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weekly quote #10: John Keats November 30, 2007

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Seems my weekly quote has become quite the end-of-the-week thing. But that might be for the best. At any rate… Once upon a time, I was a literature major; in that other life, poetry was a much larger interest of mine than it is now. I first met Mr Keats as a senior in high school; one of his sonnets seemed to speak directly to me — and although such fears plague me less now than they did in that other life (I’m not as old as I used to be, as I tend to remark), they still hang about. Perhaps I’ve just gotten better at standing on the shore and banishing them:

“…then on the shore
Of the wide world I stand alone, and think
Till love and fame to nothingness do sink.”

From the untitled sonnet headed by the first line, “When I have fears that I may cease to be” — page 283 of my edition of John Keats: The poems.

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nausea November 29, 2007

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 A post title over at FP Passport: “YouTube shuts off Egyptian blogger’s torture videos”.

The reason offered, of course, is that the content was “inappropriate”. I assume, having not seen any of them, that the videos featured some very graphic, violent content. I’m sure that someone — perhaps many people — out there was rather disgusted.

But I’d rather that many people be rendered nauseous watching video of “a police officer binding and sodomizing an Egyptian bus driver” than anyone be rendered so by having to read about someone who is trying to put such content out there in order to fight the activities being recorded having their access shut down.

Are there other sites that would be willing to host those videos? I’m sure there are. Is it YouTube’s fault that the activist lost his videos? No.

Am I disgusted that people are willing to let the offense taken by someone — anyone — dictate to everyone else what should and shouldn’t be out there to watch? Nauseating.

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weekly photo #59: Saalhof November 28, 2007

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Saalhof (edited)
This week’s photo was taken in Frankfurt, Germany, from a pedestrian bridge* on the Main River. It’s digitally edited — I removed a boom arm from the side of the bridge. The main building in the center of the photo is called the Saalhof — I’m fairly certain it serves now as a museum (I really do need to work on my German…).

*The Eisernen Steg — linked to in the first photo in the (auf Deutsch) Wikipedia article.

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art history November 27, 2007

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Over at The Frontal Cortex, Jonah Lehrer has a post up about possible origins of art, citing a passage by Natalie Angier in The New York Times. Main premise: art developed as a way of creating greater social cohesion.

I wonder what Mr Lehrer would think (or thinks) of David Lewis-William’s The Mind in the Cave?

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USSR as cautionary tale November 26, 2007

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Over at Asymmetrical Information, Megan McArdle talks about Bryan Caplan talking about libertarians’ opposition to the war. In her post, she says:

“I’d say that the fall of the Soviet Union discredited several ideas on the left and the right: on the left, the idea that the state should own most of the means of production; on the right, the idea of isolationism, or non-interventionism. It is now patently obvious that if the US had not drawn a proverbial line in the sand through Germany, the Soviets would now own large blocks of Western Europe that would be struggling in the same way that Eastern Europe now does.”

Now, I’m not going to disagree with any of this as vehemently as some of the commenters over at AI. I think that the USSR does serve as a fairly good example of what happens when you give a totalitarian regime the goal of having a planned economy. I do think that if you tried the same economic plan with a different government plan, things would turn out differently (though not necessarily very well).

I think that it was pretty much all of the 20th century that put the lie to US isolationism — attempting to retreat back across the Atlantic after WWI didn’t do much for stability, whether economic or political.

Lastly, I wouldn’t say it was ‘patently obvious’ what would have happened had the US not taken a (much belated) stand against the Soviets: I think there were far too many factors at work to say that the US alone kept the Soviet empire at bay. However, without the US, the way the Cold War played out would have been different, but I think anyone who tries to make specific claims about how different is probably overreaching — no outcome is patently obvious when talking about alternative history in post-WWII Europe.

In the end, though, I think the USSR is a certainly good example of a cautionary tale — the USSR and all that went on around it, can easily be seen to play a central role in the politics of the 20th century. (And I’m not just saying that because I’ve got a BA in Russian Studies. Pick a major political event of that century and I’d be willing to bet that Russia* had some not-insignificant role to play.)

Keep in mind that the youngest men and women enlisting in the US armed forces today were born after the wall came down. We would do well to continue to discuss the ramifications of policy decisions of any and all countries made in the 20th century, lest they be forgotten.

*In whatever political incarnation it was at the time.

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race you November 26, 2007

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Razib has a terrific post on race over at Gene Expression. The post focuses on two things: first, that “perceptions of race are as much a matter of psychology and culture as they are of genetics” and, second, that “[c]ultural priors matter”. The post, of course, goes into much more detail about how a person’s race, especially if that person is ‘mixed-race’*, is to a huge degree a matter of perception. I suggest reading it before reading more of mine.
(more…)

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weekly quote: #9 Craig Stanford November 23, 2007

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Craig Stanford’s book Significant Others deals with learning more about ourselves through studying our nearest biological relatives — the other apes. Near the end of the text, he makes an argument for how much we stand to learn, if we can muster the will to pay attention — and how mustering that will would require learning to remain interested in the familiar:

“If chimpanzees could know that humans had sent a spacecraft to Mars to search for signs of life, surely they would be impressed by our interplanetary tool use. Yet I think they would be appalled at our infatuation with the unknown versus the barely known. If Pathfinder happened to snap a photo of an ape-like creature loping across Ares Vallis, or find its fosilized remians, our society would go into a frenzy. The scientists and the media would ooh and aah and the president would seize the political moment by appropriating billions of dollars to send more probes, and maybe even astronauts, to learn what Martian apes could tell us about ourselves. All the while, the chimpanzees in their night nests would edge closer to extinction, their secrets less exotic but no less crucial to understanding our place in the universe.”

From page 205 of my edition, in chapter fourteen, “The Ape’s Gift”.

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why where matters November 23, 2007

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I noted just over a week ago that “where is not important” — and today Megan McArdle notes that “[o]n the list of things to be thankful for, geography has to be at the top.” Her point is that those born into the most economically developed nations have much more of everything — material goods, health care, and most of all opportunity — than does everyone else. In other words, geography matters very much, indeed.

So, how to I settle my cognitive dissonance? Well, I think that Ms McArdle’s point reinforces my own, earlier one — if we are in fact ever going to move beyond our short-sighted view of the future and our near-sighted view of what matters, we have to realize that the circumstances of just about everyone’s life are determined by the chance location of their birth. In other words, where matters most of all. And we must realize that, hand in hand with this, regardless of where someone lives, works, or dies — any value that we may think of someone having as a human neither increases nor diminishes based on their location. In other words, where doesn’t matter.

I don’t think that suffering can be strictly quantified: with a set amount of money I might be able to create a much larger difference, materially, in the life of someone living in ‘the bottom billion’ than I could for someone who is without shelter in, say, Portland, Oregon. But, simply picking up a Portland neighborhood and dropping it in sub-Saharan Africa for the locals to ‘move in’ won’t really do much good, either. Saying that someone who is living below the poverty line in the US is not suffering is to say just that — “They’ve got a color television and air conditioning, what’s the problem?” — that material well-being is the only kind; that dropping a western-style city in the middle of some impoverished region would make a difference.

We need to realize how lucky we are, and how unlucky others are, and we need to stop paying attention to those who live near us as if their proximity increased their importance in some mystical way. I think that if we really want our own lives to make a marginal difference in the world at large, we need to learn how to ignore, if not completely forget, about those imaginary lines our ancestors drew in the sand.

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weekly photo #58: Final November 22, 2007

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Final
This is the last of the pictures I took while bumming around in mid-October. Down at big sur, we got extremely lucky with the weather, as it was bright and sunny as we wandered around the parks; and the magnificent coastal fog rolled in as we were heading back north.

This is the cove at Julia Pfeiffer Burns State Park, looking quite tropical. It’s not easy to see on the photo here, but more visible on the full size version is the McWay falls, which is running a little slim as this year was quite dry. Wikipedia has a photo of it running stronger; during high tide it lands directly in the waters of the cove. In my photo, it’s landing on the small panhandle part of the beach, in the left middleground.

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