Chris Bertram

Tyler Cowen, in India, “discusses how the people of Calcutta might adjust to rising sea levels”:http://www.marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2004/11/how_quickly_wil.html , how many of them would leave, etc (via “Davos Newbies”:http://www.davosnewbies.com/ ). There’s a certain Swiftian quality (no doubt unintended) to Cowen’s contemplation of the fate of these poor Indians. If the costs and burdens he suggests do fall on such people (as they probably will) then it puts in perspective the fatuousness of the arguments advanced by Bjorn Lomborg and others to the effect that we shouldn’t do anything about global warming because the costs of action will exceed the benefits. The costs will be incurred by the poor in places like India who will end up with their homes and workplaces under water, and the benefits have been and will be reaped by the already rich in the first world who carry on driving their SUVs. If the economist and policy-wonks who parrot the Lomborg line are proposing a massive compensatory transfer from the winners to the losers then I haven’t heard of it. _Qu’ils mangent de la brioche_ .

With so many of the usual suspects showering opprobrium on the still-warm Arafat, it is perhaps worth raising the issue of consistency. If Arafat’s past included some of the items on Iyad Allawi’s _curriculum vitae_ then those acts would certainly have been added to the bills of indictment that feature on so many blogs. [1] Andrew Gilligan (formerly of the Today Programme, Hutton Report etc.) has “an article on Allawi”:http://www.spectator.co.uk/article.php?id=5239&issue=2004-11-13 in the latest Spectator. A snippet

bq. With a friend, Adel Abdul Mahdi, he arranged to kidnap the dean of the university to publicise the Baath cause. ‘We took Iraq’s first hostages,’ recalls Mr Abdul Mahdi, now Iraq’s finance minister, nostalgically. The two men did time for the offence, until a Baathist coup got them back out again.

And later ….

bq. The INA’s most controversial operation during this period was a campaign of what can only be termed terrorism against civilians. In 1994 and 1995 a series of bombings at cinemas, mosques and other public places in Baghdad claimed up to 100 civilian lives. The leading British Iraq expert, Patrick Cockburn, obtained a videotape of one of the bombers, Abu Amneh al-Khadami, speaking from his place of refuge in Iraqi Kurdistan, claiming that the attacks had been ordered and orchestrated by Adnan Nuri, the INA’s Kurdistan director of operations — an account that has not been seriously disputed.

He may be a bastard, but at least he’s our bastard?

fn1. Of course Arafat’s biography does include many disreputable actions.

Deutsche Welle has “an interesting article”:http://www.deutsche-welle.de/dw/article/0,1564,1391096,00.html about the Edelweiss Pirates, an anti-Nazi German youth movement whose members carried out numerous low-level acts of resistance and defiance during the war. “A feature film”:http://www.palladiofilm.de/palladio/englisch/projekte-e.htm about their exploits played at the Montreal film festival in September.

No sooner does “Des von Bladet”:http://piginawig.diaryland.com/index.html leave a comment mentioning Marshall Sahlins than I click on a link in a document Henry sent me and get taken to the “Creative Commons”:http://creativecommons.org/ site, where there’s an “interview with …. Marshall Sahlins”:http://creativecommons.org/education/sahlins on the topic of pampleteering on the internet. Sahlins has republished (and e-published) a number of pamplets from his “Prickly Paradigm Press”:http://www.prickly-paradigm.com/catalog.html , including his own “Waiting for Foucault, Still”:http://www.prickly-paradigm.com/paradigm1.pdf (PDF), which contains some great observations. Here are two:

bq. *Relevance*
I don’t know about Britain, but in America many graduate students in anthropology are totally uninterested in other times and places. They say we should study our own current problems, all other ethnography being impossible anyhow, as it is just our “construction of the other.”

bq. So if they get their way, and this becomes the principle of anthropological research, fifty years hence no one will pay the slightest attention to the work they’re doing now. Maybe they’re onto something.

And

bq. *Orientalism (dedicated to Professor Gellner)*
In Anthropology there are some things that are better left un-Said.

Will Wilkinson’s “thoughts”:http://www.willwilkinson.net/flybottle/archives/2004/11/who_likes_leisu.html on the (alleged) European taste for leisure over work had me scurrying over to my bookshelf to find a copy of Marx’s _Grundrisse_ . Will surmises that the real reason that Europeans work shorter hours than Americans is that European taxes are too high. After all, anyone who is “economically rational” would surely work more if only the rewards were there, wouldn’t they? So goes human nature according to libertarians. Well, no Will, they might work _even less_ if they could satisfy their consumption needs with fewer hours at the grindstone. As Kurt Vonnegut “says”:http://www.vonnegutweb.com/vonnegutia/interviews/int_technology.html , human beings “are here on Earth to fart around, and don’t let anybody tell you any different.” Anyway, “that quote”:http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1857/grundrisse/ch06.htm from Marx:

bq. _The Times_ of November 1857 contains an utterly delightful cry of outrage on the part of a West-Indian plantation owner. This advocate analyses with great moral indignation—as a plea for the re-introduction of Negro slavery—how the Quashees (the free blacks of Jamaica) content themselves with producing only what is strictly necessary for their own consumption, and, alongside this ‘use value’, regard loafing (indulgence and idleness) as the real luxury good; how they do not care a damn for the sugar and the fixed capital invested in the plantations, but rather observe the planters’ impending bankruptcy with an ironic grin of malicious pleasure, and even exploit their acquired Christianity as an embellishment for this mood of malicious glee and indolence. They have ceased to be slaves, but not in order to become wage labourers, but, instead, self-sustaining peasants working for their own consumption.

Good for them!

Today it is fifteen years since the breaching of the Berlin Wall. The BBC has “its reports and some video footage”:http://news.bbc.co.uk/onthisday/hi/dates/stories/november/9/newsid_2515000/2515869.stm . Reuters have “a good item”:http://www.reuters.co.uk/newsPackageArticle.jhtml?type=worldNews&storyID=617515&section=news on the continued polarisation of the city. The Independent “analyses”:http://news.independent.co.uk/europe/story.jsp?story=580905 the mismanagement of the transition. The New York Times writes of “ambivalence”:http://www.nytimes.com/2004/11/08/international/europe/08cnd-germany.html on the part of former East Germans. Further comment from “FAZ”:http://www.faz.net/s/Rub117C535CDF414415BB243B181B8B60AE/Doc~EC65261560A134ECFAA3A5F1FF14A0B51~ATpl~Ecommon~Scontent.html , “Deutsche Welle”:http://www.dw-world.de/dw/article/0,1564,1388098,00.html , “Le Monde”:http://www.lemonde.fr/web/article/0,1-0@2-3214,36-386315,0.html . A great day for human freedom, but 9 November is also a day of “shame and reflection” as Gerhard Schroeder puts it, since the anniversary of the end of the wall is also that of “Kristallnacht”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kristallnacht in 1938.

Ah “the whiff of cordite”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guy_Fawkes_night and a hint of ancient religious bigotry …. Nice to see some fireworks tonight.

I can still recall my surprise when I happened upon a volume in a second-hand bookshop by Maurice Maeterlinck, author of Pelleas et Mellisande and one of history’s most famous Belgians, only to discover that it was all about the natural history of bees. If “James Meek’s piece in the latest LRB”:http://www.lrb.co.uk/v26/n21/meek01_.html is anything to go on, I’m in good company:

bq. Not long after the First World War, the movie baron Samuel Goldwyn set up a stable of Eminent Authors in an attempt to give silent screenplays more literary weight. One of the recruits was the Nobel Prize-winning Belgian writer Maurice Maeterlinck. Initially, neither party seems to have been troubled that Maeterlinck spoke no English, and the great Belgian set to work on a screen version of his novel La Vie des abeilles. When the script was translated Goldwyn read it with increasing consternation until he could no longer deny the evidence of his senses. ‘My God!’ he cried. ‘The hero is a bee!’

Further on in Meek’s review of Bee Wilson’s _The Hive_ [1] he claims that Jean-Jacques Rousseau asserts somewhere that nations which eat honey are natural democracies but those which use sugar as a sweetener are fit only for tyranny. I guess I can see what the argument might be — something about honey-gathering being a suitable activity for free citizens whereas sugar came from large plantations worked by slaves — but does JJR _really_ say it anywhere?[2]

fn1. One of the names we canvassed for this blog before we launched was “The Grumbling Hive”, I’m glad I lost that argument.

fn2. Montesquieu makes explit the link between sugar and black slavery at _Spirit of the Laws_ I.15.v.

Since 9/11 American nationalists have not been shy to tell us about the marvellous things that the United States have brought to the world. And I agree with them. The US Constitution, the struggle against slavery, the struggle for civil rights, the greatest city in the world (New York), the blues, jazz, soul. I could go on and on. I might even, on a generous day, include Hollywood. I love those Americas, and I always will. I’d like to thank them for standing against the strident nationalists and George W. Bush.

— The thirteen original states that brought us the Constitution voted overwhelmingly for John Kerry. [1]
— The states that didn’t secede and which fought against slavery voted overwhelmingly for John Kerry.
— Black America which brought us in Martin Luther King, one of the greatest moral exemplars of modern times as well as the blues, jazz and soul voted overwhelmingly for John Kerry.
— California, home of the modern motion picture industry, voted for Kerry.

These are the great American achievements: the United States’ lasting contribution to freedom, culture and progress. Sadly, that America, the America of which Americans have the most reason to be proud and foreigners have the most reason to admire, just lost. Again.

fn1. UPDATE This is ambiguous and, on one resolution of the ambiguity, false. Since some commenters are incapable of doing charitable disambiguation themselves, let me do it for them: an electoral college based on the original 13 states would have voted in Kerry by an landslide.

I’m very glad that “Daniel has taken on the job of addressing the statistical arguments”:https://www.crookedtimber.org/archives/002780.html around “the Lancet study”:http://image.thelancet.com/extras/04art10342web.pdf because, quite honestly, I’m not up to it (though I did spend part of yesterday trying to get impromptu tutorials from friends on concepts like “confidence interval”). Reading the text of the Lancet piece, I was struck by three points especially. First, they let us know exactly what they did, so that critics can address their claims. Yes, there’s a highly controversial headline figure which the Guardian and others seize upon, but what the study actually says is that they asked such-and -such questions of such-and-such people, and extrapolation of the responses would generate such-and-such a number. Second, they notice a big difference between the numbers of people apparently shot by US troops (hardly any) and the numbers killed by aerial bombardments (lots). Third, they remark on the fact that the coalition forces have an obligation to find out for themselves how many civilians have been killed but have shown hardly any interest in doing so.

[click to continue…]

The hitherto anonymous votemaster at the excellent “electoral-vote.com”:http://www.electoral-vote.com/ website “has outed himself”:http://www.electoral-vote.com/info/votemaster-faq.html . He is Andrew Tanenbaum, professor of computer science at the Vrije Universiteit in Amsterdam and already mildly famous as the author of MINIX (an important precursor of Linux).

“The Guardian has a story today”:http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/0,2763,1338749,00.html about some research led by Les Roberts of the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in Baltimore which claims 100,000 excess Iraqi deaths, many of which it attributes to bombing by coalition forces. “Juan Cole has some comment on this”:http://www.juancole.com/2004_10_01_juancole_archive.html#109902941049326214 (and more links).

I should state plainly that I have no way of judging the accuracy of this figure. It may be way off. Nevertheless I can predict with certainty that there will be numerous posts on weblogs supporting the war attacking the study. However much they criticize such exercises, though, there is some fact of the matter about how many excess Iraqi deaths there have been as a result of the war. My faith in human reason and evidence is such that I must believe that there is some figure which, if verified, would lead the enthusiasts for _this_ war to conclude that it was a mistake. But perhaps I’m wrong about that: perhaps they think that the case for _some_ war to displace Saddam Hussein was just so strong that no facts about the actual war have any bearing on the correctness of the decision to fight?

The BBC “is reporting”:http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/3948165.stm that scientists have discovered evidence of a new human species that outlasted the Neanderthals:

bq. Scientists have discovered a new and tiny species of human that lived in Indonesia at the same time our own ancestors were colonising the world. The new species – dubbed “the Hobbit” due to its small size – lived on Flores island until at least 12,000 years ago.

“John Peel is dead”:http://media.guardian.co.uk/site/story/0,14173,1336385,00.html at only 65. I can’t believe it. He’s been a part of my life since I was a teenager and used to listen to his late-night show. He’s been responsible for introducing so much music to a British audience (he did much for punk and reggae), he’s been consistently funny in his distinctive dry way, and, of course, he was just about the world’s no. 1 Liverpool fan. Terrible news. “More from the BBC”:http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/music/3955369.stm .