Fred Halliday writes, as part of a (not unsympathetic) twenty-year retrospective on communism:

bq. … underpinning these three ideas – “state”, “progress”, “revolution” – lay a key component of this legacy: the lack of an independently articulated ethical dimension. True, there was a supposedly ethical dimension – whatever made for progress, crudely defined as winning power for a party leadership, and gaining power for a, mythified, working class – was defended. However, the greatest failure of socialism over its 200 years, especially in its Bolshevik form, was the lack of an ethical dimension in regard to the rights of individuals and citizens in general, indeed in regard to all who were not part of the revolutionary elite, and the lack of any articulated and justifiable criteria applicable to the uses, legitimate and illegitimate, of violence and state coercion. That many of those who continue to uphold revolutionary-socialist ideals, and the potential of Marxist theory, today appear not to have noticed this, that they indeed reject, when not scorn, the concept of “rights”, is an index of how little they have learned, or have noticed the sufferings of others.

There is a difficulty, or at least, so it seems to me, in making this point as part of a diagnosis of what was wrong with the communist movement _in particular_. It is that the very same disregard for, or scepticism about, the rights of individuals, the same willingness to sacrifice individual lives for valuable goals (or even in the name of “progress” broadly conceived) has usually characterized communism’s enemies and competitors too. Consequentialism was the dominant philosophy of government pretty much everywhere throughout the twentieth century.

So we were down for a few hours this afternoon thanks to a massive flood of comment spam. Tyler Cowen had a “post”:http://www.marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2009/09/not-bad-for-a-spam-comment.html a few weeks ago on the cognitive benefits of spam, which made me realize that much of my knowledge of the society I live in comes from trawling this spam and deleting it. At least 80% of the (presumed) female celebrities whose nude pictures are yours if only you click on this dodgy-sounding address are known to me from spam and spam alone (Jessica Simpson???). I would have no idea that “Ugg boots” (whatever they are) existed, let alone that anyone cared about them, were it not that a particularly persistent Chinese spammer tries to tell the users of my “academic blog wiki”:http://www.academicblogs.org about them at every possible opportunity. Sadly, given the existence of “Chris Uggen”:http://chrisuggen.blogspot.com/, I can’t just ban page changes using the term in question.

There’s a quasi-serious point buried in there, which is that the Internets, and the possibilities it offers to non-regular TV watchers like me to retrieve the information that we are interested in _and no more_ can lead to deficits in certain kinds of common cultural knowledge. Not the kinds of civic knowledge that Cass Sunstein etc care about – but celebrity gossip, junky pop culture etc.¹ Targeted advertising – to the extent that it actually works – is obviously no solution. But spam, designed as it is to cater to the lowest and broadest of tastes actually provides me with significant information that I probably wouldn’t pick up otherwise. Not that it makes spam trawling worthwhile or anything, but at least it gives me _some_ benefit.

¹ Not that I am above these things at all; just that I don’t usually have the time, energy and attention to dig it out. It has to be a Jon Stewart-worthy scandal, preferably involving Republican senators, highly specialized providers of intimate services, and greased porcupines or the like, to make it through my filters.

Being the second part of my reply to “Eric Posner”:http://volokh.com/2009/10/26/bloggingheads-cont%E2%80%99d/ …

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I recall a short but striking conversation with the formidable Piero Sraffa at the Economics Faculty cocktail party after Dennis Robertson’s Marshall Lectures. I well knew that it was Sraffa whom Wittgenstein had described as his mentor during the gestation of the Philosophical Investigations, but I still ventured a rather simple-minded remark about the obvious importance of the fact-value distinction to the social sciences. He turned on me his charming smile and glittering eyes. Did I really suppose that one could switch from fact to value as if simply moving a handle? His voice rose and his Italian accent grew sharper. “Fact, value! Value, fact! Fact, value! Value, Fact! FACT, VALUE! VALUE, FACT!” I beat a swift and chastened retreat. — W.G. Runciman, Confessions of a Reluctant Theorist, 18.

We announced a while back that we’d be doing a regularish photo slot on Sundays, so here’s an offering for today, sparked by no better reason than that I was leafing through a large compendium of photos of the 20th century yesterday (some famous, some not) and I was arrested by Aleksander Rodchenko’s portrait of Lilya Brik. Reused, recycled, copied, imitated, parodied, the original still has the capacity to make me stop and wonder at it. Such energetic, dynamic composition in the picture, and such optimism and vigour in the woman depicted.

Back in June, I excoriated Gordon Brown for his appointment of Alan Sugar as his “enterprise czar”. Since then, I’ve sometimes wavered in my determination not to vote for NuLab again, particularly when I consider the appalling nature of their replacements (even if Rory Stewart does sound slightly exciting). After all, I sometimes say to myself, Gordon Brown did do pretty well when faced with teh end of the world, and that ought to count for something … But the latest bit of populist meddling, sacking David Nutt for saying that drugs policy should be guided by science, reminds me of why they deserve to be beaten (and establishes why Alan “the minister” Johnson is unfit to succeed Brown), Oh for someone decent to vote for.

My edited methods book Research Confidential is out! I had asked for feedback about the title and cover illustration here on CT and accordingly have acknowledged the readers of this blog in the Preface (see snapshot below) including an explicit shout-out to reader Vivian for inspiring the subtitle of the book: Solutions to Problems Most Social Scientists Pretend They Never Have.

Today’s Inside Higher Ed has a Q&A with me about some questions related to the book such as why I opted for asking relatively junior scholars for contributions rather than going with more experienced senior researchers. Recently, the Chronicle also featured a Q&A with me about the chapter I co-authored with Chris Karr describing diary-data collection using text-messages.

Many thanks to the contributors of the volume for agreeing to respond to my somewhat unorthodox request to write about the behind-the-scenes dirty details of their research projects. If you’d like to read these, various online stores (e.g., Amazon, B&N, Michigan Press) are selling the volume.

Eric Posner has “two”:http://volokh.com/2009/10/27/reply-to-henry-farrell-part-ii/ “responses”:http://volokh.com/2009/10/26/bloggingheads-cont%E2%80%99d/ to my earlier post on international law. I’ll be writing two responses to the responses – the first (on Eric’s second rebutting post) beneath the fold [click to continue…]

Just after Mary Robinson announced that she was not interested in the EU Presidency, former Irish Taoiseach and outgoing EU ambassador to Washington “John Bruton has put his hat in the ring”:http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/frontpage/2009/1029/1224257604883.html. I know him and like him enormously (he’s a very decent right winger), so I won’t speak to the merits of his candidacy on grounds of manifest personal bias. But if I was a betting man (and there were a contract at Intrade), I’d think him well worth a considerable flutter. He fulfils the informal desiderata (Christian Democrat from a small state), but even more importantly seems like a very plausible compromise candidate. The Germans are likely to veto Blair, while the UK is almost certain to want to veto overly enthusiastic federalists like Jean-Claude “‘I am not a dwarf'”:http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&oi=news_result&ct=res&cd=2&ved=0CAwQqQIwAQ&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.ft.com%2Fcms%2Fs%2F55d05d12-c362-11de-8eca-00144feab49a.html&ei=ifnoSuC5L8HElAeg1YjBDQ&usg=AFQjCNHvNraUGoaaoyb7mPQ920MIXSVYmg Juncker and Guy Verhofstadt. Bruton is plausibly acceptable to both sides – he is pro-European enough to keep the mainlanders happy, but very well liked in the UK. At the moment, I’m not seeing any other declared candidate who could plausibly get a consensus behind him or her. I’ll try to write more on the candidates as the politicking continues …

A week or two ago I was doing a bit of work on the Wikipedia article on political correctness, and I came up with what may well be the first introduction of the term (initialised as “p.c.”) to the general public, as represented by the readership of the New York Times, in an article by Richard Bernstein.

At least since the 1970s, the description “politically correct” or, in Australia, “ideologically sound”, had been used within the left to mock those who were excessively concerned with doctrinal and linguistic orthodoxy. The story of how “political correctness” turned from an inside joke to a Marxist-inspired assault on All We Hold Dear is reasonably well known. Bernstein traces its emergence as a pejorative to a conference by the Western Humanities Conference held, appropriately enough, in Berkeley.

For me, at least, the real surprise in this article came right at the end, with a quote from Roger Kimball, now of Pajamas Media, who said “It’s a manifestation of what some are calling liberal fascism”. Apparently, Jonah Goldberg owes him royalties.

Update I haven’t made proper use of the excellent NYTimes search facility until now. This search shows a string of sardonic references to political correctness in the Arts section (and one reference to its use by the Chinese CP) appearing in the years before Bernstein’s piece. After that, there’s an explosion). And “liberal fascism” made its first outing (post-1980 at any rate) in a 1988 story about the Dartmouth Review, spoken by then editor Harmeet Dhillon.

My friends at Labor Notes tell me that it has gone, rather spectacularly, online. More then ten years of archived issues, the current issue, a blog, and a shop (with hoodies and mugs!).

You don’t have to go back into the 19th Century to find those dark depths, you know. Marvel did swimsuit issues in the 90’s. Start here. Here is another set.

So, which page is your favorite and why? (Defend your answer.) I’m partial to the Escher-like quality of Thunderstrike’s – what is it? I guess you could describe what we are seeing here as a cross between a deltoid and a mobius strip. Or between a pectoral and a tesseract?

In short: where exactly is either his left shoulder or the left side of his chest? Did his shoulder just sort of give up on becoming an arm and then the arm tried again, launching itself out, a bit below, where the intercostals should be? I could stare for hours. It’s like a cross between a Japanese sand garden and a fancy butcher shop. But perhaps you prefer the Doctor Strange pin-up in which the good doctor is – well, how tall would you say he looks to be?

via War Rocket Ajax

I snagged another good comics history recently. A History of American Graphic Humor, vol. 2: 1865-1938 (1938), by William Murrel. (You could get it through Abebooks; but I bought the last cheap copy. Sorry.) They sure liked to make fun of Oscar Wilde, back in the day. [click to continue…]

Following up this post, here’s the way to do the scan-and-OCR thing (if you are a mac user). [click to continue…]