Horizon

Running Debates

Two of today's additions to the blogosphere feature discussions in the comments threads that echo discussions we've had here, so Horizionistas might want to check them out:

Rich Leonardi is trying to teach himself Latin and has asked for suggestions on intermediate texts. The commenters — who include Michael Tinkler — debate the "Direct Method" versus traditional texts.

Laura at 11D is mulling over "Lexus lanes", which would allow toll-based use of HOV lanes by non-HOVs. Commenters like Megan McArdle and Brad DeLong revisit the old argument between rising-tide plutocrats and egalitarian aescetics.

A note from Mr. Anderson

Just noticed that Paul Anderson, editor (and blogger) of the new Orwell in Tribune book, answered our question about original material therein:

There's nothing in the book that's not in Peter Davison's CWGO: the point of it is to present the Tribune columns in a single volume as a coherent body of work, which has not been done before. I claim no great originality in putting the book together - Bernard Crick suggested it should be done more than 20 years ago - but I hope the introduction, footnotes and biographies of key players on Tribune add something new even for afficianados of Davison's exemplary work.

For which thanks, and glad Tribune is going to get some royalties.

New question: do they still have any of the unused submissions that Orwell supposedly left jammed into drawers because he couldn't say no to a starving writer?

Semi-carnally?

... "Cyril Connolly?"
"No, semi-carnally." ...

There's a notice in today's Federal Register captioned "Oregon venal pool and Illinois wet meadow ecosystems." I think they mean vernal pools but then it's a crab-eat-crab world.

Orwell in Tribune

Looks like Orwell in Tribune won't contain anything not in Davison.

Guilty Until Proven Innocent

Sara just sent me a link to the Austin Contrarian, a weblog covering Austin housing from Chris Bradford's mildly libertarian, pro-affordability perspective. There's a lot of great stuff, including his series on the evils of our new McMansion ordinance. My neck is sore from nodding, but at least a couple of passages from a post on affordable housing quotas seem especially worth quoting:

What kind of affordable housing solutions should we expect the neighborhood activists to push for? If we assume their behavior is consistent with home-price maximization, the answer is easy: affordable housing quotas.

[snip]

As I've noted before, my take is a "behavioralist" one; I'm not making claims about the subjective motives of NA's. For example, I can't dispute that some of these homeowners feel genuine concern about the lack of affordable housing in Central Austin. I just don't care. NA policies should judged by their likely effects and not NA's subjective intentions.

Now I don't know about the economics of affordable housing quotas but I do know about neighborhood activists in Austin, and Bradford's identified the perfect yardstick for measuring their claims: "I don't want an apartment on a residential street" reads raise my property value. "Duplexes will destroy the character of the neighborhood" reads raise my property value. "Large houses are an eyesore" reads raise my property value. It's simple and effective.

Science and the Pope

I've been enjoying the argument that Ralph Luker and Horizon's own Alan Allport have been having in the comments over at Cliopatria. I'm rooting for Ralph on this one, though I imagine Alan Hogue is screaming "Pull a prelapsarian equipoise!" from the stands.

Here at Horizon, we've all gotten a bit tired of our usual squabbles over historical parallels between the present and the 1930s. In the interest of spicing things up a bit, let me raise the lightening rod with my own take on the Pope's Regensburg address: Benedict is laying the groudwork for a Catholic exploration of Intelligent Design.

Skip down past the inflammatory book report to to the second half of the lecture. Benedict is describing the centuries-long narrowing of the application of Reason. He traces developments within theology that correspond to that narrowing, from the Reformer's rejection of dogmatic theology to Adolph von Harnack's attempt to de-Hellenize Christianity. These correspond to the reduction of the appropriate subjects of reason to those things subject to the Scientific Method, while non-technical disciplines play catch-up: The human sciences, such as history, psychology, sociology and philosophy, attempt to conform themselves to this canon of scientificity. This "reduction of the radius of ... reason" has negative consequences:

[I]f science as a whole is this and this alone, then it is man himself who ends up being reduced, for the specifically human questions about our origin and destiny, the questions raised by religion and ethics, then have no place within the purview of collective reason as defined by "science", so understood, and must thus be relegated to the realm of the subjective.... This is a dangerous state of affairs for humanity, as we see from the disturbing pathologies of religion and reason which necessarily erupt when reason is so reduced that questions of religion and ethics no longer concern it. Attempts to construct an ethic from the rules of evolution or from psychology and sociology, end up being simply inadequate.

In a sense, this is a call familiar to Americans who have followed the Intelligent Design debate. Personally, I spent a lot of my spare time in high school arguing with creationists who thought divine revelation should be injected into our Biology texts. In fact, I was subjected to more than a few teachers who injected it into science class anyway. But if you look more closely, criticism of "the self-imposed limitation of reason to the empirically verifiable" is not the same as criticising that limitation within science.

This distinction between reason and science — which should perhaps be obvious — has been absent from the American debate.

6079 Smith W.! Yes, you! Bend lower, please!

No, really, they're fitting British CCTV cameras with loudspeakers for shouting at the citizenry.

Friday Catblogging

I've never tried catblogging before, not having a cat. This submission is from my sister-in-law in Turkey.

German Science Readers VI: Fiedler and Sandbach's First German Course

H.G. Fielder and F. E. Sandbach
A First German Course for Science Students
Oxford University Press, 1920

Fiedler and Sandbach grasp at the same strange goal as Fotos and Bray: teaching scientific German to students who don't even know Der Bol ist rot. Unlike their Purdue counterparts, however, they don't even come close. In fact, A First German Course for Science Students is so woefully inadequate as a text that I can only conclude that the British school system of the time was unacquainted with the explanation/vocabulary/exercise lesson format.

The first forty pages of the volume consist of readings, the next forty of a systematic grammar, and the book ends with a 37 page glossary. The grammar section is the closest the book comes to language instruction, but is still merely a chart of conjugations and rules. Really, it's not so bad as a reference grammar, but that's the problem — you don't use reference grammars to teach beginners!

The inadequacies of the book for classroom use can be inferred from the disgruntled pencil-markings at the head of each reading. The authors helpfully provide section numbers for the grammatical rules a reading depends on. So, for example, the header of reading 4.A, Der Luft ist ein Körper is noted "Gram. sections 82, 84, 91, 92". Next to those, the miserable student has added "94, 96, 135-137".

That said, the book makes a pretty good reader. Although the grammar, rather than the vocabulary, is graduated, the book is still accessible to an intermediate speaker like me. The authors exercise students in all three persons by adopting the spoken lecture format — "Yesterday we learned...", "How do you explain...", "I will demonstrate...". Combined with the abundant diagrams (which also provide the redundancy necessary for a reader), the effect is charming:

We're sitting in a Chemistry class in Weimar Berlin, speculating on why hydrogen baloons lose their lift after a while. The guy three seats down raises his hand and volunteers. "Ich glaube, der Wasserstoff war schwerer geworden." ("I think the hygrogen got heavier.") Enraged, Herr Professor casts a Teutonic lightening bolt at the unfortunate student: "Nein, der nächste! Geben Sie eine bessere Erklärung!". Our scientific confidence overcomes our incapacity in German, and we answer correctly.

I Read Out-Of-Copyright Banned Books Too

Google is marking Banned Books Week (September 23-30) with a "Celebrate Your Freedom to Read" page featuring a group of banned and "challenged" twentieth-century classics. Yes, 1984 is there. No, not all of it. Just "limited preview" starting on page 329, which you can read if you sign in using a Google account.

Google's Celebrate Your Freedom Etc. page neglects to mention that well-known books, once out of copyright, are usually free in the money sense. Cf. Project Gutenberg... The Online Books Page... or Bartleby. A non-U.S. reader can get free Orwell and even a U.S. reader can get full texts of Twain, Joyce, and much more.

Watch What You Say, Watch What You Do?

Not quite. Hitchens looks at the transcript.

Orwell Spotting

From a New Criterion review of Absent Minds: Intellectuals in Britain, by Stefan Collini:

Collini is surprisingly harsh to Orwell, concluding that he was guilty of that “most unlovely and least defensible of contradictions, the anti-intellectualism of the intellectual.” There is certainly something to this, as it is true that Orwell could be unsparing in his attacks on what he called “the left intelligentsia” or, alternatively, “the pansy left.” Yet here one feels that the author has lost his moral balance by giving more weight to Orwell’s commentary on intellectuals than to his far more important writings on tyranny and totalitarianism. In reading this chapter, it is difficult not to feel sympathy for Orwell as he adjusts his early left-wing views in light of harsh experience to become by the time he died a peerless defender of liberty and democracy.

Wot's Paul Revere, chopped liver?

April can be a raw season in northern New England, so I'm guessing Mr. Bush's family must have spent it in Texas, not Kennebunkport. Otherwise he'd have known better than to declare yesterday "Patriot Day." The states of Maine and Massachusetts already celebrate Patriots' Day (note the plural) each third Monday in April to commemorate Paul Revere's ride and the Battle of Lexington and Concord.

I'm not sure what importance Patriots' Day has to most New Englanders these days, except for a day off work and occasionally an extra day to file taxes -- but it just seems odd to eclipse the cheerfully hallowed commemoration of what was arguably the founding moment of the United States by using nearly the same label for a grimmer memorial of a crime committed against us. It's probably good for there to be a new observance day -- I briefly cried yesterday too, there may as well be a formal way to mourn -- but couldn't it have received a new name without detracting from an older national memory that also matters?

[UPDATE: Oops, to give credit and blame where due, Wikipedia informs us that Patriot Day has been around since fall 2001 and its designation was requested by formal act of Congress. So it's not Mr. Bush's idea, sorry about that.]

Redemption Bleg

Summer is ending, and I picked the cotton off the lone plant in my garden yesterday. Over at Cliopatria at around the same time, Ralph Luker posted links to two reviews of Nicholas Lemann's Redemption: The Last Battle of the Civil War. It's dangerous to comment on a book based on its reviews, but one common thread in Wilentz and Yardley gives me serious pause: apparently Lemann starts his tale in Mississippi in 1875.

1875 Mississippi is a compelling, tragic story. White Democrats took control of the state government through a massive campaign of violence and intidation. For some reason this goes unreported in history curricula, even among "revisionist" teachers who cover Klan violence and the end of Reconstruction. My own high school history teacher spent two-thirds of a semester on the period — twelve weeks in which we learned in detail the mechanisms used to disenfranchise black voters — but I never heard about the Mississippi Plan until I started researching the period over the last ten years.

Mob violence and intimidation isn't the whole story of Redemption, however. Not that those theories haven't had their defenders — presumably this is Lemann's premise, and Faulkner depicted this massive electoral fraud favorably in the last chapter of The Unvanquished — but C. Vann Woodward wouldn't buy it. Woodward spent the first few chapters of his Origins of the new South on the Redeemers, discrediting them by empahsizing their continuity with the Reconstruction régime.

Woodward points out that most of the Redeemers in Southern states were actually old Whigs: urban industrialists who rose to power through a voter coalition including both railroad magnates and Good-Government-minded Negroes disgusted with the scandals of the Grant Administration. He emphasizes that many of them held a profound distaste for the Democratic party and its politics, to the extent that the official party name in some states was a variant on "Conservative and Democratic" — sometimes eliding the "Democratic" altogether. This variety of Redeemer came to power in the years bordering 1870, and although they eschewed the Radical agenda, they practiced tokenism whenever possible. Save perhaps for their moderate racial policy, Woodward is deeply unsympathetic to the Redeemers, viewing them as wanna-be robber barons and ex-Confederate Rent-a-Generals who come down on the wrong side of history against the Readjusters in the decade after they took control.

The states that experienced the most violence in their emergence from Reconstruction were the states that emerged last. Louisiana and Mississippi are not merely noted for racial violence in 1875, but also for being two of the three contested states in the Tilden/Hayes election of 1876. I don't know enough to assign causality here, but there's certainly a correlation between the plutocratic/patriarchal nature of the administrations that were reconstructed early and the populist, violent Democrats that only wrested control from the Federal government through mob violence and trading electoral votes.

This is where my I make my bleg. Somewhere I've read that the Mississippi Plan and the movements inspired by it were part of a larger white populist reaction to not only Reconstruction, but also the moderate Redeemer administrations to which it yielded power. This source noted the effect of racial violence on not only Freedmen but also moderate/conservative whites. The particular tactic that stuck in my mind was Democratic newspaper editors stationing observers around the polls, to publish not just the names of Negro voters, but more especially the names of their white employers so that intimidation could be brought to bear upon them, too. This narrative viewed the reactionary Redeemers of the later years as reestablishing the racial solidarity created after Bacon's Rebellion.

I've looked in Woodward, but found nothing in New South, Jim Crow, or Reunion and Reaction. I can't find it anywhere in Stampp's Era of Reconstruction, which covers the Mississippi Plan nicely. I've never read Foner, so I know it's not there. There's even a Wikipedia entry on the Mississippi Plan, but it doesn't mention the intimidation against white moderates.

Can anyone help me out?

What's the Best Thing About the Internet?

I don't know, but giving an amateur critic the ability to demolish Left Behind page by page over three years has to rank pretty high.

Orwell In Tribune

Paul Anderson is editing a collection of Orwell's Tribune columns, and he's running a weblog about it.

Collaboration

The posting on the Franklin controversy reminded me of a movie I saw downtown a few years back. It was a portrait of Mileva Maric, Albert Einstein's first wife, and has apparently been shown on PBS sometime since. The thing is that the story wasn't told with the "she wuz robbed!" tone you might expect -- rather it proposed that she and Einstein had collaborated in the informal talking-about-work way that modern spouses working in the same fields do. What sort of recognition should spouses who provide more than emotional support recieve?

Sekulow Shenanigans

Jay Sekulow is raising money again. I shouldn't be surprised -- whenever I stumble across his radio show, he's raving about some outrage committed by secularist liberals against God-fearing Americans. Due to some changes in my commute it's been several months since I tuned in, and like Martha I find that a prolonged absence makes the mundane shocking. Or perhaps there's something extra creepy about a broadcast decrying "a number of protesters backed by the ACLU" who picket military funerals. I wonder who the nasty secularist protesters were?

Oh, those protesters.

What does this mean to you?

Someone keeps writing these same words, "Fear is a Choice," in different places along a sidewalk in my neighborhood. I keep wondering what the writer means by it.

[9/25/06: Sorry, I've had to close comments due to spambots --MB]

Thanks.... and back to normal...

Ben, I can't seem to post my thanks for that nicely surreal pod village item -- the posting mechanism keeps turning up error messages.

Apart from which, I'm reading newspapers again after a long break, which means not being able to help noticing the usual stuff. S'morning there's this annoying Pat Buchanan column syndicated in the SF Chron...

...in which Buchanan of all people pretends that the word "fascism" has never had a specific meaning. This is the man who has done so much to revive ethnic scapegoating and nativist paranoia in U.S. mainstream rhetoric. This is the man who gave a 1992 Republican Convention speech about "cultural war" that Molly Ivins said "sounded better in the original German." He has to know he's lying.

It's to Buchanan's advantage to pretend "fascism" never had a meaning because he fits the nativist/scapegoating side of the old fascist template so well, whereas it's to the advantage of the Bush-Cheney people to dilute the term into a mere generic synonym for "evil" because they're slipping closer to the structurally distinctive side of the old fascist template, which is the corporatist merger of big business with big government into a fear-lubricated system of centralized control. The Bush neocons and the Buchanan paleocons both have an interest in pretending there are no scary tendencies to worry about inside their own political camps -- no fire swamps waiting below their converging slippery slopes. They'd like to claim danger comes only from swarthy foreigners or from the vaguely defined "left," which now seems to mean most of us.

...But this only leads up to my real concern, which is whether I'm correct in thinking Buchanan has misquoted Orwell. His phrase is: "Orwell said when someone calls Smith a fascist, what he means is, 'I hate Smith'." That might be about half right, as IIRC Orwell really was concerned about seeing the F-word diluted from a descriptive label into a mere insult, but I don't think B's version of it can be exactly right. For one thing, there aren't many Orwell paragraphs anywhere that you can dismember without destroying their meaning. For another thing, Orwell knew, if anyone did, that fascism has a distinctive crystalline structure, one that has to be stopped from forming long before it hardens.

So, anyone want to do some old-fashioned quote-hunting here?

Bouquet

Martha's back! I'd throw her a bouquet of carefully chosen links, but since I've been busy "enhancing shareholder value" lately, she'll have to be satisfied with a single virtual daisy: Electroplankton's ruins of a pod city.