The Mufti and the General II

Over at openDemocracy, an expanded version of Ram’s piece here in 3QD:

[T]he general’s focus in the dialogue was to stop extremists from using violence to secure their goals. While he disagreed with their goals, his point to them was that they should use democratic political means. In effect he was saying: here are extremist, even intolerant people, who use violence to get their way; my job as a general is to get them to stop using violence, then hope that the (democratic) political system can find a way to accommodate them and politically blunt their extremism.

But this leaves open an important additional point about specific practices in communities that violate what might be considered as basic democratic and liberal values, including a commitment to equal rights. These practices can range from murder and paedophilia to discrimination on the basis of gender or caste. What happens when political actors (even if unarmed) seek to use the political system to advance these kinds of aims? What are the limits to tolerating extremists?

There is no single or simple answer, but there are elements that compose a pattern:

* there is such a limit, especially when the extremists’ aims include intolerance and an explicit rejection of others’ civic equality – whether based on race, gender, caste or class

* extremists, especially those who are intolerant of others, have no general right to be tolerated based on reciprocity, since they themselves do not tolerate others

* if tolerating extremists leads to the weakening of a democratic constitutional order, then extra care must be taken before the step is taken – though the default judgment should be to have confidence that a stable democratic structure (where it exists) will not be so weakened



Responses to Slavoj Žižek’s Apparent Apologia for the Chinese Crackdown in Tibet

Shego Jinpa and others in the LRB on Žižek’s claims:

Not only does Žižek rely on Chinese propaganda for his understanding of Tibet’s past, he also interprets the current tragedy through TV images selected and transmitted by the Chinese government. These images repeatedly show footage of riots, but not the peaceful protests whose brutal suppression triggered the uprising. The Chinese authorities haven’t produced any evidence to show that there was a programme of organised violence by Tibetans: the wave of human rights protests and demonstrations in support of the Dalai Lama was vociferous but predominantly peaceful. In the incredible pictures of nomadic protesters on horseback in Amdo Bora (Gannan in Chinese) captured by a Canadian TV crew, for example, not a single weapon is being brandished. These nomads have guns so that they can protect their cattle, and it is their custom to carry swords and knives. But because they support the Dalai Lama’s message of peace, on this occasion they left their weapons behind. Žižek tellingly remains silent about the gunning down of unarmed Tibetan protesters (more than two hundred were killed), the mass arrests, the flooding of the Tibetan plateau with Chinese paramilitaries, the lockdown of monasteries and schools and the barring of independent foreign journalists from the region.

Žižek implies what the Chinese authorities have explicitly stated, that Tibet should be grateful for Chinese investment in its economy and its education and health systems. The presumption that Tibet would have remained unchanged had it not been for the Chinese invasion and colonial tutelage is preposterous, but there is also a failure to acknowledge what China gains from Tibet.

A New Normal

Ezra Klein on this historic moment, in case you missed it:

Obamablackwhite

 

Obama’s speech tonight was powerful, but then, most all of his speeches are. This address stood out less than I expected. It took me an hour to realize how extraordinary that was. I had just watched an African-American capture the Democratic nomination for the Presidency of the United States of America, and it felt…normal. Almost predictable. 50 years ago, African Americans often couldn’t vote, and dozens died in the fight to ensure them the franchise. African-Americans couldn’t use the same water fountains or rest rooms as white Americans. Black children often couldn’t attend the same schools as white children. Employers could discriminate based on race. 50 years ago, African Americans occupied, in effect, a second, and lesser, country. Today, an African-American man may well become the president of the whole country, and it feels almost normal.

It was, to be sure, not entirely unpredicted. On March 31st, 1968, Martin Luther King Jr. preached his final Sunday sermon. “We shall overcome,” he said, “because the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” Four days later, he was murdered. But 40 years later, his dream is more alive than he could have ever imagined. Not only might a black man be president, but at times, many forget to even be surprised by it.

Photo used under a Creative Commons license from Joe Crimmings.

Sexual and Asexual Reproduction

Photo Olivia Judson in the NYT:

[I]f you look at the great tree of life, asexual groups tend to be out on the twigs: there are no great branches of the tree that contain only asexuals. In other words, no one can point to a big group, such as birds or fish, or even snails, and say, “That’s a group composed only of asexuals.” What this means is that asexuality evolves often, but rarely persists for long: asexuals typically go extinct soon after they appear.

The swift extinction of asexuals, and the absence of big asexual groups, suggests that sex is essential for long-term evolutionary success: giving up sex is a Bad Idea, a kind of evolutionary suicide.

Exactly why this is so remains unclear. But it’s thought to have something to do with the fact that sex generates new gene combinations. Whereas a sexual creature like you or me inherits a unique mix of genes from our parents, asexuals are lumbered with the same set of genes their mother had. For an asexual, then, the only source of genetic novelty is mutation.(Mutations and sex are both sources of genetic variation, but they work differently. Mutations — accidental changes to DNA — are the ultimate source of genetic novelty. However, mutations tend to be harmful more often than they are helpful: they tend to disrupt genes that are already working. Sex, in contrast, takes pre-existing genetic variation and shuffles it, generating new gene combinations.)

Which brings me to the bdelloids. These animals are the great exception: a group of more than 450 species from which sex is entirely absent. How are they managing to flourish despite this epic period of abstinence?

A biography of the world’s most famous sex manual

Michael Dirda reviews The Book of Love: The Story of the Kamasutra by James McConnachie, in the Washington Post:

Ph2008053001337_2Years ago, a bunch of us were sitting around drinking when I heard a friend murmur two sentences I have never forgotten. “You know, guys, sex is the greatest thing in the world.” He paused and we were all about to nod in agreement. He was, after all, a noted and knowledgeable ladies’ man. Unexpectedly, though, he then added, with infinite wistfulness: “But it’s just not that great.”

There, in that gulf between the reality and the dream, lies the domain of pornography, the sex industry and the masturbatory fantasy — of Viagra and the midlife crisis. Our Western myths of love are seldom about fulfillment; they are all about yearning. In Plato‘s Symposium we are told that the gods divided the original ball-like human beings in two, and that we consequently spend our lives searching for the other half who will complete us. So-called romantic love, which first blossomed in 12th-century France, revels in passion delayed, forbidden or otherwise thwarted. Its real theme is desire.

More here.

Put a Little Science in Your Life

Brian Greene in the New York Times:

Brian_greeneA couple of years ago I received a letter from an American soldier in Iraq. The letter began by saying that, as we’ve all become painfully aware, serving on the front lines is physically exhausting and emotionally debilitating. But the reason for his writing was to tell me that in that hostile and lonely environment, a book I’d written had become a kind of lifeline. As the book is about science — one that traces physicists’ search for nature’s deepest laws — the soldier’s letter might strike you as, well, odd.

But it’s not. Rather, it speaks to the powerful role science can play in giving life context and meaning. At the same time, the soldier’s letter emphasized something I’ve increasingly come to believe: our educational system fails to teach science in a way that allows students to integrate it into their lives.

Allow me a moment to explain…

More here.

Where the Wild Things Are

Christopher Hitchens in The Atlantic Monthly:

Book At the age of 15, Noel Coward was staying in an English country house and found a copy of Beasts and Super-Beasts on a table: “I took it up to my bedroom, opened it casually and was unable to go to sleep until I had finished it.” I had a similar experience at about the same age, and I agree with Coward that H. H. Munro — or “Saki,” the author of the book in question — is among those few writers, inspirational when read at an early age, who definitely retain their magic when revisited decades later. I have the impression that Saki is not very much appreciated in the United States. Good. That means I can put into my debt many of you who are reading these words. Go and get an edition of this Edwardian master of the short story. Begin with, say, “Sredni Vashtar” or “The Lumber-Room” or “The Open Window.” Then see whether you can put the book down.

The spellbinding quality of the stories is almost too easy to analyze and looks mawkish when set down in plain words, because Saki’s great gift was being able to write about children and animals. But consider: How many authors have ever been able to pull off these most difficult of tricks? Kipling, for sure, but then, Kipling would not have been able to render the languid young princes of the drawing room, such as the exquisite Clovis Sangrail, with whom Saki peopled so many a scene. The character of these lethal Narcissi is well netted in a phrase coined by Sandie Byrne, who refers to them as “feral ephebes.”

If you want to incubate an author who will show lifelong sympathy for children and animals, it seems best to sequester him at an early age and then subject him to a long regime of domestic torture.

More here.

Dymaxion Man: The visions of Buckminster Fuller

From The New Yorker:

Bucky_2 One of Buckminster Fuller’s earliest inventions was a car shaped like a blimp. The car had three wheels—two up front, one in the back—and a periscope instead of a rear window. Owing to its unusual design, it could be maneuvered into a parking space nose first and could execute a hundred-and-eighty-degree turn so tightly that it would end up practically where it had started, facing the opposite direction. In Bridgeport, Connecticut, where the car was introduced in the summer of 1933, it caused such a sensation that gridlock followed, and anxious drivers implored Fuller to keep it off the streets at rush hour.

Fuller called his invention the Dymaxion Vehicle. He believed that it would not just revolutionize automaking but help bring about a wholesale reordering of modern life. Soon, Fuller thought, people would be living in standardized, prefabricated dwellings, and this, in turn, would allow them to occupy regions previously considered uninhabitable—the Arctic, the Sahara, the tops of mountains. The Dymaxion Vehicle would carry them to their new homes; it would be capable of travelling on the roughest roads and—once the technology for the requisite engines had been worked out—it would also (somehow) be able to fly. Fuller envisioned the Dymaxion taking off almost vertically, like a duck.

Fuller’s schemes often had the hallucinatory quality associated with science fiction (or mental hospitals).

More here.

How a trove of priceless antiquities survived in Afghanistan

Roger Atwood in National Geographic:

Screenhunter_01_jun_04_1115Omara Khan Massoudi knows how to keep a secret. Massoudi is director of the National Museum of Afghanistan in Kabul. Like the French citizens during World War II who hid works of art in the countryside to prevent them from falling into Nazi hands, Massoudi and a few trusted tahilwidars – key holders – secretly packed away Afghanistan’s ancient treasures when they saw their country descend into an earthly hell.

First came the Soviet invasion in 1979, followed about ten years later by a furious civil war that reduced much of Kabul to ruins. As Afghan warlords battled for control of the city, fighters pillaged the national museum, selling the choicest artifacts on the black market and using museum records to kindle campfires. In 1994 the building was shelled, destroying its roof and top floor. The final assault came in 2001, when teams of hammer-wielding Taliban zealots came to smash works of art they deemed idolatrous. When they finished, more than 2,000 artifacts lay in smithereens.

Throughout those dark years, Massoudi and a handful of other museum officials kept quiet about the hoard of museum artifacts – among them the crown jewels of Afghanistan, the famed Bactrian gold – that they had hidden in vaults under the presidential palace in 1988, as the Soviet occupation gave way to civil war. Researchers the world over despaired of ever seeing the objects again, thinking they’d been sold piecemeal into the illicit antiquities trade or destroyed by the Taliban in their final, iconoclastic frenzy.

More here.  [Thanks to Marilyn Terrell.] The objects in the photo gallery are amazing.

Tuesday, June 3, 2008

Contra Darwinism: A Debate

In Mind & Language, a more detailed article by Fodor on his objections to Darwinism (with replies from Daniel Dennett, Peter Godfrey-Smith, Elliott Sober, and Kirk Ludwig and Susan Schneider, and a rejoinder from Fodor). From Fodor’s article:

An analogy (in fact, I think, quite a close one): For each person who is rich, there must be something or other that explains his being so: heredity, inheritance, cupidity, acuity, mendacity, grinding the faces of the poor, being in the right place at the right time, having friends in high places, sheer brute luck, highway robbery, or whatever. Which things conduce to getting rich is, of course, highly context dependent: It’s because of differences in context that none of us now has a chance of getting rich in (for example) the way that Genghis Kahn did; or in the (not dissimilar) way that Andrew Carnegie did; or in the (quite different) way that Andrew Carnegie’s heirs did; or in the (again quite different) way that Liberace did; and so forth. Likewise, the extreme context sensitivity of the ways of getting rich makes it most unlikely that there could be a theory of getting rich per se; all those how-to-get-rich books to the contrary notwithstanding. In particular, it’s most unlikely that there are generalizations that are lawful (hence counterfactual supporting, not ad hoc, and not vacuous)38 that specify the various situations in which it is possible to get rich and the properties in virtue of which, if one had them, one would get rich in those situations.39 This is, please notice, fully compatible with there being convincing stories that explain, case by case, what it was about a guy in virtue of which he got as rich as he did in the circumstances that prevailed when and where he did so.

I think adaptationist explanations of the evolution of heritable traits are sort of like that. When they work it’s because they provide plausible historical narratives, not because they cite covering laws. In particular, pace Darwinists, adaptationism doesn’t articulate the mechanisms of the selection of heritable phenotypic traits; it couldn’t because there aren’t any mechanisms of the selection of heritable phenotypic traits (as such). All there are is the many, many different ways in which various creatures manage to flourish in the many, many environmental situations in which the do so. Diamond (in Mayr, 2001, p. x) remarks that Darwin didn’t just present ‘a well-thought-out theory of evolution. Most importantly, he also proposed a theory of causation, the theory of natural selection.’ Well, if I’m right, that’s exactly what Darwin didn’t do; a ‘theory of causation’ is exactly what the theory of natural selection isn’t.

From the viewpoint of the philosopher of science, perhaps the bottom line of all this is the importance of keeping clear the difference between historical explanations and covering law explanations.

In the Wake of the Food Crisis, A New Deal for Poor Farmers

Authors_photo Jeffrey Sachs in Project Syndicate:

Around the world, government-run agricultural banks in poor countries once not only financed inputs, but also provided agricultural advice and spread new seed technologies. Of course, there were abuses, such as the allocation of public credits to richer farmers rather than to needy ones, or the prolonged subsidization of inputs even after farmers became creditworthy. And in many cases, government agricultural banks went bankrupt. Still, the financing of inputs played a huge and positive role in helping the poorest farmers to escape poverty and dependency on food aid.

During the debt crisis of the 1980’s and 1990’s, the International Monetary Fund and World Bank forced dozens of poor food-importing countries to dismantle these state systems. Poor farmers were told to fend for themselves, to let “market forces” provide for inputs. This was a profound mistake: there were no such market forces. 

Poor farmers lost access to fertilizers and improved seed varieties. They could not obtain bank financing. To its credit, the World Bank recognized this mistake in a scathing internal evaluation of its long-standing agricultural policies last year.

The time has come to reestablish public financing systems that enable small farmers in the poorest countries, notably those farming on two hectares or less, to gain access to needed inputs of high-yield seeds, fertilizer, and small-scale irrigation. Malawi has done this for the past three seasons, and has doubled its food production as a result. Other low-income countries should follow suit.

The Top Ten Solutions to the World’s Biggest Problems

Ronald Bailey in Reason Online:

Screenhunter_02_jun_03_1749Where in the world can we do the most good? Supplying the micronutrients vitamin A and zinc to 80 percent of the 140 million children who lack them in developing countries is ranked as the highest priority by the expert panel at the Copenhagen Consensus 2008 Conference. The cost is $60 million per year, yielding benefits in health and cognitive development of over $1 billion.

Eight leading economists, including five Nobelists, were asked to prioritize 30 different proposed solutions to ten of the world’s biggest problems. The proposed solutions were developed by more than 50 specialist scholars over the past two years and were presented as reports to the panel over the past week. Since we live in a world of scarce resources, not all good projects can be funded. So the experts were constrained in their decision making by allocating a budget of an “extra” $75 billion among the solutions over four years.

Number 2 on the list of Copenhagen Consensus 2008 priorities is to widen free trade by means of the Doha Development Agenda. The benefits from trade are enormous. Success at Doha trade negotiations could boost global income by $3 trillion per year, of which $2.5 trillion would go to the developing countries.

More here.

Top Chef’s Mysterious Guests

Catherine Barker in National Geographic:

SpicesTwo exotic-sounding ingredients have been making repeat performances on Bravo’s Top Chef this season.

Ras el hanout has shown up in beet salad with goat cheese and in a foie gras mousse with peaches.

According to Larousse Gastronomique, ras el hanout is “a complex mixture of twenty or more ground spices, used mainly in Morocco, Algeria, and Tunisia. The literal meaning is “head” or “top of the shop.” Since the mixture was traditionally made from a market’s superior spices, the name is fitting.

A call to Casablanca Restaurant in Arlington, Virginia, revealed what exactly is in the mix. Chef Nadir Elhajji, who is Moroccan, explained that the combination includes paprika, ginger, black and white pepper, curry, coriander, nutmeg, and cumin. Depending on the country, ras el hanout might also include garlic, rosemary, lavender, or saffron. It’s available in some Middle Eastern stores and online, but chef Elhajji prefers to make his own from his battery of ground spices. He’s not so sure about mixing ras el hanout with beets or peaches but does like it with lamb. He’ll combine four pounds of lamb chops, a sliced onion, and two teaspoons of ras el hanout in an ovenproof pot. Coat the meat, onions, and spice liberally with olive oil and cover the pot tightly. Cook for two to six hours in a 250-degree oven. Or, if you happen to be in Marrakesh, do what the locals do and place your pot in the smoldering fire used to heat the local Turkish bath.

The other unfamiliar guest ingredient is something called yuzu.

More here.  [Thanks to Marilyn Terrell.]

Tuesday Poem

///
Booker T. and W.E.B.
Dudley Randall

“It seems to me,” said Booker T.,
“It shows a mighty lot of cheek
To study chemistry and Greek
When Mister Charlie needs a hand
To hoe the cotton on his land,
And when Miss Ann looks for a cook,
Why stick your nose inside a book?”
“I don’t agree,” said W.E.B.,
“If I should have the drive to seek
Knowledge of chemistry or Greek,
I’ll do it. Charles and Miss can look
Another place for hand or cook.
Some men rejoice in skill of hand,
And some in cultivating land,
But there are others who maintain
The right to cultivate the brain.”
“It seems to me,” said Booker T.,
“That all you folks have missed the boat
Who shout about the right to vote,
And spend vain days and sleepless nights
In uproar over civil rights.
Just keep your mouths shut, do not grouse,
But work, and save, and buy a house.”
“I don’t agree,” said W.E.B.,
“For what can property avail
If dignity and justice fail.
Unless you help to make the laws,
They’ll steal your house with
trumped-up clause.
A rope’s as tight, a fire as hot,
No matter how much cash you’ve got.
Speak soft, and try your little plan,
But as for me, I’ll be a man.”
“It seems to me,” said Booker T. —
“I don’t agree,”
Said W.E.B.

///

The Urban Frontier — Karachi

From NPR’s All Things Considered:

Nader_ambulance500By the end of this year, half the world’s population will live in cities, according to the United Nations, and the proportion will only increase. The way we develop our cities may determine our collective future, living standards, culture, politics, freedom — even our survival.

This is also the year that Morning Edition begins a series called “The Urban Frontier,” an occasional examination of the world’s cities.

We begin in Karachi, Pakistan. This week, host Steve Inskeep will introduce people who are trying to reinvent one of Pakistan’s historic cities. It is a place where so many people live that population estimates run anywhere from 12 million to 18 million — all of them working for their piece of real estate in this seaport city.

We meet an ambulance driver, navigating Karachi’s streets.

We meet the mayor, who’s eager to show us every new overpass he’s had built in the city.

More here.  [Thanks to Zaneb Beams.]

Dark, Perhaps Forever

From The New York Times:

Dark600 BALTIMORE — Mario Livio tossed his car keys in the air. They rose ever more slowly, paused, shining, at the top of their arc, and then in accordance with everything our Galilean ape brains have ever learned to expect, crashed back down into his hand. That was the whole problem, explained Dr. Livio, a theorist at the Space Telescope Science Institute here on the Johns Hopkins campus. A decade ago, astronomers discovered that what is true for your car keys is not true for the galaxies. Having been impelled apart by the force of the Big Bang, the galaxies, in defiance of cosmic gravity, are picking up speed on a dash toward eternity. If they were keys, they would be shooting for the ceiling. “That is how shocking this was,” Dr. Livio said.

It is still shocking. Although cosmologists have adopted a cute name, dark energy, for whatever is driving this apparently antigravitational behavior on the part of the universe, nobody claims to understand why it is happening, or its implications for the future of the universe and of the life within it, despite thousands of learned papers, scores of conferences and millions of dollars’ worth of telescope time. It has led some cosmologists to the verge of abandoning their fondest dream: a theory that can account for the universe and everything about it in a single breath.

More here.

The Future Is Now? Pretty Soon, at Least

From The New York Times:

Brain_2 Before we get to Ray Kurzweil’s plan for upgrading the “suboptimal software” in your brain, let me pass on some of the cheery news he brought to the World Science Festival last week in New York. Do you have trouble sticking to a diet? Have patience. Within 10 years, Dr. Kurzweil explained, there will be a drug that lets you eat whatever you want without gaining weight. Worried about greenhouse gas emissions? Have faith. Solar power may look terribly uneconomical at the moment, but with the exponential progress being made in nanoengineering, Dr. Kurzweil calculates that it’ll be cost-competitive with fossil fuels in just five years, and that within 20 years all our energy will come from clean sources.

Are you depressed by the prospect of dying? Well, if you can hang on another 15 years, your life expectancy will keep rising every year faster than you’re aging. And then, before the century is even half over, you can be around for the Singularity, that revolutionary transition when humans and/or machines start evolving into immortal beings with ever-improving software.

More here.

Salman Rushdie: Knight of the Tall Tale

Marco Roth in the New York Sun:

987_large“The Enchantress of Florence” (Random House, 368 pages, $26) is a “Harry Potter”-ish restoration project of great intelligence and remarkable egoism, both of which are characteristic of its author. Although he sets his novel in the Florence of the Medicis and Machiavelli, in the Mughal court of Akbar the Great, and at the height of the Ottoman Empire, Salman Rushdie hasn’t written just any pedantic, research-obsessed “historical novel.” Instead of trying to give us the past as it really was, he’s tried to produce the very kind of “historical romance” that might have been passed among French, Italian, English, and Mughal courtiers of the late 16th and early 17th centuries, a book to give them hours of “much languid play … in the curtained afternoons.” There are pirates, shipwrecks, hidden princesses, lost heirs, and magic mirrors. There are giants, epic battles, and potions that “facilitate one hundred consecutive ejaculations.” “In Andizhan, the pheasants grew so fat that four men could not finish a meal cooked from a single bird,” begins one chapter, and that note of superlative excess gives the tone of the whole.

More here.  [Thanks to Asad Raza.]