“John Peel is dead”:http://media.guardian.co.uk/site/story/0,14173,1336385,00.html at only 65. I can’t believe it. He’s been a part of my life since I was a teenager and used to listen to his late-night show. He’s been responsible for introducing so much music to a British audience (he did much for punk and reggae), he’s been consistently funny in his distinctive dry way, and, of course, he was just about the world’s no. 1 Liverpool fan. Terrible news. “More from the BBC”:http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/music/3955369.stm .

This year is the 300th anniversary of the death of John Locke and since he was born in Wrington and brought up in Pensford (both small villages near Bristol) we’ve been doing our bit to celebrate. On Saturday we had “a one-day conference aimed mainly at schoolchildren”:http://www.bris.ac.uk/Depts/Philosophy/Events/default.htm and last night I gave an evening class on his political thought (attended by, among others, our polymathically perverse commenter Count Des von Bladet who “asked a question about Levi-Strauss”:http://piginawig.diaryland.com/041025.html#5 that I didn’t understand). There’s also been a flurry of newspaper articles, of which “the latest is from Martin Kettle in today’s Guardian”:http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,3604,1335926,00.html .

Many of the British blogs are currently debating whether Charlie Brooker’s joke (or “joke”, depending on your pov) about Presidential assassination was funny, not funny, tasteless, stupid, etc. “Michael Brooke”:http://michaelbrooke.com/ , “commenting at Harry’s Place”:http://hurryupharry.bloghouse.net/archives/2004/10/23/getting_lower.php offers some much needed context for the benefit of people who’ve never actually held a copy of the Guardian’s listings supplement in their hands.[1]

bq. … it appeared on page 52 of their pocket-sized listings guide, in equally pocket-sized print, in a slot normally occupied by facetious demolitions of TV programmes (which was certainly the spirit in which I read it this morning). Unfortunately, this distinction is somewhat blurred by the more egalitarian online version.

Such attempts to minimize the affair would cut no ice with FrontPage magazine! They begin “their coverage”:http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=15659 thus:

bq. The Left’s campaign of hate and defamation against the American president has hit a new low: a major media organ of the international Left, edited by an associate of Bill Clinton, has called for President Bush’s assassination.

And after foaming at the mouth for a few more paragraphs they finish:

bq. This final American connection lays everything in place: The president’s leftist opponents – foreign and domestic – feel they have a sacred duty to rig elections around the world to their liking. And if their advice is scorned, they have the right to pursue what Clausewitz called “politics by other means”: physical warfare. The development is not a healthy one for democracies on either side of the Atlantic.

fn1. The Guardian’s listings supplement is not just ephemeral, it is, in my experience, almost useless. It is supposed to be regionally sensitive, so that you don’t have to wade through all the Cardiff cinema listings if you live in Edinburgh. Unfortunately, the Guardian appears to have a policy of distributing the various editions randomly, so there is very little chance that the one actually on sale locally pertains to that region.

This isn’t exactly a news story, but David Brooks’s “latest column”:http://nytimes.com/2004/10/26/opinion/26brooks.html?hp is bizarre even by his distinctive standards. Is it meant to be biography? Autobiography? Fantasy? The mind boggles. Here’s the most charitable explanation I can come up with. “I’m a conservative columnist and it’s a week until election day. So I should like write an argument for voting for the conservative. But I can’t think of a !@#$%^& reason for doing so, or at least one that passes the giggle test. So I’ll just doodle on the page for 760 words and hope my reputation isn’t too tattered when this is all over.”

In the “continuing”:https://www.crookedtimber.org/archives/002725.html “discussion”:https://www.crookedtimber.org/archives/002672.html around Jerry Fodor’s “LRB piece”:http://www.lrb.co.uk/v26/n20/fodo01_.html about Analytic Philosophy, “Jason Stanley”:http://www.rci.rutgers.edu/~jasoncs/ makes the following observation in a “discussion thread”:http://webapp.utexas.edu/blogs/bleiter/archives/002261.html#002261 on Brian Leiter’s blog:

bq. There is a certain kind of very influential academic who has a difficult time recognizing that they are no longer a rebellious figure courageously struggling against the tide of contemporary opinion, but rather have already successfully directed the tide along the path of their choice. Chomsky is one such academic, and Fodor is another.

This reminds me of a comment my advisor, “Paul DiMaggio”:http://www.princeton.edu/~artspol/pd_prof.html, made to me a few years ago. He’d just turned 50, and when asked how he felt about it, he said that, seeing as he couldn’t really be an _enfant terrible_ any more, he would have to content himself with merely being _terrible_.

The Bush Administration has finally conceded, on the record, that it decided, for political reasons, not to go after leading terrorist Abu Musab al-Zarqawi in the leadup to the Iraq war. The question remains, which political reasons were decisive?

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In his recent article “Against the Law Reviews”:http://www.legalaffairs.org/issues/November-December-2004/review_posner_novdec04.html, Judge Richard Posner repeats a number of long-standing criticisms directed against student-edited law journals. There isn’t really anything in his article that he hasn’t said before in other places.[1] Posner thinks students choose the wrong pieces, do a bad job of editing them, and generally diminish the quality of legal scholarship. He thinks the system of legal publishing should be reformed by placing law journals under the control of faculty. Although Posner is certainly right to question the lack of peer review in legal academia, he (1) puts the blame for the current system in the wrong place, (2) underestimates the ability of students to do quality work, (3) ignores the opportunity costs to law students of working on journals, and (4) proposes only meager reform.

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Abu Musab al-Zarqawi is a bloodthirsty terrorist. He was well-known before the war in Iraq. In fact, we knew that he had a base in Kurdish controlled northern Iraq, where we operated freely. Colin Powell’s presentation to the UN leaned heavily on Zarqawi to make the case for war. But it begged the question: why didn’t we take out Zarqawi’s base before the war?

The Pentagon drew up detailed plans in June 2002, giving the administration a series of options for a military strike on the camp Mr. Zarqawi was running then in remote northeastern Iraq, according to generals who were involved directly in planning the attack and several former White House staffers. They said the camp, near the town of Khurmal, was known to contain Mr. Zarqawi and his supporters as well as al Qaeda fighters, all of whom had fled from Afghanistan. Intelligence indicated the camp was training recruits and making poisons for attacks against the West…

But the raid on Mr. Zarqawi didn’t take place. Months passed with no approval of the plan from the White House, until word came down just weeks before the March 19, 2003, start of the Iraq war that Mr. Bush had rejected any strike on the camp until after an official outbreak of hostilities with Iraq. Ultimately, the camp was hit just after the invasion of Iraq began.

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Over at our other blog, my gnawed lambchop sale has been a considerable success. Cavilling critics may object that I have made almost no money, true, but it has been voyeuristically fascinating to stare in the shopping carts. After a while, all the commercial uncovering starts to make me feel as though I am privy not just to buffies but the Buffy of buffies, as Heidegger might have said. Let us try to make it funnier.

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In the Guardian, Daniel Barenboim “remembers Edward Said”:http://www.guardian.co.uk/arts/features/story/0,11710,1335260,00.html .

Reading “Scott McLemee’s review”:http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/24/books/review/24MCLEMEE.html?oref=login&pagewanted=all&position= of Gertrude Himmelfarb’s “The Roads to Modernity”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/redirect?tag=henryfarrell-20&path=tg%2Fdetail%2F-%2F1400042364%2Fqid%3D1098573377%2Fsr%3D1-1%2Fref%3Dsr_1_1%3Fv%3Dglance%26s%3Dbooks (as “discussed by Henry”:https://www.crookedtimber.org/archives/002732.html yesterday), I’m struck by the inadequacy of her contrast between the “French” and the “British”. Take two of the alleged dimensions of difference:

bq. She finds in some English and Scottish thinkers of the 18th century (Adam Smith, the Earl of Shaftesbury and Francis Hutcheson, for example) something like the first effort to create a sociology of virtue. The French savants exalted a bloodless notion of Reason to bloody effect. The British philosophers emphasized the moral sentiments, the spontaneous capacity to recognize another person’s suffering and to feel it as one’s own.

and

bq. Nor was this Enlightenment necessarily at war with religion, as such. Himmelfarb quotes the jibes of Edward Gibbon (no orthodox religious believer by any stretch) against those French thinkers who ”preached the tenets of atheism with the bigotry of dogmatists.”

Anyone who knows anything about the “French” enlightenment knows that at least that one of its non-French participants, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, differed from the likes of Voltaire on points such as these. Somehow, I doubt that this Jean-Jacques’ virtues on these points (if virtues they are) get highlighted by Himmelfarb since doing so would muck-up her division of the world into sheep and goats.

A guy went by me the other day wearing a T-Shirt that read, “I bet you’ll vote _this_ time, Hippy.”

I was thinking about the prospects for the US election and also about the probability of casting a decisive vote and it struck me that a situation like that of Florida in 2000 would have had a quite different outcome in Australia. In a situation where there were enough disputed votes to shift the outcome (and no satisfactory way of determining the status of those votes), the Court of Disputed Returns would probably order a fresh election. It seems to me that this is a better way of resolving problematic elections than attempts to determine a winner through court proceedings[1], though I’d be interested in arguments against this view.

In view of the long delay between election and inauguration, this solution would seem to be particularly appealing for the US. However, it seems clear from this page that the American constitutional tradition does not allow for such a possibility, preferring such devices as drawing the winner from a hat, if nothing better can be found. I wonder if there is a reason for this, or if it is just one of those things that doesn’t come up often enough for people to think about fixing it?

fn1. Obviously, once the situation arises, one side or the other will see an advantage in going through the courts, or allowing state officials to decide,and will oppose a fresh election. But ex ante, it seems as if agreeing to a fresh election in such cases would benefit both sides.

One of the least attractive features of Steven Landsburg’s column in Slate was always his habit of assuming that anyone who disagreed with him obviously did so out of ignorance, and indeed that appears to be his response to my post on the subject of quantum game theory and information. As a matter of fact, I do understand a bit (just a bit) about quantum probability and I understand a bit more after mugging up on the relevant chapter of David Williams excellent book on probability. Landsburg’s point appears to be that since no information is exchanged, there is no communication, but this won’t do. “Information” in the physical sense is not exchanged, but “quantum information” (not the same thing, but neither something completely different) is, and that is enough to turn it into a communication game. Let me elucidate with yet another variation on the cats/dogs game.

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