Chris Bertram

Ok, so I’m genuinely mystified. The (largely British based) “decent left” seems to “have”:http://hurryupharry.bloghouse.net/archives/2006/11/08/election_observations.php “been”:http://normblog.typepad.com/normblog/2006/11/not_kinky_in_te.html supporting Kinky Friedman for Governor of Texas. As far as I can see, the main reason these advocates of being “morally serious” in politics backed him was that he is a Jewish country singer. His platform seems mainly to have consisted of getting tough on illegal immigration – taking steps to “stem the tide of illegal immigrants penetrating our border” – and moaning about political correctness “gone mad”. Pat Buchanan-lite, if anything. Commenters who can see the positives are invited to enlighten me.

I’ve been involved with Imprints — once subtitled “A Journal of Analytical Socialism” but now “Egalitarian Theory and Practice” — for about ten years now. And a very friendly venture it is too with regular meetings up and down the UK, long sessions in the pub or in various Indian restaurants, and short but businesslike meetings. And, on the whole it has been a pretty successful project too. I don’t think there’s any other journal of its type with a similar bank of interviews with leading left thinkers. But as we smugly enjoyed our combination of conviviality and intellectual excitement we forgot to renew our web address which was poached from us within days of its lapsing. I sought Maria’s advice on the problem and contacted the friendly UK cyber-police at nominet. Perhaps we had a case against the poacher, perhaps not. Either way it would cost time and money to fight. So I went ahead and registered a new address www.imprintsjournal.com . So adjust your links … and subscribe if you don’t already (generous terms on back-issues available on request).

Awesome …..

(hat tip JD)

Shorter Oliver Kamm (for the benefit of those who don’t want to wade through “5000 words of Kamm’s unique prose”:http://oliverkamm.typepad.com/blog/2006/10/in_defence_of_t.html ):

bq. Many thousands of people have died, Iraq is a mess, and the war was completely mismanaged. Some other war supporters have therefore changed their minds about whether it was a good idea in the first place. Not me! Thanks to the war we in the West no longer have to worry about Saddam having WMDs. So the war was justified.

Lately, I’ve been getting less and less from reading blogs and, more generally, stuff on the internet. But there have been some exceptions, and one of the most exceptional has been “exile.ru”:http://www.exile.ru/ , the paper put out by various exapts in Russia (where they are beyond libel and defamation laws). Notable in the most recent issue is “the kicking that Mark Ames gives to the American journalistic profession as a whole”:http://www.exile.ru/2006-October-20/where_is_americas_politkovskaya.html , and Anne Applebaum in particular, in the light of their reaction to the Politkovskaya assassination. I’ve also become a regular reader of Gary “war nerd”:http://www.exile.ru/archive/by_column/war_nerd.html Brecher and of “John Dolan’s book reviews”:http://www.exile.ru/archive/by_author/john_dolan.html . You should go there too. They’re good, if nasty.

A close relative of mine has just started a university degree with an economics component and I’m looking to help him out a bit. Since a good few economists and teachers of economics read this blog, I’m interested in what you recommend as a really introductory text aimed at someone with no prior knowledge of the subject. Suggestions in comments, with reasons, and, perhaps some indication of whether the text in question would be a good or bad fit depending on whether the reader has a more mathematical or literary brain.

According to a new “report”:http://www.thelancet.com/webfiles/images/journals/lancet/s0140673606694919.pdf (pdf) in the Lancet on post-invasion mortality in Iraq:

bq. We estimate that as of July, 2006, there have been 654 965 (392 979–942 636) excess Iraqi deaths as a consequence of the war, which corresponds to 2·5% of the population in the study area. Of post-invasion deaths, 601 027 (426 369–793 663) were due to violence, the most common cause being gunfire.

With a lower bound of 426,369 for violent deaths, maybe we won’t hear from Fred “This isn’t an estimate. It’s a dart board” Kaplan this time.

Just finished watching the “C4 faux documentary”:http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0853096/ about the assassination of GWB. Very watchable, I thought. The technique mainly consisted on interspersing genuine newsreel footage with deadpan interviews with participants, including various law-enforcement people and protestors. Politically it wasn’t too heavy handed, though there was a clear attempt to situate Cheney as an opportunist who would use anything, even the killing of Bush, to advance his pet view of the world. Ditto the Syrian oppositionist who postulates official Syrian invasion on the basis of claimed insider knowledge in a manner that reminded me very much of the neocon’s pet Iranian exile. The twist was good, but I won’t spoil things for others by posting it here. I just hope that US cinemas and networks get over their reluctance to show an interesting piece of film.

I’m slightly reluctant to post this recommendation, for the simple reason that most of our readers are in the US, and this is old news (really old news) to them. But I’ll post anyway, for the benefit of those who are not, and, especially, for my fellow Brits. I was watching some show the other night in which Charlie Brooker (yes, “that”:https://crookedtimber.org/2004/10/26/those-dastardly-clintonites/ Charlie Brooker) was talking about American TV, and he recommended “The Wire”:http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0306414/ . The fact that David Simon was behind it was enough for me, because “HLOTS”:http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0106028/ was my favourite cop-show ever, so I started renting the DVDs. The Wire has never been shown in the UK (except on some nearly impossible to get satellite channel) and I guess I can see why: plot and dialogue hard for non-Americans to follow, no concessions to the viewer. But it is absolutely compulsive. Basically, it is a tale of two competing bureaucracies: the Baltimore PD and the Barksdale drug gang. On the whole, you’d say that the drug dealers have the more functional of the two organizations but the focus on the internal politics of each and on their political pathologies will elicit instant recognition from anyone who works in, say, a university. And there are great iconic characters too, such as Omar, the gay stick-up man, who only robs from the dealers and leaves civilians alone. I’ll leave it at that (since I won’t post plot spoilers). If The Wire has never been shown in your country, beg, borrow or steal the discs.

As a good European, I aim to get through half a bottle of wine most days, though I occasionally abstain midweek, or when drinking beer instead. We in the UK are really blessed when it comes to wine, since, making little drinkable of our own, we import it from everywhere (by way of contrast, try getting a decent bottle of South African in France). Lately, though, I find my enjoyments somewhat diminished by the increasing alcoholic content of the stuff. Time was, 12 or 12.5 per cent was pretty standard for a bottle of red. Not any more. A trip to my local branch of Oddbins (about 40 yards) revealed that 14.5 per cent was very common (not far off some fortified wines) and that it was hard to find a decent bottle of red under 13 per cent. I guess that there’s some good explanation for the rising strength of the stuff – probably to do with New World techniques. But I’d like something a little less fierce to knock back in front of the Sopranos.

I’ve not been blogging much of late, partly because I’ve been making the transition between being on leave and getting back to teaching, a transition that involves desperately trying to get one lot of stuff finished whilst hurriedly updating the things that you last had to think about nearly two years ago. One such is “my final-year global justice course”:http://eis.bris.ac.uk/%7Eplcdib/tj.html , which is the usual compromise between things I really think they ought to know about and things that I want to talk about. The main changes have been the inclusion of a lot more material on territory, borders, immigration and the like (weeks 9 and 10), at the expense of things that they should know about already (TJ). (The lecture/seminar distinction, btw, is a little bit artificial on this course and basically distinguishes between teaching hours where I introduce the discussion and ones where students do.) Anyway, it isn’t set in concrete, and I suddenly realized at the last moment that I don’t really know the secession literature at all. So those of you out there that do, or think there’s something else I’m neglecting, feel free to comment.

The other day, a sociologist I know slightly asked me (and another political philosopher) whether there were any important recent books in political philosophy he should read. We were stumped, and eventually suggested that he read Annette Lareau’s _Unequal Childhoods_ … which is a work in sociology (and not that recent any more). I’ve just used the amazon.com books “power search” feature to look for books in political philosophy published in 2005 and 2005. There are some interesting collections of papers here and there – both on topics and collecting someone’s previously published papers – and there are some goodish introductory books, but there was nothing listed (not a single book) of which it could truly be said that a political philosopher who had not read that book (within a reasonable time) would have neglected to do something that they should have done.

I have a short list of books that nearly made it (none of which I’ve read). The “nearly” books are Matthew Clayton’s _Justice and Legitimacy in Upbringing_ (which I’ve bought but not started), Brian Barry’s _Why Social Justice Matters_, Martha Nussbaum’s _Frontiers of Justice_ and David Schmidtz’s _Elements of Justice_. I’m sure it would be a good thing to read any of those four, but _essential_? I don’t think so. Can commenters make a case for some book published since the beginning of 2005.

Well now the Honderich’s “The Real Friends of Terror”:https://crookedtimber.org/2006/09/19/honderich-on-terror/ has gone out, I’m free to post, and, to be honest I thought it was simply awful. The whole thing was a showcase for Honderich’s fatuous “principle of humanity”, as called in aid of the proposition that the Palestinians have a “moral right to their terror”. This “principle”, which is presented as a pathbreaking step in moral philosophy, is basically just Honderich’s pet list of 6 essential components of human flourishing coupled with the suggestion that we have duty to take all rational steps necessary to bring them about. So think Sen and Nussbaum (similar list) plus a heavy dash of consequentialism. The programme consisted largely of archive footage of the aftermath of terrorist acts coupled with Honderich interviewing a few talking heads: Jenny Tonge (the Lib-Dem peer), Brian Klug, Helena Kennedy, Riz Mozal and a UK-based Palestinian academic (Ghada Karmi). The central theme was that all recent terrorism, 9/11 and 7/7 included, were basically caused by the failure of the US and UK to restrain what Honderich calls “neozionism”. The whole shoddy programme was further worsened by Honderich intoning portentously in his Canadian baritone “this I believe” in connection with a series of eminently dubitable propositions.

(Update: slight edit in the light of email.)

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As a guest of “The Philosophers’ Magazine”:http://www.philosophersnet.com/ I went to an advance screening of Ted Honderich’s programme “The Real Friends of Terror” in C5’s “Don’t Get Me Started”:http://www.mydigiguide.com/dgx/wbl.dll?a=6&h=49&PID=22132 series last night. The showing was followed by a panel discussion. I’ve been asked not to write about the content of tonight’s broadcast before it is shown, so I won’t. Regular Honderich-watchers won’t be surprised either by the content of the programme or by my reaction to it, but I won’t post more until after it goes out at 19.15 this evening on Channel 5 in the UK. This post is just to alert interested viewers. The “programme description”:http://www.mydigiguide.com/dgx/wbl.dll?a=6&h=49&PID=22132 refers to Honderich as “Britain’s leading moral philosopher”. I guess there’s room for disagreement about that claim, and much else.

Update: re-reading this post, I guess someone might get the impression that the panel discussion will be broadcast. That’s not the case: a transcript will appear in a future issue of TPM.