Guy Hasson in The Storytellers:
Stories, by their nature, have some sort of conflict. Otherwise, they would be boring. Conflict, by its nature, has at least two sides. To be able to write these two sides well, the artist has to understand, deep inside, that both sides are equally human. The more he portrays the other side as human, the better the story. The less human the other side, the more flawed the story.
That puts artists on the humanistic side of most ideological battles throughout history: against racism (the other race is people, too), against slavery (slaves are people, too), for feminism (women are people, too), for the rights of children (children think and feel just like adults), against child labor, for gay rights (homosexuals are just as human), for the downtrodden, for the poor (they are just like us, only poor), against most wars (because the other side bleeds red, too, and mourns with the same pain), and against most religions (in particular, against the religions that claim its followers are ‘the chosen’ and those who are not will not get into heaven and/or are inferior in some way).
Oddly enough, this little rule does not necessarily put artists on the side of animal rights, since animals may be many things, but they are not human.
More here.
Daniel Davies at Crooked Timber:
I tend to regard myself as Crooked Timber’s online myrmidon of a number of rather unpopular views; among other things, as regular readers will have seen, I believe that the incitement to religious hatred legislation was a good idea (perhaps badly executed), that John Searle has it more or less correct on the subject of artificial intelligence, that Jacques Derrida deserves his high reputation and that George Orwell was not even in the top three essayists of the twentieth century. I’m a fan of Welsh nationalism. Oh yes, the Kosovo intervention was a crock too. At some subconscious level I am aware that my ideas about education are both idiotic and unspeakable. But I think that all of these causes are regarded as at least borderline sane by at least one fellow CT contributor. There is only one major issue on which I stand completely alone, reviled by all. And it’s this; Budweiser (by which I mean the real Budweiser, the beer which has been sold under that brand by Anheuser-Busch since 1876) is really quite a good beer.
More here. [Thanks to Robin Varghese.]
John Allen Paulos in his brilliant Who’s Counting column at ABC News:
…Robert Louis Stevenson’s story “The Imp in the Bottle” provides a fictional illustration of the psychology behind one sort of dismissal of global warming. It is the story of a genie in a bottle who will satisfy your every wish for love, money and power. You can buy this amazing bottle for any amount that you care to offer. The only constraint is that when you are finished with the bottle, you must sell it for a price strictly less than that you paid for it. If you don’t sell it to someone for a lower price, you will lose everything and suffer everlasting torment in hell. What would you pay for such a bottle?
Certainly, you won’t pay 1 cent for it because then you won’t be able to sell it for a lower price. You won’t pay 2 cents for it either because no one will buy it from you for 1 cent for the same reason. (Everyone knows that it must be sold for a price less than the price at which it is bought.) Neither will you pay 3 cents for it; the person to whom you would have to sell it for 2 cents would object to buying it at that price since he wouldn’t be able to sell for 1 cent.
A similar argument applies to a price of 4 cents, 5 cents, 6 cents and so on. Mathematical induction can be used to formalize this argument, which proves conclusively that you shouldn’t buy this magic bottle for any amount of money. Yet you would almost certainly buy it for $1,000. I know I would. At what point does the argument against buying the bottle become practically convincing?
As the above thought experiment illustrates, the consequences of our decisions need not occur in the distant future for us to discount them. They can occur far away or after so many steps as to seem distant.
More here.
From Answers.com:
Today’s an auspicious day for the dark side: John Wilkes Booth (1838-1865), James Earl Ray (1929-1998) and Mark David Chapman (52) were all born on May 10. In 1865, Booth shot and killed President Abraham Lincoln, who was attending a performance at Ford’s Theatre. Ray took the life of Martin Luther King, Jr., in 1968, as King stood on a hotel room balcony in Memphis, TN. And in 1981, Chapman murdered John Lennon as Lennon arrived at his home in NYC.
Also, does anyone know why assassins are almost always known by their full names, meaning their middle name is also always included? Why not just Lee Oswald, for example?
Julian Bell in the New York Review of Books:
Bacon’s continued hold on the meaning of his own art is quite distinctive. If you turn to his initial artistic inspiration, Picasso—or for that matter to that other great post-Picasso painter, Jackson Pollock—you meet artists who habitually, for most of their careers, refused to offer verbal sops to interpretation. Writers on Picasso and Pollock contradict one another vigorously and incessantly; when it comes to Bacon, the commentariat is docile and orthodox. What is it that engenders this pattern of viewer behavior?
More here.
From The Eternal Universe:
A new study by Indiana University media researchers finds that Fox News host Bill O’Reilly calls “a person or a group a derogatory name once every 6.8 seconds, on average, or nearly nine times every minute during the editorials that open his program each night.”
The study documented six months worth, or 115 episodes, of O’Reilly’s “Talking Points Memo” editorials “using propaganda analysis techniques made popular after World War I.” Researchers found that O’Reilly “was prone to inject fear into his commentaries and quick to resort to name-calling. He also frequently assigned roles or attributes — such as ‘villians’ or downright ‘evil’ — to people and groups.
More here.
He also resents the way people now expect a constant flow of jokes and paradoxes from him. “The way some people celebrate me is really a disguised form of an attack. ‘He’s a funny provocateur,’ they say. ‘He just likes to provoke.’ I don’t provoke. I’m very naive; I mean what I say.”
How, then, does he see himself? “As an American preacher. I read somewhere that these evangelical preachers in the wild west had a strategy to convert the cowboys. They were very good magicians – these classical tricks, rabbits, hats, blah blah. The idea is, first, through magical tricks, attract the attention, then the message. Maybe I’m going to do the same.” But what is the message? “Pessimistic leftism.” Capitalism is doomed; classical leftist solutions are naive; we’re screwed, basically, and he doesn’t have an easy answer. Which, he says, is why he is a philosopher rather than a political theorist.
more from The Guardian here.
The decline of the Roman Empire has been discussed for centuries, and it could be that the discussion about the decline of Europe will last as long. Decline often does not proceed as quickly as feared; there are usually retarding circumstances. But it is also true that, for better or worse, the pulse of history is beating quicker in our time than before.
There is also a danger that we will throw up our hands in despair and accept with resignation Europe’s future role as a museum of world history and civilization, preaching the importance of morality in world affairs to a nonexistent audience. Surely decline offers challenges that ought to be taken up, even if there is no certainty of success. No one can say with any confidence what problems the powers that now appear to be in the ascendancy will face in the years to come. And even if Europe’s decline is now irreversible, there is no reason that it should become a collapse.
There is, however, a precondition — something that has been postponed. The debate should be about which of Europe’s traditions and values can still be saved. The age of delusions is over.
more from The Chronicle Review here.
(Via Political Theory Daily Review) in The Scientist:
Amanda lies flat on her back, clad in a steel blue hospital gown and an air of anticipation, as she is rolled headfirst into a beeping, 10-ton functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) unit. Once inside, the 20-something blonde uses a handheld device to respond to questions about the playing cards appearing on the screen at the foot of the machine. With each click of the button, she is either lying or telling the truth about whether a card presented to her matches the one in her pocket, and the white-coated technician who watches her brain image morph into patterns on his computer screen seems to know the difference.
It’s unlikely anyone would shell out $10,000 to exonerate herself in a dispute over gin rummy. But Amanda, the model in a demo video for Tarzana, Calif.-based No Lie MRI, is helping to make a point: lie-detection is going high-tech. No Lie MRI claims it can identify lies with 90% accuracy. The service is meant for “anybody who wants to demonstrate that they are telling truth to others,” says founder and CEO Joel Huizenga. “Everyone should be allowed to use whatever method they can to defend themselves.”
Barbara Ehrenreich in The Nation:
Hiasl, a 26-year old Austrian-based chimpanzee, is petitioning the courts for human status, and let me be the first to extend him a warm welcome to our species. My animal rights activism has never gone beyond the cage-free eggs’ stage; it’s the human possibilities raised by Hiasl’s case that caught my attention. If a chimpanzee can be declared a person, then there’s nothing in the way of a person becoming an ape–and I’m not just talking about a retroactive status applied to ex-husbands. In fact, I predict a surge in trans-specied people, who will eagerly go over to the side of the chimps.
The transition need not involve costly, time-consuming, surgical arm extensions and whole-body Rogaine treatments, since we are practically chimpanzees already. We share 99 percent of our genome with them, making it possible for chimps to accept human blood transfusions and kidney donations. Despite their vocal limitations, they communicate easily with each other and can learn human languages. They use tools and live in groups that display behavioral variations attributable to what anthropologists recognize as culture.
And we may be a lot closer biologically than Darwin ever imagined. Last May, paleontologists reported evidence of inter-breeding between early humans and chimps as recently as 5 million years ago, and proposed that modern humans are the result of this ancient predilection for bestiality.
In October, 2005, a truck pulled up outside the National Archeological Museum in Athens, and workers began unloading an eight-ton X-ray machine that its designer, X-Tek Systems of Great Britain, had dubbed the Bladerunner. Standing just inside the National Museum’s basement was Tony Freeth, a sixty-year-old British mathematician and filmmaker, watching as workers in white T-shirts wrestled the Range Rover-size machine through the door and up the ramp into the museum. Freeth was a member of the Antikythera Mechanism Research Project—a multidisciplinary investigation into some fragments of an ancient mechanical device that were found at the turn of the last century after two thousand years in the Aegean Sea, and have long been one of the great mysteries of science.
more from The New Yorker here.