New APPS: Art, Politics, Philosophy, Science

An important essay (and Special Issue) on "Introducing Feminist Philosophy of Disability"

Shelley Tremain has authored a document that should be read with care by all members of the profession.  URL: http://dsq-sds.org/article/view/3877/3402. Standard ref: "Introducing Feminist Philosophy of Disability," Disability Studies Quarterly 33.4 (2013). 

The article is the Introduction to a Special Issue on "Improving Feminist Philosophy and Theory by Taking Account of Disability" of which Tremain is the editor; the articles therein should be read carefully as well. 

Results of my qualitative study of religious attitudes and motivations of philosophers of religion

(X-posted on Prosblogion) My last blogpost for this year will be a preliminary report on the qualitative survey I launched last month. In this open survey, I asked professional philosophers of religion (including graduate students) about their motivations and personal belief attitudes, and how their work relates to these beliefs. I am very grateful to all who participated (an amazing 151 respondents!), and to the British Academy for funding this research.

Lowlights of 2013: un-blurring the lines

Exactly one year ago I finished off my blogging year with a post on gendered atrocities, focusing in particular on the Newtown shooting and the widely discussed gang rape in India. At that point, the hope was that these two events would at least not have been in vain, and that they would stir changes in the right direction. It seems that this did in fact happen in India, where the horridness of rape was given much more attention in the aftermath of the event, which triggered a firestorm of protest. (As for mass shootings and gun control in the US, to my knowledge nothing much seems to have changed since last year...)

And now, looking back on 2013, what strikes me as an absolute lowlight of the year is again something gender-related, at first sight of a much lesser degree of gravity – but only at first sight. One of the biggest hits of the year, Robin Thicke’s ‘Blurred Lines’, is nothing short of a badly concealed rape apology (read the lyrics for yourself here). That millions and millions of young (and not-so-young) impressionable people should be exposed to the truly disturbing message of the song is very, very worrisome. The catchiness of the song (yes, I’ll admit to its catchiness, which is really the merit of singer, co-writer and producer Pharrell Williams -- who, unlike Thicke, is a talented musician) only makes it worse, as it results in millions of kids singing ‘I know you want it’, ‘good girl’, and other horrific bits of the text. (It is particularly surprising that the three singers all seem fairly adjusted, family-oriented people; but what doesn’t one do for success…) The video is equally appalling, featuring three scantily clad female models interacting in unflattering ways with the three fully clad male singers (I’ll just mention hair-pulling and puffing smoke on one of the women’s face – see the video for yourself if you have to. Oh, and there is also an uncensored version!).

Privacy and Big Data II: NSA Metadata between Juridical Power and Biopower

In a previous post, I suggested that the concept of privacy is going to prove inadequate as a protection against big data.  This is the case for structural reasons: the concept of privacy is designed to protect information (generally, either information that is thought to be inherently intimate, or in the sense of control over the dissemination of information), whereas big data operates at what one might call a sub-information level: it siphons up enormous amounts of data, which becomes meaningful information only after it is analyzed in the context of vast amounts of other data.  As a result, big data knows everything about us, even though we have neither consented nor not-consented to the release of the information that condemns us.

Today I want to leave that aside for the moment, and develop some background by way of a Foucauldian reading of Judge Leon’s recent decision issuing a preliminary injunction against the NSA’s collection of vast amounts of telephone metadata on American citizens.  In subsequent posts, I will offer a reading of Judge Pauley’s decision upholding the NSA program and an earlier Supreme Court decision that gets at the issue before returning to the question of privacy.  Although the analysis here is based on court cases and government programs, the intention is ultimately to make a more general point.

Big Data: Why privacy is no help at all

A federal judge today ruled that some of the NSA’s broad, warrantless collection of data from American citizens, particularly of so-called ‘metadata,’ which includes routing information for phone calls (what phone numbers have been in contact with each other, and so on.  This can be very damaging!) – did not violate the constitution.  This ruling contradicts an earlier federal court ruling that the data collection was unconstitutional, and the issue seems likely headed to the Supreme Court.

If we set aside the details of this case for the moment, it seems to me that an important set of issues around big data is emerging.  That is, to be succinct, that the concept of ‘privacy’ is absolutely no good at all in slowing it down.  I don’t, however, think that the problem is either the frequently announced ‘end of privacy’ or the so-called ‘privacy paradox’ (that people say they value privacy but then act as if they don’t).  Rather, I think the problem is more basic.

Today’s opinion correctly reports a fact about privacy law: if I voluntarily disclose information to a third party – any third party – I lose any Fourth Amendment claim to privacy over that information, no matter how many times it changes hands afterwards.  That’s a problem, one well captured by Helen Nissenbaum’s work on privacy as ‘contextual integrity’ (or see the original paper here), which argues that moving information out of one context and into another can very well change the appropriate norms for sharing it.  But the pairing of ‘voluntary’ and ‘information’ also suggests that I have some cognizance of the semantic content of what I am sharing.  I may not know why information is valuable to someone else, but I at least know what that information is.

Big data challenges that.  We have no idea of the meaning of this material we are providing as we go about our daily lives, or even that it is meaningful: we are providing data, not information.  The NSA case is exemplary:

Raising college tuition in the interests of fairness and access

There was a story in today's NYT about a number of colleges that are lowering tuition, sometimes drastically. The argument is that they can do this without loss of revenue, since so few pay full tuition anyway. Thus, they are lowering tuition and cutting financial aid and making a splash vis a vis the current concern over high tuition. 

The article makes a number of useful points: that colleges have done a terrible job at advertising how few people actually pay the official tuition amounts that sound so scary, or that there is a significant phenomenon of high tuition causing a perception of quality.  But one obvious point goes utterly unmentioned in the NYT coverage: that cutting both tuition and aid hurts the most economically vulnerable and benefits the less vulnerable.  (The NYT mentions that the college it most focuses on will retain mert-based scholarships, but fails to discuss the effects of cutting need-based.)

All of which leads me to float a suggestion for discussion - one that I once raised with our university president at a party, predictably being responded to with a chuckle and a raised eyebrow: let's raise tuition.  A lot.  

Why do the inauthentic features of forgeries escape us, whereas it seems so easy to see they were forgeries afterwards?

I was looking for the source of the following picture (see below), to find out more about it.  The picture seems, to the casual observer, to be an early modern engraving, perhaps from Germany or the Low Countries. It shows a man who looks out of the confines of his world (the edge of the firmament), to look beyond, a nice illustration of the work of the metaphysician, theologian or scientist. However, a bit of poking around on the internet reveals that the engraving is probably a forgery - i.e., a late 19th century wood engraving that is deliberately made to resemble an early modern drawing. It appears first in Camille Flammarion’s L'atmosphère: météorologie populaire. The engraving was probably made on commission or by Flammarion himself to accompany the following text “A missionary of the Middle Ages tells that he had found the point where the sky and the Earth touch…” This text appears in the first edition of L’atmosphère but the engraving only appeared in the second edition.

Now that I look at it again, I wonder how I could ever have believed this to be an authentic early modern illustration. The borders, for instance, do not look authentic. The anatomy and pose of the man are unusual for 16th century iconography. It seems that artistic forgeries, when they are believed to be genuine, look genuine. Once we know, however, that they are forgeries, the many inauthentic elements seem pretty obvious: how could past art critics have been fooled? 

 

Notes on conference and essay volume organizing

[UPDATE, 1 Jan 2014, 12:10 pm CST: Here is the narrative form of the talk.]

I've been invited to take part in a panel on inclusivity in conference and essay collection organizing, to be held at the 2013 APA Eastern. Session GVIII-1, Sunday 11:15 am. Here are my notes. (Comments welcome to me by email too.)

I propose organizers take three steps: 1) reflect; 2) clarify audiences and goals; 3) make invitations.

STEP I. REFLECT. The first thing we need to do is reflect on our normal practices. Unfortunately, it seems many organizers just say to themselves, "let's get the best folks we can on topic X." I think this is so from a common response to a question about a poor inclusivity roster: "well, we tried to invite world-famous Professor X but he / she was busy."

To me this implies that the organizers used some sort of one-dimensional "merit"[1] measure and then rank-ordered the people who come to mind on that axis, starting at the top [of whatever section of the list they thought they could conceivably afford / interest][2] and working their way down.

Here, I think, is where the implicit bias claim explains just how and why these names "come to mind," thereby perpetuating a positive feedback loop locking in historically over-represented groups across generations. 

But this rank-ordering by "merit" also has a questionable metaphysics: it looks to me like "merit" is seen as a property inherent in individuals that can be discerned, extracted, and then compared to others on a single scale.

Brazilian music on Fridays: Roberto/Erasmo Carlos

A few weeks ago I posted ‘Sua estupidez’, sung by Gal Costa but composed by Roberto Carlos and Erasmo Carlos. Roberto Carlos is known in Brazil as ‘The King’, that is the king of folk music, and is immensely popular especially among the less economically favored segments of the population. He is known in particular for his ultra-romantic, ultra-mellow songs – yes, ‘tacky’ would be an appropriate description for lots of it…

But the duo Roberto/Erasmo Carlos has also produced some real gems, such as ‘Sua estupidez’ of a few weeks ago, ‘Debaixo dos caracóis dos seus cabelos’, ‘Fera ferida’, and ‘Cachaça mecânica’, which I am posting below: the first two sung by Caetano Veloso, and the third by Erasmo Carlos. (It turns out that Roberto Carlos’ versions themselves are usually not that good, not because he is not a good singer, but because of tacky arrangements…) The first two are real classics known by everyone; the third one is much less known, but possibly the best among the three: a wonderful, sad samba. So start with the third!

(BMoF will be on a break next week.)

It's not the supply, it's the demand

This Slate article* about the recent Johns Hopkins plan** is symptomatic of a seriously -- and unfortunately widespread -- mistaken approach to the political economy of higher education, namely, a short-term and ahistorical focus on the TT section of the entire labor system, mislabeled as "the job market." 

Abstracting for the moment from the details of the Hopkins plan, the article's premise that "there aren't enough [tenure-track] jobs for PhDs" is an unfortunate reification of the multiple decisions of university administrators to produce the current situation by their hiring decisions. The endorsed conclusion "therefore we should restrict the number of PhD students," by unquestionly accepting the premise, just reinforces the dynamic that produces the current situation.*** 

Has Elsevier jumped the shark?

As many of you will have seen by now, it looks like Elsevier -- not content with taking down papers from academia.edu -- is now also issuing takedown notices to individual universities. Nicole Wyatt, chair of the Philosophy Department at the University of Calgary, reported on having received such a notice in comments here. The Sauropod Vertebra Picture of the Week blog, from which I had learned about the academia.edu takedown, also reported on the note received by the University of Calgary and passed on to all their staff. (Btw, did they go after other universities as well? Or is it a case of ‘pilot harassment’, as well described by the SV-POW site? So far I only know of occurrences with Calgary.)

If anyone was still looking for reasons to boycott Elsevier, this is clearly a good one. Of course, it is not too difficult for most philosophers to boycott Elsevier, who does not publish major philosophy journals. But Elsevier is very strong in some adjacent areas, psychology in particular; it publishes for example the flagship journal Cognition, where a number of philosophers have published.

Eileen Joy on uncharitable reading

Very nice meditation on the "necessary of generous reading" by Joy HERE. I'm happy to let Joy have the last word* on the latest imbroglio over Nathan Brown's attempted polemic.** I found Joy's post to manifest what it preaches, but to be helpful to people like me who so often fall short of the explicated norms, and to be intellectually interesting in in its own right (especially given that many of the citations will be new to philosophy professors).

*Along with David Wallace.

**Which as a genre is generally imbecilic independent of Brown's attempt at engaging in it. I should say that my greatest professional regret involves the overly polemical nature of a couple of my earliest publications, and that I have friends with much better CVs than me that have the same feeling with respect to earlier pieces of their own. In a future blog post I'll expand on the imbecility of all polemic without mentioning any of the examples under current consideration.

If I worked at The University of Kansas, this post might get me fired

Why? Well, because this post is about the Kansas Regents' decision to pass a new social media policy, which states that:

the chief executive officer of a state university has the authority to suspend, dismiss or terminate any faculty or staff member who makes improper use of social media.

Improper use means making a communication that:

— Directly incites violence or other immediate breach of the peace;

— Is made pursuant to the employee’s official duties and is contrary to the best interests of the university;

— Discloses confidential student information, protected health care information, personnel records, personal financial information, or confidential research data; or

— Impairs discipline by superiors or harmony among co-workers, has a detrimental impact on close working relationships, impedes the performance of the speaker’s official duties, interferes with the regular operation of the university, or otherwise adversely affects the university’s ability to efficiently provide services.

Reading this, I'd feel compelled to say that it 1) seemed like an effort to stifle criticism of the University, 2) veered periliously close to making it impossible for colleagues to disagree publicly, especially over matters of instiutional practice, policy, or pedagogy, and 3) similarly put anyone considering discussing his or her experience with, say, discrimination or harassment on notice that doing so could be harmful to his or her carreer.  Even better, this transparent attempt to initmidate and constrain faculty speech in public fora was imposed by fiat without prior consultation with the faculty, though--in a clear effort to satisfy some of Protevi's likely objections--faculty were told that "the board would welcome input over the next several months."

Presumably, this input shouldn't be on social media, however, especially if it were critical or the process by which this policy were imposed, or its content.

Update: Scott Jaschik now has a story up at Inside Higher Ed that adds a few new details, including comments from the chair of the AAUP's Committee on Academic Freedom and Tenure. 

Update 2: KU Law and Economics Professor Bill Black has written an analysis of the policy here, and been interviewed by the Kansas City Pitch here [h/t William Pannapacker]. Black pretty much confirms (and even extends) the worst case scenario interpretations of this policy that have been floating around. 

Should I Try to Fly, Just on the Off-Chance That This Might Be a Dreambody?

I don't often attempt to fly when walking across campus, but yesterday I gave it a try. I was going to the science library to retrieve some books on dreaming. About halfway there, in the wide-open mostly-empty quad, I spread my arms, looked at the sky, and added a leap to one of my steps.

My thinking was this: I was almost certainly awake -- but only almost certainly! As I've argued, I think it's hard to justify much more than 99.9% confidence that one is awake, once one considers the dubitability of all the empirical theories and philosophical arguments against dream doubt. And when one's confidence is imperfect, it will sometimes be reasonable to act on the off-chance that one is mistaken -- whenever the benefits of acting on that off-chance are sufficiently high and the costs sufficiently low.

My Dad went to LSU, and all I got was this lousy pee-cup

A few days ago, while trying to open the interwebs thingy to allow me to start entering my grades, I was prevented from doing so by a pop-up menu that referenced LSU's Policy Statement 67. The text included unsubstantiated and highly dubious claims such as that most workplace problems are the result of drugs and alcohol abuse by workers. And this was only a few weeks after all of the chairs at LSU had to provide verification that every single faculty member had read a hysterical message from our staff and administrative overlords that justified expanding the extension of pee-tested employees at LSU to now include faculty. The wretched communiqué justified pee-testing faculty because of new evidence showing that marijuana is harmful to 13 year olds.*

Anyhow, when I scrolled to the bottom of the popup, I had to click a button saying not only that I read the document but also that I "agreed" with it. 

I honestly don't get this. Are my beliefs a condition of employment at LSU? There was no button that said I read it but didn't agree with it.

Is there any consensus on the proper behavior of invited speakers?

Earlier this year at the Translating Realism  conference I was pretty blown away by Adrian Johnston. Part of it was his talk (which, with the Q&A, lasted two hours but seemed like fifteen minutes), but a lot of it was just his behavior as an invited speaker. He went to every talk in the conference, participated helpfully in discussion throughout, and every single evening ate dinner with graduate students and other non-keynoters. 

As I've been thinking about it these last few months, it occurred to me that maybe there's something wrong with a discipline where I and others found Johnston's behavior so surprising.

The Heidegger Affair, part 356

Report by Jonathan Derbyshire here.

This decade's eructation is the official publication of Heidegger's Schwarzen Hefte. The earlier story at Le Nouvel Observateur is here. The French article is interesting because it notes that Heidegger specified the release dates of all this stuff, including these notebooks, right before his death. It also describes Hadrian France-Lanord, of a recent French Heidegger dictionary, who after seeing the notebooks has publicly retracted his previous claim that Heidegger never wrote anything anti-semitic.

From the entire Observateur article I confidently predict that Heidegger's defenders will once again recycle the grossly ignorant canard that since Heidegger did not have a biological concept of race,* he was somehow undermining the Nazis.  

In any case, I'm not clear about what the stakes are supposed to be here.

Fighting fire with fire

I like the result of the NYU graduate student unionization election (I would like to say, "obviously," but as too many profs use the "in principle I like unions, but ..." line when it comes to grad student organizing I guess I can't). But I don't think the subhead of this column ("An important victory over the corporatization of the university"*) is right. Unionizing isn't a victory over the corporatization of the university, it's a recognition that admins using corporatized universties for rent-extraction** is the reality of the university***; hence, unionization is a means of fighting fire with fire.

* I know that authors don't compose subheads or "deks" (thanks to Sean Carroll below in comments for correcting me on previously using "lede"); I'm objecting to the frame this one gives the column.

** This NYT story about sweetheart financing for summer homes for NYU "stars" deserves wide circulation.

*** The connection of the university and the corporation is not so simple ...

A plea to end informal interviews at the APA reception

Republishing this post from 14 December 2011, as it's that time of year again.

----

There has been a fair bit of discussion lately about the practice of APA interviews.  A growing body of empirical work suggests that implicit biases play a large role in interviews, especially shorter interviews in unusual social situations.  Some take this as sufficient grounds to endorse eliminating this part of the search process, while others are unconvinced. 

But there is a practice that goes on frequently at the APA that is vastly worse in all relevant respects: the practice of informal follow-up interviews at the giant reception (aka “smoker”). Both New APPS and Leiter Reports recently linked to a post on What Is It Like To Be A Woman In Philosophy? about one specific dimension of this practice. 

The point of this post is to be a bit more systematic. 

Germanic and Carthaginian Republicanism

Philosophical discussion of liberty and republicanism going back at least as far as Philip Pettit’s Republicanism (1997) have very much revolved around antiquity, when considering a historical dimension. We can take this back to Hannah Arendt’s work on Athenian liberty, which is not as nostalgic and uncritical as some claim, but certainly takes Athens as a starting point. Historical work by Quentin Skinner, J.G.A. Pocock and others has considered the evolution of liberty since the Renaissance Italian republics, which looked back to antiquity, in ways we are familiar with through Machiavelli. Pettit’s work, which shares broad historical presuppositions with Skinner and Pocock, advances a Neo-Roman theory of liberty, as superior to Arendt’s Athenian orientation. Even Michel Foucault sometimes seems as if he was inclined to classicism in political thought. 

 Despite the predominance of debates about antique models, and their early modern reception, there is a lot of republican theory, which is not Roman or Athenian, or certainly not purely so. Charles de Secondat, better known as Montesquieu, serves as a primary reference here, since in his view modern liberty is mainly the product of the republicanism of ancient German tribes. Though they had kings, Montesquieu regards these tribes as republics since the kings and aristocrats were answerable to the people. It is their conquest of Roman lands in the west in the Fifth Century, which introduced milder laws more compatible with liberty, partly because they emphasise compensation over punishment. Montesquieu’s view of the ancient German tribes is heavily reliant on Tacitus, so raising questions about how far he is using a Roman conception of liberty projected onto the German tribes. To some degree Montesquieu himself sees the very earliest forms of the Greek and Roman republics in the German tribes, but preceding those republics as we know them from anything resembling reliable history. While we cannot make a very clear distinction between the reality of the German tribes and Tacitus’s Roman interest, there is a distinction to be made between how Tacitus regarded these ‘barbarians’ with fragmented political communities in the forest and nostalgia within the great Roman state of laws and fixed institutions. 

 It is not just the Germans who Montesquieu takes up as a republican alternative to the Romans, and Greeks. He admires the Carthaginian republic, which like Rome achieved an imperial extent, as more commercial and even as escaping from the Mediterranean world into the European and African Atlantic coasts, in a triumph of commercial liberty. It is the real precursor of the commercial world of modern monarchies and republics, or republic-monarchies like Britain, much more so than the Roman world. He also thinks of ancient German law as more suited to commerce than Roman law. As Montesquieu discusses in some detail, Germanic law becomes merged with revived Roman in the Middle Ages, but not to the extent to losing an underlying influence of Germanic republican liberty in modern ‘moderate’ states.

Philosopher's Carnival #158

Philosophers' Carnival #158 is HERE.

Wittgenstein on the barest essentials

(Cross-posted at M-Phi)

( From the graphic novel Logicomix, taken from this blog post by Richard Zach.)

“He doesn’t want to prove this or that, but to find out how things really are.” This is how Russell describes Wittgenstein in a letter to Lady Ottoline Morrell (as reported in M. Potter’s wonderful book Wittgenstein's Notes on Logic, p. 50 – see my critical note on the book). This may well be the most accurate characterization of Wittgenstein’s approach to philosophy in general, in fact a fitting description of the different phases Wittgenstein went through. Indeed, if there is a common denominator to the first, second, intermediate etc. Wittgensteins, it is the fundamental nature of the questions he asked: different answers, but similar questions throughout. So instead of proving ‘this or that’, for example, he asks what a proof is in the first place.

How not to to engage with other humanists; Nathan Brown and the continental/continental divide

When I was an undergraduate at the University of Texas in the late 80s there was the huge fad of philosophers making fun of professors in other departments who had appropriated philosophical thinking for their own projects. 

Honestly, it's pretty easy work for people who spend their lives just studying philosophy to beat up on our brothers and sisters in humanities departments when they enter into conversation with a philosopher. The trick is to bracket the dialectical context of the appropriation as well as treat the norms relevant for engaging in those debates as if they are the same as writing good philosophy. With literarature department deconstructionism, this meant completely ignoring the context of New Criticism and the contribution that the appropriation of Derrida and De Man's writings made with respect to this background. 

As a result of the kind of methodological stupidity the revolution very quickly began eating its own,* culminating perhaps in the 1992 petition against awarding Jacques Derrida an honorary Cambridge doctorate.  By this point it was clear that American philosophy had completely squandered a very real chance of retaining a role as queen of the humanities. If during theory's heyday, a critical mass of us had actually taken the time (a couple of years hard work in each case) to actually immerse ourselves in the relevant history and canonical texts of other departments doing "theory," philosophy would today widely be viewed as a helpful discipline, as opposed to this weird thing where we spin our own wheels.**

One of the most depressing things to me as a student of continental philosophy is to see how the worst aspects of the the analytic/continental rift are now being replicated within continental philosophy.

failing logic students and 1980s Alabama inmates

My Mom taught in a prison in the mid 1980s, which was a weird era in lots of ways.

The movie War Games had come out in 1983, and inmates as a result had very strange views about what computers could and couldn't do. Even though none of the prison computers at that point were even hooked up to ARPANET, about once a week an inmate would sneak off and get a computer and desperately try to wreak as much havoc as Mathew Broderick does in the movie, just typing pages and pages of nonsense, usually in the hope that early release could be secured but sometimes to try to launch thermonuclear warheads. It really was a very strange time to be incarcerated, alive, and computer illiterate. One could just type nearly random symbols and the machine was supposed to make proper sense of it.

Sadly, I just remembered all this stuff because I'm grading logic finals today.  The twenty-teens are apparently also a weird era.

Tennessee Students and Educators for Social Justice: Open Letter to Stop Executions

Last week, I wrote about Tennessee's unprecedented push to execute 10 prisoners, beginning on January 15, 2014.

Today, I'm happy to report that the January 15 execution of Billy Ray Irick has been postponed to October 7, 2014.  Why?  Because of legal challenges to Tennessee's new lethal injection protocol.

Next week, I will fill in the context for this legal challenge, but this week, I want to bring your attention to an open letter by Tennessee Students and Educators for Social Justice, which calls on Governor Bill Haslam to suspend all scheduled executions immediately, and to commission a full and transparent review of capital punishment in Tennessee. 

The letter has been signed by almost 300 students and educators from colleges, universities, and high schools across Tennessee, and a companion petition has been signed by over 300 additional supporters. Everyone is encouraged to sign the petition!  If you study or teach in Tennessee, you are welcome to add your name to the open letter.

The letter is reproduced in full below.  Please share with your colleagues and students!

Orwell didn't fully get this

While reading this recent KCNA article about the execution of North Korean dictator Kim Jong-Un's uncle, I was really struck by just how transparently stupid the thing is from beginning to end. It never really tells you what the uncle did that was so bad, but just accuses him of broad classes of sin:

The accused Jang brought together undesirable forces and formed a faction as the boss of a modern day factional group for a long time and thus committed such hideous crime as attempting to overthrow the state by all sorts of intrigues and despicable methods with a wild ambition to grab the supreme power of our party and state.

The closest it ever gets to actually specifying anything is when it says that Jang didn't clap enthusiastically enough at one meeting!

When his cunning move proved futile and the decision that Kim Jong Un was elected vice-chairman of the Central Military Commission of the Workers' Party of Korea at the Third Conference of the WPK in reflection of the unanimous will of all party members, service personnel and people was proclaimed, making all participants break into enthusiastic cheers that shook the conference hall, he behaved so arrogantly and insolently as unwillingly standing up from his seat and half-heartedly clapping, touching off towering resentment of our service personnel and people.

Clearly this functions to get people in line so as to be enthusiastic in their public displays of affection for dear leader. But I think there's something more universal going on in the whole piece.

It should be clear that bludgeoning people into publicly acquiescing to transparent stupidity is a powerful way to make them complicit in their own immiseration. Orwell came very close with the 2+2=5 thing, but he didn't quite get it. It's much more subtle and powerful. The linked to article doesn't state any mathematical falsities, but just insults the intelligence through vagueness, unsubstantiated insults, and insults that presuppose ridiculous world views ("thrice cursed dog" etc.).

I think this kind of thing is much more common than we presuppose. For example, even to be able to talk about Obamacare in many contexts you have to go along with the presupposition that private insurance for health makes sense in the first place. Or when you are at an assessment meeting at your University, you just have to go along with a lot of pernicious, false presuppositions even just to discuss how to use the newest interation of the unhelpful web interface. Or consider Protevi's recent expose of a bit of utterly typical administrative newspeak.

Just to get along and navigate basic things in life you have to communicate as if a bunch of stupid nonsense actually makes sense. 

Obviously this trope is used to much more destructive effect in North Korea (mass starvation, intergenerational gulags, etc.) but I'm not sure that our own public discourse is any less ridiculous than that of the KCNA. Jello Biafra is perhaps our saving grace on this score.

What it's like to be autistic (hat tip Rod Dreher)

Nice article here about Henry Markram's theoy of autism as "intense world syndrome," which entails that:

The behavior that results is not due to cognitive deficits—the prevailing view in autism research circles today—but the opposite, they say. Rather than being oblivious, autistic people take in too much and learn too fast. While they may appear bereft of emotion, the Markrams insist they are actually overwhelmed not only by their own emotions, but by the emotions of others.

Consequently, the brain architecture of autism is not just defined by its weaknesses, but also by its inherent strengths. The developmental disorder now believed to affect around 1 percent of the population is not characterized by lack of empathy, the Markrams claim. Social difficulties and odd behavior result from trying to cope with a world that’s just too much.

Brazilian music on Fridays: Mayra Andrade

This week’s post is again not entirely Brazilian, technically speaking: today we have Cape Verdian young singer Mayra Andrade, who some of my friends have been raving about for a while (Jeroen and Rafa, that's you!). What justifies her inclusion among the BMoF guests is not only the fact that most of her songs are sung in Cape Verdean Crioulo, a variation of Portuguese; Mayra herself claims to have been highly influenced by Brazilian music. In fact, the first song she recalls singing as a child is the beautiful lullaby ‘Leaozinho’ by Caetano Veloso (equally popular among Brazilian children at large). Mayra often collaborates with Brazilian musicians and records Brazilian songs, and while not yet very widely known in Brazil, she is definitely a rising star worldwide. Her newly released album Lovely Difficult moves away from world music and towards something that can be described as ‘universal pop’, including songs in English (such as the single ‘We used to call it love’), while retaining the freshness and innovation she is known for.

I’m posting here some of Mayra’s versions of Brazilian songs, but music lovers should really also check her ‘non-Brazilian’ music, including her interpretation of Cape Verdean mornas but also her more recent work. So here is her version of 'Berimbau' (classic by Baden Powell and Vinicius de Moraes) with Trio Mocotó, featured in the Red, Hot + Rio 2 album, and a live version of ‘O que será’ (classic by Chico Buarque), a duet with French singer Benjamin Biolay. And I couldn’t resist posting a duet with the marvelous Cesária Évora, ‘Petit Pays’ – Cape Verde, that is (such a beautiful line: ‘Petit pays, je t’aime beaucoup…’)  (See here for more of her songs, and a short interview with Mayra (in Portuguese).)

Roland Barthes was right about professional wrestling

You know they laugh at us, don't you?

This is a classic in the admin bullshit arsenal, the old "here's the strategic action document that will be implementized [oh, you think that's an exaggeration of admin-speak? I see you haven't gotten a "communiqué" -- yes that's the word they chose of their own free will-- from the LSU admin] come hell or high water, it's a fate accompli [get it? Who said admins don't have a sense of humor?], but we also want to insult your intelligence, so we'll invite comments [chuckles, sneers, and high-fives among the adminbros]: “There is no truth to the claim that we were attempting to hide the documents from anyone,” he said. “When the strategic planning process was complete, we released the documents to the entire campus and invited comments.”