Kieran Healy

You should watch David Dimbleby’s “interview with Bill Clinton”:http://www.bbc.co.uk/newsa/n5ctrl/progs/panorama/latest.ram. After a bunch of Monica questions, Clinton ticks Dimbleby off for being just like every other journalist who were — how to put it? — so obsessed with Lewinsky’s blowjobs that they didn’t realize how they were helping Ken Starr to screw people. (Jump to 28:25 or so in the interview to see this). Dimbo looks a bit shocked:

*Clinton*: Let me just say this. One of the reasons he [Kenneth Starr] got away with it is because people like you only ask me the questions. You gave him a complete free ride. Any abuse they wanted to do. They indicted all these little people from Arkansas, what did you care about them, they’re not famous, who cares that their life was trampled. Who cares that their children are humiliated … Nobody in your line of work cared a rip about that at the time. Why, because he was helping their story… Now that doesn’t justify any mistake I made. But look how much time you spent asking me these questions, in this time you’ve had. That’s because it’s what you care about, because that’s what you think helps you and helps this interview… And that’s why people like you always help the far-right, because you like to hurt people, and you like to talk about how bad people are and all their personal failings.

*Dimbleby*: I don’t —

*Clinton*: Look, you made a decision to allocate your time in a certain way, you should take responsibility for that, you should say ‘Yes, I care much more about this than whether the Bosnian people were saved, and whether he brought a million home from Kosovo … [or] than whether we moved a hundred times as many people out of poverty as Reagan and Bush’.

The “BBC’s own write-up”:http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/3829799.stm write up of the interview quotes some of the best bits, but they try rather too hard to frame it as Bill Goes Ballistic:

bq. Wagging his finger and getting visibly agitated, Mr Clinton expressed anger at the media’s behaviour. … But despite the shaky start, Mr Clinton quickly recovered his composure and was questioned for a further 30 minutes by Mr Dimbleby.

“Watch the interview for yourself”:http://www.bbc.co.uk/newsa/n5ctrl/progs/panorama/latest.ram (starts about 12:00 in) and decide whether Clinton loses his composure, looks shaky or is noticeably agitated. As far as I can see, Clinton hardly raises his voice and does little more than sit up in his chair. It’s also noticeable that he hardly drops a syllable, hems, haws, or mangles a word as he speaks. Say what you like about the guy and his legacy, he knows how to fight his corner. I don’t see the current incumbent being subjected to that kind of persistent questioning in six or seven years — or even right now, come to think of it.

There’s an “interesting article”:http://www.nytimes.com/2004/06/22/science/22side.html?8hpib in the _New York Times_ today about “Elizabeth Willott’s”:http://research.biology.arizona.edu/mosquito/willott.html work on mosquitos and the environmental ethics of wetland restoration. Elizabeth’s in the Entomology department at “Arizona”:http://www.cs.arizona.edu/camera/. Her other half is the philosopher “Dave Schmidtz”:http://info-center.ccit.arizona.edu/~phil/faculty/dschmidtz.htm, and when Arizona were recruiting “Laurie”:http://www.u.arizona.edu/~lapaul and me, we stayed with them. It was the middle of December. The first morning we were there, we picked a grapefruit from one of the trees in their yard and ate it for breakfast. This effective recruitment strategy is not often used by universities on the east coast, for some reason.

Via “Nathan Newman”:http://www.nathannewman.org/log/archives/001769.shtml#001769, “Kevin Drum”:http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/archives/individual/2004_06/004194.php links to an “EPI graphic”:http://www.epinet.org/content.cfm/webfeatures_snapshots_05272004 showing differences in the growth of corporate profits, labor compensation and private salary income between the current business cycle and the average of the last eight recoveries. This time round, Kevin summarizes, “workers have gotten almost nothing while corporate profits have skyrocketed.” Then he asks,

bq. But how can anyone defend this? Easy. The free market extremists at the top of the modern Republican party argue that economic growth is caused by the risk-taking executives of Fortune 5000 companies, and therefore they deserve the benefits of that growth. Worker bees don’t make any contribution — they just work — so why should they get anything?

bq. Treating labor like a commodity is a morally bankrupt policy, but it’s one that’s become an epidemic in the Republican party …

The thing is, the “free market extremists” Kevin complains about have it backwards. Treating labor like a commodity is a way to transfer the burden of risk _away_ from businesses and on to workers. In general, CEOs of big corporations do not engage in the kind of risk taking that they typically ascribe to themselves. Or more precisely, there is plenty of evidence that they do not have to suffer the consequences of the risks they take. The United States has always been ahead of other advanced capitalist democracies in this department, because it offers less in the way of social insurance than its counterparts. (Instead of a welfare state it has a “prison system”:https://www.crookedtimber.org/archives/000386.html.) But much of what got called “downsizing” in the early ’90s and the “New Economy”:https://www.crookedtimber.org/archives/001213.html a few years later can be seen as a new round of risk-redistribution noticeable in even the U.S.’s “nominally unregulated”:http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/cgi-bin/resolve?AJSv104p1030PDF labor market. The stuff you see these days in the Business Section of Barnes & Noble about the brave new “Free Agent Nation” and its “creative class”:http://www.kieranhealy.org/files/drafts/culture-newecon.pdf is the optimistic spin the disappearance of defined-benefit pension funds, the decline of decent health benefits, the rise of temp work, and other changes in the employment bargain that push more of the risk onto workers.

In the course of the recent “great database fiasco”:https://www.crookedtimber.org/archives/002042.html, I took a look at the history of traffic to this site. The AWStats program gave me a the number of unique visitors for every day from our launch last July through to June 16th this year. I was interested in which posts had made the biggest splashes. Now, if I just looked at the posts that got the greatest number of visitors, there would be a bias towards posts from later in the year, because we get far more visitors these days than six or ten months ago. How can we get a fair estimate?

It’s possible to statistically “decompose”:http://www.jos.nu/Articles/abstract.asp?article=613 a time series into three components. First, there’s the _seasonal_ component: in this case, it’s the regular ups and downs caused by what day of the week it is. Generally, traffic will dip every weekend, regardless of how many visitors we’re getting on average. The average number of visitors from week to week net of the seasonal ups and downs is the second, _trend_ component. This has grown consistently over the year. And finally there’s the _remainder_ or “irregular” component, which is whatever spikes and dips are left over once seasonal fluctuations and the underlying trend are accounted for.

The nice picture above shows CT’s unique daily visitor series decomposed in this way, with the raw data at the top and the three components underneath. (You can also get this figure as a “higher quality PDF file”:http://www.kieranhealy.org/files/misc/ct-decomposition.pdf [only 34k].) As you can see, the trend is one of healthy growth. These days we typically get about seven to nine thousand unique visitors a day. But what about those spikes in the lowest panel? Which posts brought in the crowds? *Read on* for the Top 10 list. The punchline is that, even though we’re known for being a bunch of “pointy-headed academics”:http://www.matthewyglesias.com/archives/week_2004_01_25.html#002424, the out-of-the-ballpark hitters on our roster are not the ones with Ph.Ds.

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It turns out that not “one”:http://www.schussman.com/article/771/gadget-mail but two of my students now have “Gmail”:http://gmail.google.com/ accounts and I — I, what sits on their dissertation committees! I what gives them papers to grade! — do not. Appalling. I am investigating whether I can become a co-author on both of their Gmail accounts despite having done nothing to get one of my own. There’s a lot of precedent for that kind of thing.

*Update*: Well, that didn’t take long. Two readers generously emailed with invitations: “Alex Halavais”:http://alex.halavais.net/news/ was first, so I took up his offer. Thanks very much, Alex and “Brad”:http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/movable_type/. For my next trick I will publicly sulk about not having enough $50 bills.

Queen of SQL statements. _Pray for us_.
Empress of Emacs. _Pray for us_.
Sacred Heart of Search and Replace. _Pray for us_.
Defender of Write Permissions. _Pray for us_.
Patron of Manually Edited Dump Files. _Pray for us_.
Savior of unexpectedly small Disk Quotas. _Pray for us_.
Shepherd of Lost Posts. _Pray for us_.
Protector of Hapless Administrators. _Pray for us_.
Scourge of “Wholly Inadequate Import/Export Formats”:http://lemonodor.com/archives/000730.html. _Pray for us_.
Mother of all the Bloggers. _Pray for us_.

I think we’re back. Fresh — or at least unrotted — permalinks and all. Thank you, thank you to everyone who commented in the now-destroyed post where I wailed about the problem. The solution was to get an SQL dump of the database from the old server and read it in to the new database. Not as easy as it might have been, because the old server had old blogs, with old hard-linked archive sources and all the rest of it. But I think it worked.

My sincere apologies to fellow-posters and commenters whose recent contributions got deleted in the course of the database restoration. I guess I revealed myself to be a utilitarian at root: five or six posts and their comments were sacrificed on behalf of about two thousand posts and their permalinks. Moral: Do not put me in charge of interrogating suspected terrorists.[1]

So, as predicted in my “Don’t Upgrade”:https://www.crookedtimber.org/archives/001967.html post, I’ve just spent an unconscionable amount of time (I am about to start paying off large debts to my wife and daughter) getting us back to where we were last week. But now we are where we were last week, but on new servers. To switch religions momentarily, Oy.

fn1. Alternative moral for high-ranking Pentagon officials: By all means put me in charge of interrogating suspected terrorists, because I will lose them.

If you’ve spent any time around the blogosphere, or looking at thinktank websites, you’ll be aware that the following [professed] opinions tend to go together:

• widespread ownership of guns saves lives
• tobacco smoke is harmless (if not to smokers then to anyone who breathes it second-hand)
• global warming is a myth

There’s not too much mystery about this. The kinds of characteristics that would encourage the adoption of any one of these beliefs (make your own list) obviously encourage the others. What’s surprising to me is how frequently these opinions are correlated with support for Microsoft, and, more particularly, denunciation of open-source software.

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At “The Right Coast,” Maimon Schwarzschild cheers on the victory of the UKIP party. Apparently, it’s a heavy blow against the project of an United Europe, which, as we all know, emphasizes “anti-Americanism, and thinly veiled anti-semitism.” This is something that’s becoming increasingly common – US based conservatives (although note that Schwarzschild is a UK transplant to San Diego) finding some common ground with the European far right’s hostility to the EU. It’s a big mistake. Josh Chafetz describes the UKIP’s leadership as “a collection of racists, xenophobes, anti-Semites, Holocaust deniers, and homophobes.” Although the UKIP has tried to maintain a more respectable public profile than, say, the BNP, it has certainly had a scattering of anti-Semites and nordicists in prominent party positions in the past. The European far right doesn’t emphasize anti-Semitism as much as it used to – it has increasingly switched its attentions from Jews to Muslims and other immigrants. And the UKIP is no stranger to anti-Muslim and Arab racism; in Robert Kilroy-Silk’s own words, Muslims

are backward and evil and if it is racist to say so…. then racist I must be – and proud and happy to be so.

Far from being a setback for anti-Semitism, the success of the UKIP (and some other parts of the anti-EU right) is arguably a victory. I’m prepared to give Schwarzschild the benefit of the doubt – when he says that the success of the UKIP is “good news,” he may simply not know what he’s talking about. Still, it’s the people whom he’s cheering on, rather than Brussels Eurocrats, who are directly and materially connected with racism, anti-Semitism and the nastier aspects of Europe’s past.

Cory Doctorow has been at Microsoft research, telling them why Digital Rights Management is a bad thing. It’s a great rant – I’ll be assigning it in my classes. Via BoingBoing.

But don’t panic! This is a sub-etha move. A behind-the-scenes move. A the-audience-noticed-nothing move. In other words, a New Host Provider move. So from your point of view, gentle readers, we are where we’ve always been. Very soon entering https://www.crookedtimber.org in your browser will bring you to our new server. In a day or two it’ll be like nothing happened, but you may have some difficulty connecting to our new server while the Domain Name transfer is happening. To get your new-server CT fix in the short term, “follow this link”:http://crookedtimber1.dreamhost.com. But as I say, in the next 12-24 hours the url https://www.crookedtimber.org will begin pointing to the new site, and everything will be as it was, only spiffier in an ineffable, new host provider sort of way.

Steadfastly ignoring “our own good advice”:https://www.crookedtimber.org/archives/001967.html, Crooked Timber is moving to a new host provider, with all the potential headaches that entails. I’m doing the transfer now, so comments posted here from now on will not be imported to the new server. Please hold yer thoughts for a few hours.

Once the move is done, we’ll transfer the Doman Name registration to our new hosts, and https://www.crookedtimber.org will point to the new servers. The process of “DNS propagation”, where the big internet servers tell the little ones about the new location, may take a little while. Thanks for bearing with us.

Eugene Volokh “posts a table”:http://volokh.com/archives/archive_2004_06_14.shtml#1087270691 from a “poll”:http://pollingreport.com/religion.htm showing that about 60 percent of Americans say they believe Biblical stories like the 7-day creation, Noah’s flood and Moses’ parting of the Red Sea to be literally true. This is rather higher than other estimates I’ve seen of Biblical Literalism. Based on “GSS data”:http://webapp.icpsr.umich.edu/GSS/ (the GSS is the best available public opinion survey in the U.S. with a long time-series), we know that in 1998 about 30 percent of Americans agreed with the statement “The Bible is the actual word of God and is to be taken literally, word for word”. This was down from about 40 percent in 1988. (Most of the decline seems to have happened in the late 1980s, however.) About half of Americans agree that “The Bible is the inspired word of God but not everything in it should be taken literally, word for word.” And a steady 15 to 17 percent agree that it’s “an ancient book of fables, legends, history, and moral precepts recorded by men.” “Here’s a graph”:http://www.kieranhealy.org/files/misc/BT-plot.pdf, I put together of these trends, in pdf format.

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When I am President, those people who think they are so _clever_ and such _savvy travelers_ for using the parents’ room instead of the regular bathroom — because it’s quieter and cleaner and they read about this handy trick in a “Travel Tips” column once, even though they do not have, say, an unhappy five-month-old in their arms who needs a change and a feed — had better watch out. I will have the “Justice Department”:http://www.discourse.net/archives/2004/06/olcs_aug_1_2002_torture_memo_the_bybee_memo.html and a team of “Military Lawyers”:http://billmon.org/archives/001518.html by my side, together with a bag of bamboo splinters, a “Leatherman Crunch”:http://www.leatherman.com/products/tools/crunch/default.asp, a “Camping Stove”:http://www.gearreview.com/stovereview98.asp#CGTristar and a copy of the “Constitution of the United States”:http://www.law.cornell.edu/constitution/constitution.overview.html for kindling. And who would stop me? For one thing, a War on Irritating Frequent Flyers would command widespread popular support, and I would be willing to consider opening New Fronts in this war, e.g., on People Who Cut Me Off In Traffic, or Bloggers Who Do Not Link To My Posts. Besides, in “the words of President George W. Bush”:http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2002/11/17/60minutes/main529657.shtml, “I am the commander, see? I do not need to explain why I say things. — That’s the interesting thing about being the President. — Maybe somebody needs to explain to me why they say something, but I don’t feel like I owe anybody an explanation.”[1]

fn1. Previously thought to be mere managerial bravado but subsequently discovered by Administration lawyers to be a valid constitutional argument licensing the use of torture against unspecified numbers of persons.

Eugene Volokh says he’s “not going to comment”:http://volokh.com/archives/archive_2004_06_07.shtml#1087053377 about the “torture memo”:http://www.infoshop.org/inews/stories.php?story=04/06/07/0988582, which has already been discussed in detail by “a number”:http://www.discourse.net/archives/2004/06/apologia_pro_tormento_analyzing_the_first_56_pages_of_the_walker_working_group_report_aka_the_torture_memo.html of “well-known”:http://balkin.blogspot.com/2004_06_06_balkin_archive.html#108678914722707979 law bloggers. Eugene says he doesn’t want to talk about it partly because it’s outside his main areas of legal expertise, but mostly because he finds the topic

bq. not just difficult but also sickening. Torture is disgusting. … Does the need to save people’s lives justify torturing suspects? How many lives? Would it take hundreds of thousands (as in the hidden nuclear bomb scenario)? Thousands? Dozens? A couple? I don’t know the answers, and while I have no doubt about the importance of the questions, I don’t enjoy thinking about them. The whole topic is sad and horrible, whatever the right answer is. … It’s not a rational reaction; it’s a visceral one. I’m not proud of my squeamishness, but there it is. I know that just because something is sickening doesn’t mean we shouldn’t do it. Sometimes people need to do disgusting things to avoid greater harms. … But if I had a choice in how to invest my scarce time, I’d rather not invest it here.

I was surprised to read this, for two reasons.

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