June 2006

I want to flag an issue which I seem to have noticed in a variety of liberal egalitarian writings on global justice, namely the cut that philosophers and theorists often make between entitlement to land and natural resources on the one hand, and entitlement to socially created stuff on the other.[1] Liberal egalitarians usually reject any kind of libertarian finders-keepers principle with respect to the first category of goods. But in relation to the second, they often argue for the right of insiders to exclude outsiders from access to those goods that are the collective historical creation of the insiders’ political entity.[2] What follows is just a bit of thinking aloud: there are a lot of uncrossed ts and undotted is. I’d welcome both constructive comments and pointers to relevant papers.

This natural/social cut looks wrong and insufficiently motivated to me. With respect to natural resources and land, I guess the background thought might be that these resources come as manna from heaven, as it were, so that all of the worlds people and peoples have an original equal claim to them. We can then argue about the right way of progressing from that claim to operational property rights, but it is easy to see how arguments for (e.g.) something like a global resources dividend can go: those who actually use the resources need to compensate the others who share their original equal entitlement for that use.[3] The difficulty I see is this: that social resources also come as unequally distributed manna from heaven to each new generation. Those who inherit stable institutions, a culture conducive to economic growth etc., look to be just as arbitrarily lucky with respect to those resources as those (Norwegians for example) who are lucky with respect to the discovery of natural resources on their territory. So why not deal with the two kinds of resources in the same way: that is, initially posit an equal original right of all to ownership, and sanction transfers to those who have been comparatively unlucky in the initial distribution?

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OK, it’s “dumpster-diving”:https://crookedtimber.org/2003/12/16/rough-trade/, but I was quite taken with the writing style of this post on the “Arrogance and Evil of Crooked Timber”:http://tjic.com/blog/2006/06/18/the-arrogance-and-evil-of-crooked-timber/.

bq. I’m reading through more and more of the comments now, and the hideous intellectual dishonesty of the leftists continues to alternatively make my blood boil in anger, and run cold in fear of the kinds of totalitarian “reforms” they would make if they ever seized control of society.

The boiling blood running ice cold and then boiling up again makes for quite an arresting metaphor. But then, don’t watery liquids simultaneously boil and freeze in the vacuum of deep outer space? (perhaps the author is trying to tell us something about where he’s dialing in from).

Quite a few people have commented in John Derbyshire’s apology for supporting the war in Iraq.

I haven’t seen anyone deny Derbyshire’s suggestion regarding his National Review colleagues who still publicly support the war that

If wired up to a polygraph and asked the question: “Supposing you could wind the movie back to early 2003, would you still attack Iraq?” any affirmative answers would have those old needles a-jumping and a-skipping all over the graph paper.

but then I haven’t looked hard. I’d be interested if anyone can point to any examples [1].

My main interest, like that of many others is in Derbyshire’s reason for recanting his support. While he wanted a war with Iraq, his idea was that the US should drop a lot of bombs, demonstrate that it’s a power to be feared and then leave, without wasting time on futile projects like nation-building. As lots of commenters have pointed out, Derbyshire’s position is worse, in moral terms, than that of most of those who continue to support the war.

It does however, raise some important issues that go to the heart of the debate between supporters and opponents of the Iraq war and the debate over war and peace in general.

In the leadup to the Iraq war, many different arguments were presented for and against going to war, and many different predictions were made about the likely consequences of war. People supported war for a range of reasons, some of which were logically inconsistent, and the same was true of people who opposed war. Many people made many predictions, many of which turned out to be wrong. However, there is a fundamental asymmetry here.

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When I was first told by my wife about this story, I expected it would turn out to be an Internet factoid, probably much-circulated, melding the old stories of paintings hung upside down, works painted by ducks and hailed as masterpieces, and so on. But the Independent’s account gives chapter and verse. The Royal Academy, having received a sculpture by one David Hensel with the plinth packed separately, decided to reject the sculpture and exhibit the plinth.

“Megan McArdle”:http://www.janegalt.net/blog/archives/005802.html has a go at me for “criticizing the _Economist_”:https://crookedtimber.org/2006/06/16/ducking-under/ in my last post. Fair enough that she should want to stick up for her employer, but her argument seems to me to be (a) an attempt to duck the issue, and (b) preposterous.

bq. Note that The Economist, whose reporters extensively research and fact check their claims, is automatically full of [expletive deleted]. A New York TImes columnist who turns in 700 words twice a week consisting, in this case, apparently largely of reprinting the press releases of the Smithfield plant union organisers, is an unimpeachable source. Opinion columnists: reliable fonts of disimpassioned analysis. Reporters who spend weeks working on a story: partisan hacks. … This is not to slam opinion columnists, who I often enjoy. But having written reported stories, and opinion columns, I know that the standards for the latter are a tad more loose. No one ever challenges an opinion columnist to be balanced, fair, or even defend his facts, unless they’re of the “The Holocaust never happened!” variety. Reported pieces, on the other hand, get checked down to the spelling of the names, and then gleefully interrogated by editors and other reporters who disagree with you. When I see an opinion piece, I know that all the inconvenient facts have been left out so they won’t annoy the reader. When I read a reported piece, for all the complaining about the MSM in the blogosphere, I know that the editors and the writer are at least nominally interested in the truth, not the conclusion–at least provided that they work at a mainstream paper, and not one of the money-losing political mags where the editors have to keep the donors happy.

This is an argument from authority, a kind of argument with which Ms. McArdle has a “rather unhappy history”:http://www.kieranhealy.org/blog/archives/2003/05/01/hats-off-to-d-squared/. More to the point – it’s a bogus argument from authority. McArdle’s claim is that newspaper reporters are more authoritative than op-ed writers, because they don’t leave out “all the inconvenient facts,” and because they’re “at least nominally interested in the truth, not the conclusion.” Now this is a claim that I’m prepared to buy, up to a point, with newspapers that maintain a clear separation between editorial content and reportage. The _Wall Street Journal_, for example, does some first rate economic reporting, even if its editorial pages are a cesspit. But as a defence of _The Economist_, it isn’t even laughable; it’s pitiable. _The Economist_ has never sought to disguise the fact that it’s a magazine with a strong pro-free market agenda, which pervades not only its editorial content, but its reporting. It doesn’t try to present both sides of the question and never has; its reportage is shot through with opinionated assertions and undefended value judgments about the need for “reform” of lamentably social-democratic West European countries, to marketize the education system &c&c&c. Nor does it tend to report developments which might call its preferred policy stances into question with any great degree of enthusiasm. Now there’s absolutely nothing wrong with that in principle – I’m obviously in favour of strongly opinionated political writing, or I wouldn’t do it myself. But it certainly doesn’t put _Economist_ reporters in a very good place to criticize op-ed writers and political magazine journalists, or more generally to assume a lofty position from which they may criticize the pell-mell of ideologically driven debate beneath. The activities that op-ed writers and _Economist_ reporters are engaged in aren’t nearly as far removed from each other as Ms. McArdle might wish to suggest.

Which brings us to the more particular matter under discussion. Herbert’s piece rested on a set of factual claims – if she wants to take issue with the article, she should, one would think, concentrate on whether these claims are in fact correct, rather than appealing to general arguments about the inferiority of op-ed writers. My original post suggested precisely that “inconvenient facts have been left out so they won’t annoy the reader.” As I claimed, if you want to take an undocumented immigrant worker’s experience in Smithfield Foods’ meatprocessing plant as a proxy for the Mexican-American dream, it’s hardly irrelevant that Smithfield Foods has an established track record of abusing aforementioned undocumented immigrant workers’ rights, and threatening to report them to immigration authorities if they should dare to organize themselves. If this isn’t an “inconvenient fact” for the Economist‘s preferred narrative, I’m not sure what would be.

Where do FIFA find these guys?

I really hope the Yanks hold out for a draw.

I’m not sure what it is about Italian footballers that inspires sheer loathing. Their Oscar-worthy acting? The purity of their cynicism? Whatever it is they’ve got it to burn.

Final whistle. Well done the U.S.

The Economist really should have gone elsewhere for this week’s Horatio Alger story about undocumented immigrants making good in the American economy.
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This is almost too much – it really is painful. If you haven’t seen Rep. Lynn Westmoreland on Stephen Colbert’s show, watch it … if you dare! (I must say, I am curious what the tape looks like unedited.)

I admit that I doubted Colbert could sustain his character or make the show interesting for long – who would want to appear on it? I stand corrected.

The other day Matt Yglesias “said”:http://yglesias.typepad.com/matthew/2006/06/world_cup.html that the continuous flow of the game (and the fatuous American commentators) make it hard for him to learn what’s happening in a soccer match. “Here’s a masterclass”:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hhuRMiDz63w from Argentina, who beat Serbia & Montenegro 6-0 this morning.

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Rob Capriccioso of Inside Higher Ed reports on what Glenn Reynolds of InstaPundit, Markos Moulitsas Zúniga of Daily Kos and Jessica Coen of Gawker think about college students’ lack of interest in political blogs and Beltway gossip.

While I appreciate that they are happy with students spending their time on things other than politics, their responses ignore the fact that students do follow news, they just don’t do so on political blogs. All of the responses present time spent on these blogs as competition for time spent having fun with friends. However, findings from the survey suggest that students do follow current events (59% look up local or national news daily or weekly; 44% look up international news that frequently) so it’s not as though students only care about sex and beer. Granted, the survey doesn’t ask about the specific type of news they follow, but chances are that some of the material overlaps with topics covered on these blogs.

Additional info in the article includes my response to the inevitable question: “What about porn?”.

Thought that this recent “Julian Sanchez”:http://juliansanchez.com/notes/archives/2006/06/when_is_hate_speech_funny.php post provided an interesting way to think about the “back-and-forth misunderstandings”:https://crookedtimber.org/2006/06/15/i-laughed-till-i-cried/ over dsquared and Harry Hutton as eliminationist Coulteroids. The key bit …

bq. So it seems like you might find racist/religious/sexist/etc epithets or jokes in two very different kinds of context: First, sincerely, among actual racists, sexists, and other bigots. Second, in groups where there’s a strong taboo against those actual attitudes, but the people communicating are sufficiently confident of themselves and each other on that score that boundary-pushing results in that all-clear humor reaction. The problem on the Internet, of course, is that you often end up with a forum that feels like a small close knit community but is actually available to thousands of casual readers—a tension I expect we’ll be negotiating for a long while yet. Anyway, that might be one reason you find the kind of rhetoric the Feministe folk were so appalled by in particular among the blogs and chat boards of the left, where people are both especially likely to be conscious of speech taboos and confident that everyone’s actually got the right sorts of views.

(although I should make it clear that I don’t think it’s the whole explanation for what Sanchez is talking about – I suspect that some purportedly leftwing blog commenters _do_ have genuinely misogynistic views etc).

bq. I had been eyeing the cakes in the cafe for some time, but I decide sadly that to order one would be seen as a sign of moral weakness and that now is not the moment.

From Jackie Ashley’s “interview with Mel P”:http://books.guardian.co.uk/departments/politicsphilosophyandsociety/story/0,,1798994,00.html , in the Guardian (via “Matt T”:http://www.matthewturner.co.uk/Blog/ ).

I vaguely recall an anecdote about Reagan (?) meeting with Brezhnev/Gorbachev (?) and amiably suggesting that the US and USSR would easily set aside their differences, fighting shoulder to shoulder if aliens invaded the earth. Can anyone give me a cite? I’m writing something about Carl Schmitt, friend/enemy, you understand.

“As usual”:http://www.slate.com/id/2139458/, “Radley”:http://www.theagitator.com/archives/026693.php#026693 “Balko”:http://www.cato.org/new/pressrelease.php?id=34 is the man “to consult”:http://www.theagitator.com/archives/026686.php#026686 on the “Hudson vs Michigan”:http://www.supremecourtus.gov/opinions/05pdf/04-1360.pdf case, which concerns the constitutionality of no-knock police raids. (Balko is even cited on p.10 of “Breyer’s dissent”:http://www.law.cornell.edu/supct/pdf/04-1360P.ZD.) Today’s decision basically says evidence obtained from no-knock raids is admissible in court. The broader implication, as Balko says, is that “there is now no effective penalty for police who conduct illegal no-knock raids.” By the by, Scalia, writing for the majority, is happy to set his originalism aside and argue that the growth of “public-interest law firms and lawyers who specialize in civil-rights grievances … [and] the increasing professionalism of police forces, including a new emphasis on internal police discipline … [and] the increasing use of various forms of citizen review can enhance police accountability” all mean that the fourth amendment can be reinterpreted.