I finally got to see “Steve Earle”:http://www.steveearle.com/ play live at the “Wychwood Festival”:http://www.wychwoodfestival.com/ outside Cheltenham in England. It was a fairly miserable day weatherwise, but the storms held off for his set and (earlier) for that of his current partner Allison Moorer. Since my enthusiasm for all this may not be widely shared at CT, I’m putting the rest below the fold.
From the monthly archives:
June 2005
A few weeks ago, “Michael Bérubé”:http://www.michaelberube.com/index.php/weblog/balls_to_the_wall/ wrote a snarky post responding to a Joseph Epstein “review”:http://www.weeklystandard.com/Utilities/printer_preview.asp?idArticle=5546&R=C4FE2FB13 of Elaine Showalter’s “Faculty Towers”:http://www.powells.com/cgi-bin/biblio?inkey=62-0812238508-0, a brief history of the academic novel. As Michael says, the essay “honestly isn’t very good,” but I can understand why a little better after reading Showalter’s book. _Faculty Towers_ isn’t very good either, and it isn’t very good in the same ways as Epstein’s essay.
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Continuing on a European theme, and on recycled debates, the perennial issue[1] of Heidegger and the Nazis has been reignited by the publication of Emmanuel Faye’s Heidegger, l’introduction du nazisme dans la philosophie, which also includes an attack on Carl Schmitt, another thinker associated with the Nazis but now popular on the left (Mark Bahnisch gives some background here). Not surprisingly, Faye’s book has produced a reaction, in the classic form of a manifesto (in 13 languages!). The manifesto announces this site, with many contributions (all in French), with lots of references to to previous contributions to the debate, and without any systematic organisation, which makes it all a bit hard to follow. Some of the arguments focus on the details of the historical evidence, and others on the more general question of whether the kind of attack put forward by Faye and his supporters is legitimate, even granted the fact of Heidegger’s Nazi activity.
I haven’t read Faye, and it sounds as if he pushes his case too far, but I’m not ready to acquit Heidegger of active support for the Nazis, or to conclude that our reading of his philosophical views should be unaffected by his own apparent interpretation of them as a guide to action. However, others are, no doubt, better informed and should feel free to set me straight.
fn1. This longer post at my blog gives some links to an earlier round a few years ago.
In a story responsibly timed for release on a Friday evening, “the Pentagon confirms”:http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/4608949.stm that American soldiers at Guantanomo have been messing with the Koran in various ways:
bq. US guards at the Guantanamo Bay detention centre kicked, threw water and splashed urine on copies of Koran. The Pentagon has released details of five incidents in which the Koran was mishandled by US personnel at the camp, some intentional and others accidental. In another incident a two-word English obscenity was found written in a Koran.
I’m sure _Newsweek_ was responsible for this somehow. I suppose the next line of defense in this charade is going to be “You see, the military is investigating this and punishing the few bad apples responsible.” On the merry-go-round spins.
_Update_: As expected, the comments have examples of several of the expected, semi-trollish lines of defense. As a reminder to those now arguing that defiling the Koran is no big deal (and of course it’s small potatoes in comparison with torture and other human rights abuses), the story here is the contrast between the contents of the Pentagon report and the avalanche of aggressive, high-minded flimflam that the Administration unleashed on _Newsweek_ when it originally ran its version of the story.
“Mark Schmitt”:http://www.tpmcafe.com/story/2005/6/3/135622/4413 and “Matt Yglesias”:http://yglesias.tpmcafe.com/story/2005/6/2/104034/7861 have an interesting debate on whether the term “information age” is a metaphor, synechdoche or a description of a more-or-less tangible empirical phenomenon. I’ll have more to say about this soonish when I finish reading Bruce Abramson’s “Digital Phoenix”:http://www.powells.com/cgi-bin/biblio?inkey=62-0262012170-0 ; but in the meantime want to recommend those interested in this question to Doug Henwood’s “After the New Economy”:http://www.powells.com/cgi-bin/biblio?inkey=1-1565847709-2 (which we ran a “seminar”:https://crookedtimber.org/category/henwood-seminar on in 2004).
Update: And “Ed Kilgore”:http://www.tpmcafe.com/story/2005/6/3/233228/5444 jumps in too, arguing, as best as I can tell, that skepticism about the information age is rooted in nostalgia for a 1950’s version of social democracy, that only ever applied to the “aristocracy of labor” in the North.
Gary Farber has an interesting series of posts (here, here, here, and here) about elements of Revenge of the Sith that ended up on the cutting room floor.
From Saturday Night Live‘s TV Funhouse, the adventures of Divertor! The Jay Leno impression just slays me.
I don’t know what made me think of the Movie Trailer Cliché Theater, but it never fails to raise a smile. I miss Modern Humorist something fierce.
All the Deep Throat talk reminded me of the pleasant little comedy Dick, which proposes that Deep Throat was really two bubbly teenage girls who wandered downstairs at the wrong time during a sleepover at the Watergate. Will Ferrell and Bruce McCulloch (from “Kids in the Hall”) steal the show as Woodward and Bernstein, but Jim Breuer (as John Dean) and Harry Shearer (as G. Gordon Liddy) have some moments. I think we’ve got some readers who would enjoy it at their hastily-scheduled Deep Throat parties this weekend.
David Brooks resurrects the claim that
The Western European standard of living is about a third lower than the American standard of living, and it’s sliding. European output per capita is less than that of 46 of the 50 American states and about on par with Arkansas.
This was done to death in the blogosphere a couple of years ago, but it’s obviously time for another go.
Update: Oops! Scott Martens points out in comments that the EIU gives US median household income as $57 936, way out of line with the Census Bureau figure, which obviously invalidates my comparison, and casts doubt on their figures for France. I guess I’d better not just rely on a quick Google next time. I’ll look into the EIU numbers some more.
And, as several commentators point out, that will also teach me to be more careful before slagging off others for sloppy work. Time for a dish of crow.
Further update I haven’t yet found out how the EIU gets its numbers, but I’ve fixed the obvious errors in the post and taken the opportunity to remove unfair comments about Brooks
Have just found out that the better part of the argument that I made in “this post”:https://crookedtimber.org/2005/05/24/3351/, and which I imagined in a rather self-satisfied way to be quite original, was made (apparently some weeks ago) by Mark Leonard in this “online piece”:http://www.foreignpolicy.com/story/cms.php?story_id=2821&page=0 for _Foreign Policy_ (online). Oh well. Great minds and all that … (or perhaps, as has just been revealed in my case, not so great).
The BBC News website has “a piece on the role of bloggers in the French referendum”:http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/4603883.stm, and especially that of a “non” “manifesto by law professor Etienne Chouard”:http://etienne.chouard.free.fr/Europe/ .
The suggestion that women in Saudi Arabia might, conceivably, be allowed to drive cars provokes squeals of outrage:
Consultative Council member Mohammad al-Zulfa’s proposal has unleashed a storm in this conservative country where the subject of women drivers remains taboo. Al-Zulfa’s cell phone now constantly rings with furious Saudis accusing him of encouraging women to commit the double sins of discarding their veils and mixing with men. … [Opponents], who believe women should be shielded from strange men, say driving will allow a woman to leave home whenever she pleases and go wherever she wishes. Some say it will present her with opportunities to violate Islamic law, such as exposing her eyes while driving or interacting with strange men, like police officers or mechanics.
“Driving by women leads to evil,” Munir al-Shahrani wrote in a letter to the editor of the Al-Watan daily. “Can you imagine what it will be like if her car broke down? She would have to seek help from men.” …
It is the same argument used to restrict other freedoms. Without written permission from a male guardian, women may not travel, get an education or work. Regardless of permission, they are not allowed to mix with men in public or leave home without wearing black cloaks, called abayas.
From the guy’s point of view, the great thing about a nakedly patriarchal arrangement like this is that, absent a shift in the whole social order, women driving alone really _would_ be in serious danger. Many men who saw them would likely conclude that they were out cruising for sex, and either beat them up or rape them — and, naturally, blame the women themselves for provoking either outcome. People being the way they are, there will also be women on hand to applaud this sort of thing, thereby helping to justify it. For instance, Wajiha al-Huweidar said Saudi women did not want “the intellectuals to shine and their names to glitter at our expense. We will not permit anyone and we have not appointed anyone to speak on our behalf.” Good for you, sister! You tell those degenerate liberal intellectuals and their disgusting ideas about driving. We need some feminists in Saudi to publish a book on this topic called Our Hardbodies, Ourselves.
An unexpected outcome of the 2004 elections in Australia was that the Howard (conservative) government somewhat unexpectedly gained control of the Senate, giving it, from July 1, the power to pass legislation without relying on the support of minor parties or independents.
The most significant outcome, so far, has been industrial relations reform. Until now, Australia has experienced much less radical change in industrial relations than other English-speaking countries such as Britain and New Zealand. Not coincidentally, in my view, there has been much less growth in inequality in Australia than in these countries or the US.
Employment relationships are complex, and I can’t claim to be an expert on the details of the Australian system, either as it now exists or as it would operate under the proposed reforms. Having had most of the hard work done for me by the union, and before that by central wage fixation, I’ve tended to neglect the topic, but it’s certainly time for a crash course.
In case you missed it, the popular right-libertarian blog QandO has recently written a detailed post in opposition to torture by U.S. forces. An excerpt:
Torture and abuse is not just a moral or legal failure. It is a strategic failure in the War on Terror. Certainly, we will never be nice enough to convince Zarqawi—and the ~20,000 like him—to stop killing Americans. But there are another 55 million people in Iraq and Afghanistan who may still be convinced of our moral superiority to the Islamic fundamentalists, the terrorists and their ilk; another 55 million people whose hearts and minds may still be won.
Following a link to James Taranto from Pandagon, I find that Taranto got paid for writing this:
The Associated Press dispatch in which we found the original Kerry quote also includes this one:
“The fact is, 10 million more Americans voted for our idea of what we wanted to do than voted for Bill Clinton in 1996 when he was the sitting president of the United States,” Kerry said. “The fact is, a million people volunteered. The fact is, across America we created an energy.”“We created an energy”? But the first law of thermodynamics states that energy can neither be created nor destroyed. So much for the Democrats’ claim to be the party of science.
Well, there goes that.
I am very, very sorry that it took me so long to pull this together. Many thanks to Anthony at Things You Don’t Talk About in Polite Company for the name, and many thanks to those who emailed. Newish bloggers, I’m going to do this again in two or three weeks, and I’d love to hear from you about your best posts. Opinions expressed are not necessarily mine.
Mark Thoma at Economist’s View has a terrific basic-principles primer about The Need for Social Insurance.
Charles Norman Todd at Freiheit und Wissen compares the Bush administration’s treatment of two different Latin American governments in Guatemala and Venezuela: Two Models for U.S. Diplomacy. He also edits the Carnival of the Un-Capitalists:
Our Carnival is not meant to be anti-capitalist. Rather, we are just trying to gather the best economic posts from the left on issues ranging from globalization and neoliberalism, to income disparity, free-trade, corporate malfeasance, etc, and so on.
Patrick Smith at Tiberius and Gaius Speaking… is likely to get some angry comments about Is the Republican Party truly fascist?
Wufnik at Bazzfazz is an American ex-pat in the London. He’s got an interesting post on Team Horowitz’s take on European anti-Americanism:
American xenophobia.
Delicious Pundit has a nice metaphor going on in The martini of public policy.
Nick at News From Beyond The North Wind writes about Cumbrian company towns in These Preterite Shoes.
Chase McInerney at Cutting to the Chase is a freelance journalist in Oklahoma; he writes In Defense of Newsweek.
Josh Marshall’s new venture, “TPM Cafe”:http://www.tpmcafe.com/ is up and running, as you probably know. It’s a cross between a group blog and something like the Daily Kos model of a community website. Best of luck to them, and hopefully once they find their groove they will lay off the “Pull up a chair” stuff.