by Kieran Healy on March 8, 2004
“Juan Non-Volokh”:http://volokh.com/2004_03_07_volokh_archive.html#107867124871611745 opens an interesting line of inquiry: which political ideology has the best music? I’m torn on this. Juan leads with his chin, describing “Rush”:http://www.rush.com/ as “arguably the most prominent libertarian band of all time.” _Arguably?_ Who else is in the running here? Clint Eastwood singing “I Talk to the Trees” in “Paint Your Wagon”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/B000002PEY/kieranhealysw-20/ref=nosim/? Was “Ayn Rand”:http://www.villainsupply.com/miscevil.html, like L. Ron Hubbard, a “great composer”:http://www.scientology.org/html/en_US/l-ron-hubbard/professional-dozens-fields/artist/composer/ on the side? The irresistible image is of a phalanx of airborne Libertarians screaming up the Potomac in surplus “Hueys”:http://www.centennialofflight.gov/essay/Rotary/Huey/HE11.htm fitted with “tactical nuclear weapons sourced on Ebay”:https://www.crookedtimber.org/archives/001478.html, while Rush’s “‘Freewill'”:http://www.sing365.com/music/lyric.nsf/Freewill-lyrics-Rush/88C8D6AD95B2BD4E48256BBF0032C460 blares from speakers bolted to one of the choppers.
But the question seems a bit underspecified. For instance, conservatives in general might claim the whole tradition of western classical music for themselves, while quietly ignoring the fact that, throughout history, your common or garden conservative can reliably be found bemoaning the appalling quality of serious music since the year _n_ — 75, for all values of _n_. Those on the left, meanwhile, will have to work hard to distance themselves from the output of the troops of the “Folk Song Army”:http://www.guntheranderson.com/v/data/thefolks.htm. Perhaps we should be asking which are the best _explicitly political_ songs. A related question is which country has the best National Anthem. France edges it, I think, over South Africa (too long) and the United States (too hard to sing). _God Save the Queen_ is clearly the worst, a judgment made compelling both by the anthem’s non-existent musical merits and the fact that English fans would rather sing a “spiritual”:http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/singers/sfeature/songs_swing_l.html written about an exhausted, enslaved people longing for the sweet release of death.
by John Q on March 8, 2004
Brad de Long picks up my post on opportunities and outcomes (see also this crossposting with further discussion), in which I argued that the achievement of meaningful equality of opportunity in a society with highly unequal outcomes would require extensive government intervention to prevent the development of inherited inequality, and says that I’m falling into Irving Kristol’s trap, which he describes, accurately enough, as
an ideological police action designed to erase the distinction between Arthur Okun and Mao Zedong, and delegitimize the American left.
I agree that many people, particularly critics of social democracy like Kristol ,use the outcome/opportunity distinction in a dishonest way. This is particularly true in the American context, since anyone honestly concerned with the issue would have to begin with the observation that the United States performs just as badly on equality of opportunity (as measured by things like social mobility) as it does on equality of outcome (see the book by Goodin et al, reviewed here for one of many demonstrations of this). So if Kristol were genuinely concerned about equality of opportunity he’d be calling for at least as much intervention as the liberals and progressives he’s criticising.
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I’m saddened by the news that Alistair Cooke has decided that the ‘Letter from America’ he read on the 20th of February would be the last one. If Cooke had decided that, at ninety-five, he simply didn’t want the hassle of the damn thing anymore, that would be one thing, but it seems that the decision to stop was prompted by the outrageous medical advice that it’s usual and desirable for ninety-five year-olds to slow down a bit. Fair enough, but I was rooting for Cooke to be making me smile when he’d made his century.
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by Henry Farrell on March 7, 2004
Building from Belle’s “post”:http://examinedlife.typepad.com/johnbelle/2004/03/if_wishes_were_.html on end-state anarcho-libertarianism, a question for the floor. Everyone’s favorite libertarian SF author, Vernor Vinge, makes the case for private ownership of nuclear weapons as an important bulwark of liberty in his short story, “The Ungoverned” (it can be found in his recent “Collected Stories”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0312875843/henryfarrell-20). If you’re a serious anarcho-libertarian, do you agree that individuals should be able to have their very own nukes? If you disagree, on what grounds do you justify your disagreement? Discuss.
by Brian on March 7, 2004
I rather liked the discussion that followed from John’s “earlier post”:https://www.crookedtimber.org/archives/001450.html on voting systems. So just for fun I thought I’d try a more complicated version of an example I brought up in the comments there, to see what people’s opinions are.
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by Chris Bertram on March 7, 2004
I’m back from seeing the “ENO production of The Rhinegold”:http://www.eno.org/whatson/full.php?performancekey=18 (sung in English). I should say, before uttering a word of criticism, that I enjoyed myself and wouldn’t disrecommend the experience at all. But, that said, this was a pretty weird staging. The opening scene takes place in a pole-dancing club, with dodgy businessman Alberich being teased by dancers in turquoise pvc mini-dresses. Alberich is sung by an Alexi Sayle lookalike (Andrew Shore) who does an excellent job of portraying the sexually-frustrated dwarf. The scene opens, though, with Alberich being encouraged to enter the club by property-developer Wotan and his PR-man and Mr Fixit, Loge. This addition, needless to say, has no textual warrant and, if taken seriously, would amount to a major distortion of the plot.
Scene two takes place in Wotan’s apartment and opens with Wotan in the bath. The dynamic between Wotan and Fricka may not have been modelled on Tony and Carmela Soprano (or JR and Sue Ellen), but it is hard to think that such comparisons weren’t somewhere in producer Phyllida Lloyd’s mind. The giants are played as construction engineers who brandish their plastic-bound copies of the contract as they demand payment for their work on Valhalla. Donner wears trainers and wields a baseball bat, Loge prefers subtler methods: you get the picture. One of the problems of staging such a modernized production is that it interferes with the suspension of disbelief. If everyone is dressed up in fantasy costumes then it is easier to take seriously the idea of Freia as an object of lust even if she is somewhat hefty. But if everything else looks like Dallas or the Sopranos then a Freia who doesn’t fit with the conventions of those dramas is incongruous.
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by John Q on March 7, 2004
One of the justifications I make for the time I spend blogging is that it gives me a chance to try out arguments I use in my work. With that in mind, I’d very much appreciate comments on this short summary of the role of ideas and interests in explaining policy outcomes.
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by Henry Farrell on March 6, 2004
“Ireland 19, England 13”:http://www.rte.ie/sport/2004/0306/ireland.html
by Henry Farrell on March 6, 2004
Another, quite spectacular example of “revealed”:https://www.crookedtimber.org/archives/001446.html “preference”:https://www.crookedtimber.org/archives/001447.html theory in action. This time, it’s “David Brooks”:http://www.nytimes.com/2004/03/06/opinion/06BROO.html?hp, who uses Bush and Kerry’s privileged backgrounds to prove that Americans prefer to be ruled by blue-bloods.
bq. we don’t actually want to be governed by people like ourselves. We want the bloodlines.
It all goes back to primate social structures, you see.
This is almost so asinine an argument as not to be worth the refutation. Brooks doesn’t admit the possibility that ‘blue bloods’ might have structural advantages that go beyond commoners’ genetically hardwired instinct to yank forelocks in the presence of their superiors – money, connections anyone? Nor does he bother trying to explain how his thesis can be reconciled with viable Democratic candidates (Edwards) from humble backgrounds, or, indeed, Presidents like Clinton. Like Dan Drezner, I was quite pleased when the NYT gave Brooks a slot; some of his longer stuff is well argued and interesting. However, his op-eds have been a huge disappointment; sugary candy-fluff for the most part, but with a hard, bitter little center. The Times could and should do better.
by Chris Bertram on March 6, 2004
Belle Waring has “a brilliant lampoon of utopian libertarian discourse”:http://examinedlife.typepad.com/johnbelle/2004/03/if_wishes_were_.html .
by Chris Bertram on March 6, 2004
Seumas Milne has “an article in today’s Guardian”:http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,3604,1163360,00.html plugging a book of his and remembering the British miners’ strike of 1984–5. Like Milne I was an active supporter of that strike, collecting for striking miners and offering as much propaganda and political support as I could. I worked for Verso, the publisher of Milne’s book, at the time and we produced a special on the strike called _Digging Deeper_ in record time: going from copy to bound volume in about two weeks.
So my memories are still pretty vivid and I think I’m in a position to assess the claims Milne makes. With his general characterization of the strike as being self-defence against a class war fought by a vengeful Tory government, I have no quarrel. Likewise with what he says of the police at the time. Since the strike we’ve had to listen to no end of sermons about “insurrection” and the assertion of the “rule of law”. There was no rule of law. The police and the government and the courts acted violently and cynically against the miners and their communities: men were attacked and beaten, their freedom of movement was restricted, they were not given fair hearings by magistrates and courts. I could go on, but those who know know and those who don’t want to will not be persuaded by further extending the list of arbitrary and violent state actions. The government had decided to break the NUM, was going to apply all necessary resources to doing so and could do so untrammeled by worries about legality.
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by John Q on March 6, 2004
Brad de Long correctly summarises the argument of my papers with Simon Grant. If you accept that the equity premium (the large and unexplained difference between the rate of return expected by holders of private equity and the rate of interest on low-risk bonds) is explained in large measure by the fact that capital markets do not do a good job in allocating and spreading risk, the the natural solution to all this is the S-World: Socialism: public ownership of the means of production This is because risk can be more effectively through the tax system, and through governments’ capacity to run deficits during economic downturns than through private capital markets. A very robust implication of the observed equity premium is that a dollar of investment returns received during a recession is worth two dollars during a boom – this provides governments with a huge arbitrage opportunity.
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by Henry Farrell on March 6, 2004
The Economist has an “article”:http://www.economist.com/World/europe/displayStory.cfm?story_id=2478574 this week on John Kerry’s popularity with Europeans. The argument is twofold – Europeans are rooting for Kerry to win, but they’re likely to end up disappointed if he does.
bq. whoever is in the White House, tensions between European and American approaches to the world seem sure to persist. The heyday of Atlanticism came to a close with the end of the cold war. … Indeed, in some areas, such as trade, the quarrels between the sides could get worse … Mr Kerry might explain American views more tactfully than Mr Bush. He might even do it in French. But transatlantic tensions would endure.
As a piece of international relations analysis, it’s an odd mixture of the obvious and the wrongheaded. Of course, transatlantic disputes aren’t going to go away if Kerry becomes President. But they’re likely to be transformed – much of the sting will go out of them.
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by Brian on March 5, 2004
Some of the most charmingly pointless controversies on “my other blog”:http://brown.edu/Departments/Philosophy/tar/ have been about just what region is denoted by ‘Midwest’. (For prior installments, see “here”:http://www.brown.edu/Departments/Philosophy/tar/Archives/001580.html, “here”:http://www.brown.edu/Departments/Philosophy/tar/Archives/001568.html and “here”:http://www.brown.edu/Departments/Philosophy/tar/Archives/002519.html.) I think those are fun, but we seem to have run out of things to say on that word. So it’s time for something new. Just which parts of New York State are denoted by ‘upstate’?
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by Maria on March 5, 2004
Wow. Here I am trying to figure out how to give a good kick in the arse to my humdrum mid-level policy career, and there Gordon Brown is, trying to decide whether to be Prime Minister of the U.K. or Director of the I.M.F.
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