Hamza Shaban in New Inquiry:

A friend’s lens captures a tipsy top-shot revealing too much flesh. Or the camera catches the vacant stare of a bro’s pickled pupils, and the picture taker might mockingly pronounce, “I’ll save this when you run for office!” The joke, playfully cynical, drifts dangerously close to a cliff of paranoia. That much of what we digitally compose remains permanently archived, and that we only vaguely recognize the consequences of this, plays neatly into the narrative peddled by some in Silicon Valley—that privacy no longer exists. Zuckerberg’s Law, a convenient trend-as-truth whereby we volunteer evermore information about our intimate livings yearns to become an ethical imperative. The act of revealing rushes with unceasing momentum, unmooring our reservations of exposure. As sociologist Zygmunt Bauman has written, “The fear of disclosure has been stifled by the joy of being noticed.”

By now we’ve been trained to record only those behaviors that reflect well on ourselves, lest our employers interpret our cocktail-crushing prowess the wrong way. But Facebook’s privacy settings are clumsy and easy to circumvent. Elsewhere, blog posts, life-tracking data, consumer preferences, and check-in beacons can just as easily be ripped from their context and misdirected to an unintended audience – and meanwhile, the social networks, publishing platforms and shopping hubs just keep multiplying. For those young people interested in running for office, this poses considerable danger.

To some, the Facebook timeline reads as an explicit chronology of illicit behavior. For most, these personality museums are masterfully curated, conveying an exuberance tamed by professionalism, edginess blunted by responsibility. While we are generally aware of the risks involved in divulging personal information, the popular conception is that our norms of exposure will change. Through mass-unveiling, salacious behavior will become bland.

From The American Prospect:

John Maynard Keynes was the sexiest economist who ever lived. This might seem like half-hearted praise since in our mind’s eye the typical economist appears as a dowdy and almost always balding man, full of prudential advice about thrift and the miracle of compound interest. Keynes, with his caterpillar moustache and mesmerizing bedroom eyes, cut a more dashing figure. He had many lovers of both genders, and was married to one of the great beauties of the age, the ballerina Lydia Lopokova. His genius at playing the stock market allowed him to enjoy the life of bon vivant, socializing with the writers and artists of the Bloomsbury group such as Virginia Woolf and E.M. Forster rather than dull number crunchers he knew at Cambridge and in the British Treasury. While other economists focused on maximizing economic growth, Keynes wanted to go further and maximize the pleasures of life. Given all this, it’s perhaps not surprising that a much-publicized recent attack on the Keynesian policy of using government deficits to overcome economic recession resorted to homophobia to discredit it. Last Friday, in a question and answer session following his lecture, Harvard historian Niall Ferguson startled his audience at the Altegris Strategic Investment Conference in California by calling Keynes a childless gay man who couldn’t give his wife conjugal satisfaction and had no concern for the impact of deficits on posterity. A storm of criticism followed, and in an effort to salvage his reputation, Ferguson—a vocal critic of both President Obama’s mild stimulus policies and the more ambitious Keynesianism of economists like Paul Krugman—quickly and comprehensively apologized, saying his original remarks were “stupid as they were insensitive” and “disagreements with Keynes’s economic philosophy have never had anything to do with his sexual orientation.” Ferguson’s gaffe came in the wake of the recent news that an influential 2010 study by his Harvard colleagues Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff, which had seemed to show a hard threshold beyond which deficits hampered economic growth, turned out to depend heavily on an Excel spread sheet error as well as other elementary methodological flaws. While austerity’s advocates have enjoyed an inexplicable ascendancy in the political world since the beginning of the current great recession, the scrutiny of Ferguson as well as Reinhart and Rogoff has put deficit hawks on the intellectual defensive.

Ferguson’s repudiation of his original homophobic comments should be commended. But Ferguson has a history of making jibes about Keynes’s sexuality. University of Michigan economist Justin Wolfers called attention to the fact that in Ferguson’s 1999 book The Pity of War, Keynes is described as being depressed by World War I, in part, because “the boys he liked to pick up in London all joined up.” Later in the same book, Ferguson toys with the idea that Keynes may have been influenced to become a harsh critic of the Treaty of Versailles by an attraction to the German negotiator Carl Melchior. (Its embarrassing to have to refute arrant nonsense with facts and logic, but Keynes was likely depressed by the war because he didn’t like pointless mass slaughter, while his Treaty of Versailles critique was vindicated by the post-war political and economic chaos he predicted). But there is something deeper and weirder going on here. Homophobic slurs against Keynes, it turns out, have a long pedigree. As both Berkeley economist Brad DeLong and the Washington Monthly’s Kathleen Geier have documented, the attempt to dismiss Keynes as someone heedless about the future because he was a childless gay man has been a staple of conservative thought for nearly seven decades.

More here.

Salman Hameed in Irtiqa:

Pakistan's elections are scheduled for May 11th. There have already been a tremendous number of casualties – mostly by the Taliban (of the Pakistani flavor) targeting the relatively more secular parties. Here is from the horse's mouth:

Taliban shura had decided to target those secular political parties which were part of the previous coalition government and involved in the operation in Swat, Fata and other areas of Khyber Pakhtunkhwah,”adding that “the organisation followed the instructions of the Taliban shura and that it was the shura that decided which political parties to target, where and when.”

To another query that the Taliban were making ground and paving way for some parties to win the elections and denying space to others, he said: “neither we are against nor in favour of the PTI, PML- N, JI and JUI-F,” adding that “We are against the secular and democratic system which is against the ideology of Islam but we are not expecting any good from the other parties either, who are the supporters of the same system, but why they are not targeted is our own prerogative to decide.

Shamefully, none of the parties not targeted by the Taliban have unequivocally condemned this Taliban assault on democracy. But to add to the uncertainty, just a few hours ago, Imran Khan of PTI also got injured when he fell off a lifter while getting on a stage for a political rally. This is big news as he is one of the leading contenders in the upcoming elections.

But what are the major concerns of Pakistanis? The Pew forum has a new survey out that focuses on Pakistan. Perhaps, not surprisingly, crime and terrorism is at the top at 95 and 93% respectively. But note that even Sunni-Shia tensions are labeled as a “very big problem” by over half of the respondents, and the conflict between the government with the judiciary and the military is not considered that much of a problem.

More here.

Sean Carroll at Preposterous Universe:

A few recent events, including the launch of Nautilus and this interesting thread on Brian Leiter’s blog, have brought the John Templeton Foundation (JTF) back into the spotlight. As probably everybody knows, the JTF is a philanthropic organization that supports research into the “Big Questions of human purpose and ultimate reality,” encourages “dialogue among scientists, philosophers, and theologians,” and seeks to use science to acquire “new spiritual information.” They like to fund lots of things I find interesting — cosmology, physics, philosophy — but unfortunately they also like to promote the idea that science and religion are gradually reconciling. (As well as some projects that just seemsilly.) They also have a huge amount of money, and they readily give it away.

I don’t think that science and religion are reconciling or can be reconciled in any meaningful sense, and I believe that it does a great disservice to the world to suggest otherwise. Therefore, way back in the day, I declined an opportunity to speak at a Templeton-sponsored conference. Ever since then, people have given me grief whenever my anti-Templeton fervor seems insufficiently fervent, even though my position — remarkably! — has been pretty consistent over the years. Honestly I find talking about things like this pretty tiresome; politics is important, but substance is infinitely more interesting. And this topic in particular has become even more tiresome as people on various sides have become increasingly emotional and less reflective. But I thought it would be useful to put my thoughts in one place, so I can just link here the next time the subject arises.

In brief: I don’t take money directly from the Templeton Foundation.

More here.

Harriet Sherwood in The Guardian:

Professor Stephen Hawking is backing the academic boycott of Israel by pulling out of a conference hosted by Israeli president Shimon Peres in Jerusalem as a protest at Israel's treatment of Palestinians.

Hawking, 71, the world-renowned theoretical physicist and former Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at the University of Cambridge, had accepted an invitation to headline the fifth annual president's conference, Facing Tomorrow, in June, which features major international personalities, attracts thousands of participants and this year will celebrate Peres's 90th birthday.

Hawking is in very poor health, but last week he wrote a brief letter to the Israeli president to say he had changed his mind. He has not announced his decision publicly, but a statement published by the British Committee for the Universities of Palestine with Hawking's approval described it as “his independent decision to respect the boycott, based upon his knowledge of Palestine, and on the unanimous advice of his own academic contacts there”.

Hawking's decision marks another victory in the campaign for boycott, divestment and sanctions targeting Israeli academic institutions.

More here.

Civilization
.

Those are the people who do complicated things.

they'll grab us by the thousands
and put us to work.

World's going to hell, with all these
villages and trails.
Wild duck flocks aren't
what they used to be.
Aurochs grow rare.

Fetch me my feathers and amber

*

A small cricket
on the typescript page of
“Kyoto born in spring song”
grooms himself
in time with The Well-Tempered Clavier.
I quit typing and watch him through a glass.
How well articulated! How neat!

Nobody understands the ANIMAL KINGDOM.

*

When creeks are full
The poems flow
When creeks are down
We heap stones.
.

by Gary Snyder

From Nature:

An isolated population of Arctic foxes that dines only on marine animals seems to be slowly succumbing to mercury poisoning. The foxes on Mednyi Island — one of Russia’s Commander Islands in the Bering Sea — are a subspecies of Arctic fox (Vulpes lagopus) that may have remained isolated for thousands of years. They were once numerous enough to support a small yet thriving group of fur hunters. After humans abandoned the settlement in the 1970s, the fox population began to crash, falling from more than 1,000 animals to fewer than 100 individuals today. Researchers at Moscow State University wanted to find out if the population crash was caused by diseases introduced by the hunters and their dogs, so they teamed up with Alex Greenwood, head of the wildlife diseases department at the Leibniz Institute for Zoo and Wildlife Research in Berlin, as well as other colleagues in Germany and Iceland. They screened for four common canine pathogens in foxes captured on Mednyi Island and in the pelts of museum specimens of Commander Island foxes. All they found was a handful of cases of the parasite Toxoplasma gondii, which causes the disease toxoplasmosis, but that alone did not account for the population crash.

So the researchers looked at the foxes’ diet. Mednyi Island foxes subsist by hunting sea birds and scavenging seal carcasses. Because pollutants such as mercury are known to accumulate in marine animals, particularly in the Arctic, they tested the foxes for the heavy metal and found high levels of it. The foxes' hair had 10 milligrams of mercury per kilogram on average, with peaks of 30 mg kg^–1. By comparison, inland foxes in Iceland had lower levels, of about 3.5 mg kg^–1. Greenwood’s team also compared mercury levels in the Mednyi foxes to those in the population on the neighbouring Bering Island, and in coastal fox populations in Iceland. Levels of mercury were high there, too. But the Bering Island population and the coastal Icelandic foxes had not experienced the same population crash as their relatives on Mednyi. The difference, the researchers think, is that the Mednyi foxes have no other options for food. Bering Island is bigger than Mednyi, with small mammals such lemmings and voles, as well as a human population that creates rubbish that the foxes can eat. The Icelandic coastal foxes, likewise, have the option of moving inland to vary their diet. “It’s not so much what they are eating, as where they are eating,” says Greenwood. “The Mednyi foxes may be more susceptible to increasing global mercury levels.”

More here.

Peter Gordon in The New Republic:

There have been many biographies of Karl Marx, and most of them fit into the first category. This is understandable, because until recently most people saw Marx as the founding father in a drama of communism that was still unfolding across the globe. Celebrated or excoriated, Marx seemed very much our contemporary, a man whose explosive ideas and personality continued to fascinate. One of the earliest efforts waspublished in 1918 by Franz Mehring, a journalist who helped Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht in founding the Spartacus League (soon renamed the German Communist Party). He was not what you would call an unbiased source. Mehring wished to portray Marx “in all his powerful and rugged greatness.” After summarizing the second and third (never-completed) volumes of Capital he assured the reader that their pages contain a “wealth of intellectual stimulation” for “enlightened workers.”

Less partisan was Karl Marx: His Life and Environment by Isaiah Berlin, which appeared in 1939. In many respects, Berlin was the ideal person for the job, since he understood the inner workings of Marx’s theory but remained sensitive to its complicated and catastrophic political consequences. He was not completely unsympathetic: like Marx, Berlin was a cosmopolitan of Jewish descent who fled persecution on the Continent and ended up in England. Unlike Marx, Berlin assimilated to British custom and made a career of defending liberal pluralism against totalitarian thinking right and left. But Berlin’s skepticism did not prevent him from comprehending Marx’s ideas. A good biographer needs critical distance, not ardent identification. His book, a perennial classic, has all the virtues of Berlin himself: charm, erudition, and (occasionally) grandiloquence.

Over the last century, a handful of previously unknown writings by Marx have come to light, and they have modified the way we understand his legacy. The most important of these were the “Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts” of 1844, often known as the “Paris manuscripts,” dense and speculative texts that were discovered in the late 1920s and first published in 1932. They are significant because they give us a glimpse of the young Marx as a humanist and a metaphysician whose theory of alienation relied on the Hegelian themes that he absorbed while a student at the University of Berlin.

Zujaja Tauqeer in Jacobin:

[W]hat was supposed to be a rare feel-good moment for a beleaguered nation has in recent weeks acquired an additional perverse significance: with 100 people already killed, the 2013 elections will go down as the bloodiest in Pakistani history. The Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP), more commonly known as the Pakistani Taliban, has for the last decade agitated against the previous two governments of Pakistan for their role, however tepid, in attacking militant havens in the country. The wrath of the TTP, previously reserved for government installations and security forces, has now descended upon the general public — the political candidates and voters participating in the 2013 elections, especially those belonging to the three main secular parties of Pakistan.

This particular crescendo of pre-election bloodshed is different from the usual sort of cannibalistic violence that commonly rages in the country, the kind which occurs when one segment of society feels justified in deeming another segment ‘wajib-ul-qatl’ — worthy of death — for believing in the wrong prophet or praying the wrong way. This election season has changed everything; even the right kind of Muslim is no longer safe from being targeted. Nor has the integrity of this pro-West citadel in Asia ever been so precarious or under assault. According to Taliban leader Hakimullah Mehsud, the TTP is embarking on a concerted campaign to “end the democratic system” in Pakistan and bring errant political parties in line with Taliban demands, especially regarding Pakistan’s stand with the West in the fight against the Taliban and Al Qaeda.

The secular parties of Pakistan, which at the start of elections were castigated as representing the status quo of corrupt, inefficient politics, have now recast themselves as heroic, pro-democracy forces, particularly the Awami National Party which is the last line of Pashtun resistance to Taliban control in the northwest. The parties and their supporters are hastening to give meaning to the senseless deaths, particularly of the numerous children that have died despite having nothing to do with the electoral process.

At times like these, when martyrs for democracy are being readily supplied in the fight against the Taliban, it is critical to examine the rhetoric around the survival of democracy in Pakistan which anti-Taliban forces have rallied around. Simply by virtue of taking place these elections will not signify the growth of true democracy to Pakistan or the end of the Taliban threat.

Afiya Shehrbano responds to Jemima Khan's piece on polygamy in Muslim communities, in South Asia Citizens Web:

In the post-9/11 period, conservatives in the west view Muslim women’s freedom exclusively through the act of unveiling, while ‘anti-imperialists’ fetishise it as a tool of passive revolution against racism, imperialism and Islamophobia. Neither wishes to discuss discrimination or material rights beyond wardrobe politics.

Then, there are some adventurous souls who overstretch their benevolent sympathy for the Muslim woman’s cause with a recklessness that only the very privileged can afford. Jemima Khan, enamoured by all that she has learnt about Muslim women’s exceptional rights during her time as Imran Khan’s wife, has recently ‘investigated’ British Muslim women’s partiality towards polygamous marriages as a socio-cultural refuge.

Mrs Khan herself renounced the traditional right of Muslim women to keep their maiden names after marriage but interestingly, chooses to retain her ex-husband’s identity even post-divorce. Social-celebrity affectation or not, that’s her personal choice. However, when she masquerades as a social scientist, then Mrs Khan may be well advised to read some of the prolific international scholarship by (Muslim) women on the historical intersections of polygamy with culture, religion and class and their assessment of its doubtful ‘benefits’.

Not to privilege science too much, even an anecdotal survey of some working class communities of Lahore, where Mrs Khan lived for several years, would have confirmed her thesis – albeit not with the same optimistic conclusions. Often, polygamous marriages have indeed provided some women a sanctuary…but not from poverty or abandonment, instead, from domestic violence. Once displaced, primary wives of polygamous arrangements sometimes (though not always) become lesser targets of spousal and in-law violence/discrimination. Technically, this could qualify polygamous arrangements as safer havens, I suppose.

Jim Holt reviews Benoit B. Mandelbrot's The Fractalist: Memoir of a Scientific Maverick, in the NYRB:

Benoit Mandelbrot, the brilliant Polish-French-American mathematician who died in 2010, had a poet’s taste for complexity and strangeness. His genius for noticing deep links among far-flung phenomena led him to create a new branch of geometry, one that has deepened our understanding of both natural forms and patterns of human behavior. The key to it is a simple yet elusive idea, that of self-similarity.

To see what self-similarity means, consider a homely example: the cauliflower. Take a head of this vegetable and observe its form—the way it is composed of florets. Pull off one of those florets. What does it look like? It looks like a little head of cauliflower, with its own subflorets. Now pull off one of those subflorets. What does that look like? A still tinier cauliflower. If you continue this process—and you may soon need a magnifying glass—you’ll find that the smaller and smaller pieces all resemble the head you started with. The cauliflower is thus said to be self-similar. Each of its parts echoes the whole.

Other self-similar phenomena, each with its distinctive form, include clouds, coastlines, bolts of lightning, clusters of galaxies, the network of blood vessels in our bodies, and, quite possibly, the pattern of ups and downs in financial markets. The closer you look at a coastline, the more you find it is jagged, not smooth, and each jagged segment contains smaller, similarly jagged segments that can be described by Mandelbrot’s methods. Because of the essential roughness of self-similar forms, classical mathematics is ill-equipped to deal with them. Its methods, from the Greeks on down to the last century, have been better suited to smooth forms, like circles. (Note that a circle is not self-similar: if you cut it up into smaller and smaller segments, those segments become nearly straight.)

Only in the last few decades has a mathematics of roughness emerged, one that can get a grip on self-similarity and kindred matters like turbulence, noise, clustering, and chaos. And Mandelbrot was the prime mover behind it.

David Bromwich in the Huffington Post:

In Obama's case, too, as in Nixon's, the exorbitant love of secrecy springs from a desire not to be judged. It has its source in an almost antinomian assurance that there is no one in the world who knows enough to judge him. There is, however, a respect in which Obama has become a stranger president than Nixon. What after all are we to make of the bizarre alternation of the commands to kill and the journeys to comfort the killed? As this president has lengthened the shadow of American power in Arab lands and made it hard for someone like Farea Al-Muslimi to persuade his countrymen that the U.S. is not at war with Islam, he has made serial visits to comfort Americans mourning the dead after the mass murders in Tucson, in Aurora, in Newtown, and in Boston. None of these speeches has carried a hint of the perception that there could be a link between American violence at home and abroad. The role of this president — a president of safety and protection rather than a president of liberty and the rule of law — is dismaying in itself. But there is something actively morbid in the dramatic assumption of grief counseling as his major public function, even as he continues in secret his wars against people about whom he will not speak to Americans except in platitude.

More here.

Gary Gutting in the New York Times:

As any regular reader of news will know, popular media report “scientific results” nearly every day. They come delivered in news reports and opinion pieces, and are often used to make a variety of points concerning important matters like health, parenting, education, even spirituality and self-knowledge. How seriously should we take them?

For example, since at least 2004, we have been reading about studiesshowing that “vitamin D may prevent arthritis.” A 2010 Johns Hopkins Health Alert announced, “During the past decade, there’s been an explosion of research suggesting that vitamin D plays a significant role in joint health and that low levels may be a risk factor for rheumatologic conditions such as rheumatoid arthritis and osteoarthritis.” However, in February 2013, a more rigorous studycalled the previous studies into serious question. Similarly, despite many studies suggesting that taking niacin to increase “good cholesterol” would decrease heart attacks, a more rigorous studyshowed the niacin to have no effect.

Such reports have led many readers to question the reliability of science. And given the way the news is often reported, they seem to have a point. What use are scientific results if they are so frequently reversed? But the problem is typically not with the science but with the reporting.

More here.

It is difficult to ascertain what the cause is and what the result is here – but in parallel to the withering of interest in the quality of the common good (and, most importantly, of society itself), the demise and dismantling of traditional “factories of solidarity” can be observed, that is, of institutions that encouraged attitudes of solidarity. The “deregulation of the labour market” and the resultant fluidity of workplace communities characterized by a decreasing – less and less protected by law – stability strongly disfavours forming tighter bonds with “colleagues”. The philosophy of management in its current form transfers the responsibility for financial results of a given company from the superiors to the subordinates, thus putting every employee in a situation of competing with everyone else. This philosophy demands that the utility of every employee is measured according to his or her personal contribution to the profitability of the company: he or she is forced to compete with the rest of the working team. In essence, forcing workers to fight for their chance to survive another round of dismissals, a move often disguised by such “politically correct” cryptonyms as “contracting out” or “outsourcing”. In a clearly zero-sum game, joining and closing ranks will be of little use and will not help much in surviving – on the contrary, it is becoming dangerously close to a suicidal urge.

more from Zygmunt Bauman at Eurozine here.

Ayyaz Mallick in Dawn:

Coming to election issues, what do you think, sitting afar and as an observer, are the basic issues that need to be handled by whoever is voted into power?

NC: Well, first of all, the internal issues. Pakistan is not a unified country. In large parts of the country, the state is regarded as a Punjabi state, not their (the people’s) state. In fact, I think the last serious effort to deal with this was probably in the 1970s, when during the Bhutto regime some sort of arrangement of federalism was instituted for devolving power so that people feel the government is responding to them and not just some special interests focused on a particular region and class. Now that’s a major problem.

Another problem is the confrontation with India. Pakistan just cannot survive if it continues to do so (continue this confrontation). Pakistan will never be able to match the Indian militarily and the effort to do so is taking an immense toll on the society. It’s also extremely dangerous with all the weapons development. The two countries have already come close to nuclear confrontation twice and this could get worse. So dealing with the relationship with India is extremely important.

And that of course focuses right away on Kashmir. Some kind of settlement in Kashmir is crucial for both countries. It’s also tearing India apart with horrible atrocities in the region which is controlled by Indian armed forces. This is feeding right back into society even in the domain of elementary civil rights. A good American friend of mine who has lived in India for many years, working as a journalist, was recently denied entry to the country because he wrote on Kashmir. This is a reflection of fractures within society. Pakistan, too, has to focus on the Lashkar [Lashkar-i-Taiba] and other similar groups and work towards some sort of sensible compromise on Kashmir.

And of course this goes beyond. There is Pakistan’s relationship with Afghanistan which will also be a very tricky issue in the coming years. Then there is a large part of Pakistan which is being torn apart from American drone attacks. The country is being invaded constantly by a terrorist superpower. Again, this is not a small problem.

More here.

The decision to translate Emmanuel Swedenborg’s Rules into shorthand was not a random choice. Isaac Pitman was a devout member of the controversial Swedenborgian New Church, and was fired from his teaching post because of it, two years after the publication of Phonography. The loss of his job and religious discrimination were the real impetus behind the establishment of Pitman’s independent publishing house and school. Emmanuel Swedenborg had a good career as an all-around, 18th-century scientist/philosopher/inventor. That is, until one Easter weekend in 1744, when he started having visions. Swedenborg wrote many books about this spiritual awakening. He wrote that the Church was in man and not outside of him. He wrote that if man lived in love and charity he would understand the Word — and not the other way around. He claimed that he spoke with demons and angels, that he spoke with spirits on other planets, that he had visited both heaven and hell. Emmanuel Swedenborg was a scientist-turned-mystic whose extraordinary accounts went on to fascinate many artists and intellectuals. Not just Isaac Pitman but Ralph Waldo Emerson, William Blake, Immanuel Kant, Carl Jung, August Strindberg, Jorge Luis Borges, George Inness, Honoré de Balzac, Helen Keller, Czesław Miłosz, August Strindberg, W. B. Yeats.

more from Stefany Anne Golberg at The Smart Set here.

Is it fair to describe the Occupy movement as anarchist? In “We Are Many,” Cindy Milstein, a longtime activist, stipulates that radicals in Zuccotti Park were outnumbered by liberals, including those she deprecates as “militant liberals.” But she argues that, even if the Occupiers weren’t all anarchists, they were nevertheless “doing anarchism.” In Zuccotti Park and elsewhere, “doing anarchism” often meant struggling not against bankers, directly, but against local government and local police. (In New York, one galvanizing figure was Anthony Bologna, a senior police officer who was disciplined after video surfaced showing him squirting protesters with pepper spray.) Perhaps this was a smart strategy: instead of arguing about economics and ideology, the Occupiers could affirm, instead, their unanimous commitment to freedom of assembly. Occupy may have begun with a grievance against Wall Street, but the process of occupation transformed the movement into a meta-movement, peopled by activists demanding the right to demand their rights.

more from Kelefa Sanneh at The New Yorker here.

From The Guardian:

As you are reading this newspaper and not another, there is a good chance you may have wondered why some people you know, whose moral compasses seem otherwise to be functioning well, nevertheless vote for the Conservatives or their equivalent whenever offered the chance. This is the question Jonathan Haidt has set out to answer – and his conclusions may make unsettling reading for those of a liberal (American sense) persuasion.

Professor Haidt's premise is, as far as I can see, fairly easy to summarise: the reason republicans and conservatives persist in winning elections (if you discount Obama's last two victories, which I must say rather gum up the works of his argument) is because they appeal to a greater range of moral impulses than do more leftwing parties. Haidt claims that just as we have the taste receptors of salt, sweet, bitter, and so on, so we generally work on five basic moral receptors: those pertaining to caring, fairness, loyalty, authority and sanctity. (These terms vary: “purity” replaces “sanctity” on a website co-founded by Haidt, yourmorals.org, which, after a simple test, allows you to see how you scored in comparison with liberals or conservatives. It turns out that I am not as caring as I thought I was. Have a go – it's the foundation for the research that has gone into this book.) Liberals are very big on caring and fairness, but tend not to mind so much about “sanctity”. Conservatives, however, care about all these things. The more rightwing they are, the less bothered they are about fairness, and the more bothered they are about “sanctity”. So for liberals to appeal more to everyone, and to win more elections, what they should do is press the buttons pertaining to good order and individual responsibility towards the herd harder than they do.

More here.

From MSNBC:

A genetic survey concludes that all Europeans living today are related to the same set of ancestors who lived 1,000 years ago. And you wouldn't have to go back much further to find that everyone in the world is related to each other. “We find it remarkable because it's counterintuitive to us,” Graham Coop, an evolutionary biologist at the University of California at Davis, told NBC News. “But it's not totally unexpected, based on genetic analysis.”

Family researchers have long known that if you go back far enough, everyone with a European connection ends up being related to Charlemagne. The concept was laid out scientifically more than a decade ago. Now Coop and University of Southern California geneticist Peter Ralph have come up with the evidence. Their findings were published on Tuesday in the open-access journal PLOS Biology “Anyone alive 1,000 years ago who left any descendants will be an ancestor of every European,” the researchers say in an FAQ file about their study. “While the world population is larger than the European population, the rate of growth of number of ancestors quickly dwarfs this difference, and so every human is likely related genealogically to every other human over only a slightly longer time period.”

More here.