May 2007

Cory Doctorow coins a phrase about Teresa Nielsen Hayden.

Megan McArdle’s dog, Finnegan, contracted an infection and had to be put to sleep. She posted about it. I thought: soon, some gobshite will show up in the comments, deriding the way she felt at four in the morning the night her dog died. And sure enough. Gotta love the intertubes.

Meanwhile, Jerry Falwell has died, too. In terms of net good brought into the world during their respective lives, Megan’s dog is probably ahead of Falwell. The conjunction of events reminded me of Oliver Goldsmith on morality, dogs and men.
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Via Larry Solum, a piece in the New York Sun by Steven Smith, about Rawls, occasioned by the publication of Rawls’s Lectures on the History of Political Philosophy. (It’s sitting on my shelf, waiting for the summer: one friend commented that the paper is cheap, but in fact I like that for some reason).

One comment struck me as odd:

His very modesty and lack of speculative curiosity are what exclude him from the ranks of the great philosophers. Rawls is not an Isaiah Berlin with his anguished sense of the conflict of goods which besets human life; nor is he a Leo Strauss with his vivid awareness of the forces of persecution with which philosophy has always to contend; nor is he a Michael Oakeshott with his diagnosis of the dangers posed by excessive rationalism to the goals of a free society.

All true (except the not-great bit, in my opinion). But doesn’t this carry the implicature that, unlike Rawls, Berlin, Strauss and Oakeshott were great philosophers? Interesting thinkers, all of them, but great philosophers? Maybe I’m misreading it.

Thanks to dr slack and other well-read contributors to this comments thread, I found an early version of the drunk/lamp-post/keys joke commonly directed at economists in which the role of the drunk/economist is played by a figure from Afghan (or maybe Iranian or Turkish) tradition, Mullah Nasruddin (scroll down or search for basement).

18 months ago, it was decision day for the EU’s General Affairs and External Relations Council to decide on banning Uzbek government officials from entering Europe. A travel ban was put in place after the Uzbek government shot dead about 200 protesters in Andijan in May, 2005. The US also protested the massacre and was kicked out of its air base in Afghanistan’s neighbour (despite having poured $1 billion of aid into the country since 1992, not to mention the odd extraordinary rendition). In October 2005, the EU issued a strongly worded protest and banned Karimov and about a dozen of his cronies from entering the Europe. Today, it’s d-day again, as the Council decides whether to continue banning 12 named officials from entering Europe.

Normally, this bread and butter issue should have been decided last week in discussions between government officials. Most member states wanted the ban continued for 12 named people, but Germany wanted only 8. Using its presidency of the EU to throw its weight around, Germany refused point blank to negotiate at the working level, and pushed the issue up to the EU’s foreign ministers for their meeting today. All over Brussels, diplomats are scratching their heads at how far Germany is willing to stick its brass neck out for this nasty little dictatorship and asking themselves; wtf? [click to continue…]

I can’t resist following Conservapedia, the Tlön version of Wikipedia, in which the liberal, anti-American bias of the Earth version is replaced with virtue and apple pie. But where did this bias come from, and how is it so deeply rooted in our culture? The answer, it turns out is the Bible, not of course the true version held in the vaults of Uqbar, but the liberal Earth Bible known by such as names as the King James Version.

In the Uqbar version, as explained at Conservapedia, all sorts of politically correct liberalism is eliminated or glossed out of existence. Uqbar scholars have discovered that the soft-on-crime John 8:7 ‘”If any one of you is without sin, let him be the first to throw a stone” was inserted by time-travelling liberals some time around the 4th century. Naturally, Conservapedia says, Wikipedia sticks to the Earth version, though a check of the actual site suggests that the annoying liberal habit of looking at all the evidence is at work here as well.

Conservapedia has able assistance from other conservative sources. All that class warfare stuff about the rich not getting into heaven (Matthew 19:21-24) turns out to mean that if you want money, you should cut God (or his earthly representatives) a good share in advance. Other kinds of warfare are fine with the Prince of Peace, though. As for turning the other cheek ((Luke 6:27-31), it’s No More Christian Nice Guy.

Commenting on this Instapundit post: “I have no idea if it’s actually true, but sounds pretty plausible.” And that, my friends, is how the pros blog.

Simon Kuper, in today’s FT, “reviews Anne Goldgar’s _Tulipmania_, “:http://www.ft.com/cms/s/50e2255e-0025-11dc-8c98-000b5df10621.html a new study of the 17th century boom and bust in the Dutch tulip market. Disappointingly, it turns out that most of the stories are false. There was a boom, but it was a fairly marginal phenomenon in the Dutch economy, and people weren’t ruined: the deals were done when the plants were in the ground, but payment was due only when the bulbs were dug up. Most people simply refused to pay, or paid only a small fraction of what they owed.

What’s that? You say there is a YouTube channel devoted to discussing the implications of the Euston Manifesto?

Hot damn! I’ll make popcorn.

This “unashamed mash note”:http://newsweek.washingtonpost.com/postglobal/bill_emmott/2007/04/not_decline_but_rupture_with_t.html from Bill Emmott, former editor of the _Economist_ presents a class of a triple-distilled tincture of the prevailing globollocks on Sarkozy’s victory in France. You don’t need to read the actual column to get the gist; just the Pavlovian dinner-bell talking points that it strings together.

France … paralyzed by powerful interest groups … political elite … beholden … or … afraid … takes a brave outsider … precisely Sarkozy’s appeal … Reagan or a Thatcher … A “rupture” is what France needs … showing that his country is not doomed to decline … cadres of highly globalized managers … etc … etc

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I tend to regard myself as Crooked Timber’s online myrmidon of a number of rather unpopular views; among other things, as regular readers will have seen, I believe that the incitement to religious hatred legislation was a good idea (perhaps badly executed), that John Searle has it more or less correct on the subject of artificial intelligence, that Jacques Derrida deserves his high reputation and that George Orwell was not even in the top three essayists of the twentieth century[1]. I’m a fan of Welsh nationalism. Oh yes, the Kosovo intervention was a crock too. At some subconscious level I am aware that my ideas about education are both idiotic and unspeakable. But I think that all of these causes are regarded as at least borderline sane by at least one fellow CT contributor. There is only one major issue on which I stand completely alone, reviled by all. And it’s this; Budweiser (by which I mean the real Budweiser, the beer which has been sold under that brand by Anheuser-Busch since 1876) is really quite a good beer. I have been threatening this post in comments for a while now, and here it is:
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I’ve recently been blogging about the inadequacy of cultural explanations of national differences, but was struck by this “aside”:http://blogs.ft.com/rachmanblog/2007/05/tony_blairs_far.html by Gideon Rachman on Tony Blair’s farewell speech.

I really hated the bit when he declared that Britain is “the greatest nation on earth.” This struck me as a very unBritish statement. My faith in my fellow countrymen was, however, restored by the fact that this declaration was greeted with lukewarm applause, rather than whoops and standing ovations.

It’s true as best as I can see it, and it does make Britain quite different from other countries. Try getting away with a major speech in the US that doesn’t have some bumptious language about national greatness. France is the same I believe (albeit with a different language of triumphalism). Even Ireland has its passive-aggressive equivalent of _gloire nationale_; I read somewhere or another that there was a myth that Ireland had a special dispensation from the times of tribulation preceding the Day of Judgement because of its unsullied guardianship of the Christian virtues – the entire country would slide under the waves before the Antichrist got up to speed. But not Britain. My vague memories of reading Linda Colley’s work a decade or more ago (it surely talks about this _in extenso_) is that this wasn’t always the case. However, it certainly is now. Anyone up to date with speculations as to the reason why British nationalism doesn’t trumpet its virtues? My working hypothesis, which is open to revision or refutation, is that it’s a subtle form of Bourdieuvian one-upmanship along the lines of the “ironic gnome rule”:https://crookedtimber.org/2005/07/11/the-ironic-gnome-rule/, expressing the belief that anyone who has to proclaim their national greatness by definition doesn’t possess it.

Over at Eugene’s lair, “Ilya Somin”:http://volokh.com/archives/archive_2007_05_06-2007_05_12.shtml#1178681057 opines on Mario Puzo’s original novel of _The Godfather_, and the sociology of the Italian and American mafias.

Puzo recognized, as sociologist Diego Gambetta explained more systematically, that the Sicilian Mafia flourished because it provided better “protection” against crime and violations of property and contract rights than did the official authorities, who generally protected only the politically powerful elite.

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Via “Unfogged”:http://www.unfogged.com/archives/week_2007_05_06.html#006758, a “hall of fame note”:http://istherenosininit.wordpress.com/2007/05/07/most-outrageous-note-evar/ from a student:

Dear Prof. AWB,

I was in your British Literature class in the fall of 2006, and for that class, you gave me a grade of C. I need to have a better grade for this class. As far as I know, I got an 86 on the first paper, and I didn’t complete the second assignment. I don’t know what I got on the final essay or exam.

I would like for you to change my grade to at least a B. If this means I must complete the second assignment, I will attempt to set aside time to do so. Please address this matter immediately.

Thank you,

Bwahahaha! Actually, just this morning a colleague got an email from a student saying that he would “try to set aside time” to take the final (the time for which has been posted on the University’s website all year).