March 2005

After several days in limbo, we appear to be back in business. Crooked Timber now has its own dedicated server, which should mean that we don’t run into the same problem again in future. Kieran, who is our resident guru for all things technical, has rejigged the setup, and installed a plugin which should reduce server load substantially in the future. We are grateful to you all for your patience – we owe a particular debt of thanks to the CT readers who generously donated money to help us get back up. Between those donations (which have been applied exclusively to CT’s running costs) and our own resources, we are now on a pretty good footing. In retrospect, this is something which had probably been in the offing for a while. We now have quite a large readership, which we’re extremely grateful for, but which also means that we now have rather greater technical needs than we did when we began this enterprise back in 2003. Again, thank you all.

Nothing like teen sex to get sociology in the newspapers. Here’s “more interesting stuff”:http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-std20mar20,1,964952.story?coll=la-headlines-nation from the “AddHealth dataset”:http://www.cpc.unc.edu/projects/addhealth/, and more particularly from “Peter Bearman”:http://www.sociology.columbia.edu/people/faculty/bearman/ and “Hannah Brueckner”:http://www.yale.edu/socdept/faculty/brueckner.html. This is the most recent in a line of papers on abstinence pledges and adolescent sexual activity more generally. A summary from the “L.A. Times”:http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-std20mar20,1,964952.story?coll=la-headlines-nation:

bq. Young adults who as teenagers took pledges not to have sex until marriage were just as likely to contract a venereal disease as people who didn’t make the promise, according to a study in the Journal of Adolescent Health. … The study found that 88% of sexually active people who took the pledge had intercourse before marriage. Sexually active pledgers were less likely to use condoms the first time they had sex, Bruckner said. The study found that people who took an abstinence pledge were less likely to get tested and treated for venereal disease. They may then be infected longer than other people.

An earlier paper, “Promising the Future: Virginity Pledges and First Intercourse”:http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/AJS/journal/issues/v106n4/040236/040236.html addressed the question of whether abstinence movements like “True Love Waits” worked like they were supposed to:

bq. Since 1993, in response to a movement sponsored by the Southern Baptist Church, over 2.5 million adolescents have taken public “virginity” pledges, in which they promise to abstain from sex until marriage. This paper explores the effect of those pledges on the transition to first intercourse. Adolescents who pledge are much less likely to have intercourse than adolescents who do not pledge. The delay effect is substantial. On the other hand, the pledge does not work for adolescents at all ages. Second, pledging delays intercourse only in contexts where there are some, but not too many, pledgers. The pledge works because it is embedded in an identity movement. Consequently, the pledge identity is meaningful only in contexts where it is at least partially nonnormative. Consequences of pledging are explored for those who break their promise. Promise breakers are less likely than others to use contraception at first intercourse.

In short, true love doesn’t wait, except to when it comes to going to the clinic.

David Horowitz “meets”:http://billmon.org/archives/001752.html the Cultural Revolution, with Billmon presiding. Via “Michael Froomkin”:http://www.discourse.net/archives/2005/03/whiskey_bar_unearths_the_maoists_among_us.html.

I was writing a post about Eugene Volokh’s “defence”:http://www.volokh.com/archives/archive_2005_03_13-2005_03_19.shtml#1111021309 of the “deliberate infliction of pain, “slow throttling,” and “cruel vengeance” when I saw that Chris had “beaten me to the punch”:https://crookedtimber.org/2005/03/17/volokh-on-capital-punishment-and-cruel-and-unusual-punishment/. I find the argument that the justice system should be used as a means to inflict cruelty in order to satisfy victims’ – and society’s – desire for vengeance rather appalling. It’s a return to the idea that the animating ideal of justice should be vengeance and public display rather than the correction and dissuasion of wrongdoing. Which is not to say that the modern idea of justice doesn’t have its own, more abstract cruelties, as Michel Foucault and Michael Ignatieff have pointed out – but the claim that the justice system sometimes needs to inflict pain for the purpose of inflicting pain is something which we should have gotten rid of a couple of centuries ago. At least Eugene is being honest here. I don’t think it’s unreasonable to suspect that most of the “nonsensical defences of torture”:https://crookedtimber.org/2005/03/15/needles-under-the-nails/ that we see, invoking “ticking bombs”:https://crookedtimber.org/2004/06/18/by-the-power-of-stipulation-i-have-the-power and the like, are so many insincere public justifications of an underlying desire to torture the terrorists not to get information, but because they’re terrorists (and if a few innocents get caught up in the system, you can’t make an omelette &c &c). But that Eugene’s defence is sincere doesn’t mean that it’s not repugnant to a set of minimal liberal commitments that are shared by many leftists, classical liberals, Burkean conservatives and others.

“Eugene Volokh writes”:http://www.volokh.com/archives/archive_2005_03_13-2005_03_19.shtml#1111021309 :

bq. “Something the Iranian government and I agree on”:http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/middle_east/4353449.stm : I particularly like the involvement of the victims’ relatives in the killing of the monster; I think that if he’d killed one of my relatives, I would have wanted to play a role in killing him. Also, though for many instances I would prefer less painful forms of execution, I am especially pleased that the killing — and, yes, I am happy to call it a killing, a perfectly proper term for a perfectly proper act — was a slow throttling, and was preceded by a flogging. The one thing that troubles me (besides the fact that the murderer could only be killed once) is that the accomplice was sentenced to only 15 years in prison, but perhaps there’s a good explanation.

And there’s more …..

bq. I should mention that such a punishment would probably violate the Cruel and Unusual Punishment Clause. I’m not an expert on the history of the clause, but my point is that the punishment is proper because it’s cruel (i.e., because it involves the deliberate infliction of pain as part of the punishment), so it may well be unconstitutional. I would therefore endorse amending the Cruel and Unusual Punishment Clause to expressly exclude punishment for some sorts of mass murders.

Those, like me, who are startled and upset to read Volokh writing like this, might want to visit the website of the “National Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty”:http://www.ncadp.org/ or visit David Elliot’s “Abolish the Death Penalty blog”:http://www.deathpenaltyusa.blogspot.com/ .

This post is in Estzter territory, and probably just reflects ignorance on my part, but I’d be grateful for the information from those in the know, anyway. Following “one of Eszter’s posts recently”:https://crookedtimber.org/2005/02/07/networks-and-tastes/ , I signed up to “Movielens”:http://movielens.umn.edu/ and have been dutifully entering my ratings in various spare moments. Like Amazon, “Movielens”:http://movielens.umn.edu/ tells me that based on the movies I like I should check out various other ones. Presumably, the program checks the database to see which movies I haven’t seen are highly rated by other people who like the same films that I liked (ditto Amazon for books, dvds etc).

Now here’s my problem. When we all come to such systems “cold” (as it were), the links between our choices provide genuinely informative data. But once we start acting on the recommendations, even chance correlations can get magnified. So, for example, suppose we have three movies A, B and C. Perhaps if we showed these films to a randomly chosen audience there wouldn’t be any reason to suppose that people who like A prefer B to C or vice versa. But if the first N people to go to the expert system happen to like both A and B, then the program will spew out a recommendation to subsquent A or B lovers to follow up their viewing with B or A. And those people in turn, having viewed the recommended movie, will feed their approval back into the system and thereby strengthen the association. Poor old movie C, excluded by chance from this self-reinforcing loop, will not get recommended nearly so often.

I guess the people who design these systems must have considered these effects and how to counteract them. Any answers?

Julian Baggini, writing in the Guardian, “reports”:http://www.guardian.co.uk/g2/story/0,3604,1438440,00.html :

bq. In the newly revised, more accessible edition of the New International Version of the Bible, “stoned” has been changed to “stoned to death” for fear that modern readers may get the impression that the reward for adultery is a big spliff.

Juan Cole reports the bad news about the town of Fallujah. Forty per cent of the buildings were destroyed in the bombardment and the remaining buildings have either “major” or “significant” damage. The city has effectively no water or power. It is currently a tent city, composed of about 9,000 residents living in tents near the ruins of their homes. The other 290,000 residents are living with relatives in other cities, or in refugee camps, or dead. Presumably the refugees will be experiencing a mortality rate rather more than 1.5x its prewar level.

I suspect that the Fallujah residents might consider it an addition of insult to injury that the main importance of their town in Western political debate is as a trophy for statisticians like me to show how intellectually scrupulous we are and win arguments with morons, by discarding their suffering as an “outlier”. With real tears in my eyes, I apologise.

When I came onboard at Crooked Timber, it wasn’t without some trepidation among my august co-bloggers. As respected academics, they didn’t want CT to devolve into a cesspool of personal invective. Accordingly, my invitation asked me to refrain from using terms such as “douchebag” and “world’s biggest douchebag”.

Obviously, there was an exception in a sub-clause for Ramblin’ Christopher Hitchens. The Poor Man explains.

Rep. Edward Markey has offered a bill (note: .pdf file) to stop extraordinary rendition. Hilzoy at Obsidian Wings makes the basic case quite ably:

Extraordinary rendition is a loathsome practice. If we have grounds to think that someone is a terrorist, we ought to charge that person and try him or her in a court of law. If we do not have enough evidence to bring charges, our response should be to try to develop some, not to ship that person off to another country to be tortured. This is completely inconsistent with our respect for the rule of law, and with our claim to basic decency. It is unworthy of our country, and it should be banned.

Representative Markey’s bill has 52 co-sponsors. 51 are Democrats, and 1 is independent.

I’m not an idiot. I know that this bill will never pass in this Congress. But I’d like to see at least one Republican co-sponsor for this bill.

I’m going to ask that readers politely contact Connecticut moderate Republican Christopher Shays, who might be open to persuasion. His phone number in DC is 202-225-5541. In Bridgeport, CT, it’s 203-579-5870. He can be emailed from this page. My letter, which you can adapt or just use, is under the fold. Thank you in advance.
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Gwydion the Magician (whom I’m guessing from his title must be some kind of pagan) has “issues” with Alaskan Airlines (and quite right too):

bq. Alaskan Airlines, I discovered, does not deign to serve its transcontinental passengers anything resembling a full meal. All we got on a 6 hour flight was a crappy sandwich. The IFE comes as a small portable DVD player that costs 10 bucks. But the particular feature of the Airline that pissed me off was the little Christian verse they include on each meal tray. I know this is America, where God-fearing zealots control the government. But inflicting Christianity on a captive audience of fee-paying passengers is just too much.

Indeed.

Via “Elayne Riggs”:http://elayneriggs.blogspot.com/2005/03/estrogen-month-day-14-welcome-any-new.html comes Tild~’s “She-Blogger”:http://tildblog.blogspot.com/2005/03/return-of-she-blogger.html. Enslaved to the conventional wisdom, constantly whoring for attention and desperate for validation by the polite society they affect to despise, these sad creatu– I’m sorry, those are the He-Bloggers. That should have read, Sharp-tongued, lurking in the shadows and heedless of their proper place in life, these slatterns tempt innocent young boy-bloggers to “subvert the dominant link hierarchy”:http://www.google.com/search?q=subvert+the+dominant+link+hierarchy. Disgusting. Yet strangely alluring.

The effort to normalize torture proceeds on two fronts. The first comes up with scenarios where torture seems justified — the “ticking bomb”:https://crookedtimber.org/2005/03/13/torture-2/ case that we “know and love”:https://crookedtimber.org/2004/06/18/by-the-power-of-stipulation-i-have-the-power. As we know, real torture never meets the criteria that even seemingly reasonable ticking-bomb hypos demand. The scenario depends on the prospective torturer knowing everything relevant about the circumstances _except one thing_ (viz, the location of the bomb and the time it will explode), which the suspect knows, and we know they know. This never happens. Instead, torture is generally a much more protracted affair, carried on with much less information about what the suspect knows or even who the proper suspects are. Nevertheless, as we saw the “other day”:https://crookedtimber.org/2005/03/13/torture-2/, the ticking-bomb still exerts a “considerable hold”:http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A18709-2005Mar8.html over people’s minds. Why?

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The latest episode of Mark Tavener’s comedy, High Table Lower Orders, includes a character who has held both the Donald Rumsfeld Chair in Peace Studies and the Bill Clinton Chair in Personal Ethics. (My University has a set of Chairs which are named by the recipients: my fantasy is to hold the Tony Hancock Chair in something, though if push ever came to shove I guess I’d go for C.L.R. James if his executors would let me). Anyway, you can do better than Mark Tavener, surely. Nominations please.