by Daniel on December 22, 2009
Let’s try and put ourselves in the shoes of a member of the John Birch Society, circa 1968. What would the basis of such a person’s political worldview be? Basically, that the USA was ruled by a small cabal of educated elites, who were systematically undermining the USA’s advantages against Soviet Russia, and sabotaging the efforts of the military to protect the USA from the danger of Soviet attack. This person might also believe that the truth about the Kennedy assassination was covered up by this same elite cabal.
And such a person would be correct, of course.
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by Daniel on December 10, 2009
by Daniel on October 22, 2009
I like to think that I know a little bit about contrarianism. So I’m disturbed to see that people who are making roughly infinity more money than me out of the practice aren’t sticking to the unwritten rules of the game.
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by Daniel on October 13, 2009
Wow, I’d certainly like to know the name of the PR agency employed by Trafigura. It couldn’t have been easy to turn a fairly obscure oil trading company into the number one trending topic on Twitter. How do you manage to create that kind of buzz? I certainly hope that the people responsible will be appropriately rewarded.
In general, I have got quite a lot to say in favour of English libel law, and perhaps will for a future “contrarian Wednesday” post. But the current trend toward aggressive use of preliminary injunctions seems to me to be clearly abusive, particularly when (as alleged by Private Eye) some law firms attempt to file for injunctions as late as possible in the hope of getting an inexperienced judge out-of-hours and putting him under pressure. Anyway, this attempt to gag the press has backfired spectacularly, which will hopefully (viz, the McLibel case) make any future would-be muzzlers of the press think twice before pushing too hard.
by Daniel on October 5, 2009
Well, the European Left still has Portugal, Norway and Greece, but having lost France, Germany and Italy and with Spain and the UK looking decidedly vulnerable, one has to conclude that on balance, European social democracy is not going through one of its purpler periods. The days of Blair/Schroeder/Jospin are over. Why, and what does the future look like?
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by Daniel on September 25, 2009
Handing a rightwing media don and author of pop ev psych books commission to wrote 500 words on the subject of “Lust” for a start of term humour article has to pretty much go in the “what could possibly go wrong?” column. But I think even the THES editors must have been a little bit surprised at what they got. A classic example of the sort of thing where having shown a draft to a single close female friend might have saved the day, and in the process offered a useful insight into the distinction between the concept “refreshingly un-PC” and the concept “creepy”, and perhaps the Pleistocene conditions on the veldt which might have given rise to it.
I am more or less diametrically opposed to Dr Kealey’s point of view, which I consider wrong on two counts. On the one hand, this “look but don’t touch” stuff is guff; students and lecturers are both adults and don’t need to be protected by special rules not imposed on the rest of us against their own occasional tendency to have bad sex. On the other hand, it’s perfectly possible, if you actually are an adult man, to have a conversation with an attractive young woman and interact with her professionally without leching over her all the time. In fact, it’s not only possible, it’s the law (specifically the law with respect to sexual discrimination in the workplace). Sheesh.
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by Daniel on September 23, 2009
Do you find yourself considering the financial crisis and thinking “well, neoclassical economists have certainly come through this one with their reputations enhanced! Anyone with a world-class heterodox economics department should certainly be thinking about closing it down right now, there’s no interest in that sort of thing!”. Well, if you do, then you’re almost certainly working as an administrator at Notre Dame University (or for that matter, the University of Notre Dame, thanks Ben in comments), because nobody else does.
I mean, what the byOurLady heck do they think they are playing at. Back in April 2008, the decision to place clear fresh water between the nice professional efficient market types in the “Economics and Econometrics” department, and the dirty f**king hippies in “Economics and Policy Analysis” might have made some sort of sense, in that while cynical and not very academic-freedom-y, it would have improved students’ chances of getting into prestigious economics graduate programs where they could write “counterintuitive” and “fascinating” job market papers about penalty shootouts and speed-dating (these being the only remaining social or anthropological questions not thoroughly answered by neoclassical economists, cf “Freakonomics”).
But today? With the whole field blown wide open and all sorts of questions of the role of economic analysis wide open to debate again? With Richard Freaking Posner coming out as a post-Keynesian? I suppose that if you truly believe that it’s impossible to time the market, this is one way to prove it.
by Daniel on August 14, 2009
If you’re going to talk about humanitarian interventionism (and with Conor as our guestblogger this week, we are), then sooner or later, you are going to come up against the Big One; the argument that the fact of the Rwandan genocide forever legitimises the general principle of a “responsibility to protect”. A version of this can be seen in James Traub’s review of “The Thin Blue Line (I should note here that IIRC Conor does say in his book that there should have been more of an intervention in Rwanda):
In 2005, the world’s heads of state, gathered at the U.N. General Assembly, adopted the doctrine of “the responsibility to protect,” which stipulates that states have an obligation to protect their citizens from crimes against humanity and other mass atrocities, and that, should they be unable or unwilling to do so, other states incur that obligation. That responsibility, in the most extreme cases, includes military action. R2P, as the norm has come to be known, formalizes the principle, which lies at the heart of humanitarian intervention, that the right of people to be free from the worst forms of mistreatment supersedes the right of states to be free from external intervention. It is scarcely possible in the aftermath of Rwanda to argue otherwise, and so no one does directly.
The implication here is that there was no intervention in Rwanda, and that this was the reason for the genocide (Traub’s sentence “It is scarcely possible …” summarises the rhetorical strategy with rather more grace and subtlety than is typical – it’s not particularly uncommon for supporters of intervention to simply accuse opponents of having the blood of Rwanda on their hands). The thing is, there was a military intervention in Rwanda.
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by Daniel on July 30, 2009
by Daniel on July 2, 2009
I’ve made a number of rather harsh comments about Michael Walzer on CT in the recent past, motivated by his twin tendencies to a) reinvent the wheel with respect to international humanitarian law and b) produce arguments which seem to be tailored like a Versace evening gown to fit round the voluptuous curves of Israeli foreign policy. In this article in the New York Review of Books, however, he revisits the issue of “human shields” and although I still find it frustrating that he’s not referencing the legal literature at all, it’s clear that he’s not simply playing the more-in-sorrow-than-anger apologetics game. His specific contention is that a country in a “human shields” situation has a duty to have as much concern for foreign noncombatants as if they were its own citizens; I’m not sure that I agree with this because IIRC Walzer has a particular standard for noncombatant status that I don’t agree with[1], but it’s clear that he’s not shaping his views round the “facts on the ground”. I therefore, to the extent that I have previously suggested he had turned into a simple partisan hack, and without qualifying my opinions of the actual past articles concerned (which I maintain were bad), apologise.
[1] Also, he operates to a standard based on efforts taken to “minimise” noncombatant casualties whereas I think it’s very important to insist on the Geneva Conventions’ standard of “not excessive relative to the concrete definite military objective”. The difference being that under the Geneva standard, but seemingly not Walzer’s, you can have situations where even “minimised” casualties are still “excessive”, meaning that you’re just not allowed to do the military thing. I think that Walzer’s NYRB piece implies that he’d actually agree with the Geneva standard in practical applications, but it’s much clearer.
by Daniel on June 12, 2009
And still they come … in response to the latest pieing episode (actually an egging of Nick Griffin, leader of the British National Party), the usual crowd of wowsers and pursed-lip good-government types come out of the woodwork, sorrowfully wagging their fingers and telling us “this is just what the BNP want”, and “this sort of thing makes people sympathetic to the BNP”. And once more I say “where’s the evidence?” Nick Griffin certainly doesn’t look like he’s executing the culmination of a cunning master plan to gain favourable publicity – he looks like he’s being egged and not enjoying it. And I really don’t understand the sort of mind that would look at the chubby fascist with yolk running down his coupon and say to themselves “gosh they must have a really important point to make if the so-called anti-fascists have to stoop to these depths to silence them”. Rather than, say, my own reaction, which was roughly “Cracking shot, sir!”. As I’ve noted before, there’s a Laffer Curve implicit here. If nobody ever egged Nick Griffin, then he’d never get egged, which I presume nobody wants. On the other hand, if he was egged every single time he went out, then he’d never leave his house – result, no eggings. But I really don’t believe that we’re on the right hand side of that Laffer Curve, not yet.
And in this particular case, the egging itself is actually a very important speech act and a significant contribution to our national debate. Based on the fact that they got two MEPs elected, non-white British citizens might justifiably be looking with suspicion at their white neighbours today, thinking that a significant proportion of us were secretly harbouring fascist sympathies. In fact this isn’t true; the absolute number of BNP votes was slightly down on 2004, and their electoral success was purely an artefact of overall low turnout. It’s therefore an important point to be made, to our own population and to the world’s watching media, that Nick Griffin isn’t in fact a newly popular and influential political figure; he’s a widely reviled creep who not only doesn’t lead a phalanx of jackbooted supporters, but actually can’t even set up for a TV interview without being pelted with eggs. The voice of the British populace does not shout “Hail Griffin!”, it shouts, “Oi Fatty, cop this! [splat]”. And the only efficient and credible way to demonstrate to the world that Griffin is regarded as an eggworthy disgrace, is to actually and repeatedly pelt him with eggs.
One does worry about the “heckler’s veto”, however. Repulsive as the BNP’s message is, they do have a sacred democratic right to make themselves heard, and it would be a shame if the praiseworthy efforts of the egg-throwers were to stray into the excessive and unacceptable territory of silencing them from the debate. I therefore suggest the following compromise – Unite Against Fascism ought to agree to allow Nick Griffin to give his press conferences in peace and without interruption, and in return the BNP ought to schedule an opportunity at the end of each press conference for their leader to stand around being pelted with eggs.
by Daniel on June 12, 2009
Larry Elliott (the Guardian’s economics editor) is in my view right to say that a lot of modern macroeconomics has gone off the rails pretty badly and that most general equilibrium models are a tragic waste of time. But I think he (and most other similar critics of excessive maths in economics) really badly misidentifies the nature of the problem, and his choice of an example of a worthless piece of mathematical formalism is quite unfortunate and unfair. Let’s see if I can explain what “Generalised non-parametric deconvolution with an application to earnings dynamics” is, and why someone might care about it.
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by Daniel on June 4, 2009
by Daniel on May 27, 2009
It is traditional for the end of a football season in the UK to bring a chorus of moaning about how uncompetitive the Premier League is, and how things would be better if we followed some system loosely based on the “millionaires’ socialism” of US professional sports – salary caps, preferential drafting of new players, all the other hilariously anticompetitive interferences in the market. When making any such comparison, though, one has to remember that the USA is not the size of the UK; it’s roughly the size of Europe.
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by Daniel on May 22, 2009