From the monthly archives:
You know me. I love ’em. The worse, the better.
Take the anti-same-sex-marriage stuff, for example. NRO has two perfect examples up right now: “The Future of Marriage”, signed by ‘the editors’. And Maggie Gallagher’s latest effort, “Married To Liberty?” [click to continue…]
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Inviting one and all to the April 15 <strike>Tin Foil Hat Parades</strike> Tea Parties to protest Obama’s gay Islamic socialism and the Obama Depression it has brought upon us all. And also to protest fraud in government, a subject about which Newt is an acknowledged expert.
Please join Newt and the “big ideas” people of the new GOP — Michelle Malkin, Glenn Beck, and J. T. Plumber — as they issue their bold new Declaration of Independence from Economic Reality one week from today.
I’ve posted before about harassment of photographers by police, para-police, security guards etc. The latest panic in the UK has concerned section 76 of the Counter-Terrorism Act 2008. I’m inclined to think this is actually less of a problem than random and unlawful action by police officers, and the British government, in the shape of Shahid Malik MP (Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for the Home Department) has told us all to calm down, “in the following terms”:http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm200809/cmhansrd/cm090401/halltext/90401h0005.htm
bq. It makes it an offence to elicit, attempt to elicit, publish or communicate information about an individual who is or has been a constable, or a member of the armed forces or intelligences services. The information must be of a kind that is likely to be useful to a person committing or preparing acts of terrorism. It has been suggested that the new offence could criminalise people taking or publishing photographs of police officers. A photograph of a police officer may fall within the scope of the offence, but would do so in only limited circumstances. The offence is designed to capture terrorist activity directed at members of the protected groups, which, sadly, we know occurs. An offence might be committed, therefore, if someone provides a person with information about the names, addresses or details of car registration numbers of persons in the protected groups. The important thing is that the photographs would have to be of a kind likely to provide practical assistance to terrorists, and the person taking or providing the photograph would have to have no reasonable excuse, such as responsible journalism, for taking it.
Well now we “have a very good example”:http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2009/apr/07/ian-tomlinson-g20-death-video of why it is important for the public to have the freedom to photograph and film the police: in order to gather evidence against them of violent and oppressive conduct. The Independent Police Complaints Commission has appealed people who have film or photographs of the events leading up to Ian Tomlinson’s death. It would be perverse if the taking of those photographs were itself a crime.
From the “Chronicle”:http://chronicle.com/news/index.php?id=6263&utm_source=pm&utm_medium=en
The student-newspaper staff at Brigham Young University removed some 18,500 copies of the paper from the campus yesterday, and reprinted nearly the entire press run, because an embarrassing typo in a front-page photo caption appeared to offend key leaders in the Mormon hierarchy…. The caption described a photograph illustrating the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints’ General Conference, and it referred to the group’s “Quorum of Twelve Apostates” rather than “Apostles.” … A student had misspelled the word “apostle,” and the article’s editor chose the wrong word from among the options offered by spell-checking software.
This “essay”:http://www.georgescialabba.net/mtgs/1995/09/against-the-grain-the-new-crit.html on _The New Criterion_ by George Scialabba (not our own Scott McLemee, thank you very muchmisattribution now corrected) has been getting some recent attention because it says harsh things along the way about cultural diversity. Although Scialabba certainly doesn’t like the culturalist left very much, his discussion of its problems are a class of a diversion on the way to the main argument of the piece, which concerns the problems of the cultural conservatives who criticize them.
the New Criterionists sometimes boast that they and not the multiculturalists are the true democrats, applying to themselves Arnold’s words in Culture and Anarchy “The men of culture are the true apostles of equality. [They] are those who have had a passion for diffusing, for making prevail, for carrying from one end of the society to the other, the best ideas of their time.” But it is a hollow boast. Arnold freely acknowledged, as Kramer and Kimball do not, the dependence of spiritual equality on at least a rough, approximate material equality.
in these and other passages Arnold demonstrated his humane moral imagination and democratic good faith. Kramer and Kimball have yet to demonstrate theirs. Finally, there is the complicated matter of disinterestedness, or intellectual conscience. That both Kramer and Kimball would sooner die than fake a fact or twist a quote, I do not doubt. But disinterestedness is something larger, finer, rarer than that. To perceive as readily and pursue as energetically the difficulties of one’s own position as those of one’s opponent’s; to take pains to discover, and present fully, the genuine problem that one’s opponent is, however futilely, addressing — this is disinterestedness as Arnold understood it.
Arnold thought he had found a splendid example of it in Burke who, at the close of his last attack on the French Revolution, nevertheless conceded some doubts about the wisdom of opposing to the bitter end the new spirit of the age. …I wish I could imagine someday praising Kramer and Kimball in such terms. But alas, I know nothing more un-New-Criterion-ish.
This, and other essays, are collected in Scialabba’s new book, which is just out (I got my copy yesterday), and which I can’t recommend highly enough. This bit, on Robert Conquest, has the quality of the best aphorisms:
It may be a delusion, as Conquest repeats endlessly, to imagine that state power can ever create a just society. But one reason some people are perennially tempted to try is that private power is generally so comfortable with unjust ones.
I’d enjoyed Scialabba’s essays very much when I read them individually, but to be properly appreciated, they should be read together. NB also that Scott, while entirely innocent of the essay quoted above, did write the introduction to the new volume.
“Julian Sanchez”:http://www.juliansanchez.com/2009/04/06/climate-change-and-argumentative-fallacies/ on climate change debates.
Sometimes, of course, the arguments are such that the specialists can develop and summarize them to the point that an intelligent layman can evaluate them. But often—and I feel pretty sure here—that’s just not the case. Give me a topic I know fairly intimately, and I can often make a convincing case for absolute horseshit. Convincing, at any rate, to an ordinary educated person with only passing acquaintance with the topic. A specialist would surely see through it, but in an argument between us, the lay observer wouldn’t necessarily be able to tell which of us really had the better case on the basis of the arguments alone—at least not without putting in the time to become something of a specialist himself. Actually, I have a plausible advantage here as a peddler of horseshit: I need only worry about what sounds plausible. If my opponent is trying to explain what’s true, he may be constrained to introduce concepts that take a while to explain and are hard to follow, trying the patience (and perhaps wounding the ego) of the audience.
Come to think of it, there’s a certain class of rhetoric I’m going to call the “one way hash” argument. Most modern cryptographic systems in wide use are based on a certain mathematical asymmetry: You can multiply a couple of large prime numbers much (much, much, much, much) more quickly than you can factor the product back into primes. Certain bad arguments work the same way—skim online debates between biologists and earnest ID afficionados armed with talking points if you want a few examples: The talking point on one side is just complex enough that it’s both intelligible—even somewhat intuitive—to the layman and sounds as though it might qualify as some kind of insight. (If it seems too obvious, perhaps paradoxically, we’ll tend to assume everyone on the other side thought of it themselves and had some good reason to reject it.) The rebuttal, by contrast, may require explaining a whole series of preliminary concepts before it’s really possible to explain why the talking point is wrong. So the setup is “snappy, intuitively appealing argument without obvious problems” vs. “rebuttal I probably don’t have time to read, let alone analyze closely.”
This is both true and smart (as is Julian’s work more generally; in my opinion, he is by far the most consistently interesting and intelligent of the young sort-of-libertarian opinion journalist set).
That’s the title of a paper I’ve written for the Whitlam Institute in Australia, available (PDF) here. Here’s the Whitlam Institute Press release. This piece by Mike Steketee in The Australian is a good introduction, focusing on the most controversial (in Oz political terms, anyway) implication of my argument, the need to raise more tax revenue in the long run.
It’s a bit late to be reporting April Fools* hoaxes, but this one at Salon has to be the best ever. The premise is that the US conservative movement has gone so completely insane that David Horowitz (!!) is now, in relative terms, the voice of reason.
This sounds as if it would be impossible to pull off, but whoever Salon has writing as “Horowitz” sounds very much like the real thing, for example, “Obama has flexed the leftist muscle so nakedly and unmistakably that there isn’t a conservative left who will vote Democratic in the next election”.
The piece then quotes material supposedly sent to “Horowitz”, in which Obama is compared to Mussolini, Charles Manson and so on, and denounced as the antichrist. It looks convincing at first, but surely no serious representative of the conservative side of politics would regard Obama as comparable to Mussolini, a traitor to the United States, and so on. And the general tenor of “Horowitz” piece, while it looks sober and sound at a first reading, carries the obviously absurd implication that the leading thinkers of US conservatism are hysterical loons.
*Note: I’m sure that the piece originally appeared with an April 1 dateline, but it now has April 2.
The Supreme Court has just brought down a 5-4 ruling, written by Clarence Thomas, denying workers the right to sue over age discrimination if their union agreement calls for arbitration. As the New York Times says, it’s hard to believe that Congress intended this.
It seems likely that we will see a lot more of this kind of thing, since the Bush Administration has packed the courts with movement conservatives. Fortunately, there is a simple response available, at least in cases of statutory interpretation. Every time the Supreme Court comes out with a decision like this, Congress should pass a tightly worded act, repudiating the Court’s interpretation. Sooner or later, they wil get the message.
We had this problem in Australia with a Chief Justice (Garfield Barwick) who continually undermined the tax laws on the basis of an extreme form of textualism. In this case, it wasn’t sufficient to fix the law after he broke it, since new tax dodges arose with great regularity. Eventually Parliament passed amendments to its meta-legislation, the Acts Interpretation Act, stating that the courts should take into account the intention of Parliament as stated in the second reading speech that normally introduces the law. Barwick resigned about the same time.
Of course, this won’t work if the Republican majority on the court relies on constitutional interpretation to strike down legislation. This ought to (but certainly won’t) provoke an outcry from conservative opponents of “judicial activism”. But, as Roosevelt showed, it’s a political struggle in which the courts are not as well-placed as they might seem. A determined legislature with popular backing can make it very hard for courts to defend strained interpretations of the constitution.
Jonah Goldberg responding to a paragraph by Will Wilkinson:
As it happens, American drug prohibition and sentencing policies hit poor black men the hardest, devastating already disadvantaged black families and communities—a tragic, mocking contrast to the achievement of Obama’s election. Militarized police departments across the nation month after month kick down the wrong doors, terrify innocent families, shoot lawful citizens, and often kill the family dog.
I’m not casting doubt on the statistics they cite or the sincerity of the arguments (I’ve argued with too many liberatarians and legalizers about drugs to doubt their sincerity on the issue, statistics are another matter). But something has always bothered me about the drug war is racist argument which, in fairness, Will only suggests above.
It seems so, well, unlibertarian — at least in one respect. Sure, as an argument against the unintended consequences of what they consider to be a bad policy, the disproportionate affect on blacks works just fine.
But as an argument from proud individualists it seems a bit off. It seems to me that the classical liberal is supposed to see people as autonomous and sovereign moral actors, not identity politics groups.
“Inside Higher Ed”:http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2009/04/03/churchill
More than four years after his comments on 9/11 set off a furor, and four weeks into a trial, a Colorado jury on Thursday afternoon found that the University of Colorado did not fire Ward Churchill for legitimate reasons, but for his political views. A judge will later determine whether Churchill can return to his tenured job as an ethnic studies professor at the university’s Boulder campus. The jury was responsible for awarding damages, and gave Churchill only $1.
To find in Churchill’s favor, the jury had to determine that his political views were a substantial or motivating factor in his dismissal, and that he would not have been fired but for the controversy over his opinions.
I think that this is a reasonable verdict (although it seems to be the product of a “jury split”:http://chronicle.com/news/index.php?id=6250&utm_source=pm&utm_medium=en between a majority who wanted to give him a significant sum and a holdout who wanted to give him nothing). It says that the university was wrong to fire him for his political views (which I strongly suspect it did – what evidence I am aware of suggests that tenured plagiarists “usually get an easier deal”:http://chronicle.com/free/v51/i17/17a00802.htm than you might expect), but also suggests that his academic career wasn’t worth all that much in the first place. I imagine he’ll get his job back if he really wants it, which is about what both he and the president who fired him both deserve.
While I was at LSU talking about disability and stuff, a graduate student asked me about Obama’s “Special Olympics” gaffe on <i>The Tonight Show</i>. I said more or less what you’d expect: that it was a stunningly foolish and thoughtless remark, and something of a bitter irony that the United States’ first African-American president had become the first president to use “Special Olympics” as a laugh line. Guess we didn’t see <i>that</i> coming!
Now, of course I know the joke was supposed to be self-deprecating. But there are much better ways to be self-deprecating! Obama could have mocked his bowling skills by saying “I brought my Z game,” which would have been Very Funny because it would have been a play on the sports-cliché of bringing one’s A game, you see, and it would not have offended any Z-Americans, since they have notoriously generous senses of humor.
“The NYT”:http://egan.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/04/01/the-orphans-of-ireland/
the island of saints and scholars … The next parish over, they say … is Boston … the wellspring of poets and balladeers as advertised: those emerald fields, those ruddy-cheeked fishermen warming pub seats, a land of stone and cold wind that produced a lyrical people and a music embraced more than ever by the young. … Every village that had seen nary a rock wall or a cottage window unchanged suddenly had a cul de sac of insta-homes and a half-dozen O’Mansions. Anyone with a mortgage could get rich in little more time than it took for a head of Guinness to settle. … wonderfully brooding town, where David Lean filmed “Ryan’s Daughter,” the sod was peeled back for the worst kind of Southern California housing developments. … beer-soaked backwater … “I left a godly land of broke but merry alcoholics and came back to a place where people who used to dig potatoes were buying luxury apartments sight unseen and driving Porsches.” … marvel at a people burning peat to stay warm against blustery Atlantic winds. … empty new homes tell a story of greed.
Fill in the blanks yerself. In all fairness, a couple of the choicer phrases were quoted by the author from other people’s articles, but others weren’t. I suspect that the author of this piece was especially proud of ‘O’Mansions’ and the Guinness-head-settle as a unit of duration. He shouldn’t be.
I get contacted fairly often by students at other institutions to help them with their assignments. The message I received yesterday was unlike the usual request though:
Hello Eszter,
my name is [Firstname Lastname]
I’m a [nationality] student in [Country]
It will be really great if you could help me !
Im doing a work about your paper “Second Level Digital Differences in people’s online skills ”
I need to criticism your method of research and your conclusion and I really don’t know how to start..Waiting for your answer , Thank you very much ….
[Firstname]…
Since I got this on April 1st, I wasn’t sure if it was a joke, but somehow I don’t think so. (BTW, the title of the paper is misquoted.)
An excerpt from my daughter’s math homework:
Discuss. (Her answer is, after all, perfectly true.)