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Recent Posts
Author Archives: David Pierce
Attribution of Fascism
December 11, 2016 – 8:46 am
I began writing this article on Saturday, December 10, 2016; I finished the next morning, Istanbul time. I wrote the first three paragraphs last. The planned breakfast did take place, quite pleasantly. The death toll in the bombing rose to 39. No matter how much I read drafts of my articles, I usually want to make changes after they are published. I made one such change visible in the first paragraph. After a friend left some comments, I made some other small changes. Again these are visible. Last I heard, the policy on Diaspora* is that published posts cannot be edited at all, because there should never be any question about which version of a post any resulting comments refer to. WordPress is not so strict, and in future I may just remove all signs of editing. There may not be any point in doing this in an essay that does not say everything that seemed worth saying at the time of writing. Better perhaps to leave the signs of work in progress. In any case, I shall retain access to the older versions.
Everything changes so fast, at least when one has an internet connection and a Twitter feed. As I try to wrap up this essay, I learn of a bombing outside a football stadium not too far from us here in Istanbul. Deaths are said to be in the teens, mostly of police officers. Twenty-nine persons are said to have died, all but two being police officers. Turkey has been in a state of emergency since the summer. Rescue vehicles had trouble getting through the normal traffic. The nearest hospitals are not operational.
Meanwhile, Donald Trump and his would-be appointees are called treasonous; but it is mainly liberals and lefties who are saying this. Russia was the big enemy when it was Communist; now some Republicans do not seem too concerned with its hold over Trump, while Democrats are reinventing the Red Scare.
If I hadn’t hooked up the internet connection, I would just be looking forward to a breakfast with friends later this morning, over on the Asian side of the Bosphorus. I expect this event to happen as planned, despite the bombing.
Now I just want to think a little bit about what fascism means, historically. It does seem to me that if Donald Trump has any ideology at all, it is fascism. Fascism is the doctrine that will guide his Presidency, if he is allowed to assume it. What this means is the main subject of this essay.
How to Learn about People
November 13, 2016 – 4:19 am
A chance encounter with a Medieval definition of God, used as the title of a sculpture, leads to an ancient plane tree and to more consideration of what can go wrong with public opinion polls.
Ancient plane tree of Bayır, Marmaris Peninsula, September 9, 2010
What Now
November 12, 2016 – 8:28 am
I composed this post after the US Presidential election of November 8, 2016; I revised it after the election of November 3, 2020. The general question is of responsibility, as for Clinton’s loss in 2016 or the Democrats’ loss of Congressional seats in 2020. More precisely, the question is not whom to blame, but why. The former question depends on the latter. There is a common belief, retained from childhood experience, that somebody, some power, is going to judge our actions. With regard to this belief, many of us continue to behave as if we are still children, be we obedient or not. Asked, for example, to think of the feelings of Trump supporters after their man’s 2020 loss, some of us reply, “Why should we? Did they ever think of our feelings?” You can ask that of a parent whom you expect to impose fairness; do you think there is such a parent of the world? My investigation of the 2016 election continued in “How to Learn About People.”
“Everything will be fine” is usually correct, but not always.
I wrote my last article, “Happiness,” after the arrests of editors and writers at Turkey’s largest independent newspaper, Cumhuriyet (“Republic”).
A philosophical point buried the article was this: there is no one reason, not even a collection of reasons, why things happen.
Happiness
November 3, 2016 – 9:07 am
If only tangentially sometimes, this is about living in Turkey, especially under the ongoing official state of emergency.
Aristotle, Marx & Engels, and Collingwood
A blog article on Medium recently struck me for its treatment of science. Dated October 3, the article is called “The Purpose Of Life Is Not Happiness: It’s Usefulness,” and its opening section is as follows.
Beykoz, Istanbul
August 16, 2016 – 4:22 pm
After five years in Istanbul, we continue to learn how much there is still to discover here. Now we have been to the Asian borough of Beykoz. Much of what we saw there was rural, and the topography and flora reminded me of Appalachia. I have nothing to say about the poverty and ignorance that might be suggested by this term; for me, Appalachia was always a locus for holidays, mostly at my late uncle’s place in West Virginia, but also in the form of bicycle tours. Travelling now to Beykoz, “Country roads,” I could think, “take me home, to the place I belong!” We got there by public bus from our European borough of Şişli.
Polonezköy, Beykoz, 2016.08.14
Pyrgos Island
August 12, 2016 – 7:43 pm
The Turkish name of this island is Burgazada, and I discussed its etymology in an article about a visit in February of 2014. We stayed there again in October of 2015. During this August of 2016, on our last day on the island, I saw a fellow with the Greek name of the island tattooed on his forearm. Continue reading
All You Need Is Love
August 2, 2016 – 3:45 pm
Note added May 31, 2018: Here are some meditations on education from the summer of 2016, when Donald Trump was threatening to become President of the United States. Education cannot be forced on unwilling students. Neither need students know just what they are accepting; they may be enticed or beguiled into learning. Whether they have learned cannot be directly tested. I include some memories of racism (as an observer, not a victim) and of my own liberal education.
Note added May 22, 2023: I return to this post, precisely because of that assertion that testing does not show directly whether students have learned. As I have learned recently through a friend, Emily Bender said something similar on Medium last year, in response to Steven Johnson in “A.I. Is Mastering Language. Should We Trust What It Says?” (New York Times Magazine, April 15, 2022):
First, large language models have been making steady improvements, year after year, on standardized reading comprehension tests.
Bender’s response is “On NYT Magazine on AI: Resist the Urge to be Impressed” (April 18, 2022):
just because the tests were designed to test for reading comprehension by people, and even if we assume that they do a good job of measuring that, doesn’t mean that comparable scores by machines on the same tests entail that machines are doing something comparable …
Bender goes on to talk about “construct validity.”
Would education solve the world’s problems? A meaningfully positive answer would imply that the appropriate education could actually be supplied to us, or enough of us; and yet education is not a drug that can be administered willy-nilly.
Tables for art entrance exam, MSGSÜ, 2016.08.02
Thinking & Feeling
July 20, 2016 – 2:16 pm
This essay is written as a distraction from current events, though I make some reference to them. I am prompted by questions of analogy provoked by
- the similes of Homer and
- a recent theater review in Harper’s that mentions the parables of Jesus.
War Continues
July 16, 2016 – 6:30 pm
Earthquakes have aftershocks. In 2011 in Van, after the quake of October 23, a Japanese relief worker called Atsushi Miyazaki was killed when his hotel collapsed under the force of the quake of November 9.
Atsushi Miyazaki Parkı
Sarıyer, Istanbul
Thursday, February 9, 2023
We had moved to the area
the previous fall
Along with everybody we know, my spouse and I survived the coup attempt in Turkey yesterday (July 15, 2016). Continue reading
