Come visit Montreal

Visiting faculty and postdoc fellowships at CREUM.

CREUM - 2008-2009 Senior fellowship programme

The University of Montreal’s Centre de recherche en éthique (CREUM) is inviting applications of professor-researchers in ethics, for residential fellowships which can vary in length according to individual circumstances. Applicants are expected to have at least a working knowledge of French.

The CREUM will offer to its fellows: a research grant up to 40,000$ CAN, an individual office, access to the services of the University of Montreal (libraries, sports center, etc.), and assistance for material organization of the stay. In return, the fellows are expected to pursue the research project submitted in their application, to participate in the Center's activities (conferences, seminars, lectures), and to present their work in progress in the context of Center's seminars and workshops. Application deadline: April 30th, 2008. For more information, please visit www.creum.umontreal.ca

CREUM - 2008-2009 Postdoctoral fellowship program

The University of Montreal’s Centre de recherche en éthique (CREUM) is inviting applications of postdoctoral researchers in ethics, for residential fellowships which can vary in length according to individual circumstances (maximum 27,000 $ CAN). Applicants are expected to have at least a working knowledge of French.

The CREUM will offer to its fellows: a postdoctoral grant of 3,000$ per month, an individual workstation, access to the services of the University of Montreal (libraries, sports center, etc.), and assistance for material organisation of the stay. In return, the fellows are expected to pursue the research project submitted in their application, to participate in the Center's activities (conferences, seminars, lectures), and to present their work in progress in the context of Center's seminars and workshops. Application deadline: April 30th, 2008. For more information, please visit www.creum.umontreal.ca.

Good news, bad news

The good news is that someone thought to do this.

The bad news is how desperately McGill needs it-- and how unlikely I fear it is that any reforms will actually happen as a consequence.

Cut the red tape contest

Can you identify a policy or process at McGill that has, or appears to have, no sound academic or administrative justification and that impairs service to current or prospective students?

Do you have an idea that we can implement to resolve the issue you have identified? What would work best for you? How would you like to see it resolved?

Send us your suggestions by February 22, 2008. The 10 best entries, judged on impact, cost/benefit, and innovation, received by that date will win $100 each.

While we may not be able to do away with all of the red tape on campus, we will bring the issues you submit to the attention of the responsible unit and report back to contestants about what progress we can make.

"No sound academic or administrative justification" is a demanding standard. It's the equivalent of asking for laws that would fail rational basis review in a U.S. court.

I expect there to be at least dozens of viable entries.

New discoveries of old political science truths

Chris Bowers on superdelegates:

If the institution that exists to resolve disputes within the American center-left does not operate according to democratic principles, then I see no reason to continue participating within that institution. If that institution fails to respect democratic principles in its most important internal contest of all--nominating an individual for President of the United States--then I will quit the Democratic Party. And yes, I am perfectly serious about this. If someone is nominated for POTUS from the Democratic Party despite another candidate receiving more poplar support from Democratic primary voters and caucus goers, I will resign as local precinct captain, resign my seat on the Pennsylvania Democratic State Committee, immediately cease all fundraising for all Democrats, refuse to endorse the Democratic "nominee" for any office, and otherwise disengage from the Democratic Party through all available means of doing so.

Robert Michel's "Iron Law of Oligarchy," formulated in 1911 in reponse to his dismayed discovery that socialist parties including the German Social Democratic Party were not much different in their internal organizations and power structures from other parties:

"Who says organization, says oligarchy."

Scattered Friday thoughts

The talk yesterday was great fun. I haven't been in a serious exegesis-and-interpretation-of-Walzer conversation in many years, and there's a lot there worth talking about.

In the course of preparing the talk, I really had cause to think about the shape of Walzer's corpus. While he wrote excellent material both before and after this time, it seems to me that there's a 13-year stretch-- 1977-1990-- that's just stunning for breadth and scale of achievement. His published work from that era that I think are all major and enduring contributions, including four really quite distinct enduring books:

Just and Unjust Wars
"The Moral Standing of States"
"Philosophy and Democracy"
Spheres of Justice
"Liberalism and the Art of Separation"
"What Does It Mean to be an 'American'?"
"The Communitarian Critique of Liberalism"
Interpretation and Social Criticism
The Company of Critics

I've never read Radical Principles or Exodus and Revolution, but they were published in that timeframe too (as well as a steady stream of other articles not mentioned here). And to close it out, his second set of Tanner Lectures, "Nation and Universe," that provides the most sophisticated statement of his views of cultures as boundaries of moral and epistemic meaning, was published (only in the Tanner volumes, not as a freestanding publication) in 1990. I'm pleased to see that "Nation and Universe" has finally been republished in an accessible format-- in the new David Miller edited collection of Walzer's papers, Thinking Politically, Yale UP. It's been hard to come by, and it's an important piece of the puzzle for thinking about Spheres of Justice. (So, by the way, is "The Moral Standing of States," something that gets overlooked because the latter gets lumped with Just and Unjust Wars and segmented off as part of the sub-subfield international or global justice.)

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You know you live far north when you drive past a Winter Olympics venue, northbound, and think, "oh, that's good, almost halfway there..."

Seeing the tourist-friendly French language signs in northern upstate New York made me feel like home was on the horizon.

I've heard (and said) the Montreal greeting "bonjour-hi" so often that I don't quite notice it any more-- but I noticed and was charmed by the very Anglo-Canadian border guard who took my passport with a friendly "bonjour, eh?" Can't say that I've ever heard that before.

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I hardly ever just post links without comment to vastly-higher-traffic blogs. If you're the kind of person who's likely to enjoy Crooked Timber, you're a lot more likely to read it yourself than to follow my links to it. But just in case, two good ones from the last few days: Henry Farrell, "Seeing Like Seeing Like A State" and John Holbo, "Rawls and Liberalism".

---

Finally, speaking of Rawls, I've occasionally referred to portions of Political Liberalism as auto-talmudic or auto-talmudism for their curious approach to commenting on Theory of Justice. (All of Rawls' best friends had taken a turn at interpreting TJ, and they seemed to enjoy it, so one can imagine him deciding to make an attempt at the same activity.) On a whim, it occurred to me to check google to see whether those logisms had been neo'd before. No hits for "auto-talmudic." But a few hits for "auto-talmudism"-- all as part of gobbldy car insurance spam sites. Not sure why, but that amused me.

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One more pair of links to a vastly-higher-traffic blog: Eugene Volokh on sharia arbitration and again.

On the road

Today: "Michael Walzer on Political, Moral, and Cultural Pluralism," at Siena College's yearlong symposium on Walzer's thought. The sign says that the lecture is open to the public, so if blogreaders happen to be in Loudonville, NY...

Better late...

Australia will issue its first formal apology for past mistreatment to the country's indigenous people Feb. 13, a senior minister said Wednesday.

Indigenous Affairs Minister Jenny Macklin said the apology to Australia's so-called "stolen generation" of Aborigines would be the first item of business for the new Labour-dominated Parliament.

"The apology will be made on behalf of the Australian government and does not attribute guilt to the current generation of Australian people," Macklin said in a statement.[...]

An apology would mark a significant milestone in a decade-long debate about how best to acknowledge Aborigines who were affected by a string of 20th century policies that separated mixed-blood Aboriginal children from their families - frequently referred to as Australia's stolen generation.

From 1910 until the 1970s, around 100,000 mostly mixed-blood Aboriginal children were taken from their parents under state and federal laws based on a premise that Aborigines were a doomed race and saving the children was a humane alternative.

A national inquiry into stolen generation held in 1997 found many children taken from their families suffered long-term psychological effects stemming from the loss of family and culture.

The inquiry recommended state and federal authorities apologize and pay compensation to those who were removed from their families. But former prime minister John Howard steadfastly refused to do either.

I discussed Howard's refusal in chapter 8 of The Multiculturalism of Fear

A state that can act in its own name, a state that has a corporate existence, can commit wrongs in its own name—and can legitimately apologize in its own name. This is not even only true of states. The Catholic Church—which both legally and as a matter of its own self-understanding has a corporate, institutional existence and is not merely the sum of its faithful at any moment—has apologized for some of its failures during the Holocaust. That this means some persons who hold church offices today, and who were not yet born at the time of the Holocaust, have apologized for the actions of others long dead, is neither a conceptual nor a moral problem. There would have been a problem had Catholic prelates apologized in their capacities as natural persons for the actions of other natural persons; but this is not what they did. And it is not what state officials do when they properly apologize for past actions of the state, either. Australian Prime Minister Howard thus got matters precisely backward when he resisted an official apology to the ‘stolen generation’ of Aboriginal children but issued a personal statement of regret. That personal statement could be no more than the expression of sorrow of an onlooker to a tragedy; Howard had no hand in the policy. It was the Australian state, not the person of the head of government, that owed (and still owes) an apology.

I'm pleased not only by the fact that an apology is forthcoming but by the symbolism of its being the first act of the new Labor-majority Parliament. Good on them, as one might say.

Hither and yon

Tomorrow I'll be discussing "Federalism and the Old and New Liberalisms" at AEI's Federalism Project.

The next day, back at McGill for "Rethinking the Public Sphere, Rethinking the Making of Publics," a mini-conference on Steven Pincus and Peter Lake’s article, “Rethinking the public sphere in early modern England.”

Next Thursday, Siena College, "Michael Walzer on Political, Moral, and Cultural Pluralism," as part of a year-long symposium on Walzer's thought.

March 14-15, "Toward a Common Liberalism" conference, UCLA.

Les langues des affaires a Montreal

Two perspectives.

Onto the blogroll

My friend and former colleague Melissa Harris, a political scientist at Princeton, has had a "Bloggin' In page for a few years that has the "Ceci n'est pas un pipe"-esque motto "I don't blog... but if I did, here is what I would blog about..." And for a long time she basically didn't blog on it, so it didn't occur to me to add her to the blogroll.

Now I see via aufheben that she's blogging up a storm with very smart commentary on Obama, race, gender, and the primaries. Recommended, and onto the blogroll she goes.

Brief thoughts on the Democratic race

1) John Edwards inspires in me a great desire to smack him whenever he opens his good ole' mouth. I wanted to smack him twice when he maintained that his electability argument ('vote for me because I can campaign in rural areas not just in big cities') had "nothing to do with race and gender." And I cheered Clinton when she went after him about his self-righteous "lobbyist" shtick, and when she noted that trial lawyers are a special interest, too.

2) I'm a little surprised at how many people are shocked (shocked!) that Bill "we'll just have to win, then" Clinton is a dirty fighter on the campaign trail who may not always be entirely truthful. I mean, I guess that I understand why progressives don't remember the events of 1994-8 as Clinton fighting dirty, relentlessly savaging Congressional Republicans, Ken Starr, and Monica Lewinsky. And I share in the general retrospective sense that Clinton was a much better President than I realized at the time.

But does no one else remember the brutal, scorched-earth, deceptive victory Clinton won over Paul Tsongas in the 1992 Florida primary? To the degree that Barack Obama is this year's nice-guy good-government intellectual progressive reformist in the Adlai Stevenson model he's in trouble-- because one of the very first things Bill Clinton learned in presidential politics was how to eat a candidate like that for lunch, with none too many scruples about truthfulness.

Gone fishin'

Expect posting to be much lighter than the hardly-heavy-anyways pace around here through April. Two brand new classes, one an introduction to political ethics and one a foundations of Europe grad seminar, combined with trips roughly every three weeks and a new paper due roughly every month, will keep me plenty busy.

In the meantime, in case anyone cares, I'm basically in the neighborhood of Virginia Postrel on Ron Paul. [Update: And also Steven Horwitz: "those of us who have been paying attention to the libertarian movement for the last 15 years knew that the paleo element was growing and was associated with all kinds of unsavory views from the ugly segment of the hard right;" and Will Wilkinson.] I was an RP volunteer in 1988 as an overeager young Libertarian (met him, brought him to speak at my NH high school), and even then I got the creeps from some of the surrounding cultural baggage. Even apart from basic policy disagreements with his positions on abortion and immigration, I had a general unease about the anti-Fed, anti-banking, anti-cosmopolitan stuff. I ended up on RP mailing lists for a long time after that (never got the newsletter, which was expensive, but I got a lot of solicitations to subscribe to it), and became more and more uneasy though it no longer mattered. Then over the course of the 90s the split between Reason/ Cato/ urban liberal libertarians and Mises Institute/ Rockwellite/ Confederatista libertarians became public and hardened, and it was very clear to me both which side I was on and how unsavory I found much of what went on in the latter group. (See Tom Palmer's occasional blogging abou "the fever swamp.") And Ron Paul was always clearly part of that group, with its various flirtations with racism and anti-Semitism and its sometimes quite open homophobia. I have friends who are decent people who work with the Mises Institute and think it's philosophically pure whereas the Cato crowd has gone squishy in the search for respectability. But I've never quite understood how they can find it a comfortable milieu. (Incidentally, driving a wedge between libertarianism rightly-understood-as-far-as-I'm-concerned and the Confederatistas is part of the project of my article Federalism and the Old and New Liberalisms.)

So I've watched the Ron Paul phenomenon with ambivalence. When he'd tack to the cultural right on abortion and immigration it was easy for me to say "he's always been part of the unsavory right-wing crowd anyway." When he'd emphasize his crackpot monetary theories (ably dissected by a more-patient-than-I Megan McCardle), he was easy to ignore. When he'd instead act as the spokesman for the indictment of the Bush administration as a power-hungry big-spending Constitution-shredding machine, and for a promise to move toward much smaller government at home combined with opposition to the war, it was much harder. I want and wanted that viewpoint to be an important one in American politics, and RP was building excitement for it even if it was largely by other people's ability to project onto him. I never supported him and wouldn't have wanted him to become President, but it still seemed like good news that the segment of the electorate who was enthusiastic about him could be organized, assembled, and heard.

As others have said: I have no reason to think that RP is personally a racist and I believe him when he said he didn't write that awful stuff. (Link is, of course, to the TNR article by James Kirchik, whose character and intelligence had been subject to relentlessly, er, less-than-complimentary treatment at the hands of progressive bloggers until yesterday; now apparently all is forgiven or forgotten.) On the other hand, his name was appealing to a constituency that was also appealed to by that stuff. He drew from a part of the libertarian movement where the ghost-writers he knew to hire were people like Lew Rockwell. And he let it go out under his name, for a long time. That's plenty bad enough.

See also a very sharp post by Ross Douthat:

You know, I half-believe Ron Paul when he says that he is not a bigot or a racist or an anti-Semite. I half-believe him in when he says the inflammatory material that James Kirchick has uncovered in years and years of newsletters and pamphlets with his name on them was written by others without his supervision or direct permission. But what I'm nearly sure of is that he doesn't really care that much if some of the people around him are racists - not because he shares their opinions, but because he thinks those opinions aren't all that important in the grand scheme of things.

This doesn't make Ron Paul a terrible person; it just makes him human. He believes in a constellation of ideas - some of them nutty, but some of them not - that have been shunted to the fringe of American political life. And people who find themselves in that position tend to be far, far more forgiving of their allies' various tics and idiosyncracies and yes, bigotries than would otherwise be the case. It's unfortunate, but it's also human nature: If someone agrees with you and supports you when the whole world seems to be against you, of course you'll be more likely to look past their tendency to suggest that Mossad was behind the 1993 WTC bombing, or their fondness for pre-apartheid South Africa. When you're way out there on the fringe, without any obvious way to reach the mainstream, it's very easy to tell yourself that your dubious friends aren't really all that bad - and that besides, if you ever start finding your way back to the mainstream, it won't be all that hard to jettison them along the way. It's easy, as well, to start making excuses for them: If the mainstream accuses you of anti-Semitism, unfairly, because you're a principled non-interventionist who wants the U.S. to pull out of the Middle East, it's easy to find yourself making excuses for other people who get tarred (more justly) with the label. And then time goes by, the mainstream never gets any closer, you're spending all your time in a cramped and crankish and resentful world, and you hear yourself thinking hey, if these neo-Confederate guys are right about states' rights and the Constitution, then maybe they're right about race too ...

It's the most natural thing in the world. Just ask Sam Francis.

Thus it's to Ron Paul's credit, in a certain way, that he never went as far down this road as Francis and Joe Sobran and others like them did. But it's a shame that some of Paul's ideas have only Paul - with all his baggage, all his own weird and baseless notions, and all his unfortunate friends - as their champion.

and that problem in turn aggravates what Glen Whitman calls the small sample problem.

Given the relative rarity of libertarians, both in the public eye and in general, most people’s judgment of libertarianism will be based on a very small sample – often a sample size of one. If the first libertarian someone meets is a smart, reasonable, decent person, they will come away with a positive impression and possibly a willingness to explore further. If the first libertarian someone meets is a wild-eyed lunatic, on the other hand, they could easily write off libertarianism as the ideology of wild-eyed lunatics.

The Paul candidacy presents a special case of the small-sample problem. For many people, Ron Paul is the first and only libertarian-identified candidate they’ve ever seen receive any serious media attention. As a result, they may assume other libertarians share all of his views. Many libertarians [...] are wary of supporting Paul – even though they probably agree more with Paul than anyone else in the field – because they fear the public will assume that all libertarians are anti-immigrant gold-bug conspiracy theorists (and possible closet racists).

Liberals and conservatives don’t have this problem. Everyone understands that these groups contain a gamut of opinion, with some degree of disagreement on every issue. If one candidate goes off the reservation on one issue or another, there’s no real fear that his position will define the movement forever.

Elsewhere:

My colleague Will Roberts has posted the outline of his introductory lecture to Radical Political Thought.

Third, what differentiates Leftist from Rightist anti-liberalism?

Here I’m going to declare by fiat: Leftist anti-liberalism is resolutely anti-capitalist, while Rightist anti-liberalism tends to incorporate capitalism within a set of state structures even as it jettisons the (liberal) justificatory discourse of capitalism. Thus, in Rightist anti-liberal regimes, market mechanisms tend to be infiltrated by naked uses of force or violence: an increase in slave or convict labor, other forms of servitude, formation of mafia-like cartels, price-fixing and intimidation, etc.

Part of the Leftist case against liberalism is that it surreptitiously relies upon Rightist anti-liberalism to establish itself and function. In other words, there is a necessary violence disavowed by the liberal theory of justice. In Mao's "Combat Liberalism," he portrays liberalism as a character flaw marked above all by passive aggression. Liberals say "peace" to your face--or say nothing at all--and then look the other way while the Corleones take your farm and build a casino on it.

Obviously, I'm not in much sympathy with that way of carving things up. Right-anti-liberalism seems to be getting defined in a particular way for the purpose of serving the subsequent thesis that liberalism relies on it, and of ensuring that left-anti-liberalism is free of its taint. I guess there's Pinochet there, or Mussolini in practice-though-not-theory, but... Where is church, or aristocracy, or blood and soil, or nation, or the aesthetic-aristocratic-tory-environmentalist critique of market liberalism that runs from Carlyle and Ruskin through to John Gray? I can't recognize Maistre in that description, or Fichte, or Metternich, or Kirk This is a serious construction of the category of rightist anti-liberalism. There is plenty of anti-capitalism on the antiliberal right; and no great political theory or political ideology is free of uncomfortable connections or resemblances to the others...

Books newly bought

New additions to the library (though they're not actually there yet; they're paid for but I don't update librarything until the books are in my hands):

The Sovereignty of Parliament: History and Philosophy, by Jeffrey Goldsworthy

Paradoxes of Political Ethics: From Dirty Hands to the Invisible Hand, by John M. Parrish

Democratic Authority: A Philosophical Framework, by David M. Estlund

Justice, Democracy and Reasonable Agreement, by Colin Farrelly

Spectres that won't stop haunting

Daniel Davies writes:

I have a minor annual tradition (as in, I did it once) of beginning the year with a short list of arguments that I am no longer going to have. As I said when I produced the first such list, while not necessarily claiming to have the definitive truth on these subjects, my views

“Are no longer up for argument, pending absolutely spectacular new evidence. I’ve had a number of arguments on all of these points over the last year; I’ve heard all sides, and I’ve made up my mind. If anyone has an argument which they genuinely believe to be new, go ahead, but don’t expect much. Please note also that I am no longer interested in methodological debates over the merits of statistical studies which purport to prove the matter one way or another on any of these propositions.”

It’s basically a way of clearing the decks of old pointless arguments, leaving room for new pointless and bitter arguments (I hope to post next week a short list of things that I plan to argue about a heck of a lot more, being a list of tacit assumptions made by other people that I regard as highly questionable). If you want to have a last go on any of the short list below, now’s the time, but otherwise it is books closed, I’m afraid; I have made a reasonable donation to the Grice United Fund which ought to cover any genuinely deserving intellectual charity cases. So here’s the list – it’s actually shorter than previous years.

Communist iconography, such as posters and t-shirts of Che Guevara, the equivalent of Nazi insignia. Members and ex-members of Communist parties in Western Europe and the USA, the equivalent of war criminals. In general, the use of inflated rhetoric about Stalinist or Maoist massacres as a debating technique [DISAGREE].

I entirely disagree with Davies on the merits of this question (click through to read his defense of his view) but actually agree with him about the pointlessness of it as a debate, and have been thinking about that myself during the past year.

I have occasionally been struck, when reading about the French 19th century, by how long political actors remained stuck in symbolic fights about the French Revolution. With 1848 on the horizon, people's heads were still in 1789 or 1793. I think that some of the failure of the July Monarchy can be attributed to the fault line running through the liberal center over what were basically 1789 identity questions. The 1830s were four decades after the events that still had a stranglehold on their politics.

I don't know what the equivalent of 1848 is in this analogy. But I do know that (as Davies notes in a different context later in the post) we're four decades past the 60s. We're 6-7 decades past the Holocaust and the purges. We're a lifetime past Duranty and the New York Times and the Ukrainian famine. I get a little shudder of disgust at the Che t-shirts, but for that matter I still get a little shudder of sadness thinking about the failure of the July Monarchy. As much as possible I intend not to invest emotional energy debates about the iconographies of comparative evils.

Starting today

Annual Meeting of the American Society for Political and Legal Philosophy

December 28-29, 2007, Baltimore MD



Loyalty
Friday, December 28

GIV-2. American Society for Political and Legal Philosophy
Location: Falkland, Fourth Floor
2:45-5:45 p.m.
Topic: Loyalty

2:45-4:10 p.m.
Chair: Sanford Levinson (University of Texas)
Speaker: Daniel Markovits (Yale University)
"Lawyerly Fidelity"
Commentators: Lynn Mather, Martin Lederman

4:20-5:45 p.m.
Chair: Donald Horowirz (Duke Unversity)
Speaker: Nancy Sherman (Georgetown University)
"For the Sake of Comrades"
Commentators: Ryan Balot; Phillip Carter

6-8 pm: Reception: Kent A, Fourth Floor

Saturday Morning, December 29

Dover B, 3rd floor
8-8:50 am: Breakfast reception
8:50-9 am- Business Meeting. Note: not 8-8:50 am as indicated on some schedules
Group Session VII – 9:00-11:00 a.m.

GVII-1. American Society for Political and Legal Philosophy
9:00-11:00 a.m.
Topic: Loyalty
Chair: Nancy Rosenblum (Harvard University)
Speaker: Russell Muirhead (University of Texas–Austin)
"Partisan Loyalties"
Commentators: Richard Pildes; David Estlund
(Preceded in same room by ASPLP breakfast, 8:00-9:00 a.m.)

(I'll miss the first session because I'll be giving a paper at "IV-D. Symposium: Iris Marion Young.")

It's all true!

The reason why in recent years the British constitution has been altered beyond recognition-- abolishing the ancient and honorable hereditary lords, undoing the Union of 1707 that was the guarantee against Jacobite invasions from the north, and the carving up of the duties of the even more ancient and honorable office of Lord Chancellor-- is that there was a crypto-papist in 10 Downing Street!

Conspiracy theorists of the world, know your moment of triumph. We now have clear proof that, if you let your guard down for even a moment, 200 or so years later your prophecies will all come true.

Reforming graduate education

Via Fabio and Tyler, and Inside Higher Ed article about Harvard GSAS under Theda Skocpol initiating important reforms that rest on the premise that "graduate students need to get on to a life where they have their own careers or income before they are entering middle age" and that grad school simply should not take 9 or 10 or more years.

The reforms and results also make plain that the onus is on departments and advisors. When departments were provided with appropriate incentives, time to degree started to fall...

Heh.

Todd pointed this one out to me: the New York Times has a funny bit on recommended science fiction reading for the presidential candidates. Sample:

JOHN McCAIN
Senator from Arizona

Should tell reporters he’s read “Starship Troopers,” by Robert A. Heinlein: An impressionable young man is drafted into an intergalactic military campaign and finds that war solves all problems.

Might also consider reading “The Forever War,” by Joe Haldeman: An impressionable young man is drafted into an intergalactic military campaign and finds that war doesn’t solve anything.

Good for them.

As the hearings conclude,
the professors give a platform to the Muslim group that was absurdly attacked last year because a private commercial establishment wanted their business enough to serve them beans without pork.

Back in March, they were castigated in the populist media for insisting on praying at a Quebec maple-sugar shack and eating pork-free baked beans.

Yesterday, the same Muslims who organized that cultural field trip appeared before the Bouchard-Taylor commission and were gently asked to set the record straight.

Did they demand a change in the traditional menu of pork and beans, and did they force a small party in the next room to can its loud music so they could pray in peace? No, there were no unreasonable demands, just a mutual arrangement with the owner, said Akram Benalia, spokesperson for Astrolabe, the Muslim community association that organized the March 11 trip to the Érablière au Sous Bois, in Mont St. Grégoire.

"It was a commercial agreement that had nothing to do with reasonable accommodations," Benalia said.

"But it shows how people can use this kind of situation to denigrate Muslims and amplify Islamophobia, and that's what really sickened us." The owner of the sugar shack had agreed to make baked beans without pork for the 260 Muslims in the group, in order to meet their dietary restrictions, he said. And it was the owner who asked the party next door to turn off its music for a few minutes while some of the Muslims prayed.

The way it came out in the media, however, the Muslims were portrayed as unwilling to adapt to traditional Quebec customs, "imposing" their values on a Quebec archtype, the end-of-winter outing when families and friends go "sugaring off" in the woods.

Co-chairmen Charles Taylor and Gérard Bouchard sympathized with the group.

"It leaves us speechless - this was a myth which was invented and propagated and which caused a lot of harm," Taylor told the delegation, which included two women wearing hijabs.

"You realize, your generation has the thankless role to play these days," Bouchard told them. "There are some Quebecers who are learning the hard way about diversity - at your expense. And your role is to help us, all of us, to overcome the stereotypes and misunderstandings we have." "We'll do it for Quebec, for our Quebec, so that we can all live in harmony, and that our children can, too - it'll be our pleasure," Benalia replied.

A long way from American Political Thought 2004

Will Baude will be clerking for Chief Justice John Roberts. Congratulations!

I don't intend to make a habit of blogging links to YouTube...

but, via via Angus, this is bizarrely brilliant and highly entertaining for fogies of about my age.

New in the journals:

Michael Frazer, "John Rawls: Between Two Enlightenments," Political Theory December 2007. Persuasive, engaging, and exciting-- not a word that these days springs to mind about articles with "John Rawls" in the title. Highly recommended.

Hmm.

I don't think that the faculty- grad student interactions at our department Christmas party yesterday bore much resemblance to this. But then, I would think that, wouldn't I?

A pleasant surprise

The Quebec government's proposed amendment to the Quebec Charter of Human Rights and Freedoms, Bill 63, has finally been introduced. Considering that its political purpose was to subordinate religious liberty to gender equality, and that the people supporting it appeared to think that it meant no gender-differentiated religious practice could be protected by religious liberty, I'm more than a bit surprised by its text. It says:

Bill 63
AN ACT TO AMEND THE CHARTER OF HUMAN RIGHTS AND FREEDOMS

THE PARLIAMENT OF QUÉBEC ENACTS AS FOLLOWS:

1. The preamble of the Charter of human rights and freedoms (R.S.Q., chapter C-12) is amended by replacing the third paragraph by the following paragraph:

"Whereas respect for the dignity of human beings, equality of women and men, and recognition of their rights and freedoms constitute the foundation of justice, liberty and peace;".

2. The Charter is amended by inserting the following section after section 49.1:

"49.2. The rights and freedoms set forth in this Charter are guaranteed equally to women and men."

3. This Act comes into force on (insert the date of assent to this Act).

Section 49 lies in the section of the charter covering rules of interpretation and construction.

Bill 63 doesn't single out religious liberty, and it doesn't subordinate any other claimed right to gender equality. It states as an interpretive principle something that was surely always true of the Charter, the provisions of which guarantee rights to "every human being" or "every person." It does not say that the rights must be exercised in accordance with gender equality, which is what the initial discussions were all about. There's nothing to object to in it-- which surely means that it won't do what its supporters set out to do.

I wonder what cases anyone thinks this language would change the outcome of. Perhaps the Liberal government, having grabbed hold of this one idea in order to keep up with the anti-accommodationists of the PQ and the ADQ but actually knowing better, has deliberately introduced a minimalist amendment designed not to change anything. But I can't believe they'll get away with it, while Mario Dumont is leader of the opposition.

Plus ca change watch

John McCain:

I was in a town in Iowa, and twenty years ago there were no Hispanics in the town. Then a meatpacking facility was opened up. Now twenty per cent of their population is Hispanic. There were senior citizens there who were—‘concerned’ is not the word. They see this as an assault on their culture, what they view as an impact on what have been their traditions in Iowa, in the small towns in Iowa. So you get questions like ‘Why do I have to punch 1 for English?’ ‘Why can’t they speak English?’ It’s become larger than just the fact that we need to enforce our borders.

The language politics of Quebec last month:

MONTREAL–The English option on automated government telephone menus has become a hot-button issue for some French-language groups in Quebec.

Language activists are decrying the fact that callers to many Quebec government offices are told to "press nine" for English before instructions are delivered in French.

Two hardline language groups are teaming up to launch a campaign calling on the government to put the English selection at the end of the message.

"Asking for the English option to come at the end of a message is not something extremist," Mario Beaulieu, president of Mouvement Montréal français, said yesterday.

The Quebec government's language watchdog – the Office québécois de la langue française – recently issued a pamphlet reminding agencies it is official policy to include the English option only after the French message has been delivered in its entirety.

For what it's worth: of all the discourtesies and worse involved in automated telephone menus, I can't see getting agitated about any arrangement here. Allowing a language decision moment early on-- whether that's an opt-out-of-the-following as in the Quebec case, or a choose-which-branch-to-follow as in the Iowa case-- seems efficient to me, even though it means that local majoritarian sensibilities may be offended by the reminder that there are other languages in the system. One sign of a less-badly-designed automated menu is that callers spend a bit less time listening to irrelevant-to-them possibilities, and it's only inefficient to insist on a long spiel in one language before allowing opting out into the caller's language.

But if listening to 45 seconds of French at the beginning of the call is the worst thing that happens to me on one of these phone calls, I'll count myself lucky. (I do try to interact in French in person, but feel no urge to select French options on automated menus or websites.)

While I'm here, might as well note that the Taylor-Bouchard commission hearings are nearing their rousing conclusion.

Limits should be put on religious clothing and symbols in Quebec, but not if they're part of Quebec's heritage, Bloc Québécois leader Gilles Duceppe said yesterday.

"We should have restrictions for reasons of hygiene - in operating rooms, for example," Duceppe told reporters after presenting a brief at the Bouchard-Taylor commission on reasonable accommodations of religious minorities.

"Also for reasons of safety - on construction sites" where hard hats must be worn, he added.

"And in functions that represent the neutrality of the state - the police, for example, or judges."

But Catholic symbols that are part of Quebec history and heritage - the cross on Mount Royal, for example, or roadside crosses - should be exempt from such restrictions, the Bloc leader added.

"We shouldn't turn ourselves into the Taliban and demolish all the Buddhas of Quebec," he said.

"We're not going to stop listening to Mozart's Requiem because it was written for a mass. All that is part of the heritage of humanity of Quebec."

In other words, yet again: any visible sign of any non-Catholic religion is too much; no visible sign of Catholicism can be too much.

(I can convince myself not to mind the cross on Mont Royal. It's was built on church property, and only entered the city's ownership on a trust agreement to keep it intact. I wish the city hadn't taken ownership, but I don't think the city should break its agreement to keep it. But it's tacky, lit up year-round. It's no Requiem or Buddha of Bamiyan. Not every bit of local kitsch becomes "heritage" through sheer venerability.)