So now we know “why Srebrenica fell”:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=onySJCkRH6g&feature=player_embedded. It was party due to the fact that gays could be openly gays, which internally weakened the Dutch Army, which as a consequence was no longer able to protect the local population.

I’m not going to write a real post about this. Erik Voeten at “The Monkey Cage”:http://www.themonkeycage.org has basically said all there is to say. “Go read and comment there”:http://www.themonkeycage.org/2010/03/did_gays_in_the_dutch_military.html.

I’ve put together a symposium on the philosophy of Amartya Sen, in which Sen himself will take part. The symposium will be held in Rotterdam on July 1st, and will be preceded by a public lecture on global justice. Details below the fold.
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Oliver Kamm in the Times

bq. In his first book, The Destruction of Dresden, he [David Irving] concluded that at least 135,000 had died. That figure quickly made its way into culture. Kurt Vonnegut, who as a prisoner of war had survived the bombing of Dresden, alighted on Irving’s figure and made this alleged atrocity — complete with a long quotation from Irving — a central theme of his novel Slaughterhouse-Five. But the statistic was bogus and was revealed as such during Irving’s unsuccessful libel suit against Deborah Lipstadt and Penguin Books in 2000.

So what’s Kamm’s thought about Vonnegut here? That Vonnegut, who was there, wouldn’t have written the novel if he’d known that “only” 25,000 people had been incinerated? That the central event of the novel, the execution of Edgar Darby, would have lost its absurdity if a smaller casualty figure had been accepted? Incidentally, the “long quotation” from Irving appears on pp. 136-7 of the novel and is not, in fact, a quotation from Irving but rather from two forewords to “an American edition” of Irving’s book by officers of the American and British air forces. People who write columns excoriating other people’s shoddy research really should be more careful.

So, when Michiko Kakutani (the daughter of the famous mathematician btw) writes an article “deploring the tendency”:http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/21/books/21mash.html?pagewanted=1&ref=books of modern culture towards semi-coherent mash-ups of other people’s work, and the article is itself a semi-coherent mash-up of the work of other people (mostly themselves deploring semi-coherent mash-ups), is she being obtuse, quite brilliant in a self-undermining way, or something else entirely? I genuinely can’t figure it out.

Guardian story “here”:http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2010/mar/18/alex-chilton-dies.

The blogosphere was very exercised about the arguments for and against war in Afghanistan and Iraq, but as both conflicts have dragged on there has been less sustained attention given to the developments within those countries. Still, a trip over to Amazon presented me with a list of possible books to read about Iraq, the invasion, the occupation, the current situation, etc. Not so for Afghanistan where the top choice was an updated edition of a book first published in 1981 ( _Afghanistan: Land of Conflict and Beauty: A History of Conflict_ by John C. Griffiths). So is there anything? (And if not, why not?)

Long ago, before there was the internet, I was so much more persistently and baldly ignorant about various and sundry things that interested me. Example: I just got a guitar – well, in October – and resolved that I would finally learn to play after all these years. Needless to say, I can find lots of videos and online resources. It’s highly satisfactory. When I tried to learn guitar in college, only to give up quickly, I had none of that. (I had a teacher but, looking back, he was a bad teacher. Probably it was my fault, too.) I’m a lefty, which means I now occasionally Google up things to to with left-handed guitar. Which means that I randomly found a video of former Cars guitarist Elliot Easton musing about growing up a left-handed guitarist. Not a thrilling interview, but he remarks, off-handedly, that he had been playing left-handed for some time before learning that left-handed guitars – not just restrung righties – actually existed. And then he muses generally about how little information you had. You were just staring at a few LP covers, wondering what the hell was going on. You were pretty sure to suffer some or other stupidly and persistently huge hole in your knowledge-base, due to the accident of not happening to know someone who told you the thing any fool would Google up in a minute today. I think about the things that interested me, growing up – like science fiction novels, for example. And comics. And I realize that almost everything I knew about these things that mattered a great deal to me (did you notice?) I learned by talking to about six people, four of whom were kids like me, and going to four different stores in my hometown. (And sex. Did I mention that, as a young teen, I was quite intrigued by the topic of sex, but – sadly – lacked reliable sources of information and reportage on the subject.) I suspect you could provide your own examples, if you grew up pre-internet. And I feel it’s pretty important, somehow, that those of you who grew up post-internet probably can’t provide your own examples. Or rather fewer.

Of course, this is a flagrantly obvious thought: the internet = important! I don’t really know what to say about how it has made a difference, specifically, that things like serious young left-handed guitarists who don’t even know there are such things as left-handed guitars are now more infrequent occurrences. These sorts of minor epistemic follies tended to elude systematic documentation. Information now gets spread more easily and therefore efficiently. That’s for sure! But I feel there’s more to be said about the ways in which the shape of an individual’s whole view of the world used to be a lot less …(what’s the word?) … internetish? Maybe I should Google up something about Marx + “the idiocy of rural life”. I know that’s Marx’s phrase but I’ve never read what he had to say on the subject. (Well there you go!) Possibly there is some analogy to be drawn.

Sad and upsetting times in Ireland. Cardinal Brady, it turns out, was instrumentally involved in the closed investigation of the monstrous Fr. Smyth, and himself swore to secrecy two children raped by Smyth. The incident simply resulted in Smyth getting some form of censure from the Church and going on to rape and abuse many, many more children. Whose parents were in turn stonewalled by the Church. How does anyone get over this? Should they?

Meanwhile, Pope Ratzinger is wriggling off the hook – at least this hook, this time – for his own involvement in a cover up. It’s odd to me that people are searching so intently for Ratzinger’s smoking gun, when as head of the Congregation for the Indoctrination of the Faith, he wrote to bishops telling them that breaking the seal of secrecy on church investigations of sex abuse was punishable by excommunication. That’s the smoking gun that destroyed not just the childhoods and perhaps lives of one or two children in Ratzinger’s direct responsibility, but thousands of children around the world who deserved better from the one, true Church.

The Irish adult voices of raped children are joined by American ones; people now grown up who were raped and abused by Fr. Smith when he was sent away from these shores and off to where he wasn’t known and could start again. A Connecticut woman poignantly asks why she was repeatedly raped by a priest who had been sent to America instead of to the police. An Irish woman asks why no one went to the police. If they had, she might have been saved. Many might have been saved. [click to continue…]

“Tyler Cowen”:http://www.marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2010/03/assorted-links-12.html links to a post on a blog that I had hitherto been unaware of, “True Economics”:http://trueeconomics.blogspot.com/2010/03/economics-11032010-replying-to-prof.html (proprietor: Constantin Gurdgiev, Adjunct Lecturer in Finance with Trinity College, Dublin and Chairman of the Ireland-Russia Business Association), asking the question “How much did the Irish government subsidize housing?” I’m writing a review of Fintan O’Toole’s “Ship of Fools” which speaks specifically to this question, and the answer is ‘not very much at all.’

Gurdgiev’s post is both quite mad and oddly charming, combining denunciations of the ‘Stalinesque schemes’ to provide development funds for Western Ireland and a railway link thereto, with quite sincere-sounding suggestions that he wants to engage with his critics. His intent is to rebut Paul Krugman’s “recent column”:http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/08/opinion/08krugman.html on the Irish economic collapse (Krugman builds explicitly on this “recent report”:http://www.irisheconomy.ie/Notes/IrishEconomyNote10.pdf by three Irish economists). But his post, entertaining though it is, cannot be taken as a reliable guide to housing policy in Ireland, or indeed to Ireland’s economic crisis.
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My friend Tony Laden says, “I am toying with an idea for a new upper-level undergraduate ethics class that would take as its reading a group of about 10-15 really fantastic papers in ethics that are accessible to undergrads, and then working through them one at a time at whatever pace the class finds worthwhile. So they don’t have to survey the field or hang together on a topic or in a tradition. They just have to be really good pieces of philosophy and/or really good pieces of ethics.”

I think it’s a great idea. My top-of-the-head suggestions are below the fold. Some of these would be on any list I made, but another day other papers would have come to the top. Feel free to add, debate, etc.

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If you are one of the few remaining people not to have tried it out, watch this movie or this Daily Show clip and then come back here. The rest of you know that Chatroulette is a human slot machine where pretty much every other round comes up with some guy abusing himself or demanding that any ladies within range expose themselves. As a trained observer of human behavior I was professionally obliged to investigate. Bearing in mind the second sort of modal user, I used the following image:

Selected perfectly SFW results follow.

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Dutch politics was shaken up today, when “Wouter Bos”:http://www.pvda.nl/politici/politici/wouterbos, the political leader of the social-democrats, “PVDA”:http://nu.pvda.nl/, announced that he will leave politics in order to be able to spend more time on another major responsibility he has in life – his three children and his wife. His children are almost one, four, and six, and his decision to want to spend more time with them was the only reason he gave in his unexpected “farewell speech”:http://nu.pvda.nl/berichten/2010/03/Verklaring+Wouter+Bos.html. The Dutch cabinet was dissolved recently over a dispute between the Christian Democratic Party (“CDA”:http://www.cda.nl/) and the PVDA on whether or not to continue sending troops to Afghanistan, and elections are scheduled for early June.

I think this is a great loss for the social-democratic party, a great loss for Dutch politics and public life, but an amazing supporting signal for the kind of feminist movement which I endorse. A top male politicians says: “Enough. I don’t want to have children and a wife whom I never see.” And he uses the right word: “major responsibility”, not just something he fancies doing. His decision will serve to an increasing acceptance that both men and women are entitled to combine having a family with doing paid work – even if this implies that they need to quit a top position.

I’ve seen many short interviews today with other Dutch politicians and other public figures. And it’s interesting that most of them said they “understood” his decision, adding that he made enormous sacrifices to his family life in the last years. Of course, it is likely that other motives played a role too – but I don’t see any serious grounds for doubting his official reason as being the main reason for his decision. When about six years ago, he was ‘merely’ an MP (and not yet a Minister of Finance), he choose to use his legal right to parental leave and thus was home with his baby one day a week. I therefore think that the few public figures who have today said that his was just ‘an excuse’ and that he should give his ‘real reasons’ for quiting politics are wrong and should be deeply ashamed of themselves. If a woman were to give ‘time for family’ as the reason we would believe her; if a man, who earlier on in his political life took parental leave, gives the same reason, we should similarly believe him. Anything else would be wrong and sexist. I hope he and his kids will enjoy the time together.

(found at Luke Surl: H/T to CT commenter, tiredofblogs)

The Republican campaign to rename everything after Ronald Reagan has reached new heights of absurdity with the suggestion that Reagan should replace Ulysses S. Grant on the $US50 bill. A couple of questions struck me here
(a) Wasn’t Grant a Republican himself ?
(b) Don’t the Repugs have anybody other than Reagan to name things after?
The answer to the second question turns out to be “No”, and explains the first. Looking back at Republican presidents, nobody is really keen to remember Bush I and II, Ford or Nixon, and the same applies to Hoover[1], Coolidge and Harding. But at least some effort is required to forget these guys, unlike the non-entities who followed and immediately preceded Grant.

In the 20th century, Eisenhower was successful and widely admired, but has long been denounced by movement Repugs as the archetypal RINO. More recently, the same condemnation has been extended to Teddy Roosevelt. That leaves Lincoln and Grant. This otherwise unexceptional NYT story about Texas school textbooks explains (if you read through to the end) why these founding heroes of the Republican party are being downgraded.

With the obligatory exception of Washington, the only American presidents who pass the purity test of today’s GOP are Reagan and Jefferson.*

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