Atrios used to have those fine bits of poetry, threadbare from overuse. "He draweth out the thread of his verbosity finer than the staple of his argument," etc. Now he just says ‘yeah, yeah, another stupid open thread.’ What with timezones, that’s all I ever see at the top of the page when I visit. Let’s see if memory and google can do better.
From the monthly archives:
April 2006
I don’t have much more to say about the Mearsheimer/Walt controversy, but I do want to point readers to this “blogpost”:http://jacobtlevy.blogspot.com/2006_04_02_jacobtlevy_archive.html#114437688320082488 by Jacob Levy, who has resumed occasional blogging at his old Blogspot account. Jacob’s critique seems to me to have Mearsheimer and Walt dead to rights – while I don’t believe that Mearsheimer and Walt are guilty of anti-Semitism, I do think that their argument is fundamentally flawed, as Jacob illustrates at length.
The core of the paper’s difficulty has little to do with Israel or Jews and a great deal to do with its core purpose. M&W are committed to the neorealist view that powerful states act in their security interest. They’re also, independently, committed to opposition to the Iraq War and to what they see as U.S. overreach in the Middle East; they think that the U.S. does not effectively pursue its security interests in the region. So there’s a puzzle, an anomaly– of their own making. If you are both committed to a predictive theory and committed to an interpretation of a particular case by which it falsifies your theory, then there’s a puzzle for your views, but not yet a puzzle about the world. They proceed to address this puzzle with a slippery– I do not say sloppy– ambiguity between explanatory and evaluative claims.
bq. The mere existence of the Lobby suggests that unconditional support for Israel is not in the American national interest. If it was, one would not need an organized special interest to bring it about.
This is, I think, the worst paragraph of political science I’ve read in many years. The best, most-justified policies don’t automatically spring into being at the end of the policy-making process. An all-things-considered judgment that X is the best policy is essentially irrelevant to one’s ability to predict whether or not X will be adopted. … The snarky way to put it is: M&W treat their say-so about strategic and moral considerations as if it was naturally entitled to such overwhelming political deference that the fact that the polity hasn’t accepted their say-so is deeply anomalous. The probably-fairer way to put it is: M&W proceed as if the political system has some very strong natural tendency to reach true beliefs and justified policies about strategy and morality– such a strong tendency that, if it fails in some case, there must be an unusual explanation, such as an unusually intense and effective Lobby that includes people willing to deliberately place the interests of a foreign power over that of their own country, and that includes powerful politicians, media figures, and so on who can make their preferred policies come about.
NB – comments that veer into general discussion of the Israel/Palestine debate will be ruthlessly expunged as soon as I see them.
People speaking in some official capacity should always take care what they say, because they aren’t just speaking for themselves. The higher up the ladder you go, the more care you have to take. Most of the time inappropriate comments don’t even raise a laugh. So it’s hard not to feel a twinge of sympathy when someone is — rightly — made to apologize for having said something that’s actually funny. In this case it’s “Police Chief Constable John Vine”:http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/scotland/4913866.stm who, when speaking to the Perth Bar Association in Scotland, told a joke about Al Qaeda fathers chatting about their suicide-bomber sons. One says wistfully to the other, “Kids blow up so quickly these days.”
The peculiar British tendency that is the “decent Left” numbers among its sacred texts Paul Berman’s Terror and Liberalism. One of the most prominent Eustonian thinkers, the columnist Nick Cohen, has even mentioned Berman’s book as the reason for his own epiphany. But is it any good? Over at Aaronovitch Watch the Cous Cous Kid has been directing his attention to Berman’s work and noticing that the accounts Berman gives of other people’s ideas, of religion, and of historical events, ought to have impressed Cohen somewhat less than they did.
CCKs’ review is split into seven parts, so the easiest way to read his text is just to visit the site and scroll down. But for archive purposes, I also give the links to each part below.
Yale University Press has just released Yochai Benkler’s _The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom_. You can buy it at “Powells”:http://www.powells.com/partner/29956/s?kw=Wealth%20of%20Networks%20Benkler, and Amazon, but it’s also available from Benkler under “Creative Commons”:http://www.benkler.org/wealth_of_networks/index.php/Main_Page with an associated wiki. There’ll be more about this book on CT soon – for the moment, suffice to say that I think that this is a really important book, not only for people interested in the politics of technology, but for people interested in left or liberal politics more generally. It fizzes with ideas.
The _Economist_ gives us “yet another rendition”:http://www.economist.com/opinion/displayStory.cfm?story_id=6800698 of “Western Europeans have it too good to realize how badly they need reform.”
bq. Another great week for Europe: Things must get more hellish in Italy and France before they stand any chance of getting better
bq. THEY are two seemingly unconnected events, but they yield a common, depressing conclusion. The events were the decision by France’s government to tear up its controversial law creating a more flexible job contract for the young, and the razor-edge outcome of Italy’s rancorous election. The conclusion: the core countries of Europe are not ready to make the economic reforms they so desperately need—and that change, alas, will come only after a diabolic economic crisis. … their voters are not yet ready to swallow the nasty medicine of change … too many cosseted insiders … The real problem, not just for Italy and France but also for Germany, is that, so far, life has continued to be too good for too many people: there is not yet a general consensus that their economies are in serious trouble … There is one depressingly certain way to remedy the failings in the core European countries: to bring on a more serious economic crisis. This week will surely have brought that a lot closer.
This combines a few arguments that are true and important (there _are_ problems of equity with sclerotic labour markets that discriminate against the young) with much that is quite bizarre – the claim that Europe’s fundamental difficulty is that “life has continued to be too good for too many people.” Would that we all had such problems. Most interesting, perhaps, is the mode of analysis that the Economist‘s editorial writer employs – the suggestion that what we need is a _really nasty crisis_ to alert people to their real interests. Which is a dolled up version of the old Marxist trope that we need (as David Lodge’s Fulvia Morgana puts it) to ‘eighten ze contradictions’ if we are to bring through the revolution. Keynes famously quipped that those “who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influences, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist.” The _Economist_, which appears to believe that there’s no intellectual debate “to the left of the New Republic”:http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2006/03/brad_setser_is_.html owes rather more to defunct Marxist theorists than it imagines.
Like many a youngish man with a NetFlix subscription, I’ve taken advantage of the enormous NetFlix back catalog to catch up on film classics that I’ve heard about but never seen. Also, like many a youngish man, I’ve had a creeping feeling that I was born too late to get much pleasure out of some of them. Some films have been so influential that they’ve entered the bloodstream of cinema, and their innovations feel like cliches now. Some were made for an audience with different expectations than mine about pace and acting style. (I don’t think we’ll ever see another movie star like Rock Hudson, for example.) Some are just not for me. (Sorry, Gone With The Wind.)
Of course, this is not always true. I’d be interested to hear about movies that were released ten or more years before your birth that you genuinely enjoyed, rather than appreciated. Here are a few of mine:
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I’ve been traveling a lot recently (four locations in the last week), which has given me new opportunities to find interesting gender signs. A twist on the topic I hadn’t explored much before is whether taking care of children is assumed to be a female responsibility. I found a couple of examples recently that suggested inclusivity. At the San Francisco airport, both men’s and women’s restrooms show a diaper-changing image. At JFK, there was a separate area for families.
FYI, the gender signs pool on Flickr has over 100 photos now. Don’t be shy, join in on the fun. Or for a different type of fun, try to figure out what this restroom sign means. (I’ve explained it in the comments to the image so only read that if you’re ready for the solution.)
I linked to a piece by Steven Poole last week, and here he is again with “a terrific review of recent books”:http://unspeak.net/C226827506/E20060412142020/index.html by sages left and right. That whole “Enlightenment” theme is given some attention:
bq. Take your seats, ladies and gentlemen, for a clash of incompatible fantasies. According to the conservative essayists in Decadence, a misty golden age of “genuine virtue” has passed, to be replaced by bogus slogans and psychobabble. This is all the fault of the Enlightenment. But here comes Frank Furedi in Politics of Fear, arguing that conservatives no longer appeal to tradition, and that the problem is that we have turned our back on the Enlightenment. Evidently, both these views cannot be right.
Read the whole thing, as someone-or-other often says.
I admit that I’m not a regular reader of Randy Cohen’s column for the NY Times Magazine, “The Ethicist.” But the hostility that some of my colleagues express is surprising. There are many complaints, some of which are absurd on their face. What to make of the criticism that his column doesn’t give readers the opportunity to engage in a dialogue? As if our books and papers do? (As it happens, the Magazine now has an on-line forum called “You’re the Ethicist” where people can post comments.) Or the complaint that he sets himself up as an expert, instructing others how to act? He gives his opinion. I can’t believe that anyone slavishly lives their lives according to his instructions. His audience knows that they can accept or reject his judgments based on their own assessment of the reasons he gives.
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Sorry to inflict kid-related anecdotes on you all. However. Scene: Two-year-old sitting in her cot with Teddy and Elmo. She has put a sippy-cup in front of Teddy. Me: “Oh, is Teddy drinking some water?” Pause. Kid: “No.” Me: “Why not?” Kid: “Teddy has no mouth.” Me: “Ah.” Kid: “Elmo has mouth. Elmo drink it.”
Siva Vaidhyanathan has written a very interesting “piece”:http://www.nyu.edu/classes/siva/archives/CriticalInformationStudies.pdf on “Critical Information Studies” – the conversations that have sprung up around intellectual property, new technologies etc – as a form of cultural studies. Among many other interesting things, Siva’s piece points to two aspects of Critical Information Studies that seem (to me; Siva is rather more generous) to be very useful correctives to tendencies within cultural studies as it exists today. One is an emphasis not on bodging together different and incompatible forms of theory, but instead on trying to make them interoperable, through using a vocabulary that doesn’t necessarily span them, but that makes the insights, say, of a computer science professor like Ed Felten intelligible to a legal scholar like Larry Lessig. Second, is a clear connection between theory and praxis – critical information studies is not only devoted to sorting out theory, but pragmatically applying it to change politics through initiatives and organizations like the “Creative Commons”:http://www.creativecommons.org and “Access To Knowledge”:http://www.cptech.org/a2k/. I’d be interested to read what people who are more sympathetic than I am to modern cultural studies (as opposed, to the original work done by Hall, Hoggart etc) think.
I’ve just come from a seminar given by Michael Tierney, who before launching into his paper on the Very Serious Subject of principal-agent relations in multilateral development agencies, encouraged us to visit and contribute to his list of “international relations themed music”:http://mjtier.people.wm.edu/teaching/irplaylist.php. Apparently, he begins his early morning classes by playing a song appropriate to that week’s topic so as to wake up the students. Contributions include “One is the Loneliest Number (Three Dog Night)” for the class on Polarity/Hegemonic Stability Theory and “Peace, Love and Understanding (Elvis Costello)” for Democratic Peace Theory. He pleads for alternative suggestions “to rectify the bad musical tastes of my colleagues,” which are indeed rather impressive. Sounds like exactly the right sort of silliness for a blog’s comment section – I’ll start the ball rolling by suggesting Tom Lehrer’s “MLF Lullaby”:http://www.song-teksten.com/song_lyrics/tom_lehrer/that_was_the_year_that_was/mlf_lullaby/ for a class on multilateral alliances, and indeed that Lehrer’s “We’ll All Go Together When We Go”:http://www.atomicplatters.com/more.php?id=70_0_1_0_M replaces Metallica’s _Blackened_ as the theme song for the week on Nuclear War and Its Consequences.
I’ve promised to give a talk at the local High School on the pre-history of Monty Python’s Flying Circus. This is something I know a depressingly large amount about, not least from endless listening to the nostalgia strands on BBC7. But I wouldn’t have agreed to give a talk on it but for the delightful discovery that there are surviving episodes of both the immediate predecessor shows, Do Not Adjust Your Set
The “decent left” who brought us Unite Against Terror, Labour Friends of Iraq, Democratiya, Engage and any number of other internet fronts, have now launched their “Euston Manifesto”:http://eustonmanifesto.org/joomla/ . Together with lots of general commitments to motherhood and apple pie, there are the usual obsessions: Iraq, Israel, the alleged anti-Americanism and anti-semitism of those who disagree with them. There’s also a the usual whining reinteration of the complaint that they have difficulty in getting their voice heard given the domination of the meeja by their foes. As “Matthew points out”:http://www.matthewturner.co.uk/Blog/2006/04/oh-dear-big-night-in-pub-i-cant.html this is a bit implausible give the cvs of the participants:
bq. Nick Cohen, columnist in the Observer, the Evening Standard and the New Statesman, with the report signed by Francis Wheen, deputy-editor of Private Eye, columnist in the Guardian, John Lloyd, editor of the FT Magazine etc.
Personally, my attention was caught by sections 13 and 14 on “Freedom of Ideas” and “Open Source”. I conducted a search of the Crooked Timber comment logs last weekend wondering if that would reveal the identity of someone who vandalized a Wikipedia page. I discovered that the vandal’s IP address had been used in comments from both from someone who shows up as a prominent signatory of the Manifesto and by a pseudonymous blogger. I can only suppose that, like Hesperus and Phosphorus, they are identical. No doubt the other signatories have a stronger commitment to open source and freedom of ideas.
For futher reaction see “Matthew”:http://www.matthewturner.co.uk/Blog/2006/04/oh-dear-big-night-in-pub-i-cant.html , “Jamie K”:http://bloodandtreasure.typepad.com/blood_treasure/2006/04/by_euston_stati.html and “Mike Power”:http://mikepower.net/mrpower2/2006/3/13/the-whine-approaching-platform-2-is.html .