Chris Bertram

The Financial Times’s Simon Kuper is always worth reading, and in today’s paper he’s published “the best article”:http://news.ft.com/cms/s/95d75b52-441b-11d9-a5eb-00000e2511c8.html (by far) I’ve yet read on the anti-Muslim backlash in the Netherlands after the Van Gogh murder.

Via “Lance Knobel”:http://www.davosnewbies.com/ , this “astonishing story”:http://news.ft.com/cms/s/0d159fbc-4408-11d9-be59-00000e2511c8.html from the Financial Times:

bq. US distributors of the film Merchant of Venice, which premiered in London this week, have asked the director to cut out a background fresco by a Venetian old master so it is fit for American television viewers…
According to [director Michael] Radford, there was “a very curious request which said ‘Could you please paint-box out the wallpaper?’. I said wallpaper, what wallpaper? This is the 16th century, people didn’t have wall-paper.”
When he examined the scenes, he realised the letter was referring to frescoes by Paolo Veronese, the acclaimed Venetian 16th-century artist, which, when examined closely, showed a naked cupid.
“A billion dollars worth of Veronese great master’s frescoes they want paint-boxed out because of this cupid’s willy. It is absolutely absurd,” he said.

I’ve been looking through the headlines on international AIDS day. The BBC discusses “the disproportionate impact on women in Africa”:http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/4052531.stm . “India has 5.1 million people infected with HIV”:http://edition.cnn.com/2004/WORLD/asiapcf/12/01/china.india.aids.reut/ , and nobody really knows how many victims there are in China (CNN). “HIV and Aids are expected to kill 16 million farm workers in Southern Africa by 2010” reports the “South African Independent Online”:http://www.iol.co.za/index.php?set_id=1&click_id=68&art_id=vn20041201042230610C465958 . In Britain the “Guardian tells us”:http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk_news/story/0,3604,1363277,00.html that a fifth of respondents to a poll blame the victims. In “Lebanon”:http://www.dailystar.com.lb/article.asp?edition_id=1&categ_id=1&article_id=10570 , only a quarter of victims receive any kind of treatment. In Uganda “a government minister warns the UN”:http://www.365gay.com/newscon04/11/113004uganda.htm not to give advice to gays on safe sex because homosexuality is illegal. Please add more links in comments throughout the day.

I don’t want to turn Crooked Timber into a series of announcements for British radio shows, but I would like to give advance notice that “Alan Carling”:https://www.crookedtimber.org/archives/001911.html , sociologist, electoral candidate, and one of my collaborators on Imprints, is now on the radio with “Bradford Community Broadcasting”:http://www.bcb.yorks.com/index.php . His show — The Bradford Experience — goes out this Thursday, and he’ll be interviewing Home Office minister “Fiona McTaggart”:http://www.fionamactaggart.labour.co.uk/ . The show goes out from 1600-1700 (UK time) and I rather suspect they’ll be discussing race, religion, secularism and such matters. There’s sure to be plenty on the “live stream”:http://www.bcb.yorks.com/index.php that might interest — or infuriate — Harry, Ophelia Benson, Russell Arben Fox and others around these parts. So perhaps Crooked Timber can get Alan an audience beyond the limits of the Bradford–Leeds conurbation.

UPDATE: Alan tells me that the programme will be repeated on Saturday (9.00-10.00 am) and Sunday (4.00 – 5.00). He’ll also be interviewing the Bishop of Bradford.

Today is the fiftieth anniversary of the death of “Wilhelm Furtwängler”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wilhelm_Furtw%E4ngler and the BBC are remembering with “a special programme devoted to his conducting on Radio 3”:http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio3/pip/pip/3lm1v/ this evening. It starts at 19.30 UK time, so adjust for other time zones.

Documents concerning Karl Marx’s life, including a shareholders’ certificate and the police advice on his application for naturalization, “are to go on display”:http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/magazine/4042187.stm at the British National Archives in Kew. According to the Metropolitan Police he was a

bq. notorious German agitator, the head of the International Society and an advocate of communistic principles. This man has not been loyal to the King.

Not only is “child malnutrion”:https://www.crookedtimber.org/archives/002900.html soaring in Iraq, but so are deaths from crime. “The Times reports”:http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,7374-1376189,00.html that in Baghdad alone more that 700 people are killed every month:

bq. Shot, stabbed, blown up,burnt: the bodies of Iraqis killed in Baghdad lie piled in overcrowded refrigerators at the city’s central mortuary, their ever-increasing number overwhelming both staff and storage space in a wave that marks the city’s descent into a Hobbesian world of crime and brutality.

bq. “Our morgue was designed to cope with between five and ten bodies a day,” explained Kais Hassan, the harrassed statistician whose job it is to record the capital’s suspicious deaths. He gestured into the open door of a refrigeration unit at the stomach-turning sight of tangled corpses inside, male and female, shaded with the brown and green hues of death. “Now we’re getting 20 to 30 in here a day. It’s a disaster.”

To be fair, the article also reports that the hospital staff cannot agree on whether on not the situation is worse than under Saddam, since they remember the Baathists dumping large numbers of unclaimed bodies at the morgue. No doubt there’ll be blog commentary to the effect that (a) the crime-related death figures are invented by anti-war ideologues and (b) the Coalition can in no way be held responsible for deaths from crime. (via “Juan Cole”:http://www.juancole.com/ )

Via “Butterflies & Wheels”:http://www.butterfliesandwheels.com/notesarchive.php?id=630 I came across the following ludicrous and offensive argument against gay marriage from “Keith Burgess-Jackson, the self-styled AnalPhilosopher”:http://analphilosopher.blogspot.com/2004_11_01_analphilosopher_archive.html#109984596293987913 :

bq. I have said in this blog many times that the very idea of homosexual marriage is incoherent, which is why I put the word “marriage” in quotation marks. I do the same for dog “voting.” If we took our dogs to the polls and got them to push levers with their paws, they would not be voting. They would be going through the motions of voting. It would be a charade. Voting is not made for dogs. They lack the capacity to participate in the institution. The same is true of homosexuals and marriage.

“Richard Chappell at Philosophy etc”:http://pixnaps.blogspot.com/2004/11/gay-marriage-analogies.html says nearly all that needs to be said about Burgess-Jackson’s “argument”, so I wouldn’t even have bothered mentioning it if I hadn’t been in conversation on Tuesday with the LSE’s Christian List whose article “Democracy in Animal Groups: A Political Science Perspective” is forthcoming in _Trends in Ecology and Evolution_ . List draws on Condorcet’s jury theorem (previously discussed on CT “here”:https://www.crookedtimber.org/archives/002706.html ) to shed more light on research by Conradt and Roper in their paper “Group decision-making in animals”:http://www.nature.com/cgi-taf/DynaPage.taf?file=/nature/journal/v421/n6919/full/nature01294_fs.html , from Nature 421 (155–8) in 2003. Conradt and Roper have this to say about animal voting:

bq. Many authors have assumed despotism without testing, because the feasibility of democracy, which requires the ability to vote and to count votes, is not immediately obvious in non-humans. However, empirical examples of ‘voting’ behaviours include the use of specific body postures, ritualized movements, and specific vocalizations, whereas ‘counting of votes’ includes adding-up to a majority of cast votes, integration of voting signals until an intensity threshold is reached, and averaging over all votes. Thus, democracy may exist in a range of taxa and does not require advanced cognitive capacity.

[Tiresome, humourless and literal-minded quasi-Wittgensteinian comments, putting inverted commas around “voting” etc. are hereby pre-emptively banned from the comments thread.]

I linked last week to an op-ed by John Allen Paulos about the conclusions that might (or might not) be drawn from the recent Presidential election. Now he’s written “a piece about the possibility of election fraud”:http://www.math.temple.edu/~paulos/exit.html , which draws on work by Steve Freeman of the University of Pennsylvania. His conclusion in part:

bq. The election has prompted extensive allegations of fraud, some of which have been debunked, but many of which have not. In several cases non-trivial errors have been established and official tallies changed. And there is one more scenario that doesn’t require many conspirators: the tabulating machines and the software they run conceivably could have been dragooned into malevolent service by relatively few operatives. Without paper trails, this would be difficult, but probably not impossible, to establish. Hard evidence? Definitely not. Nevertheless, the present system is such a creaky patchwork and angry suspicions are so prevalent that there is, despite the popular vote differential, a fear that the election was tainted and possibly stolen.

In completely unrelated news US Secretary of State Colin Powell “declared of the Ukrainian elections”:http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/4040177.stm :

bq. We cannot accept this result as legitimate because it does not meet international standards and because there has not been an investigation of the numerous and credible reports of fraud and abuse. We have been following developments very closely and are deeply disturbed by the extensive and credible reports of fraud in the election. We call for a full review of the conduct of the election and the tallying of election results.

There’s some commenter unrest in a thread below about our lack of coverage of recent events in Ukraine. Lacking the resources of the BBC or the NY Times, I’m afraid that we assorted academics and oddballs at CT can’t aspire to comprehensive news coverage and usually (well sometimes!) restrict ourselves to writing about stuff we know something about. Fortunately, when we are ourselves in a shocking state of ignorance, we can sometimes point to people who are not. And such is Nick Barlow, over at “Fistful of Euros”:http://fistfulofeuros.net/ , who has multiple posts on the topic.

One of the points made most insistently by critics of the Lancet study was that they disbelieved the claim that infant mortality had increased since the war. Heiko, a contributor to “one of Dsquared’s threads”:https://www.crookedtimber.org/archives/002780.html , wrote: “I do believe infant mortality may have dropped (though maybe not halved as yet), because a lot of things are available now that weren’t before the war.” The Washington Post “has now published an article”:http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A809-2004Nov20.html suggesting that there has been a dramatic rise in child malnutrition since the war:

bq. Acute malnutrition among young children in Iraq has nearly doubled since the United States led an invasion of the country 20 months ago, according to surveys by the United Nations, aid agencies and the interim Iraqi government.

bq. After the rate of acute malnutrition among children younger than 5 steadily declined to 4 percent two years ago, it shot up to 7.7 percent this year, according to a study conducted by Iraq’s Health Ministry in cooperation with Norway’s Institute for Applied International Studies and the U.N. Development Program. The new figure translates to roughly 400,000 Iraqi children suffering from “wasting,” a condition characterized by chronic diarrhea and dangerous deficiencies of protein.

The article makes grim reading for anyone concerned about winning the hearts and minds of the Iraqi people:

bq. “Believe me, we thought a magic thing would happen” with the fall of Hussein and the start of the U.S.-led occupation, said an administrator at Baghdad’s Central Teaching Hospital for Pediatrics. “So we’re surprised that nothing has been done. And people talk now about how the days of Saddam were very nice,” the official said.

Regular readers will know that I’ve been trying to learn German since January of this year. And it is going ok. I just want to put in a plug for my favourite German resource: the online German-English dictionary “Leo”:http://dict.leo.org/?lang=en&lp=ende&search= from the Technical University of Munich. Not only is Leo invaluable as you’re trying to decipher that article in Der Spiegel or FAZ, it also enables registered users to enter the words they don’t know into a little personal list and then to test themselves repeatedly on their chosen vocabulary. Leo is also very easy to integrate with Mozilla Firefox both by adding to the search engines box and — this is really great — by installing the ConQuery plugin so you can highlight the German text and then have the dictionary open with a translation in a new tab.

Brian Leiter’s “Philosophical Gourmet”:http://www.philosophicalgourmet.com/default.asp report is now out in its latest version.

[UPDATE: I hadn’t noticed that Kieran gets a credit for statistical advice on the front page!]

John Allen Paulos has “a useful piece in today’s Guardian”:http://education.guardian.co.uk/higher/sciences/story/0,12243,1353369,00.html on the meaning of the US election and the tendency people have to draw sweeping conclusions about the US electorate from the numbers:

bq. Excuse my mathematician’s obsession with coin flips, but consider this. There is a large bloc of people who will vote for the Republican candidate no matter what, and a similarly reliable Democratic bloc of roughly the same size. There is also a smaller group of voters who either do not have fixed opinions or are otherwise open to changing their vote.

bq. To an extent, these latter people’s votes (and thus elections themselves) are determined by chance (external events, campaign gaffes, etc).

bq. So what conclusion would we draw about a coin that landed heads two or three times out of four flips (or about a sequence of two or three Democratic victories in the last four elections)? The answer, of course, is that we would draw no conclusions at all.