by Brooks Riley
Older White Men
by Akim Reinhardt
Old white men wearing ties can do anything they want.
-Mike Cooley, “One of These Days” (2001)
I am more powerful than I used to be, and it unnerves me.
I am a white man. And to be a white man in America is to have more power than women and people with darker skin. Just like rich people are more powerful than the poor, and heterosexuality holds more power than transexuality. I’ve been a white guy all my life, a half-century of it now, and for most of that time I’ve been aware that my skin color and increased testosterone endow me with extra power in our society. It’s been a learning curve, to be sure, one that I continue to climb as best I can. And the first lesson came at the hand of my father the only time he ever struck me.
Both of my parents suffered abuse as children, and when they made me and my sister, they swore they would not beat us. But there was this one time . . .
My father was working at a small, private school in the Bronx on a summer afternoon. The owners had hired him to repair a stone retaining wall. My father ran a small contracting business and often had one or two men working with him. Even though I was perhaps no more than six or seven years old, I knew this because I sometimes tagged along with him on jobs, like I had on this day. And so as I watched him labor and sweat beneath the hot sun, moving earth and lifting heavy stones, it occurred to me that normally he would have another worker to at least help with the worst of this grunt work. And indeed, there was another worker there. A black man who was close by, wearing work clothes and tending to some other manual task. So when my father let out a mild complaint about the weight of the rocks and the heat of the day, I offered what I thought was a perfectly reasonable suggestion:
“Why don’t have you have the black man do it?”
He turned, eyes afire, and slapped me across the face.
He thought I was being racist in a way that reminded him of growing up in segregated North Carolina, where even a white child could openly suggest the ordering around of black people. He would not suffer that in me. He would beat it out of me, if necessary.
But as soon as my tears welled up, he regretted it. He understood. Read more »
Now That Bill Cosby’s Been Found Guilty, Why Aren’t Harvey Weinstein, Matt Lauer And Donald Trump Under Arrest? Or Is There A Line To Be Drawn In Sexual Misconduct Between A Punishable Offense And A Guy Just Being A Jerk?
by Evert Cilliers
There are the Bill Cosbys and Harvey Weinsteins and Matt Lauers of this world, and then there are the Al Franklins and the Aziz Ansaris.
There are those who need to be in jail — Bill Cosby, Harvey Weinstein, Matt Lauer, Bill O’Reilly, Russell Simmons, Bill Clinton, Donald Trump — and those who only need to be fired, censured, shamed or … maybe forgiven?
So, the first question is: why aren’t Harvey Weinstein, Matt Lauer, Bill O’Reilly, Russell Simmons, Bill Clinton and Donald Trump being criminally prosecuted, if Bill Cosby was? What makes them more special than Cosby? Read more »
Gojira 1954: No More Nukes
When I was a child back in the nuclear-anxiety-Cold-War 1950s I went to see a film called Godzilla, King of the Monsters. I probably noticed that the people on screen didn’t look like Americans. They looked – well, I don’t know what I would have called them then, but they were in fact Japanese, except for this reporter guy (Raymond Burr) who talked a lot. What I remember is being scared out of my wits by this HUGE monster that seemed determined to destroy the world.
What I didn’t know at the time – I suppose that almost no one in the American audience did – is that this was somewhat different from the Japanese original, which came out in Japan in 1954 as Gojira. The Japanese original has two interlinked storylines: the story about the monster from the sea and a story about love vs. arranged marriage, which grapples with tradition vs. change. That second one was dropped from the American re-edit; the idea of an arranged marriage was and is all but meaningless in America, though it remains alive in Japan and in other nations. With a sense of grave ritual that is missing from the Americanized version, the Japanese original is a richer film. Read more »
Monday, April 23, 2018
Intellectual Blame
Scott F. Aikin and Robert B. Talisse
1.
Here's a philosophical heuristic about normative assessment: Domains and grounds for assessing responsibility will track domains and grounds for holding ourselves and others to be praise-worthy and blame-worthy. So, if there are unique ways to be blameworthy, there are coordinate ways in which one can be irresponsible. That's the rough heuristic, and we think it helps to elucidate intellectual responsibility.
One particular locus of intellectual irresponsibility is the exercise of our argumentative skills. On analogy with practical skills, there are situations where things go badly due to one's failure to exercise one's skill appropriately. Take the professional soccer player who shanks a shot over an easy goal, or the bartender who over pours a drink, or the teacher who mishandles a simple question in class. In these cases, it is appropriate for these people to blame themselves for their poor performances – it was their fault for failing to live up to a standard set by the skills they have. It's not because of the overwhelming difficulty of the situation, but rather it was because the requisite skills were not engaged effectively. Hence a modestly negative assessment of their performance is appropriate. Each may kick themselves for squandering a shot on goal, wasting whiskey, or a missed pedagogical opportunity. And so, too, may others. The sports writers may speak of the soccer player's ‘whiff,' and the barfly may mock the bartender's ‘party foul,' and a student may resent a question badly answered. Finally, notice that the degree of negative reaction of fault-finding is proportionate to the skills we assess these agents to have – the more skilled the soccer player, for example, the more blameworthy the shank. There's little, we think, unusual about these mundane practical failures of skill, and so it goes for intellectual skills, too.
Consider the skill of simply exploring a range of deductive entailments from a few pieces of information. The following task, Republican Friends, is illuminating. Assume these facts:
A is a Republican
A and B are friends
B and C are friends
C is not a Republican
Now the question: does it follow from these facts that there is at least one Republican with a non-Republican friend? Give yourself a second.
Procedural Thriller
"The edge of the unnavigable,
the region of no information."
~ Pynchon, Bleeding Edge
For me, the example that immediately comes to mind is John Cage's 'Imaginary Landscape No. 4'. An early experiment in removing the author from the piece, Cage's score is for 12 radios. Each radio is operated by two performers, one charged with turning the frequency dial and the other attending to volume and timbre. The score provides instructions for duration and frequency, and the overall effect intends to liberate listeners from the tyranny of the composer's intention. The Guardian's Robert Worby gives a sense of what the 1951 premier of the piece might have sounded like:
What the audience heard was the gentle crackle and hiss of radio static as the players glided between stations. Occasionally there was a burst of speech, a snatch of music, the reassuring flurry of violins playing a sweet, late-night melody. The audience giggled, coughed, and applauded wildly when a recognisable fragment of Mozart blasted out.
This last bit is interesting: on the one hand, giggling may imply delight when a surprising moment or juxtaposition occurs. But on the other, a sense of congratulation (or perhaps relief) when the performers stumble across 'real music'. But there is no one to congratulate – neither the composer nor the performers could follow the score and game the system to create this moment. It's also clear that the reactions of the audience constitute a further part of the piece itself. Cage created the space where chance drove the performance, and this opened the possibility for more sound events to further accentuate the uniqeness of that particular event. In effect, the audience itself takes up the role of performer.
Two Poems
by Amanda Beth Peery
She tips her golden watch
up her wrist to wash
the soap's extra speckled
sponged white drops,
left like a sea substance
foaming across rocks
or some mysterious ice,
from her own unshelled, soft
winter-pink wrist. When did
her hands become aquatic,
not impervious to water
and the callous scrub
but welcoming it?
. . .
The thumb's gentle joint
and the sliver-mooned nail-tip
nearly transparent after the pink
layers of the fingernail like rock layers
as Ms Green washes
her hands under the strong faucet.
She cleans each finger, held rigid,
then curling like a larger limb.
Her heart is always in her hands.
They are so much herself but
now also the object of her care
twisting with pleasure
under the heavy caress of water.
The Psychology of Collective Memory
by Jalees Rehman
The German scholar Aleida Assmann is an expert on how collective and cultural memory influences society and recently wrote about the importance of collective memory in her essay "Transformation of the Modern Time Regime" (PDF):
All cultures depend upon an ability to bring their past into the present through acts of remembering and remembrancing in order to recover not only acquired experience and valuable knowledge, exemplary models and unsurpassable achievements, but also negative events and a sense of accountability. Without the past there can be no identity, no responsibility, no orientation. In its multiple applications cultural memory greatly enlarges the stock of the creative imagination of a society.
Assmann uses the German word Erinnerungskultur (culture of remembrance) to describe how the collective memory of a society is kept alive and what impact the act of remembrance has on our lives. The Erinnerungskultur widely differs among nations and even in a given nation or society, it may vary over time. It is quite possible that the memories of the British Empire may evoke nostalgia and romanticized images of a benevolent empire in older British citizens whereas younger Brits may be more likely to focus on the atrocities committed by British troops against colonial subjects or the devastating famines in India under British rule.
Perceptions
The Criminal Tribes of Madras Presidency
by Thomas Manuel
Radhakrishna’s scholarship focuses on the erstwhile Madras Presidency where the Criminal Tribes Act, 1871 did not apply at first. It was resisted by the Madras administration who argued (using statistics!) that there was no crime problem in general and crime was actually lower in districts where these tribes operated. There were other objections voiced including questions of implementation and practicality but the real reason seemed to be because the wandering tribes were useful.
Historically, the Koravas of the Madras Presidency were salt and grain traders. They travelled from the coast with salt, taking it along regular trade routes to villages that were deep inland. Many of these remote villages were not connected by road and had no other access to salt. The Koravas, who carried these goods on the backs of their herds of cattle, would be able to sell salt in these areas at prices lower than any ordinary merchant. The Madras administration knew this and acknowledged it. This was the case with a number of tribes, each of them seen as beneficial as they ensured the movement of particular goods across the presidency.
But in the year 1911, the new Criminal Tribes Act was passed and this one applied to the entire territory of India. In the four decades since the first Act, new economic policies had played havoc with the traditional trading system. The salt trade was centralized with the government acting as clearing house. Coupled with the introduction of the railways, the entire face of the salt supply chain changed.
CATSPEAK
by Brooks Riley
Wine, Eros and Madness
by Dwight Furrow
However, if we are to make sense of the gravitational pull beautiful objects, such as wine, exert on us we have to distinguish the pretty, agreeable or good tasting from the beautiful. We know from recent history that without a clear distinction between beauty and what is pretty or likable, beauty fares rather poorly. Since the early 20th Century, the art world has abandoned beauty because it was thought to refer to superficial appearances with no ability to represent the more difficult aspects of human existence. In a world embroiled in industrialization, war, and genocide, the creation of beauty seemed frivolous. (The fact that Kant, the most influential philosopher of art, along with his acolytes among formalist critics, concurred that beauty was about appearances only didn't help. Kant neutered beauty with his notion that its apprehension required a bloodless, disinterested attitude.)
But work on the question of beauty over the last two decades provides a deeper conception of beauty, which clearly marks the distinction between beauty and what is merely attractive, and this conception of beauty can help refine our notions of wine quality. By returning to the ancient notion of beauty as a form of eros, we can explain how beauty engages our agency, providing powerful motivations to drink up.
‘Save a Mother’ – Ten Years Later: What’s New?
by Shiban Ganju
Nothing seems to have changed in ten years since I visited this village – a dusty swathe of land, home to over eleven hundred people, who connect with the world via a newly built, one car wide, winding road. Cracks, loose stones and chunks of matted mud straddle its tarred surface. A sign at its junction with the main road, two kilometers away, reads: “Prime Minister’s Rural Road Plan”; an adjacent sign announces the name of the local muscle man who claims the credit for the new road. It reminds: we are in Uttar Pradesh, a northern state of India, where muscle power grabs political power. The road ends near the village community hall – a newly built large concrete cube with dirty white walls showing new cracks. Our SUV stops. We have reached. The ride, after ten years, was a road show of frustrating pace of progress; change is imperceptible here – until we meet the women.
Over a hundred women, young and old, most draped in bright colorful Sarees, a few in black burqas without head cover, have walked from surrounding villages to participate in the review meeting. They look different: gone are the veils and bashfulness; they are vocal and animated. A twenty years old articulate college student, who is a trained health activist, conducts the meeting. She introduces herself and other health activists, who take turns to recount their experiences and of their neighbors. The embellish their stories with songs about preventive health – all written and created by them. And then they hang big paper charts on the wall displaying hand written numbers to buttress their claims: maternal deaths are rare, girls do not marry before the age of eighteen, contraceptive use has increased and they campaign for equal treatment for girls. This is new – not what I had seen ten years ago.
Then, I was not sure how we would convince the women to adopt a few simple steps to curb rampant maternal deaths. (Detox Body or Mind?) (Save A Mother). We were novices. We borrowed wisdom from a few rural doctors and took inspiration from social workers who had been pioneers in the field of maternal health. Their integrity, sacrifice and charisma had propelled their success. But these leadership qualities were not replicable. We wanted to develop a frugal model of maternal mortality reduction by working with the community, especially women but had no established theoretical scaffold to hold us steady.
Sunday, April 22, 2018
Perceptions for earth day
Monday, April 16, 2018
Algorithms, bullshit, and the dismantling of democracy
by Paul Braterman
Bullshit is sticky, and by trying to stamp on it you spread it. Because its appeal is directly to the emotions, rational critique is beside the point, while virtuous outrage is as effective as support in sending it viral.
The term bullshit was introduced in its current sense by the philosopher Harry Frankfurt in 2005, and has been the subject of a rash of books since Trump's emergence as a force to be reckoned with. I have chosen this particular volume as my jumping off point, because I am familiar with the author's UK perspective, and because the author himself, as a contributor to Buzzfeed, is part of the revolution in electronic publishing that has made bullshit so much easier to propagate.
Lying is lying; bullshit is different
Lying is misrepresentation of reality. Bullshit is something far more serious. Bullshit invites us to follow the leader into a world of subjectivity, where reality comes second to what we choose to believe. Bullshit is the delegitimisation of reality, designed to make rational discussion impossible. It is the triumph of assertion over reality.
In which connection, let me urge all readers who have not yet done so to check and adjust their Facebook settings; you will find my own detailed instructions here, and CREDO's here. When I did this, I was horrified at how much information I was allowing to be harvested, and by whom, not only about my own preferences but about those of my friends.
I, too, have spread bullshit. As in the false claim, which I passed on unexamined,2 that a close family member of a senior Conservative politician had shareholdings in a scandal-ridden company that has been strangely successful in securing government contracts. Here we have the distinguishing features of bullshit. Highly emotive, tailored to appeal to a certain audience, effective clickbait, difficult to ignore, a plausible and indeed in this case well-warranted central concern, and an allegation so sticky that the very act of refuting helps spread it (which is why I have not named names here, although I am sure that many readers could supply them).
As a safeguard against such behaviour I have now taken the Pro-Truth pledge, which includes a commitment to fact-checking information before passing it on.
Indignantly calling out bullshit plays into the hands of its producers, but it is difficult to resist the temptation. We all enjoy drawing attention to the wickedness of our opponents. The added attention that bullshit brings makes it lucrative to give it coverage, and thereby help it spread. Hence the enormous amount of coverage given to the Trump campaign in 2016, when media deeply opposed to him gave him billions of dollars worth of free advertising.
Monday Poem
Autistic
—for Danny, 1949-1976
When you caught that bird in flight,
that was a wild moment, the reflex of it,
as if you’d had the mind and eyes of a hawk,
as if in your world, mysterious to us all,
mother father sisters brothers—
as if in that world you flew above
less bewildered than we,
island brother,
eagle-eyed and quick,
but whose aerie was ringed
by an invisible moat
At that time there was not even a name
for your far, bright, blinking galaxy
so they dredged up whatever seemed useful
from their spent nomenclature:
retarded, they said,
as if a boy who could snatch a bird in flight
had a slow mind.
they should have more accurately called you
Distant, as if a galaxy 10 billion light years away,
as far from us as our understanding
of what made you tick
So my mind was no help in knowing you.
Conveniently hobbled I excused myself
from the work of understanding.
Now I see you were in no way slow but
full of crushing frustration, confined by your moat
at the center of your island inarticulate
to the point of slamming your head with a palm
to jar loose what you could not say,
not tongue-tied but mind-tied,
kept by genetic leash from joining
our world of connection, striving to snap it
so that you might join in our jokes
………………,…join in our sadness
or have us join with you in yours
And all the while I circled your moat
in relative freedom I gazed across seeing you
self-contained to the point of desperation
jangling mom’s ring of measuring spoons
next to your ear, gone in the small joy
of hearing the peal of their teaspoon bells
but…………….
……….. dropping them
……. … at the quick flicker of wings
……..….to catch your bird
.
Jim Culleny
4/13/18
Secrets of the Old One
by Ashutosh Jogalekar
After Watson’s book had been published, the physicist Freeman Dyson once asked him how he could possibly remember so many details about events that had transpired more than a decade ago. Easy, said Watson: he used to write to his family in America from Cambridge and had kept all those letters. Dyson who had been writing letters to his parents from the opposite direction, from America to Cambridge, asked his mother to keep all his letters from 1941 onwards.
The result is “Maker of Patterns”, a roadside view of the remarkable odyssey of one of the finest scientific and literary minds of the twentieth century. Letters are a unique form of communication, preserving the urgency and freshness of the moment without the benefit and bias of hindsight. They recall history as present rather than past. One wonders if the incessant barrage of email will preserve the selective highlights of life that letters once preserved. Dyson’s letter collection was initially titled “The Old One”. The allusion was to a famous letter from Einstein to Max Born in which Einstein noted his dissatisfaction with quantum theory: “Quantum mechanics demands serious attention. But an inner voice tells me that this is not the true Jacob. The theory accomplishes a lot, but it does not bring us closer to the secrets of the Old One. In any case, I am convinced that He does not play dice”.
Publishers sometimes change titles to suit their whim. Perhaps the publisher changed the title here because they thought it was presumptuous to compare Freeman Dyson to God. I would concede that Dyson is not God, but it’s the metaphor that counts; as these letters indicate, he is certainly full of observations and secrets of the universe. The letters contain relatively little science but lots of astute observations on people and places. Where the science does get explained one senses a keen mind taking everything in and reveling in the beauty of ideas.
Perceptions
What are you? Being Ethnic in Chicago
by Carol A Westbrook
Only in Chicago would this question not be taken as an insult, but as an invitation to discuss one's ethnicity. Most everywhere else, " What are you?" would be met with a puzzled expression, and answered, "I'm an American."
Being "ethnic" has a specific meaning in Chicago. It refers to Americans descended from a limited group of nationalities who immigrated to the US during the late 19th to early 20th century. Their cheap labor was needed to work the mines, steel mills, and factories during the period of rapid industrial growth. They were white Europeans, mostly Catholics, primarily from Eastern Europe, the Balkans or the Mediterranean. There are only a few other similarly ethnic cities that were settled at the same time, primarily in the rust belt around the Great Lakes, or in the mines of Pennsylvania.
Chicago ethnics have stronger bonds with each other than with their home country. Most of us will never visit that home country, and know only a few words of the language. What we have kept, though, is a sense of tradition, including some of the unique customs, foods, and religious holidays–and our unpronounceable names.
That ethnic name is the best way to get elected to office in Chicago. Some aspiring political candidates were known to change their names, or add an "i" to their surnames to make them Polish! Or take the example of Rod Blagojevich, a shady politician whose Serbian name helped him get elected to local Chicago office, and eventually to governor of Illinois. He is now in prison for corruption, but would be probably be re-elected if he ran today.
CATSPEAK
by Brooks Riley
