Must-read Philosophy

Alain de Botton gives his list. (By the way, you should see his TED talk.)

On the art of patronage

And the relationship between money and art:

Money and culture have never been easily disentangled, nor would one want them to be, considering that culture is by no means cost efficient. But there are different forms of patronage and different kinds of entanglements. And culture is now in retreat before the brute force of money. Even the most easygoing commentators can see the writing on the wall, and some critics who might have been expected to be amused by the Cattelan retrospective have not enjoyed the show. Who knows? Maybe they’re tired of partying in a funhouse where they will never be more than dinner guests. As for the people who buy and sell Maurizio Cattelan, my guess is they don’t give a damn what critics—or for that matter museumgoers—say. 

Yesterday's post on Andy Warhol here.

(Image: "Worm's-eye view of Maurizio Cattelan's 'All' retrospective at the Guggenheim Museum, New York. Italian-born artist Maurizio Cattelan is considered to be one of the most provocative contemporary artists of our time. His controversial work draws on today's popular culture, history and organized religion in a profound way." Designboom/Alessandro Ghirelli.)

Giving computing a human face

An interview with the woman who did it. Interested readers might also find this illuminating, although they've probably already seen it.

Image of the Day

"A man dipped his finger in ink at a polling station in Cairo’s Shubra neighborhood Tuesday. Voter turnout was still high on the second and final day of the first round of parliamentary voting in Egypt." Coverage on the elections in Egypt here. (Mohammed Hossam/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images, via the Wall Street Journal)

Iran's human rights abuses

Sarah Morgan and Andrew Apostolou argue that Obama should draw attention to them:

The ayatollahs' hold on power is inherently unstable because they have no popular mandate. Since staging a rigged election in 2009 to keep Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in power, they have relied on repression and brutality to silence opposition, jailing journalists, torturing detainees, and executing critics (both real and imagined). By highlighting these crimes on the world stage and actively supporting Iran’s dissidents, the United States can place a new, more effective kind of pressure on Tehran and support the movement for democratic change from within. 

Repugnant people

Like the woman behind his shocking rant (holding a child, no less):


The woman has apparently been arrested. Sunny Hundal condemns her remarks, but warns that arrest for this kind of behavior is a bad sign for free speech:

I have no problems with laws against outright discrimination. But when crafted against inciting hatred or "breaching the peace" – they almost always work against minorities and other vulnerable people rather than for them.

And let's be honest, the woman was just sitting there with a child on her lap. She offended people but posed no threat and didn't harm anyone (the person behind her had to be calmed down or it could have turned a lot uglier). It isn't the same as a group of drunken blokes swearing in a train carriage and to criminalise simply being offensive or swearing in public would have half of Britain in jail. 

It does seem rather strange that someone can be arrested for simply being offensive to others. Although I understand that's not the charge itself, is there anything else with which you could convincingly disguise such an arrest. Like Hundal, I would hate to come to this woman's defense to any degree, but I think a little respect for basic rights is in order – that is, before we can expect to see fewer repellant individuals like her.

"All electronic devices must now be powered off"

If you fly, you'll be familiar with the line, or something similar. But there's actually no known reason for the petty rule:

Michael Altschul, senior vice president and legal counsel for CTIA, the wireless industry association, said a study that it conducted more than a decade ago found no interference from mobile devices. “The fact is, the radio frequencies that are assigned for aviation use are separate from commercial use,” Mr. Altschul said. “Plus, the wiring and instruments for aircraft are shielded to protect them from interference from commercial wireless devices.” [F.A.A. spokesman] Mr. [Les] Dorr reluctantly agreed. “There have never been any reported accidents from these kinds of devices on planes,” he said.

James Fallows nods, but adds that there is an 'admittedly weak' rationale behind annoying regulation like this:

If anything went wrong on a crowded airline flight, the flight crew would need everyone's full attention, now. The prevailing theory is that passengers are less likely to be distracted if they're not cocooned by their acoustic headsets or distracted by their iPads. 

L'Affaire Cain

The plot thickens: "here we go again," indeed. The blogosphere is teeming with speculation about a possible end to his campaign after Cain's campaign manager spoke about a possible 'reassessment' – of course, they're denying that it was meant in that sense, instead suggesting that it was used only in strategic terms. From his lawyer's statement:

This appears to be an accusation of private, alleged consensual conduct between adults - a subject matter which is not a proper subject of inquiry by the media or the public. No individual, whether a private citizen, a candidate for public office or a public official, should be questioned about his or her private sexual life. The public's right to know and the media's right to report has boundaries and most certainly those boundaries end outside of one's bedroom door.

A Strauss-Kahn conspiracy?

Edward Jay Epstein seems to believe so, although he stops short, as any good journalist does, of making anything beyond implied conclusion; the hotel denies any conspiracy:

In a statement issued Sunday by its French-based parent Accor Group, the Sofitel sharply criticized the NYRB article as “inaccurate and speculative” and noted it had “has cooperated with law enforcement authorities for the entirety of this case as was its civic and legal obligation.’ The Sofitel specifically challenged the article’s assertion that two of its employees were caught on video celebrating for three minutes. “In fact, the incident in question lasted only 8 seconds and both employees categorically deny this exchange had anything to do with Mr. Strauss-Kahn,” the hotel’s statement said.

Amy Davidson responds critically to Epstein's article. All are worth reading.

Egypt heads to the polls

Large numbers are reported to have turned out for the country's first elections since the overthrow of Mubarak. Promisingly, few security problems were reported. A BBC reporter in Cairo, Lyse Doucet, describes the situation:

Ballot papers show a bewildering range of symbols in a country with high levels of illiteracy - everything from a basketball to a blender. You run out of relevant icons when there are thousands of candidates. Most queues I saw were orderly. But at one, some Egyptians started shouting: "Why is it so slow? We need to go back to work!" Party workers were still in action, still distributing leaflets, in violation of campaign rules. When I asked one Muslim Brotherhood official about it, he put it down to an excess of enthusiasm.

Tony Karon explains that the elections mark a great turning point; Robert Satloff advocates more US involvement in the elections.

(Image: "Ballot boxes being collected from a polling station near Tahrir Square in Cairo on Tuesday after a second day of voting in Egypt’s parliamentary elections." Odd Andersen/Agence France-Presse, Getty Images, via the New York Times)

What's the value of a college degree?

It's hard to know, but things aren't looking promising, as Adam Davidson reveals:

A bachelor’s degree on its own no longer conveys intelligence and capability. To get a good job, you have to have some special skill — charm, by the way, counts — that employers value. But there’s also a pretty good chance that by some point in the next few years, your boss will find that some new technology or some worker overseas can replace you.

Arguing Hitchens

George Scialabba reviews Arguably:

Few present-day journalists have a detectable, much less unmistakable, prose style; the suavity and piquancy of Hitchens’s prose are unmatched among his critical peers. Equally admirable is his breadth of reading; he has made an art of casual allusion. “Erudition” is not quite right; it suggests labor, and what is most impressive about the way Hitchens liberally sprinkles apposite quotes from Auden and Larkin, Waugh and Wodehouse, Jefferson and Churchill throughout his essays is his apparent effortlessness. He always seems to have been reading just the right book at just the right moment—though at a certain point it dawns on you that it can’t be an accident; he really must be intimate with an extraordinary expanse of modern European history and literature.

If you've been reading the blog for a while, you'll be aware that I have something of a minor Christopher Hitchens obsession. More on Hitchens here.

"I'm sick of the questions"

Crispin Burke explains why he's given up telling people he's in the military.

Rush Limbaugh has no shame

The controversial radio personality's odious remarks have been the stuff of outraged conversation for years, but the perennial question becomes louder yet: has he gone too far this time? Limbaugh's comments on this administrations efforts (to crush the Lord's Resistance Army) are disgraceful, say the least. In a textbook example of misreporting, Limbaugh informed his listeners and readers that the president was sending one hundred American troops "to wipe out Christians." How many lies can one man tell?

Conor Friedersdorf weighs in:

Many conservatives complain, with good reason, when they're caricatured as racially insensitive purveyors of white anxiety politics who traffic in absurd, paranoid attacks on their political opponents. Yet many of the most prominent brands in the conservative movement elevate a man guilty of those exact things as a "statesman" whose civility and humility ought to inspire us! In doing so, they've created a monster, one who knows that so long as his ratings stay high, he can say literally anything and be feted as an intellectual and moral role model.

Obviously Limbuagh has unceremoniously sat on every opportunity of being perceived as a respectable journalist, and few on the Left or (sensible) Right will be willing to grant him a second chance. I'd hate to sound even more elitist than usual, but the danger relating to the Fox News strain of the American media is that they lead parochial news consumers to become misinformed. It's all very well to pen articles in the Atlantic about the lies of Rush Limbaugh, but how many people will that affect? Not many, I suspect.

(Image: "Radio talk show host Rush Limbaugh attends a Medal of Freedom ceremony at the White House January 13, 2009 in Washington DC. During the ceremony U.S. President George W. Bush presented the Medal of Freedom to former British Prime Minister Tony Blair, former Australian Prime Minister John Howard and Colombian President Alvaro Uribe." Photo by Mark Wilson/Getty Images North America, via.)

The origins of Occupy Wall Street

Mattathias Schwartz has an excellent article in the New Yorker – a must read:

In mid-October, supporters in Tokyo, Sydney, Madrid, and London held rallies; encampments sprang up in almost every major American city. Nearly all of them modelled themselves on the New York City General Assembly: with no official leaders, rotating facilitators, and no fixed set of demands. Today, endorsements of the Occupy movement can be found everywhere, from anarchist graffiti on bank walls to Al Gore’s Twitter feed. On a rain-smeared cardboard sign near the shattered window of an Oakland coffee shop that had been destroyed by a cadre of anarchists during a nighttime clash with police, someone wrote, “We’re sorry, this does not represent us.” Below that, someone else wrote, “Speak for yourself.”

Understanding the Andy Warhol obsession

Work of the man who was obsessed with celebrity culture accounts for one-sixth of contemporary-art sales. Bryan Appleyard asks if Warhol's really worth it:

In a crucial passage in his book “American Visions” (1998), the great critic Robert Hughes summarised Warhol’s aesthetic: “It all flowed from one central insight: that in a culture glutted with information, where most people experience most things at second or third hand through TV and print, through images that become banal and disassociated by being repeated again and again and again, there is a role for affectless art. You no longer need to be hot and full of feeling. You can be supercool, like a slightly frosted mirror…Warhol...was a conduit for a sort of collective American state of mind in which celebrity—the famous image of a person, the famous brand name—had completely replaced both sacredness and solidity.”

Using reputation to save the earth

I don't agree with legislation to put warning labels on cigarettes, but if we're going to warn people about the highly harmful effects of smoking, why not warn people about the inefficiency of their cars? David Rand and Martin Nowak argue that it could help the climate problem:

Even better than voluntary displays would be laws enforcing disclosure. For example, governments could require energy companies to publish the amount of electricity used by each home and business in a searchable database. Likewise, gasoline use could be calculated if, at yearly inspections, mechanics were required to report the number of miles driven. Cars could be forced to display large stickers indicating average distance traveled, with inefficient cars labeled similarly to cigarettes: "Environmentalist's warning: This car is highly inefficient. Its emissions contribute to climate change and cause lung cancer and other diseases." Judging from our laboratory research, such policies would motivate people to reduce their carbon footprint.

Sounds dreadful. There's something awfully annoying about regulatory efforts to help taxpayers with their consumer decisions. But apparently people like this sort of thing. How strange.

Stalin's daughter dies at 85

Times obituary here. It's truly sad: "Wherever I go, here, or Switzerland, or India, or wherever. Australia. Some island. I will always be a political prisoner of my father’s name."

Quote of the Day

"Every day, the New York Times carries a motto in a box on its front page. 'All the News That's Fit to Print,' it says. It's been saying it for decades, day in and day out. I imagine most readers of the canonical sheet have long ceased to notice this bannered and flaunted symbol of its mental furniture. I myself check every day to make sure that the bright, smug, pompous, idiotic claim is still there. Then I check to make sure that it still irritates me. If I can still exclaim, under my breath, why do they insult me and what do they take me for and what the hell is it supposed to mean unless it's as obviously complacent and conceited and censorious as it seems to be, then at least I know I still have a pulse. You may wish to choose a more rigorous mental workout but I credit this daily infusion of annoyance with extending my lifespan." – Christopher Hitchens.

Quintana's story

Meghan O'Rourke reviews Joan Didion's Blue Nights:

Much of the book is about Quintana, who died at age 39, after a host of health problems following a bout with pneumonia, and after years of struggling with alcohol abuse and mood disorders. But it is not a simple elegy for a lost daughter. It is, rather, an account of Didion’s circling questions about her own accountability for Quintana’s struggles and her sense of ultimate mortality—which is as much a subject of the book as Quintana is. There is nothing for the author to recover here. The book instead bears harsh witness to the realization that the past can never be fixed (a realization many parents must at some point confront).

Hasan Altaf, in a more critical piece on Didion's work, takes issue with the obvious similarities between characters in each book:

I still feel that the characters in Didion's novels are almost interchangeable (Treat Morrison can stand in for Jack Lovett, Inez Victor and Charlotte Douglas have much in common) but as a writer I don't think she is particularly interested in her characters. The real subject of her novels seems to me to be systems, structures, societies. Each of the novels is set in a different world - Sacramento agricultural society, Hollywood, "the three or four solvent families in Boca Grande" - and these worlds all have their own rules for their own games. The protagonists of the novels are slightly out of sync with their societies; they do not or cannot play the game they are expected to. Maria Wyeth again: "I mean, maybe I was holding all the aces, but what was the game?"

(Video: In this short film excerpt, directed by Griffin Dunne, Joan Didion reads a selection from the first chapter of her memoir, Blue Nights.)

Remembering Concorde

Jad Adams details its downfall, on the aircraft's 40th birthday:

Concorde remained in service for 27 years. It would not be a passenger aircraft frequently used by any but the rich, but many ordinary folk did travel on it as a once-in-a-lifetime luxury or as a competition prize. The technology was developed no further, however. By 2000 it could be seen that Concorde’s cockpit was filled with the analogue dials of the mid-20th century. It was as if its creators had become ashamed of Concorde and saw it as a flying museum piece, already part of the past, and would not spend any money to upgrade it.

It's time

The case against thrift

In his book, Against Thrift: Why Consumer Culture Is Good for the Economy, the Environment, and Your Soul, Rutgers history professor James Livingston argues that it is through consumption, not investment, that our economy experiences prosperity. According to Megan McArdle:

Most of our recent woes, especially the housing bust and subsequent disaster, stem from excessive savings, driven by rising inequality. Rich savers with no particularly productive outlet for their capital create bubbles, he says, when society would be better off if ordinary people, and the government, had been given the money to spend rather than save. (Though "Against Thrift" is an argument against saving, it interestingly ends up in the same place as most arguments for it: with a call for greater government redistribution of incomes.)

I approve of this argument.

On Dwight Macdonald

Jennifer Szalai reviews a new essay collection, and reflects on the (near) dead art of literary criticism:

Macdonald specialized in the ruthless takedown, targeting the kind of overblown cultural product that had sufficient critical endorsement to tempt his educated and aspirational readers. In 1952 The New Yorker published “The Book-of-the-Millennium Club,” Macdonald’s public shaming of the Great Books project, which culminates in this grand finale: “The problem is not placing these already available books in people’s hands (at five dollars a volume) but getting people to read them, and the hundred pounds of densely printed, poorly edited reading matter assembled by Drs. Adler and Hutchins is scarcely likely to do that.”

What they were reading

When the author stumbled upon What Middletown Read, an experimental online database which catalogues the records of every book issued from an Indiana public library between 1891 and 1902, he was rather taken by the depth of information made available for browsing:

The website’s deliberately open architecture has made it easy for data hounds, scholarly and otherwise, to jump in. Douglas Galbi, for example recently analyzed the median date of publication of the database’s 20 most popular books: 1878. Hence, he pointed out, these books were probably between 13 and 24 years old when read, far older than the average book checked out nowadays.* Galbi also pointed out Middletown readers’ predilection for government publications: The 1892 Report of the tests of metals and other materials for industrial purposes … had 107 recorded borrowers—Charles Dickens’ Bleak House, by contrast, clocked 28. 

(Image: Sara McKinley, via Slate)

Is Africa on the rise?

It would appear so:

Across the continent, economic growth rates (in per capita terms) have been positive since the late 1990s. And it is not just the economy that has seen rapid improvement: in the 1990s, the majority of African countries held multiparty elections for the first time since the heady postindependence 1960s, and the extent of civic and media freedom on the continent today is unprecedented. Even though Africa's economic growth rates still fall far short of Asia's stratospheric levels, the steady progress that most African countries have experienced has come as welcome news after decades of despair. But that progress raises a critical question: what happened?

Edward Miguel goes on to explain:

Pakistan, the ally from hell

Jeffrey Goldberg and Marc Ambinder put things as they are:

In a country that is home to the harshest variants of Muslim fundamentalism, and to the headquarters of the organizations that espouse these extremist ideologies, including al-Qaeda, the Haqqani network, and Lashkar-e-Taiba (which conducted the devastating terror attacks on Mumbai three years ago that killed nearly 200 civilians), nuclear bombs capable of destroying entire cities are transported in delivery vans on congested and dangerous roads. And Pakistani and American sources say that since the raid on Abbottabad, the Pakistanis have provoked anxiety inside the Pentagon by increasing the pace of these movements. In other words, the Pakistani government is willing to make its nuclear weapons more vulnerable to theft by jihadists simply to hide them from the United States, the country that funds much of its military budget.

The Obama administration appears to be under the deluded impression that continued cooperation with Pakistan is a crucial element in the ongoing war against al-Qaeda-sponsored terrorism around the world – although their relationship, in reality, dwells at a far deeper level of complexity.

Like most self-serving arrangements of this kind, their interests differ greatly, but the disturbing list of infringements and revelations relating to this so-called 'ally' seems to suggest that another name is in order: the poorly-governed country hosted Osama bin Laden, opposes its democratic neighbour, and fosters a 'growing nuclear arsenal'. The ally from hell, indeed.

(Video: Jeffrey Goldberg explains what makes Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal so dangerous)

Orwell vs. Huxley

An infographic.

In Egypt, politics by protest

Mona El-Ghobashy argues that continued demonstrations set the country's agenda:

Many inside and outside Egypt have frowned upon continued protests, seeing them as obstructing progress toward democratic politics. Egyptian political analyst Amr Hamzawy has said that each Egyptian must now “transfer . . . from being a protesting and striking citizen into a participating citizen.” But street demonstrations are participatory politics by other means. They don’t compete with or undermine standard democratic procedures; they deepen democracy by enabling more forms of participation and ensuring that more conventional forms of participation are effective. Now that the uprising is over, Egyptians will not confine their politics to the ballot box. They will enthusiastically vote if elections are free and fair, but they will continue to take to the streets to keep their new rulers in check. 

Also: the role Twitter has played in the Egyptian revolution.

82-year-old tries pop rocks

Who's on the line?

The Times reports that caller ID, widely believed to be the most effective method of detecting annoying telemarketing calls, often provides misleading information about tech-savvy telemarketers – the practice has been dubbed "call laundering." Sounds dreadful.

I hate landline phones – and, in large part, I dislike telephone calls, particularly when I'm unaware of the caller's identity. While I do my very best not to be too rude to telemarketers, it's best to end things quickly: a quick "this isn't applicable" generally does the job, prior placing the phone in its cradle before anything more can be said.

(Just as a side note, I've had posts about this before.)

Sanitising the Obama story

Conor Friedersdorf asks why liberals continue to do it, in response to Jonathan Chait's recent article on the subject:

Telling the story of Obama's first term without including any of it is a shocking failure of liberalism. It's akin to conservatism's unforgivable myopia and apologia during the Bush Administration. Are liberals really more discontented with Obama's failure to reverse the Bush tax cuts than the citizen death warrants he is signing? Is his ham-handed handling of the debt-ceiling really more worthy of mention than the illegal war he waged? Is his willingness to sign deficit reduction that cuts entitlement spending more objectionable than the fact that he outsourced drone strikes to a CIA that often didn't even know the names of the people it was killing? These are the priorities of a perverted liberalism.

Friedersdorf's rebuttal is the best I've seen to the notion that Obama's presidency has been a successful one, but not to the Chait's article in New York. He seems to miss the point entirely. "Liberals are dissatisfied," Chait wrote, "because they are incapable of feeling satisfied."

(Image: Dec. 21, 2010, source)

The failure addict

Rob Horning profiles John Phillips, the musician perhaps best known for his involvement in The Mamas and the Papas, and opines on the nature of fame today:

The internet’s intricate connectivity supplies us an ever-flashing promise of fame, even though it may end up fleeting or slight. Anyone’s social network can make them feel stalked, hounded. Being able to realistically aspire to this kind of fame, on any scale, does more to make failure seem seductive than it does to motivate concrete accomplishments. Being talented is insufficient when one can become notorious. Indeed, in a culture of entrepreneurial self-fashioning, mandatory sharing, and ritualized backslapping, failure may come to seem the true measure of accomplishment. You can revel in your inadequacy because you know you have transcended it. It has become part of your brand.

I feel a Wilde quote coming on.

Image of the Day

"Balloons float down Seventh Avenue through Times Square during the 85th Macy's Thanksgiving day parade in New York November 24, 2011. The Thanksgiving Day parade is the quintessential Thanksgiving event, watched by 50 million turkey-gobbling families across America." (Reuters/Brendan McDermid, via the International Business Times)

With religious claims, compatibility won't do

The article is a little old now – too old by most standards – but Julian Baggini's post in the 'Comment is Free' section of the Guardian is excellent:

The religious believer could bite the bullet, accept that religion does make some empirical claims, and then defend their compatibility with science one by one. But the fact that two beliefs are compatible with each other is the most minimal test of their reasonableness imaginable. All sorts of outlandish beliefs – that the Apollo moon landings never happened, for instance – are compatible with science, but that hardly makes them credible. What really counts, what should really make the difference between assent and rejection of an empirical claim, is not whether it is compatible with science, but whether an evidence-led, rational examination of a view supports it better than competing alternatives.

Keith Ward submits otherwise; Jerry Coyne objects to Ward's argument:

Saying that God created the universe is no more a “perfectly acceptable factual claim” than is “the universe was created by a giant turtle” or “invisible and undetectable fairies move the pistons of my car.” A factual claim is “acceptable” when it is both testable and doesn’t violently contradict what we know of the world. And if “no known scientific technique” can answer the question of whether some deistic act ultimately stated the universe, then, contra Ward, there is no “rational” way to answer such a question.

Ophelia Benson and Jim Houston also weigh in.

How to win your dinner-table arguments

Slate's helpful annual Thanksgiving guide.

Thanksgiving's original menu

These are the questions that keep me up at night.

When did the GOP lose touch with reality?

David Frum has an excellent article in New York magazine on his disenchantment with this current iteration of the Republican Party. He's particularly well-placed in his estimation of Obama critics:

Some of the smartest and most sophisticated people I know—canny investors, erudite authors—sincerely and passionately believe that President Barack Obama has gone far beyond conventional American liberalism and is willfully and relentlessly driving the United States down the road to socialism. No counterevidence will dissuade them from this belief: not record-high corporate profits, not almost 500,000 job losses in the public sector, not the lowest tax rates since the Truman administration. It is not easy to fit this belief alongside the equally strongly held belief that the president is a pitiful, bumbling amateur, dazed and overwhelmed by a job too big for him—and yet that is done too.

(Image: "Candidates before a Republican presidential debate in Washington, Tuesday, Nov. 22, 2011." Evan Vucci, via CBS News)

Define personhood

It's not easy, but we have to draw the line somewhere:

Given that personhood confers such power and security, it’s no wonder that advocates seek to extend the label to the corporations, pets, primates, and fertilized eggs we want to shelter. But since America hasn’t always recognized the rights of certain classes of genuine human beings, it’s understandable that many would be alarmed by the extension of personhood to corporations, poodles, or embryos. These attempts can seem outright demeaning, as in the case of a recent suggestion by PETA that the slavery-abolishing 13th amendment should apply to killer whales at SeaWorld.

For a less legal, and more philosophical view, consult the following post.

"It's a food product, essentially"

I like the part where Megyn Kelly says they're "gonna have to learn more about the facts." Isn't that the perennial Fox News problem? Joe Coscarelli captions:

Last night on Fox News, anchor Megyn Kelly joined Bill O'Reilly to assess just how much the protesters at UC Davis deserved to get pepper-sprayed while staging a nonviolent protest last week. "First of all, pepper spray — that just burns your eyes, right?" O'Reilly asks Kelly, the legal (and apparently chemical) expert. "It's like a derivative of actual pepper," she responds. "It's a food product, essentially." 

And the meme is born.

Confronting internet harassment

Particularly for women, the abuse can be rather shocking:

The social environment seems particularly charged for women covering issues where men feel superior (sports) or emotions run high (politics). Laurie Penny, columnist for The Independent newspaper in London, recently wrote that for women, having an opinion is the “short skirt” of the Internet. “Having one and flaunting it is somehow asking an amorphous mass of almost-entirely male keyboard-bashers to tell you how they’d like to rape, kill and urinate on you.” 

It's rather disgusting, some of the vitriolic remarks one finds in internet comment threads. Stephen Fry has often said that, if looking at a webpage, he never lets his eyes drop to the bottom of the screen, because he becomes "so fantastically upset by people who write comments." Particularly if it's YouTube; that site's almost like the primary dwelling of inanity and, when things get contentious, nastiness.

Quote of the Day

"As long as we try to project from the relative and conditioned to the absolute and unconditioned, we shall keep the pendulum swinging between dogmatism and skepticism. The only way to stop this increasingly tiresome pendulum swing is to change our conception of what philosophy is good for. But that is not something which will be accomplished by a few neat arguments. It will be accomplished, if it ever is, by a long, slow process of cultural change – that is to say, of change in common sense, changes in the intuitions available for being pumped up by philosophical arguments." – Richard Rorty

Nietzsche in America's image

Adam Kirsch reviews Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen's new book, American Nietzsche, and explores the country's unusual relationship with the philosopher:

The great example in recent American philosophy is Richard Rorty, the pragmatist philosopher and liberal sage who died in 2007. Ratner-Rosenhagen shows how Nietzsche provided the inspiration for Rorty’s controversial view that philosophy’s search for stable, objective truths was misguided—a hunt for something that did not exist. “It was Nietzsche,” Rorty wrote, “who first explicitly suggested that we drop the whole idea of ‘knowing the truth.’”

For Nietzsche, however, giving up the belief in objective truth was no mere “drop”; it was a vertiginous, unstoppable fall. It changed everything. Rorty, by contrast, suggests that there is no reason why mankind should not be able to set up a white picket fence in the void. In his 1989 classic Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, he argues that people should continue to fight for social justice even while acknowledging that justice, like truth or goodness, is an essentially meaningless term. 

(Video: Richard Rorty speaking about truth and pragmatism. Taken from "Of Beauty and Consolation" by Wim Kayzer, 2000.)

Booing Putin

The prime minister, you'd think, would be among some of his greatest fans in a martial arts arena. Not so, it seems. Glenn Kates looks into the incident further:

Mitt Romney as a poet

One of my favourites, although it's not quite as good as his earlier work:

I saw the young man over there with eggs Benedict,
With hollandaise sauce.
And I was going to suggest to you that you serve your eggs—
With hollandaise sauce in hubcaps.
Because there’s no plates like chrome—
For the hollandaise.

They should make a book of these. I'd buy it.

Casually pepper spraying cop

Buzzfeed's Matt Stopera is interviewed by NPR about the significance of the 'Casually Pepper Spraying Cop' meme. On the 'danger' that such humour might trivialise the whole event:

There is that danger, but Stopera makes the case that the news about what occurred at UC Davis is now reaching a whole new — and probably younger — audience. If they jump from Tumblr posts with funny or sarcastic images to search for news about what's going on, they end up learning about what happened. And, of course, it is a meme — which means it probably has a life of just another day or two. So if it does dissolve into the silly, it won't be for long.

A whole collection of these here.

The United States of Europe

Niall Ferguson imagines the eurozone in 2021:

It was in the nick of time that the United States of Europe intervened to prevent the scenario that Germans in particular dreaded: a desperate Israeli resort to nuclear arms. Speaking from the U.S.E. Foreign Ministry's handsome new headquarters in the Ringstrasse, the European President Karl von Habsburg explained on Al Jazeera: "First, we were worried about the effect of another oil price hike on our beloved euro. But above all we were afraid of having radioactive fallout on our favorite resorts."

Debunking the 10,000 hour theory

In research made famous by Malcolm Gladwell's Outliers, K. Anders Ericsson observed that the difference between amateurs and masters in any given field is typically hard work, not natural talent. Gladwell explains that "once someone has reached an I.Q. of somewhere around 120, having additional I.Q. points doesn’t seem to translate into any measureable real-world advantage." Although, according to some, we have reason to question this contention:

Vanderbilt University researchers David Lubinski and Camilla Benbow...tracked the educational and occupational accomplishments of more than 2,000 people who as part of a youth talent search scored in the top 1 percent on the SAT by the age of 13. (Scores on the SAT correlate so highly with I.Q. that the psychologist Howard Gardner described it as a “thinly disguised” intelligence test.) The remarkable finding of their study is that, compared with the participants who were “only” in the 99.1 percentile for intellectual ability at age 12, those who were in the 99.9 percentile — the profoundly gifted — were between three and five times more likely to go on to earn a doctorate, secure a patent, publish an article in a scientific journal or publish a literary work. A high level of intellectual ability gives you an enormous real-world advantage. 

Gladwell's work, by the way, is well worth reading. But you've probably read it already, right?

Is Berlusconi really finished?

Benedetta Brevini argues that the outed Italian PM will use his (you might say, substantial) influence to undermine Mario Monti's leadership:

It's easy to predict that Berlusconi will try to protect his personal interests through two important tools: his deputies in parliament and his untouched media empire. That his unchallenged propaganda machine was already at work at the time of his resignation can be easily illustrated. While in Britain, the BBC was broadcasting Berlusconi's resignation live, Italian state and commercial television chose not to show the celebrations of thousands of Italians in front of the presidential palace. On the day of his resignation, Berlusconi also did something unthinkable for a European democracy: he sent a video message to all television stations (public and commercial) to claim the "impressive achievements of his government" and his "doubled commitment" to Italy's future. He also claimed that he never lost the confidence of the parliament.

I like her use of the term 'European democracy'. One can only assume she uses the latter word lightly. The level of influence we see in Berlusconi – including what was previously the combined-control of both state television and his own vast media interests – is a good example of how information control can be used to move a country in one man's direction. This ugly fusion of media ownership and political power is completely incompatible with a functioning democracy. That is, whether the media impresario in question has the nerve to actually run for office or not. This is why journalism is so important as a public service.

In any case, if the freedom of information is not protected, there's potential for a single man to control both a government and its reputation. That's dangerous.

(Image via Euronews and Reuters)

Feeling disappointed with Obama, ctd

On the liberal disappointment with Obama, Jonathan Chait pushes back:

Liberals are dissatisfied with Obama because liberals, on the whole, are incapable of feeling satisfied with a Democratic president. They can be happy with the idea of a Democratic president—indeed, dancing-in-the-streets delirious—but not with the real thing. The various theories of disconsolate liberals all suffer from a failure to compare Obama with any plausible baseline. Instead they compare Obama with an imaginary president—either an imaginary Obama or a fantasy version of a past president.

It certainly seems that way. I don't think that anyone can deny that Obama's performance as president has been thoroughly uninspiring, especially in comparison with the image projected by his campaign. This isn't the administration of hope and change to which voters subscribed in 2008. But although Obama has failed to live up to the enormous hype around his campaign, it would be exceedingly difficult for anyone to doubt his competence. He might not be inspiring, but he certainly isn't incompetent. Like most people, however, I'm a little tired of defending Obama.

Chait goes on to explain why Bill Clinton's role as a liberal fantasy is so oddly misplaced. He also presents conservatives as an interesting counterexample to the liberal perspective on their own presidents, writing that conservative disappointment isn't nearly as common:

The science of deception

Robert Trivers in The New Statesman:

My central claim is that self-deception evolves in the service of deception, sometimes by saving on cognitive load during the act of lying. It also provides an easy defence against accusations of deception (namely, I was unconscious of my actions). In the first case, the self-deceived subject fails to give off the cues that go with consciously mediated deception, thus escaping detection. In the second, the actual process of deception is rendered cognitively less expensive by keeping part of the truth in the unconscious. That is to say, the brain can act more efficiently when it is unaware of the ongoing contradiction. 

When ads are cool

Sex education, moving forward

Laurie Abraham profiles a Philadelphia teacher whose class on the subject is known to be unlike any other. Among others, it raises the issue of how sex education should be adapted for the twenty-first century in the midst of differing opinions on the matter:

Across the country, the approach ranges from abstinence until marriage is the only acceptable choice, contraceptives don’t work and premarital sex is physically and emotionally harmful, to abstinence is usually best, but if you must have sex, here are some ways to protect yourself from pregnancy and disease. The latter has been called “disaster prevention” education by sex educators who wish they could teach more; a dramatic example of the former comes in a video called “No Second Chances,” which has been used in abstinence-only courses. In it, a student asks a school nurse, “What if I want to have sex before I get married?” To which the nurse replies, “Well, I guess you’ll just have to be prepared to die.”

The future of torture

Obama has 'left the door open' for state-sanctioned torture to be a part of any future War on Terror in the United States, and if he loses the presidency, there's a possibility that it might reemerge. Eric Lewis warns:

A South-African style truth commission, which would have had the virtue of getting all the facts out into the open and at least creating a record that would have precluded future officials from claiming that there was ambiguity or uncertainty about whether they had the power to torture under the Constitution, didn’t happen either, despite earlier indications of support. Harboring a vain hope for what has turned out to be imaginary reconciliation, the Obama administration has failed in its legal and moral obligation to create an effective and durable bar to torture. 

Andrew Sullivan confronts the persistence of American exceptionalism in a Republican Party that endorses torture.

Where print is still winning

While much of the world's print industry seems to be sinking, India's newspapermen appear to be doing just fine. Much of it is due to the poor online offerings in the country:

For all the country's vaunted IT prowess, only 6.9% of Indians regularly surf the web. Apart from a smattering of web-exclusive news, newspaper websites tend to be a photocopy of print editions. They are dependent on wire services like PTI, Reuters, and the like, to fill online column inches. Most regional and vernacular newspaper websites are infamous for shoddy user interfaces and broken links.

Just as an aside, I recently saw the documentary Page One: Inside the New York Times. I found it extremely interesting, and was surprised to learn that it was poorly received by critics. Perhaps I found it more engaging because – let's face it – I've had something of a media crush on the Times for a long time now, much like my New Yorker obsession.

While anyone on the internet is sure to believe in the power of their medium, I don't have the Huffington-style ignorance of believing that everything is well in the world of distribution. People's appetite for journalism hasn't diminished, we're told: if anything, it has greatly intensified. It's the distribution that matters.

But the media industry is in an awkward position. One of the legs is being sawn slowly from its stool, and until everything moves online, it's unlikely that the kind of important journalism we need will get the funding it deserves. While sending reporters to warzones may strike accountants as a financial indulgence, the reality is that it's a journalistic and cultural necessity. I don't think you'll find a Huffington Post reporter in Kabul anytime soon.

Although I get almost all of my news and analysis online, most of it isn't native to the internet; it was intended for dead trees. The transformation hasn't really happened yet.

Faith and American exceptionalism

Is the United States, in the words of George W. Bush, "chosen by God and commissioned by history to be a model to the world"? Hitchens responds:

Anybody claiming to have the answer to that question—as George W. Bush once seemed to do—would be a fool. For a start, what would be his sources of information? And how good a historian would he be? In the long view, very few of the survivors of the Roman Empire would have predicted that the inhabitants of the frozen and backward British Isles would be among the next builders of a global system, but so it proved. And there was no question that the British or English, especially the Protestant fundamentalist ones, believed that they had God on their side. In fact, I know of no European state that doesn’t have some kind of national myth to the same effect. The problem, as everybody knows, is that not all these myths can be simultaneously right. 

(Image: Then-Senator Barack Obama addresses a crowd at Brown Chapel AME Church March 4, 2007. Photo by Scott Olson/Getty Images, via The Examiner)

"Unrealism"

Another review of 1Q84:

Murakami’s novels, stories, and nonfiction refuse to make such distinctions, or, rather, they display, often very bravely and beautifully, the pull of the unreal and the fantastical on ordinary citizens who, unable to bear the world they have been given, desperately wish to go somewhere else. The resulting narratives conform to what I have called Unrealism. In Unrealism, characters join cults. They believe in the apocalypse and Armageddon, or they go down various rabbit holes and arrive in what Murakami himself, in a bow to Lewis Carroll, calls Wonderland.

Is no news better than Fox News?

Yes, apparently.

What makes music boring?

Steven Hyden attempts to answer the question, unsuccessfully:

Bon Iver, Fleet Foxes, The Decemberists, St. Vincent, Wilco, Coldplay, Feist, The National, Grizzly Bear—I like some of these artists, and I don’t like others. They’re all pretty different, but they all have one thing in common: They’re “boring.”

I don't know if they're boring or not – frankly, I couldn't care less; I like them. Except for Coldplay: I've talked about this before, of course.

Tackling inequality

Larry Summers posits that we need to do better, and issues a few warnings:

Government must be careful that it does not facilitate increases in inequality by rewarding the wealthy with special concessions. Where governments dispose of assets or allocate licences, there is a compelling case for more use of auctions to which all have access. Where government provides insurance implicitly or explicitly, premiums must be set as much as possible on a market basis rather than in consultation with the affected industry. A general posture for government of standing up for capitalism rather than particular well-connected capitalists would also serve to mitigate inequality. 

We can all easily grasp the concept of income inequality, but has anyone actually considered the implausibility of income equality? Would we rather the gap were smaller, but everyone – including the already poor – poorer, or would we prefer that the gap be larger, but everyone generally better off?

Feeling disappointed with Obama, ctd

Evert Cilliers certainly is:

That was the core of Obama's appeal: in a time of darkness, he promised hope and change, and delivered his message with a gift of eloquence the world had last seen in Dr. King. Obama fed us warm, comforting, soaring and inspiring bullshit that moved us to the very bullshitted depths of our bullshittingest souls. Being a nation of bullshitters, we're ready to follow whoever among us proves to be the best and brightest bullshitter of them all. That guy is Obama, the finest spinner of BS since Jesus told the meek they'll inherit the earth.

At UC Davis, calm brutality, ctd

Xeni Jardin captions:

UC Davis students, silent, with linked arms, confront Chancellor Linda Katehi just one day after the incident. It's hard to tell exactly how many of them are present, but there they are, a huge crowd. They're seated in the same cross-legged-on-the-ground position their fellow students were yesterday just before Lt. John Pike pulled out a can of pepper spray and pulled the trigger.

With regard to the incident itself, Alexis Madrigal writes that he feels sorry for Lt. John Pike, the officer involved:

While it's his finger pulling the trigger, the police system is what put him in the position to be standing in front of those students. I am sure that he is a man like me, and he didn't become a cop to shoot history majors with pepper spray. But the current policing paradigm requires that students get shot in the eyes with a chemical weapon if they resist, however peaceably. Someone has to do it. And while the kids may cough up blood and writhe in pain, what happens to the man who does it is in some ways much, much worse.

A professor at the university denounces the new tactics used by police to diffuse protesters:

"Who is John Galt?"

Molly Worthen dissects the platitudinous Randian catchphrase, and explains why you're likely to see it on tote bags for a long time to come:

[Ayn] Rand’s critics have called her a bad novelist and a mediocre philosopher—a “fifth-rate Nietzsche of the mini-malls,” as one writer put it in these pages. But mediocre philosophy sells: It makes the half-literate consumer feel smart. (See for example the success of Avatar, the highest-grossing film of all time.) Rand was a success even in her lifetime and has never really gone out of style, her paperbacks a fixture in the back pockets of angst-ridden teenage boys everywhere. 

A devoted fan of Rand lent me his copy of Atlas Shrugged around a year ago. When I asked a maths teacher what he thought of her work, his only criticism was that it 'needs editing', or something to that effect. In any case, I only made it through about one hundred pages of the damn thing before it was left to collect dust on my desk, only to be returned shortly after because, well, we try to be polite about borrowing things.

I confess some agreement with Rand on a couple of issues, but her overall philosophy does strike me as a little redundant. Does selfishness really need its own apologist? Does it deserve one?

Quote of the Day

"We can thus imagine a technologically highly advanced society, containing many sorts of complex structures, some of which are much smarter and more intricate than anything that exists today, in which there would nevertheless be a complete absence of any type of being whose welfare has moral significance. In a sense, this would be an uninhabited society. All the kinds of being that we care even remotely about would have vanished… the catastrophe would be that such a world would not contain even the right kind of machines, i.e. ones that are conscious and whose welfare matters." – Bostrom, 2004

On the nature of identity

J. Hughes examines the debate over the existence of a 'persistent self':

Fifty years after Locke the Scottish philosopher David Hume dissected the self and argued that it, like all enduring substance, was a perceptual illusion. In his Treatise on Human Nature he argues the self is an illusion created by the contiguity of sense perceptions and thoughts. The self is merely a “…a bundle or collection of different perceptions which succeed one another with an inconceivable rapidity and are in perpetual flux and movement” (Hume, 1739).

While for Locke memory was the core of personal identity, knitting together past and present selves, for Hume memory created the illusion that there was some kind continuity between past and present mental states. The contradiction between the Enlightenment’s foundational concept of Lockeian selfhood and the Humeian, empiricist recognition that the self is a fiction lay dormant until the twentieth century when neuroscience, another product of the Enlightenment, revived the debate. As neuroscientists collected accounts of patients with localized lesions and degenerative diseases - men who mistook their wives for hats, or who could form no long term memories and were persistently in the last ten minutes, or were certain they were in the wrong body - they began to create an empirical model of the ways that the brain creates the ongoing narrative of the self, and illustrate just how malleable and fragile that narrative is.

While lighter, you might also be interested in this New Yorker profile of the philosopher Derek Parfit, who is mentioned in Hughes' post.

Vonnegut as a master of self-marketing

James Camp reviews And So It Goes: Kurt Vonnegut: A Life. On how the author cultivated his public persona:

Mr. Shield’s biography of Vonnegut takes its title from Slaughterhouse-Five, where it occurs dozens of times; it is the perennial refrain of bad news. “He was arrested for plundering. He was tried and shot. So it goes.” The phrase encapsulates the attitude of wistful passivity that readers correctly associate with Vonnegut’s fiction. But it is an ironic title for the biography of the man himself, because Kurt Vonnegut the illustrious author was a strenuous work of artifice, whose fate was anything but thrust upon him. “We are what we pretend to be,” Vonnegut wrote in his third novel, Mother Night (1961), “so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.” He was a scrupulous pretender who heeded his own advice.

(Image: Kurt Vonnegut. Photo by Gil Friedberg/Pix Inc./Time Life Pictures/Getty Images)

At UC Davis, calm brutality

James Fallows makes a valid point:

I can't see any legitimate basis for police action like what is shown here. Watch that first minute and think how we'd react if we saw it coming from some riot-control unit in China, or in Syria. The calm of the officer who walks up and in a leisurely way pepper-sprays unarmed and passive people right in the face? We'd think: this is what happens when authority is unaccountable and has lost any sense of human connection to a subject population. That's what I think here.

It's unthinkable that the brutality seen in the (now well circulated) raw footage is in any way a reasonable reaction. No doubt, there are legitimate concerns about the balance between people's right to protest, and the right of certain institutions to control the land they own; likewise, there's a tradeoff between allowing people to protest, and allowing others to go about their business without hindrance or delay, as Fallows mentions.

At any rate, however, nothing could call for the use of a submission-tool commonly associated with self-defense. From what did the police need to defend themselves? A group of peaceful protesters, however annoying, do not beg for this kind of action. It's shocking, especially the calmness with which the police officer used the pepper spray. It's always saddening to see unprofessionalism like this – but rarely does the public have the displeasure to witness it as the work of police.

An assistant professor at UC Davis calls for the resignation of Chancellor Linda P.B. Katehi, in an open letter:

One of the most inspiring things (inspiring for those of us who care about students who assert their rights to free speech and peaceful assembly) about the demonstration in Berkeley on November 9 is that UC Berkeley faculty stood together with students, their arms linked together. Associate Professor of English Celeste Langan was grabbed by her hair, thrown on the ground, and arrested. Associate Professor Geoffrey O’Brien was injured by baton blows. Professor Robert Hass, former Poet Laureate of the United States, National Book Award and Pulitzer Prize winner, was also struck with a baton. These faculty stood together with students in solidarity, and they too were beaten and arrested by the police. In writing this letter, I stand together with those faculty and with the students they supported.

I am writing to tell you in no uncertain terms that there must be space for protest on our campus. There must be space for political dissent on our campus. There must be space for civil disobedience on our campus. There must be space for students to assert their right to decide on the form of their protest, their dissent, and their civil disobedience—including the simple act of setting up tents in solidarity with other students who have done so. There must be space for protest and dissent, especially, when the object of protest and dissent is police brutality itself. You may not order police to forcefully disperse student protesters peacefully protesting police brutality. You may not do so. It is not an option available to you as the Chancellor of a UC campus. That is why I am calling for your immediate resignation.

I can't imagine that the writer is alone.

(Video: "During peacefully Occupy Movement, police came in to tear down tents and proceeded to arrest students who stood in their way. Once students peacefully demanded the release of the arrested, a police officer [Police Lt. John Pike] unnecessarily pepper sprays the students to open a path for the rest of the officers.")

Religion in outer space

An artist imagines it.

Almost like battery acid

Dental concerns about sour sweets (an oxymoron?).

What is actually meant by "organic" food?

Lee Silver takes a closer look at claims surrounding the benefits of organic food:

Organic food is defined not by any material substance in the food itself, but instead by the "holistic" methods used on organic farms. Furthermore, the physical attributes of the product and any effects it might have on environment or health are explicitly excluded from U.S., European, and international definitions.

The implicit, unproven assumption is that organic agriculture is -- by its very nature -- better for the environment than so-called conventional farming. The European Commission states as a matter of fact that "organic farmers use a range of techniques that help sustain ecosystems and reduce pollution." Yet, according to self-imposed organic rules, genetic modification in the laboratory is strictly forbidden, even if its purpose is to reduce an animal's negative impact on the environment.

I've always been a little sceptical about the whole business of organic food, and hasten to remind myself whenever faced with organic products of how little that actually means, if anything at all. All too often, people exhibit an unfailing propensity to lend themselves to all sorts of unsubstantiated bullshit. Cynicism, in all the right doses, can help ward off such curses.

On the capture of Seif al-Islam

Jon Lee Anderson considers the possible outcome:

If he survives his detention in Zintan—not necessarily a foregone conclusion—Seif al-Islam may well end up in the Hague as a defendant at the International Criminal Court, which issued an arrest warrant against him for war crimes in June, together with his father and his uncle Abdullah al-Senussi, who is still a fugitive. If he gets to court, Seif al-Islam could likely embarrass a great many people, in Libya, but especially abroad. As an example of his willingness to do so, while still underground, angered over the leading French role in the NATO campaign to unseat his father, Seif claimed that Libya had secretly helped bankroll Nicolas Sarkozy’s last election campaign.

Image of the Day

There's a whole collection of these.

Feeling disappointed with Obama

John Cassidy isn't:

Back in 2008, I viewed him not as a transformative political figure but as a moderate, talented young Democrat, whose speaking skills and keen intelligence partly made up for his lack of experience. In a classic “time for a change” election, he was the right man in the right place. As President, I think Obama has done a fairly decent job of cleaning up the financial mess he inherited, keeping the economy afloat, and restoring America’s reputation in the world.

Unfortunately for Obama, the sensible Cassidy's reluctance to view him as some sort of political messiah wasn't shared widely. The 'transformative political figure' seems to me a sort of understatement: people really did think he could solve so many of their problems. You can imagine their disappointment at the result.

Like Cassidy, I still believe that Obama is a competent leader, and was certainly the most favourable option at the time. (Can you imagine Vice President Palin romping around the White House?) What many people seem to forget is that John McCain disqualified himself in selecting that fatuous bint for a running mate. Apologies for the harsh words, but anyone (with sense) who held faith in McCain surely lost it with his selection for a vice presidential nominee – who, I might add, is essentially an understudy for the office of president. It's amazing how many people were prepared to risk the prospect of Pres. Palin.

Nietzsche's popularity

Brian Leiter argues it's because the philosopher, unlike so many of his contemporaries, was actually a great writer:

He’s a great stylist, he’s funny, he’s interesting, he’s a bit wicked, he’s rude. And he touches on almost every aspect of human life and he has something to say about it that’s usually somewhat provocative and intriguing. I think that’s the crucial reason why Nietzsche is so popular. Indeed, he’s probably more popular outside academic philosophy because he’s so hostile to the main traditions in Western philosophy.

The science of sarcasm

Or the neuroscience behind our detection of it. Although it comes easily to most of us, for some it's decidedly more difficult:

Many parts of the brain are involved in processing sarcasm, according to recent brain imaging studies. Rankin has found that the temporal lobes and the parahippocampus are involved in picking up the sarcastic tone of voice. While the left hemisphere of the brain seems to be responsible for interpreting literal statements, the right hemisphere and both frontal lobes seem to be involved in figuring out when the literal statement is intended to mean exactly the opposite, according to a study by researchers at the University of Haifa. Or you could just get a sarcasm detection device.

Sarcasm seems to receive rather bad press in the collective spheres of wit and humour. Many often opine, in a truly asinine manner, that the particular mode is the 'lowest form' of wit. I've often thought about writing an essay in defense of sarcasm; I don't think anyone would take issue with the argument that those who comment on the 'lowest form of wit' aren't particularly witty people to begin with.

Much like those who say that swearing is a sign of a low vocabulary. Are they in any position to comment? At least we haven't gone on to question whether women are funny – a debate which always turns at least a few female heads.

America's 'hipsterfication'

"What's funny is that people who aren't hipsters generally express distaste for them and those who appear to be hipsters hate to be identified as such. Everybody hates hipsters ... especially hipsters." Linton Weeks examines the rise of hipster culture:

You might think that as hipsterism ripples out, in concentric (and eccentric) circles farther and farther from its big-city epicenters, the ultra-coolitude would lose its authenticity, [Peter] Furia says, "but the opposite may be true. Cities are known for setting trends; hipsterism is about anti-trends. It sounds funny, but hipsters in Omaha may actually be cooler than hipsters in New York City — everyone knows about New York City."

Justice for gay Ugandans?

Alexis Okeowo recalls the shocking murder of Ugandan gay rights activist David Kato, and indicates that the country's gay rights battle is becoming disturbingly deadly:

We are left with many questions. What really happened that afternoon? Does this case signal a stride for justice for gay and lesbian Ugandans? The answer to the first is still hazy. There are some clues as to the second. Last month, the country’s first openly gay bar was suddenly shut down. Sappho Islands had been a haven for young and older gay Ugandans; its owner had arrived to the bar on a weekend to find a padlock placed on the door. Her landlord told her that the bar was too noisy, and that it attracted “strange” people. A couple of weeks later, Ugandan media reported that parliamentarians had voted to reopen debate on the Anti-Homosexuality Bill, including the provision that would sentence gays to the death penalty for the offense of being homosexual.

(Image: "In October 2010, Rolling Stone, a newspaper in Kampala, published photographs of gay Ugandans. Included was one of David Kato." Associated Press, via the New York Times)

Occupy vs. the Tea Party

Twitter activity, visualised.

The Mormon 'problem'

With Mitt Romney looking the likely contender to face Obama, Max Perry Mueller asks if the church has evolved its controversial positions on race:

Until 1978, black men were forbidden from holding the Mormon priesthood, a sacred status that almost every Mormon male attains, and black couples could not marry in Mormon temples, a revered ceremony that Mormons believe unites the family for eternity. This aspect of LDS history will probably prove less of a problem for Romney than for his Church, which is actively trying to change the dominant perception of Mormons as all but exclusively white. Romney’s presidential bid does not rely on the black vote, and he has put distance between himself and the history of racial exclusion once practiced by his church.

What's in a photo?

Andreas Gursky's Rhein II, above, sold for $4,338,500 at Christie's Auction House last week to an anonymous buyer. Which leaves we mere mortals to ponder what makes it so special:

The Rhine is "one of the most symbolic motifs in German art," says Francis Outred, head of Europe in post-war and contemporary art at Christie's. It runs through Gursky's hometown of Dusseldorf, as well as six European countries, and has inspired art for centuries. But Outred contends that this photo is exceptional: "One of the most powerful and profound depictions ever to be created of the Rhine, the photo's unique scale draws an ineffable link to the actual natural landscape, inviting the viewer to cross over into its vivid picture plane."

I'll ponder on, thanks.

Almost...

As I explained few days ago, I've been sitting exams lately, and haven't had the time to do much blogging. Today, as promised, was my last exam for almost a week – English, as it happens. Next week, on Thursday, I'll be returning to school for a history exam, but that shouldn't cause too much disruption. In any case, the blogging will pick up a little this week. Thanks for your patience.

OWS after the eviction

Astra Taylor reamins optimistic about the movement's future:

Anticipating just this kind of raid, organizers have been working on how to broaden the movement, to expand it beyond a single protest method or particular piece of cement. For example, occupations could evolve to become more mobile, tactical, and purposely temporary. In other words, a semi-permanent encampment is not the only way to occupy. And tweaking our methods may actually help make the movement more inclusive, as not everyone who is sympathetic to OWS can or wants to commit to living full-time in a tent.

As many have already pointed out, the eviction was a less-than-ideal political move on Bloomberg's part, assuming his goal is to end the occupation. Taylor exhibits the kind of enthusiasm brought on by resistance: in making the occupiers leave, they've broadened the notion that protesters and police are not in a supervisory-type relationship, but instead really are at war with one another.

Expect it to go on longer, even if we're not too interested in hearing about it.

A new GOP candidate!

This is why I love The Onion.

Voltaire's dictionary

Nicholas Lezard reviews Voltaire's A Pocket Philosophical Dictionary:

One of the reasons I checked against the original was because I thought: hang on, has this been gussied up to attract a modern audience? It hasn't. And it's one good reason why this book is still the first one you need on your shelves if you want to be part of the Dawkins/Dennett anti-religious crusade. (In fact, this book pre-emptively renders those works unnecessary. Not Hitchens's, though, because it's so well-written, and so could be said to be more Voltairean than the others'.) His routine is basically to point out, under almost randomly generated headings, stupidities and inconsistencies in the Bible, or in examples of religious intolerance, or of cruel and bone-headed dogmatism.

OWS is evicted

Early on Wednesday morning, New York Police officers raided Zucotti Park, evicting the occupiers who had camped there for almost two months. James Downie bemoans the eviction as an affront to free speech:

At 1 a.m. this morning, in the heart of New York City, protesters exercising their constitutional rights to free speech and assembly were swept away by the state, while that state also did all it could to preventmedia coverage. No matter what one may think of the occupiers or their cause, nothing they’ve done justifies blockading the press or ignoring court orders. Mayor Bloomberg, Police Commissioner Ray Kelly and other New York leaders who ordered the eviction should take a long, hard look at their handling of the occupation. This morning’s action may not be what a police state looks like, but it’s certainly how one begins.

Of course, the question remains as to whether Bloomberg has really solved the problem, or actually just given the protesters a greater sense of purpose. I think Matthew Yglesias might be right:

OWS was either going to end with the cops clearing the park, or else it was going to end with the protestors losing interest. It would be totally human and understandable for the protestors to end up fading away as the weather gets colder, but that would be demoralizing to everyone who’s come to look at the various Occupations as a key signal of popular discontent with rampant inequality. Instead, by ordering the protestors to be removed the Bloomberg administration has ensured continued relevance for the issue.

(Image: "Zuccotti Park was empty on Tuesday morning." Angel Franco/The New York Times)

Shrugging off Ayn Rand

"Her ideas are alive and well-represented in the U.S. Capitol."

Oops

We may have known that he's not good with foreign policy, and it may not have been as public, but this one belongs to Herman Cain:



Michelle Malkin, in one of her smarter moments, cringes:

Cain makes Rick Perry look like a Mensa president.

Daniel Drezner:

There's a mercy rule in Little League, and I'm applying it here -- unless and until Herman Cain surges back in the polls again, or manages to muster something approaching cogency in his foreign policy statements, there's no point in blogging about him anymore. I can only pick on an ignoramus so many times before it feels sadistic. 

Jonathan Chait has the best response of all:

He simply knew nothing about the subject. And this isn't some obscure corner of foreign policy; this is a widely covered war in which the United States just participated! The highlight may be when Cain, visibly struggling to pull out the file in his brain where some handler explained to him what Libya is, says, "Got all this stuff twirling around in my head." Don't listen to the voices, Herman!

Berlusconi's forced downfall

I know: finally. James Fallows expresses some measure of mixed feelings:

I am as happy as the next person to see the well-deserved end to Silvio Berlusconi's reign in Italy. But I don't think many people can, or should, feel too happy about this second resignation of a democratically elected government (after Papandreou in Greece) because of pressure from bankers outside the country's borders. 

Have we had enough Republican debates?

Alex Massie puts them in a nutshell:

The debates feel like the awkward annual Thanksgiving family reunion you nonetheless secretly kind of look forward to attending. Here’s drunk Uncle Rick, forgetting what he meant to say, and there's cousin Ron, ever peddling his conspiracy theories. Who will Uncle Herman get inappropriate with this year? Then there’s the sadly poignant example of Grandpa Newt, from whom you get the uncomfortable impression that he will soon return to debating historical figures while sitting in his underwear in the privacy of his own home. (“What kind of name is Ulysses, anyway? Sounds vaguely Mohammadian...”)

Even Obama has less-than-kind words about the Republican debates. His campaign advertising strategy? Play clips from the Republican debates. "We won't even comment on them, we'll just run those in a loop on Univision and Telemundo, and people can make up their own minds." It might just work.

(Image: "Republican presidential candidates Newt Gingrich, left, speaks as Mitt Romney, listens during the CBS News/National Journal foreign policy debate at the Benjamin Johnson Arena, Saturday, Nov. 12, 2011 in Spartanburg, S.C." (AP Photo/Richard Shiro, source)

Forgive me

Because New Zealand secondary school students, such as myself, will be tasked with demonstrating an entire year's learning in a cluster of three hour sessions over the next couple of weeks, I shan't be keeping my regular blogging schedule. I must apologise for not organising some sort of guestblogger to ease the pain – sadly, such planning has never been a strong point. Nor has numeracy, and my ability (or, rather, demonstrable lack thereof) will undoubtedly be exhibited in the triad/trinity (personally, I like 'trinity') of evil that is my first three exams: accounting, physics, and mathematics. Good Lord, help me.

As you can understand, this will ensure that maintaining the blogging rhythm to which I aspire will be difficult. Thank you for your patience, especially given that my content-outflow hasn't been wonderful as of late. At any rate, I'll see you at the weekend, when I have a bit of time in which to prepare for my last exam. I'll start posting again just after midday this Friday (that's around Thursday night for those of you on EST). See you then.

May the forced silence begin!

"Do the dishes like nobody's watching"

(via Kottke)

Michael Moore among the 1%, ctd

A reader tweets:

Not even the 1% for Michael Moore. More like the 0.1%. It's so ridiculous.

I've heard a few suggestions of this, and – yes – it is ridiculous. The piece gives little detail, but Moore's own response to criticism is worth reading.

Quitting Facebook

Michael Erard discusses the new genre of essays about the act (one I have often considered myself), and the etiquette of letting one's friends know via a status update:

Another thing I did not write about quitting Facebook was that one of the great social pleasures in my life has been to leave gatherings or parties unannounced. You know, when the party is socked in solid from the front door to the kitchen, and the conversation is drying up like old squeezed limes, it’s easiest to keep heading out the back. How cool the night. How open and unquestioning the darkness. “French leave,” we English speakers say. (“English leave,” the French say.) Often I went to parties to be able to vanish from them.