“Scott’s post”:https://crookedtimber.org/2010/04/07/all-these-democratic-hoo-hah-dreams-of-the-internet/ yesterday reminded me that I had never linked to Ethan Zuckerman’s “fascinating discussion”:http://www.ethanzuckerman.com/blog/2010/03/04/jonathan-stray-on-original-reporting-imaginary-abundance/ of how much original reporting there is out there on the Internets, as measured through the admittedly imperfect lens of Google news.

This evening, Google News tells me that I have my choice of 5,053 articles on conflicts between Congressional Republicans and Democrats over healthcare reform. (Oh goody.) How many of those stories contain original reporting? In a world with thousands of professional media outlets at our fingertips – as well as hundreds of thousands of amateurs – how much original material do we really have access to? … What’s interesting in those numbers is the 14,000/24 ratio, implying 583 versions of each story. (That ratio is probably much higher today, with Google News following more news sources.) Jonathan Stray did a very smart analysis for Nieman Journalism Lab, looking at a universe of 800 stories about the alleged involvement of two Chinese universities in hacking attacks on Google. His findings were striking: 800 stories = 121 non-identical stories = 13 stories with original quotes = 7 fully independent stories.

Stray coded the 121 non-identical stories that had been clustered together by Google (the clustering algorithms are good, but not perfect – nine stories were unrelated to the specific case of these two universities) and looked for the appearance of novel quotes, which he considered the “bare minimum” standard for original reporting. (Interesting – it’s the same logic that led Jure Leskovec to track quotes to track media flow in MemeTracker.) Only 13 of the stories contained quotes not taken from another media source’s report. The essence of Stray’s piece is the question, “What were those other 100 reporters doing?” The answer, unfortunately, is that they were rewriting everyone else’s stories.

This hasn’t gotten the kind of pick-up that it deserves in the broader blogosphere – even if it’s not necessarily a representative sampling (other stories on other kinds of news might very plausibly do better in English language media) – it’s a rather startling finding.

Another Bloggingheads, this time with Brink Lindsey, covering the helicopter gunship attacks still being discussed below, David Frum, and the parlous state of Catholicism again. “One bit”:http://bloggingheads.tv/diavlogs/27262?in=28:29&out=29:58 which is worth developing on a bit – I mention in passing that Ross Douthat made a ridiculous claim about the causes of the Catholic priest pedophilia coverup. The exact argument is “here”:http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/29/opinion/29douthat.html.

In reality, the scandal implicates left and right alike. The permissive sexual culture that prevailed everywhere, seminaries included, during the silly season of the ’70s deserves a share of the blame, as does that era’s overemphasis on therapy. (Again and again, bishops relied on psychiatrists rather than common sense in deciding how to handle abusive clerics.) But it was the church’s conservative instincts — the insistence on institutional loyalty, obedience and the absolute authority of clerics — that allowed the abuse to spread unpunished.

The problem with this claim is that one of the countries discussed by Douthat (a) did not have a permissive sexual culture during the 1970s (or, for that matter, 1980s and early 1990s), (b) did not notably overemphasize therapy (or, indeed, emphasize therapy at all), and (c ) was arguably responsible for the worst abuses and cover-up of all. That country, of course, being Ireland. Ireland’s public sexual mores did loosen up a little during the 1970s. In the late 1960s, a hint on public television that night clothes might be doffed on a couple’s wedding night was sufficient to produce public debate and episcopal fulminations on the rising tide of filth threatening to swamp the country. By the 1970s, the country had advanced to the stage where a soap opera could mention that a married couple might use birth control if a second pregnancy would endanger the life of the mother. By the time that I myself went to college in the late 1980s, it was still impossible to buy birth control without a medical prescription (the idea being that doctors would only prescribe to married couples), and there were regular battles between the Student’s Union – which kept trying to instal a condom vending machine – and the university authorities – which kept ripping it down in the middle of the night. Therapy was a decidedly odd notion, confined to Protestants and agnostics in a few metropolitan areas. Ordinary decent Catholics allowed their neuroses to blossom or fester, depending on their social acceptability; and in dire emergencies and near breakdowns, perhaps consulted their local priest.

Perhaps this all counts as sinful licentiousness by Douthat’s standards. What is curious, then, is how the causal impact of 1970s permissiveness extend backwards, as well as forward in time. Ireland’s “Child Abuse Commission’s report”:http://www.childabusecommission.ie/rpt/pdfs/ suggests that many of the worst abuses occurred in the 1950s and 1960s. Indeed, some of the worst institutions had already closed down by the early 1970s. In the report’s description:

The Confidential Committee heard evidence from 1090 men and women who reported being abused as children in Irish institutions. Abuse was reported to the Committee in relation to 216 school and residential settings including Industrial and Reformatory Schools, Children’s Homes, hospitals, national and secondary schools, day and residential special needs schools, foster care and a small number of other residential institutions, including laundries and hostels. 791 witnesses reported abuse to Industrial and Reformatory Schools and 259 witnesses reported abuse in the range of other institutions. … 77% of witnesses were aged over 50 years and 3% were under 30 years of age when they gave their evidence to the Confidential Committee. … Witnesses reported being physically, sexually and emotionally abused, and neglected by religious and lay adults who had responsibility for their care, and by others in the absence of adequate care and supervision.

Sexual abuse was reported by approximately half of all the Confidential Committee witnesses. Acute and chronic contact and non-contact sexual abuse was reported, including vaginal and anal rape, molestation and voyeurism in both isolated assaults and on a regular basis over long periods of time. The secret nature of sexual abuse was repeatedly emphasised as facilitating its occurrence. Witnesses reported being sexually abused by religious and lay staff in the schools and institutions and by co-residents and others, including professionals, both within and external to the institutions. They also reported being sexually abused by members of the general public, including volunteer workers, visitors, work placement employers, foster parents, and others who had unsupervised contact with residents in the course of everyday activities. Witnesses reported being sexually abused when they were taken away for excursions, holidays or to work for others. Some witnesses who disclosed sexual abuse were subjected to severe reproach by those who had responsibility for their care and protection. Female witnesses in particular described, at times, being told they were responsible for the sexual abuse they experienced, by both their abuser and those to whom they disclosed abuse.

If I sound sarcastic in this post, it’s because it’s the only way that I can write about this without being overwhelmed by bitterness and rage. These vile abuses had nothing to do with a 1970s culture of permissiveness. Douthat’s claim to the contrary is worse than lazy. It is actually quite shameful. The “pox on both your houses” insulates him – and the church he is trying to defend – from the obvious fact that it was exactly the conservative features of the Irish church and its social dominance that were causally responsible for perpetuating the rape and sexual abuse of many hundreds of children in religious institutions. These included not only hierarchy and the conspiracy of silence among the powerful, but a terror of, and disgust for, both female sexuality and homosexuality. The victims of sexual abuse had nowhere to turn, because they were identified as complicit in their own abuse, if not indeed its instigators. Being the ruination of a priest or brother was an enormous cause of shame. Failing to acknowledge this – and resorting instead to a cheap conservative trope about the sexual license of the 1970s – is intellectually dishonest and rather contemptible.

I first heard about David Lipsky’s Although Of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself: A Road Trip With David Foster Wallace from Mark Athitakis when we were on a panel in New York a few weeks ago. The book consists of transcripts from a prolonged interview with Wallace conducted just after Infinite Jest appeared. I’ve published some comments on the book elsewhere, but wanted to pluck out and pass along a long passage — one that Mark read during the panel discussion.

It spins out from a reference to the Interlace system in IJ, but you can skip the background without losing the point. (Ellipses in brackets are mine; otherwise they are sic from the text, as with much else.)
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“Yglesias”:http://yglesias.thinkprogress.org/archives/2010/04/massacre-and-coverup-in-iraq.php “if this is authentic, you have military personnel killing people without making any reference to the rules of engagement. … This obviously raises the question of how many broadly parallel incidents there have been that haven’t come to light since they haven’t happened to have involved a Reuters employee.”

“James Fallows”:http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2010/04/in-case-you-missed-them/38516/ – ” As you watch, imagine the reaction in the US if the people on the ground had been Americans and the people on the machine guns had been Iraqi, Russian, Chinese, or any other nationality. As with Abu Ghraib, and again assuming this is what it seems to be, the temptation will be to blame the operations-level people who were, in this case, chuckling as they mowed people down. That’s not where the real responsibility lies. ”

“Avram Grumer”:http://nielsenhayden.com/makinglight/archives/012306.html#012306 – “So, apparently if you’re a bunch of goofballs with a fake language who are just talking about killing a cop, waiting for people to show up at his funeral, and then shooting them too, all in the name of freedom from tyranny, that’s a serious crime, and the government will raid you and the media will post all sorts of stories about how scary you are. If, in the other hand, you’re a US military helicopter crew who actually kill a bunch of Iraqi civilians, including a pair of journalists, and then, when some people (including two children) show up in a van to help the wounded and collect the bodies, shoot them too, all in the name of freedom from tyranny, the government will spend two years blocking Freedom of Information Act requests for the video of the event, and when the story finally breaks on the Internet, the media will spend their time talking about Tiger Woods and the iPad.”

Now that we have a British general election called for May 6th, I suppose we should have an open thread on the subject. The Tories are favourites, but by no means certain to get an overall majority. I’m still undecided how to vote, with Labour, the Lib Dems and the Greens all possible recipients of my support. Some academic colleagues are even making pro-Tory noises on the grounds that David Willetts “understands what universities are”. Well good luck with that one, in the event. And of course, this may be a good election to lose, so that some other party ends up screwing us all at the behest of Standard and Poors and the bond markets.

A photo taken by my cousin “Hugh McElroy”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Eyes at a trendy leftwing-branded DC coffee shop.

The error has been there for at least the last couple of years. It reminds me of something that has always puzzled me – why are so many libertarians opposed to fair trade coffee?

It would seem to me that fair trade coffee is fairly hard to argue with on the principles of consumer sovereignty (i.e. the claim that consumers know their own interests best, and are able to realize them through the market mechanism). If consumers want to pay a premium for coffee that has been produced ‘fairly,’ then this should be no more troubling for libertarians than consumers wanting to pay a premium for e.g. luxury chocolate (which often is made from the same basic material as very-good-but-not-horrendously-expensive chocolate), and arguably less troubling. Perhaps libertarians can argue that fair trade coffee is a special case – and that consumers aren’t able to monitor the production of the coffee to ensure that standards are kept; that fair trade coffee has perverse consequences and so on. All this is certainly plausible – but the same problems of monitoring and possible perverse consequences apply to all sorts of government functions that libertarians are keen to have put out to private actors. If market mechanisms are poorly suited to promoting public welfare in situations where the profit motive is mixed up with the desire to do good, then many libertarian schemes for reform are in very big trouble. All in all, the left wing market skeptical case against fair trade a la (for example) Dani Rodrik seems a lot more plausible than the libertarian one (perhaps one can also argue that lefties who buy fair trade coffee ought to be plausibly more open to market mechanisms across a variety of other areas, by the same logic – but I’ll leave that for you all to discuss and dispute in comments).

I sent the manuscript of Zombie Economics off to Princeton University Press last night. There’s still plenty of work (figures, index, copyediting, some last-minute changes, galleys) to be done for a planned release at Halloween. But this is the official submission. In writing the preface I checked over the comments I’d received, here and at my blog. Several thousand in total, from more than a hundred different commenters. Thanks to everyone who took part. It was a huge help and encouragement to me.

Over at Henry’s place earlier today, I handled silly putty for the first time in my life. Great stuff, especially when it pops those unexpected little bubbles. Henry’s missus, Nicole, showed me a great silly putty trick; you squash it onto a newspaper and make an awesome transfer. The nearest newsprint to hand was the FT’s editorial page with a great cartoon of Pope Benedict, which I now share with you on pink silly putty. Happenstance being the best form of creativity, my phone’s picture of same included an unintentional shadow that looks like the jaws of a shark or similar closing on the pope’s head while he looks worriedly away. Happy Easter Sunday, y’all.

Let me propose that

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More seriously – do people seriously see a use for the iPad? For me, most of its pluses are minuses. If I want to read stuff, I _vastly prefer_ the zero animation just the plain text ma’am approach of your average e-book reader, to the hideous advertisements that I am sure will be bouncing from every page on the average iPad read (you think you’ll be able to download an AdBlock equivalent? think again). About the only positive thing I can say in the iPad’s favor is that it doesn’t do Flash.

Making a change from the usual run of the genre (ie, books about the “financial crisis” by people who didn’t tell you that there was a bubble while it was going on, but who nevertheless expect you to be interested in what they have to say about it now that it’s been and gone). A book about the bubble in the US, written by someone who was absolutely right about it, provably, ahead of time and in writing, and who is a lot more angry about the whole mess than those authors who just regard it as a great big game in which some entertaining characters made money at the expense of their dumb counterparties. Despite the comparatively microscopic size of his promotional budgets, I think Baker might have caught the spirit of the times a bit better than Andrew Ross Sorkin or Michael Lewis[1].
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First Sean Carroll gets to go on Colbert; and now Jonathan Dancy does a very creditable job on Craig Ferguson’s show. I just want to make it clear to TV producers that I am available for gigs. Now, unlike Jonathan I am not the father of a well-known actor, so I lack a connection to the world of “show business”. But, even so, comedy is kind of a hobby of mine. Well, actually, it’s a little more than just a hobby. Reader’s Digest is considering publishing two of my jokes.

This is pretty good, though it tails off towards the end. The material about breaking the “colour bar” on the Bristol buses, the St Paul’s riot of 1980 and the growth of drugs in the 1990s is all very well done. (Best seen by going to “Playlist”:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HvI01RauSKU&feature=PlayList&p=70E1676A5ED3BE2A&playnext_from=PL&playnext=1&index=1 )

Something that I should have said “the first time we went around this particular merry-go-round”:http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/glenn_greenwald/2008/11/09/kerr, but didn’t (because I didn’t see it until some days after it had happened), and want to say “now that we seem to be going around it again”:http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/glenn_greenwald/2010/04/01/nsa/index.html. Glenn Greenwald’s animus towards Orin Kerr is perhaps unsurprising (Kerr’s politics are very different from Greenwald’s, and his personal style is as dissimilar from Greenwald’s as can be) but is not especially well justified by the facts. Greenwald has repeatedly depicted Kerr as an “apologist” for Bush administration policies (disclosing that Kerr has not been an apologist “all” such policies, but notably failing to mention that Kerr was on many occasions an explicit critic of the Bush administration, and of various conservative arguments made on its behalf) in a manner which is both offensive and untrue. It’s quite clear that Kerr is (moderately) conservative – it is also clear from even the most superficial reading of his blogging and writing that he is neither doctrinaire, nor prepared to defend legal doctrines or arguments that he doesn’t himself believe in. Perhaps Greenwald means by “apologist” something like “someone who advocates for policies which I strongly disagree with.” If so, he should use more neutral language. If he intends to convey something more like the everyday meaning of “apologist,” which carries insinuations of dishonesty and hackery, he can do so of course – but it would be nice to see some evidence supporting this claim.

If Greenwald responds to this, it’s not impossible that he’ll respond in the same way as he has done to Kerr – through a fairly direct personalized attack on my motives in writing this defence. To anticipate one possible line of attack – Kerr is nominally a colleague of mine (he is employed by the same university). That doesn’t mean that I know him well – I have seen him perhaps once in the last five years, and have not (as best as I can recollect) had any other exchange with him during that period. He did come once to talk to a class I was teaching shortly after I arrived at GWU. However, my relations with him could best be described as friendly, but not close, and most importantly mediated through shared membership of a collective community (the blogosphere). Which is to say that they are more or less similar to my past relations with Glenn Greenwald (with whom I have very occasionally exchanged amicable emails). In short – the reason I want to defend Orin Kerr is because I find his online writing thoughtful and interesting (I have rather different feelings about some of his colleagues on the Volokh Conspiracy). While I’ve _absolutely no problem_ with strong partisanship, it’s necessary, in the end of the day, to recognize that we live in a plural society with competition over values, in which the other guys are going to win, at least some of the time. I would frankly far prefer to live in a world where at least some of the other guys thought like Orin Kerr than one where they thought like, say, Marc Thiessen. Claiming that _everyone_ on the other side of the intellectual divide is a dishonest hack seems to me to be an exercise in self-flattery and wishful thinking. It also means that one doesn’t have to learn from people whom one strongly disagrees with (this kind of learning is often unpleasant for exactly the same reason that it is valuable). I don’t know if Glenn Greenwald thinks that the people on the other side are all hacks (I’m mostly bringing it up because a couple of our commenters have made suggestions along these lines in the past). But I suspect that the reason that Kerr so gets on his nerves is precisely because he argues for a greater deference towards the state than Greenwald would like, but is not, obviously, a Thiessenesque hack. For me that’s a feature, not a bug.

[nb that this is a personal blogpost, does not by any means necessarily represent the views of other CTers, some of whom undoubtedly take a more vigorous line on this, etc]

Via “Gideon Rachman”:http://blogs.ft.com/rachmanblog/2010/03/mice-on-the-loose-in-parliament/, the House of Lords debates the mouse problem in Westminister Palace. It’s both wonderful and surreal.

bq. As for getting a cat, I answered a Question from the noble Lord, Lord Elton, last week on this matter. I was not aware that such a thing as a hypoallergenic cat existed-I do not know whether our cat at home is one of those. There are a number of reasons why it is not a good idea to have cats. First, they would ingest mouse poison when eating poisoned mice, which would not be very nice for them, and there would be nothing to keep them where they are needed or stop them walking around the House on desks in offices or on tables in restaurants and bars-and maybe even in the Chamber itself. Therefore, we have ruled out at this stage the possibility of acquiring a cat, or cats.

… The Chairman of Committees: My Lords, I am well aware that there are still mice around. I saw one in the Bishops’ Bar only yesterday evening. I do not know whether it was the same one that I saw the day before or a different one; it is always difficult to tell the difference between the various mice that one sees. We believe that the problem is getting better. Cleaning is one of the measures we are taking, as I outlined in my original Answer. As I speak here this afternoon, the Bishops’ Bar and the Guest Room are being hoovered, so we can get rid of the food scraps from lunch. If you were a mouse, you would rather eat the crumbs of a smoked salmon sandwich than the bait. Therefore, we want to remove the crumbs as quickly as possible.

Lord Pilkington of Oxenford: Why should I and noble Lords trust the Executive to deal with mice when they cannot deal with the economy?

The Chairman of Committees: My Lords, I do not actually deal with the economy. I am glad to say that that would be above my pay grade, whereas trying to deal with the mice is probably just about right for me.

Baroness Symons of Vernham Dean: My Lords, I was in total ignorance that there was anything of the nature of a mouse helpline until this Question Time. Can the Chairman of Committees tell us what helplines there are for Members of the House on other issues that we do not know about?

I’m trying to imagine a similar conversation taking place, say, in the U.S. Senate, and failing completely.