Alain de Botton on Success, TED

For those of you who know me, I am a huge fan of Alain de Botton. I think this is a very interesting talk and timely, given many of us are about to graduate (or have done so already) and have concerns about what comes next. I liked most in this video his discussion of success in that success involves the loss of something else, what we have chosen to miss out on.

Happy belated Thanksgiving.

The Justice Cascade and Normative Theory

I’ve been in a Political Science and Philosophy graduate reading group this semester and it has been a very interesting experience. First off, we use the same words to say different things. Secondly, there is a drastic difference in writing style from one discipline to the other. Thirdly, we have differing ideas of an agent’s (loosely speaking, people and institutions made up of people) relative importance as it corresponds to an overarching structure.

A talk today was given by Kathyrn Sikkink over her book The Justice Cascade. The premise is that a new model is needed to understand political change, and specifically in this case, the drive to punish individual heads of state for human rights violations.

This stance is novel for a couple reasons. One, heads of state are usually immune after their regime or they leave power for the crimes they committed. Two, state sovereignty is not usually violated. International courts can prosecute current heads of state for violations (with varying degrees of success of course). So what accounts for this paradigm shift.

In short, norms about harm, revenge, human rights, and notions of sovereignty come into play. The Justice Cascade is the diffusion of these norms more globally. These ideas are ignored by traditional constructivist political scienctists because ideas and agents are too small and unimportant compared to the structures they inhabit.

Not so anymore. Media, new and old, is more and more global. There is a reason China keeps a lock on social networking sites. Ideas can be disseminated quickly with minimal effort. What someone wrote about justice in France can be read by someone in Libya. When dissidents in Syria are struggling to find the words or the frame work for their cause, they can read and discuss the uprisings in Tunisia.

Technology is an interesting new factor, becoming a channel for the old norms we in the west have lived by and transmitting them elsewhere. This would be a more interesting line of thought to follow.

TED Talks: Digital Preservation

Why Historical preservation?

It’s about more than just sites and history. The history and the sites provide a context. Concepts, ideas, truth, many things are understood only when they are in a context. Meaning is given in a context. Without that context we lose site of what is meant, what is real.

Digital preservation of physical reality is another step in saving and preserving the human context and history. It’s a mapping of the human cultural genome (borrowing the phrase from another TED talk, http://www.ted.com/talks/what_we_learned_from_5_million_books.html). Our history and our sites give us the context to talk about what it is to be human.