CT doesn’t have many of these posts – lots of links with little analysis. Most of the following are horror stories of various kinds.
From the monthly archives:
January 2004
The BBC website picks up on “Cambridge philosopher Simon Blackburn’s claim”:http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/3387169.stm that lust should be reclassified as a virtue rather than a sin:
bq. Professor Blackburn is quoted as saying: “The important thing is that generally anything that gives pleasure has a presumption in its favour.
bq. “The question is how we control it.”
I had heard that lust had become fashionable among the Cambridge faculty, but I hadn’t expected a theoretical elaboration of its benefits.
I’m just back from the Oxford Political Thought Conference — and great fun it was too. One of the things I managed to do in Oxford was to meet up with Chris Brooke of the “Virtual Stoa”:http://users.ox.ac.uk/~magd1368/weblog/blogger.html in his palatial college rooms. Just over a year ago Chris and about the board games: me about “playing Monopoly in the old GDR”:http://junius.blogspot.com/2002_12_15_junius_archive.html#90066036 and “he about”:http://users.ox.ac.uk/~magd1368/weblog/2002_12_01_archive.html Bertell Ollman’s game “Class Struggle”:http://www.aardwolfgames.com/aardmakehtml.mv?look4=2985.00000&src=DETAILS . I was fortunate enough to find myself sitting next to Professor Ollman at lunch today and asked him about the game, and one of the things he told me was the Monopoly itself was originally conceived as an _anti-capitalist_ game by a follower of Henry George. The story of the game’s invention and its subsequent appropriation by Parker Brothers is “here”:http://www.adena.com/adena/mo/ (scroll down to list of articles) and “here”:http://www.washingtonfreepress.org//36/monopoly.html .
Norman Geras has “a post on anti-semitism in France”:http://normblog.typepad.com/normblog/2004/01/france_the_jews.html which documents some awful recent attacks on Jews. But he then goes on to cite another article by Serge Klarsfeld which alleges that France has been a “consistent adversary of the Jewish nation” and cites a 1789 speech to the National Assembly by Clermont-Tonnerre, one of the deputies. I was curious about this and googled for it, and “the whole speech is available on-line”:http://chnm.gmu.edu/revolution/d/284/ . The speech actually concerns the various groups who were excluded from various legal rights before the revolution, including members of “questionable professions” (such as actors and executioners) and religious minorities including Protestants and Jews. Clermont-Tonnerre is arguing for the extension of legal rights to all citizens, regardless of their religious opinion, and that no-one should have a special and distinct legal status because of the religious or ethnic identity: all individuals should be equal as citizens before the law. He attacks the idea that the Jews should be allowed to have their own judges and to exact their own punishments on lawbreakers. But it is clear that the point he is making is the same as a liberal would make now if it were proposed that Muslims should be allowed to establish Sharia courts with the power to enact punishments within France or Britain today. Maybe there is an argument supporting the thesis of a persistent anti-Jewish bias by the French state since the revolution, but the broadly liberal sentiments expressed by Clermont-Tonnerre in the National Assembly are no evidence for this.
I can’t tell how far this story has got out of Wisconsin, but it is pretty amusing. Bishop Burke of La Crosse has issued a statement denying communion to legislators who vote pro-choice. You can imagine that quasi-Catholic legislators are annoyed, and so are their Democratic colleagues. There’s been lots of nonsense on the radio about the threat to separation of church and state, revealing that people really don’t understand the point of separation, which is to protect religious believers from discrimination by the state and other faiths, not to protect them from their own church (we have laws against murder, etc, to do that). The legislators are free to leave the church if they disagree with it, or if they want to take a job which requires them to act against its policies. Burke is simply illuminating the reality of the choice. Good luck to him.
Brian Leiter has two interesting posts up (one two) on the question of whether academics should be able to claim scholarly credit for blogging. It is fairly clear that good blogging should count as service. Indeed in all my recent self-promoting activities I’ve been plugging my work on various blogs as a service both to the public and the profession. But whether this counts as scholarly work is a tougher question.
Kevin Drum picks up on something Matthew Yglesias noted a while ago: the American government spends more per person on health than some governments that run quite good comprehensive public health systems. The data almost suggest that public health care is more efficient than private health care. Of course, if America gets better quality health care for all the extra $$$$$ it is spending, this conclusion wouldn’t follow. There’s remarkably little actual data to bear that out, but if you trawl through Kevin’s comments board you’ll find lots of people reporting fourth- or fifth-hand anecdotes to that effect. So I thought I’d add my own little anecdotes, comparing the only two countries I’ve ever spent significant time in. My non-expert observations suggest
1. A person with private health insurance in Australia gets higher quality health servives than a person with private health insurance in the US.
2. A person without private health insurance in Australia gets much higher quality health servives than a person without private health insurance in the US.
3. In some cases (e.g. mine) a person without private health insurance in Australia gets slightly better health servives than a person with private health insurance in the US.
An interplanetary trial balloon is floated as the AP reports President Bush “will announce plans next week to send Americans to Mars and establish a permanent human presence on the moon”. “Bush won’t propose sending Americans to Mars anytime soon;” the report says, “rather, he envisions preparing for the mission more than a decade from now.” So it’s not clear whether there will be an explicit JFK-like commitment with a deadline (“The goal, before this decade is out…”) or just increased funding with Mars as the long-range but indefinite target. The report notes that “Bush has been expected to propose a bold new space mission in an effort to rally Americans around a unifying theme as he campaigns for re-election.” I can think of more important things that Americans might rally around besides a manned mission to Mars, and better reasons for space exploration than a feel-good election-year promise.
Will the project be funded by a series of aggressive tax cuts? Will it alienate voters who think the Earth is 4,000 years old? Will the Free State Project Libertarians ditch New Hampshire and realize that this is the chance they’ve been waiting for to really start again from scratch? Questions, questions.
The latest issue of the Arizona Law Review is available online, seemingly with no subscription needed. It’s an interdisciplinary issue on Youth, Voice and Power, with several interesting papers, all pretty accessible. Despite the liberationist-sounding title, most of the papers are pretty soberly paternalistic. They’re all worth reading, but the two I learned most from are by Tamar Schapiro and Robert Emery.
It appears that Vice President Cheney and Justice Scalia have been out “shooting”:http://customwire.ap.org/dynamic/stories/L/LA_PEOPLE_CHENEY_MOR?SITE=LALAF&SECTION=HOME&TEMPLATE=DEFAULT things. So much for being kind to your web-footed friends.
I’m not a big fan of the Googlebomb, but Moe Lane at Obsidian Wings has one that I’d be proud to be a part of.
Karma Nabulsi, a Palestinian intellectual and former PLO representative — whose book “Traditions of War”:http://www.oup.co.uk/isbn/0-19-829407-7 reclaims a central place for Jean-Jacques Rousseau in thinking about the ethics and law of war and conflict — “writes today in the Guardian”:http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,3604,1118107,00.html about Rousseau, the Geneva accords and the right of return for Palestinian refugees. Her piece points up a central problem in the politics of the Israeli–Palestinian conflict: for all the neoconservative rhetoric about the centrality of democracy to progress in the Middle East, the sort of Palestinian leaders with whom Bush and Sharon want to deal are very different from those who would emerge from democratized Palestinian institutions.
This New York Times Report about a fight in a firehouse defines a new irregular verb in its first three sentences. The conjugation appears to be “I tease playfully; You make abusive taunts; He is asking for a broken nose.” (Via En Banc.)
The 2003 Koufax Awards, hosted by Wampum, are now at the voting stage. Four CT members are nominated in the Best Writing category. Best Group Blog nominees are still to be revealed, though I think we’ll be on the list. Head over there and cast your vote. Remember, as Churchill said, “Crooked Timber is the worst blog, except for the all the others that have been read from time to time.” Similarly, Isaiah Berlin once remarked to me at High Table that “The Instapundit knows one thing; Crooked Timber knows many big things.” Or words to that effect.
Chelsea have had a jinx over Liverpool at Stamford Bridge for as long as I can remember. Tonight, with the bookies offering 4/1 against, “that jinx was broken”:http://news.bbc.co.uk/sport1/hi/football/eng_prem/3362519.stm by a superb Bruno Cheyrou goal set set up by Emile Heskey and by a great defensive effort from the team. I’m off to have another drink.