March 2005

Jim Callaghan, the Labour Prime Minister defeated by Thatcher in 1979 and, amazingly the oldest living former British PM in history, has died at 92. I’m struggling to think of anything nice to say about his tenure as Home Secretary, Chancellor, Foreign Secretary or PM. He was a machine politician rather than someone animated by a sense of social justice, and it is noteworthy that “the BBC obituary”:http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/941478.stm can’t find a single policy achievement worth listing to his credit. His government collapsed in chaos and recrimination and was followed by bitter civil war with Labour. Thanks to him and his ilk we suffered 18 years of Tory misrule. Still, RIP and all that.

Matthew Yglesias has a pair of interesting posts up (1, 2), responding to David Brooks’ latest. Basically I agree, but let me make one critical point about where Matt ends up.

I described the liberal as having a two-stage view about end of life issues. First, comes something like the "life as continuum" view Brooks attributes to us. Second, comes a principle of free choice – I think that I should make my own decision on this, but that my view should not control others, though I may try to persuade others that my view is correct (non-relativism). The problem here is that I think a lot of liberals don’t recognize that the second principle really does depend on something akin to the first. If you hold views about the sanctity of life and the doing/allowing distinction that lead you to the conclusion that failing to keep alive someone who could be kept alive is the equivalent to murder, then adopting a principle of free choice at the second level makes no sense. An absolutist view on the first question requires an absolutist view on the second question.

I think the last sentence is not actually true, due to ambiguity in ‘absolutist’. It can mean either: cleaving to a black-white view of a matter (that other folks say they see in shades of grey.) Or it can mean: insisting that views besides one’s own are beyond the pale of moral reasonableness and tolerability. Let’s thumbnail the first absolutism: denying the continuum; the second: denying pluralism. These may sound as though they come to the same, and they probably have a tendency to run together; but in fact they are distinct. [click to continue…]

I don’t share Mark Kaplan’s philosophical predilections, but he is a sharp observer of blogospheric rhetoric. At “Charlotte Street he announces”:http://charlotte-street.blogspot.com/2005/03/note-on-notes-turkey-ruse.html that his perceptive “Notes on Rhetoric” “now have their own site”:http://notesonrhetoric.blogspot.com/ . I particularly enjoyed his latest reflections on the “Turkey” ruse:

bq. Turkey – If your opponent is criticising the policies of some state you favour, demand that he talks about Turkey instead. This may sound a feeble ploy, equivalent to saying ‘please talk about something else’ but can be effective if you use language like ‘if you’re being consistent’ ‘disproportionate and selective attention’. (You may if you wish substitute some other country for Turkey – obviously so if, by chance, your opponent is talking about Turkey.)….

bq. The reductio ad absurdum of this position is that one should busy oneself with impotent cursing and condemnations of foreign regimes over which one has zero influence, while exempting your own government and its allies from criticism. In other words: ethical bombast on the one hand, and ethical abdication on the other.

bq. At worst, the ‘Turkey’ tactic can also short-circuit moral universality – the belief that we should apply to ourselves the same principles we apply to others. So, for example, moral condemnation of torture by American and British soldiers (in accordance with moral universality) meets with ‘but why are you silent about much more horrific things elsewhere..’; patient criticisms of the ‘democratic deficit’ in our own societies meets only with our attention rerouted to utterly undemocratic regimes. So it goes on, diversionary and insidious.

The FT has a good article on Kyrgyzstan today, suggesting that the recent upheavals in Russia’s ‘Near Abroad’ doesn’t actually have all that much to do with George W. Bush.

There is certainly a domino effect at work. Supporters of the US’s democracy campaign have been quick to cast Kyrgyzstan as the latest state to join “the global march of freedom led by President Bush”, as the conservative Wall Street Journal said on Friday, praising Washington’s policies in Afghanistan and Iraq.

However, of more relevance to Kyrgyzstan have been the peaceful revolts against authoritarian leaders in the former Soviet Union, in Georgia and Ukraine. Television and the internet has spread the message. The common element has been a drive to get rid of self-serving corrupt cliques which have often been in power, as in Kyrgyzstan, since Soviet times. These cliques have generally been supported by Moscow, but the revolts against them have not been principally anti-Russian or pro-western. Domestic issues have mattered most.

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For some revealing insights as to where David Horowitz’s so-called Academic Bill of Rights is bringing us, check out Scott Jaschik’s article today in Inside Higher Ed. Dennis K. Baxley, who is one of Jeb Bush’s allies has gotten a bill based on the Bill of Rights approved by the relevant committee in the Florida House of Representatives. The reasoning behind his sponsorship?

Baxley said his own undergraduate education at Florida State University — in the 1970s — illustrated the failings of higher education: The problem was that an anthropology professor “did a tirade” in his course that evolution was correct and that creationism was not. Baxley said that students should not “get blasted” as he did for not believing in evolution.

When Florida legislators say that students need to be exposed to a ‘diverse’ set of viewpoints, they aren’t joking around. I could make the obvious sarcastic comments about requiring geographers to recognize flat earth theory as a valid point of view in the classroom and so on, but this isn’t funny – it’s rather horrifying.

Update: bad link fixed.

Update2: I should of course have linked to Ted’s earlier post on the same topic.

This may well be something that everyone else has known for weeks or months, but I for one didn’t realize until yesterday that the new version of the Google desktop search tool can now make your Thunderbird mail folders, PDF files, and much more besides searchable. It’s really a great piece of software.

Robert Farley at Lawyers, Guns and Money asks, “Who is America’s worst blogger?”

My vote: Kim du Toit. Best known as the author of the infamous “The Pussification of the Western Male” (well-skewered by the Philosoraptor in “The duToitification of the Western Conservative”. I love the description of du Toit as “a Neanderthal crybaby”). He’s the guy who disgraced himself on the first anniversary of 9/11 with this vile essay, “Traitors Within Our Walls“, in which he throws around accusations of treason like Rip Taylor with confetti:

4. We find the manifestation of traitors in those who espouse causes other than (small “r”) republican ones: those who call themselves “progressives”, “socialists”, “communitarians”, “populists”, “globalists” and so on.

Then there’s “Let Africa Sink”:

So here’s my solution for the African fiasco: a high wall around the whole continent, all the guns and bombs in the world for everyone inside, and at the end, the last one alive should do us all a favor and kill himself.

He combines the quiet reasonableness of an Ann Coulter with the eliminationist rhetoric of Dave Neiwert’s worst nightmares. du Toit was a finalist in “The Vicious Instapundit Blogroll Contest” for this post giggling at the bruises of war protestors. I could go on and on. As I write this, his most recent post sighs that there may be a Democrat in the White House, due to Bush’s immigration policy. Shooting enthusiast du Toit concludes:

Just what we needed: Clintons in the White House, Part II. Oh, joy.

Range time.

“But who reads Kim Du Toit?” According to BlogAds, more people read Kim Du Toit than Andrew Sullivan or Hugh Hewitt. More people read Kim Du Toit than Tim Blair and Matthew Yglesias combined. There’s a big audience for this stuff.

Based on a letter I wrote this morning and plan to send this afternoon (once I look up the right address), from now on I’d like to be known as “‘Nobel Prize-nominated”:http://mediamatters.org/items/200503220009 blogger, Kieran Healy.’ I’m up for consideration in Physics. I nominated everyone here at CT as well, except “Montagu”:https://www.crookedtimber.org/author/montagu-norman/ because prizes aren’t awarded posthumously. There aren’t enough categories for us all to win in the same year (even counting “Economics”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nobel_Prize#Prize_categories), but I’m sure everyone’s turn will come.

Bloggers with more patience than me have been dealing with the tragic story of Terri Schiavo. “Lindsay Beyerstein”:http://majikthise.typepad.com/majikthise_/2005/03/the_left_and_te.html has been “especially good”:http://www.alternet.org/story/21572. It’s clear that the Republican position on Schiavo is sheer grandstanding and hypocritical to boot. There’s plenty of evidence for this, what with President Bush’s signature on the “Texas Futile Care Law”:http://www.markarkleiman.com/archives/schiavo_/2005/03/schiavo_futile_care_and_money.php and Bill Frist’s “statements about Christopher Reeve”:http://atrios.blogspot.com/2005_03_20_atrios_archive.html#111169758487216228 and his support for “harvesting organs from anencephalic children”:http://atrios.blogspot.com/2005_03_20_atrios_archive.html#111160342761631336. And never mind the broader policy context where the fiscal means whereby people might support patients in persistent vegetative states — via Medicare and bankruptcy protection — are being hacked away. Now, via “DC Media Girl”:http://dcmediagirl.com/index.php?entry=entry20050324-204119, we have the icing on the cake. Some “Fox News Pundit”:http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,151442,00.html is thinking that Jeb Bush should just authorize a SWAT team to storm the hospice and get Terri Schiavo out:

bq. Just to burnish my reputation as a bomb thrower, I think Jeb Bush should give serious thought to storming the Bastille. By that I mean he should think about telling his cops to go over to Terri Schiavo’s (search) hospice, go inside, put her on a gurney and load her into an ambulance. They could take her to a hospital, revive her, and reattach her feeding tube. … So Jeb, call out the troops, storm the Bastille and tell ’em I sent you.

It’s our old friend, “poetic justice as fairness”:https://crookedtimber.org/2004/07/17/poetic-justice-as-fairness/. Two words, buddy: “Elian Gonzalez”:http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/law/elian/.

While thinking about the “deterrent effect of the death penalty”:https://crookedtimber.org/2005/03/24/deterrence-and-the-death-penalty/ I wondered about cross-national variation in rates of violent death. Comparative data on homicide rates undoubtedly exist, but I don’t have them to hand. I do have OECD data on rates of death due to assault, though, so here’s a nice picture of this trend for eighteen capitalist democracies from 1960 to 2002.

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I’m woefully ignorant about the geopolitics of Asia, so I’m not going to offer any opinions of my own here. Harry at “Harry’s Place has been linking”:http://hurryupharry.bloghouse.net/archives/2005/03/24/the_eus_military_industrial_complex.php to “a piece in the Guardian by Timothy Garton Ash”:http://www.guardian.co.uk/china/story/0,7369,1444660,00.html which expresses relief at the EU’s decision to postpone the lifting of the arms embargo on China. In Garton Ash’s piece, China is cast as the bad guy. A different view is put in “a fascinating article by Chalmers Johnson”:http://www.tomdispatch.com/index.mhtml?pid=2259 which sees American concern about democracy as being merely window-dressing for a policy which is basically about preventing the emergence of geopolitical rivals. Johnson also warns about US encouragement for the remilitarization of Japan as a counterweight to China.

In yesterday’s debate on the proposed program to send CIA analysts back to campus, Martin Kramer writes:

If there’s a danger here, it’s the possibility of faculty intimidation of students. The storm at Columbia is a precedent, and if it’s known who’s made a prior commitment to intelligence work, there’s a real possibility that radical professors might target students. I wouldn’t accept anyone’s assurance that this won’t happen. So- called “transparency” sets up students for a radical witch-hunt, which will seek to gut the program by “outing” its participants. (I don’t even think the NSEP scholars should be named. I’ve seen the list, with the foreign countries where they have studied. It’s beyond me why an NSEP student who’s gone to study Arabic in Syria — a police state — should be openly named as a prospective employee of a national security agency.)

I’ll grant him the risk of NSEP students being exposed when they go to study abroad, but Kramer’s scorn for “so-called transparency,” and for exercises in “outing,” which set people up for a “witch-hunt,” seems rather hard to reconcile with his support for Campus Watch and for the David Project at Columbia. Campus Watch not only seeks to highlight possible discrimination against students, but also to highlight statements (or, very often what students claim are statements) made by Middle East studies professors, which are anti-Israel, anti-US, which make excuses for autocracies in the Arab world, etc etc. The David Project makes similar accusations against professors in Columbia’s MEALAC program – but doesn’t seem, according to the accounts I’ve read, to have much in the way of hard evidence to back them up. I don’t think that it’s much of a stretch at all to describe both of these endeavours as “outing,” or to point to the likelihood that they will indeed lead to radical witch hunts (looking to aggrieved students for ‘evidence’ of bias in the classroom is liable to produce distortions and downright falsehoods that can do irreparable damage to innocent professors’ reputations). The “storm in Columbia” is indeed a precedent – but not necessarily in the sense that Kramer intends. As noted yesterday, I’ve more respect for Kramer than for some of the others in his camp – but if, as he seems to be suggesting, he’s actively opposed to ‘so-called transparency,’ witch hunts and outing, he should extend the lesson to those forms of transparency and outing that he supports, as well as those that he dislikes.

Apologies for yet another meta post. How many sets of teeth can one site have, anyway? I’d really appreciate some help, though.

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As CT’s resident Rousseauiste, I’d like to pass on the news to residents of New York City (and parts thereabouts) that the Johnson Theater will be staging the “first ever US production of Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s play Narcisse”:http://www.theaterforthenewcity.net/narcisse.htm from 7-10 April:

bq. an utterly contemporary drama that deals with the problem of narcissism and sexual ambiguity. The play is about a man who falls in love with an image of himself dressed as a woman and explores contemporary issues of desire, self-obsession and the difficulty of the relation between the sexes.

Enjoy!