WhirledView

Moving On

by Cheryl Rofer

There’s no easy way to say this, I guess: I’m leaving WhirledView to go to phronesisiacal.

I’d like to thank everyone…Ugh. All I keep coming up with are platitudes and commonplaces, what one usually does when one (note that impersonal pronoun!) isn’t saying all that one might say. Let’s just say that after almost five years, too many differences have accumulated.

There’s been a lot of good for me in WhirledView. I think I’ve tightened up my writing because of blogging’s requirements, and I’ve made a lot of good blogfriends, some of whom I’ve even met in real life.

I’ve enjoyed the comments we get, although WhirledView’s readers are less voluble than those on other blogs.

Naturally, I hope you’ll continue to read me at phronesisiacal. And that you’ll continue with WhirledView too. I’m on Facebook and Twitter (cherylrofer) too. My Twitter feed has some of the elements of my yardblogging.

My best wishes to my colleagues as WhirledView continues.

Getting It Wrong

by Cheryl Rofer

Here's a crabby post to start your Monday morning wrong. If you are having a bad Monday, don't click on the links. They'll make it worse.

But I found these three articles so egregiously wrong, I wanted to say something about them. Unfortunately (or maybe happily), I don't have time to work through them in detail. Maybe Tuesday will be better.

It's Not the Religion, Fareed!
I like much of what Fareed writes, but here he's reeeaaaaccchhhing for a way to distinguish the people in Iran's streets today from the people in Estonia's streets in 1989. And the other countries that emerged from Communist rule in 1989-1991. He looks around, and finds...religion! The parallels of those countries to Iran fail for a number of reasons. It was an external power, Russian Communism, that held sway in a colonial fashion. Those countries had reasonably well-developed political movements with clear paths of the insurgents to power. Religion was used in Poland as a lever, but it was much weaker in other places. That's why I've gone back to the Russian Revolution of 1917 as an analogy. It's not perfect, but it's much closer than the revolutions of 1989-1991.

Because They're Illegal, That's Why!
Jackson Diehl insists this morning that President Obama go back to business as usual with Israel.

Pressuring Israel made sense, at first. The administration correctly understood that Netanyahu, a right-winger who took office with the clear intention of indefinitely postponing any Israeli-Palestinian settlement, needed to feel some public heat from Washington to change his position -- and that the show of muscle would add credibility to the administration's demands that Arab leaders offer their own gestures.

The gesture has been made, time to return to hypocrisy.

Diehl ignores the UN resolutions and international law on the settlements to argue that they are a trivial bit of fluff that don't matter, and anyway if Israel makes any concessions, the Palestinians won't. And Obama will have to back down and lose face. But perhaps not. A competing newspaper reports this morning that Israel may put some sort of freeze in place; not exactly what the administration is asking for, but more than Israel would have done without the pressure. And we'll see where it goes from here.

Ross Douthat's Reckless Romance
This one is just plain sexism. But what can we expect from the New York Times's pet conservative man? Douthat finds the last week to have been a good one for reckless romance.

The nation’s most famous reality-television father, Jon Gosselin of “Jon and Kate Plus Eight,” threw over his marriage for a fling with a 23-year-old schoolteacher. Not one but two prominent conservative politicians torpedoed their careers with public confessions of adultery — with Mark Sanford’s Argentine disappearing act eclipsing John Ensign’s accusation of extortion against his lover’s spouse.

Um, Ross, those are all guys breaking up their marriages. Romance has some mutuality to it, and I can't see any of the women involved in those scenarios feeling particularly good just now. But reckless romance rules in Ross's fantasyland. Oh well, he's the guy who thought that cartoon character had to be male. I saw her as female, myself. Who else would have to correct all the guys who are getting it wrong on the internet? (That last one is safe to click.)

Do Pictures Lie?

By Patricia Lee Sharpe

Not exactly.  But our interpretations may be way way off.

Look at this photo.  Pakistan’s president Asif Ali Zardari is extending two hands and he’s smiling—grinning really, as if he’s trying hard to be agreeable. He wants to be friends, and he wants the camera to get this.  But Manmohan Singh, India’s Prime Minister, apparently isn’t buying it.  His body is rigid.  He’s allowing, just barely, his hand to be grasped.  The absolute diplomatic minimum.  Aha! I thought, when I first saw this photo, a wonderfully graphic indication that Singh and India want as little as possible to do with Pakistan, until Pakistan takes stronger action against those behind the murderous rampage in Mumbai last year. 

So that’s how I was going to play it when I was writing my post on Pride and Paralysis.  

Fortunately before I’d posted that draft, I came across another photo, this one of all the principals at the BRIC conference in Russia.  Look at Manmohan Singh, who has no reason to be conveying anything negative in this situation.  The same aloof body posture.  That now familiar, seemingly reluctant participation in the rite when all the others are reaching eagerly into a two handed press-the-flesh fest for photographers.   (This time, of course, there is a ghost of a smile, which may or may not mean anything. )

So I advance another hypothesis, which I’ll share with you.  Manmohan Singh does what’s necessary, diplomatically, but maybe he really doesn’t like handshakes.  As an Indian of the old school, he may prefer a namaste.  Folded hands.  Gentle reserve.  No physical contact.

But that, too, is only a guess.

Photo Credits:  The Hindu; The New York Times.

Not 1913

by Cheryl Rofer

Sidenote: This is post number 1913 in the WhirledView blog. That reference is to the interwar years.

I have a running argument with Mark Safranski and Lexington Green. When the idea of getting to zero nuclear weapons comes up, one of their responses is that a world with no nuclear weapons would resemble the world of 1913, in the sense that wars of all against all would again become possible.

My customary response to this (after batting away their ideas that we are talking about unilateral disarmament or that we might have zero nuclear weapons in the next month or so) has been that the negotiations and concessions necessary to move toward zero nuclear weapons will restructure the world in such a way that it will resemble no world we know or have known.

But Nicholas and Alexandra has given me a new argument: Europe is no longer ruled by a single dysfunctional family.

That’s an exaggeration of the Europe of 1913, which was the problem back then. But no such important grouping of countries is any longer ruled by a single family. And there’s more to it than that: the form of rule is important, and the world has pretty much given up on absolute monarchies. There are still autocracies of various kinds around the world, but they are few.

3 Quarks Daily Contest

by Cheryl Rofer

My post "Prairie" has been nominated for the 3 Quarks science blogging prize.

The voting round has begun. Go here to vote and to see the rules.

More Frames

by Cheryl Rofer

Could we make a rule that anybody who hasn't questioned the ability of Justices Roberts or Alioto to judge without being influenced by their ethnicity (white establishment male, Catholic if you care to add that in) is not allowed to question Sonia Sotomayor's ability on that count? (cf. Kevin Drum, Steve Benen) It's a tired frame: white establishment male equals the norm. Not any more.

And could we stop using child-discipline words to describe North Korea's behavior or possible responses to it? Yes, some of this looks like tantrums, but so did some of George W. Bush's statements on international affairs ("Bring 'em on!). What the childish descriptors do is to mess up our thinking on the matter. We can't spank North Korea, and putting sanctions on them is not an equivalent. The Washington Post and the New York Times do pretty well in today's reports, the Huffington Post, not so well.

The Quark Prizes

by Cheryl Rofer

3 Quarks Daily is offering prizes for the best blog posts in four categories. They plan to award them on the solstices and equinoxes, and yikes! the summer solstice is almost upon us.

The categories are Science, Arts & Literature, Politics, and Philosophy. The short fuse is on the Science prize. The deadline for nomination is June 1. Then there will be a round of voting and selection by the 3 Quarks bloggers and Steven Pinker.

So I will ask our readers to nominate one or more of my posts if they think that post deserves a prize. The way you nominate is by leaving the URL in the comment thread at 3 Quarks. Here are what I think are my best in science for the past year:

Prairie

Rotifer Love

The Question of Expertise

At Last - A Good Idea in Nuclear Reactors?

What You See When You Look!

Friday Diplomacy Blogging

by Cheryl Rofer

The media are improving, marginally, at covering diplomacy. They no longer unanimously demand the hat, boots, and lasso as part of the operation. Which is not to say that they're doing a brilliant job, just that this part of their coverage has come up to their general standards.

I'm encouraged to see the improvement, although there are still many voices on the right and the left who insist on clear black and white rather than the gray that characterizes so much of diplomacy (and politics and governance, for that matter).

So I think I'll make this an occasional feature. I've got a couple of other posts I'm working on in different areas and hope to have them up soon.

Wednesday Yard Blogging

by Cheryl Rofer

I haven't done this for some long time. I've got a new camera, this one nice and small for my purse. Got it with those credit-card points that the bankers are now going to take away if they can't overcharge on interest, nyah, nyah, nyah.

Lots of things are blooming in my yard, with lots more to come. I'm pleased at some of my attempts from last year. Perennials are suspenseful the second year. Even if they seem to take during the first year, they may or may not come up the next spring. As usual, some have returned and some haven't.

I'm dedicating this post to a good friend of mine whose father died recently. He loved native Wisconsin flora. Here's some native New Mexico flora, some free-living and some in my flower beds. I'm going to just post the photos with a bit of commentary, no scientific names this time.

Friday Diplomacy Blogging

by Cheryl Rofer

This week’s big diplomatic story was Rose Gottemoeller’s statement at the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty Preparatory Conference. But I’ve already written about that. And I’ve been distracted by a big project with a deadline next week.

Pakistan, of course, is a big story this week in multiple dimensions. I’ll leave most of the details up to my WhirledView colleagues, who are much better qualified than I am to discuss Pakistani politics. There was one very interesting news story that didn’t get a lot of coverage in the blogosphere or elsewhere, the first I’ve seen that actually contains some content about Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal. Not a lot of content, to be sure, but more than the speculation elsewhere.