Friday, May 09, 2003

 
As a successful and dynamic executive, do you find that there's just not enough time in your life for the study of fine works of poetry and prose?

Do you think that complicated and subtle ideas are best described with a bullet-point, and should if possible be accompanied with a piece of clip-art?

Well, now you can ingest your daily dose of humanistic wisdom without having to cut into your time on the golf-course; the Powerpoint Anthology of Literature has been thoughtfully prepared by Daniel Radosh as a summary service for busy people just like you.

Barbarian that you are.

The rest of us, on the other hand, will probably find this particular hand-tooled time-saving item very funny indeed.

Posted by Tom 4:11 AM

Monday, May 05, 2003

 
This is truly fantastic, and almost makes me want to go back to graduate school.

Posted by Tom 4:27 AM

Sunday, May 04, 2003

 
I was saddened to discover the story of these very foolish remarks by Tam Dalyell over at Matthew Yglesias's blog, and want to add to what I had to say in the comments there.

The source we have to work from is a Sunday Telegraph report of an interview Dalyell gave to Vanity Fair. The full text of the interview is not available online, so I haven't read it, but here's the meat of the Telegraph piece:

Tam Dalyell, the Father of the House, sparked outrage last night by accusing the Prime Minister of "being unduly influenced by a cabal of Jewish advisers".

In an interview with Vanity Fair, the Left-wing Labour MP named Lord Levy, Tony Blair's personal envoy on the Middle East, Peter Mandelson, whose father was Jewish, and Jack Straw, the Foreign Secretary, who has Jewish ancestry, as three of the leading figures who had influenced Mr Blair's policies on the Middle East.

Yesterday Mr Dalyell, the MP for Linlithgow, told The Telegraph: "I am fully aware that one is treading on cut glass on this issue and no one wants to be accused of anti-Semitism but, if it is a question of launching an assault on Syria or Iran . . . then one has to be candid."

He added: "I am not going to be labelled anti-Semitic. My children worked on a kibbutz. But the time has come for candour." The Prime Minister, Mr Dalyell claimed, was also indirectly influenced by Jewish people in the Bush administration, including Richard Perle, a Pentagon adviser, Paul Wolfowitz, the deputy defence secretary, and Ari Fleischer, the President's press secretary.

I'm going to focus on the claims about the British case rather than the US in what follows.

Obviously the very first thing to say is that Tam has been an absolute bloody idiot to say what he has. This is a very difficult topic to address without causing quite justified offence, and if you really aren't anti-semitic, you need to be damn careful in your choice of words when going anywhere near this issue. I'm somewhat worried about blogging about this at all in fact, which is not a way of complaining that freedom of discussion in this area is unreasonably restricted, it's rather that I'm concerned that if I get the tone wrong I may end up seriously offending people whom I have no intention of offending. Suffice it to say that if Tam isn't a bigot, he really should have been far more careful in his language.

The more substantive point to make is of course that Tam is actually talking complete balls. I for one wasn't aware that Straw had any Jewish connections at all, and there's not been anything in his public profile to suggest any kind of obvious partiality in his attitudes towards the Middle East. Of course, I think Straw was wrong, wrong, wrong about the war, but that's by the by: I have absolutely no reason to believe that he came to defend the view that he did because of a submerged Likudnik agenda of some kind.

As to Mandelson and Levy, well, I think there are real questions to ask about the closeness of those two gentlemen to Mr Blair, but those questions have damn all to with Judaism. Mandelson is a menace because it seems to me that he stands against pretty much everything that is decent and valuable in the British Labour party. I'm very uncomfortable about someone whose values are so distant from those of most Labour supporters, and who is so clearly willing to lie for political advantage, having such influence over the PM. But that discomfort is general: I don't want Mandelson advising Blair about anything at all, not just foreign policy in particular.

Finally, let's take Lord Levy. He has no record of commitment to the Labour party; he is accountable only to the PM; he very seldom talks to the press; and his attitude to paying UK tax seems to be rather dismissive, to say the least. Yet he does, it seems, play quite an important role in the government's policy toward the Middle East. I personally have no objection to his occupying just such a role, but his position should be made official and his actions should be accountable to Parliament.

Levy and Mandelson do have some importance in illustrating what has gone wrong with the Blair government, but that importance, it should be obvious, has absolutely nothing to do with their Jewishness. The problem is that Blair treats his party and even his cabinet with contempt; that he despises the values that animate most of those who have a commitment to Labour, and prefers to seek policy advice from a network of college chums and business men who share his own very different view of the world. This has led to a state of affairs in which the PM occupies a bubble, listening seriously only to views from a very particular political perspective, and increasingly isolated from broader currents of opinion.

So insofar as Tam was saying that there's a problem with the PM's choice of advisors, he was right. But he cancelled out any force in what he had to say by bringing Jewishness into it, and particularly by doing so in so crass a way. I think a lot of us have admired Tam's awkward, cussed parliamentary ways over the years, without necessarily agreeing with everything he has had to say; I really hope he can find a way to retract his remarks convincingly. I don't want to believe he's a bigot, but he will need to do a lot of work to dispel the very ugly impression he has managed to give.

One final point. The political subtext here is of course that a certain kind of neo-conservative would like to be able to take Tam's anti-semitism, if such it be, and made it stick to the British anti-war left generally. I don't propose to talk about that here, since we can all guess how the argument would go. What I will say is that if you want to see genuine, incontrovertible instances of anti-semitism, look in certain pockets on the traditionalist British right. Leon Brittan's departure from the Home Office in the Westland Affair of 1986 was reportedly greeted by certain Tory MPs with glee on the grounds that a 'red-blooded Englishman' ought to occupy such a role. Auberon Waugh wrote unapologetically anti-semitic stuff for years. And to this day, the disgusting Taki has a column in The Spectator, which remains the right's publication of record in this country. Taki has clearly has gone off on a very strange path in the views he has taken about the war, and is for that reason out of favour in many conservative circles, but the truth remains that the editors of the magazine have evidently decided that there is a constituency out there for his particular brand of filth, which one doesn't have to read very much of to see how far racism in general and anti-semitism in particular define his world view.

The British left has an obligation to call Tam Dalyell on his remarks, and to pay no more attention to him unless he can explain what, if anything, he meant to say, and do it in a less grievously offensive fashion. But I'll take lectures on this subject from the British right only when Taki no longer makes a contribution to the Spectator's circulation figures.


Posted by Tom 11:15 PM

Saturday, May 03, 2003

 
Responding to my fairly half-hearted defence of the 'Star-Spangled Banner' Mrs Tilton over at 6th International reveals her true colours in this spirited paragraph:

I'm prepared to hypothesise that the S-SB was given the tune of To Anacreon in Heaven by some underground United Empire Loyalist keen on ridiculing the young republic that had dared usurp the King's rightful authority. While visiting America last summer I went to a baseball game, and I must say the anthem sung at the beginning was a prefect complement to the game itself: disjointed, meandering, hard to follow and long.

I can't let this pass, though God knows why.

My thought here is that if I were an American, and I were picking my National Anthem, I'd want the winning candidate to be susceptible to arrangement for performance by a jazz band, since jazz is easily America's most important homegrown artistic invention. And Duke Ellington, according to my CD collection, did indeed crank out a couple of arrangments of the SSB which actually sounded pretty cool. He moved the harmony about a bit, but then Christ knows it needed it.

So if I were patriotically obliged to sing the damn thing on a regular basis, I would at least be able to distract myself from whatever tinker-toy nonsense the lyrics may involve at a given moment by mentally tuning into the Duke's arrangement. This would make the whole thing rather more bearable. And I guess that since the lyrics of a national anthem are bound to be pretty irritating most of the time, the extent to which the music can prevent you from being bothered by them is not that bad a test of suitability.

Not entirely convinced? OK, me neither.

I'd add that the 6th International piece does have some very interesting stuff on the German case that I hadn't known about. And I must say that picking the 'Hymn of Joy' for the EU was a stroke of political genius: who can seriously be anti-Beethoven?

Posted by Tom 12:04 AM

Thursday, May 01, 2003

 
Scott Martens has followed up his post on schools with another thoughtful piece. I think I may disagree with him about the extent to which a rule which mandates school attendance can provide scope for children whose parents oppose education to take some control over their lives, but I don't really have much more than anecdote to support my sense of that issue. More importantly, the post contains this paragraph, which states what I take to be the fundamental point to make about the broader question:

If children need to learn to buckle under to authority... I don't want it to interfere with their educations. I would rather see them dealing with their authority issues at a job, or in an apprenticeship, or on an athletic team. I want school to be a place where they develop themselves as individuals, not where we beat them into being the kind of people who can be good workers. Education is about developing oneself, and especially about developing freely, and that is why it is so important. If you want to turn people into production units, get them jobs or put them in the army. Real life is oppressive enough, we don't need school to oppress them further. School should free them.

All I can say is: Amen to that.


Posted by Tom 10:34 PM

 
The patriotic Americans amongst you, and you know you who are, will presumably have spent much of today standing to attention and singing nonsense about spangles.

No? Didn't you know that the 1st of May is officially Loyalty Day?

When deciding how to spend this special day next time around, you might want to consider implementing the excellent scheme described by Joseph Heller in 'Catch 22':

Almost overnight the Glorious Loyalty Oath Crusade was in full flower, and Captain Black was enraptured to discover himself spearheading it. He had really hit on something. All the enlisted men and officers on combat duty had to sign a loyalty oath to get their map cases from the intelligence tent, a second loyalty oath to receive their flak suits and parachutes from the parachute tent, a third loyalty oath for Lieutenant Balkington, the motor vehicle officer, to be allowed to ride from the squadron to the airfield in one of the trucks. Every time they turned around there was another loyalty oath to be signed.They signed a loyalty oath to get their pay from the finance officer, to obtain their PX supplies, to have their hair cut by the Italian barbers.

To Captain Black, every officer who supported his Glorious Loyalty Oath Crusade was a competitor, and he planned and plotted twnety-four hours a day to keep one step ahead. He would stand second to none in his devotion to country. When other officers had followed his urging and introduced loyalty oaths of their own, he went them one better by making every son of a bitch who came to his intelligence tent sign two loyalty oaths, then three, then four; then he introduced the pledge of allegiance, and after that "The Star-Spangled Banner," one chorus, two choruses, three choruses, four choruses. Each time Captain Black forged ahead of his competitors, he swung upon them scornfully for their failure to follow his example. Each time they followed his example, he retreated with concern and racked his brain for some new strategem that would enable him to turn upon them scornfully again.

Without realizing how it had come about, the combat men in the squandron discovered themselves dominated by the administrators appointed to serve them. They were bullied, insulted, harassed and shoved about all day long by one after the other. When they voiced objection, Captain Black replied that people who were loyal would not mind signing all the loyalty oaths they had to. To anyone who questioned the effectiveness of the loyalty oaths, he replied that people who really did owe allegiance to their country would be proud to pledge it as often as he forced them to. And to anyone who questioned the morality, he replied that "The Star-Spangled Banner" was the greatest piece of music ever composed. The more loyalty oaths a person signed, the more loyal he was; to Captain Black it was as simple as that, and he had Corporal Kolodny sign hundreds with his name each day so that he could always prove he was more loyal than anyone else.

"The important thing is to keep them pledging," he explained to his cohorts. "It doesn't matter whether they mean it or not. That's why they make little kids pledge allegiance even before they know what 'pledge' and 'allegiance' mean."

Update: Actually, I'm prepared to admit that 'The Star-Spangled Banner' is pretty good as National Anthems go. It's certainly an improvement on that tedious dirge 'God Save The Queen' - just listen to the Hendrix version of each back-to-back and see if you don't agree. (I'm not aware that Jimi ever took up the challenge of La Marseillaise: was this just a matter of musical preference or an indication of his admirably prescient patriotic instincts?)

Posted by Tom 9:58 PM

 
Pedantry supplies some very provocative thoughts on the topic of education. Scott Martens has suggested two possible schemes for improving schooling, one of which does away with compulsory attendance altogether.

It occurs to me that one side-effect of the latter idea might be the delivery of a good kick to 'credentialism', by which I mean the gradual ratcheting up of the formal qualifications which must be attained to get a given job beyond the point at which those qualifications are necessary to indicate competence or fitness. Such a kick would clearly be a good thing.

The current mania for spending years accruing debt in order to be able to wave pieces of paper at prospective employers is, as is frequently pointed out, collectively irrational. It doesn't do me any good in the competition to get a given job if all my competitors join me at college and end up acquiring the same sparkling new diploma that I've got. But given a system in which that diploma has become a prerequisite, I've got no choice but to go off and study. If we see the education system as a sausage machine for producing employability, it clearly fails in this kind of case, in that we're collectively getting less sausage than we should for our investment of time and cash.

Of course, we damn well shouldn't see education that way. If you're lucky enough to go to college and study something the interests you, I think it's not too dewy-eyed to say that this can be one of the most amazing, transforming experiences of your life. Someone might even say that credentialism isn't all bad, since it has a side-effect of exposing people to all that life-changing Dead Poets' Society stuff that otherwise they'd miss by going straight into accountancy.

This would be a paternalistic, perfectionist argument, and that's fine with me. I would say, however, that people who are compelled to study when they'd rather be (or indeed need to be) earning are often unlikely to obtain these kinds of benefits, even if they're on offer. And more importantly, the study that is now to on offer to most people isn't of that kind: it is narrowly vocational. Business Studies isn't going to rock anyone's world in that particular way, I suspect.

We seemed to have ended up with the something like the worst of all possible worlds. On the one hand, very few people have the chance to receive an education of the kind that they will treasure and which will make them want to continue learning for as long as they live. (In my gloomier moods I think it likely that within my lifetime the study of the humanities will become a risky luxury of which only the upper-middle classes can afford to avail themselves.) On the other, we make stacks of people undergo what is nominally training but which in fact does nothing to improve their chances of getting the jobs they want to do.

The Pedantry Libertarian Free-For-All Education Scheme would instantly trash this problem. If people attain minimal standards of literacy and numeracy, hang around school if they like that kind of thing, and otherwise go off and find a trade, then the whole self-defeating system gets dismantled at the root. Much to the approval of my ninety-three year-old grandfather, a carpenter, we would probably end up reinventing the apprentice system in some form.

My own view is that learning is an end in itself, and that a large part of the point of having a certain level of national income is to enable us to make that end attainable for as many people as possible. Everyone who is capable of it should be entitled to do a non-vocational and utterly useless degree of their choosing at a time in their lives they find convenient, and I say that it's a mark of a civilised society to be glad to support such a thing. A similar principle ought to apply to more fundamental schooling: when people need it and want it, it ought to be available to them with no questions asked.

I also want the top brick off the chimney and to place parlsey on the moon.

I'm enough of a paternalist to worry that the bloody obvious objection to the libertarian scheme is sound, namely that too many people will drop out when they probably shouldn't and that these people will come bitterly to regret their choices. It should also be said this scheme may well not end up not introducing a choice for the children at all: after all, a feature of making school compulsory is that it restricts the power of chauvinist subcultures to keep their female children uneducated. Remove the mandatoriness of attendance and you severely diminish the scope for autonomous choice for girls from those subcultures. I don't doubt also that there are many children who would (in some clear sense) prefer to continue with their schooling, but would find non-attendance too tempting to resist: for them, it is best to have a rule that compels them to do what they really want to do. And generally, I can't help thinking that, like most libertarian ideas, this one loses most of its attractiveness when applied to any society in which there are large inequalities of resources.

Still, there is something in the idea, if only that it brings out the huge gap between what education ought to do and what it in fact does. The unexamined life is well worth living, but the alternative ought at least to be an option.

Posted by Tom 3:36 AM

Thursday, April 24, 2003

 
I'm very slowly and intermittently working my way through Daniel J. Boorstin's marvellous history of America in the last couple of centuries, 'The Democratic Experience'. It's full of good things, and the chapter on Prohibition includes a lovely little nugget that I can't resist blogging.

It seems that in 1931 a commission, led by former Attorney General George W. Wickersham, was appointed by the federal government in part to determine whether the Great Experiment was working. Their report concluded, in essence, that it really wasn't working at all, and should therefore be continued.

Franklin P. Adams summarised the Wickersham commission's efforts in the New York World with this little squib:

Prohibition is an awful flop.
We like it.
It can't stop what it's meant to stop.
We like it.
It's left a trail of graft and slime,
It don't prohibit worth a dime,
It's filled our land with vice and crime,
Nevertheless, we're for it.

Hmm. Anyone for a War on Drugs?

Posted by Tom 11:03 PM

Wednesday, April 23, 2003

 
Lawrence Solum has written a really interesting and, I think, penetrating piece on the proper place of ideological/religious tests in the process of confirming judicial appointments. I spent quite a lot of time studying US politics when I was younger, and I must say I remain pretty puzzled by this whole business. Can legal institutions really retain public legitimacy when they are so susceptible to being 'packed' with political appointees by the side that happens to control the White House? And if the balancing mechanism is supposed to be that you only get to appoint your chums when you're in power, what happens when one side ends up holding on to the Presidency for a long time? How far is the US system from reaching a point at which judicial positions are in effect part of the 'spoils' to be distributed by the party that happens to do well in a given election?

I certainly don't have any answers, and since I'm a foreigner and thus unlikely ever to have to rely on the even-handedness of the American judiciary, I shall probably shut up about the whole business. Still, fascinating topic, and I've enjoyed reading what Prof Solum has had to say about it.

Posted by Tom 11:09 PM

 
Matthew Yglesias is distressed about the fact that he'll have to find Harvard's Anthropology library in order get hold of the university's sole copy of Jacob Levy's book.

Tsk. Kids these days have it easy. When I was an undergraduate I needed to do some not particularly obscure reading in the philosophy of science. It turned out, I suppose reasonably predictably, that most of Oxford's collection of writing in that part of the subject was kept in ...

[Threatening orchestral stab]

The Science Library. In a basement. With the world's nastiest flourescent lighting. Where the theoretical physicists used to hang out. Shudder.

It was a really bloody awful place to work, and that, I contend, is why I got my lowest mark in my entire university career in that philosophy of science paper. Sob.

Still, Matthew is right to kvetch about Harvard keeping Brian Barry's stuff in Sociology. That's just really, really wrong.

Posted by Tom 10:43 PM

 
Posted by Tom 10:38 PM

 
There seems to be a general rumbling in the Blogosphere about the desirability of a migrating your blog from Blogger to Movable Type. The excellent Kevin Drum has just moved over to a brand-new super-swanky MT installation, and a lot of the blogging superstars seem always to have used it.

I'm thinking about making that move myself. I'm kind of professionally expected to be happy about doing geeky installation stuff, and I'm not intimidated by the fiddling about that MT seems to require. I think it's probably time for me to shell out for a proper hosting arrangement rather than getting by with the not particularly impressive freebie I'm using at the moment, and, like many people who earn a living from playing with technology, I'm sad enough to take some pleasure in having lots of new toys to break. So Blogger, your days are numbered.

A key reason to move over is of course that it seem to be a pretty regular thing for Blogger to screw up, or 'blogger' your permalinks. (A reader has very kindly pointed out to me that there is a workaround for that problem, for which many thanks, but in a way that's not the point: nobody should have to care about something as basic as this.) Given that being linked to is such a nice treat, it's a real pain when someone links to a particular piece you've written, tells their readers 'go read this thing about X, it's cool' or even 'this thing on X is totally idiotic', and the readers find themselves looking at an item about Y or Z instead. The readers will probably be irritated, and the writer probably fears they've just wasted a good chance at grabbing a new regular or two. It's like turning up to a job interview having done stacks of preparation, giving fantastic, articulate, thorough answers, and discovering afterwards that your flies were undone when you came in. Or something like that - it's bad, OK?

I must say that I hope the guys at Blogger are putting a lot of work into fixing this bug. The browser interface they've come up with is really slick, and I can imagine that there are plenty of people who are generally pretty wary about computers who are pleased to find that Blogger makes things very, very, easy for them. It'd be a shame if some silly referential integrity fubar made Blogger a tool that people feel they have to grow out of. We geeks can of course have our fun messing about with perl modules and so on, but nobody else should have to.


Posted by Tom 5:13 PM

 
Dear me. The Onion has a disturbing report according to which Christopher Hitchens has got himself into trouble again.

I do hope he's all right.

(Via Atrios.)

Posted by Tom 12:29 PM