My colleague Susan Hurley died last Thursday night. She had been ill for some time, but many of us still held on to the hope that someone as energetic and determined as Susan was would survive. Susan had only joined us at Bristol fairly recently, but she had had a tremendous impact on the Department of Philosophy. She was a great inspiration for graduate students and a formidable interlocutor for her colleagues. Susan is well known to the wider philosophical community for her books _Natural Reasons_ and _Justice, Luck and Knowledge_ as well as for an impressive array of “papers”:http://eis.bris.ac.uk/~plslh/ . Her interests were very broad, ranging from decision theory and political philosophy, through philosophy of mind, psychology and neuroscience. Lately it had been neuroscience that had engaged her, and she was keen to articulate a distinctively naturalistic view of what philosophy is that makes it very much continuous with the natural sciences. Many of us didn’t agree with Susan about that, but she was pretty good at forcing us to reexamine our own lazy assumptions in thinking through why. She’s a real loss to the profession and to the academic community more widely: someone who was committed to the discipline, who was generous with her time and person, and whom many students at Bristol, Warwick, Oxford and elsewhere will remember for having got them really excited about philosophy. We will all miss her.
A bunch of rightwing blogs are getting excited yet again about Scott Beauchamp. For those who haven’t followed the story, Beauchamp is a US soldier in Iraq who wrote some pieces for The New Republic which, among other things, described bad behaviour by US troops, such as deliberately running over stray dogs and taunting a woman disfigured by burns. The pro-war lobby has worn out dozens of keyboards seeking to discredit Beauchamp, his story and the very possibility of running over dogs in an armoured vehicle. Now it appears the US Army has denied Beauchamp’s claims. (To reiterate, I don’t care about or intend to debate, or even to link to, the details of this case).
Some might suggest that the truth or falsity of these stories doesn’t matter much in the light of this. or this or this or this, to list just a few of the disasters have taken place while the wingnutosphere has been defending the US Army’s commitment to animal welfare.
But that would miss the point. What matters, in the world of rightwing postmodernism, is not reality but the way the media reports it. One bogus memo is enough to turn George W. Bush from a scrimshank who used his family connections to line up a cushy billet to avoid war service, and then shirked even that, into a war hero.
So, lets stick to media criticism. Not long after Beauchamp’s piece ran in a single magazine of modest circulation, all the major MSM outlets ran a story by well known critics of the war, Michael O’Hanlon and Kenneth Pollack whose intrepid journey through recently pacified parts of Iraq had convinced them that the surge was working. Here, for example, is their piece in the NY Times.
Quiet around here over the weekend. Anyway, following up on my Euthyphro post, another legal thought.
Euthyphro describes the case (4c): [click to continue…]
So it’s the time of year when I teach Plato’s Euthyphro and I’m getting ready to run through my usual very short history of Athenian homicide law: how before Draco there was no legal distinction between intentional and non-intentional killing; after Draco, the state began to take greater interest in what had previously been strictly family business; how after Solon it was possible, for the first time, for a citizen who was not a blood relation of the victim to bring suit. (I hope I got that right.)
And then I asked myself: pre-Solon (and even after) what did happen, in practice, if a stranger – some traveler – was killed, and there was no family to bring suit on his behalf? In the dialogue, Euthyphro explains to Socrates that it shouldn’t matter whether the victim is family or a stranger – the pollution is the same either way. And, theologically, that is a perfectly orthodox thing for him to say. More specifically (although Euthyphro doesn’t mention it) Zeus is well-known for having a soft spot for travelers. So if someone kills a traveler or stranger then, theologically, the public has a very legitimate interest in getting all that miasma cleaned up quick before lightning strikes.
So what did the ancient Athenians do in cases in which there was a killing – in which it may have been known who did the killing – and no family with standing to bring suit?
Specific follow-up question: suppose the victim was a guest-friend of an Athenian citizen. Would the citizen then have had legal standing to bring suit on the victim’s behalf?
The US Federal Reserve has stepped in to bail out the financial sector, cutting its discount rate and, more importantly, encouraging banks to borrow directly from the Fed to finance mortgage lending. This action demonstrates that the famous “Greenspan put” has survived, and is now the Bernanke put.
Our wedding was, in so far as any can be, a happy accident, and nearly as low-key as possible (we had four guests, I made dinner, and the secretary in the UC Davis Philosophy department who was a minister of that church that the Revd. Jim was with in Taxi, signed the papers with us. She subsequently presided over an even more minimalist wedding, inspired by ours, over lunch on a workday in the outstanding student cafeteria they used to, and for all I know still, have there). So, no family, and not much in the way of gifts.
So you might think I’m not one to offer advice on what to ask for for a wedding present. But, as ever, I have strong opinions, after 15 years of marriage, about what is actually worth having, and feel obliged to pass them on to my excellent friends who are about to tie the knot, and have relatives who will not only attend the wedding but are keen to give them gifts. Here are my 4 top picks:
With stock markets down 10-15 per cent in the last few weeks, it’s a good time to ask whether this will have real effects beyond the value of our superannuation. The immediate starting point of the current disruptions was evidence that defaults on US mortgage markets were worse than expected. An obvious question is whether this underlying shock is large enough to have substantial effects in itself, or whether the problem is mainly one of liquidity and confidence.
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“Uncle Zip”:http://uzwi.wordpress.com/2007/08/14/double-bind/ (aka M. John Harrison).
Reading Benjamin R Barber’s Consumed: How markets corrupt children, infantilize adults, and swallow ctizens whole, & invincibly reminded of some of the weird contortions Thomas de Zengotita (Mediated: How the media shape your life and the way you live in it) put himself through to avoid looking as if he was saying what he was so obviously saying, I determined to write a book of cultural criticism of my own, to be called Nuanced: How the contemporary left has been forced into hypocrisy, temporising & doublespeak by the fear that no one would otherwise publish, buy or read its books of cultural criticism. Damned if he does & damned if he doesn’t in a culture that simply won’t be criticised, Barber explains why this can’t actually be described as a form of soft censorship proceeding from what unstreamlined old lefties would have called f**** c************. Not a bad thing, because it forces him to find a new way of (not) saying it, & books like Consumed–unable to point the finger at their own potential readership for fear of losing it–survive the market only on their ability to confect neologisms & catchwords, presumably in imitation of the business bestsellers & aspirational texts which they don’t actually want to be seen to be contradicting.
When I’ve finished Nuanced I’ll move on to Fucked.
Our new prime minister recently declared that the function of universities is to equip people with the skills necessary for the modern economy. The Guardian’s “higher education” section “reports today”:http://education.guardian.co.uk/higher/news/story/0,,2147814,00.html that
bq. A degree is being launched to meet the rising demand for skilled crew to work on billionaires’ luxury vessels. …. On sailing and motor vessels whose lengths range from 24 metres up to destroyer-size mega-boats owned by the world’s richest billionaires, it seems you simply cannot get the staff these days.
No doubt some enterprising new university will soon be offering degree courses in being a butler or in being some other kind of lackey or flunkey (indeed, I expect commenters will point out that they already are!).
“Megan”:http://fromthearchives.blogspot.com/2007/08/sampling-bias.html of _From the archives_ won’t be surprised that “this _NYT_ article”:http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/12/weekinreview/12kolata.html?_r=1&oref=slogin, claiming that:
One survey, recently reported by the federal government, concluded that men had a median of seven female sex partners. Women had a median of four male sex partners. Another study, by British researchers, stated that men had 12.7 heterosexual partners in their lifetimes and women had 6.5. But there is just one problem, mathematicians say. It is logically impossible for heterosexual men to have more partners on average than heterosexual women. Those survey results cannot be correct.
is already “getting”:http://ezraklein.typepad.com/blog/2007/08/i-caught-a-fish.html “play”:http://www.chrishayes.org/blog/2007/aug/13/im-back/ in the blogosphere. The only thing is that it _isn’t_ logically impossible, at least as the author presents it. Ask “Andrew Gelman”:http://www.stat.columbia.edu/~cook/movabletype/archives/2007/08/medians.html
Jeff’s response: MEDIANS??!! Indeed, there’s no reason the two distributions should have the same median. I gotta say, it’s disappointing that the reporter talked to mathematicians rather than statisticians. (Next time, I’d recommend asking David Dunson for a quote on this sort of thing.) I’m also surprised that they considered that respondents might be lying but not that they might be using different definitions of sex partner. Finally, it’s amusing that the Brits report more sex partners than Americans, contrary to stereotypes.
The Iraqi employees of the British Army story has continued to roll on, with some amount of mainstream media attention (particularly in the Times) and the first wave of responses from MPs. Any CT readers with a UK MP who didn’t write to their MPs last week, you still have time to do so, but potentially not very much time. For one thing, the British Army is withdrawing from Basra town, meaning that it is going to be much more difficult for the employees to be protected. For another, the government (an uncharitable man would say “the New Labour spin machine”) is trying to suggest that the problem can be solved by giving visas only to the 91 individuals who had been employed as translators by the British Army. This is clearly inadequate – the way Des Browne is quoted, it doesn’t even sound as if protection is being extended to families – and I’d be grateful if our readers could mention this.
By the way, the last comments thread on this subject was a bit of a disgrace. Can I make it very clear that anyone using the word “harki” is going to get themselves banned immediately and without appeal. The very idea that people who read this blog might think that the massacres in 1960s Algeria represent a model for an anti-imperialist struggle frankly gives me the creeps. I will charitably assume that the term was used out of ignorance by people who’d only heard it in the context of Zinedine Zidane, for the time being, but any evidence to the contrary and you are banned my son (the commenters in question know who they are). Ditto “quislings”, “collaborators” and any other terms which say or imply that the massacre of civilians by self-styled “resistance” movements isn’t mass murder or isn’t a war crime (as Conor Foley notes in the comments to this trainwreck, there is a decent case for saying that, along the lines of the Rwandan radio trials, advocating a war crime is a war crime itself).
Both “Ross Douthat”:http://rossdouthat.theatlantic.com/archives/2007/08/partisanship_and_the_national.php and “Matt Yglesias”:http://matthewyglesias.theatlantic.com/archives/2007/08/may_i_have_another.php suggest that I was wrong to “claim”:https://crookedtimber.org/2007/08/06/trahisons-des-clercs-2/ last week that Kristol and Kagan were more interested in Republican hegemony than in the actual worth of their foreign policy ideas when they wrote their famous 1996 “essay”:http://www.carnegieendowment.org/publications/index.cfm?fa=view&id=276 on the virtues of a neo-Reaganite foreign policy. What I said then was short-hand for what I said at greater length in a paper that I wrote a couple of years ago for an APSA panel that Russell Arben Fox chaired on conservatism. The paper has never seen the light of day, and probably never will (it wasn’t really an academic paper so much as a glorified form of current commentary; something less than academic research but more than a blogpost), so I may as well link to it “here”:http://www.henryfarrell.net/conservatism.pdf and excerpt the key bit that speaks to this argument (below the fold). [click to continue…]
In the 19th Century, Romnementum was a patent medicine compounded of equal parts chaff, opium and horse liniment.
Romnementum was also Agamemnon’s ne’er-do-well brother. Before that, I believe he was a Babylonian demi-god who met a sticky end. (Possibly I’m confusing him with some or other Jack Kirby character?)
But after the Ames straw poll, has Romney given new life to this old notion? What do you think? Does the man have …. Romnementum?
Hugh Hewitt is trying to sell it. As of this posting, his commenters are running cold. Let’s make this a Republican horse-race thread.
Good stuff. Someone should hire this guy. (Via Unfogged.)
Alex Tabarrok and Dani Rodrik have moved from arguing about industrial policy into arguing about the blinkers (or otherwise) of libertarianism.
“Dani”:http://rodrik.typepad.com/dani_rodriks_weblog/2007/08/irreconcilable-.html
It is in that spirit that I have been mulling about the derision and incredulity with which my recent post on industrial policy was met among some libertarian bloggers. … The real revolutionaries here are the libertarians. They envisage a real good world out there that looks like nothing we have now (or have ever had), and they want us to get there. Second, there are really deep philosophical differences here that have nothing to do with economics per se. Most importantly, I believe government can be a force for good; they do not. But third, libertarians hold on to their priors so strongly that they seem impervious to evidence. They shrug off the fact that there is more freedom and more wealth in those parts of the world where the government is stronger, not weaker. With respect to industrial policy proper, they refuse to engage with the fact that every nation that has grown rapidly has made use of it. I look at the world and see some government programs that work and others that fail. I want to understand what determines these outcomes, and to know how we can improve the ratio of the first to the second. When libertarians look at the same programs, they see one wreck after another.
“Alex”:http://www.marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2007/08/dani-rodrik-has.html
Dani Rodrik responds here to my pointed remarks on his argument for industrial policy. Rodrik’s response, however, is along the same lines of his earlier – “I’m sophisticated, your simplistic” – post on why economists disagree. In this case, it’s ‘libertarians are ideologues who are immune to evidence.’ Rodrik, however, has painted himself into a corner because he cannot at the same time say that the “systematic empirical evidence” for market imperfections in education, health, social insurance and Keynesian stabilization policy is “sketchy, to say the least” (also “difficult to pin down” and ‘unsystematic’) and also claim that libertarians are ideologues who are immune to evidence. Say rather that libertarian economists are immune to sketchy, unsystematic, difficult to pin down evidence. Rodrik is thus right that he is “not as unconventional as I sometimes think I am. The real revolutionaries here are the libertarians.” The libertarian economists are revolutionaries, however, not because they are immune to evidence but because they respect evidence so much that they are unwilling to accept “conventional wisdom” simply because it is conventional.