August 2003

The Sydney Morning Herald recently ran a long profile on the Hungarian-Australian philosopher George Molnar. Australian philosophers can be a weird lot sometimes, but Molnar stands out quite a bit even by our standards. I met him a few times at conferences after he returned to philosophy, but I never knew how many things he’d done outside philosophy. Somehow I don’t think a life in the academy with some blogging on the side will lead to quite the same kind of newspaper reports about me any time down the track.

It’s a while since I discovered a blog that satisfies so deeply as Transport Blog which I discovered thanks to Natalie Solent on Samizdata.

How can you not jump right into entries that start;

“A new tube torture

Ever since I first saw automatic ticket selling machines, in Germany in the eighties, and then saw them arrive in the London Underground or the “tube” as we call it here, and then saw these machines sporting “OUT OF ORDER” or “EXACT MONEY PLEASE” messages, I know that there is no machine, no matter how Teutonically efficient in its apparently inherent nature, that the tube wouldn’t find a way of mucking up and rendering English.

Yesterday I observed a new version of this syndrome, in the form of a new London Underground torture inflicted by means of automatic train doors.”

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Helen Szamuely reacts in EU Observer to Jan-Werner Muller’s reaction in European Voice to the Habermas/Derrida manifesto on a European identity. (pause for intake of breath) Muller’s article can’t be got at unless you’re a subscriber to European Voice, which is a shame – he seemed to be saying that Habermas was calling for a kind of historicism that would have Benjamin spinning in his grave. I have a special hatred for articles that end with that hoary old chestnut ‘we need a debate’, but as Muller’s piece is unobtainable by the masses, Szamuely’s is worth checking out.

By the by, I can’t bring myself to fork out for a subscription to EV. It costs almost as much as the Economist but often reads like a provincial gossip sheet. EU Observer is only available online and seems to draw on a wider pool of commentators.

Am on holidays for the next 10 days in London and the West of Ireland, so expect intermittent blogging at best from this Timberite.

You must have noticed a particularly irritating rock’n’pop tactic to which certain songwriters resort when forced into a desperate compositional corner: having flogged every last bit of life from their tune but being unable think of any natural way of killing the damn thing off, a last-ditch decision is made to shift everything up a semi-tone and just keep going, in the hope (i) that this will provide the dirge with an extra dose of energy, and (ii) that the listener won’t notice the awful jarring effect as the musical gears screech protestingly.

It usually sounds absolutely horrible, but that hasn’t stopped Whitney Houston, Michael Jackson and many others from indulging in this reckless musical practice as repeat offenders.

It just won’t do, and now there’s a website, the Truck Driver’s Gear Change Hall of Fame, dedicated to keeping track of the list of musicians who have been tempted by the dark side in this way. When the revolution comes, this kind of behaviour should be punishable with at least a stern ticking-off by the musicological authorities, so it’s important to maintain a list of the principal perpetrators to date.

The FAQ gives this high-minded description of the site’s purpose:

This site functions as an educational resource with the aim of ensuring that in a better future world, our children, our children’s children, and ideally also our children’s children’s children, avoid this musical crime. Equally, there is an element of name-and-shame involved, to help prevent those who may already have offended from doing so again in their career. Although frankly I think it’s too late for Westlife.

I especially enjoyed Dominic Pedler’s essay on the musical theory of the Truck Driver’s Gear Change, which includes a discussion of some cases in which it appears at first sight that even the Beatles couldn’t resist. Quite rightly, Paul McCartney is released without a stain on his character for the modulations in ‘Good Day Sunshine’ and ‘Penny Lane’, but Pedler is a bit less sure about ‘Octopus’s Garden’ and a few others, deciding to nominate the moptops for an honorable Yorkie in recognition of these lapses in ingenuity.

Update: Non-British readers will most likely have no idea what a Yorkie is and what its relevance might be. Fair enough: the Yorkie is a perfectly ordinary chocolate bar which was advertised in the late ‘seventies and early ‘eighties as being so extraordinarily chunky (I believe that was the adjective chosen) that the biggest baddest trucker could subsist on nothing but as he drove up and down the nation’s motorways during the night. Personally, I’ve always preferred a bag of wine gums.

The Canadian justice ministry has published the results of last year’s consultation on communications interception. Reading it is like entering an alternate universe where sanity and moderation prevailed. There’s no sign of the draft legislation yet, but the signs are good that it may actually contain the ‘balance’ between law enforcement, human rights and industry interests we’re always hearing about but I have yet to see. And for a justice ministry, the Department of Justice of Canada runs an exemplary consultation.

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We pull up behind a 1970s-vintage Holden something or other. A youngish guy is driving. There is a sticker on the back window:

bq. If its’ got tits or tyres your going to have trouble.

There is a pause. “You know, that’s very satisfying,” says Laurie.

If you’re interested in the relation between deliberative democracy and social choice theory, which Henry has just written about, then you might want to read an interesting and constructive paper by two of my new colleagues here at the RSSS, John Dryzek and Christian List. The paper, “Social Choice Theory and Deliberative Democracy: A Reconciliation” [pdf] just appeared in the British Journal of Political Science. Here’s the abstract:

bq. The two most influential traditions of contemporary theorizing about democracy, social choice theory and deliberative democracy, are generally thought to be at loggerheads, in that the former demonstrates the impossibility, instability or meaninglessness of the rational collective outcomes sought by the latter. We argue that the two traditions can be reconciled. After expounding the central Arrow and Gibbard-Satterthwaite impossibility results, we reassess their implications, identifying the conditions under which meaningful democratic
decision making is possible. We argue that deliberation can promote these conditions, and hence that social choice theory suggests not that democratic decision making is impossible, but rather that democracy must have a deliberative aspect.

It’s a good introduction to why results from social choice theory pose a challenge to what we think democracy can do, and also a useful corrective to the idea that these results should just make us chuck the whole idea of democracy out the window.

Jon “blogs below”:https://www.crookedtimber.org/archives/000346.html about winning office with a mere plurality, which touches on issues that political scientists, and theorists of a certain bent, have thought a lot about. Kenneth Arrow’s “impossibility theorem,” which I’ve blogged about before, indicates that if you make certain reasonable assumptions about people’s preferences, no possible voting system (or other means of social choice) can be expected to aggregate people’s preferences without distorting them. This suggests, according to the late William Riker, that democracy is bogus.

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And while we’re being snippy with tech-crazy rightwing bloggers, has anyone checked out Steven den Beste lately? His topic du jour is how European males “don’t like”:http://denbeste.nu/cd_log_entries/2003/08/Snippetsandcomments.shtml rugged, manly Harley-Davidson bikes, and have persuaded them to come out with a ‘castrated,’ ‘effeminate’ version. Whatever. I dunno – I’ve never been able to get the den Beste thing myself. He’s always reminded me of the bloke in Searle’s “Chinese Box”:http://www.utm.edu/research/iep/c/chineser.htm – parsing and recombining facts without ever understanding them. I imagine him locked in a cubicle somewhere, endlessly surfing the web for factoids which he weaves together into vast conspiratorial ‘explanations’ that are almost, but not quite, unlike real political analyses. His posts are vaguely interesting on the level of spectacle, but I can’t for the life of me imagine why anyone takes him seriously. Evidently, the WSJ _Opinion Journal_ disagrees.

“Glenn Reynolds”:http://techcentralstation.com/1051/techwrapper.jsp?PID=1051-250&CID=1051-080603B outs himself as a “Transhumanist”:https://www.crookedtimber.org/archives/000303.html – why am I not surprised?

bq. Would I like to be smarter? Yes, and I’d be willing to do it via a chip in my brain, or a direct computer interface. (Actually, that’s already prefigured a bit in ordinary life, too, as things like Google and wi-fi give us access to a degree of knowledge that would have seemed almost spooky not long ago, but that everyone takes for granted now). And I’d certainly like to be immune to cancer, or AIDS, or aging.

Fair enough if that’s what turns him on. What’s a little less impressive is his dismissal of skeptics as cheerleaders for AIDS, irritable bowel movement, and everyday stupidity. _Contra_ Reynolds, there are serious, principled reasons why you might want to disagree with transhumanism. And this argument has been going on for a long, long time.

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Statewatch has issued an alert about a proposal of the Italian Presidency under the Schengen accord to use plainclothes police and unmarked cars to deport expelled illegal immigrants. I’m often in agreement with Statewatch’s criticisms of undemocratic and often downright nasty decisions taken under the EU’s Third Pillar of Justice and Home Affairs, but this piece seems hyperbolic and unnecessarily shrill. If a migrant is unlucky enough to be deported, does it really matter if there is a police insignia on the van?

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There has been much commentary in the blogosphere on the California recall election, but Crooked Timber has been surprisingly immune. Let me change that by making one brief note. Slate has an Explainer on the election and a link to a useful article in the San Francisco Chronicle. Maybe this is perfectly obvious to everyone, but to me, the most glaring anomaly in the election is that a scenario like this seems entirely plausible: Davis loses the recall election, 70%-30%. Arnold Schwarzenegger receives more votes than any of the other 350+ candidates with, say, 25% of the vote – see this New Republic article. Schwarzenegger becomes governor despite the fact that more people voted for Davis to remain. Of course, I seem to remember another election in which a candidate was declared the winner, despite not receiving a plurality of votes.

It’s not quite “McArthur Flies Back to Front,” but it shares something with “Headless Body in Topless Bar” and I just read it in the current issue of the ANU’s “On Campus” newsletter [pdf]:

bq. Former Head of John XXIII Remembered

The headline writer had room to clarify the meaning by inserting the word “College” between “XXIII” and “Remembered” but clearly did not want to spoil her chance to enliven one of the world’s duller publications.

This reminds me of the time on Ireland’s Nine O’Clock News when newsreader Ann Doyle asked someone whether they would best remember the late Cardinal Tomas O’Fiach as a man or a primate.