totalitarianism today

Links on a theme: Self-justification.

According to a recent study, beards make men more handsome and healthy. Tablet refers to beards as "mankind's wheatgrass". The secondary effects on the female sex have yet to be determined.

Lisa Saunders insists that you can be "anti-porn and pro-sex". This is tied to a loose strand of the view that plastic, petroleum-laden porn is utterly unerotic.

Many digital moments can be sacrificed to The Atlantic's online Audible Anthology archives.

The Buy Palestinian campaign offers nonviolent Israelis and Palestinians a way to support Palestinian state-building outside the normal channels of governance.

A Ukranian interrogation room brings back personal memories of East European love affairs in hostels where beds were being de-loused and young backpackers paid to sleep in chairs.

After the US droned his village, a young Yemeni describes the effects to unbelieving Congressmen and White House staffers. It just goes to show that the greater part of reporting on human cruelty assumes the ability to speak English, the only language that the perpetrators bother to understand. 

Thing #27 that happened on our red couch (known as "civil rights seat").

What to do if you happen to be in Seattle on July 16, 17, or 18.

Ben Judah is cool. You can't talk me out of this one.

Author David Grossman stands up for residents of Beit Safafa as the anti-community effects of highways continue to accrue across the globe. I'm not being sarcastic here- highways are number one killer of communal life around the world. Given some semantic leeway, of course.

Hell yes Eastern European history. Need I say more?

In the age of postmodern terrorism, reading jihadi love poems aloud in your kitchen commits you to nothing except the torture of unassuming insects. If plagued by guilt, most neuroapologists lean towards penitential support of the hackathon for peace in South Asia. I'm starting to think that if anyone can bring peace, it's probably hackers.

Links on a theme: Youth without youth.

Drawing by Dee Rimbaud (Exquisite Corpse)

“And even if he’s still alive, what can we do with him?” The voice seemed to come from far away and it sounded to him tired, bitter.

“Who knows what sins he’s committed, that God would strike him on the very night of Easter, right behind a church!” Then, after a pause, he added, “Let’s see what the intern says about it.”

It seemed strange to him that he felt nothing, that he did not, in fact, feel his body at all. He knew from the conversation of those around him that he had been moved. But how had he been transported? In their arms? On a stretcher? On a cart of some sort? 

An excerpt from Mircea Eliade's book, Youth Without Youth (University of Chicago Press)

"The End of Everything", an essay by Carlos Lozada (Washington Post)
"I hope you had it while you could because, last week, sex ended." 

"Youth Without Youth", the video for the Metric song (Vimeo)

Sascha Altman DuBrul talks about "losing" his mind, his book, and the Icarus Project (Zeek)

Youth Without Youth directed by Francis Ford Coppola (2007)

"Resisting the End of Childhood", an essay by Sara Goldrick-Rab (Chronicle of Higher Education)

From Primitives to Zen, a book by Mircea Eliade (Hypertext)

"Teenage Wastleland", a short story by Anne Tyler (Weber University)

"Mircea Eliade and the Perception of the Sacred in the Profane: Intention, Reduction, and Cognitive Theory", a paper by Bryan S. Rennie (Temenos, Vol. 43)

"Our Age of Anxiety", an article by Elaine Showalter (Chronicle of Higher Education)

"The Founder of Ace of Base's Nazi Past", an article by Adam Chandler (Tablet)
"I don't think any of us saw 'The Sign'" 

Links on a theme: Policy implications of the idea of "the masses".

How Soviets mapped out Leicester for nuclear war.

A review of a review of where philosophy stands in today's Korea.

Oh my. 

 "Aesthetic totalitarianism" via M. Gerwing Architects (above photo credited as well).

Adornoism.

"The US Census: From Enumeration to Intrusion".

The complete content of SPIN magazine, available from Google Books. Even the mundane is massed.

Differences between rational and irrational forms of dictatorship.

 The Jazz Amabassadors slideshow.

The keys to the end of the world have been bought and sold.

10 links for lingering.

Irv Hamilton Jr.'s war story that wasn't quite.

Laura Miller's review of Bill Bryson's latest, a foray into the sanctity of the home.

A government salary database searchable by location and name. Because social science can be personal.

Baby Jong looked ill.

The International Database and Gallery of Structures.

"Toward a Culture of Consequences: Performance-Based Accountability for Public Services", the latest from RAND.

With Rahm gone, Obama is lonely. So Obama reaches for more spying powers.

Frank Fukuyama still finds reason for optimism. "Victory or strategic disaster?"

Critical theory: Links on a theme.

Craig: A quick inventory: critical race theory, critical discourse analysis, critical food studies, critical animal studies, critical security studies, critical legal studies, critical social theory. Some more: Critical Studies, Critical Studies in Improvisation, Critical Studies in Education, Critical Studies in Media Communication, Critical Studies in Television. There are even departments of critical studies (for instance, at UBC Okanagan, which is the first to show up in Google). You can't go on a campus (or, for that matter, read an academic or political blog) without being confronted by critique and criticism. Originally connected to the Institute for Social Research in Frankfurt, around the works of Adorno, Horkeimer, Benjamin, Marcuse, Lowenthal, Fromm, Neumann, Oppenheimer, and its successors--such as Habermas and Honneth--the "critical" in "critical theory" has achieved a remarkable degree of autonomy from its origin and, now, we can all be critical without having allegiance whatsoever to the critical theory of the Frankfurt School or its proponents. Indeed, I was even able to write a doctoral comprehensive exam in "critical social theory" a few years back with only having a couple of pieces from Adorno, Horkheimer and Habermas on the list.

Jacques Barzun: Students of Marx and Freud.. loosely known as the Frankfort School, argued for combining the liberal side of Marxism with the erotic ingredient of psychoanalysis to effect a new emancipation of mankind from intolerable physical, social, and economic oppression. In the United States, a parallel demand under the arresting title of Life Against Death gave its author, Norman O. Brown, an influence comparable to that of Herbert Marcuse, the representative in America of the Frankfort School. 

Alina: Is that an ammeter over there?

Dave: It is all a farce.

Matthew Chrulew: Central to the recent philosophical reactivation of Paul has been the argument that in our era of imperial sovereignty and advanced global capitalism the most appropriate politics is one of love. These attempts to reinvigorate progressive materialist politics are often characterised as a break with the perceived relativist tendencies of French philosophy. We must move, it is said, from the postmodern negativity of critique and disconnection to a new, positive politics of creativity and fraternity. Deconstructionist criticisms have insisted on the violent exclusions necessary to any such politics. This essay will argue that Foucault’s genealogy of modern biopolitics and governmentality as a Christianisation-in-depth demonstrates its suffocating history and contemporary risks. Only through attention to the dangers of the Christian-secular dispositifcould a politics of love be articulated that might unravel, rather than intensify, the grid of power relations.

Slavoj Zizek: The only successful sexual relationship occurs when the fantasies of the two partners overlap. If the man fantasizes that making love is like riding a bike… And the woman wants to be penetrated by a stud, then what truly goes on while they make love is that a horse is riding a bike…with a fantasy like that, who needs a personality?

Simon Bowen: Critical design and related design practices have similar characteristics and operation to Critical Theory: a view that the status quo (generally affirmed by design) somehow ‘oppresses’ society; that ‘enlightenment’ of the factors underlying this ‘emancipates’ society and is facilitated by a reading of critiques (alternative proposals such as critical artefacts).

Tamara Prosic: Since the Frankfurt school started discussing religion as an important phenomenon intersecting on many different levels with social existence a lot of pages have been devoted to the search for the positive, de-alienating anthropological and social-revolutionary aspects of Christian teachings. Most of them, however, refer to Western Christianity. Like the proverbial poor cousin, Orthodox Christianity and its teachings were mostly ignored and have never become a topic worthy of analysis in modern critical theory. Ernst Bloch is one of the few, if not the only one, who refers to it in The Principle of Hope, but only incidentally and rather confusingly and incorrectly, although not without ingenious intuitive insights about its anthropocentric and historical character. The intention of the paper, however, is not to criticize the great guru of the land of utopia for his unfamiliarity with Orthodox Christianity, but rather to draw the “poor cousin” from obscurity into the light of modern critical theories and to present “the earthly” particularities of the Orthodox utopian teachings. In a sense, it is a small addition to Bloch’s mega-project on utopia.

Ernst Bloch: Where everything is disintegrating though, the body also contorts itself effortlessly along with it. Nothing coarser, nastier, more stupid has ever been seen than the jazz-dances since 1930. Jitterbug, Boogie-Woogie, this is imbecility gone wild, with a corresponding howling which provides the so to speak music accompaniment. American movement of this kind is rocking the Western countries, not as dance, but as vomiting. Man is to be soiled and his brain emptied; he has even less idea amongst his exploiters where he stands, for whom he is grafting, what he is being sent off to die for.

Alina: I keep expecting to hear something about "instrumental rationality"., but it seems like you guys prefer to play round-robin rather than discuss critical theory in any meaningful fashion. Craig might argue that this is due to the currently-unmoored and free-floating status of critical theory in general. Is it fair to assume that no one disagrees with Craig?

Jean Baudrillard: Today's terrorism is not the product of a traditional history of anarchism, nihilism, or fanaticism. It is instead the contemporary partner of globalization. To identify its main features, it is necessary to perform a brief genealogy of globalization, particularly of its relationship to the singular and the universal.

Suzanne lives in a van down by the river. Or the beach.

SUZANNE - Leonard Cohen 

SUZANNE - Peter Gabriel

Leonard Cohen said the song was about meeting Suzanne Verdal, the then-wife of sculptor Armand Vaillancourt, in Montreal. The song refers to a chapel near the harbor, Notre-Dame-de-Bon-Secours, which faces the morning sunrise. 

Leonard says: At a certain point, I bumped into Suzanne Vaillancourt, who was the wife of a friend of mine, they were a stunning couple around Montreal at the time, physically stunning, both of them, a handsome man and woman, everyone was in love with Suzanne Vaillancourt, and every woman was in love with Armand Vaillancourt. But there was no... well, there was thought, but there was no possibility, one would not allow oneself to think of toiling at the seduction of Armand Vaillancourt's wife. First of all he was a friend, and second of all as a couple they were inviolate, you just didn't intrude into that kind of shared glory that they manifested. I bumped into her one evening, and she invited me down to her place near the river. She had a loft, at a time when lofts were... the word wasn't used. She had a space in a warehouse down there, and she invited me down, and I went with her, and she served me Constant Comment tea, which has little bits of oranges in it. And the boats were going by, and I touched her perfect body with my mind, because there was no other opportunity. There was no other way that you could touch her perfect body under those circumstances. So she provided the name in the song.

Suzanne is now homeless in Venice Beach, where she lives out of her automobile. She says she never had sex with Leonard; and Leonard confirms her story. The truth is that he only imagined having sex with her; the scent of tangerines wafting through her skirts.

Suzanne says: I was the one that put the boundaries on that because Leonard is actually a very sexual man and very attractive and very charismatic. And I was very attracted to him, but somehow I didn't want to spoil that preciousness, that infinite respect that I had for him, for our relationship, and I felt that a sexual encounter might demean it somehow.

 

Suzanne says she has met Leonard twice since the song became popular. One time she met him after a concert performance in the 1970's. Another time she met him "in passing" in the 1990's; she says she danced for him. But he did not speak to her or provide any indication that he recognized her. 

Sources include 1 + 2 + 3 + 4 + 5 + 6 + 7 + 8 + 9 + 10 + 11

Morning links.

• The Christian Right, including the Ralph Reed entourage, channels Obama and sets its sights on a white house puppy. 
• Robert D. Kaplan reviews a political history of Iraq for the National Interest. 
• An Estonian Orthodox church leader thinks economic crisis might just be good for the soul. On that note, how do church attendance stats vary with "hard times"? Any correlations with increased tithing on the part of Protestant Christians during economic downturns? If so, is it superstition which motivates the increase? Are we paying God to fix the economy?
• Regardless of personal religious affiliation, having attended a school with a high proportion of conservative Protestants appears to discourage abortion as women enter their twenties. Conversely, women from private religious high schools appear more likely to report obtaining an abortion than women from public schools. The results of this recent study on the effects of personal and school religiosity on the decision to abort a premarital pregnancy are published in the Journal of Health and Social Behavior. And yes, they are interesting.
• Scott Horton explains what he means by the Iranian "crisis in theocracy".
• Timothy Garton Ash thinks "Obama is certainly a European".
• The GOP's Iran policy remains bankrupt; the track record for Republican interventionism in Iran is not so hot.
• Wordnik makes its debut on the beta scene.  
• The 2009 Failed States Index is out. Somalia gets the gold. 
• So you missed the 6th Annual Games for Change Festival? Life via ether continues apace. 
• Self-segregation in social networks, cause for alarm or a sign of effective reputational goods pricing?

What grows on the windowsill.

Bodyism is the fallacy which states because we have separate bodies, therefore, we are completely separate entities from society. [Pravda]

Until the Victorian era, zoos were living displays of wealth and power, confined to the private pleasure gardens of the aristocracy. Then, in 1847, the Zoological Society of London began charging the public to view its collection of exotic animals in Regent’s Park. It was an immediate hit. The London Zoo captured the mood of the time. Elephant tusks had begun to grace the entrances to gentlemen’s clubs along Piccadilly; feathers from exotic birds were appearing on ladies’ hats. [Financial Times]

Dad went and died. He was a quiet guy, slightly on the mystic side, with two deep furrows on either side of his nose. He was given to occasional bouts of melancholy, and on Sundays he’d do funny stuff over lunch. He’d toss the soup spoon towards the light fixture hanging from the ceiling, then try to catch it. He always failed. [Razvan Petrescu]

I'm not a man. Playboy is not my favorite magazine. [Harold Norse]

There is no doubt that what we are as beings is intimately tied to the brain between our ears. So when neuroscientists talk of the prefrontal cortex having a role in regulating behaviour, they are bound to be correct. It is the equivalent of anatomists talking of the legs having a role in walking. In both cases there is an association of physical anatomy with function but in both cases the physical anatomy is inadequate to explain the function. We are able to walk because we have legs, but the reason we walk is to get somewhere: we do not walk because we have legs. Similarly with the brain, we are able to regulate our behaviour because we have a prefrontal cortex, but the reason we regulate our behaviour is because we have goals, ambitions and desires that require behavioural regulation. Those goals, ambitions and desires are the product of our personal histories within a specific cultural context mediated through our physical bodies including our brains. But those goals, ambitions and desires are not the product of the brain directly. [Stuart Derbyshire]

Levertov’s response surprised and comforted me. She said that not all poets were meant to write anti-war poetry. [Anne-Marie Cusac]

[Photo taken by KitOne]

The warrior gene: Hot or not?

Boys who carry a particular variation of the gene Monoamine oxidase A (MAOA), sometimes called the “warrior gene,” are more likely not only to join gangs but also to be among the most violent members and to use weapons, according to a new study from The Florida State University that is the first to confirm an MAOA link specifically to gangs and guns.

The sweeter sex remains aloof; findings apply only to males. Girls with the same variant of the MAOA gene seem resistant to its potentially violent effects on gang membership and weapon use.  

Much to the chagrin of certain scientists, the warrior gene has been studied most extensively in the Maori peoples of New Zealand. Although women have historically been considered to be the more anxious sex, Maori males are worried. The inhibiting effects of the recent MAOA research studies include a potential chilling effect on traditional tribal dances. One can certainly appear fierce without actually being violent. 

Turmeric, the yellow herb most commonly used in curry, is considered to be a herbal MAO inhibitor. While turmeric (aka Indian saffron) is used heavily in Southern Indian dishes, turmeric is not as popular in the war-torn regions of northern India, including Kashmir. 

Individuals with the so-called “warrior gene” display higher levels of aggression in response to provocation, according to new research co-authored by Rose McDermott, professor of political science at Brown University. In the experiment, which is the first to examine a behavioral measure of aggression in response to provocation, subjects were asked to cause physical pain to an opponent they believed had taken money from them by administering varying amounts of hot sauce. [Science Daily] 

Understood in this way, the appetite for aggression carries an unavoidable correlate of spite and malice. 

These discoveries about the genetic influence of MAOA on aggression and punishment behavior doesn't support the theory that humans are "altruistic punishers" who punish free-riders for the good of the group. Some daddies spank their children more than others; and they may not do so in the service of the greater good. Or greater God. It appears that humans use mixed strategies in cooperation. 

Some people may punish more than others, and there may be an underlying evolutionary logic for doing so. [Medical News Today]

Brunner syndrome is a rare (5 males in one large extended family) genetic disorder with a mutation in the MAOA gene. It is characterised by mild mental retardation and problematic impulsive behavior (arson, attempted rape, aggressive posturing). It is caused by a monoamine oxidase A (MAOA) deficiency, which leads to an excess of catecholamines in the bloodstream, such as serotonin, dopamine, and epinephrine.

One study focused on children who had been mistreated and analyzed which of the mistreated kids were prone to violent, aggressive, or criminal behavior. The study found that kids with "high levels of MAOA expression (that is, children who had genetic variants of the MAOA gene which produced higher levels of the enzyme monoamine oxidase) were less prone to violent behavior while those who had lower activity forms of the MAOA gene were more prone to criminal behavior." 

But no one bothered to define criminal behavior specifically enough to exclude the most popular form of youthful criminal behavior, namely drug use and abuse. The problem with criminal behavior as currently understood in the land of the free is that it includes many non-violent behaviors, so the warrior gene's relation to violent crime remains unclear and unspecified. 

And is there a link between those with the warrior gene and fear of hot sauce?

Unlike most European nations, the United States still makes frequent use of capital punishment to "punish" criminals and violent offenders. Does the US gene pool contain higher levels of the warrior gene? Do we have more violent criminals as well as more violent punishment behaviors? Does our celebration of legitimated violence bring environmental effects to bear on MAOA gene expression? 

Do American daddies spank more than European ones? Do men who beat their wives do so to maintain social order-- to please the gods, to keep the peace, to stay on top? Should we the people spank our Presidents when they make bad policy decisions?

The Nobel Peace Prize in 2030 will be awarded to the scientist who discovers how to engineer and activate the warrior gene in special human soldiers, an elite fighting force, if you will, for use against terrorists. 

Appropos of doubles.

b

the flag of the earth + Gravity Lens' favorite fictional flags.

Colin Powell on the future of the GOP + Kinky Friedman on the future of Texas.

psychologists, the least religious professors + the religiosity of American professors.

groupthink at GM +  groupthinking a "Muslim world".

photo from neil krug's pop art book.