Toward the end of the Miner’s Strike in 1985 I was accompanying some student march to County Hall, shaking a collecting tin, when I was confronted by a balding middle aged man in, I kid you not, a bowler hat and pin stripe suit:
(Angrily) “What are you complaining about now? I’m not going to give money to bloody students, the state already pays for you”
(Cheerfully) “Oh no, I’m not complaining about anything.” (I didn’t go into what I suspected was our agreement on the immorality of the state subsidizing the passage of the most privileged children in society into its elite, but I conveyed that complex message with a grin). “I’m collecting for the striking miners”.
(Surprised) “Oh”. He looked me straight in the eye, with genuine sympathy. “They can’t win you know. But..” he produced a 20 quid note and placed it in my tin “at least they might give this bloody shower in charge a run for their money”. (One of the lessons of collecting for the miners was never to judge a person by the way they dressed.)
Memory triggered by:
from Randy Newman’s wonderful Harps & Angels. You have just a few days left to hear it in its proper context. I hope.
Unless there’s some heroic parenting, on the other hand, my daughters have their entire lives to hear this in its proper context (particularly recommended for Laura).
… scientists have begun to examine how the city affects the brain, and the results are chastening. Just being in an urban environment, they have found, impairs our basic mental processes. After spending a few minutes on a crowded city street, the brain is less able to hold things in memory, and suffers from reduced self-control. While it’s long been recognized that city life is exhausting — that’s why Picasso left Paris — this new research suggests that cities actually dull our thinking, sometimes dramatically so. “The mind is a limited machine,” says Marc Berman, a psychologist at the University of Michigan and lead author of a new study that measured the cognitive deficits caused by a short urban walk. “And we’re beginning to understand the different ways that a city can exceed those limitations.” … This research arrives just as humans cross an important milestone: For the first time in history, the majority of people reside in cities. For a species that evolved to live in small, primate tribes on the African savannah, such a migration marks a dramatic shift. … This research is also leading some scientists to dabble in urban design, as they look for ways to make the metropolis less damaging to the brain. … The reason such seemingly trivial mental tasks leave us depleted is that they exploit one of the crucial weak spots of the brain. A city is so overstuffed with stimuli that we need to constantly redirect our attention so that we aren’t distracted by irrelevant things, like a flashing neon sign or the cellphone conversation of a nearby passenger on the bus. This sort of controlled perception — we are telling the mind what to pay attention to — takes energy and effort. …
The same factors which have thus coalesced into the exactness and minute precision of the form of life have coalesced into a structure of the highest impersonality; on the other hand, they have promoted a highly personal subjectivity. There is perhaps no psychic phenomenon which has been so unconditionally reserved to the metropolis as has the blasé attitude. The blasé attitude results first from the rapidly changing and closely compressed contrasting stimulations of the nerves. From this, the enhancement of metropolitan intellectuality, also, seems originally to stem. Therefore, stupid people who are not intellectually alive in the first place usually are not exactly blasé. A life in boundless pursuit of pleasure makes one blasé because it agitates the nerves to their strongest reactivity for such a long time that they finally cease to react at all. In the same way, through the rapidity and contradictoriness of their changes, more harmless impressions force such violent responses, tearing the nerves so brutally hither and thither that their last reserves of strength are spent; and if one remains in the same milieu they have no time to gather new strength. An incapacity thus emerges to react to new sensations with the appropriate energy. This constitutes that blasé attitude which, in fact, every metropolitan child shows when compared with children of quieter and less changeable milieus. … In the blasé attitude the concentration of men and things stimulate the nervous system of the individual to its highest achievement so that it attains its peak. Through the mere quantitative intensification of the same conditioning factors this achievement is transformed into its opposite and appears in the peculiar adjustment of the blasé attitude. In this phenomenon the nerves find in the refusal to react to their stimulation the last possibility of accommodating to the contents and forms of metropolitan life. The self-preservation of certain personalities is brought at the price of devaluating the whole objective world, a devaluation which in the end unavoidably drags one’s own personality down into a feeling of the same worthlessness.
One of the inevitable consequences of any Middle Eastern conflict is the collateral damage caused by the unprovoked and disproportionate attacks which tend to be launched by Michael Walzer on his own credibility (this joke first made on CT here). His latest is a waffly piece of blah in the Even The Liberal New Republic, on the general subject of “proportionality” and collateral damage to civilians.
SPOILER ALERT: don’t click on the “read more” link if you don’t want to find out whether or not he decides that the State of Israel is broadly justified in its latest actions. [click to continue…]
One of the safer predictions I’ve made in recent years is “this”:http://www.prospect.org/cs/articles?article=can_partisanship_save_citizenship (in _The American Prospect_):
[O]nline activists are unlikely to follow Obama if he moves toward a post-ideological politics of citizenship and may even use Obama’s own machine to organize against him (as they did within MyBarackObama.com when Obama announced his support for controversial wiretapping legislation). By rebuilding the Democratic Party around a model that is friendlier to decentralized online participation, Obama is … making it easier for Democratic activists to organize in protest against overly “moderate” decisions
I’m not going to pretend that I understand the details behind the crisis in English cricket. But it has prompted a South African friend of mine to email asking me what I knew/thought about Pietersen, and that in turn has prompted a bit of a mea culpa. I have found it impossible to enjoy Pietersen as a player since he qualified for England because, at some point around the time he qualified I heard him say something incredibly stupid and unpleasant about the racial quota system in South African cricket — something to the effect that he, himself, couldn’t thrive in a system which gave systematic preference to non-whites. Wikipedia bears out that he did indeed make such comments, and suggests that he believed he was dropped from the Natal team for quota reasons.
Why a mea culpa? Because I’m sure that numerous sport stars, some of whom I am sure I enjoy and perhaps even revere, have obnoxious political opinions, and wrongheaded views of the source of their own superior capabilities. Big money sport, and the attention lavished on the very successful, encourage vanity, and make it hard to see the role of luck in differentiating between one’s own, and others’ level of success. KP was just in a position in which it is natural for him to air these views because, unlike most sportsmen, he had to explain why he was changing his nationality.
There are brilliant exceptions both to the politics (Mike Brearley, David Sheppard, bizarrely enough Brian Clough) and to the vanity (the extraordinary Flintoff, as it often appeared most of the Australians under Waugh), and I’m not suggesting that all or even most stars are anything like the one of the great white hopes of English tennis (I had a schoolfriend who hated tennis, but used to watch Wimbledon just for the joy of watching a fascist lose), but KP is, I imagine, rather unexceptional. So my initial hint of pleasure in his downfall gave way to a sense of guilt that I had singled him out for dislike.
I was in touch with Astra Taylor about her documentary Žižek!quite a long time ago, or so it seems. She has a new film called Examined Life consisting of what might be called philosopher-in-the-street interviews. The talking heads include (to reshuffle the list alphabetically) Kwarne Anthony Appiah, Judith Butler, Michael Hardt, Martha Nussbaum, Avital Ronell, Peter Singer, Sunaura Taylor, Cornel West, and Slavoj Žižek.
Here’s the trailer:
I haven’t seen the film yet — it’s only showing in NYC now, it seems — but would welcome a screener DVD. It’s not like I’m going to bootleg it out of the trunk of my car or anything. I don’t even have a car, if that makes the folks at Zeitgeist Films feel any better.
A Long Island doctor is demanding that his estranged wife give him back the kidney he donated to her seven years ago. Dr. Richard Batista’s lawyer Dominic Barbara says his client would also be satisfied with the value of the kidney: $1.5 million. Newsday reports that Batista married wife Dawnell in 1990 and that he donated the kidney in 2001. According to Batista, their marriage was on the rocks then, but “My first priority was to save her life. The second bonus was to turn the marriage around.” Dawnell Batista filed for divorce in 2005. Dr. Batista told WCBS 880, “She had an affair, then would not reconcile, then handed me divorce papers as I was going into surgery trying to save another person’s life.
All in all the very archetype of a wacky organ donation story, right down to the mandatory quote from Arthur Caplan.
Truly wonderful. Via “PNH”:http://www.nielsenhayden.com/makinglight/, “mock-authoritative citation rules”:http://www.pmla.org/altsource.html for public restroom graffiti, alien communications and much else besides. Suggestions for more such rules welcome in comments.
It’s unusually cold in some parts of Europe and temperatures are expected to be especially harsh this coming weekend. This makes the following even more unfortunate than it would be otherwise: due to conflicts with Ukraine, Russia has cut off gas supplies to several countries some of which rely on Russia for the majority of their needs and have enough supplies for no more than a few days. There isn’t a ton of good coverage* about this out there (yet?), you can read up on some of it here and here (although some information in English already seems outdated when I compare it to reports in Hungarian papers, which presumably have more accurate updates for at least Hungary). Hungary has already shut down numerous industrial plants and has taken other measures to lower usage.
Let’s say you are a country and calculate that you have enough supplies for about three weeks. Your neighbor only has enough for two days and asks for your help. What do you do? (Judging from some of the reports, this isn’t necessarily a hypothetical.)
[*] Feel free to post links to additional coverage that you find helpful. New stories came up as I was writing this post, I suspect/hope that more will be available. (Don’t assume I didn’t search in the right places, there was very little on this when I first started looking for it earlier today. The only reason I even knew to look was a mention by my cousin in an email and a phone conversation later with my Mom. They are both in Budapest so they are following the details and seem to have more to go on.)
Funny to see the virtues of R extolled in The New York Times. Although I did wonder whether Professor Ripley spilled his tea when he read this effort at introducing Times readers to it:
Some people familiar with R describe it as a supercharged version of Microsoft’s Excel spreadsheet software that can help illuminate data trends more clearly than is possible by entering information into rows and columns.
On second thoughts, though, I imagine no tea was spilled. It would take rather more than that. There is the required bit of stuffy huffiness from a spokesperson for the SAS Institute, too:
SAS says it has noticed R’s rising popularity at universities, despite educational discounts on its own software, but it dismisses the technology as being of interest to a limited set of people working on very hard tasks. “I think it addresses a niche market for high-end data analysts that want free, readily available code,” said Anne H. Milley, director of technology product marketing at SAS. She adds, “We have customers who build engines for aircraft. I am happy they are not using freeware when I get on a jet.”
R also gets some stick (though not in the article) from the computer science side of things for being fairly slow in comparison to some potential competitors. But it’s an exemplary open-source project and is now the lingua franca of academic statistics, for good reason. In day-to-day use for its designed purpose it’s hard to beat. The commitment of many of the core project contributors is really remarkable. In the social sciences R’s main competitor is Stata, which also has many virtues (including a strong user community) but costs money to own. I like R because it helps keep your data analysis honest, it has very strong graphical capabilities, it’s a gateway to understanding new work in statistics, and it’s free. Just take my advice and be sure to read the Posting Guide before you start asking any questions on r-help.
A short but intensely felt recommendation for Felix Gilman’s first book, _Thunderer_ (“Powells”:http://www.powells.com/s?kw=Felix%20Gilman%20thunderer&PID=29956, “Amazon”:http://www.amazon.com/gp/search?ie=UTF8&keywords=felix%20gilman%20thunderer&tag=henryfarrell-20&index=books&linkCode=ur2&camp=1789&creative=9325) combined with a query – why haven’t I heard about this book before? It’s _exactly_ the kind of sf/f novel that I like – a brooding, post-Mievillian fantasy set in a decaying city of uncertain extent and boundaries, with a keen ear for politics, character and language. But that’s not how it’s been marketed – cover, blurb etc suggest a generic quest fantasy of the more or less inept and badly plotted variety. I think this misses its core market (hell, I think I _am_ its core market) – people who are looking for a standardized post-Tolkien ripoff are liable to be quite upset while people looking for a more challenging read, who would have bought it, if they knew what it was about, won’t. I can sometimes understand these kinds of marketing decisions. For example, I’ve quite enjoyed Sarah Monette’s Mirador books, which are very nicely written indeed, but are marketed to the romance fantasy/mildly titillating slash market, this, presumably, being rather more lucrative than the literary fantasy market that folks like myself inhabit. But this seems downright odd to me – I don’t see what the publishers are getting by chucking it out into the generic fantasy market without some pointers that it should also be of interest to people who have different literary tastes (Monette’s books, in contrast, _have_ been cross-marketed as best as I can tell). Gilman’s book should be getting highly approving reviews in _Locus_, nominations for major awards etc, which could allow it to straddle the split between the more and less literary ends of genre but, to the best of my knowledge, it hasn’t been, and I suspect Bantam/Spectra’s marketing folks are at fault. Or is there something relevant about the publishing trade that I’m just not getting here?
I’ve been planning for a while on a post motivated by the discussion of trolley problems a while back, but recent discussions have raised some more serious examples (the Iraq war, Gaza and so on).
Looking at the discussion, it seems as if nearly everyone is concerned about the (foreseeable) consequences of their actions, but there are a lot of claims that some consequences should be treated differently from others (intended vs unintended, direct vs intermediated by the predictable reactions of others, and so on).
To an economist, what this naturally suggests is the possibility of moral arbitrage.
I don’t like seeing you’re when your should be used and vice versa, but the following took it all to a whole new level: in a recent email I received, instead of your, the person wrote u’re. Yikes.
Over the past few years, a certain argument form has become fairly common: yes, I was wrong (about Iraq, financial stuff), but critics on the other side, even if they were right about the overall dynamics of how things went wrong, were substantially mistaken about the details. So – in the invincible words of Monty Python’s Black Knight – ‘let’s call it a draw’.
I predict that, for some strange reason, the folks who entered this characteristic defensive crouch will uncurl, re-affix rhetorical arms and legs, and become altogether more aggressive after Obama takes office. It will be argued that the stimulus package/health care reform/etc. will inevitably be afflicted with bad unintended consequences. But, for some strange reason, those who make this argument will not feel obliged to predict, in detail, exactly what things will go wrong. They will feel it is sufficient to sketch, in a broad way, why the dynamics of certain policy directions seem fraught with potential hazards.
I somewhat regret that I haven’t been bothering to document the argumentative trend of which I speak, so I suggest that we make a collective effort in comments: who has made the ‘yes I was wrong, but the critics didn’t get the details exactly right so it’s a tie’ argument? For future reference.
Those more inclined to monger twiddly philosophy angels-on-a-pinhead-type problems can, alternatively, tackle the following: the defensive crouch of which I speak seems to presuppose a broadly Russellian theory of the objects of thought. That is, you shift blame for unintended consequences by subscribing to a highly stringent theory of intentionality – of the objects of thought. The theory would seem to be this: you can’t really be thinking about X – e.g. any Bush-era debacle – unless you have in mind a definite description of X. So those who quite clearly heard the drumhoofs of financial apocalypse but mistakenly thought the first rider’s name was ‘The collapse of the dollar’ didn’t really hear that guy who was actually riding up. Alternatively, on a more Kripkean view of the determination of the objects of our thoughts, it seems that critics could have been warning about the very financial crisis that we actually suffered, even if they couldn’t, in advance, give an accurate definite description. So we have an ontological issue about the identity of apocalypses across possible worlds. Discuss. Preferably with Twin-Earth cases. And Larry Kudlow. If possible, you should fly the actual Larry to Twin-Earth and leave him there.
