June 2004

It’s looking “increasingly likely”:http://www.ireland.com/newspaper/front/2004/0621/1882121801HM1LEAD.html that Bertie Ahern, the Taoiseach (i.e. Prime Minister) of Ireland will become the next Commission President. This is a mixed bag. On the one hand, Ahern is a very skilled politician and dealmaker. He played a blinder on the negotiations of the EU’s draft constitution, managing to build a real consensus on top of some very shaky foundations. The contrast with his immediate predecessor, Silvio Berlusconi, is substantial – Berlusconi seemed to be more interested in reviving his career as a piano-bar crooner than in actually negotiating (more on this soon). On the other, nobody has ever accused Ahern of having much in the way of a political vision. Arguably, he’s the wrong man for the job – the Commission is supposed to deliver on policy implementation, while driving the EU’s legislative agenda. Ahern is neither an administrator nor a visionary – his very real political skills aren’t the skills that a Commissioner needs to have. My preference would have been either Chris Patten (who Maria also likes – a decent right-winger, who knows how to call a spade a spade) if the member states had wanted someone to galvanize the Commission’s political activities, or Antonio Vittorino if they’d wanted a technocrat to run it well. If Ahern does get the job, I suspect that he’s going to be another in an increasingly long line of mediocre Commission Presidents.

I’ve spent the last few hours doing something that I’ve meant to do for months; going through the academic blogroll to see what updates and changes need to be made. I’ve marked blogs which haven’t been updated in several months as ‘moribund.’ Those which I’m not sure about, I’ve added a question mark to. Some, which seem to have disappeared entirely, I’ve removed from the blogroll. These include “Chun the Unavoidable,” who I’m sort of sorry to see go – the _Invisible Adjunct_ once remarked that he took trolling to a higher level, and I reckon that’s about right. On the other hand, it’s nice to see that “Jeff Cooper”:http://www.jeffcoop.com/blog/ is back – and with what appears to be good news.

I’m sure that there are still some inaccuracies in the blogroll – feel free to let me know, either by comments or by email. Also, I know that I’ve missed out on some new academics in the blogosphere during my month of travelling; if you want to be in the academic blogroll, and meet the “criteria”:https://www.crookedtimber.org/archives/000273.html send me an email.

It turns out that not “one”:http://www.schussman.com/article/771/gadget-mail but two of my students now have “Gmail”:http://gmail.google.com/ accounts and I — I, what sits on their dissertation committees! I what gives them papers to grade! — do not. Appalling. I am investigating whether I can become a co-author on both of their Gmail accounts despite having done nothing to get one of my own. There’s a lot of precedent for that kind of thing.

*Update*: Well, that didn’t take long. Two readers generously emailed with invitations: “Alex Halavais”:http://alex.halavais.net/news/ was first, so I took up his offer. Thanks very much, Alex and “Brad”:http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/movable_type/. For my next trick I will publicly sulk about not having enough $50 bills.

If you’ve spent any time around the blogosphere, or looking at thinktank websites, you’ll be aware that the following opinions tend to go together:

* widespread ownership of guns saves lives

* tobacco smoke is harmless (if not to smokers then to anyone who breathes it second-hand)

* global warming is a myth

There’s not too much mystery about this. The kinds of characteristics that would encourage the adoption of any one of these beliefs (make your own list) obviously encourage the others. What’s surprising to me is how frequently, at least among thinktanks, these opinions are correlated with support for Microsoft, and, more particularly, denunciation of open-source software.

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Kieran is blaming himself for the fact that somehow it is still last week around here. Some MT import/export thing. SQL data dump. Makes my head hurt. I just want to point out that there are alternative explanations for the mysterious linkrot, it’s sudden disappearance, and the disappearance of a couple days. And it could have been worse.

“Everyone know that in the run of normal uneventful years that great eccentric, Time, begets sometimes other years, different, prodigal years which – like a sixth smallest toe – grow a thirteenth freak month.

We use the word freak deliberately, because the thirteenth month only rarely reaches maturity, and like a child conceived late in its mother’s life, it lags behind in growth; it is a hunchback month, a half-witted shoot. More tentative than real.

What is at fault is the senile intemperance of the summer, its lustful and belated spurt of vitality. It sometimes happens that August has passed, and yet the old thick trunk of summer continues by force of habit to produce and from its moldered wood grows those crab-days, weed-days, sterile and stupid, added as an afterthought; stunted, empty, useless days – white days, permanently astonished and quite unnecessary. They sprout, irregular and uneven, formless and joined like the fingers of a monster’s hand, stumps folded into a fist.”

– Bruno Schulz, The Street of Crocodiles

I’m not saying it was senile, intemperate summer itself that did for a few days of posts. In which case Kieran has just been wasting his time, futzing with computers. I’m not saying that the disappeared days were actually extra days that weren’t on the calendar to begin with, that now the calendar has reasserted itself, that the superfluous temporal … I do not hestitate to say ‘efflorescence’ “lies forgotten somewhere in the archives of Time, and its content continues to increase between the boards, swelling incessantly from the garrulity of months, from the quick self-perpetuation of lies, of drivel, and of dreams which multiply in it.”

I am not saying that comments and track-backs are still being left to these posts we no longer ‘see’ in ‘our’ world. I’m just saying.

Queen of SQL statements. _Pray for us_.
Empress of Emacs. _Pray for us_.
Sacred Heart of Search and Replace. _Pray for us_.
Defender of Write Permissions. _Pray for us_.
Patron of Manually Edited Dump Files. _Pray for us_.
Savior of unexpectedly small Disk Quotas. _Pray for us_.
Shepherd of Lost Posts. _Pray for us_.
Protector of Hapless Administrators. _Pray for us_.
Scourge of “Wholly Inadequate Import/Export Formats”:http://lemonodor.com/archives/000730.html. _Pray for us_.
Mother of all the Bloggers. _Pray for us_.

I think we’re back. Fresh — or at least unrotted — permalinks and all. Thank you, thank you to everyone who commented in the now-destroyed post where I wailed about the problem. The solution was to get an SQL dump of the database from the old server and read it in to the new database. Not as easy as it might have been, because the old server had old blogs, with old hard-linked archive sources and all the rest of it. But I think it worked.

My sincere apologies to fellow-posters and commenters whose recent contributions got deleted in the course of the database restoration. I guess I revealed myself to be a utilitarian at root: five or six posts and their comments were sacrificed on behalf of about two thousand posts and their permalinks. Moral: Do not put me in charge of interrogating suspected terrorists.[1]

So, as predicted in my “Don’t Upgrade”:https://www.crookedtimber.org/archives/001967.html post, I’ve just spent an unconscionable amount of time (I am about to start paying off large debts to my wife and daughter) getting us back to where we were last week. But now we are where we were last week, but on new servers. To switch religions momentarily, Oy.

fn1. Alternative moral for high-ranking Pentagon officials: By all means put me in charge of interrogating suspected terrorists, because I will lose them.

If you’ve spent any time around the blogosphere, or looking at thinktank websites, you’ll be aware that the following [professed] opinions tend to go together:

• widespread ownership of guns saves lives
• tobacco smoke is harmless (if not to smokers then to anyone who breathes it second-hand)
• global warming is a myth

There’s not too much mystery about this. The kinds of characteristics that would encourage the adoption of any one of these beliefs (make your own list) obviously encourage the others. What’s surprising to me is how frequently these opinions are correlated with support for Microsoft, and, more particularly, denunciation of open-source software.

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Sounds as if agreement has been reached on a draft EU constitution. That was the easy part – now they have to steer it through referendums in the UK and elsewhere. No agreement, however on a new Commission President. More on this as proper news starts to leak out …

At “The Right Coast,” Maimon Schwarzschild cheers on the victory of the UKIP party. Apparently, it’s a heavy blow against the project of an United Europe, which, as we all know, emphasizes “anti-Americanism, and thinly veiled anti-semitism.” This is something that’s becoming increasingly common – US based conservatives (although note that Schwarzschild is a UK transplant to San Diego) finding some common ground with the European far right’s hostility to the EU. It’s a big mistake. Josh Chafetz describes the UKIP’s leadership as “a collection of racists, xenophobes, anti-Semites, Holocaust deniers, and homophobes.” Although the UKIP has tried to maintain a more respectable public profile than, say, the BNP, it has certainly had a scattering of anti-Semites and nordicists in prominent party positions in the past. The European far right doesn’t emphasize anti-Semitism as much as it used to – it has increasingly switched its attentions from Jews to Muslims and other immigrants. And the UKIP is no stranger to anti-Muslim and Arab racism; in Robert Kilroy-Silk’s own words, Muslims

are backward and evil and if it is racist to say so…. then racist I must be – and proud and happy to be so.

Far from being a setback for anti-Semitism, the success of the UKIP (and some other parts of the anti-EU right) is arguably a victory. I’m prepared to give Schwarzschild the benefit of the doubt – when he says that the success of the UKIP is “good news,” he may simply not know what he’s talking about. Still, it’s the people whom he’s cheering on, rather than Brussels Eurocrats, who are directly and materially connected with racism, anti-Semitism and the nastier aspects of Europe’s past.

Jacek Kuron, one of the heroes of the postwar eastern Europe and a man of the left , despite and against Stalinism, is dead. There are obits in the New York Times , the Guardian , the Telegraph , The Scotsman , from the BBC , and in many other places.

Dick Morris, former Clinton adviser and UKIP spin-doctor was on the BBC’s flagship discussion programme, Question Time, last night. Very many of his utterances were outright falsehoods (though plain ignorance of British and European politics was evidently a good part of the explanation). Amazingly, he explained the problem of high house prices in the UK [only some parts of which actually have high house prices!] was caused by the British government having lost control of immigration to the EU [false], with the result that people were pouring in and bidding up the price of a scarce resource! Supply and demand, QED! I don’t know whether I’m more surprised that this idiot is credited as the “genius” behind Ewekip’s recent success or that he was once employed by a Democratic American President!

UPDATE: Chris Brooke links to a Mirror hatchet job on of Ewekip’s celebrity MEP Robert Kilroy-Silk.

UPDATE UPDATE: this is a restored post from Google’s cache.

Cory Doctorow has been at Microsoft research, telling them why Digital Rights Management is a bad thing. It’s a great rant – I’ll be assigning it in my classes. Via BoingBoing.

But don’t panic! This is a sub-etha move. A behind-the-scenes move. A the-audience-noticed-nothing move. In other words, a New Host Provider move. So from your point of view, gentle readers, we are where we’ve always been. Very soon entering https://www.crookedtimber.org in your browser will bring you to our new server. In a day or two it’ll be like nothing happened, but you may have some difficulty connecting to our new server while the Domain Name transfer is happening. To get your new-server CT fix in the short term, “follow this link”:http://crookedtimber1.dreamhost.com. But as I say, in the next 12-24 hours the url https://www.crookedtimber.org will begin pointing to the new site, and everything will be as it was, only spiffier in an ineffable, new host provider sort of way.

I am sick and tired of hearing about that ticking nuclear bomb in Manhattan. You know the one. Why? Because, if you let me put my thumb on the utilitarian scales, I can get you to agree that you have an affirmative moral duty to torture a three-year-old child to death.

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