Monday, June 17, 2013
The Gift of Doubt
James Hayward, one of New England’s leading railroad engineers, estimated that penetrating the Hoosac would cost, at most, a very manageable two million dollars. The president of Amherst College, an accomplished geologist, said that the mountain was composed of soft rock and that tunnelling would be fairly easy once the engineers had breached the surface. “The Hoosac . . . is believed to be the only barrier between Boston and the Pacific,” the project’s promoter, Alvah Crocker, declared.
Everyone was wrong. Digging through the Hoosac turned out to be a nightmare. The project cost more than ten times the budgeted estimate. If the people involved had known the true nature of the challenges they faced, they would never have funded the Troy-Greenfield railroad. But, had they not, the factories of northwestern Massachusetts wouldn’t have been able to ship their goods so easily to the expanding West, the cost of freight would have remained stubbornly high, and the state of Massachusetts would have been immeasurably poorer. So is ignorance an impediment to progress or a precondition for it?
The economist Albert O. Hirschman, who died last December, loved paradoxes like this. He was a “planner,” the kind of economist who conceives of grand infrastructure projects and bold schemes. But his eye was drawn to the many ways in which plans did not turn out the way they were supposed to—to unintended consequences and perverse outcomes and the puzzling fact that the shortest line between two points is often a dead end.
“The Principle of the Hiding Hand,” one of Hirschman’s many memorable essays, drew on an account of the Troy-Greenfield “folly,” and then presented an even more elaborate series of paradoxes. Hirschman had studied the enormous Karnaphuli Paper Mills, in what was then East Pakistan. The mill was built to exploit the vast bamboo forests of the Chittagong Hill Tracts. But not long after the mill came online the bamboo unexpectedly flowered and then died, a phenomenon now known to recur every fifty years or so. Dead bamboo was useless for pulping; it fell apart as it was floated down the river. Because of ignorance and bad planning, a new, multimillion-dollar industrial plant was suddenly without the raw material it needed to function.
But what impressed Hirschman was the response to the crisis. The mill’s operators quickly found ways to bring in bamboo from villages throughout East Pakistan, building a new supply chain using the country’s many waterways. They started a research program to find faster-growing species of bamboo to replace the dead forests, and planted an experimental tract. They found other kinds of lumber that worked just as well. The result was that the plant was blessed with a far more diversified base of raw materials than had ever been imagined. If bad planning hadn’t led to the crisis at the Karnaphuli plant, the mill’s operators would never have been forced to be creative. And the plant would not have been nearly as valuable as it became.
“We may be dealing here with a general principle of action,” Hirschman wrote:
Creativity always comes as a surprise to us; therefore we can never count on it and we dare not believe in it until it has happened. In other words, we would not consciously engage upon tasks whose success clearly requires that creativity be forthcoming. Hence, the only way in which we can bring our creative resources fully into play is by misjudging the nature of the task, by presenting it to ourselves as more routine, simple, undemanding of genuine creativity than it will turn out to be.And from there Hirschman’s analysis took flight. People don’t seek out challenges, he went on. They are “apt to take on and plunge into new tasks because of the erroneously presumed absence of a challenge—because the task looks easier and more manageable than it will turn out to be.” This was the Hiding Hand principle—a play on Adam Smith’s Invisible Hand. The entrepreneur takes risks but does not see himself as a risk-taker, because he operates under the useful delusion that what he’s attempting is not risky. Then, trapped in mid-mountain, people discover the truth—and, because it is too late to turn back, they’re forced to finish the job.
by Malcolm Gladwell, The New Yorker | Read more:
Illustration by Ricardo Martinez.
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The Highest Honor
[ed. Be sure to read the Q&A]
"Being called a traitor by Dick Cheney is the highest honor you can give an American, and the more panicked talk we hear from people like him, Feinstein, and King, the better off we all are."Edward Snowden • Offering his thoughts on the opinions of politicians like former Vice President Dick Cheney and Speaker Boehner who have criticized the man responsible for leaking information on the National Security Agency’s classified PRISM program. Snowden made the comments during a Q&A session moderated by The Guardian’s Glenn Greenwald on Monday, and also discussed a myriad of other issues surrounding his decision to leak the PRISM information, including claims that he might be a Chinese spy.
Image via:
My Life as an Amateur Taxidermist
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I grew up and I took a course in bird taxidermy. I stuffed a duck: a proper handsome dude with a green head and white eyeliner and a long elegant neck that I accidentally tore in half at some point in the class. It currently hangs from a bent coat-hanger protruding from a high cupboard, forever about to land but unsure what to do with its wings. It looks like it’s screaming. Technically it turned out okay, in that I mean yes, okay, the wings wrenched high above his head don’t actually mirror the way duck wings move in real life, but despite it being my first go, it looked exactly like a duck. It was identifiable as a thing that used to say “quack”. Like an animal whose unfeasibly long penis you have Google image-searched long after your bedtime. You could tell this just by looking at him. You didn’t even have to get very close (which you wouldn’t want to do anyway on account of him smelling funky) (initially) (this goes away). There was no need to ask what it was, or what it used to be, or what happened to its face. My second attempt was different. (...)Anyone who has not made these clumsy forays into DIY taxidermy has probably never wondered where the dead things come from. As self-appointed (in)expert, I will lift the veil. You’re welcome.
This is how a person who lives in the city and has no plans to kill any one-legged manky London pigeons end up with a more or less permanent avian coffin and a set of perturbed housemates who probably won't use those ice cubes after all:
The Internet. You discover that can buy a mole for a tenner on eBay. Three crows might cost you twenty. A badly photographed job lot of grim spoils from a game hunt spilled out onto a wet bathroom floor go for thirty. Merely searching for these things changes eBay’s profile on you and they start suggesting sheep thigh bones, dental picks and disembodied hawk feet. You stare at birds in the park like an unknown bearded man watches children through a primary school fence. You watch how their legs fit together, how their wings don’t go like how you made them go like when you got all excited while stuffing that duck. One day you might notice one of them dead on the grass. In real life. And the fact that you don’t have to put a bid on this thing or pay for postage makes your brain start thinking strange new thoughts. These are some of them that you have while standing completely still on Clapham High Street next to a dead crow while everybody else is not standing next to dead crows:
(We could pretend this is hypothetical but obviously that would be lying.)
I could go to Iceland over the road and buy some stuff and they would give me some plastic bags! I could take him home in said bags! All I’d have to do is ditch the choc ices! But what if somebody steals him...
And then your old sane self will pipe up on the other shoulder:
What about those people at the bus stop watching me interfering with a dead bird in the dark? What if it’s crowded on the Tube and what if the bus is crowded too, with me standing there with what was clearly a dead crow encased in one single sheath of low-grade plastic bag? And then what if I get home and my housemates are in the kitchen, and they ask me as I open the freezer drawer and shift their bags of bread and peas out of the way: “What’s in the bag?”
by Hayley Campbell, TNS | Read more:
Image by Eddie Campbell
Sunday, June 16, 2013
Open Wide
Since the earliest days of Linux and of Wikipedia, conflicting attitudes to profit have co-existed with a commitment to digital sharing. Whether it’s source code, text, artistic works, or government data, some see the open digital commons as an ethical alternative to corporate production, while others believe that sharing and profit go together like wine and cheese. And now, as massively open online courses bring the rhetoric of digital openness to education and Web-based startups are making it easy to share apartments and cars and unused parking spaces and jobs, the seeds have been planted for a sharing economy whose flowering is welcomed both by idealists who value authenticity, sustainability and community sharing over commodity ownership and by venture capitalists looking to make their next fortune. Strange bedfellows.
Cities have long been sites of commons and commerce: full of trade and private enterprise but shaped by parks and streetscapes, neighborhoods and rhythms of daily life that grow from non-commodified sharing. In his 2012 book Rebel Cities, David Harvey observes how, in cities, “people of all sorts and classes mingle … to produce a common of perpetually changing and transitory life,” from the irrepressible energy of Manhattan to the café culture of Rome to Barcelona’s distinctive architecture to the symbolic meaning of modern Berlin. Yes, by 2009, volunteers had spent a hundred million hours building Wikipedia, but cities put this dramatic number into perspective: Every year the citizens of Canada alone volunteer roughly 20 Wikipedias for hospitals and children’s sports, for charities and the arts — the equivalent of more than a million full-time jobs in a population of 30 million — and there is no reason to believe that the count is complete or that Canada is exceptional.
The similarities between urban and digital worlds are not incidental. Both are cultural spaces, and cultural spaces have always been iceberg-like. Above the surface, market forces and state interventions; beneath, a mass of noncommercial activity organized, at least in part, as open commons. But while digital entrepreneurs look to the “Internet’s way of working” to disrupt the bricks and mortar of our cities, urban experiences have sober lessons for the digerati if they will listen: The relationship between commons and commerce is fraught with contradictions. Harvey never once mentions computer technology in his book, but his reflections on cities make a compelling case that money-making and sharing are far from natural allies, and that the role of openness must be questioned if commons-based production is to be a real alternative.
The economics of culture are those of monopolistic competition. Each and every cultural work is a unique creation and, like other unique goods, they offers the prospect of “monopoly rents” for any who can corner the market on that work. Open commons are themselves cultural works, and while the tending of commons is collective and non-commodified by definition, the commons itself is a magnet for private capital. As Harvey points out, “the common, even — and particularly — when it cannot be enclosed, can always be traded upon … the ambience and attractiveness of a city … is a collective product of its citizens [but] it is the tourist trade that commercially capitalizes upon that common.”
So a non-commercial common attracts commercial capital, but is this a problem? After all, open commons are not scarce resources, prone to depletion like clean water or ocean fish stocks. Your enjoyment of a city park or a downloaded song does not hinder me from enjoying the same. What turns the contradiction into a tragedy is that private capital tends to destroy the qualities that attracted it in the first place. While commons and commerce can never be completely disentangled, it is large-scale capital that is most damaging, and it is the commitment to openness that blocks off ways to prevent the damage.
Private capital damages open commons through three mechanisms. It erodes the common, it alienates the community that tends the common, and distorts the essential nature of the common.
Neighborhood diversity is an open commons prone to erosion. Harvey writes: “A community group that struggles to maintain ethnic diversity in its neighborhood and protect against gentrification may suddenly find its property prices (and taxes) rising as real estate agents market the ‘character’ of their neighborhood to the wealthy as multicultural, street-lively, and diverse. By the time the market has done its destructive work, not only have the original residents been dispossessed of that common which they had created (often being forced out by rising rents and property taxes), but the common itself becomes so debased as to be unrecognizable.”
The similarities between urban and digital worlds are not incidental. Both are cultural spaces, and cultural spaces have always been iceberg-like. Above the surface, market forces and state interventions; beneath, a mass of noncommercial activity organized, at least in part, as open commons. But while digital entrepreneurs look to the “Internet’s way of working” to disrupt the bricks and mortar of our cities, urban experiences have sober lessons for the digerati if they will listen: The relationship between commons and commerce is fraught with contradictions. Harvey never once mentions computer technology in his book, but his reflections on cities make a compelling case that money-making and sharing are far from natural allies, and that the role of openness must be questioned if commons-based production is to be a real alternative.
The economics of culture are those of monopolistic competition. Each and every cultural work is a unique creation and, like other unique goods, they offers the prospect of “monopoly rents” for any who can corner the market on that work. Open commons are themselves cultural works, and while the tending of commons is collective and non-commodified by definition, the commons itself is a magnet for private capital. As Harvey points out, “the common, even — and particularly — when it cannot be enclosed, can always be traded upon … the ambience and attractiveness of a city … is a collective product of its citizens [but] it is the tourist trade that commercially capitalizes upon that common.”
So a non-commercial common attracts commercial capital, but is this a problem? After all, open commons are not scarce resources, prone to depletion like clean water or ocean fish stocks. Your enjoyment of a city park or a downloaded song does not hinder me from enjoying the same. What turns the contradiction into a tragedy is that private capital tends to destroy the qualities that attracted it in the first place. While commons and commerce can never be completely disentangled, it is large-scale capital that is most damaging, and it is the commitment to openness that blocks off ways to prevent the damage.
Private capital damages open commons through three mechanisms. It erodes the common, it alienates the community that tends the common, and distorts the essential nature of the common.
Neighborhood diversity is an open commons prone to erosion. Harvey writes: “A community group that struggles to maintain ethnic diversity in its neighborhood and protect against gentrification may suddenly find its property prices (and taxes) rising as real estate agents market the ‘character’ of their neighborhood to the wealthy as multicultural, street-lively, and diverse. By the time the market has done its destructive work, not only have the original residents been dispossessed of that common which they had created (often being forced out by rising rents and property taxes), but the common itself becomes so debased as to be unrecognizable.”
by Tom Slee, TNI | Read more:
Image: Stephen Shore, Church Street and Second Street (June 20, 1974)
Nate Silver Offers Up a Statistical Analysis of Your Failing Relationship
While data shows that overall happiness in your relationship fell 8 more points, there is still a 31 percent chance of makeup sex this Friday, depending on average energy levels after work and how proactive you’re feeling (see chart). However, if you just order $18 of Chinese takeout like you did last weekend, projections show a 16.8 percent drop in possible intercourse and a whopping 74.2 percent upswing in Netflix-streaming, with both of you falling asleep long before the movie is over.
In an exit poll from Monday evening, exactly one half of the duo in attendance said they had an unfavorable opinion of the chosen restaurant—Arby’s—wondering if it was some sort of retribution, or if this is sadly what it’s come to.
Between the hours of 6 and 7 p.m. tonight, there was a 77.1 percent increase in annoyance and a 54 percent rise in revulsion based on the way you slurped your capellini, drank 65 percent too much wine and prattled on about your ex-girlfriend Sarah for some reason, even though she has a new boyfriend with a sailboat, and you’ve supposedly moved on, too. The logic here is that you are 44 percent over Sarah after 3 years, but there is only a 3.6 percent chance of her taking you back, which is reduced by nearly half of a percentage point every time she steps foot on that boat.
In a very local poll released just this week, 50 percent of those in your current relationship said it bothers them when you leave your shoes in the middle of the carpet and added that, if you could clean a dirty dish or two—putting in a minimal effort of just 5 minutes—stress would be reduced by 39 percent, along with a telling 54 percent decrease in shouting matches and escalating threats to leave forever.
You’ve lost nearly 100 hairs on your head every day since March, 2011, when the two of you met, which is almost 36,500 hairs in the last year and nearly 73,000 hairs in the last two years. This is, ultimately, why you’ll be 84 percent bald by the time you’re 45.
In a survey conducted with your partner’s biological parents between Tuesday and Wednesday, you are currently ranked seventh most popular on the list of known boyfriends, after Andrew R., Bryan, Kevin, Seth, Shawn and Kyle, but before Andrew Y. who refused to apply labels to relationships and wanted to “keep things loose.”
Of the seven ex-boyfriends listed above, two of them (Andrew R. and Seth) have sent a combined two emails to your girlfriend this month, totaling about 2,200 words, both of which have gone 100 percent unmentioned.
The aforementioned emails were placed in a folder marked “SAVE,” which actually contains 26 messages you’ve never seen, 23 of which would immediately increase your base paranoia by 87 percent.
by Jory John, McSweeny's | Read more:
Image via:
Behind the Tweets: The Secretive People Behind S.F.'s Fog, Seagulls, and Bridges
In the city, more than 50 people have at some point "become" the Twitter embodiment of things such as the Bay Bridge (@SFBayBridge), sea gulls at AT&T Park (@ATTSeagull), and other well-known San Francisco landmarks, buildings, streets, places, and animals. It's a fantasy world in which aspects of the city are brought to life at an intersection of psychology and technology. But across the board, the people who adopt these digital personas are serious about their secrecy. They want to erase any connection with their characters, perhaps so that others can better connect with them.
On a day in San Francisco when the fog crawls over the city, the Twitter account for @KarlTheFog will start getting tweets. Sometimes it's just comments about the fog, sometimes it's pictures and remarks about fog in other parts of the world. A ruined summer picnic is blamed simply on Karl, the name the account holder gave to the fog and the one that has stuck, creeping into the everyday language of San Franciscans. The name has grown popular enough that when Instagram instituted tagging of people in photos, a company blog post called out Karl the Fog as a "person" with an Instagram account who appears in photographs to be tagged.
The person behind the fog account, who answered questions via email and requested anonymity (to the point of not even revealing a gender), says some inspiration for what eventually became Karl came from the fake BP public relations account that sprang up after the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico in June 2010. "It was the first parody account I followed and thought the idea was brilliant and that I could do something like it," writes Karl's puppet-master. "I love the idea of blending fact and fiction and not knowing where one stops and the other begins." The final inspiration came after a bout of foggy weather. "Friends were whining about the most recent fogpocalypse and I was loving it. ... I've always thought of the fog as mysterious and romantic and looked forward to its arrival. Since everyone was complaining, I started thinking, 'I wish the fog had a chance to defend itself,' and that's when I created the Twitter account."
@KarlTheFog is one of the most active San Francisco "things" on social media, posting pointed commentary about the city's weather to its 17,000 followers: "Yesterday you got sunburned. Tonight you're bundled up in a hoodie. Welcome to San Francisco." and retweets comments about the fog, or lack thereof. The fog also has an Instagram account, on which it posts and reposts photos of itself.
Pamela Rutledge, the director of the Media Psychology Research Center and an adjunct faculty member at the Massachusetts School of Professional Psychology, says the creation of Twitter accounts for things like the fog is like a type of performance art, "not much different than other types of theater, or perhaps stand-up." But the medium in which the characters are performing changes the interaction. "We don't think it's odd to find amusement in videos, comics, books, or magazines, but somehow Twitter seems different," she says. "The biggest difference is that it is interactive and allows for participation by the audience and co-creation of new content to further the story along, should the landmark, object, or dubious celebrity choose to engage at that level."
by Mike Billings, SF Weekly | Read more:
Image: uncredited
Saturday, June 15, 2013
What Kind of Father Am I
[ed. Reprinted for Father's Day.]
One evening—not long after my family moved to the old country
farmhouse where my wife and I have lived for 45 years—our youngest son
(my namesake, Jim, then three-year-old Jimmy) came into the woodshed,
while I was there putting away some tools. “Look,” he said proudly,
cradling in his arms the largest rat I had ever seen.
Instinctively, in what no doubt would be a genetic response of any parent, I tried to grab the rat from his arms before it bit him; but, as I reached toward it, the rat tightened its body, menacing me with its sharp teeth. At once, I stepped back: that, too, was an instinctive response, though rational thought immediately followed it. Was the rat rabid? Whether that was so or not, it was clear that the rat trusted Jimmy but not me, and yet it might bite both of us if I threatened it further.
“Where did you find it?” I asked my son.
“In the barn.”
“Which barn? The one with all the hay?”
“Yes.”
“It was just lying there, on the hay?”
“Yes, and he likes me.”
“I can see that it does.”
With the possible exception of the difference in our use of pronouns (which just now came to me without conscious intent; could it have risen from some submerged level of my memory?), that little dialogue isn’t an exact transcription—not only because it happened decades ago, but because while I was talking, my mind was elsewhere. I was looking at the garden tools I’d just returned to the wall behind Jimmy, thinking I might ask him to put the rat on the floor so that I could kill it with a whack of a shovel or some other implement. But my son trusted me, just as the rat apparently trusted him; and what kind of traumatic shock would I be visiting upon Jimmy if I smashed the skull of an animal he considered his friend?
The woodshed is in a wing of the house connected to the kitchen, where my wife, Jean, had been preparing dinner. She surprised me by coming quietly to my side; apparently she had overheard our conversation through the screen door and now was offering a solution to the dilemma. She said, “We need to find something to put your pet in, Jimmy.”
“A box,” I said. “Just keep holding it while I find one.” For I remembered at that moment a stout box I had seen while rummaging among all the agricultural items that had collected over the years in the carriage barn across the road—items that fell into disuse after the fields had been cleared, the house and barns constructed, and finally after tractors and cars had replaced horses. Amid the jumble of old harnesses, horse-drawn plow parts, scythes, and two-man saws was a small oblong box that might have contained dynamite fuses or explosives for removing stumps. It had been sawed and sanded from a plank about two inches thick. Like the house itself, it was made of wood far more durable than anything available since the virgin forests were harvested, and all of its edges were covered in metal. Though I felt guilty for leaving Jimmy and Jean with the rat, I was glad to have remembered the box I had admired for its craftsmanship, and I ran in search of it. For the longest time, I couldn’t find it and thought (as I often did later, whenever I found myself unable to resolve a crisis besetting one of our adolescent sons), What kind of father am I? I was close to panic before I finally found the box, more valuable to me at that moment than our recently purchased Greek-revival farmhouse—the kind of family home I’d long dreamed of owning.
A film of these events still runs through my mind, but I will summarize the rest of it here. Jimmy was initially the director of this movie, with Jean and me the actors obedient to his command: that is to say, he obstinately refused to put the rat into the box until a suitable bed was made for it—old rags wouldn’t do, for it had to be as soft as his favorite blanket. The rat gave him his authority, for it trusted Jean no more than it trusted me; it remained unperturbed in his embrace for a few minutes more, while Jean searched for and then cut several sections from a tattered blanket. Our son was satisfied with that bed, and the rat—whose trust in a three-year-old seemed infinite—seemed equally pleased, permitting Jimmy to place it on the soft strips. As soon as we put the lid on the box, I called the county health department, only to be told that the office had closed; I was to take in the rat first thing in the morning so that its brain could be dissected.
In response to Jean’s immediate question, “Did the rat bite you?” Jimmy said, “No, he kissed me.” Could any parent have believed an answer like that? My response was simply to put the box outside. Before giving our son a bath, we scrutinized every part of his body, finding no scratches anywhere on it. During the night the rat gnawed a hole through the wood, and by dawn it had disappeared.
Forty-odd years ago, rabies vaccination involved a lengthy series of shots, each of them painful, and occasionally the process itself was fatal. Neither the health department nor our pediatrician would tell us what to do. Once again we searched Jimmy’s body for the slightest scratch and again found nothing; so we decided to withhold the vaccination—though Jean and I slept poorly for several nights. Long after it had become apparent that our son had not contracted a fatal disease, I kept thinking—as I again do, in remembering the event—of the errors I had made, of what I should have done instead, of how helpless I had felt following my discovery that the rat had escaped.
While reading a recent biography of William James by Robert D. Richardson Jr., I found myself recalling those suspenseful and seemingly never-ending hours. As Richardson demonstrates, James was aware of the extent that circumstance and random events (like the one that led my young son to a particular rat so long ago) can alter the course of history as well as the lives of individuals, making the future unpredictable. James, like my favorite writer, Chekhov, was trained as a medical doctor and became an author—though not of stories and plays (his younger brother Henry was the fiction writer) but of books and articles on philosophical, psychological, and spiritual matters. One of the founders of American pragmatism, James rejected European reliance on Platonic absolutes or on religious and philosophical doctrines that declared the historical necessity of certain future events. Despite his realization that much lies beyond our present and future control, James still believed in the independence of individual will, a view essential to the long-lasting but often precarious freedom underlying our democratic system.
by James McConkey, The American Scholar | Read more:
Photo: Julien Denoyer
One evening—not long after my family moved to the old country
farmhouse where my wife and I have lived for 45 years—our youngest son
(my namesake, Jim, then three-year-old Jimmy) came into the woodshed,
while I was there putting away some tools. “Look,” he said proudly,
cradling in his arms the largest rat I had ever seen.Instinctively, in what no doubt would be a genetic response of any parent, I tried to grab the rat from his arms before it bit him; but, as I reached toward it, the rat tightened its body, menacing me with its sharp teeth. At once, I stepped back: that, too, was an instinctive response, though rational thought immediately followed it. Was the rat rabid? Whether that was so or not, it was clear that the rat trusted Jimmy but not me, and yet it might bite both of us if I threatened it further.
“Where did you find it?” I asked my son.
“In the barn.”
“Which barn? The one with all the hay?”
“Yes.”
“It was just lying there, on the hay?”
“Yes, and he likes me.”
“I can see that it does.”
With the possible exception of the difference in our use of pronouns (which just now came to me without conscious intent; could it have risen from some submerged level of my memory?), that little dialogue isn’t an exact transcription—not only because it happened decades ago, but because while I was talking, my mind was elsewhere. I was looking at the garden tools I’d just returned to the wall behind Jimmy, thinking I might ask him to put the rat on the floor so that I could kill it with a whack of a shovel or some other implement. But my son trusted me, just as the rat apparently trusted him; and what kind of traumatic shock would I be visiting upon Jimmy if I smashed the skull of an animal he considered his friend?
The woodshed is in a wing of the house connected to the kitchen, where my wife, Jean, had been preparing dinner. She surprised me by coming quietly to my side; apparently she had overheard our conversation through the screen door and now was offering a solution to the dilemma. She said, “We need to find something to put your pet in, Jimmy.”
“A box,” I said. “Just keep holding it while I find one.” For I remembered at that moment a stout box I had seen while rummaging among all the agricultural items that had collected over the years in the carriage barn across the road—items that fell into disuse after the fields had been cleared, the house and barns constructed, and finally after tractors and cars had replaced horses. Amid the jumble of old harnesses, horse-drawn plow parts, scythes, and two-man saws was a small oblong box that might have contained dynamite fuses or explosives for removing stumps. It had been sawed and sanded from a plank about two inches thick. Like the house itself, it was made of wood far more durable than anything available since the virgin forests were harvested, and all of its edges were covered in metal. Though I felt guilty for leaving Jimmy and Jean with the rat, I was glad to have remembered the box I had admired for its craftsmanship, and I ran in search of it. For the longest time, I couldn’t find it and thought (as I often did later, whenever I found myself unable to resolve a crisis besetting one of our adolescent sons), What kind of father am I? I was close to panic before I finally found the box, more valuable to me at that moment than our recently purchased Greek-revival farmhouse—the kind of family home I’d long dreamed of owning.
A film of these events still runs through my mind, but I will summarize the rest of it here. Jimmy was initially the director of this movie, with Jean and me the actors obedient to his command: that is to say, he obstinately refused to put the rat into the box until a suitable bed was made for it—old rags wouldn’t do, for it had to be as soft as his favorite blanket. The rat gave him his authority, for it trusted Jean no more than it trusted me; it remained unperturbed in his embrace for a few minutes more, while Jean searched for and then cut several sections from a tattered blanket. Our son was satisfied with that bed, and the rat—whose trust in a three-year-old seemed infinite—seemed equally pleased, permitting Jimmy to place it on the soft strips. As soon as we put the lid on the box, I called the county health department, only to be told that the office had closed; I was to take in the rat first thing in the morning so that its brain could be dissected.
In response to Jean’s immediate question, “Did the rat bite you?” Jimmy said, “No, he kissed me.” Could any parent have believed an answer like that? My response was simply to put the box outside. Before giving our son a bath, we scrutinized every part of his body, finding no scratches anywhere on it. During the night the rat gnawed a hole through the wood, and by dawn it had disappeared.
Forty-odd years ago, rabies vaccination involved a lengthy series of shots, each of them painful, and occasionally the process itself was fatal. Neither the health department nor our pediatrician would tell us what to do. Once again we searched Jimmy’s body for the slightest scratch and again found nothing; so we decided to withhold the vaccination—though Jean and I slept poorly for several nights. Long after it had become apparent that our son had not contracted a fatal disease, I kept thinking—as I again do, in remembering the event—of the errors I had made, of what I should have done instead, of how helpless I had felt following my discovery that the rat had escaped.
While reading a recent biography of William James by Robert D. Richardson Jr., I found myself recalling those suspenseful and seemingly never-ending hours. As Richardson demonstrates, James was aware of the extent that circumstance and random events (like the one that led my young son to a particular rat so long ago) can alter the course of history as well as the lives of individuals, making the future unpredictable. James, like my favorite writer, Chekhov, was trained as a medical doctor and became an author—though not of stories and plays (his younger brother Henry was the fiction writer) but of books and articles on philosophical, psychological, and spiritual matters. One of the founders of American pragmatism, James rejected European reliance on Platonic absolutes or on religious and philosophical doctrines that declared the historical necessity of certain future events. Despite his realization that much lies beyond our present and future control, James still believed in the independence of individual will, a view essential to the long-lasting but often precarious freedom underlying our democratic system.
by James McConkey, The American Scholar | Read more:
Photo: Julien Denoyer
Is Forced Fatherhood Fair?
This weekend millions of Americans will happily celebrate the role that fathers play in their families. For some families, though — specifically those in which dad’s role was not freely assumed, but legally mandated — Father’s Day can be an emotionally complicated occasion. And that somewhat messy reality raises a question that is worth examining today as the very definition of parents and families continues to undergo legal and social transformation.
Women’s rights advocates have long struggled for motherhood to be a voluntary condition, and not one imposed by nature or culture. In places where women and girls have access to affordable and safe contraception and abortion services, and where there are programs to assist mothers in distress find foster or adoptive parents, voluntary motherhood is basically a reality. In many states, infant safe haven laws allow a birth mother to walk away from her newborn baby if she leaves it unharmed at a designated facility.
If a man accidentally conceives a child with a woman, and does not want to raise the child with her, what are his choices? Surprisingly, he has few options in the United States. He can urge her to seek an abortion, but ultimately that decision is hers to make. Should she decide to continue the pregnancy and raise the child, and should she or our government attempt to establish him as the legal father, he can be stuck with years of child support payments.
Do men now have less reproductive autonomy than women? Should men have more control over when and how they become parents, as many women now do?
The political philosopher Elizabeth Brake has argued that our policies should give men who accidentally impregnate a woman more options, and that feminists should oppose policies that make fatherhood compulsory. In a 2005 article in the Journal of Applied Philosophy she wrote, “if women’s partial responsibility for pregnancy does not obligate them to support a fetus, then men’s partial responsibility for pregnancy does not obligate them to support a resulting child.” At most, according to Brake, men should be responsible for helping with the medical expenses and other costs of a pregnancy for which they are partly responsible.
Few feminists, including Brake, would grant men the right to coerce a woman to have (or not to have) an abortion, because they recognize a woman’s right to control her own body. However, if a woman decides to give birth to a child without securing the biological father’s consent to raise a child with her, some scholars and policy makers question whether he should be assigned legal paternity.
Women’s rights advocates have long struggled for motherhood to be a voluntary condition, and not one imposed by nature or culture. In places where women and girls have access to affordable and safe contraception and abortion services, and where there are programs to assist mothers in distress find foster or adoptive parents, voluntary motherhood is basically a reality. In many states, infant safe haven laws allow a birth mother to walk away from her newborn baby if she leaves it unharmed at a designated facility.If a man accidentally conceives a child with a woman, and does not want to raise the child with her, what are his choices? Surprisingly, he has few options in the United States. He can urge her to seek an abortion, but ultimately that decision is hers to make. Should she decide to continue the pregnancy and raise the child, and should she or our government attempt to establish him as the legal father, he can be stuck with years of child support payments.
Do men now have less reproductive autonomy than women? Should men have more control over when and how they become parents, as many women now do?
The political philosopher Elizabeth Brake has argued that our policies should give men who accidentally impregnate a woman more options, and that feminists should oppose policies that make fatherhood compulsory. In a 2005 article in the Journal of Applied Philosophy she wrote, “if women’s partial responsibility for pregnancy does not obligate them to support a fetus, then men’s partial responsibility for pregnancy does not obligate them to support a resulting child.” At most, according to Brake, men should be responsible for helping with the medical expenses and other costs of a pregnancy for which they are partly responsible.
Few feminists, including Brake, would grant men the right to coerce a woman to have (or not to have) an abortion, because they recognize a woman’s right to control her own body. However, if a woman decides to give birth to a child without securing the biological father’s consent to raise a child with her, some scholars and policy makers question whether he should be assigned legal paternity.
by Laurie Shrage, NY Times | Read more:
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The Real War on Reality
If there is one thing we can take away from the news of recent weeks it is this: the modern American surveillance state is not really the stuff of paranoid fantasies; it has arrived.
The revelations about the National Security Agency’s PRISM data collection program have raised awareness — and understandably, concern and fears — among American and those abroad, about the reach and power of secret intelligence gatherers operating behind the facades of government and business.
Surveillance and deception are not just fodder for the next “Matrix” movie, but a real sort of epistemic warfare.
But those revelations, captivating as they are, have been partial —they primarily focus on one government agency and on the surveillance end of intelligence work, purportedly done in the interest of national security. What has received less attention is the fact that most intelligence work today is not carried out by government agencies but by private intelligence firms and that much of that work involves another common aspect of intelligence work: deception. That is, it is involved not just with the concealment of reality, but with the manufacture of it. (...)
To get some perspective on the manipulative role that private intelligence agencies play in our society, it is worth examining information that has been revealed by some significant hacks in the past few years of previously secret data.
Important insight into the world these companies came from a 2010 hack by a group best known as LulzSec (at the time the group was called Internet Feds), which targeted the private intelligence firm HBGary Federal. That hack yielded 75,000 e-mails. It revealed, for example, that Bank of America approached the Department of Justice over concerns about information that WikiLeaks had about it. The Department of Justice in turn referred Bank of America to the lobbying firm Hunton and Willliams, which in turn connected the bank with a group of information security firms collectively known as Team Themis.
Team Themis (a group that included HBGary and the private intelligence and security firms Palantir Technologies, Berico Technologies and Endgame Systems) was effectively brought in to find a way to undermine the credibility of WikiLeaks and the journalist Glenn Greenwald (who recently broke the story of Edward Snowden’s leak of the N.S.A.’s Prism program), because of Greenwald’s support for WikiLeaks. Specifically, the plan called for actions to “sabotage or discredit the opposing organization” including a plan to submit fake documents and then call out the error. As for Greenwald, it was argued that he would cave “if pushed” because he would “choose professional preservation over cause.” That evidently wasn’t the case.
Team Themis also developed a proposal for the Chamber of Commerce to undermine the credibility of one of its critics, a group called Chamber Watch. The proposal called for first creating a “false document, perhaps highlighting periodical financial information,” giving it to a progressive group opposing the Chamber, and then subsequently exposing the document as a fake to “prove that U.S. Chamber Watch cannot be trusted with information and/or tell the truth.”
(A photocopy of the proposal can be found here.)
In addition, the group proposed creating a “fake insider persona” to infiltrate Chamber Watch. They would “create two fake insider personas, using one as leverage to discredit the other while confirming the legitimacy of the second.”
The hack also revealed evidence that Team Themis was developing a “persona management” system — a program, developed at the specific request of the United States Air Force, that allowed one user to control multiple online identities (“sock puppets”) for commenting in social media spaces, thus giving the appearance of grass roots support. The contract was eventually awarded to another private intelligence firm.
This may sound like nothing so much as a “Matrix”-like fantasy, but it is distinctly real, and resembles in some ways the employment of “Psyops” (psychological operations), which as most students of recent American history know, have been part of the nation’s military strategy for decades. The military’s “Unconventional Warfare Training Manual” defines Psyops as “planned operations to convey selected information and indicators to foreign audiences to influence their emotions, motives, objective reasoning, and ultimately the behavior of foreign governments, organizations, groups, and individuals.” In other words, it is sometimes more effective to deceive a population into a false reality than it is to impose its will with force or conventional weapons. Of course this could also apply to one’s own population if you chose to view it as an “enemy” whose “motives, reasoning, and behavior” needed to be controlled.
Psyops need not be conducted by nation states; they can be undertaken by anyone with the capabilities and the incentive to conduct them, and in the case of private intelligence contractors, there are both incentives (billions of dollars in contracts) and capabilities.
The revelations about the National Security Agency’s PRISM data collection program have raised awareness — and understandably, concern and fears — among American and those abroad, about the reach and power of secret intelligence gatherers operating behind the facades of government and business.Surveillance and deception are not just fodder for the next “Matrix” movie, but a real sort of epistemic warfare.
But those revelations, captivating as they are, have been partial —they primarily focus on one government agency and on the surveillance end of intelligence work, purportedly done in the interest of national security. What has received less attention is the fact that most intelligence work today is not carried out by government agencies but by private intelligence firms and that much of that work involves another common aspect of intelligence work: deception. That is, it is involved not just with the concealment of reality, but with the manufacture of it. (...)
To get some perspective on the manipulative role that private intelligence agencies play in our society, it is worth examining information that has been revealed by some significant hacks in the past few years of previously secret data.
Important insight into the world these companies came from a 2010 hack by a group best known as LulzSec (at the time the group was called Internet Feds), which targeted the private intelligence firm HBGary Federal. That hack yielded 75,000 e-mails. It revealed, for example, that Bank of America approached the Department of Justice over concerns about information that WikiLeaks had about it. The Department of Justice in turn referred Bank of America to the lobbying firm Hunton and Willliams, which in turn connected the bank with a group of information security firms collectively known as Team Themis.
Team Themis (a group that included HBGary and the private intelligence and security firms Palantir Technologies, Berico Technologies and Endgame Systems) was effectively brought in to find a way to undermine the credibility of WikiLeaks and the journalist Glenn Greenwald (who recently broke the story of Edward Snowden’s leak of the N.S.A.’s Prism program), because of Greenwald’s support for WikiLeaks. Specifically, the plan called for actions to “sabotage or discredit the opposing organization” including a plan to submit fake documents and then call out the error. As for Greenwald, it was argued that he would cave “if pushed” because he would “choose professional preservation over cause.” That evidently wasn’t the case.
Team Themis also developed a proposal for the Chamber of Commerce to undermine the credibility of one of its critics, a group called Chamber Watch. The proposal called for first creating a “false document, perhaps highlighting periodical financial information,” giving it to a progressive group opposing the Chamber, and then subsequently exposing the document as a fake to “prove that U.S. Chamber Watch cannot be trusted with information and/or tell the truth.”
(A photocopy of the proposal can be found here.)
In addition, the group proposed creating a “fake insider persona” to infiltrate Chamber Watch. They would “create two fake insider personas, using one as leverage to discredit the other while confirming the legitimacy of the second.”
The hack also revealed evidence that Team Themis was developing a “persona management” system — a program, developed at the specific request of the United States Air Force, that allowed one user to control multiple online identities (“sock puppets”) for commenting in social media spaces, thus giving the appearance of grass roots support. The contract was eventually awarded to another private intelligence firm.
This may sound like nothing so much as a “Matrix”-like fantasy, but it is distinctly real, and resembles in some ways the employment of “Psyops” (psychological operations), which as most students of recent American history know, have been part of the nation’s military strategy for decades. The military’s “Unconventional Warfare Training Manual” defines Psyops as “planned operations to convey selected information and indicators to foreign audiences to influence their emotions, motives, objective reasoning, and ultimately the behavior of foreign governments, organizations, groups, and individuals.” In other words, it is sometimes more effective to deceive a population into a false reality than it is to impose its will with force or conventional weapons. Of course this could also apply to one’s own population if you chose to view it as an “enemy” whose “motives, reasoning, and behavior” needed to be controlled.
Psyops need not be conducted by nation states; they can be undertaken by anyone with the capabilities and the incentive to conduct them, and in the case of private intelligence contractors, there are both incentives (billions of dollars in contracts) and capabilities.
by Peter Ludlow, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Louie Psihoyos/Corbis
Friday, June 14, 2013
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