Henry

Josh Cohen has an interesting new piece up at the _Boston Review_ website where he sticks it to the libertarians, complaining that they’ve always been at the rearguard of struggles for rights because of their distaste for the state. There’s one argument that I want to pick up on.

we [liberals] think that chances for influence should not depend so much on resources, and that means regulating campaign finance. Now, we know (and share) the concerns about intrusive regulations, official distortions of speech, people spending on fancy cars instead of politics, and the troubles with drawing lines between regulable and non-regulable speech, especially in our political culture. But we see all of these concerns as conversation starters, not stoppers. The issue is whether we can figure out a system of electoral finance that would not simply dismiss the value of political equality. That is the question. But when we hear the idea of regulating the flow of money, we don’t assume that it will be perverse, or futile, or ruinous of all that is good

What’s interesting is that Mark Schmitt has a piece in this month’s _American Prospect_ (which has just gone up on the website), arguing more or less the opposite case.
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Warning: Spoilers Ahead
Halting State for my money, is Charlie Stross’s best science fiction novel. Not his most fun novel – that award collectively goes to the slightly-borked-alternative-reality Merchant Princes series that Paul talks about. Nor his most wildly inventive novel (which is surely Accelerando). But it’s the novel where fun and speculation come together most successfully. It works both as an entertaining read and as a fascinating discussion of an encroaching low-level singularity. It’s one of the best pieces of sociological-political extrapolation that I’ve ever read.
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I’ve mentioned Nancy Rosenblum’s _On the Side of the Angels_ a few times here; for those who are interested, Jacob Levy has organized a seminar that will be hosting responses to the book from Jacob, Melissa Schwartzberg, Maria, Marin, Andrew Rehfeld, Patrick Dineen, Nadia Urbinati and me (some are up there; others, including Rosenblum’s responses, will be posted over the next day or two). I will also be contributing to an entirely separate seminar on the book at _Cato Unbound._ Jacob mentions in his introductory post that CT helped pioneer this way of discussing books (nb the word ‘helped;’ doubtless there are others out there who had the same idea) – it’s nice to see that it is beginning to take off among academics more generally. While I don’t think that blogs and similar forms of online publication will ever replace conventional journals, I could see them replacing traditional academic book reviews, given their advantages of speed, dialogic component etc.

I’ve been out of the blogosphere for the last week or so; one of the things that I would have written about if I had been around are the persistent and well sourced rumours (see e.g. Scott's post at _IHE_ ) that the _Washington Post_ is considering shutting down their weekly _Book World_ supplement. Editor Marcus Brauchli (whom, if rumor is to be believed, is pushing the change) has prominently failed to deny the reports, merely stating that “We are absolutely committed to book reviews and coverage of literature, publishing and ideas in The Post” (which I suspect, if decoded, translates to something like “we may still stick in the odd book review as filler when we’re running low on Paris Hilton stories”). The closure of _Book World_ is something I’d take personally; when I first came to DC in the 1990s, it was a surprise and a delight to see pieces that took, say, John Crowley seriously, interspersed with the more usual reviews of biographies, political books and so on. And Michael Dirda should be declared a Living Treasure. I understand that this decision isn’t set in stone – if you want to tell the Washington Post that this is a bad idea, you can do so here. _WP_ subscribers are especially encouraged to make their feelings known.

John Crowley’s piece on Thomas Disch, which I blogged about previously, is now available online. Also of interest is _Ghost Ship_, one of Disch’s last poems, which Crowley quotes in its totality, and which is surely one of the few poetical treatments of an online comment section.

There must be many other such derelicts—
orphaned, abandoned, adrift for whatever reason—
but few have kept flying before the winds
of cyberspace so briskly as Drunk Driver
(the name of the site). Anonymous (the author)
signed his last entry years ago, and more years passed
before the Comments began to accrete
like barnacles on the hull of a ship
and then in ever-bifurcating chains
on each other. The old hulk became
the refuge of a certain shy sort
of visitor, like those trucks along the waterfront
haunted by lonely souls who could not bear
eye-witness encounters. They could leave
their missives in the crevices of this latter-day
Wailing Wall, returning at intervals
to see if someone had replied, clicking
their way down from the original message—

_April 4. Another gray day. Can’t find the energy to get the laundry down to the laundry room. The sciatica just won’t go away._

—through the meanders and branchings
of the encrusted messages, the tenders
of love for a beloved who would never know herself
to have been desired, the cries of despair,
the silly whimsies and failed jokes, to where
the thread had last been snapped,
only to discover that no, no one had answered
the question posed. Because,
no doubt, there was no answer.
Is there an “answer” to the war
wherever the latest war is going on?
If one could get under the ship
and see all those barnacles clinging
to the keel, what a sight it would be.
Talk about biodiversity! But on deck,
so sad, always the same three skeletons,
the playing card nailed to the mast,
frayed and fluttering weakly, like some huge insect
the gods will not allow to die.

There’s been a serious debate at the other place where I blog over whether academia in general, and political science in particular is a sexy profession. I’m glad to say that we actually have Real Social Scientific Data¹ that we can bring to bear on this topic. In 2006, James Felton, Peter T. Koper, John Mitchell and Michael Stinson conducted research that sought to establish, _inter alia_ how perceived hotness of professors affected their RateMyProfessors evaluations for teaching quality. As part of this exercise, Felton et al. ranked (Table 2 in their paper) the relative hotness quotients of 36 different academic disciplines. My estimable colleague John Sides prepared a nice graph of the Felton et al. data (see below).

Three important research findings leap out from this picture.

First – that academic disciplines are, without exception, more ‘not’ than ‘hot.’ When adjusted positive and negative hotness scores are totted up against each other, no discipline does better than – 0.062 (Languages). Thus, the main hypothesis of Careerbuilder et al. 2009 is decisively refuted.

Second, the above proviso aside, political scientists are pretty damn hot in comparative terms. We rank as number 5, trailing only languages, law, religion and criminal justice. From eyeballing the data, it looks as though there is a minor discontinuity right after political science, where the hotness lurches down a notch, and another, more significant one between psychology (at number 10) and finance (at number 11).

Third, economists are, without any jot, tittle, scintilla or iota of doubt or ambiguity, the notties rather than the hotties of the social sciences (coming 30th out of 36). Tough luck, John. Sociologists are sixth (heh), philosophers come in at number 9 (which is a perfectly respectable score, I suppose), and English professors are middlin’, at number 12 in the ranking.

(An earlier version of this post appeared at The Monkey Cage)

¹ Real Social Scientific Data is a term of art here, meaning ‘statistics that are sufficiently entertaining and gratifying² that I really don’t want to look at them too hard.’ This understanding of data is very commonly applied in the public sphere of learned debate although it is, perhaps surprisingly, rarely spelled out in explicit terms. I note in passing that some commenter at the Monkey Cage wants to control for differences in sex ratios between professors and students and similar irrelevant persnickets. All I want to say to this pedant (whom I suspect to be a jealous chemistry professor or denizen of a similarly low-ranked discipline) is _political science is number 5! Suck on it._

² In a collective rather than individual sense (I don’t imagine that I’m pulling my discipline’s score up).

Mike Kazin in an email (published with his permission):

Perhaps you gotta be steeped in left history to get excited by this or be Joe Klein– But the only time I broke down in tears watching the big concert today was when Pete Seeger, all 89 years of him, started singing the two “radical” verses of This Land Is Your Land that almost always get cut when the song is sung in public, or in countless elementary schools across the nation (pasted below). I bet Pete was thinking, “This is the way Woody wrote it and so I’m going to make sure the whole country hears it.” How long before some right-wing blogger mentions that this song was written by a member of the
Communist Party — whose best buddy and fellow comrade made it to the Lincoln Memorial to bring it all back home?

When you add this to all the encomia to King and to Rosa Parks and to Lincoln the Emancipator– well, the left’s definition of patriotism is now dominant– only six years after anti-war posters reading, “Peace is Patriotic” sounded absurdly marginal. Change I can believe in…

“As I was walkin’ – I saw a sign there
And that sign said – no tress passin’
But on the other side …. it didn’t say nothin!
Now that side was made for you and me!

Chorus

In the squares of the city – In the shadow of the steeple
Near the relief office – I see my people
And some are grumblin’ and some are wonderin’
If this land’s still made for you and me.”

John Crowley has a lovely essay on Thomas Disch in the new Boston Review. The essay isn’t on the WWW yet (I’ll link to it when/if it does appear), but I wanted to quote this bit about Disch’s _334_ as soon as I read it:

… why did he need the scaffoldings of futurist fiction? We might guess that if he were beginning a writing career now, with dozens of writers taking up and inventing personal worlds in irrealistic modes and nobody minding, he wouldn’t need science fiction. But I think that he was always haunted – and vivified – by the awful and the apocalyptic. In creating the world of _334_, he had the grand sweep of decline and fall, featuring numberless populations and quick-time disasters, that would allow him to admit a competing tendency to generosity and humility in dealing with individual hurt and longing. Posit a future that is cruel enough to be convincingly the future of this bad present – a hard shell for the tender snail of self – and you can bring out from it what matters most to you: the shortened version of things in the world.

When I wrote an irritated piece in response to Benjamin Kunkel’s silly essay last month, I mentioned _334_ as a counter-example to Kunkel’s claims. But Crowley’s summation of Disch (perhaps because it isn’t a polemic or counter-polemic, instead being a sympathetic analysis of a particular aesthetic) says what I was trying to say far better. There isn’t any necessary reason why a particular set of literary tropes and themes _have_ to overwhelm character in dystopian or apocalyptic novels. Instead, as _334_ exemplifies, you can use the tensions between dystopia and the everyday lives of people as a source of art. Which is what _334_ does so well, and why it is a minor masterpiece.

I was on C-Span’s _Washington Journal_ this morning, talking about my piece for the _American Prospect_ on partisanship and organizing. Anyone who’s interested can watch it here (from about 1.01.15 for half an hour or so).

Melissa Schwartzberg at Columbia and I have an essay in the new issue of Ethics and International Affairs on the ways in which norms structure majority-minority relations on Wikipedia and the Daily Kos. The journal has made it freely available online here.

Building on case studies of Wikipedia and the Daily Kos, we make three basic claims. First, we argue that different kinds of rules shape relations between members of the majority and of the minority in these communities in important and consequential ways. Second, we argue that the normative implications of these consequences differ between online communities that seek to generate knowledge, and which should be tolerant of diversity in points of view, and online communities that seek to generate political action, which need less diversity in order to be politically efficacious. Third, we note that an analysis of the normative desirability of this or that degree of tolerance needs to be tempered with an awareness that the actual rules through which minority relations are structured are likely the consequence of power relations rather than normative considerations.

The other lead essay is Michael Walzer on democracy promotion, which should keep Daniel entertained …

A few years ago, I wrote that

Nearly every corridor in every building of the Commission, Council and Parliament has two or three examples [of EU official art] along its walls – spectacularly bland and uninteresting prints and photographs, always with the twelve stars on a blue flag in there somewhere. The art is contentless and affectless because any strong statement, or even conveyed sense of geographic location, would probably offend somebody in one or another of the member states. There’s something about the EU that seems completely inimical to lively cultural expression.

Now a Czech art-prankster has put this theory to its test, and found that member states are indeed liable to get offended.

Sited prominently in the headquarters of the EU Council in Brussels, a flagship work of art – which was designed to demolish national stereotypes by mocking them – has caused diplomatic outrage. Not only that, the piece turns out to be the work of a single Czech artist despite having been billed as the collaborative effort of all 27 member states. … As countries digested depictions of their character, such as a Dracula-inspired theme park (Romania), a rudimentary lavatory (Bulgaria) and a flooded land with minarets poking through (the Netherlands), the Czech presidency was forced into a public apology. … Other national depictions in the artwork include: Luxembourg as a lump of gold on sale to the highest bidder; France emblazoned with the word grève , or strike; Denmark made of Lego; and Sweden lying within an Ikea flatpack. Britain is simply missing – supposedly a reference to its euro-scepticism. But some diplomats appear in little doubt of what action they would like to see, namely the removal of the eight-tonne “modern art installation” from the bleak and lofty but all-too prominent atrium of the council’s main building.

In fairness, the artist seems to have gone out of his way to prod national sore spots – other depictions include Germany (autobahns making up a rather thinly disguised swastika) and Poland (a group of monks erecting the Rainbow flag). Pictures below.

I mentioned last week that I’m reading Nancy Rosenblum’s On the Side of the Angels: An Appreciation of Parties and Partisanship (Powells, Amazon). The final chapter, “Banning Parties,” has a valuable discussion of the normative implications of party bans, which speaks extensively to the Israeli example.

First, contra arguments such as those contained in this typically disingenuous post by Jamie Kirchick, it draws a clear distinction between banning hate parties (which Rosenblum argues is, within certain limits, a reasonable form of democratic self-defence) and banning parties that are threats to national identity (which Rosenblum argues is not a form of democratic self-defense). Rosenblum speaks to the rationale for Israel’s ban on the Kach party, which called for the forced ‘transfer’ of Arab ‘cockroaches’ from Israel, and sought to ban Arab-Jewish intermarriage. [click to continue…]

One of the safer predictions I’ve made in recent years is this (in _The American Prospect_):

[O]nline activists are unlikely to follow Obama if he moves toward a post-ideological politics of citizenship and may even use Obama’s own machine to organize against him (as they did within MyBarackObama.com when Obama announced his support for controversial wiretapping legislation). By rebuilding the Democratic Party around a model that is friendlier to decentralized online participation, Obama is … making it easier for Democratic activists to organize in protest against overly “moderate” decisions

But I didn’t expect it to start happening _quite_ so soon.
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Truly wonderful. Via PNH, mock-authoritative citation rules for public restroom graffiti, alien communications and much else besides. Suggestions for more such rules welcome in comments.