Right. Now take the survey under the fold. But only if your intuitions are untainted by first viewing the image at J&B. (We want to be scientistic about this.)
A “comment by Bitch PhD”:http://bitchphd.blogspot.com/2006/05/go-tell-norbiz-happy-fucking.html reminded me that this week I’ll have been blogging for four years. I’m not sure what to think about that, so let’s look at some data. Here is a time-series of the number of posts per month on “my blog”:http://www.kieranhealy.org/blog from its “inauspicious beginning”:http://www.kieranhealy.org/blog/archives/2002/05/21/the-hello-world-entry/ in May 2002 to the present. (Since CT started, I’ve just posted the same material to my own blog, so the trend represents all my posts.)
*Update*: More trendline goodness added below.
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Over the last few days we’ve been getting a new kind of comment spam; it’s semi-relevant to the posts in question, but has, if you look at it, links back to the usual kinds of websites. Unless artificial intelligence has improved a lot more than I think it has, I presume that real human beings are being paid to generate it, in the hope that it will slip under bloggers’ radar more easily than the automated stuff. If you’re a blogger at a reasonably well-trafficked site, you may want to keep an eye out for this.
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Blogger Alex Tingle has made enterprising use of Google Maps by designing “an overlay that shows the effects of the sea level rising”:http://flood.firetree.net/ . You can choose your level (up to 14m) and the map will show if a given bit of land would be underwater, and you can toggle between a map view (with placenames) and a satellite view, and you can zoom in and out. Of course, there are “lots of caveats”:http://blog.firetree.net/2006/05/18/more-about-flood-maps/ since he’s ignored tides and flood defences, the data may be less that 100% accurate, etc. Still, it’s an entertaining and instructive bit of coding. I’m happy to report that my own house will remain dry (though I’ll be dead long before we get to 14m, anyway).
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Are divorced opponents of gay marriage hypocrites?
I suppose it all depends on the reasons why they oppose gay marriage, and on the reasons they divorced. So I can imagine lots of ways of consistently endorsing one’s own divorce and opposing gay marriage; for example, one might oppose marriage tout court and, having freed oneself of its bourgeois chains, be determined to prevent others from being enslaved by it. Or one might simply hate gays and want to prevent them to get at the good of marriage.
But neither of these are the dominant public reasons for opposing gay marriage.
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This would be wankeriffic if it wasn’t so pathetic – Peter Rosse Range, the editor of the official Democratic Leadership Council rag uses the Euston manifesto as evidence for the purported “resurgence of an intelligent left in Europe”:http://www.dlc.org/print.cfm?contentid=253865. It starts with generalities about the rejection of anti-Americanism among European lefties.
bq. It is, of course, an article of faith among Europe’s lefties that America is a cultural and intellectual wasteland. But this, too, is beginning to change. A stream of Europeans passing through Washington this spring expressed surprise at the quality and variety of the debate in the city’s dynamic think tanks.
And exactly which debate is it that enjoys such remarkable “quality” and “variety”?
bq. Whereas there’s basically one opinion about the Iraq war in Paris and Berlin — “Everybody already knows it’s bad, so they don’t discuss it,” grouses Der Spiegel’s Claus Christian Malzahn — Washington is a hotbed of disagreement and discussion. Even London’s _Economist_ noted the thriving battles of ideas: “Look at the world of public policy today and it is America that is the land of the intellectuals and Europe that is the intellect-free zone.” Words I never thought I would read in a European publication.
Even apart from the rather dishonest implication that the _Economist_ is a reliable barometer of what the European left is thinking, this is nonsense. The Washington debate over the Iraq war is anything but a “thriving battle of ideas” (in fairness, the _Economist_ “article”:http://www.economist.com/displaystory.cfm?story_id=5660806 which Range cites as support doesn’t say this, although it’s very stinky in many other ways). It’s a retreat from Moscow, in which those who signed onto the war are trying desperately to salvage the few scraps of credibility that they have remaining to them. Range’s article doesn’t herald a resurgence of anything at all – it’s an attempt to conjure up allies for an exploded policy position out of thin air. Scott McLemee “puts his finger on what’s wrong”:http://www.insidehighered.com/views/2006/05/24/mclemee:
bq. But in the final analysis, there was something else bothersome about the manifesto — something I couldn’t quite put a finger on, for a while. A vague dissatisfaction, a feeling of blurry inconsequentiality…. Then it suddenly came into focus: The manifesto did not seem like the product of a real movement, nor the founding document of a new organization – nor anything, really, but a proclamation of dissatisfaction by people in an Internet-based transatlantic social network. … Something better might yet emerge … You never know. But for now, with only the text to go by, it is hard to shake a suspicion that the Euston Manifesto owes less to Marx than to MySpace.
Range would like to pretend that there’s an emerging European left that supports the rather contorted position that prominent DLCers have taken on Iraq. This is a politically convenient fiction; some blokes in a pub, a few op-ed columnists and a bunch of signatures on an Internet petition does not a widely-based movement make. But when you’re short of friends at home, the temptation to come up with quasi-imaginary friends elsewhere must be close to overwhelming.
(via “Politicaltheory.info”:http://www.politicaltheory.info/)
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I took Little Lights
Until now, it appears. Kate Rusby teaming up with Ronan Keating is the most unlikely thing to happen in popular music since Robbie Williams simultaneously plagiarised Woody Guthrie and Loudon Wainwright III. The single comes out in the UK on Monday, and Radio 2 has already decided to make it a hit. If I could buy stock in a singer, it would be Rusby. And if I wanted to appear to be cool I’d stock up on all
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Alison Wolf had an interesting piece on the consequences of women entering the workforce in April’s Prospect; May’s issue has responses by Rosemary Crompton and Pat Thane (all free I think) with a reply by Wolf in the June issue.
Wolf notes three supposedly neglected consequences:
Three consequences get far less attention than they deserve. The first is the death of sisterhood: an end to the millennia during which women of all classes shared the same major life experiences to a far greater degree than did their men. The second is the erosion of “female altruism,” the service ethos which has been profoundly important to modern industrial societies—particularly in the education of their young, and the care of their old and sick. The third is the impact of employment change on childbearing. We are familiar with the prospect of demographic decline, yet we ignore, sometimes wilfully, the extent to which educated women face disincentives to bear children.
Thane argues that women never had the similar experience that Wolf claims, and Crompton that neoliberalism, rather than any moral decline in women, is to blame for the deline in altruism. Wolf, I think, gives a pretty good account of herself in the reply.
You can make up your minds by reading the pieces. But I wanted to highlight a point not in dispute between the authors, and that I think Wolf and other people who think a good deal about education take for granted, but is not widely appreciated beyond that world; that restrictions on women’s participation in the labour market constituted a massive subsidy to public education:
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As the formal release of the IPCC’s Fourth Assessment Report on Climate Change draws nearer, quite a few skeptics have been going public to say that the evidence is now overwhelming. Here, for example, is Michael Shermer, who, appropriately enough, writes the Skeptic column for the Scientific American. He’s no fan of eco-alarmism, but he is a skeptic in the true sense of the term – someone who demands convincing evidence but is willing, when presented with such evidence to change their views. And here’s Sir David Attenborough.
There may still be a few more such announcements to come. But it’s clear by now that the evidence is more than enough to convince genuine sceptics. Those who refuse to accept overwhelming evidence are more correctly described as denialists.
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Between grading, our four month old, and a forthcoming CT seminar, I haven’t had much chance to write book reviews recently (I have a couple backed up, including one of Glyn Morgan’s _The Idea of a European Superstate_, which I’ve had half-written since last summer and promise to finish in the next few weeks). In the meantime, I have read a couple of SF/F books recently which I’d recommend as fun summer reading for those so inclined. First, Charles Stross’s _The Clan Corporate_ (“Powells”:http://www.powells.com/partner/29956/s?kw=Charles%20Stross%20Clan%20Corporate , “Amazon”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/redirect?link_code=ur2&tag=henryfarrell-20&camp=1789&creative=9325&path=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.amazon.com%2Fgp%2Fproduct%2F0765309300%2Fsr%3D8-1%2Fqid%3D1148421386%2Fref%3Dpd_bbs_1%3F%255Fencoding%3DUTF8), which I enjoyed more than his _Accelerando_, even though the latter has been nominated for umpteen awards. It’s the third of a series, and demonstrates that Stross has a nasty sociological imagination . There’s a nice set-up in the second book of the series where the protagonist (a vaguely left-wing journalist) argues that there’s simply no reason why the king and assorted nobles of a particularly squalid mediaeval state wouldn’t welcome industrialization, as they’d all get rich. You can nearly hear the author cackling into his sleeve as he writes this, and _The Clan Corporate_ demonstrates at length how horribly blase liberal assumptions of this sort can go wrong. _A Connecticut Yankee_ it isn’t. Second, Naomi Novik’s _His Majesty’s Dragon_ (“Powells”:http://www.powells.com/s?kw=Naomi%20novik&PID=29956, “Amazon”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/redirect?link_code=ur2&tag=henryfarrell-20&camp=1789&creative=9325&path=search-handle-url%3F%255Fencoding%3DUTF8%26search-type%3Dss%26index%3Dstripbooks%253Arelevance-above%26field-keywords%3Dnaomi%2520novik,) and its follow-up, _Throne of Jade_ (the third book in the series is coming out in a couple of days). The premise for these books sounds almost preposterously horrible – Patrick O’Brian meets Anne McCaffrey – but it _works_. Somehow she reconciles a story about intelligent dragons and their human riders with an early nineteenth century England that is very similar to our own. It helps that Novik’s a very good writer, and quietly witty too. Both recommended.
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Via “Chris Uggen”:http://chrisuggen.blogspot.com/2006/05/us-incarceration-at-midyear-2005.html, some new “Bureau of Justice Statistics”:http://www.ojp.usdoj.gov/bjs/pub/press/pjim05pr.htm for incarceration in the United States as of mid-2005. Imprisonment rose by 1.6 percent on the pervious year, and jail populations rose by 4.7 percent, for a total of just over 2.1 million people behind bars. The total population in prison has gone up by almost 600,000 since 1995.
Women make up 12.7 percent of jail inmates. Nearly 6 in 10 offenders in local jails are racial or ethnic minorities. In mid-2005, the BJS reports that “nearly 4.7 percent of black males were in prison or jail, compared to 1.9 percent of Hispanic males, and 0.7 percent of white males. Among males in their late 20s, nearly 12 percent of black males, compared to 3.9 percent of Hispanic males and 1.7 percent of white males, were incarcerated.” State by state, “Louisiana and Georgia led the nation in percentage of their state residents incarcerated (with more than 1 percent of their state residents in prison or jail at midyear 2005). Maine and Minnesota had the lowest rates of incarceration (with 0.3 percent or less of their state residents incarcerated).”
(You can get this figure as a PDF file if you like.)
Comparative context is provided by Roy Walmsley’s “World Prison Population List”:http://www.kcl.ac.uk/depsta/rel/icps/world-prison-population-list-2005.pdf. The U.S. has an overall incarceration rate of 738 per 100,000 people, the highest in the world. Belarus, Russia and Bermuda (!) come next, distantly trailing with rates in the 530s. Fifty eight percent of countries have incarceration rates below 150 per 100,000. There is a lot of heterogeneity within continents. I left China out of the figure above — its incarceration rate is 118, but this only includes 1.55 million sentenced prisoners, not trial detainees or those in “administrative detention.”
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An interesting short film on Barbie, Jews, identity and about a million other topics. It is so packed with material – some of which seems extremely random – that it is hard to know where to even start with any commentary. See what you think.
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Andrew Sullivan is trying to get to know his readers by asking them to send him pictures of the view from their windows. Not surprisingly, photo-sharing site Flickr has a group devoted to this topic linking to a whole separate Web site on window views. Kevin Drum responds with a view from his window. I’m afraid on this one, I win. If you post on Flickr, tag your photo with viewfrommywindow or add it to the group and post a link here. Alternatively, post a photo on “view from where I read CT”.
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In this TNR piece (not sure if subscription required), Peter Beinart laments the Republican (mis)appropriation of the word “reform”, saying
“Reform,” in today’s Washington, has come to mean “change I like.” Which is to say, it means almost nothing at all.
However, he doesn’t really make it clear what alternative definition he proposes, and concedes, later on “today’s conservatives are reformers of the most fundamental kind”.
In fact, the whole set of ideas surrounding the terms “reform” and “progressive” are bound up with historicist assumptions that can no longer be sustained, namely that history is moving in a particular (liberal/social democratic/socialist) direction, and that any deviation from this path is bound to be short-lived and self-defeating. Reform is change that is consistent with this direction. But once you have, as Beinart notes, a decade or more of “reforms” that consist mainly of the repeal of earlier reforms, none of these assumptions works.
I’ve tried all sorts of devices, such as the use of scare quotes and phrases like “so-called reform”, before concluding that the best thing is just to define reform as “any program of systematic change in policies or institutions” and make it clear that there is no necessary implication of approval or disapproval, or of consistency with any particular political direction.
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