Nobody move quickly and freak them out, but it appears Pre-Durst is back again. Indulge your 90s nostalgia.

There's no two ways about it: in a semester that's mostly dedicated to human rights crises in and after World War II, Rwanda is the most depressing of them all.

Crooked Timber on the non-tenure track faculty problem. 100% agree.

Links mostly for my own interest: a series of criticisms on Beth Simmons' new book on human rights, by Samuel Moyn: 1 2 3

A comprehensive article on the New York avant-garde origins of The Adventures of Pete & Pete. It's certainly one of the cultural items that made me a weirder, and therefore better, person back when I was a whippersnap.

A question for all the pet owners out there:

I am now regularly in contact with a loveable, companionable dog who nevertheless sheds a lot. A lot. Over everything I own, including (somehow) those items not worn in the presence of said dog. Since I must look presentable at least twice a week to teach, this has been a problem. The question: is there any dog-hair removal option for my dress clothes more practical than a lint-roller? Ideally I'd like to readjust the five-plus minutes dedicated to this in the morning and reassign it to something useful, like sleeping.

By far my favorite detail of this Bill Lawrence interview is that he got the idea to shift the emphasis of Cougar Town from a 40-ish woman sleeping with younger men to a 40-ish woman drinking wine with her friends all weekend after going to visit Courteney Cox's house, where she sits around and drinks wine with her friends all weekend.

I am going to give some nonsense a better hearing than it deserves, because I think doing so will put some worthwhile points on the table. The nonsense: is liberalism as a secret (or not so secret) Protestant plot to undermine Catholicism?

The response:
1. The original post, and Dreher as well, conflate liberalism's origins and its present status as a political theory. The two are very different. Early modern liberalism is a response to a complex mix of historical and political (and, true, religious) facts. Whether or not it's an appropriate response to those facts is one question. But the attempt to draw a genealogy is a complicated one, not least because the average present-day liberal does not share the religious assumptions of a Grotius, Hobbes or Locke. Let's say at the very least that Locke's reasons might not be anyone else's.

2. Present-day liberalism is marked by a turn to political liberalism, which may be most easily thought of as an attempt to enact policy and find compromise amongst societies that are composed of many different groups, each of which might adamantly oppose the goods and policies desired by other groups. This difference is taken to be a fixed feature of political life, and with good reason. Now, this creates two problems: it creates a difference of opinion over what the right policy outcomes are supposed to be, and it creates a problem of language, because each of those groups tends to describe their ideal policy goals via different language, concepts, etc. On the view of John Rawls, among others, the goal is to have this conversation about policy in such a way as to minimize these differences of language. Hence the creation of what he calls "public reason," or a language that is intended to be accessible to and used by all, that captures the essential features of different moral and political visions without being reducible to any of them.

3. Public reason is supposed to create a problem for people of faith, because it encourages them to use a language other than their own to articulate support for their principles--a neutral language of rights and duties, rather than a fuller language of God's commands and the structure of the world. At best, this is a burdensome doubling--figure out your own reasons for advocating a policy, then 'translate'. At worst, it's disingenuous, or looks that way--use language you don't believe in to attempt to convince others to support you.

4. The original objection, I take it, is that this practice is especially burdensome for Roman Catholicism. Yet I must confess: I can't think of a Christian denomination for whom this should be less burdensome. The RC Christian who is fully appreciative of the arguments of Thomas Aquinas knows that he already possesses a language that is fully appropriate in political liberal circles: the language of natural law. Natural law doubles, with very few exceptions, the teaching of the Magisterium, and does so in language that makes no particular reference to the Catholic conception of truth. Robbie George can give a talk--I've seen him do it--when he talks about abortion as a policy issue and makes no reference to his religious beliefs, just the facts of conception and the reasonable moral conclusions that can be drawn from those facts. The same also applies, in spades, for 20th century figures like John Courtney Murray or Jacques Maritain, who used the language of natural law to argue that Catholicism and liberalism were compatible (at a time when the RC Church itself denied the possibility).

5. So the problem, I think, is not with the issue of language, for which I, as a Reformed Christian who doubts the truth or efficacy of natural law-talk, am in a far worse position than the average Roman Catholic. The problem, I suspect, is with the reality of compromise. Almost no one ever gets entirely what they want, and policy outcomes are usually driven by majority consensus over a long period of time. Slavery is as obvious as moral wrongs get, and it still took nearly a hundred years and a war in order to get rid of it; and even then its effects lingered for another hundred-plus years. I suspect the realistic time frame for any serious and extended moral change (that involves changing individual-level beliefs and behaviors) has a similar span.

6. The problem is not, in this respect, unlike the questions I regularly get from students about the merits of the Kellogg-Briand Pact, or the (non-legal, non-binding) Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Why make an agreement that is so obviously inadequate, so very likely to fail? Because it's the best deal available at the time: better to make that now and use it as a stepping stone to something else later than wait for the day the perfect deal arises, because that day will never come.

I am not actually sure how I feel about Matthew Perpetua's argument that Rihanna is being irresponsible to her fans by considering working with Chris Brown again, but it's an interesting point to consider.

Phoebe catches out James Poulos in the act of making dubious claims about the differences between men and women. My own rule of thumb is this: any reference in a conservative-oriented blog post or article (or, heaven forfend, academic publication) to "feminism" or "feminists" that does not contain a specific reference to an actual feminist with whom the argument is supposed to be taking place automatically forfeits the argument. The argument may still fail on its merits even if it passes this test, but you'd be surprised (perhaps not) how many do not make this initial hurdle.

My reason for this rule is not any churlishness about feminism, but the expectation that academics (or aspiring academics) should know better than to think this an acceptable citation practice. One cannot hand-wavingly refer to an entire group of scholarly perspectives--'liberalism,' 'conservatism,' 'communitarianism'--as though it were one indissoluble viewpoint. It would be better, but not by much, to make reference to one specific instance of the viewpoint: claiming Carol Gilligan (apparently referenced obliquely) to speak for all of feminism is like claiming C.B. MacPherson to speak for all Locke scholars, or Alasdair MacIntyre to speak for all communitarians--even if it's close to a representative view it's still not cricket.

It was a Bob Dylan 1965 kinda weekend.

Why it looks like the island next to Undisclosed Tropical Island has gone and gotten itself in the news.

Passed along on facebook, now here: How to Look Like Ryan Gosling

Dispatches from the Front Lines of Attempting to Maintain a Guitar-Based Pop Music Industry, a periodic series:



They Might Be Giants wsg Jonathan Coulton

Look: in a healthy, functioning indie guitar-based music scene, there has to be space for a band like They Might Be Giants--weird, more self-consciously nerdy than everyone else, fun. We should love and appreciate them as earlier generations appreciated... They Might Be Giants... or our hipper-than-thou forbears insisted that Randy Newman was actually really good, when taken in small doses. "Small doses" is the key phrase--I'm not TMBG aficionado, though I know four or five of their songs and can recognize others ("oh, right, they wrote a song about James K. Polk. I knew that.")--but just shy of two hours of nasal vocals, joke-songs, and what I can only describe as the largest number of guitar solos I've ever seen outside of a Phish concert does begin to wear after awhile (the two extended breaks for a puppet show seemed to indicate even the band acknowledged this). And their most significant redeeming feature, for me, is that not all their songs are intended as jokes. See, for example, "Birdhouse in Your Soul."

See, by way of generational contrast, Jonathan Coulton. He writes and sings significantly more accessible material--by-the-numbers guitar pop--and maintains a strictly postmodern banter onstage. But it's hard not to notice the Nice Guy™shtick: most of his songs are kind of mean, in which Coulton or his protagonist evinces contempt for the people he's singing about, or anyone who is not him ("Good Morning Tucson" was the most notable offender--all these stupid terrible people putting me on tv). If this is the future of indie comic pop, maybe it deserves to die.

This story was gleefully passed around the libertarian interwebs last week, and rightly so.

Richard Thompson, guitar hero.