June 2006

A link to “Harry Hutton”:http://chasemeladies.blogspot.com/ , who writes one of the funniest sites on the interwebs, and has been “hilariously misidentified by Daily Kos”:http://www.dailykos.com/story/2006/6/13/163821/037 as a Republican eliminationist stormtrooper. (Daily Kos also has Crooked Timber’s Daniel Davies down as a follower of Ann Coulter!)

I used to think “back fat”:http://www.deliciousitaly.com/lardo.htm was a “pizza topping”:http://newyorkmetro.com/nymetro/food/openings/n_9571/ at “Babbo”:http://www.babbonyc.com/. Now I “know better.”:http://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/15/fashion/thursdaystyles/15skin.html Mario Batali should make like _Fight Club_ and lipo it off the customers at the first dinner sitting and serve it to those at the second.

There was a post here but I couldn’t get the formatting right and I nuked it. Apologies to the three people who had already commented.

The LA Times reports on the Philadelphia cheesesteak place that refuses to serve customers who don’t order in English. The message to customers is This is America. When Ordering “Speak English”. Just a few observations.

1. I’m not sure what rule of English requires, or even permits, quote marks around the last two words in that sentence. I’m no prescriptivist, so I’m happy to be shown that this falls under some generally followed pattern, but it’s no pattern I’m familiar with.
2. I’m very pleased that no place had a similar sign when I was trying to get fed in Paris using what could, charitably, be described as schoolboy French, as long as the schoolboy in question spent every class watching football rather than, say, studying French. And that pleasure is not just because if I had seen such a sign I’d have been like, Holy Cow, the Americans have captured Paris.
3. This being the LA Times, they have to describe what a cheesesteak is: “a cholesterol-delivery device consisting of grilled strips of beef, melted cheese, onions and peppers on an Italian roll.” They also misquote the sign by removing the errant quote marks and adding a ‘please’. Those polite Southern Californians!

How does the popularity of Facebook compare to MySpace among a diverse group of college students? What types of blogs are students most likely to read? How many have ever visited Instapundit or Daily Kos?

As mentioned earlier, last month I gave a talk at the Beyond Broadcast conference hosted at Harvard Law School. The conference folks have now made the presentations available in both audio and video format. You can listen to or watch my talk misleadingly titled “Just a Pretty Face(book)? What College Students Actually Do Online”. (The title is misleading, because the talk is not about Facebook or even social-networking sites more generally speaking. Rather, it’s about what young people do online and how it differs by type of background.) I have put the presentation slides online in case you are curious to see the specifics (those are hard to follow on the video and there wasn’t enough time for me to mention stats in the presentation).

I should note that these are all still preliminary findings as I need to do more data cleaning and there’s tons more to do on the analysis front. But I don’t anticipate major changes in the findings presented given the size of the sample.

If you prefer text over these various other options I will be writing up the findings this summer and will post a link once it’s done. But if you can’t wait to find out the answers to the above questions then I recommend clicking on one of the above links. (All this information is toward the end of the presentation.)

Okay, fine, I won’t make it that difficult. The quick answers to the above questions are (again, for this group of college students):
1. Facebook is more popular (Facebook 78%, MySpace 51%)
2. Political blogs are the least popular type of blogs (from among the ones asked, which included personal journals, arts/culture/music, technology, sports)
3. 1% have ever visited each, Instapundit and Daily Kos that is (as per the third question above)

There’s lots more info in the presentation.

Recall that many of you took a survey back in January here on CT about your use of various sites and services. I haven’t forgotten that I still owe you a summary of the responses and that is forthcoming as I analyze the college student Internet use data. I thought reporting the former may be more interesting in the context of the latter thus the delay.

Thanks to all those who submitted entries in the Anonymous Lawyer contest. There are several funny submissions that merit being included in the final vote, but I thought more than five options would make it too cumbersome so I have limited the poll to five entries. Using input from Jeremy Blachman (the author of the Anonymous Lawyer book) the following entries are hereby declared finalists:

• The Double Mocha-Latte Drinking, Gel-Haired, Brown Courduroy Blazer Wearing Trendoid
• The Amazing Vanishing Advisor
• Prof-Who-Burnt-His-Beard-Off-With-That-Pretentious-Pipe
• The Apprentice Loser
• Mr Happy, who believes if something funny is worth saying once, it is worth saying a thousand times, the fucker.

Please vote for your favorite Anonymous Colleague description below the fold.

[click to continue…]

“Charles Haughey has died”:http://www.ireland.com/focus/haughey/ at his home in Dublin at the age of 80. The _Irish Times_ today calls him “the dominant and most divisive figure of the past 40 years” in Ireland. If you’ve never heard of Charlie, think of him as something like a triple cross between Charles DeGaulle, Richard Nixon and Huey Long. The Times’ “obituary”:http://www.ireland.com/focus/haughey/obituary.htm gives an overview of his life. Essays by “Dick Walsh”:http://www.ireland.com/focus/haughey/ITstories/story3.htm, “Geraldine Kennedy”:http://www.ireland.com/focus/haughey/ITstories/story2.htm and “Fintan O’Toole”:http://www.ireland.com/focus/haughey/ITstories/story1.htm span his career from its brilliant beginnings to its scandal-ridden end. Wikipedia also has “a good article.”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_J._Haughey

Haughey was the leading figure of a generation of Irish politicians born in the years after the foundation of the state in 1922. They were in the ascendancy in the 1960s and by the end of the 1970s they were running the country. Haughey’s generation wanted a slice of the postwar economic boom, and they partly got it. The economy grew rapidly in the 1960s. Haughey’s career prospered and he became minister for justice, instigating a series of important reforms of the Irish legal code, and then minister for agriculture. He also became a wealthy man very fast — far wealthier, in fact, than anyone on a modest political salary could reasonably be expected to become. He bought a Georgian mansion and an offshore island. His extravagant lifestyle became a topic of conversation, and eventually his political opponents tried to make an issue of it. He brushed them off. His career nearly came to an end in 1970 with the “Arms Crisis”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arms_Crisis, but after a decade in the political wilderness he became the leader of “Fianna Fáil”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fianna_Fáil and, soon after, “Taoiseach”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taoiseach.

The view of him taken by his supporters is key to understanding Haughey’s position in Irish politics. In a brilliant article written in the early 1980s, my former advisor at UCC, Paddy O’Carroll, made an argument about the importance of local culture to Irish political style. An important figure in the Irish mythos is the “cute hoor”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cute_hoor — the person who can magically bend the rules or circumvent them altogether in order to get what they want. Cute hoors are admired by “sneaking regarders”, those too timid to get involved themselves, but who admire the strokes he pulls to get what he wants. Haughey played that role in Irish politics on a grand scale, to the point where he was subject to a cult of personality. A pliant press helped. By the 1980s, Haughey’s long-term extramarital affair and his ill-gotten personal wealth were open secrets, along with much else about the country that could not be said in public. Joe Joyce and Peter Murtagh’s book, “The Boss”:http://search.barnesandnoble.com/booksearch/isbnInquiry.asp?userid=1N9LLQ1VTU&isbn=1853718912, a superb account of Haughey’s “GUBU”:http://search.barnesandnoble.com/booksearch/isbnInquiry.asp?userid=1N9LLQ1VTU&isbn=1853718912 government of 1982 is one of the few contemporary pieces of really hard-hitting investigative journalism on Haughey. (Joyce and Murtagh’s obituary for Haughey is “in the Guardian”:http://politics.guardian.co.uk/foreignaffairs/story/0,,1796554,00.html.)

A series of “legal tribunals”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moriarty_Tribunal in the 1990s took the lid of the whole thing, detailing the bribery and corruption that greased the wheels of Irish politics in the 1980s. Haughey was at the center of it all, of course. Called as a witness in one of these investigations Haughey tried to play the fool, claiming he didn’t remember anything. His own effort to pass himself off as a clueless gobshite, after a lifetime spent burnishing an image of shrewdness and authority, probably did as much to tarnish his legacy as anything the evidence showed.

The Washington Post “comes out against”:http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/06/11/AR2006061100707.html net neutrality today, trotting out a bullshit telco industry talking-point as if it were established fact.

bq. The advocates of neutrality suggest, absurdly, that a non-neutral Internet would resemble cable TV: a medium through which only corporate content is delivered. This analogy misses the fact that the market for Internet connections, unlike that for cable television, is competitive: More than 60 percent of Zip codes in the United States are served by four or more broadband providers that compete to give consumers what they want — fast access to the full range of Web sites, including those of their kids’ soccer league, their cousins’ photos, MoveOn.org and the Christian Coalition. If one broadband provider slowed access to fringe bloggers, the blogosphere would rise up in protest — and the provider would lose customers.

It ain’t the “advocates of neutrality” who are being absurd here. The claim that “60 percent of Zip codes in the United States are served by four or more broadband providers that compete to give consumers what they want” is based on FCC statistics that are widely recognized (except by industry hacks) to be useless for this purpose. As this “Government Accountability Office report”:http://www.gao.gov/new.items/d06426.pdf discusses, the FCC zipcode survey doesn’t provide any data on how many subscribers are served by particular broadband providers within zipcodes. It indiscriminately includes satellite broadband service, which isn’t a significant option for most consumers (and is only just about broadband in any event), in zip codes where there is at least one subscriber to the service. Furthermore, it lumps together (a) data on broadband services that cater to specialized business needs and (b) data on consumer broadband, as if they formed one and the same market. The result is that it grossly overestimates the degree to which there is actual competition in consumer broadband markets. The GAO estimates that when you exclude irrelevant providers, the median number of household providers in each zipcode is two. The claim that market forces will miraculously protect consumers and resolve the network neutrality problem is unsustainable; there probably isn’t a competitive market in most municipal regions in the US, let alone rural areas. Perhaps the Post editors weren’t aware of this, but I suspect that this is because they didn’t think it was part of their job to find out. Garbage journalism, pure and simple.

One of the things that has most annoyed the so-called “decent” left has been the use of hyperbolic comparisons between the US “war on terror” and barbaric systems like the Gulag. “The Euston Manifesto”:http://tinyurl.com/nofn7 expresses outrage that

bq. officials speaking for Amnesty International, an organization which commands enormous, worldwide respect because of its invaluable work over several decades, can now make grotesque public comparison of Guantanamo with the Gulag.

Well I agree with the Eustonites that the Gulag was much much worse, partly because it extended over many decades, and partly because it involved the incarceration and deaths of an immensely greater number of human beings. But there’s another way to think about the comparison, and that’s to ask about how the daily life of a typical Guantanamo inmate compares with the life of the average “zek” as depicted by Solzhenitsyn. It is hard to avoid the conclusion that one life is similarly awful to the other. This conclusion, though, depends on the presumption that accounts of life in the Gulag (from former inmates) and in Guantanamo (from former inmates) are both accurate. And they may not be. But here, for comparative purposes, are links to the online text of Solzhenitsyn’s “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich”:http://tinyurl.com/zce6f and a “Guardian report”:http://tinyurl.com/rnx6g about the experiences of Guantanamo detainees.

I’m teaching “Recent Continental Philosophy” next semester. What would you do, if you had to do that? Recent is relative, of course. I’m thinking: Kant. No, seriously. I want to start by having the kids read Kant, “What is Enlightenment?” Then Foucault, “What is Enlightenment?” I want to make that a bit of a theme, yes. What texts would you weave around that red thread? I’m going to do some Foucault vs. Habermas (obviously.) I’m thinking about having them read bits of Robert Pippin, Modernity as a Philosophical Problem. How would you structure the course to suit my theme? There is a real problem with taking the ‘recent’ seriously. If the kids don’t really know Hegel and Nietzsche and Kierkegaard and Heidegger, what’s the point starting them out with Badiou, eh? I’m thinking of having them read a few of the short, intro chapters from the Critchley, ed. Companion to Continental Philosophy. I am also going to do a couple weeks on Zizek, because I know his stuff rather well at this point. In teaching a new course, I figure you should make sure to have at least a couple weeks on something you have down pretty cold. By the by, I’ve got a pretty good and funny Zizek post up at the Valve, if you like that sort of thing.

One of the striking features of US politics over the past fifteen years is the rise of partisan feeling. The blogosphere reflects this, and has helped to accelerate it. Whereas US political discussion used to be dominated by appeals to bipartisanship there now seems to be more party-specific rancour than, for example, in Australia.

On the other hand, there’s a lot of commentary about the absence of competitive races and the increasing advantage of incumbency.

These two trends seem inconsistent to me. Of course, with strong partisan loyalties you expect a fair number of safe seats for either party, but the discussion of incumbency is mostly about the strength of individual incumbents. And even with many safe seats, there ought also to be a large number of marginals.

Has anyone attempted to reconcile these conflicting trends?

One of my most-disliked cliches is the term Kafkaesque – most things that are described as being so really aren’t. But it’s hard not to think of _The Trial_ when reading “this”:http://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/12/washington/12cnd-nsa.html?ex=1307764800&en=a9081b7ddf6e13a1&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss.

bq. A National Security Agency program that listens in on international communications involving people in the United States is both vital to national security and permitted by the Constitution, a government lawyer told a judge here today in the first major court argument on the program. But, the lawyer went on, addressing Judge Anna Diggs Taylor of the Federal District Court, “the evidence we need to demonstrate to you that it lawful cannot be disclosed without that process itself causing grave harm to United States national security.” The only solution to this impasse, the lawyer, Anthony J. Coppolino, said, was for Judge Taylor to dismiss the lawsuit before her, an American Civil Liberties Union challenge to the eavesdropping program, under the state secrets privilege.

The U.S. “got schooled”:http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/sports/AP-SOC-WCup-World-Cup.html by the Czechs. The Times says that Dubya gave the team a call beforehand:

bq. Eager to prove they are among soccer’s elite after their surprising quarterfinal finish in South Korea four years ago, the Americans brought their most-talented team ever to this year’s tournament. They even got a pregame pep talk from President Bush, who called from Camp David before the game and wished them well.

Today’s result shows diplomatic good wishes won’t do it, so that leaves the other two standard policy tools for strategic foreign intervention. First choice would be a large foreign aid package. Seeing as Italy is the U.S.’s next opponent bribery stands a very good chance of working. Something to bail out “Juventus”:http://www.google.com/search?q=juventus+scandal, for instance. Failing that, it’s airstrikes on Turin.

I just noticed via our “Technorati Link Page”:http://www.technorati.com/cosmos/links.html?rank=&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.crookedtimber.org&sub=Get+Link+Cosmos that in the last few hours, CT has been linked to by dozens of (presumably) robo-generated blogspot blogs. Each one I’ve looked at is populated with a page of posts with content that looks like it was scraped from Wikipedia. All of them have names of the form AdjectiveNoun. My favorite name so far is TiredStation, which could be used by some pro-business content generators we know. So far the content is innocuous, but I suppose that the next step is for the Wikipedia content to disappear and be replaced by true spam after some suitable delay. Feh.

Meanwhile, the World Cup continues. In the general spirit of four hundred years of oppression I was hoping Angola would beat Portugal, or at least draw. The more anxious English pundits are killing themselves over Eriksson’s mysterious tactics, even though England won their opening game. Eriksson brought relatively few strikers along in the squad, and if the usual number of functioning legs for any _n_ strikers is given by the formula n∗2, in England’s case the calculation is presently the slightly more complex (n∗2)-(n-1). Coming up today: Australia vs Japan, USA vs Czech Republic, and Italy vs Ghana.

_Update_: My “adopted team”:https://crookedtimber.org/2006/06/05/allah-allah-dennis-bergkamp-dennis-bergkamp/ came through with a late rush of goals. Australia were unlucky with Japan’s goal, which might easily have been disallowed seeing as a Japanese player impeded the keeper. But then again, Japan should probably have had a penalty just after Australia equalized, so them’s the breaks.