually presented as a social problem needing government attention, along with drug-taking and homosexuality. Atheists also seem to be growing in numbers. This may seem odd when organisations like al-Qaeda and ISIS attract so much attention, when there has been a huge growth in religiosity over the last few decades and Arab governments have been fostering sectarianism for their own political purposes, but the “new” Arab atheism found among the younger generation is partly a response to that, and also to the reactionary views of many Muslim clerics, especially in Saudi Arabia.

Another factor is that popular uprisings against dictatorship have emboldened people and made them question things more. Questioning the political system leads some to question religion too – because politics and religion in the Middle East are so closely entwined. At the same time, of course, there are many who think the solution is to have more religion, not less, and atheist activity on the internet is still tiny compared with the vast amount of religious material posted in Arabic.

More here.