Both Alan “the Minister” Johnson [sorry, in-joke] and Ed Miliband “have raised the prospect of electoral reform in the UK”:http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2009/may/24/ed-miliband-political-reform-mps-expenses . Ostensibly, this is all about restoring public confidence in the political class after duck/moat/flip-gate, but it also makes sense as a way of cooking the Tory goose. Under the present system, Cameron stands to win a landslide and Labour would be in opposition for a generation. But introduce a proportional representation system and the Tories couldn’t get a majority on their own. (And even if they were in government for a while, the Lib Dems would probably bring them down before long.) This move is reminiscent of Francois Mitterrand’s introduction of a party-list PR system for the 1986 French legislative elections. The right still won, but the Parti Socialiste and its allies maintained a healthier legislative presence than they otherwise would have done, and the right eventually tore themselves apart over the issue of dealings with the Front National. In the UK context, the analogy would be the Tories wrangling over relations with UKIP and the BNP. It could happen.

I’ve only seen the headlines, but I expect all the clowns put on their clown suits this morning and are presently climbing out of their clown car at the studio. I’m thinking liberal, activist, Puerto Rico isn’t even a state and the Bronx isn’t either, law-into-her-own-hands, affirmative action, closeted lesbian, the guy in front of me at Dunkin D’s said she wasn’t too bright. On that last point, it’s well known amongst alums that whereas the Princeton Sam Alito graduated from in 1972 was a bastion of civilized learning, the Princeton Sotomayor graduated summa cum laude from four or five years later was a hippie “learning cooperative” where minorities got a coupon book of “A” grades upon admission to use up as needed, were all given the Pyne Prize automatically, and the concept of truth was rigorously suppressed by the leftist faculty.

“Three Quarks Daily”:http://www.3quarksdaily.com/3quarksdaily/2009/05/3-quarks-daily-announces-4-annual-blog-prizes.html has an announcement.

we have decided to start awarding four prizes every year in the respective areas of Science, Arts & Literature, Politics, and Philosophy for the best blog post in those fields. Here’s how it’s going to work: Starting next month, the prizes will be awarded every year on the two solstices and the two equinoxes. So, we will announce the winner of the science prize on June 21, the arts and literature prize on September 22, the politics prize on December 21, and the philosophy prize on March 20, 2010. … Just for fun, the first place award will be called the “Top Quark,” and will include a cash prize of one thousand dollars; the second place prize, the “Charm Quark,” will include a cash prize of three hundred dollars; and the third place winner will get the honor of winning the “Strange Quark,” along with two hundred dollars.

Voting rules etc explained at the post in question. Just to be clear, I personally don’t think you should be voting for a CT post in any of these categories. The value of competitions like this is in highlighting bloggers who people would be unlikely to come across otherwise, and we’re high profile enough that we really aren’t a deserving case. But I am very happy that 3QD is taking this initiatve increase the profile of the more intellectual side of the blogosphere (which doesn’t usually do well in larger competitions), and strongly recommend that you nominate good posts, read other nominees, and vote for whoever seems best.

Clive Crook “positions himself as a reasonable moderate”:http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/55522abc-4894-11de-8870-00144feabdc0.html between the extremes of Republican torture-and-detention-porn crazies, and people who, you know, who take civil rights seriously.

The left’s complaints make far more sense than Mr Cheney’s. Mr Obama is adjusting the Bush administration’s policies here and there and seeks to put them on a sounder legal footing. This recalibration is significant and wise, but it is by no means the entirely new approach that he led everybody to expect.

Mr Obama is in the right, in my view, but he owes his supporters an apology for misleading them. He also owes George W. Bush an apology for saying that the last administration’s thinking was an affront to US values, whereas his own policies would be entirely consonant with them. In office he has found that the issue is more complicated. If he was surprised, he should not have been.

The signature intellectual defect of the non-compromisers on each side of this debate is an inability to recognise conflicting ends. The Democratic party’s civil libertarians seem to believe that several medium-sized US cities would be a reasonable price to pay for insisting on ordinary criminal trials for terrorist suspects. There can be no trade-off between freedom and security, because the freedoms they prioritise trump everything. To many on the other side, no trampling on the liberty of ordinary citizens, no degree of cruelty to detainees, no outright illegality is too much to contemplate in the effort to stop terrorists. On this view, security trumps everything.

The “seem to believe” is a weasel-phrase, which would (to use his own dubious phrasing) “seem” to be nicely calculated so as to allow him to make very nasty insinuations and accusations without having to prove them, and the “several medium-sized US cities would be a reasonable price to pay for insisting on ordinary criminal trials for terrorist suspects” bit is a common-or-garden shameful and disgusting slur. If Crook has _any_ substantial evidence that ‘several medium sized cities’ have been put at risk, or are likely to be put at risk, because of civil libertarians’ tiresome insistence on trials and such, I invite him to produce it. And no, “hypothetical ticking bomb scenarios”:https://crookedtimber.org/2004/06/18/by-the-power-of-stipulation-i-have-the-power/ don’t do it, thank you very much.

The underlying claim of this shoddy exercise, such as it is, has three parts. First, that the people who are insisting on civil liberties in the GWOT are wild-eyed and extremist zealots, fundamentally similar in kind to the members of the lock-em-up-and-torture-em-to-death crowd on the other side. Second, that a difficult balance has to be struck between civil liberties for terrorists on the one hand and the need to avoid the destruction of medium-sized American cities on the other. Third, that the only people capable of making the necessary complex choices are sceptical moderates like Clive Crook who realise, as others don’t, that differing ends are incompatible, there are unavoidable trade-offs in life &c&c. In its fully fledged form, this might be described, after the example of Isaiah Berlin, as High Table Liberalism – that anguished and serious engagement with the difficulties of political choice in a world of irreconcilable and competing values which occurs somewhere between the end of the main course and the serving of the port and Stilton. But it reminds me even more of a radio comedy sketch I remember from my youth in Ireland, where a punter representing the Plain People of Ireland and a nun are discussing how best to deal with football hooligans. The punter says that they’re a pack of bastards, and the only solution is to chop off their goolies. The nun says no, we need to think too of the principles of charity and forgiveness, of Christian love etc – and the only solution is to chop off their goolies. Clive Crook is taking the part of the nun here.

Bryan Caplan responds to the data on US and EU-15 unemployment by offering a bet.

The average European unemployment rate for 2009-2018 (i.e., the next decade) will be at least 1 percentage point higher than U.S. unemployment rate. The bet will be resolved when Eurostat releases its final numbers for 2018.

Betting is usually unwise, but nonetheless I’m willing to take Bryan on, with one amendment. I will take the bet provided that people in prison are counted as unemployed. By my estimate, that raises the US rate by about 1.5 percentage points and the the EU-15 rate by about 0.2 percentage points. That is, assuming current imprisonment rates remain unchanged, the bet is that the Eurostat measure of unemployment (which excludes prisoners) should be no more than 2.3 percentage points higher in the EU-15 than in the US.
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According to the latest Eurostat data*, the unemployment rate in the US was equal to that in the EU-15 in March, and is now likely to be higher. Writing in the NY Times, Floyd Norris refers to the conventional wisdom that flexibility inherent in the American system — it is easier to both hire and fire workers than in many European countries implies that unemployment should be lower (at any given point in the business cycle) in the US than in Europe.

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Standard & Poors have issued a Very Serious Warning to the UK, with regard to its AAA credit rating. I reach into the archives and pull out John’s excellent article on the general subject.

Here’s the link. (This is, obviously, a follow-up to this post.)

“Groklaw”:http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20090518204959409 points out some interesting characteristics of the Terms of Service for Wolfram Alpha:

As Wolfram|Alpha is an authoritative source of information, maintaining the integrity of its data and the computations we do with that data is vital to the success of our project. … f you make results from Wolfram|Alpha available to anyone else, or incorporate those results into your own documents or presentations, you must include attribution indicating that the results and/or the presentation of the results came from Wolfram|Alpha. Some Wolfram|Alpha results include copyright statements or attributions linking the results to us or to third-party data providers, and you may not remove or obscure those attributions or copyright statements. Whenever possible, such attribution should take the form of a link to Wolfram|Alpha, either to the front page of the website or, better yet, to the specific query that generated the results you used. … Failure to properly attribute results from Wolfram|Alpha is not only a violation of these terms, but may also constitute academic plagiarism or a violation of copyright law. Attribution is something we expect you to give us in exchange for us having provided you with a high-quality free service. The specific images, such as plots, typeset formulas, and tables, as well as the general page layouts, are all copyrighted by Wolfram|Alpha at the time Wolfram|Alpha generates them.

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A colleague (in Philosophy) just sent me this interview with Michele Lamont about How Professors Think (which just arrived in my mailbox but I still haven’t read). The book is based on interviews of academics who serve on funding panels, and teases out the differences between several disciplines in how they think of their standards and apply them, among other things.

It’s all worth reading. I was particularly struck by this:

Philosophy is a problem discipline, and it’s defined as such by program officers. Philosophers do not believe that nonphilosophers are qualified to evaluate their work. Perhaps that comes out of the dominance of analytic philosophy, with its stress on logic and rigor. Philosophers think their discipline is more demanding than other fields. Even its practitioners define the discipline as contentious. They don’t see that as a problem; argument and dispute are the discipline’s defining characteristics.

All that conflict makes it difficult to get consensus on the value of a philosophy proposal — or to convince people from other disciplines of its merits. The panels I studied are multidisciplinary. Nonphilosophers are often frustrated with the philosophers. They often discounted what philosophers had to say as misplaced intellectual superiority.

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Around four years ago, there was some controversy about Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs, and Steel (and, I gather, a PBS documentary based on the book). Various bloggers at savageminds.org – a group anthropology blog – for example, here and here and elsewhere – attacked Diamond for various reasons, up to and including calling him racist. Brad DeLong replied by accusing the critics of being “positively green with envy at Jared Diamond’s ability to make interesting arguments in a striking and comprehensible way, and also remarkably incompetent at critique.” Henry discussed the flap here, here, and here, writing: “I strongly suspect that the ‘Diamond=racist’ claim is a more-or-less pure exercise in boundary maintenance – I certainly haven’t seen any substantial counter-evidence to date. Which isn’t to say that there isn’t a real, substantive argument to be had between different ways of knowing, or that there aren’t advantages to anthropological approaches which can’t be captured in a big, sweeping structuralist account like Diamond’s.” And he linked to Tim Burke, who here and here offered a critique of Diamond that was more – shall we say – nuanced (and interesting!) than the one at savageminds.org.

Now there’s a new controversy. About a year ago, Diamond published an article in the New Yorker called “Vengeance Is Ours.” Abstract is here – full text available to subscribers only (I think) from that link.
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As governments and the WHO wrestle with the decision on whether to divert resources from the production of seasonal flu vaccines to develop a vaccine against H1NI (swine) flu, I thought I’d repost this piece from 2005, suggesting an expansion of vaccination against seasonal flu, in part to expand production capacity to prepare for problems like this.

Thinking a little more, and with the idea of global public goods in mind, it seems obviously in the enlightened self-interest of developed countries to go beyond domestic vaccination programs and contribute both vaccine supplies and organisational resources to encourage routine vaccination in poor countries, as well as ensuring a further expansion of production capacity.

The same goes, I think, for more extensive use of antivirals like Tamiflu, which apparently have the nice property that the flu virus does not develop resistance to them.

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I prevaricated. [Update 1] Do you congratulate someone who has avoided the limelight? Or do you risk providing it? In the end, if he didn’t want it, he should have avoided it more successfully. Anyway, many happy returns to him.

[Update 1] JQ says I vacillated. He’s right.

Via “P.Z.”:http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2009/05/chest_bursters.php (but put under the fold so as to protect the delicate sensibilities of CT’s readership).
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