From Anthony Scalia's dissenting opinion in Hamdi v. Rumsfeld (starting on page 52):

Many think it not only inevitable but entirely proper that liberty give way to security in times of national crisis — that, at the extremes of military exigency, inter arma silent leges. Whatever the general merits of the view that war silences law or modulates its voice, that view has no place in the interpretation and application of a Constitution designed precisely to confront war and, in a manner that accords with democratic principles, to accommodate it. Because the Court has proceeded to meet the current emergency in a manner the Constitution does not envision, I respectfully dissent.

I am philosophically antagonistic with Scalia, but this is an opinion that not only demands my respect but also my agreement. It is easy to vilify Scalia as Dick Cheney's duck-hunting crony, but I will prefer a Supreme Court Justice with whom I respectfully disagree over any despot, enlightened or not, with whom I do.

Uniform fetish, as it were.

A while back, Erika commented whether I can write a bit about post-Tiananmen China. But am afraid I find writing about China to be utterly debilitating; because I am not any better informed about China, fact-wise, than anyone here who reads the major newspaper, and also because writing about China as an expatriate of long and far remove feels even more futile than it normally is.

I do read Chinese newspapers, not for information particularly, because most of them are either salacious rags or mouth-pieces, often both. But from what is and is not reported and discussed, reading between the lines, I can obtain an oblique view of what is happening. And there are a few conscientious papers in China, even though they must be circumspect in many ways. 《南方周末》 (Southern Weekend), from which the following article is taken, is a good example.

"是个人管社会，还是社会管个人？"

"Should society regulate the individual, or should individuals regulate society?"

今年高考，某省一考生因迟到一分钟被取消考试资格，引来各方议论纷纷。抗议者说，考生为了准备这一终身大考，苦读数年，仅因为这一分钟而毁了前程，实在太残酷。辩护者则说，社会有社会的规矩。只有个人服从社会的法则，社会才能运转。

A controversy went up when, during this year's national college entrance exams, a student was disqualified because he was a minute late. The critics argue: a student spend years of hard work to prepare for such an important exam, to disqualify him because of a minute's tardiness is simply cruel. The defenders counter: a society has rules; only when individuals obey the rules can the society function correctly.

但是，如果社会的法则错了怎么办？

But what if the society's rules were incorrect?

笔者实在想不明白，迟到一分钟，赶快走进考场开始做题就是了，为什么要取消考试资格？更何况，我们的公交系统并不牢靠，堵车到处都是。这些问题，本来是我们这个社会中成年人的责任。我们的成年人管不好城市，理不顺交通，对因此受害的孩子不但没有负疚感，反而要孩子们为大人的无能和失职来负责，并且还振振有辞：你们从小要学会遵守社会的规矩呀！这真是岂有此理！

Arriving a minute late - well, hurry up and get started; I simply cannot understand why it is necessary to disqualify the student? Our public transportation is far from reliable, delays and congestion are everywhere; taking care of these problems are the responsibilities of we adults. We can't manage the city, can't manage the traffic, but not only do we not feel guilty towards the young people who suffer thereby, we have them take the fall for our own incompetence. Meanwhile we intone pompously: you young people must learn to obey the society's rules! What nonsense!

不错，那个考生明年还有一次机会。但是，每一个考过大学的人(包括笔者这种在高考系统中的成功者)心里都清楚：准备高考、被迫长期死记硬背，严重压抑个人心智和学识的发展。如果今年能考上，却因为这一分钟而不得不再考一年，等于浪费了一年的生命。而高考对孩子的心理压力之大，即使是我们这些当年轻松过关的“过来人”也会终身不忘。20 多年前自己参加高考时，头一天晚上就没有睡着。第一门考试，开场才 5 分钟，坐在前面的女生就晕倒被抬了出去。如今我们还要怎么折腾下一代？这样因迟到一分钟而取消考试资格，以后考试前还有人能睡得着觉吗？

True enough, that student will get another chance next year. But anyone who has gone through the examination process (including people, such as myself, who were successful in that system) knows well: to prepare for the exam means years of hard learning by rote, seriously stunting an individual's intellectual and mental growth. If it was possible to pass this year, but because of this one minute, to be forced to wait until the next, this is nothing less than having a year's life wasted. The mental stresses associated with the exam are so enormous that even those of us who passed will never be able to forget. Twenty years ago, I spent a sleepless night before the exam, and five minutes into it, a girl in front passed out and had to be carried out of the room. And why are we are still torturing the next generations this way? If a minute's delay is enough for disqualification, will anyone ever be able to go to sleep the night before the exam?

这一事例，充分显示了如今中国虽然已经走向市场经济了，但计划经济时代的权威主义文化还是盘根错节。不错，个人必须服从社会的基本规则，社会才能正常运行。但是，社会毕竟是由个人组成的，社会的规则，是具体的个人制定的、为众多的个人服务的，同时也是得到这些个人的认可才成立的。没有这种认可，任何社会的规则都不具有合法性。因此，我们社会中的个人，不应该被动地服从社会的规则，而必须积极参与制定、改造这些规则，创造这些规则生成的程序。也只有这样，一个社会才能够逐渐学会如何自己管理自己。

This incident fully demonstrates that although China is stepping towards a market economy, the authoritarianism from state-planning days are still ever pervasive. Yes, individuals must conform to the fundamental rules of society, if the society if to function. But society is made up of individuals, society's rules are created by individual persons, to serve the broad public, with the consent of the public. Any rule, imposed without such consent, cannot be legal. Thus, the individuals in our society must not passively obey society's rules, but take an active participation to create and reform such rules, and to establish the frameworks for creating rules. This is the only way a society can learn to manage and regulate itself.

考生来考试，是为了寻求受教育的机会。我们的教育目标，不是教学生如何守别人为自己制定的规范，而是帮助他们理解规范应该如何形成，自己如何参与创造合理的社会规范。换句话说，我们不应该教他们如何“听话”，而是要他们学会如何自己管理自己，如何挑战不合理的社会规范，创造新的制度。因为我们的社会需要的是积极、负责的公民，而不是一天到晚战战兢兢、生怕自己犯错误的臣仆。　

Students participate in the examinations in order to seek opportunities for education. Our educational goal should not be teaching students to obey rules made for them by other people, but to help them to understand how rules are to be made, and how to participate in the creation and regulation of a reasonable society. In other words: we should not teach them to "listen and obey", but to regulate themselves, to challenge unfair societal rules, to create new social frameworks. What our society needs are active, responsible citizens, not fearful underlings and servants afraid of making mistakes.

Canadian Broadcasting (CBC, which is publicly owned) apparently has a TV program, ZeD, consisting of viewer-contributed (?) videos: short films, animation, music videos, &c. Can you imagine PBS giving TV air-time to, oh say, "Star Wars Gangsta Rap" or "Heap of Trouble"?

Sandra Tsing Loh, fired in March from KCRW in the midst of the post-Super Bowl FCC crack-down, is back.

Royal Journal, an excellent collection of found photographs, notes, &c., sadly defunct, has been resurrected as a fine photoblog, Pic Patrol. [Alas, it appears to be defunct yet again (June 29).]

Satan's Laundromat, actually another fine photoblog with bite (see the entry "Red America").

From here in Chicago: Big Happy Funhouse, a great and often hilarious weblog of found photos.

Time Tales is a found photography project by two Dutch photographers. It also has a wonderful page of links to an eclectic collection of interesting websites.

Object Not Found, an Australian collection of found photography and writing, has been re-designed and updated after a hiatus.

Is This You? is a collection of photographs & IDs found around London; sometimes, the photographs manager to find their way back to where they came from. Doubly found, as it were.

Look at Me, a found photography project by the La Modern Association art collective. The website regularly links to interesting art (this rather stunning panorama of Paris by night, for example) and art-related news found on the web.

Found Magazine, the website of the eponymous zine dedicated to found objects: photography, writing, even audio. Founded by This American Life (my favourite show on radio) contributor Davy Rothbart.

Not quite found objects, but found stories: Other People's Stories. It hasn't been updated for a while, but the archives are well worth perusal.

A follow up of the previous post: you classically trained humanists out there, any strong feelings, either way, on the various translations (in particular consideration: Robert Fagles, Robert Fitzgerald, Richmond Lattimore) of the Homeric epics? I have only read the Fitzgerald, happily now reprinted by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. I was enthralled by them then, particullarly by the Iliad; but that was a dozen years ago, and I can't really trust myself that far back.

It is regarded as somewhat disreputable to prefer reading books reviews over reading the books being reviewed; this is judged as being less than fair-minded and also less than independent-minded. But let me defend this preference on the ground that truly fair and independent minds are mythical beasts, wondrous unicorns as it were, and also that time is always in limited supply. In the following instances, I have the additional excuse that I can neither meet with Ronald Reagan, now that he is dead, nor do I want to put up $10 to see Troy.

"The first post-Enlightenment president?", The Economist's obituary of Ronald Reagan, is generally favourable, but also remarkable nuanced. Which is good relief from the embarassingly glowing elocutions that is taking up so much newsprint and air-time, even on NPR. This is an example of good review, that although I must disagree with it, I can at the same time understand and respect it.

"A Little Iliad", Daniel Mendelsohn's review of the Wolfgang Petersen film Troy, probably won't be fleeced by ad writers for exclamations, which is a shame; it is not often that a film review revolves itself around the Aristotelian critique of epic poetry. In fact, I was far more interested in seeing the film after reading it than I would after reading this. Perhaps when it comes out on DVD, maybe. (David Edelstein's review of the same, referred to by Mendelsohn, is here.)

It is interesting to consider both reviews, good and bad, are likely to be far more nuanced than the original articles.

Edward Tufte, professor emeritus of statistics and design at Yale, has published a cogent exposition on the corruption of PowerPoint. a short version of which was published as an editorial in Wired. Tufte's critique, among others, was the basis of a New York Time article daftly entitled "Power point makes you stupid", which gave rather short shrift to the Tufte's philosophical concerns. Those can be found, clearly and lively put, in his three beautifully published monographs, well worth owning, on the grammer and philosophy of visual communications: The Visual Display of Quantitative Information, Envisioning Information, and Visual Explanations.

It is not surprising, if oft overlooked, that the words and definitions we chose to use, unconsciously or intentional, are never neutral; they will colour our meaning, will hinder as well as aid both in our own perception and understanding, and in that of our audience. Francis Bacon and George Orwell warned us as much. In his essays, the prevalence of dichotomous modes of thinking and classification was one of Stephen Jay Gould's favorite themes; because it is impossible to fully comprehend phenomena of any complexity, Gould suggests, that we necessarily resort to a partial representations, whose selection is to a greater or lesser degree, culturally & personally (æsthetically) influenced. This is reflected in the fundamental dichotomy of representational painting and photography; it is easy to say "this is a photograph of a pepper" but it is impossible to conflate the photograph with the pepper itself — you certainly can't eat the photograph. It is difficult to say what a "natural" perspective or point view should be, or that such a privileged vantage even exists; everything depends on what we want to see or hide.

In his monographs, Tufte brings to visual communications the same skepticism towards communicative neutrality Edward Sapir and Ben Whorf, most famously, brought to linguistics. In this aspect, they can be particularly useful and edifying to a student in the sciences. The process of displaying data on a graph seems as if it should be immune to subjectivity, after all, "the numbers do not lie". But every scientist, who has to deal with data analysis on a daily basis, knows that it is perfectly possible to plot data in such a way as to be maximally friendly to our expectations, and to minimise that which we not do not like, all without broaching the letters of proper ethics. Less sinisterly, depending on how we plot it, can reveal important features otherwise easily overlooked, or render remarkable data dull or even meaningless. In Visual Explanations, Tufte provides two case-studies, John Snow's (1813-1858) cholera map of 1854, and the 1987 space shuttle Challenger disaster, on the objectivity of data and its possibilities and limitations .

The importance of all this, in the final analysis, is that classification and categorisation are important, and taxonomy cannot be denigrated as mere "stamp collecting"; how we perceive and understand the world in strongly influenced by the words and images, and by the mental categories we have in our minds that we invoke, when we talk about it. This is not an extreme cultural-relativist argument that objective facts do not exist and objective understanding impossible; rather, accurate and objective understandings are necessarily composed of many partial, subjectively influenced views. Thus to disavow at the first any pretensions to complete objectivity, and to be aware that subjective influence is pervasive and unavoidable, must be the first duties of anyone who wants to understand the world. This is especially important for a scientist.

Apparently I have ran out of indignation, temporarily I hope, which would also explain my recent inactivity. Reading the news and fuming afterwards is simply unhelpful, and so I have stopped. I wince whenever I hear something bad on NPR, and can't really bring myself to wince more by thinking about it afterwards. Punditry is an odious habit; the self-important, self-indignant, philosophically pretentious, Socrates-in-the-midst-of-fools style punditry is throughly disgusting (This is why I can't stand Thomas Friedman; Maureen Dowd is at least entertaining and capable of occasional self-deprecation.). People aren't fools dimly aware; insulated & lazy, yes, but not stupid. What we need is to engage in little self-examination now and then; punditry and to a large extent, formal education, only serves to insulate people from having to do their own thinking with wooly notions and rote.

This is something that I really appreciate about Science, and why I love it: the essence of Science its constant self re-evaluation of itself. Science is self-correcting in the sense it obtains the right answers even though scientists always make mistakes. It is not possible to be a wooly-headed pundit or a dogmatic blow-hard in Science, because Science is supremely skeptical and the burden of proof is high. In other words it has a set of high standards that routine life do not.

Today is the 15th anniversary of Tiananmen, and what is there to say about it? I can't really bring myself to argue with the considerable numbers of people who argue how really, it wasn't as bad as it looked, or how really, plenty of governments have done much worse, and at least China is getting rich, &c. &c. In an "realistic" evaluation (via GDP, per capita) China is better-off now, than it was in 1989; but what existence does a country really have outside of the individual existences of is people collected? More than its policies, it is the CCP's stubborn refusal in the last 15 years to re-examine itself, that really dismays me. That so many people, in China and abroad, have gone along with this, makes me positively sick. Mistakes can be corrected, policies can change, parties can be thrown out of government, but how can any of this be possible if we don't constantly re-evaluate what we have done? People here who hold their noses and talk about whether the Dems or the GOP is the lesser of two evils, but really they are more or less all the same, &c., have no idea what utter political impotence, the lack of even an appearance of being able to make a public decision, is like.

My friend Stef draws a wonderful web comic called 6:35. It isn't updated very regularly (she does have the whole graduate school thing to take care of), but when it is, it is a treat.