August 2005

Robert KC Johnson “claims”:http://hnn.us/blogs/entries/13987.html that the New York State legislature’s creation of a commission to examine curricula and textbooks to see whether they properly reflect the African-American experience demonstrates the convergence of the far left and far right.

bq. Whoa. Isn’t that exactly what the Kansas board of Education is doing with intelligent design? Where is the AAUP, or the CUNY faculty union, denouncing the threat to academic freedom inherent in a politically-appointed board making “suggestions for revisions to the curricula and textbooks”? I’m not holding my breath waiting for either group to act.

Tripe and nonsense. It very obviously _isn’t_ what the Kansas board of Education is doing. What’s at issue in Kansas is whether or not a pseudo-scientific set of rhetorical claims that were consciously designed to create a “wedge”:http://www.infidels.org/library/modern/barbara_forrest/wedge.html in the heart of science are given equal standing to a well established and tested scientific theory. What’s at issue here is whether or not school curricula and textbooks should reflect the historic experience of a particular group. Now you can criticize the latter on its own terms (as Tim Burke has “done”:http://weblogs.swarthmore.edu/burke/?p=40 with regard to a similar proposal in Pennsylvania), but it clearly isn’t even the same _type_ of issue as trying to steamroller Intelligent Design into the curriculum. It’s a question of the kind of collective understanding of history that schools should be teaching, which is a very different, and much fuzzier thing.

(Nor, as an aside, do curriculum committees of this sort necessarily produce the kinds of one-dimensional history that Tim rightly fears. A friend of mine was heavily involved in another committee which was mandated by the Albany legislature a few years ago to include the Irish famine on the state’s Human Rights Curriculum. It’s probably safe to guess that the Irish-American legislators who came up with this initiative anticipated schoolkids being fed wrap-the-green-flag-round-me nationalism, the wickedness of perfidious Albion etc etc. The committee’s final curriculum “didn’t do this”:http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0FKX/is_2002_Spring-Summer/ai_87915679/pg_3 – instead it used the Famine and the Irish emigrant experience to ask more general questions about the relationship between politics, economics and hunger, to draw the connections with contemporary politics, and to talk bluntly about some of the nastier aspects of the Irish-American experience, such as racism and the Draft Riots).

I’ve been meaning to write a long and irritating piece on divorce for ages. You’ll have to wait. In the mean time, Laura at 11D has a good post on it, followed by fascinating, if sometimes slightly intemperate, comments. Well worth a read. (And not irritating, unlike my unactualised piece).

Totally. “See for yourself”:http://www.crooksandliars.com/2005/08/09.html#a4385. Also disturbing in a chest-thrusting, cheesecake-grin kind of way, too. Brrr.

Via “Matt Yglesias”:http://yglesias.tpmcafe.com/story/2005/8/10/102155/390, this quite repulsive comparison from “Max Boot”:http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/la-oe-boot3aug03,0,3318247.column?coll=la-util-op-ed between the indiscriminate bombing of civilians in World War II and the war in Iraq.

bq. Oh, how times change. Today we can put “smart” bombs through the window of an office building. Along with greater accuracy has come a growing impatience with “collateral damage.” A bomb that goes astray and hits a foreign embassy or a wedding party now causes international outrage, whereas 60 years ago the destruction of an entire city was a frequent occurrence.

bq. Does this make us more enlightened than the “greatest generation”? Perhaps. We certainly have the luxury of being more discriminating in the application of violence. But even today, there is cause to doubt whether more precision is always better. During the initial invasion of Iraq in 2003, the U.S. was so sparing in its use of force that many Baathists never understood they were beaten. The butcher’s bill we dodged early on is now being paid with compound interest.

So the reason that we’re in trouble in Iraq is that we didn’t carpet-bomb the hell out of the country at the beginning of the campaign. Boot demurs that he “can’t claim to have worked out the moral calculus of bombing,” and is “troubled” by the deliberate targetting of civilians. Still, the direction of his argument is quite clear, and, as Matt says, rather revealing. There’s something deeply nasty about the disconnect (which is perhaps most clearly expressed in Charles Krauthammer’s dictum that the only way to win Arabs’ hearts and minds is to grab their balls and squeeze them hard) between neo-cons’ purported aims and methods. It would seem rather difficult to make the claim that you’re acting in the best interests of the Iraqi people gel with a claim that greater brutality and more indiscriminate use of force against said people was needed to protect said interests. But that’s what Boot seems to be trying to do.

On the way in to work I was listening to a story about the latest round of “proposed radiation standards”:http://www.ens-newswire.com/ens/aug2005/2005-08-09-04.asp for the proposed high-level radioactive waste dump at “Yucca Mountain, Nevada.”:http://www.ocrwm.doe.gov/ymp/index.shtml Because spent nuclear fuel and radioactive waste lasts a terrifically long time, and because the project is so controversial, the EPA has had to come up with a standard for storing the stuff. Yesterday they announced one designed to protect public health for a million years, or, in the words of an EPA administrator “the next 25,000 generations of Americans.”

I’m not an expert on any of this, but it seems that the inescapable fact about this sort of policy document is that the premise is wholly absurd. The sociologist Lee Clarke “has argued”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0226109410/kieranhealysw-20/ref=nosim/ that plans of this sort, designed to cope with huge disasters or accidents, are fundamentally rhetorical “fantasy documents” that have no prospect of working but which are produced as ritual symbols of social order and control. It’s bad enough when the disasters in question are things like a large-scale terrorist attack or a big oil spill. But a million years is about two hundred times longer than the whole of recorded human history, and the idea that we can design something built to work over that time-span is just ridiculous. Even the short-range standard proposed by the EPA covers a period of ten thousand years. At the same time, both the political fight and the nuclear waste are real, so you have to do something. “Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair,” to coin a phrase.

This seems like an awfully big deal.

BAGHDAD, Iraq, Aug. 9 – Armed men entered Baghdad’s municipal building during a blinding dust storm on Monday, deposed the city’s mayor and installed a member of Iraq’s most powerful Shiite militia.

The deposed mayor, Alaa al-Tamimi, who was not in his offices at the time, recounted the events in a telephone interview on Tuesday and called the move a municipal coup d’état. He added that he had gone into hiding for fear of his life.

“This is the new Iraq,” said Mr. Tamimi, a secular engineer with no party affiliation. “They use force to achieve their goal.”

The group that ousted him insisted that it had the authority to assume control of Iraq’s capital city and that Mr. Tamimi was in no danger. The man the group installed, Hussein al-Tahaan, is a member of the Badr Organization, the armed militia of the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq, known as Sciri.

The militia has been credited with keeping the peace in heavily Shiite areas in southern Iraq but also accused of abuses like forcing women to wear the veils demanded by conservative Shiite religious law.

“If we wanted to do something bad to him, we would have done that,” said Mazen A. Makkia, the elected city council chief who led the ouster on Monday and who had been in a lengthy and unresolved legal feud with Mr. Tamimi.

“We really want to establish the state of law for every citizen, and we did not threaten anyone,” Mr. Makkia said. “This is not a coup.”

As Justin Delbar notes, this militia is trained and funded by Iran. It seems that the coalition hasn’t had time to respond to this. However, through a spokesman, the Shiite Iraqi prime minister, Ibrahim al-Jaafari, announced that “the prime minister would not stand in the way of the move.” That’s very depressing. It should go without saying that the blossoming of the rule of law is incompatible with armed coups by Iranian-backed militias. I’m ignorant about so many things in Iraq, but I can’t see how coalition forces can let this stand. (Maybe Christopher Hitchens could suggest an appropriate bake sale for us liberals to support.)

On the same day, Iran broke the seals on an atomic processing facility. More on Iranian nuclear plans here and here.

UPDATE: More on Al-Tamimi. He was appointed by the Baghdad city council under Paul Bremer’s supervision. (He’s also a former engineer in Saddam’s nuclear weapons program who managed to escape the country in 1995.) Neil (in comments) notes that according to Wikipedia, he resigned on June 21st in response to charges of corruption, but apparently had not vacated yet. Apparently, the Shiite-dominated city council has been actively pressuring him to leave office since 2004.

UPDATE II: Picking on Hitchens isn’t the most important point here, but Steve at No More Mister Nice Blog points out:

This is the mayor Christopher Hitchens wrote about Monday in Slate.

Question: Why have several large American cities not already announced that they are going to become sister cities with Baghdad and help raise money and awareness to aid Dr. Tamimi?

Steve points out that Tempe, Philadelphia, Dallas, Tuscon, and Denver have established sister cities in Iraq since the war. He then notes:

It has been pointed out that, strictly speaking, Denver’s link to Baghdad isn’t a formal sister-city relationship. Whatever it is, though, it didn’t prevent this coup. Then again, neither did billions in federal tax dollars, 1,800 servicemembers’ lives, and semi-permanent occupation by 130,000 U.S. troops.

The Flop Eared Mule (who is becoming a daily stop for me) has “a fine post on Townes Van Zandt”:http://flopearedmule.blogspot.com/2005_08_01_flopearedmule_archive.html#112365680440804113 , Philip Larkin, and how life-embracing depressing lyrics can be (complete with link to an interview with the maker of the forthcoming Townes movie).

Christopher Hitchens in Slate “asks”:http://slate.msn.com/id/2124157/ :

bq. Isn’t there a single drop of solidarity and compassion left over for the people of Iraq, after three decades of tyranny, war, and sanctions and now an assault from the vilest movement on the face of the planet?

Needless to say there isn’t a mention of the fact that they wouldn’t be under assault from “the vilest movement on the face of the planet”, nor would that movement be as strong as it presently is, but for the policy that Hitchens and his co-thinkers promoted in the first place. Oh, sorry, I didn’t notice at first, but Hitchens doesn’t believe that since he claims:

bq. Bad as Iraq may look now, it is nothing to what it would have become without the steadying influence of coalition forces. None of the many blunders in postwar planning make any essential difference to that conclusion. Indeed, by drawing attention to the ruined condition of the Iraqi society and its infrastructure, they serve to reinforce the point.

The “steadying influence of coalition forces” …..

I posted before about “PledgeBank”:http://www.pledgebank.com/ and, specifically, about Nicola’s pledge (see also “accompanying blog”:http://justonepercent.blogspot.com/ ) for people to donate 1 per cent of their income to charity. Sadly, the first version of that pledge failed to attract the 400 pledgers needed. So she “relaunched it with a target of 100”:http://www.pledgebank.com/onepercent . With just under a couple a weeks to got she is 32 short, so come on CT readers, get pledging and help Nicola to succeed this time!

The Hugo award for best novel went to “Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell: A Novel” by Susanna Clarke, beating a strong field. Charles Stross, whose Iron Sunrise was also a contender, took out the best novella prize for The Concrete Jungle. And I’ll be surprised if we don’t see Ian McDonald, Iain M. Banks and China Miéville among future winners of the award.

This paragraph in a “post”:http://www.volokh.com/archives/archive_2005_08_07-2005_08_13.shtml#1123523518 by Andrew Morriss, guestblogging with the Volokhs, struck me as saying some pretty odd things about publication policies in the legal academy.

bq. There are huge problems with the U.S. News rankings but there is no question that they are important. For example, a friend recently told me that she had been called by a law review about one of her manuscripts. The articles editor apologized for rejecting the manuscript and explained that the rejection had been made without reading the paper because the editors had mistakenly misclassified my friend’s school as being in a lower tier law school. Now that they realized their error, the editor told her, they wanted to consider the article on the merits. I don’t know how widespread this type of screening is, but that it occurred at a well-ranked, but not top journal is at least moderately disturbing.

Now I know that there are a lot of complaints among legal academics about the dominant role of student-edited law reviews. But (if this is at all representative), I hadn’t realized quite how bad the problem was. It’s not (as Micah has “argued previously”:https://crookedtimber.org/2004/10/25/dont-blame-the-law-students-a-reply-to-posner ) the fault of the students editing these reviews – when you have so many article submissions that you’re literally unable to read them all (thanks to the practice of multiple submissions), you’re inevitably going to have some more-or-less unfair metric for deciding which ones to read, and which ones not to. The problem is a structural one. But it does suggest that it’s going to be a lot more difficult for a smart legal academic in a second or third tier school to improve her position by publishing material in good journals, than it would be if she were, say, a political scientist or a sociologist. If her school’s position in the rankings counts against her chances of getting published, she may find herself in a Catch-22 situation; the only way to get published in good journals is to improve her personal name-recognition (since her school won’t help), but the only way to improve her personal name-recognition is to get published. Blind peer review, which is the norm across most of academia, does serve as at least a modest corrective to mutually reinforcing hierarchies in journals’ publication records and department rankings. It’s possible, albeit difficult, to publish your way up. As an aside, I wonder whether the importance of name-recognition to legal academics helps explain why “so many”:http://prawfsblawg.blogs.com/prawfsblawg/2005/06/law_professor_b_1.html of them have started blogs – blogging is a cheap and easy way to make your name familiar to the editors of law reviews.

Update: “Steve Bainbridge”:http://www.professorbainbridge.com/2005/08/a_law_review_pu.html is seeking to test whether law review editors do indeed read law blogs, by soliciting “bids” for a recent article that he’s written. He’s already received an offer from a journal in the top 35-40 range.

The photo-sharing site Flickr has come out with some nifty features recently that make it even more fun to browse pictures on the site than before. Beware, there are hundreds of thousands of photos to see, and more ways to navigate the Web site than before so a simple click can take you away from whatever it is that you were doing for longer than what you might expect. Of course, just like with blogs and many other things, there is a lot of uninteresting mediocre material. But there are also great pictures to view. To help find these, Flickr came out with the interestingness feature. To figure out what gets highlighted in this section, they are using “a ranking algorithm based on user behavior around the photos taking into account some obvious things like how many users add the photo to their favorites and some subtle things like the relationship between the person who uploaded the photo and the people who are commenting (plus a whole bunch of secret sauce)”. There is a calendar feature that lets you browse the interestingness category by day.

Another new feature is their clustering of tags. First, let me take a step back for those who are not familiar with the service at all. When users upload photos to the system they can tag them with descriptors such as name of location, type of event, etc. Photos across the entire site can be viewed by tags. Say you are interested in viewing photos of Chicago. There are over 70,000 photos tagged with “chicago” so you are likely shown many that are not of interest. Tags in and of themselves are only so useful since someone may tag all their private party photos with the name of the city in which the party took place, but that won’t be of much interest to someone looking for pictures of the urban landscape. This is where the new clustering feature comes in handy. For popular tags, the system now offers you related tags so you can be sure that you’ll be viewing pictures of the Chicago skyline, buildings or Millennium Park if that is what’s of interest. (Note that when looking for something specific, it’s worth checking alternate spellings/specifications. For example, you’ll get more pictures of Millennium Park under the misspelled tag milleniumpark than under the correct spelling millenniumpark.)

Some basics about Flickr: anyone can create a free account, which comes with the ability to feature 200 photos organized in up to three sets with a 20MB upload limit per month. For $24.95/year you get much more (unlimited storage, 2GB upload limit, no ads, etc.). You can add contacts and specify them as acquaintances or friends. When you upload photos, you can specify them as public or restricted to your contacts. You can join communities based on interest and affiliation. You can mark photos as your favorite and find them easily later. You can add notes to photos. You can leave comments on people’s photo pages. It’s a neat service, I recommend giving it a try.

When you upload photos, you can either reserve all rights or specify a Creative Commons license for them. Although many people – especially those who seem to be pros – reserve all rights, many do not. Thanks to the Creative Commons licenses, the site offers great illustrations for those in need of adding some photos to other sites, presentations or whatnot without worrying about copyright infringement.

I really enjoy browsing the site aimlessly, but I also appreciate viewing pictures from people to whom I have some connection. So if you happen to have a flickr account, how about posting a link in the comments? My album is here.

Realistically speaking, I better put the Time Sink button on this post. Enjoy!

Nick Cohen has a column today entitled “I still fight oppression”:http://observer.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,6903,1544111,00.html . The theme is the familiar one of the moral failure of “the left”.

What to say? If, by Cohen’s lights, supporting the war in Iraq counts as “fighting oppression”, we can say that Cohen got round to it “eventually”:http://www.guardian.co.uk/Columnists/Column/0,5673,665073,00.html . On the other hand, thanks to that reckless war, there’s a great deal more oppression around, whether it is of “ordinary Iraqis slaughtered by Al Zarqawi and his friends”:http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/4714601.stm , or of the “women who are to be subjected to the new Iraqi constitution”:http://www.guardian.co.uk/g2/story/0,3604,1537387,00.html . And, of course, Cohen actually opposed the overthrow of the Taliban. So maybe that “still” in the headline is a tiny bit misleading.

“Matthew Turner”:http://www.matthewturner.co.uk/Blog/ has been doing a sterling job of digging up past Nick Cohen columns. Some of them are, in the light of recent scribblings, simply priceless. So, for example, “this one”:http://observer.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,6903,587483,00.html , which contains the line:

bq. He [Blair] has – and there’s no point being prissy about this – pinned a large target sign on this country.

As “Matthew writes”:http://www.matthewturner.co.uk/Blog/2005/07/nick-cohen-in-2001.html :

bq. Cohen is within his rights to change his mind. What he’s not within his rights is to attack [in his “UAT statement”:http://www.unite-against-terror.com/whysigned/archives/000028.html ] as “morons”, and call their views “sinister”, people who didn’t make such cack-handed predictions (and get taken in by conmen) but who still believe some of what he used to.

I can’t imagine a person who voluntarily reads political blogs who wouldn’t enjoy The Columnist by Jeffrey Frank. It’s the hilariously self-serving autobiography of a fictional arrogant, oblivious Washington hack pundit with a keen antenna for suspect ethnicities. Here, the narrator recalls learning about the assasination of John F. Kennedy at his office at the weekly journal of opinion, New Terrain.

I wandered the corridor at New Terrain, sharing my grief with Johnny, Lionel, Tobias and Esther. It was, we knew, our duty to make over the magazine, which was scheduled to go to press that evening, and we met in Tobias’s messy office, stumbling over piles of books.

“It is as if a great athlete has been cut down in his prime,” I said, and they looked at me with astonishment. “As if Ted Williams was stopped in midswing. The game goes on- the demands of history assure that- but joylessly.”

Tobias looked, I thought, strangely impressed, his eyebrows aloft; I saw that Lionel was nodding vigorously, yet seemed unable to stop nodding. Esther’s wide lips parted as if to express a thought. Johnny Stapling, as if overcome by emotion, left the room.

“The shocked crowd does not like the pinch hitter,” I continued. “We cannot boo, because we know that he did not enter the game on his own volition, yet we resent him. Just minutes before we were watching someone else and the world was right.”

It became clear from their approving silence that these thoughts would be included in the memorial edition of New Terrain, and I took notes even as I uttered them.

Now that blogs have removed arrogance, narcissism and hackery from political punditry, we can look back at this and laugh.

(recommended by McSweeney’s)