Quotulatiousness

September 11, 2012

Thomas Szasz, RIP

Filed under: Books, Health, Liberty, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 11:25

A brief obituary notice for Thomas Szasz:

Thomas Stephen Szasz, M.D., 92, died at his home in Manlius, N.Y. on September 8, 2012. He was born in Budapest, Hungary in 1920, and emigrated to the United States in 1938. He graduated the University of Cincinnati with an undergraduate degree in physics in 1941, and as valedictorian of the medical school in 1944. After medical internship at Boston City Hospital and psychiatry residency at the University of Chicago, he pursued psychoanalytic training. [. . .] He argued that what are called mental illnesses are often better described as “problems in living,” and he opposed involuntary psychiatric interventions. His reputation in defense of these principles was launched in 1961 with The Myth of Mental Illness. He published 35 books, translated into numerous languages, and hundreds of articles in the subsequent 50 years.

Jonathan Kay: How Canada has changed since 9/11

Filed under: Cancon, History, Politics — Tags: — Nicholas @ 10:55

I’m not sure many people will recognize the Canada Kay portrays before 9/11, and many will take strong issue with his view of Canada today, but I think everyone would agree we’re not the country we were 11 years ago:

How much has Canada changed in the last eleven years? Consider this: As the World Trade Center rubble was still smoldering, the then-leader of Canada’s left-wing NDP party, Alexa McDonough, declared: “As responsible international citizens, it is important to reaffirm our commitment to pursuing peaceful solutions to the tensions and hostilities that breed such mindless violence.” A year later, in a CBC interview broadcast on the first anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks, then-prime minister Jean Chrétien suggested the 9/11 attacks might have been a reaction to Western greed and arrogance: “You cannot exercise your powers to the point of humiliation for the others.”

Such remarks would be unthinkable now. Canada is a place where even most mainstream leftists recognize the need for military intervention as a means of disrupting terrorism and protecting local populations.

[. . .]

In short, the last 11 years have fundamentally transformed Canada’s attitude toward foreign policy, and the use of force more generally. After a quarter-century pacifist interregnum, we once again became comfortable with our proper historical role as an active military ally to the United States and Britain. Canadians now stand up and salute their soldiers at NHL hockey games. A major part of Ontario’s Highway 401 — the road travelled by fallen soldiers from CFB Trenton to the coroner’s office in Toronto — has been renamed the Highway of Heroes. These are small, symbolic gestures that any American would see as entirely normal. But they would have been unthinkable in the pre-9/11 era, when our Liberal leaders still entertained gauzy visions of a world without war.

Manufacturers may follow the music industry pattern

Filed under: Business, Law, Liberty, Technology — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 00:03

An interesting article in The Economist:

As an expert on intellectual property, Mr Weinberg has produced a white paper that documents the likely course of 3D-printing’s development — and how the technology could be affected by patent and copyright law. He is far from sanguine about its prospects. His main fear is that the fledgling technology could have its wings clipped by traditional manufacturers, who will doubtless view it as a threat to their livelihoods, and do all in their powers to nobble it. Because of a 3D printer’s ability to make perfect replicas, they will probably try to brand it a piracy machine.

[. . .]

As with any disruptive technology — from the printing press to the photocopier and the personal computer — 3D printing is going to upset existing manufacturers, who are bound to see it as a threat to their traditional way of doing business. And as 3D printing proliferates, the incumbents will almost certainly demand protection from upstarts with low cost of entry to their markets.

Manufacturers are likely to behave much like the record industry did when its own business model — based on selling pricey CD albums that few music fans wanted instead of cheap single tracks they craved — came under attack from file-swapping technology and MP3 software. The manufacturers’ most likely recourse will be to embrace copyright, rather than patent, law, because many of their patents will have expired. Patents apply for only 20 years while copyright continues for 70 years after the creator’s death.

[. . .]

In that, the record industry was remarkably successful. Today, websites and ISPs have to block or remove infringing material whenever they receive a DMCA takedown notice from a copyright holder — something that happens more often than actually justified. Google reckons that more than a third of the DMCA notices it has received over the years have turned out to be bogus copyright claims. Over a half were from companies trying to restrict competing businesses rather than law-breakers.

Rallying under the banner of piracy and theft, established manufacturers could likewise seek to get the doctrine of “contributory infringement” included in some expanded object-copyright law as a way of crippling the personal-manufacturing movement before it eats their lunch. Being free to sue websites that host 3D design files as “havens of piracy” would save them the time and money of having to prosecute thousands of individuals with a 3D printer churning out copies at home.

More evidence that a bit of dirt can be a healthy thing for kids

Filed under: Health, Media, Science — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 00:02

Matt Ridley reviews a new book by Moises Velasquez-Manoff:

In a remarkable new book, “An Epidemic of Absence,” Moises Velasquez-Manoff draws together hundreds of such studies to craft a powerful narrative carrying a fascinating argument. Infection with parasites prevents or ameliorates many diseases of inflammation. The author briefly cured his own hay fever and eczema by infecting himself with hookworms-before concluding that the price in terms of diarrhea and headaches was too high.

I’ve touched on the “hygiene hypothesis” in these pages before. In its cartoon form the argument-that in a clean world our immune system gets bored and turns on itself or on harmless pollen-isn’t very convincing. But Mr. Velasquez-Manoff makes a far subtler, more persuasive case. Parasites have evolved to damp our immune responses so that they can stay in our bodies. Our immune system evolved to expect parasites to damp it. So in a world with no parasites, it behaves like a person leaning into the wind when it drops: The system falls over.

Moreover, just as brains outsource much of their development to the outside world-the visual system is refined by visual input, the language system can only develop in a language-using society — so the immune system seems to have happily outsourced much of its regulation to friendly microbes. Without them, the immune system becomes unbalanced.

[. . .]

One of Mr. Velasquez-Manoff’s most surprising chapters is on autism, a disorder that almost exactly parallels asthma in its recent rise among affluent, urban, mainly male, disproportionately firstborn people. Better diagnosis explains perhaps half the rise, but the brains of people with autism are often inflamed, and there’s anecdotal evidence that infection with worms or viruses can tame autistic symptoms, at least temporarily.

QotD: Degrees of elitism

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Education, History, Quotations — Tags: — Nicholas @ 00:01

Over the last thirty years, the university has replaced the labor union as the most important institution, after the corporation, in American political and economic life. As union jobs have disappeared, participation in the labor force, the political system, and cultural affairs is increasingly regulated by professional guilds that require their members to spend the best years of life paying exorbitant tolls and kissing patrician rings. Whatever modest benefits accreditation offers in signaling attainment of skills, as a ranking mechanism it’s zero-sum: the result is to enrich the accreditors and to discredit those who lack equivalent credentials.

Jean Baudrillard once suggested an important correction to classical Marxism: exchange value is not, as Marx had it, a distortion of a commodity’s underlying use value; use value, instead, is a fiction created by exchange value. In the same way, systems of accreditation do not assess merit; merit is a fiction created by systems of accreditation. Like the market for skin care products, the market for credentials is inexhaustible: as the bachelor’s degree becomes democratized, the master’s degree becomes mandatory for advancement. Our elaborate, expensive system of higher education is first and foremost a system of stratification, and only secondly — and very dimly — a system for imparting knowledge.

The original universities in the Western world organized themselves as guilds, either of students, as in Bologna, or of masters, as in Paris. From the first, their chief mission was to produce not learning but graduates, with teaching subordinated to the process of certification — much as artisans would impose long and wasteful periods of apprenticeship, under the guise of “training,” to keep their numbers scarce and their services expensive. For the contemporary bachelor or master or doctor of this or that, as for the Ming-era scholar–bureaucrat or the medieval European guildsman, income and social position are acquired through affiliation with a cartel. Those who want to join have to pay to play, and many never recover from the entry fee.

The Editors, “Death by Degrees”, n+1, 2012-06-19

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