September 2004

For those trying to work out whether the Bush Administration’s stated commitment to democracy in the Middle East reflects Wilsonian idealism or just a tactical choice, reflecting the fact that the Administration’s enemies in the region are mostly not democrats, Venezuela provides a useful data point.

The death of the book, like the paperless office, has been predicted so many times that people have given up paying attention. But, for me, at least, it came a big step closer today, at least in one sense, when I downloaded a PDF version of China Mieville’s Iron Council from Amazon.

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I sometimes wonder about the utility of mentioning films on CT because by the time us Brits get to see them (UK release dates being later than those in the US) they’ve often finished playing in cinemas in the US and elsewhere. But Richard Eyre’s “Stage Beauty”:http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0368658/ , which I caught on Saturday is an exception. Set at the time of the Restoration, it explores the fate of Ned Kynaston, a male actor who specializes in female roles (women being prohibited from performing). When the law is changed, first to allow women on the stage and then to prohibit men from playing them altogether, Kynaston is out of a job. I won’t post spoilers but just say that what we get includes a good deal of exploration of sexual identity and sexuality. And I also laughed out loud (a lot) at some parts and was moved by others. (Sarah from the excellent “Just Another False Alarm”:http://www.rubberring.blogspot.com/ has “more”:http://rubberring.blogspot.com/2004_09_12_rubberring_archive.html#109495045156434120 — but with spoilers).

By way of a break from everything about the US elections in the blogosphere, here’s a post about the US elections.

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With apologies to The Poor Man, an application of this strategy to an issue which appears to be confusing surprisingly many surprisingly intelligent minds in the British Isles:

Why are people so keen to ban fox-hunting when (fishing, battery farming, meat eating in general, mousetraps etc) are responsible for much more animal death and suffering?

Because hunting foxes with dogs is a sadistic pleasure.

Next week, I may tackle the question of why the Beslan siege appalled us more than the ongoing deaths of children through malnutrition and disease in Africa. Or I may not.

“A & L Daily”:http://www.aldaily.com/ is giving prominence to “an article by one Thomas F. Powers”:http://www.legalaffairs.org/issues/September-October-2004/argument_powers_sepoct04.html “an assistant professor of political science at the University of Minnesota Duluth” arguing that a policy of “preventive detention an idea whose time has come”. There’s much that’s worthy of comment in Powers’s piece, not least the fact that he writes that ” we should look to other countries, especially England and Israel, which have crafted preventive detention policies with meaningful safeguards for due process.” England? !! Is this assistant professor of political science’s political geography really that bad? Anyway, he has this to say about the British Government’s internment policy introduced in Northern Ireland in 1971:

bq. Great Britain’s indefinite internment policy, formalized in 1973 following the recommendations of a famous report authored by Lord Diplock on the situation in Northern Ireland, was allowed to lapse in 1980. Lord Diplock was reacting to a legally murky use of police power, one he termed “imprisonment at the arbitrary Diktat of the Executive Government.” Though his reform proposal, incorporated in the 1973 Northern Ireland (Emergency Provisions) Act, made preventive detention a matter of administrative, not judicial, oversight, the new policy reasserted civilian control and included due process safeguards. No less a figure than the secretary of state for Northern Ireland made initial detention determinations. Within a period of 28 days, an administrative official would then review each case with the option to extend the detention. Those detained also had a right to be informed of their status hearing in advance, and they were granted the right to an attorney paid for by the government.

“Mick Fealty”:http://www.sluggerotoole.com/ or “Marc Mulholland”:http://marcmulholland.tripod.com/histor/ (or maybe other Timberites) could comment more authoritatively than I can on the strict accuracy of Powers’s account (1980 seems an odd date to choose for internment to lapse… and those of us who actually remember the period will wince at the rhetorical phrase “no less a figure than”). But it does seem strange to cite the Northern Ireland experience _in support_ of a policy of preventive detention. Here’s “the CAIN summary”:http://cain.ulst.ac.uk/events/intern/chron.htm of the introduction of internment and the political and security effects of the policy:

bq. In a series of raids across Northern Ireland, 342 people were arrested and taken to makeshift camps. There was an immediate upsurge of violence and 17 people were killed during the next 48 hours. Of these 10 were Catholic civilians who were shot dead by the British Army. Hugh Mullan (38) was the first Catholic priest to be killed in the conflict when he was shot dead by the British Army as he was giving the last rites to a wounded man. Winston Donnell (22) became the first Ulster Defence Regiment (UDR) solider to die in ‘the Troubles’ when he was shot by the Irish Republican Army (IRA) near Clady, County Tyrone. [There were more arrests in the following days and months. Internment was to continue until 5 December 1975. During that time 1,981 people were detained; 1,874 were Catholic / Republican, while 107 were Protestant / Loyalist. Internment had been proposed by Unionist politicians as the solution to the security situation in Northern Ireland but was to lead to a very high level of violence over the next few years and to increased support for the IRA. Even members of the security forces remarked on the drawbacks of internment.]

Jon’s post on Big-time college sports draws on work by Robert Frank, who treats high performance in college sports as a positional good.

By an interesting coincidence, Frank gave a seminar here in Brisbane on Friday and stayed for a very interesting chat afterwards. He argued that the growth in inequality in the US has been positively harmful to the middle class, even though their income has been roughly stationary since the 1970s.

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I just posted and (then deleted) a link to the BBC’s On this Day page, which I think is generally well worth a look. The reason for deletion was just that today is 19th September and the BBC were still linking to the 17th from their front page. Still, on _that_ day (the one I first linked to) the major item was the “60th anniversary of the Arnhem drop”:http://news.bbc.co.uk/onthisday/hi/dates/stories/september/17/newsid_3662000/3662264.stm , complete with links to audio footage and an animated map. But what also caught my eye was “a page about the Sabra and Chatila massacres”:http://news.bbc.co.uk/onthisday/hi/dates/stories/september/17/newsid_2519000/2519637.stm (22 years ago) by Lebanese Phalangists, a reminder that the murder of children is not the monopoly of any one faith or political current. Yesterday’s anniversaries were also noteworthy: they include “the arrival of the first Ugandan Asian refugees”:http://news.bbc.co.uk/onthisday/hi/dates/stories/september/18/newsid_2522000/2522627.stm in Britain (a great blow to the viability of Uganda and, as it has turned out, a major bonus for the UK). Today’s page has “the refusal of the US to allow Charlie Chaplin to re-enter the country”:http://news.bbc.co.uk/onthisday/hi/dates/stories/september/19/newsid_3102000/3102179.stm (1952) and the “Southall Rail Crash”:http://news.bbc.co.uk/onthisday/hi/dates/stories/september/19/newsid_2524000/2524283.stm (1997), the consequences of which are still very much with us.

“Matt Yglesias”:http://yglesias.typepad.com/matthew/2004/09/moral_relativis.html and “Kevin Drum”:http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/archives/individual/2004_09/004725.php have been discussing various ethical buzzwords that have been flying around recently, all starting from “this post”:http://volokh.com/archives/archive_2004_09_14.shtml#1095446087 of Eugene Volokh’s. I don’t have enough expertise to helpfully say very much here, but I thought I’d try adding some small points.

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A recent study commissioned by the Knight Commission on Intercollegiate Athletics looks at the economic results of big-time college athletic programs. The author, Robert H. Frank, a Cornell economist, reviews the literature concerning two kinds of indirect benefits that athletic programs are often claimed to generate: “1) that a winning athletic program leads to additional contributions from alumni and others; and 2) that a winning program generates additional applications from prospective students (resulting, presumably, in a higher quality freshman class).” Frank reports that while the findings of these studies are mixed, “the overall message is easily summarized: It is that if success in athletics does generate the indirect benefits in question, the effects are almost surely very small.”

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The Washington Post “hints as strongly as it can”:http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A30043-2004Sep17.html that the blogosphere’s counterattack against the Killian memos began at the White House.

bq. In another development, the Los Angeles Times reported that an Atlanta lawyer with conservative Republican connections posted the first Web log entry questioning the authenticity of the CBS documents less than four hours after the initial broadcast on “60 Minutes.” The paper identified Harry W. MacDougald as the “Buckhead,” who became a hero of conservative Web sites after pointing out technical problems with the documents, such as fonts and proportionate spacing.

bq. MacDougald declined to say how he learned about the problems with the documents so early. In addition to being released by CBS, copies of the documents were e-mailed by the White House to reporters as “60 Minutes” went on the air.

It’s unlikely that we’ll ever know quite what happened, but it seems highly plausible to me that the White House is communicating with bloggers to spin the news. We already know that the White House’s Internet Director thinks that blogs are “pretty important”:http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A30043-2004Sep17.html. Equally, I’d be very surprised if people in the Democratic party aren’t communicating with some bloggers in order to try to get their spin across (if they aren’t, they’re bad at their job). As Kieran “said”:https://www.crookedtimber.org/archives/002517.html a couple of days ago, there is a mythology of the blogger that sees him (or more rarely, her) as a lone hero speaking truth to power (or the “New York Times” as the best local approximation). The reality is murkier. To the extent that blogs help set the agenda for the media, pols have an incentive to spin the blogs, just as they have good reason to spin reporters. Blogs aren’t critiquing the system from outside – they’re increasingly part of the system. Expect more of this over time, not less.

Mira Bar-Hillel has an “interesting piece in the Spectator”:http://www.spectator.co.uk/article.php?table=old&section=current&issue=2004-09-18&id=5036 about the way in which English Heritage has undermined its own role by backing a deal not to reconstruct the Baltic Exchange in the City. I did a little googling to find out what the old building looked like and I was surprised to discover that the whole thing is up for sale in a dismantled state! Not on ebay, but on a web page of “Complete Large Buildings for Sale”:http://www.salvoweb.com/complete-buildings/forsale.html (scroll down). I happen to think that the Baltic Exchange would serve nicely as a new Crooked Timber corporate headquarters, though getting my colleagues’ agreement on location might be difficult.

“Daniel”:https://www.crookedtimber.org/archives/002516.html has been worrying about sadistic angels with infinitary choices. But we can get puzzles in the ballpark of probability 0 problems without worrying about infinity. Just thinking about bets on things you (take yourself to) know gets the troubles started.

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A few months ago, when I was doing research interviews in Brussels, I thought about doing a post on EU official art. Nearly every corridor in every building of the Commission, Council and Parliament has two or three examples along its walls – spectacularly bland and uninteresting prints and photographs, always with the twelve stars on a blue flag in there somewhere. The art is contentless and affectless because any strong statement, or even conveyed sense of geographic location, would probably offend somebody in one or another of the member states. There’s something about the EU that seems completely inimical to lively cultural expression.

Not for much longer perhaps. Bruce Sterling, gonzo science fiction provocateur and joint father of cyberpunk, is “getting excited”:http://www.locusmag.com/2004/Features/09_ShirleySocialFuture.html by the unlikely subject of the EU’s “acquis communautaire”:http://kypros.org/CY-EU/eng/04_negotiation_procedure/acquis_communautaire.htm.

bq. What if there were two global systems of governance, and they weren’t based on control of the landscape? Suppose they interpenetrated and competed everywhere, sort of like Tory and Labour, or Coke and Pepsi. I’m kind of liking this European ‘Acquis’ model where there is scarcely any visible ‘governing’ going on, and everything is accomplished on the levels of invisible infrastructure, like highway regulations and currency reform.

This sounds like an unlikely subject for sf, but if anyone can pull it off, it’s Sterling. At least two-thirds of his “Distraction”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0553576399/henryfarrell-20 is one of the wildest and funniest sf novels about politics ever written (the final section peters out pretty badly). If anyone can make regulatory international bureaucracy sound exciting, it’s going to be Sterling. And he’s onto something – there’s something deeply weird about the EU. It isn’t (and will probably never be) a fully featured state, and instead is, as Sterling says, for the most part a vast body of transnational semi-visible regulation. It’s incredibly boring on the face of it (partly because most of the regulation concerns dull matters like phytosanitary standards), but there’s something quirky and strange about the fact that it exists at all, and that it operates in the way that it does. I’m going to be interested to see whether Sterling manages to get anywhere with this.