My favorite Rachmaninov piece

Rakhmaninov: Concerto for piano and orchestra No.2 op.18, 1 mov.

Piano by Erika Handa.

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"And if it were said of us that we're almost romantics, that we are incorrigible idealists, that we think the impossible: then a thousand and one times we have to answer that yes, we are." -- Ernesto Guevara

In God's Name: Freedom of Speech v. Defamation of Religions

Miklós Haraszti in Eurozine:

On 26 March, the UN Human Rights Council passed a resolution condemning 'defamation of religions' as a human rights violation, despite wide concerns that it could be used to justify curbs on free speech. The Council adopted the non-binding text, proposed by Pakistan on behalf of the Islamic states, with a vote of 23 states in favour and 11 against, with 13 abstentions. The resolution "Combating Defamation of Religions" has been passed, revised and passed again every year since 1999, except in 2006, in the UN Human Rights Council (HRC) and its predecessor, the UN Human Rights Commission. It is promoted by the persistent sponsorship of the Organisation of the Islamic Conference with the acknowledged objective of getting it codified as a crime in as many countries as possible, or at least promoting it into a universal anathema. Alongside this campaign, there is a global undercurrent of violence and ready-made self-censorship that has surrounded all secular and artistic depictions of Islamic subjects since the Rushdie fatwa.

This year's resolution, unlike previous versions, no longer ignores Article 19, the right to free expression. That crucial human right has now received a mention, albeit in a context which misleadingly equates defamation of religions with incitement to hatred and violence against religious people, and on that basis denies it the protection of free speech. It also attempts to bracket criticism of religion with racism.

On the other hand, the vague parameters of possible defamation cases have now grown to include the "targeting" of symbols and venerated leaders of religion by the media and the Internet. What we are witnessing may be an effort at diplomacy, but it is also a declaration of war on twenty-first century media freedoms by a coalition of latter-day authoritarians.

For the full article, click here.

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"Resemblances are the shadows of differences. Different people see different similarities and similar differences." - Vladimir Nabokov

Che and His Afterlife Image

Maurice Isserman in The Nation, writes:

In Che's Afterlife: The Legacy of an Image, Michael Casey reports that local peasant women who paraded by Che's corpse on October 9 with the permission of triumphant Bolivian officers "surreptitiously clipped locks of hair from Che's head, saving themselves a future talisman." A few weeks later, the journalist and novelist Jose Yglesias, reporting on Che's death for The Nation, indulged his readers with a different sort of memorabilia. Yglesias wrote that like the relics of St. Teresa of Avila, a sixteenth-century Carmelite nun and mystic, Che's hands "may well be with us for a long time to strengthen the nonreligious but barefoot Order--like Saint Teresa's stoical Carmelites--of the guerrillas of South America." The mythic appeal of the slain revolutionary, known to many today in Latin America as "San Ernesto," has only grown in subsequent years. "Unwittingly, the Bolivian military delivered the world a lasting and sympathetic picture of the man they'd hunted down," Casey writes. "They gave it a crucified Che." Indeed, John Berger and other art critics have argued that Freddy Alborta's photo of Che's corpse bears a startling resemblance to Renaissance depictions of Jesus Christ at the moment he was brought down from the cross by the Romans.

Che hardly ever sat for a bad photo--even in death. But of all surviving photographs of him, one in particular stands out: the head-and-shoulders portrait of a bearded, longhaired, 31-year-old Che, wearing a bomber jacket and his trademark beret emblazoned with the comandante star. Casey makes this image the central concern of Che's Afterlife, and in the book's opening chapter he offers a vivid re-creation of the "frozen millisecond" when the photo was taken. The date was March 5, 1960; the location a spot near Havana's Colón cemetery; the occasion a public funeral sponsored by the revolutionary government. The previous day a French munitions ship delivering arms to Cuba had mysteriously blown up in Havana harbor, killing scores of people and wounding hundreds. CIA involvement was suspected but never proven. Che, who had been at a meeting nearby in downtown Havana when the ship exploded, rushed to the docks and helped provide medical aid to the wounded and the dying.

For the full article, click here.

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Another way of seeing. See John Berger's Ways of Seeing.

This post is dedicated to Em--who adores Che. Thanks for the bomber jacket. Hasta la vista victoria siempre.

Blending Philosophy and Natural Science

Hasok Chang sees a new role for the history and philosophy of science. He writes:

What is the use of philosophy? That is a challenging question to answer in the modern intellectual landscape dominated by empirical science. There is a common impression that philosophers just sit around and engage in idle talk, while scientists make real investigations and deliver results that are useful as well as truthful. Even professional philosophers feel the pressure of the success of science and often respond with a subservient naturalism, which would reduce philosophy of mind to neurophysiology, epistemology to cognitive psychology, and metaphysics to the latest fashion in physics. A completion of such a naturalist project would be the end of philosophy as we know it; if philosophy’s subject matter is really science, then it would be best to leave it to scientists. It is absurd conceit to think that we philosophers can “think” better than anyone, so that we can step in and draw some wise conclusions from the scientific material, which scientists themselves are missing because they are sloppy or limited in their thinking.

I wish to resist this self-denigrating naturalism in philosophy, fashionable as it is these days. The relation between philosophy and science needs to be seen in a new light. A look back at the long-term history of scholarship will help us re-orientate ourselves here. There was a time when nearly all academic inquiry was called “philosophy”. But various scientific disciplines (and other practices such as law and medicine) gradually carved themselves out and left the realm of philosophy. After the departure of astronomy, mechanics, experimental physics, chemistry, geology, biology, psychology, anthropology, sociology, economics, and so on, what is left in philosophy proper seems an empty shell. Our current academic discipline called “philosophy” became restricted and defined, as it were, against its own will.

This history goes some way to explain the origin of the common notion that philosophy should deal with “deep” questions, that its discourse has to be general, abstract and systematic. This is a reaction against all the specialisms declaring their independence from philosophy. The defining feature of what remains as philosophy must be that it is not specialist but general, aspiring to universality. Transcending the vagaries of specialist disciplines also means dealing with questions that are immutable, as we go on a quest for an eternal truth.

In articulating my own conception of philosophy, I want to propose a different contrast, a different way of being counter-specialist. Philosophical questions are not deeper than scientific questions, only different. Here I take a clue from Thomas Kuhn’s philosophy of science, though perhaps not in a way that he would have envisaged himself. In Kuhnian terms, science does not emerge from “pre-science” until the field of legitimate questions gets narrowed down with clearly recognized boundaries. Historically this was a slow and gradual process. For a long time it was common for one and the same treatise to contain tangled discussions of metaphysics, methodology, and what we would now identify as the proper “content” of science. Philosophy once aspired to encompass all knowledge, but what is now left under the rubric of philosophy is not the all-encompassing scholarship it once was. Philosophy as practised now does not and cannot include science. But in my view that is just where its most important function now lies: to address what science and other specialisms neglect.

For the full article, click here.

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"The worthwhile problems are the ones you can really solve or help solve, the ones you can really contribute something to. ... No problem is too small or too trivial if we can really do something about it." - Richard Feynman

To Become An Extremist, Hang Around With People You Agree With

Cass Sunstein argues that:

Some years ago, a number of citizens of France were assembled into small groups to exchange views about their president and about the intentions of the United States with respect to foreign aid. Before they started to talk, the participants tended to like their president and to distrust the intentions of the United States. After they talked, some strange things happened. Those who began by liking their president ended up liking their president significantly more. And those who expressed mild distrust toward the United States moved in the direction of far greater distrust. The small groups of French citizens became more extreme. As a result of their discussions, they were more enthusiastic about their leader, and far more sceptical of the United States, than similar people in France who had not been brought together to speak with one another.

This tale reveals a general fact of social life: much of the time groups of people end up thinking and doing things that group members would never think or do on their own. This is true for groups of teenagers, who are willing to run risks that individuals would avoid. It is certainly true for those prone to violence, including terrorists and those who commit genocide. It is true for investors and corporate executives. It is true for government officials, neighbourhood groups, social reformers, political protestors, police officers, student organisations, labour unions and juries. Some of the best and worst developments in social life are a product of group dynamics, in which members of organisations, both small and large, move one another in new directions.

For the full article, click here.


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Interestingly, if you do hang out with people you agree with--and you have a tendency to want to outdo the rest--you're bound to end up being the most extreme of your group. This is a viable thesis for the functional creation of a fundamentalist, an extreme rightist--or even something as mundane as the "one-upper" ("wala ka sa lolo ko").

IF

If you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you,
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you
But make allowance for their doubting too,
If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
Or being lied about, don’t deal in lies,
Or being hated, don’t give way to hating,
And yet don’t look too good, nor talk too wise:

If you can dream–and not make dreams your master,
If you can think–and not make thoughts your aim;
If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster
And treat those two impostors just the same;
If you can bear to hear the truth you’ve spoken
Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,
Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken,
And stoop and build ‘em up with worn-out tools:

If you can make one heap of all your winnings
And risk it all on one turn of pitch-and-toss,
And lose, and start again at your beginnings
And never breath a word about your loss;
If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew
To serve your turn long after they are gone,
And so hold on when there is nothing in you
Except the Will which says to them: “Hold on!”

If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,
Or walk with kings–nor lose the common touch,
If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you;
If all men count with you, but none too much,
If you can fill the unforgiving minute
With sixty seconds’ worth of distance run,
Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it,
And–which is more–you’ll be a Man, my son!

-- Rudyard Kipling


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Another year, a new chapter in my life.

looking at systemic flaws

Conrado de Quiros writes about "Systems," in his latest column in the Inquirer.

These are questions we’ve always answered with: Because of the system.

There’s nothing innately wrong with the Filipino. There is nothing in his genes that prevents him from accomplishing big things. There is nothing in his physical or mental endowments that obstructs his capacity to do great things.

But there is everything wrong with his system. It’s his system that robs him of his discipline, his direction, his drive. It’s his system that prevents him from envisioning grand things. It’s his system that stops him from accomplishing great things.

Elsewhere in the world, the system rewards the upright and punishes the wicked. Elsewhere in the world, the system praises the worthy and damns the rotten. Elsewhere in the world, the system applies the law to everyone, jailing bank robbers and Bernie Madoffs alike, jailing common criminals and uncommon criminals alike. Elsewhere in the world, the system allows merit to thrive and demerit to perish. Elsewhere in the world, the system pushes the promising to excel and the corrupt to rot away. Elsewhere in the world, the system provides the foundation or the support or the ground for talent to blossom into genius.

That is how Filipinos do great things when they’re abroad. The system allows them to.

In the end, we don’t really need to go abroad to be able to do grand things, we don’t really need American coaches to bag the gold in sports or in life. We need only to do one thing:

Change our system.

Originally posted at: http://opinion.inquirer.net/inquireropinion/columns/view/20090512-204471/Systems


I wonder what kind of systemic changes we should have. Should we opt for governmental systemic change in terms of political institutions? Should we assail the legal system, the judicial system, the administration and all that?

A few days ago, Dean Pangalangan wrote about the need for a Kuhnian paradigmatic shift... a revolution, in a scientific and socio-political sense. I somehow agree.

What we need is a revolution. But one that begins with the internal. With the sense of self, as Mabini would say.

Kudos to Mr. De Quiros for his righteous anger.

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"So I start a revolution from my bed... cause you said that all the brains I have went to my head." - Oasis, Don't Look Back in Anger

Summer in Kanji

I found the Kanji off the net from The Tokyo Traveler.  

Here comes summer, here comes summer

There goes summer, there goes summer.