by Daniel on October 15, 2003
Interesting knockabout stuff from two people who’ve decided to take it up a notch in terms of Great Weblog Comments Battles and duke it out in public on Daniel Drezner’s site with $100 at stake. The battle is over the subject “Did Bush Say That Iraq Was An Imminent Threat Or Not?”.
As far as I can tell, the case for the defence is that Bush specifically said that Iraq wasn’t an imminent threat, but that it was about to become an imminent threat and he didn’t propose to wait until it became imminent.
In other words, Bush does appear to be committed to the claim “Event I’ is imminent”, where I’ is defined as “the event of event I becoming imminent” and I is defined as “Iraq being a threat”. Which means to me that this particular line of argument turns on the question of whether “imminent” is a transitive predicate, or in other words, if something will imminently become imminent, does that mean that it’s imminent now?
My guess is that “imminent” is a short-transitive predicate; it’s transitive so long as the chain of “imminents” isn’t too long. Short-transitivity is a somewhat controversial logical property, however, albeit one which would be fantastically useful for economists in making axiomatic theories of revealed preference if it could be put on a rigorous footing. I’ll leave the matter to our resident expert on the subject, Mr Weatherson.
by Henry Farrell on October 15, 2003
When I’m swamped with work, as I am at the moment, I like to have a book that I can dip into for quick five minute breaks – thousand page behemoths like Quicksilver get put to one side until normal conditions reassert themselves. And at the moment, I’m very much enjoying Hazel K. Bell’s Indexers and Indexes in Fact and Fiction (University of Toronto Press, 2001). A surprising choice for leisure reading? Not really. It’s light (broken up into 74 bite-sized chapters, refreshing, and very, very funny.
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by Daniel on October 14, 2003
Here’s my contribution to the “M-Type versus C-Type” debate. Basically, just as it’s a useful analytical distinction to make that all UK Prime Ministers are either bookies or vicars, it’s always worth remembering that all economic policy debates of interest can be usefully analogised either to blackjack or to three-card monte.
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by Chris Bertram on October 14, 2003
There was a particularly nasty court case in my home town of Bristol recently. I forget all the details, but the essence was that a stable-owner was fined for maiming and neglecting her horses and was banned from keeping horses for life. That seems to me to be entirely reasonable. In fact a great deal of animal-cruelty legislation, such as bans on dog and cock-fighting and on bear-baiting, is something that I’d want to support. Leaving aside controversial matters like fox-hunting (on which I have a pretty libertarian view), and just taking those most extreme cases of wanton cruelty, it seems to me that there’s a problem for both libertarians and liberals. Such legislation can’t be justified either in terms of protecting the rights of (human) individuals or without appealing to some controversial conception of what gives value to life that we can’t presume is universally shared. I’d welcome thoughts on how we might adapt or extend liberal or libertarian theories to cope with these cases.
by Kieran Healy on October 14, 2003
The website of the American Philosophical Association is a quiet affair as a rule, but its section on Calls for Papers turns up the odd gem:
bq. Philosophy and The Onion. Now soliciting proposals for projected philosophical anthology on any aspect of The Onion, America’s leading satirical newspaper.
This is followed by,
bq. The Undead and Philosophy … Abstracts are sought for a collection of philosophical essays on the theme of the undead.
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by Ted on October 13, 2003
Jesse has made a good point:
A month or two ago, there was a widely-shared understanding on much of the right that Bustamante was a bad choice for governor of California because he refused to repudiate his membership as an undergrad in the Latino student group MEChA. Few people argued that Bustamante himself was a racist, but it was widely agreed that MEChA was a dangerous, hateful group of extremists. MEChA was commonly described as a “hate group,” the Latino equivalent of the Klu Klux Klan. Glenn Reynolds famously called them a group of “fascist hatemongers.” Some accused them of wishing to seize the American Southwest for Mexico. Mechistas were often accused of hating white people, and occasionally accused of hating Jews. We spent a lot of time arguing about the translation of “Por La Raza todo. Fuera de La Raza nada” and the correct reading of El Plan Espiritual de Aztlán.
Bustamante has lost the election, but MEChA didn’t go anywhere. There are still 300 active chapters all over the United States. All across the country, active chapters of MEChA go about their business. In general, I don’t think they’re doing anything wrong, although my reading led me to believe that some chapters were overly touchy and PC. Quite a few people strenuously disagreed with me.
If I thought that there were 300 chapters of the KKK on college campuses agitating for a violent revolt in order to claim their own Aryan nation, I’d see this as a continuing issue even after an election was over. So… if people believed what they were saying, where did the concern about MEChA go?
by Chris Bertram on October 13, 2003
There’s quite “an extraordinary column in today’s Telegraph”:http://www.telegraph.co.uk/opinion/main.jhtml?xml=/opinion/2003/10/13/do1301.xml&sSheet=/opinion/2003/10/13/ixopinion.html&secureRefresh=true&_requestid=147311 in which the ghastly Barbara Amiel, who no doubt has no more access to the evidence than any other member of the public, declares the as yet untried footballer-rape case to be of dubious merit, and opines:
bq. In the past, any woman crying rape under such factual circumstances would have had to show feeble-mindedness to warrant society’s protection. Going voluntarily up to a stranger’s room for intercourse or its preliminaries, and expecting a man to behave as a light switch that can be turned off at will, may be technically her right, but it is both biologically and logically mad.
Those following the case will know that it is suggested that the woman was attacked by a number of persons other than the one she had gone upstairs with. I’d be interested to know if Amiel’s piece amounts to contempt of court.
by Ted on October 13, 2003
by Chris Bertram on October 13, 2003
Norman Geras’s “greatest jazz albums”:http://normangeras.blogspot.com/2003_10_12_normangeras_archive.html#106604352478301127 poll is up. I managed to vote for just one in the top 15, Ellington’s Newport album. There’s rightly a lot of Coltrane in there, but, disappointingly, my own top pick, his “Live at the Village Vanguard”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/B0000065KK/junius-20 didn’t make it.
by Chris Bertram on October 13, 2003
Those interminable debates about whether criminals are to blame for their crimes or whether we should look to their circumstances are now repackaged as a standoff between those who want to hold terrorists responsible for their atrocities and those who look to root causes. The right answer, of course, is “both”. But here’s a simple and plausible model, entirely _a priori_ , to help us to think about things.
Imagine a population who vary in their susceptibility to pressure. We can call the property in which they vary “virtue”. Some are so virtuous that no matter what the pressure, they never perform an evil act. Some are so vicious that even if the pressure is negative, they do vile things just for the hell of it. Most people are in between (since virtue is normally distributed). As pressure — caused by poverty, social dislocation, military occupation, whatever — rises, more and more of the population switch, given their underlying propensities, from virtuous to vicious actions.
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by Brian on October 12, 2003
The third line of the latest Powderfinger album is:
You’re swollen like a lexicon.
If that’s the best they can come up with it seems to imply not swollen at all.
By the way, the album isn’t particularly good. If you were going to buy it because you’re still hoping they can recapture the quality of their early work, save your dollars and be spared some disappointment.
by Henry Farrell on October 12, 2003
If you’ve been hit in the last couple of the days by pornspam in your comments, you’re not alone; Crooked Timber has been hit too, as have many other sites. If you’re a MT person, the IP address to block for this latest wave is 209.210.176. *and make sure to include the period at the end.* Thanks to “Teresa Nielsen Hayden”:http://www.nielsenhayden.com/makinglight/ for the heads-up – and check her site for further updates and breaking news. “MT Blacklist”:http://www.jayallen.org/journey/2003/10/mtblacklist_monday_hell_or_high_water should be out tomorrow; if it works as advertised, it should help mitigate the problem.
by Chris Bertram on October 11, 2003
The FT’s economist-as-agony-aunt column takes a look at the “costs and benefits of suicide”:http://news.ft.com/servlet/ContentServer?pagename=FT.com/StoryFT/FullStory&c=StoryFT&cid=1059480520343&p=1012571727126 .
by Henry Farrell on October 11, 2003
“Tom”:https://www.crookedtimber.org/archives/000630.html posted a few days ago on fifteen great jazz albums; I’m ashamed to state that I know next to nothing about jazz – or classical music. My tastes tend to be more lowbrow – rock, pop, some country, and lots of experimental electronic music. In that spirit, I’ll offer a list of five of my favourite quasi-obscure albums. Only quasi-obscure, mind you; you should be able to find all of this stuff in yer local Tower if the spirit moves you.
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by Ted on October 10, 2003
Via Randy Barnett, I see that John Lott isn’t the only disgraced gun researcher who likes playing dress-up on the internet. It looks like Michael Bellesiles has a sock puppet too. “Benny Smith” knows a lot of things that only Bellesiles would know. Bellesiles hasn’t admitted it, but having read the story, I can’t think of another explanation.
That’s really embarassing for Bellesiles. What’s more embarassing, though, is the way that Lott’s fiercest critics have continued to stick up for Bellesiles. Even after his work was debunked, Bellesiles is being promoted on a speaking tour by People for the American Way. Just this week, the editors of the American Prospect published a piece by him as if he was a trustworthy source. And of course, any respectable think tank would have fired him a long time ago, but he keeps hanging on at Brookings.
Sad, really.
UPDATE: (Irony hat off) Now that I think of it, what in the world is Bellesiles doing nowadays? I just realized that I have no idea, and googling didn’t help.
(Also, now that my hat is off, I should reiterate without irony that the story about Bellesiles does seem true, and it really is embarassing for him. Don’t want to be misinterpreted.)