My fiancee recently finished Helen Hanff’s charming memoir, Underfoot in Show Business, about her failed attempt to break into the New York playwright scene in the 40s and 50s.

At one point, Hanff is employed by a movie studio (which she gives the pseudonym “Monograph”) as a reader. Monograph would give her new novels. She would read them very quickly, write a summary of the story, and offer her opinion about whether the studio should option the book or not. I had to laugh when she read this story to me:

On the blackest Friday I ever want to see, I was summoned to Monograph and handed three outsized paperback volumes of an English book which was about to be published here. I was to read all three volumes over the weekend, and since each volume was double the length of the usual novel I was invited to charge double money for each…

What I had to read, during that nightmare weekend- taking notes on all place names, characters’ names, and events therein- was fifteen hundred stupefying pages of the sticky mythology of J. R. R. Tolkein. (I hope I’m spelling his name wrong.) I remember opening one volume to a first line which read:

Mr. Bilbo Baggins of Bag End announced that he would shortly be celebrating his eleventy-first birthday…

and phoning several friends to say goodbye because suicide seemed so obviously preferable to five hundred more pages of that.

I also remember the bill I turned in:

For reading and summarizing
TITLE: Lord of the Rings
AUTHOR: J. R. R. Tolkein

Volume I…………….. $20
Volume II……………. $20
Volume III…………… $20
Mental Torture………. $40

Total…………………… $100

Whew! Monograph sure dodged a bullet on that one!

I haven’t seen that Michael Moore film yet; there were special previews in London on Sunday, but you couldn’t get a ticket for love nor money[1]. It strikes me, however, that those critics of the film who are currently doing such a sterling job (by using words like “deceits”, “cunningness”[2] and “misleading”) in convincing me that there are no actual factual errors in it, are failing to look at the big picture.

The big advantage of the “he’s implying this without saying it” critique, and the main reason I use I myself so often, is that since he isn’t saying it, you can chosse for yourself what you want to claim he’s implying. For example Jane Galt is cutting up rough about the timing of various Carlyle Group investments, compared with the timing of George Bush Senior joining the board. And indeed, Moore’s film would be deserving of censure if he had been attempting to make the claim that there were specific quids pro quo on those specific deals. But he doesn’t actually make that claim, as far as I can see. Now he might have been attempting to imply that claim without making it, which would be bad. But he might just have been using the revolving door between defence contractors, large investors and the highest echelons of government, to support the following assertion:

Wealthy individuals and capital have far too much influence in American politics, and members of the Bush family have provided numerous examples of this proposition.

Which would not be bad. Pace my esteemed colleague Mr. Bertram, the reason why Bush’s misleading implications are not on the same footing as Moore’s tendentious use of the facts, is that Bush was attempting to establish a specfic false claim (that Saddam Hussein was a threat to the USA) while Moore is attempting to support a general claim of opinion (that Bush as President has been bad for the USA and Americans should vote for someone else).

Footnote:
[1]Although actually, I can’t be sure of this since I only really offered money.
[2]The word is “cunning”, btw.

My preferred cure for jetlag is to arrive in the morning and spend a fair part of the day outside, resetting my body clock, then have as normal an evening as possible, before going to bed about 10pm. In most respects, my schedule fitted this plan perfectly. Leaving Paris on Monday evening, I got into Brisbane this morning (Wednesday) and the day was suitably sunny. With the State of Origin[1] starting soon, there’ll be no problem about staying up[2] .

The only unusual feature is that my normal Wednesday includes karate training. I can now report that this is a complete, if problematic, cure for jet lag. Whatever term might describe my post-training condition, it is not “jet-lagged.”

fn1. The high point of the Australian rugby league calendar, this is a three-game series between Queensland and New South Wales in which, as the name implies, players line up for their state of origin, rather than of current residence. The deciding match is being played tonight.

fn2. Wrong! The game was such a depressing walkover that I gave up and went to bed early.

Last night’s Newsnight had a nice what-he-said-then/what-he-says-now juxtaposition, and “the same quotes”:http://news.independent.co.uk/uk/politics/story.jsp?story=538832 appear in today’s Independent:

bq. We are asked to accept that, contrary to all intelligence, Saddam decided to destroy those weapons. I say that such a claim is palpably absurd. (Tony Blair, 18 March 2003)

bq. I have to accept that we have not found them and we may not find them. He [Saddam] may have removed or hidden or even destroyed those weapons. (Tony Blair 6 July 2004)

Matt Yglesias has been doing sterling work on the double standards employed by Michael Moore’s critics. So, as a supplement to my “two”:https://www.crookedtimber.org/archives/002112.html “earlier”:https://www.crookedtimber.org/archives/002127.html posts on the same topic, I’d like to draw attention to “his latest”:http://yglesias.typepad.com/matthew/2004/07/good_points.html. He cites Volokh Conspirator Randy Barnett, who has read “Kopel’s Fifty-six deceits in Farenheit 911”:http://www.davekopel.com/Terror/Fiftysix-Deceits-in-Fahrenheit-911.htm. Barnett “observes”:http://volokh.com/archives/archive_2004_07_00.shtml#1088978471:

bq. I was struck by the sheer cunningness of Moore’s film. When you read Kopel, try to detach yourself from any revulsion you may feel at a work of literal propaganda receiving such wide-spread accolades from mainstream politicos, as well as attendance by your friends and neighbors. Instead, notice the film’s meticulousness in saying only (or mostly) “true” or defensible things in support of a completely misleading impression.

Matt comments, fairly and reasonably:

bq. The funny thing, though, is that if I wrote “The 56 Deceits of George W. Bush” (as, indeed, many people have done) then some very intelligent Volokh Conspirator (as, indeed, many of the conspirators are) would doubtless have written a post in response (as, indeed, I’ve read at the Conspiracy) arguing that most of the alleged “lies” weren’t lies _per se_ (and, indeed, they’re mostly misleading juxtapositions of technically true information) and that these sorts of ad hominem attacks don’t really prove that the presidents’ policies are actually wrong.

Quite.

Anne Alstott, co-author of The Stakeholder Society, has just published another book called No Exit: What Parents Owe Their Children and What Society Owes Parents. The theme is one we’ve explored here before: what should the state do for people who decide to have and raise children? It’s a tremendously good book, written in a wonderfully accessible style, and very affordable for an academic hardback.

At the core of Alstott’s book is a proposal for a ‘caregiver’s allowance’ of $5000 a year, to be provided by the Federal government to the primary care-giving parent. The allowance would be a kind of voucher; the caregiver could use it for any of three purposes: paying for daycare while she goes out to work; supplementing her retirement savings, or investing in her own education. The grant would be paid to the parent annually until her last child turned 13, and would be save-able; if the parent wanted, for example, to save it during the toddler years and then spend it on full time education as soon as the last child started school, she’d be entitled to do that.

The book consists of an elaborate defence of this proposal (and another, supplementary, mechanism effectively insuring against the child having a chronic illness).

[What follows is basically a review of the book, timed to coincide with Laura at Apt 11D’s review so make sure you read her’s too. The Boston Review a while back carried an article based on the book which is still online.]

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When I was in Paris I spotted a guy sitting on a corner on the ground just outside a bank with a laptop. It looked pretty random, but then it occured to me that perhaps this was the best location he could find for WiFi signals. Now I see that CTD over at ionarts blogged what he considers a possible “techno-geek historical first … ‘warboating'”. He and his brother went out on a fishing boat for signals. Not bad. I’m curious, what’s the craziest/weirdest thing people have done to find wireless connection?

Just thought I’d let everyone know that the Great Barrier Reef really deserves its name.

On Parliamentary Questions the other day they played a clip of David Owen, recorded in 2003, admitting without embarrassment that when he was Foreign Secretary he seriously considered ordering the assassination of Idi Amin. There was no explanation of why the idea was rejected (it was a clip in a game show), but my immediate, and non-reflective, reaction was that it was the first good thing I had heard about Owen (whom I couldn’t stand when he was a real politician, even before reading Crewe and King’s fantastic biography of the SDP in which he emerges as a deeply unlikeable and destructive character). Without giving it a lot more thought, which I can’t do right now, I can make a very rough judgement that certain objectionable leaders are legitimate candidates for assassination (Hitler, Amin, both Duvaliers, Stalin) whereas others are not (Khomeni, Castro, Rawlings, Botha). I could tell a story about each, and probably be dissuaded on each of them (except Hitler). But I couldn’t give anything approaching necessary and sufficient conditions for candidacy. What makes a leader a legitimate target of an assassination attempt?

Clarification: as jdw says below we are talking about a government authorising the assassination of a foreign leader, rather than a citizen assassinating his/her own country’s leader, the assumption being that governments require more justification.

“The latest parlour game”:http://www.artsjournal.com/aboutlastnight/archives20040704.shtml#82118 , via both “Norm”:http://normblog.typepad.com/normblog/2004/07/choose.html and “Chris Brooke”:http://users.ox.ac.uk/~magd1368/weblog/2004_07_01_archive.html#108912007834711318 .

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I was sitting in the St. Louis Amtrak station yesterday (huh, that would be a glorified name for a shack[1]) and observing with curiosity people’s reaction to a soda machine that was sold out. Given the hot day and my tourist explorations of the morning that left me tired and thirsty, the soda machine was the first thing I looked for upon entry into the waiting room. The two machines I noticed at first were selling snacks and coffee. I couldn’t believe that there was no soda machine – unfathomable for this type of an establishment in the U.S. – so I circled the room. And there it was, of course. The first thing I looked for was to see how much the soda cost. However, instead of a price, I found the words SOLD and OUT flashing. Bummer. But now came the fun part: observing how other people reacted to the sold-out soda machine. At one point I was almost convinced we had a candid camera scenario. It was quite amusing to watch how few people bother to check signs. (This was second in a series that day after having watched just a few minutes earlier a woman in front of me exit – or try to do so in any case – a building through a door clearly labeled and also taped shut by a sign stating that the door was out of order. After pushing it a few times she noticed the sign at her eye-level letting her know that this was not going to work.)

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Arguments, fights and feuds have their own inner logic, and they lead to people taking up positions and attitudes that make little sense on a rationalistic model of what beliefs we ought to have. But sometimes, even in the middle of such a quarrel, we get a sense of where it’s going, how it is defining and entrenching us and the other person. David Aaronovich “captures something of this”:http://www.guardian.co.uk/Columnists/Column/0,5673,1254827,00.html in today’s Guardian:

bq. I wrote a year ago that other peoples’ assumptions were turning me into a Jew. And now I began to wonder whether being attacked as being anti-Muslim because of my views on Iraq and secularism, and despite my views on Palestine and racism, wasn’t beginning to make me the thing that I was being accused of. Bugger it then, you half-think, if that’s what you want.

bq. But if that’s how I feel, wonderfully rational bloke that I am, what in heaven’s name is the effect on people from the Muslim community who are being wrongly stopped in the name of counter-terrorism? Doesn’t that mean the warnings about alienation are essentially correct? Last Friday’s announcement of the police stop and search statistics were like a bucket of iced water in the face. A 300% increase in the number of Asians stopped, and you just know that most of these will be young men. And we also know from the sus laws and the experiences of black BMW drivers, what the reaction is. Fuck you.

It has been interesting to follow the various discussions about blogs and what types of communities and discussions they resemble. I thought I would post a note to remind people (or let people know) that the study of online communities[1] is one of the oldest topics explored by academics about the social aspects of information technology use. There are probably hundreds of papers written about Usenet, mailing lists and bulletin board systems. Of course blogs have some distinct characteristics, but overall the existing body of literature about online communities would probably yield some interesting and helpful reading to those interested in blogs. Let’s not reinvent the wheel. One place to look for such work is the Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication (almost a decade old), but a simple search in a library catalog will yield numerous sources on virtual communities. Of particular interest to those pondering the social network aspects of online communities may be some of the excellent work by Warren Sack and much interesting research done on Usenet by Marc Smith. I realize mapping the blogosphere is a somewhat different issue, but some of the questions that have been raised are relevant to other online communities as well. People have worked for years to find some answers, let’s not ignore them. A piece that seems especially related to some issues that have come up is “Community without Propinquity Revisited: Communications Technology and the Transformation of the Urban Public Sphere” [pdf] by Craig Calhoun.

fn1. When I use terms such as “online communities” and “virtual communities”, I do not mean to suggest that these exist in isolation from other types of communities. See this piece [pdf] by Barry Wellman and Milena Gulia for more on this point.

I’m amazed how little comment there seems to have been on this front page story in the NY Times from July 4. That date explains part of the silence, no doubt, but this still strikes me as a Very Big Deal.

In May, 2003, the U.S. returned five terrorism suspects from Guantanamo Bay to Saudi Arabia “as part of a secret three-way deal intended to satisfy important allies in the invasion of Iraq.” In exchange, the Saudi’s later released five Britons and two others [a Canadian and a Belgian] who had been convicted of terrorist attacks in Saudi Arabia.” According to the authors, Don van Natta, Jr. and Tim Golden, “The releases were public-relations coups for the Saudi and British governments, which had been facing domestic criticism for their roles in the Iraq war.”

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