COUNTERFACTUALS:Sigh:

Oborne invokes the dubious “responsibility to protect” standard that retroactively justified the intervention in Kosovo to stop (non-existent) genocide, but beyond compromising the principle of state sovereignty it asserts a new sort of sovereignty of the protector over those whom he protects.

It's the 'non-existent' that got me. Take a historical example, say the Rwandan genocide of 1994, and the subsequent refugee crises. Stipulate that this was a morally undesirable event, and the sort about which we should be concerned. Stipulate further than the recent history of the area was known, including the rise of the Hutu Power movement and the official propaganda directed against Tutsis, as well as the history of violence against the Tutsi. If aware of this, as General Dallaire was, and in the position to stop it, what would be the best time to do so? Certainly somewhere before 800,000 are killed. How much sooner? It's not straining credulity too much to say that if it could be stopped even before it started, that would be ideal; but the sooner the better.

What exactly does that world look like? If the genocide had been stopped at 500 or 5000, no doubt Hutu Power could claim that there never was any intention for widespread violence (in much the same way that no one took responsibility for committing the genocide after it happened, despite the level of organization needed to make it occur, the testimony of eyewitnesses, etc). In a world where the responsibility to protect is taken seriously, and used every time needed, there would be few, or no, genocides, but that would not constitute evidence the standard wasn't useful.

LINKS:

* Stuff Christians Like on invoking God to end a relationship. See also here. I'm less fond of the 'remix' because it's more shtick-y. However, there's a troubling tendency in evangelical circles to outsource personal responsibility to God when taking personal responsibility becomes difficult. Nothing causes quite so much consternation as causality, and thus responsibility (I believe this is a problem amongst other Christian traditions, just one they don't tend to focus on), but it's no excuse to give up just because the situation becomes difficult.

* Albert Camus would not approve, for one.

* Carrie Brownstein on summer songs and lazy descriptions of new bands.

* Vulture: "If Hancock is really as bad as it sounds, could it spell doom not only for Will Smith's sure-thing status, but also the superhero film as a genre?" I can hope. I liked, somewhat cautiously, the first of the new sci-fi/comic book movies, but I have no interest in any of them now (see also: surprisingly better-than-you-thought Pixar movies, though if I ever see Cars again, I'll scream).

* This is heinously bad, but I haven't been able to stop watching it.

* Lest anyone ever ask, "why teach philosophy?" read on here:

For Bell, 21, the right thing would include putting a past behind him that includes legal and academic problems from the nearly two years he played at Penn State. In April, Bell was dismissed from the football team after police said he threatened a teammate with a knife in a campus dining hall. He was released from the university.

Academic issues had also led to a suspension from the Nittany Lions last February.

Bell says he's ready to make a fresh start.

"I was sitting in history class the other day going over Socrates and Plato, reading, 'No human intentionally tries to do wrong,' " the junior said as he prepared for 7-on-7 drills. "I rebelled and I acted out there, but I also learned a lot.

Now, that position of Plato's (or the longer, more complicated version of it) is one that has some less-desirable implications, but the kid's getting his life back on track, and he read something that struck him and has stayed with him. Score one for philosophy. (h/t Run Up the Score)

BUT IS IT POSSIBLE? Norm:

The politics of the situation may dictate a need for negotiation, but morally and legally there should be no negotiation between an opposition party which has won an election and the regime that is attempting to negate the result of it by violence. The agencies of international law are in hock to political exigencies, where a greater separation of the two is needed.

But a greater separation of politics from law, even if it were possible (I find that dubious), is not clearly desirable: if law is going to be useful at all to problems as they arise in international politics, then laws and institutions need to be formed with an idea of what they will look like put into the hands of actual states and political officials. In some ways, it's the separation of the two that's the problem. Consider a passage from today's NYT story:

The back-and-forth at the Security Council reflected the continuing debate over whether electoral crises constitute a threat to international peace and security, the main requirement for them to be taken up by the Council. The United States and others, including Mr. Ban, hold that they do, not least because of the humanitarian crisis caused by the Zimbabwean government’s decision to bar aid organizations from working in the country.

What's holding them back is an institutional structure that separates politics and law too much. The clear interest is in expressing concern over what's occurring in Zimbabwe, and contemplating steps beyond that, if necessary. But the politics must be held back and made to conform to the law. Separation, after all, can mean giving ascendancy to either the politics that prevent good responses, or the politics that make them possible; the law that hinders due concern for the rest of the world, or the law that makes it possible.

THE ZIMBABWE THESIS: Norm writes, on international law:

It is this: the regime of international law, that is, the framework of institutions that is meant to uphold international law, should be held in contempt by all those committed to democracy and human rights, so long as and to the extent that those institutions are merely a cover for inaction and/or connive at the most blatant criminality by states against their own peoples.

He explains:

How can a citizen of any country respect a legal system which essentially stands by to the criminality of governments that have a place in the very councils whose task it is to strengthen international law? Countenancing the rape, torture and murder of Zimbabweans that system thereby countenances the rape, torture and murder of anybody, and therefore of you too. For the principle is a general one: it's not that Mugabe's thugs may destroy this man or this woman; it's that a government, a regime, may get away with killing those under its jurisdiction for all that the agencies of international law are likely to do about it. That is not a legal system to be esteemed. The publics of democratic countries also have an obligation in this regard. We should not accept, we should denounce, a system of law that accommodates such things.

Can one support the idea of a law-governed world and the development of international law to this end, while at the same time holding that system in contempt and condemning it for its failures? Indeed, one can and one should. The criticism and condemnation are for its shortcomings. In so far as the law and its implementation (where, as rarely, this occurs) live up to an acceptable ideal of the rule of law, it should be supported.

There's a lot going on here, but I will try to isolate a few points worth mentioning.

1. The status of the claim--the manner of opposition is left unclear. Is it holding a lack of esteem for international law, or holding it in contempt? This is, as one might say, the negative portion of the claim, which is supplemented by the positive claim, which is support for 'the idea of a law-governed world.' However, as is the case in so many other areas of philosophy, the negative case does not imply the positive case; Descartes thinks he has found reasons to believe in the world, in bodies, and in God, but he is one of the few who finds his reasons convincing (and if Rorty's thesis in Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature is correct, this is a structural feature of the modern mind). I see moral reasons to accept the negative premise--it may be the only morally correct conclusion to reach when one looks at international politics--but no reason to accept the positive case. Now, as I understand it, Norm deflects this criticism by reversing the priority of the two claims--because the positive belief in international law comes first, then follows the need to reject institutions that subvert that goal. I'd suggest amending the text so that "for those committed to democracy and human rights" comes first, to establish the form of the claim.*

2. The problems international law faces are deeply structural. As has often been argued, there is no central power which compels the actions of states; most instruments of international law are created by the action of a number of governments. Consequently, international law is built to serve two sets of interests: those of states, who wish to arrogate as much power back to themselves under the name of sovereignty or whatever other doctrine makes that possible, and those of international lawyers (and the concomitant portions of governments) who wish to expand the scope of international law, often for its own sake. Neither of these has democracy or human rights as a primary goal.

3. The primary reason I retain skepticism about the thesis is the invocation of 'the rule of law,' a concept that I think has done much damage to the prospects for international law. To be more correct, I believe the idea is, and has been, applied in form even while the content of international law was not prepared for it. States make international law;** states have lots of interests, not all of them good. Norm is incorrect, I aver, to think that it's 'international law and institutions' that are the problem; even on a strict positivist Doctrine of Sources, change is possible. It's the concept of rule of law that is causing the problem--to suggest that current law and institutions are doing something less than their best work, that we ought to hold them in contempt, is, to the positivist, to attempt to subvert the rule of law. Given that positivism is the dominant position within international law, and positivists can only think in terms of law, the critic must always be fighting a rearguard action--proving that they do not wish to subvert order entirely.

One might think of the domestic analogy; one need not suspend the concept of rule of law in order to protest the failure to rigorously uphold certain laws, or change them in the name of morality (think of the civil rights movement of the 50s). The analogy fails, I think, because a critique of international law as it now stands does not, I think, go far enough to ask for full application of all the laws; it needs to question the legitimacy of international institutions as such. To the extent that the institutions have failed--and in cases of severe human rights violations, their failure is the anticipated result, not an exception--then the institutions need to be replaced, and going halfway won't do it.

4. Politics, or the 'so what?' question: I get that the point of the thesis is to speak to the proper attitude and political orientation of those committed to human rights and democracy, and as one of those people, I find it to be compelling, if not yet addressing everything to the extent I would like. But there is a tremendous gap between the attitude of the individual and the function of the international system, which is an omission that, again, I think needs to be rectified. There have always been people who are committed to these things, who hold in contempt the institutions that fail to respond when needed. What makes this different, or new, or needed now in a way it hasn't been before? How does it expand beyond the attitude of one, or a number, or even a handful of states?


*I am not convinced 'democracy and human rights' is the correct formulation; depending on how one reads the source doctrine of international law, one could well argue that we have the institutions we do precisely because the international law is democratic. Additionally, Norm (I think) supports the priority of human rights to democracy--if we can only have one, it's better to have the human rights. Otherwise, the thesis collapses, on the condition that a system condoning violations of human rights is just what states want.

**A few international lawyers will argue for doctrines that are exceptions to this rule: the 'erga omnes' obligation, or else the concept that international law 'solidifies' after a treaty is signed and confers binding obligations not just on the signatories, but on everyone. These concepts are not without their own difficulties, and are primarily used by positivists, as a way of not needing to appeal to morality to frame international law. Thus I think Norm would not want to employ them.

LINK: Following on this speculation concerning what will happen if Obama loses, a thought: so much of the narrative surrounding Obama and, to a lesser extent, HRC, concerns our ability as Americans to reach a certain plateau: see how far race relations have advanced, we have an African-American major party presidential candidate. Democracy, however, is usually framed as the art of losing well--rather than declaring undesired results illegitimate or protesting, the winners get to push their legislative agenda and everyone else tries again in two or four years. It'll be interesting to see how these two narratives play off each other as the campaign progresses, since I think there is, and will be, a lot of tension between them.

LINK: Matthew Fluxblog on R.E.M. live, but more particularly on the opening acts:

The National and Modest Mouse opened for the band at this show, and at Jones Beach. What a contrast -- the former can't help but be a little leaden and/or sedate, but they really go for it and try to make the most of playing in a big space. The latter band just seems bored, and refuse to play their biggest hits, or really, aside from "Paper Thin Walls" last night, any of their best material. Between these two shows and the headlining gig I saw them play a year or so ago, I can't help but feel that Modest Mouse are one of the most joyless live acts in the world today. They have a rote professionalism, but that's about it. It's a shame, because Isaac Brock has written a lot of good songs in his day, and he should be doing better than this.

We saw both at the R.E.M. concert in Chicago. Modest Mouse had the worst sound of any band I have ever heard perform live, and I'm including all those screamer bands I heard in the basement of Becky and Lauren's house in Ann Arbor. They were almost daring you not to like them--and I didn't.

For awhile the meme was kicking around the political theory blogosphere wherein you name the five works that have most influenced you. Since I'm indulging myself today (and proctoring the last exam from the Spring semester*). My shot, interpreting the question rather broadly:

1. "Political Action: The Problem of Dirty Hands," Michael Walzer. In Winter 2003, I took Intro to Political Philosophy, and after reading Machiavelli, we read this and a long-ish piece by Isaiah Berlin (which impressed me less). As you may recall, the 2003 also saw a somewhat active debate about Iraq, which I was plenty interested in at the time (check the archives). I liked the political journalism I read, especially the longer arguments in Dissent and The Atlantic Monthly, but it wasn't until I read this that I realized what was missing: the long, sustained involvement with complicated political arguments that leaves you with more questions than answers, but much better questions that you started out with. My relationship with Walzer has become more complicated since then--I'm not much of a communitarian, and his theory of intervention is less plausibly useful the more time you spend with it--but he's basically the source.

2. The Contract of Mutual Indifference, Norm Geras. Got me to watch Shoah (totally worth it) and read Jean Améry, and fixed me to my interest in humanitarian catastrophes and the importance of solidarity amongst humans.

3. The Rights of War and Peace, Richard Tuck. First semester here, I had to read this alongside Strauss' Natural Right and History and comment on both. As I am not a believer in Strauss' thesis (there or much of anywhere), Tuck's book had the virtue of at least being plausible to me; he also spent a lot of time talking about some Dutchman named Hugo Grotius. Since, I have come to the opinion that the thesis of the book (as it concerns Grotius) is wrong, but, intellectually, this is where the interest started.

4. De jure belli ac pacis, Grotius. Fecundity of source material is one of the goals of political theory: you want to choose a book you can happily return to over and over, finding new inspiration, and material that forces you to interrogate your assumptions. De jure belli is that book for me. Running to 1000 pages or more, it took me years of reading to even get a sense of its structure, how it flows from one section to the next (even when it appears not to). It's a masterful book: judgments are given and withheld throughout the course of the book, and set up just so, because the process mirrors the reader's thinking on the subject; like Virgil with Dante, he's careful to not give too much until you have the proper foundation to understand it. His flaws are evident: a fascination with piling on source material long beyond the amount needed to establish his point, and a qualified defense of some human practices, including slavery, that no contemporary thinker could embrace. All the same, justly famous.

5. Humanitarian Intervention: Legal, Ethical and Political Dilemmas, J.L. Holzgrefe and Robert Keohane, eds. By now, you've probably figured out I'm not one of those theorists who reads Plato and Aristotle over and over (though I like both well enough). Rather, I like to sit at the boundary between political theory, political philosophy, international law, and international relations. This book convinced me that combination could work.


*What's that you say? All the rest of the exams were graded six weeks ago? I know, believe me, I know. As always, however, I will strive for the right mixture of iustitia and caritas. I will need to look up the rubric again to remember how we graded.

LINK: Norm Geras at normblog was so kind as to make me the normblog profile for this week. Norm is one of those people who I've been reading almost since I started blogging, and one of his books--The Contract of Mutual Indifference--played as big a role in my becoming a political theorist as anything else (he also wrote, I believe, the definitive refutation of Richard Rorty's Contingency, Irony and Solidarity, called Solidarity in the Conversation of Humankind; chapter 1 in particular is just devastating, and exactly the sort of empirical-and-theoretical method I hope to employ), so to say it's an honor is something of an understatement.

Excellent question

THEORY'S THIRD CHEER: Matt Yglesias, writing on theory in foreign policy:

No theory worth having is going to have totally unambiguous applications to specific cases, and besides which there's no substitute for factual information and good judgment. That said, just saying we're going to take a prudent, empirical approach to questions turns out to not have any real content. In part, this is for formal reasons like "the interdependence of fact and theory" where people's empirical assessments of situations are influenced by their theoretical precommitments.

I often have difficulty explaining why it is I find noninterventionism to be uncompelling as a theoretical approach, but Matt explains it well. It's theory writ too large: every circumstance has the same answer, no matter the underlying conditions. Kosovo? Shouldn't invade. Rwanda? Shouldn't invade. The Sudan? Shouldn't invade. Taliban Afghanistan? Shouldn't invade. In fact, we should be content to let all those parts of the world do as they wish. But despite the fact that particular circumstances are effaced in the name of theory, history is brought in, in it's own haphazard way, to support the contention that interventions have never worked and, therefore, never will work. History, sovereignty, international law and national interest all come in, at various moments, when they support the predetermined answer, though they are often enough fungible between cases.

(I would be interested in a noninterventionist interpretation of the Mexican-American War, which I suspect would cautiously support the war and, moreover, definitely support the US territorial acquisition that resulted, but probably at the cost of logical inconsistency with, say, Kosovo).

By way of contrast, I don't mean to support forcible military intervention in all cases of human rights violations (though I am closer to the Altman and Wellman* position than, say, Daniel Larison's). Certainly one should aim at respecting the principle of non-intervention, which serves the important purpose of erecting some legal barriers preventing national-interest-sphere-of-influence logic, especially when former colonial territories are concerned. Though one respects the principle, it's important not to reify it: there are other operative parts of international law,** and serious arguments to be made about potential crystallization of customary international law around a limited right of intervention in some cases. Theory's job is to take the principles, moral, legal, and political, and the cases of intervention or failed intervention we have, and to attempt to derive conclusions to improve actions that are taken in the future. One thing this debate has made clear is that there's a wide consensus in America (and elsewhere) that intervention is justifiable at least some of the time, which for those of us who worried that the Iraq War might take interventionism off the table in American foreign policy, is welcome news indeed.


* "A Defense of International Criminal Law," Ethics 115 (October 2004): 35-67. Their basic position is that any violation of human rights can justify intervention. I take them to be on the far interventionist side of the spectrum. My own views would (not surprisingly) be closer to Allen Buchanan's idea of 'international legal reform,' though I think he relies too much on institutions to do the heavy lifting of political judgment.

**There are interpretive options available, such as the legal realist or New Haven School approaches to the UN Charter and collective security system, or the simpler appeal to progressive codification of human rights and the rise of the ICC/ICJ. One shouldn't be naive and adopt a progressive account of international law, but "international law" rarely speaks in one voice, let alone one which supports strong sovereignty and noninterventionism.

IN WHICH MY WORLDS COLLIDE, SLIGHTLY: Lost is now name-dropping Hugo de Groot.

De Groot being the non-Latinized version of 'Grotius.'

Weird.

I'm surprised (maybe I shouldn't be) that no one on this post has mentioned omitted variable bias or the difference between bivariate and multivariate regressions as reasons correlation does not imply causation. Seems pretty basic to me.

UPDATE: Actually said before here, in the last paragraph, which I'll admit to skimming. I blame Google.

THE CHOSEN: Helen:

Conservatives like unchosen loyalties, and one of the strengths of loyalty to place and heritage is that it's unchosen.

Kind of. You can't choose the place you come from. The relationship you has with a place of origin contains a lot more than that fact. Hugo Schwyzer points out one dimension:

Let me make it simple: all things being equal (and Berkeley and UCLA are pretty equal in most programs, as are Cal State LA and Sacramento State), go to college as far away as possible from your friends, family, and everything you have known. I don’t know if anyone has copyrighted it yet, so call it the Gandalf theory of higher education. When in doubt, and if you can possibly afford it financially, move away.

Anyone familiar with the end of Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man knows of another example, when Stephen decides his Irishness will be his to define and understand. Helen again:

The thing that Michael Oakeshott liked about unchosen loyalties was the fact that they are non-instrumental. Chosen loyalties are, for him, always directed towards some material goal and therefore liable to be small and petty; they're also the kind of loyalty that allows a person to opt out if the association is no longer serving their purposes, which is also pretty lame.

I'm not convinced chosen-ness makes loyalties any worse, and I think one can make the case that they're better. For relatively young people in contemporary America, all your loyalties are chosen--perhaps it's better to say that part of becoming an adult is learning how to solidify one's loyalties, to recognize the ones worth keeping and pursuing. Maintaining chosen loyalties is at least a difficult as maintaining unchosen ones--perhaps harder, for the reasons Helen identifies, as so (on one reading) a better field in which to exercise virtue. I don't consider myself to have fewer, or merely instrumental, obligations to the church I attend because I chose it. But I know that, having chosen it, I bear responsibility for my relationship to it. Should I fail to fulfill those obligations, the failure will be mine, too.

SOMETIMES, THE JOKES WRITE THEMSELVES: West Virginia football blogger compares his school to Nazi Germany. No, really:

Two: What historical nation and period do you resemble most right now?

Germany during World War II. It’s all about speed and firepower. West Virginia’s offense looks to create a weakness in the defense through formation and exploit it with speed and precision. Like Germany, West Virginia is known for having lethal offensive weapons that strike fear in their enemies. But their ability to stop opponents and hold their ground can be called into question. The run defense is always stout, but there are days that it seems we can’t cover our own shadows. And in a conference with so many capable quarterbacks, that could be a problem.

LIBERALISM AND CONSERVATISM:

Liberalism. Norm Geras:

But if we understand 'the equal dignity of all citizens' in a way compatible with what political liberalism is thought to entail, that is not a framework neutral as between the various metaphysical and social doctrines, religious and secular, that rub shoulders in the public domain. It harmonizes with some better than with others, and with yet others - for example, those encompassing the unequal dignity of different types of people - it harmonizes hardly at all. Liberalism is better as a political framework, not because it is neutral (as between competing outlooks), but because it is better. It needs to be argued and fought for on that basis.

Rawls is certainly wrong to think that political liberalism can be neutral in this way, if that neutrality is a pre-condition of political deliberation (as it is). Norm points out that a freestanding overlapping consensus is only possible after, not before, you know the all-things-considered comprehensive conceptions of the people constituting a political society. And, also certainly, liberalism will require some exclusions (a point made well in John Tomasi's book Liberalism Beyond Justice). However, to the extent it needs to be argued from a specific position, liberalism has to give way in its claim to be the way of approaching the world to which all people (in the right kind of state) can agree. The Law of Peoples suggests that Rawls is more interested in creating a workable universal consensus than in defending liberalism per se (James will perhaps disagree), so, while I think Norm's interpretation is correct, the implication is that Rawls is of limited use to liberal political theory.


Conservatism. Put me down in qualified agreement with John Holbo on the question of conservatism and segregation:

Douthat rejects this, suggesting the right thing to say is that conservatism in 1958 was in favor of segregation. That is, conservatism was wrong. There is an important point to be made here, which goes a bit beyond the generic one that humility is a virtue, and bullet-bitting takes a little fortitude. Political philosophies – conservatism, liberalism, so forth – are not the sort of thing you would expect to be infallibly right. They are going to be heuristics, insofar as they are styles of governing. In some ways, they are heuristic approaches to morality itself. Obviously you should feel free to improve your philosophy, looking forward. But, looking backwards, you shouldn’t gerrymander to avoid embarrassment.

Now, I have a little sympathy with the view expressed by Helen, that the view of conservatism as hegemonically in favor of segregation requires one to overlook the conservative sources that might've led one to oppose it. I worry that this devalues 'conservative' as a term of reference: if one may be conservative and oppose segregation, and one may be conservative and support it, what on earth could it possibly mean to be conservative? The answer is, of course, that they're conserving different things (or believe themselves to be conserving different things, or mis-identifying which things ought to be conserved).

The confounding factor, as Ross identifies, is Christianity:

I should also note that my views on how to define conservatism are colored by my allegiance to Christianity, which unless you expand the Kirkian definition to the breaking point only tends to be a conservative force in societies that are already deeply permeated by Christian beliefs - and even then not necessarily. This means that I take it as a given that I wouldn't have been able to self-define as a conservative in second-century Rome, or sixteenth-century Japan, and I don't have all that much trouble saying that I wouldn't have self-defined as a conservative in 1950s Alabama either - which was one of those Christianity-permeated societies, I might add, where the Christian religion turned out to be something other than a conservative force.

I presume the conservative argument against segregation in 1958 would rely heavily on a Christian conception of identity. Ross puts his finger on the important point: I may sometimes believe there's a natural fit between my religion and my political beliefs because they have at least one thing in common--me--but they can, and do, push in different directions. Where there is a conflict, the Christianity wins out, but that belief--logically, metaphysically and otherwise--is prior to my conservatism. I don't think there's too much shame in being wrong here: shame in being caught in the morally wrong position, to the extent that that would be applicable to an individual, but people of all stripes make misguided policy decisions all the time. If, as Holbo suggests, one doesn't cling too much to the idea that one's ideology is never mistaken, then the proper response to past failure is to learn, and try to not make the same mistake again.

FOR THE RECORD: This in no way resembles a serious argument. I sincerely hope my irony detector just didn't go off on this one.

ALTERNATIVE HYPOTHESIS TIME: Ross Douthat:

And the sort of authors whose works tend to stand the test of time - the great novelists and poets, the philosophers and theologians - are getting it from both directions: The Google effect makes it harder to write War and Peace, and harder to read it.

Count me a non-believer in the Google Effect. It's hard to write another War and Peace because it's generally difficult to write anything that will hold up for 100 years or more, especially longform fiction novels. This is related to the point that it's difficult to write 1200 pages of anything (or 500, for that matter), because the logistics of creation are on a different scale--one cannot possibly keep it all going at once. Hence so few people attempting longform work; I would also suspect, by way of speculation, that people who excel at shorter formats generally do not have skills that translate to longer work.

As for the difficulty of maintaining attention: War and Peace presents its own problems, because a lot is going on and it takes some effort to follow everything (the first 100 pages of any Russian novel, for me, are an attempt to keep the names straight). For everything else, the ugly truth is that most writing is decidedly mediocre, the internet being no exception--this is certainly true of academic writing. I mean it as no insult to say most people do not approach the level of Tolstoy. Everyone writes a poor page, chapter, or blog post on occasion, but we forgive this because of an interest in the writer's work more generally, or else a particular interest in the subject matter. And, of course, subject matter on the internet varies widely. No one gets bent out of shape if they don't read every story in a newspaper, or end up skimming a number of them, and this seems the closest analogy to blog reading.

BEING COOL ISN'T WORTH IT: A remarkably sane bit of advice from McSweeny's, on trying to be cool as you get older:

If by "cool" you're referring to some sort of constellation of wardrobe, body modification, and iTunes library that approximates what someone eight years younger than you has, you don't stay cool. I mean, you can sort of pantomime it for a while, and since you've just turned 30 it wouldn't be so difficult for you. But this kind of cool shifts quickly, and assuming you're a typical 30-year-old who now has obligations beyond smuggling peyote into your dorm room, it's going to move faster than you. Maybe not much faster, at first, but coolness requires precision—either you're on top of it or you aren't. And at this point you probably have little time to figure out what the official position on the Yeah Yeah Yeahs sucking is. If you do have the time, you probably won't for much longer.

Some people manage to replace cool with the confidence that comes from experience and accomplishment, and, increasingly, the people in your life will start to value those things more as they themselves move on from their 20s. Coolness was a placeholder, something they leaned on as they assembled themselves.

Twice in the last month or so, I've had people ask me what new music I'm listening to. Both times, the honest answer has been "I don't listen to new music, I listen to old music." In high school, I was on the bleeding edge, but somewhere towards the end of college/beginning of grad school, other things became worth the time I used to devote to following new bands. I know what I like, and the kinds of things I like, and that's fine by me--it doesn't exclude the occasional worthy new thing, but the days of chasing novelty for its own sake are behind me. Thankfully.

I think there's a pedagogical equivalent to this, which is the desire for novelty less because a new source can add something to what you're teaching, and more because you're bored of reading the same things over and over again (this is not a criticism, since Lord knows one day I will feel exactly the same thing, but I worry that this valorizes the experience of the teacher, who has read, say, the Republic dozens of times, over that of the student, who may never have encountered it before); this is probably the honest explanation for the funky-looking course syllabi NR-type conservatives mock (if you read and re-read the great works, you'll start looking for perspectives that keep them interesting, and that'll lead you down some bizarre roads).

THEY DON'T LACK FOR CLARITY, I'LL GIVE THEM THAT: I've read not one but two articles on international law this afternoon that begin by quoting 2 Corinthians 3:6: "The letter killeth; the spirit giveth life." I agree on the upshot of both, but I can hardly think of a way of starting that more directly announces 'I have no interest in compromise.'

OBSERVATION WHILE LISTENING TO SOME R.E.M. LIVE PERFORMANCES:

Michael Stipe has no idea what the words to most of his songs are

QUESTION: I get the idea that shaming has some public value (emphasis on some; see Helen on this topic), though I'd tend toward the belief that it should be a set of decisions about action rather than something intentional or formal. But won't humiliation at some points conflict with the dignity of the human person, and require adopting a different mindset?

To say that Carson’s prosecution rested on Wilde being a disgrace to the community rather than any danger to it is fair enough, but Carson didn’t use humiliation because he thought it would be an effective device against a sodomite; he used it because he thought it would be effective against Wilde in particular. Wilde, then as now, was known to be a crashing snob. The only way to keep the court from being thoroughly charmed by him was to make Wilde look like a fool, and “I don’t care twopence for class” did the trick. That was Carson's reason for bringing up the boys' occupations, not any calssist prejudice of the court's.

For reasons I can't entirely ascertain, I'm not comfortable with this. Perhaps because it's happening under an institution of the state? Social pressure is one thing; but this seems quite another.

LINK: Hugo Schwyzer, whose orientation on a number of issues concerning male-female relations is very close to my own, on male jealousy:

For so many of us, are greatest challenge in any romantic relationship is to learn what it means to trust. Trust is the sine qua non of real love; fear and control are its greatest enemies. To love another adult is to do more than trust that their own intentions are good; to love another adult is to honor their own capacity to set boundaries and protect themselves from harm. Men in particular do well to learn that lesson. As for women, they do well to become very clear that there is nothing romantic, sweet, or honorable about jealousy or the desire to control. The sooner that lesson is learned, the greater the potential for joy, and the lesser the potential for misery.

I remember once having a conversation with a number of conservative evangelical women on the topic of male-female friendship. They all thought there was something vaguely untoward about maintaining close friendships with men. I thought they were all crazy. Their thesis, as I recall, was that too-close friendship with a man will either scare off potential future dateable men, or else engender some confusion about what the status of the relationship was. The practical result was to re-enforce the 'myth of male weakness,' as Schywzer calls it; men must be kept at a distance because they cannot be trusted to patrol that boundary themselves. But it also had a second clear effect, which was to make it difficult, if not impossible, for men to learn to close emotional distance with women. The guys these women met were clearly making mistakes, which resulted in their exile from continued friendship, without any clue of what had happened. (This is not to excuse them, because some of the mistakes were pretty basic; the misogyny that results from not recognizing where you went wrong is an equal problem). How exactly is a man supposed to learn to love, to trust, and be open if not in the context of friendships that allow for that level of growth and development? All this is to say I'm very, very grateful for my female friends.

I HEARTILY ENDORSE THIS EVENT OR PRODUCT V: Or,

6:00 AM IS A RIDICULOUS HOUR TO BE AWAKE:

* Interview with Joel McHale of The Soup, which functions as a sufficient reason to have cable. Excerpt:

AVC: Do you think the war on stupid culture is unwinnable? Are we headed for Idiocracy?

JM: Oh, that's a good question. I think the smart people will get even smarter, and the dumb people will get even dumber. But I think they all will enjoy A Shot At Love With Tila Tequila, no matter how you slice it. You know, we keep eating it up. Some of the most intelligent people I know cannot get enough of it. That's a dangerous thing.

AVC: All television-watching will eventually be ironic.

JM: Actually, you hit on a good point there. We should start our own network called IRO where everything you watch is like, "It's ironic that I'm watching this. It's campy. It's contradictory." I think we should start. In fact, you are going to be a billionaire because of what you just said.

* Stuff Christians Like on being too holy.

* Pajiba on the season finale of Lost

* This Megan McArdle post on mixtapes is odd, a little like asking a magician for his secrets. The best way to make a mix cd is through trial and error.

* 101 Movies to Avoid Watching Before You Die