You’ve probably heard about this. Surely we can get a thread’s worth of comments, eh? I’m awaiting the inevitable backwash of an actual edition of Dante’s poem with imagery from the game on the cover. But someone came up with that joke already. What next? Obviously video game adaptation is most natural when you have ‘levels’ or ‘generations’, and episodic picaresqueness is a plus. Vanity Fair? (You play Becky Sharp, climbing the social ladder, winning over various representative males in the Boss Fights.) Buddenbrooks?

OK, then, what about this: it’s obvious that the way to do this right would have been as an installment in the Mario series: Mario’s Comedy. With Peach as Beatrice, Bowser as Satan, Luigi as Virgil, providing ‘super guide’ assistance’. Or maybe Virgil should be a Toad. I’m flexible. And the rest of the cast. Mushrooms and King Boo and Koopas and Yoshis and big biting metal balls on chains, disporting in appropriate spiritual attitudes. Lava and ice and howling wind. Various souls trapped in blocks you free by jumping on them, then carrying them to the end of the level, maybe.

Italian guy loves princess, Italian guy loses princess, Italian guy has to struggle through level after level, eventually fighting the Big Boss, to get Princess back again. Writes itself. Nine Levels. Plus climbing the Mountain of Purgatory. Then Paradiso could be the video you watch after you’re done. Boring stuff, but running on kinda long. Like the original. (YouTube mashup artists, take it away!)

Since this isn’t the way we’ve gone, apparently, I think our second best option would be to adapt, say, Super Mario Brothers, as a terza rima epic. So that’s your assigned task in comments. Something about ‘midway along the path’, ‘running always to the right’, ‘jumping on people’s heads’. That sort of thing. If you choose to accept your mission.

Three Google executives have been convicted of violating Italian privacy law because of a children’s bullying video posted briefly by Google in 2006. Although Google took down the offending video of several children in Turin cruelly taunting a mentally disabled boy, and subsequently helped authorities to identify and convict the person who posted the video, three executives were convicted today of violating privacy. A fourth employee who has since left the company had his charges dropped, which seems to indicate that a political point is being made. The executives in question are outraged, and former UK Information Commissioner Richard Thomas is quoted as saying the episode makes a mockery of privacy laws.

For years I’ve observed that Italy always pushes for the most extreme EU version of laws about privacy and security and then domestically gold-plates them into laws that would seem more at home in Turkmenistan. It makes other Europeans scratch their heads as the Italians generally aren’t willing or able to enforce their draconian laws. Several years ago over a pint in Brussels, an exasperated UK official told me ‘the Italians have no intention of ever implementing this stuff, but we’re a common law country and if it’s on the books, we actually have to do it’.

Update: Milton Mueller has an interesting take on the decision and makes the point that the E-Commerce Directive has not aged well in an era of user-generated content.
[click to continue…]

Further to last week’s brief mention of Colin Ward’s death, “Ken Worpole now has an obituary in the Guardian”:http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2010/feb/22/colin-ward-obituary . A brief excerpt:

bq. Colin saw all distant goals as a form of tyranny and believed that anarchist principles could be ­discerned in everyday human relations and impulses. Within this perspective, politics was about strengthening ­co-operative ­relations and supporting human ingenuity in its myriad vernacular and everyday forms. One of Colin’s favourite metaphors – adopted from a novel by Ignazio Silone – was the image of the seed beneath the snow, which suggested to him that anarchist principles were ever alive and prescient. He thought it was the work of politics to nurture such beliefs and to support them through small-scale initiatives, avoiding the temptation to replicate or scale them up to a level beyond which professional bureaucracies take over.

I’d also note Daniel Trilling’s brief note at the New Statesman blog (which contains a link to an online pdf reader of Ward’s writings), Boyd Tonkin’s appreciation in the Independent, and Ross Bradshaw at the Five Leaves Publications blog.

Reading around Ward’s work in the few days since his death I kept coming across one of his favourite quotes, from the German anarchist Gustav Landauer:

bq. The State is not something which can be destroyed by a revolution, but is a condition, a certain relationship between human beings, a mode of human behaviour; we destroy it by contracting other relationships, by behaving differently.

Material there, I think, for further meditation on Jerry Cohen’s critique of Rawls, the “socialism of the the camping trip”:http://press.princeton.edu/titles/9009.html , the importance of “ethos” and the inadequacy of a conception of human emancipation based around law and citizenship. (The “the seed beneath the snow” metaphor even finds echoes in the cover design for Cohen’s _Why not Socialism?_ ) But speculation about these convergences should form the matter of another post.

Update: Roman Krznaric’s “appreciation”:http://outrospection.org/2010/02/27/382 , and the Times “obituary”:http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/obituaries/article7045467.ece .

I never really got the whole G.K. Chesterton thing. I understand lots of folks really like Chesterton but, having never read anything but a few Father Brown mysteries, I formed a theory about that: some people really like formulaic mystery series, and some people really like this C.S. Lewis-ish naive-is-sophisticated-in-a-peculiarly-English-way attitudinizing. I feel I can take or leave the both of them. So, to repeat, I never got the Chesterton thing. But I figured maybe I should sample the non-Father Brownish material, just to be sure. (People do seem to love their Chesterton, not just the Father Brown fanboys.) I’m halfway through Manalive. And it’s pretty great! Obviously, being a tediously predictable person in my own way, I want someone to do it up proper as a graphic novel, with Innocent Smith as Manalive, in a tight green costume! With strength of leaps proportional to those of a grasshopper! And a revolver! Dealing out Life! More Life-Affirming Tales of Manalive, the Living Man!

Discuss. What’s your favorite Chesterton? Is Father Brown as fundamentally tedious as I take him to be? Is Innocent Smith just as tedious, only I like him because I’m susceptible to any whiff or soupcon of man-and-superman themery? The public is banging on its breakfast table, demanding answers to these and other questions, quite possibly.

I’m writing an essay and I want to reference, in passing, Wilde’s quip that some women, so that they may be perfectly spiritual, strive to be very thin. They’re sort of like Descartes’ pineal gland that way, if it’s true, if you think about it. Only Oscar didn’t think to add that extra joke about Descartes. Getting to the point: I’m not even sure he added the thing about the women. Is it in one of the plays? Someone did. Surely a Edwardian/Victorian sort of someone. It would be altogether convenient to know who.

Sunday afternoon mashup: Fleetwood mac vs. Daft Punk. Good stuff!

Thinner, Better, Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger, plus the constructivist implication of ‘you make’, being the spiritual red thread running through this post, as it were. Daft Bodies an all.

Following up on Henry’s post …

I have just been reading Robert Louis Stevenson’s Moral Emblems (history of comics is everywhere, you know), and I think he pegs this ‘Harvard Mentality’ with a simple but elegant woodcut and associated poem.

Mark, printed on the opposing page,
The unfortunate effects of rage.
A man (who might be you or me)
Hurls another into the sea.
Poor soul, his unreflecting act
His future joys will much contract,
And he will spoil his evening toddy
By dwelling on that mangled body.

Or, as Michael Bérubé puts it: “I’ll show YOU what’s liberal about the liberal arts!”

Noted without comment, from the “Chronicle”:http://chronicle.com/blogPost/Amy-Bishops-Lawyer-Says-She/21343/?sid=pm&utm_source=pm&utm_medium=en.

Amy Bishop’s court-appointed lawyer says the professor accused of killing three of her colleagues appears to have paranoid schizophrenia and while she is “aware of what she’s done” and is full of remorse, she can’t remember the shootings. Roy W. Miller, the lawyer, told the Associated Press that her failure to get tenure at the University of Alabama at Huntsville was the likely key to the shootings. “Obviously she was very distraught and concerned over that tenure,” Mr. Miller said. “It insulted her and slapped her in the face, and it’s probably tied in with the Harvard mentality. She brooded and brooded and brooded over it, and then, ‘bingo.'”

Lots of folks seemed to think that Japanese paper theater manga book sounded pretty interesting, and many had good suggestions for related material; so here’s something vaguely similar – proto-pop culture-bleg-wise. The new The Wizard of Oz blu-ray set is on sale cheap [amazon]. Apparently they’ve toiled to improve the visual quality and the thing includes extras I want: namely, the early silent films. These are public domain, so you can watch them courtesy of the Internet Archive: The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (1910); The Patchwork Girl of Oz (1914); The Magic Cloak of Oz (1914); and His Majesty, The Scarecrow of Oz (1914). May I recommend, in particular, the fight scene between Hank the Mule and the Witches! (For anyone looking to extract baffling visual material to incorporate into your clever hipster music video project – here you go!) But the Internet Archive quality is poor, bless their charitable hearts. I’m hoping they’ve done a bit better with these new discs.

Fun facts! The Scarecrow of Oz – the 1915 book – is based on the film, not the other way around. Although I have to say: the relation is kinda loose.

The 1939 film we know and love was not, in fact, the first version to present Kansas in b&w, Oz in color. That honor goes to a 1933 cartoon included with the new set, which was originally released all b&w due to a lawsuit about the color process. You can watch it on YouTube but, again, quality not great. (Music by Carl Stallings!)

Also, The Wiz (1978) was not the first crazy blacksploitation installment of the franchise. That honor goes to the far crazier, Larry Semon-directed/starring, young Stan Laurel-containing 1925 version (again, YouTube provides, at least a bit). It has Spencer Bell as “Snowball”, the black farmhand who is send skipping to Oz on lightning bolts. (He is billed as G. Howe Black.) So far as I can tell, this version is not included in the new set, but one Amazon reviewer seems to think it is. I guess I’ll find out for myself. [click to continue…]

“Paul Krugman”:http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/02/17/feldsteins-euro-holiday/, like “others before him”:https://crookedtimber.org/2009/06/02/still-all-quiet-on-the-western-front/, fails to do justice to Martin Feldstein’s perspicacity.

Today, Martin Feldstein suggests that Greece make a temporary return to the drachma, so as to regain cost competitiveness. In terms of the macroeconomics, this actually does make sense. But it’s also impossible; Feldstein needs to read Barry Eichengreen.

What he doesn’t realise is that Feldstein is playing a much deeper game here, and that his fundamental objections to the euro “have nothing to do with macroeconomic theory”:http://www.nber.org/feldstein/fa1197.html

War within Europe itself would be abhorrent but not impossible. The conflicts over economic policies and interference with national sovereignty could reinforce long-standing animosities based on history, nationality, and religion. Germany’s assertion that it needs to be contained in a larger European political entity is itself a warning. Would such a structure contain Germany, or tempt it to exercise hegemonic leadership?

A critical feature of the EU in general and EMU in particular is that there is no legitimate way for a member to withdraw. This is a marriage made in heaven that must last forever. But if countries discover that the shift to a single currency is hurting their economies and that the new political arrangements also are not to their liking, some of them will want to leave. The majority may not look kindly on secession, either out of economic self-interest or a more general concern about the stability of the entire union. The American experience with the secession of the South may contain some lessons about the danger of a treaty or constitution that has no exits.

Obviously, Feldstein can’t write about this in public; Germans have, after all, been known to “read the Financial Times”:http://www.ftd.de/. But perhaps if Greece extricates itself very, very carefully from EMU, and promises (however disingenuously) that it _really, really will_ return to the eurozone just as soon as it can, Angela Merkel will stand down the Panzertruppen she has amassed at the Greek border …

Update: “see also Colm McCarthy”:http://www.irisheconomy.ie/index.php/2010/02/17/a-bonzer-wheeze-by-martin-feldstein/.

Matthew Yglesias says the necessary to talk people down from the ledge.

(Me? Last week I taught my students everything’s made of monads; mere universal holograms seem fairly ho-hum.)

But there is one point that should be made in these connections that almost never is: deception is a very different concept than error. Deception is a game for two: one to fool, one to be fooled. Whereas you can be wrong all by yourself. You can smudge the distinction with favorite epistemologist phrases like ‘if it turns out I am massively deceived about the way the world is …’ But if you dramatize the possibility of systematic/fundamental error by imagining deceiving demons, Evil Gods, Agent Smith, mad scientists with brain vats, caves equipped with the latest in projection technology, or giant holograms, you confuse people’s intuitions. Specifically, you confuse them into thinking that error is more conceivable (or differently conceivable) than it may really be. Telling people the universe is a hologram makes it sound as though the universe actually intends to pull the wool over their eyes. Reality itself is the ultimate Long Con! But if you just tell them matter is made of atoms, or water is really H20, that doesn’t make it sound as though the micro entities think all the macro-types with minds are marks and suckers. [click to continue…]

Below is an essay that I wrote for my undergraduate class last semester, providing them with my (doubtless idiosyncratic) ideas about how to write good political science essays. It’s also available under a CC license in “PDF format”:http://www.henryfarrell.net/pol_science_essays.pdf, as well as “MultiMarkdown”:http://www.henryfarrell.net/pol_science_essays.txt (its native format), “LaTeX”:http://www.henryfarrell.net/pol_science_essays.tex and “RTF”:http://www.henryfarrell.net/pol_science_essays.rtf in case someone wants to play around with it (e.g. by adapting it for another discipline). Feel free to suggest improvements, point out grammatical errors or typos etc in comments, or indeed to comment generally on good and lousy writing in undergraduate papers.

UPDATE: some small improvements made and “Jottit version”:http://jottit.com/wbr7p/ added.

[Cross posted to “The Monkey Cage”:http://www.themonkeycage.org ]
[click to continue…]

There’s been a lot of discussion of the problems of Greek sovereign debt, its implications for the euro and so on. But I haven’t seen much discussion, from a standard national policy perspective, of what the Greek government should do in dealing with the simultaneous problems of an economic downturn and unsustainable debt (feel free to point me to good discussions).

The course of action being demanded by the bondholders and their advocates, as well as by the EU governments that are likely to bear the costs of a bailout is that of drastic retrenchment on the lines the IMF would normally advocate in cases of this kind. But that is obviously not a desirable policy response when considered in macroeconomic terms. I’m not well informed on the details of Greece’s budget problems, so I’m mostly going to make generic suggestions that are applicable to a case like this.
[click to continue…]

Not wanting to keep on bashing the Economist‘s Charlemagne, who is actually one of my favourite bloggers/columnists,¹ but this “piece”:http://www.economist.com/blogs/charlemagne/2010/02/strasbourg_and_european_sensibilities on the sins of the European Parliament is a bit much. To summarize it a little unfairly, Charlemagne feels that the Parliament should really be less bolshie in its tedious efforts to try to increase its powers, and more bolshie about the really important stuff, like saving Brussels hacks five hour train rides cooped up with the _hoi polloi._ ² I suspect that both Charlemagne and “Gideon Rachman’s hostility”:https://crookedtimber.org/2009/03/10/defending-the-european-parliament/ (I like Gideon a lot, too) to the Parliament comes from their internalization of the Economist‘s perception of the European Union as a technocratic exercise in market integration that would work very nicely if only the member states and specialists were left to run it in peace.

But the EU isn’t merely a “‘fairly impressive experiment in market liberalism.'”:http://www.economist.com/blogs/charlemagne/2010/02/spain_and_anglo-saxon_press There are lots of other things happening in the EU – most recently including lots of innovations in Justice and Home Affairs, some of them quite remarkably dubious. And it is here that the Parliament has recently proven its merits, by “decisively rejecting”:http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/f81b6a96-1775-11df-87f6-00144feab49a.html the EU’s proposed financial data-sharing deal with the US.

bq. the parliament felt, by a 378-196 margin with 31 abstentions, that the US guarantees to protect the privacy of EU citizens were inadequate. Mr Buzek said: “The majority view in the European parliament is that the correct balance between security . . . and the protection of civil liberties and fundamental rights . . . has not been achieved.”

Now it’s worth pointing out that the Parliament’s rejection was not entirely motivated by concerns over EU citizens’ privacy. By vetoing the deal, it’s signalling that the member states (and indeed the US) have to take its policy prerogatives seriously. The member states had tried to rush the deal through the day before Parliament got jurisdiction over Justice and Home Affairs issue, but managed to screw up the technicalities, with unfortunate consequences for transatlantic security relations, but rather better results for the privacy of EU citizens. There would have been a good chance that the deal would have gone down anyway, but it probably would not have gone down in flames.

Which brings us to the main point. Just as it isn’t because of the benevolence of the butcher or baker that we get our dinner, it’s often because of the _amour-propre_ and power-lust of politicians that we get a system that works. The desire of the Parliament for a voice in international justice and home affairs issues, and of individual MEPs for the limelight, means that Parliament is likely to be a highly awkward customer. With any luck, it will continue to prevent security officials on both sides of the Atlantic from reaching mutually convenient deals that are likely to seem rather less politically attractive when they are exposed to the rigors of a public vote by elected representatives. As there are more and more of these deals being cooked up in the EU and elsewhere (a whole world of information sharing arrangements, some justifiable, some not so justifiable, but few exposed to processes of public justification,³ this would be a good thing. MEPs are surely as venal as the next bunch of politicians, but without the Parliament, there would be next to no public debate of these deals, let alone any possibility of vetoing them. It would be nice to see Economist type liberals (who care, I have no doubt about civil liberties, as well as market freedoms) acknowledging this every once in a while.

¹Although I may still have one more bout of impertinence in me, depending.

² Technically, this should really be “cooped up with hoi polloi” since ‘hoi’ is a definite article, but I’m not _that_ much of an arse.

³ The sad yet instructive tale of how the UK “came to adopt the Treaty of Prüm”:http://www.parliament.the-stationery-office.co.uk/pa/ld200607/ldselect/ldeucom/90/90.pdf being one counter-example where public exposure of the various shenanigans did diddly-squat to prevent it going through. Then, perhaps if it had gotten public traction in the Parliament as well as the House of Lords, it might have gone differently.

The policy rumblings before the British general election include an emphasis on the “mutualization” of public services.

James Macintyre in the New Statesman on Labour’s ideas for changing how public services get provided:

bq. … strategists have settled on a big idea that might just help answer all three of those challenges – the idea of mutualism. Labour is focusing on the best-known modern example: the John Lewis model, in which every employee is a “partner” with a stake in the company. Applying this, Labour now believes public bodies can be part-owned by their staff and, where appropriate, their users.

Robert Peston, 15th of February on the BBC website under the headline “The John Lewis State”:http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/thereporters/robertpeston/2010/02/the_john_lewis_state.html :

bq. The Tory proposal for core public services to be owned and managed by “employee-owned” co-operatives contains a number of ideas rolled into one. The two most important are: 1) organisations perform better where staff have a direct financial stake in their success or failure; 2) the role of the state should be limited to providing funds and monitoring outcomes. This is not an example of Tory conversion to late 19th Century co-op socialism. Although the public-sector co-ops would be “not-for-profit” in the narrow sense of not being able to bring in outside capital that could receive dividends, staff would be able to get their mits on the “financial surplus” they generate. So the central idea is that primary schools or JobCentre Plus offices or community nursing teams would become much more productive if teachers, or job advisers or nurses knew that they would become richer from achieving more out of less.

Now I’m all in favour of mutuals, cooperatives, and so on (I wouldn’t have admired the late Colin Ward if I wasn’t), but this doesn’t sound like that. There seem to be two possibilities: either the mutuals have independent sources of funding or they don’t. If they don’t then the year that some happy band of teachers makes a profit by realizing “efficiency gains” is the year before the state cuts back its stipend, leaving them running around trying to repeat the trick with less the following year (and so on). If they do or can have independent sources of finance, then we also get progressive cutting back of state support whilst public sector employees run around chasing “opportunities”, devising ways of charging people for “premium” versions of the basic service, etc. And we can add into the mix the temptation that civil servants will have to write contracts for the mutuals that exercise massive control over the detail of what they do whilst leaving all the responsibility for failure with the co-op members. In fact, all of thus sound a lot less like a “John Lewis” state than a state modelled on the British university system. Good to know we’ll have a choice at the next election.