by Mathangi Krishnamurthy

Interviews and dates begin thus, “Tell me something about yourself”. In that moment, I balk. After all, what among a dozen different things might this question demand? Must I confess? Shall I tell all? Shall I say everything there is to say? Do I even know? Come to think of it, is who I am right now tantamount to who I will or want to be? Breathing deep, I brush away the doubts. I condense. I offer caveats. I make self and knowledge palatable to my interviewer. Eyes shining, legs crossed, smile wide, back straight, I produce all of the everything that must mean so little.

There is so much I'd like to say. But I fear incomprehension, and derision, and the walls between people that render them interested mainly in self. And yes, I know. This essay. But surely, things about self are also things about the world? In David Szalay's recent work, “All That Man Is”, one of his protagonists is dismayed that the world he knows ends with him; there is only one person capable of knowing this world, and he is afraid of mortality and how it will destroy this world. I wonder that he didn't ask the other question; if this world even exists. So in hopes that it does, and in trying to grapple with its ultimate destruction, let me tell you some things about myself.

Most times, I am not even sure I exist. I am wholly and entirely the Descartian subject, however. I walk around with a body from which I feel an arm's length distance. We live together, my body and I, in a tenderly choreographed dialectic. I marvel at it sometimes, so full in its materiality and definitive weight. I wear it like raiment; other times, it wears me. And some very rare times, like when I manage to hold a tree pose, we are one.

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by Hirsch Perlman

The name of the street I live on is Bargen Way and The Battle at Bargen Way is the term I long ago gave to my studio practice. So, let me tell you about the battle at Bargen Way.

I had a mind to make a mechanical, articulated joint, perhaps for an unknown figure. And for some reason (because this is what artists do— close down the infinite possibilities, the infinite freedom we have to reveal a set of seemingly random finite possibilities) I would have to do this with no hardware, no glue, no fittings, just wood.

Two years of tooling up and experimenting followed and I arrived at an odd daisy chain design of interlocking wooden axles, nuts, and bolts. These parts were infinitely adjustable and could be locked in any orientation. I toyed with a variety of uses, placement, attachments, and configurations of the joint. Many kinds of wood were put to the test. The best wood, lignum vitae (wood of life), comes from South America. It's an extraordinary wood, with a resin that acts as a natural, built-in lubricant that has a lovely smell. Believe it or not, it's used to make large bearings in hydro-electric generators (I purchase the cut-offs from the manufacture of those bearings). It lasts longer than steel in that application. One of the first mechanical clocks was made out of lignum vitae.

Another year of toying and the real meaning of the joint unfolded. It's a mechanical schematic of thinking, the brain as an versatile tool. These parts were too flexible to be regular joints, they were “mind,” not body.

I built a number of prototypes. 10-12 foot tall “stick person” bodies/limbs with my adjustable joint as neurons/hair/headdress, each thinking itself.

If I'd managed to properly anchor any of the them to the ground, they might still stand. I missed the storm and the battle, but not its aftermath. I would need to draw this out, look at the carnage for a long time, before I knew what it meant.

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by Paul North

Fate is a conspiracy between past and future, a compact, mostly secret, that forbids us to deviate from what was decided ages ago. Fate is a keyhole through which you glimpse the secret compact. Fate is also a feeling. Out of a series of little glimpses arises an overwhelming sense that there is nothing to be done.

The last person we would associate with a predetermined future, oblique glimpses, and a feeling of paralysis is Charles Darwin, who liberated natural history from a pre-existing plan. In a certain sense, after Darwin, nature becomes a zone of freedom. For a quick comparison, some of the most forward-thinking of his contemporaries, the geologist Charles Lyell for instance or anatomist Richard Owen, believed in fixed species—despite their commitment to evolutionary ideas considered radical in the day. What separated Darwin from many of his contemporaries was the inkling that became his theory of “natural selection.” The theory says that little has been decided in advance. A “species” is a complex, contingent negotiation between a generation and its environment, as well as between the species and its past, not to mention between that species and its ongoing possibilities for transmutation—its future. At any moment the environment could find itself at a turning point, and the species could find itself, without the inherited resources, unable to transmute sufficiently in order to survive. Then the species goes extinct and an unanticipated form of life takes its place.

“Natural Selection” does sound like a force beyond our control, a force that, although we can't see it, nevertheless controls us. Say “Natural Selection” and the three Greek old ladies, the fates, appear before us, laying out our destinies on their great loom. It also sounds like the “invisible hand” in laissez-faire economics. “Invisible hand” was Adam Smith's phrase that became a popular metaphor for the orderly distribution of wealth without any external source for that order. Isn't it odd? To describe a situation without an external force governing events, we use a phrase that means precisely an external force governs events. In economics as well as in biology, when we want to say there is no such thing as fate, we name an intractable, invisible authority, an economic hand that orders, a natural hand that selects.

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Of Enlightenment

clicking buttons of a remote I dream of enlightenment
of crammed refugees in boats I dream

in flickering glow of screens I dream of enlightenment
of history that still careens I dream

hearing sirens in the dark I dream of enlightenment
of popping guns in parks I dream

seeing new corpses in the street I dream of enlightenment
of black men beaten by blue I dream

tasting the sky of a hard rain I dream of enlightenment
of earth recoiling from human stain I dream

feeling the blast and bite of drones I dream of enlightenment
of streets of blood and bones I dream

seeing skeletal forms of girls and boys I dream of enlightenment
while surfeit banquets cloy I dream

while glittering glass cubes burn and fall I dream of enlightenment
while no one seems to learn at all I dream

.
Jim Culleny
10/11/16

by Michael Liss

Sixteen. That was the percentage of respondents in a snap CNN post-second debate poll who said that they had heard about Donald Trump's “sex tape” and that it made them more likely to vote for him. 16 Percent. One in six voters surveyed, likely one in three (or more) of Trump supporters. Here's another number–Eighty-Three. In a WSJ/NBC News Poll, again, taken after the release of the tape, 83 percent of Republicans believe that the party should back Trump through the election.

Perhaps that is just circling the wagons–a later Washington Post/ABC News Poll showed the number of “mores” evaporating, but still had 83% of Trump voters saying it made no difference to them–and they were backed by a number of Evangelical leaders. A reasonable person might ask, why? Why would anyone with a girlfriend or a wife or a daughter or a mother (everyone has a mother) ignore the coarseness, to say nothing of any of the other controversial and even inflammatory things he's said and done? Their answer is that are with Trump, come hell or high water, and they aren't going to let any pointy-headed, liberal MSM pollster (or sanctimonious Establishment Republican) tell them otherwise. Trump is their guy, and there is nothing further to discuss.

That odor you are detecting is from the dumpster outside RNC Headquarters. It already had a distinct bouquet, but now is accompanied by occasional puffs of smoke. It's not the only dumpster in town—there is one near virtually every conservative think tank in America. What you are witnessing, in real time, is possibly the final death blow for Ronald Reagan's Republican Party, and Ronald Reagan's Conservative Movement. When this election cycle is over, win or lose, there will still be a Republican Party, and there will still be a Conservative Movement, but Donald Trump may very well have vandalized the two into unrecognizability.

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by Dave Maier

I had not intended to return to the issue of marijuana legalization so soon after my last such post, but this will be my last post before the November election, and there are ballot initiatives about marijuana legalization in no fewer than nine states – four medical marijuana (Arkansas, Montana, Florida, and North Dakota), and five “recreational” (California, Nevada, Arizona, Maine, and Massachusetts) – so here we go again. I won’t give a general argument for or against, but just give a sense of the wide variety of relevant issues. If you live in any of these states, please be sure to read the particular initiative carefully before voting.

Marijuana users constitute a small minority of the population, but recent polls have shown consistent majorities in favor of legalization. Not surprisingly, older voters and Republicans are less likely to support it, although not by large margins. More surprising is the opposition to the various legalization initiatives by those otherwise in favor. Why would one want to legalize marijuana but oppose an initiative which does that very thing?

For an answer, let us direct our browsers to noon1.me (“No on [Maine’s ballot proposition] 1”). Again, one might expect a site with that name to argue that it would be horrible to allow our citizens to freely take drugs to get high on drugs, and no doubt there are such sites (for a refresher on prohibitionism, see my previous post). Instead, its focus is mainly on the various regulations involved in, as proponents of the initiative put it, “regulating marijuana like alcohol”. These regulations are necessary, proponents believe, in order to sell the idea to non-users, and indeed the only successful initiatives to date (in Colorado, Washington, Alaska, Oregon, and DC), as well as the various initiatives likely to do well this year, have a whole laundry list of regulations on public use, home growing, DUI limits, possession limits, and so on. This is especially true in California, where the tag line for this year’s effort (“Let’s get it right”) alludes to the apparently overly lax nature of the failed legalization initiative there in 2010.

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by Genese Sodikoff

For thousands of years, people on every continent (save for uninhabitable Antarctica) have recognized the behavior of rabid animals and seen the ravages that rabies inflicts on the human mind and body. While the biological symptoms of rabies are universal, it, like many global diseases, manifests in different places with unique cultural markers and histories. These include everyday etiologies, or the ways people trace the origin of a disease or condition. They include the specific images or emotions expressed by victims in a feverish state, or the treatments applied to rabid animal bites. Beyond the cultural ideas and practices that shape any illness, rabies' origins and unpredictable incubation period, which can range anywhere from a week to months (or years!) before symptoms appear, invites the human imagination to fill in the blank.

In Madagascar, where I do anthropological fieldwork, rabies has been around since at least 1896, when the French colonized the island. Historian Eric T. Jennings writes that by 1899, a Pasteur Institute was established to forcefully combat human rabies, known as hydrophobia, but the virus was never eradicated. Jennings writes that to French colonial scientists experienced in treating rabies, Madagascar appeared to have a particularly acute and fast-spreading strain, requiring “more frequent injections of more active virus.” Rabid dogs in Madagascar appeared more ferocious than elsewhere, aiming right for the face.

Given the prevalence and history of rabies in Madagascar, I was surprised to learn that many Malagasy people (including doctors and veterinarians) attribute the viral source to a wild species that has only recently appeared on the landscape: a creature they call “little big chest” (kelibetratra). I refer specifically to people in the region of Moramanga District, about a three-hour drive east of the capital, Antananarivo, but knowledge of the kelibetratra as the rabies source extends far beyond this district.

The creature was described to me as a furtive wild dog from the rain forest that only roams late at night. It is built like a pit bull, but with shorter legs and a bigger thorax. Because of deforestation, they said, the animal has been scared out of its natural habitat into villages and towns, where it attacks pet dogs and cats, infecting them with rabies.

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by Leanne Ogasawara

On the day of the second presidential debate, my mom and I decided that it would be just too lewd for my son to watch.

I suppose I should mention my son is 14!

Never in my life, have I seen anything like the insane circus that is surrounding this presidential debate, have you? With 24 hour a day coverage and the wild reaches of Internet, it feels like the election is going to take down the entire country with it. I mean, I was just walking my poodle this morning, and I heard two guys in spandex shouting about Trump's latest outrages as they screamed past me on the their bikes.

You can't get away from it. Not even in the days of Bill Clinton was there this level of lechery.

And so I totally agree with John Oliver, when he said we have reached a point so low in this election that we are now breaking through the earth's crust, where drowning in boiling magma will come as sweet, sweet relief.”

Yep.

Of course, Oliver had taped his show before the world had started gleefully repeating “that word” over and over again. All of a sudden, “that word” was everywhere, to the point that the detestable Trump surrogate Scottie Nell Hugh was seen demurely asking CNN's Ana Navarro to, “Please stop saying that word, because,” She explained, “My daughter is listening…”

Suffice it to say this did not go over well with Navarro, who angrily responded,

“You know what Scottie? Don’t tell me you’re offended when I say ‘pussy,’ but you’re not offended when Donald Trump says it!” Navarro shouted at Hughes. “I’m not running for president. He is.”

The CNN panel –along with millions of viewers– sat there stunned, because TRULY, you just can't make this stuff up!

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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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