A “time capsule in Tulsa”:http://edition.cnn.com/2007/US/06/15/buried.classic.ap/index.html contained a 1957 Plymouth Belvedere, which had been intended to be started up and driven off by someone once it was opened this week. But time, chance and especially groundwater happeneth to them all and the thing turned out to be a rusted-out wreck. But the best bit was this: “The contents of a ‘typical’ woman’s handbag, including 14 bobby pins, lipstick and a bottle of tranquilizers, were supposed to be in the glove box …” Sadly, “all that was found looked like a lump of rotted leather.”
From the monthly archives:
June 2007
One way or the other you probably know “Ary Barroso’s”:http://daniellathompson.com/ary/ song “Aquarela do Brasil”:http://daniellathompson.com/ary/aquarela.html, either because you’re all up on classic Brazilian music from the 1930s and 40s or, like me, you have watched Terry Gilliam’s masterpiece “Brazil“:http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0088846, for which it’s the main theme. I show a clip of _Brazil_ in my Complex Organizations class, were we follow the paper trail through the mass of clerks up to Mr Kurtzmann’s office. How odd, then, to hear it twice in the space of half an hour this afternoon: once looking at a TV spot for Michael Moore’s new film “Sicko”:http://www.michaelmoore.com/sicko/trailer/, and then later (via “Gruber”:http://daringfireball.net/linked/2007/june#sat-16-walle) in the trailer for Pixar’s new film, “WALL-E.”:http://www.apple.com/trailers/disney/walle/large.html And in all these cases, the music is used to emphasize the perils of counterproductive routines and the promise — true or otherwise — of being liberated from them. They’re trying to send me a coded message, I’m telling you. Dum dum dum, dum dum dum dumdum …
“Alan”:http://www.schussman.com, a former student and co-author of mine (and recent graduate, congrats Alan), goes hiking in “Black Canyon National Park”:http://www.nps.gov/blca/ and reminds me how spectacular the American West is. Sheer canyon walls with “crazy rock climbers”:http://www.flickr.com/photos/belay/544579199/in/set-72157600350091740/, fly-fishing for “rainbow trout”:http://www.flickr.com/photos/belay/550006617/in/set-72157600350091740/ and “terrific views”:http://www.flickr.com/photos/belay/548660116/in/set-72157600350091740/ along the way.
So I’m reading Belle’s copy of Marie Claire (June, 2007). There’s a short Q&A with Republican Presidential hopeful, Tom Tancredo (p. 216). He’s all about the immigration stuff. Example:
Q: Would you build a wall along the Canadian border, too?
A: Yes. If you don’t build strong borders, you’ve gained nothing.
As a follow-up to the op-ed discussed below, the _Financial Times_ are running a “questions and answers session”:http://www.ft.com/cms/s/e9df7200-19c7-11dc-99c5-000b5df10621.html with Vaclav Klaus on global warming. I warmly encourage CT readers with an interest in maintaining the high quality of scientific discussion in our business press to contribute questions to the conversation. These questions should be polite (I presume that overly impolite ones will be zapped by the moderators in any event), but I don’t see why readers with scientific expertise shouldn’t make some pointed and specific queries regarding the state of debate, and Mr. Klaus’s own particular take on it. Details below.
Vaclav Klaus, president of the Czech Republic, argues in the Financial Times that ambitious environmentalism is the biggest threat to freedom, democracy, the market economy and prosperity.
Mr Klaus writes that “global warming hysteria has become a prime example of the truth versus propaganda problem” and the issue “is more about social than natural sciences and more about man and his freedom than about tenths of a degree Celsius changes in average global temperature.”
Do you agree? Or do small climate changes demand far-reaching restrictive measures? Mr Klaus will answer your questions in an online Q&A. Post a question now to ask@ft.com or use the online submissions form below – his answers will appear on Thursday June 21 from 1pm BST.
!http://www.henryfarrell.net/lewankh.jpg!
I didn’t think they made them like this anymore. Vaclav Klaus, President of the Czech Republic, tries to figure out how many denialist cliches can be squeezed into a “single 700 word op-ed”:http://www.ft.com/cms/s/9deb730a-19ca-11dc-99c5-000b5df10621.html . The results aren’t edifying.
One exceptionally warm winter is enough – irrespective of the fact that in the course of the 20th century the global temperature increased only by 0.6 per cent – for the environmentalists and their followers to suggest radical measures to do something about the weather, and to do it right now. … Al Gore’s so-called “documentary” film … The author Michael Crichton stated it clearly … global warming hysteria has become a prime example of the truth versus propaganda problem. It requires courage to oppose the “established” truth, although a lot of people – including top-class scientists – see the issue of climate change entirely differently. They protest against the arrogance of those who advocate the global warming hypothesis and relate it to human activities. … I see the biggest threat to freedom, democracy, the market economy and prosperity now in ambitious environmentalism, not in communism. …The environmentalists … do not believe in the long-term positive impact of economic growth and ignore both the technological progress that future generations will undoubtedly enjoy, and the proven fact that the higher the wealth of society, the higher is the quality of the environment. … Does it make any sense to speak about warming of the Earth when we see it in the context of the evolution of our planet over hundreds of millions of years?
_Und so weiter_
Update – I somehow neglected to quote the best bit – Klaus’s exhortation to “resist the politicisation of science and oppose the term “scientific consensus”, which is always achieved only by a loud minority, never by a silent majority.”
For some reason, Alan Dershowitz has been everywhere I’ve turned lately. Until a few years ago, I knew of him, very vaguely, as a celebrity defence lawyer (OJ Simpson’s, IIRC) with the civil libertarian views that generally go with this role. Then after 9/11 he apparently underwent a massive change in views, emerging as a supporter of torture, detention without trial and so on. I remember reviewing a book refuting his (very weak) case for torture. But shmibertarians of this kind are so common I didn’t pay him much mind.
Right now, though, it seems as if I can’t get away from him.
I like Richard Rorty, but will say a bit in defense of the negative line taken by Damon Linker in his TNR piece. Well, actually, I don’t have access, so I haven’t read it. I’ll respond to the bits available at Matthew Yglesias site, which dovetail nicely with thoughts I’ve had about Rorty’s liberal politics, quite independently of anything Linker says or thinks. [click to continue…]
Via Unfogged: Was Dubya’s watch stolen off his wrist while he worked the crowd in Albania? Seems too funny to be true. Looking at it from around 50 seconds into the clip, you can see the watch as he reaches to shake hands with people, then there’s no watch. It’s possible that it was grabbed and fell off, as Bush seems to look down at the ground just around key moment. But it’s hard to tell. The Zapruder film of this Administration.
“Here”:http://www.nos.nl/nosjournaal/artikelen/2007/6/12/120607_bush_horloge.html is a higher-resolution video, via “Alan Bostick”:http://www.spicejar.org/asiplease/archives/000605.html, and some “comments”:http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2007/06/bushs_watch_sto.html from Bruce Schneier on the various official construals of the event. Bush’s hand goes back and to the left. Back and to the left. Back and to the left.
Interesting to see that he was so popular over there. Albanians are also crazy about “Norman Wisdom,”:http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/1251406.stm as it happens.
I’ve been planning to write up something on Dan Nexon and Tom Wright’s _APSR_ piece on the politics of empires, which I think is a really important piece of work in international relations theory but haven’t gotten around to it yet (other promised reviews to finish first – next up Scott Page’s new book). Luckily, Alex Cooley has “done it for me”:http://3quarksdaily.blogs.com/3quarksdaily/2007/06/america_and_emp.html. The original article is available as a PDF “here”:http://homepage.mac.com/mgemmill/Nexon_Wright_Empire.pdf.
Last year, the Chronicle organized a “conversation”:http://chronicle.com/free/v53/i16/16a00801.htm between Michael Bérubé, who’s now my co-blogger, and David Horowitz. I enjoyed the conversation greatly, not least because Bérubé had the better of it; Horowitz had considerable difficulty in keeping up with Bérubé, who clearly didn’t take him at all seriously. But this provoked a debate in the comments section here at CT, with some commenters, including “Harry”:https://crookedtimber.org/2006/12/05/horowitz-v-berube/#comment-181414, suggesting that Bérubé should have engaged seriously with Horowitz rather than poking fun at him. I didn’t and don’t agree – I think that poking fun at Horowitz is _exactly the right thing_ to do. But I recognize that it’s necessary to make arguments as to why this is possibly so. Small-l liberal academics – that is, academics who are committed to certain standards of diversity and plurality as a basis for academic argument – have an obligation to engage in reasoned debate with people that they profoundly disagree with, or at the very least to recognize that these people not only have a right to participate in argument, but very likely have something of value to contribute to it.
So why shouldn’t we engage in serious argument with people like David Horowitz? After all, he seems (some of the time) to be inviting us to? In this overly long blogpost, or overly short essay, I want to argue that this question is important to understanding Bérubé’s recent book, _What’s Liberal about the Liberal Arts?: Classroom Politics and Bias in Higher Education_. (“Powells”:http://www.powells.com/partner/29956/s?kw=Berube%20liberal%20arts, “Amazon”:http://www.amazon.com/gp/redirect.html?ie=UTF8&location=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.amazon.com%2FWhats-Liberal-About-Arts-Classroom%2Fdp%2F0393060373%3Fie%3DUTF8%26s%3Dbooks%26qid%3D1181579041%26sr%3D8-1&tag=henryfarrell-20&linkCode=ur2&camp=1789&creative=9325). I also want to argue on behalf of a possible answer to this question, which I draw from Max Weber’s idiosyncratic and agonistic version of liberalism. The short version: I think that we need not only to distinguish (as Bérubé does) between substantive liberalism and procedural liberalisms, but between different procedural liberalisms that are appropriate to different contexts. I suspect (although I’m not entirely sure) that there’s a proto-argument along these lines buried in Bérubé’s book – and I think that Max Weber’s essays on Politics as a Vocation and Science as a Vocation help to draw it out. This said, my thinking on this is still a bit in flux (i.e. good tough criticisms are greatly appreciated).
Example: Scott Kaufman contributes, in civil fashion, to a thread at Jesus’ General – and as a result, he is defamed to his entire local academic community as a white supremacist! One of the General’s commenters – Ghost of Adolph Rupp, a.k.a. ‘John Casper’ – took it upon himself to email a bunch of people at UC Irvine (Scott’s department head, dean, various politicians across the whole state, I gather) as a generous public service.
Scott K. is innocent as charged. But that isn’t to say these allegations can’t be career-threatening, eh? (Stay classy, John Casper!)
You can read about the whole sordid saga at Scott’s blog – starting here. (A post explaining the fight that caused the fight that caused this problem.) The latest development, depressing but relatively inconsequential compared to the defamatory emails, is that Patriotboy (Jesus’ General) ain’t exactly coming up heaped in glory. Go read, if you care to. I guess the main post, reporting the first wave of emails accusing Scott of ‘refined white supremacy’, is here.
So Scott’s life is officially a mess. So if you are a friend, drop a comment, extend him your support and best wishes that an idiot hasn’t managed to wreck his career in vile and irresponsible fashion. I have the flu and am going straight to bed, probably will not be contributing to any discussion for the next 14 hours or so. So no fighting, if you please.
The entertaining and oft-chonicled tradition of bitchy footnotes and sarcastic asides from the bench becomes strangely puzzling and difficult to understand when your friends are on the sharp end of it.
Lots of people (including Kevin Drum, Brad DeLong and Tyler Cowen have jumped in on this post by Will Wilkinson about this NBER study of habituation to changes in income and status. Wilkinson and most commentators focus on the findings regarding the subgroups on the right and left of the political spectrum, which I’ll come to, but it’s worth mentioning the general findings first.
Most people (in the German sample population) initially react more, as regards self-reported happiness, to a change in income than to a change in occupational status, but gradually get habituated to changes in income. This is consistent with the standard view of the happiness literature, that income changes don’t have a big effect on happiness, so that people in rich countries aren’t on average much happier than those in poor countries. Moreover, by looking at the same people over relatively short periods of time the analysis overcomes, to a significant extent, the objection I’ve made previously, that the scale on which happiness is measured is inherently relative to some notion of what is reasonable to expect.
Richard Rorty “has died.”:http://www.telospress.com/main/index.php?main_page=news_article&article_id=188