Daniel

Crikey, if you guys regularly had to get something through a legal department, you would never again complain about mere copyediting … I’ve made a few illustrative comments which need to be taken into account before we resubmit this piece to Norman for a redraft ….

I do not generally [consider deleting, or move to beginning of sentence] hold people in contempt because of for their profession, their job^, or their calling.

[Can we prove this? Could we provide at least three examples of each (ie, three of not holding people in contempt because of their profession, three of not holding in contempt because of job, and three of not holding in contempt because of calling). Otherwise change this to “I do not always hold people in contempt ….”]

But copy editors editing!

[This sentence may be unclear to non-native English speakers]

That is something [Make consistent with either ‘editors’ or ‘editing’ in previous two sentences] different.

[Different from what? Can we prove this? Could we find someone else saying that it was different and just quote them?]

Not as bad, I will grant, as war criminals or child molesters

[Need specific examples here rather than making a value judgement. Perhaps we could provide a table of the numbers of people tortured and children molested by each of the three categories? At the very least, we need to say why we think copyeditors are not as bad as war criminals or (I really would prefer “and/or”) child molestors]

, they nevertheless belong in one of the very lowest categories of human intelligence^, and indeed morality.

[Specifically which category? How many categories are we using, and where do copyeditors, war criminals and child molestors come respectively? This sentence can’t be printed unless we provide a sidebar giving our scales of categories of human intelligence and morality. Ideally, we should also combine the two into a weighted average intelligence/morality scale. We should also give examples of where saints, charity workers and tenured professors come in order to demonstrate how much differentiation there is in our scale.]

You will [consider ‘may’] object that copy editors perform a most useful and necessary function, turning what is often ill-formed and error-strewn text into something more presentable. This, too, I will grant.

[This doesn’t appear to be consistent withour view above, and could be taken out of context. Need to rephrase the sentence to make sure our view is clear].

However, it there is no excuse for what copy editors they [referent is clear] also do

[Avoid unequivocal statements of this kind – of course there must be some excuses. Suggest “there is no excuse meeting what a reasonable man would consider to be a reasonable standard of exculpatory value”]

– which is to [run-on; consider breaking into two sentences] interfere with people’s painfully-crafted stuff
[lazy choice of word] when there is no reason whatever for doing so

[As above, there are preumably lots of reasons – you give one below – once more, suggest “no reason meeting what a reasonable persion would consider to be a reasonable standard of rationality”. BTW, the piece is too long as it stands and needs to lose 50 words]

, other than some quirk in the ^mind of the particular copy-editor ing mind which is at work….

[“Quirk” is an ambiguous term. Do we mean an idiosyncracy or do we intend to imply incompetence or something worse? If the former, we need to make it clear. If the latter, we will need to support this claim]

I have charged £541.63 to the Normblog profit centre for this advice, as per usual overhead conventions.

Time for another “Globollocks Watch piece, surveying Doug Henwood‘s piece in The Nation, which appears to have been taken by some among the neoliberal axis as evidence of a climbdown by a once-proud supporter of the Seattle rioters

Full disclosure: Although DH and I have never met, we’ve corresponded for quite a while and I consider him a mate. For this reason, I’ve decided that integrity requires me to be extra harsh in applying the patent Crooked Timber “Globollocks Scale”. I repeat my earlier point that the Globollocks ratings apply to individual pieces, not to entire ouevres and certainly not to people. The purpose of the scale is at least partly to point out how difficult it is for anyone, no matter how solid their command of the issues, to write anything short about neoliberal policy which doesn’t end up materially oversimplifying. Since I’ve never knowingly lit a candle while cursing the darkness was an option, don’t expect me to subject any of my own work to this scale any time soon.

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Presumably the Gentile AntiSemitism Police will be all over this latest from Krugman, in which (as Chris did yesterday), he takes time out from saying that Mahathir Mohammed is a Very Bad Person [1] to have a think about Islamic politics. To be honest, I think Krugman’s case is pretty weak; I don’t think that the US has offered “unconditional support” to Ariel Sharon [2] and I don’t believe that anti-Semitic rhetoric would be any less of a crowd-pleaser in Malaysia if they didn’t. Christ, Krugman’s to the left of me on this one; I feel all funny. But it’s interesting, not least because Krugman did a lot of consultancy work in Malaysia around the last time Mahathir was ranting about Jewish speculators [3] and knows whereof he speaks.

[1] Which he isn’t; he’s an authoritarian and a bigot for sure, but by the standards of the region, he’s pretty good.
[2] Also an authoritarian and a bigot, and probably a war criminal to boot, but probably once more a mistake to blame him personally for ethnic and economic forces which would still be there whoever was in charge.
[3] Although his actual support for Mahathir in 1998 was a lot more lukewarm than he implies; he floated the idea of capital controls and deserves credit for that, but was actually much more ambivalent about the specific Mahathir plan. Note from the article too that his analysis of “crony capitalism” is much more nuanced these days.

Starting a new occasional series, I’ll be keeping a look out for particularly egregious examples of breathless and/or mendacious “Globalisation” pieces from neo-liberal commentators. This isn’t to say that the antiglobo side doesn’t also talk a load of bollocks; it often does. But there’s already a cottage industry going keeping tabs on them, and immanent criticism of the neoliberal agenda is more up my alley.

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Little Green Footballs, having a go at the Guardian for … the quality of vicious oaf they tolerate on their comments board. It’s enough to make a cat laugh.

UPDATE: Tim Blair‘s apparently joined the echo chamber on this one, so that cat’s going to be pretty amused for a while.

Final update: The Guardian deleted the thread in question. Fair enough, but my cat’s already knocked off work for the day.

In today’s column, everybody’s favourite mustachioed commentator manages to put the following line in front of us:

Thankfully, there is one group of people the Bush team is listening to: Iraq’s silent majority

My question to the CT readership is; do you think he did it on purpose?

PS: If you get the Friedman photograph in Photoshop and colour in the rest of the beard he looks exactly like Krugman FACT.

Interesting knockabout stuff from two people who’ve decided to take it up a notch in terms of Great Weblog Comments Battles and duke it out in public on Daniel Drezner’s site with $100 at stake. The battle is over the subject “Did Bush Say That Iraq Was An Imminent Threat Or Not?”.

As far as I can tell, the case for the defence is that Bush specifically said that Iraq wasn’t an imminent threat, but that it was about to become an imminent threat and he didn’t propose to wait until it became imminent.

In other words, Bush does appear to be committed to the claim “Event I’ is imminent”, where I’ is defined as “the event of event I becoming imminent” and I is defined as “Iraq being a threat”. Which means to me that this particular line of argument turns on the question of whether “imminent” is a transitive predicate, or in other words, if something will imminently become imminent, does that mean that it’s imminent now?

My guess is that “imminent” is a short-transitive predicate; it’s transitive so long as the chain of “imminents” isn’t too long. Short-transitivity is a somewhat controversial logical property, however, albeit one which would be fantastically useful for economists in making axiomatic theories of revealed preference if it could be put on a rigorous footing. I’ll leave the matter to our resident expert on the subject, Mr Weatherson.

Here’s my contribution to the “M-Type versus C-Type” debate. Basically, just as it’s a useful analytical distinction to make that all UK Prime Ministers are either bookies or vicars, it’s always worth remembering that all economic policy debates of interest can be usefully analogised either to blackjack or to three-card monte.

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If anyone’s interested in taking the other side, I’d bet a shiny sixpence that when they say that they’ll be up and running by March 2004, they won’t.

Amitai Etzioni has a post up about workplace relationships, which addresses a number of genuine issues, and it certainly says far more about me than anything else that I can’t stop giggling about them.

The communitarian position on workplace relationships is not, as I’d expected, the unequivocal condemnation that one might have expected (simply on the basis that a random sampling of communitarian position papers suggested to me that they might be against anything fun). It’s quite nuanced and well worth a read. It’s all very easy to get all moralistic and say that this, that or the other kind of relationship is “off limits”, but to be frank, with working culture going the way it’s going, where the hell else are we going to meet people our own age?

Update: To make it clearer, the post is specifically about the University of California’s code of employment which basically is meant to stop professors from interfering with the cargo. I have to say it seems like an extraordinary imposition to me:

“However, as one professor argues, the rules are necessary because of the power gap that exists between professors and students, which precludes such relationships from ever being truly consensual. ”

Is it just me, or is this unbelievable balderdash? Are we really trying to claim that a relationship between a dashing young prof and a graduate student can never be “truly consensual”? Only according to a standard by which there have been approximately five “truly consensual” relationships in the history of sex. You don’t have to be Michel Foucault to see through this one.

Apologies for a post which will of necessity not be of interest to anyone who doesn’t follow UK politics, and will not necessarily be understood by anyone who doesn’t follow the media circus surrounding UK politics. But I’d just like to use the columns of Crooked Timber to send the following short message to people working in UK political journalism (I happen to know that at least two people in that circle read us).

If you think that you can prove that Charles Kennedy, leader of the Liberal Democrats, has an alcohol problem, you should say so and risk being sued. If you can’t prove it, you should shut up about the subject. But either way, please spare us the current round of innuendo, jokes and photographs of the man with a glass in his hand. It’s childish, it’s dishonest and it’s unfair to your readers (like me) who end up without a clue as to whether this is a piece of common knowledge within Westminster that’s being hushed up, or just a piece of fairly childish and malicious injokery. You’re the bloody British press, not popbitch.

Sorry about that. I return you to your regularly scheduled programming.

My education is clearly sadly lacking

Meanwhile, as a break from the hysterical, obsessive and politicised world of weblog disputes, I decided to have another look at an uncontroversial, scientific topic like John Lott’s research into gun control. And I discovered that I have been quite appalingly conned by two institutions that I thought I could trust. Instapundit has printed a letter from someone called Benjamin Zycher, a “Senior Economist”[1] at the Rand Corporation, supported by Raymond Sauer, a professor at Clemson University. Zycher says, and Sauer supports him in saying that the Ayres and Donohue paper on Lott’s work is all wet.

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This should be classified as “playing with numbers” rather than serious economic analysis, but I found it interesting at least. Basically, following on from Chris’s demographics post earlier in the week, I thought I’d follow up an idea I’ve had for a while and carry out some “financially adjusted demographics”. The idea is quite simple; there’s two ways in which you can add to a country’s effective labour power:

1. Increase the population
2. Acquire overseas assets, effectively giving you a claim on the population of other countries.

It’s always struck me that demographic analyses (particularly those carried out by people looking at pensions issues) tend to fixate on the first and ignore the second. Turns out that it doesn’t make a huge difference to the numbers, but it does make a difference.

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It seems like so much longer than four days since Henry wrote:

But I’m disturbed by the tone of triumphalism coming from a few left blogs and their commenters. It’s understandable that some see this as an opportunity to stick it to the warbloggers. It’s still a mistake. This story is too important to be turned into a cheap gotcha. There’s a growing groundswell of outrage on the right as well as the left. People should be building on this, rather than using the affair to score short-term ‘told you so’ points.

But it isn’t. Anyway, I think we can agree that by now, that this water-source has been well and truly pissed in, so I feel less guilty than I ought in taking what is, after all, a pretty decent opportunity to stick it to the warbloggers. One has to say, the opposition have performed pretty dreadfully on this one. Bereft of any unifying theme from the top, they’ve failed mightily to improvise material. Below I offer a few suggestions …

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