by Chris Bertram on October 15, 2004
The “pro-war British”:http://hurryupharry.bloghouse.net/archives/2004/10/15/does_she_exaggerate.php “blogs”:http://www.pootergeek.com/index.php?p=456 seem to be linking to and discussing “an article”:http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=15464 in David Horowitz’s FrontPage Magazine which alleges that the UK is in the grip of a frightening epidemic of anti-Americanism and anti-Semitism. In the words of one of their number, “Melanie Phillips”:http://www.melaniephillips.com/diary/archives/000842.html :
bq. This article describes vividly what it’s like to be an American and a Jew facing the tsunami of anti-American and anti-Jewish hatred that has swept over Britain
I’m neither American nor a Jew, so I hesitate somewhat to downplay these reports. Certainly unthinking anti-Americanism — of the kind depicted in Whit Stillman’s film “Barcelona”:http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0109219/ — is a feature of European political and social life. (Only the other day, a supermarket checkout assistant told me that “after all, Michael Moore is just another fat American”.) And anti-semitism also exists in a number of forms: there’s a residual British conservative strain of it and it has come to infect some of the discourse of anti-Israeli polemic on the Left. But American and Jewish friends and colleagues do not tell me of hostility of the kind recounted in the article, and the judicious Jonathan Edelstein reports in “comments to one of the blogs discussing the alleged phenomenon”:http://www.pootergeek.com/index.php?p=456 :
bq. I’m a fairly frequent visitor to London and just returned from four days there, where I hung out with quite a few Guardian and Independent-readers, some of them avowedly Marxist. None of them had any problem with me as an American, a Jew or a Zionist – we had some lively arguments, certainly, but none of them degenerated to personal abuse, anti-semitism or “Israel is a pirate state” rhetoric. I’ve never encountered that kind of crap in the UK, although I’m sure it exists; there are idiots everywhere. The reception of Americans in London probably has a great deal to do with the particular people they meet.
I’d be interested to hear of other experiences.
by John Q on October 15, 2004
I’m five years too late, and McNeil PPC has beaten me to the name, but it struck me the other night[1] that iModium.com would have been the ideal name for an Internet/telecom/dotcom IPO in the late 1990s.
fn1. There was no medical reason for this thought, just a random neural connection
by Ted on October 14, 2004
On the subject of Mary Cheney, the labor saving device of “pointing to other bloggers” saves me from the obligation to trying to top this response from Lawyers, Guns and Money:
Reynolds breathlessly claims that “Lynne Cheney is letting Kerry have it for dissing her daughter.” How, might you ask, did Kerry “dis” Mary Cheney? Let’s look at the relevant part of the transcript:
KERRY: We’re all God’s children, Bob. And I think if you were to talk to Dick Cheney’s daughter, who is a lesbian, she would tell you that she’s being who she was, she’s being who she was born as.
What a monster! How could he….er, actually, this doesn’t “dis” Mary Cheney in the slightest–it’s positive in tone and substance–unless you think there’s something wrong with being gay. So are Reynolds and Kaus just rank bigots? Perhaps, but their argument on its face is almost as stupid as bigotry itself. According to Mickey, with the assent of Reynolds, the fact that Bush’s base consists of a large number of rank homophobes means that mentioning the publicly acknowledged reality of someone’s sexuality should be out of bounds–indeed, “creepy”. The intolerance of the Republican base, therefore, is a reason to vote against Democrats. Wow, fake libertarianism doesn’t get any more fake than that!
Democrats certainly do not have a flawless record on gay rights. I’m thinking of the “hairdresser” commercial from the 2002 Montana race, or attacks on Andrew Sullivan about his personal life, or Clinton’s decision to sign the so-called Defense of Marriage Act (which Kerry voted against.) Every time I hear Kerry and Edwards stress that marriage is “between a man and a woman,” it takes a little bit of wind out of my sails.
Some of this is just realistic politics, but I can still look back and see an array of Democratic moments that should make gay-positive voters wince. I just don’t see how this is one of those moments.
Andrew Sullivan has a lot to say about this. Key quote:
The only way you can believe that citing Mary Cheney amounts to “victimization” is if you believe someone’s sexual orientation is something shameful. Well, it isn’t. What’s revealing is that this truly does expose the homophobia of so many – even in the mildest “we’ll-tolerate-you-but-shut-up-and-don’t-complain” form.
by Ted on October 14, 2004
Re: the alleged voter fraud in Nevada–
Is there any rational reason why new voters should be asked to declare their party when they register? Voter registration drives are the healthy by-products of political campaigns. The registrars are likely to be enthusiastic partisans, and the tempation to toss out new voters for the other guy will always be there.
Not every state makes new voters declare a party when they register. I know from experience that Washington and Texas don’t do it. In Texas, you effectively declare your party by voting in one primary or the other. Your party affiliation doesn’t appear on your registration form or your voter card. I’ve done some voter registration for MoveOn.org, and for all I know, I did nothing but register Republicans. I had no opportunity to throw out Republicans, because I didn’t know who they were. It seems like a good system.
Am I missing something obvious?
by John Q on October 14, 2004
For once, there has been a little bit of encouraging news coming out of Iraq. I’ve also been encouraged by some of the reactions I’ve seen.
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by Kieran Healy on October 14, 2004
Maria’s “post about required statistics courses”:https://www.crookedtimber.org/archives/002676.html reminds me of a possibly apocryphal story. I _think_ it concerns one of the very early British social surveys of urban poverty by Charles Booth, or Mackintosh or one of those guys. The results were resisted by many for political reasons, and one strategy was to discredit the new-fangled methods they relied on. Thus, one critic in (I believe) the House of Commons asserted that he could not find the results credible because the report “only relied on a sample of the population — and a mere _random_ sample, at that.”
If anyone knows the source of this (doubtless mangled) story, let me know in the comments.
by Kieran Healy on October 14, 2004
Over at Volokh, recent addition “Jim Lindgren”:http://www.law.nwu.edu/faculty/fulltime/Lindgren/Lindgren.html is making me regret once more their loss of Jacob Levy. “Here he is”:http://volokh.com/archives/archive_2004_10_14.shtml#1097728719 complaining about the supposedly appalling moderator bias that caused Bush to lose last night’s debate (again):
bq. Given Theresa (“no blood for oil”) Heinz Kerry, the only hard question John Kerry got all night was “I’d like to ask each of you, what is the most important thing you’ve learned from these strong women?”–and Kerry got to listen to Bush’s answer first. UPDATE: — OK, so Kerry should have answered the question about what he learned from his strong wife in this way (I’m recylcing a joke I heard last spring): [What KERRY might have said]: I developed my economic plan for the country from interacting with both my wives. Now I just need to find a rich country for the US to marry.
Clearly, Jim feels that whereas marrying into money is unseemly, being born into it is evidence of one’s good judgment. Is the parallel lesson that the US can spend the next 40 years drinking, partying and wasting Dad’s money on incompetent schemes, but still have things work out great?
by Maria on October 13, 2004
Why are all required statistics courses essentially the same? They start off with bland assurances from the instructor that no knowledge of maths is required and that the concepts involved are pretty easy to grasp – all you need to do is turn up in class and do lots of practice questions. Oh, and have a positive attitude. Yeah, right.
I’m about to take the third stats exam of my life. As with the two before, failure is a barrier to continuing my ‘real’ studies. And, though this is my third tour of duty through histograms to simple regression, failure is a distinct possibility. The null hypothesis, that Maria has sufficient knowledge, nerve and luck to once again pass stats by the skin of her teeth, looks like being rejected. Of course I don’t blame myself, not entirely. I’d rather blame the teachers, or perhaps the subject itself.
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by Micah on October 13, 2004
It looks like “Columbia University Press”:http://www.columbia.edu/cu/cup/ is bringing out a new edition of Political Liberalism. All things considered, I wish they wouldn’t. For the Rawls obsessed, more below the line.
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by Henry Farrell on October 13, 2004
I’ve never known any more about Walt Kelly’s comic strip “Pogo,” than that it gave birth to the famous phrase “We have met the enemy and he is us.” Now, after reading John Crowley’s lovely “essay”:http://bostonreview.net/BR29.5/crowley.html on Pogo in the _Boston Review_, I want to read the lot.
by Belle Waring on October 13, 2004
An unusual and welcome article in today’s Washington Post about a split between homegrown Iraqi insurgents and foreign fighters in Fallujah.
U.S. and Iraqi authorities together have insisted that if Fallujah is to avoid an all-out assault aimed at regaining control of the city, foreign fighters must be ejected. Several local leaders of the insurgency say they, too, want to expel the foreigners, whom they scorn as terrorists. They heap particular contempt on Abu Musab Zarqawi, the Jordanian whose Monotheism and Jihad group has asserted responsibility for many of the deadliest attacks across Iraq, including videotaped beheadings.
“He is mentally deranged, has distorted the image of the resistance and defamed it. I believe his end is near,” Abu Abdalla Dulaimy, military commander of the First Army of Mohammad, said….
Among the tensions dividing the locals and the foreigners is religion. People in Fallujah, known as the city of mosques, have chafed at the stern brand of Islam that the newcomers brought with them. The non-Iraqi Arabs berated women who did not cover themselves head-to-toe in black — very rare in Iraq — and violently opposed local customs rooted in the town’s more mystical religious tradition. One Fallujah man killed a Kuwaiti who said he could not pray at the grave of an ancestor.
If the city could be pacified before the elections without a large-scale assault, that would be a very good thing.
by Chris Bertram on October 13, 2004
Why does no-one read analytical philosophy (except for analytical philosophers) and what was the revolution wrought by Saul Kripke? “Jerry Fodor explains”:http://www.lrb.co.uk/v26/n20/fodo01_.html , over at the LRB.
by Chris Bertram on October 13, 2004
Over at “Harry’s Place, Gene picks up”:http://hurryupharry.bloghouse.net/archives/2004/10/13/social_forum_preview.php on the priorities of the European Social Forum, which is about to meet in London. I surfed over to “the programme of events and workshops”:http://www.fse-esf.org/en/programme/list.shtml and was disturbed to find that there’s a session devoted to promoting 9/11 revisionism:
bq. Members of the UK 9/11 network will be speaking including Ian Neal and Simon Aronowitz, editor of www.thoughtcrimenews.com plus a screening of 911 In Plane Sight 50 min short film followed by a question and answer forum…..Presenting the evidence supporting US government complicity in the 9/11 attacks, growing 9/11 truth movement and its implications for global peace and development.
I had a conversation last week with a very smart and likeable man from a Middle Eastern country who believes all this nonsense, and assures me that many of his fellow citizens do too. European leftists giving it further exposure, credence and legitimacy is the last thing we need.
by Eszter Hargittai on October 13, 2004
Let’s try to channel some of that energy from the last post toward a more productive discussion.:) Here’s a little Flash movie about how the media are covering the presidential campaigns. I doubt any of it will be shocking to most readers of CT, but it’s still worth a pause and some thought.
The site that features the video offers much information about media ownership and is quite a resource. But I found it difficult to locate concrete things one may be able to do, except donate money to the cause.
One section suggests ten policies to fix the media. Do you find them convincing? Realistic? Necessary? Unnecessary? Hopeless? Too vague? Too ambitious? Not ambitious enough? Discuss.
by Eszter Hargittai on October 13, 2004
I just received an email from a journalism student from a school in Florida asking to interview me about the cultural implications of the Internet for an article in a campus publication. She sent the email to my Princeton email account and also mentioned that she’d left a voicemail message for me at my Princeton number. I have not received any correspondence from this person on my Northwestern email account or phone number. My pages are the first hit on Google for searches of either my first or last name (and the two together). My site gets similar rankings (except for some sponsored links) on other major search engines as well. My Web site clearly states my current affiliation right up front directly below my name. My site’s old location at Princeton redirects to the new location. My old blog on Princeton’s servers lists my Northwestern address. What, exactly, is being taught to journalism students nowadays if, given all that, this person still couldn’t figure out where I work??
I’ll let you guess whether I decided to grant the interview.
UPDATE: Since people seem to deduce from this message that I sent the person a rude reply I should clarify: I sent her a polite note saying that I was unavailable for the interview at this time and wished her luck.