Quotulatiousness

June 12, 2013

VICE interviews Jesse Walker about his new book

Filed under: Books, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 13:14

The book is called The United States of Paranoia, and VICE‘s Harry Cheadle sat down with Walker to talk about it:

The question of whether you believe in conspiracy theories is surprisingly tricky. You may not think that the moon landing or Beyoncé’s pregnancy was fake, you may not imagine lizards lurking behind Donald Rumsfield and Dick Cheney’s faces, but by now you probably know that the US government is operating a massive secret surveillance apparatus, which would sound like a paranoid fantasy if it weren’t true. And many, many Americans profess some level of credulity when it comes to some conspiracies, which at times can seem less crazy than believing that there’s never, ever, a man behind the curtain pulling strings.

[. . .]

VICE: You take a long historical view of conspiracy theories in America. Do you think we’re more paranoid than we used to be?
Jesse Walker: I don’t think so. I’m not quite sure how I would even measure that, given what the baseline of paranoia is. What I do think happens is that the direction of the paranoia shifts. One thing I mentioned in the book was how a lot of people started saying after Obama got elected, “Ooh, the right wing has suddenly gotten very paranoid.” In fact, in the Bush era, there were tons of right-wing conspiracy theories, it’s just that they weren’t about the government. They were aimed mostly at people outside America’s borders. With another party in power, [the right] has rediscovered some of its libertarian impulses. A lot of discussions about the United States becoming more paranoid or less paranoid just has to do with what kind of paranoia people are paying attention to.

The recent revelations about the NSA and FBI’s monitoring of cell phone metadata and internet communications make me wonder if it’s possible that the government itself is paranoid.
I can’t get into the head of the average NSA bureaucrat enacting a program. But I think that the creation of that sort of system obviously has to do with fear and paranoia. I should stress I’m using the word paranoid in a colloquial way. I should just be saying “fear.” Another problem has to do with the way “conspiracy theory” gets used, because people who use the phrase conspiracy theory disparagingly believe in all sorts of conspiracies, it’s just that they say, “Well those are true, so they don’t count.” What they really mean when they say “conspiracy theory” is, at best, “nutty conspiracy theory,” and, at worst, “conspiracy theory that feeds into an ideology that I don’t share, which I will therefore think of as nutty.” But I’ve forgotten your original question.

Corey Robin refutes David Brooks, “The Last Stalinist”

Filed under: Books, Government, History, Liberty, Politics — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 13:03

David Brooks wrote a column the other day that got lots of applause from the communitarians on both sides of the aisle for blaming Edward Snowden’s atomistic individualism and his “inability to make commitments and connections”. At Jacobin, Corey Robin explains why:

This is an old argument on the communitarian right and left: the loss of social bonds and connections turns men and women into the flotsam and jetsam of modern society, ready for any reckless adventure, no matter how malignant: treason, serial murder, totalitarianism.

It’s mostly bullshit, but there’s a certain logic to what Brooks is saying, albeit one he might not care to face up to.

In the long history of state tyranny, it is often those who are bound by close ties of personal connection to family and friends that are most likely to cooperate with the government: that is, not to “betray” their oaths to a repressive regime, not to oppose or challenge authoritarian rule. Precisely because those ties are levers that the regime can pull in order to engineer an individual’s collaboration and consent.

Take the Soviet Union under Stalin. Though there’s a venerable tradition in social thought that sees Soviet totalitarianism as the product of atomized individuals, one of the factors that made Stalinism possible was precisely that men and women were connected to each other, that they were in families and felt bound to protect each other. To protect each other by cooperating with rather than opposing Stalin.

Nikolai Bukharin’s confession in a 1938 show trial to an extraordinary career of counterrevolutionary crime, crimes he clearly did not commit, has long served as a touchstone of the manic self-liquidation that was supposed to be communism. It has inspired such treatments as Arthur Koestler’s Darkness at Noon, Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s Humanism and Terror, and Godard’s La Chinoise. Yet contrary to the myth that Bukharin somehow chose to sacrifice himself for the sake of the cause, Bukharin was brutally interrogated for a year and he was repeatedly threatened with violence against his family. In the end, the possibility that a confession might save them, if not him, proved to be potent.

[. . .]

Back to David Brooks. Brooks likes to package his strictures in the gauzy wrap of an apolitical communitarianism. But Brooks is also, let us not forget, an authority- and state-minded chap, who doesn’t like punks like Snowden mucking up the work of war and the sacralized state. And it is precisely banal and familial bromides such as these — the need to honor one’s oaths, the importance of family and connection — that have underwritten popular collaboration with that work for at least a century, if not more.

Stalin understood all of this. So does David Brooks.

H/T to Radley Balko for the link.

Federal government to go ahead with Pickering airport

Filed under: Cancon, Government — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 09:05

As my house is directly under the most likely approach to the new airport, I suspect my property value is about to take a big dive:

After four decades, the long-standing controversial plan to build an airport on the Pickering Lands is scheduled for takeoff.

But that doesn’t mean residents are on board.

At a press conference held on the lands Tuesday, Finance Minister Jim Flaherty announced the 7,500 hectares of land in Pickering, Markham and Uxbridge will be transformed into a new airport and a 2,000-hectare Rouge National Urban Park.

“These lands were acquired by the government more than 40 years ago with the intention of developing an airport, but it never got off the ground,” Flaherty said. “The uncertainty ends today.”

The plan is to begin work immediately, he said. It will take at least 10 years to build the airport in the lower quadrant of the lands with Hwy. 7 and Brock Rd. as a southeastern boundary. No cost has yet been assigned to the construction of the airport.

Of course, our local politicians love it:

Durham Council chairman Roger Anderson said the airport will reduce congestion on Hwy. 401.

“Wouldn’t it be nice if you didn’t have to drive to Mississauga to go to Ottawa?” Anderson said. “For us, it’s a big win. It will show the province Durham should get one job for every three, which we fought about for years and the other thing — It’s not only good for Durham, but for Scarborough and York and Markham.”

The Ajax-Pickering Board of Trade is also backing the airport proposal, but said it wants to study it in more detail and consult with members. The board has been advocating for congestion relief in Durham Region and said the airport would be “a game changer.”

I wonder how long it’ll take after it opens to become the new Mirabel?

It was intended to replace the existing Dorval Airport as the eastern air gateway to Canada; from 1975 to 1997, all international flights to/from Montreal were required to use Mirabel. However, Mirabel’s distant location and lack of transport links made it unpopular with airlines and travellers. Moreover, Montréal’s economic decline relative to Toronto kept passenger volumes from rising to the levels originally anticipated. And so Dorval Airport not only remained viable but resumed handling overseas flights. Eventually, Mirabel was relegated to the role of a cargo airport. Initially a source of pride, the airport became an embarrassment, widely regarded in Canada as being a boondoggle and a white elephant. Ironically, the Dorval Airport was renamed Montréal–Pierre Elliott Trudeau International Airport after the Canadian Prime Minister, Pierre Elliot Trudeau, whose government spearheaded the Mirabel project to replace Dorval.

For “ironically” in the Wikipedia description, read “deservedly”.

Changing the FDA to meet the new needs of personalized medicine

Filed under: Health, Science — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 08:31

At Marginal Revolution, Alex Tabarrok links to a new paper by Peter Huber:

In a brilliant new paper (pdf) (html) Peter Huber draws upon molecular biology, network analysis and Bayesian statistics to make some very important recommendations about FDA policy.

[. . .]

The current regime was built during a time of pervasive ignorance when the best we could do was throw a drug and a placebo against a randomized population and then count noses. Randomized controlled trials are critical, of course, but in a world of limited resources they fail when confronted by the curse of dimensionality. Patients are heterogeneous and so are diseases. Each patient is a unique, dynamic system and at the molecular level diseases are heterogeneous even when symptoms are not. In just the last few years we have expanded breast cancer into first four and now ten different types of cancer and the subdivision is likely to continue as knowledge expands. Match heterogeneous patients against heterogeneous diseases and the result is a high dimension system that cannot be well navigated with expensive, randomized controlled trials. As a result, the FDA ends up throwing out many drugs that could do good:

    Given what we now know about the biochemical complexity and diversity of the environments in which drugs operate, the unresolved question at the end of many failed clinical trials is whether it was the drug that failed or the FDA-approved script. It’s all too easy for a bad script to make a good drug look awful. The disease, as clinically defined, is, in fact, a cluster of many distinct diseases: a coalition of nine biochemical minorities, each with a slightly different form of the disease, vetoes the drug that would help the tenth. Or a biochemical majority vetoes the drug that would help a minority. Or the good drug or cocktail fails because the disease’s biochemistry changes quickly but at different rates in different patients, and to remain effective, treatments have to be changed in tandem; but the clinical trial is set to continue for some fixed period that doesn’t align with the dynamics of the disease in enough patients

    Or side effects in a biochemical minority veto a drug or cocktail that works well for the majority. Some cocktail cures that we need may well be composed of drugs that can’t deliver any useful clinical effects until combined in complex ways. Getting that kind of medicine through today’s FDA would be, for all practical purposes, impossible.

The alternative to the FDA process is large collections of data on patient biomarkers, diseases and symptoms all evaluated on the fly by Bayesian engines that improve over time as more data is gathered. The problem is that the FDA is still locked in an old mindset when it refuses to permit any drugs that are not “safe and effective” despite the fact that these terms can only be defined for a large population by doing violence to heterogeneity. Safe and effective, moreover, makes sense only when physicians are assumed to be following simple, A to B, drug to disease, prescribing rules and not when they are targeting treatments based on deep, contextual knowledge that is continually evolving

New disclosure rules for Canadian oil, gas, and mining companies

Filed under: Business, Cancon — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 08:19

David Akin in the Toronto Sun:

The Canadian government announced new measures Tuesday that will force oil, gas, and mining companies to publicly disclose every penny they pay to any government at home or around the world.

The move is seen as an anti-corruption measure and one that many activists groups that work in the developing world, such as Oxfam, have been demanding for years, particularly since Canada is home to a majority of the world’s mining companies.

The European Union and the United States have already moved towards mandatory reporting requirements for their mining companies.

There have been cases in some developing countries where multinationals pay a host government substantial sums for the rights to oil, gas or minerals, but the local population complains that they do not know how much their governments are getting and, as a result, cannot demand their governments spend some of that wealth on them.

It’s not just in developing countries, either, as some First Nations activists have complained that they can’t get information on what their band councils receive in various resource development deals here in Canada. Of course, some (many?) deals get done with a bit of bribery to sweeten the attraction, but not every country will have (or enforce) rules like this.

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