by Bill Benzon

Jamie is a young man in his early twenties. He has Down syndrome and is the son of Michael Bérubé and Janet Lyon, who teach at Penn State. Michael has just published Life as Jamie Knows It: An Exceptional Child Grows Up (Beacon 2016). Here’s how Michael characterizes his book (p. 16):

In the following pages, Jamie and I will tell you about his experiences at school, his evolving relationship with his brother, his demeanor in sickness and health, and his career as a Special Olympics athlete. And we’ll tangle with bioethics, politicians, philosophers, and a wide array of people we believe to be mistaken about some very important questions, such as whether life is worth living with a significant disability and whether it would be better for all the world if we could cure Down syndrome. (Quick preview: Yes. No.) But we will not tell you that Jamie is a sweet angel/cherub whose plucky triumphs over disability inspire us all. We will not tell you that special-needs children are gifts sent to special parents. And we will definitely not tell you that God never gives someone more than he or she can handle, because as a matter of fact, God dos that all the time–whether through malice or incompetence I cannot say.

That’s a fair characterization of the book. There are stories about Jamie, lots of them, and some stories by Jamie in the Afterword. But there is also philosophy, especially the final chapter, and discussions of disability policy, health care, education, and job-related. The stories about Jamie, his family, and friends, both illuminate and motivate the more abstract discussions. Here and there, as you might already have deduced, Michael slips in a zinger, sometimes mild, sometimes hot and spicy.

In the interests of full disclosure I should tell you that Michael is a friend. While I’ve only seen him face-to-face once, I’ve known him online for sometime, interacting with him through his now defunct blog, American Airspace, where Jamie was a frequent topic of conversation, and through email about this and that, mostly recently about Jamie’s art – a topic we’ll get to in due course. Thus this is not an arms-length review. It is simply a discussion of issues raised by a thought-provoking and well-written book.

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by Matt McKenna

Having watched the second presidential debate three days after watching Deepwater Horizon, it was difficult to know which ninety minutes of entertainment showcased the greater disaster. Sure, Deepwater Horizon depicts the worst human-caused environmental disaster in United States history, but then the debate was something of a disaster itself. While both Deepwater Horizon and the debate were compelling to watch in a glad-that’s-not-me-on-screen sort of way, isn’t it strange that a movie about an oil rig fire caused by greed and avoidable mistakes somehow inspires more confidence in humanity than a debate between two people vying for the most influential job in the world?

Deepwater Horizon follows Mike Williams (Mark Wahlberg) and Jimmy Harrell (Kurt Russell) as they chopper in to start a three-week rotation working on the eponymous oil rig. When the two men finally reach the work site, they’re greeted by a smug BP suit named Vidrine (John Malkovich) who sends home the safety-check crew before they can perform the tests that would have precluded the upcoming catastrophe. And thus, the film’s protagonists and antagonists are quickly established: Mike and Jimmy are the heroes just trying to do their jobs, and Vidrine and the BP stooges are the villains willing to risk the safety of the workers for money. A bit of Googling reveals that the lead-up to the disaster in real life wasn’t quite as simple as the film portrays it, but the depiction of the disaster itself nonetheless seems pretty accurate: something goes wrong on the Deepwater Horizon, and it explodes.

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by Paul Bloomfield

Back in August, in Reno, Hillary Clinton described the “alt-right” ideology as one that “rejects mainstream conservatism, promotes nationalism, and views immigration and multiculturalism as threats to white identity”. The alt-right movement owes a great deal to Jared Taylor, who founded the American Renaissance website 25 years ago.

Taylor is a self-described “race realist”, by which he means that race is a biologically legitimate category and from which he infers that because the races are scientifically real, “the races are not equal and equivalent”. He says, “The races are different. Some are better at some things than others.” Call this “Taylor's inference”.

The most common response to this argument is to deny “race realism”, accepting the now common view that race is “socially constructed”, thereby blocking Taylor's inference to racism. This strategy is a mistake, however, as it concedes too much.

Let's begin by asking, “How is it best to argue against racism?” Consider how the biologist Richard Lewontin argued against Jensenism in the late 1960s. Arthur Jensen, an educational psychologist, argued that the education gap between blacks and whites was due to the fact that blacks are less intelligent than whites. Lewontin is not a realist about race, but his argument against Jensenism was nevertheless based on the fact that Jensen conflated the heritability of an evolved trait within a population with the heritability of that trait across two populations. He writes, “the genetic basis of the difference between two populations bears no logical or empirical relation to the heritability within populations and cannot be inferred from it”.[1]

So, Lewontin accepted the fact that the races count as “different populations” and argued from there, based on science alone. He did not attack Jensen's racist ideology. The lesson is that the soundest way to defeat racism is not on ideological grounds but on purely factual ones. Unfortunately, mainstream academic thinking about race cannot really adopt this strategy.

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by Scott F. Aikin and Robert B. Talisse

Early this week, we had prepared a column for today titled “Presidential Debates: What's the Point?,” which discusses the role of presidential debates in American national politics. We argued that the televised spectacles called “debates” served more as alternating campaign commercials than as occasions for reasoned disagreement and clarification. But intervening developments in the presidential race have rendered that piece immaterial. Perhaps we will post an updated version of “Presidential Debates: What's the Point?” some time in the future. Today, our aim is to address, very briefly, what is now an unmistakable existential crisis within American conservatism.

To be sure, we are not conservatives; however, we hold that conservatism is both a formidable tradition of political thought and a vital force within American politics. Although we rarely embrace the positive proposals advanced by American conservatives, we find that conservatism harbors forceful critical resources. Liberal or progressive political programs ignore conservative critique at their peril. Our political views need strong intellectual opposition, and, at its best, conservatism is among the most robust frameworks for political thinking.

It has been clear to us, and to many others, that today's Republican Party is no longer uniformly conservative in any standard sense. Exactly what the current GOP is committed to remains strikingly obscure, and it is doubtful that, apart from a few prevalent but vague slogans, there is any positive principle that unifies the Party today.

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Many Diamonds

if I were to cross this bridge
a thousand times

no—
I’ve crossed this bridge a thousand times
along the length of its steel lattice rail
through which my small daughter
wanting to look down at small-town icebergs
sailing in the swift spring surge
had stuck her head, turned it just so,
and in trying to withdraw could not,
and cried, I’m stuck!
her wool cap caught in the top vertex
of one of the many diamonds
of the rail’s crossed straps
I reached my left hand over the top rail
and on the river’s side laid it on her cap’s wool ball,
while on the other, between her head and the strap’s steel,
placed my right; with both I eased her head
to the diamond’s wide center
to the spot through which her head could easily pass.
She stood, adjusted dignity and hat, grinned,
we laughed

by Jim Culleny
1/22/16

by Daniel Ranard

Maybe you've heard by now about last week's Nobel Prize in Physics, awarded to three physicists for their work on topological phase transitions. But if you didn't already know what a topological phase transition was, chances are you still don't. When a friend of mine read a few popular articles on the discovery, I asked him if he felt enlightened. “No, it felt like the authors were just free-associating: first they said ‘topological phase transitions,' then they said ‘topology,' and then ‘bagels.'” I sympathize with my friend, but also with anyone trying to explain this year's prize. It's true: you can't explain topological phase transitions without mentioning the underlying mathematics, a field called topology. And when you mention topology, you're tempted to talk about bagels. In fact, not long after the Nobel announcement, a Nobel committee member was waiving bagels and cinnamon buns on screen.

Luckily, I'm not going to talk about topological phase transitions. (I'll leave that to the professionals, like Philip Ball at Prospect.) But I am going to talk about bagels. Or really, I want to focus on the mathematical field of topology, which underpins these discoveries. Topology is the study of shapes. And while shapes are interesting in their own right, topology also demonstrates the unique ways that mathematicians conceive of objects and their properties.

First we can ask, what's a shape? Imagine explaining the concept to an alien whose language doesn't have the word for shape. Let's say our alien hasn't even grasped the basic schema of human perception.

Alien: “What's the ‘shape' of an object?”

Person: “The shape of something is just… how it looks.”

Alien: “So the shape of a basketball is orange and one foot long?”

Person: “Well, you need to ignore the color and the size, but…”

We've already learned something. Mathematicians and physicists are often trying to come up with new properties to describe and classify objects, whether they're talking about physical objects or abstract mathematical constructions. Sometimes, you can come up with a new type of description by asking what's left over in your description once you ignore certain other properties. For instance, the vague property of “how something looks” requires us to ignore exactly where the object is in space: we say that two stop signs look the same, even though they stand on different streets. If we picked up one stop sign and laid it on top of the other, they'd be hard to distinguish. That's what it means to “look the same.” Still, it can be hard to specify exactly what sort of description is left over when we choose to ignore certain properties like color and size.

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by Jonathan Kujawa

In June here at 3QD we talked about Arrow's Impossibility Theorem. The short version is this: a dictatorship is the only voting system which satisfies a few sensible ground rules. Or, to put it another way, even on an island with only two people, any form of democracy can lead to absurd outcomes [1].

Arrow's theorem warns us that there are flaws in every form of democracy. It should also spur us to think deeply about the potential consequences of how we choose to vote. As Donald Saari, an expert on math and voting, put it:

…rather than reflecting the views of the voters, it is entirely possible for an election outcome to more accurately reflect the choice of an election procedure.

That is, how you decide to count votes can have a bigger impact than the votes themselves. Stalin made the same point rather more ominously:

I consider it completely unimportant who in the party will vote, or how; but what is extraordinarily important is this—who will count the votes, and how.

This is not just a theoretical worry.

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by Ahmed Humayun

In The Checklist Manifesto – How to Get Things Right (2009), Atul Gawande – surgeon, Harvard professor, and New Yorker staff writer – recommends the strategic use of checklists to manage complexity. Gawande notes that while most domains of human activity in the modern era have witnessed a striking expansion in knowledge, it has become more and more difficult to apply this knowledge effectively. Through carefully chosen case studies and anecdotes, and a bevy of facts and statistics, Gawande persuasively demonstrates how an ostensibly simple tool like the checklist has substantially reduced avoidable errors and increased successful outcomes across any number of critical industries, including surgery, construction, aviation, disaster management, and investment management.

Today, highly complex projects straddle multiple specialized disciplines and involve many different individuals and teams. We inevitably miss key steps in addressing difficult challenges, due to limited memory, faltering attention, poor communication, unforseen events, or other factors. In effect, while we know a lot more today, we often don't apply our knowledge effectively. Therefore, we are constantly faced with avoidable errors in fields such as surgery, disaster management, software design, intelligence failures, and finance – indeed, in any area of human endeavor that requires the quick application of enormous knowledge to challenging problems with uncertain outcomes.

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by Mike Bendzela

Ants versus Termites

Some ants (Formicidae) living under a certain wood stump were incapable of realizing that they didn't know anything. Their antennae were exquisitely tuned to find the airs of their own colony agreeable. The edicts that wafted down from their Queen filled them with an illusion of knowledge and reason. This motivated them to action, which felt to them just like free will.

The termites (Isoptera) in a mound nearby had developed a disposition almost identical to that of the ants: They imagined that the notions radiating from Royal Headquarters issued from their own heads, and they fancied themselves informed about the world.

It was revealed to the ants that the rotten stump under which they nested was the Holy Motherland. But this same stump had been vouchsafed to the termites instead as a delectable corpse. For the ants it was an abomination to think of their home being consumed; whereas for the termites it was a sacrilege to waste a corpse! After all, this stump was a gift from On High. They both believed this. So when a troop of termites arrived at the stump to consume what was rightfully theirs, the ants were waiting for them — with opened mandibles that snapped like traps.

The sense of belonging involves elevating group appetite over reason.

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by Jalees Rehman

It does not come as a surprise that background music in a café helps create the ambience and affects how much customers enjoy sipping their cappuccinos. But recent research suggests that the choice of lyrics can even impact the social behavior of customers. The researcher Nicolas Ruth and his colleagues from the University of Würzburg (Bavaria, Germany) assembled a playlist of 18 songs with pro-social lyrics which they had curated by surveying 74 participants in an online questionnaire as to which songs conveyed a pro-social message. Examples of pro-social songs most frequently nominated by the participants included “Imagine” by John Lennon or “Heal the World” by Michael Jackson. The researchers then created a parallel playlist of 18 neutral songs by the same artists in order to truly discern the impact of the pro-social lyrics.

Here is an excerpt of both playlists

Artist Pro-social playlist Neutral playlist

P!nk Dear Mr. President Raise Your Glass

John Lennon Imagine Stand By Me

Michael Jackson Heal the World Dirty Diana

Nicole Ein bisschen Frieden Alles nur für dich

Pink Floyd Another Brick in the Wall Wish You Were Here

Scorpions Wind of Change Still Loving You

Wiz Khalifa See You Again Black and Yellow

The researchers then arranged for either the neutral or the pro-social playlist to be played in the background in a Würzburg café during their peak business hours and to observe the behavior of customers. The primary goal of the experiment was to quantify the customers' willingness to pay a surcharge of 0.30 Euros for fair trade coffee instead of regular coffee. Fair trade coffee is more expensive because it is obtained through organizations which offer better trading conditions to coffee bean farmers, prohibit child labor and support sustainable farming practices. Information about fair trade coffee was presented on a blackboard in the center of the café so that all customers would walk past it and the server was trained by the researchers to offer the fair trade surcharge in a standardized manner. The server also waited for a minimum of six minutes before taking the orders of guests so that they would be able to hear at least two songs in the background. During the observation period, 123 customers heard the prosocial playlist whereas 133 heard the neutral playlist.

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by Shadab Zeesht Hashmi

Okra, mint and chilies grow in the back and marigolds and roses in the front yard; they’re in my peripheral vision as I bike and study. The seeing is important. Before my grandmother began teaching me and before I owned a student desk with wheels, I didn’t care much for Math. It’s now a ritual: I roll my desk out of my room to the verandah, bring a stack of paper and ask my grandmother to give me Math problems I can solve. I do this after my daily bike ride in the yard. My grandmother reads the newspaper while I work on equations. Occasionally, she shares a news item of interest. Twice I’ve seen her tear up reading about the brutality of the Indian military in Kashmir. She is a Kashmiri. She folds her spectacles and closes her eyes when I ask her for a story; it’s typically the one from the Quran about Moses in a floating basket, how he chose coals over gold, and the knotting of his tongue. There is too much brutality in the world and not enough words. The knotted tongue resonates with me.

In the sunlit verandah, where my grandmother reads, combs her hair, offers namaz, I find the slow pages of Plato’s Republic or Iqbal’s collected poems. She has been a professor for years and years; she spends all her time reading unless she is picking mulberries with me or telling me the story of King Lear, The Merchant of Venice, Androcles and the Lion, or the one about the Qazi of Jaunpur, sometimes the story of Kashmir. She drinks tea, I eat kinnos. The stories are like homes in the wilderness— familiar, welcoming, fortifying. All the bullies at school, all the demons diminish and melt away. The art of the story has a peculiar majesty— it nurtures vision, it unties the knots of history.

At the time of my grandmother’s passing, I’m ten years old, and in shock for long. My mother later describes what was to be their last drive together—how she wiped her mother’s glasses as they passed the river Ravi and historical Lahore. Ravi means narrator, storyteller. I imagine my grandmother as being rapt in the view of Ravi and the twelve doorways of the Mughal bara dari. Years later, I’ll remember this moment of seeing through her eyes, when, in her beloved Kashmir, pellet guns are used by the Indian Military to blind Kashmiri protestors, many of them women—mothers—the unspeakable brutality of “dead eyes” in the midst of the living beauty of Kashmir.

by Maniza Naqvi

It has been all about the towers hasn't it? It has been all about the towers these past 16 years? All about the towers, that the world has been made into a mess? The towers which now have been replaced by the Freedom Tower in the mecca of towers. And now towers overshadow Mecca. All about the Towers in New York–that across this country in the name of the towers in New York that the case for war and curtailing of freedoms has been made every single day for 16 years. Relentlessly. Now Trump towers over all of us as the dangerous demagogue that he is. All about the towers, and the Trump Towers. Trump Towers synonymous with the one image seared on the collective consciousness. New York City, the most diverse and tolerant of places on earth, reduced to this. The transmission of the Towers as the rationale for endless war. Transmission of definitions of good and evil. Invoke, evoke the towers and all things are made sacred and unquestionable. The towers are the sacred creed and covenant. The builder of Towers, the towering tower builder in New York, is the symbol of the rise of fascism in the United States. This branding of towers. This subliminal appeal. Even Ayn Rand would not have shrugged at this Trumping of her conceit.

It has been all about the Towers hasn't it, that Mrs. Clinton should make the case about why Americans who are Muslim should not be humiliated or insulted—because they are needed to help fight terrorism. They make good Gold Star families.

It has all been about the towers hasn't it that pornographic words and sex trump the pornography of bombs, war and genocide and make us so outraged and indignant? That the feminism of today should be this? Why isn't the declaration of war, the arming of this and that militia, every which way, drone attacks, and sales of weapons locker room talk? Why is all this acceptable, as if it were just locker room talk.

It has all been about the towering terrorism case hasn't it? The towering overpowering love of all things military in this country. President Obama, who was elected on an anti-war vote in 2008 told America that it is the military that protects Americans civil rights. The towering diminishing of civilians. On the basis of the towers. The towering overplaying of shoe bombs, pipe bombs and knives. And those demented men attached to these who are always somehow in the orbit of the FBI and the War Security Agencies and who make the case for the war machinery which produces the bombs and weapons that can wipe out whole cities and that are actually wreaking destruction in Syria, Yemen, Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere.

The American people are waking up. And in that blue haze just before the dreaming stops—Trump towers.

by Jessica Collins

My fear of flying, and a review of Christine Negroni’s, The Crash Detectives: Investigating the World’s Most Mysterious Air Disasters, Penguin Books 2016.

“Outside those aluminum walls the air is too thin to sustain coherent thought for more than a few seconds. Life itself is extinguished in minutes.”

Few air travelers consider this fact, comments Christine Negroni. Call me an exception. During the artificially long night of a trans-Pacific flight, alone in a cramped cabin of sleeping bodies thirty-nine thousand feet above the dismal ocean, insofar as coherent thought is a possibility even within the thin walls of an aluminum tube hurtling through the lower stratosphere, such facts are the only ones I can consider.

I am terrified of flying. I am also well aware of the irrationality of that fear. Yet my firm belief in the safety of air travel does nothing to allay it.

As a young child in Sydney in the 1960s, my parents would often take me and my sisters to the Skyline Drive-In Cinema in Frenchs Forest. We had a Holden EH station wagon, the back seat folded forward to accommodate makeshift beds for us kids to fall asleep in. I never slept a wink. I would quietly peer over the back of the front seat and through the windscreen of the car angled up at the huge screen: a further window into the mysterious world of adulthood. I was five and six years old. We had no television. Yet at the Drive-In I met James Bond. I saw Slim Pickens straddle an A-bomb and ride it to doom. And most memorably, one evening in 1964, I watched the movie which would plant the seed of my future fear.

“Fate is the Hunter” was directed by Ralph Nelson and starred Rod Taylor, Glenn Ford, and Nancy Kwan. The critics were not impressed. The New York Times said: “[It] is a film you may be sure will never be shown as an in-flight diversion in commercial planes. And it might be better for airline travelers if they never see it anyplace. For not only is it about the crash of a commercial plane, in which 53 are killed, but it also makes airplane travel look more chancy than taking a rocket into space.”

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by Hirsch Perlman

Now that classes at U.S. colleges and universities are well under way and we're closing in on election day, this is a good time for college students, faculty, and campus communities as a whole to remind ourselves what's at stake in November.

November could bring a real opportunity to re-instill the values of the humanities and a liberal arts education, thanks to Bernie Sanders bringing free tuition at public universities and student debt refinancing to the Clinton campaign platform. The differences couldn't be starker— the promise of tuition-free public universities vs. humanities-free Trumpenstein universities. Humanities students across the country will need to make themselves heard in the 2016 election if they want to ensure we don't see the dystopia of humanities free universities.

The recently announced bankruptcy of I.T.T. Technical Institutes after losing access to federal student loans seems to reach back to a moment early in the presidential campaign when Senator Marco Rubio took a swipe at the humanities in an unctuous call for more welders, i.e. a useful trade, and fewer philosophers (4th republican debate, Nov. 10 2015).

The false dichotomy of “useful vs. useless” areas of study haunts the backbreaking debt students now typically carry. If unprecedented tuition hikes of the last eight years weren't burden enough, there are now thousands of victims of deceptive recruitment strategies and predatory lending. For-profit trade-schools like University of Phoenix and Devry University are under increased scrutiny (maybe not enough). And others like Corinthian Colleges, I.T.T., and, yes, Trump University, have thankfully shut down.

Let's also remember that Philosophers indeed make more money than welders (as Alan Rappeport was quick to correct, NYTimes, November 12, “Philosophers Say View Of Their Skills Is Dated”). But these battle lines aren't all quantifiable and not everyone would agree that increased earning power is the most important promise of a college degree. Senator Rubio's comment still hit its anti-intellectual mark. Students and voters who already think we undoubtedly need welders (i.e. jobs) but decidedly do not need philosophers (i.e. elites), will be further outraged that public universities are squandering resources by supporting Philosophy departments.

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The Day I was My Sister’s Chaperone

Tall tan stranger
in safari suit flew
from Kenya to Kashmir

to woo her
at the Shalimar
she raised her sari

to her ankles
at the fountain’s edge
he rolled his cuffs

to his knees. Their
toes touched. She waved
and a glint on her finger

caught my curious eye.
“Amorous Lover”
sailed silently amidst
lotus buds and leaves,

the shikarawallah
slashing Dal Lake
with heart-shaped oar.

By Rafiq Kathwari, the first non-Irish recipient of the Patrick Kavanagh Award.

Twitter: @brownpundit
Website: rafiqkathwari.com

by Aasem Bakhshi

Of all the critiques of Descartes (d.1650), Bachelard’s stands out, as he has selected those principles of Cartesian method which were passed on in silence by other critics, presumably for their seeming innocence. With most of the detractors of the father of modern philosophy, it has either been the principle of universal doubt, the alienated and privileged ego, some step in the logic of the Meditations, some substantive philosophical or scientific doctrine, or the very quest for foundations. For Gaston Bachelard (d. 1962), on the other hand, it was the reductive nature of Cartesian method and resulting epistemology which rendered his philosophy “too narrow to accommodate the phenomena of physics.” (New Scientific Spirit, p. 138) In more particular terms, Bachelard attacks the following rule which according to Descartes summarized his whole method:

The whole method consists entirely in ordering and arranging of the objects on which we must concentrate our eye if we are to discover some truth. We shall be following this method exactly if we first reduce complicated and obscure propositions step by step to simpler ones and then starting with the intuition of the simplest ones of all, try to ascend through the same steps to a knowledge of all the rest.” (Descartes, Rules for the Direction of Mind, Rule 5).

Bachelard objects to the reductive nature of Cartesian method and complains that it fails to regain the unified and synthetic reality once analyzed under the demands of method. It seems that Bachelard here has a point in view of the fact that it was this analytical tendency which lends Descartes the unbridgeable Dualism of Mind and Body. On the Cartesian advice to reduce the complicated to the simple, Bachelard accuses Descartes of having neglected the reality of complexity and neglecting that there are certain qualities which only emerge in the wholes and are not there in the parts.

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