Jane Jacobs Special Issue

Jane Jacobs

Coming soon in C+T

  1. Editor’s Introduction – Sanford IKEDA
  2. Jane Jacobs as Spontaneous Economic Order Methodologist: Part 1: Intellectual Apprenticeship – Pierre DESROCHERS & Joanna SZURMAK 3.
  3. Jane Jacobs as Spontaneous Economic Order Methodologist: Part 2: Metaphors and Methods – Pierre DESROCHERS & Joanna SZURMAK
  4. Experimenting in urban self-organization: Framework-rules and emerging orders in Oosterwold (Almere, The Netherlands) – Alessandra COZZOLINO et al.
  5. Modern Cities as Spontaneous Orders – Wendell COX & Peter GORDON
  6. NIMBYs as Mercantilists – Emily HAMILTON
  7. A city cannot be a work of art – Sanford IKEDA
  8. The State of Indian Cities – Shruti RAJAGOPALAN
  9. The Kind of Problem Gentrification Is: The Case of New York – Francis MORRONE
  10. Review: Lawrence N. Powell: The Accidental City: Improvising New Orleans – Leslie MARSH

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The Road to Serfdom or Dhimmitude

friedrich hayek

Marking the birth of Hayek and the dispiriting sense that we are well on the road to a new serfdom brought on, yet again, by the regressive left but this time in cahoots with Islamofacism. The marriage of cultural marxism with its first cousin, Jihadism, is continuing exactly from where the Nazis left off. With this unholy trinity we have the makings of a perfect storm, the likes of which history has never seen with the regressives now fulfilling the role of willing collaborators. At the Nuremberg Trials, Eichmann’s deputy Dieter Wisliceny said:

The Mufti was one of the initiators of the systematic extermination of European Jewry and had been a collaborator and adviser of Eichmann and Himmler in the execution of this plan. … He was one of Eichmann’s best friends and had constantly incited him to accelerate the extermination measures.

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Conversation Piece

david bowie

Over the past few months I’ve been listening closely to Heathen and haven’t tired of it at all, despite some minor annoyances. Echoing many others, the interesting thing about this album is that Bowie, finally and for once, consistently makes good on closing out the amazing legacy of his golden years (1970-1980). Heathen (see a couple of reviews: AllMusic, The Guardian) ripped Bowie out of the doldrums of the 80s and 90s, his “Phil Collins” years (punctuated with some brilliance), but now finally displaying a Bowie comfortable with himself, i.e. not having to put any heightened effort or trendy contrivance into being ahead of the curve — something that became irksome to his longterm listeners and I think tiresome to Bowie himself. He could now stand back and draw upon other marginalized musical geniuses such as the Popul Voh (Florian Fricke)-inspired “Sunday” the album’s opening track. The music was therefore bound to be philosophical and meditative (“a rumination on death, loss and lack of belief”/”This would be a century of a cold, refined barbarism, a world fit for fanatics of all stripes”) interlaced with much tenderness, nostalgia, wisdom, and most eerily striking, is counterposed with a palpable sense of foreboding and unease (much ink has been spilt about the album’s relationship to the events of 9/11). Aside from the obvious gems “Slip Away“, “Slow Burn“, “Everyone Says ‘Hi’” the biggest surprise of all is the very low-key bonus “Conversation Piece”, a reworking of a song originally from a promising but ultimately middling 1969, on the cusp of greatness, i.e. 1970’s The Man Who Sold the World. Here’s the very excellent Chris O’Leary’s explication of the song (the recording below is a superior version to Chris’ link):

The flailing scholar of the original recording at least had energy in his desperation; here, all is resigned, empty despair.

The grim reality for those living the “life of the mind” anticipates the professionalized resentment, disappointment and nihilism so characteristic of current academia’s inauthenticity, pockmarked by fanaticism, pseudo inquiry, authoritarianism, epistemic arrogance and entitlement. Here is maestro Mike Garson’s brief thoughts on this song. High praise indeed from someone so vital to Bowie’s career.

It’s in my top 10 of David’s songs

Here too is an academic piece entitled “The Light that Shines Above the Grocer’s Store: David Bowie’s Domestic Spaces” written by Meagan Wilson.

Heathen is an immersion into the last gasps of one man’s spiritual search, a search that seems fraught from the first.

Dialogues in Scrutopia

roger scruton

Scruton conveys a world where the ideological “lie” reigned and where brave souls successfully resisted it. He also captures that in-between world between moral integrity and open collaboration that was the fate of so many in a decaying yet frightfully repressive ideological regime.

Daniel J. Mahoney in New Criterion

It was Roger who inspired me to go to the then Soviet Union in the mid-80s to bring in vital supplies (medical, news, educational) to refuseniks — from cab drivers to concert pianists and much in between. So fuck these academic and other regressives who are whining about the state of things in liberal democracy: they are no more than disingenuous cowards with no skin in the game.

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State-sponsored segregation

regressive left

From the very party that brought you the KKK and eugenics. Richard Rothstein chats about his new book The Color of Law. The publisher blurb here. (Unusually, it’s the subtitle that is more illuminating).

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Stigmergy-based modeling to discover urban activity patterns from positioning data

stigmergy

New working paper freely available for download here.

In this paper, we present an innovative approach based on stigmergy that aims to handle both complexity and dimensionality of these data, providing an analysis of urban crowds dynamics by exploiting taxi GPS data.

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On Liberty and Its Enemies: Essays of Kenneth Minogue

kenneth minogue

My late chum, Ken Minogue, has just had a posthumous collection of his classic essays republished and it is edited by none other than Tim Fuller.

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Walker Percy Wednesday 134

walker percy

percycovercroppea

The so-called détentes and reconciliations between “Science” and “Religion” are even more boring. What is more boring than hearing Heisenberg’s uncertainty relations enlisted in support of the freedom of the will? The traditional scientific model of man is clearly inadequate, for a man can go to heroic lengths to identify and satisfy his needs and end by being more miserable than a Calcuttan. As for the present religious view of man, it begs its own question, the question of God’s existence, which means that it is not only useless to the unbeliever but dispiriting. The latter is more depressed than ever at hearing the goods news of Christianity. From the scientific view at least, a new model of man is needed, something other than man conceived as a locus of bio-psycho-sociological needs and drives.

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Footnote:

My difficulty with the behaviorists is that they rule out mind, self, and consciousness as inaccessible either on the doctrinal grounds that they do not exist or on methodological grounds that they are beyond the reach of behavioral science.
It is not necessarily so. The value of Charles Peirce and social psychologists like George Mead is that they underwrite the reality of the self without getting trapped in the isolated autonomous consciousness of Descartes and Chomsky. They do this by showing that the self becomes itself only through a transaction of signs with other selves—and does so, moreover, without succumbing to the mindless mechanism of the behaviorists.

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Perhaps there was another cause. Perhaps God was the cause. We do not know. At any rate, a new kind of system came into being, the organism. It had the extraordinary property of maintaining its internal milieu, its homeostasis, and of reproducing itself.

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It is all very well to speak of the wonders of the Cosmos as testimony to the glory of God, and it may in fact be true, but it, the Cosmos, is hardly perceived as such in modern technological societies. For most scientists, it seems fair to say, these same wonders, including the behavior of organisms, can be explained as an interaction of elements. The wonder to the scientist is not that God made the world but that the works of God can be understood in terms of a mechanism without giving God a second thought. Is it not indeed more wonderful to understand the complex mechanisms (dyads) by which the DNA of a sperm joins with the DNA of an ovum to form a new organism than to have God snap his fingers and create an organism like a rabbit under a hat?

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It became useful to think of an organism as an open system which through the selective processes of evolution had developed a genetic code which enabled it to maintain an internal steady state (homeostasis) in a changing environment and to reproduce itself. Thus, all the elements and events in the Cosmos, including other organisms, could be thought of as the environment of the organism.

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An organism may also, either by being genetically coded or by learning—that is, by modifying certain neurones in its central nervous system—respond to certain signals in its environment by a behavior oriented toward other segments of the environment. Thus, a Texas leaf-cutting ant which discovers a food source too big to move will deposit a trail of pheromones on the ground, which other ants will follow for several hundred meters from the nest.

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The Texas leaf-cutting ant is genetically programmed so to respond. But Pavlov’s dog—or any other mammal exposed to certain changes in its environment—can learn to respond to a signal in an appropriate manner—by eating, fleeing, or fighting—through modification of cells in its central nervous system.

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