Dan O'Huiginn

In the US, claims Troy Jellimore,
“no system of secular ethics has managed to displace religious approaches to ethics in the contemporary [US] popular imagination. He blames Kant and Bentham, for setting an dry and overwhelming tone for secular ethics:

Kantian and utilitarian approaches have been both fruitful and influential, and they get a lot of things right. But they share an impersonal, somewhat bureaucratic conception of the human being as a moral agent. The traits that are most highly prized in such agents are logical thinking, calculation, and obedience to the rules. Personal qualities such as individual judgment, idiosyncratic projects and desires, personal commitments and relationships, and feelings and emotions are regarded as largely irrelevant.

Well, for a start utilitarianism is much more flexible than that. It’s philosophy’s Church of England — able to encompass any number of other beliefs, and self-dilute until it requires no change to your actions. Sure, an occasional fanatic may take trolley problems as an immediate guide for how to act. But for the most part, your personal preferences, fallible judgement and less-than-perfect generosity can all sit comfortably within utilitarian ethics.

And there are many more approaches to secular ethics — just rarely by that name. They are much more likely to be subsumed within animal rights, or identity politics, or family values, or charity, or any number of other ethical programs. Possibly, though, these aren’t enough integrated into systems which are coherent but not inhumanly demanding. How do you balance saving CO2 against flying to your nephew’s wedding, sneaking in the detail that you never liked him anyway? And there, OK, the religious have an advantage over us. It’ll take a while before the contradictory thoughts of a million agony aunts accrete into a comprehensive moral guide.

Sometimes all you have energy for is flicking through ridiculous tumblrs

Are electronics manuals under-appreciated repositories of mystic wisdom? Life Advice From Machines finds zen in the art of vacuum cleaner maintenance:

WTF, Evolution? provides compelling evidence that natural selection is less a blind watchmaker, more an overenthusiastic acidhead forever waking up alongside last night’s dubious Good Ideas:

“Blobfish? So, I’m just making it look like a blob?”
“Yeah, basically.”
“Can I do a nose? I love doing noses.”
“Sure, evolution, whatever.”

Connected China, Reuters’ visualization of China’s power structures, is an impressive achievement.

Connected China explains the social and professional networks of China’s leaders, highlighting the interpersonal relationships that drive business, move markets and shape the political landscape in the world’s most populous nation.
The site also provides a rich interactive platform to showcase the best of Reuters’ coverage on Chinese politics, providing deep insight into China’s new generation of leaders with immersive, seamless integration of data, text, photos and video.

It reminds me of the Anatomy of Britain, a 1962 book in which Anthony Sampson delineated the interlocking circles which formed the British ‘Establishment’.

Similar, also, is Miguel Paz‘s Poderpopedia, a web guide to who holds power in Chile.

It sits in the same productive but uneasy territory between journalism and encyclopedia. It’s a difficult balance to strike — selective and cutting enough to make for interesting reading, but sufficiently comprehensive to serve as a reference.

I imagine that’s part of what Reuters want here — to become a reference resource for people reading about China, and a source of profiles and graphs which can be integrated into their other products.

They’ve certainly thrown a lot of work into it, and at first glance they got their money’s worth. It’s visually glorious — it helps that they worked with Ben Fry, who literally wrote the book on data visualization. I can’t say I now understand Who’s Who in China, but I have a slightly better chance than I did an hour ago. Assuming Reuters do a decent job of keeping this updated, I imagine I’ll come back many times in the future, whenever I’m trying to make sense of a Chinese power-broker.

Britons can have their citizenship revoked by the Home Secretary.
The Bureau of Investigative Journalism looks into the 16 cases where Theresa May has used that power:

In a case known only as L1, a Sudanese-British man took his four British children on holiday to Sudan, along with his wife, who had limited leave to remain in the UK. Four days after his departure, Theresa May decided to strip him of his citizenship.

With their father excluded from the UK and their mother’s lack of permanent right to remain, the order effectively blocks the children from growing up in Britain. At the time of the order the children were aged between eight and 13 months.

In one case, Theresa May removed a man’s citizenship just before he was seized in Djibouti and rendered to the US. There has already been much reporting around this person, Mahdi Hashi, and there is a group campaigning on his behalf.

Here’s a worrying look at the implications of Google Glass:

Anywhere you go in public – any store, any sidewalk, any bus or subway – you’re liable to be recorded: audio and video. Fifty people on the bus might be Glassless, but if a single person wearing Glass gets on, you – and all 49 other passengers – could be recorded. Not just for a temporary throwaway video buffer, like a security camera, but recorded, stored permanently, and shared to the world.

To expand what’s implicit here: creepshots will be getting worse. For somebody now to photograph you without your consent on the street, they at least have to point a phone at you. A year from now, you’ll never know if that guy is ‘just’ ogling you, or if he’s also videoing your body for the benefit of the seamier end of the internet.

And I don’t see anything we can do to stop it. Even if we make it illegal (I believe it may already be so, in Germany), the internet is still sufficiently anonymous for this to become commonplace.

In the New York Times, CJ Chivers reports that Iran has spent perhaps the last decade quietly selling bullets for use in various African wars:

…untold quantities had been supplied to governments in Guinea, Kenya, Ivory Coast and, the evidence suggests, Sudan.

From there, it traveled to many of the continent’s most volatile locales, becoming an instrument of violence in some of Africa’s ugliest wars and for brutal regimes. And while the wide redistribution within Africa may be the work of African governments, the same ammunition has also been found elsewhere, including in an insurgent arms cache in Iraq and on a ship intercepted as it headed for the Gaza Strip.

The full report is available here

Aaron Swartz contained multitudes. In the outpouring of grief since his suicide, it’s striking how, despite being only 26, he could mean so many things to so many people.
Perhaps the surface picture is of a hacktivist, an open data campaigner, the wunderkind coder behind rss, reddit and web.py. Well, he was. But his talent and curiosity was so much broader than that stereotype. As historian Rick Perlstein writes:

I didn’t understand anything about [the technical] part of his professional world; it was only that he somehow understood everything about my professional world. All of our minds, each of us, contain a universe, but how is it that his mind contained fourteen or fifteen of them?

To Perlstein, as to his fans at humanities-academic hangout Crooked Timber, Aaron was one of them. His posts there and on his own blog shone light on anything from the political economy of think-tanks to what AI can teach stats about causation. Aaron was a major public intellectual in the making: he had the smarts, and the breadth of knowledge, and willingness to pick a fight.

Then there’s the politics. Matt Stoller “ knew Aaron as a political activist interested in health care, financial corruption, and the drug war“:

he burned with a desire for justice, but also felt a profound desire to understand the system he was attempting to reorganize. He didn’t throw up his hands lazily and curse at corruption, he spent enormous amounts of time and energy learning about and working the political system

To me, Aaron was such an inspiring figure because he embodied all these talents, and more. This world has far too few people who can step between the worlds of the programmer, the activist and the intellectual — and it needs every one of them.

Last word to danah boyd:

I adored Aaron because he was an emotional whirlwind – a cranky bastard and a manic savant. Our conversations had an ethereal sense to them and he pushed me hard to think through complex issues as we debated. He had an intellectual range that awed me and a kitten’s sense of curiosity…he wanted to mainline books and live in the world of the mind.

This impressively
vicious book review by Evgeny Morozov turns eventually into an
attack on TED, accurately attributing its failures to the lack of
politics:

Whatever problems lurk on the horizon are imagined primarily as
problems of technology, which, given enough money, brain power, and
nutritional supplements, someone in Silicon Valley should be in a
position to solve. This is consistent with TED’s adoption of a
decidedly non-political attitude, as became apparent in a recent
kerfuffle over a short talk on inequality given by a venture
capitalist—who else?—which TED refused to release for fear that it
might offend too many rich people.

Since any meaningful discussion of politics is off limits at TED, the solutions advocated by TED’s techno-humanitarians cannot go beyond the toolkit available to the scientist, the coder, and the engineer. This leaves Silicon Valley entrepreneurs positioned as TED’s preferred redeemers. In TED world, tech entrepreneurs are in the business of solving the world’s most pressing problems.

The 2012 Financial Olympics:

Sailing – It’s going to be tough with so many competitors sailing so close to the wind this year. Barclays opted to do their own rigging, having allegedly refused the advice of their BoE advisors, however the sudden suicides of the team captain and cabin boy have left an opening for Iran’s HSBC crew. With more storms forecast this year, we expect many of the field to be capsized. Team US-JPM have already spent billions on repairs having hit a whale.
….
100 meters – Facebook reached the 100 yard mark in record time but didn’t quite manage the full 100 meters. Having thought they had won, they returned 30 meters back down the track and sat down moaning that the banks had guaranteed their victory.
….
Kayaking – The Greek team have excelled throughout the past 3 years, navigating the most extreme of rapids. Experts are left amazed that they are still afloat at this point in the competition despite their leaky craft, complete lack of leadership and large debts.

Rowenna Davies has a justified rant about milk, oligopoly, and the urban bias of left-wing politics.

Britain’s milk industry, she points out, is dominated by three companies. Sheer size gives these the power to squeeze dairy farmers, who are locked into ungenerous contracts and have nowhere else to turn. They’ve been steadily grinding down the price of milk, forcing farmers out of business. She wants government intervention:

They could introduce a law allowing farmers to terminate a contract with three months notice (although the minister says EU rules prevent this). Or they could increase investigations and sanctions for price collusion. These measures wouldn’t block the free market; they’d empower it. Farmers could also help themselves here by starting co-operative processing chains of their own.

“I don’t think politicians realise what it’s like,” says Rob, “They should come and do a milk internship for a few weeks and see what we do here. See what it’s like to deliver a calf or get bruises or broken fingers from young heifers. The dedication we have to show.”