December 2008

Samuel Freeman’s _Rawls_ has received considerable praise on this blog. Indeed Harry “described it”:https://crookedtimber.org/2007/12/10/rawls-by-samuel-freeman/#more-6491 exactly a year ago as “A brilliantly careful, utterly transparent, account of Rawls’s thought and an admirable presentation of the state of the debates around Rawls’s work.” Well Harry may well be right about the book as a whole, but I’m afraid I found the pages where Freeman states his and Rawls’s objections to “liberal cosmopolitanism” somewhat objectionably arresting. Details are below the fold, but I was taken aback by the linked claims that “language itself” would not be possible without “social co-operation” which, in turn, would not be possible without the enforcement of social rules by a coercive power. From which it follows, of course, that language itself is not possible in the absence of such a coercive power. That just seems rather obviously historically and ethnographically false unless Freeman intends by “social cooperation” and “coercive power” rather looser arrangements for coooperation and constraint than he needs for the conclusion he wants to reach, namely, that there is a qualitative difference between the domestic order and the international one, such as would justify restricting strong distributive justice duties to co-members of societies. Given that he has to reject, then, a looser conception of those terms, it looks like he’s committed to the claim that “language itself” would not be possible without the state. Which is nuts.
[click to continue…]

I’m at the Berkman Center in Harvard, for a conference on the Internet and Politics in 2008 (Eszter is here too). Participants have written a number of interesting short pieces on this this topic for the “conference website”:http://publius.cc/category/internet-and-politics-2008/ (there are more promised); I’ve also done a piece, which I enclose beneath the fold on how Internet participation and partisanship are linked together.
[click to continue…]

Guardian Obit here. Picture gallery here. Dragon’s Friendly Society here. The Clangers, Bagpuss and Ivor the Engine here.

When my eldest was 5 there was just one thing on her Christmas list. A Clanger. And Father Christmas brought her a little cuddly clanger and a soup dragon. Boy was she happy. For several years there was a promise that Noggin the Nog would come out on DVD, but there was delay after delay, during which I feared that by the time it came out my kids would be too old for it. It was too late for my eldest, but just in time for the middle one, and we had a third so that a second one would get to enjoy them.

During the great debate over my son’s name the way my wife and the girls got me to accede to their preference was by pointing out that if we named him as we did he would share his first name with Oliver Postgate. Clever.

A taste of Noggin the Nog, the best thing ever on television, here.

Pride and Prejudice, the FaceBook feed.

I’m going to go out on a limb: Joni Mitchell is a great singer/songwriter/pianist/guitarist.

Pursuant of this theme, a pair of YouTube videos – really just song tracks. The first, a sweet and mournful heavy-orchestration-makes-it-good track, “Down To You”, from Court and Spark (1973). Especially the French horn bits. That was the album that gave us “Free Man In Paris”, “Help Me”, and the (slightly annoying) “Raised On Robbery”; but if you ask me: “Down To You” is the drop-dead achingly beautiful one. Right. That’s settled.

Next, “The Jungle Line”, from The Hissing of Summer Lawns (1975). She’s getting into all the fusion-y jazz stuff which, for me, is mostly hit but sometimes miss. But “Jungle Line” has this crazy thumpy blatt-y bass-y bassoon-y oboe-y, synth-y stuff over the sampled African drums. Is it the long lost Brian Eno-produced Björk album from 1975? I think a few bars from this one would be great for baffling your friends/incorporating into some oddly unplaceable mash-up. What do you think?

Speaking of dubious mash-up projects, I have a very bad idea: a mash-up of Michael Jackson’s “Smooth Criminal” with Randy Newman’s “Little Criminals“. Obviously you would have to call it “Smooth Little Criminals”. Can you sort of hear it? (Perhaps not. But I think you will agree that the original Jackson video is a stronger effort than the middle-school action figure Newman offering.)

As it has become evident that the financial crisis is comparable, in important ways, to the early stages of the Great Depression, there has been a lot of debate about the lessons to be learned from the responses to the Depression in the US, most notably the various policies that made up the New Deal. There’s a lot to be learned there, but it’s also important to remember that the Depression, in the US and elsewhere, continued throughout the 1930s before being brought to an abrupt end by the outbreak of World War II.[1]

Not only did the slump end when the war began, it did not return when the war ended – a huge difference from previous major wars. Instead the three decades beginning in 1940 were a period of unparalleled prosperity for developed countries, with economic growth higher and unemployment lower than at any time before or since.

What lessons can we learn from this experience?

[click to continue…]

My son Alex, who plays under the name Alexander Thomas (“myspace page”:http://www.myspace.com/alexanderthomasmusic) , plays the “theremin”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theremin (and then puts the output through various electronic boxes). As well as playing various gigs round the country, he’s also just had “a session on BBC Radio Bristol’s BBC Bristol Introducing programme”:http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p001mhrq . He plays three pieces as well as talking a little bit about the instrument (the first is just after 30 minutes in). The session should be available for the next seven days.

“Josh Marshall”:http://www.talkingpointsmemo.com/archives/246918.php is a little uncertain about Jerry Nadler’s “proposed measure”:http://www.talkingpointsmemo.com/archives/246918.php to reform the pardons process.

in addition to always being leery of fiddling with the constitution, I don’t know if I like the idea of changing the pardon power. I think it’s an important safety valve in our constitutional system. If it’s been a problem, rather than changing the constitution, maybe we need better presidents.

Looking more closely at what “Nadler is saying”:http://tpmmuckraker.talkingpointsmemo.com/2008/12/nadler_plans_constitutional_am.php, it seems to me that there are two distinct elements. One is the suggestion that the President not be allowed to pardon members of his/her own administration. This, I suspect, is the bit that Josh is leery of – I imagine that his thinking is that in a country where the prosecution is highly politicized (as in the US), the benefits of having the President able to overturn politically-driven prosecutions may outweigh the benefits. This, I think can be argued either way. But I can’t see any very good argument against the second, admittedly more tentative element of Nadler’s proposal – that the President’s power to pardon be restricted during his/her final months in office. As we saw most notoriously with “Clinton”:http://www.themonkeycage.org/2008/11/presidential_pardons_will_bush.html, presidents may possibly have a strong incentive to pardon people in the closing months of their administration, because they won’t have to pay a significant political price for it. This creates real problems of democratic accountability, in an area where the arguments for political discretion seem relatively weak (e.g. if the claim is that the power would be used primarily to overturn bogus political prosecutions, then there shouldn’t be much of a legitimacy hit for pardoning people earlier in the President’s term). So is there any good rationale why the President shouldn’t be constitutionally forbidden from issuing pardons say, during the interregnum after November 4 and before the new President takes office?

!http://www.themonkeycage.org/pardons.gif!

The UW School of Medicine and Public Health has just adopted a new grading policy; for first year students it has gotten rid of public letter grades, replacing them with a Satisfactory/Unsatisfactory division. You can read a bit about it here. In fact, the students do get assigned letter grades, but these do not appear on their transcript. The Wisconsin Association of Scholars asked me to participate in an event at the School this week, where we would simultaneously discuss the new policy (the Dean of the School was on the panel) and launch Grade Inflation: Academic Standards in Higher Education edited by my colleague Lester Hunt, who also spoke (adapting part of his really excellent summary afterword to the book). I adapted a bit of my chapter for the book in my talk (it also overlaps with this post announcing the book — the repetition isn’t too extensive though), but also said what I think about the new policy. I thought I’d post the talk partly because the panel was not so well attended, largely because it was one of those suddenly very cold Wisconsin evenings (my father-in-law, fresh from Iraq, did attend, but slept right through my talk!). The text is below the fold. I should add that my sense is that the W.A.S. set up the event partly because some people were very skeptical about the policy; I think that once people had heard the Dean all were convinced that it was sensible.

[click to continue…]

The great David Horowitz campaign against evul academics has reached Australia, and has even occasioned a Senate inquiry. It was a load of fun. The report is good reading, as is the minority report by the Liberal (= conservative down under) Party Senators who called the inquiry in the first place, but lost control following their election defeat last year. A snippet suggests that those involved knew how to handle Horowitzism

From the committee’s perspective it appeared as
though it was to be called on to play its part in a university revue. The submissions,
the performance and the style – to say nothing of the rhetoric – presented by some
Liberal Students suggested a strong undergraduate tone. The ‘outing’ of Left and
purportedly Left academics and commentators (masquerading as academics as we
were told at one hearing) was in keeping with this tone. None of those outed objected.
Some appeared flattered to be named in the company of others more famous

The list of leftist academics is, I must admit, a sore point. I never located the full list (the links on the inquiry website were skew-whiff) but clearly I wasn’t on it. What does a leftist have to do to get noticed in this country?

My friend Josh Glenn has a new book, The Idler’s Glossary [amazon]. An acquaintance of mine, Mark Kingwell, wrote the introductory essay. And Seth did the illustrations. (I love Seth.) The whole svelte, 3.7 x 6 in. unit would slip snugly into someone’s X-Mas stocking, mayhap.

It’s a glossary: entries on absentmindedness and acedia through to working-class hero. (Shouldn’t there be an entry for ‘zzzzzz’? With no gloss? I think that might have been an elegant way to end the book.)

Right, the philosophy of idleness. First, I will note that Kingwell and Glenn have diametrically opposed theories of boredom. Kingwell quotes a passage from a Kingsley Amis novel: “My wife accuse me of thinking her boring. It doesn’t seem to have occurred to her that this might be because she’s boring … To her mind, her being boring is a thing I do.” Kingwell takes the husband’s side, but Glenn goes on to take the wife’s: “Go ahead and blame your dull companions, but being bored [a slang term that appeared among London’s smart set in the late 18th century, perhaps derived from the French for ‘triviality’] is your own fault. It’s the state of being too restless to concentrate, while too apathetic to bust a move.” Which, come to think of it, is a pretty stable Kinglsey Amis formula.

So who’s right: Kingwell or Glenn? In philosophical terms, if a tree is boring in the forest, and there is no one there to be bored by how dull Nature is … ? In Humean terms, is boringness a matter of (we shouldn’t say ‘gilding and staining Nature with our sentiments’) dulling and drearing Nature with our sentiments. Or was existence already dull and drear when we lay down on it?

Let us proceed to our second topic, which is of even greater significance: idleness, per se. [click to continue…]

Via Leiter, this disturbing story about gnomes being banned from a church cemetery. This is the CofE: it seems a bit ironic that a church that not long ago had Bishops openly doubting whether God exists is so adamant about the non-existence of ‘real’ gnomes.

The excellent Broader, Bolder Approach Coalition has a nice “gotcha” for David Brooks here. In the first piece he endorses pretty much exactly the approach that the broader bolder coalition has outlined; in the second he criticises the coalition and supports instead, the Education Equality Project (you know, the Al Sharpton one that John McCain supports) which was, as far as I can tell, set up specifically to oppose the broader bolder approach that he advances in his first article. Good stuff.

“Philosophy professor forgets to attend his own sell-out lecture on duty”:http://www.richmondandtwickenhamtimes.co.uk/news/3938645.Professor_forgets_/ .