they used a *dog*?

Weirdest thing I’ve heard so far– the Navy SEALS used a dog. That’s weird enough, but the closing fact of the article is so weird it sounds like The Onion:

“Many SEAL dogs come equipped with ‘titanium fangs capable of ripping through enemy protective armor,’ at a cost of ‘about $2,000 a tooth,’ according to the Daily.”

Many SEAL dogs have titanium fangs?

conspiracy theories

Once in awhile they’re true, but I must admit that I usually find them completely uninteresting. (Even though I do find it hard to believe that JFK was killed by one gunman.)

The possibility that the majority are being deceived by an intimate elite cabal that knows what’s really going on seems to me to be totally eclipsed by the fact that even intimate elite cabals are just as ignorant and bewildered as the rest of us. That’s where the real action is– the truths that are hidden even from the powerful.

I’m not sure why the bin Laden conspiracy theories are gaining so much traction. Certainly there’s been some slippage in the details given of the hit scene, but ideas such as the ones that bin Laden was dead years ago, is still alive and being secretly interrogated, etc., don’t make much sense to me.

It’s hard to find one person even in your own country (longtime FBI fugitive David Rudolph is a good example; it took years to catch Rudolph and he was simply hiding in the hills and coming down for food once in awhile), let alone in Pakistan where bin Laden may have been receiving help from somebody, even if just private citizens and quite possibly at a higher level than that.

Also, why is it hard to believe that the U.S. military, frustrated by bin Laden’s decade at large, would relish the chance to gun him down on sight? On paper it might sound better to interrogate him, but this is the greatest national monster in U.S. history, and almost everybody there wanted him dead. (Even Hitler never attacked the U.S., and was only an official U.S. enemy for 3.5 years.)

In short, while I think we’re probably not hearing a clear and accurate version of all the operational details, I don’t see that the basic official story runs contrary to probability. In fact, I think there were probably shoot-to-kill orders from the start, and that’s simply being obscured by mixed reports and legal concerns, but if you were the U.S. President you’d be most likely to have issued precisely those orders. Do you really think Obama wanted to deal with a bin Laden trial?

As for the idea that he’s being held in some secret torture facility, I strongly doubt that too. Too hard to drag him kicking and screaming into a helicopter, he might not talk anyway, and then they’d either have to release him for trial eventually or just do a dirty killing and dump the body somewhere, which could eventually leak if they tried it.

In any case, I generally find uninteresting the idea that someone else knows the truth and is hiding it from me, though there are certainly such cases for all of us.

I’m no Lacanian analyst, but it seems like you could have a Lacanian field day applying the concept of the “Big Other” to conspiracy theories. In fact, you could make the case that in the West conspiracy theories have filled the gap vacated by religion. (Though they also flourish in highly religious cultures as well, such as the one in which I live.)

kitten transfer

She didn’t cry, but she looked utterly forlorn as we put her in that carrying box for the ride to Ma’adi. She had gotten really comfortable here, so it was a terrible feeling to watch her sit down in depressed silence in that box and not even cry. She’ll have a good vacation home with my cat expert, kitten-loving office colleague, and it’s better than being at the vet for a week. But still, you hate to cause even a moment of distress to an animal that was treated that badly that recently.

By now she’ll be there at her guest home. I wonder how the three adult cats there are reacting to her.

quick thought on Fintan Neylan’s review

Finally Speculations Vol. 2 downloaded, and when I noticed that Fintan Neylan’s review of Towards Speculative Realism is pretty short, I was easily able to find a few minutes for it. The review is clear and fair.

Normally it seems best not to respond to reviews at all, but Neylan does raise an interesting point that allows this to be classified as an “advice” post since it may be relevant to graduate student readers of the blog.

Neylan says there is more finesse in my work from 2006 onward, and he says this has something to do with my dialogue with other members of speculative realism. This is certainly part of it, but it’s part of a more general cause.

Namely, from 2006 onward I was simply much more connected, in the Latourian sense. As a grad student I had a touch of an “F U” attitude. (Towards Speculative Realism was initially going to include the statement I read at the start of my dissertation defense, but I was too shocked upon rereading by how combative it was, and thus it was excluded.) I’d never enjoyed school from about age 8 onward, had deeply non-enjoyed graduate school all the way through, and there simply weren’t many people above my own generation who were regularly supportive of what I was doing with Heidegger. In short, my attitude was always one of “the rebel,” and one’s graduate school persona generally carries over into early career as well.

Some things happened at around that time to shift how I viewed my personal trajectory. First, from 2005 I regularly received speaking invitations, which meant that I finally had an audience, and that goes a long way towards dissolving one’s sense of marginalization no matter how “non-mainstream” one might remain.

There was also the speculative realism community from 2006 onward, and it doesn’t matter who still agrees or disagrees to be labelled with that term– the work is done. The label changed things for all of us, and brought us all to a wider audience, which was precisely the intention of it, as we all explicitly discussed at the time. It’s far too late to complain about misunderstandings now, especially since everyone without exception has benefitted from it. We were all looking for an alternative to the mainstream continental philosophy we grew up with, and a slightly younger readership apparently had the same desire, which is why we’re all receiving a fair amount of attention now.

In 2006 I was also tenured. There’s always a tendency among the young to scorn academia, academic ranks and titles, etc., and often with good reason. But it does wonders for your sense of connectedness to the world to know that, barring disaster, you’re guaranteed lifetime employment in a job you really like. This is especially true in my case where it happens to be in a fascinating city and country and at a rather unique institution that’s been on a tremendous upswing the entire time I’ve been here, but especially since the move the new campus in 2008.

When writing up my current promotion case, I went back and checked my tenure dossier, which was compiled and submitted in fall 2005, and even that feels a bit raw and gradstudentesque now when I look back at it.

The general lesson here is that it may be wrong to think of intellectual development as an internal process that transpires in your mind. There’s some of that, of course, since age and practice do improve us in various ways. But much of our development takes place on the outside. You develop by entering into dialogue with other people, learning new things, hearing an unexpected objection at a conference, struggling with a single problem for 3 or 4 years before realizing you were looking at it the wrong way, and so forth. I’d never even heard of Levi three years ago, and now we talk philosophy all the time and it’s been very enlightening.

I wouldn’t say that I’ve “mellowed with age,” but what has changed since a decade ago is that I’ve become better at linking my ideas to other people’s ideas in ways that are useful for everyone, instead of just slamming my ideas on the table and assuming defiantly from the start that they’d be rejected and I’d have to fight my way out of a corner for them. If I could speak to my 25-year-old self, that’s probably the first advice I’d give– people are actually more receptive than you might think, even when they sometimes don’t sound receptive at first. But if you make an interesting case for an idea, there is at least a certain percentage of people out there who will give you a fair hearing. (Though ironically, it is often outside philosophy that the fairest hearings occur.)

It was probably this growing sense of the value of linking one’s ideas to numerous different electrical outlets that led me to do things like… accept administrative posts recently. Those offers came from out of nowhere, but I’ve found that these jobs are a great way to see what really goes on inside institutions, which is not remotely as sinister as I would have insinuated during my graduate students years.

In general, I think accepting responsibilities is the best way to polish and ripen yourself. It reminds you of how dependent you are on other people even for your own successes, and also how this or that effort could have collapsed if you’d simply been lazy one day and not followed up on something, and how things could have been even better if you’d simply used a bit more imagination on this or that point. 90% of the best ideas I’ve implemented at work this year have come from other people. There are tons of good ideas already out there, and you can make yourself the channel for bringing them about. An extreme case of that, of course, would be the President of a country. No one is capable of knowing everything about all aspects of a nation, so they have to choose good people to surround them and listen carefully for the best ideas of those people and learn how to implement them.

Babycat’s been reminding me a lot about responsibility too. As my father once said about a neglected fox terrier puppy he and my mother saved from my brother’s parking lot: “I love Woody, even though he’s ruined my life.” Well, Tamanya’s ruined my life too, in the sense that I’m always tired now and social life will remain in a tailspin until I don’t have to run home early every night to bottle-feed a kitten in sessions lasting several hours. But the fact is, large blocks of unobstructed private free time aren’t always intellectually healthy, let alone emotionally healthy.

That’s the main reason I usually say “yes” to everything. It’s a variant on Schopenhauer’s point that you should never decline a social invitation in order to read. As he put it, you’re a lot more likely to be provoked into thinking by going out and doing something than you are by reading a book. After some initial resistance, I eventually came to agree with Schopenhauer here.

Likewise, having a baby kitten in the house cuts way down on the amount of time I have to write, but having more time to write doesn’t necessarily make for better writing. Having too much time often means that a majority of it goes to waste on anxieties precisely over how much time you have. Sometimes it can be better to have little glimmers of free time surrounded by weighty responsibilities.

It would be interesting to do a thorough survey of the work conditions under which good writing (philosophy and otherwise) has been done. I suspect that a lot of it was done on the fly with distractions swarming all around.

My favorite example: Vico, who had lots of noisy, crying kids (his own) in the same room where he worked. He forced himself to be able to work amidst all that, and eventually it reached the point where he couldn’t work at all under conditions of peace and quiet.

In a sense, I’ve simply had less peace and quiet since 2006, and that may be the root of what Fintan Neylan mentions about my essays since then.

Speculations, Vol. 2

I’ve been so occupied with the conference and the kitten that I just learned today, from Rob Jackson, that SPECULATIONS VOL 2 is now available. But it will be at least a week before I can dig into it, since my schedule in England is packed.

I’m also having slow download issues with the journal every time I try, though it may just be my connection.

conference ends

The conference ended with the talk by our second keynote speaker, Mahmood Mamdani of Columbia University, now based most of the year in his home country, Uganda (his family is originally from India several generations ago). It was a well-received talk on the African perspective on Tahrir Square.

That was my first time being solo in charge of a whole conference, though I had tons of help. In fact, I mostly did all the logistical stuff; AUC’s Social Research Center chose the program this year.

And now I’m off right away tomorrow morning to London. At present I’m waiting for little Tamanya’s ride to the suburbs, which should come any minute. I look forward to hearing how she does with three adult cats.

Photo below: Mahmood Mamdani.

conference in Brighton

Title: Graduate Conference in Phenomenology- Sussex University, Brighton (UK)

Date: Thursday May 19, 2011
Time: All Day
Location: Brighton, East Sussex, United Kingdom
Notes: ‘The ends of Phenomenology’: Graduate Conference in Phenomenology, 19-20 May 2011, University of Sussex, Brighton (UK)

Over 50 years ago, Merleau-Ponty began his great work The Phenomenology of Perception with the words: ‘what is phenomenology?’ It may seem strange that this question had still to be asked half a century after the first works of Edmund Husserl appeared. But after Husserl’s project of turning phenomenology into a science that would provide a transcendental theory of meaning, phenomenology diverged in various directions: from Heidegger’s existential analytic to Sartre’s existentialism and Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of perception, to the radicalization of Levinas and Derrida. Most phenomenologists agree that phenomenology is a philosophical movement that began with Edmund Husserl (1859-1938). However, there is no consensus as to the end of phenomenology, in the sense of its possible limits and outstanding goals.

Within this broad understanding of the practice of phenomenology, we invite papers that seek to continue and/or reconfigure its legacy, or perhaps seek to critically draw its limits and end. ‘The ends of Phenomenology’ is a graduate conference in Phenomenology, organized by graduate students for graduate students. It aims to bring together postgraduates who are engaging in original research on phenomenology and thus to promote contemporary studies in this field.

Keynote Speakers:

– Professor Charles Guignon (University of South Florida)

– Professor Robert Bernasconi (Pennsylvania State University)

Abstract and paper format:

300-word abstracts and a brief CV should be sent to Jana Elsen (J.Elsen@sussex.ac.uk) no later than the 30th March 2011. Accepted papers should not exceed 3000 words or 20 minutes in their delivery.

Accepted papers will be considered for publication in our e-journal whose launch will coincide with the occasion of this conference.

http://www.sussex-phenomenology.blogspot.com

Egypt various

Was at a dinner party tonight in a neighborhood where many top former regime officials lived. The host of the dinner, a perfectly honest engineer, said only half-jokingly that most of his neighbors are now in jail. There was also a military presence out there, apparently because Omar Suleiman lives in the neighborhood as well.

Returning to Zamalek, there was a weird pro-Mubarak protest headed west along 26th of July Street. It was small but very aggressive, maybe 10-15 young men, some of them carrying Mubarak posters, all of them chanting pro-Mubarak slogans. They walked very assertively down the rows of stopped traffic. All the merchants along 26th of July, still in possession of their January/February gear, moved within minutes to block their windows with plywood and other such barriers. But no damage was done; just chanting.

This protests may have something to do with the Justice Minister’s RATHER UNCOMPROMISING STATEMENT about Mubarak’s legal case, basically saying that if he is found guilty of the premeditated murder of 800 protestors, the death sentence is inevitable.