by Henry Farrell on December 22, 2003
Yet another post in the “we right-wingers are smarter because we say we are” genre, this time from “Alex Singleton”:http://www.adamsmithblog.org/archives/000160.php at the Adam Smith Institute. Singleton puts forward the self-evidently preposterous argument that the blogosphere is dominated by the right wing because the blogosphere favours reasoned argument, leaving leftwingers (who are good at chanting slogans and spouting jargon, but lousy at reasoned thought) in the lurch. Weak stuff, which is barely worth jousting against. Indeed, the post effectively furnishes its own refutation; it advances a thesis which is based on
* One unproven (and “probably false”:http://volokh.com/2003_12_14_volokh_archive.html#107145978917150777) generalization – that the blogosphere is dominated by the right
* One preposterous claim – that the most successful bloggers are those who are most adept at reasoned argument. The exceptions to this rule are too many and various to require explicit mention.
* One tendentious and silly piece of polemic – that leftwingers, unlike rightwingers, have no real arguments.
If this is the sort of reasoned debate that the Adam Smith Institute thinks will help the right to prevail on the battlefield of ideas, then more power to them. But of course, it isn’t an argument as such. Rather, it’s a sort of intellectualized gut-rumbling, a tarted up set of prejudices without any factual basis. Just the sort of nonsense that you might expect from a jargon-spouting, sloganeering leftist in other words.
by Henry Farrell on December 19, 2003
“Nasi Lemak”:http://nasilemak.blogspot.com/2003_12_14_nasilemak_archive.html#107160604501240875 (a pseudonymous UK political scientist) talks in his blog about a disturbing phenomenon. Students applying for a Ph.D. usually need good letters of reference from well-known academics to get into the better programs. One of Nasi Lemak’s former students recently asked a professor at a top US research university for a reference letter, and was told to write a draft of the letter himself, which the professor would then edit and sign. Nasi Lemak did some asking around, and found a surprising number of people who seem to believe that this is acceptable practice.
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by Henry Farrell on December 15, 2003
A couple of the trolls from Chris’s “thread on Sen”:https://www.crookedtimber.org/archives/000987.html might like to check out the most recent issue of the “Onion”:http://www.theonion.com/3948/news1.html; I reckon that “economist Harold Knoep” provides a fairly precise encapsulation of their biases.
by Henry Farrell on December 15, 2003
I’ve been meaning to blog this ever since I read about it a few days ago on “Marginal Revolution”:http://www.marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2003/12/how_to_conserve.html; it’s one of the neatest ideas that I’ve seen in a while. Given endemic shortages in the availability of some vaccines (viz. flu shots this year), how should one allocate shots so as to prevent the spread of the disease in the general population? Tyler Cowen points to an “article”:http://ojps.aip.org/getabs/servlet/GetabsServlet?prog=normal&id=PRLTAO000091000024247901000001&idtype=cvips&gifs=yes&jsessionid=1910211071503525338 by Reuven Cohen, Shlomo Havlin, and Daniel ben-Avraham that suggests how best to do this. It’s fairly well established that some individuals are a lot more likely to spread viruses than others; these ‘super spreaders’ are exceptionally gregarious people, who have a wide and varied circle of friends with whom they share time, conversation, and unpleasant infections. This means that virus diffusion can be “modelled nicely”:http://xxx.lanl.gov/PS_cache/cond-mat/pdf/0107/0107420.pdf using scale free networks with power law distributions of linkages. Some individuals are much more ‘connected’ than others, and these highly connected individuals are much more likely to be the vectors of contagion. If you can vaccinate these individuals, who are the ‘hubs’ of the network, you can do an awful lot to limit the spread of the disease. The problem is that it’s often hard to figure out who the hubs are. Cohen, Havlin and ben-Avraham have figured out a very clever way of doing this. You randomly sample the population, and ask each person who you sample to nominate one of their acquaintances. You then vaccinate _not_ the initial person who has been sampled, but instead their acquaintance. Because ‘super spreaders’ are likely to know far more people than the average member of the population, they will be heavily over-represented among the ‘acquaintances’ – and thus will be far more likely to be vaccinated. According to Cohen, Havlin and ben-Avraham’s model, you may be able completely to halt the spread of the disease by sampling some 20% of the population, and then vaccinating their acquaintances. This is very clever indeed – insights into the topology of social networks can be used to stop the spread of viruses. It goes to show that the study of power-law distributions may have more uses than securing your bragging rights in the blogosphere.
by Henry Farrell on December 14, 2003
When we set up this blog, several of us were inspired by the “Volokh Conspiracy”:http://volokh.com/, which has done a quite remarkable job in combining smart political and intellectual commentary. We’re now taking another leaf from the Volokhs’ book; from here on, we hope to invite the occasional guest-blogger to join us for a week or so. We’re all very grateful to “John Quiggin”:http://mentalspace.ranters.net/quiggin/, who has very decently agreed to be our inaugural guest-blogger. We hope that most of you are already reading his blog (if you aren’t, you ought to be) – he’s one of the smartest economic and political commentators out there. We’re pleased to have him on board.
by Henry Farrell on December 14, 2003
“Atrios”:http://atrios.blogspot.com/2003_12_14_atrios_archive.html#107140956918560290 has further thoughts on Hussein’s capture – as he says, the capture of Hussein doesn’t change the fact that this was a war of choice, and was a mistake. But he then says
bq. it isn’t clear he’s any worse of a guy than some of the folks who are a part of our “Coalition of the Willing.”
which I find quite unconvincing. Even as squalid dictators go, Hussein was quite spectacularly nasty. I don’t know how many other rulers in recent history have deployed poison gas against their civilian population. Hussein’s capture is cause for unalloyed good cheer.
by Henry Farrell on December 11, 2003
“Eugene Volokh”:http://volokh.com/2003_12_07_volokh_archive.html#107107377078741002 blogs on an interesting biathlon, involving both chess and boxing, two competitive endeavours that are usually pursued in isolation from each other. There’s some fictional precedent though; the eponymous hero of Maurice Richardson’s _The Exploits of Engelbrecht: Abstracted from the Chronicles of the Surrealist Sporting Club_ proves to be a dab hand at both activities. Engelbrecht is a boxer by profession, and like all Surrealist boxers, he’s a dwarf who fights clocks. Grandfather clocks to be specific (they fight dirty). In a succession of short stories, Engelbrecht also shows his prowess not only in beating clocks to a standstill, but at a variant of chess (in which the pieces are Boy Scouts and nuclear weapons), at kraken wrestling, at pike fishing, at Surrealist golf (the first hole is several thousand miles long), and at Plant Theatre. In my favourite story, Engelbrecht plays in the Earth vs. Mars rugby game; the Earth team is several thousand strong, and features such luminaries as Friedrich Engels, Origen, Nebuchadnezzar, Attila the Hun, the Venerable Bede, Luther, Ethelred the Unready, and Judas Iscariot. Heliogabalus, Bishop Berkeley and Aubrey Beardsley score for Earth; Engelbrecht wins the game at the last moment by cunningly concealing himself inside the ball.
The book came out first in 1950; I’m awaiting delivery of a first edition, and you can’t have it. Sorry. You can however, purchase the “Savoy Books”:http://www.abel.net.uk/~savoy/HTML/engelb.html edition, which I also own, and which is handsomely illustrated by Ronald Searle among others. You can even browse the “first chapter”:http://www.abel.net.uk/~savoy/engel.pdf for free on their website. But you should, as they say, read the whole thing. Wonderful stuff.
by Henry Farrell on December 10, 2003
to “Russell Arben Fox”:http://philosophenweg.blogspot.com/2003_12_01_philosophenweg_archive.html#107066373986271483 , who has a new daughter.
by Henry Farrell on December 10, 2003
In “defending”:http://webapp.utexas.edu/blogs/archives/bleiter/000563.html#000563 Noam Chomsky from his detractors, Brian Leiter makes a couple of rather extraordinary claims.
bq. [D]o try to remember that Chomsky is a man of genuine intellectual accomplishment, having invented a real scholarly discipline in its modern form, and who participates at the highest level in theoretical debates in cognate fields. This might, at least, create a presumption that when he writes about subjects that make only modest intellectual demands–like foreign relations or politics–that he is unlikely to make gross mistakes, and that he may, in fact, have legitimate reasons for saying what he does.
As I read Leiter, he’s claiming that politics and foreign relations are trivia – they present no serious problems for someone like Chomsky, who has a really first rate intellect. Nor even for someone with a decent undergraduate education in a serious subject; Leiter has already “informed”:http://webapp.utexas.edu/blogs/archives/bleiter/000517.html us that “a BA in philosophy apparently puts you well ahead of a PhD in political science.”
Leiter isn’t noted for his belief in civil discourse, and I’ve no desire to start a flame-war. Nor do I want to tip-toe delicately around the fact that he’s talking complete smack. In his posts, Leiter gives us the (perhaps inadvertent) impression that there’s no problem in politics so vexing that a crack squad of linguists and philosophers couldn’t sort it out. Even if this isn’t what he’s trying to say, his claim that politics presents only modest intellectual demands is stuff and nonsense. Politics is complicated and messy; there aren’t any easy answers, and as a consequence it is an intellectually demanding subject matter. Perhaps _too_ demanding; I’m the first to admit that scholars of politics haven’t provided good answers to most of the important questions. But I’m profoundly unconvinced that philosophers of Leiter’s particular bent are likely to do any better. Or linguists for that matter; Chomsky’s unwillingness to grapple with the complexities of politics is perhaps the reason why he’s a first rate linguistic theorist, a second rate polemicist, and a fifth rate political scientist. The proof of the pudding is in the eating, and on the evidence to date, there ain’t much eating there.
Update: Looks like Leiter’s post has received a “lot”:http://strangedoctrines.blogspot.com/2003_12_01_strangedoctrines_archive.html#107093336802086802 of “attention”:http://www.enbanc.org/archives/000379.html in the “blogosphere”:http://www.enbanc.org/archives/000379.html. Pejman Yousefzadeh seems to “suggest”:http://www.pejmanesque.com/archives/005187.html that “he too was a member”:http://www.hyperdictionary.com/search.aspx?Dict=&define=apostasy&search.x=0&search.y=0&search=Search of the Chomsky cult once upon a time. Whoda thunk it.
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by Henry Farrell on December 9, 2003
There was an “article”:http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A41921-2003Dec6.html in the Post on Sunday that got surprisingly little attention; it talked about documentary evidence suggesting that small rockets had been modified to carry warheads with radioactive material – and had then disappeared. These rockets had last been spotted in the trans-Dniestrian Republic, a semi-independent corner of Moldova which has developed a nasty specialty in black market and grey market arms deals. As the Post describes it
bq. Transdniester is regarded by experts as a prime shopping ground for outlaw groups looking for weapons of every type. It is the embodiment of the gray zone, where failed states, porous borders and weak law enforcement allow the buying and selling of instruments of terror.
How did this unpleasant little anomaly of a statelet come into being, and why does it persist? As the Post tells the story, it comes down more or less to Russian imperialism; the Russians have 2,800 troops, which they have refused to withdraw, despite repeated requests from the Moldovan government and the international community. Whenever the Moldovans have tried to reassert control over the republic (which lies within their nominal borders), the Russians have made it clear that they’ll defend
by Henry Farrell on December 8, 2003
“Ken MacLeod’s”:http://kenmacleod.blogspot.com/2003_12_01_kenmacleod_archive.html#107076468337607417 long essay on the pro- and anti-war left. (via “Norman Geras”:http://normangeras.blogspot.com/2003_12_07_normangeras_archive.html#107088561122966260).
by Henry Farrell on December 8, 2003
“Jim Henley”:http://www.highclearing.com/archivesuo/week_2003_11_30.html#004769 has a nice post on his favourite cover-versions; “Atrios”:http://atrios.blogspot.com/2003_12_07_atrios_archive.html#107083856368381294 has just chimed in too. Here’s a few more to add to the mix.
(1) Uncle Tupelo – I Wanna Be Your Dog. The Stooges classic is given a bluegrass work-over. And it rocks. (available on their recent “anthology”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/B000063CN9/henryfarrell-20).
(2) Cat Power – (I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction. Junks the cock-rock chorus to create a nearly unrecognisable, but extraordinarily compelling slice of loneliness and despair. Trust me – you’ve never really heard the lyrics of the song until you’ve listened to this version. (available on “The Covers Record”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/B00004NHDY/henryfarrell-20″)
(3) The Blue Aeroplanes – The Boy in the Bubble. Takes a rather wuffly Paul Simon afro-beat number, and adds much urgency. On their (now deleted) album, _Beatsongs_ – good luck in finding it. The album also has the song “Cover Me,” which no-one has yet covered, to the best of my knowledge.
Update: Oh, and Outkast’s drum’n’bass take on “My Favourite Things” on “Speakerboxx/The Love Below”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/B0000AGWFX/henryfarrell-20
by Henry Farrell on December 7, 2003
Looks as though there’s a lot of “cheating”:http://wizbangblog.com/archives/001268.php going on in the Blog Awards. Various methods used – “Dive into Mark”:http://diveintomark.org/ seems to have employed a particularly cunning trick. The polls link directly to the websites of the nominated blogs, in order to allow people to check out the blogs that they’re voting on,. Apparently, the eponymous Mark set up a script to trap anyone clicking on the link to his website into voting for his blog automatically. Scroll down through the comments to see his justification for doing this – it’s a minor masterpiece of chutzpah. Fortunately, CT readers don’t seem to have been up to any mischief, either because you don’t have the skillz, or because you’re nice and honest people. Naturally, I prefer the latter explanation. (Via “Scripting News”:http://www.scripting.com/)
by Henry Farrell on December 7, 2003
David Langford’s indispensable “Ansible”:http://www.dcs.gla.ac.uk/Ansible/a197.html tells us about wirtiglugs, hwinis, and (my favourite) breekbridders.
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by Henry Farrell on December 6, 2003
Extracts from a piece in today’s “NYT”:http://www.nytimes.com/2003/12/07/international/middleeast/07TACT.html?hp=&pagewanted=print&position=
bq. As the guerrilla war against Iraqi insurgents intensifies, American soldiers have begun wrapping entire villages in barbed wire. In selective cases, American soldiers are demolishing buildings thought to be used by Iraqi attackers. They have begun imprisoning the relatives of suspected guerrillas, in hopes of pressing the insurgents to turn themselves in. …
bq. “If you have one of these cards, you can come and go,” coaxed Lt. Col. Nathan Sassaman, the battalion commander whose men oversee the village, about 50 miles north of Baghdad. “If you don’t have one of these cards, you can’t.” The Iraqis nodded and edged their cars through the line. Over to one side, an Iraqi man named Tariq muttered in anger. “I see no difference between us and the Palestinians,” he said. “We didn’t expect anything like this after Saddam fell.” …
Underlying the new strategy, the Americans say, is the conviction that only a tougher approach will quell the insurgency and that the new strategy must punish not only the guerrillas but also make clear to ordinary Iraqis the cost of not cooperating. “You have to understand the Arab mind,” Capt. Todd Brown, a company commander with the Fourth Infantry Division, said as he stood outside the gates of Abu Hishma. “The only thing they understand is force — force, pride and saving face.” …
bq. “With a heavy dose of fear and violence, and a lot of money for projects, I think we can convince these people that we are here to help them,” Colonel Sassaman said.