Sometimes I try to deny my nature, but then Chris goes and posts about a conversation in which someone says something silly. And it turns out I used the silly bit as a major premise myself just last week. Oy.

In today’s Guardian, Christopher Hitchens defends Martin Amis from Ronan Bennett’s attack. Inter alia, he has this to say:

bq. I am writing as a friend who also took issue with what he said, in unscripted conversation with a Times reporter, a short while after the ghastly assault by Muslim fanatics on our public transport system. (By the way, yes, I do think that the word “fanatic” requires that prefix in this case.) I wrote my article last autumn and it was published in the Manhattan City Journal last January, so Mr Bennett need not congratulate himself so warmly on being the only one apart from Eagleton with the nerve to raise the issue.

Here’s a link to Hitchens’s _City Journal_ piece. Commenters will notice the characteristically robust way in which Hitchens condemns Amis. Or perhaps not.

Usage Statistics for Conservapedia.

_Update_: As emerges in the discussion below, this Top 10 is a little too good to be true, and probably reflects efforts to game the system either by critics or other participants in the Conservapedia world rather than the true degree of readership for these particular pages on the site.

Over at Brainiac, Josh Glenn discusses the theme of “the intellectual, slightly mysterious rock-and-roll woman,” as a recent book calls it, running throughout songs from the Boston scene over the years. All those smart but fragile girls that Jonathan Richman sang about with the Modern Lovers, for example.

Josh suggests that there is a strain of hipster misogyny in this: the revenge of the sophomore spurned, no doubt. And he reads Mission of Burma’s “Academy Fight Song” as a response to that kind of thing –its lyrics “written from the point of view of a cool, educated young woman who was sick and tired of the obsessive attention paid to her by a would-be boyfriend….”

This seems plausible. But it would not be the first song from the Boston scene to approach this archetype (or whatever it is) from the inside. I’m thinking here, of course, of “Ballad of the Hip Death Goddess” by Ultimate Spinach.
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A real conversation among analytical philosophers:

A: You know Hitchens’s _God is Not Great_ — doesn’t that title convey an existential commitment?

B: Not necessarily, “God” might be the name of a fictional character.

A: Well, the name of several different fiction characters actually.

B: Yes, but some of those fictional characters _are_ great ….

I’m just back from Arizona (big thanks to Kieran and Laurie btw), where I had a great time. My purpose in going there was to deliver a paper on “public reason and immigration” and a couple of conversations I had on the trip concerned how some Americans see the European issue. In both of them (one with a grad student, one with the guy next to me on a plane) my interlocutor referred, in almost identical terms, to Europe’s problem with immigration by “fundamentalist Muslims”, and seemed to believe that this was an accurate depiction of the Islamic population of Europe. Meanwhile, back home, my partner had arranged for a Muslim colleague to accompany her to watch Bristol thump Stade Francais in the Heineken cup. Needless to say, the woman in question is about as distant as it is possible to be from the Muslims who feature in the imagination of my two conversation partners. At Heathrow, I bought a copy of the Guardian to read on the bus, and was reminded by Ronan Bennett’s excellent article, that such blanket stereotyping is also practised by many people here in the UK, who don’t have the excuse of lack of familiarity. When the stereotyping is done by a major British cultural and literary figure and is mixed with a strong dose of sadistic revenge fantasty, it is all the more deplorable. But as Bennett points out, Martin Amis has largely got away with it and a lot of the commentary has been more critical of Terry Eagleton for calling him the bigot that he is. (Chris Brooke at the Virtual Stoa also linked the other day to some more on-the-money kicking of Amis, in which the great writer’s grasp of the history of technology is examined.)

The NY Times has an interesting piece on statistical studies of the deterrent effect (if any) of the death penalty. For those who want to get straight into fact-free debate, the bottom line is that the evidence is too weak to allow a firm conclusion one way or the other. What’s interesting to me, though is the way in which debates within different disciplines proceed, and the lags in transmission between them. Here I think the NYT story, while excellent in many respects, is quite misleading, presenting a story of deterrence-hypothesis economists facing off against legal critics.

That was pretty much the way things stood in the 1970s, after the publication of Isaac Ehrlich’s study in the American Economic Review claiming that one execution deterred 7 or 8 homicides. Ehrlich used multiple regression analysis (quite difficult and computationally demanding in those days, and correspondingly highly regarded) in an attempt to control for other factors affecting homicide rates and isolate the effect of the death penalty.

Over the next decade, economists learned a lot about the limitations of regression analysis. With limited amounts of data, it’s impossible to avoid mining the data for patterns which are then used to fit the model. And if you try enough specifications on weak data, you can get just about any result you want. A classic exposition of this point was Ed Leamer’s 1983 article “Let’s take the con out of econometrics” which pointed out the fragility of regression analysis on time-series data and picked, as an example, the deterrent effect of the death penalty.
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“Andrew Sullivan today”:http://andrewsullivan.theatlantic.com/the_daily_dish/2007/11/race-and-iq-1.html on race and IQ, yet again.

In the end, the data demand addressing.

Yes, “they do”:https://crookedtimber.org/2007/10/21/missing-the-g-spot/, Andrew. “They”:http://cscs.umich.edu/~crshalizi/weblog/520.html “do”:http://cscs.umich.edu/~crshalizi/weblog/523.html.

Slate has a helpful article by legal scholar Tim Wu (among other things, an expert on Internet-related policy issues) about what’s at stake concerning Google’s recent announcement about the development of Android, a “truly open and comprehensive platform for mobile devices”.

A few months ago, Nina at Infinite Thought offered an appreciation of the difference between the playfulness of vintage European porn films (from roughly 1905 to 1930) and the more industrialized contemporary product:

The first thing you notice is the sheer level of silliness on show: sex isn’t just a succession of grim orgasms and the parading of physical prowess, but something closer to slapstick and vaudeville. Men pretend to be statues of fauns for curious women to tickle; two seamstresses fall into a fit of giggles as their over-excited boss falls off the bed; a bawdy waitress serves a series of sexually-inspired meals to a man dressed as a musketeer before joining him for ‘dessert’. This kind of theatrical role-play pre-empts many of the clichés of contemporary pornography, of course: nuns, school-mistresses, the ‘peeping tom’ motif, and so on. But the beauty of these early short films lies in the details, the laughter of its participants and the sheer variety of the bodies on parade: the unconventionally attractive mingle with the genuinely pretty; large posteriors squish overjoyed little men. The fact that the rules of pornographic film-making haven’t yet been formally established, as well as the rudimentary nature of the film equipment, means that often the filming cuts off before any sort of climax, which only adds to the amateurish, unstructured, anarchic charm of it all.

At Quick Study, I’ve posted a short response to another recent Infinite Thought item developing this line of reflection.

It has prompted a discussion touching — so far — on Sade, Steven Marcus, and the days when everybody in a pornographic novel would recharge their orgy batteries by stopping to listen to a lecture on Enlightenment philosophy.

If this sounds like it might float your boat, stop by. Quick Study is my personal blog, and I’ve been averse to pushing here at Crooked Timber, but what the hell….Diffidence gets you no traffic. (But the start of the semester sure did; it seems that freshmen Google the words “quick study” in an effort to increase the amount of time they can spend getting wasted.)

Ross Douthat on the great Reagan race-baiting debate. Douthat’s take: “Yes, that part was shameful, but that’s not the complete picture.” The ‘complete picture’ is more like: the great Goldwater-to-Reagan Republican realignment is “a story of liberal misgovernment on an epic scale, in which race played an important but ultimately subsidiary role.” [click to continue…]

The FT “reports”:http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/02c2471c-943d-11dc-9aaf-0000779fd2ac.html that the OSCE has withdrawn from monitoring elections in Russia.

Europe’s main election monitoring group said on Friday it was scrapping plans to deploy observers to Russia’s forthcoming parliamentary elections in a decision that could cast doubt on the integrity of the poll. The Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe claimed Moscow had imposed “unprecedented restrictions” on its activities. Russia had slashed the number of observers it would admit to the December 2 election and then repeatedly delayed issuing visas for OSCE monitors.

It may be that this is (as a quoted Russian deputy claims) the prelude to mass falsification of results, but my impression (as a non-Russia specialist) is that the government doesn’t need to do much falsifying of polls, if any, to win. They’ve already succeeded in stage-managing democracy so well that they won’t need to (admittedly, the more liberal parties in Russia haven’t done very much to help their own cause either). This is more likely a product of Russia’s general desire to revise the post-Cold War international order, and get rid of the bits (such as election monitoring) that it thinks limits its autonomy both at home, and in neighboring states (for background information, see this “earlier post”:https://crookedtimber.org/2007/02/12/out-of-control-ios/).

For me, there are two interesting questions going forward. First: are other countries (perhaps more importantly the EU than the US), going to take this quietly, or are they going to seek to embarrass the Russians in some way, claiming that there are problems with their democracy, and perhaps seeking to sideline Russia from complete participation in some of the clubs that it has joined since the demise of the USSR?

Second, how are autocrats in other states (e.g. those in Central Asia) going to respond? My best guess is that those countries that see benefits from closer integration with the West (e.g. Georgia, the Ukraine) will continue to invite external election monitors, while those that don’t will follow Russia’s lead. If this prediction bears out, we will see a little bit of Cold War politics beginning to seep back, with an increase in hostility between Russia and its satellites in Central Asia and elsewhere (anomalies such as Belarus and Moldova) on the one hand, and West and Central European democracies on the other, with both sides contending for influence over shaky democracies in between (such as Georgia and the Ukraine). All of which would intersect in complicated ways with energy politics in the region. This is only a best guess from a non-expert on the region (albeit someone who does know a fair amount about the OSCE) – agreements/disagreements welcome in comments.

This week in evolutionary psychology fun and games (and via Marginal Revolution), I engage in the most shameless piece of dumpster-diving yet. A commenter on last week’s post picked me up for a tendency to pluck out the most ridiculous things I can find and present them as representative of the entire field of evolutionary psychology, rather in the manner of those irritating “Crazzzeeeee Postmodernists!” articles that you used to find in the National Review during the 1980s (or on “Butterflies and Wheels” now). I suspect that commenter is unlikely to be impressed with the latest find, because it comes from that world-renowned centre of evolutionary genetics research, the Cornell University School of Hotel Administration. On that age old question of “Do Sexy Waitresses Get More Tips?”.

Attention conservation notice / Irritation advance warning: If you think I’m going to get through this without making at least a few puerile jokes and maybe more, you’re probably wrong.
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In the late 1990s, Doug McLennan created Arts Journal, a comprehensive aggregator of cultural journalism; for the past couple of years has been in charge of whatever is going on with the National Arts Journalism Program, which gave out fellowships at Columbia University for a while. (Until, one day, it didn’t. I’m not really sure what happened there.) He’s had a blog at AJ, Diacritical, that has been pretty episodic, goings weeks and longer without new activity. Totally understandable, of course; the man has enough else to do.

But it looks like he’s resuming it, starting with some considerations on how badly the notion of the newspaper as part of “mass culture” serves us, especially now:
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