by Eszter Hargittai on September 7, 2004
Today we celebrate Arrival Day, the 350th anniversary of the first Jewish immigrants’ arrival in New Amsterdam (today’s New York City) on September 7, 1654. The Head Heeb has been preparing for this event for over a year. He explains:
Arrival Day is a holiday of the American Jewish people rather than the Jewish religion – a celebration of the Jewish community and its contributions to the United States. As such, non-Jews as well as Jews are welcome to join in the celebration. In the wise words of Ikram Saeed, everyone is Jewish today, just as everyone is Irish on St. Patrick’s Day.
A month ago I participated in a wonderful wedding that offers the perfect story for Arrival Day. I share with you the details of this wedding as a celebration of Jews from all over the world coming together in the United States.
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by Daniel on September 7, 2004
I realise that we at Crooked Timber are too ethereal, pointy-headed creatures to get involved in mere political mudslinging, but as the resident Morlock employee, I occasionally frequent obscure Democrat blogs like Eschaton. It is my professional opinion that this video clip is enough to make a cat laugh.
by John Q on September 7, 2004
I posted this piece on my own blog this morning, in response to some challenges to set out my own views on the relationship between radical Islamism and terrorism, but was in two minds about putting it up on CT, since I didn’t have much to say that hasn’t already been said better by others. But it now appears that such diffidence is interpreted as adherence to a
Crooked Timber thesis”, according to which the truth of statements about a group or a set of beliefs ought to be weighed against the perlocutionary effect of uttering such statements on the group or the holders of the beliefs in question.
This is all a bit highbrow for me, but I assume it means not talking about Islamism for fear of inciting anti-Islamic feeling. So, for what it’s worth, here are my thoughts.
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by Chris Bertram on September 7, 2004
“David Aaronovitch in today’s Guardian”:http://www.guardian.co.uk/Columnists/Column/0,5673,1298909,00.html , defending the idea that poor people in the US might have good reason to vote for George W. Bush:
bq. But suppose, for a moment, that the Kansas voters aren’t so dumb. Suppose, first, that they don’t buy the economic prospectus unwittingly along with the social populism, but consciously because they actually agree with it – because (and this hurts) it does actually tie in with their concrete experience. In other words, their consciousness is not false at all. Why might a poor person be opposed to tax increases and social benefits? Possibly because they hope to be richer themselves, maybe because they believe that high benefits are a disincentive to work and conceivably they believe both because that is exactly what they see happening around them – folks getting rich and folks idling.
I’m sure that Aaronovitch underestimates the importance of stupid people in determining elections. There are, after all, a lot of stupid people about (even here in Yoorp). Nevertheless, we can ask whether the beliefs Aaronovitch attributes to the Bush-voting-Kansas-poor are rational, given what we know about social mobility in the US, the extremely small section of society that benefits from Bush’s tax cuts etc. It is also rather odd that he decries the idea their beliefs might be the product of false consciousness on the grounds that they are rather the product of their lived experience. But the Marxist-educated Aaronovitch ought to know that it is a highly characteristic feature of ideological beliefs that they involve extrapolation by the believing subject from the immediate and local features of their experience to beliefs about the social world as a whole. So Mrs Thatcher’s belief that national economies should be managed on the model of a greengrocer’s shop in Grantham certainly “tied in with her conscious experience” and was ideological for all that. Why is Aaronovitch writing this stuff?
by Chris Bertram on September 7, 2004
Jonathan Derbyshire of The Philosophers’ Magazine, “on his new blog”:http://jonathanderbyshire.typepad.com/blog/2004/09/emthe_guardian_.html :
bq. here’s a view, call it the “Crooked Timber thesis”, according to which the truth of statements about a group or a set of beliefs ought to be weighed against the perlocutionary effect of uttering such statements on the group or the holders of the beliefs in question. In one recurrent variant of this view, true statements about what, for shorthand purposes, I’ll call “political Islamism” ought to be circumscribed, if not actually withheld, for fear of inciting “Islamophobia”. Now, I’ve conceded in the comments section of an earlier post the persuasiveness of the point about perlocutionary effect, though I did wonder whether one of its proponents hadn’t unhelpfully mixed it up with a much less congenial argument about meaning. And it seems to me obvious that the point applies in contexts different to the one in which it’s usually applied over at Crooked Timber.
I think that the most reasonable way to read Derbyshire’s statement here, which seems to have been picked up enthusiastically by CT-bashers whom I can’t be bothered to link to, is that it contains a claim about what has been argued here on Crooked Timber. That claim would be that people at Crooked Timber have argued _repeatedly_ (“recurrent variant”, “usually applied”) that we shouldn’t tell the truth about political Islamism for fear of inciting “Islamophobia”. [1] Trawling through our posts, I _can_ find some evidence for the claim that we have alleged that it is possible to utter true statements (about political Islamism or anything else for that matter) in a manner that demeans (or threatens, intimidates etc) either the person to whom the utterance is made or other hearers. That doesn’t seem to be a thesis to which Derbyshire objects, though. (Which is just as well, since it is a true thesis.) Note, by the way, the ambiguity in Derbyshire’s formulation. He could be saying that we have said that people should _sometimes_ be careful about uttering true statements about political Islamism out of due regard for the perlocutionary effect of those utterances. But he expresses the thought in an unrestricted way, such that the effect on the reader is to mislead them into the false belief that people at CT have claimed that political Islamism just shouldn’t be criticized. Nobody here holds _that_ view or anything remotely like it.
fn1. I can find just two instances of the word “Islamophobia” on CT. The first was in the title of a blog post by me, where the point of using the word was to point to someone else’s writings on the subject. The second is by Ophelia Benson (with others picking up on her use) in comments to another post.
by Kieran Healy on September 7, 2004
A number of journalists have gotten upset this week over the fact that my uncle Seán “was invited”:http://home.eircom.net/content/unison/national/3873334?view=Eircomnet to address the “parliamentary meeting”:http://212.2.162.45/news/story.asp?j=95850800&p=9585y38x&n=95851409 of “Fianna Fáil”:http://www.fiannafail.ie/, the main coalition partner in the Irish government. Together with a small group of like-minded people, Seán’s been responsible for building “an organization”:http://www.cori.ie/justice/index.htm devoted to social policy analysis in Ireland. He started twenty-odd years ago, when the country’s financial management was on the verge of being handed over to the IMF, unemployment was running at about fifteen percent and pretty much no-one outside the civil service was doing much in the way of policy analysis. By the mid-1990s, many of CORI’s ideas about “social partnership”:http://www.cori.ie/justice/soc_partner/index.htm and “basic income”:http://www.cori.ie/justice/basic_income/index.htm had moved to the center of arguments about social policy and, particularly in the former case, become incorporated into collective bargaining institutions. So it gladdens my heart to see the likes of Ireland’s “Sunday Business Post”:http://www.sbpost.ie/web/DocumentView/did-394778113-pageUrl–2FThe-Newspaper-2FSundays-Paper.asp pulling out the stops to discredit him this week:
By any standards, it’s a harsh penance … to invite Fr Sean Healy … to address the parliamentary party in Inchydoney in west Cork tomorrow … Healy has been a constant, vocal and extremely irritating thorn in the side of the government … “I know backbenchers who would burn him,” said one … Healy is revered … by the left generally, and particularly by left-wing commentators … he’s good value in media terms – the controlled bluster … the quick soundbites … He has been described as “the only real opposition in the state” … he operated a back channel of influence through secretary to the government Dermot McCarthy, and through the Taoiseach himself …. “We thought that he was completely off the wall,” said a former official in Merrion Street. “He was the author of various mad harebrained schemes – that basic income scheme was totally mad” … not popular with the conservative wing of the Catholic Church, many of whom see in Healy the socially radical impulses of liberation theology … Healy’s reluctance to wear clerical garb … and the infrequency of his references to God, prayer and the spiritual dimension of man’s life are further irritations … His late father was a member of Fianna Fail (his brother[1] is a former national chairman of the “Progressive Democrats”:http://www.progressivedemocrats.ie/) … Some who have dealt with him consider him prickly … “He has no influence on policy. Sure, he has a great media profile and all that …” … He is perhaps aware that his views are open to caricature.
Open to caricature is right. So now you know Seán is a raving loon who is nevertheless a controlled debater and good with the soundbites on TV; he’s the author of various harebrained Marxist schemes who somehow has a secret backchannel of influence to the highest-ranking civil servants and the Prime Minister himself; and he’s a radical priest evangelizing liberation theology except he doesn’t wear a clerical collar or talk enough about the spiritual dimension of life in public. A classic incoherent hatchet job. And to top it off he has the cheek to be related to members of more right-leaning parties. Clearly he must be doing something right.
You can learn more about CORI’s “role”:http://www.cori.ie/justice/about/role_policy.htm in Irish Social Policy, and their positions on “poverty”:http://www.cori.ie/justice/publications/briefing/poverty/index.htm, “taxation”:http://www.cori.ie/justice/publications/briefing/poverty/index.htm, the Irish “housing boom”:http://www.cori.ie/justice/publications/briefing/housing_accomm_policy04/index.htm (or crisis) and “other issues”:http://www.cori.ie/justice/publications/ansoecrev/ase_review03.pdf at their website.
fn1. That’d be my father.
by Kieran Healy on September 7, 2004
Some contributors in the discussion thread “on crutches”:https://www.crookedtimber.org/archives/002445.html (if you see what I mean) bring up other ambulatory aids by-the-by, and Bad Jim says:
bq. Can anyone who remembers the 19th century think of canes as anything but a weapon?
The 19th century? What about the 1970s? I remember being caned at school. On the palm of the hand, though, rather than the backside. I think I was about six or seven. (This was in Ireland, by the way.) I also remember the news percolating down to us kids at some point[1] that such things would no longer be allowed in schools, and some of us telling the teachers “You can’t smack us anymore because capital punishment is abolished!”
fn1. Google informs me that corporal punishment was abolished Irish schools “in 1982”:http://www.corpun.com/ies00211.htm/, when I was nine.
by Daniel on September 6, 2004
Andrew Smith has just resigned as the pensions minister. I’m not particularly interested in the political backstory to this; I’m much more interested in the opportunity it offers to undo one of the Original Sins of New Labour.
It was an appalling mistake to sack Frank Field and it is time to undo it.
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by Henry Farrell on September 6, 2004
“Brad DeLong”:http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/movable_type/2004-2_archives/000131.html asks for one of us to explain this rather opaque “Perry Anderson piece”:http://www.lrb.co.uk/v26/n17/ande01_.html in the LRB about the reasons for France’s political and cultural decline – I’ll bite. Anderson’s prose is tangled and dense, but there is a thesis lurking there amid the thickets and thorns. His claim is that France is scuppered because the wrong set of intellectuals won. Anderson argues that the prospect of unity between the Socialist and Communist parties in the early 1970s provoked an intellectual backlash – the _Noveaux Philosophes_ and other partisan thinkers did a bang-up job in isolating Communism from the mainstream. This, together with conjunctural choices made by the Communists, meant that the Left had no real ideas left when Mitterand came to power. An “anti-totalitarian” front, in which the centre-left was a distinctly junior partner to the centre-right, came to dominate the intellectual landscape. The French Revolution – primal source of the cleavages in French politics – was rewritten by Furet and others so that its radical implications disappeared. It became a bourgeois liberal revolution that had failed. Thus the mess that France is in – the liberals have triumphed, but in so doing have robbed France of the deeper political arguments that used to drive its politics and intellectual life.
I’m only an amateur of French politics, so I’m not going to comment on the empirical plausibility of this thesis. I will note that it’s a rather _idealistic_ account of the driving forces of French history for a purported Marxist to be coming out with. Anderson seems to be claiming, if I understand him rightly, that the most important conflicts in French politics of the last two decades were fought out in the academy and in the journals of opinion. It’s not an entirely ridiculous argument in itself – intellectuals do play a role in France that they don’t elsewhere – but it’s still very strange coming from the mouth of a historical materialist.
by Chris Bertram on September 6, 2004
Those who have been following the decline and fall of the Conrad Black empire (a group which surely _must_ include those bloggers fond of quoting the ravings of his wife, Barbara Amiel ) will be amused to learn that “his friend Richard Perle has now deserted him”:http://www.nytimes.com/2004/09/06/business/media/06perle.html?pagewanted=1&hp.
bq. … last week, Mr. Perle’s view of Lord Black changed. Issuing his first public statements since being heavily criticized in an internal report for rubber-stamping transactions that company investigators say led to the plundering of the company, Mr. Perle now says he was duped by his friend and business colleague.
Read the whole thing, as someone-or-other once said.
by Henry Farrell on September 6, 2004
Just came across a reference in a discussion board to one of my favourite bits from one of my favourite books – Robert Irwin’s “Arabian Nights Companion”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1860649831/henryfarrell-20 – and thought it was worth quoting.[1]
bq. Other [thieves] used to make use of a tortoise with a lighted candle on its back. They sent this creature ahead of them into the house they proposed to burgle. If the house was currently occupied, then the owner would surely exclaim in surprise on seeing the tortoise (‘Oh look! There’s a tortoise with a candle on its back. I wonder what it’s doing in my house’) and the thieves would be warned off. If, however, the house was unoccupied, then the candle would help to guide the thieves as they went about their work.
fn1. I blogged last year about Irwin’s related, and wonderfully tricky novel, “The Arabian Nightmare”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1585672173/henryfarrell-20 .
by Henry Farrell on September 5, 2004
Over the next few days, I’m going to be trying to put together an annotated list of those papers at APSA that might be interesting to CT readers. It’s a very frustrating task. APSA uses database software that generates unique session IDs. The result is that it’s simply impossible to provide stable URLs for papers in the APSA database – the URLs are session specific, and anyone else trying to use them gets booted to a page asking for login and password. This seems to me to be counterproductive. It means that it’s difficult for political scientists to spread the word about interesting papers to their colleagues. It also makes it much more difficult to get relevant papers out into the wider public debate. There are a whole lot of bloggers attending APSA this year, some of whom have quite a wide general readership. It would be nice if they were able to disseminate some of the interesting papers easily to their readers.
by Kieran Healy on September 5, 2004
Seeing as “Kevin”:http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/archives/individual/2004_09/004634.php is wondering whether M&Ms have gotten smaller since the last time he looked[1], my imponderable for the day is this: Why is it that in Europe (at least in my experience) patients with a sprained ankle or whatever are typically issued with “forearm crutches”:http://www.bentonmedical.com/forearm.html whereas in the U.S. you get “underarm crutches”:http://www.bentonmedical.com/underarm.html. It seems clear to me that the underarm kind is inferior in every important respect. So why does it survive in the U.S.?
Possible explanations:
* *Efficiency*. Already ruled out. Underarm crutches are inferior.
* *Revealed Preferences*. Underarm crutches _must_ be more efficient because otherwise people wouldn’t be buying them.
* *Path Dependence*. Some QWERTY-like event in the early 1900s locked American hospitals into the underarm regime.
* *Cultural*. De Tocqueville notes somewhere that American individualism thrives in the presence of underarm supports for gammy legs, while the _ancien regime_’s tendency to lean at the elbow meant that its collapse was both inevitable and unforseen.
* *Marxist*. The ruling crutches of any epoch are the crutches of the ruling class, etc.
* *Evolutionary Psychology*. On the Pleistocene Savannah, Underarm crutches provided a selective advantage to their users due to their greater length, enabling Underarm-using groups to hold off predators at a slightly greater distance and obtain marginally higher-hanging fruit than their Forearm-using competitors.
* *Political Economy*. A cartel of crutch producers in league with hospital crutch-wranglers and has cornered the market through aggressive undercutting of the competition and a complex system of kickbacks. _Standard Crutch (New Jersey)_ pioneered this technique in the 19th century, bringing it to such a pitch of perfection that it was impossible to buy a forearm model without also getting three underarm models delivered to you.
* *Libertarian*. Though technically inferior, underarm models are ultimately beneficial because they encourage a quicker return to standing on your own two feet.
Alternative explanations (perhaps even informative ones) are invited.
fn1. Perhaps they are simply further away than before?
by Chris Bertram on September 4, 2004
I just read “the transcript of Putin’s speech”:http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/3627878.stm following the murders in Beslan. In it, Putin expresses nostalgia for the old USSR. Obviously it is intended for a domestic audience and plays to their concerns and expectations. What should we make of the following passage? And who are the “they” of the penultimate paragraph below?
bq. Today we are living in conditions which have emerged following the break-up of a vast great state, a state which unfortunately turned out to be unable to survive in the context of a rapidly changing world. But despite all the difficulties, we have managed to preserve the core of the colossus which was the Soviet Union.
bq. And we called the new country the Russian Federation. We all expected changes, changes for the better. But we have turned out to be absolutely unprepared for much that has changed in our lives…
bq. On the whole, we have to admit that we have failed to recognise the complexity and dangerous nature of the processes taking place in our own country and the world in general. In any case, we have failed to respond to them appropriately.
bq. We showed weakness, and the weak are trampled upon. Some want to cut off a juicy morsel from us while others are helping them.
bq. They are helping because they believe that, as one of the world’s major nuclear powers, Russia is still posing a threat to someone, and therefore this threat must be removed.
bq. And terrorism is, of course, only a tool for achieving these goals. But as I have already said many times, we have faced crises, mutinies and acts of terror more than once.
by Kieran Healy on September 4, 2004
Berkeley’s “Mike Hout”:http://sociology.berkeley.edu/faculty/hout/ and my colleague “Fr Andrew Greeley”:http://www.agreeley.com/author.html have an “Op-Ed in the Times today”:http://www.nytimes.com/2004/09/04/opinion/04greeley.html?ex=1252036800&en=76ca9f02982c96ca&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland making some good points about the Republican Party’s support amongst Evangelical Christians. Religious and political conservatism don’t line up as closely as you might think, and certainly not as much as the talking heads assume. The intervening factor is how much money you make:
bq. [N]either region nor religion can override the class divide: if recent patterns hold, a majority (about 52 percent) of poor Southern white evangelicals will vote for Mr. Kerry in November, while only 12 percent of affluent Southern white evangelicals will.
bq. Most poorer Americans of every faith – including evangelical Christians – vote for Democrats. It’s a shame that few pundits, pollsters or politicians seem to notice.
A related point is that the swing to the Republican in the South has not not been a uniform migration. More of the better off have drifted, but not necessarily the poorer Whites. Of course, the claim isn’t that all poorer White Evangelicals vote Democrat — Brayden can testify to that — but rather that a surprisingly large number do, even after the universally acknowledged success of the “Southern Strategy”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southern_strategy and the long-running tactic (going back to Reagan) of appealing to the Patriotism of poorer Americans in an effort to make them forget about their pocketbooks.