Talking of the 70’s, I just finished Kenneth Morgan’s biography of Michael Foot (UK). When I was about half way through, I told a good friend that it made me think worse of Foot, and this despite the fact that Morgan himself, while appropriately critical, is obviously a huge admirer. Now I’m done with the whole life (well, nearly the whole life, surely) I think better of him.

The book is full of surprises – even if some of them are ones that you vaguely knew before, but hadn’t really believed. His friendship with, and sponsorship by, Beaverbrook, was just the tip of an iceberg. I didn’t know that Foot became, in later life, a close friend of Ian Gilmour. I did, somehow, know that he was a friend of Enoch Powell’s, but it is surprising nevertheless, and what is particularly surprising is that they seem to have become friends, on Foot’s initiative, shortly after the “rivers of blood” speech (Radio 4 had a very good evaluation of Powell last year, during which the son of some Tory MP told about how his parents, previously good friends of Powell’s, turned Powell away from the door the day after the speech, and never spoke to him again, which indicates just how unacceptable the speech was). They collaborated closely both on defeating House of Lords reform (Foot wanted it abolished, not turned into a House of place-men), and, obviously, opposing entry to, and then staying in, the EEC. Another close friend was Randolph Churchill, who twice challenged him in Devonport; they became friends, apparently, during the first campaign, when Foot and Jill Craigie would frequently give Churchill rides back from events where his Conservative election workers, who disliked him, had abandoned him. The second campaign was, apparently, vicious, and yet the friendship remained solid. A lifelong Republican, who has refused any and all honours, he became friends with the Queen when he was party leader, and also with the Queen Mother, who apparently admired his good sense in wearing his donkey jacket to the Cenotaph for the Remembrance ceremony. There’s better still: some MI5 report is quoted as saying the Foot, Benn, Mikardo, Driberg, Heffer, Hart, Castle and David Owen were “Labour MPs who are believed to be Communists and are in positions of influence”. Brilliant.

There are also other, Foot-unrelated, surprises. For example, I didn’t know that it was the right wingers in the cabinet, rather than the left, who were most intransigent over accepting IMF terms in the 1976 crisis, nor that James Callaghan was the key cabinet member leading the campaign to defeat In Place of Strife. The revelation that Jack Jones “felt that Heath would have made a good Labour Prime Minister in other circumstances, with a stronger grasp of the working class world than Wilson ever had” says a lot about the political environment of the late 60’s and early 70’s.

But why did the book first make me think worse of Foot? There are revelations about his private life that I’d sooner not have known (not that I assumed he was a saint, or anything, its just that being presented with the flaws makes it hard to disregard them). Mainly, though, it is that Foot seems to have been politically irresponsible for most of his political career. He was constantly criticizing the leadership, but seems unconcerned with what the alternative courses of action were for the actors he criticizes. His interventions, frequently through pamphleteering, and often through public speaking, seem to be focused on personalities, and identifying betrayal, of movement, or ideals, or country, rather than on identifying an alternative direction and a course of action. Morgan emphasizes several times Foot’s lack of interest in economics, and of course it is not the case that everyone ought to be interested in economics, but he was a leader of a loose oppositionist movement from the mid-40’s to the mid-60’s that had, as a movement, no-one who was interested in economics, despite that being the key ground on which it was criticizing its leadership. Bevan, his hero, similarly posed no alternative, but he, at least, had the distinction of being the key person who built the one great lasting achievement of the Attlee government.

He was also, and seems to remain, unduly uncritical of his heroes. A series of them; Stafford Cripps, Beaverbrook, Bevan, and Indira Ghandi, he just seems to idolize, in a way that is not just bemusing, but also that distorts his judgment about political matters. I suppose his idolization of the Nehru family is the worst misjudgment, but the most consequential is his idolization of Bevan. Bevan was one of three personalities in the party whose ambition and disinterest in movement building kept the party out of power for 13 years, and kept it from being effective for much longer. Attlee hung onto the leadership as long as he did in order to prevent the poisonous Morrison becoming leader, and in the (vain) hope that Bevan would mature enough to assume the leadership. In the end Gaitskell became leader, but his more or less open war with Bevan which persisted until the late 1950’s made the party look entirely unprepared for power. Morgan conjectures (probably rightly) that had they both lived Bevan would have become a loyal senior cabinet member, but in a way that is irrelevant; the Bevanites could not (and would not have) made their peace with the party, but nor could they pose an alternative. Foot, by Morgan’s account, was the most loyal and troublesome Bevanite. From my perspective it looks as if the fight between the Bevanites and the Gaitskellites really was much more about personality than politics or policy (the pleasure that many of the Bevanites took in Wilson’s ascendancy to the leadership of the Party confirms this; his only merit for the Bevanites seems to have been that he was once one of them, and that seems to have been enough).

So why did I warm to him after all in the second half of the book? In a way this surprised me. I was first aware of politics in the very early seventies, when Foot was regarded as a villain in parts of the press, but was well-regarded in my home environment (not my parents so much, but my maternal grandmother, who was a child of the valleys and the General Strike). It was his oppostionism that earned him this status. But as a Minister he seems to have accepted the reality that he had no feasible alternative, and to have been loyal but critical. On top of that, he was, by Morgan’s account, a generous and hard working boss when a minister, who worked well with his civil servants and saw his job as representing the Unions in government. His leadership of the Labour Party was disastrous, and I am sure that if he could do it all again he would not have stood for the leadership when Callaghan vacated it. But the disaster was not of his making. Morgan conjectures that no-one else would have led the party better at that time, and there is no reason to disagree. Foot’s supporters in the election were not all from the left of the party; a few supporters were right wingers and centrists who thought that Healey was incapable of performing a leadership role and that Foot was a better bet (Philip Whitehead, and, apparently, Harold Wilson). Healey managed to fall out with a good number of right wingers, and treated the leadership election with a level of disinterest that alarmed some of his supporters; indication perhaps that he did not really want it, but regardless of that a bad sign in a future leader. Had Healey become leader (and Healey was the only real alternative), the civil war might have been much worse than it, in fact, was.

Another thing that made me think better of him was the discovery that his support for military action against Argentina was sincere. Now, I was an opponent of the Falklands War at the time (what a surprise), but I was not disgusted by Foot’s support of the war because I thought it was wrong, but because I thought it was mere opportunism (as, I still suspect, it was in many other Labour supporters). But Morgan points out that Foot’s strong reaction against the invasion of the Falklands pushed Thatcher to be more aggressive than she had been in public, and is convincing that it was a sincere reaction based on Foot’s own judgment. Even if I still thought the war was wrong (and I am not going to go into why I have changed my mind about this, so don’t ask – another post sometime down the line), knowing that he was not being opportunistic would make me think better of him. He made some terrible judgments (including his attack on Peter Tatchell, which Morgan deals with excellently) as leader, but for the most part it seems to me he was, like John Major after him, holding a poisoned chalice, and made a reasonable showing in a lousy situation.

All this makes it sound as if I am a moderate old Labour loyalist. But no; I’ve never actually been a member of the Labour Party, and my sympathies still lie with the left, rather than the centre and right of the party (though there are some people on the centre and right of the Party who I admire a great deal). I found that my reaction to Foot is not influenced by my political positions, but rather by an evaluation of the internal coherence of his positions.

One final, and for me rather alarming, revelation. I have long assumed that the person whose sartorial state my own is unconsciously modeled on is my dad. Not so. The pictures of Foot in the book show him dressed pretty much as I dress. Sensible shoes, white shirt, V-neck jumper or cardigan, tie on any but informal occasions, dark trousers usually stained (in my case by toothpaste rather than wine and food), tweed or other kind of sports jacket, generally a bit of a mess. Thank goodness for my wife that, unlike Foot’s (as Morgan reminds us several times), no-one is stupid or sexist enough to blame her for my sartorial condition.

I started blogging just under five years ago, and for the first few months, I kept marveling at my brand new toy.  The record of this marveling, unfortunately, is still in the blog archives for all to see: there are entire posts that read, Whoa!  Check it out!  Somebody responded to something I wrote! and d00d!  Twenty thousand readers in one month!  Inconceivable! This Inter-net is an amazing thing!  Yes, I really did hyphenate “inter-net.”  It was supposed to be really funny, you see, like something from the early twentieth-century issues of The Onion in Our Dumb Century.  Because whenever I want to suggest in shorthand that someone my age or older is clueless about new technologies, I refer to the “auto hyphen mobile,” after Our Dumb Century’s “auto-mobile,” and . . . oh, never mind.

The point is that sometimes, the internet really is an amazing thing, in which you write a blog post that takes issue with Peter Singer’s characterization of the capabilities of people with Down syndrome, and then find, a few weeks later, an email from Peter Singer in your inbox.  Last month, Singer wrote to say he’d come across my post about the SUNY - Stony Brook Cognitive Disability conference.  He said he was delighted to hear that my son Jamie has a wide range of abilities, intrigued to learn that Jamie understands a range of theories about why humans eat some animals and not others, but sorry that neither Jamie nor I appreciate Woody Allen movies—though he admitted that the recent ones have been disappointing.

Surely you’ll recall—my post was only two months ago!—that in the passage at issue, Singer wrote, “To have a child with Down syndrome is to have a very different experience from having a normal child. It can still be a warm and loving experience, but we must have lowered expectations of our child’s ability. We cannot expect a child with Down syndrome to play the guitar, to develop an appreciation of science fiction, to learn a foreign language, to chat with us about the latest Woody Allen movie, or to be a respectable athlete, basketballer or tennis player.”

Well, Singer wrote to me to say that my reply to this passage suggests that he is wrong about Down syndrome, whereas in fact it takes more than a couple of exceptional children here and there to challenge the general rule.  After all, the passage speaks of expectations, and although people do win the lottery now and again, it would be unreasonable to buy a lottery ticket and expect to win.  Professor Singer then asked me to direct him to some evidence that would indicate that Jamie is not anomalous—and, he said, this is not an idle challenge: if he is mistaken about Down syndrome, he will correct himself in the future.

I wrote back a few days later.  And then, after we’d exchanged another round of emails, I asked Singer if it would be all right with him if I posted my initial reply (but not his initial email) to the Inter-net. Of course, I don’t have to ask permission to post my own words, but I don’t believe in replying to someone’s private email by making a blog post out of it (even if I don’t publish the contents of the email).  Singer said thanks for asking—some people would have simply gone ahead and posted his letter along with the reply.  And I said, oh yes indeed, I’ve dealt with some of those people.  (That’s one reason why I eventually got a blog of my own!)  But I think it’s important to go public with arguments about what we can and can’t expect from people with Down syndrome, because those expectations play such a large role in debates over prenatal testing, reproductive rights, and “selective” abortion.

So, then, this was my reply:

Dear Professor Singer,

Many thanks for noticing that blog post, and for taking the time to write.  Thanks also for your kind words about Jamie.  I do, in fact, enjoy a handful of Woody Allen movies here and there; Broadway Danny Rose is a wonderful piece of work, and I’m fond of Bullets Over Broadway as well.  But I do think “we cannot expect a child with Down syndrome to chat with us about the latest Woody Allen film” instates a distinctly Upper West Side-y performance criterion, and is worth critiquing on those grounds alone.  More seriously, I note that in the 1920s we were told that people with Down syndrome were incapable of learning to speak; in the 1970s, we were told that people with Down syndrome were incapable of learning how to read.  OK, so now the rationale for seeing these people as somewhat less than human is their likely comprehension of Woody Allen films.  Twenty years from now we’ll be hearing “sure, they get Woody Allen, but only his early comedies—they completely fail to appreciate the breakthrough of Interiors.”  Surely you understand my sense that the goalposts are being moved around here in a rather arbitrary fashion.

I do appreciate the fact that you’re not issuing an idle challenge.  I don’t think you would do that.  I have three responses to it.

The first is nitpicky, and has to do with the meaning of “we cannot expect.”  You apparently take your phrase to mean “we have no reason to expect” X, any more than we can expect to win the lottery.  I take it to mean—and, unfortunately, all too many people take it to mean—that a child with Down syndrome will not be able to do any of the things you mention.  (This matters, of course, when it comes to the kind of information prospective parents receive after getting a positive result on an amniocentesis.)  I think there’s all the difference in the world between saying “we cannot expect” and “we should not expect”; the former suggests absolute certainty, and the latter suggests the kind of probabilism you want to convey.  Accordingly, I take the former to be falsifiable by any person with Down syndrome who demonstrates one of the abilities you say we cannot expect him or her to have.  If you do want to revise the passage ever so slightly, you could always say, “there will no doubt be exceptions that prove the rule, but as a rule, we should not expect etc.”

The second is more substantial.  The larger point of my argument with your claim is that we cannot (I use the term advisedly) know what to expect of children with Down syndrome.  Early-intervention programs have made such dramatic differences in their lives over the past few decades that we simply do not know what the range of functioning looks like, and therefore do not rightly know what to expect. That, Professor Singer, is the real challenge of being a parent of a child with Down syndrome: it’s not just a matter of contesting other people’s low expectations of your child, it’s a matter of recalibrating your own expectations time and time again—and not only for your own child, but for Down syndrome itself.  I’ll never forget the first time I saw a young man with Down syndrome playing the violin—quite competently, at that, with delicacy and a sense of nuance.  I thought I was seeing a griffin.  And who could have imagined, just forty or fifty years ago, that the children we were institutionalizing and leaving to rot could in fact grow up to become actors?  Likewise, this past summer when I remarked to Jamie that time is so strange that nobody really understands it, that we can’t touch it or see it even though we watch the passing of every day, and that it only goes forward like an arrow, and Jamie replied, “except with Hermione’s Time-Turner in Harry Potter,” I was so stunned I nearly crashed the car.  I take issue with your passage, then, not because I’m a sentimental fool or because I believe that one child’s surprising accomplishments suffice to win the argument, but because as we learn more about Down syndrome, we honestly—if paradoxically—don’t know what constitutes a “reasonable expectation” for a person with Down syndrome.

The third goes to the premise of your argument.  You’re looking for things people with Down syndrome can’t do, and I’m looking for things they can.  We each have our reasons, of course.  But I don’t accept the premise that cognitive capacity is a useful criterion for reading some people out of the human community, any more than you would accept the premise that we should grant rights to animals on the basis of whether humans think they do or don’t taste good with barbeque sauce.  I stand by what I said in response to Jeff McMahan’s paper and at the end of that blog post: I hope we have learned enough from our own history to understand why it’s a bad idea to read anyone out of the human community.  (This doesn’t mean, by the way, that we have to extend life support to people like Terri Schiavo against the wishes of their legal guardians.  One point of my remarks about surrogates and guardians, in my response to Martha Nussbaum’s talk, was to challenge people in the disability-rights community who would strip guardians of the right to determine whether their charges would in fact want to be sustained in such fashion.)  Better, I think, to add some animals to the category of rights-bearing entities without kicking any humans out.  It needn’t be a zero-sum affair.

Oh yes, evidence that might change your mind if the above paragraphs won’t.  The National Down Syndrome Society is full of useful information about what we can and can’t expect, and online, the Riverbend Dpwn Syndrome Parent Support Group is an amazing resource for everything from research on language and math skills of people with DS.  Finally, there’s the book Count Us In by Jason Kingsley and Mitchell Levitz (1994).  The book includes, among many other things, one of Jason’s high-school essays, written when he was seventeen; the topic is his mother’s obstetrician, who in 1974 had advised the Kingsley family to institutionalize Jason because he would never grow up to have a “meaningful thought.”  Of this obstetrician Jason writes:

He never imagined how I could write a book!  I will send him a copy . . . so he’ll know.  I will tell him that I play the violin, that I make relationships with other people, I make oil paintings, I play the piano, I can sing, I am competing in sports, in the drama group, that I have many friends and I have a full life.

So I want the obstetrician will never say that to any parent to have a baby with a disability any more.  If you send a baby with a disability to an institution, the baby will miss all the opportunities to grow and to learn . . . and also to receive a diploma.  The baby will miss relationships and love and independent living skills. . . .

I am glad that we didn’t listen to the obstetrician. . . .  He will never discriminate with people with disabilities again.

And then he will be a better doctor.

Anecdotal evidence, sure.  But good to think with, all the same.  Oh, and Jason’s not the young man I saw playing the violin.

All best wishes,
Michael Bérubé

___

*  Just for the record, for people unfamiliar with things I’ve written on these subjects:  my position on prenatal testing and selective abortion is here, my position on liberalism and selective abortion and l’affaire Schiavo is here and here, and Janet and I weighed in on the Schiavo debate here.

And since I believe in things like a woman’s right to terminate a pregnancy and a guardian’s right to withdraw life support from a charge, I think I should probably keep posting things in this vein every so often.  Because as I said in my contribution to the Cognitive Disability conference, I also believe in the right of people with developmental disabilities to eat too many donuts and take a nap—even as Janet and I insist to Jamie that he can have only one soda when he gets home from school.  I’m still working out just how much paternalism and liberalism and libertarianism I want in this mix, and I might as well work it on out in this medium, where I find myself with so many interlocutors.  And as Ophelia Benson pointed out a couple of years ago, I appear to have extra extra trouble working this out when children and religion are involved.  Funny how that works.

x-posted to my place.

I’ve been puzzling over this post by Steve Bainbridge for a few days. Steve vigorously denounces a suggestion by Michael Winters that Douglas Kmiec be appointed ambassador to the Vatican, saying that such an appointment would be an insult to the church.

I take it that, as a general rule, one should not choose ambassadors whose appointment will insult the country to which they are credentialed. One would not expect Obama to appoint a known anti-Zionist as ambassador to Israel, for example. Yet, while Winters and other pro-Obama US Catholics might delight in tweaking the Holy father by appointing Kmiec as ambassador to the Vatican, it would be tantamount to sending Norman Finkelstein to Israel. Doug Kmiec chose to turn his back on a life time of support for conservative and, in particular, pro-life causes to endorse Barack Obama. … Since the election, Kmiec has further angered pro-life Catholics by, among other things, his recent love letter of praise for Edward Kennedy. … His main role in public life now seems to be giving cover to pro-abortion rights Democrats. The Vatican has made clear that a Kmiec appointment would be most unwelcome … Obama may have won the vote of a majority of America’s cafeteria Catholics. Even so, to appoint Doug Kmiec as ambassador to the Holy See would be an insult to both the Vatican and to “serious, loyal” Catholics everywhere.

Now I know that these are issues that Steve takes very seriously, and while I disagree with Steve on most everything I respect him as someone who is smart and thoughtful. But I don’t see how an appointment of Kmiec could be taken as the strong and general insult to Catholicism that Steve suggests it would be. As best as I understand it, Kmiec’s support for Barack Obama clearly falls within the limits that the Catholic church has suggested are allowable (Kmiec continues to state his opposition to abortion, while suggesting that the question of whether Obama or McCain would have been the best person to lower abortion rates was a matter of prudential judgment, and that he personally plumped for Obama as the better prudential bet).

Certainly, the Catholic church hasn’t seen fit to start excommunication proceedings against him (a priest who refused him Communion was, quite rightly in my view, forced to send him a letter of apology) or to suggest that his views are in any way anathematic. The church has, as best as I understand it, carefully sought to avoid stating that support for Obama and other pro-choice candidates is sinful, while preserving its basic position that abortion is a grave evil.

This means, as best as I understand these matters, that Kmiec is a Catholic in perfectly good standing, no better or worse in the eyes of the church than those who adopt a more conservative position on these issues (to the best of my knowledge, the general class of ‘cafeteria Catholic’ has yet to be properly defined under canon law ;) ). In principle, the appointment of Kmiec should be no more or less insulting to either the Vatican (as a state governed by the Catholic church) or to the Pope (as head of the Catholic church) than the appointment of any other Catholic. Very obviously, Kmiec’s appointment might be construed as an insult to a particular (and quite powerful) conservative faction within Catholicism – but in the absence of a formal church statement to the contrary, that faction’s opinion of Kmiec’s position is no more binding than any other opinion within Catholicism’s internal debate on these issues.

Now there certainly is a prudential issue – to the extent that the Pope is (as he likely is) highly sympathetic to the conservative faction, Kmiec’s appointment might not be politically well-judged. But that’s an entirely different question to that of whether Kmiec’s appointment would be an insult to the church, which is what I understand Steve’s position to be. By the church’s own rules, I simply don’t see any grounds for judgment that Kmiec is a better or worse Catholic than any other person, and hence I don’t see where the insult lies. But perhaps there is something I’m not getting here.

NB - to commenters who want to chime in about the general irrationality of Catholicism and religion etc etc – thanks but no thanks. Your views may or may not be correct, but they are surely entirely predictable and hence unlikely to add much conversational benefit.

This article is mostly about the Bush Administration’s rush to put a new workplace unsafety rule in place:

The Labor Department is racing to complete a new rule, strenuously opposed by President-elect Barack Obama, that would make it much harder for the government to regulate toxic substances and hazardous chemicals to which workers are exposed on the job. The rule, which has strong support from business groups, says that in assessing the risk from a particular substance, federal agencies should gather and analyze “industry-by-industry evidence” of employees’ exposure to it during their working lives. The proposal would, in many cases, add a step to the lengthy process of developing standards to protect workers’ health.

Because we all know businesses oppose cumbersome federal regulations, right? Except when they can be made maximally cumbersome, and thus wholly ineffective. But the best part of the article is later:

The Labor Department rule is among many that federal agencies are poised to issue before Mr. Bush turns over the White House to Mr. Obama. One rule would allow coal companies to dump rock and dirt from mountaintop mining operations into nearby streams and valleys. Another, issued last week by the Health and Human Services Department, gives states sweeping authority to charge higher co-payments for doctor’s visits, hospital care and prescription drugs provided to low-income people under Medicaid. The department is working on another rule to protect health care workers who refuse to perform abortions or other procedures on religious or moral grounds.

Other rules under review include an OSHA rule that CEOs be allowed to kick a small child, kitten or puppy at least once per day or after particularly stressful meetings; a DoE directive encouraging nuclear power stations to seize public school playgrounds for temporary waste processing; and the permenantizing of a Department of the Interior Program allowing pilots of fire-fighting aircraft to practice drops in the off season in built-up areas using otherwise idle stocks of waste engine oil, sewage or medical waste as needed.

I have a Bloggingheads on the Mumbai attacks with Sumit Ganguly, an expert on Indian politics at University of Indiana. Since Sumit, unlike me, knows a whole lot about the background and likely consequences, the format is more like an interview than a dialogue. Click below to see it (or here for the home site).

To Bristol’s Victoria Rooms last night for a fine performance of Mahler 6 by the University Orchestra. The moments when the hammer strikes in the final movement were visually, as well as musically, dramatic. Chatting afterwards, I learnt that the conductor had made a special trip to west London, to collect the hammer and its accompanying table. It is a great big mallet like-thing with a very long shaft. It turns out that there’s a special Mahler 6 hammer, there’s only one in the country, and orchestras hire it as necessary. So you couldn’t perform two Mahler 6s on the same evening in different parts of the UK, at least not with the hammer. Does each country have a dedicated Mahler 6 hammer as the UK seems to?

Can’t imagine how we missed this the first time around …

Over lunch not long after Summers took over the presidency in 2001, Ellison said, Summers suggested that some funds should be moved from a sociology program to the Kennedy School, home to many economists and political scientists. ‘’President Summers asked me, didn’t I agree that, in general, economists are smarter than political scientists, and political scientists are smarter than sociologists?” Ellison said. ‘’To which I laughed nervously and didn’t reply.”

Via Josep Colomer.

… I have a lot of T-shirts, almost none of them bought in clothes shops. They celebrate or advertise defunct sporting teams, (mostly) unsuccessful political campaigns, obsolete versions of operating systems and long-gone folk music festivals. What’s in your wardrobe?

As part of a minor project aimed at eliminating the cliche “the very real concerns of the white working class” (the latest weaselly codeword for people who want to gain the political benefits[1] of playing anti-immigrant politics while avoiding any of the costs) from British political life through a campaign of sustained mockery and invective, I had an article up on the Guardian blog last week. A digression that I probably should have edited out of it, but in fact liked so much that I not only left it in but am posting it here now, concerned the sunset of what was once an important subsector of the British social work profession in places like Kilburn and Camden Town:

Quite a few people who got jobs as social workers in the 1970s and 1980s (and thus who must be approaching retirement now) built their careers around the (at the time, entirely sensible) belief that Irish people were a systematically disadvantaged ethnic group, who could reasonably be expected to have low educational achievement, low average incomes, frequent experience of illegal discrimination and higher incidences of all sorts of social problems. They also tended to hang around particular urban ghettoes in London and other major UK cities, providing a steady demand for the services of local authority workers of all sorts.

Nobody likes it when that sort of thing happens to them, and there’s no particular reason why a similar crisis couldn’t afflict an organisation like the Equality and Human Rights Commission – which is presumably why Phillips is so keen to add the “white working class” to his equivalent of the list of endangered species. After all, ethnic minority populations come and go, some of them develop and get privileged on you, but the white working class is here to stay. Particularly if you define “white working class” in such a manner that it’s impossible for it not to be an underprivileged group in need of special help; the kids I see on the train every morning coming in to staff the back offices of investment banks are white, and they’re working class, but they’re not what politicians mean by “the white working class”.

One can take this sort of analysis too far; if you look at everything through Public Choice Economics-coloured spectacles you’re going to end up with a very strange and very incorrect view of the world. But it’s a good idea to put on those spectacles once in a while. One shouldn’t underestimate the influence of pure and simple careerism on an awful lot of those strange political trends and schemes which appear to have inexorable momentum despite the fact that nobody seems to want them.

[1] The presumed political benefits, that is; there is really very little evidence that playing the anti-immigrant game has done any good for anyone in British politics in the last fifty years. One would have thought that Michael Howard’s destruction testing of “are you thinking what I’m thinking?” in the 2005 election would have put this one to bed, but no, there’s Phil Woolas (a nasty piece of work in my opinion and altogether too keen to inherit the “man of the people” mantle of David Blunkett[2]), kicking off. Note in this context too that “curbs on non-EU immigration” is a fraud as well as a nasty piece of dog-whistle politics; all three major UK political parties are (in my opinion, correctly) in favour of supporting Turkey’s accession to the EU, and Turkey is a country with twice the population of Poland and 65% of its GDP per capita. So even if we were to accept the premise that the “white working class” existed as a meaningful category and had strong interests in curbing non-white-Christian immigration to the UK (which I don’t), it’s very clear that any and all of these promises to reduce it over the next ten years are flat out lies. It’s almost impossible to overstate how nasty, dishonest and counterproductive this kind of politics really is.

[2] By the way, “Hampstead liberals” makes a reappearance in that interview. Why is it always the Hampstead ward of the London Borough of Camden that’s the synecdoche for out-of-touch rootless cosmopolites who don’t understand the real people of the white working class? Can anyone remind me which ethnic/religious community is quite heavily represented in that ward? Are you thinking what I’m thinking?

Victor Davis Hanson: “George Bush is neither the source of all our ills nor the “worst” president in our history.”

It says something that even Bush’s die-hard defenders implicitly concede that assessing his legacy is going to be a matter of wrangling over the semantics of ‘worst’.

Full disclosure: I’m married to a woman who is descended from James Buchanan, so it may be that I am over-eager to see the mantle of ‘worst’ pass to another family line, freeing my offspring from the stain of shame.

I can’t believe I beat Josh Marshall to this one. Check out this preview page for #3 of the new Top 10 run. To the right, in the center panel, see an elongated Don Young with ‘AK Mink’ – Alaska Mink – on his spandex. (See this old TPM post for backstory.) Also, Newt Gingrich is there. Of course I know all this because like a sensible person I listened to the John Siuntres Word Balloon podcast interview with Gene Ha, the artist for Top 10.

If you don’t know: Top 10 was an Alan Moore-authored series now being written and drawn by two of the original artists, Zander Cannon having shifted to writing. And so this seems like an appropriate time to reflect on the fact that Alan Moore is famous, and everyone has heard of Watchmen and V for Vendetta and League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. But I like a lot of other Moore work as much, if not better. Top Ten [amazon] is a police procedural set in a world in which everyone has super powers. Brilliance ensues on many levels. And Moore’s Supreme books (the first of which is out of print, but available at reasonable prices) may be my favorite Moore work of all. (I think Belle will even back me up on this one. She likes Supreme.) But everyone reads Watchmen and no one reads Supreme. In fact, in a Word Balloon podcast a month or so ago, it emerged that neither John Siuntres nor Jeff Parker, the writer for the new Age of the Sentry books (check out the previews) had read Supreme. Very strange. You should read Moore’s Tom Strong, too.

I’m embarrassed to note that seemingly we’ve never written about Global Voices on CT before. It’s a global citizens’ media project that focuses on areas of the world often ignored by mainstream media in the US and Europe. Just recently, I was talking to its co-founder Ethan Zuckerman about how at times of sudden events in otherwise less covered areas, interest in the site peaks. This may be one of those times. They are posting and linking to information about the events in Mumbai that may be of interest to those looking for additional resources.

I haven’t had time to digest the implications of this story which has been around for at least a month, but only now seems to be attracting attention (I’ve seen it in a few different places today). Apparently, short sellers in the US Treasury bond market are failing to deliver the securities they’ve sold. As long ago as 1 October, the shortfall was more than $2 trillion by one report. Via Felix Salmon, here’s Helen Avery in Euromoney.

I’m not an expert on this stuff, but it seems to raise the question of whether bond markets can or should continue to exist in their current form. Maybe the US and other Treasuries should be selling bonds directly, and offering repurchase options to provide liquidity, perhaps using the banks they’ve already part-nationalised to handle the mechanics.

If you had any doubt that we were back in the seventies, the I learned today from the BBC iplayer, that they have resurrected Terry Nation’s apocalyptic series Survivors. Even the leading characters have their original names (though I gather there are major plot differences). Here’s the script for the first episode. Here’s the website, and here’s the blog. The brilliant original is on DVD , and should please any of your older relatives for Christmas. Now, can we have 1990 and Doomwatch back please? (Oh, and I know that the BBC wiped almost all of Doomwatch, bloody vandals, but if they didn’t wipe 1990 it would be nice to have that on DVD too).

Terry Gross had Bill Ayers on Fresh Air last week. The page is here, or you can cut straight to the show.

As I indicated in my comments on The Company You Keep, I am not pre-disposed to be sympathetic to Weather or its members, being inclined to see the turn to violence in a liberal democracy as not only elitist and self-indulgent, but also reckless about the effects on other people on the left. I am not a pacifist, and understand that sometimes violence is legitimate if there is a prospect of it preventing something much worse; the idea that a campaign of violence by a small group of leftists could have contributed to ending the Vietnam War seems as fantastic to me. My own political formation took place much later (I’m younger even than Obama), but none of my friends who were politically active on the far left in the 60’s and remain active today have a good opinion of Weather, and their views of the matter lead me to suspect that had I been around then my disposition to them would be more actively hostile than it, in fact, is.

But during the campaign I was struck, and rather impressed, by the discipline with which Ayers refrained from taking advantage of the moment for his own ends.

I assumed that it was because, like the rest of us, he did not want to cause trouble for his favoured candidate, even though his politics are very different from the candidate’s (when my daughter suggested that I get a “Socialists for Obama” button, I tried to explain why that was probably not a good idea, but couldn’t quite get it across). This is not the reason he gives to Terry Gross, but then I guess it would be a bit self-defeating, even after the fact, to give that reason if it were your reason.

Otherwise, I’m curious what people make of the interview. His attitude toward the activities of the Weather Underground still seems somewhat cavalier. For example, he says that they planted bombs only to go off when there was a very small chance that anyone would be around, and gave plenty of warning, and that they withdrew from bombing when they suspected the the bomb that killed Diana Oughton had been made to take lives, not just to destroy property (maybe I’m not quoting him exactly, I haven’t gone back to listen; it seems obvious that it was made to take lives). They were young, I suppose, but it seems both naive and arrogant to suppose that once you start making bombs none among your number will seek to take life; and reckless to suppose that just because you give plenty of warning no-one will be killed. If you place a high value on not killing innocents, you do not set bombs anywhere; if you just place a pretty high value on not killing innocents you remain physically present until the bomb detonates. It was moral luck, and not good judgment, that they did not kill anyone, and I wish that Terry Gross had pushed him harder on that. She did push him on whether he was willing to apologize for his actions in the 60’s and he, all but categorically, refuses to apologise, arguing, implicitly (and rightly), that there is a lot more to apologise for than what he did, and suggesting that he would apologise only in the context of a generalised process of truth and reconciliation. (I know people who I am certain did much worse things than Ayers did, and who will never apologise because they believe that they have nothing at all to apologise for in any context). Still, I’d have liked her to push him on what he would apologise for if he were apologising. What, exactly, is at stake in refusing to answer that question? I’d also like an entirely separate interview with him on school reform, and request that, if she does so, she refrain entirely from mentioning his involvement in the 1960’s.

Gideon Rachman says what I’ve been thinking.

In fact, I would even argue that the G8 was quite well-placed to see off the upstart G20 - were it not for one thing. Next year it will be presided over by that one-man wrecking crew, Silvio Berlusconi, the prime minister of Italy. Berlusconi has a “sense of humour” that makes him a uniquely disastrous chair for international organisations. His presidency of the European Union in 2003 was catastrophic. He caused uproar in the European Parliament by comparing a German politician to a Nazi concentration-camp guard. In an official photo, he made the sign of the cuckold’s horns behind the head of a Spanish minister. He opened a summit designed to discuss the future of Europe by suggesting to his fellow leaders that they discuss women and football instead. Then he turned to the chancellor of Germany, Gerhard Schroeder, and suggested that he should open the discussion since he had been married four times. Amazingly enough, Schroeder did not see the funny side.

Not that any of this is likely to hurt his domestic approval ratings or anything (the public persona he has constructed for himself is quite extraordinary), but it certainly should be interesting to watch from a safe distance.

There’s an article on the Netflix Prize in the Times today. You know, where Netflix made half of its ratings data available to people and offered a million bucks to anyone who could write a recommendation algorithm that would do some specified percent better than Netflix’s own. What tripped me up was this sentence about one of the more successful teams:

The first major breakthrough came less than a month into the competition. A team named Simon Funk vaulted from nowhere into the No. 4 position, improving upon Cinematch by 3.88 percent in one fell swoop. Its secret was a mathematical technique called singular value decomposition. It isn’t new; mathematicians have used it for years to make sense of prodigious chunks of information. But Netflix never thought to try it on movies.

Can this possibly be true? I’d have thought that just about the most obvious way to look for some kind of structure in data like this would be to do a principal components analysis, and PCA is (more or less) just the SVD of a data matrix. PCA is a quite straightforward technique (evidence for this includes the fact that I know about and use it myself). It’s powerful, but it’s not like it’s some kind of slightly obscure method that isn’t ever applied to data of this kind. And there’s a whole family of related and more sophisticated approaches you could use instead. If you’d asked me about the prize before I read this article, I would naively have said “Well, it’s this effort to get people to help Netflix do better than I guess anyone could using something like bog-standard PCA.”

Maybe the article just got written up in a way that misrepresents the contribution of the team who introduced the method to the data. Or maybe I am misunderstanding something. I guess I should page Cosma and see what he thinks.

A little something about the whole ‘Obama needs to be cautious because this is still a center-right nation’ thingamajig. (Hilzoy derides it; Sirota has been tracking it; Ramesh Ponnuru questioned the intelligibility of the proposition. No doubt you’ve noticed some of this discussion going around.)

Way back two years ago, I blogged a review of Micklethwait and Wooldridge’s Right Nation. Here was my verdict: “The authors basically have a Louis Hartz ‘liberal consensus’ argument. Do a change-all ‘liberal’ to ‘conservative’. Which is really a substitution they ought to think through a bit harder. Since they cite much of the same evidence Hartz cited for his thesis way back when.”

Consider “Liberalism in America: A Note for Europeans” by Arthur ‘vital center’ Schlesinger, written in 1956, anthologized in The Politics of Hope [amazon]. He takes a Hartzian view. “In a sense all of America is liberalism.” That’s the first line, establishing a certain ‘who’s your daddy?’ dominance. Then what follows is ostensibly more moderate:

Accepting the theory of America as essentially a liberal society, how can one distinguish the liberal and conservative tendencies within that society? Some of the New Conservatives tell us that the liberal believes in the perfectibility of men, while the conservative has a conviction of human fallibility and of original sin. Yet no one has preached more effectively to this generation of the reality of human imperfection than the liberal (in politics, at least) Reinhold Niebuhr, while it was Andrew Carnegie, a conservative, who used to say of man that there was no “conceivable end to his march to perfection.” And it would be hard to argue, for example, that the words of Dwight D. Eisenhower, the conservative, show a greater sense of the frailty of human striving or the tragedy of the human condition than those of the liberal Adlai Stevenson.

Similarly, it is difficult to believe that the crucial distinction lies in the attitude toward the role of the state. Thus the conservatives Alexander Hamilton and John Quincy Adams and the liberal Franklin D. Roosevelt agreed in advocating government direction of the economy, while the liberal Thomas Jefferson and the conservative Herbert Hoover agreed in wishing to limit the power of the state.

Nor does the distinction lie in the question of civil freedom. Some liberals have been majoritarians with a limited concern for the rights of minorities; some conservatives have been valiant defenders of the liberties of conscience and expression. Nor does it even really lie in the question of private property. While conservatives have been the more vigilant champions of private property, liberals have perhaps stood more consistently for the rights of property in Locke’s original sense of a product of nature with which man mixes his labor.

All this ambiguity and even interchangeability of position testify once again to the absence of deep differences of principle in American society. “Each is a great half,” wrote Emerson of the liberal and the conservative, “but an impossible whole. Each exposes the abuses of the other but in a true society, in a true man, both must combine.” In elaborating on the character of each “great half,” Emerson went on to define the diverging tendencies which liberalism and conservatism have embodied within the American consensus. His distinction, I think, is still useful today.

But when it comes to political dominance, there is no question which half is which.

Even under a conservative administration, these liberal impulses will continue to have effect. Even the Republican party, on the whole, is “conservative” only in the special American sense. For all its tendencies toward ignorance and self-righteousness, that party is far from blind reactions and will, in the end, accept the arbitrament of reason and debate.

A couple years later, Schlesinger had a lot of this liberal wind knocked out of him.

It’s interesting that we are getting so much reverse Schlesingerism from conservatives now. Maybe I’ll follow up later with a bit more analysis. Rhetorically, it’s pretty simple, although a bit inconsistent: you do your best to dismiss/denature your opponent’s philosophy as, at once, foreign to the American political tradition – hence inevitably shallow-rooted in this soil. And as merely a shallow-rooted ‘me-too’ imitation of authentic American political traditions and values. So conservatives can shift from tarring Obama as a dangerous European Muslim socialist to downplaying him as a conservative copycat (he wants tax cuts!) without missing a beat. But liberals like Hartz and Schlesinger did much the same for quite a while there. (Schlesinger is actually a clearer case.) Intellectually, it’s a bit more complicated. I think I’ll leave it at that for tonight.

This post on a question-begging argument in favour of carbon taxes and against an emissions trading scheme, naturally raised (!) the question of whether the correct interpretation of a phrase like “begging the question” is determined by the predominant usage or by its original derivation as a technical term in logic or maybe by some other criterion such as the efficiency of communication.

That set me thinking and I turned to the usual research tools Wikipedia and Google to look at how this phrase and a couple of other standard items for debate (“aggravate” and “metholodogy”) are actually used.

Before I start, I’ll declare my biases. In my view the difference between the “annoy” and “make worse” meanings of “aggravate” is simply one of dialect. There are perfectly good substitutes like “irritate” and “exacerbate” for either meaning. However, in my dialect “aggravate” means “make worse”. The common use of “begs the question” is a natural error, and the technical translation of “petitio principii” is not at all intuitive. Still, there’s no good substitute (“circular argument” doesn’t quite do, in my view). Finally, “metholodogy” for “method” is indefensible. It’s pretentious, ignorant and wipes out an important (if not always clear-cut) distinction.

Looking at Google (results depend on location so YMMV), I found lots of uses of “aggravate” in its original sense, very few for “annoy” and a fair number of grammar articles explaining the difference, and taking different views on prescription. My guess is that the “annoy” sense is on the way out in spoken as well as written/typed English.

On “begging the question”, I found lots of “raise the question” uses, lots of dispute about the correct use, mostly favouring the technical use (here’s CT’s John Holbo, for example), and not very many correct technical uses. Despite this, I’m going to guess that the technical use will win out in the long run. The main reason is that, given the availability of “raise the question”, users of “beg the question” as a substitute are on a hiding to nothing[1]. At best, the error will pass un-noticed, but there is still nothing gained. At worst, you’ll get picked up on it, and if you try a descriptivist defence, get hammered for that too. This is much more likely to happen on the Internet than if, say, you’re a TV interviewer (where the usage seems to have been popularised), a point to which I’ll return.

Finally, with “methodology”, there are few more correct uses, but a great many more incorrect ones, and only occasional discussion of the issue. What’s more the erroneous uses are predominantly in high-status sources, such as government reports and academic publications, which makes it less likely that users will feel marked as poorly educated (although, in this respect they are). I’d say that the method/methodology distinction is a lost cause, and that we will end up having to use something convoluted like “philosophy of scientific method”. About the only sign of hope here is that “methodological” is much more commonly used correctly, particularly in constructions like “methodological individualism”.

Coming finally to the title of the post, I think that, just as the arrival of print greatly slowed the rate of linguistic drift, the Internet is already acting to discourage misuse of technical terms. On the other hand, I think it’s accelerating the demise of certain kinds of grammar snarks, such as bans on split infinitives or objections to the now-standard uses of “hopefully” (analogous with “fortunately” and many others) and “data” as a mass noun rather than as a Latin plural (compare “agenda”). Finally, FWIW, it’s doing a lot to encourage acceptance of acronyms initialisms.

fn1. A specific kind of no-win situation. Literally, it’s a bet where you can either lose a lot (cop a hiding), or win nothing, for example taking on a contest where you are expected to win easily, so that you gain no credit from victory, and are disgraced by defeat. Language Hat.

It appears that The Monkey Cage, a blog that I contribute to together with a bunch of other political scientists, has been domain squatted. Hence, it will no longer be themonkeycage.org, unless we somehow manage to get it back (fat chance). As soon as the domain name propagates (probably 24 hours or so) it will be http://themonkeycage.net. Those of you who read the blog please update accordingly – I’d be grateful if those of you who have blogs that are likely to be read by Monkey Cage readers passed on the information about the new URL.

UPDATE: It looks as though the problem isn’t as bad as I had thought – one of my co-bloggers (who shall remain nameless) had forgotten to renew the URL GoDaddy screwed up the renewal of the URL and it is simply going to the registrar’s home page. So the old URL should be back soon – but the new one will work too.