by Henry Farrell on October 24, 2003
I’ve been meaning for days now to put up a pointer to “John Holbo’s”:http://examinedlife.typepad.com/johnbelle/2003/10/gene_wolfe.html nice post on Gene Wolfe, which has an interesting comments-thread. A statistically improbable proportion of the politically-inclined blogosphere “are”:http://nielsenhayden.com/electrolite/archives/002548.html “Gene”:http://www.longstoryshortpier.com/archives/indulgences/000013.html “Wolfe”:http://chun.typepad.com/chun/2003/10/kim_jong_il_tim.html “junkies”:http://www.highclearing.com/archivesuo/week_2001_10_28.html#001834, and a fair few of them have commented on this thread. And if you haven’t read Wolfe, shame on you. The field of science fiction/fantasy has two standout candidates for great authors who’ll be read in 100 years, and Wolfe is one of them. His masterpiece is “The Book of the New Sun” series (collected in the US in two volumes, _Shadow and Claw_ and _Sword and Citadel_ (with a sort of coda, _The Urth of the New Sun_). It’s a wonderful book; shadows of Kafka, of Borges, of Chesterton. Wolfe’s prose style is ornate, without being baroque; _BOTNS_ is thick with archaisms, loanwords and other exotica, but they’re employed with precision and economy, and even a sly sense of humour. It’s grave, and chilly, but it sings .
bq. We believe that we invent symbols. The truth is that they invent us; we are their creatures, shaped by their hard, defining edges. When soldiers take their oath they are given a coin, an asimi stamped with the profile of the Autarch. Their acceptance of that coin is their acceptance of the special duties and burdens of military life – they are soldiers from that moment, though they may know nothing of the management of arms. I did not know that then, but it is a profound mistake to believe that we must know of such things to be influenced by them, and in fact to believe so is to believe in the most debased and superstitious kind of magic. The would-be sorcerer alone has faith in the efficacy of pure knowledge; rational people know that things act of themselves or not at all.
Go read.
by Kieran Healy on October 24, 2003
Patrick Belton at OxBlog disapproves of the “Pope Death Watch” but can’t resist linking to the betting on JPII’s successor, together with an analysis of the contenders. The main candidates are an Italian, a Cuban and a Nigerian, which sounds like the beginning of a pretty bad joke, the punchline to which is left as an exercise for the reader. I want the Nigerian to win, mainly because of the expanded possibilities for spam:
bq. REQUEST FOR ASSISTANCE — STRICTLY CONFIDENTIAL.
bq. Dear Sir, I pray this important message meets you in peace, may blessings of God be upon you and your family and grant you the wisdom to understand my situation and how much I really need your assistance. Before I start let me introduce myself, my name is FRANCIS ARINZE, Cardinal of the most holy Catholic and Apostolic Church, former President of the Vatican’s Pontifical Council for Interreligious Dialogue and prefect of divine worship and discipline of sacraments. I have recently been elected Pontiff of the Universal Church by the conclave of cardinals, which you may have seen on the news.
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by Jon Mandle on October 23, 2003
In today’s New York Times, Thomas Friedman writes:
Unfortunately, there are few Democrats to press my worries on the administration. Most Democrats either opposed the war (a perfectly legitimate position) or supported it and are now trying to disown it. That means the only serious opposition can come from Republicans…
I’ve been puzzling over how a “perfectly legitimate” opposition to the war is not a “serious” opposition. The best I can do is this: he didn’t oppose the war; he’s not now trying to disown it; but he has some worries he wants someone to press on the administration. Anything but Friedman’s own position, although perhaps legitimate, just isn’t serious.
by Eszter Hargittai on October 23, 2003
I haven’t always understood why some products have different names depending on the country. Nonetheless, there are cases where it’s clear why a name couldn’t or shouldn’t just be transplanted from one context to another. It’s one reason for having at least some locals come on board when expanding a product to new markets.
I am reminded of an Internet company a friend of mine started in Hungary a few years ago called World-Wide Link. That sounds innocent enough but the word “link” exists in Hungarian and means irresponsible or careless, which is probably not the image a company wants to convey or associate itself with in any way.
Then there are the cases that are much harder to anticipate. Apparently sales of a detergent called Ariel plummeted in Eqypt when rumors spread of its possible connection to Israel’s Ariel Sharon.
by Chris Bertram on October 23, 2003
I heard an interesting paper last year from Yael Tamir which stressed what a good predictor class is of party allegiance in Israel. Things there are “the wrong way round”, though, with the workers voting for the right. So I was interested to read “this Ian Buruma piece from the Guardian”:http://www.guardian.co.uk/g2/story/0,3604,1068681,00.html on the Israeli left, and what remains of it.
by Jon Mandle on October 23, 2003
Andrew O’Hagan has an article in The New York Review of Books about Marshall Mathers (aka Eminem). He quotes extensively, unflinchingly from some of his more notorious lyrics, and points out that some people “might even imagine they have no place in The New York Review of Books.” They do, and his comments make an interesting read.
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by Kieran Healy on October 23, 2003
Dubya joined me in Canberra last night (in a manner of speaking), but I have yet to see this obvious headline used in any newspapers. Security is tight. F-18s are buzzing overhead. I’m used to that from living in the flight path of Davis-Monthan AFB back in Tucson. There, sorties go out several times a day to further harrass the prickly pears on the Barry M. Goldwater Bombing Range out in the southwestern part of the state, flying over my department on the way. Low-flying A-10s really bring the concept of “air superiority” home.
Back in Canberra, we were walking around Lake Burley Griffin yesterday evening and saw a boat of navy frogmen inspecting the underside of the Commonwealth Avenue bridge, presumably looking for explosives, as Bush’s motorcade would have had to drive over it to get to Parliament House and the U.S. embassy. Personally, I’d be more worried that his drivers would get lost on Canberra’s carefully planned road system which consists of elegantly interlocking giant roundabouts, some of which are inside other even larger roundabouts.
by Eszter Hargittai on October 22, 2003
For those who may not be in the know, starting Nov 24th it will be possible to switch your cell phone provider in the U.S. without having to get a new phone number. There have been several extensions granted to cell providers on meeting this requirement so we probably shouldn’t hold our breath, but it may happen this time. Wireless number portability – the official name for all this – should be useful for those who have been deterred from switching due to the costs of having to change one’s phone number.
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by Chris Bertram on October 22, 2003
Travellers on Britain’s rail network are used to long delays and an all-round miserable experience. They are also used to implausible sounding announcement involving excuses aimed at “customers” (“passengers” having been abolished by some deranged management consultant around the time of privatization). One well known one is “leaves on the line”. Now the Guardian “has an account”:http://www.guardian.co.uk/g2/story/0,3604,1067932,00.html of why the leaves might indeed have become a problem, and only recently! “The wrong kind of snow” still awaits an adequate explanation. (Hat tip to “The Virtual Stoa”:http://users.ox.ac.uk/~magd1368/weblog/blogger.html .)
by Chris Bertram on October 22, 2003
I’ve just given a talk on education and social justice over at our Graduate School of Education. It was a fairly low key affair, aimed at some graduate students with no prior knowledge of political philosophy (and one CT-reader, as it turned out). So I concentrated on elaborating Rawls’s principles of justice and explaining how they might or might not feed into debates on educational policy. (I was greatly helped in this by reading Adam Swift’s extraordinarily clear and well-argued “How Not to Be a Hypocrite: School Choice for the Morally Perplexed Parent”:http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/ASIN/0415311179/junius-21 . Even if you disagree with Swift, he’ll help you to sort out your own thinking.) The point of the talk wasn’t to say that Rawlsian principles mandate this or that solution, but rather to explore how they could inform policy arguments. One of the questions I had from the floor concerned the permissibility of home schooling. Here’s, roughly, what I said as an off-the-top of my head Rawlsian response.
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by Henry Farrell on October 22, 2003
Looks as though Dan’s “prediction”:https://www.crookedtimber.org/archives/000695.html has come to pass; Glenn Reynolds “claims grandly”:http://www.instapundit.com/archives/012127.php in Instabolded type that the “ANTI-DEFAMATION LEAGUE is blasting Paul Krugman for anti-Semitism.” To put it as kindly as possible, this is a rather … overenthusiastic interpretation of the ADL’s “letter”:http://www.adl.org/media_watch/newspapers/20031021-NYTimes.htm to the New York Times, which merely suggests that Krugman “underestimates the significance of the anti-Semitic diatribe by Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad.” Of course, this isn’t the first time that Reynolds’ enthusiasm for a good slur has gotten in the way of the facts, but surely he can do better than this. Does he even read the stuff that he links to? I wonder.
by Henry Farrell on October 22, 2003
I went to see _Mystic River_ last weekend – strongly recommended. Sean Penn is outstanding, Tim Robbins very nearly as good, and there isn’t a single bad, or even middling performance. It’s the best movie that I’ve seen in the last two years. However, I still reckon that you should read Dennis Lehane’s original book too. The movie concentrates almost exclusively on the individuals and the moral choices that they make. It thus misses out on one of the richer aspects of the novel – the relationship between honour, community and assimilation among immigrant groups.
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by Kieran Healy on October 22, 2003
David Bernstein at Volokh posts about his favorite bumper stickers. The central mystery about bumper stickers in the U.S., by the way, is why they are called “bumper stickers” in the first place seeing as Americans call bumpers “fenders.” But I digress.
David’s favorite stickers are determined wholly by his politics. One of his “all-time favorites” is “If you can’t read this, thank the public schools,” which doesn’t seem that interesting to me. (Its counterpart, “If you can read this, thank a teacher,” isn’t much good, either.) His least favorite ones endorse lefty sentiments that he has no time for. Two of my favorite stickers comment on religious matters, though they endorse differing world views. The first is “In case of Rapture, this vehicle will be empty.” The second, which I’ve only seen once (on a car in New Jersey), is “Jesus loves you, but everyone else thinks you’re an asshole.”
by Tom on October 21, 2003
Mark Kleiman picks up an important story that I’d half-noticed on Slashdot a little while back, but had given little thought to. Fortunately, Professor K has a better attention-span than I do. While it could well be true that this stuff has had broader coverage in the US than it has in the UK, in which case my apologies to American readers for repeating the backstory, still…
The meat of the issue is that the fair and balanced and impeccably competent voting-machine company Diebold is doing its damn best to suppress the web-publication of leaked internal memos revealing some absolutely shocking security holes in their product.
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by Daniel on October 21, 2003
Time for another “Globollocks Watch piece, surveying Doug Henwood‘s piece in The Nation, which appears to have been taken by some among the neoliberal axis as evidence of a climbdown by a once-proud supporter of the Seattle rioters
Full disclosure: Although DH and I have never met, we’ve corresponded for quite a while and I consider him a mate. For this reason, I’ve decided that integrity requires me to be extra harsh in applying the patent Crooked Timber “Globollocks Scale”. I repeat my earlier point that the Globollocks ratings apply to individual pieces, not to entire ouevres and certainly not to people. The purpose of the scale is at least partly to point out how difficult it is for anyone, no matter how solid their command of the issues, to write anything short about neoliberal policy which doesn’t end up materially oversimplifying. Since I’ve never knowingly lit a candle while cursing the darkness was an option, don’t expect me to subject any of my own work to this scale any time soon.
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