by Daniel on October 5, 2003
Apologies for a post which will of necessity not be of interest to anyone who doesn’t follow UK politics, and will not necessarily be understood by anyone who doesn’t follow the media circus surrounding UK politics. But I’d just like to use the columns of Crooked Timber to send the following short message to people working in UK political journalism (I happen to know that at least two people in that circle read us).
If you think that you can prove that Charles Kennedy, leader of the Liberal Democrats, has an alcohol problem, you should say so and risk being sued. If you can’t prove it, you should shut up about the subject. But either way, please spare us the current round of innuendo, jokes and photographs of the man with a glass in his hand. It’s childish, it’s dishonest and it’s unfair to your readers (like me) who end up without a clue as to whether this is a piece of common knowledge within Westminster that’s being hushed up, or just a piece of fairly childish and malicious injokery. You’re the bloody British press, not popbitch.
Sorry about that. I return you to your regularly scheduled programming.
by Tom on October 4, 2003
Norman Geras is running another of his music-related polls, this one on readers’ nominations for their top 15 jazz albums.
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by Eszter Hargittai on October 4, 2003
by Kieran Healy on October 4, 2003
The New York Times reports that a number of firefighters have been receiving treatment for stress at a clinic located near the site of the World Trade Center and run along lines prescribed by L. Ron Hubbard, the founder of Scientology. The “detoxification program” has the Firefighters “take saunas, engage in physical workouts and swallow pills.” The precise composition of the pills is unclear. Tom Cruise has paid for many of the treatments.
Ah, Scientology. Was there ever a more entertaining belief system embedded in a more ruthless organization? (Apart from the obvious one, I mean.) And then there is L. Ron Hubbard himself — a man whose abilities and achievements were quite literally incredible. But don’t take my word for it.
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by Eszter Hargittai on October 3, 2003
This post is about academic literature searches in particular. (I could write a whole dissertation about Web search in general.. wait.. I did.:)
In an attempt to consolidate advice for students about academic literature searches, a grad school peer of mine posted a helpful page of resources for tracking down literature of interest on various sociological topics. This made me wonder: what are people’s favorite resources for academic literature searches? It also relates to the discussion about bundling e-journals started by Chris the other day.
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by Chris Bertram on October 3, 2003
Via the British philosophers listserv comes notice of a “Capitalism and Philosophy Lab” on the theme of “Libidinal Economics”. The programme is as follows:
bq. Mark Fisher will discuss Baudrillard’s “Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign”.
Nick Midgely will discuss Klossowski’s “Living Currency”
Luciana Parisi will discuss abstract sex and viral trading.
Commenters are invited to speculate (or even to write authoritatively) on the possible content of the third paper.
by Chris Bertram on October 3, 2003
A Guardian “profile of Al Franken”:http://www.guardian.co.uk/usa/story/0,12271,1054951,00.html , comedian author of “Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0525947647/junius-20 has this
bq. “Well, probably the people taken most seriously down the ages have not been satirists,” Franken concedes. “Marx – there wasn’t much funny in Marx, I don’t think. John Stuart Mill? Not a laugh. Hobbes? Humourless.
False, false, false, I’d say. (Actually, come to think of it false, true, false – though if anyone _can_ find an intentionally funny passage in Mill, I’ll take that back.) Marx’s humour is mainly of the dry and sarcastic kind. His wit and erudition saturates just about every page of Capital – A good example would be the end of vol. 1, ch. 6 on “The sale and purchase of labour power” (but as Glenn Reynolds likes to say say — “read the whole thing”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0140445684/junius-20 ). As for Hobbes, I’d recommend the side-splitting final pages of “Leviathan”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0140431950/junius-20 ch. XLVII, “Of the BENEFIT that proceedeth from such Darknesse, and to whom it accreweth” where Hobbes compares the church of Rome to the Kingdome of Fairies.
by Ted on October 3, 2003
by Henry Farrell on October 3, 2003
… ask Steven Lenzner and William Kristol in a recent “Public Interest”:http://www.thepublicinterest.com/current/article1.html puff-piece. It’s a good question, even if it begs a rude answer. Which Lenzner and Kristol don’t provide, of course; according to them, Strauss revived the Western tradition of reading and philosophizing, more or less single-handed. They describe Strauss’s style of close reading as focusing on how classical authors employ
bq. various types of meaningful silences, intentional ambiguity, dissimulation, the significance of centrally placed speeches, inexact repetitions of earlier statements, use or non-use of the first person singular, concealment of a work’s plan, and so forth.
All of which is legitimate, sez Strauss, because the Great Writers chose their words precisely and exactly, using ellipses and rhetorical evasions to convey hidden secrets to the wise, while concealing them from the rude and undiscriminating gaze of the grubbing multitudes. In short, the ancients were writing with a particular reader in mind, and that reader was Leo Strauss.
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by Brian on October 3, 2003
Brad DeLong quotes Stephen Cohen on California’s Uttermost Westerness.
Everybody knows that you can’t go west from California. There is no place wester. If we go from California to New York, we go Back East. If we go from California to Tokyo, we go to the Far East. We cannot go west. There is no way to do it.
But Tokyo isn’t the only place you can fly from California. When I’m flying from LA or SF to Sydney I certainly feel like I’m going west, not to the East. I suppose if you really want to feel like you’re on the western edge of things, you’d not only fly to Sydney but keep on going to Perth. I don’t think I’ve ever met anyone whose identity was as bound up with being Western as Western Australians.
by Tom on October 2, 2003
There’s a scathing piece about the competence of MI6 in today’s Guardian by Sir Peter Heap, once our (main) man in Brazil. Heap’s distinguished career in the Foreign Office has evidently exposed him to some bits of prime silliness by the spooks.
A taster:
As a diplomat who worked in nine overseas posts over 36 years, I saw quite a lot of MI6 at work. They were represented in almost all of those diplomatic missions. They presented themselves as normal career diplomats, but often, indeed usually, they were a breed apart. And it normally only took the local British community a few weeks to spot them. “That’s one of your spies,” they would say at an embassy social function. “Spies, what spies?” we would reply. “You’ve been watching too much television.” But they were usually spot on.
In one capital, the MI6 officers rarely wore suits to the office while the rest of us did. “Why?” we asked. “Because we would stand out when we go outside the capital to meet our contacts,” they would reply. Maybe they scarcely noticed that they already stood out pretty distinctly in the city. If the local expatriates could identify them in weeks, it presumably only took hours for a hostile intelligence service to spot them, even if they did not know them by name already.
by Tom on October 2, 2003
I’m moving from one software job to another, and during the period of my notice (just ended, thanks for asking) I was placed on documentation duty. It has been my proud responsibility over the last month or so to attempt to capture, in flowing English prose and naturally UML, the state of the pile of mouldering spaghetti that my erstwhile employers like to call their ‘system’. Feh.
I’m pleased but quite surprised to be able to say that I managed to avoid the temptation to get all Borgesian on their asses by making the whole thing up. That would have been much more fun than what I ended up doing, but a bit too cruel to my successor.
Anyway, I particularly enjoyed a conversation on my last day with a colleague who is Spanish, and whose written English is excellent, but who relies a bit too much on the free newspaper ‘Metro’, given away on the tube in the morning, for his education in the vernacular.
He asked me if one particular document I had prepared had been ‘sexed up’. When I’d picked myself up off the floor and wiped away my tears, I denied the charge indignantly. (It is impossible to sex up a description of spaghetti.)
BBC journalists really do need to show more care about introducing this kind of thing into the language. They just don’t know how much trouble they end up causing.
by Ted on October 2, 2003
Tuesday:
WHAT’S MISSING? [Jonah Goldberg]
Oh, I know: Character assasination. If something similar to this Joe Wilson flap (and I still believe it deserves only flap status) occured during the Clinton years, we’d be hearing a barrage of attacks on Wilson’s motives — not just from barking dogs like Conason, but from the White House too.
Thursday:
The White House encouraged Republicans to portray the former diplomat at the center of the case, Joseph C. Wilson IV, as a partisan Democrat with an agenda and the Democratic Party as scandalmongering. At the same time, the administration and the Republican leadership on Capitol Hill worked to ensure that no Republicans in Congress break ranks and call for an independent inquiry outside the direct control of the Justice Department.
“It’s slime and defend,” said one Republican aide on Capitol Hill, describing the White House’s effort to raise questions about Mr. Wilson’s motivations and its simultaneous effort to shore up support in the Republican ranks.
“Slime and defend.” Boy, it sets your patriotic heartstrings a-quivering to hear that, doesn’t it? I guess this guy kind of looks like an elephant if you squint hard enough.
Andrew Northrup weighs in:
For all other Americans out there, please take a picture of this, because this is how your government, executive and legislative, responds when confronted with information that top officials have acted criminally against the interests of the country: they do nothing. And then, months later, when a shitstorm erupts, they try to shoot the messenger. Party uber alles. This is who is running the War on Whatever. Again, pay really close attention here, voting public, because there’s going to be a test on this in 13 months.
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by Chris Bertram on October 2, 2003
Hysterical use of language alert: “Rachel Cooper in the Spectator”:http://www.spectator.co.uk/article.php3?table=old§ion=current&issue=2003-10-04&id=3575 , reacting to the suggestion that British universities admit student from rough state schools with lower A-level scores than their peers from expensive private schools:
bq. Professor Schwartz is happily preparing the ground for a pogrom of the privileged children whose successful grades are the product not only of their hard work and ability, but also the school they attended.
Those pogroms aren’t what they used to be you know.
by Daniel on October 2, 2003
My education is clearly sadly lacking
Meanwhile, as a break from the hysterical, obsessive and politicised world of weblog disputes, I decided to have another look at an uncontroversial, scientific topic like John Lott’s research into gun control. And I discovered that I have been quite appalingly conned by two institutions that I thought I could trust. Instapundit has printed a letter from someone called Benjamin Zycher, a “Senior Economist”[1] at the Rand Corporation, supported by Raymond Sauer, a professor at Clemson University. Zycher says, and Sauer supports him in saying that the Ayres and Donohue paper on Lott’s work is all wet.
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