by Dave Maier
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Yagya – The Great Attractor [Stars and Dust]
Yagya is Aðalsteinn Guðmundsson from Iceland. His latest release is very much in the vein of his earlier ones, e.g. 2009’s Rigning, which is probably my favorite. Ambient listeners might have to get used to the dance-floor pulse of Yagya’s music, as inherited from his major influence, Wolfgang Voigt (a.k.a. Gas), but that’s easily done, given his exquisite spacial and melodic sensibilities.
by Scott F. Aikin and Robert B. Talisse
The aspiration of democracy is that with its freedoms, we allow reasons to be exchanged so that the best will come to be recognized. Note that this is true of democracy at its best. And we know that real-world democracy is far from the ideal. We are in fact forced to live according to rules that are favored by ignorant, misinformed, and irrational citizens; and many of the rules we are forced to live by are defensible only by way of the flawed rationales embraced by the ignorant. In real-world democracy, we are indeed at the mercy of our irrational and ignorant fellow citizens. Knowing this, politicians and officials cater to majority irrationality, and, once in power, they govern for the sake of gaining reelection.
It's difficult to see what could justify democracy. Maybe this is as it should be? Even under ideal conditions, political orders are always coercive, and so the task of justifying any mode of politics should be onerous. And the difficulty of justifying democracy should increase under non-ideal conditions such as those we currently face. Part of the task of democracy, even in its most ideal versions, is to critically assess the prevailing democratic order. And one way to assess a democracy is to envision alternative arrangements that might be superior.
In a recent book, provocatively titled Against Democracy, Jason Brennan takes up the chore of assessing existing democracy. His central contention is appropriately modest. He claims that if there is a workable nondemocratic political arrangement that can reasonably be expected to more reliably produce morally better policy decisions than existing democratic arrangements, we ought to try that alternative arrangement. Ultimately, he identifies a range of alternatives that he alleges will outperform democracy, all of which instantiate a political form he calls (borrowing a term coined by David Estlund) epistocracy, the rule of the knowers.
As for you, my galvanized friend, you want a heart.
~ The Wizard of Oz
At least one telling of the joke can be attributed to Warren G. Bennis, a scholar of organizational psychology and more-or-less originator of the field of leadership studies. But what is more interesting to me is the fact that Bennis's version of the joke goes back to 1991—an indication that we have been thinking about technological unemployment for a long time. When I originally heard the joke, probably sometime in the mid-90s, I savored it for its absurdist connotations: man and dog, locked in an eternal, Monty Python-esque loop of feeding and guarding, so as to guarantee no interference in the well-tempered functioning of the machine that has almost entirely replaced them both.
But these days what resonates for me more profoundly is the notion that these two still have jobs, regardless of how marginal such jobs may be; someone still has to feed the dog, and someone still has to keep the man from messing up the machinery that does the actual work. The real subtlety in the joke is that any presence should be needed at all, and yet it is somehow still required. The jobs—for both man and dog—are a fig leaf, but ostensibly the owners of the factory have decided that such a fig leaf is necessary, or at least desirable. Why is this?
I was reminded of this joke when recently contemplating the ubiquitous headlines that sensationalize the wholesale replacement of human labor by non-human capital. Unsurprisingly, the mainstream media prefers the drama of entire sectors of labor being sidelined. For example, an evergreen topic is the imminent wipe-out of heavy truck driving, which accounts for 1.8 million jobs in the United States, or nearly doubling to 3.5 million jobs, if you include taxis, delivery vans and the like. But paradigms are rarely overturned quite so rapidly, and the story that is already unfolding before us is much trickier to unravel, and more interesting.
by Jonathan Kujawa
While considering topics for this month's 3QD essay, the US Senate voted to approve a tax bill which not only dramatically reshapes US tax law, but says a great deal about our society's values. We're in an era where research and education are dramatically underfunded and underappreciated, to be knowledgeable about a subject is an automatic disqualification, and where what things which should be a question of fact and evidence are being dragged down into the political muck. I thought about writing about the Dark Ages and how the advancement of knowledge is not guaranteed. About the danger of eating our seed corn. About how it feels like we are truly living in the darkest timeline [1]. But here at 3QD this is preaching to the choir. I'd rather light a candle which can be shared with others. I'd rather talk about Exploding Dots.
In math even the most innocuous ideas can lead to undiscovered worlds. All we need is equal doses of creativity and bravery. The creativity to ask crazy questions and the bravery to try crazy things. As I tell my students, bravery in math should be easy to come by. There is no harm in trying. After all, this isn't brain surgery or nuclear engineering — nobody will die if we screw up! — just erase and try again.
The really scarce commodity is creativity. After 18+ years of schools drilling the creativity right out of your skull, it's awfully hard to let your mathematical freak flag fly. As David Hilbert said when he heard one of his students had dropped out to study poetry, "Good, he did not have enough imagination to become a mathematician". But, with some practice, we can undo the damage of our early years and start to see the wonders of the mathematical universe. Sometimes all it takes is a new perspective.
by Jalees Rehman
One fundamental problem of using social and genetic predictors of criminal violent behavior in the legal setting is the group-to-individual problem. Carrying a gene or having been exposed to poverty as a child may increase the group risk for future criminal behavior but it tells us little about an individual who is part of the group. Most people who grow up in poverty or carry the above-mentioned MAOA gene variant do not engage in criminal violent behavior. Since the legal system is concerned with an individual's guilt and his/her likelihood to commit future violent crimes, group characteristics are of little help. This is where brain imaging may represent an advancement because it can assess individual brains. Imaging individual brains might provide much better insights into a person's brain function and potential for violent crimes than more generic assessments of behavior or genetic risk factors.
Poldrack and colleagues cite a landmark study published in 2013 by Eyal Aharoni and colleagues in which 96 adult offenders underwent brain imaging with a mobile MRI scanner before being released from one of two New Mexico state correctional facilities. The prisoners were followed for up to four years after their release and the rate of being arrested again was monitored.
by Dwight Furrow
I want to sketch the alternative by invoking some recent work in ontology articulated by the political philosopher Jane Bennett in her book Vibrant Matter. Bennett does not discuss wine but her way of linking the ontology of things to an aesthetic appreciation of them can help make sense of our love of wine and expose the limits of these notions of subjectivity and objectivity that persist in our discourse.
Bennett argues that all matter including the inorganic is pulsing with life. Obviously the word ‘life' has a special meaning for Bennett since we don't normally think of inorganic objects as alive. Essentially, by "life", she means the ability to act and be acted upon. When thinking of objects as stable, largely passive objects until acted upon by something else, the most important actors are human beings, fulsome subjects actively manipulating the world to serve human ends. With regard to wine such a picture seems on the surface quite defensible. After all, we make the wine and enjoy the wine, and wine is as deeply a part of human culture as blue jeans and automobiles. But Bennett argues this picture of the relationship between human beings and things is misleading and incomplete. She shows how worms, a dead rat, or gun powder residue have the capacity to act, influencing their environment in ways not intended and often not comprehended by human beings. Worms, it turns out, make vegetable mold and thus seedlings possible and protect buried artifacts from decay, thus helping both to enable and preserve human culture. A bit of detritus, gunpowder residue, can catalyze a jury to judgment. A dead rat surprisingly sparks an aesthetic response.
by Brooks Riley
For most of us, the act of looking at a painting is, and should be, subjective. The baggage we bring to the confrontation–how we see, what we notice, what we know, how we feel, what we like or don’t like—is as individual as a finger print, and often highly idiosyncratic. Like the proverbial horse, we can be led to a painting, but we cannot be made to like it—if we’re honest. We may well like it, or appreciate it (divorcing ‘like’ from ‘value’), even if we’ve been led to it. But we can also be cajoled, or conned, into liking it or appreciating it because we’ve been told it’s a masterpiece.
Sometimes I feel I’m being stalked by Leonardo da Vinci. He tiptoes in and out of my life at irregular intervals, calling attention to himself and exhorting me to believe in his painterly genius. It’s aesthetic harassment, and he’s had plenty of enablers over the centuries, telling me I should give in to him.
The first time I saw the Mona Lisa, at 14, the first thing I noticed were her eyebrows, or rather the lack of them. Like a homing pigeon, my attention swiftly bypassed the painting as gestalt and zoomed directly into a detail that delivered a personal shock of recognition. I didn’t see the smile, I didn’t try to read her expression, I didn’t try to see where she was looking, I didn’t notice the landscape outside the window behind her. I was fixated on that delicate bone along which her eyebrows might have stretched like a delicate punctuation mark on an expression.
In spite of my dark brown hair, I was born with almost no eyebrows, only a few beige weeds scattered helter-skelter in a landscape of pale skin, invisible even from a short distance. At 14, when all my friends had lovely, well-defined brows, my lack of them was a source of adolescent insecurity that eventually faded when the teasing stopped.
By the time I saw the Mona Lisa for the second time, at 22, I’d found out that Lisa shaved off her eyebrows according to Renaissance fashion–I was born too late. This may be what led bandleader Mitch Miller to tell me, when we met, that I looked like a few Madonnas he’d seen at the Frick. It had to be the eyebrows, or the lack of them.
by Ashutosh Jogalekar
What is common to all these flights of fancy is that they were spontaneous, often spur-of-the-moment, informed at best by meager data and mostly by intuition. If Einstein, Lovelace and Fermi had paused to reconsider their thoughts because of the absence of hard evidence or statistical data, they might at the very least been discouraged from exploring these creative ideas further. And yet that is what I think the future Einsteins and Lovelaces of our day are in danger of doing. They are in danger of doing this because they are increasingly living in a world where statistics and data-driven decisions are becoming the beginning and end of everything, where young minds are constantly cautioned to not speculate before they have enough data.
We live in an age where Big Data, More Data and Still More Data seem to be all consuming, looming over decisions both big and mundane; from driving to ordering pet food to getting a mammogram. We are being told that we should not make any decision pending its substantiation through statistics and large-scale data analysis. Now, I will be the first one to advocate making decisions based on data and statistics, especially in an era where sloppy thinking and speculation based on incomplete or non-existent data seems to have turned into the very air which the media and large segments of the population breathe. Statistics has especially been found to be both paramount and sorely lacking in making decisions, and books like Daniel Kahneman’s “Thinking Fast and Slow” and Nate Silver’s “The Signal and the Noise” have stressed how humans are intrinsically bad at probabilistic and statistical thinking and how this disadvantage leads to them consistently making wrong decisions. It seems that a restructuring of our collective thinking process that is grounded in data would be a good thing for everyone.
But there are inherent problems with implementing this principle, quite apart from the severe limitations on creative speculation that an excess of data-based thinking imposes.
by Paul Braterman
EVOLUTION: What the Fossils Say and why it Matters, Donald R. Prothero (2nd edition)
If you are interested in evolution, get this book. And make sure that your library gets it. And your children's high school library. Incidentally, it's incredible value; list price $35.00/£27.95 from Columbia University Press, with over 400 lavishly illustrated pages.
The author's Prologue lays out the agenda: "Instead of the embarrassingly poor [fossil] record that Darwin faced in 1859, we now have an embarrassment of riches." To which one might now also add the records in molecular biology, embryology, and historical biogeography. The final paragraphs of the book summarise the motivation: "Evolution matters because science matters. Science matters because it is the pre-eminent story of our age, an epic saga about who we are, where we come from, and where we are going."
As an integral part of the author's strategy, we have quotations from creationist writers that show their arguments to be at best uninformed, at worst consciously dishonest. To a UK audience, this may seem excessive. In a US context, I fear it is not. In any case, the creationists' errors serve to clarify the logic of the genuine science. There is an extensive bibliography at the end, and additional reading suggestions at the end of each chapter, although I would have welcomed some way of relating these to specifics in the text.
by Claire Chambers
In her 1989 memoir Meatless Days, Sara Suleri famously writes that 'leaving Pakistan was, of course, tantamount to giving up the 
Having left Pakistan recently after a whirlwind week giving and attending talks, I've had the opportunity to reflect on the acuity of Suleri's words. For me, women's company is always a large part of what it means to visit the Islamic Republic. This was all the more true on the recent trip, since a hotel mix-up led to my sharing a room in Mandi Bahauddin for one night with a young female lecturer from Lahore. As the two of us got on with 'just living', we stayed up late talking about love, academia, and religion. Amidst much laughter, we showed each other Bollywood Thumkas and energetic Zumba.
Earlier, in Islamabad, I had spent time with an old friend who had studied for her PhD in England and now teaches at International 
Smog! I had never seen anything like it, but was reminded of reading about the 'pea-soupers' of Dickens' London. Friends told me that when this miasma first descended about a decade ago, they were initially charmed by the thought of mists and mellow fruitfulness. However, amidst much choking, the smarting of eyes, and poor visibility, Pakistanis were quickly disabused of this romantic notion.
by Max Sirak
"As above, so below" is possibly the best known Hermetic aphorism. The phrase itself comes from The Emerald Tablet of Hermes Trismegistus. An actual tablet that was translated into Latin during the 12th Century and quickly became a favorite of medieval alchemists, and then a bit later someone whom you may have heard of.
His name was Isaac Newton. You know, the guy with the apple who "discovered" gravity. Well, turns out Ol' Zac was quite the mystic. In fact, some believe "As above, so below" is the seed which sparked Newton to begin searching for the similarities between ourselves and the stars.
This principle is said to be represented symbolically in a couple places. One is the six-pointed Star of David, with its two equilateral triangles overlapping and pointing in opposite directions. Another is in the Tarot. The Magician card raises one arm above his head to the sky and drops the other below his waist to the ground.
While I can't necessarily speak, authoritatively, to the origins of symbols that pre-date me, one by many thousands of years, or what precisely motivated a luminary of science to put forth ideas forever changing they way we look at our world, I do think the phrase "As above, so below" could use an addendum:
"As it begins, so too it ends."
In the last couple of years I've noticed six similarities between the beginnings of our lives and their ends. It's almost as though life is like one of those nifty pieces of art where a centerline divides two identical-though-reversed images creating a spectacular and intricate pattern when viewed together.
by Christopher Bacas
T’s lip quivered as he paced the stage between rounds. Jack motor-mouthed himself to the dressing room, leaving his gear in a heap. This wasn’t going to be resolved anytime soon. A divine intervention followed. T caught a bad cold; pneumonia, really. He couldn’t sleep at night and the bus became a torture chamber. He writhed, shivering and hacking, voice a sandpaper squawk, refusing any help. Soloist suggested T check-in to a hospital for a few days. Guitar could play T’s instrument. In Boston, Guitar often gigged on bass. He sounded great and it was a simple way to make money. Those gigs destroyed his hands, so Guitar didn’t relish playing bass in a big band, but he’d do it to help out. Sitting behind the driver, unshaven, eyes cratered, T hated the idea.
“FUCK YOU!”
He croaked from his diesel deathbed.
“You’re not gonna take my gig!”
“I don’t WANT your gig. I don’t like playing bass. Take a couple days off, man”
Soloist added,
“Chrissakes, T, let him play!”
“No fuckin’ way. He wants to steal my gig!”
In a reversal, Guitar was frustrated by someone else’s paranoia.
by G. M. Trujillo, Jr.
Homer and Ovid immortalized these poetic images, but why has Sisyphus inspired so much philosophical reflection? Traditionally, philosophers analyze the myth to understand the meaning of life. We see ourselves in Sisyphus and muse about the implications. Here, I continue that tradition by asking: how can Sisyphus endure his struggle yet judge his life worthwhile? I argue that Sisyphus’s life is meaningful because of the relationships he has with others. The myth of Sisyphus affirms that social activity consecrates our lives with significance.
Many interpretations consider Sisyphus only as an individual and thus neglect the fact that he lived with others, just as we do. Theories about meaning in life should reflect the profound and intricate nature of the social interactions we cherish. By exploring the social aspects of life, we stumble upon an insight: a person’s life may be made meaningful when others view it as such, when we enjoy rich relationships with others. Maybe Sisyphus could find his life meaningful through an act of reflective defiance, constructing meaning for and through himself. Maybe his participation in rituals of the Greek afterlife contributes meaning to his existence. However, even when subjective interpretation or objective activities fail, our friends, family, and lovers anoint our lives with meaning.
by Thomas R. Wells
Let us assume that the automation of our job tasks by algorithms and our physical displacement by robots proceeds at a rapid pace. What is the future of work? Will it be awful or will it be nice?
It makes more sense to treat the future of work as the economic question it appears to be – at least at first. Especially since we have two hundred years of historical experience with technological revolutions. When technology displaces human employment, what generally happens to the humans? In every case, humans move down the value chain, moving into work of less economic value than before.
For example, in 1800 the overwhelming majority of people still worked on the land, even in Adam Smith’s Britain. They had to. Producing food required enormous amounts of human labour. Most people spent most of their income on bread, which is not surprising since that was the main product of the economy. As the agricultural revolution spread new technologies and methods, productivity per worker soared. Millions of workers were no longer required. Those workers moved to the cities and the new economic opportunities in factories. They went from growing food (essential to human survival) to making things that were merely nice to have (helpful to human living). A similar thing happened when factories became so efficient at making things that we could afford to transfer most of the human labour force to services (around 75% of most developed economies).
In other words, automation increases productivity, the amount of economic value a society can produce with the same inputs of labour and materials. That means we can have all the things we used to have, plus we now also have some spare labour that we can use to produce things lower down on our collective list of priorities, such as mass higher education and healthcare and telemarketing. The reason we didn’t make those things already is that they were not valuable enough to be worth the cost of giving up anything higher on the list. Technology driven economic change increases general prosperity by expanding the frontier of what an economy can produce, and therefore what the people in it can consume. (How those consumption possibilities are distributed is a different, political rather than economic question.)
Applying this logic to our current revolution in automation, it seems reasonable to conclude that the future of human work will be producing things even further down our list of priorities than what most of us do now. What might that look like?
by Samir Chopra
The artfully put-together tourism poster—like illustrations of improbably delicious-looking concoctions in cookbooks—promises us a glimpse of the impossible, the inaccessible, and the too-beautiful. Its photographs of attractions are invariably of ‘postcard’ or ‘coffee-table book’ quality, fit to be mailed to friends; they suggest the ‘attraction’ is not possible to actually visit: surely the photographer was granted ‘special’ access to the Shangri-La that beams at us from the poster? But the poster and the guidebook assure us with a devastating twin salvo that this place has been visited, and more damagingly, that if we do not visit it, we have somehow failed to meet some unknown evaluative standards for vacations. The guidebook does this acutely with listings of the “essential,” the “must-see,” the “ten things any visitor to X must do.” These are resisted by pronouncements like “That’s only what the editors of that guidebook think; what do they know?” But such rhetorical bluster is just that; under the weight of the prescription, our resolve crumbles. We become acutely conscious of the need to play by the guidebook and the poster’s playbook: Visit this place! Have these experiences! Or else!
by Carl Pierer
A few months ago, this column discussed Rae Langton's argument that pornography subordinates women. This argument forms the first part of a longer paper re-published in her book Sexual Solipsism. The second part of this paper argues that pornography silences women. In light of recent events and discussions, this idea seems to have acquired a new relevance.
The second part of Langton's article builds on the speech act theory of the first. Silencing means, for Langton, the failure to perform a speech act. Her argument in this part of the paper is to first argue that speech acts can be silenced, secondly that there are silencing speech acts, and to conclude, thirdly, that pornography is a silencing speech act that silences the speech act(s) of women.
Along any one of Austin's three dimensions of a speech act, a speech act can fail to develop its force. So it is that along any one of these dimensions a speech act can be silenced. It is worth noting with Langton that when this happens there is an implicit power relation: because the dimensions of the speech act depend on qualifications concerning the speaker, the failure to perform along any of the dimensions is a measure of powerlessness.
The first, with undeniable political significance, is a failure to perform even a locutionary act. Potential speakers are intimidated, prevented from speaking, do not speak because they will not be listened to. They are not in the position to utter the words they want to utter. This is perhaps the most obvious case of silencing that comes to mind when thinking, for instance, about tyrannical regimes limiting free speech.
The second is a failure to accomplish what is intended by the speech: to comfort, without attenuating sadness, to invite, without guests coming, or to argue, without convincing. These are failures along the second dimension of speech acts, consequently they may be called perlocutionary frustrations. They too might have a political significance if failure along this dimension is, for example, due to the speaker's class or gender.
The third, of greatest interest for this article, is a failure along the third dimension. It happens "(…) when one speaks, one utters words, and fails not simply to achieve the effect one aims at, but fails to perform the very action one intends." This Langton calls illocutionary disablement. As mentioned earlier, certain speech acts require the speaker to have an authority to perform the illocutionary act: in the classic example, an ordained priest is required to pronounce the couple husband and wife in order for them to be married. This, Langton points out, means that the ability to perform an illocutionary act can be taken as a measure of authority and political power.
by Richard King
STEM, as 3QD readers will know, stands for Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics. And it is the go-to concept for anyone concerned with the future of our embattled species, especially when it comes to questions of how that species will continue to reproduce itself under conditions of waged labour and property and profit. Ever on the lips of politicians or at the fingertips of commentators, it is the universal remedy, not only to economic problems, but also to problems of social inclusion and democratic participation. Wondering about what kind of jobs we'll be doing in the future? Think STEM. Worried about the future place of women in the workforce? Think STEM. Beginning to doubt the wisdom of sending yet another generation of kids to college, where they can accumulate yet more student debt and keep the financial sector ticking over? Think STEM.
Well, STEM schtem, I say, at least until someone can tell me, in a bit more detail, what it is our kids are supposed to be doing with all these sexy, STEMMY skills. For to dig down past the bland assertions of Bill Gates and his analogues, through all the rather vague pronouncements about generic skills and job clusters and coding and systems thinking and the like, is to discover, well, not much at all. I must have read at least fifty reports on the importance of STEM in the last couple of years, and nearly all of them cite the same statistic that 75% of the fastest-growing occupations will require workers with a STEM education. Little mention is made of what these sectors are, or of how big those sectors might become (regardless of their rate of growth), and when one digs down a little further most of them seem to lead back eventually to a handful of slightly aged studies. It's all beginning to smell a bit fishy. What is going on?
by David M. Introcaso
The Past Few Months
The US is the biggest carbon polluter in history. Regardless, this past March the President Trump issued his Executive Order (EO) On Energy Independence the White House press shop stated, “stops Obama’s war on fossil fuels.” Among other things, the EO allows the EPA to review President Obama’s Clean Power Plan initiative aimed at reducing carbon pollution or greenhouse gas emissions from coal plants by 32 percent of 2005 levels by 2030. (Carbon dioxide, that accounts for approximately 60 percent of greenhouse gasses, has increased by 40 percent since pre-industrial levels and more than half of this increase has occurred over the past three decades.) The EO also lifted a 14 month moratorium on new coal leases on federal lands and it eliminates guidance that climate considerations be factored into environmental reviews under the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA).
Two months later or on June 1st President Trump announced the US would withdraw from the Paris climate accord signed by 194 other nations and considered by many to be modestly ambitious. US joined Syria as the only non-participant. (Nicaragua also refused to sign because its envoy said the accord was insufficiently ambitious.) Under the accord the US had committed to reducing its greenhouse gas emissions by 26 to 28 percent compared to 2005 levels by 2025. Trump’s decision was made despite the fact the president’s Secretary of State, and former Exxon CEO, Rex Tillerson, opposed the decision. Ironically, in early May Tillerson signed the Fairbanks Declaration that stressed the importance of reversing Arctic warming that is occurring at twice the rate of the global average and has caused to date the disappearance of 40 percent of summer Arctic ice. Following up on the President’s March EO, EPA Administrator, Scott Pruitt, announced in early October his agency would begin the process of repealing the Clean Power Plan. Most recently, or on November 3rd, the Trump administration, surprisingly, released a Congressionally-mandated report assessing climate change. (The report’s release was expected in August.) Authored by 13 federal agencies and considered the most definitive statement on the subject, the report titled, “‘US Global Change Research Program, Climate Science Special Report” (CSSR), stated in part, “it is extremely likely that human influence has been the dominate cause of the observed warming since the mid-20th century.” The White House played down the reports findings stating “the climate has changed and is always changing.”
by Paul North
Santiago-Viñas-Santiago / October 2017
For Willy Thayer, who moved a river in me
How lucky they are in Chile! How lucky they are in Chile, the past is dead and gone, how lucky that their state did not externalize it's hideous violence into secret ops, proxy wars, distant destruction of sovereign states and peoples without sovereignty, offensives in which the people at home barely believed. How lucky they are to have had a home-spun dictatorship, how fortunate that it is over and has been expelled from their nation once and for all. How envious I am that they, so far south, got the full benefit of the freest free market from the Hayek school, the Chicago School, the American corporate school up north. Between us the driest desert in the world—money scoffs at distances. It turned a murderous coup into a social reformation. What stability! "Chile is one of the most stable economies and our honest ally." How lucky that they converted brutalities into profits, detention centers into shopping malls. This is not all. How charmed the life of critical theorists suspended between the desert and the glacier. They don't know how lucky they are! To have their object so clearly in front of them, even if few ears are listening. Except the students, not the students!, some few students whose ear for critique has been sharpened by the experiences of their parents and teachers. They hear the past calling like the hollow whisper on a wireless call.
Portrait of a Thinker in Traffic. Neo-liberalism is good for traffic. Rules are for following, people without means who clutter up the city are for moving out of the centers to new desolate zones. Not like in Argentina—there's no dawdling here, that is the old way. The old way blows away. Stiching his car through the city, the thinker—nothing can block him, not diligent workers or entrepreneurs with their malls, offices, homes. No place to go, no matter. Keep driving. Flow is everything. We are happy with small affordances: to pass consumers and producers by. Passing is pleasure, unlike the acrobats who greet us at each traffic light, jugglers who illuminate the cliff edges of the system of flexible labor. Gainfully employed by contingency, they stand on their heads, balancing balls, a few pesos. "Viste, no se me cayó ninguno." "See, I didn't drop one."
by Michael Liss
I was born one mornin’ when the sun didn’t shine
I picked up my shovel and I walked to the mine
I loaded sixteen tons of number 9 coal
And the straw boss said “Well, a-bless my soul”
(“16 Tons” Merle Travis)
Who in his right mind would want to be a coal miner? It’s scary, dangerous, terrible for your health, and destructive to the environment. In popular mythology, coal miners live in tar-paper shacks without indoor plumbing that are situated next to toxic waste dumps, buy all their supplies from the company store at ruinous rates, send children below ground by the time they are 12, and look 70 at 40—if they get there.
Hyperbole aside, it actually is dangerous, and the danger isn’t just part of the historical past of Black Lung, the Coal and Iron Police, and Johnny Cash singing “16 Tons.” There have been 13 deaths just this year. In 2010, at the Upper Big Branch Mine disaster, 29 miners died at a site that had over 350 safety violations, including lack of roof support, poor ventilation of dust and methane, failure to maintain proper escape ways, and the accumulation of combustible materials. The CEO of owner Massey Energy, Don Blankenship, was aggressively unrepentant. He wasn’t going to slow production for safety’s sake. The only thing he cared about was running coal, and running it as fast as it could be wrenched from the ground, at the lowest possible cost. If that meant cutting corners, that didn’t trouble him.
Let’s pose the question a second time: Who in his right mind would want to be a coal miner? Turns out, quite a lot of people. One of the most striking things about the various retraining programs for out-of-work coal miners and other old-economy/Rust Belt jobs, is how many reject them. They don’t want to learn alternatives—the want their old jobs back. Along the Allegheny Mountain Range, where there’s still plenty of coal to be mined, they think they should have them back—and will soon, because Trump promised to bring them back.
So, these are foolish people—either too ignorant to understand market forces or too uncaring about the environmental damage mining coal can cause, or just too reckless with their own lives and that of their children? And we need to save them from themselves…
