“Body-disposal teams are credited with checking Ebola in Liberia. But such teams are often attacked in Guinea. Resistance is reported in over a third of prefectures.
…
At times last year it looked as if Ebola was under control in Guinea, the largest of the affected countries. But health workers have trouble finding the sick. Poor publicity campaigns make it less likely that they come forward. Many believe that foreigners are infecting them. The WHO is now hiring anthropologists to help co-opt local leaders.
…
Getting to zero infections will be harder the longer it takes. Heavy rains will soon make it difficult to reach remote areas. Health officials also fear complacency. America is pulling its troops out of Liberia. Others may follow. WHO officials complain of a dwindling budget. The jungles of Guinea hid the first case; as long as they hide the last ones, the outbreak is not over.
Category: Psychology
The scientific study of the nature, functioning, and development of the human mind
Jacobs of the sharp pen
There is a wistful myth that if only we had enough money to spend – the figure is usually put at a hundred billion dollars – we could wipe out all our slums in ten years, reverse decay in the great, dull, gray belts that were yesterday’s and day-before-yesterday’s suburbs, anchor the wandering middle class and its wandering tax money, and perhaps even solve the traffic problem.
But look what we have built with the first several billions: Low-income projects that become worse centers of deliquency, vandalism and general social hopelessness than the slums they were supposed to replace. Middle-income housing projects which are truly marvels of dullness and regimentation, sealed against any buoyancy or vitality of city life. Luxury housing projects that mitigate their inanity, or try to, with a vapid vulgarity. Cultural centers that are unable to support a good bookstore. Civic centers that are avoided by everyone but bums, who have fewer choices of loitering place than others. Commercial centers that are lacklustre imitations of standardized suburban chain-store shopping. Promenades that go from no place to nowhere and have no promenaders. Expressways that eviscerate great cities. This is not the rebuilding of cities. This is the sacking of cities.
Jacobs, Jane. The Death and Life of Great American Cities. 1961. p. 4 (hardcover)
Solnit on the climate crisis
Yet you have to be abysmally ignorant of history, as well as of current events, not to see that our country and our world have always been changing, are in the midst of great and terrible changes, and are occasionally changed through the power of the popular will and idealistic movements. As it happens, the planet’s changing climate now demands that we summon up the energy to leave behind the Age of Fossil Fuel – and maybe with it some portion of the Age of Capitalism as well.
Solnit, Rebecca. “Let’s leave behind the age of fossil fuel. Welcome to Year One of the climate revolution“. The Guardian. 23 December 2014.
From “The Golden Compass”
Two souls
“In me there are two souls, alas, and their
Division tears my life in two.
One loves the world, it clutches her, it binds
Itself to her, clinging with furious lust;
The other longs to soar beyond the dust
Into the realm of high ancestral minds.”
-Faust, Part One. Goethe
Happiness isn’t mental health
“More recently you have the positive psychologists who are deluded enough to believe that happiness is a hallmark of mental health – which has gotta be the stupidest theory that’s come out in the last, I would say, probably 2000 years.”
Pinker on language
Language is not a protocol legislated by an authority but rather a wiki that pools the contributions of millions of writers and speakers, who ceaselessly bend the language to their needs and who inexorably age, die, and get replaced by their children, who adapt the language in their turn.
Pinker, Steven. The Sense of Style: The Thinking Person’s Guide to Writing in the 21st Century. p. 3 (hardcover)
Love and counterintelligence
But here’s the point. He had made another choice too. He had decided to cast himself as the victim, the wronged, the deceived, the rightly furious. He had persuaded himself that he had said nothing to me about the laundry basket. The memory had been erased, and for a purpose. But now he didn’t even know he’d erased it. He wasn’t even pretending. He actually believed in his disappointment. He really did think that I had done something devious and mean. He was protecting himself from the idea that he’d had a choice. Weak, self-deluding, pompous? All those, but above all, a failure of reasoning. High table, monographs, government commissions – meaningless. His reasoning had deserted him. As I saw it, Professor Canning was suffering from a gross intellectual malfunction.
McEwan, Ian. Sweet Tooth. 2012. p. 31 (emphasis in original)
Related: Self Deception
The policy garbage can
“March and Olsen… began with the assumption that both the rational and incremental models presumed a level of intentionality, comprehension of problems, and predictability among actors that simply did not obtain in reality. In their view, decision-making was a highly ambiguous and unpredictable process only distantly related to searching for means to achieve goals. Rejecting the instrumentalism that characterized most other models, Cohen, March, and Olsen (1989) argued that most decision opportunities were:
‘a garbage can into which various problems and solutions are dumped by participants. The mix of garbage in a single can depends partly on the labels attached to the alternative cans; but it also depends on what garbage is being produced at the moment, or the mix of cans available, and on the speed with which garbage is collected and removed from the scene.’
Cohen, March, and Olsen deliberately used the garbage-can metaphor to strip away the aura of scientific authority attributed to decision-making by earlier theorists. They sought to drive home the point that goals are often unknown to policy-makers, as are causal relationships. In their view, actors simply define goals and choose means as they go along in a policy process that is necessarily contingent and unpredictable.”
Howlett, Michael, M. Ramesh, and Anthony Perl. Studying Public Policy: Policy Cycles & Political Subsytems: Third Edition. 2009. p. 152 (paperback)
See also: The Thick of It
Stone on political ideas
This model of policy making as rational problem solving can’t explain why sometimes policy solutions go looking for problems. It can’t tell us why solutions such as deregulation turn into problems for the very groups they were meant to help. Most important, the production model fails to capture what I see as the essence of policy making in political communities: the struggle over ideas. Ideas are a medium of exchange and a mode of influence even more powerful than money and votes and guns. Shared meanings motivate people to action and meld individual striving into collective action. All political conflict revolves around ideas. Policy making, in turn, is a constant struggle over the criteria for classification, the boundaries of categories, and the definition of ideals that guide the way people behave.
Stone, Deborah. Policy Paradox: The Art of Political Decision Making: Third Edition. 2012. p. 13 (paperback)