In the course of a controversy with Glenn Greenwald, Dan Drezner offers the following rewording of Greenwald’s critical summary of the orthodoxy of the US “Foreign Policy Community”

The number one rule of the bi-partisan foreign policy community is that America can invade and attack other countries when vital American interests are threatened. Paying homage to that orthodoxy is a non-negotiable pre-requisite to maintaining good standing within the foreign policy community.

and states:

I suspect that anyone who accepts the concept of a “national interest” in the first place would accept that phrasing. As a paid-up member of the Foreign Policy Community (FPC), I certainly would.

Unless “vital national interest” is construed so narrowly as to be equivalent to “self-defence”, this is a direct repudiation of the central founding principle of international law, prohibiting aggressive war as a crime against peace, indeed, the supreme international crime. It’s more extreme than the avowed position of any recent US Administration – even the invasion of Iraq was purportedly justified on the basis of UN resolutions, rather than US self-interest. Yet, reading this and other debates, it seems pretty clear that Drezner’s position is not only generally held in the Foreign Policy Community but is regarded, as he says, as a precondition for serious participation in foreign policy debates in the US.

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In Vanity Fair. Some excerpts:

No photograph of him has ever been published, but those who know Daniel Miller say that he resembles his father. Some say it’s the nose, others the mischievous glimmer in the eyes when he smiles, but the most telling feature, the one that clearly identifies him as Arthur Miller’s son, is his high forehead and identically receding hairline. He is almost 41 now, but it’s impossible to say whether his father’s friends would notice the resemblance, because the few who have ever seen Daniel have not laid eyes on him since he was a week old …

“Arthur was terribly shaken—he used the term ‘mongoloid,'” Whitehead recalled. He said, “‘I’m going to have to put the baby away.'” A friend of Inge’s recalls visiting her at home, in Roxbury, about a week later. “I was sitting at the bottom of the bed, and Inge was propped up, and my memory is that she was holding the baby and she was very, very unhappy,” she says. “Inge wanted to keep the baby, but Arthur wasn’t going to let her keep him.” Inge, this friend recalls, “said that Arthur felt it would be very hard for Rebecca, and for the household,” to raise Daniel at home. Another friend remembers that “it was a decision that had Rebecca at the center.”

Within days, the child was gone, placed in a home for infants in New York City. When he was about two or three, one friend recalls, Inge tried to bring him home, but Arthur would not have it. Daniel was about four when he was placed at the Southbury Training School. Then one of two Connecticut institutions for the mentally retarded, Southbury was just a 10-minute drive from Roxbury, along shaded country roads. “Inge told me that she went to see him almost every Sunday, and that [Arthur] never wanted to see him,” recalls the writer Francine du Plessix Gray. Once he was placed in Southbury, many friends heard nothing more about Daniel. “After a certain period,” one friend says, “he was not mentioned at all.” …

Marcie Roth remembers seeing Daniel for the first time when he was about “eight or nine.” Now the director of the National Spinal Cord Injury Association, Roth worked at Southbury during the 1970s. “Danny was a neat, neat kid,” she says, “a very friendly, happy guy.” Although there were close to 300 children at Southbury at the time, everyone, she says, knew Danny Miller. This was partly because they knew who his father was and partly because Daniel “was among the more able of the young children with Down syndrome,” Roth says. But mainly it was because of Daniel’s personality. “He had a great spirit about him,” she says. This was no small achievement, because, according to Roth, “Southbury Training School was not a place you would want your dog to live.” …

Bowen recalls the first time she met Daniel: “He was just a delight, eager, happy, outgoing—in those days even more so than now, because of his isolation.” He showed her his room, which he shared with 20 other people, and his dresser, which was nearly empty, because everyone wore communal clothing. “I remember very clearly trying to respond with happiness, but it was very hard, because there was nothing there,” she says. “He really had nothing. His sole possession was this little tiny transistor radio with earplugs. It was something you’d pick up at a five-and-dime. And he was so proud to have it. You couldn’t help but think, This is Arthur Miller’s son? How could this be?”

Two requests for help:

(1) Academic blogs wiki. I’ve grown tired of dealing with google spammers, and have upgraded to Mediawiki 1.68 which should allow me to use “ConfirmEdit”:http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:ConfirmEdit, a basic captcha tool. Unfortunately, it doesn’t work – when I try to implement it I get the following error message

Parse error: syntax error, unexpected T_BOOLEAN_AND, expecting ‘(‘ in /home/farrell/public_html/wiki/extensions/ConfirmEdit/ConfirmEdit.php on line 363

It looks from the extension’s “talk page”:http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension_talk:ConfirmEdit as though I am not the only person experiencing this problem (someone suggests a modification to the php file which doesn’t seem to work for me). Anyone have any idea of what the problem is? (fwiw my server uses php 4.4.6 – hence my inability to upgrade to a more recent version of MediaWiki). For the moment I have implemented a temporary kludge to deter spambots by protecting the relevant directory with a password easily visible to Real Humans, but this isn’t a happy or elegant long term solution. UPDATE – problem solved – a directory screw-up on my part.

(2) when messing around with my server a few months ago, I deleted the rtf and PDF files for the Yochai Benkler seminar that we ran here a while back, and can’t find any copies on my hard drive or on the Wayback Machine. Anyone who downloaded a copy and is willing to send me it will have my eternal gratitude …

My colleague Susan Hurley died last Thursday night. She had been ill for some time, but many of us still held on to the hope that someone as energetic and determined as Susan was would survive. Susan had only joined us at Bristol fairly recently, but she had had a tremendous impact on the Department of Philosophy. She was a great inspiration for graduate students and a formidable interlocutor for her colleagues. Susan is well known to the wider philosophical community for her books _Natural Reasons_ and _Justice, Luck and Knowledge_ as well as for an impressive array of “papers”:http://eis.bris.ac.uk/~plslh/ . Her interests were very broad, ranging from decision theory and political philosophy, through philosophy of mind, psychology and neuroscience. Lately it had been neuroscience that had engaged her, and she was keen to articulate a distinctively naturalistic view of what philosophy is that makes it very much continuous with the natural sciences. Many of us didn’t agree with Susan about that, but she was pretty good at forcing us to reexamine our own lazy assumptions in thinking through why. She’s a real loss to the profession and to the academic community more widely: someone who was committed to the discipline, who was generous with her time and person, and whom many students at Bristol, Warwick, Oxford and elsewhere will remember for having got them really excited about philosophy. We will all miss her.

A bunch of rightwing blogs are getting excited yet again about Scott Beauchamp. For those who haven’t followed the story, Beauchamp is a US soldier in Iraq who wrote some pieces for The New Republic which, among other things, described bad behaviour by US troops, such as deliberately running over stray dogs and taunting a woman disfigured by burns. The pro-war lobby has worn out dozens of keyboards seeking to discredit Beauchamp, his story and the very possibility of running over dogs in an armoured vehicle. Now it appears the US Army has denied Beauchamp’s claims. (To reiterate, I don’t care about or intend to debate, or even to link to, the details of this case).

Some might suggest that the truth or falsity of these stories doesn’t matter much in the light of this. or this or this or this, to list just a few of the disasters have taken place while the wingnutosphere has been defending the US Army’s commitment to animal welfare.

But that would miss the point. What matters, in the world of rightwing postmodernism, is not reality but the way the media reports it. One bogus memo is enough to turn George W. Bush from a scrimshank who used his family connections to line up a cushy billet to avoid war service, and then shirked even that, into a war hero.

So, lets stick to media criticism. Not long after Beauchamp’s piece ran in a single magazine of modest circulation, all the major MSM outlets ran a story by well known critics of the war, Michael O’Hanlon and Kenneth Pollack whose intrepid journey through recently pacified parts of Iraq had convinced them that the surge was working. Here, for example, is their piece in the NY Times.

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Quiet around here over the weekend. Anyway, following up on my Euthyphro post, another legal thought.

Euthyphro describes the case (4c): [click to continue…]

So it’s the time of year when I teach Plato’s Euthyphro and I’m getting ready to run through my usual very short history of Athenian homicide law: how before Draco there was no legal distinction between intentional and non-intentional killing; after Draco, the state began to take greater interest in what had previously been strictly family business; how after Solon it was possible, for the first time, for a citizen who was not a blood relation of the victim to bring suit. (I hope I got that right.)

And then I asked myself: pre-Solon (and even after) what did happen, in practice, if a stranger – some traveler – was killed, and there was no family to bring suit on his behalf? In the dialogue, Euthyphro explains to Socrates that it shouldn’t matter whether the victim is family or a stranger – the pollution is the same either way. And, theologically, that is a perfectly orthodox thing for him to say. More specifically (although Euthyphro doesn’t mention it) Zeus is well-known for having a soft spot for travelers. So if someone kills a traveler or stranger then, theologically, the public has a very legitimate interest in getting all that miasma cleaned up quick before lightning strikes.

So what did the ancient Athenians do in cases in which there was a killing – in which it may have been known who did the killing – and no family with standing to bring suit?

Specific follow-up question: suppose the victim was a guest-friend of an Athenian citizen. Would the citizen then have had legal standing to bring suit on the victim’s behalf?

The US Federal Reserve has stepped in to bail out the financial sector, cutting its discount rate and, more importantly, encouraging banks to borrow directly from the Fed to finance mortgage lending. This action demonstrates that the famous “Greenspan put” has survived, and is now the Bernanke put.

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Our wedding was, in so far as any can be, a happy accident, and nearly as low-key as possible (we had four guests, I made dinner, and the secretary in the UC Davis Philosophy department who was a minister of that church that the Revd. Jim was with in Taxi, signed the papers with us. She subsequently presided over an even more minimalist wedding, inspired by ours, over lunch on a workday in the outstanding student cafeteria they used to, and for all I know still, have there). So, no family, and not much in the way of gifts.

So you might think I’m not one to offer advice on what to ask for for a wedding present. But, as ever, I have strong opinions, after 15 years of marriage, about what is actually worth having, and feel obliged to pass them on to my excellent friends who are about to tie the knot, and have relatives who will not only attend the wedding but are keen to give them gifts. Here are my 4 top picks:

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With stock markets down 10-15 per cent in the last few weeks, it’s a good time to ask whether this will have real effects beyond the value of our superannuation. The immediate starting point of the current disruptions was evidence that defaults on US mortgage markets were worse than expected. An obvious question is whether this underlying shock is large enough to have substantial effects in itself, or whether the problem is mainly one of liquidity and confidence.
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“Uncle Zip”:http://uzwi.wordpress.com/2007/08/14/double-bind/ (aka M. John Harrison).

Reading Benjamin R Barber’s Consumed: How markets corrupt children, infantilize adults, and swallow ctizens whole, & invincibly reminded of some of the weird contortions Thomas de Zengotita (Mediated: How the media shape your life and the way you live in it) put himself through to avoid looking as if he was saying what he was so obviously saying, I determined to write a book of cultural criticism of my own, to be called Nuanced: How the contemporary left has been forced into hypocrisy, temporising & doublespeak by the fear that no one would otherwise publish, buy or read its books of cultural criticism. Damned if he does & damned if he doesn’t in a culture that simply won’t be criticised, Barber explains why this can’t actually be described as a form of soft censorship proceeding from what unstreamlined old lefties would have called f**** c************. Not a bad thing, because it forces him to find a new way of (not) saying it, & books like Consumed–unable to point the finger at their own potential readership for fear of losing it–survive the market only on their ability to confect neologisms & catchwords, presumably in imitation of the business bestsellers & aspirational texts which they don’t actually want to be seen to be contradicting.

When I’ve finished Nuanced I’ll move on to Fucked.

Our new prime minister recently declared that the function of universities is to equip people with the skills necessary for the modern economy. The Guardian’s “higher education” section “reports today”:http://education.guardian.co.uk/higher/news/story/0,,2147814,00.html that

bq. A degree is being launched to meet the rising demand for skilled crew to work on billionaires’ luxury vessels. …. On sailing and motor vessels whose lengths range from 24 metres up to destroyer-size mega-boats owned by the world’s richest billionaires, it seems you simply cannot get the staff these days.

No doubt some enterprising new university will soon be offering degree courses in being a butler or in being some other kind of lackey or flunkey (indeed, I expect commenters will point out that they already are!).

“Megan”:http://fromthearchives.blogspot.com/2007/08/sampling-bias.html of _From the archives_ won’t be surprised that “this _NYT_ article”:http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/12/weekinreview/12kolata.html?_r=1&oref=slogin, claiming that:

One survey, recently reported by the federal government, concluded that men had a median of seven female sex partners. Women had a median of four male sex partners. Another study, by British researchers, stated that men had 12.7 heterosexual partners in their lifetimes and women had 6.5. But there is just one problem, mathematicians say. It is logically impossible for heterosexual men to have more partners on average than heterosexual women. Those survey results cannot be correct.

is already “getting”:http://ezraklein.typepad.com/blog/2007/08/i-caught-a-fish.html “play”:http://www.chrishayes.org/blog/2007/aug/13/im-back/ in the blogosphere. The only thing is that it _isn’t_ logically impossible, at least as the author presents it. Ask “Andrew Gelman”:http://www.stat.columbia.edu/~cook/movabletype/archives/2007/08/medians.html

Jeff’s response: MEDIANS??!! Indeed, there’s no reason the two distributions should have the same median. I gotta say, it’s disappointing that the reporter talked to mathematicians rather than statisticians. (Next time, I’d recommend asking David Dunson for a quote on this sort of thing.) I’m also surprised that they considered that respondents might be lying but not that they might be using different definitions of sex partner. Finally, it’s amusing that the Brits report more sex partners than Americans, contrary to stereotypes.

The Iraqi employees of the British Army story has continued to roll on, with some amount of mainstream media attention (particularly in the Times) and the first wave of responses from MPs. Any CT readers with a UK MP who didn’t write to their MPs last week, you still have time to do so, but potentially not very much time. For one thing, the British Army is withdrawing from Basra town, meaning that it is going to be much more difficult for the employees to be protected. For another, the government (an uncharitable man would say “the New Labour spin machine”) is trying to suggest that the problem can be solved by giving visas only to the 91 individuals who had been employed as translators by the British Army. This is clearly inadequate – the way Des Browne is quoted, it doesn’t even sound as if protection is being extended to families – and I’d be grateful if our readers could mention this.

By the way, the last comments thread on this subject was a bit of a disgrace. Can I make it very clear that anyone using the word “harki” is going to get themselves banned immediately and without appeal. The very idea that people who read this blog might think that the massacres in 1960s Algeria represent a model for an anti-imperialist struggle frankly gives me the creeps. I will charitably assume that the term was used out of ignorance by people who’d only heard it in the context of Zinedine Zidane, for the time being, but any evidence to the contrary and you are banned my son (the commenters in question know who they are). Ditto “quislings”, “collaborators” and any other terms which say or imply that the massacre of civilians by self-styled “resistance” movements isn’t mass murder or isn’t a war crime (as Conor Foley notes in the comments to this trainwreck, there is a decent case for saying that, along the lines of the Rwandan radio trials, advocating a war crime is a war crime itself).