One more in our occasional ill-tempered and extremely unfair series keeping track of breathless and/or mendacious “Globalisation” commentary from neoliberal commentators. This time, we take a look at an interview in Reason magazine with Johan Norberg, a Scandinavian who “used to be part of the left but then saw the light and is now back with a book explaining it all” (where have we heard that before). I realise that some will call “no fair” on using a Reason interview, because it’s a bit of a libertarian house mag, but Norberg is unlikely to confine himself to the specialist media going forward, and I thought I’d get my retaliation in first. Besides, as a piece of Globollocks, this one is off the scale.
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Daniel
New Year, old obsession … Steven Den Beste takes a rare break from telling us that France is shit to analyse US politics. Take a glance at the URL and you will see where he is coming from. Thankfully, he steers clear (just) of the usual and rather unpleasant analysis which seems to treat white male votes as the only “real” votes and support based on “minority” votes as in some way second-rate or not of the highest quality. But he does massively overstate the importance of white males, and the extent to which a 66-33 split of white male votes in favour of the Republicans is a disaster for the Democrats. Factoid: Al Gore did not so far from this in the 200 election (he actually got 36% of the white male vote) and the race was about as even as it could possibly be. A “36 point margin [ie a 68:32 split -dd] over Howard Dean” isn’t an “insurmountable obstacle”; it’s a two point swing away from the neutral point of the 2000 election and quite the sort of thing that could get lost in differential turnout rates. The rule of thumb always used to be that a Republican candidate had to do at least 60% among white males to have a prayer, because of the inbuilt slant of all the other demographics and Ruy Teixeira thinks that the bar is, if anything, raising year after year.
A Bush lead among white women is much more worrying, because that’s a genuine swing movement, but that doesn’t offer nearly as many opportunities for riding out old hobby-horses about the “far left” and the conclusions aren’t nearly so palatable for those of us in the pale and hairy camp. My personal assessment is that the Democrats are indeed, all to hell, but tending to the nation’s largest and whiniest minority hasn’t really got all that much to do with it.
All of which assumes, of course, that you can generalise over a category as large as “white males” (c: 110m Americans). Which you can’t, not unless you don’t mind writing sentences like this one:
To a great extent, this is because white men as a group prefer cowboys to metrosexuals.[1]
Which you have to admit, could be taken a number of ways …
(by the way, when is some TV network going to have the stones to produce “Black Eye for the White Guy”?)
[1] I added the links for satirical effect, although I doubt anyone was wondering.
Via email, I discover that there is something out there called the Libertarian Green National Socialist Party, operating under the slogan that “National Socialism is neither leftist nor rightist; it is naturalist, and inherently environmental.”
Though their choice of URL does rather give the game away.
Always nice to be able to test an idea in a live application … It’s worthwhile remembering in any discussion of “terrorism futures” that nobody was ever really proposing to offer contracts on any specific terrorist events; the proposed “Policy Analysis Market” (which claims on its website that it’s going to launch in March; sadly there is no currently existing futures market which allows me to bet that it won’t), was always going to be about betting on general indices of global political stability. For example, one might think it would be useful to have a futures market which gave finer-grained information about the risks to the US than the Department of Homeland Security’s Threat Level Indicator; not just whether today’s threat was “yellow” or “orange”, but whether the risk was growing or falling.
One might think that, but one would be wrong. In actual fact, it is possible to trade futures on the US Homeland Security indicator at Tradesports.com. So, since the threat level was raised from “Yellow” to “Orange” over the weekend we can go to the tape and see whether the traders there had any advance steer on this movement. Did they?
Via Brad, I notice that what appears to have happened is that Iraq’s debt, so far from being forgiven by the French and Germans (shame really, just when I was looking forward to chastising American rightwingers for not giving credit where it was due), has been chucked into the Paris Club process. The what? Time for a mug’s guide, I think.
Just “feeding the baby” with a couple of links really …
Stuff from Maxspeak, Paul Krugman and Calpundit relevant to our own discussion of “Equality of outcome versus equality of opportunity”. Read them all. (If you want to that is, I mean it’s not like I’m ordering you to read any of them or even suggesting that you’ll be materially less well-informed if you don’t. I’m just sort of suggesting that they might be a little bit more interesting than what’s in the newspaper today)
Personally, I’ve always had a hard time taking this debate seriously. Specifically, I’ve never received (not for want of asking) a satisfactory answer from anyone who talks about “equality of opportunity” to the following two questions (also inspired by my time at business school, which I am coming to believe may have been less wasted than it seemed to be at the time)
1. What’s the point of doing anything if you’re not going to check whether it worked or not?
2. How do you find out whether a course of action worked or not, other than by the results?
In an otherwise perfectly fine post on some subject or other, Jim Henley says:
“I rather suspect that there would be states in which one could grow marijuana […] and states in which one could make a machine gun, but very few states in which one could do both […] which is too bad because if someone’s of a mind to make himself a machinegun I’d like him to be nice and mellow afterwards.
It’s a not uncommon argument in the legalisation debate; that if everyone smoked nice friendly mellow pot instead of drinking horrible yobbish alcohol, various beneficial social consequences would result. To be honest, though, there’s only one country in the world which has experimented in any serious way with the combination of widely available cannabis and widely available machine guns, and the results haven’t really been what you would call a roaring success. Apparently if someone isn’t of a mood to be mellow, that’s just more or less the kind of person they are and there’s surprisingly little you can do about it pharmaceutically. One of the few things we do know about people’s behaviour on drugs is that it’s very context-dependent and influenced by their state of mind at the time of taking them. You might have thought that if you took a bunch of chilled-out Scandinavians and fed them hippy magic mushrooms, you’d get a total peace-and-love-and-social-welfare trip, but look at the Vikings …
The excerpt from Ophelia Benson’s article which Chris posted below got me thinking about a few particularly egregious examples of the phenomenon I’ve seen over the years. The one which sticks out in my mind was of a teacher proudly boasting that he’d spent half of a class ignoring the subject matter that was meant to be discussed and instead talking about technical arcana which added nothing to our understanding of the subject, made the discussion incomprehensible to the layman, but fitted the students to carry on a discussion among people working in the same field, according to the rules of a trivial formal game.
So, with reference to the weekend’s big news story, Norman of Normblog writes that a particular pleasure has been
“The sight of some people trying to say ‘hooray’ through gritted teeth.”
If I understand this correctly, Norm is expressing his pleasure in some other people’s displeasure in having to express their pleasure in yet a third group of people’s expression of their pleasure in a separate individual’s displeasure. I don’t know what to think about this at all. Which is just as well, I suppose because at least it means that the chain of meta-levels ends here. I tell, you, this is why expected utility theory will never catch on ….
I’ve put up a post on my other weblog on the general subject of anti-war leftishness. I’ve put it over there rather than on CT because it’s fair to say that there are a number of different schools of thought among CT contributors on the general subject of war, and it seems unfair to use the CT brand for views that not everyone might stand behind. Cheers.
Update: And now I’m going to hang it on the reasonably topical peg of this Christopher Hitchens interview.
Kevin Drum has a piece of advice for composition students:
“ignore anyone who tells you to write like you talk”
I certainly agree with him that if someone can’t construct a simple English sentence without making two grammatical howlers, you probably shouldn’t listen to them any more. If someone were to instruct you to “write as you speak”, then there might be some point in having a pedagogical debate, but that’s presumably another matter.
Update: Kevin also suggests that “The meaning of a word is never unclear because an apostrophe has been misused”. Its not the daftest claim I’ve seen this week, but I think hell regret making it.
This is a piece I’ve been thinking about for around a year and have now finally got round to writing up now that the Cardhu Scandal has made it arguably topical again. Basically it’s an idea for anyone who wants an easy way into thinking about capital theory. I’ve thought for a while that the booze industry ought to be used much more as an example for people thinking about time and production, because it allows you to abstract from considerations of technology and the production process; there are any number of ways to produce a chair, some more time-consuming that others, but there’s only one way to produce a cask of ten-year-old whisky[1]; start with a cask full of nine year old whisky and wait. The fact that time is intrinsically part of the production process for wine and brown spirits is why you see “capitalised interest” on the balance sheets of drinks companies; part of the economic cost of whisky production, and therefore part of the eventual sale price and the value of the goods, is the interest foregone during the process of maturation. It’s this interest element which I’m going to concentrate on.
Robin Ramsay, editor of the excellent Lobster magazine, and co-author of an equally excellent book about Harold WIlson, makes a useful distinction between “Conspiracy Theory” and “Conspiracy Research”. According to Ramsay, the difference is that conspiracy theories are simple, interesting and leave you thinking that you understand it all, while consipracy research is difficult, boring and leaves you thinking you understand less than you did before you started. Given this, it is hardly surprising that the theoretical side of the academic discipline of Parapolitics is both far more popular than the empirical, and largely worthless.
However, the pollution of the well of parapolitical research by the theorists is pretty unfortunate, as means that the “loony” label tends to stick to a few dedicated journalists who often ask questions that really desperately need to be asked. The final stage in the disgraceful attempt to smear Gary Webb for uncovering documented evidence of Nicaraguan Contras with good political connections being given carte blanche to smuggle cocaine into Southern California, for example, was to paint him as a “consipracy theorist”. The attempt to rebrand conspiracy research as “parapolitics” (the study of those parts of the political process in democracies which involve illegal or covert activity) is probably a dead duck as with most rebrands, but men of good sense and good intention can do their bit to help by not making things worse.
Which is why I have a bit of a problem with this post from Daniel Drezner‘s site.
On the 85th Armistice day, I remember with honour the memory of:
- Military casualties of the First World War
- Military casualties of the Second World War
- Casualties of conscripted labour in the Second World War (such as the “Bevin Boys” conscripted to work in coal mines in the UK, who had a casualty rate higher than most active service units)
- Casualties of the Second World War among the fire service, ARP, ambulance service and similar, many of whom were conscientious objectors to the war itself
- Military casualties of the Falklands War
In their own ways, all of these people gave their lives in protecting the lives and liberty of Britons, for which we owe them the most profound thanks.
I also remember with the deepest sympathy and pity the men and women of our armed forces who gave their lives in the other military operations which the United Kingdom has carried out in the last century. They died for the most part in the service of dishonourable missions which were forced on them by governments which we elected, so we bear them an equally heavy debt, though much less glorious and more shameful.
This is the nearest I can come to a pacifist’s response to this day; I long since gave up wearing a white poppy in remembrance of the conscientious objectors in my own family, simply becaused it caused so much offence. I wholeheartedly apologise for any offence caused by this statement, without withdrawing any of it.
Given that Paul Krugman is reminding us all of Stein’s Law (“Things that can’t go on forever, don’t”), I thought I’d remind everyone of Davies’ Corolloraries:
1. Things that can’t go on forever, go on much longer than you think they will.
2. Corollorary 1 applies even after taking into account Corollorary 1.