December 21, 2002
You can tell a woman by the company she keeps.
Giles Coren of the Times found out something about poor persecuted friend of the Palestinians Mona Baker - namely that she writes in friendly terms to holocaust-denier David Irving. Note she seems to have initiated the correspondence, not him. I found this item via Damian Penny, who has a report of it that will outlast the Times' deadline for charging foreign readers. Do her supporters who write to the Guardian know? Does boycotter-in-chief Stephen Rose know? (Mr Rose is a Jew who supports a boycott of Israeli academics out of political conviction, but I doubt that he cares for Mr Irving or Mr Irving's friends.)By the way, I really do believe in academic freedom. Thus support Mona Baker's right to organize boycotts, so long as others have the right to denounce her and boycott her back. I also think that it is legitimate and praiseworthy (though it should not be compulsory) for universities to have a policy against racial discrimination and to fire people who breach it. If academic journals want to judge academic papers on the race of the writer, let them, but let them be revealed as temples of a pernicious cult, not temples of knowledge.
It seems that I am rarer in this belief than I would once have thought. Stephen Rose's views on academic freedom seem to be gaining ground. He writes in the article linked to above: "Academic freedom I find a completely spurious argument in a world in which science is so bound up with military and corporate funding." Very revealing. He has gone that far. He should not be too surprised when Irving and his like come up to meet him.
You don't want to hear all my moaning.
Your role in the script now requires you to write in saying, oh, but we do! Please Natalie, tell us more about your unmet deadlines, your faulty ISDN line, your tormented life as a Christmas shopping survivor, the crow-like rasp that precedes each cough...
December 20, 2002
A fisking here, a fisking there.
Layman's Logic takes on the Great Cham himself and the Mirror besides. I haven't even bothered to send you to the permalink this time, since I know it won't be working. But for the archives here it is.
"The Two Towers makes no effort to look for root causes."
From Innocents Abroad, a reflection on watching The Two Towers with an enthusiastic French cinema audience. If Blogger permalinks aren't working go here. Whateveryado, go there and read this:...there is a problem with root causes. Root causes assume something that is rarely mentioned. Root causes assume that humans can escape their moral obligations by standing outside the normal world. It assumes humans can abstract themselves from reality and go romping through history looking for the all-powerful distant cause that will explain each and every aspect of our current situation. Then, having discerned the historical secret, the wily scholar can, with a gentle wave of his hand, dismiss all those silly concerns about morality, responsibility and honor, while providing the road map for solving all our social ills. That this approach, which is really none other than the methodology of the social sciences, is simplistic in the extreme, reducing human decisions to little more than unthinking reactions to a single dominant stimulus, means little to its proponents. They accept all this because the root cause provides an immediate and simplistic explanation to impress the gullible and justify the foolish.There is one phrase later in the post that I don't think I can quite sign up to, namely "evil is its own cause", but other than that, this post had me cheering.
December 19, 2002
Habemus internetionem!
When I told her that I was having my computer upgraded a friend of mine said, "Oh, that sounds bad. Whenever or a shop has an upgrade that usually means that they are unable to function for days.I hate jokes like that.
Now I've been back for five whole minutes, I am going to read my e-mail. I hope no one is desperate for a speedy answer.