Flaming the Left is a difficult matter,
It isn’t just one of your holiday games;
You may think at first I’m as mad as a hatter
When I tell you, you’re going to need THREE DIFFERENT FLAMES.
First of all, are the flames that the bloggers use daily,
Such as Ignorant, Jerk-in-the-Box, Leftist or Lame,
Such as Asshat or Poopy-head, Liberal or Crazy–
All comprehensible, everyday flames.
There are fancier claims if you think they sound neater,
Some for the heated times, some for the tame:
Such as Clintonite, Keynesian, New Deal, Single-Payer–
But all of them regular, everyday flames.
But I tell you the left needs a flame more particular,
Something less honest, a bit more cockeyed,
Else how can we keep up our image testicular,
Or cook up the data, or tell garish lies?
Flames of this kind are by now ten a penny,
Such as Darwinist, Feminist or Stab-in-the-Back,
Such as Idiotarian, or else Fifth Columnist,
Codes the wingnuts all listen for, on their antennae.
But above and beyond there’s still one name left over,
And that is the charge you by now have all guessed;
The thing that no liberal will ever admit to–
But RIGHT-WINGERS ALL KNOW, and have “often”:https://crookedtimber.org/2005/08/16/witchfinders-general/ “expressed”:http://www.thepoorman.net/2005/08/19/back-down-the-road-a-while/.
When you engage a liberal in argumentation,
Your tactic, I tell you, should be to defame
His motives, his background, his disloyal mother,
And be sure to
Cry Treason,
With no sense of shame.
Posts by author:
Kieran Healy
“Orin Kerr”:http://www.volokh.com/archives/archive_2005_08_07-2005_08_13.shtml#1123955294, “Ted”:https://crookedtimber.org/2005/08/18/what-next/ and “Kevin Drum”:http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/archives/individual/2005_08/006937.php think about options for the future in Iraq and the likelihood of various outcomes. Kevin says,
bq. I happen to think “a timed withdrawal is probably the best bet left to us”:http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/archives/individual/2005_08/006930.php, although I admit that I suspect Iraq is going to end up in chaos no matter what we do. That would be a disaster, but if we can’t stop it anyway there’s no point in making things worse by staying. For now, that’s pretty much where I’m at, and anyone who disagrees really needs to give the chin scratching a rest and tell us clearly and concisely what they’d do differently to turn the tide in this war. Time has run out.
As many have noted, as the situation in Iraq remains stuck, the political push from the pro-war side will increasingly move towards blaming the war’s failure on those who opposed its initiation, who had no power whatsoever over its direction, and even, in some cases, those who sacrificed a great deal to its prosecution. The astonishing vilification of Cindy Sheehan by right-wing talking heads is evidence enough of that. I find it depressing — and a sign of how stuck things now are — that a CT post from “almost two years ago”:https://crookedtimber.org/2003/09/01/kinds-of-quagmires/ stands up pretty well.
Totally. “See for yourself”:http://www.crooksandliars.com/2005/08/09.html#a4385. Also disturbing in a chest-thrusting, cheesecake-grin kind of way, too. Brrr.
On the way in to work I was listening to a story about the latest round of “proposed radiation standards”:http://www.ens-newswire.com/ens/aug2005/2005-08-09-04.asp for the proposed high-level radioactive waste dump at “Yucca Mountain, Nevada.”:http://www.ocrwm.doe.gov/ymp/index.shtml Because spent nuclear fuel and radioactive waste lasts a terrifically long time, and because the project is so controversial, the EPA has had to come up with a standard for storing the stuff. Yesterday they announced one designed to protect public health for a million years, or, in the words of an EPA administrator “the next 25,000 generations of Americans.”
I’m not an expert on any of this, but it seems that the inescapable fact about this sort of policy document is that the premise is wholly absurd. The sociologist Lee Clarke “has argued”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0226109410/kieranhealysw-20/ref=nosim/ that plans of this sort, designed to cope with huge disasters or accidents, are fundamentally rhetorical “fantasy documents” that have no prospect of working but which are produced as ritual symbols of social order and control. It’s bad enough when the disasters in question are things like a large-scale terrorist attack or a big oil spill. But a million years is about two hundred times longer than the whole of recorded human history, and the idea that we can design something built to work over that time-span is just ridiculous. Even the short-range standard proposed by the EPA covers a period of ten thousand years. At the same time, both the political fight and the nuclear waste are real, so you have to do something. “Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair,” to coin a phrase.
I’m gradually making my way back to Tucson from Australia. Free advice: if you can avoid taking a flight across the Pacific oecean with a small child suffering from a cold and teething pain, go right ahead and avoid it. I am presently at an undisclosed location in the Pacific Northwest. Outside the hotel is a little plaza. A band has been playing Christian rock music to a small crowd. Lots of terrible, low-quality, saccharine power ballad stuff, complete with sexualized double-talk. (“There was a man in my room last night … ” Guess who it was.) Like Creed on valium. Hard to imagine, I know. They just closed out the show with a version of “I’m a Believer.” By far the liveliest song they’ve played, but with the lyrics changed. (“Then I saw _his_ face,” etc.) I suppose _something_ has to counterbalance the fact that a large chunk of the best music ever written is Christian music.
The IRA has “announced”:http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/northern_ireland/4720863.stm that its “armed campaign”:http://www.guardian.co.uk/Northern_Ireland/Story/0,2763,1537901,00.html is “over”:http://www.nytimes.com/2005/07/28/international/28cnd-ira.html?ex=1280203200&en=7a0719b5ff9dea7b&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss. “Slugger O’Toole”:http://www.sluggerotoole.com/ is a good place to go to get a roundup of reactions and analysis. The second-guessing and tealeaf-reading is well underway already. Here’s the first part of the statement:
The leadership of Óglaigh na hÉireann has formally ordered an end to the armed campaign. This will take effect from 4pm this afternoon.

All IRA units have been ordered to dump arms. All Volunteers have been instructed to assist the development of purely political and democratic programmes through exclusively peaceful means. Volunteers must not engage in any other activities whatsoever.
This is a big development.
Flickr’s photos tell me that it’s cold and sunny in “Canberra”:http://www.flickr.com/photos/1arc/28680138/. I knew that already. The Lobby Bar is closing in “Cork”:http://www.flickr.com/photos/docaoimh/28704801/, which comes as a shock. (It’s a great venue.) And the Saguaros are flowering in “Tucson”:http://www.flickr.com/photos/notna/28514213/. That means it’s really hot in Arizona right now — “dangerously hot”:http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/4723233.stm, in fact — just as I’m about to return there. One advantage of desert life, though, is that it’s possible to live in a more-or-less solar powered house. Even though the materials needed to build a house like this aren’t really that expensive anymore, few are built because housing construction is a lot like film-making. The difficulty of bringing together so many specialized contractors for what’s essentially a small-scale, often one-off project means that a lot of energy goes in to ensuring that all the bits hook up together in a reliable, predictable manner. The paradoxical result is that a lot of fluid network activity amongst creative individuals produces a tendency to conservatism and a bias against innovation in the actual outputs. Reconfiguring some bit of the house (the cooling system, say) means that a bunch of other people back along the supply chain have to adjust their standard practices, and they don’t want to. Symmetrically, prospective buyers may be nervous about the resale prospects of such a house in a market where the demand for innovation is strictly limited. So in much the same way that most films are boring and cookie-cutter, so are most houses, despite the fluidity and high potential for creativity inherent to the enterprise. Nicole Biggart “makes this argument”:http://ciee.ucop.edu/docs/market_struc.pdf for commercial buildings, and large parts of the housing market seem similar.
There is still a fair amount of innovation. It’s just difficult to get it incorporated into standard plans for homes. Tucson has “many examples”:http://www.solarinstitute.org/innovative_home_tour/index.html of solar-powered or otherwise energy efficient homes, including one of the few “zero-energy homes”:http://www.toolbase.org/tertiaryT.asp?TrackID=&DocumentID=3688&CategoryID=69 in the country. The ZEH is _net_ zero energy, of course: it’s designed to produce what it needs via solar panels, and its overall energy consumption is very low. An “ordinary” solar home is not a ZEH, but if its built right it’s very cheap to run. If things go according to plan, I’ll be living in one come November.
Over the past few hours we’ve had a little trouble with the server — apologies to our readers: it should be fixed now. In the course of trying to diagnose and repair the problem, I was looking through our log files and I noticed some search queries that made me feel a bit queasy. About a year ago, Belle wrote a post called “The La Perla Exception”:https://crookedtimber.org/2004/04/02/the-la-perla-exception/, which discussed the legal problems associated with drawing a line between pictures of naked children (e.g., canonical baby-in-the-bath-with-rubber-ducky photos) and child pornography. Just in the past 24 hours or so, we’ve had eleven hits on that page via google. According to “GeoBytes”:http://www.geobytes.com/IpLocator.htm, the originating IPs for these searches were in places as various as Bangalore, Chennai (also in India), Rio De Janeiro, Burnaby (in British Columbia), Oscoda (Michigan), Cabot (Arkansas), Bridgeport (Connecticut) and Tampa (Florida). Of these searches, two appeared legitimate — “debate+child+pornography” and “what+constitutes+child+porn.” The rest were queries like “European+Child+nudity+pictures”, “child+models+nude” (several variants of that one), and “small+girls(12-15+years)+sex+pics.” Because the La Perla post is so old, I’ve no reason to think this trickle of sewage isn’t typical. The searches represent just under one percent of referrals to CT from distinct google queries in 24 hours. That’s pretty low, I suppose. But, then again, it’s not as if Crooked Timber has much in the way of content that would attract pedophiles. Imagine what many other sites — never mind Google itself — must be seeing.
Kevin Drum is “mystified”:http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/archives/individual/2005_07/006789.php by “cricket slang”:http://news.bbc.co.uk/sport2/hi/cricket/england/4711875.stm. Me, too. The important thing to remember is that England are losing in a really entertaining way.
Something to meditate on, from the pen of “Jim Henley:”:http://highclearing.com/index.php/archives/2005/07/23/4474
bq. If they really do “hate us because we’re free,” the Bush Administration’s approach to civil liberties constitutes “appeasement” of the first water.
Via “Tim Lambert”:http://timlambert.org/2005/07/lott-libels/, some evidence that these two properties might still be orthogonal. Tim reproduces an email exchange between John Donohue and a representative of the Federalist Society’s chapter at University of Chicago. They are trying to organize a debate between Donohue and the awful John Lott, but they fail through a sequence of scheduling problems exacerbated by Lott’s efforts (on his blog) to make it look like Donohue is afraid to face him in public. You have to give the Federalist Society person credit for an evenhanded and respectful demeanor in the face of relentless provocation from Lott’s trademark mix of misrepresentation, slander and evasiveness. Eventually the head of the Chicago chapter writes to Donohue telling him they’ve withdrawn Lott’s invitation to speak because of his repeated refusals to remove the libels of Donohue from his blog. So full marks to them for being on the up-and-up. The fact that the American Enterprise Institute remain happy to have Lott as a senior fellow, on the other hand, speaks for itself at this point.
“Cosmic Variance”:http://cosmicvariance.com/ is a new group blog made up of a bunch of physicists, some of whom — notably “Sean Carroll”:http://cosmicvariance.com/sean/ — are already “well-known”:http://preposterousuniverse.blogspot.com/ for their writing. I used to hang out with a bunch of physicists in college. Never have so many smart people been concentrated in such a brutal job market. On the other hand, they get to have good job titles and cool-sounding research interests. I mean, who wouldn’t want to be in the “Theory Group at Stanford Linear Accelerator”:http://cosmicvariance.com/joanne/ studying “heavy flavor physics”? “Today we will accelerate a particle of this 1989 Château Haut-Brion to very high speeds and smash it into a stationary matrix composed of this bar of “Michel Cluizel”:http://www.cluizel.com/ single-plantation chocolate, in an effort to produce an entity predicted by Larousse but hitherto unobserved, the Michelin 4-star boson.”
Via “Gillian Russell”:http://www.logicandlanguage.net/archives/2005/07/top_ten.html I see that the “results”:http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/history/inourtime/greatest_philosopher_vote_result.shtml of the BBC’s “Greatest Philosopher” poll are in. The winner — with 28 percent of the vote, more than twice the share of the philosopher in second-place — was Karl Marx. David Hume is next (just over 12 percent) and Wittgenstein third (6.8 percent). If you are upset that your favorite philosopher didn’t win (or angry over who did), why not listen to Randy Newman’s “The World isn’t Fair”:http://www.randynewman.com/tocdiscography/disc_bad_love/lyricsbadlove, which also has a lot of useful information about Marx.
While I’m here in Australia (which is not for much longer), my address can be written out almost entirely in acronyms:
Kieran Healy
“SPT”:http://socpol.anu.edu.au/, “RSSS”:http://rsss.anu.edu.au/, “ANU”:http://www.anu.edu.au/,
“ACT”:http://www.about-australia.com/act.htm 0200, Australia.
All of these acronyms are actively in use, so a letter addressed this way would be properly delivered. Some kind of record, shurely?
I gave up on _Cryptonomicon_ shortly after my “despairing post about it”:https://crookedtimber.org/2005/06/29/cryptonomicon/ and decided I needed something a bit funnier. So I picked up “Cold Comfort Farm”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0141182652/kieranhealysw-20/ref=nosim/ and “Scoop”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0316926108/kieranhealysw-20/ref=nosim/. The latter was OK, but the former was terrific, right down to the helpful marking of “the finer passages with one, two or three stars.” An ancestor of “a well-known blogger”:http://bitchphd.blogspot.com/ shows up early on, too. This should really find its way into Dr. B’s sidebar:
bq. Mrs Smiling’s second interest was her collection of brassieres, and her search for a perfect one. She was reputed to have the largest and finest collection of these garments in the word. It was hoped that on her death it would be left to the nation. She was an authority on the cut, fit, colour, construction and proper functioning of brassieres; and her friends had learned that her interest, even in moments of extreme emotional or physical distress, could be aroused and her composure restored by the hasty utterance of the phrase: “I saw a brassiere to-day, Mary, that would have interested you…”
The urge to quote more is hard to resist. Here a particular religious psychology is accurately diagnosed:
bq. Flora was surprised to find him so astute, but reflected that religious maniacs derived considerable comfort from digging into their motives for their actions and discovering discreditable reasons which covered them with good, satisfying sinfulness in which they could wallow to their heart’s content.
And a persistent vice of academics:
bq. She knew intellectuals always made a great fuss about the titles of their books. The titles of biographies were especially important. Had not _Victorian Vista_, the scathing life of Thomas Carlyle, dropped stone cold last year from the presses because everyone thought it was a boring book of reminiscences, while _Odour of Sanctity_, a rather dull history of drainage reform from 1840 to 1873, had sold like hot cakes because everybody thought it was an attack on Victorian morality.
All this and Aunt Ada Doom (who “saw something narsty in the woodshed”), too.