Chris Bertram

I don’t often just reproduce someone else’s post verbatim, but I just surfed over to the Virtual Stoa where “Chris has”:http://users.ox.ac.uk/~magd1368/weblog/2005_11_01_archive.html#113096578158707788 the following from the “US Department of Justice”:http://www.ojp.usdoj.gov/bjs/pub/press/ppus04pr.htm

bq. ALMOST 7 MILLION ADULTS UNDER CORRECTIONAL SUPERVISION BEHIND BARS OR ON PROBATION OR PAROLE IN THE COMMUNITY

bq. WASHINGTON, D.C. — The number of adults in prison, jail, or on probation or parole reached almost 7 million during 2004, the Department of Justice’s Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS) announced today. The number has grown by more than 1.6 million adults under correctional authority control since 1995.

bq. The nation’s total correctional population was 6,996,500 in 2004, of which 4,151,125 were living in the community on probation; 1,421,911 were in a state or federal prison; 765,355 were living in the community on parole; and 713,990 were in jail, according to the BJS report on probation and parole. At year-end one in every 31 adults were under correctional supervision, which was 3.2 percent of the U.S. adult population…

As Chris says, wow.

Surfing over to “Nationmaster”:http://www.nationmaster.com/index.php — which uses the stats for 2003 and so has slightly fewer actual prisoners — I see that the US also has the highest absolute number of prisoners in the world (more than China!) , and the highest number per capita (715 per 100k). For comparison, the higher number per capita in the EU is 210 per 100k (Poland) and 144 for “older” Europe (Spain). For some reason the UK isn’t listed, but I think the figure works out at about 125.

I see that the left sidebar now has a permanent link to Eszter’s “Frappr Map of Crooked Timber”:http://www.frappr.com/crookedtimber readers (scroll down: under Frenzy of Renown). Add yourselves (if you want to and you haven’t already – especially if you come from Africa, South America, Eastern Europe or Antarctica).

Today’s Guardian “editorial”:http://www.guardian.co.uk/leaders/story/0,3604,1604944,00.html concerns the recent legal case involving “Hyperion Records”:http://www.hyperion-records.co.uk/ . Hyperion are best know for their wonderful series of Schubert song recordings — Ian Bostridge’s Die schöne Müllerin being a case in point. Their survival is now threatened because the editor of the works of a rather obscure French composer was successful in “an action claiming musical copyright in the work”:http://www.hyperion-records.co.uk/news.asp#1 . I offer no opinion on the legal merits of the case, though it is claimed that this effectively lowers the threshold on what counts as an original work. Hyperion will probably face small damages, but they must now meet their own and the plaintiff’s enormous legal costs. They are “appealing for donations”:http://www.hyperion-records.co.uk/shop/donate.asp .

I went to see “Sophie Scholl – Die letzten Tage”:http://uk.imdb.com/title/tt0426578/ (film website “here”:http://www.sophiescholl-derfilm.de/ ) last night, and came away with ambivalent feelings about it. On the one hand, it is good to see this extraordinary moment of heroism get a cinematic treatment, but on the other, it didn’t work especially well as a film. The film is supposedly based on Gestapo transcripts — but can it be true that Scholl and her interrogator engaged in lengthy speechifying against (and in defence of) the Nazi regime? These were the sort of exchanges that might work well in a stage play, but seemed stilted and artificial on the screen. There was also the matter of the film’s focus on Sophie as an individual rather than on her brother Hans when, from the point of view of their heroism, there seems little to choose between them. That seemed to exploit a tacit assumption that there was something specially noble about a woman resisting rather than a man. The film was good in bringing out their religious convictions, and the importance they had in motivating their acts. Certainly a film very much worth seeing for its moral and political qualities, but perhaps not for its aesthetic ones.

I got quite a bit of flak in “comments last week”:https://crookedtimber.org/2005/10/24/birmingham-pogrom/ for using the word “pogrom” to allude to the parallels between the rumour-driven riots in Birmingham and the persecution of Jews in 19th-century eastern Europe. Insofar as “pogrom” suggests some kind of official sanction, the word probably had slightly misleading connotations. But I see that both the “conservative columnist Theodore Dalrymple”:http://www.telegraph.co.uk/opinion/main.jhtml?xml=/opinion/2005/10/26/do2604.xml&sSheet=/news/2005/10/26/ixhome.html and the “Observer’s Nick Cohen”:http://observer.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,6903,1604791,00.html have also noticed the echoes. Dalrymple wrote:

bq. The rumour that a 14-year-old black girl had been caught shoplifting by a Pakistani shopkeeper in the Lozells area of Birmingham, and subsequently raped in revenge by a score of his compatriots, is highly reminiscent of the blood libels that used to sweep through Tsarist Russia at the end of the 19th century and led to vicious pogroms.

And comments:

bq. Of all the paradoxes of the situation, none is greater than that the Muslim traders of Lozells, among whom an unthinking anti-Semitism is probably widespread, should now find themselves in the position of the petty-trading Jews of Tsarist Russia, Moldavia and Romania.

And Cohen refers to Dalrymple and then generalizes the the work of Amy Chua:

bq. In World on Fire, published two years ago and which deserved far more attention than it received, Amy Chua showed how globalisation had created an explosion of racism in the anti-semitic tradition. The new wave of capitalism had raised the living standards of ordinary people by a little and the rich by a lot, her argument ran. The supporters of free markets and democracy thought everyone was benefiting and hadn’t noticed that their ideas helped fuel resentments in those countries where ethnic minorities dominated business.

Thoughts that are outrageous on Crooked Timber on Monday, are conservative talking-points by Wednesday and the conventional wisdom of the “decent” left by the following Sunday. Maybe I should be worried about that!

Today’s Guardian has “this”:http://education.guardian.co.uk/students/tuitionfees/story/0,12757,1600221,00.html?gusrc=ticker-103704 :

bq. Doctors today called for a change in the law so that graduate medical students do not have to pay fees of up to £3,000 a year upfront.

Which to my mind sits somewhat ill with “this”:http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/4373519.stm :

bq. Accountants believe average GP pay will burst through the £100,000 barrier this financial year for the first time.

Just to emphasise, that’s _average_ GP pay.

The New York Times “reports”:http://www.nytimes.com/2005/10/24/business/24onion.html?ei=5090&en=b40eb239c3b34014&ex=1287806400&adxnnl=1&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss&adxnnlx=1130162497-jv9RaBeQrH9+1m446sivmw (hat-tip JD – via “The PoorMan”:http://www.thepoorman.net/2005/10/24/hooray-for-freedom/ ):

bq. You might have thought that the White House had enough on its plate late last month, what with its search for a new Supreme Court nominee, the continuing war in Iraq and the C.I.A. leak investigation. But it found time to add another item to its agenda – stopping The Onion, the satirical newspaper, from using the presidential seal.

It is difficult to get a clear picture of what went on in Birmingham (England) at the weekend. But what seems to have happened is that unsubstaniated rumours of a sexual assault by members of a particular minority that was already resented for its local economic success began to circulate, and that vigilantes then felt entitled to attack random members of that group and their places of worship. Two people have died so far. The BBC has “a report here”:http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/west_midlands/4370288.stm , and the Guardian has “some of the background”:http://www.guardian.co.uk/race/story/0,11374,1599126,00.html . A very worrying development.

I caught the “Guinness evolution ad”:http://www.bestadsontv.com/ad_details.php?id=634 (QuickTime movie) when I went to see the (rather excellent) “Sommersturm”:http://uk.imdb.com/title/tt0420206/ last night. (I doubt that cinemas in Kansas will be showing the ad any time soon — or the movie for that matter!)

[Aaargh! It turns out that this is the _third time_ we’ve linked to the Guinness ad on CT (sorry “Eszter”:https://crookedtimber.org/2005/10/10/evolution/ and “Kieran”:https://crookedtimber.org/2005/10/06/noitulove/ ) — we really must start reading one another’s posts!]

Der Spiegel has “an interview with Turkish novelist Orhan Pamuk”:http://service.spiegel.de/cache/international/spiegel/0,1518,380858,00.html — currently facing criminal charges for having publicly discussed the mass murder of Armenians during the First World War — which touches on his career as novelist, the political evolution of Turkey, the possibility of Turkish accession to the EU, among other matters.

I happened to be reading a paper by a friend today and came across a lovely passage by “William Morris”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_morris on the principle of distribution that would obtain in a socialist society. The passage is from Morris’s “What Socialists Want”:http://www.marxists.org/archive/morris/works/tmp/want.htm and I found it interesting in the light of the arguments that go on today among egalitarian liberal political philosophers. Thus spake Morris:

bq. when a family that is comfortably-off sit down to a leg of mutton how do they act? do they bring in a pair of scales and weigh out to each one his share of the victuals? No that is done in a prison, but not in a family: in a family everybody has what he needs and no one grudges it: Mary has one slice, Jack has two, and Bill has four: but Mary and Jack don’t feel wronged, since they have had as much as they wanted: and the reason for this is that enough has been provided, and that the members of the family trust one another. My friends it is for you to choose whether you will live in a prison or a family: we Socialists beg you to choose the latter.

The important thing for Morris is that everyone have enough, and that everyone trusts one another sufficiently to be assured that others are not taking more than they need. And he contrasts this with an attitude of (suspicious) calculation. I’m not sure whether Morris is enunciating a principle of justice here, or whether he would say that justice is inherently calculative and that these are circumstances of abundance where the watchful attitude of strict justice no longer applies. But if (and it’s a big if) this is taken as a principle of justice, then it is notable that he isn’t endorsing a principle of strict equality, but rather one of sufficiency. Indeed this contrast is even clearer towards the beginning of the text where Morris writes:

bq. So you see whatever inequality I admit among people, I claim this equality – that everybody should have full enough food, clothes, and housing, and full enough leisure, pleasure, and education; and that everybody should have a certainty of these necessaries: in this case we should be equal as Socialists use the word ….

Again, a principle of sufficiency and the suggestion of the dimensions of human existence in which we should have sufficient that prefigures some of the lists of essential capabilites that Martha Nussbaum enumerates in various places.

The European Parliament website has “details of the shortlist for the Sakharov prize”:http://www.europarl.eu.int/news/public/story_page/008-1413-285-10-41-901-20051013STO01412-2005-12-10-2005/default_en.htm , “awarded annually to the person or group who are judged to have made a “particular achievement” in the promotion and protection of freedom of thought.” The 2005 finalists are:

bq. “Ladies in white” (“Damas de Blanco”) of Cuba: This group of women have been protesting peacefully every Sunday since 2004 against the continued detention of their husbands and sons who are political dissidents in Cuba. They wear white as a symbol of peace and the innocence of those imprisoned.

bq. Hauwa Ibrahim: Of humble birth, she has risen to be a leading Nigerian human rights lawyer. She represents women who face being stoned to death for adultery and young people facing amputation for theft under Islamic Sharia law.

bq. “Reporters without Frontiers”: This international organisation campaigns for press freedom throughout the world. It also champions the protection of journalists and other media professionals from censorship or harassment.

That looks like a good shortlist to me. The fact that the European Parliament is celebrating Cuban dissidents and defenders of the victims of Sharia doesn’t really fit with the narratives promoted by Insta-people, EUrabians etc, so I expect they’ll just ignore the whole thing.

I’m pleased to see that reactionary gadfly Peter Briffa, a playwright himself, has “a better appreciation”:http://publicinterest.blogspot.com/2005/10/im-afraid-i-cant-share-my-fellow.html of Harold Pinter’s merits than most of his co-thinkers. (Actually, I doubt Peter has any co-thinkers, but you know what I mean.) The Pinter-reaction prize for unintentional self-reference goes to Christopher Hitchens, who is “quoted by Oliver Kamm”:http://oliverkamm.typepad.com/blog/2005/10/hitchens_on_pin.html as writing:

bq. Let us also hope for a long silence to descend upon the thuggish bigmouth who has strutted and fretted his hour upon the stage for far too long.

Indeed, Christopher, indeed.

The FP/Prospect poll on top public intellectuals “has been published”:http://www.foreignpolicy.com/story/cms.php?story_id=3260 . Not much there that is worthy of comment. Nearly everyone on the list has made a contribution which is either totally ephemeral, or which will simply be absorbed into the body of human knowledge without leaving much trace of its originator. Ideas from Sen, Habermas or Chomsky will survive in some form, but nobody will read _them_ in 100 years. And the rest will be utterly forgotten — or so I predict. Anyway, without further ado, I invite comment on who were the top public intellectuals of 1905. You can comment on either (a) who would actually have topped such a silly poll in 1905 or (b) with hindsight, who turned out to be the top public intellectuals.

Just to get us started — and to cross reference “John’s post”:https://crookedtimber.org/2005/10/17/the-winter-palace-and-after/ earlier — “Trotsky”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trotsky has to be a strong contender under both (a) and (b): Chairman of the St. Petersburg Soviet, a major contributor to subsequent events, and still very very readable (My Life, 1905). Over to you …