Chris Bertram

Matt Yglesias has been doing sterling work on the double standards employed by Michael Moore’s critics. So, as a supplement to my “two”:https://www.crookedtimber.org/archives/002112.html “earlier”:https://www.crookedtimber.org/archives/002127.html posts on the same topic, I’d like to draw attention to “his latest”:http://yglesias.typepad.com/matthew/2004/07/good_points.html. He cites Volokh Conspirator Randy Barnett, who has read “Kopel’s Fifty-six deceits in Farenheit 911”:http://www.davekopel.com/Terror/Fiftysix-Deceits-in-Fahrenheit-911.htm. Barnett “observes”:http://volokh.com/archives/archive_2004_07_00.shtml#1088978471:

bq. I was struck by the sheer cunningness of Moore’s film. When you read Kopel, try to detach yourself from any revulsion you may feel at a work of literal propaganda receiving such wide-spread accolades from mainstream politicos, as well as attendance by your friends and neighbors. Instead, notice the film’s meticulousness in saying only (or mostly) “true” or defensible things in support of a completely misleading impression.

Matt comments, fairly and reasonably:

bq. The funny thing, though, is that if I wrote “The 56 Deceits of George W. Bush” (as, indeed, many people have done) then some very intelligent Volokh Conspirator (as, indeed, many of the conspirators are) would doubtless have written a post in response (as, indeed, I’ve read at the Conspiracy) arguing that most of the alleged “lies” weren’t lies _per se_ (and, indeed, they’re mostly misleading juxtapositions of technically true information) and that these sorts of ad hominem attacks don’t really prove that the presidents’ policies are actually wrong.

Quite.

“The latest parlour game”:http://www.artsjournal.com/aboutlastnight/archives20040704.shtml#82118 , via both “Norm”:http://normblog.typepad.com/normblog/2004/07/choose.html and “Chris Brooke”:http://users.ox.ac.uk/~magd1368/weblog/2004_07_01_archive.html#108912007834711318 .

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Arguments, fights and feuds have their own inner logic, and they lead to people taking up positions and attitudes that make little sense on a rationalistic model of what beliefs we ought to have. But sometimes, even in the middle of such a quarrel, we get a sense of where it’s going, how it is defining and entrenching us and the other person. David Aaronovich “captures something of this”:http://www.guardian.co.uk/Columnists/Column/0,5673,1254827,00.html in today’s Guardian:

bq. I wrote a year ago that other peoples’ assumptions were turning me into a Jew. And now I began to wonder whether being attacked as being anti-Muslim because of my views on Iraq and secularism, and despite my views on Palestine and racism, wasn’t beginning to make me the thing that I was being accused of. Bugger it then, you half-think, if that’s what you want.

bq. But if that’s how I feel, wonderfully rational bloke that I am, what in heaven’s name is the effect on people from the Muslim community who are being wrongly stopped in the name of counter-terrorism? Doesn’t that mean the warnings about alienation are essentially correct? Last Friday’s announcement of the police stop and search statistics were like a bucket of iced water in the face. A 300% increase in the number of Asians stopped, and you just know that most of these will be young men. And we also know from the sus laws and the experiences of black BMW drivers, what the reaction is. Fuck you.

I “posted the other day”:https://www.crookedtimber.org/archives/002112.html about “Paul Krugman’s correct observation”:http://www.nytimes.com/2004/07/02/opinion/02KRUG.html that many of the right-wing pundits who get exercised about Michael Moore apply lower standards to the spin coming out of the Bush administration. As I said in comments at the time, that _comparative_ judgement is compatible with thinking Farenheit 9/11 is a pretty bad movie. Elsewhere in Krugman’s piece he gives qualified approval to Moore as providing an essential public service and writes that this is despite the fact that Farenheit 9/11 is tendentious, promotes unproven conspiracy theories and that viewers may come away from the film “believing some things that probably aren’t true.” This “has somewhat upset Norm”:http://normblog.typepad.com/normblog/2004/07/the_morgan_rati.html , who compares Krugman’s defence of Moore to the line some took on behalf of Daily Mirror editor Piers Morgan, who published faked photographs of British solidiers mistreating Iraqi detainees.

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The BBC commentators have been comparing Otto Rehhagel to Socrates and invoking Greece’s ancient past. And why not? “Moments like tonight”:http://news.bbc.co.uk/sport1/hi/football/euro_2004/3860105.stm are what make football the great sport it is.

The BBC has made “Artur Pizzaro’s complete Beethoven sonatas”:http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio3/classical/pizarro/ available online, together with interview, critical notes etc. Fantastic!

I see that the “Poor Man already covered this”:http://www.thepoorman.net/archives/002866.html . No matter, it is worth the repetition. “Krugman on responses to Farenheit 9/11”:http://www.nytimes.com/2004/07/02/opinion/02KRUG.html :

bq. There has been much tut-tutting by pundits who complain that the movie, though it has yet to be caught in any major factual errors, uses association and innuendo to create false impressions. Many of these same pundits consider it bad form to make a big fuss about the Bush administration’s use of association and innuendo to link the Iraq war to 9/11. Why hold a self-proclaimed polemicist to a higher standard than you hold the president of the United States?

“The Guardian has reacted”:http://www.guardian.co.uk/gender/story/0,11812,1252410,00.html to the sex imbalance of Prospect’s list of 100 “British” public intellectuals (“previously discussed here”:https://www.crookedtimber.org/archives/002069.html) , with a list of women whom they might have included.

Greece, “in the final”:http://football.guardian.co.uk/euro2004/minutebyminute/story/0,14582,1251717,00.html ! Whod’a thunk it?

Good news. I posted a few weeks ago about the availability of Edgar Reitz’s “Heimat on DVD”:http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/ASIN/B000284A56/junius-21 and I’ve just found out that Tartan will be releasing it in the UK in August (Region 2 only, though). As some CT readers may have noticed, I’ve been watching rather a lot of German films recently. I’m getting somewhat depressed, though, by the fact that, though German cinema had a golden age in the 1970s and 80s, the last twenty years have seen a sharp decline in quality. Some directors are dead, of course, and others have taken to producing films in English for Hollywood. My local rental shop, which has “a very extensive range”:http://www.20thcenturyflicks.co.uk/ , has shelves and shelves of French, Italian and Japanese films on DVD but I’ve more or less watched my way through their German holdings. They have some more in store, but mainly on fading VHS tape since there has been no DVD release (at least in Europe). I’d like to think that this is just my perception and that there’s a treasure trove of recent German cinema that I’ve not discovered yet.

“Matthew Yglesias on John Rawls”:http://www.matthewyglesias.com/archives/week_2004_06_20.html#003637 :

bq. A Theory of Justice is a brilliant work in many ways, but it’s also — quite obviously — wrong in a number of ways and employs a variety of arguments that are pretty dubious. Any undergraduate can see this, and dozens — if not hundreds — do so every semester. Now it seems to me that a slightly more scrupulous philosopher might have looked at the manuscript and said to himself, “this is a very interesting argument I’m putting together here, but it doesn’t quite work. Better keep on revising.” But instead Rawls put his thought-provoking work out there in the press, attracting decades worth of criticisms, counter-criticisms, suggestions for improvement, and so forth, thus becoming the major figure in postwar political philosophy.

Someone who all accounts agree was a deeply serious, thinker who cared most of all about getting it right (“scrupulous”), is thus dismissed by a blogger as a careless promoter of his own reputation. Contrast John Rawls on reading the history of philosophy:

bq. I always too for granted that the writers we were studying were much smarter than I was. If they were not, why was I wasting my time and the students’ time by studying them? If I saw a mistake in their arguments, I supposed those writers saw it too and must have dealt with it. But where? I looked for their way out, not mine. Sometimes their way out was historical: in their day the question need not be raised, or wouldn’t arise and so couldn’t then be fruitfully discussed. Or there was a part of the text I had overlooked, or had not read. I assumed there were never plain mistakes, not ones that mattered anyway. (“Lectures on the History of Philosophy”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0674004426/junius-20 , p. xvi)

Since my own copy of the first edition of “A Theory of Justice”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0674000781/junius-20 is peppered with silly undergraduate marginal sneers, I shouldn’t be too hard on Yglesias. What of Brad DeLong, though, “who responds approvingly”:http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/movable_type/2004_archives/001093.html to Yglesias’s comments by suggesting that David Hume’s Of the Original Contract constitutes an _avant la lettre_ refutation of Rawls? DeLong reveals nothing but his own catastropic misunderstanding (as a number of his commenters point out).

Heavy rain in Bristol today, so I spent the afternoon watching Volker Schlondorff’s “The Lost Honour of Katharina Blum”:http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0073858/ (based on the Heinrich Boll novel). For those who don’t know, the film is about what happens to a young woman after she spends the night with a man who turns out to be a terrorist suspect. She is alternately bullied by the police and villified by the gutter press. What is different today, of course, is the way that the blogosphere serves as an Insta-echo-chamber for tabloid coverage of such stories. One imagines the “Heh”s and “Readthewholethings” that would accompany posts linking to a contemporary Die Zeitung’s online coverage of events. (If you’ve not seen the film, don’t be put off by the sole IMDB commenter, who has also posted politically-motived negative reviews of Rabbit-Proof Fence and Bloody Sunday.)

IRRITATED UPDATE: Why is a classic of the New German Cinema available on DVD in Region 1 but not in Region 2 (including the UK and Germany)?

Brian Leiter has a “couple”:http://webapp.utexas.edu/blogs/archives/bleiter/001529.html#001529 of “interesting posts”:http://webapp.utexas.edu/blogs/archives/bleiter/001531.html#001531 reflecting on the state of analytical philosophy, and also links to Dan Dennett’s “The Higher-Order Truths of Chmess”:http://www.ephilosopher.com/modules.php?op=modload&name=Sections&file=index&req=viewarticle&artid=9 , which I hadn’t read before. Dennett cites Donald Hebb’s dictuum “If it isn’t worth doing, it isn’t worth doing well,” and remarks

bq. Each of us can readily think of an ongoing controversy in philosophy whose participants would be out of work if Hebb’s dictum were ruthlessly applied.

I confess to succumbing to feeling of utter despair whenever I have to listen to people talking twaddle about twater on twin-earth, so that would be my candidate even though I have dear colleagues who care passionately about the topic. But the twaddlers themselves would, no doubt, want to consign some of my pet interests to the bin. Commenters are invited to nominate the disputes that drive them crazy, and those who care about the tw-topic are invited to explain to the rest of us why we should think it matters.

Germany, Spain, Italy, England, all gone. And now France! This is getting interesting.