Dan Drezner has finally taken the plunge, and switched to Movable Type. His new address: “http://www.danieldrezner.com/blog/”:http://www.danieldrezner.com/blog/; update your bookmarks/blogroll accordingly.
From the monthly archives:
August 2003
That link that Chris posted to his ‘Imprints’ interview with Michael Walzer was well worth following. Walzer has done some work that I admire the hell out of, (‘Just and Unjust Wars’ especially), and his thoughts about Iraq shoud probably be required reading for those of us who ended up on the other side of the argument.
I was in Washington, DC, over the weekend and noticed this license plate for the first time. Apparently, it came out a couple years ago and is now the “default”:http://www.dmv.washingtondc.gov/serv/plates/tax.shtm (though optional) license plate for the District.
The story is that Clinton had this plate put on the presidential limousine just as he was leaving office, and Bush (who got only “9%”:http://www.fec.gov/pubrec/2000presgeresults.htm of the vote in DC) had it promptly removed.
A week late and a couple of dollars short, here are my thoughts on the now defunct Policy Analysis Market. I’d note right up front that this “market” always looked suspicious to me; even when it was going, the website seemed to consist of precisely five flat, static HTML pages, and this for a website that was meant to be going live with active trading in October. Particularly since nobody seems to be at all clear on the details of what this market was meant to achieve (was it open to the general public? Only to specialists? Was it going to trade “assassination futures”? Or just derivatives on the EIU political stability indices?), let alone on its clearing arrangements, confidentiality clauses, etc, I rather suspect that the whole thing was disinformation from start to finish. That’s why I didn’t want to comment on it at the time.
However, I do want to comment on the fact that a number of bloggers analysed it in terms of Hayek’s concept of tacit knowledge and markets as information-creating social entities. Henry had an excellent first cut at trying to develop a more rigorous Hayekian analysis last week, but I’d like to take issue with some of his points and make a couple of my own about the characteristics of successful markets.
This particular bit of wood is off for a brief holiday in Ireland. Henry reported a while back that internet access isn’t great. So even if I wanted to, I probably couldn’t blog. With luck, I should meet up with Henry in Kerry somewhere – thereby doubling the number of Timberites I’ve encountered in “real life”.
A bit more online content from Imprints: Norman Geras’s reaction to Roman Polanski’s The Pianist. He concludes:
bq. The Holocaust and other calamitous experiences not only can be represented, they must be, whatever the difficulties. There will be those who err or fail in the way they do it. Others, though, will not, as The Pianist itself exemplifies. And if part of what is revealed in these efforts to represent the universe of pain and death is some surviving human value, so be it. Would the world be better without this, or for not being shown it? No, it would be then truly without hope, the hope that Polanski professes to have found in Szpilman’s story in spite of the enormity of the surrounding horror.
Via “Invisible Adjunct”:http://www.invisibleadjunct.com/archives/000221.html, I see that Bob at Unfogged has had a “smart idea”:http://www.unfogged.com/archives/week_2003_08_03.html#000622 -academic reality tv. His proposal – _Ph.D. Island_ – desperate Ph.D. students, with tenured faculty sitting in judgement, awarding one lucky candidate a half-way decent job in a half-way decent city.
It’s a nice concept – but I have an alternative proposal. I reckon that we male social scientists are in urgent need of a different sort of reality tv. All of us could do with some serious input from “Queer Eye for the Straight Guy”:http://www.prospect.org/webfeatures/2003/08/thrupkaew-n-08-04.html. Academic lawyers have their “bow ties”:http://www.law.miami.edu/~froomkin/welcome.html, b-school types have their Armani outfits. We have our badly fitting blue suits. Anyone who’s ever been to the APSA annual convention, and seen several thousand of these suits milling about a hotel lobby, checking out each other’s name badges, has glimpsed the very bowels of fashion hell. I’m not exempting my own dress sense by any means – I’m a classic exponent of the anonymous slacks, blue shirt and bland tie combo myself. We all need help: if there has ever been a profession that could do with a serious makeover from the fashionistas (whether they be gay or straight), we are it. TV producers – I’m waiting for your call.
A puff for one of my other collaborative projects: Imprints. The latest issue is now out and contains much of interest. The online content this time is an interview with Michael Walzer which ranges over many issues: the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the morality of humanitarian intervention, Israel and Palestine, anti-Semitism, memories of Rawls and Nozick, the permissibility of torture, blocked exchanges and commodification, the narcissism of Ralph Nader, and much more. Read the whole thing – it is both enlightening and provocative.
So I trot over to Instapundit for the first time in several months and find the latest version of “The absence of evidence isn’t evidence of absence” defence for the lack of Iraqi WMDs. (It’s been interesting to see the Hawks all become experts on the subtle metaphysics of causation, events and omissions, incidentally. They sound quite Hegelian with that line.)
bq. OBVIOUSLY, THE ANTHRAX-BY-MAIL ATTACKS NEVER HAPPENED — otherwise surely the FBI would have found something by now … And they’ve had access to the entire country for months! Years, even.
Er, they did find something, just after the attacks. I believe it was anthrax. It arrived in the mail. It killed some people. The FBI also know the places in the country where weaponized anthrax can be made. They’ve been in and out of them for 18 months. And could you remind me of the parallel Iraqi WMD attack on the United States? Sorry, what was your point again?
See ya in another few months.
… but I got a courtesy upgrade to business class, so who cares?
I’m waiting to hear why right-thinking, law-abiding folks should not be in the least bit worried about this recent discovery.
Our household has just finished reading Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix and the general feeling is one of disappointment. Henry has already written about the claim, made recently by the much-reviled A.S. Byatt,that Harry is derivative and ersatz. The real problem is more that Harry seems to be an idiot.
Spoilers, and a certain amount of ranting, ahead.
I’m very much looking forward to seeing Goodbye Lenin!, especially because I’ll be interested to find out how far the film tallies with my own (admittedly brief) experience of the GDR. I spent a week there in 1984, staying with some medical students in Leipzig whom my girlfriend had made friends with in Hungary on an earlier holiday. They’d been very interested that we thought of ourselves as Trotskyists and we, in turn, were keen to discover what a “deformed workers’ state” (to use the official Trot jargon) was like. At the time (early Thatcherism) Britain was in a real mess, and the claim was frequently made that the GDR had a higher per capita GDP than the UK. So we went there expecting both a somewhat repressive society and one where living standards were similar to our own. So what did we find?
There’s been a lot of “talk”:http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A26264-2003Jul22.html lately about Mel Gibson’s movie about the death of Jesus. The “New York Times”:http://www.nytimes.com/2003/08/02/national/02GIBS.html?hp reports that Gibson has shown “The Passion” to:
bq. friendly audiences, but has refused to show it to his critics, including members of Jewish groups and biblical scholars. In Washington, it was shown to the Web gossip Matt Drudge, the columnists Cal Thomas and Peggy Noonan and the staffs of the Senate Republican Conference and the White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives and others. In Colorado Springs, the capital of evangelical America, the film drew raves. A convention of the Legionaries of Christ, a conservative Roman Catholic order of priests, saw a preview, as did Rush Limbaugh.
Why is it that no Jews seem to have seen this movie? (Do correct me here if I’m wrong.) Gibson’s people won’t show it to the “Anti-Defamation League”:http://www.adl.org/cgi-bin/MsmGo.exe?grab_id=10&EXTRA_ARG=&CFGNAME=MssFind%2Ecfg&host_id=42&page_id=12845568&query=mel+gibson&hiword=gibson+GIBSONS+mel+. The Times quotes the marketing director for the film as saying: “There is no way on God’s green earth . . . that any of those people will be invited to a screening. They have shown themselves to be dishonorable.” So the obvious question is: why doesn’t Gibson show the movie to some “honorable” Jews? Seems like he’s shown it to just about eveyone else.
bq. Update: I’m corrected already. “Matt Drudge”:http://www.msnbc.com/news/942575.asp is Jewish, and he liked the film. Somehow, that doesn’t allay my concerns.
Thanks to Michael Blowhard I’ve just wasted loads of time at Yugo Nakamura’s site. Is it art? I’ve no idea, but it is certainly compulsive and fun (broadband connection needed).
Just a quick note; I’ve dumped on the _Economist_ a couple of times in the last few weeks, so I should say that it has an excellent “open letter”:http://www.economist.com/displaystory.cfm?story_id=1939979 to Silvio Berlusconi on its website today, with a detailed dossier on the various legal controversies that Mr. Berlusconi has become embroiled in. I especially recommend the discussion of Berlusconi’s “attempts to smear Romano Prodi”:http://www.economist.com/displaystory.cfm?story_id=1936286 to Glenn Reynolds, who may wish to revisit this snarky and unpleasant little “post”:http://www.instapundit.com/archives/009356.php#009356 from a couple of months back.
This is something I hope to blog about at greater length sometime in the next few days, as the story develops. Megan McArdle “speculates”:http://www.janegalt.net/blog/archives/004306.html that the _Economist’s_ dossier will cause “a lot of consternation in Italy.” Sadly, I suspect that it won’t have much political effect. Berlusconi’s disinformation machine which has already described the _Economist_ as a Communist publication (sic) after it published a previous article on his shady dealings, and gotten away with it, seems to be gearing itself up again. His company’s lawyers are “describing”:http://www.repubblica.it/2003/h/sezioni/politica/economist/azionilegali/azionilegali.html the _Economist_ article as “more of an affront to the true facts and journalistic decency than to the honorable Mr. Berlusconi.” Since Berlusconi has a lock on both public and private tv, his people will be able to spin the dossier as an attack on Italy’s national pride rather than the damning litany of facts that it is. More on this as it develops.