Showing posts with label linkage. Show all posts
Showing posts with label linkage. Show all posts

Friday, December 21, 2018

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

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!

Sunday, December 31, 2017

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

Saturday, December 31, 2016

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:
Happy new year everyone!

Monday, December 21, 2015

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

Sunday, December 21, 2014

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:
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!

Saturday, December 21, 2013

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?


And now for your regularly scheduled solstice extremophiles blogging:

Deep Lake in Antarctica. Crawling with haloarchaea.

Happy Yule/Winter Solstice/Summer Solstice!

Tuesday, December 20, 2011

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:
Some biologically-themed links:
And finally, some beautiful holiday extremophiles for you: haloarchaea turn Lake Eyre in Australia pink:

Monday, October 31, 2011

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). 
  • 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 Drinkwatercreating a totalitarian society inside a film set. And then living in it. And refusing to finish the film. 
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.”
    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).
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.
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.

Bet you cannot do that.

More here, while it lasts.

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

Wednesday, June 30, 2010

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...