Having blogged about Alasdair Gray on Junius and declared my intention to read Lanark, of course I had to do so (especially given Henry’s encouragement). It is both an extraordinary and a really frustrating and perplexing work, combining as it does both the quasi-autobiographical story of Duncan Thaw and a Kafkaesque allegory about his double, Lanark. The Thaw parts (the middle of the book) I thought quite wonderful in their description of childhood and early youth both in Glasgow and as a wartime evacuee. The allegorical sections worked less well (sometimes the socialist didacticism is just too heavy-handed). The general effect is something like a random wander through a large gothic mansion: sometimes you find youself in a room full of interesting objects but the next moment at the end of a bare subterranean corridor. Recommended – but don’t expect an easy time.
From the monthly archives:
July 2003
I’m just back from a week’s holiday in Pembrokeshire with my family. I’ve been walking, swimming in the sea, fishing for mackerel and identifying wild flowers. Pembrokeshire trees, especially the hawthorn, are often attractively distorted by the wind: so here’s some crooked timber for the site:
I don’t expect the flower identification thing to be for everyone. My own interest may be Rousseauiste in origin (see the Reveries of the Solitary Walker). But I can thoroughly recommend it for its cooling effect upon the soul (listening to a great soprano has the same effect on me) and for its intrinsic interest. There’s something very satisfying about being able to walk through a landscape and read it as one goes – sheepsbit scabious, bittersweet, mint, watercress, meadowsweet, hemp agrimony etc etc. Out on a walk, I usually take a good pocket guide with me, but it is also good to look through Richard Mabey’s incomparable Flora Britannica once I get home. Mabey’s book not only contains beautiful photographs, but also extended commentary on each plant, its medicinal and culinary uses and its social history.
“Friedrich Blowhard”:http://www.2blowhards.com/archives/000909.html#000909 has discovered public choice economics a la Buchanan and Tullock, and decided that he quite likes it.
bq. What a gas to see a group of smart people take many of my private musings of the past decade and set them out with more clarity than I ever gave them. I actually read a webpage outlining some of the notions of public choice while literally laughing out loud to see that I wasn’t the only lunatic in the insane asylum.
Friedrich is especially impressed with public choice’s description of how government tends to get captured by special interest groups, who gorge themselves at the expense of the public purse. He also suggests that public choice provides some interesting alternatives to the current political system.
Slowly recovering from jetlag here in Canberra, I’ve been catching up with some of the blogchatter about Yellowcake and the infamous sixteen words. I’m struck by a peripheral aspect of the debate. Before the invasion, many anti-war protestors used the slogan “Not In My Name” or something similar. That line was derided by pro-war commentators as epitomising the supposedly self-indulgent or solipsistic attitiude of the anti-war movement. So it’s interesting that, in the wake of the controversy over the State of the Union speech, hawks like Daniel Drezner respond like this:
bq. I understand why Josh Marshall, Kevin Drum, and others are so exercised about the “sixteen little words” meme. The uranium question — and the blame game that has erupted along with it — manages to undercut two pillars of strength for the Bush team. …
bq. I can’t get exercised about it, however. My reasons for supporting an attack on Iraq had little to do with the WMD issue. The uranium question was part of one rationale among many the administration gave for pushing forward in Iraq. I’m not saying this should be swept under the rug, but the level of righteous indignation that’s building up on the left is reaching blowback proportions.
Dan can be relied on to have made as well-argued and well-supported case for war as possible, but at this point I really don’t care what it was, for the same reasons the hawks had no time for the “Not In My Name” line. The substance of the President’s case for war is what matters, and it had everything to do with “the WMD issue.” If that case was built on a series of lies — immediate threat, 45-minutes to deployment, uranium from Niger and all the rest of it — then that is something to get exercised about.
Matt from _A Bright Cold Day in April_ has a long post up about how bad things can get when a post becomes the subject of a political blogfight. It’s a pretty messy tale, and also a warning or two for folks at political blogs.
To misquote Robert Solow, everything reminds some bloggers of their political disagreements; everything reminds me of sex but I try and keep it out of the blog posts. Mostly.
Something which I should have mentioned previously. Below our main blogroll is a list of academic bloggers, which has been transplanted over from my old blog. This is a fairly non-exclusive list; i.e., if you think that you should be on it, you’re probably right. And not only that, if you email me, and you qualify, I’ll put you on it (you can email one of my fellow bloggers if you prefer, but it may take a bit longer to get you up). The qualifications are fairly straightforward. You should either _a_ have an academic position at a university type institution, or _b_ be a Ph.D. student or equivalent at same. And _c_, you shouldn’t be using your blogs to propagate views that I and/or my fellow bloggers find downright revolting. Which isn’t to say at all that you need to agree with us; conservatives, right-libertarians etc, are all very welcome. But if you’re a racist, or anti-Semitic, or homophobic, or you think that all Jews or Arabs ought to be forcibly expelled, or similar, we would prefer if you continue to practice your right to free speech without a link from us.
We all know there are lots of horror stories about trying to find work in academia. The smart money is on not even starting a PhD unless you are prepared to sell your soul on the job market. Just say no to those fancy scholarships. Unless, it seems, they’re from a good school in philosophy, where the numbers don’t exactly support the bad tidings.
Thanks to lobbying from various sources (prominent amongst them being Brian Leiter’s Philosophical Gourmet Report) we now have quite a bit of data about how philosophy PhDs do on the job market. And the news on the whole is fairly good, or at least much better than I had expected.
“The Economist”:http://www.economist.com/opinion/displayStory.cfm?story_id=1923421 gives us a rather longwinded editorial today, explaining why it was right to support the war, even if it turns out that George and Tony indeed were telling porkies. The piece makes some (apparently) good arguments. First, Saddam had repeatedly failed to comply with UN sanctions, and had lied about what he was up to. The UN needed to carry through if its threats were to be considered credible. Second, any delay in following through on the threat would possibly have led to divisions among the allies. Third, America and its allies are doing their best to make the country and the region more peaceful and less threatening.
So why is the _Economist_ wrong? Let’s take each of their arguments in turn.
Given that we have at least two or three contributors who hold down paid jobs as philosophers of one kind or another, and it’s a Friday afternoon, I thought I’d take the opportunity to ask a question that’s been on my mind for a while.
Why is it that no moral or political philosophy of which I am aware has a satisfactory explanation for the fact that snitches, grasses and tattle-tales are almost universally reviled? In most other areas of moral philosophy, it is considered generally unsatisfying at least to have what is known as an “error theory”; a set of principles which commits you to the belief that the majority of the population are wrong in some of their strongly held beliefs. But in the case of snitches, grasses and squealers, most of the moral philosophies I’ve ever heard of seem to be more or less entirely committed to an error theory? Why?
Two strikingly similar mischaracterizations of opposition to the war today, from different sources. The “NYT”:http://www.nytimes.com/2003/07/17/international/worldspecial/17BLAI.html?hp quotes an unnamed British official as saying of Iraq and Afghanistan:
bq. There is this myth that these countries don’t want freedom, and that Saddam or the Taliban are popular, but then it becomes apparent that they were not at all popular after they fall.
And “Instapundit”:http://www.instapundit.com/archives/010537.php quotes at length from a New York Post “article”:http://www.nypost.com/postopinion/opedcolumnists/774.htm that says:
bq. This chorus [a mixture of Arab and Western newspapers, and _Time_ magazine] wants us to believe that most Iraqis regret the ancien regime, and are ready to kill and die to expel their liberators. Sorry, guys, this is not the case. … ONE fact is that a visitor to Iraq these days never finds anyone who wants Saddam back.
Now I don’t know whether this is a flash in the pan, or a new talking-point in the making, but either way it’s bogus. It implies that opponents of the war believed that Iraqis were happy with Saddam, and that Afghans liked the Taliban – thus, their criticisms of what’s happening now can safely be ignored. The fact that no-one outside the lunatic fringe (and perhaps a couple of Arab newspapers) actually makes this claim is irrelevant. When your opponents have arguments that you can’t answer, you don’t try to answer them – instead you construct a straw man and start clobbering the bejesus out of that, in the hope of confusing innocent bystanders.
Critics aren’t arguing that the Iraqi people are begging Saddam to return, at least not the ones that I’m reading. They’re dissecting the deceptive claims that were made by Bush et al. in the run-up to the war. They’re looking closely at the lurching disaster that is post-war Iraq – a far cry from the smooth and easy transition to democracy that the administration seemed to be promising. They’re asking about the lasting damage that the US has done to its relationship with its allies. And I’m not hearing much in the way of a convincing response from the pro-war crowd.
Michael Rea, a philosopher at Notre Dame, has posted a reply to Daniel Dennett’s ‘brights’ Op-Ed, complete with a reply from Dennett and a counter-reply from Rea.
Does America need a new agency to combine law enforcement and intelligence functions, AKA spy on American citizens?
These aren’t good times for traditional socialists. What with the disappearance of the Soviet Union and its satellites, China’s evolution towards bog-standard market authoritarianism, and the dismal record of the few remaining true-blue Communist regimes (Cuba, North Korea, Myanmar etc), there aren’t all that many active examples of state socialism out there to inspire the masses. But there is one political organization that has remained true to the cause through thick and thin, providing its members with extensive social benefits in return for unquestioning obedience. Friends, comrades, I give you the US Armed Forces.
Via Virulent Memes, I see that an American-Australian academic is recommending Australia merge with the U.S. This kind of suggestion comes up a lot, though for some reason the suggestion always seems to be that Australia would become the 51st state. Wouldn’t it be better if the six Australian states stayed as separate states? Not sure.
I’ve been planning to write about John Rawls’s theory of international justice – what he calls “the law of peoples” – when I have a little more time. But Eric Alterman has posted a letter from “David” in Baltimore that touches on the subject, and this seems like a good excuse to say something. Here, I only want to try to clarify Rawls’s position, rather than to evaluate it.