From a Guardian article bemoaning the decline of national cinematic traditions comes the following catalogue of national characteristics as revealed in film:

bq. The Japanese, haunted by feudal warlords and ancestral ghosts. The Italians, preoccupied with fascism, communism and huge family meals. The Spanish, grappling with catholicism, beggars and a taste for the surreal. The repressed, puritanical, Swedes. The French, who adored infidelity, bourgeois dinner parties and murders in provincial towns. The British, engaged in an interminable class struggle. The Russians, the Poles and the Czechs, evading the communist censors with sophisticated comedies and metaphorical allegories. And, of course, the Americans and their obsession with rugged individualism, the wild frontier and the “American dream”.

Oxford philosopher Kathy Wilkes, probably best known for her book Physicalism has died. The London Times has has a obituary. (I’ve now started to add Donald Davison obituaries to this post).

I am blinking in the glare of Right on the Left Beach‘s analysis of my fellow bloggers and me:

bq. Lefties just cannot stand back and take an honest look at their agenda and supporters and admit the truth — they would rather be living under Stalin’s Soviet Union than the United States headed by President George W. Bush — they will defend without logic any lefty miscreant that supports the lefty agenda. Lefties crave power at all costs.

I’d write more, but I am craving power at all costs right now. Coffee! I mean craving coffee at all costs. Yes, that’s it.

Coming up later, a new installment of our ongoing series, “Defending Stalin and All His Works.” This week we’re focusing on the long-term social benefits of Show-Trials and Lysenkoism. This will be followed at three by our “Miscreant of the Month” pledge drive.

The collectivisation of the blogosphere (or, as righties might prefer, its rationalization in response to market forces) continues, with two new group-blogs, “Open Source Politics”:http://www.ospolitics.org/ and “A Fistful of Euros”:http://fistfulofeuros.net/. I’m especially pleased about the latter- European politics doesn’t get enough attention in the blogosphere, and when it does get mentioned, it’s usually filtered through intra-American arguments (prime example: right-trolls who defend Berlusconi because he’s friends with W.). Iain Coleman gets the ball rolling with an especially nice “take”:http://fistfulofeuros.net/archives/000006.html#more on a quite bizarre “article”:http://www.spectator.co.uk/article.php3?table=old&section=current&issue=2003-08-30&id=3450 by Adrian Hilton, in the British _Spectator_, which claims that the EU is a Catholic plot to subjugate Protestant Britain. Iain, not surprisingly, thinks that Hilton is barking mad. I disagree – Hilton’s just very _old fashioned_. He’s harking back to a political tradition that’s nearly dead in the mainland UK – equating British national identity with Protestantism,so that the Queen is defender both of the faith and of Britishness.

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It may sound to the uninitiated as though science fiction conferences are bad places to go for insights into economics, but the uninitiated would be wrong. One of the more interesting sf phenomena of the last fifteen years or so has been the creation of a more economically literate science fiction, which gets away from the libertarian ‘competent man’ certitudes of much of the early writing in the genre. It seems to me that the Brits have pioneered this – Iain Banks, Charlie Stross, Ken MacLeod, China Mieville, Justina Robson, Paul McAuley come to mind – but notable Americans too (Steven Brust, Cory Doctorow and Neal Stephenson) have been guilty of economically sophisticated literature on occasion.

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The Age is running a story today headed Asteroid Heads for Earth. Which sounds fairly scary I guess. The article then says that the best estimate is that it has a 1 in 909,000 chance of hitting the earth. I guess Asteroid might be heading for earth, like you might win the lottery this week was too long to fit above the story.

Speaking of Rousseau, I hope that my fellow-Timberites will forgive a little self-publicity. I now have copies of my new book Rousseau and The Social Contract in my hands, and a very nice feeling it is too. If you’d like to buy a copy (for only £9.99) you can click on the image below (which takes you to Amazon’s UK website). The publication date is tomorrow for the UK, but not until November for the US (I’ll post a link to the main Amazon site when it becomes available there).

Over at the Virtual Stoa, Chris Brooke has an highly entertaining post on the uses of the classic western in explaining Rousseau’s political philosophy:

bq. One of the many valuable things I learned from Bonnie Honig when I was a graduate student was that the reasons why Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s lawgiver must leave the city he helps to found in Book Two Chapter Seven of the Social Contract are the same as the reasons why the cowboy rides off into the sunset at the end of a Western….

Jane Galt is worried about the economics of childcare and she gives a good account of the hard choices women often feel they must face about bearing and rearing children:

bq. Should we stay home, or shouldn’t we? It’s a difficult question for professional women. … We want to be successful as much as our husbands do. Taking five or eight or ten years off to get the kids started off right before they go to school is going to mean irreperably harming our prospects for advancement. We want very badly to convince ourselves that day care is really just as good, better even — or at the very least, that it is sufficiently not-worse that it’s justified. … And if I am a professional woman, my child is going to be spending ten or more hours a day with [a child-care provider] — more hours than they are with me. … And that’s assuming some hypothetical ideal of day care. Then there’s the actual day care we get, which pays people between $12-20K a year to babysit a large number of children.

Jane’s initial question — “Should we stay home, or shouldn’t we? It’s a difficult question for professional women” — effectively concedes the case as lost from the get-go. It frames the problem as wholly belonging to the prospective mother. Dad has no responsibility towards his potential offspring, is not required to make any work/family tradeoffs, and indeed has so much autonomy that a woman who chooses kids over career is “taking a huge financial bet on her husband’s fidelity.”

Jane’s dilemma is real, but its reality isn’t a necessary fact about the world. Rather, it’s a product of how the institutions of work and family are organized. As she herself says in passing, “society is not set up to allow women to take a break. Jobs aren’t made to accommodate it. And neither is marriage.” She’s right. But instead of framing the question in the terms society hands to you (this is entirely a problem for individual women which necessitates a tradeoff whose costs are borne solely by individual women), we can ask how these institutions might be reconstructed.

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I don’t think that I have too much more to say about MEChA; there are a lot of people who I’m not going to convince. But I wanted to share this comment on Kevin Drum’s site from “J” :

Why won’t Bustamante make a statement against separatism or fascism or racism? First of all, it hasn’t been exactly established that this is a MEChA stance. I read the Juan Non-Volokh piece, and in his fisking of Barlow, he also made one mistake that I noticed immediately. He linked to the Berkeley MEChA website, which links to that Aztlan plan that everyone is quoting. However, and there probably is no way Non-Volokh could have known this, Berkeley MEChA is actually not the official MEChA of Berkeley — they split off from the regular MEChA. The regular MEChA branch, however, doesn’t have a website. The Berkeley MEChA is decidedly more radical. You can check out the Office of Student Life listing of student groups and see that there are two MEChA’s listed (this website is for last semester, neither MEChA has registered for the Fall yet). What this says to me is that each MEChA branch is likely to have its own statement of purpose, so someone needs to investigate the branch that Bustamante actually belonged to before they demand that he renounce anything.

I certainly didn’t know that. Hat tip to Henry, who tipped me off.

When I, somewhat unwisely, ventured into the “greatest figures of the 20th century” debate and mentioned Trotsky, there was a good deal of flak in the comments to the post. One blogger who agreed with that judgement, and who had voted for Trotsky in the original poll, was Norman Geras. Now Norman has published (for the first time in English) an essay he wrote a few years ago on Trotsky’s Jewish identity and the tension between that identity and the revolutionary leader’s universalist goals. It is well worth reading for many reasons, but I’ll mention two: first, it reveals Trotsky’s remarkable prediction, as early as 1938, that the extermination of the Jews was in prospect, and second, Geras reminds us via Trotsky’s account of a pogrom from 1905 what a powerful writer he was.

It turns out that Kazaa has succeeded in having Google remove several responses to search queries involving ‘Kazaa’ and ‘Kazaa Lite’. The grounds? Violation of copyright of course.

Google ‘Kazaa Lite’ and a note pops up on the bottom of the page;

“In response to a complaint we received under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, we have removed 11 result(s) from this page. If you wish, you may read the DMCA complaint for these removed results.”

Googling ‘Kazaa’ yields 6 removed results. Have no fear, though. The DMCA complaint that Google thoughtfully links to contains a list of the banished urls.

What’s interesting here is that rights holders are now picking off the low-hanging fruit by targetting search engines – shooting the messenger, so to speak. Rightsholders much prefer the big, easy targets, e.g. technical intermediaries such as telcos and ISPs, and are succeeding in changing laws all over the world to tip the balance even further against the idea of communications companies providing ‘mere conduit’ as the postal service does.

The latest push comes through the EU Commission’s IPR Enforcement Directive, which sacrifices the right to privacy, the European internal market, competitiveness and the entire communications industry to keep on filling the coffers of content owners. Check out London-based FIPR for an excellent analysis of everything that’s wrong with this proposal.

The US is not the only place where political dissent is considered a reasonable basis to prevent individuals from travelling freely. If the Italians have their way, all of Europe will be a no-go zone for anti-globalisation protesters, anti-war demo organisers, and a whole slew of objectors to the current soft-authoritarian right that prevails around the Mediterranean.

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Over at the Volokh Conspiracy, David Bernstein has a problem. Recently he’s smelled stale urine in three different hotel rooms. “Has anyone else had the same experience,” he asks, “or know of some explanation for this phenomenon?” But the Volokh Conspiracy does not have comments enabled, so enterprising readers cannot make the appropriate rejoinder.