Henry

I’ve been quite skeptical in the past about the power of the Internet to change politics in authoritarian states. If this Washington Post story bears out, I may have to change my mind.

bq. In Memory of Ms. Liu Hezhen,” which Lu Xun wrote in 1926 after warlord forces opened fire on protesters in Beijing and killed one of his students, is a classic of Chinese literature. But why did thousands of people read or post notes in an online forum devoted to the essay last week? A close look suggests an answer that China’s governing Communist Party might find disturbing: They were using Lu’s essay about the 1926 massacre as a pretext to discuss a more current and politically sensitive event — the Dec. 6 police shooting of rural protesters in the southern town of Dongzhou in Guangdong province.

bq. In the 10 days since the shooting, which witnesses said resulted in the deaths of as many as 20 farmers protesting land seizures, the Chinese government has tried to maintain a blackout on the news, barring almost all newspapers and broadcasters from reporting it and ordering major Internet sites to censor any mention of it. Most Chinese still know nothing of the incident. But it is also clear that many Chinese have already learned about the violence and are finding ways to spread and discuss the news on the Internet, circumventing state controls with e-mail and instant messaging, blogs and bulletin board forums.

This shouldn’t be overestimated – it sounds as though discussion is only confined to a smallish elite, and in any event, _contra_ blog evangelists, argument over the Internets is not in itself a major political force for change. But it’s something new, and perhaps something that’s going to become more important over time.

Scott McLemee wrote a little while back about reading Colin Wilson as a teenager.

bq. But I have a certain fondness for that novel [Wilson’s _The Philosopher’s Stone_], having discovered it during Christmas break while in high school. It set me off on a fascination with Wilson’s work that seems, with hindsight, perfectly understandable. Adolescence is a good time to read The Outsider. For that matter, Wilson himself was barely out of it when he wrote the book.

I too had a Colin Wilson thing when I was a teenager; something I’m a little embarrassed about today. But nowhere near as embarrassed as I am about the Erich von Daniken phase I went through when I was ten or so. Which seems a nice topic for a weekend discussion thread. What is the most embarrassing book that CT readers idolized when they were teenagers or pre-teens? Painful confessions welcome.

Scott Lemieux’s Tech Central Journal of Medicine excerpts a WSJ article that uncovers some pretty nasty practices in medical academic publishing.

bq. In 2001, the American Journal of Kidney Diseases published an article that touted the use of synthetic vitamin D. Its author was listed as Alex J. Brown, an associate professor at Washington University in St. Louis. But recently, that same article was featured as a work sample by a different person: Michael Anello, a free-lance medical writer, who posted a summary of it on his Web site. Mr. Anello says he was hired to write the article by a communications firm working for Abbott Laboratories, which makes a version of the vitamin D product. Dr. Brown agrees he got help in writing but says he redid part of the draft. It’s an example of an open secret in medicine: Many of the articles that appear in scientific journals under the by-lines of prominent academics are actually written by ghostwriters in the pay of drug companies. These seemingly objective articles, which doctors around the world use to guide their care of patients, are often part of a marketing campaign by companies to promote a product or play up the condition it treats.

bq. …

bq. Susanna Dodgson, who holds a doctorate in physiology, says she was hired in 2002 by Excerpta Medica, the Elsevier medical-communications firm, to write an article about J&J’s anemia drug Eprex. A J&J unit had sponsored a study measuring whether Eprex patients could do well taking the drug only once a week. The company was facing competition from a rival drug sold by Amgen Inc. that could be given once a week or less. Dr. Dodgson says she was given an instruction sheet directing her to emphasize the “main message of the study”… That report said the study’s goal “could not be reached.” Both the instruction sheet and the report were viewed by The Wall Street Journal. The higher figure Dr. Dodgson was asked to highlight used a broader definition of success and excluded patients who dropped out of the trial or didn’t adhere to all its rules. The instructions noted that some patients on large doses didn’t seem to do well with the once-weekly administration but warned that this point “has not been discussed with marketing and is not definitive!”

Meanwhile, the backers of the real Tech Central Station may have been involved in the New Hampshire phone-jamming scandal.

bq. McGee’s testimony suggested that the DCI Group, a powerful public relations firm which publishes the Tech Central Station website and is closely connected to the Republican party, was involved through lawyer and New Hampshire native Bruce McCabe. He also said he had talked to Darrell Henry of the American Gas Association, who said that he would keep the phone jamming going after it was officially called off.

Following swiftly on Gerhard Schroeder’s decision to accept the chairmanship of a pipeline consortium owned by Gazprom, this is rather creepy.

bq. Donald Evans, a close friend of president George W. Bush and the former commerce secretary, met president Vladimir Putin of Russia last week but refused to be drawn on growing speculation that he had been offered the chairmanship of Rosneft, Russia’s state-controlled oil company. A person close to Mr Evans on Tuesday confirmed the meeting with Mr Putin but refused to comment on a report by Russia’s Kommersant newspaper that he had been offered the job ahead of Rosneft’s expected initial public offering next year. The appointment of a former high-ranking Bush administration official to the top ranks of a Russian oil company would generate shock waves in Washington.

I’ve just discovered when poking around for some figures that you can now analyse data from the World Values Survey online. This is a very neat tool, not only for political scientists and sociologists, but for anyone else who’s interested in getting basic information on attitudes in different countries to politics, society and religion. You don’t have to be a stats wizard to play around with the numbers. As far as I’m aware, the Survey is outstandingly the most comprehensive database of its kind.

In other news, Sam Rosenfeld points in comments to an interesting response to the Bartels paper that I blogged a couple of days ago. According to David Gopoian and Ralph Whitehead, whether Bartels is right depends on how you define the white working class, and Bartels, by their books, is working with a non-standard definition. Bartels talks a bit in the paper about definitional questions, but it would be interesting to know what his counter-response would be.

I’d somehow missed this fascinating paper by Larry Bartels which Ezra Klein links to today. It uses NES data to argue that the thesis of Thomas Franks’ _What’s the Matter with Kansas_ is completely wrong. Poor white voters have become _more_ likely to vote Democrat over the last few decades. While they’re less likely to identify with the Democratic party than they used to be, the decline in Democratic party ID has been less marked among poor white Democrats than among richer ones, and is entirely attributable to losses in the South in the post-Civil Rights era. Nor, if you look at the preponderance of evidence, is there good reason to believe that poor white voters are more interested in cultural than in economic issues; if anything the opposite seems to be true.

Of course, Bartels’ argument isn’t only discomfiting to Franks; it also undermines the self-justifying claims of right wing pundits who consider themselves, against all the odds, to be populists. The one part of Bartels’ paper that I disagree with is its conclusion, which implies that mistaken Democratic angst over the party’s appeal to poor white voters is what motivates arguments over whether the Democrats need to fundamentally rethink their political message. If I understand Bartels rightly, he’s suggesting that the Democrats don’t need to change what they’re doing. I don’t think that’s true, and indeed it seems to me that some of Bartels’ earlier empirical findings point in the opposite direction. If, as Bartels has previously argued, the general public has a difficult time in connecting public policy with economic inequality, Democrats are likely to succeed to the extent that they can draw these connections in their rhetoric, and show how inequality affects not only the working class but the middle class too. That said, this paper seems to me to be a lovely example of how political scientists and other social scientists should be speaking to broader public debates, by using their expertise to examine whether the fundamental assumptions underlying these debates are fundamentally right or wrong. _And_ it describes Peter Beinart’s arguments as “fatuous.” What more could you ask for?

Cosma Shalizi says it loud and clear

bq. Surveying the treatment of our graduate student employees from the lofty perch of half a year on the faculty, it seems to me that CMU, at least in the statistics department, treats them pretty well, and much better than we had it at Madison when I was a TA there, and a member of AFT local #3220. But still, if they wanted to unionize, I’d be completely behind them, and I think it’s idiotic and reprehensible for universities to refuse to even recognize and negotiate with graduate student unions. Unions can ask for stupid and/or selfish things, of course — which distinguishes them from any other organization how, exactly? — but the merits of particular proposals isn’t the issue here; punishing people who attempt to organize to exert their rights is.

As Chris notes in comments, left academics who’ve come out in favour of the NYU administration have ducked this point, preferring to concentrate on whether or not the grad student union has somehow or another been a pain in the ass. Get over it – unions are professional pains in the ass for administrators – and in any event it’s quite irrelevant to the broader issue. The make-or-break question is quite simple. Do you, or do you not, support what the university is threatening to do to striking grad students? To quote the title of one of my favourite books, which side are you on?

Tyler Cowen links to Leonard Peikoff, suggesting that”a bracing Randian approach is needed” to the commercialization of Christmas. But why settle for an epigone like Peikoff, when you can get the Randite vision of Christmas straight from the horse's mouth?

*Ayn Rand’s A Selfish Christmas (1951)*

bq. In this hour-long radio drama, Santa struggles with the increasing demands of providing gifts for millions of spoiled, ungrateful brats across the world, until a single elf, in the engineering department of his workshop, convinces Santa to go on strike. The special ends with the entropic collapse of the civilization of takers and the spectacle of children trudging across the bitterly cold, dark tundra to offer Santa cash for his services, acknowledging at last that his genius makes the gifts — and therefore Christmas — possible.

bq. Prior to broadcast, Mutual Broadcast System executives raised objections to the radio play, noting that 56 minutes of the hour-long broadcast went to a philosophical manifesto by the elf and of the four remaining minutes, three went to a love scene between Santa and the cold, practical Mrs. Claus that was rendered into radio through the use of grunts and the shattering of several dozen whiskey tumblers. In later letters, Rand sneeringly described these executives as “anti-life.”

(nb – I linked to this last year when it lived on its author, John Scalzi’s, blog). As a result of which people promoting Christmas specials like the The Happy Elf seem to have become convinced that I’m a valuable target for their marketing efforts).

From Jefferson Morley’s World Opinion Round-Up at the _Post_.

bq. Has the United States government decided that Americans don’t care about what the world thinks of their country? You might get that impression from the State Department’s Web site. Last week the department stopped posting surveys of how the international press is covering significant developments in U.S. foreign policy. Based on reporting from U.S. embassies around the world, the surveys quoted newspaper and broadcast reports in just about every language. … No more. The Web address of the Office of Media Reaction — “usinfo.state.gov/products/medreac.htm”:usinfo.state.gov/products/medreac.htm — now yields a “page not found” error. The archive of past surveys is also unavailable. The page states, “The USINFO website is undergoing significant design changes.” There’s a link to the surveys from the main State Department press page, but it’s dead. The changes involve more than just the “design,” according to a State Department official who spoke on the condition he not be identified. “The USINFO.state.gov Web site is directed, by law, at foreign audiences. It doesn’t make sense for us to put up what foreign newspapers are saying,” he said.

Judith Butler, Fredric Jameson and a bunch of other prominent lit-crit types have organized a group letter to John Sexton, president of NYU, protesting at NYU’s appalling behaviour towards graduate students on strike. So far they’ve gotten over 5,000 signatures. Go give them some more.

Update: I hadn’t realised until I read Michael Bérubé that Alan Sokal too has written to Sexton in protest. Nice to see old antagonists uniting in a good cause.

Three discussions worth taking note of.

* Our own Eszter Hargittai will be talking about blogging with Dan Drezner and Sean Carroll on Milt Rosenberg's show on Chicago radio station WGN this evening. Should be fun.

* The Chronicle is running a discussion tomorrow on how to beat academic procrastination with professor of psychology, William Ferrari. Leave yer questions or comments here. Left untouched is the topic of whether some forms of procrastination may actually make you productive.

* Our libertarian comrades at the Cato Institute have created a new institution, Cato Unbound. Each month, they’ll have an essay by some luminary, responses to that essay, and trackbacks to blogs that take up the discussion. Not entirely unlike our Crooked Timber seminars, albeit somewhat more ambitious in scope. It looks to be a very interesting experiment – blog/online discussions of this kind seem to me to have a lot of potential to shake up the academy.

I finished reading George Packer’s The Assassin's Gate on the plane back from Europe yesterday, and discovered when I got back home that Kevin Drum had already said half of what I wanted to say about it. Anti-war people should read this book – it really does a terrific job of setting out the complexities of politics in Iraq. Pro-war leftists and liberals should read this book too, and reflect carefully on Packer’s documentation of how badly “democracy-building” was implemented in practice. But there’s something quite troubling about the book’s rhetorical set-up. On one level, the book resembles Jason DeParle’s book on welfare reform, American Dream. It’s a meditation on the relationship between the abstract debates of policy wonks and intellectuals, how ideas from these debates get implemented (with quite astounding incompetence in this particular instance), and the results that implementation have for individuals’ lives. But on another, it’s an indirect defence of a particular policy stance. In the book’s closing pages, Packer sets out his indictment of the Bush administration:

bq. I came to believe that those in positions of highest responsibility for Iraq showed a carelessness about human life that amounted to criminal negligence. Swaddled in abstract ideas, convinced of their own righteousness, incapable of self-criticism, indifferent to accountability, they turned a difficult undertaking into a needlessly deadly one. When things went wrong, they found other people to blame. The Iraq War was always winnable; it still is. For this very reason, the recklessness of its authors is all the harder to forgive.

This isn’t only an indictment. It’s also an apologia for a claim that is never directly defended – that the project of bringing democracy to Iraq could have worked if it had been executed more competently. Packer has documented over four hundred odd pages just how bad the implementation was. But proving the negative doesn’t prove the positive, and Packer’s method of presentation allows him to avoid making the case that deposing the Hussein regime in 2003 could feasibly have brought democracy to Iraq. There’s a strong case to be made that this wasn’t doable in the first place. Packer presents Rumsfeld’s decision to override Shinseki, and invade Iraq with a minimal number of troops, as one of the main causes of the current disaster. But as Sam Rosenfeld and Matt Yglesias argue

bq. Perhaps the founding myth of the incompetence argument is that the postwar mess could have been avoided had the United States deployed more troops to Iraq. … A RAND Corporation effort … concluded that a ratio of 20 foreigners for every 1,000 natives would have been necessary to stabilize Iraq. … The 20-to-1,000 ratio implies the presence of about 500,000 soldiers in Iraq. That’s far more than it would have been possible for the United States to deploy. Sustaining a given number of troops in a combat situation requires twice that number to be dedicated to the mission, so that soldiers can rotate in and out of theater. . As there are only 1 million soldiers in the entire Army, a 500,000-troop deployment would imply that literally everyone — from the National Guard units currently assisting with disaster relief on the Gulf Coast to those serving in Afghanistan, Korea, and Europe to the bureaucrats doing staff work in the Pentagon and elsewhere — would be dedicated to the mission. This is plainly impossible.

Packer doesn’t address this argument, nor does he address the arguments more generally of the anti-war side with anything approaching seriousness. While he acknowledges in passing that a couple of anti-war people were sincere and thoughtful, he doesn’t even begin to consider their claims, and the implication of those claims for his own position. This isn’t to dismiss the book out of hand. As Kevin says, it should be required reading for anyone concerned with the Iraq war and its aftermath. It’s far more than another statement of the incompetence dodge. But it’s also much less than it should have been.

Update: thanks to Jay Conner in comments for pointing me towards this interview with Packer in yesterday’s _San Francisco Chronicle_. Packer qualifies his statement that “the Iraq War was always winnable; it still is,” but only by saying that he “would not have written that line in the present tense” given recent developments. As best as I understand him, he isn’t prepared to revisit his belief that the Iraq war could have been won had it been conducted differently at the outset. I fully agree with Packer when he argues that “what liberals need to do now is argue very strongly for the U.S. to remain engaged in a responsible internationalist way around the world.” But if we’re to have the “serious national conversation” that Packer wants, he, and others like him, need to think more seriously about what the Iraq debacle means for the possibility conditions of pro-democratic intervention (this is also what I take Yglesias and Rosenfeld to be arguing in their piece).

Adam Kotsko blends Fafblog with the higher theology.

bq. That university faculties are Marxist totalitarian regimes is a timeless ontological truth — and although the accidental fact that a particular university might show occasional signs of not being a Marxist totalitarian regime participates in truthfulness to some degree (as Horowitz indicates by conceding that his falsification meant he missed the mark of saying “the whole truth”), the essence remains constant and truer.

via Scott McLemee

Two interesting articles in the Financial Times this morning. First, this piece on the use of league tables to assess school performance in the UK does a decent job of talking about the limits of statistical measures.

bq. while quantitative targets and performance indicators may seem like an advance on vague aspirations, their apparent clarity is an illusion. … But statisticians warned of a more basic flaw. … each figure is based on a limited sample, and thus inherently uncertain. … The sample-size problem has since been found to undermine league tables for other institutions whose performance is calculated from small numbers, such as fertility clinics. In common with school league tables, they often show dramatic changes in rankings. These are often taken to signal dramatic change in performance. In reality, they are merely expected random variation in the quoted performance level – an effect that would be made clear if error bars were included.

Second, the WHO says that it's going to stop hiring of smokers to promote its campaign against tobacco use. This is both idiotic and anti-liberal. There’s a decent case to be made for banning smoking in the workplace, because of the externality costs that smoking imposes on non-smokers. There’s no case whatsoever to be made for discriminating against smokers who don’t impinge on others’ health by refusing to hire them in the first place. The British print version of the article has a quote from ASH, the UK anti-smoking lobby group, criticizing the decision as not being “a very good way of tackling the issue.” Clearly, they’re worried – and rightly so – that this is going to be a public relations disaster.