Henry

I’ve been too caught up in a genuine academic debate over “UFOs and sovereignty”:http://www.henryfarrell.net/movabletype/mt-search.cgi?IncludeBlogs=75&search=UFos over at the Monkey Cage to respond to this quasi-related “query”:http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/archives/individual/2008_07/014204.php from Kevin Drum:

Question:

bq. According to a poll done to publicize the new X-Files movie, the #1 conspiracy theory (in Britain, anyway) is the belief that Area 51 exists to investigate aliens. … But down at #10, we get this: “The world is run by dinosaur-like reptiles.” What the hell kind of conspiracy theory is that? Dick Cheney doesn’t look anything like a dinosaur.

Answer:

It’s a conspiracy theory in which Dick Cheney is a _shape-shifting_ “dinosaur-like reptile”:http://www.bibliotecapleyades.net/biggestsecret/biggestsecretbook/biggestsecret.htm, that’s what. A shape-shifting dinosaur like reptile who “hunts people down for kicks”:http://www.bibliotecapleyades.net/biggestsecret/biggestsecretbook/biggestsecret16.htm in secret federal compounds, to boot. Crooked Timber surely represents the greatest concentration of expertise on this particular set of claims in the respectable blogosphere – see “here”:http://www.bibliotecapleyades.net/biggestsecret/biggestsecretbook/biggestsecret16.htm, “here”:https://crookedtimber.org/2004/04/07/shelf-life/, and “here”:https://crookedtimber.org/2004/06/07/i-dont-licke-icke-all-that-much-anymore/ for more, and this “article”:http://www.adequacy.org/public/stories/2002.2.10.183349.284.html, by the mysterious “jsm,” for a fuller briefing on the David Icke phenomenon. Indeed one of our “occasional contributors”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Montagu_Norman has actually been identified by Icke as a key member of the international lizardoid conspiracy. Since Icke came out as an actual anti-Semite, I think that our collective researches have ceased. Maybe, given the continued popularity of the theory, we need to start looking at this stuff again …

“Scott”:http://www.artsjournal.com/quickstudy/2008/08/verily.html at his other place blogs about the latest McCain video (which is so staggeringly bad at achieving its purported aims that it doesn’t make sense _except_ as a dogwhistle video).

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Norm Geras has put up a “profile”:http://normblog.typepad.com/normblog/2008/08/the-normblog-profile-254-henry-farrell.html of me – if you’re interested, click over. The bit I’d recommend really has nothing to do with me, except that I was there when it was uttered – my favorite take on a proverb. It came from an Australian friend whom I’ve fallen out of touch with, Mac Darrow. Off the cuff, he glossed _in vino veritas_ as

Many a true word

Is slurred

which I’ve always thought was a translation tinged with genius.

Also, two very good appreciations of writers. First, Julian Barnes has a “lovely piece”:http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2008/jul/26/fiction on Penelope Fitzgerald both as a person and as a novelist. I fell in love with _The Blue Flower_, less for the portrait of Novalis than for the quiet tragedy of Karoline Just, and read everything else by her that I could get my hands on. As an aside, while she may seem as far from genre as a writer could be, her pastiche of an M.R. James short story in _The Gate of Angels_ is uncanny and brilliant. Second, Kathy G. has a great discussion of “Tom Geoghegan”:http://thegspot.typepad.com/blog/2008/07/tom-geoghegan-m.html. His _Which Side Are You On?_ (“Powells”:http://www.powells.com/s?kw=Geoghegan%20Which%20Side%20are%20you%20On&PID=29956, “Amazon”:http://www.amazon.com/gp/redirect.html?ie=UTF8&location=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.amazon.com%2FWhich-Side-Are-You-Revised%2Fdp%2F1565848861%3Fie%3DUTF8%26s%3Dbooks%26qid%3D1217606748%26sr%3D8-1&tag=henryfarrell-20&linkCode=ur2&camp=1789&creative=9325 ) is a wonderfully written contrary class of a book about the union movement. As Kathy says:

bq. a lot of people just don’t get his charmingly idiosyncratic writing. He writes about politics, and about policy, but God knows his books and essays don’t read like formal scholarly papers or dry think tank reports — they’re far more fluid, inventive, and playful than writing about policy has any right to be. But the problem is, political types often don’t appreciate the literary qualities of his writing, and the literary types don’t get the politics.

I suspect that’s right – his books don’t have arguments so much as they _are_ arguments – going backwards and forwards between different points of view, looking at different aspects of the issue, proposing viewpoints and counter-viewpoints. For those who haven’t read him, he’s really wonderful; one of the best and most original political writers alive.

I have a “bloggingheads”:http://bloggingheads.tv/diavlogs/13161 with Jacob Heilbrunn of _The National Interest_ here on various foreign policy issues; one of the most interesting of which we never got around to debating. A bunch of Democratic foreign policy types, which once included Susan Rice of the Obama campaign, have come out with a new document, the so-called “Phoenix Initiative”:http://www.cnas.org/PhoenixInitiative/. Now in one sense, manifestoes like this are ten a penny at this stage of the election cycle – they’re the calling cards that foreign policy elites use to try to sell themselves to a potential incoming administration. But what’s unusual about this one is the near total lack of self-congratulation about the US as the one essential nation, leader of the free world etc. Instead, the document’s main message is that the US’s military predominance doesn’t count for as much as it used to, and in a globally connected world, not only are other forms of power becoming more important, but other countries are going to take the lead on many key issues, and the US should get used to this. I’m a little surprised to see so little of the usual bombast in a document like this – even liberal internationalists used to talk a few years ago about how the US needed to create the institutions for a global system that would ensure US soft hegemony. Now, this group at least, isn’t talking in these terms, but implicitly suggesting that the US is just one large power among several. It’s an interesting change in rhetoric.

“Tyler Cowen”:http://www.marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2008/07/what-ive-been-1.html evidently doesn’t realize that he’s touched upon a significant cultural phenomenon when he praises Biddy White Lennon’s “Irish Food and Cooking,” co-written with Georgina Campbell, and remarks that BWL has “a great name to write a book like this, no?” Biddy White Lennon was one of the mainstays of Irish rural soap opera, _The Riordans_, which did as much as anything to help shepherd Ireland into modernity. The “Wikipedia entry”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Riordans on _The Riordans_ is a gem, providing a really nice encapsulated history of the show and its relationship to social debates in Ireland.

The Riordans tackled many ‘conservative versus liberal’ issues from its very start. Its start coincided with the coming into force of the Succession Act which for the first time granted to the wife of a farmer an automatic right of succession to the family farm, so removing the danger that after her husband’s death she could be left with nothing, with the property being willed to a total stranger. The issue was at the time controversial; banks until the 1970s would not allow a wife to open a bank account except with the approval of her husband. Conservatives suggested that the new Act, which had been pushed through in the face of opposition by then Minister for Justice Charles Haughey, would undermine the traditional family and lead to the sale of a farm owned by a family, were a farmer’s marriage to break up. Liberals argued that the reform was one of social justice and a long-overdue recognition of the rights of farmers’ wives. …

The show also focused on a range of farming issues, from the promotion of new farm technology to safety on farms. (In the 1970s Tom and Benjy featured in a television advertisement urging farmers to have metal framed cabs put onto their tractors to protect themselves from serious injury should the vehicle overturn.)

Other issues were also raised, such as illegitimacy, poverty, the problems of old age, marriage break-up, sexual activity, the dramatic changes in the post-Vatican II Catholic Church, and most famously contraception, when it was revealed that Benjy’s wife, Maggie, for medical reasons could not risk having a second pregnancy. The decision of the couple to use contraception (the Pill) caused considerable controversy and criticism from “family values” organisations and some in the Catholic Church. The show was on many issues both praised and criticised in the national media and even in Dáil Éireann while civil servants in the mid 1960s criticised the image portrayed of a ‘farm advisor’ sent out to advise farmers on new advances in farming but who in the series was seen drinking in the pub and gossiping.

Of course, as was the usual course with good Irish shows which touched on social and political controversies (see e.g. _Scrap Saturday_, _Nighthawks_), the show was axed without warning.

I’ve a particular fondness for Biddy White Lennon’s cooking books (although I haven’t seen this one, which Tyler describes as a ‘revelation’), being a graduate of _Biddy White Lennon’s Leaving Home Cookbook_, a volume which I received when I first went to college and couldn’t fry a rasher to save my life, and which contained recipes for such then-exotic foodstuffs as pita bread.

Not the Pulp song; Siva Vaidhyanathan is looking for people to “tell him”:http://www.googlizationofeverything.com/2008/07/can_you_remember_your_first_ti.php about the first time that they used Google, if they can remember it. Personally, I can’t – there was a vague process of transition beginning with exclusive use of Alta Vista (remember that?) and finishing with exclusive use of Google, and I’m not sure what came in between.

Kevin Drum “links to”:http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/archives/individual/2008_07/014163.php an unusually stupid (by which I mean ‘unusually stupid, even by the standards of the Corner’) post by Byron York on Obama’s Berlin speech.

It’s a small passage from Obama’s Berlin speech, but this formulation, common in some circles, grates on some ears, like mine:

The terrorists of September 11th plotted in Hamburg and trained in Kandahar and Karachi before killing thousands from all over the globe on American soil.

Yes, the victims were from all over the globe — places like Brooklyn, and the Bronx, and Manhattan, and Queens, and Staten Island, and New Jersey — all over. And most were Americans, weren’t they?

I knew when I read this that I’d seen the same sentiment expressed in a speech by Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, Michael Chertoff. And indeed, Google confirms that “it is so”:http://useu.usmission.gov/Dossiers/Data_Privacy/May1407_Chertoff_EP.asp.

Homeland Security’s Chertoff Addresses European Parliament Committee on Data Transfer, Privacy May 14, 2007

…Today’s terrorists fund their operations internationally. They recruit members, they train, they plan and they carry out attacks by exploiting the gaps in the seams in our international systems. The attack of September 11th was a clear illustration of this. The plot was hatched in Central Asia, the recruits came from Saudi Arabia, the training occurred in Afghanistan, the planning occurred here in Europe, and the attack culminated, of course, in the United States with citizens from many countries including many countries represented here lost in the World Trade Center.

I’m eagerly looking forward to Byron’s follow-up post on the dubious sentiments common among ‘some circles’ of senior Bush officials, Chertoff’s shameful failure to mention that most of those killed were American, und (to use the mots justes) so weiter. Byron?

I’ve seen various textcloud applications before, but “Wordle”:http://wordle.net/ (via “Steve Poole”:http://unspeak.net/) is the first one that I’ve seen that makes it easy to produce aesthetically attractive pictures of the information. Below is the textcloud of my book, “The Political Economy of Trust: Institutions, Interests and Inter-Firm Cooperation” which I’m preparing for publication in Cambridge’s Comparative Politics series (click on the graphic to see the full thing). I want to make a poster of this and frame it for my office.

I’m moderating a discussion at “Firedoglake”:http://www.firedoglake.com on Cory Doctorow’s new book Little Brother, starting about now (with Cory himself as main attraction). If you’re interested, drop by.

“Duncan Black”:http://www.eschatonblog.com/2008_07_06_archive.html#858626388020530189 links to Amity Shlaes at the Washington Post “telling us”:http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/07/11/AR2008071102543.html?hpid=opinionsbox1 that Americans _are too_ whiners. As he says, having people like Shlaes and Gramm mouthing off is a public service in a general election (if only McCain would nominate David Bernstein as a senior surrogate, my happiness would be complete). But talk of Shlaes reminds me of her notorious 2005 “FT column”:http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/73ac2964-50fa-11dd-b751-000077b07658.html?nclick_check=1

It is early to be getting partisan about New Orleans. …Iraq has not caused the US to botch Katrina – either the preparation or response. On the contrary, the fact that the country and President Bush personally were already mobilised for disaster has saved lives.

the US was prepared for Katrina. All the old and new federal offices worked together and confronted the storm early. Nearly two days before Katrina hit New Orleans, the president made millions available to Louisiana by declaring the state an official disaster area. In a press conference on Sunday morning, he instructed the country to listen for any alerts – and warned straightforwardly that he could not “stress enough the danger this hurricane poses to Gulf coast communities”. On Sunday too, Alabama and Mississippi received access to cash when they in turn were declared disaster areas. Citizens of New Orleans with special needs were instructed to go to the Superdome.

Very shortly after writing this appalling piece of hackery, Ms. Shlaes ceased to be a columnist at the _Financial Times._¹ I don’t think that it’s _at all_ unwarranted to surmise that the column and Ms. Shlaes’ rapid departure were connected.

So we may possibly have some idea of what it would take to get a columnist fired at the FT. I’d be interested to know what it would take to get a persistent vendor of mendacious and malignant tripe such as, say, Charles Krauthammer, fired from the _Washington Post_? By the man’s own admission, his credibility is problematic. A few months ago, we passed the fifth anniversary of his “statement”:http://www.aei.org/events/filter.,eventID.274/transcript.asp that

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.

Indeed.

¹ A “search”:http://search.ft.com/search?sortBy=gadatearticle&queryText=%22amity+shlaes%22&aje=true by date suggests that Shlaes produced one more column (which tried to blame the Katrina shambles on the Evils of Federalism, directly contradicting what she had said the previous week), a piece for the wealth section, and a book review over the next couple of weeks, and was then gone forever.

I have a Bloggingheads dialogue with Eric Posner up, where among other things, we talk about the “origins of the netroots”:http://bloggingheads.tv/diavlogs/12432?in=00:04:20.5&out=00:09:44.5. The (not very original, I suspect) theory that I put forward in the dialogue is that this wasn’t the result of any necessary affinity between the left and the Internet, but instead a historical accident, resulting from the emergence of a new medium at a moment when US progressives were (a) extraordinarily frustrated with the Iraq war, and (b) deeply disenchanted with the traditional means through which they might have found expression of their views in happier times (TV and purportedly ‘left’ newspapers like the _New York Times_; the Democratic party). This is less a political science judgement than a semi-journalistic one – I haven’t done enough specific research to really do more than articulate my best guess as to what happened. I am interested in working more on this in a more serious way at some stage though, and would love to both people’s views (preferably good disagreements with my argument) and any evidence for or against that they can think of. More generally, there is a lot of work to be done updating the social movement literature to deal with these new Internet mediated movements – at the very least, there are a few dissertations in it.

Matt Yglesias “gets political spam from Airtran”:http://matthewyglesias.theatlantic.com/archives/2008/07/paging_paul_krugman.php

AirTran got ahold of my email address somehow or other over the years and sends me occasional doses of spam. Normally, it’s to promote some deal or something. But now they’re giving me rants against the evils of oil speculators

But it turns out that this is part of a much larger campaign. Cue “Zephyr Teachout:”:http://www.techpresident.com/blog/entry/27220/united_delta_american_southwest_the_airlines_move_in_on_moveon

I got an email this morning from United, asking me to go to a petition site, which asks me to enter my zip code and send a note to my MOC to “Stop Oil Speculation” and lower energy costs. Tracy Russo reports she got the same email from Northwest. The entire coalition list is at the bottom of this post, and includes the Petroleum Marketers Association of America and Agricultural Retailers association, as well as Delta, Continental, US Air, American, Airtran…

I don’t think this is big news in the good way, mind you–its important because it signals that corporations are willing to use their massive databases to try to leverage political will in Washington. I’m sure this isn’t the first of its kind, but its the first of such a scale that its caught my attention (I’m happy to be rebutted in the comments). We’re talking tens of millions of emails (possibly nearing a hundred million? Jose Antonio Vargas, can you find out?) if all the airlines’ lists are involved. This is clearly just the beginning, and its a crude one–a few years from now you’ll see more organizing, including international organizing, to leverage corporate databases to influence policies that help corporate wealth.

This is an interesting challenge to Clay’s account of how the politics of group formation is changing (all the more so as one of his “key examples of group empowerment”:http://whimsley.typepad.com/whimsley/2008/04/here-comes-ever.html is airline customers who are annoyed at their treatment. I think that Clay’s fundamental claim – that the transaction costs that have hitherto often blocked group formation have been lowered dramatically – is both important and indisputably correct. But this doesn’t necessarily have a levelling effect on power relations, as Clay sometimes seems to suggest when he talks about mobilized consumer groups, protesters etc.

My impression is that we still don’t have good concepts for figuring out the consequences of lowered transaction costs of group formation and communication, partly because we are fighting a set of tired arguments between techno-evangelists (Glenn Reynolds’ dreadful _An Army of Davids_ standing in for multitudes here), and techno pessimists (Andrew Keen, Sven Birkets and other guardians of traditional hierarchies) about whether the Internet is a generally empowering or disempowering phenomenon. It’s neither, of course, and it’s in the detail of which _particular_ groups get empowered and disempowered, and under which circumstances, that the interesting questions lie. I’d be very interested in Clay’s views about how to move forward in this direction (or in another, of course, if he thinks I’m wrong)

Having handed in my tenure file, and gotten my book accepted (yay!), I’m now, for the first time in years, in a place where I can think about doing some really serious reading outside the topics of my research, while I wait for the results to come in on the first, and do copy preparation on the second. So I’m in the market for good books about American politics, society, and history to fill in some of the holes in my knowledge of same as a non-US native. What I’m looking for are interesting, intellectually rich, accounts of American politics, preferably with a minimum of boosterism. Less Doris Kearns Goodwin then, than _The Boys on the Bus._ I’m interested both in academic books with a general appeal and good popular histories with intellectual bite. I’m also happy to entertain suggestions for good fiction that touches on these subjects – first on my list is Peter Mathiessen’s “Shadow Country”:http://www.amazon.com/gp/redirect.html?ie=UTF8&location=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.amazon.com%2FShadow-Country-Modern-Library-Matthiessen%2Fdp%2F0679640193%3Fie%3DUTF8%26s%3Dbooks%26qid%3D1215537418%26sr%3D8-1&tag=henryfarrell-20&linkCode=ur2&camp=1789&creative=9325 (I read one of the books that it’s based on, _Killing Mr. Watson_, years ago, and loved it). So please submit recommendations in comments. Up before I start on this list, I hope, my reviews of John McGowan on American liberalism and Dan Solove on reputation and the Internet.

I didn’t know him, although I did know and love his novels – Patrick Nielsen Hayden knew man and work both, and has “more of substance”:http://nielsenhayden.com/makinglight/archives/010413.html#010413 to say than I ever could. John Clute “reviewed”:http://www.scifi.com/sfw/books/column/sfw18985.html his most recent book a couple of weeks ago, and quoted a poem that he published in the _Paris Review,_ “The Moon on the Crest of the New-Fallen Snow.” I liked it a lot.

Pain

Has its place—and pity, too—but it is not here.
Here all is calm and cold and luminous.
The snow has smoothed over the tracks of the deer.