Kieran Healy

Atrios “points to”:http://atrios.blogspot.com/2005_05_08_atrios_archive.html#111590753078228325 an “absurd bit of ‘fact checking'”:http://factcheck.org/article325.html from Factcheck.org:

Judicial Fight Prompts Duelling, Distorted Ads
Millions are being spent on rival ads supporting and opposing two of President Bush’s most controversial judicial selections. Neither ad is completely accurate. … A rival ad by the liberal People for the American Way quotes Texas judge Janice Rogers Brown as saying seniors “are cannibalizing their grandchildren,” without making clear she was speaking metaphorically of debt being passed on to future generations by entitlement programs. … Brown was speaking about the debt being passed on to future generations, not suggesting that Medicare or Social Security causes old people to eat human flesh. Here’s the full quote from a speech she gave in 2000 before the Institute for Justice: … “My grandparents’ generation thought being on the government dole was disgraceful, a blight on the family’s honor. Today’s senior citizens blithely cannibalize their grandchildren because they have a right to get as much “free” stuff as the political system will permit them to extract.”

That’s certainly a colorful metaphor. Readers can decide for themselves whether the idea being expressed is “radical” or not.

Thanks for clearing that up! I now know that Janice Rogers Brown was not, in fact, claiming that Social Security causes seniors to literally eat the flesh of their grandchildren.

Yet it seems that Factcheck.org is not abiding by their own high standards. I think they need to issue a Factcheck on themselves, for erroneously (and perhaps maliciously and with partisan intent?) implying that the Progress for America foundation and the People for the American Way were engaged in a duel using their Ads. _Analysis_: (1) These organizations are merely legal entities, and strictly speaking cannot in fact have a duel between themselves or with real human beings. (2) Even if they could do so in principle, political Ads are not suitable weapons for dueling. According to an “authoritative history”:http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/duel/sfeature/dueling.html of the practice, there has _never_ been a case where the disputing parties agreed that their weapons of choice would be “30-second Spots at Dawn.” This is because major U.S. networks do not air political ads this early in the morning. (3) Perhaps most decisively, “dueling was outlawed”:http://internetproject.com/members/BurdanUSA/duel.htm in all American states in the years after the civil war, and in Washington DC as early as 1839. The continued neglect of basic facts like this in the public square is slowly poisoning our body politic. Oh shit. I mean, not _literally_ poisoning … Look, I’ll fix that later, OK? I need to get back to writing the release about how the “Nuclear Option” in the Senate is not actually a threat to bomb the opposing parties using silo-launched thermonuclear devices.

Tim Lambert catches John Lott “with his hand up a sock-puppet’s backside”:http://cgi.cse.unsw.edu.au/~lambert/cgi-bin/blog/2005/05#economist123 yet again. Under the reviewer name “Economist123”:http://www.amazon.com/gp/cdp/member-reviews/A2E612F97JB6X2/ref=cm_cr_auth/002-7803436-2896049?%5Fencoding=UTF8, Lott puts up a signed review of Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner’s “Freakonomics”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/006073132X/kieranhealysw-20/ref=nosim/ — a book that criticizes Lott’s work in passing. Lott says:

Not surprisingly, Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner’s new book “Freakonomics” ignores their academic critics. … If Messrs. Levitt and Dubner were correct, crime rates should have first started falling among younger people who were first born after legalization. … But in fact the precise opposite is true. …

John R. Lott Jr.
Resident Scholar
American Enterprise Institute
Washington

Now, if you scroll down through Economist123’s “other Amazon reviews”:http://www.amazon.com/gp/cdp/member-reviews/A2E612F97JB6X2/ref=cm_cr_auth/002-7803436-2896049?%5Fencoding=UTF8, you get to a review of John R. Lott’s “More Guns, Less Crime”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/A2E612F97JB6X2/kieranhealysw-20/ref=nosim/. There, Economist123 doesn’t sign his review, but neither does he mince his words:

This is by far the most comprehensive study ever done on guns. … it is important to note how many academics have tired to challenge his work on concealed handgun laws and failed and that no one has even bothered to try and challenge his work on one-gun-a-month laws and other gun control laws.

I am constantly amused the lengths to which reviewers here will go to distort Lott’s research. … These guys will do anything to keep people from reading Lott’s work.

Given the way he’s misrepresented by his critics, it’s a good job Lott has defenders like Economist123 (“amongst others”:http://cgi.cse.unsw.edu.au/~lambert/cgi-bin/blog/guns/files/lottreviews.html) to back him up.

“Tyler Cowen”:http://www.marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2005/05/revenge_of_the_.html is excitedly looking forward to Revenge of the Sith, and is encouraged by “positive review”:http://www.variety.com/VE1117927015.html in Variety:

bq. The Force returns with most of its original power regained in “Star Wars: Episode III — Revenge of the Sith.” Concluding entry in George Lucas second three-pack of space epics teems with action, drama and spectacle, and even supplies the odd surge of emotion … Whatever one thought of the previous two installments, this dynamic picture irons out most of the problems, and emerges as the best in the overall series since “The Empire Strikes Back.” Stratospheric B.O. is a given.

Not up to speed on Variety’s entertainment-industry jargon, my first thought on reading that last sentence was, “Well of course, what with all those nerds packed in to the cinema.”

George Lucas’s relationship with his fans must by now be a standard case study for second-year social worker students specializing in the treatment of abusive, co-dependent relationships:

_Fans_ (to therapist): I love him, and, and, I _know_ he’s really wonderful deep down — I know he means well and is a decent man. It’s just that sometimes … (sobbing)

(Cut to videotape)

_Lucas_: Take this, you stupid bitch! [Offscreen: Smack! Ewoks! Crash! Jar-Jar! Bang! Big parade/award ceremony at end!]

_Fans_ (crying openly): It’s my fault, I know — I just can’t seem to please him. He doesn’t _mean_ to hurt this way …

It’s awful, really.

PZ Myers has a “useful roundup”:http://pharyngula.org/index/weblog/comments/heres_where_to_find_out_whats_going_on_in_kansas/ of the current round of “hearings” on evolution “that are going on”:http://www.nytimes.com/2005/05/05/education/06cnd-evolution.html in Topkea, Kansas. He also points to “Red State Rabble”:http://redstaterabble.blogspot.com/, where you’ll find on-the-spot reports. The usual Creationist/ID guff is in full flower. The funniest sideshow is the appearance (at local taxpayer’s expense) of Mustafa Akyol, “an Islamic ID proponent from Turkey”:http://www.pitch.com/issues/2005-05-05/news/feature_1.html and all-round scheming pain in the neck. As a sociologist, these fights for footing in the public sphere and for control over things like the school curriculum are interesting for all kinds of reasons — knowledge, power, rationality, all that stuff. But personally I just find them depressing. The most annoying thing about the whole clown show is the legalistic format chosen for the “hearings,” with cross-examination of “witnesses” and other pseudo-courtroom theatrics. Such rubbish. It just feeds the he-said/she-said storytelling format that lazy reporters like best, never mind the legal profession’s tendency to believe that their adversarial methods are the best way to come to the right conclusions about any given question. Lawyers have a lot to answer for.

Judge Janice Rogers Brown is back in the news, with “Mark Schmitt”:http://markschmitt.typepad.com/decembrist/2005/05/the_fortas_fili_2.html and various members of the “Volokhs”:http://www.volokh.com discussing her promotion prospects. Henry has already “noted her fondness”:https://crookedtimber.org/2005/05/04/happy-days/ for self-help guru Sam Beckett. Below the fold I reproduce a post of mine from 2003 about “Brown’s rant”:http://www.constitution.org/col/jrb/00420_jrb_fedsoc.htm — there’s really no other word for it — to the Federalist Society, delivered at the University of Chicago Law School in 2000. Mark Schmitt links to a “similar outing”:http://www.communityrights.org/PDFs/8-12-00IFJ.pdf from around the same time. She should have taken it on the comedy club circuit.

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I’m off to “UCLA”:http://www.sscnet.ucla.edu/soc/ tomorrow to give a talk to their “Comparative Social Analysis”:http://repositories.cdlib.org/uclasoc/trcsa/ group. Provided, that is, I don’t get “shot”:http://www.sanluisobispo.com/mld/sanluisobispo/11541089.htm “on”:http://www.signonsandiego.com/news/state/20050503-1615-ca-freewayshootings.html “the”:http://www.latimes.com/news/local/state/la-me-freeway4may04,1,1550122.story?coll=la-news-state&ctrack=1&cset=true “way”:http://abcnews.go.com/US/wireStory?id=716475 to campus.

While the sun was setting this evening, I drove up to the “Catalina foothills.”:http://www.boulder.swri.edu/~durda/snow.html Tucson’s sunsets are the kind that are “so rich and colorful”:http://www.hereintucson.com/wallpaper.htm that you think photographs of them have been photoshopped. Just beautiful. Anyway, on the way back I stopped at the local “swanky mall”:http://www.tucsonattractions.com/encantada.htm (I think the proper marketing-speak is “upscale”), which is home to an Apple Store. I bought “Tiger”:http://www.apple.com/macosx/overview/. The shop was packed. They were handing out scratch-cards and I ended up winning an “iPod shuffle”:http://www.apple.com/ipodshuffle/, which was a nice surprise as I never win anything. Then I came home and while “Spotlight”:http://www.apple.com/macosx/features/spotlight/ was indexing my computer with metadata goodness, I put the kid to bed and made the first stage of a recipe for “croissants”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Croissant. (They take three days to make!) Then I finished a paper I was supposed to draft and now I’m having a beer. I imagine people like “John and Belle”:http://examinedlife.typepad.com/johnbelle/ go through life in this well-adapted manner all the time, but personally I’m still trying to figure out what was in my lunch this afternoon that caused all this to happen. Naturally I’m now warily waiting for the house to catch fire or the cat to explode or something, because things clearly need to balance out.

A post over at the “Valve”:http://www.thevalve.org/go/valve/article/going_around_the_room_at_the_desk/ asks, _inter alia_, “Do you compose on the computer? Why or why not? … Do you have a stationary and/or a pen fetish?” Scott McLemee at _Inside Higher Ed_ “chimes in”:http://www.insidehighered.com/views/2005/04/19/mclemee with a column about his own writing habits:

The reading notes, the rough outline, the first draft or two … all will be written there, in longhand. … My friends and colleagues are occasionally nonplussed to learn that someone trying to make a living as a writer actually spends the better part of his workday with pen in hand. … In my own experience, though, writing is … a matter of laboriously unknotting the thread of any given idea. And the only way to do that is by hand. … So the penchant for haunting stationary stores (and otherwise indulging a fetish for writing supplies) has the endorsement of distinguished authorities. But my efficiency-cramping distaste for the computer keyboard is somewhat more difficult to rationalize.

The implication is that, unlike the printed page and the ink-filled pen (or mechanical pencil), composing prose on a computer is different — perhaps efficiency-enhancing but somehow also inferior — and, more importantly, not subject to fetishization in the way that the pen-and-ink method is. But a moment’s reflection shows this to be wrong. Or, in my case, far too much time spent getting manuscripts (scholarly apparatus, tables, figures, indexes and all) to produce themselves automatically and beautifully shows this to be wrong.
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A “sad story”:http://www.nytimes.com/2005/04/24/fashion/sundaystyles/24plastic.html?ex=1271995200&en=51887825f7c0747a&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss in the Times today about a woman from Limerick who died following a facelift at the hands of a self-promoting “New York surgeon”:http://www.michaelevansachs.com/:

Mrs. Cregan had left her home in rural Ireland two days before, telling her husband, a farmer and part-time plumber, that she would be attending a business course in Dublin. In fact she had flown to the United States to have a face-lift performed by Dr. Michael E. Sachs in his offices on Central Park South. Hours after surgery she went into cardiac arrest and was rushed to the hospital. … Examining Mrs. Cregan’s knapsack after her death, her family found a folded copy of an article from The Sunday Independent of Ireland. It was a glowing account of a face-lift performed by Dr. Sachs, “a leading cosmetic and facial reconstruction surgeon” in the United States, the article said, with a “highly confidential client list.”

Sachs appears to have drummed up interest in Ireland via a story in the “Sunday Indo”:http://www.unison.ie/irish_independent/ Magazine about a facelift he performed on an Irish woman for free, in exchange for the publicity. Sachs seems like a dodgy character:

Dr. Sachs is among the most sued doctors in New York State, having settled 33 malpractice suits since 1995 … last year the State Health Department took the extraordinary step of banning Dr. Sachs – an ear, nose and throat specialist – from performing complex nasal surgeries without the supervision of another surgeon; … the operating room in his office is not accredited … [and] while he states on his Web site that he has been affiliated with the New York Eye and Ear Infirmary “for the last 23 years,” he is not affiliated with that hospital or any other.

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Thanks to the SQL gurus who responded so quickly to my “question”:https://crookedtimber.org/2005/04/22/sql-query-query/. Their help allowed me to get the data I wanted, namely, a table showing how often each of our authors has posted in each of our categories. A matrix like this allows for a “correspondence analysis”:http://www.statsoft.com/textbook/stcoran.html of the joint space of authors and topics, in the spirit of “Pierre Bourdieu”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0804717982/kieranhealysw-20/ref=nosim/.

I’ve updated the analysis from the original post, following some of my own advice to amalgamate the categories that different people were using to post a short joke or trivial item (like “Look like flies” or “Et Cetera” and so on). I grouped all of them into a “Trivia” category. “Books” and “Literature” were grouped together, as were “Internet”, “Intellectual Property” and “Information Technology”. Finally, I also grouped “British Politics” and “UK Politics” into a single category. Unfortunately I had to drop Jon Mandle from the analysis (sorry Jon!) because none of his posts has a category.

Correspondence analysis lets you represent two kinds of entity simultaneously in two dimensions, allowing you to see how the elements of each entity are related to one another, and to those in the other entity. The idea is to reduce high-dimensional spaces (many authors, many categories) to low-dimensionsal ones with minimal loss of information. The figure below (also available in “a larger size”:http://www.kieranhealy.org/files/misc/dudi-ct.png and in “PDF format”:http://www.kieranhealy.org/files/misc/dudi-ct.pdf) gives the results for the CT data.

The results are interesing. You can assess the similarity of authors and categories to one another by their closeness on the diagram — or, more specifically, by the size of the angle formed between any two entities and the origin. Entities further out from the origin are more influential in structuring the dimensions that the figure is constructed on.

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Any MySQL gurus out there, who also know about WordPress’s database structure? I have a question for you.
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It takes a long, long apprenticeship laboring the Augean stables of “Globollocks”:https://crookedtimber.org/2005/04/19/gimme-an-air-gimme-a-miles/ to write “a sentence like this”:http://nypress.com/18/16/news&columns/taibbi.cfm:

bq. The walls had fallen down and the Windows had opened, making the world much flatter than it had ever been—but the age of seamless global communication had not yet dawned.

Amazing. Tom Friedman is a God. No, not a God so much as a moustachioed force of nature, pumped up on the steroids of globalization, a canary in the coalmine of an interconnected era whose tentacles are spreading over the face of a New Economy savannah where old lions are left standing at their waterholes, unaware that the young Turks — and Indians — have both hands on the wheel of fortune favors the brave face the music to their ears to the, uh, ground.

From a WP story “about the conclave”:http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A6132-2005Apr20.html:

bq. Although the cardinals swore an oath of perpetual secrecy about what occurred in the conclave, many began to talk about it on Wednesday.

I know it’s impossible to properly conceive of eternity within the finitute of the human mind, but you’d think the Cardinals might have done better than “about 24 hours after the Conclave.” Still, the article is worth a read for its glimpse of the politics of the Church at its highest levels.

“An article about new books on Robert Oppenheimer”:http://www.nytimes.com/2005/04/21/books/21masl.html?ex=1271736000&en=2a34a86231a33e36&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss quotes the following zinger:

bq. “American Prometheus” does capture the world in which Oppenheimer established his credentials: thick with future Nobelists, bristling with innovation, cattily competitive. (As one of his fellow scholars remarked about another: “So young and already so unknown.”)

That one’s up there with “This book fills a needed gap in the literature.”