July 2006

Under the rubric “Can Blogging Derail Your Career?”, the Chronicle of Higher Education has seven bloggers discussing Yale’s decision to not hire Juan Cole as a professor of history, and the role, if any, played by his blog in that decision: Siva Vaidhyanathan, Dan Drezner, Brad DeLong, Michael Bérubé (all: yay!), Glenn Reynolds and Ann Althouse (both: hiss), and Erin O’Connor (null result), with a “response” by Cole, which doesn’t actually address the others’ posts specifically, and reads like a separate essay on the same subject as the others. (Via DeLong.)

(Some of the things which were written about Cole as part of the controversy (e.g.,) give the impression of a professor who attains incomprehensibility not through obscurity but through foaming at the mouth. As it happens, though, I sat in on his seminar on millenarian movements when I was a post-doc at Michigan, and nothing could be further from the truth. I suppose I could have missed all the sessions which degenerated into hours-long rants about Zionist Entities… Of course, I don’t know why Yale didn’t give him the job, but if it was because they thought he was too spittle-flecked to be presentable to parents and alumni, they were misinformed.)

The fact that this post is not filed under “Middle East Politics” isn’t going to stop anyone in the comments, is it?

First off, I should thank Henry and the rest of the Timberites for the kind invitation to guest-post, and that very warm introduction. In exchange, I’m going to blog more or less as I usually would, only here. This means some big bricks of posts about “complex systems”, so called, which is or was my scientific field, more or less; and also any miscellaneous outrages which catch my eye this week. Mounting my usual hobby-horses on this stage is a poor exchange for their generosity, but mounting hobby-horses is why I started blogging in the first place, and anyway I’m big on conscienceless nomothetic exploitation of cooperators.

Today I want to talk (below the fold) about some recent work in the statistical mechanics of disordered systems, which might help explain how our sense organs work, and actually involves some good uses of the self-organized criticality and power laws; tomorrow or the day after I’ll get to the smoldering question of “Why Oh Why Can’t We Have Better Econophysics?”

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Via Scott McLemee I see that Frank Zeidler, former socialist mayor of Milwaukee and all-round good chap, died a couple of weeks ago. A wonderful obit here. Even conservatives can celebrate him — he was married just once, for 67 years, and they had 6 children. A good innings and a great life.

For CT extra credit, which cast member refers to Zeidler in Waynes World?

Cosma Shalizi is joining us as a guestblogger for a week. I suspect that most CT readers will already know his “blog”:http://www.cscs.umich.edu/%7Ecrshalizi/weblog/ and/or his “notebooks”:http://www.cscs.umich.edu/%7Ecrshalizi/notebooks/. Kieran once expressed the wish that he could “upload”:https://crookedtimber.org/2005/06/07/summer-vertigo/ part of Cosma’s brain; while Cosma describes himself as a “philistine physicist who gave up on Gravity’s Rainbow after three tries,” he’s frighteningly well versed in social sciences, philosophy, history and pretty well any other subject you might care to name. He’s also one of the people responsible for the exploding butterfly map of voting patterns in the 2004 Presidential election. Over to Cosma.

!http://www.utsc.utoronto.ca/~farrell/cartcolors.png!

In response to my post about William and Nicholas fatwhiteduke confessed that he (and I bet he is a he) still cannot bring himself to admit that William is better than Jennings. During a rather long period of my childhood I would beg my dad to take me on Saturdays to the bookshop in Aylesbury so that I could browse the Jennings books, waiting till I had saved enough pocket money to buy the next one. I think I read them all, which I still have not done with William. The Jennings books occasionally go out of print, unlike the Williams. Several have recently been reprinted, and are available in the States here and here (UK here and here).

I recognize that William is, in some sense, superior, but never had the relationship with William that I did with Jennings. (I actually had a friend in secondary school who resembled Jennings a good deal in both looks and surface personality, and who, interestingly given the influence of Wodehouse on Buckeridge, reveled in the name of Mulliner – any information on his whereabouts welcome, because google is bloody useless when your target shares the name of a world famous croquet player). I suspect that my and fatwhiteduke’s fondness of Jennings is partly a response to authorial intention. Crompton wanted to make adults laugh, and entertaining children was an unexpected side benefit; Buckeridge clearly adored children and wanted to engage and amuse them. The stories offer a great deal to adults, but the world is created for the child reader. Although the boys are the heroes, the world is controlled by adults, who (unlike the adults in William who are being pretty mercilessly satirised) have the best interests of the boys in their charge always in focus. The reason we became so enamoured with boarding school life without ever wanting to go to one is because the Linbury Court staff are like a composite ideal parent, the boys have enough freedom really to enjoy themselves, but not enough ever to be in real danger, and when all their plans go wrong (as it often does), while they are terrified of the consequences, the reader knows that kindness will prevail.

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Interesting anecdote in the comments to this post over at Science + Professor + Woman = Me. This is a conversation between the commenter and her chair, a man, about getting the signature for two graduate students to join her lab.

Chair: I’m not sure that I can sign off on your being the advisor for these students.

Me [Pam]: Excuse me? (Background: two new federally-funded three-yr grants, each with a doctoral stipend available for a student)

Chair: Well, how do I know you are not going to meet a man and run off and be with him?

(I kid you not, he said that).

Me: You don’t. But how do I know that you aren’t going to meet a man and run off with him, and abandon the department?

(He didn’t think it was funny – but he signed the forms.)

This week, Chicago has been hosting Gay Games VII. It’s been fun to have all the various high quality sports competitions in town. Of course, as a spectator, there is not much difference when you watch the competitions at these events vs others since most sports tend to be divided by gender. However, couples sports (like figure skating or dancing) may look a bit different. But actually, only if you focus in on the gender aspect.

It should not be much surprise to anyone who’s been paying attention that I opted to go see the Dance Sports event. I only made it to the A-level competition of the men’s Latin dances and the women’s 10-dance, but this was just as well since this is the highest level under international rules. It was superb.

Anecdotally, my impression has been that most people in Chicagoland have either been excited about the Gay Games in town or haven’t paid much attention. But of course there is the occasional hostile approach. You really do have to wonder why people can’t just let others be as you’re standing there in the ballroom with all the energy and enthusiasm from both the crowd and the participants. Better yet, imagine if peope realized that they could even get something out of these events themselves, like enjoying the hard work of some very talented people.

The surprise of the event for me was to find out that the World Champion couple for men’s Latin hales from Hungary. In the Gay Games this week they placed third. I found out from them that Budapest will be hosting this year’s Same Sex Dance Competition . This made me wonder how the competition (and related associations and studios) got that particular name. Is use of the term “gay” exclusionary? Is it less politically charged to say “same sex”? Is the idea that not everyone who participates is gay? Anyone know the history of this? Apologies if I’m missing something obvious.

Via “Kevin Drum”:http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/archives/individual/2006_07/009218.php, this quite disgusting “claim”:http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/la-oe-dershowitz22jul22,0,7685210.story?coll=la-opinion-rightrail from Alan Dershowitz.

bq. Hezbollah and Hamas militants, on the other hand, are difficult to distinguish from those “civilians” who recruit, finance, harbor and facilitate their terrorism. Nor can women and children always be counted as civilians, as some organizations do. Terrorists increasingly use women and teenagers to play important roles in their attacks. The Israeli army has given well-publicized notice to civilians to leave those areas of southern Lebanon that have been turned into war zones. Those who voluntarily remain behind have become complicit.

Irish and British readers may find this line of reasoning familiar. It was advanced by the IRA at the height of its murder campaign. According to the IRA, civilian bystanders, including women and children, who were killed when bombs blew up police officers or soldiers should have known better than to be associating with the security forces or socializing in places that they were known to frequent. These bystanders were complicit in their own deaths. It was an utterly contemptible argument then. It’s just as contemptible today.

I’m late to the party, but that doesn’t mean I haven’t enjoyed it. Chris "Day by Day" Muir has been mocked round the blogs on account of an incandescently ignorant pair of strips he perpetrated about ‘Kantian nihilism’. Muir made it worse with an egregious, homophobic follow-up. (Honestly, you’d think someone who had just been so roundly spanked could come up with a better a posteriori proof joke.) Then, bless him, he tried to figure out some way to mock Hilzoy at Obsidian Wings. I think: "Way to miss the entire point, cretin," was his most devastating jab. People started to feel a bit sorry for him.

Ouch.  This is getting to be like watching a cat toying with a still-living mouse. – Gromit

No, it’s like watching a still-living mouse pretend to be a cat and kill itself. – Hilzoy

Back to ‘Kantian nihilism’. A few commenters – starting at Yglesias’ site, I think – have scrupulously noted that ‘nihilism’ was a charge first lodged against Kant by Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi. There’s quite an extensive entry on the man at the Stanford Encyclopedia. I happen to have just read Andrew Bowie, From Romanticism to Critical Theory [amazon]. I’ll quote a few bits about Jacobi, because who doesn’t love a bit of esoteric piquancy with their transcendent absurdity?
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…, …, …!

I’m going to Australia in about two months. I’ve been interested in visiting ever since I read Jill Ker Conway‘s Road from Coorain, which was almost 15 years ago.

The reason I’m particularly excited about all this today is because I just received my tourist visa. Via email. Cool. Yes, talk about a good use of IT by government services. I had submitted my application just four days ago. (Anyone want to tear into this regarding security concerns?)

I got very anxious earlier this week when I realized I needed a visa to go to Australia. I feel like I’ve done my fair share of standing in lines for visas at 5am. Luckily, after a bit of browsing I realized that citizens of certain countries could apply for visitor visas online.

I HATE getting tourist visas. I don’t like the process involved in getting student/work visas either, but tourist visas bother me more. I don’t see why Australia needs to know so much about my various medical conditions just to allow me to visit for a week. In any case, being able to fill out the form in my living room without having to run around for x copies of y dimension passport photos made a big difference.

My most frustrating visa experience to date was at the Canadian embassy in NYC a few years ago. It was unbelievable how they treated people. They also sent people home, one after another – after the requisite five hours of standing in the freezing cold, of course – for paperwork that they never stated was required. I decided not to return to Canada until I could go without having to obtain a visa.

As is true everywhere else in the world, Australian news reports at the moment are dominated by the fighting in Lebanon. But much more than in other countries, news reports here are dominated by the dangers facing Australian citizens in Lebanon, and the problems of arranging an evacuation. Lebanon is a major source of migration to Australia and, at any given time, as many as 20000 Australian citizens are visiting the country, and a smaller number living there on a longer-term basis. With the current crisis coming as a near-complete surprise, most of them want to get out as fast as possible. This has proved just about impossible, with the airport closed and no guarantee of safe departure by road or ship. The only really safe way out is on a warship, and Australia’s nearest armed vessel is 17 days away. There are also around 10 000 Australian citizens in Israel, some within reach of Hezbollah rockets.

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“Mary Wells”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Wells came on the radio the other day singing “My Guy”, and when she sang the line

I’m sticking to my guy like a stamp to a letter

it set me thinking about the way that old technologies get referred to in popular song. There’s no end of trains, especially in country music, but even horses and ferries get a lot of attention. Old technology is homely and part of the shared cultural experience even of people who hardly use it. By contrast, digital technology hardly gets a mention, and when it does the results can be embarassing. “Cheezeball.net refer to this cringeworthy effort”:http://www.cheezeball.net/Features/OTSD-RunninOutOfMemory.htm from one Tim O’Brien:

My color screen won’t even function,
My hard drive it went soft, my application coughed,
and I’m a runnin’ out of memory for you.

Ugh!

“Bob Harris”:http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio2/shows/bobharriscountry/index.shtml played a Guy Clark song tonight called “Analog Girl”. It was pretty good, and managed to mention email and websites without making me want to curl up and die. But of course the whole point of the song is that its heroine is authentic because she eschews all contact with the digital world. Other non-embarassing mentions of computers, technology and the internet in popular song?

“Steven Poole”:http://www.unspeak.net/ seems to have gone on holiday, so it must fall to others to catalogue the emergence of new unspeak terms. “Rebalancing” seems to be the vogue word with British government ministers at the moment. It is used when the government wants to restrict the rights of people accused of crimes, to promote summary punishment of offenders, to impose harsher sentences, and so on. The open admission that the government wants to restrict civil liberties would cause many people to worry about justice. “Rebalancing”, with its tacit reference to the scales of justice, and its suggestion that this or that measure is merely the tuning of a delicate machine, aims to calm such anxieties. Authoritarian thug Home Secretary John Reid is “a frequent user”:http://society.guardian.co.uk/crimeandpunishment/story/0,,1824989,00.html of the word, and I see that blogger Oliver Kamm “likes it too”:http://oliverkamm.typepad.com/blog/2006/07/justice_means_s.html .

Michael Walzer has “a piece in the New Republic”:http://www.tnr.com/user/nregi.mhtml?i=20060731&s=walzer073106 which addresses the question of how Israel may legitimately prosecute its war in Lebanon. There’s much to agree with in the piece, especially since Walzer is clear about the impermissibility of deliberately killing civilians and deliberately destroying the infrastructure necessary to support civilian life. There’s also much with which I disagree. Walzer tends to take IDF claims about the extent to which they actually do seek to minimize civilian casualities at face value; the reports from Lebanon would seem to support a more sceptical stance. I was, however, brought up short by this:

bq. the Israeli response has only a short-term aim: to stop the attacks across its borders… Until there is an effective Lebanese army and a Palestinian government that believes in co-existence, Israel is entitled to act, within the dialectical limits, on its own behalf.

Now I don’t dissent from the proposition that Israel is entitled to act to stop attacks across its borders. But Walzer’s linkage of that claim to the capacity of the Lebanese government is surely perverse. The claimed legitimacy of many of the Israeli actions has hinged on the failure of Lebanese government to act and on its legal responsibility to do so. Attacks on facilities outside the Hezbollah zone of control have been conducted with this explicit justification. But if it is part of the case for action that the Lebanese government actually lacks the capacity to act — as it surely does — then those operations were wrong.

Israel can’t simultaneously base its justification for action on the responsibility of the Lebanese government to act _and_ on its incapacity to do so, except insofar as it limits itself to actions that an effective Lebanese government would be duty-bound to perform, namely, suppressing Hezbollah. But Israel hasn’t limited itself to such actions, it has attacked other Lebanese targets.

The Walzer justification could surely only be offered in good faith by a party that was also committed to enabling the Lebanese government to exercise effective sovereignty over its territory. The Israeli attacks aren’t strengthening the post-Cedar-revolution government, they are increasing the probability that Lebanon will once again descend into being a failed state.

Trying to make sense of what Israel is actually doing is hard, in my opinion. I don’t believe that Israel can destroy Hezbollah by direct military action, and I’m sure they don’t believe so either. The point of their action can’t be to get the Lebanese government to act, because, as the Walzer justification insists, they lack the capacity to do so. So what are they trying to do? My guess, is that they are trying to exploit the US commitment to a post-Syrian Lebanese order to bounce the US into acting against Syria and Iran. “Take action Condi, or we’ll screw an important plank of your Middle East policy” is the message, and this might indeed be an effective way to get Hezbollah to stop firing rockets. If Iran or Syria pushed Hezbollah to provoke Israel (and I think it very likely they did) then presumably they’re also trying to pressure the US to make a deal in some way whilst they can. Lebanese civilians are expendable chips in what looks like a high stakes game of diplomatic poker.