Oliver Kamm — “There goes liberty” — attacks Steven Rose for writing that hate speech ought to be banned because it violates the human rights of its victims. There are tricky debates to be had about what counts as a properly human right, but I don’t think there’s much mileage in forensically examining Rose on _that_ point. Kamm’s point is that hate speech — unlike, say, racist violence — doesn’t harm its victims, strictly speaking. That’s a highly dubious proposition: being bombarded with the message that you are of lesser worth than others, are disgusting, repellent, vicious or stupid, may well cause you significant harms (and where genocidal crimes have taken place, it is often against the background of such messages being prevalent). But we can let that go as an instance of Kamm’s lack of imagination. What Kamm really has in his sights are restrictions on speech that are alleged to flow from the idea that we owe one another respect, have duties of civility to our fellow citizens, and so forth. He’s surely wrong on this point, and for two reasons: first, in a a democracy of equal citizens it is important to see to it that the conditions are in place for people to participate as equals; second, no-one has any legitimate interest in the protection of hate speech, _as such_.* If particular groups are so stigmatized and marginalized because of hate-speech messages that their members cannot get their voices heard in the public sphere (they may speak, but most people will not listen to _people like them_) then the freedom and equality of citizens is undermined, and the formal right that those people have to legal, civil and political equality is of lesser value than the formally similar rights of others. Far from liberty being endangered by hate-speech legislation it may — and whether it is depends very much on the specific social and historical circumstances — ensure that many people continue to enjoy effective liberty. Kamm also writes: “I do not … regard it as any legitimate part of public policy to eradicate bigotry.” Even if the elimination of bigotry were not a legitimate part of public policy, the elimination of its public expression might well be, for the reasons having to do with the freedom and equality of citizens I just mentioned. But, of course, the elimination of bigotry _is_ an important and legitimate part of at least one area of public policy: the education system. Children should, contra, Kamm be taught that racism (along with sexism, homophobia etc) is deplorable and it is very much part of the government’s business to see that they are.

*They may have a legitimate interest in speech that would fall foul of hate-speech legislation, which is one reason to be very wary about passing such legislation and to be careful in formulating it, but hate-speech, as such, has no value and hence no claim to protection. The speech that Rose implicitly thought ought to be banned, that of James Watson about the intelligence of Africans, isn’t, strictly speaking, in that category, and banning it would endanger the legitimate expression of scientific opinion. Kamm, however, opposes Rose on the wrong grounds.

China Mieville, a man who certainly knows his “political pelagic communities”:http://www.powells.com/partner/29956/s?kw=China%20Mieville%20The%20Scar, takes to the pages of _In These Times_ to fault “floating libertarian utopias”:http://www.inthesetimes.com/article/3328/floating_utopias/ for _not being crazy enough_. Much unfair fun ensues,

However, one senses in even their supporters’ literature a dissatisfaction with these attempts that has nothing to do with their abject failure. It is also psycho-geographical: There is something about the atolls, mounts, reefs and miniature islets on which these pioneers have attempted to perch that insults their dignity. A parable from seasteading’s past goes some way in explaining. In 1971, millionaire property developer Michael Oliver attempted to establish the Republic of Minerva on a small South Pacific sand atoll. It was soon off-handedly annexed by Tonga, and, in a traumatic actualized metaphor, allowed to dissolve back into the sea. To defeat the predatory outreach of nations and tides, it is clearly not enough to be offshore: True freedom floats.

Via “3 Quarks Daily”:http://3quarksdaily.blogs.com/3quarksdaily/2007/10/floating-utopia.html. Bonus points for anyone who figures out the obscure pun in the title of this post.

One year ago today I started a project: take at least one photo each day and post it online. Yesterday, I took the 365th photo in the project and today I compiled a video of the set:

I have found this to be an amazing experience and I’m going to continue with it. Setting aside a few moments each day to look around and find something worthy of a photo adds a very interesting and nice component to everyday life. Like Chris, I’ve started noticing things I never saw before. Looking back at the full set is also a great reminder of all that I’ve been up to over the last 12 months.

I highly recommend a hobby of this sort. I have two pieces of advice. First, it’s helpful to have a small enough digital camera that you can take it with you everywhere. You never know when a great photo opportunity will present itself. Second, don’t expect to maintain a separate blog or even blog section for this (as I naively did), it’s hard to find the time for that. Rather, post the photos to a community photo-sharing site like Flickr that makes posting and organization easy and can connect you to a group of people engaging in a similar project.

I want to send a shoutout to folks on Flickr who’ve been participating in this concurrently. A great community has built up around the project, which has been another great aspect of all this.

I’ve been running my “political science weblog”:http://www.henryfarrell.net/polsci/ for the last few months, and it seems to be doing quite well thank you in attracting some attention and readers to political science research. However, because there isn’t any single dominant repository for political science papers on the Internet, I have to look around a bit to find what people are doing – there are bits and pieces on SSRN, on various seminar websites etc etc. I’d be grateful for any suggestions from readers as to good places to find papers in political science, political theory and related disciplines (sociology, political economy). Weekly seminars at your university, working paper depositories, professors with lots of recent stuff on their homepages etc etc all qualify. Either email me, or submit it in comments below (if you do the latter, it has the advantage that other people can read it too). I’d also obviously be grateful for leads on interesting new papers that I haven’t come across but that are available in ungated form somewhere on the Internets. Suggestions for improvements to the site are also gratefully appreciated. It is probably going to be little more than a papers-plus-abstracts-blog until my tenure file is in next year, at which stage I should have a bit more time to develop it (I’ve gotten some suggestions as to how it may be put on a firmer institutional basis in the long run, but this will likely be up in the air for a while).

Finally and most generally, I would really encourage academics (esp. those on the market for the first time, or in the early stages of their career) to work on building a website which has access to their key papers. It’s straightforward to do, and massively increases your visibility to others (you are allowing people who are interested enough in you to look you up to economize on their search costs by downloading and reading papers that sound sort of interesting).

Via the Instapundit, I recently read this Michael Yon piece in which he proposes to offer his articles for free to US newspapers so that they can serve as a corrective to the misleading, negative reports on Iraq one reads today. I also read all the comments, because I am a peculiar person. My loss is your gain, however, since I am able to promote this moving, yet mysterious comment from its lowly position at 129 in the thread:

Carol Says:
There are two kinds of people in the world, those who read Michael Yon, and therefore know the truth and those who do not.

It’s easy to figure it out, I just ask. I’ve stopped tipping black cab drivers who don’t know about you Michael, the smart ones do, they deserve the tip.

I will definitely send you a tip and will spread the word in deepest darkest Kensington.

I’m afraid I can’t muster any response to this more eloquent than, “wha–?” I briefly considered instituting a new practice of tipping Singaporean Tamil taxi drivers only when they had heard of dsquared, but it seems comparatively lackluster. Chinese taxi drivers only when they are willing to spit on a wallet-sized photo of Tom Friedman?

UPDATE: helpful readers point out that the commenter is talking about “black-cab” drivers, rather than cab drivers who are black. I didn’t know that. So, 100% less racist, but still crazy.

Oh the Feminists hate Republicans
And Republicans hate the Feminists
To mock all Feminazis
Is an old G.O.P. rule

But during Islamo-Fascism Week
Islamo-Fascism Week
You’ll see Ann Coulter On Our Backs at USC
She’s helping Muslims seek
Their Feminine Mystique
Simone De Beauvoir’s really very cool

[click to continue…]

Via “TechPresident”:http://techpresident.com/, I thought this “Republican Facebook feed”:http://www.rightwingfacebook.org/index.html parody was pretty funny.

Telegraph obituary here. No consolation at all, but if, despite my unbelief, there’s a heaven and hell, I just hope he and Linda Smith got to the same place.

UPDATE: a delicious memoir from Michael Bywater here. From it here is Coren on adultery:

“I would never have an affair,” he said, “because I wouldn’t want my children to have for their mother the sort of woman who would be married to a man who would cheat on her.”

I thought, at first that he worked far harder than most of the men I knew. Later, I came to doubt this, finding that Quiggin’s work was something to be discussed rather than tackled and that what he really enjoyed was drinking cups of coffee at odd times of day

Anthony Powell, in A Dance to the Music of Time. Any of my co-authors will recognise this much of the picture, at least.

“Andrew Sullivan”:http://andrewsullivan.theatlantic.com/the_daily_dish/2007/10/genetics-and-ra.html links briefly to the post below on whether _g_ is a statistical myth, describing it as another expression of the “conventional left-liberal view,” and defending again his decision as editor of _The New Republic_ to publish extracts from _The Bell Curve._ I would have much preferred to have seen a substantive response to the “essay”:http://cscs.umich.edu/~crshalizi/weblog/523.html by Cosma Shalizi that the post linked to and summarized. I don’t see anything in Cosma’s essay that requires subscription to left-liberal views, conventional or otherwise – instead, I see a (to me entirely convincing) methodological critique of the basis for statistical claims that _g_, the purported general factor for intelligence, exists. To quote Cosma again:

If, after looking at your watch, you say that it’s 12 o’clock, and I point out that your watch has stopped at 12, I am not saying that it’s not 12 o’clock, just that your watch doesn’t actually give you any evidence about the time. Similarly, pointing out that factor analysis and related techniques are unreliable guides to causal structure does not establish the non-existence of a one-dimensional latent variable driving the success of almost all human mental performance. It’s possible that there is such a thing. But the major supposed evidence for it is irrelevant, and it accords very badly with what we actually know about the functioning of the brain and the mind.

If Andrew would like to take issue with something, these are the claims that he needs to be taking issue with. And there’s nothing stopping him, if he has even a moderate grasp of statistical reasoning (Shalizi’s arguments are quite comprehensible to someone with a basic minimum of statistical training, as evidenced by the fact that a gawp like me can reasonably claim to understand them). What Cosma is saying is that the entire body of research on _g_ is demonstrably based on bad statistical reasoning. Nor is it only Cosma who says this. Nor is this a product of political druthers – it clearly flows from a set of methodological claims that are widely accepted among statisticians, and that have many applications outside this particular and highly heated debate. If Andrew wants to show how Cosma’s methodological critique is fundamentally flawed in some way because of left-liberal preconceptions, he really should do so. If not, then all of his claims about “conventional left-liberal view”s and “going to challenge many assumptions of right-thinking liberalism” are by-the-by – they don’t count for anything unless they are actually backed up by, like, methodologically sound science.

I spent the last couple of days in Canberra at the Coral Reef Futures Forum, as part of my new Federation Fellowship is to look at economic approaches to management of the Great Barrier Reef. As one of the speakers said, a lot of the talks had people staring at their shoes in gloom, though the tone got a little more positive towards the end. I’m an optimist on ecological issues which is fortunate, because when you look at the threats facing coral reefs, you need a lot of optimism. Looking at historical data, even the GBR, which is much better managed than most reef systems is significantly degraded relative to 100 years ago, and a large proportion of reefs are at or near the point of no return, thanks to overfishing, destructive fishing methods and marine pollution. When you add regular bleaching due to climate change, and also acidification due to higher CO2 levels, the chances of saving much of the world’s coral reef systems do not look too good.

The most hopeful view is that, if we can fix the local threats like overfishing and poor water quality, the resulting increase in resilience (part of my project is to develop a more rigorous understanding of this popular buzzword) will offset moderate global warming, so that if we can stabilise the climate (an increase of no more than 2 degrees) we might save at least some reef systems.

[click to continue…]

Suppose there were an Iranian cult combining Islamism and Stalinism, with a history of terrorist attacks, that had enjoyed friendly relations with Saddam’s regime, back when.

Why, that’s something that the American right would fund a special TV network just to denounce 24-7, isn’t it?

Not so fast. Daniel Pipes and Max Boot think the Mujahedeen-e Khalq (MEK) is just sadly misunderstood. Get the backstory at the Campaign for America’s Future.

Myself and the wife have been watching the second series of _Heroes_, which is finally beginning to pick up after a slow start (although the spunky cheerleader needs to lose the drippy boyfriend _immediately_ ). One of the subplots plays out, strangely enough, among the Cork criminal underclass, or at least the show producer’s idea of same. The accents of these purported Corkonian ne’er-do-wells are nothing short of atrocious. Perhaps it’s understandable that there’s nothing at all resembling an actual Cork accent to be found among them; that might be a bit much to inflict on unsuspecting American television viewers. But there’s not much in the way of _Irish_ accents, full stop. One fella who thinks that Irish people speak like Scotsmen with adenoids, another with standard mid-Atlantic intonations, and a British actress who at least seems to have heard Irish people talking once upon a time, even if her ability to imitate them slips in and out of focus. The nadir was reached when one of the actors pronounced “Slainte” as “slah-in-che” on this week’s show (all they needed to do to get this one right was to do a bloody “Google search”:http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&client=firefox-a&rls=org.mozilla%3Aen-US%3Aofficial&hs=k6w&q=slainte+pronounce&btnG=Search). This is all quite unnecessary – I can testify from a considerable personal acquaintance that unemployed Real Irish Actors with Real Irish Accents are not a commodity in short supply.

That said, the problem goes both ways. We also recently saw the first episode of _Spooks_ (MI5 on this side of the Atlantic), a BBC production, which has an abortion clinic bomber whose purported Southern US accent had to be heard to be believed. My wife didn’t even realize that it was meant to be an American accent until I told her (a later episode’s subplot concerning the vast amounts of WTO cash subsidizing the Russian economy did little to add to my estimate of the show’s commitment to verisimilitude). So anyway, I thought that there might be some entertainment value in a thread on Bad TV/movie Accents that you have heard (and good ones too, if you like; the best Hollywood Irish accent by far that I’ve heard was Brad Pitt in _Snatch_ – it approached a kind of incomprehensible Platonic ideal of dense Midlands guttural).

A (slightly ponderous) documentary on a set of rare sound recordings of British and Irish POWs from World War I. First recordings are just after 10 minutes in. I liked the way the speed of the shellac recording is calibrated by matching an A note on the last groove to the A from a tuning fork. At 23″ or so there’s a recording of a man telling the parable of the Prodigal Son, where the difference between the ‘a’ in _father_ and the ‘a’ in _man_ is quite striking. At about 35″ there’s an nice example of the problems associated with interpreting material like this: another recording of the Prodigal Son story (a set text for the German academics who were interested in English accents) is played to a woman who knew the solider speaking, with interesting results.