The past few weeks have, in the light of the cartoon dispute, brought forth much in the way of blogospherical indignation, analysis, clarification, etc. on the subject of free speech. This has sometimes been accompanied by philosophical and legal reflection of varying subtlety and insight on the idea, its relation to the theory of speech acts, and so on. The “British House of Commons votes today”:http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/4714578.stm on HM Government’s proposal to outlaw the “glorification” of terrorism, a vague offence that may outlaw the praising of historical events in distant lands. If passed this law will, like all laws, be enforced with the resources of the police, the Crown Prosecution Service, the courts, and so on. Since this measure is, therefore, a far more immediate and effective threat to free speech than the complaints of genuinely and synthetically offended members of a religious minority, why does it not provoke a similar level of outrage?

I’m off to hear my colleague Jimmy Doyle talk about the “Gorgias”:http://classics.mit.edu/Plato/gorgias.html . In preparation I came across this passage (at about 457d) .

bq. Socrates: You, Gorgias, like myself, have had great experience of disputations, and you must have observed, I think, that they do not always terminate in mutual edification, or in the definition by either party of the subjects which they are discussing; but disagreements are apt to arise-somebody says that another has not spoken truly or clearly; and then they get into a passion and begin to quarrel, both parties conceiving that their opponents are arguing from personal feeling only and jealousy of themselves, not from any interest in the question at issue. And sometimes they will go on abusing one another until the bystanders at last are quite vexed at themselves for ever listening to such fellows.

I was pleased that “Liverpool beat Arsenal”:http://news.bbc.co.uk/sport1/hi/football/eng_prem/4703844.stm last night, but perhaps I shouldn’t have been surprised. Despite having heard Alan Hansen and Mark Lawrenson tell us on may occasions (usually apropos Chelsea) that money doesn’t buy success, I’m struck by the “table of 2004 transfer spending”:http://www.footballeconomy.com/stats/stats_turnover_10.htm for English PL clubs on the “Political Economy of Football”:http://www.footballeconomy.com/index.htm site. Here are the top spenders:

1. Chelsea
2. ManYoo
3. Liverpool
4. Tottenham
5. Arsenal

and the rank ordering of the “Premiership today”:http://news.bbc.co.uk/sport1/hi/football/eng_prem/table/default.stm after 26 games?

1. Chelsea
2. ManYoo
3. Liverpool
4. Tottenham
5. Arsenal

The correlation breaks down somewhat further down the table, but still.

I don’t, generally, subscribe to the paranoid strain in US politics (my mom does and is irritatingly always right about everything. I well remember when de Menezes was shot in London and the initial story was all about how he had jumped the turnstiles in a heavy coat, etc., and mom instantly said, “this is all bullshit and he was some random innocent.” Chalk another one up for mom.)

Still, something is fishy in this whole Cheney story. My first instinct was just to say, there was an unfortunate hunting accident, and Cheney wasn’t adhering to well-known rules of gun safety, but basically his secretiveness created the impression of some wrong-doing where none existed. But. This whole push-back of blaming the victim? Like he was supposed to give a hearty “halloa!” to his friends who were flushing some other birds? Standing behind the shooter when you are hunting birds in a line is supposed to be a pretty iron-clad way of staying safe. Was Cheney in the middle, so that the barrel swung past one of his fellows on the right or left on its fateful 180 movement? Even if he were at one end or the other, right behind him is not supposed to be a good place to fire, especially since he knew his pal was recovering another brace of quail somewhere. And what’s up with the whole scrubbed beer thing? I don’t think Cheney is a brazen murderer or something, but I have to say that recent coverage has made me much more inclined to think that either he was drunk, or he was standing a lot closer to the victim then we have heard. It’s just weird. This seems like something they could have defused with an early statement and apology. Something is going on.

UPDATE: aah, there we go. “In response to Mr. Hume’s questions about the day, Mr. Cheney said that he had consumed one beer earlier in the day, but that no one in the party was drinking as they hunted.” One beer. I’ve done a lot of stupid things after having “one” beer before, too. Classic drunk denial; you can’t just say you didn’t have anything to drink, so…

Seriously, if Michael Bérubé bitch-slaps Horowitz any harder, there’s going to be teeth on the ground. It’s hard to choose just one excerpt–(Bérubé whaling on D. Ho; the Pringles of the internets!) The ineluctable inference that Horowitz doesn’t know what these new-fangled “links” are is rich in charm.

To his credit, Mr. Horowitz addresses one of my objections about my appearance in his new book, The Professors. It appears that I have once again seized on a mere quirk in the format—or, rather, a “stylistic conceit”:

“Michael quibbles with a bullet-point heading, a stylistic conceit of the book, which claims that Berube believes in teaching literature so as to bring about “economic transformations.” Michael protests that the sentence from which this phrase comes is lifted out of context. This is what the sentence says: “The important question for cultural critics, is also an old question—how to correlate developments in culture and the arts with large-scale economic transformations.” This appears to me like a classical Marxist notion. Michael doesn’t actually argue otherwise. In other words, despite the context Michael supplies, the statement stands.”

You heard it here from the Respectful One himself, folks: the statement stands. It’s official: David Horowitz thinks “correlate” means “bring about.”

Damn! I’ve had my ass fact-checked on the interweb before, and it felt all tingly. I can only imagine Horowitz has got some serious Tiger Balm on the toilet paper happening up in there. Or how about this:

But you know, dear friends, I resent being called “the very professor who calls [Horowitz] a liar without checking the facts.” The truth—and I use the term advisedly—is that I called Horowitz a liar while hyperlinking to the facts. Horowitz lied about the student in Colorado, he lied about the biology professor who allegedly showed Fahrenheit 9/11 to his class, he has lied about me (actually, the line about how my “entire political focus since 9/11 has been in getting our terrorist enemies off the hook” comes closer to actual slander), and—I can’t believe I forgot this one!—he lied—to O’Reilly, on one of his many Fox News appearances—about his speaking engagement at Hamilton College. Or, as Horowitz put it at the time, “I fibbed about my invitation to Hamilton and about my Academic Bill of Rights . . . because it was truer to say that I had to be invited by students . . . than to say the faculty there—the Kirkland project in particular, which is what we were talking about—would invite me.”

When “fibbing” prospers, none dare call it a bald-faced lie on national TV. Mmmm, feel the truthiness. Well, as I told John just now, when we move back to the States, he damn well better get on the list of the 102-203rd most dangerous professors in America, at the very least, or I’m leaving his sorry, insufficiently-devoted-to-the-cause-of-worldwide-Islamic-revolution ass. Oh, sure. Call me Xanthippe.

Peter Strawson has died. There are obituaries in the “Guardian”:http://www.guardian.co.uk/obituaries/story/0,,1709718,00.html and the “Times”:http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,60-2040505_1,00.html . I met him a few times, as I was briefly a member of the Magdalen SCR. Of his contribution to philosophy, I know little beyond “Freedom and Resentment”, but I shall always have an impression of an immaculately dressed figure smoking a cigarette in a peculiarly distinguished way and making witty conversation.