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Posts from February 2005

Second verse, not quite the same as the first

I already did something like this a while back, but the instructions for this one are a little different, and I’m trying to force myself to stay in the habit of posting things. This time it comes from Philobiblon:

  1. Grab the nearest book.
  2. Open the book to page 123.
  3. Find the fifth sentence.
  4. Post the text of the sentence in your journal along with these instructions.
  5. Don’t search around and look for the coolest book you can find. Do what’s actually next to you.

I don’t actually know whether the book in front of me on the table or the books piled behind me on the windowsill are closer, but I don’t want to do the trigonometric calculations, so I’ve arbitrarily decided that “in front of” is closer than “behind.” Thus, we have The Philosophy of Art: Readings Ancient and Modern, page 123, sentence 5 (in the midst of selections from The Principles of Art by R.G. Collingwood). Actually, the fifth sentence makes no sense on its own, so here’s the surrounding context, with emphasis on the fifth sentence:

Conversely, is a poem means to the production of a certain state of mind in an audience? Suppose a poet had read his verses to an audience, hoping that they would produce a certain result; and suppose the result were different; would that in itself prove the poem a bad one? It is a difficult question; some would say yes, others no. But if poetry were obviously a craft, the answer would be a prompt and unhesitating yes. The advocate of the technical theory must do a good deal of toe-chopping before he can get his facts to fit his theory at this point.

So far, the prospects of the technical theory are not too bright. Let us proceed.

Collingwood, here as elsewhere, is mostly on the side of the angels; this is part of a longer exposition of the theory of poetry-as-craft (that is, as the means to some end–here, the end of producing some state of mind in the audience), and directing some ire in particular against economistic and psychologistic reductions of art as the technique of fulfilling certain kinds of wants that consumers have, or offering stimuli that elicit desired or desirable reactions from the subjects (that is, you and me). (Of course, this is not to say that art operates outside the laws of economics or of human psychology; it is just to say that to understand the sort of value and the sort of behaviors that are associated with artworks–that is, to apply those laws in the case of paintings, poetry, music, and the rest–you have to understand how art works for us on its own. And understanding that, Collingwood argues, is not a matter of understanding any craft.)

Anyway, that’s my passage. Do it for yourself, and be merry!

P.S.: This is still not a meme. Because there aren’t any.

Bureaucratic rationality

Cleaning out some of the older links from my newsreader brought me this old news about a bit of Yuletide scroogery from the IRS, courtesy of Alina at Totalitarianism Today (2004-12-23):

As if payroll taxes weren’t enough– here is an example of the IRS almost literally whisking the Christmas turkery from the table-tops of hard-working Americans. According to Brian Hindo of Business Week, many companies used to hand out turkeys this time of year. Now, however, 41% give out coupons, which can be redeemed at any store for a turkey or a tofu turkey or whatever suits the employee’s fancy.

Sensing a little possibility for happiness, the IRS immediately put its best and brightest bureaucrats on the job. Heaven forbid an employee use that coupon to purchase a tub of Whip Cream rather than a fine-feathered friend. The result? The judgement that gift certificates, unlike actual turkeys, are a cash equivalent– and therefore taxable.

With apologies to H.L. Mencken and Max Weber, I think our theoretical lexicon needs revision. Thus:

Bureaucratic rationality, n.: The haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy without permission.

Give ’em hell, Howard

It’s official: the Democratic Party has undergone the world’s first successful spine transplant operation. Howard Dean is now Chair of the Democratic National Committee.

I’m pretty much done with this whole shell game for the forseeable future, but this at least is an encouraging sign in some important respects. The Democratic Party will remain frustrating and limited and limiting. Party electoral politics will remain mostly dull, soul-killing and ultimately pretty futile, even if all you want out of it is to put speedbumps in the way of onrushing Caesarism. But Howard Dean’s ascension will mean

  • Dean is good, remarkably good for a Democrat, on two important things: (1) abortion, (2) the war. He’s kept a solid position, knows how to answer questions without weaseling, and, well, he’s been right all along. He defends his positions as a matter of principle and demands that the rest of the Democratic Party catch up to him, instead of wringing his hands over how much he respects the position of people who want to see everything he stands for destroyed. If Democrats intend to make any headway whatsoever against Bushism and its Know-Nothing blowhard brigade of pundits, they need to take a resolute stance on both abortion and the war, and to form a serious opposition both rhetorically and politically. Dean’s increased leverage as a spokesperson for the Democratic Party means some hope for an unapologetic opposition and for the introduction of some basic cognitive decency into the talking-head world.

  • Dean’s major goal in campaigning for the DNC Chair has always been primarily to shake the upper echelons of the Democratic Party out of the hands of the grubbing apparatchiks. As he put it in his acceptance speech, It won’t take us that long [to win] — not if we stand up for what we believe in, organize at the local level, and recognize that strength does not come from the consultants down. It comes from the grass roots up. Is a Democratic Party that is more attuned to its base and less to the Beltway Bizarro World echo chamber going to be perfect? No, not at all, but it is better than the useless crowd of me-too warmongers and police statists that we have today. An effective and responsive Democratic Party will come up with plenty of stuff that needs to be fought, but if that was the worst thing we had to fight today, we’d be much better off than we have been for many years.

  • Dean’s a funny guy and a great interview. The sooner that he completely replaces the soulless gaze and sibilant verbal slime of Terry McAuliffe on the Sunday morning talk circuit, the better. Besides, cop to it–that scream speech was really funny. Even when Dean blows it on national television, it’s great fun to watch.

He won’t redeem party politics for me, but at least Howard Dean’s ascension offers some hope that there will be a lot more slimy party hacks forced to find themselves a new job, some gauntlets thrown down where they need to be thrown down, and someone in the Democratic Party who, for all his many faults, I can earnestly cheer for. And in these dark times, every ray of light is a pleasant sight to catch.

Whiggish progress

Exciting news from the front on Bombing for Choice!

I was going to put up a longer post about this tonight, but I have been a bit distracted and unproductive all day. So: I’ll have more to say about this on the morrow, but as of yesterday evening, a Google search for Roe v. Wade returns Touro Law Center‘s copy of the Roe v. Wade decision as the number one search result, displacing the anti disinformation site, roevwade-dot-org. The position is holding as of tonight. Fantastic, and thank you to everyone who has taken part in this campaign; it’s been awesome to watch it grow, and it’s awesome to see it beginning to make itself felt.

As of tonight, searches for abortion are more of a mixed bag: on the plus side, the target that I suggested for GoogleBombing on abortionGynPages, a no-nonsense online directory of abortion providers–has moved from its old position at #6 up to #4, and now appears above the fold (no scrolling necessary to find it) at a 1024×768 screen resolution. That’s heartening, but the top spot is still contested territory between the (even-handed) Religious Tolerance page on the abortion debate and the vile abortionfacts-dot-com. (The two have flip-flopped in position since the campaign began, and they seem to have flip-flopped yet again tonight.)

It’s important to keep up the GoogleBombing to point abortion to GynPages, and to encourage others to join if you haven’t already. Here’s why: not only is a website full of misrepresentation and lies vying for the #1 position on Google, almost all of the other top results for abortion are also sites about the political debate over abortion. They may be agin’ it; they may be for it; they may be remarkably even-handed. But they all tend to crowd out something that’s vitally important: straightforward information on where to find abortion services if you need them. If someone is searching for abortion because she needs that information, it’s important that she be able to find it easily and without trouble. It’s worth being able to find political yelling about abortion too, of course, but that will still be easy enough to do when the political debate sites are demoted to #2 and below.

In other words: things are looking good. Thank you thank you thank you, and keep it up!

I’m thrilled to see how this idea has spread, and I’m glad to see important factual information win out over disinformation and misrepresentation. We’re most of the way there, and if we keep this up, we are going to win.

More on this–and where we can go from here–tomorrow.

Hoppe and Churchill: On the Justice of Strange Bedfellows

Ward Churchill and Hans-Hermann Hoppe might not enjoy coffee together very much. I can clearly see the meeting ending in blows. But they do have some things in common, sure: both are radical critics of the State and the social status quo; both are tenured professors at state Universities in the West; and both have recently found themselves in administrative hot water for making controversial public statements.

Churchill’s case, so far, has been more widely reported. Thanks to the heroic efforts of a student journalist using Google, the Know-Nothing blowhard brigade finally discovered that Ward Churchill wrote an essay called Some People Push Back–which has been distributed on the Internet since 2001, and was expanded into a book-length treatment in 2003–in which he described the September 11 attacks as chickens coming home to roost, pointed out that the plane flown into the Pentagon was striking a military target, and that As to those in the World Trade Center … Well, really. Let’s get a grip here, shall we? True enough, they were civilians of a sort. But innocent? Gimme a break. You’re hearing about all this now because Churchill, a professor at the University of Colorado at Boulder, was scheduled to speak on a panel at Hamilton College in New York on The Limits of Dissent (because God is an ironist, I guess), and after a journalist at the student newspaper dug up Churchill’s essay and wrote a story on it, the Right-wing commentariat saw something they’ve been salivating over for a long time: a perfect opportunity to sink their teeth, hard, into the (allegedly Left-dominated) world of academia. So they deployed a predictable combination of media hue-and-cry and outright threats of violence, and managed to mau-mau Hamilton into cancelling the panel. Now, in hopes of a second victory for silence, they are pushing for University of Colorado at Boulder to follow it up by firing Churchill from his (tenured) professorship. The University’s Chancellor has so far agreed to bring a thorough examination of Churchill’s opinions before the Holy Inquisition:

And Colorado’s DiStefano, after an angry grilling from the university’s Board of Regents — an elected body dominated by conservatives — reversed himself and announced a 30-day investigation of all of Churchill’s lectures and publications. This is the first step, the chancellor said, in the legal process required to fire a tenured professor.

Meanwhile, there have been Web site calls for the resignation of Stewart for allowing Churchill to be invited in the first place.

— Washington Post 2005-02-05

Just a few days later, in Las Vegas, because–again–God is an ironist, anarcho-capitalist economics Professor Hans-Hermann Hoppe found himself brought before a disciplinary hearing by the administration at the University of Nevada in Las Vegas. Hoppe had a formal complaint filed against him by a student for his comments in a lecture on the economic concept of time preference, in which he decided to illustrate the concept by examples, and claimed that homosexuals, as a group, tend to have higher time preferences than heterosexuals–that is to say, that homos tend to prefer immediate gratification over deferred rewards more strongly than straights. He went on to insinuate that the emphasis on short-run effects over long-run equilibria in J.M. Keynes’s economic theories might be explained by Lord Keynes’s fondness for gay liasons. In response to the student’s complaint, UNLV is demanding Hoppe accept a letter of reprimand and a dock in pay in response to a formal complaint filed by a student in one of his economics classes; Hoppe is striking back with a letter-writing campaign and legal assistance from the ACLU.

The anarcho-capitalists who are coming out for Hoppe and the lefty anarchists who are coming out for Churchill might not want very much to do with each other. But both camps are right to point out that both of these cases represent dangerous threats to academic freedom. (Note: threats to academic freedom, not freedom of speech. The two are importantly different concepts, although both are valuable.) Unfortunately, both camps have also developed a maddening tendency to smother the point about academic freedom (or open debate more broadly) in a bunch of rally-’round-the-black-flag nonsense.

Hoppe and Churchill should not be punished by academic Inquisitors for the contents of their arguments. Academic freedom is absolutely vital to the functioning of a University (as a place of education rather than an indoctrination camp), and it’s absolutely vital to maintain a climate of vigorous, open debate in our culture. But it’s important to note that the reasons for protecting academic freedom apply to bad arguments as well as to good ones: defending Hoppe’s and Churchill’s freedom to make arguments without fear of professional reprisals doesn’t require defending the arguments they make. And that’s a good thing, because Ward Churchill is a dick, and Hans-Hermann Hoppe is a homophobic bigot. Their arguments shouldn’t be defended, because those arguments are indefensible.

It ought to be transparent why Hoppe’s claims are offensive–and I’m frankly tired of seeing libertarians play innocent on the matter. Hoppe’s latest comments are only the latest in a long record, and I’m frankly baffled that Ilana Mercer or anyone else would take seriously the notion that describing the comments as only a generalization about how homos usually prefer immediate gratification more strongly than breeders is supposed to make it less offensive. Does anyone think that Hoppe’s left-field ad hominem argument–insinuations that poofery might explain errors in Lord Keynes’s economic thought that Hoppe finds particularly grave–is really a vital teaching tool? Or that it doesn’t make his other comments on homosexuality and gratification seem just a little, well, bigoted?

Churchill’s essay, for its part, is a farrago of confusions, logical fallacies, and flat-out lies. Most of the nits aren’t worth picking here; what is worth pointing out is that the central theme of the essay depends entirely on the claim that when America–that is, the American government–goes on a rampage around the world, we are acting like bullies, and so we have no grounds for complaint when we are ruthlessly slaughtered by people [who] push back. The problem here is that the people picked out by the we changes with every use: the people who did the rampaging and bullying are the government and its agents; the people who are complaining are, I guess, ordinary Americans; the people who were ruthlessly slaughtered were a couple of thousand workers, the overwhelming majority of them neither involved with the military nor holding any foreign policy position in the U.S. government, who happened to commit the terrible crime of going to work one Tuesday. But the people are not the government, and they are not owned by the government. They are mostly–we’re anarchists here, remember?–the victims of the government. We didn’t attack Iraq; we rarely if ever have meaningful control over the war-policy machine that has wrought so much misery in the Muslim world. The crimes of the United States government do not license crimes against civilians who happen to be in the United States; any more than the crimes of Osama bin Laden or Saddam Hussein license crimes against civilians who happen to be in Afghanistan, Iraq, or whatever other part of the Muslim world the Leviathan is planning to stomp through next.

Churchill’s critics have repeatedly been accused of misunderstanding his arguments and taking his words out of context. Now, I have read the whole essay through several times, but you never know. So perhaps one of Churchill’s defenders could explain to me exactly what the proper, contextual understanding of this is:

In sum one can discern a certain optimism — it might even be call humanitarianism — imbedded in the thinking of those who presided over the very limited actions conducted on September 11.

Their logic seems to have devolved upon the notion that the American people have condoned what has been/is being done in their name — indeed, are to a significant extent actively complicit in it — mainly because they have no idea what it feels like to be on the receiving end.

Or, while we’re at it, this:

And when they do, when they launch these airstrikes abroad — or may a little later; it will be at a time conforming to the “terrorists”‘ own schedule, and at a place of their choosing — the next more intensive dose of medicine administered here at home.

Of what will it consist this time? Anthrax? Mustard gas? Sarin? A tactical nuclear device?

That, too, is their choice to make.

During the HUAC era, many people in the U.S. were drummed out and blacklisted from teaching because they were genuinely associated with Stalinist parties in the United States. That was wrong; but you shouldn’t have to act like Stalinists were anything other than dupes or bloody-minded opportunists to make the case that the blacklisting and the anti-Communist witch hunts were wrong. The case for their academic freedom shouldn’t have been contingent on their having the right beliefs. And the same is true for both Churchill and Hoppe: the fact that they are wrong does not mean that they should be fired.

I’ll be writing a letter on behalf of both of them; defending both Churchill and Hoppe from the administrative goon squad is important. But we shouldn’t let a siege mentality dull critical thought. The reason Churchill and Hoppe are in hot water is that they made controversial statements which are rationally indefensible and deeply offensive. The problem is the administrative response to the controversy, not the controversy itself; the way to respond to terrible arguments, among rational adults, is with other arguments, not with politically-driven intimidation.

Let’s begin.

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