Chris Bertram

So here’s a topic on which CT readers are bound to have opinions: which laptop should I buy? Or, more exactly, what should I be looking for? Productivity-wise I need a machine that will run a LaTeX implementation — currently I use MiKTeX plus WinEdt on my desktop machines (XP based) in the office or at home — but just about anything will do that. And I’d like something that will be generally OK for surfing, playing the occasional video-clip or mp3, but that’s about it. And, of course, wireless is essential (though I’ve got a spare wireless card for a notebook as it happens … it came packaged with my router). How much memory? What size HD?

I had thought about making the switch to Apple, having seen a grad student’s neat little iBook. But since Apple is moving to Intel and their low-cost laptops haven’t yet made the switch, that seems a bad choice at the moment. (If I’m wrong about that mattering, then I’m sure some Apple-fan will set me right.)

Today’s Guardian has an “obituary for Peter Alexander”:http://www.guardian.co.uk/obituaries/story/0,,1770686,00.html (written by my colleague Andrew Pyle).

Did you know what it meant? “Neither did I”:http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/west_yorkshire/4756851.stm .

Since Harry “recommended”:https://crookedtimber.org/2006/03/12/david-brooks-on-unequal-childhoods/ Annette Lareau’s “Unequal Childhoods”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0520239504/junius-20/102-8303545-9810554 I’ve been doing a good deal of thinking about it and related issues. Two questions seem particularly pertinent to me: first, I think that Lareau’s demonstration that different parenting values and styles impact on children’s life chances has implications for the way in which political philosophers view the social world since it suggests that social outcomes are not just the result of the the “basic structure” of society, but also of ingrained habits and dispositions that are reproduced from one generation to another. Second, I think that fact, if true, poses a problem to liberals in that state action to overcome disadvantage-reproducing “habitus” requires the state to take a stand on the relative value of different conceptions of the good.

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bq. The sole aim, let us not forget, of the British military deployment in Iraq is to facilitate the establishment of a stable government in Iraq. But if, as now seems increasingly likely, that goal is unobtainable, then the sooner that they pack up and come home, the better.

So writes “Con Coughlin in the Daily Telegraph”:http://www.telegraph.co.uk/opinion/main.jhtml?xml=/opinion/2006/05/09/do0902.xml&sSheet=/opinion/2006/05/09/ixopinion.html . Now I’ve no brief for Mr Coughlin, whose absurd stories “Saddam had advance knowledge of 9/11”, blah blah blah … have regularly been picked up by Powerline, Instapundit and the credulous Euston left in Britain. My guess is that Coughlin is best seen as a relay for what “intelligence sources” want us to read. If British “intelligence sources” are now promoting the idea of abandoning Iraq that’s worth noting. (Btw, googling “Con Coughlin” and “intelligence sources” gives a useful sample of past reports.)

The Irish and Welsh contingents here at CT must be well pleased … and no doubt they’ll be dancing in the streets of Auchtermuchtie tonight too (not to mention Malmo, Asunción, Port-of-Spain, and points in-between). Departing England manager Sven-Goran Eriksson has picked a World Cup squad with only two fit recognized strikers: a 17-year-old who has never played a competitive game in the top division, and Peter Crouch.

Georgina Turner at “the Guardian’s Newsblog”:http://blogs.guardian.co.uk/news/archives/2006/05/08/sven_strikes_speculative_parting_shot.html :

bq. “Maybe it’s not logical,” the Swede laughed at the press conference, with the same half-laugh of a soon-to-be ex-employee explaining how exactly the entire client database had been wiped. “But sometimes things work out very well even though they’re not logical. Of course it’s a gamble, but it’s a nice one.”

I was just in gmail reading some emails from John and Daniel which mention some technical questions about choice under uncertainty and, in the rh pane, there appears under “sponsored links” an advertisment for Tyler Cowen’s “Marginal Revolution”:http://www.marginalrevolution.com/ — “The greatest econ blog on the web! Insightful & interesting every day.” Well, often, I’ll give them that. Are many bloggers paying google to advertise their on-line scribblings?

Sad news. Jane Jacobs, thinker about cities, eclectic economist and brilliant nonconformist, about whom I’ve blogged a “couple”:https://crookedtimber.org/2006/02/08/jane-jacobs/ of “times”:https://crookedtimber.org/2004/07/24/lunch-with-jane-jacobs/ , died this morning in Toronto. “Globe and Mail”:http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20060425.wjanejacobs0425/BNStory/National/home and “Toronto Star”:http://www.thestar.com/NASApp/cs/ContentServer?pagename=thestar/Layout/Article_Type1&c=Article&cid=1145976509962&call_pageid=968332188492&col=968793972154 among others have reports.

Update: I’ll add links to other coverage and obituaries sporadically. “Douglas Martin in the New York Times”:http://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/26/books/26jacobs.html . “Jeff Pruzan in the Financial Times”:http://news.ft.com/cms/s/225787b2-d491-11da-a357-0000779e2340.html .

My former student Colin Farrelly (now Assistant Professor at the University of Waterloo) has started a blog — “In Search of Enlightenment”:http://colinfarrelly.blogspot.com/ — go visit!

In Rolling Stone, Princeton historian “Sean Wilentz makes the case”:http://www.rollingstone.com/news/profile/story/9961300/the_worst_president_in_history for judging George W. Bush the worst President in US history:

bq. The president came to office calling himself “a uniter, not a divider” and promising to soften the acrimonious tone in Washington. He has had two enormous opportunities to fulfill those pledges: first, in the noisy aftermath of his controversial election in 2000, and, even more, after the attacks of September 11th, when the nation pulled behind him as it has supported no other president in living memory. Yet under both sets of historically unprecedented circumstances, Bush has chosen to act in ways that have left the country less united and more divided, less conciliatory and more acrimonious — much like James Buchanan, Andrew Johnson and Herbert Hoover before him. And, like those three predecessors, Bush has done so in the service of a rigid ideology that permits no deviation and refuses to adjust to changing realities. Buchanan failed the test of Southern secession, Johnson failed in the face of Reconstruction, and Hoover failed in the face of the Great Depression. Bush has failed to confront his own failures in both domestic and international affairs, above all in his ill-conceived responses to radical Islamic terrorism. Having confused steely resolve with what Ralph Waldo Emerson called “a foolish consistency . . . adored by little statesmen,” Bush has become entangled in tragedies of his own making, compounding those visited upon the country by outside forces.

I’m hoping against hope that the forces of “Good”:http://www.liverpoolfc.tv/ will defeat the legions of “Evil”:http://www.bbc.co.uk/bbcfour/documentaries/profile/abramovich.shtml in the semi-final of the FA Cup later on today (although “God himself”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robbie_Fowler is ineligible to play for Good, being cup-tied from an earlier round). Meanwhile, I laughed aloud at several passages of Simon Burnton’s meditations on “Djibril Cisse and the off-side rule”:http://football.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,,1758833,00.html .

Alex Voorhoeve (LSE) writes to tell me of a proposed law in the Netherlands which would establish a special legal status for young Dutch citizens of Caribbean descent, allowing them to be deported from the Netherlands back to their territory of origin for minor crimes. The people in question are Dutch citizens of as good a legal title as anyone else, but this appears to single them out on the basis of ethnic or racial criteria for treatment that would not be meted out to others. The details are in “this pdf”:http://www.nrc.nl/redactie/binnenland/BobWit.pdf , by a judge on the Caribbean Court of Justice (and formerly a judge in The Netherlands).

When someone says of their adversaries that they pay “lip-service” to something, they are trying to devalue some of the substance of what those people say. This may be a claim that their opponents are insincere, or simply that they lack a suitable degree of commitment. The suggestion is that someone is making a merely token acknowledgement of the importance of some matter or value but that it is merely incidental to their view of what matters, a view that is actually focused on other things. It is a charge that the authors of the “Euston Manifesto” have been happy to dish out:

bq. We have no truck, either, with the tendency to pay lip service to these ends [Iraqi democracy], while devoting most of one’s energy to criticism of political opponents at home (supposedly responsible for every difficulty in Iraq), and observing a tactful silence or near silence about the ugly forces of the Iraqi “insurgency”.

(Get the “silence or near silence” there! So if your opponent has actually said that beheading hostages or blowing-up civilians is a monstrous crime but hasn’t said it as often or as loudly as you think fit, you can still point the finger!)

Others can judge how much of the Eustonites’ energies have been devoted to criticism of political opponents at home and how much to the material promotion of Iraqi democracy (writing about it on your blog doesn’t really count, in my book). Anyway, here’s a list of the things that the Euston Manifesto pays “lip service to”, a charge I am as entitled to make, without supporting evidence, about them as they are about others:

Pure lip service, if you ask me, since issues such are rarely mentioned on the blogs in question without some degree of contextualization, minimization, relativization, whatabouterry, and so on. (Of course torture is bad, they acknowledge, but the real outrage is committed by those torture critics who compare Guantanamo to the Gulag.) These are the same verbal manoeuvres that, when applied to acts of terror, are condemned by said blogs as amounting to de facto apology.

Incidentally, it seemed odd to me for the Manifesto to include among the events that have made the democracy-and-human-rights package the heritage of us all, blah blah blah, the “anti-colonial transformations of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries”. “Transformations” is a strangely euphemistic term to describe the various anti-colonial struggles of the last century. Still, I suppose it wouldn’t do to look too closely at the methods employed by the FLN, the Mau Mau, the NLF etc. just in case they resembled the “ugly forces” of the Iraqi insurgency rather more closely than would be comfortable. Some insurgents, it seems, have contributed to the great Enlightenment bundle, and some have not.