I managed a mere 39 per cent on “Chris Lightfoot’s estimation quiz”:http://roughly.beasts.org/ I’m sorry to say. Instructive and entertaining it is though. (Hat-tip “Dave Weeden”:http://backword.me.uk/ ).
From the monthly archives:
August 2004
“Four posts on al-Sadr: it’s getting to be an obsession isn’t it?” writes a commenter on “John Quiggin’s post below”:https://www.crookedtimber.org/archives/002396.html . Not really, one might think, since the continuing events in Najaf look to be of enormous significance for the future of Iraq and for the nature of whatver regime emerges. I’ve just done a tour of the various British blogs that supported the war from of liberal/lefty pov, and I find, amazingly, that they haven’t been discussing Najaf at all. Not a mention! (I’m sure commenters will dig up exceptions.) Perhaps events have deviated too far from the script? Data does not compute! What I do find is generic comment on the war or on the “war on terror”, derogatory comment on opponents of the war, occasional mention of “good news” from Iraq, and links to unreliable sources suggesting Iranian or Syrian nefariousness. The American pro-war blogs seem to have dropped everything in favour of endless comment on the Kerry/SBV affair. Those interested in the detail of what is actually happening in Iraq will, of course, continue to consult “Juan Cole”:http://www.juancole.com/ .
Brad de Long gives a rather unenthusiastic case for thinking Kerry will be a better economic manager than Bush. The first and most convincing of his proposed reasons is that
The Bush administration always does much worse than you anticipate, no matter how low your expectations are
The others are the quality of his team and the fact that he will restore proper processes.
The reason Brad doesn’t display more enthusiasm is that Kerry hasn’t given much ground for it. Kerry has a plan to cut the deficit in half, but then, so does Bush[1].
I’d like to offer an argument based on political business cycles to suggest that Kerry has to do better than Bush.
A cleaner at Tate Britain has taken a “work of art”:http://news.independent.co.uk/uk/this_britain/story.jsp?story=555511 that takes the form of a bag of rubbish, and thrown it away.
Over the last couple of months, Brad de Long has been documenting how difficult it is to find independent academic economists who are prepared to defend Bush administration policy. I haven’t seen anyone else saying this, but the same is true of international relations scholars. For a long while, the consensus among right-leaning realists, as well as liberal and lefties, has been that the invasion of Iraq was a disaster. I don’t know of any serious IR scholars who are prepared to defend Bush’s foreign policy (I’m not counting policy wonks in AEI etc, who face what we may politely describe as a different incentive structure). There have to be some out there – but as best as I can tell, they’re keeping very quiet.
Which is all by way of context for John Mearsheimer’s “paper”:http://www.learnedhand.com/mearsheimer_lying.htm on “Lying in International Politics,” to be presented at the forthcoming APSA meeting in Chicago (thanks to Martin Weiss for bringing it to my attention).
Final call for anyone who wishes to joing the Crooked Timberites fantasy football league (“instructions here”:https://www.crookedtimber.org/archives/002341.html ). I’m off to Germany on Saturday, so anyone who doesn’t email me details before tomorrow evening will get added in the middle of next week. (You can always register a dummy team now, mail me your number and tinker with your selection until the Saturday deadline).
I’ve always found Foucault pretty hard going, as I intimated in yesterday’s post, though I think he’s a more interesting figure than his epigones. As it happens, he is the subject of not one but two biographies. The first is David Macey’s “The Lives of Michel Foucault”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0679757929/junius-20 which is scholarly and fact-filled. The other is James Miller’s “The Passion of Michel Foucault”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0674001575/junius-20 , and is a tremendous piece of writing which presents itself as a “narrative account of one man’s lifelong struggle to honor Nietzsche’s gnomic injunction, ‘to become what one is’.” I really can’t recommend Miller’s various books highly enough. As well as the Foucault volume he wrote a very readable study of Rousseau — “Rousseau: Dreamer of Democracy”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0872203379/junius-20 — and a highly entertaining history of rock music: “Flowers in the Dustbin”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0684808730/junius-20 (also published as “Almost Grown”:http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/ASIN/0099409925/junius-21 in the UK). Miller is currently editor of “Daedalus”:http://mitpress.mit.edu/daedalus .
As the pointless bloodbath in Najaf drags on, Ayatollah Sistani has finally returned from hospital treatment in London, and looks likely to be the only person to come out of this disaster with any credit[1]. His march on Najaf will, it seems likely, allow Sadr and the American-Allawi forces to reach the kind of face-saving compromise that has been the only possible outcome all along, apart from the disastrous option of an assault on the shrine and the martyrdom of Sadr.
Update #1 27/8 I’ve come across a useful piece by a former Senior Adviser to the Coalition Provisional Authority, Larry Diamond, linked, with some interesting comments by Gary Farber Gives an account of the Coalition’s dealings with Sadr and other militias (minor snipe: Diamond uses “prevaricating” when he means “vacillating” to describe this).
Update #2 27/8 Like most people not actually on the scene who seek to be well-informed about Iraq, I’m indebted to Juan Cole for his informed comment and information on the situation. He’s just put up a post assessing the winners and losers from the Najaf situation which matches, almost point for point, what I posted yesterday. Of course, it carries a lot more weight coming from him than from me.
I spent a very pleasant evening with other bloggers who live somewhere close to Britain’s M4 corridor at Bristol’s Severnshed last night. Pictured from left to right are myself, Dave Weeden (“Backword”:http://backword.me.uk/ ), Josephine Crawley Quinn (“The Virtual Tophet”:http://tophet.blogspot.com/ ) and Chris Brooke (“The Virtual Stoa”:http://users.ox.ac.uk/~magd1368/weblog/blogger.html ). Topics discussed included Equatorial Guinea, leading Welsh politicians, the excavations at Herculaneum, and, naturally, other bloggers. It was great to meet Dave and Josephine for the first time and Chris once again. A fine time was had by all.
Maybe someone has already drawn the comparison, but the New York Times “op-ed”:http://www.nytimes.com/2004/08/25/opinion/25wed2.html?hp today had me reaching for Julius Caesar. “The noble Brutus.” To hear Scott McClellan call Kerry “noble”:http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2004/08/20040823-2.html, you’d think it was an insult.
Late last year, the debate over climate change was stirred up when an environmental economist, Ross McKitrick and a mining executive, Steven McIntyre, published a piece claiming to refute climatological research crucial to the claim that the last few decades have seen unparalleled global warming (the ‘hockey-stick‘ paper of Mann, Bradley and Hughes). According to McKitrick and McIntyre, the work of Mann et al was riddled with errors, The paper was loudly publicised by the American Enterprise Institute (home of John Lott) and, as you would expect, Flack Central Station. Mann et al produced an immediate rebuttal, and despite many promises of a rejoinder, McKitrick and McIntyre have never responded on the substantive issues[1].
This would be par for the course, except that McKitrick somehow managed to attract the attention of Aussie computer scientist Tim Lambert, famous for his demolition of Lott’s shonky research, which purported to show that guns reduce crime. The result: McKitrick’s work is even shoddier than Lott’s.
Surfing round the blogosphere, I find “Oliver Kamm banging on”:http://oliverkamm.typepad.com/blog/2004/08/fascism_and_the_2.html about alliances between “the Left” and theocratic fascism. Kamm’s correspondent, the philosopher Jeff Ketland of the University of Edinburgh, offers the following as an example:
bq. One can find examples in the postmodernist literature, and the most obvious example is Michel Foucault, once a member of the French communist party and main source of much recent postmodernist and social constructivist philosophy. Foucault visited Iran around the time of the revolution. He enthusiastically described the revolution as a new kind of “political spirituality”, and was very impressed with its characteristically anti-Enlightenment aspects.
This just doesn’t stack up, though as an instance of left-theocratic alliance. …
According to “Scott Martens at A Fistful of Euros”:http://fistfulofeuros.net/archives/000782.php , Tariq Ramadan (recently “interviewed”:http://www.opendemocracy.net/debates/article-5-57-2006.jsp by OpenDemocracy) who had been appointed to a visiting position at Notre Dame, has been denied a US visa under sections of the Immigration and Nationality Act that were amended by the Patriot Act. Scott comments:
bq. Whether one agrees with Ramadan or not, it is difficult to image an Islamic intellectual figure who is likely to be more acceptable as the other side in an American dialogue with Islam. Thus, the refusal to allow him to enter the US suggests that someone in Homeland Security agrees with the Daniel Pipes standard: Any Muslim who fails to condemn Islam, from its founding to the present and in all its manifestations, must be a fanatic and a threat to the West. …. This is an opportunity for Europeans and Americans to show that at the very least they are capable of exercising better judgement than the Bush administration.
In my previous post on US trade, I argued that if the current account deficit is to be stabilised at a sustainable level, the balance of trade on goods and services must return to surplus in the next decade or so. In this post, I’m going to ruIe out a soft option and argue that, while a smooth market-driven adjustment is not inconceivable, it’s unlikely.
First week of the Fall semester in “sunny Tucson”:http://www.cs.arizona.edu/camera/. New classes, new students — including the undersocialized ones who come into your office asking to use the phone — and an uptick of amusing activity in the “Police Blotter”:http://wildcat.arizona.edu/papers/98/2/01_50.html. The Blotter is kind of a litany (“reports stated”) of the joys of being young, engaged in illegal activity, and perhaps a little slow off the mark:
A student was referred to the diversion program for possession of marijuana in the courtyard between Coronado and La Aldea, 822 E. Fifth St., Friday at 10:23 p.m., reports stated.
Police smelled burning marijuana coming from the area and saw the student who had red, bloodshot eyes and whose breath smelled of marijuana, reports stated.
Police asked the student if he had any marijuana on him and he said he had smoked earlier but didn’t have any on him and said, “You can check me,” reports stated.
At that point he put his hands in his pockets and said “Oh yeah, I have a little,” reports stated.
These are the people I have to interest in the transition from Feudalism to Capitalism. As it turns out, it can be easier than you might think (when they’re not stoned). For instance, you can go a long way with a discussion of the division of labor that begins with the question “Why the hell are there nearly a million people living here in the desert?”