Month: January 2012

A theory:

Psychological research suggests chin shape may be a physical signal of the quality of a mate. For example, women may prefer men with broad chins because it’s sign that a man has good genes; likewise, a woman’s narrow chin may correlate with high levels of estrogen. Zaneta Thayer, a graduate student at Northwestern University, and Seth Dobson, a biological anthropologist at Dartmouth, examined the sexual selection hypothesis by measuring the chin shape of nearly 200 skulls in a museum collection, representing people from all over the world. The pair discovered that there is a small but distinct difference in chin shape between the sexes, with men having a taller, more pronounced chin.

Spelled-out:

Balko reviews studies on Taser safety:

Tasers may indeed be safe when used on “healthy, normal, nonstressed, nonintoxicated persons,” but it’s unlikely someone who meets all of those criteria would be a legitimate Taser target in the first place. It would only be a slight exaggeration to say the study’s real conclusion is that Tasers are only safe when they’re used on people who shouldn’t be Tasered.

Kenneth Rogoff argues that high economic growth rates are less important than we imagine:

[A]sk yourself how much you really care if it takes 100, 200, or even 1,000 years for welfare to increase eight-fold. Wouldn’t it make more sense to worry about the long-term sustainability and durability of global growth? Wouldn’t it make more sense to worry whether conflict or global warming might produce a catastrophe that derails society for centuries or more?

Will Wilkinson counters:

Kahnemann and Deaton have found that while life satisfaction, a judgment about how one's life is going overall, does continue to rise with income, the quality of subjective experience improves until an annual income of about $75K and then plateaus. They conclude that "high income buys life satisfaction but not happiness [i.e., subjective experiential quality], and that low income is associated both with low life evaluation and low emotional well-being."

What's average world income? About $8K per year! The typical experience of a human being on Earth is "low life evaluation and low emotional well-being" due to too little money. How many times does global GDP need to double in order to put the average person at Kahnemann's $75K hedonic max-out point? Three and change. But life satisfaction ain't worth nothin', and it keeps rising. And, of course, rising income doesn't just correlate with rising happiness, but with better health, greater longevity, more and better education, increased freedom to choose the sort of life one wants, and so on. If it's imperative to improve the health, welfare, and possibilities of humanity, growth is imperative.

A reader writes:

Thanks for sharing. In regards to "knowing" the theological differences between Christianity and Buddhism, but still "feeling" their kindred spirit, I was reminded of Joseph Campbell. He spoke once about attending a global conference of world religions and noted that the priests/rabbis/ministers etc. spent most of the time squabbling about doctrinal conflicts but that the monastics and mystics of the various sects tended to get along famously. So there you go.

As a Zen Buddhist, I can say that the differences between various forms of Buddhism can be as extreme as those between variations of Christianity (i.e. Catholicism, Evangelism, and Mormonism). For example, you mention your discomfort with the idea of losing your individual identity. In my experience of Zen in the West, we put less emphasis on this.

Saying you "lose" your individuality in order to become part of an amorphous collective conscious creates a duality – individual vs. collective, or, in Buddhist terms, form vs. emptiness. Instead, we emphasize that there is no form without emptiness and no emptiness without form. As Thich Nhat Hanh might say, they are "interdependent".

Buddhism's emphasis on the collective, or the "emptiness" aspect of our lives is not because it is believed to be some sort of ultimate reality, but because it seems to be part of our human nature to focus exclusively on our individuality or form – often at the expense of our deep connectedness to all sentient beings. In their emphasis on group sitting practices and collective efforts to address human suffering, many Buddhist sects are trying to emphasize this deep connectedness – not to erase the individuality of the participants.

David Weinberger theorizes that the Internet has changed how we conceptualize knowledge:

Knowledge was traditionally about driving out difference and settling things, and not coincidentally the medium of knowledge was amenable to that. If you print a book, you can’t really change it. Books settle things, and so does knowledge. … But in the networked world that’s shifting a bit. It’s not simply that diversity is a good means to the ends of knowledge, but knowledge consists of a network of people and ideas that are not totally in sync, that are diverse, that disagree. … We are beginning to think of knowledge itself as having value insofar as it contains difference.

Evgeny Morozov isn't impressed:

This is an ambitious thesis. It’s also not original.

"The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge," a famous 1979 book by the French philosopher Jean-François Lyotard, makes a similar claim about computerization. “Along with the hegemony of computers comes a certain logic, and therefore a certain set of prescriptions determining which statements are accepted as ‘knowledge statements,’” wrote Lyotard. Weinberger doesn’t mention Lyotard by name but claims that “the Internet showed us that the postmodernists were right.”

Too bad, then, that his argument is ridden with familiar postmodernist fallacies, the chief of which is his lack of discipline in using loaded terms like “knowledge.” This term means different things in philosophy and information science; the truth of a proposition matters in the former but not necessarily in the latter. Likewise, sociologists of knowledge trace the social life of facts, often by studying how and why people come to regard certain claims as “knowledge.” The truth of such claims is often irrelevant.

Michael Moyer interviewed Weinberger back in November. You can watch the documentary On The Brink featuring Weinberger, among others, here.

We know a little bit more about him now, don't we? He'd be happy to see Ben Bernanke lynched. He'd re-invade Iraq. And he'd also celebrate the counter-productive, obscene and profane pissing on enemy corpses by a handful of Marines in Afghanistan. That's the kind of thuggish mindset we have come to expect from a man who appears to be a walking parody of a troglodyte.

But where he truly captures the spirit of the current GOP is in saying that by disciplining these Marines – as urged by the Pentagon and any sane person who actually respects the Armed Services' professionalism and ethics – the White House and State Department have revealed a "disdain" for the military. Seriously. Of course, the opposite is true. Finding anything to approve of in the errant Marine's disgrace is to disdain the quality of the US military.

But Perry, like Romney, will say anything to smear the commander in chief as a traitor.

I'm beginning to wonder, if only because of the fatal combination of a tax plan that cuts taxes on the very wealthy even more and his own suicidal refusal to release his own tax returns promptly. Tomasky deepens the case:

There's still enough material in one or two of those [Bain] stories to make for some wrenching ads that are bound to pack more emotional wallop. And they’ll resonate more because of who Romney is and how he comes across—his gaudy net worth, his difficulty connecting with people, all of that. In some ways, the most damning thing in that documentary is that he tore down a $12 million beach house in La Jolla because it was inadequate to his needs.

Toss in that ghastly remark about it being all right to discuss inequality in “quiet rooms,” which I feel certain we haven’t heard nearly the last of. Which quiet rooms did he mean? Not churches or funeral parlors. He meant corporate board rooms, where everyone would agree with him. An astonishingly frank moment, like the comment about liking to be able to fire people. I know he was talking about insurance companies, but here in the 99 percent, we don’t “fire” insurance companies, or usually doctors and certain other service professionals. We change them. It was a word choice that really did reveal a world view.

I've gone from finding Romney tolerable to amusing to nauseating the more I have read about him and observed him. And there are alternatives that simply take a bit of imagination to consider.

Wells Tower reports from Dawson City in Canada's Yukon Territory:

When I visit in the summer of 2011, with the price of gold at record highs, the very dirt under the city has become controversially precious. One prospector is pissing people off by trying to mine a local road. Rumor has it owners of the Westminster Hotel got into trouble for sinking a shaft under the saloon. By law, you can't start your own gold mine within city limits, though according to scuttlebutt, a few local householders are furtively mining their basements. 

(Fool's gold by Reilly Butler)

John Médaille reflects on David Graeber’s book Debt: The First Five Thousand Years:

We cannot help but be a society of strangers, yet underneath this, we cannot be a society at all unless we recognize our mutual obligations to one another. It is possible that our rude ancestors had it right all along: that obligations are more important than debts, and that amnesties are the key to economic and social order. Surely this question faces us now with a force that cannot be ignored. We are truly in each other’s debt, but it is a debt that extends beyond the mere payment of the sum of money. Money is a useful, even a marvelous tool, but like a fire it can either warm or destroy us. In his latest encyclical, Pope Benedict XVI saw in the root of all financial dealings, a “principle of gratuitousness,” a principle that binds society together in a way that exceeds mere money debts. 

Previous Dish discussion of the book here and here. 

Irin Carmon explores the popularity of the PBS period drama "Downton Abbey":

"I actually think it’s a lot like 'The West Wing,'" Steve Jacobs, a political communications strategist and a fan of the show, told me. "Lord Grantham is the platonic ideal of an English aristocrat, just like Jed Bartlet was the platonic ideal of an American president. The very fact that Grantham and Bartlet are so good and selfless is, to me, an indication that they’re not meant to be completely accurate depictions of their real-life counterparts." Even if a democratically -elected president differs in earned legitimacy from an earl, both involve a Great Man shaping history.

As Max Read, a writer at Gawker, says of the analogy, “Both shows suffer from operating under ideas of politics/history that focus on the individual actor rather than the system. So the nobility and selflessness of Bartlet and the earl justify the systems in which they work … It’s a very classically conservative notion of history.”

Simon Schama wonders why Americans like the show so much. Kathryn Hughes offers a British perspective:

In the 1970s, the original Upstairs, Downstairs soothed anxieties about the power of the trades union and the disruptive capacity of "women’s lib" by showing a deferential working class and a set of women, both above and below stairs, who lived within the status quo. In 2011, our anxieties are more concerned with ethics than political justice, in particular with what might be described as social connection. …

For as we ourselves travel further into a period of economic decline that has already involved the partial dismantling of such engines of social equality as the National Health Service, old-age pensions, and free higher education, we realize that it is not out of the realm of possibility that harder and faster divisions could open up once more. The thought of being dependent on someone else’s goodwill, kind heart, and strict conscience does not seem quite so benign after all.

Alyssa Rosenberg sees the onset of WWI in the second season as a reminder that war can be a great equalizer. The first season is available to stream on Netflix and may consume most of your weekend.