by Pranab Bardhan

Many find fault with liberal democracy because it exacerbates inequality, particularly when wedded to unbridled capitalism. But inequality has been rampant in authoritarian countries as well, with or without capitalism. Many non-capitalist countries in actual history have been friendly neither to liberty nor equality, never mind the soaring rhetoric, whereas some liberal democracies have provided their alert citizenry with the means of taming the harshness of capitalism, showing the possibility of liberty and equality working together at least up to some distance.

Others find fault with liberal democracy because its emphasis on individual freedom may loosen community bonding and rootedness, but ‘liberty’ and ‘fraternity’ need not work at cross-purposes, and one should keep in mind that communitarian excesses without liberalism can hurt interests of minority and dissident or non-conformist groups and individual autonomy. For a discussion of these issues see my piece, “Can the Local Community Save Liberal Democracy?”. Yet why is liberal democracy so fragile? All around us demagogues rule even in traditional bastions of democracy; and majoritarianism so easily hollows out democracies and keeps only the shell (and even sometimes triumphantly gets that shell described by the oxymoronic term ‘illiberal democracy’).

In my article, “Coping with Resurgent Nationalism” I have suggested that if the constitution in some democratic countries incorporates liberal inclusive values and is reasonably difficult to change, it can provide the basis of some form of civic nationalism (or what Habermas called ‘constitutional patriotism’) that may resist the marauding forces of majoritarianism or exclusivist ethnic nationalism. But the ethnic nationalist leaders are so adept at whipping up our primordial or visceral evolutionary defensive-aggressive urge to fight against so-called ‘enemy’ groups, that such resistance is currently crumbling in many countries –for example, conspicuously in India under the onslaught of Hindu nationalism, even after several decades of reasonably successful civic nationalism based on values of pluralism enshrined in the constitution and undergirded by centuries of folk-syncretic tradition of tolerance and pluralism of faith among the common people. Read more »

by Robert Frodeman and Evelyn Brister

Where is philosophy in public life? Can we point to how the world in 2020 is different than it was in 2010 or 1990 because of philosophical research?

On the first day of class, philosophy professors tell their students that philosophy promises to make us better citizens and to increase our understanding of science, politics, and art. Or in the words of the American Philosophical Association’s guide for undergraduates, philosophy develops the capacity to see the world from the perspective of other individuals and other cultures; it enhances one’s ability to perceive the relationships among the various fields of study; and it deepens one’s sense of the meaning and variety of human experience.

We agree. But more needs to be said about the relevance of philosophy to shaping society than that. People want to know that philosophy and the humanities are valuable not only to college students while taking a class or two, but also how the massive bodies of professional research that are being produced are relevant to society at large.

This is where philosophy (and the humanities generally) has failed: philosophers don’t investigate the specificities of philosophy’s relevance. Granted, there’s a pile of works (e.g., Martha Nussbaum’s Not for Profit, Fareed Zakaria’s In Defense of a Liberal Education, Michael Roth’s Beyond the University) that provide a general defense of the humanities. But when the question is put: “How specifically is humanities research relevant to society?,” any answer is seen as either a political challenge aligned with a defense of ignorance or else as being self-evident.

We think that asking—and answering—this question is neither a disrespectful nor a trivial task. Read more »

Galleon

the complexity of your crossed purposes
beauty and war, grace and wastefulness,
you rest solidly at sea upon a liquid
without yet dropping through,
a steel log with algorithmic spurs
hollow inside of rust and rot, a contradiction,
weighty, weightless, floating

divine swan human pawns
Jesus weeps Mars is gloating
.
Jim Culleny
2/15/20
Pen & ink 1997, Jim C.

by Joan Harvey

Everyone at every moment is guided by what he sees most clearly—compounded with what he sees least clearly. —Paul Valéry

And while this show is going in public, in the background, the wrecking crew is working. —Noam Chomsky

Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar is proposing a new nickname for his agency: the “Department of Life.” An agency, as Ilyse Hogue of NARAL has pointed out, that was a primary architect of putting children in cages at the border.

More frightening is Attorney General William Barr’s announcement of the “Presidential Commission on Law Enforcement and the Administration of Justice.” Under the guise of uncovering “opportunities for progress, improvement, and innovation,” the commission is a thinly veiled move toward increasing the power of the federal government to extend law enforcement and interfere with local decisions. An Executive Order recommends study of:

• The challenges to law enforcement associated with mental illness, homelessness, substance abuse, and other social factors that influence crime and strain criminal justice resources;
• The recruitment, hiring, training, and retention of law enforcement officers, including in rural and tribal communities;
• Refusals by State and local prosecutors to enforce laws or prosecute categories of crimes;
• The need to promote public confidence and respect for the law and law enforcement officers; and
• The effects of technological innovations on law enforcement and the criminal justice system, including the challenges and opportunities presented by such innovations.

Then we have the new travel ban. The first ban restricted travel from Iran, Libya, Syria, Yemen, and Somalia, as well as Venezuela and North Korea. Recently six more countries have been added: Eritrea, Sudan, Tanzania, Kyrgyzstan, Myanmar (where the Muslim population is fleeing genocide), and Nigeria. The ban bars a quarter of Africa’s population from applying for immigrant visas to the U.S. Recently Iranians, including American citizens, were singled out at the border in Blaine, Washington and subjected to questioning about their political and religious beliefs.

The Federal Election Commission is down to three members, not enough for a quorum, and so cannot enforce campaign finance violations.

Every member of Trump’s human rights commission is an anti –LGBTQ activist. Read more »

Li Huayi. Longevity. 2016.

Ink on antique Japanese gold foil.

More here, here, here, and here.

Leonidas C. Platanias, MD, PhD, is the director of the Robert H. Lurie Comprehensive Cancer Center of Northwestern University. He is the Lurie Family Professor of Oncology and Professor of Medicine and Biochemistry and Molecular Genetics. He is board certified in Internal Medicine and Medical Oncology and started his research career at the National Institutes of Health, Bethesda, MD, followed by clinical training in Medicine in New York and Hematology-Oncology at the University of Chicago. Dr. Platanias’s research work focuses on cytokine signaling pathways in malignant cells and the targeting of such pathways for the treatment of leukemias. He has published more than 320 papers in national and international scientific journals. He is the recipient of several grants including R01, U54, T32, and P30 awards from the National Cancer Institute and an I01 Merit Review (VA). His work is recognized by numerous awards, including the Seymour and Vivian Milstein Award for outstanding contributions in cytokine research. A member of various scientific societies, Platanias served as President of the International Cytokine Society and in other national leadership positions. He serves as Associate Editor and/or in the editorial board of several scientific journals and has chaired and/or been a member of several NIH, VA and DOD study sections.

Azra Raza, author of The First Cell: And the Human Costs of Pursuing Cancer to the Last, oncologist and professor of medicine at Columbia University, and 3QD editor, decided to speak to more than 20 leading cancer investigators and ask each of them the same five questions listed below. She videotaped the interviews and over the next months we will be posting them here one at a time each Monday. Please keep in mind that Azra and the rest of us at 3QD neither endorse nor oppose any of the answers given by the researchers as part of this project. Their views are their own. One can browse all previous interviews here.

1. We were treating acute myeloid leukemia (AML) with 7+3 (7 days of the drug cytosine arabinoside and 3 days of daunomycin) in 1977. We are still doing the same in 2019. What is the best way forward to change it by 2028?

2. There are 3.5 million papers on cancer, 135,000 in 2017 alone. There is a staggering disconnect between great scientific insights and translation to improved therapy. What are we doing wrong?

3. The fact that children respond to the same treatment better than adults seems to suggest that the cancer biology is different and also that the host is different. Since most cancers increase with age, even having good therapy may not matter as the host is decrepit. Solution?

4. You have great knowledge and experience in the field. If you were given limitless resources to plan a cure for cancer, what will you do?

5. Offering patients with advanced stage non-curable cancer, palliative but toxic treatments is a service or disservice in the current therapeutic landscape?

by Charlie Huenemann

Last week we had our dog put down. It was time. She was getting old and facing some serious neurological difficulties. The tipping point was a pair of severe seizures in the middle of the night, spaced about a minute apart. I know that seizures can trigger more seizures, and as I was trying to help ease her through the second one, I was thinking “What if this is it? What if she keeps seizing until she dies?” and I wondered whether I would have the nerve to strangle her myself rather than let her die in that horrible way. Thankfully, I was not put to that test. She came out of the second seizure, and stumbled around blind for the rest of the night, trying to escape from the dark hole she thought she was in.

We visited the vet in the morning to get some advice and a “quality of life” assessment. He was very kind in examining her and then laying out our options. Yes, we could submit Maggie to tests, and find some procedures and drugs that would help mitigate her impairments. Or we could wait it out, and see how things were going in another couple of weeks or months. Or we could decide that it was time to say goodbye. He emphasized that each one of these decisions would be right, and in the end we would have to decide what felt most right to us. My daughter and I both felt the time had come. So the vet gave us some time with Maggie, administered a tranquilizer that put her into deep sleep, and then a drug that stopped her heart. It was a gentle death.

It’s an occupational hazard for a philosopher to wonder about all sorts of odd questions even in the midst of a dramatic event like this. As it happens, this was a decision made under a cloud of uncertainty, with many different interests balanced against one another in utilitarian fashion: the interests of the dog and the family, as well as how those interests were likely to change in the near future. Read more »

by Brooks Riley

Your laughter was a car engine sputtering. Your peers were whiz kids in the dot com world. You showed me notes you’d made in the margins of all seven volumes by Proust. You said Sentimental Education wasn’t sentimental enough. You rolled your own leaves reading Ulysses, finishing it in three nights flat, but you wished to read it in one day to parallel the book’s action. “Impossible,” I said. “Impossible doesn’t exist in my vocabulary,” you said. “This can’t be a poetic line,” you said, shaking your head at my poem. “It’s running all the way to Pakistan.” I was nearly your dad’s age, yet I looked up to you literally and physically. My last memory of you standing against a pine, at my brother’s home with views of Long Island Sound, aiming your pee at the tree. You were the pine you peed on. You were the sputtering car engine hugging the tree you peed on moments ago. I pointed to the crescent moon. “Wow,” you said, rolling your leaves, “let’s read Das Kapital.” Nearly 10 years after your childhood chum, my nephew, was killed in Afghanistan, you went from your basement to au petit coin retrouvé or, depending on mood, au petit coin perdu — your Acura parked in a shuttered garage of your home in Scarsdale. You reclined on the driver’s seat, popped a pill of Topamax to dumbfound the snakes in your mind, chased the pill with a gulp of Perrier and to warm up the car, you gunned the engine.

For R. Q.  25 December 1972 —17 March 2001

By Rafiq Kathwari / @brownpundit

Photo taken from the window (with partial internal reflections) of a train speeding from Bruneck to Franzensfeste last week.

by Thomas Wells

The case for men’s rights follows straightforwardly from the feminist critique of the structural injustice of gender rules and roles. Yes, these rules are wrong because they oppress women. But they are also wrong because they oppress men, whether by causing physical, emotional and moral suffering or callously neglecting them. Unfortunately the feminist movement has tended to neglect this, assuming that if women are the losers from a patriarchal social order, then men must be the winners.

While it is bad luck to be born a woman in our society, it is also bad luck to be born a man, in ways that relate directly and indirectly to gender norms and rules. For example, men die significantly earlier than women in just about every society and historical period known to us. The causes are manifold and interact in complex ways. They include physiological factors (notably the harmful effects of testosterone on the immune system) that make human males frailer than females at every stage of development, even before birth. Gender norms about the value of men’s lives aren’t directly responsible for this, but they nonetheless play an indirect role in deflecting away public concern and action. Other factors reducing men’s life-expectancy are more directly related to social context and upbringing, such as men’s propensity for risky behaviour (such as smoking) and violence. Not only are these intimately connected with gender roles and rules, they are also shielded from scrutiny by them: Men are supposed to be aggressive risk-takers, and we are also blamed for being so. Read more »

by Joseph Shieber

Bertolt Brecht, the German poet and playwright, was born on this day 122 years ago, February 10, 1898.

Fearing persecution by the Nazis for his writing and leftist political views, Brecht left Germany in February 1933, shortly after Hitler assumed the German Chancellorship.

At the time that he wrote the poem “Frühling 1938 / I”, Brecht was living in exile on the Danish island of Fyn.

Frühling 1938 / I (German)

Heute, Ostersonntag früh
Ging ein plötzlicher Schneesturm über die Insel.
Zwischen den grünenden Hecken lag Schnee. Mein junger Sohn
Holte mich zu einem Aprikosenbäumchen an der Hausmauer
Von einem Vers weg, in dem ich auf diejenigen mit dem Finger deutete
Die einen Krieg vorbereiteten, der
Den Kontinent, diese Insel, mein Volk, meine Familie und mich
Vertilgen mag. Schweigend
Legten wir einen Sack
Über den frierenden Baum.

Spring 1938 / I (English)

Today, early Easter Sunday
A sudden snowstorm came over the island.
Snow lay between the budding bushes. My young son
Brought me to an apricot sapling at the house wall,
Away from a verse in which I pointed with my finger at those
Who prepared a war that may well mean, for
The continent, the island, my people, my family and me,
Extermination. Silent
We placed a sack
Over the freezing tree.

Translation: Joseph Shieber

by Emrys Westacott

“In unity is strength!” This is one of the foundational maxims repeated by progressive forces everywhere. As history has often demonstrated, though, unity is easier to affirm than to achieve. And the consequences of failing to achieve it can be dire.

Germany 1932

The direst of all dire examples of progressive disunity helping to bring about a horrendous outcome was that which allowed Hitler to attain power in Germany in 1933. Here are the results of the November 1932 general election:

Nazi Party  33.1%
Social Democrat Party 20.4%
Communist Party  16.9%
Catholic Centre Party 12.4%
German National People’s Party 8.3%
Bavarian People’s party 3%

The Social Democrats and Communists combined received more votes than Hitler’s Nazis. But in the early 1930s, even though the threat posed by the Nazis was becoming increasingly dangerous and apparent, those opposed to them could not form a united front. The Social Democrat leadership viewed communists and fascists as essentially the same, and they chose to support the right-wing Hindenburg government as a “lesser evil” to (and as a bulwark against) Hitler. The communists labelled the Social Democrats “social fascists” and also rejected the idea of collaboration against the Nazis. In January 1933, Hitler was appointed Chancellor. Less than eight weeks later, Germany was a dictatorship. Many of those who couldn’t work together to oppose Hitler would soon find themselves suffering and dying together in Nazi concentration camps. Twelve years later, more than seventy million people lay dead, victims of World War II, and much of Europe lay in ruins. Read more »

Christa David. I Am My Own Shelter, Thanks?. 2017.

Mixed media.

More here, and here.

by Abigail Akavia

A. E. Stallings’ long poem “Lost and Found” (from her 2018 collection Like) delivers a mesmerizing meditation on loss in its various and myriad forms. I first encountered it read out loud, like a true epic, and I was gripped, astonished at once by the breadth of the journey Stallings invites us on as by the intimacy of its landscapes. A journey from the prosaic, to a Virgilian terrain of shadows and truths, and back again. 

The protagonist of this journey is a poet-mother—can we just agree to call her Stallings?—who starts off on her hands and knees, crawling on the floor in search of a lost toy. In her dream that night, she is led by a woman—she later learns it is divine Mnemosyne herself, Memory, Mother of the Muses—on a guided tour through “the valley on the moon / Where everything misplaced on earth accrues, / And here all things are gathered that you lose.” I found it a delightfully feminist act on Stallings’ part, to cast herself as a hero who crosses the threshold between our world and the beyond, in order to come back to the land of bills and paperwork and lunches waiting to be packed for school, armed with wisdom. A journey that reveals and affirms her position in this mundane world as a poet, a “sieve” who lets the moments pass through her, an artist noticing and writing them down. Read more »