Monthly Archive for July, 2008

Anthro Quick Hits: Telos and McFate

Published
by
Dara Lind
on July 31, 2008
in General Scholarship
. 1 Comment

How to make friends with an anthropologist:

DO NOT: design Pentagon-funded anthro-warrior schemes that make the anthropological establishment leery, then decide that the perfect anthropologist to present the public face of these schemes is the daughter-in-law (and former support staffer!) of a former gun-lobby double agent. (h/t Open Anthropology)

DO: Talk about Transhumanism more often. As ckelty of Savage Minds explains:

Most of the critiques of transhumanism center around its more speculative aspects, like the notion of the singularity, the emergence of artificial intelligence etc. But I think there is increasingly an opening here for thinking about what we do and what we do not have control over as humanity evolves. Most transhumanist rhetoric seems to imply that there is no control—-it’s just the next stage of evolution—-but when push comes to shove, whatever “evolution” means to them, it isn’t simply your basic genetic-species evolution, but involves culture and technology as well.

…

I think that transhumanists will increasingly come to dominate discussions about the controlability of technology and its effects on people and their potential. But more than that, I think anthropologists are already interested in transhumanism, we just don’t call it that because we’ve given up (or just studiously avoid) trying to define the human.

Of course, the closest thing to a Transhumanism expert I know once argued with me for an hour during slow traffic outside Montreal about the worth of my discipline. (The opening line was something like “So, anthropology. Totally useless. Discuss.”) So I’m not too optimistic on the prospects for dialogue here.

Yeah, I know Montgomery McFate got her doctorate from the department that’s giving me my B.A. next June. And I know that my feelings on the Human Terrain System are more complicated than I allow for here. But the spy thing is still pretty hilarious.

This may bode poorly for my future on the Internet.

Published
by
Nicola Karras
on July 31, 2008
in Extemporanea
. 4 Comments

I made this myself, but you may feel free to do with it as you will.

Alberto Gonzales: Oblivious with Good Reason

Published
by
Dara Lind
on July 30, 2008
in Immigration and Politics
. 0 Comments

Josh Patashnik at The Plank:

…immigration judges aren’t minor backroom bean counters; they’re responsible for conducting formal court proceedings to determine what should be done with aliens who have been apprehended by federal authorities. Yet the former attorney general of the United States admits that he literally didn’t know how they were being screened and selected by people under his direct supervision… It’s particularly disappointing that someone with extensive experience practicing law in a border state would have so little regard for selecting qualified immigration judges.

It is indeed pretty horrifying that an Attorney General was (or pretended to be) ignorant about the hiring portfolio of one of his employees, regardless of what that hiring portfolio included. But the situation is a little more complicated than Patashnik admits.

In fairness, I don’t blame people who haven’t been spending their days at immigration court for the last few weeks like I have (it’s so I can write one of these, though I doubt it’ll attract the attention of future generations of oppo researchers) for not understanding the bizarrely nebulous relationship immigration court has with the DoJ (through the Executive Office of Immigration Reform, which employs judges) and the Department of Homeland Security (Citizenship and Immigration Services, Customs and Border Protection and ICE all have some role in referring cases; prosecutors are employed through ICE as well).

Suffice to say that it’s undeniably true that the DoJ hires immigration judges, but immigration court itself is a weird melange of departmental responsibilities. It’s not that the division of labor is unclear, at least in terms of the system: one of my sources explained to me that a 2003 law provided summary clarification by listing all the cases in which the phrase “at the discretion of the Attorney General” should be replaced by “at the discretion of the Secretary of Homeland Security.”

At the level of individual cases, there’s often some wiggle room regarding whether a case should be handled judicially through EOIR or administratively through CIS. That’s to be expected, but the push-and-pull doesn’t stop there. To cite just one example, hearings for detained individuals are held in a courtroom in ICE offices; cases for non-detained individuals are heard across the street, in a courtroom at EOIR offices. The same ICE attorneys and EOIR judge preside at both.

At the federal level, of course, it’s clear that more emphasis and resources are being placed on immigration court on the ICE end than the EOIR end: think how many people might have been involved in planning the Postville raid, and then think of the understaffing of immigration judges. Furthermore, ICE initiatives like Operation Streamline, which are currently overwhelming federal (criminal) judges in border states, were designed to decrease the caseload on immigration judges — making EOIR even more secondary to immigration proceedings. (This is also why, contra Patashnik, Gonzales’ legal experience in a border state didn’t make him automatically more likely to pay attention to immigration judges as Attorney General.)

Clearly, there were broader failures in corporate culture at the Department of Justice under Gonzales. But the obliviousness regarding immigration judges speaks just as much to another paradigmatic failure: the tendency of the federal government to treat immigration exclusively as an issue of Homeland Security despite its roots in Justice, to the extent that the latter is forgotten entirely.

I’m well aware that in some anthropological circles it may be considered compromising my fieldwork to blog about it during the period I’m in the field, even though most of this information is publicly available through other means and none of it is confidential. I’m also well aware that in some anthropological circles the question of “relevance” is paramount, and relevance doesn’t wait for formal peer review. Besides, I’m an undergraduate. Cut me some slack.

This Charming Man

Published
by
Dara Lind
on July 30, 2008
in Across The Pond and Arts
. 1 Comment

I am to Maureen Dowd columns as kids with drunkard nursemaids are to whiskey: my grandmother used to clip her columns and mail them to me during the Starr Report years. (I turned 10 years old in 1998, so the politics and sex were every bit as exotic as the snark.) So while I’m sure that my blood ought to be boiling at the faux-intimacy of her column today (and its totally vapid Homer references), I’m instead gushing over the insight she’s given me into New Toryism, as revealed by Barack Obama’s party favors:

The British opposition leader David Cameron gave Obama a copy of Winston Churchill’s “A History of the English-Speaking Peoples” and a box of CDs by British bands, including the Smiths, Radiohead and the Gorillaz.

Radiohead, I concede, is a fairly safe choice in general and for Obama in particular: it’s the sort of act that a man whose passions are for jazz and the Stones would find to be intriguing and worthwhile, though he might admire it more than he liked it in the end. (I’m assuming Cameron chose In Rainbows rather than, say, Hail to the Thief.) But the other two are legitimately inspired choices. I find Gorillaz to be consistently underrated and just plain fun — furthermore, by turning up the bass a bit more than Radiohead does, the songs are probably a bit more likely to hit Obama’s sweet spot.

And the Smiths? That’s just a matter of consciousness-raising, man. Though I’m concerned that Mr. Cameron may be trying unfairly to influence the veepstakes.

Admittedly, Reggie Love is the man responsible both for keeping Obama’s iPod hip and for presenting gifts to foreign dignitaries, so Cameron might have someone equivalent on his side. Still, though, someone out there in Toryland has very good taste — yet another thing major parties here would do well to emulate.

The Real Reason Why I’m Glad Ta-Nehisi Coates Sold Out

Published
by
Dara Lind
on July 29, 2008
in Extemporanea and Media
. 1 Comment

In the vein of Withywindle’s dream (which I think of less as “alternate history” than “blogger fanfic”), here’s my fantasy as to what happens next:

  • Ta-Nehisi immediately (within 2 weeks) gets into a multi-day mano-a-mano with Ross Douthat. The topic is preferably something sprawling and cultural that isn’t covered much in Grand New Party.
  • When the exchange fails to subside within a day but instead gets more heated, Ross’s comment-purging interns find themselves working overtime on the more overtly racist comments, but opt to leave those that just say “soft-headed affirmative-action beneficiary” in place.
  • Among many posts on the Left using the argument to reopen the question of whether conservatives have souls, someone at Firedoglake writes a post that all-but calls Douthat a racist. In response, Reihan quickly composes and records a song called “Some of my Best Friends Are Ross Douthat.”
  • Impressed, Ta-Nehisi posts the video on his blog. His readers are mollified (or just hypnotized by Reihan’s exceptionally round head; it’s not clear which).
  • The blogosphere finally moves on from the flareup, but Ross and Ta-Nehisi continue to be spirited and influential philosophical adversaries. Ross pulls fewer punches. Everyone links to Marc Ambinder less. The world is a better place.

Why I’m Glad That Ta-Nehisi Coates Sold Out

Published
by
Dara Lind
on July 29, 2008
in Media
. 0 Comments

I’m not exactly surprised that Ta-Nehisi Coates is joining the Atlantic blogroll (I know, no one else is, either) but I’m absolutely tickled pink about it.

I say all the time that there aren’t any bloggers on the Left who seem to care about culture, but Ta-Nehisi is absolutely the exception: he posts for the sake of narrative rather than the sake of fact-checking, and he weaves cultural logics and socioeconomics together so well that he makes it look easy. I’d call him “Gramsci to Yglesias’ Marx,”  but aside from the inaccuracy of the political comparison there’s the little matter of hegemony.

You see, unfortunately, I suspect that the reason he’s gained traction among liberals for writing about culture is that “he has a culture to write about” — which is to say that the culture of urban black America is subaltern and therefore readily noticeable, whereas that of white America and/or the American mainstream and/or coastal elites is not, i.e. hegemonic. It’s not that the blogosphere lacks cultural self-consciousness — to the contrary, bloggers relish in self-caricature regarding their personas virtual (see also: Cheetos Experiment) and actual (see also: Stuff White People Like). But that’s a far cry from using personal narrative, or talking about codes of behavior and social norms — that is to say, writing about culture the way Ta-Nehisi writes about culture. The implication is that growing up African-American in Baltimore is a unique experience, a perspective worth reading, in a way growing up somewhere else isn’t: that the dominant culture is in fact predominant, even universal.

Just last week, Ta-Nehisi’s response to David Brooks warned against calling a middle-class “economic” phenomenon “cultural” when it hits a lower class. Fascination with West Baltimore as “a culture to write about” among white, coastal policy bloggers is the flip side of the same coin. I hope that this isn’t actually why the blogosphere likes Ta-Nehisi; maybe his reception when he makes the move to the Atlantic will definitively prove me wrong.

Does this federal subsidy make me look fat?

Published
by
Nicola Karras
on July 25, 2008
in Food and Politics
. 1 Comment

Via Adam, a story about government intervention that doesn’t get me up in arms:

Better labels are all well and good, but “we don’t want to exhort people to look at labels for trans fat,” he said. “We want people to walk into a restaurant and not worry there’s an artificial chemical in their food” that is killing them. A city trans-fat ban, he says, could prevent 500 premature deaths a year from heart disease.

The first time I ever heard of trans fats was in high school, when I was working in a bakery. A customer asked if our products had any trans fats; I’d never heard of them, so I asked the owner, who had never heard of them either. “What are trans fats?” she asked. The customer allowed as she didn’t know, but that they were bad for you.

“Well, we use the same ingredients you’d use in your kitchen,” my boss said, “just in larger quantities.” (If you’ve never seen a five-pound stick of butter, you haven’t lived.) And that’s the crux of this.

Saturated fats, like butter or lard, really aren’t that bad for you. The problem is when you take unsaturated fats and artificially saturate them. Liquid oil becomes a solid, which is much easier to transport and store. That’s great for bakeries that use large quantities of shortening. (If you’ve never had to clean up the five pounds of butter that have melted into a greasy mess because someone forgot to put it back in the fridge, I envy you.)

Still, if you’ve used oil while baking, you know it doesn’t taste as good. No one would choose partially hydrogenated soybean oil over butter — except that it’s much, much cheaper. The price has been artificially lowered by corn and soybean subsidies (though vegetable oils would probably be slightly cheaper than animal fats anyway, because plants are more efficient converters of energy).

And, like most cheap, convenient food-like products, it’s also much worse for you.

The trans fat crisis is just another symptom of industrial agriculture. It galls me to see programs like this — we incentivize Very Bad Things, then ban them — but it’s a short-term fix for one of the worst consequences of a disastrous federal program. The best option, of course, would be to end farm subsidies and make sustainable farming and eating a viable option for Americans. If people could bake with butter for a reasonable price, they would.

In the short run, though, this is better than nothing.

Sticking to one’s principles

Published
by
Kate Maltby
on July 23, 2008
in Across The Pond and Politics
. 0 Comments

This is a particularly ridiculous newsflash from Number 10 Downing Street, that I just had to share:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/7520401.stm

But can the robot love?

Published
by
Nicola Karras
on July 21, 2008
in Arts, Navel Gazing and Philosophy
. 0 Comments

I just got back from (finally) seeing Wall-E. So much ink, virtual and otherwise, has been spilt over the film that I’m not sure I have anything fascinating or original to share. My favorite moment of the film — besides the ought-to-be immortal phrase “I don’t want to survive, I want to live” — was very simple.

Wall-E bumps into the floating chair of one of the Axiom’s inhabitants, turning off the ever-present screen that keeps her virtually connected to all her friends. (Irony levels rising…) Suddenly, she sees the starfield beyond the ship’s windows, the panoply of multimedia advertisements, the wonder both of nature and of what man has wrought. She looks down: “Hey, I didn’t know we had a pool!”

That feeling it just familiar enough to make me wistful. Every so often, I pause and look around. Suddenly, instead of seeing “just” a tree, I remember the complicated dance of photosynthesis and respiration, the compact mystery of the atoms, the sheer alien wonder of a thing that turns sunlight into leafy shade. And then I blink, and check my email.

The joy of Wall-E isn’t in the story or the animation, but in the discovery. Like the best science fiction, the robots and spaceships are only there to make us remember the wonder of home.

If you’re not a YPU nerd, look away now

Published
by
Kate Maltby
on July 21, 2008
in Ladies, Navel Gazing and Yale
. 15 Comments

So I’m a bit late to join the “women in academia or the YPU” party (some of us have real summer jobs, you know) but as a wannabe academic-cum-YPU hack I just couldn’t restrain myself. Dara’s right to argue that we should look at “success as the field defines it”, which is why I’m surprised that no one of my fellow “Union-theory” obsessives has mentioned the political elephant on the room : that according to the obscure nature of Yale Political Union, “Union” posts are actually fairly low-status, as opposed to “Party” office. With the strength of the Parties comes an assumption that “real leadership”, charismatic and intellectual, comes through Party Chairmanship - this is seen as glamorous leadership compared to the administrative responsibilities of the elected Executive Board. So on positions occupied, the YPU no longer seems such a women-friendly place after all, when you notice that for the forthcoming semester, only 1 out of 7 Party Chairmen will be a woman (Jane Hu, of the Progs, the smallest party). 

Within the YPU, the charismatic leadership to which the many aspiring politicos are taught to aspire is explicitly described as masculine.  I’ve never forgotten the very semester I arrived, hearing a dear and intelligent friend state that “leadership has two main areas - administrative management, and inspiration of other people to follow a vision. Obviously, a woman can do the first, but not the second.” This past semester, the very same friend told me “when given the option, a Fall Chairman should always be a man, because he has to inspire new recruits to join his party, and obviously a man in charge will always be more inspirational than a woman”. (N.B. It’s not who you think it is, and I’m not going to tell you).

Of course, if you’re still reading this you’re enough of YPUer to know that the cult of Chairmanship is more powerful in the POR than in any other party. But I’ve heard similar sentiment in other parties (the IP, Tories and POL) - and from members of AdComm explaining that the masculine / feminine dichotomy is  necessary to the very fabric of the YPU. 

The argument goes like this: the YPU is defined by conflict between Parties - at its best, this is competition for intellectual supremacy which makes us all fiercer thinkers. The members of EBoard have to co-ordinate these components and weave together the different parts to make a harmony. Men are naturally more aggressive and confrontational, women more harmonious…Male Party Chairman, Female EBoard = great.  Whether or not we actually buy into gendered conventions of “warrior” or “peacemaker”, as long as others around us in the YPU do, they will be part of the parlance that defines our YPU careers - even if there’s still a status inequality given that leading one’s close comrades is widely considered more significant than leading the Union.

So where does this relate to larger claims about affirmative action and academia? Well, certainly the analogy of warrior and peacemaker holds true for academia. A Yalie who graduated a few years ago and is now a PhD student in philosophy told me recently that “Academia at the highest levels is a blood sport, it really is. It’s all about whose argument you savaged last and whether anyone else has been able to tear a strip off your latest publication. When I meet academics socially, who don’t know my work, and tell them that I want to go into the field, they tell me ‘but you seem like a sweet girl, you’re probably too nice for this’.” In the other side of the field, a Yale academic who served her time on ExComm told me “they’re always trying to get women onto the pastoral and disciplinary committees, because we’re apparently more student friendly”. Anecdotal evidence, but in both cases stemming from years of experience at the hard end.

So for both our microcosm of the YPU and the only larger world that really matters, academia, affirmative action doesn’t stand a chance of succeeding unless it adapts to the subtle discourses that define and redefine success. And as both fields success is chiefly measured by the approbation of the community as a whole, the discourse has to change before anything approaching collective action, conscious or subconscious, can help anyone. Let’s face it, if communities frequently went in for affirmative action in combating their own stereotypes, affirmative action of the tangible kind we usually refer to would never have been proposed in the first place.

And because this is a late night (British time) rant to friends, rather than a structured blog post for public consumption, on that inelegant note I’m going to bed.