August 2006

I’m really very sorry to hear the news of the death of Robbie Wokler. Wokler may well have known as much about the life and work of Jean-Jacques Rousseau as anyone of the past half century. Sadly, much of that knowledge never made it into print, as Wokler was often reluctant to hand over final versions of his work to editors. Maybe there is material that will emerge. His essays, though, on Rousseau — and on the Enlightenment more generally — were often brilliant, insightful, iconoclastic and scholarly, all at the same time. He was a lively character, who often asked questions at conferences in a pretty robust manner, and was often willing to share a few drinks afterwards. I’m glad to have had the opportunity to learn from him a little. There’s “an obituary in the Times”:http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,60-2296552,00.html , I’ll add more as an when I hear of them. UPDATE: Josh Cherniss has “a fine appreciation”:http://www.guardian.co.uk/obituaries/story/0,,1856123,00.html in the Guardian.

Following on from last week’s post on Hezbollah’s War Crimes, it would seem appropriate to follow up with a discussion of the actions of the state of Israel with respect to the Geneva Conventions. Human Rights Watch has an excellent and thoroughly-researched report on the subject of whether the civilian casualties in Lebanon have been the result of collateral damage to legitimate military actions, or whether there have been instances of illegitimate, intentional or excessive violence against civilians. It concludes that there is certainly a case to answer. There is also the issue of whether the war crime of “reprisals” has been committed – the carrying out of acts of violence against civilians in order to put pressure on their government to carry out some desired course of action, which is of course called “terrorism” when non-state actors do it.

I had prepared a post on this subject, but the Human Rights Watch report is so much more thorough that I think it’s better to base discussion on that (by the way, the comments on the Hezbollah war crimes post were very civilised and intelligent, let’s repeat that). My summary of the report’s conclusions would be that the proposition that the IDF “takes the utmost care to minimise civilian casualties” has been falsified to a high degree of certainty, and even the weaker claim that the IDF does not intentionally target civilians looks a lot less certain than one would previously have believed. The attacks on infrastructure such as the LibanLait dairy look not at all like legitimate attempts to shut down Hezbollah and very much like attempts to intimidate the Lebanese population; unless we are prepared to postulate a truly colossal series of blunders, it looks very bad indeed.

Israel has in the past been able to maintain, with some justification, that there can be no “moral equivalence” between its actions and those of the terrorists; an important point when the physical effects of the IDF’s actions have been so many more deaths than the physical effects of terrorism. Whatever the jus ad bellum, this issue of jus in bello matters a lot, and speculation about the long term genocidal aims of the President of Iran simply cannot justify war crimes now. The gradual disintegration of the clear distinctions between the conduct in war of Israel and that of its enemies, which are very important in maintaining Israel’s international diplomatic reputation, ought to worry the Israeli government a lot more than it apparently does.

My new book, Last Best Gifts: Altruism and the Market for Human Blood and Organs has just been published by the University of Chicago Press. You can buy it from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Powells or of course any bookseller worth the name. There’s a website for the book, too. Amongst other things, there you can learn more about the cover image, which the people at Chicago did such a nice job with after I came across it by chance.

The book is a study of the social organization of exchange in human blood and organs. In a nutshell, it tries to show that gift exchange can do both more and less than we think when it comes to organizing the blood and organ supply: more, because there’s a lot of heterogeneity in actually-existing systems of donation. Some countries and regions do much better than others, and, in many cases (especially cadaveric donation), market incentives would probably not work any better. But also less, because gift exchange is not some magical mechanism for generating social solidarity out of thin air, especially in a procurement system that is increasingly rationalized and globalized. The book argues that the consequences of rationalizing the blood and organ supply are in many ways more important than the consequences of commodifying it. In particular, the logistical demands of procurement systems — short-run, nuts-and-bolts stuff about finding bodies and procuring organs — are in tension with the public account of donation as a sacred gift of life.

I’d like to think that the book has something new to contribute to the ongoing debate about commodifying human blood, organs and tissues. And I’d like to think that it’s written in an accessible and engaging way. And while I’m waiting for UPS to deliver my pony, I’d like you all to go and buy it, not just for yourself, but for your friends, and for the sake of this small kitten beside me. You wouldn’t want anything bad to happen to the kitten, would you?

“Alex Tabarrok”:http://www.marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2006/08/fiasco.html

bq. In Fiasco Thomas Ricks’ says the war on Iraq and subsequent occupation was ill-conceived, incompetently planned and poorly executed. I have no quarrel with that. What dismays me is that anyone expected any different. All wars are full of incompetence, mendacity, fear, and lies. War is big government, authoritarianism, central planning, command and control, and bureaucracy in its most naked form and on the largest scale. The Pentagon is the Post Office with nuclear weapons. If this war has been worse on these scores than others, _and I have my doubts_, we can at least be thankful that the scale of death and destruction has been smaller. At the Battle of the Somme there were a million casualties and 300,000 deaths over the course of a few months. If we remember previous wars more fondly this is only because those wars we won. Incompetent planning and poor execution are not fatal so long as the other side plans and executes yet more incompetently. Is this a suggestion to put the current war in context? Not at all. It is suggestion to put government in context.

This is not a good argument. That the massive bureaucracies of war involve waste and duplication is undeniable (although history doesn’t give us any reason whatsoever to believe that markets would do a better job). But to say that the incompetence with which the Iraq war was conducted was simply business as usual is not only to get Rumsfeld _et al._ off the hook for the quite specifically personal incompetence that they displayed and are still displaying. It’s to make a general claim that can’t be supported using the evidence that you claim is supporting it. An incompetently conducted war does not a general case against government make. Indeed, if you wanted to make a polemic case for a strong state and _against_ market reforms, you could quite easily use post-war Iraq as an example of how “massive contracting-out of military work to private actors”:http://www.guardian.co.uk/international/story/0,3604,1103566,00.html, “mass demobilization of an army”:http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A63423-2003Nov19?language=printer and “privatization and free trade”:http://www.harpers.org/BaghdadYearZero.html lead inevitably to political disaster. Not that I believe the Iraq experience actually supports so sweeping a claim – while the decisions in question all were bad ones in the context of post-war Iraq, this context is not generalizable. The argument that post-war Iraq demonstrates the badness of privatization everywhere would be a very poor argument indeed. But then, so is the argument that the Iraq war demonstrates the badness of government everywhere.

… The Rolling Stones weren’t original. Bach wasn’t original. Einstein wasn’t original. Show me someone who is original, creative, self-expressive, and I’ll show you someone who is boring.

Originality, creativity and self-expression dumb people down. Platonism dumbs people up. Platonism is the biggest dumbing-up exercise in the history of civilisation.

Think in terms of the Platonic Realm. Say you are painting a picture. The picture exists in the Platonic Realm. It is a perfect picture, and it is beautiful. Your job is to depict it as best you can. For you to do this demands that you be a technician – you must know how to use paints, know about perspective, and so on.

It demands that you paint selflessly. It demands that you paint objectively. Originality doesn’t come into it. The picture was there before you existed.

I don’t care if Platonism is metaphysical moonshine. The point is that all human achievement revolves around Platonism …

Read the rest, from the Telegraph.

Thanks for the many helpful recommendations given in response to my request last week about enduring a long flight without losing too much of the next day. I suspect the lack of time-zone change from Chicago to Buenos Aires helped quite a bit, but I would like to think my master preparedness was useful, too. Below the fold I have summarized the list of recommendations for future reference.

I did end up taking an hour-long nap after I got to Buenos Aires, but then was well-equipped to spend a good chunk of Saturday exploring the city. And what a fabulous city it is! It was my first time in Argentina, but after this visit I am convinced it was not the last.

As a side note on how some people try to make a long-distance relationship work, consider the story of the person sitting next to me on the flight there. He works in DC, but has a wife and young child in Argentina. Twice a month he gets on a plane Friday evening for the ten-hour flight to Buenos Aires to spend less than 48 hours with his family returning Sunday night so he can be back at work on Monday morning. Ouch.

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I’m still not entirely comfortable about assuming that CT readers are necessarily interested in the stuff I put on the Guardian blog. But this bit on the current attempt by the UK government to stop people pretending to be Plymouth Brethren in order to take advantage of a tax loophole given to them (no really) is pretty ontopic. I’m more interested in comments about what this says about the politics of tax policy than in boilerplate rants about why the government shouldn’t give any special treatment to religious groups, so I thought that having two comments sections on this piece would give me two chances of not having the discussion end up going that way.

The Guardian has “a piece by Julian Borger”:http://commentisfree.guardian.co.uk/julian_borger/2006/08/post_279.html on the different versions of the Lebanon war being presented to British and American audiences. It seems that British reporters have focused far more on the the sufferings of the Lebanese, with lots of eyewitness interviews with distressed people there, whereas the Americans have concentrated far more on the perpective from the bomb-shelters in northern Israel.

Via “Larry Solum”:http://lsolum.typepad.com/legaltheory/2006/08/iris_marion_you.html, Iris Marion Young died two days ago, on July 31. I had known that she was ill with cancer over the last couple of years – it doesn’t seem to have slowed her writing down. She criticized liberal theory from a perspective that seemed to me to be both tougher and more attractive than communitarianism, focusing on the ways in which liberal remedies failed to address enduring structural inequalities. She liked the ways in which cities fostered diversity – her best book, _Justice and the Politics of Difference_, drew as much on sociologists of the city like Richard Sennett as on political theory. I don’t have any personal anecdotes – I never met her – but I liked and admired her work very much indeed.

Update: obituary “here”:http://www-news.uchicago.edu/releases/06/060802.young.shtml (thanks to David Kahane in comments)

Now this is what I call “filling the mind with ever new and increasing admiration and awe, the more often and steadily we reflect upon them”.

(Via David R. in e-mail.)

Thomas Medvetz has just published an article in “Politics and Society”:http://pas.sagepub.com/ (my favourite academic journal) that deserves a wide readership; he’s given me permission to “post it”:http://www.henryfarrell.net/weeklyties.pdf temporarily. The piece is about the role that Grover Norquist’s Wednesday meetings play in cementing the conservative movement and indeed, in an important sense, in constituting its identity (Medvetz attended fourteen of these meetings and interviewed several key figures separately). Readers who aren’t familiar with current debates in sociology shouldn’t be put off by the initial theoretical discussion – the points that Medvetz makes in the main part of the article are clear, and easily understood. He’s claiming that these meetings serve a key function in creating a cohesive conservative community, centered on agreement over those things that aren’t open for discussion – babies (abortion), guns and taxes. It also helps conservatives frame issues for wider debates, and constitute themselves as distinct from the wider Republican party – participants frequently criticize centrist Republicans, or those who are too willing to bow to their constituents rather than sticking to conservative principal. Finally, the meetings are a point of exchange among movement conservatives themselves, and between the conservative movement and elected officials – both have something to gain from the other.

Medvetz backs up his story with juicy ethnographic details. His account of the debate over Medicare (beginning on the bottom of p.354) is a highly valuable piece of political history. A Heritage Foundation fellow denounced the forthcoming legislation as a massive expansion in government. The White House, aware that this was in the offing (and that conservatives were highly suspicious of the legislation), sent Doug Badger to make the positive case for the legislation. He and Newt Gingrich claimed that the legislation should be seen as an important incremental step towards privatizing healthcare and dismantling the welfare state. Gingrich’s argument that the healthcare bill was a victory for conservatism seemed to win his audience over. This account is a lovely illustration of Jacob Hacker’s “argument”:http://www.staatlichkeit.uni-bremen.de/download/de/ueber/gast_hacker.pdf about the new politics of welfare state entrenchment. It also serves as a capsule account of what the conservative movement has become today. Great stuff – go read it.

(via “Dan Nexon”:http://duckofminerva.blogspot.com/2006/07/academic-articles-make-strange.html)

Feel like getting really angry? Go read this Pandagon post and the zuzu post at Feministe it refers to. And the comments. From Amanda:

Zuzu at Feministe, in trying to write a normal blog post on how this case is being blown up to bolster racist fears, ran into this problem when some of their regular commenters started to bleat about how Moore has only herself to blame for what they considered the outrageous behavior of being young and leaving the house to have fun. Always these people say they mean well, of course, but in this case, the commenter slipped up and showed the true purpose of her bleating:

I don’t know about the whole race thing you’re getting at, but I agree that the coverage seems to be trying to force her into the victim role. It’s tragic what happened, but Jennifer made a number of really stupid decisions that are not terribly sympathetic (to me, at least). Driving into manhattan to get tanked (while underage no less), then not calling parents or authorities for help when she and her friend got stranded was profoundly bad judgment.

You read that right. People are “trying to force…into the victim role” a person who was raped, murdered, and then dismembered and left in a dumpster. I know that there is strong psychological pressure to find some reason why someone else was raped, a reason you could avoid. If I just do this and don’t do this and… Why? Because it’s just really scary to think that you might become a victim for no reason at all. People feel that if they can just do some magical thinking they will stay in the not-victim chalk circle and everything will be OK. The problem is not that women sometimes get drunk or go dancing or get into cars with strangers because someone threatening is following them down a dark city street. The problem is the rapists and murderers. Keep your eyes on the ball, people. Now let’s have the comments thread degenerate into a pointless discussion of what women should be doing to avoid getting raped, because god knows I’ve never heard any of that before. C’mon, Steve, advocate concealed carry! [NB: I am not actually particularly opposed to concealed carry laws (or Steve!), but I don’t think they would put a dent in the US rape rate, because most people are raped by someone they know and no one is likely to tote their pistol around from room to room in their own goddamn house while they talk with a friend. Which nonsensical behavior is also not relevant to concealed carry. And I don’t want to hear about it at all.]

The term “conservative” gets bandied about a lot these days, and readers may wonder where it comes from. Jason DeParle in the NYT has the answer. It was invented by one Russell Kirk in 1953. DeParle’s opening para (“lede” in US newsspeak) introduces us to

Russell Kirk, the celebrated writer who a half-century ago gave the conservative movement its name

and elaborates later on

Kirk, who died in 1994, wrote 32 books, the most famous being “The Conservative Mind,” which was published in 1953. It championed 150 years of conservative thought, and offered “conservative” as a unifying label for the right’s disparate camps.

I must say, it’s a great term, offering a neat contrast with “progressive”. Surprising nobody came up with it earlier, really.

Maurice Manning has an excellent piece in today’s Irish Times (pay-walled) marking the 80th birthday of Declan Costello. Costello wrote ‘Towards a Just Society’ in the 1960s. The pamphlet re-defined Irish politics in terms of social justice, energised a new generation of activists, and probably cost Costello a Cabinet position when Fine Gael got back into power in 1973. Some of the ideas of the Just Society – especially its emphasis on direct government intervention in the economy – seem outdated today. But Costello helped to make Fine Gael a Christian democrat party, back when that meant something more than fighting stem cell research and gay marriage.
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