I’ve been reading the Aubrey-Maturin books by Patrick O’Brian and was struck by an episode in Post Captain . The hero, Jack Aubrey has been given command of a ship but is being pursued by his creditors and faces indefinite imprisonment for debt if they catch him. Reaching Portsmouth and his crew, he turns on the bailiffs who have been pursuing him and routs them. Several are knocked down and, in a marvellous twist, Aubrey presses them into service on his ship.

It struck me on reading O’Brian that this kind of thing would happen routinely in a libertarian utopia. On the one hand, bankruptcy and limited liability, the first great pieces of government interference with freedom of contract would be abolished, and imprisonment for debt presumably reintroduced. On the other hand, since most libertarians envisage a minimal state with no real taxing powers but a continuing responsibility for defence, reliance on conscription would be almost inevitable. From the libertarian viewpoint, any form of taxation constitutes slavery, and fairness is not a proper concern of policy, so there can be no particular objection to the press gang as opposed to, say, voluntary recruitment financed by involuntary income taxes.

Not bad. Not my choice though.

I arrived in Pasadena (from Sydney) yesterday. Or possibly today. I’m still adjusting to jetlag, driving on the right and Los Angeles in general. The view of the mountains from the hotel is beautiful, at least in the photo in the hotel guidebook. Right now the smog makes them invisible. The area around the hotel has the usual collection of dull office blocks and carpark-like structures that turn out also to be office blocks. I’ve seen three buildings so far that are more than three stories tall, face the street on at least two sides, and have no windows at all: a Bank of America, a Target, and a Macy’s. I don’t have very high expectations when it comes to urban design, but these things look like the _Simpsons_’ Springfield Mall. They might as well have “Ministry of Truth” or “Central Reprocessing” written on the side. Is Pasadena particularly bad in this respect? Or has nine months away from the U.S. been enough for me to start paying attention to this kind of thing again?

“Atrios”:http://atrios.blogspot.com/2004_03_21_atrios_archive.html#107996352207644285 links to this “pretty good Wall Street journal article”:http://online.wsj.com/article_email/0,,SB107991342102561383-IJjgoNjlaF3oJ2rZnuIaKeBm4,00.html on the many conflicting accounts about the government’s immediate response to the September 11 attacks. Much of the confusion is probably due to the inevitable difficulty in remembering precise timelines, but I’d bet that at least some of the time some people are deliberately making things up.

One thing I didn’t know was that Cheney’s office is still sticking to the story that there was a credible threat to Air Force One that day. I thought that story had been officially inoperative for years now.

Here’s a semantic construction I hadn’t heard before. (This was on SportsCenter, or some sports show, on the weekend.)

bq. (1) Nevada upset Gonzaga by 19 points on Saturday.

That isn’t, or at least wasn’t, a sentence in my dialect.

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Apparently, Coke has nicked its “business plan”:http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/story/0,3604,1174127,00.html for _Dasani_ from Trotter’s Independent Trading – “bottled tap water with added contaminants”:http://www.bbc.co.uk/comedy/onlyfools/christmas/1992.shtml. Does it glow in the dark too?

Following on from Chris’s post on the ethics of ritual slaughter, I thought I’d put up a link to one of the best things I read last year in the Guardian, on the ins and outs of the Halal meat industry. Suffice it to say that the definition of “Halal”, as with so many regulatory issues in the food industry, is a somewhat fluid concept, subject to the same sorts fo industry lobbying and regulatory capture as any other (reading between the lines, I pick up that the real problem for the halal industry is that if you don’t stun animals before slaughter, then they tend to kick around a bit, damaging the meat and leading to wastage costs which cannot always be passed on to the consumer).

Suffice it to say that if you really believe that it is a grave sin for you to eat meat which was not killed in the precise manner prevalent in Mecca around 622 CE, then it is probably not a good idea to go shopping for stuff branded “Halal” in the UK. It looks to me as if vegetarianism is the only religiously safe option for fundamentalist Muslims in the UK. For non-fundamentalists who understand that the strict traditional approach is not consistent with the realities of a modern abbattoir, then surely there can be no principled objection to starting up a debate about what compromises can reasonably be expected between religion and animal welfare.

I have no comparable information easily accessible online about the Kosher meat industry, but kosher/non-kosher scandals are a staple of the North London local press, so I would guess that similar arguments go through …

I have “a letter in todays’s Guardian”:http://www.guardian.co.uk/letters/story/0,3604,1174928,00.html on l’affaire Cavanagh (on which see “JQ’s earlier post”:https://www.crookedtimber.org/archives/001551.html and, especially, comments there by Harry). There are also supportive letters from Edward Lucas of the Economist and Bernard Crick (who is, perhaps, somewhat compromised by his previous association with Cavanagh’s employer, on which, “see Chris Brooke”:http://users.ox.ac.uk/~magd1368/weblog/2004_03_01_archive.html#107986894172321743 ). One benefit of having a blog is that, when the Guardian edit your letter you can publish the unexpurgated version yourself. They’ve not done a bad job, but here’s the original with the bits the Guardian cut out in italics:

bq. Political philosophers often entertain hypotheses which ordinary people find outlandish _or even outrageous_ . They do this in order to clarify our our fundamental commitments about justice, fairness, liberty, and so on. Even when they have come to a considered view _about those commitments_ , the question of how principles translate into policy is a difficult one. I take it that _a liberal newspaper like_ the Guardian believes that such fundamental inquiry by academics has a place, indeed and essential place, in the political ecology of a free society. _How deplorable it is then, when one of your correspondents, in search of material to discredit David Blunkett, should dig out theoretical reflections made in a wholly different context by Matt Cavanagh, a former philosopher now employed as a policy advisor._ Kudos is due to Blunkett for being willing to seek the advice of someone who has been so sharply critical of him in the past. Taking Cavanagh’s quotes from their context, then crying “race” _and seeking soundbites from backbenchers to embarrass a minister_ is _behaviour_ worthy of muckraking tabloids, not of the Guardian.

Dan Dennett has an example somewhere where he imagines that someone discovers the score of a hitherto lost Bach cantata. But by an unfortunate co-incidence, the first few notes are identical to “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer” thus preventing us from ever having the experience eighteenth-century Leipzigers had of the music. Pauline and I have an interest in Art Nouveau, and, surfing ebay to see what there was for sale, she stumbled on “an exquisite brooch”:http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=2696908359&category=58553 designed by Charles Horner of Chester in 1895 or 6. From the description:

bq. The brooch is decorated with a flyfot symbol. In Western traditions, the flyfots arms each represent one of the four elements, and the extention symbolizes that element in motion; thus representing life and movement. It was also used by the Maya, Navajo, Jains and Buddhists. In Scandinavia mythology it represents Thor’s hammer.

Did you know what a flyfot is? No, neither did I.

Pulling together a few different threads from recent posts, I came up with the following idea. It seems certain that Nader will be on the US Presidential ballot in November and that, while he will get less votes than in 2000, he might get enough to swing the outcome in some states. Also, as I understand things, each state has more-or-less unfettered control over the procedures used to select members of the Electoral College. With 50 states, I assume there must be at least one state where the Democrats control the legislative process (including, if required, the governorship) but which is potentially marginal in the Presidential election. In such a case, it would seem rational to introduce instant runoff voting.

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“Language Hat”:http://www.languagehat.com/archives/001217.php has an excellent post up about a silly list of ‘mispronunciations’ that’s been apparently doing the rounds.

To get the full effect you really have to read the whole thing, but I will answer one of Mr. Hat’s questions. No, of course the author of the list doesn’t recommend pronouncing the _c_ in _Connecticut_. As every fule nose, the correct pronunciation is ON-NECK-TEA-COO.

It is not often that “a dissertation gets written up in the New York Times”:http://www.nytimes.com/2004/03/20/arts/20DEVA.html so I thought it was worth a mention here. Kieran has written here about Devah Pager‘s work earlier including a bit of context. Since Devah is a friend of mine, I would like to add that not only is she really smart and great at finding innovative approaches to research questions, but she’s also a delightful person. It’s wonderful to have people like her in academia and in sociology in particular using her talents to work on important questions… and it’s also nice to see good academic work get public recognition for a change!

Update: Be sure to check out Kieran’s note in the comments for more details about the public life of this dissertation.

Since I’ve argued previously that there’s a lot of confusion in discussions about equality of opportunities and of outcomes, I was interested by this story that UK Home Secretary David Blunkett has hired as special advisor on race someone named Matt Cavanagh, most notable for writing a book called Against Equality of Opportunity which says that employers should be permitted to engage in racial discrimination.

This interview with Cavanagh in The Guardian does not seem very promising – he comes across as the worst kind of contrarian[1] – but is not really enough to go on. So I was hoping someone with a subscription to the London Review of Books might send me a copy of Jeremy Waldron’s apparently favorable review. In case you’re worried about the sanctity of intellectual property, I am a subscriber but I’ve never registered with the website and don’t have the required address slip to hand.

Meanwhile, I’m confident that lots of readers (and probably other CT members) will be well ahead of me, so I’d welcome comments, particularly setting me straight if I have misunderstood Cavanagh (or Waldron).

fn1. That is, one who makes great play with contradictions in the conventional wisdom, does not put forward a coherent alternative, but nonetheless makes authoritative-sounding pronouncements on public policy.

I’ve been meaning to blog for the past week about a topic which caused some lively debate over Sunday lunch with some friends last week, prompted by political philosopher Paula Casal’s article “Is Multiculturalism Bad for Animals?” (Journal of Political Philosophy 11/1 2003). Muslims and orthodox Jews are only allowed to eat meat slaughtered according to Halal or Kosher procedures. These procedures are typically worse from the animal’s point of view that the “humane” methods required for slaughtering cattle normally (at least in the UK). Now as far as I know there’s no religious requirement on Muslims or Jews to eat meat slaughtered by these methods: that’s to say Muslims and Jews can be vegetarians if they want to be. The religious requirement is simply that IF they eat meat, these slaughtering methods must be used. The question that then arises is this: should adherents of these religions (and other similar ones if there are any) be given an exemption from standard animal cruelty regulations to permit them to continue to use these methods?

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