Fish has several other videos describing his relation to reading books by well-regarded authors, one a week.
Thursday, December 27, 2018
Harvard undergraduate makes a pitch for audio books, and explains the value of fiction
I thought I would share this video from Harvard
undergraduate John Fish on the value of reading fiction.
He makes a case for the idea that in identifying with a
character you can learn about yourself. He
presents the all too familiar experience of studying Shakespeare in high school. I remember reading “Julius Caesar” (10th
grade), and “Macbeth”, “King Lear”, and (for a book report) “Hamlet” in twelfth
grade.
I think I can turn this around and imagine this idea from an
author’s point of view. Many of my older manuscripts are about “me” as the
central character, who migrates through apocalyptic change and finds success,
in his own terms, in relationships through this navigation. Finally, for the manuscript (“Angel’s Brother”)
that I am working on now, I tell the outer story through other two characters,
a very gifted graduating college-student (whom Fish, ironically, I might be
able to compare to based on his videos), and a middle aged covert CIA agent
whose family and marriage is on the verge of breakup. The student, a gifted
hacker, has discovered “the plot”, so to speak, through decoding the
unpublished works of “Bill” (me) and now wonders if he is an alien himself
(that’s a little bit the idea of NBC’s “The Event”, where Jason Ritter’s
character doesn’t know that he is an alien). Of course, this leads to heavy layering
of levels of plot.
Fish also makes a (sponsored) pitch for Audio Books, and
recommends Aldous Huxley’s “Brave New World” (1932) . Conservative author George Gilder, in
his book “Men and Marriage” in 1986, and probably even “Sexual Suicide” in 1973,
mentioned this book and often made the point that the retreat from the
traditional family (as already developed in society by the 1980s) would invite
genetic engineering of babies for perfection and remove the personal risk of
dealing with people with disabilities. Yup, the idea could be made to sound
fascist.
Getting audio books made sounds like an expensive process,
probably not practical for many self-published authors. It also takes much longer to listen to a book
than read it, and often the books are abridged. I have had friends who buy them.
Fish has several other videos describing his relation to reading books by well-regarded authors, one a week.
Fish has several other videos describing his relation to reading books by well-regarded authors, one a week.
Tuesday, December 25, 2018
Anthology of psychiatric assessments of Trump's mental health
Donald Trump’s behavior the past week has rattled markets
and seemed to indicate instability.
There is a book “The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump: 27 Psychiatrists
and Mental Health Experts Assess a President”, edited by Bandy X. Lee, from
Thomas Dunne Books, ISBN 978-1250-17945-6, 2017, 384 pages, publisher link.
A former staff member of Trump wrote this piece in the NYTimes
about being the adult in the room back in Sept. 2018
The same writer put a piece in “The Conversation”.
This book seems especially relevant now that Mattis is gone.
Some of the pieces admit reluctance by some psychiatrists to discuss a patient they haven't treated/
Attention by Congress, especially Republicans, should need to be placed on the president's cognitive fitness.
Labels:
anthologies,
book previews,
Trump presidency
Sunday, December 23, 2018
David Mixner's work and the birth of "don't ask don't tell" under Clinton recalled in Blade, right after Mixner's own book "Stranger Among Friends" (1996)
Karen Ocamb has an article about David Mixner and how “Don’t
Ask Don’t Tell” happened in the Washington Blade (p 12) and Los Amgeles Blade,
Dec 21.
The subtitle is “Mixner on how it happened – and Clinton’s
Betrayal”.
That refers to Clinton’s DADT policy announcement at Ft. McNair
on July 19, 1993. But it was an “honest compromise” with Sam Nunn at the time,
and included the other logline, “don’t pursue’.
The article includes details about the cases of Keith
Meinhold and Tracy Thorne. The video above comes from the 1993 March on Washington.
This all brings up the issue of David Mixner’s 1996 book “Stranger
Among Friends”, Bantam, ISBN 0-553-10073-4. I read this while working on my DADT-1 book in the 1990s.
Mixner had recounted how he was “setup” in 1969 by imposters
from the FBI to find out he was gay.
Thursday, December 20, 2018
"Wind-up Train Book": a model train little toy world (3 of them) inside a children's book
Here’s something different, and maybe a Christmas present.
It's a mechanical train-set that offers three micro worlds to live in, as if they were O'Neill nodes on a space station.
It's a mechanical train-set that offers three micro worlds to live in, as if they were O'Neill nodes on a space station.
Usborne Farmyward Tales presents the “Wind-Up Train Book
with Model Train and 3 Tracks”.
It is illustrated by Stephen Cartwright. It’s based on stories
by Heather Amery, designed by Helen Woodm rewritten by Alex Forth, edited by
Gilliam Dpherty, with additional illustrations by Erica Harrison and Non
Taylor.
There are three layouts where a windup engine can run and
switch directions through loops, which is not possible when a rail is
electrified. You could prove mathematical theorems about how many times a train
can change directions in a particular.
Maybe you could make a toy like this with a true Mobius strip.
I bought this at the Greenberg trains show at Dulles Airport in Virginia.
There is an ISBN 978-0-7945-2192-9.
Labels:
3-D interactive,
children's,
illustrated books
Tuesday, December 18, 2018
Two major reports sent to the Senate on Russian leveraging of US social media
Here are two of the reports sent to the Senate regarding
Russian infusion into American politics since about 2014, maybe earlier.
One is from New Knowledge, in Austin, TX is “The Tactics andTropes of the Internet Research Agency”. It is authored by Renee Di Resta et al
from NK (see the pdf for the list), and Jonathan Albright (Tow Center for
International Journalism, Columbia University in NYC, and Ben Johnson (Canfield
Research, LLC).
The other is from the Computational Propaganda Research
Project at Oxford University in London., and at Graphika. The authors are Philip N. Howard, John Kelly
et al (see link). The title is “The IRA and Political Polarization in theUnited States”,
The New York Times has several articles and editorials today.
Scott Shane and Sheera Frenkel have a long analysis.
The IRA (“Internet Research Agency”, not “Irish Republican
Army” or “Individual Retirement Account”) particularly targeted African
Americans. They would show truthful videos about police mistreatment of African
Americans after profiling, and get them fed through the algorithms of many
social media platforms (esp. Instagram), not “just” Facebook and Twitter. (I doubt they bothered with Gab.) Then once
they had an audience, they would send out posts recommending that POC vote for
the Green Party, or at least not for Hillary, breaking up her coalition and
allowing Trump a better chance through remainder math of plurality.
Legally, of course, it may be a crime for a foreigner to
impersonate an American when using an online service (that’s what the
indictments are about), Were Facebook
able to identify their origin, they could have labeled them as such and not fed
them into the algorithms (they missed the signals – the use of rubles, and the
Russian language – like they should have hired “Paul” from Language Focus on YouTube
to help ferret out non-US sources.
But the content itself would be perfectly legal and ethical. There would be nothing wrong with a domestic
user pumping the system with valid videos of police misconduct, and then encouraging
people not to vote for Hillary. That’s the First Amendment. If you don’t want this to happen, get rid of
the Electoral College (which gives rural “places” more electoral clout). As “Economic Invincibility” has pointed out
on YouTube, you can consider major changes in voting systems if you want. It is
very hard to change the Constitution, of course (as it must be).
The Russians were amazingly fluent on American culture, and
were especially uncanny on the divide between the intellectual elites and the
less educated “proles”, and on the deep divisions over gender and sexuality –
and even the prospective population demographics (fewer children in higher
income people). They may have gleaned
that from “elitist” blog posts, from people who would not fall for their mass “spammy”
campaigns.
Alex Ward has a higher-level analysis on Vox.
Here is New Knowledge’s own high-level takeaway on its work.
Saturday, December 15, 2018
"Content or Context Moderation?" Booklet by Data and Society looks at challenges for platforms with user-generated content, but seems to miss some big developments
Data and Society published, in mid November 2018, a 50 page
paper “Content or Context Moderation? Antisanal, Community-Reliant, and
Industrial Approaches”, by Robyn Caplan, at this link (downloadble PDF)
The three basic strategies parse according to the kind of
service. Patreon, Medium, and Vimeo are
said to you antisanal (context-based) approaches; Reddit and Wikipedia use community volunteers;
Facebook and Google (especially YouTube) use industrial approaches with
considerable automation (such as Google’s ContentId).
There are many areas the report doesn’t mention. For one
thing, the upcoming implementation of the European Union’s Copyright Directive
(especially Articles 11 and 13) could increase moderation problems for platforms
even for users in the rest of the western world.
The article discusses Section 230 of the 1996
Telecommunications Act in the US, with a “good Samaritan” policy to allow platforms
to set their own moderation standards. Recently CDA230 has been weakened by FOSTA,
the new ant-trafficking law. Violet Blue’s Engadget article (“Congress JustLegalized Sex Censorship: What to Know”, March 2018) gives a detailed rundown
on the self-protective behavior of many platforms.
Caplan doesn’t mention the parallel DMCA Safe Harbor
for copyright. It does compare how downstream liability works in Germany, where
there is a visitor size threshold and where hate speech is illegal, to the US.
The recent bannings by Patreon (crowdfunding) on a rule
based on “manifest observable behavior” as defined in 2017 by CEO Jack Conte,
seem to be based on an inflexible (rather than context-antisanal) approach to
the use of bad words or slurs. Increasingly platforms are willing to ban for
off-platform behavior (beyond the obvious cases of criminal convictions) and
associations, partly out of fear of the alt-right and of covert and hostile foreign
(especially Russian) influence.
Friday, December 14, 2018
Two big reports show how many people self-radicalize on social media, esp. toward the alt-right by reinforcing algorithms
VOX-Pol (no connection to Vox in the US), in Europe, recently
published a large booklet report as a PDF, by J. M. Berger, “The Alt-Right
Twitter Consensus: Defining and Describing the Audience for Alt-Right Content
on Twitter”, link here.
A shorter but more explosive report comes from Bellingcat
and Robert Evans. It is titled “From Memes to Infowars: How 75 Fascist
Activists Were ‘Red-Pilled.”.
The term “red-pilling”, from the Matrix movies, means
converting someone from a moderate ideology to a much more extreme and combative
one, usually emphasizing loyalty to the group or tribe.
Vox (in the US) analyzes these reports in a piece by Zach
Beauchamp, suggesting that YouTube has become “infested” as a honeypot for the alt-right. It's interesting, though, that the Bellingcat report read literally doesn't point to YouTube (75 cases) but the Vox piece does, perhaps jumping to conclusions.
Before going to far, it’s good to give the Wikipedia
reference for “alt-right”, which shows the wide variations in the meaning of
the term. But generally many of these forms are quite extreme and emphasize
extreme tribalism, such as “national anarchists”. They are generally
anti-intellectual and anti-individualistic, and want “socialism” within a
patriarchal tribal structure. They see
this as a way to rectify individual inequality of ability
The Vox article shows how the algorithms, in a manner
similar to Facebook, drive repeated users into echo chambers. More moderate users will never be aware of
the problem, as they will generally not even see the content.
However, the article shows that populations are susceptible
to propaganda, and that less cognitively intact people can be driven into radical
areas and convinced to join radical movements. Intellectually sound people will not even
notice this is going on.
Practically all the speech involved is protected under the
First Amendment and downstream liability largely protected by Section 230. This is quickly shaping up as an enormous
public policy problem.
Oddly, the danger of promoting radicalization may be greater
from users who don’t sell anything or raise money for causes in a conventional
way. Independent journalist Tim Pool has been especially skeptical of reports like this from larger media, who are challenged by low-cost competition from independent media.
Labels:
extremism,
meeting radical Islam,
periodicals
Thursday, December 13, 2018
"The Tablet" looks at hidden "intersectional" bigotry within the Women's March
Leah McSweeny and Jacob Siegel have a booklet-length analysis
on “The Tablet” about the Women’s march movement, “Is the Women’s March Melting
Down?” There is a correction on Twitter
by Yair Rosenberg.
The Washington Times, a conservative paper, has boiled down
the problem in a short summary by Valerie Richardson, “Women’s March leaders
blame bigotry for issues; didn’t address report on anti-Semitism” (p. A8, Thursday,
December 13, 2018).
But the Tablet article, in various places, gets into
intersectionality and the idea that groups are systematically oppressed by
those in privilege, as such, and need to be dealt with that way.
My own take is that we are finding out that individual
rights work well locally, but when they are deployed publicly and
internationally in a world with such gross inequality, it is inevitable that
runaway abuses with what seem like legitimate self-expression, will occur. There is a problem that many less educated users
don’t grasp meta-speech or the use of abstract conjectural thought. Frankly, there is also a body of thought emerging
saying nothing gets done until everyone is organized (which is how it is in
socialist countries, though).
Kevin Roose had continued this idea with a piece about “frictionless”
apps, especially on Facebook, “Is Tech too easy to use?”, which makes it too
easy for extremist groups (or undemocratic governments) to use social media against
people in more vulnerable groups. This
comes back to other recent suggestions to “slow the Internet down”.
See my International Issues blog post today for a preview of Van Jackson's "On the Brink: Trump, Kim, and the Threat of Nuclear War".
See my International Issues blog post today for a preview of Van Jackson's "On the Brink: Trump, Kim, and the Threat of Nuclear War".
Wednesday, December 12, 2018
Scammell writes that Solzshenitsyn, as a writer who emigrated to the US, may have brought down the Soviet Union himself
Michael Scammell is author of “Solzhenitsyn: A Biography”
(W.W. Norton, 1984).
Today, Wednesday, December 12, 2018 he has an op-ed in the
New York Times, p. A27, “The writer who beat an empire.” Solzhenitsyn started out with a novella “A
Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich” about a Stalinist labor camp, where he (the
person) was sent to a labor camp for writing to a friend criticizing the soviet
system. As in early colonial America,
letters were read by authorities.
The little book was published in the west in 1962 by a small
literary magazine Novy Mir. Further autobiographical
novels would include “The First Circle” and “Cancer Ward”, and then “The Gulag
Archipelago” in 1973. The Soviets
expelled him, and his arrival in the US out to prove to conservatives and especially
Trumpians the desirability of some immigration.
His writings helped bring down the Soviet Union in 1991. But Solzhenitsyn
did want a nationalist country with religious and conservative family values, rather
than Boris Yeltsin’s freewheeling republic, but he got what he wanted with
Putin in 2000.
The op-ed also discusses the clandestine publication of
Boris Pasternak’s “Doctor Zhivago” which had become a massive motion picture by
1966.
When I became a patient at NIH for the second half of 1962,
my roommate had a copy of “The Brothers Karamazov” by Dostoyevsky. We would scape
past the Cuban Missile Crisis will I was still a patient.
Tuesday, December 11, 2018
Sandy Hook papers on and by Adam Lanza released and published by Hartford Newspaper
The Hartford Courant is making available all the court
papers in state police custody concerning Adam Lanza, perpetrator of the Sandy
Hook killings on Dec. 14. 2012.
The main link for the publication is here, as a Courant Exclusive.
The reporters are Josh Kovner and Dave Altimari.
The article provides a link to an editorial explaining why
the newspaper decided to release the papers.
There is no “manifesto” as such, but many scrapbooks and
loose writings, like “Big Book of Granny”.
Lanza’s mental state seems to be extremely disturbed,
starting with autism, which usually does not take this kind of path. He hated any kind of personal contact with
anyone. There are references to what he perceived as sexual abuse from physicians,
doing normal examinations.
Wednesday, December 05, 2018
The "Homebrewed Christianity" series:Bill Leonard's "Flaming Heretics"
Author: Bill Leonard
Title: “Homebrewed Christianity: Church History: Flaming Heretics
and Heavy Drinkers”
Publication: Nashville: Fortress Press, 2017, 238 pages,
paper, 8 chapters, endnotes.
This orange book is one of a series called “Homebrewed Christianity”,
edited by Tripp Fuller.
The basic premise is that Christianity is practice has been
a bottom-up religion, defined by how it is practiced by real people, who are
compared to chess pieces (Bishop, Elder, Deacon, Acolyte). Yet the tone of the book presumes people want to act together and belong, not be so much on their own.
Indeed, the first chapter is called “herding ecclesiastical
cats. As the reality of actually witnessing
a resurrection and ascension, which would have seemed like ultimate truth to those
who happened to live at a time and place where they could see it, receded, and became
a matter for “men of faith”, it became a member of socialization and
organization to figure out who really should be in charge and who should
deliver the messages and how people would follow.
Perhaps that has meaning today as individual speech itself becomes
questionable and we wonder who has the “privilege of being listened to” in a
secular sense.
The church has always had to deal with the paradoxes of
hypocrisy. It doesn’t know who walks
with the Lord. Only people do. The latter part of the book gets into specific episodes,
like the Jim Crow laws and Scopes Trial (movie “Inherit the Wind” and the “old
time religion” scene).
Copies of this book were sold at the First Baptist Church of
the City of Washington DC last spring.
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