Wobbly Sociology

2018-01-22T14:24:00.002-05:00

2018-01-22T14:11:00.004-05:00

2018-01-22T08:16:00.002-05:00

Fukushima worse than one can imagine

2013-09-01T11:09:00.001-04:00

Just when one thought the news couldn't get any worse, apparently the radioactivity strength of the latest Fukushima leaks is 18 times than previously reported. That's what we are told now, but who knows what the real situation is. Meanwhile, India's work on the new nuclear reactor in Tamil Nadu, continues without any lessons learned.

Fukushima leak crises gets worse

Nuclear fallout from Fukushima gets worse

2013-08-21T21:11:00.002-04:00

The situation involving the new Fukushima radiation leak is worse than earlier estimates last week:

Fukushima nuclear leak

Fracking Documentary "The Sky is Pink" by Josh Fox

2013-08-18T10:19:00.000-04:00

The euphoria over fracking as a solution for the insatiable thirst for energy has been orchestrated and marketed by an army of propagandists. "Science" of course has been deployed as an alibi by the supporters and beneficiaries of fracking. Not unexpectedly, historian Niall Ferguson has jumped on the fracking bandwagon. His earlier prediction was the emergence of a democratic and peaceful Iraq. Prior to that, he was writing articles and books praising the wonders of colonialism and empire.

A brief documentary on fracking "The Sky is Pink"

The Sky is Pink

An Epidemic of Rapes in India

2013-08-09T10:16:00.001-04:00

An epidemic of rapes in India. Bearing the violent brunt of it all are girls, some as young as five. The sheer scale of sadistic violence is unbelievable. From the media coverage it would appear that this is something new, but what is probably new is the increased reporting of it, particularly because of social protests that have erupted in many parts of India. In some cases, the police has reacted violently against the protesters - in Delhi a high ranking officer actually slapped a woman protester so hard that she bled from her ears. In Delhi too, another police officer offered about 40 dollars to the parents of a five year old who was violently raped, to hush up the case. As is usually the case elsewhere, most victims of rapes are not strangers to their tormentors. The increased media coverage gives the impression that it is usually the members of the down and out classes that are involved in such horrendous sex crimes. However, there is no shortage of evidence that many of the sexual predators are members of the dominant classes and some of them are the fathers of the rape victims. Most of them also get away scot free because in most cases the banner of "family honour" is invoked without any sense of irony of course. Institutions and agents charged with dispensing social justice actively collude with the covering up of such crimes.

Fukushima - TEPCO not liable

2013-08-09T10:15:00.002-04:00

The private corporation TEPCO will not be prosecuted for the continuing Fukushima nuclear disaster. And, not surprisingly, the Japanese taxpayers will pay for the radioactive mess of a private company

Fukushima and TEPCO

tax payers to pay for the radioactive mess

Nuclear Horror (Continued) in Fukushima

2013-08-08T12:54:00.002-04:00

More than two years after the Fukushima meltdown, the nuclear horror shows no signs of abating. Radioactive water is leaking out at a rate of 400 tons a day. Naturally, TEPCO officials argue that the level of radioactivity in the water is within the "legal" limits (whatever that means for real live humans and non-humans) even as they admit to being baffled as to what is going on. Meanwhile, the Japanese government seems committed to spending public funds for containing a disaster brought to us by TEPCO, a private company. It's the same story - public funds used to support and bailout private appropriation and clean-ups. Meanwhile in Tamil Nadu in India, despite the massive protests, national and global, the nuclear reactor has reached "critical stage" and is all set to begin generating the chimerical "pollution free" energy.

An editorial in Japan's leading national daily, the Asahi Shimbun:

"For decades, nuclear weapons and nuclear power generation have generally been treated as separate issues. But is this the right approach?

Japan is the only nation to have experienced nuclear devastation with the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki 68 years ago. It has also suffered a nuclear disaster that caused tremendous damage in Fukushima Prefecture.

We can no longer afford to put off confronting the unimaginably frightful risk posed by nuclear power."

nuclear weapons and energy

Rana Plaza, Bangladesh

2013-04-27T05:58:00.005-04:00

The horrendously high cost of low prices. The brutal commodity chains of global capitalism and its local and global predators. Vijay Prashad in Counterpunch

http://www.counterpunch.org/2013/04/26/the-terror-of-capitalism/

VP Joseph Biden on gun violence

2013-01-11T21:49:00.000-05:00

The Vice President Joseph Biden is expected to make an announcement on Tuesday about steps to deal with gun violence.

He used gun related metaphors to dampen expectations. As he put it:

"I'm shooting for Tuesday. I hope I get it done by then,” he said on Friday, cautioning that "we know that there's no silver bullet."

He hinted at technological fixes:

"Vice President Joe Biden expressed interest Friday in existing technology that would keep a gun from being fired by anyone other than the purchaser."

Chair of the Chattisgarh Women Commission: women "equally responsible for rapes"

2013-01-05T12:38:00.003-05:00

Yes, the usual suspects are drummed up: Western culture, "display of body", ignorance of Hindu epics, the Inernet etc.

"Vibha Rao, the chairperson of Chhattisgarh State Women Commission, doesn’t agree that her views are a case of ‘blaming the victim’ but is emphatic that women are “equally responsible” for the sexual offences committed against them.

The gruesome acts of rape and victimisation of women may have shocked many. But Ms. Vibha Rao says that women, influenced by western culture, send wrong signals through their dress and behaviour and men often take the cue from those signals. “Women display their bodies and indulge in various obscene activities. Women are unaware of the kind of message [their actions] generate,” she said.

Ms. Rao’s focus is not the criminal nature of rape or the power relations behind it, but she believes excessive “display of body” by women influenced by western culture is the key. Ms. Rao, an advocate by profession and a prominent BJP leader in the State, says Bollywood with its film songs is adding to the cultural breakdown.

Other reasons for sexual offences against women are ignorance of Hindu epics that teach values, proliferation of the Internet, and the breakdown of joint families. “Joint family system is disintegrating and hence cultural values are not inculcated in kids,” Ms. Rao said.

Tribals in Chhattisgarh have little exposure to western culture. But there have been several well publicised cases recently when tribal women have been raped without the police taking any action. Ms. Rao does agree that rape figures in tribal districts of Chhattisgarh are not ‘readily available’ with the Women’s Commission, but she says, “They [tribals] are in live-in relationship and have consensual sex. Once a [tribal] couple gets separated, the case goes to the police. Those are not rape,” said Ms. Rao.

Regarding alleged rape of the tribal women by erstwhile vigilante gang members in south Chhattisgarh, Ms. Rao said she cannot comment on ‘sub judice’ matters."

Vibha Rao on women and rape

Urvashi Butalia on Rape in India

2012-12-28T19:23:00.002-05:00

Highly recommended

Urvashi Butalia on Rape in India

Rampage: The Social Roots of School Shootings

2012-12-24T10:37:00.000-05:00

A team of sociologists studied a number of cases of mass shootings. Here is a brief synopsis of their findings in a recent issue of The Nation

Rampage: The Social Roots of School Shootings

Arundhati Roy on Rape in India

2012-12-22T11:06:00.001-05:00

A week ago, a woman while riding a public bus with her friend in New Delhi, was brutally gang-raped, beaten up and thrown out of the running bus. As she battles for her life in a New Delhi hospital, waves of protests and demonstrations all over the country have been held. In New Delhi today, police used tear gas to break up a massive protest march outside Rashtrapati Bhavan.

Anti-Rape demonstrators gassed in New Delhi

Finally, an issue that has been rampant but more often than not, ignored, might actually be addressed, not just by the so-called authorities, but more importantly by society at large. All too often, as is common in many other countries, the victims of rape have been blamed for their predicament. Arundhati Roy puts the horror of rape in India in its historical and contextual perspective.

Arundhati Roy on rape in India

Indeed....

2012-12-16T21:08:00.004-05:00

Quite predictable indeed....

predictable indeed

On his part, the White House spokesperson Jay Carney continued with his platitudes:

"Gun violence such as the Newtown, Connecticut, school shooting is a "complex problem," and "no single piece of legislation, no single action will fully address" it, White House spokesman Jay Carney says."

Few thinking people deny that such massacres occur due to "complex problems" - the state of the economy, the rates of unemployment and the stress and strain induced by these larger structural issues. However, no thinking person really believes that regulating guns will actually escalate the problems. Gun control is merely the first step in the right direction.

Amazingly enough, "In Newtown right now, you can shoot any gun at anytime on your property," said town police commission member Joel Faxon (CNN)

Meanwhile, the National Rifle Association has yet to respond to the Connecticut massacre. It's website features a story from late November - touting, not unexpectedly, the same predictable message:

"The point is, gun owners and the NRA have been right all along. It's the criminals, not the law-abiding gun owners, who are the issue. More guns, less crime isn't just "quite possible," it's a fact."

Robert Biernacki on the measurement of meaning

2012-12-15T12:23:00.000-05:00

At about the same time when C. Wright Mills tried to chart a course between what he called "this statistical stuff and heavy duty theoretical bullshit" by publishing The Sociological Imagination, the British philosopher Peter Winch also declared war on the pretensions of physics envy based on a caricature of physics. In The Idea of a Social Science and its Relation to Philosophy (1958) Winch did not mince words:

"That the social sciences are in their infancy has come to be a platitude amongst writers of textbooks on the subject. They will argue that this is because the social sciences have been slow to emulate the natural sciences and emancipate themselves from the dead hand of philosophy; that there was a time when there was no clear distinction between philosophy and natural science; but that owing to the transformation of affairs round about the seventeenth century natural science has made great bounds ever since. But, we are told, this revolution has not yet taken place in the social sciences, or at least it is only now in process of taking place. Perhaps social science has not yet found its Newton but the conditions are being created in which such a genius could arise. But above all, it is urged, we must follow the methods of natural science if we are to make any significant progress....I propose, in this monograph, to attack such a conception of the relation between the social studies, philosophy, and the natural sciences. [...] It will consist of a war on two fronts: first, a criticism of some prevalent contemporary ideas about the nature of philosophy: second, a criticism of some prevalent contemporary ideas about the nature of the social studies. The main tactics will be a pincer movement: the same point will be reached by arguing from opposite directions. To complete the military analogy before it gets out of hand, my main war aim will be to demonstrate that the two apparently diverse fronts on which the war is being waged are not in reality diverse at all; that to be clear about the nature of philosophy and to be clear about the nature of the social studies amount to the same thing. For any worthwhile study of society must be philosophical in character and any worthwhile philosophy must be concerned with the nature of human society."

Under different guises and names, overtly and covertly, positivism continues to thrive even in areas where one would least expect it. This year, a new book by Robert Biernacki titled Reinventing Evidence in Social Inquiry: Decoding Facts and Variables (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012) provides a trenchant critique of the attempt by some sociologists to codify, quantify and measure culture and meaning.

The premise of coding is that meanings are entities about which there can be facts. But we all know that novel questions and contexts elicit fresh meanings from sources, which is enough to intimate that meaning is neither an encapsulated thing to be found nor a constructed fact of the matter. It is categorically absurd to treat a coding datum as a discrete observation of meaning in an object-text. My preference is to think of “meaning” as the puzzle we try to grasp when our honed concepts of what is going on collide with the words and usages of the agents we study. Describing meaning effectively requires us to exhibit that fraught interchange between cultures in its original: the primary sources displayed in contrast to the researcher’s typifying of them (p.131)

This volume has shown that humanist inquiry on its own better satisfies the “hard” science criteria of transparency, of retesting the validity of interpretations, of extrapolating from mechanisms, of appraising the scope of interpretations, of recognizing destabilizing anomalies, of displaying how we decide to “take” a case as meaning something, of forcing revision in interpretive decisions, of acknowledging the dilemmas of sampling, and of separating the evidence from the effects of instrumentation (p.151)

The book has also been selected by sociologist (and colleague of Biernacki at UCSD) Andrew Scull as one of the Times Literary Supplement's "book of the year.

"

The Connecticut Massacre and "meaningful action"

2012-12-15T10:04:00.003-05:00

Entirely predictable:

"President Barack Obama urged Americans on Saturday to join in solidarity as they mourned the victims, saying the hearts of parents across the country were "heavy with hurt".

He called for "meaningful action to prevent more tragedies like this", but stopped short of specifically calling for tighter gun-control laws in his weekly radio and Internet speech." (Reuters)

Meanwhile, at a press conference with the White House spokesperson:

"Q: The President made a campaign promise to work to renew the assault weapons ban. Why won’t you stand up here today and say that that remains a commitment of his?

CARNEY: It does remain a commitment of his. What I said is, today is not the day, I believe as a father, a day to engage in the usual Washington policy debates. I think that that they will come, but today is not that day, especially as we are awaiting more information about the situation in Connecticut."

White House Press Secretary Carney "today is not the day"

Responding directly to the White House Press secretary's claim that "today is not the day" to discuss gun control, Jerrold Nader, D-New York said:

" We cannot simply accept this as a routine product of modern American life. If now is not the time to have a serious discussion about gun control and the epidemic of gun violence plaguing our society, I don’t know when is. How many more Columbines and Newtowns must we live through? I am challenging President Obama, the Congress, and the American public to act on our outrage and, finally, do something about this.”

On its part, "The National Rifle Association, which advocates for gun rights, said in a statement it would not have any comment on the Connecticut shooting "until the facts are thoroughly known." (CNN)

Outdoing everyone else, the ex-governor of Arkansas, Mike Huckabee weighed in too:

"We don't have a crime problem, a gun problem or even a violence problem. What we have is a sin problem," Huckabee said on Fox News. "And since we've ordered God out of our schools, and communities, the military and public conversations, you know we really shouldn't act so surprised ... when all hell breaks loose."

Huckabee on lack of religion and mass killings

There are of course many other factors - structural, historical, ideological, social psychological - all seamlessly connected - that contribute to these endlessly recurring massacres. Michael Moore pinpointed many of these factors in his _Bowling for Columbine_ documentary. So while gun control in and of by itself will not be the proverbial magic bullet for preventing any further mass shootings, there is little doubt that it is a good first step that is actually within the realm of immediate action. If the political will is there - a big caveat for sure.

Massacre in Connecticut - unlikely to ignite debate on gun control

2012-12-14T18:22:00.002-05:00

Tragically, it is unlikely that the horrendous mass killing in Connecticut, just a few days after a shooting in a mall in Oregon, will ignite any meaningful debate on gun control in the United States. Each such heart rending tragedy is amazingly enough always followed by its twin tragedy - the near complete absence of any real move to really regulate the ownership of guns. Any move in the right direction is almost always labeled as an attempt to "politicize" the issue. Sadly, some commentators on news-blogs will even use this occasion to promote more gun ownership - using the "logic" that such incidents could be prevented by arming everyone.

"The House I Live In" - on the American war on Drugs

2012-12-14T10:29:00.004-05:00

Here is a powerful documentary on the tragic consequences of the American "war on drugs"

The House I Live In

The new University of California logo and the slickfication of everything

2012-12-12T04:10:00.000-05:00

The furor over the new University of California logo signals both the profound transformation in the "business" of higher education as well as the unease with the increasing pattern of rationalization that results in "institutional isomorphism" (DiMaggio and Powell, 1983) - or the situation where different organizations with very distinctive goals, practices and histories acquire formal similarities. As the "image consultants" laugh all the way to the bank and plan to be back in a few years for more, the venerable UC logo that used to feature an open book, with a light shining on it accompanied by the words "let there be light" is now a deep blue U and a barely decipherable bright yellow C. The staple of all university logos - a motto expressing some overall value, is missing. Not even a slick, marketing slogan. During these cash-strapped times for public universities, perhaps the C stands for the not so implicit "let there be cash"?

The new UC logo

a sad sign for higher education

DiMaggio, Paul J. and Walter W. Powell. 1983. "The Iron Cage Revisited: Institutional Isomorphism and Collective Rationality in Organizational Fields." American Sociological Review 48:147-160.

Harvard University - a giant hedge fund?

2012-12-08T10:41:00.002-05:00

And interesting piece characterizing Harvard University as a giant hedge fund with some students and faculty members attached to it. As the writer puts it:

"Harvard’s Division of Arts and Sciences—the central core of academic activity—contains approximately 450 full professors, whose annual salaries tend to average the highest at any university in America. Each year, these hundreds of great scholars and teachers receive aggregate total pay of around $85 million. But in fiscal 2004, just the five top managers of the Harvard endowment fund shared total compensation of $78 million, an amount which was also roughly 100 times the salary of Harvard’s own president. These figures clearly demonstrate the relative importance accorded to the financial and academic sides of Harvard’s activities.

Unlike universities, the business model of large and aggressive hedge funds is notoriously volatile, and during the 2008 Financial Crisis, Harvard lost $11 billion on its net holdings, teetering on the verge of bankruptcy as its highly illiquid assets could not easily be redeployed to cover hundreds of millions of dollars in ongoing capital commitments to various private equity funds. The desperate hedge fund—ahem, academic institution—was forced to borrow $2.5 billion from the credit markets, lay off hundreds of university employees, and completely halt construction work on a huge expansion project, ultimately surviving and later recovering in much the same way as did Goldman Sachs or Citibank.

Harvard University - a giant hedge fund?

Satirist Tom Lehrer on Quantification in Sociology

2012-12-05T17:18:00.001-05:00

Tom Lehrer on a certain kind of quantification in Sociology - "The Sociology Song"

Tom Lehrer on Sociology

Vijay Prashad on Real News

2012-12-05T08:58:00.001-05:00

The Prashad Report Israel, Palestine, Drones etc. on Real News

The Prashad Report

"Land Grab" in Africa by Indian companies

2012-12-05T08:45:00.002-05:00

"Land grab" in Africa by Indian companies - following in the footsteps of other companies who are already there. the nineteenth century "scramble for africa" is not quite over...

Land Grab in Africa by India