Obama and the Real World
The president should read this. Except he won’t get it till after it happens to him.
Some may say it already did, and he’s just setting up our enemies, talking past leaders to amass capital in world public opinion, laying the groundwork for a big “OK, no one can say I didn’t try the high road. NOW . . .”, that he’s got plenty of Chicago mean up his sleeve. That the campus idealist is his preferred veneer, the way the Texas rancher was his predecessor’s.
We’ll see.
(H/T: Sisu)
Hillary on “This Week”
How adeptly she’s put on the diplomat’s ambiguous armor. Every word she utters is designed to keep options open, to hint at pressure under a veneer of ceremony. For example, she says, twice, “There would be retaliation” if Iran nuked Israel, but she won’t take Stephanopoulos’s bait and come out and say the United States would retaliate, as she did during the campaign. It’s a very tricky business, and I have to admire the speed with which she’s mastered that nebulous language; for the most part it comes tripping off her tongue.
She could’ve been president. Maybe she still will, one day. You wonder if she also has her own concealed agenda.
Life as a Boy Toy in Southern China
Jason (the commenter), @BXGD, tweeted this remarkable story this morning by an Argentine writer/photographer about life in a genuine matriarchy, the Mosuo of southern China.
[I]t simply doesn’t make sense to the Mosuo women to solve conflicts with violence. Because they are in charge, nobody fights. They don’t know feelings of guilt or vengeance — it is simply shameful to fight. They are ashamed if they do and it even can threaten their social standing.
* * *
They are strong women who give clear orders. When a man hasn’t finished a task he’s been given, he is expected to admit it. He is not scolded or punished, but instead he is treated like a little boy who was not up to the task.
* * *
For the Mosuo, women are simply the more effective and reliable gender. However, they do say that the “really big” decisions — like buying a house or a machine or selling a cow — are made by the men. Men are good for this kind of decision-making as well as physical labor. The official governmental leader of the village, the mayor, is a man. I walked with him through the village — nobody gre[e]ted him or paid him any attention. As a man he doesn’t have any authority.
* * *
[T]hese are very strong women who give the orders and yell at you as if you were deaf. [You wouldn’t want this one‘s eagle eye on you!] But when it comes to seduction, they completely change. The women act shy, look at the floor, sing softly to themselves and blush. And they let the men believe that we are the ones who choose the women and do the conquering. Then you spend a night together. The next morning, the man leaves and the woman goes about her work like before.
* * *
[T]he women decide with whom they want to spend the night. Their living quarters have a main entrance but every adult woman lives in her own small hut. The men live together in a large house. The door of every hut is fitted with a hook and all the men wear hats. When a man visits a woman, he hangs his hat on the hook. That way, everybody knows that this woman has a male visitor. And nobody else knocks on the door. If a woman falls in love, then she receives only the specific man and the man comes only to that woman.
* * *
When she can talk with a man, have sex, and go out, then she is in love. Love is more important for them than partnership. They want to be in love. The one reason to be with another person is love. They aren’t interested in getting married or starting a family with a man. When the love is over, then it’s over. They don’t stay together for the kids or for the money or for anything else.
* * *
One woman wanted to have a child with me. I told her, no, I can’t have a child with you because you live here in China and I live in Argentina. “So?” was the reaction. The children always stay with the mothers. I said that I couldn’t have any children whom I could never see. She just smiled as if I took it too seriously. When they have kids, the children are theirs only — the men don’t play a role.
* * *
Often, the women don’t know which man is responsible for the pregnancy. So the children also don’t know who their biological father is. But for the women it is usually not important because the men barely work and have little control over things of material value.
Most Chinese citizens prefer sons and suffer from their government’s draconian regulation of the birthrate. But because the Mosuo have ethnic minority status, they are allowed three children. And because women run the family and handle money, “[a] family without daughters is a catastrophe.”
Look at the picture gallery: these people look and dress rather like Peruvian Indians. Their way of life, so utterly alien to us, feels familiar to the nervous system somehow, eh? (I want my own small hut with a hook on the door!) Fascinating food for thought. Now I can say “Read the whole thing” and mean it.
“Wise Woman/Wise Latina” . . .
. . . is a trope it turns out Sonia Sotomayor likes so much she’s used it repeatedly, virtually verbatim. In fact, it could be called her signature line in public speeches.
I’m going to tell you a) why I don’t like it, and b) why I nonetheless think it may be irrelevant.
My dislike is directed particularly at this kind of feminism. The coupled ethnic chauvinism takes the same payback form (“the last shall be first,” the long-thought-inferior are really superior), but is necessarily less essentialist; only crazies like this guy think brains differ predictably by “race,” whatever that is, although such thinking may be making a creeping, and creepy, comeback. (That’s really not a trend minorities want to encourage, by the way, because it’s not going to break their way. I happen to believe that the evidence is biased, but it’s biased towards Euro-Americans.)
And, it’s not primarily men I want to defend from “this kind of feminism,” although I get that men are both demonized and denigrated by it — but I find I believe (perhaps wrongly) that it’s too stupid to stick, to men. No, I think it’s bad for women. The assumption that women are nicer, more caring, more compassionate than men strikes me as both dangerously wrong and nauseatingly cloying. Women are human, and can be mean, nasty, cruel, criminal, physically brutal, and psychologically maiming. In fact they’ve — we’ve — refined that last to a torturer’s art because the cruder physical means of domination are less available to us. Women can also be emotional hacks and manipulators, who’ve worn such overtrodden paths across the terrain of “feelings,” our specialty, that they’ve become muddy ruts where nothing grows, only to be prettied up with toxic therapeutic AstroTurf. Men’s emotions, when not successfully suppressed, can be much more touching, raw, and real.
Ask anyone who’s had a less than cuddly mother how warm and compassionate and empathetic and nurturing women are. I’ll even go so far as to say that the human mean streak in women, used properly, is what enables us to discipline our children, defend ourselves and them, and accomplish things. The notion that we’re these nobly egalitarian, collective, empathetic nurturers is called “difference feminism,” and accepting it, even taking pride in it, is a trap for women because in fact there are many important things you can’t do with those “soft” qualities alone.
Like, judge.
And that brings me to why I think these statements of Sotomayor’s may be irrelevant.
What matters is to examine how she has judged.
Why don’t her public statements, declarations of identity and beliefs, carry the same weight as her decisions? Because people’s personalities are not the same as their working function. Think of how many movie actors are banal a-holes in their personal lives and in interviews, and then they take on a character and deliver a powerful performance. How can such a superficial twit be possessed by a character of such depth and complexity that we are shatteringly moved? I don’t know, but it happens all the time, and it happens to all of us. Writers whine and complain and drink and cheat on their mates and in general behave badly until they settle down to write. Then something else, deeper and impersonal, possesses them and comes through them. Good judges, I suspect, are possessed, when they are working, by an archetype of the law, by the seriousness and impersonality that it calls them to. When they’re off work, they could say any damn thing. There’s not necessarily a connection between a person’s identity and beliefs and his or her work performance.
I’ve had a line in my head for a while that I like: “‘I’ is the noise of an idling engine.”
So what is important is not what Sonia Sotomayor says when she’s off duty. What matters is what she has said and done when she’s “on.”
Just in Time for D-Day . . .
. . . a Romanian professor we know (through correspondence about Jacques’ Donbas) has invented the most amazing visual learning tool: Virtual Omaha Beach. I’m simply going to reproduce in full the press release he just sent us, which includes links.
_______________________________
Virtual Omaha Beach: Purdue team recreates D-Day battlefield, launches learning environment where information searches for user
Purdue and Indiana University researchers are commemorating the 65th anniversary of D-Day by releasing the first version of a 3-D, interactive model of the Omaha Beach battlefield.
“The model, which includes 3-D pillboxes, beach obstacles, field guns, or ships is, in effect, a Web interface,” said Purdue Professor Sorin Adam Matei, its creator and leader of Visible Past, a project developing similar virtual historical sites. “By simply pointing to an object or location of the virtual battlefield, you can call up more information, collaborate with other learners, or add new information.” Matei, an associate professor of communications, is an affiliate of the Envision Center for Data Perceptualization, part of Information Technology at Purdue (ITaP) and its Rosen Center for Advanced Computing. Envision Center staff members and students help develop the D-Day and other Visible Past models.
Students using Virtual Omaha can walk or fly through the model of the beach and the French countryside behind it, taking the perspective of the American or German troops who fought during World War II. Users can inspect troop positions from all angles and information about the digital artifacts encountered can be brought up automatically.
“The really novel aspect of the project is that if another group uses the model while you are visiting it, any information that they add to it will become available to you instantly,” Matei said.
Besides the Web, the Visible Past models can be run in 3-D virtual environments like the three-walled, room-sized system at the Envision Center. They also work in Google Earth or through free, open source software for 3-D Web-based modeling.
In the near future, people visiting Omaha Beach in Normandy, France, will be able to use an iPhone application, developed by Matei, to access the model and collaborate remotely with others.
“We will have professors delivering a tour to a group in Normandy, while students in Indiana will be able to see and hear through (an immersive virtual environment) what their colleagues see and do in France,” Matei said.
The iPhone application also can be used as a “location-aware” guide for Omaha Beach or any historical site documented by the Visible Past project. When visiting the Roman Forum, for example, information about the nearest building could be sent automatically by Visible Past to the iPhone. “This is ubiquitous computing, where information searches for you,” Matei said.
Virtual Omaha is one of the more than two dozen 3-D models, including several UNESCO World Heritage sites, that can be used for teaching and collaboration through the Visible Past project. The models, some of which were created collaboratively by a worldwide community of students, scholars and amateur historians, are enhanced with information collected by Purdue students. Among the projects under development are the Roman Forum, the Taj Mahal and the Statue of Liberty.
Directions to Virtual Omaha demonstrations:
To introduce Virtual Omaha to the public in anticipation of the June 6th D-Day anniversary, public presentations will be given at 12:30 and 1:30 p.m. Tuesday, June 2, at the Advanced Visualization Lab on the Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis campus. The lab is located on the fourth floor of School of Informatics, 535 W Michigan St., Indianapolis. A Google Map of the event location and directions are available here. Seating is limited. Contact Sorin Matei for a reservation at (317)416-5807 or at smatei@purdue.edu. Please arrive at least 10 minutes early. There are a limited number of parking meters in the lot directly west of the building. Additional parking can be found in the University Conference Center parking garage approximately a quarter mile west on Michigan St. See the IUPUI campus map for more information. At the School of Informatics building, check in with the receptionist on the first floor and request an escort to the Virtual Omaha event.
Source: Sorin Adam Matei, smatei@purdue.edu
Image caption: A screen shot showing elements of the Virtual Omaha Beach project displayed in a Web browser, including an interactive 3-D model of the battlefield, pictures of some structures left there today and a video clip from the film “Saving Private Ryan.” Note: A high-resolution image is available. Contact: Greg Kline, gkline@purdue.edu
Related Web sites:
Visible Past
Omaha Beach Google Earth Model
Omaha Beach historical details in Google Earth
(To experience Visible Past as a teaching environment both links should be clicked in succession.)
Omaha Beach, 3-D VRML model (requires plug-in):
It’s the Economy, Stupid.
As we were saying. What’s an avant-gardiste to do when he, or she, realizes that economics is now the cutting edge of the culture, with technology close behind? Something like this:
I’ve got a longstanding fascination with the way economics haunts literature, and vice versa. You can trace the history of this haunting from Joyce, whose writing is obsessed with credit, debt and forgery, right back through Shakespeare, whose “Merchant of Venice” should be required reading for all economists — especially now. . . . Right now I’ve just installed a “Black Box Transmitter” in an art institute in Germany. It sends out looping sequences of poetry created by cutting up and mixing together stock market prices, weather forecasts and lines of Hölderlin. . . . I’ve just finished a novel about early radio and its relation to poetry and death. Technology is always haunted, too: that’s what makes it so sexy. [Tom McCarthy]
Talk about jumping on a bandwagon with such enthusiasm you almost capsize it. There’s no parody like self-parody (the bolded part, I think, is priceless). This was, of course, in the New York Times.
In Love With Hubble
My new post on Natural History‘s blog, facTotem. (Far preferable to politics. I’m shamefaced at having been sucked back into politics. A hand out of the quicksand, please? )
Is Obama a Threat to Osama?
God, I hate to follow that last post with something tendentious and tedious, so I’ll be really, really brief.
You can view Obama’s conciliatory approach to the Muslim world as naïve, or you can view it as strategic. If you don’t demonize all Islam, or all Muslims, you have a chance to turn perhaps the preponderance of the Muslim world in our favor. It’s not enough; economic and political change on the part of some of our allies (read: jobs for young men) are even more crucial to uprooting militancy. But the former must be the reason why Osama, or his posthumous sock puppet, is slamming Obama just now.
Ambiance 