July 2006

There are good reasons why I haven’t bought Wired Magazine in about five years. The whole bleeding edge thing frayed a bit with the dot com crash. And that hyperactive, slightly autistic gadget-boy take on the world (a planet which only spanned the west coast of the US and the high tech bits of Asia) just started to seem ever so recursive. But today, in honour of being on the west coast and much delayed on a flight from L.A back to Europe, I cracked and bought the magazine.

Wired now has fashion tips for how to wear your bluetooth, a rather pointless feature on ‘Earth 2.0’, advertisements for Gilette (because the best a man can get is a whopping five blades), and far more car ads than I remember – most of them for Japanese vehicles that improbably combine performance, high tech fuel efficiency, and the nodding respect of other techies. So ‘Wired Man’ is slightly more environmentally aware than he used to be, but just as insecure and rather implausibly hirsute.
[click to continue…]

Today’s NYT runs an Associated Press story headed Farmers Use Bull Semen to Inseminate Cows, which reports, as news, the fact that dairy farmers use artificial insemination on a large scale.

Next they’ll be telling us that milkmaids face unemployment due to the introduction of milking machines.

Since I’ve given the setup, feel free to lower the tone in comments.

William Browning Spencer, in the introduction to his new collection of short stories, _The Ocean and All Its Devices_, contemplates the one form of life that the unsuccessful writer can look down on.

bq. How does the ignored writer dodge envy and bitterness? How does he keep clear of the thought that he is writing in a vacuum, making no real sound as he topples over in the forest? Is he as deluded as some drug-addled blogger alone in a room with his computer and the cast-off shells of ordered-out pizzas, ranting to a potential audience of millions (because they are irrefutably out there; those millions of readers are out there on the Web)?

(The implication in the above that we get forests in vacuums might suggest to the unwary that Spencer is a bad writer, which is wildly untrue. The collection is very good, although so far I haven’t found anything that’s quite at the level of his utterly wonderful short, “The Entomologists at Obala,” in which two increasingly lunatic biologists conduct war-by-proxy in the wilderness via wasps and spiders)

I see in this piece by Alan Wood that the House of Lords Select Committee on Economic Affairs inquiry into “The Economics of Climate Change” (which strongly questioned the science of climate change) is still getting a run in denialist circles.

I haven’t bothered posting on this before, because the main outcome of the inquiry was the establishment of the Stern Review which issued its first discussion paper back in April, stating (from the Executive Summary)

Climate change is a serious and urgent issue… There is now an overwhelming body of scientific evidence that human activity is increasing the concentrations of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, and causing warming.

There’s more like this, giving an excellent summary of the mainstream scientific position.

So the House of Lords exercise was something of an own goal for the denialists. But how did a supposedly serious inquiry come up with with such nonsense in the first place?

[click to continue…]

I’ve been rather enjoying the response of conservative commentators to the “girls do better in school than boys” debate. Everybody’s favourite conservative (or maybe he’s just mine), David Brooks, invokes brain science to show that boys are different from girls, but instead of concluding that girls are simply superior, he assumes that schools are doing the wrong things. It used to be that when a conservative claimed that an inequality was natural, he was defending it, but because this time it is boys that are being shown up its ok to claim that the natural difference is just a difference, and it is the fault of society that it is turned into an inequality which matters socially.

It isn’t nuts to think that the gender achievement gap is grounded in a natural inequality.

[click to continue…]

Radley Balko’s study of the increase in paramilitary police raids by SWAT teams “is now available”:http://www.cato.org/pub_display.php?pub_id=6476 from Cato. They’ve also produced a “map of botched raids”:http://www.cato.org/raidmap/, using Google Maps, to show the distribution of raids that involved some kind of serious error. I’d like to see a table of that data as well (or, because I’m greedy, the whose dataset). There are a lot of things one could do with the data beyond just plotting the incidents on a map, though this is certainly an effective way to draw attention to the issue. The “monograph itself”:http://www.cato.org/pubs/wtpapers/balko_whitepaper_2006.pdf contains summaries of a large number of the botched raids. The rise of paramilitary policing is a serious problem in itself — just on the very narrow grounds that mistakes are common — but is also clearly bound up with larger questions of criminal justice policy in the United States, and America’s “astonishingly high”:https://crookedtimber.org/2006/05/26/incarceration-again/ rate of incarceration.

Over at academicsecret, several posts start out discussing topics in fairly general terms, but have ended up with a gender twist. For example, there is the issue of having babies while in grad school or the question of “strategic incompetence”. The latter refers to some people’s ability to convince others that they are incompetent with all sorts of inconvenient tasks (whether secretarial work or committee membership) and thus manage to get out of a lot of service work.

Neither of these posts started out as a discussion of gender differences, but in both cases a commenter suggested that the issues work differently for male vs female academics. I think those commenters are correct. Even in fields and departments that are more egalitarian less obvious differences remain. But it’s interesting to note that even people who recognize these challenges in academia don’t necessarily see the gendered aspects right away.

The comment thread to my Schmitt post is perking along nicely. (Good poems about taxes, too.) I’m going to take the liberty of elevating some bits of that thread for discussion in this here fresh post. John Quiggin writes:

So, let me start with the observation that war is inherently a negative-sum activity and the empirical fact that, in practice, aggressive war is almost invariably a negative-return activity for the inhabitants of countries that undertake it, Germany in the first half of C20 being a striking example. Schmitt and similar thinkers manage to construct logical frameworks that insulate them from crucial facts like this.

[click to continue…]

Do people oppose gay marriage because they dislike gay people, or because they’re in favour of marriages with traditional sex roles for blushing brides and chivalrous grooms? Richard Thompson Ford wrote a “piece”:http://www.slate.com/id/2145620/nav/tap2/ for _Slate_ last week suggesting that the latter is more important than people think and that opposition to gay marriage doesn’t necessarily stem from homophobia. My colleague John Sides has taken a quick look at the survey results on this – I append his findings below the line. Short version: Ford is likely right that attitudes to traditional sex roles help explain attitudes to gay marriage, but it’s a much less important explanatory factor than basic like/dislike of gay people.
[click to continue…]

Jim Johnson “summarizes the argument”:http://politicstheoryphotography.blogspot.com/2006/07/architecture-of-authority.html of one of his more provocative papers on the way to making some points about photography, architecture and Guantanamo.

[click to continue…]

First, I’d just like to say that this post about Leo Strauss and fascism at Balkinization is interesting. Scott Horton has translated an odd letter, written by Strauss on the occasion of his emigration under anti-semitic pressure: "the fact that the new right-wing Germany does not tolerate us says nothing against the principles of the right. To the contrary: only from the principles of the right, that is from fascist, authoritarian and imperial principles, is it possible with seemliness, that is, without resort to the ludicrous and despicable appeal to the droits imprescriptibles de l’homme to protest against the shabby abomination."

Moving right along, I just read Carl Schmitt, Political Romanticism [amazon]. And now I’m telling you I had the slightly unusual experience of coming to a work by a familiar author, on a (fairly) familiar topic, with really no strong sense whether he would be for or against.

[click to continue…]

I am here in Palo Alto at the “Center for Advanced Study”:http://www.casbs.org/, for a Summer Camp Institute, and am drowning in readings on global convergence, divergence and trajectories of global capitalism, while trying to punch above my weight with a bunch of smart people. (World Cup mixed metaphors have infected my writing: not “Not waving but drowning” but “Drowning and Punching”. Hmm.) Palo Alto is like Princeton West, only somewhat larger. Meeting my co-campers has added significantly to the list of books and articles I need to read, let alone write. For instance, there’s Len Seabrooke’s “The Social Sources of Financial Power”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0801443806/ref=nosim/kieranhealysw-20, Josh Whitford’s “The New Old Economy”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0199286019/ref=nosim/kieranhealysw-20, and Monica Prasad’s “The Politics of Free Markets”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0226679020/ref=nosim/kieranhealysw-20. Fortunately I have no internet access where I’m staying to distract me.

Meanwhile, “Omar Lizardo”:http://www.nd.edu/~olizardo/index.html is “blogging”:http://wordpress.com/tag/guest-bloggers/ at “OrgTheory”:http://orgtheory.wordpress.com/. Go read him. I’m on Omar’s dissertation committee so I take full credit for all the good stuff he says, including the title of this post.

What does my brother have to do with Bigelow Aerospace, asks internet legend Gary Farber. (I posted here about the sucessful launch of a 1/3 scale prototype for Bigelow’s inflatable modules, meant to be connected into a space station. You can read more about it here at Space.com.) Well, long ago Ben decided he wanted to be a space lawyer. And we all supported him. Sort of. Supported him in a way where you’re like “riiiight, cool idea, man.” And, to be frank, we said lots of things like “‘I space object, space your honor!’ ‘Space overruled!!'” John unhelpfully suggested that Ben, perhaps clad in a Nehru jacket-ed suit and boots, could someday be part of a thrilling, 2001-like scene in which he would toss a metallic capsule containing a scroll of papers at someone against the majestically rotating background of a space station, and then when the guy caught it say “you’re seeeerved!” But then he got into Penn Law, and that was pretty cool. And he went to GW for a one-year program in Space Policy. And now he’s assistant to the general counsel at Bigelow! They need lawyers to negotiate with other companies, and with the governments of the US and Russia, and to organize insurance, and make sure they are complying with the various regulations governing the export of missile technology. Also, to make sure the lasers they have pointed at James Bond’s crotch are up to code. A picture of Ben is in space right now, inside the module, which is pretty much the definition of awesome. He’s obviously on track to be the first person in our family to go into space. I hope that our descendents will pour a 40 out onto the frozen methane of Triton in his honor, where it will crackle into amber shards. It’s actually really one of my main goals in life to go into space before I die, and see the earth from orbit. I don’t care if I’m an old lady squandering my children’s inheritance on some 16 hour tourist flight so I can see what vomit looks like in 0g, I’m going. When I was a kid my dad told me that I had to grow up and “invent Waring Drive, to take mankind to the stars.” (Stoned people can be super-inspiring, if you’re 7.) It hasn’t worked out so far, but Violet’s got unusual mathematical aptitude for a 2-year-old (that is, she can count to 10 and knows how to read the numbers 1-5, and can rotate non-bilaterally-symmetrical shapes to get them into the shape sorter. Once numbers get higher than 13, though, she is less likely to “go on in the same way” reliably). Holbo Drive? It’s not as catchy, but I guess I can live with it.

I’m looking forward to the release of Lady in the Water. Like everyone else, I appreciate that The Village was ridiculous, but I loved Unbreakable. I even enjoyed Signs. This thing I’m about to link to is a little old. But, well – last call to lay your bets. I’m torn between:

“It turns out Paul Giamatti is trapped on a planet of sea nymphs, who’ve actually “discovered” him – who’s the sea nymph now?”

And:

“The sea nymph’s mother was dead all along – just a wig and a rocking chair.”

Consider this your M. Night Shyamalan weekend open thread.