Ms. Almontaser, a teacher by training and an activist who had carefully built ties with Christians and Jews, said she was forced to resign by the mayor’s office following a campaign that pitted her against a chorus of critics who claimed she had a militant Islamic agenda. In newspaper articles and Internet postings, on television and talk radio, Ms. Almontaser was branded a “radical,” a “jihadist” and a “9/11 denier.” She stood accused of harboring unpatriotic leanings and of secretly planning to proselytize her students. Despite Ms. Almontaser’s longstanding reputation as a Muslim moderate, her critics quickly succeeded in recasting her image.

The conflict tapped into a well of post-9/11 anxieties. But Ms. Almontaser’s downfall was not merely the result of a spontaneous outcry by concerned parents and neighborhood activists. It was also the work of a growing and organized movement to stop Muslim citizens who are seeking an expanded role in American public life. The fight against the school, participants in the effort say, was only an early skirmish in a broader, national struggle. “It’s a battle that’s really just begun,” said Daniel Pipes, who directs a conservative research group, the Middle East Forum, and helped lead the charge against Ms. Almontaser and the school.

I’m temporarily coming out of hiatus to point to this “New York Times article”:http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/28/nyregion/28school.html?_r=1&hp&oref=slogin which should, I hope, give some pause to people who claim that concerns over whether to fire people like John Yoo reduce down to academics trying to defend their privilege of tenure. And yes – I completely agree that there is a vast gaping difference between trying to fire someone for actions that were directly intended to facilitate torture,¹ and firing someone because vicious paranoid hatemongers like Daniel Pipes and his cronies say that she deserves firing. The question is whether that distinction can be maintained politically in an employment system where very few people indeed have the kind of job protections that academics (or, to a lesser extent, teachers in an unionized system) have, and where people like Daniel Pipes have considerable political sway. I think it’s perfectly legitimate for people to maintain either (a) that firing people like Yoo in the absence of external proceedings is still worthwhile, even if it has substantial knock-on effects, or (b) that firing Yoo is unlikely to have the kinds of repercussions that I fear. But I also think that my position is legitimate (and I also think that it’s right or I wouldn’t have put it forward), and whatever you believe, it’s clear that the battles that are about to begin are only indirectly about academic freedom. They’re better considered as battles over whether people who hold minority views (‘middle ground’ Muslim views, certain political beliefs), whether they be professors, teachers, or whatever are going to be persecuted (either sporadically or systematically, depending on how successful Pipes is), sacked or forced to resign, and forced out of public life in its myriad forms. That’s the agenda that Pipes is proposing. Now back to my cave …

¹ I should say, by the way, that I think that “Brian Leiter’s claim”:http://leiterreports.typepad.com/blog/2008/04/american-freedo.html that

Anyone calling for him to be fired is calling for him to be punished for his ideas, and nothing else. Attempts to claim it is more “complicated” are just attempts to rehabilitate the idea that having bad ideas, even bad ideas others act on, is a crime.

is misleading and very badly wrong. “Ideas” that are floated in an academic paper are very different from _legal analyses_ that are offered by someone working within a bureaucratic apparatus, which are directly intended to help others in that apparatus to carry out war crimes. The latter are better considered as actions than ideas – they are directly connected to the activities that are carried out on their basis in a way that free floating ideas are not.

UPDATE: I should perhaps have made clearer that I am not diving into the comments section of this post for reason of time commitments. I recognize that this isn’t very satisfactory for people who might want to push me on this or that aspect of my argument, and promise that I’ll post again on this when I return …

It’s not that surprising to read that former Malaysian PM Mahathir Mohamad has called for an international tribunal to try Western leaders with war crimes over the war in Iraq, nominating Bush, Blair and Howard in particular. Mahathir is well-known as a provocateur, with a fondness for extreme statements, which have included anti-Semitic attacks on George Soros and others. So it’s unlikely that anyone will pay much attention to him.

Still, his views on Iraq as a war crime are widely shared. It scarcely seems beyond the bounds of possibility that someone like Baltasar Garzon might find a legal way to file criminal charges (Wikipedia says he’s already threatened a civil suit).

Such charges would have enough factual and legal support to make the outcome unpredictable if they ever came before a tribunal. Apart from the general question of the legality of the war itself, the US in particular has openly denied the applicability of the Geneva Conventions and has engaged in many actions (torture of prisoners, bombing of occupied civilian areas, reprisal attacks of various kinds) that at least arguably violate the Conventions.

On the other hand, the prospect of Bush, or any US official, for that matter, actually standing trial, let alone being convicted or punished, seems unthinkable. The only consistent inference that I can draw from this is that, if charges are ever laid in any jurisdiction, the governments concerned will find a way to abort the process without allowing the substantive issues to come before a court. Since most of the doctrines that might be used to achieve such an outcome (sovereign immunity, non-interference in internal affairs and so on) have already been repudiated, it seems as if such an outcome could only be justified in terms of a bald claim of “reasons of state”.

Are there any legal experts who can help me out here? I have two main questions:

1. Where, if at all, might charges be brought against Bush and others?
2. How would the hearing of these charges be prevented?

I gave a couple of lectures on Hobbes last week, having volunteered a long time ago when doing so seemed like a breeze, then remembering rather late in the day that I hadn’t taught Hobbes for a while. Anyway, it all seemed to go pretty well but then a smart first-year student asked me a question that I’ve been puzzling about ever since. No doubt *real* Hobbes scholars have the answer all sorted (and if so, please tell me) but I wasn’t quite sure what to say. The problem is below the fold.

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Simon Blackburn is clearly doing his best to give philosophers a bad name through his own “popular” writings, but his “latest effort”:http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/story.asp?sectioncode=26&storycode=401547&c=1 — part of “a series in which academics range beyond their area of expertise” — is spectacularly awful. Norman Geras, with whom I often disagree, takes issue with him in a series of posts “here”:http://normblog.typepad.com/normblog/2008/04/todays-big-matc.html . My own hackles weren’t especially raised — I was just in “yeah, whatever” mode — until I got to his eighth “myth”, “the myth of equal respect” where Blackburn writes:

bq. The belief that everyone deserves equal respect and that anything else is discriminatory and elitist. The truth is the exact opposite: discrimination is a virtuous activity and elites are to be admired. The _very few human beings who are good at anything_ [emphasis added], whether football or playing the violin or writing or painting, form an elite and deserve respect for their excellence. Other people either deserve sympathy for trying and failing, or should be ignored if they have not even tried.

Aside from the obvious fact (which Geras points out) that the claim that everyone deserves respect in the rights and human dignity sense doesn’t entail the hostility to discriminations of achievement that Blackburn claims, his statement that “very few human beings … are good at anything” is simply crap.

Many many human beings are talented cooks or gardeners, accomplished dancers, considerate colleagues, good mothers or good fathers. Many many human beings are empathetic, or courageous, or patient. And no, I don’t think those who are (for example) rated good cooks by those they know and cook for “deserve our sympathy” for failing to be Escoffier, nor should they be ignored for not even trying to be Escoffier. Blackburn, on the other hand, probably ought to have our sympathy: not for trying and failing to make it to the level of, say, David Hume, but for falling victim to the delusion that the less that superb doesn’t amount to good. What a failure he must imagine himself to be!

Humphrey Lyttelton has died. The Guardian has an obituary written by George Melly, who also happens to be dead.

I first came across Lyttelton not on Radio 4, but in Peter Winch’s The Idea of a Social Science and its Relation to Philosophy, of all places. He pops up there in an anecdote showing why some kinds of social practice are in principle not amenable to precise predictions derived from some (putative) social physics. Lyttelton was once asked if he knew where jazz was going, and replied “If I knew where jazz was going, I’d be there already.”

Henry has inspired me. I’ve been trying everything to break through my blogger’s block – even to the point of going to a writing class in UCLA. (which is great, but doesn’t have much bearing on blogging so far) Generally the best way to start blogging again may be to announce that I’m taking a hiatus. Then again, I’ve been on an unofficial one since about Christmas, so perhaps not.

When you first start blogging, everything in your life becomes fodder for ‘ooh, I might blog about that’. After a couple of years, and especially if you’re in a job where you can’t really write about your area of expertise, the dry spells appear. And life intervenes. For months after I moved to L.A. I could barely think of a thing to blog about. It reminded me of how after my university finals, I literally could not read a page of a book for a couple of months. Eventually that wore off. For the last month or more, there are absolutely all manner of things I think of blogging about. And I just can’t seem to write about any of them.

Some topics I dismiss because they’re too boring, too done, and who wants to hear a blogger say they think the same thing about the same thing as everyone else? And as Chris mentioned last week, CT’s audience is so wide and so knowledgeable about every single thing in the universe, why write some half-assed thing and get shot down? But then I think to myself, ‘hey, that’s what blogging is all about!’ But even on a high-powered, Guardian list featuring type of intello-blog, we all feel kind of insecure. (well, with the probable exception of Daniel who is the funniest man in the world and also, by the way, my blog crush. Hi Daniel.) The one thing CT bloggers all say when we meet up is ‘Timberteer X’s stuff is so good, I really feel intimidated writing on the same blog.

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So, that’s the week for me.  Please visit me and Ari at The Edge of the American West.  Please buy my books, if you possibly can (to make it easier: Rauchway books from Amazon US * UK * FR * DE * CA) (no, not California).

Many thanks to the Crooked Timber collective for letting me mess about with their site for a week.

Be excellent to each other.

During this week’s guest stint I’ve managed to touch on Palestine-Israel, the New Deal, and Michel Foucault. Steering clear of the real killer tripwires—i.e., sex roles, the Democratic primaries, or emacs/vi—that leaves a final frontier of Internet mischief….

On this day in 1945, only three days after the occupation of their city by French troops, the remaining full professors of the University of Freiburg assembled to elect new officers and to restore the customs under which they had operated before 1933, when their faculty, racially purged by the Nazis, elected as rector the philosopher Martin Heidegger. (All details here come from Hugo Ott; see more at the footnote.)¹

This is not a parable or an analogy. It is a story of one episode in which civil authorities and academic governing bodies reckoned with a disastrous crossover between scholarship and politics.

One of the first orders of business for the reassembled professors was the question of what to do about Nazis among their colleagues. They chartered an internal review committee for the purpose, and tried to keep jurisdiction over this process, without success. City authorities were conducting their own reviews, and they designated Heidegger’s house, among others, as a “Party residence” to be requisitioned for use. The university protested, based on the opinion of legal scholar Franz Böhm (an anti-Nazi dismissed from his post during Hitler’s regime) that for “establishing political guilt” one needed “a proper court of law.”
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One for the junior-birdman Hayekians, Coasians and such like:

Consider a finite quantity of a consumption good G, which is to be divided into two allocations G1 and G2 for two different agents with utility functions over G described as U1(G1) and U2(G2).

What would be the minimum information that a central planner would need to have about U1 and U2 in order to be able to calculate a Pareto efficient allocation G1/G2?

Answer after the jump – I just asked three economists this question and they all got it wrong.
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Apparently. Not the CP, I’m afraid. Just a CP.

For our many George Formby fans, the first of a two part bio of George Formbys Sr and Jr. Less mournful than the bio of Kenneth Williams, and more hard-hitting than the one on the SWP (though that’s not saying much!). Here’s George jr, with his greatest hit of all.

Speaking of public intellectuals, Siva Vaidhyanathan gave a talk here a couple days ago on privacy and surveillance, developing the ideas here. (For one thing, he now prefers “Cryptopticon” to “Nonopticon.”)

Siva thinks we should stop our Foucauldian worrying about Bentham’s Panopticon. He says he’s lived in the Panopticon, in New York, where there are lots of visible cameras everywhere (when I lived in one of the home counties, where it is said you can go all day without being out of CCTV range, I knew the feeling). Siva points out a lot of the cameras aren’t maintained, monitored, or even attached to anything; that’s not the point of them. They’re not there to watch you, they’re there to make you think that you’re being watched. Such reminders (your call may be monitored) are supposed to get you to become your own social superego.

On balance, Siva seems to think, this is pretty harmless. The point of the Panopticon is to get you to behave, to hide your real self, to conform. About which we can note two things: one, if you’ve been to London or New York, you see that in the real Panopticon people get their freak on just fine, thank you very much. And two, to the extent that it does work, the Panopticon actually reinforces privacy—getting you to hide your real self draws the boundaries around that real self. What we really need to worry about is unannounced, concealed surveillance: the NonCryptopticon.
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Part-time work is often argued to be one possible solution for working parents, so as to make the balance between work and caring easier. This post is not about the question whether this is indeed (part of) the solution in general – that is, for all types of paid work. Rather, I’d like to raise some doubts about the idea that part-time work is a good thing for academics who are doing research (in addition to whatever else they do – teaching or management). In this country, plenty of academics work part-time, and often standard lecturer positions are only offered on a part-time basis (often 80%). [click to continue…]

As the Olympic torch touches down in Australia, it is hard to see how any good can come of the entire exercise.

After Kevin Rudd’s visit to Beijing, which seemed to herald a newly mature relationship between Australia and China, we’ve spent a week or more embroiled in a petty squabble, of a kind which is all too familiar in international relations, over the role of Chinese torch attendants/security guards, with the Australian government insisting that all security will be provided by our police and the Chinese saying that the attendants will “protect the torch with their bodies”.

George Orwell observed over 60 years ago that

Even if one didn’t know from concrete examples (the 1936 Olympic Games, for instance) that international sporting contests lead to orgies of hatred, one could deduce it from general principles.

and history since then has given plenty of examples. It looks as if the 2008 Olympics will join them.
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