reading
A Rarely Realized Classroom Ideal
Last night, in my graduate seminar–which carries the snappy title ‘From Schopenhauer to Freud (Via Nietzsche): Depth Psychology and Philosophy‘–my students and I spent the entire two hours of our class meeting time reading and discussing Section 354 of Nietzsche‘s The Gay Science. We each had a copy of the section in front of us; I read its text out aloud in class, pausing to offer commentary and elucidation and inviting similar interjections from my students. In the closing half-hour or so of class time, we discussed a pair of written responses to the section 354. (My students write responses to the assigned reading every week; this week while the primary readings were all secondary sources on Nietzsche, I had asked my students to base their responses on the primary Nietzsche texts invoked in these sources.)
It is no secret. to me at least, that the class meeting I described above comes close to an imagined ideal for a philosophy class meeting: I assign a text to be read; my students do the reading and have intelligent responses to it; in class we ‘work through the text’ diligently and patiently, reading every single word carefully, bringing out the texts many meanings and allusions and implications. Rarely is such an ideal realized; that is precisely what makes its rare occurrences even more pleasurable. Once, over the course of a semester in an undergraduate Social Philosophy class, my students and I achieved this ideal repeatedly; the secrets of that ‘success,’ were that my reading assignments were short and my class included a few ‘bright lights’ who came to class prepared and ready to dig into the material with me.
The reasons why such a class meeting represents an ideal for this teacher of philosophy should be evident from my descriptions above. My students and I ‘encounter’ the text in the way its writer intended it to be: sympathetically. This does not mean eschewing criticism of the text, but rather, “by looking at reality in the light of what it is saying.” From a personal perspective, as I’ve noted here previously, my understanding of a philosophical text is considerably enriched by these discussions with my students. A good discussion with my students always lets me know there is more going on in the text than I might have imagined.
Our task was made easier, of course, by the text and its writer. Nietzsche always repays close attention and his language is extraordinarily rich (and to think that we were reading him in translation!) As he almost always does, Nietzsche sends out a message to all future writers and philosophers: if you want to read be with such attention and care, you would do well to follow him–in your own way!–on his chosen path. Write clearly and joyfully, letting your readers know that your writing represents a genuine attempt on your part to work through the problem at hand–which should always, always be a problem for you too, and not an idle academic pursuit.
Reading update
Although Reading has still not provided details of the £120million its owes to the National Institute for Research in Dairying Trust, for which it acts as sole trustee, a couple of letters and a blog post have provided a bit more insight.
Reading’s UCU branch has published a letter from the acting vice-chancellor, Robert van der Noort, which argues that the £120m is not a debt. I was told by Reading press office that the money owed to the trust is a loan and that interest is payable. (As an aside, I first contacted Reading in mid-January and spoke to them at length over a week before publication, when I gave them a list of questions. These were reiterated in the email to which the letter refers. They have still not answered these.)
Following a staff vote of no confidence, van de Noort published an Open Letter on Reading’s website. It contained the following paragraph:
Undoubtedly, some past activities and investments, such as our Malaysia campus, have not performed as well as we would have liked. Others have given a positive financial return for the institution, which we have reinvested in necessary improvements to our campus environment, teaching and research infrastructure and student experience – including the redevelopment of a modern library. Despite views to the contrary, the NIRD land sale is one of these and all considerable net proceeds of the sale will over time be reinvested in research in food and agriculture at the University. (my emphasis)
The future of the loss-making Malaysia campus is now under review. More pertinent to our concerns, Reading management here appears to admit that money coming from the trust should have been spent on research relevant to the trust’s objects.
The key point is that Reading does not have that money currently to hand and “over time” funds will have to come from elsewhere to match the £120m. That has financial implications for university, despite what has been said so far and irrespective of arguments over what exactly constitutes a “debt”.
In a blog originally intended for wonkhe but appearing today at Times Higher Education, van der Noort expends a lot of words saying not very much but does confirm the outlines of what we reported:
The article in The Guardian highlighted an issue that we have already dealt with, relating to the sale of land belonging to a charity for which the university was both trustee and beneficiary. Acting on the best advice available, we took steps last year to resolve this, and there are no wider implications for the university group’s finances. This concerned a historical issue of governance that needed to be put right.
Reading have as yet not explained how the matter has been resolved (if it has – we have yet to hear from Office for Students) and, again, the article makes no mention of the loan.
Sunday, 17 February 2019 - 2:01pm
This week, I have been mostly reading:
- Is your ‘experience diet’ making you unwell? — Jenny Donovan in the Conversation:
Just as our food diet affects our physical and emotional health, so does our “experience diet”. This is the day-to-day mix of the things we do, see, hear and feel. And, just like our food diet, the quantity, quality and balance of those experiences need to be right. […] Unfortunately, many of us have lifestyles that make it difficult or even impossible to meet all these needs. This diminishes our lives and leaves us isolated and unwell. This happens for several reasons, among which is the range of experiences our surroundings invite us to enjoy, endure or miss out on. You might call this our experience menu. If it’s not on the menu it doesn’t get to be in our diet.
- The dark side of decision-making in groups: Nastiness to outsiders — Michal Bauer, Jana Cahlíková, Dagmara Celik Katreniak, Julie Chytilová, Lubomír Cingl, Tomáš Želinský in Vox (EU):
Being anti-social is very different from being self-regarding. Economic agents motivated purely by self-interest will destroy the resources of others only when they stand to gain. But there is much more scope for harming others if they also derive utility from relative status or feel pleasure from beating an opponent. It is also important to understand whether simply being placed into a group creates an 'us versus them' psychology that influences behaviour of group members, or whether the behavioural difference is an outcome of deliberation. If the mere fact of deciding in a group makes an individual more willing to cause harm, a broad range of situations may create an increased tendency to behave anti-socially.
- Bloom County — By Berkely Breathed:
- The Lonely Life of a Yacht Influencer — Oliver Lee Bateman in MEL Magazine:
“Nah, I’m nobody you’d know,” he assured me. “I’m here to take some pictures and post some video stories of the yacht, which a brokerage group is trying to sell. The watch is a loaner from a friend. I wear it, take a picture of my wrist and tag his company on my Instagram account. It’s just a small part of the hustle.” The yacht hustle, I soon learned, was the all-consuming passion of Jimenez’s life. He went from a guy who took Instagram pictures, always head-on yacht shots run through one of the generic filters, to a guy that yacht brokers paid to stay on their yachts in order to mention that said yachts were docked in a port and available for sale or charter. He was helicoptered from yacht to yacht, and slept in the smallest guest cabins.
Has Reading milked its dairy trust?
Back in December, I made an offer via Twitter to look over the accounts of any universities where academics and/or students had any concerns about what was happening.
A member of staff at Reading approached me. A quick look at the latest financial statement (for 2017/18) flagged up a few issues. The main one was contained in Note 19 “Creditors: Amounts falling due within one year”.
It looked as if the University was committed to paying £120m to the trusts for which it acts as sole trustee.
That seemed unlikely. It was not as if the University was in a position to produce such sums and anyway the figure included for 2017 indicated that a slightly smaller sum had been in the same category in the previous financial year.
The accounts offered no explanation. I would have expected to see something either in this Note or in that devoted to “Related Party Transactions”. This prompted me to look back through Reading’s previous financial statements. I had to go all the way back to 2014/15 to see the first clue:
“Included in other creditors is an amount of £40.9m owing to the University’s endowment trusts (2014: £13.2m). This total increased significantly in the year due to land disposals by the trusts.”
In subsequent years, the amount owed to the trusts increased rapidly, climbing to £87m and then the £107m of the 2016/17 accounts. What I now know is that this reflects the manner in which the proceeds arrived from the sale of land at Shinfield belonging to the National Institute for Dairying Research Trust: £20m in 2014, £50m in 2015 and a further £50m in instalments over the next 3 years.
The University spent these sums and noted that it owed NIRDT the £120m. In a statement issued on Saturday in response to our Guardian story the University argues that the sales were fully documented in its accounts.
“The University is confident that it has responded appropriately to the issues relating to the sale of land that formed part of the assets of the National Institute for Research in Dairying trust. The details have already been set out in the University’s published financial statements.” (9 February 2018)
I don’t disagree. But what is missing from all recent financial statements is any account of the loans, which the University says were made to itself by the Trust. The University has nowhere disclosed the terms of the loan and, although it told me interest was payable, it was not able to say what interest was due and indeed whether any had been paid. The terms of the loans should have been published in the accounts and declared in the notes devoted to “related party transactions”.
There are prima facie conflicts of interest when a trustee is also the beneficiary of a trust. In this case, Reading appears to have accepted that it should have acted differently …
“The appropriate governance arrangements are now in place relating to the university’s management of the trust …” (my emphasis)
but is still being less than clear regarding how the matter is going to be resolved. I was told that two independent panels with legal representation have been convened: one to represent the interests of the trust, the other, the university. And that the university has also informed the regulators of what Office for Students called “a reportable event”. OfS said it had received this notification “recently”, but would not give any more specific timeframe.
There is obviously a broader question about what this means for the university’s finances and whether such a loan should be thought of as a “real debt”. I take that to be part of what needs to be resolved. Since the trust is designed to fund research at Reading, it is never going to be in trust’s interests to precipitate a brutal reckoning, but it seems clear that the loan is on generous terms (rolled over and increased each year) and isn’t being used solely for agricultural research. This indicates two sets of questions: was the conflict of interest properly managed? should the loan have been approved and extended annually?
Setting those questions aside, and returning to the finances: it is clear that the university has used proceeds from the sales to cover over problems in the last few years (deficits from ordinary activities of c. £20m in each of the last accounting periods).* It is not all clear what additional pressure may be put on the university’s position when the matter is fully resolved. (If anyone knows more about trust law and potential precedents, feel free to comment below).
More broadly, there is a question regarding how appropriate it is to “consolidate” the accounts of related trusts into university statements. NIRDT accounts do not appear to be published. Since it is a trust connected to an “exempt charity” , its accounts do not appear on the Charity Commission website; since it is not a company, there is nothing at Companies House. Reading does produce an annual statement regarding the investments held by another of its trusts, the Research Endowment Trust, but does nothing similar for NIRDT. Does anything prevent OfS from requiring universities to also publish the accounts of such trusts? (Again, if anyone with more knowledge in this area wants to comment, please do so below).
Judging from my inbox, this story has wider pertinence. My offer is still there. Please email if you want me to have a look at something.
*update: while over £110m was spent on acquiring fixed assets.
Sunday, 3 February 2019 - 5:05pm
This week, I have been mostly reading:
- Death to the D.I.Y. Society — Ted Rall:
Since the 1970s corporate efficiency experts have burdened American consumers with a constantly expanding galaxy of tasks that businesses used to perform for them. Craig Lambert calls it “shadow work”—labor imposed on you that you’re not conscious of. The Do It Yourself (because companies won’t hire workers to do it anymore) movement faced little resistance in a culture that elevates personal responsibility and rugged individualism. Which is how, in less than half a century, we have become accustomed to pumping our own gas and planning our own vacations and scanning our own groceries and running our own cable TV diagnostic tests, forgetting how much easier life was with service station attendants and travel agents and cashiers and technicians who came to your actual house. Not only do we work harder, we earn less due to the disappearance of service personnel jobs from the labor market.
- Economic Growth and Climate Change: Mistaking an Output Variable for an Instrument — Peter Dorman at Angry Bear:
Economic growth is not, not, not a policy variable. There is no magic button available to society that delivers a given rate of economic growth, or degrowth for that matter. It’s an outcome of a host of factors, some of which are controllable, others not. Indeed, as we wait for quarterly GDP numbers to be revised several quarters later, we still don’t know what economic growth or contraction we’ve experienced. It is true that politicians often speak of the need to adopt some policy or other for sake of economic growth, but at best they are proposing to push on one of the many factors that influences it. There is no growth dial, and even if there were, twisting it a few notches would have almost no impact on carbon emissions, which need to fall by nearly 100% within two generations.
- Tome the Dancing Bug — by Ruben Bolling:
- 20th anniversary for the euro — no reason for celebration — Lars P. Syll:
When the euro was created twenty years ago, it was celebrated with fireworks at the European Central Bank headquarters in Frankfurt. Today we know better. There are no reasons to celebrate the 20-year anniversary. On the contrary. Already since its start, the euro has been in crisis. And the crisis is far from over. The tough austerity measures imposed in the eurozone has made economy after economy contract. And it has not only made things worse in the periphery countries, but also in countries like France and Germany. Alarming facts that should be taken seriously.
- The Democrats Are Climate Deniers — Branko Marcetic in Jacobin:
Elizabeth Warren is instructive in this respect. She is considered one of the most progressive candidates in the race in 2020, but Warren has never really shown any leadership on the issue, as numerous environmental activists attest to. The leading piece of legislation she authored (“I’ve got a plan to fight back,” she said at the time) only came in September of last year, and it’s a bill that — drum roll — would force public companies to disclose climate risks, so that “investors would have the information they need . . . [to] make smart decisions with their money.” If that sounds like what might generously be described as a quarter-measure that relies on market solutions to a problem actively being driven by the market, that’s because it is.
[Ignore the misguided "pay-for" bits in the article. And, on the subject of pay-fors:] - We Can Pay For A Green New Deal — Stephanie Kelton, Andres Bernal, and Greg Carlock in the Huffington Post:
Are taxes an important part of an aggressive climate plan? Sure. Taxes can shape incentives and help change behaviors within the private sector. Taxes should be raised to break up concentrations of wealth and income, and to punish polluters for the cost and consequences of their actions. In a period without federal leadership on the climate crisis, this is how many state and local governments are considering carbon pricing. That’s useful ― not because we “need to pay for it” but to end polluters’ harmful behavior. The federal government can spend money on public priorities without raising revenue, and it won’t wreck the nation’s economy to do so. That may sound radical, but it’s not. It’s how the U.S. economy has been functioning for nearly half a century. That’s the power of the public purse.
- Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez's 70 Percent Tax on the Rich Isn't About Revenue, It's About Decreasing Inequality — Vanessa Williamson in Common Dreams:
Progressive taxation should work as a corrective tax, like tobacco taxes or a carbon tax. Sure, tobacco taxes raise some revenue for the states. But their primary purpose is to curb smoking. While a carbon tax could produce a lot of government revenue, the real point is to limit global warming pollution. In essence, corrective taxes try to put themselves out of business; if tobacco tax revenues decline because people quit smoking, or if carbon taxes stop rolling in because the economy becomes fossil-free, that is victory, not defeat.
The Point and Selection of Readings in Introductory Philosophy Courses
“What role should readings play at the lower undergraduate level in a philosophy class?”
That question was sent in by a reader, who explains the motivation for the question:
During my own undergraduate years, I did readings for some classes and not others. I never found readings especially helpful in understanding lectures. In fact, I usually have to use what I learned in lecture to understand what I read (that is, I can only understand something if I read after class rather than before). I remember a lot of what I learned in class, and not at all what I read, except how it was really hard to not fall asleep while I mindlessly turned the pages. Granted, my case might not be general: I might’ve had a different learning style than others; I might’ve had profs who were especially good at lecturing and bad at assigning readings, etc. So, my question is: what should the act of reading accomplish in intro-level philosophy classes?
We could add to the inquiry: how does your view of the role and aims of readings affect which readings you have your students do, how much reading you assign, what reading-related work you ask students to do, and so on.
Related: “Why Students Aren’t Reading“
Book sculpture by Su Blackwell
The post The Point and Selection of Readings in Introductory Philosophy Courses appeared first on Daily Nous.
Sunday, 27 January 2019 - 4:33pm
This week, I have been mostly reading:
- Wondermark #1443; In which All Knowledge is Equal — David Malki !:
- Trump Models His War on Bank Regulators on Bill Clinton and W’s Disastrous Wars — Bill Black at New Economic Perspectives:
Bill Clinton’s euphemism for his war on effective regulation was “Reinventing Government.” Clinton appointed VP Al Gore to lead the assault. (Clinton and Gore are “New Democrat” leaders – the Wall Street wing of the Democratic Party.) Gore decided he needed to choose an anti-regulator to conduct the day-to-day leadership. We know from Bob Stone’s memoir the sole substantive advice he gave Gore in their first meeting that caused Gore to appoint him as that leader. “Do not ‘waste one second going after waste, fraud, and abuse.’” Elite insider fraud is, historically, the leading cause of bank losses and failures, so Stone’s advice was sure to lead to devastating financial crises. It is telling that it was the fact that Stone gave obviously idiotic advice to Gore that led him to select Stone as the field commander of Clinton and Gore’s war on effective regulation.
- The US Wants to Bring Back the Shah of Iran — David William Pear at the Greanville Post provides illuminating context for those unfamiliar with the backstory:
Since Iran was a developing democracy, an excuse had to be found for a US intervention. Churchill accused Mossadegh of being a communist. There was no evidence that he was. Mossadegh was an anti-colonial nationalist who cared about the welfare of the Iranian people, and that was all the evidence that Eisenhower needed. Mossadegh had to be punished for standing up to the British and demanding Iran’s natural resources for the benefit of the Iranian people. The winners from the coup were the US and the timid Shah who had ran from his own people. The US would teach him how to have a backbone. He turned out to be a good student, and with the support of the US he turned Iran into a totalitarian police state and ruled by terror. The Shah got US protection from his own people and from foreign enemies. The US looked the other way from the Shah’s corruption of conspicuous consumption, stuffing dollars in foreign bank accounts and lining his own pockets, and those of his cronies. The US got a big piece of the Iran oil industry, and Iran gave the US a strategically important location for a military presence. As for the people of Iran, they continued to live in abject poverty and illiteracy.
- Why Trump’s Private Transactions are Terrifying — Robert Reich:
After two years of Trump we may have overlooked the essence of his insanity: His brain sees only private interests transacting. It doesn’t comprehend the public interest. Private transactions can’t be wrong or immoral because, by definition, they require that every party to them be satisfied. Otherwise there wouldn’t be a deal. Viewed this way, everything else falls into place. For example, absent a public interest, there can’t be conflicts of interest.
- Beto, We Hardly Knew Ye — Norman Solomon:
Beto O’Rourke’s actual political record deserves scrutiny, and it’s not what progressives might expect from the overheated adulation that has sent his presidential balloon aloft. Some pointed reporting and critiques this month may have begun a process of bringing Beto fantasies down to earth.
- Pulling Rabbits Out of Hats — J. W. Mason in Jacobin:
Left critics often imagine economics as an effort to understand reality that’s gotten hopelessly confused, or as a systematic effort to uphold capitalist ideology. But both of these claims are, in a way, too kind — they assume that economic theory is “about” the real world in the first place. Better to think of it as a self-contained art form, whose apparent connections to economic phenomena are the results of a confusing overlap in vocabulary. Think about chess and medieval history: the statement that “queens are most effective when supported by strong bishops” might be reasonable in both domains, but its application in the one case will tell you nothing about its application in the other.
- Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Crusher of Sacred Cows — Matt Taibbi in Rolling Stone: There’s a reason aides try to keep their bosses away from microphones, particularly when there’s a potential for a question of SAT-or-higher level difficulty in the interview. But the subject elected officials have the most trouble staying away from is each other. We’ve seen this a lot in recent weeks with the ongoing freakout over newcomer Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Lest anyone think any of the above applies to “AOC,” who’s also had a lot to say since arriving in Washington, remember: she won in spite of the party and big donors, not because of them. That doesn’t make anything she says inherently more or less correct. But it changes the dynamic a bit. All of AOC’s supporters sent her to Washington precisely to make noise. There isn’t a cabal of key donors standing behind her, cringing every time she talks about the Pentagon budget. She is there to be a pain in the ass, and it’s working. Virtually the entire spectrum of Washington officialdom has responded to her with horror and anguish.
- 'The goal is to automate us': welcome to the age of surveillance capitalism — John Naughton interviews Shoshana Zuboff for the Guardian:
Surveillance capitalism is no more limited to advertising than mass production was limited to the fabrication of the Ford Model T. It quickly became the default model for capital accumulation in Silicon Valley, embraced by nearly every startup and app. And it was a Google executive – Sheryl Sandberg – who played the role of Typhoid Mary, bringing surveillance capitalism from Google to Facebook, when she signed on as Mark Zuckerberg’s number two in 2008. By now it’s no longer restricted to individual companies or even to the internet sector. It has spread across a wide range of products, services, and economic sectors, including insurance, retail, healthcare, finance, entertainment, education, transportation, and more, birthing whole new ecosystems of suppliers, producers, customers, market-makers, and market players. Nearly every product or service that begins with the word “smart” or “personalised”, every internet-enabled device, every “digital assistant”, is simply a supply-chain interface for the unobstructed flow of behavioural data on its way to predicting our futures in a surveillance economy.
- Why divine immanence mattered for the Civil Rights struggle — Vaneesa Cook in Aeon:
The concept of divine immanence became less theoretical once King learned about the activism of Mahatma Gandhi. Though Gandhi was not a Christian, his method of satyagraha, meaning ‘truth-force’ or, as King put it, ‘soul force’, fascinated King. Gandhi challenged the British empire by forcing them to confront their Indian subjects as fellow humans, deserving fair treatment. He did so without firing a shot. From Gandhi’s example, King saw how humans practising God’s love, particularly through nonviolence and disciplined self-comportment, could unleash the power of God’s love in the world. He acknowledged Gandhi’s method as ‘the guiding light of our technique of nonviolent social change’ during the Montgomery bus boycott. In Selma, Alabama and in Memphis, Tennessee, and throughout the US South, King continued to utilise Gandhian strategies of direct action throughout his campaign against American racism. For King, in short, divine immanence was a call to action. ‘All humanity is involved in a single process,’ he contended, working in concert with God’s Holy Spirit, the ultimate ‘community creating reality that moves through history.’ God and mankind, in other words, moved together. From the perspective of theological doctrine, King had reconciled immanence and transcendence.
- Trump vs Mattis: Watch out when men of war come to the rescue — Robert Fisk in the Independent:
[…] the dignified, cold and fastidious de Gaulle would never have lent himself to the rant Mattis embarked upon in San Diego in 2005: “You go into Afghanistan, you got guys who slap women around for five years because they didn’t wear a veil. You know, guys like that ain’t got no manhood left anyway. So it’s a hell of a lot of fun to shoot them. Actually, it’s a lot of fun to fight. You know, it’s a hell of a hoot. It’s fun to shoot some people. I’ll be right upfront with you, I like brawling.” […] But now he has entered a new pantheon. Suddenly the man of war, the US marine general who found it “a hell of a lot of fun” to shoot Afghan misogynists and liked “brawling”, has become a peacemaker. He was the restraining hand tugging at the sleeve of the insane Trump, the one man who could stop Nero burning Rome. He was “the sanest of Trump’s national security team”, according to Paul Waldman in The Washington Post. He was “an island of security”, announced Amos Harel in Israeli newspaper Haaretz.
- Wondermark #1444; In which Kinship is formed — David Malki !:
I would not normally post two consecutive comics by the same author, for fear of accusations of leeching, but I just had to in this case. To assuage my guilt, the reader — i.e. Jeff, my imaginary friend — is encouraged to go to the Wondermark site to enjoy more of this splendidness, and then go buy some merch which I personally can't afford.
Sunday, 20 January 2019 - 5:34pm
This week, I have been mostly reading:
- Wondermark — by David Malki !:
- The DNA Industry and the Disappearing Indian: DNA, Race, and Native Rights — Aviva Chomsky for TomDispatch:
In reality, such testing does not tell us much about our ancestors. That’s partly because of the way DNA is passed down through the generations and partly because there exists no database of ancestral DNA. Instead, the companies compare your DNA to that of other contemporary humans who have paid them to take the test. Then they compare your particular variations to patterns of geographical and ethnic distribution of such variations in today’s world -- and use secret algorithms to assign purportedly precise ancestral percentages to them. So is there really a Sardinian or East Asian gene or genetic variation? Of course not. If there is one fact that we know about human history, it’s that ours is a history of migrations. We all originated in East Africa and populated the planet through ongoing migrations and interactions. None of this has ended (and, in fact, thanks to climate change, it will only increase). Cultures, ethnicities, and settlements can’t be frozen in time. The only thing that is constant is change. The peoples who reside in today’s Sardinia or East Asia are a snapshot that captures only a moment in a history of motion. The DNA industry’s claims about ancestry award that moment a false sense of permanence.
- Students Evaluating Teachers Doesn’t Just Hurt Teachers. It Hurts Students. — Nancy Bunge in the Chronicle of Higher Education:
Some students understand the implications of all this. When I first told a class that one of the students would have to collect and submit the evaluations so that I couldn’t tamper with them, one of them asked, "Doesn’t that make you feel demeaned?" Another student wrote on an evaluation, "Why don’t you get off your ass and see for yourself what a great job she is doing?" And, indeed, the administration, not the students, should undertake the difficult task of appraising how well a class works. A colleague once remarked, "When we agitated for student evaluations in the ’60s, we never guessed we were handing the administration a club."
- Doonesbury — by Gary Trudeau:
- Education…education…education — The Gower Initiative for Modern Money Studies:
Instead of higher education being about learning, exploration and creativity, it is increasingly becoming commodified; serving the interests of capital rather than the development of the individual for life and the benefit of society. Already, as Steve Watson notes, there is the potential for subjects that do not have a direct link to the world of work to disappear or be reconfigured for employability. And while universities struggle for funding and try to cut costs, students face the prospect of a lifetime of education debt without even the certainty of finding a good, well paying job at the end of it.
- Tom Toles for December 02, 2018:
- Why language might be the optimal self-regulating system — Lane Greene in Aeon:
It is a delight to be able to use a good literally: when my son fell off a horse on a recent holiday, I was able to reassure my mother that ‘He literally got right back in the saddle,’ and this pleased me no end. So when people use literally to say, for example, We literally walked a million miles, I sigh a little sigh. I know that James Joyce, Vladimir Nabokov and many others used a figurative literally, but as a mere intensifier it’s not particularly useful or lovely, and it is particularly useful and lovely in the traditional sense, where it has no good substitute. So I do believe that when change happens in a language it can do harm. Not the end of the world, but harm.
- Evil Mansion — Phil Are Go:
- Urban planning is failing children and breaching their human rights – here’s what needs to be done — Jenny Wood in the Conversation:
When children are asked about their favourite places to play, the playground is rarely their first choice. And most adults will often agree that they also favoured places other than the playground when they were children: parks, woods, riverbanks, fields and beaches were the places that captured imagination, not a few swings in an enclosed tarmacked space. Similarly, skateparks offer only limited recreation potential and tend to be favoured more by boys than by girls. Playgrounds often lack a range of equipment to suit children of different ages and abilities and are not always well maintained. Children also have to be able to reach the playground safely on their own, otherwise they have to be accompanied. This can limit the time children have to play outdoors and contributes further demands on the time of already pressured parents and carers. These exclusions and misunderstandings of what children really need contribute to environments that favour adults over children, and can leave children feeling disempowered, discouraged, inactive and dependent on the adults around them.
- Off the Mark — by Mark Parisi:
Sunday, 13 January 2019 - 5:29pm
This week, I have been mostly reading:
- Just You Wait, History Proves That Someday Liberals Will Love Donald Trump — Ted Rall:
- The unwelcome revival of ‘race science’ — Gavin Evans in the Guardian:
Although race science has been repeatedly debunked by scholarly research, in recent years it has made a comeback. Many of the keenest promoters of race science today are stars of the “alt-right”, who like to use pseudoscience to lend intellectual justification to ethno-nationalist politics. If you believe that poor people are poor because they are inherently less intelligent, then it is easy to leap to the conclusion that liberal remedies, such as affirmative action or foreign aid, are doomed to fail.
- Universal Basic Income Is Silicon Valley’s Latest Scam — Douglas Rushkoff in Medium:
The policy was once thought of as a way of taking extreme poverty off the table. In this new incarnation, however, it merely serves as a way to keep the wealthiest people (and their loyal vassals, the software developers) entrenched at the very top of the economic operating system. Because of course, the cash doled out to citizens by the government will inevitably flow to them. […] Under the guise of compassion, UBI really just turns us from stakeholders or even citizens to mere consumers. Once the ability to create or exchange value is stripped from us, all we can do with every consumptive act is deliver more power to people who can finally, without any exaggeration, be called our corporate overlords.
- The Rise and Demise of RSS — Sinclair Target in Motherboard:
About a decade ago, the average internet user might well have heard of RSS. Really Simple Syndication, or Rich Site Summary—what the acronym stands for depends on who you ask—is a standard that websites and podcasts can use to offer a feed of content to their users, one easily understood by lots of different computer programs. Today, though RSS continues to power many applications on the web, it has become, for most people, an obscure technology. The story of how this happened is really two stories. The first is a story about a broad vision for the web’s future that never quite came to fruition. The second is a story about how a collaborative effort to improve a popular standard devolved into one of the most contentious forks in the history of open-source software development.
Sunday, 6 January 2019 - 3:14pm
This week, I have been mostly reading… not cartoons, for a change:
- The Charitable-Industrial Complex & the perpetual poverty machine — Daniel Margrain at Renegade Inc.:
The Royal British Legion whose philanthropic poppy appeals ostensibly raise money for men and women who ‘serve the country’ in conflict zones, is sponsored by both Lockheed Martin, the world’s largest arms’ company, and BAE Systems, the UKs biggest arms dealer. This is largely hidden from the public in much the same way that there is a lack of transparency and public accountability in the activities of the Foreign and Commonwealth Office who help administer the Conflict, Security and Stability Fund and the Jo Cox Fund. Independent journalist, Aaron Bastani, was widely lambasted by the establishment media for simply pointing out the fact that the current model of charity does not help Britain’s veterans, at least 13,000 of whom are homeless. Bastani pointed to the clear correlation between the worship of the poppy, the commercial and financial success of the Royal British Legion (income £150m+) and the plight of homeless UK veterans.
- Apple’s “Capital Return Program”: Where Are the Patient Capitalists? — William Lazonick at INET:
From the last quarter of calendar year 2012 through September 29, 2018, under its inaptly-named “Capital Return Program,” Apple spent $239.0 billion buying back its own stock. […] Apple’s “Capital Return Program” is an ideologically laden name for these distributions of corporate cash to shareholders that has nothing to do with returning capital. First, you can’t “return” something to a party that never gave you anything. The only time in its history that Apple actually raised funds from public shareholders was its initial public offering in 1980, which yielded $97 million for the company. Second, in distributing cash to shareholders, Apple is not giving them “capital.” It’s just transferring cash that may be used for a multitude of purposes, ranging from household consumption to building the war chests of hedge-fund activists, augmenting their power to engage in predatory value extraction.
- The ‘Pelosi Problem’ Runs Deep — Norman Soloman in Truthdig:
Increasingly, such leadership is isolated from the party it claims to lead. Yet the progressive base is having more and more impact. As a Vox headline proclaimed, more than a year ago, “The stunning Democratic shift on single-payer: In 2008, no leading Democratic presidential candidate backed single-payer. In 2020, all of them might.” The Medicare for All Caucus now lists 76 House members. Any progressive should emphatically reject Pelosi’s current embrace of a “pay-go” rule that would straitjacket spending for new social programs by requiring offset tax hikes or budget cuts. Her position is even more outrageous in view of her fervent support for astronomical military spending. Like Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (who was just re-elected to his post), Pelosi went out of her way last winter to proclaim avid support for President Trump’s major increase in the already-bloated Pentagon budget, boasting: “In our negotiations, congressional Democrats have been fighting for increases in funding for defense.”
- Everything You Thought You Knew About Western Civilization Is Wrong: A Review of Michael Hudson’s New Book, And Forgive Them Their Debts — John Siman in Naked Capitalism:
In ancient Mesopotamian societies it was understood that freedom was preserved by protecting debtors. In what we call Western Civilization, that is, in the plethora of societies that have followed the flowering of the Greek poleis beginning in the eighth century B.C., just the opposite, with only one major exception (Hudson describes the tenth-century A.D. Byzantine Empire of Romanos Lecapenus), has been the case: For us freedom has been understood to sanction the ability of creditors to demand payment from debtors without restraint or oversight. This is the freedom to cannibalize society. This is the freedom to enslave. This is, in the end, the freedom proclaimed by the Chicago School and the mainstream of American economists. And so Hudson emphasizes that our Western notion of freedom has been, for some twenty-eight centuries now, Orwellian in the most literal sense of the word: War is Peace • Freedom is Slavery • Ignorance is Strength. He writes: “A constant dynamic of history has been the drive by financial elites to centralize control in their own hands and manage the economy in predatory, extractive ways. Their ostensible freedom is at the expense of the governing authority and the economy at large. As such, it is the opposite of liberty as conceived in Sumerian times” (p. 266).
- Where to for Sydney property in 2019? Experts expect further price falls — Ingrid Fuary-Wagner at the Australian Financial Review:
Property prices have now fallen 7.2 per cent over the year to date, according to CoreLogic – and 9.5 per cent since they peaked in July 2017 – with industry experts anticipating more pain to come for homeowners in the new year. AMP Capital's Shane Oliver expects prices in Sydney to drop by another 10 per cent over the 2019 calendar year.
- Chuck Schumer Caved to Facebook and Donald Trump. He Shouldn’t Lead Senate Democrats. — Mehdi Hasan at the Intercept:
It wasn’t Mike Pompeo who said, “It’s easy to sit back in the armchair and say that torture can never be used. But when you’re in the foxhole, it’s a very different deal.” It wasn’t Stephen Miller who responded to the 2015 terrorist attacks in Paris by suggesting “a pause may be necessary” in the resettlement of Syrian refugees in the United States. It wasn’t Betsy DeVos who joined a group of finance industry executives for breakfast only a few weeks after the 2008 financial crash and told them, “We are not going to be a bunch of crazy, anti-business liberals.” Forget the hawks, blowhards, and kakistocrats of the Trump administration. You know who made all these statements? It was Chuck Schumer. Yes, the fourth-term Democratic senator from New York has a long history of making really right-wing and rancid remarks. Yet on Wednesday morning, Schumer was re-elected as minority leader by acclamation in a closed-door meeting of Senate Democrats. They didn’t even bother to vote on it.
- “Moral Hazard” vs Mutual Aid – How the Bronze Age Saved Itself from Debt Serfdom — Michael Hudson in Naked Capitalism:
The Naked Capitalism discussion of John Siman’s review of my new book “and forgive them their debts”: Lending, Foreclosure and Redemption from Bronze Age Finance to the Jubilee Years quickly slipped into a discourse about modern economies and whether it was moral to cancel the debts of people who are in arrears, when some people have struggled to keep current on their payments. Bankers and bondholders love this argument, because it says, “Don’t cancel debts. Make everyone pay, or someone will get a free ride.” Suppose Solon would have thought this in Athens in 594 BC. No banning of debt bondage. No Greek takeoff. More oligarchy Draco-style. Suppose Hammurabi, the Sumerians and other Near Eastern rulers would have thought this. Most of the population would have fallen into bondage and remained there instead of being liberated and had their self-support land restored. The Dark Age would have come two thousand years earlier.
- “Economically illiterate and morally fraudulent”: Lord Skidelsky on the Chancellor’s narrative — Robert Skidelsky's post-budget speech in the House of Lords, Progressive Economy Forum:
First, let me say I welcome the general thrust of the Budget. As the OBR says it represents the “largest fiscal loosening” since 2010. But we are not here to discuss the Budget, over which we have no control in this House, but “the state of the economy in light of the Budget statement” – that is, how will the Budget affect the economy? The answer is: very little. The “loosening” of which the OBR speaks is much too small to repair the damage caused by the eight years of austerity policy since 2010. An adequate loosening would have required an admission of error beyond the economic understanding or moral compass of this government.
- What Einstein meant by ‘God does not play dice’ — Jim Baggott in Aeon:
Einstein’s was a God of philosophy, not religion. When asked many years later whether he believed in God, he replied: ‘I believe in Spinoza’s God, who reveals himself in the lawful harmony of all that exists, but not in a God who concerns himself with the fate and the doings of mankind.’ Baruch Spinoza, a contemporary of Isaac Newton and Gottfried Leibniz, had conceived of God as identical with nature. For this, he was considered a dangerous heretic, and was excommunicated from the Jewish community in Amsterdam. Einstein’s God is infinitely superior but impersonal and intangible, subtle but not malicious. He is also firmly determinist. As far as Einstein was concerned, God’s ‘lawful harmony’ is established throughout the cosmos by strict adherence to the physical principles of cause and effect. Thus, there is no room in Einstein’s philosophy for free will: ‘Everything is determined, the beginning as well as the end, by forces over which we have no control … we all dance to a mysterious tune, intoned in the distance by an invisible player.’