Chris Bertram

Many of the British blogs are currently debating whether Charlie Brooker’s joke (or “joke”, depending on your pov) about Presidential assassination was funny, not funny, tasteless, stupid, etc. “Michael Brooke”:http://michaelbrooke.com/ , “commenting at Harry’s Place”:http://hurryupharry.bloghouse.net/archives/2004/10/23/getting_lower.php offers some much needed context for the benefit of people who’ve never actually held a copy of the Guardian’s listings supplement in their hands.[1]

bq. … it appeared on page 52 of their pocket-sized listings guide, in equally pocket-sized print, in a slot normally occupied by facetious demolitions of TV programmes (which was certainly the spirit in which I read it this morning). Unfortunately, this distinction is somewhat blurred by the more egalitarian online version.

Such attempts to minimize the affair would cut no ice with FrontPage magazine! They begin “their coverage”:http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=15659 thus:

bq. The Left’s campaign of hate and defamation against the American president has hit a new low: a major media organ of the international Left, edited by an associate of Bill Clinton, has called for President Bush’s assassination.

And after foaming at the mouth for a few more paragraphs they finish:

bq. This final American connection lays everything in place: The president’s leftist opponents – foreign and domestic – feel they have a sacred duty to rig elections around the world to their liking. And if their advice is scorned, they have the right to pursue what Clausewitz called “politics by other means”: physical warfare. The development is not a healthy one for democracies on either side of the Atlantic.

fn1. The Guardian’s listings supplement is not just ephemeral, it is, in my experience, almost useless. It is supposed to be regionally sensitive, so that you don’t have to wade through all the Cardiff cinema listings if you live in Edinburgh. Unfortunately, the Guardian appears to have a policy of distributing the various editions randomly, so there is very little chance that the one actually on sale locally pertains to that region.

In the Guardian, Daniel Barenboim “remembers Edward Said”:http://www.guardian.co.uk/arts/features/story/0,11710,1335260,00.html .

Reading “Scott McLemee’s review”:http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/24/books/review/24MCLEMEE.html?oref=login&pagewanted=all&position= of Gertrude Himmelfarb’s “The Roads to Modernity”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/redirect?tag=henryfarrell-20&path=tg%2Fdetail%2F-%2F1400042364%2Fqid%3D1098573377%2Fsr%3D1-1%2Fref%3Dsr_1_1%3Fv%3Dglance%26s%3Dbooks (as “discussed by Henry”:https://www.crookedtimber.org/archives/002732.html yesterday), I’m struck by the inadequacy of her contrast between the “French” and the “British”. Take two of the alleged dimensions of difference:

bq. She finds in some English and Scottish thinkers of the 18th century (Adam Smith, the Earl of Shaftesbury and Francis Hutcheson, for example) something like the first effort to create a sociology of virtue. The French savants exalted a bloodless notion of Reason to bloody effect. The British philosophers emphasized the moral sentiments, the spontaneous capacity to recognize another person’s suffering and to feel it as one’s own.

and

bq. Nor was this Enlightenment necessarily at war with religion, as such. Himmelfarb quotes the jibes of Edward Gibbon (no orthodox religious believer by any stretch) against those French thinkers who ”preached the tenets of atheism with the bigotry of dogmatists.”

Anyone who knows anything about the “French” enlightenment knows that at least that one of its non-French participants, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, differed from the likes of Voltaire on points such as these. Somehow, I doubt that this Jean-Jacques’ virtues on these points (if virtues they are) get highlighted by Himmelfarb since doing so would muck-up her division of the world into sheep and goats.

I watched the first part of Adam Curtis’s new documentary, “The Power of Nightmares”:http://www.bbc.co.uk/bbctwo/listings/programme.shtml?day=wednesday&service_id=41532&filename=20041020/20041020_2100_41532_40078_60 , last night. The hype around the series has been that it claims that Al Qaida is a myth. Anyway, I thought it might be useful to use “David Aaronovitch’s reaction”:http://www.guardian.co.uk/Columnists/Column/0,5673,1330499,00.html as a template for my own. Here’s Aaronovitch:

bq. I admire Curtis greatly, but this time his argument is as subtle as a house-brick. It is, essentially, that everything in American politics in the past 25 years from Reaganism, through Christian fundamentalism and anti-Clintonism, to the war on terror, has been got up by Dick Perle, Paul Wolfowitz and others that the programme identifies as conspiring neocons. They have created a “dark illusion” about Islamist terrorism, just as they earlier created one about that tin-pot, ramshackle, essentially harmless old flea-bitten bear, the Soviet Union. Curtis’s is a one-stop conspiracy theory to stand alongside those fingering the Illuminati, the Bilderberg group and (vide the Da Vinci Code) Opus Dei.

To which my reaction is: not really. I did find the organising trope of the first episode somewhat irritating: a supposed parallelism between Sayyid Qutb and Leo Strauss. But there was a good deal of highly suggestive and illuminating material amid the polemic. The efforts by “Team B”, for example, systematically to exagerrate both the offensive capability and the aggressive intentions of the Soviet Union in the 1980s. These included the assertion, based _on no evidence whatsoever_ that the Soviets had developed a non-acoustic submarine detection system, the reasoning being that since they didn’t have a working acoustic version they must have had a secret ultra-modern technology that the US didn’t know about! And then there was the bizarre demand that the CIA provide the evidence to back up a claim that the Soviets were behind a single, interlinked global terror network (IRA + Baader Meinhof + etc). This fell down because the CIA operatives knew that what was being cited as “evidence” was, in fact, black propaganda that they themselves had concocted and planted in European newspapers! (Today, of course, such “evidence” would be endlessly recycled around the blogosphere by credulous dupes.) Does Curtis exaggerate the influence of the neocons? Almost certainly.

For example, next week’s episode is supposed to be about the neocons and the Islamic fundamentalists joining forces to fight the Soviets in Afghanistan, as if this was a project dreamed up in the neocons’ heads. But the idea of drawing them into a war in Afghanistan was conceived not by the neocons but by Zbigniew Brzezinski under the Carter administration. In the latest LRB, “Chalmers Johnson”:http://www.lrb.co.uk/v26/n20/john04_.html has Brzezinki saying:

bq. “CIA aid to the mujahidin began during 1980, that’s to say, after the Soviet army invaded Afghanistan. But the reality, kept secret until now, is completely different: on 3 July 1979 President Carter signed the first directive for secret aid to the opponents of the pro-Soviet regime in Kabul. And on the same day, I wrote a note to the president in which I explained that in my opinion this aid would lead to a Soviet military intervention.”

bq. Asked whether he in any way regretted these actions, Brzezinski replied: ‘Regret what? The secret operation was an excellent idea. It drew the Russians into the Afghan trap and you want me to regret it? On the day that the Soviets officially crossed the border, I wrote to President Carter, saying, in essence: “We now have the opportunity of giving to the USSR its Vietnam War.”‘

It is hard to know exactly where Curtis will go next, but I expect him to argue that whilst Islamic terrorist groups certainly exist (who could deny that!) they don’t constitute a co-ordinated international network (AQ+ Hamas + Hezbollah, etc etc) of the kind that is often suggested. He’ll probably suggest that such “links” as are claimed are largely an artefact of similar propaganda to that behind the last “international terror network”. Anyone who has followed the pathetic attempts by figures like the Daily Telegraph’s Con Coughlin to demonstrate a Saddam-AQ link will probably suspect he has a point.

[One further thought, on Brzezinski’s lack of regret. On a view of moral responsibility that one frequently finds deployed in parts of the blogosphere, Brzezinski and other proponents of the Afghan “trap” bear no responsibility for the millions of dead in Afghanistan — and elsewhere — since. It isn’t a view I can share.]

Tyler Cowen “had a discussion of this”:http://www.marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/economics/index.html a few days ago, but I think it worth a mention here: tit-for-tat was beaten in a recent iterated PD computer tournament. The winners entered a large number of different strategies programmed to communicate with one another. By signalling their existence to their confederates and adopting master and slave roles, some strategies were able to gain full exploiter’s advantage over many rounds and thereby build up huge scores. Non-confederates were systematically punished by strategies from this stable, thus damaging the scores even of conditionally co-operative rivals. Full details “here”:http://www.wired.com/news/culture/0,1284,65317,00.html?tw=wn_tophead_6 .

James, in comments to my Condorcet post, writes

bq. It will only anger the American voter to suggest that foreign nationals should be involved in electing the US President.

Of course (some) foreign nationals are allowed to vote in British general elections (Henry, Kieran and Maria would be if they were resident). I’m guessing that there are other countries that also allow (some) foreign nationals to vote in national elections. [1] Information?

fn1. EU citizens can vote in countries other than their own in European elections and in the UK I think they can vote in local elections too.

What is the US Presidential election about? Well, one possible answer is that it is about which of George W. Bush and John Kerry would make the best President of the United States. Now there’s certainly room for disagreement about the relevant qualities to be best President, but much of the media and blogospheric discourse is couched in such a way as to appear to be discussing a matter of fact: best translates as “most competent”, “wisest” etc. I’m going to assume — for the purposes of this post alone and contrary to my saner instincts — that a matter of fact is indeed involved. Given that simplifying assumption, the matter of determining who would be the best President by a democratic vote is something we might justify by invoking “Condorcet”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Condorcet ’s jury theorem. According to the jury theorem (which I cite in Zev Trachtenberg’s formulation [1])

bq. the probability that majority is correct ( _Pm_ ) is given by the formula
v ^h-k/(v ^h-k+e ^h-k ), where number of voters = n = h+k , where _h_ is the number of voters in the majority, _v_ is the probability that each voter will give the correct answer, and _e_ is the probability that each voter will give the wrong answer.

This has the remarkable consquence that just in case we expect each voter’s competence slighly to exceed the tossing of a fair coin (say we expect each voter to be right 50.1 per cent of the time), and just in case we can interpret “each voter” to mean “the average voter”, then with an electorate of, say, 100 million, the probability of a majority getting the result right approaches one. Of course, there’s a flip side to this: if the each voter has a < .5 probability of getting the right result, the majority will almost certainly be wrong! So what should we think, _ex ante_ , about the competence of the average American voter? The votemaster at the excellent "electoral-vote.com":http://www.electoral-vote.com/ opines: bq. Are the voters stupid? It is not considered politically correct to point out that an awful lot of voters don't have a clue what they are talking about. A recent "poll":http://www.mtsusurveygroup.org/mtpoll/f2004/MTSUPoll_Election_Report.htm from Middle Tennessee State University sheds some light on the subject. For example, when asked which candidate wants to roll back the tax cuts for people making over $200,000 a year, a quarter thought it was Bush and a quarter didn't know. And it goes down hill from there. When asked which candidate supports specific positions on various issues, the results were no better than chance. While this poll was in Tennessee, I strongly suspect a similar poll in other states would get similar results. I find it dismaying that many people will vote for Bush because they want to tax the rich (which he opposes) or vote for Kerry because they want school vouchers for religious schools (which he opposes). (Lest Carol Gould or her apologists think that this post reflects the anti-Americanism of a sneering Brit, let me say (a) I'm quoting an American and (b) that I'm far from convinced that citizens of the UK would fare much better than the people of Tennessee were _their_ competence to be evaluated in a similar poll.) [2] fn1. Trachtenberg, _Making Citizens_ p. 281 n. 6 fn2. A commenter to a recent post of mine asked, sarcastically, whether the I thought flipping a coin would have been superior to having the Supreme Court decide on the outcome in 2000. Actually, I do think flipping a coin would have been a better method then. Whether it would be a better method than having the US electorate decide is questionable, although _if_ voter-competence is such that individuals are more likely to get the wrong answer than the right one, it would yield a better chance of choosing the best President. Observant and thoughtful readers will also notice that, since Al Gore won a majority of the popular vote in 2000, I ought to believe that either Bush was the right answer then or that average voter competence has declined below the .5 level in the past four years....or perhaps I should believe that voter competence then as now exceeds .5 and that Kerry will inevitably triumph, or .....you do the permutations.

Former (?) liberal hawk Michael Ignatieff “reviews”:http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/17/books/review/17IGNATIE.html Sy Hersh’s _Chain of Command_ in the New York Times:

bq. The war on terror began as a defense of international law, giving America allies and friends. It soon became a war in defiance of law. In a secret order dated Feb. 7, 2002, President Bush declared, as Hersh puts it, that ”when it came to Al Qaeda the Geneva Conventions were applicable only at his discretion.” Based on memorandums from the Defense and Justice Departments and the White House legal office that, in Anthony Lewis’s apt words, ”read like the advice of a mob lawyer to a mafia don on how to . . . stay out of prison,” Bush unilaterally withdrew the war on terror from the international legal regime that sets the standards for treatment and interrogation of prisoners. Abu Ghraib was not the work of a few bad apples, but the direct consequence, Hersh says, of ”the reliance of George Bush and Donald Rumsfeld on secret operations and the use of coercion — and eye-for-an-eye retribution — in fighting terrorism.”

Via John B at “Shot by Both Sides”:http://www.stalinism.com/shot-by-both-sides/ , I see that US citizens or permanent residents who buy Cuban cigars abroad (say in the UK) and consume them there, are liable to criminal penalties of up to $250,000 and up to 10 years in prison and civil penalties of up to $65,000. So my British-based American friends who amble down to the local tobacconists and buy one of Havana’s best to smoke in their own living room will be in jeopardy of arrest on their next trip back home (if suitably denounced). [1]

From the Office of Foreign Assets Control’s “Cuban Cigar Update (pdf)”:http://www.treas.gov/offices/enforcement/ofac/sanctions/ccigar2.pdf :

bq. The question is often asked whether United States citizens or permanent resident aliens of the United States may legally purchase Cuban origin goods, including tobacco and alcohol products, in a third country for personal use
outside the United States. The answer is no. The Regulations prohibit persons subject to the jurisdiction of the United States from purchasing, transporting, importing, or otherwise dealing in or engaging in any transactions with respect to any merchandise outside the United States if such merchandise (1) is of Cuban origin; or (2) is or has been located in or transported from or through Cuba; or (3) is made or derived in whole or in part of any article which is the growth, produce or manufacture of Cuba. Thus, in the case of cigars, the prohibition extends to cigars manufactured in Cuba and sold in a third country and to cigars manufactured in a third country from tobacco grown in Cuba.

Here’s what to do if you spot an American having an illicit puff:

bq. Suspected embargo violations may be reported telephonically to OFAC’s Enforcement Division at (202)622-2430 or via facsimile at 202 622-1657.

fn1. Since the ban also hits permanent residents, Henry, Harry, Brian and Kieran had better be careful on _their_ trips home!

I’m plagued by an evil SpyWare problem at the moment, which neither SpyBot S&D nor AdAware detects. (Norton AV also says I’m virus free.) The problem is an occasional launch of an Internet Explorer window, linking to this site or that site. Perhaps installing XP SP2 would solve this, but my last attempt just hung my system mid-install (and I needed to do a lot to recover). I’m tempted just to rename the IE exe file so that the program won’t run, but since evil Microsoft may have programmed in all kinds of subterranean connections between the browser and the OS, I’m wary of doing so. Any advice? (Advice of the form “You should buy a Mac” will not improve my immediate situation or mood.)

The “pro-war British”:http://hurryupharry.bloghouse.net/archives/2004/10/15/does_she_exaggerate.php “blogs”:http://www.pootergeek.com/index.php?p=456 seem to be linking to and discussing “an article”:http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=15464 in David Horowitz’s FrontPage Magazine which alleges that the UK is in the grip of a frightening epidemic of anti-Americanism and anti-Semitism. In the words of one of their number, “Melanie Phillips”:http://www.melaniephillips.com/diary/archives/000842.html :

bq. This article describes vividly what it’s like to be an American and a Jew facing the tsunami of anti-American and anti-Jewish hatred that has swept over Britain

I’m neither American nor a Jew, so I hesitate somewhat to downplay these reports. Certainly unthinking anti-Americanism — of the kind depicted in Whit Stillman’s film “Barcelona”:http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0109219/ — is a feature of European political and social life. (Only the other day, a supermarket checkout assistant told me that “after all, Michael Moore is just another fat American”.) And anti-semitism also exists in a number of forms: there’s a residual British conservative strain of it and it has come to infect some of the discourse of anti-Israeli polemic on the Left. But American and Jewish friends and colleagues do not tell me of hostility of the kind recounted in the article, and the judicious Jonathan Edelstein reports in “comments to one of the blogs discussing the alleged phenomenon”:http://www.pootergeek.com/index.php?p=456 :

bq. I’m a fairly frequent visitor to London and just returned from four days there, where I hung out with quite a few Guardian and Independent-readers, some of them avowedly Marxist. None of them had any problem with me as an American, a Jew or a Zionist – we had some lively arguments, certainly, but none of them degenerated to personal abuse, anti-semitism or “Israel is a pirate state” rhetoric. I’ve never encountered that kind of crap in the UK, although I’m sure it exists; there are idiots everywhere. The reception of Americans in London probably has a great deal to do with the particular people they meet.

I’d be interested to hear of other experiences.

Why does no-one read analytical philosophy (except for analytical philosophers) and what was the revolution wrought by Saul Kripke? “Jerry Fodor explains”:http://www.lrb.co.uk/v26/n20/fodo01_.html , over at the LRB.

Over at “Harry’s Place, Gene picks up”:http://hurryupharry.bloghouse.net/archives/2004/10/13/social_forum_preview.php on the priorities of the European Social Forum, which is about to meet in London. I surfed over to “the programme of events and workshops”:http://www.fse-esf.org/en/programme/list.shtml and was disturbed to find that there’s a session devoted to promoting 9/11 revisionism:

bq. Members of the UK 9/11 network will be speaking including Ian Neal and Simon Aronowitz, editor of www.thoughtcrimenews.com plus a screening of 911 In Plane Sight 50 min short film followed by a question and answer forum…..Presenting the evidence supporting US government complicity in the 9/11 attacks, growing 9/11 truth movement and its implications for global peace and development.

I had a conversation last week with a very smart and likeable man from a Middle Eastern country who believes all this nonsense, and assures me that many of his fellow citizens do too. European leftists giving it further exposure, credence and legitimacy is the last thing we need.

I’ve been teaching Hobbes, and couldn’t help my thoughts turning to the last US Presidential election when I got to the seventeenth and eighteenth laws of nature:

bq. And seeing every man is presumed to do all things in order to his own benefit, no man is a fit arbitrator in his own cause: and if he were never so fit, yet equity allowing to each party equal benefit, if one be admitted to be judge, the other is to be admitted also; and so the controversy, that is, the cause of war, remains, against the law of nature.

bq. For the same reason no man in any cause ought to be received for arbitrator to whom greater profit, or honour, or pleasure apparently ariseth out of the victory of one party than of the other: for he hath taken, though an unavoidable bribe, yet a bribe; and no man can be obliged to trust him. And thus also the controversy and the condition of war remaineth, contrary to the law of nature.

(Leviathan, ch. 15).