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Chris Bertram

Callaghan dead

by Chris Bertram on March 26, 2005

Jim Callaghan, the Labour Prime Minister defeated by Thatcher in 1979 and, amazingly the oldest living former British PM in history, has died at 92. I’m struggling to think of anything nice to say about his tenure as Home Secretary, Chancellor, Foreign Secretary or PM. He was a machine politician rather than someone animated by a sense of social justice, and it is noteworthy that “the BBC obituary”:http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/941478.stm can’t find a single policy achievement worth listing to his credit. His government collapsed in chaos and recrimination and was followed by bitter civil war with Labour. Thanks to him and his ilk we suffered 18 years of Tory misrule. Still, RIP and all that.

Talking Turkey

by Chris Bertram on March 26, 2005

I don’t share Mark Kaplan’s philosophical predilections, but he is a sharp observer of blogospheric rhetoric. At “Charlotte Street he announces”:http://charlotte-street.blogspot.com/2005/03/note-on-notes-turkey-ruse.html that his perceptive “Notes on Rhetoric” “now have their own site”:http://notesonrhetoric.blogspot.com/ . I particularly enjoyed his latest reflections on the “Turkey” ruse:

bq. Turkey – If your opponent is criticising the policies of some state you favour, demand that he talks about Turkey instead. This may sound a feeble ploy, equivalent to saying ‘please talk about something else’ but can be effective if you use language like ‘if you’re being consistent’ ‘disproportionate and selective attention’. (You may if you wish substitute some other country for Turkey – obviously so if, by chance, your opponent is talking about Turkey.)….

bq. The reductio ad absurdum of this position is that one should busy oneself with impotent cursing and condemnations of foreign regimes over which one has zero influence, while exempting your own government and its allies from criticism. In other words: ethical bombast on the one hand, and ethical abdication on the other.

bq. At worst, the ‘Turkey’ tactic can also short-circuit moral universality – the belief that we should apply to ourselves the same principles we apply to others. So, for example, moral condemnation of torture by American and British soldiers (in accordance with moral universality) meets with ‘but why are you silent about much more horrific things elsewhere..’; patient criticisms of the ‘democratic deficit’ in our own societies meets only with our attention rerouted to utterly undemocratic regimes. So it goes on, diversionary and insidious.

China, Japan, Taiwan

by Chris Bertram on March 24, 2005

I’m woefully ignorant about the geopolitics of Asia, so I’m not going to offer any opinions of my own here. Harry at “Harry’s Place has been linking”:http://hurryupharry.bloghouse.net/archives/2005/03/24/the_eus_military_industrial_complex.php to “a piece in the Guardian by Timothy Garton Ash”:http://www.guardian.co.uk/china/story/0,7369,1444660,00.html which expresses relief at the EU’s decision to postpone the lifting of the arms embargo on China. In Garton Ash’s piece, China is cast as the bad guy. A different view is put in “a fascinating article by Chalmers Johnson”:http://www.tomdispatch.com/index.mhtml?pid=2259 which sees American concern about democracy as being merely window-dressing for a policy which is basically about preventing the emergence of geopolitical rivals. Johnson also warns about US encouragement for the remilitarization of Japan as a counterweight to China.

Narcisse in the US

by Chris Bertram on March 24, 2005

As CT’s resident Rousseauiste, I’d like to pass on the news to residents of New York City (and parts thereabouts) that the Johnson Theater will be staging the “first ever US production of Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s play Narcisse”:http://www.theaterforthenewcity.net/narcisse.htm from 7-10 April:

bq. an utterly contemporary drama that deals with the problem of narcissism and sexual ambiguity. The play is about a man who falls in love with an image of himself dressed as a woman and explores contemporary issues of desire, self-obsession and the difficulty of the relation between the sexes.

Enjoy!

Endangered spouses

by Chris Bertram on March 23, 2005

I don’t know — and neither do you — if “Glenn Reynolds is trying to murder his wife”:http://instapundit.com/archives/021948.php (or if Bill Hobbs is trying to murder his) …. but I do know that I find it gratuitously offensive just to leave the possibility open, just hanging there, for rhetorical purposes. But, whatever … if they can dish it out, they can presumably take it. Read the whole thing.

Schiavo Nazi comparisons

by Chris Bertram on March 22, 2005

Watching from the UK, the Terri Schiavo case makes the US look like a very weird and deeply troubled polity. All those homely and patronising sermons about “government of laws not of men &c”, and then the US Congress passes a law to deal with a particular case and to subvert a prior decision of the judiciary, just so that Republicans can grandstand to their Christian fundamentalist base (see “Obsidian Wings for the best commentary so far”:http://obsidianwings.blogs.com/obsidian_wings/2005/03/terri_schiavo.html ). And all this signed into law by a President who, “when governor of Texas, approved a measure to switch off life support where people didn’t have the money to pay any more”:http://digbysblog.blogspot.com/2005_03_20_digbysblog_archive.html#111134934659869241 . I note, by the way, that the so-called “right-to-life” brigade have been “pretty free”:http://www.nationalreview.com/thecorner/05_03_20_corner-archive.asp#058829 “with their use of”:http://www.therant.us/staff/guest/federer/the_court_ordered_death_of_terri_schiavo.htm “Nazi analogies”:http://www.tallahassee.com/mld/tallahassee/news/breaking_news/11134243.htm on this one. Since any Nazi-comparison (however casual) involving George W. Bush, Ariel Sharon, Daily Mail journalists or Abu Ghraib elicits instant howls of outrage from the British-based neocon cheerleaders, I expect we’ll be hearing from them shortly. Or not.

Volokh on capital punishment and cruel and unusual punishment

by Chris Bertram on March 17, 2005

“Eugene Volokh writes”:http://www.volokh.com/archives/archive_2005_03_13-2005_03_19.shtml#1111021309 :

bq. “Something the Iranian government and I agree on”:http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/middle_east/4353449.stm : I particularly like the involvement of the victims’ relatives in the killing of the monster; I think that if he’d killed one of my relatives, I would have wanted to play a role in killing him. Also, though for many instances I would prefer less painful forms of execution, I am especially pleased that the killing — and, yes, I am happy to call it a killing, a perfectly proper term for a perfectly proper act — was a slow throttling, and was preceded by a flogging. The one thing that troubles me (besides the fact that the murderer could only be killed once) is that the accomplice was sentenced to only 15 years in prison, but perhaps there’s a good explanation.

And there’s more …..

bq. I should mention that such a punishment would probably violate the Cruel and Unusual Punishment Clause. I’m not an expert on the history of the clause, but my point is that the punishment is proper because it’s cruel (i.e., because it involves the deliberate infliction of pain as part of the punishment), so it may well be unconstitutional. I would therefore endorse amending the Cruel and Unusual Punishment Clause to expressly exclude punishment for some sorts of mass murders.

Those, like me, who are startled and upset to read Volokh writing like this, might want to visit the website of the “National Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty”:http://www.ncadp.org/ or visit David Elliot’s “Abolish the Death Penalty blog”:http://www.deathpenaltyusa.blogspot.com/ .

Social network systems

by Chris Bertram on March 17, 2005

This post is in Estzter territory, and probably just reflects ignorance on my part, but I’d be grateful for the information from those in the know, anyway. Following “one of Eszter’s posts recently”:https://crookedtimber.org/2005/02/07/networks-and-tastes/ , I signed up to “Movielens”:http://movielens.umn.edu/ and have been dutifully entering my ratings in various spare moments. Like Amazon, “Movielens”:http://movielens.umn.edu/ tells me that based on the movies I like I should check out various other ones. Presumably, the program checks the database to see which movies I haven’t seen are highly rated by other people who like the same films that I liked (ditto Amazon for books, dvds etc).

Now here’s my problem. When we all come to such systems “cold” (as it were), the links between our choices provide genuinely informative data. But once we start acting on the recommendations, even chance correlations can get magnified. So, for example, suppose we have three movies A, B and C. Perhaps if we showed these films to a randomly chosen audience there wouldn’t be any reason to suppose that people who like A prefer B to C or vice versa. But if the first N people to go to the expert system happen to like both A and B, then the program will spew out a recommendation to subsquent A or B lovers to follow up their viewing with B or A. And those people in turn, having viewed the recommended movie, will feed their approval back into the system and thereby strengthen the association. Poor old movie C, excluded by chance from this self-reinforcing loop, will not get recommended nearly so often.

I guess the people who design these systems must have considered these effects and how to counteract them. Any answers?

Further religious news….

by Chris Bertram on March 16, 2005

Julian Baggini, writing in the Guardian, “reports”:http://www.guardian.co.uk/g2/story/0,3604,1438440,00.html :

bq. In the newly revised, more accessible edition of the New International Version of the Bible, “stoned” has been changed to “stoned to death” for fear that modern readers may get the impression that the reward for adultery is a big spliff.

Inflicted Christianity

by Chris Bertram on March 16, 2005

Gwydion the Magician (whom I’m guessing from his title must be some kind of pagan) has “issues” with Alaskan Airlines (and quite right too):

bq. Alaskan Airlines, I discovered, does not deign to serve its transcontinental passengers anything resembling a full meal. All we got on a 6 hour flight was a crappy sandwich. The IFE comes as a small portable DVD player that costs 10 bucks. But the particular feature of the Airline that pissed me off was the little Christian verse they include on each meal tray. I know this is America, where God-fearing zealots control the government. But inflicting Christianity on a captive audience of fee-paying passengers is just too much.

Indeed.

Wonderful photographs

by Chris Bertram on March 13, 2005

This post contains a valuable commercial opportunity for someone, but I’m giving the advice for free. If I were a publisher of art-books, a commissioner of programmes for a channel like BBC4, or the editor of an art magazine or a Sunday supplement, I’d be desperately trying to do something on the photographs of Gustav Szathmary. Szathmary was the lover of the well-known German painter Paula Modersohn-Becker, and the “Modersohn-Becker Museum”:http://www.pmbm.de/ in Bremen, Germany currently has an exhibition of his work. (He was a composer and an inventor of photographic equipment too.) I toured the exhibition yesterday with another academic (and anonoblogger) who, like me, was there for the “Social Justice Conference”:http://www.gsss.uni-bremen.de/socialjustice/ at the GSS at the University of Bremen. We were both stunned by the Szathmary’s portraits of his friends. The pictures, from about 1905, are so natural and lively that — allowing for changes in clothing in some cases — they could have been taken at any time up to last week. There’s hardly anything about Szathmary on the internet (8 hits on google and 9 on allthweb) and the only way you can see any of the photos is by “downloading the German catalogue”:http://www.cupere.de/pdf/gustav_szathmary.pdf (only a small selection, right at the end of this enormous PDF) or by visiting Bremen. There’s also “an html-page on Szathmary”:http://www.cupere.de/gustav_1.htm , linking to the catalogue, but without any of the relevant pictures.

(BTW, if anyone actually is a commissioning editor etc., reads this page, acts on it, and something comes about, I’d appreciate a free copy or an invite to the opening etc.)

Update: See also Gwydion the Magician’s take on “Gustav Szathmary and Elfriede Lohse-Wächtler”:http://gwydionthemagician.blogspot.com/2005/03/joys-of-bremen-elfriede-lohse-wchtler.html .

UPDATE: See the link from Andrew’s comment below: Szathmary appears to be a spoof character wholly invented by artist Dirk Hennig. Doh!

Academic Blogs

by Chris Bertram on March 11, 2005

This list is being maintained for archival purposes only. It is no longer being updated. If you wish to consult an up-to-date list, or add an academic blog, go to to the academic blogs wiki, maintained by Henry Farrell at “http://www.academicblogs.org”:http://www.academicblogs.org

An excellent suggestion

by Chris Bertram on March 7, 2005

Mad Melanie Phillips has started using the subject-line “Weimar Broadcasting Corporation” for “her”:http://www.melaniephillips.com/diary/archives/001080.html “rants”:http://www.melaniephillips.com/diary/archives/001081.html against the BBC. I have to say, it sounds rather a good idea. How about “these guys”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weimar for a new board of governors:

bq. Weimar is one of the great cultural sites of Europe, since it was the home to such luminaries as Bach, Goethe, Schiller, and Herder. It has been a site of pilgrimage for the German intelligentsia since Goethe first moved to Weimar in the late 18th century. The tombs of Goethe, Schiller, and Nietzsche may be found in the city, as may the archives of Goethe and Schiller.

And we’d still be able to turn over to Channel 4 for “Wifeswap”:https://www.crookedtimber.org/archives/003305.html …..

Heimat 2 to be released on DVD

by Chris Bertram on March 6, 2005

Regular CT readers will know that “I’m a big fan”:https://www.crookedtimber.org/archives/003012.html of Edgar Reitz’s “Heimat”:http://uk.imdb.com/title/tt0087400/ and that I was thrilled when it was released on DVD in the UK. The “Heimat news page”:http://heimat123.net/news.html now announces that “Heimat 2”:http://uk.imdb.com/title/tt0105906/ (the sequel) will be out in May in the UK (and slightly earlier in parts of Europe). Fantastic!

Perry Anderson on Rawls

by Chris Bertram on March 3, 2005

The latest “New Left Review has a piece by Perry Anderson”:http://www.newleftreview.org/NLR26501.shtml on the thinking of Rawls, Habermas and Bobbio on global order and justice. Since I’m busy teaching Rawls’s “Law of Peoples”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0674005422/junius-20 at the moment, I thought I’d give it a read. The article has all the classic Anderson hallmarks — the arrogant pronouncement of judgement from on high, the frequent lapses into Latin, a will to the most unsympathetic reading possible. Typically, Anderson is incapable of reading his targets in any other way that as providing pragmatic cover for the American hegemon. On the one hand he seems to adopt the stance of high principle against the unwitting tools of US power whose every argument is accounted for in terms of their personal history and psychology, but on the other it seems hard to know where the critical principles can be coming from since it is hard to see how, on Anderson’s world-view, principles can ever be anything other than the residue of power politics as false consciousness.

The central charge against Rawls and Habermas is that of providing left philosophical cover for Western intervention in Kosovo, Afghanistan and Iraq. In Rawls’s case, this is because Rawls argues in general terms that “outlaw states” which violate human rights and threaten their neighbours cannot claim immunity from intervention from liberal states. Does Anderson advance a counter-argument to the effect that the state sovereignty of such regimes is inviolable, or that considerations such as those adduced by Rawls are insufficiently weighty to over-ride such considerations? No, of course not. Anderson wouldn’t stoop to construct such an argument: for him, all that counts is the interest of powers.

Two examples which especially annoyed me of Anderson misresepresenting Rawls to his readers are below the fold, no doubt others could be found.
[click to continue…]

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