Chris Bertram

The Flop Eared Mule (who is becoming a daily stop for me) has “a fine post on Townes Van Zandt”:http://flopearedmule.blogspot.com/2005_08_01_flopearedmule_archive.html#112365680440804113 , Philip Larkin, and how life-embracing depressing lyrics can be (complete with link to an interview with the maker of the forthcoming Townes movie).

Christopher Hitchens in Slate “asks”:http://slate.msn.com/id/2124157/ :

bq. Isn’t there a single drop of solidarity and compassion left over for the people of Iraq, after three decades of tyranny, war, and sanctions and now an assault from the vilest movement on the face of the planet?

Needless to say there isn’t a mention of the fact that they wouldn’t be under assault from “the vilest movement on the face of the planet”, nor would that movement be as strong as it presently is, but for the policy that Hitchens and his co-thinkers promoted in the first place. Oh, sorry, I didn’t notice at first, but Hitchens doesn’t believe that since he claims:

bq. Bad as Iraq may look now, it is nothing to what it would have become without the steadying influence of coalition forces. None of the many blunders in postwar planning make any essential difference to that conclusion. Indeed, by drawing attention to the ruined condition of the Iraqi society and its infrastructure, they serve to reinforce the point.

The “steadying influence of coalition forces” …..

I posted before about “PledgeBank”:http://www.pledgebank.com/ and, specifically, about Nicola’s pledge (see also “accompanying blog”:http://justonepercent.blogspot.com/ ) for people to donate 1 per cent of their income to charity. Sadly, the first version of that pledge failed to attract the 400 pledgers needed. So she “relaunched it with a target of 100”:http://www.pledgebank.com/onepercent . With just under a couple a weeks to got she is 32 short, so come on CT readers, get pledging and help Nicola to succeed this time!

Nick Cohen has a column today entitled “I still fight oppression”:http://observer.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,6903,1544111,00.html . The theme is the familiar one of the moral failure of “the left”.

What to say? If, by Cohen’s lights, supporting the war in Iraq counts as “fighting oppression”, we can say that Cohen got round to it “eventually”:http://www.guardian.co.uk/Columnists/Column/0,5673,665073,00.html . On the other hand, thanks to that reckless war, there’s a great deal more oppression around, whether it is of “ordinary Iraqis slaughtered by Al Zarqawi and his friends”:http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/4714601.stm , or of the “women who are to be subjected to the new Iraqi constitution”:http://www.guardian.co.uk/g2/story/0,3604,1537387,00.html . And, of course, Cohen actually opposed the overthrow of the Taliban. So maybe that “still” in the headline is a tiny bit misleading.

“Matthew Turner”:http://www.matthewturner.co.uk/Blog/ has been doing a sterling job of digging up past Nick Cohen columns. Some of them are, in the light of recent scribblings, simply priceless. So, for example, “this one”:http://observer.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,6903,587483,00.html , which contains the line:

bq. He [Blair] has – and there’s no point being prissy about this – pinned a large target sign on this country.

As “Matthew writes”:http://www.matthewturner.co.uk/Blog/2005/07/nick-cohen-in-2001.html :

bq. Cohen is within his rights to change his mind. What he’s not within his rights is to attack [in his “UAT statement”:http://www.unite-against-terror.com/whysigned/archives/000028.html ] as “morons”, and call their views “sinister”, people who didn’t make such cack-handed predictions (and get taken in by conmen) but who still believe some of what he used to.

Robin Cook, former Labour Foreign Secretary and prominent critic of the Blair government over Iraq, “has died suddenly at the age of 59”:http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/4127654.stm . His “resignation speech”:http://www.robincook.org.uk/cook/rc_press.asp#article8 over the war will be remembered for a very long time. From that speech delivered on the eve of war:

bq. For four years as Foreign Secretary I was partly responsible for the western strategy of containment. Over the past decade that strategy destroyed more weapons than in the Gulf war, dismantled Iraq’s nuclear weapons programme and halted Saddam’s medium and long-range missiles programmes. Iraq’s military strength is now less than half its size than at the time of the last Gulf war. Ironically, it is only because Iraq’s military forces are so weak that we can even contemplate its invasion. Some advocates of conflict claim that Saddam’s forces are so weak, so demoralised and so badly equipped that the war will be over in a few days. We cannot base our military strategy on the assumption that Saddam is weak and at the same time justify pre-emptive action on the claim that he is a threat. Iraq probably has no weapons of mass destruction in the commonly understood sense of the term—namely a credible device capable of being delivered against a strategic city target.

Here’s a site I think is fun: “Cheezeball”:http://www.cheezeball.net/index.html . Dedicated to alt.country (whatever that is) and keeping it free of schmaltz and schlock: ‘ “It is “cheeze” with a “z,” as in “Muzak.”‘. The reviews are often savage (including of a least one album I think is pretty good) and funny and the “manifesto”:http://www.cheezeball.net/Manifesto.htm is worth a read (and connects with “Kieran’s recent post”:https://crookedtimber.org/2005/07/31/the-devils-music/ on Christian rock).

My friend and colleague Jimmy Doyle has a guest post on Normblog: “Human Agency and the London Bombings”:http://normblog.typepad.com/normblog/2005/08/human_agency_an.html . I hesitate to summarise Jimmy’s argument here, since it is stated with characteristic carefulness and precision, but among the more striking claims he endorses is that genuine human actions cannot figure among the causes of other human actions:

bq. human actions cannot be thought of as mere events in a causal chain of further events. This is expressed in the traditional legal doctrine of _novus actus interveniens_ , according to which a human action cuts short the chain of causally-connected events consequent upon any previous action. For the cause of a human action is not an event at all, but an agent: a person, a human being.

I am not putting a counter-argument, but merely making an observation, in saying that if Jimmy’s view is correct then much of social science and history rests on a mistake. Economics and psychology, for example, certainly presuppose that one person’s action can figure among the causal antecedents of another’s. And all those books on the “causes” of the First or Second World Wars would have to be pulped or substantially rewritten.

Jimmy advances this consideration in favour of his view:

bq. I should emphasize that I have not tried to show that what is presupposed in our ordinary thought and talk about human action is true. But if it turned out false, that would be a disaster; and we would very likely find it impossible to lead recognizably human lives consistent with such a realization.

I suspect that we would find it a good deal easier than he supposes to lead “recognizably human lives”, but let’s leave that to one side. The examples of history and social science show that whilst Jimmy may be right to say that we engage in much thought and talk about human action which rests on the very presuppositions he mentions, we also engage in a great deal of talk about human behaviour that rests on the causal view he rejects. Very likely we would find it hard to get along without that mode of thought and talk too.

The hapless Peter Wilby has a column — “The Responsiblity We All Share for Islamist Shock and Awe”:http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,3604,1542996,00.html — in the Guardian today about how citizens of democracies share responsibility for the actions of their leaders. Wilby it was who famously answered his own question about whether the victims of September 11th were innocent with a ‘yes and no’, as if somehow some of them were deserving of their fate( ‘In buildings thought indestructible’, New Statesman, 17 September 2001). There’s more of the same today, with a similar slide from the notion that we as citizens should take responsibility for our governments (with which I agree) and the claim that this somehow turns us all into legitimate objects of attack (which is garbage). Of course Wilby doesn’t actually say this, he sort-of says it and then he sort-of takes it back (well sort-of, in a Guardianish sort-of way).

It is hard to pick out a low point from the article, but if I were pushed I’d go for:

bq. … a home-grown suicide bomber, dreaming of 72 virgins for himself and “a painful doom” (in the Qur’an’s words) for his victims, seems an unpleasantly self-absorbed figure.

I googled the phrase “unpleasantly self-absorbed” and found it variously applied to a book by a management consultant, some characters from _Die Fledermaus_ , and the protagonists in Lars von Trier’s _The Idiots_ .

“Eve Garrard at Normblog”:http://normblog.typepad.com/normblog/2005/08/profiling_polic.html :

bq. The statistics suggest that the chances of a Muslim man being killed by the police are considerably less than the chances of a Muslim man being killed by suicide bombers, given that the latter make no effort to avoid killing Muslims. So assuming that these policies do indeed prevent some successful bombing attempts, then people who reject them in favour of ones which don’t impinge more on Muslims than on others are actually prioritizing policies which will save fewer Muslim lives over ones which will save more Muslim lives.

I suppose the conclusion might be true …. and I don’t suppose we actually have any statistics that would allow us to estimate the chance of a Muslim _man_ being killed by the police. There are about 1.3 million male Muslims in the country, and Garrard takes the chances of any person from the whole population being killed by being a suicide bomber as relevant to their chances of being killed in that way: 1 in a million? Is their prospect of being killed by police marksmen more remote than that? Anyway, “statistics suggest” that they are surely safer either than men carrying table legs in a suspicious manner in a public place or Brazilian electricians boarding tube trains.

The “Rousseau Association/Association Rousseau”:http://www.rousseauassociation.org/default.htm , which is a very fine bunch of scholars and a nice crowd of human beings, has “a new website”:http://www.rousseauassociation.org/default.htm thanks to Zev Trachtenberg at the University of Oklahoma. It is still in development but when finished it should be an important resource and marks a distinct improvement on the last version. Visitors can dowload works by Rousseau, follow links to other sites of interest, browse a selection of images and even “listen to some of the music”:http://www.rousseauassociation.org/aboutRousseau/musicalWorks.htm Jean-Jacques composed. (Full disclosure, I’m currently VP of the Association.)

I’ve just wheeled the latest issue of Imprints (8:3) to the post office and it will shortly be sent out to subscribers. Having just done this, I’ve noticed there’s *a typo on the cover* Crossland for Crosland — aargh!! Still, if you can get past that there’s a great deal of interest inside:

bq. * An interview with Joseph Raz
* Philip Bielby on equality and vulnerability in biomedical research
* Kevin Hickson on revisionism from Crosland to New Labour

and reviews by — cue drumroll — Crooked Timber stalwarts Harry Brighouse and Kieran Healy of, respectively, Anne Alstott’s “No Exit: What Parents Owe Their Children and What Society Owes Parents”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0195162366/junius-20 and Eric Klinenberg’s “Heat Wave: A Social Autopsy of Disaster in Chicago”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0226443221/junius-20 . Kieran’s long-awaited “review was pre-published here on CT”:https://crookedtimber.org/2005/03/22/hot-in-the-city/ .

Calling British lawyers! In the wake of the London bombings the British government has moved to get the Opposition to agree to “new laws”:http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/4717959.stm :

bq. … including bans on preparing, inciting or training for terrorism.

Aren’t all these activities already illegal under the law of conspiracy? Weren’t IRA bombers regularly charged, for instance, with “conspiracy to cause explosions”? Informed answers only please.

Since the bomb attacks in London there have been a number of polls which, among other things, ask British Muslims whether or not they thought the attacks were justified. This then provides material for op-ed columnists and bloggers to scale up the number so as to argue that there are {insert large number} Muslims who are prepared to back the terrorists. Having looked at the detail of the latest poll, from “ICM as reported in the Guardian”:http://image.guardian.co.uk/sys-files/Politics/documents/2005/07/26/Muslim-Poll.pdf (pdf), I’m sceptical about any such conclusions given the strange combination of views apparently endorsed by respondents in Table 8.

Out of 500 Muslim respondents, 26 said the bombings were justified. Of those 26 bomb-justifiers, 7 declared they would vote Conservative if there were a general election tomorrow, 12 were potential Labour voters and just 2 backed the Liberal Democrats. Go figure.

The BBC showed “a programme the other day”:http://www.blackjackscience.com/bbc/BBC%20-%20Science%20&%20Nature%20-%20Horizon%20-%20transcript.htm about the history of card counting in blackjack and how the casinos eventually defeated the card counters using facial recognition technology. Having traced suspected card counters to MIT, Griffin Investigations, the agency employed by the casinos, then fed the faces from the MIT yearbooks into their databases. When a face appeared in a casino and the software matched it to a suspect, that person was shown the door. The relevant bit of the transcript:

NARRATOR: It was then that Beverley noticed something unusual. Many of the big winners had given addresses from around the same area, Boston. Then she noticed something else, most of her suspects played only at weekends, and they were all around college age. Beverley made the connection. Could these card counting team members be students at M.I.T.? To find out Beverley checked the M.I.T. student year books.

BEVERLEY GRIFFIN: And lo and behold there they were. Looking all scholarly and serious and not at all like a card counter.

NARRATOR: The M.I.T. yearbooks viewed like a rogue’s gallery of team counters. Beverley now realised she was up against some of the smartest minds in America. So the casinos began to develop facial recognition technology, for quick and accurate identification of team play suspects. The basis for the database were the M.I.T. yearbooks. From the moment a suspected counter entered a casino they could be monitored by the hundreds of cameras on the casino floor. Snapshots could then be downloaded for computer analysis.

TRAVIS MILLER: Each time he moves I try to see which shot is going to be the best for him, that we can use to match him up further down the road. This would be the perfect shot, he’s directly in the centre of the photo, all we see is his face, he’s looking straight ahead in to the shot.

NARRATOR: Facial recognition software analysed the relative position of over eighty coordinates on a suspects face. As individual as a fingerprint this information could be run through the Griffin database of suspected card counters, and an identification made.

I’m guessing that if casinos can do this with MIT students then states and security agencies could certainly employ the same technology to keep anyone photographed at a “Hizb ut-Tahrir”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hizb_ut-Tahrir meeting (or similar) off the London Underground or Heathrow Airport. As soon as a match appeared, they could be stopped.

I hasten to state that the civil liberties implications of any such system are horrendous. But my interest here is in whether it would be technologically feasible. Could it work for a large system? How many false positives and false negatives would there be? Any answers?