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July 10, 2012

(…)

I wasn’t bullied a lot in high school, but I remember what it was like when I was. Being violated makes you into a different person, a person who cannot control, cannot be sure, cannot feel safe. Again, this didn’t happen to me very much, but I remember what it was like. And I remember just as vividly what it was like when a guy on the high school basketball team, a popular person, told the guy who was picking on me, in gym class of all the cliched places, that I was “cool.” It was in a stairwell. “Bady’s cool,” he said. “You’re not.” That was the day the bullying stopped, because it had stopped being “funny.”

The point of Judith Butler’s argument about “grievable life” is actually pretty simple: when violence happens against some kinds of living beings, it’s a big fucking deal. When it happens against other kinds, it isn’t. She has examples. You can come up with your own. New Yorkers on 9/11. Pakistani males “of military age” who happen to be somewhere where they might get hit by a drone, like Pakistan. Palestinian children and Israeli children. One kind of death matters a lot, another kind somehow seems to not matter so much. I don’t need to tell you which is which. The only question worth asking is this one: what makes some kinds of life more grievable than others?

You might say that Judith Butler is theorizing a kind of marketplace, or a stock market: the value of some lives rises, while that of others falls. Between 1970 and 1990, the value of prison life fell, as mass culture became less and less interested in “correcting” and rehabilitating, and more and more interested in punishing. Today, we make jokes about people getting raped in jail, in “pound-you-in-the-ass” prison. It’s a way to not think about the kinds of violence people condemned to that life have to endure. If it’s funny that people get raped in jail, after all, then you don’t have to think about them as people, you don’t have to take their pain into consideration. They’re nothing to you. Their degradation makes you laugh.

The phrase “rape culture” describes the way people don’t get too upset at the thought of a woman being raped. They might even laugh at it. It might seem funny, such a funny word. But nothing about this is just a joke. It’s about devaluing the sanctity of certain people’s security in their person, about refusing to feel bad about it, about taking a pride in it, even. Saying “wouldn’t it be funny if a violent act happened to this person” is almost the definition of how that works. If a terrible thing happened to a person, you say, I would not grieve. I would laugh. Their pain is not worth my empathy, or yours. Their pain makes me stronger, bigger, more important. Their pain is worth nothing.

5 comments
July 4, 2012

Freedom

verbatim caption, CA Corrections’ facebook page: 

“Happy Independence Day from the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation! (Photo: A female inmate works on an American flag while working in the Prison Industries Authority Fabrics program at the Central California Women’s Facility on Thursday, April 5, 2012 in Chowchilla, Calif. Photo: Lea Suzuki, The Chronicle / SF)”

2 comments
June 24, 2012

Sunday Reading

Is now fully located here, at the New Inquiry. I decided I’m not going to cross post it both places, because, you know, laziness. Also, they have cool side-margins over there. But mainly it’s the lazy.

1 comment
June 23, 2012

Another Question

Dear Thomas Jefferson,

I get that, but the thing is, you know, Classics don’t pay the bills.That’s just reality. So why should the taxpayers of the state of Virginia pay for people to learn stuff that doesn’t pay off? You know? I’m thinking that either students should pay for it, or we should just let the market make those decisions.

Helen Dragas, Rector

*

Dear Helen Dragas,

Some good men, and even of respectable information, consider the learned sciences as useless acquirements; some think that they do not better the condition of man; and others that education, like private and individual concerns, should be left to private individual effort; not reflecting that an establishment embracing all the sciences which may be useful and even necessary in the various vocations of life, with the buildings and apparatus belonging to each, are far beyond the reach of individual means, and must either derive existence from public patronage, or not exist at all. This would leave us, then, without those callings which depend on education, or send us to other countries to seek the instruction they require.

(original)

2 comments
June 23, 2012

Since you asked

Dear Thomas Jefferson,

I was thinking of getting rid of the University of Virginia’s classical department. You cool with that?

Helen Dragas, Rector

*

Dear Helen Dragas,

You ask my opinion on the extent to which classical learning should be carried in our country. A sickly condition permits me to think, and a rheumatic hand to write too briefly on this litigated question. The utilities we derive from the remains of the Greek and Latin languages are, first, as models of pure taste in writing. To these we are certainly indebted for the national and chaste style of modern composition which so much distinguishes the nations to whom these languages ae familiar. Without these models we should probably have continued the inflated style of our northern ancestors, or the hyperbolical and vague one of the east. Second. Among the values of classical learning, I estimate the luxury of reading the Greek and Roman authors in all the beauties of their originals. And why should not this innocent and elegant luxury take its preeminent stand ahead of all those addressed merely to the senses? I think myself more indebted to my father for this than for all the other luxuries his cares and affections have placed within my reach; and more now than when younger, and more susceptible of delights from other sources. When the decays of age have enfeebled the useful energies of the mind, the classic pages fill up the vacuum of ennui, and become sweet composers to that rest of the grave into which we are all sooner or later to descend. Third. A third value is in the stores of real science deposited and transmitted us in these languages, to-wit: in history, ethics, arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, natural history, &c.

But to whom are these things useful? Certainly not to all men. There are conditions of life to which they must be forever estranged, and there are epochs of life too, after which the endeavor to attain them would be a great misemployment of time. Their acquisition should be the occupation of our early years only, when the memory is susceptible of deep and lasting impressions, and reason and judgment not yet strong enough for abstract speculations. To the moralist they are valuable, because they furnish ethical writings highly and justly esteemed: although in my own opinion, the moderns are far advanced beyond them in this line of science, the divine finds in the Greek language a translation of his primary code, of more importance to him than the original because better understood; and, in the same language, the newer code, with the doctrines of the earliest fathers, who lived and wrote before the simple precepts of the founder of this most benign and pure of all systems of morality became frittered into subtleties and mysteries, and hidden under jargons incomprehensible to the human mind. To these original sources he must now, therefore, return, to recover the virgin purity of his religion. The lawyer finds in the Latin language the system of civil law most conformable with the principles of justice of any which has ever yet been established among men, and from which much has been incorporated into our own. The physician as good a code of his art as has been given us to this day. Theories and systems of medicine, indeed, have been in perpetual change from the days of the good Hippocrates to the days of the good Rush, but which of them is the true one? the present, to be sure, as long as it is the present, but to yield its place in turn to the next novelty, which is then to become the true system, and is to mark the vast advance of medicine since the days of Hippocrates. Our situation is certainly benefited by the discovery of some new and very valuable medicines; and substituting those for some of his with the treasure of facts, and of sound observations recorded by him (mixed to be sure with anilities of his day) and we shall have nearly the present sum of the healing art. The statesman will find in these languages history, politics, mathematics, ethics, eloquence, love of country, to which he must add the sciences of his own day, for which of them should be unknown to him? And all the sciences must recur to the classical languages for the etymon, and sound understanding of their fundamental terms. For the merchant I should not say that the languages are a necessary. Ethics, mathematics, geography, political economy, history, seem to constitute the immediate foundations of his calling. The agriculturist needs ethics, mathematics, chemistry and natural philosophy. The mechanic the same. To them the languages are but ornament and comfort. I know it is often said there have been shining examples of men of great abilities in all the businesses of life, without any other science than what they had gathered from conversations and intercourse with the world. But who can say what these men would not have been had they started in the science on the shoulders of a Demosthenes or Cicero, of a a Locke, a Bacon, or a Newton? To sum the whole, therefore, it may truly be said that the classical languages are a solid basis for most, and an ornament to all the sciences.

I am warned by my aching fingers to close this hasty sketch, and to place here my last and fondest wishes for the advancement of our country in the useful sciences and arts, and my assurances of respect and esteem for the Reviewer of the Memoir on modern Greek.

(original)

3 comments
June 18, 2012

“the good order of a school”

On Friday, a group of parents, teachers, and community members began a sit-in to protest Oakland Unified School District’s decision to close down Lakeview Elementary school (along with four other schools deemed to be unsustainable). You can read their argument and demands here, at their petition of support. In a nutshell:

[School Superintendent] Tony Smith and the school board have offered no plan to facilitate safe transportation to and from the new schools. Children will be put on public buses to make complex cross-town journeys alone, in many cases returning from afterschool programs after dark. Closing the schools will separate children from beloved teachers, breaking lines of continuity that, in some cases, stretch back three generations. It will destroy community networks, threatening the bonds between neighboring families who meet every day at school. It will further destabilize communities already suffering from high levels of violence and poverty. It will impact attendance, criminalizing children who can’t make it to school, who can then be arrested by truancy officers. Closing schools will demoralize the children, making them feel worthless and unwanted.

  • Stop handing over our schools and our students to charter schools!
  • Put student needs above the administration’s needs!
  • We demand the school board fire OUSD’s biggest charter school proponent - Superintendent Tony Smith

Until today, they were camping in the back area behind the school, reportedly playing a lot of basketball. This morning, as planned (and after a brief press conference), they entered into the school building proper, to began the first day of what they are calling “The People’s School for Public Education.”

The police were already present when they opened the doors; as the @LakeviewSitIn twitter account dramatically tweeted: “The building is full of cops.” But the police left shortly, after informing everyone that they were trespassing and handing out this beautiful piece of rationalization:

Let’s linger over those words. If there is a poetry to privatization (and I’m starting to think that there is), this is a wonderful example of it, the words that don’t quite, can’t quite, say what they really mean, and yet somehow still do. The command to NOTICE, the commanded attention that carries with it the fact that you — yes, YOU — have just been transformed into a criminal trespasser as a function of having read those words handed to you, that you’ve just been served with a legal stay-away order commanding you to stay away, for thirty days, from the place you’re not allowed to be in at all, and the strange assertion that you — yes, YOU — are ”interfering with the good order and peaceful conduct of a school” which is and is supposed to be utterly empty of anything to interfere with. This is order: the absence that signifies control and exclusion. Not to make too much of this, but this is how you convert a public good into a piece of property, what it means to make a school into a piece of institutional capital. It ceases to be an open space, a public space where parents and community members are welcome and where children are taught to be citizens. It becomes a place which is owned by the men with the keys and their police. And it must be emptied of students so that it can become administrative offices. Safe, healthy and supportive schools require good order and peaceful conduct. 

There will be a rally at 4.

3 comments
June 16, 2012

Sunday Reading

Frank Pasquale:

  • Technocracy as bankocracy as hypocrisy.
  • 13 ways of looking at American decline.
  • Rotten elites (PS: the book is brilliant till the last chapter).
  • How does PersonicX classify you?
  • The mustache will take your questions now.
  • Columbia U and finance: Take 1; Take 2.
  • “If you can imagine it, you can see it here,” said a Broward Crime Stopper. “This is South Florida. I’m not that surprised.”
  • Ludic pharma: play with data.
  • The Jonah Lehrer take-down you’ve all been waiting for.
  • Big Elsie: “us or the stone age.”
  • Change you can barely believe, trade edition.  And “US government sides with Shell over victims of crimes against humanity.”
  • Outrage: “the servicers will get credit on the same loans they got taxpayer-funded checks for”
  • Plausible deniability for the imperial CEO at JPM; Apple edition; Sarbox angle; “The CEO ‘I’m in charge and I know nothing’ defense is alive and well because it has proven to be so successful.”
  • “Executive prerogative is to not be quantified, to mandate the quantification of others”
  • Lecture by Richard Bronk: Hayek “attempted a restatement of the central problem for economists and economic agents alike.” Hayekians must face up to the possibility that “free market ideology and deregulation itself may destroy the very institutions that market participants use to access dispersed and contextual information, and that it may lead to a dangerous analytical monoculture that corrodes the pluralistic underpinnings of the wisdom of prices.” Excellent on “data” in Hayek as well.

Bint Battuta:

Jane Hu:

Me:

Egypt’s “Coup by Proxy”:

1 comment
June 9, 2012

Sunday Reading

Enter Jane Hu, stage left:

Boring old me:

ReclaimUC, defiantly debting as usual, but also enjoying an organic, locally produced burrito:

According to a report from the National Consumer Law Center, “The U.S. Department of Education (the Department) relies on an increasing number of private contractors to collect the approximately $67 billion in defaulted federal student loan debt.” Moreover, not only is the government on the hook for an increasing number of student loan defaults, but it is paying outside collection agencies huge sums of money to collect these debts: “The Department paid contractors almost $1 billion in commissions in 2011.” Thus instead of providing free public higher education, the federal government is lending students huge amounts of money that they can never pay back, and the result is that the feds have to hire expensive private contractors to collect the cash.

When Bint Battuta and Frank Pasquale are on vacation, I shamelessly steal from Gerry Canavan:

1 comment
June 7, 2012

“The vigor of these baton thrusts is most distressing and should not be repeated”

Yesterday, the committee formed to review how the police handled the November 9th “Occupy Cal” thing last November — which I wrote about here – released their findings, only seven months later and squarely in the middle of summer vacation, when the maximum number of people would be not paying attention.  Read it if you’re a glutton for punishment like me; there are all sorts of lovely sentences like the one I quoted in my title. Perhaps slightly less vigorous baton thrusts, if you don’t mind, and if it’s not to much trouble.

Or don’t. It’s a shit-show, as usual; it’s absolutely filled with examples of individual police doing all sorts of things wrong, and lots of hairsplitting about whether protesters are merely “nonviolent” or also “non-compliant”: if you actively resist, you can be (and presumably should be) beaten with clubs until you comply. So, you know, awesome. As ReclaimUC is right to point out, the most important thing to notice is that the document adopts a “best practices” approach to policing protests: Given that it is necessary to take down the tents at all costs, the document presumes, how can we beat as few nonviolent students with clubs as possible while doing it? The problem is administrative, a technical problem. What tools can ensure total compliance while producing the minimum number of distressing PR images? Perhaps if the baton thrusts were 40% less vigorous, they would get the job done without being distressing.

The first 33 pages of the report are only worth reading if you want to see how moral subservience to administrative power clothes itself in the pretense of critique. But there is a kind of dissenting opinion included — called the “addendum” — at the end, by law student Eve Weissman (which you can read here) and it shreds much of the preceding argument. Three juicy bullet points:

  • “It is distressing that campus leadership continues to assume that “outside elements” pose an imminent threat, despite evidence to the contrary. Campus leadership should not prepare for protests based on the faulty assumption that individuals from outside the UC Berkeley community will be present – not without concrete evidence that this is the case and that such individuals will ferment disruption.”
  • “The Report does not address whether the campus leadership and police had a legal basis to remove the tents. This is a significant omission…Just as campus leadership should not respond to protests based on faulty factual assumptions, they should not respond on the basis of unclear or erroneous legal premises.”
  • “Based on both legal standards and the campus’s own written policies (detailed in the PRB Report), that the responses of campus leadership and law enforcement on November 9 were inconsistent with campus norms existing at that time. Campus leadership and law enforcement should have known that removing tents from Sproul Plaza in the middle of the day at the height of the protest would require use of force and likely the use of batons. Despite the no-encampment policy, it is unclear why they chose to take such action.”

I would put it more succinctly: the campus administration did whatever they wanted, empowered the police to do whatever they wanted, and did so because they knew that no real oversight of their actions would occur, and they were right to think that. They did what they did because they knew they could get away with it, and seven months later, they more or less have gotten away with it. This “tepidly worded” report — as an unusually punchy Nanette Asimov put it for the Chronicle – just provides the appearance of oversight, and it will be as swiftly ignored and forgotten as the Brazil report (around a similar incident in 2009) has been. Indeed, this PRB report is the first time since the Brazil report was released that anyone has even pretended the Brazil report mattered; the administration certainly filed it away and forgotten it, except for occasions like this one, where they’re all “we had a review, totally, we’re totally looking into it.”

Anyway. Other than Weissman’s evisceration, the only point in reading the report is to let the logic of sentences like this one filter through your brain:”

“Some members of the committee do not think that pulling protestors by their hair is consistent with campus norms; others believe it is effective and creates little risk of permanent injury.”

I think this really crystallizes the mindset of the committee, because it shows that A. we have replaced “legality” with “norms,” and B. when the committee to review police behavior can’t decide if pulling protesters by their hair is okay or not, it should be clear that there are no norms. It isn’t even that some people think it’s okay to do so, in other words; it’s that when some people think its fine and some people don’t, the end result is: the police will do whatever they want. If they want to grab a non-resisting protester by her hair and throw her to the ground — this time, next time, every time — they will. The norm is that they can do whatever they want, and the administration will back them up, and the Police Review Board (chaired by law professor Jesse Choper) will  ratify that non-existence of oversight. Rinse and repeat.

9 comments
June 2, 2012

Sunday Reading

From Frank Pasquale:

From Me:

From Bint Battuta:

From ReclaimUC:

Links poached from “Remaking the University”:

A few links poached from Jadaliyya’s Syrian Media Roundup:

And if you’ve been watching Girls, you’ve been reading Dear Television, haven’t you?

2 comments
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