John & Belle Have A Blog

People of Iest! I Have a Message From the Most Holy!

Read an interview with the crazy, crazy, crazy Dave Sim here.

As I got closer to the end of Cerebus, I started examining it as if it were a math problem. I got X and Y figured out and made some progress structurally, and then I hit the brick wall of feminism. I live in a society that believes feminism is workable. They literally won't read anything unless it's founded on an outright lie.

Did I mention he was crazy? (Yeah, I like Cerebus, too.)

Commies Kick it Old School

It's nice to see the old timey Communist traditions being upheld in today's Russia:

Russia's wealthiest man, Mikhail Khodorkovsky, in prison on fraud and tax evasion charges, praised President Vladimir Putin in a newspaper article published Monday and called for higher taxes on businesses.
In the article published in the business daily Vedomosti, Khodorkovsky criticized himself and other tycoons for failing to help the poor and for insufficient patriotism. He also criticized the post-Soviet privatization policies that made him rich.

Mmm, essays of self-criticism from people in jail. Really takes you back, doesn't it? In unrelated news, I learn that John and Belle Have a Blog (along with all its Typepad brethren) is now banned in China (via Hit and Run). And just when we were singing the glories of Sichuan dumplings and the Monkey King! My next recipe is coming straight from Taiwan, I tell you.

As it appears that we can't defeat the Monkey at this time, I suggest it would be better to grant him the empty title of 'The Greatest Sage'

And it just gets worse for the Jade Emperor from there.

There was something I meant to add to my Drunken Monkey post but didn't bother to type out; it dovetails with comments I have been getting to my Cerebus Post. Might as well get it said.

Dumplin's

I am still on (modified) bed-rest, and definitely becoming weary under the 95% boredom/5% terror regime of problem pregnancy. (Yes, I'm feeling sorry for myself, but everything is really fine, baby is fine, etc. Feel free to think kind thoughts, especially about John, who has to feel stressed out and grade papers. Tricksy ssstudentses--we hates them!) So, I can't actually cook anything. But you can! I suggest you make these tasty Sichuan dumplings. Easy peasy, and you will really impress people. (Actually, now that I think about it, I recall reading that the US has been banning imports of Sichuan peppercorns over concerns about some citrus canker they could theoretically spread, but I understand that if you go to your local Chinatown you can still find them. There is no substitute for their weird taste, but black pepper would be OK.) As always, DON'T OVERSTUFF. This is the secret of all dumpling-making. I regularly fail to heed my own advice here.

Lucky?

For those readers who don't live in the States or didn't watch Clarke's performance on Meet the Press, some nice person is hosting it here (as well as a hilarious Daily Show treatment of the 9/11 hearings). Very impressive indeed. So the short answer to the Instapundit's unnecessarily crack-smoking question,"THE TOTAL COLLAPSE OF RICHARD CLARKE: Does Karl Rove pay these guys, or is Bush just preternaturally lucky where his critics are concerned?" would be "no and no".

Congratulations - it's a meme!

We've been slashdotted. Cigars all around, because this proves 'and a pony' is a true meme; (or, as folks used to say, a catchphrase or useful saying.)

So when our site goes down in a day due to bandwidth exhaustion, our old readers - who can't see all the slashdotters buzzing about them like hornets - will know the reason why.

Slashdotters may be curious to read the two follow-up posts (here and here) to the pony original.

The moon fairy waved her wand and the dictionary opened and read to wisen the evening

A couple people have emailed to thank me kindly for the link to The Young Visiters. You are quite welcome. I actually posted before about the genius of Daisy Ashford - long ago, before we had readers. I also strongly recommended another work, Crippled Detectives, by Lee Tandy Schwartzman, from which I take the title for tonight's post. I love it for the Mamet-rewrites-Enid-Blyton-as-Memento dialogue, plus metaphysical poetry. If you've nothing else to do of a Saturday night, I suggest a class of fine wine; and, as they say, a reading of the whole thing.

Kid hangs up bunny suit at 300

Just discovered Long story;short pier. (Into the blogroll with him, whoever he may be.) This is a very fine post. If you don't quite get it, go read Cerebus for ten years or at least a 1000 pages to appreciate why March 2004 is such a milestone. (You can get some flavor from this abridged version. And this guy has some scans.)

Me? I fell off the bus round about Women.

When I got to Singapore I discovered my High Society and Church & State vol. II had gone missing in transit. Been meaning to replace them. Those are damn fine books. Dirty Fleagle and Dirty Drew. The wuffa-wuffa-wuffa guy, Moon Roach and Sergeant Preston, the Secret Sacred Wars. Gimpsee doodle. (Oh, wait. That was back in the "Beguiled" parody in no. 23. Ooh, right here on the shelf. Reread that one later.) Too bad about Sim going stark raving. Sigh. Bad soldier, bad soldier. Pretty much why I never made it past Women. But he's still a true genius, just for his phonetic transcriptions of Mick and Keef. Wonder what he's going to do now?

Like the albino said, back in issue 4: "Sooner or later you'll have to take off the bunny suit, kid - then, I say, then where will you be?"

"A Monkey that is Inebriated is the Most Funny"

I've just watched two pieces of Hong Kong cinema - one good, one bad. One marks a return to all the things that make classic kung-fu flicks fun. The other is all cynicism and obtuseness, competing to see which will manage to jettison more of that good old stuff to make room for Hollywood cliches, which are neither fully funded nor understood; with the result that the thing looks - and feels - like an expensive commercial for the next generation of mobile phones hallucinating it is an X-Men movie.

The good is Drunken Monkey; the bad is Silverhawk. (Michelle Yeoh can't seem to follow up "Crouching Tiger" with anything. Someone should give her a role.)

I don't know how available these films are in the states. They are major releases out here, and "Monkey" showed at Cannes. Well, anyway - worth getting your paws on. Check out the trailers and galleries via the link above. (This promo trailer is particularly classy.)

The director/star of "Monkey" is Liu Chia Liang, a true veteran of the industry (but I don't really know about these things.) He's over 60, and he's got this great assymetrical sag of a monkey-clown face, but with a steely Clint Eastwood glint. And he's still got the moves. (You see lots of great stills in the galleries.) The movie is sort of a cross between "Drunken Master" and "Unforgiven" - lots of indestructible-old-man-fu and leather duster-fu. (That's the "Unforgiven" part, with fu on top.) But goofy. And everyone is obviously having so much fun making it that they didn't bother to remember they set it in the 30's, so there's a basketball scene that is most anachronistic. And people wearing suits and shirts that obviously just came off the rack at the Gap. But they are having fun, and we like them, so we are having fun.

And all astonishments blow up the world

Ray (who is necessary in all possible worlds) has left comments to various imaginative resistance posts. His criticisms merit a lengthy response (well, if you think long posts about imaginative resistance are a good thing. If not, you know what to do.)

A Dose of Dosa

It's nice to see that New Yorkers can finally eat South Indian and other Indian vegetarian cuisine. I won't be satisfied until all America has the same acess to idlis and masala dosas as it does to chicken tikka masala and lamb vindaloo. Of course, this is all no problem for me, because I live in Singapore. Now that I read this article I am so hungry to go to Komala Vilas, but I'm stuck on bed rest. Mmmm, spongy little idlis. When I went to India after college graduation with one of my friends, some of the best food we had was on the train. At every station there are people selling food, and you can hear their distinctive chants as they wander up and down the train: "Ooommmlette omlette omeletteomletomlet!" Or, "Iiiiiidli idli idlidlidli." They would give you the idlis wrapped up in newspaper, and another little paper package with the fiery sambar in one half and coconut chutney in the other. Heaven.

*Safety conscious folks may wonder if you won't get all sorts of diseases from eating Indian street or train food. Yes, but it is still worth it. I draw the line at pre-cooked things with lots of flies around, but I figure anything which has just emerged from boiling oil has got to be OK.

Morally deviant fictional worlds - or, My own idear is that these things are as piffle before the wind

I owe Brian Weatherson a response. He must settle for a downpayment in the form of a question. Does Weatherson admit the fictional world of Daisy Ashford's The Young Visiters is morally deviant? I find it to be so. Take, for example, the following passage (chosen almost at random) from Chapter 4, in which Mr. Salteena is informed by the earl of clincham that he can be made a gentleman for £42.

Such a hare is madness the youth, to skip o'er the meshes of good counsel the cripple

Lou Marinoff - the man who would be the philosopher-king of counseling - has come in for some understandable ribbing (from Belle and others) for his unflattering NY Times profile. I actually know the man. Well, met him. He gave a talk to the NUS philosophy department a while back (about his own project, but also on a theme Matt Yglesias briefly mentions: philosophy is a technical discipline, not a dispensary of life wisdom, but 'twas not always so.) Then a bunch of us went to dinner and chatted at great length

Put Me Down For Plato And Prozac

From the NYT magazine: "Does a doctorate in philosophy give you license to practice a new kind of talk therapy?"

Answer: No.

Following the Poor Man, this has been an Easy Answer to an Unnecessarily Complicated Question TM. (Post updated to remove excess snark.)

I Shall Call Him -- Mini-Me

The Washington Post regales us today with the Great South Carolina Minibottle Mystery. As detailed in the article, it is written into the South Carolina constitution that hard liquor may only be served from minibottles in bars (frankly, banning gay marriage would be a step up in constitutional seriousness.) Oh well, better that than seceding from the Union, I guess. Now, the bartender must pour out the whole contents of the bottle, meaning that S.C. drinks are pretty stiff at 1.7 ounces of hard liquor per drink. Further a Long Island Iced Tea ends up big:

Because [Charleston bartender] Keller is forbidden to pour a partial minibottle, a Long Island Iced Tea -- made of vodka, rum, tequila, gin and triple sec -- gets so big that it has to be served in a pitcher and contains 8.5 ounces of liquor. The lightweights pull up to his bar and ask for "two split three ways or one split two ways," and Keller takes care of them, wedging a minibottle between his fingers and casually flipping them backhanded to pour.

Even though I'm from South Carolina, I've never spent any time drinking in bars there; my dad lives right on the GA border, so we would go to bars in Savannah instead. Plus, much of my family is composed of strict tee-totalling pot-smokers (really, don't ask.) So I don't know the answer to some obvious questions. Such as, is the South Carolina martini legally composed of (shudder) equal parts gin and vermouth? What about a Cosmo? Do you have to order four or five at a time, thus buying five minibottles of vodka and one of Cointreau? And, John wants to know, is there a special, delicate, fencing-like art to S.C. bar-fights, in which people break off minibottles and circle warily around looking for the chance to gouge out an eye? Any fellow South Carolinians want to help me out here (provided you're not Clemson fans)? I know plenty of S.C. alcoholics, but they all nurse cases of beer and bottles of Maker's Mark at home, so they can fire guns randomly without getting into much trouble, like honest Southerners (I'm looking at you, Moore).

Lead Paint -- Delicious But Deadly!

Nicholas Kristof has a depressing column today about women dying in childbirth, and Bush administration cuts to our (already feeble) funding of efforts to combat the problem. This is the kind of thing that makes me reflect on how much I loooove modern medicine. I have a good friend who is a doula, and another friend who gave birth at home to a 9+ pound baby. When I hear them talk about how childbirth is a natural process that doesn't need to be overmedicalized, I always think, yeah, OK, you know what's natural? Dying in childbirth, that's what. I would never, ever want to give birth at home, though I think people should be allowed to if they want, and if some responsible doctor deems it's safe. Give me some of that sweet hospital loving! I want teams of white-suited neo-natal specialists standing by in the NICU, just in case. And pain relief! I had planned to try natural childbirth with my first baby (I told my doctor that I didn't know how badly it would hurt, so I couldn't really say in advance). After 20 hours of contractions and little dilation, I got the epidural, partly because it looked like I was heading for a C-section anyway. Holy Moly! Those things rule! From searing agony to enjoying a cup of tea and listening to Nightmares on Wax chill me out with some fine trip-hop, in about 10 minutes. (Once I relaxed in my new, pain-free environment, everything sped up massively, and Zoë was born within the hour.) Different doctors use different drugs, but here in Singapore it seems they inject Demerol right into your spinal column. Fuck the bullshit. I was reminded of my mom's advice (she was a hippie natural childbirth pioneer and had both me and my brother that way). She said the childbirth educators were going to lie like crazy about the level of pain, and talk about "pressure", and not to believe a word of it. No, she said, that hideous agony stuff you read about in great works of literature is all true. (Cue Medea on the preferred battle/childbirth ratio.)

Fair is foul, and foul is fair

This will be another wonky analytic philosophy post about imaginative resistance. (Here is the last such, with links to others yet further back.) Today I cranked out the first half of an essay - too hastily, although I've been taking notes for the longest time, and the first bit is recycled. It is a bit precious and scholastic, as befits its dignity as an academic paper. It lacks an ending, so don't expect one. But if there's anything fundamentally defective about these feet and torso, it would be helpful if I were informed before screwing on the head. Brian Weatherson, in particular, is instructed to leave critical comments. (And I am sorry that, in the course of the post, I have been compelled to note before god and google that the fiction he has penned of late is hardly of the first water, aesthetically. Brian is a fine fellow. But there you are. Plato dear, truth dearer, yadda, yadda, yadda.)

And I've realized I don't really understand Gendler's paper. That is, it seems to me she should conclude her paper by saying, sensibly: 'so there's really no such thing after all. Just a big misunderstanding.' But she doesn't. I really should email her and request clarification, but haven't yet.

Proceed at own risk. Geek-talk between us academic wonks.

No, no! Let me show you how to do it

"William T. … Vollmann’s work … “Rising Up and Rising Down” …. is the …. best … book."

– Scott McLemee, New York Times Book Review

[Since the man needs permalinks - hint, hint - I suggest you scroll down to March 9, in case something new has been added on top.]

Kind of Blue

Check it out! This guy has re-mixed Jay-Z's Black album with Weezer's Blue album, creating the Navy Blue Album -- no, he calls it Jay-Zeezer: the Black and Blue Album. Track 14 (My 1st Song/My name is Jonas) is particularly rockin'. (Via Boing Boing)
UPDATE: You can get DJ Dangermouse's more famous "Grey Album" (a mix of Jay-Z and the Beatles White Album) here. Or, listen to a preview of Cheap Cologne's "Double Black" Album (Jay-Z plus Metallica).

My burning feet of fire! Oh! oh! This height and fiery speed!

Before there was Marvel's Wendigo, there was Algernon Blackwood's "The Wendigo" - finest spooky tale I've read, and I've read a few. It's "The Blair Witch Project" before it's time, and way more classy. (The movie doesn't look so good, but some of the reviews were positive. The band? Who knows. The golf course doesn't look at all spooky.)

When I was courting Belle, early one Sunday morning in Oakland, CA - in 1996 I think it was - I read her Blackwood's classic tale. Way to a young woman's heart is through her spine, or nearly.

Re-Inventing the Wheel

Interesting article today in the NYT Science section about new attempts to use mathematical tools developed for biology to do comparative linguistics. The authors of the new study have come up with a very early date for PIE (that's proto-Indo-European, to you and me): 8,700 years ago. Traditional dates based on older methods agree on about 5,500 years ago. Linguists are skeptical after failed attempts at "glottochronology", which involves comparing how many cognates languages share from a core group of words. This objection also seems pretty telling:

The earliest wheels appear in the archaeological record around 5,500 years ago. So the proto-Indo-European language could not have started to split into its daughter tongues much before that date, some linguists argue [because they all have cognates for "wheel" which are descended from a comon source word]. If the wheel was invented after the split, each language would have a different or borrowed word for it.

Still, it could be true. Dr. Gray (one of the authors) argues that each language could have independently derived their word for wheel from the PIE root for "to roll." I'm not sure how plausible that is, but it's not obviously crazy. Anyway, it's food for thought.

It's also cool that scientists have found a new planetoid, or Kuiper Belt object, or maybe even wandering Oort Cloud object. But Sedna? What's with abandoning Latin and Greek mythology for some native American name? I like a little onomastic consistency in my solar system, thank you very much. How about Dis or something? Orcus? Aidoneus? Minthe, even? (She was a concubine of Hades' whom Persephone turned into a mint plant. The things you had to watch out for in ancient Greece, I'm telling you. She's probably no good because "Sedna" is bright red.) I don't think we've seen any features on Pluto, so it can't be we've used up the whole cast of the underworld on craters and suchlike. C'mon, science guys! Don't go all Kwakiutl on us, there's no sense in it.

The Personal is Political

Baby Violet (due May 14) has been head down for some time now. I can tell by the hiccups, which she gets all the time (Zoë was the same). These feel really funny: little, regular, interior jerks, as if I had swallowed a clock. I am reassured by them, though, because my scan technician/doctor told me that fetuses stop having hiccups when they go into distress. This doctor is a very funny guy, an amazing scanner. (The standard of medical care in Singapore is high, much better in some ways than in the states, because the doctors take more time with you.) He is an Indian Singaporean and worked for many years at some pioneering Scottish lab where many ultrasound advances were made, before coming back to Singapore. Round and jolly, with a charming accent. Strangely, he himself might have been aborted if the techniques he practices had been available in his mother's day: he was born at full term but weighed only 1 kilo, having failed to thrive for some reason.

Ring!

Kieran Healy sounds the horn of warning: a dark force rises in the East. But a few brave souls have been warning of this danger for months. (I see that the original link to a Salon article has died, but in life it chirpily heralded this danger to all of us.)

Snarking in

My local video store is poor but honest; a mom n' pop affair. Pop was once ordering old American movies to supplement his spotty collection and asked me whether he should order "Sleepless in Seattle". I told him no. The shop contains several racks of mysterious (to an American) VCDs - mostly from Hong Kong, Taiwan and Korea. This allows for activity functionally equivalent to snarking out, as per Daniel Pinkwater's classics, but with a distinctive 'east is east' flavor, and without leaving the house late at night. Double-bills are more Pinkwateresque and minimize the chances of total loss. (As Walter Galt says of the world's greatest movie house: "It shows movies I never heard of, and it shows them in strange combinations." And: "I wouldn't say that every movie the Snark Theater shows is good but they're all interesting in their way.")

Tonight was a good night 'snarking in', if you will.

The best in this kind are but shadows; and the worst are no worse, if imagination amend them.

Victorian Shakespeare fan fic: Ophelia as Mary Sue. Please feel free to leave a favorite sentence or brief passage in the comments box as a token of your appreciation. Or take it to the next level and try your hand at a little Ulf the Bear fan fic.

E-Z Duz It

Here is a recipe for the easiest cake ever. I couldn't remember whether I had posted it before, but google thinks not. It's so easy that when you read the recipe, you're going to think it's not very good. Nuh-uh! This is tasty! Plain, but tasty. A no-special-occasion, week-night kind of cake. You can even let small children "help" (i.e. massively retard your progress) make this cake, without problems. Except cocoa powder might get everywhere. Seriously, it takes about 10 minutes to mix, plus another 5 for the icing. If you were ever considering making cake from a mix, make this instead.

Cake:
1 1/2 c all-purpose flour
1/4 c unsweetened natural cocoa (not dutch-process)
1 t baking soda
1/2 t salt
1 c sugar
1 T white vinegar (yes, I know, but it's needed for chemical reasons to make the leavening happen. Trust me.)
6 T flavorless cooking oil, like canola
1 t vanilla extract
1 c cool water

1. Preheat oven to 350.
2. Sift flour, cocoa, baking soda and salt together. Add sugar and stir. Make three wells in the surface of the ingredients, big, medium, and litttle.
3. Put the oil in the big well, the vinegar in the medium one, and the vanilla in the small one. Pour the water over all and mix till just combined (lumps are OK).
4. Pour into ungreased 8 x 8 pan.
5. Bake 30 minutes and cool on rack (in pan).

Icing
1/3 c unsalted butter, softened to room temp.
2 c confectioner's sugar
2 T cocoa powder
1-3 T milk, as needed
1 t vanilla extract

1. Mix butter with 1 c sugar and cocoa till blended. May be dry. Add 1 T milk, vanilla, and next cup of sugar. Mix well. Add more milk if needed to reach a nice consistency. Spread on top of cake in pan and serve out of pan.

Voila! You don't have to listen to E-Z E's solo album E-Z Duz It while making this cake, but it might be fun, because you probably haven't listened to it in a while, and it's so killer. You do have to have a glass of cold milk while you eat the cake, though.

Strong brand identity through strict self-identity?

Because Singapore is what it is, and not another thing. No, I don't think the city-state's obedience to this basic metaphysical stricture suffices to mark it out as an attractive tourist destination, per se. (I have posted on this fraught topic before, but with respect to Canada.) I'm at a loss to come up with anything clearly better, although I haven't had eight months to do so. (The 'Malaysia, Truly Asia' jingle is catchy, so tautology cannot be written off as an inevitable drag on the market.)

The thing about Singapore, from a tourist's point of view, is that everything is so stunningly efficient, from the moment your plane touches down in what I believe in my heart to be the nicest airport in the world, Changi; and the food is so good. Really good. And you are going to visit several other countries anyway, since Singapore is about the size of the Bay Area. On the other hand, 'Singapore: come for the airport, pause for the pepper crab, see Thailand' is not exactly a winner. Maybe: Singapore: sweet, sensible, and so close to so much'. Modest but winning. Like the city itself. Maybe someday they'll build the space elevator here, since it's on the equator and all. And the slogan will still work.

I suppose the emphasis on Singapore's sharp, well-defined self-identity could be an attempt to woo vagueness-averse tourists from competing destinations like the Midwest and upstate New York. But frankly, if you are even thinking about visiting Kansas instead of Singapore, you're nuts.

If you build it

I see that Randy Barnett is a little annoyed at us. This is very understandable, as he has gone to the trouble of writing books, and we haven't gone to the trouble of so much as reading them. Sometimes a snark is a boojums, perhaps. So I went to the law library to check out Barnett's The Structure of Liberty. (Noticed NUS does not have a copy of his new book, Restoring the Lost Constitution. I'm official philosophy department library rep, so on my list of books to order it goes. Could do with a little more libertarianism around the place. Perhaps prof. Barnett will accept this proxy purchase as a token of our good will. We at John & Belle do like our Volokh Conspiracy with coffee every morning.)

Was Was

Time for a new look. I was getting tired of looking like Fox Mulder in a burglar mask with his eyelids sewn shut. (Well, that's what it looked like.) And Great Gatsby came up in comments. I've never cared for the novel myself. But it certainly was a book. So the stuff is here. Mellow out, all you gold-hatted, high-bouncing lovers.

Four Chances to Gain 10 Yards and You Turn Over the Ball

Also at the Volokh Conspiracy, a discussion of California's "Three Strikes and You're Out" laws. Eugene thinks that when critics of the law focus only on the third strike, which may be a minor property crime, and the disproportionate life sentence that results, they skew the debate, because the law was precisely intended to take into account previous crimes. I think the real shame is that the law takes its form from America's alleged national pastime, baseball, rather than its actual national pastime, professional football. Football is quicker, easier to understand, much more violent, and totally unknown outside the States. I think it's obviously our national sport, and should provide the basis for sound lawmaking. Plus, then we'd get to hear lawyers say things like, "Your Honor, my client would like to go for it on fourth down."

My Little Pony

Now Sasha Volokh thinks that I "think there's something objectionable about even looking that far ahead [i.e. to libertarian end-states]." It would be better to say I think that when people do, they sound funny. It would almost be true to say, I just wanted to make a joke about a pony.

Would you state the difficulty?

My title recalls a passage from Lewis Carroll's Sylvie and Bruno, which I quote for no particular reason except that it is vaguely relevant and terribly funny:

“Do you really find no logical difficulty in regarding Nature as a process of involution, passing from definite coherent homogeneity to indefinite incoherent heterogeneity?” . . . “No physical difficulty,” she confidently replied: “But I haven’t studied Logic much. Would you state the difficulty?” “Well,” said Arthur, “do you accept it as self-evident? Is it as obvious, for instance, as that ‘things that are greater than the same are greater than one another?” “To my mind,” she modestly replied, “it seems quite as obvious. I grasp both truths by intuition. But other minds may need some logical – I forget the technical terms.”. . . .

Brian Weatherson has taken up the topic of 'imaginative resistance' once again. I wrote some rather rambling posts (here and here) on the subject myself sometime back. Let's see if I can be brief for a change. [UPDATE: nope.]

Tamar Gendler states the problem like so: "The puzzle of imaginative resistance: the puzzle of explaining our comparative difficulty in imagining fictional worlds that we take to be morally deviant." (Confused, or you want the reference? Go click on my earlier posts above.)

Weatherson more or less takes for granted there is a difficulty. He attempts to generalize to a difficulty concerning imagining 'assymetric compound impossibilities.' Be that as it may be - and it may be everything I am about to say is consistent with what Brian says - it seems worth noting that it isn't all that hard to imagine morally deviant fictional worlds. Yet no one seems to offering example. So let's.

Mostly Harmless

Can't let Belle have all the fun. Here's a passage from the "Reason" libertarian roundtable that sort of sums it up for me. Randy Barnett:

Of course, to some extent this debate is moot. If we ever get to a libertarian world in which these are the only forms of coercion still existing beyond self-defense, etc., we will know a lot more about how liberty actually works and how to achieve it politically than we do now. We will be in a much better position to decide whether to abolish these practices along with all the other vestiges of the welfare state. I should live so long.

Why then debate them now? For the same reason Epstein has been harping on these points for decades. We debate the form of the ideal end stage as part of the debate over whether to take any further steps in its direction.

Barnett clearly wishes to duck the 'and a pony' objection. Let it be so. His explanation of why he finds these sorts of debates interesting and worthwhile is still not fully credible.

The Withering Away of the State

Damn. Now everyone thinks I hate on the libertarians. I don't, really. Libertarians have many principled, coherent arguments to offer in a piecemeal way. I even agree with quite a few: I don't think there should be subsidies or tariffs; I think people should be able to own guns; I think drugs should be decriminalized. Hell, I think that people ought to be able to practice gay polygamy. 'Do your own thing, man, as long as it doesn't hurt anyone else', as that one hippie guy in your undergraduate philosophy classes used to say. I'm perfectly willing to listen to arguments about how the state is performing some function badly and at a loss which someone else could perform better and at a profit. Up with private space exploration! Let's sell the moon to random technopreneurs!

Nonetheless, I also think it's fair to point out when people go off the rails. The proposed end-state of all this state-trimming can't just be no government at all. Minarchist libertarians, people who just wish the US government was 50% of its current size, (or 15%) -- fine. I'm sure we can have many fruitful arguments. Anarcho-libertarians are fruitcakes, though, and many of the things they believe seem to contradict some of the more compelling arguments for things libertarians hold dear. For example, I have been convinced that strong property rights are a good thing. Countries with weak property rights and a lack of contract enforcement languish economically and can't unleash their full potential -- people can't borrow against their farm land to buy fertilizer, commerce is restricted to trust-based, small scale operations. So, I'm afraid we need the government to enforce contracts and guard against violations of property rights, otherwise everything will go to hell.

Finally, I know that libertarians are sick of hearing about the Wild West (or the eastern Congo), but if you propose a model of rights enforcement whose nearest analogue seems to be the Clint Eastwood movie "A Fistful of Dollars", then you just have to suck it up. It can hardly be irrelevant or illegitimate to point out that in our world, which my people call "Earth", there already exist places where people must band together for self-defense and form militia-like organizations for private rights enforcement. In all these places, some bastard gets in charge of it and starts treating everyone like shit. Quis custodiet, etc. How do I fire my private-rights enforcement group again?

It's important not to fetishize the right of self-defense out of all proportion. I could be as heavily armed as I like, but I have to sleep sometime, and if I'm home alone with my children and fifty armed guys show up, I'm still screwed. Personally, I'd like to be able to call 911 and have the cops show up (I figure I could hold even 50 guys off that long, with a defensible position and a sniper rifle). In the libertarian utopia, those guys outside would be the cops. I know that there are places in the world where the cops are the bad guys. But this is a problem which we know, empirically, can be fixed. It seems to me there are insuperable, structural difficulties in proposing that private organizations take over all the functions of the state, which have to do with human nature. People will be bastards if you give them a chance. Stipulating this feature away does not make for good political practice. See: communism, passim.

Saturday Kid Blogging

We really have quite a beautiful view out our 19th floor window. Zoë likes to sit in there with the flowers and look out. Behind the green hill is the sea, you see. Yesterday she came up with something rather philosophical, staring into the distance at Indonesia: "Hello, Mr. World! What's your favorite riddle?" Some days, if we leave the front door open - today, for example - the wind whips through something fierce. So Zoë's hair does the whole swept-back thing and she looks rather grave and serious. She's only two and a half. Aw, geeze.

I shifted the picture into extended post mode to speed front-page loading and save bandwidth. (It's really mostly for the grandparents, you understand. But all these folks from elsewhere are dropping by today.)

If Wishes Were Horses, Beggars Would Ride -- A Pony!

I think Matthew Yglesias' response to Josh Chafetz' exercise in wishful thinking was about right, even if Brad DeLong's is more nuanced. I'd like to note, though, that Chafetz is selling himself short. You see, wishes are totally free. It's like when you can't decide whether to daydream about being a famous Hollywood star or having amazing magical powers. Why not -- be a famous Hollywood star with amazing magical powers! Along these lines, John has developed an infallible way to improve any public policy wishes. You just wish for the thing, plus, wish that everyone would have their own pony! So, in Chafetz' case, he should not only wish that Bush would say a lot of good things about democracy-building and fighting terrorism in a speech written for him by a smart person, he should also wish that Bush should actually mean the things he says and enact policies which reflect this, and he should wish that everyone gets a pony. See?

Anvil of Cheese

I love musing about how I would direct the movie and what the soundtrack would contain. Example: Greg Bear's Anvil of Stars, sequel to The Forge of God. I don't absolutely love Forge, but Anvil is one of the two greatest sci-fi revenge tales - the other being Alfred Bester's The Stars My Destination. Anvil has an atmosphere of melancholy, fierce stoicism. Yes, it's sentimental Spielberg child-cult, in an Ender's Game sort of way - yet cerebrally chilling, too, in a Count of Monte Cristo to the tenth power sort of way. A solemn vendetta pursued across millions of years and light-years, only to find ... well, don't let me spoil it.

So, in a Platonic spirit, I need music for the soundtrack - both violent and voluntary. The Ship of The Law hangs solemnly in space, barely moving relative to its origin and unknown destination. It's orphaned crew of battered and dauntless avengers rest or stand like sentries; few in number and fewer over time, mauled and maddened by fiendish solar system-sized traps beyond their comprehension. They are pawns, sacrificed as children to buy the deaths of all the murderers of the earth.

As this not-so-favorable review puts it:

If it sounds all a bit dour and heavy going, it is. Anvil of Stars is as weighty as its title implies. The story is overburdened at times by its own gravitas, and while it's never anything less than intelligent and sensitive in depicting the odyssey of its characters, it is a story more easily admired than enjoyed.

Me? I couldn't put it down. So, anyway, I settled on Radiohead's "Pyramid Song", off of Amnesiac. "Jumped in the river, what did I see?/Blackheart angel swam with me". I thought that the opening bars - the simple piano, the mournful high 'ooooh, ooooowooh' cooing - would accompany a languid, slow, chilly crawl shot over the massive ship crawling through space; then, faces of the crew, impassive, still and set - portraits of loss and grim resolve.

Turns out someone else had exactly the same idea for a soundtrack. Well, it's not quite the story I had in mind, but the mood is exactly the same. You should really watch part 1 & part 2 first, just as you should read Forge of God first.

Serves me right for liking to be overburdened by child-cult gravitas, plus all the E-Z push emotional buttons of revenge melodrama - like someone went and dropped a three-hundred pound wheel of cheese on my silly head. Oh, well. There you go.

Domestic Policy Abroad

Timothy Burke reveals an interesting facet of the great blogospheric nanny debate in his latest post. (See also Harry's post on Crooked Timber, which contains lots of relevant links). He talks about how he just feels disturbed by the idea of having someone other than a family member in such intimate contact with his life:

What it boiled down to was that I was intensely uncomfortable about having strangers inside my domestic space. Not racially phobic, but generically, universally so. I didn’t want any people seeing my dirty clothes, my books, my things, my way of life, if they weren’t very close friends or family.

I was interested in this discussion, because John and I employ a maid here in Singapore (she is also a nanny). I realize that D^2 thinks we're jerks now, but I chalk that up to his having listened to the Clash so much as a young man:

There were masters and servants and servants and dogs
They taught you how to touch your cap
Through strikes and famine and war and peace
England never closed this gap

- "Something About England"

No, actually, I understand that some people just feel really strongly that you ought to clean your own toilet (like Chun, for example). Or, possibly have your wife clean it for you (but Chun doesn't think this. He's on toilet duty for all time.)

Whereat, with blade, with bloody blameful blade

'In a hazy cloud of blood-dumb pain, McGregor felt the blade work its way forwards, through the knot of his adam's apple and on towards the base of the chin. Then, slowly, it began to turn skywards. Och, no, he thought before the end, not ma brain... not ma brain... anything but ma brain...please don't slice ma brain... no, no... not the brain...och, no...'

Just thought I should post to show that I'm home from Crooked Timber and everything is back to normal.

Link via Treacher

UPDATE: didn't mean to imply any connection between the above passage and our experience at CT. No, we were delighted from beginning to end. (We hope they will have us back for another visit.)

Can I Borrow That?

Fontana Labs' students think he looks dumb.

...one of my students thinks, well, maybe he won't notice if I paste whole paragraphs from the Stanford Encyclopedia into my essay. He won't get the least bit suspicious when a first-year college student quotes from the original latin. I'm sure he doesn't know how to use Google.

This reminds me of a case John had once. One of his students plagiarized something from a website so sloppily that the cut-and-pasted sections were actually in a different color and font from the rest of the text. Plagiarism so extreme that it approaches citation!

Back in the day, when I was at Columbia, one of my profs had a frat boy student plagiarize from some Edwardian English author, with the result that the paper included an extended cricket metaphor. My prof didn't know the source (and this was when students had to go to the library to find things to steal; paradoxically a more secure undertaking), so he just called the student in and asked him to explain the rules of cricket. A full, Perry Mason-style confession ensued.

You Make the Rocking World Go Round

From the Onion, it's the Nietzsche diet! A "dense, aphoristic nutrition plan", in which you eat what you fear most, along with "generous portions of simple salad."

The Nietzschean diet has its critics. Detractors say the diet's actual nutritional requirements are vague, that it provides no concrete plan for progression toward weight-loss targets, and that the book consists mostly of unclear and unusually harsh sets of inspirational logical lacunae.

They've got him dead to rights with the "inspirational logical lacunae" thing. We could all use the help, though, as the NYT reports that a new size survey undertaken by clothing manufacturers confirms the ugly truth: Americans are getting crazy fat.

Over all, the new measurements shake up what have long been considered the average outlines of the American body. For years, an average woman was thought to be a size 8, although some circles had bumped that up to size 12 in recent years. But even the women who came in on the small side in the SizeUSA survey look more like what the longtime clothing industry standards would consider a size 14 — the size at which "plus size" clothing begins.

By the Power of Counter-Examples

This is what happens when you let philosophers have children. Zoë, as part of a multi-stage campaign to avoid going to sleep, asked me the other night, "What do 'safe' means?" Well, I explained (why do I let myself be drawn into these discussions?), when you're safe, nothing can hurt you. "Like tigers?" she asked. Right, like how here in the apartment you're safe from tigers, because they only live in the zoo and far away in the jungle, and there are bars on the doors and windows, and mommy and daddy are here. She pondered this for a moment. "You could still bonk your head." D'oh!