Alan Jacobs

adventurousness and its enemies, part 2

I predict we’re in a phase. In a few years, people will learn to reduce their message sending, the same way many of us have learned not to answer the phone during dinner. Technology enriches our lives. I’m hoping the students of today will embrace the nearly instantaneous electronic communication that modern mobile technology enables, and use it to make things better.

I don’t think such a law should pass. I think the current laws, which criminalize the leaking of secrets but not the publishing of leaks, strike the right balance. However, as a citizen of a democracy, I’m willing to be voted down, and I’m willing to see other democratically proposed restrictions on Wikileaks put in place. It may even be that whatever checks and balances do get put in place by the democratic process make anything like Wikileaks impossible to sustain in the future.

The key, though, is that democracies have a process for creating such restrictions, and as a citizen it sickens me to see the US trying to take shortcuts. The leaders of Myanmar and Belarus, or Thailand and Russia, can now rightly say to us ‘You went after Wikileaks’ domain name, their hosting provider, and even denied your citizens the ability to register protest through donations, all without a warrant and all targeting overseas entities, simply because you decided you don’t like the site. If that’s the way governments get to behave, we can live with that.’

adventurousness and its enemies

Ohio State lists 458 people in its athletic department. Included are the athletic director (who’s also a vice president of the university), four people with the title senior associate athletic director, 12 associate athletic directors, an associate vice president, a “senior associate legal counsel for athletics” and plus a nine-person NCAA compliance office. NCAA rules are complex, to be sure, but does Ohio State really needs nine people who do nothing but push NCAA paperwork? The Ohio State NCAA compliance staff is lean and mean compared to the football staff, which includes 13 football coaches, a director of football operations, three associate directors of football operations, a “director of football performance” and three football-only trainers.

How do these numbers compare to academic departments at the school? There are 192 faculty members in Ohio State’s English department, with a support staff of about 50. Thus the Ohio State athletic department has roughly twice as many people as the Ohio State English department. Sports receive more staffing than English though nearly all Ohio State students at some juncture take a course through the English department, while few participate in NCAA athletics. And sports receive more staffing than English, though there is a widespread feeling that many Americans are inadequately educated in subjects such as English, while not one single person in the entire United States believes there isn’t enough emphasis on sports.

crabwise

brave new digital world (number 3,782 in a series)

The abstractions of science are too readily assimilable to the abstractions of industry and commerce, which see everything as interchangeable with or replaceable by something else. There is a kind of egalitarianism which holds that any two things equal in price are equal in value, and that nothing is better than anything that may profitably or fashionably replace it. Forest = field = parking lot; if the price of alteration is right, then there is no point in quibbling over differences. One place is as good as another, one use is as good as another, one life is as good as another — if the price is right. Thus political sentimentality metamorphoses into commercial indifference or aggression. This is the industrial doctrine of the interchangeability of parts, and we apply it to places, to creatures, and to our fellow humans as if it were the law of the world, using all the while a sort of middling language, imitated from the sciences, that cannot speak of heaven or earth, but only of concepts. This is a rhetoric of nowhere, which forbids a passionate interest in, let alone a love of, anything in particular.

landscapelifescape:

Olive Tree, Jerusalem, Israel

via 2.bp.blogspot.com

That said, there is something reassuring about a list, a precision and formality that makes us think we’ve got a handle on things. Isn’t every list in reality a ceremonial flourish against amnesia and chaos? Indeed, before Copernicus and Kepler stretched the sidereal canvas, lists were the logical means of representing the analogical, immutable and hierarchical universe. Nature, after all, was once a series of graded entities from the lowest (grubs) to the highest (God), and a list — whether of elements or angels — automatically conveyed the Aristotelian notion of a place for everything and everything in its place. Even after astronomers abandoned the notion of a closed Ptolemaic universe, hierarchical thinking was not abandoned. Order wasn’t something you tossed aside because of a little thing like infinity. A list spoke the volumes that numbers could only symbolize.