I’m reading and enjoying Steven Poole‘s _Unspeak_ at the moment, but was a little disappointed not to find one of my least favourite bits of unspeak, the term “Islamofascist,” in the index. It’s what Lewis Carroll’s Humpty-Dumpty (surely the patron saint of unspeak) calls a “portmanteau”:http://www.cs.indiana.edu/metastuff/looking/ch6.html.gz word, and indeed there’s something of the badger, something of the lizard, and something of the corkscrew about it. I’m also dipping into various volumes of E. Haldeman-Julius’ _Questions and Answers_, courtesy of Scott McLemee, and was a little startled to find Haldeman-Julius using a quite similar term in the 1930s:

bq. We thus see that the people most subject to Catholic-Fascism’s idea of censorship is most given to crime … True, we have our crime problem in this country, but Catholic apologists should be the last to throw this fact into the face of those who oppose Catholic-Fascism and its policy of suppressing heterodox literature.

And so on.

Now Haldeman-Julius and his friends (most prominently former Franciscan priest, “Joseph McCabe”:http://kenmacleod.blogspot.com/2006_02_01_kenmacleod_archive.html ) certainly had a thing about Catholicism, but it seems to me that the term Catholic-Fascism was rather more defensible in the 1930s than Islamofascism is today. You had the practical example of Franco’s regime in Spain, and Salazar’s in Portugal. Both were fascist; both had strong elements of Catholic clericalism (and Church support). Islamofascism … not so much (you could certainly make a case that Baathism was fascist, but it wasn’t really Islamic).

My last Plato bleg was a success, so I’m going to try another. Everyone has read Euthyphro, so you remember that the dad allegedly killed the guy who allegedly killed the other guy. And so Euthyphro is prosecuting him for murder. And so here we are, on the steps of the King Archon’s court. Fair enough. But it happened on Naxos. So why is it being tried in Athens? Obviously Euthyphro and his dad are Athenian citizens who happen to own land on Naxos. I can see various possibilities. If it happened at the height of Athenian imperial power – say, at the time that Naxos attempted to withdraw from the Delian league and got stomped for it by the Athenians – I would presume the Athenians had at some point asserted extraterritorial legal jurisidiction at least in cases involving its citizens. But the trial of Socrates happens in 399 BC, a few years after the restoration of democracy. Athens is hardly the empire it was. So why does its court have extraterritorial authority in cases concerning people who die of exposure in ditches on Naxos? (If you commenters know the answer, I will be impressed.)

Eve Garrard, has written a comment on this John Gray‘s latest piece in the New Statesman. Since Gray got his new post-JG Ballard prose style it is often quite difficult to work out precisely what he is on about, but in this case, he is making the point that “Enlightenment Values” have historically been associated with a hell of a lot of death and destruction (things like the French revolutionary Terror). Garrard’s point is that when she and the Euston Manifesto crowd use the phrase, they use it only to refer to ” universal human rights, equality (in some sense), religious tolerance, scepticism about received dogmas, freedom of speech, a commitment to the use of reason to improve our condition” rather than blood and the guillotine, and that Gray knows this and is just being silly.
[click to continue…]

Story here. Tony Blackburn here. Don’t know what to say, so I won’t.

“Teresa Nielsen Hayden”:http://nielsenhayden.com/makinglight/archives/007671.html#007671 writes about finding an old sociology textbook in a second hand bookstore.

bq. _Bits that are familiar from age to age_: predictably, the book’s big on the idea that, until recently, traditional values held society together and enforced morality; but now that we’ve become an atomized society, other mechanisms of control will have to be found. People say that today, and I remember them saying it when I was a sprat, so it’s nice to find out that they were saying it in 1939. …

bq. The real reason I picked up the book: It discusses stuff you no longer see stated that bluntly. … the real prize was a section that turned out to have been quoted (approvingly) from Harold Lasswell’s Propaganda Technique in World War I. … We really don’t see people saying stuff like that in clear any more. Of course, being me, I’d be happier if we did.

When I read this I immediately thought of Charles Tilly’s work. First, because Tilly’s book, _Big Structures, Large Processes, Huge Comparisons_ ( “Powells”:http://www.powells.com/partner/29956/s?kw=Charles%20Tilly%20Big%20Structures%20, Amazon) is, among other things, about how 19th century worries about the atomization of society have fundamentally shaped the concepts of 20th century sociology. Second, because I think Tilly’s writing is an excellent example of how sociology can speak in clear in both of Teresa’s senses. It’s written in straightforward, uncomplicated English with a minimum of jargon, and is admirably blunt when discussing matters that ought to be discussed bluntly. There’s a good example available online in a slightly iffy scan – his wonderfully brutal short essay, “War Making and State Making as Organized Crime”:http://www.jesusradicals.com/library/tilly/warmaking.pdf. I also like these lines from his curriculum vitae.

bq. Among Tilly’s negative distinctions he prizes 1) never having held office in a professional association, 2) never having chaired a university department or served as a dean, 3) never having been an associate professor, 4) rejection every single time he has been screened as a prospective juror. He had also hoped never to publish a book with a subtitle, but subtitles somehow slipped into two of his co-authored books.

(there are a couple of other gems in the cv if you’re prepared to dig)

The domain name under which I keep my philosophy blog and personal webpage seems to have been taken over by a domain name hijacker. (You might wonder how this could happen; there are a few details below the fold.) So I’ve had to move everything around. For anyone who links to those sites, or read them, the domain name is now weatherson.org rather than weatherson.net. Similarly the domain name of my email address has changed so it now ends .org rather than .net.
[click to continue…]

Sorry, Chris. At least Stevie Gerrard played well.

What a disaster:

One example out of many comes in Ron Suskind’s gripping narrative of what the White House has celebrated as one of the war’s major victories: the capture of Abu Zubaydah in Pakistan in March 2002. Described as al-Qaeda’s chief of operations even after U.S. and Pakistani forces kicked down his door in Faisalabad, the Saudi-born jihadist was the first al-Qaeda detainee to be shipped to a secret prison abroad. Suskind shatters the official story line here.

Abu Zubaydah, his captors discovered, turned out to be mentally ill and nothing like the pivotal figure they supposed him to be. … Abu Zubaydah also appeared to know nothing about terrorist operations; rather, he was al-Qaeda’s go-to guy for minor logistics — travel for wives and children and the like. That judgment was “echoed at the top of CIA and was, of course, briefed to the President and Vice President,” Suskind writes. And yet somehow, in a speech delivered two weeks later, President Bush portrayed Abu Zubaydah as “one of the top operatives plotting and planning death and destruction on the United States.”…

Which brings us back to the unbalanced Abu Zubaydah. “I said he was important,” Bush reportedly told Tenet at one of their daily meetings. “You’re not going to let me lose face on this, are you?” “No sir, Mr. President,” Tenet replied. Bush “was fixated on how to get Zubaydah to tell us the truth,” Suskind writes, and he asked one briefer, “Do some of these harsh methods really work?” Interrogators did their best to find out, Suskind reports. They strapped Abu Zubaydah to a water-board, which reproduces the agony of drowning. They threatened him with certain death. They withheld medication. They bombarded him with deafening noise and harsh lights, depriving him of sleep. Under that duress, he began to speak of plots of every variety — against shopping malls, banks, supermarkets, water systems, nuclear plants, apartment buildings, the Brooklyn Bridge, the Statue of Liberty. With each new tale, “thousands of uniformed men and women raced in a panic to each . . . target.” And so, Suskind writes, “the United States would torture a mentally disturbed man and then leap, screaming, at every word he uttered.”

I can practically hear the little tearing sounds as Jim Henley rips the remaining hairs out of the top of his own head.

In “yesterday’s global justice thread”:https://crookedtimber.org/2006/06/19/global-justice-taxing-inherited-social-resources/ , commenter Nicholas Weininger made the following comment, which raises a broader set of issues than were appropriate in that discussion, but which I think are worth responding to. Here’s Nicholas:

bq. Chris, I understand that you are framing your argument within the assumption that your arguers accept liberal egalitarianism, but it is still worth pointing out that some of us anti-egalitarians will see in your argument a rather nice slippery-slopish case for our side. To wit: once you start deciding that some things are “just luck” and that that implies it’s legitimate to forcibly redistribute them, there is nothing, however clearly it may be the product of choice and hard work, which is exempt from the depredations of the robbers with badges and good intentions. If liberal egalitarianism really does imply that “inherited social resources” should be taxed away, so much the worse for liberal egalitarianism!

It isn’t entirely clear to me what the central point of Nicholas’s objection is, but there seem to be three components (1) a complaint about “forcible redistribution”, (2) a worry about the indeterminacy of liberal egalitarian theories of distributive justice, and (3) a worry that literally everything might be up for redistribution if we press a radical line about what results from luck.

[click to continue…]

Linda Hirshman wrote what seemed to me to be “quite a dreadful op-ed”:http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/06/16/AR2006061601766.html for the _Washington Post_ over the weekend, defending her claim that stay-at-home mothers are betraying the feminist movement, and (I really don’t think I’m exaggerating here) suggesting that her critics were dominated by a congeries of vomit-eulogizing housewives and Christian fundamentalists. And, which I suspect was the main point of the exercise, touting her new book (Hirshman’s professed surprise at the controversy that she’d created didn’t ring true at all to me – I read her original article as a quite deliberate exercise in bomb-throwing). I don’t want to start a discussion over the merits of Hirshman’s arguments; I’m quite sure that this would degenerate into the usual bloodbath . What I’d like to do instead is something that I tried a while back on Israel/Palestine issues without much success – to have a meta-debate about _why_ it is that this is such an emotive topic both for women who have decided to stay at home to raise kids and women who’ve gone to work instead (I note that the element of choice here is mostly only present for middle class and upper middle class women, but that’s another debate). So to be clear – what I’m interested in is why the bombthrowers like Hirshman (and Caitlin Flanagan on the other side of the debate) have become the dominant voices. I’m _not_ interested in back-and-forths about the merits of the two sides of the argument (we’ve had that in response to quite innocuous previous posts “such as this one”:https://crookedtimber.org/2005/09/20/mommy-tracking-the-ivy-leaguers/ and it hasn’t been very helpful) – rather in argument about why this is such a loaded and painful subject matter in the first place, for women who have made either choice. I’ll keep an eye on the comments section and – be warned – will vigorously delete comments which seem to be wandering off-topic in an unhelpful direction, which seem interested in laying the blame on one side of the debate etc etc. People may sincerely hold such views, and may even be right under the gaze of Eternity, but for the purposes of this argument, I’d like to take these claims as being stipulated. One place to start is this “FT article”:http://www.ft.com/cms/s/b700b1be-f7a4-11da-9481-0000779e2340,i_email=y.html (likely subject to rapid linkrot) from the week before last, which concludes:

bq. The real problem, it seems to me, is the notion that we can’t all be right if we are making different choices. My mother taught me never to say anything un-pleasant about the food other people chose to put on their plates. It might not look good to me but that doesn’t matter – it’s not my plate.

Why does it matter so much what is on other people’s plates? Why do we so often take other people’s choices as being value-judgements on our own in this area of social life? Have at it.

I want to flag an issue which I seem to have noticed in a variety of liberal egalitarian writings on global justice, namely the cut that philosophers and theorists often make between entitlement to land and natural resources on the one hand, and entitlement to socially created stuff on the other.[1] Liberal egalitarians usually reject any kind of libertarian finders-keepers principle with respect to the first category of goods. But in relation to the second, they often argue for the right of insiders to exclude outsiders from access to those goods that are the collective historical creation of the insiders’ political entity.[2] What follows is just a bit of thinking aloud: there are a lot of uncrossed ts and undotted is. I’d welcome both constructive comments and pointers to relevant papers.

This natural/social cut looks wrong and insufficiently motivated to me. With respect to natural resources and land, I guess the background thought might be that these resources come as manna from heaven, as it were, so that all of the worlds people and peoples have an original equal claim to them. We can then argue about the right way of progressing from that claim to operational property rights, but it is easy to see how arguments for (e.g.) something like a global resources dividend can go: those who actually use the resources need to compensate the others who share their original equal entitlement for that use.[3] The difficulty I see is this: that social resources also come as unequally distributed manna from heaven to each new generation. Those who inherit stable institutions, a culture conducive to economic growth etc., look to be just as arbitrarily lucky with respect to those resources as those (Norwegians for example) who are lucky with respect to the discovery of natural resources on their territory. So why not deal with the two kinds of resources in the same way: that is, initially posit an equal original right of all to ownership, and sanction transfers to those who have been comparatively unlucky in the initial distribution?

[click to continue…]

OK, it’s “dumpster-diving”:https://crookedtimber.org/2003/12/16/rough-trade/, but I was quite taken with the writing style of this post on the “Arrogance and Evil of Crooked Timber”:http://tjic.com/blog/2006/06/18/the-arrogance-and-evil-of-crooked-timber/.

bq. I’m reading through more and more of the comments now, and the hideous intellectual dishonesty of the leftists continues to alternatively make my blood boil in anger, and run cold in fear of the kinds of totalitarian “reforms” they would make if they ever seized control of society.

The boiling blood running ice cold and then boiling up again makes for quite an arresting metaphor. But then, don’t watery liquids simultaneously boil and freeze in the vacuum of deep outer space? (perhaps the author is trying to tell us something about where he’s dialing in from).

Quite a few people have commented in John Derbyshire’s apology for supporting the war in Iraq.

I haven’t seen anyone deny Derbyshire’s suggestion regarding his National Review colleagues who still publicly support the war that

If wired up to a polygraph and asked the question: “Supposing you could wind the movie back to early 2003, would you still attack Iraq?” any affirmative answers would have those old needles a-jumping and a-skipping all over the graph paper.

but then I haven’t looked hard. I’d be interested if anyone can point to any examples [1].

My main interest, like that of many others is in Derbyshire’s reason for recanting his support. While he wanted a war with Iraq, his idea was that the US should drop a lot of bombs, demonstrate that it’s a power to be feared and then leave, without wasting time on futile projects like nation-building. As lots of commenters have pointed out, Derbyshire’s position is worse, in moral terms, than that of most of those who continue to support the war.

It does however, raise some important issues that go to the heart of the debate between supporters and opponents of the Iraq war and the debate over war and peace in general.

In the leadup to the Iraq war, many different arguments were presented for and against going to war, and many different predictions were made about the likely consequences of war. People supported war for a range of reasons, some of which were logically inconsistent, and the same was true of people who opposed war. Many people made many predictions, many of which turned out to be wrong. However, there is a fundamental asymmetry here.

[click to continue…]

When I was first told by my wife about this story, I expected it would turn out to be an Internet factoid, probably much-circulated, melding the old stories of paintings hung upside down, works painted by ducks and hailed as masterpieces, and so on. But the Independent’s account gives chapter and verse. The Royal Academy, having received a sculpture by one David Hensel with the plinth packed separately, decided to reject the sculpture and exhibit the plinth.