No kidding. Says so in Achieving Our Country [amazon].

As a teen-ager, I believed every anti-Stalinist word that Sidney Hook and Lionel Trilling published in Partisan Review – partly, perhaps, because I had been bounced on their knees as a baby. My mother used to tell me, with great pride, that when I was seven I had had the honor of serving little sandwiches to the guests at a Halloween party attended both by John Dewey and by Carlo Tresca, the Italian anarachist leader who was assassinated a few years later. That same party, I have since discovered, was attended not only by the Hooks and the Trillings, but by Whittaker Chambers. Chambers had just broken with the Communist Party and was desperately afraid of being liquidated by Stalin’s hit men. Another guest was Suzanne La Follette, to whom Dewey had entrusted the files of the Commission of Inquiry into the Moscow Trials. These files disappeared when her apartment was burgled, presumably by Soviet agents. (p. 61)

So I guess I no longer find it strange, relatively speaking, that Hegel and Schelling and Hölderlin were roommates. (I’ve really got to read The Sociology of Philosophies, which people have been insistently recommending to me [amazon].)

If a book is translated in your mother tongue, but the original was in a language that you understand, would you read the book in translation or in the original language? I (almost) always choose the original, despite that this generally requires greater effort. The reason is simple: many translated works are not able to capture the exact meanings of the original text (especially in the case of non-fiction), or do not breathe the same atmosphere (especially in the case of fiction). Even for single quotes, the original is often better phrased than the translated. But there are exceptions. Take the quote at the top of your screen: as far as I know, it is “Isaiah Berlin’s translation”:http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0691058385/102-7074207-0531324?v=glance&n=283155 of Immanuel Kant’s original. I’ve always wondered how the original sounds, and since I couldn’t figure out myself, I asked “Pauline Kleingeld”:http://leidsewetenschappers.leidenuniv.nl/show_en.php3?medewerker_id=816, a Kant Scholar. Here it is:

Aus so krummem Holze, als woraus der Mensch gemacht ist, kann nichts ganz Gerades gezimmert werden (Akademische Ausgabe, Band 8, page 23).

For once, the translation beats the original.

Via “PZ Myers”:http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2006/08/i_guess_you_can_be_innumerate.php, I see that the idea that liberals are going to be outbred by conservatives has made it to the “Wall Street Journal”:http://www.opinionjournal.com/editorial/feature.html?id=110008831. PZ deals with some questions about the growth rates cited in the piece. But of course it’s not just about the math — “liberal” and “conservative” are not exactly stable features of a population with respect to their content. About six months ago “I wrote about a similar claim”:https://crookedtimber.org/2006/03/15/demography-is-not-destiny/ from Philip Longman. Here’s what I said then.

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No time to comment at length, but I had to post about this since it is a big deal. It shouldn’t have been such a big deal, but it became one and so it’s worth a note: the U.S. Food and Drug Administration has finally approved over-the-counter access to Plan B (“morning after pill”, emergency contraception) for women 18 and over. More here.

Planned Parenthood is quick to point out that it’s still a problem that those under 18 continue to require a prescription:

While we are glad to know the FDA finally ended its foot-dragging on this issue, Planned Parenthood is troubled by the scientifically baseless restriction imposed on teenagers. The U.S. has one of the highest rates of teen pregnancy in the western world — anything that makes it harder for teenagers to avoid unintended pregnancy is bad medicine and bad public policy.

They’re right. But let’s take a moment to be excited about the progress that’s been made anyway. There are a lot of people who worked on this for years and to them a huge THANK YOU. Again, no time to comment at length, but I wanted to post a brief note to mark the occasion.

Now that there’s something like a ceasefire in Lebanon, I think what needs to happen is for Hezbollah to relocate to the DC area and start firing rockets at suburban homes in the region. This would have the advantage of combining two of “David”:http://www.volokh.com/archives/archive_2006_08_20-2006_08_26.shtml#1156342789 “Bernstein’s”:http://www.volokh.com/archives/archive_2006_08_20-2006_08_26.shtml#1156382394 three main interests in life. I imagine gleeful posts about the sudden drop in housing prices combined with dark suspicions over photos of dead realtors being carried out of the rubble. If the rockets could be launched from the safety of campus free-speech zones, we’d have the trifecta.

My draft review of Steven Poole’s Unspeak is over the fold. Comments much appreciated.

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Between 1998 and 2003, “Joris Luyendijk”:http://www.jorisluyendijk.nl/ worked for various Dutch media as their correspondent in the Middle East. He has now written a book about his experiences (as far as I know, it’s only available in Dutch).

Luyendijk, who studied political science and Arabic, lived as a correspondent in Egypt, Lebanon, and East-Jerusalem. One of the main themes of his book is the impossibility of being a correspondent in this region according to the standards that journalists are assumed to aspire to in Europe. With many anecdotes, he shows that the ‘news’ Dutch people are getting about the Middle Eastern countries in the mainstream media is heavily filtered, manipulated, and constrained. It seems plausible to think that if it really is so bad with the Middle East reporting in the Dutch media, it ain’t going to be any better for other countries. Despite that this book is written for a broad readership and therefore aspires to be as readable as possible, it does not offer one simple explanation for this problem. Rather, Luyendijk describes a number of factors. [click to continue…]

… to “Scott Page”:http://www.cscs.umich.edu/~spage/ for somehow getting the Quarterly Journal of Political Science to publish an “article”:http://www.wcfia.harvard.edu/seminars/pegroup/Page2006.pdf discussing the concept of ‘phat dependence.’

Blogger.com’s “flagging policy”:http://help.blogger.com/bin/answer.py?answer=42517 seems decidedly peculiar to me. [click to continue…]

There’s been a lot of discussion about claims that world oil output is going to reach a peak some time soon. If you look at the recent numbers, there’s a pretty good case to be made that world all output has already reached its peak at about 73 million barrels a day, a level reached in mid-2004, and sustained for the past two years.

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Jeffrey Sachs, William Easterly (and Bono for that matter) can stop their bitching, Christopher Hitchens has “an explanation”:http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/topstories/tm_objectid=17550835&method=full&siteid=94762-name_page.html for a good deal of global destitution:

bq. … the mass murder of people on aeroplanes is a leading cause of poverty.

If only Larry Summers were still in post, he could have offered Hitch a job. (shamelessly stolen from “Marc Mulholland”:http://moiders.blogspot.com/2006/08/political-economy-of-under-development.html ).

This “Los Angeles Times”:http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/asection/la-na-vietnam20aug20,1,7586489,full.story story (free sub or bugmenot required) deserves more attention than it’s getting.

In early 1973, Army Chief of Staff Gen. Creighton Abrams received some bad news from the service’s chief of criminal investigations. An internal inquiry had confirmed an officer’s widely publicized charge that members of the 173rd Airborne Brigade had tortured detainees in Vietnam. But there was a silver lining: Investigators had also compiled a 53-page catalog of alleged discrepancies in retired Lt. Col. Anthony B. Herbert’s public accounts of his war experiences. “This package … provides sufficient material to impeach this man’s credibility; should this need arise, I volunteer for the task,” wrote Col. Henry H. Tufts, commander of the Army’s Criminal Investigation Division. Now, declassified records show that while the Army was working energetically to discredit Herbert, military investigators were uncovering torture and mistreatment that went well beyond what he had described. The abuses were not made public, and few of the wrongdoers were punished. Tufts’ agents found that military interrogators in the 173rd Airborne repeatedly beat prisoners, tortured them with electric shocks and forced water down their throats to simulate the sensation of drowning, the records show. Soldiers in one unit told investigators that their captain approved of such methods and was sometimes present during torture sessions. In one case, a detainee who had been beaten by interrogators suffered convulsions, lost consciousness and later died in his confinement cage. Investigators identified 29 members of the 173rd Airborne as suspects in confirmed cases of torture. Fifteen of them admitted the acts. Yet only three were punished, records show. They received fines or reductions in rank. None served any prison time.

The LA Times story leaves no doubt that there was a coverup.

In the spring of 1969, about a dozen members of the 172nd MI organized a letter-writing campaign to complain to higher-ups about the abuse, Stemme said. “Next thing we know, we have this major coming up from IG’s office who is Miranda-izing us and asks us if we’re admitting to committing war crimes,” Stemme said, referring to the inspector general. “It was all about us, when this was de facto command policy. It was really scary.” They decided as a group not to give any statements, he said. … Records show that Stemme detailed specific instances of maltreatment, offering names and approximate dates. Yet a case summary produced by the Army chief of staff’s office reported that investigators closed the investigation because Stemme “declined to provide any specific information concerning his allegations.” “I spent hours with these guys,” said Stemme, now 63 and retired from his job as an investigator for the San Francisco public defender’s office. “There was no reason for me to be reticent.”

This post from the Freakonomics blog on why beautiful women sometimes marry unattractive men seems somewhat incomprehensible to me. Maybe you all can help:

…a new study by Satoshi Kanazawa, an evolutionary psychologist at the London School of Economics, suggests it may be a simple supply-and-demand issue: there are more beautiful women in the world than there are handsome men.

Why? Kanazawa argues it’s because good-looking parents are 36% more likely to have a baby daughter as their first child than a baby son—which suggests, evolutionarily speaking, that beauty is a trait more valuable for women than for men. The study was conducted with data from 3,000 Americans, derived from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health, and was published in The Journal of Theoretical Biology.

According to this news article, “Selection pressure means when parents have traits they can pass on that are better for boys than for girls, they are more likely to have boys. Such traits include large size, strength and aggression, which might help a man compete for mates. On the other hand, parents with heritable traits that are more advantageous to girls are more likely to have daughters.”

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When some people hear the words ‘gender’ and ‘feminism’, they have negative associations with these words. So I’ve very often been advised to be very carefully in using these words, especially with the F-word. My ‘strategy’ (if there every was such a thing) has been to never introduce myself as a feminist to people I didn’t know and who are not feminists themselves. In that way a person may get to know me a little without the influence of prejudices and bad connotations. During graduate work, I guess I’ve been very lucky that “my PhD supervisor”:http://post.economics.harvard.edu/faculty/sen/sen.html was famous (and thus powerful) and entirely supported me in my feminist activities, so that I didn’t need to worry about whether my feminist interest would jeopardize my chances in obtaining my PhD degree (you bet I worked like hell). In addition, growing a little older, having job security and having collected some professional credits (grants, publications etc.) makes a lot of difference. If you don’t have to worry about bread on the table (or, for some people, a partner to live with), you are freer to speak your mind.

Still, outside academia I am much more careful. Hence when a few years ago I was at a party where the Belgian philosopher “Axel Gosseries”:http://www.uclouvain.be/11692.html introduced me to the Belgian Crown Prince as “a great Belgian feminist”, my first thought was “Help, what do I say now?”. I interpreted the prince’s facial reaction as expressing disgust and fear. My guess is that he had never met a self-proclaimed feminist, and must have felt the way I would feel if someone would introduce me to a terrorist or to a child-hater. He asked “are you really a feminist?” I replied that I wouldn’t normally introduce myself as such, but that yes, I was writing a PhD thesis on gender inequality and that this was clearly a feminist concern. He replied that he was concerned about the position of women too, since women who were staying at home where no longer valued and respected in our societies. I said that I agreed, but that it was even more difficult for men who wanted to spend time with their children or other dependents. Oh, he replied, but women and men are not the same. He then asked whether I had children. No, I didn’t. That seemed to disqualify me to talk about gender issues, because if I would have a child, I would have understood that women can never be equals to men, since they are the ones who become pregnant and give birth and care for children, and are therefore naturally unsuited to compete in the hard world outside. A few years of research on gender inequality and one baby later, I still don’t see why my having a womb and female hormones would make me unsuited to “competing in the hard world outside”. I wonder what he thinks about the fact that his daughter is second in line for the throne.