by Kieran Healy on February 16, 2004
The “latest issue”:http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/AJS/journal/contents/v109n4.html of the “American Journal of Sociology”:http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/AJS/index.html [subscription required] has a number of interesting articles, but given the, ahem, cosmopolitan nature of the crew here at CT, a paper by Alderson and Beckfield on “Power and Position in the City World System”:http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/cgi-bin/resolve?AJS080226 [also “pdf”:http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/cgi-bin/resolve?AJS080226PDF] caught my eye. They examine power relations between three and a half thousand cities in a network analysis, operationalizing ties with a measure of HQ and branch locations of the world’s 500 largest corporations. The authors develop a “blockmodel”:http://faculty.ucr.edu/~hanneman/SOC157/TEXT/C9StructuralEquivalence.html#block to identify clusters of “regularly equivalent”:http://faculty.ucr.edu/~hanneman/SOC157/TEXT/C11RegularEquivalence.html cities. Roughly, members of regular equivalence sets have similar relations to members of other equivalent sets, so equivalent cities stand in the same relations to other groups of cities.
As you might expect, the core of the city world system is the block made up of London, New York, Paris and Tokyo, and these four cities are much more powerful than any of the others. But outside this core group, the analysis suggests some patterns that aren’t visible from less formal approaches. Outside the “L-N-P-T” block, there are six other “Primary” blocks:[1] Amsterdam, Basel, Atlanta, Caracas, Cologne and … “Bristol”:http://www.bristol-city.gov.uk/. “Chris”:http://eis.bris.ac.uk/~plcdib/ will be delighted.
fn1. These are “cliques whose members are involved in high levels of relations with outsiders. More specifically, they are blocks with greater than expected ingroup preference (their cliquishness), but also greater than expected outdegree and indegree.”
by Micah on February 15, 2004
“En Banc”:http://www.enbanc.org/, which was one of the best law-student group blogs (surely a genre to itself these days), has been disbanded. The members of that blog had their differences, and I’m sure “Unlearned Hand”:http://www.unlearnedhand.com/ has his reasons for pulling the plug on things. Still, I’m looking forward to reading him and the others as they go it alone.
by Kieran Healy on February 15, 2004
Kevin Drum “is surprised to learn”:http://www.calpundit.com/archives/003272.html that schools in Britain offer religious education classes. (Ireland is the same, by the way.) He comments that “I don’t think there’s anything unconstitutional about teaching a “History of Religion” class or something like it in an American high school, but it just wouldn’t happen. And then a proposal to add atheism as one of the highlighted religions? Kaboom!”
I’ve wondered before about this, in part because of a course in “Classical Social Theory”:http://www.u.arizona.edu/~kjhealy/teaching.php3 that I teach. I usually take a detour for a lecture before we read some “Max Weber”:http://www.ne.jp/asahi/moriyuki/abukuma/, because a chunk of the class (upper-level undergraduates) will have no clear idea what the Reformation was. This surprised me when it first happened, but now I anticipate it. Last year I got a very nice evaluation from an evangelical Protestant student saying, in part, “Thanks for respecting my views and for all the information about where Protestantism came from! I never knew that!” She would wear “Jesus Loves You” t-shirts to class and really livened up our discussions about “Durkheim”:http://durkheim.itgo.com/religion.html.
by Kieran Healy on February 15, 2004
Tyler Cowen “lists his nominations”:http://volokh.com/2004_02_15_volokh_archive.html#107687506590275408 for “best all-time songs about obsession.” My vote goes to Nina Simone’s version of “I Put a Spell on You”:http://www.sing365.com/music/lyric.nsf/I-Put-a-Spell-on-You-lyrics-Nina-Simone/C305A20BC494E7BA482569A10024AEE5. Especially the last verse.
by Brian on February 15, 2004
by John Q on February 15, 2004
Tim Lambert has a devastating critique of Steve Milloy, operator of the “junkscience.com” site attached to the Cato Institute, and model for many of the similar party-line science sites that have proliferated in the blogosphere. Most of these promote some combination of
- global warming contrarianism
- ozone layer contrariarianism
- shilling for the tobacco industry, and
- boosting creationism
but Milloy covers all bases. I’ve covered Milloy at length before and pointed out most of these things with links. However, in the light of this 1999 story linked by Tim, I’m disinclined to engage in the kind of contact with slime implied by a new link, so if you want to check him out you can type the URL yourself.
As with John Lott and the American Enterprise Institute, the link between Cato and Milloy raises the question of how an institution that has some pretensions to respectability and employs some decent people can justify supporting such unethical and intellectually bankrupt charlatans.
by John Q on February 15, 2004
With Christmas, post-Christmas sales and Valentine’s Day all behind us, it’s time for the next season in the annual consumption calendar, so I wasn’t surprised to see Easter Eggs on sale when I went grocery-shopping today. I do however, have a couple of questions for historically-minded readers.
First, while I know that it’s traditional to have a day of excess at Mardi Gras, followed by forty days of feasting in Lent, and then another blowout at Easter, and that this festival of consumption follows an earlier Christian tradition, I have the feeling that there has been a subtle change somewhere along the line – can anyone tell me what it is?
Second, where does the name Lent come from? Is this considered a particularly auspicious time for adding to your consumer debt, or is that just a piece of folk etymology?
by Brian on February 14, 2004
Context can be so crucial in figuring out what a sentence means, even in subconscious processing. When I first scanned this I thought Ed Gillespie shouldn’t be so candid in front of reporters.
bq. In prepared remarks, Gillespie attacked Kerry and other Democrats, saying they are readying “the dirtiest campaign in modern presidential politics.” (From CNN)
I bet our Republican readers did not read it that way!
by Harry on February 14, 2004
My daughter (who is reliable about these things) informs me that several girls in her school are called Madison. Now, I know it can be hard to think up a good name for a kid, but simply slapping them with the name of their birthplace seems excessively unimaginative. Its also seems like free-riding — what if everybody did it? I hope that they wouldn’t have done it if they’d lived in the Bronx, Bognor Regis, or Llandrindod Wells.
I should declare an interest. If my parents had engaged in this abusive practice, I would now share the name of an incredibly lame Radio 4 sitcom.
by Chris Bertram on February 14, 2004
A friend emails with details of “a Flash presentation”:http://www.albinoblacksheep.com/flash/liberty.php (full screen version “here”:http://www.jonathangullible.com/mmedia/PhilosophyOfLiberty-english_music.swf ) explaining why libertarianism is the most appropriate political philosophy for matchstick people who have swallowed a collection of bizarre objects and like listening to Tubular Bells (TB on smaller version only).
by Eszter Hargittai on February 14, 2004
Those interested in reproductive health and rights probably already know that back in December an advisory panel of the Food and Drug Administration recommended that the “morning after” pill[1] be sold over the counter (OTC). The easy availability of such emergency contraception (EC) could reduce unwanted pregnancies significantly. Unfortunately, the issue is now running up against political hurdles.
[click to continue…]
by Henry Farrell on February 13, 2004
Begging to differ (politely) from a “comment “:http://pedantry.fistfulofeuros.net/archives/000358.html that Scott Marten makes on the French headscarf ban:
bq. I just don’t understand how people who feel this law is justified because girls are being forced to wear headscarves can think that the solution is to force them to take it back off. If I hold a gun to your head and make you do something you don’t want to, is the correct police response to hold another gun to your head and tell you not to? What makes otherwise rational people think that the solution lies in that direction?
Well, perhaps because there are situations in which holding a gun to someone’s head _is_ the right thing to do, and is indeed in the interests of the person at gunpoint. I don’t think that the headscarf ban is one of those situations, but …
[click to continue…]
by Kieran Healy on February 13, 2004
It’s quiztime, courtesy of Mike Rappaport at “The Right Coast”:http://therightcoast.blogspot.com/2004_02_01_therightcoast_archive.html#107665099925278362, who does not like us. He turns his keen critical eye on four of our recent posts. The goal of the quiz is to match each of Mike’s devastating indictments to its target:
table(fig). {font-weight:bold;center}_|Accusation|Target|
|(. 1. Attacked conservatives when they were down. |((. A. John. |
|(. 2. Failed to discuss something on our blog. |((. B. Harry. |
|(. 3. Relies on news sources other than Fox. |((. C. Chris. |
|(. 4. Knows about the history of socialism. |((. D. Kieran. |
Answers are at “The Right Coast”:http://therightcoast.blogspot.com/2004_02_01_therightcoast_archive.html#107665099925278362. The accuracy of these criticisms, and their effect on our credibility here at CT, will be the subject of a later quiz.
by Brian on February 13, 2004
Looks like being an election official in Florida just got easier.
bq. The Department of State has notified elections supervisors that touchscreen ballots don’t have to be included during manual recounts because there is no question about how voters intended to vote.
bq. While touchscreen ballot images can be printed, there is no need and elections supervisors aren’t authorized to do so, Division of Elections Director Ed Kast wrote in a letter to Pasco County Supervisor of Elections Kurt Browning.
So we’re just going to trust the computers. Given how reliable we all know computers to be, this is about as democratic as selecting candidates by lots. (Just for the record, I think it’s an interesting theoretical question about how democratic that is. It’s how we pick juries after all, and they are often considered an important part of the democratic process.)
Counting votes is a very hard business, so you can see why they’d want to speed it up. In Australia, with roughly the same population as Florida, spread over a much larger area, with I think twice as many voters, and a more complicated voting system, we manage to count every ballot by hand in 3 or 4 hours. To be sure, we don’t have as many elections at once as Floridians do, but you’d think for top-line elections they could try for a change running elections as well as we do. (Hat tip: kos.)
by Daniel on February 13, 2004
Tyler on the Volokh conspiracy links to a New York Times story and comments that “Deterrence doesn’t fully reassure me on the basis of this extract:
“”A complacent Saddam Hussein was so convinced that war would be averted or that America would mount only a limited bombing campaign that he deployed the Iraqi military to crush domestic uprisings rather than defend against a ground invasion, according to a classified log of interrogations of captured Iraqi leaders and former officers.
Mr. Hussein believed that a “casualty averse” White House would order a bombing campaign that Iraq could withstand, according to the secret report, prepared for the Pentagon’s most senior leadership and dated Jan. 26. And the Iraqi Defense Ministry, in a grand miscalculation, believed that any ground offensive would come across the Jordanian border. “
Lads, lads, we’re not learning the lesson here are we? Testimony from captured military officers, defectors, and anyone else who thinks that they have something to gain by telling interesting stories (which inflate their own importance) is worthless. This is how we got into the whole WMD fiasco. I’ve no idea whether or not this is true as a description about Saddam’s state of mind or military tactics. But after reading this story, given its sourcing, I’ve still got no idea. Stick to the satellite photos, that’s my advice, they don’t lie. That’s how Scott Ritter, Andrew Wilkie and myself managed to get it right on the question of Iraqi nukes.