I wasted part of my holiday reading one of the more dreadful books I’ve come across recently, Catherine Salmon and Donald Symon’s _Warrior Lovers: Erotic Fiction, Evolution, and Female Sexuality_ (published in Weidenfeld and Nicholson’s “Darwinism Today” series). It’s a grandiose title for a rather slim volume, which purports to apply Darwinian theory to the understanding of ‘slash fiction,’ fan-written stories in which various characters from popular fiction have passionate sex and declare their undying love for each other (Kirk and Spock are favourites, and have their own subgenre). Not that fan fiction mightn’t be an interesting subject of study, but you won’t find many insights in Salmon and Symon’s mercifully short monograph.

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If you’ve ever put in hard time trying to make sense of the writings of Richard Rorty, you’ll probably get some harmless giggles out of this deliciously silly poem that Norman Geras has managed to acquire, Bob Woodward-style, from a poet who wishes to remain anonymous. Here’s a taste:

Richie Rorty, Richie Rorty,
Naught he hadn’t read, it seems.
Heidegger and Nietzsche brought he,
Both, to feature in his schemes,

Next to others not so warty:
Caught he Dickens, Proust and Yeats,
Kundera and Orwell. Sought he
To cavort with them as mates.

Since I’m at it, I recall that the Philosophical Lexicon provided us with this useful definition:

a rortiori, adj. For even more obscure and fashionable Continental reasons.

Via “David Langford”:http://www.ansible.demon.co.uk/cc/cc143.html, a comprehensive and rather wonderful accounting of the various reasons advanced for the collapse of the Roman Empire.

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I’ve just returned to the US after a long holiday in Ireland, and had an interesting, if unpleasant, experience on my way back. When I tried to check in to my American Airlines flight at Heathrow, the ticket agent, and then her supervisor, refused to give me a ticket. US immigration authorities require that all non-visa travellers to the US have a return or onwards flight to be allowed to enter the country. I had an onward flight to Toronto, where I teach and work, but for some reason, the American Airlines people wouldn’t accept it. At first, they claimed that I needed to have a return flight to London, and London alone to satisfy US immigration requirements. Then they changed their story, and claimed that because I was going to be returning to the US later (my onward flight was a return from Washington DC to Toronto), US immigration authorities wouldn’t accept it. I strongly suspect that the real reason was that I had an electronic ticket, and they weren’t very familiar or comfortable with them. Certainly, when I went through US immigration, the official had no problems whatsoever in letting me through.

So far perhaps, unsurprising – another instance of heightened security measures, twitchy airline employees etc. The interesting bit is what comes next. The American Airlines supervisor tells me that each time someone gets sent back by US immigration officials, American Airlines has to pay a $3000 fine. However, they’ll let me get on the plane on one condition – I have to buy a fully refundable one-way ticket back to London. This is to satisfy US immigration authorities that I have a return flight so that they don’t fine the airline – but as soon as I pass through immigration, I can go to an American Airlines desk, and get the ticket torn up and refunded. In other words, the airline was abiding by the letter of US immigrations regulations as it understood them, but flouting these regulations’ intention – and requiring me passively to cooperate with what it was doing if I wanted to board the flight. The airline supervisor gave me to understand that this was their standard practice.

This policy is obviously very problematic for travellers – I’d have been stuck in London if I hadn’t had a credit card with enough of a limit to pay for this temporary ticket. I was able to buy it in good conscience because it was clear that the airline was wrong in its interpretation of US immigration requirements – my original onward flight to Toronto would have sufficed perfectly well for US immigration authorities, so that I wasn’t seeking to evade the law in doing what American Airlines told me to do. But the airline’s policy says something more profound about current US aviation security policy. In part thanks to the unwillingness of the US administration to expand federal government employment, US authorities are relying more and more on airlines and other private actors to act as gatekeepers for them, threatening whopping fines if the airlines don’t cooperate. But sanction-and-control only goes so far because airlines, like other business actors, are motivated by the bottom line. Thus, in many situations they’re going to comply with the formalities of the regulations, so as to minimize their legal exposure, but look for ways to circumvent the intentions of the rule, so as not to turn paying customers away. I suspect that this isn’t only true of airlines – I’d be interested to know more, say, about banks’ compliance with Treasury rules on money flows, where I imagine that there might well be similar legalistic dodges and evasions.

I guess at some level we all recognise the syndrome, but Ian Jack’s account of how the news get manufactured (especially by the Sunday papers) is well worth a look. Jack is the former editor of the Independent on Sunday, so knows whereof he speaks:

bq. The political editor is furiously sucking a paper clip. “Well, we could do a little ring-a-round of back-benchers who might not support the new Europe bill.” “And you could talk to that madman X [an alienated cabinet minister]”, says the deputy editor. “He’s bound to say something original.” And so the great hole – the lead story hole – on the front page is filled. The deputy editor, an excellent re-writer, “hardens up” a few of the political editor’s softer and more equivocal sentences. Headline type which really should be held in reserve for something significant, such as the sinking of the Titanic, reads: MAJOR IN NEW BATTLE OVER [something or other]. The first paragraph begins “A beleaguered John Major is this weekend facing one of the gravest crises of his political career.” The political editor looks wryly at the page proof and says, “That’s what you call a scoop of interpretation” The deputy and I (who, unlike the political editor, never need meet politicians) defend the choice of words: “one of” not “the gravest”, so that’s OK, and some clever use of the passive and conditional tenses further down, “It is believed” rather than “One embittered madman who wishes to remain anonymous thinks”, “may” rather than “will”, and so on.

Of course, Jack’s experience of all this is pre-blogosphere. In these newly enlightened times, if the story concerned some appropriate subject it would be referred to by Glenn Reynolds as evidence of something (European anti-semitism; French perfidy….) and then spun into a whole geopolitical theory by Steven Den Beste. And who is to say that “Secret EU plan to slaughter firstborn” wouldn’t get picked up by Samizdata!(Story first linked by Slugger O’ Toole).

At the risk of sounding like Eugene Volokh, and inspired by a post from John Quiggin, I can think of three bands who take their names from William Burroughs’ writings. Name them and be entered in a prize drawing for the paperback edition of The Best of Crooked Timber, vol 2.

Brad DeLong wonders why Dan Weintraub seems least inclined to support the candidate for Governeror of California about whom most is known. On Dan’s own admission, McClintock and Simon are liars, Schwarzenneger is an unknown quantity and Bustamente has a known program that at least holds together. And yet Dan leans towards McClintock (whom he knows is lying) or Arnie (about whom he knows nothing). Brad says:

bq. A normal person, if offered a choice between candidates (McClintock, Simon) who are lying to you, a candidate (Schwarzenegger) who refuses to say what he would do both because he has no clue and because he thinks “people do not care about the numbers and figures,” and a reasonably-smart guy who understands what the tradeoffs are and has a set of ideas about what to do with them–as I said, a normal guy would choose the clued-in candidate who is not lying to him.

bq. But, as I said, Dan Weintraub is strange. The clued-in candidate who is not telling lies is to be avoided at all costs … Anyone have any idea why Dan Weintraub is such a strange guy?

Well, no. But there’s a neat experiment by Eldar Shafir that I want to tell you about, which may possibly be relevant.

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Jon posted last month about the controversy surrounding the adoption of Barbara Ehrenreich’s Nickel and Dimed at the University of North Carolina. I notice the latest issue of the Progressive has a column by Ehrenreich about her experience of the argument, and how it was for her on North Carolina talk radio.

The latest figures from France suggest that there were up to 10,000 excess deaths in France’s recent heatwave. Chirac has called an emergency cabinet meeting and there will be an inquiry into the state of France’s medical services. As always, some kinds of people died more than others:

bq. Half the victims are believed to have died in old people’s homes, many operating with fewer staff during the August holidays. Many hospitals had closed complete wards for the month and were unable to offer sophisticated, or sometimes even basic, treatment to victims. About 2,000 people are thought to have died in their homes from the effects of dehydration and other heat- related problems while neighbours and relatives were away.

I’m a bit surprised that no-one covering this in the media has yet called on Eric Klinenberg whose analysis of the Chicago heatwave 1995 – in his book Heat Wave: A Social Autopsy of Disaster in Chicago – showed that what was at first thought of as a natural disaster had complex social causes. (UPDATE – thanks to Chris K for the link – big media in the form of today’s IHT have a piece by Klinenberg )

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John Kay has a good column (from yesterday’s Financial Times) arguing that the crisis on Britain’s railways and in the US electricity supply industry exemplify a more widespread failing affecting both public and private sectors: boosting revenues whilst neglecting the underlying assets

bq. … modern business depends on intangible factors that, for good reasons, are not measured on the balance sheet. Security of supply is one. But the loyalty of employees, the trust of customers and the quality of service are also assets that require investment and depreciate if not well maintained. Reducing these investments enhances earnings. Media companies could focus on producing clones of already successful works – and it would be a few years before their bored audiences turned away. Financial institutions could replace their customer service staff by sales people and call centres. And drug companies could reduce costs and obtain synergies through mergers – and today find their pipelines of new drugs narrower than they have ever been.

This “headline”:http://www.nytimes.com/2003/08/21/international/middleeast/21CND-MIDE.html?hp from the “New York Times”:http://www.nytimes.com has been bothering me all day. It reads: “Islamic Militant Groups Say Truce Is Dead After Israeli Strike.” Wasn’t this obvious from the fact that they “claimed responsibility”:http://www.nytimes.com/2003/08/20/international/middleeast/20MIDE.html?8bl for the Jerusalem bus bombing two days ago?

I’ve blogged before on Junius about retired British philosopher Ted Honderich and his lamentable book After the Terror. It seems that Honderich is now involved in a fierce spat with his German publishers Suhrkamp Verlag who have withdrawn the book after charges that it is anti-semitic were levelled by Micha Brumlik (Director of the Fritz Bauer Institute, Study and Documentation Centre for the History of the Holocaust and Its Effects). Jurgen Habermas, who originally recommended the book to Suhrkamp, now agonises about and seeks to contextualise his recommendation. Honderich in turn, angrily rejects the charge of anti-semitism and calls for Brumlik to be dismissed from his post by the Johann Wolfgang Goethe University, Frankfurt am Main.

For what its worth, Brumlik’s charge of anti-semitism is, in my view, technically unwarranted. I doubt that Honderich bears any animosity towards Jews as such. But Brumlik is correct to state that Honderich “seeks to justify the murder of Jewish civilians in Israel.” In Honderich’s recent essay “Terrorism for Humanity” he gives a list of propositions including “Suicide bombings by the Palestinians are right.” He says of his list: ” These are some particular moral propositions that many people, probably a majority of humans who are half-informed or better, now at least find it difficult to deny.”

There’s probably some possible world where I’m moved by freedom of speech considerations to the thought that Suhrkamp shouldn’t have withdrawn Honderich’s book (though it hardly amounts to censorship, since they’ve relinquished the rights and he can presumably disseminate it himself). But I can’t summon up any indignation on behalf of someone with his odious views who also calls for his critics to be sacked from their academic posts.

(Honderich’s site has links to the text of Brumlik’s letter, Habermas’s thoughts, Honderich’s replies and “Terrorism for Humanity”.)

Matthew Yglesias has some reaction to Right-Wing News’s lists of greatest figures of the twentieth century as voted for by right- and left-wing bloggers. My considered view that such lists are inherently silly hasn’t sufficiently stifled my irritation at the omissions. There’s obviously an argument to be had (on Aristotelian lines) about whether a person can both be great and do really bad things, though the further back in time one goes the easier it seems to be to reconcile judgements of greatness with the fact of a historical figure having committed atrocities or other acts of cruelty (e.g. Alexander the Great, Cromwell).

But I was also appalled by the fact that the so-called left-wing bloggers were, for want of a better word, chicken. Their list contained no leading figures from the international communist and socialist movements at all, and yet quite a few of them warrant serious consideration. Jean Jaures, French socialist opponent of war, murdered on the eve of the first world war, for one. And how about Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht, again, socialist opponents of the war, murdered by the neo-fascist Freikorps in 1919? I’d even make the case for Lenin and Trotsky. The leftists have voted, safely and reasonably enough, for Gandhi, Nelson Mandela and Martin Luther King jr. Fair enough, but I’d have thought Ho Chi Minh and Ben Bella were in with a shout. Yglesias bemoans the absence of theorists other than Orwell (who wasn’t). I concur: why were there no votes for Bertrand Russell (also a campaigner against WW1), Max Weber and Emile Durkeim (20th century figures both) or John Rawls? No doubt the prevalent francophobia meant that the right-wing crowd denied Charles de Gaulle his place. (And don’t get me started on the artists, writers and composers.)

UPDATE: (Thanks CY) There’s a long thread on this at Electrolite.

UPDATE UPDATE: Norman Geras posts the list he voted for and some reflections.

Devah Pager has won this year’s Dissertation Award from the American Sociological Association. (I wrote about her work last year. It’s worth mentioning again.) Devah studies the effect of incarceration on labor market outcomes. Her approach was to conduct an audit study of employers, sending in applications for real jobs using vitas for matched pairs of black and white men. The abstract of a working paper from the study says, in part:

bq. With over 2 million individuals currently incarcerated, and over half a million prisoners released each year, the large and growing numbers of men being processed through the [U.S.] criminal justice system raises important questions about the consequences of this massive institutional intervention. This paper focuses on the consequences of incarceration for the employment outcomes of black and white job seekers. … By using matched pairs of individuals to apply for real entry- level jobs, it becomes possible to directly measure the extent to which a criminal record in the absence of other disqualifying characteristics serves as a barrier to employment among equally qualified applicants. I find that a criminal record is associated with a 50 percent reduction in employment opportunities for whites and a 64 percent reduction for blacks.

Pager found that blacks “are less than half as likely to receive consideration by employers relative to their white counterparts, and black non-offenders fall behind even whites with prior felony convictions.” In other words, even though being black and having served time both negatively affect one’s employment opportunities, controlling for education and skills you are better off being a white male with a felony conviction than a black male with no criminal record.

To put Devah’s work in context, take a look at Bruce Western’s research in this area. “How Unregulated Is the U.S. Labor Market? The Penal System as a Labor Market Institution” is a good place to start. It’s a comparative macro-sociological account of what’s been happening to the U.S. penal system. A recent working paper co-authored with Becky Pettit, “Inequality in Lifetime Risks of Incarceration” estimates risk of imprisonment by race and education. Here’s the abstract:

bq. Although growth in the U.S. prison population over the last 25 years has been widely discussed, few studies examine changes in inequality in imprisonment. We study penal inequality by estimating lifetime risks of imprisonment for black and white men at dierent levels of education. Combining administrative, survey, and census data, we estimate that among men born 1965–69, 3 percent of whites and 20 percent of blacks will have served time in prison by their early thirties. The risks of incarceration are highly stratified by education. Among black men born 1965–69, 30 percent of those without college education and nearly 60 percent of high school dropouts went to prison by 1999. The novel pervasiveness of imprisonment indicates the emergence of incarceration as a new stage in the life course of young low-skill black men.