The Quodlibetarian

The Other Highwaymen

2011-10-03T05:47:00.000-07:00

Highwayman, by Jimmy Webb (c1977), became the eponym for the outlaw country group that consisted of Johnny Cash, Waylon Jennings, Willie Nelson, and Kris Kristofferson, who collectively represent a large share of the world's total coolness. The song narrates the life (and death) of four men, or one man passing through four lifetimes. It has an incredibly catchy bounce to it, and there is a pattern on Youtube of writing new verses for the song. This caught my attention, since the base level of discourse on Youtube is garbled monosyllabic insults, and even a basic AABBCC rhyme scheme seems like critical theory by comparison. Some of the new verses have to do with real people (Jesus, Archimedes, etc.) Others are more autobiographical, including my favorite line here: "no client of mine ever knew what bleeds were". Some are funny, some are heartbreaking, some don't really seem to grasp the rhyme scheme after all. All in all, I think Webb would be proud....

I was a garbage man, I rode the dank streets of L.A.

I was on my route when I got jumped by some essay.

I hit him with a greasy bash of trash.

He sent his pitbull, and it bit me in my ass.

I fell ill to rabies but I will not pass, I'll be around and around,...

I was the son of god, born of a virgin.

Healed the sick and poor, and did miracles some more.

Then the romans came, and said who should we do in

Oh yeah this guys into sin.

They hung me on the cross,

They really showed me who was boss.

But after 3 days i came back again and again and again

I was a coal miner,

Beneath the earth I did thrive,

Shovel and pickax by my side,

I lived in a small Appalachian town,

Every day we would go down,

When the earth came down, they said that I was killed,

But I am living still

I was a coffee plant,

making caffeine in my beans,

somebody canned me by their means

Now I sit in a cupboard waiting to be brewed,

I hope my caffeine is so strong, the drinker will be screwed.

And when I'm drunken my power will be desired,

I hope it makes them wired,

And I will make them wired, and wired and wired and wired ......and wired.....

I Flew a Star ship

And it was called the Enterprise

With Captain Kirk here by my side

and then was taken over by Jean- Luc Picard

The loss of Kirk as captain hit me very hard..

And when i left the ship, they said that i was killed,

But i'm living still

I write the music,

For an all American band

On the stage we made our stand

Playing songs across this great land of the free

And what they'll say on that dark day they bury me

Is that the music was his God given domain

And he will remain...

I was a gangsta man,

Out in compton I did ride,

With blow and pistol by my side,

Many a young lads lost their money to my trade,

Many a ni***s shed their life blood on my blade,

The bastards shot my in my arm and in my thigh,

But I am still alive...

I was an intel man,

Tradecraft and cunning by my side.

No global laws did I abide.

I worked the angles of a target like a pawn.

Traveled the world chasing sun-up's early dawn.

And then I got caught up behind an enemy's line...

Stuck in the sand I lost my head beneath a blind,

But I'll be back again, and again, and again, and again and again...

I was a paladin, WoW's holy powers at my side.

I was fightin kobolds when a tauren jumped me from behind.

He used pyroblast and I never had a chance.

I tried to fight back but I had unequiped my lance

He stalked my tombstone so I couldnt resurrect,

But I will be back, i always will be back, and back, and back...

I am a stoner, with a big bong by my siiiiide.

In a hot boxed car I ride.

Plenty of swerving as the smoke clouds fill my eyes,

Better get off this road before some-body dies.

Just as that thought came up I heard an awful sound,

I'm going to jail now.... but I'll always be around, and around and around

I was a senator

I said the gays were really crude

They'd made our pop culture so lewd

I ran for president, I really thought I might

Get to the white house with the voters from the right

Than Dan Savage turned my last name into frothy fecal lube

Man I hate that dude, I hate that dude, hate that dude...

I am a woman I gave love

But no one gave love back

My heart did die one long night

So long ago time stood still

But my heart did live to love

I will back again and again and again

I was a logger. Deep in the mighty forests I did work

The law of the woods I did abide

Many a tall tree fell to my saw

Along a patch in the northwoods

A tree took a wrong turn, crushed my body in the earth

My body forever lost beneath that tree

But I am living still

I was a graphic designer, I set up postcards and brochures

No client of mine even knew what bleeds were

I'd try to set up some nice business cards

But everyone used vistaprint like retards

I tried to make sure that my clients' marketing looked good

But comic sans and papyrus was all they understood

I was a teacher, drawing circles in the sand.

Best minds of Greece learning at my side.

Killed when the Romans invaded my land.

Today it is a wheelchair that I ride.

With Gravity and Spacetime as my friends.

But the work never ends,

And I look to the day when I can do this again, and again, and again

I was a viking man, I set sail with the tide

Across the ocean riding high

I carved my name with the blow of axe and sword

Many a year I spent away from home at war

I caught an arrow from atop a fortress gate

But I will remain, I always will remain.

I was a sadistic man to the rifle I did abide.

Love and hate in my heart do collide.

I'll always be around to my marine brothers I will always love and abide.

But until death i will love my sadistic side.

My peom to my fallen friends i love u

I was an army man,

In a hummer I did ride,

With grenade and pistol at my side.

A many insurgent died through my iron sights.

Many a loved ones worried through the nights.

A sniper got me once we where inbound,

But i am still around, ill always be around and around and around and around and around...

I was an demoman...

In Cp-Dustbowl I did ride,

Sword and chargin'targe by my side...

Many a young Scout lost his baseball on my blade...

Many a Soldier sheld his health on my grenades.

A RED spy backstabbed me at the first control point.

But I'm stil around, I'll always be around, and around, and around...

I was a driving man,

Across the backroads i did ride,

With blunts and bottles by my side,

I saw a fat man ride down the highway on a bike,

And into the gaurdrail he did ride,

He is still alive,

But I laughed so hard I died,

But I'll always be alive,

Yes ill always smoke and ride and get high and ride and get high

I was an administrator,

I shuffled paper in an office in the city,

I scanned a thousand pieces of paper in a day,

I Processed memos and calculated pay,

They say i died from an infected paper cut,

In a coffin made from recycled paper i was shut,

But now I haunt the office slut.

I was a lonely child,

Living with not a sibling was I,

Every day I played with no-one at my side,

Many a day I would watch across my pond,

Why had the gods treated me so very wrong?

My brother fell in and drowned when he was just five,

But he is still alive.

I am a Youtube man

I have lived against the grain.

Through troubled times I have survived.

Unlike my brothers who have fallen by the way.

Some came home and they will never be the same.

I am a Veteran, I did join of my free will' and I am standing still...

And i will... and I will... and I will...

I was a hockey fan

In the streets of canada

And we lost the stanley cup

So I went mental on the streets and burned some cars

I got burned and never woke back up

But I'll be back again and again and again ..

I made some famous youtube vids.

Ran out of ideas, and quickly hit the skids.

Folks ask me, "What's the deal with Chocolate Rain?"

But I can not explain.

And I remain.. I remain.. I remain

Cheap Treets

2011-04-05T08:52:00.000-07:00

The idea of establishing fixed ratios between different commodities is an error as old as economic theory, and unfortunately still has adherents. It held a special fascination during the middle ages, with endless theorizing about bimetallism and the like. One of the more famous documents in this literature is the Assize of Bread and Ale, first proclaimed c.1266 by Henry III.

The Assisa Panis provides one of the most elaborate attempts to standardize prices in medieval history. The formulas price seven different types of bread in the context of thirty-nine possible market prices for wheat. To understand them, it has to be born in mind that medieval England (like the continent) held bread prices constant, and varied the weight of the loaf instead. Moreover, the shilling was used both as a unit of weight and a unit of currency, causing further confusion.

Here are the bread pricing formulas, per the Internet Medieval Sourcebook:

When a Quarter of Wheat is sold for 12d., then Wastel Bread of a farthing shall weigh £6 and 16s. But Bread Cocket of a farthing of the same grain and bultel, shall weigh more than Wastel by 2s. And Cocket Bread made of grain of lower price, shall weigh more than Wastel by 5s. Bread made into a Simnel shall weigh 2s. less than Wastel. Bread made of the whole Wheat shall weigh a Cocket and a half, so that a Cocket shall weigh more than a Wastel by 5s. Bread of Treet shall weigh 2 wastels. And bread of common wheat shall weigh two great cockets.

All of this is then spread across a twentyfold range of possible wheat prices. Henry III does not go to the lengths of Dupré de Saint-Maur, who established “natural” price ratios between different kinds of grain, but this is still a formidable economic exercise by 13th-century standards. It appears very rational, thoroughly considered, and scientific: exactly the sort of image that government economists like to project today. But it isn't rational. The confusion caused by the various cockets obscures a simple algebraic problem: Henry (or his economists) have mixed together linear and geometric functions. The resulting lines are bound to cross each other, though most of these crossovers do not occur in the range of wheat prices the authors have envisioned (and some of the crossovers occur only in the abstract, at negative wheat prices.)

However, as can be seen by charting the Assisa Panis formulas, one crossover occurs near the middle of the stated range: when a quarter of wheat sells for 9 shillings, bread of treet (a dessert bread) and whole wheat bread are equivalent in weight (i.e. price). When wheat costs less than 9 shillings, treet is heavier (cheaper); when wheat costs more than 9 shillings, whole wheat bread is cheaper.

If it is not immediately apparent that this is irrational, consider the price of gasoline today. When the price of a barrel of oil goes up or down, all grades of gasoline are affected, but premium will always be more expensive than regular.

Moreover, if we extrapolate the price of wheat, more irrationalities appear. If a wastel loaf is reduced to 5 shillings, treet crosses the price curve for the low-cost version of cocket. At 2 shillings, it reaches the high-budget cocket curve; moreover, the appropriate weight for simnel cake becomes zero (and thereafter negative!).

The irrationalities in formulas of this sort never play out in real life. What dooms projects like these is the belief that market prices can be pinned down to inflexible ratios in the first place, and that problem would persist even if the curves stacked as neatly as china bowls. Rather, the irrationalities bear witness that the mathematics, despite their authoritative precision, have not been thought through. Indeed, it seems very clear that the authors of the Assize and Bread and Ale did not evaluate their formulas, either algebraically or manually. Solving the 273 simple problems they had created would have taken a 13th-century clerk perhaps an a hour, and he surely would have discovered the treet / whole wheat crossover.

For want of an hour's work, the Assize stayed in effect for just under 600 years. Like all such systems, it went through cycles of being fairly innocuous, then more annoying, and finally absurd. It is possible (although far from proven) that the “baker's dozen” originated in a pathetic effort by bakers to stay on the right side of the law. In all events, whenever the law became intolerable vis-a-vis market realities, it was re-calibrated: the version above seems to have lasted only about fifty years. These constant modifications were necessitated, of course, because the original legislation made no sense, as evidenced by the treet / whole wheat crossover. Yet the effect of the secondary interventions, then as now, was to create an class of legislator/economists with a discourse of expertise in solving the problem that their predecessors had created. As the fixes repeatedly failed and were replaced with more complex fixes, the reputation of the experts became paradoxically greater.

Surely it takes great minds to get us out of the mess that great minds have gotten us into.

Measuring Factors Contributing to Public Perception of the Consent of the Governed

2010-05-21T16:48:00.000-07:00

Consent of the governed is an ancient concept with a convoluted history. While it is a critical feature of modern political rhetoric—enshrined, for instance, in the preamble to the Declaration of Independence—I have shown (here and here) that it hardly features at all in popular thinking about consent. One of my interests in conducting a survey on people's attitudes towards consent (described here) was in assessing the way people understand the idea of “consent of the governed” in relation to particular cases.

120 of the 500 stories in the survey were modified versions of the same story, in which an individual is said to have (indirectly) consented to the actions of their government. Four variables were altered: the individual's status, the type of government, the action in question, and the way in which the individual participated (or did not) in the state's decision. The stories spanned a wide range of circumstances, but all fit the general schema that is referenced by the phrase “consent of the governed.”

The respondents provided 2621 direct comparisons between the different versions of this ur-story. These comparisons were analyzed using the assumption of a linear formula with different values for each of the 19 possible story elements, approximated via a Monte Carlo algorithm (40,000 iterations randomly varying the previous best-fit values by progressively smaller amounts.) Using the resulting optimal weighting for each variable, 77.5% of the subject's comparisons were predicted correctly by a linear equation, where ± 1% was considered “correct” for equalities. The resulting breakdown of constituent factors is graphed below. The “neutral” point is simply the average of all weight values; it should not be interpreted as a threshold between consent and non-consent.

The variable for the type of state action provided 33% of overall variance from the mean, the plurality of the whole. This seems to be in keeping with other suggestions that our perception of consent is heavily colored by the nature of the activity. Signing a waiver for a haircut is not at all the same as signing a waiver for a heart transplant, at least by the subjects of the survey. From there, the type of government contributed 27% of variance, the form of participation accounts for 24%, and the individual's personal status only 16%.

The weighting are shown in the chart below. While relatively little here is surprising, the formality of the analysis is perhaps novel enough to make many of these points warrant discussion.

Outliers

We might begin with the two state actions that are essentially outliers in terms of the strength of their factors: the incarceration of thieves and taxation. As I've said before, it is a commonplace that people ascribe high levels of consent to “normal” events and lower levels of consent to unusual actions. Both of these events are so engrained into our sense of business-as-usual that I imagine they have come to be considered almost apolitical. Franklin's adage about death and taxes seems relevant here: if we view something as inevitable, we may be apt to also view it as consensual.

The idea that thieves have consented to the legal consequence of their crimes (imprisonment) is apparently very non-controversial: even for marginalized groups in a dictatorship, it receives a neutral score in this analysis. I imagine that this is, in part, because theft is considered a transcultural criminal act, and imprisonment a nearly ubiquitous response to theft. There is, however, a striking disjunct between the notion that thieves have consented to be imprisoned and the (legally parallel) notion that murderers have consented to be executed. (In both cases, the story stated that the individual was guilty, plead innocent, and was convicted.) In the abstract notion of the Rule of Law, these may be equivalent concepts, but they score very far apart in this analysis. It would appear that people who accept the idea that you can consent to suffer imprisonment balk at the idea that anyone can consent to their own execution.

Individual Status

Individual status breaks down as hypothesized: adult immigrants to a state are rated as consenting more highly to the state's action, citizens born in the state somewhat less so, and racially marginalized groups still less so. The super-consensual status of immigrants makes sense in several respects: they have gone through an elaborate legal ritual, entailing considerable personal difficulty, to enter the situation they are in. Moreover, they have exercised intentionality (as adults) in a way that native citizens have not necessarily done. On the other hand, it could be argued that immigrants in general are less informed about local laws and legal customs than native-born citizens.

This variable was the least important of the four, accounting for only 16% of total variance from the mean—less than half the impact of the event variable.

Form of Government

The weighting for governmental form are, again, fairly unsurprising. Dictatorships have the lowest ranking of any variable, but an almost equally low rank was given to pseudo-democracies that had in fact been “rigidly controlled by a single ruling party for half a century.” Conventional democracies rank considerably higher, and the rather Utopian description of “direct democracies using town meetings and referenda” garners a ranking very much higher than that. The considerable span here is noteworthy: an ongoing question in international law has been the extent to which citizens of authoritarian regimes can be held personally accountable for the actions of their government. The popular sentiment here would appear to be that people are not so accountable, and it makes little difference whether the state is explicitly dictatorial or maintains a facade of democratic process.

The other rather striking finding here is that the subjects readily agree that a putative direct democracy would provide a substantially closer bond between state action and individual consent. This implies that most subjects can easily envision a much more consensual form of government than the one we currently have, and make evaluations accordingly.

State Action

The two outlier variables, taxation and the imprisonment of thieves, are both actions of the state. The remaining five state actions received much lower rankings, although one of them (the execution of a murderer) was still above average.

Two forms of austerity measure were described, corresponding to two narratives about third-world debt. In each case, the state was described as having “contracted significant international debts over the last three decades” and “imposing austerity measures that directly impact” the individual in the story. In one case, the state had spent the money on development projects. In another case, it had been “squandered by corrupt politicians.”

Subjects felt that this latter case—corruption/austerity--was somewhat more consensual than development/austerity. This is perhaps the most counter-intuitive result from this section of the study. But the sentiment of the subjects here seems to be that government corruption is broadly within the scope of events that a citizen is accountable for remedying, whereas international development loans are not. In other words, domestic events are more receptive to the notion of “consent of the governed” than international events.

In fact, we might see another sign of this domestic / international dichotomy in the next pairing of state actions. Compulsory military conscription is ranked in between democratic governments and non-specified support: it is, if not seen as being as consensual as taxation, at least not considered to be extraordinarily coercive. (Again, the principle of inevitability may apply.) However, when the stories describe specific military actions, the subjects view this as much less consensual from the perspective of any given citizen.

The story used was “X has just declared war on a neighboring country, Y. In a bombing raid against one of Y's military installations, X has killed nine people. [The Protagonist] has consented to these nine people being killed.” This received the lowest ranking of any state action. It would appear that while subjects are (relatively) sanguine that consent of the governed applies to military conscription, and also applies to the state executing criminals, they do not believe this consent extends categorically to cover the specifics of international military operations.

This echoes one half of the Nuremberg paradox: citizens can disclaim responsibility for the extreme actions of the state. Other aspects of this study will, I hope, allow us to look at the counterpoint: that the state can disclaim responsibility for the decisions of its citizenry. In any event, this is a major discursive claim of democracy, and the paradox is quite evident here. If one has implicitly consented to be drafted into a military force, it seems problematic to assert that one has not consented for that military force to be utilized (in any particular way).

Yet this is undoubtedly a common attitude, and our final category touches on it to some degree.

Mode of Participation

For states described as direct democracies or democracies, and for the three stories involving austerity measures or warfare, five options for participation were stated. The default option, “unknown”, was also extended to the stories involving dictatorships and pseudo-democracies. The four other options were as follows: the subject could have voted in support of the referendum on the state's action (or voted for the ruling party); could have opposed the referendum or the ruling party; could have failed to vote; or could have refused to participate on principle, because they believe the government is illegitimate.

What is perhaps most surprising about the results here is the very large span between the ranking of “support” and “oppose.” A longstanding theme in consent-of-the-governed literature, stated with maudlin eloquence as early as Plato's Crito, is that the opposition consents to the outcome of the political process they have engaged in. A secondary theme, especially prominent in the hegemonic discourse of electoral politics, is that non-participation also implies consent to the outcome. “If you don't vote, you can't complain,” as the adage goes.

But the subjects in this study do not appear to entirely agree with these precepts. To a very large degree, they view citizens as not having consented to state actions which they voted against. Moreover, while they view non-participation as almost tantamount to a yea vote, they see principled non-participation as almost identical to active opposition. This is worth a great deal more discussion than I have the space for here.

Discussion

These findings concretize the observation that the general public does not view the “consent of the governed” in the way that political philosophers have urged us to. We do not envision there being a single legal formula that determines consent or non-consent, regardless of the event. Nor do we believe that participation in a political process necessarily implies consent to the outcome of that process. These results seem to uphold the idea of a social contract that binds people to consenting to criminal law and taxation. But the subjects do not seem to extend this idea of a social contract to the more impersonal actions of the state: economics and warfare.

On the ownership of virtual persons

2010-05-02T15:11:00.000-07:00

"This is not my tune / but it's mine to use"

-Sadie, Joana Newsom

The Great North Woods is haunted by authors, most of them safely dead (Frost, Kipling) or departed (Solzhenhitsyn). When I began this essay, J. D. Salinger was very much alive, pursuing his curiously irritating monasticism in upstate New Hampshire. And as I wrote, Salinger was busy unleashing his lawyers to attack his quasi-namesake, J. D. California, for proposing to publish a novel called 60 Years Later: Coming Through the Rye. 60 Years was intended to be a follow-up piece to Catcher in the Rye, featuring the original character, Holden Caulfield, as an old man (now named Mr. C). This entire conflict may have been a hoax, in fact, but the litigation was in keeping with Salinger's reputation. He was an artist who, if he were able to, would probably have had security guards from the New Yorker come around to our houses and burn our copies of Franny and Zooey. Current IPR law, happily, did not give him the right to do that. But it did protect his imaginary worlds from imaginary threats.

The intersection between narrative fiction and legal fiction is a comparatively new one. Newer still is the notion of legal protections for fiction. Until quite recently, the law has regarded all dramatic works and most other pieces of fiction as little more than a lineup of the usual suspects for pornography, sedition, and blasphemy. If they happened to be clear of those charges, they were of scant further legal interest. Until the 19^th century, authors attempting to make money from their muses had a wide range of options, but these hardly ever included legally protected royalties. They could search for a patron, like Virgil; or sell tickets to performance events, like Shakespeare; or incorporate their writing into a larger and harder-to-duplicate piece of artwork, like Blake; or get a government sinecure, like Newton; or get real jobs, like almost everyone else. The works themselves, as economic entities, were given only feeble protection in the mind of the law, and no protection whatsoever in the minds of the police.

And literature went on, of course, quite merrily. To quote Gillian Welch, “We're gonna do it anyway / Even if it doesn't pay.” But her bitterness occurs at a rare point in history, when a (comparatively small number) of musicians could aspire to make a livelihood off selling contractual rights to their music, rather than performing it. Already, there is every sign that this state of affairs will not last long, and musicians will be the first ones up against the wall. But they're used to it.

For the present moment, we are deeply engrossed in these abstractions of content, wherein an author who publishes a novel thereby secures a plausible legal claim against the publication of a completely different novel, whose author will not even be born for a quarter century. As if the imagined worlds of fiction are a kind of gold rush, complete with claim jumpers and real-estate agents. Now, please note that there is no economic rationale here, no 'taking' in a tangible sense. It is absurd to suppose that the publication of 60 Years could do anything but boost the sales of Catcher in the Rye. The taking is of an imaginary asset: the Holden Caulfield persona.

Legal cases of this nature are intended to put heads on posts, to keep at bay the “barbarians” who are, in this case, fanfic authors. Now, when I hear the horrible little internet-ism “fanfic,” I have a very specific vision, and it is not a pleasant one. I see websites seething with a morass of indistinguishable horrible stories, all of them about the same set of characters, whose personas and environment have already been fashioned by much better authors, freeing the fanfic writers for the simple choreography of sex or violence or ego with an arsenal of ready-made puppets. I see unspeakable things being done to innocent maiden apostrophes. I see the over-wide paragraphs demanded by browser windows, which somehow ruin even the most orphic prose. I see multi-colored background images tiled underneath the text, as if the whole thing is some perverse experiment in finding the breaking point of the human eyeball. And I am talking about prose, here. The poetry, brilliantly original free verse, all of it center-aligned.....oh god, I cannot even talk about the poetry.

This apocalyptic vision of mine is shared by a great deal of media consumers and critics, who reiterate in various ways a distinction between “real authors” (JD Salinger) and “fanfic writers” (JD California). The distinction begins with a fascinating legalism: the ownership of the fictional characters. The ownership of the setting also comes into play, but only in cases where the setting itself behaves more or less like a fictional character. Tolkein's Middle Earth is a uniquely invented geographic persona; in a different way, so is Lawrence Durrell's Alexandria. But the San Francisco shown in Monk is just San Francisco.

We can further isolate this distinction. What is at stake here are not the names of the characters, but their essence, their persona. When Alice Randall was taken to court for writing The Wind Done Gone, she had not plagiarized any particular passage from Gone With the Wind. Nor, pointedly, had she used the names of Margaret Mitchell's heroes and heroines: Rhett became R, Ashley became “Dreamy Gentleman,” and so forth, just as Holden Caulfield becomes “Mr. C”. The gist of the lawsuit was that Randall had stolen the spirit of Mitchell's characters and setting: that persona, in this sense, is the sort of thing that one might produce, own, buy, sell, and steal—that it is a capital commodity. The writers who produce these personas are “real authors,” those who appropriate them are writing fanfic.

Transparently, this distinction is based on a capitalist litmus test: real authors are the ones who produce profit for publishing companies, just as real musicians are the ones who produce profit for recording studios. Any writing that does not put money in the coffers of a major publisher is "writing for pleasure," and has marginal status, both culturally and legally. Real authors (and real musicians) are cast, of course, as the sympathetic victims of fanfic authors and musicians who sample, like The Verve. But it is worth bearing in mind that authors and musicians, in round numbers, have never actually made two bucks in a row, while publishing houses and record labels have turned a pretty good profit over the years.

Now, if fanfiction is described as writing that steals pre-existing personas and settings, it is weirdly precise to describe most Western literature before 1600 as fanfiction. The works of Homer, Mallory, Dante, all of Shakespeare except The Tempest, Milton....all of these rely on stock characters, stock settings, and even pre-existing storylines. Indeed, the very power of forms like Commedia dell'Arte or the historical tragedies and comedies of Elizabethan theater is that the audience already knows what's going on. When you pick up Paradise Lost you don't wonder who's going to win at the end. When you set a story in Camelot, you don't need to spend twenty pages on exposition. Rather, you wonder how this iteration of the Great Story will be told. Even the lesser stories that make up the Thousand Nights and One Night or the Decamaron are variations on a handful of standard themes, with entirely interchangeable characters.

As Western authors began to invent new characters, powerful unique personas, they must have crossed a threshold of doubt about whether it was even a legitimate literary project to do so. Prince Hamlet, Don Quixote, and Eugene Onegin are all depicted very consciously as personas arising from fiction: each of them powerfully unique, but also rooted obsessively in the imitation or reflection of art. (I think the same may be true in the East. Sei Shonagon's self-portrait follows a similar pattern, and occupies a similar role in Japanese literature, though half a millennium earlier.)

But the persona that interests me for the moment, qua fanfiction, is Falstaff. Or, as he was probably known in life, John Oldcastle. John Oldcastle, who was executed in 1417, had appeared in at least five works, including several fictional pieces, before Shakespeare decided to rework him as a character in Henry IV. He was, in other words, a stock character. According to tradition, Oldcastle appeared as a figure in the play, but Lord Cobham—a descendant of the real Oldcastle—intervened before the script could be printed, and had Shakespeare change the characters name, leaving only one pun to reference the original:

By the Lord, thou sayest true, lad. And is not my
hostess of the tavern a most sweet wench?

As the honey of Hybla, my old lad of the castle. And
is not a buff jerkin a most sweet robe of durance?

-(Henry IV, part I, act I, scene ii)

Thus was born Falstaff, one of the most famous and indeed one of the most unique characters in Western literature. And without question, the Falstaff that we know and love is an invention of Shakespeare, but Lord Cobham's hereditary claim to the Oldcastle persona was, in a sense, upheld and legitimated.

There is an unquestionable strength and freedom to this kind of writing. I will use contemporary examples. When Moore wrote The Watchmen, he began by using characters from the Charlton comics pantheon, which had recently been purchased en bloc by DC comics. They freaked out, and he had to switch to new characters, more or less a clef renditions of the earlier ones. Again, Joss Whedon mentions that one of the major incentives for incorporating Dracula in Buffy The Vampire Slayer was that Dracula was public domain. Now, for writers of the caliber of Whedon or Moore, these little frictions are perhaps trivial, but they are, obviously, frictions. No one who looks back at 20th-century literature from the distance of two or three centuries will have the slightest interest in whether or not a given character was legally defensible, they will only care whether or not the character was compelling. Moreover, the critics of the 23^rd century will have only contempt for the legal machinations that got between today's artists and their masterpieces. And they are right. We are wrong.

But it all seems so compelling. I want to quote, at some length, a piece from the website of one of my favorite living authors, Ursula Le Guin. It is followed by an admonitory coda from her agent:

It's all right with me — it's really none of my business — if people want to write stories for themselves & their friends using names and places from my work, but these days, thanks to the Web, "stuff for friends" gets sent out all over the place and put where it doesn't belong and mistaken for the genuine article, and can cause both confusion and real, legal trouble.

As for anybody publishing any story "derived from" my stuff, I am absolutely opposed to it & have never given anyone permission to do so. It is lovely to "share worlds" if your imagination works that way, but mine doesn't; to me, it's not sharing but an invasion, literally — strangers coming in and taking over the country I live in, my heartland......

A note from UKL's literary agency:

No formal policy but as with any of our authors we would object strongly on her behalf if anyone were to publish either stories or books using her characters and situations. Writing for your own pleasure is one thing but disseminating it is something else. It used to be that fan fiction would reach only a specific audience — a close circle of friends and acquaintances. But with the Web things have changed.

Now, a running theme in all of LeGuin's fictional worlds is that property ownership in general is pathological, but slavery, the ownership of persons, is especially horrific; the root evil, at least by analogy, of all social pathology. This moral concern is also precisely the one that prompted Randall to rework an epic novel set in the antebellum South, retelling it through the eyes of slaves. It is a fascinating irony that LeGuin defends the ownership of her virtual persons, and that this defense is then wielded like a bludgeon against Randall.

And it raises a host of squirrely questions about how far such logic can be expected to push. If the law is willing to view personas as capital assets, fungible capital assets, then what is the disposition of the personas we actually happen to have? Oldcastle was a real person, before he became Falstaff. Accepting that Randall was appropriating Mitchell's personas of the slaves, is it not reasonable to ask whether Mitchell had appropriated the personas of actual slaves, as Shakespeare did with Oldcastle? If so—since they had no Lord Cobham to defend them—that conversion of their actual persona into a commodified, legally defended virtual persona seems strikingly like an extension of slavery.

From this wild jumping-off point, let me sprawl forward (briefly) into the future of what commodified personas might look like. There is already a nascent trade in the production of avatars to represent people in virtual spaces. To date this primarily means the creation of imagery (sprites, etc.) by graphic designers, who certainly are concerned with property rights. A typical boilerplate (from Dodrio's Sprite site) reads “Please do not steal/copy/or claim as your own anything on this website without permission from the creators and/or owners...” and is repeated in variations several times on the page, as well as appearing in a pop-up window. To a limited extent there is also a trade in voice, cadence, and mannerism as components of persona. For instance, the prizes on that wretched, wretched show, Wait Wait Don't Tell Me, are designer answering-machine messages. Such messages are a stone age version of an “expert agent” persona: they are expected to do business in their owner's absence, and they are expected to have a distinctive, economic valuable personality. Add a few hundred thousand lines of code, and it is easy to imagine the answering machine that returns calls, checks your email, schedules your appointments, and apologizes to your sister-in-law about the barbecue. All with vibrant personality....but whose? And at what cost? In 2007, ConAgra digitized the then-deceased Orville Redenbacher to sell popcorn from beyond the grave. His grandson approved. But what if Gary Redenbacher had said no? What if ConAgra had wanted to run the undead Orville in a slot urging people to vote for Obama, or Bush? Who owns Orville's personality?

Again, we are several tiers into the widespread application of Peter Kramer calls, with wonderful accuracy, as “cosmetic psychopharmaceuticals.” We are probably more than halfway to the point where a particular drug-and-therapy cocktail can at least be touted as producing a “signature personality,” the way that certain horrible celebrities market (and copyright) their signature fragrance. We all know people who have, in various ways, modeled their personalities on the image of various celebrities, or even fictional characters. I would imagine that millions of lovestruck Americans have tried to emulate Hepburn and Peppard's kiss from Breakfast at Tiffany's. In the future, it might be possible for Paramount to sue them, rather in the way that Disney sues day-care-centers who paint Mickey Mouse on the wall. And their position may not be unsympathetic, because for a very small fee, honest people would have been able to buy* Holly Golightly pills, which not only make you impish and eccentrically romantic, but also convey a legal right to act that way for a week after each purchase.

Of course, none of this will happen. It's paranoid, to begin with, and the future always twists in unforeseeable ways. But it is unquestionably a logical progression from the idea that personas are commodities. And it is this reality that authors should be asked to defend when they want to make property claims over their characters. Slavery has never worked out well, even when the slaves are fictional entities.

* I just love that tense. I don't even know what it's called.

Modes of Government in Intentional Communities

2010-05-02T12:16:00.000-07:00

Modes of Government

The first element of the FIC data that I want to discuss is governmental style. The questionnaires allowed communities to describe their decision-making system using any of seven options. They could, however, select multiple options, and many of them did so. The five main choices were: “Leader” for autocracies; “Consensus” for a consensus democracies (sometimes self-identified as anarchies); “Majority” for a majoritarian democracies; “Elders” for oligarchies (usually the founders), and “Other.” In some versions of the questionnaire, two other options existed: “Democratic Leader” and “Planner-Manager.”

To some degree, we can typify these governmental elements in an empirical fashion. At correlations of 0.2 or better, communities with leaders are associated with using a “weighting system,” wherein not all members have the same level of standing, and having a core group of advisors. They are also associated with high labor demands; with a shared spiritual path (especially Eastern religions or the Emissaries of Divine Light, and not an eclectic spirituality); with being celibate or prohibiting homosexuality, or having some other mandatory sexual policy. They are strongly negatively associated with feminism.

Consensus groups are statistically associated with feminism; with having relatively few communal meals; and with permitting the use of alcohol. They are negatively associated with Eastern religions; with weighting systems; and with core groups. Consensus is numerically the most prominent governmental mode among the FIC communities. It was the dominant political method in the FIC itself, derived from the FIC's Quaker and Mennonite precursors. In the 1960s and 1970s, formal consensus began to supplant majoritarianism as the default model for communities that professed some version of radical democratic politics. (The student cooperative movement seems to have been majoritarian). I have outlined this genealogy in more detail in a previous article.

Majoritarian groups are statistically associated with high labor demands and the absence of sexual policies. “Elder” groups are associated with prohibiting alcohol, and with having a “core group:” presumably in this case the core group and the elders are usually one and the same. “Other” groups are, of course, impossible to typify. They are statistically associated with prohibitions on alcohol use, and with land that is own by a single individual.

“Democratic leader” systems are ostensibly autocracies mitigated by some form of election or plebiscite, although as we will see below, there is some reason to doubt that this always the case. “Planner-Manager” systems are in principle based on a bicameral elected legislature, modeled on the one described in B.F. Skinner's book, Walden II. They existed only in the 1970s, and seem to have disappeared in the general shift away from leftist fascination with behavioral psychology.

Mixed Modes

Where communities have indicated multiple forms of government, it is often unclear exactly what they meant. For instance, a “Leader / Majority” system might refer to rule by a leader who is periodically elected by a majority vote. It might refer to a leader having complete control over some facets of the community, while other aspects are controlled by a majoritarian assembly. It might simply refer to a leader who periodically uses a plebiscite to validate their decisions.

One of the popular criticisms of communes, especially after the Manson Family arrests in 1969, was that they were run by dictatorial cults of personality. It seems likely that many essentially autocratic communities wish to present themselves in a democratic light. This is perhaps especially true in communities where a single founder owns the land and assets of the community—and therefore exercise considerable de facto political authority—but has some type of democratic vision. In all events, there are many variations on the theme of communities with leaders that also use some other political model, including the designation “democratic Leader.” I will refer to these as “leader-plus” communities. Again, there is good reason to think that this was frequently little more than a public relations effort.

Nevertheless, the term “consensus” is often applied to less formal procedures, and sometimes is used to reflect a political style rather than a process. It seems likely some communities reporting consensus in tandem with other methods of government probably did not use a formal consensus model. However, as mentioned in the article above, a common modification of consensus process in secular organizations is to allow a reversion to some type of supermajority rule in the event that consensus is not reached. This became a fairly common (and very stable) pattern among intentional communities, and is probably reflected by the “Consensus / majority” designation in many cases.

Frequency of and conversion between modes

The secular pattern over the last three decades has been for consensus process and autocracy to squeeze out nearly all other modes of community government. This could plausibly be seen as a kind of polarization between democratic and authoritarian models. The diagram below shows the number communities professing a given mode of government in the seven surveys for which there was sufficient data. The total N is 1878. (For clarity, this data is collapsed somewhat further than the collapse system described for the analysis below; most importantly, the leader-plus communities are combined with autocracy.)

There are 682 instances in which we can make a longitudinal comparison between the same community at two points in time, and in which we have information about the governmental model for those points. These encompass 487 communities.

I have collapsed the data as follows. “Other” has been maintained, but combinations with “other” have been truncated to their basic form. (E.g. “Leader / majority / other” is collapsed to “Leader / majority”.) “Democratic leaders” have been collapsed to “Leader / Majority.” (There were no communities in this sample that indicated Democratic Leader by itself.) Finally, a range of communities that checked four or more different modes of government, usually in unique patterns, are all collapsed into “Diverse.” It is noteworthy that nearly every group in this category includes “Leader” as one of their categories.

After these collapses, there are 161 instances of governmental modes changing, and 521 cases of the modes remaining the same. I've created the chart below to visualize these conversions. The width of the arrows represents the likelihood of a given conversion. For the sake of clarity, probabilities lower than 2% annually are not shown. This means that there are in fact some “pathways” between governmental styles that are not shown here, though they are exceedingly unusual.

There is considerable variation in the stability of the governmental modes. “Other” and “Consensus” are both retained 98% of the time annually. “Leader / Consensus” is retained 96% of the time, “Leader” and “Majority” 94% of the time. Of the other major modes, “Planner-Manager” is 91%, and “Elders” at 81%, and “Diverse” at 79%. At the bottom of the spectrum, “Majority / Elders” is retained only 57% of the time, making it the least stable governmental mode in this sample (Though it is also a fairly unusual one).

As both diagrams indicate, there is a tendency for governmental modes to convert towards three attractors: Consensus, Leader, and Other. The coloring shows the conversion-sheds for these three attractors, although these are not absolute: this graph does not show conversions at very low levels of probability. On the basis of this graph, most community government modes (shown in white) are capable of ultimately converting to either consensus or leader systems; a few may also convert to “other.”

There is a mechanical logic to these transformations in one sense. Consensus systems and autocracies both have a sort of constitutional inertia. In principle, these are the two modes of government that can persist even when all but one person is opposed to them. On the other hand, a majoritarian assembly (including planner-manager systems) can convert to some other mode of government even over the wishes of a substantial minority.

Oligarchies (“elders”) present a more nuanced question. In principle, an oligarchy could behave like an autocracy, only converting to another mode of government when the members voluntarily relinquish power. In fact, oligarchies appear to be among the least stable model here, with attrition of 19% per year, mostly to “other.”

Finally, the pattern of conversion shown here bears out my suspicion that autocratic communities may paint themselves as democratic. Among the conversions from “leader-plus” communities, 55% go to simple autocracies, and another 32% go to some other version of “leader-plus.”

Towards Autocracy or Consensus? Predictive Factors.

The diagram above shows that there is very considerable overlap between the conversion sheds of consensus and leader systems. A number of factors, however, seem to predispose a group to convert to one format or the other. The following list are factors that (individually) have a correlation at |r| > 0.1 for both to autocracy and (with the opposite sign) for consensus, with all correlations significant at 0.01 or better. The combined variance for each pairing is shown on the right.

CONVERSION TO AUTOCRACY	CONVERSION TO CONSENSUS	COMBINED VARIANCE
Leader	No leader	61%
No Consensus	Consensus	56%
Not Feminist	Feminist	43%
Weight System	No Weight System	37%
Core Group	No Core Group	32%
Queer Friendly	Not Queer Friendly	19%
Eastern Religion	No Eastern Religion	18%
More labor required	Less labor required	17%
Spiritual Path	No Spiritual Path	16%
More group meals	Fewer group meals	12%
More buildings	Fewer buildings	12%
Sexual Policy	No Sexual Policy	12%
More people	Fewer people	9%
No alcohol	Alcohol	6%
No Joining Fee	Joining Fee	5%
No Land Trust	Land Trust	5%
“Other” politics	No “other” politics	5%

Most of this is relatively unsurprising. Existing political structures that are non-egalitarian predict conversion to autocracy, and the absence of those predicts conversion to consensus. Being socially conservative in matters of feminist values, sex, or alcohol use all predict conversion to autocracy; being socially liberal in those matters predicts conversion to consensus. Communities with a shared spiritual path, especially an Eastern religion, tend towards autocracy, others tend towards consensus.

A more interesting pattern exists with respect to the communities' economics. Larger communities are more likely to become autocratic. Communities that subsequently convert to consensus average an adult population of 19; those that subsequently convert to autocracy average a 79. However, we can qualify this observation in several ways. First, the number of buildings is more predictive measure of size than the number of the people: plausibly this corresponds to the communities' economic assets. And the source and tenure of those assets seems to matter as well: communities with joining fees, or with a land trust, are more likely to convert to consensus process. This would seem to suggest that economic stakeholding is an important factor in the evolution of governmental modes.

I had hypothesized that there would be correlations with change in population or gender balance, but I cannot find any.

Although it is not apparent in the numbers above, the tiny minority of conversions away from autocracy and consensus typically involve “elder” formulas of some type. Oligarchy is also the most indeterminate system, tending to convert to consensus or autocracy with about equal frequency.

Báez and Book-Burning

2010-04-30T17:47:00.000-07:00

I have just been reading Fernando Báez's A Universal Hisdtory of the Destruction of Books. Báez is, among other things, the head of the Venezuelan National Library, but his scholarship has been centered on the Library of Alexandria. He is a brilliant writer, and—since I can tell—Alfred Macadam is providing a brilliant translation. A Universal History is a lovely book, and it fills an ironic vacancy in the history of letters. But it is also an aggravating book, one that demands a discussion it does not itself provide.

The issue of text loss is very dear to me, in part because I have spent a few too many hours introducing young people to ancient and classical literature. In this role, I always feel like a collaborator in millenia-old censorship. To read the Greek philosophers today means, at the outset, to read Plato and Aristotle. Coleridge, I think it was, even proposed to divide all approaches to knowledge between those two ancient schools, as if there was no one else in town. This approach is a sad acceptance of the academies' long campaigns against the works of their competition. The Cynics, the Skeptics, the Epicureans, the Stoics—we have almost none of their writing left. And so we teach the beautiful words of the book-burners, and only then, if we have time, we mention the fragments of the opposition happened to survive the fire.

Plato's Republic is a very explicit and eloquent call for censorship. If a counter-argument existed in the contemporary literature, an Hellenic Areopagitica, it was probably something like Epicurus' book The Canon. And it is an unsurprising tragedy that we still have the former, but no trace of the latter.

Of course, perhaps The Canon was worthless. Perhaps, as Neil Steinberg suggests, everything was lost was literary junk. Perhaps book destruction is a process of attrition, sifting out the dross. These sentiments help assuage our conscience—as readers and teachers--for toleraring this winner-take-all version of literature. The great gift of Báez's work is to rip away these false comforts, and make us face the staggering dimensions of what we have lost. Moreover, Báez confronts us with the fact that books have been destroyed, in large part, not by random attrition or even an anti-intellectual populism, but by the organized efforts of cultural elites.

Báez writes in the litanic style that I associate with certain other Latin American authors—Galeano, Borges, even Neruda. He catalogs a endless series of tragedies, and he does so almost entirely without comment. Frustratingly, this follows on an introduction that makes it very clear Báez could have been brilliantly narrated his funeral march for books. That he does not play Virgil to the reader's Dante is possibly a function of time: the book feels rushed, and Báez suggests that his own experiences of the US-overseen devastation of the Iraqi libraries compelled him to go to press faster than he might have otherwise.

And so A Universal History tactically resembles certain other litanies of destruction. I am thinking of the old UK newspaper Green Anarchist, or the NOI's propaganda piece, The Secret Relationship Between Blacks and Jews, or (less esoterically) the Declaration of Independence. In some circumstances, authors believe that the most damning indictment is a bare litany of the facts, with little or no commentary.

And maybe that is a very pure and noble goal. But the choices Báez makes in presenting his case are too curious to avoid comment. Most immediately, I think, the reader is quickly confronted by an oddity in Báez's understanding of destroying books. He interprets these losses as cultural crimes (even if only crimes of negligence) aimed at a physical target. And he explains them in terms of apocalyptic thought: destroying books is an effort to destroy memory; to destroy and re-make the world. In this analysis, Báez is quite aware that books are both metonyms for texts and are, in many historical circumstances, the actual instrument of those texts: exogenous memories. To destroy the only remaining copy of the Ksitigarbha is to destroy the Ksitigarbha forever: it is both a symbolic and a semantic deletion. But Báez consistently remarks on symbolic bibliocausties that have no semantic impact whatsoever.

That a few fundamentalists have burned copies of Harry Potter may be distasteful or offensive; it may even be a warning sign of a rising censoriousness. But there are 6 million other copies in circulation, which will probably ensure, for a time at least, that the Harry Potter text is not lost to human knowledge. Meanwhile, there is a continuous attrition of actual texts, especially marginal texts: ephemera; pulp magazines; pornography; manuscripts; letters; ledgers; marginalia; packaging; advertisements. These are huge cultural losses, even if they are not felt to be so at the moment: a text extinguished can never be replaced. Báez does not seem to make this distinction between text and book at all: for the purposes of his catalog, any act of destroying a book seems almost equivalent in desecration. He discusses the fictional destruction of fictional books such as the Necronomicon, and the destruction of manuscripts by their own authors, in quite the same tone as he discusses focused efforts to eradicate a text for ideological reasons. Most suprisingly, Báez laments that compact disks can store so much data that “when someone destroys a disk containing that kind of information, he or she destroys an entire library.”

Now, I'm sure this is meant as a challenge to our assumptions about the scope of the field. It expands the discussion in a counter-intuitive way, a great tactic of social historians like Fernan Braudel and Sidney Homer. In much the same tone, we might begin to discuss to the benefits of wind mills, and then point out that nearly all wind power, historically, has been used to winnow grain, dry laundry, or move ships. This is quite true, and even insightful, and yet it may well try the patience of someone whose interest is advocating for wind turbines. Similarly, if we approach Báez's project from a desire to conserve endangered texts—a process which at this point probably means digitizing them—it is a bit maddening to hear him suggest an equivalence between a unique papyrus fragment in Cairo and a digital file of The Da Vinci Code on someone's Kindle.

I'm sure Báez doesn't think of those items as equivalent, either. But he seems to treat digitization as merely a venue for even faster book-destruction. This leaves it to us to pursue a very provocative line of reasoning that he hints at a few times, and which is implied heavily by the entire weight of the volume. And it is this: while books are destroyed everywhere, libraries destroy texts.

Over and over, the pattern established in A Universal History is that rare books are consolidated into libraries—at Babylon or Alexandria or Berlin or in private collections. The prestige of these libraries obviates the need for those books to exist elsewhere. For instance, I do not need a copy of the Umdat al-Salik, because if I should need to refer to it, there's probably one at UVM, and there's certainly one in the Library of Congress. And so libraries become not only points of access for a text, they soon become the only point of access for certain texts. At the same time, they become increasingly attractive cultural targets in the event of warfare or other disturbance. And eventually they are burned. To a very impressive degree, Báez catalogs the fact that book-destroyers do not have to go to great pains to collect the books they want to destroy. That work has been done for them, in advance.

Some of the most poignant passages in the book are from Iraqi librarians facing the nearly total devastation of their collections, in the land that first invented writing. Lamenting the loss of the ancient books in the Mustansiriya University, one of the men Báez interviewed said “Someday someone will burn the Library of Congress, you know, but they won't lose anything like what's been destroyed here.” The claim is doubly shocking, but I am only interested in the first half. Of course, of course, someday the Library of Congress will be burned. It was burned down, after all, as recently as 1814. As Rumsfeld said of the Iraqi looting: “stuff happens.” And already, a vast number of the texts at the LoC are either unreadable or lost in the stacks.

And yet, for the first time in history, it is possible to fireproof the texts themselves, even if the books get burned. We can put the Umdat al-Salik on dozens of servers all around the world for less money than it would cost to ship a physical copy of the thing through inter-library loan. This project is already well underway, with sites like the Gutenberg Project or Perseus, though in general their formatting issues are daunting. But the principle of this redundancy has been tested on thousands of little memes ranging from political cartoons to sex tapes to pirated music: once it is on the internet, it is nearly impossible to delete it. Project Gutenberg, for instance, has 38 mirror sites and allows anyone to freely download all the texts they currently store. (Which means, of course, that anyone who has done so can re-upload them onto their own servers.) This is what today's censors have to contend with, should they want to eliminate any of those 30,000 texts from the world.

The British Library has an amazing collection of bookbindings, which they prominently advertise as a tourist attraction. It is conceivable that in a few decades, that will be the primary role of archival libraries: preserving rare books as physical artifacts, the way we preserve paintings or furniture. But readers and scholars interested in the texts will not need to enter those museums of bookbinding. And culture warriors bent on destroying the texts will have a much, much, harder job than they have ever had.

I don't know if Báez, who is a great lover of libraries, would approve of this analysis. And even if he did, perhaps is much too optimistic. But we seem to be in a moment of enormous possibility. Báez relates that King Vishtaspa ordered two copies of the Avesta to be made: one stored in Sasbigan and one in Persepolis. This must have been a huge task—Pliny the Elder suggests that the original Avesta was upwards of two million verses. It didn't work. Alexander burned the archives in Persepolis and the copy in Sasbigan seems to have been lost, perhaps earlier. But today, we can effortlessly put the Avesta on dozens of servers, all over the world, and ensure that, Hydra-like, it becomes even more redundant the moment it comes under attack.

Perhaps the end of library-burning will also be the end of libraries.

Introduction to the FIC Data

2010-04-25T20:38:00.000-07:00

This is a preliminary introduction to a collection of studies of intentional communities. My survey population for most of these studies is formed from the indices published by the Federation of Intentional Communities (FIC). These publications date back to 1972. Occasionally, they would send out questionnaires, attempting to contact all the communities in their network, a group that included a very wide range of living arrangements. The resulting indices were aimed at people who wanted to join intentional communities, and served a function of allowing communities to publicize their existence and goals. While these surveys were not created for research purposes, and may have significant self-reporting bias, in aggregate they create a longitudinal database: we can use them to see how communities grow or decline, change in nature, and survive or dissolve.

This is a vast data set: 3,185 observations, usually consisting of 95 data points, on 1,978 different communities. It took me years to compile, and somehow it has survived the death of three different computers, although I lost most of my analysis and notes in that process, which was rather discouraging. Recently, I have begun re-creating them.

Defining Intentional Communities

For the purposes of this study, the “intentional communities” of interest are the group of institutions listed by the FIC surveys. These institutions all share several major features: they have a physical plant where people live (and often work); they have an ideological discourse that shapes aspects of their living arrangements there; and they have a organizational existence as a polity.

These communities tend to be small. The mean community in this survey has a population of 39 people, but the modal range is between 5 and 10. However, 7% of the communities have populations of 100 or higher, and the highest claims 4,100.

There have been many waves of intentional community development in American history, beginning with settlements like the Plymouth Bay Colony. In the 19^th century, Utopian Socialist communities like Amana, Oneida, and the Shaker communities enjoyed considerable longevity and cultural influence. Between the Great Depression and World War II, the student cooperative movement produced a large number of housing cooperatives that were the immediate precursors to the communes of the 1960s and 1970s. Those communes, in turn, have given rise to the co-housing movement. The communities listed in the FIC index are primarily focused on the last two categories.

A case can be made, however, that institutions such as the private plats, gated communities, retirement homes, and the like are also intentional communities in the sense defined above. Some of these seem to overlap to a considerable extent with co-housing projects. Yet clearly they do not fall inside the FIC's criteria. It isn't immediately clear why not: the FIC includes a very wide range of ideological positions, organizational structures, beliefs, and the like, many of them mutually antagonistic. However—and this is the final feature that all the communities seem to share—the institutions in the FIC indices all have a discourse that in some way positions themselves in opposition to mainstream society.

Functions of intentional communities

In their opposition to (or at least distancing from) mainstream US culture, many intentional communities envision themselves as testing grounds for a millenial society, either in the sense of religious chiliasm or post-revolutionary radicalism; occasionally both. From this point of view, the purpose of the community is to demonstrate the viability (or superiority) of a particular way of life.

The way this is usually framed—both by outside critics and by many communities themselves--is in terms of longevity. By that metric, the IC movements are widely considered to be failures. Many people, even sympathizers like Stewart Brand, have suggested that intentional communities tend to fail rapidly, and that this gives the lie to their basic project.

The question of the longevity of communities is one that we can address empirically later on. But we need not accept the longevity as a primary goal to value the IC movements; no more than we need to accept Catholicism to value the Sistine Chapel. After all, very few corporations have proven to be sustainable: almost all of them fail within a decade. Yet corporate capitalism, as a movement, has done great and dreadful things. There are at least two other major functions of the IC movements, which I consider equally, if not more, important.

In the first place, intentional communities in the United States have, for a very long time, served as repositories of counter-cultural memory and perspective for outsiders. I remember my own exposure, as a young man, to Jonah House in Baltimore, and to Estación Libre and the other safe houses in San Cristóbal de las Casas. I had, in those spaces, neither the time nor the prerequisite knowledge to fully absorb all the resources jammed on their crumbling bookshelves. But I was exposed, in a more direct way, to a set of memories and assumptions that were quite unlike the world I was familiar with (and I say this as someone who had a radical left-wing education). Through the incidental media of posters and T-shirts and old pamphlets stapled to the kitchen wall, I quickly learned that there was an entire cultural history I had been missing: had, in fact, been denied.

As a frequent visitor of the Collective A-Go-Go in Worcester, I have seen this same dynamic play out dozens, if not hundreds, of times. Intentional communities of this sort frequently host or sponsor speakers, workshops, and other formal events, but I am inclined to think that those are almost secondary. The great reproduction of radical culture occurs when someone arrives two hours early for the party, and they have nothing to do but sit there reading zines and listening to freaky-looking people talk about their plans for the next protest. It occurs in the most incidental ways: the vegan dinner; or the beer offered to the 15-year-old at breakfast; or the women working on their biodiesel rig or their tandem bicycle in the driveway; or the composting toilet; or the nudity; or the long walk in from the road; or even the slavish devotion to a charismatic leader. Whatever it is, it jogs the outsider into a new set of questions: are my assumptions about how to live warranted? And the communities often provide locally unique resources to explore those questions.

In the data set I am working with, there are somewhere a little over 50,000 adults who have spent time living in intentional communities. But I have no doubt that there are five million people who have passed through those communities, and for some large number of them, the experience has been deeply important to their worldview. There are no metrics for this, of course. But it is no less important for being unmeasurable.

The second great function of intentional communities is measurable, to some degree, and I am working on this project because I believe it has not yet been measured very well. Intentional communities are—as they themselves point out—anthropological experiments. In the 1,978 communities encompassed by this data set, we can find bureaucracies, anarchies, democracies, oligarchies, god-kingdoms, lesbian separatist gynocracies, and a dizzying range of other possible modes of social organization. Moreover, the FIC indices create a longitudinal database on the outcomes of those experiments, spanning 34 years.

There are a many reasons to approach this database with skepticism, but it is so unique, and so large, that it begs to be analyzed. So let's begin....

What Happens in Miller County...

2010-04-23T08:07:00.000-07:00

There is a slow debate going on over the permitting and location of casinos here in Massachusetts. In the headlines recently, I notice that pro-casino politicians are “admitting” that casinos are associated with crime, as if this was some carefully guarded secret. Now, there are many reasons that one might oppose (or defend) casinos or other institutions that permit ostensibly vicious activities. The pattern of those arguments is one that interests me at many different levels. It is a conversation that extends all the way from struggles for the most basic human liberties to such bizarre, seemingly devil's-advocate positions as the legalization of blackmail. For better or for worse, every inch of freedom has had a signpost on it saying “Now you've gone too far! Here be dragons...”

But right now I want to do what I do worst, and focus on only one particular aspect of this debate. The notion that casinos are associated with external social problems—prostitution, extortion, etc.--is conceptually independent of the question of whether the internal activity of casinos (gambling) is a social problem. Jewelery stores and pawnshops are also associated with crimes, but hardly anyone would suggest that there is something inherently wrong with selling earrings or buying used saxophones. This distinction is easily lost in the rhetoric around vice crimes, which often insists that both the primary activity and the secondary effects are problematic. From the other side of the aisle, it can be lost in the rebuttal that neither the primary or secondary effects are problematic. If you argue that legalized gambling encourages prostitution, many will quickly respond that prostitution should be legalized as well. Which is as may be, but that sort of argument quickly begins to sprawl beyond what we can easily keep track of.

My interest here is on a specific question: are the secondary effects of “vice establishments” dependent on their concentration? I think this question is often overlooked in the relevant debates. When a society begins experimenting with some kind of formalized permissiveness, it usually does so in very focused ways. Massachusetts is discussing the legal permitting of two casinos, which we imagine (no doubt correctly) will be massive, highly concentrated dens of sin. We'll also be legalizing slot machines at our four existing racetracks: taking existing centers of gambling and making them more intensive. Even this proposal is being discussed as “convenience gambling.” Of course, we already have actual convenience gambling—you can buy lottery tickets in almost every convenience store in Massachusetts. But at the moment, we can only imagine two options: no access to slot machines, or highly concentrated access to slot machines. The idea of having slot machines everywhere—as in England, say—is not even within the scope of debate.

Possibly, possibly, this narrowing of the scope of discussion blinds us to certain comparisons.

To take a famous example, in 1986 Switzerland created the experimental Platzspitz for heroin users in Zürich. The park attracted drug users from all over Europe, and was accused of creating a highly crimogenic environment (above and beyond heroin use). The Platzspitz was closed in 1992 after constant protest from the locals. This story is frequently told in the US as an admonition to those who want to legalize, well, anything. What is less well known is that Switzerland subsequently created many “injection rooms” all over the country. These remain controversial, of course, because the primary activity is shooting heroin. But they are off the street, supervised, and not concentrated in one place. They do not seem to be causing the secondary problems associated with Platzspitz.

So.

For a long time, I've been interested in the hypothesis that experiments in tightly concentrated permissiveness tend to absorb deviant behavior from the surrounding area. Or indeed, from the entire world: what happens in Las Vegas might stay in Las Vegas, but people fly in from Australia and England and Saudi Arabia to make sure it happens there. The same is true of Bangkok, or Amsterdam, and so forth. At the very least, this may invalidate these locations as useful laboratories for the effects of that permissiveness. Putting injection rooms all over Switzerland did not turn the country into one huge Platzspitz, any more than the slot machines in British pubs turn the UK into one huge Las Vegas.

This is a difficult hypothesis to test, in part because there are relatively few experiments in permissiveness. Moreover, the social ills associated with these experiments are usually of a sort that has many possible causes. The best I can do, on short notice, is look at Arkansas.

Arkansas provides a sort of lab bench for one version of this question. About half the counties in the state are dry. Moreover, there are several dry counties more or less surrounded by wet counties, and several wet counties more or less surrounded by dry counties. (There are also a few local anomolies inside this pattern, which I'm ignoring.) Since the 19^th century, when many of the dry laws date from, retail alcohol sales have been blamed for a huge number of localized public secondary ills. Of these, the most immediate is public drunkenness. Arrests for public drunkenness are also a relatively precise metric of the secondary effects of alcohol sales. If a guy is running a short con in Atlantic City, we might blame that on legal gambling in some ambient way. But if a guy is passing out in the gutter in Texarkana, we can almost certainly draw a causal link to the local liquor stores.

So. In the most recent data that I can find, the arrest rate for public drunkenness per 1000 people averaged 3.89 in the “islanded” dry counties of Arkansas, and 3.85 in the other dry counties. The difference is tiny and not significant. However, the island wet counties—which are, in a sense, miniature versions of concentrated permissiveness—have an arrest rate of 8.15. (Significant at 0.004 or better). The other wet counties have an arrest rate of only 4.68, which is not significantly different from the dry counties.

This piqued my curiosity a bit, so I came up with a rather clumsy variable: what percent of the adjacent counties are dry? (I know, I know, that questions like this are better addressed by real GIS. But this isn't an in-depth study. It's scratching an itch.) As it turns out, the wet/dry status of the surrounding counties in Arkansas is a (very modest) predictor of any given county's arrest rate for drunkenness. The county's own policy is a better predictor (6% of variance rather than 4%) but...in the wrong direction. That's right: there is a slight positive correlation between banning liquor sales and public drunkenness.

Taken together, that seemed to warrant a prisoner's-dilemma hypothesis. We can imagine that each county is playing for a payout in terms of reduced public drunkenness. Cooperating, in the classic PD terminology, means allowing liquor sales. Defecting means going dry. A county that cooperates is betrayed if 60% or more of the surrounding counties defect. The best payout (1.0) is received if a given county defects while most of the surrounding counties cooperate: the dry county surrounded by liquor stores. The worst payout (0.0) is received if the county remains wet while surrounded by dry counties: the Las Vegas or Platzspitz scenario.

At a range of payout ratios for the two intermediate scenarios, this model explains 26% of variance in the observed arrest rates: it is more than four times as predictive as simply referring to the local law. If this is true, and generalizable, it has interesting implications. There is a vast and heady literature on the virtues of self-government, ranging from bumper-sticker platitudes to Nozick's minarchist tome. It is easy enough to think of public policy as being entirely atomizable. In fact, when I think of Marcos' phrase “a world in which many worlds will fit,” this is precisely what I imagine: a meta-polity in which one commune can be run like Thélème and the one down the street can be run like a boot camp, and so and on and so forth. Putting a massive casino right down the street from a suburb that doesn't allow off-track-betting or poker night at the bar is another version of this same fantasy.

And perhaps it is a valuable fantasy...there is certainly much more here to discuss. But it seems important to note that public policies are interdependent, and can cooperate or conflict. Not, by itself, a revolutionary concept. But one that is too often glossed over in discussions of autonomy. Or, as in Massachusetts today, when we are measuring how much vice we can fit into how small an area.

More of my favorite comedy...

2010-04-11T17:26:00.000-07:00

Sorry, I'll post something more substantial here soon. But I just love Wikipedia's efforts to paraphrase song lyrics without getting into copyright violations. (See here and here). Here you go:

The song opens with three upbeats as André 3000 counts "one, two, three" and then leads into the first verse. The lyrics begin to describe the persona's concerns and doubts about a romantic relationship. He wonders if they are staying together just "for tradition," as in the lines "But does she really wanna [mess around] / But can't stand to see me / Walk out the door?" André 3000 commented, "I think it's more important to be happy than to meet up to…the world's expectations of what a relationship should be. So this is a celebration of how men and women relate to each other in the 2000s." The song then leads into the chorus, which consists of the line "Hey ya!" repeated eight times, accompanied by a synthesizer performing the bassline.

During the second verse, the persona gets cold feet and wonders what the purpose of continuing the relationship is, pondering the question, "If they say nothing is forever…then what makes love the exception?" After repeating the chorus, the song leads into a call and response section. André 3000 jokes, "What's cooler than being cool?", and the "fellas'" response, an overdubbed version of his vocals, is "Ice cold", a reference to one of André Benjamin's stage names. He then calls to the "ladies", whose response is overdubbed from vocals by Rabeka Tuinei, who was an assistant to the audio engineer.

The song's breakdown coined the phrase "shake it like a Polaroid picture," a reference to an erroneous technique used by some photographers to expedite instant film. Early versions of the film needed to be dried, and shaking the picture helped it to dry faster. The breakdown also namechecks singer Beyoncé and actress Lucy Liu. The song closes by repeating the chorus ad libitum and gradually fading out.

Assembly of the whole

2010-03-07T10:06:00.000-08:00

I bought a blue endtable at Target. It came with two pages of assembly instructions, though, you will note, there's only one piece: Part A, the whole table. I suspect a deeper level of wisdom here than I can fathom.

The Adept: Master, I am confused. If part A was missing, it could be replaced. But if it Part A was missing, there would be nothing there to begin with.

The Sage: But you see, my child, that is just what happened. Before Part A was, it was missing, and so it was replaced at no charge. And thus it now exists. Now go make some soup.

This is not an ad....

2010-01-28T07:30:00.000-08:00

...because the sale will not be advertised. But I get it in the mail several times a year, as, no doubt, everyone else in Addison County does. But not, we note, the general public.

Vespers

2009-12-12T07:02:00.000-08:00

I've had several occasions to teach the Bible, and often when I'm teaching other subjects that have any relationship to Christian thought, I digress into talking about the relevant Biblical stories. I've done this in public school settings, even in public school math classes. On that basis, I am the sort of teacher that a particular breed of conservative Christian believes to be unjustly persecuted, nay, extinct. Except I've never been admonished in any way for doing this. Because...ahem...I am teaching relevant content, not proselytizing. But the line between teaching and indoctrination is a fine one, I know.

With that in mind....Susannah and I just went to see the Mt. Holyoke Vespers, which is a joint production of their chorale, chamber singers, vocal jazz group, handbell chorus, and their ferocious glee club. It was about two hours of Christmas music, in English and Latin. Again, the aforementioned conservative Christians who think the liberalsecularconspiracy has banned people from teaching the Bible in high school probably would not believe Vespers occurred, either. No cutesy multiculturalism here. No Hanukkah music. No Kwanzaa madrigals. No mention of the solstice. Not even the secular Christmas world of snowmen and sleigh-bells and Santa Claus. This was straight-up Christianity until you drop. They did, for instance, two different versions of Ave Maria.

Now. In the usual metrics of indoctrination and spectacle, Vespers should have rated right up there with Triumph of the Will. It was visually and acoustically stunning, and the same series of points—several of which are manifestly untrue—were hammered in over and over, in two different languages and dozens of different arrangements: some melancholy, some manic, some comic, some lilting. This is how you market ideas, right? And the ideas were quite simple:

Christ is king (11x), and his birth fulfilled ancient prophecy (5x). His mother was a mild-mannered (3x) virgin (6x). She gave birth to him in the winter (3x), in a manger (4x), alongside an ox (3x) and ass (2x). There were shepherds involved (9x). Angels sang about it (7x).

And so forth.

The setup is perfect. It's like Fox News telling me how I should think and feel about Iraq. And yet....it doesn't have the feel of indoctrination. I really doubt anyone went and witnessed for Christ after watching Vespers, and I spent awhile afterward trying to think why not.

My first idea was that our society is in some way inoculated against Christmas, or against Christianity, by over-exposure or evident hypocrisy or some other process. But...nah. It doesn't work. We aren't inoculated against the commercial presentation of Christmas (X-mas, as C. S. Lewis would say). And it is a totally indoctrinating force...secular Christmas music and decorations and advertisements every single place you go, for a month. And that shit works...we spends billions on it. But Vespers doesn't work.

So I think it's this....The reason that Vespers doesn't feel like indoctrination is that there is a clear severance between the message and the power structure that would ostensibly benefit from us internalizing that message. When I go to the mall and hear “Jingle Bells,” and I have this sudden urge to buy someone a pair of socks with mistletoe embroidered on them, I can do it right there. In fact, three people dressed up like elves are there to help me. And I know that in advance, as does everyone else in the mall. We are being seduced, and they are more than happy to make good on the seduction.

But even though Vespers is completely on-message for Jesus the whole time, there is clearly no follow-up. Mt. Holyoke is not a Christian institution and no one in the audience is in much danger of thinking it is. If I went up to the glee club and witnessed for Christ, they would freak out. And everyone in the audience knows that.

OK, enough about Vespers. To what extent is this applicable in pedagogy? I am sensible of two different sets of critiques of indoctrination in pedagogy. One comes from the worlds of activism and moral entrepreneurship, and focuses on specific “hidden curricula:” secularism, nationalism, multiculturalism, class and gender role socialization, the “homosexual agenda,” and so forth. The other—which in my mind, at least, is quite distinct—come from a consensual-education perspective: teaching anything that the student is not interested in learning is indoctrination.

All of these criticisms feel slightly out of touch with reality. You can teach the Bible in high school, and even the most ferocious unschoolers routinely get seduced into learning things they weren't initially passionate behind. And, like Vespers, these moments don't feel much like indoctrination, although from a given point of view, they may look like indoctrination.

This is all exciting and troubling to me. More later, perhaps.

Predictive Populations (Part 2.1)

2009-12-06T12:02:00.000-08:00

This begins the results section of my informal study of predictive ability in different groups, based on the Gallup polls. The preliminary discussion is here. I'll be presenting a series of charts, all in the same format. The first one deals with the predictive ability of people from different nations.

The charts present this information in a fairly concise visual format, but they take a moment to read. From left to right on the horizontal axis, we have increasing rates of correct predictions. From bottom to top on the vertical axis, we have increasing rates of incorrect predictions. (The scores are normalized, because some issues are much easier to predict than others). Thus Israel, in the lower right hand corner, has the highest overall accuracy. They are two standard deviations above the mean for correctness, and one standard deviation below the mean for incorrectness. Sweden, diagonally opposite Israel, has the dubious distinction of being least accurate. They are wrong about twice as often as they are right. If the Israelis tells you it will rain, and the Swedes tells you it will be sunny, pack your umbrella.

We can visualize this diagonal axis as one of increasing predictiveness: more correct answers, fewer incorrect answers. We can define a summary score for predictiveness (P) as the ratio of accuracy to inaccuracy scores. Sweden has a P of 0.46; Israel's is 2.56. Almost all the nations measured here, however, score between 0.8 and 1.2. Their predictions are correct about as often as they are incorrect.

However, these nations are splayed across the other diagonal axis, running from the lower left to the upper right. This axis corresponds to confidence, and we can define a summary score (C) as the product of accurate and inaccurate scores. Spain, for instance, has a C-value of 0.52. Although their predictions are are slightly more apt to make be right than wrong (P=1.07), they are very reluctant to make any predictions whatsoever. The US has a slightly higher P-value than Spain (1.12), but we are vastly more confident than the Spanish. Our C-value is 1.75: we always have an opinion.

I hope that this basic layout is comprehensible. I am going to post the other charts as I finish them up.

Open Access: A comedy of manners

2009-10-21T13:17:00.000-07:00

What follows is bitching. But it's not aimless.

You are reading these words on a blog, or perhaps in some text copied from a blog, because I, the author, am a proponent of free, open-access content. In our era, the most trafficked battleground between free and commodified content is music, but just here I am interested in scholarship. Compared to the artist, the scholar or the journalist is in a much worse ethical position to make commodifying claims over their work. Scholars have, after all, spent centuries defending access to factual knowledge as an essential and vital part of civilization and progress, whereas art, as no less than Shaw tells us, is “perfectly useless.” Access to art in general is a human need, but access to any particular song or novel or sculpture is (arguably still) a luxury. On the other hand, access to scholarship is also a human need, and this necessarily implies access to all available research. Science is an evolving totality; the second-best information is never a substitute for the best information. If a researcher discovers a vaccine for AIDS tomorrow, the vast bulk of human moral sentiment is that she must share that discovery: we do not feel the same way about a poet and his latest sestina.

In the face of this ancient rhetoric, the arguments in favor of artificially restricting access to scholarship seem almost incredibly weak. E-journals and the indexes to those journals have a whole host of login restrictions, moving walls, proprietary back-content, and so forth. Even sitting here tonight, in the middle of a fabulously wealthy inter-collegiate library complex, fraudulent using various logins to gain access to four different indices of e-journals, I am constantly being stymied. I am, for instance, repetitively being shown portions of articles that I am not permitted to read in full-text. To avoid shelling out hundreds of dollars, I must resort to absurdly inefficient shun-pike strategies: calling people who I know to have a print copy and asking them to scan it for me, and so forth. I feel like I am hustling for crack: in fact, I am helping create the syllabus for a course at a prestigious liberal arts college.

The tortured justification for this obstructionism is that it helps scholarship, by providing a market incentive for people to publish journals and for online services to index them. This neoliberal argument is gaining ground as many journals are increasingly becoming the inventory of Blackwell and similar corporations. But little else in academia, libraries especially, conforms to direct market incentives. Universities are vast exercises in internal redistribution. No one is proposing that the Eastern Religions faculty should find a way to recover costs on translating the next scroll from Pali. Moreover, the actual cost of publishing an article online is well nigh zero....I am doing, for instance, doing so tonight, at no cost to myself and without advertising.

In reality, of course, the economy that drives scholarship is not financial, but is notional: it is an economy of reputation. The absurdly inflated prices {http://www.journalprices.com} of print journals are simply an entrenched means of bolstering reputation; conspicuous consumption in the classic sense. Behavioral and Brain Sciences is clearly a locus of great scholarship, because it costs $430 per article, whereas the Open Behavioral Science Journal costs nothing, and therefore is for hacks. And among the many dysfunctions of this system is that it churns out dross. Everyone must publish to gain career advancement, whether or not they are having any ideas. And so a myriad of conventional journals exist, very much like degree mills, in order to provide the space for those publications. All of which contributes nothing to human knowledge, except that it is ever-more-difficult to do a comprehensive literature review.

In the last few years, a wave of new models have appeared, models that both re-invigorate the stale and faltering idea of peer review, and simultaneously destroy both the profit mechanism and the access barriers on commodified scholarship. The most direct challengers to traditional scholarly publication are arXiv and Plos-One, along with open archives such as the Digital Library of the Commons, where the recent Nobel laureate Ostrom has published much of her work. Wikipedia and other wikis play a similar role as challengers to the mechanics of publication. Automated reputation systems like Digg and Reddit present vast improvements on the mechanics of traditional peer review (and similar systems have been used for scholarship, as in the experimental journal Philica) Finally, blogs and personal web pages, along with search engines, provide the mechanism for self-publication into indexed media in a way that has previously been restrictively expensive.

I'm all in favor of these experiments. That's why I prefer blogging to publishing in commercial or proprietary formats (though I've done that on a few occasions). It's also why I used to publish in the above-mentioned Philica, an experimental open-access open-peer-review journal. Philica allows authors to post an article as if it were a pre-print, and then be reviewed anonymously by other scholars, using a weighted ranking method. In comparison to the technical problems manifested in traditional peer-review journals, and the ethical problems of commodified scholarship, these experiments seem to me unquestionably superior. I have no doubts on that score. I did, however, have considerable doubts about my own motivations. Most scholars do not percieve their work as being commodified, or their peer review process as broken and nepotistic, precisely because they are inside the walls of the academy, looking out. Perhaps my fascination with the alternatives was simply an obstinate outsider status? On that score, I had a lot of doubts.

But no more. One of the articles I posted on Philica back in early 2007 has become—for me—an object lesson in the current dynamics around open access. The article was called Educational Antidisestablishmentarianism, and it was essentially a review of the literature critical of unschooling and free schools. Unfortunately, Philica's interface ate the formatting, so it was and is a bit daunting to read. Such are the risks of alternative institutions.

Now, my interest in writing that piece had to do with yet another, much larger, experiment in open-access content: Wikipedia. I was annoyed at the fact that the Wikipedia article on Unschooling described “common criticisms” of unschooling that were not referenced to any notable source: my impression was that they were not common criticisms at all, they were simply one editor's personal criticisms. Some words about this are in order....esoterica, including counter-institutions like unschooling (or Philica, or indeed Wikipedia!) are often beneath the notice of reputable defenders of the orthodoxy. It may seem very clear to wikipedia editors that decapitation porn is considered horrifyingly offensive, or that the hollow-earth theory is discredited by modern science. In fact, it is far more accurate to say that decapitation porn isn't considered at all, and modern science has nothing to say about hollow-earth theories. Wikipedia's editorial standards require criticisms to be cited to a “reputable source,” a term of art defined at some length in their standards. So if someone of note has gone on record saying that decapitation porn is the ultimate depravity of our decadent age, fine. But the editors are not supposed to assume that this is the case.

In less extreme cases, this nuance can do real damage to the facts. I remember, for instance, a controversy that occurred three years ago around the relationship of hurricanes to global warming. If you'll recall, 2005 had been a very bad hurricane season. At the beginning of the 2006 season, an op-ed piece circulated on the internet and in some newspapers, intending to pre-empt “liberal climatology” groups linking hurricanes with global warming. (I'm afraid I can't find this piece in my files, as I've just moved...so much for citations...) Subsequently the author was challenged by some actual climatologists, who alleged that there were no major groups, and very few authors, willing to go into print drawing such a connection. For climate conservatives, it was self-evident that liberals had a particular discourse, but in fact this discourse did not exist, or was confined to marginal voices.

Such, I felt, was the case with the Unschooling article. There were a list of “common criticisms” of unschooling, many of which I felt sure were not actually that common, since most educators are not aware of unschooling to begin with. The citations for those criticisms were absent, or misquoted, or quoted to non-reputable sources like offhand comments in a blog. All of which seems trivial enough. But wikipedia—though it is highly experimental—has enough scholarly charisma that it forms the basis of citation for many, many other sources on the internet. Downstream articles about Unschooling, like this one at Education Bug, wind up citing the wikipedia article categorically to justify the claims about Unschooling that are themselves not cited appropriately or accurately.

Miffed, I decided to do a comprehensive survey of the literature so that, in principle, someone could cite these claims correctly: “According to Mitchell (2007), the major critics of unschooling said blah blah blah....” And I did. It's not a great piece of scholarship, more of a laundry list than anything else, but it did fill a gap in the literature.

However, this didn't achieve the immediate effect that I had in mind. The hamartia of experiments like Philica is that there is no incentive for anyone to review articles. Many articles, over time, are never reviewed: they are not “accepted” or “rejected,” promoted or demoted in Philica's local reputation system. They just sit there, as unmentioned as the hollow-earth theory. Such was the case with Educational Antidisestablishmentarianism, and so....being un-peer-reviewed, even in the alternative sense that Philica allows....it could not be used as a source for the Wikipedia article, as I had hoped.

But it was getting read. And in 2009, two authors from the Chinese National University of Defense Technology, Wenting Wang and Rui Hou, cut-and-pasted four paragraphs of my article into their article Deschooling or Schooling? Theirs was a soft version of plagiarism: they mention my name, they just don't mention that their text is a quotation, rather than a summary. They submitted this article to a Canadian Journal, International Education Studies, published by the Canadian Center of Science and Education (CCSE). It describes itself as “a peer-reviewed journal...in the fields of education, training and educational administration.” It is electronically accessible, free to download, and released on a Creative Commons Attribution license. In other words, while it uses a traditional peer review system, it embraces some of the principles of scholarly open-ness. Deschooling or Schooling? was printed in February, 2009 (Volume 2, #1, pp. 70-75)

Plagiarism as it is understood in the West is a scarlet-letter intellectual crime: the sort of thing that gets dragged out of library stacks decades letter for the purpose of character assassination. To take a strange example, when Condoleeza Rice wanted to convince Americans that Sadaam was evil and untrustworthy, one of her talking points was accusing him of plagiarism (NYT Jan 23, 2003). But the highest form of flattery seems to be viewed as something more of a peccadillo in the East, and perhaps even carries connotations of respect. At one liberal arts school I know of, the dean of students notes that upwards of 90% of all reported plagiarism cases are coming from Asian students. So I do not want to cast too many stones at Wang and Hou, lest they bounce off the walls between our cultures.

But the CCSE's role in this story cannot be waved away as an intercultural misunderstanding. Not only was Deschooling or Schooling? a rather obvious cut-and-paste job, but it calmly cites at least two sources that are non-scholarly: my own article, and—much more obviously—Wikipedia. Yet all of this slid past CCSE's peer reviewers, if indeed there actually are any. And in the end, Wang and Hou had an article for their CVs vetted by the respectable, old-fashioned process of peer review, unsullied by newfangled experiments like Philica. And perhaps in an unconscious expression of that disdain, they did not bother to review Educational Antidisteblishmentarism using Philica's system, which would have taken them all of ten minutes.

I wrote what I felt was a rather polite letter to CCSE, asking them to explain this. They didn't: as of seven weeks later, I haven't heard from them, nor have they published any sort of errata or apology. They have, however removed the article, without any explanation to the reader: Vol 2, #1 skips from page 69 to page 76. As far as I know, the print copy of the article I have in my files is the only one left: and the only evidence that International Education Studies saw fit to print an obviously plagiarized work, or that the authors in question were caught lifting passages from dubious amateurs such as myself. I doubt this typical protocol; certainly it falls far short of basic best-practices for journalism. But the lack of commentary is Orwellian.

And it gives me a certain kind of clarity. As Marx and Bugs said, this means war. For me, at least, any personal doubts about the integrity of my motives as an outsider scholar have been extinguished by this whole sequence of events. The old guard is technically incompetent and is rationing access to information, yes, yes. But they are also cannibalizing the products of alternative scholarship to keep their journals glutted, and they cannot even acknowledge it, burying the evidence when it is pointed out to them.

Hell with that. I am shaking the dust off my shoes for good and all. Schooling or Deschooling? Deschooling. Damn. I am, much more firmly now, an antidisestablishmentarian.

Survey on the nature of consent, part V

2009-09-10T18:19:00.000-07:00

While the survey population is in no way representative of the wider world, the scarcity of data on consent seems to justify a little examination of the internal patterns. In particular, I was interested to know which categories of respondent identified consent as an (un)important part of their personal outlook on life.

As I have pointed out earlier, most subjects--54%--considered consent “quite important” to their outlook on the world, but only a small number--4%--considered it the “most important thing.” I've used a simple binomial breakdown on this question (which I asked as a 5-part likert variable.)

In the chart below, I've included associations as far as the very low significance of p=0.15, because in several cases these seem to complement more significant results. For instance, democrats are negatively associated with prioritizing consent at a significance of only 0.13, but this contrasts with conservatives and Republicans, who are positively associated at 0.08. Similarly, there is a weakly significant association for women, but it is a consistent one: women are positively associated with prioritizing consent, and negatively associated with de-prioritizing consent. Moreover, this mirrors a more strongly significant negative association for men prioritizing consent.

So what can we say about the general fabric of these patterns, keeping in mind that it only speaks for our non-random sample?

Consent seems to be a higher priority for women than for men, although consent extremists tend to be male. It is a higher priority for the young than for the old, for the right than for the left, with the notable exception of anarchists. Christians as a whole seem to robustly prioritize consent; the pattern for people who espouse no particular religious belief is contradictory. The only other religious group that has even a modestly significant association are Jews, who in this sample seemed relatively unconcerned with consent. BDSM practioners are deeply focused on consent, second only to anarchists.

Most of this makes some degree of sense intuitively, though it is nice to have a bit of confirmation. Much research would suggest that consent is strongly embodied, with rape occupying the nadir in the imagination of consent statuses. Since sexual coercion is imagined primarily as a risk for women, it makes sense that women should be more focused on consent than men. (Note, though, that those men and women who volunteered that they identified as feminists are not significantly associated with a focus on consent, in either direction.) However, ideological extremism—of any flavor—is a typically male domain, and so the appearance of males identifying consent as the most important aspect of their worldview does not seem entirely unusual.

That anarchists and conservatives express an interest in consent is straightforward: despite significant differences, both of these philosophies profess to valorize individual freedom of choice. While the archist left does not seem to show any strong tendency here, the general drift of the numbers is that democrats, liberals, socialists, and “radicals”--who I presume to be generally leftist—are not strongly interested in consent. At best, consent is for them just one of a constellation of political virtues, and perhaps takes a backseat to equity and justice in their worldview. Again, it is possible that radicals influenced by Gramscian or Chomskyian thought may have a negative association with the concept of consent, presented by those authors as an object of manipulation.

The prioritization of consent seems to be associated with Christian culture. This is a very robust finding, and works in both directions: positive association with prioritzation, and negative association with de-prioritization. In contrast, those who eported having no religious beliefs are negatively associated with prioritization, and Jews are (very weakly) positively associated with de-prioritization.

That the young valorize consent is not necessarily intuitive: the politics of youth are highly volatile. The very young are associated with category 1, while 18 to 35 year olds are associated with category 2. Older demographics do not seem to devalue consent, but they do not seem to prioritize it, either.

Finally, the very strong association with the subjects who volunteered an interest in BDSM would seem straightforward. At a first approximation, the set of sexualities encompassed by BDSM are more or less focused on the replication of coercion in consensual ways. That this fascination might promulgate, or be based in, an interest in consent is not hard to understand. However, we do not see the same pattern with people who volunteered that they had an occupational interest in consent, including some lawyers and medical practitioners.

There were no significant associations with the final likert category, “consent is irrelevant to my outlook on the world.”

Survey on the nature of consent, part IV

2009-08-10T04:16:00.000-07:00

As described previously, the fifteen “marker stories” were designed to provide a subset of direct comparisons that nearly every subject had input on, allowing relatively stronger claims to be made about them. While all subjects were offered at least two marker stories to compare, some deleted one or both of them. In all, 205 respondents compared at least two of the marker stories, for a total of 424 such comparisons.

Many of these comparisons contradicted each other. In fact, 270 comparisons (or 64% of the total), accounting for 59 out of 105 edges, were contradictory. This seems like an immediately noteworthy result: the survey population cannot agree on direct comparisons for better than half of the possible combinations. We focus here on what the subjects did agree on. For the remaining 46 edges, an average of 11.4 subjects made the same comparison X>Y (or a redundant comparison), and no subject disagreed. Another 1.8 subjects, on average, evaluated these edges as X=Y, so the flow lines on the chart should be read as X>=Y.

Five edges were only evaluated as X=Y, on average by 2 subjects each, again without any disagreements. I have grouped them together accordingly. Those groupings do not contradict any indirect comparisons (e.g. X>Z>Y), either, so they seem to be fairly rational.
As can be seen, the resulting graph is largely linear and rational, but one “loop” occurs in the center, where the consensus position holds that A>B>C>D>E>A. There is only one source: story #153: the private act of a woman (Virginia Woolf, in my imagination) alone in her home, reading a poem. And there is only one sink: story #181, in which a woman is raped by a stranger after a struggle and threats of further violence. These poles seem fairly intuitive.

>>>The general architecture of this graph can be loosely summarized in the second chart. We proceed in linear fashion from a solitary act; then to straightforward contractual arrangements; then to the distant and remote consequences of such arrangements; then to situations that develop the principle volenti non fit injuria (“to the willing there is no harm”); then to the power wielded by the crash of two massively unequal worlds; then to violent intimidation; and finally to embodied violence. Only one or two stories seems surprisingly placed to my eyes.

>>>The most striking placement is story #441, describing what we are apt to consider a highly exploitative version of prostitution. Christina has indentured herself to a pimp largely to feed her drug addiction, and has no support network to fall back on. It seems to me to make intuitive sense to place this in the volenti non fit injuria cluster, if not lower. A well-developed school of feminist thought considers this scenario trivially dissimilar from rape. (Indeed, some subjects evaluated this story as a worse version of consent than rape story #181.) But we find it ranked, by consensus, as a fairly strong example of consent, on a par with—for instance—scholarly research. Perhaps the high rating of Christina's consent is mostly a function of her age: at eighteen, she is more adult than her obvious counterpart in exploitation, the eleven-year-old Mario in story #84.

Notably, subjects could only agree on three of the fourteen edges comparing story #441 to the others. This is a fairly low rate of agreement, and it seems likely that with a somewhat larger sample (and thus further disagreement), we would be unable to make any comparisons to the other stories at all. Perhaps the basic dilemma is that a story involving a negotiated contract (which this is) tends to be seen as viewed as a good example of consent. A story involving bodily harm, especially sexual harm, tends to be viewed as a very bad example of consent. This combines the two.

What is perhaps most unsettling about the placement of story #441 is its equality with stories that seem rather banal in comparison: Emile studying dinosaurs; Arnold paying his income tax. We see a similar comparison lower down: destitute child factory workers and revolutionary martyrs are being compared to a girl who is simply bored with her history class. But these juxtapositions do suggest that subjects at least occasionally evaluate consent on the basis of a process, rather than solely an outcome. Given the numerous inconsistencies in the usage of consent rituals, I've considered this to be very much an open question.

Moving beyond story #441, I want to proceed with observations roughly from top to bottom.

>>>The subjects agreed that story #153 is the best example of consent. The other intuitive candidate was #154. Both stories have the same outcome: a woman reads a poem. In the first story, Virginia is alone in her room, under no pressure whatsoever; her consent to read the poem is very much casual. In the second story, Marie has struggled long and hard to gain access to the manuscript with the poem in it. She has even been searched. Now, in a number of scenarios, the presence or absence of consent seems to be achieved through symbolic effort: a “work of refusal” or “test of commitment,” or the like. Some consent rituals build in redundancy or initiation-like ordeals, demonstrating that the subject is not simply willing to do something, they are also willing to suffer for it. We might imagine, then, that since Marie has gone to much greater lengths to access the poem, she provides a better example of consent than Virginia. But the subjects agree in placing Virginia higher.

Apparently, the subjects feel that consent is better exemplified by a situation with no pressure than a situation in which the actor has to prove their consent by fighting through substantial countervailing forces. The suggestion, perhaps, is that extraordinary effort implies some kind of extraordinary motive—whether internal or external—that is in a sense deleterious to consent. Virginia is acting out of casual love, and we regard that as more consensual than Marie, who is acting out of burning passion or perhaps careerism.

>>>Scholarly research, along with unschooling, are seen as better examples of consent than typical compulsory schooling. In fact, compulsory schooling of the usual type is agreed to be less consensual than either chattel prostitution or working in a sweatshop-like factory. And this is not simply a function of age: an eleven-year-old street urchin working in a dangerous factory is still seen as a better example of consent than a typical sixteen-year-old school student. The issue, presumably, is that the student has a legal obligation to attend the school, and her opinion on the matter is not even being consulted, whereas both the prostitute and the child laborer are acting out of some attenuated and circumscribed version of their own interests. The child laborer may not be in a position to quit his job, but the student is, in a formal sense, not even allowed to. This reinforces some of the rhetoric of educational critics like Goodman, Holt, Llewellyn, Baker, and so forth that schools are a deeply compulsory total institution.

>>>Like story #441, story #292--paying taxes to a democratic government—seems to be evaluated as highly consensual. In fact, the subjects agree that this is a better example of consent than the externalities of consumption in the private sector. This seems at odds with the discourse of libertarian tax protest, which often argues that taxation is prima facie a coercive taking, while viewing the far-reaching effects of private consumption as consensual.

>>>A second comparison of economic exploitation that stands out is the distinction between the child worker consenting to risks in producing a product (Manuel and Mario), and the distant consumer (Bibi) consenting to those same risks. The subjects agreed clearly that the consumer's tacit informed consent to the conditions of labor in a distant factory was a better example of consent that the worker's explicit consent. This is striking in several ways. First, it suggests that neither the continua of explicit/implicit consent nor immediate/distant outcomes are seen as monotonically pro-consensual. It could also be interpreted in light of the moral arguments surrounding sweatshops and child labor. While both Mario and Bibi consent to the presence of child labor in a dangerous factory environment, Bibi—being a distant, unaffected, and relatively privileged actor—is seen as consenting more so to those realities.

>>> The five stories that appear in a loop are, I am provisionally assuming, roughly viewed as equivalent in the imagination of the subjects. The existence of a loop is fascinating, but at the moment I am not inclined to pursue what it might mean, except that our conceptions of consent are not entirely rational.

Four of the stories in this loop, in spite of their various nuances, clearly share a similar feature: the protagonist is consciously taking a known risk of predictable negative consequences in order to secure some type of benefit. Thus their consent status falls into a pattern of volenti non fit injuria, (VFNI). The same principle can be seen in story #441 (Christina the prostitute), but in general we do not see volenti non fit injuria themes in the stories above or below this loop.

The other story that falls into this loop is #210, Tara studying history in a compulsory school setting. This is not quite a volenti non fit injuria setting, as Tara has no formally defined choice in the matter. And yet there is certainly a similar dynamic at work. By cooperating with the compulsory school curriculum, as her peers are and as society expects her to, Tara certainly obtains a likely benefit, while non-cooperation would entail predictable risks. While Tara doesn't like studying history, and is therefore suffering some type of subjective disutility, nothing in the story suggests that she is trying to drop the class. So perhaps we can best understand this as a version of volenti non fit injuria, noting that in this context, willingness to cooperate with the societal norm is assumed as a default condition.

>>>Story #84 describes a remote tribe called the Real People, who are under pressure from the Republic to make a formal commitment of political allegiance. While they have rejected this formal consent ritual, they have also become dependent on medical aid from the Republic. This is, in short, a story of the consent dynamics of indigenous peoples all over the planet, somewhat bowdlerized insofar as there is nothing in story #84 to suggest that the Republic has carried out a campaign of extermination against them previously. Nevertheless, it ranks fairly low as an example of consent. There is little question that the Republic has superior negotiating power, and could easily have made their demand for a formal consent ritual a condition of medical aid. Since they have not done so, the subjects seem to feel that if the Real People accept medical aid as offered in good faith, no obligations pertain to that fact. Perhaps this echoes the rather low rating given to compulsory schooling vis-a-vis economic exploitation. If options are not being formally presented, consent is seen as low. But if an option is being offered, and is rejected, the subsequent claim for implied consent based on dependency is ranked even lower.

>>>The last three stories describe scenarios that are common stereotypes of coercion. A popular dysphemism for coercion is “being held at gunpoint,” and story #245 is Rousseau's version of that, the brigand demanding money at gunpoint. Story #250, considered equivalent to this last, is the “offer he couldn't refuse” from The Godfather. Story #181 is a violent stranger rape with no previous contact between rapist and victim. This is a nightmare scenario which is increasingly recognized to describe only a minority of actual rape cases, but clearly holds power because it represents an ultimate version of non-consent in the subjects' imagination.

While the placement of #181 as the worst example of consent is not surprising, it is still worth contrasting it with #245. In the rape scenario, Grace (the victim) is not explicitly threatened with death, nor is her assailant armed. The actuality of violence against her body—both before and during the rape—seems to outweigh these points in the imagination of the subjects.

The Marker Stories

(#84) Mario grows up on the streets of an impoverished city. He does not know who his father is and has only a tenuous connection with his mother, who is chronically ill. He subsists by begging, petty theft, and selling candy to tourists. When Mario is 11 years old, he has an opportunity to work in a factory making injection-molded plasticware. The work is unhealthy and dangerous, especially for someone as small as he is, but it pays about six times more than his previous income. Mario believes that by taking this job, he can improve his own and his mother's life. He agrees. Mario has consented to work in the plastics factory.

(#119) A group of swidden agriculturalists who call themselves the Real People live in a wide forest valley. They have very little contact with the neighboring peoples, but once a year they are visited by a representative from a distant alliance called the Republic. The Republic have very sophisticated technology, and are obviously quite persistent. On each of their visits, the representatives of the Republic ask the Real People to pledge allegiance to the Republic, which they have never done. However, the Real People have started to ask the Republic's representatives for medical supplies, and they now rely heavily on these annual medical supplies. The Real People have consented to be ruled by the Republic's government.

(#153) Virginia is sitting alone in her house on a day when she has no obligations. She decides to read from her favorite book of poems. She locates this book, opens, and begins to read. Virginia has consented to read the poem.

(#154) Marie has been working for years on a scholarly dissertation about a poet. Certain manuscript copies of this poet's writing are only available at a single archive. Marie corresponds with this archive for several months, and finally gains permission to look at the poems. She travels there. The security guards ensure that she is not carrying any cutting or marking devices before allowing her into the reading room. They bring her the manuscript, and she reads a poem. Marie has consented to read the poem.

(#169) Bibi lives in New York City. Manuel, who is 15 years old, works in a factory in the Philippines, making rubber boots for the DeMarie company. Manuel is regularly exposed to toxic chemicals at work, which cause him to develop lung cancer very early. The DeMarie company is fairly notorious for their unsafe work conditions, and Bibi has heard radio stories about the issue. Nevertheless, Bibi has purchased rubber boots made by the DeMarie company. Bibi has consented to Manuel getting cancer.

(#181) Grace is leaving work at night when a stranger, Dave, grabs her. She struggles with him, but is nevertheless dragged into an empty building. Dave is significantly stronger than Grace, and tells her that he will break her arm unless she stops resisting him. Grace indicates that she will not resist, and Dave has intercourse with her. Grace consented to have sex with Dave.

(#208) Emile is 10 years old. He lives in a community with few schools, and has never been to a school. He has, however, studied things that happened to interest him. Currently, he is fascinated by dinosaurs, and studying them as much as possible. Emile has consented to study dinosaurs.

(#210) Tara is 16 years old. She attends a school that offers a wide range of elective classes. In addition to these electives, the school requires her to take certain classes. Currently she is taking world history, which is a required course. Tara does not like history. Tara has consented to study world history.

(#245) A brigand surprises John at the edge of a woods. The brigand points a pistol at John and demands that he surrender his purse. John does so. John has consented to give the brigand the purse.

(#250) Jack is the head of a studio in Hollywood. He bears a grudge against Johnny, an actor who has slept with one of his actresses. Out of spite, Jack has decided not to cast Johnny as the hero in his upcoming movie, although he feels that Johnny would be especially good at the part. Johnny's family are mafia, and Jack is visited by a mafia lawyer who urges him to give Johnny the role. Jack entertains the lawyer cordially, but refuses to give Johnny the part. The next morning, he finds that his mansion has been burglarized, his prize race-horse killed, and the head of the race-horse left in his bed while he was sleeping. He gives Johnny the starring role in the upcoming movie. Jack has consented to give Johnny this role.

(#251) Martin has become deeply convinced that the orthodox government-supported religion is making serious doctrinal errors. He publishes a book defending his thesis, and is called before a tribunal. His political allies obtain a safe-conduct passage for him to and from the tribunal. Presented with his writing, Martin confirms that it is his own work, and is then asked if he stands by it. He requests a recess to pray and talk to his friends. He feels that he cannot conscientiously say that he disagrees with what he has written. Returning to the tribunal, he tells them that he does stand by his writings, and cannot say otherwise. Martin has consented to re-affirm his writings.

(#292) Arnold was born and raised in Holverness. Holverness is a democratic republic, with biennial elections of political representatives. Arnold is required to pay taxes to the government, and does so. Arnold has consented to pay these taxes.

(#422) Damon was born and raised in Arden. Arden is officially a democratic republic, but in fact the government has been rigidly controlled by a single ruling party for over half a century. Damon has spent his entire adult life working with a resistance movement that rejects the legitimacy of Arden's government. In doing this work, Damon knowingly violates certain laws regulating freedom of the press in Arden, and is arrested. He refuses to enter a plea in the court, making a statement that the court is invalid. He is convicted and sentenced to prison. Damon has consented to be imprisoned.

(#441) Christina is 18, and has a serious addiction to alcohol and cocaine. She has been kicked out of her hometown, and has recently moved into a major city where she is a stranger. She has no job. She has been living with her boyfriend, who provided her with drugs; now that they have broken up she needs to make money quickly. Christina is approached by a pimp named Jason, who offers her to provide her with an apartment, drugs, and a small amount of money if she will work for him as a prostitute for one year. Jason will keep most of the money that she receives from customers. She agrees to this. Christina has consented to these arrangements.

(#492) Icaria is a region of Subdune, a democratic republic. There is a small movement in Icaria to secede from Subdune and become a separate nation-state. Milo is a member of this movement. He has recently signed a manifesto that details the grievances Icaria has against Subdune, and declares Icaria to be an independent state. The Subdune government responds by ordering the arrest of all the signatories of this manifesto. Unarmed police officers come to Milo's house and demand that he accompany them to the prison. Milo goes with them. He is convicted of treason and imprisoned. Milo has consented to be arrested by Subdune.

Survey on the Nature of Consent, Part III

2009-07-21T07:40:00.000-07:00

(For reasons that I am not going to try to figure out just now, Blogger wants you to read this article with huge buckets of whitespace included. My apologies. Keep on hittin' that scroll bar....)

The survey that follows is based on a snowball method, so the survey population is not representative of the public at large. The analysis being employed accomodates this limitation to some degree. With minor exceptions, I am not interested in describing the frequency of opinions expressed by this non-random population. Rather, I am using tools that focus on the existence or non-existence of particular opinions. This analysis privileges minority and dissenting voices, rather in the fashion of a consensus exercise, and leaves us with a mapping of the shared opinions, the topology that no one in the population disagrees with.

It is important, then, to know who this population is, what perspectives are present and absent here. The preliminary survey of participant's personal informatio provides a good deal of information on this point. There were 300 responses to the survey, collectively accounting for 54,277 pairwise comparisons between stories. That is to say, roughly 44% of the possible pairwise comparisons were evaluated directly at least once.

Of 300 responses, 21 (7%) were entirely blank—no information whatsoever had been volunteered. Another 42 responses (14%) were “balks;” respondents had filled out their personal information, but on seeing the survey, had decided not to take it. Based on the timestamps and communication from respondents, however, it seems clear that many of these respondents returned—often within a few minutes—to take the survey, and frequently declined to re-enter their personal information upon return. Of the 279 non-blank responses, 11 have no personal information and 37 have no write-in personal information. It is plausible that a large number of these 48 entries corresponded to the 42 respondents who initially balked, but there is no way to verify that.

For each of the categories listed in tabular form below, I am presenting three numbers. The first is the number of respondents that identified as belonging to this group and immediately went on to compare two or more stories. The second is the additional number of respondents that identified as belonging to this group on balked surveys (but plausibly did return to compare an unknown number of stories). And the third is the total number of evaluations known to have made by people in that group.

How much would you say you think about issues of consent?
Constantly	11	1	2705
Often	82	16	26572
Sometimes	93	11	17837
Rarely	37	10	5863
Never	1	3	314

How important do you see consent as being in your outlook on the world?
Most Important Thing	10	1	1393
Quite Important	121	20	31077
Important	77	16	17208
Unimportant	9	2	2699
Irrelevant	4	2	59

We can assume with some certainty that a population self-selected by their decision to take a survey about the nature of consent are apt to be interested in consent. Given that, it seems especially interesting that these results do not indicate even more people who describe themselves thinking about consent often or constantly. It is also worth noting that 90% of the people responding to the question view consent as an important but non-primary element of their outlook on the world. The notion that consent has a sort of philosophical primacy, even among this group of people, is almost as unusual as the idea that consent is not important.

Gender
Female	122	19	25479
Male	66	10	23492
Trans	6	1	1776

Note the prepondernace of female subjects, though the number of comparisons are similar. “Trans” includes three people identifying as genderqueer or transgendered as their gender, and also includes four people listing a binary gender but noting that they are transsexual or transgendered. The latter category are cross-listed.

Age
15 to 17	15	0	2797
18 to 25	57	7	10809
26 to 35	63	9	12186
36 to 45	27	5	12968
46 to 55	17	2	3849
56 to 65	10	4	5659
66 to 81	4	0	1493

Nationality
United States	136	19	39079
Canada	15	2	1847
Europe	7	2	888
Other Nations	2	2	381
Race
White	13	2	1895
Other Races	3	3	644
Mixed Race	3	0	441

The question was phrased as “Nationality,” but a number of respondents interpreted this as race or ethnicity, so we have a range of responses. Moreover, some respondents added race as an additional factor in the last question, and those are included here as well.

Occupation
Professor	11	1	6872
Student	41	4	6792
Self-Employed	3	0	5416
Administration	9	0	4351
Retired	8	3	1664
IT Workers	6	1	1661
Activist / Organizer	6	0	1520
Programmer	4	0	1471
Music	6	0	1423
Office	8	1	1405
Unemployed	7	0	1097
Other Health Care	9	1	1084
Grad Students	3	5	1065
Legal	6	2	1024
Teachers / Youth Workers	12	2	1009
Doctors and Nurses	6	0	927
Homemakers	4	0	906
Engineering	6	0	893
Trades	6	0	722
Writing	6	3	627
Ministry	3	0	551
All Other	3	1	464
Social Work	3	0	393
Graphic Arts and Design	3	0	274
Service Work	6	1	253

Political Outlook
Democrat	9	0	7210
Liberal	48	2	6702
None	8	1	4714
Conservative	9	4	3890
Progressive	10	1	2932
Moderate / Bipartisan	16	1	2883
Undecided or “Other”	9	3	2700
Left	19	2	2582
Socialist	10	3	2248
Other Radical Left	6	1	2025
Anarchist	13	2	1996
Independent	5	1	913
Libertarian	4	2	710

Conservatives include “Republicans” and “conservative constitutionalists.” Moderates include people responding that they admired aspects of both major parties, and similar answers.

Religion
All Christians	55	6	20512
including
Quakers	12	0	9280
“Christian”	18	3	3280
Lutherans	2	0	2981
Catholics	13	2	2139
Unitarians	6	0	1475
Other Protestants	5	1	1411
Non-Christians
Atheist	17	1	6406
None	38	7	5424
Undecided or vague	13	2	4935
Agnostic	18	0	3638
Buddhist	5	0	1492
Jewish	9	0	1484
Other	4	3	1410
Earth-based / Pagan	6	2	955
Spiritual	7	0	777
Humanist	2	0	507

Other Notes
Queer	8	1	2719
Class Background	3	0	577
BDSM	3	0	377
Feminist	3	1	323

Fifty-three people volunteered other significant issues that might impact their understanding of consent. The major categories appear above. Other volunteered information had to do with location, childhood experience, having been raped, occupational use of consent protocols in a variety of settings, personal philosophies and politics.

Commentary

Again, this population is not representative of the world at large, and some categories (Quakers, for instance) are present in hugely disproportionate numbers. But that is not too problematic. The subsequent analysis does not privilege any opinions based on frequency. I am satisfied that this survey population includes significant input from a very wide spectrum of American opinion. The possible exception here is race, which I did not ask about. Based on comments, I know that a number of non-whites did take the survey, but they were primarily non-US-citizens. And the number of non-US-citizens, in general, is too small to make me feel that this survey has included input from a global range of voices. But in terms of politics, religion, gender, occupational category, and sexuality, we have significant input from across a very wide range of persepctives.

Two words I loathe

2009-06-27T19:05:00.000-07:00

But first, see the awesomeness of this.

Technically

I associate the overuse and misuse of the word “technically” with teenagers in a certain set of geeky subcultures, but it seems to be spreading beyond them. In any event, it is one of those words, like “hopefully,” whose incorrect usage has so thoroughly crowded out its correct usage(s) that they are almost non-existent. For every instance of:

Blake was a technically skilled printmaker

There must be twenty instances of

Blake was technically not a poet but a printmaker

You can't turn back the clock on something like this, and you shouldn't...but in this instance, I really want to. We are not only losing a good word—the adverbial form of “technique”--but we are replacing it with a synonym for “specifically” or “actually,” differentiated only by how obnoxious it sounds. As in the example above, phrases using technically to mean actually generally have a smug, positivist, I-know-something-you-don't-know tone. And it usually gets hauled out when the implied depth-of-understanding really isn't there. I can still remember listening to two kids in a math class, and one of them lording it over the other that the answer to a problem was not seven, because “technically, it's positive seven.” Statements like this, which often follow the t-word, I find jaw-clenching annoying. As Pauli said, they aren't even wrong. Technically, it's the real positive integer 7.000000000, or whatever you like, but nothing whatsoever is gained by piling on these specifications.

Courtesy

The ancient term “courtesy,” once used to refer to the manners of the court, has fallen on very hard times. It was first taken up, I think, by industries that were in process of eliminating once-standard elements of the goods and services they provided customers with, generally lagniappes or loss leaders. To promote the fact that they had not completely abandoned these programs, they would attach the word “courtesy” to them, as if to say: see, other airlines might not give you a soda, but we do! We do! It's a courtesy!

Now, these “courtesies” tend to involve added inconvenience, so the gas station that once would take personal checks now asks you to fill out a bunch of paperwork to be issued a “courtesy card” so that they will...take your personal check. When we didn't blink at that, it became possible for robot telemarketers to call you up in the middle of dinner, and call that a “courtesy call.” At this point the word has no meaning whatsoever; it is simply marketing drivel. They might as well call it a “jumbospecialgood call.”

In a similar vein of meaninglessness, corporate jargonistas have started to backronymize email BCCs (“blind carbon copies”) into “blind courtesy copies,” which doesn't even make sense, since a “courtesy copy” is a usage from publishing, strictly from the first paragraph: a free thing you once expected to get during a transaction, but now ought to feel grateful for. Moreover, a whole generation of young white collar workers have probably never seen carbon paper, so the original acronym made no sense, and here's this word, courtesy, floating in the air, starts with a C and conveniently has no meaning....

And lastly, while I'm in full rant mode, let's talk about the corrupting effect of citing images, text, and the like that meet fair-use criteria by saying “courtesy of ______.” This implies that the provisions of fair-use law, far from being a bare minimum for IPR reform, are in fact a privilege bestowed on us by the owners. It is like feeling that one should tip one's hat to the bank every time we use their sidewalk, or saying “Thanks Wiley! Thanks Blackwell!” after every line of bibliography. Hell no, people. Hell no.

Watching Coppélia While White

2009-06-13T20:08:00.000-07:00

The stages of life are not marked, as the Sphinx thought, by how many feet you have, but by what sort of public rituals you spend your time attending. And these move in generational waves. In your early twenties, for instance, you are always going to weddings; in your early fifties you are always going to weddings again. There are waves of funerals, waves of graduations, waves of baby showers. Today we ushered in what is doubtless the beginning of such an era: other people's children's performances. In this case, a production of Coppélia by the local children's ballet troupe.

Our friends are Mexicans, and the ballet (and thus the audience) was about 15% people of color—in Vermont, this is the equivalent of an all-black crowd. It was one of the most racially diverse groups I've ever seen in our state. Susannah had to ask for toliet paper in French; we were talking in Spanish, the troupe included kids who were African immigrants, African-American, Chinese, Korean, Mexican, and from somewhere in the Arab-speaking world; there was also a considerable delegation from Indochina, but I am too ignorant to distinguish between the various nationalities therein. And maybe Russians? Anyway, it was diverse to a degree that almost nothing in Vermont is diverse.

Neil Steinberg writes wonderfully about the spelling bee as a traditional American gatekeeping ritual for immigrant families. Part of its beauty is that it is so very arbitrary; the demands of English orthography make no sense, add nothing to our understanding of the wider world. We can learn a simple rule, such as the fact that i comes before e, except if it comes after c, or in a plural noun whose singular ends in “cy,” or when the vowels are sounded as “ay,” or in recent loanwords, or various other exceptions like deity, eight, neither, sovereign, weird, and so on. But we will never reach back to this learing as an adult as a useful analogy for something else life throws at us. It is a dead end.

These qualities are precisely what make arbitrary sets of rules so useful as a gatekeeping mechanism. Any arbitrary set of rules will do. Richard Mulcaster, the English educator who was signally responsible for standardizing English spelling, was also one of the major lawmakers for football. He demanded that students develop a competency both in orthography and in football, two distinct sets of arbitrary exercises which he had, in their details, invented from whole cloth. His list of over 8,500 “difficult words,” spelled to his taste but not defined(!), set the telling priorities for all spelling bees since the 1500s. And as David Crystal points out, he was probably the inspiration for Shakespeare's Holoferenes.

Ballet follows a similar pattern. For children, in particular, the choreography and performance of a ballet are not apt to have exceptional production value; nor are they likely to contribute much to the narrative of the ballet. Coppélia is a story about a maker of magical automatons, and a girl who breaks into his lair, replacing the clockwork girl he has some erotic fixation with. He doesn't notice; she is full of remorse; et cetera. Having a train of four-year-olds skip around the stage in a circle really doesn't add to this story, but it does form a public trial, an arbitrary exercise with differential levels of success of failures. It does hold out a particular brass ring of excellence in that most sophisticated and white and upper-class genre, the ballet. And, in this case, it does much more than that.

The major fin-de-siecle ballets, are, with few exceptions, racialist and Orientalist in aesthetic: Coppélia, La Bayadère, Cléopâtre, Schéhérazade, the Nutcracker, etc. Race “science” was at its apex in this era, and ballet reflects that as well as any other medium. Coppélia, which for all its humor is in a sense a very dark narrative, combines that racialism with an interrogation of science and the boundary between humanity and mechanism. It stands somewhere between Frankenstein and The War With The Newts, though it is hardly the masterpiece that either of those works is. But Coppélia also joins the Nutcracker Suite in presenting a series of dances based on racial stereotypes. (Both ballets, incidentally, are based on E.T.A. Hoffman stories.)

To use an 1870s rendering of race as the basis for a ritual performance aimed at achieving white privilege presents....decisions. Should the “Chinese Doll” roles be performed by Asian children, or white children made up to appear Chinese, or perhaps black children? If an Arab child is type-cast as the “Arabian Doll,” will it seem incongruous for a Vietnamese child to be playing the role of a white person? The troupe had to resolve these questions with a superabundance of budding ballerinas of color—they made some effort to ensure that the “Chinese Dolls” looked Chinese—at least to an audience thay can't visually distinguish Han from Hmong. But the Tyrolean corset girls who are the local equivalent of “white” are cast in all races.

I watched this show with all the tragedy of looking back at the authors of the 1870s looking forward on modernity in horror; and all the comedy that a children's ballet necessarily entails. I was sitting beside my good friends, who are Mexican immigrants. They love America so much more viscerally than I do, and for them—and the many other families of color there—this ballet and all its racial insanity was surely a rung on the ladder towards acceptance as white, as bourgeouis, as members of the club. And in that striving, it was I, and the other whites, who were the immediate beneficiaries and judges of the fact that the Chinese Dolls were played by Vietnamese kids rather than Burkinabé kids or Italian-Irish kids. Yet I have a notion that this trial-by-insanity attitude would not have been much different if it were entirely immigrants in the audience. I was strongly reminded of Genet's stage directions for The Blacks, A Clown Show:

This play, written, I repeat, by a white man, is intended for a white audience, but if, which is unlikely, it is ever performed before a black audience, then a white person, male or female, should be invited every evening. The organizer of the show should welcome him formally, dress him in ceremonial costume and lead him to his seat, preferably in the first row of the orchestra. The actors will play for him. A spotlight should be focused upon this symbolic white throughout the performance. But what if no white person accepted? Then let white masks be distributed to the black spectators as they enter the theater. And if the blacks refuse the masks, then let a dummy be used.

Predictive Populations (part 1)

2009-06-08T11:09:00.001-07:00

“My visions of the future are always pretty much standard issue. The rich get richer, the poor get poorer and there are flying cars.”

-Joss Whedon

It has been many years since soothsayers, oracles, and astrologers were called upon to shape public policy. All right, it’s only been a few decades, but Reagan was an anomaly. Yet predicting the future remains big business, and big politics. One does not have to scan the media for long, or spend much time chatting at the bar, before you hear a prediction of what is about to happen: “The Fed expects unemployment to decline.” “The Iraqis will be dancing in the streets.” “The end of the world is nigh.” Almost everyone is willing to get into the act.

Yet predictive accuracy is not very well studied. We have considerable information about the public ability to answer general-knowledge questions, which is to say questions about the past and the present. Much of this data is ambiguous; much of it is also rather depressing. (For instance, Gallup has found that 50%-60% of Americans cannot give a roughly accurate definition of “liberal” and “conservative.”) But general knowledge questions are a different species from predictive questions. Prediction is not solely based on access to knowledge, and perhaps is not even very closely related to such access. It is based on a general outlook about how the world works, an informal historicism, common sense, and realism—however cynical or idealistic reality may be. Finally, questions about the future are in a special way immune to interviewer bias. There is not, at the time the question is asked, any “right answer.”

This is a very informal study based on Gallup’s surveys from 1935 to 2002. Gallup is an American institution, and reading through the old polls is a strange walk through American anxiety. The questions are as pregnant with neurosis as the answers: there are, for example, almost constant references to “World War III.” If one had no other familiarity with the American people, the image that emerges from the Gallup polls is that of a society passionately bickering over social mores and dress codes while expecting the apocalypse.

From the thousands of questions in the survey archives, I have picked out only those 75 questions that meet specific criteria. First, they must be purely predictive. They cannot be phrased as general knowledge tests, or inquiries into personal desires, hopes, or fears. Second, the questions must refer to global outcomes, not personal or localized outcomes. Thus I have discarded questions such as “Do you think your economic situation will improve next year?”

Third, the questions must refer to outcomes which can be verified or falsified with some degree of objectivity after the fact. They cannot refer to a counterfactual example, like how an unelected president would have performed. Nor can they refer to inherently vague benchmarks. This is sometimes contentious, given the ambiguous wording of many of Gallup’s questions, especially in the earlier years. At the one extreme we have a question like “Will Truman be elected president?;” at the other, we have a question like “Will 1956 be a better year overall than 1955?” I have also passed over questions that refer to degrees of likelihood. In some grand deterministic sense, everything that happens was certain to happen, but that is not the universe we normally inhabit. A black man did win the US election in 2008, but people who predicted that that was “unlikely” in 2001 were not wrong, in our usual way of thinking.

Some of these 75 questions can be falsified but not verified; for example “Will it be impossible for a man to land on the moon?” In a seeming defiance of Popper, other questions can be verified but not falsified: “Will anyone ever use a nuclear weapon?” But if a question cannot be (or has not been) falsified or verified with some degree of objectivity, I've passed over it.

Finally, I have only selected those questions for which answers are broken down by some demographic basis. We know that people in general cannot predict the future, that people in general are overconfident. What I propose to look at is whether certain groups are better (or bolder) prophets than others.

100 Documentaries

2009-06-05T06:31:00.000-07:00

Well, it's something like this. Back in '05, I guess, I remember having this sense that I wanted to watch documentaries. A LOT of documentaries. It wasn't that I liked the genre: just the opposite. I had seen a couple of documentaries, and the flap about Fahrenheit 9/11 was big back then. I was impressed that most of the documentaries I'd seen, despite their pretensions to being a sort of popular education, (and thus quasi-radical), were more manipulative and biased than the mainstream news they so frequently disparaged. That fascinated me; I have this ongoing love of biased media. Understandably, no one in my household was that keen on going out to rent bad documentaries, though.

Around that point, my aunt gave my great-aunt a DVD player for Christmas, and asked that I ensure that my great-aunt actually get some use out of it. She's an amazing old-school socialist, feminist, atheist agitator. I love her to bits. Too often, I think, young radicals embrace their older counterparts on sufferance—we love them if and only if their politics mesh perfectly with ours. But the great thing, after eight decades of the grind, is to have any politics left at all. Anyway, my great-aunt and I began to watch one documentary every week, with tea and ice cream, very ritualistically. Usually it ends with her shouting in indignation about the failings of the United States, white people, and humanity in general.

That was several years ago. At that time, the local video store had about three shelves worth of documentaries, and after discarding those that were about sex, boxing, and/or Charles Bukowski, the remainder seemed like a relatively straighforward checklist. Now they have fifteen shelves of documentaries. When I look at a site like Snagfilms, of their 559 listed documentaries, I have seen precisely one. The genre is booming, and most of it is still ineffably effing terrible. The tacit understanding of many thousands of documentarians seems to be that their voice has not been heard, and rectifying that omission is worth any number of journalistic sins. But the best of them are very, very good: the AV equivalent of great essayists like Orwell or McPhee.

So I have tried—first on paper, then on Zemita, now here—to make a list of the better documentaries we've watched, or that I've watched elsewhere. At first I was going to extend this list to include progressively lower and lower circles of hell, but I am largely abandoning that enterprise. It seems bad for my soul, and also meaningless in light of the sheer volume—what Bloom calls “Malthusian repleteness”--of the genre. Moreover, the fact is that I forget the insipid documentaries. Only the good ones and the memorably horrible ones stick out in my mind.

So here is the current list, at least of all the ones I can think of.

The Excellent Dozen

These are documentaries that I think are brilliant, engaging, and unique. They also have some kind of journalistic integrity—that means very different things in these instances, but in every case I felt like I was not being intellectually manipulated. Emotionally, perhaps, but that is what art is for, no? Perhaps because many of these are so conceptually unique, I came in doubting half of them. And they won me over.

Buena Vista Social Club
The Devil's Playground
Genghis Blues
My Architect
My Country, My Country
Planet Earth (David Attenborough Series)
Shapes of the Invisible
Terror's Advocate
The Up Series (series)
Touch the Sound
The Way Things Go
Wild Parrots of Telegraph Hill

The Very Nice Twenty

Basically these are excellent documentaries that for one reason or another I can't quite bring myself to place in the previous category. The flaws are subtle, though.

Been Rich All My Life
Control Room
David Attenborough in Paradise (BBC Series)
David Attenborough Wildlife Specials (BBC Series)
Eyes on the Prize (PBS series)
Fast, Cheap, and Out of Control
Frank Lloyd Wright
Into Great Silence
Jesus Camp
Life And Debt
Manufactured Landscapes
Milarepa
Nanook of the North
No Direction Home
National Geographics' The Photographers
The Real Dirt on Farmer John
Rivers and Tides
Spellbound
The Take
Winged Migration

The Pretty Good Twenty-five

This is my largest category. They're good. They have some issues that I wouldn't feel like an ingrate pointing out. But if you like the subject matter, you'll probably love them, and even if you don't, they may still draw you in.

Atomic Cafe
The Beauty Academy of Kabul
Bling
Bowling for Columbine
Chisholm '72: Unbought and Unbossed
Crumb
David Attenborough Life in Cold Blood (BBC series)
Don't Look Back
The End of Suburbia
Gandhi
Good Night and Good Luck
I'm Your Man
In the Shadow of the Moon
Into the Blue
Koyaanisqatsi
The Leaning Tower of Pisa (Discovery Channel)
Monsters of the Deep
Outfoxed
The Shape of the Future
Sick: The Life and Death of Bob Flanagan, Supermasochist
Sir! No sir!
Sketches of Frank Gehry
The Story of the Weeping Camel
This is what democracy looks like
Who gets to call it art?

The OK Eighteen

These are documentaries that have tragic flaws ranging from being boring or propagandistic to mere inept writing or cinematography. I think they still manage to be compelling if you have some previous interest in the topic. Otherwise, probably not...

The ACLU Freedom Files (Series)
The Blue Planet (Series)
Breaking Vegas
Butterflies of the Northeast
The Corporation
Earthscapes
The Endurance
Flow
The Future of Food
Genesis
The Human Face (BBC Series)
Money as Debt
Roger and Me
South Indian Temples (Discovery Channel)
Ten Days That Unexpectedly Changed America (Series)
This Film is Not Yet Rated
Who killed the Electric Car?
Writer of O

The Lousy Ten That You've Maybe Heard Of

Most of the really bad documentaries I've seen alo have the virute of being fairly obscure, so I will simply let them rest in peace. These ten are worth mentioning, though, because they're relatively popular and—I would say—not worth people's time.

Blue Vinyl
Darwin's Nightmare
Everthing (else) on the Discovery Channel
Everything on the History Channel
Fahrenheit 9/11
Freedom Fries
Genesis
Guns, Germs, and Steel
King Corn
Supersize Me*

The Unforgettably Horrible Five

And then there are these. These are documentaries that reach some kind of Nirvana of horrificness. They are to non-fiction cinema what Plan 9 From Outer Space is to fictional cinema. I do not recommend watching any of these, because your brains will dribble out your nostrils, but then, some people like that kind of thing...and I strongly encourage would-be documentarians to watch these and learn from their excruciating mistakes.

Loose Change
Lost in La Mancha
Nobelity
Pirates (Discovery Channel)
World Tour 1966: The Home Movies

The Possible Ten

These are documentaries that have come very strongly recommended to me by people whose opinions I respect, but which I haven't seen.

The Beales of Grey Gardens
Born into Brothels
The Business of Being Born
Into the Wild
Mad Hot Ballroom
Race: The Power of an Illusion
Some Kind of Monster
Vernon, Florida
When the Levees Broke
Young@Heart

*This one gets an honorable mention, though. I don't gross out easily. I mean, I have a friend, a doctor, who talks about dissecting penises lengthwise, and I managed to gross her out with a veterinary tale involving the phrase “sucking the mucus out of its nostrils.” So...yeah. But Supersize Me left me so disgusted I couldn't eat for 48 hours, and when I finally had to have protein or die, I was driving past the skeezy Polish-food shack on the highway. I ordered a gristlewurst or something, which was the absolute last thing I wanted to eat at that point, and asked the lady if it was spicy (Cause, you know, empty stomach.) She fixes me with a kind of baba-yaga look and says: “I don't know, kid. I don't eat this shit.” True fact.

No Not Mocked

2009-05-23T05:34:00.000-07:00

Written April 7
Well, today Vermont gets the honor of being the first state to pass a gay marriage bill via the legislature rather than the courts. More than that—we passed the bill over a gubernatorial veto, so it had to achieve supermajorities: 23 to 5 in the Senate and 100 to 49 in the House. There is no threshhold in Robert's Rules that allows an assembly to convey its wishes more forcefully than this. Yes, the 100 to 49 split means that Douglas' veto was only one vote shy of holding in the House. Amazingly, this point is being used on at least a couple of conservative blogs as evidence that Vermonters don't really want gay marriage—after all, only 77% of the Senate and 66% of the House support the bill.

I am not a huge fan of marriage laws per se, and I'm partial to the argument—be it found in queercore zines or libertarian rants—that the state has no business legislating marriage in the first place, and should have used this time and energy to divest from heterosexual marriage, rather than invest in other marriages. But whatever. Somewhere or other, Tristan Taormino writes that sexual identities are “simultaneously crucial and insignificant”--if today's actions help us remember just how insignificant, from a social level, sexual identity can be, then it is all time well spent.

I think the social conservatives are going to take some reminding, though.

Back in 1998(?), when civil unions were being discussed in the courts here, I got a letter from some concerned folks in Hawaii. In fact, I believe that every resident of Vermont got this letter, which spelled out, in tones of deep anxiety from thousands of miles away, the moral, social, and economic catastrophe that would ensue in Vermont if same-sex civil unions were allowed. We would be hit, very likely, by volcanos and tidal waves and coqui frogs and spam musubi and other bad things that happen to poor sinners in the Hawaiian imagination. We are, of course, still waiting.

As of this morning, I see some rumblings that this time the state's economy will be destroyed for sure, the flaming flyswatter of vengeance will fall on us from the skies, etc. That's not just a credibility lapse, it misses the point: the marriage bill passed so easily precisely because there was no fallout from civil unions. All social movements could take a lesson from this, though at the moment I'm thinking of Peak Oil folks: do not warn people about the plagues of locusts unless there will actually be plagues of locusts. Or society will stop paying attention.

Written May 23
Prop 8 in Califoria now has the flavor of being the last major legal victory that homophobes will get to have. Already on “second-wave-feminist” blogs, (Ooooh, I hate that taxonomy...) some married and civil-unionized queers are asserting their own normativity as against polyamorists, the leather crowd, and so forth. While that reversal happens in every liberation movement, it's worth noting as a sign that we are on the down-slope. As recently as five years ago, it would be inconceivable to see a married gay man asserting that his sex life was socially (and legally!) vetted, while the punks doing ____ were just deranged perverts. However ugly such sentiments are, they are important cultural markers.

From the other side of the fence, the paladins of heterosexuality are getting forced into ever-sillier terrain. But hell, they chose it themselves. The best conceivable rhetoric against gay marriage would probably have been some sort of hybrid of a precautionary-principle and a hypersensitivity to childhood development; either of those things might have dazzled much of the left. But most of the right-wing rhetoric has been distinguishable only in tone from Fred Phelps: gays are unnatural, against civilization, and against the bible. Traditional marriage occurs in a man-woman, boy-girl situation.

I got to meet Phelps, actually, or at least his harem. The man has no security; when the God Hates Fags touring troupe came to play Montpelier, back in civil-union days, I emailed him to ask if I could join the fun. He said yes; rather incoherently if I recall.

I had been entranced by the fact that in several of Phelps publications, and in images of his wives/daughters/parshioners holding up signs, the phrase “NO NOT MOCKED” appeared, alongside “GOD HATES FAGS,” “THANK GOD FOR AIDS,” and “ALL FAGS BURN IN HELL,” and pictures of Matthew Shepherd in hellfire, etc. Why “NO NOT MOCKED?” If it was a biblical reference, I couldn't figure it out—the tauting by the soldiers? Galatians 6:7? Anyway, I thought, here is a man so far down in his own crazy he will travel hundreds of miles to protest something, and then hold up a sign no one can understand.

So I, feeling very clever, joined the Westboro Baptist hateful harem of homophobes on the steps of the capitol in Montpelier. It was...wow, I have been to a lot of much larger protests, gotten tear gassed and thrown around and played all the usual games. But I have never seen this level of emotional intensity in a protest within the United States. There were only about nine people in Phelps' contingent, most of them teenagers, all of them crying. Phelps himself was hiding in the van; I didn't see him. The counter-protesters, who numbered about 150, were shouting savageries (Vermonters did not use the kiss-in tactic that Phelps has often been met with.) There seemed to be little question that fourteen-year-old girls raised in scary-land and trucked across country by their pastor/father/uncle/husband/whatever to wave signs were, indeed, an appropriate target for anti-anti-queer vituperation. And in the background, of course, Bread and Puppet was doing their best to make things even more surreal. Which they do well.

My initial sign (I had a sort of flip-board set-up), was “GOD HATES FAGS,” which allowed me to join the group, and then I switched to the meaningless but still acceptable “NO NOT MOCKED.” People were crying and screaming all around me, at me—the girl on my immediate right was shaking visibly, I would say with fear rather than cathartic rage. (We were completely surrounded). She murmured some desperate overture to me for solidarity and comfort, something like “They really hate us, don't they?” I'm sure I agreed; it was obviously true.

I switched up to my third sign “GOD HATES RADISHES,” and got a few smiles from the crowd. In sequence, if I recall, I went to “ALL RADISH BURN IN HELL,” “DOWN DEATH TO RADISH,” and lastly an excerpt from one of my favorite stories in the Tsurezuregusa of Yoshida Kenko, “WE ARE THE TWO RADISHES THAT YOU HAVE EATEN SO FAITHFULLY.” I held that sign up for the bulk of the protest, invisible, of course, to my compatriots standing alongside me.

Again, I was young and I thought I was being clever and absurdist. It kind of worked—quite a number of people saw this, laughed, and I hope had a moment to reflect on the absurdity—rather than the hatefulness—of all the other messages our little knot of maniacs were holding up. But it didn't work swimmingly. I remember one woman, completely distraught, her face covered in tears, screaming at me from twelve inches away “What does that mean? What does it mean?”

But, you know, satire is doomed in comparison with reality. These days in South Carolina, the anti-gay battalions have re-entrenched over some stupid domestic-violence education bill. Conservatives argued, successfully, that mandatory DV education in the schools would become a locus of the “gay agenda,” and then they stipulated that the bill would only mention heterosexual couples. The response from SC queer-rights folks is predictable: DV affects everyone, how can you leave out these people, etc. (Neither side seems to question the efficacy of this program.) But the piece de resistance comes from Rep. Joan Brady, who sponsored the bill, explaining why it had to be restricted to heterosexual couples (yes, I know her facts are wrong):

The fact is, this is a gender-specific, abusive behavior. The overwhelming predominance of dating abuse occurs in a traditional or heterosexual relationship.... Traditional domestic violence occurs in a man-woman, boy-girl situation.

No, they are not mocked. One can't mock them, really, not even with the Tsurezuregusa. They do the job themselves, so much better than anyone else ever could...

Survey on the Nature of Consent, part II

2009-05-10T20:07:00.000-07:00

(This is a bit of a rough draft, I may come back in here to tweak it.)

The survey actually presented was the sixth version of the concept; both the content and the interface went through several revisions as I gathered feedback from people. The content of the stories reflects an earlier study, which I have shelved, to simply compile a comparative list of consent tests. Some of the results of that study are detailed here and here.

Inquiries into subjective ordinal comparisons are usually hampered by the sheer effort of generating enough data to be relevant. Preference curves and other ordinal phenomena usually have to be intuited from theory, as it would be tedious to generate empirical evidence for a long series of similar pairwise comparisons from a single person. However, where there have been empirical approaches to ordinal preference—as in behavioral economics—they have often revealed patterns that are markedly different from those predicted by theory alone.

Ranking techniques facilitate this type of study, as they generate geometrically more information for a given number of examples than do pairwise comparison. For instance, a subject ranking 10 stories generates 45 comparisons; ranking 50 stories generates 1225 comparisons. (c = (s²-s)/2). A visual interface for ranking stories allows the subject to provide a great deal of information for a relatively short amount of time of effort. (The chief limiting factor here is the cognitive exhaustion of the subjects, which many people reported at about s>25.)

Ranking surveys can be achieved using a computer program, as in this case, or in a face-to-face interview by presenting the subject with cards and asking them to place them in order. Rankings can also be achieved by asking subjects to number a list; this has several disadvantages, though, in terms of cognitive effort and the bias created by presentation order.

A ranking system that allows elements to be rated as equivalent also provides a greater diversity of possible ontologies to be expressed by subjects. If people view consent as a linear continuum, they can rank elements in the form A>B>C>D>E>F. If they view consent as a binary, they can rank in the form A=B=C > D=E=F. If they view consent as having tiers, they can rank in the form A=B > C=D > E=F, or the like. The survey does not need to presume one of these options. It does presume that consent is visualized as a single variable, not a bivalent or multivalent space. In fact, my hypothesis was that people's varying perceptions of consent would not resolve into a single variable, but it is commonplace for us to describe the concept this way.

Anticipating that the survey population would not be a representative sample of any larger population, I looked for analyses that would provide multiple evaluations of the same comparison. This allows us to focus on “consensus evaluations” on which no subject disagrees. This does not eliminate the bias produced where certain opinion groups are not represented at all, but it does eliminate the spurious over-weighting of groups that responded to the survey in disproportionate numbers.

Since any two stories can be directly compared, we can envision the stories as vertices in a directed graph. Each pairwise comparison between two stories produces a directional evaluation for one edge. With s=500 stories altogether, there are c=124,750 different possible pairwise comparisons or “edges.” For the s=15 marker stories, there are c=105 possible edges. Not all edges have been evaluated, but the anti-edges are randomly distributed. In particular, when we aggregate the presence of the subject's evaluations between marker stories, or between the 485 non-marker stories, the output closely resembles a very dense Erdős-Rényi random graph.

Most of these edges are apt to be redundant. I define an edge AC as redundant if an open walk ABC exists, as in the figure below. Redundant edges will not be shown in the diagrams; since they tend to the evaluations of their respective open walks, I will note wherever edge evaluations are not redundantly evaluated.

In my initial analysis, I will be focusing primarily on two kinds of meta-evaluations: primary consensus and secondary consensus. A primary consensus occurs when two or more subjects evaluate XZ, giving it the same directionality, and no other subject disagrees. A secondary consensus occurs when the following conditions are met:

One subject evaluates the edge X>Z.
No subject evaluates the edge Z>X.
No pair of subjects evaluating the edges Xy and yZ, for any y, create an open path XyZ that disagrees with the direct evaluation.

Where we have a relatively large amount of data, as with the marker stories, we can rely on analyses of primary consensus. Secondary consensus (or even lower levels) allows us to utilize relatively sparse data. Both techniques, however, provide a meaningful an intuitive output. They give us a sub-graph of evaluated edges such that we can argue no one in the sample disagrees with these evaluations. Such graphs, then, illustrate a lowest-common-denominator approach to the variable being measured, in this case understandings of consent.

A possible weakness in this approach is that an individual (or opinion group) that has not evaluated many pairs may simply never have had the opportunity to “veto” a particular claim or set of claims. This problem is especially noticeable when the claim is described by a very short walk. For an open walk A>.....>B that goes through w edges, the odds that an individual comparison has the opportunity to veto it for primary consensus are w²-w) / 2 )/ c. For secondary consensus the odds of a veto are very much higher, but they are not randomly distributed, as they depend partially on the evaluations of other subjects.

Thus, for any two stories XZ with a relatively large value of w, an individual or subgroup that has evaluated a significant number of stories has had likely had the opportunity to veto the meta-evaluation of XZ. So although the survey population is non-random, we can identify a number of groups that have had essentially equivalent opportunities to cancel out each other's opinions, at least for long walks.

Survey on The Nature of Consent, part I

2009-05-10T19:44:00.000-07:00

Description

Between January and April of 2009, I designed and administered an on-line survey asking subjects to rank a series of vignettes. Each story described events for which a particular consent claim was then made, and the survey asked the subjects to rank these stories by evaluating the extent to which this claim is “a good example of consent.” Story #245 provides a quick example of this format:

A brigand surprises John at the edge of a woods. The brigand points a pistol at John and demands that he surrender his purse. John does so. John has consented to give the brigand the purse.

The subjects went through a preliminary (optional) questionnaire page. Invitations to this survey were e-mailed to several dozen people, with a request to forward the invitations on to others. Some subjects also placed links to the survey on internet fora. The resulting pool of subjects is relatively diverse, but clearly non-random, limiting the ways in which we can analyze the results.

After this preliminary stage, the survey algorithm presented a series of stories in a two-part random order. The instructions asked the subjects to rank these stories by forming a longer and longer list, with better examples of consent at one end, and worse examples at the other. Stories could be ranked vertically (A>B) or horizontally (A=B), using a visual interface. The subject could terminate the survey after ranking any number of stories.

The survey consisted of 500 possible stories. Some of these stories were “freestanding,” including a number of more or less well-known consent scenarios from mythology and literature: the sirens in the Odyssey; Martin Luther's Hier stehe ich, ich kann nicht anders; the Brigand in Social Contract (above); two intimidation scenes from The Godfather; the enslavement in Story of O; the eponymous dilemma in Sophie's Choice; and so forth.

Other stories were designed to form serial progressions in which only one element of the story would vary at a time. To take a simplified instance: “He signed the contract” vs. “He signed the contract and two witnesses signed as well.” In many cases, two or more serial progressions were combined to form a matrix of various dimensions. There were about 48 such series of stories; the overlapping makes an exact count a matter of interpretation. This story set is by no means “comprehensive,” nor am I sure what that would entail. It does, however, capture a large range of possible consent phenomena.

Finally, fifteen stories were tagged as “marker stories,” with the hope of creating a denser subset of the overall data. These stories are chosen to represent a wide range of topics and likely reactions, and to be mnemonically intuitive and distinguishable from each other in discussion. They are as follows:

84	An impoverished child working in a dangerous factory.
119	A remote tribe becoming dependent on industrial goods.
153	A woman reading her favorite poem.
154	A researcher gaining access to a manuscript.
169	A consumer consenting to distant factory conditions.
181	A woman is raped by a strong but unarmed assailant, who is a stranger.
208	A 10-year old unschooler studying.
210	A 16-year student studying in a compulsory school.
245	John being robbed by an armed brigand
250	The “offer he couldn't refuse” in The Godfather. (The horse head scene.)
251	Martin Luther saying “Ich kann nicht anders.”
292	Consent of the governed to be taxed in a democracy.
422	Revolutionary is arrested after denying validity of the court prosecuting him.
441	A drug-addicted prostitute's relationship with her pimp.
492	A secessionist is arrested for treason by the government he is seceding from.

Every person taking the survey was initially presented with two random marker stories; from then on, all stories (including the marker stories) were presented in random order, without repetition. Thus almost every person taking the survey compared at least two marker stories to each other, even if they made no other comparisons. (Exceptions could emerge in cases where people deleted one or more marker stories.)

Hubber Him (Him? Ha!)

2009-05-10T05:19:00.000-07:00

“I dream'd a dream to-night”
“And so did I."
“Well what was yours?”
“That dreamers often lie.”
-Romeo and Mercutio

Another oneiric ramble.

This morning I dreamed that I was reading a text, a sort of novel. It was in soft focus, as it were, I don't think I was actually parsing words. I think that the story was about two gamblers on a boat, one of whom had lost everything except for a hardboiled egg that was sitting on the sideboard. (It's probably worth noting that I have a strong aversion to hardboiled eggs, which I associate with mayonnaise.) And I think that at the moment of focus I want to describe below, the losing gambler was ready to leave the table, and the winner was encouraging him to wager the egg as a final stake. I say I think these things, because they are actually quod erat demonstrandum. As LeGuin shows beautifully in Some Thoughts on Narrative, the mind is quite capable of constructing a narrative from random or at least unknowably patterned “primary material”—in her example, a crocodile and the roof of a castle. Really, my fascination with oneirology is borne from a suspicion that the mind is always constructing such narratives, that our sense of causality is largely the outcome of this very process, but only in dreaming do we get a chance to see it happen “in the raw.”

Anyway, at this juncture, the dialog in the text comes into much more focus, viz:

“Hubber him.”
“Him? Ha!”

Now, in these two lines, I was quite sure, hubber is an archaic verb meaning “to fetch” or “to bring,” and the use of “him” instead of “it” in reference to the egg dates the whole text to a moment just after the Norman conquest, when English grammar was dabbling with the possibility of using gender to refer to objects. I experienced this, in the dream, as a kind of eureka moment—the story I was reading was from clearly from the 11th or 12th century. Who knew?

But.....there never was such a verb as “hubber,” and with few exceptions, English never did use gendered pronouns for inanimates. More to the point, in my waking life, I know all that. So what is going on here?

An extreme version of LeGuin's view might be that the dream started off with only the lallation of “hubberhimhimha,” and my entire narrative for it is constructed in an outward spiral: first parsing it into words, or in this case quasi-words; assigning those words meanings; inventing a context in which those meanings would be relevant; and then explaining away the residual problems with my first explanation. This is appealing but not very parsimonious. Most obviously, if my dream-architect is faced with signifier “him,” it would seem unlikely—inefficient?—for it to invent an new and false grammar in order to parse the signified. Much easier to say that “hubber him” means “annoy him,” him being the fireman. Or whatever. No, it seems more likely that at the moment the dream-architect encountered the signifier, the signified was already fixed, and the work of the architect is to explain, to the most credulous audience possible, why “he” refers to a boiled egg.

If that's the case, though, we could still imagine that the primary material of this dream was as minimal as, for instance: a rocking motion (must be a boat); a sense of revulsion (must be a hardboiled egg); and “hubberhimhimha.” Given that wealth of sensations, my entire dream is a plausible explanation.

I have no doubt that I am currently dreaming in text because I have been hitting the archives pretty hard lately. When I am doing a lot of data analysis, I dream in spreadsheets, and when I was working on trading algorithms, I dreamt in graphs. But there is an additional possibility. By presenting me with text or some other explicitly static presentation of a narrative, I think the dream-architect is fighting against my lucidity. If I am dreaming that I am lost in the woods, I have a great deal of voluntary discretion to move around, climb a tree, declare that I'm not lost but am, instead, on a treasure hunt, and so forth. In a very lucid dream, I can even “break the rules” of the context, insisting on a change of setting, or the ability to fly, or that I am not a backpacker but a mastodon, or whatever I like. “I” experience this as volition, the architect must functionally experience it as a great deal of extra work. By contrast, if I am presented with the same narrative as text, I am unlikely to demand any rewrites, and the architect can proceed unimpaired. (If you don't like the hylopathy, let me rephrase: those heuristics that create the sensations “I” interpret as a dream have to generate a great deal more information if they are responsive to “my” choices than if they aren't.)

It would be interesting to know if other lucid dreamers tend to dream in text. To the best of my knowledge, there is not a great deal of research on lucid dreaming, and what is it out there seems to be clouded by a sort of sensationalistic “teach yourself to realize all your fantasies” self-help discourse. I think lucid dreaming is kind of a minor curse, and I have no doubt it is related to other sleep disorders (I have always had long waves of insomnia). Because the manifestation of a night full of lucid dreaming, however nifty keen it sounds, is that one retains to some large degree a sense of volition and control throughout the night as well as the day. And this probably subverts whatever psychic work dreams ought to be doing—or, I should say, whatever it is that dreams do that human psychic norms have come to rely on.

Many people experience dreams of waking up, getting up and going to work or school. People often categorize these dreams as different from other dreams, in that they seem to have more verisimilitude. Often people describe such dreams as terminating in deep surprise or even disappointment that the dream wasn't real, which is a bit unusual. The same person may dream that they are the mermaid empress of the Seven Seas, with musical accompaniment and X-rated seashells, and they are not surprised when that dream ends. My guess is that this “daily routine” dreams are in fact a dilute form of lucid dreaming, and what sets them apart is that the usually non-lucid dreamer is experiencing volition during the dream. Not much volition, of course: they are dreaming their way through a routine, not an adventure. But enough volition that it is abruptly jarring when it stops.

I remember, for instance, that as an adolescent, I was entirely in control of my erotic dreams, and this caused me pretty serious distress. I had a notion in my waking life that homophobia and sexism were in some way causally related to people's fantasies. (Not my idea at all; I think I probably got it from MacKinnon and Dworkin, through some pop-feminist intermediaries.) I was a deeply self-righteous thirteen-year-old boy dreaming about sex all the time. I had a complete sense of control over the content of those dreams, and I felt ethically obliged to give all the possibilities equal time. As if a preponderance of heterosexual acts in my dreamspace would be a form of discrimination, like redlining. I spent a lot of time intentionally dreaming my way through activities that weren't erotic to me, at all. This is a particular neurosis that I suppose opaque dreamers are spared, though I imagine most lucid dreamers are spared it, too....POPDH...

As an older teenager, I remember that for about two years I would invite commentators in on my dreams; usually either Freud or the Grand Inquistor from Brothers Karamazov. (God, I know, I know...) I would let the dream play out unhindered while I volitionally discussed it with the commentator, rather like Mystery Science Theatre. Often the dream would play as text, and the discussion would seem to be audio.

III

I am an idiot and don't deserve to have a blog. Here's why.

The evening before the hard-boiled egg dream, I was at an academic awards ceremony. I find events like that poignant and fascinating, marinated in neurotic power dynamics and amnesia. (Is this all an ancient medieval ritual or did we invent it last spring? Who knows?) And it also fascinates me to watch the academy, which believes that it more or less invented and copyrighted the idea of “being conscious of privilege” go through all their ritual incantations to induct new adepts into their incredibly privileged cabal. I love them to bits, but at a collective level it seems so un-self-aware.

Anyway, on this particular evening I was especially having fun, because one of the award recipients was a transman whose visual performance is, for the purposes of 2009, pretty much female. And this is not the Oscars; the MC is doing all the talking. He—the recipient—just stands there and looks pretty...much...female. While it is always fun to watch the audience watching the pronoun game, I was especially in love with this setup, where the labor of gender presentation had been displaced almost entirely on someone else.

So, obviously, my mind was already thinking about disjunct pronouns when I fell asleep that night. Which means that perhaps I did start with hubberhimhimha, and I was recycling the notion that “him” would not refer to an obvious male entity. But I completely spaced that. Now I am back where I started. A good place to stop.

Rhaposdy I

2009-05-09T13:40:00.000-07:00

“If it be your will / to let me sing...”

-LC

Half my life ago, I looked out across the valley—this valley, the same valley that is succored today under the implacable spring thunderstorms—and I had a vision which I can still remember as if it were a photograph lying before me. I saw the valley stripped of its soil. I was, at the time, fascinated by the pedology of the farm, and it is an interesting place to look at pedology, since the South cliff, rather unusually, took the glacier head-on. In this vision, the overwrought dolomite topography that my mind had been working out in a logical fashion leapt into the most visceral kind of reality, and I was standing there, on another planet, our abiotic, anhydronic earth, its curves of solid rock unscarred by waterborne ions and lascivious tree roots. The soil we disdain so much, which we are made of, had never formed. The South cliff stood a thousand feet proud; there had never been a glacier.

And it was gorgeous. I wept.

Beauty is a human construct, or at least a vertebrate construct, but it transcends us. There will be beauty, our beauty, after the vertebrates have taken their final bows, and their would be beauty, our beauty, if we had never come on stage at all. I don't believe in these abstractions, these eidolons. I really don't. In my own little time on the stage, I think that my intellectual task, my cargo as the Zapatistas would say, is to destroy and annul the abstract. But I feel that abstract beauty, like a knife in my soul. And I want to feel that stab wound, though I don't believe any of it.

I have spent most of a decade making whatever money I make from the world of stonecarving. It is a cynical world. We want to sell you a graven image in calcium carbonate to reify your grief, and we know very well how long calcium carbonate will last under the exhalate of Detroit and Beijing. And we know that tectosilocates, which we would also be happy to sell you, will last a little longer. But we know better than anyone that it will all be reduced to soil; look on us, ye mighty, and renew your grief. In the end all stonecarving is subsumed by pedology.

As I write this, the ionosphere is venting the largess of its wattage into the South cliff. Still tall enough to receive those caresses, despite the glacier. The sky groans; the tectosilicate gravestones I have built my house out of moan in response. That eroticism would exist even if there were no soil, no planaria, no cuttlefish, no philosophy. In the mind of my 16-year old self, an unnameable intelligence watches that other lightning, striking the stone without treetops to humbly guide it in. But the same work is done in this reality. Exuberance is bliss; turbulence is mind. And I, in my frailty and my pajamas, I am an epiphenomenon of the lust of the lightning, which would be here whether or not my planet had blessed with water......

PNGed!

2009-05-08T07:41:00.000-07:00

Jacqui Smith, secretary of the UK's home office, has just handed Michael Savage the free publicity of a lifetime. He's banned from the UK, along with, apparently, 21 other people, ranging from Fred Phelps (whose harem / church I've had the honor of protesting alongside of. Sort of.) to Kashmiri militants to Russian skinheads. Smith writes:

“Coming to the UK is a privilege, and I refuse to extend that privilege to individuals who abuse our standards and values to undermine our way of life. Therefore, I do not hesitate to name and shame those who foster extremist views, as I want them to know that they are not welcome here."

Has she lost her mind? Obviously, as long as there are states, there will be (and arguably should be) efforts to filter out dangerous people at the border. And that means there will also be (though arguably there shouldn't be) efforts to filter out political extremists. The UK has always done that. The US has always done that, giving rise to a certain bureaucratic hilarity about which years it was OK to be a Nazi in*, etc. Everybody does that.

Such filters usually don't work very well. You can't do a blood test for extremism. So they are generally used when countries want to send a signal. Saying that you'll arrest Pinochet or Kissinger if they set foot on your island doesn't do much to stop the spread of militarism, but it does send a message. Saying that you won't allow CP members to enter the country will only stop the four people dumb enough enough that they check the “are you a member of the Communist Party” box; but it does send a message.

What message is Smith sending? Maybe that she watches a lot of YouTube. Many of the dudes on her list seem to have a running theme of viral videos. And perhaps...perhaps that makes a kind of sense. Savage is certainly a more visible face of extremism than some far-right guy who merely makes comments on internet forums. But it is absolutely impossible to imagine that this list of 22 folks is in some way an objective or even a coherent list of the most dangerous, celebrity-staus extremists in the world today. Even though it contains names that inspire such worldwide dread and recognition as Pavel Skachevsky(?) Moreover, the list contains a chunk of people who have committed or organized acts of mass violence, and also mere propagandists like Savage and Phelps. The odd conclusion is that most political violence is not as extreme as talk radio. If you want to bump Michael Savage off this list and you don't have your own radio show, you'd better kill at least four or five people. One or two won't do the trick at all.

So....total fail. The only message that Home Office succeeds in sending is that they spend lots of time on the internet and are big fans of their own arbitrary authority. And now we innocent Americans, if that's not an oxymoron, have to listen to Savage's righteous indignantion. Well, more of it, anyway. Thanks a lot....

*The problem dates are 3/23/33 to 4/8/45, BTW. If you were a Nazi after that, the line goes, then at least you didn't wuss out.

The Silence of the AMVs

2009-05-01T06:40:00.000-07:00

The Marx Brothers, at least apocryphally, got a cease-and-desist letter from Warner Brothers for using the word Casablanca in their movie A Night in Casablanca. Groucho responded “I'll sue for using the word 'Brothers.'” Nothing changes. Time Warner has just bust down the door of YouTube, guns blazing, and the aftermath is eerie and spectral. Hundreds or thousands of music videos are...not gone, always but either silent or re-tracked with the wrong music. The pattern is something like the Tenth Plague: the firstborn sons, the videos tracked with “official” studio recordings, have been silenced. Live recordings are left mainly unscathed.

This is censorship, of course—we should never fail to recognize censorship behind its various excuses, for there will always be an excuse or two out in front. In this case, the excuses for censorship are well-established legalisms and much more dubious consumer ethics. But in a simply aesthetic light, Warner Brother's move does not so much resemble censorship as iconoclasm, mutilation, mere vandalism. And it is, in that light, very, very stupid. There are books that are not in my local library because one entity or another has conspired to prevent me having them. I barely miss them; it takes a strong effort of imagination for me to even believe that they exist. But there are other books in my local library that have had controversial passages cut out of them, and this screams at me with pathos, like the old Chinese Buddha statues with their heads knocked off, or all Hellenic and Roman nudes that got penectomies in the Vatican collection. Vandalism, even vandalism at the behest of the artist or their assignees, calls attention to itself in a way that the perfect censorship of disappearance does not.

The producer of a movie, or television segment, or music video is certainly taught to think that they “own the content,” and while I believe this is a specious and confused idea, it is one that we are all quite familiar with*. But many—perhaps most—of the videos being targeted on YouTube are Anime Music Videos (AMVs), fan-dubbed videos, machinima, or the like. Perhaps less commonly, there are wholly new videos created to existing music. Here I am thinking of the inspired Daft Hands, which has survived, or Birthday Greetings from Joe Crocker, which has been destroyed (but was, once upon a time, the funniest thing on earth). And then there are complete or partial re-trackings of a given video, such as the various “literal video” series, videos with fan-added commentary. And then there are pieces that manage to violate copyright law by wholly recreating a piece of owned content.

It's telling to use my sister as an example, because it allows me some numbers. Of the 80-odd YouTube hits for her, something like three or four are clearly “official” videos, one is a (wholly new) animated short, two of them are sequences of still images matched to the lyrics, one is a live-action sequence with scripted subtitles, and one uses still images of Anais overlaid with an original audio track. So even in a fairly short run of videos, we have quite a diverse pirate ecology, and all of it is vulnerable to cease-and-desist letters.

Now, I will ignore the straight-up piracy examples, since only doctrinaire anarchists and everyone under 25 thinks they're legit. Moreover, the property-rights incentive-based argument against piracy, though arrogant nonsense, makes the accurate point that the content in question can be purchased on the open market, usually for relatively small amounts of money. This forces the downloader into the difficult position of arguing that their need to hear Free Bird is legally compelling, but also not worth $1 to them. But this situation does not apply to AMVs and the like. To take one example among myriads: in April 2006, OrionHui created an AMV called D.H.T. - Listen To Your Heart (Game Music Video). In June of that year Warner Brothers axed it for using their music. Now, D.H.T. - LTYH (GMV) is no longer extant as a piece of art. You can't legally buy it from OrionHui. You can't buy it from Warner Brothers. And YouTube won't distribute it. It is gone like a burned book.

At this point, the demons of high culture start whispering in our ears that D.H.T. - LTYH (GMV) probably wasn't a huge loss to civilization. Pay them no mind. Influential art usually overwhelms for awhile the art that is derived from it, even across the boundaries of genre. (Thomas Pakenham describes the Monacute House yew hedge as having “upstaged Emma Thompson” in Sense and Sensibility: topiary beats cinematography. Etc.) But that is simply to say that, as the sign in my boss's studio reads, “Most Art Sucks.” Of course most work is inferior to the works it is derived from, because the secondary creators tend to choose strong pieces to work off of, and tend to regress towards the mean. Those are the odds of the game, but they do not preclude the occasional Picasso or Dickinson. And it is insane to suppose, sight unseen, that a whole genre of art has nothing of value. The Mayan literary corpus probably wasn't that interesting either, and when you've seen one Buddha, you really have seen them all....

So, let us ignore the legal and contractual frameworks that have gotten us to this particular round of book-burning. I want to focus on the issue from a purely aesthetic lens. If the good people at Warner Brothers or other labels decide to cut out the audio from such a video (let's say an AMV), they have to be making one of the following claims about the AMV qua art:

That the AMV is not a piece of art, or any other sort of culturally important “content.”
That the AMV is a piece of art, but it is not a new piece of art; it is already within the scope of a previous act of artistic creation.
That the AMV is a piece of art, and is a new piece of art, but is illegal and should be suppressed.
That the video (audio) portion of the AMV is a piece of art, but the audio (video) portion of the work is an extraneous and illegal addition.

There are hardly any other possibilities. But all of these options are either absurd or dark beyond imagination. #1 and #3 place final, definitive control over the scope of artistic creation in the hands of corporate lawyers. Even contemplating this possibility causes my dear Bertrand Russell to nearly have an aneurysm in Proposed Roads to Freedom, and in any event the United States pretty much discarded it in the Brâncuşi case, back in the day. #4 is patently absurd. The audio track Harder Better Faster Stronger is not an extraneous addition to Daft Hands, it is an integral and coordinating element. It could no more be stripped out than Andy Warhol could have stripped out the brand names from his paintings. And where the AMVs have been silenced, they speak loudly: the music was integral to most of them--not all, perhaps, but most.

This leaves us with the second claim, which is indeed the legal basis for the Night in Casablanca gambit. An artist, through the creative magic of employing enough lawyers, is thought to morally encompass not only their work and replications of their work, but also derivative works or works that utilize their work in order to achieve a new effect.

But....all art is derivative. If we back-cast this sort of ethical position, let's say twenty-thousand years, Warner Brothers' lawyers should have just secured the rights to the idea of metaphor, the color palette, and chord progressions. And then they could have happily sued the shit out of everyone for millennia. That they did not do so is, in their own representation of today's legal scenario, an historical anachronism. And so artistic creation as we have come to know it is not accounted for by copyright law, it is grandfathered in.

------------

(*--One of the most lovely legalisms I've ever heard anyone actually get through their mouth was in asking a community television director whether I could re-post a video I had made in their facility on the internet. I believe she said, quite sympathetically: "Since you are the creator of the video, you have certain legal rights regarding it that I am not allowed to discuss with you unless you ask me a specific set of questions, which I can't tell you." Because, y'know, that encourages artistic production.)

Abecedaria

2009-04-26T20:46:00.000-07:00

Many critics have pointed out that Franz Kafka has come to own the letter K, although he always professed to dislike it. He had the odds on his side, and he worked it a bit for the prize. The hero(?) of The Trial, that brain-sucking masterpiece, is known only as Josef K., and in The Castle the hero is simply K. Moreover, K is the 5th most uncommon letter in the English langauge—it's the 9th rarest letter in the original German—so he had an advantage in terms of letter frequency.

I have been thinking about this as I use YouTube, obsessively, as my radio. Two years ago, during a fit of insanity, I stopped listening to the radio, and YouTube is my replacement. So I have come to think of celebrity as a function of search-box-suggestion prominence. Madonna and Shakira score a 1; that is to say, if I type “M” into YouTube's search bar, Madonna is immediately suggested. Sarah Palin is a 2: I have to type “SA”. Jesus, Noam Chomsky, and Nixon all score 3. Karl Marx and Ronald Reagan are 4. Kissinger and Joan of Arc are 6. And so on.

But if we focus on the most impertinent suggestions, the ones offered on the basis of a single letter, YouTube gives us the following alphabet:

A is for Akon
B is for Beyonce
C is for Chris Brown
D is for Disturbia
E is for Eminem
F is for Funny
G is for Green Day
H is for Hot n Cold
I is for If I Were a Boy
J is for Just Dance
K is for Katy Perry
L is for Lil Wayne
M is for Michael Jackson
N is for Nickelback
O is for Obama
P is for Pink
Q is for Queen
R is for Rihanna
S is for Single Ladies
T is for Twilight
U is for Usher
V is for Vanessa Hudgens
W is for Womanizer
X is for X Factor
Y is for Young Jeezy
Z is for Zac Efron

And Google provides a similar list:

A is for Amazon
B is for Bank of America
C is for Chase
D is for Dell
E is for Ebay
F is for Facebook
G is for Google.com
H is for House
I is for Images
J is for Jobs
K is for Kayak
L is for Lost
M is for MSN
N is for News
O is for Obama
P is for Paypal
Q is for Quotes
R is for Recipies
S is for Skype
T is for Target
U is for UPS
V is for Verizon
W is for Weather
X is for Xbox 360
Y is for Yahoo
Z is for Zune

Please to note: Obama rules the O in both abecedaria, and Beyonce owns not only B, but also I on YouTube. And hundreds of clever authors to the contrary, Kafka no longer has a grip on the K.

Halloween at Times Square

2009-04-22T15:27:00.000-07:00

In the aftermath of my grandfather's funeral, we were ransacking the photo albums and I came across a binder containing his memoirs. In the frontispiece, it was addressed to his children and grandchildren, but as far as we could tell, no one knew it was there. I can't imagine a better parting gift.

Wayne's memoirs extend back three and even four generations before himself, and carry forward only into his twenties. They revealed, among other things, that his mother's family were all German immigrants, fleeing militarization under Bismarck. Family histories are, in my view, usually bullshit—even the events of a few weeks ago are transmuted and bifurcated in the telling. But in at least one version of the family history, Wayne never mentioned that he was half German, and the memoirs seem to corroborate a reluctance to identify with his German heritage.

Wayne's memoirs join with a manuscript from my mother's side of the family, the Memoirs of A Plain Engineer, written by my great-grandfather, Julius Herschel Serra, a tunnel engineer. I want to excerpt the introduction:

ON MAY 15, 1966, I WAS EIGHTY YEARS OLD. MY YOUNGEST DAUGHTER, LAURAINE WARFIELD AND HER HUSBAND, GEORGE, GAVE ME A BIRTHDAY PARTY AT WHICH WERE MY NEAREST CHILDREN, RELATIVES AND FRIENDS. IN ADDITION TO NICE PRESENTS WHICH THEY GAVE ME I GAVE MYSELF “UNEXURGATED” COPIES OF “MEMOIRS OF CASANOVA” AS TRANSLATED BY ARTHER MACHEN AND “THE BOOK OF A THOUSAND NIGHTS AND A NIGHT” TRANSLATED BY SIR RICHARD BURTON....I HAVE USED THESE IN A POOR SORT OF WAY AS A GUIDE FOR MY EFFORT AND HAVE INTERPOLATED MY IDEAS ON SOME SUBJECTS, EVEN AS THEY DID. AS MY DAUGHTER NORA COMMENTED ON READING MY FIRST DRAFT, “WHAT ABOUT HIS WOMEN AND HIS MISTAKES?”, I HAVE INCLUDED INCIDENTS SOME OF WHICH I AM NOT PROUD. INCIDENTALLY BURTON FINISHED “THE NIGHTS” THE YEAR I WAS BORN, 1886.

Julius' manuscript is an instrumentally thought-out document. The first 25 pages primarily describe his childhood and his career, with most of the attention focusing on the nuances of tunnel engineering and his career therein. In this sense, Julius' writing resemble Wayne's memoirs: Wayne was an electrical engineer. Wayne's writing is broader in scope but also pays very close attention to the workings of various machines. For instance, Julius writes:

MY NEXT JOB WAS TAKING OVER THE EXTENSION OF THE STEINWAY TUNNEL IN 41^ST ST. FROM 42^ND TO A POINT NEAR THE EIGHTH AVE SUBWAY. THIS WAS DUE TO THE PROMOTION OF STEPHEN SCHMIDT, A VERY CAPABLE NATURALIZED GERMAN TO THE POSITION OF ASST. DIVISION ENGINEER, LEAVING THE JOB OF SECTION ENGINEER OPEN. THE JOB WAS ABOUT 60% COMPLTE BUT STILL INVOLVED THE COMPLETION OF A NEW STATION UNDER THE EXISTING TIMES SQUARE STATION AND CONNECTING PASSAGEWAYS, BUILDING NEW DUCT LINES ON THE SURFACE NEW MANHOLES AND THE RESTORATION OF STREET SURFACES. MANY NEW ELECTRIC AND TELEPHONE CABLES HAD TO BE PULLED IN. A CONSIDERABLE AMOUNT OF THE WORK HAD TO BE DONE AT NIGHT....

In between such paragraphs, we learn almost nothing whatsoever about his wife and children. However, we do note seventeen little superscript numbers, as if for endnotes. And indeed, there are nine pages of endnotes, perhaps the addition that Nora suggested. Some of them are afterthoughts, some of them are political commentary (Julius believed in racial integration, family planning, and temperance), but most are about sex, and/or his troubles with premature ejaculate. Endnote #4 is typical:

THIS PLANT WAS AT THE INTAKE SHAFT NEAR AN ISLAND ABOUT 5 MILES FROM THE CITY. IT WAS NECESSARY AND ALSO ENJOYABLE TO GO THERE BY ICEBOAT. THE SANITARY ENGINEER FOR THE CITY WAS VERY CAPABLE.

HE AND TWO BROTHERS HAD BEEN STUNTED BY MYELITIS BUT HAD A NORMAL SIZED SISTER WHO KEPT HOUSE FOR THEM AND I HAD SOME ENJOYABLE MEALS WITH THEM.

AT THE HOTEL WHERE I STAYED, WERE A BLOND AND BRUNETTE WAITRESS. IF ONE BROUGHT ME ICE CREAM IN BED, THE OTHER WOULD SOON BE UP TO CHECK ON HER. HOWEVER, I MADE OUT O.K. WITH THEM, EVENTUALLY....

Or note #8, presumably about gonorrhea:

MY WIFE USED TO TAKE LONG VACATIONS AT HER HOME, SEVERAL WEEKS SOMETIMES, AND I OCCASIONALLY MET A WOMAN WHO WOULD GIVE ME TEMPORARY COMPANION SHIP. I MET ONE AT A RESTAURANT NEAR TIMES SQUARE. SHE WAS A SALES “LADY” IN A DEPT. STORE. ONE NIGHT I MADE THE MISTAKE OF NOT BRINGING THE USUAL “MERRY WIDOWS” WHEN VISITING HER AND SHE GAVE ME A “MEMENTO” WHICH I WAS FORTUNATE ENOUGH TO GET RID OF BEFORE MY WIFE RETURNED FROM ONE OF HER LONG VACATIONS

Note #10 goes on forever; this is an excerpt:

ON THE JOB, THERE WERE THREE TYPISTS. ONE OF WHOM HAD BEAUTIFUL BREASTS. SHE WOULD COME INTO MY OFFICE AND SAY “MR SERRA YOU LOOK COLD, I'LL HAVE TO WARM YOU UP.” THERE WOULD THEN BE AN EMBRACE WITH THOSE BREASTS PRESSING AGAINST ME AND EVEN THOUGH WE WERE DRESSED, I DID WARM UP—COMPLETELY! THE SALESMAN WHO SOLD THE RUBBER CONVEYOR BELTS USED TO GIVE “FRENCH SAFES” TO ANY WHO WANTED THEM, AND I USED TO SEE A FEW ON THE GROUND. I DID NOT GET THE OPPORTUNITY TO USE ONE THERE MUCH AS I WOULD HAVE LIKED TO...

And so on and so forth. Clearly, Julius intended the two sections of his memoir to be separable, so that he could portray himself either as an earnest engineer and family man, or else as a hapless Casanova, depending on the audience. But what is fascinating in both of these memoirs is the author's desire to come clean, at long last, not of what they considered to be great sins but simply of the details in their private life. Wayne wanted us all to know his mother was German; Julius wanted all to know that Alma, the chamber-maid, had thrown herself on his bed, but he didn't have a condom. Theirs is the passion of the twitterer, the blogger, the diarist, the exhibitionist. And it fascinates me.

I've had the honor and occasionally the pleasure of serving on the Vermont ACLU board for three years. (Though I am not at the moment.) The ACLU, among others, has spent two generations in establishing a beachhead “right to privacy,” with supply lines running tenuously back to the 4th amendment. From those trenches, they have captured contraception and abortion—as Julius dreamed of—and fought the good fight against data aggregators of all sorts.

And this old guard, the veterans of that fight, are horrified beyond words by MySpace and webcams and twitter and the young people these days. They cannot fathom that a generation would simply flush their personal privacy down the toilet in the interest of exchanging comments with 27 people about their sex life on a public forum. They cannot even talk about it, bless their hearts, without lapsing into the most patronizing and puzzled vocabulary: we must educate these young people about the internet. Right.....

But the drive to, as Andy Warhol said “tell the story of your life, and at some point, take off your clothes” is an ancient one. It was compelling for Wayne in 2005, and for Julius in 1966, each of them at the end of their lives. It was compelling for Burton in 1886, writing his steamy footnotes, and for Casanova in 1797, and I think it has been compelling for many people, for a long time. And now, obviously, it is compelling for the authors of well over 100 million blogs.

I'm very conflicted about it, which is probably why this blog is not very self-disclosing. I think privacy is vital to sanity (at least my own), while secrecy—the distinction is subtle but crucial—is pathological in any system. I understanding people wanting to be in the closet about their German mother / extramarital affairs / general queerness. I also understand people wanting to be very open and transparent about those things. I respect either of those positions; the compromise of being open and transparent after you're dead doesn't seem very healthy. Rather, it is a trope of suicidal ideation: when I'm dead they'll all know I was half-German. Or whatever.

Ah, but...what about anonymity? I expect that better than 80% of the blogs on the web are pseudonymous, and probably close to half are strongly anonymous, in the sense that the author has taken considerable steps towards preventing their identity from being discovered. Is this as crazy as posthumous revelations? Not quite, I think, since there is still a possibility to have a conversation. But I am quite uncomfortable with it. Nearly every post on every web forum I've ever been to, I have used my real name. But I think I'm a prude, really, part of the old guard ACLU. And I admire the young people these days, or at least the young people back in '03, who wrote, in the Fakester Manifesto:

Identity is Provisional

Who we are is whom we choose to be at any given moment, depending on personality, whim, temperament, or subjective need. No other person or organization can abridge that right, as shape-shifting is inherent to human consciousness, and allows us to thrive and survive under greatly differing circumstances by becoming different people as need or desire arises. By assuming the mantle of the Other, it allows us, paradoxically, to complete ourselves. Every day is Halloween.

It's a wonder they can think at all...

2009-04-22T10:28:00.000-07:00

Roughly a million billion times in the course of a typical student's math career, they ask their teacher when they are even going to use long division (or word problems or the quadratic equation or the formula for the volume of a cone) in the real world. And roughly a million billion times, the teacher lies. They lie in what they believe is a noble way; they may even prep for it by lying to themselves. I remember one math teacher who told his class that he used linear equations almost every day, and I am fairly sure he believed it. But I am equally sure it wasn't true.

This dishonesty becomes a screen of propaganda, for teachers are quite certain that their lies will be backed up by other teachers, and in fact by most other adults that the kids interact with. The utility of factoring polynomials, like the existence of Santa Claus, becomes a kind of massive conspiracy, not simply leveraged against gullible students, but also against any teachers who might betray la cosa nostra. I remember another teacher asking me to help out with some formulas for a science class, and whispering to me “I hate this stuff, and I don't remember any of it, but don't let them know that.” Like all conspiracies waged against children, it is futile, for if kids can't always uncover the truth, they are at least very good about realizing when they are being lied to.

But what is the truth? Hal Saunders' book When Are We Ever Gonna Have to Use This? offers some insights. I am working from an earlier version--1986, and it's Dale Seymour publications--but it contains a black-dot chart which is still in use as a poster in many math classrooms, based on interviews with people from 100 different professions, asking them what sort of math they used in their work. The chart is somewhat difficult to read, and the categories leave a great deal to be desired. “Ancient Numeration” (e.g. Roman Numerals) gets one slot, and so does the entire field of “Statistics.” All such evidence would suggest that Saunders intended the chart to be a kind of shock-and-awe display: students are not so much meant to say “gee, I need to learn algebra in order to be a car mechanic;” rather, they are supposed to say “my god, look at all those black dots, I have to study harder.”

Several of the 100 occupations listed in Saunders are so esoteric that they have clearly been included only to demonstrate that some occupation exists in which a given mathematical skill might be used. Four in particular attract my attention: cartographers, economists, hydrologists, and experimental psychologists. The BLS suggests that these professions account for about 63 thousand people: that's about .047% of the labor force, whereas they make up 4% of Saunders' sample. Why this hundred-fold increase in the prominence given to hydrologists? Clearly, hydrology requires specialized math skills. When I worked on water systems, I learned trigonometry largely in order to do hydraulic gradient calculations. But I also learned how to set concrete in running water, how to use a theodolite, and how to build concrete tanks without forms. Those are also interesting skills, but they are not part of the standard curriculum, nor would anyone suggest that their possible utility to hydrologists justifies adding them to the curriculum. Math, for reasons we can discuss at length later, is special.

If we drop these extraordinary examples, however, we are still left with a broad list of occupations, including computer designers and programmers, many different kinds of engineer, and so forth. At this point, we can begin to use Saunders research as research should be used, rather than as mere propaganda.

The math skills identified by Saunders as being used by 80% or more of the vocations he sampled are as follows:

Whole Numbers	100%
Decimals	100%
Calculator use	99%
Percentages	98%
Fractions	88%
Ratios and Proportions	85%
Rounding	85%
Averaging	84%
Quick Computation	83%

At the other end of the spectrum, we have the math skills that less than 20% of Saunders' vocations use—including at least four vocations that are only included to keep these numbers high:

Inductive and deductive logic	18%
Systems of Equations	18%
Polynomial operations	18%
Congruent triangles	17%
Simplifying radicals	16%
Distances in the plane	16%
Linear inequalities	15%
Computer Programming	15%
Linear and Quadratic Functions	15%
“Higher Math”	13%
Rational expressions	12%
Transformations	12%
Trigonometric Identities	12%
Matrices	12%
Sequences and series	12%
Systems with three variables	11%
Polynomial equations	10%
Set theory	10%
Quadratic equations	10%
Factoring polynomials	8%
Permutations and combinations	8%
2nd Degree Equations	7%
Complex Numbers	7%
Ancient numeration	5%

These are eye-opening lists, or should be, even if we take into account the myriad problems with Saunders' methodology. What particularly catches my eye, as a high school math teacher in two different schools, is that we lavish time and energy onto polynomial work. Students routinely question whether or not that skill set is relevant to their life, and it would appear that they are quite correct: even with all of Saunders' cherry-picking, it seems clear that not many of us will ever add two polynomials, let alone factor them, on the job.

On the other hand, calculator usage (at 99%) and statistical graphing both seem to be vital skill sets, and neither one is a major focus of most math curricula. Most students graduate high school without having any literacy in the visual display of quanta—else Edward Tufte would be out of a job—and with relatively little practice on the calculator, let alone the now-ubiquitous spreadsheet.

Saunders' approach only looks at job skills. Much of the math we use in our lives...or could use, if we knew it...happens off the job. Consumers use arithmetic; taxpayers in effect use algebra; Sudoku players use combinatorics; consumers of the news are constantly inundated with statistics and ought to know how to interpret them.

But all of these data points ought to be assembled and presented in a sincere fashion, rather than as a propagandistic assault on student's very reasonable questions about how we are wasting their time. Only then can we move away from our routine stupidities like teaching higher geometry and skipping basic statistics, or teaching a student differential calculus when they don't know how to use a spreadsheet. More poignantly, if not more importantly, it is only in that sincerity that math teachers will have the credibility to say what most of believe: that mathematics is beautiful, and needs no more practical justification than poetry.....but until then, that line, while true, is propaganda.

Talking On and On as the Gentiles Do

2009-04-21T11:16:00.000-07:00

I have just been out at my paternal grandfather's funeral in suburban Chicago. He was the patriarch of the family, and though in some ways I didn't actually know him especially well, I have a deep love for all the people who did. It was a weekend of strange revelations and a sort of three-way culture shock between New England hipsters and artists, Midwestern white Christians, and Hmong refugees and their families. But I am not going to write much about any of that. I want to write about prayer.

I think one of the design features of funerals is their slowness; the interminable waiting for the next element of the ritual is part of their power. After awhile you are exhausted; all the platitudes you could exchange with your second cousin once removed have already been run through. You are forced into the reflective space that the funeral aims to produce: memento mori; patikulamanasikara; où sont les neiges d'antan?

In that mood, I walked around the church that was so important to my grandparents, and I was struck, in particular, by several walls of prayers that the children had produced, written on card stock and stapled up for general consumption. In Japan you see trees covered in little knotted papers, each one of them a prayer, and I suppose that in America the same idea exists in many churches. In the youngest children's room, most of the prayers were drawn out and then captioned, and most of the drawings featured men with guns. I pray for the army; I pray for the navy; I pray for hunters(!); I pray for the 5-years old kid that got shot it was an accident.

The older kids were more reflective. About half of the prayers were for some kind of academic or athletic achievement. But there was also the wonderfully bold historicism: I pray for Barack Obama because if he is elected he might get assassinated and/or the Cuban Missle Crisis. And the grammatically dubious: I pray for breast cancer; I pray for drugs. And the slightly paternalistic voice of solidarity: I pray for the kids in the C[hicago] P[ublic] S[chool] District.

I have always considered intercessory prayer to be a kind of flagrant violation of Matthew 6:5-7. I don't understand how Christian denominations get past that slam-down wording: the only prayer that gets the Jesus seal of approval is the Lord's prayer. Aside from hesychastic groups and the Hicksite Quakers on a good day, I don't know any Christian denominations that pay attention to that rather-easy-to-follow precept.

But intercessory prayer raises other troubling issues. According to Gallup's recent polls, of the 87% of Americans who pray, “only” 5% pray for harm to befall others. However, 23% pray that their sports team will win, and God only knows (presumably) how many people pray for victory in other zero-sum games. Some of my relatives pray that they will find parking spaces.

Empirical studies of whether or not intercessory prayer actually gets you the parking space date back to at least Galton(!), but I think they've always missed the point. It is clear enough that, in a nation where both football teams pray for victory before every game, the efficacy of those intercessory prayers is exactly 50%...that is to say, it does not get away from the null hypothesis.

But no psychic exercise on this scale can be futile. The point of prayer is to express one's desire and, often, disappointment. Here I am not talking about the eremite's hesychastic prayer or Maimonides' divine reflection or Mechthild's sublime eroticism. If you are praying for a parking space, your prayer is immediately instrumental, and even if you don't get the object of your desire, you at least get the emotional equivalent of the soothing music and the pre-recorded message: your call is important to us. Please stay on the line for assistance...

OK. All of this would be rather boring and patronizing except that there is a secular equivalent, very closely interwoven. Petitions, either in the collective sense or by writing letters to one's political representatives, fill exactly the same role in the political universe that intercessory prayer does in the religious universe. And the same dubious discourse surrounds petitions: the constant claim that this is not simply effective, but noble and virtuous; the total absence of empirical evidence that it produces outcomes; the anecdotal claims about the one time it really worked; the shame heaped on those who do not invoke the higher power in this way; and so forth. Perhaps most especially, efforts to raise political awareness about _____—much like religious revival movements and efforts to deepen the faith of the faithful—usually boil down in practice to a demand that the group should spend more time in prayer / letter-writing.

We do not need Bakunin to question whether these are really separate dynamics. The powerful thing about writing a letter to your senator (let alone to the president, as elementary-school students are often encouraged to do) is that you feel empowered. You were dissatisfied about the parking space, threat of nuclear war, or whatever, and now you have had a cathartic experience. You feel more satisified, and you feel that you have participated in the body politic or church triumphant, or whatever. And nothing has changed whatsoever on the ground.

At best, intercessory petitions are justified because they might countervail other intercessory petitions. This logic suggests that the pro-X forces need to write their senator simply because the anti-X forces are already doing so. It is individually compelling, and it's probably one of the chief reasons that people vote, and engage in other forms of political participation. (More on that, more empirically, later on.) But it's also horribly inefficient. It requires hundreds or thousands of separate acts to arrive at what is very often a draw. At best, it provides the targeted politician with a sense of public opinion that is substantially lower quality than a poll, and much more expensive in every sense.

Above all, petitions are expensive insofar as they mis-utilize the political energies of laypeople. Just as good Christian pastors everywhere invest endless oratorical skill in crafting really gourmet prayers, so it goes with politics. At this very minute, thousands of people are carefully laying out the arguments for or against proposition Z, which they will proceed to mail to their representative, whose interns will at most make a tally mark before throwing it out. I would love to think that these energies could be re-channelled into something more productive, and someday, we will stop writing letters and get the goddamn parking space.

Elements of Consent (Part IV) Search Terms

2009-04-21T10:36:00.000-07:00

For the last several weeks I have been using Google AdWords to direct people to my survey on consent. A side effect of this process is creating a relatively objective statistical portrait of the way people utilize “consent” and “coercion” in Google searches. AdWords automatically recommended a battery of search terms to target based on these two keywords. I accepted all of these recommendations. As people actually searched for these terms, my ad would appear, and, basically, they would not click on it. But no matter: the information generated by this process is equally interesting.

Google's algorithms are a black box, of course, but the results are almost certainly a direct function of the number of times that people searched for various terms. So this provides us with a rough parallel to my earlier mini-study. Where that study looked at blog tags—people producing ideas—this looks at search terms: people consuming ideas. With a sample size of about five and half thousand, I feel fairly confident in the results.

I have consolidated the search terms into 16 groups, as many of them are variant phrasings of the same concept. Age of Consent, at the top of the list, was searched for 1456 times, Consensual BDSM, and variants, ends the list with 25 searches.

A comparison to the previous mini-study pulls out some key differences and similarities:

Consent Forms and Medical Consent occupy a high position in both studies.
As in the previous study, phrasings that suggest economic issues around consent and coercion come in vanishingly low. There were only 16 hits for Economic Exploitation and none for Economic Coercion. “Explotiation” itself was not a suggested keyword.
Age of Consent is much more common as a search term than as a blog tag.
It seems fair to assume that the lion's share of Age of Consent searches, along with a large portion of Christian Ethics searches, are about sex. Again, Parental Consent searches are probably largely about abortion. Thus, perhaps a third to two-fifths of the searches are about embodied consent.
Consent of the Governed, notably absent from the first half of the previous study, now accounts for 4.1% of the total. Plausibly this is a function of current events (I am thinking of the “tea parties” in resistance to taxation in the last few weeks.) But it also seems likely that this topic generates more inquiry than it does blog output.

In summary, the overall pattern of search terms generally follows the pattern of blog tags. When we think about consent, we are usually thinking about embodied and personal consent. If we are thinking about consent in collective terms, we tend to focus on the political and philosophical realm, more than the economic.

Caption Me

2009-04-16T10:42:00.000-07:00

POPDH

2009-04-16T05:42:00.000-07:00

My bathtub, as per the picture above, is outdoors. It's an old clawfoot-style cast iron tub, which I found on the side of the road and used (with the help of a borrowed crane) to excavate the foundations of the house. I am working on putting a bathtub inside, which would be especially nice in the winter. Really I am.

Anyway. I'm in the tub, yesterday evening, and I hear a scurffling sound coming through the construction debris alongside the house. I assume that it is one of our two cats, cats who we inherited from the troubadour Mary Bue. But no, it's a skunk. A pretty good-sized skunk, too, moving along with the casual gait they have when they're moving slowly. Coming right at me, about ten feet away.

What to do? I don't want to startle it, so I freeze. I know, or think I know, that skunks have lousy eyesight, and I am concerned that, inside my bathtub, I might appear to be some sort of larger animal, a sawed-off cow or something. Any sudden movement or noise, and the skunk could break the Geneva Conventions on me. So I hold still, waiting for it to pass.

But it doesn't pass. It comes right up next to me, because the bathtub, after all, is nice and warm. I can smell the individual flavor notes in its scent glands. It is practically in my lap—never have I been this close to a wild weasel that wasn't attacking me. I am trying not to move or breathe; the skunk is taking a nap.

Enter both of our cats. They don't understand the crucial thing about skunks, what you might call the skunk thesis, and they are both avid and fearless hunters. They are creeping in towards their mephitic prey, and I am subvocalizing at them: “no, no, go away.” But I can't really yell at them without startling the skunk.

Imagine my dismay. Visions of the slain Marat were flashing through my mind. In the movies, you can always evade the fireball of doom by diving underwater, but I had a feeling that wasn't going to work here. The mercaptans would just settle all over the bath water and get me when I came up for air. (Actually, I have always had a similar concern about the practicality of diving underneath flaming oil slicks, as per at least two Indiana Jones movies, but Hollywood wouldn't lie....)

Happily, the skunk starts to huffle away from the cats. Like porcupines, skunks don't really seem to get nervous, but it is moving in that weird, hunchback-toad gait that is the skunk version of high gear. The cats could easily have taken it down, but—perhaps because it looked so easy—they didn't pounce. They just tracked it, and when the whole trio of them are about twenty feet away (not a safe distance, I know, but better than six inches) I start hollering at the cats to come back. Eventually they did, and the skunk took off slowly across the field.

Susannah uses the titular acronym to describe these episodes: problems other people don't have.

Sigh.

To thine own self be true...

2009-04-06T12:38:00.000-07:00

NOUN is
ADJECTIVAL is
VERBED was
TWO WORDS is
TEN LETTERS is
LONGER and SHORTER respectively aren't
FOUR SYLLABLES is
PALINDROME isn't
DACTYL isn't
IAMB is
ANAPAEST is
SPONDEE is
ABBR. is

more, please...

All dogs go to heaven(?)

2009-04-05T13:21:00.000-07:00

I have just been browsing a long “vanity” thread on FreeRepublic from someone who has euthanized their cat, and is feeling some guilt or remorse qua their pro-life values. The 140-odd responses of condolence and pop theology offer me some thought about the way pro-life, anti-euthanasia sentiment is construed.

Now, I should say, I live with two people who are ardent supporters of legalizing euthanasia for humans, and I have myself killed a number of sheep that had terminal conditions. The latter poses more of an ethical exercise for me, since a “terminal condition” for a newborn lamb means anything that would cost more than a small amount of money to fix. Veterinary euthanasia is (usually) predicated on a very cold-blooded calculation of how much an animal's life is worth. While human human euthanasia can be thought of in those terms, and it is a commonplace nightmare scenario for the Right, in practice the advocates of human euthanasia are (primarily) focused on consent and intention, not costs.

In the most rational conservative literature in opposition to euthanasia, there is a pretty intense skepticism that adequate consent tests can be maintained for a practice which would also save massive amounts of money. (Maybe...the Emanuels argument in NEJM is dubious about the savings). Transparently underlying this critique, though, is a sensibility that euthanasia would be wrong even if consent was entirely assured. And thus it fascinates me to read this kaleidoscope of conservative affirmations for the euthanasia of an animal, where consent is manifestly not assured.

Two arguments appear over and over again in this thread, and two more get honorable mention. First, everyone agrees that it is wrong to let an animal suffer. Second, everyone agrees that animals are “in a different category” than people, or are not people. I was hoping that this would be elaborated on, but it isn't. The only explanation, offered by one poster, is that there is a specific Biblical injunction against killing people, not animals. (In fact, of course, this isn't true, though all Talmudic scholars have agreed to interpret the sixth commandment in that light.) We can append to this the third argument: that the Bible gives humanity dominion over the animals, which entails the perogative of killing them, and/or the responsibility to euthanize them.

But all of these points sit uneasily with the fourth argument, some versions of which I want to quote:

I believe God takes pets into heaven to wait for us.

I’m so sorry about your little furbaby. He/She was much loved, but I believe that when we get to Heaven, God will give our little furbabies back to us

I truly believe that we see our pets again in heaven. I had a dream last night about my cat. I knew it was a dream as I was dreaming, and Jesus was there. I pet her, and Jesus said that she wasn’t gone forever, she was just away and would be waiting for me.

Opinions vary, obviously. At one end of the spectrum, heaven is a kind of plasmic bliss in which all our mundane concerns and concepts burn away. Nirvana. Ecstatic union with Godhead. And I am thinking there are no pets in that realm. Your gerbil might achieve ultimate transcendence, and you might, too, and you might spend all eternity in the joyous consciousness that “you” and “Mr. Snookum” are one and the same and consubstantial with everything, but that is a bit different than watching him run around in his gerbil wheel.

At the other end of the spectrum, heaven is an improved and elongated version of everyday life, according to one's tastes. For the early Muslims, this meant a boudoir full of virgins. For the Jehovah' Witnesses, this means a multi-ethnic picnic out in a lakeside park, with lots of large animals hanging out. For Borges (and myself) it means a library. I want to call these “mundane heavens.” I think in most religious traditions that talk about heaven(s), mundane heavens are used as a pointer, a way to introduce the concept of heaven as transcendence...but the signifier replaces the signified, as usual, and we are left with crazy questions about how the virgins will get their hymen back in the morning, and what the poor lions are going to eat.

In Islam, there are traditionally ten animals that get to make into heaven. (Not ten species, but ten individual animals—Jonah's fish, Mohammad's horse, etc.) Christianity is more ambiguous. The general impression of many Christians, including the posters on FreeRepublic, is that animals will appear in heaven more or less as emotional furniture, much like the houris in Islam, and leaving the same problem. Do they have souls?

St. Francis seemed to think they did. His sermons to the fish and the birds have become, in the abstract, metaphors for religious environmentalism. I doubt that the environmentalists in question have actually read the Little Flowers, because the sermons are in fact quite disturbing. Francis is essentially saying: “shape the fuck up, fish, or you'll burn in hell.” And if the fish can sin and go to hell, man, hell is full by now.

It would certainly appear that if we accept the presence of animals in a mundane heaven, and we accept that animals have souls (and are, as Francis suggests, capable of sin), the distinction between human euthanasia and animal euthanasia gets very strained. In effect, we are saying that humans and animals both have souls, but we have different sorts of souls, and the specific details of the human soul mean that it is appropriate for us to die in misery and great financial expense, while the details of the animal soul do no require that. The weirdness of this concept is underscored by the fact that the folks on FreeRepublic use the phrase “humane” many times to describe the appropriate intervention for ensouled non-human animals; humans are apparently outside the “humane.”

If, on the other hand, animals are not ensouled, they are zombies. If they meet us in heaven, they are simply emotional furniture, like the houris. And if that is the case then there is no need to euthanize them, for their suffering is ethically irrelevant, except perhaps as a metaphor. There is certainly no need to take them to a vet and pay for barbiturates. If your cat gets sick, you can just put it in a plastic bag and throw it in the trash, like other cute, broken things with no souls.

The empathetic and consoling voices on FreeRepublic can't seem to decide which of these positions is less problematic. Until they can work it out and explain it coherently to the rest of us, perhaps they shouldn't be telling us how to die...

Why Don't Students Like School?

2009-03-30T12:21:00.000-07:00

I have just read Daniel Willingham's article Why Don't Students Like School? In American Educator. It is a synopsis of his book of the same name, and it is oddly joined with two excerpts from that book. I haven't read the book, and based on the merits of the article and these two excerpts, I am not planning to. So what I have to say here pertains to his article, and it is only my strong suspicion that it pertains to the book as well.

Willingham begins the article with the rhetorical question that is its title, and then immediately answers it. Kids (many kids) don't like school, he says “because the brain is not designed for thinking.” Unraveling this little piece of sophistry occupies most of the rest of the article, and it soon becomes apparent that the very last thing Willingham is planning to do is ask students why they don't like school. In fact, he shouldn't have to even do that. With any self-reflection, the very fact that he is uninterested in students' own opinions about why they dislike school should go a long way towards explaining matters.

But Willingham's approach is strictly through the lens of cognitive science, with all the usual lens flare. He makes a fairly interesting argument about the way that the brain engages problem-solving at various levels of effort and difficulty. The primary moral, as Willingham sees it, is to establish a pace of cognitive exercise that is neither too fast nor too slow.

This is not exactly earth-shattering pedagogical advice, though this time around it is being wrapped up in the oh-so-chic language of cognitive science. But there are two points that, on a dreary day in March, strike me as a little unfortunate.

In the first place, the article—like most popular cog-sci writing—is almost completely devoid of references to actual empirical studies, so the reader is left feeling rather patronized by expert pronouncements. And Willingham does this with positive flourishes worthy of Comte. For instance:

Appealing though [X] may be, it turns out this argument is false. Data from the last 30 years lead to a conclusion that is not scientifically challengeable...

Wow, we say. The expert has spoken; our beliefs are false, and his beliefs cannot be challenged. This all becomes the more disturbing, in a book on thought processes, when Willingham points out that experts think in a categorically different way than novices. In the local jargon, their critical thinking processes are not tied to the background knowledge. This is presumably why their conclusions cannot be scientifically challenged by the likes of you and I. (And perhaps this state of affairs is locked in...one of Willingham's teasers for the book is that teachers will “discover why you should not try to get your students to think like real scientists.”)

However, I would not bother harping on these matters if it were not for the second, and larger point. Nothing in this article approaches an actual discussion of why students don't like school. In fact, the titular question of the article is never actually asked in the article itself. It is simply assumed that the answer lies in the realm of cognitive effort. Progressive educators, school critics, and unschoolers (including, in all cases, students themselves) have articulated a range of other answers that Willingham would do well to be aware of: institutional coercion; arbitrary exercise of authority; sociopathic internal regulations; lack of motivation; insincerity of adult leadership; and irrelevance of the curriculum. Willingham only addresses the last of these, and very superficially. He seems to regard “relevance”--the scare quotes are his--as ineffective and even gimmicky.

I'm sad about all this, because I really value the accomplishments made by cognitive science and its sibling fields in the last few decades. And they do, clearly, have a lot to offer any discussion of education. But I don't see any trace of that contribution here.

Balsamic Reduction

2009-03-23T20:26:00.001-07:00

Here, as per Splog Bot's request, are very brief synopses of the blog entries thus far. Having done this, I realize that I misread the request....actually I am supposed to write a synopsis of the blog as a whole. So I would say that goes like this: I use this blog to dispatch ideas or pieces of ideas that would otherwise be taking up even more of my time. That's all. It's a knicknack shelf.

As Canadian as Possible Under the Circumstances
Eight brief histories of Canada. Very brief.

Baa, Tweet, Get Off Your Ass and Jam, M46, π
Why is it you can copyright a song but not a number, given that basically there are more different numbers out there than there are songs out there?

The NIFI Criteria and Academic Charisma
If you want to look like a school, you better have a fricking campus and some sober literature.

The Verses Replicated, Again
Right Said Fred + Geeks = the funny.

Elements of Consent (Part III) Body / Politic
When bloggers talk about consent, they are usually either talking about getting laid or the feds.

Accidental Rosette
Pretty but hard to identify.

Snow, Stem, Strength
Daucus carota is way stronger than you'd think.

Detroit on the Dole
Why does the right wing only like free markets when it serves their immediate purposes? Fricking hypocrites.

The Verses Replicated
Music + Geeks = the funny.

Narnia vs. Summerhill
C. S. Lewis is just adorable, but I hate on his politics and educational philosophy.

Elements of Consent (Part II)

It doesn't really seem consent is a straight up-and-down spectrum, more kind of tangled.

Petrol Dreams

If there was so much abiogenic oil like the crazy people say there is, we'd be swimming in it.

Elements of Consent (Part I)

I've been thinking about consent. It's weird how two kids can get it on, and in one place it's supposed to be consenual, and in another place it's supposed to be rape. More on this later...

ZOMG
If I don't write something pretty soon, I'm going to freak out.

Unschooling and Rurality
Unschoolers always like to make out they're from the countryside, and people even complained about that, but it was never really true.

The Day the Dam Broke
Fricking beavers, man. Get you every time.

Mapping Unschooling, parts 1, 2, and 3
Where do unschoolers live, anyway? In the North-East, North-West, and sure as hell not in the deep South.

Pulling Your Weight (x6)
Ethan enjoys burdocks.

A man, a plan, a canal
Some folks think that Obama isn't eligible to be president. Ditto for McCain. Is it a coincidence that our final electoral showdown is between two dudes whose credentials aren't bulletproof? No, because these are ambitious dudes.

Some notes on the U-Word
Nobody's quite sure what “unschooler” means. Here's the history of the word.

On the Transcendence of the Martian Penguin
If it looks like it's alive, it's probably alive.

Alphabets, Bridges, and Dreams
When you dream that you heard the perfect song, maybe you just dreamed that you heard a song, and dreamed that the song was perfect.

We Are a Warlike Nation
It used to be when you invaded a country you just said so. Now we have to beat around the bush.

Haroldry
Lauryn Hill can do everything Ezra Pound can do, and Harold Bloom should chill already.

It Doesn't Matter About Your Genome
Knowing your genetic code probably isn't going to save your ass; better get a car.

Dueling Vegans and Economic Ethics
I think about dumpster diving way too much.

Look on my Epigrams, ye mighty, and despair
That guy who said that thing? Someone else said it first.

In Which Malcom X Makes Both Teams
It's weird to make book lists if you don't care about reading.

Memos From the Rue Morgue
I busted my ass to find a copy of this one book and some college kid had cut it up back in the '20s. But then it made me all nostalgic.

Three Grammatical Notes
“To beat” is a weird verb. Grammar is like a worldview, maybe. And I wrote this other thing:

The Real Chinese Room
Searle thinks if he was pretending to be a computer talking Chinese he wouldn't understand Chinese. I tried it on some friends, though, and they started learning Chinese. I feel like this weakens Searle's argument; most reviewers don't agree.

Yearning for Zion
This is a sad, stupid raid and it is going to get slapped down. (Postscript: Yup.)

Paging Edward Tufte
Some graphs suck.

When Ice Gets Cold
Pretty!

They'll Be Damned if they Pay for a Landslide
Elections keep getting closer and closer, which is good news for the media. Maybe they're involved.

Absentis Vox
Just because you don't use the word “eugenics” doesn't mean you aren't talking about eugenics. Jeezum.

So Can = Thereby Are Able
If you write something two different ways, depending on who's going to be reading it, wow, that's a window on your assumptions. Or something.

The Greisse-Losengow Experiment
A silly hoax reveals some assumptions about unschoolers.

Illegal Tender
If a government agency refuses to accept cash, what's going on?

A Brief Statisical Moment
If you're going to bash someone for having no numbers, you better have good numbers.

Robert Spencer Thinks You're a Chump (Part 2)
Sometimes it's OK to lie if you're a Muslim. Or even a Catholic. But especially if you're a protestant.

The Parsnip's Insomnia (With Apologies to Alberti)
I got the toxic schmear; Schwarzenegger creeps me out; how many people got their ears bitten off?

Books and Stuff
I am kind of maudlin and have too much crap in my house.

Robert Spencer Thinks You're a Chump (Part 1)
Nobody is trying to censor weird medieval books you've never heard of, for Christ's sake.

Ibn Quzman and the Archpoet
Did this one medieval dude read stuff by this other medieval dude? God, I hope so.

Ich Steke Fast
Given the wide, wide world of fetishes, how can we even define porn?

Cinco de Mayo
Why do we celebrate May 5th while we're deporting Mexicans?

The Imp of the Perverse
Palisades Parkway is just gorgeous. Especially when you really need to sleep.

Canal Street Meditations
New York is so stylish indoors, and so skanky outdoors.

Sammy the Horse
Used to be you could curb-tie a horse for free. Now you put them in an ATM booth.

Starting a Blog
My reasons for starting this blog, and my excuses for the shambles what it is.

Testing
Lipsum.

As Canadian as Possible Under the Circumstances

2009-03-23T15:30:00.000-07:00

A certain Splog asks me for condensed versions of my entries, which will be forthcoming. To get me in the groove, though, here are eight histories of Canada, which I am pirating from two dear friends. In ascending order of brevity (?!?)

#8 (Pablo)

Bering Strait crossing. Indigenous groups across Northern part of continent settled in numerous communities, mainly fisheries-based communities on both coasts, pastoral and semi-nomadic communities in prairies and along shield.

Europeans. 1000 AD. Vikings in Newfoundland. More Europeans. French fur traders. English settlers. Battle of the Plains of Abraham. French lose. Keep Church, language, and poutine.

Confederation. Railroads. Timber. Mining. Fishing. John A Macdonald.

Trudeau. New country. Repatriation of constitution. Hockey. Expo 67. Olympics 76 and 88.

Bryan Adams. Mitsou.

Nothing else has happened since then.

#7 (Pablo)

Staples theory. W.A. Mackintosh. Harold Innis. George Grant.

#6 (Reecia)

Mines. Trees. Ontario is now a have-not province

#5 (Ethan)

Vast. Colonized. Resources.

#4 (Pablo)

White

#3 (Reecia)

Cold

#2 (Pablo)

CBC

#1 (Reecia, winning entry)

UI

Baaaa, Tweet, Get Off Your Ass and Jam, M46, π

2009-03-13T08:37:00.000-07:00

In 1914, Marcel Duchamp signed a commercial bottle rack and hung it on the wall of an art gallery. This original piece of “ready-made” art underscored a vocabulary that Duchamp often used: that the artist selects as much as creates, that the creative act is in some sense merely a selection among options that have some abstract pre-existence. In his case, we can imagine, there were several hundred models of bottle rack already on the Paris market; perhaps several hundred thousand commercial objects that would have served his general purpose—perhaps a few million. We cannot find a precise, meaningful number, but whatever the number is, this was Duchamp's selective field for Bottle Rack. And he described the matter in precisely those terms, like selecting a move in chess from a few dozen options.

Most artists do not. For most artists, the production of art is described largely as a creative act, in which new possibilities emerge, rather than a selection among pre-existing options. (And indeed, the criticism levied against ready-mades, for almost a century now, is that it is not creative, or at leas not the creation of the artist who puts it in the gallery.) The painter does not envision herself as choosing from a finite range of possible paintings; they feel that they are free to paint anything at all.

But in some cases, a finite field of possibilities is inherent to an art form. Take the humble tweet. (Is that too weak a word? Take that pathetic excuse for a creative act, the tweet.) A tweet is 140 characters, and there are 95 printable ASCII characters, including white space. There are, in other words, 95¹⁴⁰ possible tweets: a mere 7,608,599,781,118,356,298,135,408,710,751,483,265,995,839,561,200,415,768,293,251,897,463,276,887,905,308,084,750,663,238,388,192,091,262,455,112,983,664,085,632,015,778,607,866,277,286,667,119,278,691,334,591,691,395,102,241,018,148,609,396,820,768,967,497,516,903,602,766,888,745,368,135,114,497,853,537,865,999,264,122,596,201,787,018,799,223,005,771,636,962,890,625 possibilities.

In most genres of writing, of course, the author can immediately discard the vast majority of these options, as they do not conform to a set of rules governing orthography, punctuation, grammar, and semiotics. It is not evident that twitterers are overly concerned with any of these things, so they have the entire “field” to work with: 7,608,599..... arrrgh, let's say 7.6 x 10²⁷⁶ options.

Let us imagine a new social networking software, for barnyard animals, called the Baaaa. It consists of two characters, the second of which gets repeated four times. You know: Baaaa, moooo, sssss, grrrr, maaaa, ?////. We don't need any special notation for this: there are only 9,025 possible Baaaas. They could all be listed in ten or twelve pages in a fairly reasonable font size.

Now, what I want to suggest here is the act of instantiating a tweet feels like creation, whereas the act of instantiating a Baaaa feels like selection. From the outside, this makes sense, because the field of possibilities is so much larger for the tweet. For the Baaaa we can literally scan our eyes over all the options, whereas for the tweet we could never consider all the possibilities in the lifetime of the universe. But there is a paradox buried here. For if we ask someone on the “inside” to describe why their tweet is a creative act, they will describe a series of constraining decisions, which, though they may not include spelling or capitalization, are still dramatic reductions in the number of options. As Twain put it: “The difference between the right word and the almost right word is the difference between lightning and a lightning bug.” We hear a similar sentiment from many fields of the arts, and other comparable endeavors. Michealangelo spoke of releasing sculptures from inside the stone, and Luther famously says “I can do no other.” These claims and metaphors suggest the idea that the artist is indeed selecting among a field of possibilities, and that the genius of the artist is to make a selection based on very exacting criteria: to reduce the number of valid options, ultimately to one.

Where, then, is the distinction between creation and selection? Is art creative because the field of possibilities is expanded, or because it is narrowed, or both? The question is not simply an abstract philosophical exercise. Images of Duchamp's artwork are still held under copyright; not the copyright of the forgotten companies that produced his ready-made objets, but the copyright of Duchamp's estate, because what he called “selection” was nevertheless legally intelligible as creation. This is, surely, interesting....

More recently, we might consider the case of NWA's song 100 Miles and Running, which samples and loops a sonic “ready-made”, a two-second guitar chord from the Funkadelics Get Off Your Ass and Jam. The ensuing lawsuit, which NWA lost, represent what I believe is the
successful legal defense of the copyright of the shortest piece of music—not a bottle rack, but a splinter of a bottle rack.

And here we can find a precise, meaningful number. At a sampling rate of 44.1 KHz--which is typical for CDs—two seconds means 172 kilobytes of audiotory information. 172 kilobytes can be represented in binary format by a million and a half bits. If we try setting each bit independently, we find there are only p possible options, where p is a number about 424,966 digits long. That's it. If you want to record two seconds of CD-quality music, you are, in effect, choosing between p finite options of sounds.

Now, ok, p is a big number. It's a lot bigger than 7.6 x 10²⁷⁶. But compared to some of the high primes, and other mathematical exotica, it's nothing whatsoever. The 46th Mersenne, currently the highest known prime, runs on for almost 13 million digits. That is to say, it takes over 26 times more space to write than p. Yasumasa Kanada has calculated pi to over 1.2 trillion digits. That's trillion with a “tr,” as in “trouble.”

And here's the trouble.....

Finding a long but meaningful numeric sequence is comparable, in some ways, to finding the Twain's “lightning” words, or releasing the sculpture from the stone. The field of possibility is mind-buggeringly vast. At 1.2 trillion digits, Kanada's pi is roughly equivalent to the information contained in a hundred million pages of, let's say, romance novels or critical theory. And yet the selective criteria are extremely precise: there is only one pi. There are, to date, only 46 Mersenne primes. And so on.

Should Kanada, then, be allowed to copyright the digits of pi? Because compared to the scope of those digits, the clip from the Funkadelics is a Baaaa, not a tweet. Certain large prime numbers (which have substantial value in cryptography) are probably already trade secrets, but should they also be subject to copyright? This scrabbles at our entire, quasi-metaphysical notion that numbers are not imaginary, or at least that numbers are not the same kind of imaginary that unicorns and Barbie dolls are. But if Kanada can't copyright his instantiation of specific criteria across a vast field of possibility, what remains of the Funkadelics claim, not simply for their two seconds, but for their entire song, or their entire album? They have to assert that their creation is more privileged—legally, economically, ethically—either because the field of possibility was smaller, or because their selective criteria was less specific. (e.g. there is only one pi, but there are many possible Get Off Your Ass and Jams).

Neither of these claims is extensible, because both of them would suggest that a tweet is even more sacred than a music clip, and a Baaaa is more sacred than either, and the choice of a heads/tails coin toss is the most sacred artistic decision possible. More to the point, the latter claim, that non-specificity is the crucial feature of artistic creation, flies against most of what artists have told us about their craft, from Twain and Michelangelo and Duchamp on down.

In making their ruling on the 100 Miles and Running case, the 6th Circuit Court of Appeals seems to apply the reductive argument that once an artwork is created, all constituent parts of it, however small, are owned by the creator. Every splinter of the bottle rack. Following on this logic, Disney probably owns the rights to the bits “0” and “1.” There is a kind of grandeur to that logic. I think Duchamp would be pleased. But is has little long-term value for either the law, or art theory.

The NIFI criteria and Academic Charisma

2009-02-28T13:22:00.000-08:00

Probably my all-time favorite social history of education is William Clark's Academic Charisma and the Origins of the Research University, a book that I am forced to believe Clark wrote for me, personally, and which I would strenuously recommend to anyone who is thinking about entering a quaternary degree program. In the Clarkian spirit, and with a flagrant dollop of fair-use, I want to offer an inverted version of Steve Levicoff's document The NIFI Criteria; or, How to Spot a Degree Mill in 75 Easy Steps. (http://levicoff.tripod.com/ (contains pop-ups.))

Levicoff is a complex and quintessentially American figure. He is an unschooler, although he probably does not use that term, a Jewish convert to evangelical Christianity who has spent much of his time in alternative degree programs, and is best known for attacking alternative degree programs run by and for Evangelicals. Got all that?

The NIFI criteria, revised from his 1992 book Name It & Frame It: New Opportunities in Adult Learning and How to Avoid Being Ripped Off by "Christian" Degree Mills, are a list of shortcuts aimed primarily, it would seem, at Christian adults who are seeking continuing education and navigating a morass of deceptive or entirely fraudulent institutions. I have the sense, both from Levicoff and from my own sojourn among the Evangelicals, that born-again Christians seeking quaternary and even tertiary degrees are often easy marks: they don't have much informed support from their community, and the high priority they are apt to place on Christian pedagogy makes them a little blind to otherwise obvious failings in a school.

This is a world that seems quite alien to educated Yankee folks, perhaps, and yet it fascinates me. Because by turning the NIFI criteria on its head, Levicoff provides us with a very solid account of what the bare-minimum of academic charisma in the United States looks like. In essence, the NIFI criteria describe how an institution of higher learning, in 21st century America, should look in order to be seen as legitimate. So here we go:

ORGANIZATIONAL STRUCTURE
The school should be a not-for-profit corporation. The administrators and board members should not be relatives. If the school offers a secular curriculum, it should not be sponsored or owned by a church. The school should not be located in a state that has lenient accreditation standards for religious schools. The school's telephone number should be a business number, not a home number, and should be listed in the local telephone directory.

The school should be accredited by an association that is itself accredited by the US Department of Education and the Council on Higher Education Accreditation, or else it should not be accredited at all. If the school is not accredited, it should not attempt to explain the lack of accreditation at much length, nor should it state that it is “intending to apply for” accreditation, or the like.

THE CATALOG
The school should provide a free catalog, commercially printed and perfect bound, and printed in such quantities that the school does not run out of them. The catalog should have a complete list of the school's faculty, along with the institutions where the faculty got their degrees. Faculty who teach via audio or video courses should not be listed, nor should the school list “invited” or visiting faculty. The catalog should also include specific degree requirements, including course descriptions.

The catalog should contain photographs of the school campus, but not many pictures of the city the school is located in, nor should the catalog spend much time describing the city, unless it has a major residential program. The catalog should not contain personal testimonials, nor should it mention the Sosdian-Sharp study. It should not mention persons that have received honorary degrees from the school, nor should it mention accessories with the school logo (clothing, mugs, etc.)

The catalog should come with a personal letter printed on commercial letterhead, in a pre-printed envelope, sent using a postal meter. The letter should be signed by a low-ranking person within the school's administration, who should not use their title in their signature.

THE CAMPUS
The school should have a physical campus; it should not be an “online university.” This campus should have been where the school was located for many years, and should contain its own library. The school should disclose the number of enrolled students, which should be fairly high (more than a few dozen).

OUTREACH
The school should advertise with display ads, not classified ads, and should not advertise in airline magazines, tabloids, USA Today, or other “lowbrow” publications. Advertisements should not include a picture of an administrator. The school should be listed in college directories like Lovejoy's or Peterson's.

The school should not have a past history of being viewed as a degree mill, nor should the schools literature address the question of whether or not it is a degree mill. The school administrators should not defend their school's legitimacy in any public forum, nor should they threaten critics with legal action.

The schools website should be a .edu extension, and should contain the schools physical address (not a PO Box) and phone number. The school should not have addresses in multiple states. The school should use ledger-book checks, not checkbook checks, when making payments.

FACULTY
The student-faculty ratio should be 30:1 or better. The faculty should largely have gotten their degrees from other, accredited institutions, and should not hold multiple doctorates.

ADMISSION REQUIREMENTS
Students should not be admitted for quaternary degrees (including professional degrees) unless the student has already completed the prerequisite tertiary degree. The school should charge a significant tuition, more than a few thousand dollars for quaternary degrees. They should not offer a discount for pre-payment, nor should they offer scholarships or discounted tuitions without a dialog.

DEGREE REQUIRIMENTS
For any given degree level, the school should offer no more than three possible titles, using the traditional American degree system (e.g. Master of Arts vs. Master of Science) They should not offer programs that combine multiple degrees.

The school should require a significant amount of course work, on-campus residence, and lengthy thesis work before granting quaternary degrees. Life experience should not earn credit towards quaternary degrees. If there are examinations for correspondence courses, they should have proctors.

Professional certifications offered by the school should be based on board examinations, and/or validated transcripts of previous work, and the certifications should be recognized by other institutions.

Schools should only ordain students as ministers if the student has been on the campus and met the faculty.

THE DIPLOMA
Literature about the school should not contain a picture or description of the diploma. The diploma should be signed only with the president's name, no title.

Remarks
Levicoff is quick to point out that many legitimate schools do not meet all these criteria. It would be silly to treat this implied description as a set of hard and fast standards. Rather, it paints a fascinating is picture of what academic charisma means today. In particular, it would seem to mean two things.

First, a school is legitimate when it has a campus, with a resident “university of scholars,” and the tenure of students on that campus. Very much of what Levicoff's degree mills are supposed to be covering up is the fact that their students do not live and study in a school campus. Given the burgeoning variety of online schooling, it is fascinating to me that Levicoff views pretty much all of it as indicative of illegitimacy.

Second, a school is legitimate when it downplays overt status symbols. There is a “speak softly and carry a big stick” ethos to many of Levicoff's points, even simple things like when to use titles. This is in marked contrast to some of the elements of academic charisma in the middle ages, which went to great lengths to exaggerate the pomp and dignity of the schools and their professors. The distinction, I suppose, is that in early modern Europe, the university was in a constant struggle to assert itself as a needed and respectable social institution. Since the late 1700s or so, there is no doubt that the university has weight and stature, so it becomes almost more impressive to treat the mater casually. This latter point seems to be especially true for the faculty themselves: for the school to be charismatic, it has to downplay the charisma of the teachers to some extent. (For instance, in Levicoff's imagined school, it seems that is OK for the school catalog to describe the school itself in glowing terms, but the faculty should be presented more or less as a flat inventory. There is an interesting trade-off implied here, but more on that in a follow-up piece.

The Verses Replicated, again...

2009-02-18T18:26:00.000-08:00

Dammit, I can't help myself. In an earlier post I started a little collection of how wikipedians have deadpan paraphrased song lyrics to dodge stupid IPR laws with hilarious effect. But I missed what may be the blue ribbon...Right Said Fred (the world's buffest band)'s only hit:

"I'm Too Sexy" is sung from the point of view of a self-satisfied fashion model. The song's lyrics express confidence that his personal level of sexiness makes him too sexy for numerous things, most notably his shirt....The following is a list, in lyrical order, of the things for which the model considers himself to be too sexy:

My love ("love's going to leave me"; used in the opening and after "...my cat")
My shirt ("so sexy it hurts")
Milan
New York
Japan
Your party("no way I'm disco dancing")
My car ("too sexy by far")
My hat ("what d'you think about that?")
My cat ("poor pussy...poor pussycat")
The song itself ("and I'm too sexy for this song", at which point the song abruptly ends)

I am in pain with how much this amuses me. Even the wiki-links, which you can't see here...shirt is wikified, in case scholars approaching Western civilization through the lens of Right Said Fred aren't familiar with the concept (which would be understandable, I guess.) And something about "the things for which" just sends me....oh god....

Elements of Consent (Part III) Body / Politic

2009-02-07T14:09:00.000-08:00

Like certain other philosophical concepts (I'm thinking of volition, or justification) consent is often envisioned as a kind of default variable, a value always true in everyday situations. But that does not mean that we are always talking about it; rather the opposite. Usually we are not discussing consent, either because we are certain that it is present or (more rarely) because we are certain that it is not present. The gray zone is necessarily informative.

To begin mapping this space out, I used Technorati to locate the top-listed 125 blogs that have been tagged with “consent” or immediate cognates. (As I realized later, my search did not include acronyms like ACO, HSR, RACK, or SSC.) This is a pretty crude metric, but I think it is a good starting point.

In the first place, I want to call attention to what, exactly, those cognates are. Of the variations on consent shown in the pie chart below, it's probably worth noting that about 17% are what I would consider “difficult” versions of consent—partial consent, lack of consent, etc. Another 8% are false positives, blogs that do not have any relevance to consent whatsoever, despite using consent in one of their tags.

Most interestingly to me, the tag “consent of the governed” did not show up once, and we also don't see “transaction” or “contract,” though we have a small helping of “mutual consent.” In other words, the tags about consent primarily have to do with individual consent scenarios, not bilateral or collective scenarios. As we refine this observation, I want to suggest that most discussions of consent focus on the individual (and, in fact, the physical body). We are going to see some emphasis on consent of the governed, despite the absence of that explicit tag. It is the middle ground that become conspicuously absent. In Build Soil, Frost gave that spectacularly bad advice:

Don’t join too many gangs. Join few if any.
Join the United States and join the family —
But not much in between, unless a college.

We appear to locate our conversation about consent at the level of the United States, and within the family (and body), but not much in between, except economics and education.

Now for the other tags. I categorized the other 1448 tags into standard formats, combining closely related concepts, a process that is obviously subject to personal bias, but still has a little light to throw. These standardized tags are then ranked by the number of different blogs they appear in. (So even if a blog is tagged “coerce, coercion, force, violence, violent, violent people, coercive violence” only gets counted once, yes?)

At the top of the list of general topics appearing in these blogs, we have politics and medicine: roughly speaking, the state and the body. This neat dichotomy doesn't entirely hold, for some of the blog articles tagged politics are actually about consent at the individual level, not about consent of the governed per se. But many of them are, indeed, discussions of collective consent to political arrangements, and we see a carry-over with articles tagged global issues: “the people of Gaza did not consent to etc...”

Beyond medicine itself, we have a long and diverse range of tags that are unquestionably about embodied consent: drugs, BDSM, games and sports, sex, disabilities, health, rape, abortion, and pregnancy. There are also a handful of tags for topics that are not necessarily embodied, but are still concerned with individual acts of consent: privacy, data privacy, and research. In fact, any examination of these articles reveals that, in this conversation, privacy means sex, especially exotic sex, and research means medicine. So we are still quite in-the-body, thank you very much.

Of the middle ground—bilateral consent or communal networks of consent—we have only a few incidences, the largest of them being finance / economics, though many of those articles reference a more general consent-of-the-governed concept. Beyond that, the closest approaches to communal consent probably have to do with therapy and education.

It seems consent is primarily imagined as visceral and embodied. Lack of consent is primarily envisioned as having to do with bodily injury, or the immediate threat of bodily injury. Hence Rousseau's first metaphor for coercion is the brigand with a gun, and we still usage the adage “unless someone is holding a gun to your head,” meaning that a given decision is prima facie consensual. This line remains remarkably well-defined even for authors who have no problem viewing intimidation and overwhelming power imbalances as being compatible with consent. For instance, Alan Wertheimer, who has written on several instances about the legal notion of coercion and duress, uses “a contract signed at the point of a gun” as his reach-for example of coercion, while defining a wide range of contracts that the courts found “unconscionable” to be consensual.

From this highly embodied point, we make a great leap to apply consent language to the nation and the state (the “body politic,” in fact) with some frequency. This is a troubled metaphor—it isn't clear, for instance, if the notion of coercion becomes more or less sensitive when we speak of collective consent. If someone punches you in the face, we would describe the matter as non-consensual. But if a police officer punches you in the face, or even kills you, we do not necessarily see it as breaching the nation's overall “consent of the governed.” On the other hand, if that state abandons what Judge Frankfurter called “procedural safeguards,” even if they seem trivial and bureaucratic, we might view the consent of the governed as seriously compromised.

Between the two poles of body and state, the terrain is not especially well trafficked in actual discussions of consent. It isn't absent: libertarian economists like Milton Friedman have spent a great deal of energy developing the argument that networks of mutually consensual transactions (in capitalist markets) can provide an ethically superior homologue to coercive state intervention. Left-wing anarchists develop a similar argument in cultural and social terms, believing that capitalist market institutions are themselves significantly non-consensual (wage slavery) but that homologous consensual networks can be developed (mutual aid, cooperativism, syndicalism, etc.) As can be seen below, these perspectives do in fact inform the conversation: they account for a large number of the ideological stances that are specifically mentioned in the tags of articles tagged for consent. Nevertheless, they do not occupy much of the discussion.

So, when we discuss consent, on the basis of this evidence, we are in the first place usually discussing the individual body consenting unilaterally. Secondly, we are discussing the “body politic” consenting unilaterally though collectively at a large and abstract level. Thirdly, and least commonly, we are discussing visions of bilateral consent at a scale somewhere between “the United states and the family;” those visions are dominated by liberal ideological perspectives in the broadest sense.

Accidental Rosette

2009-01-07T17:43:00.000-08:00

Snow, Stem, Strength

2008-12-23T12:26:00.000-08:00

Detroit on the Dole

2008-12-19T08:03:00.000-08:00

"Why are people so afraid of the word Socialism?"

-My great-aunt Harriet

I light my fires with Workers' World (Yeah, yeah, yeah...) and a few weeks ago I ran across a wonderful article decrying the Republican meme that Obama is a socialist. Because, of course, they actually are Socialists, big “S,” and while they have sprawled out their rhetoric to ride along on some of the enthusiasm for Obama, they realize that he ultimately is not on their team. At all. Which makes them, for once, fairly clear-headed. The rest of the country has gone beserk around the s-word.

Here's Ben Stein, speechwriter-turned-Creationist-propagandist, on the auto bailout:

I get sick when I hear about how this or that professor says we cannot have bailouts in a free market. Really? How about the bailouts the professors get because gifts to colleges are tax free? How about the bailout they get because if they have to teach six hours a week they feel overwhelmed, while the guy on the line in Dearborn works a grueling forty and doesn't whine about it?

When Stein speaks of “free markets” here, he does not mean the actual extant economy, nor does he mean the far-reaching and contested visions of anarcho-capitalism, but rather he means markets comparable to today's environment, only a little more deregulated, a la the WTO or Milton Friedman. Here's one of the evil college professors eulogizing Friedman:

He was a brilliant mathematician, statistician, economist, writer, and champion of freedom, and a dear, trustworthy, loyal friend. I've lived by his maxims and his friendship my whole life.
Now that he's passed into eternity, we're all thinking of his contributions to monetary policy, price theory, exchange rates, fiscal policy, free markets, and the freedom of free men and women everywhere. He won a Nobel Prize in 1976, and as far as I'm concerned he should've won one every year after that, too....

Right now, as the control of Congress passes from Republicans to Democrats, well-meaning people are asking me which party is the more helpful to the middle class in terms of securing retirement.

My answer is always the same, and I believe it's what Milton's answer would have been: You're in really serious trouble if you think that either party is going to do you much good. In fact, you're in serious trouble if you think that government itself is going to be your salvation -- you have to be your own salvation.

Thanks to Milton Friedman -- and to the men and women who have fought for this great country and given their lives and their blood from Guadalcanal to Pusan to Khe Sanh to Baghdad -- we have a free society with free markets and unlimited opportunities.

Don't wait for government to come along to save you. Do it yourself.

Fuck, I'm wrong. That wasn't an evil college professor, that was Ben Stein, writing in the same blog as the previous quote. In fact, if we consider the right-wing view of college professors promulgated in, let's say, every single one of Stein's books, the point is that they are evil socialists, not evil free marketeers. Indeed, a great deal of writing by conservatives about academic bias would suggest that no professor is even allowed to promote free-market capitalism, much less that they all are. What's going on here?

An immediate explanation, and probably an accurate one, is that the right uses the academic chic as a generic slur to attack their opponents with. Simply attributing a position to college professors is supposed to denigrate that position in the view of Stein's readers, by old-fashioned fallacy-of-opposition. Whether or not the academy is being portrayed accurately—or even being lied about in a consistent way—is immaterial. Witness Spencer's claim that liberal professors are hushing up ancient Islamic texts (or maybe not hushing them up. Or both! The bastards.)

But the larger fulcrum that political discourse seems to be turning on is more interesting. Gore Vidal has described the United States as “free enterprise for the poor, socialism for the rich,” and while we can adduce a mountain of evidence that this is the case, we still lack a decent vocabulary to talk about it. All the verbs and adjectives have been peed on by one side or the other. I think that most of my own efforts at economic writing were completely wrecked by this lack of neutral terminology. "Worker-owned corporation" and "co-operative," for example, ought to mean roughly the same thing, but each phrase is wearing gang colors.

When Obama talks about giving automakers billions of dollars, he is expressing an idea that has nothing whatsoever with socialism in the anarchist/Marxist/Fabian sense: the goals are different, the actors are different, the outcomes are different, and so on. But is still very much susceptible to the arguments of anti-socialists in the Austrian/anarchist/Washington-Consensus camps. It is indeed economics by government paladin, as in fact the entire history of the U.S. auto industry has been, in ways too large for us to see anymore.

This bailout, if it happens, will be chump change compared to what the taxpayers have already given the auto companies. We gave them our entire foreign policy for at least twenty years, including two wars. We gave them the strategic reserve. We gave them the interstate highway system. We gave them the entire layout of American urbanism since the 1950s, all predicated on the use of their product. We gave them, primarily, the Taft-Hartley act. We gave them the atmosphere. If they can't make good by now, why on earth would we think that another few billion is going to turn the tide?

And the answer to that question is, I think, legible in the fact that political discourse is turning on a fulcrum, not moving forward. Neither party has any new ideas. Thus far, the left is hoping that Obama will enact something like the New Deal, and is preparing for disappointment when he doesn't. The right is attacking Obama in the same increasingly dated rhetoric that they have used to attack all their opponents since 1945. One gets the sense, from both parties, that the primary motivation for bailing out the auto industry is not to save capitalism, or to save jobs, but because we cannot envision America without an auto industry.

Judith Levine, who I've had the pleasure of serving on a board with, writes that there is no nascent revolutionary movement in the United States to step into the vacuum of our economic meltdown. That seems to be true: the paleo-Marxists at Workers' World haven't had a new idea since 1917; for them, the New Deal and its opposition still lie in the future. The Libertarians and Greens have worked so hard to embed themselves in the debates of the major parties that the originality of their ideas is hard for anyone to hear. This lives us a little vulnerable. If Obama's decades-old ideas don't work, and work fast, people will start bringing out the centuries-old ideas: Christian Dominionism, from the right, and neo-Feudalism, from the Left. So here's hoping...

The Verses Replicated

2008-12-18T20:03:00.000-08:00

In the happier future, when we have recovered from the insanity of copyright law, the economists will look back at these centuries and ponder why we spent so much effort creating scarcity in the one market where nothing needs to be scarce. The artists and scientists will scratch their heads at the idea that their forebears were motivated primarily by market forces. But I think it is the social historians who will really have a field day. Intellectual property rights have had such a bizarre, unpredictable influence on the culture.

For instance...when trademark laws were first being drafted in the 1800s, I am sure no one envisioned that they were setting in motion a cascade of events that would lead, inexorably, to twenty-odd different spellings of the word “biscuit.” But Cheez and Fharmacy and Sox were already there, like prophesies of doom, from the moment legislators turned spelling into a finite economic terrain.

The IPR oddity that I am fascinated with at the moment is on Wikipedia. Copyright violations are a bête noire of Wikipedia, and are especially problematic where song lyrics are concerned. Lyrics to most popular songs are widely available on the internet, and short quotes from songs are clearly not actionable, but Wikipedia understandably does not want the lyrics of entire songs to be included on its pages. This has given rise to a certain class of editor who attempt to paraphrase a song's lyrics, sometimes in great detail. Such efforts are obviously a worse option than actually providing the lyrics, so the pages often link to off-site pages that do contain the lyrics. But more than that, the results are unintentionally ludicrous. In fact, let's start with Ludacris, Roll Out:

The song's lyrics address the irritation felt by Ludacris as a result of nosy onlookers. The verses replicate the questions these parties ask about choices he's made ("Who's your house-keeper and what you keep in your house/What about diamonds and gold, is that what you keep your mouth"), the dollar amounts of his lavish purchases and the people with which he spends his time ("Who's that bucked-naked cook fixing three course meals"). In the final lines of the song, Ludacris warns these people to stay out of his personal affairs.

Bob Dylan, who seems to be an especially good target; As I Went Out One Morning:

...about a man who offers a hand to a woman in chains, but realizes that she wants more than he is offering, and that "she meant to do [him] harm." A character identified as Tom Paine then appears and, "command[s] her to yield" and apologizing[sic] to the narrator for the woman's actions.

Joni Mitchell; Coyote:

...describes an encounter (which turns into a one night stand) between the narrator (possibly meant to be Joni herself as there is a reference in the lyrics to her coming home from the studio) and "Coyote", a ranch worker. Coyote represents nature contrasted with the narrator's big city (presumably LA) life where "pills and powders" are necessary to "get them through this passion play".

Kansas Joe McCoy, and everyone after; Why Don't You Do Right?:

...tells the narrative of a woman who is complaining about her partner's apparent financial insolvency. She states that he was financially well off in 1922, but now has nothing. She claims it is because he wasted it on other women, and that these lovers will no longer show any interest in him now that he's poor. She claims that he tricked her into a relationship where all he has to offer her is 'a drink of gin'. She ends each verse asking why the man doesn't 'do right' by her, and then throws him out, insisting that he go earn a living in order to support her.

I gotta quit. But as a finale, here's the unbelievable beginning of an old version of Dylan's Desolation Row:

The place described is having abnormal morality, where they sell "postcards of the hanging", and the social status quo is not followed: "beauty parlor (is) filled with sailors" and the "blind commissioner", who has "one hand tied to the tight-rope walker" while he masturbates with "the other (hand) in his pants". All these strange characters "need somewhere to go" and the place turns out to be Desolation Row.

The second verse concerns Cinderella and Romeo, who has apparently come to woo Cinderella; she "seems so easy". He is rebuffed, however, as someone says "you're in the wrong place, my friend/You better leave." After this disagreement between "someone" and "Romeo," Cinderella is left "sweeping up/on Desolation Row" after the ambulances leave. Most reviewers agree that Romeo and Cinderella are in Desolation Row because they do not fit into their assigned roles. Cinderella is supposed to fall in love with a prince, and Romeo is meant to love Juliet--their refusal to heed these roles and rules sends them in exile to Desolation Row.