Evaluating a recent book about Derrida at Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews, Nancy J. Holland says:

One wonders, for instance, about the statement that philosophy in America “has the role of legitimating the US government and the scientific enterprise” leading to the suggestions that analytic philosophy “has as its telos the establishment of a universal culture for a static, totalitarian universal civilization” (pp. 124-125). Intriguing, and possibly even largely justified, but surely in need of much more argument.

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Tyler Cowen provides a “sociological explanation of tipping norms”:http://www.marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2007/05/why_does_americ.html in the US.

The real question is why America is structured so that waiters and waitresses can sell feel-good services (“you are a generous tipper and a fine man”) to strangers, in return for money. In other words, how did waiters end up as fundraisers …? Most cross-cultural explanations of tipping start with the agency problem between diners and servers (“can you bring my drink now?”), but I believe that is the wrong approach. I view tipping as correlated with effective fundraising in other areas, and Americans as being especially willing to set this additional fundraising arena in motion.

I think that he’s right not to focus on the agency problem, but I also suspect as a first approximation that any sociological explanation has to refer to different norms about equality and conspicuous consumption. Certainly, my personal experience of eating out in Germany during the couple of years that I lived there was that tipping beyond the nominal 50c to 1 euro that indicated you had enjoyed your meal was not only not obligatory, but actively frowned upon by the waitstaff. It suggested (or so my German friends told me) that you were trying to demonstrate your superiority to them by playing Lord/Lady Bountiful.

My Valve colleague, Scott, has the actual ‘is anyone still being made to read Shakespeare?‘ thing covered. This is about something else.

Matthew Yglesias has a 90’s nostalgia post, dissing Semisonic for their 1998 earworm, “Closing Time”. Matt is not feeling strangely fine; rather, finding it ‘weirdly hilarious’ that anyone would write: they were “no longer upstarts, underdogs or indie rockers. Instead they had a hit song and sales of two million albums worldwide to follow up.”

Here’s the thing. [click to continue…]

This “piece”:http://www.dissentmagazine.org/article/?article=790 by Mark Levinson in _Dissent_ on Paul Krugman and John Kenneth Galbraith touches on something I “blogged about”:https://crookedtimber.org/2006/07/26/krugman-galbraith-and-kamm/ last year. When I read my way through Krugman’s early 1990s book, _Peddling Prosperity_, Galbraith came in for a surprising amount of flak. This gave me the impression that Krugman was being a little defensive, the _sotto voce_ measage being that yes, perhaps Krugman too was an economist who could write wittily and well for a popular audience, but unlike Galbraith, he was a _real_ economist, who had imbibed the lessons of Samuelson et al. and did equations and stuff. _Peddling Prosperity_ is as much as anything an effort to re-create the boundary between real economists and those whom Krugman perceived as populist hacks; Galbraith is awkward to fit into that classification, as he wasn’t a mathematically rigorous economist, but was a past-president of the American Economics Association.

The interesting bit of Levinson’s piece is his discussion of how Krugman has morphed over time into the kind of economist that JKG wanted to see.

Galbraith insisted that power—which he defined as “the ability of persons or institutions to bend others to their purposes”—is decisive in understanding what happens in the world. He went on: “If we accept the reality of power . . . we have years of useful professional work ahead of us. And since we will be in touch with real issues, and since issues that are real inspire passion, our life will again be pleasantly contentious, perhaps even usefully dangerous.” … It’s hard to think of a better description of Krugman. His discovery of the abuse of power now seems to influence not only his op-ed pieces for the Times but also his more serious economic writing. … In the late 1990s and early 2000s, when Krugman spoke about causes [of inequality], he usually said something like this (from an interview in 1999): “Looking at the numbers makes it clear that this [inequality] is . . . [caused by] some combination of technological change and more complicated factors.” Now his explanation incorporates power and politics: “The government can tilt the balance of power between workers and bosses in many ways—and at every juncture this government has favored the bosses.”

Two developments worth blogging. First, the _Political Theory Daily Review_ is in the process of transplanting itself to “Bookforum”:http://www.bookforum.com/. This is a good thing; it gives the famously information-dense PTDR a new design which makes it a bit easier to read, while bringing a few more eyeballs to Bookforum, an estimable site in its own right.

Second, Rick Perlstein is now blogging regularly at the “Big Con”:http://commonsense.ourfuture.org/thebigcon/, where he’s bringing his vast accumulated knowledge of the history of the conservative movement to bear on current politics. This “post”:http://commonsense.ourfuture.org/legionnaires_diseased on the American Legion’s guff about how Democrats are “politicizing” Memorial Day ought to be of particular interest to CT readers who remember the outrage among some of our commenters when Kieran “suggested”:https://crookedtimber.org/2005/05/30/memorial-day/ a couple of years ago that they use Memorial Day to “reflect on what it means to serve and perhaps die for your country, and to think about the value of the cause, the power of the reasons, and the strength of the evidence you would need before asking someone—someone like your brother, or friend, or neighbor—to take on that burden.”

This survey says I’m an Internet Omnivore, but reading the descriptions I’m more of a Lackluster Veteran. I don’t like mobiles/cellphones much, because they’re fiddly and unintuitive, and I only rarely send text messages – I keep forgetting where the space bar is. However, once the iPhone comes out, I expect to be properly omnivorous. (H/T Edumacation* – Also an Omnivore)

* While I’m at it, can anyone point me to the origin of constructions like Edumacation, Journamalism and so on. Wikipedia isn’t much help, and Uncyclopedia’s entry, while edumacational, gives no etymamology.

Cory Doctorow coins a phrase about Teresa Nielsen Hayden.

Megan McArdle’s dog, Finnegan, contracted an infection and had to be put to sleep. She posted about it. I thought: soon, some gobshite will show up in the comments, deriding the way she felt at four in the morning the night her dog died. And sure enough. Gotta love the intertubes.

Meanwhile, Jerry Falwell has died, too. In terms of net good brought into the world during their respective lives, Megan’s dog is probably ahead of Falwell. The conjunction of events reminded me of Oliver Goldsmith on morality, dogs and men.
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Via Larry Solum, a piece in the New York Sun by Steven Smith, about Rawls, occasioned by the publication of Rawls’s Lectures on the History of Political Philosophy. (It’s sitting on my shelf, waiting for the summer: one friend commented that the paper is cheap, but in fact I like that for some reason).

One comment struck me as odd:

His very modesty and lack of speculative curiosity are what exclude him from the ranks of the great philosophers. Rawls is not an Isaiah Berlin with his anguished sense of the conflict of goods which besets human life; nor is he a Leo Strauss with his vivid awareness of the forces of persecution with which philosophy has always to contend; nor is he a Michael Oakeshott with his diagnosis of the dangers posed by excessive rationalism to the goals of a free society.

All true (except the not-great bit, in my opinion). But doesn’t this carry the implicature that, unlike Rawls, Berlin, Strauss and Oakeshott were great philosophers? Interesting thinkers, all of them, but great philosophers? Maybe I’m misreading it.

Thanks to dr slack and other well-read contributors to this comments thread, I found an early version of the drunk/lamp-post/keys joke commonly directed at economists in which the role of the drunk/economist is played by a figure from Afghan (or maybe Iranian or Turkish) tradition, Mullah Nasruddin (scroll down or search for basement).

18 months ago, it was decision day for the EU’s General Affairs and External Relations Council to decide on banning Uzbek government officials from entering Europe. A travel ban was put in place after the Uzbek government shot dead about 200 protesters in Andijan in May, 2005. The US also protested the massacre and was kicked out of its air base in Afghanistan’s neighbour (despite having poured $1 billion of aid into the country since 1992, not to mention the odd extraordinary rendition). In October 2005, the EU issued a strongly worded protest and banned Karimov and about a dozen of his cronies from entering the Europe. Today, it’s d-day again, as the Council decides whether to continue banning 12 named officials from entering Europe.

Normally, this bread and butter issue should have been decided last week in discussions between government officials. Most member states wanted the ban continued for 12 named people, but Germany wanted only 8. Using its presidency of the EU to throw its weight around, Germany refused point blank to negotiate at the working level, and pushed the issue up to the EU’s foreign ministers for their meeting today. All over Brussels, diplomats are scratching their heads at how far Germany is willing to stick its brass neck out for this nasty little dictatorship and asking themselves; wtf? [click to continue…]

I can’t resist following Conservapedia, the Tlön version of Wikipedia, in which the liberal, anti-American bias of the Earth version is replaced with virtue and apple pie. But where did this bias come from, and how is it so deeply rooted in our culture? The answer, it turns out is the Bible, not of course the true version held in the vaults of Uqbar, but the liberal Earth Bible known by such as names as the King James Version.

In the Uqbar version, as explained at Conservapedia, all sorts of politically correct liberalism is eliminated or glossed out of existence. Uqbar scholars have discovered that the soft-on-crime John 8:7 ‘”If any one of you is without sin, let him be the first to throw a stone” was inserted by time-travelling liberals some time around the 4th century. Naturally, Conservapedia says, Wikipedia sticks to the Earth version, though a check of the actual site suggests that the annoying liberal habit of looking at all the evidence is at work here as well.

Conservapedia has able assistance from other conservative sources. All that class warfare stuff about the rich not getting into heaven (Matthew 19:21-24) turns out to mean that if you want money, you should cut God (or his earthly representatives) a good share in advance. Other kinds of warfare are fine with the Prince of Peace, though. As for turning the other cheek ((Luke 6:27-31), it’s No More Christian Nice Guy.

Commenting on this Instapundit post: “I have no idea if it’s actually true, but sounds pretty plausible.” And that, my friends, is how the pros blog.

Simon Kuper, in today’s FT, “reviews Anne Goldgar’s _Tulipmania_, “:http://www.ft.com/cms/s/50e2255e-0025-11dc-8c98-000b5df10621.html a new study of the 17th century boom and bust in the Dutch tulip market. Disappointingly, it turns out that most of the stories are false. There was a boom, but it was a fairly marginal phenomenon in the Dutch economy, and people weren’t ruined: the deals were done when the plants were in the ground, but payment was due only when the bulbs were dug up. Most people simply refused to pay, or paid only a small fraction of what they owed.