Matins

¶ If it were up to us, of course, students who expressed views consonant with deficit-hawks such Concerned Youth of America would be flunked out of elite schools such as Andover for solipsistic social stupidity. A school that does not inculcate the paramountcy of equity is a bad school. (There; we’re done.) Christopher Shea picks up a chilling development at CNN. (Brainiac)

Both Gruskin and Matthews attended Phillips Academy, Ryan McNeely points out (writing at Matt Yglesias’s blog), a boarding school with tuition and fees of $41,000. Indeed, that is where the group was born, and its leaders now attend such colleges as Harvard, Penn, Yale, Duke, and Georgetown. “Now, there’s nothing wrong with going to Phillips,” McNeely writes, or to a highly selective college. But McNeely, for his part, is concerned that these demographically distinct and well-connected students–a slice of America “least affected by the current downturn”– are getting an outsize amount of media and political attention. They have testified before the president’s federal deficit commission. “Will the debt commission,” McNeely asks, “listen to young Americans who didn’t go to Phillips Academy?”

Lauds

¶ A propos of the apparent ban on music (!) in Iran, Frank Oteri writes about the act of listening to music in terms that are new to us. It made us realize that we secretly believed that composers discover music, instead of inventing it. We’re not sure that we’re wrong to do so! But we’re savoring Mr Oteri’s thoughts all the same. (NewMusicBox; via  Arts Journal)

Last week I remarked in passing that music’s greatest asset is that if you truly listen to it, you are allowing the input of someone other than yourself into your consciousness. For leaders who don’t want their citizens to challenge them, this is extremely subversive. If you really want to be open to other ideas and other points of view, and you don’t want to unquestioningly do what someone else tells you to do, listen to music. For even if the act of listening is in some sense an act of submission to someone else, it is an open-ended submission that ultimately leaves you with a new perspective. Since it is impossible in the process of listening to completely lose your memory of everything you have listened to before, everything you listen to adds to that memory rather than negates it—so it is never a monolithic experience. Plus if you make music as well as listen to it, you have the opportunity to share that perspective with someone else.

Prime

¶ James Kwak struggles to maintain a hopeful tone, but his thoughts about new financial regulation fill us with despair. He puts one thing very, very well:

The regulators in all these agencies should realize that they are going to spend the next two years fighting against the Wall Street banks and their legions of lobbyists. If they do their jobs right, they will never work in the financial sector again (except maybe at a hedge fund or a buy-side investment consultancy). And if they’re not up for that fight, we need someone else who is.

We have always believed that financial regulators ought to be paid financial-industry standards, to insure that they do fight the good fight, without being asked to be heroic about their income as well. (The Baseline Scenario)

Tierce

¶ Think about it for a moment, and it’s obvious: curiosity is an emotion. Jonah Lehrer writes about a recent Caltech study that “extended this information gap model of curiosity. (The Frontal Cortex) 

The lesson is that our desire for abstract information – this is the cause of curiosity – begins as a dopaminergic craving, rooted in the same primal pathway that also responds to sex, drugs and rock and roll. This reminds me of something Read Montague,  a neuroscientist at Baylor College of Medicine, told me a few years ago: “The guy who’s on hunger strike for some political cause is still relying on his midbrain dopamine neurons, just like a monkey getting a sweet treat,” he said. “His brain simply values the cause more than it values dinner…You don’t have to dig very far before it all comes back to your loins.”

The elegance of this system is that it bootstraps a seemingly unique human talent to an ancient mental process. Because curiosity is ultimately an emotion, an inexplicable itch telling us to keep on looking for the answer, it can take advantage of all the evolutionary engineering that went into our dopaminergic midbrain. (Natural selection had already invented an effective motivational system.) When Einstein was curious about the bending of space-time, he wasn’t relying on some newfangled circuitry. Instead, he was using the same basic neural system as a rat in a maze, looking for a pellet of food.

Sext

¶ Will the English language survive Sarah Palin? Of course it will! It will co-opt her many unwitting (and witless) contributions, of which the wonderful “refudiate” is simply the latest. Who knows what a future this word has? We surmise that, if anything, it will be the former governor’s ticket to immortality. After all, what singles out Boss Tweed from a host of Nineteenth Century political operatives? Excess! (Tweed didn’t invent corruption any more than Ms Palin coined “refudiate.”)  Mark Peters explores. (Good)

As almost always seems to be the case, this “new word” is not entirely new. New York Times On Language columnist Ben Zimmer found a use going all the back to 1925, in an Atlanta Constitution headline: “Scandal Taint Refudiated in Teapot Case by Court, Fall Says in Statement.” In 2006, Historical Dictionary of American Slang editor Jonathan Lighter pointed out Senator Mike DeWine using the word a couple of times, and there’s enough in common meaning-wise and sound-wise between “refute” and “repudiate” to assume lots of others have made the same mistake. Still, if and when “refudiate” appears in a dictionary, it will feature a picture of Palin and no other: She is to “refudiate” as Homer Simpson is to “d’oh.”

Perhaps because of her folksiness, if the collected Palinisms took on physical form, they would fill several barnyards: there are animals aplenty. Her nickname “Sarah Baracuda” preceded her step into the national spotlight, and when John McCain picked her as his running mate, a joke of her own choosing linked her with a pit bull. The oft-repeated punchline of that joke led the Palin camp to take offense when Barack Obama used the common expression “lipstick on a pig.”  Palin professes a love for hunting wolves, caribou, and moose, and those critters are shorthand for her, like when a writer described her campaign as having “Moose-mentum.” When Palin resigned as Alaska governor, she said, “It would be apathetic to just hunker down and ‘go with the flow.’ Nah, only dead fish go with the flow.” With that zooful of words, it’s no wonder a writer mistakenly referred to “Sarah Palin and her elk.”

“…and her elk”! Ha! We’d never heard that one.

Nones

¶ Regular readers will not be surprised to hear about the New Great Game, or to be unaware of who’s playing it and on what field. Matteo Tacconi’s essay, (translated by Francesca Simmons) concludes with the prospect of a rather unstable Central Asian Islamic heartland. (Reset DOC; via 3 Quarks Daily)

Will there be a domino effect? Such a risk exists, and, in addition to the Americans and the NATO countries involved in Afghanistan, Russia too fears this possibility. In Moscow the thesis is that if the Afghan front spreads to Central Asia, it is possible that it will then also expand into the borders of the Federation, reigniting the never-sedated separatist desires of Islamic movements in Chechnya, Dagestan and Ingushetia, always rather active on the stage. But the risks do not end here. According to the respected and authoritative analyst Ahmed Rashid, an expert on the world of the Taliban, to the rise of radicalism one must also add another danger; the prospect of a regional conflict, pitting any one of these former Soviet republics in Central Asia against the other. According to Rashid such a war could break out due to a number of border controversies, widespread poverty and the chronic lack of water. On the other hand, it is known that the intense exploitation of water basins in Central Asia in the days of the USSR has added to the more recent effects of global warming, which have slowly melted part of the surfaces of glaciers situated locally at high altitudes. This has resulted in each of the former Soviet republics in Central Asia becoming annoyed and blaming their respective neighbours. The bomb may not necessarily explode. The fuse, however, has been lit.

¶ Meanwhile, in “Is Pakistan a Failed State?”, Ali Hashmi rephrases the question. We wish that the American foreign policy elite would do the same. (Daily Times of Pakistan; via Real Clear World)

For our purposes, let us assume that the average citizen of Pakistan has not read Weber or Engels and for him or her, the state simply means those organs of government power outlined above with which he or she interacts on a daily basis. In Pakistan’s case (as in the case of the US and any other society based on the capitalist mode of production), this means that the state (the institutions named above) always represents the interests of the wealthy and influential. That being the case, the Pakistani state is failing the vast majority of its citizens by not providing the bare essentials of existence, i.e. clean affordable food and water, basic services (energy, healthcare, education, etc) as well as physical security in the form of protection of the citizens’ lives and property.

This offends the nationalistic sensibilities of our intelligentsia (those who write the opinion pieces) but is a stark fact for the vast majority of Pakistan’s citizens. As such, were the question to be rephrased from “Is Pakistan a failed state?” — which engenders lots of excited but confusing discussion about states, public sector debts, foreign policy, elites, electoral process, etc — to “Is the Pakistani state failing the majority of its citizens?”, the answer would be a simple yes.

Vespers

¶ Doug Bruns writes engagingly on the solution (imprisonment) to a problem (piles of unread books). It is not the optimal solution, certainly, and we find that we read best when we feel most free to put the book down and do something else. But we enjoyed contemplating Doug’s prospect, and that was a surprise. (The Millions)

Prison cells. Towers in Bordeaux. Cabins in the woods, and tents on the sides of mountains. At work behind the scene is the argument that life can be forced into an edifying and redeeming corner. It is a persuasive, if not compelling notion: That when everything is lost or set aside or taken from you, only then do you have the opportunity to do what it is you truly wish to do, to review your list of what is worthy and what is wasteful. The theme rings true. “I went to the woods because I wanted to live deliberately, I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, To put to rout all that was not life and not when I had come to die discover that I had not lived.” I never grow tired of this quote. Thoreau’s desire to live deliberately resonates and is at the heart of Socrates’ observation that the unexamined life is not worth living. Although I cannot personally attest to its efficacy, it carries weight that I suggest prison a good thing because it would strip one of everything extraneous. Extraneous to reading, of course.

Compline

¶ Taking Jean Twenge, author of The Narcissism Epidemic to task for overdramatization — “Words such as ‘epidemic’ should only ever be preceded by words like “smallpox,’ and should henceforth be stricken from the social scientist’s lingo. — Charles Ferguson argues for excitement-avoidance among fellow social scientists (Chron Higher Ed; via  The Morning News)

Twenge and her colleagues are not the first to lambaste the self-esteem movement. Others have been identifying it as the source of all that ails us for years. I’m no fan of it myself. All the efforts to ban competitive sports, encourage group hugs, and say nary a negative word to a child do seem to run the risk of turning today’s youth into some socialized version of the Children of the Corn. I’m the first to acknowledge a certain absurdity at the core of the self-esteem movement and the implication that competition is harmful and children so delicate that any failure will be horribly crushing rather than an opportunity for learning and growth. However, the notion that children are so malleable that the self-esteem movement, or anything else, could twist them into an antisocial horde is equally absurd.

There’s nothing wrong with examining narcissism rates over time. It’s an interesting question. Yet once we start throwing sneering labels around and started talking about “epidemics” and “crises,” we have left the realm of science and entered that of polemics and pseudoscience. The narcissism debate is, I’d argue, no extreme case in the social sciences either. The rush to slap young people with the tag “Generation Me” is simply one more spin of the “kids today” wheel, as in “kids today, with their music and their hair. … “

Have a Look

¶ “The Truth About Boscoe.” We have no idea what he’s up to, but we’re tickled by Sean Adams’s impersonation of a very naughty teacher. (The Bygone Bureau)

¶ “The paradox of an earlier, more primitive time that was more advanced than ours“: Frank Jacobs muses on a TWA ad from a mid-Sixties issue of Paris-Match. (Strange Maps)

¶ The beautiful, sand-flooded rooms of Alvaro Sanchez-Montañes. (The Best Part)

Drop me a line at rjk@dailyblague.com
This entry was posted on Wednesday, August 4th, 2010 at 10:30 am.