4000 people from 38 countries learn about global warming. They let our world leaders know that they really should do something about it. As you know, nobody cared anyway, but it seems that as a world public-reading device, this World Wide Views experience/ment fared better than politicians.
But there’s an irritating underlying media narrative. Journalists (and that horrid, shameful subspecies of journalists, social scientists) gleefully point at the “contradiction” between the public-regarding view of people (as in “we should do more about global warming, even if it costs us”) and their private views (as in “I wouldn’t like to pay more in taxes or for goods”). Oh, really? This is Elsterian rationality, you simpletons, and the clash in worldwiews is coming to that: how do we find ways to restrain ourselves, as Ulysses had himself bound so as to avoid heeding the sirens. But when the sirens sing, it would be simply stupid to ask Ulysses “would you like to be unbound?” and then point at the “contradiction”. Or worse, not even wrong.
John Lanchester, proponent of a number of crucial concepts for the advancement of the social studies of finance (e.g. “cityphilia”, “cityphobia”, “bankocracy”), has now concentrated all his conceptual wisdom into the one notion that will better serve the task of clarifying the sociological nature of the credit crisis: “whoops!” (book forthcoming from Penguin).
A very nice point made by Donald MacKenzie in the pages of the Financial Times: “Beneath all the toxic acronyms lies a basic cultural issue”, November 25 2009 (or, alternatively, “Culture gap let toxic instruments thrive”, November 26 2009).
It’s interesting how the French police contributes to the enhancement of the political education of students at Sciences Po:
“Police reacted with deliberate and overtly racist violence during celebrations in Paris after Algeria’s footballing victory over Egypt last Wednesday, a French student of Moroccan descent has alleged. In an account written on his Facebook page immediately after the events, and re-printed as the lead story in French daily Libération on Tuesday, 21-year-old Anyss Arbib claims he was assaulted for no reason, sprayed with mace and called a “dirty Arab”. Arbib, a fourth-year student at Paris’s elite Sciences-Po (Political Sciences) university, went into central Paris from his home in the northern suburbs of Bondy to celebrate Algeria’s victory with friends. ” (from “Have your say: French police violence”, France 24, November 24 2009)
With special encouragement from the Dean:
“It was not until a day later however, that Arbib decided to publish his account, after Sciences Po dean, Richard Descoings, encouraged him to do so.” (from “Alleged victim of police brutality told by uni dean it was “essential to publicise account”, France 24, November 24 2009)
Even Eric Besson, Sarkozy’s man for immigration and national identity, seems to be looking forward to meet this newly formed politician (see “Le cabinet de Besson contacte le ’sale Arabe’ de Sciences-Po”, Rue89, November 24 2009). Congratulations to the forces de l’ordre for this pedagogical contribution! Students from prestigious foreign schools in political sciences (here, here, etc.) can now increase their curricula with just a spontaneous encounter with the CRS in central Paris. And it’s free!
Jacqueline Rose concludes her recent LRB review of Rana Husseini’s Murder in the Name of Honour, Unni Wikan’s In Honour of Fadime, and Ayse Onal’s Honour Killing with the following (the whole review is worthwhile reading):
“By the time I had finished reading these ghastly stories, it was the sisters who for me stood out as the heroines. Not the ones who are lamented too late, but those who survive and go on telling the story. For Wikan, Songül Sahindal is the bravest of them all, taking to the witness stand against the advice of her whole family, who were happy to dismiss her and her evidence as insane – ‘a madwoman’s tale’. Bekhal Mahmod, whose sister Banaz was killed in 2006, was the key prosecution witness at the trial of her father and uncle and the first woman in the UK ever to testify at an honour killing trial. Undercover and in hiding ever since, she continues to speak out on behalf of her dead sister (you can see one of the interviews on YouTube). These sisters’ futures will probably not be public knowledge, although Wikan is optimistic about Songül. But trying to follow them, or perhaps just remembering the difficulty of the lives they are now likely to be living, might be one way to keep the issue at the forefront of our minds, and to hold on to what happens next.” (from Jacqueline Rose, “A Piece of White Silk”, London Review of Books, November 5 2009)
Incredible. Here is Le Monde quoting The Onion in its press review. Sorry, misquoting (“patrons”?).
Update: removed! But it was there, as pointed out by the 17.11.09 12h55 comment.
Another comparison: try this.
How does one control a US Republican Senator, or any other political entity, for that matter? An economic way is to make him, her or it transparent, and thus amenable to discipline. Take the American Conservative Union ratings: one can find out that Senators Inhofe, Coburn or Barrasso vie for the most conservative record in their voting. With a lifetime score of almost 90, Lindsey Graham might have felt reasonably secure. You wanna mess with me and call me a RINO (Republican In Name Only), check my ACU rating, pal. But then he struck a framework agreement with John Kerry on global warming and clean energy, and Harry Kimball, RINO HUNTer, just flushed him down the toilet. So much for the abstract, carefully constructed, boring transparency provided by ACU, to be replaced, says good old Harry, by a “committee of folks who are working on researching the incumbents”, and create a “definitive list of RINOs”.
So, in the end, as with all transparency matters, the question is who do you trust? Surely, a committee of folks, morally akin to me, beats hard-to-decipher numbers… One can only think so much about these political things before yelling politically…
Comparing something to something else (say, today’s France to the Vichy Regime) does not mean that this something and that something else are exactly identical. They are just comparable, which means that the resemble at least a little bit. So let’s compare:
“On Monday 5 October the film-maker José Chidlovsky was summoned to the offices of the French border police at Toulouse-Blagnac airport. Chidlovsky is currently filming a documentary called Journal de sans-papiers. This feature-length documentary, filmed in Paris and Toulouse, is due to be completed in 2010. It follows the experiences of several people without residence permits who live in fear of being deported. Amongst them is a young Algerian woman threatened with being escorted to the border and suffering from severe emotional stress. José Chidlovsky is accused of having provided accommodation for the young woman at his home in Toulouse. [...] Eric Besson, the Minister for Immigration insists that assisting illegal immigrants, the so-called “offence of solidarity”, is not a crime in France. Yet for having “housed a person in an illegal situation” José Chidlovsky risks a prison sentence. According to his lawyer Pascal Nakache, the prosecutor can either close the case or send the documentary maker before the criminal court.” (from “Film-Maker Accused of Assisting ann Illegal Immigrant”, translation of “Un cinéaste poursuivi pour délit de solidarité”, L’Humanité, October 6 2009) (and see here for a solidarity campaign)
What should a fine comparison start with? With nazis marching in leather boots? Well, no. Not with that, of course. That would be silly.
From some very preliminary opportunistic fieldwork conducted during an important organisational studies conference in Barcelona this summer it was found that expenses receipts were a major preoccupation for many society testers. A particularly poignant vignette from this fieldwork was provided by an experiment in the collective ordering of the highly refreshing drink of orxata (unknown to many of those involved in the experiment until then). Apart form providing an opportunity to see Douglas Adams’ Bistromathics “in the wild”, the vignette also raised a number of interesting calculatory and ethical issues about whether such an “unknown” (unknowable?!) object would fit into the increasingly rigid categorisation and classification schemes of the administrative bureaucracies of the institutions to which the various self experimenters belonged to and then, on seeing a plethora of discarded receipts on the floor, about whether to exploit or not the get-rich-quick opportunity presented by these trampled pieces of paper. Now, in true STS fashion, a completely new direction to such experimentation is being provided by the technological innovation of the Random Expenses Receipt Generator. The article includes some ‘bonus tracks’ in the form some brilliant accounts of the expenses practices of British journalists and a link to an article about the institution by this profession of the proto-market device of the London Bill Exchange.
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Authors
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typewritten
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foamsociety
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nikip
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mudarchitect
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dementine
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metatester
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wholeseller
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