Monthly Archives: November 2016
Christopher Hitchens on free speech
Christopher Eric Hitchens (13 April 1949 – 15 December 2011) was an Anglo-American author, columnist, essayist, orator, religious and literary critic, social critic, and journalist. He contributed to New Statesman, The Nation, The Atlantic, London Review of Books, The Times Literary Supplement, Slate, and Vanity Fair. Hitchens was the author, co-author, editor or co-editor of over 30 books, including five collections of essays, on a range of subjects, including politics, literature, and religion. A staple of talk shows and lecture circuits, his confrontational style of debate made him both a lauded and controversial figure and public intellectual.
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No true Scotsman
No true Scotsman is a kind of informal fallacy in which one attempts to rescue a universal generalisation from counterexamples by changing the definition in an ad hoc fashion to exclude the counterexample. Rather than denying the counterexample or rejecting the original claim, this fallacy modifies the subject of the assertion to exclude the specific case or others like it by rhetoric i.e. those who perform that action are not part of our group and thus criticism of that action is not criticism of the group.
Philosophy professor Bradley Dowden explains the fallacy as an ‘ad hoc rescue’ of a refuted generalisation attempt. The following is a simplified rendition of the fallacy:
Person A: ‘No Scotsman puts sugar on his porridge.’
Person B: ‘But my uncle Angus likes sugar with his porridge.’
Person A: ‘Ah yes, but no true Scotsman puts sugar on his porridge.’
The introduction of the term is attributed to British philosopher Prof. Antony Flew, because the term originally appeared in Flew’s 1971 book An Introduction to Western Philosophy.
A practical example of this fallacy occurs when Marxists try to defend their regressive and unworkable ideology against the overwhelming evidence from the 20th century that almost every communist regime was brutally repressive; and most of them resulted in poverty for everybody except the communist party elite. ‘But they weren’t true communists’ they say. Yeah, right.
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Tufts University: a black hole for freedom of speech
Once again we must turn to right-wing websites, the College Fix and Heat Street (corroborated from other sites), to find out how free speech is going down the tubes at many American Universities. In this case it’s Tufts University in Medford, Massachusetts (home of Dan Dennett), which has been given a “red rating” by the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) for its speech code policy, a rating that means this:
A “red light” institution has at least one policy that both clearly and substantially restricts freedom of speech. A “clear” restriction is one that unambiguously infringes on what is or should be protected expression. In other words, the threat to free speech at a red light institution is obvious on the face of the policy and does not depend on how the policy is applied.
What happened at Tufts is dire. A student, Jake Goldberg, introduced a…
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How many species of elephant? (with bonus rants)
If you follow the popular science press, or read the evolution blogs, you’ve probably heard that, according a new paper in PLos Biology by Rohland et al., scientists have added another species of elephant to the two we have already. Up to now we all knew about the African elephant (Loxodonta africana) and the Asian elephant (Elephas maximus). Besides being located on different continents, these two species differ in size (the Asian is smaller) and other morphological traits (Asians have much smaller ears and, unlike Africans, only the males are tusked).
Previously, though, the Africans were divided into two subspecies, L. africana africana, called the “savanna” or “bush” elephant, and L. africana cyclotis, the “forest elephant.” These subspecies differ in morphology (though not as strongly as the African vs. Asian species), ecology—well, at least location; they are, as their names indicate, found in different habitats, although…
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Farewell Fidel: Castro dies aged 90
Mark Beeson, University of Western Australia
20th-century political icons don’t get much bigger than Fidel Castro. His death will reignite many important and still-unresolved debates about his particular place in history, and about the revolutionary ideas he seemed to epitomise.
For many of my generation, he retained a special place in our collective imagination, however undeserved it may have been in reality. The hopelessly corrupt regime that he, and his even more glamorous co-conspirator Che Guevara, overthrew was the quintessential banana republic. Causes don’t get much more worthy either, it seemed.
The parasitic regime of Fulgencio Batista provided a convenient playground for dissolute Americans escaping the cloying morality of the United States in the 1950s. From the little we knew about Cuba then, Fidel looked to be unambiguously on the right side of history. But this is not the way he will be remembered.
Unlike Che, Fidel lived long enough to see his legacy tarnished, his model overturned, and even relations with his arch-enemy normalised. In such circumstances, the very real achievements of the Castro regime are likely to be forgotten.
The reality is, though, that a dirt-poor third-world country managed to create a very credible medical and education system. True, there may have been some doubts about the curriculum, but key social indicators compared well with other states in the region. As iconoclastic film director Michael Moore took delight in pointing out, Cuba’s medical system was in many ways better than that of the US itself.
Not bad for a country that has laboured under American economic sanctions for more than half a century. Australia might have struggled under such circumstances, too, and we’re the other side of the planet with some formidable domestic advantages. How much more remarkable that the Cubans actually did as well as they have.
It’s not hard to see why the US loathed Castro and mounted a – at times, comical – series of efforts to assassinate or overthrow him. The abortive, CIA-sponsored Bay of Pigs invasion in 1961, which ended in humiliation for the US, only reinforced Castro’s position and aura among his own people and some of his more starry-eyed foreign admirers.
Even the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962, in which the US and the Soviet Union came to the brink of nuclear war over the latter’s attempts to place ballistic missiles on Cuban soil, did not dislodge Fidel. It did cement his reputation as the most irritating and enduring affront to American hegemony in the region the US considered its own, however.
In what may prove to have been the last gasp of revolutionary idealism in Latin America, and possibly the world, the so-called Pink Tide that swept through the region in the 1990s and 2000s looked as if it might present yet another challenge to American dominance and the political and economic order it represented.
A succession of leftist leaders in Latin America have come, gone or – in the case of Hugo Chavez’s successor in Venezuela, Nicolas Maduro – look to be on their way out. Even in Brazil, former president Lula da Silva’s legacy has been fatally undermined by a major corruption scandal and the dismal performance of the Brazilian economy of late.
Paradoxically enough, however, Cuba’s future might actually be brighter than some of its counterparts in South America. No-one can predict what the incoming Trump regime may do in this context (or any other), but if Fidel’s brother Raul continues to liberalise the economy and improve relations with Cuba’s giant neighbour, it may benefit from much needed inflows of investment and tourists.
Given that we would be pretty much back where we started before Fidel launched the revolution this would be another historical irony. It also begs questions about the ability of “great men of history” to make an enduring difference, and about their long-term legacies.
We now know Mao Zedong was a megalomaniacal monster, despite the popularity of his little Red Book in the heady era of the 1960s. There aren’t too many communists in China these days either, and no-one is planning a return to central planning.
Fidel Castro is consequently an anachronism and symbol of a particular time and place. Socialism remains a dazzlingly attractive idea in theory. Even its biggest admirers would have to concede that the practice hasn’t worked out quite as well.
What Robert Michels famously described as the “iron law of oligarchy” looks more apposite and persuasive than ever, and not just in putative banana republics. The rise of nationalism north of the border provides a sobering illustration of the difficulty of even talking about progressive change in a way that actually resonates with “the masses”, as we used to know them.
As Fidel’s life and times reminds us, actually doing anything transformative about repression and inequality looks as difficult and unlikely as it has ever been.
Mark Beeson, Professor of International Politics, University of Western Australia
This article was originally published on The Conversation. (Reblogged by permission). Read the original article.
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Straight talk about Islam in the Los Angeles Times
You don’t often see an op-ed on Islam this straightforward, especially in a major newspaper like the L.A. Times. So the September 9 op-ed by Shadi Hamid, “From burkinis to the Koran: Why Islam isn’t like other faiths,” is refreshingly candid—albeit worrisome. The refreshing bit is that it doesn’t pull any punches about the nature of Islam. The worrisome bit is also that it doesn’t pull any punches about the nature of Islam.
Hamid is described by the Times as “a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and the author of “Islamic Exceptionalism: How the Struggle Over Islam is Reshaping the World.” Because the Brookings Institution, a think tank, is on the liberal side, this makes the editorial especially compelling.
At any rate, Hami singles out two aspects of Islam that, he says, make it qualitatively different from other religions. We’re familiar with both of these…
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When the Lunatic Fringe gets Mainstream attention
by Grania Spingies
So a guy almost nobody ever heard of before last Saturday holds a meeting where approximately 200 members show up—the size of a large-ish knitting club or a small-ish local atheist group—makes some benightedly stupid hand gestures, and scores the media coup of the century.
While one should probably not completely ignore people publicly championing a range of nasty and obsolete views that are predictably vomited by the mouths of white nationalists, a group that small certainly doesn’t merit the wall-to-wall coverage lavished on them by the media. However, if you are a white nationalist with delusions of grandeur and a modicum of intelligence and a complete lack of inhibition, you can probably work out a way to troll the world and make everybody pay attention.
Since then, there has been the predictable avalanche of op-eds in which people generally agree that Nazis (even wannabe Nazis) are bad (this is good) and other op-ed…
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What’s unique about “identity politics”?
I’m really too distressed to write much today, but here’s an expansion of some notes I made yesterday.
It’s been said that there’s no difference between “identity politics” and “politics”, given the old trope that “the personal is political.” And of course even if you’re supporting the Democratic or Republican party, that can be seen as “identity politics,” for, after all, you’re adhering to the values of a group. What do I mean by identity politics? It’s this: the emphasis on your own personal aggrievement rather than the suffering of your entire group.
When I listened to the “Hijab Debate” at the Art Institute in early May, in which Asra Nomai debated a University of Chicago student, Hoda Katebi, I was struck at the difference in how they were framing the debate. While both agreed that it should be a woman’s choice whether to wear the hijab, Nomani dwelt on the oppression…
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Friday essay: the loss of music
Peter Godfrey-Smith, City University of New York
In New York City, a classical saxophone player I know was asked to play some live music for an event at a large, successful store that sells computers, phones, and other electronic equipment. The event was a product launch, and they wanted something innovative. The sax player was interested. The man from the store then added: “There’s no budget for this.” The musician was being asked to play, for free, surrounded by the machines that are destroying his profession.
Discussion has been going on for years now about the future of music under the impact of technology, especially computer downloads and streaming, and the subtraction of billions of dollars from every part of the music industry. I am offering some thoughts because it seems to me that a particular place is now being reached. The threat to professional music is becoming acute.
Why should you believe me? I am a philosopher, not a professional musician. But I am a close observer of professional music, through my spouse (who is a classical musician) and her colleagues. (Disclosure: because of this connection I do have a vested interest in the issue). Musical professions have been under stress for decades, but I think the present time is special. Quite a lot of musicians are just now leaving the field, or shifting away from full professionalism. The “day job” is more and more common, ideally a job around music, but not always so – hopefully a job that allows time to play.
Dun.can/flickr, CC BY
Those leaving the field had been sustained by hope over recent years (“maybe iTunes will save the business… Maybe a streaming service will start to pay real money…”) That is looking less and less likely. Instead, people are asked more and more to play for what is euphemistically called “exposure,” as in the case of the saxophone player of my opening.
Music itself is not being destroyed, but it is being changed, and some valuable things are being lost. I want to do what I can to increase awareness of this situation. The changes are due in part to technology, and there’s no turning that back.
But the changes are also due to habits and decisions, which are things we can reflect on and modify, and the viewpoint of a philosopher who lives close to the troubled ecology of music might have a role to play. If we are going to have professional musicianship go down the tubes, we should at least be aware that it’s happening. And it might not take so much to turn things around.
Amateur creators, unpaid professionals
Each creative field operates through an interaction between two sets of behaviours, roles that are modified in each case by quirks of the practice and its market. That basic duality is between making and consuming, writing and reading, playing and listening. Between these basic roles, we have intermediaries who broadcast, publish, and curate. The “making” side in the case of performing arts – music, drama, dance – also has more steps than “making” usually does in the case of words and pictures.
www.shutterstock.com
Practices on both sides, making and consuming, are being continually shifted by technology. In recent years, technology has led to changes for good and for bad, and has done this in just about all creative fields. On the positive side, a shift in many areas has been a deluge of amateur creativity. Photography, as exemplified by Instagram, is the extreme case. Vast numbers of people have become creators of content, not just consumers.
Compare this to the decades people spent sitting in front of the TV not long ago. This is something to celebrate; it is surely making more agile and creative minds. What is bad is the ebbing of the willingness of the culture to support professionals who are doing a different thing from amateurs.
In the case of words, the deluge of amateur work has challenged the earlier producer/consumer balance, and at one stage professional writing might have seemed in more danger than music, as technology galloped along. But it’s not looking that way now. The ancient format, the book, is showing its resilience. Writing is also a field where high-quality, crafted work is not too much more expensive to produce than low-quality work. You might think I am wrong to be so sanguine about words, but however badly words are doing, music is doing worse.
New behaviours
In the case of music, the threat comes less from amateur creativity than from new behaviors on the consumer side, and from new businesses mediating between performers and listeners.
When I taught at Stanford at the end of the last century, I used to chat just before my classes about music, and ask what people were buying. I remember that before one particular class, I asked the question and learned that no one in the class had bought anything for a while.
Some of the students looked at me slightly uneasily, while some beamed. This was around 2000, the era of Napster, the first file-sharing platform that took off in American colleges. This piece of technology initiated a shift in habits. Once people did not have to pay for vast libraries of music, they became reluctant to pay, even after Napster in its original form had been shut down. Technology developed further to accommodate those shifts in behaviour.
Along with the sheer devaluing of musical production came the steady relegation of music to background. The increase in music’s background presence is made possible by technology, and people then become accustomed to it in that role; music becomes less and less a natural focus of attention. That creates markets for very cheaply produced sound – much popular music now is made on a laptop with a singer or two, no band. As sounds of these kinds become the norm, it makes even less sense to sit down and listen. There is a spiralling downward feedback between modes of production, reproduction, and listening.
Outside of music, people often assume that an adjustment is underway and money is returning. Promising signs do sometimes appear, but they fade or are squashed by a new problem. In a major development over the last few years, YouTube has become a monster. When it streams music, it pays even less to artists than services like Spotify, and YouTube now dominates online listening.
In 2015, David McCandless put together a graphic summary of how much money musicians make from various online platforms. One calculation he did was how many plays of a song would be needed, on a given platform, in order for an artist to make the US monthly minimum wage of $1,260.
On Spotify, a signed artist (hence sharing revenue with a record label) would need a million plays per month (180,000 if they were unsigned and independent). On YouTube, 4 million plays in a month would be needed (4 million if signed, 700,000 if unsigned). That’s not 4 million plays to make a decent living that repays years of practice, but 4 million to make the minimum wage.
One result of all this is the revival of live shows, and the rediscovery by some audiences of how different live music is from the cheaply-produced sounds that surround them. But as more and more musicians take this road, it puts new downward pressure on the money.
The 1980s/90s singer-songwriter Suzanne Vega wrote in 2014: “Right now I’m in competition with my heroes, my peers and everyone else coming up.” Vega, who is getting close to 60 years of age, probably did not expect to be touring continually now, simply to make a living. Live music is wonderful, but it’s a tough road, only works financially for some kinds of music, and shouldn’t be the sole way for a recording artist to pay the bills.
What to do?
How then can we retain the profession of being a cellist, or a composer, or a guitarist – someone who works all day to practise this activity and does it at a higher level than any amateur can manage?
Do we want these people to exist? Surely yes. We want people who will put in the time to be able to play the hardest material, and create works that extend what’s possible. Then they have to be paid. One option is for them to be paid through government grants and programs, but it’s not healthy for an art to depend too much on a bureaucracy, with its political vulnerability, waste, and openings for manipulation.
Instead we have to look for individual, decentralized behaviors that nudge things in the right direction, look for ways to be part of music in a non-parasitic way. (Wasn’t listening to the radio “parasitic,” back in the old days? No, radio was part of a mix that worked. You listened for free, and were exposed to a mix of familiar and novel music, with advertisements along the way. You listened to new things and you bought some of them. Now we can listen to everything at will while buying nothing.)
In 2015, when Adele’s album “25” was released, she kept it off the streaming services for many months. A story in the New York Times at the time noted that Adele appeared to have “activated millions of customers for whom making a purchase is viewed as a sign of devotion and support” for an artist.
“There’s a level of respect by buying the song, rather than just streaming it,” said one fan quoted in the story, Carlos Villa. “I acknowledge the work that you put into this song, and I appreciate you for that.”
Adele kept her album 25 off streaming services for months. Paul Buck/AAP
Mr Villa, in the music world you are more appreciated than you realize. A lot of good feelings went out to you. Around the same time, a New Yorker writer noted that Adele had put subscribers to streaming services in a “quandary” by holding it off the streams. It was a quandary because the music would end up being streamed eventually, so this felt like “an attempt to make us purchase the music twice.”
Consider the cost involved in the “quandary.” An album today costs today about US$11 through a download, a bit more as a CD. Back in the heyday of popular music – say 1980 – the cost of a record was perhaps the same nominal amount, about $11. But given inflation, that $11 in 1980 is over $30 now. A record purchase back then was something to give careful thought to. Now it’s in the category of a drink or two in a bar.
My students sometimes used to say, as they filled their computers with unauthorized downloads: “Information wants to be free.” I don’t hear that sentence much any more, perhaps because people have begun to realize that it could best be translated like this: “All sorts of activities that were essential in forming western culture (playing and composing music, poetry) will soon no longer be professions.” There is now some acknowledgment of the problem; there’s acknowledgment of the madness in this superfically appealing slogan. But how can we redirect the forces that have been set loose?
The future will come from the interaction between technology and behavior, and “redirecting forces” is largely a matter of changing the habits we bring to the technology we use. In the past, there were only a few ways to listen to music, and they fitted together into an economy that made the profession viable. Now everyone has more choices in their behavior. What I want to do here is encourage people to think about those choices.
If you like a piece of music, ask yourself: will you get some benefit from owning a copy? Is it just inertia that prevents it? Does having it on your machine have advantages over relying on the internet all the time?
Perhaps you think those things won’t really make much difference to you. Then I say: buy some of the music anyway. That sounds like charity – as if I am begging on behalf of the musicians – but I have in mind something different.
Composer Iannis Xenakis in his Paris studio in early 1960.
cea +/Flickr, CC BY
Don’t think of it as charity; think of it as more like voting. Voting is a behavior most of us engage in, at some cost, because we want to have an effect – even a tiny one – on what happens in politics. And even if we have insignificant effects, we want to express our preferences. We want to be on one side or the other, and if our candidate wins we can identify with what happens next. Buying music right now is voting for a certain future, voting for a system that will include professional music in later generations.
Whenever you listen to a streamed song, like it but don’t buy it, and instead stream it again – especially on YouTube – you are casting a vote for the future nonexistence of professional musicians.
It’s not a vote for the nonexistence of music itself, but a vote for the loss of the profession. You are voting for the end of the difference it makes to have people practising for six hours a day and spending months in a studio, making it one’s life project to do those things well.
I don’t know what you like – Adele, Kendrick, Xenakis – it doesn’t matter. Whatever it is you like, vote for it to continue.
This is the first of two articles discussing the state of the music industry. A response to this essay – Why music is not lost – will be published on Monday.
Peter Godfrey-Smith, Distinguished Professor of Philosophy, City University of New York
This article was originally published on The Conversation. (Reblogged by permission). Read the original article.
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The Logical Place 