November 2005

David Glenn has written an entertaining and interesting piece of “intellectual history”:http://chronicle.com/free/v52/i12/12a01501.htm on sociologist Philip Rieff, perhaps best known these days for having once being married to Susan Sontag. While Rieff hasn’t had a lasting impact on his field, he’s inspired the fierce loyalty of a coterie of former students, and appeared as a supporting character in various “works of fiction”:http://chronicle.com/free/v52/i12/12a01601.htm. It appears that he’s returning to the field after thirty years away, with no fewer than four books on the verge of being published. It’s unclear whether these will be important and influential works or intellectual curiosities.

Rieff sounds to be full of high sentence, but a bit obtuse; still he seems to be a very interesting and sympathetic character, and an academic type that’s vanishing rare these days. Once upon a time, sociologists and political theorists used to be able to get away with speaking to literary types on their own terms; while they produced a lot of guff, they also sometimes drew some very interesting connections. Rieff’s a sort of academic Rip van Winkle, emerging from a long sleep over decades during which the world has changed. It’ll be interesting to see whether he’s able to reconnect.

Ted Wragg is dead, aged 67. Guardian obituary is here. I never met Ted, only once spying him across the table at a long meeting, but I read his columns in the TES from my early teens, and was always struck by the nice combination of ironic humour and passionate concern. He was prolific and energetic, funny (he sometimes contributed jokes for Bremner, and the News Huddlines) and always ready to puncture the presumptions of the powerful. The obit says that an email address has been set up for messages of condolence at education@exeter.ac.uk
I know one should not speak ill of the dead, but I suspect he is one of the culprits (along with others I shan’t mention) for the tendency of education policymakers and even academics in the UK to indulge in excessive football analogies. A very sad loss.

Via “Jamie Zawinski”:http://jwz.livejournal.com/ comes “C’était un Rendezvous”:http://www.jerrykindall.com/2005/11/07_cetait_un_rendezvous.asp. A short and very fast film:

On an August morning in 1978, French filmmaker Claude Lelouch mounted a gyro-stabilized camera to the bumper of a Ferrari 275 GTB and had a friend, a professional Formula 1 racer, drive at breakneck speed through the heart of Paris. The film was limited for technical reasons to 10 minutes; the course was from Porte Dauphine, through the Louvre, to the Basilica of Sacre Coeur. No streets were closed, for Lelouch was unable to obtain a permit. The driver completed the course in about 9 minutes, reaching nearly 140 MPH in some stretches. The footage reveals him running real red lights, nearly hitting real pedestrians, and driving the wrong way up real one-way streets.

The film has been “remastered and released on DVD”:http://www.rendezvousdvd.com/. You can watch the whole thing “here”:http://www.bsdunix.ch.nyud.net:8090/public/rendezvous20_04.mov. (Big download: about 34MB.) Bump it up to full screen mode or twice the normal size to get the full effect. The middle third of the film, when he’s right in the middle of Paris, is just unbelievable, as he runs six or seven red lights, screams around garbage trucks and narrowly misses several pedestrians as he flies down narrow, cobbled streets. Apparently there are all kinds of stories about the film, including whether the director did the driving himself in his own car. Having just watched it, I’d happily insinuate I could drive like that, too.

I’ve “complained in the past”:https://crookedtimber.org/2003/07/22/learned-friends/ about the lack of an SSRN equivalent for political scientists (while APSA has put together a portal site for papers, it still leaves something to be desired; e.g. no stable permalinks). Now SSRN has created a new “working paper series”:http://www.clpenet.ca/mission.html which aims to bring together “international studies in comparative law and political economy.” This looks to be a great resource – the idea is to bring scholars in relevant fields of comparative politics, comparative law, international political economy and economic sociology into a single debate. There’s a lot of fascinating work on new modes of international and domestic governance – but it’s difficult to keep track of, because it’s split across several disciplines.Worth “signing up for”:http://hq.ssrn.com/jourInvite.cfm?link=LSN-RES-all-inclusive-journal.

“Judith Miller resigns her position at the Times”:http://www.nytimes.com/2005/11/10/business/media/10paper.html, in a deal that’s been under negotiation for a couple of weeks, apparently.

You may have read about Sony/BMG putting rootkits on some of their music cds. (The original discovery was revealed by Mark Russinovich on his blog. Today, he posted a follow-up. Mainstream coverage is here, here, and here. There’s a good discussion on the Security Now podcast, number 12.)

Basically, rootkits are pieces of software that change the operating system in order to hide themselves and what they are doing. For example, they can intercept directory calls, thus hiding files from the operating system and from any software using the operating system. This makes it virtually impossible to see them from within. And once the operating system is compromised in a way that is invisible to users, all bets are off.

It’s bad enough that Sony would do this without giving users adequate notification. But the system they used – licensed from a company called First 4 Internet – did this in a particularly clunky way. Any file starting with the prefix $sys$ would also be hidden from the operating system, leaving the computer open to other hacks that would themselves be hidden.

Last week, on an NPR interview, a Sony executive downplayed the controversy, saying: “Most people, I think, don’t even know what a rootkit is, so why should they care about it?” Words to live by, I guess, because nothing can hurt you unless you know about it.

Update: EFF has a page with useful information including a list of cds known to contain the software. (hat tip: boingboing)

The title of the latest Norman Podhoretz “diatribe”:http://www.commentarymagazine.com/Production/files/podhoretz1205advance.html, approvingly linked to (surprise, surprise) by “Glenn Reynolds”:http://instapundit.com/archives/026737.php.

*Who Is Lying About Iraq?*

The short answer to this timely question: “Norman Podhoretz”:https://crookedtimber.org/2005/08/12/trahisons-des-clercs/.

Number whatever the hell it is in a series of simple answers to unnecessarily complicated questions.

Update: See also “this”:http://www.prospect.org/weblog/archives/2005/11/index.html#008302 from Matt Yglesias at Tapped. To misquote _To Kill a Mockingbird_, it would seem that the truth is not in the Podhoretzes.

Over at Normblog, “Sophie Masson has been defending the French model against its detractors”:http://normblog.typepad.com/normblog/2005/11/riots_in_france.html , pointing out the France has successfully assimilated generations of Portuguese and Italian immigrants and turned them into French men and women. The funny thing is, that, leaving aside a bit of Napoleonic rambling around Italy in the 1790s, France never colonized Italy and Portugal. Nor did it fight a bitter war in Italy and Portugal as recently as the 1960s. Nor did it employ methods including massacre and torture against Italians and Portuguese in the recent past. Moreover those recent events have, as far as possible, been brushed under the carpet and France recently passed a law making schools teach the allegedly positive aspects of its colonial regimes in North Africa. Whilst the Algerian War was the subject of one of the greatest films ever made, French cinema (to mention just one popular cultural medium) has not faced up to the Algerian war in the way the Hollywood has addressed the American experience in Vietnam. I don’t assert that there is some direct causal connection between the Algerian war and the recent riots, but one cannot think seriously about the situation of the banlieue without noticing the unmentionable facts and silences. There has been no Truth and Reconciliation Commission for France, but until these wounds are acknowledged and examined, those of North African origin cannot be treated as just another immigrant group — like the Italians and Portuguese — they are not.

The “Kansas Board of Education”:http://www.cnn.com/2005/EDUCATION/11/08/evolution.debate.ap/index.html has approved new standards that mandate the teaching of “Intelligent Design” (which I’ve always thought should be called “Paleyontology”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Paley) in science classrooms. According to CNN, in addition to mandating that students be told that some basic Darwinian ideas “have been challenged in recent years by fossil evidence and molecular biology,” the board also decided to help themselves to a bit more, too:

bq. In addition, the board rewrote the definition of science, so that it is no longer limited to the search for natural explanations of phenomena.

Priceless. Unfortunately they didn’t adopt my suggestion that science be further redefined to include sitting at home drinking a beer and watching the game on TV. This would have greatly enhanced my weekend contributions to science.

I am not quite sure why, but I am both too embarrassed with my views on the subject of the riots in France to post them on CT and too pleased with them to resist linking to them elsewhere. Sorry.

It’s a bit silly to link to things b0ingb0ing has already linked to, but I saw this awesome Guinness ad and —had you going there, didn’t I? No, actually, here’s a link to The Fifth Dimension performing what may be my favorite of their songs, the transcendently weird “Paper Cup.” It’s about how cool it is to become homeless, or something (lyrics. OMG I can get a polyphonic Fifth Dimension ringtone!). The outfits, the painfully amateurish dancing, the backdrop; it’s beautiful. As discussed in the comments at Bedazzled, the Fifth Dimension was a band for white people who were afraid of real black musicians. Totally safe for you to listen to some of that crazy Negro music the kids are into these days! Just look at these guys; they’re not about to break the white man off something lovely, at all! They’re more about to float up into the sky in a beautiful balloon, wearing matching yellow Wild-West outfits with foot-long fringe, and warbling incoherently about the glory hole in my mind! By any groovy means necessary!

Now, I hope I’m not going to hear any rock snob grumbling about liking the Fifth Dimension. I have gone into the realm of rock snobbery beyond good and evil, where I like the America song “Sister Golden Hair”, and Rush songs and the Shirley Bassey cover of “Spinning Wheel”. Sometimes, just for a laff, I listen to the music that plays in the background in Rocky IV during the cross-cut work-out scene, where Dolph Lundgen is all on a treadmill with commie scientists monitoring him, and Rocky is out on the Siberian tundra chopping wood and growing a beard and digging the Byelamor canal with his teeth, and ironically understanding the great Russian soul way better than the actual Russian people–because that’s what America is all about. Yeah, that song. I mean, it sucks, obviously, but in a cool way.

Now, why don’t I have anything to say about the rioting in France? Well, I sort of don’t understand what the hell is going on. I’m reluctant to embrace the Victor Steyn Hinderaker death-throes of Eurabia thing, since it looks more like your run-of-the-mill broke people rioting, combined with massive state incompetence. The cheerful schadenfreude on this issue from the right is unseemly. “Remember when they mocked our social system because something terrible happened to us? Now something terrible is happening to France! I bet they wish they could go cry on the shoulder of their old friend — Saddam Hussein!” I am surprised to learn that les flics are crippled by their mushy multicultural love all all things Islam; the blogosphere really can turn you on to new ideas. Obviously, though, the French government has screwed this up royally; it’s ludicrous that it would go on this long, and that it would take Chirac more than a week to even deign to notice the situation. Some forceful police action is obviously needed; it’s not right for citizens to be cowering in their homes while every car in France is set on fire right outside. (And, damn, those things are more flammable than I ever thought. Suddenly all those 80’s TV scenes where a car going 12 mph noses into a fence and blazes up like a Pinto inferno seem realistic.) Finally, and I mean this in the nicest way, and I don’t want people to die, but doesn’t this seem like some kind of pussy rioting, frankly? It’s been going on for almost two weeks and only one or two people have died? If American people had been rioting that long the death toll would be in the three digits, for sure. Don’t mess with American pride.

UPDATE: it isn’t very helpful or accurate to call this rioting “run-of-the-mill” when it’s so obviously serious and strange in a possibly epochal way. So, retract that. What I meant to say is that from what I have seen, ordinary underclass alienation, reaction to percieved racism, massive unempolyment among bored young men, cack-handed government responses, etc. seem to be playing the largest role, vs. the “let’s reduce impotent France to dhimmi status and take over the world with the evil powers of Islam” fantasizing one sees at many right blogs.

Dammit, why do all these rock snob thumbsuckers have to hate on the chicks? Maybe if you just assume that all the rock snobs in the world are guys, you won’t find any rock snob chicks? Maybe we’ve got, like, lives and stuff and don’t just sit around at home changing our minds about the relative merits of alphabetization by artist vs. genre vs. date of purchase? Because we already decided? Strict alphabetical order!! (I know, I can hear my friend Daniel complaining about all the stuff that gets lost. Serendipity!) Jesus, now you’re going to tell me you just discovered Can’s Ege Bamyasi. But, you know…maybe most rock snobs are guys. And most bloggers are guys? I hope it doesn’t turn out chicks suck. That wouldn’t be very punk rock at all.

Over at Volokh, the “puppy blood”:https://crookedtimber.org/2005/08/13/taking-a-stand/ is flying again. This time, “it’s Juan Non-Volokh”:http://www.volokh.com/posts/1131321731.shtml who defends “America’s network of secret, overseas torture centers”:http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/11/01/AR2005110101644_pf.html against the vicious charge that they resemble Soviet gulags:

bq. I would like to underline my ultimate position: Not every mass murder is comparable to the Holocaust. By the same token, not every secret detention is comparable to the Gulag. In my view, the overuse of such comparisons undermines our ability to recognize the varying magnitudes of various evils. Such hyperbole deadens the sensitivity to moral distinctions in public discourse. Again, I am not excusing the conduct of our government. Some of the allegations are quite serious and, if true, merit condemnation, but that does not make Gitmo and other U.S. facilities equivalent to the Soviet Gulag.

Nice to see a fine legal mind at work on such a hard problem. How difficult is it to enumerate the differences between what the U.S. is doing at the moment and what the Soviets did? Let’s see. Millions of people are not being spirited away to labor camps in Siberia. Whole segments of society are not being brutally annihilated. Dick Cheney doesn’t even speak Russian! QED, they are not gulags.

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I haven’t got enough information on the riots in France, to make any useful comment on what’s happening, except an obvious one, that the Chirac government has made an awful mess of things.

In this context, there’s an expectation about that leftists should defend Chirac and his government, and therefore be embarrassed by his failures. The first time this expectation arose was when (thanks to poor performance and co-ordination on the left) Chirac ended up in a run-off against Le Pen for the presidency in 2002. Hence it was necessary for the left to campaign for a strong vote against Le Pen and, necessarily, for Chirac. Then in 2003, Chirac’s government led the opposition to the Iraq war at the UN, by virtue of its permanent membership of the UNSC, rather than because of its great moral standing. Still, the war had to be opposed, and Chirac therefore had to be supported.

But this can only go so far. Much of the reason why French Gaullists annoy US Republicans is that they have so much in common. There’s little doubt that, if Chirac had the kind of global power that Bush does, he’d abuse it in exactly the same way. Australians and New Zealanders, who’ve seen Chirac and his predecessors throwing their weight around in the South Pacific (long used as the site for French nuclear tests), are well aware of this. The same kind of heavy-handedness is evident in domestic policy and seems to have contributed to the riots.