Quick, in high school were you ever told not to date your old girlfriend’s current boyfriend’s old girlfriend? Or your old boyfriend’s current girlfriend’s old boyfriend? Probably not. But I bet you never did, either. This month’s “American Journal of Sociology”:http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/AJS/journal/contents/v110n1.html has a very nice “paper”:http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/AJS/journal/issues/v110n1/070259/070259.html (subscription only, alas) by “Peter Bearman”:http://www.columbia.edu/cu/sipa/RESEARCH/bios/psb17.html, “Jim Moody”:http://www.sociology.ohio-state.edu/jwm/ and “Katherine Stovel”:http://www.soc.washington.edu/people/faculty/faculty_detail.asp?UID=stovel about the structure of the romantic and sexual network in a population of over 800 adolescents at “Jefferson High” in a midsized town in the midwestern United States. They got a pretty well-bounded population (a high school included in the “AddHealth”:http://www.cpc.unc.edu/projects/addhealth/ study) and mapped out all the connections between the students. Read on for the lurid details.

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As most of you reading this outside America will know, the 2004 Olympics have begun. Of course in America none of this has been seen yet, because it is technologically impossible or something to broadcast live from Greece. So the film of the opening ceremony is being sent by carrier pigeon to New York, where it will arrive in a few hours to be shown.

Now I don’t really care when or where the opening ceremony is shown. But I do care about when and where they show Olympic events in which Australians have a decent chance of doing well, especially swimming. And if one is stuck in the televisual hell-hole that is the United States, the answer is “Nowhere live, and unknown time and location on tape delay.” Because NBC refuses to show any swimming events live, and refuses (as far as I can tell) to say just when it will show events on tape delay, it is practically impossible to tell how much of a commitment will be needed to actually see Australians (or anyone else you might be interested in) in action. If you’re lucky NBC will, just like a cable company, say that the event you want will turn up sometime in a 4 hour interval. Just why Americans tolerate this kind of behaviour from a TV station is a little unclear, but I can’t imagine it would be possible to get away with such behaviour anywhere else in the western world.

Liberal Oasis has a good collection of quotes from our sensitive Republican friends.

Julian Sanchez adds,

I swear, stuff like this is almost enough to make me want to become one of those partisan Democratic hacks that Matt refuses to be. It ought to be crystal clear to everyone—it surely is to Cheney—that Kerry meant by a “more sensitive” war on terror exactly what Bush did when he used the same word: It’s a point about more deft diplomacy, not a suggestion that we watch Steel Magnolias with Osama and talk about our feelings.

Via Tapped, who point out the shoddy job that the press has done in pointing out the dishonesty in Cheney’s remarks. The Washington Post, the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times all fail to print Kerry’s entire quote in their articles about Cheney’s attack. With these guys, it doesn’t matter if what they’re saying is true; it only matters if it’s useful. It would be nice if the major media outlets didn’t keep falling for it.

Prominent German historian, Wolfgang Mommsen “has died”:http://www.spiegel.de/kultur/gesellschaft/0,1518,312871,00.html while swimming in the Ostsee. He was the scion of an astonishingly prolific family of German historians and thinkers (his great-grandfather, Theodor Mommsen, won the Nobel Prize; Max Weber was a relation by marriage). He is likely to be remembered for his prominent and honorable role in the _Historikerstreit_ (historians’ controversy), in which he along with several others (Jurgen Habermas, _Kaiserreich_ historian Hans-Ulrich Wehler, social historian Jurgen Kocka) battled with conservatives who seemed to be trying to normalize the Nazi period of German history. See “Rhine River blog”:http://rhineriver.blogspot.com/2004/08/passing-of-wolfgang-mommsen.html for more. Thanks to Nathanael Robinson for letting us know.

Jeff Jarvis makes a decent point:

Apparently, everyone else in New Jersey media knew McGreevey’s secret. And if that’s so, it raises lots of questions. I’m not saying they should have outed him; I long for the day when a politician’s personal life is just that. But if he indeed hired his lover for a state job for which that reputed lover was in no way qualified… well, that’s a crime. Why didn’t we know?

It’s great that McGreevey came right out and told the world that he was gay without apologizing for it. But if the charges about cronyism for his lover are true, they’re much more serious than Jack Ryan’s trips to sex clubs.

I understand that the specific comparison is meaningless; the individuals who make up the press corps in New Jersey don’t have to answer for the Chicago Tribune, or vice versa. There’s no one to point to, other than the imaginary beast called “the media.” Still, the public right to know is self-evident in the case of McGreevey, and not at all evident in the case of Jack Ryan. This isn’t right.

“Will Wilkinson”:http://willwilkinson.net/flybottle/ has a “column up at TechCentralStation on desert”:http://www.techcentralstation.com/081104F.html . This very fact is regrettable, since Wilkinson is smarter, saner, and more interesting that the average TCS columnist and hence will serve to cover-up — somewhat — the nakedness of this “astroturf”:http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/features/2003/0312.confessore.html operation. Anyway, the real issue is what he says, which is aimed at “Matthew Yglesias”:http://yglesias.typepad.com/matthew/2004/07/selfmade_men.html , “Max Sawicky”:http://maxspeak.org/mt/archives/000663.html and others who attack the concepts of meritocracy. Wilkinson credits their argument — that we don’t really deserve anything — to John Rawls. The argument Wilkinson (mis)attributes to Rawls is, in a nutshell, that although, superficially, it may seem that we deserve praise or reward for our efforts, in some deeper sense we don’t, because the attributes that enabled us to strive (such as our genetic makeup and our upbringing) were not themselves deserved. Given the moral arbitrariness of of our natural endowments — including the capacity for hard work — those with more talent can be legitimately taxed, as necessary, to support those unfortunate enough to have less.

[I’m putting the rest of this below the fold as it gets into technical Rawlsiana]

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According to this AP report in the NY Times, Moqtada al-Sadr has been wounded by US shelling in Najaf. Sadr is an irresponsible demagogue, his political agenda is reactionary and authoritarian and his militia has been guilty of many acts of thuggery and violence. And we should all wish for his complete and speedy recovery from his wounds.

Update There is a ceasefire and negotiations have started for a truce. This is welcome news, and I hope the talks are successful. However, it only points up the fact that the bloody campaign to destroy Sadr was both morally indefensible (as well as being politically stupid). I restate the point I made when the fighting was at its peak.

Almost certainly, the current fighting will end in the same sort of messy compromise that prevailed before the first campaign started. Nothing will have been gained by either side. But 2000 or so people will still be dead. Sadr bears his share of the guilt for this crime. The US government is even more guilty.

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