November 19, 2006: Rush to Judgement?

Last Tuesday night an Iranian UCLA senior, Mostafa Tabatabainejad, declined to show his identification to UCLA police officers when requested to do so after 11 PM in Powell Library. According to his attorney, Stephen Yagman, and as reported by the Los Angeles Times, he "declined because he thought he was being singled out because of his Middle Eastern appearance." The Times continued the account as follows:

The lawyer said Tabatabainejad eventually decided to leave the library but when an officer refused the student's request to take his hand off him, the student fell limp to the floor, again to avoid participating in what he considered a case of racial profiling. After police started firing the Taser, Tabatabainejad tried to "get the beating, the use of brutal force, to stop by shouting and causing people to watch. Generally, police don't want to do their dirties in front of a lot of witnesses."

He said Tabatabainejad was hit by the Taser five times and suffered "moderate to severe contusions" on his right side.

The Web page for this story, filed the following Friday after Tabatabainejad had retained Yagman's services, also included a link to a YouTube site with "video evidence" of the incident. This site has attracted considerable attention and provides links to several supposed "on the spot" recordings, one of which is also available on Truthdig. As of this morning, this particularly video has been viewed 344,777 times and accrued 2976 comments. The comment count at Truthdig is only up to 46 but is more "on topic" than the YouTube comments (such as "Worst camerawork I've ever seen, even for a citizen journalist..."). However, it is because I agree with this particular comment that I put those scare quotes around the word "evidence." At the end of the day, there is far more audio than video here; so one can assume that, should this matter ever come to trial, there will be justifiable debate over whether it would be legally admissible as evidence. (For that matter I can imagine the judge asking which members of the panel from which a jury was selected have seen any of the YouTube videos.)

The Truthdig comments exhibit an extremely passionate reaction to the incident. From my vantage point in the grand scheme of history, I was almost immediately reminded of when the National Guard fired on protesting student at Kent State and the rhetorically passionate photograph taken of the consequences. In the wake of yesterday's musical reflections, I was also reminded of when and why Coltrane composed "Alabama." However, it is important to remember that rhetoric is not logic (and, for that matter, that legal decisions are not necessarily made on the basis of either logic or rhetoric). Therefore, in the wake of all this passion, I feel a need to reproduce my own contribute to the Truthdig comments:

About ten years ago there was a case in Northern California involving environmental protesters getting pepper-sprayed by the police. My wife decided to give the students in her class the project of trying to interview as many of the parties involved in this incident as they could. Sure enough: both sides explained the motives for their actions clearly and sympathetically. What did the kids learn? Be very careful when the media try to get you to take sides when you do not know all the facts! Ten years ago this kind of dispute could have been settled by a good impartial judge. Today I’m not so sure ...

What I do know for sure is that there is more to this story than will ever be resolved by YouTube videos or Truthdig comments. The lesson this time around is that there is a fine line between creating forums for public discourse and muddying the waters of due process of law. I have the greatest sympathy for any judge who will have to deal with Mr. Yagman.

November 11, 2006: Why I am not a Positivist

Once again, David Cole has written an excellent book review for The New York Review. The last time he came to my attention, he was writing about terrorism; this time the issue is the constitutional foundation of our legal system. The book under review is Not a Suicide Pact: The Constitution in a Time of National Emergency, by Richard Posner (pictured above as rendered, with at least two meanings intended, by David Levine). What is at stake is Posner's legal philosophy, which basically reduces judicial ruling to the mechanics of cost-benefit analysis.

While Cole does not mention it explicitly, this kind of positivism-with-a-vengeance actually recalls Bertrand Russell's internationalism, where Russell envisioned a single government for the entire globe that would resolve all disputes by invoking the machinery of an appropriately designed logical calculus. Cole does an excellent job of challenging this vision. For me the most compelling passage of his text is a quotation of a 1961 dissenting opinion by Justice John Marshall Harlan concerning the nature of due process:

Due process has not been reduced to any formula; its content cannot be determined by reference to any code. The best that can be said is that through the course of this Court's decisions it has represented the balance which our Nation, built upon postulates of respect for the liberty of the individual, has struck between that liberty and the demands of organized society. If the supplying of content to this Constitutional concept has of necessity been a rational process, it certainly has not been one where judges have felt free to roam where unguided speculation might take them. The balance of which I speak is the balance struck by this country, having regard to what history teaches are the traditions from which it developed as well as the traditions from which it broke. That tradition is a living thing. A decision of this Court which radically departs from it could not long survive, while a decision which builds on what has survived is likely to be sound. No formula could serve as a substitute, in this area, for judgment and restraint.

While the focus of Posner's book and Cole's challenge involves the relationship between the current executive and judicial branches of the Federal Government, reading about the subtleties of due process reminded of when, about five years ago, John Seely Brown enjoined me to drop everything and read Lawrence Lessig's new book, Code (dragging me to a bookstore on Maui in the process). Revisiting the index of that book, I discovered only one entry for "due process," that being in a paragraph on page 7 that reviews the protections guaranteed by the Bill of Rights. That neglect for one of the most important elements of our Constitutional process can perhaps explain the sort of position that Lessig tried to take in his book:

Government should push the architecture of the Net to facilitate its regulation, or else it will suffer what can only be described as a loss of sovereignty.

This, again, is positivism-with-a-vengeance, guided possibly by a calculus more sophisticated than one Russell could have ever imagined, but (in Harlan's language) a "formula" nonetheless. Today we may be more conscious of the judicial issues that have been arising in the way of American military adventurism. However, those issues are also likely to arise in other more mundane aspects of our lives; so we should all be aware of the cautionary arguments that Cole has articulated so excellently.

November 02, 2006 (1): Validate Your Assumtions!

As if there have not been enough entries today, here is an entry for the commonplace book from the interview that Mohammad Khatami gave to the BBC:

Democracy is not something to get exported.

November 01, 2006 (2): Tell it Like it Is, Matt!

Once again, Rolling Stone has made its mark in quality political journalism, again thanks to the perceptive writing of Matt Taibbi! This time Matt has decided to take on "the Letterman-O'Reilly dust-up last week," where Bill O'Reilly (in Taibbi's usual colorful language) "ended up skewered and turned over the video-spit by the end of the segment, with an apple in his mouth and Sumner Redstone's massive billionaire foot wedged firmly in his ass." The point, however, is that this was the full extent of Taibbi's celebration of this event, because, at the end of the day, there really was not that much to celebrate. His point is that Letterman and others of his ilk (meaning those media "performers" who only recently have begun to reverse their position on the Iraq war) really deserve no praise for what amounts to taking forever to recognize the baldly obvious. Here are Taibbi's words again (in language that, this time, may be too colorful for some readers):

What's dangerous about what's going on right now is that an electoral defeat of the Republicans next week, and perhaps a similar defeat in a presidential race two years from now, might fool some people into thinking that the responsibility for the Iraq war can be sunk forever with George Bush and the Republican politicians who went down with his ship. But in fact the real responsibility for the Iraq war lay not with Bush but with the Lettermans, the Wolf Blitzers, the CNNs, The New York Timeses of the world -- the malleable middle of the American political establishment who three years ago made a conscious moral choice to support a military action that even a three-year-old could have seen made no fucking sense at all.

It doesn't take much courage to book the Dixie Chicks when George Bush is sitting at thirty-nine percent in the polls and carrying 3,000 American bodies on his back every time he goes outside. It doesn't take much courage for MSNBC's Countdown to do a segment ripping the "Swift-Boating of Al Gore" in May 2006, or much gumption from Newsweek's Eleanor Clift to say that many people in the media "regret" the way Gore was attacked and ridiculed in 2000. We needed those people to act in the moment, not years later, when it's politically expedient. We needed TV news to reject "swift-boating" during the actual Swift Boat controversy, not two years later; we needed ABC and NBC to stand up to Clear Channel when that whole idiotic Dixie Chicks thing was happening, not years later; we needed the networks and the major dailies to actually cover the half-million-strong protests in Washington and New York before the war, instead of burying them in inside pages or describing the numbers as "thousands" or "at least 30,000," as many news outlets did at the time; and we needed David Letterman to have his war epiphany back when taking on Bill O'Reilly might actually have cost him real market share.

This all reminds me of a lecture I heard John Cage deliver at the Philadelphia Museum of Art some time in the vicinity of 1974. On that occasion Cage chose to read an acceptance speech he delivered for some award he had recently received (which may very well be the first time he had been acknowledged with any such prestigious award). Since those of us who actually knew Cage are declining in our numbers, I have to explain that Cage was probably the closest approximation to a saint I had ever met (although, if one could call him a saint, it would have to be a Buddhist saint). The number of times I ever heard him break with his serene equanimity and voice anything like a complain could be counted on one hand. So it was quite a surprise to discover that the message of this particular lecture (and, for all I know, he delivered it while holding the award just given to him) was, "Where were you when I needed you?" Both John Cage and Merce Cunningham spent more years than any of us would wish to number on the brink of poverty, wondering where the next meal would come from, just because they wanted to be true to their ideas of how music and dance should be made. (Cage even told the story that, when Cunningham received his first serious grant award, someone asked him what he would do with the money; and Merce answered immediately, "Eat.") For all that serene equanimity, Cage could not forget persevering the poverty when finally awarded the fruits of recognition.

Nothing has changed. Attention was not paid to John Cage and Merce Cunningham when they were struggling to make their voices heard. Attention was not paid to those few to dared to speak of the folly of going to war in Iraq when the question was still being debated in the Congress. Today also happens to be the day that Nelson Mandela was capable of offering up a few kind words for P. W. Botha. When will the United States of America come to terms with the concepts of Truth and Reconciliation? When will we accept responsibility for our mistakes of neglect?

September 27, 2006: Generation M in the World

The discussion on libraries and search continues vigorously on Confused of Calcutta. JP Rangaswami continues to champion the "unvarnished selves" of Generation M and the wisdom of crowds of such minds. Fortunately, John Dodds was keen enough to recognize the difference between unvarnished and untouched (which I think was part of the story that the above issue of Time was trying to tell). JP's response was to invoke Clarence Fischer and Judy Breck, almost as if they were cultural icons. Since I have always tried to be an iconoclast, you can imagine how I react to cultural icons! However, the stuff that Clarence Fisher does come "from the trenches;" and, to invoke Dodds' terminology, if anyone knows how to “touch” Generation M, Fisher is a likely candidate and, if I am to believe what I have read about him, one who deserves all the awards and recognition he has received. Unfortunately, he is only one person; and that has two implications:

1. First, I suspect that his skill in “touching” is inversely proportional to the number of people he has to “touch;” and it remains to be seen how “reproducible” (to invoke Giddens' language) that skill is.
2. Secondly, as my father has always delighted in saying, “One is not a statistic!”

To develop that point, I really cannot figure out, for the life of me, just how good Judy Breck’s Golden Swamp is at “touching.” I do not need to be sold on how cool it is, but that may be the problem. To invoke another metaphor, my concern is that Golden Swamp may be one of the best circuses on the Web at a time when we have all those students (and probably plenty of teachers, too) hungry for bread. (All those jokes comparing the Bush Administration to the Roman Empire are finally beginning to register with me!)

Don’t get me wrong. It is not my intention to disparage cool. However, just as there has never been a Royal Road to Geometry, there will never be a “Superhighway to Being in the World.” I am not just concerned that Generation M may be untouched by teachers who can guide without disrupting those “unvarnished selves;” I am concerned that the extent to which they perceive the world through their media experience may be leaving them untouched by the world itself!

Zen Flesh, Zen Bones includes a story about the master teacher of Zen, Gasan (an unvarnished self if ever there was one). The story goes that he was visited by a university student who brought along a copy of the New Testament and read him passages from the Sermon on the Mount. After hearing the text, Gasan said, “Whoever said that is not far from Buddhahood.” If we cannot communicate with Generation M through today’s classrooms, can we at least figure out how to “touch” them as the student “touched” Gasan?

September 07, 2006 (2): It's Not What you Read but How you Read It!

Harlan Ellison used to go off on these great rants about how important it is that everyone read. He would stress that what you read was less important than the fact that you were reading. (He would say things like, "You can read comic books for all I care!") This made for wonderful rhetoric; but, like all rhetoric, it needs to be put in perspective. The recognition of the need to read with perspective is what stimulated me to begin my day with that quote from Joe Conason.

The fact is that reading, itself, is only a part of the story. Reading is only important to the extent that it cultivates our ability to read critically. So, while I am firmly opposed to censorship, I still recognize that there is a lot of reading matter out there that has been either maliciously designed to shape the reader's opinion or assumes a position of authority that is actually grounded in ignorance. If we lack the ability to read critically, we can be victimized by both classes of text.

I suppose the best example of the former category is The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Again, going beyond all the rhetoric that has been spilled over this book, we may never know how many Jews died as a result of its publication and distribution; but, if ever there were a book "maliciously designed to shape the reader's opinion," it was this one! In this respect the Internet has probably served us very well by providing resources that expose this malice for what it is. Those resources include books, the cover of one being the lead illustration for this entry.

The thing about this first category, however, is how blatant is usually is. The second category tends to be more subtle and sometimes more insidious. Let me offer up a few examples:

• In 1959 Oxford University Press published a book by Deryck Cooke entitled The Language of Music. Cooke was a reputable musicologist, if not a heavy hitter in the academic league. He is probably best known today for coming out with the first performing edition of all five movements of Mahler's tenth symphony (which, if nothing else, inspired others to take on this extremely challenging task). His public reputation, however, was primarily as a broadcaster and music critic; so there was no questioning his credentials for writing about music. Unfortunately, his credentials for writing about language, not to mention the more general nature of communication, were not as impressive, if they existed at all! As a result, the book came out with some really astonishing bloopers about language and communication. Now, in fairness to Cooke, linguistics, as we know it today, was somewhere between infancy and adolescence in 1959; but, in spite of the many reprintings of this book, Cooke never seemed to want to go to the trouble of reviewing his initial Preface and bringing into a more contemporary perspective (or, for that matter, explaining why he would not try to realign his position). So the book is still available in its initial form, and Oxford now touts it as "a modern classic!"
• Now, to be fair to Cooke, I do not think that there was any "hidden agenda" behind his book. He wrote about things he knew and extrapolated speculatively from there. We may not even accuse him of being too lazy to subject his speculations to critical review. The very thought of such a review may never have occurred to him. On the other hand I do not feel I can be as generous when I examine Joseph Weizenbaum's 1976 book, Computer Power and Human Reason: From Judgment to Calculation. Weizenbaum will probably be best known as the author of Eliza, an astonishingly simple piece of software that could carry on a conversation with a human user, pretending to be a Rogerian therapist. (Rogers' approach to psychotherapy was that the therapist should allow the patient to keep talking, contributing as little as possible to the content but just encouraging the patient to say more.) Weizenbaum's reaction to Eliza's success was a horror equal to that of Victor Frankenstein's; and he went on an ethical crusade against writing software that might be dangerously "deceptive." One can even discern in the subtext the implication that some people were too irresponsible to be allowed to write software. Now, in light of some of the software that is out there today, such as viruses, Weizenbaum could have initiated an important conversation; but he was so blinded by what he felt was an affront to his personal ethics that the soundness of his arguments was compromised.
• Roger Penrose, on the other hand, seems to have had a deep appreciation for sound argument, which may be one reason why he was awarded a Wolf Prize in 1988 (which he shared with Stephen Hawking). Unfortunately, Penrose then decided to shift his attention from mathematics to consciousness; and the result, which appeared in 1989, was The Emperor's New Mind: Concerning Computers, Minds, and the Laws of Physics. There was no doubting Penrose's understanding of the laws of physics or the mathematical theory behind the software that computers run. It was "the middle of the sandwich" that posed the problem. Indeed, Penrose's model of consciousness was so well crafted that it took one of the most reputable cognitive scientists (Aaron Sloman) a major exertion of effort to tease out the faulty reasoning in the book. Penrose's response was to write another book (Shadows of the Mind: A Search for the Missing Science of Consciousness), which acknowledged that the logic of his first book had been challenged but never addressed the challenges!
• This now brings us to the object of one of my own campaigns for critical reading: On Intelligence, by Jeff Hawkins. This is the first time I decided to compose my text as I read the book, but it was still easy to home in the the heart of the weakness of this book. Since Hawkins tended to substitute anecdote for the logic of argumentation, my task was far easier than Sloman's.
• Now I find myself confronted with Ray Kurzweil and his book The Singularity is Near. In this case I have chosen to focus my critical thinking on the ways in which Kurzweil has chosen to apply his arguments to the nature of education. Nevertheless, this book emphasizes that the need to read critically is as important today as it was in 1959!

Needless to say, this was an "autobiographical" list. For better or worse, age allows you to look back on what you have read and recognize the claptrap in some (much?, most?) of it! Unlike Satie, however, I do not feel I can look back and say that I have seen nothing. Perhaps the problem is that I have seen too much: I may never be able to sort it all out, but I sure hope that I never lose the energy or the will to keep trying!

September 07, 2006 (1): A Quote for Today

It has been a while since I created a "commonplace book" entry; but I could not pass up the opening sentence from a report by Joe Conason that I saw this morning on Truthdig:

To observe the Washington press corps is to wonder why so many people who don’t remember what happened yesterday and can’t master basic logic are expected to analyze politics and policy.

August 04, 2006: Wikipedia Goes to War

It all seems to have begun when last week's Onion ran a front-page story (which also appeared on their Web site) entitled "Wikipedia Celebrates 750 Years Of American Independence." The Web site included the above captioned photograph. I really felt this was a great example of how sharply-focused humor can often tell a story far better than the most reasoned argumentation, the The Onion really has a knack for seeding their text with throw-away gags that too easily slip by unnoticed.

Did this article prompt Stephen Colbert to enter the fray? While there was no explicit acknowledgment, the timing of his July 31 broadcast makes one think. The Media Blog on CNET News.com provided a nice account of the whole affair, complete with a link to the YouTube video. However, while it appears that Wikipedia did not pay attention to The Onion (perhaps because they figured that Onion readers know what satire is, which is why they read The Onion in the first place), they decided that they would not let Colbert's jab go without a response. (Do they assume that Colbert's viewers do not know what satire is and now turn to Comedy Central as their primary source for news and commentary?) Yesterday's Media Blog reported that Wikipedia is trying to ban Colbert from interfering with their content. Admittedly, Colbert gave them more cause for concern than The Onion: If Colbert was not only celebrating the inaccuracies on Wikipedia but also encouraging his viewers to seed Wikipedia with bogus content, then I can understand why the editors at Wikipedia would be worried.

My question, though, is whether or not this was the right way for Wikipedia to react. The fact is that content maintenance is a far more delicate problem than Wikipedia has led us to believe. After all Wikipedia already had to deal with deliberately contributed bogus information in their article about John Seigenthaler, Sr.; and Seigenthaler raised quite a stick when he discovered it. Nevertheless, it appears that the way in which Wikipedia responsed was to incorporate information about the controversy into their article about Seigenthaler as evidence of how their system "works." The problem is that this situation was an isolated case. Their reaction to Colbert seems to be an admission that their "solution" would not scale up to a more massive attack on their content. So their "Plan B" reaction appears to be to censor Colbert; but there are a variety of ways in which we can envision a samizdat campaign to undermine Wikipedia content (without there necessarily being any involvement on Colbert's part).

Personally, I think that anyone interested in this episode would do well to bone up on Gresham's Law (possibly by reading the Wikipedia entry before anyone tries to muck with it). If "artificial" currency (such as paper fiat money) drives out specie, content that is "artificial" (in the sense of being made up without necessarily being in any way warranted) can drive out content that is more "substantiated." Come to think of it, isn't that what the Bush administration has been trying to do with mass media?