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Design and Photo Credits

The original site was designed by Mikko Hyppönen and deployed by Henrik Rydberg. It was later upgraded extensively by Dan Balis. The current layout was designed by S. Abbas Raza, building upon the earlier look, and coded by Dumky de Wilde.

The banner images have been provided by Terri Amig, Carla Goller, Tom Hilde, Georg Hofer, Sheherbano Husain, Margit Oberrauch, S. Abbas Raza, Sughra Raza, Margaret Scurlock, Shahzia Sikander, Maria Stockner, and Hartwig Thaler.


Monday, April 23, 2018


Intellectual Blame

Scott F. Aikin and Robert B. Talisse Tarot Fool

1.

Here's a philosophical heuristic about normative assessment: Domains and grounds for assessing responsibility will track domains and grounds for holding ourselves and others to be praise-worthy and blame-worthy. So, if there are unique ways to be blameworthy, there are coordinate ways in which one can be irresponsible. That's the rough heuristic, and we think it helps to elucidate intellectual responsibility.

One particular locus of intellectual irresponsibility is the exercise of our argumentative skills. On analogy with practical skills, there are situations where things go badly due to one's failure to exercise one's skill appropriately. Take the professional soccer player who shanks a shot over an easy goal, or the bartender who over pours a drink, or the teacher who mishandles a simple question in class. In these cases, it is appropriate for these people to blame themselves for their poor performances – it was their fault for failing to live up to a standard set by the skills they have. It's not because of the overwhelming difficulty of the situation, but rather it was because the requisite skills were not engaged effectively. Hence a modestly negative assessment of their performance is appropriate. Each may kick themselves for squandering a shot on goal, wasting whiskey, or a missed pedagogical opportunity. And so, too, may others. The sports writers may speak of the soccer player's ‘whiff,' and the barfly may mock the bartender's ‘party foul,' and a student may resent a question badly answered. Finally, notice that the degree of negative reaction of fault-finding is proportionate to the skills we assess these agents to have – the more skilled the soccer player, for example, the more blameworthy the shank. There's little, we think, unusual about these mundane practical failures of skill, and so it goes for intellectual skills, too.

Consider the skill of simply exploring a range of deductive entailments from a few pieces of information. The following task, Republican Friends, is illuminating. Assume these facts:

A is a Republican

A and B are friends

B and C are friends

C is not a Republican

Now the question: does it follow from these facts that there is at least one Republican with a non-Republican friend? Give yourself a second.

Continue reading "Intellectual Blame"



Posted by Scott F. Aikin and Robert B. Talisse at 12:50 AM | Permalink | Comments

Procedural Thriller

by Misha Lepetic

"The edge of the unnavigable, 
the region of no information.
"
 ~ Pynchon, Bleeding Edge

ALast month I ended with a question: If art is partly about eliciting a diversity of reactions that come from a shared experience of a single object, gesture or construct, then how do the potential meanings of art change when reproduction is made deliberately impossible? As we'll see, recent advances in software allow for custom (or 'procedural') generation of worlds and narratives that are not only unique to a single individual, but will also never be repeated, even for that person. Nevertheless, this approach is not entirely without precedent: precursors can be found, as always, in the work of artists going back at least as far as the 1950s. 

For me, the example that immediately comes to mind is John Cage's 'Imaginary Landscape No. 4'. An early experiment in removing the author from the piece, Cage's score is for 12 radios. Each radio is operated by two performers, one charged with turning the frequency dial and the other attending to volume and timbre. The score provides instructions for duration and frequency, and the overall effect intends to liberate listeners from the tyranny of the composer's intention. The Guardian's Robert Worby gives a sense of what the 1951 premier of the piece might have sounded like:

What the audience heard was the gentle crackle and hiss of radio static as the players glided between stations. Occasionally there was a burst of speech, a snatch of music, the reassuring flurry of violins playing a sweet, late-night melody. The audience giggled, coughed, and applauded wildly when a recognisable fragment of Mozart blasted out.

This last bit is interesting: on the one hand, giggling may imply delight when a surprising moment or juxtaposition occurs. But on the other, a sense of congratulation (or perhaps relief) when the performers stumble across 'real music'. But there is no one to congratulate – neither the composer nor the performers could follow the score and game the system to create this moment. It's also clear that the reactions of the audience constitute a further part of the piece itself. Cage created the space where chance drove the performance, and this opened the possibility for more sound events to further accentuate the uniqeness of that particular event. In effect, the audience itself takes up the role of performer.

Continue reading "Procedural Thriller"



Posted by Misha Lepetic at 12:40 AM | Permalink | Comments

Two Poems

by Amanda Beth Peery
 
She tips her golden watch
up her wrist to wash
the soap's extra speckled
sponged white drops,
left like a sea substance
foaming across rocks
or some mysterious ice,
from her own unshelled, soft
winter-pink wrist. When did
her hands become aquatic,
not impervious to water
and the callous scrub
but welcoming it?
 
. . . 
 
The thumb's gentle joint
and the sliver-mooned nail-tip
nearly transparent after the pink
layers of the fingernail like rock layers
as Ms Green washes
her hands under the strong faucet.
She cleans each finger, held rigid,
then curling like a larger limb.
Her heart is always in her hands.
They are so much herself but
now also the object of her care
twisting with pleasure
under the heavy caress of water.



Posted by Daniel Ranard at 12:35 AM | Permalink | Comments

The Psychology of Collective Memory

by Jalees Rehman

MemoriesDo you still remember the first day of school when you started first grade? If you were fortunate enough (or in some cases, unfortunate enough) to run into your classmates from way back when, you might sit down and exchange stories about that first day in school. There is a good chance that you and your former classmates may differ in the narratives especially regarding some details but you are bound to also find many common memories. This phenomenon is an example of "collective memory", a term used to describe the shared memories of a group which can be as small as a family or a class of students and as large as a nation. The collective memory of your first day in school refers to a time that you personally experienced but the collective memory of a group can also include vicarious memories consisting of narratives that present-day group members may not have lived through. For example, the collective memory of a family could contain harrowing details of suffering experienced by ancestors who were persecuted and had to abandon their homes. These stories are then passed down from generation to generation and become part of a family's defining shared narrative. This especially holds true for larger groups such as nations. In Germany, the collective memory of the horrors of the holocaust and the Third Reich have a profound impact on how Germans perceive themselves and their identity even if they were born after 1945.

The German scholar Aleida Assmann is an expert on how collective and cultural memory influences society and recently wrote about the importance of collective memory in her essay "Transformation of the Modern Time Regime" (PDF):

All cultures depend upon an ability to bring their past into the present through acts of remembering and remembrancing in order to recover not only acquired experience and valuable knowledge, exemplary models and unsurpassable achievements, but also negative events and a sense of accountability. Without the past there can be no identity, no responsibility, no orientation. In its multiple applications cultural memory greatly enlarges the stock of the creative imagination of a society.

Assmann uses the German word Erinnerungskultur (culture of remembrance) to describe how the collective memory of a society is kept alive and what impact the act of remembrance has on our lives. The Erinnerungskultur widely differs among nations and even in a given nation or society, it may vary over time. It is quite possible that the memories of the British Empire may evoke nostalgia and romanticized images of a benevolent empire in older British citizens whereas younger Brits may be more likely to focus on the atrocities committed by British troops against colonial subjects or the devastating famines in India under British rule.

Continue reading "The Psychology of Collective Memory"



Posted by Jalees Rehman at 12:30 AM | Permalink | Comments

Perceptions

Cedar

Sarah Simblet. Cedar, 2015.

Pencil drawing.

More here, here, and here.

Thanks to Lauren Shaw for the tip!



Posted by Sughra Raza at 12:25 AM | Permalink | Comments

The Criminal Tribes of Madras Presidency

by Thomas Manuel

Irulas1871In Dishonoured by History: ‘Criminal Tribes' and British Colonial Policy, Meena Radhakrishna presents rare scholarship on some of the worst excesses of the British Empire. The Criminal Tribes Act, 1871 was passed with intention of demarcating certain tribes in India as being "hereditary criminals". This wasn't necessarily genetic but rather occupational. The colonial interventions of the 19th century had invalidated a lot of hereditary occupations and the British were extremely aware of the dangers of the resulting mass unemployment. In their eyes, there was no other choice for these poor, wandering nomads but to take up a life of crime. What else could they do?

Radhakrishna's scholarship focuses on the erstwhile Madras Presidency where the Criminal Tribes Act, 1871 did not apply at first. It was resisted by the Madras administration who argued (using statistics!) that there was no crime problem in general and crime was actually lower in districts where these tribes operated. There were other objections voiced including questions of implementation and practicality but the real reason seemed to be because the wandering tribes were useful.

Historically, the Koravas of the Madras Presidency were salt and grain traders. They travelled from the coast with salt, taking it along regular trade routes to villages that were deep inland. Many of these remote villages were not connected by road and had no other access to salt. The Koravas, who carried these goods on the backs of their herds of cattle, would be able to sell salt in these areas at prices lower than any ordinary merchant. The Madras administration knew this and acknowledged it. This was the case with a number of tribes, each of them seen as beneficial as they ensured the movement of particular goods across the presidency.

But in the year 1911, the new Criminal Tribes Act was passed and this one applied to the entire territory of India. In the four decades since the first Act, new economic policies had played havoc with the traditional trading system. The salt trade was centralized with the government acting as clearing house. Coupled with the introduction of the railways, the entire face of the salt supply chain changed.

Continue reading "The Criminal Tribes of Madras Presidency"



Posted by S. Abbas Raza at 12:20 AM | Permalink | Comments

CATSPEAK

by Brooks Riley

ScreenHunter_3065 Apr. 23 10.39



Posted by Brooks Riley at 12:15 AM | Permalink | Comments

Wine, Eros and Madness

by Dwight Furrow

ErosUnlike ice cream, orange juice, and most other things that taste good, wine is peculiar in that it is an object of devotion. Many people abandon lucrative, stable careers for the uncertainties and struggles of winemaking; others spend a lifetime of hard intellectual labor to understand its intricacies; still others circle the globe sampling rare or unusual bottles. Wine has an attraction that goes beyond mere "liking"—a spiritual dimension that requires explanation. Why does wine exert such a powerful attractive force? The beauty of wine seems a natural answer.

However, if we are to make sense of the gravitational pull beautiful objects, such as wine, exert on us we have to distinguish the pretty, agreeable or good tasting from the beautiful. We know from recent history that without a clear distinction between beauty and what is pretty or likable, beauty fares rather poorly. Since the early 20th Century, the art world has abandoned beauty because it was thought to refer to superficial appearances with no ability to represent the more difficult aspects of human existence.  In a world embroiled in industrialization, war, and genocide, the creation of beauty seemed frivolous. (The fact that Kant, the most influential philosopher of art, along with his acolytes among formalist critics,  concurred that beauty was about appearances only didn't help. Kant neutered beauty with his notion that its apprehension required a bloodless, disinterested attitude.)

But work on the question of beauty over the last two decades provides a deeper conception of beauty, which clearly marks the distinction between beauty and what is merely attractive, and this conception of beauty can help refine our notions of wine quality. By returning to the ancient notion of beauty as a form of eros, we can explain how beauty engages our agency, providing powerful motivations to drink up.

Continue reading "Wine, Eros and Madness"



Posted by Dwight Furrow at 12:10 AM | Permalink | Comments

‘Save a Mother’ - Ten Years Later: What’s New?

by Shiban Ganju

ScreenHunter_3052 Apr. 20 11.30An update and gratitude is overdue to the readers and editors of 3QD who supported the NGO, ‘Save a Mother' in its infancy. Years have passed. So, what's new?

Nothing seems to have changed in ten years since I visited this village – a dusty swathe of land, home to over eleven hundred people, who connect with the world via a newly built, one car wide, winding road. Cracks, loose stones and chunks of matted mud straddle its tarred surface. A sign at its junction with the main road, two kilometers away, reads: "Prime Minister's Rural Road Plan"; an adjacent sign announces the name of the local muscle man who claims the credit for the new road. It reminds: we are in Uttar Pradesh, a northern state of India, where muscle power grabs political power. The road ends near the village community hall - a newly built large concrete cube with dirty white walls showing new cracks. Our SUV stops. We have reached. The ride, after ten years, was a road show of frustrating pace of progress; change is imperceptible here - until we meet the women.

Over a hundred women, young and old, most draped in bright colorful Sarees, a few in black burqas without head cover, have walked from surrounding villages to participate in the review meeting. They look different: gone are the veils and bashfulness; they are vocal and animated. A twenty years old articulate college student, who is a trained health activist, conducts the meeting. She introduces herself and other health activists, who take turns to recount their experiences and of their neighbors. The embellish their stories with songs about preventive health – all written and created by them. And then they hang big paper charts on the wall displaying hand written numbers to buttress their claims: maternal deaths are rare, girls do not marry before the age of eighteen, contraceptive use has increased and they campaign for equal treatment for girls. This is new - not what I had seen ten years ago.

Then, I was not sure how we would convince the women to adopt a few simple steps to curb rampant maternal deaths. (Detox Body or Mind?) (Save A Mother). We were novices. We borrowed wisdom from a few rural doctors and took inspiration from social workers who had been pioneers in the field of maternal health. Their integrity, sacrifice and charisma had propelled their success. But these leadership qualities were not replicable. We wanted to develop a frugal model of maternal mortality reduction by working with the community, especially women but had no established theoretical scaffold to hold us steady.

Continue reading "‘Save a Mother’ - Ten Years Later: What’s New?"



Posted by S. Abbas Raza at 12:05 AM | Permalink | Comments


Sunday, April 22, 2018


A Remembrance of Morris Halle

Jay Keyser at MIT Press:

Morris_HalleWhen the history of modern theoretical linguistics is written, Morris Halle will be one of its chapter headings. Together with Noam Chomsky, his influence was seminal in turning linguistics from a descriptive discipline in which taxonomy counted for much and explanation for very little into the first explicit theory of the defining feature of homo sapiens, the ability to formulate and express an infinite number of thoughts. In this respect, the revolution wrought by Morris Halle and his colleague, Noam Chomsky, was akin to the Galilean revolution of the 17th century. Both led to profound changes in the way scientists thought about their domains.

I first experienced this revolution when I was a young graduate student at Yale University. Morris, a member of the foreign language section at MIT, was giving a talk at an American Mathematical Society meeting in New York City. The year was 1959. Morris was 36 years old. His talk was on Verner's Law. The effect of that talk on me was electric. I had come from two years of very traditional philological study at Oxford University where I concentrated in Old and Middle English. I had one year of graduate study at Yale under the tutelage of scholars like Bernard Bloch. And here in New York I was listening to an approach to the study of diachronic linguistics that was as radical in its way as the Galilean program was to the neo-scholastics who preceded him. If Morris was right, then everything I had been taught was not just wrong, it was meaningless.

More here.



Posted by S. Abbas Raza at 02:50 PM | Permalink | Comments

More Equal Than Others

Srinivasan_1-041918

Amia Srinivasan in the New York Review of Books:

All men are created equal—but in what sense equal? Obviously not in the sense of being endowed with the same attributes, abilities, wants, or needs: some people are smarter, kinder, and funnier than others; some want to climb mountains while others want to watch TV; and some require physical or emotional support to do things that others can do on their own. And presumably they are not “equal” in the sense of demanding identical treatment: a father can give aspirin to his sick child and not his healthy one without disrespecting the equality of his children. Rather, all humans are said to be equal in what philosophers call the “basic,” “abstract,” “deep,” or “moral” sense of equality. We are all, in some fundamental sense, and despite our various differences, of equal worth, demanding, in Ronald Dworkin’s famous phrase, “equal concern and respect.”

For many of the founding fathers, the principle of basic equality was consistent with some people being the property of others; in 1776 the abolitionist Thomas Day remarked that “if there be an object truly ridiculous in nature, it is an American patriot, signing resolutions of independency with the one hand, and with the other brandishing a whip over his affrighted slaves.” A commitment to basic equality was also apparently consistent with “free” women being legally excluded from civic life. Today, the US’s commitment to basic equality is apparently consistent with not only enormous socioeconomic inequality, but also enormous inequality of opportunity, much of it still determined by race and gender.

The seeming compatibility of basic equality with gross material and social inequality has led more than one critic (Marx most obviously) to wonder if talk of being “created equal” is a hollow spiritual promise designed to placate those suffering from earthly misery. That basic equality is not such a hollow promise—that it means something substantial, and that it is crucial to our political morality—is the central thesis of Jeremy Waldron’s One Another’s Equals.

More here.



Posted by Robin Varghese at 02:45 PM | Permalink | Comments

Can Christian democracy save America from Trump?

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Carlo Invernizzi-Accetti and Daniel Steinmetz-Jenkins in The Guardian:

Since Donald Trump’s election, the American left has asked itself tough questions about what it must do to respond to his rise. An equally important conversation needs to happen over the future of the American right. In a democratic system based on alternation in power, the left has an interest in the kind of opponent it is confronted with. When the other side is captured by far-right populism, the damage to democracy can be great.

From that point of view, Christian voters are a constituency that can play a key role in moving the right away from the likes of Trump. Their overwhelming support for him at the polls was essential to his success, but it seems to be at odds with fundamental Christian principles. This suggests there is scope for a different kind of conservative movement in this country.

Christian democracy, a political ideology embodied by figures like Germany’s Angela Merkel, contributed to establishing stable democracies in Europe in the aftermath of the second world war. The US was often deeply supportive of this process, yet never cultivated an analogous political movement at home. Now that it is facing a serious institutional threat of its own, it can perhaps learn from what it has long preached abroad. 

More here.



Posted by Robin Varghese at 02:40 PM | Permalink | Comments

Steven Pinker: Counter-Enlightenment Convictions are ‘Surprisingly Resilient’

From Quillette:

Quillette: What are some of the classic experiments in psychology that you think an educated person should know about?

ScreenHunter_3063 Apr. 22 20.35Steven Pinker: Where to begin? I’d cite studies of illusions and biases, to remind people of the fallibility of our perceptual and cognitive faculties. These would include experiments on visual attention by the late Anne Treisman and others showing that people are unaware of visual material they don’t attend to, together with any experiment on memory showing how un-photographic our recollections are (for example, Elizabeth Loftus’s studies on the unreliability of eyewitness testimony, or even the low-tech study in which people are asked to draw a penny, an object they have seen thousands of times). Let’s add Slovic, Tversky, and Kahneman’s demonstrations of illusions in reasoning about probability and risk. Overconfidence and the Lake Wobegon Effect (everyone is above average). Cognitive dissonance and our self-serving rationalizations. The Fundamental Attribution Error — we overestimate the importance of individual traits, and underestimate the power of the situation. And the basic findings of behavioral genetics: that all individual differences are partly heritable.

Q: Who is the most underrated psychologist of the 20-21st Century?

SP: Judith Rich Harris, who was kicked out of the graduate program in my department (Harvard psychology) in the 1960s because she “didn’t fit the stereotype of a psychology grad student”), and after writing several textbooks, came out in 1998 with The Nurture Assumption, the first book on parenting and personality that took the results of behavioral genetics seriously. She showed that people (including psychologists) were deluded by the heritability of personality into overestimating the effects of parenting on personality, and that peers, not parents, are the primary socializers of children.

More here.



Posted by S. Abbas Raza at 02:36 PM | Permalink | Comments

The darkest show on TV—Netflix’s tech-dystopian ‘Black Mirror’—is itself a sign of hope for a human future

Michael Saler in The Weekly Standard:

DownloadCaution: Netflix’s Black Mirror may be hazardous to your health. This anthology series about the perils of modern technologies is one of the most captivating shows on television; with its talented casts, immersive worlds, and tricksy narratives, it approaches platinum heights in this new golden age of television. But be prepared to binge and cringe simultaneously, because it is also the darkest series being broadcast today. While laden with satirical humor, the often-harrowing episodes can leave an unsettling residue of anxiety.

The series premiered in Britain in 2011 with an episode, “The National Anthem,” that set the tone. An opinion-conscious prime minister is thrown into crisis when a popular member of the royal family (think Princess Diana) is kidnapped. Her terrified pleas for help are broadcast across the nation, together with the kidnapper’s condition for her release: The prime minister must have sexual intercourse with a pig on live television. The public ultimately supports this demand through their comments and “likes” online, driven as much by an unstated desire to witness the humiliating spectacle as by any concern for the princess. And it gets its wish. As the prime minister’s pained and sweaty exertions are broadcast, we see the viewers’ facial expressions change from amused disbelief to shock, disgust, and ultimately chagrin at their complicity in the dehumanizing spectacle. Those new to the series may experience a similar spectrum of emotions. “The National Anthem” may be the first episode, but it isn’t necessarily the best place to begin watching Black Mirror. Since it doesn’t matter in what order the shows are seen, the 2014 holiday special “White Christmas” or the third season’s “San Junipero” would each make a kinder—and more representative—starting point.

Black Mirror, which now runs to four seasons and 19 episodes, is unrelenting in its depiction of connectivity as a conduit for cruelty. A condemned murderer is repeatedly tortured in a privatized prison that doubles as a public attraction. A doctor with a malfunctioning brain implant meant to heighten his empathy to patients’ discomfort becomes so addicted to pain that he ecstatically slices off portions of his own body.

More here.



Posted by S. Abbas Raza at 02:27 PM | Permalink | Comments

The salon reinvented

Jonathan Beckman in 1843 Magazine:

Norn-Events-IMG_3292-HEADERThe marriage of sated appetites and adventurous conversation has a long history. In Ancient Greece, philosophical discourses were washed down with jugs of wine at banquets known as symposia. There was always a risk that some people would over-indulge. In the most famous description of a symposium, Plato describes how the guests, who included Socrates and Aristophanes, were expounding on the nature of love when they were interrupted by the arrival of a boozed-up general, Alcibiades. Table talk was considered an art to be mastered. Athenaeus, a Greek grammarian of the third century AD, wrote a 15-volume work entitled Deipnosophistae (“The Learned Banqueters”) about a series of dinners in which conversation ranged from philology to homosexuality.

In 18th-century France, the sharpest minds of the Enlightenment sparred in the salons of their aristocratic hostesses. Intellectual combat was a prerequisite of socialising. Over the last few years, there has been a flourishing of literary salons in London. These tend to be considerably less sharp-tongued then their precursors – often, they simply involve soft-ball interviews of authors with books to sell. But their popularity suggests that there is a demand for conversation that is both stimulating and intimate. The harder people work, the less often they see their friends and the more time they must devote, when they do, to a recitation of the chronicle of minor triumphs and disappointments known as “catching up”. Then comes gossip, gripes about work and family fortunes. Precious little time is left for truth and beauty. More formal occasions are little better: dinner-party chat can death-spiral with alarming speed into a collective lament over house prices, catchment areas and the intolerable expense of a loft conversion.

More here.



Posted by Azra Raza at 10:55 AM | Permalink | Comments

Saturday Poem

What Are Women Made Of

......There are many kinds of open.
…………………………..—Audre Lorde

We are all ventricle, spine, lung, larynx, and gut.
Clavicle and nape, what lies forked in an open palm;

we are follicle and temple. We are ankle, arch,
sole. Pore and rib, pelvis and root

and tongue. We are wishbone and gland and molar
and lobe. We are hippocampus and exposed nerve

and cornea. Areola, pigment, melanin, and nails.
Varicose. Cellulite. Divining rod. Sinew and tissue,

saliva and silt. We are blood and salt, clay and aquifer.
We are breath and flame and stratosphere. Palimpsest

and bibelot and cloisonné fine lines. Marigold, hydrangea,
and dimple. Nightlight, satellite, and stubble. We are

pinnacle, plummet, dark circles, and dark matter.
A constellation of freckles and specters and miracles

and lashes. Both bent and erect, we are all give
and give back. We are volta and girder. Make an incision

in our nectary and Painted Ladies sail forth, riding the back
of a warm wind, plumed with love and things like love.

Crack us down to the marrow, and you may find us full
of cicada husks and sand dollars and salted maple taffy

weary of welding together our daydreams. All sweet tea,
razor blades, carbon, and patchwork quilts of Good God!

and Lord have mercy! Our hands remember how to turn
the earth before we do. Our intestinal fortitude? Cumulonimbus

streaked with saffron light. Our foundation? Not in our limbs
or hips; this comes first as an amen, a hallelujah, a suckling,

swaddled psalm sung at the cosmos’s breast. You want to
know what women are made of? Open wide and find out.

by Bianca Lynne Spriggs
from Poetry, April 2018



Posted by Jim Culleny at 08:40 AM | Permalink | Comments

gillian ayres (1930 - 2018)



Posted by Morgan Meis at 08:32 AM | Permalink | Comments

nathan davis (1937 - 2018)



Posted by Morgan Meis at 08:30 AM | Permalink | Comments

vittorio taviani (1929 - 2018)



Posted by Morgan Meis at 08:24 AM | Permalink | Comments


Saturday, April 21, 2018


End of the American dream? The dark history of 'America first'

Sarah Churchwell in The Guardian:

KkkSadly, the American dream is dead,” Donald Trump proclaimed when he announced his candidacy for president of the United States. It seemed an astonishing thing for a candidate to say; people campaigning for president usually glorify the nation they hope to lead, flattering voters into choosing them. But this reversal was just a taste of what was to come, as he revealed an unnerving skill at twisting what would be negative for anyone else into a positive for himself. By the time he won the election, Trump had flipped much of what many people thought they knew about the US on its head. In his acceptance speech he again pronounced the American dream dead, but promised to revive it. We were told that this dream of prosperity was under threat, so much so that a platform of “economic nationalism” carried the presidency.

Reading last rites over the American dream was disquieting enough. But throughout the campaign, Trump also promised to put America first, a pledge renewed – twice – in his inaugural address. It was a disturbing phrase; think pieces on the slogan’s history began to sprout up, explaining that it stretches back to efforts to keep the US out of the second world war.

In fact, “America first” has a much longer and darker history than that, one deeply entangled with the country’s brutal legacy of slavery and white nationalism, its conflicted relationship to immigration, nativism and xenophobia. Gradually, the complex and often terrible tale this slogan represents was lost to mainstream history – but kept alive by underground fascist movements. “America first” is, to put it plainly, a dog whistle. The expression’s backstory seems at first to uncannily anticipate Trump and (at least some of) his supporters, but the truth is that eruptions of American conservative populism are nothing new – and “America first” has been associated with them for well over a century. This is merely the latest iteration of a powerful strain of populist demagoguery in American history, from president Andrew Jackson (1829-1837) to Louisiana senator Huey Long a century later – one that now extends to Trump.

More here.



Posted by Azra Raza at 04:59 PM | Permalink | Comments

Yanis Varoufakis: Marx predicted our present crisis – and points the way out

Yanis Varoufakis in The Guardian:

ScreenHunter_3062 Apr. 21 20.51For a manifesto to succeed, it must speak to our hearts like a poem while infecting the mind with images and ideas that are dazzlingly new. It needs to open our eyes to the true causes of the bewildering, disturbing, exciting changes occurring around us, exposing the possibilities with which our current reality is pregnant. It should make us feel hopelessly inadequate for not having recognised these truths ourselves, and it must lift the curtain on the unsettling realisation that we have been acting as petty accomplices, reproducing a dead-end past. Lastly, it needs to have the power of a Beethoven symphony, urging us to become agents of a future that ends unnecessary mass suffering and to inspire humanity to realise its potential for authentic freedom.

No manifesto has better succeeded in doing all this than the one published in February 1848 at 46 Liverpool Street, London. Commissioned by English revolutionaries, The Communist Manifesto (or the Manifesto of the Communist Party, as it was first published) was authored by two young Germans – Karl Marx, a 29-year-old philosopher with a taste for epicurean hedonism and Hegelian rationality, and Friedrich Engels, a 28-year-old heir to a Manchester mill.

As a work of political literature, the manifesto remains unsurpassed. Its most infamous lines, including the opening one (“A spectre is haunting Europe – the spectre of communism”), have a Shakespearean quality. Like Hamlet confronted by the ghost of his slain father, the reader is compelled to wonder: “Should I conform to the prevailing order, suffering the slings and arrows of the outrageous fortune bestowed upon me by history’s irresistible forces? Or should I join these forces, taking up arms against the status quo and, by opposing it, usher in a brave new world?”

For Marx and Engels’ immediate readership, this was not an academic dilemma, debated in the salons of Europe. Their manifesto was a call to action, and heeding this spectre’s invocation often meant persecution, or, in some cases, lengthy imprisonment. Today, a similar dilemma faces young people: conform to an established order that is crumbling and incapable of reproducing itself, or oppose it, at considerable personal cost, in search of new ways of working, playing and living together? Even though communist parties have disappeared almost entirely from the political scene, the spirit of communism driving the manifesto is proving hard to silence.

More here.



Posted by S. Abbas Raza at 02:52 PM | Permalink | Comments

Machine Learning’s ‘Amazing’ Ability to Predict Chaos

Natalie Wolchover in Quanta:

ScreenHunter_3061 Apr. 21 20.45Half a century ago, the pioneers of chaos theory discovered that the “butterfly effect” makes long-term prediction impossible. Even the smallest perturbation to a complex system (like the weather, the economy or just about anything else) can touch off a concatenation of events that leads to a dramatically divergent future. Unable to pin down the state of these systems precisely enough to predict how they’ll play out, we live under a veil of uncertainty.

But now the robots are here to help.

In a series of results reported in the journals Physical Review Letters and Chaos, scientists have used machine learning — the same computational technique behind recent successes in artificial intelligence — to predict the future evolution of chaotic systems out to stunningly distant horizons. The approach is being lauded by outside experts as groundbreaking and likely to find wide application.

“I find it really amazing how far into the future they predict” a system’s chaotic evolution, said Herbert Jaeger, a professor of computational science at Jacobs University in Bremen, Germany.

The findings come from veteran chaos theorist Edward Ott and four collaborators at the University of Maryland. They employed a machine-learning algorithm called reservoir computing to “learn” the dynamics of an archetypal chaotic system called the Kuramoto-Sivashinsky equation.

More here.



Posted by S. Abbas Raza at 02:45 PM | Permalink | Comments

How Chinese gangs are laundering drug money through Vancouver real estate

Sam Cooper in Global News:

ScreenHunter_3060 Apr. 21 20.12Criminal syndicates that control chemical factories in China’s booming Guangdong province are shipping narcotics, including fentanyl, to Vancouver, washing the drug sales in British Columbia’s casinos and high-priced real estate, and transferring laundered funds back to Chinese factories to repeat this deadly trade cycle, a Global News investigation shows.

The flow of narcotics and chemical precursors — and a rising death count in western Canada caused by synthetic opioids — is driven by sophisticated organized crime groups known as Triads.

The Triads have infiltrated Canada’s economy so deeply that Australia’s intelligence community has coined a new term for innovative methods of drug trafficking and money laundering now occurring in B.C.

It is called the “Vancouver Model” of transnational crime.

More here.



Posted by S. Abbas Raza at 02:12 PM | Permalink | Comments

Claire Chambers tells us why she finds Pakistan’s literary scene so exciting



Posted by S. Abbas Raza at 02:05 PM | Permalink | Comments

Gaza: The Lesser Child of Israel’s Occupation

Gideon Levy in the New York Times:

ScreenHunter_3057 Apr. 21 19.59Sometime in the mid-1990s, I bade farewell to the Gaza Strip. In thrall to the great illusion, sweet and dizzying, that were the 1993 Oslo peace accords, I was sure that Gaza was about to be liberated from Israel’s occupation. The fate of that stretch of land mattered to me very much. There were nearly 700,000 Palestinian refugees there at the time, many already second- and third-generation. Most lived in camps, in disgraceful conditions.

Two decades later, Gaza is even worse off. The number of refugees there has almost doubled, reaching 1.3 million, out of a total population close to 1.9 million. Its residents are even less free. In fact, they have been under blockade by Israel — with help from Egypt — after the militant group Hamas took power in 2007. Unemployment has reached nightmarish figures: more than 46 percent overall in late 2017, and close to 65 percent for people under 30. Israel continues to tighten its hold, building an underground wall into the sandy soil to block tunnels that Hamas has dug.

This Friday, like the three Fridays before, thousands of Gazans faced offhundreds of Israeli soldiers across a fence. They are expected to gather again for more protests every Friday until May 15, the day that commemorates what Palestinians call the Nakba, or catastrophe: the creation of the state of Israel in 1948 — which meant the loss of hundreds of Palestinian towns and villages.

More here.



Posted by S. Abbas Raza at 02:00 PM | Permalink | Comments

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