Daniel

And still they come … in response to the latest pieing episode (actually an egging of Nick Griffin, leader of the British National Party), the usual crowd of wowsers and pursed-lip good-government types come out of the woodwork, sorrowfully wagging their fingers and telling us “this is just what the BNP want”, and “this sort of thing makes people sympathetic to the BNP”. And once more I say “where’s the evidence?” Nick Griffin certainly doesn’t look like he’s executing the culmination of a cunning master plan to gain favourable publicity – he looks like he’s being egged and not enjoying it. And I really don’t understand the sort of mind that would look at the chubby fascist with yolk running down his coupon and say to themselves “gosh they must have a really important point to make if the so-called anti-fascists have to stoop to these depths to silence them”. Rather than, say, my own reaction, which was roughly “Cracking shot, sir!”. As I’ve noted before, there’s a Laffer Curve implicit here. If nobody ever egged Nick Griffin, then he’d never get egged, which I presume nobody wants. On the other hand, if he was egged every single time he went out, then he’d never leave his house – result, no eggings. But I really don’t believe that we’re on the right hand side of that Laffer Curve, not yet.

And in this particular case, the egging itself is actually a very important speech act and a significant contribution to our national debate. Based on the fact that they got two MEPs elected, non-white British citizens might justifiably be looking with suspicion at their white neighbours today, thinking that a significant proportion of us were secretly harbouring fascist sympathies. In fact this isn’t true; the absolute number of BNP votes was slightly down on 2004, and their electoral success was purely an artefact of overall low turnout. It’s therefore an important point to be made, to our own population and to the world’s watching media, that Nick Griffin isn’t in fact a newly popular and influential political figure; he’s a widely reviled creep who not only doesn’t lead a phalanx of jackbooted supporters, but actually can’t even set up for a TV interview without being pelted with eggs. The voice of the British populace does not shout “Hail Griffin!”, it shouts, “Oi Fatty, cop this! [splat]”. And the only efficient and credible way to demonstrate to the world that Griffin is regarded as an eggworthy disgrace, is to actually and repeatedly pelt him with eggs.

One does worry about the “heckler’s veto”, however. Repulsive as the BNP’s message is, they do have a sacred democratic right to make themselves heard, and it would be a shame if the praiseworthy efforts of the egg-throwers were to stray into the excessive and unacceptable territory of silencing them from the debate. I therefore suggest the following compromise – Unite Against Fascism ought to agree to allow Nick Griffin to give his press conferences in peace and without interruption, and in return the BNP ought to schedule an opportunity at the end of each press conference for their leader to stand around being pelted with eggs.

Larry Elliott (the Guardian’s economics editor) is in my view right to say that a lot of modern macroeconomics has gone off the rails pretty badly and that most general equilibrium models are a tragic waste of time. But I think he (and most other similar critics of excessive maths in economics) really badly misidentifies the nature of the problem, and his choice of an example of a worthless piece of mathematical formalism is quite unfortunate and unfair. Let’s see if I can explain what “Generalised non-parametric deconvolution with an application to earnings dynamics” is, and why someone might care about it.
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The news that NICE has put acupuncture and chiropractic on the list of approved therapies for non-specific lower back pain has led to about the reactions you’d expect – back-slapping and high-fiving from the crystals and “life force” crowd, agonised complaining from the professional skeptics. But it’s actually a sign of something that ought to make us worry, not much but at least a little bit, about the way in which we’re doing medical science in this country.
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It is traditional for the end of a football season in the UK to bring a chorus of moaning about how uncompetitive the Premier League is, and how things would be better if we followed some system loosely based on the “millionaires’ socialism” of US professional sports – salary caps, preferential drafting of new players, all the other hilariously anticompetitive interferences in the market. When making any such comparison, though, one has to remember that the USA is not the size of the UK; it’s roughly the size of Europe.
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Standard & Poors have issued a Very Serious Warning to the UK, with regard to its AAA credit rating. I reach into the archives and pull out John’s excellent article on the general subject.

I think it’s generally agreed that the worst possible sin for a book reviewer is not to have read the book in question. However, what if you really really knew what the book was going to say? How about if you’d spent the previous five years obsessively maintaining a blog about the author, reading all of his published work and developing a whole political philosophy in reaction to his? If the book hadn’t quite come out yet, would you really feel like you had to wait until it did to write your response? Remember, when the thing comes out, it’s going to be reviewed by all sorts of people who have only the barest awareness of the context of the author’s views, and will most likely have skim-read the thing working to a deadline.

Basically, David Aaronovitch (the British Thomas Friedman) has a book in press entitled “Voodoo Histories: The Role Of The Conspiracy Theory In Shaping Modern History“. I’ve been aware that something like it was in the pipeline since 2006, when he delivered a lecture on the subject. I have a number of political disagreements with Aaro, and one of the most important ones is over his structural tendency to give politicians the benefit of the doubt, the origins of which I locate in his early career working on “Weekend World” with John Birt. I also don’t like the general tendency among commentators to act as if explanations of events by reference to covert or criminal/political activity were per se evidence of unseriousness or paranoia; after Watergate, Iran/Contra, P2, the Tonkin Gulf and the Zinoviev Letter one might have hoped that we would have learned a lesson. I’ve written an essay on this subject, over at “Aaronovitch Watch (Incorporating ‘World Of Decency’)”, in the form of a review of the forthcoming book. I honestly believe that more thought and effort has gone into it than is remotely likely to be exerted by any of the eventual reviewers who write with the benefit of having read a copy. See what you think.

Via my Amazon recommendations, “Naked Willie“[1], the latest album from American national treasure Willie Nelson:

After establishing himself as a major Nashville songwriter (he wrote “Crazy” for Patsy Cline, among others), Willie Nelson signed his first serious artist contract at RCA in 1964. At that time, the producers and A&R men like Chet Atkins were boss. Singers weren’t allowed to select arrangements, musicians, studios – any of the key factors in making the records the artist has in mind. Willie was constantly frustrated by the syrupy strings, vocal group choruses and generally “slick” final product

Fast forward to 2008. Willie and long-time harmonica player Mickey Raphael are casually wondering what those records would or could sound like if only the multi-track tapes could be tracked down and …

… and, a whole lot of time and effort in a recording studio could be spent, in order to get something that sounds less “over-produced”. Ahhh authenticity.

(actually, I’ve listened to the clips on the Amazon site, and as well as getting rid of some rather charming olde-Nashville arrangements, it’s very clear indeed that nobody told the mastering engineer that he was meant to be recreating the sound of 1964. These tracks have entirely modern compression and equalisation and the stereo mix doesn’t have the drums panned to one side. “Naked Willie” is a pretty strange hybrid of what the recordings might have sounded like if they’d been made in 1964 and then buried in a vault waiting for the invention of a) modern digital audio workstations and b) alt-country).

[1] I know, I know.

From the New York Times editorial page, and on the day when we’re expecting the International Criminal Court to hand out its decision on whether to indict Omar al-Bashir for genocide (or for a lesser charge of crimes against humanity) in Darfur, the two opposing points of view on the role of the ICC set out pretty clearly.

Update: the warrant’s out. Five counts of crimes against humanity and two of war crimes (specifically, ordering attacks against civilians, and pillaging). But, no genocide charge (the warrant might be amended later to include genocide but this one doesn’t have it). Moreno-Ocampo was very insistent on this six months ago, but it was widely thought at the time that it looked like overreach and apparently the court has decided to stick with what it can definitely prove. More discussion perhaps later.
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I know, readers, sometimes it seems that we at CT are determined to continue discussing Rawls vs Cohen on the requirements of justice until our last reader has been driven into screaming insanity, but have faith – this is empirically relevant stuff.
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I’m a bit bemused by the bemusement. Brad DeLong and Paul Krugman are both running round tearing their hair out about the fact that half of the economics faculty at Chicago appear to be saying demonstrably wrong things about the Obama stimulus policy, and specifically to be reinventing mistakes that everyone thought had been put to rest in the Keynesian debates of the 1940s and 50s. What, O what, would Milton Friedman have said, if he were alive to see this travesty?

Well, call me a cynic, but I am not at all sure that BdeL and PK, two mainstream Keynesians from a different intellectual tradition entirely, can be so sure that they are right and Milton Friedman’s acolytes, former colleagues, former students, close friends and intellectual heirs are wrong about what is the way to carry on Milton Friedman’s intellectual legacy in an environment where a Democratic government is proposing an increase in the federal budget for purposes of fiscal stimulus.

Producing more or less mendacious intellectual smokescreens for policies which favour the interests of very rich men is not an incidental side effect of Chicago School libertarianism. It isn’t some sort of industrial pollution – it’s the product. If and when the Milton Friedman Institute is endowed and operating, it will be people like John Cochrane who staff it, and it will be arguments like this that, when push comes to shove, it produces. The Cossacks work for the Czar. They have always worked for the Czar.

So, should the University of Chicago economics department be razed to the ground and its foundations sowed with salt? Well, Brad at least has recommended this treatment for the Washington Post for what appear to me to be much lesser crimes, but I would be inclined to be more merciful. Taking my cue from Jehovah in the Old Testament, I would be prepared to spare the Chicago School if one innocent man could be found there. So basically, unless and until James Heckman comes out with a stinker on the stimulus package, I say let it survive.

One of the inevitable consequences of any Middle Eastern conflict is the collateral damage caused by the unprovoked and disproportionate attacks which tend to be launched by Michael Walzer on his own credibility (this joke first made on CT here). His latest is a waffly piece of blah in the Even The Liberal New Republic, on the general subject of “proportionality” and collateral damage to civilians.

SPOILER ALERT: don’t click on the “read more” link if you don’t want to find out whether or not he decides that the State of Israel is broadly justified in its latest actions.
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Ahhh, the curse of a title that you like too much to throw away, but not enough to write a relevant post about. Lengthy, multiply footnoted philosophical meanderings, below the fold.

Update: Unaccountably, I forgot to thank “Robotslave” for massive amounts of help provided in this research. Sorry and thanks!
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As part of a minor project aimed at eliminating the cliche “the very real concerns of the white working class” (the latest weaselly codeword for people who want to gain the political benefits[1] of playing anti-immigrant politics while avoiding any of the costs) from British political life through a campaign of sustained mockery and invective, I had an article up on the Guardian blog last week. A digression that I probably should have edited out of it, but in fact liked so much that I not only left it in but am posting it here now, concerned the sunset of what was once an important subsector of the British social work profession in places like Kilburn and Camden Town:
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Budweiser, eh?

I asked the brewmaster, Jean-Marie Rock, which American beer he likes best. He thought for a moment, squinting down his bladelike nose, and narrowed his lips to a point. Then he raised a finger in the air. “Budweiser!” he said. “Tell them that the brewer at Orval likes Budweiser!” He smiled. “I know they detest it, but it is quite good.”

Thanks very much for the heads up to Luis Enrique and Unfogged. Sweet vindication, albeit coming from a guy with pointed lips. Other gems from the article:

“When a brewer says, ‘This has more hops in it than anything you’ve had in your life—are you man enough to drink it?,’ it’s sort of like a chef saying, ‘This stew has more salt in it than anything you’ve ever had—are you man enough to eat it?’ ”

Microbrewers, gahhh.