I’ve only ever had one proper job. For about 6 months in 1985 I worked for Pipkins Removals. My acquisition of the job is a classic case of being plugged into the right network; I was oddly friendly with the boss’s daughters (and still am: I say oddly because they were 9 and 11 at the time). I was the most casual of the three employees, taken on because they won the contract to move the Oxford courts into the (then new) Combined Court Center in St. Aldates. I was also, surprisingly, good at the job, compensating for my initial lack of physical strength with a good eye for space, which is a vital labour-saving asset in that line of work. Despite my remarkable lack of homosociality I also got along well with the other employees, whom I respected and whom, I imagine, knew that.
What was striking about moving office (as opposed to home) furniture was the bizarre combination of incompetence and self-importance displayed by almost every office manager we worked with. They were paying for our time, but when we arrived they would frequently have no idea where they wanted anything (the courts, and the Dole office, were both exceptions). We moved every desk in one large office three times in the same day — the manager had basically paid us for the pleasure of ordering us about, as the final arrangement differed barely at all from the original arrangement. But they certainly got pleasure ordering us about and I, as the youngest and scruffiest of the men, was a particular target. They assumed, almost to a person, that I was on a YOPS scheme, or something like it, and treated me with extreme contempt, which never bothered me (I knew it was temporary); and my colleagues (who treated me with unmerited respect) took great delight in it.
Every day was punctuated with frequent, and strong, cups of tea. We had one before getting going, had another at 10.30, a third at lunch, and a fourth at 3. We worked bloody hard, and the tea was an essential accompaniment to the brief breaks.
Where is this going? An advertisement, of sorts. I have just acquired the newly released Very Best of Bernard Cribbins which contains the two brilliant songs Right Said Fred (which is about furniture moving) and Hole in the Ground (self-important officials). They sound as fresh as the day they were first recorded to me, and between them sum up my only experience of proper work. The CD contains numerous other gems from the talented man — his When I’m 64 is better than Paul McCartney’s. It’s readily available in the US too.
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As “Kieran noted yesterday”:https://www.crookedtimber.org/archives/002007.html I’ve been gallavanting around the world (most recently into St Andrews) so I haven’t had time to promote the latest round of philosophy blogs. Actually there have been two big group blogs launched since the Arizona blog Kieran linked to. I was going to try and make a systematic list, but that’s hard work away from one’s home computer, so I’ll just link to David Chalmers’s very good “list of philosophy blogs”:http://jamaica.u.arizona.edu/~chalmers/weblogs.html instead.
Unlike CT, most of these blogs are geographically based. The contributors to group blogs are usually from the same time zone, and frequently from the same zip code. I prefer CT’s cosmopolitan flavour, but that isn’t looking like becoming the dominant form of blogging. That’s a pity, because the real attraction of the medium, to me anyway, is that it helps overcome the tyrannies of distance. Hopefully active comment boards and crosslinks can do that even if the blogs themselves are spatially centralised.
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I caught about five minutes of some retrospective on Reagan last night. One of the talking heads — a US protagonist whom I didn’t recognize — said something like the following:
bq. Of course, we now know that the Soviet Union was incredibly weak, falling apart in fact, and that it probably wouldn’t have survived even without the pressure we were putting on. But you have to remember that, _at the time_ , all the intelligence reports (and the media) stressed how _strong_ the Soviets were. On the basis of the intelligence we were getting, we’d never have guessed the reality.
Deja vu?
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Mike Davis, “writing in the Guardian”:http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,3604,1236209,00.html , puts D-Day in perspective.
bq. But what American has ever heard of Operation Bagration? June 1944 signifies Omaha Beach, not the crossing of the Dvina River. Yet the Soviet summer offensive was several times larger than Operation Overlord (the invasion of Normandy), both in the scale of forces engaged and the direct cost to the Germans.
bq. By the end of summer, the Red army had reached the gates of Warsaw as well as the Carpathian passes commanding the entrance to central Europe. Soviet tanks had caught Army Group Centre in steel pincers and destroyed it. The Germans would lose more than 300,000 men in Belorussia alone. Another huge German army had been encircled and would be annihilated along the Baltic coast. The road to Berlin had been opened.
bq. Thank Ivan. It does not disparage the brave men who died in the North African desert or the cold forests around Bastogne to recall that 70% of the Wehrmacht is buried not in French fields but on the Russian steppes. In the struggle against Nazism, approximately 40 “Ivans” died for every “Private Ryan”. Scholars now believe that as many as 27 million Soviet soldiers and citizens perished in the second world war.
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According to this report, Louis De Branges claims to have proved the Riemann Hypothesis. If correct, it’s very significant – much more so than the proof of Fermat’s Last Theorem by Wiles.
It is also, I think, the last of the big and well-known unsolved problems in mathematics, and it would be nice to see the search ending in success. Some of the other big problems have been closed, rather than solved. The classic problems of the Greeks such as squaring the circle were shown to be insoluble in the 19th century, and the Hilbert program of formalisation was shown by Godel to be infeasible. And the four-colour problem (not a really important problem, but a big one because it was easily described, interesting and very tough) was dealt with by a brute-force computer enumeration.
Almost instant update Commenter Eric on my blog points to Mathworld which says “Much ado about nothing”. On the other hand, the same page reports a proof of the infinitude of twin primes which has been an open question for a long time, though not a problem in the same league as those mentioned above.
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Seeing as “Brian”:http://tar.weatherson.net/ is off gallivanting somewhere, let me point you towards “Desert Landscapes”:http://www.arizonaphilosophy.com/, a new blog brought to you by some of the faculty and graduate students of the “Philosophy Department”:http://info-center.ccit.arizona.edu/~phil/ at the “University of Arizona”:http://www.arizona.edu. You can see them all there, inside the Social Sciences building in the right foreground of “this live view of the campus”:http://www.cs.arizona.edu/camera/.[1] They live on the ground floor philosophically underlaboring for the “Political Science people”:http://info-center.ccit.arizona.edu/~polisci/ department in the middle and the “Sociology department”:http://fp.arizona.edu/soc/, appropriately located on the top floor.
fn1. Unless it’s the night time, obviously, in which case you can “look here instead”:http://www.cs.arizona.edu/camera/week.html.
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“Jack Balkin”:http://balkin.blogspot.com/2004_06_06_balkin_archive.html#108680154938193129 on the torture memo.
bq. The stench of corruption permeates the pages of this report. Legal minds, blinded by ideology, and seduced by power, have willingly done the Administration’s dirtiest work– apologizing for torture and justifying violations of the most basic human rights. They have mangled the law and distorted the Constitution, manipulating legal sources to maximize power and minimize accountability. It is the sort of legal reasoning that twists law to destroy the Rule of Law. It is the sort of legal reasoning that brings shame on our nation and our people. It is the sort of legal reasoning that makes me ashamed to be a lawyer.
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Two good links from Randy Paul at Beautiful Horizons:
There was recently an intelligent bit debate about Amnesty International between Chris (also here), Jacob Levy at the Volokh Conspiracy, and Eve Garard at Normblog. Randy confronts some other anti-Amnesty points that aren’t quite up to snuff.
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Two good links from Randy Paul at Beautiful Horizons:
There was recently an intelligent bit debate about Amnesty International between Chris (also here), Jacob Levy at the Volokh Conspiracy, and Eve Garard at Normblog. Randy confronts some other anti-Amnesty points that aren’t quite up to snuff.
As most readers will know, it has recently come to the attention of the world that lawyers in the Pentagon’s Office of General Counsel have prepared a memo arguing that torture can be authorized by the President. The argument, as I understand it, is that when the President believes that he is operating in his capacity as Commander in Chief, he has unlimited power, which cannot be constrained by the Legislature. It goes so far as to say that authority to set aside the laws is “inherent in the president.”
Michael Froomkin’s analysis of the torture memo is an invaluable example of the best of blogging. (Also see Jim Henley, Eric Muller, von from Obsidian Wings, among others.)
On pages 22-23 the Walker Working Group Report sets out a view of an unlimited Presidential power to do anything he wants with “enemy combatants”. The bill of rights is nowhere mentioned. There is no principle suggested which limits this purported authority to non-citizens, or to the battlefield. Under this reasoning, it would be perfectly proper to grab any one of us and torture us if the President determined that the war effort required it. I cannot exaggerate how pernicious this argument is, and how incompatible it is with a free society. The Constitution does not make the President a King. This memo does.
Via TalkLeft, I see that Sen. Dick Durbin has introduced:
an amendment to the Defense Authorization bill to reaffirm US commitment to the Geneva Conventions, the Convention Against Torture, and the International Convention on Civil and Political Rights, and to affirm unequivocally the prohibition against torture, cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment.
TalkLeft has a good deal of information about this, including a sample letter of support for this amendment which can be adapted and forwarded to your representatives in Congress. Here’s a good resource for contacting them. Please do this.
One last point, in which I get a little emotional.
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Via Eugene Volokh,[1] I came to this Boston Globe piece by Jeff Jacoby, who complains that the term “partial birth abortion”, when used in news stories, is normally surrounded by scare quotes, with the explanation that this term is used by opponents of legal abortion, but disputed by supporters. Jacoby complains about liberal bias here and says, among other things “when reporting on the same-sex marriage controversy, they should observe that “what critics call ‘homophobia’ — a term promoted by gay and lesbian activists — is not recognized by medical authorities”
As far as I can recall, I’ve never seen the word “homophobia” used in a news story in a major newspaper, other than in quotes, usually direct, but occasionally indirect (“activist X is concerned about homophobia”) Certainly I’ve never seen it used as if it referred to a recognised medical condition analogous to, say, claustrophobia. I looked in Google News and the recent uses I could find were all either in direct or indirect quotes, opinion pieces (including reprints of Jacoby!) or in publications such as Gay Times and Alternet, which don’t claim to be unbiased. Can anyone point to examples that would support Jacoby?
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Endless playing with the “BBC score predictor”:http://news.bbc.co.uk/sport1/hi/football/euro_2004/score_predictor/default.stm has me anticipating an England–France final with England beating Italy in the semis and France having knocked out the Dutch. But, of course, whatever happens in the real world, it won’t be that. The Dutch are the big mystery, of course, they always screw up in the end (and with Clarence Seedorf threatening to quit if he’s not played in his favourite position, it looks like business as usual). Group C looks the hardest to call: neck and neck between the Swedes and the Danes to avoid relegation [I meant non-qualification, of course]. And I expect the Germans to get just one point, a miserable goalless draw with Latvia. And the final victors? Like everyone else I can’t see beyond France.
[Update: my hot betting tip is Fernando Morientes for top scorer at 20/1]
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On this sacred day of democracy, two old posts of mine putting forward the case for not taking part in this complete farrago. I would add two points in the context of the current UK elections:
1) Given the large-scale use of postal ballots, the “electoral bezzle” (the proportion of the turnout which consists of fictional characters who are the result of electoral fraud) is probably much larger this time than in previous elections.
2) As the FT points out today, the list system used in the European elections means that there are substantial numbers of political hacks and placemen who will get elected no matter what, making it even more pointless to bother voting.
Don’t encourage them.
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Another positive-negative rights-liberties post. Probably you’ve had enough of that, so I’ll tuck it away discreetly.
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I swear I had this post ready before “all”:https://www.crookedtimber.org/archives/001996.html “this”:https://www.crookedtimber.org/archives/001991.html “stuff”:https://www.crookedtimber.org/archives/001987.html about positive and negative rights. My appetite for that kind of thing isn’t terribly high, except as an opportunity to think up slogans like “Libertarianism is the Socialism of “Lawyers”:http://examinedlife.typepad.com/johnbelle/2004/03/if_wishes_were_.html.” But a few months ago “I made a passing comment”:https://www.crookedtimber.org/archives/001414.html that “Libertarianism has always seemed to me to depend for its realization on features of the social structure that it officially repuditates.” There’s probably a nice theory to be built about how this is true of _all_ programmatic ideologies for social reorganization. For now, “Peter Levine”:http://www.peterlevine.ws/mt/ sketches “some sociological ideas about Libertarianism in particular”:http://www.peterlevine.ws/mt/archives/2004_06_06.html#000378.
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