China Miéville has just won the “Arthur C. Clarke award”:http://www.appomattox.demon.co.uk/acca/News/Winner%2005.htm for _Iron Council_, which we ran a “seminar”:https://crookedtimber.org/category/mieville-seminar on in January. He seems to be on a bit of a roll the last month or two; he’s also interviewed in the “current issue”:http://www.believermag.com/issues/200504/interview_mieville.php of _The Believer_. Look out next month for some more Miéville-related goodness.
From the monthly archives:
May 2005
After featuring on 60 minutes last night, On Bullshit climbed from #21 (when I checked at the start of the segment) in the Amazon charts to #3 (when I checked 5 minutes ago). I have no idea what this means in terms of numbers, but the commissioning editor must be feeling pretty smug. As must Harry Frankfurt, I’d guess.
It doesn’t seem to me to be unreasonable to guess that there’s an indirect link between this “NYT story”:http://www.nytimes.com/2005/05/15/national/15chaplain.html?hp&ex=1116129600&en=00e6129405ca2b50&ei=5094&partner=homepage on evangelizing Christians making life uncomfortable for non-believers in the armed forces, and the “riots in Afghanistan”:http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/05/13/AR2005051300301.html that followed a _Newsweek_ report that a copy of the Koran had been flushed down the toilet by Guantanamo interrogators. Other services than the Air Force have a spotty track record in the area of Christian-Muslim sensitivities; to the best of my knowledge, “General Boykin”:http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2003/10/16/attack/main578471.shtml was never disciplined for the flagrantly offensive comments that he made in 2003.
This is important stuff; as Robert Kaplan “said”:http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/prem/200307/kaplan in the _Atlantic_ (sub required) a couple of years ago, the US armed forces are what administer the American imperium, such as it is. Kaplan claimed that this was a good thing, pointing to the positive role that army officers could play, and quoting Winston Churchill’s dictum that the Americans were ‘worthy successors’ to the British Empire. However, the inheritance may run in different directions than those that Kaplan highlighted. What’s happening in Afghanistan is reminiscent of the rebellion of 1858 in India, where false rumours that the British were issuing cartridges smeared with the body fat of cows and pigs were lent credibility by the efforts of Company officers from Britain to evangelize among their troops. There’s no evidence whatsoever that fundamentalist Christians were responsible for any decision to flush Korans down the toilet. Indeed, I suspect that they weren’t; if the _Newsweek_ “story”:http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/7693014/site/newsweek/ bears out, this is more likely to be a general cultural problem in the military than something that can be specifically attributed to a sub-group of officers. But still, an organization’s culture is in part a product of the actions that are tacitly encouraged or discouraged by its leaders. A military establishment in which extremists who believe that Allah is a “false idol” can not only survive, but prosper and reach high military rank, and in which non-Christians can experience systematic bullying and intimidation, is likely to have problems when it not only has to deal with “idol worshippers,” but has to take their beliefs seriously. Certainly, I can’t imagine that interrogators in the US military would ever have flushed a Bible down the toilet to shock a Christian prisoner into cooperation, regardless of whether this was likely to have worked or not.
Update: _Newsweek_ is now “saying”:http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/05/15/AR2005051500493.html that it erred in its report.
The news on the massacre in Uzbekistan is sketchy, but it seems clear that troops fired on a protest meeting, killing dozens.
The massacre followed violent protests in which government buildings were taken over, and prisoners, including alleged members of Islamist groups, were set free, but it appears that the protestors were simply listening to speeches when the troops attacked them .
The best information seems to be at Registan, which I found through the relatively new system of Technorati tags
The US currently has an air base and around 1000 troops in Uzbekistan. They can’t be regarded as neutral, and their presence clearly supports the mass murdering and torturing dictator Karimov, someone who appears indistinguishable from Saddam circa 1980. A literal reading of Administration rhetoric would suggest that the US should use its power to overthrow Karimov , but there’s zero possibility that this will happen (the official US response is an appeal for restraint, directed mainly at the protestors). But the troops should be withdrawn immediately, and all ties with this evil regime broken.
The BBC radio news this morning has been dominated by hours of whining about “the takeover of Manchester United by a Michael Moore lookalike”:http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/4542913.stm . Meanwhile the disappearance of hundreds (and possibly thousands) of African children from London schools is relegated to mere mention status. (Some of the children have been killed, many more are probably in some kind of slavery.) The relative importance the BBC assigns to these stories is also reflected on its main news page.
About a third of the 152 adult guests who slept at the White House or Camp David last year were fundraisers or donors to President Bush’s campaigns, but at least half of those also are family or old friends.
It’s not surprising that there’s a lot of overlap between a successful politician’s fundraisers/ donors and his old friends, so I appreciate that they tried to break that out. It looks like about 1/2 of 1/3 of the guests were donors or fundraisers who were not family or old friends. That’s probably a little less than 16%.
Most readers will remember that Bill Clinton’s presidency came under continuous assault for inviting donors to stay at the White House, specifically the Lincoln bedroom. In 1997, the White House released a list of all of the guests who had stayed in the Lincoln bedroom. (The Bush administration does not report where guests stayed.) CNN posted the list as of 2/97, which they have divided into five groups. They’ve tried to define donors and fundraisers who were not family or old friends as “friends and supporters”. They make up 13% of the list.
There are obviously several degrees of imprecision here. Most importantly, there’s no great way to discern who’s really the President’s friend and who isn’t without a subpoena of his Trapper Keeper. We’re also looking at different timespans, and comparing the Lincoln bedroom to both the White House and Camp David.
What’s less obvious is how the liberal media allowed one President’s pattern of behavior (about 13%) to become a widely-understood multi-year scandal, whereas another President’s pattern of behavior (about 11-15%) is a page 17 story, if that. But, what do I know.
Brad DeLong revisits the Guenter Grass question.
bq. UPDATE: Well, the original title is wrong: Guenter Grass is not minimizing the holocaust by comparing Nazi Germany to globalization. And I should not call him crypto-Nazi scum.
bq. But there is, still, something very wrong with claiming not that the neoliberal approach to economic reform is wrong, and that the analyses of people like me and my friends are flawed, but that we and I are the standard-bearers of a new totalitarianism. There is something very wrong with claiming that that the decision of the Social Democratic Party to push Harz IV is not a mistake, but rather a reflection of the Social Democratic Party’s subservience to multinational capital.
bq. Chancellor Schroeder is working for the interests of the German people as he sees them, and deserves a better quality of critic.
There aren’t many (any?) political bloggers who haven’t made overly-hasty or sweeping judgments at one point or another. But there’s a lot more rhetoric out there about the “self-correcting blogosphere” than there are selves who are willing to correct where correction is appropriate. More power to Brad for doing this.
A shoe that has taken a little while to drop; mainstream conservatives are finally beginning to point out in public that the neo-con project of remoulding the world sits uncomfortably with traditional Burkean notions of prudence and culture. In a forthcoming article in conservative house journal, _The National Interest_ (still to be published; hence no link), John Hulsman and Anatol Lieven argue that realism is not only more moral than neo-conservatism (it better reflects the moral duty to be prudent), but that it better reflects traditional conservative values as articulated by Burke and others. They have some harsh words for the neo-cons.
bq. an ethic of ultimate ends – especially when linked to the belief that one’s nation is the representative of all that is good – has a dangerous tendency to excuse its proponents from responsibility for the consequences of their actions. For if ideals and intentions are seen as spotlessly, self-evidently pure, then not only the grossest ruthlessness, but the grossest incompetence is of comparatively little importance. The Iraq War and its aftermath have been the first real test of the neoconservative approach in action. It is not an anomaly of the neoconservative philosophy as some have argued. Rather, it springs fully formed like Athena from neoconservatism’s head.
Hulsman and Lieven also give short shrift to those like Krauthammer who have tried to blend realism and neo-conservatism into an uneasy cocktail.
bq. Moreover, given America’s past historical record, the neoconservative combination of a professed belief in spreading democracy with a commitment to the limitless extension of American power and American interests in the Middle East is bound to be widely seen as utterly hypocritical. This is all the more so when – as advocated by Charles Krauthammer and others – the United States openly adjusts its public conscience according to its geopolitical advantage, talking loudly about democratic morality in cases that suit it, while remaining silent on others.
These tensions have been brewing for a while, and now appear to be breaking out “into”:http://www.thewashingtonnote.com/archives/000020.html “open”:http://www.sais-jhu.edu/pubaffairs/SAISarticles04/Fukuyama_NYT_082204.pdf “warfare”:http://www.sais-jhu.edu/pubaffairs/SAISarticles05/Fukuyama_NYT_031305.pdf. It’s a little surprising that this hasn’t gotten much attention from bloggers, given the obsessive debates over who was or wasn’t a neo-con last year. Some conservatives are clearly “worried”:http://www.gwu.edu/~elliott/faculty/articlenotes/Nau%20NI%20Article.pdf that these divisions may help the Democrats take back the White House in 2008, and are trying to get the different factions of the conservative-foreign-policy-wonkosphere to pull together rather than against each other. But this fight isn’t just reshaping the foreign policy debate among Republicans; Democrats too are being pulled in. On the one hand, people like “Peter Beinart”:http://www.tnr.com/doc.mhtml?pt=whKP5U%2BbbaxbirV9FQhQuh%3D%3D of the New Republic are trying to pull hawkish Democrats into closer cooperation with the neo-cons in the fight to spread democracy. On the other, people like Hulsman (who I heard speaking a couple of days ago), are looking to create a “Truman moment” with Democrats rather than their Republican brethren. They have quite a lot in common with centrist internationalists like Charles Kupchan and John Ikenberry, who believe that America’s power is best preserved through recreating the kind of international institutions and relationships that underpinned American hegemony during the Cold War. While this fight may well have partisan consequences, it isn’t in itself a partisan battle. I’ll be posting more on this as it develops.
Atrios “points to”:http://atrios.blogspot.com/2005_05_08_atrios_archive.html#111590753078228325 an “absurd bit of ‘fact checking'”:http://factcheck.org/article325.html from Factcheck.org:
Judicial Fight Prompts Duelling, Distorted Ads
Millions are being spent on rival ads supporting and opposing two of President Bush’s most controversial judicial selections. Neither ad is completely accurate. … A rival ad by the liberal People for the American Way quotes Texas judge Janice Rogers Brown as saying seniors “are cannibalizing their grandchildren,” without making clear she was speaking metaphorically of debt being passed on to future generations by entitlement programs. … Brown was speaking about the debt being passed on to future generations, not suggesting that Medicare or Social Security causes old people to eat human flesh. Here’s the full quote from a speech she gave in 2000 before the Institute for Justice: … “My grandparents’ generation thought being on the government dole was disgraceful, a blight on the family’s honor. Today’s senior citizens blithely cannibalize their grandchildren because they have a right to get as much “free” stuff as the political system will permit them to extract.”That’s certainly a colorful metaphor. Readers can decide for themselves whether the idea being expressed is “radical” or not.
Thanks for clearing that up! I now know that Janice Rogers Brown was not, in fact, claiming that Social Security causes seniors to literally eat the flesh of their grandchildren.
Yet it seems that Factcheck.org is not abiding by their own high standards. I think they need to issue a Factcheck on themselves, for erroneously (and perhaps maliciously and with partisan intent?) implying that the Progress for America foundation and the People for the American Way were engaged in a duel using their Ads. _Analysis_: (1) These organizations are merely legal entities, and strictly speaking cannot in fact have a duel between themselves or with real human beings. (2) Even if they could do so in principle, political Ads are not suitable weapons for dueling. According to an “authoritative history”:http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/duel/sfeature/dueling.html of the practice, there has _never_ been a case where the disputing parties agreed that their weapons of choice would be “30-second Spots at Dawn.” This is because major U.S. networks do not air political ads this early in the morning. (3) Perhaps most decisively, “dueling was outlawed”:http://internetproject.com/members/BurdanUSA/duel.htm in all American states in the years after the civil war, and in Washington DC as early as 1839. The continued neglect of basic facts like this in the public square is slowly poisoning our body politic. Oh shit. I mean, not _literally_ poisoning … Look, I’ll fix that later, OK? I need to get back to writing the release about how the “Nuclear Option” in the Senate is not actually a threat to bomb the opposing parties using silo-launched thermonuclear devices.
From a delightful “short essay”:http://www.ansible.co.uk/sfx/sfx128.html by David Langford on footnotes in literature.
bq. My favourite helpful annotation in fantasy appears in Lord Dunsany’s story “The Bird of the Difficult Eye”, where “beasts prowling in the blackness gluttered” at the doomed protagonist. Gluttered? A footnote is provided: “See any dictionary, but in vain.”
The essay discusses Alasdair Gray’s use of fictional footnotes, but curiously fails to mention his Lanark, an almost uniformly depressing novel, with a happy ending which is only described (implied?) in the endnotes to a nonexistent final section. It also mentions in passing J.G. Ballard’s short story, “The Index” (which nabakov talks about in the comments to this “post”:https://crookedtimber.org/2003/10/15/indexing-as-artform/ on ‘Indexing as Artform’). Of course, Anthony Grafton has written an entire book on the genealogy of the footnote. However, despite frequent displays of Grafton’s personal literary flair ( e.g. “Like the high whine of the dentist’s drill, the low rumble of the footnote on the historian’s page reassures: The tedium it inflicts, like the pain inflicted by the drill, is not random but directed.”), the book confines its scope to the academic footnote, almost entirely ignoring its exotic fictional cousins. Finally, Scott McLemee “writes”:http://www.insidehighered.com/views/2005/05/10/mclemee about the guilty pleasures of reading reference books for entertainment, and solicits nominations for “favorite reference books” to provide “diversion, edification, or moral uplift .” My personal favourite is Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase and Fable, available in a thoroughly outdated (and thus vastly more entertaining) edition “here”:http://www.bartleby.com/81/. “Fowler’s English Usage”:http://www.bartleby.com/116/ (again available in an antiquated edition) runs a close second, although I understand that its most recent edition has lost much of the vigour and charm that earlier versions had.
Update: I’d always assumed (without reading it) that Fowler’s “The King’s English” was an early and rather different version of “Modern English Usage.” Not so; they’re separate (if related) texts, and the link above is to the former rather than the latter.
This really ought to enter the standard brief against PowerLine, along with “Jimmy Carter is a traitor!”, “That Schiavo memo is a forgery!”, “How dare the New York Times reveal the sexual orientation of openly gay activists!” and “When the left begins beating its wife, it will be an outrage!”
Tim Lambert catches John Lott “with his hand up a sock-puppet’s backside”:http://cgi.cse.unsw.edu.au/~lambert/cgi-bin/blog/2005/05#economist123 yet again. Under the reviewer name “Economist123”:http://www.amazon.com/gp/cdp/member-reviews/A2E612F97JB6X2/ref=cm_cr_auth/002-7803436-2896049?%5Fencoding=UTF8, Lott puts up a signed review of Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner’s “Freakonomics”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/006073132X/kieranhealysw-20/ref=nosim/ — a book that criticizes Lott’s work in passing. Lott says:
Not surprisingly, Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner’s new book “Freakonomics” ignores their academic critics. … If Messrs. Levitt and Dubner were correct, crime rates should have first started falling among younger people who were first born after legalization. … But in fact the precise opposite is true. …
John R. Lott Jr.
Resident Scholar
American Enterprise Institute
Washington
Now, if you scroll down through Economist123’s “other Amazon reviews”:http://www.amazon.com/gp/cdp/member-reviews/A2E612F97JB6X2/ref=cm_cr_auth/002-7803436-2896049?%5Fencoding=UTF8, you get to a review of John R. Lott’s “More Guns, Less Crime”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/A2E612F97JB6X2/kieranhealysw-20/ref=nosim/. There, Economist123 doesn’t sign his review, but neither does he mince his words:
This is by far the most comprehensive study ever done on guns. … it is important to note how many academics have tired to challenge his work on concealed handgun laws and failed and that no one has even bothered to try and challenge his work on one-gun-a-month laws and other gun control laws.
I am constantly amused the lengths to which reviewers here will go to distort Lott’s research. … These guys will do anything to keep people from reading Lott’s work.
Given the way he’s misrepresented by his critics, it’s a good job Lott has defenders like Economist123 (“amongst others”:http://cgi.cse.unsw.edu.au/~lambert/cgi-bin/blog/guns/files/lottreviews.html) to back him up.
Stephen Bainbridge ruminates on Patrick O’Brian’s Aubrey-Maturin novels and the reasons for the success of the British Navy in its wars against Napoleonic France and the US. He gives a brief discussion of a “paper”:http://www.sfu.ca/~allen/navy2.pdf by Douglas W. Allen, which analyzes the institutions of the British Navy as a solution to a set of principal-agent problems. Now, the paper is interesting, but it seems to me to be flawed, in a manner that’s unfortunately rather typical of many economists who analyze social institutions. Allen treats the rules of the Navy as an efficient solution to a set of monitoring problems, where the British state wanted to make sure that its captains, officers and seamen fought well on its behalf. In other words, he’s making a functionalist argument.
Now the functionalist part of the story is an important one; the British Navy clearly existed for a reason. But if the Aubrey-Maturin novels provide any sort of an accurate picture of the institutions of the British Navy, there’s strong countervailing evidence to suggest that many of the institutions of the Navy were less intended to maximize the overall efficiency of the Navy as a fighting machine, than to provide powerful actors in the Navy with the opportunities for individual gain. Viz., the institutionalized prerogatives of pursers to engage in certain forms of peculation. The right of admirals to a third-share of any prize money won by captains under their command. The need to pay sweeteners to those in charge of the docks to provide timely repairs. The arbitrary system of promotion, which depended at least as much (and probably rather more) on patronage and political connections as on merit. Not to mention Aubrey’s (and Hornblower’s) continual source of complaint – the miserable official allotment of gunpowder, which meant that captains had to lay in their own supplies to have any chance of fighting successfully at sea. Now I imagine that one could construct “just-so” stories which explained why most (or all) of these institutionalized features of Navy life contributed to the overall goal of maximizing the Navy’s efficiency as a fighting machine. But they would be just-so stories – not especially convincing on their merits. To the extent that O’Brian is right (and he clearly did a hell of a lot of research), the institutions of the British Navy during the Napoleonic wars weren’t even a second-best solution. They were an ungainly compromise between a wide variety of different actors, each of whom had a strong streak of self-interest, and the ability and desire to bargain in order to achieve that interest, whatever this meant for the British Navy as a fighting force.
Update: title changed following comment from Kieran
For some neat images, check out the Art of Science online exhibition hosted at Princeton. [thanks]
Via Australian Senator Andrew Bartlett, I see that The Independent is campaigning for electoral reform in the UK, following Labour’s re-election with only 36 per cent of the vote.
Leading opponents within the government are named as John Prescott and Ian McCartney and the story also mentions that Many union leaders also fear it will lead to coalition government with the Liberal Democrats, and prevent Labour from governing again with an absolute majority.
I imagine that the opponents regard themselves as hardheaded realists, but it would be more accurate to view them as reckless gamblers.