“Amnesty International’s annual report for 2004”:http://web.amnesty.org/report2004/index-eng is now out. A sobering reminder of how bad things are out there. It is also a reminder of how bad things are in world of chatterers, op-ed columnists and bloggers that we can expect (a) a great deal of moaning about how Amnesty has failed to treat country X (of which the writer approves) with due understanding, context, perspective etc; and (b) much noise about how the activites of country Y (of which the writer disapproves) are demonstrably condemned by the same report. Human rights are indivisible, and in my view, the burden of proof is on those whom Amnesty condemns to show their innocence.
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Chris Bertram
Tim Smith’s and David Korevaar’s page on “Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier”:http://jan.ucc.nau.edu/~tas3/wtc.html is one of the best things I’ve seen on the web in a long time. Click on the links and you get music, analysis, history and fantastic graphics. (via “Michael Brooke”:http://www.michaelbrooke.com/2004/05/breathtaking-bach.html )
From the “Economist”:http://www.economist.co.uk/agenda/displayStory.cfm?story_id=2703519 :
bq. At the next official meeting of OPEC, in Beirut on June 3rd, Saudi Arabia will be asked to demonstrate solidarity with its co-conspirators in the cartel. The bargain that holds OPEC together—each member shows restraint in production, so that all can enjoy higher prices—is at stake, they will say. But it is widely assumed that Saudi Arabia must also keep its side of a more fundamental bargain. It must be conscious of American petrol prices, especially in an election year, and, in return, the world’s only superpower will continue to offer the desert kingdom its protection.
My friend and occasional collaborator, the sociologist “Alan Carling”:http://www.betterbradford.org.uk/about.htm , is running as an independent candidate in local elections in Bradford, West Yorkshire (in the UK). Bradford has in recent years acquired something of a reputation for urban deprivation, ethnic violence and increasing patterns of residential segregation, something which the main political parties have done little to address. Alan has thought more than most people about the problems of combining social justice and ethnic diversity. I’m sure that if I lived in Bradford I would give him my support. Alan’s campaign aims to tackle some of these issues head-on. He has a campaign website “BetterBradford.org.uk”:http://www.betterbradford.org.uk/campaign.htm . From Alan’s “campaign statement”:http://www.betterbradford.org.uk/campaign.htm :
bq. Multicultural policies have rightly recognised the differences in ways of life. The question in Bradford is whether the well-intentioned practice of multiculturalism in the past has contributed inadvertently to undesirable forms of segregation in the present. Multiculturalism makes us think in terms of single identities and multiple ‘communities’: the White community, the African-Caribbean community, the gay and lesbian communities and so on. But ‘community’ can mean an inward-looking attitude, so that each separate group regulates its own affairs without reference to anyone else outside. This is undesirable in an open democratic society.
bq. Identity is about how we describe ourselves, as ‘White’ or ‘Sikh’ or ‘Muslim’ or ‘English’ or ‘Ukrainian’. But whatever we choose as our main label, the truth is always more complicated. There are different meanings to each label, and there are many different ways of observing any religion. No-one is only White or only Muslim, because we are also women and men, young and old, and these different identities mean different things in different circumstances. A new perspective on multiculturalism would emphasise a single community and multiple identities.
(I don’t know what others at CT would make of Alan’s campaign: this just represents my own endorsement of Alan.)
The Scotsman has a cluster of reports on Darfur, “starting here”:http://news.scotsman.com/index.cfm?id=578622004 , which also contains many links to other reports including the one from “Human Rights Watch”:http://www.hrw.org/reports/2004/sudan0504/ .
bq. “The aim is to kill as many people as possible and drive the remainder from their lands, destroying the fabric of rural society,” reports the specialist journal Africa Confidential. “Proxy militias torch villages and exterminate villagers, slaughtering livestock and poisoning wells with corpses to prevent residents returning. Gang rape of women (often branded afterwards) and children reinforces the terror and helps to produce an ‘Arab’ next generation. Abduction is widespread in Darfur, with groups of women flown away by helicopter.”
Staff Sgt. Camilo Mejia is facing a court martial for refusing to go back to Iraq. His case is described in “Bob Herbert’s column in the NYT”:http://www.nytimes.com/2004/05/21/opinion/21HERB.html?hp . His testimony about the morally corrosive circumstances in which soldiers find themselves in wars of this kind is eloquent. The situation is underdescribed, but it sounds as if his friend was legally justified in shooting the child he shot. That doesn’t seem to have made things any easier.
bq. “Imagine being in the infantry in Ramadi, like we were,” he said, “where you get shot at every day and you get mortared where you live, [and attacked] with R.P.G.’s [rocket-propelled grenades], and people are dying and getting wounded and maimed every day. A lot of horrible things become acceptable.”
bq. He spoke about a friend of his, a sniper, who he said had shot a child about 10 years old who was carrying an automatic weapon. “He realized it was a kid,” said Sergeant Mejia. “The kid tried to get up. He shot him again.”
bq. The child died.
bq. All you really want to do in such an environment, said Sergeant Mejia, is “get out of there alive.” So soldiers will do things under that kind of extreme stress that they wouldn’t do otherwise.
bq. “You just sort of try to block out the fact that they’re human beings and see them as enemies,” he said. “You call them hajis, you know? You do all the things that make it easier to deal with killing them and mistreating them.”
bq. When there is time later to reflect on what has happened, said Sergeant Mejia, “you come face to face with your emotions and your feelings and you try to tell yourself that you did it for a good reason. And if you don’t find it, if you don’t believe you did it for a good reason, then, you know, it becomes pretty tough to accept it — to willingly be a part of the war.”
In today’s Financial Times William Shawcross and Emma Bonino have “a worthwhile piece”:http://news.ft.com/servlet/ContentServer?pagename=FT.com/StoryFT/FullStory&c=StoryFT&cid=1084907689070&p=1012571727085 on the murders, rapes and village-burnings being committed in Darfur by the Sudanese government.
I’ve just finished reading the “Haaretz coverage of yesterday’s incident in Gaza”:http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/429687.html , when the Israeli army fired tank shells into a demonstration. Nor is this an unprecedented event, as some of the commentary elsewhere in Haaretz recalling the Qana massacre reminds us. It is a common trope in the “blogosphere” to write of symptomatic silences, to accuse people of indifference or lack of balance for failing to mention some event or incident. I’ve read endless outrage in the blogosphere condemning the BBC or whoever for putting the work “terrorist” in inverted commas. Stupid comments by Jenny Tonge or whoever excusing suicide bombers generate thousands of words of commentary. (And lest there be any doubt, I have always and will always condemn actions such as suicide bombing which target civilians.) I’ve looked at a lot of blogs this morning — the usual suspects, the leftie warbloggers, the boy-wonder journalists, the distinguished lawyers, economists and political scientists, and so on. Of events in Rafa, not a mention.
[Update: not total silence. “Jonathan Edelstein”:http://headheeb.blogmosis.com/archives/025206.html , as so often, is worth reading on this.]
I’ve just notices Julian Baggini’s “piece about hypothetical questions over at Butterflies and Wheels”:http://www.butterfliesandwheels.com/badmovesprint.php?num=40 . Baggini observes the politicians often bat away questions they don’t want to answer by observing that the point is hypothetical. This is a disgraceful move by politicians, but its televisual ubiquity means that many people now seem to believe that hypothetical questions are, by their very nature, illegitimate. And bad though this belief is among the general public, it now seems to be spreading among philosophy undergraduates who don’t seem to appreciate that their subject would be _impossible_ without such questions. I first noticed this phenomenon a few years ago, when sitting-in on a lecture my then-colleague Patrick Greenough. Patrick was running through some “Gettier problems”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gettier_problem and had reached a familiar example involving a dog cunningly disguised as a sheep in a field (a real sheep being just out of sight behind a fold in the land). When Patrick asked whether the observer of the dog knows there is a sheep in the field, a hand went up in the audience: “Excuse me, isn’t that a hypothetical question?” Doh!
I know that a largish number of political theorists and philosophers read Crooked Timber, and some of them even write for it! I’m interested in opinions about the most significant journal papers in the field over the past 10 years (we can start with 1994 to keep things simple. I’m especially interested to hear about papers that others consider fine, but which have not received the attention they deserve. Here are five suggestions from me to start us off, some well known, others less so (post other ideas in comments):
Thomas Pogge, “An Egalitarian Law of Peoples”, _Philosophy and Public Affairs_ (1994).
G.A. Cohen, “Where the Action Is” , _Philosophy and Public Affairs_ (1997).
Michael Ridge, “Hobbesian Public Reason”, _Ethics_ (1998).
Elizabeth Anderson, “What is the point of equality?” _Ethics_ (1999).
David Schmidtz, “How to Deserve”, _Political Theory_ (2002).
UPDATE: With the permission of my co-bloggers, I’m moving this post up to the top again in the hope of getting a few more submissions. On a related note, I’m happy to see that two of my own selections (Anderson and Cohen) and a different paper from another one of my chosen authors (Pogge) are included in Matthew Clayton and Andrew Williams (eds) “Social Justice”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1405111461/junius-20 , my copy of which arrived in this morning’s post.
A couple of bloggable bits from the programme booklet for last nights opera. There’s an advertisment for the “National Theatre’s production of Iphigenia at Aulis”:http://www.nationaltheatre.org.uk/?lid=7783 , where the copy reads
bq. Just how far will a leader go in order to save face and secure a military victory in the East?
How far indeed?
And the notes for Valerie Reid (mezzo soprano, Grimgerde in Valkyrie) tell us that her plans include
bq. Natasha [in] ” _The Electrification of the Soviet Union_ for Music Theatre Wales”:http://www.musictheatrewales.org.uk/electrification.html .
Comments from anyone who has seen that piece?
I saw the second installment (and therefore, confusingly “The first day … “) of Phyllida Lloyd’s _Ring_ for ENO: “The Valkyrie”:http://www.eno.org/whatson/full.php?performancekey=19 , last night. Some of it was rubbish, but other parts were truly splendid, and, as it became more and more splendid as the evening progressed, I was able to leave feeling quite satisfied.
From “the Guardian review”:http://books.guardian.co.uk/reviews/politicsphilosophyandsociety/0,6121,1216899,00.html of a new book by Regis Debray:
bq. Jeffrey Mehlman has managed to translate from French into an entirely new language, one born dead. It is constructed using English words but the effect is of something almost entirely unlike English. This raises profound questions. What is one to make of a chapter heading like “The Milieu/Medium Deflagration”? How is one to translate the last sentence of that chapter: “That nomadic psycho-object, the unknown masterpiece of a nation’s furniture, would mark the improbable encounter, to the benefit of a God more snobbish than His predecessors, of the custom-made and the ready-to-bear”? The last word is clearly wrong. But should it be “wear” or “bore”?
The philosopher Alan Gewirth has died, “according to Jacob Levy over at the Volokh conspiracy”:http://volokh.com/archives/archive_2004_05_07.shtml#1084404300 . Like Jacob, I’m astonished to learn that Gewirth was 90 years old. I’ll add obituaries to this post as they appear. “Washington Post”:http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A34812-2004May17.html , “University of Chigago Press Release”:http://www-news.uchicago.edu/releases/04/040517.gewirth.shtml .
Amid all the bad news, we should celebrate the fact that in the world’s largest democracy “the forces of secularism have triumphed and those of communalism have been defeated”:http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/south_asia/3712201.stm. Congress is far from perfect, but it is a great deal better than the alternative. Sonia Gandhi may well become the world’s best Italian prime minister as a result (not that the competition in that field is all that stiff).