----- Original Message -----
From [deleted by JM so some random Columbia administrator doesn't get spammed]
Date Mon, 23 Mar 2009 16:25:25 -0400
To many recipients;
Cc
Subject RUINS WORKSHOP - THIS THURSDAY
The Ruin Theory Group at Columbia University presents:
The Ruination of the Social and The Social Lives of Ruins
A one-day interdisciplinary workshop exploring the social significance
and impact of ruins
THURSDAY MARCH 26TH
9.30AM-1PM
754 SCHERMERHORN Ext.
PROF. SHANNON DAWDY (CHICAGO - ANTHROPOLOGY)
PROF. PETER FRITZSCHE (U ILLINOIS ? HISTORY)
PROF. ANN STOLER (THE NEW SCHOOL - ANTHROPOLOGY)
PROF. VYJAYANTHI RAO (THE NEW SCHOOL ? ANTHROPOLOGY)
PROF. JOHN COLLINS (QUEEN?S COLLEGE, CUNY - ANTHROPOLOGY)
Discussant
PROF. ZOË CROSSLAND (COLUMBIA - ANTHROPOLOGY)
All are welcome «» Lunch will follow
This event is sponsored by the Columbia Center for Archaeology and
Barnard Art History Dept.
23 March 2009
From my inbox: [Fwd: RUINS WORKSHOP]
15 March 2009
Talk to Hamas
Sure, its continued non-recognition of Israel may be a barrier to any lasting and secure settlement... sometime down the road. But it's a position that could also shift down the road, and since coercion and exclusion haven't worked so far to shift it, we should try something new.
Sure, Hamas has yet to renounce the use of force against civilians in the name of political struggle... but that could also change. And the prospects for peace are so bleak right now that we can ill afford to close off future options based only on past behavior.
Both points above are premised on the simple notion that we should not expect the future to be completely like the past, especially if we change our own behavior (to believe the opposite would be to deny our own agency). Neither will the future be radically different; all I am saying is that the simple act of engaging in a dialogue does not foreclose the goal of changing Hamas's commitment to these two unacceptable strategies and positions. But more to the point, there are two positive reasons to expect talking to Hamas to have positive relative payoffs.
First, I don't agree that talking to a previously excluded party doesn't concede anything. In this case, it concedes to Hamas something it has already: some minimal claim to represent some population roughly bounded by some territorial delimitation. Yes, it to some degree would legitimize Hamas as an actor - but with the act of legitimation comes the coupling of responsibility. The act of recognition embeds the party in a constellation of expectations and rules which did not apply to the previously excluded party (even if it would be naive to expect full or even partial compliance). Over time, the normative power of recognition could shift the very interests and identity of Hamas. This is boilerplate constructivism. (Yay! A policy application!)
Second, prospect theory would seem to indicate that granting even minimal concessions could deradicalize some members of the Hamas leadership independent of the goal of changing their preferences. Very roughly, prospect theory basically holds that as an individual moves from the "domain of losses" to the "domain of gains" - basically, as her feeling that she has something to lose increases - she also becomes less risk acceptant and more risk adverse. We obviously don't know where the tipping point is for any given individual, but when dealing with a collection of individuals, granting them ownership over something they did not have before could make them, on average, less willing to adopt radical strategies. Now, I'm sure there are a number of counterarguments from prospect theory that would be important caveats here (e.g perhaps Hamas is mostly composed of individuals whose subjective framings shift quickly back into the domain of losses no matter what gains you give them. But we could find out, by giving them something).
12 March 2009
Reflections on The Israel Lobby in a Post-Freeman America
1. Maybe they had a point?
2. End of list.
[Update: Oh, and the msm clues in.]
10 March 2009
Overzealousness
Seems to me that making an exception for religious headdress falls well within the bounds of reasonable accommodation:
A Muslim woman was asked to leave her place in line at a credit union in Southern Maryland and be served in a back room because the head scarf she wore for religious reasons violated the institution's "no hats, hoods or sunglasses" policy, the woman said yesterday.
06 March 2009
Schadenfreude!
Luke's link to Thomas Friedman's failures of foresight was excellent, but I am more entertained by John Tory's by-election defeat!
Failingest UTS graduate-cum-politician?
05 March 2009
Underachieving Your Country*
Things don't look particularly rosy:
During a three-hour televised hearing in San Francisco, only Justices Carlos R. Moreno and Kathryn Mickle Werdegar suggested that the court could overturn the marriage ban as an illegal constitutional revision.*With apologies to Richard Rorty.
04 March 2009
03 March 2009
Is it possible to discriminate against a state? (IV)
Another obnoxious editorial raises the question in a slightly different, more specific, form: is it possible to be anti-Semitic against a state?
The weirdness of this question is perhaps made even more obvious. The poster is clumsy, perhaps hackneyed - just as, in my perception, much "Israeli Apartheid Week" activity tends to be - but is there any reasonable sense in which it's racist? 
The state is represented by an object, suggesting it is more like a helicopter - an inorganic object - than a person or people. The author, of course, calls this a "fig-leaf": the helicopter is implicitly "the Jew." Of course, the state is, physically, neither an inorganic object nor a person or people. At least in this context, the state is not really physical in any non-trivial way. But the state is still plausibly an object: a symbol or social fact or collective identity or [insert generic constructivist-scientific-realist platitude here].
Therefore, it is at least possible to attack or negatively depict a state without attacking any person or group, except to the extent that citizens of a given state or external groups that shape state policy can be held responsible for the state actions in question. But the latter kind of attribution of responsibility is an empirical and moral question, not one to be a priori dismissed as discriminatory and racist. To what extent are Americans responsible for torture and cruelty? That would be a perfectly reasonable question for debate, and not racist or discriminatory in any meaningful way.
02 March 2009
28 February 2009
Meh
Predictably, the WSJ finds Obama's budget plan dubious:Mr. Obama is very good at portraying his agenda as nothing more than center-left pragmatism. But pragmatists don't ignore the data. And the reality is that the only way to pay for Mr. Obama's ambitions is to reach ever deeper into the pockets of the American middle class.
25 February 2009
Is it possible to discriminate against a state? (III)
Well, I was going to write a longer reply that involved various platitudes about the social self and the impossibility of meaningful discrimination that does not refer to a collective identity, but instead, it seems that said discrimination has been brought to an end.
Is it possible to discriminate against a state? (II)
Thanks, Aldous, for drawing attention to the upcoming Durban Review of the United Nations World Conference Against Racism, Xenophobia and Related Intolerances (which, it seems our own country will not be attending). I remember the hysterics surrounding Durban I quite well, not least because 9/11 proved them touchingly fatuous, and also, in their own way, oddly idealistic.
Can one discriminate against a state? I think, to paraphrase the Rev. Lovejoy, the long answer is yes with an "if, and the short answer is no with a "but."
An individual qua individual can, I think, be "discriminated" against. In fact, we do it all the time - through friendship, love, catty comments, etc. This discrimination (the word comes from the Latin root to "divide" after all) stems from some inherent questions surrounding individual agency and communication with the "other," and can be, frankly, what makes life universally interesting. You can (and should) debate on the level of values whether some discrimination is "good" (e.g. smarts over dullness, etc) but in any case, to be "discriminating" is still a positive term.
Discrimination in a racial sense is, following Christopher Hitchens, a bit of a misnomer. It's division based on...what? It's not profound biological difference (which is a whole other kettle of fish - think of cases around those with developmental disabilities, for instance), but it's not wholly a cultural division either. To me, racism has always seemed to be centred on proximity - not just physical proximity, but also cultural, personal, and emotional, to someone, who, for whatever reason, is "not on your side/team/race/." A proximate understanding of racism explains how some people can reconcile irredeamably racist views of groups with a positive personal view of individual members of those groups.
Anyway, this is a roundabout way of saying that of course Israel, like any other state, can be "discriminated" against by other states - the difference between the system of states and the system of personal relationships being, as I think Aldous' putative supervisor would argue, not all that different.
Unfortunately, the broader crisis underlying the issue is that according to biopolitical models, the modern state elevates the ordering of life - and by extension, race, which is one ordering of life - to the centre of the state's raison d'etre. So perhaps Durban II should be devoted to more honestly discussing the various institutional tactics and strategies by which all states - including the United States, Israel, Iran and our own - order life, and the relative merits and demerits of each.
The Forbes commentary fails mightily on that score in two respects: first, it conflates all criticism of Israeli policy (as a state) with blanket anti-Semitism (towards a group, the Jewish people, that do not universally believe Israel speaks for them). This is a very old - not to say hackneyed - observation
Second, and to me more interestingly, the piece only inadvertantly and obliquely refers to the fact that it's proximity or its lack - with terrorists, with "Arabs," with a the idea of a Palestinian state, with the idea of Palestinians themselves, with the wall, with Iran" - that's at the root of the regional problem.
My questions is, where does the opposition to Israel from Arab or Islamic states coming from (because remember, these aren't quite the same thing). Is it opposition to the Jewish people's existence - opposition that the Quran at endorses any more than the Bible does? Or is it opposition to the Israeli state, for a wide variety of reasosn? I guess this is the $64,000 dollar question.
That's my two cents. John? 'Dous?
23 February 2009
Is it possible to discriminate against a state?
This discussion question is prompted by a hyperbolic, outraged (and outrageous) Forbes commentary on American participation in preparations for Durban II, and specifically the following passage:No matter that discrimination against the Jewish state, and against Jews for supporting the Jewish state, is the major form of anti-Semitism today.
(Background question: is it possible to discriminate against an individual qua individual, as opposed to an individual as a member of a group?)
18 February 2009
17 February 2009
16 February 2009
Sacriligious Thoughts
Haaretz Reports:Defense Minister Ehud Barak told senior military leaders on Monday that Iran's development of nuclear weapons was likely to "threaten the existence of the State of Israel."
I just want to make three comments. First, obviously, Barak's statement was really that Iran's development of nuclear weapons is likely to "threaten the existence of the State of Iran."
Barak told the top Israel Defense Forces commanders that should Iran achieve nuclear capability, it would enormously strengthen the immunity of groups aided by Tehran and dramatically boost the efforts of enemy regional elements to develop the same capabilities.
"It will be very difficult to stop the trickling if nuclear capabilities, even if primitive, to terrorist organizations," he said. "We have already received our first sign of such from Pakistan.
Second, if Iran actually developed nuclear capabilities together with adequate delivery systems, the risk of nuclear proliferation should not necessarily increase at all. Nuclear weapons are a powerful bargaining chip between rivals when they have secure control over them, not when they are handed over to non-state actors who are pursuing complementary strategies with divergent aims.
And so, third, and most importantly, the real Israeli fear is precisely that once another regional power gains nuclear capabilities, the bargaining terms are going to change. Israel's regional nuclear monopoly will no longer be a decisive factor (we already know that it is no good as a conventional deterrent against terrorist groups; in the possible future we are imagining - assuming Iran is developing nuclear weapons at all - it will also be no good as a conventional deterrent against Iran). The potential Iranian threat of nuclear attack or of proliferation to groups like Hamas and Hezbollah - a threat which would be irrational but paradoxically powerful - would also alter the bargaining situation between Israel and aspirant rulers of a future Palestinian state (e.g. Hamas). Barak points to the real considerations at play here beneath the rhetoric of existential threats and irreconcilable enmities: "it would enormously strengthen the immunity of groups aided by Tehran."
What I want to highlight is that the fear is not of increased regional instability exactly, but a change in the terms of regional stability which would be less favorable to (a certain interpretation of) Israeli interests. Whether this is desirable or undesirable is actually not as obvious as we have been primed to believe. The persistence of protracted conflict over Palestine and the use of asymmetrical violence by Palestinian militants (with the usual disproportionate IDF response), we can all probably agree, seems pathological. And perhaps it is due to the fundamental disproportion in the bargaining situation, in which the Palestinians lack the power to achieve a solution that meets their minimum threshold and so the Israelis feel no compulsion to gift them that bargain. If this is the case, and Iran is actually intent on developing nuclear weapons because it wants to alter its and its allies' bargaining power with Israel, and the U.S. has a separate (non-Israel-related) interest in seeing a non-nuclear Iran, then a plausible policy recommendation is for the U.S. to distance itself from Israel, achieving a similar shift in bargaining power without the need for Iran to nuclearize.
Pure speculation, of course, and there are many good arguments against this point of view.
15 February 2009
Vacuous Paragraphs, I
Richard Florida in the latest Atlantic: Yes, when you get to define "mega-region" according to whatever criteria you feel like, you'll find you can associate a bunch of impressive figures with the top-40. Hmm, you might even define "mega-region" in order to maximize those impressive figures. Of course, like all concepts, regions are regions because people think of them as regions (nominalism, roughly). But in this case, many of these mega-regions are mega-regions because Richard Florida thinks of them as mega-regions. For the record, the "Shanghai-Beijing Corridor" stretches over 1000 kilometers:Worldwide, people are crowding into a discrete number of mega-regions, systems of multiple cities and their surrounding suburban rings like the Boston–New York–Washington Corridor. In North America, these mega-regions include SunBelt centers like the Char-Lanta Corridor, Northern and Southern California, the Texas Triangle of Houston–San Antonio–Dallas, and Southern Florida’s Tampa-Orlando-Miami area; the Pacific Northwest’s Cascadia, stretching from Portland through Seattle to Vancouver; and both Greater Chicago and Tor-Buff-Chester in the old Rust Belt. Internationally, these mega-regions include Greater London, Greater Tokyo, Europe’s Am-Brus-Twerp, China’s Shanghai-Beijing Corridor, and India’s Bangalore-Mumbai area. Economic output is ever-more concentrated in these places as well. The world’s 40 largest mega-regions, which are home to some 18 percent of the world’s population, produce two-thirds of global economic output and nearly 9 in 10 new patented innovations.
14 February 2009
"Generational Theft"?
It's probably too obvious to require stating, but the Republicans' recent anti-stimulus slogan would be a whole lot more rhetorically powerful if anybody was convinced that the Republicans were at all concerned about social justice.
12 February 2009
Buy American!
A discussion on a Times blog that provides a variety of different positions on the issue (though some of the positions are pretty silly or unhelpful, in my reading - those of the "local union official" and Sherrod Brown in particular):
Things I hadn't realized that are useful to point out:
1. Only 38 countries plus the U.S. are party to the WTO agreement that ensures non-discrimination in government procurement. For the U.S. to fulfill its international obligations, then, it only has to not discriminate against those 38 countries.
2. That agreement allows countries to discriminate in particular country-specific pre-agreed sectors; or, to put it another way, the agreement only applies to certain pre-specified sectors. So, the U.S. can discriminate even against signatories in sectors it did not sign on to open up.
To me, "Buy American" needs to be framed as a very specific issue rather than an argument about the broader merits of or problems with "free trade" versus "protectionism." True, as one contributor claims, there's a lot of room for protectionist policies while abiding by the letter of international trade law. But as another of the writers points out, today we have a broad network of international agreements and commitments which, if followed fairly closely, defend against a beggar-thy-neighbor spiral of protectionism. They serve as a line which leaders are wary to cross, since crossing it changes the game from a matter of protectionism within the law to an abandonment of the regulatory regime altogether. There's a huge difference there. Moreover, I'd add that any negative consequences of loopholes in the law can just as well serve as incentives for deeper cooperation in the future (i.e. when the economic crisis is over).
It's only if leaders believe the "Buy American" clause to be part of a more general protectionist turn that it could undermine cooperation on international trade. Then, the argument that the "Buy American" clause will encourage a spiral of trade wars will become a self-fulfilling prophecy. Economists and politicians who frame the issue in terms of this deeper danger, perversely enough, contribute to the risk of that outcome. It will be crucial for the U.S. to engage in smart public relations and public diplomacy to prevent this prophecy from being fulfilled.
10 February 2009
I reject your metaphysical assumptions!
1. W. V. Quine, Two Dogmas of Empiricism, in the possible world where it is a book.
2. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations
3. W. V. Quine, “Two Dogmas of Empiricism”, in the actual world, where it is only an article.
4. Saul Kripke, Naming and Necessity.
5. Saul Kripke, “Semantical Considerations on Modal Logic”.
6. David Kaplan, “Demonstratives”
7. Richard Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature.
6. Noam Chomsky, Aspects of the Theory of Syntax
5. John Rawls, A Theory of Justice
4. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception
3. Those works which would be ranked “7-10” on this list if it were ordered according to the standard >-relation on the positive integers.
2. Jorge Luis Borges, “The Analytical Language of John Wilkins”
1. W. V. Quine, Two Dogmas of Empiricism, in the possible world where it is a book.
Etc.
Discussion question: (3) was published in 1951. Would (1) therefore also have been published after 1945, had it existed?
