From the monthly archives:

February 2004

Visible Libertarians

by Kieran Healy on February 28, 2004

I’m trying to remember the source of a quote, and the quote itself — roughly, it says “Individualism is a transitional stage between two kinds of social structure.” It sounds like something “Simmel”:http://socio.ch/sim/index_sim.htm would say, or maybe “Amos Hawley”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0226319849/kieranhealysw-20/ref=nosim/. Libertarianism has always seemed to me to depend for its realization on features of the social structure that it officially repuditates. It wouldn’t be the first ideology of which that was true. But I’m not going to defend that idea here. All I want to say is that I think we’d all be better off if “Jim Henley”:http://www.highclearing.com/archivesuo/week_2004_02_22.html#005104 got the kind of traffic that Glenn Reynolds gets, and maybe “Julian Sanchez”:http://www.juliansanchez.com/notes.html got “Virginia Postrel’s”:http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/movable_type/2004_archives/000339.html job at the _Times_.

Something new at the Oscars

by Eszter Hargittai on February 28, 2004

I don’t usually watch the Oscars but I hope to tune in this weekend. A friend of mine, a frequent visitor of CT – comments by “laura” – will be performing at the event.

So how does a Sociology PhD student make it to the Oscars? Certainly not by planning for it. Laura’s dissertation is on Sacred Harp singing. It’s not something most of us know anything about. I’ve learned from her that it’s an a capella four-part harmony style that’s been a living tradition in the South for over 150 years and has undergone something of a folk revival in the Northeast, Midwest, and West coast over the past 20-30 years. It is participatory singing, not usually performed in this way so the Oscar performance will be a bit artificial. But anything is possible in Hollywood, as we know.

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Blood libel

by John Q on February 27, 2004

The notion that Jews are collectively responsible for the death of Christ may seem too silly for words, but it is obviously still taken seriously enough to require refutation, not surprisingly in view of the immense human suffering it has caused. My question is, has anyone ever suggested that Italians[1] are collectively responsible?

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Space Merchants

by Henry Farrell on February 27, 2004

Has anyone else come across the new ads on the NYT’s website with both animation _and_ sound (I hit one reading “this piece”:http://www.nytimes.com/2004/02/27/movies/oscars/27OSCA.html)? It’s offensive and obtrusive; when you’re trying to read an article, the last thing you want to deal with is some bloke yelling inanities about the latest box-office stinkeroo. We’ve moved from static banners to animated banners, to popunders, to popovers, to popthroughs, to flyovers to this. Mozilla Firefox doesn’t seem to block it. If this sort of thing becomes standard on the Times, it’ll be enough to stop me reading the paper (I use my computer as my sound system, so don’t want to have to disconnect my speakers).

Milosevic guilty of genocide?

by Daniel on February 27, 2004

It’s a right old week for collapsing cases … although Slobodan Milosevic is almost certain to be found guilty of crimes against peace and war crimes, the central charge of genocide is apparently a lot more doubtful. The prosecution in the Hague are moving to rest their case a couple of days early, admitting as they do so that they’ve not really found any smoking gun linking Milosevic to the actions of Radovan Karadzic, the real butcher of Bosnia. Not sure what to make of this myself, and it’s probably best not to comment further in the absence of real evidence; I know that CT’s Chris B is of the opinion that Milosevic was guilty as sin and the NATO intervention in Kosovo was a paradigm example of a good war, but my good mate Chris DeLiso, who hasn’t posted on the subject yet but will probably do so soon, thinks different.

All in all, I think the most important lesson to learn here is a negative one, for anyone on the left who ever thought that the Hague international tribunal was ever going to be more useful than a chocolate teapot.

Silent majorities

by Henry Farrell on February 27, 2004

More and more, when I come across academic blogs that I’ve never read before, they have links to Crooked Timber. This is all very nice and gratifying – but it also suggests that there are bloggers out there who are aware of CT, qualify for the academic blogroll, but aren’t there for the simple reason that I don’t know about them. If you meet the “criteria”:https://www.crookedtimber.org/archives/000273.html email me, and I’ll put you up.

The abuse/mention distinction

by John Holbo on February 27, 2004

When philosophy of language attacks!

Technical Assistance Required

by Kieran Healy on February 27, 2004

Ah, crap. My Movable Type installation has decided to “stop working”:http://www.movabletype.org/support/index.php?act=ST&f=10&t=36622&s=4fd53020f9a6073951da6e25ae637b67, and refuses to accept my username or even recognise the existence of my “blog”:http://www.kieranhealy.org/blog. A more detailed description follows below. Suggestions gratefully received.

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Fahrenheit 451

by Henry Farrell on February 26, 2004

John Q. “talks about”:https://www.crookedtimber.org/archives/001403.html Britain’s addiction to Official Secrets. This reminds me of a bit from Margaret Levi’s _Consent, Dissent and Patriotism_, where she discusses the politics of military archives.

bq. More arcane is the account of a small fire that destroyed relevant materials from World Wars I and II in the Australian War Memorial. The representatives of the British government operate under strict rules of secrecy concerning a very large amount of military-related material, and they uphold those rules rigorously. The Australian government operates with a greater openness. The problem arose because in the Australian War Memorial were records that the British deemed secret and the Australians did not. The problem was resolved by the British, or so my reliable source tells me, by planting a mole archivist in the War Memorial. This mole lit a small fire in the relevant stacks and then disappeared.

On a more personal note, John also namechecks the novelist and politician Erskine Childers, who was executed under dubious circumstances in 1922 by the Irish Free State government, with only my and Maria’s great-grandfather, Eoin MacNeill, “dissenting”:http://www.findarticles.com/cf_dls/m0FQP/n4297_v125/18629541/p1/article.jhtml from the decision. Today seems to be the “day”:https://www.crookedtimber.org/archives/001400.html for office-holding ancestors on CT.

Arabesque

by Kieran Healy on February 26, 2004

We continue to search for sources of insight into America’s geopolitical position in the Middle East. Following up on the “Pontius Pilate angle”:https://www.crookedtimber.org/archives/001394.html (which some people took “a little too seriously”:http://warliberal.com/mt/blog/archives/007670.html), we stick with the cinema. “PreReview”:http://homepage.mac.com/joester5/prereview reviews movies the reviewer hasn’t seen, usually because they’re not out yet. Here is a snippet of “a review”:http://homepage.mac.com/joester5/prereview/#Hidalgo of “Hidalgo”:http://hidalgo.movies.go.com/main.html, the forthcoming Viggo Mortensen disaster:

bq. Viggo Aragorn … goes to Arabia with Hidalgo, his horsey best buddy to race against a bunch of Arabs who are BOUND BY HONOR except when they are DOUBLE CROSSING

This summarizes the basic view of many neocons pretty well, especially the Huntingtonian ones.

Gentlemen don’t read other gentlemen’s mail

by John Q on February 26, 2004

The news that British spies bugged the office of Kofi Annan during the Iraq debate has a number of implications. First, for me, this is the point at which Tony Blair should go. The whole idea of going to the UN for authority to invade Iraq was his, not Bush’s, and now it’s clear that it was corrupt from the beginning. I won’t argue this in detail – no doubt a lot of people already thought he should go, and others still won’t be convinced.

The main point I want to make is that it’s time for Britain to get out of the spy game. More than any other democratic country, Britain is addicted to spies and their natural counterpart, Official Secrets.[1] From Burgess and McLean to the present day, the spies have been a constant cause of embarrassment and worse. On the other hand, there’s no evidence that they’ve ever found out anything that was both useful and sufficiently reliable to act on[2].

This isn’t a matter of bad luck, or even incompetence. Standard game-theoretic reasoning shows that, outside the zero-sum case of war, there’s unlikely to be a net benefit from actions like bugging offices. The problem is simple. If I bug your office and you don’t suspect me, I can gain potentially valuable information that you don’t want me to have. But if you suspect me, and I don’t suspect that you suspect, you can use my bugs to mislead me. As with all game theoretic reasoning, you can iterate this as many times as you like, but the end result is that the net value of information derived from bugging is zero. On the other hand, the costs of the activity are substantial. In an environment where bugging is routine, everyone learns to communicate in various forms of code, and decoding is costly and prone to error.

He’s often been dismissed as hopelessly naive, but US Secretary of State Henry Stimson was right when he shut down the State Department’s cryptanalytic office saying “Gentlemen don’t read each other’s mail.”

fn1. This is a case where life imitates art. The spy novels of Erskine Childers and John Buchan were written before the rise of espionage as a significant government activity and before the passage of the first effective Official Secrets Act (1911)

fn2. In this context, I’m excluding wartime codebreaking, which is always useful since, at a minimum, it disrupts enemy communications.

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Gun case dropped

by Daniel on February 26, 2004

Hurray for the jury system, as all right-thinking people should be shouting. The Katharine Gun case has been dropped. And the best thing is, the reason for which it’s been dropped.

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The Enemy Within

by Henry Farrell on February 26, 2004

Like Chris and Daniel, I’ve been nonplussed at the nastiness of much rightwing US commentary on Europeans. If we’re not a clatter of cowardly Saddam fancying invertebrates, we’re a sinister cabal of jackbooted anti-Semites. While France’s behaviour over Iraq was unimpressive, and there are quite real problems of anti-Semitism, many of Europe’s critics have a rather transparent agenda. They seek to imply that any European criticism of the war or of Israel is automatically suspect, by virtue of its source. It’s the mirror image of Adbusters’ “insinuations”:http://www.adbusters.org/magazine/52/articles/jewish.html about rightwing Jews’ support for Israel, and not very much more intellectually respectable.

_Mirabile dictu_ a right wing pundit devotes a column today in the Washington Post to praising Europe. You might expect that I’d be pleased. Not on your life.

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Aunt Fancy is spinning in his grave tonight

by John Holbo on February 26, 2004

Marriage in the United States shall consist only of the union of a man and a woman. Neither this Constitution or the constitution of any State, nor state or federal law, shall be construed to require that marital status or the legal incidents thereof be conferred upon unmarried couples or groups.

So much not to like. Yet our outrage is such – and rightly so – that we may flail about to find yet more holes through which to vent. Yesterday folks were pointing out that the proposed FMA would be the first amendment to exclude, rather than include – if you see what I mean. Thought about adding my voice to that choir. Then: nah, people are sinful. Ergo, someone proposed an amendment back in the 19th century that never made the cut but was way worse. We’ll read about it in the blogs tomorrow. And Jack Balkin does not disappoint. And, since President Buchanan is somewhere in Belle ‘Bucky’ Waring’s family tree (great, great, great grand-second-uncle or something?) – it’s all in the family. She’s not a direct descendant, mind you, because Buchanan never, erm, married. Ahem: “Buchanan’s long-time living companion, William Rufus King, was referred to by critics as his “better half,” “his wife,” and “Aunt Fancy”.”

But I digress.

I would be curious to know whether Bush can legitimately be deprived of this laurel: first sitting President to support a Constitutional amendment without knowing – hence without caring – what it says.

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Teaching Political Philosophy Right

by Harry on February 26, 2004

I hate to admit it, but Ed Felser may have a point about something, at least. In attacking the teaching practices in Philosophy departments he says:

bq. If, for example, a course in political philosophy is offered in which the readings comprise selections from the likes of the liberal philosopher John Rawls, the libertarian Robert Nozick, and various feminist and left-of-center communitarian critics of Rawls, with no conservative writers assigned at all and with Nozick treated as an easily-refuted eccentric whose views are not shared by any other contemporary philosopher worth reading, then students will — obviously — get the impression that the left-of-center views are the only realistic options. And this sort of thing is, I submit, extremely common in the contemporary university.

I observed this pretty much as soon as I taught my first upper-division political philosophy course. You start with Rawls, because you feel obliged to treat them to a proper, fully articulated, theory of justice, and also to give them a reasonably good sense of the field. You move onto Nozick, who is very clever but full of incomplete arguments, and intuitions that he passes off as arguments, along with apparently willful misreadings of his colleague. You use Dworkin, maybe Raz, and some commentators on Rawls, including perhaps Jerry Cohen. You might introduce some feminist work (easier to do now than 13 years ago). And you complete it with Sandel and a bit of MacIntyre (or MacIntyre and a bit of Sandel), which involves many of the same misreadings of Rawls.

Now, a course like that succeeds in the two main missions I feel obliged to carry out: giving a true sense of the nature of the field, and structuring the students’ learning so that they learn how to reason sharply and do political philosophy analytically.

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