by Rishidev Chaudhuri
Don’t Feed the Trolls
by Scott F. Aikin and Robert B. Talisse
Thinking one's way into Internet trolling isn't very difficult. There are news stories, blog postings, and opinion pages. With these, there are comment threads for critical discussion. Sometimes on these threads, there are hundreds or even thousands of comments. Now, when there are many people talking in a room, sometimes the best way to be heard is to raise one's voice. But, alas, there's no volume on the internet. To be sure, there is the practice of writing in ALLCAPS, which is the written equivalent of shouting. But anyone can do that, and on the Internet, all such shouting is rendered equally “loud.” So the only way to be heard on the Internet is to have content that captures the eye of readers, and in a comment thread, few things attract attention better than comments which are rude and abusive. Thus a troll is born.
We should note that Internet trolls come in many shapes and forms. There are some who post unflattering pictures of their exes online, there are others who bully classmates on Facebook, and there are those who intentionally post false information in the midst of natural disasters. We are not talking about these trolls here, but much of what we say will likely be relevant to them. The trolls we are concerned with are those that dominate discussions with overblown objections and personal attacks, who seem immune to criticism, and who thereby derail Internet argument. A further feature of trolls of this kind is that they seem to thrive on the negative reactions they elicit. Responding to them and defending your view causes them to become even more unhinged. It seems that the best thing you can do is simply ignore them.
But here's the trouble. It seems clear that engaging with critics is a good thing. In fact, it is not merely a good thing; it is what one ought to do. This is an old thought, and one exceedingly well-articulated by John Stuart Mill in On Liberty, with the observation that “He who knows only his own side of the case knows little of that.” The thought is that even if you're right and have excellent reasons to believe so, if you have no reasons that address the other side of an issue, you have no ground to make the comparative judgment that your side is better. The consequence is that those who have critical things to say should be of great interest to us, and we should feel deeply obligated to take up with them. That's a really important reason for why argument matters – even if you're right in a disagreement, you need the grounds for preferring your own side, which requires knowing the other.
Heidegger and the Reluctant American
by Leanne Ogasawara
Those obsessively poring over emerging news about the Boston bombers should take a break from their iPhones and laptops and newspapers and read Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist, (and see Mira Nair’s film version out later this week). The novel will go further in answering the general bewilderment about the Tsarnaev brothers than the little snippets of their lives we have so far, in answering the bigger mystery: “Why did young men who grew up and studied here, as part of our communities and our country, resort to such violence?” as Obama put it.
The comments to the piece are pretty disturbing and say more about things here than anything else. No, it isn't anything about the immigrant experience, but rather is something inherent to Islam, they say in the comments. But were these young men politized or involved with fundamentalist fanatics? Or were they (at least one of them) mentally ill– end of story? We just don't know yet, do we?
However, I do think Roiphe makes a good point about identity issues and how cruel and damaging they can be.
In 2000, the conservative critic and Tokyo University professor Susumu Nichibe wrote a book about Japanese virtue and national morality, in which he strongly discouraged teaching a foreign language to Japanese children before they had mastered their own language. I didn't agree with much of anything in his book including that piece of advice (!!), but his description of how bilingualism in languages as different as Japanese and English can cause something which he called cultural schizophrenia stuck in my mind.
I think anyone who speaks two unrelated languages at a high level of fluency will agree that they quite simply think different thoughts depending on the language in which they are thinking at any given time. This is part of the huge attraction, of course, in learning a second language and living overseas–since that experience opens up for a person all kinds of new possibilities: new ways of thinking, new ways of looking at the world, new behaviors, and new ways of understanding the world. It is tremendously expanding.
Japanese is something that has added an indescribable richness to my own inner life and often affords me two very different perspectives on things. At the same time, however, it can be a strain.
The constant cultural comparisons and negotiating back and forth between worldviews can make a person feel the are never wholly at home anywhere. There are also power issues that can generate feelings of humiliation and shame–such as brilliantly portrayed in Hamid's novel. The Reluctant Fundamentalist is at base a novel documenting what it feels like to be between worlds, specifically where one is not in the privileged position (a Pakistani in post 9-11 America).
Maybe unbelievable to me was that the character was only meant to have lived in America four years. Though on second thought, that seemed to be the most common period when people experience nervous breakdowns resulting from culture shock–within the first five years. And, just as Roiphe suggested, what is really interesting about the story is just how so wildly successful by American standards the character was in terms of the “American dream.”
Little Brothers, Total Noise and Trickster
“At the end of the day, someone is going to be right.”
~Brian Williams, NBC Anchor
Were we offered a weary reminder of the racism that always seems to be lurking just below the surface of American society? Indeed. Further proof of Americans' abiding ignorance of geography? Check. A prime opportunity for yet another efflorescence of conspiracy theorists? Yawn. Please tell us something new.
Actually, in the case of Boston, conspiracy theory is a pretty good place to begin. The deepest conceptual failure of conspiracy, as an ontological mode, is its presupposition of a larger, unifying order. Since a benevolent conspiracy is not a conspiracy but really just a miracle – and a conspiracy that is indifferent to us is, by definition, impossible to discern – the fact that conspiracies are also evil is entirely redundant. The goal of identifying (and then wallowing in) a conspiracy, is not so much about the subsequent pursuit of justice, as it is about the reassurance that the world is not chaotic; that however you might detest its presence and seek to escape its influence, there is a deliberate design.
The problem is originary: we are sensemaking creatures. In this light, conspiracy is only our most extreme indulgence of that bedrock behavior. The only thing better than every thing meaning something, is if the meaning of every thing belongs to the same something. But confronted with the immediacy of the Boston bombings, the need to quickly interpret – or, more accurately, create – some kind of meaning is difficult to resist, and technologies, old and new, for better or worse, stood ready to lend a perhaps dubious hand.
Prose Poem
by Shadab Zeest Hashmi
I write to you of folding, tucking, burying side by side. The silk you worried the centuries into being, has arrived; bolts of it. But when we opened the trunks, all we saw was a smooth tongue: Urdu's cascade, a shimmer in ruins. We had to snap shut and lock your decorous viscera, counting only what sells in the market.
Most days, it is over fifty degrees; memories steal away easily. Guards in their fat stupor don't notice them your side of the border.
Pakistan— land of the thirsty, land of skipped beats: half an oscillation, an unfinished verse. India throbs behind us: Its many drums, torn kites and squalor. To both, dust returns again and again, the powdered ghost of goodbye the British viceroy's last plane.
I write to you of a crazed goat leaping across the stretch of No Man's land— no larger than a cricket pitch. A cawing here, a rustling there; the air weighed down by cannons. Another goat, its ears shaking as it grazes under a dwarf tree, will be the first to hear warplanes.
Miles and miles of rice paddies on both sides of the border, roofed by rancor; Hindu gods bathed in milk on one side, on the other, terraces where we wait for the green-domed country carved for us. I write to you of the armor you forgot to pack, the missing tools. Your silk, dear dead, is a rheumatic sleep fingering a new tangle of history.
Trees please, with fruit
by Quinn O'Neill
I think this is a fantastic idea. Why haven't we been doing this everywhere?
The potential benefits are innumerable. The most obvious perk might be aesthetic, but lush blossoming trees and greenery are more than just eye candy. Exposure to vegetation also has benefits for mental health, reducing anxiety and improving mood. Memory gains and improvements in mood as a result of nature walks have even been reported in adults suffering from major depressive disorders.
The mechanism underlying the mental boost isn't clear. Neighborhood greenery could encourage people to spend more time outdoors, more time engaged in physical activity, and more time mixing socially with other community members. These factors probably play a role, but they don't tell the whole story. Even looking at photos of vegetation can help to focus attention and reduce mental fatigue and stress compared to looking at similar photos with no vegetation.
Of course, Seattle's food park isn't just about greenery, since much of its botanical offerings will be edible. Given the prevalence of obesity, poverty, and food deserts in the US, we might also expect some improvement in physical health as a result of better nutrition. The park's fruit and berries may not be adequate to steadily supply community members, but this might not be so important. Just encouraging experimentation with novel food items – particularly the more exotic ones – can inspire people to buy them when they go grocery shopping. Shoppers encountering persimmons or guavas for the first time might be deterred by the unknown: Do you have to peel them? Can you eat the seeds? Do they need to be cooked first? With park visitors inadvertently offering free demonstrations of how to eat the foods, overcoming these knowledge barriers would literally be a walk in the park.
Monday, April 22, 2013
Revisiting the Idea of India — Part 2
by Namit Arora
A two-part review of The Indian Ideology, October 2012, by Perry Anderson. Part 1 is here.
In 2011, for instance, Jaswant Singh, a leader of the Indian right-wing party BJP and former Defense and Foreign Minister of India, caused a storm with his biography of Jinnah. In it Singh assigned greater blame for Partition to Nehru and even praised Jinnah for his sundry qualities. No BJP official attended the book launch, after which Singh was summarily expelled from the BJP and his book banned in Gujarat. So while emotions still run high on the topic, it’s also true that at least among scholars today, such as Pakistani historian Ayesha Jalal and Indian jurist HM Seervai, Singh’s interpretation has gained ground. Yet few historians have offered a sharper account of it than Perry Anderson, who humanizes many icons of Indian nationalism, restoring to them their rightful share of human follies.
One such icon is Nehru, a disciple of Gandhi with a crippling ‘psychological dependence’ on him, but whose ‘intellectual development [was] not arrested by intense religious belief’. Nehru, a Brahmin, was born into a higher social class than Gandhi, a Bania. Anderson notes that Nehru was not religious, had extramarital affairs, and ‘had acquired notions of independence and socialism Gandhi did not share’. That said, Nehru’s ‘advantages yielded less than might be thought’ and he ‘seems to have learned very little at Cambridge’, becoming ‘a competent orator’ but never acquiring ‘a modicum of literary taste.’ To Anderson, The Discovery of India, ‘a steam bath of Schwärmerei’ with a ‘Barbara Cartland streak’, reveals ‘not just Nehru’s lack of formal scholarship and addiction to romantic myth, but something deeper … a capacity for self-deception with far-reaching political consequences.’ He combined qualities like ‘hard work, ambition, charm, some ruthlessness’ with ‘others that were developmentally ambiguous: petulance, violent outbursts of temper, vanity.’
& in Togo, Was there Class Tension?
I do not work as these ladies do.
My body is indolent.
I should lift things,
Sash things,
Cook.
Should have a child on my back.
A basket on my head.
When I leave my book
to make more coco, I wash
a dish in the sink, I waste
the soap.
Modesta catches me.
“I will do it,” she says.
“You are like your Mama, the American woman!
Everything, you want to do it, yourself”
She takes the soapy dish
from my hand.
She is laughing, but is it real?
Am I proud now, for washing one dish?
Modesta scrubs shirts
in a metal bowl for hours.
I tried it once.
Even Mama can’t bend like that
for long.
She’s right, about Mama.
Who works hard in an office to make
American money to send me to school
but would like to have her houseL
to herself.
I don’t like
any of this. I like the men
who clap for a girl
to bring palm wine. The men
who discuss
Books. I like them.
They carry nothing
on their heads.
Poem
HALCYON DAYS
Two brothers unlike each other
Under the copper beech
Chairs patterned with impatiens
It is going to be a bad day
The only wind is our breathing
Patronizing the silence he says
You’ve inherited Mother’s madness
by Rafiq Kathwari
More poems by Rafiq here.
Pakistan Elections 2013: The view from afar
by Omar Ali
If all goes well, Pakistanis will go to the polls on May 11th to elect a new national assembly and all 4 provincial assemblies. The Pakistan People’s Party was the largest party in the outgoing parliament and under the guidance of President Asif Ali Zardari, successfully held together a disparate coalition regime in the face of multiple challenges to complete its 5 year term of office. Unfortunately, that huge achievement is almost their only major achievement in office. While things were not as absolutely abysmal as portrayed by Pakistan’s anti-PPP middle class (rural areas, for example, are better off economically than they have ever been), they are pretty awful. Chronic electricity shortages (inherited from Musharraf’s Potemkin regime, but still not fixed), galloping inflation, widespread corruption and endless terrorism have tried the patience of even the most devoted PPP supporters and make it difficult for the PPP to run on their record. There are a few bright spots (including a relatively well run welfare scheme called the Benazir income support program) and with Zardari deploying his coalition building magic, it is not a good idea to completely rule them out. Still, they are clearly not the favorites in the coming elections. The middle class excitement (especially in Punjab and KP) is all about Imran Khan, while more serious pundits seem to be betting on Nawaz Sharif and his PMLN. Being out of the country, I have little direct knowledge of what retail politics looks like on the ground; but there is such a thing as a long-distance view and I am going to take that view and try and make some predictions. We will know in 3 weeks how out of touch I really am.
If you do want to look up what is happening on the ground in detail there are several excellent sources available, for example: Saba Imtiaz’s election watch, the Dawn newspaper’s election page (including an interesting motor cycle diary from Tahir Mehdi as he motors across Pakistan), an election page from journalist and public intellectual Raza Rumi and last but not the least, the wonderful young team at fiverupees.com, who don’t have a lot of coverage yet, but do have writers who prefer carefully checked facts and data to mere opinion.
On to predictions:
Monday, April 15, 2013
Awkward in Malawi
By Maniza Naqvi
I spot a café, called, “99% God's Plan.” It is on the side of the road which goes straight from Lilongwe, the Capital, passed the sprawling Monsanto complex, passed the tobacco auction facility, passed the gigantic silos of the national granary—passed churches and more churches and missions and mosques, passed the vendors selling trees burned down into charcoal and ending two hours later at the gates of the Livingstonia Sunbird Resort, in the district of Salima on the shores of Lake Malawi. I joke that at least there is some recognition, that there is one percent chance that it isn't.
And that's exactly what seems to be the scheme of things in Malawi—Where 99% of the people are made to rely on God's plan and prayer while the 1% of people made up of foreigners seem to own everything: land, missions and businesses. How did this happen? There are more churches here then there are schools, or health posts or hospitals or shops or maize and other grain storages or water bore holes in villages. Jomo Kenyatta, the first Prime Minister and President of independent Kenya said: When the Missionaries arrived, the Africans had the land and the Missionaries had the Bible. They taught us how to pray with our eyes closed. When we opened them, they had the land and we had the Bible.”
Awkward is the word Malawians, I've met, use to say very politely: very bad, or awful.
The Powwow
by James McGirk
My wife and I moved to the capital of Cherokee Nation, a small city in Northeast Oklahoma called Tahlequah, a few months ago. Tahlequah, as the would-have-been capital of a proposed all-Indian state, Sequoyah, is arguably the center of indigenous culture in the United States, or at least it has a plausible claim to be. Last Saturday, the local college, Northeastern State University, hosted a powwow as part of their annual symposium on the American Indian. A powwow is a tribal gathering. Having never seen one before we decided to watch. We saw Native American traditional rites mixed with, for lack of better way to describe them, that unique American civic culture of card tables and paper cups. If anyone reading this knows what’s going on in any of the following pictures, I’d be delighted to hear it.
A picture of the Cherokee National Color Guard: they marched behind the American flag, followed by the orange colors of the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma, and the black POW/MIA flag (which commemorates American prisoners-of-war and missing in action). Two of the flag bearers wore swords. The Guard wore red and black, with tribal insignia and American military patches sewn on them. At times the company was lead by an elderly man carrying what a cursory Googling reveals is the tribe’s “eagle head staff.”
Monday Poem
”Civilization” is the soothing notion that, in it, natural
callousness has been successfully quarantined.
…………………………………………. —Roshi Bob
.
Civilization
.
A cat on the pillow of a couch, on the point of a spear, looks out
through windows facing south with the fierce frustration
of an indoor cat who preys through glass
.
The squalor of first spring just after the snow has passed
falls under her gaze which pierces its drabness for anything that moves
beyond the breezy animation of pine limbs and spruce—
the quick jerk or dart of something sentient on the loose
which, unlike a couch cat, lives with the threat of spacious freedom,
in the wind, on the prowl without the leash of civil cover,
who scuttles among the hungry with a life as short as its cunning
who’s liberty is only cramped by the cunning liberty of others
.
Jim Culleny
4/8/13
Monday, April 8, 2013
The Accidental Pilgrim: David Downie on Extreme Questing
Arrow and Cockle Shell. Copyright Alison Harris
By Elatia Harris
Their 50th birthdays in sight, the acclaimed travel writer David Downie, and his wife, the photographer Alison Harris, decided that trekking from Paris, where they live, to Spain, would be just the thing. The Way of St. James, for a millennium one of the world's most celebrated pilgrimage routes, was right at their back door. Neither Alison nor David is religious, so the classical pilgrimage experience was not what they were seeking. What were they seeking? Renewal, changed perspectives. Perhaps to test themselves, over 72 days and 1100 km of — at times — very rough terrain. And thereby hangs a tale. Paris to the Pyrenees: A Skeptic Pilgrim Walks the Way of St. James, will launch this week. Permission to post, here, the superb photos from the book was granted by Alison Harris.
ELATIA HARRIS: There has been a lot in the news lately on pilgrimage, however one understands the phenomenon — a recent New York Times article, for instance. People who do it talk about needing to lose their routine and find themselves. Most set out alone, meeting others en route. You and Alison started together.
DAVID DOWNIE: Our choice to walk together happened organically. I had planned to do this on my own. Alison came along to keep me out of trouble. If you ask her, she’s likely to say it was her idea about 25 years ago, when she suggested we do something similar.
EH: Readers cannot but wonder how they would hold up, in these circumstances. I pictured a leisurely outdoorsy spell, kind of a French countryside movie. Cows, chateaux…oh, perhaps mildly strenuous stints. I was so wrong. This was a test of all your combined resources. It would be for any couple. 72 days of togetherness and real physical hardship. And you had already spent years collaborating on your books.
Cow. Copyright Alison Harris
Shipwrecked With Voltaire
by Leanne Ogasawara
He pondered this question in a rose garden. And as he happily ran through his various candidates– “Plato or Socrates in downtown Athens; or how about Nietzsche or the young Rimbaud?” — his mind lingered lazily over Cleopatra, “Ah, but one day would never be enough…”.
I had, in the meantime, already made up my own mind. For almost in an instant I had decided who I would choose. To meet Proust would have been delicious and the sight of John the Baptist incredible, and yet, in the end, I knew I could not really top the allure of Voltaire. In terms of a day spent, I just have to believe that Voltaire really had what it takes. I mean, he kept Madame du Châtelet happy for decades in her grand chateau, right?
We know at Cirey, the two lovers would spend their days absorbed in the respective studies. Working at opposite ends of the vast chateau, it is said they passed notes constantly during their days spent working apart; liveried butlers would deliver handwritten love-letters on silver platters whenever one of the lovers had something to say to the other. In the evenings, though, Madame and Voltaire would always come together to dine. Oh, can you imagine the sparkling conversations? Those dinners alone make him worthy of a wistful sigh.
I love Voltaire. And, like a favorite landscape, Candide is a book that I seem to return to again and again. Maybe like a lot of people after Japan's deadly earthquake in 2011, I found myself thinking about the book's opening chapters, when the luck-less Candide– along with the syphilitic Pangloss and the sailor from the boat– were shipwrecked; washing up on Lisbon's shores just moments before the city was struck by the infamous mega-quake of 1755.
As if the earthquake wasn't enough, the mega-quake was followed by fires and then a great tsunami that caused the complete destruction of one of the world's greatest cities of the time. Indeed, the human suffering was so terrible that the disaster sparked philosophical and religious debates on the nature of Evil that continued across Europe for a long time afterward; Voltaire's Candide being perhaps among the most famous.
In one of the vivid scenes of the novel, as Candide is lying there trapped under the rubble, he begs for wine and light. The sailor has gone off to pillage– but what of Candide's companion Pangloss? Well, our man Pangloss is too busy philosophisizing to be of any real help. Though thousands have perished, he tells his friend lying under the rubble, still everything is just as it should have been, for: “How could Leibnitz have been wrong?”
How indeed?
Bowie Fever: From Drag Queen To Intellectual Respect: The Pop Star as Persona: The Mask as Public Figure: A Personal Take On The Supreme Uniqueness Of David Bowie
by Evert Cilliers aka Adam Ash
London is in the grip of Bowie fever these days. His first album in 10 years is top of the charts, and a V & A museum exhibition, “David Bowie Is,” devoted to all things Bowie and drawn from his personal archive, is the greatest thing that this august establishment museum has ever put on: double the ticket sales of any previous exhibit in its 160-year-long history.
Selfridges has pop-up stores where you can buy Bowie T-shirts and stuff, and there's a makeup kit for you to Bowie-make-over your quotidian visage. His album is tipped to win the Mercury prize. Not a day goes past that there is not a Bowie pic or article in the popular press. There's even been an April Fool's joke about Bowie opening a pet shop called Spiders from Mars, which would sell some of his favorite spiders as pets.
How has this happened? Well, credit the marketing of no marketing. No publicity buildup. Bowie dropped his album The Next Day out of the blue. After a decade of silence. Surprise, surprise. The subsequent impact may also bespeak the paucity of any great popstar breakout in the last twenty years, since the era of rock titans of the sixties, seventies and eighties. We don't seem to have such titans today. Beyonce, maybe. Social media — so democratic, so pervasive, so accessible — have led to isolated monad pockets of excitement; nothing ranging wide across the entire culture. Frank Ocean is hardly a hugely impactful phenom, even if he's a black guy who admits to being partial to other guys. Lady Gaga is the closest thing we have to a recent high-and-wide-impact popstar, but if she weren't such a good songwriter, her meat dress and other performance-art Haus-of-Gaga stunts would've relegated her to New York's underground scene — just another Klaus Nomi figure, of which Manhattan has had plenty.
Well, what can one say about Bowie Resurgent?
Number one, there hasn't really ever been a popstar worthy of a museum exhibit, except for Bowie. After all these years, the man is eminently intellectually respectable. And why is he so museum-appropriate? Because of his chameleon personas, and the way his personas venture forth from strictly music to engage fashion and other trends. The popstar as persona. The mask as public figure. Before him, public figures worked at creating an enduring single persona. Even actors did it — John Wayne as avuncular cowboy; Clara Bow as vamp; Cary Grant as the ideal gentleman date; Humphrey Bogart's cynical tough guy covering up a morally upright soft heart (when he started off as an upperclass white-tie fop on Broadway). But Bowie said, nope, I'll create a new self every now and then. In his public personas, Bowie exemplifies the psychological theory which says we consist of various self-states, who need to make peace with one another. Except his self-states are so various, there's no way they could be integrated.
Read more »
An ode to gay marriage
by Sarah Firisen
So who has the right be wed?
Who deserves a marital bed?
Should just Jack and Jill
Marry at will?
We’ll wait for the ruling with dread
But what really here is at stake?
Will the value of wedded bliss break?
Is it really the case
That gay weddings debase
The vows that the rest of us take?
Are we hetros doing so well?
Is straight marriage doing just swell?
Why does their right to join
Kick my vows in the groin?
Why’s this the right's end of days hell?
Can’t we just all relax and agree
That gays and lesbians have as much right to be
Miserably wed
Stuck together till dead
Bickering, depressed and sex free
Maybe unlike us they’ll find a way
Actually together to stay
Maybe theirs is the course
That won’t lead to divorce
Despite what the right-wingers say
A Massacre By Any Other Name: From Ft. Hood to Wounded Knee
by Akim Reinhardt
There is ample evidence that Major Hasan was working on behalf of Al Qaeda when he launched the attack. He had been in communication with Al Qaeda leader Anwar al-Awlaki, and was very likely acting on Anwar al-Awlaki's orders. That would be the same Anwar Al-Awlaki who was killed in Yemen two years later when a CIA-led joint operation struck his vehicle with a Hellfire missile fired from a predator drone.
There is now little doubt that Hasan's bloody rampage was a planned military strike by an Al Qaeda operative against the U.S. military. But that's not how the U.S. military wants to frame it.
Instead of classifying Hasan's attack as combat or an act of terrorism, the Department of Defense is officially deeming it an episode of “workplace violence.” Essentially, they're saying Hasan was just another disgruntled worker who “went postal.”
This stance defies evidence, including that which the military itself will be presenting at Hasan's upcoming court martial. For example, the prosecution is using an expert witness named Evan Kohlmann who says Hasan meets numerous criteria that define him as a homegrown terrorist.
Beyond defying logic and truth, labeling Hasan's attack as workplace violence has very real consequences for the survivors and the loved ones of those who died. On a ceremonial level, the military is refusing to hand out Purple Hearts, the medal awarded for injuries sustained in combat. On a more practical level, as the lawsuit waged by the survivors asserts, the designation of “workplace violence” also means that survivors and the loved ones of those killed are receiving lower priority for treatment and are being denied benefits that would have come their way if this was officially recognized as combat.
As one might imagine, this has led to no shortage of outrage. There has even been a Congressional effort to pass federal legislation that would grant combatant status to all casualties. The Fort Hood Families Benefits Protection Act was first introduced two years ago by Congressman John Carter (R-Texas) and Senator John Cornyn (R-Texas), but it died in committee.
Carter reintroduced the bill again earlier this year, but withdrew it under pressure from the military. They claim that publicity stemming from the legislation, the awarding of medals, and the classification of Hasan's action as combat or terrorism, will make it difficult to successfully prosecute him in his upcoming court martial. Upon withdrawing the bill, Carter recently stated:
“After additional investigation into the potential implications of pre-trial publicity, I am postponing any future publicity on these bills at this stage of Maj. Hasan's trial. However, the victims of this tragic shooting fully quality for compensation pay and purple heart recognition.”
Monday, April 1, 2013
Facebook and the solitary practice of friendship
What kind of happiness does technology procure then? And why do people remain both enthralled and unsatisfied by it? (Albert Borgmann, Technology and the Character of Contemporary Life)
To be a friend to many people in the complete kind of friendship is not possible (Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, Book VIII)
There is a nice moment in Desmond Morris’ documentary The Human Zoo where, as he ponders the means by which the human animal deals with dense urban living, he hoists his address book and declares: “This is his [the urban dweller’s] personal tribe!” No doubt if he were writing the documentary today he would make the same point by recourse to his Facebook page.
Facebook provides us a convenient mnemonic device for keeping track of family and acquaintances. More than this, of course, it offers the means to friendship itself. We can carry out a range of cordial tasks on Facebook: we can post, comment, like, poke (does this even exist anymore?), chat, re-share, or indeed, if we incline to do so, quietly monitor the lives of our friends.
One of the implications of Facebook use, according to anthropologist Robin Dunbar, is that is slows the decay-rate of friendship. Facebook allows us to collate intimates from the fragmented geographies of our contemporary lives and to sustain contact with friends from our past with whom we might otherwise only have sporadic contact. In doing so, Facebook may be, in fact, just one of a progression of technologies that allow us to keep track of our personal human networks (our “tribe”) when these extend beyond the so-called “Dunbar’s number”, that is, those 150 people predicted to be within the “natural” limit of our information-retention ability. Dunbar’s observations were based upon a supposed general relationship between the size of a primate brain’s neocortex and the size of the average social group. Dunbar’s Number seemingly finds support in analysis of social aggregations of hunter-gatherer tribes, military units, and even Christmas card networks. Lending further support is Facebook’s own assessment that the average number of friends per account is between 120 and 130.
Philosophical Moods
by Jalees Rehman
Nietzschean, Heideggerian, fascist, anarchist, libertarian, brilliant genius, blabbering nutjob – these and many other labels have probably been used to describe Peter Sloterdijk, who is one of Germany's most widely known contemporary philosophers. He has achieved a rock-star status in the echelons of contemporary German thinkers, perhaps because none is more apt than Sloterdijk at fulfilling the true purpose of a public intellectual: inculcating his audience with an insatiable desire to think. His fans adore him; his critics are maddened by him. Few, if any, experience indifference when they encounter the provocateur Sloterdijk.
Sloterdijk achieved fame in Germany after publishing his masterpiece “Kritik der zynischen Vernunft” (English translation: “Critique of Cynical Reason“) in 1983, but his hosting of the regular late-night talk show “Das Philosophische Quartett” on the major German TV network ZDF for ten years turned him into a cultural icon and a household name. I realize that it might seem strange to non-Germans that philosophers instead of comedians can host TV talk shows, however Sloterdijk would probably be the first to agree that there isn't much of a difference between a true comedian and a true philosopher. Not only do we Germans have TV philosophers, we even enjoy the TV gossip and cockfights that they indulge in. When the ZDF network decided to get rid of Sloterdijk and replace him with the younger, more handsome and less thoughtful philosopher Richard David Precht, they start engaging in reciprocal mockery and name-calling.
Unfortunately, Sloterdijk is not quite so well-known in the English-speaking world and this may in part be due to the fact that much of his oeuvre has only recently been translated into the English language. It is no easy feat to translate his writings, in part because his playful mastery of German words is one of his signatures. Sloterdijk is a wonderful story-teller who weaves in beautiful images and puns into his narration, many of which are unique to the German language. His story-telling also makes it difficult to understand some of his texts in the original German. One may be enthralled by his stories, but after reading a whole chapter or book, it is quite difficult to condense it into a handy “message” or “point”. Sloterdijk is a professional digressor, going off on tangents that are entertaining and exciting, but at times quite frustrating. He shares his brilliant insights on a broad range of topics ranging from metaphysics to politics with his readers, but he also offers practical advice on how we can change our lives as well as bizarre and pompous statements.