Speaking of sharing “Adventure Time” time with my girls, our household is in some internal dispute about the relative merits of the two halves of the latest double episode: “Earth & Water/ Too Old”. Belle and the girls loved “Earth & Water” because Flame P., that’s why: “Cinnamon Bun and I staged a coup and I overthrew my dad.” Also, everyone is wondering whether Flame P. and Finn will get back together or what. However, I feel that, with “Too Old”, the show has finally achieved Ubu Roi levels of ecstatic distress and all around weirdness. (It has, of course, been building since we were first introduce to the Earl of Lemongrab in “Too Young”. “Yo, Earl! Hey, you’re fired, ya’ butt!”) “Lemonhope’s Song” is the very soul of soft plangency. So I say “Too Old” is genius. Belle says she feels Finn is out of character. What’s the deal with a couple dozen lemon people being able to take him down like that? I say it just shows how much his break-up with Flame P. has junked up his fighting. He’s not all “crush this mess all accordingly,” as in previous encounters with Lemongrab. Because his mess has been crushed. Stands to reason.

Discuss!

I was going to write a long post arguing the case for a UNSC resolution to indict Assad before the ICC, but Google revealed that Edward Bernton at the Globalist had already written it. So, I’ll just add some notes over the fold

[click to continue…]

Unless there’s a sudden turnaround in the polls, Tony Abbott will become Prime Minister of Australia tonight. This will be the third time in my life that a Federal Labor government has been defeated, the other two occasions being 1975 and 1996. On both those occasions, despite substantial and enduring accomplishments, the government had made a mess of macroeconomic management, and the electorate, unsurprisingly, wanted to punish them. And, despite my strong disagreements with them (and with the way Fraser came to office), the incoming Prime Ministers had serious views on how best Australia’s future could be managed. Fraser has only improved since leaving office, making valuable contributions on the national and global stage. My evaluation of Howard, following his defeat, starts with the observation that he was ‘the most substantial figure produced by the Liberal party since the party itself was created by Menzies’.

Nothing of the sort can be said this time. The case put forward by the LNP is based entirely on lies and myths. These include the claims that
* Labor has mismanaged the economy and piled up unnecessary debt and deficits
* Australian families are ‘doing it tough’ because of a soaring cost of living
* The carbon tax/price is a ‘wrecking ball’, destroying economic activity
* The arrival of refugees represents a ‘national emergency’

None of these claims stands up to even momentary scrutiny.

Then there’s Abbott himself. After 20 years in politics, I can’t point to any substantial accomplishments on his part, or even any coherent political philosophy. For example, I’m not as critical of his parental leave scheme as some, but it’s totally inconsistent with his general political line, a fact that his supporters in business have been keen to point out. On climate change, he’s held every position possible and is now promising, in effect, to do nothing. His refusal to reveal policy costings until the second-last day of the campaign debases an already appalling process. He treated budget surplus as a holy grail until it became inconvenient, and has now become carefully vague on the topic.

Obviously, the fact that such a party and such a leader can be on the verge of victory implies that the Labor side has done something dreadfully wrong. It’s the oldest cliche in politics for the losing side to claim that the problem is not the policies but inability to get the message across. In this case, however, I think it’s true. Gillard lost the voters early on with stunts like a consultative assembly to decide on climate change policy, and never managed to get them to listen to her for any length of time. Rudd was doing well in communicating his vision from his return to the leadership until he called the election. He then wasted three weeks on small-bore stuff apparently aimed at securing minor party preferences. He seemed finally to have rediscovered his voice, in the last week of the campaign, but almost certainly too late.

If you add just a negation sign to this Walter Russell Mead post, you get my view. Except for the bit where he says that the plans for war seem pretty screwed up. Everyone agrees about that.

Wouldn’t it be great if we set a precedent? Wouldn’t the Republic be healthier for it having happened – just once?

President proposes military action. Congress votes against. It doesn’t happen.

Once it happens once, it’s more likely to happen again, after all.

But won’t this destroy Obama’s status and credibility and all that good stuff? [click to continue…]

In shul this morning, the second day of Rosh Hashanah, the rabbi spoke at length about the State of Israel. This is more surprising than you might think. I’ve been going to this shul since I moved to Brooklyn in 1999, and if memory serves, it’s only been in the last two or three years that the rabbi has devoted at least one of her High Holy Days talks to Israel.

Throughout the aughts, Israel didn’t come up much in shul. During flash points of the Second Intifada, you might hear a prayer for Jewish Israelis or nervous temporizing about some action in Jenin or Gaza. But I can’t recall an entire sermon devoted to the State of Israel and its meaning for Jews.

That’s also how I remember much of my synagogue experience as a kid. Don’t get me wrong: Israel was central to my Jewish education. My entire family—my five sisters, my parents, and my grandfather—visited there with our synagogue in 1977. Several of my sisters, as well as my parents, have been back. The safety of Israel was always on my mind; I remember spending many a Friday night service imagining a terrorist attack on our synagogue, so short seemed the distance between suburban New York and Tel Aviv. I wrote about Israel in school essays (I actually defended its role in the Sabra and Shatila massacre). I had a strong feeling for Israel (or what I thought was Israel): a combination of hippie and holy, Godly and groovy, a feeling well captured by Steven Spielberg in Munich. [click to continue…]

For months now, the prospect of federal elections in Germany at the end of September have put a halt to making hard choices about the continuing Eurozone crisis. But now that the elections are near, domestic debate about policy choices is oddly muted. There seems to be a resigned acceptance in Germany that Merkel will lead the next government, and that her policies are not really open to serious challenge.

Maybe domestic contentment makes voters oblivious to the wider world – after all, unemployment in Germany is actually lower now than before the crisis. But Germany’s political choices at home can’t be separated from its role as the largest and strongest European economy. It has a massive European current account surplus that closely mirrors the deficits of the European ‘periphery’ – most of the EU’s trade takes place within the EU itself. But in the Eurozone, relative cost adjustment is heavily one-sided, requiring that all the adjustment must take place in the ‘periphery’, while Germany’s real effective exchange rate is held down. 

Then again, it isn’t as if all is rosy in Germany either. Low unemployment is made possible by a tough-minded strategy of cost containment, which has give rise to new form of ‘precarious’ jobs, rising inequality, and static real living standards. Tight spending controls have resulted in an ongoing decline in investment in skills and education which threatens the sustainability of the export-led model itself. Yet the European dimension of German politics seems to have fallen entirely from sight. Since decision-making in the Eurozone now hinges almost entirely on the German government’s preferences, this matters a great deal.

So it’s quite entertaining to see the ad by the largest trade union, IG Metall (here with subtitles, courtesy of The Guardian), encouraging people to turn out and vote. It’s clearly meant as a last-ditch effort to remind people that they don’t have to sleep-walk to an inevitable electoral outcome. Whether that’s enough to energize a change of mood is probably doubtful.

So I finally got around to making book for our recent event. I had fun devising an appropriate cover and table of contents page:

Here’s the PDF. And here are mobi and EPUB versions. Those are zip files, not because the actual files are large – they’re not – but because WordPress apparently doesn’t ‘trust’ EPUB and mobi.

Speaking of untrustworthiness: when I made our last event book – Red Plenty – I got some complaints that the EPUB version was barfing in an unlovely fashion when read on a Nook. Sorry about that! I am an amateur! And Nookless, to boot. I tried to do better this time. Perhaps some Nook user will report back, one way or the other. If all is well, I may remake the Red Plenty stuff.

Here’s a thing. Call it: the view from your tintype. (We could make it a regular contest!) Can you identify the work I appropriated (that’s a fancy word for ‘swiped legally’, since it’s public domain)?

As we’ve discussed, bombing Syria seems like a bad idea, and its international legality is dubious at best. Still, it’s possible to make a case. The proposed action is directed against the military forces of a dictatorship that has killed thousands of its citizens, and Obama seems willing to comply with US law for once.

That would be a lot more convincing if it weren’t contradicted by the continued provision of aid to the military dictatorship in Egypt, following a coup against the democratically elected government. This is in direct violation of US law, and has emboldened the generals to engage in steadily more brutal repression.

There are some reports that the Administration is quietly suspending aid, or that it plans to do something after the Syrian bombing has been approved (or not). But there’s plenty of resistance as well, most notably from AIPAC.

As long as the US continues to prop up murderous dictatorships for geopolitical or economic reasons, it’s hard to take seriously the eruptions of moral outrage about those, like Assad’s, that have fallen out of favor. Obama may move on Egypt. But the US still supports autocracies throughout the region, most obviously Saudi Arabia and Bahrein, home of the 5th Fleet.

Frederik Pohl, RIP. A nice write-up from Annalee Newitz, at i09. [UPDATE: Henry’s memorial post went up while I was writing this one!]

A personal story. I read my first Pohl book, Gateway [amazon], in 1978. I was 11. Wikipedia will spoil the plot for you, if you’re into that sort of stuff. [click to continue…]

Via “Kevin Drum”:http://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2013/09/fred-pohl-dies-93 who has a good appreciation. Like Coase, he was intellectually active (and “blogging”:http://www.thewaythefutureblogs.com/) up to his death at the age of 93. As everyone says, _The Space Merchants_ is just wonderful – politically lively (I believe Pohl was a Trotskyist at the time), and very, very funny. _Gladiator-At-Law_, his other collaboration with Kornbluth, gets less attention, but is also excellent. Many of his short stories are also very fine, and have much to say about economics and politics – “The Midas Plague,” for example, is a lovely illustration of themes explored in more rarified prose by both Veblen and J.K. Galbraith. His satire of advertising and politics, “The Tunnel Under the World,” which is its own thing, but also foreshadows Dick’s generalized paranoia, is “available for free online”:http://www.gutenberg.org/files/31979/31979-h/31979-h.htm. If you haven’t read it, you should.

Via “Tyler Cowen”:http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2013/09/ronald-coase-has-passed-away.html. I met him briefly once, at the third meeting of the International Society for the New Institutional Economics, where he gave the “keynote address”:http://www.coase.org/coasespeech.htm. His address was followed by the usual kind of discussion, in which various prominent institutional economists asked self-serving ‘questions’ that were obviously crafted to magnify their role, or further their own specific agenda. Coase, who was then in his late eighties, did a wonderful job of deflating them in a fashion that combined acerbity and politeness. His contribution to economics is sometimes misunderstood. He repeatedly “deplored”:http://coase.org/coaseinterview.htm the way in which the Coase ‘theorem’ had been taken up in the literature – economists had focused on the model in which bargaining would resolve social problems perfectly well in a world without transaction costs, while ignoring his actual point (that such a frictionless environment did not, and never would exist). Obviously, his politics weren’t my politics, nor the politics of anyone else here at Crooked Timber – he’s still worth reading. That he remained so intellectually active – into his 11th decade! – is extraordinary.

I really have no excuse for posting this. This year is the 25th anniversary of Kenneth Williams’s death, maybe? Its just that my 6 year-old-son came downstairs the other day talking about Chiswick flow, and moulies, and then, today, sang the whole song, pretty much word perfect, and I am very happy about it. So is my daughter. My wife? Maybe not.

Via Andrew Sullivan Matt Sitman, the look of music.

In a study by Harvard graduate Chia-Jung Tsay … nearly all participants — including highly trained musicians — were better able to identify the winners of classical music competitions by watching silent video clips than by listening to audio recordings. “In this case,” says Tsay, “it suggests that the visual trumps the audio, even in a setting where audio information should matter much more.

I thought Eddie Izzard already proved that.

Haven’t read Appiah on moral revolutions yet so I’ll just give you a bit from his Cosmopolitanism: Ethics In A World Of Strangers, which I am also reading.

Maybe, though, the term can be rescued [from the negative connotations]. It has certainly proved a survivor. Cosmopolitanism dates at least to the Cynics of the fourth century BC, who first coined the expression cosmopolitan, “citizen of the cosmos.” The formulation was meant to be paradoxical, and reflected the general Cynic skepticism toward custom and tradition. A citizen—a polite–s—belonged to a particular polis, a city to which he or she owed loyalty. The cosmos referred to the world, not in the sense of the earth, but in the sense of the universe. Talk of cosmopolitanism originally signaled, then, a rejection of the conventional view that every civilized person belonged to a community among communities.

I posted about this a couple years back. Short version: ‘kosmos’ is a matter of order – military order, cosmetics, ‘getting it together’ – more than vastness, sublimity (‘to boldly go!’) So maybe Diogenes was saying, in effect: I’m a citizen of wherever they’ve actually got good government. Or even: I’m a Utopian. Or: I’m a citizen of nature. Or: I’m a citizen of the natural order, the true order of things.

I got mild pushback in comments. (You don’t want to rehash old comments threads? Fine! Go read something else.) [click to continue…]