Endnotes

Happy solstice, everyone!

I have not been very consistent this year about writing in this blog, despite my resolution last year. After a flurry of posts in January (Flattery at the Money Cage, Stalin as Reviewer #2, Democracy Data, Updated, and Charisma and Representation), I only wrote one other thing - my piece Against Renaming Victoria. (About which - the no change position won, at least for now; and I’m proud to have been an early participant in the “stick with Vic” campaign). The “Charisma and Representation” piece was the most popular of these posts; and I’m currently working on a more academic version of the arguments there. Thank you all for reading!

I also published a paper of potential interest to this blog’s readership: “Two Models of Political Leader Cults: Propaganda and Ritual” (ungated version here); but my other research projects took a bit of a beating at the hands of increased administrative responsibilities. (Still, more is coming - and perhaps will be previewed in this blog if I can find the time next year).

In the spirit of the holiday season, here are some reading recommendations:

Books

• Possibly the best book I read (or rather, finished reading) this year was Yuri Slezkine’s The House of Government. It’s not an easy book – it’s more like 3 or 4 books in one, including an essay about the Bolsheviks as a millenarian sect, an interpretation of pre-WWII Soviet literature, a history of the private lives of the residents of the “House on the Embankment” told through their letters and personal reminiscences, and a tribute to Yuri Trifonov’s work – but for readers with some background about the history of the period the overall effect is magnificent. I’ve been mulling over writing a long post about it, which will probably never get written.
• Slezkine’s work also led me to read some of Trifonov’s novels – The House on the Embankment and Another Life, both of which I found powerfully moving in their reflections about memory and identity. I also finally read The Master and Margarita, a book that I finally feel I understand a bit. (I had tried reading it years ago, and never got past about the halfway point). Lots more “serious” literature this year than last! Perhaps I enjoyed these now only because I could understand some of their background better; and yet I still feel like I barely know anything about Soviet society. (This is how historians must feel all the time).
• I did lots of other communist-related reading this year, including A. James McAdams’ Vanguard of the Revolution: The Global Idea of the Communist Party (a sort of global history of communist parties - I learned a lot from this!); Kevin Morgan’s International Communism and the Cult of the Individual (a history of communist leader cults in the West); Wang Shaoguang’s Failure of Charisma: The Cultural Revolution in Wuhan (a really interesting analysis of what I might call the “irrelevance of charisma” in the Cultural Revolution, written by a former Red Guard turned political scientist). If I had some time, I would write more about all of these; though these books are primarily for specialists, they are all quite interesting…
• I finally took a crack at Leszek Kolakowski’s Main Currents of Marxism; I found volume I really useful in thinking about what was utopian in the communist projects of the 20th century. (And the fact that I had to give a public lecture on Marx spurred me to actually read it).
• Lest you think I actually have any taste, I also read I lot of sci-fi. I enjoyed Ada Palmer’s Terra Ignota series, though I thought the third volume flagged a little. And I always enjoy anything by Charles Stross - this year’s Dark State and The Labyrinth Index were great fun. (I’m a fan of the Cthulhu+bureaucracy genre that Stross has perfected).

Other Stuff Online

• Ribbonfarm always gets a mention here (because I like it), and this year is no exception. I love Sarah Perry’s essays - this year I especially liked Metaphor Therapy, Treasure Hunting, Social Media Consciousness, Deep Laziness, and perhaps most of all Luxuriating in Privacy.
• Somewhat idiosyncratically related: Agnes Callard’s beautiful essay on Unruliness.
• This year I spent a lot of time on Gwern’s site; I really enjoyed his extraordinarlily thorough exploration of My Little Pony fandoms, but there’s lots and lots there worth reading. (I expect most people reading this already read Gwern, but it’s only recently that I delved into his site).
• Also idiosyncratically related: this totally different essay in Commune on Ursula LeGuin’s “Hainish” novels, Communism Might Last a Million Years. (I think both My Little Pony and LeGuin’s novels have to do with utopia, but don’t ask me to articulate the connection right now).
• Cosma Shalizi had some great new posts, after a while of not posting anything: a reading of Marx’s Capital, Practical Peer review (I’ve used this with my PhD students).
• This year I’ve tried to add some art to my twitter feed, and I’ve really enjoyed @inconvergent’s procedurally generated pieces (follow him here). I’ve also enjoyed the algorithmic and conceptual weirdness catalogued in Esoteric.Codes (not on twitter).
• Some other random pieces worth mentioning: Perry Anderson on Anthony Powell; The Endless Reign of Rupert Murdoch (much more than you ever wanted to know about Rupert Murdoch, but also a brilliant sociology of the newspaper industry); Interfluidity on Authority; Andrew Batson on A Weberian Analysis of Xi Jinping’s Authority (also read his blog more generally, e.g this); Justin Smith on Cave Art; Welcome to Armaggedon.
• And for the extremophiles fans, there was this nice NYT piece recently about microbes 3 miles under the crust.

As usual, there’s a lot more worth sharing, but this is probably enough for now. Happy summer solstice / winter solstice / Christmas / Festivus / Yule / Newtonmass / Toxcatl to all!

Endnotes

There was a bit more activity on this blog than last year, though still very little (only 5 posts); my New Year’s resolution is to write more. In any case, I especially enjoyed writing on Utopia and Revolution and reading KCNA’s headlines as literature. I also wrote a couple of R packages that I hope are useful to others. Offline, I managed to edit a volume on “democratic moments” in political thought. Unlike many such collections, this one (forthcoming in February 2018) will also be freely available online (under a Creative Commons license), though of course you can always buy a physical copy. Thank you readers!

As usual, some end of the year reading recommendations:

• This year, I read fewer books than I had hoped. There was a fair amount on the Russian Revolution; beyond Richard Stites’ fantastic Revolutionary Dreams, I also recently picked up Yury Slezkine’s The House of Government which is so far excellent (but will take me a while to get through, at over 1000 pages), and Vasily Grossman’s Life and Fate, perhaps the most important Russian novel of WWII.
• I also visited Beijing for the first time in my life (exceedingly interesting!), which led me to pick up some books on Chinese history (many via recommendations from Razib Khan); so far, I’ve really liked Timothy Brooks’ The Troubled Empire, and I’m currently finishing Jonathan Spence’s The Search for Modern China, which I have found useful.
• Seva Gunitsky’s Aftershocks was excellent; it’s in part about how the prestige of power helps drive regime change. I hope to write more about it next year.
• I also read a lot of sci-fi (I have no taste in literary fiction – for that, look at David Auerbach’s amazing list), but the only things that really stood out were Cixin Liu’s The Three-Body Problem trilogy and Charles Stross’ novels; the Laundry files novels strike me as great “novels of bureaucracy,” in particular. But everybody knows about those, right?
• Scott Alexander’s reviews of Eichmann in Jerusalem, Surfing Uncertainty, and Seeing Like a State are well worth reading.
• Lots of Ribbonfarm, including Chris Reid’s Games, Videogames, and the Dionysian Society; Sarah Perry’s Idiots Scaring themselves in the Dark and Feeling the Future; and especially Venkatesh Rao’s How to Make History (which is a really interesting use of Hannah Arendt to think about Silicon Valley).
• Joseph Heath on Iain M. Banks’ “Culture” novels - an excellent exploration of what a purely “memetic culture” would entail.
• Mike Travers on eclipses and rituals.
• Other web pieces worth mentioning (at least, things that stuck in my mind or found interesting): Christian Thorne’s Fulfilling the Fascist Lie (on Adorno’s Authoritarian Personality); Randall Collins’ Faces Around a Dictator; The Sacred Monarchies that survive into the postmodern age; The Conservation of Coercion.

There was much more worth sharing, but this is enough for now. Happy new year everyone!

Endnotes

Not much happened on this blog this year, except for two announcements (for my new book and a software package for extending the Unified Democracy Scores); I didn’t even have the usual solstice link post. (Lots of things going on in my offline job; there should be more activity here next year). But there was still a lot of good writing this year worth sharing. In no particular order:

• I’ve continued to really enjoy Ribbonfarm. Some especially interesting or memorable pieces: Adam Elkus' The Strategy of Subversive Conflict; Sarah Perry’s The Origin of Authenticity in the Breakdown of the Illusion of the Real, The Art of the Conspiracy Theory, and Dares, Costly Signals, and Psychopaths; and Venkatesh Rao’s massive 14,000 word piece King Ruinous and the City of Darkness - combining personal memoir, Bihari politics in the age of Lalu Prasad Yadav, the Tata business empire, and many other things in a surprisingly interesting stew.
• Nick Szabo writes occasionally at Unenumerated. His piece on Artifacts of wealth: patterns in the evolution of collectibles and money was very thought-provoking, but just about everything there is worth reading.
• If you’re a political science or IR person, Paul Musgrave has been blogging regularly, mostly but not exclusively interesting book reviews. His twitter account is also very much worth following.
• Nintil is another good blog I discovered this year. I especially enjoyed the Soviet Union series, a good example of the very useful “someone reads the literature so I don’t have to” form of blogging.
• If you’re interested in Chinese politics and economics, Andrew Batson has been really good this year. I especially enjoyed his post What is Socialist about “Socialism with Chinese characteristics”?, but there were many other good ones.
• More China: I’ve really enjoyed following Everyday Life in Mao’s China. Beyond the pictures of “everyday life” during a sometimes difficult period, there’s also a lot of rare art, much of it not obviously political.
• Maciej Ceglowski has some really great talks here. I found the the one on Superintelligence arguments and the one on Lev Sergeyevich Termen, especially interesting. His travel writing is also compulsively readable.
• Inga Clendinnen passed away this year. (Another casualty of 2016). I loved her work on the Aztecs; David Auerbach writes a wonderful essay about her book on the encounter between the Maya and the Spanish, Ambivalent Conquests.
• Zenpundit is hosting a Thucydides Roundatable. I especially liked T. Greer’s Why I read Thucydides and History is Written by the Losers, but there’s lots of good stuff there.
• On Trump and the politics of Trump, some pieces I found useful throughout the year: Timothy Burke’s Trumpism and Expertise; David Auerbach’s Donald Trump: Moosbrugger for President; Adam Aelkus’ Trump: The Explanation of No Explanation; Gabriel Rossman’s Traitors; and Jacob Levy’s Authoritarianism and Post-Truth Politics.
• Venezuela is collapsing, economically and socially. Nick Casey at the New York Times and Hannah Dreier at the Associated Press are doing fantastic reporting; for political argument and analysis, see Caracas Chronicles.
• Among the non-fiction books I read this year, Stephen Kotkin’s Magnetic Mountain: Stalinism as a Civilization, Charles Kurzmann’s The Unthinkable Revolution in Iran, and Robert Crassweller’s Perón and the Enigmas of Argentina have stayed with me. (I may write about Kotkin’s book soon). Also worth mentioning: Achen and Bartels’ Democracy for Realists and Mary Beard’s SPQR.

Happy new year everyone!

Endnotes

Happy solstice, everyone!

It’s been a good year here at Abandoned Footnotes HQ. On the more academic side of things, three papers derived from ideas first discussed in this blog a long time ago are now in print (ungated copies here, here, and here, if anybody is interested enough). I may get around to saying more about them sometime next year. Plus, progress on other projects, and 11 posts on this blog!

The most viewed post was “The Saudi Monarchy as a Family Firm,” which won a 3QuarksDaily prize; the runner up was “Propaganda as Signaling.” The graph-heavy posts (modernist art masquerading as social science?) were also widely shared. Thanks to everyone who read, commented on and shared them!

As is the tradition here, here are a few things for your reading pleasure:

• Two blogs I discovered this year and have really enjoyed: Pseudoerasmus by the eponymous pseudonymous author (mostly economic history, growth, and development) and The Scholar’s Stage by T. Greer (East Asian history, strategy, politics). I especially enjoyed Pseudoerasmus’ Where do pro-social institutions come from? and T. Greer on Hobbes and Ibn Khaldoun.
• For your political science and IR needs, Chaos and Governance seems to have restarted occasional blogging. I’ve also learned quite a bit from Tom Pepinsky this year. Alas, however, Jay Ulfelder has decided to stop blogging…
• Ribbonfarm has been greatly reinvigorated this year, especially with the posts on ritual by Sarah Perry, and the posts on physics by Brian Skinner. I especially enjoyed A Children’s Picture-book Introduction to Quantum Field Theory, Samuel Beckett’s Guide to Particles and Antiparticles, An Ecology of Beauty and Strong Drink and Ritual and the Consciousness Monoculture.
• A few books that I wish I had had more time to talk about this year: Andrew G. Walder’s China under Mao and Alison Pargetter’s Qaddafi’s Libya. And so much more to say about Nina Tumarkin’s Lenin Lives! Perhaps next year…
• Some other neat or fun or simply good pieces I’ve saved this year: Andrew Batson’s Marxist Numerology, or Why Seven Workers are Different than Eight; BLDGBLOG’s Occult Infrastructure and the “Funerary Teleportation Grid” of Greater London ; Justin E. H. Smith’s The Stateless Europeans; XKCD’s Randall Munroe’s Proton Earth, Electron Moon (reminds me of this old classic, How to Destroy the Earth); on Liberland, a micronation that seems like a performance art piece; Perry Anderson’s Incommensurate Russia. 

Happy summer solstice / winter solstice / christmas / festivus / yule / Newtonmass / Toxcatl or any other ritual you may celebrate to all!

Endnotes: Solstice Edition

Another year is coming to an end, another Ragnarok deferred; a time to take stock and give thanks. It’s been a very busy year. I spent six months in Spain undertaking new research, and am now in the middle of writing a book. (More details to follow eventually). One paper that emerged from ideas discussed in this blog is now forthcoming in Political Studies in 2015: “The Irrelevance of Legitimacy;” hopefully more will follow soon. All this has meant this blog has been a bit abandoned - only 5 posts, though some of them were very popular and widely shared. Thanks to everyone who read, commented and shared these footnotes!

In the season’s spirit of sharing, here are a few things I’ve enjoyed this year:

• Slate Star Codex has been very very good this year. Among many excellent posts, I really enjoyed Beware the Man with One Study, Meditations on Moloch, Five Case Studies on Politicization, and The Control Group is Out of Control (“the Ouroboros of scientific evidence”). 
• For all your nerdier political economy and global income inequality needs, Branko Milanovic has been writing an occasional blog, Global Inequality. I’ve also enjoyed reading Dietz Vollrath’s Growth Economics Blog this year. Both a bit technical, but generally excellent.
• For the 2-3 people reading this blog with interests in Venezuelan politics, the unimaginatively named Venezuelan Politics and Human Rights blog has been very good this year, though I don’t always agree with their conclusions. Hugo Perez Hernaiz has been doing some amazing work monitoring every weird conspiracy theory emanating from the Venezuelan government.
• I’ve been on a Neal Stephenson kick; The Baroque Cycle and Cryptonomicon were great fun. (My favorite is Anathem, though I read that a few years ago. Anathem has a lot to say about what it means to be a scholar).
• Stephen Kotkin’s first volume of his planned three-volume Stalin biography is amazing so far (I have not finished it). It’s more like a history of the world over the last two centuries than a simple biography; hopefully I’ll have more to say about it next year. Among big books on dictators I read this years, Stanley Payne’s The Franco Regime is also fantastic, a work of overwhelming scholarship (Payne appears to have read everything related to Franco in about nine European languages, including Finnish and Russian). Richard Evans’ three volume history of the Third Reich (mentioned here in the post on the tedium of authoritarianism) is extremely readable and full of interesting details; I had planned to write more about it, but life intervened.
• Among online long reads worth noting this year, this powerfully evocative piece on Maoist China by Simon Leys from 1977 really stuck in my memory. Other long reads from this year I’ve liked and failed to promptly forget, in no particular order: Perry Anderson on basically everything you could ever really wish to know about Italian Politics; The New Atlantis on elephants; “That Impostor Known as the Buddha;” Dimitris Xygalatas on extreme rituals; Boriz Munoz on Emptying the Tower of David; Justin E. H. Smith on The Skeleton Garden of Paris (which made me think back to many visits to museums this year).
• Your regularly scheduled solstice extremophiles blogging: microbes in space. 

The season is not complete without linking again to Phil Schrodt’s post from last year on the insidious war on Yule:

Where has our appreciation of the true Yule gone?: the blessings of the wisdom of Odin, the protection given us by Thor, the abundance bestowed by Freya? Recognition that with the passing of another year, the guardians of Asgard have again held off the Frost Giants [7], Ragnarok is again deferred, and in a few months the light and warmth of summer will return?

Here in the Southern hemisphere it’s the summer, not the winter solstice, but happy solstice/christmas/festivus/yule/Newtonmass/Toxcatl or any other ritual you may celebrate to all!

Endnotes

It's the solstice: time to take stock, and (in the Northern hemisphere, where I am right now) give thanks to the guardians of Asgard for another Ragnarok deferred.

It's been a slow year in this blog - only eight  posts, though most of them proved surprisingly popular. The post on Aztec political thought, in particular, was an unexpected hit, with more than 8,000 views so far, and my review of Randall Collins' Interaction Ritual Chains was even republished, with minor changes, as a more or less proper book review here. Many posts were about ritual, since for the first time I feel like I've "got" ritual; a friend told me recently that I was like a man with a hammer now, seeing ritual everywhere. In any case, thanks to everyone who read, commented, and shared these rather irregular footnotes!

In the season's spirit of sharing, here are some links for your reading pleasure, some older than others:

• Phil Schrodt writes a dispatch on the insidious War on Yule:

Yes, the outward signs surround us: the evergreen wreaths on doors, the houses and streets festooned with lights against the darkness of December, the ubiquitous gaily-decorated trees—aluminum, plastic, occasionally real, all invoking the world-encompassing Yggdrasil—and festive gathering of friends and family [1] before the blazing Yule fire [2] to feast and drink mulled wine. Even that ever-present “Santa”: obviously an odd synthesis from many cultures, but coming out of the northern skies in a sled pulled by reindeer and accompanied by elves. The signs of Yule are everywhere.

But this has become shallow amid the crass materialism, the anodyne references to “the holiday season” and the confusion of social obligations. Where has our appreciation of the true Yule gone?: the blessings of the wisdom of Odin, the protection given us by Thor, the abundance bestowed by Freya? Recognition that with the passing of another year, the guardians of Asgard have again held off the Frost Giants [7], Ragnarok is again deferred, and in a few months the light and warmth of summer will return?

• The Cognition and Culture Institute is hosting a Book Seminar on Ara Norenzayan's book "Big Gods" that is well worth reading. 
• What happens when you program a bot to mashup the King James Bible and Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs. (Via Charlie Stross).
• These Chavez and Bolivar murals from all over Venezuela cry out for further analysis. (The better ones appear earlier - scroll down for some truly striking ones).
• My family and I have really enjoyed the WTF evolution tumbler all year. 
• On Pekka Hamalainen's "The Comanche Empire." (Via Cosma Shalizi).
• A Soviet adaptation of Winnie the Pooh. 

And now for your regularly scheduled solstice extremophiles blogging:

Deep Lake in Antarctica. Crawling with haloarchaea.

Happy Yule/Winter Solstice/Summer Solstice!

Endnotes: Solstice Edition

It's the summer solstice here in New Zealand, a day which always seems full of meaning: a more suitable end for the year than the astronomically meaningless 31st. Perhaps because I grew up in Venezuela, where every day is about the same length, I always enjoy the idea of getting to the longest day (or the shortest day, in the winter solstice), and like to mark the occasion; among other things, it feels like a fitting time to take stock and look back on the year.

I (re)started blogging a year and a half ago, mostly as a way to force myself to write while I was on research leave, and I'm grateful and astonished at the fact that I seem to have acquired a bit of a readership. Some 200 people seem to read this blog regularly via RSS feed, and perhaps 100-200 more read it through various other means. Several of the posts on cults of personality and related phenomena have been picked up by very high traffic sites, garnering thousands of pageviews, and the unexpected attention pushed me into starting an actual research project on the topic, which will consume me probably for years :).  Thanks to the people who have linked to or shared my posts, and thank you readers!

In the spirit of celebrating the holidays, I give you some links for your holiday reading (or viewing) pleasure:

• The creativity of the Syrian protestors on display in this article is amazing. The Homs International Tank Wash and Lubrication Center would not be out of place in a play by Brecht. And the prank with the amplifier broadcasting a recording of a protest (and forcing the police to run around the city looking for a non-existent protest) is just brilliant. Incidentally, it seems that the protesters are (rightly) following the playbook of the CANVAS group (previously OTPOR, this group played a role in the colour revolutions), staging "dilemma" actions that make the regime lose the respect of the population regardless of how they respond. I wonder if this is a case of independent evolution, or if there is real diffusion at work (as appears to have been the case in Tunisia and Egypt). 
• I quite enjoyed this post by Timothy Burke on information as a mirror. 
• Towards a general theory of noncompetitive elections in authoritarian contexts. Electoral fraud is part of a signalling game; there is often more fraud in elections that are not close than in those that are close, since the extent of fraud is used to signal regime strength.
• Flattery inflation happening right now in Venezuela. 
• Jay Ulfelder's forecast of democratic transitions in 2012. He makes a good point here as well: for pure forecasting purposes, comparative perspective (and statistical analysis) is often far more useful than deep country knowledge. (See also Tetlock's "Expert Political Judgment").
• The Philosopher's Beard on why democracy cannot be seen as a "truth machine." 
• The trouble with causality. This is why I don't get criticisms of social science that suggest that it is inaccessible, or criticize sophisticated methodologies. Figuring out social and biological causal relations is hard!
• Theoretical egalitarianism as primitive classification.
• Richard Sennett on cities, complexity, and becoming mature. I thought this was very wise: "Learning to interact well with strangers requires a toleration of ambiguity, the capacity to contain frustration, an ability to listen carefully to people whose speech, needs, or desires may seem alien; none of these skills falls within the domain of pleasure, if that’s what happiness is; indeed, the entry into adulthood occurs exactly when people become capable of feeling connected to, and even solidarity with, other people who give them no pleasure." 
• Reihan Salam is very thought-provoking on the importance and implications of embeddedness (and its lack) for politics here and here.

Some biologically-themed links:

• All sufficiently advanced technologies are indistinguishable from nature.
• The World's Tallest Tree. The video is awesome. 
• Dolphins and whales at play.
• Spider perception at the edge of the possible.
• The great wolverine: much tougher than you are.
• How to destroy the earth. "The Earth is built to last. It is a 4,550,000,000-year-old, 5,973,600,000,000,000,000,000-tonne ball of iron. It has taken more devastating asteroid hits in its lifetime than you've had hot dinners, and lo, it still orbits merrily. So my first piece of advice to you, dear would-be Earth-destroyer, is: do NOT think this will be easy." 

And finally, some beautiful holiday extremophiles for you: haloarchaea turn Lake Eyre in Australia pink:

(Image from NASA Earth Observatory)

Endnotes

I haven't done one of these in a couple of months. So, for your Monday (or Sunday - we're ahead of the world here in NZ) reading pleasure:

• Via a link from Cosma Shalizi, more on Arendt and Occupy Wall Street by The Slack Wire. There's some interesting discussion in the comments as well, which implicitly brings out some points I didn't stress in my post: concrete political action with specific goals always ends up transforming the space of appearances and introducing elements of surveillance, hierarchy, and the like (sometimes with very good reason!). Organized hierarchy appears to be unavoidable in both politics and economic life, but (according to Arendt) there is something that is always lost in that transition. Hence the need for a different balance between spaces of appearance, spaces of surveillance, and spaces for escaping visibility. (Maybe I'll write more about this later). 

• The Slack Wire also has an interesting post  (it's an interesting blog!) using Acemoglu and Robinson's ideas to think about Occupy Wall Street as a "democratization" movement. (I'm fond of Acemoglu and Robinson's basic model of democratization, as constant readers will know, despite its obvious extreme simplifying assumptions).

• Speaking of Cosma Shalizi, I enjoyed his discussion of an obscure book on Marxist econophysics and of Bayesianism and the law in the UK. It is obscure, but you'd be surprised about how much you learn about the perils and difficulties of using models in the social sciences! Besides, it comes with a mention of the call-in show at Radio Yerevan, and who doesn't like that?

Question to Radio Yerevan: Is it correct that Grigori Grigorievich Grigoriev won a luxury car at the All-Union Championship in Moscow? 

Answer: In principle, yes. But first of all it was not Grigori Grigorievich Grigoriev, but Vassili Vassilievich Vassiliev; second, it was not at the All-Union Championship in Moscow, but at a Collective Farm Sports Festival in Smolensk; third, it was not a car, but a bicycle; and fourth he didn't win it, but rather it was stolen from him.

• Via BK Drinkwater, creating a totalitarian society inside a film set. And then living in it. And refusing to finish the film. 

• Jay Ulfelder on the difficulties of democratization efforts even in the EU.

• Some China-centric links: China's rulers appear to be realizing the advantages of religion. Fang Lizhi on Ezra Vogel on Deng Xiaoping (quietly angry). And humor as a weapon of the weak in China:

No government in the world pours more resources into patrolling the Web than China’s, tracking down unwanted content and supposed miscreants among the online population of 500 million with an army of more than 50,000 censors and vast networks of advanced filtering software. Yet despite these restrictions — or precisely because of them — the Internet is flourishing as the wittiest space in China. “Censorship warps us in many ways, but it is also the mother of creativity,” says Hu Yong, an Internet expert and associate professor at Peking University. “It forces people to invent indirect ways to get their meaning across, and humor works as a natural form of encryption.” To slip past censors, Chinese bloggers have become masters of comic subterfuge, cloaking their messages in protective layers of irony and satire.

This is not a new concept, but it has erupted so powerfully that it now defines the ethos of the Internet in China. Coded language has become part of mainstream culture, with the most contagious memes tapping into widely shared feelings about issues that cannot be openly discussed, from corruption and economic inequality to censorship itself. “Beyond its comic value, this humor shows where netizens are pushing against the boundaries of the state,” says Xiao Qiang, an adjunct professor at the University of California, Berkeley, whose Web site, China Digital Times, maintains an entertaining lexicon of coded Internet terms. “Nothing else gives us a clearer view of the pressure points in Chinese society.”

• Via Eric Crampton, Scott McLemee on a recent book on Caligula:

The core of his argument is that even Caligula’s wildest behavior reflected the instability of the political order, not of his mind. The transition from republic to empire in the decades prior to his reign had generated a rather convoluted system of signals between the Senate (the old center of authority, with well-established traditions) and the emperor (a position that emerged only after civil war).

The problem came from deep uncertainty over how to understand the role that Julius Caeser had started to create for himself, and that Augustus later consolidated. The Romans had abolished their monarchy hundreds of years earlier. So regarding the emperor as a king was a total non-starter. And yet his power was undeniable – even as its limits were undefined.

The precarious arrangement held together through a strange combination of mutual flattery and mutual suspicion, with methods of influence-peddling ranging from strategic marriages to murder. And there was always character assassination via gossip, when use of an actual dagger seemed inconvenient or excessive.

Even those who came to despise Caligula thought that his first few months in power did him credit. He undid some of the sterner measures taken by his predecessor, Tiberius, and gave a speech making clear that he knew he was sharing power with the Senate. So eloquent and wonderful was this speech, the senators decided, it ought to be recited each year.

An expression of good will, then? Of bipartisan cooperation, so to speak?

On the contrary, Winterling interprets the flattering praise for Caligula’s speech as a canny move by the aristocrats in the Senate: “It shows they knew power was shared at the emperor’s pleasure and that the arrangement could be rescinded at any time…. Yet they could neither directly express their distrust of the emperor’s declaration that he would share power, nor openly try to force him to keep his word, since either action would imply that his promise was empty.” By “honoring” the speech with an annual recitation, the Senate was giving a subtle indication to Caligula that it knew better than to take him at his word. “Otherwise,” says Winterling, “it would not have been necessary to remind him of his obligation in this way.”

The political chess match went smoothly enough for a while. One version of what went wrong is, of course, that Caligula became deranged from a severe fever when he fell ill for two months. Another version has it that the madness was a side-effect of the herbal Viagra given to him by his wife.

But Winterling sees the turning point in Caligula’s reign as strictly political, not biomedical. It came when he learned of a plot to overthrow him that involved a number of senators. This was not necessarily paranoia. Winterling quotes a later emperor’s remark that rulers’ “claims to have uncovered a conspiracy are not believed until they have been killed.”

In any event, Caligula responded with a vengeance, which inspired at least two more plots against him (not counting the final one that succeeded); and so things escalated. Most of the evidence of Caligula’s madness can actually be taken, in Winterling's interpretation, as ways he expressed contempt for the principle of shared power -- and, even more, for the senators themselves. Giving his horse a palace and a staff of servants and announcing that the beast would be made consul, for example, can be understood as a kind of taunt. “The households of the senators,” writes Winterling, “represented a central manifestation of their social status…. Achieving the consulship remained the most important goal of an aristocrat’s career.” To put his horse in the position of a prominent aristocrat, then, was a deliberate insult. It implied that the comparison could also be made in the opposite direction.

More evidence for the "signaling" interpretation of cults of personality. (Working on a paper on the topic right now).

• Also via Eric, this story about a boy scout who tried to build a nuclear reactor is old but amazing.
   
• Aaron Bady on surveillance:

In one sense, the Information Sharing Environment is a medium tending toward unobstructed transmission; it is like an ocean that conducts whale songs for hundreds of miles. But in another sense, the ISE has created a very private pool of publicly circulating information. Simplified Sign-On, for example, gives those who qualify total access to "sensitive but unclassified" information—but it gives it only to them, and with only internal oversight on how that information is used. The problem is not simply that private information is now semi-public but that the information is invisible to anyone outside organizations that "need to share."

Citron and Pasquale have suggested that if technology is part of the problem, it can also be part of the solution—that network accountability can render total information sharing harmless. Rather than futilely attempting to reinforce the walls that keep information private, publicly regulating how information is used can mitigate the trends that caused the problem in the first place. Immutable audit logs of fusion-center activity would not impede information sharing, but they would make it possible to oversee whom that information was shared with and what was done with it. In fact, it was John Poindexter, the director of the Total Information Awareness program, who first suggested this method of oversight, though even today, many fusion centers have no audit trail at all. Standardization and interoperability might also provide means of regulating what kinds of data could be kept. The technological standards that make information available to users can also facilitate oversight, as Poindexter himself realized.  

Spaces of surveillance are worse when the watchers cannot be watched.

•  Keith Gessen on Putin's Russia:

This fusion of despotism and postmodernism, in which no truth is certain, is reflected in the craze among the Russian elite for neuro-linguistic programming and Eriksonian hypnosis: types of subliminal manipulation based largely on confusing your opponent, first developed in the US in the 1960s. There are countless NLP and Eriksonian training centres in Moscow, with every wannabe power-wielder shelling out thousands of dollars to learn how to be the next master manipulator. Newly translated postmodernist texts give philosophical weight to the Surkovian power model. François Lyotard, the French theoretician of postmodernism, began to be translated in Russia only towards the end of the 1990s, at exactly the time Surkov joined the government. The author of Almost Zero loves to invoke such Lyotardian concepts as the breakdown of grand cultural narratives and the fragmentation of truth: ideas that still sound quite fresh in Russia. One blogger has noted that ‘the number of references to Derrida in political discourse is growing beyond all reasonable bounds. At a recent conference the Duma deputy Ivanov quoted Derrida three times and Lacan twice.’

In an echo of socialism’s fate in the early 20th century, Russia has adopted a fashionable, supposedly liberational Western intellectual movement and transformed it into an instrument of oppression. In Soviet times a functionary would at least nominally pretend to believe in Communism; now the head of one of Russia’s main TV channels, Vladimir Kulistikov, who used to be employed by Radio Free Europe, proudly announces that he ‘can work with any power I’m told to work with’. As long as you have shown loyalty when it counts, you are free to do anything you like after hours. Thus Moscow’s top gallery-owner advises the Kremlin on propaganda at the same time as exhibiting anti-Kremlin work in his gallery; the most fashionable film director makes a blockbuster satirising the Putin regime while joining Putin’s party; Surkov writes a novel about the corruption of the system and rock lyrics denouncing Putin’s regime – lyrics that would have had him arrested in previous times.

In Soviet Russia you would have been forced to give up any notion of artistic freedom if you wanted a slice of the pie. In today’s Russia, if you’re talented and clever, you can have both. This makes for a unique fusion of primitive feudal poses and arch, postmodern irony. A property ad displayed all over central Moscow earlier this year captured the mood perfectly. Got up in the style of a Nazi poster, it showed two Germanic-looking youths against a glorious alpine mountain over the slogan ‘Life Is Getting Better’. It would be wrong to say the ad is humorous, but it’s not quite serious either. It’s sort of both. It’s saying this is the society we live in (a dictatorship), but we’re just playing at it (we can make jokes about it), but playing in a serious way (we’re making money playing it and won’t let anyone subvert its rules). A few months ago there was a huge ‘Putin party’ at Moscow’s most glamorous club. Strippers writhed around poles chanting: ‘I want you, prime minister.’ It’s the same logic. The sucking-up to the master is completely genuine, but as we’re all liberated 21st-century people who enjoy Coen brothers films, we’ll do our sucking up with an ironic grin while acknowledging that if we were ever to cross you we would quite quickly be dead.

• The fun is about to end - it seems like Google is changing many of the features that make Google reader great. (I got half the links above through reader shares). #OccupyGoogleReader! Sign the petition!

• Finally, your Sunday/Monday extremophile: Uranium-munching, electrically conductive bacteria of the genus Geobacter:

Bet you cannot do that.

More here, while it lasts.

[Update 10/31/2011: added Geobacter picture, fixed some typos, some minor wording changes]

Endnotes

• Chuck Close apparently suffers from face blindness. [! - via marginal revolution]
• DuPont's solution to the problem of securing explosive material: hostages!
• A recent attempt to find symbolic meaning in Plato via stichometry. (From one point of view, it is simply obvious that there is symbolic meaning in Plato, the problem is how to extract it in non-question-begging ways). [Also via marginal revolution].
• An interesting meditation on the moral personhood of elephants: the elephant as doomed guerrilla fighter.
• More forms of moral personhood, whale edition.

Probably will have more to say on moral personhood soon - thinking of featherless chickens...