Author: geoff

60 laps of unremitting concentration

Watching the British Grand Prix this morning, I was trying to imagine what it would be like to spend nearly an hour and a half at an average speed of 135 MPH, at the limits of adhesion, with no opportunity to relax. Even pit stops don’t offer a break – witness the way that Fisichella threw away points in both the French and British Grands Prix by stalling in the pits. Anyway, Montoya executed flawlessly today to beat Alonso; Raikkonen was third, but only because he was moved 10 places down the grid because of an engine change. Without that, it would have been a McLaren 1-2.

As David Hobbs just reminded us, the British Grand Prix is perpetually under threat from the Formula One organizers. This makes no sense: for most teams it’s the “home race” (even the Renault team is based in England), and the event always attracts a huge, knowledgeable, and enthusiastic crowd.

And Michael Schumacher, who completely dominated the 2004 season? The only time the camera picked him out was to show how he was holding up Raikkonen’s progress towards the front. Other than that, he was curiously irrelevant, finishing 6th.

On American coverage of London

I like astute observers like James Wolcott who have the knack of capturing an idea that has been hovering on the edge of my consciousness and hauling it out into the spotlight. Case in point, apropos of the US coverage on London in the aftermath of Thursday’s terrorist attack:

“The curious thing is that so many of the rightward bloggers and Fox Newswers who are hailing the Brits for their quiet stoicism and pluck don’t seem to realize they’re issuing an implicit rebuke to themselves and their fellow Americans. They’re saying, in effect, ‘You’ve got to admire the Brits for showing calm and quiet perserverence after these explosions–they don’t get all hysterical, overdramatic, and overreactive the way we Americans do.’ They don’t seem to realize the example shown by Londoners might be a lesson to them, a model they might follow instead of playing laptop Pattons at full volume every time they feel a rousing post coming on.”

DARWIN rules

darwin.jpg Yesterday I installed the vanity plates (custom license plates) on my new Subaru. Obviously my main purpose in choosing “DARWIN” was to honour one of the greatest scientists of all time, especially at a time when science in general, and evolution in particular, is under attack. Coincidentally it also lets me pay tribute to the open source project associated with the kernel of Apple’s OS X.

The space under the word SUBARU will shortly be occupied by a silver plastic fish with feet, bearing the legend “EVOLVE”. (Not that anyone or anything has any choice in the matter, of course! Evolution is what imperfectly replicating systems do, pretty much.)

Déjà bloody vu

My reactions on hearing about today’s bombings in London:

  • “Oh, no – not again.”

  • An almost visceral sensation of being transported back to 1976, to Platform 3 at Baker Street Station, waiting for a Metropolitan Line train, seeing a momentarily unattended bag, and being convinced that it was another IRA bomb. (It wasn’t. But to this day I scan for unattended packages or bags in trains, buses, and public spaces, as a matter of deep habit.)

  • Are my colleagues at SunUK all right? (So far the answer seems to be yes.)

  • Thinking how stupid Bush’s “We’ll fight them in Iraq so we don’t have to fight them at home” sounds now.

  • A deep satisfaction that the cricket match between England and Australia went on without a hiccup. And England won by nine wickets: Australia 219-7, England 220-1 in 46 overs.

  • A strong impulse to jump on a plane to Heathrow. (I guess that removes any doubt about where I think of as home.)

  • Hollow laughter at hearing a survivor explain that “nobody in my carriage panicked when we heard the explosion and saw the smoke, because we assumed that it was just another technical malfunction.”

  • Reading Tim Bray’s piece (linked from Chris’s), and remembering a group counselling session after 9/11 when I was shouted down for saying that I thought we needed to understand why people do these things better than we do. We still need to.

  • Trying to imagine what it would be like to pack your briefcase (removing any unnecessary weight), get an extra bottle of water from the vending machine, and prepare to leave work in the City and walk five, eight, or ten miles home. And just doing it, without any fuss.

The Economist reaches a nadir

Here in Massachusetts the debate about gay marriage is proceeding in a remarkably restrained, civil, and thoughtful manner, in spite of the posturing of Mitt Romney. (He has no credibility, in part because everyone knows he’s just pandering to the various groups that he needs to make a run for the Republican Presidential nomination in 2008.) But as Gene Stone writes at The Huffington Post, that doesn’t stop people from trying to stir the pot: “the right-wing British newsweekly, The Economist, is running a piece this week called ‘The Slippery Slope to Bestiality.’ (Now there’s a headline designed to placate all sides…)” Stone is right; it’s a pretty disgusting piece. I’ve subscribed to the Economist for most of the last 30 years, and I can remember when they were a respectable, fairly non-partisan journal of economic record. They used to be the scourge of dissembling politicians of all stripes, and no-one would have described them as “right-wing”. But as I noted early last year, those days are gone: the Economist may still have the best writers, but it has lost its soul.

As Stone suggested, I just sent a letter to the editor of the Economist. (If you’re a subscriber, I urge you to do the same.) Since I have no confidence that they’ll publish it, I reproduce it here:

Subject: Romney, bestiality, and bartenders.
Date: Wed, 6 Jul 2005 12:22:50 -0400
To: letters@economist.com

Your story on Mitt Romney’s exploitation of the gay marriage issue was shameful. From the extravagant title to the closing sentence, you seemed determined to use extreme viewpoints to leave the impression that Romney is a moderate on this issue. By quoting those who “claim that it could open the door to legalised unions with horses” and Bob Pitko’s paean to rampant promiscuity, you ignore the majority of Massachusetts’ residents who are wrestling with this question. Why would you seek to trivialise their thoughtful debate?

Your correspondent missed the point that on this subject Romney is widely seen as irrelevant, because of his blatant pandering in advance of his run for the Republican nomination. Remember that Massachusetts is fundamentally a Democrat state; we elect Republican governors simply to keep the legislature in check, not because we like them.

This was well below the standard I’ve come to expect of the Economist over the 30 years I’ve been reading it.

Geoff Arnold
[address deleted]
[expat Brit, resident in the USA since 1981]

Who has the most interesting politics?

By “interesting” I don’t mean “reasonable”, “rational”, “fair”, “representative”, “democratic”, or (heaven forbid) “intellectually rigorous”. No, I mean, where do political rubber-neckers go to gawk, as they might at a train wreck or a runaway moose? Time and again it seems to come back to one place: Texas. Check out Seriously Kinky from the Dallas Observer: “This Texas Jewboy wants to be the next governor of Texas, and if you think he’s kidding, the joke may be on you.” You couldn’t make this stuff up. Screaming Lord Sutch, move over. (OK, he’s dead, I know.)

(Via GeneBob.)

Hen-pecked dads?

The Independent has now published an enthusiastic, and thoroughly sexist, review of my new car, the Subaru Legacy. Highlights:

The current über dad brand is Subaru, which makes chunky, reasonably priced and practical intercontinental ballistic missiles. Though they might look the epitome of sensible family motoring… Subaru make some of the fastest cars, point-to-point, in the world right now….

I plumped for the good, old-fashioned, four-door saloon – a car so wilfully nondescript [love that phrase] no wife could ever suspect that a fire-breathing rally car lurks beneath…. Drive one, though, and you are left in no doubt that this is an extremely capable sports saloon with immense traction and grip capable of hauling itself to 60 quicker than an Audi TT. I reckon it’s got the hen-pecked dad’s vote sewn up.

Of course the one that they tested was the 3 litre normally aspirated Legacy; mine is a GT with a 2.5L turbo. A quick look at Subaru UK‘s web site suggests that they don’t offer this model over there. (And as for the reviewer’s sexist views about car purchasing, I should note that my wife’s choice in the new car stakes was a BMW 325Xi – hardly a vote for moderation.)

Hegel's bluff

On a mailing list to which I subscribe*, an argument debate was developing about possible Supreme Court nominees. Nothing unusual about that; it happens everywhere. As on many other lists, the views of most of the participants were fairly predictable and a couple of the more vocal members were staking out their positions. Suddenly another occasional contributor to these food-fights chimed in with the immortal words, “Actually, I see you 2 as opposites sides of the same coin called ‘political extremism'”.

Now this pushed one of my buttons: the sloppy assumption that the right answer to any question must lie in the middle. Historically it’s a really dubious stance – how would one apply it to slavery, for instance, or voting rights? Intellectually it’s just plain lazy: a way of positioning oneself as moderate, and therefore right, without actually having to do any of the heavy lifting of working out a real argument.

Slacktivist wrote about this back in 2002 (and again recently):

The middle-path-between-extremes-must-be-right rationale is enormously appealing. But it’s helpful to state it more plainly as a logical argument:
1. Everyone thinks I’m wrong.
therefore
2. I am right.
It’s possible, of course, that statements 1 and 2 are both true, but the “therefore” does not follow. Let’s try a more charitable form of the argument:
1. People who are wrong think I’m wrong,
therefore
2. I am right.
Again, it could be true, but it doesn’t necessarily follow (and you haven’t, in fact, proven that the others are wrong). That magical “therefore” can be a convenient way of justifying your position without any sort of principled rationale.

Staking out a coherent, principled position is a lot of hard work. So is trying to understand and respond to the principles and arguments of your opponents. So why bother with all that?

Instead, just find someone seated to your right and label them “thesis.” Then turn to someone seated to your left and label them “antithesis.” Bingo! That makes you “synthesis” – the inevitable and uncontestable culmination of all right-thinking on the subject. Anyone who disagrees with you now is swept into the dustbin of history as a misguided extremist. All done simply without all that belabored appeal to argument, principle or fact.

I call this maneuver “Hegel’s bluff.”

The astute observer will spot this manoeuvre at work all over the place.

—
* Names withheld, since nobody’s given me permission to drag this private debate into the blogosphere, and it would be unfair to assume that any statements were intended as carefully considered and defensible positions.

Biblical literalism, Constitutional "original intent": it's all the same thing

I was reading Slacktivist this evening and came across a piece that contained a simple idea that I had never thought about. (It seems so obvious now that I wonder if I’m the only one who hasn’t got it.) Put simply: religious conservatives and political conservatives are both obsessed with the primacy of authority over reason. Their sacred texts must never be subjected to reasoned interpretation, because then they cease to be magical tokens of authority.

Let me quote the author, Fred Clark:

At the FRC’s “Justice Sunday”… clergy and religious leaders… railed against any judge who dared speak of a “living Constitution”…

[they cited] a Supreme Court ruling barring the execution of the developmentally disabled. That decision was based, in part, on evolving community standards, and that idea — the evolution, or progress, or development of moral understanding — is what these religious leaders find dangerous and terrifying. From their perspective, community standards have been devolving ever since Mt. Sinai. The idea that the Constitution, or any revered text, might be read differently over time due to evolving community standards is the very idea these folks have been fighting against for the past century.

This is simply a continuation in a new arena of the fundamentalist/modernist controversy of the early 20th century. The fundamentalist “battle for the Bible” has escalated to include the battle over another sacred text: the U.S. Constitution. The terms of this battle are exactly the same. So too is the underlying motivation. It’s all about control. A “living Constitution” threatens that control as surely as the living word of the Bible.

A superficial reaction would be to assume that the fundamentalists of both types adopt this stance – authority instead of reason – because they are incapable of defending their positions rationally and reasonably.* A more nuanced view is that capability has nothing to do with it: conservatives are temperamentally drawn to arguments from authority. (This is perhaps the fundamental distinction between the conservative and liberal worldview, although many conservative intellectuals might disagree.) And finally a cynical view is that conservative leaders – intellectual, organizational – adopt this stance simply because it is a path to power, to command and control the mass of people. Demagogues have always known the power that comes from unshakable conviction coupled with unquestionable authority.

—
* The last thing a Biblical fundamentalist wants is to be dragged into a debate about why Leviticus is authoritative about homosexuality but not shellfish, let alone slavery and mixed fibres.