I’m not sure if this is an occult link with the Zeitgeist, or just a manifestation of the reallocation of attention that leads new parents to notice other people’s babies, but a month ago, I finally got around to ordering “The Strange Death of Liberal England” (George Dangerfield) which arrived at Easter. In the ensuing couple of weeks I’ve seen not one but two uses of the same idea, with both Protestantism and Toryism dying strange deaths. Maybe this is happening all the time and I’ve just started noticing.
From the monthly archives:
April 2005
“Over at John Band’s site”:http://www.stalinism.com/shot-by-both-sides/full_post.asp?pid=970 they’re all doing Chris Lightfoot’s “Who Should You Vote For?”:http://www.whoshouldyouvotefor.com/ (in the coming UK general election) test. Annoyingly, I came out Lib Dem on this though I fully intend to grit my teeth and vote Labour anyway. But for the purposes of this post I’m going to go all meta and discuss what we are trying to do in voting and how that affects how we should vote. Here’s something I posted on the philos-l list just before the 1992 general election:
bq. A friend asked me to provide him with an argument against tactical voting and I came up with this – derived very loosely from some of the things Geoff Brennan says in his ‘Politics with Romance’, in Alan Hamlin and Philip Pettit eds The Good Polity (Blackwell 1989).
bq. The only situation in which an individual voter can affect the outcome is one where there is a tie among the other voters. But in a large electorate this is unlikely to be the case. I want to do two things with my vote: express a preference and secure an outcome. But since my chances of the latter are so small, I may as well concentrate my deliberations on the expressive side. If I am a positive identifier with a particular party — and this is more important to me than my negative feelings towards another party — then even if my party is third I should still vote for it (if I vote). By doing so I secure one of my objectives (the expressive one) but run only a vanishingly small risk of incurring the cost of bringing about a worse outcome than if I had voted tactically. The rational voter should therefore vote for the party she prefers unless it is more important to you expressively to declare your hostility to the party you loathe most – in which case vote for the best placed challenger to that party.
In other words: it is a waste of time and effort to try to bring about a determinate outcome. You’ll almost certainly make no difference. Tactical voting is an attempt to bring about some determinate outcome. But if what is important to you is saying “Blair hooray!” or “Howard boo!” then you can do this perfectly well (voting being only one way of doing it of course). And there’s no merit to the argument that voting for the Lib Dems, Respect, or even the Monster Raving Loony Party is a “wasted vote”. It is no more wasted than any other. So vote for whom you like best, or against whom you hate most, instead of making micro-calculations about effectiveness.
(BTW I realise that this argument deprives me of one lot of nasty things I might say about people who voted for Ralph Nader in either 2000 or 2004, but there are many other nasty things to be said about such people anyway, so I don’t care that much.)
Whether the debate centers around a Presidential election, the right to die movement, the gay agenda, prayer in school, or simply letting our children recite the Pledge of Alligence, the teachings of Jesus Christ always seems to thwart the agenda of America’s left wing elites.
Forget what you heard in the 1960s.
God is not dead.
In fact, he is very much alive and beating liberal elites on one political issue after another.
Maybe that is why so many of them hate the Prince of Peace.
via Andrew Sullivan, who wonders, as I do, which of Jesus’s teachings related to homosexuals or Bush vs. Kerry. Perhaps if I didn’t hate the Prince of Peace I’d know.
In 580 words, Scarborough uses the words “elite” or “elites” 6 times. This kind of class resentment is understandable from a “regular Joe” (his term) like Scarborough, but it’s hard to put your finger on when it developed. He might have picked it up during his hardscrabble days as a partner in a Florida law firm. He might have learned to resent the elites that he hired and fired as a newspaper owner. It could have come from his days as a hard-working blue-collar Congressman. (As Tom DeLay has attested, it’s very difficult making ends meet on a Congressional salary.)
Or maybe it’s more recent. Like most millionaire television pundits, Regular Joe can probably really commiserate with the concerns that working folks have about shitty service from the incompetent idiots that our employers hire to style our hair and apply our makeup.
Meanwhile, the House is about to vote for the permanent repeal of the estate tax. Joe will probably get right on that.
P.S. Did you notice that one of the “liberal elites” named ‘n’ shamed is Christopher Hitchens? What a coincidence.
Now that Meetup has decided to start charging for its services, I wonder if Upcoming.org is going to take off. It seems like a promising service and many new features are being added these days. It’s not clear why it’s been so slow to spread. It seems it’s still lacking the necessary critical mass. It’ll be interesting to see how the recent additions of features to it and the changes at Meetup may influence its future.
I am not letting this performance be the sole CT contribution to the noble cause of book-related vanity-stroking blog memes.
“Tom B,” commenting at Making Light, points us to the Automatic Computer Science Paper Generator, which uses context-free grammar to generate papers, complete with graphs, figures and citations, which can then be submitted to conferences with low or no standards for the papers they accept. Its creators (MIT pranksters) have already succeeded in getting accepted by one conference – if they can raise the money, they intend, Yes Men style, to go there and deliver the paper with straight faces. It seems to me that pranks of this sort (the Atlanta Nights affair also qualifies) have the logic of a reverse Turing test – any conference (or publishing house, or journal, or whatever) which is stupid or unprincipled enough to accept this sort of nonsense is revealing itself to be a fake.
A reminder to CT readers in the DC area: Chris Mooney is giving a talk today at 5pm (Room 602, the Elliott School for International Affairs, 1957 E St, Washington DC) on “Abuses of Science in Politics and Journalism.” – RSVP at cistp@gwu.edu. The talk will preview some of the themes of his forthcoming book, The Republican War on Science, which you can pre-order at Amazon. Blurb for the talk below.
When 48 Nobel Laureates denounce the current administration for abusing and distorting scientific information, we can safely say that the once strong relationship between the scientific community and our political leaders has all but disintegrated. What are the causes of the current crisis? In “Abuses of Science in Politics and Journalism,” science writer Chris Mooney takes on both the politicians who have distorted scientific information, and the media gatekeepers who have too often let them get away with it. On issues ranging from global climate change to the new pseudo-debate over the theory of evolution versus “intelligent design,” he will explain who’s undermining science–and why their strategies are succeeding.
Everyone else is talking about health care this week, so here’s a reprise of an old post of mine. Below is a figure showing the relationship between the “Publicness” of the health system and the amount spent on health care per person per year. Data points are each country’s mean score on these measures for the years 1990 to 2001.
You can also get a “nicer PDF version”:http://www.kieranhealy.org/files/misc/health-ratios.pdf of this figure. As you can see, health care in other advanced capitalist democracies is typically twice as public and half as expensive as the United States.
When I posted this before, I made the mistake of not emphasizing a key point: these data *do not include* any health-related Research and Development spending, so it’s not the case that the U.S. is way up in the top left simply because it’s generously subsidizing everyone else’s research costs.
The figure doesn’t show it, but it’s worth noting that despite not having a national health system, U.S. public expenditure on health in the 1990s was higher in terms of GDP than in Ireland, Switzerland, Spain, Austria, Japan, Australia and Britain.
It’s easy to see that mainstream debate about health care in the U.S. happens inside a self-contained bubble, and that one of its main conservative tropes — the inevitable expense and inefficiency of some kind of universal health care system — is wholly divorced from the data.
I had a conversation at the weekend where the topic of baby-farming came up. Unmarried mother in Victorian England? Can’t stand the social stigma? No problem, babies disposed of no questions asked …. The full details are in Dorothy Haller’s online essay “Bastardy and Baby Farming in Victorian England”:http://www.loyno.edu/~history/journal/1989-0/haller.htm . A sample quote:
bq. Baby farmers, the majority of whom were women, ran ads in newspapers which catered to working class girls. On any given day a young mother could find at least a dozen ads in the Daily Telegraph, and in the Christian Times, soliciting for the weekly, monthly, or yearly care of infants. All these advertisements were aimed at the mothers of illegitimate babies who were having difficulty finding employment with the added liability of a child. A typical ad might read:
bq.
NURSE CHILD WANTED, OR TO ADOPT — The Advertiser, a Widow with a little family of her own, and moderate allowance from her late husband’s friends, would be glad to accept the charge of a young child. Age no object. If sickly would receive a parent’s care. Terms, Fifteen Shillings a month; or would adopt entirely if under two months for the small sum of Twelve pounds.
This ad may have been misleading to the general public, but it read like a coded message to unwed mothers. The information about the character and financial condition of the person soliciting for nurse children appears to be acceptable at first glance, but no name and no address is given. No references are asked for and none are offered. The sum of 15s a week to keep an infant or a sickly child was inadequate, and a sickly child and an infant under two months were the least likely to survive and the cheapest to bury. Infants were taken no questions asked and it was understood that for 12 pounds no questions were expected to be asked. The transaction between the mother and the babyfarmer usually took place in a public place, on public transportation, or through a second party. No personal information was exchanged, the money was paid, and the transaction was complete. The mother knew she would never see her infant alive again.
No doubt this practice flourishes in certain societies today and would do wherever the theocrats get the upper hand. Read the whole thing, as someone-or-other is wont to say.
Peter Briffa “passes the latest meme thingy”:http://publicinterest.blogspot.com/2005/04/via-peter-cuthbertson-youre-stuck.html on to Crooked Timber. It’s a good job I never became a major celebrity (it was touch-and-go for a while there) because I am useless with these kinds of questions, and celebrities seem to get asked them all the time. I never know what my favorite _x_ (color, food, piece of music, composer, book, whatever) is; I can rarely remember the right answer to the “What’s the last …?” questions; and I can never think up a good response to the “If you only had …?” questions. This one is no different.
John Maeda has some nice visualizations comparing U.S. tax dollars spent on science vs the arts or the Whitewater/Lewinsky Investigations vs the 9/11 Commission. His source is an article in Parade whose print version apparently has much more info than the online one. [via]
If there wasn’t such a stigma attached to being gay for so many, would men really have to be so paranoid about catching up with a male friend? It seems like such an unfortunate waste of energy to tiptoe around these situations. Of course, I understand why I can’t simply say “So what if someone thinks you’re gay even if you are not?” given that it may have implications depending on the circumstances. But that is what’s so unfortunate.
“Lee Scoresby” on blogs:
A recent hypertext trail of posts and comments, which I followed from Obsidian Wings to Jane Galt, sparked some thoughts I’ve been entertaining about another paradigm that might be useful for thinking about at least some of what goes down on weblogs. In brief, the idea is that one things good weblog discussions and postings do is to recreate the important experience of late-night collegiate bullshit sessions.
Discuss, with reference to the larger claims advanced in the original post.
He still believes in progressive taxation; the New Deal; … and, in general, firm and constant opposition to the very frequent efforts of the rich and their agents to grind the faces of the poor. It’s just that he now cordially despises most of the people who proclaim or advocate these things.
…
Since 9/11, reflectiveness and skepticism have gone on holiday from his political writing. Logic and good manners have also frequently called in sick. “Embattled” is too mild a description of his state of mind; it’s been inflamed. Those who returned different answers than he did to the questions “Why did 9/11 happen?” and “What should we do about it?” were not to be taken seriously. They were Osama’s useful idiots, “soft on crime and soft on fascism,” their thinking “utterly rotten to its very core.”
…
On and on Hitchens’s polemics against the left have raged, a tempest of inaccuracy, illogic, and malice.
George Scialabba writes Christopher Hitchens’ political obituary for N+1 magazine.