Henry

The Financial Times has an excellent article summarizing the institutional issues facing the EU if, as expected, Lisbon passes. Read it for the substance. But enjoy it for this suggestion, which I haven’t seen floated before:

However, as became clear this week, many smaller EU member states do not want a high-profile president. Belgium, Luxembourg and the Netherlands circulated a document contending that the first president should be “someone who has demonstrated his commitment to the European project and has developed a global vision of the Union’s policies, who listens to the member states and the institutions, and who is sensitive to the institutional balance that corresponds to the Community method”. Translated from Eurospeak, this means a person with a lower profile than Mr Blair and from a country more deeply committed than the UK to the European ideal. Across Europe there is a recognition that the EU would do its image a favour if it awarded the job to a woman, one possibility being Mary Robinson, Ireland’s former head of state.

Depending on how Vaclav Klaus’s brinkmanship plays out, the new president will have to be chosen pretty soon. It would be very, very sad to see wingnuts’ heads exploding again in just a few weeks time …

I’ve been doing my best to resist getting pulled back in by Clive Crook. I really have. I nearly succumbed when I read his Monday FT column, in which otiose self-congratulation dukes it out with utter lack of self-knowledge for seven hundred words but pulled myself back from the brink (self-congratulation wins, but it’s a very close call). But his follow-up blog post has propelled me into the abyss.

Mr. Crook has a theory of what is wrong with American politics. It involves partisanship, of the kind not practiced by himself and his friends.
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He has just introduced an amendment to prevent the NSF from funding political science research (PDF). Apparently, Fox News and CNN pundits can do our job better than we can.

The largest award over the last 10 years under the political science program has been $5.4 million for the University of Michigan for the “American National Election Studies” grant. The grant is to “inform explanations of election outcomes.” The University of Michigan may have some interesting theories about recent elections, but Americans who have an interest in electoral politics can turn to CNN, FOX News, MSNBC, the print media, and a seemingly endless number of political commentators on the internet who pour over this data and provide a myriad of viewpoints to answer the same questions.

Whether the answers provided by this ‘myriad of viewpoints’ are good ones, I will leave as an open question. I obviously have a dog in this fight as a political scientist who will probably apply for NSF funding in the future. But I also think that there are measurable Good Things (in terms of understanding how our system of politics works etc) that come from good empirical work in political science. And the politics of Coburn’s amendment are not precisely difficult to discern (among his stated objections are that this money has gone to fund research concluding that the US is increasingly willing to torture suspected terrorists, and carefully unspecified work – doubtless some form of shameless subsidized leftwing punditry – by Paul Krugman). If you feel that political science doesn’t deserve any funding, feel free to say so in comments. If you disagree with Coburn (and are a political scientist) and live in the US, get on to your senator’s office to say so (and ideally, contact your university’s research vice president’s office or whatever while you are at it – they are likely to have good contacts). This may come up for a vote today.

Update: Senator contact information here.

Glenn Beck ?!!???. Truly, these are desperate times for conservative would-be intellectuals (n.b. also the defence of Jonah Goldberg’s Liberal Fascism as a ‘serious work’ that will stand the test of time).

So the polls are open in Ireland for the Lisbon Treaty Mulligan referendum. Early reports suggest that more people are voting than the last time in Dublin, but that turnout elsewhere in the country is very low. I’m predicting a win by somewhere in the 6%-8% range (more predicated on ‘No’ voters being discouraged and not voting, than on any great sense of positive enthusiasm for the referendum). Also worth noting in passing that Wolfgang Munchau who suggested last year that the Irish could (and perhaps should) be kicked out of the EU for their impertinence in voting No the first time around now seems to have gone quite cold on the Treaty himself. He fails to tell us whether major European member states are monitoring his shifting beliefs against the likelihood that they might soon have to pull out of the EU and reconstitute themselves in a new organization that would specifically exclude Wolfgang Munchau. Perhaps his column next week will reveal more – in the meantime, feel free to speculate about the vote, provide updated information, opinions etc in comments.

Update: Looks as though I seriously underestimated the swing – the Treaty passed by a 17% margin.

More evidence that the discovery trove from the tobacco litigation is one of the major sources for information on the political economy of late 20th century America. James Fallows on notorious hack Betsy McCaughey.

the real news is the evidence that tobacco lobbyists secretly worked with McCaughey to prepare her infamous New Republic article “No Exit.” As I argued back in 1995 in “A Triumph of Misinformation,” everything about McCaughey’s role in the debate depended on her pose as a scrupulous, impartial, independent scholar who, after leafing through the endless pages of the Clinton health proposals, had been shocked by what she found. If it had been known at the time that she was secretly collaborating with one of the main interest-group enemies of the plan, perhaps the article would never had been published; at a minimum, her standing to speak would have been different.

Ms. McCaughey was apparently unwilling to be interviewed for the Rolling Stone article that Fallows is riffing off. This is a pity. It would have been interesting to have found out a little more about the precise role that tobacco lobbyists played in helping draft McCaughey’s notoriously mendacious piece (since the proposed reforms would have been partly bankrolled by a tobacco tax, they clearly had a considerable interest in influencing debate).

Update: The Manhattan Institute appears to be denying that McCaughey ‘worked with’ Philip Morris.

Is this a question of a lobbyist grossly exaggerating his “influence” to impress bosses and funders? That’s a very familiar pattern in Washington. On the other hand, the lobbyist’s detailed knowledge of Betsy McCaughey’s writing plans suggests some interaction. I don’t know the underlying truth here. It would be valuable if Ms. McCaughey, who has specialized in detailed textual analysis, would address in specific what these documents contend.

That politely acidulous ‘has specialized in detailed textual analysis’ is quite nice. I suspect that all this turns on the precise definition of what the term ‘worked with’ means or can be taken to imply.

Taxonomy was once a sedate occupation; now it’s like staging triage in a big city hospital.

Context. Also check out the Cocoon concept cooker.

Scott reviewing David Harvey’s latest at BookForum (free reg. required).

It is unlikely that anyone has ever confused a page of Thomas Friedman’s with one of Immanuel Kant’s, but between them it is possible to triangulate a prevailing sensibility of the past two decades. Call it managerial cosmopolitanism. It celebrates the idea of a global civil society, with the states cooperating to play their proper (limited) role as guardians of public order and good business practices. The hospitality that each nation extends to visiting foreign traders grows ever wider and deeper; generalized, it becomes the most irenic of principles. And so there emerges on the horizon of the imaginable future something like a world republic, with liberty and frequent-flier miles for all.

The core insight here is sufficiently close to the Forty Days and a Mule post of last week as to suggest a competition. Winner will get the usual prize (a year’s free subscription to CT). Rewrite some of Immanuel Kant’s Perpetual Peace in the style of Thomas Friedman’s The World is Flat. Or, if you prefer, Thomas Friedman’s The World is Flat in the style of Immanuel Kant’s Perpetual Peace. Or any contemporary purveyor of bollocks in the style of some more learned and wordy philosopher with whom he or she may be said to have an intellectual connection, however tangential. Or vice-versa. Or plausible and amusing variations on any of the above; you get the idea.

Cory Doctorow in the Guardian:

Somewhere in the past year or so, it seems as though every studio exec has decided to greenlight one or more blockbuster in 3D, using a pretty impressive technology that employs polarised glasses to give a reasonably convincing illusion of depth. … And the 3D is … nice. … But I’m sceptical. … Up is a tremendous movie; it made me laugh and cry, and was intended to be seen in 3D … Nothing was obviously missing from the 2D experience that made me feel like the 3D was a must-have.

And of course, that’s true of all 3D movies. Movies, after all, rely on the aftermarket of satellite, broadcast and cable licenses, of home DVD releases and releases to airline entertainment systems and hotel room video-on-demand services – none of which are in 3D. If the movie couldn’t be properly enjoyed in boring old 2D, the economics of filmmaking would collapse … he economics just don’t support it: a truly 3D movie would be one where the 3D was so integral to the storytelling and the visuals and the experience that seeing it in 2D would be like seeing a giant-robots-throwing-buildings-at-each-other blockbuster as a flipbook while a hyperactive eight-year-old supplied the sound effects by shouting “BANG!” and “CRASH!” in your ear. Such a film would be expensive to produce and market and could never hope to recoup.

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One of the odd and not-very-well-known-by-non-Irish-people things about Ireland is that every day, at 6pm, the main television station broadcasts the Angelus – one minute precisely of church bells ringing – for people to pause, reflect (and at least according to the original intentions of those who instituted it), pray.¹ Back when I was growing up in Ireland, and the vast majority of my compatriots claimed that they went to Mass every week, the Angelus bells were accompanied by still shots of paintings of the Holy Family. As the country began to modernize a bit in the 1980s and 1990s, the Angelus gradually became more pluralistic, titillating religiously adventurous viewers with the occasional picture of a Russian Orthodox icon or whatever. But what to do after the supplanting of Roman Catholic hegemony by a bog-standard West European post-religious society? The Irish Times has an interesting short article on the politics of the Angelus in the modern era.

THE ANGELUS will from next Monday be changed – though not utterly. Under a revamping of the evening pause for prayer on RTÉ One television, the gongs will remain the same. …the same ones as have been heard since the Angelus was first broadcast on RTÉ radio in 1950, and which originated with the bells at Dublin’s Pro-Cathedral … seven “episodes” in a new Angelus mini-series of visual reflections … oblivious calm amid the hue and cry … while he sketches an image of a pair of praying hands. … mother in Sixmilebridge, Co Clare, as she polishes a memorial stone to her drowned son … grandparents Tess and Pascal Finn feeding fussy swans on the Shannon at Limerick and Enniscorthy fisherman John Keating, who is shown out at sea in his trawler … Namucana Nyambe from Zambia as she gazes contemplatively towards the Phoenix Park … grist to the mill for those avid letter writers who have been campaigning for years to get the Angelus taken off the schedule of the State broadcaster.

It’s interesting how little bits of the previously dominant religious culture can weather the storm of progress – but only through the transfiguration of their content. If the Angelus didn’t already exist it would never be instituted in a society like contemporary Ireland – but since it does exist and would be difficult to get rid of without upsetting people (still-believing Catholics; once-were-Catholics who fancy they would miss it if it were gone) it has been gradually transformed instead into something that maintains the form of the original (still the old church bells), but few of the original religious valences.

¹ Italy’s Rai Uno has something similar as I recall (although timed not to interfere with the celebration of the true national religion, soccer).

Fabio Rojas at Orgtheory.

In general, there seem to be to two mindsets in the social sciences. The first I call “precision modeling.” The attitude might be summarized this way:

Social science should focus on simple & clearly defined concepts. Real science is when you formalize these simple concepts into models. The height of empirical research is clear identification of cause and effect mechanisms implied by such models.

The second attitude I call “thick accounts.” Here’s my summary:

Social science should be built around a tool box of flexible concepts. These flexible concepts can be juxtaposed, elaborated and rephrased. The height of empirical research is when researchers can use this tool box to interpret an otherwise opaque complex social domain. … these people can’t stand tool-centric theories that can’t accommodate meaning and eliminate complexity.

I’ve always thought that the loveliest expression of this dualism is set out in Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities (I’m relying here on William Weaver’s grave and lovely translation). [click to continue…]

This , via Making Light, is pretty awesome.

Book Titles, If They Were Written Today

• Then: The Wealth of Nations
  Now: Invisible Hands: The Mysterious Market Forces That Control Our Lives and How to Profit from Them
• Then: Walden
  Now: Camping with Myself: Two Years in American Tuscany
• Then: The Theory of the Leisure Class
  Now: Buying Out Loud: The Unbelievable Truth About What We Consume and What It Says About Us
• Then: The Gospel of Matthew
  Now: 40 Days and a Mule: How One Man Quit His Job and Became the Boss
• Then: The Prince
  Now: The Prince (Foreword by Oprah Winfrey)

Further suggestions solicited in comments.

So this week’s Sunday picture is a detail of the frontispiece of Darwyn Cooke’s excellent graphic novel adaptation of the first of Donald Westlake/Richard Stark’s Parker books, The Hunter (Powells,Amazon, B&N). It’s not typical of the art in the graphic novel itself (see here for a preview), but it does reflect an interesting choice on the part of the artist. Like many other long series of genre novels, the Parker series gradually become unstuck in time – time advances more or less as it does in the outside world, but Parker doesn’t age nearly as he should. He should be at least in his early seventies in the final books in the series, but rather obviously isn’t. The last couple of books recognize this – the world of the Internet and money flowing backwards and forwards across electronic networks is not Parker’s world anymore, and the author says as much.

So when Cooke starts the book with a specific date (the date that The Hunter first appeared) and draws the book in a style that borrows heavily from 1960s popular art, it is a deliberate choice. One could interpret Cooke’s frontispiece in at least two ways. One is as a decision to situate Parker again in his particular historical milieu. Cooke is contracted to do three more of these – if this is what he wants to do, one imagines that the successive volumes will either be the immediate sequels to The Hunter, or, if not will show Parker aging normally. The other possibility is that Cooke is embracing rather than rejecting the Parker series’ idiosyncratic chronology. This might see, for example, the follow ups set in different decades, with appropriate period drawing styles and an unaging (or only slightly aging) Parker. The second possibility seems a little more interesting to me than the first, but the first would have its virtues too.

The Economist’s Brussels correspondent muses on the difference between German and American campaigning.

The Bavarian event was genuine, in a way that stage-managed American politics cannot match. There is a lot that is creepy about an American campaign event. Arriving early at Bush rallies, I would watch aggressive and chilly young Republican aides in smart suits kneeling on gymnasium floors with fistfuls of different felt tip marker pens, and large rectangles of white card. Frowning with concentration, they would then write things like “South Dakota Loves W” in deliberately babyish writing, or pick out the words “Hello Mr President” in red, white and blue lettering. The styles and slogans would be carefully varied, and the end results were impressive: a stack of signs that looked as though supporters of all ages had lovingly written them out on homely kitchen tables. Then, when the crowd arrived (all of them invited and vetted as bona fide Bush supporters) any of them who had forgotten instructions not to bring signs of their own would have them politely confiscated. Then they would be handed one of the ersatz home-made signs by one of the chilly, bossy young munchkins from campaign HQ. On television, it all looked very sweet.

‘Chilly, bossy young munchkins’ is pretty good, I thought.