[PHOTO] Looking west on St. Joseph at Yonge, August 2012

Looking west on St. Joseph Street from Yonge, just north of Wellesley, the Five Condominiums construction site is visible behind scaffolding and wire fence. Compare this September 2011 photo.

[BRIEF NOTE] On Ramil Safarov, Azerbaijan, Hungary, and the Internet

The case of Ramil Safarov, an Aserbaijani soldier who gained worldwide notoriety in 2004 when, while in Hungary attending a NATO training session, hacked to death Armenian soldier Gurgen Margaryan and was subsequently sentenced to life imprisonment without chance of parole for 30 years, has eight years later produced more international turmoil. The Hungarian government extradited Safarov to Azerbaijan, where--contrary to promises, so the Hungarian government has stated--the man was given a presidential pardon and public honours. Armenian-Azerbaijani emnity is at a high, Armenians are now unhappy with Hungary, many Hungarians are unhappy with their government's actions, and the risk of a new conflict in the South Caucasus has risen sharply.

• Eastern Approaches concentrates on the Hungarian end of things. There are rumours afoot that the controversial Viktor Orbán government extradited Safarov in exchange for Azerbaijani promises to buy several billion dollars in Hungarian government bonds, while the affair seems to have been masterminded not by the competent Foreign Ministry but by "Viktor Orbán, the prime minister, and Péter Szijjártó, the minister for external economic relations".


• At Registan, Péter Marton outlines the case of Safarov, going into greater detail into the need of the Hungarian government--cash-strapped, needing cheap Azerbaijani natural gas--to keep its options with Azerbaijan open.


• Finally, writing at Al Jazeera, Sarah Kendzior notes that the presence of the Internet in Azerbaijan does nothing to dampen popular nationalism or soften an authoritarian regime when neither populace nor government wants to change. The central paragraphs of her essay are below, quoted.

The small petrostate of Azerbaijan has made headlines in 2012. In May, it hosted Eurovision, the annual singing competition watched by hundreds of millions around the world. As Azerbaijan's government spent more than $700 million on promotion and infrastructure in an effort to put its best face forward, activists focused on alerting the world to Azerbaijan's atrocious record on human rights.

Eurovision was seen as an "opportunity to highlight Azerbaijan’s failings", with the understanding that Azerbaijan's international image was of great importance to the Aliyev administration.

The Safarov case makes clear that it is not. While during Eurovision the Azerbaijani government paid lip service to democracy - "Azerbaijan is not an authoritarian state - we want to prove this to the whole world" an Aliyev aide told the Guardian - they have since brazenly promoted a murderer as a national hero, despite Western condemnation and a possible violation of international law.

Azerbaijani officials portray Safarov's murder of Margaryan as a capsule version of the war in Nagorno-Karabakh, a region which Azerbaijan and Armenia have fought over for decades. The conflict led to the deaths of thousands on each side, a massive refugee crisis for Azerbaijan, and the occupation of the territory by Armenia. Safarov versus Margaryan stems from Nagorno-Karabakh and serves as its representation. Only in this version, Azerbaijan won.

"Safarov's moral superiority was apparent even when he was in prison. The Armenian's insults towards our people, touching upon our national feelings, forced him to take this step," said Mubariz Gurbanli, a leading member of the ruling New Azerbaijan party. Gurbanli refers to an alleged desecration of the Azerbaijani flag by Margaryan and presents Safarov's response of hacking him to death as moral and justified.

The Safarov case serves as a warning to the West that they should never underestimate the insularity of dictatorships. Dictators struggle to shield citizens from foreign influence, with the result that foreigners come to believe that their influence matters. But the desire to block out the outside world stems from paranoia more than respect and that paranoia plays out in domestic politics - politics that strengthen pride by encouraging enmity.

Azerbaijan does not care what the rest of the world thinks. No action of a foreign power - be it international media or international law - has the resonance of revenge.

[LINK] "Mismodeling Indo-European Origin and Expansion"

I mentioned last August a recent computer study claiming that, contrary to current consensus, the ur-heimat of Indo-European languages was located not in the Pontic steppes on the northern shore of the Black Sea but rather in the landmass of Anatolia on the southern shore. I linked in passing to Razib Khan's GNXP criticism of problems with the model used by the team--Romani's divergence from South Asian Indo-European languages is much more historically recent than the model claims, notably--but now at Geocurrents, Martin Lewis has a long post with the full title of "Mismodeling Indo-European Origin and Expansion: Bouckaert, Atkinson, Wade and the Assault on Historical Linguistics" taking issue with the basic claims. Five paragraphs are excerpted below.

Our initial response was one of profound skepticism, as it hardly seemed likely that a single mathematical study could “solve” one of the most carefully examined conundrums of the distant human past. Recent work in both linguistics and archeology, moreover, has tended against the Anatolian hypothesis, placing Indo-European origins in the steppe and parkland zone of what is now Ukraine, southwest Russia, and environs. The massive literature on the subject was exhaustively weighed as recently as 2007 by David W. Anthony in his magisterial study, The Horse, the Wheel, and Language: How Bronze-Age Riders from the Eurasian Steppes Shaped the Modern World. Could such a brief article as that of Bouckaert et al. really overturn Anthony’s profound syntheses so easily?

The more we examined the articles in question, the more our reservations deepened. In the Science piece, the painstaking work of generations of historical linguists who have rigorously examined Indo-European origins and expansion is shrugged off as if it were of no account, even though the study itself rests entirely on the taken-for-granted work of linguists in establishing relations among languages based on words of common descent (cognates). In Wade’s New York Times article, contending accounts and lines of evidence are mentioned, but in a casual and slipshod manner. More problematic are the graphics offered by Bouckaert and company. The linguistic family trees generated by their model are clearly wrong, as we shall see in forthcoming posts. And on the website that accompanies the article, an animated map (“movie,” according to its creators) of Indo-European expansion is so error-riddled as to be amusing, and the conventional map on the same site is almost as bad. Mathematically intricate though it may be, the model employed by the authors nonetheless churns out demonstrably false information.

Failing the most basic tests of verification, the Bouckaert article typifies the kind of undue reductionism that sometimes gives scientific excursions into human history and behavior a bad name, based on the belief that a few key concepts linked to clever techniques can allow one to side-step complexity, promising mathematically elegant short-cuts to knowledge. While purporting to offer a truly scientific* approach, Bouckaert et al. actually forward an example of scientism, or the inappropriate and overweening application of specific scientific techniques to problems that lie beyond their own purview.

The Science article lays its stake to scientific standing in a straightforward but unconvincing manner. The authors claim that as two theories of Indo-European (I-E) origin vie for acceptance, a geo-mathematical analysis based on established linguistic and historical data can show which one is correct. Actually, many theories of I-E origin have been proposed over the years, most of which—including the Anatolian hypothesis—have been rejected by most specialists on empirical grounds. Establishing the firm numerical base necessary for an all-encompassing mathematical analysis of splitting and spreading languages is, moreover, all but impossible. The list of basic cognates found among Indo-European languages is not settled, nor is the actual enumeration of separate I-E languages, and the timing of the branching of the linguistic tree remains controversial as well. As a result of such uncertainties, errors can easily accumulate and compound, undermining the approach.

The scientific failings of the Bouckaert et al. article, however, go much deeper than that of mere data uncertainty. The study rests on unexamined postulates about language spread, assuming that the process works through simple spatial diffusion in much the same way as a virus spreads from organism to organism. Such a hypothesis is intriguing, but must be regarded as a proposition rather than a given, as it does not rest on a foundation of evidence. The scientific method calls for all such assumptions to be put to the test. One can easily do so in this instance. One could, for example, mathematically model the hypothesized diffusion of Indo-European languages for historical periods in which we have firm linguistic-geographical information to see if the predicted patterns conform to those of the real world. If they do not, one could only conclude that the approach fails. Such failure could stem either from the fact that the data used are too incomplete and compromised to be of value (garbage in/garbage out), of from a more general collapse of the diffusional model. Either possibility would invalidate the Science article.

This is promised to be the first post of a few criticizing the paper.

[LINK] "Gay Marriage Made Me Get Married"

Writing at the Everyday Sociology Blog, Jonathan Wynn writes about his recent marriage, and marriage generally, from a sociologist's perspective. (If you're curious about the title, with same-sex marriage being legal in the Massachusetts where he lives, neither a common-law relationship nor a registered civil union would have resulted in his partner's health benefits being available to him.)

Here’s that greater heft: Despite dire predictions about the institution of marriage crumbling due to homosexuals earning the same rights as the rest of us, the wheels have not come off. Massachusetts’s divorce rates have not skyrocketed since the state Supreme Judicial Court opened the doors for all to marry in November 2003. They are the lowest divorce rates in the nation, below pre-WWII levels.

My colleague, Professor and Director of the Center for Public Policy and Administration, M.V. Lee Badgett, compares across countries in her book When Gay People Get Married and concludes: “nothing much changed as a result of recognition of same-sex couples.” Numbers from the CDC indicate that, after a slight uptick in Massachusetts’ marriage rates, they returned to their normal trajectories after 2004’s legal decision. Maybe it is dawning on us as a nation: last year marked the first time a majority of Americans supported same-sex marriage.

[. . .]

The National Organization for Marriage and the Marriage Anti-Defamation Alliance argue for marriage based upon values, but there are plenty of ways to understand why we would engage in this kind of social activity outside of “traditional values.” As Robyn and I planned our wedding (we did a surprise wedding which is a whole other story, but one that turns out to be quite in vogue), I could not help but chuckle that I had long used marriage as an example of Max Weber’s verstehen and theory of social action. (Everyday Sociology blogger Sally Raskoff wrote a post about that, too.)

There are, in Weber’s lights, four reasons for social action: affective (emotion-based), traditional (habit or tradition-based), value-rational (based upon values deemed as paramount), and instrumental-rational (based upon efficiency). Marriage, I tell my Introduction to Sociology students, could be analyzed through this lens.

Two people who just love each other to pieces get married for affective reasons. Robyn’s parents, it turned out, got married so they could live together off base while he was serving in the military (i.e., instrumental-rational). Marriage in this day and age has all sorts of instrumental-rational reasons: the tax incentives to filing jointly, legal ramifications, and, as I already mentioned, health care concerns. Marriage is a social action that requires analysis from the perspective of the acting subjects, and that’s where verstehen comes in: empathetic understanding of the actors themselves. These are not mutually-exclusive. An interpretative understanding means that you can tease out the multiple reasons for a social act. To say that I got married for health care alone isn’t quite accurate. There are affective reasons as well!