Galloway’s preferred style is that of vulgar ad hominem insult, usually uttered while a rather gaunt crew of minders stands around him. I have a thick skin and a broad back and no bodyguards. He says that I am an ex-Trotskyist (true), a “popinjay” (true enough, since its original Webster’s definition means a target for arrows and shots), and that I cannot hold a drink (here I must protest). In a recent interview he made opprobrious remarks about the state of my midriff, which I will confess has—as P.G. Wodehouse himself once phrased it—”slipped down to the mezzanine floor.” In reply I do not wish to stoop. Those of us who revere the vagina are committed to defend it against the very idea that it is a mouth or has teeth. Study the photographs of Galloway from Syrian state television, however, and you will see how unwise and incautious it is for such a hideous person to resort to personal remarks. Unkind nature, which could have made a perfectly good butt out of his face, has spoiled the whole effect by taking an asshole and studding it with ill-brushed fangs.

– Who else but Hitch?

Context for Galloway’s latest stunt here.

My philosophy of religion class this week revolves around the topic debated below. The discussion is surprisingly interesting and extremely clear. Plantinga’s big idea is that in the same way we are justified in believing certain things – like the existence of other minds – regardless of and before we have good arguments for doing so, the same applies to belief in God:

Today has been the best day for this blog in over six months, with over four hundred views. Most of those were for the ‘Your diet is destroying the world‘ post from late last night. If the unanimous and widespread positive feedback on Facebook is anything to go by, I should have convinced – or at least begun to persuade – more than a handful of you that our meat-eating practices need to be seriously reconsidered. If so, then this is certainly worthwhile. I hope all the information and arguments I’ve been airing have spurred some small-scale contemplation, in which case doing my civic duty will be partially complete. Once more, all environmental posts are available and archived here.

All my posts on climate change and its ethics are now easily accessible under the tag ‘green’. Just click here, and you should get them reverse-chronologically in an endless stream.

Conversations with friends recently have got me wondering what the boundaries are between friends, lovers and casual partners, and whether we can draw some firm conceptual lines here. My guess is not, and vagueness is inevitable. But it’s bugging me. I think the bones of the problem have been around since Aristotle, but the rise of the casual category in modern society has certainly spiced things up and made the question more practically urgent. But to map out some of the questions here, the SEP seems like a good guide:

In providing an account of love, philosophical analyses must be careful to distinguish love from other positive attitudes we take towards persons, such as liking. Intuitively, love differs from such attitudes as liking in terms of its “depth,” and the problem is to elucidate the kind of “depth” we intuitively find love to have.

The same issue arises when considering friendship:

The relationship of friendship differs from other interpersonal relationships, even those characterized by mutual caring, such as relationships among colleagues: friendships are, intuitively, “deeper,” more intimate relationships. The question facing any philosophical account is how that characteristic intimacy of friendship is to be understood.

And the problem, it seems to me, is that any such analysis of the depth inherent to love is going to struggle to distinguish itself from the depth in friendships. Take, for instance, Scruton’s view:

[He] claims that love exists “just so soon as reciprocity becomes community: that is, just so soon as all distinction between my interests and your interests is overcome”… The idea is that the union is a union of concern, so that when I act out of that concern it is not for my sake alone or for your sake alone but for our sake.

But the ideal in friendship – of Platonic, mutual identification; becoming ‘soul-mates’ – seems to map this model of reciprocity too, and yet there need not be anything romantic about it. So what’s the difference? We may be inclined to say the addition of physical intimacy, but surely not. First, because friends could regularly fuck and remain single. Second, because the socially uptight could easily wait until marriage, but that doesn’t mean their relationship doesn’t start earlier.

There’s also the question of whether views like Scruton’s can accurately capture the value of such relations. After all, they’re supposed to be good things, but on this model they seem to impinge upon our freedom and perhaps our ‘autonomy’. I’m tempted, however, to agree with Nozick and Fisher on this one:

Nozick seems to think of a loss of autonomy in love as a desirable feature of the sort of union lovers can achieve. Fisher somewhat more reluctantly, claims that the loss of autonomy in love is an acceptable consequence of love. Yet without further argument these claims seem like mere bullet biting. Solomon describes this “tension” between union and autonomy as “the paradox of love.”

In the entirety of the two Stanford entries, though, this passage jumps out to me as crucial:

To begin, Thomas claims that we should understand what is here called the intimacy of friendship in terms of mutual self-disclosure: I tell my friends things about myself that I would not dream of telling others, and I expect them to make me privy to intimate details of their lives. The point of such mutual self-disclosure, Thomas argues, is to create the “bond of trust” essential to friendship, for through such self-disclosure we simultaneously make ourselves vulnerable to each other and acknowledge the goodwill the other has for us. Such a bond of trust is what institutes the kind of intimacy characteristic of friendship.

Again, however, we’ve got to wonder whether the boundaries between friends and partners is being blurred here. This kind of self-disclosure seems equally essential to and characteristic of both types of relations. We can’t even say that the difference is to be understood in terms of time spent together and who we prioritise, because I know of plenty of people in relationships who make equal if not more time for their long-term friends.

Perhaps the solution is really as simple as saying that we need a contractualist component here? Maybe it’s by virtue of agreeing, or at least mutually seeing yourselves as in a relationship, that a friendship becomes precisely that? So then the status doesn’t depend on any intrinsic features. It boils down to an ad hoc choice. That doesn’t make me feel comfortable (being with someone has got to be for a reason, right?). But for now I don’t have anything better to say.

Ian Birrell makes the conservative case against Prohibition today. About time. It’s good to finally see ripples reach across the Atlantic and begin to raise this issue on our radar. And Birrell is surely right to suggest not only that the logic would be sound – since when did conservatives so warmly embrace wasting money and forcing upon us such futile laws? – It would also go a long way to repairing the party’s image amongst people of my age.

Unfortunately, the party has been united by an awkward bond for a while now, between a socially uptight faction with a gut-inclination against anything new, and a vote-winning more liberal-minded leadership able to see what their ideology must and should entail. In that respect, marriage equality was a precursor to this future fight. But few should doubt that insofar as conservatives tend to flirt with libertarianism, drug liberalisation just has to be on the cards.

I’m sure the prime minister is not comfortable with his hypocrisy. And he would have to consider the question of whether this could even get passed. Labour’s potential position isn’t obvious (let’s not forget the David Nutt debacle), and no doubt his own party would split on any non-whipped ‘moral’ issue. There probably wouldn’t be sufficient support for a while yet. But we’ll get there, slowly. With marijuana, at least, it’s inevitable.

If you want to understand the potential of this medium, go see what Ta-Nehisi is currently doing over at The Atlantic. As he researches black history and civil rights in America for the sake of writing something longer on those topics, he’s taking a tour through the social contract tradition and his readers are tagging along for the ride. They agree to read a chapter of Leviathan each week, he posts some thoughts on Friday, the comments section grows and then key reader contributions are flagged. Everyone involved in his online community learns something. Philosophy is made digestible for people through digital interaction without any multi-thousand pound degrees and institutions being in sight.

Romney’s senior strategist, Stuart Stevens, may well be remembered by historians, as one House Republican senior staff member put it to me, “as the last guy to run a presidential campaign who never tweeted.” (“It was raised many times with him,” a senior Romney official told me, “and he was very categorical about not wanting to and not thinking it was worth it.”)

Robert Draper, in an enormous NYT piece on whether the Republicans can be saved from obsolescence. Also note Plouffe’s comments on Rubio. The short version: he’s not worried.

Phillip Lopate ponders the essay as a writing format:

Ever since Michel de Montaigne, the founder of the modern essay, gave as a motto his befuddled “What do I know?” and put forth a vision of humanity as mentally wavering and inconstant, the essay has become a meadow inviting contradiction, paradox, irresolution and self-doubt. The essay’s job is to track consciousness; if you are fully aware of your mind you will find your thoughts doubling back, registering little peeps of ambivalence or disbelief.

According to Theodor Adorno, the iron law of the essay is heresy. What is heresy if not the expression of contrarian doubt about communal pieties or orthodox positions? This is sometimes called “critical thinking,” an ostensible goal of education in a democracy. But since such thinking often rocks the boat, we may find it less than supported in school settings. Typically, the exercise of doubt is something an individual has to cultivate on his or her own, in private, before summoning the courage to air it, say, in an essay.

I’ve treated my entire time in higher education this way. I don’t know if I was actively encouraged to at some point, and have since forgotten the initial source, but something conspired with the fact that it’s simply impossible to offer definitive positions on issues when you’re churning out 2,000 words every three days as an undergraduate here, and it meant that I quickly adopted a philosophy in which the purpose of the essay was primarily to think out loud and stimulate future discussion. And I still do that to this day. Yes, I develop positions and push for a particular viewpoint. But I also openly offer up the doubts I inevitably have in order to provoke my supervisor.

And this all applies equally to the method of blogging, which goes some way to explaining why Montaigne is one of Sullivan’s heroes. And insofar as blogging grants such liberty with regards to length – anything between a hundred and over a thousand words for a post can be justifiable – it is arguably superior to the essay. You can entertain ideas and reach a global audience immediately for feedback without having to perfect a narrative and drag out the idea, as essays may oblige you to. Sullivan also linked us to Alan Massie, who was surely right to speculate that if Orwell were alive today, he’d be blogging. Prolifically.

That’s Fraser Nelson’s take on Rod Liddle, who blogs at The Spectator, which Nelson edits. A typical post of Liddle’s from last month:

Does it matter that white Britons are now a minority in three towns or cities in this country? … Those who welcome more and more immigration usually wave their hands and say listen, change happens, and we should welcome it – for the white people in those towns it is a chance to meet new neighbours from a vibrant culture, an uplifting experience for them. But of course this is not always how it feels if you actually live there…

Well, I can hardly accuse Liddle of lacking views, as I did Paul Staines. The problem is just that his views are so obviously awful.

He really isn’t, and this should be obvious. I wouldn’t feel the need to say it but for the fact that the Guardian blessed him with this title yesterday in their Saturday interview. The following line was laughable:

His online persona is relentlessly mocking; it is also, compared to many online offerings, strikingly concise. Few entries, unless they contain a leaked memo or email, are more than 300 words long; you may object to their point, but there is never any doubt what it is.

That may be because there never is a point.

Look, I just opened Order Order’s homepage and it currently reads as follows. First, a promotion of his own column in the Sunday Sun. Second, a video of Keith Vaz performing karaoke. Further down, more self-promotion, this time of a Guido app. Then a flagging of the Telegraph’s “Big Mac Blooper“. You get the picture. They tell us their top-clicked story this week was “Sally’s Boozy Night Out With Tory Boys“.

And yet, courtesy of the Guardian again:

Guido Fawkes now has a column in the Sun on Sunday, thus reaching a potential readership of four million, on top of the 50-100,000 readers the blog gets every day.

We should collectively weep at the fact that this man’s readership is so large. There’s only one difference between vacuous joke non-stories in the tabloid press and Guido Fawkes blog posts: the former are printed and the latter are digital. And now that he writes for both and sells one using the other, even that boundary is blurred. There is no commentary or analysis to be found here. Staines doesn’t use his platform to think out loud and debate policy and ideas with others. He barely writes thoughts at all. And yet that is the essence of blogging. We’re really going to refer to this man using the same title we apply to Andrew Sullivan and Ezra Klein, granting it to anybody that posts anything online on a regular basis? What is the point of that?

Still, we probably shouldn’t be surprised that there’s nothing of intellectual significance to find on Order-Order. A friend pointed out to me a particularly pathetic part of the interview, which pretty much sums the man up:

[Staines] went to Catholic school in Harrow, and although he lost his faith at 13, he and his wife intend to raise their daughters with all the rituals of the Catholic church.

So not only poisoning young minds with bullshit, but doing so believing it’s bullshit yourself? Classy.

No serious person with even the inclination to critically reflect on life would ever say or do something this utterly fatuous. If there’s major space for this man in the British ‘blogosphere’ then we can consider it doomed.

I saw it again today. This time, the following exchange stood out to me the most. It takes place after Stevens tried to keep Democratic opposition in the House calm by insisting he believed only in equality before the law, rather than racial equality simpliciter:

Asa Litton: The basis of every hope for this country’s future life – you denied Negro equality! I’m nauseated. You refused to say that all humans are, well, human! Have you lost your very soul, Mr. Stevens? Is there nothing you won’t say?

Stevens: I’m sorry you’re nauseous, Asa, that must be unpleasant. I want the amendment to pass so that the Constitution’s first and only mention of slavery is its absolute prohibition. For this amendment, for which I have worked all of my life, and for which countless coloured men and women have fought and died, and now hundreds of thousands of soldiers – No, sir. No. It seems there is very nearly nothing I won’t say.

I hope Kantians were listening.

My thoughts on the film here.

The judge has reserved his decision. I’m waiting for lawyer-friends to confirm what, if anything, that most likely means, but my guess is not much. So we’ll just have to wait a little longer.

Meanwhile, The Mail is the only paper so far to let this little but staggering detail slip out:

The court heard that the college’s estimation for living costs included items such as £453 for clothes for the year, £67 per week for meals provided by the college, and £2500 for general expenses.

There was a separate amount for the costs of entrance into local nightclubs.

Let’s repeat that. Oxford University has openly stipulated that in order to study here as a graduate, it is necessary to demonstrate you have an amount of money to live on which includes £453 to spend on clothes.

It isn’t even worthy of commenting on, is it? This fact alone is enough to repulse me. It’s hard not to feel ashamed at being part of this place when you read things like that.

How is this not page one Guardian material? It should be headline news everywhere until the university is embarrassed into either defending or ditching these insane requirements that stink of elitism to the bone.

It’s surprising that after so much coverage, so many people commenting on this case have false information. A quick Twitter search brings up a sea of ignorance.

So just to set the record straight. It is not the case that Shannon is suing St Hugh’s for wealth discrimination because he had no money, couldn’t afford his degree, and so wasn’t granted a place. That would be absurd.

Fact: Shannon had sufficient funds to cover the cost of his college and tuition fees, and he had £9,000 to cover his living costs. The only reason he wasn’t granted a place was that he didn’t have £12,900 to live on, which is how much Oxford requires us to prove we have, regardless of the fact that we all can and do live on less. Damien explained all of this in his CiF piece.

That’s the crux of the issue here: whether Oxford has the right to impose an absurdly high living expenses requirement on applicants, when this is not necessary to ensure our well-being, no other university in the UK has a similar policy, and the consequences are discriminatory insofar as they needlessly cause the exclusion of people like Damien on lower incomes.

We should be hearing from the court shortly.

Previous posts here and here.

Godfrey Hodgison summarises Dworkin’s career:

[H]e developed a powerful, scholarly exegesis of the law, and expounded issues of burning topicality and public concern – including how the law should deal with race, abortion, euthanasia and equality – in ways that were accessible to lay readers. His legal arguments were subtly presented applications to specific problems of a classic liberal philosophy which, in turn, was grounded in his belief that law must take its authority from what ordinary people would recognise as moral virtue.

Kevin Vallier concurs with my perception of his prominence:

Save Rawls’s death, Dworkin’s passing is perhaps the major event in the passing of the Rawls generation into the history books. I understand the Rawls generation to include those egalitarian liberal political philosophers who rose to prominence soon after Rawls led the revival of political philosophy in analytic philosophy (Dworkin’s famous Taking Rights Seriously was published in 1978, only seven years after A Theory of Justice). The Rawls generation has had extraordinary influence over the direction of the profession and will surely be remembered as such.

David Wagner notes how he defied convention:

Dworkin didn’t conform to stereotypes of the cloistered, academic specialist who can only converse with field experts about his or her ideas. His articles were often witty and provocative, passing issues widely discussed in the mainstream media through a philosophical filter.

As an example, he cites one particular NYRB article Dworkin wrote on what a ‘good life’ is:

In my own view, someone who leads a boring, conventional life without close friendships or challenges or achievements, marking time to his grave, has not had a good life, even if he thinks he has and even if he has thoroughly enjoyed the life he has had. If you agree, we cannot explain why he should regret this simply by calling attention to pleasures missed: there may have been no pleasures missed, and in any case there is nothing to miss now. We must suppose that he has failed at something: failed in his responsibilities for living.

An article Dworkin wrote for the Index on Censorship defending free speech is also doing the rounds on Twitter:

How can we expect people who are committed to a particular faith, as a value transcending all others, to tolerate its open desecration? John Stuart Mill’s argument On Liberty says that we should tolerate even the speech we hate because truth is most likely to emerge in a free intellectual combat from which no idea has been excluded. People with passionate religious convictions think they already know the truth, however, and they can hardly be expected to have more confidence in Mill’s doubtful epistemology than in their own bibles. Nor could Mill’s optimism justify, even to us, tolerating everything that those who believe free speech is a basic human right insist should be tolerated. Pornographic images hardly supply “ideas” to any marketplace of thought, and history gives us little reason for expecting racist speech to contribute to its own refutation. If freedom of speech is a basic right, this must be so not in virtue of instrumental arguments, like Mill’s, which suppose that liberty is important because of its consequences.

It must be so for reasons of basic principle. We can find that basic principle, moreover. We can find it in a condition of human dignity: it is illegitimate for governments to impose a collective or official decision on dissenting individuals, using the coercive powers of the state, unless that decision has been taken in a manner that respects each individual’s status as a free and equal member of the community.

Adam Liptak outlines Dworkin’s driving thought:

Professor Dworkin’s central argument started with the premise that the crucial phrases in the Constitution — “the freedom of speech,” “due process of law,” “equal protection of the laws” — were, as he put it, “drafted in exceedingly abstract moral language.”

“These clauses,” he continued, “must be understood in the way their language most naturally suggests: they refer to abstract moral principles and incorporate these by reference, as limits on the government’s power.”

Liptak also directs us to an old paean from Tom Nagel:

Ronnie also did something else: he wrote for the public. Rawls, who did not have this gift, greatly admired Ronnie’s capacity to explain difficult moral issues about law, politics, and society in lucid terms to a general, nonacademic audience—without in any way watering them down or simplifying them. He said that in this respect, Ronnie had made a contribution in our own day comparable to that of John Stuart Mill in the 19th century—a just and memorable tribute.

(Photo: Ronald Dworkin at Oxford University in the 1970s, by Terrence Spencer/Time & Life/Getty)

Anthony Lane reflects on the truths in Blue Valentine:

“Blue Valentine” is that rare creation: a love story that doesn’t shy away from sex, ignore its consequences, or droop into pointless fantasy. The result is adult entertainment as it should be, in other words, right down to the laugh that Cindy lets out, in her leaping delight, when Dean goes down on her. Needless to say, the M.P.A.A., which cannot bear very much reality, took fright at all this and hobbled the movie with an NC-17 rating, which was overturned only after a concerted challenge. It is now an R-rated picture, and rightly so, although you have to ask: In what circumstances would you take a teen-ager, let alone a child, to see it? Who, on the verge of growing up, would wish to learn that the first heady bloom of rapture is doomed to rot and fall, and that even someone as devoted as Dean will wind up pleading to his paramour, with a kind of bullish grovel, “Tell me how I should be”?

… “Blue Valentine,” true to its title, is overwhelming proof that hurt is the bedfellow of love. For anybody who already knows that, or has been the cause of it, the film may be very hard to take. I saw it months ago, and I can’t forget it, but I’m not sure that I’ll be seeing it again.

Happy Valentine’s Day, folks.

Kind of poignant that the biggest early ed proposal in a generation comes at the passing of a passionate defender of equality of opportunity

— Dylan Matthews (@dylanmatt) February 14, 2013

AP broke the news. He was far from a hero of mine. He’s cropped up occasionally in my political philosophy classes through the years. I can recall reading him on rights and civil disobedience and perhaps a little on luck egalitarianism. But his contentious work on pornography as free speech and his central work against positivism escaped my attention, because I don’t study jurisprudence.

Nonetheless, it’s impossible in this business to escape his shadow entirely. His reputation looms large, not only because he was a prolific writer, but because he was also evidently a great one. There will be few doubting today that his name will still be batted around decades from now. In that respect, today brings the biggest loss since Rawls.

I’ll defer to and eagerly await the paeans of those better placed to pen them. In the mean time, here’s the New York Review of Books’s collation of his contributions.

But one small thing from me. As I noted last summer, his paper just titled ‘Liberalism‘ is the most succinct, accurate and explanatory exposition of the ideology I’ve read. If you want to know what it’s all about – Liberalism, but also Dworkin – then start there.

‎We want to be great. Like Neil says in his book, “Be great or be gone.” We want to be great, we want to be important in your life. That was all that mattered to me. I didn’t care if I was going to make it rich or famous, but I wanted to be great more than anything else and I wanted to be important in your life. Because you keep us in search of the force that reignites our gifts, our ability to make you want to move, to dance, to love, to make love, to be angry, to act. When we play, we want the hair to stand up on your arms, we want you to feel the glory and we want you to be glad of being alive. And really, at the end of the day, that’s all there is to it.

And to think that I doubted for a while what made me want to write about why creativity is a virtue, and why artists can be just as important in this world as moral saints. Is that some account of the importance and value of art, or what?

I love you, Bruce.

Update: Now I’m remembering this quote from the Remnick profile and thinking how apt it is:

Thousands of fans, many of whom had been waiting outside since morning, were allowed to enter the stadium grounds at six o’clock for a show that would not begin until ten. I noticed a few young Spaniards carrying a sign, in English, reading, “Bruce, Thanks for Making Our Lives Better.” I tried to imagine a sign like that for—whom? Lou Reed? AC/DC? Bon Jovi? (“Richie Sambora, Thanks for making our lives better.” Doubtful.) The ultra-sincere interchange between Springsteen and his fans, which looks treacly to the uninitiated and the uninterested, is what distinguishes him and his performances.

Peter Elbow has looked into the stylistic differences between academics and ordinary people:

People who care about good language tend to assume that casual spoken language is full of chaos and error. I shared this belief till I did some substantial research into the linguistics of speech. There’s a surprising reason why we — academics and well-educated folk — should hold this belief: we are the greatest culprits. It turns out that our speech is the most incoherent. …

[W]e drift into sentence interruptus: a phrase is left dangling while we silently muse — and we never return to finish it. When we academics were in graduate school, we were trained to write badly (no one put it this way of course) because every time we wrote X, our teacher always commented, “But have you considered Y? Don’t you see that Y completely contradicts what you write here.” “Have you considered” is the favorite knee-jerk response of academics to any idea. As a result, we learn as students to clog up our writing with added clauses and phrases to keep them from being attacked.

Recent posts on writing style here and here.

(Hat Tip: The Dish)

Frances Ryan reports for The Guardian on this wonderful phenomenon. Read the whole thing. The final quote is key, for me:

For [King], being with a sex worker was a way to have at least some sexual experiences. “To think I could have gone through my life never having known [what sex is like] is frightening,” he says. “Nobody should ever have to do so. It’s too much part of being human.”

When I researched market ethics for my political philosophy class back in October, I remember stumbling across a letter to The Observer from 2003 which Cecile Fabre quotes in her book, ‘Whose Body Is It Anyway?‘ The letter:

As a single man who visits prostitutes, I object to being branded by Cristina Odone (Comment, last week) a sad creature who must pay for his thrills. Most clients of these patient, sympathetic and compassionate ladies are, like me, disabled, elderly, disfigured, ugly or socially or sexually inadequate. The prostitute provides the only opportunity for a brief, life-enhancing taste of physical affection. God bless her!

This hits on the central truth here. Yes, it would be better if disabled people could experience physical sensations within an emotionally rich relationship, but given their appearance it’s a tragic but undeniable fact that the vast majority of them struggle to find these forms of recognition and rewards in life. So who are we to explain to the worst off why they should be prohibited from having access to even these small but significant pleasures that prostitution offers them?

I feel very strongly about this, and I’m with Cecile all the way when she writes that:

It is not true, of course, that the ‘disabled, disfigured, elderly, ugly or socially or sexually inadequate’ can only get sex by paying for it. What is true is that they do not want to have sex with other disabled, elderly, disfigured, ugly, socially, or sexually inadequate individuals: they want to have sex with persons whom they regard as desirable. But what is wrong with that? To the extent that these clients would rather be in loving sexual relationships with such persons, the fact that they have to resort to prostitutional sex should, if anything, elicit compassion and sympathy, rather than moral condemnation.

Several friends confirm that Catcher in the Rye reaches some English literature lessons in Britain, so consider the record corrected. There’s certainly no blanket ban on ethically deviant literature. But I’ll try to dig up more on this later. It would be nice to find more examples of prominent badass books in British schools. Less of the ethically safe Steinbeck, please, however great he is. Previous post here.

You expect it over the space of months or years, but over the space of five days? Seriously. Compare this:

We are not suggesting that Mr Osborne waters down his deficit reduction strategy. On the contrary, he should make more ambitious cuts. After three years in office, he will have reduced core government spending by just 3 per cent. Far greater savings can be achieved, and in areas of current spending, rather than taking the money from capital projects.

With this:

The Government could simply borrow to invest. With the economy still in the doldrums, as the CBI made clear once again on Tuesday, the time has come for bold action… He could also console himself with the knowledge that he’d be using the UK’s record low borrowing costs to build the country’s future. Of course, it would almost certainly mean waving goodbye to the UK’s AAA credit rating – but that must be lost anyway given the scale of the borrowing overshoot… Desperate times call for desperate measures, and another £10bn of targeted borrowing could be just the kind of “elbow grease” needed to finally deliver some growth.

(Hat tip: Jonathan Portes, who also has no clue what’s going on here).

There are worse places to work.

Ta-Nehisi makes some observations about writing regular columns that has a lot of relevance to mine and Aveek’s recent exchanges about academia:

Here is an exercise: Spend a week counting all the original ideas you have. Then try to write each one down, in all its nuance, in 800 words. Perhaps you’d be very successful at this. Now try to do it for four weeks. Then two months, then six, then a year, then five years. Add on to that all other ambitions you might have — teaching, blogging, writing long-form articles, speaking, writing books. etc. How do you think you’d fare?

… I end up recycling ideas in my own blogging, and blogging is a much more forgiving form. I can’t imagine how’d cope with the demands of staying fresh for a regular column. The point I’m making isn’t that you shouldn’t criticize columnists at the Times (I’ve done my share of criticizing), but that you should have some sense of the built-in structural limitations of the form. They are formidable.

I’m tempted to just say to this – look, if it’s true that nobody can sincerely come up with something original to say of this length on a biweekly basis, then there’s something fundamentally dysfunctional and dishonest about the way the Op-Ed system operates. I sometimes feel like even geniuses such as Krugman struggle with it, churning out the same point each week and only applied to a slightly different news story. Hire more people to write less each. Shift the focus to brief blogging with no pressure on people to write except when they want to, rather than people being obliged by their job to try to come up with some idea of length on regular deadlines. Otherwise, what is the point? We’re all just wasting one another’s time.

Victoria Monro speculates as to why liberals support inheritance tax:

People see the children of wealthy individuals and they’re naturally angry that these kids will inherit wealth and riches they didn’t themselves earn. The immediate kick of jealousy leads to the vicious need to control these people and their future money. Thus, inheritance tax is born. Studies have concluded that given the choice, people would generally prefer to earn a smaller income, providing that income is relatively higher than most other people’s, to a larger income that is relatively lower than most other people’s. We don’t like feeling worse off. Given this, the motivation for inheritance tax can be seen in its true light – not one of the desire to help poorer children aspire to more, without entrenching the richness of the well-off, but a jealousy-fuelled need to bring other people down so we as a society feel comparatively better.

Unfortunately for this ingenious thesis, the chances that I’m deceiving myself when I believe I back inheritance tax for moral reasons seem slim. I am, after all, the child of parents whose income puts them in the top one percent of national earners. I easily stand to inherit tens of thousands of pounds. In believing that the state should tax this money, I’m not enviously dragging down everyone else around me so I no longer feel like I’m on a lower level. I drag myself down to the national lower level. Quite a quaint form of jealousy and selfishness, isn’t it?

I missed this post at Practical Ethics the other week. Owen Schaefer offers an equally committed but much more thorough defence of Damien’s decision to sue St. Hugh’s than I did:

The requirement is not only imprudent but unfair insofar as it ends up excluding some students of lesser means, and imposing unfair burdens on others. Shannon’s case is a good example of someone so excluded. An unfunded master’s degree is already unfortunately exclusionary. But given that fact, the university should do its utmost to minimize further exclusionary factors. The excessive living expenses are one such factor – it only allows students willing and able to support a more abundant lifestyle to study at Oxford. This is not to say that there should be no requirement for living expenses, but there is at least a strong prima facie case for it being much lower.

Damien emailed me yesterday saying that the hearing is on Friday, so we will know if this thing is going forward soon. I have no doubts that justice is on his side. I’m in no position to judge whether the law is too. But the law at least ought to reflect what is just, so all we can do now is hope that it does.

This is by far the most laughable thing I’ve read about the Vatican over the past few days:

When Pope Paul VI’s commission of learned and loyal Catholics, lay and clerical, reconsidered the “natural law” teaching against birth control, and concluded that it could not, using natural reason, find any grounds for it, Cardinal Alfredo Ottaviani, the secretary of the Holy Office, told Paul that people had for years, on papal warrant, believed that using a contraceptive was a mortal sin, for which they would go to hell if they died unrepentant. On the other hand, those who followed “church teaching” were obliged to have many children unless they abstained from sex. How could Paul VI say that Pius XI, in his 1930 encyclical Casti Connubii, had misled the people in such a serious way? If he admitted it, what would happen to his own authority as moral arbiter in matters of heaven and hell? So Paul VI doubled down, adding another encyclical in 1968, Humanae Vitae, to the unrenounceable eternal truths that pile up around a moral monarch.

Meanwhile, the word on the street seems to be that the trip to Mexico last March broke the camel’s back:

[It] was haunted by the specter of the Rev. Marcial Maciel Degollado, the Mexican founder of the Legionaries of Christ, a powerful and deeply conservative religious order with close ties to John Paul’s papacy. Before he died in 2008, Father Maciel was found to have raped seminarians, fathered several children and engaged in drug abuse.

Throughout the visit, victims’ groups and other advocates organized news conferences and other events to call attention to what they saw as the church’s dismal record on sexual abuse, even though Benedict, as the Vatican’s chief doctrinal officer, had reopened an investigation into Father Maciel that ultimately disclosed his double life. But he failed to address the issue in Mexico, upsetting victims’ groups there and around the world.

This sums it all up, really. So little compassion for fellow humans as to not even offer a real apology. So little accountability as to not even face internal political pressure for so long over this repulsive negligence. And so little humility as to not even repent and recognise his own role in protecting rapists for decades.

But I guess that’s the problem. True remorse and a total apology would necessitate a personal acknowledgement of unfathomable and unforgivable guilt in facilitating evil. For the man who deems himself divinely placed to offer the rest of us moral guidance, achieving that sort of self-consciousness was always going to be a stretch.

In under five months I’ll have to confirm the topic of my thirty thousand word thesis, even though I won’t start writing and researching it for another eleven. I’ve been thinking over the past few days about what I could possibly want to spend six whole months reading and writing that much on, especially now I’m almost certain it will be my last hurrah in the academic world. It will be something practical – ethics, politics, aesthetics. It will not be contributing further mere noise to an already over-done field. So out goes vegetarianism, however much it intrigues me. And it will hopefully be something that straddles the boundaries of those three fields and ends up saying something I, at least, deem worthwhile and important. That has to be my aim. And I’m wondering right now if that aim could be best served by aiming to do something on the philosophy of education.

Several quick reasons for pondering this.

First, I love Rousseau, as you all know, and this would give me a rare chance to legitimately focus on the guy in my philosophy degree. Emile is a pedagogical masterpiece without precedent, and to be able to get my teeth into its lengthy chapters is far too tempting.

Second, it’s a pressing and topical question. Nussbaum’s Not For Profit, which I’ve reviewed before, shook me deeply. If there’s a time for the nature of education to be reassessed and emphasised, it’s now.

Third, it would allow me vast scope. Insofar as ethics is about human improvement and goodness, it’s inevitably a question for that part of philosophy. But it also falls under the tradition of civic republicanism and raises questions about what sort of education is consistent with the tenets of liberalism, specifically state neutrality. And then the role of art in education is also obvious, so this potential thesis could plausibly cover the entire scope of practical philosophy.

It’s a start, anyway. I’d appreciate comments, and in time I’ll post any other ideas I have.

I am equal parts depressed and inspired by Ezra Klein’s success, as detailed in The New Republic’s profile. It’s hard for aspiring journalists not to feel both of those emotions about a twenty eight year old who has two columns, regularly hosts on MSNBC, writes for The New Yorker and runs a blog which rakes in four million hits a month. All after such a mediocre launchpad in life:

At the University of California, Santa Cruz—the only school that would accept him—Klein didn’t quite fit in… Klein applied to the student newspaper, and was rejected. Sophomore year, he applied to an internship at The American Prospect, and was rejected. He applied to be a reporter-researcher at The New Republic, and didn’t get that either. He tried to help out Gary Hart, who pondered a presidential bid in 2004, and the day after he drove him around traffic-clogged San Francisco, Hart decided not to run.

And yet despite getting a far greater education, I feel like I can only dream of Klein’s level of success. The fact I major in a subject that most people don’t seem to appreciate the value of doesn’t help my anxiety. Then again, Matt Yglesias, Chris Hayes and Glenn Greenwald all have backgrounds in philosophy, and Sullivan laboured on a PhD in political theory before heading into the world of journalism. Perhaps there’s no reason in principle why, with some fortunate breaks and a real drive and work ethic, I couldn’t give that career a good shot.

Ezra’s self-consciousness about the importance of his job, and the duties inherent to it, also shone through and struck me:

I think the focus on gaffes is a deep embarrassment, like, a deep embarrassment, and a systemic failure on the media’s part… And the danger of that is that, when you don’t tell people how a machine works, when it’s broke, they don’t know how to fix it. And I think that’s begun to happen.

Britain desperately needs an Ezra. But I think that thought hints at one barrier I face which isn’t present in the States. Namely, my country is infinitely further bogged down in Old Media models. The blogosphere is nowhere near as lively. No prominent and young figures have made their name by rising online on merit. The only blogs that print institutions host are as side-projects for their Establishment old-hand paper columnists, as evidenced by a quick look at The Telegraph and Spectator and New Statesman’s websites. I mean, what does it say about a country that the most prominent and financially successful independent blogger is Guido fucking Fawkes? How long must we wait for this cultural shift to occur?

In his original ’78 review of Darkness on the Edge of Town, Dave Marsh reflected for Rolling Stone on what makes Springsteen special:

Bruce Springsteen has a tendency to inspire messianic regard in his fans — including this one. This isn’t so much because he’s regarded as a savior — though his influence has already been substantial — but because he fulfills the rock tradition in so many ways. Like Elvis Presley and Buddy Holly, Springsteen has the ability, and the zeal, to do it all. For many years, rock & roll has been splintered between the West Coast’s monopoly on the genre’s lyrical and pastoral characteristics and a British and Middle American stranglehold on toughness and raw power. Springsteen unites these aspects: he’s the only artist I can think of who’s simultaneously comparable to Jackson Browne and Pete Townshend. Just as the production of this record unifies certain technical trends, Springsteen’s presentation makes rock itself whole again. This is true musically — he rocks as hard as a punk, but with the verbal grace of a singer/songwriter — and especially emotionally. If these songs are about experienced adulthood, they sacrifice none of rock & roll’s adolescent innocence. Springsteen escapes the narrow dogmatism of both Old Wave and New, and the music’s possibilities are once again limitless.

He also comments on the infamous John Landau line: “I saw rock & roll future and its name is Bruce Springsteen”:

With its usual cynicism, the world chose to think of this as a fanciful way of calling Springsteen the Next Big Thing.

I’ve never taken it that way. To me, these words, shamefully mistreated as they’ve been, have kept a different shape. What they’ve always said was that someday Bruce Springsteen would make rock & roll that would shake men’s souls and make them question the direction of their lives. That would do, in short, all the marvelous things rock had always promised to do.

But Born to Run was not that music. It sounded instead like the end of an era, the climax of the first twenty years of this grand tradition, the apex of our collective adolescence. Darkness on the Edge of Town does not. It feels like the threshold of a new period in which we’ll again have “lives on the line where dreams are found and lost.” It poses once more the question that rock & roll’s epiphanic moments always raise: Do you believe in magic?

And once again, the answer is yes. Absolutely.

Naturally, Sullivan nails it:

He seems to recognize that the challenges the Catholic church now faces – its intellectual collapse in the West, the stench of moral corruption revealed by the decades of child-rape and cover-ups, and the resort to the crudest forms of authority and reactionaryism in response to new ideas, discoveries and truths about human nature – have now overwhelmed his physical and mental strength. At some point, the sheer human energy required to try and impose a moral authority already lost must have seemed hopeless.

And the damage has been enormous.

A final word, then, on this matter. My original post here, Aveek’s objection here, and key excerpts from the objection here.

I think the crux of my response to Aveek has already been made best by a friend on my Facebook page:

The journals are too packed to form a republic of letters. If you want to test your ideas, you can go to conferences and seminars, you can blog, you can just talk to people; the journals are not an appropriate forum. If you write a thing, you should hope that it is right and important, the best that you can make it; otherwise, you’re just wasting people’s time.

This strikes me as spot on. I appreciate Aveek’s argument that there’s a sense in which we have no choice but to allow a boiling pot of ideas to expand and brew out there. I also acknowledge the whiff of inconsistency when I often blog several times a day. And it is hard to conceive of an obviously better way for good ideas to flourish and climb out of the mess.

And yet, I do think we can conceive of a better system. Namely, one in which the formalism and prestige and bureaucracy intrinsic to the journal system is replaced with something more suited to the purposes Aveek envisions for it. If you have rough ideas you think it is worth throwing out there, then by all means carve out a blog post and seek feedback. What bugs me about journals is the way in which simple thoughts seem to be dragged out for twenty pages. If time were infinite, this wouldn’t be a problem. But nobody can keep up, it wouldn’t be worthwhile for them to be able to do so, and it just seems unlikely that the best papers would rise to the top democratically. Remember Malcolm’s statistic: the average article is read by five people. This format needs reserving for only the best and most original of articles.

So I just doubt that it is healthy for institutions to be built on this bloated system. But my core point was more about the way this is all stupidly tied up with notions of merit and employability. On the question of whether successful publication records should get you top teaching jobs, I’m glad that Aveek and I can agree.

The Pope resigns, JT strikes gold, and now YouTube informs me that someone finally uploaded these thirty minutes of heaven. Don’t miss McCartney coming on stage for the final two songs. And if you look carefully, you’ll see me several times during Thunder Road, about ten rows back. Five months until we’re privileged with their presence in Britain again.

A friend linked me to a new organisation called Watsi. From its ‘About Us’ section:

All over the world people are dying of treatable illnesses because they can’t afford basic medical care. Watsi connects you with patients in serious need of low-cost medical care and enables you to fund high-impact treatments.

We believe non-profits should be impactful, innovative, efficient, and transparent, and we built Watsi on those principles. Watsi is a community, not just an organization. We are young, dynamic and serious about using technology to connect people and change lives.

We invite you to join us and change the world, one treatment, one person, and one life at a time.

The home page offers us, for example, the chance to fund Chem, a boy born with clubfoot who can be cured for $300. The site’s blog claims that “Watsi donors have given a total of $100,000 for 100+ life-changing medical treatments in 10 countries around the world”. The organisation appears to have received much positive press coverage, in Wired and the Huff Post amongst other media outlets.

Whilst no doubt well-intentioned and admirable, Watsi’s claim that it facilitates high-impact low-cost giving is worrying me. It seems to think that because it cuts out red-tape and offers a direct channel from donor to receiver, it is effective. But it is promoting treatments that are comparatively expensive. It looks like much more good can be done for these costs.

For example, according to Giving What We Can, the organisation Deworm the World offers “mass school-based deworming [which] is also cost-effective and highly scalable, costing less than US$0.50 per child per year.” If instead of donating $300 to cure Chem’s clubfoot, someone instead donated that money to a charity recommended by GWWC, it is estimated that they could produce 100 years of school attendance. Alternatively, the $100,000 donated to Watsi to provide 100+ life-changing medical treatments could have saved 1,800 years of healthy life, or 33,000 years of school attendance.

I’ve alerted GWWC to Watsi’s existence. I could be wrong, but it looks unlikely that the organisation facilitates high-impact giving. Much more good can be done by other means.