It seems that everyone else around here is just too quietly dignified to mention that Crooked Timber has been listed as one of the world’s fifty most powerful blogs by The Guardian.

But not me. So: Woo hoo!

It seems appropriate, then, to follow up Henry’s recent post about bookshelves with a notice that Matt Christie is offering wooden shelves to the public at a reasonable price. (They are much more attractive than some I’ve seen lately.) Matt also turns out chopping blocks.

These item are all made by hand from actual crooked timber. Contact him via pas au-delà for rates.

Anybody who combines woodworking with Blanchot deserves a plug on the 33rd most powerful blog in the world. The precise metrics used to determine that ranking are probably among the Guardian‘s trade secrets, of course.

A Nobel prize-winning scientist once described Basketball to me (in his impeccable Yorkshire accent) as “a dreary game played by physical freaks in which nothing happens till the last minute”. I enjoy regaling my students with this story, and explain that cricket is the only real sport. But, apparently, I’m wrong (about cricket, not basketball). The Boston Review contains a 27-year-old letter from John Rawls explaining why baseball is, in fact, the best of all games. (Hattip Tom Hurka — sorry, Tom, I couldn’t resist)

Some commenters thought that I should have waited before attacking the BBC’s “White” season. After, all, they argued … legitimate topic of inquiry …. watch first, judge later, … blah blah. Martin O’Neill has been watching, and he doesn’t like what he’s seen. Specifically, he has an article in the New Statesman deploring Denys Blakeway’s film about Enoch Powell, which attempts both a partial rehabilitation of the man and manages to suggest (without saying directly) that Powell’s “rivers of blood” claim was vindicated on 7/7 (a product of multiculturalism). Anyway, I’m summarizing Martin, so surf over to his excellent piece.

“Lane Kenworthy”:http://lanekenworthy.net/2008/03/09/the-best-inequality-graph/ shows how it’s done.

Martin Wolf, whom I frequently disagree with, but always find worth reading, had an “excellent piece”:http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/228997cc-eb99-11dc-9493-0000779fd2ac.html in last Thursday’s _Financial Times_. It was about the quasi-hysteria in the UK press over the prospect that ‘non-doms’ – wealthy foreigners resident in the UK – would be obliged either to become taxpayers or fork over 30,000UKP per year after they had lived there for 7 years.
[click to continue…]

Two very different outside links. First is to the Mole series of Czech cartoons, which is probably well known to lots of CT readers, but which I hadn’t heard of before I ran across it on Youtube. It keeps my 2 year old son happy, while not containing any tricky content beyond a couple of scary moments involving foxes and cats chasing after the eponymous hero. I was given pause when I found out on Amazon that Michael Medved rates it highly, but it’s good enough even to survive that most dubious of recommendations. The embedded video is “The Mole as Painter,” which is quite beautifully animated. Nominations for other Youtube videos likely to please toddlers will be gratefully received in comments. Information on where/how to procure DVDs of the Mole series even more so.

Second, and more seriously, the SSRC have a new blog, “Knowledge Rules”:http://www.ssrc.org/blogs/knowledgerules/, which looks worth following. It deals with a topic that we’ve frequently discussed on CT – the intersection between intellectual property issues and how the academy disseminates knowledge. For your bookmarks.

Via Roger in comments to Chris’s post below, Michael Walzer mounts what can only be regarded as an unprovoked dawn raid on his own reputation.

The topic is the ethics of using mercenaries (or at least, that is the formal topic; at a deeper level, the topic is the same as the topic of everything Walzer’s written in the last ten years; that sadly, oh so sadly, “the left” simply doesn’t believe in its principles with the same seriousness and intellectual depth which Walzer does. It’s frankly the philosophical equivalent of “I was into your favourite band before they started to suck”, and it’s frankly becoming tedious).
[click to continue…]

“Decent left” columnist Nick Cohen, “writing for Pajamas Media”:http://www.pajamasmedia.com/2008/03/why_brits_dont_fall_for_obama.php , and explaining the alleged fact, that, unlike continental Europeans, the British are not keen on Obama:

bq. A more convincing explanation to my mind is that European support for Obama is tied to levels of anti-Americanism, and despite all Bush has thrown at them, the British are not as anti-American as the continentals have become.

And the test of how anti-American people are? It is whether they support, retrospectively, Israel’s bombing of Saddam’s nuclear reactor:

bq. At a recent meeting in London Reuel Marc Gerecht, a former CIA officer, elegantly calibrated attitudes to the US. He spoke all over North America and Europe and whenever the subject of an aggressive foreign policy came up he asked audiences whether Israel had been right to take out Saddam Hussein’s Osirak nuclear reactor in 1981. In America, virtually everyone was in favor. Whatever their politics, they reasoned that a totalitarian regime was about to get the bomb and, obviously the West should stop it. In Germany, virtually everyone was against — “even the hawks are pacifists,” he said. In France, audiences split 80 per cent against, 20 in favor — “which was good of the 20 per cent considering Chirac had built the reactor in the first place.” In Britain, people divided evenly.

[Hat tip DW and MT.]

It’s the international women’s day today – but with “a 6-weeks old baby”:https://crookedtimber.org/2008/01/30/born-under-a-full-moon/, a 2-year-old toddler, and a close family member in hospital (nothing to panic about), I didn’t have the time or energy to go to any activity or debate. Luckily I have a long list of feminist and women’s issues that I want to blog about in the near future (but with the little one, I think I shouldn’t make too many promises about timing). So in the meantime let me turn this into an open thread. If you celebrated women’s day, what did you do? Any other thoughts or stories on international women’s day? And what should be the priorities of the women’s/feminist movement for the years to come — locally, regionally, internationally?

Russell has “a very rich post up”:http://inmedias.blogspot.com/2008/03/thoughts-on-kosovo-mill-and-walzer.html discussing some of the questions I raised in “two”:https://crookedtimber.org/2008/02/26/the-kosovo-non-precedent/ “posts”:https://crookedtimber.org/2008/02/29/kosovo-and-the-dark-side-of-democracy/ recently concerning self-determination, democracy, ethnicity and matters related. I’m a bit too busy to respond right now, so this is just a pointer. I hope to write something more in a few days.

The “NYT”:http://thecaucus.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/03/07/obama-aide-apologizes-for-calling-clinton-a-monster/index.html?hp tells us that Samantha Power (who is, on a variety of levels, one of the most interesting senior foreign policy types in US politics) has just resigned from Obama’s campaign after a supposed-to-be-off-the-record quote about Hillary Clinton being a ‘monster’ was published by _The Scotsman._ Which makes this “piece”:http://chronicle.com/free/v54/i07/07a00101.htm from David Glenn in the _Chronicle_ a few months ago all the more interesting.

Ms. Power is just one of dozens of university-based scholars advising the current crop of presidential candidate … The role of presidential advisers has changed a great deal since the early 1960s, when John F. Kennedy was closely identified with a clutch of Ivy League scholars. One of those advisers, the late Harvard economist John Kenneth Galbraith, is credited with writing one of the most famous lines in Kennedy’s Inaugural Address: “Let us never negotiate out of fear, but let us never fear to negotiate.”

Ms. Power and the other scholar-advisers of the 2008 season face challenges that Galbraith’s generation never knew. The public is much more skeptical of credentialed expertise than it was during the Kennedy administration. And new technologies make the candidate-adviser relationship more perilous than it once was. In theory a student in one of Ms. Power’s Harvard courses might post one of her classroom comments (perhaps wildly out of context) on a blog and create a news-media storm within hours.

“That’s the one thing that terrifies me,” Ms. Power says. “That I’ll say something that will somehow hurt the candidate.” She says that in public lectures and interviews, she sometimes fights the urge to make unkind statements about other candidates. “That’s just not Obama’s style,” she says. “Left to my own devices, I’d articulate my frustrations in a much harsher way.”

If further reinforcement be needed, this tells me again how bad I (and I suspect many other blogging academics) would be at real world politics in the highly unlikely event that someone wanted me to work for them in a campaign. It’s pretty easy to shoot off your mouth when you’re only representing yourself, but it’s obviously not so great when others can use what you say to attack the candidate that you work for.

This is obviously a terrible abuse of posting privileges to promote something that really ought to be a comment on Harry’s piece below, but whatcha gonna do? I just wanted to add a small note on a technical issue to do with his conclusion about our civic responsibilities:

When you vote, you have a very stringent obligation to deliberate responsibly about the effects of your vote, and about whether those effects are morally justifiable or not. You should deliberate about the moral issues at stake in the elections, and come to have a tentative, but warranted view, about what justice requires, as well as about what the likely effects of policies your candidate is likely to implement (and whether they are morally justified).

That sounds like pretty hard work doesn’t it? However, luckily the Condorcet Jury Theorem comes to our rescue. More or less the same mathematics which ensure that voting is a waste of time also ensure that as long as the average voter has a slightly better than 50% chance of making the right decision and the electorate is large enough, the majority vote will be correct in a two horse race (like a Presidential election; voters in multiparty democracies, do what Harry says). It’s one of those seeming informational free lunches which are the basis of the James Surowiecki’s book.

So, the full advice to potential voters would be that your civic duty is:

1. If you are a reasonably intelligent and responsible citizen, just kind of think for it a bit and make a snap decision, like Malcolm Gladwell says and you’ll probably be right.

2. If you are voting for an essentially completely frivolous reason which has nothing to do with the actual election (like, for example, P Diddy threatened you with death if you didn’t, or you thought it might get you a shag, or you want to commemorate people who died a hundred years ago), then toss a coin; you won’t be bringing the average below 50%.

3. If you’re so stupid that you nearly always cock it up, then follow the Costanza Principle and do the opposite of what you think you should do. Actually, people like that probably can’t be trusted to follow the principle properly, so you lot flip a coin too.

4. If you’re reasonably intelligent, but also a selfish bastard, then stay at home.

So there you go. Voting isn’t actually quite as onerous a social duty as it would seem, at least in two-horse races, so go on, make Stone Cold Steve Austin proud. Or not, as the case may be.

thanks banksy

Originally uploaded by ben bell

I’m not normally a big fan of Banksy, but this one (photo by Ben Bell) strikes me as quite brilliant.

As I was sitting around the faculty lounge this morning, staring vacantly into space and dreaming of summers filled with golf, <a href=”http://edgeofthewest.wordpress.com/2008/03/05/if-only-id-realized-there-was-such-an-easy-solution-to-all-this-work-piling-up-in-my-office/”>a busy colleague</a> brought <a href=”http://chronicle.com/review/brainstorm/bauerlein/stop-pushing-yourself”>Mark Bauerlein’s latest blog post</a> to my attention. It’s a response to a <a href=”http://s.wsj.net/article/SB120425031647901841.html?mod=most_viewed_leisure24″>recent <i>Wall Street Journal</i> essay</a>, it’s about faculty workloads, and it’s rather skeptical of reports about faculty workloads:

<blockquote>We have seen, indeed, many books and articles on the subject, such as Profscam by Charles Sykes, and when people hear about a 2-2 teaching load that means 6 classroom hours a week for 28 weeks out of the year, they wonder what all the complaining is about.

But Professor Kelly-Woessner maintains, “Our average workweek is 60+ hours. And unlike a regular job, where you come home at 5, we’re grading well into the evening.”

Can this be true, 60+ hours?</blockquote>

[click to continue…]