Scott Lemieux reads my Brooks-Burke-Oakeshott-Bush piece, and “raises me one“, by finding this “astonishing outpouring” from Brooks’ 2003 archive.

Oakeshott was epistemologically modest. … But the fog didn’t make Oakeshott timid. He believed we should cope with the complex reality around us by adventuring out into the world, by playfully confronting the surprises and the unpredictability of it all. … We can’t know how Oakeshott would have judged the decision to go to war in Iraq, but it is impossible not to see the warnings entailed in his writings. … I try to reply to these warnings. I concede that government should be limited, prudent and conservative, but only when there is something decent to conserve. Saddam sent Iraqi society spinning off so violently, prudence became imprudent. … Because of that legacy, we stink at social engineering. Our government couldn’t even come up with a plan for postwar Iraq — thank goodness, too, because any ”plan” hatched by technocrats in Washington would have been unfit for Iraqi reality. I tell Oakeshott that the Americans and Iraqis are now involved in an Oakeshottian enterprise. They are muddling through, devising shambolic, ad hoc solutions, and learning through bumbling experience. In the building of free societies, every day feels like a mess, but every year is a step forward.

I fold. This has to be one of the most deeply and offensively stupid op-ed columns I’ve ever read. I don’t know whether even at the time Brooks was able to convince himself that these claims were true; they read to me as a self-consciously weak effort to cover up for a disaster in the making. As Scott says,

The Iraq War is a case in which Burkean conservatism (or its Foucauldian variants) has a great deal of wisdom to offer, and it’s advice is “it was an extraordinarily stupid idea.” That Brooks tried to turn this theoretical line into a _defense_ of the war tells you what you need to about him.

In rugby’s Darwinian stroke,
Whole countries evolve into jokes:
You’ll see Wallabies cry,
Springboks that fly,
Gaels that suck — and Kiwis that choke.

Douglas Adams really wasn’t a good writer of books. Even the first entry in Hitchhiker’s Guide depends entirely on his ideas, not on his writing. He wrote for TV and radio, and for radio best. Fans will want, then, to listen to the BBC adaptation of Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency (with Harry Enfield in the lead). First episode should stay online until Tuesday night.

We’ve got a new MacBook, after our 7 year old iBook finally gave up the ghost. (I figure that’s a pretty good run for a portable computer.) I have gotten a baffling amount of frankly contradictory advice about battery conditioning from a number of sources. (Weirdly, the documentation says nothing about this. Doesn’t even tell you to charge it fully the first time.) The only thing everyone I’ve asked agrees on is charging fully the first time. But then some people say you are supposed to let it run down fully. Then charge it again fully. Others say it is bad to do that. You are supposed to make sure it retains a middling sort of charge and that the old ions are jostled regularly. Or whatever. Is there any actual knowledge in the world (I would settle for true belief, honestly) concerning how to maintain a mac battery for maximum power and life?

I forgot to link to my Bloggingheads with Paul Glastris of the _Washington Monthly_ a couple of days ago; one of the things that we talked about was our frustration with David Brooks’ _NYT_ columns. As Paul said, there’s a good Brooks who seems thoughtful and interesting, and a bad Brooks, who behaves, not to put too fine a point on it, like a party-line hack. To see this Jekyll-and-Hyde act in action, you can start with today's Brooks column on the failings of Republicanism.

Over the years, the voice of Burke has been submerged beneath the clamoring creeds. … Over the past six years, the Republican Party has championed the spread of democracy in the Middle East. But the temperamental conservative is suspicious of rapid reform … the Bush administration has operated on the assumption that if you change the political institutions in Iraq, the society will follow. But the Burkean conservative believes that society is an organism … and that successful government institutions grow gradually from each nation’s unique network of moral and social restraints. …To put it bluntly, over the past several years, the G.O.P. has made ideological choices that offend conservatism’s Burkean roots.

This is all _obviously true_ – and speaks to the real insights that certain kinds of conservatism have to offer. But before we get overly congratulatory, we should go back to the distant era of June 2005 to see what David Brooks was writing then.

Karl Rove has his theories about what separates liberals from conservatives and I have mine. Mine include the differences between Jeffrey Sachs and George Bush. … The Bush administration has nearly doubled foreign aid, but it will not spend the amounts Sachs wants. The Bush folks, at least when it comes to Africa policy, have learned from centuries of conservative teaching – from Burke to Oakeshott to Hayek – to be skeptical of Sachsian grand plans. Conservatives emphasize that it is a fatal conceit to think we can understand complex societies, or rescue them from above with technocratic planning. …The Bush folks, like most conservatives, tend to emphasize nonmaterial causes of poverty: corrupt governments, perverse incentives, institutions that crush freedom. Conservatives appreciate the crooked timber of humanity – that human beings are not simply organisms within systems, but have minds and inclinations of their own that usually defy planners.

and so on. As I noted then, the “at least when it comes to Africa policy” bit was quite weaselly given everything else that was going on at the time. Brooks-2005 gives an impression of George W. Bush and his administration as people who have learnt the lessons of conservative teaching, who are skeptical of grand plans etc, which can only be described as utterly misleading. It was as obvious then as it is now that the invasion of Iraq, the efforts to remake the Middle East from scratch etc were _not_ conservative in the Burkean sense. Yet Brooks passes over these grand initiatives in silence, telling us instead that what separates conservatives such as George W. Bush from liberals like Jeffrey Sachs is their attention to Burkean complexities. As Brooks-2007 tells us quite straightforwardly, the notion that George W. Bush and his administration are exemplars of Burkean prudence is an utter nonsense. I don’t think that there is any other reasonable explanation of Brooks’ reticence in 2005 (and indeed before and after) than a willingness to shut up for the cause. While it’s all _very nice_ that he’s coming out and saying these things now, it would obviously have been rather more _helpful_ if he had said it, say, back in 2004, when it might conceivably have helped make a difference.

Last week, I met Todd Gitlin in the studio at Inside Higher Ed’s world headquarters on K Street to record an interview about his new book, The Bulldozer and the Big Tent. (The “studio” is actually the publisher’s office, since it has the best acoustics. Podcasting has become a routine if not a regular thing for us; here’s the backlist. I’m still getting used to the format itself and trying to think about its potential as a way to supplement my column, since merely duplicating content of a written piece in audio (or vice versa) isn’t very interesting or appealing.

At TPM Cafe, Gitlin expresses what seems like surprised appreciation to his interviewer “for actually having read the book.” Given journalistic norms, that probably means I’ll never get a steady gig again, and certainly not in radio or TV.

But in consequence of this peculiar tendency, I have notes indicating that Henry’s netroots essay is quoted on page 184 and then again on page 185.

Marty Lederman on the revelations in today's NYT.

“[James] Comey told colleagues at the department that they would all be ‘ashamed’ when the world eventually learned of it.” [Would] that it were so. Between this and Jane Mayer’s explosive article in August about the CIA black sites, I am increasingly confident that when the history of the Bush Administration is written, this systematic violation of statutory and treaty-based law concerning fundamental war crimes and other horrific offenses will be seen as the blackest mark in our nation’s recent history — not only because of what was done, but because the programs were routinely sanctioned, on an ongoing basis, by numerous esteemed professionals — lawyers, doctors, psychologists and government officers — without whose approval such a systematized torture regime could not be sustained.

“Anmik,” commenting on Kieran’s post below writes:

But then, what about the very real, very reasonable impulse to softpedal book reviews, to write overly generous tenure evaluations, and on and on? I only ask because the whole idea of peer review, and the review process more broadly, has begun to feel a bit, how to say this, corrupt of late. I noted yesterday some very minor flap in which Chris Matthews, the political “journalist,” admitted that it’s hard to cover the people he sees at cocktail parties. The same is true for scholars, no? And blogs only compound the problem, I suppose.

This is a real problem, albeit not one of recent vintage; mutual backscratching is especially endemic in academic book reviews. But it isn’t one that is very easy to fix. Some months ago, I wrote a quite negative review of a book that seemed lazy to me; I thought it only fair to signal this to potential buyers. But precisely because there’s a kind of pooling equilibrium going on here I worried a bit about whether or not I was sending out _too_ negative a signal to readers and colleagues about the book’s quality. If everyone says nice things about everyone else’s books, then a negative review will likely be overinterpreted as saying that this book _really_ stinks to high heaven, its author should be denied tenure etc. In this case, it wasn’t a major issue, because the book was written by a seniorish figure, who presumably wouldn’t be damaged too much by an asst. prof’s evaluation of his work. However, I would worry if I were writing a review of a more junior person’s work, to try to be sure that whatever signal I was sending out wasn’t misinterpreted.

I suspect that this is even more of an issue in tenure review letters, where, I understand, negative comments will receive far more attention than positive ones on the assumption that their informational content is much higher. Given this, someone who wants to give an honest assessment that is critical but basically favorable is going to have to choose her words very carefully indeed so that she says only what she wants to say and isn’t interpreted as saying more. So the problem isn’t simply one of corruption – it’s also one of signalling conventions that are quite hard to overturn once they become established. Anonymous peer review is different in my experience – negative signals by and large don’t receive undue weight, because there aren’t any obvious pressures to converge on an equilibrium where we say nice things about each other even though we don’t mean them.

Dan Myers tells a story for all you academic bloggers:

Sometime within the past year, a certain person made some very snarky, I’d even say rude, comments on my blog. (I erased the comments, so don’t bother going to look for them). Shortly thereafter, I received a letter from this person’s department asking me for an external evaluation of the person’s work for tenure and promotion. … Did I take the opportunity to punish them for their misdeeds? Of course not. Did they know me well enough to know that I wouldn’t? They did not! My point–be nice, academics. Even if you can’t drum up the humanity to do it, use your own self-interest.

Tim Lambert has some good, clean fun with Mark Steyn’s strange notions about Hollywood hygiene. (via Yglesias.) But then I flip to the NY Times and read that the bidet is finally coming to the US:

Although Americans have long shied away from conventional bidets, which are common in other countries, and the newer bidet seats, at least two major companies, Kohler and Toto, expect the seat to overcome that resistance eventually.

Proving once again that you can’t spell commodity fetishism without the ‘commode’. This calls out for something – not as beat your head against the basin stupid as Steyn; a microtrendy David Brooks column. Something wise and telling about bidet liberals vs. flyover country, do-it-yourself sons of the soil; of left-coasters who like sipping lattes, hands free, while “a remote-controlled retractable wand that spouts oscillating jets of well-aimed aerated water and a dryer that emits warm air” do the necessary. Some sort of ceramic sequel to Bowling Alone: America’s Declining Social Capital. Something faintly superior, yet self-deprecatingly alarmist, possibly involving clever yet oddly meaningless puns on ‘day’.

Via John Gruber, here is a striking series of photographs of workers in toy factories in China. I wish I had seen them yesterday, because this morning I did a midterm review in my social theory course and, in quick succession, students asked me about Smith’s idea of the invisible hand and about Marx’s concept of commodity fetishism.

_Update_: More photos, from their originator, here.

[click to continue…]

Via Tyler Cowen, this IHE article covers the right orthodoxy vs. left heterodoxy debate in economics again, and seems to end up implying that it’s mostly happening in the heads of heterodox economists. For my money, that’s far too strong a conclusion – there is genuine evidence that economics training pushes grad students further to the right, weeds out radical ideas etc. It may indeed be true that heterodox types exaggerate the degree of uniformity among the orthodox, but that is a somewhat different argument. Be that as it may, I found the article’s extensive discussion of Daniel Klein’s “counter-insurgency” against leftwing economists to be pretty interesting. According to the article, Klein starts from the position that economics should be a classical liberal creed, and that “the burden of proof should be on those who wish to intervene in markets.” Fair enough if that’s yer ideological druthers. But then he argues that:

there is also a bias, perhaps unconscious, in the media: “Basically they’re social-democratic periodicals, and probably journalists, writing those articles talking almost exclusively … to people on the left.”

This is a … striking claim – there’s plenty of survey evidence (Jonathan Chait discusses this in his recent book) that journalists tend to have somewhat right-of-center views on economic issues. I doubt that Klein (whose bread-and-butter appears to be survey evidence on professionals’ attitudes) is unaware of this; the only conclusion that I can come to is that Klein believes that the vast majority of people in the US, including many people who would be considered to be on the right and indeed consider themselves to be so, are in fact social democrats. If only, says me.

Clarification: Daniel Klein says in comments below that he was specifically referring to the journalists who wrote the pieces for The Nation, In These Times, the NYT and the Atlantic. This is, to me, a considerably more defensible claim with respect to The Nation and ITT (I’m skeptical about the NYT being social democratic on economic issues and the Atlantic is a resolutely centrist publication) , and suggests that I simply didn’t understand what seemed to me to be a pretty odd statement.

Last weekend, I had a friend visiting who is a Washington-based journalist. She told me that Ayaan Hirsi Ali is the interesting new woman in town, who receives lots of attention for her outspoken views. I responded that I didn’t have the impression that the Dutch were sad that she left. Perhaps in the Netherlands people were a bit tired of hearing her views which never covered any shade of gray but were always rather black-white, provocative, and, at least in the opinion of some, unnecessarily insulting and divisive.

So what a surprise when the news came that Ayaan Hirsi Ali has returned to the Netherlands. Apparently the Dutch state is no longer willing to pay for her security in the US, which it has been doing since she moved to Washington. According to the Dutch newspapers, she is willing and planning to raise funds for her security in the US, but was not allowed to do this before she had a Green Card. That Green card she received a week ago, but this implied she only had one week’s time to raise the funds, before the Dutch funding of her security in the US ended. Now that she’s back on Dutch territory, the Dutch State is again protecting her, and as soon as she has raised enough funds, she wants to go back to the US.

According to the Dutch radio, she is not entitled to private protection by the US government when she is on US territory – with or without Green Card. So I was wondering…. since Hirsi Ali is a Resident Fellow of the American Enterprise Institute, can’t they pay for her security as part of her secondary employment conditions?

Charles Stross’s _Halting State_ (Powells, Amazon) should be on the shelves of yer local bookshop as of today; I thoroughly recommend it. It combines the intellectual fireworks of _Accelerando_ with a much less choppy plot and is a lot more fun to read – starting from a virtual bank raid by orcs and a dragon in a newly independent Scotland, and steadily getting more weirder and more interesting from there. It’s the first book I’ve seen that really begins to think through how distributed forms of collective action are likely to collide with more traditional kinds of state-based politics; the bit towards the end where you first figure out what is _really_ going on blew my mind.

Also very good, but a little more traditional is Paul McAuley’s SF thriller _Cowboy Angels_ (no US publisher but the import isn’t too expensive ). McAuley uses the many-worlds trope to think through US imperialism with a novel twist – a variety of alternative America’s located in different ‘sheaves’ that have split from each other since the 1920’s, one of which, the ‘Real’ America, has discovered how to build Turing Gates between sheaves, and is using them to introduce democracy by fair means or foul to the rest (our reality is referred to as the ‘Nixon sheaf,’ natch). While some of the spy-novel element is a little formulaic, the different Americas are well thought through and all feel real – they’re shot through with ambiguities rather than simply standing in for this or that political system. For some reason, the book didn’t find a US publisher a couple of years back when it was first on the market – this is a little surprising given its topicality (perhaps it was too politically awkward – my impression is that people who buy this kind of novel in the US tend (a) to be right of center and (b) not to enjoy having their priors challenged).