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From the monthly archives:
October 2003
bq. I do not generally [consider deleting, or move to beginning of sentence] hold people in contempt because of for their profession, their job^, or their calling. But copy editors editing! That is something [Make consistent with either ‘editors’ or ‘editing’ in previous two sentences] different. Not as bad, I will grant, as war criminals or child molesters, they nevertheless belong in one of the very lowest categories of human intelligence^, and indeed morality. You will [consider ‘may’] object that copy editors perform a most useful and necessary function, turning what is often ill-formed and error-strewn text into something more presentable. This, too, I will grant. However, it there is no excuse for what copy editors they [referent is clear] also do – which is to [run-on; consider breaking into two sentences] interfere with people’s painfully-crafted stuff [lazy choice of word] when there is no reason whatever for doing so, other than some quirk in the ^mind of the particular copy-editor ing mind which is at work….
“Norman Geras writes”:http://normangeras.blogspot.com/2003_10_26_normangeras_archive.html#106718001212566747 :
bq. I do not generally hold people in contempt because of their profession, their job or their calling. But copy editors! That is something different. Not as bad, I will grant, as war criminals or child molesters, they nevertheless belong in one of the very lowest categories of human intelligence and indeed morality. You will object that copy editors perform a most useful and necessary function, turning what is often ill-formed and error-strewn text into something more presentable. This, too, I will grant. However, it is no excuse for what copy editors also do – which is to interfere with people’s painfully-crafted stuff when there is no reason whatever for doing so, other than some quirk in the particular copy-editing mind which is at work….
Hmm. As an author, I share some of Norm’s frustrations. Indeed I’ve felt them keenly very recently. But I also once worked as a freelance copyeditor to supplement my then pitiful income as a 0.5 temporary lecturer. I remember having to justify myself to desk editors and production managers and hoping, hoping that they’d give me another book to work on. Most of these people are ill-paid casual workers constantly having to prove their worth. I’m sure that’s where the urge to over-correct comes from — to demonstrate that you _did_ something for that miserable payment.
Sometimes, when I’m reading or listening to a paper which excites me with its novelty and brilliance, perhaps because it contains some really elegant move, a mental image comes into my head of Steve McManaman running with the ball, circa 1996. Colin McGinn, “writing in the latest Prospect”:http://www.prospect-magazine.co.uk/ArticleView.asp?accessible=yes&P_Article=12310 about how he became a philosopher, would see the parallel:
bq. The metaphor that best captures my experience with both philosophy and sport is soaring: pole vaulting, gymnastics and windsurfing clearly demonstrate it, but the intellectual highwire act involved in full-throttle philosophical thinking gives me a similar sensation – as if I have taken flight, leaving gravity behind. It is almost like sloughing off mortality. (Plato indeed thought that acquiring abstract knowledge is a return to the prenatal state of the immortal soul.) There is also an impressiveness to these physical and mental skills that appeals to me – they evoke the “wow” reflex. Showing off is an integral part of their exercise; but as I said earlier, I don’t have any objection to showing off. In any case, there is not, for me, the discontinuity between sports and intellectual activities that is often assumed. It is not that you must either be a nerd or a jock; you can be both. It has never surprised me that the ancient Greeks combined a reverence for the mind with a love of sports: both involve an appreciation of the beauties of technique skilfully applied. And both place a high premium on getting it right – exactly right.
I’ve recently taken on the job of department head for a couple of years. I’ve done it before, but my successor’s early retirement has meant that I’ve had to step in again. Dennis Baron in the Chronicle of Higher Education “published a heads-up”:http://chronicle.com/jobs/2003/10/2003102401c.htm on what the job _really_ involves (allegedly). (Link via “Michael Froomkin”:http://www.discourse.net/ )
This is the second installment in a series of postings to accompany a reading group around Michael Otsuka’s “Libertarianism Without Inequality”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0199243956/junius-20 (first installment “here”:https://www.crookedtimber.org/archives/000687.html ). I’ll put the meat of the posting below the fold. Comments are again welcome from others who are reading or who have read the book.
It’s health insurance decision time at both my workplace and my wife’s. Like most employers mine is shifting more of the cost of insurance onto employees (though, brilliantly, it is not telling us how much we will have to pay, though we have to choose by today). I usually insure the family through my employer, and will again this year despite the cost, since, although my wife’s insurance would not cost us anything, we could not continue with our current GP on her insurance.
BUT, of course, we are also entitled to insure through her employer, and without any cost to ourselves. This would save us about $200-500 per year, as the co-pays for drugs through her insurer are lower and she gets better dental coverage (and we use a lot of drugs and dental). It would cost her employer about $10,000 per year to provide us with this benefit. (On top of the $12,000 my own employer pays).
So, what should we do? Have her employer pay $10,000 to an HMO so we can save at most $500? Or just lose the $200-500? (Please don’t suggest moving to a civilised country with a sane and efficient arrangement for funding healthcare: that’s not an option).
Three relevant facts:
1. My wife’s employer is the local public school district.
2. For years my employer has been effectively subsidising hers, both because when the kids are sick my job has the flexibility that I can take time off instead of her, and because we have never signed up for health insurance through her employer.
3. She works 30-35 hours a week and is paid on a 50% contract.
Speaking of Eminem, I’ve been fascinated for a long time by this: quite a few black and Latino rappers fill their albums and videos with images of ostentatious, even cartoonish wealth. With the possible exception of Vanilla Ice rolling in his 5.0*, I’ve never seen a white rapper portray his success in a remotely similar way.
I have certain questions for the candidates that only TV campaign ads can answer. Such questions as:
Have you ever had a picnic with minority schoolchildren?
Do you like to quickly walk down hallways while surrounded by people holding clipboards and laws?
Can you go to a factory, put on a hard hat, shake hands with other people in hard hats, and look at a blueprint while pointing off into the distance as if you know how to extrapolate things from a blueprint?
“Peu de gens devineront combien il a fallu être triste pour ressusciter Carthage.”
Next week the body that oversees the technical co-ordination of the internet, ICANN, meets at Carthage in Tunisia. The top item on the agenda, for anyone who cares about privacy and freedom of expression, is the WHOIS database. This is the set of data of domain name owners which was originally collected so that network administrators could find and fix technical problems and keep the internet running smoothly.
Of course no collection of personal data can remain long without various interests campaigning to open it up to a variety of unintended uses. In this case, those interests include IP rights holders, law enforcement, oppressive regimes, stalkers, and of course spammers.
Well, strike me dead. BBC news online reports that Jim Caviezel, who’s playing Jesus in Mel Gibson’s controversial film, has been struck by lightning. And an assistant director too, him for the second time. Apparently it actually is true that people struck by lightning have smoke come out of their ears (how? how? where does it come from?).
Today brings the “last commercial flight of Concorde”:http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/3209837.stm . “Concorde”:http://www.concordesst.com/ was built jointly by engineers in Toulouse and in Bristol (the city where I live and work). It is a tremendous source of local pride for the people of the city. Just last weekend I happened to be in the British Aerospace Welfare Association in Filton and overheard a number of elderly people who had worked on the project chatting about their experience of the aircraft. Anyone who grew up in Britain in the 1960s and 1970s will also know what the plane represented then in terms of confidence in a new technology-driven future, how the test flights were reported, the celebrity status of test-pilot “Brian Trubshaw”:http://www.concordesst.com/history/trubshaw.html , the worries about Concordski (later crashed at the Paris air show) and Boeing’s rival SST (abandoned). Now it will take longer to get from London to New York than it did twenty-seven years ago.
The “British Philosophical Association”:http://www.britphil.ac.uk/ , which aspires to be a professional body representing all academic philosophers in the UK, has its inaugural conference today. Onora O’Neill (Cambridge) and Robert Audi (Notre Dame – from the American Philisophical Association) are the keynote speakers. I’ll be there.
Via the ever wonderful “BoingBoing”:http://boingboing.net/2003_10_01_archive.html#106695295940140592 this interesting, if very, very weird “project”:http://ineradicablestain.com/skin.html in which Shelley Jackson invites a couple of thousand people to each have a single word tattooed on their body; the words, when put together, will form a short story that will not be available in any other medium. Jackson is responsible, among other things, for a fine (if rather _visceral_) collection of short stories, _The Melancholy of Anatomy_, as well as for the “cover”:http://www.lcrw.net/kellylink/sth/sthimage.htm of Kelly Link’s
“Dan Drezner”:http://www.danieldrezner.com/archives/000837.html claims that France’s flouting of the rules governing the euro is proof that the European Union is just a standard international organization; I’m not any more convinced than “I was”:https://www.crookedtimber.org/archives/000383.html when he made the same argument a couple of months ago. I simply don’t see how this particular case provides a definitive test of whether or not the EU is a standard international organization (which is incapable of disciplining its more powerful members) or a truly supranational organization.