and the dean fawning continues

An editorial in the Nation chastises some of the Democratic presidential candidates for being petulant and attacking Dean.

The charge of petulance is rather amusing, since if I had to pick any word for Dean, petulant would be it. I can't quite put my finger on it, but something about him rubs me the wrong way. His anger often seems, to me, misplaced. And no, I can't think of any examples off the top of my head, so you're more than welcome to disregard that claim entirely.

But this is the sentence that really bugs me: Dean displaced Kerry as the liberal standard-bearer by speaking clearly against the war on Iraq. Do we have to go over this again? Dean's not that liberal. That's his reputation, largely due to his opposition to the war in Iraq, but I'd argue that his reluctance to embrace that label is indicative of just how not liberal he is.

If you want the liberal standard bearer among the candidates, look no farther than Dennis Kucinich. It's entirely true, of course, that there are few stronger signs of Kucinch's eventual demise than the fact that the Nation barely mentions him. For what it's worth, Dean's claim that he was the only candidate to oppose the war all along is wrong; Kucinich's criticism of the current administration has been far more strident.

A mystery photographer and the slipperiness of knowledge

The Guardian has a rather fascinating story about a large collection of photographs whose creator is unknown. The photographs are described as "superb," yet no one knows who took them. Lindy Grant, a curator at the Courtauld Institute is doing some detective work, trying to figure out just who this phantom photographer was. His (Grant doesn't think a woman could travel alone with the camera used, though I'm not sure that guarantees that a man took the photos) locations at various dates can be ascertained, as can the equipment he used. But beyond that, there's not much to go on. Provenance is of no help, since the collection was given by the Leicester Musuem, which now has no records at all of ever having the collection. So it looks as if the Courtauld is left with a rather fine collection of photographs with no name to attach to them.

Cases like this highlight just how fragile knowledge is. David Lowenthal touches upon this somewhere near the beginning of The Past is a Foreign Country, pointing out that when each person dies, innumerable unique memories vanish forever. The state of human knowledge is in constant flux; we're always learning things and forgetting things. And only those things that get recorded in some form even have a chance of being known by future generations. And the preservation of knowledge is pretty haphazard. We have Samuel Pepys's diary, of course, but it's entirely possible that there was a whole rash of diarists of the 17th century who painted vastly different pictures of London. We just don't know.

The internet could be changing things, at least in terms of preservation of records. It'd be rather interesting to see the amount how text produced (and maintained) per capita changed over time. But even the solipsism of personal blogs only captures a fraction of human experience. Think about the things you did today. How many of them will you remember a week from now? How about a month? And a year?

Knowledge is slipping away from us every day. A hundred years from now, it's entirely possible that someone could stumble upon the archives of high-traffic, anonymous blogs (see, for example, Atrios and Tacitus) and have no way of determining the identity of their authors. Just like that mystery photographer.

Wouldn't it be nice if the top sports story of the year involved, you know, sports?

So the Kobe Bryant rape case was chosen by members of the AP as the top sports story of the year. Clearly, this was a big story this year. Bryant used to be perceived as near squeaky clean, especially compared to some other NBA players. And this has, how do you say, tarnished his reputation.

But it's a sad indication of media coverage of sports are covered in the media. I'm not trying to argue that sports should be covered in a vacuum, that the only story that matters is what happens on the field, court, etc. (Though, I have to admit, I could do without some of the pappy human interest stories that are foisted on viewers so often.) Nor am I saying that only feel-good stories should be remembered. Rather, if we're going to be talking about big sports stories, we should be talking about stories that matter the most to sports fans. The Bryant case has pretty much become for widespread consumption; you don't hear (or, at least, I haven't heard) groups of people that typically talk about football or baseball now talking about Kobe Bryant. Because, frankly, he doesn't matter.

If you ask me, it's hard to find a better story in sports this year than the baseball playoffs. The Cubs and Red Sox both suffer heartbreaking losses. The wildcard Marlins somehow defeat the juggernaut Yankees to win their second World Series in seven years. Now that's excitement.

the post in which I date myself as a child of the '80s

I haven't been following the Libya situation very closely, but all I can think of whenever I hear Libya and weapons mentioned in the same sentence is the parking lot scene of Back to the Future. You know the one. Doc Brown shouting, "Oh my god, they found me, I don't know how but they've found me. [...] The Libyans!"

gender, sexuality, and geeks

Stephanie Zacharek of Salon defends The Return of the King against Caryn James's claim that the final installment of LOTR, like triliogies in general, is only enjoyable to men.

Zacharek's right to point out that it's rather facile to label movies along gender lines. I went to see ROTK with four other Swarthmore students: three girls and one guy. It's ridiculous to call the LOTR trilogy guys' movies. If you're going to single out any one group that it appeals to, there's no reason to look beyond geeks. It's Tolkien, after all.

But what Zacharek (and so few mainstream writers, at least those that I've read) fails to recognize is just how male-dominated the film is. There's all of, what, three female characters in the third installment? The major characters are all male. As such, it's impossible not to look for (and find) the homoerotic subtext to, well, almost every scene. I mean, come on. Sam and Frodo? Need I say more?

Maybe I just enjoyed the secret diaries far too much.

american football -> rugby ?

David Post, over at the Volokh conspiracy, thinks that (American) football teams should use more laterals and handoffs, just like rugby! The last play from scrimmage in the Saints-Jaguars game this past weekend. Post thinks that football players, by incorporating rugby techniques, could string together some long impressive plays.

There's a couple reasons why plays like this aren't as effective as Post would like them to be. It's really no surprise that you only see them as desperation plays at the end of games.

1) If you screw up and the pass goes forward (after the ball's passed the line of scrimmage), it's an illegal forward pass and the play's whistled dead (see, for example, the last play of the Eagles-Panthers game a few weeks ago). While Post would have teams practice laterals to avoid this, I don't think they could devote enough time to it to become proficient. There's plenty of other things that they practice.

2) Laterals, if dropped or badly thrown, remain live balls. In other words, the other team can recover it and possession changes. While the trickery of these plays can have a big payoff, the risk is just as big, if not bigger. You generally don't want to give your opponent the ball in good field position, and every time you lateral there's a chance it could happen.

3) Rugby players have different abilities and skills from football players. While I don't know all that much about rugby, I'm pretty confident in saying that the average speed on a rugby team is faster than the average speed on a football team (think of all those offensive linemen). From what I understand of rugby, those nifty weave plays work because almost everyone on the team can be involved with them. With football, you're basically going to be looking at the wide receivers, the running backs, and the tight end(s). Football players just aren't built to "use handoffs and laterals and intricate, weaving runs by the players off the ball to move the ball downfield."

Gadget plays are great fun to watch. But there's good reason why you seem them used so seldomly.

(also, Post calls the Hail Mary stupid and generally futile. Futile, yes. But there's a reason it's called a Hail Mary. Also, few NFL quarterbacks have arms strong enough to heave it into the endzone from their own 25.)

the american response to the mortara case

Seems like all I do here these days is whine and post academic work. This is an instance of the latter.

My recently completed paper on the American response to the Mortara case. Its focus is what that response reveals about American images of Catholics and Jews. The Mortara kidnapping occurred in 1858, just at the tail-end of one of the intense nativism of the 1840s and 1850s. This paper shows that, at least in one instance, nativism wasn't directed equally at all outsiders. Instead, Catholics bore the brunt of nativist sentiment. I also speculate on why that might be the case.

Comments, as always, are much appreciated.

(The version just linked to is a .doc file. I haven't had a chance to convert it to a pdf as yet, but that'll happen at some point.)

me being curmudgeonly about sports

Okay, mostly I just wanted to use the word "curmudgeonly." Because, come on... hardly anyone uses it anymore.

But I digress... Greg Garber's latest on espn.com is a puff piece on Mike Vanderjagt, the kicker for the Indianopolis Colts. It's kinda late (since I got up early today), but just a quick skim of the article reveals two errors on Garber's part.

1) Vanderjagt came into the season as the NFL's most accurate kicker -- ever. Now his edge over Mare, who is second all-time, is statistically enormous. Vanderjagt has converted 170 of 194 career attempts (.8762), compared to Mare's 160-192 (.8216).

Yeah, Vanderjagt's accuracy is pretty damn impressive. But Mare's not second on the all-time list. David Akers (that's right, of the Philadelphia Eagles) is, with an accuracy over 83%. Does no do fact-checking over at espn?

2) And before you rip him for kicking in a dome, Vanderjagt said his percentage kicking outside is actually better than it is inside. That's nice. Do you want to actually check Vanderjagt's statistics to see if he's right? I don't, since I have better things to do than back up the claims of a guy who said some rather assholish things in the past, but you'd think that Garber, whose job it is to write about sports, could take the time to do some independent fact verification.

I'm a big fan of espn.com... they've got interesting content by writers whose personalities really come through in their pieces. But bush league stuff like this is just inexcusable. At least to a crusty 21-year-old like me.

Joining in on the fun

I think that George Bush is unelectable. What do you think?

no new content, but new organization

I finally got around to making a page that links to the various academic work I've put online. I don't know what took me so long, seeing as it took all of about fifteen minutes. In any case, you can find links to the work I've posted so far here. Also notice that I've put a permanent link in the sidebar. I'll probably put up some more papers in the next month or so.

thesis: done

My recently completed paper on the semantics and pragmatics of few and a few is now available. You know, in case you've ever wondered about it.

A few thoughts on the meaning of few and a few

more on religion

In a somewhat related note to what I had to say about Richard Dawkins last week, Ben Shapiro (of the cruddy conservative Town Hall) is a pompous jack-ass.

In defending Ann Coulter (never a good start) for remarks that struck me as condescending at best and antisemitic at worst, Shapiro comes up with this paragon of tolerance for diversity:

But for most liberal Jews, authentic Judaism is an afterthought. These Jews are born Jewish, but they don't think Jewish, and they certainly don't act Jewish. When American Jews are identified as a demographic group, observers should note that the vast majority of them do not practice authentic Judaism -- they practice secularism.

Dude. It's not up to you to decide who gets to call themselves Jewish or not. I'm not one to advocate that anyone who says they're Jewish is Jewish (see, for example, Jews for Jesus). But I do recognize that the Jewish community is a bigger tent than my brand of Judaism, and I'm cool with that.

Ben, apparently, is not. For Ben, Jews can't make accusations of antisemitism unless they themselves embrace "authentic Jewish values." Two things. First, why on earth is there a restriction on the people who can point out and criticize antisemitism? What does one's own relationship with Judaism have to do with the ability to recognize persecution? Second, who gets to decide these authentic Jewish values? Our friend Ben Shapiro? I'd rather not have to follow that path...

campaign website traffic

According to Alexa (a subsidiary of Amazon and thus at least somewhat legit), here's a breakdown of the "reach" (expressed as the number of users per million internet users) over the last week of the Democratic presidential candidates' websites:

Wesley Clark: 130

Howard Dean: 280

John Edwards: 45

Dick Gephardt: 40

John Kerry: 41.5

Dennis Kucinich: 65

Joe Lieberman: 20

Carol Moseley Braun: 10.5

Al Sharpton: 5

What's striking (besides Sharpton's incredibly low number. I can't help but think it's some sort of glitch) is that the website of Dennis Kucinich, typically the cellar dweller in polls, has a greater reach than all other candidates besides Dean (whose dominance is to be expected) and Clark. Even more surprising is that Kucinich has the highest number of page views per visitor (again, based on the latest one-week average) at 11.9. John Edwards is second at 10.4, and Gephardt is a distant third at 4.1. Howard Dean, incidentally, has the fifth highest number of page views per visitor, 3.5.

Without further examination, these numbers could mean lots of things. It might be that Kucinich's and Edward's websites require more clicking around to obtain content. A far more useful statistic would be the length of visits to each website, but Alexa unfortunately doesn't provide that. As a preliminary conclusion, though, is that Dennis Kucinich has a real internet presence, quite possibly more of one than most of the other candidates. That presence doesn't translate into electoral success, of course, but it does indicate that people have a real interest in Kucinich. Whether that interest would ever turn into a commitment to vote for him in a primary is still unclear.

update

This is the busy part of the semester. So don't be surprised if I don't post much in the next two weeks.

But... do check out Cliopatra, a new history group blog whose writers include Swarthmore's very own Tim Burke.