Conrad and the First World War

During the First World War, Conrad believed himself peripheral to a transitional historical moment. In November 1914, he wrote: 'the thoughts of this war sit on one's chest like a nightmare. I am painfully aware of being crippled, of being idle, of being useless with a sort of absurd anxiety' (CL 5, 427). In August 1915, Conrad felt the 'world of 15 years ago is gone to pieces; what will come in its place God knows, but I imagine doesn't care' (CL 5, 503). The political forces of nineteenth-century Europe that had fashioned Conrad's literature, notably imperialism and nationalism, were undermined and unleashed anew by the violence of the Great War and the uncertain legacy of the conflict. Conrad closely observed Poland's fate throughout the war in his relationship with Polish activist Józef Retinger, which inspired 'A Note on the Polish Problem' (1916) and 'The Crime of Partition' (1919). While 1918 saw the political rebirth of Poland, antagonisms provoked by the redrawing of Europe's historical boundaries made Conrad uneasy. On Armistice Day, he wrote: 'The great sacrifice is consummated - and what will come of it to the nations of the earth the future will show. I can not confess to an easy mind. Great and very blind forces are set free catastrophically all over the world' (CL 6, 302)

Peacekeeping Forces, Jurisdiction and Immunity: A Tribute to George Barton

George Barton wrote his PhD thesis at Cambridge on "Jurisdiction over Visiting Forces". He published three spinoffs from the thesis in the British Yearbook of International Law.  In all of these – each a tour de force in examining elusive and arcane State practice – he was at great pains to deny various supposed customary rules recognising immunity of foreign armed forces in the courts of a State in which they were visiting by consent. He worked in the United Nations Secretariat in New York just as the practice of United Nations peacekeeping began to develop. In this tribute, I try to imagine that he returned to the subject some 60 years later. Affecting, as best I can, the style of Dr Barton circa 1950, I offer some guesses as to how he might assess six decades of developments in law and practice in the multilateral context in which the United Nations, and especially the Secretariat and the Security Council, have been major actors

Assessing Responsibility: Fixing Blame versus Fixing Problems

In the midst of even the most tragic circumstances attending the aftermath of disaster, and co-existing with a host of complex emotions, arises a practical consideration: how might similar tragedies be prevented in the future? The complexity of such situations must not be neglected. More than mere prevention must usually be taken into consideration. But the practical question is of considerable importance. In what follows, I will offer some reasons for being concerned that efforts to fix the problem -- efforts, that is, directed toward insuring that similar tragedies do not occur in the future -- can easily be obstructed by attempts to fix blame -- that is, efforts directed toward determining which agent among those involved is guilty of wrong-doing. This is the case, I shall contend, even where some agent or another really is guilty of wrong-doing. The problem is further complicated by a pervasive human tendency to imagine that some agent or another must be responsible in some way for any tragedy that occurs -- even when this is not really true -- but its influence is not at all limited to such cases. As I shall suggest, philosophical attitudes toward issues of determinism and free will may be implicated in the different approaches people take to the problem of assessing what has gone wrong in a particular case and how to fix it, but such deep philosophical problems need not be resolved here. The point is not that humans are never guilty of wrong-doing (since their actions, the argument might go, are all products of outside forces), but rather that whatever the case may be about guilt, tracking down guilty persons is a different business from fixing institutionally-embedded problems so as to lessen the likelihood of their recurrence

Veterans in need of housing are at risk of being forgotten because of the pandemic

First paragraph: Imagine leaving your job, moving house and trying to find a new social identity all at the same time. Most of us never have to do all of these things at once, but this is the experience of many people as they leave the Armed Forces in the UK.https://theconversation.com/veterans-in-need-of-housing-are-at-risk-of-being-forgotten-because-of-the-pandemic-15164

Is Religion an Evolutionary Adaptation?

Religious people talk about things that cannot be seen, stories that cannot be verified, and beings and forces beyond the ordinary. Perhaps their gods are truly at work, or perhaps in human nature there is an impulse to proclaim religious knowledge. If so, it would have to have arisen by natural selection. It is hard to imagine how natural selection could have produced such an impulse. There is a debate among evolutionary scientists about whether or not there is any adaptive advantage to religion at all (Bulbulia 2004a; Atran and Norenzayan 2004). Some believe that it has no adaptive value itself and that it is just a hodge podge of of behaviors that have evolved because they are adaptive in other non-religious contexts. The agent-based simulation described in this article shows that a central unifying feature of religion, a belief in an unverifiable world, could have evolved along side of verifiable knowledge. The simulation makes use of an agent-based communication model with two types of information: verifiable information (real information) about a real world and unverifiable information (unreal information) about about an imaginary world. It examines the conditions necessary for the communication of unreal information to evolved along side the communication of real information. It offers support for the theory that religion is an adaptive complex and it disputes the theory that religion is a byproduct of unrelated adaptive processes.Religion, Myth, Deception, Empirical Reasoning, Rationality

A practitioner's guide to 'Imagine', the systemic and prospective sustainability analysis

The purpose of the Mediterranean Action Plans Coastal Area Management Programme is to help Mediterranean countries implement a sustainable management process for their coastal areas. This in particular implies thinking collectively about possible futures by taking into account past developments and the present situation of the area in question. To do so and right from the very start, the Blue Plan has assisted teams involved in the CAMPs to use the systemic and prospective approach so as to highlight priorities, forecast negative developments and suggest action to be taken to establish sustainable development in the Mediterranean's coastal areas. What do we mean by sustainable development? The Blue Plan adheres to a definition that is a blend of what you find in the Bruntland Report and at the FAO, 'sustainable development is one that respects the environment, is technically appropriate, economically viable and socially acceptable, making it possible to meet the needs of present generations without jeopardising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs'. In this framework the 'Imagine' analysis of systemic and prospective sustainability now proposes a set of tools and methods (a methodological corpus) to describe, assess and examine the level of sustainability of an eco-socio system in the past, present and future by means of indicators and a participatory process that considers local actors to be experts at their level

A family of big brother that do not talk each other

Professor Slemrod’s IFS annual lecture (2006) concerning recent fiscal development in the U.S. is an interesting, thoughtful piece of high level taxation theory. However, I believe a couple of remarks ought to be made here. One is that the lecture sounded somewhat “American” to the ears of a continental European tax scholar. The U.S. Supreme Court is increasingly committed towards defending individuals’ privacy rights, unlike its Europe counterparts. Some Buchanan’s wind blows all around. Furthermore, it is difficult to imagine that tax administrations, which in many countries are rather poor at performing the simplest everyday tasks, could be transformed into well-organised, efficiently run, Big Brother-like organisations. Professor Slemrod expects Oceania to be with us with a decade or two. However, in the long run, globalisation will constrain the modelling of tax systems to a far greater degree than it already does. Several forces are going to shape tax designs consisting of simple, barely progressive taxes, largely applied in a shedular way in the source countries, ,while global income tax will be abandoned. all together. There is going to be an increase in the proportion of taxes based on the benefit principle. The restoration of the residence principle, and the rebuilding of a global, personalised income tax, could result from a rapid rise in the sharing of information among countries concerning revenue earned and taxes paid in different countries by the same tax payers. Back in 1999, Tanzi and Zee had already warned us that a country providing tax information on non-resident taxpayers would become a less attractive option in a world of increasing tax competition. Tanzi and Zee also produced a long list of factors which may make information-sharing ineffective. Similar conclusions were recently drawn by Keen and Ligthart (2006).Taxing power; Privacy; International exchange of tax-information;

Non equilibrium in statistical and fluid mechanics. Ensembles and their equivalence. Entropy driven intermittency

We present a review of the chaotic hypothesis and discuss its applications to intermittency in statistical mechanics and fluid mechanics proposing a quantitative definition. Entropy creation rate is interpreted in terms of certain intermittency phenomena. An attempt to a theory of the experiment of Ciliberto-Laroche on the fluctuation law is presented.Comment: 22 page