Pink Floyd singer Roger Waters narrates short film about West Bank wall built by Israel.
Part 1:
Part 2:
Category: Recommended Reading
Babur Nama: An emperor’s life
Ammar Ali Qureshi in the Daily Times:
Babur Nama is the action-packed and colourful chronicle of life of Zahiruddin Muhammad Babur (1483-1530) — the daring Central Asian who was the founder of the Mughal Empire in the Indian sub-continent, then called Hindustan. Regarded as the first autobiographical work of a monarch in world history, Babur Nama describes the life of Babur from the time he became ruler, at the age of 11, of Fergana in Uzbekistan, to his struggles and conquests in Central Asia, Afghanistan and Hindustan.
The recent edition published by Penguin is based on translation by Annette Sussanah Beveridge (1842-1929) — an orientalist who became famous as a social reformer for promoting women’s education in British India. However, her major contribution has been as a translator of medieval Indian and Central Asian texts from Turkish into English.
Dilip Hiro, the London-based journalist and writer on the Middle East and South and Central Asia, has abridged and edited this new edition. He has also written an introduction and preface to this slim volume, which has reduced the original translation of 300,000 words to one-third the size without impairing the essence and spirit of this masterpiece.
More here.
Tuesday, September 1, 2009
Creationists at Bloggingheads: The Fallout
Sean Carroll and Carl Zimmer will no longer be appearing on bloggingheads. They explain why.
Sean:
A few weeks ago we were a bit startled to find a “Science Saturday” episode of BH.tv featuring Paul Nelson, an honest-to-God young-Earth creationist. Not really what most of us like to think of as “science.” So there were emails back and forth trying to figure out what went on. David Killoren, who is the person in charge of the Science Saturday dialogues, is an extremely reasonable guy; we had slightly different perspectives on the matter, but in the end he appreciated the discomfort of the scientists, and we agreed to classify that dialogue as a “failed experiment,” not something that would be a regular feature.
So last week we were startled once again, this time by the sight of a dialogue between John McWhorter and Michael Behe. Behe, some of you undoubtedly know, is a leading proponent of Intelligent Design, and chief promulgator of the idea of “irreducible complexity.” The idea is that you can just look at something and know it was “designed,” because changing any bit of it would render the thing useless — so it couldn’t have arisen via a series of incremental steps that were all individually beneficial to the purpose of the object. The classic example was a mousetrap — until someone shows how a mousetrap is, in fact, reducibly complex. Then you change your choice of classic example. Behe had his butt handed to him during his testimony at the Kitzmiller vs. Dover trial over teaching intelligent design in schools; but embarrassment is not an arrow in the ID quiver, and he hasn’t been keeping quiet since then.
Carl:
Last week the linguist John McWhorter spoke to Michael Behe. Behe, like Paul Nelson, is part of the Discovery Institute, your ultimate destination for Intelligent Design–a k a the progeny of creationism. So now Bloggingheads had two people from the Discovery Institute on in the space of a few weeks. Behe has written a couple books on intelligent design, in which he makes various claims about what evolution can’t do. He tells us it can’t produce complex biology; it can’t even account for drug resistance in the past few decades in malaria parasites. So the great Intelligent Designer who shall not speak his/her/its name must be responsible.
beach birds for camera
O pensioners, O demagogues and pay-men!
In the fall of 1936, after a decade of not doing so, this magazine sponsored a poetry prize. Of the 1,800 poems submitted, said the editors of The Nation, “the overwhelming majority were concerned with contemporary social conflicts either at home or abroad.” The winning poem, Wallace Stevens's “The Men That Are Falling,” was an elegy for soldiers recently killed in the Spanish Civil War, which reads, in part:
Taste of the blood upon his martyred lips,
O pensioners, O demagogues and pay-men!
O pensioners, O demagogues and pay-men!
This death was his belief though death is a stone,
This man loved earth, not heaven, enough to die.
These stand among the most uncharacteristic lines that Stevens ever published. Coming upon them in the elegantly compressed compass of the new Selected Poems, it's difficult to imagine that the author of a quietly unnerving pentameter like “The river that flows nowhere, like a sea” could have written the line “Taste of the blood upon his martyred lips.”
more from James Longenbach at The Nation here.
Something Called the Buggynaut
The history of America is the history of the automobile industry: it starts in fields and garages and ends in boardrooms and dumps; it starts with daredevils and tinkerers and ends with bureaucrats and congressmen; it starts with a sense of here-goes-let’s-hope-it-works and ends with help-help-help. We tend to think of it as an American history that opens, as if summoned by the nature of the age, early in the last century, when the big mills and factories were already spewing smoke above Flint and Detroit, but we tend to be wrong. The history of the car is far older and stranger than you might suppose. Its early life is like the knock-around life one of the stars of the ’80s lived in the ’70s, Stallone before Rocky, say, picking up odd jobs, working the grift, and, of course, porn. The first automobile turned up outside Paris in 1789, when Detroit was an open field. (The hot rod belonged to the Grand Armée before it belonged to Neal and Jack.) It was another of the great innovations that seemed to appear in that age of revolution.
more from Rich Cohen at The Believer here.
September 1, 1939
Brad Delong notes that this is the 70th anniversary of the beginning of World War II, and also of Auden's phenomenal poem “September 1, 1939” (first published in October 1939). In my humble opinion, these 99 lines constitute perhaps the finest political poem every written in the English language. Joseph Brodsky used to lecture on the poem with such happiness and insight that we would all walk away even more overwhelmed by Auden. (A decent transcript can be found in Less Than One.) It is the poem I most frequently recite to myself, still.
Auden was unhappy, perhaps even embarrassed by the line “We must one another or die.” Unless I'm mistaken, he once changed it in one version to “We must love one another and die,” which fails, I think. Brodsky suggested that the line really was trying to say “We must love one another or kill,” but then the rhymes fail.
So, on this occassion, W. H. Auden:
I sit in one of the dives
On Fifty-second Street
Uncertain and afraid
As the clever hopes expire
Of a low dishonest decade:
Waves of anger and fear
Circulate over the bright
And darkened lands of the earth,
Obsessing our private lives;
The unmentionable odour of death
Offends the September night.Accurate scholarship can
Unearth the whole offence
From Luther until now
That has driven a culture mad,
Find what occurred at Linz,
What huge imago made
A psychopathic god:
I and the public know
What all schoolchildren learn,
Those to whom evil is done
Do evil in return.
What Should Colleges Teach? Part 2
Stanley Fish in the New York Times:
The negative comments on my previous column (there were many positive ones too) fall neatly into two groups, the attacks on me and the attacks on my ideas.
Let’s do the ad hominem stuff first. More than a few posters declared that while I talk the talk, I don’t walk the walk. Eric issues a challenge: “So Mr. Fish, how about teaching some comp classes yourself?” English Professor is confident that “we can safely assume that Mr. Fish has never actually taught a composition class himself.” Ditto anonymous writing instructor: “I’m sure that Fish is paid too dearly for his opinions here and elsewhere to actually teach composition classes.” Maeve asks, “By the way, when’s the last time you taught a freshman composition class?”
That one’s easy. The last time I taught a regularly scheduled freshman composition class was my last year teaching in a liberal arts college. That was 2004-2005, and in the years before that, when I was the dean, I taught the course every fall. Since 2005, I’ve been a faculty member at a law school where there are no freshmen to teach, so I’ve had to make do with offering a non-credit writing workshop on Mondays; it’s my version of pro bono work and last fall 50 or so students and a few colleagues took advantage of it.
More here.
Zia’s long reach
Quddus Mirza in Himal Southasian:
The Pakistani state no longer forces the country’s artists to comply with stringent political or moral diktats – but it doesn’t have to.
“We live in a postmodern age, everything is simulation, everything is reference, even dictatorships.”
– Dubravka Ugresic
A young man writes a love letter to his fiancé, and adds a line or two about the government of his country. He posts the letter, but soon after dispatching he realises that if it is opened in the censor office, he is going to suffer because of the casual negative remark he made. In order to avoid such consequences, he decides to apply for a job in the censor department, so he can try to get hold of his letter. To his surprise, he does indeed get a position, and thus starts learning his new tasks. Several months later, during the course of normal post-checking, he finally comes across his letter. He opens it and reads the content. But instead of hiding it or throwing it away, he writes a note that the sender of the letter has committed a crime against the state and must be punished.
More here.
Skipping Spouse to Spouse Isn’t Just a Man’s Game
Natalie Angier in The New York Times:
In the United States and much of the Western world, when a couple divorces, the average income of the woman and her dependent children often plunges by 20 percent or more, while that of her now unfettered ex, who had been the family’s primary breadwinner but who rarely ends up paying in child support what he had contributed to the household till, climbs accordingly. The born-again bachelor is therefore perfectly positioned to attract a new, younger wife and begin building another family.
Small wonder that many Darwinian-minded observers of human mating customs have long contended that serial monogamy is really just a socially sanctioned version of harem-building. By this conventional evolutionary psychology script, the man who skips from one nubile spouse to another over time is, like the sultan who hoards the local maidenry in a single convenient location, simply seeking to “maximize his reproductive fitness,” to sire as many children as possible with as many wives as possible. It is the preferred male strategy, especially for powerful men, right? Sequentially or synchronously, he-men consort polygynously.
More here.
3 Quarks Daily 2009 Philosophy Prize: Vote Here
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.
If you are new to 3 Quarks Daily, we welcome you and invite you to look around the site after you vote. Learn more about who we are and what we do here, and do check out the full site here. Bookmark us and come back regularly, or sign up for the RSS feed. If you have a blog or website, and like what you see here, we would very much appreciate being added to your blogroll. Please don’t forget!
Results of the voting round (the top twenty most voted for posts) will be posted on the main page on September 8, 2009. Winners of the contest, as decided by Daniel C. Dennett, will be announced on September 22, 2009.
Now go ahead and submit your vote below!
Cheers,
Abbas
P.S. If you notice any problems, such as a nominee is missing from the list below, please leave a comment on this page. Thanks.
BEWARE: We have various independent ways of keeping track of attempts at voting multiple times, which I am deliberately not revealing publicly. Any attempts at fraud will be thoroughly investigated, and anyone caught trying to vote multiple times will be instantly disqualified. I don’t think I really need to say this, but there are always a couple of bad eggs who will try!
The Meaning of Coerced Confessions in the Tehran Show Trials
Ladan Boroumand in Dissent:
In a clumsy remake of an old-time Stalinist show trial, a pale and underfed individual with a distraught gaze recites more or less convincingly a story whose plot is ever the same: A self-told tale of (highly improbable) contacts with American or Israeli agents is put forward as “evidence” of the hapless defendant’s nefarious desire to topple the Islamic Republic.
This treatment is not reserved for oppositionists alone. On the contrary, prosecutors have administered it liberally over the years to former mid- or even high-ranking regime cadres who made the mistake of daring to question some higher-up’s wisdom or claim to command. On April 23, 1982, for instance, the confession of former IRI foreign minister and broadcasting chief Sadeq Ghotbzadeh aired on Iranian state television. He accused himself of plotting a military coup against Ayatollah Khomeini, an alleged crime for which he would be shot that September. A few days later, the highest-ranking Shi’a ayatollah, Mohammad Kazem Shariatmadari, was given a text to read on television “proving” his connivance with Ghotbzadeh. Shariatmadari’s real “crime” was his disapproval of political rule by the clergy, but the trumped-up confession gave the IRI the legal fig leaf that it needed to silence the ayatollah and keep him under house arrest until his death in 1986.
More here.
Is art criticism so easy that a pigeon can do it?
Our own Morgan Meis in The Smart Set:
I've always been suspicious of the birds. Maybe it's because they are always spying on us from above. The ancients understood that the birds were in cahoots with powerful forces. They poked about in bird entrails trying to find messages from the heavens, omens from hell. They wondered whom the birds were working for. Poor Prometheus was punished for the simple and humane act of giving fire to mankind. It is no accident that he was punished with the torture of an eagle eternally feasting on his liver. The birds will always sell us out for a pittance.
Our latest humiliation at the hands of our feathery friends comes in the unexpected realm of art criticism. The birds, it seems, enter any arena if there is the chance of making us look like fools.
Here's what happened. Shigeru Watanabe (a psychologist at Keio University in Tokyo and possibly a man in league with the birds) set up a nefarious experiment. Watanabe showed children's paintings to pigeons; a panel of adults had deemed each work either good or bad. He trained the pigeons to distinguish between them with a system of tasty rewards. When the pigeons pecked correctly, he gave them some seed. Later, he presented 10 paintings to the birds they had never seen. Five of these paintings had been deemed good by humans, five bad. The pigeons recognized the good paintings as “good” twice as often as they recognized the “bad” paintings. In short, they came off as pretty good critics. There are those (names withheld) writing for major publications who might do markedly less well. Given these results, Watanabe claims, “pigeons are capable of learning the concept of a stimulus class that humans name 'good' pictures.”
Monday, August 31, 2009
3 Quarks Daily Prize in Philosophy
September 22, 2009, NOTE: The winners have been announced here.
September 11, 2009, NOTE: The list of nine finalists can be seen here.
September 8, 2009, NOTE: The list of twenty semifinalists can be seen here.
Dear Readers, Writers, Bloggers,
The first place award, called the “Top Quark,” will include a cash prize of one thousand dollars; the second place prize, the “Strange Quark,” will include a cash prize of three hundred dollars; and the third place winner will get the honor of winning the “Charm Quark,” along with a two hundred dollar prize.
* * *
(Welcome to those coming here for the first time. Learn more about who we are and what we do here, and do check out the full site here. Bookmark us and come back regularly, or sign up for the RSS feed.
* * *
Today:
- The nominating process is hereby declared open. Please nominate your favorite blog entry in the field of philosophy by placing the URL for the blogpost (the permalink) in the comments section of this post. You may also add a brief comment describing the entry and saying why you think it should win.
- Entries must be in English.
- The editors of 3QD reserve the right to reject entries that we feel are not appropriate.
- The blog entry may not be more than a year old from today. In other words, it must have been written after August 23, 2008.
- You may also nominate your own entry from your own or a group blog (and we encourage you to).
- Guest columnists at 3 Quarks Daily are also eligible to be nominated, and may also nominate themselves if they wish.
- You may also comment here on our prizes themselves, of course!
August 31, 2009
- The nominating process will end at 11:59 PM (NYC time) of this date, so there is only a week to submit nominations.
- The public voting will be opened immediately afterwards.
September 7, 2009
- Public voting ends at 11:59 PM (NYC time).
September 22, 2009
- The winners are announced.
One Final and Important Request
If you have a blog or website, please help us spread the word about our prizes by linking to this post. Otherwise, just email your friends and tell them about it! I really look forward to reading some very good material, and think this should be a lot of fun for all of us.
Best of luck and thanks for your attention!
Yours,
Abbas
perceptions
Sunday, August 30, 2009
The Nominees for the 2009 3QD Prize in Philosophy Are:
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.
- 3 Quarks Daily: Penne For Your Thought
- 3 Quarks Daily: The Temporal Prospects of Humanity
- Another Heidegger Blog: Interview with Jeffery Malpas
- Biophilia: Altruism Through Genocide
- Biophilia: Holy Gibberish!
- Blog & ~Blog: Graham Priest’s Theory of Change
- Brain Hammer: Bandwidth and Storage in the Human Biocomputer
- Cognition and Culture: Descarte’s Skull
- Der Wille Zur Macht und Sprachspiele: Nietzsche’s Causal Essentialism
- Duck Rabbit: Can words be used incorrectly?
- Engage: Conversations in Philosophy: Empathy, Equity, and the Wise Latina Judge: Sotomayor and the Supreme Court Oath of Office
- Evolving Thoughts: Aristotle on the Mayfly
- Evolving Thoughts: “Class” War
- Evolving Thoughts: Darwin, Atheism, and the Catholic Church
- Evolving Thoughts: Darwin, God and Chance
- Evolving Thoughts: Darwin thought evolution relied on accidents and chance
- Evolving Thoughts: Definitions of Atheism
- Evolving Thoughts: How to derive an ontology in biology
- Evolving Thoughts: Information and Metaphysics
- Evolving Thoughts: Laws, Theories and Models
- Evolving Thoughts: Phenomena
- Evolving Thoughts: Philosophy and Evolution
- Evolving Thoughts: The Doctrine of Double Truth
- Grundlegung: Philosophy as Bildung
- How Not to Win A War: Light ’em up, Baber!
- How Not to Win A War: On Ideology
- Hyper Tiling: Unheimlich Realism (and Zombies)
- In Living Color: Can you be blamed for forgetting?
- In Search of Enlightenment: The Availability Heuristic and the Inborn Aging Process
- Justin Erik Halldór Smith: The Fundamentals of Gelastics
- Larval Subjects: Object-Oriented Ontology and Scientific Naturalism
- Larval Subjects: Speculative Realism and the Unheimlich
- Let Us Philosophize: Against Much Erudition
- Matters of Substance: How Many Regions of Spacetime Actually Exist?
- Methods of Projection: Wittgenwanker
- Minerva’s Howl: On Retrospective Prophecy
- MSU Philosophy Club: Philosophy and Video Games: Idealism and Closure
- Object-Oriented Philosophy: English Stylists and Related Matters
- PEA Soup: Constraints: Agent-Focused or Victim-Focused
- PEA Soup: Scanlon on Moral Responsibility and Blame
- Perverse Egalitarianism: Early Heidegger: Fundamental Ontology
- Philosophy, et cetera: Reflecting on Relativism
- Philosophy Sucks!: The Contestability of (P & ~Q)
- Philosophy Sucks!: Reflections on Zoombies and Shombies Or: After the Showdown at the APA
- Possibly Philosophy: Uncertainty in the Many Worlds Theory
- Public Reason: On Public Reason and Justificatory Liberalism
- Specter of Reason: Discovery, Demonstration, and Naturalism
- Specter of Reason: The Language of Consciousness
- Specter of Reason: Wise on Intelligent Design in the Classroom
- Strange Doctrines: Third-World Zombies and (Ana) Qualiac Reference
- The Edge of the American West: Part 1, All noble things are as difficult as they are rare
- The Edge of the American West: Part 2, The Best of All Possible Worlds
- The Edge of the American West: Part 3, Why should we be loyal to reason if it pushes us into the abyss?
- The Garden of Forking Paths: Defining Determinism and Such
- The Garden of Forking Paths: To Hell With the TNR Principle
- The Immanent Frame: Immanent Spirituality
- The Prosblogion: An Opinionated Play-by-Play of the Plantinga-Dennett Exchange
- The Space of Reasons: A Counterexample to Setiya
- The Space of Reasons: Dilworth’s Functional Consonance
- Tomkow: Blackburn, Truth and other Hot Topics
- Tomkow: The Good, The Bad and Peter Singer
- Underverse: Refuting “It,” Thus
- Wide Scope: Emotions and Moral Skepticism
- Yeah, OK, But Still: An Ethics of Honor
To vote, click here.
Land of hypocrites
Shandana Minhas in Pakistan's The News:
I would like to begin by asking when Ramzan or Ramazan officially became Ramadan? It is the month the natural born Pakistani's intrinsic need to feel holier than thou — a necessary if trying counterpoint to the self loathing we traditionally embody– manifests itself to an alarming degree.
Celebrities begin their yearly plummet off the cliffs of prudishness at the onset of the month, like lemmings but without the charisma. Chiffon clad women wrap themselves in an extra layer of piety as they harangue their Hindu maids. Those who imbibe swear off the stuff for the duration, as if it isn't haram all year around.
Mosque loudspeakers' volumes are raised an extra notch, a crude but effective way to ensure all in their immediate vicinity bridge the class divide by being equally susceptible to inner ear damage. And salespeople ringing up midday food purchases do so with such a contemptuous superiority it is a wonder they are able to stay seated and not inadvertently levitate straight to heaven, bottoms up. And should the topic of inappropriate sanctimonious be brought up in conversation with, say, a person who has broken a red light in their rush to get home for Iftar and nearly totaled your car in the process, do you know what you are likely to get in response? I cannot possibly eat humble pie: I am fasting.
I'm generally not so negative but this year things got off to a bad start for me thanks to the pick up truck that parked outside the apartment complex I live in during the wee hours of the first night and proceeded to harangue all inmates with demands for charity over a megaphone, which is never a nice thing to do to anyone in bed.
Then, reeling from both sleep deprivation and the knowledge of my own helplessness in the face of wanton, unprovoked wailing, I read about the directive issued by the Ministry of Religious Affairs to all provincial governments directing them to ensure full implementation of the Ehteram-e-Ramadan Ordinance. The ordinance, promulgated in 1981 under Zia-ul-Haq, makes it illegal for anyone – young, old, infirm, pregnant, lapsed – to eat, drink or smoke in public and applies across the board to Muslims and non-Muslims. In other words, resistance is futile, you will be assimilated.
More here.