Academics From Canada

"Rather than reduce this to the personality of Modi or his lack of knowledge, I am more interested in the fact how the Hindu Right has made a virtue of anti-intellectualism, ignorance, and fake news/propaganda in the last five years, and how people have been asked to believe the most illogical, irrational, untruthful statements coming out, especially from the PM."

"All the fantastical claims are coupled with the fact that Mr Modi has not given a single press conference, or an unscripted interview. This makes it impossible to question the PM on critical policy matters, and his grasp of them. [...] Ultimately, I see this as a part of the greatest exercise in anti-intellectualism, propaganda/fake news seen in Independent India, in which it is normal to defend the most absurd statement, and in which it has become impossible to distinguish between truth and falsehood."

"The unifying logic of both neo-liberal capitalist development and Hindutva (which is technicism). Both have an instrumental attitude, the former towards economic growth and science and technology, and the latter towards culture. [...] Modernity is not technicism or the expansion of the market, it is a larger project in which technological and economic betterment is only one aspect. More significant is the liberation of the human mind from the shackles of unreason (in which science is a mere aid), the seeking of the end of all oppressions, satiating the craving for . Without this, there is no modernity."

"While releasing the tax data, Prime Minister Narendra Modi said that it should lead to enhanced insights for policymaking on taxation. What he did not say was that it was a scathing commentary on the nation. Unless the cultural idea of the nation as comradeship and fraternity is complemented by material and economic arrangements that realise this, the nation will remain only in name."

"The joke is not on Modi. The joke is on the "educated" elite/middle class supporters of Modi who have made idiocy and ignorance fashionable."

"Generally, the death of a judge, in what seem to be mysterious circumstances, while presiding over a case against the second most powerful person in the country, and the closest associate of the head of the government, would be make prime-time television in a democracy. Similarly, the allegations of corruption against the family of the same person would have garnered media attention. But recent events in India prove otherwise. [...] Despite the explosive nature of the story and its potentially unprecedented implications for Indian democracy (in independent India's history, to my knowledge, there is no instance of a judge being assassinated) there was a stunned silence in the mainstream and big media, especially, the English-language television channels that have a disproportionate influence in the setting of the political ."

"Much of Narendra Modi's legitimacy among the Indian public comes from the perception that, unlike most of the political class, he is personally beyond reproach when it comes to financial corruption. Moreover, it was he who declared a war on corruption, the most emphatic example of which, the government claims, is the demonetization exercise. But Mr. Modi's silence on the corruption story finally exposed the hollowness of the government’s crusade against corruption, which in any case, has so far amounted to nothing more than targeted attacks against rival politicians. In politics, perceptions play a huge role. This is the first time that Mr. Modi's carefully crafted image as incorruptible and as a crusader against corruption has taken a considerable beating. WhatsApp messages, tweets and Facebook posts were rife with jokes about Mr. Shah’s businesses, and Mr. Modi’s silence."

"There is something deeply troubling about a culture which makes humans into gods, and which puts people on pedestals to be worshipped. For, it glosses over all blemishes in its quest for the godly."

"As examples from history show, when jokes start circulating about a powerful leader, cracks in political legitimacy begin to appear."

"But the more damaging development has been the role of the mainstream media in the face of government attempts to muzzle it. Just as in the judge story, there was silence about the corruption story in the media. Even when there was coverage, it was more about the defamation case filed by Mr. Shah rather than the merits of story itself. The rare television channel that has sometimes been critical of the Modi government and faced its wrath for doing so, succumbed, pulling down reportage about the Shah story. This is an extraordinary level of submissiveness displayed by the media. This must also be read in the context of the largest democracy’s abysmal ranking in the World . Last year, India ranked 133 out of 18 countries. And this year, it has declined to 136. Recently, the main mode of against journalists doing investigative stories has been through Strategic Lawsuits against Public Participation (SLAPPs), like the one filed by Mr. Shah. Journalists face severe challenges, including physical violence and threat to life, in carrying out their work."

"Other times, authoritarianism may come by stealth, cloaked in the rhetoric of science, liberalism and the common good. Meanwhile, there will almost certainly be efforts by those vastly enriched and empowered in the last decades, notably in the intertwined technology and financial sectors, to leverage their influence and resources, as well as the weakness and disarray of traditional institutions, to lead the reorganization of society along neo-technocratic lines. They will continue to generously offer the services of their powerful and integrated surveillance, logistics, financial and data empires to “optimize” social and political life. This corporate dystopia can wear a human face: basic income, for new epidemics, . Already they arrive, bearing gifts to help us in this emergency: tracking disease vectors, banning disinformation, offering states help with data and population management. Underneath the mask will be the reorganization of society to better conform to the hyper-capitalist meta-algorithm which, though driven by capitalist contradictions, will essentially be neofeudal for most of us: a world of data and risk management where only a small handful enjoy the benefits. We will be told it is for our own good."

"In the wake of the pandemic we can be sure that fascists and will seek to mobilize tropes of ⁠— racial, national, economic ⁠— purity, purification, parasitism, and pollution to impose their long-festering dreams on reality. The vengeful romance of the border, now more politicized than ever, will haunt all of us in the years to come. The “new” authoritarians, whether they emphasize the totalitarian state or the totalitarian market ⁠— or both ⁠— will insist that we all recognize we now live ⁠— have always lived ⁠— in a ruthless, competitive world and must take measures to wall ourselves in and cast out the undesirable."

"Against all these fateful outcomes there will be those among us who refuse to return to normal, or to embrace the “new normal,” those of us who know that “the trouble with normal is it only gets worse.” Already, in the that the crisis has unleashed, we are seeing extraordinary measures emerge that reveal that much of the neoliberal regime’s claims to necessity and austerity were transparent lies. The God-like market has fallen, again. In different places a variety of measures are being introduced that would have been unimaginable even weeks ago. These have included the suspension of rents and mortgages, the free provision of public transit, the deployment of basic incomes, a hiatus in debt payments, the commandeering of privatized hospitals and other once-public infrastructure for the public good, the liberation of incarcerated people, and governments compelling private industries to reorient production to common needs. We hear news of significant numbers of people refusing to work, taking wildcat labor action, and demanding their right to live in radical ways. In some places, the underhoused are seizing vacant homes. We are discovering, against the upside-down capitalist value paradigm which has enriched the few at the expense of the many, whose labor is truly valuable: care, service, and frontline public sector workers. There has been a proliferation of grassroots radical demands for policies of care and solidarity not only as emergency measures, but in perpetuity."

"and capitalist are panicking, fearful that half a century of careful ideological work to convince us of the necessity of neoliberalism ⁠— the transformation of our very souls ⁠— will be dispelled in the coming weeks and months. The sweet taste of freedom ⁠— real, interdependent freedom, not the lonely freedom of the market ⁠— lingers on the palate like a long-forgotten memory, but quickly turns bitter when its nectar is withdrawn. If we do not defend these material and spiritual gains, capitalism will come for its revenge."

"On the other hand ⁠— or maybe at the same time ⁠— we can also expect that, among the powerful and among the rest of us, there will be calls to reject the “return to normal,” but in order to embrace something even worse. It is likely that the chaos and deaths of the pandemic will be blamed on too much democracy, liberalism and empathy. Now that states are flexing their muscles and taking full command of society, there will be many who do not want the sleeve to be rolled back down. We may yet see, in this crisis, the use of repressive force on civilians ⁠— as it is already being used on migrants and incarcerated people ⁠— and I fear that it will be seen by many as justified, a to feed the Gods of fear."

"Meanwhile, the quarantined and semi-isolated are discovering, using digital tools, new ways to mobilize to provide care and mutual aid to those in our communities in need. We are slowly recovering our lost powers of life in common, hidden in plain sight, our secret inheritance. We are learning again to become a cooperative species, shedding the claustrophobic skin of . In the suspension of a capitalist order of competition, distrust and endless, pointless hustle, our ingenuity and compassion are resurfacing like the birds to the smog-free sky. When the Spring arrives, the struggle will be to preserve, enhance, network and organize this ingenuity and compassion to demand no return to normal and no new normal."

"The arrival of the COVID-19 pandemic in early 2020, unfolding around the world as I write these words, will likely be remembered as an epochal shift. In this extended winter, as borders close, as s and multiply, as people succumb and recover, there is a strong sense that, when the spring finally arrives we will awaken in a drastically changed landscape."

"After months of chaos, isolation and fear, the desire to return to normal, even if normal is an abusive system, may be extremely strong. The stage is set for this desire to be accompanied by a frantic . Will we want someone to blame, especially those of us who lose loved ones? Must there be blood, figurative or literal?: a baptism by fire so that the old order ⁠— which, of course, created the conditions of austerity and inequality that made this plague so devastating⁠ — can be reborn in purified form. Of course, things will never be “normal” again: some of us, the privileged and wealthy, may be afforded the illusion, but this illusion is likely to be carried on the backs of the vast majority who will work harder, longer and for less, suffer greater risks and fewer rewards. The debts of the pandemic, literal and figurative, will have to be repaid."

"We have learned how to bring a capitalist economy to its knees through non-violent protest in the face of overwhelming, technologically augmented oppression. We are learning how to become ungovernable by either states or markets. Equally important, we have learned new ways to care for one another without waiting for the state or for authorities. We are rediscovering the power of mutual aid and solidarity. We are learning how to communicate and cooperate anew. We have learned how to organize and to respond quickly, how to make collective decisions and to take responsibility for our fate."

"I imagine that struggles to come will be defined by either the desperate drive to “return to normal,” or a great refusal of that normal. But this is no manichean melodrama. On the one hand, there will be those who seek to return us to the order of global revenge capitalism to which we had become accustomed: a nihilistic system of global accumulation that appears to be taking a needless, warrantless vengeance on so many of us, though without any one individual intending any particular malice, and one which breeds the worst kind of revenge politics. Of course, we should expect the demand that we return to the vindictive normal from the beneficiaries of that system ⁠— the wealthy, the political elite ⁠— who have everything to gain from business as usual. But we should also expect it from millions of those oppressed, exploited, and alienated by that system, whose lives have been reduced to slow death under it."

"Those of us now in isolation, in spite of our fear and frustrations, in spite of our grief ⁠— for those who have died or may die, for the life we once lived, for the future we once hoped for ⁠— there is also a sense we are cocooned, transforming, waiting, dreaming. True: Terrors stalk the global landscape, notably the way the virus ⁠— or our countermeasures ⁠— will endanger those among us whom we, as a society, have already abandoned or devalued. So many of us are already disposable. So many of us are only learning it now, too late. Then there is the dangerous blurring of the line between humanitarian and authoritarian measures. There is the geopolitical weaponization of the pandemic. But when the Spring comes, as it must, when we emerge from hibernation, it might be a time of profound global struggle against both the drive to “return to normal” ⁠— the same normal that set the stage for this tragedy ⁠— and the “new normal” which might be even worse. Let us prepare as best we can, for we have a world to win."

"Like the heroes of all good epics, we are not ready, our training was not completed, yet fate will not wait. Like all true heroes, we must make do with what we have: one another and nothing else. As the world closes its eyes for this strange, dreamlike quarantine ⁠— save of course for those frontline health, service and care workers who, in the service of humanity, cannot rest, or those who have no safe place to dream ⁠— we must make ready for the waking. We are on the cusp of a great refusal of a return to normal and of a new normal, a vengeful normalcy that brought us this catastrophe and that will only lead to more catastrophe. In the weeks to come, it will be time to mourn and to dream, to prepare, to learn, and to connect as best we can. When the isolation is over, we will awaken to a world where competing regimes of vindictive normalization will be at war with one another, a time of profound danger and opportunity. It will be a time to rise and to look one another in the eye."

"The celebrity character of Trumpism appeals to citizens that would otherwise be disengaged from politics, with Trump serving as a placeholder for their unsatisfied wants and dreams. The ability to translate the of celebrity into seems also to mean that one-time spectators can be similarly transformed into motivated voters."

"Much to the consternation of Republican elites, it also stands well outside of conservative ."

"I lived most of my life feeling like an outsider. I remember in second grade being bullied, taunted and beaten up. I am bicultural, biracial – my mother is Japanese and my father is caucasian. I grew up in Connecticut; it was a fairly white culture and I grew up thinking I was Japanese. Then when I went to Japan I realised that I was American. That was shocking but also a wonderful completion, realising that I was neither here nor there but occupied some liminal space, neither in one culture or the other. That's a great vantage point."

"We’re afraid of saying the word “suicide” and talking about it. Certainly the word suicide has a kind of energy that is frightening, and people can be afraid of talking about it. Why is it that we forget we were adolescents once? I don’t forget that. Writers need to keep that part alive in order to write. What’s important (for adolescents) is that you have a lifeline; it can be your friends, it can be your family, church, writing practice, a teacher, your cat, your gerbil. And little by little, the hormones subside and you develop coping skills and you develop passions and things that are really worth living for, and you get through that difficult period."

"More recent writers who have knocked me dead include Roberto Bolaño, Ruth Ozeki, Sabrina Vourvoulias, Isabel Quintero and N. K. Jemisin."

"All through my childhood, I wanted to be a novelist. I stopped writing at various points because I would get frustrated because there were things I didn’t know how to do. I didn’t know how to move a story through time. Pacing. My character would enter a room and need to get across the room to the action, and I would walk her ploddingly across the room. I didn’t know how to move the plot along quickly and efficiently through time…"

"As a writer you wait around for inspiration; this book is about what happens when a character taps a writer on the shoulder and calls her into being; it's about the character creating a novelist."

"Don't pay too much attention to that Nobel Prize. They have to be capricious — they have to be. And that means that people fully deserving the award don't get it."

"I don't think there is a final theory of anything. It's theories all the way down."

"Another somewhat confusing usage is the name "the big bang" for the standard model. It is not appropriate, because it connotes a spatially isolated event, an explosion, that marked the start of everything. ... But the name has a very evident appeal and I expect that people will continue to use it."

"A solid stores energy in the vibrations of the atoms about their equilibrium positions. In the simplest approximation, which Einstein considered, each atom vibrates with the same frequency, ν, in each of three dimensions, so a solid containing N atoms can be thought of as 3N one-dimensional simple harmonic oscillators."

"The n-point correlation functions have proved useful not only as descriptive statistics but also as dynamic variables in the Newtonian theory of the evolution of clustering. ... The functions are generalized to mass correlation functions in position and momentum, and the BBGKY hierarchy of equations for their evolution is derived. This yields a new way to analyze the evolution of mass clustering in an expanding universe."

"I have been working in cosmology for 55 years ... I'm the last man standing, so to speak, from those early days."

"Only "America," of all national designations, took on the combined force of eschatology and chauvinism. Many forms of nationalism have laid claims to a world-redeeming promise; many Christian sects have sought, in open or secret heresy, to find the sacred in the profane; many European Protestants have linked the soul’s journey and the way to wealth. But only the "American Way," of all modern symbologies, has managed to circumvent the contradictions inherent in these approaches. Of all symbols of identity, only "American" has succeeded in uniting nationality with universality, civic and spiritual selfhood, sacred and secular history, the country’s past and the paradise to be, in a single transcendent ideal."

"Robert E. Park and Ernest Burgess, two of the influential urban sociologists from the famed "Chicago School," wrote in their book Introduction to the Science of Sociology:"

"David Lyon, Surveillance society: Monitoring everyday life, Open university press, 2001. ISBN 9780335205462"

"Surveillance today is a means of sorting and classifying populations and not just of invading personal space or violating the privacy of individuals. In postmodernizing contexts surveillance is an increasingly powerful means of reinforcing social divisions, as the superpanoptic sort relentlessly screens, monitors and classifies to determine eligibility and access, to include and to exclude."

"The panopticon produces subjects with desires to improve their inner lives. In contrast the superpanopticon constitutes objects, individuals with dispersed identities, who may remain unaware of how those identities are construed by the computer. We are once again back with disappearing bodies."

"What a contrast with the lives of ordinary people at the start of twenty-first century! Today, everyday life is constantly monitored."

"How long can surveillance theory ignore the implications of this? It seems entirely appropriate to add to the surveillance impetuses of the nation state, capitalism and bureaucracy, the imperatives of an implicit cultural commitment to omniperception. [...] The driving desire to dragnet yet more detailed data is both as old and as ominous as the aspiration to be "as God"."

"But the term surveillance society does have connotations that at least hint at possible negative consequences, in ways that unambiguously optimistic talk of "information societies" and "knowledge-based economies" does not. My point is rather that such societies are in part constituted by a surveillance dimension."

"Comint represents the effort to gain access to, intercept and process every important modern form of communication, in every significant sphere, and in many countries."

"What persists into postmodern conditions is an abiding infrastructural dependence on communication and information technologies. They are undoubtedly viewed in the popular and political imaginations as far more beneficial than baleful to humanity. That they will continue to expand their influence is beyond doubt, short of some global catastrophe."

"Then we got very excited because now there was this very simple local-learning rule. On paper it looked just great. I mean, you could take this great big network, and you could train up all the weights to do just the right thing, just with a simple local learning rule. It felt like we'd solved the problem . That must be how the brain works. I guess if it hadn't been for computer simulations, I'd still believe that, but the problem was the noise. It was just a very very slow learning rule. It got swamped by the noise because in the learning rule you take the difference between two noisy variables--two sampled correlations, both of which have sampling noise. The noise in the difference is terrible. I still think that's the nicest piece of theory I'll ever do. It worked out like a question in an exam where you put it all together and a beautiful answer pops out."

"We got quite a few applications, and one of these applications I couldn't decide if the guy was a total flake or not... He wrote a spiel about the machine code of the brain and how it was stochastic, and so the brain had this stochastic machine code. It looked like rubbish to me, but the guy obviously had some decent publications and was in a serious place, so I didn't know what to make of him... David Marr said, "Oh yes, I've met him." I said, "So what did you think of him?" David Marr said, 'Well, he was a bit weird, but he was definitely, smart." So I thought, OK, so we'll invite him. That guy was Terry Sejnowski, of course... the book was one of the first books to come out about neural networks for a long time. It was the beginning of the end of the drought... both Dave Rumelhart and Terry said that from their point of view, just getting all these people interested and in the same room was a real legitimizing breakthrough."

"I first of all explained to him why it wouldn't work, based on an argument in Rosenblatt's book, which showed that essentially it was an algorithm that couldn't break symmetry... The next argument I gave him was that it would get stuck in local minima... We programmed a backpropagation net, and we tried to get this fast relearning. It didn't give fast relearning, so I made one of these crazy inferences that people make--which was, that backpropagation is not very interesting... [One year of trying and failing to scale up Boltzmann machines later] "Well, maybe, why don't I just program up that old idea of Rumelhart's, and see how well that works on some of the problems we've been trying?"... We had all the arguments: It's assuming that neurons can send real numbers to each other; of course they can only send bits to each other ; you have to have stochastic binary neurons; these real-valued neurons are totally unrealistic. It's ridiculous." So they just refused to work on it, not even to write a program, so I had to do it myself."

"It seems very likely to a large number of people that we will get massive unemployment caused by Ai."

"If you or I learn something and want to transfer that knowledge to someone else, we can’t just send them a copy. But I can have 10,000 neural networks, each having their own experiences, and any of them can share what they learn instantly. That’s a huge difference. It’s as if there were 10,000 of us, and as soon as one person learns something, all of us know it. It’s a completely different form of intelligence. A new and better form of intelligence."