Aszilvasy

Hi Folks! A reader writes: “Thought you might be interested in this ‘How to Spot a Pedophile’ list, which enraged me. It narrows down the field of potential pedophile suspects to ‘any adult male who has ever had contact with children’. As somebody who ticks several of the boxes here (worked with kids, babysat for friends, among others) I’m enraged that those things somehow make me a suspect.”

While we always stress here that it is GOOD to teach kids to understand how to recognize, resist and report sexual abuse, it’s also good for parents to understand that just because we are now keenly aware of the problem doesn’t mean it’s happening more than before (studies show it’s actually happening less!), or that all kids are in danger any time they are around MEN.

The article makes a valid point that abusers don’t necessarily look like creepy strangers. BUT it suggests that we treat with suspicion, even revulsion, any male who evinces any interest in kids. This is a distorted and actually perverse way to look at half the population. And God forbid a guy actually volunteers to help out!

As a mom who has hired male babysitters, I’m sickened to think that the really nice men we employed would be treated as guilty until proven innocent (and how, by the way, does that work? How can you prove a negative?).

But if you want to know the type of guys the article finds suspect, here’s an abbreviated list: Men who seem normal. Men who don’t. Men who work with kids. Men who take pictures of kids. Men who have relatives who are kids. Men who help out women with kids. Men who live with kids. Good looking men. And weird looking men.

Hope that clears things up! – L

 

 

College Humor

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via DailyMail.co.uk

The team at Wait But Why put together this amazing snapshot of our lives right now… and then keeps pulling back to reveal where our lives are with respect to the past week, the past year, the past century, the past millennium, etc.

Check the site out to see how far back them zoom out.

To paraphrase the great Carl Sagan:

Consider again that sliver. That’s here, that’s home, that’s us. In it, everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every “superstar,” every “supreme leader,” every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there — on a tiny little sliver suspended in a spectrum.

(Thanks to Lauren for the link!)

Taegan recommends – and I second:

From Global Times:

The Year of the Snake has proved unlucky for one woman in northern China who received hospital treatment after opening a bottle of wine containing a snake that suddenly jumped out and bit her hand.

The surprise attack occurred after the woman surnamed Liu from Shuangcheng, Heilongjiang Province decided to add more alcohol to the bottle when the snake, which she had bought live in June and since kept pickled in spirits, pulled a Jesus and sprung to life, dbw.cn reported on September 3.

Liu received treatment at a local hospital for inflammation, explaining she drank snake wine regularly to cure her rheumatism. Alcohols containing preserved snakes boasting medicinal properties are common in China.

via

       The Literary Saloon post that attracted the most visitors to the weblog for any one-day period appeared exactly a decade and a day ago -- and, ironically, given how little attention I pay to book covers, it was about a book cover, suggesting that this was quite likely the most depressing cover of that year:



       Yes, the tie-in cover that saw Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights billed as: "The inspiration for the MTV original film" ('starring' Erika Christensen, Katherine Heigl, and some guy who played one of the brothers on Malcolm in the Middle) was always going to be hard to beat -- but now it has competition.
       Leave it to professional dilettante James Franco to top the untoppable, defacing another classic, with:



       The reaction re-posted at Slate sums it up nicely.

       I won't pass up this opportunity to make my pitch for the plainest of covers (for all books !) yet again. Consider, for example, how the Germans did this Faulkner (in at least one of the editions ...):



       Sold ! (And I love the rows of Bibliothek Suhrkamp titles on my shelves, all the same handy size, all of the same uniform design, with just the colors of the covers differing from book to book.)

       (Admittedly, the bulk of my Faulkners are the wonderful mass-market paperback-sized Vintage ones, à la:



       Yeah, those are pretty good, too.)

Jeff Wysasky of Pleated Jeans teaches us some more-or-less accurate facts about space and planets.


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The accountability hawks thought that tests and report cards would help to display the failure of urban public schools and pave the way for more privatization via charters. What they didn’t anticipate, however, was that the charter schools would do no better than the public schools–and by their own measures, far worse.

Test case, Ohio.

On the A-F report cards (a favorite of the reformers), nearly 90% of the charters were graded either D or F. These were supposed to be schools that produced spectacular results by dint of freedom from regulation and unions. They didn’t. Embarrassingly, the Ohio charters had a lower graduation rate.

The charter experiment is not working on Ohio, although it is making a few people very rich.

This is a story written by a mother who enrolled her son in Democracy Prep in Harlem. She is a Nigerian-born journalist. She contends that the school’s rigid discipline was excessive and that her son spent hours every day in detention.

It is a harrowing story. No doubt, Democracy Prep has another version. I welcome its response to this article. I will post it.

She writes:

“On my first visit to observe class I was struck by the robotic and monotonous style of teaching whereby teachers are programmed to literally clock every second of the class through a count down, while simultaneously monitoring every movement and body language of the young students.

“The students are supposed to respond in non-verbal coded signals called : spirit fingers – a twirling of all ten fingers in the direction of the scholar being supported – means a ‘show of support,’ brain match – is the simultaneous waving of the thumb and the pinkie – it means ‘I agree with you,’ track your speaker means ‘focusing on who’s speaking,’ pound it out – a chorus of pounding on the desks – means ‘the question is answered correctly’; and so on.

“So now I understand fully well why my 12 year old who is very creative and loves to be in motion would feel like he’s in prison; having to endure ten hours of monotonous class sessions daily without any sports activities or recess. Scholars have to eat their lunch in their respective classroom/homeroom and are only given fifteen to twenty minutes.”

And more:

“The endless list of reasons for which students can get railroaded into detention and ultimately suspension include: “not spontaneous on queue,” “clapping three times instead of twice as prompted,” “slouching over the desk,” “looking back at another student,” “talking,” “mumbling to yourself,” “fake coughing or sneezing,” “asking to go to the rest room,” “raising your hands too long,” “clearing your throat” or “breathing too hard.”

“I found this preposterous.

“So the process of suspension usually starts as follows. A teacher would declare “that’s one,” meaning a deduction, then if a student interjects “what did I do,”? The teacher would respond: “that’s two.”

“The third deduction automatically sends a student to “COLUMBIA,” the detention room managed by two African-America male coaches.

“All the Advisory/home rooms are named after a University. My son is in UCONN. I’m not sure why the detention room is called COLUMBIA. And by the way all the teachers at this charter school are white and from out of state. The school’s administrators did manage to get two coaches that are African-American from the New York City area. They are the two in charge of the detention room.”

Read the article and think about this:

The US Department of Education was so impressed by Democracy Prep that it have the charter chain $9.1 million to expand.

Question: With measures that demand total compliance, is Democracy Prep educating for democracy?

by Jessie Roberts

Thomas Frank rails against the role of financial interests in higher education:

What actually will happen to higher ed, when the breaking point comes, will be an extension of what has already happened, what money wants to see happen. Another market-driven disaster will be understood as a disaster of socialism, requiring an ever deeper penetration of the university by market rationality. Trustees and presidents will redouble their efforts to achieve some ineffable “excellence” they associate with tech and architecture and corporate sponsorships. There will be more standardized tests, and more desperate test-prep. The curriculum will be brought into a tighter orbit around the needs of business, just like Thomas Friedman wants it to be. Professors will continue to plummet in status and power, replaced by adjuncts in more and more situations. An all-celebrity system, made possible by online courses or some other scheme, will finally bring about a mass faculty extinction—a cataclysm that will miraculously spare university administrations. And a quality education in the humanities will once again become a rich kid’s prerogative.

And so we end with dystopia, with a race to the free-market bottom. What makes it a tragedy is that President Obama is right about education’s importance. Not because college augments our future earning power, or helps us compete with Bangladesh, but because the pursuit of knowledge is valuable in its own right. This is why every democratic movement from the Civil War to the 1960s aimed to bring higher ed to an ever widening circle, to make it more affordable. Ours is the generation that stood by gawking while a handful of parasites and billionaires smashed it for their own benefit.

(Hat tip: Sue Halpern)

E.D. Hirsch, Jr., the founder of the Core Knowledge curriculum, wrote an article opposing value-added teacher evaluation, especially in reading. Hirsch supports the Common Core but thinks it may be jeopardized by the rush to test it and tie the scores to teacher evaluations. He knows this will encourage teaching to the test and other negative consequences.

Hirsch believes that if teachers teach strong subject matter, their students will do well on the reading tests. But he sees the downside of tying test scores to salary and jobs.

He writes:

“The first thing I’d want to do if I were younger would be to launch an effective court challenge to value-added teacher evaluations on the basis of test scores in reading comprehension. The value-added approach to teacher evaluation in reading is unsound both technically and in its curriculum-narrowing effects. The connection between job ratings and tests in ELA has been a disaster for education.”

He is right. Will the so-called reformers who recently became Hirschians listen?

by Jessie Roberts

Italian archaeologists are borrowing a page from Virgil and the ancient winemaker Columella in an attempt to make wine that tastes like it did in antiquity:

At the group’s vineyard, which should produce 70 litres at the first harvest, modern chemicals will be banned and vines will be planted using wooden Roman tools and will be fastened with canes and broom, as the Romans did.

Instead of fermenting in barrels, the wine will be placed in large terracotta pots – traditionally big enough to hold a man – which are buried to the neck in the ground, lined inside with beeswax to make them impermeable and left open during fermentation before being sealed shut with clay or resin.

“We will not use fermenting agents, but rely on the fermentation of the grapes themselves, which will make it as hit and miss as it was then – you can call this experimental archaeology,” said researcher Mario Indelicato, who is managing the programme.

(Photo by Udo Schröter)

"Imagine if you will sitting down to your morning coffee, turning on your home computer to read the day's newspaper. Well it's not as far-fetched as it may seem."

Yeah, Imagine that.





I love pieces like this. Going back and hearing about how outlandishly amazing the things we now take for granted are. It was literally a crazy notion for most people back then, to be able to skip the step of going to the convenience store to get the day's news. This is very much akin to the idea that it was once crazy to imagine a computer that fits in your pocket is way more powerful than

Man, my childhood seems primitive.

After four days in Boston, one screamingly obvious thing is that Harpoon IPA is the normal craft beer in town. Fenway. The Four's. Union Oyster House. A Cheesecake Factory. My relatives' fridge. Citizen Public House. It is everywhere. Every town should have a normal good beer but not all do. Allagash White is pretty pervasive in Portland, Maine where we head next. Not sure Albany has one yet. Ithaca sure likes its Cascazilla.

I was a bit surprised it isn't Sam Adams lager here in Boston. But that more of a beer from around here than a beer from here. Normal beer has to be from here. Wherever that is.

The hardest thing about trying to have an intellectual debate with ‘reformers’ is every time they start to lose, they try to change the rules.

First they say “poverty doesn’t matter” and when it becomes clear that it does, they start saying “Well, it matters, but we still need to make schools as good as possible and standardized test accountability is the best way to do that.”  First they deny that charters have a self-selected population that is easier to teach, and then when you prove them wrong, they say “Yes, it’s true, but it is a good thing.”

So for years they have been hailing “miracle schools” which are high poverty schools with, supposedly, the “same kids” as the nearby ‘failing’ school who get incredible standardized test results.  In New York City these included the KIPP schools, the Democracy Prep schools, and the Success Academy schools.  Then, when the results came back from the more difficult common core tests, the KIPP and Democracy Prep schools didn’t do so well, though the Success Academies did.

This certainly put ‘reformers’ in to an awkward position.  If Success Academies are so much better than KIPP and Democracy Prep, why not throw those other two charter chains under the proverbial bus and focus on the one true Messiah?

Instead the ‘reformers’ are trying to have it both ways:  For Success Academies, there have been many op-eds about how those schools are proving all the critics wrong with their superior test results.  As far as the schools who are not proving any critics wrong with their inferior test results, well, we have this recent Huffington Post piece by Michael Petrilli from the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, called ‘The Problem With Proficiency’.

In it, he quotes Democracy Prep founder Seth Andrews:

Like the rest of New York, our Democracy Prep Public Schools saw dramatic drops in “proficiency rates.” In fact, we saw declines that were even greater than most. Why?

1) Entry Grade Level: Charters that enroll at the K-1 level did dramatically better than those (like Democracy Prep) who enroll in the middle school grades. This is potentially GREAT news for urban education because it means that if students don’t fall dramatically behind, they can get on grade level by grade 3, and stay on or above grade level over time. However, it is not even remotely reasonable to compare schools that randomly enroll in kindergarten to those that enroll in the sixth grade. One school has had seven years with a student while we’ve had nine months!

2) Growth Matters Most: The metric that no one has seen yet and that will be the most important to our teachers, administrators, students, and families at Democracy Prep is not “proficiency” but “value-added growth.” The reason we have operated only “A” rated schools every year since 2006 is primarily because 60 percent of that grade has been based on individual student growth, a metric on which our scholars and teachers post some of the most dramatic improvements year-over-year. In fact, even this year, our percent of “1’s” goes dramatically down in grade seven while our “2’s” go up, and by eighth grade we’ve dramatically reduced “1’s” and substantially increased “3’s and 4’s.”

My key point here is that NO ONE in this work, especially at Democracy Prep, makes so-called “miracle school claims” as reported by our critics. We believe, in fact we KNOW, that educating low-income students is incredibly hard work, compounded by the challenges of poverty, mobility, ELL status, and disability. These are not excuses; they are facts. To move our scholars from whatever grade or performance level they enter to be ready for success in the college of their choice and a life of active citizenship takes us at least five years. Given that time, our scholars consistently out-perform wealthy Westchester County on their Regents exams in nearly every subject and our first class of graduates outperformed white students on their SAT’s. Nearly 70 percent of our graduates met the NYC “aspirational performance measure” for college readiness compared to 22 percent across NYC and we require that our graduates earn an Advanced Regents Diploma because, as these new CCSS results prove, the old bar was far too low.

I actually agree with the first point.  Certainly if you have a better school model, then starting with cohorts in kindergarten is going to yield the best results.  But that is not what 5-8 charters like KIPP and Democracy Prep have been saying for years.  They claim that they get two to three years of progress per year and in doing so their students catch up by the time they are seniors.

Also notice that he denies that anyone ever claimed that Democracy Prep was a ‘miracle school,’ yet he finishes with a bunch of miracle statistics about how their seniors did so well on the SATs and how they got better Regents scores than Westchester.

The main point of this article is that it is not proficiency rate that matters, but it is ‘growth.’  Yes, Democracy Prep had low scores on the new common core tests, but we will have to wait another year to see how much they ‘grow’ from this new baseline.  Or do we?

I made two scatterplots comparing how the 7th graders did in all schools in 2012 with how the 8th graders did in all schools in 2013.  Even though everyone went down, the schools with the most “growth” relative to other schools that had the same starting points should hover above the regression trend curve like little accountable angels.

As can be easily seen in these scatter plots, Democracy Prep underperformed on math compared to other schools that had similar proficiency rates last year, and did about average (as a vast majority of schools did) on the ELA test.  Surely an analysis like this will be done in the upcoming New York City ‘progress’ reports, and unless there is some Tony Bennett like manipulations to unfairly boost pet schools, Democracy Prep will have low proficiency scores and low growth scores on the upcoming progress reports.  I wonder how they will try to change the rules when that happens?

As far as their miraculous Regents and SAT scores?  Well, fortunately New York publishes the school report cards with enrollment data for every school.  The 52 eleventh graders in the 2011-2012 school year were once 65 tenth graders in 2010-2011, 79 ninth graders in 2009-2010, 104 eighth graders in 2008-2009 (must I keep on going?), 106 seventh graders in 2007-2008, and a whopping 131 sixth graders in 2006-2007.  To drop from 131 sixth graders to 52 eleventh graders is a 60% attrition rate.  Surely this taints any good statistics they may have for their Regents grades and SATs.

It is pretty clear that, at least by the test score accountability, Democracy Prep is, at best, an average school.  Reformers better get working on some new measure that they can claim is the ‘real’ way that schools are to be judged so that they can use Democracy Prep, again, as a school that deserves to be replicated as others get closed down.

I often hear the word "meritocracy" kicked around rather thoughtlessly on the Internet in a context where the suggestion is that an "unfair" system is somehow the opposite of a meritocratic one. The reality is just the reverse. Meritocracy itself is often grossly unfair. A great example came yesterday from Kevin Drum who as you may know is obsessed with the link between lead in children's bloodstreams and crime. A key point for my purposes, though, is that toxic lead exposure during childhood doesn't just lead to increased likelihood of committing violent crime. It's generally associated with a range of cognitive impairments. Drum's point yesterday was to draw our attention to the fact that while black youths still commit crimes at a higher rate than white ones, the black offending rate has fallen much faster than the white one and this is because the racial gap in lead exposure has also fallen a great deal.

And good for us. But the current cohort of black teens is still more than three times as likely as the cohort of white teens to have had lead levels of 25 mcg/dl as little kids. And exposure levels as low as 10 mcg/dl among children under the age of 6 are associated with an over 5 point decline in IQ among adults.

Needless to say, children under the age of 6 do not exercise a great deal of choice over where they live or what level of soil testing is done. Nor is it an accident that low-income parents are more likely to be inhabiting the kind of dwellings where their kids are likely to be exposed to toxic levels of lead. I think it takes a fairly perverse outlook on life to believe that a person deserves lifelong economic hardship as a consequence of his parents' having lived in an old house near a freeway when he was a toddler. But the name for that social system is "meritocracy." The non-poisoned infants really will grow up to be adults who really are smarter and really do have better impulse control and ability to do long time-horizon planning. They have more "merit" than the poisoned kids just like Dwight Howard is very genuinely taller and stronger than you or I.

Obviously the right response to lead and other atmospheric toxins is to clean them up. But the fact of the matter is that we're not going to eliminate lead from the build environment next year, and we're certainly not going to go back in time to the late 1960s and clean up the environment that today's 45 year-olds grew up in. And though lead is very important, it's also obviously not the only source of relative cognitive disadvantage out there (consider mercury or bad school lunches or just noise). The point, however, is that the unfairness that who your parents were and where they lived 30 or 40 years ago has a major impact on your income and opportunities today isn't a contrast to the idea that the American economic system in some sense rewards merit—this happens precisely because the system rewards merit and possession of "merit" is largely driven by factors that are themselves totally beyond a person's individual control.

In Which Steven Pinker Is A Total Ignoramus Who Should Go Read A Fucking Book And Get Himself Some Fucking Education

(click)

Here’s what I want:  I want Steven fucking Pinker to take a copy of Spinoza’s Ethics and explain one of the propositions to me.  Not all of them; not the whole book.  One.  Just one proposition.  I’ll even do him a solid - I’ll let him read it in English, instead of embarrassing him by making him try to translate Latin.  Or maybe the Critique of Pure Reason.  Can you explain that to me, Pinker?  Hell, can you explain any of Kant’s critiques?  

I’m gonna go out on a limb and say “no.”  In fact, I’m going to go out on a limb that Steven fucking Pinker has not read a single one of these thinkers he so casually and authoritatively name-drops since his undergraduate years, if then.  If Pinker has ever read all of Leviathan, I will eat my fucking copy of the book. 

Let’s be absolutely clear - not a single one of the thinkers this asshole claims for “science” were scientists.  Not a single one of them thought of themselves as scientists; not a single one had a concept of “science” that was anything like the concept Pinker is so anachronistically imposing on them.  All of these men, even if they didn’t think of themselves as “a philosopher,” thought of their work as “a philosophy.”  It’s right in the texts, if you take the time to read them.  And the way you can tell Pinker has no fucking clue what he’s talking about is that he misses the two most important examples that would actually support his claim:  Francis Bacon and Robert Boyle.  Of the thinkers that he lists, Descartes, Spinoza, and Leibniz are the only ones who actually conducted anything that might even remotely fit the bill of “scientific experimentation.”  Smith was an economist.  Rousseau was a dilettante. Kant…I mean, the idea of describing Kant as a an “evolutionary psychologist” is just…OMFG.  

“I often long to travel back in time and offer them some bit of twenty-first-century freshman science that would fill a gap in their arguments or guide them around a stumbling block.”  

Did you follow that, folks?  Stephen fucking Pinker, the great scientific genius, is going to go back in time to correct Spinoza’s arguments and “guide” him.  The idea that these thinkers wrote “in the absence of formal theory” is so reductive and offensive.  Descartes’ Discourse on Method, Spinoza’s Tractatus de Intellectus Emendatione and his correspondences with Olderburg and others, Hume’sTreatise…these thinkers were conscious of formal method and self-reflexive about it in a way few scientists today are even remotely capable of.  Incredibly, implausibly, each of these philosophers invented an inferential method, from the ground up, instead of taking for granted any assumption they were taught.  

Let’s be perfectly clear - “science” as we think of it today is a new thing.  It dates back to the middle of the 19th century, when the disciplinary divisions we today regard as entirely natural wereformalized by people like Hermann von Helmholz.  Before that there were no “scientists”:  there were thinkers, writers, philosophers, ethicists, geometers, and doctors.  There were also theologians, who Pinker dismisses out of hand, even though “science” would not exist without the precedent of Roger Bacon and Albertus Magnus.  “Science” is a fully historical product of the regimentation, organization, and professionalization of what used to just be people observing the world and thinking about it.  Science is the transformation of knowledge into a cliquish guild. 

But the best part of this verbal tripe is the fact that Pinker is so narrow-minded and unself-reflexive in his anachronistic, ahistorical claims that he doesn’t even realize the extent to which his critique of the humanities itself depends on ideas generated by the humanities.  Like this hilarious bit:  “The term ‘scientism’ is anything but clear…The definitional vacuum allows me to replicate gay activists’ flaunting of ‘queer’ and appropriate the pejorative for a position I am prepared to defend.”  First of all - “flaunting”?  And second - isn’t that fucking rich.  Such an original concept!  We can already see how indebted the humanities are to science.  Or this bit here:  “we know that we did not always know these things, that the beloved convictions of every time and culture may be decisively falsified, doubtless including some we hold today.”  Oh, really?  You know that, do you?  And where did this concept of epistemological relativism come from, exactly, if not from the humanities? 

Assholes like Steven Pinker think that people in the humanities resist their ideas because we don’t understand “science.”  But the truth is that many people in the humanities love and embrace the sciences:  there are historians of science, there are digital humanities, there are philosophers of technology.  What we resist isn’t “science”; what we resist are obnoxious fucking ignoramuses like you who come up in our house and tell us how ignorant we are, how much we don’t understand, and what we should be doing with our research.  This is not an issue of science vs. humanities - this is the nature of contemporary academic research and, indeed, human nature itself.  I’m not saying it’s good, I’m not saying it’s healthy, but I am saying that in an era of incredible competition and increasingly narrow specialization, nobody likes people from other disciplines stepping on their turf.  The sciences don’t like it when the humanities do it - have you ever seen the absolutely hideously rude responses a humanities scholar gets when they try to deliver a paper at a science conference? - so why should you expect different when you do it yourself? 

Pinker is defending science against an extremely odd idea:  “The mindset of science cannot be blamed for genocide and war and does not threaten the moral and spiritual health of our nation. It is, rather, indispensable in all areas of human concern, including politics, the arts, and the search for meaning, purpose, and morality.”

So, first of all, I’ve been a scholar in the humanities for a while now and I’ve never heard anybody accuse science of genocide.  Unless incurable dweeb-hood is lethal, in which case run for the hills.  Second, “indispensable in all areas of human concern”?  Well, let’s think about that for a second.  If Pinker had ever read Spinoza and Hume, much less understood them, he would understand how basic claims from necessity function:  namely, if science is 200 years old and aesthetic and political theory are over 2,000 years old, then former is not necessary to the existence of the latter.  To borrow a formulation from Descartes - you know, the philosopher - both art and politics “can be and be conceived” without any concept of “science.” 

But really there’s a point more important than all of these, which is this:  Science doesn’t cause genocide or war.  The humanities don’t cause genocide or war.  What causes genocide is the ignorant belief in an absolute formal distinction between two things where in fact there is only a spectrum.  Nobody has ever started a war under the mantra “let’s all get along” or “we’re all human,” but plenty of wars fall under the rubric of “us or them.”  One of the most fundamental sources of human error, anxiety, and misery is this unreflexive tendency to set up absolute oppositions between things that have never been and never will be absolute opposites.  The supposed division between the sciences and humanities is not a question of method, or of epistemology, even - it’s question of disciplinarity and the economic structures of contemporary academic institutions.  Simple evidence:  you can get science funding to write about Bachelard, because he’s a “historian of science,” but you can’t get science funding to write about Bachelard’s student, Michel Foucault, because Foucault was a “philosopher.” 

The best thinkers - throughout history, in every field of inquiry - embrace whatever insights and information that their thought requires.  The best scholars in the humanities respect the sciences; the best scientists are the ones who actually take the time to read the occasional book and can form a decent sentence.  The worst thinkers are the ones who insist on inane distinctions, who set up false binaries instead of knocking them down, and who think of knowledge as an either/or proposition instead of embrace the notion that knowledge is a mosaic of perspectives that together generate an evolving and diverse picture of existence. 

Personally, I think “science” can be incredibly useful to research in the humanities.  I have regular arguments about this with traditionalists in my discipline.  But I don’t think this because I want to “infuse” the humanities with science, I think this because I consider all human knowledge to be a single vast and manifold field, and I pick and choose what’s useful to me and not what the disciplinary guilds of contemporary academia think I need.  This true when literary scholars frown at my diagrams, and it’s equally true when obnoxious, ill-informed assholes like Steven Pinker tell me that evolutionary psychology is useful for literary criticism.  Don’t tell me how to do literary criticism, you self-important airbag. 

And don’t even fucking talk to me about Spinoza. 

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Henry Blodget says he hates labor unions, but unless companies start raising wages we're going to need them.

I would put this another way. If you turn back 30 or 40 years, the policy rationale for crushing labor union influence went something like this: In the short-term crushing private sector labor unions is going to lead to a surge in corporate profits, but profits are the fuel of investment and long-term economic growth. Companies with high profits have the capital necessary to invest. And the existence of large profit margins means there are profit opportunities to be exploited with new investment. It makes perfect sense. But it hasn't happened, and profits have soared far in excess of investment.

You can look at this in different ways, but here's corporate profits after tax minus net private investment:

Which is to say that several decades into this experiment, we're seeing much more of the "profits surge" than the "surging profits lead to an investment boom" dynamic. One explanation for this that's growing in popularity on the right is that the rise of more capital-friendly politics in the mid-1970s coincidentally occurred at the exact same time as a structural slowdown in the rate of technological progress, so while it seems like anti-labor politics has failed to deliver the goods, it's really all just a stroke of bad luck.

And maybe that's right—just because an unfalifiable proposition seems conveniently conducive to the interests of very rich people doesn't mean it's false. But it sure seems false to me.

Now of course the policy world isn't binary. Just because something has failed doesn't mean the only way to fix things is to simply reverse the thing that failed. Possibly, the right remedy to this is to change labor law. Possibly, the right remedy is to change corporate governance. Possibly, the right remedy is to engineer a public sector investment boom. Maybe some of the sources of these profits need to be attacked directly. Maybe it's all of them. But however you slice it, the striking issue isn't simply the structural growth of profits in a low wage environment, it's that the business-friendly environment isn't bringing us the investment utopia we were promised.

Can you imagine that the governor of your state would tell teachers which books they are allowed to assign or use in class?

Can you imagine that the governor of your state would tell college professors which books they are allowed to assign or use in class?

Can you imagine that the governor of your state would use his power to try to audit and close down a program at a university because its director dared to criticize him?

Well, all of these things happened in Indiana when Mitch Daniels was Governor.

And this, dear readers, is why teachers need tenure, to protect them against thuggish politicians who want to control what teachers are allowed to teach. It is called “academic freedom.” Yes, teachers need academic freedom. Otherwise some very important historical controversies, some basic scientific ideas, and some major novels will never be taught for fear that someone will be offended.

 

“The Weiner-Abedin marriage is to the Clinton marriage as Sharknado is to Jaws,” – Dave Weigel.

I harrumphed and stamped my foot upon hearing that the Obama administration had agreed to some small arms sales to some Syrian rebels. I called the decision a “betrayal.” It seems more and more that it was instead just a canny sop to the allies until they came to their senses, which they seem to have finally done:

British newspaper reports on Monday said British military commanders had advised Mr. Cameron that there was no purpose to be served by sending small arms, since such modest arms supplies were unlikely to sway the outcome of the conflict, which is now in its third year. British officials declined to confirm the reports that Mr. Cameron had abandoned the idea of arming the rebels, saying that since no formal decision had been made to send weapons in the first place, it was not clear how he could be cast as retreating from it.

Of course, one reason to have a blog is to sound off loudly enough to send a message. So I don’t regret publicly going after Ben Rhodes et al. But I was empirically wrong to over-read what was a minimalist gesture in a longer game plan. And not for the first time.

The GOP is abuzz about Liz Cheney's decision to mount a 2014 primary challenge against incumbent Republican Senator Mike Enzi of Wyoming. In an item titled "Old Boy Net United Against Liz Cheney," Jonathan Tobin describes the daughter of old boy Dick Cheney as "widely acknowledged to be among the party's brightest stars," a dubious characterization. He goes on:

Why are so many leading Republicans lining up against Cheney? They are saying that they are opposing her bid because they don't like divisive Republican primaries that weaken the party and the eventual winner against the Democrats. But this is bunk. Wyoming is so deep red it's almost impossible to imagine the scenario in which a GOP primary, no matter how nasty, would lead to a Democratic win. Rather, what they really seem to be mad about is a breach of manners. If Enzi were to disappear from the Senate, few in Washington would even notice, let alone miss him, while Cheney would be a strong asset for a party that needs talented members able to stand up to President Obama and the Democrats as well as strengthening the party's appeal to women. But many in the establishment are so offended by her not waiting her turn until Enzi left on his own steam that they are prepared to stand by him.

Even more interestingly, Senator Rand Paul, who is usually to be found among those least likely to join the go-along-to-get-along crowd, is also backing Enzi, which may have more to do with his disagreement with Cheney's sensible views on foreign policy than any affection for the incumbent.

One aspect of that analysis is accurate: Liz Cheney's foreign-policy views, which would only be considered "sensible" at a magazine that still regards the Iraq War as a prudent undertaking, explain a great deal of the opposition to her. Most Americans understand that investing trillions of dollars and thousands of American lives in Iraq was a historic blunder. Tea Party types don't want to defend the conflict, but neither are they comfortable fully confronting the truth about Team Bush's folly or the toll it has taken on the GOP's reputation for competence in foreign policy.

Enzi supported the Iraq War too, and it may be irrational that his challenger is more tied, in the public mind, to the invasion. But being the offspring of a vice president has consequences. On one hand, you enjoy a base of donors and a degree of name recognition far beyond what individual merit would've brought. On the other hand, you're tied to the family brand. Republicans aren't thrilled about this primary challenge in part because of the nature of the Cheney brand: It is understandably associated in the minds of many Americans with misleading the nation into a disastrous war, an official program of illegal torture, a proclivity for Machiavellian power grabs, and a relationship with Halliburton that seemed like cronyism. There is, as well, the public's distaste for political dynasties, due to the reasonable suspicion that the younger members wouldn't be where they are without inside-the-Beltway nepotism, and the carpetbagger vibe of her brief residence in the state prior to declaring her run.

It is fair to judge Liz Cheney based on the family brand? Personally, I try not to hold the illegal, immoral acts of a father against his son or daughter unless he or she implicates herself in the objectionable positions.

Liz Cheney hasn't just embraced the objectionable actions and positions of neoconservative Republicans. She has also earned an independent reputation as someone who participates in weak, laughable, and even scurrilous attacks on ideological opponents that can only cast doubt on her judgment and moral character. The weak, laughable attacks are often aimed at Obama, of whom I am often critical. But even people who hold Obama in low esteem can't help but feel embarrassed on behalf of commentators who discredit themselves by making absurd claims like, "He's unwilling to go after the terrorists that are threatening the nation." To deny Obama's willingness to go after terrorists is to be deeply ignorant, ideologically blinkered, or a liar. None of those qualities is desirable in an aspiring U.S. senator.

On another occasion, Cheney said of Obama, "He's working to preemptively disarm America while rogue states like North Korea and Iran build nuclear weapons capabilities and stockpiles." Under Obama, the U.S. spends orders of magnitude more on defense than any other country; it maintains a nuclear stockpile large enough to obliterate whole continents if not the earth itself; and it has invested billions in a fleet of armed drones that increases our weapons capabilities. Obama's policy is, in other words, keeping us armed to the teeth. I understand that convention holds that it's unfair to begrudge pundits when they go on Fox News and utter inane talking points so far beyond exaggeration that they're just lies, but this is especially inane. 

Cheney's low regard for civil liberties bothers me most. Others on the right are most bothered by her work for Keep America Safe. As the New York Times reported in a 2010 article about its efforts:

A conservative advocacy organization in Washington, Keep America Safe, kicked up a storm last week when it released a video that questioned the loyalty of Justice Department lawyers who worked in the past on behalf of detained terrorism suspects.

But beyond the expected liberal outrage, the tactics of the group, which is run by Liz Cheney, the daughter of the former vice president, have also split the tightly knit world of conservative legal scholars. Many conservatives, including members of the Federalist Society, the quarter-century-old policy group devoted to conservative and libertarian legal ideals, have vehemently criticized Ms. Cheney's video, and say it violates the American legal principle that even unpopular defendants deserve a lawyer.

"There's something truly bizarre about this," said Richard A. Epstein, a University of Chicago law professor and a revered figure among many members of the society. "Liz Cheney is a former student of mine -- I don't know what moves her on this thing," he said.

On Sunday, Benjamin Wittes, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, issued a joint letter criticizing the "shameful series of attacks" on government lawyers, which it said were "unjust to the individuals in question and destructive of any attempt to build lasting mechanisms for counterterrorism adjudications." The letter was signed by a Who's Who of former Republican administration officials and conservative legal figures, including Kenneth W. Starr, the former special prosecutor, and Charles D. Stimson, who resigned from the second Bush administration after suggesting that businesses might think twice before hiring law firms that had represented detainees. Other Bush administration figures who signed include Peter D. Keisler, a former acting attorney general, and Larry D. Thompson, a former deputy attorney general.

The letter cited "the American tradition of zealous representation of unpopular clients," including the defense by John Adams of British soldiers charged in the Boston Massacre, and noted that some detainee advocates, who worked pro bono, have made arguments that swayed the Supreme Court. Ms. Cheney's video referred to the lawyers as the "Al Qaeda Seven," and accused the Justice Department of concealing their names, which were later revealed by Fox News.

Tobin might have been less puzzled by the opposition to Cheney's candidacy if he'd recalled how many people lost respect for her enough to publicly declare her approach to advocacy "shameful." 

In Tobin's defense, there are probably some Republican operatives who are upset that she didn't "wait her turn." Politicos are often overly invested in dues paying, obsess over perceived slights, fetishize tribal loyalty, and exhibit entitlement on a scale that used to be considered sinful. The Republicans who oppose Cheney for those reasons should get over themselves. They should oppose her based on the dearth of what she has to offer, and the many discrediting statements, actions, and policy stances that call her values, character, and judgment into question. This is someone who has a history of mistaken foreign-policy judgments, an inability to make sophisticated critiques of ideological opponents, and a bad habit of behaving dishonorably toward rivals. She should never be trusted to hold elected office in America.

This November, a film adaptation of the classic sci-fi novel Ender’s Game is hitting theaters. Normally, that’s the kind of movie I’d be first in line to see. The problem in this case is that the novel was written by Orson Scott Card, who’s a more than merely run-of-the-mill religious bigot. Card has said that [Read More...]

Graham “Gizz” Butt played guitar for English Dogs in the '80s and The Prodigy during the '90s, but left other endeavors to form his own prog-metal band The More I See, which has shifted lineups a few times since debuting in 2002. Current lead singer James Cluer is apparently a big Star Wars fan, so for the first song off their upcoming album, the band flew to Tunisia to film the video for “The Eye That Offends” on the old, decaying Star Wars sets still preserved in the desert heat. It's been almost 40 years, and they barely look like they've aged since George Lucas just left them rotting in the middle of the Sahara desert near the Algerian border. This is not the band you’re looking for, typically, to do a video like this—it’s fairly standard punk-influenced metal, with lots of talk of misery ...

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“Do elephants have souls?” asks Caitrin Nicol, who describes how the beasts demonstrate an unusual appreciation for mortality:

For man, his sense of self, sense of history, and sense of the intemporal, however inchoate, are gestured at with his remembrance of those who have passed on. But here he is joined by the elephants, the only other known creatures that — whatever it may mean to them — purposively commemorate their dead, in a way [Coming of Age with Elephants author] Joyce Poole calls “eerie and deeply moving”: “It is their silence that is most unsettling. The only sound is the slow blowing of air out of their trunks as they investigate their dead companion. It’s as if even the birds have stopped singing.” Using their trunks and sensitive hind feet, the ones they use for waking up their babies, “they touch the body ever so gently, circling, hovering above, touching again, as if by doing so they are obtaining information that we, with our more limited senses, can never understand. Their movements are in slow motion, and then, in silence, they may cover the dead with leaves and branches.”

After burying the body in brush and dirt, family members may stay silently with it for over a day; or if a body is found unattended by elephants not related to it, they may pause and stand by for some time. They do this with any dead elephant, recently deceased or long departed with only the skeleton remaining. “It is probably the single strangest thing about them,” [Elephant Memories author] Cynthia Moss writes:

Even bare, bleached old elephant bones will stop a group if they have not seen them before. It is so predictable that filmmakers have been able to get shots of elephants inspecting skeletons by bringing the bones from one place and putting them in a new spot near an elephant pathway or a water hole. Inevitably the living elephants will feel and move the bones around, sometimes picking them up and carrying them away for quite some distance before dropping them. It is a haunting and touching sight and I have no idea why they do it.

Elephants even react to carved ivory, long divorced from the original remains and altered and handled extensively. Poole writes of a woman who came to visit Tsavo National Park wearing ivory bracelets: as an elephant approached, the park warden cautioned her to hide them behind her back; but when the elephant arrived, she reached around behind the woman and contemplatively perused the bracelets with her trunk. Poole then had a friend stage a repeat performance later, and the same thing happened.

Recent Dish on animal consciousness here and here.

Robert Mann, a professor of communications at Louisiana State University, tries to imagine how Bobby Jindal and John White would react if they heard that Headstart centers kept sloppy records and couldn’t pass an audit.

He writes:

“Imagine if almost every one of those schools could not produce any records to prove that their expenditures did not constitute “gross irresponsibility or gross individual enrichment.”

“What do you think would be the reaction of Louisiana Republican leaders?

“What if the audits of these Head Start schools were littered with the following statements: ”We were unable to perform the [investigative] procedures because the school did not have a separate checking account or other procedures to account for [government related] expenditures separate from other expenditures.”

“Can you imagine the outrage we’d hear from Gov. Bobby Jindal and state Education Superintendent John White?

“Well, what if similar audits turned up showing the same kind of sloppy record keeping at almost every private voucher school in Louisiana? What do you imagine the reaction would be to that?

“Well, we don’t have to imagine.”

It is okay by them if voucher schools keep bad records. It doesn’t matter at all.

No problem. Just throwing taxpayer dollars out the window with no accountability at all.

But when most voucher schools could not produce the records needed to be audited, John White shrugged it off.