Henry

In the NYT today.

bq. Mr. Boehner’s views on what is permissible were outlined in a 37-page manifesto that he sent to House Republicans when he was campaigning for majority leader in January. In the part dealing with “institutional ethics and reform,” Mr. Boehner made a virtue of being friendly with lobbyists, saying that “absent our personal, longstanding relationships, there is no way for us to tell” which ones might be corrupt.

Scott McLemee makes a modest proposal.

bq. With such difficulties in mind, then, I want to propose a kind of public-works project. The time has come to create a map. In fact, it is hard to imagine things can continue much longer without one. At very least, we need a Web site giving users some idea what landmarks already exist in the digital space of academe. … AggAcad 1.0 would resemble the phonebook for a very small town — with one column of business numbers and another of personal. It would provide a rather bare-bones set of links, in two broad categories. There would be an online directory of academic publishers, similar to the one now provided by the Association of American University Presses. But it would also have links to the Web sites of other scholarly imprints, whether from commercial publishers or professional organizations. The other component of the start-up site would be an academic blogroll – perhaps an updated version of the one now available at Crooked Timber, divided broadly by disciplines. …

bq. AggAcad 2.0 would provide not just directories but content from and about scholarly publishing. As academic presses make more material available online — sample chapters, interviews with authors, etc. — the site would point readers to it. (This aspect of the site might be run by RSS or similar feeds.) Likewise, visitors to the site would learn of the more substantial reviews in online publications, including symposia on new books held by academic bloggers.

bq. AggAcad 3.0 would incorporate elements of Digg — the Web site that allows readers in the site’s community to recommend links and vote on how interesting or useful they prove. … By this stage, AggAcad would provide something like a hub to the far-flung academic blogosphere (or whatever we are calling it within a few years). Individuals would still be able to generate and publish content as they see fit. The advantages of decentralization would continue. But the site might foster more connections than now seem possible. Information about new scholarly books could circulate in new ways. It would begin to have some influence on how the media covered academic issues. And — who knows? — the quality of public discussion might even rise a little bit.

This all seems to me to be great. First, it would create some sort of credentialling process, which might make it easier, say, to get tenure committees to take blogging seriously as a form of disciplinary or public service (and some of the more thoughtful blog symposia etc as a form of publishing). Secondly, on a more personal level, it would allow me to get out from under the academic blogroll. As a new-ish father, I’m finding it more nearly impossible than ever to keep up with the expansion of the academic blogosphere, and have gotten woefully bad at updating it (I will be updating it with various requests next week, _promise_). It’s just too big for one person to keep track of any more. As a first step towards Scott’s proposal, I may change the blogroll to a wiki format, and ask a few people to act as discipline specific editors (or alternatively just throw it out to the public as an open resource). Or, if anyone has any technically elegant alternative suggestions, feel free to throw them out in comments.

This FT op-ed by Timothy Garton Ash, Dominique Moisi and Alexsander Smolar makes some good trenchant points about the EU’s increasingly tricky relationship with Russia.

bq. Europeans are faced with a delicate balancing act in their policy towards Russia. Should the message be one of trust in a re-emerging power whose energy resources are vital to us, or wariness of a regime whose authoritarian instincts are clearer than ever? … Today we may be witnessing the emergence of competition between European states for privileged relations with Moscow and favoured access to Russian gas. … he time has come for the EU to develop a genuinely European policy towards Russia. While seeking a long-term strategic partnership with its giant Eurasian neighbour, the EU should not hesitate to ask three elementary things of Russia. …The first of these requirements is that Russia should allow its neighbours to determine their own futures. … The second requirement … Energy contracts should be clear, binding and respected … The third strategic requirement has to do with certain minimal standards of legal and political conduct inside Russia’s borders. …Non-governmental organisations should be allowed to function properly in civil society and media independence should be a reality. … The concepts of “sovereign democracy” or “managed democracy” advanced by Vladimir Putin, Russia’s president, remind us of yesterday’s concept of “people’s democracy.”

I was too busy grading to write a post a few weeks ago on Cheney’s comments on Russia’s slide into autocracy. These were undoubtedly hypocritical (Cheney was perfectly happy to kiss up to nasty Central Asian autocrats a couple of days later) but nonetheless dead on target. Russia is a real problem for both the US and Europe, but EU member states don’t want to face up to it. They’re increasingly dependent on Russian energy resources, and Russia has made it clear that it’s willing to exploit this dependency towards political ends. It has very successfully been playing the game of divide and rule, making individual deals with EU member states (many of which have been notably willing to reach agreement, sometimes under rather dubious circumstances). There were some mutterings a month or two ago about a special energy summit to be convened by the Finns, but as far as I know, nothing has come of this. Unless the EU comes up with a common approach to energy policy, its member states are likely to find their political choices greatly curtailed in coming decades. As far as I can see, there’s no sign that the EU is willing to do this.

From the FT yesterday.

bq. Just before or after Sunday’s Italy-France final in Berlin, a sports tribunal in Rome is expected to decide whether four leading Italian clubs systematically influenced referees. A lawyer for Juventus, Italy’s most popular club, says a punitive relegation to the second division would be “acceptable”. … Silvio Berlusconi became another divisive force. In 1994 he became prime minister with a party called Forza Italia (Go Italy), his attempt to borrow the team’s aura. The fact that Mr Berlusconi was voted out of office in April makes it easier for some leftwingers to support Italy on Sunday. If he is unlucky, his club, AC Milan, will be relegated by the tribunal on the day his rival Romano Prodi, the prime minister, may see Italy crowned world champions in Berlin.

Which reminds me that Scott McLemee emailed me an article a while back where Toni Negri declares that he’s an AC Milan fan. Whoda thunk it?

I’ve been listening a lot to Si Schroeder’s _Coping Mechanisms_ over the last couple of weeks, and wanted to recommend it, although I can’t really describe it very well. My Bloody Valentine is the closest comparison, but it’s still not very close. There’s a free MP3 here, and you can buy the album as a CD, MP3s, Ogg Vorbis or whatever you like here. Full disclosure: I used to know Simon in Dublin, but I haven’t seen him in over six years.

More on the Mancini affair. First, the foreign minister, Massimo D’Alema (who’s one of the less pleasant operators on the Italian left imo) has suggested that the Italian government knew about Abu Omar's kidnapping.

bq. It appears to me unlikely that operations of this sort, which seems to have involved actors at the highest level of the services, could have taken place totally unbeknownst to the political authorities (my translation).

Second, the justice minister, Giuliano Amato has suggested that there may be a need to reform the secret services. There appears to be a debate taking place within the Italian government over whether the blame should be laid at the door of individual actors within SISMI or SISMI as a whole. Amato is being quite cautious – but hinting that serious reforms are needed. Prodi is even more cautious – but may become less so as this develops (see below).

Finally, Laura Rozen links to a story at the _European Tribune_ suggesting that Mancini was running an elaborate dirty tricks operation with dossiers on thousands of Italians considered enemies of the previous Italian government. I’m not sure what the sourcing is for this piece, but it’s certainly interesting and consistent with much of what we know already.

Now on the one hand, as Robert Waldmann suggests, none of this is likely to surprise many Italians. There’s a long tradition in Italy of “dietrologia” – of assuming that politics is a shadow play, where the really important things happen back stage among clandestine actors of one sort or another. Most Italians will likely be less surprised that SISMI was involved than at the revelation that some within SISMI seem to have resisted the extraordinary rendition of Abu Omar. But on the other, there does seem to be an interesting political realignment taking place. I wouldn’t like to bet hard money that the Italian government is going to use the scandal as an excuse to clear out some of the rotten wood from the Italian intelligence services, which have traditionally been run like a state within a state (think of a combination of the worst attributes of J. Edgar Hoover and James Jesus Angleton and you won’t go far wrong). But Romano Prodi is among those who have suffered directly from smear campaigns run by people with SISMI connections in the past, and may well be personally inclined to do something about it, as the scandal gathers force. It’s also becoming increasingly clear that there were connections between SISMI and the Berlusconi government which went considerably beyond formal lines of authority, suggesting that there may be some political gains to be made by investigating further. More as this develops.

A rather important political development in Italy. Marco Mancini, the second-in-command of SISMI, the Italian intelligence agency has been arrested, along with his former boss, General Gustavo Pignero, for his part in the extraordinary rendition/kidnapping of Abu Omar. The NYT also has a piece on this, but its focus is on the magistrates’ decisions to issue arrest warrants for four Americans who were allegedly involved. It seems to me that the SISMI part of the story is the more important one. There’s no prospect that the US is going to comply with warrants issued against its agents, but there is a real possibility of substantial political repercussions from the SISMI arrests.

The path to justice in Italy is a long and tortuous one – arrest by magistrates is no guarantee of successful prosecution. But the arrest of a key figure in the Italian intelligence agency suggests that the unwritten rules of Italian politics are changing. SISMI has traditionally been a law unto itself, with many connections to shady right wing groups in Italian politics, and an unstated presumption of judicial immunity. This may not be true any longer. The Italian government has issued a statement which is a quite perfect example of the art of flowery Italian political rhetoric – effusive and entirely meaningless expressions of confidence in the loyalty of the Italian intelligence apparatus to the state, which strongly suggest to me that some of the principals of aforementioned intelligence apparatus are being measured for the chopping block. Readers of Laura Rozen and Josh Marshall will remember that there are many interesting things that Mancini’s boss, Nicolo Pollari, could reveal about Nigerien uranium and forged documents should he choose to. It’s still unlikely that he’ll be forced to make that choice, but it’s a little more likely than it was yesterday.

I have an op-ed in the _Financial Times_ tomorrow on Swift and privacy in Europe and the US – link here, but subject to rapid linkrot. NB that a final correction appears not to have made it into the online version – the opening sentences:

bq. In the increasingly bitter dispute over press freedom in America, some Republicans are pressing for The New York Times to be charged with espionage. The editor of The New York Times has claimed for his part that the US government is out of control over the newspaper’s disclosures that the government was monitoring international financial transactions.

should read

bq. In the increasingly bitter dispute over press freedom in America, some Republicans are pressing for the New York Times to be charged with espionage for disclosing that the government was monitoring international financial transactions. The editor of the New York Times has claimed for his part that government surveillance programs are effectively out of control.

Jenny Turner in the latest issue of the _London Review of Books_ (or, to be more precise, the latest issue to arrive in print on my doorstep).

bq. ‘All lazy writing about Doctor Who,’ Kim Newman writes in his ‘critical reading’ of what he calls ‘the franchise’, ‘trades on the stereotypes of children watching “from behind the sofa”’ – exactly what I remember doing, though in our house we called it the settee. So do I really remember it, or do I just think I do, because I want to join in? Newman confesses that he can ‘confirm the authenticity’ of the sofa stereotype in his own case; so culturally embedded has the trope become that when the now defunct Museum of the Moving Image curated a Doctor Who exhibition in the 1990s, they called it Behind the Sofa

Me too! I remember the specific episode (if not its name) – it involved Cybermen and a back-and-forth between Earth and Mars where the two light minutes between the planets proved to be a crucial point in the plot. I dove behind the sofa, and refused to come out until my parents told me that the scary part was over. We were living in Darlington for a year and I was six – I then went back to Ireland, escaping the reach of BBC forever (you could get it on the East coast, but not in the wilds of Tipperary). I haven’t been exposed to Dr. Who culture or to Dr. Who itself since, so I don’t think that this can be a false memory. Is this one of those experiences that people from a particular generation share, but don’t necessarily talk about?

(and speaking of cybermen, Michael Bérubé can be vewy, vewy cwuel)

I’ve been waiting for the other shoe to drop on this for the last few days, and it finally has. Privacy International has filed complaints with umpteen European and non-European data regulators that SWIFT has illicitly shared European citizens’ financial data with US authorities. This could have some very interesting consequences. Now bear in mind as you read the below analysis that I am not a lawyer. I have, however, spent a lot of time over the last six years working on and writing about privacy issues in the EU-US relationship, so I do have a good grasp of the political issues involved.
[click to continue…]

It would appear that Tariq Ramadan has won an important victory in his legal battle against his exclusion from the United States.

bq. A federal judge on Friday gave the U.S. government 90 days to act on the visa application of a renowned Muslim scholar who has been kept out of the United States for two years … [I]n forcing the government to make a decision about the scholar, Judge Crotty rejected — sometimes in mocking tones — many government arguments that would have given federal officials broad power to exclude people from the United States without giving any reason. … despite the wide latitude federal officials have to deny visas, Judge Crotty wrote, “it cannot do so solely because the executive disagrees with the content of the alien’s speech and therefore wants to prevent the alien from sharing this speech with a willing American audience.” Further, Judge Crotty wrote: “The First Amendment rights of Americans are implicated when the government excludes an alien from the United States on the basis of his political views, even though the non-resident alien has no constitutionally or statutorily protected right to enter the United States to speak.”

I meant to mention Philip Connors’ sharp and funny piece about working for the _Wall Street Journal_ (to be found in the most recent issue of _N+1_, but not available on the WWW) last week, when I was writing about newspapers, editorial policies etc. His description of Bob Bartley, late editorial-page editor for the newspaper:

bq. Bob Bartley, who has since passed away, was among the most influential American journalists of the second half of the twentieth century … He was fairly soft-spoken and his posture was poor. He rarely smiled, but when he did he looked like a cat who’d just swallowed your canary. His abiding obsessions were taxes and weapons. He thought taxes should be cut always and everywhere, except for poor people, and he thought Americans should build as many weapons as possible … Bartley was appalled by the very idea of poor people. In fact, he’d once said he didn’t think there were any poor people left in America – “just a few hermits or something like that.” (This quote can be found in the _Washington Post_ Magazine of July 11, 1982.) On this issue, Bob Bartlley was the intellectual heir of an old American idea expressed most succinctly by the preacher Henry Ward Beecher: “No man in his land suffers from poverty unless it be more than his fault – unless it be his _sin_.” For Bob Bartley, the agrarian pictures of Walker Evans and the homoerotic pictures of Robert Mapplethorpe were morally equivalent. Both depicted human beings in a sinful state of filth and degradation, and such images had no place in an American museum.

!http://www.utsc.utoronto.ca/~farrell/octopus.jpg!

All I can say is wow. David Brooks channels Jeff Minter in the _New York Times_ today.

bq. The Keyboard Kingpin, aka Markos Moulitsas Zuniga, sits at his computer, fires up his Web site, Daily Kos, and commands his followers, who come across like squadrons of rabid lambs, to unleash their venom on those who stand in the way.

Squadrons of rabid, venom-spitting command-lambs. As I said. Wow.

(thanks to bad jim for alerting me to this in comments).

According to the _New Republic_, the threat to the Republic isn’t Islamofascism any more, it’s blogofascism. Lee Siegel explains:

THE ORIGINS OF BLOGOFASCISM

At the end of my post yesterday, I wrote, “The blogosphere’s fanaticism is, in many ways, the triumph of a lack of focus.” … All these abusive attempts to autocratically or dictatorially control criticism came about because I said that the blogosphere had the quality of fascism, which my dictionary defines as “any tendency toward or actual exercise of severe autocratic or dictatorial control.” … insults, personal attacks, and even threats. This truly is the stuff of thuggery and fascism. … Two other traits of fascism are its hatred of the processes of politics, and the knockabout origins of its adherents. Communism was hatched by elites. Fascism was born along the drifting paths of rootless men, often ex-soldiers who had fought in the First World War and been demobilized. They turned European politics into a madhouse of deracinated ambition. … In a 2004 article in The San Francisco Chronicle, Markos Moulitsas Zuniga told a reporter …

bq. “I believe in government. I was in El Salvador in the late ’70s during the civil war and I saw government as a life-and-death situation,” he said. “There was no one to root for. The government was a corrupt plutocracy and the rebels were Maoists. The concept of government is important.” …He also remembers watching footage of the Solidarity movement in Poland. He was 9, and he asked his father what that was all about. His father, a furniture salesman, said, “It’s just politics.” The future blogger said, “Tell me all about it.”

So he loves government, but hates politics. There’s something chilling about that.

This was silly enough when it was just a back-and-forth of insults and recriminations. But Siegel actually seems, unless I’m misreading him completely, to be advancing a _serious thesis_ about the linkages between leftwing bloggers and fascism. That the netroots crowd are the equivalent of the deracinated young men of the Weimar Republic (note, by the way, the rather unpleasant snobbery of the “knockabout origins” crack), and that Kos has “chilling” autocratic tendencies. I really don’t know what to say in response to this. It’s almost magnificent in its crackpottery. The _New Republic_ used to be a very good magazine back in the day – one of the “little magazines” that really brought literature and politics together. It hasn’t been that for a very long time now, but I still feel a little sad every time I’m reminded of what it’s become.