Have At You, Sir!

It's not really time yet for my monthly post (hah!) but I couldn't resist linking to this site featuring the video of the famous verbal dust-up between Gore Vidal and William F. Buckley Jr. at the time of the 1968 Democratic Convention. (Short version: WARNING - SPOILER Vidal calls Buckley a pro-crypto-Nazi, so Buckley calls Vidal a queer and threatens to sock him in the face. Bloody intellectuals, you can't take 'em anywhere.) Along with that you can read Vidal's Esquire article "A Distasteful Encounter with William F. Buckley Jr." on the event:

[I]n full view of ten million people, the little door in William F. Buckley Jr.'s forehead suddenly opened and out sprang that wild cuckoo which I had always known was there but had wanted so much for others, preferably millions of others, to get a good look at. I think those few seconds of madness, to use his word, were well worth a great deal of patient effort on my part.

Although I'd seen the video before I wasn't aware the Esquire article even existed. It was apparently in response to Buckley's piece "On Experiencing Gore Vidal" over which Vidal lost a libel suit only to have Esquire settle out of court in response to Buckley's suit against Vidal over the response. And yet today I can link to the one Esquire caved, twice, into suppressing, while the court-approved polemic published first is nowhere to be found*. The internet is so unfair!

Via Mal de Mer commenting at Sadly, No! where you can also find links to YouTube feeds of Buckley versus Chomsky from the next year.

*Well, apparently if you ask National Review nicely they'll mail you a copy. (Update June 2016: Or you can read it here, for now. [I just purchased Best of Enemies, in case you were wondering why I was fiddling about with this decade old post.])

Et tu, K?

From an interesting thread about Y2K at Crooked Timber

At the millennial First Night Boston, someone did an art installation which filled a small hotel exhibition room with computers, so that people could watch to see if they failed.

It was interesting to see the people who were ringing in the new millennium watching a room full of junked computers. Or maybe they didn’t stay either. My husband said we had to get home by 11 in case the subway stopped running.

I can't remember what I was doing on NYE 1999 but I hope it wasn't that dull.

The Jokes of a Dismal Scientist

In a post about one of the various brushfires that joined up into the conflagration that was the blogosphere's most recent rerun of the "civility" debate (Chris Clarke's take on the issue adequately mirrors my views), Henry at Crooked Timber brings to light this article by Scott McLemee on the recently departed John Kenneth Galbraith, which concentrates on the economist's forays into satire, as demonstrated by his alter-egos Epernay and McLandress:

The McLandress Dimension, a short collection of articles attributed to one “Mark Epernay,” was published by Houghton Mifflin during the late fall of 1963...

...While his name was not yet a household word, McLandress had an impressive (if top-secret) list of clients among prominent Americans.

The work that defined his career was his discovery of “the McLandress Coefficient” – a unit of measurement defined, in laymen’s terms, as “the arithmetic mean or average of intervals of time during which a subject’s thoughts centered on some substantive phenomenon other than his own personality.”

The exact means of calculating the “McL-C,” as it was abbreviated, involved psychometric techniques rather too arcane for a reporter to discuss. But a rough estimate could be made based on how long any given person talked without using the first-person singular pronoun. This could be determined “by means of a recording stopwatch carried unobtrusively in the researcher’s jacket pocket.”

A low coefficient — anything under, say, one minute — “implies a close and diligent concern by the individual for matters pertaining to his own personality.” Not surprisingly, people in show business tended to fall into this range.

Writers had a somewhat higher score, though not by a lot. Epernay noted that Gore Vidal had a rating of 12.5 minutes. Writing in The New York Review of Books, Vidal responded, “I find this ... one finds this odd.”

...

Epernay enjoyed his role as Boswell to the great psychometrician. Later articles discussed the other areas of McLandress’s research. He worked out an exact formula for calculating the Maximum Prestige Horizon of people in different professions. He developed the “third-dimensional departure” for acknowledging the merits of both sides in any controversial topic while carefully avoiding any form of extremism. (This had been mastered, noted Epernay, by “the more scholarly Democrats.”)

And McLandress reduced the size of the State Department by creating a fully automated foreign policy — using computers to extrapolate the appropriate response to any new situation, based on established precedent. “Few things more clearly mark the amateur in diplomacy,” the reporter explained, “than his inability to see that even the change from the wrong policy to the right policy involves the admission of previous error and hence is damaging to national prestige.”

I was pleased to come across this because I had been hoping at least one of Galbraith's obituaries would mention how he had got in on another prominent jape of the 1960s by endorsing, as McLandress, the provenance of Leonard Lewin's satire on the action intellectuals, Report from Iron Mountain. The Report was purported to be a leaked thinktank paper on the benefits of perpetual war.

Serious journals devoted articles to debating the authenticity of the document. One prominent sociologist wrote a long article suggesting that it was so close to the real thing that one might as well take it seriously. At one point, people in the White House were reportedly making inquiries to determine whether Report from Iron Mountain might not be the real thing.

In the midst of all this, Herschel McLandress, who had retreated into silence for almost four years, suddenly returned to public life. In an article appearing in The Washington Post, the great psychometrician confirmed that Report from Iron Mountain was exactly what it claimed to be. He had been part of the working group involved in the initial brainstorming. He chided whoever was responsible for leaking the document. By no means were Americans ready to face the horrors of peace. He did not challenge any of the report’s conclusions. “My reservations,” McLandress stated, “relate only to the wisdom of releasing it to an obviously unconditioned public.”

Mr McLemee suggests that the McLandress endorsement might be partly responsible for this admitted hoax still being cited as a government text by conspiracy nutters today, despite every attempt by Lewin, including a copyright lawsuit, to establish his authorship.

Wikipedia links to the full text - apparently they're not buying Lewin's copyright claim either.

Numbers

I must have a dark sense of humour but I laughed out loud when I read this paragraph provided by the Indonesian consul-general as his argument that genocide could not possibly be happening in Irian Jaya.

In 1935, the population of West Papua was about 700,000. By 2000, however, the population was 2,220,034. Between 1980 and 1990 the average population growth was 3.34 per cent, well above the national level of 1.74 per cent. From 1990 to 2000, population growth of 3.22 per cent was recorded in West Papua, still well above the national level of 1.49 per cent for the period. It is true that migrants account for a significant slice of this increase in population, but that is the national trend throughout Indonesia.

A "significant slice". Now that's what I call authentic diplomat gibberish.

Alienation

With one simple tale, she summarised the process whereby people at work feel no connection with whatever they're producing. She was working on an assembly line, on which apple pies would emerge from an oven, then Smith and her colleagues would pick them up as they passed and place them in their boxes. Every single time, she said, as the pies approached, one worker who'd been there 20 years would flare his nostrils, look menacingly at them and snarl, "Here come the little fuckers."

- from Mark Steel's obituary for British comedian and radio performer Linda Smith.

Foolish Laws for Foolish People

I assume an important punitive element of David Irving's three year sentence for Holocaust denial will be that every time he complains about being in prison the guards will reply "No, you're not."

Heh. Three years for some cretinous comments this anti-Semitic tosser made fifteen years ago? Very silly, Austria, very silly indeed, and rather poor timing what with Europe's mainstream media at pains to stress the West's principled commitment to freedom of speech, in stark contrast to those excitable Musselmen, enraged to violence by some silly cartoons and nothing else! Be that as it may, there's really no justification for this. I know some claim that Holocaust revisionism amounts to racial vilification, implying as it does a dishonest conspiracy on the part of those who were witnesses to mass murder, but allegations of insinuation should not be sufficient to throw someone in the pokey. Even if I regarded anti-vilification laws as a sensible legal concept - and I don't - I'd still be concerned about allowing states to lock people up for subtext. And one might simply ask, how does Irving's expression of bizarre falsehoods do as much harm to anyone as imprisonment does harm to him?

Such prohibitions on denying the Holocaust also raise the sticky question of why this particular case of genocide should be so privileged, when any number of historians (and sociologists) have built careers on glossing over the atrocities of empires old and new, and the exterminations attendant on them. But, then, perhaps that's a good thing.

Kerry Saved Me from Hicksville

From a letter in today's Herald justifying the state service for Australia's richest dead man:

I am in year 12 and thanks to Mr Packer's charity have been privileged to attend Ascham School as a boarder since sixth grade on a full scholarship. Without this gift I would have been relegated to a country high school and would not have experienced or learnt half as much.

It's funny coz it's true. A' course, I hope the locals won't be waiting for you, lassie, when you venture home for the hols.

Naysayers might argue that a man who had millions to throw away on the geegees could have tossed a few in the direction of the public education system (perhaps, who knows, by simply paying a fair amount of tax), rather than merely sponsoring a few toff changelings from less fortunate circumstances, but these sort of commos clearly fail to understand that a good education is like the old school tie: it isn't worth much if everybody has one.

Paying Tribute

Here's my tribute to Kerry Packer: he probably wasn't so evil as to deserve being devoured alive by giant aphids. And while this is likely to be true of many other people, very few of them were also rich bastards. So as their legacies won't be celebrated with a publicly funded memorial at the Sydney Opera House, let their tribute be the fact that they weren't devoured alive by giant aphids. As far as we know.

Mr Packer's death also makes it even more unlikely I'll ever get the opportunity to publicly respond to some corporate mouthpiece whining about left-wing bias on the ABC with "Well, yes, you're right, the commercial media shouldn't be held to the same standard of 'balance' you keep throwing at public broadcasting. After all, the public stations are funded by taxpayers, whereas the commercial stations are owned by people who DON'T PAY TAX.

"Has your bitching got you a spot on Radio National yet?"

I mean, I don't suppose Kerry Stokes pays much tax either, but with Bullimore gone it doesn't have the same ring to it.

Potential Australians, Actually

I've actually read in The Daily Telegraph where a certain Imam from the Lakemba Mosque actually said that Australia's going to be a Moslem nation in 50 years time.

I didn't believe him at the time, but, you know, when you actually look at the birth rates and you look at the fact that we are aborting ourselves almost out of existence by 100,000 abortions every year, and that's on a guesstimate. You multiply that by 50 years: that's five million potential Australians we won't have here.

I'm not sure to what idiot constituency* Danna Vale was directing her bizarre remarks, but I like to think she was making an appeal to fans of Spike Milligan.

"We have to be careful," said the Chief Inspector. "The Chinese are very clever. If we let this Chinaman become a policeman here in Dublin, very soon all of the police in Ireland will be Chinese."

The Sergeant looked worried. "Including me?"

(Until such time as I can dig up my copy of Puckoon, that's going to be a paraphrase.)

* You'll notice those Americans are under the impression Ms Vale is a member of the Labour Party. Perhaps the concept of a Pro-Life Liberal was too much for their minds to encompass.

Enough Already

I am so freakin' tired of this Cartoon Wars shite. Clearly the people burning down embassies are Islamic right-wing tossers. Now I hate right-wing tossers on principle, but I'm damned if I'm going to hate Islamic right-wing tossers more than I hate non-Islamic right-wing tossers just because some non-Islamic right-wing tosser tells me to and claims that the Islamic right-wing tossers' actions prove their societies can't comprehend Western Enlightenment values. No-one ever points at non-Islamic right-wing tossers and claims that. Name one person who ever pointed at Andrew Bolt and said he showed Melburnians had turned their backs on the Enlightenment, embraced the Romantic era and now spent their time lounging in gothic follies, smoking opium and having free love with tubercular poets. See, you can't. I reserve the right to hate all right-wing tossers equally. Does this make me a cultural relativist?

Anyway, here's a blogosphere round-up, a healthy mix of refusal to take the righties' framing of this issue seriously and impatience with the stupidity of people who can't tell the difference between freedom of speech and bigoted incitement.

Roy Edroso

lenin with a small l

Sisyphus Shrugged

The Rude Pundit

Ken MacLeod

William Burroughs' Baboon

Dennis Perrin

Worker #3116

The Assparrot

And, of course, Chris Bertram's gorgeous "I'm Offended" post from Crooked Timber, not so much about this fiasco as about all of them.

And now, let us never speak of it again.

See you in another six months.

Zzzzz

Work is insane at the moment, and even if I wasn't exhausted when I get home of an evening, my mind's a blank anyway, so I hereby declare a hiatus. This blog is now officially moribund.

You could always go look at my crappy photos.

Getting Felt

Wow, that Peggy Noonan really is completely fecking insane:

Was Mr. Felt a hero? No one wants to be hard on an ailing 91-year-old man. Mr. Felt no doubt operated in some perceived jeopardy and judged himself brave. He had every right to disapprove of and wish to stop what he saw as new moves to politicize the FBI. But a hero would have come forward, resigned his position, declared his reasons, and exposed himself to public scrutiny. He would have taken the blows and the kudos. (Knowing both Nixon and the media, there would have been plenty of both.) Heroes pay the price. Mr. Felt simply leaked information gained from his position in government to damage those who were doing what he didn't want done. Then he retired with a government pension. This does not appear to have been heroism, and he appears to have known it. Thus, perhaps, the great silence.

...

Even if Mr. Felt had mixed motives, even if he did not choose the most courageous path in attempting to spread what he thought was the truth, his actions might be judged by their fruits. The Washington Post said yesterday that Mr. Felt's information allowed them to continue their probe. That probe brought down a president. Ben Stein is angry but not incorrect: What Mr. Felt helped produce was a weakened president who was a serious president at a serious time. Nixon's ruin led to a cascade of catastrophic events--the crude and humiliating abandonment of Vietnam and the Vietnamese, the rise of a monster named Pol Pot, and millions--millions--killed in his genocide. America lost confidence; the Soviet Union gained brazenness. What a terrible time. Is it terrible when an American president lies and surrounds himself by dirty tricksters? Yes, it is. How about the butchering of children in the South China Sea. Is that worse? Yes. Infinitely, unforgettably and forever.

I ask again, why can't Australian commentators be this entertainingly deranged?

Oh, and my apologies for the title. Did I mention I was ill?