http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A40912-2003Jul10.html?nav=hptoc_eo
From the monthly archives:
July 2003
Grumpy US readers, who would like Congress to push the administration harder on what it did and didn’t know about WMD, should breeze over to “Brett Marston’s”:http://marston.blogspot.com/2003_07_06_marston_archive.html#105786196538842848 blog for a nice example of how to bother your Congressperson, by framing the problem in terms of Congress’s powers and responsibilities. Tho’ readers with Republican congressional representatives may want to skip the bit on Republican hypocrisy and Clinton-bashing in their own letters.
The WP’s “review”:http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn?pagename=article&node=style/movies/reviews&contentId=A29898-2003Jul8¬Found=true of _Pirates of the Caribbean_ has some useful insights into the scriptwriters’ authorial intentions. It informs us that in the “production notes”:http://laughingplace.com/Info-ID-Movie-Pirates-ProdNotes.asp to the movie, one of the film’s authors says:
bq. We wanted it to be a very classic, Jane Austen-style, bodice-ripping romance.
This is, I have to say, a rather lovely idea, which should be developed further. We already have “Jane Austen’s Terminator”:http://groups.google.com/groups?hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&safe=off&selm=3E7FC19F.55ED%40wizvax.net&rnum=87 (courtesy of “Making Light”:http://www.nielsenhayden.com/makinglight/). Surely it can’t be difficult to sex up, say, _Pride and Prejudice_ a little bit? If Alastair Campbell can make weapons dossiers sound lascivious, Jane Austen should be a cinch. And why not include a congeries of cutlass-waving undead pirates too, while we’re at it. Friends, I hand the task over to you.
The Chronicle of Higher Education reports (subscription required) that “several Republican state legislators and incoming students at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill” are upset by the book chosen for the university’s summer reading program. This is the same program for first-year and transfer students that caused controversy last year when it selected a book on Islam.
This time it’s Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America, by Barbara Ehrenreich. It was selected, says the university’s interim vice chancellor Dean L. Bresciani, with the idea that it “would be a relatively tame selection.” Alas,
bq. “I am offended because I am a Christian and she [Ms. Ehrenreich] is an atheist,” said [State Senator] Mr. Allran, who has not read the entire book but disagrees with what he has read. “I don’t like the disparaging remarks made about Jesus. If I was there, I would sue the school for religious discrimination, and, in fact, I think someone needs to.”
Just to be clear: he doesn’t like the disparaging remarks made about Jesus, but he is offended because Ehrenreich is an atheist. And exactly who is guilty of religious discrimination?
Alex Ross attended something called the “Pop Conference” in Seattle and has an interesting piece on pop music and academia in the latest issue of the New Yorker. He’s pretty funny about some of the academic jargon on display:
bq. Some of the presentations, a few too many for comfort, lapsed into the familiar contortions of modern pedagogy. Likewise, in the many pop-music books now in circulation, post-structuralist, post-Marxist, post-colonialist, and post-grammatical buzzwords crop up on page after page. There is a whole lot of problematizing, interrogating, and appropriating goin’ on…. At the Pop Conference, I made it a rule to move to a different room the minute I heard someone use the word “interrogate” in a non-detective context or cite any of the theorists of the Frankfurt School.
My sense is that academic philosophers (like me) lapse into this kind of jargon less than members of certain other disciplines, often confused with philosophy. But this may be because we don’t get out as much as others. This is one of the things I like about blogs. I’m new to the blogosphere – new to this side of it, anyway. Here’s hoping I can follow the lead of my colleagues here and combine accessibility with a bit of insight.
The more things change, the more they stay the same. On the metro this morning I got to the passage in The Wings of the Dove where James beautifully describes why Kate Croy, “a young person who wasn’t really young, who didn’t pretend to be a sheltered flower” readily allows Merton Densher to call on her;
“…she was just the contemporary London female, highly modern, inevitably battered, honourably free.”
I revere James’ two great heroines, Kate Croy and Isabel Archer, and wish I was like them; admirably cool without being coy, analytical but not truly manipulative, reserved and self-reliant yet possessing great depths of passion. But I’m afraid Bridget Jones is a much more accurate self-reflection; gossipy, hapless and profoundly trivial! And BJ II (the Edge of Reason) follows my favourite Jane Austen, Persuasion, which shows that even spinsters pushing thirty can sometimes be nudged off the shelf…
The Cato Institute has published a new edition of its annual report on The Economic Freedom Of The World, endorsed by Milton Friedman and not to be confused with about a million other such reports produced by rival thinktanks (I seem to remember that Heritage were the first to get into this game, but their index is based on subjective scoring and is really bad, while Cato’s is based on publicly available economic and survey data and is only quite bad, from a scientific point of view.)
Lovers of liberty will be pleased to know that the forward march of human civilisation continues unabated and we are all precisely 0.15% freer than we were at the time of the 2002 Report; the Index of World Economic Freedom apparently increased from 6.34 to 6.35 in 2001. Is it me, by the way, or is it pretty pathetic that such a self-important document is only produced with a two year lag? Anyway, as usual the dominance of the rankings by a bunch of incredibly rich free-ports and tax havens at the top and a bunch of horribly poor kleptocracies at the bottom, means that they can publish their usual diatribe about how “economic freedom is closely correlated to wealth, equality, development, relief from aching piles etc”. But the interesting thing to me is the extraordinary level of philosophical incoherence of the whole exercise.
I teach a course on 19th Century Social Theory [pdf] at the University of Arizona, of the kind often required of Sociology majors around the world. I usually begin with the question “How can there be a city as big as Tucson in the middle of the desert?” and go on to give them a sense of the differences between Europe around 1800 and the society they’re used to. Then we trace the development of the idea of the division of labor in the writings of each of the theorists.
There are other ways to approach a class like this. Rather than focusing on the authors, you can look at different images of society, basic metaphors or pictures of what the social world is like or how bits of it work. Thinking of how to build a course along these lines, I began to wonder what films could I show as part of the class to illustrate these images and processes?
Some of you out there, particularly users of Internet Explorer 5 for Windows, have complained that this page hasn’t been displaying properly for you. Now, if this were a more right-leaning blog we’d shrug our shoulders and tell you to go solve your own damn problems. But even though you use an old and broken browser, we’re a caring bunch here at CT and we don’t like seeing people get left behind. “To Each According To His Need, Even Though It Wouldn’t Kill You To Upgrade” is our motto. So thanks to the skills of John Yuda, we are experimenting with a new stylesheet that should fix things for IE5 users. Please let us know if this centralized solution improves things for you. Users who haven’t been having problems so far should of course see no changes in the usual high quality of service.
I’m normally quite a fan of Tory blogger Iain Murray, but I couldn’t believe his most recent TechCentralStation column. Iain is attacking some proposal for restricting carbon emissions that is currently before the US Senate and is full of doom and gloom about the economic implications. He cites a report on the impact of the proposed legislation – the McCain-Lieberman “Climate Stewardship Act” – from the Energy Information Administration (a government agency of which he clearly approves). Here’s Iain’s take on their report:
When the system comes into operation, the economy would be severely affected resulting in job and output losses in the short-run. Because of this shock, real disposable income would drop by almost 1 percent per person by 2011, and would take fifteen years to return to 2000 levels. By 2025, the average person will have lost almost $2,500 as a result of McCain-Lieberman. The effect on GDP is even more startling, with the nation losing $507 billion in real terms over the next twenty-two years. By 2025, the country’s GDP will be $106 billion lower in real terms than it is today.
Whoah! That looks pretty bad. So bad, in fact that I just couldn’t believe it. So I went to the EIA’s website and looked at the report for myself (available via the following, wonderful, URL http://www.eia.doe.gov/oiaf/anal_emissions.html ) It turns out that far from the US economy being worse $106 billion worse off than it is today (what! you mean the US economy which grew by 60% over the past two decades wouldn’t grow for 22 years because of one piece of legislation!!), it would be $106 billion worse off in 2025 than they are currently projecting it to be (peanuts for a 10 trillion dollar economy). What we’re looking at here is the compound interest effect of a very slightly reduced growth rate over a very long period (the expected difference in GDP between the two cases is simply the difference between a 3.02% and a 3.04% average annual growth rate over 22 years).
The NYT has a very interesting “article”:http://www.nytimes.com/2003/07/10/technology/circuits/10poke.html today on AI and poker. A group of researchers in Alberta are using game theory to create automated ‘bots that can take on and beat most players. Now this was a little worrying for me; two months ago, I wrote a “couple”:https://www.crookedtimber.org/archives/000064.html of rather confident “posts”:https://www.crookedtimber.org/archives/000068.html suggesting that game theory wasn’t very helpful in solving complex and open-ended games like poker. Indeed, as Chad Orzel “notes”:http://steelypips.org/principles/2003_06_29_principlearchive.php#105708829647353420, human beings sometimes have difficulty in dealing with this sort of stuff too.
I was daydreaming earlier today about a moment in my adolescence. It is 1974 and I’m with my French exchange partner playing a pinball machine in a cafe on the banks of the Dordogne. The radio is on, and the news comes that President Giscard has just sacked his Prime Minister, Jacques Chirac.
Fast forward to 2003 (29 years later) and Giscard is presiding over the European constitutional convention and Chirac is President of the Republic. Chirac had first entered the cabinet in 1968. Not that it is just the right. Michel Rocard, whose party, the PSU, had some prominence in 1968 cropped up in the news the other day. And Mitterrand (b. 1916) held his first ministerial post in 1947 and finished up being President from 1981 to 1995 before popping his clogs the following year.
Look at the British political class and the picture is completely different. There’s no-one left from 1974, let alone 1968. A few politicians have a good run: Major Healey, Quintin Hogg – but it is nothing compared to the dominance of the French political scene by a few dinosaurs. In fact I can’t think of any democracy with where politicians last as long as in France. A few in the US, perhaps (Thurmond, Mayor Daley) but not ones who ever formed the core of a national administration. Explanations? Counterexamples?
I’m surprised this one didn’t get all that much play in the weblog world; Gorgeous George finally filed suit the week before last against the Telegraph. There was a lot of suspicion going round earlier that he wasn’t going to; Telegraph editor Charles Moore has certainly been talking a bit of smack to this effect. My guess is that what has happened is that Galloway has reached a point where he is reasonably confident that he will be able to finance the Telegraph suit out of the proceeds of a settlement with the Christian Science Monitor. I’m pretty sure that the CSM will settle; they’ve been caught bang to rights, and their apology won’t count all that much since they made it after Galloway sued them. Soon we’ll find out what kind of barrister GG’s retained, and shortly after that we’ll find out if the Telegraph is really as confident as they appear, or whether they’ve been bluffing a pair of deuces, hoping that with his charity under investigation and the Arabic contributors who’ve supported his lifestyle over the last few years perhaps backing off a little, he wouldn’t be able to afford the price of a ticket. If the Telegraph ends up settling, though, we will have been deprived of what could potentially have been a wonderfully entertaining trial.
Much is made of the damage to US civil liberties of Ashcroft, Poindexter et al’s new crusade against the enemy within. But, as Henry and I discovered at CFP 2003, few people Stateside have really grasped the deep and permanent damage the war on terror is doing to European human rights and civil liberties. This isn’t simply a case of the US pushing unpalatable policies on its hapless allies (though there’s plenty of that going about), but is a more complicated situation in which the law enforcement / Justice and home affairs crowd have used the US war on terror to ram through retrograde measures that no civilised democracy should tolerate.