Archive for July 2010
Alas, 2014
The World Cup is over and I was able to watch only a few minutes of the final (though I did see the goal). Spain’s win salvaged my showing in the ESPN bracket to a still-disappointing 6th place, while in the McDonald’s Cup I managed a heartbreaking second in both regular and tournament modes. I will be sad forever. See you in 2014.
Alas Poor Holland?
World Cup Daily has me second-guessing my endorsement of the psychic octopus. Maybe Holland will pull it off. I really don’t know.
Facts Are Stupid Things
Our brains don’t work, politics edition.
On its own, this might not be a problem: People ignorant of the facts could simply choose not to vote. But instead, it appears that misinformed people often have some of the strongest political opinions. A striking recent example was a study done in the year 2000, led by James Kuklinski of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He led an influential experiment in which more than 1,000 Illinois residents were asked questions about welfare — the percentage of the federal budget spent on welfare, the number of people enrolled in the program, the percentage of enrollees who are black, and the average payout. More than half indicated that they were confident that their answers were correct — but in fact only 3 percent of the people got more than half of the questions right. Perhaps more disturbingly, the ones who were the most confident they were right were by and large the ones who knew the least about the topic. (Most of these participants expressed views that suggested a strong antiwelfare bias.)
Studies by other researchers have observed similar phenomena when addressing education, health care reform, immigration, affirmative action, gun control, and other issues that tend to attract strong partisan opinion. Kuklinski calls this sort of response the “I know I’m right” syndrome, and considers it a “potentially formidable problem” in a democratic system. “It implies not only that most people will resist correcting their factual beliefs,” he wrote, “but also that the very people who most need to correct them will be least likely to do so.”
Alas, Poor Holland
The psychic octopus has picked Spain. I picked Spain to win it all way back in the ESPN pool, and I suppose I’m sticking with that after watching them dispatch Germany—though I’ll be rooting for Orange.
Polygraph 24: Call for Papers
Polygraph 24—Call for Papers
Special Issue: Resistance to Finance
http://www.duke.edu/web/polygraph/cfp24.html
What does financial capitalism demand of us in thought and in action today?
Financial capital is one of the fundamental structuring forces in our world. Evidence of this is ubiquitous: the severity and extent of the most recent global financial crisis, the collapse of whole national economies (as in Greece and Iceland), the steadily progressing securitization of pensions and savings, a growing volume of derivatives trading that already dwarfs “real” global GDP.
Yet many critical accounts of corporate globalization, free trade, neoliberalism, and so on all too rarely emphasize the fact that high finance constitutes the very condition of possibility of capitalism as we know it. Other available forms of economic critique, from world-systems theory to dependency theory to theories of Empire, often do grant high finance the central role that it in reality occupies, but rarely go beyond critique to directly address the question of resistance. Too often, critique remains mired in highlighting isolated acts and agents of malfeasance rather than producing totalizing, systemic claims with real leverage. We now know this state of affairs to be in need of immediate rectification.
We also know that action is demanded, but its contours are not yet well defined. The clout of finance capital has received ample attention in Marxist economics, neo-classical economics, and other quarters—yet the accounts produced thus far of what is to be done have been less than satisfactory. What political responses on the part of on-the-ground social movements and both current and potential bodies of governance are necessary? Are some already underway but obscured from view? What alternative economic futures can we begin to construct out of the wreckage of the most recent crisis and the structural shifts that produced and accompany it? Is it necessary to break the global economy of its speculative bent and return it to its “real” roots, or is this antithesis, stemming from Hilferding’s classic critique of “fictitious capital,” fundamentally ill-conceived? Should the focus of political action be shifted away from past struggles—against multinational corporations, free trade, and the powerful political allies of both—in the direction of the financial crux of the global economy? What would such a change in focus entail?
Potential topics:
Financial capitalism and Marxism
* The continued efficacy or potential obsolescence of previous critical outlooks (world systems theory, Empire theory, etc.) in confronting global finance
* The centrality of the question of global finance in any meaningful critical engagement with globalization
* Systemic global inequality, post-Fordism and crisis
Resistance
* Forms of political subjectivity capable of comprehending and acting within (and against) high finance as it stands
* What is the role of the state in confronting financial capital?
* Real and hypothetical political movements and direct action
* Strategies of flight and subtractive action, whether individual (e.g. walking away from mortgage contracts) or institutional (e.g. Argentina’s post-crisis debt restructuring)
Alternative financial institutions and orders
* Jacques Sapir’s recent call for a “new Bretton Woods” system (akin to Antonio Negri’s call for a “new New Deal”)
* Microfinance and financial decentralization
* The global Tobin tax on of financial transactions and other forms of regulation
* Neo-Luddism and the return to the “real” economy
* Radical political economy and the pursuit of anti-capitalist alternatives
Other
* Historical perspectives on high finance, dealing with periodization, secular trends, particular crises and institutions, and exemplary modes of resistance
* Mystification, abstraction and the “new” digital/virtual economy
* Epistemological barriers to adequate critique of the global financial system
* Perception and belief as primary structural forces in the financial system
* Artistic representations of the financial world as possible critical tools
* Socio-political underpinnings of the financialization of the world
Deadline for submissions: January 31, 2011
Email complete manuscripts to the issue editor at lucas.perkins@duke.edu.
Two Days Left Links
* What in life did it take you a surprisingly long time to realize you’ve been doing wrong all along? It’s not the first time I’m finding out about this, but I should say I don’t think I’ve ever written “discreet” correctly.
* Why you’re getting divorced.
* Climategate: absolutely no evidence of any impropriety whatsoever.
* What to do about the suburbs?
* Climate legislation vs. the filibuster.
* And Salon has the latest on the Daily Show-Jezebel flare-up.
Sunday Night
* Game of the night: Entanglement.
* The Declaration of Independence, in American.
When things get so balled up that the people of a country got to cut loose from some other country, and go it on their own hook, without asking no permission from nobody, excepting maybe God Almighty, then they ought to let everybody know why they done it, so that everybody can see they are not trying to put nothing over on nobody.
* “Reconciliation” has become a darling of political theorists, journalists, and human-rights activists, especially as it pertains to the rebuilding of postwar and post-genocidal nations. Nowhere is this more so than in the case of Rwanda. Numerous books and articles on the topic—some, though not all, inspired by Christian teachings—pour forth. It can plausibly be argued, of course, that in Rwanda—and in other places, like Sierra Leone and the Balkans, where victims and perpetrators must live more or less together—reconciliation is a political necessity. Reconciliation has a moral resonance, too; certainly it is far better than endless, corpse-strewn cycles of revanchism and revenge. Yet there is sometimes a disturbing glibness when outsiders tout the wonders of reconciliation, as if they are leading the barbarians from darkness into light. Even worse, the phenomenological realities—the human truths—of the victims’ experiences are often ignored or, at best, treated as pathologies that should be “worked through” until the promised land of forgiveness is reached. This is not just a mistake but a dangerous one; for it is doubtful that any sustainable peace, and any sustainable politics, can be built without a better, which is to say a tragic, understanding of those truths.
* And how we nuked ourselves, 1945-1998.
Tough Out There For Predictors
Is it too late to pick Germany to win it all? Carumba. I think in the chaos of travel I forgot to predict a Spain win, so here goes that. 3-0.
Gerry Canavan 