April 2004

The poet Thom Gunn has died, and there are obituaries in the “NYT”:http://www.nytimes.com/2004/04/28/books/28GUNN.html , “the Times”:http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,60-1089982,00.html and the “Guardian”:http://www.guardian.co.uk/obituaries/story/0,3604,1204724,00.html . A friend introduced me to Gunn’s work about twenty years ago and there are some lines from “Elegy” from “The Passages of Joy”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0374517967/junius-20 (1982) that have stuck in my mind ever since I first read them:

bq. There will be no turn of the river
where we are all reunited
in a wonderful party
the picnic spread
all the lost found
as in hide and seek.

A sad loss.

I haven’t watched _South Park_ in years, but when I did I tended to agree with the conclusion of “this article”:http://www.nytimes.com/2004/04/28/arts/television/28SOUT.html?ex=1398484800&en=9cf4a2bb20610253&ei=5007&partner=USERLAND that it’s too preachy for its own good. Still, the article’s title gives me an idea or two. _South Park and Philosophy_ could be better than most of the “_Randomly Chosen Segment of Pop Culture and Philosophy_”:http://www.theage.com.au/articles/2004/04/20/1082395861338.html?from=storyrhs books that are coming out I think. Perhaps there is still potential for life in the genre. Apart from _South Park_, what could be next?

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One of the most pleasant aspects of being a Research Fellow is guest lectures. I give guest lectures in a number of different courses, ranging over several faculties and sometimes different universities. This gives me all the things I like about teaching, including (since a change is as good as a holiday) generally attentive audiences, and a chance to present material that’s not the standard textbook, but not new or rigorous enough to justify an academic seminar. On the other hand, all the unpleasant stuff – booking rooms, litigious students complaining about their grades, administrators trying to promote customer-centric shareholder value in a dynamic enterprising university, and so on – is taken care of for me.

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Drudge is showing a 1984 picture of John Kerry in a “Member’s Only” jacket.

Somehow, I don’t think a “man of the people” would be .

UPDATE: Mickey Kaus comments:

Nice jacket, freak!!

Indeed. Just keep scrolling.

UPDATE: Hugh Hewitt has a a question:

So who, exactly, are the “members” of this little club that the John “man of the people” Kerry belonged to? More specifically, who isn’t welcome? Could it be…. Jews?

Good question.

UPDATE: Roger L. Simon comments on the developing anti-Semetic implications of Kerry’s.. er… questionable taste in clothes.

UPDATE: Oliver Willis writes:

“Members Only” was just the name of a popular clothing line. I had one. There was no club, exclusionary or not, for John Kerry to belong to. It’s just some words on the back of a jacket.”

While I share Oliver’s feeling that Kerry is a phony, I’m a little disturbed that he would blow off the charges of anti-Semitism so lightly. Funny, I thought the left was supposed to be concerned about prejudice.

UPDATE: Reader mmallow writes:

Where have you been? The left has been a Nazi-light organization for years now. If there’s any difference between the Nurenburg rally and the so called “Rally for Life” this weekend, I’d like to see it.

While that’s inappropriate and inflamatory, I’m going to print it anyway.

UPDATE: Several readers have sent me this picture of George W. Bush in a
Members Only jacket. Sorry, I don’t see how that’s relevant.

UPDATE: Snopes says that the Members Only jacket photo is a fake. Sheesh.

Mylast couple of goes at a solution to the Adjunct Problem were, to be honest, more in the nature of an extended buildup to a slightly mean joke than a real attempt at social policy. But post-Invisible Adjunct, I remembered that shortly after posting the joke solution, a real solution occurred to me, which has been festering at the back of my mind for a while.

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Dave Podmore is back on Radio 4 on Thursday at 11 pm GMT (that’s 6 pm Eastern Time, Brian). It may be on LISTEN AGAIN, but, then again, it may not (it’s not up yet, anyway). The alert I received said ‘Listen to it – or cop one up the snot box!’ so I’ll be listening if I get home on time….

I work right beside the Pont de l’Alma where Diana, Princess of Wales, Dodi Fayed and Henri Paul died in that infamous car crash. It’s a very ordinary underpass, and probably disappoints the tourists who still come to see the accident site. It’s also much too dangerous to walk into the underpass, so most visitors leave their mark on a superbly tacky and incongruous sculpture across the road. (The sculpture is a brassy looking ‘eternal flame’ meant to symbolise American-French friendship, and probably deserves a post of its own.)

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The things you think of when you can’t sleep; my younger sister Nelly spent a good part of the wee hours this morning thinking about the relative merits and weight-bearing facilities of stiletto versus wedge heels.

The other night, I actually woke myself up with the conviction that the jealous threesome of Bush, Blair and Sharon is mirrored by the parable of the prodigal son. Apart from the fact that Bush makes a singularly uncompelling father figure, it fits.

Sharon is the wayward but adored son. It doesn’t matter how much of his father’s wealth/political capital he squanders, how many irresponsible gestures he makes, how much self-harm he inflicts. A light tap on the wrist and the fattened calf (flame-roasted Texan style) will be the paternal response. (The main difference, of course, being that the original prodigal son apologised for his folly before Dad threw the steaks on the barbie.)

Blair, on the other hand, is the ‘good son’ who has spent years toiling away within the system, doing as he’s told, taking all his father’s guff while being refused even a goat to feast on with his friends (or the occasional UN resolution/Guantanamo inmate).

Nothing new here of course. For all of Thatcher’s famous closeness to Reagan, she barely got a head’s up when the US invaded Britain’s former colony, Grenada.

The good son’s lot seems rather harsh and thankless, though it’s implied he will ultimately inherit the remaining property. But for our purposes, I don’t think the parable’s application can be stretched that far. And anyway, they do say virtue is its own reward.

According to this report, the widely-predicted Google IPO is likely to value the equity in Google at more than $20 billion – others suggest $25 billion. I immediately wondered whether Google was really worth $25 billion.

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“Eugene Volokh”:http://volokh.com/2004_04_25_volokh_archive.html#108301673013543402 points to a very good _Chronicle_ “article”:http://chronicle.com/temp/email.php?id=xsvzl412963d3sb8hhgwrus0stnwe0op on Invisible Adjunct’s decision to call it a day. The piece does an excellent job in capturing why her site was important. Adjunct faculty often find themselve systematically excluded from the collegial supports that allow tenured and tenure track faculty to chat, compare situations, and figure out common problems. It’s hard to engage in corridor talk when you’re a non-person. Invisible Adjunct’s site created a very real space for conversation.

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“Eugene Volokh”:http://volokh.com/2004_04_25_volokh_archive.html#108301673013543402 [points to a very good _Chronicle_ “article”:http://chronicle.com/temp/email.php?id=xsvzl412963d3sb8hhgwrus0stnwe0op on Invisible Adjunct’s decision to call it a day. The piece does an excellent job in capturing why her site was important. Adjunct faculty often find themselve systematically excluded from the collegial supports that allow tenured and tenure track faculty to chat, compare situations, and figure out common problems. It’s hard to engage in corridor talk when you’re a non-person. Invisible Adjunct’s site created a very real space for conversation.

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One hears it said from time to time that it’s irrational to perform inductive inferences based on a single data point. Now this is sometimes irrational. For example, from the fact that Al Gore got the most votes in the last Presidential Election it would be foolish to infer that he’ll get the most votes in the next Presidential Election. But it isn’t always irrational. And this matters to some philosophical debates, and perhaps to some practical debates too.

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John makes a commonly heard “argument”:https://www.crookedtimber.org/archives/001762.html – that the problems at the root of the European Union’s governance system revolve around the weakness of its Parliament.

bq. The central problem with the EU is the lack of democratic accountability arising from a structure with a powerless parliament, under which all decisions are effectively made either by the unelected European Commission or by national governments in the Council of Ministers. The solution is either to keep the EU relatively weak and ineffectual, by maintaining national vetos over most issues, or to make the system more like a bicameral legislature, with some form of majority voting in both the Parliament and the Council.

I reckon that both analysis and solution are arguable. The Parliament isn’t nearly as weak as it’s reputed to be, thanks to the beefing up of the so-called “codecision” legislative procedure, in which both Parliament and Council have an effective veto over major areas of policy. Indeed, the common complaint heard around the Commission these days is that it doesn’t have much of a role – the European Council is increasingly usurping its agenda-setting powers, while the Council and Parliament stitch up deals together on important items of legislation. The European Union is increasingly looking like a bicameral legislature – but this hasn’t done much to solve the famous democratic deficit. As the Parliament has gotten more powerful, it has found itself being sucked into the Council’s traditional, rather secretive, way of doing business, and informal deal-making. Because voters don’t take the Parliament seriously (they often use European Parliament elections to punish their national governments), it’s easy for members of the European Parliament to get away with this. Thus, the problem is less a weak Parliament, than a Parliament which has accrued substantial power without serious electoral accountability. This is a much trickier problem to solve.

The problem with, and the virtue of, referendums is that, in the absence of armed guards at the ballot box, you can never be sure of the result. The curious politics of the European Union are such that referendums are of particular importance. The big news at present relates to the twin referendums just held in Cyprus, on the UN plan for reunification, and the commitment by Tony Blair to hold a referendum on the EU ‘constitution’.

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