I was in Trier, Germany last week, famous for.. among other things, being the birth place of Marx.

I found the store filled with Marx merchandise amusing:

The “opium of the people” quote was only available on a magnet in German, not in English (other quotes were available in English), I’m assuming a conscious choice based on potential interest.

I couldn’t resist getting a copy of the poster that has the entire Communist Manifesto written on it with an image of Marx and Engels coming through from the text thanks to manipulation of the formatting.

I also got a postcard with a cartoon of Marx and the following quote: “Tut mir leid Jungs! War halt nur so ‘ne Idee for mir…”, which Babelfish completely butchers in its translation so I’ll try, but feel free to correct me: “Sorry kids! ‘Twas just an idea I had.”

Boarding a plane to Budapest later in the day added a twist to all this for me. While I can see friends and colleagues in the U.S. understanding why I would’ve picked up those items, I don’t think too many people in the town where I grew up would get why I’d want anything with Marx on my walls.

John Sides at _The Monkey Cage_ asks whether whites are more likely to support the death penalty when they think black people are being executed, and finds that the answer is yes.

In a 2001 survey conducted by Mark Peffley and John Hurwitz, a random subset of whites was asked:

“Do you favor or oppose the death penalty for persons convicted of murder?”
Somewhat favor: 29%
Strongly favor: 36%

Another random subset of whites was asked:

“Some people say that the death penalty is unfair because most of the people who are executed are African-Americans. Do you favor or oppose the death penalty for persons convicted of murder?”
Somewhat favor: 25%
Strongly favor: 52%

That is a 12-point increase in overall support

See more “here”:http://www.themonkeycage.org/2007/12/are_whites_more_likely_to_supp.html (and original paper “here”:http://www.uky.edu/AS/PoliSci/Peffley/pdf/Peffley%20&%20Hurwitz%20Death%20Penalty%20ajps_293.pdf.

What a relief. December 1st show here.

On the surface of it, Romney shouldn’t have to give a Mormon speech any more than Obama should have to give a Muslim speech.

Link.

Perhaps comments will be better.

Almost immediately after being sworn in as Prime Minister, Kevin Rudd has signed the instrument of ratification of the Kyoto Protocol. Of course, it’s only a first step, but one that seemed well beyond us only a couple of years ago.

The formal ratification process will take 90 days, but the effect is that Australia can take part in the Bali conference as a full participant, leaving only one significant holdout – the Bush Administration in the United States.

A significant side benefit for Australia is that our attendance at Bali as a participant rather than a spoiler will help to cement the improvement in our often fraught relationship with Indonesia, evident since Rudd replaced Howard.

Isn’t it just enough that the _National Review Online_ seems to have published dodgy reporting on massive (and apparently entirely imaginary) Hezbollah invasions of chunks of Beirut, without the source of said reportage being the “co-author”:http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2007/12/01/in-the-tank-did-national_n_74954.html of _The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Understanding Intelligent Design_ ? ? Sweet.

So, for anyone who wants to know, “the Belgian crisis”:https://crookedtimber.org/2007/09/19/the-ingredients-of-the-belgian-cocktail/ has arrived at a new absolute low. The coalition negotiations have been broken off. The negotiating Flemish and Francophone parties could not agree on the core issue – whether or not to openly debate in the next years the shift of certain governmental responsibilities from the federal to the regional levels. And I really don’t know what solutions are still available now. Almost all parties seem to impose non-negotiable demands or taboos that together make any coalition impossible. New elections? Not sure whether they would be constitutional – recall that the constitutional court has ruled that the electoral district Brussels-Halle-Vilvoorde is currently holding unconstitutional elections, and that problem has not been solved either. To be continued.

The NY Times says that Iraq is the third most corrupt country in the word after the failed states of Somalia and Myanmar (Burma). The article gives plenty of examples at all levels, but is striking in the way it represents US forces as dismayed, but largely helpless, onlookers.

It’s time, obviously, to dive into the memory hole, and point out that the looting that started the downward spiral was a matter of deliberate Coalition policy. As this report in the London Times stated in April 2003

The British view is that the sight of local youths dismantling the offices and barracks of a regime they used to fear shows they have confidence that Saddam Hussain’s henchmen will not be returning to these towns in southern Iraq.

One senior British officer said: “We believe this sends a powerful message that the old guard is truly finished.”

This report focuses on the British but the US and Australian governments were at least as culpable

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A rich post over at Scatterplot.

bq. I spent a lot of those years exhausted and angry. We continued to have only part-time child care. Some nights I put the children to bed crying because I knew they were better off crying alone in bed than interacting with an angry sleep-deprived mother. I was furious that I had to make constrained choices and could not have the life I wanted. When he was home, my spouse was “superdad,” who did a lot of the work and played a lot with the children, so there was a big hole when he was gone. He was aware of how much he did when he was around, but not of what it was like when he was not around. I wanted him to confront the consequences of the work-home choice he was making and feel just as bad as I did. In retrospect, I probably should have used more paid child care and household help, as the children would probably have been better off with a saner mother, but I did not want to concede defeat to the constraints in my life. I preferred feeling angry to adjusting.

I haven’t said “Read the whole thing” in a while. This one’s worth it.

Via Lindsey, I see that Christianity Today has an interesting interview with Philip Pullman; the extended interview is at Peter Chattaway’s blog here. Well worth reading. My favourite quote is the same as Lindsey’s (no doubt because I can identify with it pretty well, and it helps explain why I liked HDM so much; though my atheism is more of the low-CofE-veering-on-Methodism kind):

My answer to that would be that I was brought up in the Church of England, and whereas I’m an atheist, I’m certainly a Church of England atheist, and for the matter of that a 1662 Book of Common Prayer atheist. The Church of England is so deeply embedded in my personality and my way of thinking that to remove it would take a surgical operation so radical that I would probably not survive it.

This has been another episode of “what Cosma said”:http://cscs.umich.edu/~crshalizi/weblog/546.html

In my first post about this, I said that there were two possible interpretations of Saletan’s actions: that he didn’t know that the ideas he was spread were crap, or that he did, but spread them anyway to advance an agenda. Saying that the second interpretation was more charitable wasn’t _just_ a joke. Sadly, this partial _mea culpa_ supports the first interpretation, that of incompetence. To put it in “shorter William Saletan” form, what he is saying is: I am shocked — shocked! — to discover that the people who devote their careers to providing supposedly-scientific backing for racist ideas are, in fact, flaming racists. And he does seem to be shocked, though it is hard (as Yglesias says) to see why, _logically,_ he should strain out those gnats he displays for our horrified inspection while swallowing the camel of group inferiority (and telling his readers that camel is really great and the coming thing). This indicates a level of incompetence as a reporter and researcher that is really quite stunning …

But let me back up a minute to the bit about relying on “peer review and rebuttals to expose any relevant issue”. There are two problems here. One has to do with the fact that, as I said, it is really very easy to find the rebuttals showing that Rushton’s papers, in particular, are a tragic waste of precious trees and disk-space. For example, in the very same issue of the very same journal as the paper by Rushton and Jensen which was one of Saletan’s main sources, Richard Nisbett, one of the more important psychologists of our time, takes his turn banging his head against this particular wall. Or, again, if Saletan had been at all curious about the issue of head sizes, which seems to have impressed him so much, it would have taken about five minutes with Google Scholar to find a demonstration that this is crap. So I really have no idea what Saletan means when he claimed he relied on published rebuttals — did he think they would just crawl into his lap and sit there, meowing to be read? If I had to guess, I’d say that the most likely explanation of Saletan’s writings is that he spent a few minutes with a search engine looking for hits on racial differences in intelligence, took the first few blogs and papers he found that way as The Emerging Scientific Consensus, and then stopped. But detailed inquiry into just _how_ he managed to screw up so badly seems unprofitable.

This Atlantic Monthly “piece”:http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/195711/sex-college/ from 1957 on sex and the college girl is quite entertaining, in the ways that you might expect it to be entertaining. My favorite paragraph:

Even more complicated to deal with is the intellectual-amoral type of man, who has affairs as a matter of course and doesn’t (or says he doesn’t) think less of a girl for sleeping with him. He is full of highly complicated arguments on the subject, which have to do with empiricism, epicureanism, live today, for tomorrow will bring the mushroom cloud, learning about life, and the dangers of self-repression, all of which are whipped out with frightening speed and conviction while he is undoing the third button on his girl’s blouse.

Political events in Australia have been moving so fast, no one has really caught up. A week ago, Labor looked very likely to win the election (held last Saturday) and there seemed a good chance that Liberal (= pro-business right) Prime Minister John Howard would lose his own seat. Those things duly happened, and that seemed to be about as much as we could expect or hope for. Instead, there has been a meltdown of spectacular proportions on the losing side.

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Dennis Perrin, who I’ve just realised is the same bloke as the Dennis Perrin I used to have really nasty flamewars with on a mailing list five years ago, has a post up which, among other things, mentions a bumper sticker he recently saw which read:

“As Hillary, Nancy and Jennifer Rise In Stature, They Give New Meaning To The Phrase Ho Ho Ho!”

Well it got me thinking. Quite a number of points, below. I tried, but failed, to keep the footnotes under control this time.
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