As I mentioned a couple of months ago, it’s been increasingly difficult for one person to keep up with changes in the academic blogosphere. Over the last few months I’ve spent a lot of time updating the blogroll, removing defunct blogs and what inaccuracies I could detect, and putting in new ones, to lay the foundations for a new, wikified version of the blogroll. The idea is that academics who want to add their own blogs or other academic blogs that they know of don’t need to hassle me; they can instead go and update the list themselves. The new site lives at “http://www.academicblogs.net”:http://www.academicblogs.net and “http://www.academicblogs.org”:http://www.academicblogs.org. I’m also encouraging people to add other kinds of content – descriptions of blogs, lists of blogs at a given university, and other such material that they or others might find useful (stuff which is obviously inappropriate or self-serving is a different matter, obviously). The site is on my own server space (which I hope won’t be overwhelmed by users); the “frequently asked questions list”:http://www.academicblogs.net/wiki/index.php/Frequently_Asked_Questions provides a more comprehensive description of what the site is, how it works etc.
.. or where we confirm that I am, on occasion, obsessive about some things. The New York Times has a short piece about GMail’s increasing ability to avoid false positives when it comes to legitimate commercial email requested by the user.
What caught my eye was the accompanying illustration (on the left in this image below).
That Inbox screenshot is not from a GMail account. GMail calls spam “Spam” not “Bulk” as per the screen capture on the right. A commenter on my Flickr stream noted that the illustration they put up comes from Yahoo! Mail. Hah. How hard would it have been to feature the matching Inbox?
At the Valve we’re hosting a book event discussion of Walter Benn Michaels’ The Trouble With Diversity
In my post I discuss, in passing, Michael Lind’s Up From Conservatism (1996) – his notion of the ‘overclass’ – and so I happened to notice that he has a new book out just yesterday: The American Way of Strategy
Doesn’t float your boat? I’ll try to come up with more comic book jokes for later.
“ABC news runs a story”:http://blogs.abcnews.com/theblotter/2006/10/warnings_about_.html under the headline “Warning Signs about Foley Ignored for at least Five Years.”
“No one in the Republican leadership, nor Congressman Shimkus, saw those messages until last Friday when ABC News released them to the public,” said Speaker of the House Dennis Hastert (R-IL). But there were lots of warning signs. In 2001, pages were warned to be careful with Foley. In 2005, one page complained to his congressman about “sick” e-mails from Foley, a complaint passed on to the Speaker’s staff.”
You can see how the story is taking shape. I expect soon we will learn of the existence of a Presidential daily briefing headed “FOLEY DETERMINED TO STROKE IN U.S. CONGRESS.”
I have a post up on the Guardian blog, in praise of “stasis” as an under-rated strategy for government when compared to “reform“.
Of course, the general principle that the status quo is no worse than the status quo, and that all proposals for radical change should first be assessed to see if they can beat this hurdle, is one that has applications in foreign policy as well as domestic. For example, via Normblog Wole Soyinka is apparently castigating the UN and African Union for “inaction” on Darfur. Soyinka apparently believes that sponsoring two sets of peace talks, providing a massive humanitarian relief effort and negotiating the AMIS peacekeeping force don’t count as “doing anything”, which suggests to me (along with the fact that Norm links Soyinka’s speech to a series of diatribes by Eric Reeves on Jeff Weintraub’s site) that the only thing that would count as “doing something” would be war, or economic sanctions of such severity as to be roughly equivalent to war in terms of lethality.
Nobody, from Alex de Waal to Jan Pronk to Mark Malloch Brown, thinks that an invasion would pass the simple test of “would it make things worse or better”. As I’ve said repeatedly with respect to Darfur, it’s the height of irresponsibility to demand “action” without saying what that action might be, or to provide some kind of sensible assessment of its likely consequences.
There are a few places on Earth where it makes little sense to have a car. The innercity of Venice, for example. Or Manhattan. But apart from these exceptional places, is it possible for families in post-industrial societies to live comfortably without a car? [click to continue…]
Because all the Uk bloggers have linked to it, I tried out the webcameron. Cameron’s introduction is very nice. He might want to read this paper by Erik Wright: it’ll provide some nice theoretical underpinnings. Oh, and everyone else might want to look at the draft manuscript for Wright’s book, Envisioning Real Utopias. (I don’t mean to suggest that Cameron won’t want to read the whole book, I’m just helpfully pointing him to the central ideas, so he can decide whether its worth his while to read the whole thing, presuming that he’s busier than the rest of us).
I mentioned a “couple”:https://crookedtimber.org/2005/08/12/trahisons-des-clercs/ of “times”:https://crookedtimber.org/2005/08/16/witchfinders-general/ last year that Norman Podhoretz had demonstrably lied when he smeared critics of the Iraq war as rooting for America’s defeat. But I hadn’t realized how deep his hypocrisy went. Ezra Klein “quotes”:http://www.prospect.org/weblog/2006/09/post_1527.html#010145 Spencer Ackerman at Tapped.
In 1971, as editor of Commentary, Podhoretz wrote despondently about the war, “I now find myself … unhappily moving to the side of those who would prefer … an American defeat to a ‘Vietnamization’ of the war which calls for the indefinite and unlimited bombardment by American pilots in American planes of every country in that already devastated region.” By 1982, however, Podhoretz had relocated the true fault for the Vietnam debacle–not among the war’s architects, but among its critics. In Why We Were in Vietnam, he accused the antiwar movement of bearing “a certain measure of responsibility for the horrors that have overtaken the people of Vietnam.” Over the intervening decade, Podhoretz had somehow grown illusioned with the war and disillusioned only with its opponents.
Perhaps it’s not just hypocrisy. Some bizarre kind of displacement ???
The passage by the US Congress of a bill that among other things abolishes habeas corpus for terrorism suspects, allows interrogation methods that would normally be classed as torture, and allows the President to declare legal residents of the United States to be enemy combatants has produced a predictably partisan divide. All but two Senate Republicans voted for the Bill (Lincoln Chafee opposed and Olympia Snowe did not vote), and most pro-Republican bloggers seem to have backed it with marginal qualifications.
Those of us who fear and distrust the Bush Administration naturally find it easy to see what harm could be done with powers like this. The Administration’s supporters, on the other hand, seem confident that only the likes of David Hicks and Jose Padilla have anything to fear.
So, for those who support the bill, it might be useful to consider the standard thought experiment recommended to all who support dictatorial powers for a leader on their own side. Think about what the other side might do with these powers.
I finally got around to watching V for Vendetta [imdb]. Being a comics nerd, I am mildly bothered by the departures from the original (wikipedia will tell you all about it) – and more so by the fact that the author, Alan Moore, didn’t want this. So he got his name struck from the project. (Then they went and packaged a whole teaser section from his graphic novel with the DVD. Chance of Moore disassociating himself from the Wachowski bros.? Not so much.)
I found it a pretty good film. Entertaining. Nicely slick. Thought-provoking? In some ways I think the less ambiguous treatment of the material suits the material, although in other ways it dumbs it down. But here’s my simple thought: the film pretty clearly intends to be anti-Bush allegory or what have you. (You can cut it finer, but it comes to that.) Yet you could turn around and say: but the whole Iraq mess depends precisely on people finding this sort of political romanticism far too realistic for their own good. The dream of an Event – an explosion – after which, miraculously, everyone comes out into the public square and spontaneously dons the mask of their destructive liberator. Freedom forever! Unity through demolition. And there will be flowers. Why would you think postwar planning wasn’t necessary? [click to continue…]
Taking advantage of my Silicon Valley location this year, I decided to go check out Yahoo! Hack Day (it’s actually a two-day event so I’ll be back for more today). I doubt that there are too many CT readers who would participate in something of this sort, but if you happen to be there today, do let me know.
Hundreds of people showed up for the opportunity to spend a day adding functionality to various Yahoo! products such as Flickr, Upcoming.org and now even Yahoo! Mail. The demos of these creations will be this afternoon (Saturday) where we’ll get to hear 90-second descriptions of the hacks. It sounds fun and exciting especially to someone like me who’s such a fan of some of Yahoo!’s products.
The event organization so far has been impressive with clear directions, plenty of parking, fast registration and some fun swag. Yesterday was filled with various presentations culminating in a pizza dinner and then a live concert. I finally met Lifehacker Gina Trapani in person and hung out for a while. This was fun since despite having written for Lifehacker in the past, we’ve never met in person.
The surprise of the evening was the Beck concert (see a recent interview in Wired as to why he was an especially appropriate selection for this event). The performance included puppet versions of all the artists projected onto the screen behind the stage. It was great. You can find photos of the concert on Flickr (mine, others’) and there’s also a Yahoo! video not of the concert, but of the Beck puppet’s visit to Sunnyvale. Google gets most of the attention for being a fun place to work, but Yahoo!’s campus seems quite fun as well, something I already noted when giving a talk there two years ago.
“David Corn”:http://www.davidcorn.com/archives/2006/09/this_is_what_wa.php posts the pictures which I’ve copied below of a waterboarding apparatus, and a painting of the process by a former prisoner, taken from a Cambodian “museum that documents Khymer Rouge atrocities.” Yes, that’s right. The current administration is out there on torture together with the fucking Khmer Rouge. Who, according to Corn’s correspondent, “like so many brutal regimes–made waterboarding one of their primary tools for a simple reason: it is one of the most viciously effective forms of torture ever devised.” I’d like to think that torture apologists (a couple of whom occasionally infest our comments sections) would be deeply ashamed – but I suspect that they’ve lost the capacity for shame long ago, if they ever had it to begin with.
If I have any regrets (apart from not having played enough cricket) among the biggest must be indolently passing up the opportunity to wander down the Iffley Road to watch Jake Thackray play in a pub sometime in the mid-1980’s. I still can’t imagine what I was thinking; the cover price was something like 2 quid, and it didn’t even require staying out late (something I was slightyl less averse to in those days anyway). Now the chance is gone forever. But a while ago Jake In a Box
(NB: bob mcmanus should be sure to read on)
*1*. _trans_. To corrupt the morals or moral principles of; to deprave or pervert morally.
bq. The Senate approved legislation this evening governing the interrogation and trials of terror suspects, establishing far-reaching new rules in the definition of who may be held and how they should be treated. … The legislation … strips detainees of a habeas corpus right to challenge their detentions in court and broadly defines what kind of treatment of detainees is prosecutable as a war crime. … The legislation broadens the definition of enemy combatants beyond the traditional definition used in wartime, to include noncitizens living legally in this country as well as those in foreign countries, and also anyone determined to be an enemy combatant under criteria defined by the president or secretary of defense. It strips detainees being held at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, of a habeas right to challenge their detention in court, relying instead on procedures known as combatant status review trials, which have looser rules of evidence than the courts. It allows evidence seized in this country or abroad to be taken without a search warrant.
I see that Adam Swift is giving an interesting-looking paper on “Parents’ Rights and the Value of the Family” at the UCL political theory seminar next month. All right, I’m being coy, we co-authored it, but since I never directly post anything on my own non-existent web page, I wanted to encourage people who might be interested to read it.