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Chris Bertram

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…]

2nd Treatise Rap

by Chris Bertram on March 2, 2005

In my “Locke in Modern English”:https://www.crookedtimber.org/archives/003289.html thread below, commenter Gordon writes in exasperation:

bq. Jeez, what next? Maybe a rap version?

A leading British political philosopher, whose identity I am sworn not to reveal, submits the following by email:

bq. Political power, wanna know the truth?

bq. Get to the roots, man, get to the roots.

bq. What’s it like without the state?

bq. Freedom, freedom nothing to hate.

bq. Who’s the pimp and who’s the whore?

bq. Don’t talk to me til you learn the score!

bq. Unless our maker says I’m first,

bq. Me and you’s equals on this earth.

A challenge to others to do better?

Nick Cohen, blogger

by Chris Bertram on February 28, 2005

As various people have noted, the “Observer has started a blog”:http://blogs.guardian.co.uk/observer/ (or perhaps a “blog” ). Nick Cohen, darling of the pro-war lefties is, naturally, “one of the contributors”:http://blogs.guardian.co.uk/observer/archives/2005/02/26/so_this_is_blogging.html — and recommends his favourite blogs. Many of Cohen’s recent column’s have included fulminations against the “pseudo-left” , a term which designates those who take a different view to his own on such matters as Iraq and Sheikh Qaradawi. I’m always suspicious of people with the capacity the exhibit great moral indigation against imbeciles who are stupid or venal enough to espouse positions similar to those that they themselves have only just abandoned (John Gray is another good example). Unsporting it may be, but I’d like to take this opportunity to link to “one of Cohen’s columns on Afghanistan”:http://observer.guardian.co.uk/waronterrorism/story/0,1373,582309,00.html (a war that, btw, I supported). The tone of outraged moral superiority is the same, but was, at that time, directed against different targets. Plus ça change ….

Locke in modern English

by Chris Bertram on February 28, 2005

bq. To understand political power correctly and derive it from its proper source, we must consider what state all men are naturally in. It is a state in which men are perfectly free to order their actions, and dispose of their possessions and themselves, in any way they like, without asking anyone else’s permission – all this subject only to limits set by the law of nature. It is also a state of equality, in which no-one has more power and authority than anyone else; because it is simply obvious that creatures of the same species and status, all born to all the same advantages of nature and to the use of the same abilities, should also be equal ·in other ways·, with no-one being subjected to or subordinate to anyone else, unless ·God·, the lord and master of them all, were to declare clearly and explicitly his wish that some one person be raised above the others and given an undoubted right to dominion and sovereignty.

The latest of Jonathan Bennett’s “renderings of the classics of early modern philosophy”:http://www.earlymoderntexts.com/ into modern English is now out on the web: the “Second Treatise of Government”:http://www.earlymoderntexts.com/f_locke.html . In my experience it is a work that students find especially opaque in the original, much as I love the archaic language. (Sceptics might be interested to read “Bennett’s rationale”:http://www.earlymoderntexts.com/f_why.html for his project.)

Crabwalk

by Chris Bertram on February 27, 2005

I’ve just finished Günter Grass’s “Crabwalk”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0156029707/junius-20 , which which I read partly because it dovetails with some other stuff I’ve been reading (such as Sebald’s “Natural History of Destruction”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0375504842/junius-20 ) and partly because I have to give a presentation to my German class about a recent book I’ve read. I figured that if I chose a German book there’s be plenty of on-line material to help me work out the relevant vocabulary.

There’s been “much blogospheric concern”:http://hurryupharry.bloghouse.net/archives/2005/02/14/thousands_of_neonazis_march_in_dresden.php recently about the resurgence of the German far-right, and that’s very much Grass’s concern. One of the favourite themes of the neo-Nazis is Germans-as-victims and Grass’s underlying thought is that the embarassed silence of the German mainstream about the fate of the refugees from Germany’s lost eastern provinces has gifted the extremists a monopoly of that issue. The novel is centred around the sinking of the “Wilhelm Gustloff”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KdF_Ship_Wilhelm_Gustloff on 30 January 1945. The ship, a former pleasure cruiser, was carrying as many as 10,000 people when it was sunk by a Soviet submarine. Nearly everyone on board perished and it therefore ranks as one of the worst maritime disasters even. The narrator protagonist Paul Pokriefke is a cynical journalist whose mother, a survivor, gave birth to him on one of the lifeboats. His estranged son, Konrad, is a neo-Nazi obsessive who runs a website devoted both to the ship and to the assasinated Nazi functionary after whom it was named. Paul tells us of the sinking itself, of his difficult relationship with mother (a DDR loyalist who cried when Stalin died) and son, and of the assassination of “Gustloff”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wilhelm_Gustloff himself in Zurich in 1936 by a Jew, “David Frankfurter”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Frankfurter .

One thing that Grass gets absolutely right is the atmosphere of internet chatrooms. The son, Konrad, is forever engaged in hostile-but-matey banter with a “Jewish” interlocutor “David”. Not only are their identities not quite what they seem but he gets the adolescent faux-enemy-I-hang-out-with thing. I won’t say more about this, because I don’t want to spoil the denoument for anyone.

I’m not sure that Grass ends up telling us all that much about the neo-Nazi phenomenon. What he does get across though is a sense that the commitment of all of his protagonists to anything like a liberal democracy is fragile and contingent. Certainly a book worth reading for both its literary and historical interest, though the translation is occasionally clunky.

Labour’s antisemitic strategy?

by Chris Bertram on February 23, 2005

The ghastly Rod Liddle has “a piece in the Spectator”:http://www.spectator.co.uk/article.php?id=5703&issue=2005-02-19 alleging that Tony Blair’s Labour Party has a strategy of pandering to anti-Semitic prejudice in order to win over Muslim voters. The piece contains such gems as “many psychoanalysts believe that the Left’s aversion to capitalism is simply a displaced loathing of Jews.” (Tony Blair’s Labour Party has an aversion to capitalism???!!!) Liddle’s usual sensitivity to the feelings of minorities is expressed in his recent “Things I shouldn’t say about black people”:http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2088-1491679,00.html in the Sunday Times, “ably exposed by Matthew Turner”:http://www.matthewturner.co.uk/Blog/2005/02/bad-maths.html . Melanie Phillips (about whom see also Chris Brooke “here”:http://users.ox.ac.uk/~magd1368/weblog/2005_02_01_archive.html#110908416817746981 ) is now promoting the “Labour anti-Semitism theory”:http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=17081 in the notorious FrontPage magazine.

Which is more likely (a) that New Labour strategists have decided on a campaign strategy on the lines delineated by Phillips and Liddle or (b) that someone else (perhaps some adviser to Tory Central Office?) has decided that an effective strategy for unsettling Labour politicians and putting them on the defensive is to fling around allegations of anti-Semitism?

[Small update: John Band “makes the point”:http://www.stalinism.com/shot-by-both-sides/full_post.asp?pid=808 that we shouldn’t let our disgust at the antics of the likes of Liddle and the Tory party blind us to the real problem of anti-semitism and recommends “this piece by Johann Hari”:http://www.johannhari.com/archive/article.php?id=571 , a recommendation I endorse.]

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