Discussion in Naked Capitalism Mark Ames: Why the American Right Never Liked V.S. Naipaul:
"I’ve often wondered why the American Right has been so quiet about V.S. Naipaul. He’s easily the most talented reactionary writer in the English language–maybe the only living talent left in the right-wing zombiesphere.....
Now that Naipaul could compare the two Eldridge Cleavers–the Black Panther vs. the Republican lackey–the message was clear. If Naipaul wanted to pick up that check from the American Right-Wing, it wasn’t enough to have fought on the front-lines of the ideological battle of the 1970′s against the literary Marxists. He’d have to become a lobotomized, conquered version of himself, an Eldridge Cleaver. He’d have to give up everything interesting about himself.
Instead, Naipaul essentially banished himself to the whispered margins of the American Right by doing what he was always best at: Describing exactly what he saw at the 1984 Convention, without artifice, without pandering."
As thet say, read the whole thing. In the comments section Yves Smith has some comments on Australia "I’ve lived in Australian and done business in Canada. They are so far from libertarian it isn’t funny.
Both are WAY to the left of the US. They have universal health care, much more progressive taxation (and far more cumbersome tax reporting in Oz than here), much higher minimum wages, have laws more favorable to unions, far more aggressive regulation (Australia’s version of the FDA makes the FDA look like pussies; they shut down a major drug maker while I was there and have much tougher policies on food than we do. Similarly Canada, New Zealand, and Australia have more extensive and intrusive bank regulation by a country mile).
Voting is MANDATORY in Australia, for Chrissakes. Paid political advertising on TV is forbidden. People there do not believe CEO of companies they did not build deserve to be paid a lot. Hedge fund manager John Hempton has said flat out no CEO is worth more than $2 million a year, and I’m sure if I asked him he would not object to confiscatory taxation to support that. And he has plenty of company in the top tier in Oz (I know because I met about half the people at that level in Sydney, they are very accessible if you make the effort).
And Australia is also rated as having one of the most intrusive surveillance states in the world, in the same category as the US, the UK, and China. So how libertarian is that?"
Monday, July 04, 2011
Rohiniprasad on Bhairavi
భావతరంగాల సింధువు: భైరవి with lonks to lots of songs( many in Hindi).
P.S. See also the articles by విష్ణుభొట్ల లక్ష్మన్న
P.S. See also the articles by విష్ణుభొట్ల లక్ష్మన్న
Sunday, July 03, 2011
A.K.Ramanujan's famous essay
Is there an Indian Way of Thinking? An Informal Essay online.
Some commentaries:
Attipat Krishnaswami Ramanujan by Candy Wagoner ""Is There an Indian Way of Thinking?" is a cultural essay that appears in social anthropologist, McKim Marriot's India Through Hindu Categories (1990). Ramanujan's ultimate answer to the title question is yes; it is what he calls "context-sensitive" as opposed to "context-free." These terms, he takes from linguistics, in which they refer to different kinds of grammatical rules. In applying them to cultures or ways of thinking, Ramanujan relies primarily on a text-based analysis. He cautions that they are "overall tendencies." "Actual behavior may be more complex, though the rules they think with are a crucial factor guiding the behavior" (47). Context-sensitive is, he suggests, the more appropriate term for what others have taken for an Indian tendency toward inconsistency and hypocrisy, as well as, perhaps tolerance and mimicry. Ramanujan cites Said's Orientalism here, suggesting a European source for these stereotypes created out of a necessity to essentialize and exoticize the Eastern world.
Context-free thinking, which he attributes to Euro-American culture, gives rise to universal testaments of law, such as in the Judeo-Christian tradition and in the European philosophical tradition, e.g. Hegel. Context-sensitive thinking, on the other hand, gives rise to more complicated sets of standards such as the Laws of Manu, by which appropriateness depends on various factors, especially factors of identity and personhood, such as birth, occupation, life stage, karma, dharma, etc. Ramanujan stresses that this difference in philosophical outcome is not a symptom of irrationality, but a different kind of rationale."
In People Of The Grammar, Anil Menon quotes from the article "...And grammar is the central model of thinking in many Hindu texts. As Frits Staal has said, what Euclid is to the European thought, the grammarian Panini is to the Indian. Even the Kama Sutra is literally a grammar of love — which declines and conjugates men and women as one would nouns and verbs in different genders, voices, moods and aspects."
Respective influences of Euclid and Panini have also been discussed by Swiss Samskrit scholar Johannes Bronkhorst in "Panini and Euclid:Reflections on Indian Geometry", which appeared in Journal of Indian Philosophy, 29, pp 43-80. In a discussion forum Aravindhan remarks:
"I think he identifies an important problem, and does it well, but misidentifies its cause. He seems to suggest that the problem could have been that science was influenced by grammatical methodology (though there is no clear evidence for this). In my opinion, it was much deeper than that.
Panini's grammar, from a methodological perspective, embodies two trends. The first is the trend towards the primacy of exegesis in scholarly discourse. For some reason, texts by renowned scholars came to have a very special status, eventually becoming a source of knowledge equal to or superior than observation. The second trend is the increasing importance of inductive reasoning, where you used specific examples to derive generalised rules. Taken together, these are capable of producing devastating errors.
But Panini's grammar did not create these trends, nor were they confined to grammatics. You find them equally in philosophical works of the period which - unlike earlier texts - only try to interpret, expound on and clarify the meanings of existing texts; and even the original work that is done still seeks support in interpretation of existing texts.
We see exactly the same disease in the mathematics of the period. Bhaskara tries to argue mathematics using rules of mimamsa. Mimamsa, for heaven's sake! And proofs - where they are provided - tend to be anecdotal, rather than deductive. Bronkhorst argues that philosophy in that period understood the concept of proof. He's right, technically speaking, but the form of proofs they used lacked rigour and routinely accepted exegetic and anectdotal evidence as "proof". Just as the mathematicians did.
So I don't think Bronkhorst adequately looks at what was happening in other disciplines. I think there is a readily available explanation for why the problems he identifies happened in Ancient India, as I've tried to outline above.
There is also a clear parallel with certain modern trends (not just confined to India), where ancient knowledge is being venerated without much independent inquiry. I would like to quote one passage from Bronkhorst's paper:
"Aryabhatta is wrong where he gives the volume of a pyramid as: "Half the product of the height and the [surface of the triangular base] is the volume called 'pyramid'." The correct volume of a pyramid is a third, not half, of the product here specified... The same is true of Aryabhatta's incorrect rule for the volume of a sphere."
These errors are discussed in greater detail in a 1985 paper published in a French journal. It tends to flabbergast people because the idea that Sanskrit texts might actually be wrong is not something people think about (which is absurd - no human science can ever be wholly right about everything at any point of time).
And that, I think, is the biggest danger in the current trend of constantly exalting ancient works. Science (and any other field of inquiry) progresses best when it is most open and least dogmatic. Which is why (in my opinion) Indian science didn't progress beyond a point - and why even mathematicians as obviously gifted as Aryabhatta and Bhaskara made such glaring errors."
And finally Amit Chaudhuri reviewing a book of poems by A.K. ramanujan in The twin-lobed brahmin quotes extensively from the famous article and says "I quote this passage at length not only because of its intrinsic readability, but also because of the way it embodies some of the most characteristic features of Ramanujan's poetry. First, there is the exploration of an idea, not through metaphor or analogy, but through an "image" of a member of Ramanujan's family, in this case his father."
Some commentaries:
Attipat Krishnaswami Ramanujan by Candy Wagoner ""Is There an Indian Way of Thinking?" is a cultural essay that appears in social anthropologist, McKim Marriot's India Through Hindu Categories (1990). Ramanujan's ultimate answer to the title question is yes; it is what he calls "context-sensitive" as opposed to "context-free." These terms, he takes from linguistics, in which they refer to different kinds of grammatical rules. In applying them to cultures or ways of thinking, Ramanujan relies primarily on a text-based analysis. He cautions that they are "overall tendencies." "Actual behavior may be more complex, though the rules they think with are a crucial factor guiding the behavior" (47). Context-sensitive is, he suggests, the more appropriate term for what others have taken for an Indian tendency toward inconsistency and hypocrisy, as well as, perhaps tolerance and mimicry. Ramanujan cites Said's Orientalism here, suggesting a European source for these stereotypes created out of a necessity to essentialize and exoticize the Eastern world.
Context-free thinking, which he attributes to Euro-American culture, gives rise to universal testaments of law, such as in the Judeo-Christian tradition and in the European philosophical tradition, e.g. Hegel. Context-sensitive thinking, on the other hand, gives rise to more complicated sets of standards such as the Laws of Manu, by which appropriateness depends on various factors, especially factors of identity and personhood, such as birth, occupation, life stage, karma, dharma, etc. Ramanujan stresses that this difference in philosophical outcome is not a symptom of irrationality, but a different kind of rationale."
In People Of The Grammar, Anil Menon quotes from the article "...And grammar is the central model of thinking in many Hindu texts. As Frits Staal has said, what Euclid is to the European thought, the grammarian Panini is to the Indian. Even the Kama Sutra is literally a grammar of love — which declines and conjugates men and women as one would nouns and verbs in different genders, voices, moods and aspects."
Respective influences of Euclid and Panini have also been discussed by Swiss Samskrit scholar Johannes Bronkhorst in "Panini and Euclid:Reflections on Indian Geometry", which appeared in Journal of Indian Philosophy, 29, pp 43-80. In a discussion forum Aravindhan remarks:
"I think he identifies an important problem, and does it well, but misidentifies its cause. He seems to suggest that the problem could have been that science was influenced by grammatical methodology (though there is no clear evidence for this). In my opinion, it was much deeper than that.
Panini's grammar, from a methodological perspective, embodies two trends. The first is the trend towards the primacy of exegesis in scholarly discourse. For some reason, texts by renowned scholars came to have a very special status, eventually becoming a source of knowledge equal to or superior than observation. The second trend is the increasing importance of inductive reasoning, where you used specific examples to derive generalised rules. Taken together, these are capable of producing devastating errors.
But Panini's grammar did not create these trends, nor were they confined to grammatics. You find them equally in philosophical works of the period which - unlike earlier texts - only try to interpret, expound on and clarify the meanings of existing texts; and even the original work that is done still seeks support in interpretation of existing texts.
We see exactly the same disease in the mathematics of the period. Bhaskara tries to argue mathematics using rules of mimamsa. Mimamsa, for heaven's sake! And proofs - where they are provided - tend to be anecdotal, rather than deductive. Bronkhorst argues that philosophy in that period understood the concept of proof. He's right, technically speaking, but the form of proofs they used lacked rigour and routinely accepted exegetic and anectdotal evidence as "proof". Just as the mathematicians did.
So I don't think Bronkhorst adequately looks at what was happening in other disciplines. I think there is a readily available explanation for why the problems he identifies happened in Ancient India, as I've tried to outline above.
There is also a clear parallel with certain modern trends (not just confined to India), where ancient knowledge is being venerated without much independent inquiry. I would like to quote one passage from Bronkhorst's paper:
"Aryabhatta is wrong where he gives the volume of a pyramid as: "Half the product of the height and the [surface of the triangular base] is the volume called 'pyramid'." The correct volume of a pyramid is a third, not half, of the product here specified... The same is true of Aryabhatta's incorrect rule for the volume of a sphere."
These errors are discussed in greater detail in a 1985 paper published in a French journal. It tends to flabbergast people because the idea that Sanskrit texts might actually be wrong is not something people think about (which is absurd - no human science can ever be wholly right about everything at any point of time).
And that, I think, is the biggest danger in the current trend of constantly exalting ancient works. Science (and any other field of inquiry) progresses best when it is most open and least dogmatic. Which is why (in my opinion) Indian science didn't progress beyond a point - and why even mathematicians as obviously gifted as Aryabhatta and Bhaskara made such glaring errors."
And finally Amit Chaudhuri reviewing a book of poems by A.K. ramanujan in The twin-lobed brahmin quotes extensively from the famous article and says "I quote this passage at length not only because of its intrinsic readability, but also because of the way it embodies some of the most characteristic features of Ramanujan's poetry. First, there is the exploration of an idea, not through metaphor or analogy, but through an "image" of a member of Ramanujan's family, in this case his father."
On China Pakistan Alliance
Amit Menghani
FISA leader Amit Menghani is ‘Young Victorian of the Year 2011′
An earlier opinion piece by him: AMIT MENGHANI: Discrimination and Victoria
An earlier opinion piece by him: AMIT MENGHANI: Discrimination and Victoria
Friday, July 01, 2011
Thursday, June 30, 2011
Glenn Davis Stone revisits Warangal
Field versus Farm in Warangal; Bt Cotton, Higher Yields. and Larger Questions
A recent survey article by Glenn Stone
The Anthropology of Genetically Modified Crops
Earier articles available at http://anthropology.artsci.wustl.edu/stone_glenn and for discussion of some of his earlier articles by Andrew Leonard see The Napster pirates of transgenic biotech How genetically modified cotton escaped Monsanto's control in India, with a little help from Robin Hood
P.S. I just noticed that Glenn Davis Stone has a blog. Here is a recent post
GM Eggplant and Ayurveda in India
A recent survey article by Glenn Stone
The Anthropology of Genetically Modified Crops
Earier articles available at http://anthropology.artsci.wustl.edu/stone_glenn and for discussion of some of his earlier articles by Andrew Leonard see The Napster pirates of transgenic biotech How genetically modified cotton escaped Monsanto's control in India, with a little help from Robin Hood
P.S. I just noticed that Glenn Davis Stone has a blog. Here is a recent post
GM Eggplant and Ayurveda in India
Sunday, June 26, 2011
Scary story
by Marcia Angell, ex-editor of the New England Journal of Medicine, linked in several blogs (see, in particular, the comment by Felix E F Larocca MD which gives several more references):
The Epidemic of Mental Illness: Why?
The Illusions of Psychiatry
P.S. Daniel Little comments on the above articles Mental illness, big pharma and agent-based simulation.
Related In Medicine, New Isn’t Always Improved
The Epidemic of Mental Illness: Why?
The Illusions of Psychiatry
P.S. Daniel Little comments on the above articles Mental illness, big pharma and agent-based simulation.
Related In Medicine, New Isn’t Always Improved
Saturday, June 25, 2011
Women and collective intelligence
From Defend Your Research: What Makes a Team Smarter? More Women
"The finding: There’s little correlation between a group’s collective intelligence and the IQs of its individual members. But if a group includes more women, its collective intelligence rises."
via Mind Hacks post A dose of female intelligence
The original article:
Evidence of Collective Intelligence in the Performance of Human Groups
"The finding: There’s little correlation between a group’s collective intelligence and the IQs of its individual members. But if a group includes more women, its collective intelligence rises."
via Mind Hacks post A dose of female intelligence
The original article:
Evidence of Collective Intelligence in the Performance of Human Groups
Tuesday, June 21, 2011
The Telegraph reviews "River of Smoke"
River of Smoke by Amitav Ghosh: review:
"His taste for obscure words aside, Ghosh can be a rather ponderous storyteller. Far too much of the book is taken up by windy letters from an English painter. But there are some nice comic touches, mainly involving characters talking pidgin English, and moments of real lyricism.
Best of all, Ghosh, through the depth of his research, lightly worn, has captured the many cross-currents of a fascinating historical period."
His "In an Antique Land" is one of the best books I read and I liked much of his non-fiction that I read. But I thought that his "The glass Palace" is a soap opera and this type of historical fiction seems to be a bit of cop out, which does not allow much discussion. I think that I will skip this book.
"His taste for obscure words aside, Ghosh can be a rather ponderous storyteller. Far too much of the book is taken up by windy letters from an English painter. But there are some nice comic touches, mainly involving characters talking pidgin English, and moments of real lyricism.
Best of all, Ghosh, through the depth of his research, lightly worn, has captured the many cross-currents of a fascinating historical period."
His "In an Antique Land" is one of the best books I read and I liked much of his non-fiction that I read. But I thought that his "The glass Palace" is a soap opera and this type of historical fiction seems to be a bit of cop out, which does not allow much discussion. I think that I will skip this book.
Dreaming of cancer
Recently on the way back from USA I was stuck in San Francisco airport for two nights, the first night because I did not check the times carefully and the second night because of United Airlines computer problems. It gave me chance to finish Siddhartha Mukherjee's excellent book " The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer" and now I imagine that I have precancer conditions. May be I will give up smoking now. In any case, I am back home to celebrate my 70th birthday today.
Friday, June 17, 2011
Kuffir on farmers
Kuffir wonders how farmers in India survive when the returns are so low:no mantras or miracles will work here . More in the Indian Farmers website linked in the article.
Thursday, June 09, 2011
A comment in the post 'Academic Writing' by Amitava Kumar
From a comment in Academic Writing:
"A couple of years ago, I sent this as a puzzle to my colleagues in a course with a reading from Partha Chatterjee:
“The illusion of normative values is consistent with the legitimation of the nation-state. The logic of civil society carries with it the ideology of agency. Rival conceptions of collective identity have become implicated in rival claims to autonomous subjectivity, and the reification of capitalist hegemony opens a space for the historicization of the nation-state. The emergence of history as such functions as the conceptual frame for the politics of power.”
One or two sentences are from Chatterjee’s Nationalist Thought. The rest are generated from the U of Chicago Automatic Sentence Generator. No one guessed the auto-generated part correctly."
"A couple of years ago, I sent this as a puzzle to my colleagues in a course with a reading from Partha Chatterjee:
“The illusion of normative values is consistent with the legitimation of the nation-state. The logic of civil society carries with it the ideology of agency. Rival conceptions of collective identity have become implicated in rival claims to autonomous subjectivity, and the reification of capitalist hegemony opens a space for the historicization of the nation-state. The emergence of history as such functions as the conceptual frame for the politics of power.”
One or two sentences are from Chatterjee’s Nationalist Thought. The rest are generated from the U of Chicago Automatic Sentence Generator. No one guessed the auto-generated part correctly."
M.F. Husain RIP
One of India's most famous artists, MF Husain, has died in hospital in London aged 95 after years of self-imposed exile. For 15 years, I used to see his paintings almost daily in TIFR, Bomay (now Mumbai).
Monday, June 06, 2011
Saturday, June 04, 2011
Farmer Networks in Mexico
From Farmer Networks Hold Key to Agricultural Innovation in Developing Countries, Study Finds:
"In Yaqui Valley, credit unions hold sway among the majority of farmers, McCullough said. In addition to providing loans, crop insurance, fertilizer and seed, credit unions have taken over the government's role in providing technical expertise and management advice.
Valley growers also have a long history of working with the Mexico-based International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center, a world-renowned agricultural research center known by its Spanish acronym, CIMMYT.
But interviews conducted for the PNAS study revealed that most farmers take their cues from local credit unions and not from experts at CIMMYT. As an example, McCullough pointed to a collaborative effort between CIMMYT scientists and farmers to develop a nitrogen diagnostic tool that reduces fertilizer use without sacrificing crop yields.
The device, which gives real-time readings of nitrogen levels in the soil, proved early on that it could save farmers 12 to 17 percent of their profits. Yet most farmers rejected the new technology until CIMMYT researchers finally convinced credit union officials that it was a worthwhile investment.
"The most successful innovations that have been adopted by farmers in the Yaqui Valley have come from collaborations among researchers, farmers and local establishments, like the credit unions," McCullough said. Because of their considerable influence among farmers, credit unions should be included in any effort to effect environmental change in the region, she added."
"In Yaqui Valley, credit unions hold sway among the majority of farmers, McCullough said. In addition to providing loans, crop insurance, fertilizer and seed, credit unions have taken over the government's role in providing technical expertise and management advice.
Valley growers also have a long history of working with the Mexico-based International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center, a world-renowned agricultural research center known by its Spanish acronym, CIMMYT.
But interviews conducted for the PNAS study revealed that most farmers take their cues from local credit unions and not from experts at CIMMYT. As an example, McCullough pointed to a collaborative effort between CIMMYT scientists and farmers to develop a nitrogen diagnostic tool that reduces fertilizer use without sacrificing crop yields.
The device, which gives real-time readings of nitrogen levels in the soil, proved early on that it could save farmers 12 to 17 percent of their profits. Yet most farmers rejected the new technology until CIMMYT researchers finally convinced credit union officials that it was a worthwhile investment.
"The most successful innovations that have been adopted by farmers in the Yaqui Valley have come from collaborations among researchers, farmers and local establishments, like the credit unions," McCullough said. Because of their considerable influence among farmers, credit unions should be included in any effort to effect environmental change in the region, she added."
Wednesday, June 01, 2011
Last interview with Syed Saleem Shahzad
Splits in Pakistan's Military Over New Agreement to Cooperate with US
Syed Saleem Shahzad, A Pakistani journalist and correspondent of Asia Times, who was killed between May 29 and 31.
Syed Saleem Shahzad, A Pakistani journalist and correspondent of Asia Times, who was killed between May 29 and 31.
Salim Durrani wins C.K. Nayudu Award
Salim Durrani the only Test cricketer to have been born in Afghanistan wins C K Nayudu Award lifetime achievement award for his contribution to Indian cricket A first person account and When Salim Durrani did a Shane Warne .... Ramachandra Guha on Salim Durrani's background and career.
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