Author Archives: oook

Mien and moue

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I’m always on the lookout for passages that articulate things I’ve observed more clearly than I’ve ever managed to express them. Here’s one from Tony Judt’s Thinking the Twentieth Century that applies equally well to milieux I have experienced:

…to become an insider at Cambridge or Oxford does not in itself require conformity, except perhaps to intellectual fashion; it was and is a function of a certain capacity for intellectual assimilation. It entails knowing how to “be” an Oxbridge don; understanding intuitively how to conduct an English conversation that is never too aggressively political; knowing how to modulate moral seriousness, political engagement and ethical rigidity through application of irony and wit, and a precisely calculated appearance of insouciance. It would be difficult to imagine the application of such talents in, say, postwar Paris. (pg 56)

The details of mien and moue vary from place to place, and time to time (early-1960s Harvard not the same as late-1960s Stanford, in my own case, and present-day fashions are different again), but Judt really nails it with ethnographic precision and verbal elegance. I have the sense that Tony Judt spoke with semicolons…

This week’s New Yorker

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Two fine not-behind-paywall items from this week’s New Yorker:

Adam Gopnik on Elaine Pagels’ new book Revelations: Visions, Prophecy, and Politics in the Book of Revelation

As Stephen Batchelor has recently shown, the open-minded, non-authoritarian side of Buddhism, too, quickly succumbed to its theocratic side, gasping under the weight of those heavy statues. The histories of faiths are all essentially the same: a vague and ambiguous millennial doctrine preached by a charismatic founder, Marx or Jesus; mystical variants held by the first generations of followers; and a militant consensus put firmly in place by the power-achieving generation. Bakunin, like the Essenes, never really had a chance. The truth is that punitive, hysterical religions thrive, while soft, mystical ones must hide their scriptures somewhere in the hot sand.

Hendrik Hertzberg on the Satanic Reverses of the GOP:

…the Republican “base”—an excitable, overlapping assortment of Fox News friends, Limbaugh dittoheads, Tea Party animals, war whoopers, nativists, Christianist fundamentalists, à la carte Catholics (anti-abortion, yes; anti-torture, no), anti-Rooseveltians (Franklin and Theodore), global-warming denialists, post-Confederate white Southrons, creationists, birthers, market idolaters, Europe demonizers, and gun fetishists…

…Romney has had remarkable good fortune in those he has shared the stage with. His rivals in reputed reasonableness obliged him by dropping out sooner (Mitch Daniels, Tim Pawlenty) or later (Jon Huntsman). What remained was a kick line of clowns, knaves, and zealots for the fabled base to examine, exalt, and, as soon as each surged past Romney to the top of the polls, expunge. The Donald flashed first, but Trump the Candidate smelled less sweet than Trump the Fragrance. Michele Bachmann, Sarah Palin’s understudy, muffed her lines. Herman Cain fell fast when the grievances of a disgruntled ex-mistress packed him off to political Uzbeki-beki-beki-beki-stan-stan. Rick Perry slunk out with an “oops,” but his most damaging lapse was to blurt that only people without “a heart” would treat as criminals the blameless children of immigrants without papers.

Testing Stephen’s blog

The question of how and when a website is indexed by Google has arisen, and I need to do an experiment, so feel free to ignore… but I’m curious to see how quickly the phrase “tendentious fritillary” appears once instantiated here and in Stephen’s new and experimental blog (which is as yet unknown to Google). What do I have to do to get Stephen’s blog noticed and indexed?

(N.B. that it took less than 3 minutes for the phrase to show up in Google with a link to my blog)

Today’s dose of cognitive dissonance

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Compare and contrast, as the exam questions sez:

and

…The tribal people of the Omo Valley keep cattle, sheep and goats but their unique pastoral way of life is sadly threatened by the modern world and the march of development.
A hydroelectric dam, known as Gibe III, is planned to be constructed across the Omo River Valley and according to Survival International this will cause the threatened end to the way of life of some 200,000 Ethiopian tribal people.
Survival International’s director, Stephen Corry, is quoted on the organisation’s site as saying: “The Gibe III dam will be a disaster of cataclysmic proportions for the tribes of the Omo valley. Their land and livelihoods will be destroyed, yet few have any idea what lies ahead. The government has violated Ethiopia’s constitution and international law in the procurement process. No respectable outside body should be funding this atrocious project.” (from http://bardofely.hubpages.com/hub/The-amazing-body-art-of-the-Ethiopian-Omo-tribes)

Clay Shirky’s eloquence

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If you are going to read or watch JUST ONE summary of sopa/pipa stuff, Clay Shirky’s TED talk is my current candidate. It’s 14 minutes, but (or, better, AND) you get the Backstory of the continuing machinations of the “content industries” … the point that WE SHARE STUFF is at the heart of his presentation. And The Mouse doesn’t like that.

Another good presentation: Khan Academy on YouTube

…and here’s another essential piece: Dan Gillmor’s commentary in The Guardian, which says that the proponents aren’t proceeding from ignorance, and in fact they understand the Internet quite well:

…the Protect IP Act (Pipa) – and a host of activities around the world – share a common goal. These “fixes” are designed to wrest control of these tools from the masses and recentralize what has promised to be the most open means of communication and collaboration ever invented… it’s fair to say that some individual members of Congress have demonstrated, via their public statements, a lack of attention to the technical details of how the net works. I assure you, however, that the staff members who have taken dictation from Hollywood and its allies know precisely what their measures would achieve, if enacted. And I assure you that Rupert Murdoch and his top staff are fully cognizant of the realities they fear and loathe.

This is developing into a much more interesting and important dispute than first met the eye and ear, and a number of commenters have pointed out that sopa/pipa is just another skirmish in the wars of “the copyright cartel and its allies” (in Gillmor’s words) against, well, us. Do I see 99% here? Gillmor again:

The people who want to protect “intellectual property” from all infringement have set up a binary choice. They tell us that if we do not agree to their absolute control, we are endorsing stealing. This is another lie, though it’s been an effective one until recently – when people began to realize what was at stake.

And there’s more, in fact so much more that I’m not sure what to leave out, but meanwhile take a look at NewLeftMedia’s 12-minute YouTube analysis, which provides some more valuable context.

These presentations will turn out to be really interesting examples of explanations, once we can see and analyse a broad range of them.

And while we’re exploring motivations and reactions, add this bit from John Battelle’s SearchBlog:

…Major Obama donors in Hollywood assumed they were buying their way into legislative protection of their threatened business models, and when the President didn’t do their bidding, they “leaked” their displeasure…

Only its mother could love it

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Still chewing at the bones of this Poststructuralist carcass, and this morning I’m trying to puzzle through just why the stuff is so hard to read. It’s passages like this that stick in the craw:

Foucault sought to understand the discontinuities within Western European history by highlighting the differences between distinct contingently constituted epistemological situations. In studies influenced by Foucault, history is mapped in order to trace the borders of discursive formations for discontinuities of meaning… Foucault imagined differences in terms of discontinuities internal to a given culture’s history and as marking the interior structure of the subjectivities formed within that culture. (Peter Jackson “Mapping Poststructuralism’s Borders: The Case for Poststructural Area Studies” Sojourn: Journal of Social Issues in Southeast Asia 18:1 2003:49)

The bolded fragments must be meant to mean something, but I have to read them about six times before what that something might be starts to percolate through to my thinking brain, and even then I’m awash in alternate readings. How does anybody ever learn to read this stuff?

It is deconstruction’s positing of a single field of meaning upon which opposed dominant and marginalized binary categories are mutually defined that permits this approach to become linked with universalisms despite a professed interest in particularity. (Jackson 2003:54)

The mind quails, rebels, withers, and declares itself too goddam old and inflexible to get it.

Linking four texts

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Cory Doctorow is one of those who gets (and puts) it so clearly:

The last 20 years of Internet policy have been dominated by the copyright war, but the war turns out only to have been a skirmish. The coming century will be dominated by war against the general purpose computer, and the stakes are the freedom, fortune and privacy of the entire human race.

The problem is twofold: first, there is no known general-purpose computer that can execute all the programs we can think of except the naughty ones; second, general-purpose computers have replaced every other device in our world. There are no airplanes, only computers that fly. There are no cars, only computers we sit in. There are no hearing aids, only computers we put in our ears. There are no 3D printers, only computers that drive peripherals. There are no radios, only computers with fast ADCs and DACs and phased-array antennas. Consequently anything you do to “secure” anything with a computer in it ends up undermining the capabilities and security of every other corner of modern human society.

And general purpose computers can cause harm — whether it’s printing out AR15 components, causing mid-air collisions, or snarling traffic. So the number of parties with legitimate grievances against computers are going to continue to multiply, as will the cries to regulate PCs.

The primary regulatory impulse is to use combinations of code-signing and other “trust” mechanisms to create computers that run programs that users can’t inspect or terminate, that run without users’ consent or knowledge, and that run even when users don’t want them to.

The upshot: a world of ubiquitous malware, where everything we do to make things better only makes it worse, where the tools of liberation become tools of oppression.

Our duty and challenge is to devise systems for mitigating the harm of general purpose computing without recourse to spyware, first to keep ourselves safe, and second to keep computers safe from the regulatory impulse.

(summary of his keynote at 28th Chaos Communication Congress)

The comments open various other cans, and are interesting to scan through to appreciate the great variety of geek perspectives.

Cory’s presentation shares time’n’space with some other recent reading, and it’s occurring to me that there are some potent interrelations, though they’re a bit on the latent side, and not immediately obvious.

I had occasion to try to read an article on GIS and postmodernism (Agnieszka Leszczynski’s “Poststructuralism and GIS: is there a ‘disconnect'”, in Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 21:581-602 [2009]), which I found as impenetrable as most writing that references (privileges?) the Poststructural. As a part of my attempt to wrestle with its vocabulary, I converted the pdf to text, did some word counts, and produced a word cloud which does at least exemplify the problematic: words like ontic, epistemology and ontological make me squirm. Thus,

…theorists problematize the disembodiment of the conventional deployment of GIS… opposition to (empirical) ontological commitments is raised on the basis that the effects and objects of mapping and encoding practices ensconced within the technology are enabled by a contemptible epistemology systematically implicated in the networks of control that rationalize daily life…

gives me the jimjams. So I tried a Google Ngram for some of the most vexatious terms, and another for problematiz/se. These probably demonstrate little more than my age and remoteness from the academic fray.

A few days ago I was reconnected with a friend of 50+ years ago via a pointer to Matt Cartmill’s 1991 review of a book by Donna Haraway (see Miguel Centellas’ posting and Maggie Koerth-Baker’s too –Matt was a year ahead of me in high school, and one of those ‘smartest-person-I-ever-met’ people). I retrieved the whole review and read it gleefully, then sent it to a friend who read it not-gleefully, and so it goes…

So here I am, wondering if ‘ontic’ really ought to mean something to me, wondering if it’s even possible for me to grasp what the problem is that Leszczynski is writing about. So I somewhat idly try Google for ‘ontic’ and it’s bloody Wikipedia that gives me a way in:

“Ontic” describes what is there, as opposed to the nature or properties of that being.

…that is, as opposed to the linguistic acts that produce interpretations, readings, characterizations of “what is there”. OK, a good start.

Co-incidentally, I’ve been reading Adam Gopnik’s Winter: Five windows on the season, with on-and-off pleasure and this morning was brought up short by this passage, which seemed directly apposite to my wrangling with ‘ontic’:

I sometimes stop and wonder at the reality of the geological and biological world, that the things we see, though certainly existing, have none of the intense sequence, the personifications, the character we give them; without us they would just fall back into the world of nothing. I have a hard time expressing this, though it is one of the strongest emotions I know: this sense that somehow the entirety of the universe could have been made –was made– without purpose, that it is cold, spinning, unconscious, neither kind nor cruel, just following laws that are in the end not even laws, just regularities produced by the cycling of chances. A vast, empty room, with no one home…

I recall once when I got word that my best friend was dying and I happened to pass a paint store where all the shades of yellow were laid out and named, quite cleverly and precisely –lemon zest and buttercup and canary, each shade given a personality– and I thought, This is all a lie. The spectrum of light is as indifferent as the rest of the universe. “Buttercup” and “lemon zest” were not labels but just lies, hopeful names given to arbitrary swatches in a physical phenomenon of light, which is not only indifferent to our existence but without any kind of neat internal structure at all, with no more charm or colour than the indifferent hum of a radio on the wrong station. (pp.209-210)

And what is it that ties these disparate bits of text into a bouquet? I’m thinking that all of them operate in the realm of onomastics: they’re about the utterly (entirely, exclusively) human exercise of naming what surrounds us, so that the various things can be woven into the stories we tell. Good old Homo narrans, at it incessantly.