A commenter to “one of John Q’s posts”:https://www.crookedtimber.org/archives/002899.html suggested “Asia by Blog”:http://simonworld.mu.nu/archives/cat_asia_by_blog.php, which provides a twice-weekly digest of links to asian blogs. And the same friend who drew that to my attention also recommended “Life in China”:http://www.zonaeuropa.com/lifeinchina.htm , a stunning collection of photographs without commentary.

Many across the bits of the blogosphere I read have declared themselves simply bowled-over by “the latest column from the Observer’s Nick Cohen”:http://www.guardian.co.uk/Columnists/Column/0,5673,1371935,00.html . Cohen is writing, _inter alia_ in opposition to David Blunkett’s deeply flawed proposal to ban incitement to religious hatred, and one passage in particular has been reproduced in full or in part on at least five blogs (“Harry’s Place”:http://hurryupharry.bloghouse.net/archives/cat_uk_politics.html#003048 ,
“Normblog”:http://normblog.typepad.com/normblog/2004/12/the_power_to_sh.html , “SIAW”:http://marxist-org-uk.blogspot.com/2004_12_01_marxist-org-uk_archive.html#110285818716789492 , “Mick Hartley”:http://mickhartley.typepad.com/blog/2004/12/nick_cohen_gets.html , “Melanie Phillips”:http://www.melaniephillips.com/diary/archives/000941.html ) :

bq. MPs didn’t point out that when society decides that people’s religion, rather than their class or gender, is the cultural fact that matters, power inevitably passes to the priests and the devout for whom religion does indeed matter most. To their shame, many on the left have broken with the Enlightenment to perform
this manoeuvre. They have ridden the Islamic wave and agreed to convert one billion people into ‘the Muslims’. A measure of their bad faith is that they would react with horror if this trick was pulled on them, and they were turned into ‘the Christians’ whose authentic representatives were the Archbishop of Canterbury and ‘Dr’ Ian Paisley.

I hope I’m not alone in being considerably less admiring of the passage in question.

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I downloaded “Google Desktop”:http://desktop.google.com/ a couple of weeks ago, and have found it invaluable – it’s greatly superior to the standard Windows search tools. But up until a few minutes ago, I didn’t realize that it could serve as a sort of rough-and-ready backup tool to boot. I loaded up a Word document that I’d been working on recently, and found (as occasionally happens) that most of my work had somehow disappeared, through the vagaries of Windows, or my having pressed the wrong key at some stage or another, or some combination of the two. None of the temporary files were still on my hard drive, so I more or less resigned myself to having to recreate several days work. But then I decided to use Google Desktop search to trawl my hard drive on the off chance that it was still in existence somewhere – and discovered that Google creates and retains several caches of all Word documents that you are working on, so that you can go back and see earlier versions, and, if necessary, cut and paste old material that has somehow gone missing back into your document. It’s not an ideal solution (you lose formatting etc) – but it beats the hell out of having to rewrite something that you had already spent a lot of time on.

Apropos of Dan’s “post”:https://www.crookedtimber.org/archives/002988.html below, it’s interesting how unconcerned Jim Lindgren and many other “critics”:http://volokh.com/archives/archive_2004_10_07.shtml#1097679747 of European anti-semitism appear to be when it’s “European Muslims”:http://volokh.com/archives/archive_2004_12_07.shtml#1102869137 who are at the receiving end of the jackboot. Lindgren links approvingly to a ‘fascinating’ (read: bizarre and very possibly deranged) “article”:http://www.nationalreview.com/hanson/hanson200412100841.asp by Victor Davis Hanson at the National Review Online about the ‘Ents’ of Europe. Apparently, Europeans, like Ents, have slumbered through the threat from Islamofascism. Hanson hopes that the Dutch Ents at least are waking up to the dangers that they face from the Islamists in their midst, and finishes by calling for a European Demosthenes who will ‘soberly but firmly’ demand an end to multiculturalism and the internal threat from radical Islam. It’s quite unfair to note in this context that the leader of the racist Belgian Vlaams Blok party has just “called”:http://www.guardian.co.uk/international/story/0,,1370599,00.html for the European far right to join forces to combat the ‘Islamization of Europe.’ But it’s not at all unfair to see something disturbing and even disgusting in the way that Hanson glides over the mosque-burnings and racist and religious violence that have happened over the last several weeks as a consequence of the ‘waking up’ of the Netherlands. As I’ve “mentioned before”:https://www.crookedtimber.org/archives/001401.html, I much prefer it when the more ignorant members of the American right-wing commentariat limit themselves to attacks on European anti-semitism, even if they grossly exaggerate its extent and effects. It’s much more disturbing when they praise Europe than when they damn it – they invariably latch onto the nastiest and most atavistic aspects of European politics and policy.

Nominations are now open for the “2004 Koufax Awards”:http://wampum.wabanaki.net/archives/001502.html. If you think we deserve it, head over and nominate CT for any or all of *Best Blog*, *Best Group Blog*, *Best Writing,* *Best Post* and *Best Looking*. I think that last one is a category.

With quite a lot of kerfuffle going on in the UK blogosphere over the changes to the law to create an offence of “incitement to religious hatred”, I thought it might be neighbourly to help John Band out in the rather Sisyphean task of trying to ensure that the debate is conducted in a less frighteningly fact-free atmosphere. To that end, I ask the question; have you heard of Dick Warrington? If you’re having opinions about the racial hatred laws, it would probably be a good idea if you had.

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As “Brian notes”:https://www.crookedtimber.org/archives/002985.html (via Kevin Drum), there are “some people”:http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/sunday/commentary/la-oe-kranna12dec12,1,4469435.story?coll=la-sunday-commentary who think that

bq. [Clarence] Thomas is one of the few jurists today, conservative or otherwise, who understands and defends the principle that our rights come not from government but from a “creator” and “the laws of nature and of nature’s God,” as our Declaration of Independence says, and that the purpose and power of government should therefore be limited to protecting our natural, God-given rights.

My feeling is that objections to Clarence Thomas’s jurisprudence should focus on what we think people’s rights are, substantively, rather than where we think they come from. But let me comment on the God vs Man question anyway. Actually, let Roberto Mangabeira Unger comment on it, from his “Politics”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1859841317/kieranhealysw-20/ref=nosim/:

bq. Modern social thought was born proclaiming that society is made and imagined, that it is a human artifact rather than an expression of an underlying natural order.

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In previous posts on Bjorn Lomborg’s Copenhagen Consensus exercise, both before and after the event, I expressed the suspicion that the whole thing was a setup, designed to push Lomborg’s favorite line that money spent on implementing the Kyoto protocol would be better allocated to foreign aid projects of various kinds. (I’ve pointed out some contradictions in Lomborg’s general argument, here).

However, I thought some good could come of the exercise, if the conclusions were taken seriously. In my last post, I observed

As attentive readers will recall, the conference concluded that fighting AIDS should be the top global priority in helping developing countries and also that climate change mitigation was a waste of money. I agree with the first of these conclusions, and more generally with the need for more spending on health poor countries, and I hope that Lomborg will put some effort into supporting it. I’ll try to keep readers posted on this.

Now Lomborg has revealed his priorities. Chris points to an article by Lomborg in the Telegraph. The supposed top priority item, initiatives to combat AIDS, gets two passing mentions. The entire article, except for a couple of paras, is devoted to the pressing need to do nothing about global warming.

It’s obvious from reading this piece that the entire lavishly funded Copenhagen exercise was a put-up job, designed to secure impressive-sounding endorsements for Lomborg’s anti-Kyoto agenda, and that the supposed concern for making good use of aid funding was a hypocritical scam. A lot of work went into relative rankings for different health policies, but I don’t expect to hear anything from Lomborg on this score. Similarly, I doubt we will ever see him campaigning for more funding for AIDS programs, as opposed to using them as a cheap anti-Kyoto debating point.

If I was one of the eminent economists who participated in the ranking exercise, or who submitted papers supporting various initiatives, I would be feeling really angry with Bjorn Lomborg right now.

“Kevin Drum”:http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/archives/individual/2004_12/005311.php links to “Thomas Krannawitter’s interesting defence”:http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/sunday/commentary/la-oe-kranna12dec12,1,4469435.story?coll=la-sunday-commentary of Clarence Thomas’s jurisprudence. Apparently he’s the best Supreme there is because only he understands that all rights come from God. In the course of putting forward this good Christian view, Krannawitter makes the following charitable interpretative claim.

bq. By 1986, liberal Justice William Brennan could easily dismiss the Constitution out of hand because it belonged “to a world that is dead and gone.”

Hmmm, is that what Brennan really said? Here’s what I think is “the source of this quote”:http://www.politics.pomona.edu/dml/LabBrennan.htm.

bq. We current Justices read the Constitution in the only way that we can: as Twentieth Century Americans. We look to the history of the time of framing and to the intervening history of interpretation. But the ultimate question must be, what do the words of the text mean in our time? For the genius of the Constitution rests not in any static meaning it might have had in a world that is dead and gone, but in the adaptability of its great principles to cope with current problems and current needs.

Yeah I’d say that talking about its genius and great principles amounts to “dismissing the Constitution”.

Further to “my post”:https://www.crookedtimber.org/archives/002982.html on Lomborg below, here’s an idea. Maybe it isn’t new, but I’d still be grateful for critical comment. Lomborg says that it would be better to direct our resources to helping the world’s poor, rather than trying to implement Kyoto. Well, one thing first-world governments could do would be to introduce taxes on carbon emissions (many already have these) and to hypothecate those taxes (or some fixed proportion of them) to foreign-development aid.[1]

fn1. I take it that those who think that foreign aid is always a waste of money or counterproductive would not, themselves, put the Lomborg argument in good faith (whatever their opinions on CO2 and global warming). No need for them to comment below then.

Asia Source has “an interview with Amartya Sen”:http://www.asiasource.org/news/special_reports/sen.cfm , which touches on the record of the World Bank and IMF, the evolution of Sen’s ideas on “capabilities”, democracy, the postwar histories of India and China, anticolonialism, and much else. (Found via “INBB”:http://www.inbb.org/ , which looks like a really interesting blog.)

Bjorn Lomborg has “a column in today’s Sunday Telegraph”:http://www.telegraph.co.uk/opinion/main.jhtml?xml=/opinion/2004/12/12/do1202.xml&sSheet=/opinion/2004/12/12/ixopinion.html arguing that it would be much better to spend money on helping the world’s poor than on Kyoto-style measures to cut carbon emissions. It is an interesting way of putting things, especially since, as he points out, the world’s poor are likely to be the principal victims of climate change. Thank goodness, then, that those governments most sceptical about Kyoto are also “among the most generous with their foreign-aid budgets”:http://www.globalissues.org/TradeRelated/Debt/USAid.asp (scroll down for table). And shame on those Kyoto-enthusiasts who are, comparatively, so mean with their foreign-aid contributions (and who also tie what little aid they do give to compliance with their foreign-policy objectives).

Thanks for the many comments – many long comments – to my academic groupthink posts, particularly the second. Having dutifully read through, I’m too tired to respond point by point to any more points. I do feel that this exercise – which threatened to be a bit of the old same old/same old – did me much good, writing and reading.

I hope those who followed along feel the same. Otherwise you must be seething.

One commenter requested – for the benefit of those with day jobs, or whose time is valuable – a dsquared-style shorter Holbo for all this.

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“Stephen Bainbridge”:http://www.professorbainbridge.com/2004/12/jonathan_chair_.html, in the course of attacking Jonathan Chait’s recent “article”:http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe-chait10dec10,1,5960569.column?coll=la-news-comment-opinions on the dearth of conservative academics, makes an interesting leap of logic.

bq. “Second, professors don’t particularly want to be Republicans. In recent years, and especially under George W. Bush, Republicans have cultivated anti-intellectualism.” In other words, conservatives are stupid. *Wrong again*. As I also pointed out in my TCS column, Data from the widely used General Social Survey (GSS) consistently show that Republicans are better educated than Democrats (on average, they have more than half a year more education and hold a higher final degree). In addition, Republicans score better than Democrats on two tests included in the GSS. As for Chait’s argument that conservatives are anti-intellectual, how about all those fine public intellectuals who write for opinion journals like Policy Review, Commentary, or First Things, to name a few? Or how about all those policy wonks working at places like AEI or Heritage?

How exactly does the observation that “Republicans cultivate anti-intellectualism” imply that the observer believes that Republicans are stupid? This is a complete non-sequitur, and a misleading one at that – Bainbridge is trying, not very successfully, to change the subject to one that he feels stronger on (I’m sure that there’s a technical term for this sort of rhetorical manoeuvre, but I don’t know what it is). Nor does the fact that Republican intellectuals exist contradict the fact that there is a strong strain of anti-intellectualism to Republican Party rhetoric, and Republican attempts to appeal to voters (as, for example, the pillorying of Al Gore for using big numbers and complicated ideas). While this anti-intellectualism doesn’t completely explain the dearth of Republican academics by any stretch of the imagination, it surely helps contribute to the hostility of many in the academy, as does the open hostility of many Republicans to evolutionary biology and the very real scientific consensus on global warming.

Update: Stephen Bainbridge responds in an update to his original post:

bq. One would have thought my point was obvious, but let me spell it out. Point one: There are a lot smart conservatives out there interested in intellectual matters and the life of the mind. They’re qualified to be academics and likely would pursue an academic career if they had a fair shot at landing one. Point two: Even if Chait and Farrell are right that there is a streak of anti-intellectualism in the Republican party, so fricking what? Why does that justify the academic left’s discrimination against conservatives? (You’ll note Farrell just sort of glides past that point.) Would Farrell say that environmentalists should be excluded from the academy because some eco-nuts commit the grossly anti-intellectual act of vandalizing laboratories doing animal research? Of course not. So spare me your stereotypes and generalizations. And stop using Karl Rove’s (highly successful) campaign tactics as your spurious justification for discriminating against conservative academics. Just because your Democrat party can’t beat Bush doesn’t justify taking our your anger on right-of-center job applicants.

He’s either having serious comprehension problems with a perfectly straightforward argument (namely that there is a major non-sequitur in his original claims), or he’s being intellectually dishonest. I don’t at any stage offer any “spurious justification for discriminating against conservative academics” (or indeed any non-spurious justifications either). I simply point to a major flaw in Bainbridge’s argument; he egregiously misinterprets Chait for his own rhetorical purposes. This has no bearing on the underlying question of whether there is, or is not, discrimination against conservative academics. In Bainbridge’s response, he doesn’t even bother to try and justify his misinterpretation; instead he tries to change the subject again by claiming (without any evidence whatsoever) that I’m trying to justify anti-conservative discrimination. Weak, silly bluster – I’d have expected better from him.