Totalitarianism Today

TOTALITARIANISM TODAY

Wednesday, April 16, 2003

What is the relationship between special ed funding incentives and the drastic rise in the number of students deemed needful of special ed?

The picture isn't as altruistic as some might prefer. According to the Manhattan Institute's Education Research Office, between 1976 and 2002, the percentage of all public school students placed in special education grew from 8.3% to 12.7%.

"This rapid growth has occurred almost entirely in one category of special education: specific learning disabilities. While enrollment in this category grew from 1.8% of public school students to 6.1%, the percentage of students in all other categories (including mental retardation, orthopedic impairment, blindness, and deafness) was essentially constant, moving from 6.5% to 6.6%. Learning disabilities are much more subjective in their diagnosis than other kinds of disability and are less expensive to treat."

Jay P. Greene provides an interesting analysis of the effects of funding incentives on special education enrollment.

Wednesday, April 16, 2003

A little Russian political humor.

From a site devoted to such things....

A political activist named Dave was just arriving in Hell, and was told he had a choice to make. He could go to Capitalist Hell or to Communist Hell.

Naturally, Dave wanted to compare the two, so he wandered over to Capitalist Hell. There outside the door was Rockerfeller, looking bored. "What`s it like in there?" asked Dave. "Well," he replied , "In Capitalist Hell, they flay you alive, boil you in oil, chain you to a rock and let a vulture tear your liver out, and cut you up into small pieces with sharp knives."

"That`s terrible!!" gasped Dave. "I`m going to check out Communist Hell!" He went over to Communist Hell, where he discovered a huge line of people waiting to get in; the line circled around the lobby seven times before receding off into the horizon. Dave pushed his way through to the head of the line, where he found Karl Marx busily signing people in. Dave asked Karl what Communist Hell was like.

"In Communist Hell," said Marx impatiently, "they flay you alive, boil you in oil, chain you to a rock and let vultures tear out your liver, and cut you up into small pieces with sharp knives."

"But ... but that`s the same as Capitalist Hell!" protested Dave.

"True," sighed Marx, "but sometimes we don`t have oil, sometimes we don`t have knives ..."

Wednesday, April 16, 2003

No surprise.

Who can honestly say they didn't know this was coming?

Monday, April 14, 2003

The post-Saddam diplomatic scenario.

Elise Kissling reports that Germany is exploring a "new axis" on the diplomatic front. Though it's still hard to tell how the Iraq war will alter diplomatic ties in Europe and Asia, this article hints at a few changes in worldview.

Monday, April 14, 2003

Rumsfeld takes a Havelian twist.

It looks like Rumsfeld has been reading his Havel given the newfound commitment to a living in truth that he expressed when questioned about Syria.

In Beirut, French Foreign Minister Dominique de Villepin said the time was not right for the United States to raise pressure on Syria by accusing it of aiding Saddam's collapsed regime.

Villepin said after meeting Lebanese leaders the international community should focus instead on rebuilding Iraq and reviving Middle East peace efforts.

But Rumsfeld said Washington would not "deny the truth."

"The fact of the matter is that Syria has been unhelpful and pretending that that's not the case it strikes me is to deny the truth. And I don't think you can live a lie," he said on CBS.

Oh, but you can... And there is no better place to live a lie than Washington DC.

Monday, April 14, 2003

Two oddies but goodies.

Russ Kick asks if she-males are the best of both worlds. A fascinating lecture on phantom limbs and other "phantoms in the brain" in the 2003 Feith Lecture series.

Monday, April 14, 2003

Early morning philosophy of mind.

Browsing through the new issue of the Stanford Electronic Humanities Review, inspired by jetlag and a pot of tea, I ran across an interesting piece by Geneviéve Teil & Bruno Latour entitled, "The Hume Machine". The article asks if association networks can do more than formal rules to explain "social" interactions and behaviors in the "social sciences", which the authors qualify as follows:

The word "social" in the expression "social science" would no longer refer to "society" but to the "associations" established between humans and non-humans. The problem encountered by such a theory is to decide whether or not one should qualify the associations beforehand. In studying a fragment of science, should we be able to sort the associations by types (for instance "student of," "instrument for," "stronger than," "interested in," "implies that," and so on) or simply stick to the mere occurences of the associated elements. The empirical consequences of such a decision are important and seem to lead us into a quandary. If we follow the first line of enquiry we will have a rich narrative, but will be able to deal only with a very small amount of data. If we follow the second line, we might be able to handle a large amount of data, but we would lose the richness of the information and will have only a cloud of elements with no other relations than the fact that they occur together. We seem to be limited by the very same weakness that suspended the associationist research program in the eighteenth century. The use of computers and large data banks might help us out of this quandary by allowing "mere associations" to give us enough information to qualify also the types of association. This is, at least, the attempt that we want to present in this article.

Three questions in particular are important here:

1. Does the idea of networks enable us to deconstruct the set of forms and vocabulary that the social sciences have used, every which way, up to the present?
2. Does it allow us to follow a class of problems with fluid definitions, something that computer science has not yet been able to deal with?
3. Is it possible to use the idea of networks to successfully reconstruct the logics that the concepts of forms and structures only give us very partial access to?

So what is the Hume machine and how might it answer these questions? The authors believe that these questions can be answered by using the form of a program written for a microcomputer.

We have given our project the code name of "the Hume-Condillac machine"6 in honor of the Scottish (1711-1776) and French (1714-1760) philosophers whose research programs we are partially reviving using computers, to which they obviously did not have access. This project for Sociology Assisted by Computer is also a form of CAS (Computer Assisted by Sociology). We agree with Hewitt that models for developing cognitive science rooted in the mind or brain are less useful for constructing computer tools than those borrowed from organizations, society, and networks.

In this paper, we draw certain logical, cognitive, and information-science conclusions from work that has accumulated over the past ten years in the sociology of science and technology.8 What we have been able to show from studies of laboratories, theories, machines, and technology is that their robustness, their solidity, their truth, their efficiency, and their usefulness depend less on formal rules or on their own characteristics than on their local and historical context-independently of the various ways that there are of defining that context.

The authors contend that the "robustness of structured relations does not depend on qualities inherent to those relations but on the network of associations that form its context". At first glance, one is tempted to believe they might be grasping for some form of contextualist explanation-- a common and quite accepted approach in modern philosophy of mind. If the quality of a relationship depends, however, on particular situation-specific association networks, then modifying context (and thereby relationship quality) would involve more complicated measures than status quo contextualists might grant. All in all, good morning yoga for the mind.

Sunday, April 13, 2003

Corporate classrooms still recieving rave reviews from parents and students.

Sara Rimer reports on the recent success of Edison schools in Philadelphia.

Eight months into the school year, students, teachers, parents and administrators at Potter-Thomas Elementary School say that privatization has transformed their school. The hallways are clean and orderly, the classrooms calm. The new principal, Sergio Rodriguez, is in control.

Edison Schools, the for-profit company that took over the school and hired Mr. Rodriguez, has also brought in new computers and new books. Students say they are learning in a way they never could last year, when fights broke out all the time.

"My teacher couldn't teach," a seventh grader, Eduardo Soto, said. "She always had to go outside to see what was going on."

The ambitious experiment that brought Edison and six other outside managers to run 45 of the city's worst elementary and middle schools, including Potter-Thomas, caused widespread excitement last fall. But the educational and political landscape has shifted since then. Privatization is no longer being held up as the central solution to the school district's problems.

Instead, it is now viewed as one of many possible remedies, as public attention has turned away from the Edison experiment to the wide-ranging efforts promised by the new chief executive officer of the school system, Paul G. Vallas, who arrived from Chicago in July.

The controversy over the sustainability of Edison's successes continues. It will be interesting to see how the Bush standardized test plans interact with Edison's focus on winning bottom lines.

Sunday, April 13, 2003

Photo of the day.

Muchos gracias to Lawrence for pointing out the protest photo for April 4th-- a lesson in poignance.

Sunday, April 13, 2003

Another William Matthews poem-- Misgivings.

"Perhaps you'll tire of me," muses
my love, although she's like a great city
to me, or a park that finds new
ways to wear each flounce of light
and investiture of weather.
Soil doesn't tire of rain, I think,

but I know what she fears: plans warp,
planes explode, topsoil gets peeled away
by floods. And worse than what we can't
control is what we could; those drab
scuttled marriages we shed so
gratefully may auger we're on our owns

for good reason. "Hi, honey," chirps Dread
when I come through the door; "you're home."
Experience is a great teacher
of the value of experience,
its claustrophobic prudence,
its gloomy name-the-disasters-

in-advance charisma. Listen,
my wary one, it's far too late
to unlove each other. Instead let's cook
something elaborate and not
invite anyone to share it but eat it
all up very very slowly.

Sunday, April 13, 2003

So there is a maxi-me out there.

Another Alina Stefanescu who seems, by the way, to be far more interesting than me. Should I start my quarter-century-life crisis now?

Sunday, April 13, 2003

This is what 2 and 1/2 months pregnancy looks like....

Or so I hear.
And some men are just beautiful enough to take such pictures.

Sunday, April 13, 2003

The Blues by William Matthews

What did I think, a storm clutching a clarinet
and boarding a downtown bus, headed for lessons?
I had pieces to learn by heart, but at twelve

you think the heart and memory are different.
"'It's a poor sort of memory that only works
backwards,' the Queen remarked." Alice in Wonderland.

Although I knew the way music can fill a room,
even with loneliness, which is of course a kind
of company. I could swelter through an August

afternoon -- torpor rising from the river -- and listen
to Stan Getz and J. J. Johnson braid variations
on "My Funny Valentine" and feel there in the room

with me the force and weight of what I couldn't
say. What's an emotion anyhow?
Lassitude and sweat lay all about me

like a stubble field, it was so hot and listless,
but I was quick and furtive as a fox
who has his thirty-miles-a-day metabolism

to burn off as ordinary business.
I had about me, after all, the bare eloquence
of the becalmed, the plain speech of the leafless

tree. I had the cunning of my body and a few
bars -- they were enough -- of music. Looking back,
it almost seems as though I could remember --

but this can't be; how could I bear it? --
the future toward which I'd clatter
with that boy tied like a bell around my throat,

a brave man and a coward both,
to break and break my metronomic heart
and just enough to learn to love the blues.

Sunday, April 13, 2003

The Sunday best.

Kenneth Anderson asks "Who owns the rules of war?" in an excellent essay for today's New York Times Magazine.

Also worthy of mention, an editorial in the NYT warns Americans not to confuse the Bush administration's military success with a validation of the preemptive strike doctrine, which falls under the rubric of foreign policy approach. An excerpt:

We do not belittle the achievement of American fighting forces. But their victory was the one element of this campaign that was never in doubt — just as there is no doubt that American soldiers could be toppling statues in Damascus, Tehran or even Pyongyang if they were ordered to do it. The trouble is that each of these cases has its own complexities, its own consequences. There is no one-size-fits-all approach to world affairs, and even if there were, it is far from certain that Iraq is a template. The situation there remains chaotic, and it will take a long time to judge whether American intervention will bring democracy and prosperity to Iraq or improve the situation in the Middle East.

So far, the hawks in the administration have not publicly suggested a sequel to Iraq, even if there have been warnings to other malefactors contemplating weapons of mass destruction to "draw the appropriate lesson" from the war. We have no doubt that the administration would far prefer that Iraq proved to be the catalyst for velvet revolutions across the Middle East and beyond.

The yearning to right wrongs has a noble tradition in American foreign policy, and few could oppose those portions of the Bush doctrine that would extend the benefits of freedom, democracy, prosperity and the rule of law to the far corners of the globe. Unfortunately, these goals were overshadowed by an arrogant, go-it-alone stance and an aggressive claim to the right to use pre-emptive action against threatening states.

For many people and nations, the way the Bush administration went after Saddam Hussein confirmed fears raised by the doctrine. That is one reason why the move to war drew so much opposition around the world, and why this page urged the administration to pursue its goals in Iraq within an international framework. A doctrine that purports to spread happiness, but ends up spreading resentment, is not working, no matter how many statues come tumbling down. That is why it is especially important now to show that the United States also has the confidence and wisdom to sheath its sword until it is really needed.

Sunday, April 13, 2003

Rumsfeld the sexpert?

I'm beginning to believe the man has his finger in way too many pies.... Thanks to Radley for the link.

Sunday, April 13, 2003

Ariel Dorfman and revolution.

A friend emailed me about watching Chilean dissident and human rights advocate Ariel Dorfman's comments on his opposition to the war aired on the BBC last week. For those unfamiliar with Dorfman's work, he wrote the play "Death and the Maiden", which later showed up as a film (one of my longtime favorites) directed by Roman Polanksi.

In the BBC broadcast, Dorfman said that overthrowing dictators is work that has to be done by the Iraqi people themselves. I share his feelings and opinions on this matter. The only effective and sustainable change is the change wrought from below by the citizens themselves. If the citizens are not psychically ready to fight for change, then its imposition by force will hardly be worthy of "democracy". Do I wish the US had intervened to overthrow Ceausescu? Absolutely not. I am quite happy to report that Romanians did it themselves, as they well should have.

Sunday, April 13, 2003

She seems to have the right idea...

Sunday, April 13, 2003

Please pardon my sarcasm.

Joseph Farah echoes Rumsfeld's comments that the US should take the next wing of this war to liberate the world to Syria. Hawks make no secret of their interest in "following-up" by bombing uncooperative Iraqi neighbors. Maybe we'll have more luck finding the ever-elusive WMD there. Fat chance.

Apparently, we might never know the number of Iraqis killed during this war, thanks to the semantic trickery of the distinction between civilian and soldier, blurred all the more by the PATRIOT Act's designation of terrorists as "unlawful combatants". What does it mean to be a "lawful combatant"? Technically, it means abiding by the international laws of war. However, these laws don't keep US forces from bombing mosques, hotels, neighborhoods, water purification plants or public parks. In fact, the victor names the crime and designates the guilty.

Sunday, April 13, 2003

I'm back.

Romania provided a different outlook on life, often refreshing, this time a little more sobering. I missed recieving emails from my readers.

Today, I turn 25-- with a quarter-century behind me and three more of the same to go. So what do I have planned for this year? Well, Rumsfeld did offer some quick cash to anyone willing to plant some WMD in Iraq and then report the existence of such materials to the US government. Nothing like quick cash. At least our government pays you-- the commies in Romania never bothered.

CASTIGAT RIDENDO MORES.