Chris Bertram

From “yesterday’s Guardian”:http://www.guardian.co.uk/online/news/0,12597,1506976,00.html :

bq. Civil liberties groups have condemned an arrangement between Microsoft and Chinese authorities to censor the internet.

bq. The American company is helping censors remove “freedom” and “democracy” from the net in China with a software package that prevents bloggers from using these and other politically sensitive words on their websites.

bq. The restrictions, which also include an automated denial of “human rights”, are built into MSN Spaces, a blog service launched in China last month by Shanghai MSN Network Communications Technology, a venture in which Microsoft holds a 50% stake.

bq. Users who try to include such terms in subject lines are warned: “This topic contains forbidden words. Please delete them.”

Giulini’s recording of The Marriage of Figaro was, I think, the first opera CD I ever bought. It remains one of my better choices. He died the other day at 91, and “there’s an obit in the Guardian”:http://www.guardian.co.uk/obituaries/story/0,3604,1507333,00.html .

A remarkable admission from “Valery Giscard d’Estaing in the New York Times”:http://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/15/international/europe/15france.html?hp :

bq. A crucial turning point for the fate of the constitution in France came last March, Mr. Giscard d’Estaing said, when he phoned Mr. Chirac to warn him not to send the entire three-part, 448-article document to every French voter. The third and longest part consisted only of complicated treaties that have already been in force for years.

bq. He said Mr. Chirac refused, citing legal reasons. “I said, ‘Don’t do it, don’t do it,’ ” Mr. Giscard d’Estaing said. “It is not possible for anyone to understand the full text.”

At Samizdata the other day, “Natalie Solent wrote”:http://www.samizdata.net/blog/archives/007640.html :

bq. In Milton and Rose Friedman’s “Free to Choose”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0156334607/junius-20 it says:

bq.

Of course, an egalitarian may protest that he is but a drop in the ocean, that he would be willing to redistribute the excess of his income over his concept of an equal income if everyone else were compelled to do the same. On one level this contention that compulsion would change matters is wrong – even if everyone else did the same, his specific contribution to the income of others would still be a drop in the ocean. His individual contribution would be just as large if he were the only contributor as if he were one of many. Indeed, it would be more valuable because he could target his contribution to go to the very worst off among those he regards as appropriate recipients.

bq. I have a question for all the protestors planning to give up their time and money by going to Edinburgh for the G8 summit. Why is what you are doing better than just giving your spare money to the poor?

Later in comments to the same post she adds:

bq. They could do both: go to Edinburgh and give their spare money away. That’s all their money above what is required for subsistence, of course, because by their own account the Third World is poor because they are rich and money transfer is the way to correct that situation.

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I arrived at work today to find that my PC wouldn’t start: a corrupted registry. The guy from tech support quickly reached the conclusion that he’d have to do a complete reinstall of the system. Luckily, most of my work files are stored on the departmental server (which gets backed up daily) and all incoming emails are automatically forwarded to a gmail account (so I have copies). Still, a lot of software had gone and, crucially, my setups for Firefox and Thunderbird. Luckily, I had read about “MozBackup”:http://mozbackup.jasnapaka.com/ on the “Lifehacker”:http://www.lifehacker.com/ site and had backups of all my settings. Download it now: it has saved me hours of hassle.

Nice to know that our trade union apparatchiks are in tune with their membership. AUT Vice-President Gargi Bhattacharyya has “a piece in the Guardian”:http://education.guardian.co.uk/higher/columnist/story/0,9826,1502676,00.html that seems to be arguing (though the article’s rambling incoherence makes it hard to be sure) that “academic freedom” is a kind of fantasy which probably gets in the way of fighting for better pay and conditions, but that, sadly, it is a fantasy to which academics are rather attached. The lesson of the AUT boycott is, apparently, that union activists upset this world of myth and illusion at their peril, so they’d better be more careful in future. Just as Christmas would be ruined if parents told their children that Santa doesn’t exist, AUT leaders better pay lip service (for purely pragmatic reasons) to the values their members actually hold!

There’s a “fun article in the FT today”:http://news.ft.com/cms/s/ba9e5fc0-d6ac-11d9-b0a4-00000e2511c8.html about the practice of extrapolating from current trends. Unless you are a subscriber, you’ll only get the first couple of paragraphs, but you’ll see the general idea:

bq. At the time Elvis Presley died in 1977, he had 150 impersonators in the US. Now, according to calculations I spotted in a Sunday newspaper colour supplement recently, there are 85,000. Intriguingly, that means one in every 3,400 Americans is an Elvis impersonator. More disturbingly, if Elvis impersonators continue multiplying at the same rate, they will account for a third of the world’s population by 2019.

Today’s Guardian has “a piece by Jonathan Wolff, political philosopher at UCL”:http://education.guardian.co.uk/higher/research/story/0,9865,1500524,00.html , on the peculiar way in which humanities research is funded in the UK and the distorting effects this may have on the way academics work:

bq. Many of the grants currently awarded require outputs to be specified in advance, and to be submitted for publication soon after the grant ends. There is at least a suspicion that this is having a peculiar effect. Some people, including some leaders in their fields, are simply refusing to jump through these hoops, and are not applying for grants. Others are playing a more subtle game. They are applying for grants for their “second best” projects that they know they will be able to complete and deliver to deadline. At the same time, on the side, they are working on projects they care about much more, but have not included on their funding applications. Why not? Because they do not want to be forced to stand and deliver when the grant is over. The work is too important to them for that. Years more might be needed to sort out the details. Maybe it will never be ready, or at least not in the planned form. Genuinely creative work is risky, and risk means the real possibility of failure. But even when it succeeds it is unpredictable, perhaps even a little chaotic, and often deadlines are deadening. Better not to promise anything.

Others here at CT have been more critical of the whole evolutionary psychology approach than I have, and I imagine their scepticism will be bolstered by a newish book by “David J. Buller”:http://www.niu.edu/phil/~buller/adaptingminds.shtml , a philosopher at Northern Illinois University: “Adapting Minds: Evolutionary Psychology and the Persistent Quest for Human Nature”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0262025795/junius-20 . According to the reviews, Buller devotes some attention to the factoids that evolutionary psychologists deploy in support of their view. Many of these “well-known facts” seem to have little more support than the well-known fact that if you step on the cracks in the pavement, the bears will get you. From the “Wall Street Journal review”:http://www.niu.edu/phil/~buller/wsjrev.pdf (pdf) :

bq. This field claims to explain human behaviors that seem so widespread we must be wired for them: women preferring high-status men, and men falling for nubile babes; stepfathers abusing stepchildren. …. Take the stepfather claim. The evolutionary reasoning is this: A Stone Age man who focused his care and support on his biological children, rather than kids his mate had from an earlier liaison, would do better by evolution’s scorecard (how many descendants he left) than a man who cared for his stepchildren. With this mindset, a stepfather is far more likely to abuse his stepchildren. One textbook asserts that kids living with a parent and a stepparent are some 40 times as likely to be abused as those living with biological parents.

bq. But that’s not what the data say, Prof. Buller finds. First, reports that a child living in a family with a stepfather was abused rarely say who the abuser was. Some children are abused by their biological mother, so blaming all stepchild abuse on the stepfather distorts reality. Also, a child’s bruises or broken bones are more likely to be called abuse when a stepfather is in the home, and more likely to be called accidental when a biological father is, so data showing a higher incidence of abuse in homes with a stepfather are again biased. “There is no substantial difference between the rates of severe violence committed by genetic parents and by stepparents,” Prof. Buller concludes.

I finally got to see “Steve Earle”:http://www.steveearle.com/ play live at the “Wychwood Festival”:http://www.wychwoodfestival.com/ outside Cheltenham in England. It was a fairly miserable day weatherwise, but the storms held off for his set and (earlier) for that of his current partner Allison Moorer. Since my enthusiasm for all this may not be widely shared at CT, I’m putting the rest below the fold.

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The BBC News website has “a piece on the role of bloggers in the French referendum”:http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/4603883.stm, and especially that of a “non” “manifesto by law professor Etienne Chouard”:http://etienne.chouard.free.fr/Europe/ .

The exit polls say “that the French electorate have rejected the European Constitution”:http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/4592243.stm , with 55% voting “no”.

As the French prepare to vote “non”, my friend Glyn Morgan has “a piece in the Independent about the constitution”:http://comment.independent.co.uk/commentators/story.jsp?story=642292 , the conservative nationalism of its opponents on both left and right, and the importance of enlargement. Unfortunately, he argues, faced with problems of demographic transition, immigration, international competition from India and China, and the unilateralism of the only global superpower, much of the left would prefer not to face facts:

bq. Befuddled by these challenges, many Europeans, particularly in France, have slipped their moorings from reality. Both the Eurosceptic left and the Eurosceptic right have reached for the security blanket – moth-holed and threadbare, though it is – of nationalism. The Eurosceptic left’s embrace of nationalism is particularly insidious, because it hides behind the language of social justice. Time was when the European left was outward-looking, internationalist, and concerned with the least well-off, no matter where they lived. In Europe today, the least well-off are to be found primarily in central and eastern Europe. European enlargement, one of the greatest achievements of post-war Europe, offers these victims of history a life-line into the modern democratic world. That’s the reason for admitting Turkey.

The AUT boycott of Haifa and Bar-Ilan Universities in Israel was overturned at today’s special meeting of AUT council. BBC report “here”:http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/education/4582955.stm.