September 2003

Distributive-Justice.com offers various quizzes which aim to tell you what your political position is and how it maps onto the work of various recent political philosophers. Have a go, you know you want to.

I turned out to be both a Communist and a follower of Ronald Dworkin. I’m somewhat puzzled but, I have to admit, rather pleased by this result.

(Found via the ever-readable MaxSpeak.)

Evidently Distributive-Justice.com was not a domain name for which there was fierce competition during the tech boom. I wonder why that was?

Update: Blush. Micah has already posted on this, I now see. Oh, the perils of group blogging. Assume I’ve just written myself an appropriately harsh memo about the importance of checking for duplication before sharing my, er, thoughts with the world.

According to the “NYT”:http://www.nytimes.com/2003/09/10/obituaries/10TELL.html?hp, Edward Teller has finally met his “antimatter twin”:http://www.cs.rice.edu/~ssiyer/minstrels/poems/795.html.

Mark Kleiman has a timely reminder that Al Sharpton is a horrible person.

If you just manage to hang around for long enough in politics, you can achieve some kind of undeserved quasi-respectability. If Al Sharpton spent his time apologizing to his victims instead of demeaning the Presidential race, the world would be a better place.

In today’s FT, Samuel Brittan reviews John Gillingham’s European Integration, 1950-2003 : Superstate or New Market Economy?. One interesting snippet, which I knew about but deserves wider publicity:

bq. Readers may be more surprised to find the name of Frederich Hayek given as the source of the alternative neoliberal interpretation. For most of today’s self-proclaimed Hayekians view everything to do with the EU with intense suspicion. Indeed I was sufficiently surprised myself to look up some of Hayek’s writings on the subject. Although he played no part in the post war institutional discussion, he had written at some length on the problems of federalism in the late 1930s. Hayek was among those who believed that some form of federalism, whether in Europe or on a wider basis, was an important step towards a more peaceful world. In a 1939 essay, remarkably anticipating the EU Single Market Act, he argued that a political union required some elements of a common economic policy, such as a common tariff, monetary and exchange rate policy, but also a ban on intervention to help particular producers.

Like “Jacob Levy”:http://volokh.com/2003_09_07_volokh_archive.html#106312814305620404 I’m waiting on the release of Neal Stephenson’s _Quicksilver_: and the early signs are good. Dave Langford, who’s part way through reading it for Amazon UK “pronounces”:http://www.ansible.demon.co.uk/cc/cc143.html it to be a “joy to read, with a genuinely fresh slant on 17th/18th century history (or ahistory).” And Jacob and I are not alone – I confidently predict that September 23 (the book’s release date) is going to see prolonged blog-silences from everyone from Glenn Reynolds to Atrios.

But I’m digressing … I wanted to post about another book that I’m nearly as excited about, which will be released at around the same time. JG Ballard’s new novel, “Millennium People”:http://associatesshop.filzhut.de/shop/product.php?ID=7e33e52a9f201e22872aa9c926e79e21&Mode=&CategoryID=&Asin=&ASIN=000225848X, is about to come out. Ballard isn’t as popular in the blogosphere as Stephenson – but he should be; he’s a writer of genius. Which isn’t to say that he’s without flaws. He’s notoriously obsessive; ever since he developed his own voice, he’s written the same novel over and over. His language is (deliberately) flat, and his imagery repetitive – abandoned swimming pools; empty wastes of sand; rusting launch platforms. But there’s something admirable about his singlemindedness; something important.

For my money, John Gray has the most concise “take”:http://www.newstatesman.co.uk/199905100041.htm on why Ballard’s important (indeed, I think that this short review-article is likely the best thing that Gray has ever written). Gray’s essay highlights the main theme of Ballard’s work – “life as it is lived when the fictions that sustain society have broken down.” If the Revolution was immanent in every moment for Walter Benjamin, the Catastrophe is immanent in every moment for Ballard. Polite society is always wobbling on the verge of savagery. Gray also mentions how funny Ballard is – something that a lot of people miss (his humour, like Beckett’s is black and so understated as to be very nearly obscured in the shadows).

Two of Ballard’s recent novels are of particular interest to social scientists. If I ever teach my dream course on muddy thinking in social science, _Cocaine Nights_ will be the first required reading in the section on social capital. It presents in satiric form the disturbing thesis that the vibrant civic activism prized by Putnam, Fukuyama, Etzioni and other neo-communitarians is best produced through systematic clandestine violence. For Ballard, it’s not only impossible to have Salem without the witchburning; it’s the witchburning that brings Salem together as a community. _Super-Cannes_ is of more interest to sociologists, geographers, and urban planners. It’s all about the return of the repressed in a very thinly disguised version of “Sophia-Antipolis”:http://www.sophia-antipolis.net/. The orderly planned community of Super-Cannes doesn’t so much break down into chaos, as it perpetuates it – again, community and violence reproduce each other.

At the end of “Science as a Vocation”:http://www2.pfeiffer.edu/~lridener/DSS/Weber/scivoc.html, Weber famously claims that the age of prophecy, when an inspiration might sweep ‘through the great communities like a firebrand’ is over; we live in an age of disenchantment. Ballard’s work is a direct riposte to Weber; it claims that the New Millennium is most likely to have its start amidst the bored and deracinated upper middle classes and suburbanites, the willing victims of Weber’s ‘rationalization.’ A rough beast is slouching towards Shepperton to be born …

Didn’t someone tell this guy that things can go badly wrong if you try mailing yourself across the country?

I see that Christopher Walken nearly walked out of the remake of The Stepford Wives because he was unhappy with changes in the script.

When the star of The Country Bears, Kangaroo Jack, Gigli, Jungle Juice, Joe Dirt, The Prophecy 1,2, and 3, Blast From the Past, and Mouse Hunt nearly leaves your movie because of the script, that’s got to hurt your feelings a little bit.

This is a “game”:http://www.distributive-justice.com/mainpage_frame-e-n.htm everyone should play. And, if you like, try it in German or Italian.

Of the people who’ve played the “Discover your Distributive Profile” game (almost 4000 of them), Dworkinians are out in front. Right-libertarians aren’t well represented. Two weeks floating around the blogosphere, and I bet the numbers would change a lot. Just a hunch.

Next month I plan to go to Washington D.C. for a fellowship event of the 21st Century Trust. But with the new visa rules to the US, I can’t simply rely on being white and English-speaking to get me through immigration without a scratch. Luckily, citizens of countries belonging to the Visa Waiver Program (VWP) won’t need a visa as long as they have a machine readable passport. My passport isn’t ‘machine readable’, so from 1st October I’ll need to either have a new passport or apply for visa.

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Why is it, that when I see a “headline”:http://www.nytimes.com/cnet/CNET_2100-1016_3-5072973.html like “Study: Windows Cheaper than Linux,” I can expect with near 100% certainty to see the words “Microsoft commissioned” in the text of the article?

It’s sad to read that Ian Macdonald, the music critic, has died.

Macdonald deserves the description ‘music critic’ rather than the more workaday ‘rock journalist’, in my view, simply on the strength of his extraordinary book Revolution in the Head: The Beatles and The Sixties.

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From Donald Rumsfeld:

Mr. Rumsfeld did not mention any of the domestic critics by name. But he suggested that those who have been critical of the administration’s handling of the war in Iraq and its aftermath might be encouraging American foes to believe that the United States might one day walk away from the effort, as it has in past conflicts.

From Christopher Durang:

You remember how in the second act Tinkerbell drinks some poison that Peter is about to drink in order to save him? And then Peter turns to the audience and he says, “Tinkerbell is going to die because not enough people believe in fairies. But if all of you clap your hands real hard to show that you do believe in fairies, maybe she won’t die.”

So, we all started to clap. I clapped so long and so hard that my palms hurt and they even started to bleed I clapped so hard. Then suddenly the actress playing Peter Pan turned to the audience and she said, “That wasn’t enough. You did not clap hard enough. Tinkerbell is dead.” And then we all started to cry. The actress stomped off stage and refused to continue with the production. They finally had to lower the curtain. The ushers had to come help us out of the aisles and into the street.

You hear that? CLAP LOUDER!

More from Patrick Nielsen Hayden, Arthur Silber, Kevin Drum, Atrios, and Tim Dunlop.

Teresa Nielsen Hayden’s latest post – The Fabric of the City – deserves a wide readership, both for itself and for the wealth of resources it links to. Lots of stuff about New York’s transportation infrastructure, abandoned subway stations and so on. There’s something about abandoned stations (especially underground ones) that calls to mind murder, mystery, romance (the stuff of old movies basically). There used to be such a station, perhaps more than one, on Berlin’s U-Bahn. It was part of the West Berlin network but was situated under East Berlin. The trains would pass through slowly, the old station was illuminated by a few 40w light bulbs and (I think) sometimes there were East German police on the platform with dogs.

From the campaign trail:

bq. Schwarzenegger, campaigning in a heavily Hispanic Los Angeles suburb, said his pronunciation of “California” was just one of the words Davis didn’t like to hear. “He doesn’t like ‘lost jobs,’ he doesn’t like that word,” Schwarzenegger said.

Of course, Arnie comes out of this exchange looking much better than Gray Davis, whose pathetic appeal to anti-immigrant sentiment started it all. Davis should be feeling ashamed of himself, but instead he’s reverting to the time-dishonoured ‘it was all a joke’ defence.