Glenn Reynolds tells us that he just doesn’t get Nick Confessore’s article on TCS’s connections with the Astroturf purveyors of the DCI Group. Reynolds says that he’s never felt pressure to write articles in a certain way, or on certain subjects. He then goes on to treat us to some ponderous sarcasm, effectively dismissing Confessore, Marshall et al. as conspiracy theorists. Now, accusations of conspiracy theory are a bit rich from someone who bought into Den Beste’s crackpot explanations of European opposition to the war. But that’s a side issue. Reynolds (deliberately?) misses the main point of Confessore’s article. I’m quite happy to believe Reynolds when he says that he never felt any pressure to change his writing. But Confessore doesn’t say (or imply) that every article for TCS is driven by a corporate agenda. If Confessore’s insinuations are on the mark (and he’s amassed some fairly convincing circumstantial evidence to support his claims), one may easily imagine why a crowd of flacks might solicit articles from independent outsiders. They provide useful camouflage for the corporate shill-pieces that are written to order. To put it in terms that Glenn can understand, there’s a better than even chance that he’s been a useful idiot. I wonder how it feels.
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Henry
!https://www.conservatives.com/siteimages/volunteer/joinus.jpg!
The British Conservatives have recently been trying to get more bright young people to join the party. It looks as though they’ve got some way to go. It’s no secret that the Conservative party is getting a bit long in the tooth (the average party member is over 65 years old). But Matthew Turner really brings their problems home when he takes a look at the products that advertisers try to flog to Conservatives. Turner provides a complete list of the ads in this month’s issue of _Conservative Heartland_, the official party rag. So what are merchants trying to peddle to the Tories? In consecutive order, it seems to be:
Accountants
Retirement investment advice
Vitamins ‘for a healthy lifespan’
Wine
Savile Row shirts
Medical insurance for the over 50s
Retirement homes on the South coast
Leg ‘relaxa-stool’ supporter
Margaret Thatcher books
‘Back-care’ chairs
‘Easy-bather’ bath aid
Typewriter
Pensioners hearing aid
Branded ‘comfort stretch’ trousers
Reproduction antique gramophone
This is so perfect (especially the comfort stretch trousers, hearing aids and gramophones) that it nearly sounds like a hoax. Apparently it’s not though, and indeed it’s been picked up by _Private Eye_. Found via Harry's Place
Glenn Reynolds announces that Eric Raymond, self-proclaimed prophet of the open source age, has moved from blogspot. Nobody has ever described Mr. Raymond’s quite particular contribution to intellectual debate as precisely as NTK – unfortunately, their assessment seems to have vanished from their website. In honour of the special occasion, it seems only appropriate to reprint it.
David Bernstein responds to Matthew Yglesias’ suggestion that righties have an “unhealthy obsession” with oddball groups on university camps, and in so doing, jumps off the rhetorical deep end. It turns out that the takeover of the universities are just “a step in the authoritarian radical Left’s broader agenda.” And that agenda? Government-enforced authoritarianism, just like they’re successfully introducing in Canada. Yes, that’s right. Canada. Bernstein bolsters his argument with a quote from a professor in Western Ontario, who describes Canada as a “totalitarian theocracy” ruled by the “secular state religion” of political correctness.
Now I’m all for occasional doses of overheated language to enliven our political discourse, but Bernstein’s rhetoric verges on the bizarre. Canada has adopted some (relatively moderate) free speech restrictions in its Charter, but by most reasonable definitions of the word, it isn’t an authoritarian society. Nor is it likely to become one anytime soon. There’s a rhetorical slippage in Bernstein’s argument, between government-enforced restrictions on free speech and political authoritarianism/totalitarianism. They’re rather different things. States can have some restriction on free speech and remain democratic. France and Germany have done it for fifty-odd years.
Bernstein’s hyperbole gets in the way of his argument, which is perfectly defensible. It’s not unreasonable to oppose government restrictions on free speech. However, lurid denunciations of these restrictions as creeping totalitarianism, or as initial steps toward implementation of the radical left’s master plan are … odd. I don’t think David Bernstein is a candidate for the tinfoil hat brigade. I don’t agree with most of what he has to say, but he seems fairly rational, and occasionally indeed thoughtful. Which is all that any of us can aspire to being. But this time, he’s gone over the top.
Update: David Bernstein responds with a comeback that he seems to think is a gotcha, but which (a) rests on a rather strained interpretation of Canadian law, and (b) doesn’t really address my criticism. I’m not asking whether or not Canada’s legislation on free speech is a good idea; I’m questioning whether it’s appropriate to describe it as theocratic totalitarianism. And so far I’m not seeing anything to convince me that he’s right.
John Holbo cuts David Frum down to size. Go read.
Peter Briffa, leaping to the defence ^1^ of soon-to-be-anointed Tory leader, Michael Howard, offers us a revisionist interpretation of Jeremy Paxman’s infamous skewering of Howard in a television interview. Paxman asked Howard fourteen times whether or not he’d instructed Derek Lewis, the head of the prison service to suspend the governor of Parkhurst prison; Howard refused fourteen times to give a straight answer. For Briffa, this is evidence of Howard’s basic honesty.
Not much blogging for me at the moment; three courses to teach, together with sundry administrative and other responsibilities mean that I don’t have much free time. In the meantime, let me recommend:
Cosma Shalizi on “Our Geopolitical Situation, Dispassionately Assessed.”
Norman Geras on Emmylou Harris. I’m a _Wrecking Ball_ man myself, which probably marks me out as a hopeless Emmylou lightweight.
And finally, Teresa Nielsen Hayden has suffered a catastrophic disk crash, and is contemplating the horrors and expenses of professional data recovery. She’s politely soliciting donations – sounds like a good cause to me.
On the one hand, Bruce Sterling waxes lyrical about the weirdness of dark matter in WIRED this month. On the other, Jacques Distler links to the rather more skeptical (and funnier) Dark Matter Flowchart. We blog; you decide.
A quick addendum to my recent post on bad academic writing; it turns out that Steven Berlin Johnson was a student of Said. Which is quite an interesting intellectual trajectory. Johnson recalls that Said
bq. was largely responsible — some might say to blame — for importing French cultural theory into the American intellectual scene, particularly Foucault, who obviously had a huge influence on Orientalism. But he always resisted the inane wordplay and self-absorption that characterized so much of American theory in the eighties and early nineties. He absolutely despised “radical theorists” like Judith Butler, for instance. I remember him bristling anytime someone used the word “discourse” in one of our seminars — and I remember thinking at the time that I had first starting using the word myself after reading Orientalism during my freshman year. … on his best days, he was the most charismatic man I’ve ever met in my life — handsome, stylish, impossibly articulate, and surprisingly willing to take a joke at his own expense. (I used to tease him about his being indirectly responsible for unleashing Butler on the world).
From James Buchan’s _Frozen Desire: The Meaning of Money_ (as nice an example of limpid prose as you could ask for, by the way) comes the following.
bq. Sir William Petty, when challenged to a duel in Ireland by Sir Aleyn Brodrick, readily accepted, though he was so short-sighted as to be purblind. He merely asked for choice of weapons and selected, according to Evelyn and Aubrey, ‘an hatchet or Axe in a darke cellar.’
Thanks to Jeffrey Atkinson for pointing me to the Chronicle’s recent review of a collection of essays in defense of bad academic writing in the humanities. Or, more precisely,
bq. exposing to interrogation the history, conventions, and assumptions underlying the designation ‘bad writing’ and its almost inarguable efficacy [as a rhetorical weapon].
Via the ever wonderful BoingBoing this interesting, if very, very weird project in which Shelley Jackson invites a couple of thousand people to each have a single word tattooed on their body; the words, when put together, will form a short story that will not be available in any other medium. Jackson is responsible, among other things, for a fine (if rather _visceral_) collection of short stories, _The Melancholy of Anatomy_, as well as for the cover of Kelly Link’s
Dan Drezner claims that France’s flouting of the rules governing the euro is proof that the European Union is just a standard international organization; I’m not any more convinced than I was when he made the same argument a couple of months ago. I simply don’t see how this particular case provides a definitive test of whether or not the EU is a standard international organization (which is incapable of disciplining its more powerful members) or a truly supranational organization.
I’ve been meaning for days now to put up a pointer to John Holbo's nice post on Gene Wolfe, which has an interesting comments-thread. A statistically improbable proportion of the politically-inclined blogosphere are Gene Wolfe junkies, and a fair few of them have commented on this thread. And if you haven’t read Wolfe, shame on you. The field of science fiction/fantasy has two standout candidates for great authors who’ll be read in 100 years, and Wolfe is one of them. His masterpiece is “The Book of the New Sun” series (collected in the US in two volumes, _Shadow and Claw_ and _Sword and Citadel_ (with a sort of coda, _The Urth of the New Sun_). It’s a wonderful book; shadows of Kafka, of Borges, of Chesterton. Wolfe’s prose style is ornate, without being baroque; _BOTNS_ is thick with archaisms, loanwords and other exotica, but they’re employed with precision and economy, and even a sly sense of humour. It’s grave, and chilly, but it sings .
bq. We believe that we invent symbols. The truth is that they invent us; we are their creatures, shaped by their hard, defining edges. When soldiers take their oath they are given a coin, an asimi stamped with the profile of the Autarch. Their acceptance of that coin is their acceptance of the special duties and burdens of military life – they are soldiers from that moment, though they may know nothing of the management of arms. I did not know that then, but it is a profound mistake to believe that we must know of such things to be influenced by them, and in fact to believe so is to believe in the most debased and superstitious kind of magic. The would-be sorcerer alone has faith in the efficacy of pure knowledge; rational people know that things act of themselves or not at all.
Go read.
Looks as though Dan’s prediction has come to pass; Glenn Reynolds claims grandly in Instabolded type that the “ANTI-DEFAMATION LEAGUE is blasting Paul Krugman for anti-Semitism.” To put it as kindly as possible, this is a rather … overenthusiastic interpretation of the ADL’s letter to the New York Times, which merely suggests that Krugman “underestimates the significance of the anti-Semitic diatribe by Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad.” Of course, this isn’t the first time that Reynolds’ enthusiasm for a good slur has gotten in the way of the facts, but surely he can do better than this. Does he even read the stuff that he links to? I wonder.