June 2004

Eve Garrard, who figured prominently in our comments last week on my posts discussing Amnesty International (“here”:https://www.crookedtimber.org/archives/001924.html and “here”:https://www.crookedtimber.org/archives/001935.html ) has written “an impassioned criticism”:http://normblog.typepad.com/normblog/2004/06/the_biggest_att.html of AI over at Normblog. You should read what she says, although I happen to disagree with her claim — which I regard as obviously misguided — that the universal applicability of a principle entails that all who violate it are equally blameworthy for so doing (penultimate paragraph). The most serious criticism to be made of Garrard’s post, though, is that it seriously misrepresents what Amnesty said.

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Robert Samelson argues that we should stop using the word ‘reform’. I’ve grappled with this question for a long term, having been generally critical of the neoliberal policies generally referred to as “microeconomic reform”. I’ve tried all sorts of devices, such as the use of scare quotes and phrases like “so-called reform”, before concluding that the best thing is just to use the word in ways that make it obvious that I am not attaching positive connotations to it.

Over the fold is an old post on the subject, from my blog (I needed to repost to fix broken links).

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Cribbed from “Dirk Eddelbuettel’s”:http://dirk.eddelbuettel.com/ email signature on the “R-help List”:http://www.R-project.org/ …

bq. FEATURE: VW Beetle license plate seen in California

Well _I_ thought it was funny.

I think Michael Rappaport is straining to find the silver lining in this intelligence cloud.

Consider this an open thread about this important story, with optional special reference to the question: is it a source of consolation if it turns out the whole spy game is usually just seeing how many clowns you can cram into a riddle, wrapped in a question, locked inside an enigma?

Americans are often shocked when they learn that not only does ‘public school’ mean ‘private school’ in the UK, but also in the UK the state not only funds, but collaborates with religious organisations in running, religious schools. I used to be strongly opposed to this practice, at least in principle, though I have also long thought that Muslim schools should be candidates for funding given that RC and C.of E. schools were funded. I’m still unenthusiastic about the situation, but also have a suspicion that the practice is part of the reason that religion, though powefully present in the public culture, is a less rich source of social division than it is in the US. Alan Carling has very nicely posted my idiosyncratic take on this subject on his website. The piece is written really for a UK audience, but its nice and short, and comments somewhat on the US situation. Although it is scheduled for publication as is I’m very curious about reactions to it and, as usual, take my own tentative views to be evolving objects of critique rather than anything set in stone.

And further into the envelope madness …

Although I started out on the side of John and Bill Carone in believing that there was something funny about the two-envelope problem, I’ve always been suspicious of claims that the class of inifinty paradoxes (even Zeno’s Paradox) can really be tamed by asserting that they disappear if you know how to take limits properly. With that in mind, I mercilessly torture some of Greg Chaitin‘s work to create a version of the two-envelope paradox in which I don’t think there are any limit arguments to make use of. Once more into Socratic dialogue ….

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Apart from going to the Rivals, the bank holiday weekend was something of an Almodovar fest for me. I watched “All About My Mother”:http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0185125/ on Friday and “Women on the Edge of a Nervous Breakdown”:http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0095675/ on Sunday, capping it all with a visit to “Bad Education”:http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0275491/ at the cinema last night. “Bad Education”:http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0275491/ really is a terrific film, and the main device of a film-within-a-film (and a script-within-a-script) works well. I won’t post any spoilers, but I will say that it contains one great cinematic moment and that Hollywood would deal with the sexual abuse of boys by priests rather differently. Highly recommended.

John Howard’s government “gets sucked further in”:http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2004/05/31/1085855502334.html to the Iraqi torture scandal. The Defence Department is found to have been aware of the Red Cross’s documenting of torture “much earlier”:http://southerlybuster.blogspot.com/2004/06/defence-chiefs-come-clean-on-abuse.html than previously believed. “Howard insists”:http://www.news.com.au/common/story_page/0,4057,9714293%255E28102,00.html that he only learned about the abuses in April and claims to have been “misinformed by the defence department”:http://www.abc.net.au/news/newsitems/s1120503.htm. Senior civil servants at the Defence department seems to be taking the flak. “Tim Dunlop”:http://www.roadtosurfdom.com/surfdomarchives/002400.php has more.

So does Howard bear any responsibility or is it just that no-one tells him anything? Though they wouldn’t like to admit it, in many respects Australians have a self-image very similar to that of Americans — they take the same pride in being down-to-earth, straight-talking types. It’s the legacy of a frontier country. A No-BS image is prone to its own distinctive kind of bullshit, but Australian politics does have more of a social-democratic conscience than America and less religiously-inspired self-righteousness. So we’ll see whether they put up with this.

“Draft Syllabus”:http://www.kieranhealy.org/files/teaching/culture-syllabus.pdf for Soc 508, a graduate seminar/survey course in the Sociology of Culture. Coming this Fall[1] to a University of Arizona near you. Comments welcome.

fn1. If August 24th can count as the Fall. The University of Arizona thinks it can.