My first real encounter with Norman Geras’s writings was when I read his excellent Marx and Human Nature. I subsequently saw him give a talk on the book at one of the SWP’s Marxism conferences (87?), and was struck by the way that he kept his temper despite extraordinary provocation by the audience. This experience combined with my more or less simultaneous encounter with the work of the analytical Marxists, and a class I took with (my subsequent colleague) Andy Levine, to convince me that normative philosophy was worth doing — resulting in my exiting philosophy of language for political philosophy.

So I was delighted to discover that he writes about the greatest sport human beings have invented. I was pleased, but also incredibly frustrated recently when I had the good fortune to stay at the home of a friend who possesses a copy of Two Views from the Boundary. I got half way through the book — and had to leave on the next flight out. Now, the relative obscurity (sorry Norm) of his cricket writing means it is not readily available in the US, and it never occurred to me to seek the book directly from him till I found this ancient post on his blog. Now that I have selfishly secured shipment of numerous copies for myself, my dad (he doesn’t read CT, so it’ll be a surprise as long as you don’t tell him), my godfather, etc, I can advertise the offer to all. Email Norm at his site, and see if he’ll cut you a deal on his cricket writing.

I “posted the other day”:https://www.crookedtimber.org/archives/002112.html about “Paul Krugman’s correct observation”:http://www.nytimes.com/2004/07/02/opinion/02KRUG.html that many of the right-wing pundits who get exercised about Michael Moore apply lower standards to the spin coming out of the Bush administration. As I said in comments at the time, that _comparative_ judgement is compatible with thinking Farenheit 9/11 is a pretty bad movie. Elsewhere in Krugman’s piece he gives qualified approval to Moore as providing an essential public service and writes that this is despite the fact that Farenheit 9/11 is tendentious, promotes unproven conspiracy theories and that viewers may come away from the film “believing some things that probably aren’t true.” This “has somewhat upset Norm”:http://normblog.typepad.com/normblog/2004/07/the_morgan_rati.html , who compares Krugman’s defence of Moore to the line some took on behalf of Daily Mirror editor Piers Morgan, who published faked photographs of British solidiers mistreating Iraqi detainees.

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The “New York Times”:http://www.nytimes.com/2004/07/04/international/asia/04MONG.html?pagewanted=print&position= tells us today about some bloke who’s playing golf across Mongolia, treating the entire country as a course, and dividing it into eighteen holes. Par is 11,880.

Sounds impressive – until you consider the Surrealist Golf Course in Maurice Richardson’s “The Exploits of Engelbrecht”:http://www.abel.net.uk/~savoy/HTML/engelb.html (previously discussed in “this post”:https://www.crookedtimber.org/archives/000981.html). According to Richardson

bq. To start with, a surrealist golf course has only one hole. But don’t get the idea that it’s any easier on that account. … Par is reckoned at 818181, but anything under 100,000 is considered a hot score. The hazards are desperate, so desperate that at the clubhouse bar you always see some pretty ravaged faces and shaky hands turning down an empty glass for the missing members.

These hazards include Sairpents, Vultures, the Valley of Dry Bones, Muezzins and Butlins Holiday Camp. In comparison, the Gobi Desert sounds like a cakewalk.

The BBC commentators have been comparing Otto Rehhagel to Socrates and invoking Greece’s ancient past. And why not? “Moments like tonight”:http://news.bbc.co.uk/sport1/hi/football/euro_2004/3860105.stm are what make football the great sport it is.

“Matt Yglesias”:http://yglesias.typepad.com/matthew/2004/07/long_philosophi.html#more gives us a “long philosophical rant” about the inconsistencies in Spiderman 2. More power to him, I say – but he’s still very likely wrong. Spiderman is not only a really, really good movie, it’s not necessarily making the claims that Matt suggests it does. Warning: spoilers follow.

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Brian Leiter posts on ‘philosopher’s tics’. Very true, very true. I just happen to have buried something similar in a long recent post you probably didn’t read, and just as well. So here it is. It’s from Imre Kertész’ novel – but I fear it’s his autobiography – Kaddish For a Child Not Born. The narrator is at some sort of forest retreat for writers and thinkers, trying to avoid the writers and thinkers. Alas, he is not successful. “The philosopher was nearing me in a pondering mood; I could see it in the slightly inclined pose of his head, on which his rascally visored cap perched; he approached like a humorous highwayman with a few drinks down his gullet, pondering whether to knock me down or content himself with the loot.”

Americans, of all ages, of all stations in life, and all types of dispositions are forever forming associations. They are not only commercial or industrial associations in which they all take part but others of a thousand different types – religious, moral, serious, futile, very general and very minute … Nothing, in my view, deserves more attention that the intellectual and moral associations in America.

– Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America

I stumbled on that passage – appropriate unto the day, for what is declared independence if not a precondition for happier association? – while poking around regarding blogging and social networks and such, following up Henry’s interesting ‘blogosphere as 18th century coffee-house’ post, following up Laura at Apartment 11D’s ‘blogging polis’ post. (I’d tell you who posted that Tocqueville passage, but I’ve forgotten.)

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Anyone care to explain this?

Only $366 million has been spent out of the $18.4 billion
President Bush and Congress provided last fall for rebuilding Iraq, the
White House said yesterday.

I know just the company to burn through a few extra
billion, if they’re looking.

The comments on the recent post about Focus on the Family’s distribution of Michael Moore’s home address have occasionally drifted into anti-Christian sentiment, which was very much not what I was hoping for. For a more heartening look at conservative Christianity:

The Southern Baptist Convention, a conservative denomination closely aligned with President Bush, said it was offended by the Bush-Cheney campaign’s effort to use church rosters for campaign purposes.

“I’m appalled that the Bush-Cheney campaign would intrude on a local congregation in this way,” said Richard Land, president of the Southern Baptist Convention’s Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission…

The Bush campaign defended a memo in which it sought to mobilize church members by providing church directories to the campaign, arranging for pastors to hold voter-registration drives, and talking to various religious groups about the campaign…

But on Friday, Land said, “It’s one thing for a church member motivated by exhortations to exercise his Christian citizenship to go out and decide to work on the Bush campaign or the (John) Kerry campaign. It’s another and totally inappropriate thing for a political campaign to ask workers who may be church members to provide church member information through the use of directories to solicit partisan support.”

I disagree with the Southern Baptists on many things. At the same time, I have great respect for this enthusiastic defense of the boundaries between church and state from a religious organization . Furthermore, their apparent acknowledgement that it’s just as legitimate for congregants to feel moved by Christian principle to work for Kerry as Bush is highly welcome. My heartfelt thanks to the Southern Baptists for this bit of culture war disarmament.

P.S. More on Focus on the Family here (funny!) and here (not funny; it’s a FOTF ad).

AND ANOTHER THING: A small point about that ad- who is that sad little boy supposed to be? In context, it only makes sense if he’s supposed to be a boy raised by gay parents, upset because he doesn’t have both a father and a mother. How, exactly, is a constitutional amendment preventing his parents from marrying each other supposed to help him?

At first I thought this was a bad typo, but perhaps it’s just a quirk of American English that I hadn’t noticed before.

bq. Though few would argue that children should be protected from exposure to Internet pornography, COPA, the law designed to protect them has been struck down by the U.S. Supreme Court. (“NewsFactor Network”:http://www.newsfactor.com/story.xhtml?story_title=Supreme-Court–First-Amendment-Covers-Online-Porn&story_id=25722.)

In my idiolect, _argue that p_ means put forward arguments in support of the truth of _p_. Here it seems (unless I’m really misinterpreting the paragraph) to mean something like dispute that _p_. Is that what the phrase means in American?

Edward at Obsidian Wings points to an ad from Focus on the Family. It contains a large picture of a sad child, and expresses the concern that children raised by gay parents will grow up without both a father and a mother, and encourages readers to contact their senators to support the Federal Marriage Amendment.

Edward points out, quite rationally, that the vast majority of children who don’t have both a mother and a father are in that position because their heterosexual parents have split up, or never were together. If being raised by both a male and female parent is important enough to change the Constitution, surely it’s important enough to ban divorce.

A few questions remain…

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Laura at “Apartment 11d”:http://apartment11d.blogspot.com/2004_06_01_apartment11d_archive.html#108847109152995261 posts on the blogosphere as a space for debate:

bq. is the blogosphere a public space, like the New England townhall meeting? Is it a place where individuals can debate ideas and policy proposals and have some impact on political officials?

Perhaps it should be neither. The most attractive ideal for the blogosphere that I’ve come across is in sociologist Richard Sennett’s brilliant, frustrating shaggy-dog of a book, “The Fall of Public Man”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0393308790/henryfarrell-20. Sennett is writing about the eighteenth century coffee-house as a place where people could escape from their private lives, reinventing themselves, and engaging in good conversation with others, regardless of their background or their everyday selves. They could assume new identities, try out novel arguments usw. This kind of polity doesn’t so much conduct towards a shared consensus, as allow the kinds of diversity and plurality that Iris Marion Young (who’s heavily influenced by Sennett) talks about in “Justice and the Politics of Difference”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0691023158/henryfarrell-20.

I’m quite sure that eighteenth century coffee houses weren’t actually like that (unless you were bourgeois and male) – but Sennett’s arguments are still helpful in understanding how the blogosphere differs from a New England townhall. Like Sennett’s patronizers of coffee shops, bloggers don’t usually know each other before they start blogging, so that it’s quite easy for them to reinvent themselves if they like, and indeed to invent a pseudonym, or pseudonyms to disguise their real identity completely. This has its downside – “some bloggers”:http://apartment11d.blogspot.com/2004_06_01_apartment11d_archive.html#108854101450715172 take it as license for offensive behaviour – but in general, if you don’t like a blog, you can simply stop reading it, or linking to it. The blogosphere seems less to me like a close-knit community (there isn’t much in the way of shared values, and only a bare minimum of shared norms), and more like a city neighborhood. An active, vibrant neighborhood when things are working; one with dog-turds littering the pavement when they’re not.

A Florida Division of Elections database lists more than 47,000 people the department said may be ineligible to vote because of felony records. The state is directing local elections offices to check the list and scrub felons from voter rolls.

But a Herald review shows that at least 2,119 of those names — including 547 in South Florida — shouldn’t be on the list because their rights to vote were formally restored through the state’s clemency process….

State elections officials acknowledge there may be mistakes on the list but insist they have built in safeguards to make sure eligible voters are not removed by local election offices. They say they have warned election offices to be diligent before eliminating voters, and have flagged possible cases in which voters on the list may have regained their rights….

Of the 2,119 people who obtained clemency, 62 percent are registered Democrats, and almost half are black. Less than 20 percent are Republican. Those ratios are very close to the same in the list of 47,000 voters who the local elections officers are supposed to review and possibly purge from the registration rolls.

As it turns out, justice delayed is, in fact, justice denied. The list was released yesterday, and the Miami Herald has already found this. I feel a case of the shrill coming on.

Via Body and Soul.

The White House has contacted the Irish Embassy to complain about the Irish journalist, Carole Coleman, who interviewed President Bush last week. (via Radley Balko)

“‘The White House rang Thursday evening,'” said Irish embassy spokeswoman Síghle Dougherty. ‘They were concerned over the number of interruptions and that they thought the president was not given an opportunity to respond to the questions.'”

Said Dougherty: “They were mostly troubled by what they said was the way the president was ‘talked over.’ “

I’d imagine that most regular blog readers are aware of this interview. (Here’s the transcript; here’s the video, starting around 15:00.) You can judge for yourself about whether Bush was given the opportunity to respond to questions.

She asked tough questions about the mounting death toll in Iraq, the failure of U.S. planning, and European opposition to the invasion and occupation. And when the president offered the sort of empty and listless “answers” that satisfy the White House press corps – at one point, he mumbled, “My job is to do my job” – she tried to get him focused by asking precise follow-up questions.

The president complained five times during the course of the interview about the pointed nature of Coleman’s questions and follow-ups – “Please, please, please, for a minute, OK?” the hapless Bush pleaded at one point, as he demanded his questioner go easy on him.

A few questions:

1. What the hell is the Irish embassy supposed to do about it?
2. Why would the White House decide that the benefits of this action possibly outweigh the negatives involved in keeping the story alive?
3. … unless this supposed to be a warning shot at the American press,letting them know that the President is not to be the subject of serious interviews?
4. Will the press be so cowardly as to play along?

There’s this sense of how dare you question them. And that is the thing that I almost find more appalling than the decisions that they make. Because I can accept incompetence, but I cannot accept self-righteous incompetence.

Jon Stewart

UPDATE: Jesse Walker has more, and the Poor Man does a good job of summarizing the general issue.

ANOTHER UPDATE: One of my betters has more on this. Thanks to antirealist.