From today’s “Telegraph”:http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2004/03/18/ndons18.xml&sSheet=/portal/2004/03/18/ixportal.html :

bq. Oxford dons are biased in favour of female applicants, especially if they come from independent schools, according to a study by four eminent academics. One of them, A H Halsey, emeritus professor of sociology at Oxford, said: “I fear that the male lust hypothesis is part of the explanation.”

Would any of the Oxford admissions tutors who read CT care to comment? (Hat tip JW).

There’s an interesting poll by Pew, which suggests that anti-Semitism has actually “declined significantly”:http://people-press.org/reports/display.php3?ReportID=206 in France and Germany since 1991. I imagine that much of the decline, especially in Germany, can be traced to older anti-Semites dying as time progresses. Even still, the percentage of Germans who view Jews “unfavorably” is unacceptably high, at 20% of the population. I’d like to see a breakdown of the difference between former East and West Germany (some 500 people were polled – probably enough to make a decent first attempt at identifying sub-national differences). My suspicion is that there are substantially higher numbers of people from former East Germany with anti-Semitic views. They missed out on most of the collective self-recrimination about Germany’s behaviour towards Jews in the 1933-1945 period (the East German regime preferred to propagandize the martyrdom of Communists in the concentration camps, for obvious reasons). Via “Norman Geras”:http://normblog.typepad.com/normblog/2004/03/european_attitu.html.

In British universities and, I suspect, elsewhere, medical ethics has been one of the big growth areas in philosophy (well, quasi-philosophy, anyway). It seems, in fact, that the expansion has been so fast that universities are struggling to find qualified lecturers. How else to explain that a scientist who tried to poison his wife’s gin-and-tonics with atropine and tried to cover his tracks by spiking products at the local supermarket has been “taken on by the University of Manchester”:http://www.thisislondon.co.uk/news/articles/9561757?source=PA to lecture in philosophy and medical ethics? Do as I say, not as I do? (Hat tip “Mick Hartley”:http://mickhartley.typepad.com/blog/2004/03/the_ethics_of_p.html )

In case anyone has missed the news in “today’s Times”:http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2-1042250,00.html , “Don Foster”:http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/entertainment/reviews/newsid_1410000/1410211.stm , the guy who used literary forensics to identify Joe Klein as the author of _Primary Colors_ and who confirmed Ted Kaczynski as the Unabomber, claims to have outed the anonymous author of “Belle de Jour”:http://belledejour-uk.blogspot.com/ as Sarah Champion, a minor author from Manchester. Belle, naturally, “denies the claim”:http://belledejour-uk.blogspot.com/2004_03_01_belledejour-uk_archive.html#107953767586241556 .

1. We enjoy the benefit of some very smart, very civil conservative commentators on this site. I’d be honestly interested in their answer to this question:

Regarding the war on terror, what policies or actions are you afraid that President John Kerry might actually adopt that could reasonably be described as “appeasement”?

2. For interested U.S. citizens, The Poor Man is holding a fundraising competition between former Clark supports (aka “the Jets”) and Dean supporters (aka “the far, far inferior Jets”). Give generously, or the terrorists win. (I kid!)

3. The Spainish election has been blogged heavily, not least by my my fellow Timberites. There have been a good deal of ignoble slurs on the subject that I’m pleased to ignore. On a more reasonable level, a number of people have made the argument that, even if we grant that Spaniards have done nothing wrong, the results will nonetheless incentivise terrorists. They will be convinced that terrorism can be effectively used to change the results of elections. This knowledge can only lead to more terrorism. (Jane Galt, for example, makes it here.)

This argument seems to rest on the premise that the terrorist attack did, in fact, change the results of the election. But for the train bombings, Aznar’s incumbent People’s Party would have remained in power.

I’m not going to pretend to be an expert on Spanish opinion polling, so I can’t make a claim for the significance of these polls. But according to this post, the Socialists were in the lead before the bombings, so the terrorists didn’t change the results. Doesn’t the argument take a severe blow?

3b. The argument that the right is showing contempt for democracy by decrying the results of the Spanish election is silly. If I had had a blog when Jorg Haider or Kurt Waldheim enjoyed electoral success in Austria, I would have complained, and I wouldn’t have been alone.

4. September 11th, 2001, was the worst day for the United States in my lifetime. I’d have a hard time choosing second place. But we all remember the way that the nation, and the world, pulled together in sympathy and support. I don’t want to get too sentimental, and we all have enough memories of those terrible days. But I’ll never forget sobbing as members of Congress stood on the steps of the Capital and sang “God Bless America” off-key. We were at our best, and it was easy to believe that we were all basically on the same side.

Fundamentally, I still believe that. But watching how people reacted to last week’s events in Spain has been deeply depressing. If there is another major terrorist attack on the U.S. in the next few months, I suspect that it would tear this country apart. May God have mercy on us all if it happens.

Congratulations to Kevin Drum for having effectively “taken over”:http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/ the Washington Monthly’s website with his rather excellent blog. I note for the record that I “argued”:https://www.crookedtimber.org/archives/001372.html last month that hybridization with blogs was likely the way forward for magazines of opinion. Clearly the proprietors of the Washington Monthly agree. It’s a magazine that has been doing quite well the last year; I suspect that its links to the blogosphere (through Josh Marshall and Nick Confessore) have already been helping it get the word out to potential subscribers. More power to them.

Oliver Kamm has a fun post (and ensuing discussion) giving his nominations for the worst UK ministers since the WWII. Some of his nominations are obvious — Michael Foot for worst leader of the opposition (not, of course, a ministerial post, but you get the idea), Anthony Eden as worst prime Minister (though Churchill is overrated, and why have Major rather than Callaghan as runner up?). Others seem to get the nod simply because bad things happened on their watch, which it is not really reasonable to blame them for — like Nick Brown for Agriculture, and Byers for Transport. They handled their crises badly, to be sure, but is it fair to condemn them rather than the numerous lightweights who never had a crisis to handle? Other still mystify me perhaps because of my ignorance — why is Douglas Hurd the worst FS? One of the commentators rightly takes Kamm to task for leaving George Brown off the list — maybe he just deserves a special award of his own. Finally there are nominees who are simply political: Shirley Williams, I presume, is blamed for comprehensivisation despite the fact that it was set in process by her predecessors Tony Crosland and Margaret Thatcher (yes, that’s right, that Margaret Thatcher). I believe (though somebody could correct me) that more LEAs went comprensive under the preceeding Heath government than during Williams’s time at the DES, and the evidence against comprehensive schooling is mostly hype. Why not John Patten, a truly awful education secretary, and surely at least more deserving of runner up than Kenneth Baker? (not that I have any agenda against him…).

When I first started blogging, I struck up a fairly cordial on-line relationship with Iain Murray of “The Edge of England’s Sword”:http://ism.politicos.ws/MT/ despite a pretty wide gulf in our politics. I’m afraid I’ve not read much I’ve liked by Iain in quite a long time (especially on global warming). So it was a pleasant surprise to find that Iain has “a column on the Spanish elections”:http://www.techcentralstation.com/031704F.html published in that bastion of lunacy TechCentralStation. Despite working with a Rumsfeldian New/Old Europe framework the column is a very useful corrective to some of the foaming at the mouth which we’ve endured from US-based commentators and bloggers over the past few days (see Matthew Turner “for some of the worst examples”:http://mattysblog.blogspot.com/2004_03_01_mattysblog_archive.html#107947336635790262 ). Credit where credit is due.

Can someone in the UK confirm the accuracy of “this report”:http://www.sundayherald.com/40592? (Via “Jim Henley”:http://www.highclearing.com/archivesuo/week_2004_03_14.html#005165.)

WHAT do you give someone who’s been proved innocent after spending the best part of their life behind bars, wrongfully convicted of a crime they didn’t commit? An apology, maybe? Counselling? Champagne? Compensation? Well, if you’re David Blunkett, the Labour Home Secretary, the choice is simple: you give them a big, fat bill for the cost of board and lodgings for the time they spent freeloading at Her Majesty’s Pleasure in British prisons.

On Tuesday, Blunkett will fight in the Royal Courts of Justice in London for the right to charge victims of miscarriages of justice more than £3000 for every year they spent in jail while wrongly convicted … spokesmen in the Home Office say it’s a completely “reasonable course of action” as the innocent men and women would have spent the money anyway on food and lodgings if they weren’t in prison. The government deems the claw-back ‘Saved Living Expenses’.

Is this a step in the calculation of compensation money prior to paying it to the victims, or an attempt to grab some of that money back after the fact? (Is that distinction even relevant?) The _sang froid_ of the British Legal Establishment never ceases to amaze. Maybe they could take it out of “Lord Denning’s”:http://www.people.fas.harvard.edu/~mponeill/law/utilitarianism.html estate. He “said”:http://www.highclearing.com/archivesuo/week_2004_03_14.html#005165 he wanted to be remembered in good works.

Much of the value of a blog like Crooked Timber is in the comments threads, but the signal to noise ratio is inevitably low, especially when flame wars erupt. I thought this point by Donald Johnson responding to Chris’ post on the Spanish election (and disregarded in subsequent comments) was valuable enough to justify more prominence.

If al Qaeda has the capability to plant bombs and kill hundreds of people, they’re going to do it however they interpret the Spanish election. They might plant their bombs before elections if they think they can influence them, or they might plant their bombs where there are large crowds on some special date, or they might choose some big symbolic target again, like the Pentagon or the WTC. The point is to stop them, not to worry about how they might read election results except to the extent that understanding what they think might give clues on what their next target is going to be.

Exactly right. The idea, that by doing what al Qaeda (supposedly) wants[1] we are sending a message that will influence them to do more of the same directly contradicts the overwhelming evidence that al Qaeda is unconditionally committed to terroristic war against us, and cannot be dissuaded from it (evidence that has been stressed more on the right of the blogosphere than anywhere else). They cannot be influenced, only incapacitated.

fn1. This applies equally to the Spanish election result and to Bush’s decision to pull US troops out of Saudi Arabia.

It’s St Patrick’s Day, and I’m thinking about terrorism. So here is a poem from “James Simmons”:http://www.pgil-eirdata.org/html/pgil_datasets/authors/s/Simmons,J/life.htm.

From the Irish
Most terrible was our hero in battle blows:
hands without fingers, shorn heads and toes
were scattered. That day there flew and fell
from astonished victims eyebrow, bone and entrail,
like stars in the sky, like snowflakes, like nuts in May,
like a meadow of daisies, like butts from an ashtray.

Familiar things, you might brush against or tread
upon in the daily round, were glistening red
with the slaughter the hero caused, though he had gone.
By proxy his bomb exploded, his valour shone.

Chris Sheil has been making lots of excellent points in his running review of “The”:http://backpagesblog.com/weblog/archives/000295.html “Howard”:http://backpagesblog.com/weblog/archives/000309.html “Years”:http://backpagesblog.com/weblog/archives/000341.html. I’m not sure how much interest this will have to our one or two non-Australian readers, but it’s been an excellent series so far and I hope Chris keeps it going. It’s a real pleasure to see someone prepared to use the freedoms of the blog format to spell out all the things they want to say rather than compress them into a soundbite length post.

Gabe Wildau, a (real-life) Brown philosophy grad, and Jai Singh have a smart-looking blog called “Flexible Response”:http://flexibleresponse.blogspot.com/. It’s early days, but so far they look like they’re doing a good job putting into practice the aggressive liberalism “the Gadflyer”:http://gadflyer.com/ is campaigning for.

I’ve always been curious about why some academics blog and some don’t. Indeed, I’ve been thinking of finding out more from CT readers ever since John Holbo’s first “guest post”:https://www.crookedtimber.org/archives/001378.html, which talks at length about his start in the blogosphere. So, in a completely unscientific survey, I’d like to turn the mike over. If you’re an academic who blogs, what prompted you to start blogging? And what keeps you going? What do you try to do in your blog? Does your blog have any relationship to your scholarship? If you’re an academic who just reads blogs, do you intend to start your own blog sometime? If yes, what are the reasons that you haven’t done so at this point in time? If no, why not? Either way, what do you get from reading blogs? Answers to any or all of these questions (or other related questions that you think are more interesting) would be appreciated. Anonymity/pseudonymity is fine. Anecdotes are positively encouraged – as I say this is a completely unscientific inquiry.

If there were a British general election tomorrow I’d probably vote Labour, as I nearly always have done. I’d think about Iraq, the “war on terror”, Northern Ireland, the EU constitution, asylum seekers, taxes, prisons, higher education policy, Tony Blair, poverty, the environment, local government and a whole host of things. And I’d probably still vote Labour. If there were a terrorist attack which killed 200 of my compatriots, and the government, suspecting Al-Quaida, chose nevertheless to spin a story that the Real IRA were to blame, I might, just might, change my mind. But I’d still probably vote Labour. I certainly wouldn’t take kindly to commentators from other countries — themselves basically ignorant of my country’s politics and history — telling me that my task, in casting my vote, is to “send a message” to Osama bin Laden or anyone else. I’d be upset if such pundits told me that voting other than they way they recommended amounted to “dishonouring the dead”:http://www.telegraph.co.uk/opinion/main.jhtml?xml=/opinion/2004/03/16/do1602.xml&sSheet=/portal/2004/03/16/ixportal.html . And if a Spanish person, encountering such a commentator were to punch them on the nose, I’m not saying they’d be right, but I’d understand.