Just broke the Water Pitcher

The _Financial Times_ isn’t the leftiest of newspapers, but it is hard to argue with their “verdict”:http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/4cd4fc48-5460-11de-a58d-00144feabdc0.html on the European Parliament elections:

The centre-right held its ground or advanced, both where it is in power and where it is in opposition. The mainstream left was decimated. This election shows that the social democratic parties have lost the will to govern. At a time when “the end of capitalism” is raised as a serious prospect, the parties whose historical mission was to replace capitalism with socialism offer no governing philosophy. Their anti-crisis policies are barely distinguishable from those of their rivals. The leadership crisis in several European socialist parties suggests their outdated ideas are matched by oversized egos.

Greens triumphed where the traditional left failed. Daniel Cohn-Bendit, who knows a thing or two about critiques of capitalism, appealed to voters willing to consider fundamental social change. As one of few groups to fight on pan-European issues, the Greens also proved that not all voters are deaf to Europe-wide politics. But the crisis has most benefited the strand of the European right that was never against regulating the market economy. By arguing that the crisis is a result of excessive “Anglo-Saxon” policies, centre-right parties have presented themselves as the most trustworthy stewards of a safer, European-style capitalism. Voters agreed.

My own take on the failures of European social democracy a few months ago “was more or less identical”:https://crookedtimber.org/2009/02/18/social-democrats-and-capitalism/. I’d love to be convinced that I was wrong though. Or, in the absence of a compelling counter-claim, at least get a better sense of why European social democratic parties have become empty shells. One first-approximation guess is that this had to do with the largely successful efforts by social democrat ‘reformers’ to replace the old anti-capitalist ideas and language with more market-friendly stuff, which succeeded just in time to leave these parties completely unprepared to deal with the demise of actually existing capitalism. A second is that current day social democrats are much less able than their 1930s-1950s predecessors to meld nationalism and market constraints. Other possible explanations?

Welcome to our guest, Michèle Lamont, whose book I have been intending to read because it sounds damned interesting. The topic of her first guest post (philosophy vs. theory) has been an abiding research and reading interest of mine. A quick point about pecking orders, in response to her post, then I’ll just plug my own stuff, what hey! (But first: Squid and Owl was good today, and highly relevant to the theme of this very post. Right, that’s out of the way.)

Lamont says there’s a question as to “whether philosophers [inhabitants of that cave known as the department of philosophy, that is] have intellectual/emotional dispositions that preclude free interdisciplinary exchange of ideas. Or whether they are too concerned with their own status or with making claims for philosophy as the queen of the disciplines (encompassing others) to be open to interchange (to be contrasted with top-down proselytizing).” Yes, that one does get asked, and her asking it has provoked the usual range of responses in comments. (Not that there’s anything wrong with that!) But let me articulate what seems to me a fairly important sociological component to this ongoing interdisciplinary failure to communicate that actually tends to be overlooked – and is almost always funny. (So that’s two reasons not to overlook it.) Philosophers (by which I shall mean: typical inhabitants of the philosophy department) seem hyper-aggressive and bent on world domination because there is a style of debate in the philosophy department that is typically received as friendly and (personally) non-threatening by philosophers but typically received by non-philosophers in the humanities as the very opposite: namely, as unfriendly, an attempt to destroy, to humiliate, to silence, to cause the opponent to lose face in an intolerably grind-your-claims-into-sand fashion. (By the way, please note that I said ‘typical’. Yes, I know there will be counter-examples.) Who’s right? The question is ill-formed. It’s a cultural miscommunication. Maybe it’s easier to illustrate with a likely hypothetical. [click to continue…]

In other cool things about L.A., I have to admit the non-mortal earthquakes are pretty great. I’ve sat through two of the 5+ richter ones and was about 4 miles from last night’s epicenter. The most striking thing is that in the first few seconds of an earthquake, a completely random explanation for it pops into my mind. The first time around I got quite irate that our upstairs office neighbours were thumping around making such racket that the building swayed. Last night, although I live 2 miles from the freeway, I instantly thought ‘wow, that’s one big truck passing by. Or maybe it’s a tank?’.

It turns out that’s not an unusual reaction. Human brains are very good at rationalising the immediate aftermath of a disaster into business as usual. But, contrary to popular belief, not panicking isn’t all that successful a survival strategy. A book I read last year ‘The Unthinkable; Who Survives When Disaster Strikes’, says much of the planning around plane crashes, fires, etc. assumes that the first thing people will do is panic and run around doing stupid things that impede their escape. In fact, the most common and dangerous reaction is to just go limp, stay passive and assume that the nightclub fire is really not all that bad or that you should sit in your crashed plane seat until help arrives. Or that the hostage situation is all a terrible misunderstanding. That’s a very good way to die.
[click to continue…]

In January 1995 I published a little essay that almost nobody liked.  Eh, that happens sometimes.  It was a review essay on the then-recently-published work of a couple of African-American public intellectuals, and I wrote it quite simply because the <i>New Yorker</i> asked me to.  I was a newly-tenured associate professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and I was surprised by the request; to this day it’s the only time I’ve written for the <i>New Yorker</i>.  And then, within about three months of the thing’s appearance, a whole mess of people decided to weigh in on the work of a couple of African-American public intellectuals.  Many of those people came to the conclusion that I had done a pretty piss-poor job of writing about the recently-published work of a couple of African-American public intellectuals; the general verdict was that I had basically written a press release, a puff piece on a bunch of lightweights and/or sellouts.  But some of those people weren’t responding to me at all; they had much more important figures to go after, like Cornel West.  And it wasn’t just my little essay they were responding to; my essay was bad enough, sure, but it was compounded by the appearance, in the March 1995 <i>Atlantic</i>, of a much longer essay by Robert Boynton.  That essay was about the work of a couple of <i>other</i> African-American intellectuals, and, like my essay, it drew a loose analogy between contemporary African-American intellectuals and the New York intellectuals of yesteryear, so clearly there was some kind of conspiracy afoot.

[click to continue…]

Via “BoingBoing”:http://www.boingboing.net, Ben Goldacre tells us that the Elsevier journal scam “went even further then originally reported”:http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/may/09/bad-science-medical-journals-companies.

In a statement to The Scientist magazine, Elsevier at first said the company “does not today consider a compilation of reprinted articles a ‘journal'”. I would like to expand on this ­statement: It was a collection of academic journal articles, published by the academic journal publisher Elsevier, in an academic ­journal-shaped package. Perhaps if it wasn’t an academic journal they could have made this clearer in the title which, I should have mentioned, was named: The Australasian Journal of Bone and Joint Medicine.

Things have deteriorated since. It turns out that Elsevier put out six such journals, sponsored by industry. The Elsevier chief executive, Michael Hansen, has now admitted that they were made to look like journals, and lacked proper disclosure. “This was an unacceptable practice and we regret that it took place,” he said.

You’ve got to love that ‘mistakes were made’ passive-voice shtick. But the interesting question for me as an academic, is how we should treat Elsevier journals going forth? I really think that the base presumption has to be that if Elsevier was pulling manifestly dishonest stunts like this, it has also been up to lots of borderline unethical activities too. When you see the creation of a _complete line_ of astroturf journals, presumably with the sign-off of senior executives in the company, you aren’t just talking about a couple of bad apples. So what do we do?

Most obviously, we shouldn’t publish in Elsevier journals. This is easy for me to say – I am in a field where Elsevier isn’t especially strong – but I hope that I would say it if I were in a field where Elsevier journals dominated. In general, I would prefer my own work not to be used to add cover and credibility to manifestly bogus and unethical publication strategies. Furthermore, I don’t think we should review for Elsevier journals either. There are obviously a lot of honest scholars who edit journals for Elsevier (one would hope that they are in a majority), but they should really be devoting their efforts elsewhere – and polite but firm negative responses to review requests might help generate the necessary norm shift that would encourage them to move. Finally, I am quite attracted to the idea of registering disapproval when one cites to work that has been published in Elsevier journals. Some boilerplate language along the lines of

bq. Timewaster(2009) finds _x_ to be the case. Although these results were reported in a journal published by Elsevier, the company responsible for deliberately publishing pseudo-journals such as _The Australasian Journal of Bone and Joint Medicine_, there is no reason whatsoever to believe that these particular findings are problematic.

might usefully serve to communicate to academics that publishing with Elsevier is a net reputational negative.

Also, and by the way, there is plenty more in Goldacre’s piece about Merck’s response to critics – hitlists of doctors to be ‘neutralized’ or ‘discredited,’ hints of drying up of funds to academic institutions that asked unfortunate questions etc. Discovery can be an awful lot of fun.

Oh, I suppose Stanley Fish’s latest, “God Talk”, can do with its own CT comment thread.

There’s this bit, for example: [click to continue…]

Kevin Drum gives The Black Swan a fairly thumbs-downish review. I had a slightly more favorable reaction myself when I read it recently. I’ll add a comment and a question. Drum is right about the crankishness of the book’s tone. It’s impressive, isn’t it? How well ivory towers work as insanity field-generators? Everyone knows they make their inhabitants go crazy. But it’s also true that they drive everyone outside insane, who comes anywhere near.Those the gods would destroy, they first make really, really annoyed. To live just outside an ivory tower without going all cranky. That’s the trick.

Now, a question. Taleb claims in passing at various points that the modern world is Extremistan, and getting more so all the time. By constrast, our primitive ancestors lived in Mediocristan. As Drum summarizes: “[Taleb] writes about how humans are hardwired to be bad at estimating risks in the modern world.” Extremistan breeds more ‘black swans’: events that are, if I remember rightly, highly unpredictable; highly consequential; retroactively explicable. But it strikes me that animals – our ancestors in particular – probably never lived in Mediocristan. The Pleistocene wasn’t Mediocristan. Our ancestors were just as bad at estimating risks in their environments as we are in ours. Their black swans, the stuff that gave them fairly short lives, were just different. Mediocristan isn’t a time or a place, or a primitive development stage, it’s a projection of a confused form of cognition. It’s a place everyone acts as if they live in, but no one has lived there. Mediocristan is only a state of mind. This is the important thing, for Taleb, so I expect he would respond by saying – yeah, whatever. I didn’t write a history of the Pleistocene. But he does repeatedly imply that it’s a state of mind because, once upon a time, we really lived there. He talks as though it’s an adaptive trait that has become mal-adaptive. But that’s wrong, right?

Elsevier already has an awesomely wonderful reputation as an academic publisher, but even by their standards, “this”:http://www.the-scientist.com/templates/trackable/display/blog.jsp?type=blog&o_url=blog/display/55671&id=55671 (free reg. required) is pretty extraordinary.

Merck paid an undisclosed sum to Elsevier to produce several volumes of a publication that had the look of a peer-reviewed medical journal, but contained only reprinted or summarized articles–most of which presented data favorable to Merck products–that appeared to act solely as marketing tools with no disclosure of company sponsorship.

…The _Australasian Journal of Bone and Joint Medicine,_ which was published by Exerpta [HF-sic] Medica, a division of scientific publishing juggernaut Elsevier, is not indexed in the MEDLINE database, and has no website (not even a defunct one).

… In testimony provided at the trial last week, which was obtained by The Scientist, George Jelinek, an Australian physician and long-time member of the World Association of Medical Editors, reviewed four issues of the journal that were published from 2003-2004. An “average reader” (presumably a doctor) could easily mistake the publication for a “genuine” peer reviewed medical journal, he said in his testimony. “Only close inspection of the journals, along with knowledge of medical journals and publishing conventions, enabled me to determine that the Journal was not, in fact, a peer reviewed medical journal, but instead a marketing publication for MSD[A].”

He also stated that four of the 21 articles featured in the first issue he reviewed referred to Fosamax. In the second issue, nine of the 29 articles related to Vioxx, and another 12 to Fosamax. All of these articles presented positive conclusions regarding the MSDA drugs. “I can understand why a pharmaceutical company would collect a number of research papers with results favourable to their products and make these available to doctors,” Jelinek said at the trial. “This is straightforward marketing.”

… Lurie, in examining two of the issues for _The Scientist,_ agreed that one particularly strange element of the _Australasian Journal of Bone and Joint Medicine_ is that it contains “review” articles that cite just one or two references. “I’ve never seen anything quite like this,” he said. “Reviews are usually swimming in references.”

Elsevier acknowledged that Merck had sponsored the publication, but did not disclose the amount the drug company paid. In a statement emailed to The Scientist, Elsevier said that the company “does not today consider a compilation of reprinted articles a ‘Journal’.”

“Elsevier acknowledges the concern that the journals in question didn’t have the appropriate disclosures,” the statement continued. “It is worth noting that project in question was produced 6 years ago and disclosure protocols have evolved since 2003. Elsevier’s current disclosure policies meet the rigor and requirements of the current publishing environment.”

“Via Summer Johnson”:http://blog.bioethics.net/2009/05/merck-makes-phony-peerreview-journal/.

I’m on this private list (a thing consisting of a set of private tubes or private trucks) on which the question arose: occult detectives? History of? I suppose it starts with Poe (where else?) Some interesting names were suggested. This site was linked.

But, tragically – sinisterly, even – no mention was made of possibly the greatest occult detective of all. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you …

He appeared in a 1940 issue of Jungle Stories, available in this volume [ amazon].

Not to give away the ending, but …

Fero, Planet Detective:

Turn-offs:
Long walks on the beach
Women

Turn-ons:
Detecting planets
Stamping out vampires of Pluto that have invaded the earth.

In <a href=”http://www.michaelberube.com/index.php/weblog/comments/1269/”>comments to a post</a> over at my newly-renamed Other Place, a person by the handle of FrogProf directed me to <a href=”http://suburbdad.blogspot.com/2009/04/project-based-education-response-to.html”>this discussion</a> of <a href=”http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/27/opinion/27taylor.html?_r=2&ref=opinion”>Mark Taylor’s recent (and very strange) <i>New York Times</i> op-ed</a>.  Taylor’s essay is modestly titled “End the University as We Know It,” and the response, from (as it says on the blog banner) a veteran of cultural studies seminars in the 1990’s who has since moved into academic administration, takes apart Taylor’s proposal for replacing departments with temporary topic-clusters with seven-year sunset clauses:

<blockquote>I’m at a loss to explain where all these interdisciplinary experts will get their disciplinary expertise. Yes, a significant part of grad school involves exploring new questions. But another significant part — the part he skips — involves getting grounding in the history of a given line of inquiry. Call it a canon or a discipline or a tradition, but it’s part of the toolkit scholars bring to bear on new questions. Abandoning the toolkit in favor of, well, ad hoc autodidacticism doesn’t really solve the problem. If anything, it makes existing grads even less employable than they already are. I need to hire someone to teach Intro to Sociology. Is a graduate of a program in “Body” or “Water” capable? How the hell do I know? (And even if I think I do, can I convince an accrediting agency?) Am I taking the chance? In this market? Uh, that would be ‘no.'</blockquote>

I agree that Taylor’s proposal is unworkable, but I have a tangential-but-related point.  Challenging the departmental structure of universities (whatever you might think of that project) isn’t the same thing as doing away with <i>disciplines</i>.

[click to continue…]

I know, everyone read the New York Magazine piece with everyone singing Poor, Poor Pitiful Masters of the Universe. That was so a week ago. Thankfully, everything is back to normal. But let’s revisit ancient history. The following bit was especially wondered at (by Kevin Drum, for example): [click to continue…]

Sigh.

You know what that means. I’ve been reading Jonah Goldberg again. Here we go, pondering the notion that a few of these teabag types might be right-wing extremists of a certain sort.

I wrote a book on fascism which tried to show that what everybody knows isn’t necessarily true. The idea that soldiers will return from war and become right-wing militants? Well, that has its roots in Fascist Italy, where veterans returned as black-shirted shock troops of “Il Duce,” Benito Mussolini. The only problem with this theory is that what they clamored for was socialism — the socialism of the trenches! — and their leader had earned the title “Il Duce” as the leader of the Socialist Party.

Now obviously ‘socialism of the trenches’ means something like: recover that feeling of unity and common cause we had, in the immediate aftermath of that initial irruption of chaos and disaster, when everyone set aside petty class differences and stood, shoulder to shoulder, against a perceived external enemy.

And it’s obvious that nothing like that could be spiritually akin to – oh, say, Glenn Beck’s 9/12 project. Because Glenn Beck isn’t in favor of socialism.

Sigh.

Let’s talk Texas secession. Like I said, Belle bought me this stack of old paperbacks – because she loves me – and the whole mouldering lot are turning out to be weirdly prescient. First the beaver management, now this. [click to continue…]

Last Thursday I took part in a plenary session of the <a href=”http://www.csaus.pitt.edu/frame_home.htm”>US Cultural Studies Association</a>.  The session was called “the university after cultural studies,”  and the participants were (besides myself) Marc Bousquet, Michele Janette, Cary Nelson, Sangeeta Ray, and Jeff Williams.  We were each given eight minutes to speak, and we were admirably (I might say anomalously) disciplined, coming in at 50 minutes altogether.  For those who might be interested, I’ll post my remarks below, with this brief explanation/ introduction:  my talk assumes that everybody in the ballroom, at a cultural studies conference, can speak to the impact of cultural studies on their own research and/or teaching and/or program and/or department, so that <i>somebody</i> has to get up and say that whole entire huge sectors of the university are not “after” cultural studies at all: they didn’t have any cultural studies to begin with, so they’re not “after” cultural studies in a temporal sense, and they’re not interested in doing any now, so they’re not “after” cultural studies in that sense either.

And without further ado:
[click to continue…]

We’ll just make it webcomics week for me, here at CT. If you don’t happen to know, “Hereville, How Mirka Got Her Sword” is a great read. It’s a complete story, nice art, peculiar setting, apparently part of a larger graphic novel in progress. (Page 36 is particularly nice, compositionally.)

On the other hand, if you are like me, you probably figured they’d done about as much damage to the Howard the Duck franchise as they were likely to do, at least by means of that 1986 movie. We were wrong. The DVD [amazon] just got released – and they Photoshopped the poor guy’s stogey off the cover. Compare: [click to continue…]