by Kieran Healy on February 10, 2005
“Michael Totten”:http://www.michaeltotten.com/archives/000730.html recounts his night out with Christopher Hitchens and a couple of Iraqis that they talked to. Some of the latter weren’t too happy. Totten reflects:
bq. Maybe there was no way to avoid the tension wrought by invasion and occupation, and the air just had to be cleared. Perhaps our Iraqi guests … really didn’t (and don’t) completely understand how we differ from the colonialists and imperialists of the past.
He goes on to say that “Friendly Arabs are the easiest people to bond with I’ve ever met.” It’s the unfriendly ones that cause everyone such problems. And, he continues,
bq. I respected them more, too, because they stood up to me and Christopher Hitchens. They are not servile people. They will never, _ever_, be anyone’s puppets.
They’ve got spirit, the little buggers. Me ‘n’ Hitch are quite the team, but when you’re trying your best to tell them the way things are, they will be interrupting and getting annoyed and saying unreasonable things like “Who are you to tell us what to do!?” What’s that phrase again? “The blame of those ye better, The hate of those ye guard.” But dissent is the lifeblood of democracy. Of course, we can’t permit them to pick the wrong government for themselves. “If the Iraqis were to elect either a Sunni or Shia Taliban, we would not let them take power” (Hitchens). The invasion force would consist of “the US and Britain … along with — hopefully — everyone here at this table” (Totten). Or, as Tom Lehrer put it “more succinctly”:http://members.aol.com/quentncree/lehrer/marines.htm some years ago, “They’ve got to be protected / All their rights respected / Till somebody we like can be elected.”
“Read the whole thing”:http://www.michaeltotten.com/archives/000730.html if you like. It’s full of small moments of whatever the opposite of an epiphany is. Like Hitchens’ schoolboy-debater habit of calling people “Sir” as he talks down at them (as in “So you’re saying, sir, that you can be bought”). Or Totten’s heartfelt comment that “Something I said must have got through to him, and thank God for that. He and I — truly — were on the same side. I knew it, and I’m pretty certain he knew it too.” Or Hitchens saying that he has to leave because “I have to get up in the morning and continue the fight on CNN.” Couldn’t have put it better myself, mate.
(Via “Jim Henley”:http://www.highclearing.com/archivesuo/week_2005_02_06.html#005890.)
by Kieran Healy on February 10, 2005
Here’s a picture of a small part of Milford Sound, on New Zealand’s beautiful South Island. I took it when I was there about a year and a half ago. It was my laptop wallpaper for a while. All this is really apropos of nothing, but I can’t look at that “tentacle mole”:https://www.crookedtimber.org/archives/003223.html any more. I know I’m not the only one who feels this way.
by Kieran Healy on February 8, 2005
Try “Juan Cole’s critique of Jonah Goldberg”:http://www.juancole.com/2005/02/goldberg-v.html and his ilk. Fewer calories and more satisfying.
by Kieran Healy on February 7, 2005
From the Guardian, a sample from the test administered to recruits to the Iraqi Police Force:
bq. Any act by which severe pain or suffering, whether physical or mental, is intentionally inflicted on a person is: a) torture; b) interview techniques; c) interrogation techniques; d) informative and reliable.
How sad that the United States now has an Attorney General who would get this question wrong.
by Kieran Healy on February 5, 2005
Crooked Timber has been out of commission for the past day or so. Our hosting provider had a hardware problem on one of its file servers, and fixing it took longer than they thought. The upshot was that this site was accessible the whole time, but everything was read-only: any attempt to post a comment, or write a post explaining what was wrong, or do anything that involved creating any file on the server, would get an error. Sorry about this: we didn’t have any control over it. But now here we are again, I hope.
by Kieran Healy on February 4, 2005
Matt Yglesias explains what Bush’s three-step plan for Social Security entails, “in terms adapted to the meanest understanding”:http://yglesias.typepad.com/matthew/2005/02/understanding_t.html. It’s a very good post, and you should read it. Regular observers of the present administration will not be surprised to find that by the end, Matt is saying things like this:
bq. If you are in the top one or two percent of the income pyramid, this may be a good deal for you anyway since phase one allows you to keep your income taxes lower. The other 99-98 percent of us are getting the shaft. … This is also good for you if you are a manager or major stockholder in a company that will be managing the private accounts. It also might be good for you if you own a great deal of stock already (i.e., you’re rich!) and this program winds up increasing the share of national wealth invested in the stock market.
Funny how analyses of recent domestic policy always tend to conclude along those lines. It’s almost like there’s a pattern or something.
by Kieran Healy on February 3, 2005
In the conclusion to his “state of the union address”:http://mywebpages.comcast.net/duncanblack/sotu.txt last night, President Bush invoked Franklin Roosevelt’s words from his second inaugural: “each age is a dream
that is dying, or one that is coming to birth.” Here’s a bit more from that speech by FDR:
Instinctively we recognized a deeper need-the need to find through government the instrument of our united purpose to solve for the individual the ever-rising problems of a complex civilization. Repeated attempts at their solution without the aid of government had left us baffled and bewildered. For, without that aid, we had been unable to create those moral controls over the services of science which are necessary to make science a useful servant instead of a ruthless master of mankind. To do this we knew that we must find practical controls over blind economic forces and blindly selfish men.
We of the Republic sensed the truth that democratic government has innate capacity to protect its people against disasters once considered inevitable, to solve problems once considered unsolvable. We would not admit that we could not find a way to master economic epidemics just as, after centuries of fatalistic suffering, we had found a way to master epidemics of disease. We refused to leave the problems of our common welfare to be solved by the winds of chance and the hurricanes of disaster. …
In fact, in these last four years, we have made the exercise of all power more democratic; for we have begun to bring private autocratic powers into their proper subordination to the public’s government. The legend that they were invincible-above and beyond the processes of a democracy-has been shattered. They have been challenged and beaten. …
In that purpose we have been helped by achievements of mind and spirit. Old truths have been relearned; untruths have been unlearned. We have always known that heedless self-interest was bad morals; we know now that it is bad economics. Out of the collapse of a prosperity whose builders boasted their practicality has come the conviction that in the long run economic morality pays. We are beginning to wipe out the line that divides the practical from the ideal; and in so doing we are fashioning an instrument of unimagined power for the establishment of a morally better world.
As they say on the internets, “read the whole thing”:http://www.search.eb.com/elections/pri/Q00114.html.
by Kieran Healy on February 1, 2005
Somehow I missed “this appalling sequence of photographs”:http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/shared/spl/hi/picture_gallery/05/middle_east_shooting_in_tal_afar/html/1.stm of a shooting in Iraq a few days ago, probably because they were running in newspapers outside the U.S. on inauguration day. I want to know whether any of them — especially “this one”:http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/shared/spl/hi/picture_gallery/05/middle_east_shooting_in_tal_afar/html/3.stm — ran anywhere in the U.S. media?
Look, I know I’m asking for trouble. I don’t want the comments to degenerate into angry whataboutery. All kinds of terrible things happen — purposely and by accident — in war zones. These photos are just awful. That’s all.
by Kieran Healy on February 1, 2005
We’re dealing with a flood of trackback spam this morning. Sorry for even more inconvenience than usual. We will get around to upgrading eventually, even though my past self wisely tells me “not to”:https://www.crookedtimber.org/archives/001967.html.
by Kieran Healy on February 1, 2005
I suppose I should have expected the likes of “Michelle Malkin”:http://www.michellemalkin.com/ to treat the Iraqi elections as an opportunity to take a pot shot at “the Left.” As you know, we on The LeftTM are all for for more death and suffering in Iraq because it improves our case for universal health care and better prescription drug coverage. Like an excited kid on Christmas morning, Malkin wasn’t able to wait all day. She restrained herself till lunchtime (U.S. east coast time) on Sunday before indicting us along with a few other blogs: “Left goes into Hibernation”, “Crooked Timber is Silent on the Iraqi Elections“. “Silent”:https://www.crookedtimber.org/archives/003167.html, “silent”:https://www.crookedtimber.org/archives/003169.html, “silent”:https://www.crookedtimber.org/archives/003170.html. You can practically hear the wind whistling through the trees around here. An excerpt from our non-existent commentary on the election appears on the Op-Ed page of Tuesday’s Dallas Morning News1, presumably as a big ole chunk of white space. I suppose we were hibernating, really, as long as you think “Hibernation” means “Doing some other things on Sunday (in our own time zones) before catching up on the news.”
fn1. Irritatingly detailed registration required. Try “bugmenot”:http://www.bugmenot.com/.
by Kieran Healy on February 1, 2005
“This report”:http://edition.cnn.com/2005/EDUCATION/01/31/students.amendment.ap/index.html of a survey of more than 110,000 (!) students at 544 high schools has been getting a lot of play. The survey found that one in three high schoolers think the First Amendment “goes too far”; that three quarters believe that flag-burning is illegal; and that 36% of them thought newspapers should get “government approval” before publishing stories in the newspaper.
The White House issued a statement congratulating American students not just for their views on constitutional law, but also for their “accurate characterization of the relationship between the Executive branch and the White House Press Corps.”
OK, I just made that up about the White House. But the study is real. Further reading of the “full report”:http://firstamendment.jideas.org/downloads/future_final.pdf reveals the usual smorgasbord of opinion that surveys like this typically bring out. For instance, substantially more teenagers believe that “musicians should be allowed to sing songs with lyrics others may find offensive” than believe that “newspapers should be allowed to publish freely without government approval of stories.” Even better, whereas only 49 percent thought that newspapers should be able to report without government approval, 58 percent said that _school_ newspapers should be able to report controversial issues without the approval of school authorities. I guess it all depends on who you think The Man is — the Prez or the Principal.
by Kieran Healy on January 31, 2005
The “Iraqi elections”:http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/4220551.stm have gone off successfully, in the sense that the turnout was good and the violence relatively contained. That’s very good news. Now comes the hard business of establishing a real government. I’m sympathetic with “John’s view”:https://www.crookedtimber.org/archives/003167.html that it might not be such a bad thing if the U.S. took a “Declare Victory and Go Home” attitude, even though that’s one of the scenarios people were most worried by before the invasion. Getting out would leave the government in a position to at least try to run its own country, instead of inevitably playing second-fiddle to the U.S. occupying forces. I’m not sure any more that this is likely to happen, though.
The best possible outcome of the weekend’s election is a successful completion of the present government’s term followed by another real election. It’s often said that the key moment in the growth of a democracy is not its first election but its second, because — as Adam Przeworski says somewhere — a democracy is a system where governments lose elections. The question planners need to be asking is what are the chances that Iraq will be able to do this again in four or five years without the presence of U.S. troops and with the expectation that whoever wins will get to take power. This partly depends on whether some functioning government can really be established within the country, and partly on whether the U.S. wants a working democracy in Iraq (with the risks that implies) or just a friendly puppet state.
[click to continue…]
by Kieran Healy on January 30, 2005
First let me say that this calculation is probably wrong. But one of Brad DeLong’s “One Hundred Interesting Math Calculations”:http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/cgi-bin/wiki.cgi?OneHundredInterestingMathCalculations asks “How Much Blood is there in the World?”:http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/movable_type/archives/001384.html (How much _human_ blood, that is.) The answer assumes that the average person has about a gallon of blood in them, which is a tad low, I think — it’s more like 9.5 to 10.5 pints per person. But let’s keep it at a gallon. The answer is about 8 x 108 cubic feet of blood, which is less than you might think: as Brad says, “All the human blood in the world could be stuffed into a cube less than one-thousand feet on a side.”
But who can visualize a cube a thousand feet long on a side? As a person with a “sociological interest”:http://www.u.arizona.edu/~kjhealy/vita.php3 in blood, I like the calculation, but I need to translate it into the “standard SI unit of volume”:http://www.illuminated.co.uk/blog/archives/2004/10/14/volume applicable to this case, namely the “Olympic-size swimming pool”:http://www.faqfarm.com/Home/Pool/72761. My goal is to do the conversion using only Google.
Brad gives us the 8 x 108 cubic feet number. An Olympic pool measures 50 x 20 x 2 meters, which gives us 2000 cubic meters or 2 x 106 liters. So we have a units problem. But Google knows that 2 x 106 liters is 528,344.102 US gallons. Google also knows that this is equivalent to 706,293.746 cubic feet. And so it will be no surprise to learn that Google has no trouble calculating that 8 x 108 cubic feet divided by 706,293.746 cubic feet is 1,132.6732. Roughly speaking, all the human blood in the world would fit into about eleven hundred Olympic-sized swimming pools.
According to the National Blood Data Resource Center, about 15 million pints of blood are collected each year in the United States. That’s equivalent to just over three and a half Olympic pools. Blood is a renewable resource, of course, in that you make more of it when you lose some. Over the course of a year the U.S. blood system controls the allocation of roughly 0.31 percent of all the blood in the world. Unless the glass of wine I’m having has caused me to make a mistake somewhere.
by Kieran Healy on January 28, 2005
“What do you mean a ceremony at Auschwitz? I was just about to go dig out the driveway.”:http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A43247-2005Jan27.html
by Kieran Healy on January 27, 2005
Kevin Drum “relays the bad news”:http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/archives/individual/2005_01/005527.php that high self-esteem is basically good for nothing in terms of tangible outcomes. These findings sound much like the literature on optimism and pessimism, which finds that optimists overvalue their abilities and blame others for their mistakes. People with sunny dispositions are a real menace to society. A solid Irish Catholic upbringing (or functional equivalent) is guaranteed to inoculate you against these problems for good. Where I grew up, people thought “self-esteem” was the Italian for “sauna”.[1]
fn1. I wish I could claim authorship of this joke. But I’d feel very guilty if I did.