More Noted Things

by Cliopatria

Lift Global Voices to celebrate yesterday's release of Wu Hao, a documentary filmaker and blogger, who was imprisoned for five months in China. American educated and a permanent resident of the United States, Wu Hao is with his family in Beijing after a lobbying campaign by international news media, bloggers, and officials. See also: this press release by Reporters without Borders.

Scott McLemee's"Aggregate This!" Inside Higher Ed, 12 July, proposes a vehicle to aggregate the academic blogosphere and make it possible, for example, for university presses to find bloggers who would be interested in particular books. Having already taken the step of creating Cliopatria's History Blogroll, we're prepared to cooperate in the effort.

Peter Berkowitz,"Gentlemen Revolutionaries," RealClearPolitics, 9 July, reviews Gordon Wood, Revolutionary Characters: What Made the Founders Different.

Noemie Emery's"The Inconvenient Truth about Truman," Weekly Standard, 17 July, won cheers on the right, from John Podhoretz, Jonah Goldberg, and Alonzo Hamby, and will irritate historians on the left. But in"The Weekly Standard Mugs Truman," one conservative blogger found the article"appalling and intellectually dishonest." Thanks to Andrew Sullivan for the tip.

Dana Heller,"Desperately Seeking Susan," The Common Review, Winter, thoughtfully recalls Susan Sontag's visit to Norfolk's Old Dominion University in her last days. Thanks to Arts & Letters Daily for the tip.

In"The Language of Lynching," at Outside Report, my virtual son, Chris Richardson, objects to language used by defenders of Duke's lacrosse players. However wrongly zealous their prosecution may be, unlike the Scottsboro Boys, they have not endured years of imprisonment because of false accusations. However disrupted their lives, they have not been hung, burned, and their body parts publicly displayed as trophies. The lacrosse players' defenders should shun the language overload about"legal lynching" because it was one of Duke's paragons who fantasized of skinning a person alive, while climaxing in"my duke issue spandex." Meanwhile, another one of the paragons is convicted of misdemeanor assault in Georgetown and put on six months probation. Thanks to Margaret Soltan for the tip.

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Jonathan Dresner - 7/12/2006

That's the one, yeah. I love that quote. Truly humbling.

Robert KC Johnson - 7/12/2006

I posted over at Chris' blog, and agree with much of what he says about language--with the exception of the Scottsboro Boys comparison, which I think, as Kristof used it, is apt.

As to the "paragons," I've written a lot about this case (and have a significant post coming tomorrow) and have never defended either Finnerty or McFayden on a personal level. In most groups of 50, there will be jerks, or worse. But unless you consider underage drinking a character flaw (which I don't), I'm willing to trust the conclusions of the Coleman Committee on the players' basic character. I doubt that any randomly selected group of 50 college students would have fared much better before that kind of open-ended inquiry into their behavior--one with few or none procedural protections. And it seems clear that, as in most groups of 50 college students, there are members of the team--among them Seligmann--who, from all appearances, have outstanding characters.

Alan Baumler - 7/12/2006

Jonathan,

The quote you are thinking of is in Han Fei

There was a farmer of Song who tilled the land, and in his field was a stump. One day a rabbit, racing across the field, bumped into the stump, broke its neck, and died. Thereupon the farmer laid aside his plow and took up watch beside the stump, hoping that he would get another rabbit in the same way. But he got no more rabbits, and instead became the laughing stock of Song. Those who think they can take the ways of the ancient kings and use them to govern the people of today [e.g., the Confucians] all belong in the category of stump-watchers!

from http://www.east-asian-history.net/textbooks/PM-China/ch5_main.htm

Jonathan Dresner - 7/12/2006

Many thanks!

Ralph E. Luker - 7/12/2006

Thanks, Jon. I've fixed the link now.

Jonathan Dresner - 7/12/2006

That last link in the Truman paragraph -- the one offering some comfort to us liberals -- isn't quite right, apparently.

A thought though, one which might seem heretical for an historian: is it me, or is "claiming the mantle" a form of the appeal to authority fallacy? There's a great line about the Confucians from one of their contemporary rivals (Mohists or Legalist, I don't remember and I'm not going to go look it up right now), that their approach of following the example of the ancient sages was like a farmer who, having seen a rabbit once run into a stump and kill itself, stands watch on the stump waiting for another rabbit to come along....