Daniel

Via Matthew Yglesias, this is enough to make a cat laugh. As I’ve argued elsewhere, although the Mearsheimer & Walt “Israel Lobby” does have a referent which is a real and definable set of groups and institutions, this lobby really doesn’t have all that much to do with Israel. Every time this slightly scary bunch of warlike, paranoid and rather right-wing people are asked to make a choice between the national interests of Israel and their own vanity politics, it’s Israel that gets shafted. Any concern over “divided loyalties” or what have you is completely misplaced – the “Israel Lobby” are nationalists of a completely imaginary state, one which has no meaningful politics of its own, no need to compromise with reality and no national interests other than constant war.

Note also that the well-known South Africa analogy, which has been pronounced to be intrinsically bigoted and anti-semitic by the wisest heads outside Israel, is considered normal politics by the head of government of that country. I begin to think that the Israeli state (which has, over the years, played its part in giving these nutters much more prominence and credibility than they deserve) has been lately finding the wingnuttier wing of American “pro-Israel” politics to be more trouble than it is worth. There are all sorts of reasons one might have to be less than happy with the human rights record of the State of Israel, but as far as I can see they don’t deserve to be blamed for the extremely negative contribution made to public debate in English-speaking politics by the political organisation trading under their name.

Dennis Perrin, who I’ve just realised is the same bloke as the Dennis Perrin I used to have really nasty flamewars with on a mailing list five years ago, has a post up which, among other things, mentions a bumper sticker he recently saw which read:

“As Hillary, Nancy and Jennifer Rise In Stature, They Give New Meaning To The Phrase Ho Ho Ho!”

Well it got me thinking. Quite a number of points, below. I tried, but failed, to keep the footnotes under control this time.
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Dan Hardie just emailed me with some news about the Iraqi employees campaign. God help us all, but the compromise asylum arrangements have been so poorly publicised that several Iraqi employees have been left searching the internet for information and ended up at Dan’s blog.

I have, with permission, reproduced the whole of his post below the fold, but in summary we’re basically making another call on your good nature. The last set of emails and letters to British MPs worked, in as much as they pretty directly led to the Milliband statement and the announcement of asylum and resettlement packages. However, it’s clear that we need to keep making the point (politely) that the British blog reading public has not forgotten about this one, and to insist that the policy is generously and efficiently implemented. So basically, we need people to send emails and letters to their MPs. Crooked Timber readers have done us proud in the campaign so far and I hope we can rely on your support once more.

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This week in evolutionary psychology fun and games (and via Marginal Revolution), I engage in the most shameless piece of dumpster-diving yet. A commenter on last week’s post picked me up for a tendency to pluck out the most ridiculous things I can find and present them as representative of the entire field of evolutionary psychology, rather in the manner of those irritating “Crazzzeeeee Postmodernists!” articles that you used to find in the National Review during the 1980s (or on “Butterflies and Wheels” now). I suspect that commenter is unlikely to be impressed with the latest find, because it comes from that world-renowned centre of evolutionary genetics research, the Cornell University School of Hotel Administration. On that age old question of “Do Sexy Waitresses Get More Tips?”.

Attention conservation notice / Irritation advance warning: If you think I’m going to get through this without making at least a few puerile jokes and maybe more, you’re probably wrong.
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Rather as Galileo and Newton used to make sure to profess allegiance to the doctrines of the Holy Church, “One Economics, Many Recipes” asserts firmly in its introduction that the book is firmly in the neoclassical tradition and that although substantial use is made of case studies, the author is a believer in the catchechism of econometrics – the validity of cross-sectional regressions as a means of extracting underlying structural facts. In actual fact, however, the first cross-sectional regression does not appear until page 170, and when it does it really does throw into sharp relief the weakness of cross sectional regressions relative to case studies (it’s a regression which uses one of those Freedom House indices as if it were an unproblematic proxy for “democratic institutions”) [click to continue…]

From the Department of “Are you absolutely sure about that?”, evolutionary psychology once more is on the march:

Hmmm. I think the best you can say about this is at least they did the right thing and went ahead and published these desperately unconvincing results rather than sweeping them under a rug.

You know middle age has arrived when you think to yourself “I’m going to write a letter to my MP!“. It’s a tacit admission that your days of throwing petrol bombs are probably behind you and that you have been ground down and co-opted into the System, Man.

On the other hand, kids grow up much faster these days, so maybe it’s not as unfashionable as it used to be. Maybe if we all try, we can make writing a letter to your MP become the next cool craze among the hip, trendy, pipe-smoking, tweed-wearing crowd. Let’s all try it this evening – come back from work, stride through the door, hang your bowler hat on the stand and loudly announce to your long-suffering spouse or partner “Dammit, Muriel! I’m going to write a letter to my MP!”. Writing a letter to your MP is the new black.

What should we all write a letter to our MPs about? I know! How about the Iraqi employees campaign talking points?

• David Miliband’s Statement on ‘Iraq: Locally Recruited Civilians’ of 9th October stated that Britain will help to resettle- in the wider Middle East, or in the United Kingdom- Iraqis who can prove that they have worked for this country’s soldiers or diplomats for a continuous period of twelve months.
• Hundreds of Iraqis have been targeted for assassination for having worked for this country. Some have worked for a period of twelve months exclusively for the British and can prove this. Some have not but have been pinpointed for murder anyway. We have a responsibility to save these people from being murdered for the ‘crime’ of working for the British.
• There are a lot of local employees who fled their jobs before 12 months precisely because they had been targeted, or who did a 6-month tour for one British battalion and were then told to go and work for the Americans, or who did 12 months or more with interruptions, or who the Army didn’t give proper documentation too.
• Iraqi staff members must be given shelter not because of their provable length of service but according to whether they have been identified for murder by local death squads. This can be investigated on the spot by Army officers and referred rapidly to London: the process needs to start now.
• Mr Miliband’s statement did not mention the families of Iraqi employees. As Iraqi militias also murder the families of their ‘enemies’, we must resettle our employees’ families as well. Mark Brockway, an ex-soldier who hired many Iraqis, estimates that we are talking about a maximum of 700 Iraqis to resettle: this country admits 190,000 immigrants net every year.
• Iraqis have already been targeted for murder for having worked for this country. We will be shamed if we allow more to be killed for the same reason. Our soldiers, who are angry at this betrayal, and our diplomats, will be placed at risk if they gain a reputation for abandoning their local helpers.

I’d add that, of course, to tie the relocation package and thus the risk of death to 12 months’ continuous employment puts the employers of local staff in an utterly invidious position – how the hell do you manage your personnel and budget if you know that making someone redundant is tantamount to signing their death warrant? But anyway, come on folks, it’s so far out that it’s far in again! Write a letter to your MP! Seriously, write a letter to your MP. I am trying to jolly things along but it is a really important campaign. Write a letter to your MP.

Via Marginal Revolution and the Freakonomics blog, Michael Greenstone of MIT’s analysis of developments in Iraq since the beginning of the surge. Most of it is pretty unobjectionable stuff (if not terribly related to economics), but the bit that caught my eye was the use of the secondary market price of Iraqi government bonds (they’re tanking) as an indicator of whether the surge is working.

IRAQI EMPLOYEES CAMPAIGN UPDATE: sorry to interrupt – the post is continued below the fold. The following update is mainly aimed at our British readers – once more could I prevail on the goodwill of other CT authors to keep this one at the top for the rest of UK daytime? Thanks.

Frank Dobson, my local MP, has replied to me about the Iraqi employees. His letter is mainly concerned with administrative arrangements for the speaker meeting on the 9th – I had asked him to book a room for us, but Dan had already sorted one out. He is, however, in firm sympathy with the campaign and is utterly sound on the issue. If any readers who wrote letters the last time we asked have received replies from their MPs, then do please say so in the comments here (or if you have a blog, post them there). We’re trying to keep the list of MP replies up to date; Dan’s apparently having quite a good response to the mailing we sent out but it’s important to keep the blog campaign running too. Thanks very much.
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I’ve just realised that as well as the new academic year for PhD programs, it’s also graduate intake season in the world of proper jobs, and thus a new generation of CT readers will be entering the workforce. And thus, my “Advice to a Young Person”. I only actually have one tip.

Basically it’s this. If you are a young man or woman of fair-to-middling ability, or even a borderline dullard, but you want to get a reputation as an uncommonly bright and perspicacious thinker, it’s really not that hard to do. The secret weapon is this: take an interest in what happens in other countries.

It’s really quite unusual to find an important issue on which international comparisons aren’t worth knowing about. Even in situations which look purely domestic, you can often get an entirely new perspective on things by looking at your fundamental assumptions in the light of what happens overseas. There are few sights sweeter than the look on someone’s face after they’ve confidently proclaimed something to be impossible, only to be informed that they’ve been doing things that way in Australia for the last twenty years.

It’s also a great way to generate ideas; it’s both easier than coming up with something yourself, and more likely to succeed, to plagiarise something that’s already worked well in a different time zone. So few people bother to keep up with the international news that one doesn’t even need to be an expert in these things; simply reading the relevant pages of your daily newspaper will probably do, whereas reading the superficially more “relevant” domestic or business pages will usually just tell you a load of crap you know already, and tell it wrong.

So my advice to a young businessperson is to save ten minutes a day by not reading the domestic news, and spend them on reading the international news properly. Within six months of the graduate program you’ll see I’m right, not least because at least once or twice you’ll quite likely be asked to prepared an analysis of international comparisons by a senior executive who got where he is by following my method.

PS: another great tip is never put question marks on your Powerpoint slides, it always looks really weak.

Do you know what this blog needs? More posts about the constraints of international law on American foreign policy!

My two pence worth on this subject (which probably doesn’t really merit a full post but I can’t find the right one to append it to as a comment) is that although the criterion “America can unilaterally decide to invade anywhere in the world if it feels like its interests are threatened” looks like something of an insane recipe for perpetual war, it would potentially be an improvement on the current situation.
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The Iraqi employees of the British Army story has continued to roll on, with some amount of mainstream media attention (particularly in the Times) and the first wave of responses from MPs. Any CT readers with a UK MP who didn’t write to their MPs last week, you still have time to do so, but potentially not very much time. For one thing, the British Army is withdrawing from Basra town, meaning that it is going to be much more difficult for the employees to be protected. For another, the government (an uncharitable man would say “the New Labour spin machine”) is trying to suggest that the problem can be solved by giving visas only to the 91 individuals who had been employed as translators by the British Army. This is clearly inadequate – the way Des Browne is quoted, it doesn’t even sound as if protection is being extended to families – and I’d be grateful if our readers could mention this.

By the way, the last comments thread on this subject was a bit of a disgrace. Can I make it very clear that anyone using the word “harki” is going to get themselves banned immediately and without appeal. The very idea that people who read this blog might think that the massacres in 1960s Algeria represent a model for an anti-imperialist struggle frankly gives me the creeps. I will charitably assume that the term was used out of ignorance by people who’d only heard it in the context of Zinedine Zidane, for the time being, but any evidence to the contrary and you are banned my son (the commenters in question know who they are). Ditto “quislings”, “collaborators” and any other terms which say or imply that the massacre of civilians by self-styled “resistance” movements isn’t mass murder or isn’t a war crime (as Conor Foley notes in the comments to this trainwreck, there is a decent case for saying that, along the lines of the Rwandan radio trials, advocating a war crime is a war crime itself).

Good news readers! I’ve gone mad! I don’t know what it was that tipped me over the edge but I’m now a signed up 27%er and I’ve decided to start applying my new grasp of the scientific method! After all, our scientific institutions are being destroyed by the leftist politicised science of global warming and the Lancet study, and that’s just not on. Luckily my cheerful attitude and can-do approach to statistics survived my trip to the dark side so I’ve been hard at work all morning applying the sort of tenacious scientific critique that my new status as a crazy person allows me to carry out with no qualifications whatever.

I started with the UK Census. I’ve always thought that there were maybe a few more, or possibly less, ethnic minorities in Camden than the census said, so I phoned them up and asked for the data. The woman on the end of the line pointed me toward their website and noted that there was quite a lot of county-level data there which might be helpful. I explained that no, I wanted the data, by which I meant the actual census forms. They won’t release the data! Really! I shouted that this was a fundamental building block of the scientific method, and that her sinister refusal to hand over the forms to any random person who asked was the equivalent of the Catholic Church burning Galileo[1]. While she was on the line, I asked for the last month’s death figures for Central London – after all, since she’s the central registering authority for births and deaths, she ought to have them at her fingertips as they must magically update every time a hospital morgue writes a certificate. I think she was in tears by the time she slammed the phone down, so Advantage: Blogosphere!

Next on to the Dow Jones Industrial Average people. Did you know that there are three entire missing days from their figures, which suspiciously enough[2] just “happen” to be September 12-15, 2001???????Q? I suppose we are meant to assume that this “missing cluster” was selected at RANDOM!!!!11! Some chance. Clearly the leftist MSMs of Dow Jones International censored these numbers, because they would have added so much to the variance of the DJIA that we could no longer be sure that it wasn’t 36,000! Perfidy! Wal-Mart are releasing their Q2 earnings numbers next week, or at least I should say “releasing” their “numbers”, because as I found out, when you go down to Bentonville demanding a look at the till rolls, you don’t even get let into the car park. Scientific method, my ASS!

Stay tuned for more science, readers, because until this case of Red Bull runs out, I am going to be a blogoscientific force of nature!

[1] Galileo was not actually burned, but I am now a right wing crazy person, so this kind of factul nitpicking no longer bothers me.

[2] The fonts are a lot more fun on this side of the political divide too.

(Initial bad temper warning: I am a little bit cross as I write this, because I think that the distribution of the paper on the Michelle Malkin website was both silly (because the paper has huge flaws that a mass audience can’t possibly be expected to understand) and rude (because at the time when he gave permission for it to be distributed, David was soliciting comments, seemingly in good faith, from the Deltoid community, aimed at improving it before distribution). The Malkin link has meant that this paper has metastatised and I will therefore presumably be dealing with cargo-cult versions of it by people who don’t understand what they’re talking about from now to the end of time. I see that Shannon Love of the Chicago Boyz website is claiming to have been “sweetly vindicated”, FFS. Ah well, the truth has now got its boots on, and big clumpy steel toe-capped boots they are too. C’mon boots, let’s get walking.)
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I’ve written on this in the past (as has John, and Jim Henley, and it’s been in the New Republic), but the situation is now urgent as well as serious – there is a very grave danger that the UK is preparing to sell its local employees in Iraq down the river, and the time to do something about it is now.

Iraqi interpreters used by the British Army and CPA South have already been hunted down by death squads. The British forces in and around Basra are no longer really sufficient to protect themselves, let alone their employees, as Channel 4 news details.

There really is no way of keeping these people safe while they are in Iraq, and they need to be kept safe. Quite apart from what one would call a “debt of honour” (the phrase is somewhat pompous, but accurately describes the situation), it never makes sense to get a reputation for abandoning one’s friends. Therefore, the Iraqi staff used by the British in Iraq need to be given asylum in the UK, along with their families.

This is not the current policy of the UK. The Home Office has simply suggested that Iraqis put at risk by their work for the British “register with the appropriate UN refugee agency”, joining the mountain of 2 million-plus refugees and IDPs already caused by the war. This simply isn’t good enough; the safety of Iraqis who are marked out as traitors by the insurgency can’t be guaranteed in the refugee camps either.

Denmark has already done the right thing, giving asylum to all 200 Iraqis who worked alongside their forces. The vast majority of the people concerned are already fluent English speakers and number only a few thousand, so we are not talking about a huge burden on the UK’s asylum system here – certainly nothing like the scale of the Ugandan Asian asylum operation, which is itself generally recognised to have been a massive net positive for the British economy and society.

British readers of CT ought to write to their MPs to ask them what they plan to do about this problem. It is best if you can write an individual letter, perhaps based on the set of bullet points over the fold, but if not, then the form letter on Dan Hardie’s blog is better than nothing (Update: the entire form letter is now also below the fold, after a burst of realism about how many readers you lose per click). I’ve also emailed my small set of contacts in the media about this story – as the links above show, to a large extent the “MSM” is already working on it, but anything we can do to keep it on the front pages will help. American readers of CT, well I guess you probably need to be thinking about how to organise something similar when your politicians start doing the same thing.

(other CT authors – can we leave this one up at the top of the page during Monday UK daytime please?)

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