I chatted last night with a friend who is a Dem Representative (so not a Senator holed up wherever they are now), and my wife saw him an hour or so later, and said he looked as exhausted as he sounded. The Dem Reps are in the building round the clock basically, and excited but also tired. My friend says it really gives them energy to get messages of support, from old friends and new friends. Honestly, pretty much wherever you are, a short encouraging email will help keep their spirits up, and obviously if you’re in Wisconsin a nice note to your own (Dem) Rep is appropriate (Phelps – send a nice note to a bunch of them, ok, you’re almost uniquely capable of writing a letter that will encourage in this situation). An extremely polite note to your (Rep) Rep explaining why he or she should be opposing the bill, and making whatever pledge of support you can bring yourself to make, conditional on him/her contributing to the bill’s defeat, is also in order. Here’s the list of home pages, addresses, etc. I’m off now to see my mate and find my daughter.

Oh, by the way, its looking as if Tuesday’s budget speech will announce the de facto privatization UW Madison, so that’ll be fun too.

A little while ago, my son pointed me to a news item in a periodical called The Onion, reporting Republican opposition to an Obama proposal to protect the earth against destruction by asteroid impact. The usual libertarian arguments were advanced, pointing out that everyone would be forced to pay for this protection, thereby undermining the incentive to act for themselves.

At the time, I was suspicious that this might be some sort of satirical gag[1]. But now I see the proposal being discussed, and rejected, at the very serious Volokh blog (H/T Paul Krugman and Matt Yglesias).

So, based on my extensive agnotological studies, let me make some predictions about some of the scientific claims we are likely to see advanced (by the same people, but at different times), once the debate over Obama’s socialist plan hots up.
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Congratulations to Belgium, which holds since midnight the world record cabinet formation after the elections now exactly 250 days ago. Being the founders of surrealism, the Belgian people decided to celebrate this with people’s parties in open air, especially a big one Gent. The poster says ‘steun onze helden’, that is, ‘support our hero’s’, but this should be interpreted as ironically as possible. The people organising and attending these parties are fed up with the Belgian politicians who are unable (or unwilling?) to form a coalition and govern the country. If you want to see another piece of Belgian surrealism, watch the Flemish comedian Geert Hoste giving an interview to CNN in which he comments on the situation and the festivities.
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My understanding is that organizers are hoping for 100,000 at the State Capitol tomorrow. There is also word of counter-demonstrations, which should be fun. So if you’re within a reasonable distance of Madison and can come, you’re welcome. Bring your friends.

It’s a bit of a surprise to suddenly be in the midst of the biggest protests I’ve seen in my 25 years in the US. Wisconsin old-timers are saying they’ve never seen anything like it — not the Vietnam War protests, not even the earlier civil rights demonstrations in Wisconsin over housing. A sea of red surrounds the Capitol all day long, and the Capitol itself is chock full, tens of thousands of people chanting, joking, and occasionally bursting into loud applause which is entirely incomprehensible given that no-one can hear anything that speakers say.

The best news-gathering source I’ve found is at GlobalHigherEd where my colleague Kris Olds is regularly updating the links, and has a lot of background information. But the short story is this: last Friday our new Governor, Scott Walker, proposed a budget repair bill which includes considerable reductions in benefits for public sector workers, the removal of collective bargaining rights over anything but pay for public sector workers, and a provision disallowing payroll deduction union dues and a requirement that workers be allowed to be union members without paying dues. With majorities in both houses he assumed he could pass the bill within the week — the plan was that he would be signing it tomorrow (I’m writing on Thursday). Last weekend it was not at all clear that the opposition would be strong, and it wasn’t really until Tuesday night, when the local teacher’s union announced a sick out for Wednesday (widely thought to be a tactical error, including, I understand, by some of the leadership) that things really got moving. The Republicans have a large majority in the Assembly, but a majority of just 5 in the Senate, so all the action is in the Senate vote. Wednesday was when it all started to happen. The estimates of 15-30,000 demonstrators are probably on the low side — at any given time there may be 15,000 at any given point in the day hundreds are walking toward the Capitol, while hundreds are marching away. Although the teachers have been in the forefront of this (many more districts were closed today), other unions have been fully involved, including the police and firefighters unions which are exempted from the bill’s provisions [CORRECTED]

Thursday’s demonstrations were larger than Wednesday’s, and tomorrow’s (Friday’s) will be bigger still. Contrary to the impression given by the national reports I have seen, hardly any of the protest or rhetoric concerns the cuts in benefits; almost the entire movement is about protecting collective bargaining rights.

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So, we are to have a referendum in the UK on the alternative vote system. Tempting though it might be, I suppose I shouldn’t decide my view on the basis of my desire to stick it to the vile Nick Clegg. The fact that AV (like the French two-ballot runoff system) requires MPs to secure (eventually) a majority in each constituency certainly has _prima facie_ attractions, and it is troubling that most MPs are now elected on a minority vote. (In 1951 and 1955 only 39 and 37 seats in the Commons were held without a majority, so things have changed.) So on the plus side, there’d be more work work for candidates to do in more constituencies in order to secure election. On the other hand, AV can get you dramatically non-proportional outcomes (worse, in fact than FPTP). This will be familiar to Australians from (for example) the 1977 elections where the Liberals managed a majority of seats with considerably fewer first preferences than Labour and where the coalition of which the Liberals were part got two-thirds of the seats (a landslide) with only a minority of the vote.

I’m culling these facts from Vernon Bogdanor’s 1984 book _What is Proportional Representation?_ Bogdanor (David Cameron’s tutor at at about that time, incidentally) believed the system would hurt the Tories on the grounds of the their geographical distribution. John Curtice, on the other hand, “thinks”::http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/john-curtice-this-could-make-cameron-the-winner-from-electoral-reform-2124667.html that Labour would suffer. Any more reliable indications out there? Psephological guidance please.

A recent report on a poll finding that a majority of Republicans (that is, likely primary voters) are “birthers”, with only 28 per cent confident that Obama was born in the United States has raised, not for the first time, the question “how can they think that?” and “do they really believe that?”.

Such questions are the domain of agnotology, the study of culturally-induced ignorance or doubt. Agnotology is not, primarily, the study of ignorance in the ordinary sense of the term. So, for example, someone who shares the beliefs of their community, unaware that those beliefs might be subject to challenge, might be ignorant as a result of their cultural situation, but they are not subject to culturally-induced ignorance in the agnotological sense.

But this kind of ignorance is not at issue in the case of birtherism. Even in communities where birtherism is universal (or at least where any dissent is kept quiet), it must be obvious that not everyone in the US thinks that the elected president was born outside the US and therefore ineligible for office.

Rather, birtherism is a shibboleth, that is, an affirmation that marks the speaker as a member of their community or tribe. (The original shibboleth was a password chosen by the Gileadites because their Ephraimite enemies could not say “Sh”.) Asserting a belief that would be too absurd to countenance for anyone outside a given tribal/ideological group makes for a good political shibboleth.

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Just listened to an interesting bloggingheads exchange between our Henry and Robert Farley on Egypt and zombie international relations.

Two responses: Robert Farley reads a WSJ piece on Egypt and suggests, in effect, that the effect of internet social networking might not be to allow for more connections between protesters – ‘just connect’, as the slogan might be – but to enable aggregate overwhelming of the security response; which, in the end, couldn’t be quite ‘dexterous’ to be in enough places, with enough force, at once. I have no idea whether this is right or not but, as a thesis, it deserves a name, which will obviously be ‘Denial of Service Attack’, DoS for short. Denial of Security Service, that is.

Then they are on to zombies, and Drezner’s book. Farrell and Farley consider whether there is a history of supernatural approaches to political theory – Marx and vampires and a certain amount of para-zombie theory of the market, so forth. Any good Soviet-era socialist zombie political theory? They miss an important data point which, in fact, all historians of the zombie film, and zombie literature have also missed. The ‘modern’ zombie genre does not start with Romero, in 1968. It starts with one of my pet favorite sf films: the 1936 Menzies/Wells film, Things To Come. And it starts as emblematic political theory allegory. You read that right, kids: the modern zombie film genre was born as an explicit exercise in pedagogically illustrating the strengths and weakness of IR realism. [click to continue…]

Stephen Walt writes a “quite odd post”:http://walt.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2011/02/15/can_ir_theory_predict_the_future_of_the_euro on realism, liberalism and the future of the euro.

bq. Over the past few months, however, German Chancellor Angela Merkel and French President Nicolas Sarkozy have been negotiating a joint proposal for deepening economic coordination within the EU (and especially the eurozone) in an attempt to solve some of the problems that produced the crisis in the first place. … Not only does this question have obvious implications for politics and economics in Europe itself, but it also raises some fundamental questions about IR theory and might even be a revealing test of “realist” vs. “liberal” perspectives on international relations more generally. Realists, … have been bearish about the EU and the euro since the financial crisis, arguing that European member states were more likely to pursue their individual national interests and to begin to step back from some of the integrative measures that the EU had adopted in recent years. … By contrast, “institutionalists”:http://www.newsweek.com/2009/07/31/europe-defies-the-skeptics.html, and EU-philes more generally, have suggested that the only way forward was to deepen political integration within Europe. … So what we have here is a nice test of two rival paradigms, and students of international politics should pay close attention to how this all plays out.

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Some observers have wondered why Ireland’s dramatic economic crash has not produced more visible anger. Where are the street riots, they ask. The Greeks, they say, do this sort of thing better, the Icelanders managed to rise up as one – what is wrong with us? The Irish banks are a vast financial black hole and taxpayers are looking at crushing liabilities stretching into the future. Unemployment is over 13%. For those in work, pay packets have shrunk yet again as new taxes and charges kick in. Many households carry huge debt. Emigration is making a return. The terms of the EU-IMF loan constrain the terms of economic debate: we are not a sovereign economic state. Yet everyday life looks like business as usual.

The election campaign is slightly surreal for this reason. Last night saw a US-style TV discussion involving the five main party leaders, all men and all wearing identikit business suits. The studio audience, picked by a PR company to represent undecided voters, was pained yet polite.

But these are surface impressions. Out there, as the parties well know, all the evidence indicates that the voters are merely biding their time, ‘waiting in the long grass’. This could be a realigning election, a shape-shifter for the Irish political system.

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We won’t know for some time yet whether we are living through a game-changing period in which a dominant economic paradigm is replaced by something else. We don’t yet know what the catchy label will be for it.

Yet some of our conventional notions about how states manage market expectations have already been upended in recent times. One of these concerns the politics of credible commitment, which doesn’t always work the way we think it should.

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I like it! The new Jim McCann authered/Janet Lee illustrated graphic … well, it’s too short to be a novel, Return of the Dapper Men [amazon]. Use ‘search inside’ to read the first pages, or view a slightly different selection at the publisher’s site. In the land of Anorev, time has stopped. Living below the surface are children, with no conception of adulthood. Above are machines, with no conception of why they function. (Which makes it sound like some Eloi/Morlock time-machine fable, but that isn’t it at all. Also, how are people doing things if time has ceased? Well, I don’t know. A sort of eternal present. There is only now, no tomorrow, no yesterdays.) Ayden, the boy who asks, and Zoe, the robot-girl who says nothing at all, are friends, and the key. Then time starts again, and 314 Dapper Men descend from the sky, like a Magritte painting. It is all very charming and surreal and doesn’t make any sense, except in an advantages and disadvantages of vermiculation for life, in a space-time worm sort of sense, sense.

As the introduction by Tim “Project Runway” Gunn makes clear, it’s in a fairytale line that includes Alice, The Wizard of Oz, Pinnochio. I would add: Hans Christian Andersen, E.T.A. Hoffman. This bit from Andersen’s “The Ice Queen”, for example, in which Gerda is uselessly interrogating the solipsistic and surreal-minded flowers about where Kay might be: [click to continue…]

Will Wilkinson has a post at The Economist, taking issue with Orrin Kerr, re: the Vinson decision.

Kerr:

The core problem, I think, is that Supreme Court doctrine has strayed far from the original meaning of the scope of federal power granted by the Constitution. Today’s constitutional doctrine permits a scope of federal power that is much broader than the original meaning of the Commerce Clause and Necessary and Proper clause would allow. When interpreting the scope of federal power, then, you need to decide what you will follow: The original meaning or case precedents. As I read Judge Vinson’s opinion, he mixes the two. Judge Vinson jumps back and forth between purporting to apply Supreme Court precedents and purporting to interpret the Commerce Clause and Necessary and Proper clause in light of its original meaning. Judge Vinson spends about half of the legal analysis on original meaning and about half of the legal analysis on precedent, and he seems to treat both as important.

Wilkinson:

I agree with Mr Kerr that the freshest, topmost layer of the body of constitutional interpretation built up over the ages by the myriad sages of the Supreme Court is at best tenuously connected with the meaning of the hallowed document ordinary Americans imagine to govern their republic. What I don’t understand is Mr Kerr’s objection to mixing respect for precedent and original meaning in rendering judgments about the “constitutionality” of legislation

This is a perfect illustration of what I was talking about in this post – and the rather invigorating thread that went with it. Originalism is incompatible with respect for precedent. Kerr is getting at this, but he isn’t as clear as he might be. If you just substitute ‘originalism’ in that first passage for ‘the original meaning’ it becomes clear. Wilkinson’s objection is met: obviously you can combine combine respect for original meaning with respect for precedent (that’s Will’s objection). But the philosophy that sees and advocates this practical possibility is the ‘living constitution’ view, nemesis of originalism. What you can’t do is combine originalism with respect for precedent, in coherent philosophical fashion. [click to continue…]

I’m in Melbourne for the conference of the Australian Agricultural & Resource Economics Society (in fact, I’m currently President-elect of the Society[1]. There have been a couple of great papers on long-term food supply from Phil Pardey and Tom Hertel. So, this seems like a good idea to write down some thoughts about (what ought to be, at any rate) the central issue of agricultural economics – whether the global food system can produce enough food for the world and deliver it to those who need it.

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