Phlogger On Vacation

I will resume regular posting as classes begin in mid-January. Happy holidays.

dkj

Meanwhile...

December 23rd: Jazz piano great Oscar Peterson, 82, dies of kidney failure.

December 26th: (especially for PE and IH students, fall, 2007) another tiger (and one human) dies at the hands of the (pornographic) zoo industry.

December 31: Looking for New Year's resolution? Why not consider vegetarianism/veganism? It's good for you, good for the animals, and good for the planet.

The End of Coral Reefs

A recent report estimates that 98 % of coral reefs will be gone by 2050.

(PE) Flying Fish

Speaking of invasive or otherwise odd species, here's a video of several "flying" Asian Carp. One student has since blogged about the (native and threatened) Alligator Gar. Perhaps the strangest (and most ecologically disruptive) is the air-breathing Snakehead Fish (pictured).

Ethics "off the table," too

I suppose this recent revelation erases the last ounce of mystery about Speaker Pelosi’s refusal to launch investigations of the duplicitous duo in the White house.

(IH&PE) Bush and Ideology

The National Intelligence Estimate, in a sharp rebuke to Bush's bellicose anti-Iran "WWWIII" rhetoric, just this week revealed (in concert with earlier statements from the UN's IAEA) that Iran suspended its nuclear weapons projects years ago.

Bush responds: “I believed before the NIE that Iran was dangerous and I believe after the NIE that Iran is dangerous.”

And, as we've noted several times, Peter Singer writes: "It's a distinctive characteristic of an ideology that it resists refutation."

Bush's words seem to follow this inferential pattern:

1. I believe X.
2. My hand-picked experts soaking up $44 billion taxpayer funds annually to help inform my beliefs say not-X.
3. I still believe X.
___________
Therefore ... ? (I mysteriously have access to better information than even the world's most extensive/expensive information-gathering agencies? I'm lying? I'm willfully ignorant? I speak directly with 'God'?)

You pick.

(IH) "Got Rights?"

Here are links to the three panelists from "Got Rights?" (I couldn't find Mark's official homepage, unless he's also a photographer in the DC area):

Grace Clement (Read about her book here)
Bonnie Brown
Mark Parascandola

Lastly, here's a link to Ken Knisley's (the moderator) one-post blog, set up just prior to his death. (Warning: the comments section is very sad.)

(IH & PE) Chimp Beats College Students on Memory Tests

Chipping away at yet another prop for speciesism:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/huff-wires/20071203/chimp-memory/

(A&P) Piper's Fetishizing of Fetishism

Adrian Piper claims that we errantly fetishize art objects if we see them as unique, their spatio-temporal locations and histories not amounting to a full-fledged "identity, and their putative power to influence us a mere reflection of our own displaced capacities. Human beings, that is, are alone inherently creative, "alive," and non-reproducible.

Her complaint with fetishism is Marxist in spirit (as he applies the concept to commodities and economic "laws"), though I suspect that the impulse to fetishize in aesthetics (as in human sexuality and religion), while clearly an epistemological and metaphysical error (the object of our fetish does not in fact possess the properties we ascribe to it), is relatively harmless. We oftentimes willingly submit to exaggerated or false accounts of the nature of art objects in order fully to appreciate their aesthetic dimension. (We "lose" ourselves in a novel, for example, tacitly attributing to its characters and setting more reality and power than they possess.)

It may be that Piper would not count these as legitimate examples of fetishism in art (because we are at least partly aware of our impulse to fetishize). At any rate, the very idea of fetishism seems to lose much of its force when transferred from the life-and-death realm of political economy to the highly subjective world of art.