March 2007

Kevin Drum asks why, if it’s so conservative, 24 is so liberal. I’ve only watched 96 hours worth, but here goes. Yes, the CTU action is, at bottom, a kind of Dirty Harry dirty bomb fantasy. But, since this is partly a fantasy of (justified) moral transgression, the show needs to telegraph awareness that ‘this is all very complicated and fraught with moral peril – yet we are doing it with clear eyes.’ So you need to spend some time gesturing in that direction, but it would be annoying if these gestures slowed down the action. So those bits get outsourced to the political side of the narrative. So a subdued sense of how the game actually ought to be played, cleanly, gets played as a sort of steady accompaniment, with the left hand, while the right is banging out a rousing, martial tune. It would be a good bargain, if the reality-based liberal community could strike it: in exchange for liberal control of actually existing institutions and policy-making, conservatives could be ceded total control of a network of powerful but strictly mythical agencies, headed by omnicompetent, albeit non-existent agents.

Guinness Marmite

Originally uploaded by Chris Bertram.

This is for “Harry”:https://crookedtimber.org/2006/03/22/michael-gove-is-right/ . (And perhaps for Henry, Kieran and Maria too.) A limited edition (300,000 jars). It is already being re-sold on ebay. Not sure what it tastes like, as mine is as yet unopened.

I took a quick trip around “Fantasy Island”:http://www.dirtragmag.com/print/article.php?ID=441 this morning, a series of fast, fun mountain-bike trails about twenty minutes from downtown Tucson. To get there, you drive past “Davis Monthan AFB”:http://www.dm.af.mil/ and “AMARC”:http://www.amarcexperience.com/Scrapyards.asp, better known as the Boneyard. This is a huge complex of decommissioned, mothballed, cannibalized and just plain decaying U.S. military aircraft of all sorts. Here’s a Google Satellite Shot to give you a sense of the scale of the place.

As it happens, this is only one of three boneyards in the area. Up out past the northwest side of town past Marana is “Pinal Air Park”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pinal_Airpark, which is a boneyard, storage and re-branding site for civilian aircraft, including many 747s. (It also has a history as a CIA Airfield.) And it’s here that St Kieran, an Aer Lingus 747, met his end some years ago.

Here’s a larger shot. This photo was taken in 1997. I don’t think he’s there any more, having probably been scrapped in the meantime. Like I say, you see some strange things in the desert. (Me on a mountain bike, for example.) Maybe I should do a series. Next up could be the local Titan II ICBM silo (missile included), where we take job candidates when they ask us where the Dean’s office is.

I visited Pajamas Media today and it looks like they’ve adopted the same model as public broadcasting – a couple of public service ads for the a girls-and-technology initiative from the Girl Scouts (quite a good one, I thought) and ads for PJM itself, but, as far as I can see, no commercials.

I have a post up at “Aaronovitch Watch” (incorporating “World of Decency”) imagining the response of the South African government to some of the media commentators who are loudly shaming them for their failure to act (in what way?) on Zimbabwe. A few more thoughts for the slightly less polemic Crooked Timber venue …
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From what I’m hearing, it sounds probable that John Edwards “is going to pull out of the race for Democratic candidate today”:http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/22/us/politics/22edwards.html?hp, because of his wife’s health. I’m very sorry if this is so; Edwards is the candidate whom I would have voted for, if I had a vote. He’s as close to being a Social Democrat as can reasonably be expected of anyone in the mainstream of US politics, and seems as a person and candidate to be deeply smart, serious, and committed to making hard choices in order to right some of the economic inequalities that have become pervasive in this country. I’m even sorrier because of the circumstances. From all accounts, Elizabeth Edwards is an extraordinary force in her own right, combining a tough intelligence with a fundamental sense of decency. I wish them well.

Update: Elizabeth Edwards has had a recurrence of her cancer, but it appears to be treatable, albeit not curable; Edwards says he isn’t dropping out.

Update 2: See “Jane Hamsher”:http://www.firedoglake.com/2007/03/22/best-wishes-for-elizabeth-edwards/ (and Elizabeth Edwards in comments).

Greetings, O Timberites! Welcome to “spring,” unless it’s now “autumn” for you. (I hate these fashionable nods to “global relativism,” but I’m informed that some CT readers and contributors are adherents of some kind of Southern Hemisphere Standpoint Epistemology.) I fear that my nasty reputation has preceded me to this prestigious blog, but just for those of you who might be wondering who I am and why I’m here, my name is Michael Bérubé. I teach literature and cultural studies at Penn State University, where I also co-direct (with my wife, Janet Lyon) Penn State’s Disability Studies Program. In future posts, I will be more than happy to remedy this blog’s inexplicable inattention to (a) disability studies and (b) professional hockey in North America, but first, I should probably mention by way of introduction that I published two books last fall, one of which features my <a href=”http://www.michaelberube.com/images/uploads/berube_rhetorical.jpg”> ginormous looming ghostly head</a> and the other of which has been widely lauded for its innovative jacket design:

Hey, hold the phone!

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Blackwell has just published the latest of the Blackwell Philosophy Anthologies: Philosophy of Education: An Anthology (UK) edited by (almost full disclosure) my friend and collaborator Randall Curren. I was approached about editing an anthology myself a few years ago, and thought about it but, mainly out of laziness, never got around to it. Curren’s anthology is so good that it makes me cringe at the thought of how any volume I might have edited would have compared with it. I suppose that from outside the field it just looks like a good anthology, but from inside it reveals a wonderfully broad conception of the field, and it’s clear that an enormous amount of work must have gone into constructing it.

Philosophy of education suffers from being somewhat marginal within Education, and not well respected within Philosophy (for example, I’ve never seen an advertisement in Jobs for Philosophers with Philosophy of Education as an AOS, nor do I know of a Philosophy PhD program in the US which regularly, if ever, offers Philosophy of Education graduate seminars. I don’t offer them, and nor do the other philosophers of education I know within philosophy departments).I doubt many philosophers know much of the field beyond Plato’s, Aristotle’s and Rousseau’s contributions, and knowledge that Locke said something relevant but no idea what it was. (Anyone who does know that much knows more than I did when I started working in the field).

If you wanted to know more, Curren’s Anthology would be the perfect place to start.

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Matthew Yglesias pens a partial defense of Giuliani’s statement that “freedom is about the willingness of every single human being to cede to lawful authority a great deal of discretion about what you do.” Matt: “The cause of political liberty is not, in fact, served by living in an underpoliced city. Generally speaking, while freedom does require that authority not overstep its proper bounds, it also very much requires that properly constituted authorities be reasonably strong and effective.” But this isn’t what Giuliani said. A point Isaiah Berlin makes very well in “Two Concepts of Liberty”: it is one thing to give up liberty for some greater good – possibly even an increase in freedom along some other axis. (Giving up the freedom to murder in order to secure freedom from murder seems like a good deal.) It is quite another thing to call the sacrifice of liberty ‘liberty’.

This paradox has been often exposed. It is one thing to say that I know what is good for X, while he himself does not; and even to ignore his wishes for its – and his – sake; and a very different one to say that he has eo ipso chosen it, not indeed consciously, not as he seems in everyday life, but in his role as a rational self which his empirical self may not know – the ‘real’ self which discerns the good, and cannot help choosing it once it is revealed. This monstrous impersonation, which consists in equating what X would choose if he were something he is not, or at least not yet, with what X actually seeks and chooses, is at the heart of all political theories of self-realization. It is one thing to say that I may be coerced for my own good, which I am too blind to see: this may, on occasion, be for my benefit; indeed it may enlarge the scope of my liberty. It is another to say that if it is my good, then I am not being coerced, for I have willed it, whether I know this or not, and am free (or ‘truly’ free) even while my poor earthly body and foolish mind bitterly reject it, and struggle with the greatest desperation against those who seek, however benevolently, to impose it.

As Matt says: “He’s still, I think, a pretty creepy authoritarian but the idea he’s expressing has a reasonably distinguished lineage and isn’t just some madness he dreamed up on his couch one afternoon.” Yes, it’s some madness that Hegel dreamed up on his couch one afternoon.

In other news, I’m in the market for a new scanner. It has to work well with mac and have the best OCR capability I can buy for under $200. Googling around, it seems that the most of the stand-alone software packages (OmniPage) are not getting rave reviews from consumers, and are rather expensive. If I have to choose between paying $400 for semi-functionality and just using whatever semi-functionality is bundled with a cheap scanner, I guess I’d go with the latter. I have Adobe Acrobat, which has some ok – not great, I think – OCR capability. What do you think?

Two examples from what I hope will be an ongoing series:

1. At the annual Miami-Dade Lincoln Day Dinner (for our overseas readers, that translates as “South Florida, right-wing Republicans”), he ended his speech with the stirring phrase, “¡Patria o muerte, venceremos!” Somehow, Romney missed out on knowing that that phrase—“Fatherland or death, we shall overcome!”—has for decades been the closing line of almost every one of Castro’s speeches. It’s 100% associated with the Castro regime. Romney’s audience was not impressed. (From Making Light.)

2. Mitt Romney and his wife were on ‘Larry King Live’ last week, and the former governor discussed his Mormon mission overseas: “Oh, it is a fabulous experience. Look, I was sort of having fun going to college and not worrying about the future. And then I went to a different country and saw how different life could be if we didn’t have the values and the kinds of opportunities that exist in America.”

It is indeed tragic that so much of the world doesn’t have the same freedoms and conveniences that America does. Whole continents are filled with the scourges of disease and poverty. I’m just glad that Romney got a small taste of how so much of humanity actually lives. Anyhow, where exactly was he? “I was in France. Bordeaux, Paris, all over France. A great learning experience to live overseas.” (From The Plank via Brad DeLong.)

“Marc Lynch”:http://abuaardvark.typepad.com/abuaardvark/2007/03/endings_and_beg.html is finally able to announce that he’s coming here to GWU this fall; he’ll have a joint appointment in the Elliott School of International Affairs and the Department of Political Science. We’re incredibly happy to be getting him (for me, not least because it’ll be a lot of fun having another blogger in the dept).

Last month I mentioned that Political Theory Daily Review had found a sponsor — the magazine Bookforum. As it happens, the new issue just arrived in my mailbox yesterday, even before it reached the newstand, which doesn’t always happen.

Well, now you can read it, too. As of the April/May issue, nearly all of the contents are online for free. It looks like a couple of items are print-only, out of about 45.

I’m still partial to the paper version. Easier on the eyeballs, for one thing; plus, the ads in a book publication actually count as information that I want to see. But at a time when most newspaper review sections are shrinking when not disappearing, it’s good that one publication seems to be doing well enough to make its content available to the largest possible readership.

I’m thinking of getting an electronic reader, now that display technologies are finally catching up, but have been unimpressed with reviews of the Sony Reader, which seems to be the market leader in the US. The iRex Iliad looks to have better specs, but I haven’t seen any proper reviews of it. It doesn’t handle proprietary DRM stuff, but that’s not what I’m interested in reading – I want it more to reduce the load of book and article manuscripts that I always seem to lug with me when I am going from place to place. Anyone out there who has this machine (or another competitor), and is prepared to offer advice/opinions?

Guardian has an obituary here.

I can’t resist one comment. As a kid I didn’t care so much for Are You Being Served? Apart from Mr. Humphreys. When, later, I became aware that he was despised by some gay activists, I always guessed that his critics (mentioned in the obit) didn’t actually watch the show. What was portrayed on the screen was a genuinely decent and kind man with a (somewhat) naughty sense of humour, around whom idiocy prevailed. It was, at the time, the central portrayal of a poof on TV. But far from a negative one, and personally, if I can point to a single influence on my own positive attitudes to homsoexuality and homosexuals in my pre-teen and early teen years, it was probably Inman’s character. I’m sad to see him go.

For my current, much more positive, attitude to AYBS?, here.