September 2006

In the last ten years, most of my friends became parents. One thing I observed was that many of these New Parents, both men and women, changed their character a little. Of course, people didn’t suddently become different persons by moving into parenthood; but the more I watched them, the more evidence I gathered that people who become parents somehow soften a little. Character traits such as being very assertive, being bossy, being easily irritable, all lost their sharp edges. In addition there were the changes in character, values and worldviews that these New Parents noticed themselves (and that are generally not observable to outsiders). Writing deadlines became much less important, work could wait till another day. What once looked like an almost unbearable cost of parenthood (like getting up at 5.30 am every morning) suddenly was of little importance.
Am I deluding myself when I believe to observe that the move into parenthood softens characters and makes many previously Really Important Things suddenly look rather trivial?

BBC obit here.

Tuesday is, of course, International Talk Like a Pirate Day. There is by now a considerable body of pirate historiography. But is the field of piracy studies sufficiently well theorized?

Aye, often have I axed myself, only to be distracted by the plundering of booty.
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Via a “comment”:http://www.haloscan.com/comments/maxbsawicky/2521/#240907 by Michael McIntyre at MaxSpeak, this extraordinary _Telos_ article (translated rather too literally from the German, I suspect) on Condoleeza Rice.

In a bright turquoise suit and with her hair finally looking relaxed, she seems younger than two years ago in the White House, and the hemline of her skirt above the knee proves that as head of the State Department she has definitely not adopted the fashion styles of elderly ladies. Was it historical symbolism to have me wait in the Marshall Room, I ask, but evidently too softly for someone who has entered the realm of the Secretary: she takes me by the hand to lead me, with quick athletic steps, to the office of two colleagues concerned with public relations. The boss introduces me, notes with the pride of an engaged teacher that her former colleague has passed “the test,” and we set off in the opposite direction, passing the flag with fifty stars in the reception room, which any visitor would recognize from many press photographs, to her office. I sink into a yellow chair, opposite the couch of the Secretary, who crosses her lovely legs and urges me, in a friendly if somewhat impatient tone, to pose the first question.

Und so weiter

As “Michael Froomkin”:http://www.discourse.net/archives/2006/09/will_the_us_legislate_torture.html says, the headline of this Washington Post “editorial”:http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/09/14/AR2006091401587.html is admirably blunt.

A Defining Moment for America: The president goes to Capitol Hill to lobby for torture

PRESIDENT BUSH rarely visits Congress. So it was a measure of his painfully skewed priorities that Mr. Bush made the unaccustomed trip yesterday to seek legislative permission for the CIA to make people disappear into secret prisons and have information extracted from them by means he dare not describe publicly.

Of course, Mr. Bush didn’t come out and say he’s lobbying for torture. Instead he refers to “an alternative set of procedures” for interrogation. But the administration no longer conceals what it wants. It wants authorization for the CIA to hide detainees in overseas prisons where even the International Committee of the Red Cross won’t have access. It wants permission to interrogate those detainees with abusive practices that in the past have included induced hypothermia and “waterboarding,” or simulated drowning. And it wants the right to try such detainees, and perhaps sentence them to death, on the basis of evidence that the defendants cannot see and that may have been extracted during those abusive interrogation sessions.

Both Michael and (as usual) “Marty Lederman”:http://balkin.blogspot.com/2006/09/at-last-issue-is-publicly-joined-and.html have more.

Most of my students write in Word, as (like Daniel) I do. I’m not crazy about it, and used WordPerfect for years, before collaboration with other people who write in Word made me fall in line. But Word does have one feature that I love: the grammar and style warning constituted by the little green underlining of any string of words that Word doesn’t like. I find that eliminating the green lines almost always (19 times out of 20) improves the way that the text reads. It is especially valuable to me because my grammar has never been brilliant (though it is better than my spolling, and much better than my typinf). It is not perfect; some strings that it underlines are the best way of putting things, and many strings it doesn’t underline are not.

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Over at Comment is Free, our very own Daniel “has joined”:http://commentisfree.guardian.co.uk/group_post/2006/09/post_389.html with other writers on that site to urge support for the Global Day for Darfur.

Pace Belle, I’ve failed to hype The Weblog not through shyness — or even laziness — but from the assumption everybody already knows about it. Even if it isn’t listed in the CT Lumber Room (hint hint), a situation that has long been a puzzle to me.

Likewise, I’ve assumed that everyone has seen the well-produced greatest hits album by Scott Eric “Acephalous” Kaufman (from Ronco!) including such chestnuts as “My Chiasmus of Hatred and My Hatred of Chiasmus.” But no more, with the assumptions. Check it out. The collection seems like the prototype of some new blogal genre, for which no name has yet been coined.

Finally, just to tie things together: Adam Kotsko of The Weblog certainly ought to put together such a compilation. So say we all?

C’mon it’s The Weblog. You’re missing out on insightful posts like this one from Dominic, on how Fay Weldon is the antichrist:

The model of libidinal economy endorsed by Weldon is essentially that of middle-class parenting: let your children have the smallest possible amount of what they clamour for – sweets, television, computer games – and make their access even to that conditional on an unremitting parade of good manners and the assiduous consumption of vegetables. In such a manner is exorbitant desire acknowledged through gritted teeth – when it is not being exploited to secure obedience. All of this is fair enough in extremis, which is where most parenting of small children is done, but it is nauseating to encounter an adult person still willingly enthralled by such a ruthlessly petty system of restraint and reward. If adolescence has any purpose at all, it is to shatter those bonds.

Read the whole thing, because it really is an excellent little essay. On a lighter note, you can be astounded by the unparallelled quote-mining skills of Adam Kotsko:

In Moral Man and Immoral Society (1932), Reinhold Niebuhr quotes a Southern politician protesting against suffrage tests for black voters “on the ground that they would discriminate in favor of the educated Negro against the servile, old-time Negro”:

Now, sir, the old-time Negro is assassinated by this suffrage plan. This new issue, your reader, your writer, your loafer, your voter, your ginger-cake school graduate, with a diploma of side-whiskers and beaver-hat, pocket pistols, brass knucks [sic] and bicycle, he, sir, is the distinguished citizen whom our statesmen would crown at once with the highest dignities of an ancient and respectable commonwealth.

I think I speak for all of us when I say, humina whatsa ginger-whisker beaver-hat whaaaaa? The Weblog has many other fine posters, too; I’m sure your life needs more Ben Wolfson. McLemee may be shy to hype The Weblog, but I’m not. Go ye, and read of it. Also, ginger-cake.

Regular readers will know of the Euston Manifesto, a British-based initiative by various self-described leftists some of whom were big supporters of the Iraq war and all of whom share an obsession with the idea that “Enlightenment values” are under threat from a nefarious coalition of Islamists, postmodernists and Chomskyites. Now they have “a US chapter”:http://www.telospress.com/main/index.php?main_page=page&id=44&chapter=0 , launched by people around the journal Telos. The list of initial signatories and supporters is interesting, but contains figures not usually thought of as having much to do with the left as traditionally construed. They include Daniel Jonah Goldhagen, Walter Laqueur, Martin Peretz and Ronald Radosh. Laqueur has become the victim of a Mark Steyn-like obsession with demography and recently gave a positive review of Michael Gove’s execrable Celsius 7/7 in the the TLS, Peretz – a member of the pro-war “Democratic Leadership Council” – has just joined the advisory board of Lewis Libby’s defense fund, and Radosh is a regular writer for David Horowitz’s FrontPageMag.

update: a link to Tony Judt’s essay “The Strange Death of Liberal America”:http://www.lrb.co.uk/v28/n18/judt01_.html from the latest LRB seems right (via “Marc Mulholland”:http://moiders.blogspot.com/ ).

Michael Bérubé tosses out an aside in a “post”:http://www.michaelberube.com/index.php/weblog/theory_tuesday_act_v_scene_iii/ on Raymond Williams and culture.

bq. Left media critics make much of the fact (to take a random example) that millions of Americans believe that Iraq was involved in 9/11, and I have heard any number of my colleagues adduce this as evidence of the Foxification of national discourse. But the curious thing is that on September 12, 2001, millions of Americans believed that Iraq was involved in 9/11, and Iraq’s refusal to denounce the attacks didn’t exactly reassure those people. The question remains, then, of whether Fox News actively recruits people to the “Iraq was involved” agenda, or whether it simply confirms the Cheney-Rice conspiracy theorists in what they already believe.

As it happens there _is_ evidence that Fox News has a real and quite substantial effect on people’s politics (albeit on voting behavior rather than the propensity to believe in conspiracy theories). Stefano Della Vigna and Ethan Kaplan have a paper (“pdf”:http://elsa.berkeley.edu/~sdellavi/wp/foxvote06-03-30.pdf#search=%22fox%20news%20effect%22 ) which compares voting in the 1996 and 2000 presidential and senate elections in towns where Fox News was introduced on cable and in towns where it wasn’t. They argue that there isn’t any substantial difference between the two different groups of towns besides the introduction or lack of same of Fox News, providing a sort of natural experiment. However, there are significant _ex post_ differences in the degree to which people in these towns then vote for Republicans. Between 1996 and 2000, Republicans gain between 0.4 and 0.7 percentage points more of the vote in towns with Fox News than in towns without it. DellaVigna and Kaplan reckon that Fox News persuaded between 3% and 8% of its audience to vote Republican.

I’m now on on the West coast after spending a chunk of last week driving to Palo Alto from Chicagoland.* I didn’t have much time so I just got on I-80 and drove with few interruptions. I made a stop in one of the more populated parts of Wyoming: Buford. As you can see from the sign, the town has a population of two. It’s also noteworthy due to its high elevation, apparently the highest on I-80. I had no idea I was that high up had it not been pointed out on this sign as the roads on the way weren’t particular steep. In any case, I am curious, what makes a town a town? The Eisenhower Expressway Interstate System (I-80) goes by plenty (more than plenty, in fact) unpopulated areas with just a house here or there. So what makes Buford a town of two vs just a house attached to another town?

[*] For those not familiar with distances in the US, this is similar – in terms of distance, pretty much nothing else – to something like driving from Moscow to Madrid.

As I mentioned recently, I am hiring for a full-time staff position in my research group. Details are below. If you know of someone in the Chicagoland area who may be interested (or someone somewhere else who’d be up for moving to the area), please let them know about this opportunity. Or if you can think of relevant mailing lists, please let me know. (I’ve posted it on air-l and CITASA. I’ve put an ad on Craig’s List Chicago and on Salon Jobs. And I’ve sent a note to a bunch of people I know both in Chicagoland and elsewhere. I welcome suggestions for additional ways of publicizing it though. For now I’m holding off on posting it on Monster.com.) Thanks!

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Although the U.S. Constitution of 1787 does not include the word “slavery”, there are five more-or-less direct references to it, and other more indirect references. Article IV, Section 2, is the fugitive slave clause – any person “held in service or labor in one state, under the laws thereunto, escaping into another … shall be delivered up on claim of the party to whom such service or labor may be due.”

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