October 2006

A magazine called Cognitive Dissidents came online several weeks ago, so its long past time that I link to it. The contributors include a core of philosophy grad students from UW Madison, plus other philosophers and intellectuals. It has a magazine rather than a blog format, and promises regular issues rather than the chaotic and teasing semi-regular updating of the blog format. The current issue has several interesting essays on topics ranging from ethical eating through fair trade, global responsibility for poverty and the distinction between war and terrorism to reflections on the relationship between philosophizing and political activism. Worth keeping an eye on.

A close relative of mine has just started a university degree with an economics component and I’m looking to help him out a bit. Since a good few economists and teachers of economics read this blog, I’m interested in what you recommend as a really introductory text aimed at someone with no prior knowledge of the subject. Suggestions in comments, with reasons, and, perhaps some indication of whether the text in question would be a good or bad fit depending on whether the reader has a more mathematical or literary brain.

Not surprisingly, the publication by the Lancet of new estimates suggesting that over 600 000 people have died (mostly violently) in Iraq, relative to what would have been expected based on death rates in the year before the war, has provoked violent controversy. A lot of the questions raised about the earlier survey, estimating 100 000 excess deaths in the first year or so appear to have been resolved. In particular, the lower bound estimate is now around 400 000, so that unless the survey is rejected completely, there can be no doubt about catastrophic casualties.

One number that is striking, but hasn’t attracted a lot of attention is the estimated death rate from air strikes, 13 per cent of the total or between 50 000 and 100 000 people. Around half the estimated deaths in the last year of the survey, from June 2005 to June 2006. That’s at least 25 000 deaths, or more than 70 per day.

Yet reports of such deaths are very rare. If you relied on media reports you could easily conclude that total deaths from air strikes would only be a few thousand for the entire war. The difference between the numbers of deaths implied by the Lancet study and the reports that shape the “gut perceptions” that the Lancet must have got it wrong are nowhere greater than here. So are the numbers plausible?

[click to continue…]

Everyone is much amusing by our President’s proclivity for finding things ‘unacceptable’. (As in: you keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it does.) I got curious whether anyone had made the obvious inversion of Teddy R’s wisdom. Turns out Josh Marshall said it, back in early 2003:

Speak softly and carry a big stick. Or, speak loudly and carry a big stick. Or maybe even speak softly and get by with a small stick. But, for God’s sake, don’t speak loudly and carry a small stick. And yet that’s precisely what President Bush has been doing on the Korean Peninsula issue for two years …

Wait, it’s coming to me in a vision: speak sensibly, and carry a medium-sized stick and a medium-sized carrot (which was the fashion at the time). Damn, we all pretty much miss the Clinton years, don’t we? (You can make jokes about Clinton’s carrot if you like. Doesn’t change a thing.)

I’ve been thinking a lot about the idea that some propositions are self-evident recently. And it is hard to think about this without being reminded of the Declaration of Independence. But I realised when going back over it that I didn’t quite know what Jefferson meant at one crucial point. Maybe this is something completely obvious, or maybe there is some historical literature on this that I should know about. But it seemed to me to be an interesting interpretative question.
[click to continue…]

A few months ago I praised Kim Deitch – as well I should. I didn’t mention at the time that his dad, Gene Deitch, is no slouch either. (I guess that must be why they gave him an Oscar, so maybe my help here is not needed.) And not just that: on Gene Deitch’s website you can listen to the original John Lee Hooker recordings he made long, long ago.

I mention Deitch because I notice that Amazon just put a bunch of Scholastic DVD’s for kids on sale (we parents watch out for such things). And the pick of the litter is Where the Wild Things Are; a bunch of Sendak stories, directed and produced by Deitch. And you get Peter “PDQ Bach” Schickele providing some music and narration. And Carole King singing songs we remember: “Pierre”, “One Was Johnny”, “Alligators All Around”, “The Ballad of Chicken Soup”. (You can watch them all on YouTube.) Best of all is “In the Night Kitchen”. It tripped out my 2-year old. And, of course, “Where The Wild Things Are”.

Just a reminder that there are quite a few interesting posts on the Ukraine study tour blog. You may remember that I blogged a couple of weeks ago about taking part in a study tour of Ukraine organised by two UK trusts and stuffed with meetings with policy makers, NGOs and media people in Kiev and the Crimea. Well, now the study-tourers are all back in our respective homes, digesting what we’ve learnt and writing it up.

So far, there’s a great piece by anthropologistDaniel Washburn about faith and politics in Ukraine. It gives a potted history of orthodoxy in Ukraine and how those religious and political cleavages interact today.

Our friend in Kiev, by tour director John Lotherington, describes how the conflict and enduring civility of Ukrainian poltics are united in the person of Professor Valentin Yakushik (our ‘indefatigable mentor, guide and political matchmaker’).

Alastair Nicolson grappled with the many greys of the Ukrainian economy, using proxy indicators and eyeball evidence to get a feel for Ukraine’s prospects for economic development.

John Edward got a surprising amount of mileage out of Scottish-Ukrainian cultural links before turning to Ukraine’s recent politics and its prospects for EU entry. (Hard luck to the Tartan Army whose team lost 2-0 in Kiev this week.)

And Katie Allen wondered how politics could be cleaned up when corruption and seat-buying is cheerfully acknowledged but many journalists are still afraid to do their jobs.

There’s lots to read, and the comments are pretty much virgin territory. Plus, there’ll be several new pieces next week, including one from me on our meeting with Ukraine’s most famous living novelist, Andrei Kurkov.

Two interesting pieces on the intersection between free speech and politics. Richard Byrne in the “Chronicle”:http://chronicle.com/free/v53/i08/08a01201.htm on how the writer of ‘Reading Lolita in Tehran’ is being accused of preparing the way for war.

Mr. Dabashi, a professor of Iranian studies and comparative literature at Columbia University who has been active in the antiwar movement since the attacks of September 11, 2001, heard a call to action. The article prompted him to dust off an essay that he had written a few years before and publish it in the June 1 edition of the Egyptian English-language newspaper Al-Ahram. His target? Not President Bush or the Pentagon, but Azar Nafisi, author of the best-selling memoir Reading Lolita in Tehran and a visiting fellow at the Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies, in Washington. … His blistering essay cast Ms. Nafisi as a collaborator in the Bush administration’s plans for regime change in Iran. … “By seeking to recycle a kaffeeklatsch version of English literature as the ideological foregrounding of American empire,” wrote Mr. Dabashi, “Reading Lolita in Tehran is reminiscent of the most pestiferous colonial projects of the British in India, when, for example, in 1835 a colonial officer like Thomas Macaulay decreed: ‘We must do our best to form a class who may be interpreters between us and the millions whom we govern, a class of persons Indian in blood and color, but English in taste, in opinions, words and intellect.’ Azar Nafisi is the personification of that native informer and colonial agent, polishing her services for an American version of the very same project.” In an interview published on the Web site of the left-wing publication Z Magazine on August 4, Mr. Dabashi went even further, comparing Ms. Nafisi to a U.S. Army reservist convicted of abusing Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib prison. “To me there is no difference between Lynndie England and Azar Nafisi”

And Martin Arnold and Vincent Boland in the “FT”:http://www.ft.com/cms/s/4dcb8dfa-5a04-11db-8f16-0000779e2340.html, on a bill passed by France’s National Assembly that will criminalize denial of the Armenian genocide if the Senate passes it too.

The French legislation, which could still be blocked by the senate, would make it a crime to deny that Armenians were the victims of genocide in the last years of the Ottoman Empire. The bill was read in Turkey as a sign that France was now permanently opposed to Ankara’s bid to join the EU. Bulent Arinc, the parliamentary speaker, criticised France’s “hostile attitude” towards Turkey. “This is a shameful decision. We are very sorry to see that this [bill] was passed only because of internal [French] politics.” Turkey itself denies genocide and the judicial authorities have prosecuted writers who have used the term to describe the killings of Armenians. One of the most prominent such figures is Orhan Pamuk, the Turkish novelist, who was awarded the Nobel prize for literature on Thursday minutes after the French vote.

I haven’t read _Reading Lolita in Tehran_ (would be interested to hear from anyone in comments who has), but it seems to me that the evidence against Nafisi is ridiculous as it’s presented here. It seems to consist of a reductive reading of Edward Said, and the facts that she’s critical of the Iranian regime (which is better than some others in the region, but still pretty nasty) and friends with people like Paul Wolfowitz and Bernard Lewis. This doesn’t in my book add up to proof that she supports, let alone is actively paving the way, for any sort of violent regime change from outside. On the other hand, I think that the evidence that France’s new proposed law _is_ intended as a slap in the face for Turkey is quite strong. I don’t have any principled objection to bans on speech by Holocaust deniers and their like, but the law seems almost designed to be counter-productive. Telling Turkey that it’s effectively not qualified to be an EU member state (which is how this law is being received, and, I suspect, how it was intended to be received) means that the real changes in Turkey’s internal censorship regime which were starting to take hold a year or two ago are almost certain to be rolled back, and that the more vicious nationalist elements (who were never happy with EU membership in the first place) will increasingly be in the ascendant in Turkey’s internal political debates.

Remember all the concerns about GMail reading people’s emails with the goal of displaying targeted ads? I was among those expressing reservations back when the service was first introduced. I continue to believe that it is important to be generally conscious about how much of our email and other activities are stored and potentially analyzed by Google and other service providers. Nonetheless, it’s also interesting to pause on occasion to see the level of sophistication – or lack thereof – that some of these services have reached nowadays.

Sometimes I am surprised by how well the ads on the sidebar match the content of my messages. For example, from very little text, GMail seems to be able to tell if a conversation is conducted in another language and serves up ads consistent with the language of the correspondance (here I’m referring to some experiences with Hungarian). It may be that it’s tracking the route the email took. None of the email address domains end in .hu so no clues there.

Today, however, I was reminded that there is still considerable room for improvement in the system. I am in the midst of corresponding with some friends about an evening outing consisting of drinks, dinner and possibly dancing. There is no information in the messages about the location of all this (even at the city-level) so it’s hard for the ads to be targeted in that way. Our email addresses either end in gmail.com or educational institutions scattered across the country so even if GMail analyzed that information, it wouldn’t help in this case. We also haven’t mentioned any restaurant names to provide clues.

There is one piece of specific information that has come up, however: “I’m flexible (except the usual Thai food allergy problem).”

Given this note, it was curious to see a link to “Thai Restaurant Iowa”. The word “allergy” is right next to “Thai food” in the above sentence. So what are the chances that information about Thaid food restaurants is going to be of interest?

About 23 years and 3 weeks ago You and Yours had one of those “off to University” shows, helping parents and about-to-be new undergraduates to understand what the first few weeks of University was going to be like. Although fitting in one of those categories, I only listened because at the time You and Yours was among my regular listening. One comment has stayed with me ever since then. A woman in her thirties, commenting on Fresher’s Weeks, said that “in that first week of college you meet people who will be your friends for the rest of your life”.

I was skeptical. And it turned out to be untrue for me. I’m in closer touch with several friends from secondary school than anyone from college (I did meet CB sometime in 1984, but only for a few minutes, and not again till Sept 12, 2001, so he doesn’t count). My first day was spent almost entirely with a girl who decided the next day to leave (not because she spent the first day with me, but because she was trying to escape her home town of Egham, to which my college suddenly announced it was moving). I’m still in touch with two other people I met that week, but I’ve seen them each only once in the past ten years, and have spoken to them only once or twice more.

But it was also that week that I met Adrian.

[click to continue…]

Look, can we knock these two on the head, please, gang? I realise that we have no chance of stamping out these fallacies all over the internet – it’s almost as if there were a whole network of right-wing talking points sites out there all taking in each other’s washing! – but we can at least stop regurgitating them ourselves.

1. Iraq is a young country. Therefore, it has a low “crude” death rate. “Crude” in this case means “not adjusted for demographic structure and therefore not meaningfully comparable across countries”. Therefore, it is not surprising that pre-war Iraq had a crude death rate similar to that of Denmark, any more than it is surprising that any other two completely non-comparable statistics might happen to be the same number.

2. When someone dies, you get a death certificate from the hospital, morgue or coroner, in your hand. This bit of the death infrastructure is still working in Iraq. Then the person who issued the death certificate is meant to send a copy to the central government records office where they collate them, tabulate them and collect the overall mortality statistics. This bit of the death infrastructure is not still working in Iraq. (It was never great before the war, broke down entirely during the year after the invasion when there was no government to send them to and has never really recovered; statistics agencies are often bottom of the queue after essential infrastructure, law and order and electricity). Therefore, there is no inconsistency between the fact that 92% of people with a dead relative could produce the certificate when asked, and the fact that Iraq has no remotely reliable mortality statistics and quite likely undercounts the rate of violent death by a factor of ten.

Go on and sin no more, or at least not on our Lancet comments threads.

How many people are murdered in the U.S. every day? How many people die in car accidents every day? How many people die of heart disease in the U.S. in a year? What about the number who die for any reason at all? If you don’t know the answer to these questions, do you have immediate, confident intuitions about what the answers must be?

The “Lancet paper”:http://www.thelancet.com/webfiles/images/journals/lancet/s0140673606694919.pdf by Burnham _et al._ study estimates about 655,000 excess deaths in Iraq for the period of March 2003 to July of 2006, of which about 600,000 are directly attributable to violence — an appalling number. Right-wing reaction has been, understandably, that the 600,000 estimate is unbelievably high. (“Tim Lambert”:http://scienceblogs.com/deltoid/2006/10/flypaper_for_innumerates.php gives a roundup.) Convincing those critics who see this number and declare “that can’t possibly be right,” or “my gut says no” or “this doesn’t even pass the smell test” is difficult. This is partly because some will just think that any estimate that sounds bad must be false, and take refuge in old saws about lies, damned lies, and what have you. But it’s also partly because six hundred thousand violent deaths since the war began seems huge — and, frankly, it is. As “this typical guy”:http://gatewaypundit.blogspot.com/2006/10/new-liberal-death-count-claims-770.html says, that’s equivalent to 3 to 10 Hiroshima atomic blasts, 6 to 20 Nagasaki atomic blasts or 10 Dresden bombing campaigns. Yes, that’s right. Those events happened in a single day or over a very short period. The present estimate is for a large country of twenty six million people over three and a half years. Sadly, this means it’s quite achievable. As “Juan Cole”:http://www.juancole.com/2006/10/interview-with-rajiv-chandrasekaran.html points out, you just have to believe that four our five people a day are being shot or otherwise killed in each of Iraq’s major towns outside of Baghdad.

The incredulous ones will then say, “But that’s about 500 violent deaths a day over the period! Why hasn’t this been reported! “So, does this mean all of those headlines of 18 or 30 deaths were off by 700 or so?”:http://gatewaypundit.blogspot.com/2006/10/new-liberal-death-count-claims-770.html Inconceivable!” As David Lewis once said, it is hard to know how to refute an incredulous stare. If neither a careful reading of the study itself nor examples like Cole’s will do anything to make you doubt the cognitive power of your bowels, then there’s probably not much to be done. Consider this, though. Even small societies are big. And big societies are huge. Nearly two and a half million people die in the United States every year. Nearly seven hundred thousand people die of heart disease. Lots of things happen that you don’t hear about. I can say with confidence that about a hundred and fifteen people died in road accidents today in the U.S., as did yesterday, and will tomorrow, and the day after that. And about fifty people in the U.S. died today as the result of assault, and will again tomorrow. These numbers are accurate, but I don’t mean them as any kind of serious comparison. They’re just a catalyst for the imagination. Fifty in the U.S., five hundred in Iraq. The two countries are very different, but is it really so inconceivable that ten times as many people might be dying violently on any given day in Iraq than in the United States?

Off the top of my head, I can recall at least one passage each in which Derrida and Foucault say, more or less: “Okay, yes, it would be good to stop talking about Hegel, finally. It’s been a long time since we all agreed that dialectics was a dead end, in fact it seems like we’ve been at this point forever. But there I go, talking about Hegel again. Because he makes us do it, somehow. Damnit, this is really getting old.”

It sounds more impressive when they get that Ecole Normale Supérieure rhythm going, but that’s the rap, in paraphrase. It’s as if the first half of the twentieth century were spent rediscovering Hegel, and the second half trying to forget him.

All of this as prologue to what Adam Kotsko thinks is the present and future “Can we just shut up about this guy?” dynamic:

In fact, although it’s early yet, I will venture a prediction — the 21st century will have been little more than the century of Heidegger fatigue. There will be no great figure who arises to take his place. The recent half-hearted rise of Badiou is little more than a symptom of Heidegger fatigue, and — more to the point — Badiou’s own monumental arrogance can never be anything more than a feeble parody of Heidegger’s. Long after Being and Event has been forgotten (ca. 2009), we’ll all still be doing our painfully close readings of Being and Time, even though we hate it, even though we’ve forgotten why.

Is this sort of thing limited to people doing Continental philosophy and/or “capital-T to show we’re dead serious” Theory? Are there figures in poli sci or sociology — or elsewhere for that matter — who keep monopolizing the conversation for decades after their death?

Crooked Timber has just passed a sort of milestone without really realizing it; Daniel’s piece on faking physics was the 5,000th post on CT. We’ll make a bigger fuss over post number 10,000; promise!