Say It Ain't So, Jackie Chan!

Among my fondest memories from the years when my oldest sons Jeffrey and Douglas were little are of watching Jackie Chan movies. The movies are so goofy that they'd send the boys into peals of joyous laughter.  Turns out that Jackie is considerably less critical of the Chinese regime than is Ai Weiwei, and their differences are making a bit of a splash in the press. Like here at The Guardian. I have to say this is disappointing. But it won't stop me from watching Chan's movies with August and (soon enough) Esme.

Obama's One-sided Condemnation of Using Chemical Weapons

"Of course, even as we focused on our shared prosperity — and although the primary task of the G-20 is to focus on our joint efforts to boost the global economy — we did also discuss a grave threat to our shared security: And that’s the Syrian regime’s use of chemical weapons. And what I’ve been emphasizing and will continue to stress is that the Assad regime’s brazen use of chemical weapons isn’t just a Syrian tragedy, it’s a threat to global peace and security.

Syria’s escalating use of chemical weapons threatens its neighbors, Turkey, Jordan, Lebanon, Iraq, Israel. It threatens to further destabilize the Middle East. It increases the risk that these weapons will fall into the hands of terrorist groups. But more broadly, it threatens to unravel the international norm against chemical weapons embraced by 189 nations,, and those nations represent 98 percent of the world’s people.

Failing to respond to this breach of this international norm would send a signal to rogue nations, authoritarian regimes and terrorist organizations, that they can develop and use weapons of mass destruction and not pay a consequence. And that’s not the world that we want to live in. This is why nations around the world have condemned Syria for this attack, and called for action. I’ve been encouraged by discussions with my fellow leaders this week. There is a growing recognition that the world cannot stand idly by. Here in St. Petersburg leaders from Europe, Asia and the Middle East have come together to say that the international norm of the use against chemical weapons must be upheld, and that the Assad regime used these weapons on its own people, and that, as a consequence, there needs to be a strong response."

This is a sanctimonious and hypocritical statement on the Syrian use of chemical weapons taken from Obama's statement at the post-G20 Summit news conference yesterday. Now, I am not defending the Syrian use of chemical weapons. Far from it. The Asad regime is despicable. And much of the opposition at best is barely less so. The problem is that Obama's condemnation ought to start at home. He ought to be pursuing the officials, military and civilian, responsible for the use of chemical weapons by American forces in Iraq. To the best of my knowledge the mainstream American media have not as much as mentioned this matter. You can find reports here and here and here.

Marina Abramović ~ Latter Day P.T. Barnum

I have posted here numerous times on the fatuous Marina Abramović. NPR recently ran this too credulous interview with her in which she simply reinforced my view that she is full of it. That is not really the point here. Instead, I recommend this essay on the exploitative approach she takes to those who participate in her projects. I wonder how many of the repeat customers at her much heralded MOMA sit-in a couple of years back were paid paltry sums to fabricate "authentic" emotional responses to her gaze?

Uptake: Jurich on Aranda and his Critics, Including Me

Fatima & Zayad, Yemen, 2011. Photograph © Samuel Aranda/Corbis.

The nice folks* at afterimage sent me a copy of their Summer 2013 issue (40:5) which contains an essay "What Do Subjects Want?" by Joscelyn Jurich. The essay assesses the critical response to the World Press Photo designation of Samuel Aranda's image (above) as Photo of the Year for 2011. Among the critical commentaries Jurich discusses is my initial, quite negative post on the WPP jury decision. I have followed up on that assessment - prompted mostly by well-deserved push back from Nina Berman, who served on the WPP jury - especially here, but here too.

My immediate response to the Jurich essay [pdf here]  is that what the 'subjects want,' what their personal feelings are, is largely beside the point in this instance. The essay concludes with reports that Fatima Al-Qaws, the now-not-anonymous woman in Aranda's photograph, is heartened by and proud of the way Aranda depicts her. That is a second order effect. Welcome, perhaps, yet even that is something to be discussed. But the award from WPP was for Aranda's putative success at addressing his primary audience - readers of The New York Times and other (primarily) western outlets. Jurich seems more sanguine than me about the impact the image may have had on that audience. My complaints about the image and the prize designation address that matter and what I continue to see as their de-politicizing thrust.
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* Thanks Lucia! I hope you are well.

FEMEN Troubles? (2)

And today The Guardian is running this forthright reply by Inna Shevchenko to those scandalized by recent reports about the emergence of FEMEN.

FEMEN Troubles?

Today The Guardian raises disturbing questions about the motivations and internal organization of the Ukrainian feminist group FEMEN.

What is Philosophy of Science Good For?

Over the past week or so I've not posted at all. In my day job I teach political theory at the University of Rochester. And last week was the annual convention of the American Political Science Association (APSA) in Chicago. Susan and I went to give a joint paper and August came along for the fun - quite literally. Susan took him to the zoo and the natural history museum, he and I went swimming every day, and during our paper presentation he sat in the back of the room guffawing at Epic which he was watching on my laptop. On Saturday and Sunday I flew cross country and back so that he could be back in Oregon for the start of school today. Today was the first day of classes for me too. Hence the dearth of posts.

In any case, among the things I'm preoccupied with - I'm working on a book on the topic - is how social scientists use models. So I found this post at the Opinionater blog by philosophers Alex Rosenberg and Tyler Curtain entertaining. Their argument is pretty thoroughly wrongheaded. It might be persuasive if, like them, we accept predictive success as the most important or even sole criterion for assessing the performance and progress of a science. Paul Krugman insists that they misjudge economists' success on that dimension and so are wrong on their own grounds. I think that is the wrong response, in part because it is unclear whether the work to which he refers actually predicts in the way Rosenberg and Curtain demand. There is good reason to challenge the overriding priority they ascribe to empirical performance. Other philosophers of science - Larry Laudan and Phillip Kitcher, for instance - insist that if our criteria of scientific performance and progress are properly attuned to scientific practice, they must be multidimensional in the sense of countenancing conceptual and technical as well as empirical progress.That seems especially crucial in talking about political economy. After all, there are many extremely influential models in political economy that make no predictions at all. And their are prominent political economists who doubt that the models they construct can be predictive in the first place. Rosenberg and Curtain have nothing to say about such work other than to banish it from the domain they proclaim scientific. In trying to legislate as they do, they make us wonder what philosophy might be good for.