April 2005

Last week, I asked newish bloggers to send me links to their strongest posts. One of the smarter traditions of the right-wing blogs is their various “Carnival of the ….” link roundups, in which blogs volunteer themselves for links from higher-traffic blogs by presenting the posts that they are proudest of. On the left, we don’t do so much of that.

If none of my fellow Timberites object, I’m going to try to do this once a month or so. People who began blogging after January 1, 2004 or so are invited to send me links to their best posts as the month goes on. Also, anyone is welcome to suggest a better name for these sorts of roundups. “Carnival of the Reality-Based” seemed kind of lame.

Dave at The Big Lowitzki’s Random Ravings asks, “What is pro-life?”

Taryl Cabot at non-ecumenical ramblings has a fun post about inventions that still need inventing (N.B.- I think that this was the post that I was referred to… stupid Blogspot. If I’m wrong, I’ll change the link.)

Kenneth Rufo at Progressive Commons has a long and serious post about rhetoric and strategy, titled “How Not to Respond to the Luntz Memo”.

The Corpuscle has a letter to a young person, “Young Person’s Guide to Democracy”. (I’m liking this one, too: “Brand New Gay Stereotype, Gratis”.)

Adam Kotsko has obviously had his share of pledge drives.

Nick at News From Beyond The North Wind has a post about another corner of the Victorian attic, the Keswick Museum.

Alex at Bloodless Coop has a meditation on the intersection of reason and politics that doesn’t let the political left off scot-free.

Alex is also a member of a terrific group blog on neuroscience and psychology called Mind Hacks. Here’s a fascinating post on the drug ketamine, a recreational drug that produces symptoms similar to those seen in schizophrenia.

Do you know what’s interesting about comment spam? Nothing, of course. But consider this. No piece of comment spam has ever been able to mimic a human convincingly. It tries, but comment spam is like the aliens among us. They look like us, dress like us … but they also eat the houseplants. In obedience to the iron genre trope that there must be some obvious failure of mimicry that gives away this sinister presence. To read comment spam is to come to awareness that these creatures have travelled a long way to get to our little blue marble floating in space (whether they come in peace, or to breed with the ladies, or because their home planet is tragically polluted.) Consider this offering, left in response to a post about a passage from Thomas Mann:

I also have read some of the best articles I’ve ever read after coming into the blogoshpere. I check the indices such as Daypop for what are the most linked news stories and blogs. I used to go to the library and look through publications but I would never find the articles and stories I’m finding on the internet.

There is a pathos to it. (I’ve left it up to reward it for winning my heart.) I’m seeing an alien who has assumed a somewhat Walter Mittyish form. He is short with thick glasses. His suit is ill-fitting. Every day he goes to the library seeking information about this strange new world. The nice librarian – a mousy girl with glasses and pearls – very demurely executes a gesture that takes in a whole room of books full of articles and stories. Our protagonist clumsily examines a few volumes, sniffs them, turns them upside down. Where is the information? When he becomes frustrated he makes little honking noises that annoy a bosomy old blue-haired bluenose society-type. A rugged teenage boy in his proud letterman’s jacket is checking out a book on football. He openly laughs at the stranger. “Yer an oddball, fella,” causing the little man to back nervously against the shelves, eyes darting. A book falls on his head. The librarian, feeling sorry for him, whispers ‘shhhh’. Every day it is the same until one day the delivery man, polite cap in hand, presents the librarian with the heavy box containing the library’s new computer. She is nervous but excited, eager to make this new thing part of her little domain. She isn’t sure how it works … but the mysterious stranger is there by her side. Somehow his fingers find all the right keys. We see the light of scrolling pages reflected in the lenses of glasses. Daypop! He is happy. The light is in her glasses, too. She is happy, seeing that he is happy. Every day he is there, always Daypop sending him to new blogs where he leaves messages. Always the same. About how in the library he could never find anything, but now Daypop sends him to new blogs everyday. He can hardly type the messages quickly enough. (He has another amusing tick. He always drinks milk. Only milk. Which gives him a silly moustache. But the milk makes him slightly drunk – his alien metabolism. Hence he slurs his speech and types things like ‘blogoshpere’.) One day the librarian, out of curiosity, clicks on the little hyperlink that is his name – odd name, sounds foreign – at the bottom of one of those many comments he leaves all day, every day. It transports her to … the little stranger’s homeworld, where she is surrounded by golden (oh, hell with it.)

There was a bit of an argument that was provoked by my recent post about Republican intentions and labour reform; Sebastian Holsclaw, among other commenters, suggested that not only could Republicans be trusted to undertake reform and increase accountability in the labour movement, they were the only political party that could be so trusted. Democrats were too close to the unions to want to change them. By sheer coincidence, I was reading Rick Perlstein’s Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus over the last couple of days, and came across the following bit (p.37), in which Goldwater compares idealistic and incorruptible union leader Walter Reuther to James Hoffa senior (who was incidentally a Goldwater fan):

“Do you mean to tell me,” asked an amazed committee accountant after wading through the ascetic leader’s expense accounts,”that Walter Reuther pays for his own dry cleaning when he stays in a hotel?” Goldwater was not deterred. “I would rather have Hoffa stealing my money, ” he declared, “than Reuther stealing my freedom.”

Now on the one hand, Goldwater was one individual, and he’s dead. But on the other, he was perhaps the single most important influence on modern Republicanism. As Perlstein documents, Goldwater’s particular brand of don’t-touch-me conservatism came to dominate the Republican movement. His ordering of preferences is, I’d submit, very strong evidence that one strain (arguably the dominant strain) of modern Republicanism shouldn’t be trusted anywhere near the question of trade union reform. It’s not interested in reforms to improve transparency so much as gutting the labour movement. Charismatic, personally honest leaders are a much bigger threat to these people than corrupt union bosses like Hoffa.

(I should also say that “Before the Storm” is a cracking read; anyone who’s interested in the forces driving current American politics should read it).

Two interesting stories in the Chronicle. First, another state legislature bill that sought (in its original form) to control how academics teach in the classroom; this time addressing their English language abilities.

Late in January, Ms. Grande proposed a bill in the North Dakota legislature to prod public institutions of higher education in precisely that direction. Under her bill, if a student complained in writing that his or her instructor did not “speak English clearly and with good pronunciation,” that student would then be entitled to withdraw from the class with no academic or financial penalty — and would even get a refund. Further, if 10 percent of the students in a class came forward with such complaints, the university would be obliged to move the instructor into a “nonteaching position,” thus losing that instructor’s classroom labor.

As a differently-accented professor myself, I don’t feel in a position to make substantial comments. The article does seem to cover both sides of the argument fairly. It notes research suggesting that students in sections taught by foreign born T.A.s do worse than students in sections taught by native Americans. Equally, however, there’s evidence suggesting that this is in part the result of bad training (many schools don’t offer proper training to incoming T.A.s from different countries), as well as expectations (experiments suggest that students ‘expect’ foreign-appearing lecturers to have worse English, and have difficulty in understanding them even when they are perfectly fluent).

The Chronicle also has a follow-up story (sub-required) on the fallout from its plagiarism investigation of last year. Two plagiarists lost their jobs; one had (unspecified) disciplinary action taken against him by his university, another had no action taken against him, after an internal university investigation, which determined that the evidence supported a charge of plagiarism, but that the issue had arisen during a previous collaborative relationship.

Brad DeLong once wrote “Marty Weitzman is smarter than I am”. And he probably is; his paper on the equity risk premium was a gem, and in the couple of email exchanges I had with him he seemed like a hell of a nice bloke too. But it just goes to show that there are all sorts of different kinds of intelligence; I’d struggle horribly in any one of Weitzman’s economics seminars, but having grown up in the country, I’m pretty sure that if I wanted to nick a trailer load of horse manure I’d have been over the hills and far away with it, no trouble, before you could say “what a way to earn a living”. Nicking agricultural waste seems to me like one of those Hayekian “tacit knowledge” fields, where street-smarts and experience are probably a bigger driver of success than book-larnin’.

You wouldn’t have thought that someone who spent most of his working days in the Harvard Economics Faculty would be short of horseshit[1] but apparently so. On a more serious note, if there are any disciplinary consequences for Weitzman, at all, then I for one will be kicking up a hell of a fuss and encouraging him to sue. I mean, talk about a bloody double standard. Best of luck, Marty. Btw, what a pity it wasn’t Bullshit[2], or the rhetorical irony would have been complete.

[1]I plagiarised this from Doug Henwood
[2]Yes yes, fellow bumpkins, I know; nobody would bother to collect cow manure or steal it because cow manure isn’t all that good a fertiliser. Since I moved to the city I discovered these things called “jokes” and that was one of them.

Via “Pandagon”:http://www.pandagon.net/mtarchives/004936.html, the “Rev. Terry Fox”:http://www.ljworld.com/section/gaymarriage/story/201237 of Wichita, KS:

bq. Fox helped turn defeat of the amendment in the Legislature in 2004 to victory for his side at the polls Tuesday night. The amendment passed by 70 percent to 30 percent. “We never dreamed we would have this margin of victory,” he said. Next in his sights, he said, is “keeping an eye on evolution and abortion clinics.”

Evolution clinics? Hey, that’s not such a bad idea. We could get “P.Z. Myers”:http://pharyngula.org/ to run them as a franchise:

Walk-in: Well _I_ think that evolution is just a _theory_.
PZ: Step in to this room, please.

Meanwhile, Tad Brennan finds the Washington Post describing the “unusual educational careers”:http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A32379-2005Apr6.html of Howard Dean supporters:

bq. More than half (54 percent) hold post-graduate degrees and a quarter have graduated from college.

Tad says that if he’d known you could get a post-graduate degree without graduating college, he’d have saved years of his life.

Which could be inconvenient as I fancy the knickers off him. Who are you? Via the younger Farrell siblings who are thinking of setting up a blog just to discuss the books, the George R.R.R.R. Martin Ice and Fire personality test.

After months of delay and dispute, the BBC reports that the Iraqi Parliament has finally mustered the two-thirds majority needed to nominate a president and two vice-presidents. These positions are largely ceremonial, but the deal presumably implies an agreement to select a Prime Minister, after which an interim government can finally take office, with the task of drawing up a permanent constitution. Some good news is that the Allawi group has been kept to the marginal position its weak electoral support implies.

There are still plenty of big problems ahead – the delays reflect fundamental divisions between Kurds and Shias about the future of Iraq and, except for some token appointments, the Sunnis have been excluded altogether. And the insurgency continues with little letup, having no doubt found many recruits among the refugees from Fallujah, almost completely destroyed in the November campaign there. Still, it seems reasonable to hope that a reasonably democratic, and only moderately Islamist government will eventually emerge.

Assuming this happens, was the invasion worth it? In my view, No.
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“Mark Schmitt”:http://markschmitt.typepad.com/decembrist/2005/04/david_brooks_is.html, “Jesse Taylor”:http://www.pandagon.net/mtarchives/004914.html#more and “Matt Yglesias”:http://yglesias.typepad.com/matthew/2005/04/brooks_on_disag.html have some interesting (and, in Jesse’s case, annoyed) things to say about “this David Brooks column”:http://www.nytimes.com/2005/04/05/opinion/05brooks.html?ex=1270353600&en=95b8e0d5b311e9b1&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland. All I have to say is that I hate this sort of thing:

bq. A year ago I called the head of a prominent liberal think tank to ask him who his favorite philosopher was. If I’d asked about health care, he could have given me four hours of brilliant conversation, but on this subject he stumbled and said he’d call me back. He never did.

This is supposed to be an indictment? I mean, I’m sorry the guy didn’t call Brooks back. But can you think of _any_ answer that Brooks would not have been able to turn into a head-shaking anecdote about the intellectual poverty and disarray of modern liberalism? Meanwhile, Brooks switches on his dichotomizer and, remarkably, always has himself come down on the right side — Red and Blue, Thinkers and Actors, Isolationists and Interventionists, “Fifties intellectuals and Contemporary intellectuals”:http://newyorkmetro.com/nymetro/news/media/columns/medialife/n_9749/index1.html , “Lucky-Charmers and Cheerioians”:http://www.mcsweeneys.net/2004/9/20warner.html. Occasionally he’ll divide people up in a way that makes sense in the light of your own analysis of things. This is what seems to have happened this time with “Mark Schmitt”:http://markschmitt.typepad.com/decembrist/2005/04/david_brooks_is.html. But whereas Mark has a point of view and an argument to back it up, I don’t see much evidence that Brooks’ efforts are coming from anywhere other than the ur-distinction in his head between Us and Them.

This post should probably be called The Pope in Ireland II, following Kieran’s post of a couple of days ago. But I’m not quite ready to finally delete the shreds of a posting I keep re-writing that keeps getting overtaken by other posts and events in the meantime.

Anyway, this morning Slugger O’Toole points to the most beautiful antidote to the dolorous (and, frankly, condescending) blanket coverage of the pope’s death by CNN. Slugger kindly reproduces in full Fintan O’Toole’s superb essay placing JPII’s reign in the context of Hobbes’ description of the papacy as “nothing other than the ghost of the deceased Roman Empire, sitting crowned upon the grave thereof”.

If, like me, you can’t bear another moment of mock-mourningful journalists raking out endless and unseemly titbits of human interest and pointless kremlinology-like speculations about the next pope, read this. It’s a cracker.

Blair has “called the UK general election for May the 5th”:http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/4409935.stm . Though the polls seem to be indicating a Tory surge, the “current odds at bluesq”:http://www.bluesq.com/bet?action=go_events&type_id=850 are Labour 1/14, Tories 13/2, and LibDems 100/1.

I watched “Der Untergang”:http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0363163/ (Downfall) last night at Bristol’s Watershed cinema. An astonishing film. Bruno Ganz is fantastic as the increasingly stressed and incoherent Hitler and Corinna Harfouch is chilling as the the unremittingly evil Magda Goebbels. The film works partly through the contrast between above-ground where Berlin crumbles under Soviet bombardment and the bunker where reality impinges on fantasy intermittently and increasingly shockingly. There’s a great scene where Hitler addresses Albert Speer across the model of his planned Berlin-of-the-future whilst the real Berlin is flattened. Hitler is petty and selfish to the end, screaming of betrayal, his hatred of the Jews, and telling all that will hear that the German people deserve to die for letting him down — personally. The only slightly false note was when Traudl Junge (Hitler’s secretary) escapes at the end — one suspects some embellishment.

When the film ended the cinema was perfectly still for a moment or two. Everyone in the audience was, I think, psychologically winded by what they’d seen. Ganz, Harfouch and director Hirschbiegel deserve Oscars for this, no question.

“Josh”:http://www.talkingpointsmemo.com/archives/week_2005_04_03.php#005332 is entirely right that Sen John Conryn’s statements in the Senate today about violence against judges are utterly unacceptable. Saying that judges are somehow to blame for violence against judges and courtworkers should be enough to get you kicked out of any ethically responsible caucus. This being the contemporary GOP, I’m not holding my breath.

“Brad DeLong”:http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2005/04/ben_bernanke_to.html gets a mild case of “pundit’s fallacy”:http://www.jargondatabase.com/Jargon.aspx?id=990 as he reacts to the news that “Ben Bernanke will head the CEA”:http://news.ft.com/cms/s/0de25c40-a304-11d9-b4e8-00000e2511c8,_i_rssPage=9d5b9ebe-c8bc-11d7-81c6-0820abe49a01.html:

bq. … the first thing that Ben should do is to make a stand on a technical-but-vital issue where the CEA should have made its stand: get the Bush administration to reduce the clawback real interest rate on its proposed private accounts from 3% plus inflation to a floating rate equal to the U.S. Treasury’s borrowing rate (or the borrowing rate minus a small margin). That would keep Bush’s private accounts from being a bad deal for the non-rich who opt for them.

He probably should. But one has to ask, how likely is it that _that’s_ going to happen? Bernanke certainly seems like a good guy, but the Bush Administration has a way of making sure that the good guys knuckle under. I see three ways this might happen. First, a pre-emptive effort to get him to publicly articulate the Apostolic Creed of the administration. (“I believe in one authority, the Executive almighty …”) Second, a straightforward smack on the wrist (or blow to the back of the head) as soon as Bernanke tries to assert a bit of intellectual independence. Third, a temptation on Bernanke’s part to make a Devil’s bargain: something like, “If I hold back for now, I’ll be in a _much_ stronger position to do the right thing when they appoint me Chairman of the Fed.” That way madness lies.