March 2004

The first answer is; no one can be sure until the evidence is in. The second one; no one can be told until the votes are in.

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I’m just back from a trip which included a visit to Manchester for “a conference to honour the academic career of Norman Geras”:http://les1.man.ac.uk/government/whatsnew/manceptconference.html . Chris Brooke of The Virtual Stoa “asks”:http://users.ox.ac.uk/~magd1368/weblog/2004_03_01_archive.html#107920404047110697 how it went. Very well indeed, I think. I gave a paper in the morning on the relationship between Marx and Rousseau, Ian Kershaw gave a most interesting paper on the singularity of the Holocaust, Shane O’Neill spoke about Richard Rorty and Simon Caney about the concept of a crime against humanity. The discussion was all very friendly and civilised and I got the impression that “Norm”:http://normblog.typepad.com/ enjoyed the event (though he hasn’t blogged about it yet). Anyway, thanks to Norm and Hillel and the other folks in Manchester for inviting me: it was an honour and a pleasure.

“Nate Oman”:http://www.tutissima.com/archives/000017.html thinks there’s something wrong with using religious reasons that one doesn’t believe to convince people who do believe them to change their political views. Here’s what Oman says:

bq. Consider, for example gay marriage activists who quote the New Testament at opponents of same sex marriage. In other parts of the world, Christians are frequently aligned with left-wing causes, and secular conservatives will quote passages about rendering unto Ceasar what is Caesar’s and getting out of politics. For that matter, consider the attempts of westerners to persuade Muslims that Islam, properly understood, is not really inconsistent with modern liberal democracy.

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I’ve written, revised and rejected a number of thoughts about the terrorist massacre in Madrid. I would have liked to have written something like this.

In the case of the dismissal of tenured professor Nona Gerard from Penn State (details here, Brian Leiter cites the generic response

Thank you for your email. President Spanier is out of the country so I am responding on his behalf. I will be sure he is aware of your opinion. I can assure you that there is much, much more to this than you are reading in the papers. I hope you realize that the University is also limited in what it can say publicly about this case at this point in time, especially given that the faculty member has already indicated she plans to file a lawsuit. I can also assure you that the University’s hearing process was followed explicitly at every step of the way.

“We have never taken away anyone’s job for criticizing the quality of a program, and we never will. You should also know that when five members of the University community who heard over 40 hours of testimony in what was a quasi-legal proceeding would vote unanimously that the faculty member was guilty of grave misconduct, there is not just smoke but a lot of fire. For the faculty member to make public statements about due process not being served is understandable in her circumstances, but simply untrue.

“What you have been reading in the press has simply not reflected the whole story.”

As it happened, I recently received an almost identical letter in relation to a property dispute in which I am peripherally involved. In both cases, I’m tempted by the simple response MRD> But I think it might be worth exploring the issues a bit further.

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Yeah, the guys over here probably think they’re pretty hot stuff, right?

After all, it’s definitely a very cool thing to be able to print off your own specially configurable buzzword card from the web, take it to the next buttock-shrivelling meeting you have to attend, patiently tick off the matches against your boss’s (or boss’s boss’s boss’s) tedious meanderings, and finally get yourself fired by standing up during his/her peroration and shouting ‘Bingo!’

I can’t be the only one, can I?

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The NY Times reports that my department just acquired a new fictional graduate.

bq. “Orders Come From a Talking Lion (Made of Wax)”:http://www.nytimes.com/2004/03/12/arts/television/X12HEFF.html?ex=1394514000&en=0d7f1ed9316e4d01&ei=5007&partner=USERLAND

bq. Jaye [the main character in __Wonderfalls__] lives in a tricked-out trailer, which makes her seem resourceful; she also has a degree in philosophy from Brown. And in the second episode we learn that she can write.

I would like to think that when we learn she has a degree in philosophy from Brown, we thereby learn she can write, but I’m not sufficiently down with the requisite fictional conventions to tell for sure. I do think it’s cute that saying a character is a Brown grad is a way of placing them in American fiction. I don’t know how exactly many other schools have fictional stereotypes associated with them, though obviously there are a few.

Brayden King is in Depression, Stage 4 of the Five Stages of Blogging. Characterized by morbid feelings that your blog may somehow get you into trouble, this stage follows Denial (“I don’t really have a blog, it’s just a webpage I update sometimes”), Anger (“Why the hell isn’t anyone reading my blog?”), and Bargaining (“I’ll only post once a day, I promise”). Fortunately it is usually followed in short order by Acceptance.

There’s a lot of confusion about the perpetrators of the Madrid terrorist bombings, with a letter, purportedly from Al-Qaeda, claiming responsibility, and leaders associated with ETA disclaiming it. There’s evidence pointing both ways and, of course, it’s possible that more than one group was involved. Meanwhile, another letter, also purportedly from Al Qaeda, disclaimed responsibility for the even bloodier atrocity in Karbala last week.

I don’t think it’s necessary to come to a conclusive finding as to who set up which bombs. All groups and individuals that embrace terrorism as a method share the guilt of, and responsibility for, these crimes. Both in practical and symbolic terms, terrorist acts by one group provide assistance and support to all those who follow in their footsteps. The observation of apparent links between groups that seemingly have nothing in common in political terms (the IRA and FARC, for example[1]) illustrates the point.

This point isn’t only applicable to terrorists. For example, governments that engage in, or endorse, torture in any context share in the guilt of criminals like Saddam, whether or not they were directly complicit in particular crimes.

Whether or not the official leaders of ETA and its political counterpart were directly involved in this attack, they deserve condemnation for it unless they are willing to repudiate terrorism and abandon those who would continue it.

fn1. Both the IRA and FARC have issued partial and mutually contradictory denials of the accusation that IRA members provided explosives training to FARC. But denials of particular accusations are beside the point unless they are accompanied by a renunciation of terrorism.

As more news filters through, it looks as though the Madrid train-bombings are going to be one of the worst terrorist atrocities in modern European history, if not the worst. More than twice as many people have been killed as in the Bologna train station bomb; there are nearly an order of magnitude more casualties than there were in the Birmingham pub bombing. If ETA is responsible (as it almost certainly is, “Glenn Reynolds'”:http://www.instapundit.com/archives/014568.php speculations to the contrary), it’s a move born out of desperation. Paddy Woodworth, who knows as much about the Basque country as any English speaker, suggests that ETA have been in trouble for a while. Their political wing’s support among voters was cut in half when ETA went back to terrorism, and many of their established leaders are in jail, so that the current active leadership is young, radical and politically inexperienced. It’s hard to imagine how they could have more effectively discredited a cause that was hardly very creditable to begin with.

Update: This may turn out not to have been an ETA attack after all, in which case my arguments above would be quite beside the point – there’s some evidence pointing to Islamic terrorists. I should also note that Glenn Reynolds, in fairness to him, is now sounding considerably more equivocal about the likely perpetrators.

I’ve just bought a double-bill of Umberto Eco’s ‘The Name of the Rose’ and Barbara Tuchman’s ‘A Distant Mirror’ for Henry’s and my younger sister. Nelly’s a huge fan of historical mysteries who can tell you more about Richard III and the murdered princes, the Holy Grail and Pompei than is probably healthy for a 16 year old.

I thought Tuchman would be a good all-round introduction to medieval European history – I bet I’m not the only one who read it as a teenager and took a degree in medieval history as a result. I was amazed to see the book is now over 20 years old and I wondered – has it aged well? How is the book regarded by medievalists? Any other recommendations?

Here’s another question while I’m tapping CT’s collective brain power; Nelly’s thinking of applying to Oxford to study history, maybe with politics. (I think she should do PPE, but she says I’ll have to live vicariously through my own children if I have them, and not through my younger siblings.) Any ideas/prejudices/anecdotes about which colleges to apply to? The little I know about Oxford colleges I learnt from University Challenge.

Where’s a good place to be challenged but not hot-housed? What are the women’s colleges like? (bearing in mind that one blue-stocking in the family is probably enough) How to avoid the rugger-buggers? (fine people, but you don’t necessarily want to be sharing accommodation with them for 3 years.) And, how important is the choice of college for both academic and social life? Answers on the back of a postcard…

David Lester has come under fire in a number of places for, among other things, not attending faculty meetings. But judging from the tenor of the piece he is doing his colleagues a favour by not attending. Don’t we all have colleagues to whom we are grateful when they refrain from doing committee work, attending meetings, etc? Lester sounds as if he is, very generously, sparing his colleagues torment.

In a disproportionate and heavy-handed response to a specific problem, the University of Birmingham (UK) has banned staff from hosting personal web pages (including blogs) on their systems. “The Guardian has the story”:http://education.guardian.co.uk/administration/story/0,9860,1166989,00.html . And staff at Birmingham have “a campaign”:http://web.bham.ac.uk/web_campaign/ to defend their right to host personal material.

“Bill Tozier”:http://williamtozier.com/slurry/comment/academia/adviceToYoungScientists.html and “Cosma Shalizi”:http://cscs.umich.edu/~crshalizi/weblog/archives/000208.html on the tough-love approach to academic peer review. Cosma opts for the frank and brutal – “This MS. is completely lacking in scientific interest and should be rejected.” I’ve never had the heart to do this myself, but I don’t know that my slightly more hesitant approach to stinkers (usually something along the lines of “this manuscript may have had some merit, but I couldn’t see it”) is any more pleasant or helpful for the author.

Also via Cosma, this admirable “Michael Chabon piece”:http://www.nybooks.com/articles/17000 on Philip Pullman’s _His Dark Materials_ series in the _New York Review of Books._ Chabon captures precisely the strengths of the first two volumes, and the weaknesses of the third. Nor does he worry about catching genre-cooties – he unapologetically situates the books in a wider fantasy/sf tradition dating back to Vance, Moorcock and others.

“Ellen Fremedon”:http://www.livejournal.com/users/ellen_fremedon/204107.html on ‘grading with Gollum’ (via “Chad Orzel”:http://steelypips.org/principles/index.php).

And “sometime blogger”:http://www.mclemee.com/id4.html Scott McLemee “savages”:http://www.nytimes.com/2004/03/07/books/review/07MCLEMET.html?ex=1393995600&en=50b3a9cdab447859&ei=5007&partner=USERLAND William Vollmann’s multi-volume ‘treatise’ on violence in a review for the NYT. My favorite bit:

bq. Vollmann’s prose has a distinctive way of cycling between two styles. In one, the sentences snake through dense thickets of figural language, wrapping themselves around elephant-size metaphors, which (jaws unhinged) they try to swallow. In his other voice, the tone is flat, narrating the scene in a detached and almost affectless way, like some cross between Alain Robbe-Grillet and Joe Friday on ”Dragnet.”

although

bq. Appreciation of ”Rising Up and Rising Down” properly begins — and will, for most people, immediately end — with awe at its physical presence. Whatever the genre, it is a remarkable example of the book as furniture.

is rather well put too.