5.9.02

VVV World Summit Erred By Ignoring Tourism, Editor Says

This is a good example of how to ask loaded questions.

Moving on to address the substance of the article, I've never been convinced by the ecotourism argument -- that tourism is the answer to making areas economically productive without chopping down their forests or digging up their minerals or other unsustainable practices. Maybe it's because I'm not much of a traveler, but I think Bellows over-estimates the potential of tourism as a growth industry.
posted by Stentor Danielson at 10:55 -- link --

3.9.02

VVV Sorry, Buyers, But Happiness Won't Last

I posted two big things already today, so I won't dilute their importance by giving you a big quote and commentary on this article. But I'm linking it because it has some interesting things to point out about the correlation between economic growth and happiness. Basically, it boils down to this: being rich is nice, but it's not all that much nicer than being moderately well-off.
posted by Stentor Danielson at 21:15 -- link --

VVV

Israel's Supreme Court Approves Deportations In a landmark decision, Israel's Supreme Court ruled Tuesday that Israel can expel relatives of Palestinian terror suspects from the West Bank to the Gaza Strip, but only if it proves they pose a security threat. The Israeli military argued that expulsions create an effective deterrent and help prevent suicide bombings and other terror attacks. Human rights lawyers said the measure constitutes collective punishment and violates international law, specifically the Geneva Conventions, which forbids "individual or mass forcible transfers" from occupied territory. The ruling written by Chief Justice Aharon Barak said that the military can only expel a relative of a militant if that person poses a real security threat. "One cannot assign the residence of (expel) an innocent relative who does not present a danger, even if it is proved that assigning his residence may deter others from carrying out terrorist acts," Barak wrote.

This is kind of an odd ruling. I'm not a fan of deporting terror suspects' relatives, because it sounds like collective punishment -- guilt by proximity, punishing a person by hurting their relatives. The recent case of the Pakistani girl who was raped because her brother committed a crime is a particularly gruesome example of collective punishment. The theory behind this ruling, however, doesn't seem to constitute "collective punishment." This is because of the stipulation that the deportees be shown to be security risks themselves. This means that the deportation must be based on the characteristics of the deportees, not just who their relatives are. But this raises an important question, one that makes me wonder about how this ruling will be implemented. By making deportation contingent on the deportees' characteristics, it makes their status as suspects' relatives irrelevant. If they're to be deported on their own merits, why even consider that they're related to a suspect? One possibility is that family ties would be used as a sort of profiling -- suspects' relatives would be given extra scrutiny by the officials in charge of deciding who's too dangerous to remain in the West Bank. Or it come become more insidious. If the court establishes a low threshold of evidence for relatives' deportation, demonstrating that they pose a threat themselves would become just a formality and the collective punishment would go ahead as before. Alternately, "he's also related to a terrorist" could become a trump card to be drawn out when other evidence for deportation is flimsy.

The ruling as issued upholds the deportation of terorrists' relatives by making their relative status irrelevant. But whether that will hold true in practice is a very different question.
posted by Stentor Danielson at 16:00 -- link --

VVV You can find some neat things when you use the "most recently updated blogs" list. For example, the archetypally frightening blog linked in the last post. But sometimes you run across something genuinely interesting. Like this post. The content isn't so interesting (to me at least, since I know little about "energy medicine"). And she has fairly dismissive words for "occult" traditions. Yet instead of rejecting anything associated with chi or prana or what have you, she is translating their substantive, useful content -- the medical observations that connect them to the real world -- into her own Christian metaphysical framework. This sort of points out some ideas I've had recently about the nature of knowledge. By knowledge I mean any sort of explanation of some aspect of existence. Knowledge, it seems, must be verified in some way -- that is, shown to be useful. There are two main types of verification. External verification means that knowledge is tested against data from your senses. Internal verification means that knowledge is tested against the requirements of your own brain -- is it comprehensible, does it make meaningful sense out of the world, is it intellectually satisfying, etc. In a very crude way, you could say that science is a system of external verification, while religion (and to some extent all the humanities) is a system of internal verification. The two systems -- physics and metaphysics, so to speak -- are linked, so a change in one may require adaptation in another. At the moment I'm tempted to see metaphysics as a sort of spuerstructure, integrating and making sense of externally verified data. It provides a kind of language in which to express externally verified propositions, which can thus be translated back and forth between different metaphysical systems.
posted by Stentor Danielson at 15:37 -- link --

VVV Wow. This is probably the scariest blog I've ever come across. I don't think it's possible to do that without trying.

Also, apparently a posse consists of exactly 20 people. Or so section LXVI of the Skáldskaparmal, in the Prose Edda, tells me.
posted by Stentor Danielson at 00:24 -- link --

VVV Also, why do authors always need to point out that Karl Ritter and Alexander von Humboldt, the founders of modern geography, both died the year Origin of Species was published?
posted by Stentor Danielson at 00:21 -- link --

2.9.02

VVV Why do authors not feel a need to translate when they quote passages written by French scholars?
posted by Stentor Danielson at 01:04 -- link --

1.9.02

VVV Claude Lévi-Strauss talked at one point about a Navajo trial. A young man was charged with casting a spell on a girl, a charge which, however sincerely believed by the accusers, we are to assume must be false. The defendant, however, does not deny the charge against him for very long, even though he of all people should know that he is innocent. He constructs a story about how he did it, revising his explanation to match the expectations of the judges. Once he has thoroughly implicated himself and laid out all the gory details of how he (supposedly) committed the crime, the judges accept the story and decline to punish him.

The explanation, Lévi-Strauss says, is that the more serious issue at stake was not the ensorcelling of the girl, but rather the blow to the social system caused by someone rejecting its tenets. By breaking the rules, a sorcerer calls them into question. A sorcerer, or someone accused of being one, is thus separated from the community by virtue of these broken social values. But by constructing the story, the accused integrated the threatening crime back into the Navajo worldview. And in doing so, he brings himself back into the tribe. The interrogation was not so much a means of establishing the truth as it is a means of affirming the social system.

When we read this passage, it tends to strike us as alien. We're used to trials as means of establishing facts of guilt and innocence, not as social rituals that act out our values and integrate the community. But it seems we're not so different from the Navajo after all:

The Truth About Confessions How many people over the centuries have been executed or spent life in prison on the basis of a false confession? Eddie Joe Lloyd of Detroit, who in 1984 confessed to the gruesome rape and murder of a 16-year-old girl, was freed from prison last week because DNA testing proved that he was innocent. He had spent 17 years behind bars. The idea that one can confess to a crime one didn't commit seems bizarre. Confession is the most personal of statements. It is supposed to express the intimate truth of the individual, to reveal his lived experience and "inner dispositions," as Rousseau put it in his "Confessions." This truth, these dispositions, are obscure, shifting, illusive; most confessions are laden with unintended meanings. As the psychoanalyst Theodore Reik noted in "The Compulsion to Confess," confession is often not an end in itself, but rather the means of an appeal to parents or authority figures for absolution and affection. Police interrogators are authority figures with a vengeance. They can use the consolatory model of religious confession, implying that absolution will come from making a clean breast of things, leading to a reintegration with the community from which the suspect is now wholly severed. Courts have played along, permitting them to use all sorts of ruses, including outright lies — claiming "proof" of guilt from fabricated polygraph tests, false eyewitness reports, false findings of fingerprints, hair, blood or semen at the crime scene.

posted by Stentor Danielson at 19:45 -- link --