Imagine that you are a Cardinal in the Roman Catholic Church. Now imagine that your last name is "Sin."
You are imagining the fate of this real person.
In all seriousness, I hope he gets well soon. Anyone who helped to overthrow Ferdinand Marcos gets props from me. In honor of him, I am thinking of changing my name to "Cardinal Singh."
Let us hope that the rumors that Cardinal Sin is in fact mortal are greatly exaggerated.
"Just remember that your real job is that if you are free, you need to free somebody else. If you have some power, then your job is to empower somebody else." --Toni Morrison
Poll: India lags behind in sex, too
A recent poll by the condom company Durex has India way behind Europe and the U.S. in copulations per annum. France is #1, with 137 per person. The U.S. is at 111. India is way behind, with 46.
My punchline: How long before some joker Economist will find a correlation between GDP and "SDP"?
My punchline: How long before some joker Economist will find a correlation between GDP and "SDP"?
Githa Hariharan: Honor Killings still a problem
See this op-ed in a recent issue of the Calcutta Telegraph, by Githa Hariharan, one of India's important novelists.
Not only are they still a problem, there is no good way to estimate how widespread they are, since deaths are often concealed. It's a problem that people like Urvashi Butalia and Ritu Menon talked about in their respective books on partition, but the essential social structure that fosters honor killings (rigid social boundaries between castes and ethno-religious groups, firmly entrenched patriarchy) is still prevalent in rural India. And while the violence is usually directed against women, men are also frequently targeted by the families of their lover or spouse.
Hariharan makes the connection between past (partition violence) and present especially clear in the following paragraphs:
Not only are they still a problem, there is no good way to estimate how widespread they are, since deaths are often concealed. It's a problem that people like Urvashi Butalia and Ritu Menon talked about in their respective books on partition, but the essential social structure that fosters honor killings (rigid social boundaries between castes and ethno-religious groups, firmly entrenched patriarchy) is still prevalent in rural India. And while the violence is usually directed against women, men are also frequently targeted by the families of their lover or spouse.
Hariharan makes the connection between past (partition violence) and present especially clear in the following paragraphs:
It is a useful thing to perpetuate a tradition of martyrdom, especially when women's bodies are vulnerable to being viewed as the vessels of national honour. It was this unholy honour that provided the motive for otherwise "normal" men to kill their own sisters and wives and mothers during the Partition - "disappearances" and murders which have been covered by a conspiracy of silence, and by the more acceptable belief that these women were abducted or killed by men from the other side. In her book The Other Side of Silence, Urvashi Butalia takes on this myth that the perpetrators of violence were always "outsiders". She writes about a man she interviewed in Amritsar, Mangal Singh, whose family killed seventeen of its women and children. He refuses to use the word killed; he says they became "martyrs" in keeping with Sikh pride. The women, he says, were willing to become martyrs. "The real fear was one of dishonour." But, asks Butalia, who had the pride and the fear? It is not a question Mangal Singh was willing to examine. Similarly, in Borders and Boundaries: Women in India's Partition, Ritu Menon records the account of a partition survivor, Durga Rani. In this account, two types of honour killings occur: one in anticipation of dishonour; the other as a way to cope with dishonour. Consider, on the one hand: "In the villages of Head Junu, Hindus threw their young daughters into wells, dug trenches and buried them alive. Some were burnt to death, some were made to touch electric wires to prevent the Muslims touching them." On the other hand, Durga Rani gives us an idea of what happened to many women who had been abandoned after being raped and disfigured. They could not be "kept" any longer because their "character" was now spoilt. In some cases, as in that of a girl who was raped by ten or more men, the only way to deal with the dishonour was murder; the girl, says Durga Rani, was burnt by her father.
All these years after Partition, this dishonourable honour still stalks the land, wreaking its barbaric violence on both men and women, but preferably on women. Most cases are reported from Punjab, Haryana and parts of western Uttar Pradesh. The statistics are disturbing; twenty-three such murders were reported during 2002 and 2003 in Muzaffarnagar alone. Thirty-five young couples were declared "missing". And in Punjab and Haryana, one out of every ten murders is an honour killing. In most of the cases where the girl is from an upper caste, the boy is the target of violence, usually by the girl's family. Often, girls who are murdered for "destroying the honour of the family" are cremated without any legal formalities and the deaths concealed.
Judith Butler's Obituary of Derrida: Lamenting the failure to communicate
[UPDATE: The Butler obituary I quoted appeared in the November 4 issue of the London Review of Books. I've cut all but the first paragraph I quoted.]
I received an obituary of Jacques Derrida authored by Judith Butler in an email. The subject line is "Judith Butler on Derrida for the German newspapers." I don't know whether it has already appeared in the papers yet, or where it is likely to come out.
I'm only excerpting the first paragraph, out of respect for the LRB. I like this piece by Butler because she's taking stock of Derrida on his own terms and in his own tone -- a tone I call Derrida's perpetual lament. And, contrary to what is commonly thought, that tone did not first appear in the last few years, though it did become more urgent then. It's there even in the early, major works in the 1960s and 70s.
Q: What was he lamenting? A: Fundamentally -- sort of -- the impossibility of communication. Communication is impossible because of the opacity of language itself as a medium (which is nevertheless inevitable), because of the opacity of subjectivity, and because of the inevitability of death. We never understand each other just right, his argument goes, and therefore we never really understand each other at all. Sometimes Derrida is talking not about the communication attempted between and amongst individuals (whether in private or in public; the two were always intimately intertwined in Derrida's writing), but other times he is talking about a philosophical abstraction referred to as the Other. In his essays, Derrida slipped back and forth between the two.
I myself only saw Derrida speak once, at the American Academy of Religion conference in Toronto in the fall of 2002. Derrida's recent turn to "religion" elicited considerable interest and excitement amongst religious studies scholars, led by a Villanova theologican named John Caputo (who has written two impressive books on Derrida). The room was packed -- probably upwards of 1000 people were there. I responded probably the way most people responded -- intense interest, curiosity, and occasionally a sense of awe. But he went on too long, and was too confusing. I couldn't stay focused; people began filtering and then streaming out of the lecture.
And Derrida sidestepped (would we expect anything else?) Caputo's repeated questions (the "lecture" was technically an "interview") about his -- JD's -- personal relationship with God, and with "faith." It seemed that Derrida was saying that deconstruction and theology are simply not compatible methods of thought; he would not accept God as an ontologically whole entity with whom human beings can "communicate" (and I mean that in the Catholic as well as the linguistic sense). Indeed, to have done so would have been profoundly incongruous with his philosophical project of nearly 40 years. The work of deconstruction is simply not -- and cannot be -- the work of theology, even negative theology.
I should also mention that I taught a class called "How to Read Deconstructively," where I assigned a few Derrida classics, including Of Grammatology and Limited Inc. A bare-bones syllabus is here. I tried to structure it so that students who had had no previous exposure (initiation?) to deconstruction could enter into the arguments. I assigned Levi-Strauss, Barthes, Austin, and even a little Cavell.
* * * * *
So then, here is Judith Butler on Jacques Derrida:
[For the rest of this piece, go to the LRB]
I received an obituary of Jacques Derrida authored by Judith Butler in an email. The subject line is "Judith Butler on Derrida for the German newspapers." I don't know whether it has already appeared in the papers yet, or where it is likely to come out.
I'm only excerpting the first paragraph, out of respect for the LRB. I like this piece by Butler because she's taking stock of Derrida on his own terms and in his own tone -- a tone I call Derrida's perpetual lament. And, contrary to what is commonly thought, that tone did not first appear in the last few years, though it did become more urgent then. It's there even in the early, major works in the 1960s and 70s.
Q: What was he lamenting? A: Fundamentally -- sort of -- the impossibility of communication. Communication is impossible because of the opacity of language itself as a medium (which is nevertheless inevitable), because of the opacity of subjectivity, and because of the inevitability of death. We never understand each other just right, his argument goes, and therefore we never really understand each other at all. Sometimes Derrida is talking not about the communication attempted between and amongst individuals (whether in private or in public; the two were always intimately intertwined in Derrida's writing), but other times he is talking about a philosophical abstraction referred to as the Other. In his essays, Derrida slipped back and forth between the two.
I myself only saw Derrida speak once, at the American Academy of Religion conference in Toronto in the fall of 2002. Derrida's recent turn to "religion" elicited considerable interest and excitement amongst religious studies scholars, led by a Villanova theologican named John Caputo (who has written two impressive books on Derrida). The room was packed -- probably upwards of 1000 people were there. I responded probably the way most people responded -- intense interest, curiosity, and occasionally a sense of awe. But he went on too long, and was too confusing. I couldn't stay focused; people began filtering and then streaming out of the lecture.
And Derrida sidestepped (would we expect anything else?) Caputo's repeated questions (the "lecture" was technically an "interview") about his -- JD's -- personal relationship with God, and with "faith." It seemed that Derrida was saying that deconstruction and theology are simply not compatible methods of thought; he would not accept God as an ontologically whole entity with whom human beings can "communicate" (and I mean that in the Catholic as well as the linguistic sense). Indeed, to have done so would have been profoundly incongruous with his philosophical project of nearly 40 years. The work of deconstruction is simply not -- and cannot be -- the work of theology, even negative theology.
I should also mention that I taught a class called "How to Read Deconstructively," where I assigned a few Derrida classics, including Of Grammatology and Limited Inc. A bare-bones syllabus is here. I tried to structure it so that students who had had no previous exposure (initiation?) to deconstruction could enter into the arguments. I assigned Levi-Strauss, Barthes, Austin, and even a little Cavell.
* * * * *
So then, here is Judith Butler on Jacques Derrida:
"How do you finally respond to your life and your name?" Derrida raised this question in his final interview with Le Monde, published in August 18th of this year. If he could apprehend his life, he remarks, he would also be obliged to apprehend his death as singular and absolute, without resurrection and without redemption. At this revealing moment, it is interesting that Derrida the philosopher should find in Socrates his proper precursor, that he should turn to Socrates to understand that, at the age of 74, he still did not quite know how best to live. One cannot, he remarks, come to terms with oneâs life without trying to apprehend oneâs death, asking, in effect, how a human lives and dies. Much of Derridaâs later work is dedicated to mourning, though he offers his acts of public mourning as a posthumous gift, for instance, in The Work of Mourning published in 2001. There he tries to come to terms with the death of other writers and thinkers through reckoning his debt to their words, indeed, their texts; his own writing constitutes an act of mourning, one that he is perhaps, avant la lettre, recommending to us a way to begin to mourn this thinker who not only taught us how to read, but gave the act of reading a new significance and a new promise. In that book, he openly mourns Roland Barthes who died in 1980, Paul de Man, who died in 1983, Michel Foucault, who died in 1984, and a host of others, including Edmund Jabes (1991), Louis Marin (1992), Sarah Kofman (1994), Emmanuel Levinas (1995) and Jean-Francois Lyotard (1998). The last of the essays, for Lyotard, included in this book is written six years before Derrida's own death. It is not, however, Derridaâs own death that preoccupies him here, but rather his "debts." These are authors that he could not do without, ones with whom and through whom he thinks. He writes only because he reads, and he reads only because there are these authors to read time and again. He "owes" them something or, perhaps, everything, if only because he could not write without them; their writing exists as the precondition of his own; their writing constitutes the means through which his own writing voice is animated and secured, a voice that emerges, importantly, as an address.
[For the rest of this piece, go to the LRB]
Theorist Jacques Derrida dead at 74: Lots of Links
The great French Algerian/Jewish intellectual Jacques Derrida is dead at 74.
See Michael Berube for a brief intro to what Derrida was on about. I may do one of these myself sometime soon (I first have to get some grading, book-writing, and teaching preparation out of the way).
Also see: Balkin, and the New York Times (via Crooked Timber).
Further links from Adam Kotsko: reactions from France; Spurious; Infinite Thought; and of course, Adam Kotsko himself.
And then via Kitabkhana, I found a link to this entertaining article about JD from 1991 (Headline: "DECONSTRUCTING JACQUES DERRIDA; THE MOST REVILED PROFESSOR IN THE WORLD DEFENDS HIS DIABOLICALLY DIFFICULT THEORY")
See Michael Berube for a brief intro to what Derrida was on about. I may do one of these myself sometime soon (I first have to get some grading, book-writing, and teaching preparation out of the way).
Also see: Balkin, and the New York Times (via Crooked Timber).
Further links from Adam Kotsko: reactions from France; Spurious; Infinite Thought; and of course, Adam Kotsko himself.
And then via Kitabkhana, I found a link to this entertaining article about JD from 1991 (Headline: "DECONSTRUCTING JACQUES DERRIDA; THE MOST REVILED PROFESSOR IN THE WORLD DEFENDS HIS DIABOLICALLY DIFFICULT THEORY")
Glenn Gould: Asperger's Syndrome, Marshall Mcluhan, and Walter Benjamin
Some friends in graduate school introduced me to Glenn Gould, initially through a biographical film called 32 Short Films About Glenn Gould, and then through his many recordings of Bach, Mozart, and Brahms.
Gould was the first classical pianist I really clicked with, partly because his style seemed so radical. He sharp anti-romantic tendencies are evident in his approach to Bach in particular, and were made famous by his 1955 recording of the Goldberg Variations. It appealed to the electronic music aesthetic; I still think there is a kind of unconscious affinity between radical electronic music composers like Autechre, Squarepusher, and Aphex Twin, and Gould's Bach. Since then, my taste has broadened some (I like more conventional players), but I am still pretty much a dodo when it comes to classical music.
I liked Michael Kimmelman's recent New York Review of Books review of Kevin Bazzana's new biography of Gould. I was interested about the speculation that Gould might have had Asperger's Syndrome.
Asperger's Syndrome has been on my mind after listening to an audiobook of The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time (about which a post may be forthcoming; I need to get a hard-copy of the book so I can quote).
Bazzana's biography apparently links Gould to that other famous Torontonian -- Marshall Mcluhan, and also speculates on possible links between Gould's famous renunciation of stage performance in 1964 with what has happening in the art world in the 1970s -- conceptual art especially:
Despite the parallels, I find it difficult to place Gould alongside the rest of those names above. The sharpness of his playing does fit well with minimalism in a certain way, and his refusal of the concert piano form, and "dial-twiddling" are not to be overlooked. But mostly I think Gould was completely off on his own -- not a conceptual artist at all. Remember, Gould is most famous for his recitals of baroque music from 300 years earlier, not of original compositions.
The most conceptually interesting point made in Kimmelman's review is whether Walter Benjamin was right about the "era of mechanical reproduction." Kimmelman thinks not, and argues that Gould's own theatricality and endless self-contradictions cancel out his interest in going mechanical:
This last point -- is it really true? People do fetishize the "live recording" (whatever that is), the live performance, etc. But isn't it true that when one goes to hear live music, one is always comparing it to the CD one has in the car?
People do pay $100 to see live music. But I often think it's become more a social ritual for rich people (dress up; see and be seen) than a bona fide site where music is experienced. For most people who take music seriously, that usually happens alone, in spaces where sound is contained and controlled: headphones (the Ipod), or the car.
[Speaking of serious music, but otherwise completedly unrelatedly, I'm very happy with my new M83 CD.]
Gould was the first classical pianist I really clicked with, partly because his style seemed so radical. He sharp anti-romantic tendencies are evident in his approach to Bach in particular, and were made famous by his 1955 recording of the Goldberg Variations. It appealed to the electronic music aesthetic; I still think there is a kind of unconscious affinity between radical electronic music composers like Autechre, Squarepusher, and Aphex Twin, and Gould's Bach. Since then, my taste has broadened some (I like more conventional players), but I am still pretty much a dodo when it comes to classical music.
I liked Michael Kimmelman's recent New York Review of Books review of Kevin Bazzana's new biography of Gould. I was interested about the speculation that Gould might have had Asperger's Syndrome.
He was born Glenn Herbert Gold on September 25, 1932, an only child in a Protestant family of furriers who by the late 1930s had begun to call themselves Gould, perhaps to avoid being mistaken for Jews. The Toronto where Gould grew up, Bazzana recounts, was a small, peaceful, puritanical, Anglophilic city. Canada was achieving a degree of cultural independence in those decades, increasingly through the radio and television. The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation was pioneering and experimental. Gould was among the few classical musicians (Toscanini and Leonard Bernstein were others) who, early on, recognized and exploited the potential of the new technologies.
As a boy, he was a loner, polite, gangly, and disheveled, already an insomniac, amusing when he chose to be but also a young fogy, intolerant of his friends' smoking, drinking, and flirting. There has been some speculation about Asperger's syndrome. He was the sort of teenager who affected a German accent after reading Nietzsche and who claimed to identify with Tonio Kröger, Mann's fictional aesthete.
Asperger's Syndrome has been on my mind after listening to an audiobook of The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time (about which a post may be forthcoming; I need to get a hard-copy of the book so I can quote).
Bazzana's biography apparently links Gould to that other famous Torontonian -- Marshall Mcluhan, and also speculates on possible links between Gould's famous renunciation of stage performance in 1964 with what has happening in the art world in the 1970s -- conceptual art especially:
Gould's attitude toward his recordings, as Bazzana points out, was actually akin to McLuhan's toward his books, which McLuhan once described to Playboy as "the process rather than the completed product of discovery; my purpose is to employ facts as tentative probes, as means of insight." Likewise, Gould approached the studio, or at least liked to say that he approached the studio, without fixed ideas about a performance, trying out different approaches—this is what he enjoyed about recordings as opposed to concerts, notwithstanding that his various takes might be nearly indistinguishable to anyone except him—while he regarded the finished album as something listeners could modify according to their whims by fiddling with the hi-fi. "Dial twiddling," he pointed out, is "an interpretative act."
He imagined producing kits of variant recordings for listeners to assemble their own preferred version of a performance. He had the Brechtian idea of recording Scriabin's Fifth Sonata with pairs of microphones around the studio in order to produce an album in which the sound would be perceived as shifting from one place to another, as if to simulate someone moving through the room, making the physical space of the studio part of the recording.
He compared this concept with a filmmaker's mixing of long shots, close-ups, and zooms. But this was also the era of Conceptual art, of Rauschenberg's collages, of Fluxus and John Cage. Sol LeWitt was devising works consisting merely of instructions for other people to follow. Donald Judd was asserting the inextricable relationship between sculpture and the space around it. Jim Dine and Claes Oldenburg and Yoko Ono were staging happenings. Gould, enough aware of what was going on in the art world, called the performance in which he sprawled across the piano lid the first happening in southern Ontario.
Despite the parallels, I find it difficult to place Gould alongside the rest of those names above. The sharpness of his playing does fit well with minimalism in a certain way, and his refusal of the concert piano form, and "dial-twiddling" are not to be overlooked. But mostly I think Gould was completely off on his own -- not a conceptual artist at all. Remember, Gould is most famous for his recitals of baroque music from 300 years earlier, not of original compositions.
The most conceptually interesting point made in Kimmelman's review is whether Walter Benjamin was right about the "era of mechanical reproduction." Kimmelman thinks not, and argues that Gould's own theatricality and endless self-contradictions cancel out his interest in going mechanical:
Walter Benjamin predicted that the proliferation of reproductions of art would eradicate the aura of the original. Following Benjamin, Gould believed that musical recordings would vitiate the public's longing for live performance. "When Aunt Minnie can turn on her four-screen television and watch the Berlin Philharmonic we will have reached total inwardness on the part of the audience," he told a reporter in 1962.
Just a few months after Gould left the concert stage, Horowitz ended a dozen-year sabbatical and made a widely publicized return, at Carnegie Hall, after which Columbia Records, which was also Horowitz's producer, rushed out a "live" version of the recital. Gould disdained everything about Horowitz's recital and the recording—he despised the Horowitz cult, Horowitz's choice of music (Scarlatti, Mozart, Chopin, Rachmaninoff), not to mention the spectacle of his return. For some years he pondered making a parody album of Horowitz's comeback. He speculated about his own historic return someday being a recital filmed in an empty Carnegie Hall. He felt live recordings mixed up the art of performing with the art of recording. The two were distinct. The recording studio, Gould said, had "its own laws and its own liberties, its quite unique problems and its quite extraordinary possibilities." It even had, he believed, a higher moral purpose than a concert, which celebrated a player's ego. "I think that the finest compliment one can pay to a recording is to acknowledge that it was made in such a way as to erase all signs, all traces, of its making and its maker"—which of course applied to no recording ever made by either Horowitz or Gould.
Like Benjamin, Gould was wrong. That live recording of Horowitz's return was itself a technological fiction. In the studio Horowitz rerecorded passages he had muffed on stage. But now Sony has reissued the album and restored the mistakes, arguing that the public wants the real experience, the authentic performance. The aura of the original, it turns out, has only increased, not diminished, with the proliferation of reproductive technologies.
This last point -- is it really true? People do fetishize the "live recording" (whatever that is), the live performance, etc. But isn't it true that when one goes to hear live music, one is always comparing it to the CD one has in the car?
People do pay $100 to see live music. But I often think it's become more a social ritual for rich people (dress up; see and be seen) than a bona fide site where music is experienced. For most people who take music seriously, that usually happens alone, in spaces where sound is contained and controlled: headphones (the Ipod), or the car.
[Speaking of serious music, but otherwise completedly unrelatedly, I'm very happy with my new M83 CD.]
Wahhabism in South Asia: C.M. Naim
C.M. Naim attacks the Indian Muslim Personal Law Board (AIMPLB) in the latest Outlook. Not only is he correct to attack the Board, his essay is pretty interesting and informative, especially for those of us non-Muslims who are trying to make sense of things.
Among the many points he makes, Naim argues that the AIMPLB's judgments are rife with intra-Muslim sectarianism of the most predictable kind.
The main issues on the table right now are: Muslim marriage law (the AIMPLB actually formed in response to the Shah Bano case in 1986), the use of Mosque space by women, and birth control, the use of which the AIMPLB still, unbelievably, opposes. (Also: Funny how these all involve women!)
Naim gives some helpful basic facts on Muslim marriage law:
Also, on whether women can pray in the Mosque, Naim points out that there is evidence in the Hadith (the stories of the Prophet's life) that women did attend Mosque during his times (I gather there is no reference to this in the Quran itself). Naim speculates that the current, "severe" restrictions on women attending Mosque probably came much later. But when? And how universal are the restrictions? He doesn't say.
Naim ends with a proper dismissal:
Among the many points he makes, Naim argues that the AIMPLB's judgments are rife with intra-Muslim sectarianism of the most predictable kind.
As is well-known to those who read Urdu, many people associated with the Nadva have long engaged in anti-Iran and anti-Shi’ah polemic and propaganda. For example Maulana Manzoor Nu’mani, who was much encouraged by Maulana Ali Mian, the former rector of Nadva and the present rector’s uncle. The latter even wrote a highly admiring introduction to the former’s most vitriolic book, Irani Inqilab, Imam Khomeini aur Shi’iyat. Thanks to Saudi patronage, Wahabism of the worst kind has spread in South Asia, and since 1979 it has included a prominent trend of anti-Iran and anti-Shi’ah sentiment. Its horrific results have been evident in Pakistan for some time. The chief reason it has not so blatantly showed itself in India is the secular stance of the Indian state, no matter how faulty the latter may seem sometimes.
The main issues on the table right now are: Muslim marriage law (the AIMPLB actually formed in response to the Shah Bano case in 1986), the use of Mosque space by women, and birth control, the use of which the AIMPLB still, unbelievably, opposes. (Also: Funny how these all involve women!)
Naim gives some helpful basic facts on Muslim marriage law:
As is well known, marriage in Islam is a legal contract and not a sacrament. It does not entail a declaration that the two persons have been ‘joined by God’ and therefore none should separate them. The ceremony requires neither the presence of a mulla nor the premises of a mosque. The only requirements are that the two parties must consent to the marriage freely, and that the groom should pay a mehr or bride-money to the bride—not to her parents—before the marriage is consummated.
Needless to say, in the name of ‘tradition’ or ‘local practice’—why do they always favour the groom?—the two requirements have been diluted beyond recognition to serve the purpose of Muslim patriarchy. Now any non-adult female can be given away in marriage by her father. In fact, even an adult female cannot now give or deny her consent directly but must have a vakil to represent her. As for the requirement of the mehr being paid directly and promptly to the bride, it can now be delayed, paid only partially, ‘forgiven’ by the wife, set too low to be of any use, set too high to be realistically payable, or simply litigated out of existence.
Also, on whether women can pray in the Mosque, Naim points out that there is evidence in the Hadith (the stories of the Prophet's life) that women did attend Mosque during his times (I gather there is no reference to this in the Quran itself). Naim speculates that the current, "severe" restrictions on women attending Mosque probably came much later. But when? And how universal are the restrictions? He doesn't say.
Naim ends with a proper dismissal:
The AIMPLB is not a representative body; nor is it a democratic body. It created itself, and its members have held on to their seats to serve their own agendas. More ominously over the years it has tried to expand its self-proclaimed authority—vide its brief flirting with the perilous idea of an out-of-court settlement of the Babri Mosque issue. In its existence the Board has done nothing to improve the lot of Muslim women who constitute roughly one-half of the community. Many of its members have little individual distinction of their own, and are there only because they gained some hereditary position. It is about time the Indian press gave Indian Muslims a break. Ignoring the Board may be best, but that may not be possible. In that case, the press should give the AIMPLB only the due it actually deserves within the secular polity of the Indian nation—one among many Muslim organizations and not one bit more authoritative than others.
The Scientific Indian; and Why Indians aren't "Aryan"
Prashant Mullick has started a project he's calling the The Scientific Indian. I think it's a great idea. It's a useful counter to the Vedic Science/neo-astrology/homeopathy trend we've been seeing, a tendency often espoused, surprisingly enough, by people working in high technology and science fields themselves. I've complained about this often, in my readings of Meera Nanda (whose work I like), and in my various rants and critiques of Rajiv Malhotra.
Small digression: some people may wonder why I include homeopathy on the same list as "Vedic Science" ... I'm currently trying to make peace with Ayurveda, though I worry when people begin to take it seriously on its own terms. Some Ayurvedic remedies may work, but if they do, it's purely by accident -- trial-and-error. And even before we can say they "work," we need to see their effects studied through double-blind testing... Has this work been done?]
But back to the Scientific Indian. There, you'll find a link to a post by Razib at Gene Expression, about whether genetics -- specifically mitochondrial DNA can prove the myth that high-caste Indians are actually descended from ancient Caucasian invaders. I'm not a big fan of sociobiology, especially with a libertarian twist. But Razib I like, and here he makes a really interesting point about the relationship of language formation to the story of human migration told by mtDNA.
Small digression: some people may wonder why I include homeopathy on the same list as "Vedic Science" ... I'm currently trying to make peace with Ayurveda, though I worry when people begin to take it seriously on its own terms. Some Ayurvedic remedies may work, but if they do, it's purely by accident -- trial-and-error. And even before we can say they "work," we need to see their effects studied through double-blind testing... Has this work been done?]
But back to the Scientific Indian. There, you'll find a link to a post by Razib at Gene Expression, about whether genetics -- specifically mitochondrial DNA can prove the myth that high-caste Indians are actually descended from ancient Caucasian invaders. I'm not a big fan of sociobiology, especially with a libertarian twist. But Razib I like, and here he makes a really interesting point about the relationship of language formation to the story of human migration told by mtDNA.
Subcontinent roundup
Check out this Indian subcontinent roundup at Winds of Change. It's put together by Robi Sen and Nitin Pai (of Acorn).
Very useful.
Very useful.
Conan O'Brien goes to Bangalore
Conan O'Brien sent one of his deadpan skit comedy hams (Andy Blitz) to Bangalore. In response to a pop-up infestation, Blitz first calls NBC's internal tech support, and gets "Sharon," at a call center in India. He then decides to bring his computer to her to look at in person... so he gets on a flight to Bangalore. He then walks around the city carrying the computer, trying to find "Sharon." Some of it is pretty goofball, but I found it funny -- makes for good timepass.
I'm not sure how long this link will be up. But there you have it.
I'm not sure how long this link will be up. But there you have it.
Parody: A Presidential Candidate Debate "about nothing" PART I
Watching these guys nattering on gets tiresome. And clearly the networks are struggling to maintain ratings (a mere 60 million viewers??? surely they can do better...). So I have devised a two-fold strategy by which to reinvigorate the national presidential debate process. 1) Have a series of schmo-debates, and 2) have the actual candidates have a debate a la Seinfeld.
1. Schmo-debate. It might be interesting to have an "issues" debate between two average joe-schmo guys. Call it the Shlemieliad, the Nobodebate, the Whatever-athon. One should be a republican, the other a democrat. And they should debate all this stuff:
Ok, so it's not so exciting after all.
2. Candidates Have a Debate About Nothing. More exciting would be a debate between the actual candidates, which would be about nothing! Jerry Seinfeld would moderate:
PART II on Thursday
1. Schmo-debate. It might be interesting to have an "issues" debate between two average joe-schmo guys. Call it the Shlemieliad, the Nobodebate, the Whatever-athon. One should be a republican, the other a democrat. And they should debate all this stuff:
Moderator: So what is up with Iraq?
Democrat: I really don't understand it. As long as these insurgents have all these rocket-propelled grenades and such, it seems like it will basically be impossible to win definitively.
Republican: Nuke the place. Pay somebody. Then everyone here is invited to come over and watch it on my plasma TV.
Moderator: Why is the economy so ho-hum?
Republican: Poor people aren't buying enough stuff to keep consumer spending up.
Democrat: It is the curse of the Bambino.
Moderator: Should the tax cuts be made permanent?
Democrat: What tax cut?
Republican: What tax cut?
Ok, so it's not so exciting after all.
2. Candidates Have a Debate About Nothing. More exciting would be a debate between the actual candidates, which would be about nothing! Jerry Seinfeld would moderate:
Seinfeld: So what is the deal with all this spyware, adware, malware...? Why was my computer faster five years ago than it is today?
Kerry: I think this is clearly a result of the administration's diversion from the real priority of the war on terror. Spyware is the real weapon of mass confusion. The administration has been investing in anti-virus software, which scientists have shown to be utterly useless against the new browser hijackers. Four years of failed policies, lousy freeware, and the surreal specter of adware pop-up ads that promise to help you fight adware and spyware! This administration has failed, and failed again. They don't even have a policy on it. 91% of the computers in the United States in America have it. A Kerry administration would have a Cabinet-level position dedicated to solving this crisis.
Bush: My opponent was for spyware when we were using it as a weapon against the European art cinema and the uncheckered proliferation of bad cop shows. But now that Hollywood has vanquished the specter of Euro-Communism that was haunting Europe, he's suddenly changed his mind. Like that makes it all right.
Seinfeld: Speaking of which, would you ever mix ketchup and mustard? If not, are there any common condiments you might consider mixing?
Bush: Ketchup? I don't eat kraut-food. [Grins slyly; big laugh]
Kerry: I'm opposed to the ketchup-mustard combination. However, I might consider ketchup and mayonnaise under particular circumstances and on certain select dishes, for the brighter future that I know everyone in this room is seeking. The President says he's opposed to "Kraut-food," but that kind of attitude is costing American jobs, here and now. On the dish that I think most of us know as the hamburger, I think most condiment mixing is acceptable in the interest of the stengthening of Our Common Flavour. However, on hot dogs and cheesesteak, it's been well-documented that the over-mixing of condiments only benefits the wealthiest 2 percent of Americans. It's time to think about our philosophy of condimentation differently.
Seinfeld: What can be done to halt the spread of reality TV, and restore the 30-minute situation comedy to its rightful place in prime time?
Kerry: I believe in America's future, not America's past. The future is reality television, not some extremist right-wing idea of division, not unity. I am in favor of television about reality, but I have been consistent in opposing the outsourcing of screen-writing labor to these kinds of outfits that hurt working families of people -- good, ordinary folks, in the entertainment industry.
Bush: I think reality television promotes the highest values of America -- the entrepeneurial spirit and the can-do attitude. The small-businesses that made, have make up, for America. Now sure, I reckon--I recognize that some of these shows, where you have people eating shark testicles and all, well they are not in the best taste. [Bush Chuckles.] And I want to remind you, Jerry, and remind everyone out there in TV-Land, that my opponent voted against reality television in the floor of the Senate before saying that he was in favor of reality.
But I don't know what all these big fancy words like "reality" are supposed to men, I mean, mean. Let me be 100% clear: I love reality television. I love its values. But I, my wife Laura, and my daughters are all opposed... to "reality."
PART II on Thursday
A busy few days
[UPDATE: Is it just me or is Blogger getting really slow lately? I just wanted to fix my grammatical errors, and it's taken nearly 15 minutes to get logged in... grr.]
Phew. A busy five days! I added like 30 new pages to my book over the weekend (it is, I hope, nearing completion). On Monday I went to Franklin & Marshall College in Lancaster PA to talk about the "Cyclops" episode of Ulysses (thanks for the invite, F&M!).
Monday night, back in Bethlehem, I spent several hours in my office putting together a large 'what I've accomplished lately' file for my department, then graded a stack of papers, then prepared a 'lecture' on T.S. Eliot for my graduate students, and then read a couple of challenging short stories to teach to my undergraduate class (Katherine Ann Porter's "Theft" and Willa Cather's "Double Birthday"). Then I woke up Tuesday and taught. Somewhere in there I slept. A little.
I would especially recommend the Katherine Anne Porter story; she packs real psychological complexity into a character study that only runs 5 pages. The Cather is also intriguing, but it helps a bit if you know your Stravinsky from your Schumann. Both are in the Updike-edited anthology The Best American Short Stories of the Century.
I also missed most of the debate last night, but I have a good reason -- we actually had dinner plans in what hackers like to call "meatspace." It's too bad Cheney can get away with lying about what he said about the Saddam-9/11 connection, but oh well.
Did I mention that I spent 10 hours in my car over those same three days, while trying to get all these things together? Some readers already know this, but every week I drive from New Haven, CT, to Bethlehem, PA, every Monday night, stay in Bethlehem for three days, and then drive back to New Haven Thursday night. I do this because my spouse has a job in Connecticut, and we technically live there. That's about six hours in the car a week -- not too bad considering that most Americans spend more than an hour in the car every day (and some spend more). But if you add in Monday's drive to Franklin and Marshall, 2 hours southwest from Bethlehem, I just spent 10 hours in three days behind the wheel! That means finishing off an audio-book (Josh Haddon's The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time -- a pleasant listen), lots of NPR, and lots of Hindi songs (today I'm humming "Hum tum/ ik kamre mein band ho/ aur chhabi khojaaa".....)
But it also means less time to get work done.
Thank God this week is fall break (well, the second half of this week, anyway), so today is, effectively Friday for me. I'm kind of relaxing this morning, but there's more book to be written this afternoon.
I would recommend:
Adam Kotsko's genius mini-post on a recent New Yorker cartoon.
Berube's characterization of Cheney as a "barking loon," pre-debate
Lilith's photos from Budapest. Interesting architecture lesson about 19th century brothels!
And, my friend Ross is a graduate student in the lab at Columbia that just picked up the Nobel in Biology. Cool, huh. Imagine deciding what to research and saying, "Dude, why not do a project that will more-or-less definitively explain the sense of smell?"
Phew. A busy five days! I added like 30 new pages to my book over the weekend (it is, I hope, nearing completion). On Monday I went to Franklin & Marshall College in Lancaster PA to talk about the "Cyclops" episode of Ulysses (thanks for the invite, F&M!).
Monday night, back in Bethlehem, I spent several hours in my office putting together a large 'what I've accomplished lately' file for my department, then graded a stack of papers, then prepared a 'lecture' on T.S. Eliot for my graduate students, and then read a couple of challenging short stories to teach to my undergraduate class (Katherine Ann Porter's "Theft" and Willa Cather's "Double Birthday"). Then I woke up Tuesday and taught. Somewhere in there I slept. A little.
I would especially recommend the Katherine Anne Porter story; she packs real psychological complexity into a character study that only runs 5 pages. The Cather is also intriguing, but it helps a bit if you know your Stravinsky from your Schumann. Both are in the Updike-edited anthology The Best American Short Stories of the Century.
I also missed most of the debate last night, but I have a good reason -- we actually had dinner plans in what hackers like to call "meatspace." It's too bad Cheney can get away with lying about what he said about the Saddam-9/11 connection, but oh well.
Did I mention that I spent 10 hours in my car over those same three days, while trying to get all these things together? Some readers already know this, but every week I drive from New Haven, CT, to Bethlehem, PA, every Monday night, stay in Bethlehem for three days, and then drive back to New Haven Thursday night. I do this because my spouse has a job in Connecticut, and we technically live there. That's about six hours in the car a week -- not too bad considering that most Americans spend more than an hour in the car every day (and some spend more). But if you add in Monday's drive to Franklin and Marshall, 2 hours southwest from Bethlehem, I just spent 10 hours in three days behind the wheel! That means finishing off an audio-book (Josh Haddon's The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time -- a pleasant listen), lots of NPR, and lots of Hindi songs (today I'm humming "Hum tum/ ik kamre mein band ho/ aur chhabi khojaaa".....)
But it also means less time to get work done.
Thank God this week is fall break (well, the second half of this week, anyway), so today is, effectively Friday for me. I'm kind of relaxing this morning, but there's more book to be written this afternoon.
I would recommend:
Adam Kotsko's genius mini-post on a recent New Yorker cartoon.
Berube's characterization of Cheney as a "barking loon," pre-debate
Lilith's photos from Budapest. Interesting architecture lesson about 19th century brothels!
And, my friend Ross is a graduate student in the lab at Columbia that just picked up the Nobel in Biology. Cool, huh. Imagine deciding what to research and saying, "Dude, why not do a project that will more-or-less definitively explain the sense of smell?"
Debate Misstatements--A partisan (but objective!) scorecard
A big part of the spin in the '04 Gore-Bush debates was the myth -- grounded, as all myths are, in reality -- that Gore couldn't resist his tendency to "embellish." Here, it seems that both Bush and Kerry made a few statements that were either factually incorrect, or didn't quite make sense. From a quick survey of this morning's coverage of the debates, it seems that neither are getting nailed especially hard on inaccuracies. Here is a list of 8 important debate misstatements I've seen documented in the media this morning:
1. On whether Bush went to the UN before invading Iraq (Kerry says no, Bush says he did). The LA Times:
But this we knew.
2. On how 10 million Afghans have registered to vote, when there aren't 10 million eligible voters in Afghanistan. (Via Keywords)
3. On whether Pakistan's Abdul Qadeer Khan has been "brought to justice." This was, in my view, the most glaring and horrific of any statement by either candidate. The LA Times again:
4. On whether the U.S. has trained 100,000 Iraqi troops. Here Bush is not as wrong as the Democrats seem to think:
If there's a credible number close to 100,000, the Dems can't do much with this one, even if 75% of them are "shake-and-bake."
5. On why there are so many insurgents in Iraq. Here I go to Slate:
Yes-- "we're losing the peace because we won the war too fast" doesn't exactly inspire.
6. On North Korea--bilateral vs. multilateral talks: Slate and others say that China, South Korea, and Russia are all actually encouraging the U.S. to have bilateral talks with North Korea, so Bush's point that bilateral talks would disrupt relations with China doesn't make any sense.
7. On whether Osama Bin Laden is actually in Afghanistan, as Kerry suggested he is. (Instapundit tried to make something of this.) Who cares? Nab the guy, then we'll have a discussion about where he is, ok?
8. Was the subway running during the RNC? Kerry says no. Everyone in New York City says yes.
Admittedly, this list is a bit partisan -- 6 against Bush, 2 against Kerry (though point #7 is really irrelevant). But then, Kerry hasn't been running the country (even ostensibly) for the past four years. Bush should know better.
1. On whether Bush went to the UN before invading Iraq (Kerry says no, Bush says he did). The LA Times:
Bush, for example, eager to blunt Kerry's charges that he charged unilaterally into the Iraq war, contended that his administration had "used diplomacy every chance we get." In fact, though Bush sought United Nations approval for the war in early 2003, it had become clear that the administration's patience for diplomacy was nearly exhausted. The administration rebuffed proposals from other countries that would have extended international weapons inspections and delayed the March 2003 invasion.
But this we knew.
2. On how 10 million Afghans have registered to vote, when there aren't 10 million eligible voters in Afghanistan. (Via Keywords)
3. On whether Pakistan's Abdul Qadeer Khan has been "brought to justice." This was, in my view, the most glaring and horrific of any statement by either candidate. The LA Times again:
Bush also sought to portray efforts underway as projects completed. Outlining his administration's progress against nuclear proliferation, he asserted that the network of Pakistani physicist Abdul Qadeer Khan had been "busted" and "brought to justice."
However, Khan himself was pardoned by Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf in February, and of 11 staff members at the top-secret Khan Research Laboratories near Islamabad originally believed to be involved in the nuclear trafficking, none has been charged after lengthy detentions and interrogations. International investigations are still underway.
4. On whether the U.S. has trained 100,000 Iraqi troops. Here Bush is not as wrong as the Democrats seem to think:
Bush said there were currently a "hundred thousand troops trained" — close to the 96,681 trained police and military forces cited in a Sept. 22 statement by the Defense Department.
Though Bush's claim is factually true, it has drawn strong criticism as an overstatement by Democrats in Congress and independent military experts. Deputy Secretary of State Richard L. Armitage acknowledged last Friday to Congress that some of the forces were "shake-and-bake" trainees, with three weeks of training or less. (LA Times)
If there's a credible number close to 100,000, the Dems can't do much with this one, even if 75% of them are "shake-and-bake."
5. On why there are so many insurgents in Iraq. Here I go to Slate:
Bush's counter—that the problems exist because Gen. Tommy Franks won the battle for Baghdad too quickly (the Baathists disappeared, now they're coming back and we're fighting the war we thought we'd have to fight last year)—is deeply unconvincing. For one thing, most of the insurgents are not Saddam loyalists. Many are Shiites who hated Saddam.
Yes-- "we're losing the peace because we won the war too fast" doesn't exactly inspire.
6. On North Korea--bilateral vs. multilateral talks: Slate and others say that China, South Korea, and Russia are all actually encouraging the U.S. to have bilateral talks with North Korea, so Bush's point that bilateral talks would disrupt relations with China doesn't make any sense.
7. On whether Osama Bin Laden is actually in Afghanistan, as Kerry suggested he is. (Instapundit tried to make something of this.) Who cares? Nab the guy, then we'll have a discussion about where he is, ok?
8. Was the subway running during the RNC? Kerry says no. Everyone in New York City says yes.
Admittedly, this list is a bit partisan -- 6 against Bush, 2 against Kerry (though point #7 is really irrelevant). But then, Kerry hasn't been running the country (even ostensibly) for the past four years. Bush should know better.
More Live Debate Blogging: Mentioning Darfur
I'm glad they're mentioning the genocide in Darfur; I didn't expect it.
Update: It's too bad they didn't say anything substantial about it. Darfur is just an excuse for more points on Iraq.
Update: It's too bad they didn't say anything substantial about it. Darfur is just an excuse for more points on Iraq.
Wow, this is getting heavy.
I was expecting pre-written scripts and little interaction between the candidates.
People on Kos are saying that Bush is sweating. But I don't get clear enough reception to be able to tell for sure ... ;-(
People on Kos are saying that Bush is sweating. But I don't get clear enough reception to be able to tell for sure ... ;-(
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