The Washington Post review of Mel Gibson’s Passion is basically a pan which concedes there is more than a whiff of anti-semitism about the whole thing. (Based on the visions of a 15th-century german nun who “sets out to clear Pilate’s name, describing the famously ruthless governor as a weak and unwilling pawn of Jewish blood lust”? Oh, that sounds good.) But for some reason the author backslides into the trap of “journalistic objectivity”, which quoted item differs from real journalistic objectivity in consisting merely of empty formal gestures towards balance. It can be seen most vividly in articles about Bush economic policies, in which sentences starting “critics claim…” or “some Democrats argue” are followed by incontrovertible statements of fact. See Brad DeLong’s “Why Oh Why Can’t We Have a Better Press Corps” series, parts I-MMDCLXXIII. (And while I am digressing, I would like to encourage all readers to adopt the Poor Man’s pithy formulation of the current scandal, which he terms “WhatInTheNameOfAllThatIsHolyAreYouDoingToTheEconomyGate.”) The item I object to is here:

Gibson’s use of Aramaic and Latin is similarly helpful in grounding his story, although it’s been suggested that first-century Romans would more probably have spoken Greek.

Is there anything wrong with just saying “even though the characters in the film would actually have been speaking Greek, the lingua franca of the eastern Mediterranean”? (I realize that as a blanket statement about “first-century Romans” it’s false, but that’s what editing is for.) I mean, you’ve already accused Mel of a pornographic taste for violence, anti-semitism, being a hackneyed director (ooo, Judas tosses the thirty pieces of silver in slow-motion!), and trivializing the mysteries of the Christian faith. Is it necessary to bring out misleading qualifiers like “it’s been suggested” when accusing him of historical inaccuracy?

Via the Volokh lads, news that those tiresome Internet purveyors of laboured satire at Adbusters have made the startling discovery that, in general, Jews are more likely to have strong opinions about Israel than, say, Norwegians. Oy gevalt, as they say up the road from me in Golders Green, who’d have thought it. Christ knows what may happen next week when they spot the connection between the Northern Irish republican cause and the Church of Rome. Jesus.

Actually, what might be a lot more use than Adbusters’ idea would be a list of American pundits who aren’t Jews and have never set foot in Israel, but nevertheless think that they’re qualified to act as spokespeople for the Zionist cause worldwide. (Or for that matter, people who haven’t visited Europe since student days but still regard themselves as experts on trends in anti-Semitism there). I can think of a few names off the top of my head, and I daresay CT commenters can think of others …

bq. “Goddammit, Morris, what are we going to do with this guy Swallow? He claims he ain’t _got_ a field.” Morris has recommended putting Philip down to teach English 99, a routine introduction to the literary genres and critical method for English majors, and English 305, a course in novel-writing. As Euphoric State’s resident novelist, Garth Robinson, was in fact very rarely resident, orbiting the University in an almost unbroken cycle of grants, fellowships, leaves of absence and alcoholic cures, the teaching of English 305 usually fell to some unwilling and unqualified member of the regular teaching staff. As Morris said, “If he makes a fuck-up of English 305, nobody’s going to notice. And any clown with a PhD should be able to teach English 99.”
“He doesn’t have a PhD, ” Hogan said.
“What?”
“They have a different system in England, Morris. The PhD isn’t so important.”
“You mean the jobs are hereditary?”

I quote this passage from David Lodge’s “Changing Places”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0140170987/junius-20 in reaction to reading some of “the comments about Simon Schama”:http://www.invisibleadjunct.com/archives/000471.html over at Invisible Adjunct. As is happens, I don’t have a PhD either, and nor do several prominent British philosophers of my generation (such as UCL’s Jo Wolff, a contemporary of mine on the M.Phil at UCL in the early 80s). In the previous generation hardly anyone did the PhD or DPhil, most people got appointed after doing the Oxford B.Phil or the London M.Phil or something similar (these are both two-year postgraduate degrees involving a combination of examination and dissertation).

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bq. Greenspan Urges Congress to Reign in Deficit

Says the “NYT”:http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/business/AP-Greenspan-Budget.html?hp (though I’m sure the typo won’t last long).

With great power comes a little responsibility. As guest timberwossname, I inform you the best lit/film/culture online journal is Pseudopodium – formerly, Bellona Times. I wandered in one night by accident, while making my drunken way home. Well, it felt more like I fell through the roof, as Indiana Jones might find himself suddenly amongst the treasures of an ancient temple. For, you see, it’s one of those serially updated personal sites/online journals that goes back so far that it’s … older than blogging. Damn, you think, running a fingertrack through the dusty HTML. Place is old. 1999; 1997, even. Crap, some of this stuff was written in 1990. Frankly, it spooked me how good – smart and winning and heartfelt and erudite. Hazlitt and Howard Hawks, Nicholas Ray and Ruskin. I felt about uncertainly in this marvelous terrain, then with increasing delight; finally I was cramming my pockets with treasure to call my own ever after. I have returned regularly and very lately entered into edifying correspondence with its ten-times admirable demiurge, Ray Davis.

Now go and don’t come back until you have read for an hour. I could tell you which are my favorites, but I want you to have your own, that you found yourself.

Here’s the song that gave my title. Hope Ray doesn’t mind me provoking you all to strain his bandwidth.

UPDATE: Just to explain the joke, the connection between the two is, via the world, ‘with a kick to it’.

I’ve been rereading parts of the “German Ideology”:http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1845/german-ideology/index.htm , the text where Marx and Engels really start to get historical materialism straightened out. And very fine and interesting it is too. But my purpose in this post isn’t to discuss the content of a work which Marx and Engels did not publish but “abandoned … to the gnawing criticism of the mice”, but to reproduce (below the fold for bandwidth reasons) a page of the original MS which appears in facsimile in volume 5 of the MECW. What readers get, thanks to the intervention of subsequent editors, as a piece of elegant if vituperative prose, appears in the original in the form of a half-crossed out scrawl . The scrawl only occupied about half the page, the rest of which is filled with jottings, notes and many many doodled heads (probably by Engels). Other facsmile pages are in an even worse condition with great chunks consumed by the rodents. [I now discover that the page I’ve photographed and a few others besides are on the “marxists.org”:http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/index.htm website anyway, never mind ….]

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The announcement that Ralph Nader will again run for the Presidency raises the (almost) unaskable question -are there any circumstances under which we should hope for, promote, or even passively assist, the re-election of George W. Bush as against either of the remaining Democrat contenders? I feel nervous even raising this question, but I think it’s worth a hard and dispassionate look.

Regardless of their political persuasion, most people will agree, at least in retrospect, that it would have been better for their own side (defined either in ideological or in party terms) to have lost some of the elections they won. Most obviously, this was the case for the US Republican Party in 1928. Hoover’s victory, and his inability to cope with the Depression, paved the way for four successive victories for FDR and two generations of Democratic and liberal hegemony, which didn’t finally come to an end until the Reagan revolution in 1980. The same was true on the other side of poltiics in Australia and the UK, where Labour governments were elected just before the Depression, split over measures of retrenchment demanded by the maxims of orthodox finance and sat out the 1930s in Opposition, watching their own former leaders implement the disastrous policies they had rejected, but had been unable to counter.

p. So, is 2004 one of those occasions? The case that it is rests primarily on arguments about fiscal policy. Bush’s policies have set the United States on a path to national bankruptcy, a fact that is likely to become apparent some time between now and 2008. Assuming that actual or effective bankruptcy (repudiation of debt or deliberate resort to inflation) is unthinkable, this is going to entail some painful decisions for the next President and Congress, almost certainly involving both increases in taxation and cuts in expenditure. On the expenditure side, this will mean a lot more than the obvious targets of corporate welfare and FDW[1]. Either significant cuts in the big entitlement programs (Social Security and Medicare) or deep cuts in everything else the government does will be needed, even with substantial increases in taxes (to see the nasty arithmetic read these CBO projections, and replace the baseline with the more realistic *Policy Alternatives Not Included in CBO’s Baseline*)

fn1. Fraud, Duplication and Waste

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I’m reading a lot of blogs, both liberal and conservative, and seeing copious abuse rained on Bush for his support of the Federal Marriage Amendment. (See especially John Scalzi for a remarkably eloquent defense of equal rights for gays here, here, and here. Also, see the Declaration of Independence*, where it says something about how all men are created equal.)

This is right and good. I agree with Andrew and Michael that this could be a major disaster for Bush. Even DeLay is slowly distancing himself from the FMA.

But it’s entirely appropriate to ask for more from the Democratic candidates. It seems to me that they’re missing a huge opportunity. I think that these points would be fairly uncontroversial:

1. There’s a significant trend in the United States is toward legal recognition of same-sex marriage. We may very well be all-but-there by election day. Here’s Nick Confessore:

The one thing that most polling shows on the issue of gay marriage is that the prejudice against it is rapidly dying off. According to that same Gallup poll I mentioned earlier, 39 percent of those respondents aged 18-29 support full marriage rights for gays, versus 24 percent of those aged 30-49 and just 15 percent of those 50 and older. Add up those in the younger bracket who support either gay marriage or civil unions, and you’ve got 59 percent. In a decade or so, full marriage rights for gays may well command a strong majority of Americans.

Many conservatives acknowledge this, although not all.

2. Democrats have enjoyed tremendous goodwill as a result of the stance that the national leadership took in the 1960s regarding civil rights.

If I’m right, then the national Democratic leadership has an unusually clear opportunity to get on the right side of history with a clear statement about fairness and equality.

In a few years, I’ll be able to say that the left led the way on the question of gay marriage. But as of today, I won’t be able to say the same thing about the national Democratic party.

Make me proud, John. Or, if you won’t, John.

* Not the Constitution. How embarassing.

Keynes famously “quipped”:http://www.economist.com/research/Economics/alphabetic.cfm?LETTER=K “When the facts change, I change my mind – what do you do, sir?” G.W. Bush’s riposte – Why sir, I “change the facts”:http://www.talkingpointsmemo.com/archives/week_2004_02_22.html#002598.

I drafted the following post yesterday, when it had a more anti-Nader feel to it. But two people subsequently approached me about my thoughts about Nader, and told me they supported him standing, giving pretty good reasons, so I have modified my thoughts in the light of that (an indication, perhaps, of how fluid my views are right now). However, one of them said she would have to be a closet Nader supporter, because she didn’t want to deal with the unreasoned anger she felt that open support would make her vulnerable to in her workplace, which, I think, supports my main point.

bq. UPDATE interesting stuff here from unrepentant 2000 Nader supporters Chun the Unavoidable and Russell Arben Fox. See also Chuck at the Chutry Experiment. And a fun rant from Timothy Burke

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When I was a kid, I really liked Sesame Street, and now that I have a little girl, I still like it. Timothy Burke, for one, finds it a bit too cloyingly pro-social (he complained of this in a comments thread that I am too lazy to find here). One of my favorite animated bits as a child was one in which three plainly dressed workmen emerge from, clean, and retreat into a giant letter I, accompanied by the following song in a minor key: “We all live in a capital I/in the middle of the desert, in the center of the sky/and all day long we polish on the I/to make it clean and shiny so it brightens up the sky.” Imagine my surprise when I read Ulysses at 17 (yes, I was trying too hard; don’t worry, I re-read it later) and found the following passage:

(He points to the south, then to the east. A cake of new, clean soap arises, diffusing light and perfume.)

THE SOAP:
We’re a capital couple, Bloom and I;
He brightens the earth, I polish the sky

Those jokers at the Children’s Television Workshop. I have also always liked the look of it. Even when I lived in NYC in a terrible place between Amsterdam and Columbus on 109th — I recall holding the phone out the window for my brother to hear the small arms fire before I retreated into the tub — I was always tickled by the resemblance to Sesame Street. Only there were fewer muppets and more crack dealers.

Finally, they sometimes address the big issues. On a recent episode, Big Bird and Snuffleupagus were investigating whether various things (toasters, plants, small children) were alive or not. By the end, they had worked themselves around to some serious questions. Is the letter “A” alive? No. Is the Children’s Television Workshop alive? Indeterminate. Is the word “alive” alive? No, because it doesn’t grow or change. Take that, Platonism!

Following the whole “Max Cleland, Ann Coulter, Mark Steyn controversy”:https://www.crookedtimber.org/archives/001352.html the other day, I was struck by the fact that the defenders of the smearers thought it a sufficient reply to their critics to say that what was said was literally true. (Whether it was literally true is, of course, another matter.) For once, it seems to me, philosophy can be of some use in showing that such a reply is inadequate.

Speech act theory is a pretty unsexy branch of philosophy of language these days (though elsewhere people like Habermas keep it above the visibility threshold, and there have been some daft attempts to deploy it in defence of the idea that pornography silences women). Indeed I’m not even sure that students get taught the basic distinctions on phil lang courses (which tend to be post-Davidsonian in content). But when it comes to thinking about what is going on in political discourse, it isn’t half helpful.

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I was a bit slow to respond to Kieran’s post on the World City System, but let me say that my views on this system are pretty much a cross between Wired and William Cobbett. In a world where nearly all legitimate work of high-pay and status can be performed electronically and remotely, the most plausible explanation of ‘global cities’ is that they facilitate cronyism and corruption.

Updated with a little more evidence 25/2

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I think I have to register one of my occasional dissenting opinions, from the view expressed by Ed Felten and semi-endorsed by Eszter below, that the world would be a better place if we forced a bit more science down the necks of schoolchildren.

It’s a pretty well-established fact (source: “Adult Literacy in Great Britain”, ONS, 1997) that just under half of all Britons can’t cope with mathematical operations more complicated than addition and subtraction. That is, can’t divide up a restaurant bill or calculate the area of a room, even with a calculator. This makes rather a mockery of any proposals to raise our national savings rate via “financial literacy classes” in schools etc; half of the people being taught can’t really cope with percentages.

Lots of UK commentators regard this as a national scandal; however will we compete with the Japanese etc. My view has always been “Well, the old country isn’t doing too badly; just goes to show that percentages aren’t as important as you might have thought”. I suspect that the same is true of science.

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