One hesitates to use the term, because it is so often misused, but it’s genuinely applicable here. Brazil just passed a law requiring every pregnant woman to register with the State. The alleged reason is to improve pre-natal care, but since no such provisions exist in the law it seems an exercise of raw power.

On December 27, while most Brazilians prepared for the New Year by bleaching their whites and gathering flowers to toss into the Atlantic for the goddess Iemanjá, Dilma Rousseff, Brazil’s first female president, was gathering a group a conservative legislators to stealthily assist in drafting and enacting a CeauÅŸescu-like law requiring all pregnant women to register their pregnancies with the state….
So what is going on? Brazil, the most populous Catholic country in Latin America, finds its politics intrinsically tied to the hierarchy of the Catholic Church. Dilma, who won a last-minute reprieve from the church’s negative onslaught in the 2010 presidential elections once she disavowed any suggested support for abortion, is to a certain extent beholden to that base. Indeed, Dilma’s cabinet includes an unofficial church representative who was responsible for brokering an agreement between the Vatican and Brazil during President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva’s administration. For years Catholic and evangelical parliamentarians have been trying unsuccessfully to establish a registry for pregnant women, with Dilma’s support they’ve finally succeeded.

The obvious actual intention of the law is to prosecute women who have abortions or induce miscarriages. It’s hard to imagine anything more painful than losing a wanted fetus and then being grilled by the police about it, and possibly sent to jail for up to 3 years. Oh wait, except being forced to carry a fetus to term when you are the victim of a rape but there was no successful rape prosecution. That would be worse. Will the cops walk around stopping pregnant women and checking whether they are registered? If anything this seems likely to worsen access to pre-natal care, as women who are undecided about whether to carry to term at first, but end up staying pregnant, decide to give birth at home to avoid getting in legal trouble for failing to register the pregnancy earlier. Or when teenage girls who are ashamed of their pregnancy don’t want to register, and then won’t go see the doctor for any pre-natal care whatsoever. I hope when Brazil’s congress returns to session they will overturn this law. This is just evil and wrong.

UPDATE: Thanks to Witt in comments below, a link to an English-language article explaining the law in greater detail, by Brazilian women’s health activist and human rights advocate Beatriz Galli. (Additionally, those curious may want to know that the woman’s doctor will be compelled to register her with the government when he knows she’s pregnant, which might well be before she does!) Excerpt:

In fact, PM 557 does not guarantee access to health exams, timely diagnosis, providers trained in obstetric emergency care, or immediate transfers to better facilities. So while the legislation guarantees R$50.00 for transportation, it will not even ensure a pregnant woman will find a vacant bed when she is ready to give birth. And worse yet, it won’t minimize her risk of death during the process….
Last but certainly not least, MP 557 violates all women’s right to privacy by creating compulsory registration to control and monitor her reproductive life. In fact, it places the rights of the fetus over the woman, effectively denying her reproductive autonomy. A woman will now be legally “obligated” to have all the children she conceives and she will be monitored by the State for this purpose.

Another great radio piece by Emily Hanford (I caught the end of what I assume was just part of it on the NPR afternoon news show on Sunday) here (audio and transcript both there). She reports the research on the effectiveness of lectures in prompting actual learning: not much. Anyone reading who lectures must listen to/read it. A long excerpt (followed by some comments):

Lecturing was the way just about everyone taught introductory physics. To think there was something wrong with the lecture meant physics instructors would “have to really change the way they do things,” says Hestenes. A lot of them ignored his study and kept teaching the way they always had. They insisted their lectures were working just fine. But Eric Mazur was unusual, says Hestenes. “He was the first one who took it to heart.” Mazur is a physics professor at Harvard University. He came across Hestenes’s articles in 1990, five years after they’d been published. To understand why the articles had such a big impact on Mazur you have to know some things about his history. Mazur grew up dreaming of becoming an astronomer.

“When I was five years old I fell in love with the universe,” he says. “I tried to get my hands on to every accessible book on astronomy. I was so excited by the world of science.” But when Mazur got to university, he hated the astronomy classes.”It was all sitting in the lecture, and then scribbling down notes and cramming those notes and parroting them back on the exam,” he says. “Focusing on the details, focusing on memorizing and regurgitation, the whole beauty of astronomy was lost.” So he switched to physics. It wasn’t as heartbreaking for him to sit in a physics lecture and memorize things. Mazur eventually got a Ph.D. in physics and a job at Harvard University. Like most Ph.D.s, Mazur never got any training in how to teach.

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The Internet Society (ISOC) is twenty years old in 2012. ISOC is a nonprofit with offices in Washington DC and Geneva, and operations around the world. It was created almost as an afterthought by two of the people who helped start the Internet itself; Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn. This was a far-sighted act to help keep the Internet open and evolving, not just in Europe and North America, but all over the world. Ten years ago, a deal was struck to channel into ISOC the surplus funds from running dot ORG. ISOC has expanded rapidly since then, but kept a tight focus on doing more of what it does best.

ISOC does essential work campaigning for public policies that keep the Internet open and offering technical training, especially in developing countries. It has hundreds of local chapters around the world that teach people how to build out the Internet and develop their own professional and technical leadership skills. The chapters push for open and ready access in their own countries and feed in information and viewpoints to ISOC’s global advocacy work.

But let me step aside from how ISOC would probably describe itself, and put some less modest flesh on these bones.
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I have piece in the National Interest about developments in non-carbon based energy. It ran under the headline “The end of the nuclear renaissance”, but that’s only half the story and probably the less interesting half. The real news of 2011 was the continued massive drop in the price of solar PV, which renders obsolete any analysis based on data before about 2010. In particular, anyone who thinks nuclear is the most promising candidate to replace fossil fuels really needs to recalibrate their views. There’s a case to be made for nuclear as a backstop option, but it’s not nearly as strong as it was even two years ago.

Since John wrote his post below, Mark Lilla has come out with a “lengthy attempted rebuttal”:http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2012/jan/12/republicans-revolution/?pagination=false of Corey Robin’s argument. Even as New York Review of Books articles by creaky centrist-liberals go, it’s a terrible essay – see further “Alex Gourevitch”:http://jacobinmag.com/blog/2012/01/wrong-reaction/. Even as _Mark Lilla essays on the American right_ (a category that includes a plenitude of incompetent arguments) go, it’s awful. Two things that I think are worth adding to Alex’s takedown.
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Two months ago, I wrote a post which argued, among other things, that the European Union used to be run according to the ‘Community Method’ (according to which member states often used to defer to each other on matters of vital interest, and the Commission had an important role), had moved to the so-called ‘Union Method’ (under which member states were supposed to do stuff on their own, in practice being led by France and Germany), and was now transitioning towards the `ECB Method’ (under which the European Central Bank determined politics). I suggested that this was going to be untenable, and hoped that we might see a push instead towards greater democracy. Well, we didn’t get one. Instead, what we’re getting is the ECB method on steroids. By supporting bank borrowing rather than sovereign state borrowing, the ECB has managed to prop up the system without openly changing its mandate. But by doing this under the table, and without very much in the way of an officially stated long term policy, it has retained and indeed arguably dramatically expanded its political clout.

I don’t have sufficient expertise to make strong claims about whether this will be a sustainable way of propping up bond markets for any significant period of time. What I am convinced of is that it will be a political disaster. As Cosma Shalizi and I argued (Cosma puts it “much better”:http://cscs.umich.edu/~crshalizi/weblog/838.html than I did) about libertarian paternalism, the problem is that it “break[s] the feedback mechanisms which (1) keep policy-makers accountable to those over whom they exercise power, and (2) allow[s] policy-makers to tell whether what they are doing is working, and revise their initial policies and plans in light of experience.” This dynamic can be extended to explain why the European Central Bank is making a complete hash of the European economy. I’ve spoken to people at the European Central Bank – they are very smart, and very sincerely believe that the best path to long term prosperity is through enforced austerity. They are also – by design – nearly completely insulated from democratic pressure. And despite claiming that they are apolitical, they are in fact playing a profoundly political role, dictating the kinds of domestic institutional reforms that states need to implement if they want to continue getting ECB support.

This means that ECB decision makers are under no very great obligation to think about why they might be wrong, up to the point where complete disaster occurs. And disaster is very likely, if the lessons of the gold standard in pre-World War II Europe tell us anything at all. Enforced austerity does not produce economic growth. What it does produce is political instability.

This is why we should be deeply skeptical of claims for technocracy as a way of making political decisions. Technocracy is supposed to work better because it is insulated from political pressure. But exactly because of that, it is liable to go off the rails when left to its own devices. Expertise is a very good thing – when it is leavened by democratic accountability. When it is not, it is likely to be responsive instead to its own internal discourses and understanding of the world, which can lead it in some very problematic directions. It isn’t just that the eurozone is an experiment in the economic virtues of imposed austerity (as a means of creating confidence and hence a by-its-own-bootstraps cycle of virtuous growth). It’s that the experiment is already visibly failing. And it’s that despite this visible failure, there is little chance of any reversal of direction, because those who have the power to set the course have no obligation to listen to anyone else, and hence aren’t listening.

On the home front, the year opened with the inexplicable rupture of a whole-house water filter on January 2, a mishap that left four inches of water in the basement, ruining a bunch of Jamie’s books and DVDs; it closes as I return from visiting my father, who is intubated and unconscious after triple-bypass heart surgery.  We didn’t know he would be unconscious for my entire visit — I learned that via a phone call from my sister only after Nick, Jamie and I had gotten halfway through a seven-hour drive.  Our assumption was that at some point he would be conscious but unable to communicate, which is why I did what any dutiful son would do, namely, bring a copy of <i>A Year on Ice</i>, Gerald Eskanazi’s chronicle of the New York Rangers’ 1969-70 season, to read to him at his bedside.  When that plan fell through, we videotaped a bunch of messages for him (including my rendition of the final game of the Rangers’ regular season, April 5, 1970, which was the most exciting thing a nine-year-old kid could possibly hope to see — thanks for taking me, Dad!) and I’ll go back when he’s back home, which should be in a few weeks.

And oh yes, in March Lucy the Dog died after thirteen and a half years of faithfully guarding the house, playing with Nick, tending to Janet whenever she had migraines, and talking to Jamie when no one else would understand him.

But there was one good thing about 2011, and it was a world-historical event.  I refer, of course, to <strike>our family’s decision to topple Qaddafi and plunder Libya</strike> a milestone we had been anticipating for approximately twenty years:

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It wasn’t too many years ago that I was suicidally depressed. Because this is a public forum, I won’t go into what finally got me to a psychiatrist (I’d seen psychotherapists for years, but hadn’t been diagnosed with clinical depression) and onto medication, and I had to try several different pills before I found something that worked. Recently I’ve switched meds again, and I’m really having a great holiday season.

But for a lot of people the holidays suck. Sometimes that’s temporary, but often it’s not. Please take twelve minutes to watch the video below, and please take the time in real life to listen to the people you love. I think one of the profoundest difficulties we have as human beings, despite all our ways of communicating, is that ultimately it’s horribly easy to hear someone say they’re unhappy but not really understand that they are deeply in trouble, especially if the things they seem unhappy about seem small or temporary or like minor fillips in a pretty great life.

It’s impossible to know how someone with depression feels if you haven’t been there. And if you are there, it’s impossible to realize that it really doesn’t have to be that bad. If you think you need help, please ask for it. And if you think someone you know needs help, please listen–because when you’re way down that well, it can be almost impossible even to whisper.

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“Science”:http://www.sciencemag.org/content/334/6061/1344.full has an article behind its paywall (but available in “liberated form here”:http://world.edu/?worldedu_posts=saudi-universities-offer-cash-exchange-academic-prestige) that likely merits discussion.

bq. At first glance, Robert Kirshner took the e-mail message for a scam. An astronomer at King Abdulaziz University (KAU) in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, was offering him a contract for an adjunct professorship that would pay $72,000 a year. Kirshner, an astrophysicist at Harvard University, would be expected to supervise a research group at KAU and spend a week or two a year on KAU’s campus, but that requirement was flexible, the person making the offer wrote in the e-mail. What Kirshner would be required to do, however, was add King Abdulaziz University as a second affiliation to his name on the Institute for Scientific Information’s (ISI’s) list of highly cited researchers. …

bq. “I thought it was a joke,” says Kirshner, who forwarded the e-mail to his department chair, noting in jest that the money was a lot more attractive than the 2% annual raise professors typically get. Then he discovered that a highly cited colleague at another U.S. institution had accepted KAU’s offer, adding KAU as a second affiliation on ISIhighlycited.com.

bq. Kirshner’s colleague is not alone. I have learned of more than 60 top-ranked researchers from different scientific disciplines—all on ISI’s highly cited list—who have recently signed a part-time employment arrangement with the university that is structured along the lines of what Kirshner was offered. Meanwhile, a bigger, more prominent Saudi institution—King Saud University in Riyadh—has climbed several hundred places in international rankings in the past 4 years largely through initiatives specifically targeted toward attaching KSU’s name to research publications, regardless of whether the work involved any meaningful collaboration with KSU researchers.

bq. … Academics who have accepted KAU’s offer represent a wide variety of faculty from elite institutions in the United States, Canada, Europe, Asia, and Australia. All are men. Some are emeritus professors who have recently retired from their home institutions. All have changed their affiliation on ISI’s highly cited list—as required by KAU’s contract—and some have added KAU as an affiliation on research papers. Other requirements in the contract include devoting “the whole of your time, attention, skill and abilities to the performance of your duties” and doing “work equivalent to a total of 4 months per contract period.”

Understandably, the “regular faculty at the affected university”:http://www.alarabiya.net/articles/2011/12/18/183235.html are quite upset. I wonder how many researchers turned this offer down? (I’d hope that most did, but I’d be unsurprised to be disappointed)

Do you know what’s more boring than the insularity of academia? Bold Rebels Who Take Stands Against the Insularity of Academia by using minor players/subfields as weapons to bash someone who is mistakenly thought to be Really Important because he has a Column in the New York Times.

I so do not miss this kind of wankery. I had spent a few minutes feeling mildly wistful about lacking a reason to go up to Seattle this year, since I like and miss Seattle and would have enjoyed having drinks with some old friends and acquaintances, but dear god do I prefer sitting on my couch in 70-degree December weather thinking about taking a walk to the grocery store to having to listen to people preen themselves on their superior cynicism. If I’d stayed in academia I’m afraid my eyeballs would have gotten stuck staring at the ceiling and I’d be unable to walk anywhere.

Via “David Moles”:http://chrononaut.org/2011/12/01/but-the-sabres-of-jeb-stuarts-cavalry-and-the-bayonets-of-picketts-division-had-on-the-slopes-of-gettysburg-embodied-him-forever-in-a-revivified-tory-party/, Winston Churchill’s Grasshopper-Lies-Heavyesque exercise in the genre of alternative history within an alternative history deserves a wider readership. I give you the counter-counter-historical bit of “If Lee had not won the battle of Gettysburg.”

bq. If Lee after his triumphal entry into Washington had merely been the soldier, his achievements would have ended on the battlefield. It was his august declaration that the victorious Confederacy would pursue no policy toward the African negroes which was not in harmony with the moral conceptions of western Europe that opened the highroads along which we are now marching so prosperously

bq. But even this famous gesture might have failed if it had not been caught up and implemented by the practical genius and trained parliamentary aptitudes of Gladstone. There is practically no doubt at this stage that the basic principle upon which the color question in the Southern States of America has been so happily settled owed its origin mainly to Gladstonian ingenuity and to the long statecraft of Britain in dealing with alien and more primitive populations. There was not only the need to declare the new fundamental relationship between master and servant, but the creation for the liberated slaves of institutions suited to their own cultural development and capable of affording them a different yet honorable status in a commonwealth, destined eventually to become almost world wide.

bq. Let us only think what would have happened supposing the liberation of the slaves had been followed by some idiotic assertion of racial equality, and even by attempts to graft white democratic institutions upon the simple, docile, gifted African race belonging to a much earlier chapter in human history. We might have seen the whole of the Southern States invaded by gangs of carpetbagging politicians exploiting the ignorant and untutored colored vote against the white inhabitants and bringing the time-honored forms of parliamentary government into unmerited disrepute. We might have seen the sorry force of black legislators attempting to govern their former masters. Upon the rebound from this there must inevitably have been a strong reassertion of local white supremacy. By one device or another the franchises accorded to the negroes would have been taken from them. The constitutional principles of the Republic would have been proclaimed, only to be evaded or subverted; and many a warm-hearted philanthropist would have found his sojourn in the South no better than “A Fool’s Errand.”

Since the JSTOR version is apparently a straight reprint of Churchill’s original 1930 essay, I’m presuming it’s not in copyright any more, and have put it up here taken it down as I understand from comments that it is still in copyright.

There’s a very interesting interview with Brian Leiter over at 3:AM Magazine. Read the whole thing, as they say. Interesting and entertaining though Brian’s thoughts are, I reacted somewhat negatively to his promotion of “realism” over “moralism” and to the somewhat dismissive (though sugar-coated) remarks he makes about Jerry Cohen. Jerry actually did have some “realist” things to say about society and politics, most notably in parts of _Self-Ownership, Freedom and Equality_ and in chapter 11 of _Karl Marx’s Theory of History_, but his work can speak for itself. More worrying, I think, is Brian’s apparent desire to abolish large parts of philosophy altogether when he write approvingly of:

bq. those who think the aim of philosophy should be to get as clear as possible about the way things really are, that is, about the actual causal structure of the natural and human world, how societies and economies work, what motivates politicians and ordinary people to do what they do ….

My question here is: why’s that an aim of _philosophy_ ? The people investigating the actual causal structure of the natural world are natural scientists, not philosophers; the people investigating the actual causal structure of the human world are social scientists, not philosophers.

Update: Brian assures me that he has no desire that the moralists be “purged” (my work was “abolished”). I’m happy to hear that, but it remains that he thinks that we moralists are pursuing an agenda that is other than he believes the aim of philosophy ought to be.