Charles Stross’s _Halting State_ (“Powells”:http://www.powells.com/partner/29956/s?kw=Charles%20Stross%20Halting%20State, “Amazon”:http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0441014984?ie=UTF8&tag=henryfarrell-20&linkCode=as2&camp=1789&creative=9325&creativeASIN=0441014984_) should be on the shelves of yer local bookshop as of today; I thoroughly recommend it. It combines the intellectual fireworks of _Accelerando_ with a much less choppy plot and is a lot more fun to read – starting from a virtual bank raid by orcs and a dragon in a newly independent Scotland, and steadily getting more weirder and more interesting from there. It’s the first book I’ve seen that really begins to think through how distributed forms of collective action are likely to collide with more traditional kinds of state-based politics; the bit towards the end where you first figure out what is _really_ going on blew my mind.

Also very good, but a little more traditional is Paul McAuley’s SF thriller _Cowboy Angels_ (no US publisher but the import isn’t “too expensive”:http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0575079355?ie=UTF8&tag=henryfarrell-20&linkCode=as2&camp=1789&creative=9325&creativeASIN=0575079355 ). McAuley uses the many-worlds trope to think through US imperialism with a novel twist – a variety of alternative America’s located in different ‘sheaves’ that have split from each other since the 1920’s, one of which, the ‘Real’ America, has discovered how to build Turing Gates between sheaves, and is using them to introduce democracy by fair means or foul to the rest (our reality is referred to as the ‘Nixon sheaf,’ natch). While some of the spy-novel element is a little formulaic, the different Americas are well thought through and all feel real – they’re shot through with ambiguities rather than simply standing in for this or that political system. For some reason, the book didn’t find a US publisher a couple of years back when it was first on the market – this is a little surprising given its topicality (perhaps it was too politically awkward – my impression is that people who buy this kind of novel in the US tend (a) to be right of center and (b) not to enjoy having their priors challenged).

“Cosma Shalizi”:http://cscs.umich.edu/~crshalizi/weblog/520.html has a mammoth post intended _inter alia_ to explain precisely what is at stake in debates over heritability and IQ to those whose eagerness to pronounce winners in these debates is not, perhaps, matched by their grasp of the underlying methodological issues. Takeaway point:

Do I really believe that the heritability of IQ is zero? Well, I hope by this point I’ve persuaded you that’s not a well-posed question. What I hope you really want to ask is something like: Do I think there are currently any genetic variations which, holding environment fixed to within some reasonable norms for prosperous, democratic, industrial or post-industrial societies, would tend to lead to differences in IQ? There my answer is “yes, of course”. I’ve mentioned phenylketonuria and hypothyroidism already, and many other in-born errors of metabolism also lead to cognitive deficits, including lower IQ, at least in certain environments. More interestingly, conditions like Williams’s Syndrome, Downs’s Syndrome, etc., are genetically caused, and lead to reasonably predictable patterns of cognitive deficits, affecting different abilities in different ways. … I suspect this answer will still not satisfy some people, who really want to know about differences between people who do not have significant developmental disorders. Here, my honest answer would be that I presently have no evidence one way or the other. If you put a gun to my head and asked me to guess, and I couldn’t tell what answer you wanted to hear, I’d say that my suspicion is that there are, mostly on the strength of analogy to other areas of biology where we know much more. I would then — cautiously, because you have a gun to my head — suggest that you read, say, Dobzhansky on the distinction between “human equality” and “genetic identity”, and ask why it is so important to you that IQ be heritable and unchangeable.

“Rick Perlstein”:http://www.thenation.com/docprint.mhtml?i=20071015&s=perlstein demonstrates exactly how to do the devastating book review in his account of two right-wing revisionist histories of Vietnam.

The Pentagon Papers were quite certain and cited convincing evidence: “The Catholic deputy province chief ordered his troops to fire…. The Diem government subsequently put out a story that a Viet Cong agent had thrown a grenade into the crowd and that the victims had been crushed in a stampede. It steadfastly refused to admit responsibility even when neutral observers produced films showing government troops firing on the crowd.” The instigator was a Vietcong agent, Moyar insists. How does he know? By inference, not by evidence. He claims the monasteries were lousy with Communist infiltrators, even, perhaps, among their highest counsels. And how does he know that? The Communists said so. It is more than passing strange. On one page Moyar knows what every good right-winger knows: Communists are liars (“With characteristic exaggeration a Communist history stated that…”). On others, however–it is one of the reasons conservative reviews have found him so impressive–he uncritically accepts Communist sources as his key proof texts.

Siva Vaidhyanathan’s work in progress is a book that will address “three key questions: What does the world look like through the lens of Google? How is Google’s ubiquity affecting the production and dissemination of knowledge? and, How has the corporation altered the rules and practices that govern other companies, institutions, and states?” It seems likely this will add more to the sum of human knowledge than, say, Jacques-Alain Miller’s papal bull a while back.

With support from the Institute for the Future of the Book, Siva has started blogging the project as he goes. And he doesn’t sound entirely comfortable doing so, which if anything makes the experiment more interesting:
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The FT is going to start making its “online content free”:http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/01/business/media/01cnd-ft.html?ref=technology, sort-of:

The Web site of the London-based business newspaper, which currently charges for much of its content online, as of mid-October will allow users to get up to 30 articles a month for free, said John Ridding, chief executive of the newspaper. Anyone who wants to view more online material will have to subscribe to the site.

This is obviously intended to respond to Rupert Murdoch’s likely decision to open up the WSJ’s website to non-subscribers. I suspect that it is also a dipping-of-toes-in-water, and that the FT people are considering making the whole thing available and switching to an ads-based model (as dsquared pointed out in comments some months back, the print version is effectively carried by advertising aimed at a small – but extremely rich – sub-segment of its total readership). In any event, this is excellent news for anyone who wants to see high quality journalism made more widely available. The FT is a genuinely excellent newspaper, and its non-US coverage – especially its Europe coverage – is unparalleled. Ideally, it’ll respond to the Murdoch threat pro-actively rather than reactively – I’d like to see this going together with a beefing up of its US coverage and presence (although ideally not combined with the same kind of dodgy political pandering that the _Economist_ got up to when it started moving in on the US market). There’s a real gap in the US market for an intelligent, internationalist newspaper – and if Murdoch starts to dumb down the good bits (i.e. news pages) of the WSJ as he has done with every other property that he’s bought, that gap will widen dramatically.

Quiet around here. I’ll try to amuse you.

I love Daniel Pinkwater. I feel there is something lost in all this playlisted, Netflixed, on-demand hoo-ha you call Modernity. There needs to be an element of randomized, cinematic, B-listiness. So I bought all these sketchy multi-DVD sets and, every couple weeks, Belle and I ‘snark out’, picking a disc literally at random. (First a random cartoon.) Mostly it’s worked out, until we actually drew Wild Women of Wongo from the deck. We’re too old for that stuff. Now, mostly, we go for SnarkPlatinum or SnarkSelect options (but I won’t bore you with my elaborate randomization system.)

Last week’s pick was "Illegal" (1955), starring Edward G. Robinson, plus bonus DeForest Kelley, Jayne Mansfield, and Henry Kulky action. The tag is simply false: " He was a guy who marked 100 men for death – until a blonde called ‘Angel’ O’Hara marked him for life!" Nothing of the sort happens.

I like the way they used to use quotation marks in the title itself.

But wait. If the title is "Illegal", shouldn’t I have to refer to it as "’Illegal’"?

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Among many questions that you could ask about the US electoral systems, one of the more minor but harder to answer is Why Tuesday. More precisely, if you want to maximise turnout, why not hold the election on Saturday as in Australia, or even keep the polls open all weekend? I asked this question a couple of years ago , and there was no obvious answer. Now there’s an effort to raise the issue and force candidates to take a stand.

As with many other features of the US system, there is a historical explanation that has long since ceased to be relevant, but the bigger question is why such things persist. In particular, why don’t

It’s fair to note that the UK situation is even worse. Elections are traditionally held on Thursday, even though the Prime Minister is free to select a more sensible day of the week.

From Michael Medved’s latest column, “Six Inconvenient Truths About the U.S. And Slavery”:

Historians agree that hundreds of thousands, and probably millions of slaves perished over the course of 300 years during the rigors of the “Middle Passage” across the Atlantic Ocean. Estimates remain inevitably imprecise, but range as high as one third of the slave “cargo” who perished from disease or overcrowding during transport from Africa. Perhaps the most horrifying aspect of these voyages involves the fact that no slave traders wanted to see this level of deadly suffering: they benefited only from delivering (and selling) live slaves, not from tossing corpses into the ocean.

So the ‘inconvenient truth’ is that the slave traders were the real moral sufferers, in this situation. (OK, you’re so smart. What do you think he meant to say?) Let’s read on.

By definition, the crime of genocide requires the deliberate slaughter of a specific group of people; slavers invariably preferred oppressing and exploiting live Africans rather than murdering them en masse. Here, the popular, facile comparisons between slavery and the Holocaust quickly break down: the Nazis occasionally benefited from the slave labor of their victims, but the ultimate purpose of facilities like Auschwitz involved mass death, not profit or productivity.

But since the most morally ‘horrifying aspect’ of the Middle Passage was, by hypothesis, the element that is missing in the Nazi case – the element that breaks the analogy: the heartrending spectacle afforded by frustrated profit motive – I take it Medved has just proved the slave trade was worse than the Holocaust?

So we don’t need to feel guilty about slavery, after all?

Oh, never mind. (Honestly, don’t these people have a Moveon ad to complain about?)

Via Sadly, no! (whose discerning discussion of the whole column is worthy of your attention.)

UPDATE: In comments it has been pointed out that my reading is not plausible. Yes, I noticed. In all seriousness, what do you think he meant to say?

“Interesting and creepy…”:http://www.politico.com/blogs/bensmith/0907/Perils_of_access.html

Early this summer, Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton’s campaign for president learned that the men’s magazine GQ was working on a story the campaign was sure to hate: an account of infighting in Hillaryland. So Clinton’s aides pulled a page from the book of Hollywood publicists and offered GQ a stark choice: Kill the piece, or lose access to planned celebrity coverboy Bill Clinton. Despite internal protests, GQ editor Jim Nelson met the Clinton campaign’s demands, which had been delivered by Bill Clinton’s spokesman, Jay Carson, several sources familiar with the conversations said. GQ writer George Saunders traveled with Clinton to Africa in July, and Clinton is slated to appear on the cover of GQ’s December issue, in which it traditionally names a “Man of the Year,” according magazine industry sources.

The journalist who wrote this up describes it as a story about access, but it also speaks to the strange mix of features you get in magazines like GQ – fashion and triviality leavened with the odd ‘serious’ story to burnish the magazine’s image. “Vanity Fair” – the magazine about celebrities who wish they were intellectuals, and intellectuals who wish they were celebrities – is the classic practitioner of this weird mix-and-match. It’s unsurprising that when GQ‘s editors have to choose, they would decide to keep the coverboy stuff that sells copies – but I hope they end up publicly embarrassed over this (and the Clinton campaign too; it doesn’t say nice things about their _modus operandi_).

The struggle to build a revolutionary vanguard party of the workers and peasants has never been easy here in the United States. The line of march is tortuous, the peasants rowdy, and it often happens that a group must split. Usually one of the resulting entities will keep the original name, while the other will assemble a new one from the standard combinatoire. (As Dwight Macdonald explained when the Socialist Workers Party begat the Workers Party, “Originality of nomenclature was never our strong point.”)

Once in a while both groups will lay claim to the orginal name, however. The usual practice in that case is to distinguish them by adding some identifying term in parentheses. And so the Freedom Road Socialist Organization (Fight Back), which publishes a newspaper called Fight Back, is distinct from the Freedom Road Socialist Organization (Red Star). The latter refers not to the name of its journal but to the rather well-turned logo found on its homepage.

Within the past few days, an organization known as the Communist League has undergone mitosis, which nowadays means that each of the by-products has a website. I have examined the statements by each faction, but am still no wiser about the issues that require a tightening of ranks in the leadership of the workers and peasants. Yet it is clear that one side is ahead in the fight for hegemony — the one with the Cafe Press store offering very cool Communist League merchandise.

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This “bloggingheads segment”:http://bloggingheads.tv/video.php?id=405&cid=2456 features one of the nastiest political slurs that I’ve seen in a while: David Frum engaging in a public episode of histrionic soul-searching about how he and his fellow conservatives have made Mark Schmitt (Mark Schmitt! ! !) into Charles Lindbergh. The background can be found in a previous “bloggingheads debate”:http://bloggingheads.tv/video.php?id=395&cid=2380 where Mark politely pointed out that it was difficult for liberals like him to fully embrace the public commemoration of September 11, however they felt about it privately, because of the way that these commemorations had been politicized by Bush and Giuliani. This apparently was sufficient to brand Mark (who is a friend of mine) as the modern incarnation of a notorious isolationist Hitler-fancying anti-Semite. I’m not sure precisely why this particular slur is “so attractive”:http://matthewyglesias.theatlantic.com/archives/2007/02/and_then_theres_rudy.php to soi-disant conservative ‘public intellectuals’ – but the ease with which people like Goldberg and Frum reach for it in order to smear people whom they simply don’t agree with suggests that they are (a) vicious and deranged (b) dishonest, or (c ) some combination of the above.

Via “Dani Rodrik”:http://rodrik.typepad.com/dani_rodriks_weblog/2007/09/scholarship-vs-.html, this nifty piece of “free software”:http://www.harzing.com/pop.htm for academics, which munges data from Google Scholar to figure out your citation counts, various indices of influence etc. Hours of fun for your inner Bourdieuvian.

Also of interest to sociologists of academia, this post by “Sean Carroll”:http://cosmicvariance.com/2007/09/24/academics-still-totally-lame/ on how pathetic academics can be when they’re asked to disclose their ‘guilty pleasures.’

Here’s the thing: the Chronicle of Higher Education asked a handful of academics to divulge their guilty pleasures. … I was one of the people they asked, and I immediately felt bad that I couldn’t come up with a more salacious, or at least quirky and eccentric, guilty pleasure. I chose going to Vegas, a very unique and daring pastime that is shared by millions of people every week. I was sure that, once the roundup appeared in print, I would be shown up as the milquetoast I truly am, my pretensions to edgy hipness once again roundly flogged for the enjoyment of others. But no. As it turns out, compared to my colleagues I’m some sort of cross between Hunter S. Thompson and Caligula. Get a load of some of these guilty pleasures: Sudoku. Riding a bike. And then, without hint of sarcasm: Landscape restoration. Gee, I hope your Mom never finds out about that. But the award goes to Prof. McCloskey, who in a candid examination of the dark hedonistic corners of her soul, managed to include this sentence:

bq. Nothing pleases me more than opening a new textbook.

My interpretation is different than Sean’s – given Deirdre McCloskey’s well publicized gender change some years back, I suspect that her anodyne response is a calculated ‘screw you’ to prurient CHE readers hoping for something shocking or salacious. But Sean’s basic point still stands. I’m as bad as any of the respondents if not worse – my guilty pleasures are nothing more exciting than science fiction and fantasy novels with garish covers – but if anyone else has more interesting pleasures to confess in comments (nonymously or anonymously), go ahead.

I don’t have a lot to say about Burma, except that, naturally, I’m in favour of democracy and human rights and against tyranny. I’ve vaguely followed the career of Aung San Suu Kyi over the years, and I might even have signed some petition a long time ago (I can’t remember). Here at CT we have two past hits for “Burma” and tow for ‘Myanmar”. Despite its place in the biography of George Orwell, a recent search on a “decent left” website the other day revealed very few mentions, most of which were in the “whatabout” category. But now Burma is a real place again, and will inevitably escape from its role as not-somewhere, worse-that-somewhere-else, and its walk-on part in blogospheric games of “will-you-condemn?”. So given my ignorance, and our pool of well-informed readers, this post is a bleg: what is happening, where will it lead, and what should we read? So far I’ve found “this piece”:http://www.opendemocracy.net/article/burma_s_question by Aung Zaw on OpenDemocracy. Other recommendations?

Update: I should have thought of “Jamie K’s blog”:http://bloodandtreasure.typepad.com/blood_treasure/2007/09/monkish-politic.html as a good place to start, he has links to Burmese bloggers.

My column today is a very basic introduction to Zotero. As noted there, the release of Zotero 2.0 is a thing to look forward to — it will, among other things, allow you to store your searches, annotations, etc. on a server, rather than your computer, which will have all sorts of benefits. But it’s not clear when that will happen.

People have pointed out that the enhanced version faces two potential problems: storage space and intellectual-property issues (regarding ownership and control of stored material, mainly). I asked one of the directors of the project, Dan Cohen, about that. Unfortunately he only got back to me after the column was done. But here’s his response:
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(via “Chris Brooke”:http://virtualstoa.net/ )