It’s extraordinary how quickly the blogosphere has become a significant channel for political donations; Atrios has raised “$25,000 in five days”:http://atrios.blogspot.com/2004_03_07_atrios_archive.html#107879845206303065 for the Kerry campaign. I’ve no doubt that this will be a big issue of debate at the blogging panel that Dan Drezner and I are organizing for the APSA meeting this September. My spur-of-the-moment impression – to the extent that this favours one side, it’s going to favour the Democrats. Regardless of whether the blogosphere tilts left or tilts right (your guess is as good as mine), the most-read blogs on the liberal-left side of the spectrum are much more closely aligned with the Democratic party apparatus than the blogs on the right are with the Republican machine. They also have the precedent of MoveOn, and of the Dean movement to build on. Rightbloggers, even the ones who support the administration, tend to self-identify as libertarians rather than Republicans, and maintain a little distance from the formal aspects of the Republican party. I could be wrong, but I don’t see Glenn Reynolds hosting appeals for donations to the Republican National Committee, let alone Eugene Volokh. Andrew Sullivan might have up to a month or so ago, but not today.

How big a deal this is remains to be seen; my guess is that its consequences will be significant, but not enormous. Where it will have an impact is in terms of the agenda-setting power of the few bloggers who can and will raise large amounts of cash for the cause. If Atrios can keep on getting people to donate that kind of money, the powers that be in the Democratic party are going to start taking him quite seriously indeed. Especially if the FEC starts cracking down on soft-money contributions to 527s. Developing, as they say.

Last week it was the “apparently unjustified firing”:https://www.crookedtimber.org/archives/001447.html of a Professor at Penn State Altoona. This week it’s the suspension of “two professors at Southern Mississippi”:http://volokh.com/2004_03_07_volokh_archive.html#107879035707294419, again for what looks like no good reason. Ralph Luker at Cliopatria “has more”:http://www.hnn.us/blogs/entries/3981.html, with links to various commentaries. Here also is “a news story”:http://www.printz.usm.edu/termination.html from the student paper found via “a blogger”:http://scott.littlemeanfish.com/blog/ who knows more about the situation on the ground. Looks like there’s been “some”:http://scott.littlemeanfish.com/blog/archives/000753.html “student”:http://scott.littlemeanfish.com/blog/archives/000752.html “reaction”:http://scott.littlemeanfish.com/blog/archives/000750.html to the suspensions, together with “criticism”:http://scott.littlemeanfish.com/blog/archives/000749.html from benefactors and a “vote of no confidence”:http://scott.littlemeanfish.com/blog/archives/000746.html from the USM faculty senate. (Hat tip: “Matt Weiner”:http://mattweiner.net/blog/archives/000137.html.)

My friend Rob Reich has just told me the very sad news that Susan Moller Okin died last week. Her book, Justice Gender and the Family, had a major effect on political theory, and helped produce the turn to the intimate that has happened in the last decade or so: an agenda setting achievement. I have been meaning for some time to blog about one of her arguments, but today is obviously not the day for that. I met her only once myself, but was impressed on that meeting by how the quality of the work I have admired for so long was matched by the quality of the personality I met — something one does not always find. An obituary will appear in tomorrow’s edition of the Stanford Report. (UPDATE: the full Stanford Report obituary is now online here.) Here is the press release:

Susan Moller Okin died of unknown causes last week at the age of 57. Okin was Marta Sutton Weeks Professor of Ethics in Society and professor of Political Science at Stanford University. At the time of her death she was on leave with a fellowship at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

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Chris’s post about “the ENO production of Rheingold”:https://www.crookedtimber.org/archives/001476.html reminded me of why I don’t know anything about Wagner’s music. When I was a graduate student, I invested a substantial chunk of my income in a pair of season tickets to the Met, with half-decent seating. You got a set program of opera over the course of the year. We had a great time. Then came the Wagner week. I forget which opera it was. Die Walküre I think — anyway, the one where the guy stumbles into the forest hut, falls in love with the girl, and upon discovering she’s his sister sings, delightedly, “Such wonderful news! Our children will therefore be of the purest blood!” or words to that effect.

As soon as we got to our seats we knew something was wrong.

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“Caoine”:http://caoine.org/mt/archives/2004_03.php#002966 is feeling remarkably generous. She has decided to donate her 2004 Amazon referrals income to a charity, but can’t decide which one. This seems like a good opportunity to ask blog readers who might know something about this, which charities do provide good value for your donated dollar? I’ve always thought Oxfam was good value, but my evidence for that isn’t entirely overwhelming. (I remember “Peter Unger”:http://www.nyu.edu/gsas/dept/philo/faculty/unger/ did some investigations and decided they were worth supporting, so that’s some evidence, but that was one data point several years ago.) If anyone has any better suggestions, or reasons why Oxfam isn’t really as good as I’ve always thought, I’d be happy to hear them.

In what appears to be an attempt to defuse some of the controversy, NEWSWEEK has learned, White House officials have privately signaled to the commission that Bush will not rigidly stick to the one-hour time limit. When time is up, Bush won’t walk out if there are still more questions, an aide said.

That was his plan? After sixty minutes with two members of his own party, whom he appointed to investigate 9/11, he was planning on turning his back and walking out on them? [UPDATE: The co-chair is a Democrat appointed by Daschle. Sorry about that.]

Boy, that moment would look great on a National Review commemorative plate. Can you imagine such a scene? I can.

IMAGINING SUCH A SCENE

A play in one act

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Thanks to “Michael Brooke”:http://michaelbrooke.com/ , I’ve been reading “Adam Yoshida”:http://www.adamyoshida.com/ ‘s surreal rantings on and off for the past few weeks. They really are marvellous, although “today’s speculation about whether John Kerry was a KGB sleeper”:http://www.adamyoshida.com/2004_03_01_archive.html#107872548628430079 may in fact be a coded message that Yoshida himself is a deep-cover satirist for the left. Sample quote:

bq. If one picture emerged of George W. Bush, in 1970, of raising his arm in what vaguely appeared to be a Nazi salute, the media would cover it for weeks. Why, then, has no one in the mainstream media probed John Kerry’s ties to an evil which, at the very least, is the equal of Nazism?

Why indeed? And why doesn’t “TechCentralStation”:http://www.techcentralstation.com/index.html hire this guy?

I don’t have much to add to Brad de Long’s take on this MSNBC story asserting that Bush stopped plans to bomb the camp of terrorist Abu Musab Zarqawi because

the administration feared destroying the terrorist camp in Iraq could undercut its case for war against Saddam.

This assertion is sourced to unnamed “military officials”, and may be hard to verify, but if true it would surely constitute grounds for impeachment, as well as a conclusive refutation of the case for the Iraq war.

“Juan Non-Volokh”:http://volokh.com/2004_03_07_volokh_archive.html#107867124871611745 opens an interesting line of inquiry: which political ideology has the best music? I’m torn on this. Juan leads with his chin, describing “Rush”:http://www.rush.com/ as “arguably the most prominent libertarian band of all time.” _Arguably?_ Who else is in the running here? Clint Eastwood singing “I Talk to the Trees” in “Paint Your Wagon”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/B000002PEY/kieranhealysw-20/ref=nosim/? Was “Ayn Rand”:http://www.villainsupply.com/miscevil.html, like L. Ron Hubbard, a “great composer”:http://www.scientology.org/html/en_US/l-ron-hubbard/professional-dozens-fields/artist/composer/ on the side? The irresistible image is of a phalanx of airborne Libertarians screaming up the Potomac in surplus “Hueys”:http://www.centennialofflight.gov/essay/Rotary/Huey/HE11.htm fitted with “tactical nuclear weapons sourced on Ebay”:https://www.crookedtimber.org/archives/001478.html, while Rush’s “‘Freewill'”:http://www.sing365.com/music/lyric.nsf/Freewill-lyrics-Rush/88C8D6AD95B2BD4E48256BBF0032C460 blares from speakers bolted to one of the choppers.

But the question seems a bit underspecified. For instance, conservatives in general might claim the whole tradition of western classical music for themselves, while quietly ignoring the fact that, throughout history, your common or garden conservative can reliably be found bemoaning the appalling quality of serious music since the year _n_ — 75, for all values of _n_. Those on the left, meanwhile, will have to work hard to distance themselves from the output of the troops of the “Folk Song Army”:http://www.guntheranderson.com/v/data/thefolks.htm. Perhaps we should be asking which are the best _explicitly political_ songs. A related question is which country has the best National Anthem. France edges it, I think, over South Africa (too long) and the United States (too hard to sing). _God Save the Queen_ is clearly the worst, a judgment made compelling both by the anthem’s non-existent musical merits and the fact that English fans would rather sing a “spiritual”:http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/singers/sfeature/songs_swing_l.html written about an exhausted, enslaved people longing for the sweet release of death.

Brad de Long picks up my post on opportunities and outcomes (see also this crossposting with further discussion), in which I argued that the achievement of meaningful equality of opportunity in a society with highly unequal outcomes would require extensive government intervention to prevent the development of inherited inequality, and says that I’m falling into Irving Kristol’s trap, which he describes, accurately enough, as

an ideological police action designed to erase the distinction between Arthur Okun and Mao Zedong, and delegitimize the American left.

I agree that many people, particularly critics of social democracy like Kristol ,use the outcome/opportunity distinction in a dishonest way. This is particularly true in the American context, since anyone honestly concerned with the issue would have to begin with the observation that the United States performs just as badly on equality of opportunity (as measured by things like social mobility) as it does on equality of outcome (see the book by Goodin et al, reviewed here for one of many demonstrations of this). So if Kristol were genuinely concerned about equality of opportunity he’d be calling for at least as much intervention as the liberals and progressives he’s criticising.

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I’m saddened by the news that Alistair Cooke has decided that the ‘Letter from America’ he read on the 20th of February would be the last one. If Cooke had decided that, at ninety-five, he simply didn’t want the hassle of the damn thing anymore, that would be one thing, but it seems that the decision to stop was prompted by the outrageous medical advice that it’s usual and desirable for ninety-five year-olds to slow down a bit. Fair enough, but I was rooting for Cooke to be making me smile when he’d made his century.

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Building from Belle’s “post”:http://examinedlife.typepad.com/johnbelle/2004/03/if_wishes_were_.html on end-state anarcho-libertarianism, a question for the floor. Everyone’s favorite libertarian SF author, Vernor Vinge, makes the case for private ownership of nuclear weapons as an important bulwark of liberty in his short story, “The Ungoverned” (it can be found in his recent “Collected Stories”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0312875843/henryfarrell-20). If you’re a serious anarcho-libertarian, do you agree that individuals should be able to have their very own nukes? If you disagree, on what grounds do you justify your disagreement? Discuss.

I rather liked the discussion that followed from John’s “earlier post”:https://www.crookedtimber.org/archives/001450.html on voting systems. So just for fun I thought I’d try a more complicated version of an example I brought up in the comments there, to see what people’s opinions are.

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I’m back from seeing the “ENO production of The Rhinegold”:http://www.eno.org/whatson/full.php?performancekey=18 (sung in English). I should say, before uttering a word of criticism, that I enjoyed myself and wouldn’t disrecommend the experience at all. But, that said, this was a pretty weird staging. The opening scene takes place in a pole-dancing club, with dodgy businessman Alberich being teased by dancers in turquoise pvc mini-dresses. Alberich is sung by an Alexi Sayle lookalike (Andrew Shore) who does an excellent job of portraying the sexually-frustrated dwarf. The scene opens, though, with Alberich being encouraged to enter the club by property-developer Wotan and his PR-man and Mr Fixit, Loge. This addition, needless to say, has no textual warrant and, if taken seriously, would amount to a major distortion of the plot.

Scene two takes place in Wotan’s apartment and opens with Wotan in the bath. The dynamic between Wotan and Fricka may not have been modelled on Tony and Carmela Soprano (or JR and Sue Ellen), but it is hard to think that such comparisons weren’t somewhere in producer Phyllida Lloyd’s mind. The giants are played as construction engineers who brandish their plastic-bound copies of the contract as they demand payment for their work on Valhalla. Donner wears trainers and wields a baseball bat, Loge prefers subtler methods: you get the picture. One of the problems of staging such a modernized production is that it interferes with the suspension of disbelief. If everyone is dressed up in fantasy costumes then it is easier to take seriously the idea of Freia as an object of lust even if she is somewhat hefty. But if everything else looks like Dallas or the Sopranos then a Freia who doesn’t fit with the conventions of those dramas is incongruous.

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