From the monthly archives:
bq. A top US official has described the suicides of three detainees at the US base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, as a “good PR move to draw attention”.
So “reports”:http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/5069230.stm the BBC. And who is this “top official”? She is Colleen Graffy,
bq. “Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Public Diplomacy.”
I wonder what she says when she’s being undiplomatic.
A couple weeks ago Matt Yglesias noted the peculiarity of ‘unapologetic liberal‘. (File under ‘catechism of cliche’, ‘what sort of liberal is he?’) I thought I’d dredge up something from the files:
Sadly, John Thornhill’s “a Martian economist visits earth” “article”:http://news.ft.com/cms/s/9080568a-f7e4-11da-9481-0000779e2340.html is behind a subscription firewall. Hard not to smile at this:
bq. Our Martian friend scratches its heads. “When my economics professor last visited earth in 1945 he told me that the Europeans had just experienced a terrible civil war in which 36m people had been killed, including many of their most brilliant minds. Now you tell me that 60m French people produce almost as much economic output each year as 1.3bn Chinese, who have been the dominant economic power for most of your planet’s history. What is more, the French can do this while working 35-hour weeks and producing 246 different types of cheese. How did this economic miracle come about?”
I’d say “read the whole thing”, but unless you’ve got an FT subscription, you can’t.
Peter Levine on “why I am not a zealot about church and state”; well worth reading, quite independently of his excellent choice of source material. (Previous thoughts, from me, here).
Because it is impossible to find a live internet radio stream of World Cup matches, I am forced to follow the games on the text-only FIFA MatchCast. Winding up to the Poland vs Ecuador match, which is just starting, the Official MatchBot Commentator guy just wrote, “Poland’s record on German soil is excellent …” I guess it depends when you’re talking about.
The words “social justice” appear in a glossary of terms that the National Council for Accreditation of Teacher Education uses as an example of what programs might consider using when evaluating a teaching candidate’s “disposition” and classroom readiness.
Supporters of a traditional curriculum have argued that evaluating students based on their commitment to social justice is an inherently subjective practice with ideological undertones. Late last year, the National Association of Scholars filed a complaint with the Education Department saying the accreditor encourages standards that violate students’ First Amendment rights.
I surfed over to the Daily Telegraph’s “obits page”:http://tinyurl.com/qxxoc , looking for someone who wasn’t there, and was struck by the way in which the headline writers dispassionately express the achievements of the dead. So
bq. Abu Musab al-Zarqawi — Jordanian terrorist associated with bombings and beheadings of hostages in Iraq.
is immediately followed by
bq. Raymond Davis, Jr — Physicist whose proof that the Sun’s energy came from nuclear reactions won him the Nobel.
Almost as if proving the sun’s energy came from nuclear reactions and beheading hostages were just different ways of spending one’s life. Sadly, I also learned that “Billy Preston is dead”:http://tinyurl.com/oas9n aged only 59.
A “transcript”:http://world-o-crap.com/blog/?p=42 from World O’Crap, with Tim Russert and panelists Michelle Malkin, Ann Coulter, Satan (“Call me Bob”) and Jesus Christ. A taste:
*Russert*: Mr. Christ, what do you say to accusations that you’re opposed to fighting a battle to bring about the end of all life on Earth because you’re an Anti-Semite?
*Jesus*: Well, first of all, I’d like to point out that I myself am Jewish—
*Ann Coulter*: Yeah! Just like George Soros. Another Jew who somehow figured out a way to avoid crucifixion.
*Jesus*: I WAS crucified! (DISPLAYS WOUNDS IN HANDS)
*Michelle Malkin*: Why don’t people ask him more specific questions about the nails in his hands and feet? There are legitimate questions about whether or not they were self-inflicted wounds.
*Russert*: What do you mean self-inflicted? Are you suggesting Mr. Christ crucified himself on purpose?
*Michelle Malkin*: Did you read the book by Barabbas and the Golgotha Veterans for Truth? Some of the thieves who were actually crucified have made allegations that these were self-inflicted wounds.
*Jesus*: I did not NAIL MYSELF to the cross!
Richard Garner provides some nice howlers about Shakespeare from 14-year-olds. Worth showing to your own 14-yr-olds, perhaps:
a pupil dealt with Macbeth’s three witches and the appearance of the dagger used to kill Duncan by saying: “Macbeth had been smoking up and imaged them all.”
Macbeth, on hearing of his wife’s death, according to one pupil,”goes into full-on soliloquy mode”. Another says that the Scottish noble gets his revenge because “as my mum always sez ‘wot goes around comes around'”.
I’ve deliberately not quoted the best ones.
“Mark Schmitt”:http://www.newamerica.net/templets/Documents/print.cfm?pg=article&DocID=3095&Prt=Yes has a good article in this month’s _The American Prospect_, which is now available on the New America Foundation’s website. He argues that we’re probably seeing a secular shift to a more partisan and polarized politics, with less emphasis on bipartisan coalition building, and more on party coherence. The interesting bit is his take on interest group politics.
bq. It has become an article of faith on Democratic blogs such as DailyKos that progressive interest groups betray their own causes by sometimes endorsing Republicans. The Sierra Club and NARAL endorsements of Republican Senator Lincoln Chafee have been particular points of controversy. But it’s not that NARAL and the Sierra Club are idiots. Up to now, it made perfect sense for them to endorse Chafee. You reward your friends, especially when they have stood up to pressure from within their own party. But at a certain point, rewarding friendly Republicans crosses the line into desperately trying to prop up a few so that you can still seem bipartisan—at the price of legitimating a majority whose highest priority after tax cuts is the evisceration of environmental regulation.
While I agree with Mark’s conclusions, I suspect that there’s more going on here than he mentions. Another reason why progressive interest groups might want to endorse Republicans occasionally is because this increases their bargaining leverage vis-a-vis Democrats. If you want to get Democrats to take your agenda seriously, it helps to be able to make credible threats that you’ll support the other guys unless you get your way. One way to underline the seriousness of your threats is occasionally to endorse moderate members of the opposing party. If Mark is right (I think he is), then the ability of progressive interest groups to make these threats will shrivel away as moderate Republicans lose office. Hence, such groups are likely to lose a lot of their clout. This doesn’t necessarily mean that all interest groups are going to lose out. I suspect that interest groups which draw their bargaining leverage from threats to support more ‘orthodox’ candidates in primaries, along the lines of Grover Norquist’s crowd on the Republican side, are going to do quite well under the new system. If so, then these will further weaken incentives towards bipartisanship, and help reinforce party discipline on both sides of the divide.
(Link via “Political Theory Daily Review”:http://www.politicaltheory.info/ )
It’s getting lonely for the denialists. According to the Sierra Club, even pollster Frank Luntz, author of an infamous memo urging Republicans to exploit doubt on global warming, has jumped ship.
More interesting perhaps is Tyler Cowen, who concedes that
It is by now pointless to deny that global warming is man-made to a considerable degree.
but is very pessimistic about our ability to do anything about it. (via Brad DeLong)
Since such pessimism is inversely correlated with faith in markets to achieve adjustments to changing prices (and since Tyler is generally pretty optimistic about the capacity of markets to do almost anything), I find this quite surprising. Given a reasonable long-run elasticity of demand for C02 emissions, there’s every reason to suppose that very large reductions in global emissions could be achieved in the long run at a welfare cost of only a few percentage points of world GDP.
With all this talk about fun books, it’s time for me to write a post about Jeremy Blachman’s new book Anonymous Lawyer. Better yet, I even have a copy to give away courtesy of the publisher, so this time I’m holding a contest with an actual prize. Yipee.
First, a few words about the book. (Disclosure: I was Jeremy’s TA for a class in college and have been in touch with him over the past few years.) It is in the format of a blog. (But no, uhm, you don’t start on the last page flipping backward.) The story is told through blog posts with email messages interspersed. If you have read the blog Anonymous Lawyer then you will be familiar with the topic and style, although rest assured that the book content is new and not simply a copy-paste of what is already available.
More about the book, a special book-related Web site and contest details below the fold.
From the weather forecast on the radio this morning: “Highs around 100 until Friday, warming up after that.” I’m looking forward to next month, when I’ll be in Palo Alto.
vance maverick complains: “Could you guys recommend something other than “SF/F” for once?”, and would like some “straight fiction“.
Well, I only read straight fiction recommended to me by Adam Swift and Chris Bertram; my own diet is otherwise restricted to detective novels. Oliver Kamm, however, makes the familiar, and I think absolutely correct, argument that some of these should count as straight fiction. He singles out P. D. James
they are skilfully constructed stories in which the denouement is always surprising but retrospectively plausible. Unlike the paradoxes of G.K. Chesterton’s Father Brown stories, where there are infuriating cases of the detective’s revealing that all along he had had more information than the reader, these mysteries are never extravagantly contrived.
Secondly, without being didactic, Baroness James’s novels convey a coherent philosophy of life more powerfully than many overtly political or theological books. Aesthetic judgements are independent of political or religious ones, and of course one can enjoy a book by a writer of different views from one’s own. But Baroness James, for me, is a slightly different case: her Conservative politics and orthodox Anglican faith are far from my own beliefs, but I find nonetheless that they illuminate the personal and social relationships she writes about.
If murders did not occur in her books, she’d be seen as a great writer of “straight” fiction. He goes on:
[These strengths] exemplify her achievement in rescuing English detective fiction from the sub-literate form in which it was cast by the most popular of all crime writers, Agatha Christie
I’ve been surprised recently to discover several mystery lovers who have never read P.D. James, so it is apparently not redundant to recommend her. But I’d also like to recommend 2 other mystery writers with a lower profile.
I’m writing up a set of explanatory notes to go with Plato’s Republic, Book I. And I find myself unable to fact-check something I found on wikipedia – namely, Cephalus, the old guy we meet right at the beginning, is “an elderly arms manufacturer.” Arms manufacturer? How do we know? And how much do we know? Ship-building, sword-making, what? It would be interesting to know more for a couple reasons. First, it casts Socrates’ whole ‘would you give a madman his weapons back?’ question in a slightly more personal light. Selling weapons to madmen – hey, a deal’s a deal – is the modern complaint about arms dealers, after all. Also, it is ironic that, in just a few years, the war will be lost and Cephalus will have his fortune seized by the Thirty Tyrants; his son Polemarchus will be dead, executed. (This whole war business is a double-edged sword. Profitable, but tricky to handle safely.)
Can any intrepid classicists get me a source for the Cephalus-as-arms-manufacturer fact?