This is the follow-up to my previous academic literary studies and blogging post. (Memo to self: need snappier handle than ‘academic literary studies blogging’ – but not yet, lest we snap off some corner of the subject prematurely. ‘Bookchat’ not it – since it is vague and probably refers to a thing possibly necessary but hardly sufficient, if you see what I mean.) WARNING: post of interest to few.

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I’m running between meetings and trying to get this story into the print media (why do these things always happen on a Friday afternoon?) of an important development in the privacy of communication, so I will just point you to a leaked document hosted by the indefatigable people over at Statewatch.

Ireland, Britain, France and Sweden have proposed that the European Council of Ministers pass a Framework Decision on the retention of communications and mobile phone location data throughout the EU. This is the latest in an ongoing effort of certain European law enforcement interests (led by the UK, pushed by the US) to create a total surveillance capacity over anyone who uses a communications device of any kind, anywhere in the EU. This is sad, bad and disastrous news.

Yet again, policies which fundamentally change the relationship between the citizen and the state are being pushed through the most secretive and unaccountable decision-making body of the EU. Yet again, so-called anti-terrorism measures are being opportunistically introduced – this time in reaction to the Madrid bombings – but applied far beyond terrorism related investigations.

As comparisons go, this measure will far exceed the Patriot Act. It is obscenely dismissive of European data protection law – which now applies to multinationals using call centres but not to curb the state excesses it was created to prevent. It is absolutely sickening to see the Irish government using its presidency of the EU to endorse measures that cut the heart right out of European human rights.

For any decision-makers who haven’t been listening to the years of pleas and demands that EU states not use the promise of information and communications technologies to surveil their citizens, hear this: we don’t trust you, we don’t support you, and unlike you we haven’t forgotten the historical reasons Europe chose to stop governments compiling databases of their citizens’ most innocent acts.

I’ve been asked by my administration for my estimation of the strongest philosophy departments in the UK (in research terms). I’m not a big fan of league tables, but, rather than leave things to my private whim I thought I’d take a look at a least two peer-review based assessments out there: the “last RAE (2001)”:http://www.hero.ac.uk/rae/rae_dynamic.cfm?myURL=http://195.194.167.103/Results/openuoa.asp and the “Leiter reports”:http://www.philosophicalgourmet.com/overall.htm . Leiter has a ranking of UK departments, but to get one for the RAE you need to make some choices. My crude method was to to take the crude score (5*, 5 or 4) and multiply this by the number of staff submitted (with 5* as 6). This gave me the following ranking table (below the fold):

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The Google IPO has now been announced, and there are some more figures to analyze. In addition, I wanted to talk a bit about the option, suggested by one of the commenters on Kevin Drum’s blog of arbitraging by short-selling overpriced dotcoms and buying those with more reasonable valuations. Finally, I wanted to look at what all this means for capital markets and therefore for capitalism.

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From tomorrow’s “FT”:http://news.ft.com/servlet/ContentServer?pagename=FT.com/StoryFT/FullStory&c=StoryFT&cid=1083180189879

bq. Six US army soldiers are facing courts-martial for abusing and humiliating Iraqi detainees – activities uncovered during an investigation that also found widespread abuses at the notorious Abu Ghraib prison, according to US military officials. The alleged abuses, made public by CBS News, included soldiers forcing prisoners to simulate sex with each other and to pose naked with American men and women in military uniforms. In photographs obtained by the CBS News programme 60 Minutes, Iraqi prisoners are shown stacked in a human pyramid, one with a slur written on his skin in English. In another, a detainee is shown with wires attached to his body in an attempt to convince him he might be electrocuted. In almost all photos, CBS said, the US soldiers are laughing, posing, or giving thumbs-up signs.

bq. In an interview with CBS, Staff Sgt Chip Frederick, an army reservist and one of the soldiers charged, said he would not plead guilty … “We had no support, no training whatsoever, and I kept asking my chain of command for certain things … like rules and regulations. And it just wasn’t happening.”

bq. The army’s investigation reportedly shows that military investigators asked untrained reservists to prepare inmates for interrogation, but offered little guidance. Because of the success rate of “breaking” prisoners prepared by the unit now under investigation, they were encouraged to continue their practices, Sgt Frederick said.

This really sounds pretty dreadful. It’s not My Lae, and it’s not on the same plane as what went on under Saddam Hussein. But it’s symptomatic of a more general moral deadening that’s taking place – a willingness to countenance the threat of torture, “the turning over of people to third countries for torturing”:http://www.guardian.co.uk/afghanistan/story/0,1284,665939,00.html, and the employment of physical brutality in the ‘war on terrorism.’ People know this is happening – both the “Washington Post”:http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn?pagename=article&contentId=A37943-2002Dec25&notFound=true and “the Economist”:http://www.economist.com/displaystory.cfm?story_id=1522792 have run stories on this. But there’s no US debate about it that I can see; the stories sank like lead balloons. Even the “Maher Arar”:http://obsidianwings.blogs.com/obsidian_wings/2004/01/arar_14_a_plea_.html case seems not to have had any impact in the US beyond a few bloggers, and a scattering of news stories in the back pages. There’s a lot of knee-jerk anti-Americanism among the left, especially in Europe, and an unwillingness to acknowledge the many good (and sometimes utterly wonderful) things that the US has done in the rest of the world. Equally, there seems to be a persistent unwillingness among many Americans to acknowledge the ugly things that are being done in the name of their national security. Perhaps this story – and the actions being taken to punish those who were directly responsible – will help change this. But I don’t have much confidence that it will.

I’m in Oxford for a few days, as “Laurie”:http://www.u.arizona.edu/~lapaul is giving a talk to the “Jowett Philosophical Society”:http://users.ox.ac.uk/~scat1655/jowett/ tomorrow.[1] The last time I was in town, I was thirteen years of age and was hospitalized with gastroenteritis contracted from food cooked by scout masters who were supposedly proficient in wilderness survival skills. This visit is turning out much better than that, though it’s hard not to invent ways to annoy students who affect a patronizing attitude to tourists. Maybe I should ask the next one directions to the grave of Oxford’s most famous economist, John Milton Keynes.

fn1. “Change is Mulitple Realization,” at 4:30pm in the Lecture Theatre in the Faculty of Philosophy, 10 Merton Street. Under the rules of a non-aggression pact governing attendance at talks given by one’s spouse, I won’t be there.

Roger Ailes has found a particularly stunning Kaus moment.

(Don’t bother to keep reading if you’re making a noble attempt to avoid irrelevant trivia about the candidates; there’s nothing terribly important here.)

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The ever-fascinating “Head Heeb summarizes the Pitcairn case”:http://headheeb.blogmosis.com/archives/024688.html (full judgement “here in PDF”:http://pidp.eastwestcenter.org/pireport/2004/April/Judgment.pdf ). Mutiny, treason, adventure, sex, Lord Haw-Haw and legal positivism: it’s all there, along with the European Convention on Human Rights. Enjoy.

Something I’ve been meaning to mention for a while and never quite getting around to … Pitchfork Media report that “My Bloody Valentine”:http://pitchforkmedia.com/news/04-02/09.shtml, very possibly the Best Band in the World, Ever, are releasing a bunch of stuff next year, including some of the material that never made it onto the Glider EP. Cause for celebration, if not quite as much cause as a genuinely new album would be. Pitchfork also has a nice piece on the demise of “Black Eyes”:http://pitchforkmedia.com/news/04-04/08.shtml, which featured my cousin, Hugh McElroy, as co-vocalist in its heyday.

There has been much hype about how the Internet and especially search engines (need I name the one in particular?;) are giving everyone everywhere access to anything and everything. I’ve already commented previously about why this simplifies matters (even beyond controlling for mere access issues), but let’s limit our discussion to people who are quite skilled at online information-seeking. What remains – or may increasingly become – hard to access?

Here are some examples. I’d be curious in what other instances people have encountered or perhaps expect to encounter roadblocks at some point.

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Courtesy of zizka I notice that our honourable colleague Daniel has been profiteering while all the time opposing the US action. Just to declare that CT will make no money from the sale of these goods, unless we can figure out how to.

I never knew much about Doris Day, except that her singing still makes me go weak at the knees, and some of the films are great (I started watching after reading a surprising laudatory essay by the excellent Judith Williamson in the 80’s), and, like Rosemary Clooney, she comes from my favourite American city. But that has all changed, because Radio 2 is running an 80th birthday tribute called The Life of Doris Day. All that you would want to know about her (the first 5 minutes are a bit annoying). But I defy you to find tributes like this on US radio stations. Why?

UPDATE: I should have warned you that the BBC website is very slow and unreliable the past day or two, so you may have to be patient trying to listen to the show.

Like nearly everyone else, I’ve been deeply disappointed by David Brooks’ Op-ed columns in the NYT. But it’s not only out of a sense of fairness that I’m giving a favorable link to his latest – it’s not only good relative to the other stuff he’s written but better than most other commentary[1]. Referring to the debates over the Clarke and Woodward books, occurring at a time when Iraq looks like sliding into chaos, he says

This is like pausing during the second day of Gettysburg to debate the wisdom of the Missouri Compromise.

Right though this is, it’s obviously helpful to the Republicans, as is the observation that

many Americans have decided that it’s time to persevere and win.

But his final para raises the real issue

Over the next weeks, U.S. forces are going to jump from the fires of unilateralism to the frying pan of multilateralism. What’s going to happen when our generals want to take on some insurgents but Brahimi and the sovereign Iraqi appointees say no?   

Brooks might want to ponder the point that the Bush Administration appears to have no answer to the question he has posed here. They have set up rules that let them ignore the supposedly sovereign government they plan to establish, but it’s obvious that any such action will bring the whole structure crashing around their ears.

Update 29/4 Well, no-one at all in the comments thread agreed with me, but I haven’t seen anything to change my mind on the central point. Of course, the he said-she said stuff reported by Woodward and Clarke will be relevant to the election in November, but the “handover” in Iraq is due to take place at the end of June, and the crucial issues seem to me to have received no discussion at all in the (mainstream) media.

Can any readers point me to any prominent old-media commentator who has addressed the issue raised in Brooks’ final paragraph, and quoted by me? And if the whole thing falls in a heap, as looks increasingly likely, will anyone really care about the precise alignment within the Administration that got us to this point ?

fn1. Obligatory blogplugging: That’s old-media commentary, of course. This whole post is a subtle reminder that blogs, including this one, have already moved on from point-scoring and asked the questions that are now being raised by Brooks.

The poet Thom Gunn has died, and there are obituaries in the “NYT”:http://www.nytimes.com/2004/04/28/books/28GUNN.html , “the Times”:http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,60-1089982,00.html and the “Guardian”:http://www.guardian.co.uk/obituaries/story/0,3604,1204724,00.html . A friend introduced me to Gunn’s work about twenty years ago and there are some lines from “Elegy” from “The Passages of Joy”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0374517967/junius-20 (1982) that have stuck in my mind ever since I first read them:

bq. There will be no turn of the river
where we are all reunited
in a wonderful party
the picnic spread
all the lost found
as in hide and seek.

A sad loss.