From the monthly archives:
According to my local suburban paper, Western Brisbane has won more gold medals at the Commonwealth Games than either Canada or New Zealand. I’m sure Doreen Root would have something to say about this.
Although I’ve contributed nothing to this outcome beyond some desultory cheering at the TV set, and have never previously considered Western Brisbane as a distinct entity, I am, of course, filled with patriotic pride at this glorious victory.
The BBC are running a story about “SWAT raids”:http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/4803570.stm. The hook is the case of Dr Salvatore Culosoi, a Virginia doctor who was under investigation for illegal gambling. Culosi was unarmed, had no history of violent behavior, and threatened no-one during the raid. He was shot dead by a police officer. A striking statistic from the article is that the number of SWAT raids per year has increased from 3,000 in the 1980s to “at least 40,000 per year” now. Seems like a straightforward “garbage-can”:http://faculty.washington.edu/krumme/gloss/g.html process at the organizational level, or a “neoinstitutionalist”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_institutionalism story at the field level: SWAT teams are effective in certain situations. Initially, it’s cutting-edge departments who have them. They also get a lot of press. The gear makes a nice recruiting tool, too. Pretty soon, you need one if you want to be seen as a respectable police department. Once you have one, it’s a solution sitting around waiting for problems to apply itself to. Seeing as your podunk town is unlikely to have a hostage crisis, the bar for its application gets lowered way, way down. Voila, the police force is now militarized.
The story led me back to “Radley Balko’s”:http://www.theagitator.com/ outstanding coverage of the “Cory Maye case”:http://www.theagitator.com/archives/cat_cory_maye.php, which I wrote about “late last year”:https://crookedtimber.org/2005/12/12/knock-knock-bang-bang/. It’s to Balko’s great credit that he’s been following up on this miscarriage of justice. He’s working on a magazine article about the case, which I sincerely hope appears where people will see it. Right now the Maye case shows that a lot of blogger agitation (about a nonpartisan issue, no less) can just sink without a trace unless it gets picked up by the media.
Fellow Timberteer Maria is visiting Singapore on her way to some important meeting. She and Belle ran off to Little India today. I had to work. It is left to me to memorialize their shopping trip, based on its products. What can I say?
My work is done. You, our readers, shall now compose the screenplay/libretto of a Bollywood musical, based on Donnie Darko. (Click for larger image.) Since I am an incorrigible Amazon whore I cannot refrain from noting that the director’s cut
As longtime readers will know, CT is the Internet’s premier research institute for the political sociology of the Eurovision Song Contest. In the recent past, for example, we have warned the econophysics community about the dangers of simple extrapolation from Eurovision voting blocs to national comities.
It appears that recent events have borne us out. I probably shouldn’t be treating this as an “and finally” item, as the Serbian newspaper Danas is comparing it to the 1990 Serbia/Croatia football riot, which was a precursor to the Balkan wars. But I mean really; surely to god, even in the Balkans, nobody is going to kill their neighbours over Eurovision, are they?
Today’s Lifehacker special is a piece I wrote on “Public speaking do’s and don’t’s”. I list ways in which one can prepare for a talk and suggestions for how to make the most of a presentation. I welcome additions to the list, in the comments here or to the original post.
Before it seems like CT is becoming nothing but a pointer to content we have posted elsewhere, I thought I’d mention just one of the issues I bring up in the piece. One of my biggest pet peeves when it comes to presentations has to do with most people’s inability to stick to the time they have been alloted for their talk.
Few people are such amazing speakers that the audience can’t get enough of listening to them so it is best to wrap up a speech on time. One of the most common pitfalls is to add “brief” introductory remarks to one’s prepared talk. There is usually nothing brief about such comments. Moreover, given that most conference presentations – the ones with which I tend to be most familiar – are supposed to take about 15 minutes, adding just three minutes of intro uses up 20 percent of the time allocation. However, most people are already short on time so this way they get even more behind.
I have considerably less experience in industry and other realms. Is this better elsewhere?
A related pet peeve concerns moderators who are unable to tell people that it is time to wrap up and give the next person a chance to speak.
He’s far too shy to announce it over here, but Daniel has “a piece”:http://commentisfree.guardian.co.uk/daniel_davies/2006/03/defining_protectionism_down.html about the shifting meaning of “protectionism” over at the new Guardian “Comment is Free” pseudo-blog.
Johann Hari, Independent columnist and one-time contributor to the “decent left” blog “Harry’s Place”:http://hurryupharry.bloghouse.net/ , writes “eloquently in the Indie today”:http://www.johannhari.com/archive/article.php?id=831 about why he was wrong about the Iraq war and how he now regrets his pro-war stance.
(I note, btw, that there is “a dismissive post at HP”:http://hurryupharry.bloghouse.net/archives/2006/03/20/whither_iraq.php referring to Hari as a “London-based journalist” but omitting to mention his former association with the site.)
Many bloggers are looking back these days, and I’m no different. I was recently reminded of an old post of mine in which I criticized media outlets for prioritizing coverage of the Michael Jackson trial over a massive North Korean train accident.
That was almost a year ago. Since that day, I’m sorry that I can honestly say that not a day has gone by in which I have thought about that train crash again. Not once.
To my fellow Timberites: despite my admiration for countless blogs such as Obsidian Wings, Arms and Influence and The Agitator, if I’m ever caught engaging in anything resembling blog triumphalism, pull the plug on me. I mean it.
Normally we hoity-toity academic types around here don’t stoop so low as to name a wanker of the day. And this isn’t even from today. Nevertheless, this cries out for wankegnition (that’s when you recongnize someone as a wanker, obvs). Vote for your favorite in comments [click to continue…]
This NYT Magazine article about women who are choosing to become single mothers by using donor sperm is very interesting. The article is entirely focussed on the women’s side; no sperm donors are interviewed. But I actually thought the strangest fact was this:
…the Aryan bodybuilder with the leaping sperm has fathered 21 children (and counting — he is still an active donor), including four sets of twins. These children are all 3 and under, and their families — four lesbian couples, three heterosexual couples and six single mothers — have formed their own Listserv, where photographs of the children (all blond, with a strong familial resemblance) are posted, and daily e-mail messages are exchanged about birthdays, toilet training and the like. They are planning a group vacation in 2007.
21 children? That’s a lot of children. Is there a limit to how many children the fertility clinics will allow a single man to father? These people seem to live in NYC, so the chances of two unknowing half-siblings turning Tristan and Isolde Seigmund and Seiglinde, duh (thanks Matt) are small (and this listserv forestalls the possibility in any case). Or, if he prefers younger women, could a reverse Holy Sinner situation loom in his future? I am most interested in what this guy thinks, though. I mean, he’s a bodybuilder, which at least implies a certain degree of narcissism. It can only enhance his self-image that he’s got such motile sperm and that he is so frequently chosen by the would-be mothers–he’s the man! I’m sure we can all spin a nice Darwinian tale about how he’s maximizing his chances for reproductive sucess (and boy is he ever!), but is that really the sort of thing that consciously motivates people? Does he turn and look at every tow-headed kid on the playground as he walks by, wondering? What will he feel like when he has a child of his own, and it’s his 28th child?
UPDATE: it has been suggested in coments that he might not even know–do they really not tell you at the clinic? Also, it occurred to me that this number is only of children whose parents have registered on this donor sibling list; he may well already have 50 kids.
Unless “you’re English”:http://news.bbc.co.uk/sport1/hi/rugby_union/international/4813172.stm, I mean. Not very funny at all then, really.
It looks as though a lot of CT readers decided to “join the EFF”:https://crookedtimber.org/2005/11/18/eff-on-bloggers-rights/ as a result of our post a couple of months ago; the EFF is now “listing us”:http://www.eff.org/bloggers/badges/ as one of the ten blogs that brought in the most donations. They’re doing very good work – thanks to all of you for supporting it.
Here’s a bit of not-quite-shameless self-promotion. My new book On Education
I started writing the book around the time I started blogging here at CT, and wrote it largely with a CT-type audience in my head — smart, intellectually serious, and interested, but not necessarily specialists, in Philosophy or in Education. Also a transatlantic audience; I try to develop arguments and positions that will be interesting and useful to people in both the countries I know well. It’s an attempt to argue for a (small l) liberal account of the purposes of education, and to explore some current policy controversies in the light of those purposes — viz, funding of faith schools, teaching patriotism, and citizenship education; all with the aim of being accessible to just about anyone who is interested in these things (unlike some of what I write). It’s not for me to say how good it is, but it was reviewed very favourably in the TES, and the nicest comment was reported to me by the spouse of a teacher who is reading it: “She’s had several moments where her reaction as been that as soon as you said something, she sees that it’s obviously right, had thought about similar things, but had never formulated the point quite that way.” That’s a large part of what I hoped to achieve in the first part of the book.
I can say that it has three unquestionable virtues. It is short, inexpensive, and it has a nice cover (according to my wife, not always
“Whatte the swyve?” you say? “Anothere of myne servauntes hath just dyede of the blacke death.”:http://houseoffame.blogs.friendster.com/my_blog/2006/01/abbreviaciouns.html This and other useful acronyms from “Geoffrey Chaucer Hath a Blog”:http://houseoffame.blogs.friendster.com/my_blog/. (Via “Making Light”:http://www.nielsenhayden.com/makinglight/.)
David Bernstein “writes admiringly”:http://www.volokh.com/posts/1142624100.shtml of his friend “David Boaz’s effort”:http://commentisfree.guardian.co.uk/david_boaz/2006/03/why_do_conservatives_like_bush.html “to explain why conservatives love Bush so much, even though his economic policies are anything but conservative.” Boaz says,
Conservatives love Bush because the left hates him. If the New York Times would run a front-page story headlined “Bush Delivers the Big Government Clinton Never Did,” and the lefty bloggers would pick it up and run with it, maybe conservatives would catch on.
So here’s your challenge, lefty bloggers: If you don’t like the tree-chopping, Falwell-loving, cowboy president–if you want his presidency fatally wounded for the next three years–then start praising him. One good Paul Krugman column taking off from that USA Today story on the surge in entitlements recipients under Bush, one Daily Kos lead on how Clinton flopped on national health care but Bush twisted every arm in the GOP to get a multi-trillion-dollar prescription drug benefit for the elderly, one cover story in the Nation on how Bush has acknowledged federal responsibility for everything from floods in New Orleans to troubled teenagers, and maybe, just maybe, National Review and the Powerline blog and Fox News would come to their senses. Bush is a Rockefeller Republican in cowboy boots, and it’s time conservatives stopped looking at the boots instead of the policies.
Oh, please. Sure, let me be the first to step up and say people on the left think Bush is great because of all the damage he’s done. After all, “the left” and the Democratic Party are all about ruining America. Thanks but no thanks. Both Davids labor under the belief — genuine or disingenuous, who can say? — that “lefty bloggers” and their ilk are all in favor of irresponsible government spending, economic mismanagement, ham-fisted responses to security threats and natural disasters, gigantic handouts to energy and pharma companies disguised as environmental and health policy, phenomenally botched foreign policy interventions, and so on. If, after several years of this from the President, “schmibertarian”:https://crookedtimber.org/2004/09/24/song-of-the-schmibertarians/ fellow-travelers now feel that, for the sake of their own conscience, someone needs to smear the GOP faithful as rubes more impressed by cowboy boots than good government, let them go ahead and do it themselves. (Where’s individual responsibility when you need it?) I recall, though, that when Tom Frank made something like this argument about a key part of the Republican base, it wasn’t very well received by those on the right.
