Most long-lived dictatorships have at least some positive achievements, and, the world being what it is, most dictators have some unattractive enemies. These facts have generated a couple of marathon threads here, following Chris post’ on Castro and mine on Suharto** , not to mention vast numbers on Saddam. Then there’s Algeria and Pakistan, where dictatorial governments have had plenty of fans.
What are the implications of these facts, both for the policies we should support and for the moral judgements we should offer? I have a couple of fairly obvious points to make about policy, and some less clear thoughts about moral judgements.
My GWU law school colleague Dan Solove has persuaded Yale University Press to let him put his new book, _The Future of Reputation_ “online under a non-commercial CC license”:http://www.concurringopinions.com/archives/2008/02/the_future_of_r_3.html. Good stuff: I hope to be reviewing the book here at CT one of these days soon as well as John McGowan’s _ American Liberalism: An Interpretation for Our Time_ (which I am half way through – it’s very good) and a fantasy blockbuster that Matt Lister has sent me, but tenure stuff has seriously cut into my writing-longish-essays time (normal service will be resumed shortly).
Pepin books has a forthcoming title, Encyclopedia of Ornament [amazon]. Which, frankly, is just the sort of thing I might buy. Pepin books – all those Agile Rabbit titles, maybe you’ve seen them – are great, if you like that sort of thing.
But, as I am very prepared to notice, that cover is just plate 17 of Haeckel’s Kunstformen der Natur, with the title on top. I wonder whether this is some sort of joke. Maybe, since the book isn’t out until June, they decided to have some fun, putting a dummy graphic up. It is pretty funny to have a bunch of ornamental-looking things, none of which are actually ornaments, most of which are carnivorous colony life-forms.
Belle, “at her and John’s other place”:http://examinedlife.typepad.com/johnbelle/2008/02/nasty.html, describes the argument of a quite startlingly horrendous post at NRO’s _The Corner._
The truly beautiful thing about this is that it incoherently wavers between two poles of repulsive slander: is it Communist Negroes having sex with our white women? Or are Communist Jewesses subverting black Americans who, patriotic though modestly ill-treated, would have been able to resist had the party not offered them the tempting fruits of miscegenation?
Unfortunately, I imagine that this is only the start …
I haven’t looked yet, but I’ve no doubt that there’ll be lots of posts in the blogosphere saying “good riddance” to Fidel Castro (especially from “left” US bloggers like Brad DeLong who never miss the chance to distance themselves). And, of course, Castro ran a dictatorship that has, since 1959, committed its fair share of crimes, repressions, denials of democratic rights etc. Still, I’m reminded of A.J.P. Taylor writing somewhere or other (reference please, dear readers?) that what the capitalists and their lackeys really really hated about Soviet Russia was not its tyrannical nature but the fact that there was a whole chunk of the earth’s surface where they were no longer able to operate. Ditto Cuba, for a much smaller chunk. So let’s hear it for universal literacy and decent standards of health care. Let’s hear it for the Cubans who help defeat the South Africans and their allies in Angola and thereby prepared the end of apartheid. Let’s hear it for the middle-aged Cuban construction workers who held off the US forces for a while on Grenada. Let’s hear it for Elian Gonzalez. Let’s hear it for 49 years of defiance in the face of the US blockade. Hasta la victoria siempre!
“Mark Schmitt”:http://www.prospect.org/csnc/blogs/tapped_archive?month=02&year=2008&base_name=the_pete_rose_of_politics#104506 on another of those principles that John McCain only “‘bends or breaks out of desperation and with distaste'”:http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/17/opinion/17kristof.html?hp.
We now have the exact language of John McCain’s “second loan,” and it is a legal masterpiece, albeit an ethical travesty … rather than pledge his existing certification for matching funds as collateral for the loan, which would bind him to the system and thus the spending limits, McCain carefully pledged to seek to re-enter the system later, and to use a non-existent future certification as collateral. And while the system is “voluntary,” McCain essentially traded away for cash his right to choose whether to participate in the system, and even his right to drop out of the presidential race, allowing the bank to force McCain “to remain an active candidate” in order to reapply for and qualify for funds. He was betting the spread (10 points) on his own primary performance!
I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say this is a promise to perpetuate a fraud on the American taxpayers: if he no longer intended to seek the presidency, he made a legally-binding promise to pretend to remain in the race just long enough to collect public money to repay the loan. … Is this illegal? Who knows. … What we know is that McCain found a way to use the public funds as an insurance policy: If he did poorly, he would use public funds to pay off his loans. If he did well, he would have the advantage of unlimited spending. There’s a reason no one’s ever done anything like this. It makes a travesty of the choice inherent in voluntary public financing, between public funds and unlimited spending.
The following in the comments thread of Kieran’s recent post reminds me of an issue I’ve wondered about in the past. The comment exchange:
Do people think it’s worth learning R if you already use STATA*?
Probably in the general sense that it’s worth learning new languages or applications so as not to get too rusty.
I’m not sure whether Kieran meant to refer to computer languages here only or foreign languages as well. I remember reading generals requirements in some graduate program (perhaps my own, I don’t recall) that equated speaking a foreign language with being proficient in a programming language. I’d always found that to be curious. While I believe both are helpful and important skills to have, they seem to be sufficiently different not to equate. Foreign languages (and time spent in other countries) allow us to get to know cultures, histories, peoples in a way that is very difficult to do through translation. Knowing a programming language lends itself to other potential benefits.** The two hardly seem interchangeable. I’m just curious to know what other people think about this.
[*] It’s actually Stata not STATA, I’m not sure why so many people spell it with all caps. Same goes for the Pew Internet & American Life Project. It’s Pew, not PEW.
[**] Yes, yes, I can think of ways in which knowing a programming language might also help one get to expand one’s horizons on those other dimensions as well and feel free to offer entertaining scenarios, but my overall question still stands.:)
My column in last week’s Australian Financial Review was about the spreading crisis in financial markets. In the same week, we saw the first indication* that the crisis was spreading to the market for credit derivatives. The possibility of a full-scale financial crisis arising from these markets, which financial market bears have been talking about for years. Whereas the losses from sub-prime loans and related derivatives markets are likely to be in the hundreds of billions, the nominal volume of outstanding contracts in the credit derivatives markets is in the tens of trillions, and interest rate swaps are in hundreds of trillions.
Such amounts cannot possibly be repaid by anybody, so a breakdown in these markets would imply either wholesale bankruptcy or a government rescue involving the abrogation of existing contracts on a scale unprecedented in history. Either way, as noted in the article, large classes of financial assets, and the associated financial markets, may simply disappear. Hundreds of trillions of dollars in derivative contracts may be unwound, reversing the explosion of asset and transaction volumes over the three decades since the Bretton Woods system of financial controls broke down in the 1970s. [click to continue…]
Australian politics this year has been dominated by the incoming Rudd Labor government’s commitment to offer a formal apology to indigenous Australians for discriminatory laws and actions of the past, most notably the policy of removing children from their families, with the ultimate aim of assimilating them into the white population. The policy, later referred to as creating the “Stolen Generation” was directed mainly at mixed-race children, since it was assumed that the remnant population still living in their traditional lands would “die out” within a couple of generations.
The previous Prime Minister, John Howard, had resolutely resisted an apology and in particular the word “Sorry” and the issue was one of the focal points of the culture wars that went on under his leadership. Continued resistance to an apology was the main reason the Liberals (= conservatives) passed over their most able remaining figure, Malcolm Turnbull, who supported an apology, in favour of the amiable but ineffectual Brendan Nelson, who indicated opposition, but was ultimately forced by public pressure to change his view.
The apology was the first business of the newly elected Parliament this week, and received the unanimous support of the House of Representatives, though given with obvious reluctance on the part of some Liberals. All of Australia’s previous Prime Ministers, except Howard, were present, and the TV coverage (at 9am) drew over a million viewers.
Apologies for various kinds of past national actions have been debated in quite a few countries in recent years. Perhaps because we’ve been arguing over the question for a decade or more, or perhaps just because I’ve followed it more closely, the Australian debate seems to me to have clarified some of the general issues.
Via Robert Farley“Scott Lemieux”:http://lefarkins.blogspot.com/2008/02/economics-writers-should-understand.html, I see that “noted economist”:http://marcambinder.theatlantic.com/archives/2007/08/dont_panic_megan_mcardle_is_he.php Megan McArdle “is arguing”:http://meganmcardle.theatlantic.com/archives/2008/02/tax_me_more_fund_raises_little.php that the fact that Virginians haven’t voluntarily contributed to a fund increasing government revenues implies that people don’t want higher taxes. [click to continue…]
“Moira Whelan”:http://www.democracyarsenal.org/2008/02/ohanlon-and-thi.html speculates on Mike O’Hanlon and ‘think tank sociology.’
Think tanks in DC are traditionally known as refugee camps for the out-of-office team of foreign policy wonks. There’s an expected turn over when new administrations come on as each team goes about grabbing “the best and the brightest” to fill their ranks. O’Hanlon has by now gotten the message that he’s burned his bridges with his Democratic friends. Those that like him personally even agree that he’s radioactive right now thanks to his avid support of Bush’s war strategy. So what’s a wonk to do? … one option is pre-positioning yourself for the future. By getting out there and going after the leading Democrats—people that some of his closest colleagues are actively supporting—is he lining himself up to say that he was critiquing the next Administration before it was cool? That would be worth it, because as I’ve mentioned before, there are three forms of currency in the think tank world that make you a valuable player: bringing in money, getting press, and getting called to testify. This strategy could certainly pay off in those categories over the next few months.
The wacky world of software licensing visits my inbox:
The newest version of SPSS cannot leave the country according to our current licensing agreement and US Export laws. Additionally, graduate students are not legally allowed to work on laptops (regardless of ownership) that utilizes the university site license. As a result, we are imposing a hiatus on SPSS installations on laptops and on any system that will leave the country until this can be resolved. Anyone who is leaving the country with a UA laptop, please contact us to remove the software before you leave to ensure software licensing and export conditions are met.
They’re trying to fix this absurd state of affairs, but the Contracting Office apparently signed off on the original site-license agreement. If you’re using SPSS in the first place you need to reconsider your plan for your life, but still.
[amazon]. Which, frankly, is just the sort of thing I might buy. Pepin books – all those Agile Rabbit titles, maybe you’ve seen them – are great, if you like that sort of thing.