Over at Crooked Timber, Kieran Healy complains that

When you’re a Sociologist like me, and your field has no credibility, people just assume you’re stupid and don’t bother sending you their Final and Completely True Theory of X in the first place. On the other hand, it does invite people to assume the answer to any problem you are studying is simply obvious common sense.

But sociology is a victim of its own success here. All of the big insights of sociology, from its beginnings in the 19th century up to 1950s work like that of Erving Goffman are indeed common sense, not because they were already known, but because they have been incorporated into the intellectual baggage of everyone in Western societies, educated or not. No one, for example, would be accused of talking academic jargon if they raised the problem of “peer group pressure” at their local school, or made a reference to ‘social status’.
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Expat Aussie physicist has sent me this personal view of the Ukrainian Presidential election. Well worth reading

‘I’m back in the USSR,
You don’t know how lucky you are boy…’

What exactly did Paul McCartney mean by that second line? The question ran through my head with a mixture of excitement and awe as I located Mykola’s wave and smile amongst the rainbow of babushka scarves on the platform at Kyiv Vokzal. A multitude of peaked caps were balanced precariously on the blond crew-cuts of rosy-cheeked teenage soldiers greeting girlfriends and mothers in the dim autumn evening. It was a relief to see Mykola’s familiar face after 24 hours on the Berlin-Kiev ‘express’. Through the train window the rural scenery presented the country as incredibly poor. Groups of farm workers digging potatoes by hand and antiquated soviet machinery were sparsely scattered between vast forests and the odd pollution belching industrial centre. A rude 2am awakening by a self important Ukrainian border guard, and subsequent mild interrogation, was smoothed over by my well ordered paperwork and an official letter of invitation from Mykola’s Professor at the Taras Shevchenko University to attend a physics conference.
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Supporters of both sides in the war in Iraq, and particularly those who are or were associated with the left, have described it as a “war of liberation”. Here, for example, is John Pilger and here is Norman Geras. Presumably Geras and Pilger each think the other is wrong.

The obvious position for an opponent of the war is that both are wrong. On reflection though, I think that Geras and Pilger are both right.
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Tony Parkinson raises an important issue as to whether the principle of not bombing civilian targets can survive conflicts like that in Fallujah. But in rightly condemning the tactics of the insurgents, he makes absurd claims on behalf of the Americans, who are already violating this principle on a massive scale. Estimates of civilian fatalities, mostly arising from American bombing range from a minimum of 15 000 (these are deaths credibly reported in news media) to 100 000 (based on a recent population survey). In this context, something like this is just absurd

The Americans, in conjunction with Iraqi officials, have steadily built up networks of informers in the Sunni cities. They have trained small, mobile units to set up sophisticated aerial and ground surveillance, and have been studying extensively the counter-terrorism methods used by the British and Israelis in urban settings. Here is perhaps where comparisons with, say, Grozny, begin to falter.

Far from having sophisticated networks of informers, the Americans have consistently shown that they lack even basic knowledge about the insurgents, even in places like Baghdad which are more or less under their control. They don’t know who the insurgents are or what their objectives might be, let alone where to find them. They had no idea how many were in Fallujah, or whether the (unidentified except for Zarqawi) leaders had stayed or fled.

Yet in the leadup to the Fallujah assault, the Americans mounted nightly bombing raids, supposedly on targets precisely identified by intelligence in a city to which they had had no access for months. The targets included restaurants and many private homes. It’s obvious that the claims about intelligence were lies, used to justify a major breach of international law. The Americans were bombing to wear down the resistance of the locals, hitting any target that might possibly have an insurgent connection, regardless of civilian casualties. There is only one word for the practice of using bombs, aimed at civilian targets, to terrify your enemies into submission.

If Parkinson had really been concerned about the principle of excluding civilian targets, he would have opposed the war from the outset, or at least from the point, some months ago when the Americans started using air raids in an occupied country, a clear breach of all the relevant laws and conventions.