The heads of government of the various EU member states are meeting together this evening to discuss, among other things, who should replace Romano Prodi as President of the European Commission. It’s an important decision – but there isn’t a clear front-runner. For what it’s worth, my estimate of the various candidates’ chances of getting the nod.
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Henry
Today is the 100th anniversary of the day on which stately, plump Buck Mulligan came down the stairs of the Martello tower, razor, mirror and washbowl in hand. Like many other Dubliners, I’ve a distant relative who’s a character in _Ulysses_. “Professor MacHugh” is based on my great-uncle Hugh MacNeill. He appears in the “Aeolus section”:http://www.web-books.com/Classics/Fiction/Other/Joyce_Ulysses/Ulysses_07_3.htm, which is appropriate enough; he’s a bit of a windbag (and according to family hearsay, the original was an alcoholic and a chronic gambler to boot). This isn’t as unusual as it might seem: everyone in Ireland is related to everyone else, and ‘placing’ someone (i.e. finding what relatives or friends you have in common) is a source for hours of entertainment whenever two Irish people meet. Not only that – but _Ulysses_ is a long novel, with many minor characters – Dubliners who don’t have some tenuous connection to the novel are perhaps even rarer than Dubliners of a certain age who don’t claim to have been regular drinking companions of Paddy Kavanagh, Brendan Behan, and Myles na gCopaleen (aka Brian O’Nolain). Which is to say, very thin on the ground indeed.
Update: Google too are celebrating Bloomsday.
!http://www.google.com/logos/james_joyce.gif!
In comments at John and Belle’s “other blog”:http://examinedlife.typepad.com/johnbelle/2004/06/pull_the_the_fi.html, Fafnir from Fafblog speaks to the perplexity caused by reading Gene Wolfe.
bq. Gene Wolfe is a punk. He also greedily ate my fudgcicle once while signin my copy of “The Island of Doctor Death and Other Stories and Other Stories.” I said “hey gene wolfe that is my fudgcicle” an he said “maybe you only THINK it is your fudgcicle because you are plaaaaauged by the ghooosts of meeeeemory. wooooooo!” all the while makin wiggly fingers. And I went home thinkin that maybe I really was plagued by the ghosts of memory and maybe I wasn’t who I thought I was, was I Fafnir or was I Gene Wolfe, or was I a butterfly dreaming I was Gene Wolfe dreaming I was Fafnir? And the next day I woke up an realized that punk had just eaten my fudgcicle.
I’m spending some time in Washington DC, where I’ll be starting a new job this September in George Washington University’s Dept. of Political Science and Elliott School of International Affairs. There was a Kerry fundraiser yesterday where Bill Clinton was speaking – I went along with my wife because I thought it would give some interesting insights into how Clinton was going to sell Kerry’s candidacy on his upcoming “book tour”:http://nytimes.blogspace.com/genlink?q=http://www.nytimes.com/2004/06/14/politics/campaign/14CLIN.html?pagewanted=print&position=. As it did.
Clinton spoke for about 15 minutes. There were three main points to his speech. First was a slightly defensive apologia for Kerry’s lack of public profile – Clinton spoke about how difficult it was to get media space for a challenger at this stage of the Presidential campaign. Second was a thinly-veiled attack on Bush. Clinton spoke at length about how John Kerry would be a President who was comfortable with people who were smarter than him, and who were prepared to contradict him when he was wrong. This seemed to me to be a smart use of Clinton’s experience in running the Oval Office. It didn’t come across as raw partisanship (the criticism was implicit), but pointed up by contrast the plain, simple badness and incoherence of the executive policy-making process under GWB. Third, Clinton tried to sell Kerry as a caring Democrat, by talking about Kerry’s commitment to helping deprived youth during Clinton’s Presidency. This wasn’t very convincing – there wasn’t any specific information, or even anecdotes, about what exactly Kerry had done. All in all, it served to confirm my overall impression that the Democrats are still having difficulty in selling Kerry as a positive quantity, rather than as an alternative to the (undoubtedly execrable) incumbent. Some of this could be my bias as a non-US lefty who has no emotional commitment to the Democrats, but it seemed to me that Kerry still has a lot of work to do if he’s going to maintain his narrow lead, let alone extend it.
“Jack Balkin”:http://balkin.blogspot.com/2004_06_06_balkin_archive.html#108680154938193129 on the torture memo.
bq. The stench of corruption permeates the pages of this report. Legal minds, blinded by ideology, and seduced by power, have willingly done the Administration’s dirtiest work– apologizing for torture and justifying violations of the most basic human rights. They have mangled the law and distorted the Constitution, manipulating legal sources to maximize power and minimize accountability. It is the sort of legal reasoning that twists law to destroy the Rule of Law. It is the sort of legal reasoning that brings shame on our nation and our people. It is the sort of legal reasoning that makes me ashamed to be a lawyer.
“Eugene Volokh”:http://volokh.com/archives/archive_2004_06_07.shtml#1086708760 has a nice short piece on the incoherence of the distinction between positive and negative liberty. His main argument – that even negative liberties entail government enforcement – is reminiscent of the basic claim of Stephen Holmes and Cass Sunstein’s “The Cost of Rights: Why Liberty Depends on Taxes”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0393320332/henryfarrell-20.[1] It’s also a good reminder of why Volokh is a consistently interesting blogger and scholar – he’s willing to follow ideas where they lead him, even if they point in (for him) politically awkward directions.
fn1. See “here”:http://cscs.umich.edu/~crshalizi/reviews/cost-of-rights/ for a short review by Cosma Shalizi.
Pejman Yousefzadeh has a “Flack Central Station piece”:http://www.techcentralstation.com/060704F.html that is quite remarkably at odds with the facts, even by Yousefzadeh’s usual standards. He criticizes Matt Yglesias’ comparison of warbloggers with German purveyors of the “Stab in the Back” legend, arguing that if Matt is not “actually accusing those who are critiquing the media of being Nazis, he is accusing them of stealing a page out of the Nazi playbook.”
Update: German spelling correction following comments
I’m in Europe at the moment for research, and staying with friends in Brussels while I do academic interviews with political types. The place I’m in has a nice big back garden (property is relatively cheap here) which is periodically invaded by flocks of wild green parrots that have gone native. It’s delightful – a splash of the exotic in a notoriously unexotic city. Apparently though, many of the locals are unimpressed – the parrots build big, ugly communal nests resembling poorly built rafts that are a bit of an eyesore in winter, when the leaves drop off the trees. How the parrots themselves make it through the winter, I don’t know. According to the “National Geographic”:http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2003/04/0407_030407_parakeets.html, Brussels isn’t the only city in temperate climes to support a wild parrot population; there are thriving flocks in London, San Francisco and elsewhere.
“Max Sawicky”:http://maxspeak.org/mt/archives/000395.html is right – Ted Rall sucks. And he sucks even more than usual in this “hysterical diatribe”:http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=127&ncid=742&e=7&u=/uclicktext/20040504/cm_ucru/anarmyofscum, charmingly entitled “An Army of Scum (Or, We’re Looking For a Few Good Homosexual Rapists).”
According to Rall, the US army is equivalent to the SS.
bq. Now it’s official: American troops occupying Iraq (news – web sites) have become virtually indistinguishable from the SS. Like the Germans during World War II, they cordon off and bomb civilian villages to retaliate for guerilla attacks on their convoys. Like the blackshirts who terrorized Europe, America’s victims disappear into hellish prisons ruled by sadists and murderers. The U.S. military is short just one item to achieve moral parity with the Nazis: gas chambers.
You don’t have to be an apologist for Abu Ghraib to recognize this as nonsense. Even if it turns out that there are systematic abuses in US interrogation of prisoners, there’s no comparison between the US army and Hussein’s crowd, let alone the SS. I imagine that the shrill and obnoxious tone of Rall’s recent writing is not entirely unconnected to the fact that he has a book coming out this week. He’s the Ann Coulter of the left – a shameless self-publicist trying to build a career out of moral superiority, cheap shots and relentless, vicious stereotyping. To be avoided at all costs, in other words.
Those who still maintain that the abuses at Abu Ghraib were an isolated and atypical incident should consider this paragraph from a “Washington Post”:http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn?pagename=article&contentId=A37943-2002Dec25¬Found=true article of December 26, 2002.
bq. According to Americans with direct knowledge and others who have witnessed the treatment, captives are often “softened up” by MPs and U.S. Army Special Forces troops who beat them up and confine them in tiny rooms. The alleged terrorists are commonly blindfolded and thrown into walls, bound in painful positions, subjected to loud noises and deprived of sleep. The tone of intimidation and fear is the beginning, they said, of a process of piercing a prisoner’s resistance. … Bush administration appointees and career national security officials acknowledged that, as one of them put it, “our guys may kick them around a little bit in the adrenaline of the immediate aftermath.” Another said U.S. personnel are scrupulous in providing medical care to captives, adding in a deadpan voice, that “pain control [in wounded patients] is a very subjective thing.”
It sounds as though the kinds of ‘cooperation’ between soldiers and interrogators that were discovered at Abu Ghraib have been going on for a long time, and have received some sanction from either administration appointees or senior security officials, or both. It may – or may not – be that the soldiers in Abu Ghraib went further than they were supposed to in using specifically sexual forms of humiliation. But the pattern of using non-specialized army personnel to ‘soften up’ people for interrogation through physical abuse and terror seems to have been established a long, long time before Abu Ghraib.
“Jacob Levy”:http://www.tnr.com/doc.mhtml?i=scholar&s=levy043004 has a very good column in TNR, about politics and responsibility. Levy refers to Clinton’s persistent habit of making apologies that weren’t really apologies, because they weren’t accompanied by any real consequences for the people involved (as Jacob notes, this is preferable to not making apologies at all). There’s something similar going on in the current breastbeating over Abu Ghraib. Many of the condemnations, including George W. Bush’s statement, seem to me to be either complete disclaimers of responsibility, or non-apology apologies. By implying or stating that these are the actions of a small group of individuals, who will be duly punished, they’re saying that there isn’t any wider problem, nor any need for those who weren’t directly involved, or supervising those directly involved to take responsibility. They’re not so much apologies as apologias – speeches for the defence.
As “John Quiggin”:https://www.crookedtimber.org/archives/001786.html has already said, the expected market valuation of the Google IPO seems to reflect fundamental irrationality among its investors. At first glance, Google’s “IPO statement”:http://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1288776/000119312504073639/ds1.htm#toc16167_1 is even crazier – it seems to poke a finger in the eye of Wall Street. Larry Page’s covering letter tells potential investors that Google will continue to reserve the right to make extremely risky investments, to coddle its employees, and to refuse to release traditional earning guidances.
bq. Although we may discuss long term trends in our business, we do not plan to give earnings guidance in the traditional sense. We are not able to predict our business within a narrow range for each quarter. We recognize that our duty is to advance our shareholders’ interests, and we believe that artificially creating short term target numbers serves our shareholders poorly. We would prefer not to be asked to make such predictions, and if asked we will respectfully decline. A management team distracted by a series of short term targets is as pointless as a dieter stepping on a scale every half hour.
In fact, there’s a very strong argument to be made that Google’s behavior is entirely rational, and furthermore is exactly the right thing to do if it wants to maximize its long term profits. As Gary Miller has argued in a series of publications, shareholder capitalism in the strong sense of the word is plagued by fundamental inefficiencies – shareholders cannot be trusted to maximize long term value because of fundamental dilemmas of social choice.
From tomorrow’s “FT”:http://news.ft.com/servlet/ContentServer?pagename=FT.com/StoryFT/FullStory&c=StoryFT&cid=1083180189879
bq. Six US army soldiers are facing courts-martial for abusing and humiliating Iraqi detainees – activities uncovered during an investigation that also found widespread abuses at the notorious Abu Ghraib prison, according to US military officials. The alleged abuses, made public by CBS News, included soldiers forcing prisoners to simulate sex with each other and to pose naked with American men and women in military uniforms. In photographs obtained by the CBS News programme 60 Minutes, Iraqi prisoners are shown stacked in a human pyramid, one with a slur written on his skin in English. In another, a detainee is shown with wires attached to his body in an attempt to convince him he might be electrocuted. In almost all photos, CBS said, the US soldiers are laughing, posing, or giving thumbs-up signs.
bq. In an interview with CBS, Staff Sgt Chip Frederick, an army reservist and one of the soldiers charged, said he would not plead guilty … “We had no support, no training whatsoever, and I kept asking my chain of command for certain things … like rules and regulations. And it just wasn’t happening.”
bq. The army’s investigation reportedly shows that military investigators asked untrained reservists to prepare inmates for interrogation, but offered little guidance. Because of the success rate of “breaking” prisoners prepared by the unit now under investigation, they were encouraged to continue their practices, Sgt Frederick said.
This really sounds pretty dreadful. It’s not My Lae, and it’s not on the same plane as what went on under Saddam Hussein. But it’s symptomatic of a more general moral deadening that’s taking place – a willingness to countenance the threat of torture, “the turning over of people to third countries for torturing”:http://www.guardian.co.uk/afghanistan/story/0,1284,665939,00.html, and the employment of physical brutality in the ‘war on terrorism.’ People know this is happening – both the “Washington Post”:http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn?pagename=article&contentId=A37943-2002Dec25¬Found=true and “the Economist”:http://www.economist.com/displaystory.cfm?story_id=1522792 have run stories on this. But there’s no US debate about it that I can see; the stories sank like lead balloons. Even the “Maher Arar”:http://obsidianwings.blogs.com/obsidian_wings/2004/01/arar_14_a_plea_.html case seems not to have had any impact in the US beyond a few bloggers, and a scattering of news stories in the back pages. There’s a lot of knee-jerk anti-Americanism among the left, especially in Europe, and an unwillingness to acknowledge the many good (and sometimes utterly wonderful) things that the US has done in the rest of the world. Equally, there seems to be a persistent unwillingness among many Americans to acknowledge the ugly things that are being done in the name of their national security. Perhaps this story – and the actions being taken to punish those who were directly responsible – will help change this. But I don’t have much confidence that it will.
Something I’ve been meaning to mention for a while and never quite getting around to … Pitchfork Media report that “My Bloody Valentine”:http://pitchforkmedia.com/news/04-02/09.shtml, very possibly the Best Band in the World, Ever, are releasing a bunch of stuff next year, including some of the material that never made it onto the Glider EP. Cause for celebration, if not quite as much cause as a genuinely new album would be. Pitchfork also has a nice piece on the demise of “Black Eyes”:http://pitchforkmedia.com/news/04-04/08.shtml, which featured my cousin, Hugh McElroy, as co-vocalist in its heyday.
“Eugene Volokh”:http://volokh.com/2004_04_25_volokh_archive.html#108301673013543402 points to a very good _Chronicle_ “article”:http://chronicle.com/temp/email.php?id=xsvzl412963d3sb8hhgwrus0stnwe0op on Invisible Adjunct’s decision to call it a day. The piece does an excellent job in capturing why her site was important. Adjunct faculty often find themselve systematically excluded from the collegial supports that allow tenured and tenure track faculty to chat, compare situations, and figure out common problems. It’s hard to engage in corridor talk when you’re a non-person. Invisible Adjunct’s site created a very real space for conversation.