If there’s time, it’s probably best to go ahead and turn back for the camera and take the picture then rather than later. I didn’t feel like doing this as I headed out for work one morning this week, and when I came home again, the horse meat drying on the clothing line had been taken down. I think there is (or was) a horse head with flesh and fur still on it on the floor of the outdoor kitchen, but I turned away as soon as I thought I saw that. I tried telling myself it was probably just a cow head, but there’s really no reason a cow head would hanging around when there’s not been any freshly butchered beef.

My friend and fellow volunteer ”>Ryan Giordano has learned the value of yelling. I saw it work in the story he tells. I haven’t yet given the yelling a try, mainly because I’m really so bad at it that I used to deputize people to yell for me when I needed it done. But maybe the ability is hidden inside me somewhere. At the end of practicum, the Peace Corps’s education specialist came to me and said, “Amanda, we had been concerned about you as a teacher since the beginning. We did not think you could raise your voice enough to speak in front of a classroom. But I watched you teach today, and you can actually speak loudly.” I didn’t know whether I could do it myself until the first time I stepped in front of the students. But taking the persona of a confident teacher is one thing; breaking my ingrained habits and taboos against yelling is another. Ryan’s probably right , though, that living in Kazakhstan needs yelling just as much as living needs the assumption that the absolutely anything has the right of way over the pedestrian.

Yelling at people in Kazakhstan has different social meaning than in America. When I went some other PCVs to buy our train tickets home, I was put in charge of making sure with the ticket window attendant that we had understood the schedule correctly before we bought it. So after waiting our ten minutes in line, I got up to the window and asked in Russian whether the train to Ural left on Wednesday. The lady told me that this was the ticket buying window, and I had to go to the question window to ask that. I told her that we would buy the ticket if it left that day, could she please tell me whether it left then or not. She yelled at me to go to the question window. So I yelled at her to tell me when the train left and we would buy the ticket. And with that, she did what I asked.

My friends don't speak Russian and didn't know what the fuss was about. When I looked back at them they looked a little surprised at my behavior, and I realized how naturally and without actually getting viscerally angry myself I had raised my voice at a woman to get what I wanted. My tone would have been very rude in America, but here it's just the way you talk sometimes. And it doesn't mean anything personally. The rest of our lengthy ticket-buying transaction with the woman was no less unfriendly-sounding. We all had the impression that she really didn't like us. We asked if three of us could be put together on a train towards Kokshetau, but were told we couldn't because we had different destinations. "There's no way?" "Absolutely impossible," she snarled back at us. So we backed down and bought our tickets, and after some more shouting with the woman about passports and who was going where and whose money, we got our tickets and left. Only when we got outside did we check our seats and discover that she had put us together after all, possibly against the rules. Despite the ugly tone of voice and our being certain that the woman hated us, she had secretly done us a big favor.

The realization, which has been dawning on me slowly since the beginning, but which this example beautifully confirms, that the confrontational grouchiness and anger that you see all the time here doesn't belie actual animosity takes so much stress out of day-to-day life. I would go so far as to say that this realization is the number one survival skill for working in Kazakhstan.

Yelling at people in Kazakhstan has different social meaning than in America. When I went some other PCVs to buy our train tickets home, I was put in charge of making sure with the ticket window attendant that we had understood the schedule correctly before we bought it. So after waiting our ten minutes in line, I got up to the window and asked in Russian whether the train to Ural left on Wednesday. The lady told me that this was the ticket buying window, and I had to go to the question window to ask that. I told her that we would buy the ticket if it left that day, could she please tell me whether it left then or not. She yelled at me to go to the question window. So I yelled at her to tell me when the train left and we would buy the ticket. And with that, she did what I asked.

My friends don't speak Russian and didn't know what the fuss was about. When I looked back at them they looked a little surprised at my behavior, and I realized how naturally and without actually getting viscerally angry myself I had raised my voice at a woman to get what I wanted. My tone would have been very rude in America, but here it's just the way you talk sometimes. And it doesn't mean anything personally. The rest of our lengthy ticket-buying transaction with the woman was no less unfriendly-sounding. We all had the impression that she really didn't like us. We asked if three of us could be put together on a train towards Kokshetau, but were told we couldn't because we had different destinations. "There's no way?" "Absolutely impossible," she snarled back at us. So we backed down and bought our tickets, and after some more shouting with the woman about passports and who was going where and whose money, we got our tickets and left. Only when we got outside did we check our seats and discover that she had put us together after all, possibly against the rules. Despite the ugly tone of voice and our being certain that the woman hated us, she had secretly done us a big favor.

The realization, which has been dawning on me slowly since the beginning, but which this example beautifully confirms, that the confrontational grouchiness and anger that you see all the time here doesn't belie actual animosity takes so much stress out of day-to-day life. I would go so far as to say that this realization is the number one survival skill for working in Kazakhstan.

I want to clarify that the post below on the question, Are Libertarians Liberals?, was a spontaneous riff off what John Phillips was saying, and not a considered response to the Samuel Freeman paper John was thinking about. John's post conjured a phantom interlocuter who I decided to argue against. Now that I've looked again at the Freeman essay ("Illiberal Libertarians" in Philosophy & Public Affairs 30, no. 2), I see that most of what I said doesn't apply to Freeman's particular argument. Freeman reserves the label 'libertarian' for natural rights anarchists and minimal statists such as Nozick, Rothbard, and Rand. He labels Hayek, Buchanan, and Friedman as 'classical liberals.' And classical liberals, along with Freeman's 'high liberals', are naturally enough kinds of liberals. He's arguing, among other things, that natural rights anarchists and minarchists have no room for an account of legislative authority or political legitimacy, which he takes to be necessary conditions of liberalism.

I'll say more about Freeman's very interesting (and long!) paper later. But for now let me say I think there is (a) some tendentiousness or at least arbitrariness in the way Freeman decides to characterize the nature of liberalism, (b)perhaps room for legislative authority for some natural rights minimal statists, (c) more complexity in the minarchist's notion of contracting and the adjudicatory function of state courts than Freeman makes it out, which may solve most of the problems he thinks you get without legislative authority, and (d) confusion in the way he attempts to apply the idea of the "political" to anarchists.

In any case, in Freeman's terms, I am a classical liberal, not a libertarian, my current views being a frothy stew of Hayek, Buchanan, Coase, Schelling, Rawls, Gauthier, Vernon Smith, and Douglass North. But in the vernacular that just makes me a libertarian.

A collection of others' thoughts about whether Chicago is a bastion of either moral decay or academic banality (my own reply to Stanley Kurtz's allegations was here).

Here's former classmate 4th-year Phoebe Maltz:

Is Chicago really so terrible for conservative kids?

No, it is not. The Maroon is filled with rants on the left, right, and in between; the faculty, yes, even in the French department, are generally open different sorts of ideas, and, perhaps most importantly, socializing occurs across the red-blue barrier in a way it couldn't possibly at most elite schools in the Northeast. Much of what makes Chicago unique is the combination of its location and its reputation, which automatically means it draws students both from the middle of the country and from the coasts; unless Chicago either moves or drops in prestige, this will be the case, giant-boat-gyms and gender-neutral bathrooms not withstanding.

Former classmate and grad student Victor Muniz-Fraticelli discusses David Brooks's allegations of moral decay in today's universities.

Former Volokher and my former professor Jacob Levy also had words (substantially similar to mine) for Kurtz:

Mr. Kurtz,

Bah. Humbug.

You're talking about a school where:
--a quarter of the undregraduates are (Chicago-)economics majors.

--Jean Bethke Elshtain, Leon Kass, Nathan Tarcov, Mark Lilla, Richard Epstein, Eric Posner, and Gary Becker, to name only a few of the biggest senior names, are members of the faculty. Richard Posner is a revered Senior Lecturer.

--in the spot in the student handbook where an increasing number of universities have a speech code, there is a statement on academic freedom and the importance of disagreement

--there is a constitutional commitment *not* to allow the university or faculty as a group take social-political stands-- no statements on the Iraq War, no divestment from Israel, no grape boycotts-- because such things are incompatible with genuin eacademic and intellectual freedom for individuals

--the Common Core persists, and remains required, albeit with some greater choice of Core sequences than used to exist. Overwhelming majorities of undergraduates take one or another kind of Great Books-oriented sequence.

--the administration sends out an e-mail to the whole university each fall, restating the principles of disagreement and academic freedom and reminding (among other things) that they mean no shouting down, no destruction of flyers or newspapers, none of the hecklers'-veto tools that have become so common elsewhere

I've been at both a left-leaning (Brown) and mainstream (Princeton) elite university before. If you really think that Chicago is becoming indistinguishable from the rest of the academy, then you have no idea whereof you speak. Somehow you seem to have generalized from Sassen's presence on the faculty and her behavior (at a panel that could hardly have taken place on many campuses) to an indictment of the faculty as a whole. This is nonsense.

Despite all of the hand-wringing letters Kurtz has been posting, I am intrigued by the fact that I haven't yet found somebody in the blogosphere with a current/recent Chicago connection has agreed with him. I wrote to him to call attention to this disagreement, but no link to disagreement has come; and I doubt it will.

Will and I recently had a pair of posts on the Ortolan, a small apparently delicious French bird eaten whole off the grill. Reading through Waverly Root's The Food of France, which I'll talk about in more length this weekend, I find this additional information on the delicacy:

"South of Bordeaux, the Landes provide a number of typical dishes of their own . . . The region is known for its ortolans, a small bird of the yellowhammer family which is considered the most delicately flavoured of all birds in France, and has provided a household word for the utmost refinement in eating, ortolans sauce blanche, generally used jocularly. Thus a Frenchman reaching the table and finding it set with a particularly economical repast may observe sarcastically: "Eh Bien! Ortolans sauce blanche encore une fois?" (Roughly, "Ortolan again?")

One of the reasons why the ortolan is so prized is that it is not simply shot and served, as are most most wild birds. It is caught during the autumn migrations in traps called matoles, which possess some screening ability that enables them to catch ortolans rather than other birds of the same caliber, and is then caged and fattened on millet . . . Ortolans a la landaise are cooked by an open fire, either spitted or, preferably, each in a little heavy paper box set close to the flame, in which the birds sizzle in their own fat. No other liquid is tolerated, but the guest may be invited to apply salt and pepper to his own taste as the cooking progresses before his eyes. When the bird is done, pick it up in your fingers and eat it without ceremony, as hot as you dare. They are so small you can put away half a dozen of them with ease".