BrainMortgage

The Vatican Assimilates Marx

2009-10-22T23:06:00.003-04:00

(((Marx turns out to have been pretty important, even from the point of view of Catholicism, which has traditionally not been so warm -- leaving aside, of course, a wing of the Society of Jesus.)))

I see that the Vatican has extended its recantation of past hostilities from Darwin to that other bete noir of contemporary piety, Karl Marx, the (grand)father of "godless" communism. Said The Times,

L’Osservatore Romano, the Vatican newspaper, said yesterday that Marx’s early critiques of capitalism had highlighted the “social alienation” felt by the “large part of humanity” that remained excluded, even now, from economic and political decision-making.

Georg Sans, a German-born professor of the history of contemporary philosophy at the pontifical Gregorian University, wrote in an article that Marx’s work remained especially relevant today as mankind was seeking “a new harmony” between its needs and the natural environment. He also said that Marx’s theories may help to explain the enduring issue of income inequality within capitalist societies.

“We have to ask ourselves, with Marx, whether the forms of alienation of which he spoke have their origin in the capitalist system,” Professor Sans wrote. “If money as such does not multiply on its own, how are we to explain the accumulation of wealth in the hands of the few?”

With Darwin, Galileo, and Oscar Wilde now in the fold, what's an atheist to do? Is there nothing that is incompatible with Catholicism? Maybe this is like the parable of the rich man's banquet . . . they're out in the streets dragging in the scientists and atheists and social delinquents. That'll do.

Mandating and Incentivizing Health Care

2009-10-09T11:37:00.003-04:00

(((The logic of mandates and penalties in health insurance; it's really hilarious to be lectured on how the penalties actually have to mean something by industry representatives with actuaries who probably do those very calculations for every move these companies make.)))

Blue Cross/Blue Shield representative on Morning Edition this morning sounding all sternly maternal, pointing out that a mandate has to be a mandate, and if there's no penalty for not buying into the health care system, people will find it much more reasonable to pay some small fine than to pay what it takes to buy insurance.

Wait, you're saying small fines for breaking the laws, not abiding by guidelines, missing certain kinds of targets, and so on, those fines can be worth paying when you stand to pay less overall -- or even, let's say, make lots more money -- by going ahead and doing what you're not supposed to do?

Shocking. It's as if the private sector has thought about this before. And, well, it's like they've all become . . . socialists! Obama wins!

American Conservatism Lacks Political Imagination

2009-09-20T16:10:00.004-04:00

(((Irving Kristol dies; who is left on the American right? cons and neo-cons; who's left on the American left?)))

Hey, it isn't me. I'm just quoting Irving Kristol:

Kristol adds, "American conservatism lacks for political imagination. It's so influenced by business culture and by business modes of thinking that it lacks any political imagination, which has always been, I have to say, a property of the left." He goes on, "If you read Marx, you'd learn what a political imagination could do."

As I noted in a comment on FB, it's not like there's a lot of imagination in the American left these days, which I am tempted to say (à la Badiou) is too dominated by party culture and party modes of thinking, when it's not dominated by the false hope of achieving its goals through the Dem party. But I'll admit I'm not prepared to elaborate on that stuff yet. That's coming when I get around to posting on The Meaning of Sarkozy.

Thanks to Doug for remembering this quote from this old but still very interesting essay of Corey Robin's.

Finding your way through (a) book(s)

2009-09-06T11:22:00.005-04:00

(((Prep school ditches physical books in favor of digital "books;" what about the "geographical" aspects of reading?)))

A Boston Globe story about Cushing Academy ditching their library for some Kindles is making the rounds. There is, of course, much to quibble with in this decision, including this peculiar way of framing it:

“Instead of a traditional library with 20,000 books, we’re building a virtual library where students will have access to millions of books,’’ said Tracy, whose office shelves remain lined with books. “We see this as a model for the 21st-century school.’’

I really don't understand why "traditional library" and "virtual library" are mutually exclusive. Except, maybe, for bad pricing models.

My main reason for preferring to do my Serious Reading with books, rather than on my laptop or a reader, is that I have yet to find a reading device that lets me interact with the text in the same way that a book does. For the minimal cost of a pencil (or perhaps a Sharpie acid-free pen, ahem), I can react to the book in the book, including circling and drawing lines and writing notes, connecting notes to each other or places in the text, and connecting pieces of the text to each other. Some of this can be done digitally, but some of it so far cannot -- especially the drawing of lines.

But that is not going to be my Argument For Books.

My AFB is about geography.

Argument Part the First

When I read a physical text, I get a feel for where in the text something is, literally, physically, "geographically" where. I know it's at the beginning, the middle, the end, at the top of a page, on a "left-hand" page or a "right-hand" page, and so on. This physical, tactile aspect of reading contributes to memory, which a forthcoming post will say is essential to the very possibility of critical, analytical thinking. What I worry about with screen reading, and I do it all the time, by the way, is that this geographic aspect of reading gets lost, and then our reading bypasses a lot of the mental architecture we have for remembering things we've read. For shorter stuff, this "geographical" aspect doesn't matter -- there's not enough geography to the text. For War and Peace or Being and Time or The Odyssey, on the other hand? That said, this way of reading might suit many Christians in their approach to the Bible, where verses devoid of historical or textual context stand entirely alone, or, conversely, it is more important to look back at Zechariah to understand that passage in Matthew than to read the rest of the story in Matthew.

Argument Part the Second

Space is not only important in terms of one's interaction with a single book, but also in terms of one's interaction with multiple books or even texts of shorter length. Colleagues of mine recently expressed frustration at how little of a text they could see at once when they're writing (one of the reasons I sometimes compose online, but for my longer stuff I always edit a printed copy). This limitation applies in spades to working with multiple texts: there is nothing like working on a problem where you are dealing with multiple texts and/or multiple readings of those texts, and having the books spread out on a table or desk in front of you. This is just not the same as flipping between windows on screen, even though the screen in that case takes on a geographical element, and of course the idea of a desktop or of "screen real estate" uses spatial metaphors.

The problem is that there isn't enough space, and it's simply not malleable enough. It can't be. Why not? While in certain respects you could say that there are infinite dimensions in a computer screen, the truth is that, in terms of the ways humans process visual information, there are not. The visual information communicated by a single book in your hands, or by piles of books and articles and note papers strewn about a desk is richer and more intuitive, taking in the scene tells you about what you have in front of you without your even thinking about it.* How deep is a stack of windows on your computer? It could be a hundred, or it could be two, but how would you know? On a table, you just look, and you don't even think about it. The flattening effect of the screen is in this respect positively debilitating. And we know this, which is why people talk about screen real estate in the first place: we know it matters to have stuff spread out in front of you, rather than buried in a virtual pile. Programmers and designers want big monitors because they need to be able to see stuff easily and not always be shuffling windows from the front to the back -- or top to bottom -- note how there is no difference when we talk about computer screens. It's the simple difference between two and three physical -- not virtual -- dimensions.

I love my computers. Both of them. Couldn't live without them. But they are not replacements for books. And thinking about my comments above about editing, by the way, has me thinking about the effects of this spatial/geographical problem and blog posts . . .

* See the forthcoming post of an article from a cognitive scientist about human processing of information, and in particular the relation of thinking to memory. In short: we remember more than we think, and rely on memory more than we rely on "new" thinking, and even when we think, we think using stuff we remember. So, learning to think is not just a matter of learning "how to think", understood as some pure or abstract skill divorced from content. And content is not just a matter of having something to think about, but of having something to think with. Learning to think is, in fact, in no small part, learning content.

Active Learning is Passive, Too

2009-09-05T15:20:00.000-04:00

(((The latest and greatest in ed theory; did anyone ever learn anything before there were education departments? I should note that when I say "our students" and "my students," below, I am speaking in very broad strokes, about students in general, not about any student or students in particular. The question here is pedagogy and how we ought to approach teaching our students. I was working on this before the semester started, so: emphatically not a response to any particular classroom experience.)))

I'm getting really sick and tired of the discourse and attitude around so-called "active learning." This latest shibboleth (although it is not terribly new, by the way) says "passive learning" is bad, and what we're doing if we lecture (which I actually almost never do, anyway, but I'm pretty good at it when I do) -- or, worse, if we don't do the spiffy in-class projects classified as "active" -- is relegate students to passivity, and, so, to not actually learning.

Maybe our students could learn to take in lectures and discussions ACTIVELY, so that, you know, they could ask questions. Why is a conversation or lecture passive? Because students let it be. I don't remember ever in my life listening to a lecture and not thinking about it, even if I thought it was crap. If I wasn't thinking about it, I wasn't listening to it. At all. I read the same way. Unless thinking is passive, there is an issue when "active learning" doesn't include "active listening."

Ah, but here is the problem. Our students approach listening exactly the same way they approach reading: passively. Reading is not supposed to be any work. Textbooks, alas, encourage this, and that is why I don't use them. I make my students buy and read real books. And as far as I can tell, they skim lectures, trying to figure out what the word or fact is that they're supposed to write down -- so they don't know at all how to parse discussion, for example, and in the case of lectures, they don't pay attention until they've heard a word or phrase that sounds like it ought to be written down . . . by which time, they will have missed everything or almost everything that makes said word or phrase meaningful. There are certainly poor lecturers in the world, but this does not make lectures as such the cause of passive listening. Passive listeners are the cause of passive listening; or my other (not mutually exclusive) pet theory is that this what they've been taught to do in middle school and high school. It's the same reason they always ask for "study guides," by which they mean lists of things they're supposed to memorize. They've been trained that they're going to be told what they have to "know" (="memorize"), and then they just have to jump through the hoops they've been told will be there (that's called "taking a test").

On the other side, I'm trying to figure out exactly what is "active" about "active learning" when students are running mazes we've designed for them. Sure they have to do stuff. I get that. They are supposed to "use" the stuff they "know" (although where content comes in is frankly not always clear), and of course the activities aren't supposed to be rat mazes. But what about students coming up with their own problems based on reading I give them? When and how do they learn to do that except by doing it? And why isn't that considered an "activity"?

Am I just being reactionary?

I want my students to learn lots of things, but the single most important thing I've seen is that students don't know how to read actively. That is the main thing I try to teach, I guess. And a lot of them hate it. But when they learn how to do it, they're then ready to actually start thinking and talking creatively about what they've read, past the first layer of understanding what they've read. They're ready to stop thinking that everything they read should be transparent and not cause confusion. They're past the point where they think that being confused is a bad thing, rather than a place you spend some time as part of the process of learning things. Indeed, if you keep learning, you spend a lot of time in confusion. If you're not confused at points, you're not being challenged by anything.

Or maybe I am just making that up. I certainly don't think it's the only thing they need to learn, or that everyone needs to teach this, or teach it the way I do. On the contrary. But I think I am pretty good at this stuff, and it gets under my skin that so many people think I am just that lazy about my teaching, or so disconnected from "the learning side" of teaching, that I need charts fit for sixth-graders and exercises designed to reveal to me my misconceptions that work as if they were designed for high-schoolers.

I can't help thinking that Socrates had no whiteboards and no PowerPoint (maybe that was his secret!). Siddhartha Gautama didn't distribute rubrics. Thomas Aquinas never passed out study guides before the disputatio.

Maybe here's the other thing, and maybe this for me has always been the hardest part of teaching, the tough nut to crack, the main thing I still think I work on: how do you teach students that sometimes there is no right answer, or no one right answer? How do you put them in a position to understand this? And then to start figuring what to do with it?

I teach a lot of religion, where you can imagine this kind of approach leads to a lot of anxiety and misunderstanding, and so I am very attuned to the finer points of managing it. But maybe that is something to pick up in a second post, where maybe I should also address the difficulty of making this point (about no right answer and what to do with it) in classrooms filled overwhelmingly with students convinced that "everyone has a right to their own opinion," by which they inevitably mean, "stop trying to persuade me of something other than what I already believe to be the case."

Parking in Boston

2009-09-02T16:21:00.003-04:00

(((re-tweet, you might say: humor; this month in history; why not?)))

This month's historic dates from the Somerville (Boston-ish) Public Library. Turns out, Bostonians have been complaining about parking since, well, forever.

Quote of the Day: There is no such thing as the State

2009-09-01T12:47:00.006-04:00

(((Auden; "September 1, 1939;" Badiou should have written about this, if he didn't, because it really is about communism; I've had it with Thatcher, too.)))

From "September 1, 1939," a poem Auden was "ashamed" of, the famous stanza he struck from at least one printing of it:

All I have is a voice
To undo the folded lie,
The romantic lie in the brain
Of the sensual man-in-the-street
And the lie of Authority
Whose buildings grope the sky:
There is no such thing as the State
And no one exists alone;
Hunger allows no choice
To the citizen or the police;
We must love one another or die.

I have written before of Badiou's view of the state, and in particular the communist negation of the state. Thatcher might have agreed (with Auden and Badiou) that there is no such thing as the state, but Auden insists that "no one exists alone." If Thatcher's "there are only individuals" means "there are only people who exist alone," then Auden, at least, knows she is wrong, that people being people live in communities. There is, he says, a human community, a community that is not "the State" (meaning not just national governments, but even local ones), the community in which we exist with other human beings. And whether you are the individual or the representative of the state, you face the same question, the same choice -- to live in that community, with others, or to die alone. This is, I think, the "one world" Badiou takes as a political principle. Not a statement of fact, but an assertion of principle. Whereas the State always presupposes its outside, presupposes (at least) two worlds (but probably really three -- the non-state governed by the state, and the Other State, both of which are threats to the order imposed/maintained by the state).

In one printed version of this poem, Auden rewrites the last line of the above stanza to read, "We must love one another, and die." If you read the whole poem, this makes sense, since it seems so much to be about how death is always with us. So the idea that we can escape death by loving one another is kind of ridiculous, at best, and "the romantic lie in the brain," at worst. But the point is still taken -- we must indeed love one another in order for us to live with each other, and so to live longer, better lives, even if not to become immortal.

Although perhaps, in a way, we become that, too, by loving one another. But that would be another post.

I am certain that I have seen or read (or both) Badiou discussing a part of an Auden poem. I can't find this reference and don't know if it's this poem. I kind of hope it is, since it fits and would slot right into the paper I am working on, but I also hope it's not, so that I can appear momentarily to be clever by making the connection. I'll follow up if I find it, but I would also be happy to have it pointed out to me. Actually, anything where Badiou discusses Auden at all would be helpful.

Religion in a Nutshell

2009-08-20T14:45:00.010-04:00

(((evolutionary pychology and cognitive studies in religion summed up brilliantly in under two minutes by a stand-up comic; yes, it leaves out some nuance . . . emphasis on some.)))

Patton Oswalt has a brilliant little bit on the development of religion. Hmm, maybe I can embed it. I never tried that.

It worked!

Anyway, if you follow this, then you've finished about half my intro to religion course. And this is cheaper, although maybe not funnier. Ahem.

Aliens Are Not Running the NHS

2009-08-16T12:49:00.005-04:00

(((Health care; UK's "orwellian" National Health Service, which is pretty good and which people generally like pretty well; Obama's plan not really comparable to the NHS, in the first place; the debate is not a rational one, anyway; the paranoid style in American politics.)))

Maybe this is why I've tuned out of politics for so long, now. Because it's just so inane. When Sarah Palin can get away with calling the NHS "evil," as if people in the UK wouldn't raise their hands and say, "hey, we can hear you over here." What was she thinking, that the oppressed sick of the UK would rise up and overthrow their Orwellian NHS overlords? "Mr. Brown, tear down these hospitals!" Now we know that everyone in the UK has been to Room 101, because it's clear that they have been brainwashed to think the NHS is good for them.

Unless they're actually right, of course.

But there is a nice collection of articles and op-eds in the Financial Times (that liberal rag) about the current debate in the US and in particular about the comparison of Obamacare (TM) to the NHS. In the latter, they note right off the bat that, on the one hand, Obama's plan is less "socialized" than the NHS (the government insurer won't run the hospitals), and on the other, that US health care is already more "socialized" than people seem to notice (Medicare and Medicaid). It's a very reasonable article.

Alas, as Edward Luce notes in his op-ed, "reasonable people might as well be living on Venus." Noting the conspiracy-prone nature of American politics, on vivid display at the town hall meetings and related protests, Luce concludes:

Their issues are diverse. But their sentiment is common: America’s constitution is being trashed by un-American values. Which brings us to another important strain in US politics that Mr Obama, along with other educated liberals, shares with the Clintons: the belief that the fight is won or lost over the quality of reason.
No amount of contrary evidence will puncture the view that Mr Obama plans to establish “death panels” that will decide which grannies get to live or die. Nor will reason counter the view that countries such as Canada and the UK push their weakest to the back of the queue. “Who will suffer the most when they ration care?” asked Sarah Palin, the former governor of Alaska on Thursday. “The sick, the elderly and the disabled, of course.”
Mr Obama’s proposals have many flaws. Reasonable people can disagree on whether the reforms would bring down the cost of healthcare, an overriding priority, or sufficiently expand coverage to include the uninsured, a twin, but not always compatible, goal. For all their impact, reasonable people may as well be living on Venus.
The multi-generation battle to reform healthcare will be won or lost over faith rather than reason. The more nuanced Mr Obama appears, the more frenzy it will provoke in his critics. The more he mentions his mother, denied healthcare by the insurance companies when she was dying of cancer, the more progress he will make. What happened to her was un-American, Mr Obama should say. Forget the details of healthcare reform. The side that identifies with American values will get the upper hand.

We can wish as much as we like that reason would win out in such things, but we ignore the fact that it won't at great peril. There is a price to pay for such naiveté, which is naive with respect to both the nature and the efficacy of rationality. Myself, I have not decided whether or not I am willing to pay it, or even whether it is my decision to make. But let's at least be honest about it (which may or may not be the "rational" thing to do).

Amazement at Tax Evasion in God's Creation

2009-08-05T15:16:00.004-04:00

(((Dinosaur Adventure Land Creation Science theme park; tax evasion; is God a good employer?)))

Via BoingBoing, the Dinosaur Adventure Land theme park promoting so-called "creation science" is to be seized by the government in partial compensation for back taxes owed by its proprietor, Kent Hovind, who never paid nearly half a million dollars in taxes.

He was found guilty in November 2006 on 58 counts, including failure to pay employee taxes and making threats against investigators.The conviction culminated 17 years of Hovind sparring with the IRS. Saying he was employed by God and his ministers were not subject to payroll taxes, he claimed no income or property.

Hovind insists his park is not for "amusement," but "amazement":

Our funny and experienced guides will lead your family or group on the tour, declaring the works of the Lord and the words of the Lord.

DAL is not an amusement park, for “amuse” means “to not think,” and we want people to think. Rather, it is an amazement park. Come and stand amazed at the truths of the Creator and Savior of the world, Jesus Christ.

Personally, I'm amazed that God, as his employer, didn't get him a better lawyer, the best money (or eternal salvation) could buy. Maybe hovind didn't get that in his contract? Maybe it was a lawyer from Regent. But if God can't (or won't?) get you off the hook, maybe that says more about you and your pious crap than it does about any god there might (or might not) be?

I'm not sayin'. I'm just sayin'.

The Vast Left-Wing Conspiracy

2009-04-28T21:20:00.003-04:00

(((Michele Bachmann is either completely certifiable or utterly cynical; intimations -- but not accusations! not at all! -- of sinister Dem plots to poison the US with swine flu.)))

This is hilarious, mainly because it seems right out of a segment of the Colbert Report: Minnesota Republican representative Michele Bachmann remarked on the "coincidence" that the last swine flu outbreak in the US also occurred in a Democratic administration.

Except, of course, that it didn't. It was the Ford administration (which the linked AP article helpfully notes).

So either she believes that all those Democrats are, as she called them to Chris Matthews, un-American, and so out to get America, to the point where she misremembers things so that they fit this twisted view of her political opponents, or she makes it up because she knows it gets her fans and she doesn't care that it's not true. Either way, it is Bad.

And for what it's worth, it's never occurred to me that someone like George Bush or Karl Rove hates America. They love it. It's just that most of what they love about it is what I hate about it.

Activist Judges Threaten CEO Compensation

2009-04-16T14:34:00.003-04:00

(((Richard Posner as "activist judge;" the market is structurally incapable of setting CEO compensation and mutual fund fees; and this according to none other than Posner.)))

Eliot Spitzer (srsly?) has a piece in Slate examining Chicago School free-marketeer Richard Posner's comments in a recent decision:

In an opinion dissenting from the "denial of rehearing en banc"—a sequence of words only a lawyer could love—Posner wrote that there are growing indications that CEO compensation "is excessive because of the feeble incentives of board of directors to police compensation. … Directors are often CEOs of other companies and naturally think that CEOs should be well paid. And often they are picked by the CEO." He then examined the conflicts inherent in the process of CEO compensation determination, concluding that "[c]ompetition ... can't be counted on to solve the problem because the same structure of incentives operates on all large corporations and similar entities, including mutual funds" [emphasis added]. [ . . . ]

In other words, there is precisely no check within the market, because the people deciding how much the CEO should make are the same people who stand to gain if CEOs are highly valued, or -- dare I say it? -- overvalued.

Spitzer continues:

Posner concluded that while judges shouldn't directly review corporate salaries, evidence of unreasonable compensation could be evidence of a breach of fiduciary duty. Yes, these are legal words, but they reveal a remarkable conclusion—courts should take a hard look at private-compensation issues—and demonstrate how far, and rapidly, the world has shifted.

So in other words, the solution is for courts to keep an eye on the situation and to consider compensation and fees in the context of, or as aspects of, the fiduciary duties of governing boards. So here come the activist judges once again threatening the American way of life, at least, if that's understood as the right to marry only someone of the opposite sex, or the right to make as much money as you can legally convince someone to pay you.

Isn't it ironic, though, that the activist judge in this case is Judge Posner? It sounds so Adam Smith, so old school capitalist, so . . . moral. So much of the socialist objection to capitalism is the tendency to socialize costs while privatizing profits (see the bailout), but here's Posner acknowledging that it's not all about how much money you can make.

The Wikipedia page on the Chicago School quotes this interesting little snippet from Posner: "[the central] meaning of justice, perhaps the most common is – efficiency… [because] in a world of scarce resources waste should be regarded as immoral." We don't have to agree with this conception of justice to see that, in its terms, CEO compensation and mutual fund fees have become essentially wasteful and, hence, immoral. And that the inability of the market to account for this means that the market is, to that extent, inefficient and, well, yeah: immoral.

The Red(coat)s are Coming!

2009-04-14T18:07:00.003-04:00

(((More accusations of "socialism;" if you don't actually say who you mean, you don't have to explain why your use of the term is accurate or appropriate, or maybe not even what you mean by it.)))

Politico.com has a note on Spencer Bachus' ominous hinting that the Soviet Union left behind plants in the US Congress to turn us commie long after the Old Girl bit the dust. They were so clever that way.

Unfortunately, Politico actually takes this somewhat seriously.

“Socialism” is one of the more elastic nouns in the political lexicon. In the broadest sense, it defines a system that provides for state ownership of some private industries and governmental commitments to providing direct housing, health care, education and income supports.

To many on the left, it’s a relatively benign — if outdated — term, representing an activist, interventionist government that prioritizes economic security over the unfettered freedom of the marketplace.

To many on the right, it’s practically an epithet — suggesting a return to Soviet-style Communism or a leap toward a hyper-regulated European brand of capitalism that stifles innovation and hikes taxes.

But this is already to cede too much ground to Bachus's rationality and integrity. It's not "practically an epithet;" it is an epithet. Calling someone a socialist in the US is roughly equivalent to standing up in church and saying that some people sitting in nearby pews worship the devil; or in this case, like someone in the choir saying there are some unnamed choir members who worship the devil. Everyone agrees devil worship is bad, or at least no one is going to go standing up for the devil, so instead of defending devil worship, everyone trips over themselves to prove they don't worship the devil. The accusation is already the damning evidence, so the burden of proof is on the accused.

Enter the godless [sic] commie.

But socialism is not devil worship. Unless maybe poverty, unemployment, illness, and the desire for a meaningful life outside of wage slavery are sins. In that case, sign me up with whoever calls bullshit.

Anyway, I don't think Bachus pulled that number out of his behind. I expect him to name his names. That's why he came out with a number. He knows who he's prepared to make some kind of case about. So let's have 'em.

Bridge Metaphor to Nowhere

2008-12-19T13:37:00.003-05:00

((("Bridge to nowhere;" auto industry bail-out; Washington "pork" spending; tiresome spin masquerading as cleverness.)))

Am I really the only one who is sick to death of hearing spin-meisters on TV calling the auto industry loan the "bridge loan to nowhere"? How about "bridge loan to stabilized unemployment"? Or "bridge loan to an economy not in the tank"?

Never mind whether the loan is a good idea. Never mind if it's throwing good money after bad. Can someone please just stop the insanity of the metaphor slicer-dicer to nowhere (with Scandinavian snowball earrings yours to keep if you can stop it right now)? Or clean up this metaphorical spill with the sham-wow of political discourse?

Please?

Michael Perelman on the Bubble and the Bailout

2008-11-28T00:43:00.004-05:00

(((Nice rant; physicists can't make something out of nothing, but financial whiz-kids keep trying, and the rest of us pay when they fail; all that is solid melts into air.)))

Michael Perelman has a great, succinct rant on the sorry, avoidable mess we're in.

Skilled physicists do not know how to take nothing and turn it into matter and antimatter, but finance behaves as if it had the capacity to do something similar. Imagine a simple market economy about to create a bubble. I want to tell the story of this bubble, only to put the current, crazy stimulus package into perspective.

Somebody says to me they have a piece of paper worth $1 million. I can buy for half the price. I borrow the money to cover most of the cost. People are willing to lend me the money confident in the belief that my paper will increase in value. Other people are engaging in the same transaction, spreading confidence that these papers are now increasing in value, say to $600,000.

The seller of the paper now has a half-million dollars, having given up nothing but blank piece of paper. I have a capital gain of hundred thousand dollars. My lenders have a credit with a half-million dollars. We are all better off, even though nothing has been produced. [snip]
At some point, people realize that this paper is nothing more than a blank sheet of writing paper. The bubble may have stimulated some investment that is capable of producing real economic benefits, but mostly it has induced people to consume and commit themselves to pay back debts.

Credit Democracy

2008-10-28T11:09:00.004-04:00

(((Not universal healthcare, but universal credit; except when you marry your dream girl and you didn't know her credit was bad; relationship between credit, democracy, and housing, especially housing bubbles; credit is not the way to provide housing.)))

Ross McKibbin in the LRB. Aspects are quite specific to Britain, but some fundamental observations are not.

The second inescapable obligation is the return of housing to its proper function: as providing places to live in rather than to speculate on. The relationship of housing to politics in both Britain and the United States is not fully understood even by those who transformed it. They don’t understand it because that would require confronting awkward facts about Anglo-American democracy. Fundamentally, private housing has become a compensation for the increasingly gross maldistribution of income. Inadequate incomes mean that large numbers of people don’t have access to the style of life that has always been the ultimate justification of neoliberalism and to which, reasonably enough, they now believe they have a right. What does give them access to it (in the short term) is credit. But credit has to be secured, and that’s what housing does. However, it works only if house prices keep rising and people have enough income to repay debt. When prices stop going up and people can no longer repay what they owe, the financial system begins to disintegrate. This is what has happened; and it has happened because we have replaced something like social democracy with credit democracy, or universal access to credit, and credit is a thoroughly inadequate substitute because sooner or later it has to be repaid. Which means that people’s incomes have to be sufficient to repay it, and in many cases they aren’t. What we have put in place is a dynamically destructive cycle. The number of houses is rationed in order to force up prices [this ir related to a specific Tory policy]; people buy houses in order to secure credit on the strength of those prices; this encourages a heady belief in perpetual profit and thus both risky lending and risky borrowing; this renders the banking system unstable; and lending both to individuals and among banks then collapses. Such a cycle involves a paradox. Since these credit democracies still hold elections, governments are forced to underwrite savers at the expense of creditors and stockholders. And if savers are also small shareholders, as many are, the price they pay for protecting their deposits is the devaluation of their shares. This is absolutely not what was originally intended. The rationing of house building has one other consequence: it means that many cannot acquire somewhere adequate to live.

There Is Only One World

2008-10-26T15:55:00.011-04:00

(((Alain Badiou on what it means to be communist today, the necessity for courage, a distillation of a communist "hypothesis" in the form less of a manifesto proper (communism already has one) but maybe a sort of post-manifesto?, communism is not properly speaking utopian (or religious for that matter :-))))

From a Badiou essay mainly about Sarkozy in the New Left Review:

What is the communist hypothesis? In its generic sense, given in its canonic Manifesto, ‘communist’ means, first, that the logic of class—the fundamental subordination of labour to a dominant class, the arrangement that has persisted since Antiquity—is not inevitable; it can be overcome. The communist hypothesis is that a different collective organization is practicable, one that will eliminate the inequality of wealth and even the division of labour. The private appropriation of massive fortunes and their transmission by inheritance will disappear. The existence of a coercive state, separate from civil society, will no longer appear a necessity: a long process of reorganization based on a free association of producers will see it withering away.
‘Communism’ as such denotes only this very general set of intellectual representations. It is what Kant called an Idea, with a regulatory function, rather than a programme. It is foolish to call such communist principles utopian; in the sense that I have defined them here they are intellectual patterns, always actualized in a different fashion. As a pure Idea of equality, the communist hypothesis has no doubt existed since the beginnings of the state.

Note that "state" is used here in a historically specified sense, but understood this way, communism is surely an essentially contra-statist idea, a reaction to (and against) the state-formation as a mechanism of oppression and repression, which it can hardly not be, to greater or lesser degrees. Of course, communism has become bound up with statism even more than Nazism (an expressly statist ideology), for reasons that require no explanation. The question before is us how to proceed in the world as communists while leaving behind (we might say, negating, in that technical sense of Badiou's) the statist/party politics of the 20th century. That's the challenge, and it is of course both a theoretical and a practical challenge, a universal and a local challenge (how can it possibly be one and not at the same time the other?). So what we set ourselves is not the proverbial ideologue's task (to figure out what is wrong with the world while maintaining our theory), but the goal of rethinking the theory and the practice together. Again, what does it mean to do anything else? What we DO maintain is the idea, the hypothesis, that another world is possible; indeed, that one world is possible.

The (19th-century) movement and the (20th-century) party were specific modes of the communist hypothesis; it is no longer possible to return to them. Instead, after the negative experiences of the ‘socialist’ states and the ambiguous lessons of the Cultural Revolution and May 68, our task is to bring the communist hypothesis into existence in another mode, to help it emerge within new forms of political experience. This is why our work is so complicated, so experimental. We must focus on its conditions of existence, rather than just improving its methods. We need to re-install the communist hypothesis—the proposition that the subordination of labour to the dominant class is not inevitable—within the ideological sphere.
What might this involve? Experimentally, we might conceive of finding a point that would stand outside the temporality of the dominant order and what Lacan once called ‘the service of wealth’. Any point, so long as it is in formal opposition to such service, and offers the discipline of a universal truth. One such might be the declaration: ‘There is only one world’. What would this imply? Contemporary capitalism boasts, of course, that it has created a global order; its opponents too speak of ‘alter-globalization’. Essentially, they propose a definition of politics as a practical means of moving from the world as it is to the world as we would wish it to be. But does a single world of human subjects exist? The ‘one world’ of globalization is solely one of things—objects for sale—and monetary signs: the world market as foreseen by Marx. The overwhelming majority of the population have at best restricted access to this world. They are locked out, often literally so.
The fall of the Berlin Wall was supposed to signal the advent of the single world of freedom and democracy. Twenty years later, it is clear that the world’s wall has simply shifted: instead of separating East and West it now divides the rich capitalist North from the poor and devastated South. New walls are being constructed all over the world: between Palestinians and Israelis, between Mexico and the United States, between Africa and the Spanish enclaves, between the pleasures of wealth and the desires of the poor, whether they be peasants in villages or urban dwellers in favelas, banlieues, estates, hostels, squats and shantytowns. The price of the supposedly unified world of capital is the brutal division of human existence into regions separated by police dogs, bureaucratic controls, naval patrols, barbed wire and expulsions. The ‘problem of immigration’ is, in reality, the fact that the conditions faced by workers from other countries provide living proof that—in human terms—the ‘unified world’ of globalization is a sham.

We maintain the idea of one world against a contradictory capitalist idea of division deserved and unification deferred. Capitalism, liberalism, insists that it is the best way to achieve the goal of one world, despite all the evidence to the contrary, but also despite a hypothesis that insists that such class divisions as there are, are the fault of the world—lazy people who don't work hard enough or at all, for example, and so do not deserve to live in the upper classes, if they deserve to live at all—and at the very same time the very meting out of justice according to the hypothesis. Extraordinarily, capitalism (usually, I think, by means of economic growth) is both supposed to spread the wealth to everyone and at the same time (by means of its meritocratic logic) to redistribute wealth from the undeserving (the sign of whose moral bankruptcy is their very poverty) to the deserving (the sign of whose moral superiority is their very wealth).

In its compassionate, liberal moments, it recognizes the falsity of that claim, but insists instead that, in Thatcher's words, there is no alternative, or at least no democratic alternative, no alternative compatible with the idea of the individual. But I've run out of the steam right now to respond to that. So go read the essay. Maybe, probably, I will take it up soon. But surely we can understand that the constitution of identity under capitalism is woefully underformed and binds us each to our several worlds, worlds in which our identity is often already constituted for us, but that even when we participate, we do so in the only way we can in a world of competing worlds: we pick a world.

War and Democracy: Always Already Together Again

2008-10-24T21:29:00.004-04:00

(((Alain Badiou on what results from democratic materialism's commitment to the proposition that there are only bodies and languages; what else, by the way, is there?)))

Alain Badiou in Radical Philosophy, 2005:

Today, natural belief can be summarized in a single statement:
There are only bodies and languages.
This statement is the axiom of our contemporary conviction. I propose to name this conviction democratic materialism. Why? Democratic materialism. The individual fashioned by the contemporary world recognizes the objective existence of bodies alone. [ . . . ]
Moreover, it is essentially a democratic materialism. This is because the contemporary consensus, in recognizing the plurality of languages, presupposes their juridical equality. [ . . . ]
Having said that, democratic materialism acknowledges a global limit to its polymorphous and animalistic tolerance. A language that does not recognize the universal juridical and normative equality of languages does not deserve to benefit from this equality. A language that claims to regulate all the others, to rule over all bodies, will be termed dictatorial and totalitarian. Then it is no longer a matter of tolerance, but of our ‘right to intervention’: legal, international and, if necessary, military intervention. Aggressive actions serve to rectify our universalistic claims, along with our linguistic sectarianism.
Bodies will be made to pay for their excesses of language. That is how a violent Two (the war against terrorism, democracy against dictatorship – at any cost!) sustains the juridical promotion of the multiple. In the final analysis, war, and war alone, makes possible the alignment of languages.
War is the barely hidden materialist essence of democracy.

Democracy has always been at war with terrorism.

And always will be.

QOTD: Hegel's Got You

2008-06-26T12:05:00.002-04:00

(((Judith Butler; the inescapable logic of the dialectic; freedom is irrelevant [isn't that *almost* a great Hegel pun?]; resistance is futile; you will be assimilated.)))

Noticed this today in Michael Hardt's book on Deleuze.

References to a "break" with Hegel are almost always impossible, if only because Hegel has made the very notion of "breaking with" into the central tenet of his dialectic.
-- Judith Butler, Subjects of Desire p. 184

Why say "almost"? Hegel will always be tapping you on the shoulder. Indeed one wonders if there's anyway to avoid Hegel even if you make a point of never talking about him and never using any of his vocabulary. The thing is that that would be taken, with some justification, as a marker that you really aren't reckoning with arguably the most important philosopher in Western history.

PKD might compare the dialectic to a Chinese finger-trap -- the harder you try to get out, the more stuck you get. It might be better to avoid Hegel altogether, except that that would be dumb, not because you would look dumb, but because it would be like trying to do quantum mechanics while ignoring Heisenberg.

So, what is to be done with/about Hegel? Isn't that the most basic question in contemporary philosophy? Or am I making too much of it?

www.iam.jeffreyfisher

2008-06-26T11:50:00.002-04:00

(((ICANN approves loosened rules on top-level domains; remember the old usenet days? i mean the really old ones? do they still do that?)))

According to the BBC:

The net's regulator, Icann, voted unanimously to relax the strict rules on so-called "top-level" domain names, such as .com or .uk.

The decision means that companies could turn brands into web addresses, while individuals could use their names.

Under the new plans, there could be thousands of domain names based on any string of letters.

The smart one will register .diediedie ASAP. Clearly that's not me or I'd have done something about it before posting on my blog, even if no one reads it.

I Am Become Chaos

2008-06-24T21:34:00.006-04:00

(((cool science stuff: matter in the universe distributed in a fractal pattern; how can we hook this up with process philosophy? also: difficulty squaring general relativity with a fractal universe.)))

According to the New Scientist:

According to their latest paper, which has been submitted to Nature Physics, Sylos Labini and Pietronero, along with physicists Nikolay Vasilyev and Yurij Baryshev of St Petersburg State University in Russia, argue that the new data shows that the galaxies exhibit an explicitly fractal pattern up to a scale of about 100 million light years.

And they say if the universe does become homogeneous at some point, it has to be on a scale larger than a staggering 300 million light years across.

Apparently no dispute about the smaller scales. The question is mainly whether there's been enough time for gravity to produce clumps. The smoothing factor is also apparently connected to Einstein's theory of general relativity, which makes it easy to model the universe as smooth, but not so much to model it as, er, striated?

Regarding the latter point, doesn't that just mean that maybe it's time for a new model, or principle for the model? Like that's never happened before? Like we always expect that the stuff we know now is going to be how it actually is for all time? Because we're just that smart.

On the former point, doesn't the question of there being enough time leave us with the idea that the universe is in the process of forming fractal patterns on the largest possible scales? We're a chamber in a mighty big nautilus. Or something like that.

Quote of the Day: Theoria

2008-06-20T21:27:00.005-04:00

(((We're back, I guess; hit and run foray into posting again -- gotta start easy; Brecht on theories; I have lots of them; Theories, I mean.)))

A man with one theory is lost. He needs several of them, or lots! He should stuff them in his pockets like newspapers.
-- Bertolt Brecht

This is maybe why Philip K. Dick must be recognized as a genius. By this criterion, he was about as found as a person could be. lulz, if you'll allow me. I aspire to being that not-lost.

Nod to Philosophy's Other for the Brecht quote.

Spray-On Authenticity

2008-03-08T21:01:00.003-05:00

I observed something depressing about modern toy culture via Lego the other day. We were killing time in Times Square between eating and the Lyceum Theatre's opening. We wandered around the flagship Toys'r'us snarklng. When we got to the Lego, which I've not seen close-up for nigh on thirty-five years, it struck me that the vast majority of the items on sale were kits, not bricks. There were (branded) Star Wars kits, aircraft kits, car kits and so on. Each of these was made up of a small number of large preformed parts, which presumably snap together. On about a fifth of the parts, some of the surfaces were covered with the lego nubbles; all the rest were smooth and featureless. The nubbles had no constructional function - they were on things like wing surfaces where nothing should be attached. They were clearly nothing but elements of “spray-on authenticity” - intended to give the illusion that the object had been constructed out of Lego bricks, without any of the preliminary visualization or actual construction that really building a large model out of Lego would require. It was as depressing an example as I've yet seen how things that were educational and challenging in my youth have been dumbed down to fuck and franchised to buggery.

Oops, Indeed: Quechup Can't Stop Spamming

2008-02-26T09:09:00.004-05:00

(((Quechup; Cheesy social networks; Spam; Bad business practices; Bad apologies you shouldn't have to make in the first place; And then making them twice: Oops!)))

So I found myself signed up for Quechup when a friend fell victim to their efforts to sign up his whole address book (this has also happened to your humble narrator, alas, but with a different site). It seemed silly, but I'm always curious about these things, so I gave it a go just to take a look. Haven't been back to the site since, and I honestly don't remember if I've tried to unsub from their mailing list, but I honestly don't care since I ignore it, anyway, and I think most of it is going to the trash, at this point.

So when I received Quechup's apology for sending too many and the wrong emails, I didn't feel apologized-to. I just thought it was hilarious. Imagine being the person who had to write the following with a straight face:

Ooops... First of all a big, big apology for sending the February newsletter more than once and for sending the 2007 newsletter! This was due to an admin error at Quechup, needless to say those responsible will be making the tea for the next month. We hope it didn't cause too much inconvenience and promise it won't happen again.

You've got to be kidding me. Making the tea? I guess if Quechup had a reputation to ruin or salvage, it might matter.

But here's the best part: I got the apology twice. No, seriously. On the same day.

Lies, Damn Lies, and Congressional Hearings

2008-02-14T15:29:00.004-05:00

(((Roger Clemens; Brian McNamee; Chris Shays; Steroids are drugs, they are even illegal drugs, but insisting on calling McNamee a "drug dealer" is at best stupid and at worst an insidious category confusion)))

Gotta love congressional hearings, where two people sit virtually next to each other at a table (see this great photo) and call each other liars, even though they never once address each other, and elected officials take turns calling one, the other, or both liars. For some reason, it seemed to be the Republicans defending Clemens and going after McNamee, but I really don't get why that would be.

The best, though, was watching Chris Shays, dork extraordinaire, insisting that McNamee is "a drug dealer":

[Mr. Shays. . . . ] For you, Mr. McNamee, I believe some of what you say. But you know, it depends when. I view you as a police officer who is a drug dealer. [ . . . ] I read that comment and I think maybe [being or having been] a police officer would have made you not want to be a drug dealer. But instead it made you be wary of [Clemens].

Mr. McNamee. I understand your concerns. But as far as your comment about a drug dealer, I only did what players asked and it was wrong.

Mr. Shays. Mr. McNamee, you are a drug dealer. You may --

Mr. McNamee. That's your opinion.

Mr. Shays. No, it's not in my opinion. You were dealing with drugs.

Mr. McNamee. Okay.

Mr. Shays. You were dealing with illegal drugs. Tell me as a police officer how that is not being a drug dealer.

Mr. McNamee. That's your opinion.

Mr. Shays. No, it's not my opinion. I'm asking you to tell me. Tell me how it's legal to do illegal things and you not call it what you were. You were dealing in drugs, weren't you?

Mr. McNamee. Dealing in them, yes.

Mr. Shays. Were they legal drugs?

Mr. McNamee. No, they weren't.

Mr. Shays. Thank you.

This is a version of the classic pedant's two-step. It is often a good way to get people to stop being wishy-washy and to dump euphemisms. But it has its Orwellian uses, too.

Imagine the following conversation:

Mr. Shays. As for you, Mr. Fisher, I would think that as an American you would not want to be a godless commie terrorist-sympathizer.

Mr. Fisher. Sir, I object to that characterization.

Mr. Shays. But you are a godless commie terrorist-sympathizer.

Mr. Fisher. That's your opinion. [Okay, this is a stupid argument, too, but let's keep things simple.]

Mr. Shays. Do you believe in God?

Mr. Fisher. What do you mean by "god"? And while we're at it, what do you mean by "believe in"?

Mr. Shays. Right. And do you not argue that communism is preferable to capitalism?

Mr. Fisher. Isn't it obvious?

Mr. Shays. And do you not oppose the War on Terror?

Mr. Fisher. I sure do.

Mr. Shays. Then how are you not a godless commie terrorist sympathizer?

Mr. Fisher. Fuck. You got me. Pretty sneaky, Shays.

In the case at hand, Shays's use of this utterly transparent—but often very difficult to counter—maneuver is merely meant to tarnish McNamee. After all, who can believe a "drug dealer"? Why he wanted to do this in the first place remains a mystery to me.

Yes, yes, technically McNamee could be called a drug dealer . . . he made money administering illegal pharmaceuticals (aka, "drugs"). But let's be honest that this is bullshit. It's as if the guy were standing on street corners selling dime bags of cream and clear, or ran a run-down HGH house where people come to shoot up and stay there for days lying around on soiled mattresses.

The businesses of elite performance enhancing drugs, on the one hand, and recreational drugs, on the other, are totally different businesses, the only commonality being that both involve illegal pharmaceuticals. People don't prostitute themselves or take their child's baby-food-money for a hit of HGH. Brian McNamee doesn't have an army of street dealers or ties to Colombian cartels. Conversely, there isn't pressure from sports teams on players to do lines of coke the way there is pressure to take a shot of HGH on the sly in order to heal up for a game. How stupid does Shays think we are? Or does he just think he's that clever?

Shays's grandstanding is not just an affront to language and logic, but to the police he professes to respect, the narcotics officers who risk their lives undercover to bust up crack dealers. Busting Brian McNamee, "drug dealer," just doesn't have the same, I don't know, oomph.

But maybe he'll get a Law & Order spot out of it.