Aesthetic Relativism > Moral Relativism > Cultural Assassination...,

Counterpunch |  In contrast, an ongoing exhibition at the Chicago Art Institute shows the early Soviet arts in all their bustling contradiction and coming-to-be. The CIA could not have produced anything on this scale, which required a world-shaking collision of forces and a belief uncomfortably close to the religious. Malevich, Dziga Vertov, El Lissitzky, Lenin, Mayakovsky… The US, too, had considerable forces at its disposal (Buster Keaton, first and foremost). The strange thing is that this exhibition, mounted in a refreshingly no-nonsense and rather cool style, still manages to inspire, as if the past was waiting for the present to catch up to it. This power lies not so much in the myriad forms of the works, which may be bound in time, but in the pure electricity of their still-disarming presence. Against the morose ideas of ends, the grand mortuary they call ‘history’, against the relegation of past works of art to nostalgia and price, something else appears beside the collages, constructivist paintings, fabrics and living spaces constructed for the great new socialist world. We are always told that Stalin was the culmination of this moment in time. Who says? And who paid him to say it? The answer is obvious. They say that here is only one modernism; that there is only one history (and one power able to declare that it is over); that there is only one self to express; that there is only one public and one art which can express it (sometimes fearfully, it has to be admitted). If this sums up the most banal kinds of socialist realism, it is equally applicable to the art the CIA promoted in the middle of last century. Behind the paintings was the logic of pacification.

Alan Dulles’ influence extends far beyond his admittedly meagre artistic output. The CIA’s most recent work of criticism is the destruction of San’a and Aleppo, where the Agency has taken to task outmoded theories of architecture in an imperial inversion of the Situationists’ support for the Watts riots. And The Intercept informsus that Erik Prince, infamous Blackwater capo, and that old has-been Oliver North are setting up a parallel intelligence agency to defend the embattled President against a rogue CIA. Thus, the old rivalry between Classical and Romantic has returned with a swinging post-modern, mercenary twist. Although painting seems to be off the radar for now, the ideas behind the Abstract Intelligence school await resurrection in another form whose inelegance may delight or offend, depending on the myths necessary for the murder of both the Image and its reflection.

Is This Why Poppy Bush Abruptly Commenced Playing Grab Ass?

Counterpunch |  The legend of Camelot has had a decidedly devastating effect on the sober appreciation of US government institutions. The Kennedys were the US variant of the Royal Family and even more to the point, seemed photogenic, intellectual, glamorous.

The Kennedy family was itself the architect behind the faux aristocratic fantasy, the fiction, if you like, of an administration awash with shiny competence and brain heavy awareness.  In truth, it was essentially piloted by a medically challenged and heavily medicated figure who suffered, amongst other conditions, Addison’s disease.

President Kennedy’s rocky stewardship, as Robert Dallek notes in considerable detail, was marked by anti-anxiety agents, sleeping pill popping, stimulants, and pain killers.  The public image of a formidable, robust Cold War warrior was itself an elaborate fantasy, padded by its own conspiracy of deception.  As if realising the implications of his medical burrowing, Dallek had to reiterate the point that Kennedy was still functioning and capable and was at no risk of cocking up during the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962.[2]

The Kennedys were successful enough, be it through their army of ideological acolytes and publicists (think of the unquestioning pen of Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.), to create the impression of knight-like purity, intellectual sagacity and calm.  To kill, then, what is noble, became an essential American trope: JFK, Bobby Kennedy, Martin Luther King, Jr.  Behind each had to be a gargantuan conspiracy, an establishment puppeteer.

The Kennedy files that are promised for release are hardly going to rock the boat, alter the world, or change a single mind.  Historians will be able to bring out modestly updated versions of old texts; official accounts might be slightly adjusted on investigations, locations and suspects, but the conspiracy set is bound to stick with grim determination to ideas long formed and re-enforced by assumptions that refuse revision.

The Bushes and JFK.

ebola in west africa: the outbreak country by country

guardian |  The outbreak of the deadly Ebola virus currently sweeping through parts of west Africa has so far killed an estimated 673 people. As of 23 July there had been a total of 1,202 confirmed, probable or suspected infections

neurological evidence for chaos in the nervous system is growing...,

nautilus |  In one important way, the recipient of a heart transplant ignores its new organ: Its nervous system usually doesn’t rewire to communicate with it. The 40,000 neurons controlling a heart operate so perfectly, and are so self-contained, that a heart can be cut out of one body, placed into another, and continue to function perfectly, even in the absence of external control, for a decade or more. This seems necessary: The parts of our nervous system managing our most essential functions behave like a Swiss watch, precisely timed and impervious to perturbations. Chaotic behavior has been throttled out.

Or has it? Two simple pendulums that swing with perfect regularity can, when yoked together, move in a chaotic trajectory. Given that the billions of neurons in our brain are each like a pendulum, oscillating back and forth between resting and firing, and connected to 10,000 other neurons, isn’t chaos in our nervous system unavoidable?

The prospect is terrifying to imagine. Chaos is extremely sensitive to initial conditions—just think of the butterfly effect. What if the wrong perturbation plunged us into irrevocable madness? Among many scientists, too, there is a great deal of resistance to the idea that chaos is at work in biological systems. Many intentionally preclude it from their models. It subverts computationalism, which is the idea that the brain is nothing more than a complicated, but fundamentally rule-based, computer. Chaos seems unqualified as a mechanism of biological information processing, as it allows noise to propagate without bounds, corrupting information transmission and storage.

At the same time, chaos has its advantages. On a behavioral level, the arms race between predator and prey has wired erratic strategies into our nervous system.¹ A moth sensing an echolocating bat, for example, immediately directs itself away from the ultrasound source. The neurons controlling its flight fire in an increasingly erratic manner as the bat draws closer, until the moth, darting in fits, appears to be nothing but a tumble of wings and legs. More generally, chaos could grant our brains a great deal of computational power, by exploring many possibilities at great speed.

Motivated by these and other potential advantages, and with an accumulation of evidence in hand, neuroscientists are gradually accepting the potential importance of chaos in the brain.

the flight 370 in kiev open thread...,

Cause inquiring minds want to know what Bro. Umbra thinks about the impossible phenomenon of a Boeing 777 being lost? Somebody DEFINITELY knows where that plane is sitting and has known exactly where it's been sitting since this narrative jumped off. Any liminal perspectives causing you to itch, now's the time to scratch.

though he swears by only four, this is the notion I believe umbra is on about...,

wikipedia | A concept inventory is a criterion-referenced test designed to evaluate whether a student has an accurate working knowledge of a specific set of concepts. To ensure interpretability, it is common to have multiple items that address a single idea. Typically, concept inventories are organized as multiple-choice tests in order to ensure that they are scored in a reproducible manner, a feature that also facilitates administration in large classes. Unlike a typical, teacher-made multiple-choice test, questions and response choices on concept inventories are the subject of extensive research. The aims of the research include ascertaining (a) the range of what individuals think a particular question is asking and (b) the most common responses to the questions. Concept inventories are evaluated to ensure test reliability and validity. In its final form, each question includes one correct answer and several distractors. The distractors are incorrect answers that are usually (but not always) based on students' commonly held misconceptions.^[1]

Ideally, a score on a criterion-referenced test reflects the amount of content knowledge a student has mastered. Criterion-referenced tests differ from norm-referenced tests in that (in theory) the former is not used to compare an individual's score to the scores of the group. Ordinarily, the purpose of a criterion-referenced test is to ascertain whether a student mastered a predetermined amount of content knowledge; upon obtaining a test score that is at or above a cutoff score, the student can move on to study a body of content knowledge that follows next in a learning sequence. In general, item difficulty values ranging between 30% and 70% are best able to provide information about student understanding.

Distractors are often based on ideas commonly held by students, as determined by years of research on misconceptions. Test developers often research student misconceptions by examining students' responses to open-ended essay questions and conducting "think-aloud" interviews with students. The distractors chosen by students help researchers understand student thinking and give instructors insights into students' prior knowledge (and, sometimes, firmly held beliefs). This foundation in research underlies instrument construction and design, and plays a role in helping educators obtain clues about students' ideas, scientific misconceptions, and didaskalogenic, that is, teacher-induced confusions and conceptual lacunae that interfere with learning.

in praise of the clash of cultures

NYTimes | Can we be sure that our beliefs about the world match how the world actually is and that our subjective preferences match what is objectively in our best interest? If the truth is important to us these are pressing questions.

We might value the truth for different reasons: because we want to live a life that is good and doesn’t just appear so; because we take knowing the truth to be an important component of the good life; because we consider living by the truth a moral obligation independent of any consequences; or because, like my Egyptian friends, we want to come closer to God who is the Truth (al-Haqq in Arabic, one of God’s names in Islam). Of course we wouldn’t hold our beliefs and values if we weren’t convinced that they are true. But that’s no evidence that they are. Weren’t my Egyptian friends just as convinced of their views as I was of mine? More generally: don’t we find a bewildering diversity of beliefs and values, all held with great conviction, across different times and cultures? If considerations such as these lead you to concede that your present convictions could be false, then you are a fallibilist. And if you are a fallibilist you can see why valuing the truth and valuing a culture of debate are related: because you will want to critically examine your beliefs and values, for which a culture of debate offers an excellent setting.

Of course we don’t need to travel all the way to Cairo to subject our beliefs and values to critical scrutiny; in theory we can also do so on our own. In practice, however, we seem to need some sort of unsettling experience that confronts us with our fallibility, or, as the great Muslim thinker al-Ghazâlî (d. 1111) puts it in his intellectual autobiography “The Deliverance from Error,” that breaks the “bonds of taqlîd” — the beliefs and values stemming from the contingent circumstances of our socialization rather than from rational deliberation.

In his own case, al-Ghazâlî writes, the bonds of taqlîd broke when he realized that he would have been just as fervent a Jew or Christian as he was a Muslim, had he been brought up in a Jewish or Christian community. He explains taqlîd as the authority of “parents and teachers,” which we can restate more generally as all things other than rational argument that influence what we think and do: from media, fashion and marketing to political rhetoric and religious ideology.
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The problem of taqlîd (or what social psychologists today call “conformism”) has a long history. Socrates explained the need for his gadfly mission by comparing Athenian citizens to a “sluggish” horse that “needed to be stirred up.” Note that philosophers, too, fall prey to taqlîd. Galen, the second century Alexandrian doctor and philosopher, complained that in his time Platonists, Aristotelians, Stoics and Epicureans simply “name themselves after the sect in which they were brought up” because they “form admirations” for the school founders, not because they choose the views supported by the best arguments.

If we take taqlîd to be a fact about human psychology and agree that it is an undesirable state to be in — at least when it comes to the core convictions that underlie our way of life and worldview — then we should particularly welcome debates across cultural boundaries. For if we engage someone who does not share the cultural narratives we were brought up in (historical, political, religious etc.), we cannot rely on their authority, but are compelled to argue for our views — as I had to in my discussions with Egyptian students in Cairo.

open thread saturday...,