Ralph Keyes in The American Scholar:

Soon after they arrived in America, British settlers got busy with an important task: reinventing their language. This called for repurposing old words and coining new ones. Colonists called the plump, smelly rodents they encountered in swamps muske rats. Other forms of wildlife were named katydids, bobcats, catfish, and whippoorwills. To these settlers, sleigh improved on sledge, and the help reflected their values better than servants. “The new circumstances under which we are placed,” observed Thomas Jefferson, “call for new words, new phrases, and for the transfer of old words to new objects.”

“Necessity,” he concluded, “obliges us to neologize.” According to the Oxford English Dictionary, Jefferson is the first person known to have used the termneologize, in an 1813 letter. It is one of 110 words whose earliest use the OED credits to him. Others include indescribable, pedicure, and electioneer.

Once they caught wind of all the new words being coined across the Atlantic, self-appointed guardians of the King’s English were rather cross. When Jefferson used the new word belittle in his 1781 book Notes on the State of Virginia, a British critic exclaimed, “It may be an elegant [word] in Virginia, and even perfectly intelligible; but for our part, all we can do is to guess at its meaning. For shame, Mr. Jefferson!” Undaunted, the third president proceeded to coin Anglophobia.

More here.

Tunku Varadarajan in The Daily Beast:

More here.

Erle C. Ellis in the New York Times:

Many scientists believe that by transforming the earth’s natural landscapes, we are undermining the very life support systems that sustain us. Like bacteria in a petri dish, our exploding numbers are reaching the limits of a finite planet, with dire consequences. Disaster looms as humans exceed the earth’s natural carrying capacity. Clearly, this could not be sustainable.

This is nonsense. Even today, I hear some of my scientific colleagues repeat these and similar claims — often unchallenged. And once, I too believed them. Yet these claims demonstrate a profound misunderstanding of the ecology of human systems. The conditions that sustain humanity are not natural and never have been. Since prehistory, human populations have used technologies and engineered ecosystems to sustain populations well beyond the capabilities of unaltered “natural” ecosystems.

The evidence from archaeology is clear. Our predecessors in the genus Homo used social hunting strategies and tools of stone and fire to extract more sustenance from landscapes than would otherwise be possible.

More here.

Henry Gould in The Critical Flame:

Lissa Wolsak is a major American poet, living in Vancouver; Squeezed Light is a comprehensive gathering of her published work, which includes seven poem-sequences, a prose piece titled “An Heuristic Prolusion”, an interview, and an extended introduction by George Quasha (with Charles Stein).

“Major” is a weighty word, not to be trifled with; yet I feel confident in this case. It has become a commonplace to note that American poetry is various, fractured, “balkanized”—but if we think of the distinctive American stream in English writing, we must reckon with a single, branching river. That is, we are dealing on the one hand with the brilliant, idiosyncratic, metaphysically-ambitious, transcendental Emerson, Whitman, Dickinson—and on the other with a darker channel: the melancholic, skeptical, ironic “power of blackness” (Harry Levin’s term) represented primarily by Poe and Melville. Lissa Wolsak floats her boat where both streams merge. She is an heir to their astringent, challenging, and problematic greatness.

put me on the dune
oval
sloping
this is,
she, made, undertaken…

T.S. Eliot once famously wrote, “poetry in our civilization, as it exists today, must be difficult.” In this regard, Lissa Wolsak demands the reader Walt Whitman required: an athlete—alert, engaged, willing to wrestle both angels and devils in order to grasp the poem.

More here. [Thanks to Daniel Pritchard.]

From Conservative Magazine:

The Chinese probably eat the world’s greatest diversity of wild beasts. As their national appetite grows, American biologists are wondering, where have all the turtles gone?

There is an often repeated Chinese joke that says, “In southern China people eat everything on four legs except tables, everything that flies except planes, and everything in the water except boats.” I had heard the saying before and already knew that China is arguably the world’s most adventurous culinary destination. Over the decade I had lived in China, I had learned that almost everything that moves is considered edible. I had been served snake soups and tiny pigeons roasted on long skewers. At a banquet in Sichuan province, the host had placed a heaping mound of fried bees in front of me. I once reluctantly joined two friends for a boiling hot pot meal that included the genitals of various animals. I had passed countless restaurants displaying a wide array of unusual food: in backwater towns, restaurants commonly displayed the skinned carcasses of cats and dogs, their muzzles frozen in permanent snarls; in wealthier cities, seafood was more common—giant shark fins, sometimes tied in red bows and always bearing outlandish price tags, held prominent space in front windows; turtles and fish peered with dull expressions from dirty glass tanks.

And I had seen more exotic fare. At the edge of a national park in Hunan province, a restaurant owner had shown me a thick black snake that she said was called the “three-step”: one bite, and the victim would take three steps before collapsing. Boiled, it cost a few hundred yuan. Outside a wildlife sanctuary in Sichuan province, an official happy to be hosting an American guest presented me with a plate of what he said was a wild local deer. He told me it had been killed in the park and was healthier than farm-raised animals. To maintain our friendship, I took a few bites of the tough, gamey meat. A Chinese friend described being served meat from wild pangolins and monkeys at an expensive restaurant in southern China.

More here.

Stephen Greenblatt on Joss Whedon's Much Ado About Nothing, in the NYRB:

In a curious way the central figure in the splendid new film of Much Ado About Nothing, directed by Joss Whedon (Buffy the Vampire Slayer, The Avengers), is the house in which the events unfold. Not that the house—Whedon’s own—is particularly remarkable. It is a comfortable, sprawling Santa Monica McMansion, no doubt very expensive, with more than a touch of a suburb about it. But that is the point: we are not in faraway Sicily, where Shakespeare set the story, or in glorious, technicolor Tuscany, where Kenneth Branagh set his admirable film adaptation twenty years ago. We are rather on familiar ground, and, as if to conjure up the ordinary accoutrements of modern American upper-middle-class life, the camera dwells lovingly on the kitchen counter and the wine glasses and the piles of dishes and the stairs that lead up to the pleasant patio and, discreetly hidden, the video screens scanned by the bumbling employees of a security company—Whedon’s clever incarnation of Messina’s night watchmen.

All of this familiarity makes the circumstances that set the story in motion in Shakespeare and in his sources seem particularly discordant and weird. They were strange enough to begin with. Shakespeare followed his principal source, a story by the Italian monk Matteo Bandello, in having a Spanish army commander, Prince Don Pedro of Aragon, and several of his officers arrive in Messina, in the wake of a successful military campaign, for a month’s stay as the guests of the town’s governor, Leonato. The awkwardness such a stay would inevitably entail is heightened by the fact that Don Pedro brings with him his disgraced bastard brother, Don John, who is under a kind of uneasy house arrest. The situation calls for an elaborate exercise of courtesy: everyone knows that there is no choice about the visit, but everyone has to behave as if they were witnessing an act of unconstrained hospitality.

More here.

Carl Zimmer in The New York Times:

From biology class to “C.S.I.,” we are told again and again that our genome is at the heart of our identity. Read the sequences in the chromosomes of a single cell, and learn everything about a person’s genetic information — or, as 23andme, a prominent genetic testing company, says on its Web site, “The more you know about your DNA, the more you know about yourself.” But scientists are discovering that — to a surprising degree — we contain genetic multitudes. Not long ago, researchers had thought it was rare for the cells in a single healthy person to differ genetically in a significant way. But scientists are finding that it’s quite common for an individual to have multiple genomes. Some people, for example, have groups of cells with mutations that are not found in the rest of the body. Some have genomes that came from other people. “There have been whispers in the matrix about this for years, even decades, but only in a very hypothetical sense,” said Alexander Urban, a geneticist at Stanford University. Even three years ago, suggesting that there was widespread genetic variation in a single body would have been met with skepticism, he said. “You would have just run against the wall.”

But a series of recent papers by Dr. Urban and others has demonstrated that those whispers were not just hypothetical. The variation in the genomes found in a single person is too large to be ignored. “We now know it’s there,” Dr. Urban said. “Now we’re mapping this new continent.” Dr. James R. Lupski, a leading expert on the human genome at Baylor College of Medicine, wrote in a recent review in the journal Science that the existence of multiple genomes in an individual could have a tremendous impact on the practice of medicine. “It’s changed the way I think,” he said in an interview. Scientists are finding links from multiple genomes to certain rare diseases, and now they’re beginning to investigate genetic variations to shed light on more common disorders.

More here.

Joseph Stromberg in Smithsonian Magazine:

To the best of our knowledge, the mechanical gear—evenly-sized teeth cut into two different rotating surfaces to lock them together as they turn—was invented sometime around 300 B.C.E. by Greek mechanics who lived in Alexandria. In the centuries since, the simple concept has become a keystone of modern technology, enabling all sorts of machinery and vehicles, including cars and bicycles.

As it turns out, though, a three-millimeter long hopping insect known as Issus coleoptratus beat us to this invention. Malcolm Burrows and Gregory Sutton, a pair of biologists from the University of Cambridge in the U.K., discovered that juveniles of the species have an intricate gearing system that locks their back legs together, allowing both appendages to rotate at the exact same instant, causing the tiny creatures jump forward.

The finding, which was published today in Science, is believed to be the first functional gearing system ever discovered in nature. Insects from the Issus genus, which are commonly called “planthoppers,” are found throughout Europe and North Africa. Burrows and Sutton used electron microscopes and high-speed video capture to discover the existence of the gearing and figure out its exact function.

More here.

Dear Reader,

We are very pleased to collaborate with the Amsterdam-based Dialogue Advisory Group (DAG) to bring to you quarterly online symposia on topics of international peace and justice. This is the fifth in this series of symposia; the first four can be seen here.

DAG is an organization which discreetly assists government, inter-government and other actors to confidentially manage national and international mediation efforts. Among their publicly known activities is DAG’s involvement in verifying the ETA ceasefire in Basque Country and the decommissioning of the weapons of INLA, a dissident Republican armed group in Northern Ireland.

DAG is directed by Ram Manikkalingam who also teaches politics at the University of Amsterdam. He advised the previous President of Sri Lanka during the peace process with the Tamil Tigers and prior to that advised the Rockefeller Foundation’s program in international peace and security.

In the DAG-3QD Peace and Justice Symposia internationally recognized figures will debate challenges in conflict resolution and human rights. One (or more) author(s) will present a thesis in the form of a short essay and then the others will present critiques of that point of view. Finally, the initial author(s) will also have an opportunity to present a rebuttal to the critiques.

The topic this time is “The Elusive Quest for Political Stability: Diverging Approaches by the United States, Russia, and China in Central Asia and Beyond”.

The distinguished participants in this symposium:

• Alexander Cooley is Professor of Political Science at Barnard College. He is also a Doctoral Dissertation Sponsor in Columbia University’s Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, a Faculty Member of The Harriman Institute, Saltzman Institute for War and Peace Studies, and teaches at the School of International and Public Affairs. Cooley is the author of four academic books: Logics of Hierarchy: The Organization of Empires, States and Military Occupations (Cornell 2005; cowinner of the 2006 Marshall Shulman Prize); Base Politics­: Democratic Change and the US Military Overseas (Cornell 2008, Reviews: JFQ, APSR, PSQ, and Military Review); and Contracting States: Sovereign Transfers in International Relations(Princeton 2009), co-authored with Hendrik Spruyt of Northwestern University. Cooley latest book examines the multipolar politics of US-Russia-China competition for influence in Central Asia–Great Games, Local Rules: The New Great Power Contest for Central Asia (Oxford 2012).

• Pavel Baev is a Norwegian political scientist and security scholar. He is currently a research professor at the Peace Research Institute Oslo (PRIO) and a senior nonresident fellow at the Brookings Institution (Washington, DC). Baev graduated from Moscow State University (M.A. in economic and political geography, 1979) and worked in a research institute in the USSR Ministry of Defence. He received his PhD in international relations from the Institute for US and Canadian Studies in Moscow in 1988, then worked in the newly created Institute of Europe in Moscow until 1992, when he moved to Oslo, Norway and joined PRIO. In 1994-1996, he held a ‘Democratic Institutions Fellowship” from NATO. From 1995-2001, Baev was co-editor of the academic journal Security Dialogue, and From 1999-2005 he was a member of the PRIO board. Baev’s current research includes the transformation of the Russian military, Russia – European Union relations, Russia’s energy policy, Russia’s policy in the Arctic, terrorism and conflicts in theCaucasus. Baev is the author of several books.

• David Lewis is senior lecturer at the University of Bradford in the Department of Peace Studies. He has research interests in the areas of peacebuilding, security, political change and conflict, and has considerable field experience in Central Asia, the Caucasus and South Asia. Before working in Bradford, David worked at the International Crisis Group in Central Asia and in Sri Lanka. His publications have focused on political change and the dynamics of authoritarian regimes in Central Asia. His recent book The Temptations of Tyranny in Central Asia (Hurst/Columbia University Press, 2008) examined the impact of Western policy on the region in the aftermath of 9/11. David is also an active adviser and consultant on political engagement and programming in the Caucasus and Central Asia. David has also been working on the impact of global geopolitical change on peace and conflict norms and practices. Within the same research framework, David has been awarded a British Academy grant to study shifting international norms within the OSCE and the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation. 

I would like to thank the participants as well as Ram Manikkalingam, Fleur Ravensbergen, Daniël Grütters, Michelle Gehrig, and the indefatigable Amanda Beugeling of the Dialogue Advisory Group for working closely with me in organizing these symposia. The logo for the symposium has also been designed by Amanda Beugeling.

We look forward to your comments and feedback.

Yours,

S. Abbas Raza

NOTE: DAG and 3QD wish to acknowledge the generous contribution of the Dutch Stichting Democratie en Media toward these symposia, as well as the support of our readers.

THE SYMPOSIUM

[Click the links below to read the essays.]

1. The Elusive Quest for Political Stability: Diverging Approaches by the United States, Russia, and China in Central Asia and Beyond by Alexander Cooley
2. The Stability Paradox in Central Asia by Pavel Baev
3. Caveats to Cooley’s Argument by David Lewis
4. A Response to Baev and Lewis by Alexander Cooley

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Please leave comments about any of the essays in the symposium in the comments area of this post. Thank you.

by Alexander Cooley

The post-Soviet region of Central Asia is frequently viewed as an arena of Great Power competition and contemporary geopolitical maneuvering. But officials from the United States, Russia and China publicly deny any rivalry, citing their shared interest in promoting regional prosperity and “stability.” The latter has become a scripted trope, trotted out alongside periodic warnings that the region has the potential to become “failed,” “ungoverned” or run over by militants from surrounding regions. Whatever their exact regional strategies, surely all external powers share the common goal of maintaining a stable “Central Asia.”

Yet, what exactly do we mean by “political stability”? Do the regional actions of the “big three” actually match such a shared vision? And what lessons might this maneuvering among external patrons hold for other regions such as the post-Arab Spring Middle East, Africa and Southeast Asia?

My basic argument in this essay is that the public emphasis on “political stability” masks a more fundamental debate that we are reluctant to have about the underlying factors that might promote political order and responsive governance in an increasingly multipolar world. This is all the more pressing in areas such as Central Asia where local strongmen agendas increasingly intersect with the security cooperation of multiple external patrons.

The most frequently used definition of stability, drawing upon Samuel Huntington's still influential concept of “political order,” is the absence of political violence. But throughout the region, the term has also been used as a synonym for political loyalty, regime longevity, the durability of informal political institutions, and the need to clamp down on all forms of political opposition.

The region's “stability” has also varied by state. In small Kyrgyzstan, host to both US and Russian military facilities, has witnessed two revolutions (in 2005 and 2010) and a violent conflict among ethnic Uzbeks and Kyrgyz in the south of the country in 2010. On the other end, Turkmenistan, outwardly, at least appears the most depoliticized, having seamlessly transitioned from the repressive personality cult of President Saparmurat Niyazov to the equally indulgent Gurbanguly Berdhimuhamedow. Uzbekistan, Tajikistan and Kazakhstan have all experienced bouts of political violence, mostly because of internal grievances, though their governments have been keen to blame such outbreaks on subversive and destabilizing foreign influences. Cumulatively, external engagement has contributed to the region's “securitization” and the consolidation of power by ruling authoritarians.

Read more »

by Pavel Baev

In the 22 years long post-Soviet period, Central Asia has remained far more stable than standard risk analysis would predict, given the intensity of internal tensions and disagreement between external impacts. Alex Cooley demonstrates convincingly the deep differences between the US, Russia and China in defining what “stability” in this geographically land-locked and politically anti-modern region is about; he is also absolutely right in arguing that these differences do not amount to direct competition, for which the cliché “New Great Game” has long been coined – and never made any sense. He may be not quite correct, however, reducing the emphasis on “stability” to a “convenient rhetorical exercise”. What is really odd about these three policies is that each of them is based on a particular definition of “stability” – and is executed in a way that is not compatible with it. This incompatibility of the proclaimed aims and employed means constitutes a “stability paradox”, which is set to acquire a dramatic character as the interplay between various conflicts in the region escalates, while the regimes are fast approaching their respective expiration dates.

Starting with the US, we can see that this paradox cuts deeper than just sacrificing the compromised “democracy promotion” for the access to the infrastructure supporting the Northern Distribution Network. The fundamental premise of the US strategic assessment is that stability in Central Asia could only be achieved through the transformation of the corrupt authoritarian regimes towards what Cooley calls “responsive governance”, as well as through building a regional security system with the support of the European NATO allies and the EU. In reality, all efforts at fostering cooperation between Central Asian states have long been abandoned as useless, while the joint work with the allies is centered on securing safe withdrawal from Afghanistan. The EU has lost whatever “soft power” it tried to project and accepted its inability to play even a supportive role in Central Asia. The pragmatic approach of the Obama administration to doing security business with Uzbekistan and Tajikistan directly contributes to consolidation of the despotic regimes (Cooley’s term “normative regression” appears rather academic for this ugly process). This is completely at cross-purposes with the proposition for encouraging democratic reforms, moderating corruption and curtailing narco-trafficking.

Russia has no doubt about identifying stability in Central Asia with continuation of the ruling regimes, obviously reflecting on the domestic ideological dogma that only the “verticality of power” created by President Vladimir Putin holds the country from collapsing into anarchy and disintegration. Contrary to this article of faith, Moscow orchestrated the coup against the Bakiyev regime in Kyrgyzstan in April 2010, stopped abruptly importing gas from Turkmenistan in April 2009, thus putting in peril Berdymuhammedov’s regime, and picked quite a few quarrels with Karimov’s regime in Uzbekistan, which constitutes the key link in the chain of despotic regimes in the region. Russia also puts a strong emphasis on the strengthening of regional security system structured first of all by the Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO) and other institutions, including the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO). This institution-building falls far short of “an almost demonstrative obsession with projecting influence” (as Cooley argues). It has provided for plenty of high-level networking but for very little hard substance. Russia has never put serious resources behind this political aim and is not building sufficient military muscle for performing convincingly the role of “stability provider”. Its failure to intervene into the Osh riots in summer 2010, was caused by the shortage of projectable power, and no “rapid deployment corps” will spring to life in the course of badly mismanaged military reform.

Read more »

by David Lewis

I share Alex's concerns about the increasingly widespread vision of ‘political stability' : it leads to dangerous complacency about authoritarian states and their often violent legacies. The crisis in Syria reminds us again that almost every US foreign policy crisis of the past two decades has come through misreading the politics of authoritarian states. Central Asia is yet another region where the lure of short-term, authoritarian stability disguises the real political, social and economic challenges these countries face.

But I want to add a couple of caveats to his argument in relation to Central Asia, because I think that some of the old liberal tropes about the region need to be revisited and rescripted.

Firstly, the alternatives to the mantra of stability are not simple: rapid regime change in the Middle East has produced a real possibility of political renewal, but also mass violence, renewed authoritarianism and social and economic collapse. In the post-Soviet world, processes of regime change have also provoked civil conflict and ethnic violence. Russia and China may appear obsessed with regime stability, but both experienced 20^th century revolutions that led directly to the deaths of tens of millions of people. Not surprising that they have less romantic ideas about revolution than most Americans.

And it is not only elites in Central Asia who support these discourses of stability: many ordinary people are wary of the allure of radical political change, when the outcomes are so uncertain, and alternatives not easy to identify. The choices are often between religious radicals, corrupt oligarchs in exile or marginalised secular liberals. A majority of the population certainly want more freedom, prosperity and justice, but finding viable channels to articulate and institutionalise these concerns is not easy.

None of this excuses the repression that blights so many people's lives in countries such as Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan. Managed reform is clearly the best option, but the international community has been weak in maintaining pressure for change and too willing to go along with the short-term stability that such regimes represent. As Alex argues, these authoritarian states are building up tensions that will surely make any future political development incredibly difficult and prone to conflict. But a recognition that stability is important to people who actually live in the region does highlight the need for advocates of reform to have responsible ideas on how to manage political change.

Read more »

by Alexander Cooley

I am pleased to respond to the important points raised by Pavel Baev and David Lewis, both long-time and insightful observers of Eurasia and its rapidly changing politics.

Pavel's point about the “stability paradox” (a term he might consider patenting), or how great powers such as the United States, Russia and China actively pursue policies that ultimately undermine even their own visions of the concept, is right on target, so I will confine myself to discussing the implications of my argument for the post-Spring and current developments in Syria.

Rather than provide any one set of clear lessons, the Arab Spring and subsequent developments appear to have reinforced these varying external assumptions about the determinants of “stability.” In hindsight, Western policymakers and commentators now view the 2011 upheavals as a long-term consequence of decades of political stagnation and kleptocracy, with the Tunisian spark quickly generating regional demonstration in other countries with these same characteristics.

But in practice, translating such hindsight into new Western policies has remained difficult. Indeed, the US pursued dramatically different policies towards Egypt, Libya, Bahrain and Jordan, in great part because of enduring concerns over “access stability.” In Egypt, for instance, following the Egyptian military's overthrow of President Morsi and post-coup the Obama Administration has struggled mightily to reconcile its enduring need for security cooperation and access to Suez with its own legal guidelines, such as the Leahy Law, mandating aid termination.

As with US policy towards Uzbekistan, the parsing of various categories of US military assistance and activities and calls for “political engagement” in the service of encouraging incremental political reform might facilitate internal bureaucratic policy compromises, but abroad it mostly signals confusion, inconsistency and hypocrisy. Moreover, in Egypt, like in Central Asia, the political conditions accompanying assistance have become weaker still given the availability of other external patrons in the event of US aid cut-offs. As Stephen Cook of the Council on Foreign Relations has observed regarding US military assistance to Cairo, “We allegedly have influence but we never used the lever of the influence; so as a result we don't have any.”

Read more »

Dear Reader,

It is with great excitement and pleasure that I present to you the new version of 3 Quarks Daily. You will have already noticed our bold new look, I am sure. Here is a summary of some of the new features:

1. Site width has been explanded to 1024 pixels and a column added on the left side to make the look more symmetrical and reduce clutter in the right-hand column.
2. A randomly chosen main banner is displayed from a list of interesting images contributed by various artist and photographer friends of 3QD. If you don't like the banner image, just refresh the page by clicking the main banner and you'll get a different one. Try it now, it's kind of addictive!
3. There is a new menu bar and new pages which are under construction at the moment. We are in the process of organizing the information for the prizes and symposia in a better way. We will also be updating the Monday Magazine page with a better design a little bit later.
4. The “Search” function in the menu bar finally works properly!
5. At the bottom of each post are new social media buttons to allow you to share that post on Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, LinkedIn, Pinterest, and other sites, or just to email it to a friend.
6. The biggest change of all is that we have switched to a very powerful comments platform called Disqus and have imported all existing 75,000+ comments into this new system. This will allow you to do many useful things, such as:
   • Threaded comments: one can comment not just on the post, but on other comments as well.
   • Subscribe via email: you can do this to be notified of new comments on a given comment thread.
   • Edit or delete your own comments after publishing them.
   • Vote comments up or down.
   • Share comments via social media.
   • Include pictures in comments.
   • And much more.
7. The HTML code for the entire site has been cleaned up and updated and we hope you'll notice that the site loads significantly more quickly than before.

We had to overcome a number of hurdles and so it has taken us a while to roll out this new version but I hope you'll agree that it has been worth the wait. We have tried to maintain a degree of continuity with our old design while adding new features and giving the site a more contemporary look.

The overall layout and banner logo have been designed by me, and I have tried to keep it as simple and clean as possible. Banner images have been contributed by Terri Amig, Carla Goller, Tom Hilde, Georg Hofer, Sheherbano Husain, Margit Oberrauch, Sughra Raza, Hartwig Thaler, and me. I would especially like to thank Henry Molofsky who worked energetically with me on various aspects of the design. And last, but not by any means least, the new features have been expertly coded by Dumky de Wilde, to whom goes much credit and many thanks.

Goodbye, old 3QD!

As you can imagine, there will inevitably be some bugs and it will take a little time before everything starts humming along smoothly, so please be patient as we try to fix any problems and do bring anything wrong that you notice to our attention. Please keep in mind that it always takes a few days to get used to a new look!

I really, really, hope you like the changes but even if you don't we would love to know what you think. Please do give us some feedback in the comments section of this post, including on the new comments system itself.

Yours,

Abbas

P.S. This post will stay on top for a few days as explanation of the new stuff for returning readers. New posts are just below this one.

From the New York Times:

You were born in Kenya and spent your early childhood there. What kinds of books did you read while growing up in Africa?

The greatest novel to come out of Kenya is, in my admittedly limited opinion, one of the great novels of the English language, and it is lamentably neglected by literary connoisseurs: Elspeth Huxley’s “Red Strangers,” a saga sweeping through four generations of a Kikuyu family, based on the author’s sympathetic and lifelong familiarity with that tribe. Beginning before the coming of the white men, she takes us readers into the Kikuyu world and mind so successfully that when the British finally arrive, we find their ways as quaint and alien as if they were invading Martians. We feel at home in an economy pegged to the goat standard (as I put it in my introduction to the Penguin reprint of the book), and we share the tribal indignation that rupees cannot, as promised, be “changed into goats.” Huxley’s descriptive powers rival Steinbeck’s, with the added subtlety that her metaphors and imagery are drawn from the Kikuyu mind. The pasture “gleamed like a parrot’s wing.” A felled tree “tottered like a drunken elder.”

More here.

Salman Hameed in The Express Tribune:

Here is the recipe: You take two stars that are orbiting each other. This is not as hard as it seems. Nearly half of all stars in our own Galaxy have at least one other star in its system. But make sure that both of these stars are at least 10 times bigger than our Sun. Then wait about 10 million years. This is the average lifetime of big stars. They will eventually exhaust all their fuel and explode in their individual supernovae. All that will be left of them will be their cores, called neutron stars. These are some of the strangest objects in the universe. Each of the neutron star contains mass equal to that of our Sun, but all packed in a size no greater than a city like Karachi. This means that they have very high density. A teaspoon of neutron star material would weigh as much as a mountain. Now you have two of these neutron stars orbiting each other. But orbits for such exotic objects are unstable. The two stars will eventually collide with each other — and this collision will result in the creation of gold and other rare elements.

However, in an act of ultimate charity, these elements are spread into the surrounding space.

By the time our Solar system was born, many such collisions had enriched our Galaxy with gold (and other elements). The gas cloud that formed the Sun and the Earth already contained these elements. Some of this gold became part of the Earth. Four-and-a-half billion years later, this rare element caught the attention of bipedal species and it became an object of desire and envy.

More here.

Ian Lustick in the NYT:

The Palestinian Authority needs its people to believe that progress is being made toward a two-state solution so it can continue to get the economic aid and diplomatic support that subsidize the lifestyles of its leaders, the jobs of tens of thousands of soldiers, spies, police officers and civil servants, and the authority’s prominence in a Palestinian society that views it as corrupt and incompetent.

Israeli governments cling to the two-state notion because it seems to reflect the sentiments of the Jewish Israeli majority and it shields the country from international opprobrium, even as it camouflages relentless efforts to expand Israel’s territory into the West Bank.

American politicians need the two-state slogan to show they are working toward a diplomatic solution, to keep the pro-Israel lobby from turning against them and to disguise their humiliating inability to allow any daylight between Washington and the Israeli government.

Finally, the “peace process” industry — with its legions of consultants, pundits, academics and journalists — needs a steady supply of readers, listeners and funders who are either desperately worried that this latest round of talks will lead to the establishment of a Palestinian state, or that it will not.

Conceived as early as the 1930s, the idea of two states between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea all but disappeared from public consciousness between 1948 and 1967. Between 1967 and 1973 it re-emerged, advanced by a minority of “moderates” in each community. By the 1990s it was embraced by majorities on both sides as not only possible but, during the height of the Oslo peace process, probable. But failures of leadership in the face of tremendous pressures brought Oslo crashing down. These days no one suggests that a negotiated two-state “solution” is probable. The most optimistic insist that, for some brief period, it may still be conceivable.

Richard Marshall interviews Timothy Williamson in 3:AM Magazine:

3:AM: Alex Rosenberg thinks that understanding the nature of maths will rest on the success that science has had so far in making sense of everything else. He bets that an epistemology explaining how we know a priori synthetic truths will come from science not analytic philosophy. And he also points out that even if you’re right that naturalists have no handle on mathematical truths, neither do non-naturalists. How do you respond?

TW: Alex bravely defends what I think of as the worst beliefs associated with the word ‘naturalism’, the scientism and the reductionism. He claims that only the methodology of natural science produces genuine knowledge. I pointed to mathematics as a glaring counterexample. He admits that it’s a problem for his view, but has faith that somehow or other, he has no idea how, the methodology of natural science will solve the problem and show that mathematics isn’t really a counterexample after all. There is no symmetry between his view and mine with respect to mathematics. On the face of it, mathematics is a massive counterexample to his view. On the face of it, mathematics is perfectly consistent with my view. His view requires mathematics to be either reduced to natural science or ditched. He can’t ditch it, because natural science itself uses mathematics all the time, and he has no idea how to reduce it to natural science. My view involves no such dilemma. Mathematics is fine as it is, without being reduced to anything else. He can’t find the sort of handle on mathematics his view says he needs. My view says no such handle is needed.

Furthermore, it’s not even approximately true that natural science has had success in making sense of everything but mathematics, if that involves showing that other forms of genuine human knowledge resulted from the methodology of the natural sciences. We have massive knowledge of history that doesn’t come from that methodology. Of course, some naturalists in a watered-down sense would stretch their understanding of the methodology to cover past and present historical scholarship. But Alex Rosenberg doesn’t do that, he just dismisses history as a source of genuine knowledge. If he wants to enact a reductio ad absurdum of his own extremist brand of naturalism, that’s fine by me.