Chris Bertram

Online bookies BlueSquare now have Kerry and Bush neck and neck at 5/6 , which represents a significant shortening of Kerry’s odds. (Compare their odds on the next British general election, which have Labour 2/7 on.)

I just got back from seeing Farenheit 9/11. There’s a little voice saying I should pick away, argue about this point or that point, qualify, criticize. Others can do that. Moore makes one point quite brilliantly: that those who suffer and die come overwhelmingly from families and communities that are, shall we say, _somewhat poorer_ than the politicians who chose to go to war, or the executives of the corporations who hope (hoped?) to profit from Iraqi reconstruction. Something like that is true of all wars, and if Moore were just making a general pacifist case then it would have been a weaker film. Instead, he was saying, or I took him to be saying , that those who expect others to bear the risks and costs of their projects better have a convincing justification for them. Self-defence might be one such justification, but plainly not in this case.

Those who have made the “humanitarian” case for war have never addressed the dirty little issue of who runs the risks and who does the dying. Rather, they’ve sought refuge in pointing out the plain truth that Saddam’s Iraq was an evil tyranny and that the world is a better place without it. So it was and so it is. But would or could this war have been fought if the children of the wealthy were at as much risk of dying as the children of the poor? One rather suspects not. It may be unpalatable to think that there’s a moral link between being willing to wage wars for democracy and human rights, and being willing to introduce conscription, but maybe those who have taken a leftist/liberal-hawk line on Iraq should be calling for a citizen army too. I’ve never read them doing so.

I’m just back from a brief holiday in Pembrokeshire where, among other things, I managed to finish Hari Kunzru’s new novel Transmission. Transmission is a fairly frothy but sharply observed tale of globalized internet folk which centres around the intertwined lives of Arjun Mehta, a microserf swept from his native India to code in the United States, Guy Swift, a London-based postmodern marketing executive and Leela Zahir, a Bollywood icon. I won’t say more, so as not to spoil it. But if you’ve read his earlier The Impressionist , then I’d say that this one is lighter but, on the whole, more satisfactory. Definitely worth taking to the beach.

Recent postings here on health care expenditure made me think of Ronald Dworkin’s essay “Justice in the Distribution of Health Care” (McGill Law Journal 1993, but also in Clayton and Williams eds, The Ideal of Equality. Dworkin is concerned to ask (a) how much society should spend on health care and (b) how that spending should be distributed. To answer this question he uses an ideal market (as a model, as a thought experiment, mind, he’s not advocating a market-based health care system). Dworkin argues that we should

bq. aim to make collective, social decisions about the quantity and distribution of health care so as to match, as closely as possible, the decisions that people in the community would make for themselves, one by one, in the appropriate circumstances, if they were looking from youth down the course of their lives and trying to decide what risks were worth running in return for not running other kinds of risks.

Dworkin enters three counterfactual modifications to his hypothethical choice situtation.

1. The decisions would be taken against a fair background distribution of resources. [See Dworkin, _Sovereign Virtue_ for his view on this.]

2. The choosers would know everything about risks, costs, procedures etc that very good doctors actually know.

3. Except that the choosers are to be deprived of the knowledge of the antecedent probability of any _particular_ person going down with any particular disease or infirmity. I think Dworkin’s idea here is that they would know about the incidence of a disease such a sickle-cell in the general population, but not, crucially, that blacks are more likely to suffer from it than whites.

Dworkin argues that choosers in that position and subject to those constraints would _not_ think it a good bargain to spend money that they could otherwise spend in their fit and healthy youth on insurance to cover them against some eventualities. In particular:

* Almost no one would injure to provide themselves with equipment to keep them alive if they had lapsed into a persistent vegetative state.

* Almost no one would insure to provide themselves with expensive medical treatment (even life-saving treatment) if they had lapsed into some form of irreversible dementia.

* Almost no one would by cover to extend their lives by a few months when doing so would be very costly and they would enjoy a low quality of life.

In all those cases, and others we can imagine, the cost of the treatment is so high and the expected benefit so low that it would be a poor bargain to buy the insurance rather than spending the money on education, training, travel, fun, whatever, today.

Someone has to make the announcement: Crooked Timber is one year old today!

Last night’s Newsnight had a nice what-he-said-then/what-he-says-now juxtaposition, and the same quotes appear in today’s Independent:

bq. We are asked to accept that, contrary to all intelligence, Saddam decided to destroy those weapons. I say that such a claim is palpably absurd. (Tony Blair, 18 March 2003)

bq. I have to accept that we have not found them and we may not find them. He [Saddam] may have removed or hidden or even destroyed those weapons. (Tony Blair 6 July 2004)

Matt Yglesias has been doing sterling work on the double standards employed by Michael Moore’s critics. So, as a supplement to my two earlier posts on the same topic, I’d like to draw attention to his latest. He cites Volokh Conspirator Randy Barnett, who has read Kopel's Fifty-six deceits in Farenheit 911. Barnett observes:

bq. I was struck by the sheer cunningness of Moore’s film. When you read Kopel, try to detach yourself from any revulsion you may feel at a work of literal propaganda receiving such wide-spread accolades from mainstream politicos, as well as attendance by your friends and neighbors. Instead, notice the film’s meticulousness in saying only (or mostly) “true” or defensible things in support of a completely misleading impression.

Matt comments, fairly and reasonably:

bq. The funny thing, though, is that if I wrote “The 56 Deceits of George W. Bush” (as, indeed, many people have done) then some very intelligent Volokh Conspirator (as, indeed, many of the conspirators are) would doubtless have written a post in response (as, indeed, I’ve read at the Conspiracy) arguing that most of the alleged “lies” weren’t lies _per se_ (and, indeed, they’re mostly misleading juxtapositions of technically true information) and that these sorts of ad hominem attacks don’t really prove that the presidents’ policies are actually wrong.

Quite.

The latest parlour game , via both Norm and Chris Brooke .

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Arguments, fights and feuds have their own inner logic, and they lead to people taking up positions and attitudes that make little sense on a rationalistic model of what beliefs we ought to have. But sometimes, even in the middle of such a quarrel, we get a sense of where it’s going, how it is defining and entrenching us and the other person. David Aaronovich captures something of this in today’s Guardian:

bq. I wrote a year ago that other peoples’ assumptions were turning me into a Jew. And now I began to wonder whether being attacked as being anti-Muslim because of my views on Iraq and secularism, and despite my views on Palestine and racism, wasn’t beginning to make me the thing that I was being accused of. Bugger it then, you half-think, if that’s what you want.

bq. But if that’s how I feel, wonderfully rational bloke that I am, what in heaven’s name is the effect on people from the Muslim community who are being wrongly stopped in the name of counter-terrorism? Doesn’t that mean the warnings about alienation are essentially correct? Last Friday’s announcement of the police stop and search statistics were like a bucket of iced water in the face. A 300% increase in the number of Asians stopped, and you just know that most of these will be young men. And we also know from the sus laws and the experiences of black BMW drivers, what the reaction is. Fuck you.

I posted the other day about Paul Krugman's correct observation that many of the right-wing pundits who get exercised about Michael Moore apply lower standards to the spin coming out of the Bush administration. As I said in comments at the time, that _comparative_ judgement is compatible with thinking Farenheit 9/11 is a pretty bad movie. Elsewhere in Krugman’s piece he gives qualified approval to Moore as providing an essential public service and writes that this is despite the fact that Farenheit 9/11 is tendentious, promotes unproven conspiracy theories and that viewers may come away from the film “believing some things that probably aren’t true.” This has somewhat upset Norm , who compares Krugman’s defence of Moore to the line some took on behalf of Daily Mirror editor Piers Morgan, who published faked photographs of British solidiers mistreating Iraqi detainees.

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The BBC commentators have been comparing Otto Rehhagel to Socrates and invoking Greece’s ancient past. And why not? Moments like tonight are what make football the great sport it is.

The BBC has made Artur Pizzaro's complete Beethoven sonatas available online, together with interview, critical notes etc. Fantastic!

I see that the Poor Man already covered this . No matter, it is worth the repetition. Krugman on responses to Farenheit 9/11 :

bq. There has been much tut-tutting by pundits who complain that the movie, though it has yet to be caught in any major factual errors, uses association and innuendo to create false impressions. Many of these same pundits consider it bad form to make a big fuss about the Bush administration’s use of association and innuendo to link the Iraq war to 9/11. Why hold a self-proclaimed polemicist to a higher standard than you hold the president of the United States?

The Guardian has reacted to the sex imbalance of Prospect’s list of 100 “British” public intellectuals (previously discussed here) , with a list of women whom they might have included.