October 2007

Tim Lambert has some good, clean fun with Mark Steyn’s strange notions about Hollywood hygiene. (via Yglesias.) But then I flip to the NY Times and read that the bidet is finally coming to the US:

Although Americans have long shied away from conventional bidets, which are common in other countries, and the newer bidet seats, at least two major companies, Kohler and Toto, expect the seat to overcome that resistance eventually.

Proving once again that you can’t spell commodity fetishism without the ‘commode’. This calls out for something – not as beat your head against the basin stupid as Steyn; a microtrendy David Brooks column. Something wise and telling about bidet liberals vs. flyover country, do-it-yourself sons of the soil; of left-coasters who like sipping lattes, hands free, while “a remote-controlled retractable wand that spouts oscillating jets of well-aimed aerated water and a dryer that emits warm air” do the necessary. Some sort of ceramic sequel to Bowling Alone: America’s Declining Social Capital. Something faintly superior, yet self-deprecatingly alarmist, possibly involving clever yet oddly meaningless puns on ‘day’.

Via John Gruber, here is a striking series of photographs of workers in toy factories in China. I wish I had seen them yesterday, because this morning I did a midterm review in my social theory course and, in quick succession, students asked me about Smith’s idea of the invisible hand and about Marx’s concept of commodity fetishism.

_Update_: More photos, from their originator, here.

[click to continue…]

Via “Tyler Cowen”:http://www.marginalrevolution.com/, this “IHE article”:http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2007/10/03/heterodox covers the right orthodoxy vs. left heterodoxy debate in economics again, and seems to end up implying that it’s mostly happening in the heads of heterodox economists. For my money, that’s far too strong a conclusion – there is “genuine evidence”:http://www.atypon-link.com/AEAP/doi/pdf/10.1257/0895330053147976?cookieSet=1 that economics training pushes grad students further to the right, weeds out radical ideas etc. It may indeed be true that heterodox types exaggerate the degree of uniformity among the orthodox, but that is a somewhat different argument. Be that as it may, I found the article’s extensive discussion of Daniel Klein’s “counter-insurgency” against leftwing economists to be pretty interesting. According to the article, Klein starts from the position that economics should be a classical liberal creed, and that “the burden of proof should be on those who wish to intervene in markets.” Fair enough if that’s yer ideological druthers. But then he argues that:

there is also a bias, perhaps unconscious, in the media: “Basically they’re social-democratic periodicals, and probably journalists, writing those articles talking almost exclusively … to people on the left.”

This is a … striking claim – there’s plenty of survey evidence (Jonathan Chait discusses this in his recent book) that journalists tend to have somewhat right-of-center views on economic issues. I doubt that Klein (whose bread-and-butter appears to be survey evidence on professionals’ attitudes) is unaware of this; the only conclusion that I can come to is that Klein believes that the vast majority of people in the US, including many people who would be considered to be on the right and indeed consider themselves to be so, are in fact social democrats. If only, says me.

Clarification: Daniel Klein says in comments below that he was specifically referring to the journalists who wrote the pieces for The Nation, In These Times, the NYT and the Atlantic. This is, to me, a considerably more defensible claim with respect to The Nation and ITT (I’m skeptical about the NYT being social democratic on economic issues and the Atlantic is a resolutely centrist publication) , and suggests that I simply didn’t understand what seemed to me to be a pretty odd statement.

Last weekend, I had a friend visiting who is a Washington-based journalist. She told me that Ayaan Hirsi Ali is the interesting new woman in town, who receives lots of attention for her outspoken views. I responded that I didn’t have the impression that the Dutch were sad that she left. Perhaps in the Netherlands people were a bit tired of hearing her views which never covered any shade of gray but were always rather black-white, provocative, and, at least in the opinion of some, unnecessarily insulting and divisive.

So what a surprise when the news came that Ayaan Hirsi Ali has returned to the Netherlands. Apparently the Dutch state is no longer willing to pay for her security in the US, which it has been doing since she moved to Washington. According to the “Dutch newspapers”:http://www.nrc.nl/anp/binnenland/article780539.ece/Hirsi_Ali_bereid_beveiliging_zelf_te_betalen, she is willing and planning to raise funds for her security in the US, but was not allowed to do this before she had a Green Card. That Green card she received a week ago, but this implied she only had one week’s time to raise the funds, before the Dutch funding of her security in the US ended. Now that she’s back on Dutch territory, the Dutch State is again protecting her, and as soon as she has raised enough funds, she wants to go back to the US.

According to the Dutch radio, she is not entitled to private protection by the US government when she is on US territory – with or without Green Card. So I was wondering…. since Hirsi Ali is a “Resident Fellow of the American Enterprise Institute”:http://www.aei.org/scholars/scholarID.117,filter.all/scholar.asp, can’t they pay for her security as part of her secondary employment conditions?

Charles Stross’s _Halting State_ (“Powells”:http://www.powells.com/partner/29956/s?kw=Charles%20Stross%20Halting%20State, “Amazon”:http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0441014984?ie=UTF8&tag=henryfarrell-20&linkCode=as2&camp=1789&creative=9325&creativeASIN=0441014984_) should be on the shelves of yer local bookshop as of today; I thoroughly recommend it. It combines the intellectual fireworks of _Accelerando_ with a much less choppy plot and is a lot more fun to read – starting from a virtual bank raid by orcs and a dragon in a newly independent Scotland, and steadily getting more weirder and more interesting from there. It’s the first book I’ve seen that really begins to think through how distributed forms of collective action are likely to collide with more traditional kinds of state-based politics; the bit towards the end where you first figure out what is _really_ going on blew my mind.

Also very good, but a little more traditional is Paul McAuley’s SF thriller _Cowboy Angels_ (no US publisher but the import isn’t “too expensive”:http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0575079355?ie=UTF8&tag=henryfarrell-20&linkCode=as2&camp=1789&creative=9325&creativeASIN=0575079355 ). McAuley uses the many-worlds trope to think through US imperialism with a novel twist – a variety of alternative America’s located in different ‘sheaves’ that have split from each other since the 1920’s, one of which, the ‘Real’ America, has discovered how to build Turing Gates between sheaves, and is using them to introduce democracy by fair means or foul to the rest (our reality is referred to as the ‘Nixon sheaf,’ natch). While some of the spy-novel element is a little formulaic, the different Americas are well thought through and all feel real – they’re shot through with ambiguities rather than simply standing in for this or that political system. For some reason, the book didn’t find a US publisher a couple of years back when it was first on the market – this is a little surprising given its topicality (perhaps it was too politically awkward – my impression is that people who buy this kind of novel in the US tend (a) to be right of center and (b) not to enjoy having their priors challenged).

“Cosma Shalizi”:http://cscs.umich.edu/~crshalizi/weblog/520.html has a mammoth post intended _inter alia_ to explain precisely what is at stake in debates over heritability and IQ to those whose eagerness to pronounce winners in these debates is not, perhaps, matched by their grasp of the underlying methodological issues. Takeaway point:

Do I really believe that the heritability of IQ is zero? Well, I hope by this point I’ve persuaded you that’s not a well-posed question. What I hope you really want to ask is something like: Do I think there are currently any genetic variations which, holding environment fixed to within some reasonable norms for prosperous, democratic, industrial or post-industrial societies, would tend to lead to differences in IQ? There my answer is “yes, of course”. I’ve mentioned phenylketonuria and hypothyroidism already, and many other in-born errors of metabolism also lead to cognitive deficits, including lower IQ, at least in certain environments. More interestingly, conditions like Williams’s Syndrome, Downs’s Syndrome, etc., are genetically caused, and lead to reasonably predictable patterns of cognitive deficits, affecting different abilities in different ways. … I suspect this answer will still not satisfy some people, who really want to know about differences between people who do not have significant developmental disorders. Here, my honest answer would be that I presently have no evidence one way or the other. If you put a gun to my head and asked me to guess, and I couldn’t tell what answer you wanted to hear, I’d say that my suspicion is that there are, mostly on the strength of analogy to other areas of biology where we know much more. I would then — cautiously, because you have a gun to my head — suggest that you read, say, Dobzhansky on the distinction between “human equality” and “genetic identity”, and ask why it is so important to you that IQ be heritable and unchangeable.

“Rick Perlstein”:http://www.thenation.com/docprint.mhtml?i=20071015&s=perlstein demonstrates exactly how to do the devastating book review in his account of two right-wing revisionist histories of Vietnam.

The Pentagon Papers were quite certain and cited convincing evidence: “The Catholic deputy province chief ordered his troops to fire…. The Diem government subsequently put out a story that a Viet Cong agent had thrown a grenade into the crowd and that the victims had been crushed in a stampede. It steadfastly refused to admit responsibility even when neutral observers produced films showing government troops firing on the crowd.” The instigator was a Vietcong agent, Moyar insists. How does he know? By inference, not by evidence. He claims the monasteries were lousy with Communist infiltrators, even, perhaps, among their highest counsels. And how does he know that? The Communists said so. It is more than passing strange. On one page Moyar knows what every good right-winger knows: Communists are liars (“With characteristic exaggeration a Communist history stated that…”). On others, however–it is one of the reasons conservative reviews have found him so impressive–he uncritically accepts Communist sources as his key proof texts.

Siva Vaidhyanathan’s work in progress is a book that will address “three key questions: What does the world look like through the lens of Google? How is Google’s ubiquity affecting the production and dissemination of knowledge? and, How has the corporation altered the rules and practices that govern other companies, institutions, and states?” It seems likely this will add more to the sum of human knowledge than, say, Jacques-Alain Miller’s papal bull a while back.

With support from the Institute for the Future of the Book, Siva has started blogging the project as he goes. And he doesn’t sound entirely comfortable doing so, which if anything makes the experiment more interesting:
[click to continue…]

The FT is going to start making its “online content free”:http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/01/business/media/01cnd-ft.html?ref=technology, sort-of:

The Web site of the London-based business newspaper, which currently charges for much of its content online, as of mid-October will allow users to get up to 30 articles a month for free, said John Ridding, chief executive of the newspaper. Anyone who wants to view more online material will have to subscribe to the site.

This is obviously intended to respond to Rupert Murdoch’s likely decision to open up the WSJ’s website to non-subscribers. I suspect that it is also a dipping-of-toes-in-water, and that the FT people are considering making the whole thing available and switching to an ads-based model (as dsquared pointed out in comments some months back, the print version is effectively carried by advertising aimed at a small – but extremely rich – sub-segment of its total readership). In any event, this is excellent news for anyone who wants to see high quality journalism made more widely available. The FT is a genuinely excellent newspaper, and its non-US coverage – especially its Europe coverage – is unparalleled. Ideally, it’ll respond to the Murdoch threat pro-actively rather than reactively – I’d like to see this going together with a beefing up of its US coverage and presence (although ideally not combined with the same kind of dodgy political pandering that the _Economist_ got up to when it started moving in on the US market). There’s a real gap in the US market for an intelligent, internationalist newspaper – and if Murdoch starts to dumb down the good bits (i.e. news pages) of the WSJ as he has done with every other property that he’s bought, that gap will widen dramatically.

Quiet around here. I’ll try to amuse you.

I love Daniel Pinkwater. I feel there is something lost in all this playlisted, Netflixed, on-demand hoo-ha you call Modernity. There needs to be an element of randomized, cinematic, B-listiness. So I bought all these sketchy multi-DVD sets and, every couple weeks, Belle and I ‘snark out’, picking a disc literally at random. (First a random cartoon.) Mostly it’s worked out, until we actually drew Wild Women of Wongo from the deck. We’re too old for that stuff. Now, mostly, we go for SnarkPlatinum or SnarkSelect options (but I won’t bore you with my elaborate randomization system.)

Last week’s pick was "Illegal" (1955), starring Edward G. Robinson, plus bonus DeForest Kelley, Jayne Mansfield, and Henry Kulky action. The tag is simply false: " He was a guy who marked 100 men for death – until a blonde called ‘Angel’ O’Hara marked him for life!" Nothing of the sort happens.

I like the way they used to use quotation marks in the title itself.

But wait. If the title is "Illegal", shouldn’t I have to refer to it as "’Illegal’"?

[click to continue…]