I very much hope that the US (and British) occupation of Iraq is a success, that peace will soon prevail, that a stable civilian administration is soon installed, that democratic institutions take root and that the Iraqi people enjoy a prosperous and uneventful future. That said, I’ve long thought that when people in or supportive of the Bush administration point to the experience of postwar Germany as suggestive of what can be achieved, there is some rather desperate flailing around for historical parallels going on. Good then to see some reflections on this from someone with a degree of historical, political and sociological insight who actually experienced the allied occupation of Germany: namely, “Ralf Dahrendorf”:http://www.project-syndicate.cz/commentaries/commentary_text.php4?id=1353&m=commentary .
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Chris Bertram
Here’s a nice puzzle, which I was told about over dinner last night. I’m not sure who devised it, though there’s “a reference in a paper by Roy Sorensen”:http://www.dartmouth.edu/%7Erasoren/papers/Infinitedecisiontheory.pdf :
bq. You are in hell and facing an eternity of torment, but the devil offers you a way out, which you can take _once and only once_ at any time from now on. Today, if you ask him to, the devil will toss a fair coin once and if it comes up heads you are free (but if tails then you face eternal torment with no possibility of reprieve). You don’t have to play today, though, because tomorrow the devil will make the deal slightly more favourable to you (and you know this): he’ll toss the coin twice but just one head will free you. The day after, the offer will improve further: 3 tosses with just one head needed. And so on (4 tosses, 5 tosses, ….1000 tosses …) for the rest of time if needed. So, given that the devil will give you better odds on every day after this one, but that you want to escape from hell some time, when should accept his offer?
I “promised”:https://www.crookedtimber.org/archives/000696.html to come back to the new urbanism and crime issue. But as it happens, David Sucher — more knowledgeable than I — “has done a pretty good job”:http://citycomfortsblog.typepad.com/cities/2003/10/centerfield_cri.html of responding to the alarmist and misleading “Operation Scorpion report”:http://www.operationscorpion.org.uk/design_out_crime/policing_urbanism.htm . And don’t miss the comments to his post, especially from Matthew Hardy of the International Network for Traditional Building, Architecture & Urbanism (“INTBAU”:http://www.intbau.org/ ).
Below the fold are some reactions to chapter 3 of Michael Otsuka’s “Libertarianism without Inequality”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0199243956/junius-20 (previous installments “1”:https://www.crookedtimber.org/archives/000687.html and “2”:https://www.crookedtimber.org/archives/000722.html ). Mike is giving a paper — “Skepticsm about saving the greater number” — “in my department this afternoon”:http://www.bris.ac.uk/Depts/Philosophy/Events/deptsems03.html , so I wanted to get some thoughts down independently before they became contaminated by conversation with him. As always, comments are welcome from anyone who is either reading or has read the book.
Michael Howard, the soon-to-be-leader of the British Conservative Party is clearly a man who is trying to reinvent himself. Chris Brooke of the excellent “Virtual Stoa”:http://users.ox.ac.uk/~magd1368/weblog/blogger.html reminds us of “one of the key paradoxes about the man”:http://users.ox.ac.uk/~magd1368/weblog/2003_10_01_archive.html#106759949225059957 : that the child of an asylum seeker has promoted policies under which his own father would have been denied entry to the UK. Tom Watson MP “lists some of the reasons why Howard was once so reviled”:http://www.tom-watson.co.uk/archives/001071.html.
There’s much to amuse in David Cohen’s “survey of education journalism”:http://education.guardian.co.uk/higher/columnist/story/0,9826,1074093,00.html in today’s Guardian. Those of us who are fed up with league tables evaluating and ranking university departmant can take heart from one published by Canada’s Globe and Mail which awarded high marks to some nonexistent institutions: York’s medical school and the medical and law schools at Waterloo. The methodology does seem somewhat suspect:
bq. According to the market research firm responsible for the rankings, the results had been based entirely on student responses to an online survey on issues such as the quality of teaching assistants, class size, availability of courses and the library services at their colleges.
“Brian Leiter”:http://webapp.utexas.edu/blogs/archives/bleiter/000399.html and “Larry Solum”:http://lsolum.blogspot.com/2003_10_01_lsolum_archive.html#106748057295088488 have been posting about the political compass test. “Brian”:http://webapp.utexas.edu/blogs/archives/bleiter/000415.html#000415 finds the rightist bias of law professors depressing and expresses hope that more of the blogosphere’s philosophers will take the test (including me). So here goes. And yes, unsurprsingly, there I am in the “bottom left-hand quadrant”:http://www.digitalronin.f2s.com/politicalcompass/questionnaire.pl?page=printable_graph&X=-4.88&Y=-6.36 . I’m not sure about the company I’m keeping, though. George Orwell, Tom Paine and even Joseph Stiglitz and the Dalai Lama I can live with, but Naomi Klein and Tariq Ali? This chart needs another dimension.
I went to see “The Opera Project’s”:http://www.nowt2do.co.uk/TPreview_TobAut_Cosi.htm production of Cosi Fan Tutte last night at Bristol’s “Tobacco Factory”:http://www.tobaccofactory.com/theatre.htm . I wasn’t sure quite what to expect, since my previous experience of the venue had been for the excellent “Shakespeare”:http://www.shakespeareatthetobaccofactory.co.uk/ productions there, rather than for anything musical. The theatre is very small and the audience entirely surrounds the “stage”. Anyway, it worked marvellously. Musically, of course, it wasn’t going to be on a par with Covent Garden or the Met since only a very small orchestra could possibly fit in the space. But dramatically it was tremendous with the players in very immediate contact with the audience. The singing was pretty good, but Richard Studer’s very colloquial English translation of the libretto — “You’re winding me up!” etc — and the unfussiness of the production made for a very engaging evening.
Via “Libertarian Samizdata”:http://www.samizdata.net/blog/archives/004847.html#004847 and the “Telegraph”:http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2003/10/26/nnazi26.xml&sSheet=/portal/2003/10/26/ixportal.html comes further evidence that the British police are not particularly careful whom they employ:
bq. A detective responsible for investigating racially motivated crime lives in a home filled with Nazi SS uniforms and tributes to Hitler, The Telegraph can reveal.
bq. Det Con Linda Daniels, who is married to a known racist and BNP member who believes the Holocaust was “exaggerated”, works in the community safety unit at the police station in Notting Hill, one of the most ethnically diverse areas of London.
bq. The unit, one of many set up across the city as a result of the inquiry into the murder of Stephen Lawrence, investigates “hate crimes”, including “racist crime, domestic violence, homophobic crime and hate mail”.
bq. Her home, however, which she shares with her 52-year-old husband Keith Beaumont, contains a life-size mannequin of a Nazi SS soldier, with swastikas on its helmet and belt, in the hallway.
Kudos to Samizdata’s David Carr for pointing to the story. The sentiments expressed in the accompanying comments thread (her private business, political-correctness-gone-mad, Trevor Phillips just as bad, blah , blah blah) are somewhat alarming).
“Norman Geras writes”:http://normangeras.blogspot.com/2003_10_26_normangeras_archive.html#106718001212566747 :
bq. I do not generally hold people in contempt because of their profession, their job or their calling. But copy editors! That is something different. Not as bad, I will grant, as war criminals or child molesters, they nevertheless belong in one of the very lowest categories of human intelligence and indeed morality. You will object that copy editors perform a most useful and necessary function, turning what is often ill-formed and error-strewn text into something more presentable. This, too, I will grant. However, it is no excuse for what copy editors also do – which is to interfere with people’s painfully-crafted stuff when there is no reason whatever for doing so, other than some quirk in the particular copy-editing mind which is at work….
Hmm. As an author, I share some of Norm’s frustrations. Indeed I’ve felt them keenly very recently. But I also once worked as a freelance copyeditor to supplement my then pitiful income as a 0.5 temporary lecturer. I remember having to justify myself to desk editors and production managers and hoping, hoping that they’d give me another book to work on. Most of these people are ill-paid casual workers constantly having to prove their worth. I’m sure that’s where the urge to over-correct comes from — to demonstrate that you _did_ something for that miserable payment.
Sometimes, when I’m reading or listening to a paper which excites me with its novelty and brilliance, perhaps because it contains some really elegant move, a mental image comes into my head of Steve McManaman running with the ball, circa 1996. Colin McGinn, “writing in the latest Prospect”:http://www.prospect-magazine.co.uk/ArticleView.asp?accessible=yes&P_Article=12310 about how he became a philosopher, would see the parallel:
bq. The metaphor that best captures my experience with both philosophy and sport is soaring: pole vaulting, gymnastics and windsurfing clearly demonstrate it, but the intellectual highwire act involved in full-throttle philosophical thinking gives me a similar sensation – as if I have taken flight, leaving gravity behind. It is almost like sloughing off mortality. (Plato indeed thought that acquiring abstract knowledge is a return to the prenatal state of the immortal soul.) There is also an impressiveness to these physical and mental skills that appeals to me – they evoke the “wow” reflex. Showing off is an integral part of their exercise; but as I said earlier, I don’t have any objection to showing off. In any case, there is not, for me, the discontinuity between sports and intellectual activities that is often assumed. It is not that you must either be a nerd or a jock; you can be both. It has never surprised me that the ancient Greeks combined a reverence for the mind with a love of sports: both involve an appreciation of the beauties of technique skilfully applied. And both place a high premium on getting it right – exactly right.
I’ve recently taken on the job of department head for a couple of years. I’ve done it before, but my successor’s early retirement has meant that I’ve had to step in again. Dennis Baron in the Chronicle of Higher Education “published a heads-up”:http://chronicle.com/jobs/2003/10/2003102401c.htm on what the job _really_ involves (allegedly). (Link via “Michael Froomkin”:http://www.discourse.net/ )
This is the second installment in a series of postings to accompany a reading group around Michael Otsuka’s “Libertarianism Without Inequality”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0199243956/junius-20 (first installment “here”:https://www.crookedtimber.org/archives/000687.html ). I’ll put the meat of the posting below the fold. Comments are again welcome from others who are reading or who have read the book.
Today brings the “last commercial flight of Concorde”:http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/3209837.stm . “Concorde”:http://www.concordesst.com/ was built jointly by engineers in Toulouse and in Bristol (the city where I live and work). It is a tremendous source of local pride for the people of the city. Just last weekend I happened to be in the British Aerospace Welfare Association in Filton and overheard a number of elderly people who had worked on the project chatting about their experience of the aircraft. Anyone who grew up in Britain in the 1960s and 1970s will also know what the plane represented then in terms of confidence in a new technology-driven future, how the test flights were reported, the celebrity status of test-pilot “Brian Trubshaw”:http://www.concordesst.com/history/trubshaw.html , the worries about Concordski (later crashed at the Paris air show) and Boeing’s rival SST (abandoned). Now it will take longer to get from London to New York than it did twenty-seven years ago.
The “British Philosophical Association”:http://www.britphil.ac.uk/ , which aspires to be a professional body representing all academic philosophers in the UK, has its inaugural conference today. Onora O’Neill (Cambridge) and Robert Audi (Notre Dame – from the American Philisophical Association) are the keynote speakers. I’ll be there.