“Steven Poole”:http://www.unspeak.net/ seems to have gone on holiday, so it must fall to others to catalogue the emergence of new unspeak terms. “Rebalancing” seems to be the vogue word with British government ministers at the moment. It is used when the government wants to restrict the rights of people accused of crimes, to promote summary punishment of offenders, to impose harsher sentences, and so on. The open admission that the government wants to restrict civil liberties would cause many people to worry about justice. “Rebalancing”, with its tacit reference to the scales of justice, and its suggestion that this or that measure is merely the tuning of a delicate machine, aims to calm such anxieties. Authoritarian thug Home Secretary John Reid is “a frequent user”:http://society.guardian.co.uk/crimeandpunishment/story/0,,1824989,00.html of the word, and I see that blogger Oliver Kamm “likes it too”:http://oliverkamm.typepad.com/blog/2006/07/justice_means_s.html .

Michael Walzer has “a piece in the New Republic”:http://www.tnr.com/user/nregi.mhtml?i=20060731&s=walzer073106 which addresses the question of how Israel may legitimately prosecute its war in Lebanon. There’s much to agree with in the piece, especially since Walzer is clear about the impermissibility of deliberately killing civilians and deliberately destroying the infrastructure necessary to support civilian life. There’s also much with which I disagree. Walzer tends to take IDF claims about the extent to which they actually do seek to minimize civilian casualities at face value; the reports from Lebanon would seem to support a more sceptical stance. I was, however, brought up short by this:

bq. the Israeli response has only a short-term aim: to stop the attacks across its borders… Until there is an effective Lebanese army and a Palestinian government that believes in co-existence, Israel is entitled to act, within the dialectical limits, on its own behalf.

Now I don’t dissent from the proposition that Israel is entitled to act to stop attacks across its borders. But Walzer’s linkage of that claim to the capacity of the Lebanese government is surely perverse. The claimed legitimacy of many of the Israeli actions has hinged on the failure of Lebanese government to act and on its legal responsibility to do so. Attacks on facilities outside the Hezbollah zone of control have been conducted with this explicit justification. But if it is part of the case for action that the Lebanese government actually lacks the capacity to act — as it surely does — then those operations were wrong.

Israel can’t simultaneously base its justification for action on the responsibility of the Lebanese government to act _and_ on its incapacity to do so, except insofar as it limits itself to actions that an effective Lebanese government would be duty-bound to perform, namely, suppressing Hezbollah. But Israel hasn’t limited itself to such actions, it has attacked other Lebanese targets.

The Walzer justification could surely only be offered in good faith by a party that was also committed to enabling the Lebanese government to exercise effective sovereignty over its territory. The Israeli attacks aren’t strengthening the post-Cedar-revolution government, they are increasing the probability that Lebanon will once again descend into being a failed state.

Trying to make sense of what Israel is actually doing is hard, in my opinion. I don’t believe that Israel can destroy Hezbollah by direct military action, and I’m sure they don’t believe so either. The point of their action can’t be to get the Lebanese government to act, because, as the Walzer justification insists, they lack the capacity to do so. So what are they trying to do? My guess, is that they are trying to exploit the US commitment to a post-Syrian Lebanese order to bounce the US into acting against Syria and Iran. “Take action Condi, or we’ll screw an important plank of your Middle East policy” is the message, and this might indeed be an effective way to get Hezbollah to stop firing rockets. If Iran or Syria pushed Hezbollah to provoke Israel (and I think it very likely they did) then presumably they’re also trying to pressure the US to make a deal in some way whilst they can. Lebanese civilians are expendable chips in what looks like a high stakes game of diplomatic poker.

I thought I’d give this post a title which combines the obsession of the blogosphere with the obsession of the entire internet, because Max Sawicky has been complaining that some of our post titles have been a little bit off-putting of late, in particular, “Was Foucault a closet Habermasian?”. Max has a point; Foucault is all right but Habermas is ratings death. I actually own a book called “Hegel, Habermas and Hermeneutics” which I bought secondhand out of sheer admiration for the publisher’s gall at such a commercially suicidal title. It was standing next to a row of ten other copies, mint and unopened.

It got me to thinking though; what would be the most off-putting title in the world? So far, my suggestions are “Insurance Accounting in the Communist Countries”, “Comitology in the EU” and “The Role of Telecommunications Standards in the WTO Negotiations”.

The thing is, all three of these issues are actually rather interesting, and so was “Was Foucault a Closet Habermasian?”. It just goes to show you shouldn’t judge a book by its cover, I suppose. Furthermore, I am in the mood to get all contrarian and say that off-putting titles can be a virtue. Henry’s title of the Foucault post might have scared off readers who didn’t care about Foucault and Habermas, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing, given that it was about Foucault and Habermas. Certainly, the posts with popular and whizzy titles often seem to attract the most ferocious morons to their comments sections.

So what would be the most genuinely off-putting title for a potentially interesting post? Suggestions are welcome in comments with one proviso: I am not looking for fictitious posts. Anyone suggesting a post title had better be able and prepared to write 250 words on the subject without being boring (or even better – link to a real-world example on their own blog). I will be making a few quasi-randomly selected calls of “bullshit” to keep you honest.

There are good reasons why I haven’t bought Wired Magazine in about five years. The whole bleeding edge thing frayed a bit with the dot com crash. And that hyperactive, slightly autistic gadget-boy take on the world (a planet which only spanned the west coast of the US and the high tech bits of Asia) just started to seem ever so recursive. But today, in honour of being on the west coast and much delayed on a flight from L.A back to Europe, I cracked and bought the magazine.

Wired now has fashion tips for how to wear your bluetooth, a rather pointless feature on ‘Earth 2.0’, advertisements for Gilette (because the best a man can get is a whopping five blades), and far more car ads than I remember – most of them for Japanese vehicles that improbably combine performance, high tech fuel efficiency, and the nodding respect of other techies. So ‘Wired Man’ is slightly more environmentally aware than he used to be, but just as insecure and rather implausibly hirsute.
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Today’s NYT runs an Associated Press story headed Farmers Use Bull Semen to Inseminate Cows, which reports, as news, the fact that dairy farmers use artificial insemination on a large scale.

Next they’ll be telling us that milkmaids face unemployment due to the introduction of milking machines.

Since I’ve given the setup, feel free to lower the tone in comments.

William Browning Spencer, in the introduction to his new collection of short stories, _The Ocean and All Its Devices_, contemplates the one form of life that the unsuccessful writer can look down on.

bq. How does the ignored writer dodge envy and bitterness? How does he keep clear of the thought that he is writing in a vacuum, making no real sound as he topples over in the forest? Is he as deluded as some drug-addled blogger alone in a room with his computer and the cast-off shells of ordered-out pizzas, ranting to a potential audience of millions (because they are irrefutably out there; those millions of readers are out there on the Web)?

(The implication in the above that we get forests in vacuums might suggest to the unwary that Spencer is a bad writer, which is wildly untrue. The collection is very good, although so far I haven’t found anything that’s quite at the level of his utterly wonderful short, “The Entomologists at Obala,” in which two increasingly lunatic biologists conduct war-by-proxy in the wilderness via wasps and spiders)

I see in this piece by Alan Wood that the House of Lords Select Committee on Economic Affairs inquiry into “The Economics of Climate Change” (which strongly questioned the science of climate change) is still getting a run in denialist circles.

I haven’t bothered posting on this before, because the main outcome of the inquiry was the establishment of the Stern Review which issued its first discussion paper back in April, stating (from the Executive Summary)

Climate change is a serious and urgent issue… There is now an overwhelming body of scientific evidence that human activity is increasing the concentrations of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, and causing warming.

There’s more like this, giving an excellent summary of the mainstream scientific position.

So the House of Lords exercise was something of an own goal for the denialists. But how did a supposedly serious inquiry come up with with such nonsense in the first place?

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I’ve been rather enjoying the response of conservative commentators to the “girls do better in school than boys” debate. Everybody’s favourite conservative (or maybe he’s just mine), David Brooks, invokes brain science to show that boys are different from girls, but instead of concluding that girls are simply superior, he assumes that schools are doing the wrong things. It used to be that when a conservative claimed that an inequality was natural, he was defending it, but because this time it is boys that are being shown up its ok to claim that the natural difference is just a difference, and it is the fault of society that it is turned into an inequality which matters socially.

It isn’t nuts to think that the gender achievement gap is grounded in a natural inequality.

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Radley Balko’s study of the increase in paramilitary police raids by SWAT teams “is now available”:http://www.cato.org/pub_display.php?pub_id=6476 from Cato. They’ve also produced a “map of botched raids”:http://www.cato.org/raidmap/, using Google Maps, to show the distribution of raids that involved some kind of serious error. I’d like to see a table of that data as well (or, because I’m greedy, the whose dataset). There are a lot of things one could do with the data beyond just plotting the incidents on a map, though this is certainly an effective way to draw attention to the issue. The “monograph itself”:http://www.cato.org/pubs/wtpapers/balko_whitepaper_2006.pdf contains summaries of a large number of the botched raids. The rise of paramilitary policing is a serious problem in itself — just on the very narrow grounds that mistakes are common — but is also clearly bound up with larger questions of criminal justice policy in the United States, and America’s “astonishingly high”:https://crookedtimber.org/2006/05/26/incarceration-again/ rate of incarceration.

Over at academicsecret, several posts start out discussing topics in fairly general terms, but have ended up with a gender twist. For example, there is the issue of having babies while in grad school or the question of “strategic incompetence”. The latter refers to some people’s ability to convince others that they are incompetent with all sorts of inconvenient tasks (whether secretarial work or committee membership) and thus manage to get out of a lot of service work.

Neither of these posts started out as a discussion of gender differences, but in both cases a commenter suggested that the issues work differently for male vs female academics. I think those commenters are correct. Even in fields and departments that are more egalitarian less obvious differences remain. But it’s interesting to note that even people who recognize these challenges in academia don’t necessarily see the gendered aspects right away.

The comment thread to my Schmitt post is perking along nicely. (Good poems about taxes, too.) I’m going to take the liberty of elevating some bits of that thread for discussion in this here fresh post. John Quiggin writes:

So, let me start with the observation that war is inherently a negative-sum activity and the empirical fact that, in practice, aggressive war is almost invariably a negative-return activity for the inhabitants of countries that undertake it, Germany in the first half of C20 being a striking example. Schmitt and similar thinkers manage to construct logical frameworks that insulate them from crucial facts like this.

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Do people oppose gay marriage because they dislike gay people, or because they’re in favour of marriages with traditional sex roles for blushing brides and chivalrous grooms? Richard Thompson Ford wrote a “piece”:http://www.slate.com/id/2145620/nav/tap2/ for _Slate_ last week suggesting that the latter is more important than people think and that opposition to gay marriage doesn’t necessarily stem from homophobia. My colleague John Sides has taken a quick look at the survey results on this – I append his findings below the line. Short version: Ford is likely right that attitudes to traditional sex roles help explain attitudes to gay marriage, but it’s a much less important explanatory factor than basic like/dislike of gay people.
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Jim Johnson “summarizes the argument”:http://politicstheoryphotography.blogspot.com/2006/07/architecture-of-authority.html of one of his more provocative papers on the way to making some points about photography, architecture and Guantanamo.

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First, I’d just like to say that this post about Leo Strauss and fascism at Balkinization is interesting. Scott Horton has translated an odd letter, written by Strauss on the occasion of his emigration under anti-semitic pressure: "the fact that the new right-wing Germany does not tolerate us says nothing against the principles of the right. To the contrary: only from the principles of the right, that is from fascist, authoritarian and imperial principles, is it possible with seemliness, that is, without resort to the ludicrous and despicable appeal to the droits imprescriptibles de l’homme to protest against the shabby abomination."

Moving right along, I just read Carl Schmitt, Political Romanticism [amazon]. And now I’m telling you I had the slightly unusual experience of coming to a work by a familiar author, on a (fairly) familiar topic, with really no strong sense whether he would be for or against.

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