“Nothing sways them from the habit—not illness, not the sacrifice of love and relationships, not the loss of all earthly goods, not the crushing of their dignity, not the fear of dying. The drive is that relentless… If human life was so simple that people learned from negative consequences, well then human history would be very different… The drugs solve problems in people’s lives, in the short term. Of course, they create problems in the long term… When you stress animals, they’re more likely to engage in addictive behaviours… Our whole social policy’s based on stressing the addict—and then we hope to redeem them—which flies in the face of science, not to mention human compassion… We’re punishing people for having been abused in the first place.”
Category: Language
Sometimes working for the ACLU is fun
Step 1: British comedian John Oliver produces an absurd segment about coal CEO Bob Murray:
In it, Oliver acknowledges Murray’s history of litigiousness toward critics and challenges him to do his worst.
Step 2: Murray sues Oliver for defamation in West Virginia circuit court
Step 3: As reported in Slate, Jamie Lynn Crofts of the American Civil Liberties Union of West Virginia files one of the world’s funnier legal documents in the form of an amicus brief to the court
As John Stuart Mill said about freedom of speech in general: “Strange it is that men should admit the validity of the arguments for free speech but object to their being ‘pushed to an extreme’, not seeing that unless the reasons are good for an extreme case, they are not good for any case”.
Political speech, news reporting, and satire all deserve special protection in the public interest. Hopefully this whole back and forth will discourage those who face criticism in the future from seeking to suppress it through the courts of a free society.
Diplomacy by toast
In another attempt to dissuade Pakistan from its nuclear path, Kissinger visited Pakistan in August 1976. At the same time, U.S. elections were sparking debates, and Democrat Jimmy Carter’s agenda specifically targeted Kissinger and his relaxed response to India’s nuclear test. As Dennis Kux writes, “Kissinger and Ford were under pressure to demonstrate that they were doing everything possible to prevent Pakistan from continuing its efforts to match India’s nuclear capability.”
Thus Kissinger’s second trip to Pakistan was an attempt to remedy his mistakes. He arrived with an offer of 110 A-7 attack bombers for the Pakistani Air force in exchange for canceling the reprocessing plant purchase [from France], indicating that Congress would most likely approve such a deal. And as a stick, he brandished a possible Democratic victory, hinting that when in power, Carter would certainly make an example of Pakistan. Since that meeting, the popular myth in Pakistan has been that Kissinger threatened Bhutto with “a horrible example,” meant as an ultimatum.
At an official dinner in the city of Lahore, Kissinger and Bhutto engaged in nuclear banter in the midst of toasts. Raising his glass, Bhutto declared, “[Lahore] is our reprocessing center and we cannot in any way curb the reprocessing center of Pakistan.” When Kissinger’s turn for the toast came, he replied, “All governments must constantly ‘reprocess’ themselves and decide what is worth reprocessing.”
Khan, Feroz Hassan. Eating Grass: The Making of the Pakistani Bomb. Stanford University Press; Stanford. 2012. p. 136-7
Supergrade
The technical term “supergrade” has had a pair of distinctly American meanings:
(a) A supergrade was the civilian equivalent of an Army general
(b) Supergrade is industry parlance for plutonium alloy bearing an exceptionally high fraction of Pu-239 (>95%), leaving a very low amount of Pu-240 which is a gamma emitter in addition to being a high spontaneous fission isotope
Efforts at alien communication
An interesting genre! And you can own a gorgeous-looking replica for $100.
Automated voice impersonation
I’ve written before about some problems with biometric security: it seems convenient to be able to use facial recognition to log in to your computer, until you find your co-workers doing it with colour photocopies of your picture.
Computers aren’t the only context where we use biometrics for identification. “Don’t you recognize my voice?” has been used for decades for authentication over the phone, whether implicitly or explicitly. Now, we’re approaching the day when faking anybody’s voice and having it say anything you like is getting near.
Expect disruption on every level, from teens pranking each other to abusive harassers terrifying victims in new ways to more election-altering political fraud.
Flowers grow in wastelands
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain.
These seemingly grim lines may be the most optimistic in modern literature: life feeds into life, change is constant, and the spring’s rain helps complete the cycle.
Learning to write as an undergraduate
Most undergraduate students would really benefit from an intensive one-on-one tutoring program in writing essays. Even among third and fourth year students, it’s something most of them can’t or don’t do competently. While U of T offers some writing resources, you can’t really turn up at a writing centre with an unstructured, ungrammatical, and unconvincing draft and have someone teach you the basics of being credible and convincing in an hour or so.
It would be better to find a subject that is of particular interest to the student, and then begin with some lessons on what distinguishes credible sources and how to conduct research. The tutoring could then progress to a review of the basic essay template people should have learned in high school or earlier: an introduction with a clear thesis and a basic outline of the argument, body paragraphs with organized and coherent lines of evidence and argumentation, and a conclusion that wraps up and perhaps points to some broader implications.
They need to be guided away from both mindlessly vague claims with no substantive content and from the wild extrapolation and hyperbole where ludicrous statements are made about how the small topic of their paper will have vast, automatic, permanent, global effects. This one little UN initiative will save the world’s oceans, or one tweak in parliamentary procedure will save Canadian democracy, etc.
They could also be taught to edit. Clearly, most of them don’t even skim through their own writing looking for awkwardly phrased and ambiguous passages or language problems. They could, however, be taught to go beyond that to really think about making an argument and being convincing: evaluating whether each sentence and paragraph is serving their overall purpose, and how to hold the interest and win the respect of the reader.
Doing all this one-on-one would overcome the limitations of drop-in writing help, where the tutor doesn’t know the student’s strengths and weaknesses and can only provide ad hoc suggestions and corrections rather than a broad and coordinated program of improvement. A bespoke approach would let tutors avoid boring students by rehashing things they already understand, while letting the student focus on subject matter where they have actual passion.
Such a program of tutoring could do a lot to enhance what is almost the only tangible skill developed during an undergraduate program in the humanities or social “sciences”, and it would be a small investment of time and money compared to the undergraduate program as a whole.
Related:
Peter Dauvergne on environmentalism as a social movement
Saying mainstream environmentalism now reflects the interests and concerns of the rich is like coming upon a river of spawning salmon and noting the colour red. There are naturally many shades of difference. Not all of the mainstream, everywhere, has to the same extent come to embrace markets, corporations, and technologies as solutions. Nor does everyone have equal faith in the value of economic growth, CSR, and eco-consumerism as ways to move toward global sustainability. And nor is everyone equally pragmatic, calling for “evolution not revolution.” Environmentalism will always be a “movement of movements,” with a great diversity of values and visions surfacing out of a turbulent sea of informal groupings and formal organizations. Environmentalists share a commitment to try to protect the environment, yet sharp differences even exist in the understanding of the word “environment,” from those who mean nature (wildlife and ecosystems) to those who really mean living spaces for humans (cities, towns, parks, and beaches).7 (p. 6-7)
…
7. The phrase “movement of movements” is more often used to describe the global resistance to capitalism and globalization than to characterize global environmentalism. I use the phrase, however, to emphasize the diversity of environmentalism, which itself overlaps with movements against capitalism and globalization (and for global justice). For a discussion of this phrase in relation to anti-globalization activism and alter-globalization campaigns (offering social justice alternatives to globalization), see Tom Mertes, ed. A Movement of Movements: Is Another World Really Possible (Verso, 2004). For a sense of the great diversity of environmentalism, see Further Readings, “Environmental Activism (“insider” critiques of),” “Environmental Discourses and Movements (varieties of),” “Environmental Justice Movements,” “Environmental NGOs and Transnational Networks,” “Environmentalism (developing countries),” “Environmentalism (overviews) and “Voluntary Simplicity, Localization, and Eco-Villages.” (p. 154-5)
Dauvergne, Peter. Environmentalism of the Rich. MIT Press; Cambridge. 2016.
Resisting Trump effectively
Former George W. Bush speechwriter David Frum has been making the media rounds with some thought-provoking ideas about the Trump presidency and the risk that protests which lack a specific focus or which come across as a threat to public order may empower rather than constrain him.
In “What Effective Protest Could Look Like“, Frum argues:
With the rarest exceptions—and perhaps the January 21 demonstration will prove to be one—left-liberal demonstrations are exercises in catharsis, the release of emotions. Their operating principle is self-expression, not persuasion. They lack the means, and often the desire, to police their radical fringes, with the result that it’s the most obnoxious and even violent behavior that produces the most widely shared and memorable images of the event. They seldom are aimed at any achievable goal; they rarely leave behind any enduring program of action or any organization to execute that program. Again and again, their most lasting effect has been to polarize opinion against them—and to empower the targets of their outrage.
Even those closely associated with the creation of Occupy Wall Street acknowledge that the lack of a coherent program of action with achievable objectives helped make the movement ineffective.
He also criticizes “the futile squabbling cul-de-sac of intersectionality and grievance politics” — a boldly stated position on the eternal question in progressive activism, namely whether disparate movements with progressive aims (reducing economic inequality, saving the climate, treating refugees justly, ending discrimination, curbing police violence, etc) can better achieve success by attempting to form a unified coalition that can alter policy or win elections, or whether each should be trying to build support among people of all political persuasions, and finding their effort hampered by the demand that anyone who they are trying to influence buy into the whole broad (though not necessarily coherent) progressive agenda at the same time.
In “How to Build an Autocracy“, Frum argues:
Civil unrest will not be a problem for the Trump presidency. It will be a resource. Trump will likely want not to repress it, but to publicize it—and the conservative entertainment-outrage complex will eagerly assist him. Immigration protesters marching with Mexican flags; Black Lives Matter demonstrators bearing antipolice slogans—these are the images of the opposition that Trump will wish his supporters to see. The more offensively the protesters behave, the more pleased Trump will be.
It’s also worth listening to The Current’s interview with Frum.
One aspect of Frum’s thinking which aligns with my own but clashes with that of many activists is that meetings are essential. While I have seen an entire activist group fall apart partly because of how frustrated people were with meetings, they are necessary for assembling a program of action that goes beyond socially-motivated and superficial support for causes your friends seem to approve of: Facebook activism and the occasional protest march not linked to a specific demand.
In any event, we need to be thinking carefully about activist effectiveness in terms not defined by what it does emotionally for activists. I would be very interested to hear responses to Frum’s arguments, along with links to any other analysis of the Trump situation which seems perceptive and useful.
Related: