July 2004

Anyone care to explain this?

Only $366 million has been spent out of the $18.4 billion
President Bush and Congress provided last fall for rebuilding Iraq, the
White House said yesterday.

I know just the company to burn through a few extra
billion, if they’re looking.

The comments on the recent post about Focus on the Family’s distribution of Michael Moore’s home address have occasionally drifted into anti-Christian sentiment, which was very much not what I was hoping for. For a more heartening look at conservative Christianity:

The Southern Baptist Convention, a conservative denomination closely aligned with President Bush, said it was offended by the Bush-Cheney campaign’s effort to use church rosters for campaign purposes.

“I’m appalled that the Bush-Cheney campaign would intrude on a local congregation in this way,” said Richard Land, president of the Southern Baptist Convention’s Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission…

The Bush campaign defended a memo in which it sought to mobilize church members by providing church directories to the campaign, arranging for pastors to hold voter-registration drives, and talking to various religious groups about the campaign…

But on Friday, Land said, “It’s one thing for a church member motivated by exhortations to exercise his Christian citizenship to go out and decide to work on the Bush campaign or the (John) Kerry campaign. It’s another and totally inappropriate thing for a political campaign to ask workers who may be church members to provide church member information through the use of directories to solicit partisan support.”

I disagree with the Southern Baptists on many things. At the same time, I have great respect for this enthusiastic defense of the boundaries between church and state from a religious organization . Furthermore, their apparent acknowledgement that it’s just as legitimate for congregants to feel moved by Christian principle to work for Kerry as Bush is highly welcome. My heartfelt thanks to the Southern Baptists for this bit of culture war disarmament.

P.S. More on Focus on the Family here (funny!) and here (not funny; it’s a FOTF ad).

AND ANOTHER THING: A small point about that ad- who is that sad little boy supposed to be? In context, it only makes sense if he’s supposed to be a boy raised by gay parents, upset because he doesn’t have both a father and a mother. How, exactly, is a constitutional amendment preventing his parents from marrying each other supposed to help him?

At first I thought this was a bad typo, but perhaps it’s just a quirk of American English that I hadn’t noticed before.

bq. Though few would argue that children should be protected from exposure to Internet pornography, COPA, the law designed to protect them has been struck down by the U.S. Supreme Court. (“NewsFactor Network”:http://www.newsfactor.com/story.xhtml?story_title=Supreme-Court–First-Amendment-Covers-Online-Porn&story_id=25722.)

In my idiolect, _argue that p_ means put forward arguments in support of the truth of _p_. Here it seems (unless I’m really misinterpreting the paragraph) to mean something like dispute that _p_. Is that what the phrase means in American?

Edward at Obsidian Wings points to an ad from Focus on the Family. It contains a large picture of a sad child, and expresses the concern that children raised by gay parents will grow up without both a father and a mother, and encourages readers to contact their senators to support the Federal Marriage Amendment.

Edward points out, quite rationally, that the vast majority of children who don’t have both a mother and a father are in that position because their heterosexual parents have split up, or never were together. If being raised by both a male and female parent is important enough to change the Constitution, surely it’s important enough to ban divorce.

A few questions remain…

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Laura at “Apartment 11d”:http://apartment11d.blogspot.com/2004_06_01_apartment11d_archive.html#108847109152995261 posts on the blogosphere as a space for debate:

bq. is the blogosphere a public space, like the New England townhall meeting? Is it a place where individuals can debate ideas and policy proposals and have some impact on political officials?

Perhaps it should be neither. The most attractive ideal for the blogosphere that I’ve come across is in sociologist Richard Sennett’s brilliant, frustrating shaggy-dog of a book, “The Fall of Public Man”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0393308790/henryfarrell-20. Sennett is writing about the eighteenth century coffee-house as a place where people could escape from their private lives, reinventing themselves, and engaging in good conversation with others, regardless of their background or their everyday selves. They could assume new identities, try out novel arguments usw. This kind of polity doesn’t so much conduct towards a shared consensus, as allow the kinds of diversity and plurality that Iris Marion Young (who’s heavily influenced by Sennett) talks about in “Justice and the Politics of Difference”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0691023158/henryfarrell-20.

I’m quite sure that eighteenth century coffee houses weren’t actually like that (unless you were bourgeois and male) – but Sennett’s arguments are still helpful in understanding how the blogosphere differs from a New England townhall. Like Sennett’s patronizers of coffee shops, bloggers don’t usually know each other before they start blogging, so that it’s quite easy for them to reinvent themselves if they like, and indeed to invent a pseudonym, or pseudonyms to disguise their real identity completely. This has its downside – “some bloggers”:http://apartment11d.blogspot.com/2004_06_01_apartment11d_archive.html#108854101450715172 take it as license for offensive behaviour – but in general, if you don’t like a blog, you can simply stop reading it, or linking to it. The blogosphere seems less to me like a close-knit community (there isn’t much in the way of shared values, and only a bare minimum of shared norms), and more like a city neighborhood. An active, vibrant neighborhood when things are working; one with dog-turds littering the pavement when they’re not.

A Florida Division of Elections database lists more than 47,000 people the department said may be ineligible to vote because of felony records. The state is directing local elections offices to check the list and scrub felons from voter rolls.

But a Herald review shows that at least 2,119 of those names — including 547 in South Florida — shouldn’t be on the list because their rights to vote were formally restored through the state’s clemency process….

State elections officials acknowledge there may be mistakes on the list but insist they have built in safeguards to make sure eligible voters are not removed by local election offices. They say they have warned election offices to be diligent before eliminating voters, and have flagged possible cases in which voters on the list may have regained their rights….

Of the 2,119 people who obtained clemency, 62 percent are registered Democrats, and almost half are black. Less than 20 percent are Republican. Those ratios are very close to the same in the list of 47,000 voters who the local elections officers are supposed to review and possibly purge from the registration rolls.

As it turns out, justice delayed is, in fact, justice denied. The list was released yesterday, and the Miami Herald has already found this. I feel a case of the shrill coming on.

Via Body and Soul.

The White House has contacted the Irish Embassy to complain about the Irish journalist, Carole Coleman, who interviewed President Bush last week. (via Radley Balko)

“‘The White House rang Thursday evening,'” said Irish embassy spokeswoman Síghle Dougherty. ‘They were concerned over the number of interruptions and that they thought the president was not given an opportunity to respond to the questions.'”

Said Dougherty: “They were mostly troubled by what they said was the way the president was ‘talked over.’ “

I’d imagine that most regular blog readers are aware of this interview. (Here’s the transcript; here’s the video, starting around 15:00.) You can judge for yourself about whether Bush was given the opportunity to respond to questions.

She asked tough questions about the mounting death toll in Iraq, the failure of U.S. planning, and European opposition to the invasion and occupation. And when the president offered the sort of empty and listless “answers” that satisfy the White House press corps – at one point, he mumbled, “My job is to do my job” – she tried to get him focused by asking precise follow-up questions.

The president complained five times during the course of the interview about the pointed nature of Coleman’s questions and follow-ups – “Please, please, please, for a minute, OK?” the hapless Bush pleaded at one point, as he demanded his questioner go easy on him.

A few questions:

1. What the hell is the Irish embassy supposed to do about it?
2. Why would the White House decide that the benefits of this action possibly outweigh the negatives involved in keeping the story alive?
3. … unless this supposed to be a warning shot at the American press,letting them know that the President is not to be the subject of serious interviews?
4. Will the press be so cowardly as to play along?

There’s this sense of how dare you question them. And that is the thing that I almost find more appalling than the decisions that they make. Because I can accept incompetence, but I cannot accept self-righteous incompetence.

Jon Stewart

UPDATE: Jesse Walker has more, and the Poor Man does a good job of summarizing the general issue.

ANOTHER UPDATE: One of my betters has more on this. Thanks to antirealist.

I only noticed this thanks to a comment from otto below, but Anthony Buckeridge, author of the Jennings books, died on June 28th, aged 92. He received a very belated OBE a few years ago, of which I know he was very proud. There are two obituaries here and here. The books, mysteriously, went out of print about a decade ago, but have come back into print recently. You can even get the scripts for the radio plays (but not, of course, the audio, which the BBC has almost certainly lost) at David Shutte books. As a kid I would wait impatiently for the opportunity to go to the bookshop in Aylesbury and then look longingly at the shelf of Jennings books thinking about which to buy next. They are, as the Guardian obit says, brilliant:

bq. Buckeridge wrote carefully and well, and often with style; each hilarious episode takes the narrative forward with an expertise usually associated with more famous authors – it is no coincidence that PG Wodehouse was one of Buckeridge’s literary heroes. He may have written about a more innocent, decent and ordered world than our own, but the essential character of a young boy remains as true today as it was 50 years ago.

I’ve been reading them aloud recently to my 7 year old daughter who, despite being an American gurl, is rivetted by them, as she should be. Timeless classics. And Buckeridge was always one of us, as Mrs Thatcher would have said. Only not one of her one of us, if you see what I mean.

Those who would like to express condolences to Mrs Buckeridge should send them to this address:

Mrs Buckeridge
c/o David Shutte,
‘Waterside’ 119 Sussex Road
PETERSFIELD : Hampshire : GU31 4LB, UK.

The BBC has made “Artur Pizzaro’s complete Beethoven sonatas”:http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio3/classical/pizarro/ available online, together with interview, critical notes etc. Fantastic!

I see that the “Poor Man already covered this”:http://www.thepoorman.net/archives/002866.html . No matter, it is worth the repetition. “Krugman on responses to Farenheit 9/11”:http://www.nytimes.com/2004/07/02/opinion/02KRUG.html :

bq. There has been much tut-tutting by pundits who complain that the movie, though it has yet to be caught in any major factual errors, uses association and innuendo to create false impressions. Many of these same pundits consider it bad form to make a big fuss about the Bush administration’s use of association and innuendo to link the Iraq war to 9/11. Why hold a self-proclaimed polemicist to a higher standard than you hold the president of the United States?

Brian has already “critiqued Christopher Peacocke’s argument”:https://www.crookedtimber.org/archives/002108.html#comments that a belief in our capacity to accurately represent the the external world is justifiable _a priori_ by appeal to the mechanism of natural selection. Accurate representations of the world are selected for, so (Brian summarizes) “we probably get basic things right most of the time.”

Brian’s the philosopher, so he’s better able than me to spot the big problems in the argument. (He was selected by graduate school for this.) An additional one strikes me. Elsewhere in the world of arguments from natural selection we find arguments that practices like religion or a belief in God are also fitness-enhancing for a whole bunch of reasons and thus likely to be selected for. But the people who make these arguments do so to explain why religious beliefs are useful fictions, not to show that they therefore accurately represent facts about the world. So while Peacocke’s argument seems plausible as long as we restrict ourselves to the contemplation of tables, contemplation of the varieties of religious experience seems to cause him some problems. Of course, you can say that while accurate representations of the world are selected for in the case of the perception of tables, inaccurate representations are selected in the case of perception of divine entities. But then “basic things” and “most of the time” start to do an awful lot of work in the argument, distinguishing what we get right from what we get wrong starts to look much harder, and the seemingly elegant _a priori_ bridge effected between reality and representation by means of natural selection seems shaky. That’s the problem with arguments from adaptation. They’re a bit too adaptable.

“The Guardian has reacted”:http://www.guardian.co.uk/gender/story/0,11812,1252410,00.html to the sex imbalance of Prospect’s list of 100 “British” public intellectuals (“previously discussed here”:https://www.crookedtimber.org/archives/002069.html) , with a list of women whom they might have included.

In keeping with the CT tradition of bringing you tomorrow’s talking points today, I thought I’d look a bit further than the current election campaign and consider the implications of a Bush victory. On past form, there’s no reason to suppose that a second term will lead Bush to abandon his tax cuts, or to propose any significant net reduction in expenditure. At least not when there’s an obvious alternative, that only a few shrill Democrat economists and some incredibly out-of-date Republicans would ever object to. The US government has at its disposal and endless source of costless wealth – the printing press that turns out US dollars. Hence there’s no need to do anything tough like raising taxes or cutting Socil Security benefits. The only problem is that, according to some economists, reliance on the printing press as a source of government finance is likely to cause inflation.

As a first line of defence, the views of these economists can be criticised. There are plenty of Keynesian critics of monetarism who’ve pointed out that there’s no simple or automatic relationship between the money supply and the rate of inflation, and probably there are some who’ve been incautious enough to deny that there is any relationship at all. In any case, in the new era, the dynamism of the US economy is such that everyone wants to buy US dollars as fast as the Treasury can print them (ignore any recent observations on currency markets that might suggest otherwise).

Still, these are only delaying tactics. What will really be needed is a set of talking points showing that inflation (properly referred to as price appreciation or something similarly positive) is actually a good thing. In the hope of bringing the debate forward a bit, I’ve advanced a few.

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I’ve been reading Christopher Peacocke’s “The Realm of Reason”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0199270724/caoineorg-20?creative=125581&camp=2321&link_code=as1, and I was rather struck by one of the moves in it. Unless I’ve really badly misinterpreted what he says in Chapter 3, he thinks you can come to justifiably believe in, and perhaps even know the truth of, theories of natural selection by looking really hard at a kitchen table and reflecting on what you’re doing.

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