Dear Reader,

Thanks very much for participating in our contest. For details of the prize you can look at the announcement here, and to read the nominated posts you can go here for a complete list with links.

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Results of the voting round (the top twenty most voted for posts) will be posted on the main page on December 11, 2011. Winners of the contest will be announced on or around December 19, 2011.

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Cheers,

Abbas

Alphabetical list of blog names followed by the blog post title:

(Please report any problems with links in the comments section below.)

For prize details, click here.

And after looking around, click here to vote.

1. 3 Quarks Daily: Indians Abroad: A Story from Trinidad
2. 3 Quarks Daily: Pakistan: The Narratives Come Home to Roost
3. 3 Quarks Daily: The Immensity Of Killing Bin Laden vs. The Banality Of Language
4. 3 Quarks Daily: The Pao of Love
5. 3 Quarks Daily: There’s Something about the Teeth of Tyrants
6. Abandoned Footnotes: A Simple Model of Cults of Personality
7. Accidental Blogger: The mideast uprisings: a lesson for strong men, mad men and counterfactual historians
8. Andy Worthington: Mocking the Law, Judges Rule that Evidence Is Not Necessary to Hold Insignificant Guantánamo Prisoners for the Rest of Their Lives
9. Asian Security Blog: I finally played “Homefront”
10. Barry Pump’s Blog: Union Membership and Welfare Spending
11. Blinktopia: Ain’t Capitalism Grand?
12. Brendan Nyhan: Forecasting 2012: How much does ideology matter?
13. Brian Thill: On the Early Iconography of Certain of the 2012 Presidential Campaign Logos, Considered Alphabetically
14. Corey Robin: Revolutionaries of the Right: The Deep Roots of Conservative Radicalism
15. Crikey: Could Australia’s record on arms control harm UN Security Council bid?
16. Crikey: Theorising Darwin: US may stockpile and transit cluster munitions
17. Crooked Timber: Sex, hope, and rock and roll
18. David B. Sparks: Isarithmic History of the Two-Party Vote
19. Ezra Klein’s Wonkblog: Could this time have been different?
20. Guernica: The Iron Lady
21. Heathen Scripture: Joyce, Katter, Devine: Last bastion against the Gaypocalypse
22. HLD6: Christian Persecution Complex
23. Hopeless but not serious: Pokémon gets political
24. Jadaliyya: Palestine in Scare Quotes: From the NYT Grammar Book
25. Jadaliyya: The Marriage of Sexism and Islamophobia; Re-Making the News on Egypt
26. Jeremy Scahill: DoD Investigating Nine Cases of “Terrorism-Related Acts” by US Military and Contractors?
27. Muhammad Cohen: Overheard at Ali’s Diner on Arab Street
28. Naked Capitalism: On the Invention of Money
29. Occupy | Decolonize | Liberate: Flathead: Occupy Thomas Friedman
30. Pandaemonium: Rethinking the Idea of “Christian Europe”
31. Peter Frase: Anti-Star Trek: A Theory of Posterity
32. PH2.1: Polarization?
33. Platykurtosity: The Economics of Sex, Revisited
34. Progressive Geographies: The Killings of Troy Davis
35. RantAWeek: Here Comes Monti’s Army
36. Sagartron: Psychotropic drugs anyone?
37. Scholar as Citizen: Who’s Really Behind Recent Republican Legislation in Wisconsin and Elsewhere? (Hint: It Didn’t Start Here)
38. Shunya’s Notes: Decolonizing My Mind
39. Tang Dynasty Times: The Persian Prince Pirooz
40. The Awl: The Livestream Ended: How I Got Off My Computer And Onto The Street At Occupy Oakland
41. The Buck Stops Here: Charter Schools and Averages
42. The Monkey Cage: It’s a Bird! It’s a Plane! It’s…. Technocratic Government!
43. The Philosopher’s Beard: Democracy is not a truth machine
44. The Primate Diaries: Freedom to Riot: On the Evolution of Collective Violence
45. The Sociological Eye: The Inflation of Bullying: From Fagging to Cyber-effervescent Scapegoating
46. Thought News: Barack Obama, Abraham Lincoln, Reinhold Niebuhr, and Creativity
47. TripleCrisis: Paradigms Lost? Cowboys and Indians in the Battle over Economic Ideas
48. U.S. Intellectual History: Going beyond the “Racial Protocol”
49. U.S. Intellectual History: Great Books Liberalism
50. U.S. Intellectual History: Leo Strauss, Common Sense, and American Conservatism 
51. U.S. Intellectual History: War and the “We”
52. U.S. Intellectual History: “When the Zulus Produce a Tolstoy We Will Read Him”: Charles Taylor and the Politics of Recognition
53. Voteview Blog: S.& P. Downgrade and the Polarization of the American Political System
54. Voteview Blog: The Ideological Makeup of the “Super Committee”
55. Vox Mentis: Democracy vs Republic – Essential differences & Speculations on Future Politics of the world
56. Zunguzungu: “The Grass Is Closed”: What I Have Learned About Power from the Police, Chancellor Birgeneau, and Occupy Cal

By Namit Arora

(Why the Bhagavad Gita is an overrated text with a deplorable morality at its core. This is part one of a two-part critique. Part 1 is the appetizer with the Gita’s historical and literary context. Part 2 is the main course with the textual critique.)

In mid-first millennium BCE, a great spiritual awakening was underway in areas around the middle Ganga. People were moving away from the old Vedic religion—which revolved around rituals, animal sacrifices, and nature gods—to more abstract, inner-directed, and contemplative ideas. They now asked about the nature of the self and consciousness, thought and perception. They asked if virtue and vice were absolute or mere social conventions. Personal spiritual quests, aided by meditation and renunciation of material gain, had slowly gathered pace. From this churn arose new ideas like karma and dharma, non-dualism, and the unity of an individual’s soul (atman) with the universal soul (Brahman)—all pivotal ideas in Brahmanical Hinduism.

Some of these innovations in thought soon made their way into the texts we now know as the Upanishads, setting them qualitatively apart from the earlier Vedas. All of this occurred in the context of great sociopolitical and economic changes, marked by the rise of cities, trade and commerce, social mobility, public debates, new institutions of state, and even some early republics. This was also the world of the Buddha, Mahavira, and Carvaka.

The Great War of Yore

By this time, versions of a Mahabharata story had been circulating for centuries. Perhaps inspired by a war that took place c. 950 BCE around modern Delhi (the date is tentative), the story, through oral transmission, took on a life of its own. In The Hindus: An Alternative History (2009), Wendy Doniger writes that the earliest bards who told the Mahabharata story came from a caste of charioteers, who served as drivers, confidantes, and bodyguards to the Kshatriya warrior-castes. While on military campaigns, they recited stories around campfires. (No wonder God is a charioteer in the epic! Even Karna is raised by a charioteer.) In later ages and in times of peace, many bards took their performance art to lay audiences in villages and folk festivals. The story also came to be recited during royal sacrifices, where the Brahmins gradually took over its delivery and evolution, eventually writing it down in Sanskrit. Its “final form” dates from 300 BCE-300 CE and ranges from 75K to 100K verses, seven to ten times the Iliad and the Odyssey combined. (Read an outline of the story here.)

Read more »

Afshar Malik. LR Story Told by a Reed 2008.

Photo etching.

More here and here.

From Foreign Policy:

1. ALAA AL ASWANY: For channeling Arab malaise and Arab Renewal. Novelist/Egypt:

All revolutionaries want their stories told to the world, and no one has conveyed the hopes and dreams of Egyptians more vividly than Alaa Al Aswany. The dentist turned author rose to fame with his 2002 novel, The Yacoubian Building, which charted Egypt's cultural upheaval and gradual dilapidation since throwing off its colonial shackles. Aswany used his prominence to help found the Kefaya political movement, which first articulated the demands that would energize the youth in Tahrir Square: an end to corruption, a rejection of hereditary rule, and the establishment of a true democratic culture. For his political activism, Aswany was blacklisted by Egypt's state-owned publishing houses, and security officials harassed the owner of the cafe where he met with young writers.

How times change. Aswany was a fixture in Tahrir Square during Egypt's uprising — he was almost killed three times, he said, during the running battles between demonstrators and pro-Mubarak thugs. And he has tried to keep the revolution's spirit alive since, pressing the country's ruling military junta to remove the vestiges of Hosni Mubarak's regime and assailing Egypt's Islamists for their willingness to sacrifice the movement's principles for a taste of power. In the process, Aswany has given voice to a people silenced for too long. “Revolution is like a love story,” he said in February. “When you are in love, you become a much better person. And when you are in revolution, you become a much better person.”

More here.

From The Telegraph:

Utopia

Rick Ungar in Forbes:

I have long argued that the impact of the Affordable Care Act is not nearly as big of a deal as opponents would have you believe. At the end of the day, the law is – in the main – little more than a successful effort to put an end to some of the more egregious health insurer abuses while creating an environment that should bring more Americans into programs that will give them at least some of the health care coverage they need.

There is, however, one notable exception – and it’s one that should have a long lasting and powerful impact on the future of health care in our country.

That would be the provision of the law, called the medical loss ratio, that requires health insurance companies to spend 80% of the consumers’ premium dollars they collect—85% for large group insurers—on actual medical care rather than overhead, marketing expenses and profit. Failure on the part of insurers to meet this requirement will result in the insurers having to send their customers a rebate check representing the amount in which they underspend on actual medical care.

This is the true ‘bomb’ contained in Obamacare and the one item that will have more impact on the future of how medical care is paid for in this country than anything we’ve seen in quite some time.

More here. [Thanks to Asad Raza.]

Amanda Marcotte in Slate:

The programmers behind Siri seem to be a bunch of gleefully juvenile dudes who took the time to teach Siri corny jokes, marijuana know-how and sci-fi references, along with teaching it about serious problems that can affect both men and women, such as suicidal thoughts. And even though they really like the idea of sex with women, they seem to have not thought much about the work that women have to put into being sexually accessible. Just as with the mind-boggling name fail of the iPad, the problem seems to be that there simply aren't enough women working in innovative, customer-driven technology services, and the ones who do have to adopt a bro-like attitude that makes them nearly as forgetful of the concerns of ordinary women as the men are.

I don't have Siri on my phone, but my boyfriend does, and like pretty much all dorks left alone with Siri for five minutes, we've had our fun playing with it. It was also pretty stupid when I asked it for a vasectomy. Just as with the phrase “birth control”, it had no ability to look past the actual name of clinics, so instead of producing the names of local urologists, it gave me a couple of seedy-sounding places with the word “vasectomy” right in their name. But I still can't see this as some kind of egalitarian fail on the reproductive health front; even though vasectomies are performed on men, they are done to protect women from pregnancy. Again, it just seems that some of the most basic, everyday health concerns of women hadn't registered as important with Siri's programmers. When I used some common slang terms for oral sex performed on women with it, Siri seemed to think I was in the the mood for a hamburger or on the market to buy a cat (and shame on Siri for sending me to a pet store instead of a local animal shelter!). It had zero problem knowing what I meant when I referenced fellatio.

Ed Yong over at Not Exactly Rocket Science (via Andrew Sullivan):

When we make moral judgments, we do so subtly and selectively. We recognise that explicitly antisocial acts can seem appropriate in the right circumstances. We know that the enemy of our enemy can be our friend. Now, Kiley Hamlin from the University of British Columbia has shown that this capacity for finer social appraisals dates back to infancy – we develop it somewhere between our fifth and eighth months of life.

Hamlin, formerly at Yale University, has a long pedigree in this line of research. Together with Karen Wynn and Paul Bloom, she showed that infants prefer a person who helps others over someone who hinders, even from the tender age of three months. These experiments also showed that infants expect others to behave in the same way – approaching those who help them and avoiding those who harm them. Now, Hamlin has shown that our infant brains can cope with much more nuance than that.

She worked with 64 babies, and showed them a video of a duck hand puppet as it tried to get at a rattle inside a box. This protagonist was aided by a helpful elephant puppet that lifted the lid (first video), but hindered by an antisocial elephant that jumped on the lid and slammed it shut (second video). Next, the babies saw the two elephants playing with a ball and dropping it. Two moose puppets entered the fray – one (the ‘Giver’) would return the ball to the elephant (third video), and the other (the ‘Taker’) would steal it away (fourth video). The babies were then given a choice between the two moose.

Hamlin found that over three-quarters of the five-month-old babies preferred the Giver moose, no matter whether it returned the ball to the helpful elephant or the antisocial one. They were following a simple rule: “helpful moose = good moose”. But the eight-month-old babies were savvier. They largely preferred the Giver moose when it was aiding the helpful elephant, but they chose the Taker when it was took the antisocial elephant’s ball.

Carl Zimmer in the NYT Sunday Review:

IMAGINE a scientist gently swabs your left nostril with a Q-tip and finds that your nose contains hundreds of species of bacteria. That in itself is no surprise; each of us is home to some 100 trillion microbes. But then she makes an interesting discovery: in your nose is a previously unknown species that produces a powerful new antibiotic. Her university licenses it to a pharmaceutical company; it hits the market and earns hundreds of millions of dollars. Do you deserve a cut of the profits?

It is a tricky question, because it defies our traditional notions of property and justice. You were not born with the germ in your nose; at some point in your life, it infected you. On the other hand, that microbe may be able to grow and reproduce only in a human nose. You provided it with an essential shelter. And its antibiotics may help keep you healthy, by killing disease-causing germs that attempt to invade your nose.

Welcome to the confusing new frontier of ethics: our inner ecosystem. In recent years, scientists have discovered remarkable complexity and power in the microbes that live inside us. We depend on this so-called microbiome for our well-being: it helps break down our food, synthesize vitamins and shield against disease-causing germs.

“We used to think of ourselves as separate from nature,” said Rosamond Rhodes, a bioethicist at Mount Sinai School of Medicine. “Now it’s not just us. It’s us and them.”

For bioethicists, one of the most important questions is what our microbes can reveal about ourselves. Studies have revealed, for example, that people who are sick with certain diseases tend to have distinctive collections of microbes. Someday we may get important clues to people’s health from a survey of their microbes. Professor Rhodes argues that this sort of information will deserve the same protection as information about our own genes. Your germs are your own business, in other words.

John Sides reports on the findings of some new, methodologically interesting studies that estimate the race effect, in The Monkey Cage (image from Wikipedia):

Erik recently blogged about a new paper (pdf) by Seth Stephens-Davidowitz that used Google searches to measure racial prejudice in American media markets and found this:

The estimates imply that racial animus in the United States cost Obama three to five percentage points in the national popular vote in the 2008 election.

The Google methodology is a viable way to grapple with people’s unwillingness to reveal racial prejudice in polls and surveys. Of course, one can criticize it—as Rebecca Greenfield does here—but an even better strategy is simply to see if Stephens-Davidowitz’s results are confirmed by recently published research using other kinds of measures. Here’s an example, from a recent paper in Political Psychology by political scientist Brian Schaffner (ungated; see also the rest of the issue, also ungated thanks to Wiley-Blackwell publishers):

In this paper, I introduce a relatively unobtrusive measure of racial salience to examine whether these initial interpretations are correct. I find that when race was a more salient factor for White voters, they were substantially less likely to vote for Obama and were more likely to think that Obama was focusing attention on African Americans during the campaign. I estimate that the salience of race for some Whites may have cost Obama as much as 3% of the White vote. Thus, this paper indicates that even in Obama’s historic 2008 campaign, African American candidates continue to face barriers to winning White support.

Rebecca Walker in The Daily Mail:

I was raised to believe that women need men like a fish needs a bicycle. But I strongly feel children need two parents and the thought of raising Tenzin without my partner, Glen, 52, would be terrifying.

As the child of divorced parents, I know only too well the painful consequences of being brought up in those circumstances. Feminism has much to answer for denigrating men and encouraging women to seek independence whatever the cost to their families.

My mother's feminist principles coloured every aspect of my life. As a little girl, I wasn't even allowed to play with dolls or stuffed toys in case they brought out a maternal instinct. It was drummed into me that being a mother, raising children and running a home were a form of slavery. Having a career, travelling the world and being independent were what really mattered according to her.

I love my mother very much, but I haven't seen her or spoken to her since I became pregnant. She has never seen my son – her only grandchild. My crime? Daring to question her ideology.

More here.

Melissa Healey in the Los Angeles Times:

Janeen Delany describes herself as an “old hippie” who's smoked plenty of marijuana. But she never really dabbled in hallucinogens — until two years ago, at the age of 59.

A diagnosis of incurable leukemia had knocked the optimism out of the retired plant nurserywoman living in Phoenix. So she signed up for a clinical trial to test whether psilocybin — the active ingredient in “magic mushrooms” — could help with depression or anxiety following a grim diagnosis.

Delaney swallowed a blue capsule of psilocybin in a cozy office at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore. She donned a blindfold, a blood pressure cuff and a headset playing classical music. With two researchers at her side, she embarked on a six-hour journey into altered consciousness that she calls “the single most life-changing experience I've ever had.”

What a long, strange trip it's been. In the 1960s and '70s, a rebellious generation embraced hallucinogens and a wide array of street drugs to “turn on, tune in and drop out.” Almost half a century later, magic mushrooms, LSD, Ecstasy and ketamine are being studied for legitimate therapeutic uses. Scientists believe these agents have the potential to help patients with post-traumatic stress disorder, drug or alcohol addiction, unremitting pain or depression and the existential anxiety of terminal illness.

“Scientifically, these compounds are way too important not to study,” said Johns Hopkins psychopharmacologist Roland Griffiths, who conducted the psilocybin trial.

More here.

Jonah Lehrer in Wired:

And this brings me to a fascinating new paper by an all star team of psychologists, including Kurt Gray, Joshua Knobe, Mark Sheskin, Paul Bloom and Lisa Feldman Barrett. The scientists nicely frame the mystery they want to solve:

Do people’s mental capacities fundamentally change when they remove a sweater? This seems absurd: How could removing a piece of clothing change one’s capacity for acting or feeling? In six studies, however, we show that taking off a sweater—or otherwise revealing flesh—can significantly change the way a mind is perceived. In this article, we suggest that the kind of mind ascribed to another person depends on the relative salience of his or her body—that the perceived capacity for both pain and planned action depends on whether someone wears a sweater or tank-top.

In order to understand why sweaters and tank-tops influence the kind of minds we perceive, it’s important to know about the different qualities we imagine in others. In general, people assess minds – and it doesn’t matter if it’s the “mind” of a pet, iPhone or deity – along two distinct dimensions. First, we grade these minds in terms of agency. (Human beings have lots of agency; goldfish less so.) But we also think of minds in terms of the ability to have experience, to feel and perceive. The psychologists suggest that these dual dimensions are actually a duality, and that there’s a direct tradeoff between the ability to have agency and experience. If we endow someone with lots of feeling, then they probably have less agency. And if someone has lots of agency, then they probably are less sensitive to experience. In other words, we automatically assume that the capacity to think and the capacity to feel are in opposition. It’s a zero sum game.

What does all this have to do with nakedness? The psychologists demonstrated it’s quite easy to shift our perceptions of other people from having a mind full of agency to having a mind interested in experience: all they have to do is take off their clothes.

More here.