June 2005

Two interesting articles in the new issue of the “Boston Review”:http://bostonreview.net/. “Joe Carens”:http://bostonreview.net/BR30.3/carens.html makes a political-theoretical argument that we have an obligation to grant citizenship to most immigrants and their children. “Jennifer Gordon”:http://bostonreview.net/BR30.3/gordon.html argues on practical grounds that those who want strong trade unions should be in favour of granting citizenship rights to undocumented immigrants. She writes about how these workers are exploited in sweatshop situations, and how the threat of alerting immigration authorities is used to enforce compliance and to squash union membership drives. On the one hand, this means that the workers who are most vulnerable to exploitation and most in need of union representation are extremely hard for unions to reach. While new forms of protection – worker centers – have sprung up, they’re structurally disadvantaged and only cover a small number of undocumented immigrants. On the other, the existence of a large working population which has no choice but to accept the conditions that they are offered weakens the bargaining power of organized labour more generally. As Gordon writes:

bq. A serious attack on the very worst work in this country will require immigration reform to allow undocumented workers to legalize their status, removing the greatest source of their vulnerability to exploitation; a genuine commitment to enforcing the worker-protection laws that currently languish on the books; and a significant investment in new forms of organizing—including worker centers.

I don’t think much of most conspiracy theories which require that an improbably large number of people to keep a lid on some explosive piece of information forever. However, I could just be the victim of availability bias. Obviously, in the event of a successful conspiracy, I’d never hear about it.

I point this out, not to rip anything from today’s headlines, but as an excuse to quote this jewel from a book full of jewels, David Fromkin’s A Peace to End All Peace. Lord Kitchener, the general beloved by the British people for his successes in extending the empire in Egypt and India, had done a poor job directing British military strategy in World War I. Since his popularity made him impossible to fire, he had been sent on a trip to Russia. Kitchener was among the casualties when the ship hit a German mine. It shouldn’t have happened:

The departure route of the Hampshire had already been plotted, but should have been changed. Naval Intelligence, which earlier had broken the German radio code, intercepted a message to the German minelaying submarine U75 in late May. It indicated the the submarine was to mine the passage that the Hampshire intended to follow. Two further intercepts confirmed the information, as did signtings of the submarine. In the confusion at British headquarters at Scapa Flow, Admiral Sir John Jellicoe, the British naval commander, and his staff somehow failed to read or to understand the warnings that Naval Intelligence sent to their flagship. (At a court of inquiry that convened later in 1916 to look into the matter, Admiral Jellicoe succeeded in hiding the existence of these intelligence warnings, which were revealed only in 1985.)

The Poor Man has produced the finest PowerLine parody this side of paradise.[1] However, as Brad R. notes in the comments, there’s no beating the masters at their own game:

The Senate is poised to apologize for its failure to enact anti-lynching legislation between 1890 and 1952. Why didn’t the Senate act?

In the past, efforts to pass such legislation fell victim to Senate filibusters despite pleas for its passage by seven presidents, among others, between 1890 and 1952.

I suppose Senator Robert Byrd, widely known then as a former Kleagle, better known today as the “conscience of the Senate,” participated in some of those filibusters. Do you suppose he will oppose the current resolution, and explain that the filibuster is a pillar of democracy? No, probably not. I suspect the Senate Democrats will keep their “conscience” under wraps for this one.

UPDATE: As several readers have pointed out, Byrd isn’t quite that old–he was first elected to the Senate in 1958. So his personal involvement with the filibuster didn’t begin until the Civil Rights era. The point, of course, remains valid nevertheless.

[1] This is awfully good, too.

I arrived at work today to find that my PC wouldn’t start: a corrupted registry. The guy from tech support quickly reached the conclusion that he’d have to do a complete reinstall of the system. Luckily, most of my work files are stored on the departmental server (which gets backed up daily) and all incoming emails are automatically forwarded to a gmail account (so I have copies). Still, a lot of software had gone and, crucially, my setups for Firefox and Thunderbird. Luckily, I had read about “MozBackup”:http://mozbackup.jasnapaka.com/ on the “Lifehacker”:http://www.lifehacker.com/ site and had backups of all my settings. Download it now: it has saved me hours of hassle.

EU Foreign ministers decided today in Luxembourg to recognise Irish as an official language of the European Union. Why, oh why? I won’t rehearse last year’s arguments for how pathetic and grasping this makes us look. But I will ask; how many of our MEPs now plan to change from using English to Irish in the European Parliament?

The only sensible part of the Fine Gael press release – which mostly gloated that a concession made by Fianna Fail in 1972 had been won back – was the following; “We must not be deflected from the challenges and difficulties facing the Irish language, as indicated by recent surveys and reports, and regardless of its status at EU level, preserving the language has to begin at home.”

Pity they didn’t think of that before chomping rudely into this piece of overdone pork.

Robert Lemieux has an “interesting analysis”:http://lefarkins.blogspot.com/2005/06/lochner-comes-to-canada.html of the decision of the Canadian Supreme Court to strike down a Quebec law forbidding the sale or purchase of private health insurance. I’m not sure if the _Lochner_ analogy isn’t a little strong, but this does seem to be a worrying precedent, whatever the substantive merits of the decision.

bq. Every day, though, I see in the faces of men around me the longing that led me to the reservoir that night, and every day I shudder at the thought that one of them could have been sent to further my indoctrination. I turn away from their stares, I do not return their kind words, and I petition people in power to recognize the grotesque threat among us.

“Matthew Cheney”:http://mumpsimus.blogspot.com/2005/06/indoctrination.html stakes a strong claim for the office of Elder Tentacled Abomination in the Order of the Shrill.

I was on the “Odyssey”:http://www.wbez.org/programs/odyssey/odyssey_v2.asp show on Chicago NPR yesterday, debating blogs with Eugene Volokh, and got a question that floored me in the opening minutes of the discussion (audio link “here”:http://www.wbez.org/DWP_XML/od/2005_06/od_20050609_1200_5031/episode_5031.ram). I was asked by the radio host what we knew about bloggers – and responded that there were a lot of them, and that while we didn’t know much about the profile of bloggers in general, we did know that the “big” political bloggers tend to be overwhelmingly male, white and well educated. She then asked me how I knew that these bloggers were white, and I floundered for some seconds before saying that many had pictures up on the WWW. This wasn’t really a satisfactory answer, as many don’t have pictures, and even those that do might in theory be putting fake pictures up for the hell of it. Probably the more accurate answer is that I infer it from the way that Technorati 100 bloggers overwhelmingly tend to discuss the kinds of things that white well educated guys with mildly-to-very geeky interests in technology, pop culture and science fiction like to talk about. At a later point in the interview, we were both asked whether this was a problem. Eugene thought not so much – there’s a lot of political diversity among well educated males. I disagreed – there are some real issues with, say, the way that politics is defined. Certain issues get discussed to death; others are systematically overlooked. If a different crew of people had been there at the outset of the blogosphere, and able to take advantage of the massive network effects/path dependence, the blogosphere could have been a very different place indeed. On the one hand, the blogosphere does seem to me to have made a real contribution to diversity in the media as a whole. Some voices that tend systematically to get shut out, say, from the op-ed pages of the major dailies, play a real role. The left is a lot stronger and diverse in the blogosphere than it is in the mainstream media. But that doesn’t mean that we should think that the blogosphere itself is a level playing field for all forms of opinion; it isn’t.

My floundering aside, I should note that Gretchen Helfrich who hosts Odyssey, did far better at asking interesting and searching questions about the blogosphere than anyone else who has interviewed me on the topic before (or who I’ve heard interviewing other people). That’s in part a function of the hour long format, which allows for more expansive discussion, but only in part.

I recently had a good time with some old friends on an email list sharing stories of the athletic humiliations of our youth. I’ve posted my favorite story under the fold.

Most bloggers and blog junkies are, of course, diamond-hard triatheletes jotting off a few lines between reps. For those of us who aren’t, share your funniest athletic embarassments as a young person. You’ll feel better.

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Here I am in Brisbane airport, though at the moment the chance of sunburn is low (it’s raining) and only 50 percent of our luggage seems to have decided to come along with us. The fact that there was a giant roulette wheel on top of the luggage carousel (advertising the local casinos, I think) did not augur well. We’re en route to Canberra, where we’ll be at the “RSSS”:http://rsss.anu.edu.au/ for a couple of months. Despite the “social sciences” contained in that acronym, it looks as though I’ll be “surrounded by ontologists”:http://philrsss.anu.edu.au/ the whole time.

Harry’s piece on Christopher Hitchens prompted me to collect some thoughts about him. I briefly reviewed Letters to a Young Contrarian a few years ago (along with Lilla’s “The Reckless Mind: Intellectuals in Politics) and found plenty both to like (the gadfly’s unwillingness to accept evasions and easy answers) and to dislike (the tendency to vendetta, epitomised by his campaign against Clinton).

That was when he was still on the Left. Having signed up with Bush, Hitchens has found his talent for vendetta in high demand, but the Bushies aren’t too keen on hard truths. So we get pieces like this one on the Bush Administration’s backing for the Uzbekistan dictator Karimov, notable for the observation

The United States did not invent or impose the Karimov government: It “merely” accepted its offer of strategic and tactical help in the matter of Afghanistan

This phraseology is, or ought to be, familiar – it’s virtually identical to rhetoric defending or downplaying the Reagan Administration’s embrace (metaphorical and, in Rumsfeld’s case, literal) of Saddam during the 1980s, when his foreign wars and internal oppression killed vast numbers of people (Google “US did not create Saddam” or “Did not install Saddam” for examples)[1].
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Nice to know that our trade union apparatchiks are in tune with their membership. AUT Vice-President Gargi Bhattacharyya has “a piece in the Guardian”:http://education.guardian.co.uk/higher/columnist/story/0,9826,1502676,00.html that seems to be arguing (though the article’s rambling incoherence makes it hard to be sure) that “academic freedom” is a kind of fantasy which probably gets in the way of fighting for better pay and conditions, but that, sadly, it is a fantasy to which academics are rather attached. The lesson of the AUT boycott is, apparently, that union activists upset this world of myth and illusion at their peril, so they’d better be more careful in future. Just as Christmas would be ruined if parents told their children that Santa doesn’t exist, AUT leaders better pay lip service (for purely pragmatic reasons) to the values their members actually hold!

When I learned that Ohio Republicans had (cough) “invested” $50 million of public funds in rare coins and collectables controlled by a highly connected Republican fundraiser, I thought, this doesn’t look good. When it turned out that $10 to $12 million was missing from the rare-coin kitty, I had similar thoughts. Then, when I saw that the Ohio Bureau of Workers’ Compensation had agreed to turn their long-bond fund into a highly-leveraged hedge fund, which ended up losing $225 million out of $350 million, I thought, this is a real problem. The fact that Governor Taft’s office had been informed in October, and was apparently waiting for the $225 Million Fairy to fill the hole, didn’t help. I found myself agreeing with Atrios that it was maybe time for some new leadership in Ohio.

Luckily, I caught myself in time. What was I doing wallowing in this kind of negativity? Heck, I might as wear a “Party of No” T-shirt and march down Main Street! After all, my guys lost. The voters of Ohio supported the positive Republican agenda of pissing away hundreds of millions of dollars of taxpayer funds. What ideas do Democrats have? Just leaving the money in secure investments? Wow, guys, way to fire up the electorate. I must record new-age music for Windham Hill, cause I’m getting all yawny.

If there’s one thing that I’ve learned from the helpful Democratic strategists at the GOP, it’s that America hates negativity. So I’m hoping that the brain trust here can help come up with a positive agenda about how the Democrats should deal with this. A Democratic proposal for bake sales and bikini car washes will do a lot more to turn those frowns upside down than loose talk of “resignations” and “basic oversight”. I’m going to get started on my self-esteem boosting pamphlet, “So You’ve Lost $235 Million of Other People’s Money”, right after I deal with this crack in my desk that I somehow caused with my forehead.

I’ve just spotted via Fistful of Euros‘ blogroll that Richard Corbett, a Member of the European Parliament, has a “blog”:http://www.corbett-euro.demon.co.uk/blog/. While this will mean absolutely nothing to 99% of CT readers, Corbett is one of the most interesting figures in EU politics. Over the last twenty years, the Parliament has been extraordinarily successful in “grabbing new competences”:http://www.henryfarrell.net/governance.pdf – often in the teeth of opposition from the Council (which represents the interests of the member states in day-to-day law making). Corbett has been one of the key figures in the Parliament’s ascent to power – he’s got an extraordinarily keen sense for how dull-sounding procedures can be manipulated to produce substantive political gains. His blog, unsurprisingly, is vigorously in favour of more European integration – but he makes points that nicely undermine some of the common wisdom on the EU in the English speaking world. For one nice example, see his post arguing (correctly) that “France”:http://www.corbett-euro.demon.co.uk/blog/2005/05/common-wisdom-has-it-that-france-has.html has never been as pro-European as it’s to be; by and large, it’s only been in favour of those bits of the EU that directly benefit French interests. For another, see this “one”:http://www.corbett-euro.demon.co.uk/blog/2005/06/adam-smith-institute-is-right-leaning.html, which links to a report from the frothing right-wingers in the Adam Smith Institute arguing in favour of “dumping UK business regulation”:http://www.adamsmith.org/publications/pdf-files/Deregulation.pdf in favour of a reliance on EU Regulations (which they also propose to reform to make more business friendly). There’s a widely spread belief in the US and UK that the EU is a vast, all-devouring Socialist Moloch. In fact, its primary goal over the last twenty years has been to build a single marketplace and dismantle national regulation (often, in so doing, weakening the ability of member states to maintain traditional forms of social-democratic control of the market). If you’re interested in EU politics, this is definitely going to be a very useful blog.