Kieran Healy

One of the perks of refereeing books for university presses is that you get to pick some books in lieu of money. I try to get stuff that I can’t really justify buying, such as interesting but expensive scholarly books from well outside my field. Which explains why I’ve been reading G.E.M de Ste. Croix’s Christian Persecution, Martyrdom, and Orthodoxy, a posthumously edited collection of papers. (Ste. Croix’s Big Red Book, The Class Struggle in the Ancient Greek World, is terrific, by the way, and rather cheaper.) One of the essays is a classic paper from 1963 on Christian persecution under the Romans. From it, I learned this:
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We’ve just had an issue with some spam showing up on the site. Not the run-of-the-mill comment-based sort. It was hidden in a block of html enclosed in a tag. Weirdly, and this is the disturbing bit, it appeared as a block of HTML appended to our index.php file, which really shouldn’t happen at all. The result was that WordPress would render CT pages and then this bit of spam text would be right at the bottom of the html, outside the body tags, etc, as the index.php file closed out.

The permissions on the index.php file are right and our WP installation is up to date. There doesn’t seem to be anything else amiss, and apart from it appearing in a very strange place it seems like automated rather than handcrafted spam. (Another odd thing was that some of the spam links pointed to some personal pages hosted by washington.edu, but I didn’t follow the links.) Unfortunately I don’t know how long the spam has been there. What happened to us is approximately the same as what happened to this guy on the WP support forum, but there wasn’t any helpful followup from that thread. Has anyone encountered this issue before?

Rich Byrne writes on Al Gore’s new book critiquing newsertainment and Gore’s own history facilitating the current state of affairs:

Gore’s book rehearses the well-known factors in the decline of TV news: runaway conglomeration, slashed news budgets and sharp profit incentives for news divisions to drown out the serious with titillation and slapstick.

But how precisely did it get this way? It’s been a long slow slide, to be sure, but the Telecommunications Act of 1996 – in which Gore was a key player as Bill Clinton’s vice president – has accelerated the very problems Gore bemoans in _The Assault on Reason_.

… it’s an inconvenient truth for Gore that this overhaul of US media law narrowed consumer news choices and curbed the public accountability of broadcasters. In a review of the legislation’s fallout in 2005, the advocacy group Common Cause noted that the law created “more media concentration, less diversity and higher prices”. …

… The new law increased the license period granted to broadcasters from five years to eight years and it significantly raised the bar required to successfully challenge license renewals. This double whammy effectively blunted one of the only tools available to ordinary citizens to hold media accountable.

The effects are already there to see. Recent studies have shown that local broadcast coverage of politics has been largely obliterated, with many broadcast news stations virtually ignoring regional congressional elections. … So it’s no surprise that Gore prefers to ping the soft target of celebrity. Nor is it surprising that his critics in the media prefer to keep the discussion on Gore v Britney.

Kevin Drum has often complained about the terrible state of data protection laws and the related burden of dealing with identity theft. Over the weekend, I was listening to “That Mitchell and Webb Sound”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/That_Mitchell_and_Webb_Sound on Radio 4 and heard this sketch and thought it summed up the issues pretty well.

Last weekend I read Prophet of Innovation, Thomas McGraw’s biography of Joseph Schumpeter. Maybe more on that later: I need to write something about it before I forget the content. Somewhere in there McGraw quotes Schumpeter’s line that “the budget is the skeleton of the state, stripped of all misleading ideologies.” With that in mind, here’s a kind of X-ray of California’s state budget, via “Chris Uggen”:http://chrisuggen.blogspot.com/2007/05/san-francisco-chronicle-offers-well.html.

This is from a “SF Chronicle”:http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2007/05/21/MNG4KPUKV51.DTL article on these trends, which look set to continue.

Over the past few years, sociologists “Bruce Western”:http://www.princeton.edu/~western and “Becky Pettit”:http://faculty.washington.edu/~bpettit/ have shown that incarceration has become a standard feature of the life-course for certain segments of society, especially young, unskilled black men. A “paper by Pettit and Western”:http://www.princeton.edu/~western/ASRv69n2p.pdf provides some estimates, notably the astonishing finding that in the cohort born between 1965 and 1969, thirty percent of black men without a college education — and _sixty_ percent of black men without a high school degree — had been incarcerated by 1999. Recent cohorts of black men “are more likely to have prison records (22.4 percent) than military records (17.4 percent) or bachelor’s degrees (12.5 percent).” Western develops the argument at greater length in a recent book, Punishment And Inequality in America, which you should really go and buy. As these shifts show up in the social patterning of individual biographies, so too will they be reflected in the Schumpeterian skeleton of the state budget.

A “couple”:http://www.talkingpointsmemo.com/archives/week_2007_05_27.php#014334 of “people”:http://matthewyglesias.theatlantic.com/archives/2007/05/cheney_on_geneva.php have commented on “these remarks”:http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2007/05/20070526-1.html, delivered by Dick Cheney to the graduating class at West Point. The piece is full of the usual doubletalk: “We’re fighting a war on terror because the enemy attacked us first, and hit us hard”, etc. Notice he didn’t _quite_ say, “We’re fighting a war in _Iraq_ because the enemy attacked us first,” but this is clearly what he means, because later on he says,

bq. The terrorists … [seek] to establish a totalitarian empire, a caliphate, with Baghdad as its capital. They view the world as a battlefield and they yearn to hit us again. And now they have chosen to make Iraq the central front in their war against civilization.

Nice choice, guys. The bit that’s gotten notice is this:

bq. As Army officers on duty in the war on terror, you will now face enemies who oppose and despise everything you know to be right, every notion of upright conduct and character, and every belief you consider worth fighting for and living for. Capture one of these killers, and he’ll be quick to demand the protections of the Geneva Convention and the Constitution of the United States. Yet when they wage attacks or take captives, their delicate sensibilities seem to fall away.

Yeah, you see, that sort of double standard is what makes them the bad guys. Josh Marshall Steve Benen asks whether it “is it too much to ask the Vice President to refer to the protections of the Geneva Convention and the Constitution of the United States as _good_ things? Perhaps protections that he’s proud of?”

The thing about Cheney’s rhetoric, though, is that the flow from the first to the second sentence strongly implies that he _does_ think of them as good things. From what he says, it’s clear that the U.S. constitution and Geneva Conventions are amongst those things the graduates “know to be right,” that and that they embody ideals of “upright conduct” and express those beliefs they “consider worth fighting for and living for.” It’s just that he doesn’t seem to have any notion that these ideals themselves express rules for how to defend one’s principles without betraying them.

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Not the sort of phrase you associate with Britain, “but this may change.”:http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/6695685.stm

Steven Pinker reviewing Natalie Angier’s _The Canon_:

bq. Though we live in an era of stunning scientific understanding, all too often the average educated person will have none of it. People who would sneer at the vulgarian who has never read Virginia Woolf will insouciantly boast of their ignorance of basic physics.

C.P. Snow, 1959:

bq. A good many times I have been present at gatherings of people who, by the standards of the traditional culture, are thought highly educated and who have with considerable gusto been expressing their incredulity at the illiteracy of scientists. Once or twice I have been provoked and have asked the company how many of them could describe the Second Law of Thermodynamics. The response was cold: it was also negative. Yet I was asking something which is about the scientific equivalent of: Have you read a work of Shakespeare’s? I now believe that if I had asked an even simpler question — such as, What do you mean by mass, or acceleration, which is the scientific equivalent of saying, Can you read?-not more than one in ten of the highly educated would have felt that I was speaking the same language. So the great edifice of modern physics goes up, and the majority of the cleverest people in the western world have about as much insight into it as their neolithic ancestors would have had.

By all accounts not any sort of couch potato, Ogged is “understandably distressed”:http://www.unfogged.com/archives/week_2007_05_20.html#006859 to look at the age-group records for his chosen event, the 50 meters freestyle, and find that he has to go all the way up to the 75-79 age group to find a time he would stand a chance of beating.

I have the related experience of having family members who are irritatingly athletic. For instance, my brother was on the Irish cross-country team and won a bunch of stuff in college. My sister-in-law ran the Chicago marathon in 2004 — her first — and finished seventeenth. Worst of all, two years before I was even born my uncle won a marathon in “Kaduna”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kaduna in a time of 2:15:03, then the fastest time ever run in Africa, and now more than thirty five years later still one of the the 20 fastest marathons ever run by any Irishman. (And also, “to my knowledge,”:http://www.arrs.net/AC_Mara.htm still the fastest marathon ever run in Nigeria.)

Elite athletes are different from you and me, and this is true even when, as in my case, you share a significant percentage of their genes. My sister-in-law once told me of the experience — common amongst top women athletes — of being out for a run and getting held up at a stop light. Some regular semi-fit guy out for his evening jog runs up alongside, and glances over. The light changes, and the guy takes off at an unsustainable speed because, obviously, it would be a violation of natural law for a woman to be able to run faster than a guy. Having gone through this one too many times, my sister-in-law adopted the strategy of just tucking in behind the guy and waiting to see what would happen. After a short while he realizes she’s behind him. He tries to go faster. He glances behind. She’s still there. A very short while later the guy, now beginning to boil in a self-made vat of lactic acid, starts making random turns down streets in a desperate effort to shake his pursuer. It doesn’t work. Eventually the guy grinds to a halt, she breezes by, he’s left gasping for air and maybe reflecting on his views on gender.

“The 17-year Cicadas are coming.”:http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2007/05/070521-cicada-facts.html The fact that subsets of them are named by Brood Year and the current batch is Brood XIII is just fantastic. Surely (where’s John Holbo when you need him?) there is a ’50s Attack of the Giant Cicadas film called Brood Thirteen. Or an early comic book? Even better, according to National Geographic, “Each brood of 17-year cicadas actually consists of three different species … and each one has its own song. … The three songs have been described as sounding like the word ‘pharaoh,’ a sizzling skillet, and a rotary lawn sprinkler.” _Cicadas of the Pharoah_ (Tor 1986), shortlisted for a Hugo. _Lawn Sprinklers of the Pharoah_ was the admittedly failed sequel.

Seeing as the kids are on the front page, indulge me a bit. My wife had a baby boy early yesterday morning (hurray!) and this morning I brought our three-year-old daughter up to see the new arrival. She has in principle been getting used to the idea of being a big sister for a while, and was excited to meet him. As we’re walking in she says, “What is that thing on your wrist, Daddy?” “It’s so that people here know that I’m your little brother’s daddy,” I said. She stopped walking and looked up at me. “But … but you’re my daddy,” she said.

Onward to sibling rivalry, I suppose.

Cory Doctorow coins a phrase about Teresa Nielsen Hayden.

Megan McArdle’s dog, Finnegan, contracted an infection and had to be put to sleep. She posted about it. I thought: soon, some gobshite will show up in the comments, deriding the way she felt at four in the morning the night her dog died. And sure enough. Gotta love the intertubes.

Meanwhile, Jerry Falwell has died, too. In terms of net good brought into the world during their respective lives, Megan’s dog is probably ahead of Falwell. The conjunction of events reminded me of Oliver Goldsmith on morality, dogs and men.
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Via “Unfogged”:http://www.unfogged.com/archives/week_2007_05_06.html#006758, a “hall of fame note”:http://istherenosininit.wordpress.com/2007/05/07/most-outrageous-note-evar/ from a student:

Dear Prof. AWB,

I was in your British Literature class in the fall of 2006, and for that class, you gave me a grade of C. I need to have a better grade for this class. As far as I know, I got an 86 on the first paper, and I didn’t complete the second assignment. I don’t know what I got on the final essay or exam.

I would like for you to change my grade to at least a B. If this means I must complete the second assignment, I will attempt to set aside time to do so. Please address this matter immediately.

Thank you,

Bwahahaha! Actually, just this morning a colleague got an email from a student saying that he would “try to set aside time” to take the final (the time for which has been posted on the University’s website all year).