September 2013

I’ve always been envious of John Holbo’s discovery of the two-step of terrific triviality, a manoeuvre we’d all seen, but never properly identified. I’d like to solicit names for a manoeuvre I run into all the time in debates over climate policy which goes along the following lines

A: The planet is doomed unless we abandon industrial civilization/adopt my WWII-scale emergency program

B (me): On the contrary,we could cut emissions by 50 per cent quickly and with minimal effects on living standards.[^1]

A: What about cars, methane from ag production, air travel etc?

B: (me) We could cut vehicle emissions in half just by switching to the most fuel-efficient cars now on the market, methane by eating chicken instead of beef, air travel by videoconferencing and taking one long holiday in place of two short ones. The same for most other sources of emissions.[^2]

A: That’s absurd. No one would ever stand for that.

So, does anyone have a name for this manoeuvre, or, alternatively, a defense of this kind of argumentation

[^1]: Actually, we need a 90 per cent reduction by 2050. That would be a bit harder, but once you accept the idea that we could greatly reduce emissions without harming living standards, we’re down to arguing about parameter values in economic models. All economic models yield the conclusion that we could decarbonize the economy over 40 years while still improving living standards greatly.
[^2]: I’ll leave aside the question of whether it’s better to bring this about using prices (eg a carbon tax) or direct controls. My preferred answer is a bit of both, but either will work for the purposes of this example.

Political theorist Marshall Berman, who was my colleague at the CUNY Graduate Center, died yesterday morning.

When I heard the news last night, my first thought was the date: 9/11. There’s no good day to die, but to die on a day so associated with death—whether the murder of nearly 3000 people on 9/11/2001, most of them in his beloved New York, or the 9/11/1973 coup in Chile that brought down Allende and installed Pinochet—seems, in Marshall’s case, like an especially cruel offense against the universe.

For as anyone who knew or read him knows, Marshall was a man of irrepressible and teeming life. The life of the street, which he immortalized in his classic All That’s Solid Melts Into Air; the life of sex and liberation, which he talked about in The Politics of Authenticity (read the section on Montesquieu’s Persian Letters; you’ll never read that book the same way again); the life of high art and popular culture, whether it was the Sex Pistols or hip-hop. [click to continue…]

“Advice”:http://www.whiteoliphaunt.com/duckofminerva/2013/09/so-you-want-a-job-in-policy.html on succeeding as a policy intern in Washington DC. Doubtless, this is entirely well meant. Very likely, it is _good advice._ But precisely to the extent it is good advice, it speaks volumes …

The number one thing that ensures a “way in” to this town/field is an internship- which are typically unpaid and last about 6 months. … While internships aren’t exactly paid in cash, they are paid in networks, and those networks are worth more than money.) … So there is a lot of competition about “who’s smarter than who” or “who produces more.” A little secret: one of the ways to get ahead is to take some of that energy and just be kind and helpful. Cleaning coffee mugs with a good attitude gets you noticed. Then people realize you are smart and read your stuff. … recognize that your 40-hours-a-week is simply the cost of entry. If you really want to leverage your internship, expect to work a lot more (though no one will tell you that, because I’m pretty sure that legally they can’t) … I was fortunate enough that I could incur the cost of not earning an income for 6 months; some of my fellow interns ended up doing all of that and then waiting tables until 2am…crazy, I know! Just think of it as if you’re Andrea Sachs in The Devil Wears Prada, except hopefully your boss is much nicer (mine certainly was!) and your shoes probably shouldn’t cost as much (though if you are in the market, here’s some worth investing in if you are going to be running around this city and want to look uber professional: http://www.zappos.com/cole-haan-chelsea-low-pump-black-patent?zfcTest=fcl%3A0)

My department just moved into a new building, and, being in a new building, acquired a new set of cleaners. I got chatting to one of them the other day and asked her where she was from. “Chile,” she told me. She had come to the UK some time after the coup, when other family members had been imprisoned and life had become impossible. She had been given refugee status and had raised a family here. She had been back once, but Chile had become a foreign country to her, all her life was now in the UK where her children had grown up. Often, such is the fate of the refugee, permanently exiled, a whole life, with its plans, expectations and connections, very different from how it might have been. In the late 1970s and early 80s I was involved in Latin American solidarity work in Oxford and got to know quite a few Chileans. Many seemed to be happy and friendly people but others were scarred by the experiences they had been through before exile, and it showed. People fleeing conflict, persecution and the threat of torture or death are very vulnerable and often fragile. At least British governments of the 1970s and 80s recognised and put into practice their obligations towards such people. Things are different now.

Today is the fortieth anniversary of that other, bloodier, September 11th when General Augusto Pinochet seized power in Chile and overthrew a democratically-elected left-wing government, with thousands killed, “disappeared”, tortured or imprisoned. The Chilean coup hung over the leftists of my generation as a warning of what can and might happen, should capital ever be seriously worried about its entitlements and prerogatives. Such an atmosphere spawned novels such as Chris Mullin’s A Very British Coup, an imaginative recreation of what a British Chile could be like. We know that in the recesses of MI5 and the Tory right there were murmurings and proto-plans. Plans for eventualities in which the country proved “ungovernable”, where the far left become too strong, or where the miners “brought down” another government. (Of course, it was the electors who actually deposed Edward Heath.) We knew too of the likely hand-wringing reaction of supposedly democratic liberals and conservatives, should such an intervention prove “necessary” closer to home. That thought was present in Ralph Miliband’s well-known “The Coup in Chile”:
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I was working on a piece about how to respond to anti-vaccination beliefs, when it struck me that, in the absence of the germ theory of disease, vaccination looks a lot like homeopathy – you use a tiny amount of something that causes a mild version of the disease you want to prevent. I wondered whether the success of vaccination in the 18th century had any impact on the development of homeopathy. A very casual search suggests not, though there is something called homeopathic vaccination. Does anyone know more about this?

My older daughter is supposed to learn a new word a week. And tell the class. She has a good vocabulary, so I think some weeks she coasts on fancy words she already knew. But she likes new words! So I thought I would make a short list of cool words for 12-year olds, in case she ever needs a new one on short notice: asperity, vermiculation, sussurus. That sort of thing.

Then I thought of a good one: Custerdome! From the classic Steely Dan track, “Gaucho”. The Steely Dan lexicon defines it as “an archetype of a building that houses great corporations.” Alas, since this fictional synecdoche of a fictional archetype exists in the minds of Fagen and Becker, the term has languished on the badland borderlands of private language-hood. My daughter is not exactly a Dan fan, so probably that state of affairs will persist. “Try again tomorrow.” [click to continue…]

I have a new article (Web version, PDF) on technology intellectuals in the current issue of _Democracy._

Three addenda. First, the piece finishes by offering some (much deserved) praise to Tom Slee. It’s probably worth making clear that he has _absolutely no responsibility_ for anything I say in the article (I’m tolerably frank in my opinions about a few people – he likely disagrees with some of these criticisms). Neither he nor anyone else mentioned in the article has seen it before publication. Second, that there’s at least one major omission in the piece. I mention both Susan Crawford and Siva Vaidhyanathan as technology intellectuals who are skeptical about the positive role of business – I can’t think why I didn’t include Rebecca MacKinnon (whose excellent book, _Consent of the Networked_, takes this as a major theme) too. And I’m sure there are others. Finally, the piece may very possibly get some lively reaction, which I am unlikely to respond to at any length. When I describe myself as an amateur of these debates, I’m speaking the literal truth – my actual livelihood, which involves classes to be prepared, academic research to be finished up and sent off to journals, and comprehensive exams to be put together, is keeping me extremely busy at the moment. So take it as it stands …

The most recent Greenwald document release – of a Powerpoint suggesting strongly that the NSA has a backdoor into the SWIFT financial messaging system – may have some interesting political consequences. Abe Newman at Georgetown and I are in the throes of writing a book about the internationalization of homeland security. Roughly, our story is that domestic officials in both the EU and US, who prefer to prioritize homeland security over privacy and civil rights, have been able to use cross national networks and forums to push their agenda, weakening the previously existing privacy regime in the European Union. And SWIFT is a big part of this story. The US began secretly requiring SWIFT (which is based in Belgium) to share its data after September 11. When EU decision makers became aware of this (thanks to a New York Times story which the Bush administration tried to get spiked), there was political uproar, resulting in the negotiation of a framework under which the US agreed to impose limits and safeguards in return for continued access. If you don’t mind wading through some political science jargon, you can get the basic story from the relevant bits of “this paper”:https://crookedtimber.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/09/layering_apsa.doc.

This is interesting for two reasons. First – the EU thought the US had signed onto a binding deal on access to SWIFT data. If,as appears likely at this point, the US was letting the EU see what it did when it came in through the front door, while retaining a backdoor key for the odd bit of opportunistic burglary, it will at the least be highly embarrassing. Second – there are “people in the EU”:http://www.pcworld.com/article/2048424/eu-politicians-call-for-suspension-of-datasharing-deal-amid-new-nsa-spying-allegations.html who never liked this deal in the first place, and have been looking for reasons to get rid of it. The allegations of the last couple of months have helped their case considerably – this, if it bears out, will do more than that. If the US has demonstrably lied to the EU about the circumstances under which it has been getting access to SWIFT, it will be hard for the EU to continue with the arrangement (and, possibly, a similar arrangement about sharing airline passenger data) without badly losing face. Even though the people who dominate the agenda (officials in the Council and European Commission) probably don’t want to abandon the agreement, even after this, they’ll have a bloody hard time explaining why they want to keep it. The EU-US homeland security relationship, which had been looking pretty cosy a few months ago, is now likely to be anything but.

Speaking of sharing “Adventure Time” time with my girls, our household is in some internal dispute about the relative merits of the two halves of the latest double episode: “Earth & Water/ Too Old”. Belle and the girls loved “Earth & Water” because Flame P., that’s why: “Cinnamon Bun and I staged a coup and I overthrew my dad.” Also, everyone is wondering whether Flame P. and Finn will get back together or what. However, I feel that, with “Too Old”, the show has finally achieved Ubu Roi levels of ecstatic distress and all around weirdness. (It has, of course, been building since we were first introduce to the Earl of Lemongrab in “Too Young”. “Yo, Earl! Hey, you’re fired, ya’ butt!”) “Lemonhope’s Song” is the very soul of soft plangency. So I say “Too Old” is genius. Belle says she feels Finn is out of character. What’s the deal with a couple dozen lemon people being able to take him down like that? I say it just shows how much his break-up with Flame P. has junked up his fighting. He’s not all “crush this mess all accordingly,” as in previous encounters with Lemongrab. Because his mess has been crushed. Stands to reason.

Discuss!

I was going to write a long post arguing the case for a UNSC resolution to indict Assad before the ICC, but Google revealed that Edward Bernton at the Globalist had already written it. So, I’ll just add some notes over the fold

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Unless there’s a sudden turnaround in the polls, Tony Abbott will become Prime Minister of Australia tonight. This will be the third time in my life that a Federal Labor government has been defeated, the other two occasions being 1975 and 1996. On both those occasions, despite substantial and enduring accomplishments, the government had made a mess of macroeconomic management, and the electorate, unsurprisingly, wanted to punish them. And, despite my strong disagreements with them (and with the way Fraser came to office), the incoming Prime Ministers had serious views on how best Australia’s future could be managed. Fraser has only improved since leaving office, making valuable contributions on the national and global stage. My evaluation of Howard, following his defeat, starts with the observation that he was ‘the most substantial figure produced by the Liberal party since the party itself was created by Menzies’.

Nothing of the sort can be said this time. The case put forward by the LNP is based entirely on lies and myths. These include the claims that
* Labor has mismanaged the economy and piled up unnecessary debt and deficits
* Australian families are ‘doing it tough’ because of a soaring cost of living
* The carbon tax/price is a ‘wrecking ball’, destroying economic activity
* The arrival of refugees represents a ‘national emergency’

None of these claims stands up to even momentary scrutiny.

Then there’s Abbott himself. After 20 years in politics, I can’t point to any substantial accomplishments on his part, or even any coherent political philosophy. For example, I’m not as critical of his parental leave scheme as some, but it’s totally inconsistent with his general political line, a fact that his supporters in business have been keen to point out. On climate change, he’s held every position possible and is now promising, in effect, to do nothing. His refusal to reveal policy costings until the second-last day of the campaign debases an already appalling process. He treated budget surplus as a holy grail until it became inconvenient, and has now become carefully vague on the topic.

Obviously, the fact that such a party and such a leader can be on the verge of victory implies that the Labor side has done something dreadfully wrong. It’s the oldest cliche in politics for the losing side to claim that the problem is not the policies but inability to get the message across. In this case, however, I think it’s true. Gillard lost the voters early on with stunts like a consultative assembly to decide on climate change policy, and never managed to get them to listen to her for any length of time. Rudd was doing well in communicating his vision from his return to the leadership until he called the election. He then wasted three weeks on small-bore stuff apparently aimed at securing minor party preferences. He seemed finally to have rediscovered his voice, in the last week of the campaign, but almost certainly too late.

If you add just a negation sign to this Walter Russell Mead post, you get my view. Except for the bit where he says that the plans for war seem pretty screwed up. Everyone agrees about that.

Wouldn’t it be great if we set a precedent? Wouldn’t the Republic be healthier for it having happened – just once?

President proposes military action. Congress votes against. It doesn’t happen.

Once it happens once, it’s more likely to happen again, after all.

But won’t this destroy Obama’s status and credibility and all that good stuff? [click to continue…]

In shul this morning, the second day of Rosh Hashanah, the rabbi spoke at length about the State of Israel. This is more surprising than you might think. I’ve been going to this shul since I moved to Brooklyn in 1999, and if memory serves, it’s only been in the last two or three years that the rabbi has devoted at least one of her High Holy Days talks to Israel.

Throughout the aughts, Israel didn’t come up much in shul. During flash points of the Second Intifada, you might hear a prayer for Jewish Israelis or nervous temporizing about some action in Jenin or Gaza. But I can’t recall an entire sermon devoted to the State of Israel and its meaning for Jews.

That’s also how I remember much of my synagogue experience as a kid. Don’t get me wrong: Israel was central to my Jewish education. My entire family—my five sisters, my parents, and my grandfather—visited there with our synagogue in 1977. Several of my sisters, as well as my parents, have been back. The safety of Israel was always on my mind; I remember spending many a Friday night service imagining a terrorist attack on our synagogue, so short seemed the distance between suburban New York and Tel Aviv. I wrote about Israel in school essays (I actually defended its role in the Sabra and Shatila massacre). I had a strong feeling for Israel (or what I thought was Israel): a combination of hippie and holy, Godly and groovy, a feeling well captured by Steven Spielberg in Munich. [click to continue…]

For months now, the prospect of federal elections in Germany at the end of September have put a halt to making hard choices about the continuing Eurozone crisis. But now that the elections are near, domestic debate about policy choices is oddly muted. There seems to be a resigned acceptance in Germany that Merkel will lead the next government, and that her policies are not really open to serious challenge.

Maybe domestic contentment makes voters oblivious to the wider world – after all, unemployment in Germany is actually lower now than before the crisis. But Germany’s political choices at home can’t be separated from its role as the largest and strongest European economy. It has a massive European current account surplus that closely mirrors the deficits of the European ‘periphery’ – most of the EU’s trade takes place within the EU itself. But in the Eurozone, relative cost adjustment is heavily one-sided, requiring that all the adjustment must take place in the ‘periphery’, while Germany’s real effective exchange rate is held down. 

Then again, it isn’t as if all is rosy in Germany either. Low unemployment is made possible by a tough-minded strategy of cost containment, which has give rise to new form of ‘precarious’ jobs, rising inequality, and static real living standards. Tight spending controls have resulted in an ongoing decline in investment in skills and education which threatens the sustainability of the export-led model itself. Yet the European dimension of German politics seems to have fallen entirely from sight. Since decision-making in the Eurozone now hinges almost entirely on the German government’s preferences, this matters a great deal.

So it’s quite entertaining to see the ad by the largest trade union, IG Metall (here with subtitles, courtesy of The Guardian), encouraging people to turn out and vote. It’s clearly meant as a last-ditch effort to remind people that they don’t have to sleep-walk to an inevitable electoral outcome. Whether that’s enough to energize a change of mood is probably doubtful.