5.4.03

VVV

Aborigines Try To Ban The Tale Of The Teddy Bear On Ayers Rock National park officials say the Uluru [aka Ayers Rock] book, which depicts the bear at the summit of the rock, sends the wrong message to impressionable children. They also claim it contravenes strict laws governing photography at sacred sites. They have warned the Campbells that they face a £20,000 fine unless they pulp a new edition or write a more culturally sensitive version. Brooke Watson, manager of the Uluru-Kata Tjuta national park, said: "This is a special place, with its traditional indigenous culture alive in it. We are charged with protecting that culture, and if we have to put a plastic bubble over it to preserve it we are prepared to do that." -- via WitchVox

I find Watson's comment to be a bit hard to believe. Yes, the park does make efforts to protect the native culture. But there's also a chain railing to help people climb it. I would think if they're that committed to preserving the cultural significance of the rock, they would at least take the chain down (thus making it much more difficult to climb the rock) and change the sign at the bottom from "climb at your own risk, and remember the Aborigines don't want you to" to "don't climb."

On the one hand, I would tend to lean toward measures to protect Aboriginal culture. The Pitjantjatjara people do, after all, nominally own the land that the park is on (it was given back to them in 1985, with the stipulation that it would be used as a national park). And emphasising the sanctity of Aboriginal culture at a site as important as Uluru is an important symbolic victory for a culture that has gotten the short end of the stick countless times. On the other hand, total indigenous sovereignty ignores the fact that the rock has attained important cultural significance for non-Aboriginal Australians, as an important symbol of their country. The situation requires some form of accomodation between the cultures. Book banning, however, tends not to make you any friends.
posted by Stentor Danielson at 16:47 -- link --

VVV Rabi has a nicely existential post over on wockerjabby. The interesting bit for me is the first paragraph:

I've been having trouble with reality lately, even more than usual. there's always a seedling of doubt burrowed in the back of my consciousness that tells me that nothing beyond my reach exists at all, that it's all a great spherical projection or hallucination or mirage, and if I were to shake my head too hard or trick the world into thinking my eyes were closed, everything beyond the stretch of my fingertips would disappear into static.

In a sense, her suspicion is right. The world out there is just a jumble of stuff. It becomes meaningful -- resolves into objects and forces and so forth -- because we interact with it, either by sensing it or thinking about it or acting on it. The world can't interpret itself.
posted by Stentor Danielson at 16:17 -- link --

VVV A few weeks ago I read an article (I don't recall where or who the author was) about the Sokal Hoax. Some years ago physicist Alan Sokal submitted an article to the postmodern journal Social Text arguing that gravity is a social construct. After the article was published, Sokal revealed that it was a hoax -- he didn't believe what he had said, and the "argument" was just a jumble of postmodern jargon. This hoax proved quite embarrassing to the editors of Social Text, and is often referred to as an expose of postmodernism, revealing that it has no standards of intellectual rigor because nobody saw that Sokal's article was entirely BS. While I have certain sympathies with postmodernism, I'll admit to a desire to perform a similar hoax when reading some of the more infuriatingly relativist authors.

The author of the article I read was critical of Sokal for surrendering his scientific standards by using a trick to "disprove" postmodernism. The author is correct to point out that the hoax proves nothing when judged by the rules of objective positivist science that Sokal champions. His conclusion was that the hoax was an instance of stooping to his enemies' level in order to score PR points. But I think there is a sense in which Sokal's hoax was on the right track. The issue here is the framing of a discourse. Every school of thought operates in a certain frame (roughly the same as a paradigm for Kuhn or an episteme for Foucault) that sets out what the rules for making valid statements are. This frame allows members of the school to critique each other and evaluate competing theories. Philosophical disagreements -- such as the positivism versus postmodernism issue -- are often quite intractable because the combatants share no overarching frame that would help them adjudicate between their arguments. In most cases, a person uses the rules of her own frame to construct an argument demolishing other frames (for example, by showing that postmodernism violates the rules of scientific reason). But these sorts of arguments don't do much to convince the holders of other frames. It's as if the person is speaking a different language. What Sokal attempted to do is to construct an argument against postmodernism using postmodernism's own rules -- particularly its love of word play and irony as discursive strategies. (Postmodernism, incidentally, began as an attempt to create a critique-from-within of the modernist frame.) To avoid criticisms that he doesn't understand the postmodern frame, Sokal enacted his hoax through a peer-reviewed journal, on the assumption that any article that was not valid by postmodernist standards would be rejected (though this argument is complicated by the fact that it was not just Sokal's article, but the whole hoax apparatus -- not all of which was peer reviewed -- that constitutes his critique of postmodernism).

Without knowing more about the hoax, I can't say whether Sokal was successful in disproving postmodernism on its own terms. But I think it's too narrow a view to say that he gave up his scientific rigor in the process of criticising people for having no scientific rigor. Rather, he became frustrated with arguing against postmodernists on positvist terms and decided to take the argument to the enemy's turf.
posted by Stentor Danielson at 01:12 -- link --

4.4.03

VVV Dean over at Dean's World posts that the newly discovered cannibal dinosaur isn't really all that unexpected a thing, since lots of creatures eat their own, but it does make it easy for the media to write sensational "Cannibal Dinosaurs!" headlines. The headline for the story in the Sydney Morning Herald -- In twilight of dinosaurs, some turned their jaws on own kind -- goes even further, implying that dinosaur cannibalism was some sort of desperate or degenerate act carried out as world dominance slipped from dinosaurs' grasp. The SMH article does, however, go on to talk about cannibalism in other animals and how dinosaurs compare on that front.

On a related note, if the asteroid impact theory is correct (I can't say for certain, as I gather there has been a lot of research done on the issue in the years since I was obsessed with dinosaurs), there was no "twilight of the dinosaurs." "Twilight" implies a waning, a preparation for the end. But being killed off by a rock from outer space gives no twilight. The end of the dinosaurs is not the extension of their developmental trajectory, but an exogenous disturbance.
posted by Stentor Danielson at 04:48 -- link --

VVV Here's an Afghan proverb that I like: "Some people use a glass for water, some for milk, and others use it for wine -- so should we break all the glasses, or only punish the one who drank wine in it?" The problem is that it doesn't work so well in a culture that doesn't consider drinking alcohol a sin.

The expression was quoted as a defense of cable TV, which has been banned by the Afghan Supreme Court because Indian programs featuring scantily-clad women.
posted by Stentor Danielson at 01:32 -- link --

3.4.03

VVV My commentary and cartoons for the week are up.
posted by Stentor Danielson at 17:01 -- link --

VVV John Quiggin points to a post by Stephen Kirchner in which Kirchner alleges that Quiggin wouldn't be so upset about the projected US budget defecits if the president causing them were a Democrat. This sort of thing -- "you wouldn't say that if it were the other party proposing it" -- is one of my least favorite rhetorical strategies. It takes the focus away from the actual issue, and it's usually nearly impossible to prove one way or the other. There are, however, two situations in which this type of argument is valid: 1) the person's argument is explicitly based on their feelings for the person proposing the policy ("I support the war because I trust President Bush to do the right thing") or 2) you can cite an actual example of the person taking a different stance in a similar situation under a different administration ("You supported Clinton's attack on Serbia, which is no different from the situation with Iraq"). Note that in number 2 the person may validly counter by saying either that there is some important difference between the two situations, or that they were mistaken in the earlier situation.
posted by Stentor Danielson at 15:19 -- link --

VVV (I seem to blog in waves -- several posts one day, then a couple days with nothing. Anyway, here's part 3 of the current wave.)

On Rewarding Friends Latvia was one of the Soviet "captive nations," ultimately freed by the U.S. victory in the cold war. Recently, as some of us had long urged, Latvia gained greater security when the U.S. lobbied for the Baltic nations to be brought under NATO's umbrella, despite Russian disapproval. Under President Vaira Vike-Freiberga, Latvia has been an outspoken U.S. ally in the campaign to liberate Iraq. But polls show a possible switch: Latvians, swept up in a wave of European pacifism, may send Americans a message by turning her out of office in June. Democracy gives Latvians the freedom to ride that anti-U.S. wave — but should the Russian bear growl, Americans would be free to remember that message.

I think it's important to remember that there are limits to gratitude. If you do a favor for someone without any prior agreement about recompense, you have no moral claim to your choice of payback. In particular, one cannot demand that someone else perform an immoral act (or, I would argue somewhat less definitively, an act that offends their morality even if you don't share it) as a return favor. Thus, even if I save your life, I can't expect you to kill an innocent person for me (and for my parenthetical addition, if I save an Orthodox Jew's life I can't ask him to repay me by eating pork). If supporting the US war were simply an unwanted burden -- Latvia just chafes at spending the money to send a few troops, or expending the political capital to stand by our side at the UN -- Safire's gratitude case would carry weight. But if the action requested is considered immoral (as I imagine most of the antiwar public thinks), then Latvia is within its rights to refuse that particular show of gratitude.

Such are the perils of doing a favor (or, in the Latvia case, a self-interested action with incidental consequences that are beneficial to another) without agreeing in advance on a repayment.
posted by Stentor Danielson at 04:26 -- link --

VVV

Indians Who Sought Billions Owed $60.94, Report Finds Four Native Americans went to court in 1996 to demand that the government pay them and many others like them billions of dollars in royalties from a trust fund established in 1887 to manage mineral and timber development on lands apportioned to individual Indians. Now a $20-million study ordered by the government has produced a different accounting of the shortfall in the government's payments, at least to the four named plaintiffs and their predecessors. Its finding: $60.94.

This is an interesting development. I'm a bit skeptical, given the inherent inefficiencies of bureaucracy, the nation's not-quite-stellar history of dealings with Native Americans, and the fact that the BIA's profile is fairly low (so it's subject to less pressure by people with real power to make sure it's doing things right). And it's not as if a number of inaccuracies over the years have averaged out to $60.94. The study found one single instance of mistaken accounting, amounting to $60.94. On the other hand, I don't have much beyond my suspicions to go on, since I haven't seen the report. Either way, the study is certainly a huge victory for the government. Unless there's some embarrassing expose of flawed methodology in the study, the plaintffs' case has become far more difficult,

It's also interesting that, based on Yahoo! News's archive, the LA Times was the only major news outlet to cover this story (there isn't even an AP wire about it).
posted by Stentor Danielson at 03:53 -- link --

VVV In his latest post, presidential-candidate-with-a-blog Gary Hart offers a popular criticism of the desire to democratize Iraq:

But serious foreign policy thinkers have pointed out that "democracy" is not necessarily liberality. What if, for example, the first "free" Iraqi elections produce President Mullah Omar? Do we then overthrow a democratically elected theocracy? Has Dick Cheney thought this far ahead?

The remainder of Hart's post suggests he hasn't come up with a great answer either. His feeling seems to be that he wants to avoid getting in the situation of installing a democracy that becomes anti-American. I can sympathize with that sentiment. Nevertheless, by the time Hart would be in the White House he may be forced to make such a choice. Dick Cheney has another two years to make the US responsible for an anti-American democracy, and then it will be up to Hart (if he wins) to decide what to do about it.

This is an instance of a problem that the Democratic candidates are all going to have to deal with. It's all well and good to criticize Bush for how he ought to have handled the war. But come 2004, we'll be occupying Iraq, and whoever wins the election will have to make the most of the situation we're in.

My solution? It's hard to say without a specific case before me, but I think the general guiding principle can be taken from the philosophy behind the Bill of Rights. The presumption of legitimacy must rest on democracy, even when democracy produces results we don't like. A functional liberal order is built on a respect for the process over the results -- so, for example, dissatisfied Democrats didn't start riots when they lost the midterm Congressional election. This is necessary both for the fostering of real Iraqi civil society, and for redeeming the US's claim to the moral highground in international politics. But there must be established certain bedrock principles -- things like freedom of speech and ethnic and gender equality before the law -- that are so fundamental to the liberal order that they cannot be democratically overturned. Electing an Iraqi Mullah Omar would be a case of going too far, using the democratic process against the principles that make democracy legitimate.
posted by Stentor Danielson at 03:07 -- link --

1.4.03

VVV Kevin Drum has had a series of posts about not wanting to be associated with the extremism of the left. The consensus among Drum and those who have responded to him seems to be that, while the extremists of the right are more numerous and more powerful (they run the GOP in a way the Democrats' left wing can only dream of), moderate liberals get tarred with the sins of their neighbors to the left. (This may in fact be a result of the power of the right's extremists, who have the media apparatus to suggest that John Kerry and Joe Lieberman are only a step away from participating in the latest "vomit-in" or spiking some timber.) Drum's solution is for Democrats to repudiate the left wing and set themselves up as the representatives of the middle.

It seems to me that the Green Party could have a role in making this happen. Many people look at the Greens as a way of forcing the Democrats to listen to their left wing by threatening those votes -- exactly the opposite of the Clinton-DLC moderation Drum wants. But it's possible that a strong Green Party could help the Democrats slide to the center. The Dems would give up on the far left as a lost cause, and cease to pander to it. Meanwhile, it would make it easier to deflect accusations of extremism -- it's hard to call moderate liberals "communists" when there's an honest-to-goodness socialist party with national political clout. This disassociation with accusations of leftism would, I think, help to encourage moderate Republicans to jump ship, particularly those with a libertarian bent (assuming the reformed Democrats take up Dean-esque fiscal conservatism and Clintonian free trade).

The result would be a hard-left Green Party, a hard-right Republican Party, and a thoroughly centrist Democratic Party. This three-way split would probably necessitate using a sort of governing-coalition model in Congress (similar to the situation in most parliaments), in which the Democrats would ally with one of the wing parties to get the majority. This would provide the added benefit of ensuring project-continuity and moderation (because the Democrats would always be part of the leadership) while allowing voters to shake things up by shifting power alternately toward the Greens or Republicans.
posted by Stentor Danielson at 02:17 -- link --

31.3.03

VVV

Suit Challenges Right To Report Political Slurs ... One council member, William T. Glenn Sr., called the council president and the mayor "liars," "criminals," "draft dodgers" and "child molesters." Mr. Glenn did not then or later produce evidence for any of his charges. The lawsuit that followed [filed against the reporter who covered the council meeting], legal experts said, illuminates one of the hardest questions in libel law: May the news media report, without endorsement on the one hand or skepticism on the other, wild charges made by one politician against another?

Maybe it's because I'm such a fierce freedom of the press advocate, but I don't think that question is hard at all. If someone says something in a public or "on the record" situation, the media is well within its rights to report that they said it. Any libel charge should fall on the shoulders of Glenn, who made the remarks, not the newspaper that reported that he made them. Indeed, I would say the paper is failing in its durty to give an accurate picture of the council meeting if it omitted Glenn's accusations.

Journalists have a responsibility, whenever possible, to verify the accuracy of statements made by public officials -- that's what investigative journalism is all about. At the very least, the reporter ought to have checked to see if the council president had a criminal record and mentioned the result. Nevertheless, this responsibility is a matter of journalistic ethics, not law.
posted by Stentor Danielson at 23:06 -- link --

VVV

East Versus West: One Sees Big Picture, Other Is Focused Like many scholars of human thought since at least Hume and Locke, today's cognitive psychologists tend to be "universalists," assuming that everyone perceives, thinks and reasons the same way. "There has long been a widespread belief among philosophers and, later, cognitive scientists that thinking the world over is basically the same," says psychologist Howard Gardner of Harvard University in Cambridge, Mass. Although there have always been dissenters, the prevailing wisdom held that a Masai hunter, a corporate raider and a milkmaid all see, remember, infer and think the same way. But an ever-growing number of studies challenge this assumption. "Human cognition is not everywhere the same," concludes psychologist Richard E. Nisbett of the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, in his new book, "The Geography of Thought: How Asians and Westerners Think Differently ... and Why." Instead, he says, "the characteristic thought processes of Asians and Westerners differ greatly."

I certainly agree with the general conclusion here -- that different brains work differently, and we should be skeptical of generalizing how our own cultural group thinks. However, I worry about the way the study is set up as a contrast between Euro-Americans and East Asians. There is an implication (not necessarily intended by the author) that there are two diametrically opposed ways of thinking, one used by "us," and the other used by whatever "them" is being considered (East Asians being a popular choice). The strangeness of this paradigm is apparent when you think of the diversity of "them"s that have been used. Taking into account the whole body of literature about how Euro-American forms of thought are not universal, we would be led to the conclusion that East Asians, hunter-gatherers, women, African Americans, and Indians (to name the most popular) all think alike, in contrast to some uniquely unusual Western consciousness. I'd like to see someone trying to contrast the thinking of, say, Chinese and Navajos.
posted by Stentor Danielson at 14:03 -- link --

30.3.03

VVV I have managed to overload Microsoft Word's spell-checker. 281 pages into this document, I got a message saying "There are too many spelling and grammar errors for Microsoft Word to continue displaying them." It's not that I'm a bad speller (or a prolific writer), though. The document was a compilation of news stories copy-pasted out of Lexis-Nexis for a project. Since they were news stories, I must assume they were all spell-checked extensively, which means the errors that Word was getting overloaded with were just unusual last names.
posted by Stentor Danielson at 21:45 -- link --

VVV I think the editorial coordination at Newsweek is breaking down. This week the Conventional Wisdom watch is premised on the idea that the administration is taking a hit for predicting that the war would go much more smoothly than it has. But the cover story is about a poll that shows Americans are rallying behind the Commander-in-Chief.
posted by Stentor Danielson at 03:43 -- link --