March 2006

David Brooks has discovered Annette Lareau’s book Unequal Childhoods. Through the miracles of modern blogging those of you who missed the column can read it in the body of Laura’s post on it. If, like Laura, you’re unnerved in some way by Brooks’s interpretation, don’t let that put you off the book. He is right about several things, the main one being that the book is brilliant, and should be read by just about anyone interested in family life. If you’re a teacher of poor children it will help you understand what’s going on in the children’s lives; if you’re a teacher of wealthy children it’ll probably confirm what you already know. If, like me, you’re a parent, it’ll help you reflect on your own situation. I don’t do anything radically different because of reading the book, but there are several ways in which I treat my children somewhat differently; in particular giving them more unsupervised time, and being (even) less interventionist when they are at odds with each other which, as if by magic, is much less often.

So what does Brooks get right?

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I have a question for lawyers. Would it be possible simply to repeal copyright extension? Could Congress just repeal the Copyright Extension Act of 1998, for example, placing many works in the public domain with a stroke – and letting the mouse out of jail, etc.?

The main concern is that repeal would be a ‘taking’, under the 5th Amendment: “nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation.” This would make such a repeal prohibitively expensive. But would it be a taking? That’s what I’m asking. What are the precedents in this area? I’ll spare you my untutored, a priori thoughts about this question. But I would like to focus the question a bit more, if I may. The relevant bit from Article I is brief to a fault (or virtue, as you like): “To promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries.” I realize that giving people rights – especially rights they can sell – amounts to giving them a kind of property. But Congress can always legislate to provide benefits, ergo rights to benefits, that can later be repealed. Is copyright different? I am curious what precedent there is. One (very legally naive) argument against the ‘takings’ reading would be this: if copyright is regular old property, copyright extension – which deprives the public of its property – is a taking. The right to copy, which I am going to get in 20 years is already my property, just like a trust fund that will only starting paying out in 20 years is already my property. Since apparently taking this from the public isn’t a legal taking, copyright isn’t regular old property, and repealing copyright wouldn’t be a taking. I realize this is dubious.

I also realize the argument could be made that it would be imprudent of Congress to extend copyright, then turn around and contract it. Such inconsistent shenanigans would deprive copyright holders of confidence. But no one denies that Congress has the right to make some dumb laws. (The Copyright Extension Act of 1998, for example.) Let’s just discuss whether it would be strictly possible to contract copyright without compensation to holders.

Like John Howard, I won’t be shedding any tears over Slobodan Milosevic, whose death in prison, apparently from natural causes, has been announced.

An obvious question raised by his death is whether (and how) his trial on a variety of war crimes charges could have been accelerated. The fact that he will never be properly convicted is certainly unfortunate. Even if it would have had no short run impact on opinion among Serbian nationalists, it would have helped to set the historical record straight. Milosevic’s death increases the urgency of capturing his main instruments, Mladic and Karadzic, whose connection to the crimes of the Bosnian war is more immediate, and whose trial could drive home the evil of Milosevic’s policies.

Still, the long, and now abortive, trial in The Hague is better than the alternative on offer in Baghdad, where Saddam Hussein, whose wars cost millions of lives, is being tried, and may be executed, for a comparatively minor crime, but one which is politically convenient for the purposes of victors’ justice.

* An adaption of the headline of the Sydney Telegraph on the good news of 5 March 1953.

As Jim Henley has noted, there’s a lot of ressentiment on the right these days. And “not only”:http://news.ft.com/cms/s/5824c998-b0a3-11da-a142-0000779e2340.html in the US.

bq. Two years after the Madrid train bombings, Spain’s main political parties cannot agree on who was responsible for the nation’s deadliest terrorist attack. … The Popular party, which lost power in a general election three days after the train bombings, accuses the Socialist government, the police and the judiciary of taking part in a massive conspiracy to cover up alleged links between Islamic radicals and Eta, the violent Basque separatist group. … The Popular party’s conspiracy theory has been taken up by rightwing talk- show hosts, some of whom have even accused unamed Socialists of financing the terrorist attacks to oust the Popular party from power. …

bq. After a two-year investigation spanning nine countries, Juan del Olmo, an investigating magistrate, says he will lay formal charges against dozens of suspects within the next three weeks. … The Popular party refuses to endorse Mr del Olmo’s conclusions, perhaps because José María Aznar, the former prime minister, retains a powerful influence over his party. Mr Aznar blamed Eta for the Madrid train bombings and continued to insist on a Basque connection long after evidence began to point to Islamist extremists.

Reading this, and drawing the obvious comparison with Cheney’s “bogus claims”:http://www.cnn.com/2004/ALLPOLITICS/06/18/cheney.iraq.al.qaeda/ about the Saddam-Al Qaeda connection, and Wolfowitz’s “fantasies”:http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/features/2003/0312.bergen.html, about who ordered the original World Trade Center bombing makes it seem pretty strange to me that the meme of lefties as conspiracy theorists has stuck. Not that there aren’t some strange conspiracy theories out there on the left – but they’re weak beer in comparison to some of the deeply weird shit that our Right Wing Overlords in the US administration, and our former and would-be future Overlords in Madrid, take as gospel truth.

Today I was wondering whether it was worth buying Slavoj Zizek’s new book, “The Parallax View”:http://mitpress.mit.edu/catalog/item/default.asp?ttype=2&tid=10762 and reading it, even in a spirit of ironic detachment or what have you. Reasons to Buy: 1. Some smart people I know like him. Selected Reason Not to Buy: 1. Life’s too short to deal with bullshit, even if it’s high-quality, triple-sifted, quintessence of ironic Lacanian crunchy-frog bullshit like this: “Zizek is interested in the “parallax gap” separating two points between which no synthesis or mediation is possible, linked by an “impossible short circuit” of levels that can never meet. … Modes of parallax can be seen in different domains of today’s theory, from the wave-particle duality in quantum physics [I assume he put this in just to irritate people — KH] to the parallax of the unconscious in Freudian psychoanalysis between interpretations of the formation of the unconscious and theories of drives. … Philosophical and theological analysis, detailed readings of literature, cinema, and music coexist with lively anecdotes and obscene jokes.” From this — especially the last bit — it’s clear to me that it’s not the Mainstream Media that has anything to fear from the blogosphere, but rather Slavoj Zizek — he will shortly be rendered obsolete by the universe of pop-culture enriched slacker grad-student/ABD bloggers. Even Zizek can’t write fast enough to keep up with them all.

Anyway, here’s “another slightly breathless example”:http://chronicle.com/temp/email2.php?id=rs6ZjbSWsvgFHx6bhccDzTtjYNwYhggx, this time from the _Chronicle_ about the philosopher Alain Badiou:

bq. Monday’s discussion celebrated the publication of a long-awaited English translation of Mr. Badiou’s 1988 book, _Being and Event_ … First, he dissects “being” with the aid of set theory, the mathematical study of abstract groups of objects (sets) and their relations to one another. … Indeed, Being and Event makes the striking claim that “mathematics is ontology.” And chunks of the book are studded with equations and theorems that may frighten off the scholar who fled to the humanities to escape mathematics.

The idea that set theory might be useful to philosophy is not exactly new, nor are claims about the relationship between math and ontology. (Maybe “Kenny”:http://www.ocf.berkeley.edu/~easwaran/blog/ will show up in the comments with the relevant reading list.) On the other hand, although often ignored in English-speaking countries, it is nevertheless an important fact that an elite French education can entail learning quite a lot of math in addition to ploughing through the great philosophers. So your typical Next Big French Intellectual often has the wherewithal to bug the shite out of technoids _and_ comp-litters, although only one of these constituencies is typically targeted. Badiou looks like he might be a rare double-header. He can alienate the humanities people with the set theory and simultaneously annoy the technoids with stuff like this:

bq. “Love is an event in the form of an encounter,” said Mr. Badiou, and it has the effect of forming “a new relation to the world.” … In response to one question that asked Mr. Badiou to link his philosophy to contemporary politics, he noted that “names in politics are impoverished. … The weakness of politics today is a weakness of poetry.” The fall of communism, he continued, also influenced that impoverishment. “Marxism,” he said, “had a constellation of names” for political concepts. “It was a sky of names. We lost the sky.”

Lovely. The other great thing about French academic culture, by the way, is that in addition to producing high theorists like Badiou it also produces the “best theory of the theorists”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0804717982/kieranhealysw-20/. The cafés at the Collège de France sell bottled reflexivity instead of Evian.

A favorable citation of my arguments at Tech Central Station. Normally, I’d be pretty concerned about this, but it’s from Tim Worstall, the sole exception, AFAIK, to the otherwise uniform hackishness of that site[1].

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[This post is co-written by Harry and Chris and is an extended follow up to Chris’s “initial response”:https://crookedtimber.org/2006/03/06/cato-on-inequality/ to David Schmidtz’s Cato Unbound piece “When Equality Matters”:http://www.cato-unbound.org/2006/03/06/david-schmidtz/when-equality-matters/ .]

We live in a highly unequal world and in strikingly unequal societies. The income discrepancies between the global poor and those in wealthy societies are enormous, with around one quarter of the world’s population living on less than $1 US per day, and many suffering from acute malnourishment, disease and premature death.[1] (For some further details see articles by Thomas Pogge “here”:http://www.onlineopinion.com.au/view.asp?article=3717 and “here”:http://portal.unesco.org/shs/es/file_download.php/9c2318f24653a2a4655347d827f144acPogge+29+August.pdf .) But even within the very wealthiest societies great wealth coexists with severe poverty. Moreover, this is not simply an inequality in outcomes. Whilst the United States, for example, likes to imagine itself as a land of opportunity, social mobility is extremely low and in recent years the benefits of economic growth have been ever more concentrated in the very richest sectors of the population. According to one study, only 1.3 per cent of children born to parents in the bottom 10 per cent of income earners end up in the top 10 per cent. By contrast, almost a quarter of children born into the top 10 per cent stay there, and almost half stay in the top 20 per cent. Children born into the richest tenth of households are 18 times more likely than children born into the poorest tenth to end up in the top tenth. (Further see the “Economist”:http://www.economist.com/world/na/displayStory.cfm?story_id=3518560 and “Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis”:http://www.umass.edu/preferen/gintis/intergen.pdf .)

David Schmidtz’s recent piece for Cato Unbound, “When Inequality Matters”:http://www.cato-unbound.org/2006/03/06/david-schmidtz/when-equality-matters/ is an artful and unnerving attempt to make use of some recent work within egalitarian political philosophy to argue against what we what we think of as the core of egalitarianism: the demands for greater equality of condition and opportunity. We are not convinced. In our view Schmidtz’s case neglects the impact that relative inequalities have on absolute levels of flourishing and depends at crucial points on dubious analogies and on muddying important distinctions. But it would be churlish not to acknowledge that he gets some things right. For instance, he is correct to emphasize that we must identify the dimensions in which equality matters, for the basic reason that making people equal on one dimension will often have the simple effect of making them unequal on another. Equalizing incomes, for example, would leave people unequal in well-being, because different people have different capacities to convert their income into well-being.

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Crooked Timber is going boingboing with all the ‘cool stuff!’ links. On we go. Amazon has piles of books slashed up to 75%. Mostly utter depths of crap, like you’d expect. But: The Locus Awards is a bargain. $4.99 for 30 years of the best, including Wolfe, LeGuin, Ellison, Varley, Russ, Butler, Tiptree, Bisson, Crowley, Chiang, couple others.

I’ll tell you a secret about Belle. She’s loves Hornblower. Don DeLillo’s Cosmopolis? (Was it really bad? That’s what I heard.) This looks good: The War Against Cliche, 500 pages worth of essays and reviews by Martin Amis. (Yes, I’m serious.) For the kids: Neil Gaiman, The Day I Swapped My Dad  For Two Goldfish; Daniel Pinkwater, The Picture of Morty and Ray; and for the kid in all of us, Peter Bagge, Buddy’s Got Three Mom’s. Maybe there’s something else good in there. I missed it, apparently.

This article in the Times is about the dangers to children, real and imagined, of social networking websites. The usual ping-pong back-and-forth about MySpace, etc. I liked the tag-line, though: “Parents fear Web predators. Some Internet experts, and some kids, call that fear overblown.” Other parental fears that “some kids” strenuously call overblown: the fear that the kid will spend some huge amount of money if given the chance, the fear that the kid will take the car and crash it at the first opportunity, the fear that the kid will have a big old party in your house while you’re away, etc, etc. Compare these reassurances to their near-perfect complement, “stern warnings from the AMA”:http://www.tpmcafe.com/node/27655 to 19-year-olds about to head off to Rocky Point for the week: “The American Medical Association is warning girls not to go wild during spring break after conducting a survey in which 83 percent of college women and graduates admit spring break involves heavier-than- usual drinking, and 74 percent saying the break results in increased sexual activity.” You don’t say! Both these messages will be put through the well-developed Bayesian filter located in the brains of their intended audience — parents in the first case, spring-breakers in the second — where the probability of the information being worthwhile is weighted by its source and then immediately disregarded.

“Pamela” of _Atlas Shrugs_ has a very funny and over the top encomium to Charles Johnson at the “Blogometer”:http://blogometer.nationaljournal.com/archives/2006/03/39_voting_on_th.html today.

bq. Who is your favorite political blogger? Favorite non-political blogger?

bq. Little Green Footballs. Hands down. When the history books are written, Charles Johnson will surely go down as a great American that made a critical difference between victory and defeat. His role has been largely ignored but so what? Most of the greats are ignored in their time. Van Gogh was ignored in his time too, although I don’t think Charles can draw… but you get my meaning. The media wants Charles and the blogs for that matter to just go away. But just the opposite is happening, the blogs are dictating the national dialog. What’s on the blogs today, is in the news 3,4 sometimes a week later.

Now, while you could certainly draw an interesting comparison between Charles Johnson and Vincent van Gogh, it wouldn’t be in terms of Johnson’s unrecognized genius. More generally, Pamela’s claim reminds me of this passage on palmistry from John Sladek’s 1974 book, _The New Apocrypha_.

bq. Palmists are of course in no doubt as to who was right. As with all cranks, they feel they haven’t been given a fair hearing and that orthodoxy is ganging up on them. [quoting palmistry author Noel Jaquin] “The reward of the pioneer is so often the ridicule of his fellow-men. We are not very much more just today. Of recent years men of genius have been deprived of their living and literally hounded to death by the ridicule of their more ignorant brethren.” How true, how true. They laughed at Galileo, they laughed at Darwin, they laughed at Edison … and they laughed at Punch and Judy.

I caught (the excellent) Stuart Maconie talking about Catweazle on the Freak Zone last weekend (about 40 minutes in, and easy to lose during the discussions of H R Pufnstuff: I wasn’t listening carefully but it sounded as if they hadn’t yet heard of Jack Wild’s demise!. They also discuss the Bugaloos which must have been created on some sort of drug, even if HR Pufnstuff wasn’t). I waited a long time to watch Catweazle, which was semi-forbidden when I was a kid (we were allowed to watch the commerical channel, but only if we were willing to put up with the merciless ridicule to which my mother would subject us). When we recently lived in Oxford the public library had a single video cassette with 3 episodes from series 1, and my daughter, then 5, was captivated. I mentioned this to a couple of her friends’ mothers, both of whom sighed and said “that must be lovely to watch”. After numerous delays it finally came out on DVD last year sometime. And series 1 really is lovely; Geoffrey Bayldon is quite believable as a 900 year old magician who is completely nuts, and the gags, although predictable, work every time. The light is just slightly dim, suggesting something sinister which never actually happens; and there’s wonderful chemistry between Bayldon and the young Robin Davies. Series 2 is fine; if you watch 1 you’ll want to watch 2. Before the DVD arrived I asked my daughter if she remembered it; her response was a withering ‘Dad, it doesn’t matter how long it is, you don’t forget TV that’s that good’. Which is about right.

Here’s a lovely little video that, near as I can tell, has not gone nearly so viral as it deserves. "Superman lay broken … La-da-da-da-Daa."

The naive beauty of it – part childcult, part cynicism about fight scenes – is what Daniel Clowes is getting at, I guess, in this interview.

As a kid, I was really attracted to superheroes, but I never read the comics. I’d buy every single comic, and I had some connection to it, but I didn’t like them, really. I remember talking to my other friends who read superhero comics, and they liked them on such a different level than I did. They were like, “Yeah, when Iron Man fights the guy, and punches him in the face, it’s so awesome!” But it had this pop-art iconographic quality to me that was really charming, and I just loved that aspect of it. I always gravitated towards that part of it, and I could never quite get past that, and that’s what I was going for. I wanted to create a story that lived up to the iconography, but also had something else going on.

If you don’t know who Clowes is, you should. (Go read wikipedia or something.)
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If, like me, you adored Linda Smith, you might want to put aside 30 minutes to listen to the News Quiz tribute to her. If you’d never heard of Linda Smith until I mentioned her last week you should definitely listen to the tribute — 30 minutes of an incredibly funny, and manifestly delightful, person. If she doesn’t make you laugh I don’t know what to say. (I’m not going to tell you what the name of this post refers to — you have to listen to the show). If the link above is slow, try this and then click on listen again.

Adonal Foyle is my (adopted) brother. (Here or here, but turn down your speakers first.) He came to live with my parents and go to high school when I was already away at graduate school. Then he attended Colgate before going on to play for the Golden State Warriors in the NBA. This is his ninth year with the team. In 2001, he founded an organization called Democracy Matters that is devoted to organizing college students around the issue of campaign finance reform. They now have chapters on over 80 campuses. The focus on campaign finance allows them to bring together many different issues, and there is a broader goal of helping students learn to be politically engaged. It’s really quite a great group.

C-Span showed an interview with him the other day. (It was up against the Oscars – I haven’t seen the ratings.) He talks about growing up on a very small island; life in the NBA; founding Democracy Matters; poetry; politics; his family; money; and lots more. Adonal says that he did the interview after a long flight, and he was completely exhausted and didn’t really know what he was saying. He finished it and thought he did horribly. In fact, he was very open and unselfconscious (for example, in public he’s usually much more guarded about talking about the abuse he suffered as a child). I think it came off really well. It’s now available on-line. And, yes, that’s my daughter sitting on my mother’s lap in the picture at 20:30 – thanks for asking.