From the monthly archives:

October 2011

Flann O’Brien’s Birthday

by Henry Farrell on October 5, 2011

Today (Wednesday, Irish time) is the hundredth anniversary of Flann O’Brien’s (Brian O’Nolan’s) birth. Several of us here at CT are fans – I think it was John Holbo who first transformed O’Brien’s Plain People of Ireland (the interlocutor in many of his newspaper columns) into the Plain People of the Internet. This “piece”:http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/ireland/2011/1001/1224305062073.html by Fintan O’Toole is the best account of his life that I’ve seen. This “longer article”:http://www.bostonreview.net/BR33.4/boylan.php by Roger Boylan in the _Boston Review_ is also worth reading, as long as you take good care to stop reading at the point where Anthony Cronin, bard-befriending bollocks and professional bore, introduces himself and goes on to provide “many delightful insights” into his own “rich and various” life.

People may reasonably disagree about which are the very best bits of O’Brien’s work. My own favorite is the description of the practical philosopher De Selby’s efforts (in The Third Policeman) to take advantage of the “appreciable and calculable interval of time between the throwing by a man of a glance at his own face in a mirror and the registration of the reflected image in his eye.”

bq. De Selby, ever loath to leave well enough alone, insists on reflecting the first reflection in a further mirror and professing to detect minute changes in this second image. Ultimately he constructed the familiar arrangement of parallel mirrors, each reflecting diminishing images of an interposed object indefinitely. The interposed object in this case was De Selby’s own face and this he claims to have studied backwards through an infinity of reflectins by means of a ‘powerful glass.’ He claims to have noticed a growing youthfulness in the reflections of his face according as they receded, the most distant of them – too tiny to be visible to the naked eye – being the face of a beardless boy of twelve, and, to use his own words, ‘a countenance of singular beauty and nobility.’ He did not succeed in pursuing the matter back to the cradle ‘owing to the curvature of the earth and the limitations of the telescope.’

Time for a Tobin tax

by John Q on October 4, 2011

There’s been a lot of discussion about the need for concrete demands from the #AmericanAutumn #OccupyWallStreet protests.

I just want to toss up the wholly unoriginal idea of a tax on financial transactions, originally proposed by James Tobin (he focused on international transactions, but the distinction is no longer meaningul). I’ve seen a sign advocating this on one of the videos of the protest, but I think it deserves more attention, for a bunch of reasons

* It’s directed squarely at Wall Street

* It’s global in its orientation

* It doesn’t require complicated structural change, as would a return of Glass-Steagall

* There’s an existing global movement supporting it

* It’s on the elite policy table right now, with support from the EU

* It would potentially raise substantial revenue, while greatly reducing the volume of short-term financial transactions

Here’s a  a piece I wrote about not long ago in Politics and Society and an older article on the Tobin tax, and over the fold some notes I prepared for our Parliamentary Library a few years back

[click to continue…]

Schauble “Going Rogue”

by Henry Farrell on October 3, 2011

I’m not going to be able to blog my opinions on the latest iteration of the eurozone crisis in any detail, thanks to an exceptionally busy week (comprehensive orals to be supervised, reports to be written, grant applications to be reformulated, papers to be presented and book workshops to be sat in upon). Semi-organized versions of my thoughts can be found here and here; John Quiggin and I have another short piece that will likely be coming out soon. But fwiw I was distinctly heartened by the news today that “Wolfgang Schäuble”:http://www.welt.de/politik/deutschland/article13638710/Schaeuble-wirbt-verstaerkt-fuer-Mehr-Europa-Plan.html and “Alain Juppé”:http://bruxelles.blogs.liberation.fr/coulisses/2011/09/alain-jupp%C3%A9-en-faveur-dune-f%C3%A9d%C3%A9ration-europ%C3%A9enne-.html are both floating the idea of real fiscal integration and accompanying democratic reforms of the EU. This has plausibly been orchestrated. If they are right to think that this could be pulled off, it would finally create an intersecting set in the “Paul Krugman Eurovenn”:http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/09/28/the-eurovenn/. I’m still not optimistic – but I’m now prepared to up the odds to a 35% chance that Europe could actually get out of this alive. I’ve always suspected that Schäuble was “playing a complex game”:https://crookedtimber.org/2010/05/20/eurofederalism/ – he’s now putting his cards on the table. Unsurprisingly, this is giving rise to howls of indignation from conservative and euroskeptical Germans – this _Spiegel_ “piece”:http://www.spiegel.de/international/europe/0,1518,789661,00.html (in translation) gives some flavor.

bq. FDP parliamentarians have long been convinced that the finance minister is not playing with an open hand, and that he would prefer to force them out of the coalition. But there has also been an increasing amount of discontent over Schäuble among the ranks of the CDU/CSU parliamentary group. … Many conservative parliamentarians, regardless of their position on the common currency, feel as if they are being treated with contempt. … Many German politicians are also insinuating that he has a hidden agenda. They fear that one of the last fully committed supporters of the European project is taking advantage of the crisis to advance his dream of a United States of Europe … heedlessly allowed himself to be drawn into a dangerous debate over whether the EFSF could get a banking license and leverage its assets to borrow even more money from the European Central Bank (ECB). Most of his German predecessors in office would have rejected such notions with indignation and referred to Germany’s traumatic experiences during the 20th century … In addition to being imprudent, Schäuble’s comments showed bad timing. … discovered that Schäuble was using a torrent of words and statements in an attempt to conceal what he is really planning and thinking. … Schäuble’s political style is also characterized by a good deal of posturing. … Schäuble had merely demonstrated another tactic from his bag of tricks as a seasoned politician.

That he’s arousing such vehement opposition (and nasty articles in prominent German news magazines) suggests that he may have a better chance of pulling this off than I would have thought yesterday. Fingers crossed …

Occupy Crooked Timber

by John Q on October 2, 2011

Ed, in comments on the previosu post, made a request for a post on the Occupy Wall Street movement. As with the movement itself, I have more enthusiasm than analysis to offer at this point. I went to a (very small) meeting a couple of weeks ago which was part of the planning for a similar protest in Washington starting on 6 October (more info here). Things have certainly grown since then, and it could be quite a big event.

In the generally undirected spirit of the movement, here is an open thread for your comments, predictions and so on.

On the wrong side of the Arab Spring

by John Q on October 1, 2011

The US Administration has been ambivalent about the Arab Spring from the start. But three recent developments have palce the US more clearly on the opposing side than at any time since the fall of the Tunisian regime. The list of motives is long, and its variety indicates how many things are more important to US foreign policy than the democratic aspirations of people in Arab countries

* The autocracy in Bahrein has sentenced doctors to long prison terms for the crime of treating injured demonstrators. The US reaction is to sell the regime more weapons, as part of the deal that keeps the 5th Fleet based there

* The assassination of Anwar Al-Awaki was carried out in close co-operation with the Saleh regime. Although the US has called on Saleh to leave, it’s clear that the Eternal War on Terror takes precedence over the concerns of Yemenis

* Finally, there’s the promised veto on Palestinian statehood, driven by US politics, which are now characterised by the “antipathies against particular nations and passionate attachment to others” against which Alexander Hamilton warned two centuries ago.

As with the Iraq war, there is such a mixture of motives and inconsistent policy goals that it’s a safe bet that few if any will be achieved in the long run. Conversely, I think that attempts to find a coherent national or class interest driving US policy are doomed to failure. There are a bunch of different interest groups, each with their own veto points and spans of control, and the outcomes are good for (almost) no-one.

Newer Entries →