Turns out that some of those “Godfearing, family values penguins”:http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/13/science/13peng.html?ex=1284264000&en=36efde9c1de3fa22&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss may be “playing for the other team”:http://www.jrn.columbia.edu/studentwork/cns/2002-06-10/591.asp.

(via “Max”:http://maxspeak.org/mt/archives/001605.html).

The blogosphere ecosystem just lost a bit of its biodiversity with John Band’s decision to shut down “Shot by Both Sides”:http://www.stalinism.com/shot-by-both-sides/ . I’ve alternately enjoyed and been infuriated by John’s blog and he’s certainly been a major irritant to the decent smug and self-satisfied former left and the samizdatistas. Both Daniel and I were regular commenters on John’s site and I’ll miss the mix of friendly repartee and ill-tempered invective there. Still, there’s an upside: John says he’ll be writing more at the excellent “Sharpener”:http://thesharpener.net/ . Go to read him there.

I haven’t been following the buildup to the Roberts hearings closely, but today, “via Bitch PhD”:http://bitchphd.blogspot.com/2005/09/and-theyre-off.html, I see this analysis from the NYRB:

Roberts was in favor of limiting the progress of African-Americans in participating in the political process and of making far-reaching changes in the constitutional role of the courts in protecting rights. … Roberts conceded that the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment could pose a formidable barrier to legislation intended to strip the federal courts of jurisdiction over cases involving school desegregation. But, he noted, the problem might be surmounted, since strict scrutiny would be applied only if there were “racial classification,” and the legislation in question would only classify cases by type, i.e., not “race” but “school desegregation.” Giving state courts the final say over school desegregation, he added, *would not involve unequal treatment because white officials as well as black groups would lack the right to appeal*. … Nowhere in any of the memos that have been made available did John Roberts acknowledge the effect of the many years of disenfranchisement on black citizens. Instead his concern was about the effect of an imagined quota system on whites, a concern that twenty-five years later has proved to be groundless. (Emphasis added.)

I’d be interested to see the original text that this paraphrases. It looks like it was just lifted directly from Anatole France: “The law, in its majestic equality, forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, beg in the streets or steal bread.” Or sue under the fourteenth amendment. It’s hard to imagine someone with an education like Roberts’ writing that sentence and not immediately thinking of France’s epigram. Maybe he smirked.

Kevin Drum “says”:http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/archives/individual/2005_09/007112.php:

bq. The fact is, conservatives haven’t won much of anything in the last 10 years except a PR triumph. Their biggest successes have been on taxes — a Pyrrhic victory at best without corresponding spending cuts — and in the court system, which hasn’t actually delivered much real world benefit. Plus they have a war in Iraq, for whatever that’s worth. Public opinion simply hasn’t allowed them anything more.

I think that this misunderstands what has been happening these last few years. I’m reading Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson’s _Off Center: The Republican Revolution and the Erosion of American Democracy_ (“Powells”:http://www.powells.com/s?kw=Off%20Center%3A%20The%20Republican%20Revolution&PID=29956, “Amazon”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/redirect?link_code=ur2&camp=1789&tag=henryfarrell-20&creative=9325&path=tg/detail/-/0300108702/qid=1126622313/sr=2-2/ref=pd_bbs_b_2_2?v=glance%26s=books) at the moment, and it’s very good on this topic.

bq. As is often noted, usually with a “gotcha” thrown in, the size of public spending under President Bush has _not_ fallen, even as tax revenues have plummeted. … And while Republicans are reducing the beast’s daily rations, they are asking it to do more things – from new subsidies for corporations and rich investors to new drug benefits for the aged to trillions in potential borrowing to establish private accounts for the Social Security system. Some say this means the Republican revolution never happened. The truth is more complex. Although Republicans have not starved the beast in the short run, they are putting it on a very specific diet that is transforming the role of government in American life. This special diet is not principally aimed at making government larger or smaller, at least in the short term. It is aimed at tilting the balance of benefits and protections – usually away from ordinary Americans and toward the well off, the well connected and the Republican base … Plus, the day of budgetary reckoning _will_ come. The Republican innovation has been to separate the pleasant business of cutting taxes from the unpleasant business of slashing popular social programs. But if the Republicans continue to cut taxes, or even simply maintain existing tax reductions, the unpleasantness is coming. And it will be especially painful for those who value the popular government programs likely to come under the knife.

Update: See also “Brad Plumer”:http://plumer.blogspot.com/2005_09_01_plumer_archive.html#112660240377724548.

Henry pointed me to this Financial Times report of an interview (over lunch) with rightwing Australian historian Keith Windschuttle, which begins with Windschuttle saying he regrets his involvement in the dispute over Australia’s Aboriginal history, seeing as a distraction from his ambition to write a polemical defence of Western civilisation, aimed at the US market, and make heaps of money in the process.

”If you have a reasonably big hit in America you’re talking about hundreds of thousands of dollars,” he says. “That’s my aim – to have a couple of big sellers and have a leisurely life.”

It is unclear how much of this is intended as tongue-in-cheek affectation, but it’s certainly consistent with notable elements of Windschuttle’s past career, which has been marked by repeated political and methodological somersaults.

Although a lot of attention has been focused on Windschuttle’s political jump from Marxist left to Christian right, I’ve always been more interested in his shift in methodological stance. Having made his name as a defender of objective truth against politicised history in both left-wing and right-wing varieties, Windschuttle has become a practitioner of an extreme form of politicised history, and now looks ready to abandon any remaining links to the world of fact.

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CT was a knocked out by today’s “big power outage”:http://www.guardian.co.uk/uslatest/story/0,1282,-5274095,00.html in Los Angeles, along with every other site hosted by our provider, and much else besides, like traffic lights. Despite our cosmopolitan nature, our server is in one place only — the wrong place, today. But they seemed to have managed over there without any panic. One of the news reports I saw quoted a vox pop reaction from a woman identified as “Stylist for TV Commercials.” Ah, LA.

After a rivetting series, England have, at last, won the Ashes back. I have wasted a lot of work time listening to these matches — I hope there isn’t another series like it for years.

I pointed out to my dad yesterday that without Flintoff this would have been a walkover for the Aussies; he, reasonably, retorted that without Warne it would have been a walkover for England (even without Flintoff). I can’t remember any series in which both sides had one such dominating player. Warne is supposed not to be back — but the guy took 40 wickets in a 5 match series at 16.875 a piece; it is hard to believe that someone who can achieve that in his mid-30’s will be done for before he’s 40. And as for Flintoff — he’s like a throwback to the 60’s, or 30’s, or something, the days of Washbrook, Laker, and the like: if he didn’t seem so unselfconsciously generous, I’d think he had made it a mission to shame every other sportsman and woman in the world.

Oh, and I should add, well done, chaps! (as if any of you are reading!)

Routledge publish a nice line of “classic social science, literary criticism and philosophy”:http://www.routledge.com/classics/. A couple of months ago I picked up their edition of “Words and Things”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0415345480/kieranhealysw-20/ref=nosim/, Ernest Gellner’s entertaining hatchet-job on linguistic philosophy _a la_ Wittgentein, J.L. Austin and the like. The flyleaf has a couple of blurbs from Bertrand Russell and the Times (“The classic attack on Oxford Linguistic Philosophy”, etc) but also one from Bryan Wilson, the sociologist of religion. He says “No one who has flirted with, or been puzzled by, postmodernism, or wondered about the meaning of resurgent Islam, should fail to read this tour de force.” What? This is in fact an endorsement of another of Gellner’s books, “Postmodernism, Reason and Religion”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/041508024X/kieranhealysw-20/ref=nosim/. Perhaps a small, once-off error, I thought — but then last night I was in a bookshop and saw Routledge’s edition of “The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/041525406X/kieranhealysw-20/. While the front cover affirms the author as Max Weber, the spine insists that credit should go to Friedrich Hayek. Perhaps there’s an intern somewhere in need of a harsh performance review. I suppose these errors aren’t quite so bad as they might have been: a friend of mine who was an editor for a major university press once told me that they had to recall the entire run of a prominent astronomy book because, mysteriously, every instance of the word “quasar” in the text had been replaced by the word “banana.”

I went to watch the Arizona Wildcats beat Northern Arizona University in the first home game of the season last night in front of a happy home crowd. I’ve only been to one other American Football game in my life, so there was a whole novelty dimension. During the halftime show, as the “marching band”:http://www.arts.arizona.edu/band/athletic/marchingband.html played Led Zeppelin favorites and marched in complex, quasi-aesthetic formations (it looked and sounded like you might imagine), the “color guard”:http://web.cfa.arizona.edu/colorguard/ drew a disproportionate amount of attention. (The color guard join in the band routines, twirling and throwing large flags. It looks tricky.) The color guard wore blue pants and sparkly, ruby-colored bustiers … except for one of them, whose whole upper body was covered in sparkly goodness. His presence was hard to miss, partly because he was the only male in the colorguard, partly because he was about twice the size of his fellow flag-bearers, but mostly because he twirled more effusively and pirouetted more extravagantly than anyone else. He flung himself _en arrière_ and _en avant_, he pirouetted under the posts and _jeté _-ed across the fifty yard line. He was terrific. Some people in the crowd got a little wound up, apparently annoyed that a gender boundary might be in danger of subversion on the very altar of American masculinity’s defining ritual. There were some catcalls and cries of “Get that guy outta there!” But mostly people loved it. And the guy himself could have cared less, blissed out as he was in front of 40,000 people, having reached a kind of camp Nirvana.

Any DC-area CT-readers who want to go to the Sigur Ros concert at the “Strathmore”:http://www.strathmore.org/ today? I have a spare ticket which I’m giving to the first person to ask for it in comments (I’ll be around the show at 6.45pm or so to do the handover).

“110 Stories”:http://www.110stories.us/.

The NYT Magazine has a “long story”:http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/11/magazine/11BELIEVERS.html?ex=1284091200&en=e1fba3185dd284cf&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss on “The Believer”:http://www.believermag.com/ and “n+1”:http://www.nplusonemag.com magazine as apostles of the new seriousness in literary culture.

bq. In the end, this may be the common ground n+1 and The Believer occupy: a demand for seriousness that cuts against ingrained generational habits of flippancy and prankishness. Their differences are differences of emphasis and style – and the failings that each may find in the other (or that even a sympathetic reader may find in both) come from their deep investments in voice, stance and attitude rather than in a particular set of ideas or positions. For The Believer, the way to take things seriously is to care about them – “to endow something with importance,” in Julavits’s words, “by treating it as an emotional experience.” And this can lead, at times, to the credulous, seemingly disingenuous naïveté that Greif finds infantile. For n+1, the index of seriousness is thought for its own sake, which can sanction an especially highhanded form of intellectual arrogance. But, of course, this distinction, between a party of ardor and a party of rigor, is itself too schematic, since The Believer, at its best, is nothing if not thoughtful, and n+1 frequently wears its passions on its sleeve.

It’s an interesting article, which has a lot to say about the role of the little magazine in American culture. Still, its underlying argument misses the mark in its attempt to bundle two dissimilar publications into the same category. There’s a very big difference between sincerity, which is what The Believer is looking for, and the kind of seriousness that _n+1_ advocates. The one is more or less entirely apolitical, and (in my personal opinion) quite annoying – its underlying claim is that we should abandon our critical faculties and only speak when we have something nice to say. The other is a claim that both literature and politics _matter_ and should be subjected to harsh and ferocious criticism where they go wrong. Randall Jarrell, moved to sarcasm at an editor’s wrath on behalf of an aggrieved reviewee, wrote:

bq. I had thought a good motto for critics might be what the Persians taught their children: _to shoot the bow and speak the truth_; but perhaps a better one would be Cordelia’s _love and be silent_.

As best as I can tell, _n+1_ is of the Persians’ party, and _The Believer_ of Cordelia’s. Not the same thing at all.

(Full disclosure: a piece of mine will probably be published on N+1‘s website in the next month or two).

Update: “John Holbo”:http://www.thevalve.org/go/valve/article/the_functioning_little_magazines reacts to the same article on the _Valve_.

As a result of the evacuation from New Orleans, thousands of displaced students around the country will be absorbed into elementary, middle, and high schools which are not ready for them. If the experience of my own city (Madison, WI) is anything to go by, these students are largely disadvantaged, and are being placed in neighborhoods which are also disadvantaged; and will hence attend schools with high proportions of disadvantaged students. Department of Education officials are figuring out what to do — according to Education Week there is talk of relaxing unspecified provisions of No Child Left Behind; there is some pressure to relax or waive adequate yearly progress (AYP) requirements for schools that take in refugees, and also to relax or waive the ‘Qualified Teacher in Every Classroom’ requirements.

I want to recommend that D of E officials would do well to resist some of this pressure. They should try to get their hands on some of the relief money, and use it to give schools both the incentive and the ability to meet the requirements. (If they do give into the pressure, they should, do this anyway). Specifically:

* Give schools which take evacuees totaling 2-5% of their previous student population funds which they can use to retain and attract qualified teachers (with incentive payments)

* Reward schools in this group which have increased their percentage of qualified teachers by February 2006 with flexible funds (which the schools could use, for example, for supplies, residential field trips, bonus payments to the teachers most affected, etc).

* Establish a program to incentivize qualified teachers who have left teaching to return to the classroom (in refugee-qualifying schools). The Department of Education could request current employers of such returning teachers to hold their jobs open for them for 24 months, and could pay the returning teacher the difference between her teachers’ salary and her non-teaching salary (again for 24 months).

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A few days ago I finished The Right Nation, by Micklethwait and Wooldridge, a pair of "Economist" writers. Perhaps you recall their June 21, 2005 WSJ op-ed, “Cheer Up Conservatives, You’re Still Winning,” in which they declare “the right has walloped the left in the war of ideas.” Ahem:

One of the reasons the GOP manages to contain Southern theocrats as well as Western libertarians is that it encourages arguments rather than suppressing them. Go to a meeting of young conservatives in Washington and the atmosphere crackles with ideas, much as it did in London in the heyday of the Thatcher revolution. The Democrats barely know what a debate is.

Well, the book is not such a polemical and high-handed affair as that portends. Mostly. [click to continue…]