“This”:http://littleprofessor.typepad.com/the_little_professor/2007/01/scholars_studen.html is rather wonderful.
From the category archives:
Just broke the Water Pitcher
Henry’s post below reminds me of one of the 50,000 completely ridiculous things that have happened to my sister in her day. She went to a Christian day camp in Sewanee one summer when she was about 11. They all set out for an overnight camp-out, and decided upon a meadow of tall grass. The camp’s faithful golden retriever promptly got bitten by a copperhead. Now, for the benefit of our European readers, I will disclose some wisdom from the South, and that is, where there’s one copperhead, there’s another. The only solutions are either to get the hell away, or, if it’s your own yard you’re talking about, stalk around nervously with a gun until you’ve shot both of them. (I did once watch my mom chop the head off a snake with a hoe and some vigorous action, but that was only a rat-snake. It had just swallowed “Quing-Quack”, my newborn duckling friend, who unfortunately did not survive. The life of a hippie farm is not necessarily a placid one.) [click to continue…]
The Eastern Division of the American Philosophical Association had its annual meeting last week. This year it was in Washington, and for the second straight year I attended but went to exactly zero sessions – I was conducting interviews. But the real excitement was at 4:30 am on Saturday when the fire alarm went off in the hotel. I basically assumed somebody had pulled a switch in a drunken stupor, but my wife and I decided not to take the time to get our 6-year-old dressed, so we just wrapped her up in her sleeping bag and I carried her down the hall to the stairs. We definitely smelled something burning when we passed the seventh floor, and as we waited outside some people were saying that they had crawled through part of the hall on the seventh floor because the smoke was so thick. The rumor was that one woman was taken away by ambulance after breathing in smoke, but I didn’t see that.
After about an hour (I’m guessing – I didn’t have a watch), we were allowed to go into the ballroom where we waited for another hour before being allowed back into our rooms. On the ground floor, there was some water damage from the sprinklers on the seventh. On our way back to our room we peeked into the seventh floor where the smell of smoke was strong and several of the doors had been broken down. No word on how it started, but I’m sure grateful that the alarms and sprinklers worked.
Last spring I put up a post about Randy Cohen, the NY Times Magazine “ethicist”, and I quoted the following passage from his book: “real virtue lies not in heroically saving poor orphans from burning buildings but in steadfastly working for a world where orphans are not poor and buildings have decent fire codes.” Let’s hear it for decent fire codes.
I see a lot of pundits and politicians saying that Sunnis and Shiites in Iraq have been fighting for a millennium. We need better history than that. The Shiite tribes of the south probably only converted to Shiism in the past 200 years. And, Sunni-Shiite riots per se were rare in 20th century Iraq. Sunnis and Shiites cooperated in the 1920 rebellion against the British. If you read the newspapers in the 1950s and 1960s, you don’t see anything about Sunni-Shiite riots. There were peasant/landlord struggles or communists versus Baathists. The kind of sectarian fighting we’re seeing now in Iraq is new in its scale and ferocity, and it was the Americans who unleashed it.
I have a vague recollection that, in the run-up to war, more or less this point was adduced as evidence democratization could work: no deep history of sectarian in-fighting (not like the Balkans, or anything.) I don’t have a thing to add, ignorant as I am, but I think Cole’s choice of verbs – unleashed – points in the direction of a question. It seems to imply the opposite of what Cole pretty clearly means to suggest: namely, that the beast itself is substantially new. So what should we say? The most obvious thing? Saddam bred the beast, but kept it on a leash; we unleashed it? But I’m not going to bother to pretend I know what I’m talking about here.
Cole links approvingly to this post that offers a slightly different assessment – namely, the beast was born, leashless, after Saddam fell: “close social and political identification with one’s religious group has come about largely as a result of the political environment after the fall of Saddam Hussein – the situation of the Shi’ites in Iraq before that was largely the result of the clan-based nature of political power in the country rather than religious discrimination.” I have to say: this could be cited as evidence that ‘it could have worked, but the Bush crew gratuitously screwed up the reconstruction’ – a line that has taken quite a beating the last 12 months or so. (I’m not proposing we revive such counter-factual apologetics. I’m just asking.)
Homecoming is, for me, always an invitation to unnatural acts – specifically, reading the Wall Street Journal editorial page. (Hey. Dad’s a subscriber.) For example, this Bret Stephens piece (Dec. 12), “Honor Killing” [maybe a web link, but I’m not seeing it]:
Alexis de Tocqueville observed that in America morals count for a lot while honor counts for relatively little. Reading the lamentable report of the Iraq Study Group, it shows.
The operative word in the ISG report is “should,” which is what grammarians call a defective verb. The report easily contains more than a 100 shoulds, varying tonally from hectoring to plaintive to nitpicking …
By contrast the word “honor” appears just once: “We also honour the many Iraqis who have sacrificed on behalf of their country,” writes ISG co-chairman James Baker and Lee Hamilton, who also put in a kind word for our Coalition allies.
But honor isn’t simply a sentimental verb. It is a decisive principle of action in all foreign policy, never more so than in the honor-obsessed Middle East. It is not about good intentions, wisdom or virtue, but about appearances and perception. “Honor acts solely for the public eye,” wrote Tocqueville. In practice, it means standing by one’s friends and defying one’s enemies, whatever the price. During the 1973 Yom Kippur War Richard Nixon ordered the military resupply of Israel in its hour of need not because he was sympathetic to Jews – he wasn’t – but because he understood that the U.S. could not be seen to let a client down. Nine months later, he was accorded a ticker-tape parade through the streets of Cairo.
Then Stephens accuses the authors of the report of failing ‘the test of honor’ by conceding, with their first sentence, that “the situation in Iraq is grave and deteriorating.” Then it actually gets worse. (And, obviously, we could back up and point out that there are problems with reducing honor to ‘help your friends, hurt your enemies’. This confusion, I’ll wager, has more than a little to do with the man’s bizarre allergy to ‘should’, in a document that is supposed to recommend a course of action.) But let’s go back to the Tocqueville quote. It’s actually interesting to read how the quoted passage continues: [click to continue…]
Did you know?
On April 2, 1917, the United States declared war on Germany despite considerable public opposition. Just a few months after the United States entered the war, Secretary of the Treasury, William Gibbs McAdoo, called the public mood a “delirium”. Sauerkraut became liberty cabbage, German Shepards became Alsatians and the city of Syracuse banned pinochle, a German card game. The press published calls for mass hangings of “disloyal German-Americans” and some clergymen compared Germans to cholera germs that must be annihilated. Despite this, naturalized Germans collected relief funds for the Red Cross and served in the U.S. Army.
They banned pinochle? (Wikipedia informs me it is etymologically derived from the German Binokel.) ‘Liberty cabbage’ puts that whole ‘freedom fries’ episode in perspective. At least we aren’t getting any dumber. I wonder whether some shrewd entrepreneur marketed pinochle decks under the badass tempting slogan ‘banned in Syracuse!’
For all you game theorists out there, Hammad Siddiqi (2006): The social norm of leaving the toilet seat down: A game theoretic analysis. Unpublished (available “here”:http://mpra.ub.uni-muenchen.de/856/ as PDF). Don’t bother with the obvious jokes about trembling hand equilibria – the author has made them already. Via “Mark Thoma”:http://economistsview.typepad.com/economistsview/2006/12/that_settles_it.html.
I’m writing this post in part to recommend Charles Stross’s _The Jennifer Morgue_ (publisher, Powells, Amazon, As Brad DeLong says, if you’re into Cthulhu mythos, operating system humour, spy novels and parodies of bureaucracy, this is the novel for you. But mostly, I’m writing it to perpetrate the pun in the title, which in addition to being atrocious is also almost certainly incomprehensible to anyone who hasn’t read the book already. But it could have been worse … [worser]Goldfingerling? Branzino Royale? Flounderball?[/worser] _Much_ worse.
Jim Henley “passed on”:http://highclearing.com/index.php/archives/2006/10/14/5537 one of those internets memes to me a few weeks ago which I’m finally responding to – name three authors whom you’ve given up on, and say why. Here goes …
[click to continue…]
A couple days ago Matthew Yglesias took time out from thinking about tough issues to note that WW I was really, really a terrible thing. Jim Henley commented:
The fascinating thing about recent American "conservatism" is how many Republican commentators have tried to rehabilitate WWI as a noble cause. It was when Tacitus made that argument that I first really understood that he was insane. I’ve since seen it from others.
On cue, Instapundit linked to this, by Trevino (a.k.a. Tactitus):
Most humorous wikivandalism ever. (via Dave Moles.)
Perhaps one shouldn’t laugh at such things. It encourages bad behavior. For example, here’s vandalism more genuinely annoying and not creative or delightful in the least. Will Baude emails to inform that somehow Crescat Sententia lost their domain to some search engine optimization outfit. Which then offered to sell it back at an extravagant mark-up. Crescat Sententia has declined their offer and moved here. From org to net. Update bookmarks accordingly, and do not favor the old address with your custom, if possible. Apparently for a while the lovely SEO people were hosting a cache of an old page in the hopes of disguising what had happened. Naughty, naughty.
UPDATE: In defense of wikipedia be it noted that the vandalism only lived for 38 minutes before being reverted. Hmmm, there’s a good idea for a story. An eccentric treasure-hunter is sent off on a months-long quest for a lost tribe in South America, on the unfortunate evidential basis of a vandalized wikipedia page he read in the 12 minutes between when it was posted and reverted by the ever-watchful editors. Of course it turns out that, quite by coincidence, everything the vandalized page said was true. The vandal himself is somehow ensnared in the plot and ends up sacrificed to a giant snake.
UPDATE 2: It’s coming to me, as in a dream. It turns out wikipedia itself is an elaborate plot concocted by the Knights Templar, together with the greatest of their hashhashim enemies, one al-Whikid (!). To ‘hide their greatest treasures in plain sight’, they conspire to create wikipedia. During the Middle Ages it was maintained by monks on scrolls. A specific pattern of reversion edits constitutes … a map! So there is an esoteric as well as an exoteric wiki. Fortunately, Nicholas Cage stumbles on the aforementioned vandalized page. It contains a jpeg of a map to a tribe. The map is part of the true map, but the vandal was just using it as likely mash-up material. So the film will be like National Treasure meets Hackers meets The Da Vinci Code (‘don’t I know you?’). There will be a scene in which the true wiki is surreptitiously handed off in a USB thumb-drive shaped like Quark‘s head.
UPDATE 3: The vandal is played by Steve Buscemi. (Because he and Cage had chemistry in Con Air.)
UPDATE 4: And Ed Harris plays an earnest wikipedia command editor, thus reprising his stern, steady role in Apollo 13. When the Knights realize their plan has failed they attempt to sabotage the entire wiki, reverted every single page to stuff about Buffy the Vampire Slayer Firefly. In the wikipedia command room all the editors (buzz cuts, thin black ties, pocket protectors) are frantically scribbling their corrections to the erroneous Buffy Firefly posts on paper. Harris: “with all due respect, sir, I believe this will be our finest edit.”
UPDATE 5: Who do you think would win in a fight between Wikipedia and Aquaman?
Damnit, Crooked Timber should have some sort of nail-biting election material up. (Journalism is the second-hand on the clock of history – basest material, never runs true. What’s a blog without posts that will be obsolete in 6 hours?) Anyway, Hugh Hewitt has a post up with the title ‘exit polls more than 6 pts biased towards Dems‘. There isn’t any explanation. The whole post reads ‘and possibly worse’. I suppose the point could be: exit polls skew Dem, but how could you know – yet – that they skew 6 pts? I take it there is a bit of a comic over-reaching for the term ‘bias’ here. If the Dems win, the election was ‘biased’!
UPDATE: Scott Kaufman has a good, Onionesque report. “Emails obtained by the Associated Press indicate that top Republican officials now believe that the margin of victory will be too high to rig the results. “A four or five percent margin, we can handle,” said one GOP official. “But eight or higher? That’s asking the implausible.”
UPDATE the 2nd: Hewitt is reaching for a silver lining and coming up with … at least the Soviet Union has collapsed. (That’s worth cheering about.) So: three cheers!
Michael Ledeen blew my mind today:
More on Media Coverage [of the Kerry flap–Belle] [Michael Ledeen]
Nothing at all on the front page of the WSJ, quite disgraceful. In case you wondered about the WSJ newsroom, the main political story is an allegation of graft against a Republican congressman.A story that should have been delayed until after the election. Talk about journalistic ethics! Get a new editor for the news section.
Is this supposed to be satirical in some way? I think not, but then again surely he doesn’t think…that is…I
Moving on, John Derbyshire continues to stoke my guilty admiration:
Yes, But [John Derbyshire]
John Kerry is awful, and anything we can do further to degrade his political prospects is worth doing. But really, I saw a clip of him making the much-deplored remark, and it was obvious that the dimwit in Iraq that he referred to was George W. Bush, not the American soldier. It was a dumb joke badly delivered, but his meaning was plain. My pleasure in watching JK squirm is just as great as any other conservative’s, but something is owed to honesty. There’s a lot of fake outrage going round here.
Is this why Derbyshire always posts from home, so as to avoid uncomfortable moments around the NR watercooler? Do they have tenure at the National Review? This blithe insouciance, these outright accusations of bad faith against one’s colleagues, seem to me rightly to belong to the tenured. Perhaps William F. Buckley has given him an endowed chair in Disarmingly Frank Racial Prejudice/Old-fashioned Tory Studies.
Glenn Greenwald is complaining about Peggy Noonan and, by extension, a considerable swathe of the punditocracy. I’ve been meaning to write that post myself, give or take. The problem is: it’s a bit hard to complain effectively about such things because you end up just sounding extra bothered about minor stuff from years ago. It seems like there should be some snappy way to make this charge stick and sting a little. Thus do I toss my post title – humble message in a bottle – onto the sea of talking points. Perhaps it can be used by someone to embarrass someone who deserves it.