Jason Hackenwerth’s balloon sculptures are playful, dramatic and slightly indecent. Some of them can be worn; some of them fire unspeakable things. Ideal for adding a whiff of trauma to a child’s birthday party.
There are films of the sculptures too. (h/t, Coudal.)
A few weeks ago, in one of the ephemera roundups, I posted a link to some tilt-shift photography. The technique is a kind of reverse Supermarionation, whereby life-size objects are made to look like scale model miniatures. Keith Loutit combines tilt-shift photography with stop-motion filming. The results are quite striking. Watch those teeny tiny people move.
In the comments following this, on unrepentant former terrorist and current academic, William Ayers, I wrote:
I’m not sure what the precise level of ostracism should be for those, like Ayers, who show no contrition for past sins. But I find it remarkable that so little stigma is apparent. There is a double standard here, whereby leftwing extremism, even of the most contemptible kind, is excused as some youthful exuberance or badge of credibility. I’m trying to picture a deranged ultra-rightwing academic still being employed, even acclaimed, despite his past attempts at sedition and indiscriminate murder, and despite such “radical” statements as, “break into the homes of poor people and kill them. That’s where it’s really at.”
Well, hey there, daddio…
Jeff Goldstein has some thoughts on Obama’s links with Ayers, and the mainstream media’s strange incuriosity:
No evidence? Well, Stanley Kurtz and Steve Diamond, two of the only journalists actually interested enough to look into the relationship, would beg to differ about the extent of Obama’s relationship with Ayers… Obama, we have found out, lied about the extent of his relationship with Ayers ([AP reporter Douglass Daniel] appears unfazed by Senator Obama’s dishonesty); he has never given an account of his CAC activities, and Ayers’ role in those activities (and has in fact tried to keep Kurtz and other journalists from telling their stories, issuing “action alerts” directing supporters to try to shout down his critics). […]
Here’s Daniel:
Obama, who was a child when the Weathermen were planting bombs, has denounced Ayers’ radical views and actions.
Well, unless you count his glowing endorsement of those radical views as put into action, including an endorsement of Ayers’ book on education, (which is nothing if not in keeping with Ayers’ radical views about the US-as-villain-and-oppressor), and the funding he funneled, through CAC, to Ayers-backed “educational” programs that eschewed things like math and science for courses based around progressive and radical notions of “social justice” and the politicizing of curricula through the “small schools” initiative.
Other than that, though, yeah: consider Ayers and his radicalism denounced in the strongest terms!
“If you’re a Communist who’s declared war on the US government, if you’ve set off bombs all over the country and spent years on the run, there’s always one place where you will be welcomed with opened arms.”
A while ago, in the comments following this, I wrote:
It occurs to me that the implications of social construction can appeal to rather unsavoury motives. If a person’s tastes and disposition are primarily socially constructed, that person can also, presumably, be remade to suit society and its representatives. Such high-minded Agents of Society might even become “engineers of the human soul,” to borrow Stalin’s phrase. The idea of innate disposition and talent is in some circles quite contentious, not least with regard to intelligence and its unequal distribution. This seems to cause unease in ways that, say, the unequal distribution of musical or athletic talent does not. It also undermines many conceptions of egalitarianism, which is probably why it causes such a fuss.
And it does cause a fuss. It’s possible, for instance, to find people who are (or will be) employed precisely because of their well above average intelligence performing extraordinary contortions to deny the existence of the intelligence they possess. Some, like Joseph Kugelmass, an English graduate student at the University of California, say things like this:
The abstract personal definition of “intelligence,” reified in our minds thanks to IQ tests and their derivatives, is a source of social ills and should be abandoned. It impedes and confuses pedagogy, underwrites racism and sexism, inhibits culture, and trivializes political debate… To claim that intelligence exists as a phenomenon, but not as an inherent personal quality, is the same as arguing that race or gender exist as social phenomena but not as simple, natural facts. […] Intelligence, like all essentialism, is a technology of power. It reinforces privilege and hierarchizes speech. It cuts art and language off from its inspirations, aping capital by circulating language through a series of useless oppositions… and non-signifying refinements of craft.
Setting aside the tendentious postmodern framing, dutifully regurgitated, note how the objection to intelligence as a personal attribute is asserted rather than argued and is essentially political in origin.
With the above in mind, here’s a short TED lecture from 2003, in which Steven Pinker addresses the political appeal of the “blank slate” theory, its prevalence, and its shortcomings. Topics touched on include ideological taboos, experience versus theory, and the self-inflicted disrepute of literary criticism.
Pinker’s book, The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature, is well worth reading.
Time for another episode of the excellent documentary series The Planets, this time on the Sun. Titled Star, the episode captures the magnitude of several “Eureka!” moments, as when Angelo Secchi, the Vatican’s chief astronomer, realised the blinding disc in the daytime sky is another one of those points that twinkle at night. As with previous episodes, there’s plenty of rare footage and some interesting characters, not least Kristian Birkeland, who created laboratory auroras while wearing a fez to protect his brain from radiation.
The issue of classroom political advocacy crops up here quite often and Evan Maloney’s documentary, Indoctrinate U, illustrates just how far advocacy can go, and how corrosive to probity it can be. A key scene in Maloney’s film concerns psychology professor Laura Freberg, who faced a campaign of harassment by left-leaning colleagues and was told, “We never would have hired you if we knew you were a Republican.” Freberg’s students later admitted they’d known she was a “closet Republican” precisely because she didn’t use the classroom to air her political views.
A recent post on classroom advocacy at Crooked Timber, a site popular among left-leaning academics, has prompted some interesting comments:
There’s really just the media and you, the universities, between civilization and chaos, and you are natural enemies because reality is liberal and media is corporatist. […] If we lose to McCain, at some point you can say goodbye to your pretty little university system. […] I’d say meet in darkened caves in the middle of the night if that’s what it takes to get out the truth.
Some take a more nuanced view:
I expect my students to respect my statements in class as authoritative (although not necessarily correct), and so I have a responsibility to limit what I say in class to what is warranted by my expertise. Since candidate preference is not a matter of expertise, it would be remiss of me to indicate a preference for a specific candidate when teaching. However, this doesn’t apply to my non-teaching related interactions with students at the university where I teach.
It’s not all bad, of course.
Indoctrination only makes sense if you believe reasoning won’t actually win over the students.
But even if we set aside the not insignificant issue of whether professors of, say, literary criticism have any business trying to “win over” their students and mould their political outlook, reasonably or otherwise, there is another problem. Is the student-professor relationship sufficiently equal and reciprocal to ensure evidence and reason prevail? Is there no pressure on students to defer, to please? Can we simply assume that improper leverage will never be brought to bear – for instance, in terms of grading or more subtle signs of displeasure? And isn’t there an unavoidable air of… predation?
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