From the monthly archives:

December 2003

Libertarianism without inequality (5)

by Chris Bertram on December 6, 2003

Apologies to those of you who followed my first four posts on Michael Otsuka’s “Libertarianism Without Inequality”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0199243956/junius-20 (“1”:https://www.crookedtimber.org/archives/000687.html, “2”:https://www.crookedtimber.org/archives/000722.html , “3”:https://www.crookedtimber.org/archives/000756.html , “4”:https://www.crookedtimber.org/archives/000810.html ). For various reasons — mainly pressure of work — I’ve taken a while to get around to chapter 5 (though I’ve actually read the whole book now). Some comments on that chapter are below the fold. I’ll try to comment on the two remaining chapters over the next week. (Comments are welcome from those who have read or are reading the book).

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Preferential Voting

by Brian on December 6, 2003

I know this makes sense given the way votes are counted in Australia, but it’s still a very odd paragraph.

In a fascinating glimpse of the immediate reaction to Mr Latham as Opposition Leader, voters elevated Labor to pole position with 42 per cent of the primary vote, compared to 45 per cent for the Liberals. (Sun-Herald 7 December.)

I’m not so upbeat about the poll though. Latham’s entire campaign strategy seems to involve focussing on western Sydney and hoping the rest of the country doesn’t mind being relatively ignored. If he still can’t win the primary vote in western Sydney, the results in, say, regional Victoria could be brutal.

Most annoying Christmas record

by Harry on December 6, 2003

My friend Carrie writes from England to say that her annoyance with the radio play of Wham’s Last Christmas is interfering with her work. Is Last Christmas the most annoying Christmas record? No way.

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Isn’t PageRank marvellous?

by Tom on December 6, 2003

Given that the result of a Google query consisting solely of the string ‘miserable failure’ is this, I think it truly is.

(Via Atrios.)

Love is a many-legged thing

by Kieran Healy on December 6, 2003

Via my former RA Brayden King comes news that you can now Marry Your Pet if you feel that it’s, you know, the one. Matilda, who has been a “Pet and Partners Priest for longer than she’d care to remember” will marry you and your chosen pet in one of three sizes of wedding. Many happily married interspecies couples testify that it brought added depth and meaning to their lives. It was the disclaimer that convinced me the site was on the level. It helpfully points out that although you get a marriage certificate “You have no conjugal rights. You are not allowed to have sex with your pet.”

If you don’t want that kind of relationship with your dog, then perhaps you should consider sending it to Dog Island, where they may roam freely on one of the three constituent islands (for big, medium and small dogs, as appropriate), and feed on rabbits raised on wild carrots.

Incidentally, you may not wed if both you and your pet are gay, as this would desecrate the sanctity of marriage.

A different book list

by Eszter Hargittai on December 5, 2003

I’ve enjoyed reading the various book rankings. One problem with such lists, however, is that they rarely offer new books to consider. Were there any books on those lists that we haven’t heard of? Unlikely. I realize that isn’t necessarily the point of such lists, but it got me thinking along those lines anyway. I recall enjoying the thread generated on Kieran’s blog back in the summer about long reads.

I would like to read some more about books that I am less likely to have come across already but come highly recommended nonetheless. I thought one possible approach could be to compile a “best of” list consisting of books on our bookshelves that seem obscure (at times even to us owners of those books) or are perhaps not so obscure per se but are nonetheless unlikely to be found on the shelves of others.. not because they’re not good but because they are less mainstream.

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Playing safely

by Eszter Hargittai on December 5, 2003

Play safely this holiday season. (Heck, play safely even if it’s not a holiday season.) Brought to you by the UK National Health Service. [Warning: content – including audio – may not be appropriate in some work environments.]

Answers solicited

by Henry Farrell on December 5, 2003

How does one best describe someone who engages in a blatant exercise in Newspeak (viz. arguing that all opponents to the Iraq war were objectively ‘pro-fascist’), and then “invokes Orwell’s blessing”:http://rogerlsimon.com/archives/00000528.htm on his project? Me, I can’t find the words.

Update: goof (Newspeech for Newspeak) fixed.

Update 2: In the spirit of Mr. Simon’s interesting and helpful contribution to our public discourse, we might press for the relabelling of the “Best Liberal Blog” and “Best Conservative Blog” “awards”:http://wizbangblog.com/poll.php as the “Best Pro-Fascist Blog” and “Best Anti-Fascist Blog” respectively. Just to clarify matters.

The Elders are getting at the Protocols

by Henry Farrell on December 5, 2003

Unless I want my contribution to this blog to become some sort of Glenn Reynolds-watch, I’m going to have to stop reading him. Quite simply, whenever he posts on something I know about (EU politics; the governance of information technology), he gets it wrong. And not just wrong on details. More often than not, he’s spectacularly wrong, usually because of some conspiracy theory or another that’s rattling around in his skull. It’s really getting on my nerves. “This”:http://www.instapundit.com/archives/012876.php is a particularly outrageous example.

bq. THE NEW CLASS IS THREATENED BY THE INTERNET, with its intolerance for lies and posturing and its openness to alternative voices. Here’s the response:

bq. Leaders from almost 200 countries will convene next week in Geneva to discuss whether an international body such as the United Nations should be in charge of running the Internet, which would be a dramatic departure from the current system, managed largely by U.S. interests.

bq. The representatives, including the heads of state of France, Germany and more than 50 other countries, are expected to attend the World Summit on the Information Society, which also is to analyze the way that Web site and e-mail addresses are doled out, how online disputes are resolved and the thorny question of how to tax Internet-based transactions.

bq. The “new class” types who dominate international bureaucracies can’t be expected to take the threat to their position lying down. And, as I’ve written before, it’s a very real threat to them, and to others who profit from silencing people. As blogger-turned-Iranian-Parliamentary-candidate Hossein Derakshan notes: “We can’t vote, but we can still say what we really want.”

bq. That’s a horrifying notion to some, and you can expect more efforts to put a stop to it.

It’s hard to know where to start. But I’ll try.

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It was Crooked Timber wot won it

by Brian on December 5, 2003

Wizbang is running a Blog Awards competition. CT is nominated for best group blog and best liberal blog, though not, somehow, for best blog. So head over there, and vote early vote often. I voted for Calpundit, Fistful of Euros and Caoine. (At least, I voted for them in the categories they weren’t competing with CT!) Hat tip: Dave Winer, who would also like you to vote for him.

Don’t do like what I say, do what I does

by Daniel on December 5, 2003

Kevin Drum has a piece of advice for composition students:

“ignore anyone who tells you to write like you talk”

I certainly agree with him that if someone can’t construct a simple English sentence without making two grammatical howlers, you probably shouldn’t listen to them any more. If someone were to instruct you to “write as you speak”, then there might be some point in having a pedagogical debate, but that’s presumably another matter.

Update: Kevin also suggests that “The meaning of a word is never unclear because an apostrophe has been misused”. Its not the daftest claim I’ve seen this week, but I think hell regret making it.

British political blogs

by Chris Bertram on December 5, 2003

“Harry Hatchet”:http://hurryupharry.bloghouse.net/ has “a piece on the Guardian website”:http://politics.guardian.co.uk/egovernment/comment/0,12767,1099845,00.html on British political blogs. He’s kind enough to mention CT among others.

Three Oracles

by Henry Farrell on December 4, 2003

I’m reading Michael Wood’s “The Road To Delphi: The Life and Afterlife of Oracles”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0374526109/henryfarrell-20 now; there’s a lot of meat to it. The book considers the fascination that oracles exert, and traces some of it back to their mixture of infallibility and ambiguity; they tell us the truth, but not necessarily in a form that we can recognize or use.

bq. Oracle-stories characteristically not only center on equivocation as part of their plot, the way they make the oracle come out right. They are _about_ equivocation. They need the oracle to be both right and wrong; they need more than one outcome to lurk from the start in the oracle’s utterance.

I imagine that this is not only fertile matter for literary criticism (Wood is professor of English at Princeton), but for philosophy too. However, my skills aren’t well-suited to these debates, so I’ll confine myself to recommending the book, admiring the catholicism of Wood’s choice of examples, and suggesting a few of my own. Wood draws on a remarkably broad selection of sources; not only Sophocles and Shakespeare, but Philip K. Dick’s _The Man in the High Castle_. Still, there are many literary oracles that receive no mention; here are three of my favorites.

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Fair and balanced

by Ted on December 4, 2003

Regarding Robert Bartley, Wall Street Journal editorial page editor and Presidential Medal of Freedom recipient, you might be interested in this long, detailed article from the Columbia Journalism Review about the trustworthiness of the Wall Street Journal editorial page under his leadership. It’s well worth reading.

Just one example out of many:

In late 1994 (the WSJ editorial page) targeted Peter Edelman, then counselor to the Secretary of Health and Human Services, who was being considered for a seat on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia circuit. The Journal said that when Edelman was director of New York State’s Division for Youth in 1978, he ordered a one-week furlough for a seventeen-year-old who had knifed a girl during a robbery. While on his furlough, the youth was arrested on charges of raping, robbing, and trying to electrocute a sixty-three-year-old woman.

That the Journal’s charge was not true was eventually pointed out in a letter, published about three weeks later, written by J. Thomas Mullen, president of the Catholic Charities Services Corp. in Cleveland, who had worked with Edelman in New York. Under the structure of the agency, Edelman did not order transfers or furloughs, but he could override them, particularly when there was a concern about security, which he did in this case. But by the time he had ordered the boy picked up and returned to the facility, it was too late.

It was also too late for Edelman’s nomination. Under pressure from the right wing’s judicial attack machine, Clinton got cold feet, and Edelman’s name never went to the Senate…

“They were almost indifferent as to whether what they wanted to say comported with dispassionate factual reality,” says Taylor, who is now a senior writer at The American Lawyer.

Whose product?

by Eszter Hargittai on December 4, 2003

I am about to hire a programmer to write some code for me that will help collect data for my research. It suddenly occured to me that there will be a final product here and I have no idea who would have ownership of that product. I’m not trying to complicate things, I am just wondering. My preference would be to make the program available free of charge to other researchers who could benefit from such a product. But will I have the right to do that? What kind of agreement would I have to have with the programmer up front? Is she automatically the owner of the program? If I pay for all the time she spends on creating it and the program specifics came from me would it be mine to distribute freely? I suspect some of this might depend on what kind of agreement we come to ahead of time. Could I ask her to create the program under a Creative Commons license, for example Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 1.0? I realize I can certainly ask her and she could say no, but I’m wondering if that sounds like a reasonable approach.