Henry

When I’m swamped with work, as I am at the moment, I like to have a book that I can dip into for quick five minute breaks – thousand page behemoths like Quicksilver get put to one side until normal conditions reassert themselves. And at the moment, I’m very much enjoying Hazel K. Bell’s Indexers and Indexes in Fact and Fiction (University of Toronto Press, 2001). A surprising choice for leisure reading? Not really. It’s light (broken up into 74 bite-sized chapters, refreshing, and very, very funny.

[click to continue…]

If you’ve been hit in the last couple of the days by pornspam in your comments, you’re not alone; Crooked Timber has been hit too, as have many other sites. If you’re a MT person, the IP address to block for this latest wave is 209.210.176. *and make sure to include the period at the end.* Thanks to “Teresa Nielsen Hayden”:http://www.nielsenhayden.com/makinglight/ for the heads-up – and check her site for further updates and breaking news. “MT Blacklist”:http://www.jayallen.org/journey/2003/10/mtblacklist_monday_hell_or_high_water should be out tomorrow; if it works as advertised, it should help mitigate the problem.

“Tom”:https://www.crookedtimber.org/archives/000630.html posted a few days ago on fifteen great jazz albums; I’m ashamed to state that I know next to nothing about jazz – or classical music. My tastes tend to be more lowbrow – rock, pop, some country, and lots of experimental electronic music. In that spirit, I’ll offer a list of five of my favourite quasi-obscure albums. Only quasi-obscure, mind you; you should be able to find all of this stuff in yer local Tower if the spirit moves you.

[click to continue…]

“Arnold Kling”:http://www.techcentralstation.com/100703B.html posts an essay on Tech Central Station, criticizing Paul Krugman’s punditry for deviating from sound economic theory. Kling suggests that Paul Krugman should stick to “Type C” arguments, about the consequences of policies, and that he should avoid “Type M” arguments about the motives underlying these policies. According to Kling, type M arguments are difficult to prove, and are anyway unimportant compared to policy outcomes, which are what we should care about.

Kling’s tone is reasonable and moderate, as compared, say, to the mendacious and economically illiterate ravings of Donald Luskin and his ilk. He’s still wrong.

[click to continue…]

For heartless capitalists only: the Financial Times advises us that “stuffed kittens”:http://search.ft.com/search/article.html?id=031004000901&query=kittens&vsc_appId=totalSearch&state=Form may be a sound investment. As long as they’re high quality stuffed kittens, of course.

… ask Steven Lenzner and William Kristol in a recent “Public Interest”:http://www.thepublicinterest.com/current/article1.html puff-piece. It’s a good question, even if it begs a rude answer. Which Lenzner and Kristol don’t provide, of course; according to them, Strauss revived the Western tradition of reading and philosophizing, more or less single-handed. They describe Strauss’s style of close reading as focusing on how classical authors employ

bq. various types of meaningful silences, intentional ambiguity, dissimulation, the significance of centrally placed speeches, inexact repetitions of earlier statements, use or non-use of the first person singular, concealment of a work’s plan, and so forth.

All of which is legitimate, sez Strauss, because the Great Writers chose their words precisely and exactly, using ellipses and rhetorical evasions to convey hidden secrets to the wise, while concealing them from the rude and undiscriminating gaze of the grubbing multitudes. In short, the ancients were writing with a particular reader in mind, and that reader was Leo Strauss.

[click to continue…]

Via “BoingBoing”:http://boingboing.net/2003_09_01_archive.html#106487652773758854, an interesting story about the new Transport and Security Administration (TSA). CAPPS II program, which aims to hoover up personal data from all airline passengers. The TSA has appointed a certain David S. Stempler, head of the “Air Travelers Association,”:http://www.1800airsafe.com/ as passenger advocate in the CAPPS II process. The trouble is that there’s no evidence that the “Air Travelers Association” consists of more than a fancy website, a customer loyalty program, a couple of flacks, and a bunch of letterheaded stationary. Moreover, there’s strong circumstantial evidence “to suggest”:http://www.dontspyon.us/stempler.html that the “Air Travelers’ Association” has close and intimate connections with Cendant Corporation, a data processing company that stands to make a lot of money if CAPPS II is implemented. In other words, it looks as though the “passenger advocate” may well be a corporate shill.

This is a perennial problem for interest group politics in the US. It’s very hard to tell “real” grassroots organizations from fake ones; private interests often set up astroturf associations to peddle a particular line and pretend that it’s emanating from a real constituency. Even when the US government wants to know who’s for real and who’s not (doubtful in the present instance), it’s hard put to distinguish the genuine from the ersatz. Many European countries do things differently; they give quasi-official status, and a privileged voice, to interest associations that they consider to be “genuine.” This has its own problems – it often gives rise to worryingly comfortable relations between governments and consumer watchdogs. But it’s still an improvement on the US approach.

Recently, however, US consumer groups have begun to organize – thanks to the EU. The EU and US set up a cross-Atlantic organization called the “Trans-Atlantic Business Dialogue”:http://www.tabd.org a few years back, to push the common interests of EU and US business. The Europeans insisted that there be a similar organization for consumer associations too, the “Trans-Atlantic Consumer Dialogue”:http://www.tacd.org, or TACD. Since its inception, TACD has not only represented EU-US consumer interests, but has served as an umbrella group to organize US consumer groups into a quasi-official lobby. Amazingly, nothing of the sort existed before (many US consumer associations had fallen out over NAFTA, and weren’t talking to each other). TACD also serves as a sort of vetting procedure for genuine consumer associations – if you’re a member of TACD, you’re undoubtedly the real thing. That said, it’s not surprising that the TSA didn’t invite a “real” consumer organization to provide an advocate. If you want to provide the appearance of consultation, but not the reality, astroturf groups have their advantages.

Like most everybody else in the blogosphere this morning, I’ve been reading about the “Plame affair”:http://www.calpundit.com/archives/002263.html. It’s potentially an enormous story – if the facts are as they “appear to be”:http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A11208-2003Sep27.html, there are at least two senior White House officials who deserve to be hauled off to jail. 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. If nothing else, a more constructive attitude will make it more likely that the story will stick around, and receive the sustained public attention that it obviously deserves.

Update: See also Kevin Drum’s “plea to conservatives”:http://www.calpundit.com/archives/002264.html – angry, but carefully worded and targetted.

Update 2: But of course, some will never be convinced … for a sampling, see “Belle Waring”:http://examinedlife.typepad.com/johnbelle/2003/09/is_not.html

John M. Ford comments in an “Electrolite”:http://nielsenhayden.com/electrolite/archives/003727.html#003727 thread on mixed metaphors and cliches.

bq. If you want a vision of the future, it is a wireless broadband network feeding requests for foreign money-laundering assistance into a human temporal lobe, forever. With banner ads.

As Brad DeLong readers may recall, Ford is responsible for introducing “Zweeghb”:http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/movable_type/archives/000845.html into the Scrabble lexicon. A man of many talents.

I’d planned to do a number on Paul Johnson’s extraordinary “rant”:http://www.forbes.com/columnists/free_forbes/2003/1006/037.html against Europe, but “Mark Kleiman”:http://markarkleiman.blogspot.com/2003_09_01_markarkleiman_archive.html#106461571572522168 has beaten me to it. I don’t have much to add, except to say that Johnson is a dreadful old fraud, even as superannuated Tory farts go. And his prose style is wretched; the sort of sub-Burkean lugubrious sententiousness that conservatives are liable to mistake for profundity when they’ve overdone the port a bit.

Still, there’s good news for those of you who think that Johnson’s right about Europe’s economic backwardness. Silvio Berlusconi has just launched a “new marketing effort”:http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/3137406.stm, encouraging foreigners to invest in Italy. As Berlusconi describes it:

bq. “Italy is now a great country to invest in… today we have fewer communists and those who are still there deny having been one … Another reason to invest in Italy is that we have beautiful secretaries… superb girls.

It’s a cliche to say that you can’t make this stuff up. But you can’t. You really can’t.

Do conservatives have a hard time getting tenure in American universities? “David Brooks”:http://www.nytimes.com/2003/09/27/opinion/27BROO.html suggests as much in a NYT op-ed today. This isn’t David Horowitz-style ravings; Brooks makes a real argument. He quotes various conservative professors to say that:

bq. A person who voted for President Bush may be viewed as an oddity, but the main problem in finding a job is that the sorts of subjects a conservative is likely to investigate – say, diplomatic or military history – do not excite hiring committees.

Brooks’ respondents may be right about history (although military history is making a bit of a comeback; look at “Niall Ferguson”:http://www.boston.com/globe/magazine/2003/0629/coverstory_entire.htm). Even so, I think that Brooks exaggerates. While the average political scientist is somewhere to the left of the average punter, she isn’t all that far to the left. In my experience, most political scientists are moderate liberals, with substantial minorities who are real leftists, centrists, or mild to moderate Republicans. There aren’t many hardcore conservatives in top political science departments, but there aren’t many Marxists either. Indeed, I’d guess that there are rather more conservatives than Marxists – conservatives dominate certain areas of political theory (classical political philosophy) that most pol-sci departments have to offer courses in.

There’s also another factor that Brooks doesn’t talk about (although he hints at it at the end of the article). If you’re a young conservative, who’s just gotten a Ph.D. in pol. sci. or pol. theory from a good school, you have many attractive options outside the academy. Conservative think-tanks like Heritage and the American Enterprise Institute are remarkably well-funded (thanks to the “charming”:http://www.dailyhowler.com/dh022403.shtml Richard Mellon Scaife and other mega-millionaires), and provide direct access to the US policy process. They offer better pay (usually), more immediate recognition and more influence. It’s a wonder that any bright conservatives stay in the academy at all.

Eugene Volokh “sez”:http://volokh.com/2003_09_21_volokh_archive.html#106437620610467368

bq. Work? Blogging? Sleep? Or _Quicksilver_? I say _Quicksilver_.

_Quicksilver_ junkies will want to know about the Quicksilver “Wiki”:http://www.metaweb.com/wiki/wiki.phtml that Neal Stephenson has set up, which will allow people collectively to annotate the book, its characters, ideas, and whatever odd tangents they find interesting. Via “BoingBoing”:http://boingboing.net/2003_09_01_archive.html#106438136711313636.

“Dan Drezner”:http://www.danieldrezner.com/archives/000756.html and I are co-writing an academic paper on blogging and politics – if you’re a journalist, columnist, commentator, producer, or editor for a newspaper, magazine, or television station, we’d appreciate your help. We’d be grateful if you could take two minutes to send an email to ddrezner@hotmail.com with answers to the following five questions:

1) How many blogs do you read a day?

2) Please name the three blogs you read most frequently. [What if you read less than three? Then just name the ones you do read.]

3) Why do you read the blogs you read? In other words, what makes those blogs worth checking out on a regular basis?

4) Have you ever read something on a blog that affected your decision-making on what to air/publish? If the answer is yes, can you give an example?

5) How much influence do you think blogs have on political discourse? A lot, a little, or none at all?

All answers will be kept confidential unless you give us explicit permission to do otherwise in your email. Dan has also posted our “working definition”:http://www.danieldrezner.com/archives/000754.html of what a blog is – comments and suggestions gratefully appreciated.

Thanks!

I mentioned Caroline Bradley and Michael Froomkin’s “paper”:http://intel.si.umich.edu/tprc/papers/2003/240/VirtualReal.pdf on law in MMORPGs (massively multi-player online role-playing games) earlier today. Its argument is straightforward – these online communities offer a nice way to test legal scholars’ (and social scientists’) arguments about how different rules will affect behaviour and exchange. By looking at how this or that rule in an online game affects how players behave online, we can (with plenty of provisos and cautionary footnotes) reach interesting conclusions about social behaviour more generally.

My tuppence worth: one theory has already been ‘tested’ in this way; the argument that easing restrictions on weapons and their use will lead to a drop in violent crime. If you grant the assumption that MMORPGs are analogous to everyday life (a whopping assumption to be granting, I’ll admit), then the evidence is unequivocal. A society where each can use weapons against each without restriction is likely to deteriorate into Hobbesian anarchy. People will positively beg for a Leviathan to come in and put an end to the Warre of All against All.

[click to continue…]