James Trimarco reviews the book in The Brooklyn Rail:

Revolutionary leaders like Lenin and Mao, if they could return today, would find a political left transformed beyond their recognition. While they believed in the absolute truth of their ideas, or at least wrote as if they did, most modern leftists see truth as partly contingent on one’s point of view. Where the old leaders saw the hierarchical political party as the best tool for transforming society, most modern leftists prefer decentralized forms of organizing, in which power flows from the bottom up. And where the old leaders imagined an uprising that would sweep capitalism from the face of the earth, modern leftists often believe it capable of incorporating every type of resistance. They advise their followers to bend it to their needs, to wait for the catastrophe that might cause its collapse, to build small spaces of resistance in which a semi-autonomous life is possible.

Slavoj Žižek, the Slovenian philosopher and author of more than fifty books, has harsh words for this approach in his new book, In Defense of Lost Causes. He calls it “a worthless sophistic exercise, a pseudo-theorization of the lowest opportunist survivalist fears,” and urges leftists to look beyond the old legacy’s “totalitarianism” to see what might still be valuable there. Žižek has been arguing this point for decades, and the failure of the anti-war movement has put new wind in his sails. Still, it’s not going to be easy to convince the people he calls “postmodern leftists” (a pejorative term nearly all of them would object to, as Simon Critchley recently did in Harper’s magazine) that there is anything of use to them in the legacies of Stalin and Mao, let alone Hitler.

Is this book really going to defend such characters? Yes and no.

To the extent there are political pamphlets today, it still rings true.  I wonder what he’d say about the writing on political blogs. In the New Statesman (picture from Wikimedia):

The liveliest pamphlets are almost always non- party, a good example being Bless ’em All, which should be regarded as a pamphlet, though it costs one and sixpence.

The reason why the badness of contemporary pamphlets is somewhat surprising is that the pamphlet ought to be the literary form of an age like our own. We live in a time when political passions run high, channels of free expression are dwindling, and organised lying exists on a scale never before known. For plugging the holes in history the pamphlet is the ideal form. Yet lively pamphlets are very few, and the only explanation I can offer – a rather lame one – is that the publishing trade and the literary papers have never made the reading public pamphlet-conscious. One difficulty of collecting pamphlets is they are not issued in any regular manner, cannot always be procured even in the libraries of museums, and are seldom advertised and still more seldom reviewed.

A good writer with something he passionately wanted to say – and the essence of pamphleteering is to have something you want to say now, to as many people as possible – would hesitate to cast it in pamphlet form, because he would hardly know how to set about getting it published, and would be doubtful whether the people he wanted to reach would ever read it. Probably he would water his idea down into a newspaper article or pad it out into a book. As a result most pamphlets are either written by lonely lunatics, or belong to the subworld of the crank religions, or are issued by political parties. The normal way of publishing a pamphlet is through a political party, and the party will see to it that any “deviation” – and hence any literary value – is kept out.

Colin Jager in The Immanent Frame:

What’s so bad about heteronomous thinking, anyway?  Stathis Gourgouris has used the term in several posts here on The Immanent Frame.  He says that Charles Taylor’s book A Secular Age is an example of heteronomous thinking, and he also thinks that Saba Mahmood’s post on secularism and critique exemplifies it. Though Gourgouris doesn’t define “heteronomous thinking,” he seems to mean something like “thinking that depends at some crucial point on something outside itself.” He thinks this kind of thinking is pretty bad—though it’s less clear exactly why he thinks so.

It could be that heteronomous thinking is bad because it leads to unpleasant things. This would be a kind of consequentialist argument and would therefore live or die on the empirical evidence. This is Christopher Hitchens territory. Rightly recognizing that this is not where he wants to go, Gourgouris opts for the other kind of answer, which is to insist that heteronomous thinking is problematic in itself–-a kind of formal argument. But at some point any argument along these lines will beg the question, for it will need to assert that thinking for oneself is a good in itself. And that assertion can’t in turn be justified without appealing—heteronomously, if you will—to some scheme of values outside the mode of thinking in question.

At stake here is a certain kind of intellectual posture.

///
Nettie Moore
Bob Dylan

Lost John sittin’ on a railroad track
Something’s out of wack
Blues this morning falling down like hail
Gonna leave a greasy trail

Gonna travel the world is what I’m gonna do
Then come back and see you
All I ever do is struggle and strive
If I don’t do anybody any harm,
I might make it back home alive

I’m the oldest son of a crazy man
I’m in a cowboy band
Got a pile of sins to pay for and I ain’t got time to hide
I’d walk through a blazing fire, baby,
if I knew you was on the other side

Oh, I miss you Nettie Moore
And my happiness is o’er
Winter’s gone, the river’s on the rise
I loved you then and ever shall
But there’s no one here that’s left to tell
The world has gone black before my eyes

The world of research has gone berserk
Too much paperwork
Albert’s in the grave-yard, Frankie’s raising hell
I’m beginning to believe what the scriptures tell

I’m going where the Southern crosses the yellow dog
Get away from all these demagogues
And these bad luck women stick like glue
It’s either one or the other or neither of the two

She says, “look out daddy, don’t want you to tear your pants.
You can get wrecked in this dance.”
They say whiskey will kill ya, but I don’t think it will
I’m riding with you to the top of the hill

Oh, I miss you Nettie Moore
And my happiness is o’er
Winter’s gone, the river’s on the rise
I loved you then and ever shall
But there’s no one here that’s left to tell
The world has gone black before my eyes

Don’t know why my baby never looked so good before
I don’t have to wonder no more
She been cooking all day and it’s gonna take me all night
I can’t eat all that stuff in a single bite

The Judge is coming in, everybody rise
Lift up your eyes
You can do what you please, you don’t need my advice
Before you call me any dirty names you better think twice

Getting light outside, the temperature dropped
I think the rain has stopped
I’m going to make you come to grips with fate
When I’m through with you,
you’ll learn to keep your business straight

Oh, I miss you Nettie Moore
And my happiness is o’er
Winter’s gone, the river’s on the rise
I loved you then and ever shall
But there’s no one here that’s left to tell
The world has gone black before my eyes

The bright spark of the steady lights
Has dimmed my sights
When you’re around all my grief gives ‘way
A lifetime with you is like some heavenly day

Everything I’ve ever known to be right has proven wrong
I’ll be drifting along
The woman I’m lovin’ , she rules my heart
No knife could ever cut our love apart

Today I’ll stand in faith and raise
The voice of praise
The sun is strong, I’m standing in the light
I wish to God that it were night

Painting: Train Tracks, Bob Dylan

//

From The Telegraph:

What is Casanova’s biographer to do? The retired libertine did the job so well himself in his Histoire de ma vie that no one could possibly improve on his story, just as no one setting out to describe his extraordinarily restless life could have read, travelled or written more than Casanova, or thought more about the business of living than he did, or lived as bravely or as excessively. The Histoire, which Casanova wrote at the end of his days when he was working as a librarian at Dux Castle in Bohemia, details with such wit, candour and style his peripatetic years as a priest, con-man, cabbalist, violinist, soldier, alchemist, prisoner, fugitive, gambler, intellectual, writer and lover, while inadvertently giving such a vivid picture of mid-18th-century Europe, that not only is there little for anyone to add but due to its sheer bulk – over 3,800 pages, making up 12 volumes – the beleaguered biographer must rather choose what to take away in order to make his own version a reasonable length.

Casanova has baffled and thwarted many of those writers who, while trying to describe and evaluate his experiences, have succeeded only in repeating in edited form the events as he tells them, but in Ian Kelly he has at last found his Boswell. Himself an actor, Kelly is immediately alert to the theatricality of his subject.

More here.

From lensculture.com:

Each year, in the heat of summer, photography lovers descend on the quaint town of Arles in the South of France for a week-long celebration. Photography is shown everywhere — in old churches and Roman ruins, abandoned factories and hotel lobbies, government buildings and exquisite chateaus… everywhere you go! You can see photos projected at night on impromptu screens hanging in flower gardens, and on the walls of narrow alleyways, and pasted as illegal billboards wherever there’s a flat surface.

The yearly event has become like a vast summer camp for adults, where you can eat and drink well, enjoy boundless art, and catch up with your like-minded friends from all over the world.

The main curator for the 2008 event comes from the world of fashion, Christian Lacroix. However the biggest buzz is usually generated around the “discoveries” proposed by a handful of experts  — and this year’s discoveries look particularly promising. These are the cutting edge artists who are invited because their work deserves to be seen, not because it fits a theme.

More here.

Speaking of dialogue, Bruce Ackerman and James Fishkin in the wake of the Irish “no” vote on the Lisbon Treaty, in the FT:

The Irish No provides Europe with an opportunity to rethink its approach to referendums. Ever since Napoleon initiated the modern practice two centuries ago, referendums have been one-shot affairs – the people going to the polls to say Yes or No without taking preliminary steps to deliberate together on the choices facing the nation.

This populist method is unworthy of a modern democracy. If an issue is important enough to warrant decision by the people as a whole, it is important enough to require a more deliberate approach to decision-making. If the Irish return to the polls next year to rethink their vote, they should be encouraged to engage in a more deliberative exercise. Two weeks before the next referendum, Ireland should hold a special national day of deliberation at which ordinary citizens discuss the key issues at community centres throughout the country.

Suppose, for example, that deliberation day begins with a familiar sort of televised debate between the leading spokesman for the Yes and No sides. After the television show, local citizens take charge as they engage in the main issues in small discussion groups of 15 and larger plenary assemblies. The small groups begin where the televised debate leaves off. Each group spends an hour defining questions that the national spokesmen left unanswered. Everybody then proceeds to a plenary assembly to hear their questions answered by local representatives of the Yes and No sides.

After lunch, participants repeat the morning procedure. By the end of the day, they will have moved far beyond the top-down television debate of the morning. Through a deliberative process of question-and-answer, they will achieve a bottom-up understanding of the issue confronting the nation. Discussions begun on deliberation day will continue during the run-up to referendum day, drawing those who did not attend into the escalating national dialogue.

In The Daily Times (Pakistan):

What does it mean to be “civilised”? Obviously, being highly educated, wearing a tie, eating with a fork, or cutting one’s nails weekly is not enough. We all know that being “civilised” in this formal way doesn’t prevent people from behaving like barbarians. Everywhere and at all times, being civilised means being able to recognise and accept the humanity of others, despite their different modes of living.

That may seem like an obvious point, but it is not universally accepted. The idea of dialogue between civilisations usually gets good press, but it is also sometimes mocked. The conclusion of Elie Barnavi’s recent essay Les religions meurtrières (“Murderous religions”) is entitled “Against the dialogue of civilisations”. His argument is implacable: “There is civilisation on one hand and barbarism on the other. There is no possible dialogue between them.”

But if you look at this line of argument more closely, the flaw in Barnavi’s argument is immediately apparent. The meaning of the words civilisation and culture is very different when they are used in singular and plural forms. Cultures (plural) are the modes of living embraced by various human groups, and comprise all that their members have in common: language, religion, family structures, diet, dress, and so on. In this sense, “culture” is a descriptive category, without any value judgement.

Civilisation (singular) is, on the contrary, an evaluative moral category: the opposite of barbarism. So a dialogue between cultures is not only beneficial, but essential to civilisation. No civilisation is possible without it.

To remind us of what has been done in our name:

Pete [Wehner ] concedes that this administration has seized thousands of innocents, and tortured and abused many of them, and released many of them. But he has a secondary point:

The notion that Bush-administration officials were intentionally issuing orders and seizing innocent people to be picked up off the streets of Afghanistan and Iraq to be tortured and abused strikes me as absurd.

Now of course it may be true that the administration would, in an ideal world, have preferred that every person they seized was actually guilty; and that every person they tortured gave up accurate information. Police states would love it if this were true as well. But the point is that this cannot happen and has never happened in the real world – and recognizing this fact is a core principle of Western civilization. If you suspend the Geneva Conventions, give the green light to anything that will get intelligence, round up thousands all over the globe with reckless disregard for guilt or innocence, you are effectively and knowingly issuing orders to seize innocent people and torture them. Any president who decides to do that and then says it was not his intention to do that is a fraud or a fool. It matters not a whit what fantasy the president had cooked up in his own mind about what he was doing. This is what he was doing. Major Gen Antonio Taguba, trusted enough by this administration to run an earlier report on the abuse scandal, puts it plainly enough:

“After years of disclosures by government investigations, media accounts, and reports from human rights organizations, there is no longer any doubt as to whether the current administration has committed war crimes. The only question that remains to be answered is whether those who ordered the use of torture will be held to account.”

Pete’s kicker:

[Andrew’s] rage at President Bush is causing him to ignore and reinterpret history and make statements that are simply reckless.

This gets this round the wrong way. My rage at Bush has not caused me to accuse the man of war crimes. Bush’s war crimes are what caused my rage.

///
As I Grew Older
Langston Hughes

It was a long time ago.
I have almost forgotten my dream.
But it was there then,
In front of me,
Bright like a sun–
My dream.
And then the wall rose,
Rose slowly,
Slowly,
Between me and my dream.
Rose until it touched the sky–
The wall.
Shadow.
I am black.
I lie down in the shadow.
No longer the light of my dream before me,
Above me.
Only the thick wall.
Only the shadow.
My hands!
My dark hands!
Break through the wall!
Find my dream!
Help me to shatter this darkness,
To smash this night,
To break this shadow
Into a thousand lights of sun,
Into a thousand whirling dreams
Of sun!

….
….
….
….
….
….
….
….
Dreams

Writer Charles Johnson speaks to the realization of some dreams in this articles at The American Scholar.  He talks about the black narrative —the back-story of blacks in America— and how he thinks this narrative has changed.

“As a writer, philosopher, artist, and black American, I’ve devoted more than 40 years of my life to trying to understand and express intellectually and artistically different aspects of the black American narrative. At times during my life, especially when I was young, it was a story that engaged me emotionally and consumed my imagination. I’ve produced novels, short stories, essays, critical articles, drawings, and PBS dramas based on what we call the black American story. To a certain degree, teaching the literature of black America has been my bread and butter as a college professor. It is a very old narrative, one we all know quite well, and it is a tool we use, consciously or unconsciously, to interpret or to make sense of everything that has happened to black people in this country since the arrival of the first 20 Africans at the Jamestown colony in 1619.

“The story begins with violence in the 17th-century slave forts sprinkled along the west coast of Africa, where debtors, thieves, war prisoners, and those who would not convert to Islam were separated from their families, branded, and sold to Europeans who packed them into the pestilential ships that cargoed 20 million human beings (a conservative estimate) to the New World.”

More.  Related.

///

Critics have had a field day with the copious references to food in Gogol’s work, commenting on the semiotics of eating in his fiction or postulating that the writer’s sublimated desire for his mother found satisfaction in food, rather than sex. Indeed, Gogol’s exuberant gustatory images encourage this kind of analysis. As he himself remarked on his four-cornered fish pie, it’s one that could make “a dead man’s mouth . . . water.” The gastronomic Gogol uses language as textured and rich as the foods he so lovingly describes. After reveling in his prose for years, I have discovered a different kind of sublimation, one less psychosexual. It doesn’t have to do with the author’s mother or with his nose—the organ that famously parades through the streets of Saint Petersburg in his brilliant short story “The Nose.” Rather, I find Gogol’s writings full of instances that emphasize the stomach and the processes of digestion, literary manifestations of the troubles that plagued the writer throughout his life. Though I delight in the gastronomic Gogol, I’m even more intrigued by the gastric Gogol.

Gogol’s stomach, his “most noble part,” was at least as great an obsession as his much talked-about nose.

more from Words Without Borders here.

Emily Dickinson: post-9/11 poet?

I began to consider this question after returning to Susan Howe’s My Emily Dickinson, her kaleidoscopic, deeply researched, brilliantly written 1985 tour-de-force, which has been reissued with a new introduction by Eliot Weinberger.

Weinberger calls My Emily Dickinson a “classic” of “avant-gardist criticism,” and he invokes a lineage of poets’ criticism extending from William Carlos Williams (In the American Grain) to Charles Olson (Call Me Ishmael) to “Susan Howe herself, the most Americanist of American poets.”

Howe’s book is simultaneously a dazzling exploration of Dickinson’s power and an anatomy of the American cultural imaginary. “The vivid rhetoric of terror,” Howe writes, “was a first step in the slow process of American Democracy.” This rhetoric of terror—fueled by a double legacy of Calvinist predestinarianism and violent frontier experience—animates some of Dickinson’s best work.

more from Boston Review here.

If you want to know how we ended up getting seduced by a woman in a plastic Viking hat chatting away through an already-encrusted bloody nose while holding a piece of Styrofoam cheese in an emergency room parking lot, or if you’re wondering why we fell in love as she cheese-guitared Zeppelin’s “Immigrant Song” on a mountaintop perch—well, that part is pretty hard to explain. But if you’re curious just when shaky, hand-held, low-res video became our absolute favorite artistic medium, we can tell you precisely: about three minutes into Harry Dodge and Stanya Kahn’s “Can’t Swallow it, Can’t Spit it Out,” at the 2008 Whitney Biennial.

Many of the other artworks installed in the museum also tried to reflect the ugly, over-complicated chaos of our newest late-capitalist moment—intricate, idiosyncratic maquettes of storefronts, sweatshop floors, and storage rooms—but boy did we prefer that stuff when it was outside in the dirty city, still menacing and boldly unintentional. Inside, we were more drawn to Melanie Schiff’s washed-out, murky interiors; Walead Beshty’s similarly faded, body-sized photos of office ruins; Joe Bradley’s sneaky arrangements of bright rectangles; and Matthew Brannon’s little print of a cigarette, an ashtray, and a glass, with the legend: “Finish your drink, we’re leaving.”

more from n+1 here.

For students of comics history, there are few names that strike the ear and the imagination quite like Ditko’s. In a field defined by brilliant oddballs, embittered journeymen, penniless geniuses and colorful hacks, Ditko is the strident hermit king. He gave the world Spider-Man but then more or less bugged out, deciding in 1969 to stop doing interviews and making public appearances. Now 80, Ditko lives in New York City, and although you can track down his studio, nobody I know who’s done so has gotten past the front step. It’s not that Ditko is unfriendly — he’s willing to talk, apparently (in one case, for more than an hour), but only while standing in his doorway, blocking any view into his home and his life.

If you’re a journalist, however, it’s a different story. Last year, the BBC aired a documentary, “In Search of Steve Ditko,” in which reporter Jonathan Ross, accompanied by Neil Gaiman, sought an audience with Ditko. He refused to speak on camera, which only reinforces the idea of him as the J.D. Salinger of super-hero comics. This, I suppose, makes Peter Parker a wall-crawling Holden Caulfield.

more from The LA Times here.

From The Guardian:

Until fairly recently, Jhumpa Lahiri didn’t have much name recognition in this country. But in the US, where she grew up and lives, and in India, where her parents were born, she’s had star status since the beginning of her career. Her first story collection, Interpreter of Maladies (1999), which she finished not long after turning 30, won a string of awards that culminated in the Pulitzer prize for fiction. Her first novel, The Namesake (2003), was also well received and became a US bestseller; a less well received film of it by Mira Nair was released in 2006. Her marriage in Calcutta in 2001 to Alberto Vourvoulias-Bush, a Guatemalan-American journalist, was given Hollywood-scale coverage by the local media, complete with paparazzi shots. And – unusually, to say the least, for a serious piece of writing, let alone a story collection – her new book, Unaccustomed Earth, went straight to the top of the New York Times fiction bestseller list.

One of the things that make Lahiri’s success in the marketplace all the more surprising is her lack of interest in either charming her readers with exoticism or dazzling them with a slick style. Unflashily written, long, almost grave in tone, her new stories patiently accumulate detail, only gradually building up a powerful emotional charge. And until not so long ago, her subject matter – the experiences of first and second-generation Bengali immigrants to the United States – would have been of marginal interest to most American readers.

More here.

From Science:

NASA’s “follow the water” approach to finding life–or evidence of past life–on Mars has finally hit pay dirt. Three weeks into its 90-day mission, the Phoenix lander has scraped a few centimeters down to an irrefutable layer of water ice in the martian arctic. The first robotic contact with water on Mars promises a score of chemical analyses in the next few months that could reveal whether this ice ever melted to liquid water that could have supported living organisms. And the discovery has already revealed some new mysteries beyond the question of life.

“It is with great joy that I report we have found the proof that this material really is water ice,” Phoenix principal investigator Peter Smith of the University of Arizona, Tucson, said during a media teleconference today. The kilometers-thick ice cap to the north of Phoenix’s landing site is exposed water ice, but orbital observations of the past decade had implied that ice must also lurk beneath just a few centimeters of loose soil well south of the ice cap. So NASA sent Phoenix to a safe-looking spot where, if past climates were warm enough, that ice might have melted to form a cozy zone for life between the ice and the soil surface. Phoenix’s first digging exposed a thin layer of white material, but team members couldn’t tell whether it was ice or perhaps salts. So they waited and watched the trench. In 4 days, at least eight crouton-sized white chunks formed by the digging disappeared, vaporized into the cold, dry air. “Salt does not behave like that,” said Smith, “so we are confident now that this is ice.” “The big story is that we can reach down and touch it now,” said team member Mark Lemmon of Texas A&M University in College Station.

More here.

Barbara Herrnstein Smith over at the Immanent Frame:

Boyer presents a picture of human behavior as largely a matter of the automatic, unconscious workings of evolved mental mechanisms, and he promotes the description of such workings as a properly scientific explanation of religion that trumps all other accounts. Indeed, for Boyer, it is precisely insofar as an explanation of some phenomenon—any phenomenon—is put in terms of what he refers to repeatedly as “underlying causal mechanisms” that it counts as genuinely scientific. In relation to these central features of Religion Explained, two important points should be made.

First, it should be recognized that neither the computational-modular model of the mind nor the idea of innate, automatically triggered mental mechanisms is a foregone conclusion of contemporary cognitive science or of any other science. The computational model has been significantly challenged both by practitioners of cognitive science per se and by researchers and theorists working in a number of related fields, including evolutionary biology, developmental psychology, paleoanthropology, and philosophy of mind. Moreover, a number of important alternative models of cognition have been developed in these and other fields…The alternative models often give considerable attention to a number of features of human cognition slighted in Boyer’s book and in the new cognitive accounts of religion more generally. Among them are the significance, for humans, of ongoing individual experiential learning; the complex social dynamics involved in the transmission of skills and beliefs; the presence among post-Paleolithic humans of such crucial cultural cognitive resources as transgenerational material culture, schools, texts, and duplicated images; and the significant differences among individuals with regard to various aspects of cognition.

Contrary, then, to the assumptions of paradigmatic evolutionary psychology and the claims of current cognitive explanations of religion, it is by no means clear that our interactions with our environments are determined largely by the operation of mental mechanisms hardwired at birth or that various widespread and recurrent features of human behavior and culture, including those associated with religion, are best explained by reference to a universal and virtually uniform species-specific mind.

In Bernardo Bertolucci’s Before the Revolution, one of my favorite movies, the young protagonist, Fabrizio—he’s in his early twenties—is torn between the doctrinaire Marxism he’s vowed to commit his life to—the revolution he professes to believe in with all his heart and soul—and the bourgeois pleasures that, presumably, the revolution is meant to put an end to. He’s so serious-minded—that is, he takes himself so seriously—that he can’t just admit that, like most of us, he’s easily seduced by sensual delights and youthful frivolities, which his sober politics are too narrow to permit. But he loves arguing about American movies over coffee with his (non-Marxist) friends and the bustling squares and antique architecture of Parma, where he grew up in a very comfortable home, and going to the opera with his family in the magnificent opera house that was built for the kind of people he’s not supposed to approve of. Truth be told, Fabrizio is a terrible fraud. And if he weren’t, if he were really as pure of mind and straight of purpose as he wants to believe he is, then we wouldn’t identify with him, and we wouldn’t sympathize with him.

The art I love most dearly emerges from an acknowledgment that we’re none of us pure of either mind or heart. It’s the art of mixed tones—buffoonery mixed with regret, as in Mozart’s The Marriage of Figaro; comic absurdity mixed with heartache, as in Chekhov’s stories; salvation that appears improbably out of despair, as in Shakespeare’s King Lear, or when all hope is lost, as in The Winter’s Tale.

more from The American Scholar here.

Corey Robin in The Nation:

In “Conservative Thought,” an unjustly neglected essay from 1927, Karl Mannheim argued that conservatives have never been wild about the idea of freedom. It threatens the submission of subordinate to superior. Because freedom is the lingua franca of modern politics, however, they have had “a sound enough instinct not to attack” it. Instead, they have made freedom the stalking horse of inequality, and inequality the stalking horse of submission. Men are naturally unequal, they argue. Freedom requires that they be allowed to develop their unequal gifts. A free society must be an unequal society, composed of radically distinct, and hierarchical, particulars.

Goldwater never rejected freedom; indeed, he celebrated it. But there is little doubt that he saw it as a proxy for inequality–or war, which he called “the price of freedom.” A free society protected each man’s “absolute differentness from every other human being,” with difference standing in for superiority or inferiority. It was the “initiative and ambition of uncommon men”–the most different and excellent of men–that made a nation great. A free society would identify such men at the earliest stages of life and give them the resources they needed to rise to pre-eminence. Against politicians who subscribed to “the egalitarian notion that every child must have the same education,” Goldwater argued for “an educational system which will tax the talents and stir the ambitions of our best students and…thus insure us the kind of leaders we will need in the future.”

Sean Carroll:

I feel compelled to offer up another round of predictions, now that we’ve narrowed the field to two major candidates. By why not make it more fun and have a prediction contest? Anyone can join in, just by leaving your prediction the comments. Entries that appear before the end of June will officially count.

But to make things somewhat science-y, let’s use equations to judge who will win. Each prediction consists of two numbers: the fraction f of the total popular vote cast for the two major candidates that goes to Barack Obama, but also the standard deviation σ of your prediction for that percentage. We are thus ignoring the electoral college entirely, and dealing with the annoyance of third-party candidates by concentrating exclusively on McCain vs. Obama. And we are assuming for purposes of misleadingly-precise quantification that each prediction follows a normal (Gaussian) distribution:

And here is the rub:  the winner is not the one whose fraction f is closest to the final answer, but the one whose value of P(x) is the highest, when x is equal to the fraction of votes Obama actually does win.  The smaller your standard deviation is, the higher your P(x) will be for x very close to your predicted value f , but the faster it will die off as you get further away. So if you are extremely confident, you can ensure victory by choosing an appropriately tiny standard deviation on your prediction. Contrariwise, if you choose a large standard deviation, you might get lucky if none of the confident folks comes close to the actual result. Cool, eh?