Henry

I forgot to note a very special anniversary yesterday. April 22nd is the date on which Charles Krauthammer opined:

Hans Blix had five months to find weapons. He found nothing. We’ve had five weeks. Come back to me in five months. If we haven’t found any, we will have a credibility problem.

You’ve now had six years. How’s that credibility looking?

John’s post reminds me that I was giving some grief to Matt Welch about seasteaders and the more … conceptually novel side of libertarianism last week (Matt held his own).

This came up in an argument over Peter Leeson’s new book on the joys of eighteenth century piracy as an exercise in stateless government, and the recent excitement off the coast of Somalia. I suggested that Somalia looked like a libertarian paradise – no government, lots of guns etc – something that Matt certainly didn’t agree with personally. But what I didn’t know (until one of the bloggingheads commenters pointed it out) was that Peter Leeson himself has written an article arguing that modern Somalia is teh awesome (or, at least, a lot better than you might think). As he argues in a different, summary essay (linked to below):

Like all other choices, the choices we face in “selecting” governments are constrained. Unfortunately for most developing countries, the political choice set they face is far smaller than the political choice set more developed countries face. Historical features, such as clan tension, rampant corruption, territorial conflicts, and many others, which cannot be changed in the short run, severely restrict the kind of government countries like Somalia can reasonably expect to have if they have a government. Sadly, well-functioning, well-constrained governments like the ones we observe in the U.S. and western Europe are not part of this choice set. Ultra-predatory, corrupt, and abusive governments, however, are. And so is anarchy. As Somalia’s experience illustrates, for many LDCs with these limited options anarchy may very well be the best feasible choice.

I’ll leave the claim here to others who know African politics better than me (Chris Blattman, feel free to chime in) and merely note that these views presents an interesting question for the Princeton people charged with publicizing his book. On the one hand, piracy and Somalia are surely topical issues, but on the other, professor Leeson’s views on piracy and the benefits of Somalian political organization are likely to be unpopular with many people (his current proposed solution for the Somalian piracy problem, by the way, is to privatize the ocean).

I’ve started reading his book on piracy, which is an entertaining enough exercise, but one which I suspect is a bit fishy on the empirics. He clearly has his ideological druthers (see here for his grand theory of why we don’t really need government), but then, so do we all. While I don’t find his claims for anarcho-libertarianism to be particularly convincing, I am probably not the target audience, and they have their place in the grand ideological debate. What I do find disconcerting though, is his obvious sweet tooth for efficiency arguments and just-so stories. History, when you look at it at all carefully, is much too messy to support any ideological explanation unequivocally. The book (and the academic articles that it draws upon) simply feel too neat to me, and don’t persuade me that he went into his research on these topics looking to be surprised by what he found (which I really think you should, any time you engage in empirical research). Others’ mileage may vary.

Via Paul McAuley. I haven’t seen any obituaries yet. I preferred his early novels, and (even more) his short stories to his later work. I read “The Voices of Time” (probably in one of the old Spectrum SF collections) when I was seven or eight, and didn’t understand it at all, but somehow, it caught me and haunted me. Much of his later work read like different versions of the same novel. But they were often very funny – his over the top plotlines with their garden-suburbia-turned-into-chaos and insane reformer-cum-dictator-wannabes were intended to be satirical. I have a particular fondness for Super-Cannes, if only because of how it jumps up and down in glee on the corpse of the notion of social capital. His work had its problems – most obviously in its depiction of women which was at best chilly, at worst rather worse than that. But he was genuinely a great writer, in the sense that Borges described Kafka as being a great writer – he created his own precursors (but these summoned ancestors were to be found less in literature as such than in what he perceptively called ‘invisible literature’ – all the bureaucratic forms and minutiae that define our lives). We all live in the decaying aftermath of the Space Age that he, better perhaps than anyone else. described. If he was a novelist who was better at describing landscapes and extreme social situations than people, he captured, as a result, something important about an era in which individuality simply doesn’t mean as much as it once seemed to. There are bits of the world (and not-unimportant ones) that are Ballardian – if you’ve read him, you experience the shock of recognition when you see them.

As I mentioned previously on this blog, I had a somewhat unfortunate experience a few months back. I was working in my office, when a work-study knocked on my door with a brand new MacBook Pro, which he told me had been sent over from my school’s technology program. I was nonplussed, and told him that he must be wrong, that I hadn’t ordered one etc, but he insisted, and indeed my name was on his work-order form. So I finally acquiesced, on the grounds of gift-horses, and the wisdom of not inquiring too closely into the dental conditions thereof, and unpacked it. 2 hours later, I was completely hooked – more rational and altogether nicer than my Windows box, while much smoother than my Ubuntu installation. I would have wanted to take it home and marry it, if I wasn’t married already. 3 hours later, I discovered that of course it had been a mistake, and that it was in fact intended for a colleague with a vaguely similar name (the person preparing the work order had not unreasonably gotten confused). And I had to give it back.

Hence my proposal (copyright Henry Farrell 2009, but if Apple want it, they can have it in return for a rolling program of hardware replacement to be negotiated) for a new TV ad series, building off of the classic series from the early 2000s, and entitled (in honor thereof) Bait and Switch. Deliver Apple computers to a number of unsuspecting Windows users, selected from various advertising friendly demographics. Give them a few days to get used to their new machines. Then tell them that it is a mistake, and that they will have to give them back and return to Windows. And film their reactions, consternation, refusal etc. I imagine it would make for great television (perhaps I am speaking from the zeal of the new convert).

Second, and more seriously, having been bait-and-switched myself, I have finally taken the plunge and bought a MacBook Pro for the new book that I hope to start writing. Good software recommendations and general tips are gratefully appreciated. I already know about (and have bought) TextMate, and plugged in MultiMarkdown thanks to Kieran’s earlier tutelage (he was the first person I emailed when I thought I had been given a new Apple free, gratis and for nothing). I’m also probably getting Scrivener, for aforementioned project. But any other recommendations for productivity software etc would be gratefully appreciated.

From Hilzoy.

If you have been reading public health blogs for a couple of years, you probably know, and miss, Confined Space, a blog about worker health and safety issues. If you don’t, you missed a great blog, the kind that really educates you about an issue that it’s hard for non-professionals to learn about otherwise. … Confined Space closed up shop a bit over a year ago when Jordan Barab, who wrote it, went to work for the House Education and Labor Committee. … From the Effect Measure post that I linked above, which is aptly titled “Miracle at OSHA”:

“Jordan Barab has been named Deputy Assistant Secretary for OSHA and until a permanent OSHA Director is named he will be Acting Assistant Secretary (i.e., OSHA Director) (…)If you go back through the archives of Confined Space you’ll find post after post taking the Bush administration OSHA to task for falling down on the job of protecting workers’ health. Now the hand that typed those posts will be running the agency. The bottom line here is that workers who would have died under the old regime will now live. Mirabile dictu!”

Indeed.

In Spring 2002, _Dissent_ published Michael Walzer’s essay, “Can There Be A Decent Left?,” which played as big a part as any piece of writing in generating the fractures among lefty intellectuals over the Iraq war. Although Walzer was later to come out in (mildly expressed) opposition to the Iraq war, he calumniated the left for its persistent failure to wake up to the reality of global terrorism.

The radical failure of the left’s response to the events of last fall raises a disturbing question: can there be a decent left in a superpower? Or more accurately, in the only superpower? Maybe the guilt produced by living in such a country and enjoying its privileges makes it impossible to sustain a decent (intelligent, responsible, morally nuanced) politics. Maybe festering resentment, ingrown anger, and self-hate are the inevitable result of the long years spent in fruitless opposition to the global reach of American power. Certainly, all those emotions were plain to see in the left’s reaction to September 11, in the failure to register the horror of the attack or to acknowledge the human pain it caused, in the schadenfreude of so many of the first responses, the barely concealed glee that the imperial state had finally gotten what it deserved. Many people on the left recovered their moral balance in the weeks that followed; there is at least the beginning of what should be a long process of self-examination. But many more have still not brought themselves to think about what really happened.

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Lane Kenworthy will be guest-blogging with us for a little bit. He is a professor of sociology and political science (and former colleague of Kieran’s) at University of Arizona. Lane is an economic sociologist, with a particular interest in the political economy of inequality in the US and elsewhere. His most recent book is Jobs with Equality, which really does groundbreaking work in arguing that the trade-offs between employment growth and economic equality are much, much weaker than conventional wisdom holds them to be. Lane blogs at Consider the Evidence. We’re really happy to have him with us.

From the Chronicle

The student-newspaper staff at Brigham Young University removed some 18,500 copies of the paper from the campus yesterday, and reprinted nearly the entire press run, because an embarrassing typo in a front-page photo caption appeared to offend key leaders in the Mormon hierarchy…. The caption described a photograph illustrating the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints’ General Conference, and it referred to the group’s “Quorum of Twelve Apostates” rather than “Apostles.” … A student had misspelled the word “apostle,” and the article’s editor chose the wrong word from among the options offered by spell-checking software.

This essay on _The New Criterion_ by George Scialabba (not our own Scott McLemee, thank you very muchmisattribution now corrected) has been getting some recent attention because it says harsh things along the way about cultural diversity. Although Scialabba certainly doesn’t like the culturalist left very much, his discussion of its problems are a class of a diversion on the way to the main argument of the piece, which concerns the problems of the cultural conservatives who criticize them.

the New Criterionists sometimes boast that they and not the multiculturalists are the true democrats, applying to themselves Arnold’s words in Culture and Anarchy “The men of culture are the true apostles of equality. [They] are those who have had a passion for diffusing, for making prevail, for carrying from one end of the society to the other, the best ideas of their time.” But it is a hollow boast. Arnold freely acknowledged, as Kramer and Kimball do not, the dependence of spiritual equality on at least a rough, approximate material equality.

in these and other passages Arnold demonstrated his humane moral imagination and democratic good faith. Kramer and Kimball have yet to demonstrate theirs. Finally, there is the complicated matter of disinterestedness, or intellectual conscience. That both Kramer and Kimball would sooner die than fake a fact or twist a quote, I do not doubt. But disinterestedness is something larger, finer, rarer than that. To perceive as readily and pursue as energetically the difficulties of one’s own position as those of one’s opponent’s; to take pains to discover, and present fully, the genuine problem that one’s opponent is, however futilely, addressing — this is disinterestedness as Arnold understood it.

Arnold thought he had found a splendid example of it in Burke who, at the close of his last attack on the French Revolution, nevertheless conceded some doubts about the wisdom of opposing to the bitter end the new spirit of the age. …I wish I could imagine someday praising Kramer and Kimball in such terms. But alas, I know nothing more un-New-Criterion-ish.

This, and other essays, are collected in Scialabba’s new book, which is just out (I got my copy yesterday), and which I can’t recommend highly enough. This bit, on Robert Conquest, has the quality of the best aphorisms:

It may be a delusion, as Conquest repeats endlessly, to imagine that state power can ever create a just society. But one reason some people are perennially tempted to try is that private power is generally so comfortable with unjust ones.

I’d enjoyed Scialabba’s essays very much when I read them individually, but to be properly appreciated, they should be read together. NB also that Scott, while entirely innocent of the essay quoted above, did write the introduction to the new volume.

Julian Sanchez on climate change debates.

Sometimes, of course, the arguments are such that the specialists can develop and summarize them to the point that an intelligent layman can evaluate them. But often—and I feel pretty sure here—that’s just not the case. Give me a topic I know fairly intimately, and I can often make a convincing case for absolute horseshit. Convincing, at any rate, to an ordinary educated person with only passing acquaintance with the topic. A specialist would surely see through it, but in an argument between us, the lay observer wouldn’t necessarily be able to tell which of us really had the better case on the basis of the arguments alone—at least not without putting in the time to become something of a specialist himself. Actually, I have a plausible advantage here as a peddler of horseshit: I need only worry about what sounds plausible. If my opponent is trying to explain what’s true, he may be constrained to introduce concepts that take a while to explain and are hard to follow, trying the patience (and perhaps wounding the ego) of the audience.

Come to think of it, there’s a certain class of rhetoric I’m going to call the “one way hash” argument. Most modern cryptographic systems in wide use are based on a certain mathematical asymmetry: You can multiply a couple of large prime numbers much (much, much, much, much) more quickly than you can factor the product back into primes. Certain bad arguments work the same way—skim online debates between biologists and earnest ID afficionados armed with talking points if you want a few examples: The talking point on one side is just complex enough that it’s both intelligible—even somewhat intuitive—to the layman and sounds as though it might qualify as some kind of insight. (If it seems too obvious, perhaps paradoxically, we’ll tend to assume everyone on the other side thought of it themselves and had some good reason to reject it.) The rebuttal, by contrast, may require explaining a whole series of preliminary concepts before it’s really possible to explain why the talking point is wrong. So the setup is “snappy, intuitively appealing argument without obvious problems” vs. “rebuttal I probably don’t have time to read, let alone analyze closely.”

This is both true and smart (as is Julian’s work more generally; in my opinion, he is by far the most consistently interesting and intelligent of the young sort-of-libertarian opinion journalist set).

Inside Higher Ed

More than four years after his comments on 9/11 set off a furor, and four weeks into a trial, a Colorado jury on Thursday afternoon found that the University of Colorado did not fire Ward Churchill for legitimate reasons, but for his political views. A judge will later determine whether Churchill can return to his tenured job as an ethnic studies professor at the university’s Boulder campus. The jury was responsible for awarding damages, and gave Churchill only $1.
To find in Churchill’s favor, the jury had to determine that his political views were a substantial or motivating factor in his dismissal, and that he would not have been fired but for the controversy over his opinions.

I think that this is a reasonable verdict (although it seems to be the product of a jury split between a majority who wanted to give him a significant sum and a holdout who wanted to give him nothing). It says that the university was wrong to fire him for his political views (which I strongly suspect it did – what evidence I am aware of suggests that tenured plagiarists usually get an easier deal than you might expect), but also suggests that his academic career wasn’t worth all that much in the first place. I imagine he’ll get his job back if he really wants it, which is about what both he and the president who fired him both deserve.

The NYT

the island of saints and scholars … The next parish over, they say … is Boston … the wellspring of poets and balladeers as advertised: those emerald fields, those ruddy-cheeked fishermen warming pub seats, a land of stone and cold wind that produced a lyrical people and a music embraced more than ever by the young. … Every village that had seen nary a rock wall or a cottage window unchanged suddenly had a cul de sac of insta-homes and a half-dozen O’Mansions. Anyone with a mortgage could get rich in little more time than it took for a head of Guinness to settle. … wonderfully brooding town, where David Lean filmed “Ryan’s Daughter,” the sod was peeled back for the worst kind of Southern California housing developments. … beer-soaked backwater … “I left a godly land of broke but merry alcoholics and came back to a place where people who used to dig potatoes were buying luxury apartments sight unseen and driving Porsches.” … marvel at a people burning peat to stay warm against blustery Atlantic winds. … empty new homes tell a story of greed.

Fill in the blanks yerself. In all fairness, a couple of the choicer phrases were quoted by the author from other people’s articles, but others weren’t. I suspect that the author of this piece was especially proud of ‘O’Mansions’ and the Guinness-head-settle as a unit of duration. He shouldn’t be.

Scott McLemee has the sordid details.

Last month, the Washington, D.C., newspaper Politico revealed the existence of a secret online discussion group for left-tilting reporters and academics called JournoList. The article provoked a furor of denunciation among right-wing bloggers, who took the existence of an Obamaphile wonk cabal as proof that something darkly conspiratorial must be afoot. … So you can imagine my surprise when, a few days later, I discovered the existence of an even more well-concealed e-mail group. It connects up the nation’s most powerful academics. For the sake of this article we can call it AcademoList. …

Scott is now in hiding – but the truth must get out. And there are more shocking revelations to come. Scott has discovered that:

AcademoList’s cover was nearly blown in 2006, when David Horowitz published The Professors: The 101 Most Dangerous Professors in America. In spite of the subtitle, the book actually listed only 100 dangerous professors. At the time, scarcely anyone noticed this. And if they had, it would not have been too surprising, since it was obvious that considerable ingenuity had been required to get it up to that length. … The mysterious “dangerous professor number 101” turns out to have been one of the founders of AcademoList — a truly sinister figure, and indeed the single most important player in the effort to subject the United States to both Islamic fundamentalism and the gay agenda.

Scott could only say so much, but I can now reveal that the secret 101st Dangerous Professor in America is _David Horowitz himself_ (he holds endowed chairs _in pectore_ at Yale, Harvard and Princeton). He is also the Fourteenth (sic) Imam and the Beast Foretold in the Book of Revelations. Further Fun AcademoList Factz:

• Mickey Kaus was invited to be one of the founding members of Academolist (he too holds an _in pectore_ appointment, as Snifre-Bedschietz Chair in American Politics at Long Beach College) but balked when he learned that he would have to sacrifice a goat to Shub-Niggurath at the initiation ceremony.
• In addition to Aristotle’s lost treatise on comedy and the True Vindication of Camille Paglia, the AcademoList secret library hosts the skulls of Vannevar Bush and William F. Buckley Jr. Persistent rumours suggest that it also holds a birth certificate with Stanley Fish’s real name (and it ain’t Morris Zapp).
• The comments sections to _Inside Higher Ed_ columns reflect the ongoing research activities, and plans for future world domination, of one of AcademoList’s most distinguished emeritus members, Dr. Alphonse Moreau.

Further revelations are promised (and should anyone have additional useful information that they wish to share in comments, anonymously or otherwise, we are happy to guarantee their safety).

I’m not particularly keen on the current Irish government, but this seems a bit much:

Ireland may need “new faces in Government”, an analyst with debt ratings agency Standard & Poors said this morning. Frank Gill, speaking a day after the agency lowered Ireland’s credit rating, also said Ireland had a “very low” chance of defaulting on its debt during an interview with Newstalk radio this morning. Mr Gill said a change of Government may be required in an effort to stabilise the debt to gross domestic product ratio. That ratio may rise to above 9.5 per cent, according to the Government, more than three times the European Union limit. Ireland has lost its prized “AAA” credit rating from Standard & Poor’s, which yesterday downgraded its outlook for the Irish economy, blaming the deterioration in public finances. In a move that will make the cost of Government borrowing more expensive and put further pressure on the economy, Standard & Poor’s lowered Ireland’s rating from AAA, the top rating possible, to AA+.

I wouldn’t have thought that this was an especially opportune moment for credit rating agencies to start throwing their weight around given their major contribution to the ongoing crisis, but even in normal times, this would have struck me as serious over-reach. Credit rating agencies are purely private bodies, with an awful lot of political power. In theory, they impartially pronounce upon the perceived riskiness of lending to particular debtors, putting money in particular deals and so on. In practice, their decisions often prove to be quite political. But rarely as political as this. I don’t think that this comment can be interpreted as anything but a statement that Standard and Poor’s willingness to improve Ireland’s credit rating is dependent on the Irish Dail and Irish voters kicking the current government out. That’s a very dubious – and very political – action for a purportedly neutral and technical body to be taking.

Update: Thanks to nnyhav in comments for pointing to this later story.

Reacting to S&P’s decision to cut the Republic’s rating, economists and market analysts yesterday homed in on its concern that there would not be a credible plan for the public finances until after the next election. Mr Gill told The Irish Times that the statement was not meant to question the State’s leadership, and simply reflected the challenge facing the Government and the uncertainty surrounding the banks. He also stressed that a AA+ rating was still broadly positive. “That is a very high rating and this suggests an extremely low probability of default,” he said.

I originally thought that this looked like a walkback rather than a clarification and said as such – then I saw that the Irish Times had changed their original story (without saying that they were doing this) to include the full quote which appears considerably more ambiguous than the original story implied.

Mr Gill said a change of Government may be required in an effort to stabilise the debt to gross domestic product ratio.

“It’s likely that for there to be a buy in into what are going to be inevitable tax hikes in order to stabilise the debt to GDP ratio, you are going to need new faces in the Government. This is typically the case in the aftermath of an economic crisis,” Mr Gill said

The GDP ratio may rise to above 9.5 per cent, according to the Government, more than three times the European Union limit.