Carnival

Niiiiice rant.

Surely it is time the international community abandoned this Olympic nonsense, and not just because of the massive cost and inconvenience of protecting the games, although that is bad enough. London’s preparations have plainly elevated Olympic security to new and dangerous levels of lethality. ...

The fact is that every Olympic Games is a massively state-subsidised carnival staged primarily for the economic benefit of global fizzy drink companies and television networks. ...

Olympic contests also encourage the descent of countries into nationalistic primitivism and conflict, with the medal count seen as evidence of national superiority...

...Australian Olympic officials brazenly demand increased Commonwealth funding for the elite Australian Institute of Sport in order to maximise the chance of big medal hauls...[,] already warning that Australians might win fewer medals in London than they have won at other recent Olympic contests. Australians are taught to believe that Olympic loss is a cause for national shame and victory is a cause for national ecstasy. ... A more mature nation would reject such simplistic nonsense.

This month's statement of the blindingly obvious from Geoffrey Barker at Inside Story.

The Fall

A surprising fact about the Neolithic revolution is that, according to most evidence, agriculture brought about a steep decline in the standard of living. Studies of Kalahari Bushmen and other nomadic groups show that hunter-gatherers, even in the most inhospitable landscapes, typically spend less than twenty hours a week obtaining food. By contrast, farmers toil from sunup to sundown. Because agriculture relies on the mass cultivation of a handful of starchy crops, a community’s whole livelihood can be wiped out overnight by bad weather or pests. Paleontological evidence shows that, compared with hunter-gatherers, early farmers had more anemia and vitamin deficiencies, died younger, had worse teeth, were more prone to spinal deformity, and caught more infectious diseases, as a result of living close to other humans and to livestock. A study of skeletons in Greece and Turkey found that the average height of humans dropped six inches between the end of the ice age and 3000 B.C.; modern Greeks and Turks still haven’t regained the height of their hunter-gatherer ancestors...

Why would anyone stick with such a miserable way of life? Jared Diamond... describes the situation as a classic bait-and-switch. Hunter-gatherers were "seduced by the transient abundance they enjoyed until population growth caught up with increased food production." By then they were locked in - they had to farm more and more land just to keep everyone alive. Deriving strength from their large, poorly nourished numbers, the farmers gradually killed off most of the hunter-gatherers and drove the rest from their land. Diamond considers agriculture to be not just a setback but "the worst mistake in the history of the human race," the origin of "the gross social and sexual inequality, the disease and despotism, that curse our existence."

Was the Neolithic revolution really a "curse" on our existence? The high emotional and political stakes of this question were manifested in a cover article in Der Spiegel in 2006, which proposed Göbekli Tepe as the historical site of the Garden of Eden... Evidence for the identification with Eden included Göbekli Tepe’s position between the Tigris and the Euphrates, the copious snake imagery, and Schmidt’s characterization of the region as "a paradise for hunter-gatherers." But the theory really draws its power from a reading of the Fall as an allegory for the shift from hunting-and-gathering to farming. In Eden, man and woman lived as companions, unashamed of their nakedness, surrounded by friendly animals and by "trees that were pleasing to the eye and good for food." The fruit of the Tree of Knowledge, like the first fruits of cultivation, brought on an immediate, irrevocable curse. Man now had to work the earth, to eat of it all the days of his life. According to Maimonides, there are legends in which Adam, after the Fall, went on to write "several works about agriculture."

God’s terrible words to Eve - "I will greatly increase your pains in childbearing; in pain you will give birth to children. Your desire will be for your husband, and he will rule over you" - may refer to a decline in women’s health and status produced, in early agricultural societies, by the economic need to have children who would till and inherit the land. Women, having access to goat’s milk and cereal, may have weaned their children earlier, resulting in more frequent, more debilitating pregnancies. The institution of private property, meanwhile, made paternal certainty a vital concern, and monogamy, particularly for women, was strictly enforced.

To continue the interpretation, the story of Cain and Abel may be taken as an illustration of the zero-sum game of primogeniture, as well as an allegory for the slaughter of nomadic pasturage by urban agriculture. Having killed his brother, Cain goes on to found the world’s first city and name it after his son Enoch. Read in this spirit, large chunks of the Old Testament - the territorial feuds, the constant threat of exile or extinction, the sexual jealousy and sibling rivalry - begin to resemble the handbook for a grim new scarcity economy of land and love.

From Elif Batuman in the New Yorker, on Göbekli Tepe, which I went looking for after watching How to Grow a Planet.

Animated

rrrrrrrroll

stellar

via this is colossal

Militant Consensus

You can't help feeling, along with Pagels, a pang that the Gnostic poems, so much more affecting in their mystical, pantheistic rapture, got interred while Revelation lives on. But you also have to wonder if there ever was a likely alternative. Don’t squishy doctrines of transformation through personal illumination always get marginalized in mass movements? As Stephen Batchelor has recently shown, the open-minded, non-authoritarian side of Buddhism, too, quickly succumbed to its theocratic side, gasping under the weight of those heavy statues. The histories of faiths are all essentially the same: a vague and ambiguous millennial doctrine preached by a charismatic founder, Marx or Jesus; mystical variants held by the first generations of followers; and a militant consensus put firmly in place by the power-achieving generation. Bakunin, like the Essenes, never really had a chance. The truth is that punitive, hysterical religions thrive, while soft, mystical ones must hide their scriptures somewhere in the hot sand.

Adam Gopnik in the New Yorker.

Embodiment

Cory Doctorow at the boings on self-serving anonymity as flack industrial standard practice:

PR people, both in-house and outside contractors, have adopted a gospel that holds that they themselves should never appear in an article. When I asked around about this practice, PR people defended it, saying that their success would be judged by the extent to which they were absent from the story. It's as though the odd doctrine that companies are people means that companies can't admit that they are made up of people. When a PR person says something innocuous, he is speaking ex cathedra, voice of the company embodied, which has possessed him and speaks through him, without interpretation or engagement by the person himself. He is the company's living embodiment, without name or identity.

Previously here, here, here and here.

Contoured

...posters that are torn away to reveal startling pairings of images, and the photographic imagery wheat-pasted over contoured surfaces, transforming what are supposed to be stately, assuring images of politicians into ghoulish, comical, or Pinnochio-esque caricatures.

Eyeteeth on the photography of Pascal Fellonneau.

Storytime

Featuring Don the Cockroach and the Life of Albert Einstein. (The Christmas card animation is also tacked on at the end.) Gosh. I haven't seen this since my family went to the local cinema to watch Life of Brian, and it was played as one of the shorts (so it was that long ago they still played shorts before the main feature), along with Away From It All, a John Cleese narrated send-up of travelogue flicks, and Spike Milligan's The Case of the Mukkinese Battle Horn. Oh, wait - those two are on Youtube too. The internet really is like an emptied-out attic.

Named

Matt Groening Reveals the Location of the Real Springfield

Pfft. Stop burying the lede.

In my novel, Bart was the son of Homer Simpson. I took that name from a minor character in the novel The Day of the Locust, by Nathanael West.

Hah! Every time I'd tell people about the child-killing* social-phobic lovelorn rube, played by Donald Sutherland in the movie, they'd say, "No, the cartoon dad is named after Groening's father". Hah!!!

I feel so validated.

*Err - warning... ... spoiler.

Easter Isn't Just About Zombies

Via Laughing Squid.

The Extended Mind Hypothesis

Not sure I entirely agree with this, being the introspective fellow I am, but it is most interesting:

I actually came to the conclusion that thinking is not something done by a single person. We have a false model of what thinking is. Because you can't really think by yourself, can you? You have to create someone else in your mind to explain things to, and to have an imaginary conversation with. This idea was inspired in part by the philosopher of cybernetics, Andy Clark, who proposed something he calls the extended mind hypothesis. Basically, the argument goes like this: Say you're doing long division on a piece of paper instead of doing it in your head. Clark asks why the piece of paper is not just as much a part of your mind while you're doing that calculation as the part of your brain that's doing the math. He says there's no reason at all.There are a million similar examples that philosophers like to trundle out — you have a bad memory so you write everything down. Is that piece of paper then part of your mind?

"Mind" isn't "brain" — the brain is just an organ; your mind is the dynamic interaction of various moving elements that culminates in thought. Philosophers like Clark are willing to take that argument this far, but the question that never seems to occur to them is this: when you're having a conversation with someone else, is their mind part of your mind? Nowadays, many philosophers of consciousness like to note just how razor-thin this thing we call "consciousness", that self-aware part of our mental operations, really is. The average person can rarely hold a thought for more than three or four seconds, eight at the most, before the mind wanders. It's very unusual to be fully conscious for more than a tiny window of time. That is, unless you're having a conversation with someone else, in which case you can often do it for long periods of time, especially if the conversation is with someone you find particularly interesting. In other words, most of the time we're conscious is when we're talking to someone else, or otherwise interacting intensely; during moments in which when we're not clear whose mind is whose. So consciousness is interactive, it's dyadic or triadic. It's a fallacy to imagine that thinking is something you largely do alone. On some level, of course, we already know that. But I don't think we've even begun to explore the full implications.

From an interview with David Graeber. Yeah, I know, I'm such a fanboy.

Loyalty

Once again it falls to Mr Rundle to state the blindingly obvious.

But above all, what is most significant is that absolute refusal to question either the wisdom, politics or necessity of the asset sales, one of the single most politically destructive moves in the history of Australian politics. Labor had a more solid relationship with sections of its electorate in Queensland than anywhere else  —  a relationship grounded in its ancient history but forged above all by the decades-long fixed electoral dictatorship of Joh Bjelke-Petersen.

The sense that Labor, the majority choice, was excluded from power by a fix, gave Queensland Labor an extra dimension of solidarity with its base, just as that was withering away elsewhere, under the impact of the wholesale reconstruction of economic and social life in the 1990s. The asset sales move, which treated Labor’s own supporters with utter contempt, and communicated to them that the party’s loyalty was to a technocratic elite, could not have been more precisely designed to f-ck up that relationship if it had been designed in the LNP skunk-works room.

Significance

Investor confidence is the key to understanding the unprecedented Gagosian show of Hirst's spot paintings. Hirst's atelier has been turning these out at every scale since 1986, and by the artist's own estimate there are around 1,400 in existence, of which Gagosian was showing 300 under the faux-definitive title The Complete Spot Paintings. They are made by Hirst's assistants to a simple aesthetic rule – the colour sequences of the dots must be "random". ... Many of them are technically difficult to execute, such as the piece completed for the Gagosian show that comprises 25,781 one millimetre spots that the poor bloody assistants had to paint without repeating any single colour. Examples have sold at recent auctions for between $800,000 and $3m. This is to say that they are valued like unique, individual works of art, yet are made in quantities – and using methods – that seem to deny this fiction. ...

If I were Larry Gagosian ... and I wanted to help my top client shore up the value of a body of work ... what would I do?

Long-term value in the art world depends in a certain raw way on scarcity, but is largely produced through a delicate process by which aesthetic value (determined by curators and critics) intersects with market value, determined ultimately by auction prices. One point at which these two types of value intersect is in provenance. The story behind an object – its past owners, where it has been shown, its place in the story of the artist's career, and so on – confers both types of value. A landmark show, geographically dispersed in an unprecedented way, is bound to be remembered as a significant moment in Hirst's career as a global art star. When that show is accompanied by a critical apparatus, chiefly a catalogue raisonnée (a meticulously documented list of works shown, accompanied by scholarly essays), those works become part of a canon and a magical walled garden of significance is erected around them.

As Francis Outred, Christie's European head of contemporary art, told the Economist, this catalogue "could bring reassuring clarity to the question of volume". The pharmaceutical paintings are frankly too financially valuable to too many people for their actual status (banal, mass-produced, decorative) to intrude on the consensus fiction that they are scarce and important. The owners of the 1,100 paintings not in the Gagosian show should be nervous, though. They just lost their AAA rating.

Hari Kunzru in the Guardian.