1958 Aldeburgh Carnival and Lifeboat Launch.

1995 Aldeburgh Carnival and Lifeboat Launch.
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I’ve been too busy to post on a lot of things I’ve noticed so I thought I’d just post some quick links.

* One measure of the death toll in the wars launched by Saddam and then by Bush is the number of Iraqi widows, estimated at between one and two million. Widows are largely excluded from paid work and many are in a desperate position.

* What have the unions ever done for us (Via Eric Lee at Labourstart

* Finally, some real progress in the struggle against malaria.

“William Skidelsky”:http://blog.prospectblogs.com/2008/02/08/the-four-lives-of-john-gray/ at the Prospect(UK)’s blog.

I was somewhat surprised, perusing today’s Independent, to be confronted, in the “5-Minute Interview” slot, with a picture of the philosopher John Gray, under the headline “Not many people know that I have a wellness centre… Upon looking more closely, I was reassured to see that the subject of the interview was not, in fact, John Gray the philosopher, but John Gray the author of the bestselling self-help book, Men are From Mars, Women Are From Venus. The paper had simply made a mistake, and plucked the wrong John Gray from its photo archive. … In addition to the philosopher and the self-help author, there’s also John Gray the multi-millionaire founder of the Spearmint Rhino chain of strip clubs (and husband of a former porn star), and John Gray the American Christian comedian. Which leads me to think that they should all agree to do each others’ jobs for a week, and film the result: the resulting reality TV series would surely be a huge popular hit (title, anyone?)

This is indeed an amusing thought. However, couldn’t you do very nearly as well with a show that confronted the various philosophers who have the name John Gray with each other’s intellectual positions? I’m personally aware of John Gray the Millsian liberal, John Gray the post-Millsian liberal, Rawlsian John Gray, John Gray the green conservative, John Gray the German Christian Democracy-style _Sozialmarkt_ advocate, John Gray the sort-of social democrat, and John Gray the nihilistic Ballardian. I can’t deny that a couple more may possibly have popped up since the last time I checked. The _Chronicle_ published “an article”:http://chronicle.com/temp/email2.php?id=H2jBsJtDbCFsN3fsszjCpdk46bKqWqFt recently by Carlin Romano, which perpetuated the common misconception that these were all the same person, but it simply couldn’t be so; no one man could contain such multitudes. I imagine that this has to be another photo-archive mistake.

The UK is all agog at the moment over the bugging of an MP’s conversations with one of his constituents, while the constituent was being held by police on (apparently credible) suspicion of terrorist offences. There seems to be quite a debate going back and forth about whether the “Wilson Doctrine” (basically forbidding the tapping of MPs’ telephones and commonly thought to also rule out bugging them in more modern ways) has any place in the new world order. I think this is a very easy question to answer, along game-theoretic lines not a million miles from those suggested by John in a post on the general subject of bugging and spying a couple of years ago. All one has to do is to remember the following fairly basic general principle, which would hardly make it onto the syllabus at most decent business schools because it’s so obvious:

If you create the presumption that the cops can hear anything that you tell an MP, then people will only tell their MP things that they would be happy to tell a cop

I would guess that there are plenty of people in the Muslim community in Tooting who would tell Sadiq Khan MP things that they would not tell the police. I would further surmise that the general security of the British public (ie me) is benefited to some small extent from the fact that there are people in the Muslim community in Tooting who would tell Sadiq Khan MP things that they would not tell the police. I rather suspect that the bod who decided to bug Sadiq Khan’s conversation with Babar Ahmad was concentrating purely on his own case and did not consider the more general ramifications of undermining the general principle that MPs conversations are not directly accessible to the police.

CT readers who have been around for a long time may remember a “couple”:https://crookedtimber.org/2005/08/12/trahisons-des-clercs/ of “posts”:https://crookedtimber.org/2005/08/16/witchfinders-general/ I wrote in response to Eugene Volokh way back in 2005, asking for instances of prominent “commentators mak[ing] egregious claims that a substantial section of those who opposed the war are, in fact, rooting for the other side.” Now, CT readers came up with quite a number of ripe examples, but if there were still a Golden Eugene [UPDATE: since Eugene has since described Romney’s comments as ‘over the top’ in an update to his “original post”:http://volokh.com/archives/archive_2008_02_03-2008_02_09.shtml#1202406769 on the topic, it’s a bit unfair to name the award after him] award to be handed out, I think I’d be giving it to Mitt Romney for “this claim”:http://tpmelectioncentral.talkingpointsmemo.com/2008/02/romney_staying_in_race_would_h.php in his forthcoming concession speech.

“If I fight on in my campaign, all the way to the convention, I would forestall the launch of a national campaign and make it more likely that Senator Clinton or Obama would win. And in this time of war, I simply cannot let my campaign, be a part of aiding a surrender to terror.”

Now I suppose that he’s not quite saying that Clinton and Obama _support_ the terrorists; merely that they’re going to surrender to them (perhaps he’s even prepared to concede that they would surrender America to the forces of evil with reluctance and heavy hearts). But he’s also the Republican also-ran, who might have been an outright winner in a slightly more favourable political climate. You don’t get much more prominent than that. Also implicit iis that Mike Huckabee, if not quite a terrorist-surrender-monkey, is surely a terrorist-surrender-monkey-enabler as long as he stays in the race and delays the anointment of McCain. Finally, I understand from reliable sources that this isn’t even the _creepiest part of the speech._ The Republicans are a very, very messed up political party.

This is just by way of a short announcement that I’m rolling up my political science paper weblog, and instead doing a bit more active political science-y blogging over at “The Monkey Cage”:http://www.themonkeycage.org along with my GWU colleages John Sides, David Park and Lee Sigelman (to whom thanks for inviting me along). This is the kind of thing that I hoped the political science weblog would turn into anyway, when I had more time, so it makes sense to join efforts with what has become a very active group blog (several hundred posts in the few months that it has been in operation). Anyway, my first post is up there now – a “piece looking at”:http://www.themonkeycage.org/2008/02/conservative_and_liberal_blogg.html Eszter and her colleagues’ findings that conservative blogs are more likely to have substantive responses to liberal blogs than vice-versa, and why this might be.

It is often suggested that what distinguishes Rawls’ Political Liberalism from his earlier A Theory of Justice is the ‘political’ bit. This second book is a ‘political’ interpretation of the first one. But I just noticed something. The word ‘liberalism’ does not appear in the index of Theory, and occurs in the text (thank you, Amazon search inside) only three times; none of the three is a self-reference to features of his own theory. What about ‘liberal’? It has no entry in the index either (one entry is for ‘liberal equality’). It occurs 18 times, which is still pretty light. Again, none of the occurrences has a clear ‘mine is a liberal theory’ character. There are several references to works by others with the word ‘liberal’ in the title. The one bit that even makes it into the index is a brief, ‘liberal’ interpretation of equality that is, however, rejected in favor of the ‘democratic’ conception encoded in the so-called ‘difference principle’.

I don’t really have any point to make. But I’m curious. When did Rawls become a ‘liberal’ – when did justice-as-fairness become a theory of ideal ‘liberalism’?

There are some books that mankind was never supposed to read. From a review by Pete Rawlik in the most recent issue of the _New York Review of Science-Fiction._

Over the years, H.P. Lovecraft’s Cthulhu mythos has been melded with a multitude of other genres by a bevy [sic, even though the article then goes on to list eight writers] of authors … Marion Zimmer Bradley and Esther Friesner have adeptly created Cthulhu romances …

The mind squirbles. But not as much as it does at the revelation (which I saw somewhere on the Internets in the last few weeks, meant to blog, and forgot about) that Henry James and H.G. Wells once seriously discussed collaborating on a novel set on the Red Planet. “A Princess Casamassima of Mars” or somesuch. There is that famous James story about the popular author and the literary one who swap places, which I’ve always presumed (without ever bothering to look it up) is based on the James-Wells relationship. Finally, changing the subject back to Lovecraft, “Ross Douthat”:http://rossdouthat.theatlantic.com/archives/2008/01/hope_for_the_hobbit.php argues that it’s a good thing that Guillermo del Toro is being signed up to do _The Hobbit_, as he, like Peter Jackson, understands how to make digital special effects seem tactile and organic. I’m not entirely sure that this is true of Jackson – while Gollum was awesome, some other bits of digital wizardry in the LOTR trilogy seemed pretty lame; the movie’s Balrog was yer standard roaring demon, instead of Tolkien’s own evocative if difficult-to-film shadow among flames, and the skeleton-ghosts in the Paths of the Dead looked as though they had staggered off the leftovers shelf of Pirates of the Caribbean. However, it’s certainly true of del Toro – _Hellboy_, in addition to being a criminally underrated popcorn movie has the best pastiche-Lovecraft sfx that I’ve seen to date – the squamousness of the tentacle-things is _sans-pareil._

A kind reader alerted me to “an article”:http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2008/feb/03/health.nhs1 in last Sunday’s Guardian, on the proposal by the Conservative Party to introduce the Dutch system of Kraamzorg in the UK. As I briefly mentioned in “an earlier post”:https://crookedtimber.org/2008/01/03/2-weeks-of-birthleave-for-fathers/, under this system a qualified maternity nurse cares for mother and the newborn child at home in the first week after the birth.

The article gives a fair account of what these nurses do, and of the advantages of this system. Yet I’m surprised by the claim that the system would be too expensive to be introduced. Of course the question is ‘expensive in comparison with what’. In the Netherlands, one reason why mothers who give birth leave the hospital so quickly after the delivery (if they go to the hospital at all, that is), is the cost; a maternity nurse at home is much cheaper than the cost of keeping mother and child in hospital (as is the case in Belgium, for example). I don’t know what the kind of care is that is currently provided to newborns and their mothers in the UK – yet it is self-evident that if the comparison is made with no care for the newborn and mother at all, then the system is relatively expensive. But how under a system of no care at all the mothers can take the rest that they need is a mystery to me. The days that this could be provided by family members are, for most of us, long gone. Hence not a bad plan from the Tories, if you ask me.

I’ve got nothing much in the way of predictions (as I’ve noted before, I’m not that kind of political scientist) but feel free to chat in comments as results come in from Super Tuesday …

My long “post”:https://crookedtimber.org/2007/10/31/delong-scott-and-hayek/ from a couple of months ago on James Scott’s _Seeing Like a State_ and Brad DeLong’s review of it enjoyed a temporary revival when Brad “republished”:http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2007/12/delong-smackd-1.html it in his ‘DeLong Smackdown’ series. But I got a bit of grief from one reader, who thought that I had given Scott far too easy a ride. Which is probably true – while I admire the book, I do have many disagreements with it, which I would have gotten into if I had been reviewing the book proper, rather than arguing against Brad’s interpretation. One such disagreement popped up when I was reading it again for class a couple of weeks ago, together with John Brewer’s _The Sinews of Power._¹
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I thought that “delivering people to the labour market” was the principal function of public transport rather than higher education. It seems that the Arts and Humanities Research Council, Britain’s government agency charged with supporting research in this area thinks differently, since that is one of the headings of their most recent strategy document, the AHRC “Delivery plan” (pdf). I won’t go on, since Leiter has already covered the issue and linked to Simon Blackburn’s piece in the THES (and see also the comment by occasional CT-commenter Mike Otsuka under Blackburn’s article). The AHRC headquarters are local to me, so I can fantasize about a re-staging of the 1831 Bristol riots, with AHRC’s plate-glass headquarters being torched by the enraged citizenry. That won’t happen.

There are many reasons to take pleasure in the New York Football Giants’ victory in the Supreme Bowl last night, but none, I think, is more important than the fact that the Northeast Region Patriots did not manage to pick up any points on their first drive of the second half. Here’s why.

For those of you who didn’t watch the game (and what, really, is wrong with you people? are you not sufficiently cosmopolitan to follow every last detail of American sporting contests that run for a mere four hours?), the Patriots faced a fourth-and-two at the Football Giants’ 44-yard line. They punted, and the Football Giants got the ball on their 14.

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From “Three Quarks Daily”:http://3quarksdaily.blogs.com/3quarksdaily/2008/02/selected-minor.html.

Super Tuesday Surprise: Leading Minsk Newspaper Endorses Candidates in US Presidential Race

… From Belaruskija Naviny (translated by the Belarus Information Agency): Minsk (BIA) 1 February, 2008–

In America, there are not strong leaders like Aleksandr Grigorevich Lukashenko, who come into power, and stay in the power. The only president in American history to have held on his power more than two terms was Franklin Roosevelt. And he was cripple! He stayed long because of war-time situation, not strength. But every four years, the parties make their best effort. This year, because of failed war in Iraq and weak leadership of George W. Bush, the American people are going in for politics like never before in their history. … What choices are the Republican and Democratic parties offering them?

At this present, the Republican (“Grand Old”) Party has three candidates in competition: the Christian retail-store magnate and “healthy life-style” advocate Mike Huckabee, whose business practices were subjected to critique already in American independent cinema production “I Heart Huckabee” (2005); Mitt Romney, governor of State Utah and elder of Mormon church, which until Lukashenko’s bold measure against foreign missionary-activity was responsible for the common sight on the streets of Grodno and Brest and Vitebsk of clean and polite young Americans, speaking Belarusian like mother tongue, and promoting their heretical sect to our villagers like we were pagan Indians; and finally, John McCain, senator of City Phoenix and number-one opponent of current president George W. Bush within Republican party.

The Democrats have now only two candidates who stand to chance against this powerful phalanx: Barack Obama, senator of City Chicago and nephew of Saddam Hussein; and Hillary Rodham Clinton, organizer of popular solidarity-building women’s breakfasts for discussion of hair-hygiene and of place of woman in American politics, and only official wife of number-one enemy of Serbs and all Slavic peoples, Bill Clinton.

(for more on Hillary Clinton’s role in creating ‘polyclinics’, Barack Obama’s surprising failure to promote sport, leisure, tourism and patriotic games, and the key question of why _shouldn’t_ Mike Huckabee eat pigs’ legs in aspic and goose-fat on craquelins, go to 3QD).