Buggerit

Soooo, it turns out that moving a Movable Type blog from one host to another using MT’s “Import” facilities works OK — up to a point. An unforeseen problem is that the MT installation in our old home had a couple of other blogs running on it prior to the birth of Crooked Timber. This meant that archived CT posts on that system didn’t have IDs starting from 00001.html —- they started from 200-odd. Posts on the new host do have IDs starting from 1 (or 31, actually, for other reasons). The upshot of all this is that if links to this blog are currently broken — e.g., if you linked to a CT post from a few months ago from your blog, that link will still bring you to this site, but to the wrong post. That’s not good.

Now. What I want to know from the MT whiz kids who read this blog is, can this be fixed? Say I can construct a lookup table — just two columns of numbers side by side — that matches the old archive entry numbers to the new ones. Unfortunately, the matching of ID numbers between the old and new installations isn’t a trivial a matter of subtracting the new ID number from the old and getting the same difference all the time. This is because people occasionally deleted their posts, or duplicated them, or revised them in other ways that creates gaps or additional entries in the ID sequence. Errors in the import process also introduced changes in the ID sequence. But say I could laboriously construct such a table: can I somehow use it to force a renumbering of all the imported entries in the SQL database, with some spiffy SQL command or other, and then rebuild the site so they take on these values? (Perhaps also incrementing the IDs of posts made since the move by 500 or so to avoid conflicts?) Or can I write an apache mod-rewrite rule to achieve something similar? Or is this a lost cause and should I just try to make the best of it by, e.g., switching to some more rational way of archiving posts by dirifying them by date or some other method (though I haven’t looked into this yet). I am very unhappy about the prospect of breaking a year’s worth of links to this site, so suggestions are welcome.

Guns, smoke, global warming and Microsoft

If you’ve spent any time around the blogosphere, or looking at thinktank websites, you’ll be aware that the following [professed] opinions tend to go together:

• widespread ownership of guns saves lives

• tobacco smoke is harmless (if not to smokers then to anyone who breathes it second-hand)

• global warming is a myth

There’s not too much mystery about this. The kinds of characteristics that would encourage the adoption of any one of these beliefs (make your own list) obviously encourage the others. What’s surprising to me is how frequently these opinions are correlated with support for Microsoft, and, more particularly, denunciation of open-source software.

Draft constitution

Sounds as if agreement has been reached on a draft EU constitution. That was the easy part - now they have to steer it through referendums in the UK and elsewhere. No agreement, however on a new Commission President. More on this as proper news starts to leak out …

The (Far) Right Coast

At “The Right Coast,” Maimon Schwarzschild cheers on the victory of the UKIP party. Apparently, it’s a heavy blow against the project of an United Europe, which, as we all know, emphasizes “anti-Americanism, and thinly veiled anti-semitism.” This is something that’s becoming increasingly common - US based conservatives (although note that Schwarzschild is a UK transplant to San Diego) finding some common ground with the European far right’s hostility to the EU. It’s a big mistake. Josh Chafetz describes the UKIP’s leadership as “a collection of racists, xenophobes, anti-Semites, Holocaust deniers, and homophobes.” Although the UKIP has tried to maintain a more respectable public profile than, say, the BNP, it has certainly had a scattering of anti-Semites and nordicists in prominent party positions in the past. The European far right doesn’t emphasize anti-Semitism as much as it used to - it has increasingly switched its attentions from Jews to Muslims and other immigrants. And the UKIP is no stranger to anti-Muslim and Arab racism; in Robert Kilroy-Silk’s own words, Muslims

are backward and evil and if it is racist to say so…. then racist I must be - and proud and happy to be so.

Far from being a setback for anti-Semitism, the success of the UKIP (and some other parts of the anti-EU right) is arguably a victory. I’m prepared to give Schwarzschild the benefit of the doubt - when he says that the success of the UKIP is “good news,” he may simply not know what he’s talking about. Still, it’s the people whom he’s cheering on, rather than Brussels Eurocrats, who are directly and materially connected with racism, anti-Semitism and the nastier aspects of Europe’s past.

Preaching to the unconverted

Cory Doctorow has been at Microsoft research, telling them why Digital Rights Management is a bad thing. It’s a great rant - I’ll be assigning it in my classes. Via BoingBoing.

Ewekip

Dick Morris, former Clinton adviser and UKIP spin-doctor was on the BBC’s flagship discussion programme, Question Time, last night. Very many of his utterances were outright falsehoods (though plain ignorance of British and European politics was evidently a good part of the explanation). Amazingly, he explained the problem of high house prices in the UK [only some parts of which actually have high house prices!] was caused by the British government having lost control of immigration to the EU [false], with the result that people were pouring in and bidding up the price of a scarce resource! Supply and demand, QED! I don’t know whether I’m more surprised that this idiot is credited as the “genius” behind Ewekip’s recent success or that he was once employed by a Democratic American President!

UPDATE: Chris Brooke links to a Mirror hatchet job on of Ewekip’s celebrity MEP Robert Kilroy-Silk.

Jacek Kuron

Jacek Kuron, one of the heroes of the postwar eastern Europe and a man of the left , despite and against Stalinism, is dead. There are obits in the New York Times , the Guardian , the Telegraph , The Scotsman , from the BBC , and in many other places.

By The Power of Stipulation: I Have The Power!

I am sick and tired of hearing about that ticking nuclear bomb in Manhattan. You know the one. Why? Because, if you let me put my thumb on the utilitarian scales, I can get you to agree that you have an affirmative moral duty to torture a three-year-old child to death.

If You're Reading This...

… Then you have arrived at the new Crooked Timber servers, hosted by DreamHost. Everything should be as it was. I hope. Moving 30mb of chattering class output from one host provider to another isn’t trivial, but it went reasonably smoothly in the end. The main problem was that Movable Type’s import/export file format is very fragile: the delimiters it uses to mark posts and comments are just a series of dashes. People tend to use those sometimes to set off comments or emails that they’re reposting, which chokes the import parser. Yuck. But here we are in our new home all the same.

George R.R. Martin update

Nelly, who checks George R.R. Martin’s website pretty much every day, tells me that after almost 6 months’ silence, George is getting impatient with his impatient readers.

“I will say, just to set some rumors straight, that I am not dead, I am not dying, I am not in ill health, I have not forgotten about my readers, and I am not lounging in my hot tub drinking chilled wine with hot babes in bikinis (though I’d like to be). I have been working on this bloody book almost every bloody day (okay, except for Sundays during football season and the two days of the NFL draft) for more years than I care to contemplate, writing, rewriting, revising, and writing again, trying to make FEAST a feast in truth.”

European Commission Presidency

The heads of government of the various EU member states are meeting together this evening to discuss, among other things, who should replace Romano Prodi as President of the European Commission. It’s an important decision - but there isn’t a clear front-runner. For what it’s worth, my estimate of the various candidates’ chances of getting the nod.

Shorter Dick Cheney

Howl, howl, howl, howl.

UPDATE: Mark Kleiman might point out that this is a pretty good summary of Rumsfeld’s behavior as well. Who am I to argue? What kind of an outfit illegally orders that a prisoner be held off the books for over a year, and then forgets to interrogate him?

ANOTHER, NON-SNARKY UPDATE: Interesting point from Michael Froomkin:

People like me, who have been highly dubious about the US acceding to the jurisdiction of the International Criminal Court due to the real and troubling encroachment on our traditional conception of national sovereignty are really going to have to think long and hard about changing sides on this one, or at least accepting jurisdiction with regards to some of our treaty obligations. The last few months argue strongly that the US cannot always be relied on to observe its international law obligations as much as I would have thought and hoped.

I doubt that too many people will join Professor Froomkin in thinking long and hard, but these revelations will have the unfortunate effect of changing the terms of the debate. As Anne Applebaum* points out, it’s hard to see how those in power have sufficient incentives to follow stories as thoroughly as they deserve.

• corrected; thanks to Russell Arben Fox

Philosophical movies

Thanks to Tyler Cowen, over at Volokh , I came across Jason Brennan’s list of movies with philosophical themes . It’s a good list , though a bit lacking in non-American content. Possible additions? There’s already been some blogospheric discussion of The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance and Christine Korsgaard’s claim that it illustrates Kant on revolutions (scroll down comments). Strictly Ballroom arguably deals with freedom, existentialism, and revolution. Rashomon is about the epistemology of testimony. Dr Strangelove covers the ethics of war and peace and some issues in game theory (remember the doomsday machine?). Suggestions?

UPDATE: I see Matthew Yglesias is also discussing this.

More Fed Fellow Fun

I’ve been enjoying a visit from my friend and co-author Simon Grant for the last couple of days. We’ve been working on fairly abstruse aspects of the economics of uncertainty, though with an eye to practical applications to issues like an analysis of the precautionary principle.

However, we downed tools this afternoon when it was announced that Simon has been awarded a Federation Fellowship. This is only the second such Fellowship in Economics, mine being the first.

Obviously, I’m very happy about this, and particularly about the fact that it will bring Simon back to Australia (he’s currently at Rice university in the US).

Federation Fellowships

As Brian Leiter reported, it’s a wonderful day for philosophy in Australia. David Chalmers, Paul Griffiths and Philip Pettit have been awarded Federation Fellowships, which are among the biggest and most prestigious awards in Australian academia. The awards are for five years, and having the three of them around (even more than they are now) should be great for Australian philosophy.

The Communion Question

I’ll assume you are an educated person who’s already read Josh Marshall’s post about … what to call it? Bush’s Al-Sadrist gambit: locked in a death-struggle with the forces of democratic reconstruction in your country? See if you can get zealous souls to lay down suppressing fire from the holy places. If you succeed, fine. If the holy places end up getting shelled when the targets lose patience, you cry religious persecution (even if it was pure self-defense) and make hay out of that. It’s win-win.

Let’s consider this issue of Bush’s attempt to “nudge the American bishops toward greater ‘activism’.” To wit: denying communion to Catholic political candidates who take church-disapproved stances on gay marriage, abortion and stem cell research.

Happy Bloomsday

Today is the 100th anniversary of the day on which stately, plump Buck Mulligan came down the stairs of the Martello tower, razor, mirror and washbowl in hand. Like many other Dubliners, I’ve a distant relative who’s a character in Ulysses. “Professor MacHugh” is based on my great-uncle Hugh MacNeill. He appears in the Aeolus section, which is appropriate enough; he’s a bit of a windbag (and according to family hearsay, the original was an alcoholic and a chronic gambler to boot). This isn’t as unusual as it might seem: everyone in Ireland is related to everyone else, and ‘placing’ someone (i.e. finding what relatives or friends you have in common) is a source for hours of entertainment whenever two Irish people meet. Not only that - but Ulysses is a long novel, with many minor characters - Dubliners who don’t have some tenuous connection to the novel are perhaps even rarer than Dubliners of a certain age who don’t claim to have been regular drinking companions of Paddy Kavanagh, Brendan Behan, and Myles na gCopaleen (aka Brian O’Nolain). Which is to say, very thin on the ground indeed.

Update: Google too are celebrating Bloomsday.

UKIP

The success of Eurosceptic parties like the UK Independence Party, has contributed to generally negative coverage of the recent EU Parliamentary elections. Although I disagree with UKIP, I think its success is a good thing.

Gene Wolfe steals my fudgsicle

In comments at John and Belle’s other blog, Fafnir from Fafblog speaks to the perplexity caused by reading Gene Wolfe.

Gene Wolfe is a punk. He also greedily ate my fudgcicle once while signin my copy of “The Island of Doctor Death and Other Stories and Other Stories.” I said “hey gene wolfe that is my fudgcicle” an he said “maybe you only THINK it is your fudgcicle because you are plaaaaauged by the ghooosts of meeeeemory. wooooooo!” all the while makin wiggly fingers. And I went home thinkin that maybe I really was plagued by the ghosts of memory and maybe I wasn’t who I thought I was, was I Fafnir or was I Gene Wolfe, or was I a butterfly dreaming I was Gene Wolfe dreaming I was Fafnir? And the next day I woke up an realized that punk had just eaten my fudgcicle.

School Uniforms

I don’t know enough about this case to feel comfortable commenting on the all-things-considered rights and wrongs of it. But I was taken aback by the comments of the girl’s MP on Radio 4’s PM programme. Margaret Moran, who backs the school and the court, said, in their defence, that the girl had the option of going to a Muslim school, and her family also had the option of withdrawing her from school and home-schooling. She went on to accuse them of having ‘political motivations’ for their suit.

I can imagine good reasons for having uniform regulations, and for upholding them even in the face of religious objections, hence my relctance to comment on the all-things-considered merits. But the fact that the regulations might drive a girl into an educational situation in which her religious beliefs will not be challenged or tested seems to me a reason for bending, or revising the rules, not a consideration in their favour. The parents’ enthusiasm that their child should attend a state comprehensive school is to their credit. Telling them that they should school her religiously or at home doesn’t seem very helpful to me.