August 2008

So I have a quite different take on the broader geo-politics of the Russia-Georgia conflict than either “Matt Yglesias”:http://yglesias.thinkprogress.org/archives/2008/08/georgia_on_my_mind.php (in “new digs”:http://yglesias.thinkprogress.org/ – update blogroll accordingly) or “Steve Clemons”:http://www.thewashingtonnote.com/archives/2008/08/georgiarussia_c/. Clemons:

much of what we are seeing unfold between Russia and Georgia involves a high quotient of American culpability. When Kosovo declared independence and the US and other European states recognized it — thus sidestepping Russia’s veto in the United Nations Security Council — many of us believed that the price for Russian cooperation in other major global problems just went much higher and that the chance of a clash over Georgia’s breakaway border provinces increased dramatically. By pushing Kosovo the way the US did and aggravating nationalist sensitivities, Russia could in reaction be rationally expected to further integrate and cultivate South Ossetia and Abkhazia under de facto Russian control and pull these provinces that border Russia away from the state of Georgia. At the time, there was word from senior level sources that Russia had asked the US to stretch an independence process for Kosovo over a longer stretch of time — and tie to it some process of independence for the two autonomous Georgia provinces. In exchange, Russia would not veto the creation of a new state of Kosovo at the Security Council. The U.S. rejected Russia’s secret entreaties and instead rushed recognition of Kosovo and said damn the consequences.

Yglesias:

In a broader sense Steve Clemons raises the good point that the government of Russia made it pretty clear that if the United States recognized Kosovo’s unilateral declaration of independence from Serbia over Russian objections that Russia would retaliate by stepping up support for separatists in Abkhazia and South Ossetia. This doesn’t seem to have given any of Georgia’s outspoken friends in the United States any pause. Indeed, strong pro-Georgian views in the U.S. media and foreign policy community correlate heavily with strong pro-Kosovo views. This highlights the fact that the underlying issue here is simply a disposition to take a dim view of Moscow and to favor aggressive policies to roll back Russian influence rather than some kind of deep and sincerely felt desire to help Georgia.

Now I’m not too keen on the ‘brave little Georgia’ crowd myself, but neither of these seems to me to be right. Steve, who’s a realist, doesn’t seem to me to be providing a realist enough take on Russia’s motivations, while Matt seems to be soft-pedalling his liberal internationalism. There are many ways to interpret what’s been happening over the last few days, but one important part of the explanation is an argument over norms, and specifically the relationship between the norms of territorial integrity and self determination, that has been playing out since the end of the Cold War. [click to continue…]

This morning I was out for a walk and I found a twenty dollar bill lying in the street.

Mild-mannered Professor of History by day, Eric Rauchway emerges at night other times of the day in an altogether different guise.

He’s going to swim a mile for charity (presumably in just a few seconds, and while wholly underwater). You can go ahead and donate some money to his cause. Comments are open on the topic of the Rauchfish’s origin story, his unique powers, his faithful sidekick, and the special properties of his suit.

It’s not every morning I’m sipping my coffee, click onto BBC news, and the first thing out of my mouth is “oh, f**k!”. Absent any deep analysis, it is just horribly, horribly worrying that Russia has invaded South Ossetia. We can spend any amount of time on the rights and wrongs of it, and whether the Saakashvili has brought this on himself. But as the news is filtering in, I have a couple of very superficial observations to make.

The current level of hostility has been bubbling towards the boil all year, but I truly thought the Russians would wait for a more obvious excuse to send the tanks in. But why wait when you can slip quietly into an obscure part of the Caucasus on the monster news day that follows the Olympics opening ceremony?

A couple of weeks ago, Russian planes were blatantly flying over Ossetia and the Georgians sent in more of their troops. The Western powers called for restraint. Fat chance. Russia claims to be protecting the Russian minority in Ossetia, but really wants to show the Georgians who’s boss. ‘Restraint’ may be appropriate with two equally sized belligerents. It’s irrelevant when you’re sleeping beside someone big enough to roll over and crush you without waking up. I can’t help thinking that if we’d heard a bit less about restraint, and a bit more to remind Russia that joining the international system means you have be a less obvious playground bully, Putin might have thought twice before he sent the tanks in.

Another observation, this is part of the long pay-back for Kosovo. When Russia was strong-armed on the UN Security Council into accepting Kosovan independence, they made it clear that the precedent would ring out in the Caucasus and indeed any where else the Russians want to destabilize. Again, the rights and wrongs of springing Kosovo free of the Serbs can be argued, and so can the means of doing it. But the outcome is that Russia believes it has a free hand to prop up Russian or other minority nationalities anywhere geopolitically convenient within its Near Abroad.

Finally, to NATO. Georgia’s application was recently put on ice, but not placed sufficiently in the deep freeze to placate Moscow. NATO’s failure to either fully accept Georgia into the family or to expel it into Russia’s brawny arms may have created the moment and the motive for Russia to move. Russia was just as offended by the extended promise of membership to Georgia as it would have been by the real thing, but Georgia was effectively left to fend for itself.

Saakashvili has not played a smart game, that’s for sure. Perhaps thinking the west would stand behind him, or just trying to distract attention from his government’s unpopularity, he has willfully provoked Moscow whenever he had the chance. But here’s the thing; wanting to join NATO is not a provocation. As Russia’s actions have clearly shown, joining NATO was the only sensible thing to do.

*Update* A far more thoughtful piece about the invasion is at commentisfree, though the comments are pretty depressing. If anyone wants to reference a piece explaining things from the Russian point of view (that does more than the recently deleted comment “U ARE A US STOOGE. GEORGIAN ARE WRONG AND STALIN WAS GEORGIAN ANYWAY” etc.), please go ahead and I’ll be happy to link to it.

*Update 2* In that vein, Robert Farley at Lawyers, Guns and Money is worth a look. My cousin Daragh McDowell has a far more knowledgeable take than mine on today’s developments. Also, Daragh points to an excellent backgrounder on Ossetia that the redoubtable Doug Merrill posted back in March. Doug is based in Tbilisi as of last week and posted this morning. Le Monde is practically live-blogging.

*Comments closed*

I thought I’d get this rant out of the way before the season hits. Watching the Olympics in the US is no fun, because the only thing you can watch is Americans winning. You’d think the U.S. is the only country ever winning from the coverage. Don’t get me wrong, I’m happy for Americans to win, but I’m happy for other people to win, too. In fact, in some ways it’s much more interesting when you have a diversity of folks competing and this is portrayed clearly in the coverage. It gets boring fast when all you can hear is the U.S. national anthem.

Growing up in Hungary, I remember watching all sorts of sports competitions – and I don’t just mean the Olympics – where people from all over were taking home the gold. Sure, Hungary is a small country (population 10 million, that’s like Chicagoland having its own team) and its athletes are only going to win so many medals so you could argue that by definition coverage would have to feature other competitions as well. But actually, for a small country, Hungary ranks very high on the all-time medals list (whoa, I actually had no idea how high before writing this post) so it’s not as though there aren’t opportunities to feature its own. Also, TV could just show less of the event if there were not enough Hungarian nationals to feature. But that’s not what happens as featuring one’s own doesn’t seem to be the point. I remember hearing plenty of other national anthems and seeing lots of different flags.

This approach of showcasing athletes from all over doesn’t seem to be restricted to small countries. I was in Italy (pop ~ 60 million) recently flipping through channels and noticed the Hungarian national anthem playing on one of them. The station opted to show the end result all the way despite the fact that Italians were not the winners. Then they played another anthem (the Russian one so I could sing along in Hungarian, hah) for another winner, again, not Italians.

I wonder how this works in other countries, especially the ones winning lots of medals (e.g., for 2004, Russia, China, Australia, Germany, Japan, France, etc.).

A “study”:http://www.admin.cam.ac.uk/news/dp/2008080601 conducted by sociologists from Cambridge University seems to suggest that the support for working mothers is weakening. The researchers compared survey results from the 1980s till recently, and found “growing sympathy for the old-fashioned view that a woman’s place is in the home, rather than in the office”, caused by “mounting concern that women who play a full and equal role in the workforce do so at the expense of family life.”
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Having just agreed to review a manuscript for a journal, I was greeted with this message:

When viewing the article online we recommend that you view the HTML version of the article. If the author used EndNote (or, beginning in the fall of 2007, Reference Manager) for reference management, the article HTML proof will have its references linked directly into Web of Science. This linking will save you time when ascertaining the accuracy and validity of the references. Web of Science is now also available as an ”External Search” option.

I think I’m a reasonably conscientious reviewer, but I’ve never tried to “[ascertain] the accuracy and validity” of an author’s references in my life. I just assume that either (a) they’re accurate, or (b) if more than a few are inaccurate, the author will get a flea in her ear when the proofing process commences (I’ve been on the receiving end of this). Nor do I imagine that a few iffy referenpces in the bibliography would make me change my mind about the worth of a piece (perhaps if the biblio was obviously hopelessly incompetent, but I suspect that when this happens it is one of a multitude of sins, and bad referencing is likely to be the least of the author’s problems. But am I unique in this – do others scrupulously check the endnotes etc? I suppose that this is hardly a matter of world historical significance, but I’ve always been fascinated by the details of the reviewing process.

I’m guessing that there’s already a ton of papers about a certain sort of second-order desire, so people can tell me in comments …. The sort I have in mind is the following: I, trivially, want my desires to be satisfied. But over the course of a life, I want for some of my desires not to be satisfied. Now this is clearly the case for desires I ought not to have. But I’m not thinking of _those_ cases: cases involving desires to drink the clear liquid on the table (which turns out to be sulphuric acid) etc … In fact we can rule those out by stipulating that I’m rational, fully-informed, that my desires are filtered by some guardian angel (or whatever desire-cleaning tweak we choose). I’m thinking about the case where my satisfied desires wouldn’t give me the satisfaction they give me were it not for the thwarting of many similar desires. So, for example, I always want my football team to win, but if they were to win all the time it would be rather boring and I would lose interest in football. It is a condition for me to live the life of a happy football fan that they win, but not too much. Maybe we could express this with the thought that it would be good for me to have those desires satisfied with a certain probability, but I’m not sure about that, either, because it seems that the probability of winning must itself be uncertain if I’m to get the necessary satisfaction.

In other words, then, it is a crucial component of the good life that my life be unpredictable and that I don’t get many of the things that I want. Not just that I don’t get many of the things I think I want (but wouldn’t if I were fully rational, informed etc), but that I don’t get lots of outcomes I would actually want on the best account of wanting, desire, etc. As I mentioned above, sports are a good example of this phenomenon. But my guess is that it generalizes and that it is good for me not to get a lot of what I want across a whole range of activities (maybe nearly all of them): career, parenting, politics, whatever.

(I’ve rescued the above post from the CT drafts folder, where it has been languishing for months. But Harry persuaded me that I should press “publish”, even though I’m not sure there’s a lot there. Harry thought it relevant to “the discussion over at 11D about happiness and parenting”:http://11d.typepad.com/blog/2008/07/little-bundles.html . I’m not sure I quite see the connection that Harry sees, but commenters who do (or don’t) might like to tell us.)

I’ve been too caught up in a genuine academic debate over “UFOs and sovereignty”:http://www.henryfarrell.net/movabletype/mt-search.cgi?IncludeBlogs=75&search=UFos over at the Monkey Cage to respond to this quasi-related “query”:http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/archives/individual/2008_07/014204.php from Kevin Drum:

Question:

bq. According to a poll done to publicize the new X-Files movie, the #1 conspiracy theory (in Britain, anyway) is the belief that Area 51 exists to investigate aliens. … But down at #10, we get this: “The world is run by dinosaur-like reptiles.” What the hell kind of conspiracy theory is that? Dick Cheney doesn’t look anything like a dinosaur.

Answer:

It’s a conspiracy theory in which Dick Cheney is a _shape-shifting_ “dinosaur-like reptile”:http://www.bibliotecapleyades.net/biggestsecret/biggestsecretbook/biggestsecret.htm, that’s what. A shape-shifting dinosaur like reptile who “hunts people down for kicks”:http://www.bibliotecapleyades.net/biggestsecret/biggestsecretbook/biggestsecret16.htm in secret federal compounds, to boot. Crooked Timber surely represents the greatest concentration of expertise on this particular set of claims in the respectable blogosphere – see “here”:http://www.bibliotecapleyades.net/biggestsecret/biggestsecretbook/biggestsecret16.htm, “here”:https://crookedtimber.org/2004/04/07/shelf-life/, and “here”:https://crookedtimber.org/2004/06/07/i-dont-licke-icke-all-that-much-anymore/ for more, and this “article”:http://www.adequacy.org/public/stories/2002.2.10.183349.284.html, by the mysterious “jsm,” for a fuller briefing on the David Icke phenomenon. Indeed one of our “occasional contributors”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Montagu_Norman has actually been identified by Icke as a key member of the international lizardoid conspiracy. Since Icke came out as an actual anti-Semite, I think that our collective researches have ceased. Maybe, given the continued popularity of the theory, we need to start looking at this stuff again …

Interesting thought piece in today’s Irish Times; ‘what will life be like for the average Irish middle class family in 2050?’. It is inspired by JM Keynes’ 1930 ‘Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren’.

It’s low on specifics but not remotely tech-evangelist, which makes a nice change. It’s clear we won’t all be driving around in space ships and commuting to and from Mars (energy and everything else being too dear). Interestingly, it predicts Ireland will be physically smaller because of climate change, and also more densely populated. One topic it doesn’t deal with is changes to income distribution.

I have a feeling that with higher prices and the predicted period of economic ‘adjustment’ we can look forward to, the gap between rich and poor Irish/Europeans may come to more closely resemble that in the US. (Bearing in mind that Ireland’s income distribution is probably somewhere between continental European and the US. But I’m not an economist and the writer, Stephen Kinsella, is. In any case, his policy prescriptions call for government actions to help the middle class that might mitigate overall income inequality:

“Well, first, they need to help me save. The more the middle class saves, long term, the more their children and their children’s children will benefit. Second, they need to make sure my children survive, by providing a health service which will make the chances of this more likely. Third, the Government must ensure the natural environment my grandchildren inhabit is as conducive to their happiness as possible, while allowing service sectoral growth and general economic development to maximise the economic possibilities for my grandchildren.”

(By the way, kudos to the Irish Times for finally pulling down the paywall.)

Talk about burying the lead! All the press coverage of Shadow Education Secretary Michael Gove‘s recent speech to the Institute of Public Policy Research focused on the fact that he had a bit of a go at “Nuts” and “Zoo”[1]. But they missed the real highlight of Gove’s speech, which is that he favourably cited CT’s own Harry Brighouse (and some bloke called Adam Swift, who is less newsworthy. Yay Harry.

If you look at Gove’s speech, it’s actually surprisingly socially liberal and sensible stuff – a bit of apologia for the Tory Party’s historical treatment of gays and single mums, a bit of blah about communitarianism and a strong hint that Crooked Timber will be invited to draft future Conservative education policy once they get into power (I may be reading a bit too much between the lines here). I could almost see myself voting for the guy if it wasn’t all so transparently a pack of bollocks. I mean really, the Conservative Party, in office, is going to subsidise unprofitable post offices? I was born during a shower of rain, but I wasn’t born during the last shower of rain. Increased devolution to local government? Subsidised maternity nurses on the Dutch model? I scratch my chin, sir, and nod vaguely in the direction of the marginal rate of capital gains tax. About the only thing in this speech which you’re ever going to see is the education vouchers proposal, and I confidently predict that the administration of that one is going to be cocked up on an epic scale.

But nonetheless, the philosophical underpinnings of Cameronism, in as much as Gove sets them out here, are both interesting and sensible. Worth a look.

Update: Despite the implication given by the title of this post, the Conservative Party are not currently the government.
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“Scott”:http://www.artsjournal.com/quickstudy/2008/08/verily.html at his other place blogs about the latest McCain video (which is so staggeringly bad at achieving its purported aims that it doesn’t make sense _except_ as a dogwhistle video).

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The Wall Street Journal has a fascinating article about how corporations like Intel are loading up their general pension funds with obligations to pay massive “supplemental” benefits to senior executives. It’s partly a tax dodge, and partly an example of what Jacob Hacker has called the great risk shift. The extra liabilities increase the risk that the fund will fail, but the top brass can be protected against this eventuality with a trust fund, while the rank and file get to take their chances.

Update To clarify, in response to comments, the pension entitlements of ordinary workers are supposed to be protected by the government through Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation, and to the extent that this works as expected, risk is shifted to the PBGC rather than to workers. But as both the WSJ story and the discussion below make clear, things don’t always work as planned. Some benefits paid to ordinary workers turn out to be classed as supplemental and therefore lost when the scheme fails.

Quiet around here. Alright: about that Britney/Paris ad. First, I take it to be obvious the dog whistle ‘he’s coming for your daughters’ subtext was, if not expressly intended, then well appreciated by the ad’s producers. But here’s something else about these ads in general. McCain is an old man without a lot to say, policy-wise, running against a charismatic younger man in an environment that favors the younger man for a lot of age and charisma-independent reasons. There is really no choice but to go for the ‘but he’s too young’, ‘he’s not ready’, ‘he’s all smile, no substance’ line. Obviously there isn’t really any reason to think so, and obviously the Republicans don’t actually think so. This isn’t their reason for voting McCain – namely, they’ve thought hard about the age issue and concluded it favors McCain. It’s just: what else are you going to say? Joe Lieberman: he’s a “good young man.” Who calls a 46-year old man ‘young’? Lieberman just called Obama ‘boy’, in effect. Is Lieberman racist? I doubt it, so why did he do it? Because there isn’t anything else for him to say that would make Obama sound bad, in a general sort of way. He would have done the same for John Edwards, if Edwards had gotten the nomination.

But: there’s no way for old white men to call a professionally accomplished, intelligent, articulate, younger – but not actually young – black man ‘boy’, in effect, without it being heard as racist. There’s no way for an old white man to drop hints that such a man might have a certain animal magnetism, might be qualified to be an entertainer, but should hardly be placed in a position of professional responsibility. (Perhaps someday, but for now, people like this ‘aren’t ready’, for obscure and unspoken reasons.) Again, Edwards would have gotten the same treatment: he’s a blow-dried lightweight. But the race angle changes it. And there isn’t any way for the attackers to convincingly deny they were making a racist attack because the true defense, if any, would be: ‘I wasn’t making a totally baseless attack on his race, I was making a totally baseless attack on him personally.’ That’s a funny corner to be driven back into. Hence the rather strange ‘these ads are just fun, sit back and enjoy it’ defense. But what’s the alternative? ‘What’s the country coming to when an honest man can’t unfairly attack another honest man, personally, without that other man saying the unfair attack is against his whole race, which is just plain an unkind thing to say and drags our political discourse through the mud? This is where Political Correctness has gotten us!’ [click to continue…]