Archive: Society
British Council colludes with China’s censors
Jonathan Mirsky writes in the current New York Review concerning the actions of the organizers of the London Book Fair (16–18 April) in cooperating with the Chinese General Administration to exclude dissident writers, both those still in China and those who have been exiled, from their official presence at the Fair (“Bringing censors to the Book Fair”, NYRB 59.9, 24 May 2012).He is drawing on the work of Nick Cohen at the Observer and also perhaps of Richard Lea at the Guardian.
This is one of those cases where the statements of the people in charge suffice to exhibit their abjectness. In a press release of 21 March, Susie Nicklin of the British Council writes:
The authors taking part in the British Council Cultural programme are internationally recognised as the leading voices writing from China today. Mo Yan, the veteran writer, Han Dong and Li Er, both of whom missed ten years’ schooling during the Cultural Revolution, Annie Baobei who became an internet sensation at the age of 24, Sheng Keyi (published by Penguin China) who writes about new migrations and the metropolis – these authors are writing their best work in contemporary China.
As the British reading public is aware, the situation for writers in China is not the same as it is in the UK.[…]
There was no disagreement with the Chinese government about the final list of British Council writers who regularly appear on well-respected lists of the best novelists and poets in China. These writers live in China and write their books there; other writers have left. The British Council respects both groups and there will be plenty of opportunities for both sets of writers to put their views across in the UK.
“Not the same ”: to show how inadequate—not to say callous—that bland phrase is, I will mention just one case. Yu Jie, author of Wen Jiabao: China's Greatest Actor, after a long campaign of harassment by the state, was abducted and beaten until he was unconscious; his family was placed under house arrest, their phone and internet connections severed; eventually he decided to leave. He is now finishing a book on a fellow dissident, the Nobel Prize winner Liu Xiaobo, who has is serving an 11-year jail sentence for having urged an end to one-party government in China (Tania Branigan, “Chinese dissident who fled to US tells of beatings and harassment”, Guardian
Dredge: new frontiers
Some of the largest structures built by humans are invisible or go largely unnoticed. The shorelines around big cities like New York have been almost completely subordinated to the needs and wants of their inhabitants. Dredging plays a large role in the building of artificial boundaries between land and sea. BLDGBLOG, a must-read for anyone interested in architecture, reports on an exhibit by the Dredge Research Collective.
The Dredge Cycle is landscape architecture at a monumental scale, carving the coastlines and waterways of continents according to a mixture of industrial need and unintended consequences. Thus far, dredge has remained the domain of logistics, industry, and engineering, a soft successor to the elevated freeway interchanges and massive dams that captured the infrastructural imagination of the previous century.
For the past year, the Dredge Research Collective have been exploring the choreography of these interconnected sedimentary landscapes, visiting dredged material confinement areas, from Poplar Island in the Chesapeake Bay to Hayden Island in the Columbia River, talking with dredge experts, such as the transnational materials conglomerate TenCate, the Army Corps of Engineers, and the Bureau of Land Management, and publishing and lecturing widely on dredge.
Urban Omnibus.
Mammoth, another architecture blog that includes two members of the Collective, defines the Dredge Cycle:
[…] dredging is better understood as a component of a wider network of anthropogenic sedimentary processes which generate a fascinating array of interconnected landscapes. Fluid topographies are restrained by bright orange silt fences; dredging barges continuously empty shipping channels which are promptly re-filled with sediment disturbed by upstream farms and new subdivisions; sensate geotextiles monitor the stability of landscapes they are literally embedded in; hulking geo-tubes lay engorged with dredged sediments in streams on Filipino golf courses and along Mexican beaches and on the coastal dunescape of Virginian spaceports. Silts, sands, and clays flow rapidly between these landscapes in liquid suspension, linking them and re-shaping the earth’s surface. Collectively, the choreography of these landscapes embodies a vastly quickened counterpart to conventionally defined geologic cycles — the Dredge Cycle.
One site, still being planned, where the Dredge Cycle will make itself apparent—in the form of several billion dollars of real estate—is the Lo-Lo Ma project, which could connect Governor’s Island to the southern tip of Manhattan. Core77 explains how it will be done:
How do you grow land, you may be asking? […] The first step, apparently, is to take out-of-commission subway cars, drop them into the river and cover them with landfill.
A medium-sized shopping mall contains about 400 to 500 thousand square feet.
If this sounds crazy, you should know that New York regularly dumps outdated subway cars into the Atlantic Ocean, simply because they have nowhere else to dispose of them. But instead of trashing the cars, we might very well be able to use them to our benefit, recycling them into the slow expansion of an 88-100 million square foot land mass, a borough they're tentatively calling Lo-Lo Ma.
Source: Urban Omnibus, from Mammoth.
On top of this recycled infrastructure, students at Columbia’s architecture school propose that the sludge now dredged out of waterways around the city be piled to create new land. (I like it that they have already named certain features of the new, as yet nonexistent, borough. Even if Lo-Lo Ma is never built, ‘LLM’ will still refer to that piece of land below Battery Park. A nice test for your favorite theory of reference…)
Another example. The “tourist landscape of the beach” in Delaware (and at other spots along the East Coast) is now an artifact sustained, if not created, by dredging.
This means displacing those thousands of cubic yards of sand from the ocean floor and using massive compressing stations to pump tiny rocks through miles of hulking metal tubes. […] The miles of pressurized metal tubing will certainly be removed before the summer’s vacationers have a chance to take them in. Pumping and compressing stations are only small hiccups in the gaping expanse of the ocean horizon, often unnoticed by winter ocean-goers.
The dredge infrastructure’s impermanence in the oceanfront landscape is central to its work of producing the “natural” beach, an object of consumption for the seasonal tourism within the region. This particular operation, according to the Delaware Department of Natural Resources and Environmental Control’s (DNREC) newsletter, is repairing the beach damage incurred from a 2008 Mother’s Day storm that pockmarked the beach with massive craters and distorted the function and image of the beach as a tourist destination. The storm, a geographic and meteorological event that, in part, could be due to anthropogenic changes in global weather patterns, damaged the beach to the point of putting nearby housing in jeopardy of being engulfed by the high tide. In response, the dredging operation is rebuilding the beach as a protective boundary to the adjacent tourist housing (Chris Mizes, “.dredge”, space within lines 5 Feb 2012).
Source: DNREC Division of Soil and Water Conservation, Shoreline and Waterway Management Section, Coastal Connection 3no3 (Summer 2009).
Unlike architects, philosophers, so far as I can tell, have had very little to say about the immensity of human intervention in natural processes except by implication, when they write in a general way about the relation of humanity to the natural world (needless to say, I welcome references). The scale of projects like Lo-Lo Ma or the Delaware beaches seems to defeat traditional æsthetics, oriented as it is toward artworks on a more modest scale. The industrial landscapes photographed by Edward Burtynsky and others challenge the imagination in the manner that Kant takes to be characteristic of the sublime. But rather than offering us, as the starry heavens above do, a natural counterpoint to the moral law within, these landscapes present us within infernal ideas of its absence. What may have been my first experience of the nonnatural sublime occurred thirty years or so before the picture below was taken, when I was walking near the Marina Towers in Chicago and realized I had no idea where the ground was.
Marina Towers, Chicago (2007). Source: Araceli Arroyo at Flickr.
On magnets and lies, and checking sources
The historian’s attitude, when attempting to establish matters of fact, toward the sources, is one of tempered but universal skepticism. The same applies to the history of the present. For example:
Don’t depend on popularizations for your knowledge of neuroscience (see the previous item in this blog for a similar issue concerning the biology of sex). A recent headline in several newspapers and online sources reads something like this: “Magnetic Pulses To The Brain Make It Impossible To Lie”. Wow! That’s exciting! And scary too…
The only problem is, it’s false. The original study, which takes two minutes to retrieve if you have access to the journal (Behavioural Brain Research, Volume 225.1 (Nov 2011) 209-214; doi:10.1016/j.bbr.2011.07.028) states its main result as follows:
In our study we found support for the general hypothesis: rTMS targeted at DLPFC changed spontaneous truth-telling/lying rate in a task with no mock-criminal, guilty knowledge, or personally relevant information processing contexts being involved. Importantly, clear hemispheric differences were found. In principle, artificial inhibition of the sustained neuronal activation-states in left DLPFC and possibly the concomitant effect on the systems intimately associated with DLPFC decreases the willingness to tell the truth (more non-truthful answers produced) and/or increases the willingness to tell lies. Conversely, inhibitory rTMS effect on right DLPFC and possibly the concomitant secondary effect on the DLPFC-associated systems increases willingness to tell truth (more truthful answers produced) and/or decreases willingness (or capability) to lie.
[Acronyms unpacked: rTMS = repetitive transcranial (from outside through the skull) magnetic stimulation; DLPFC = dorsolateral prefrontal cortex.]
The authors carefully note the limitations of their study.
- The effects of the magnetic stimulation may spread beyond the area adjacent to the coil; and so “ interpretations on causal effects of TMS exclusively through the TMS-targeted area should be taken with care”.
- The dorsolateral prefrontal cortex has many functions, and in a complicated task like “spontaneous” lying more than one may be activated: because “perceptual stimuli had to be named and two response variants chosen and reversed from time to time, the number of possible neural mechanisms that influence readiness to lie in our task and their possible interactions remain too numerous at present” to be sorted out.
- The spontaneity of the lying was limited to some unknown degree. Subjects were “instructed to name the colour correctly or just lie about it, naming the other colour that was not presented in this trial, being free to choose whether to lie or not”, but they were also told that only lying or only telling the truth would not be “good for the experiment”.
The upshot is that there is a positive correlation between spontaneous truth-telling and rTMS stimulation of the right dorsolateral prefrontal cortex; and between spontaneous lying and stimulation of the left DLPFC. That’s very interesting. But it’s far from what you would gather from the headlines and stories online.
The moral should be obvious. In matters of science, there is no substitute for reading the original studies. Science journalists, and for that matter popularizing philosophers, should be drawn upon cautiously. Moreover, the studies often present complexities and issues (as here) that summaries, especially of the ax-grinding sort, tend to omit.
I learned this long ago when reading studies on animal perception that were cited over and over in the philosophical literature on representation. It was clear that only a few people had read the original studies; everyone else drew on their predecessors’ summaries. When I read the original studies, I discovered not only mistakes in the summaries but also a world of fascinating work that the “poor diet of examples” in the literature had simply omitted. Insect senses in particular offered much food for thought, and I recommend it highly if you’re thinking about the origins of representation or defining sensory modalities.
Philosophers have done a better job in the last twenty years. A much broader range of scientific results is brought to bear on philosophical debate, and prejudices according to which doing so is somehow unphilosophical have waned. Experimental Philosophy even generates its own results. But it’s well worth remembering, both when doing philosophy and when judging scientific results of political import, that although a great deal of expertise is required to contribute to ongoing research, rather less is needed to acquire a basic understanding of the results of research, to understand their limitations, and to evaluate second-hand accounts.
The Long March
Had you told me, when I was growing up, that someday the First Family would look like this—
Source: Reuters via Daylife.
—I’d have said you were dreaming.
When I was growing up, Jim Crow’s death was a rumor.
Source: Civil Rights Movement Veterans
When I was growing up, blacks in the South went to “separate but equal” schools. White people rioted when the public schools were desegregated.
Little Rock, 1957. Source: Civil Rights Movement Veterans
Civil rights demonstrators were greeted with dogs and high-pressure firehoses.
Birmingham, 1963. Source: Civil Rights Movement Veterans
Rosa Parks was arrested for refusing to move to the back of the bus.
Montgomery, Alabama, 1955. Source: World’s Famous Photos
Many people—some but not all of them “conservatives” in the spirit of the National Review fifty years ago—would just as soon that this history was relegated to museums. Obama’s election shows that now America is color-blind; the struggle is over. Maybe it is. And maybe the Southern Strategy will no longer work. But Obama’s accomplishment cannot be understood except by remembering the past—a past within living memory, a past in which merely voting, let alone holding office, was a right denied to millions on the basis of race. Obama’s victory is a victory for all those who kept their “eyes on the prize”.
Johnson’s 100th
Source: Lyndon B. Johnson
Centennial
Centennial
In their twenty years in power since 1980, the Republicans have done their best to destroy the legacy of the Great Society (and, under Bush, they have also done their best to emulate the disaster of Vietnam). Even the Voting Rights Act, though it has not been repealed, has in recent years been gutted by a Justice Department more interested in Southern-style vote-suppression and race-baiting than in maintaining the franchise for those who were historically denied it.
Firedoglake lists some of the major domestic legislation of the Johnson years:
- 1964: Civil Rights Act
- 1964: Urban Mass Transportation Act
- 1964: Wilderness Act
- 1964: Nurse Training Act
- 1964: Food Stamp Act
- 1964: Economic Opportunity Act
- 1965: Higher Education Act
- 1965: Social Security Act
- 1965: Voting Rights Act
- 1965: Immigration and Nationality Services Act
- 1967: Age Discrimination in Employment Act
- 1967: Public Broadcasting Act
- 1968: Bilingual Education Act
- 1968: Fair Housing
Looking at this, and remembering how strongly opposed I was to Johnson in ’68, I realize that those of us who were coming of age then could not imagine how good we had it.
For a Johnsonian take on Johnson’s legacy, see the Lyndon B. Johnson Centennial Celebration.
McCain’s Wife’s Money
Society
·· More from August 2008
Very good reporting on the origins of the Hensley millions, which helped McCain start his political career.
By now, many Americans know John McCain’s family story. His best-selling memoir, Faith of My Fathers, chronicles the lives of the senator’s father and grandfather, distinguished admirals. The book takes readers up through John McCain’s own military service, including his five and a half years as a prisoner of war in Vietnam. But Faith of My Fathers ends there, a few years short of John McCain’s marriage to Cindy Hensley and the advent of his political career.
That’s only half the family story.
The rest could be called “Cash of My Father-in-Law,” a tale of how beer baron James W. Hensley’s money and influence provided a complement to McCain’s charisma and compelling personal story and launched him to a seat in Congress — and perhaps to the White House.
Taking advantage of restrictions on liquor by violating them to make money is a common racket. Joseph Kennedy, father of Jack, is supposed to have made money from illegal imports of liquor from Canada during Prohibition. Our no-longer-local beer company, Anheuser-Busch, though it didn’t score during Prohibition, did very well immediately after. Among the first public appearances of famous Clydesdales was a delivery of fresh cases of Budweiser to the White House in April 1933.
Added 26 Aug: more of the same from the Times: David M. Halbfinger, “For McCains, a public path but private wealth” New York Times 22 Aug 2008.
Statistical snake oil, again
Or: where is Darrell Huff when you need him? The Chronicle of Higher Education, drawing on the services of Academic Analytics LLC, presents lists of departments and institutions ranked by “productivity”. Here are the 2007 and 2006 rankings for philosophy:
The measure is based on statistics concerning publications, grants, awards and honors, and so forth. These are normalized and weighted to yield the composite scores you see above. It should be clear that although the scores are significant, the rankings aren’t. They’re too volatile. Only three departments manage to remain in the top ten from 2006 to 2007.
Unfortunately, the numbers will be used to make distinctions they cannot rightly be said to justify. Academic Analytics claims that “more universities than ever are using FSP on their campus”, and I believe them. What I don’t believe is that the FSP is as objective as they claim. Carnegie-Mellon, which ought to know better, highlights its no. 5 ranking in 2007; but a year earlier, as you can see, they weren’t even in the top ten. Michigan State’s index plunged from 2 to below 1.31 in one year. Were they exhausted after their stellar season?
It’s too bad that the Chronicle is lending its prestige to this dubious enterprise. An antidote to the FSP can be found at the International Mathematical Union which has produced a Report (
) on citation statistics. Here are the conclusions:
) on citation statistics. Here are the conclusions:- Relying on statistics is not more accurate when the statistics are improperly used. Indeed, statistics can mislead when they are misapplied or misunderstood. Much of modern bibliometrics seems to rely on experience and intuition about the interpretation and validity of citation statistics.
- While numbers appear to be "objective", their objectivity can be illusory. The meaning of a citation can be even more subjective than peer review. Because this subjectivity is less obvious for citations, those who use citation data are less likely to understand their limitations.
- The sole reliance on citation data provides at best an incomplete and often shallow understanding of research—an understanding that is valid only when reinforced by other judgments. Numbers are not inherently superior to sound judgments.
The last item, I think, may be irrelevant to the people who are most likely to be customers of Academic Analytics. I have in mind administrators or the people who hire them, people who think that a university should be run like a business. The point of appealing to the FSP and measures like it is to avoid judgment, substituting for it the authority of numbers.
(For more statistical snake oil, see “How to mislead with statistics”, 7 Dec 2004.)
Sources:
“A ‘Nixon going to China’ moment”Geomblog, 14 June 2008.
Abraham Mahshie. “Former executive spooks some, but not all, faculty” Columbia Daily Tribune, (21 Dec 2007) p. 1A. Also here ().
).If Hillary wins…
In 1971, when this book was published, 1992—the year Bill Clinton was elected—was still part of the hazy future. On another branch of time, Big Brother would have been in power for at least eight years.
Concerning Parley J. Cooper, I find nothing online except titles of books, mostly from the 1970s, all of them genre fiction (romance, horror, sci-fi).
John Grant at Infinity Plus has reviewed The Feminists. He finds the writing “drab and uninspiring”. What I’ve skimmed is like the blurbs, but less punchy. Grant adds that “one cannot imagine any front-line commercial publisher being willing to take such a thing on” now. That is too optimistic. All that a present-day Parley Cooper need do is to wrap the tale in sociological jargon, and call it a “projection”. Regnery would publish it as non-fiction, and Mr. Cooper would soon be a commentator on Fox.
For background, see Laura Quilter, “A short history of the backlash against feminism in SF/F”, Feminist Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Utopia. Find The Feminists at Bookfinder.
Flowers
Society
·· More from January 2008
Below the fold: flowers from friends of M.
The left’s totalitarian vision
Our future according
to Liberals
to Liberals
a college campus with free food, shelter and recreation.
The good doctor’s perspicuous view of liberal aims owes something, no doubt, to her having interviewed Jonah Goldberg, author of Liberal Fascism, a book that has already received the strong endorsement of Charles Murray. Goldberg believes that
[…] for a lot of liberals and progressives, the end of history is a giant college campus, or increasingly, Europe. You know, this place where you’ve lost any great ambition, everyone’s much more concerned with self-esteem, with caring for each other.
What Goldberg means by ‘ambition’ is something like this:
I’ve long been an admirer of, if not a full-fledged subscriber to, what I call the “Ledeen Doctrine.” I’m not sure my friend Michael Ledeen will thank me for ascribing authorship to him and he may have only been semi-serious when he crafted it, but here is the bedrock tenet of the Ledeen Doctrine in more or less his own words: “Every ten years or so, the United States needs to pick up some small crappy little country and throw it against the wall, just to show the world we mean business.” That’s at least how I remember Michael phrasing it at a speech at the American Enterprise Institute about a decade ago.
It’s true that no university has yet thrown any small countries against the wall. I’m afraid that in all likelihood none has even wished to do so. That is a definite flaw in their character. Only the School of the Americas has shown some gumption in this respect.
So there you have it: caring for each other is bad, whacking small little countries is good. Anti-fascism in a nutshell.
As an antidote to Goldberg’s pretenses to scholarship, Jean-Pierre Faye’s work on “totalitarian language” is a good starting point. See
Langages totalitaires. Critique de la raison narrative, l'économie (Hermann, 1972) German translation: Totalitäre Sprachen (Ullstein, 1977).
Théorie du récit. Introduction aux Langages totalitaires (Hermann, 1972) — a briefer presentation.
La Raison narrative (Balland, 1990).
Le Piège (Balland, 1994)—on Heidegger and the language of National Socialism.
Unfortunately, there don’t seem to be any translations of these works into English, but see “The critique of language and its economy”, Economy and society 5.1 (Feb 1976) 52–73. Langages totalitaires is a minute examination, first of narratives and events in the French Revolution, and then of key phrases like “conservative revolution” and “national socialism” in Germany during the 1920s and 30s. The bits and pieces that were compounded to form the ideology of Nazism were indeed more complicated than one might have thought. But they don’t amount to anything resembling liberalism. Not if by that you mean a historically real liberalism—the New Deal, say, plus the anti-racism and anti-bigotry that became part of the Democratic party’s platform in the sixties.Added 31 Dec: The “Ledeen Doctrine” could just as well be called the “Presidential Initiation Rite Doctrine”. See R. W. Apple, Fighting in Panama: The Implications; War: Bush’s Presidential Rite of Passage, New York Times 21 Dec 1989. See also Spiderbytes; Allan Nairn, “No More Coddling Big Criminals. Huckabee Fails to Get Tough on Crime”, News and comment 18 Dec 2007.
