There’s some commenter unrest in a thread below about our lack of coverage of recent events in Ukraine. Lacking the resources of the BBC or the NY Times, I’m afraid that we assorted academics and oddballs at CT can’t aspire to comprehensive news coverage and usually (well sometimes!) restrict ourselves to writing about stuff we know something about. Fortunately, when we are ourselves in a shocking state of ignorance, we can sometimes point to people who are not. And such is Nick Barlow, over at “Fistful of Euros”:http://fistfulofeuros.net/ , who has multiple posts on the topic.

Tyler Cowen links to Martin Wolf (FT, subscription) on the failure of the radical free-market reforms undertaken by New Zealand from 1984 to the mid-90s. The results are even more striking when you observe that the only sustained period of growth has come after 1999, when the newly-elected Labour government raised the top marginal tax rate, amended the most radical components of the Employment Contracts Act, and undertook some renationalisation. I’ve written about all this many times, for example in this AFR piece and this Victoria economic commentary published in NZ (PDF file).

[click to continue…]

“Lynne Cheney Tops National Christmas Tree.”:http://www.guardian.co.uk/uslatest/story/0,1282,-4633299,00.html

Via “Patrick Nielsen Hayden”:http://nielsenhayden.com/electrolite/, a cool index of “photographs of cities”:http://www.worldcityphotos.org/. Of the cities in the index, I’ve lived in “Cork”:http://www.worldcityphotos.org/Ireland/IRE-Cork-webshotscheryllynn121.jpg, “Tucson”:http://www.worldcityphotos.org/UnitedStates/USA-AZ-Tucson-luvbride1.jpg and “Canberra”:http://www.worldcityphotos.org/Australia/AUS-Canberra-anueduau1.jpg, in that order. I imagine our cosmopolitan CT crowd can do better than that.

The database isn’t without its errors: “this”:http://www.worldcityphotos.org/Ireland/IRE-Cork-webshotstommy371.jpg claims to be Cork but is in fact “Cobh”:http://www.cork-guide.ie/cobh.htm, a town down the road that was the _Titanic’s_ “last port of call”:http://www.cobhheritage.com/index2.html.

“Kevin Drum writes”:http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/archives/individual/2004_11/005214.php:

bq. *LAKOFF FRAMING….* it’s finally time for me to get a copy of George Lakoff’s “Don’t Think of an Elephant”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/1931498717/qid=1101255135/sr=1-1/ref=sr_1_1/103-7671099-8551863?v=glance&s=books, which appears to be something of a Bible among despairing liberals who can’t believe that half the country likes George Bush and apparently doesn’t like us. Basically, Lakoff says we need to get our act together and “frame” our arguments in more positive ways …

Although I know (and like) his work on “Metaphor”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0226468011/kieranhealysw-20/ref=nosim/, I’ve only seen Lakoff’s stuff on this at one remove or more — snippets on TV shows here and there, and talk in newspapers and blogs. So I don’t know whether he’s pitching the idea of framing as new, or his own bright idea. But it’s worth noting that this concept is pretty old. I don’t mean some equivalent concept, either, I mean the same idea with the same name. Here’s a “very short reading list”:http://www.ssc.wisc.edu/~oliver/SOC924/Assignments/Framing.htm#Frames to start you off. It has its prehistory in work in micro-interaction work in linguistics and cognitive psychology (going back to Gregory Bateson). It gets named in the sociological literature by Erving Goffman’s (1974) _Frame Analysis_, but like a lot of Goffman nobody could do anything with it unless they were him. It was developed into a useful tool explicitly oriented to the study of political processes (especially social movements) in “Dave Snow”:http://today.uci.edu/Features/profile_detail.asp?key=112 et al’s “Frame Alignment Processes”:http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0003-1224%28198608%2951%3A4%3C464%3AFAPMAM%3E2.0.CO%3B2-2 (American Sociological Review, 1986). That paper spawned a very big literature. Benford and Snow’s “Framing Processes and Social Movements: An Overview and Assessment”:http://arjournals.annualreviews.org/doi/abs/10.1146/annurev.soc.26.1.611, (Annual Review of Sociology, 2000) reviews fifteen-or-so years of theory and research in the field, including plenty of stuff on the limits of the concept and its potential for overuse. If Lakoff has managed to get the media to put his name in front of this idea then I guess he’s worth listening to, because he’s clearly very good at framing indeed.

*Update*: Seems like Lakoff gives the history of the idea its due, develops a version of his own in terms of his views about conceptual metaphors, and then applies it to the liberal cause in an accessible way. All to the good. My memory of the conceptual metaphor stuff in _Metaphors We Live By_, though, is that the metaphors that book looked at (“Love is a Battlefield”, etc) can’t really explain how and why political framing is really successful, as it’s not just a cognitive process. Moreoever, the idea that metaphors underpin our concepts is very similar to the idea that the social structure decisively shapes our thinking: immensely suggestive, almost certainly right in some sense, but very difficult to specify in a satisfactory way. I guess I should read the books, though, before saying anything else.

MEMRI makes an “inept attempt to intimidate”:http://www.juancole.com/2004/11/intimidation-by-israeli-linked.html Juan Cole.

bq. Dear Professor Cole,

bq. I write in response to your article “Osama Threatening Red States?” published on November 3, 2004 on antiwar.com. The article included several statements about MEMRI which go beyond what could be considered legitimate criticism, and which in fact qualify as slander and libel. … As such, we demand that you retract the false statements you have made about MEMRI. If you will not do so, we will be forced to pursue legal action against you personally and against the University of Michigan, which the article identifies you as an employee of.

MEMRI’s threat is strongly reminiscent of Donald Luskin’s threat of legal action against Atrios a while back. It seems to me (though I note that I’m not a lawyer) that the purported complaint is completely, utterly and entirely bogus. But like Luskin’s supposed complaint, the threat isn’t so much in the possibility of a successful action, as in outcomes related to that action. In Atrios’ case, the real threat was that his identity would be revealed, possibly landing him in difficulty with the university that employed him. Similarly, MEMRI’s threat seems to me to be more about trying to create difficulties for Cole with the University of Michigan than the nugatory possibility of an adverse judgement in court against him. There’s no remotely plausible theory under which the University of Michigan can be held responsible for Cole’s private activities or statements, even if they were libellous. However, a state-funded university would presumably prefer, all things considered, not to be embroiled in an action of this sort, however frivolous. Thus, the inclusion of University of Michigan in the complaint seems to me to be an inept class of an indirect threat to embarrass the university and thus perhaps put Cole in a tricky position. I’m glad to see that he’s treating it with the contempt that it deserves. Cole urges

bq. all readers to send messages of protest to memri@memri.org. Please be polite, and simply urge MEMRI, which has a major Web presence, to withdraw the lawsuit threat and to respect the spirit of the free sharing of ideas that makes the internet possible.