From the monthly archives:
In today’s column, everybody’s favourite mustachioed commentator manages to put the following line in front of us:
Thankfully, there is one group of people the Bush team is listening to: Iraq’s silent majority
My question to the CT readership is; do you think he did it on purpose?
PS: If you get the Friedman photograph in Photoshop and colour in the rest of the beard he looks exactly like Krugman FACT.
There’s a jaw-dropping line in today’s Anne Applebaum column in the Washington Post:
“According to another opinion poll, more than a third of the Germans now think of themselves as “victims” of the Second World War — just like the Jews.”
Applebaum might be correctly representing the results of a real poll question, but I’m amazed. I’d be especially amazed if the question asked Germans to compare their WWII-related victimization to the victimization of the Jews. I don’t know what question was asked, and I was unable to find a corroborating story by Googling. There are some very smart people reading this blog. Does anyone know anything about this?
UPDATE: I emailed Anne Applebaum about this, and she was kind enough to email back. She says that the source was the Polish newspaper Rzeczpospolita, and that the question was “Do you think Germans were victims of the war just like Poles and Jews?” 36% of Germans said yes. She doesn’t have the newspaper article in front of her, but she’s having it faxed to her tomorrow. I can’t read Polish, so I’ll never be able to find it on the Rzeczpospolita site.
In comments, pg links to this story, which is almost certainly the same thing. 57% of Poles said yes. I don’t know what to think of this.
– The cast of the Antic Muse can write circles around most of us. The best posts I’ll read today are Holly Martins’ hilarious take on David Brooks, while the second best is Ana Marie Cox on New York magazine’s discovery of dirty pictures on the internet.
– Daniel Drezner is hosting a debate on the truth or falsity of the statement: “It is a complete fabrication that the Bush administration argued in the runup to the war that there was an imminent threat from Iraq.” It’s being held at a pretty high level; no one has yet been compared to Hitler. So root, root, root for your side. Anonymous Blogger has much more on the question.
– Jim Henley has a concise take on the story about US soldiers allegedly bulldozing the crops of Iraqis to punish the farmers for not providing information about guerillas. I sincerely hope that this story isn’t true.
– Finally, my friend Irfan posted a picture of me last night at a farewell party. I can be pretty self-conscious about photos, but I think it turned out pretty well.
I just heard that Neal Wood, Marxist historian of political thought and author of at least a couple of books on Locke has died. “The Guardian carried an obit”:http://www.guardian.co.uk/obituaries/story/0,3604,1058891,00.html .
An email this morning brings a copy of a begging letter from Guardian columnist Paul Foot, on behalf of his Socialist Workers Party (British version) comrades Lindsey German and Alex Callinicos. (Full text below). The letter arises because said “comrades” accused Quintin Hoare and Branka Magas, long-time scholars of the Balkans and, as it happens, friends of mine, of being apologists for the government of Holocaust revisionist Franjo Tujdman. Not unreasonably, given that the accusation was wholly false and a grave libel disseminated by the several thousand sellers of the SWP’s literature, Hoare and Magas sought the advice of m’learned friends. German and Callinicos have had to back down and apologise for thus damaging their reputation (apology “here”:http://www.socialistreview.org.uk/article.php?articlenumber=8610 ). Foot’s letter appeals to the convention that disputes on the left should not be taken to the lawyers (a very convenient convention for a an influential and powerful organization which resorts to tabloid-style smears against its opponents). He also claims that “The publisher, Lindsey German and Alex Callinicos cannot possibly afford these sums.” Since the sum involved is about £13,000 and Foot and Callinicos at least are reasonably affluent, this claim is plainly untrue.
Interesting knockabout stuff from two people who’ve decided to take it up a notch in terms of Great Weblog Comments Battles and duke it out in public on Daniel Drezner’s site with $100 at stake. The battle is over the subject “Did Bush Say That Iraq Was An Imminent Threat Or Not?”.
As far as I can tell, the case for the defence is that Bush specifically said that Iraq wasn’t an imminent threat, but that it was about to become an imminent threat and he didn’t propose to wait until it became imminent.
In other words, Bush does appear to be committed to the claim “Event I’ is imminent”, where I’ is defined as “the event of event I becoming imminent” and I is defined as “Iraq being a threat”. Which means to me that this particular line of argument turns on the question of whether “imminent” is a transitive predicate, or in other words, if something will imminently become imminent, does that mean that it’s imminent now?
My guess is that “imminent” is a short-transitive predicate; it’s transitive so long as the chain of “imminents” isn’t too long. Short-transitivity is a somewhat controversial logical property, however, albeit one which would be fantastically useful for economists in making axiomatic theories of revealed preference if it could be put on a rigorous footing. I’ll leave the matter to our resident expert on the subject, Mr Weatherson.
When I’m swamped with work, as I am at the moment, I like to have a book that I can dip into for quick five minute breaks – thousand page behemoths like Quicksilver get put to one side until normal conditions reassert themselves. And at the moment, I’m very much enjoying Hazel K. Bell’s Indexers and Indexes in Fact and Fiction (University of Toronto Press, 2001). A surprising choice for leisure reading? Not really. It’s light (broken up into 74 bite-sized chapters, refreshing, and very, very funny.
Here’s my contribution to the “M-Type versus C-Type” debate. Basically, just as it’s a useful analytical distinction to make that all UK Prime Ministers are either bookies or vicars, it’s always worth remembering that all economic policy debates of interest can be usefully analogised either to blackjack or to three-card monte.
There was a particularly nasty court case in my home town of Bristol recently. I forget all the details, but the essence was that a stable-owner was fined for maiming and neglecting her horses and was banned from keeping horses for life. That seems to me to be entirely reasonable. In fact a great deal of animal-cruelty legislation, such as bans on dog and cock-fighting and on bear-baiting, is something that I’d want to support. Leaving aside controversial matters like fox-hunting (on which I have a pretty libertarian view), and just taking those most extreme cases of wanton cruelty, it seems to me that there’s a problem for both libertarians and liberals. Such legislation can’t be justified either in terms of protecting the rights of (human) individuals or without appealing to some controversial conception of what gives value to life that we can’t presume is universally shared. I’d welcome thoughts on how we might adapt or extend liberal or libertarian theories to cope with these cases.
The website of the American Philosophical Association is a quiet affair as a rule, but its section on Calls for Papers turns up the odd gem:
bq. Philosophy and The Onion. Now soliciting proposals for projected philosophical anthology on any aspect of The Onion, America’s leading satirical newspaper.
This is followed by,
bq. The Undead and Philosophy … Abstracts are sought for a collection of philosophical essays on the theme of the undead.
Jesse has made a good point:
A month or two ago, there was a widely-shared understanding on much of the right that Bustamante was a bad choice for governor of California because he refused to repudiate his membership as an undergrad in the Latino student group MEChA. Few people argued that Bustamante himself was a racist, but it was widely agreed that MEChA was a dangerous, hateful group of extremists. MEChA was commonly described as a “hate group,” the Latino equivalent of the Klu Klux Klan. Glenn Reynolds famously called them a group of “fascist hatemongers.” Some accused them of wishing to seize the American Southwest for Mexico. Mechistas were often accused of hating white people, and occasionally accused of hating Jews. We spent a lot of time arguing about the translation of “Por La Raza todo. Fuera de La Raza nada” and the correct reading of El Plan Espiritual de Aztlán.
Bustamante has lost the election, but MEChA didn’t go anywhere. There are still 300 active chapters all over the United States. All across the country, active chapters of MEChA go about their business. In general, I don’t think they’re doing anything wrong, although my reading led me to believe that some chapters were overly touchy and PC. Quite a few people strenuously disagreed with me.
If I thought that there were 300 chapters of the KKK on college campuses agitating for a violent revolt in order to claim their own Aryan nation, I’d see this as a continuing issue even after an election was over. So… if people believed what they were saying, where did the concern about MEChA go?
There’s quite “an extraordinary column in today’s Telegraph”:http://www.telegraph.co.uk/opinion/main.jhtml?xml=/opinion/2003/10/13/do1301.xml&sSheet=/opinion/2003/10/13/ixopinion.html&secureRefresh=true&_requestid=147311 in which the ghastly Barbara Amiel, who no doubt has no more access to the evidence than any other member of the public, declares the as yet untried footballer-rape case to be of dubious merit, and opines:
bq. In the past, any woman crying rape under such factual circumstances would have had to show feeble-mindedness to warrant society’s protection. Going voluntarily up to a stranger’s room for intercourse or its preliminaries, and expecting a man to behave as a light switch that can be turned off at will, may be technically her right, but it is both biologically and logically mad.
Those following the case will know that it is suggested that the woman was attacked by a number of persons other than the one she had gone upstairs with. I’d be interested to know if Amiel’s piece amounts to contempt of court.
Did you know that Rita Mae Brown, who wrote Rubyfruit Jungle*, the frequently-assigned novel about growing up lesbian, also wrote the screenplay for the slasher movie The Slumber Party Massacre? (She also writes a popular series of mysteries.)
If I was a professor of cultural studies, my head would be spinning. Accurately measuring the brow altitude of American culture is a job for braver souls than I.
UPDATE: Just Rubyfruit Jungle, not The Rubyfruit Jungle. Thanks, Patrick.
Norman Geras’s “greatest jazz albums”:http://normangeras.blogspot.com/2003_10_12_normangeras_archive.html#106604352478301127 poll is up. I managed to vote for just one in the top 15, Ellington’s Newport album. There’s rightly a lot of Coltrane in there, but, disappointingly, my own top pick, his “Live at the Village Vanguard”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/B0000065KK/junius-20 didn’t make it.
Those interminable debates about whether criminals are to blame for their crimes or whether we should look to their circumstances are now repackaged as a standoff between those who want to hold terrorists responsible for their atrocities and those who look to root causes. The right answer, of course, is “both”. But here’s a simple and plausible model, entirely _a priori_ , to help us to think about things.
Imagine a population who vary in their susceptibility to pressure. We can call the property in which they vary “virtue”. Some are so virtuous that no matter what the pressure, they never perform an evil act. Some are so vicious that even if the pressure is negative, they do vile things just for the hell of it. Most people are in between (since virtue is normally distributed). As pressure — caused by poverty, social dislocation, military occupation, whatever — rises, more and more of the population switch, given their underlying propensities, from virtuous to vicious actions.
