Just a pointer: be sure not to miss John Holbo’s post on “conservatives in academia”:http://examinedlife.typepad.com/johnbelle/2004/02/andrew_stuttafo.html and Belle Waring’s memoir of “one she knew”:http://examinedlife.typepad.com/johnbelle/2004/02/the_story_of_c.html in the Berkeley Classics Department.
From the monthly archives:
February 2004
Australian foreign minister, Alexander Downer, in today’s Australian
But, of course, if the international community knew early last year what it knows now about Saddam’s WMD programs, there would have been less debate in the Security Council about the appropriate action. Kay’s report shows that removing Saddam was the only way the international community could be assured that he would no longer threaten anyone with WMDs. Far from unstuck, the WMD case is proven.
I didn’t think this was going to be a difficult question to answer, but it’s stumped me, so I’m asking for help.
Is there any authoritative source (for fairly low standards of “authoritative”; as the title suggests, I’m looking for something no worse than the Black Book of Communism) telling us how many people Saddam Hussein killed and when?
I was at a meeting the other day where the question of “normal” boy and girl behaviour came up. I mean by this what girls and boys, especially teenagers, take to be normal behaviour for those of their own and the opposite gender. I _don’t_ mean what they ought to do. The opinion was voiced by others present that these norms had shifted appreciably in the last twenty or thirty years. Wearing makeup, for instance, they thought, was far more acceptable for boys today that for boys “twenty or thirty years ago”.
Since I was myself a teenager thirty years ago, I think I can say with some authority that this is mistaken, at least for the UK. Sexual intercourse was, as we know, “invented in 1963”:http://alt.venus.co.uk/weed/writings/poems/plam.htm , and by the early-to-mid-1970s glam-rock in the shape of David Bowie and Marc Bolan had made all kinds of flirting with cross-dressing and ambiguous gender identity acceptable for teenage boys. Punk followed almost immediately afterwards. (I’m told that things were different and more backward in the US, which, for James Miller, in his magisterial “Flowers in the Dustbin”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0684865602/junius-20 , explains Bowie’s initial lack of success over there — until he toned things down.) But my guess is that, in the UK at least, teenagers were more ready to play with mixed sexual signals in the 1970s than they are today (and have been since the advent of “new laddism” in the 1990s).
My reading of the evolution of teenage mores may, of course, be wide of the mark. But my point in making it is just to observe how common is the notion of a “dreamtime” about “twenty or thirty years ago” when 1950s moral and cultural norms are supposed to have applied. Probably such standards didn’t obtain in the 1950s either, but people look on the past with a permanently moving horizon before which things were different, everybody was straight, lived in conventional families and playing with sexuality (and indeed being serious about it) was the preserve of intellectuals, poets and German cabaret artistes. It wasn’t like that.
These days, US fears of offshore outsourcing are echoed by European worries about an influx of poor Eastern Europeans when the accession countries join on 1st May. White House economists are pilloried for publicly stating The Bleedin Obvious, and the Daily Mail is convinced Britain will be overrun by Roma. What links these two issues? Fear of competition. Or, as our friends in literary theory might have it, dread of The Other. Suddenly, after 50 odd years of dispensing aid and the omni-prescription of market-opening commitments, liberalisation, harmonisation, free flow of capital, government investment in education and training and all the rest of it, the worst has happened. It worked. (Albeit at great cost, in a limited way, and for the chosen few.)
But instead of gratitude and docility from semi-developed countries like Thailand, India, and the Ukraine, the payback is more competition. They take our jobs whether they emigrate or stay at home. Apocalyptic flows of people and jobs are predicted, all in the ‘wrong’ direction. The cry goes up; ‘something must be done.’ But the real displacement going on is not of people, but of issues.
“Barbara Chamberlain, 79, also of Milwaukee, backed Edwards for the same reason,” the Associated Press reports from Wisconsin, “‘I have hope for him beating you-know-who,’ she said.”
Oh come, Barbara, you’ll just have stop living in fear and come out and say it — “Voldemort.” Now, doesn’t that make you feel better?
This story about the inflation of high school diplomas simply states what anyone working in a US high school knows — graduation simply requires attendance plus a modicum of obedience. Failing that, it helps to have parents who are willing to make life sufficiently difficult for administrators and teachers that they will give you a passing grade anyway. There are multiple culprits. One is the ludicrous system of having classroom teachers be the sole assigners of grades. I spent Sunday watching two teachers spend 90 minutes preparing for a meeting one of them was having on Monday with a parent of a student. The sole purpose of the meeting was to negotiate over the grade. The teacher had assigned a B and the parent was not satisfied. In the end, the parent refused to be satisfied (having recalculated the grade herself) and is insisting on a meeting with the Principal. My prediction — the parent will win, because the Principal will think — ‘this is a complete waste of my time, caving on this won’t make things any worse between me and the teacher, and it’ll get this p-i-t-a off my back’. Total waste — about 5 hours of school teachers and principal’s time. (I don’t care about the student’s or parent’s time — lets assume that harassing teachers is their hobby).
There’s been light blogging from me over the past few days as I’ve been in “Bilbao”:http://www.bilbao.net/WebBilbaonet/home_c.jsp?idioma=c , biggest city in the Basque country and home to Frank Gehry’s wonderful “Guggenheim Museum”:http://www.guggenheim-bilbao.es/idioma.htm. The Guggenheim is really the main reason to visit the city and is a visual and technological marvel. The computer-generated curves link sufaces of stone, glass and most memorably titanium scales which shimmer over the bank of the Nervion river. Gehry isn’t the only architect in town, though, with Norman Foster represented by “the new Metro”:http://www.metrobilbao.net/Indicei.html which runs all the way out to the sea. Building the Guggenheim cost around US$100 million of public money but the effect has been to regenerate a decaying industrial city and put it back on the map as a tourist destination. Good to see a practical demonstration of the power of compulsory taxation and state-sponsored public works projects!
While we’re on the subject of anniversaries, I just got an invitation to a conference on the 300th anniversary of the death of John Locke (Southern Hemisphere readers can email j.jones@griffith.edu.au, there are also events at Yale and Oxford.
I was first introduced to Locke through his demolition of Sir Robert Filmer’s Patriarchia in which the divine right of kings is derived from the supposed natural rights of fathers, beginning with Adam. Locke has great fun with this, pointing out that if Filmer is right, there is a single rightful monarch for the entire planet, namely the man most directly descended from Adam under the rules of primogeniture – by implication, all existing monarchs (except perhaps one) are usurpers who can justly be overthrown.
I was very disappointed then, to discover that Locke’s own analysis of property rights was no better than Filmer’s theory of divine right; in fact worse. Rights to property are supposed to be obtained by the first productive user and then passed on by inheritance and voluntary transfer. So, if we could locate the Garden of Eden, where Adam delved, his lineal descendent, if not king of the world, would be the rightful owner of Eden. To determine a rightful allocation of property, we would need to repeat the same exercise for every hectare on the planet. The Domesday Book wouldn’t even get you started on this task.
That was thirty years ago or so, and science has advanced a lot since then, to the point where we can award victory to (a modified version of) Filmer. By careful analysis of DNA, we can now postulate a mitochondrial Eve and Y-chromosomal Adam from whom we are all descended (of course, there’s no reason to suppose the two were contemporaneous). Suppose, following the practice of various hereditary monarchies, we identify the rightful heir of Y-chromosomal Adam as the man with the smallest number of accumulated mutations (defects from the point of view of a strongly hereditary principle). In principle, this man could be identified uniquely. In practice, I imagine it would be possible to identify the ethnic group to which this man belongs, probably somewhere in Africa, and crown some prominent member of that group. A feminist version, with descent on matriarchal lines, is equally reasonable and, on the current state of scientific knowledge, a litte more practical.
Of course, for those of us who don’t buy patriarchal/matriarchal arguments in the first place, this isn’t at all compelling. But I don’t find Locke’s theory of property any more compelling and, unlike Filmer, his theory is no closer to implementability than it was 300 years ago.
[Posted with ecto]
Via “Atrios”:http://atrios.blogspot.com/2004_02_15_atrios_archive.html#107694748162031817 and “RMPN”:http://www.rmpn.org/weblog/archives/permalink/001104.cfm I found a beta version of “FollowTheNetwork.Org”:http://www.followthenetwork.org/uidev/default.cfm. Apparently the brainchild of David Horowitz, it purports to be “a guide to the political left” and takes the form of a big database of people, funders, media, government and so on. The design of the site suggests that the left is a huge, interconnected web of shadowy figures and money flows. The database entries make for interesting reading. Trawling around in it (note that the site is in beta, so these links may stop working soon) I find that you can “follow the network” for people like these:
* “Troy Duster”:http://www.followthenetwork.org/uidev/personsDetail.cfm?pid=69. Described as a “Radical black sociologist.” Duster teaches at NYU is a past-president of the “American Sociological Association”:http://www.asanet.org.
* “Jamal Ahmen Al-Fadl”:http://www.followthenetwork.org/uidev/personsDetail.cfm?pid=184. Described as “bin Laden lieutenant, Sudanese … Helped Sudan’s ruling NIF build world’s then-largest complex of terrorist training camps.”
* “Bruce Ackerman”:http://www.followthenetwork.org/uidev/personsDetail.cfm?pid=324, “‘Progressive’ academic.” Ackerman is “Sterling Professor of Law and Political Science”:http://www.law.yale.edu/outside/html/faculty/baa27/profile.htm at Yale University.
* “Ben Ali Zinedine”:http://www.followthenetwork.org/uidev/personsDetail.cfm?pid=127, ” President General of Tunisia’s democratic government.”
* “Joan Baez”:http://www.followthenetwork.org/uidev/personsDetail.cfm?pid=27, “singer, radical.”
* “Osama Bin Laden”:http://www.followthenetwork.org/uidev/personsDetail.cfm?pid=178, “Saudi Arabian financier … Issued fatwa calling for Muslims to kill Americans and Jews everywhere in the world. CIA notified Congress of this.”
* “Barbara Reskin”:http://www.followthenetwork.org/uidev/personsDetail.cfm?pid=315, “progressive academic.” Reskin is professor of sociology at the “University of Washington”:http://www.soc.washington.edu/people/faculty/faculty_detail.asp?UID=reskin and a former president of the American Sociological Association.
* “Ahmad A. Ajaj”:http://www.followthenetwork.org/uidev/personsDetail.cfm?showHeader=No&pid=117, ” Associate of first WTC bombers. From Houston. Pizza deliveryman. ‘Mysterious connections and unlimited funds.'”
* “Mary Waters”:http://www.followthenetwork.org/uidev/personsDetail.cfm?showHeader=No&pid=455, “‘Progressive'” academic. Waters is Professor of Sociology and Chair of the Department at “Harvard University”:http://www.wjh.harvard.edu/soc/faculty/waters/
* “Mohammed Ali”:http://www.followthenetwork.org/uidev/personsDetail.cfm?showHeader=No&pid=121, “Special operations chief for Osama bin Laden in USA.”
* “Michael Walzer”:http://www.followthenetwork.org/uidev/personsDetail.cfm?pid=87, “political theorist.” Walzer is Professor at the “Institute for Advanced Study”:http://www.sss.ias.edu/home/walzer.html.
* “Ayman Al-Zawhiri”:http://www.followthenetwork.org/uidev/personsDetail.cfm?showHeader=No&pid=192 is “Second in command of al-Qaeda.”
I could go on. And that’s just the database of individuals. There’s also the “list of groups”:http://www.followthenetwork.org/uidev/groups.cfm, where you can find invaluable information on terrorist groups like “Hamas”:http://www.followthenetwork.org/uidev/organizationsDetail.cfm?orgid=66&chksearch=organizations&type=alpha&alpha=H, “Habitat for Humanity”:http://www.followthenetwork.org/uidev/organizationsDetail.cfm?orgid=2754&chksearch=organizations&type=alpha&alpha=H and the “Harvard Alumni Association”:http://www.followthenetwork.org/uidev/organizationsDetail.cfm?orgid=5977&chksearch=organizations&type=alpha&alpha=H. And like any good blacklist, everyone is “invited to submit any information they might have”:http://www.followthenetwork.org/uidev/contribute.cfm.
*Update*: Blogger “Jack Balkin”:http://balkin.blogspot.com/ is “on the list”:http://www.followthenetwork.org/uidev/personsDetail.cfm?pid=398, as another “‘Progressive’ Academic.” What are we at CT? Chopped Liver?
*Update 2*: It seems like the Follow The Network has been taken offline, but those helpful people at “RMPN”:http://www.rmpn.org/weblog/ have a “Mirror Site”:http://www.thinkpol.net/ftnmir1/ for you all to play with.
Chris reminded us that the other day was the 200-year anniversary of Kant’s death. I didn’t get this done in time, but here is a brief overview of Kant’s ethics – what I, at least, think is valuable and distinctive about his approach. I don’t claim that my account is particularly original, although do I think it differs from the way Kant is usually presented. Nor do I say that there are no good objections to his view, but at least I hope to show that it isn’t as mysterious as it sometimes appears. Here goes….
Sometimes quotes take on a life of their own. They become famous and get attributed to someone without anyone citing a traceable origin. I ran into such a problem about five years ago when I wanted to use a quote by Herbert Simon in an article. The quote was this:
What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention, and a need to allocate that attention efficiently among the overabundance of information sources that might consume it.
I remember doing all sorts of searches online to figure out the exact source of that quote. But others using those lines either cited no source or pointed to a piece by Hal Varian in Scientific American as the source of the quote. I checked out that article, but there was no citation. What to do? I ended up contacting Hal Varian directly for the source and he very kindly provided a pointer to it (p.40.).
Has either Flack Central Station or Junkscience.com thought about commissioning a few articles from David Icke and friends? It sounds to me as though there might be a real “meeting of minds”:http://www.davidicke.com/icke/articles2002/greensgovern.html (although they might have to get the Icke crowd to soft-pedal the “shapeshifting reptilians from outer space angle”:http://www.davidicke.com/icke/articles3/obsessed.html).
The incomparable “Michael Dirda”:http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A38093-2004Feb12.html does a full-page review of Gene Wolfe’s The Knight in this week’s Washington Post. Dirda says that Wolfe “should enjoy the same rapt attention we afford to Thomas Pynchon, Toni Morrison and Cormac McCarthy” and he’s not blowing smoke. I’ve “blogged before”:https://www.crookedtimber.org/archives/000700.html on Wolfe, who’s perhaps my favourite living writer. _The Knight_ isn’t quite as wonderful as Wolfe’s “New Sun” books, which together constitute his masterpiece, but is still quite wonderful indeed. Its setting most closely resembles that of his juvenile novel, _The Devil in a Forest_, but its story is rather more complex; as Dirda says, the surface smoothness of Wolfe’s language is “that of quicksand.” The prose-style of _The Knight_ is plain, plainer by far than the archaisms and loanwords of the _New Sun_ books, but it is possessed of the same gravity and music. Wolfe is staunchly conservative, and the book shows it. _The Knight_ presents a vision of chivalry and fealty in the Dark Ages that borrows from “Tolkien”:http://home.clara.net/andywrobertson/wolfemountains.html, and that is likely to be signally unsympathetic to most lefties. But there’s something important there; like other good writers on both left and right, Wolfe’s understanding of human nature and society runs deeper than his immediate political sympathies. His depiction of life in a society on the margins of civilization (caught between the depredations of barbarism and the efforts of the monarchy to impose order) is note-perfect; Wolfe not only has an ear for the music of language, but for the rhythms of society. If you haven’t read Wolfe before, I still recommend that you start with the New Sun books (Shadow and Claw, and Sword and Citadel); but _The Knight_ is a worthy companion.
The “NYT”:http://www.nytimes.com/2004/02/14/technology/14AMAZ.html?ex=1392094800&en=183dc1d16a0c7b4c&ei=5007&partner=USERLAND has an article on anonymous reviews on Amazon, and how they’re manipulated in different ways by authors, authors’ friends, and authors’ most bitter enemies. It’s a real problem with a system that allows uncontrolled anonymity or pseudonymity – the information content of the average review quickly drops to zero, unless (like “Tyler Cowen”:http://www.marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2004/01/how_do_consumer.html you’re interested in the degree of controversy that surrounds the book, rather than the ratio of positive to negative reviews). For an academic, the obvious point of comparison is peer review. Most halfway decent scholarly journals[1] get anonymous scholars to review any articles that are submitted to them so as to assess publishability. Although the editor of the journal usually has the final say, the anonymous reviewers’ findings count for a lot. There’s a lot of bitching and griping about this in the particular, especially because it’s sometimes not too difficult for the paper’s author to guess the identity of the ‘anonymous’ reviewer who did a hatchet-job on their cherished piece. The identity of particularly venomous reviewers is the subject of (frequently lurid) speculation and gossip.
Still, the system works reasonably well in the general, for three reasons. First, even if the reviewers are anonymous from the point of view of the article’s author, the journal’s editor knows who they are. This encourages at least some degree of responsibility on the part of the reviewer; even those with malice in their hearts may prefer not to run the risk of becoming known as a partisan hack by a journal editor, who may be receiving their own pieces in the future. Second, most journals will solicit at least two, and very likely three or four reviews, which ideally will be written by people from a variety of backgrounds, so that neither the author’s friends nor foes determine the article’s fate. This doesn’t always work as well as it should – but most journals at least make good-faith efforts to ensure that a piece receives a fair hearing. Finally, anonymity does provide some protection for fair criticism. Even in contexts where the disgruntled author of a rejected article can make a fair guess at who the reviewers were, they can’t be entirely sure; thus, it’s hard for them to retaliate, even when they’re powerful figures in the field. Anonymous peer review isn’t perfect – but by and large the articles that get published in the better known journals in the social sciences are reasonably good, interesting pieces (I don’t know other disciplines well enough to comment properly on their journals).
fn1. Legal journals are the most obvious exception.