Saturday (July 4) Linkorama

 By Phil Percs (with the help of Jon Cogburn, John Fletcher, Debbie Goldfaber, and Duncan Richter)

"That when you hear the sound of the horn, pipe, lyre, trigon, harp, bagpipe, and every kind of music, you are to fall down and worship the golden image that King Nebuchadnezzar has set up. And whoever does not fall down and worship shall immediately be cast into a burning fiery furnace.” Therefore, as soon as all the peoples heard the sound of the horn, pipe, lyre, trigon, harp, bagpipe, and every kind of music, all the peoples, nations, and languages fell down and worshiped the golden image that King Nebuchadnezzar had set up. - The Book of Daniel

You say, 'I am rich; I have acquired wealth and do not need a thing.' But you do not realize that you are wretched, pitiful, poor, blind and naked. - The Book of Revelations

Aesthetics:

1. John Dyer's "John Cheever: Parody and the Suburban Aesthetic."
2. Wikipedia article on visual pollution.
3. There's no Wikipedia article for aural pollution.
4. On the other hand, there is one on everyday aesthetics.
5. Hey, this is fun! Outsider Art! Blues!  Cajun music! Appalachian music!
6. Literary Hub's Rebecca Brill chronicles the evolution of the great gay novel. Pretty good overall, but the exclusion of John Rechy is depressing.
7. The Economist on Philip Larkin's being given a flagstone at Westminster Abbey's Poet's Corner. Larkin's flagstone will be next to tombs (Chaucer and Dickens) and poets (Hughes) that he mocked mercilessly in private correspondence.
8. i09's Diana Biller suggests an essential Cyberpunk reading list.
9. Sci-fi author and iO9 writer Charlie Jane Anders relates eight books you need to know about to understand the current Hugo Awards snafu. (As a superfunpack extra, do yourself a favor and read Anders's excellent short story "As Good as New.")
10. LRB's Ian Penman reviews the recent 3 CD set Sinatra: London. There actually quite a bit of interesting history in this piece. Example- "Working the road in the 1930s and 1940s with the Harry James and Tommy Dorsey bands, Sinatra acquired a lot of jazz life knowledge by osmosis. (Jazz inflections peppered his speech for the rest of his life: ‘I’ve known discouragement, despair and all those other cats.’) He learned what not to do: how to hold back, live in the space between instrumental arcs. By Sinatra’s own account, the three main figures who shaped his navigation of song – how to float and sustain and linger – were Tommy Dorsey (‘the General Motors of the band business’), Billie Holiday and Bing Crosby. Anyone surprised by the inclusion of the latter should do a bit of digging: Crosby is a fascinating character. As well as a subtly revolutionary singer he was a technophile obsessed with recording techniques, and with how best to refine and update them to suit the new, softer style of singing and playing. Crosby was the original ‘crooner’ when the world was full of vocalists who belted out songs to the back of the hall. An old-school jazz fan like Sinatra, he worshipped Louis Armstrong and closely studied Satchmo’s self-presentation and singular way with a tune. Crosby’s delivery was ‘cool’ in a way that was entirely new to the mainstream, studded with jazz tics such as unexpected pauses and slurred or flattened notes. His understanding of microphone technique meant he could step back and let the audience come to him. He was a pivotal figure on the journey of cool jazz tones from a largely black, underground world into the mainstream, and a big influence on younger acts like Sinatra."

Anarchy/Anarchism:

1. Next New Deal's Mike Konczal attempting to eviscerate the boozhy fantasy of the hour, the end of work. QUOTE- "Going further, the idea that a post-work economy would involve simply choosing between a handful of quasi-utopias strikes me as completely naive. In Thompson’s piece, for instance, the problem seems to be whether post-work people would spend their time in intellectual pursuits or as independent artisans. But it’s just as likely people would spend their days as refugees trying not to starve."

Ethics:

1. Start your day's festivities with a group reading of Margaret Moore's The Ethics of Nationalism. ABSTRACT: "The Ethics of Nationalism is about the normative limits of nationalism. It assesses three justificatory arguments for the institutional recognition of national identity and argues that they suggest the appropriate limits of national accommodation. There are two kinds of projects associated with nationalism—nation‐building projects and national self‐determination projects—and these are often in tension with one another, at least in practice. The book discusses guidelines for determining when one is more appropriate than the other and the extent to which states can legitimately engage in nation‐building. The discussion of national self‐determination draws not only on the normative arguments for institutional recognition of national identity but also on claims to particular pieces of territory."
2. Questions to ask before giving up.
3. John Quiggin on John Locke. Locke offers "a liberal-sounding defense of the rights of Englishmen to property and freedom, used to justify their deprivation of those rights from indigenous people."

History:

1. Aeon's Peter Turichin (author of War and Peace and War: The Rise and Fall of Empires) on what history has to tell us about the sharp rise in inequality. The next time you find your local elites confusing the maintenance and expansion of their own prerogatives with the common good, assign them Turichin's work.
2. Urban Kchoze's Simon Vallee on why it's nearly impossible to design livable Euro style cities all at once. QUOTE- "So, to come back to the idea of urbanism focused on form or on process, focusing on the form of these Euro-blocs rather than the process through which they were built is, in my view, a mistake. They have emerged largely organically through incremental development, responding to economic signals and community needs, trying to replace that by a planner's dictates seems like a bad idea to me. But that's what happens when people want harmony and are ready to leapfrog stages of development heedless of economic realities to get it. Not that it cannot work, but it can also fail by making it so expensive and difficult to do that developers will pass on that opportunity and prefer to work in suburbs where regulations are less restrictive." Here's old urbanist's Charles Gardner, adding some meat to Valee's post by describing in more depth the differences between American and European cities.
3. And here's Vallee again building livable communities, this time on "mixed use" and the need to allow some zoning slack. CONCLUSION- "What is "mixed use"? There is no one correct definition, everyone could debate on how close is close enough before uses are considered to be "mixing". And anyway, left to their own devices, uses are quite likely to separate and congregate on their own, as each use favors different types of location. The important thing should be proximity and scale. You can have a city where uses are separated, as long as these uses are separated based on a human, walking, scale and not on a "highway-driving car" scale, that way, uses can remain in close proximity to one another, when it is beneficial for them. The most important aspect of "mixed use" is the regulatory one: if zoning is used, zones should allow for multiples uses inside them, to provide margins of error to planners and their inevitable failure to predict correctly evolving demand for the different uses. If regulations don't allow for mixed uses, then it will inevitably create shortages of land for some uses and over-supply for others, creating distortions in the economy and failing to allow communities to grow so as to respond to their own needs." And here's another on how modern zoning incentivizes sprawl.
4. The history of men fighting bears.

LGBT:

1. John Oliver on transgender identity and rights.
2. Straight White Male is the lowest difficulty setting there is.
3. John Stewart's rundown of the post-same-sex-marriage sadz by various conservatives is on point. Come for the takedown of "5 unelected judges" arguments; stay for Trump's answer to "What's so traditional about your three marriages?"
4. 25 examples of male privilege as discovered by a trans guy.

Logic & Language:

1. Experts have now created the world’s first online Metaphor Map, which contains more than 14,000 metaphorical connections sourced from 4m pieces of lexical data, some of which date back to 700AD.
2. Day 8 of the official Phil Percs protest that none of the 34 M Phi contributors has defended deductive logic from Elijam Milgram's widely shared (OUP Press Blog) claim that it is "stale science." M-Phi is the same blog that once brought us "A List of Achievement in Analytic Metaphysics" (w/ 32 comments). Can no one there do something similar with respect to deductive logic? Can no one there respond to Milgram's interesting claim that "moral philosophy, metaphysics, epistemology; it’s all just applied logic. But not logic in the sense of what is taught in these math classes"? Is the lack of public response from people invested in deductive logic evidence that Milgram is correct? Stick up for yourselves logic types! The only thing you have to lose is your. . . (can't figure out anything remotely clever. . . lemma?).
3. While we're kvetching, I should probably note that Phil is tired of very cool logicky pieces only accessible behind journal pay-walls. Since nearly everything in the linkorama is freely available, this ties our hands. Feh. Everyone has LaTex (or, for the Parsonian converts among us, Word) now. Why do we put up with this?
4. Alan Hajek's "What Conditional Probability Could Not Be. PUNCHLINE- "Conditional probability should be taken as the primitive notion, and unconditional probability should be analyzed in terms of it."
5. Crucial Considerations' Adrian Hutter has a nice piece explaining Bayes' Theorem to the rest of us.

Metalinkorama:

1. Epistemicists believe that there is a determinate n such that n + 1 links are no longer a heap (perhaps a mountain).
2. Scenes from a class war.
3. What the individuals at the Prindle Post were reading on July 3, 2015.

Metaphysics, broadly construed:

1. LARB's Ian Lowrie reviews Levi Bryant's Onto-cartography: An Ontology of Machines and Media.
2. Rocco Gangle's "The Theoretical Pragmatics of Non-Philosophy" enlists Brandom's meaning-use diagrams in a really interesting way. ABSTRACT- "Brandom's method of analyzing pragmatic relations among different practices and vocabularies through meaning-use diagrams is used to specify how Laruelle's nonphilosophical suspension of the Principle of Sufficient Philosophy may be distinguished from the philosophical auto-critiques of such thinkers as Badiou and Derrida. A superposition of diagrams modeling philosophical sufficiency on the one hand and supplementation through the Other on the other provides a schematic representation of the core duality of what Laruelle calls The-Philosophy. In contrast to this self-implicating and self-reproducing structure, Laruelle's axiomatic method is shown to enable a unilateral usage of the practices and vocabularies of philosophy as mere material that is no longer subject to the presuppositions or ineluctable restitution of philosophy as such." 
3. Laruelle's own summary of non-philosophy here.
4. Graham Harman's "Eh" here.
5. From Collapse Vol VIII:  Casino Real: Malik Suhail's "The Ontology of Finance:  Price, Power and the Arkhederivative." Say the editors: "Malik seeks to combine the philosophical understanding of the nature and logic of the derivatives market with an analysis of the entirely novel, structurally-specific mode of capitalist power it expresses."

Mind:

1. Psychology Today on why people fight in wars.
2. Oxytocin is not just a cuddle chemical.

Philosophers On:

1. The Supreme Court's gay marriage ruling.

Philosophers Profiled and/or Featured:

1. What is it Like to be a Philosopher profiles Al Mele. INEVITABLE, YET SATISFYING, GOSSIPPY BIT- "As I might have mentioned in my reply in Daily Nous didn’t take Dan Dennett’s remarks personally. He likes bashing the John Templeton Foundation, and reviewing my book Free – which was one of the many fruits of my Big Questions in Free Will project – gave him the opportunity to do that. Frankly, I wasn’t bothered at all by the remarks you have in mind. People who know my work on free will know that the suggestion that I warped my ideas in Free to cater to JTF is utterly unfounded, and anybody else can easily look into it. The single point on which Dennett suggested I might be catering to JTF has been a feature of my position on free will since 1995 (as voiced in my book Autonomous Agents), long before I knew anything about JTF. As you remember, Cliff, I’m an easy going guy. When my actual philosophical positions are misrepresented in print by philosophers, I sometimes find that irritating. But Dennett didn’t do that, and his suggestion was too far-fetched to take seriously."
2. Philosop-her's Meena Krishnamurthy features Lucy Allais. A really nice discussion of what we owe to one another and the state's role with respect to this.
3. Kyla Ebels-Duggan writes "More than Words Can Say: On Inarticulacy and Normative Commitment" at Pea Soup.
4. Aeon's Frederick De Boer describes why he takes Stephen Toulmin to be the most unederrated twentieth century philosopher. Watch out for looming Collingwood Paradoxicality!
5. Aeon's Nigel Warburton's list of the five most important twentieth century women philosophers.
6.  Socrates on Death row:  Boston Review's Albert W. Dzur  interviews with Lisa Guenther discussing her reading group in maximum security.

Politics not otherwise categorized:

1. The always impressive sociologist Timothy Burke ruminates on "The Production of Stigma" and the pros and cons of using stigma as a lever for social change.
2. The Unit of Caring blogger warns against the pessimism trap with some sensible guidelines for discussions.
3. Corey Robin's insights about Clarence Thomas's thoughts regarding dignity. With Whitney Houston. (Robin is writing a book about Thomas. He makes some surprising discoveries.)

Race and Racism:

1. Mapping the journey of 15, 790 slave shapes in 2 minutes.

Religion:

1. Richard Beck's "Letter to my Class on Being Prepared for Sadness."
2. Francis J. Beckwith on The problem with God's wonderful plan for you.
3. In the "what do conservative Christian intellectuals think of Obergefell" file: a symposium by the conservative Catholic First Things.
4. Books & Culture's John Schneider schools biblical innerantists.

Science/Technology:

1. Another account of quantum weirdness and/or the relationship between quantum physics and relativity theory and/or what this might tell us about dark matter/time travel/the age of the universe/the directedness of time/etc. etc. etc..
2. A just-so story to explain something I'm either enthusiastic about or irritated by.
3. A walk in the park increases poor research practices and decreases reviewer critical thinking.
4. LARB's David Kordahl reviews three books: David Z Albert's After Physics, Marcelo Gleiser's The Island of Knowledge: The Limits of Science and the Search for Meaning, and Max Tegmark's Our Mathematical Universe: My Quest for the Ultimate Nature of Reality. QUOTE- "The quote about prophets and hometowns came to mind, not because any of these writers are religious (so far as I know), but for the opposite reason — because physicists, of all people, should not be prophets. Competent physicists understand how their explanatory schemata are based on either empirical facts or introduced assumptions. But even if there’s no especial honor among peers, once physicists venture out from hometown they may as well be prophets. And make no mistake: most of us who read popular science want prophets. We want the inside scoop, an easy path to transcendence, oracles who will just give us the truth. The good news is that there are plenty of difficult, boring books that will do just that. The bad news is that there are just as many simple, exciting books that only want to blow your mind."

Songs:

1. Mbongwana Star:This band is worth knowing about. It was started by two homeless and paraplegic Congolese musicians in their fifties who recruited some younger Congolese musicians and an Irishman. The Guardian describes their debut single as: "a track that seemed to have fallen out of the sky, that somehow managed to be both identifiably Congolese – you can’t mistake the amplified likembes of guest stars Konono No 1 – and utterly unlike anything else the fertile Kinshasa music scene had yet produced: hypnotic rhythm patterns that clattered and echoed as if they were being played at the end of a vast tunnel; vocals coated with so much distortion they sounded like something picked up on a shortwave radio; a beautiful, keening male voice marooned over spacey electronics and mournful gusts of feedback to eerie effect." It's a great single.

Sports:

1. David Papineau schools Noam Chomsky on the value of sport.With reference to Bernard Suits!

Superfunpack:

1. Mark Twain's War Prayer. We ask it, in the spirit of love, of Him Who is the Source of Love, and Who is the ever-faithful refuge and friend of all that are sore beset and seek His aid with humble and contrite hearts. Amen.
2. The Scalia Insult Generator.
3. Notes towards a theory of Canadian boringness.
4. Summer-y dispensations from Chaucer.
5. The cover letter of every liberal arts graduate student.
6. Zombies think about metaphysically possible worlds containing philosophers.
7. Despair bears. One can get a joke without finding it that funny. Early seasons of Family Guy succeeded solely because their audience members didn't make this crucial distinction. I worry that this strip is sometimes Family Guy for people who know some philosophy. But there I go being a despair bear again.
8. And the monster was me.

This Week’s Cool Podcasts and Videos:

1. Please check out This Week’s Wifi below.
2. History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps′ Peter Adamson describes Robert Grosseteste.
3. Joe Gelonesi on gender and the brain.
4. Eric Schwitzgebel on all sorts of cool things.

This Week’s IEP:

1. Michael Buckley's "Political Constructivism."

This Week’s NDPR:

1. Erica Lucast Stonestreet reviews Nancy E. Snow (ed.)'s Cultivating Virtue: Perspectives from Philosophy, Theology, and Psychology.
2. Katherine Withy reviews Matthew Ratcliffe's Experiences of Depression: A Study in Phenomenology.
3. Earl Conee reviews Timothy Williamson's Tetralogue: I'm Right, You're Wrong.
4. Farid Masrour reviews Tim Crane's Aspects of Psychologism.
5. Daniel Giberman reviews Geoffrey Madell's The Essence of the Self: In Defense of the Simple View of Personal Identity.
6. Nina Emery reviews Alastair Wilson (ed.)'s Chance and Temporal Asymmetry.
7. Adam C. Pelser reviews Peter Olsthoorn's Honor in Political and Moral Philosophy.
8. Michael Della Rocca reviews Gonzalo Rodriguez-Pereyra's Leibniz's Principle of Identity of Indiscernibles.
9. Jeffrey Seidman reviews Sabine Roeser and Cain Todd (eds.)' Emotion and Value.

This Week’s SEP:

1. The Definition of Lying and Deception (James Edwin Mahon) [REVISED: June 30, 2015]
   Changes to: Main text, Bibliography

This Week’s WiPhi:

1. Geoff Sayre-McCord on The Prisoner's Dilemma. ABSTRACT- "In this video, Dr. Geoffrey Sayre-McCord (UNC-Chapel Hill) explains the prisoner's dilemma. The prisoner's dilemma is a scenario where all parties making rational choices ensures a less desired result for each than if each actor had chosen individually less-preferred options."

Teaching/Universities/Professional:

1. Some new stuff about increased administrative pay, the student loan crisis, adjunctification, and building funds.
2. Sexual harassment.
3. Don't teach with Powerpoint!
4. Student as consumer.
5. We have a couple of concerns about academic publishing.
6. Academic freedom!
7. Tenure?
8. Job market. Och. Ouch Ouch.
9. Neo-liberalism? Feh.

What It's Like:

1. To take the BacPho.
2. To hallucinate from sleep deprivation.
3. Cleaning out dead people's homes for a living.
4. Being a phone psychic without any psychic abilities.

Word Unheard:

The stairs lead to the room as bleak as glass   

Where fancy turns the statues.

The empty chairs are dreaming of a protocol,   

The tables, of a treaty;   

And the world has become a museum.

(The girl is gone,

Fled from the broken altar by the beach,

From the unholy sacrifice when calms became a trade-wind.)

The palaces stare out from their uncurtained trouble,   

And windows weep in the weak sun.

The women fear the empty upper rooms

More than the streets as grey as guns

Or the swordlight of the wide unfriendly esplanade.

Thoughts turn to salt among those shrouded chairs   

Where, with knives no crueller than pens, or promises,   

Took place the painless slaying of the leader’s daughter.

O, humbler than the truth she bowed her head,   

And scarcely seemed, to us, to die.

But after she was killed she fled, alive, like a surprise,   

Out of the glass world, to Diana’s Tauris.

Then wind cheered like a hero in the tackle of the standing ships

And hurled them bravely on the swords and lances of the wintry sea—

While wisdom turned to salt upon the broken piers.

This is the way the ministers have killed the truth,   

       our daughter,

Steps lead back into the rooms we fear to enter;   

Our minds are bleaker than the hall of mirrors:

And the world has become a museum.

          -Thomas Merton