From the monthly archives:
Via “Jeremy Freese,”:http://jeremyfreese.blogspot.com/2006/09/and-you-thought-astrosociology-was.html a paper by Alan Gerber and Neil Malhotra called “Can political science literatures be believed? A study of publication bias in the APSR and the AJPS.” Here’s the main finding.
Well now the Honderich’s “The Real Friends of Terror”:https://crookedtimber.org/2006/09/19/honderich-on-terror/ has gone out, I’m free to post, and, to be honest I thought it was simply awful. The whole thing was a showcase for Honderich’s fatuous “principle of humanity”, as called in aid of the proposition that the Palestinians have a “moral right to their terror”. This “principle”, which is presented as a pathbreaking step in moral philosophy, is basically just Honderich’s pet list of 6 essential components of human flourishing coupled with the suggestion that we have duty to take all rational steps necessary to bring them about. So think Sen and Nussbaum (similar list) plus a heavy dash of consequentialism. The programme consisted largely of archive footage of the aftermath of terrorist acts coupled with Honderich interviewing a few talking heads: Jenny Tonge (the Lib-Dem peer), Brian Klug, Helena Kennedy, Riz Mozal and a UK-based Palestinian academic (Ghada Karmi). The central theme was that all recent terrorism, 9/11 and 7/7 included, were basically caused by the failure of the US and UK to restrain what Honderich calls “neozionism”. The whole shoddy programme was further worsened by Honderich intoning portentously in his Canadian baritone “this I believe” in connection with a series of eminently dubitable propositions.
(Update: slight edit in the light of email.)
Via “PZ Myers”:http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2006/09/its_such_a_quick_read_too.php, “What’s Liberal About the Liberal Arts? The Graphic Novel”:http://faultline.org/index.php/site/comments/whats_liberal_about_the_liberal_arts1/.
As a guest of “The Philosophers’ Magazine”:http://www.philosophersnet.com/ I went to an advance screening of Ted Honderich’s programme “The Real Friends of Terror” in C5’s “Don’t Get Me Started”:http://www.mydigiguide.com/dgx/wbl.dll?a=6&h=49&PID=22132 series last night. The showing was followed by a panel discussion. I’ve been asked not to write about the content of tonight’s broadcast before it is shown, so I won’t. Regular Honderich-watchers won’t be surprised either by the content of the programme or by my reaction to it, but I won’t post more until after it goes out at 19.15 this evening on Channel 5 in the UK. This post is just to alert interested viewers. The “programme description”:http://www.mydigiguide.com/dgx/wbl.dll?a=6&h=49&PID=22132 refers to Honderich as “Britain’s leading moral philosopher”. I guess there’s room for disagreement about that claim, and much else.
Update: re-reading this post, I guess someone might get the impression that the panel discussion will be broadcast. That’s not the case: a transcript will appear in a future issue of TPM.
Pessimism seems to be a newly popular theme in American cultural discourse. Having written a bit about worst-case scenarios, I was interested to get a review copy of Karen Cerulo’s Never Saw It Coming: Cultural Challenges to Envisioning the Worst. Perhaps because I’m naturally optimistic by temperament, I’m finding Cerulo’s relentless pessimism a bit annoying, and, not coincidentally, finding a lot to disagree with in the book.
One point particularly struck me. Cerulo claims that “positive asymmetry” is demonstrated by the fact that, in theology and art, Heaven is given a detailed and appealing description, while hell is described only in vague and non-specific terms. She mentions, as an illustration of the latter point, an etching inspired by Dante’s Inferno.
My recollection of Dante is that the descriptions of Hell, and the various categories of sinners, were detailed and intricate, making the Inferno a fascinating book, while Purgatory was less distinctly graded and the Paradiso was unreadably dull. I haven’t read Paradise Lost or Paradise Regained, but I get the impression that the same is true. Correct me if I’m wrong here, but I thought this was one of the standard criticisms of religious art – Hell and the Devil are made much more interesting than Heaven and Hell.
Cerulo focuses mainly on paintings, and maybe she’s right on this score, but even here I’d hazard a guess that the work of Hieronymus Bosch is much more widely reproduced than any detailed representation of Heaven.
There has been already quite a lot of discussion about children’s well-being on CT in recent years, but not so much in political circles in most countries. But this might be changing, after the “open letter on childhood”:http://www.telegraph.co.uk/core/Content/displayPrintable.jhtml?xml=/news/2006/09/12/njunk112.xml&site=5&page=0 about which “Chris Bertram wrote”:https://crookedtimber.org/2006/09/12/that-letter/ last week. In the UK there is now the “Archbishop of Canterbury”:http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/5354998.stm warning about a child crisis, and “the children’s society”:http://www.childrenssociety.org.uk/ asking children, young people, parents, professionals and other adults “to submit their own views”:http://www.childrenssociety.org.uk/what+we+do/The+good+childhood+inquiry/call+for+evidence/Call+for+Evidence.htm about what makes for a good childhood.
I think all this debate is great, and I don’t know any country where it’s not at least somewhat needed (the Nordic countries, perhaps?). But here are three thoughts about this debate. First, the social conditions of children vary drastically between countries: for example, in some countries there are concerns that children spend too much time at school, but this is not the case in other countries. Thus, what is an urgent problem in one country might not be an issue at all in another. Second, many of the issues relevant for children’s well-being cannot be discussed in a gender-neutral framework. I don’t want mothers to bear all or most costs for the social changes that are needed for the well-being of children. Thus, the debate on children’s well-being policies needs to be gender-sensitive, and we need to discuss who will bear the ‘costs’ (broadly defined, of course) related to the well-being of children. In fact, these distributive justice issues are not just between fathers and mothers, or men and women, but also between parents and non-parents. Third, rather than moving forward with a haphazard agenda, shouldn’t we first debate what kind of issues need to be discussed? I have my own idiosyncratic list of issues (which includes, among other things, breastfeeding policies, parental leave, parenting classes, urban planning issues, and the inevitable child care question); what issues do you think should be on the agenda of child well-being policies?
I’ve been on the road for the last week or so, gradually making my way by tramp steamer to Australia. By coincidence, I was on “ABC”:http://www.abc.net.au radio’s “Background Briefing”:http://www.abc.net.au/rn/backgroundbriefing/stories/2006/1740584.htm programme on Sunday, talking about gift and market exchange in the world of human organ and tissue procurement. There’s a “podcast of the show”:http://www.abc.net.au/rn/podcast/feeds/bbg_20060917.mp3 available if you want to listen. The topic is easy to treat in a glib or sensationalistic way, but I thought Ian Walker (who wrote and presented the show) did a really good job with it. There’s a lot of good first-hand material from organ and tissue donors, recipients and bankers, alongside stuff from me, “Virginia Postrel”:http://www.vpostrel.com/weblog/ and others.
I’m a little late with this, and others have written about it, but it’s worth repeating over and over again….
The new Army Field Manual for Human Intelligence Collector Operations prohibits the use of specific interrogation techniques including water boarding, electrical shock, burning, beating, mock executions – you know, the usual. The Army’s deputy chief of staff for intelligence Lt. General Jeff Kimmons clarified during a press conference that “interrogation” refers to “getting truthful answers to time-sensitive questions on the battlefield” and that the manual applies “all detainees, regardless of their status under all circumstances.”
A reporter pointed out that “some of the tactics that were used in particular in Guantanamo Bay … are now prohibited” and asked, “does that limit the ability of interrogators to get information that could be very useful?”
GEN. KIMMONS: Let me answer the first question. That’s a good question. I think — I am absolutely convinced the answer to your first question is no. No good intelligence is going to come from abusive practices. I think history tells us that. I think the empirical evidence of the last five years, hard years, tell us that.
And moreover, any piece of intelligence which is obtained under duress, under — through the use of abusive techniques would be of questionable credibility. And additionally, it would do more harm than good when it inevitably became known that abusive practices were used. And we can’t afford to go there.
So just to clarify: we now have empirical evidence from that last five years that “No good intelligence is going to come from abusive practices” including in the “time-sensitive” circumstances of the battlefield.
Describing an argument with her mum, Laura puts into words the problem I had with David Brooks’s column on Sunday. The column does little more than articulate the conclusions of Louann Brizendine’s The Female Brain
After I read this article, I thought “and?” And what’s the point, Davie? So, boys and girls are different, But what does that mean. I mean this isn’t a science column; it’s a political and social column on an opinion page, but he never spits it out. Mom and I were fighting over the Brooks’ unstated point.
Mom: Brooks is just saying, “ha” to the feminists who kept telling me over and over in the 70s that you kids were different, because we were messing with them. If only we were more nurturing to Chris, he would like dolls. And I told them they were crazy.
Me: Brooks is also saying something else, Mom. If we’re all just slaves to genetics as Brooks says, then women have to be the moms and dad have to go to the office or war or the soccer field. I think that’s what he’s really saying there, but he’s too chickenshit to get it out.
I don’t know whether to side with Laura or her mum. But that’s the point. Unlike most of you, but I suspect like Laura, I have a real soft spot for Brooks. But in an op ed, shouldn’t you forward an op?
Arguments about DDT have been going on for a long time in the blogosphere and similar circles. These debates typically involve a confusion between two unrelated issues
* The bogus story, popular in rightwing circles, in which the US ban on agricultural use of DDT, inspired by Rachel Carson, is morphed into a global ban on DDT, bringing to an end a previously successful compaign to eradicate malaria
* The real disputes, among malaria experts, about the relative merits of insecticide-treated bednets and spraying of house walls, and of DDT and alternative insecticides.
Some weeks ago, watching our Dear Leader answer questions on television, I was overcome with a wave of pity. Not for the president, but for those poor souls, many as yet unborn, who will one day specialize in studying his administration.
Can you imagine having to read countless transcripts of George W. Bush’s speeches? Let alone being obliged to posit them as meaningful? And yet, in the fullness of time, it must come to pass.
Then again, maybe not.
[click to continue…]
Please tell me I didn’t just read a white male blogger dismiss a black woman complaining about the lack of any black or latino bloggers at the Bill Clinton blogger meetup by telling her not to attack “her betters” and insinuating that she is too ignorant to write properly. Pleasepleaseplease. Aw, damn:
So, Liza, dear, before you go assailing your betters and making Jane stand in for every blond white woman who ever pissed you off, maybe you should head back to eighth grade English and, you know, learn to spell and to write in a linear fashion. Although judging from your other posts that I read, mediocrity may be a chronic condition for you….You just might have a future in this blogging thing, although I think you might be more at home on LiveJournal or MySpace where you can post lots of photos of yourself to distract from your decidedly tepid prose and numerous grammatical faux pas.
This is coming on the heels of lots of sarcastic “sic’s” and “ed’s” inserted in the quoted passages. That’s just uncalled for. I make spelling errors too; so does everyone. Telling a minority woman blogger she’s too stupid and uneducated to make it in the big leagues, and telling her not to “assail her betters” (?!) is just bullshit, and all the black-co-blogger-having in the world isn’t going to make it OK. There are plenty of ways to disagree with people, even humorously, even vehemently, that don’t play into harmful stereotypes. I know that sarcastic mockery of other people’s spelling and grammatical errors is an internet trope from the usenet days of yore, and I’m not saying women or minority bloggers are exempt from ordinary mockery, but think about the context a little. Context matters. If someone makes fun of, say, the lovely John Holbo for some typo, there’s really no subtext. It’s just: “ha-ha!” John will think, whoops, I was typing fast. Oh well. No one questions his right to be heard on the internet.
When a black woman is asking a legitimate question about why minority bloggers are absent from a blogger meet-up in Harlem, and you turn around with a lot of complaints about her writing and reasoning ability, there most definitely is a subtext: you’re too stupid to write properly, and that’s why no one who looks like you was at this meeting. You’re not good enough. Don’t assail your betters. I was actually kind of shocked to see this up at Firedoglake, which is an excellent blog. I’ve never read Liza’s blog before, so I have no real opinion about it or her previous dust-up with Jane Hamsher over the Lieberman-in-blackface thing, but I’ll be reading her posts a damn sight sooner than TRex’s, I’ll tell you that.
Watching established news organizations set up homesteads in the blogosphere is a pastime of great interest to me, both as a professional writer and an amateur social psychologist. Few phenomena better illustrate the role that anxiety plays in the life of large institutions.
In some few cases, the internal culture of a magazine or newspaper will encourage (or at least tolerate) a degree of initiative on the part of the writing staff. But most places are just too inflexible for that. And it shows, at all levels.
The habits fostered by an entrenched bureaucracy combine with hazy notions of “our audience” (often treated with an overblown deference finally indistinguishable from condescension) to yield a rigidity embodying pure terror. There is a clutching at reliable formulas, and a deep fear of the interesting, let alone the unusual. A compulsive avoidance of experimentation sometimes alternates (in an almost cyclothymic way) with joylessly frantic, top-down efforts at renewal.
“Be spontaneous!” comes the directive from on high. “Just not too spontaneous!”
And you see the spastic consequence in the blogs, which should probably be called Unclear on the Concept or Lipstick on the Corpse or Watching Grandma Dance the Frug.
[click to continue…]
I wrote a summary of my drive West for friends and family. Given the interest some people around here seem to have in highways and that part of the country, I thought I’d post a copy of it here.
Joseph Lindsley on the “Weekly Standard’s website”:http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/012/657klans.asp?pg=2 .
AS THE NEW ACADEMIC YEAR BEGINS, parents will give, as they always do, lectures about studying hard and attending class. But nonetheless many collegians will devote time to chugging pints, throwing darts, and doing just about anything that doesn’t involve cracking the books. This seems a gross waste of resources, but, considering the often ridiculous content of those neglected textbooks and ignored lectures, some of these prodigal students just might be better off.
…[various denunciations of various courses] …
Swarthmoreans have to wait until next year to feast on “The Whole Enchilada: Debates in World History,” but right now they can take “Engendering Culture” where they’re supposed to learn how “culture is constructed and reconstructed to replicate gender roles,” by studying “New York night life and John Wayne movies and the masculine West.”
Timothy Burke gives us the rather demanding “syllabus”:http://weblogs.swarthmore.edu/burke/?page_id=203 (for it is he) for his course at Swarthmore, “The Whole Enchilada: Debates in World History” (copied below the break).
This displays in its primeval majesty the boneheaded stupidity of a common genre of opinion article (and occasional “rigorously researched”:http://weblogs.swarthmore.edu/burke/?p=201 report) on the Evils of Left Wing Indocrination and Pandering to Lazy Students in the Modern University. Sloppy Google searches and sweeping assertions don’t provide evidence of anything other than the author’s laziness and desire to find backup for his prejudices with the least amount of exertion possible. The kind of guff that deserves an F, in other words.