Nelson Mandela RIP

There have been a variety of comments from right to left in the comments sections of various posts and also from leftist sites. I do not think he was prefect. My feel is more in line with this short article by J.M.Coetzee:
"With F.W. de Klerk, a man of much smaller moral stature, yet also, in his way, a contributor to the liberation of South Africa, Mandela held a turbulent country together during the dangerous years 1990-94, exercising his great personal charm to persuade whites that they had a place in the new democratic republic while step by step emasculating the separatist white right wing.
By the time he became president in his own right, he was already an old man. His failure to throw himself more energetically into the urgent business of the day – the creation of a just economic order – was understandable if unfortunate. Like the rest of the leadership of the ANC, he was blindsided by the collapse of socialism world-wide; the party had no philosophical resistance to put up against a new, predatory economic rationalism."

Kathak dancer Monisa Nayak

Interview describing her career and explaining the connections with music, difference between different gharanas.

Interesting paper on self-decption

The Evolution and psychology of self deception by William von Hippel and Robert Trivers. The paper is about fifteen pages long and after that pen peer commentaries and response by authors. From the abstract: "In this article we argue that self-deception evolved to facilitate interpersonal deception by allowing people to avoid the cues to conscious deception that might reveal deceptive intent. Self-deception has two additional advantages: It eliminates the costly cognitive load that is typically associated with deceiving, and it can minimize retribution if the deception is discovered. Beyond its role in specific acts of deception, self-deceptive self-enhancement also allows people to display more confidence than is warranted,which has a host of social advantages."

A scary article

They're watching you at work "What happens when Big Data meets human resources? The emerging practice of "people analytics" is already transforming how employers hire, fire, and promote." though Chris Dillow seems to believe that it is all luck. Another scary story but more familiar theme Is BP trolling its facebook critics?

On identities and deterriotorializatiomn

Two articles via Chapati Mystery
Places and their pasts by Doreen Massey
Disjuncture and difference in the global culture economy by Arjun Appadurai

From Jacobin on social democracy

Chris Maisano on Social Democracy's Incomplete Leacy (via 3quarksdaily)" Instead of aspiring to establish public ownership of the commanding heights of the economy, Crosland argued that socialists and social democrats should instead seek to harness the wealth-generating capacities of modern capitalism for social ends. The task of modern social democracy was not to overthrow or transcend capitalism, but to manage it and redistribute the surplus in the interest of social equality. This perspective has attained almost total hegemony on the Western left since Crosland wrote his book,...
The radical energies the Occupiers and indignados have unleashed have been bracing, particularly for those of us who have only ever known defeat and demobilization. To a significant extent, the traditional formations of the social-democratic left deserve their scorn. Still, one cannot and should not lose sight of the fact that, as Harrington remarks somewhere, for all their limitations, the world’s social-democratic parties and movements are responsible for freeing more human beings from political and material deprivation than any other political formation in history. In building the new political movements of the twenty-first century, our impulse should not be to reject the social-democratic legacy, but to build on and complete its unfulfillable promise."

Links 19th November

Winds of change in the USA Socialist Kshama Sawant elected to Seattle City Council and
Comrade de Blasio
Ed Luce on Obama
The single argument against inequality
David Harvey on the crisis of capitalism
Interview with Kshama Sawant
I have not been reading Paul Krugman for a while; some economist's views
Ajit K. Ghose in EPW on the dollar glut
And a song from the only film that Shailendra produced http://www.dailymotion.com/video/xvr91t_laali-laali-doliyaan-mein-waheeda-rehman-teesri-kasam-asha-bhosle_music