“Eugene Volokh”:http://volokh.com/archives/archive_2007_05_27-2007_06_02.shtml#1180464590 gives the nod to Glenn Reynolds for a story about how Muslims are likely to respond in a “worrying” way if Ayaan Hirsi Ali speaks in Australia.

A tip: When you warn that your religious community will respond to critical speech in a “worrying” way, it is that response — and your use of that response as an attempt to deter such speech — that has the most potential to incite hostility. Oddly enough, citizens of a free country are often hostile (sometimes even to the point of hatred) to ideologies that demand suppression of critical religious views. And if your view is that Islam is a religion of peace, and that the overwhelming majority of Muslims don’t support religious violence, then condemn the (by hypothesis) small and unrepresentative segment of the community that is likely to act violently rather than using the “reaction from the community” as a threat in your political advocacy.

“Glenn Reynolds himself”:http://www.instapundit.com/archives/015626.php a couple of years ago on the American press and Iraq:

Freedom of the press, as it exists today (and didn’t exist, really, until the 1960s) is unlikely to survive if a majority — or even a large and angry minority — of Americans comes to conclude that the press is untrustworthy and unpatriotic. How far are we from that point?

See also his more recent “claim”:http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/archives/individual/2006_03/008351.php that “The press had better hope we win this war, because if we don’t, a lot of people will blame the media.” It seems to me that both statements invoke the same kind of implied threat as Eugene’s Muslim spokesperson: if you don’t say what I like, then other elements of the community are going to punish you for it (I’ll stand on the sidelines and sadly deplore what they do, but don’t try to tell me that you weren’t asking for it). I’d very much like to believe Eugene’s claim that the citizens of a free society are likely to be hostile to those who want to suppress critical views. But I imagine that this claim would be rather more persuasive if Eugene weren’t himself drawing on someone who has made implied threats about what will happen to the journalists rooting for America’s defeat unless they get on-side with the righteous American patriots.

On the whole, ethnic stuff in English churches tends to consist of displays celebrating multiculturalism and interfaith understanding etc. So it was with some surprise that, when visiting Lichfield’s magnificent medieval cathedral I stumbled on this war memorial in the south transept. This in-your-face bit of Africa dates from just after the “Anglo-Zulu War of 1879”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anglo-Zulu_War (think Rorke’s Drift, think Michael Caine) and is just a teeny bit incongruous amidst the gothic widows and vaulted ceilings.

The whole Cathedral is magnificent by the way — there are other photos in my Flickr stream — and this isn’t the only cultural surprise. A memorial to Erasmus Darwin has the words:

“His speculations were directed towards problems which were afterwards more successfully solved by his Grandson, Charles Darwin, an inheritor of many of his characteristics.”

This post has perhaps the single most unriveting title that a Crooked Timber post has _ever_ had (although there are arguably some other “close contenders”:http://maxspeak.org/mt/archives/002361.html). But it’s motivated by some real annoyance. I’ve been dealing with a major project which has moved from one publishing venue to another, and am now checking to make sure that all the authors have switched over to the new bibliographical format, with brackets in the right places, journal volume number but not issue number, and all of the rest of that nonsense Which made me think about the considerable transaction costs that this involves for authors of academic articles and books. Most publications and presses in the social sciences have their unique house style, which one has to conform to in order to get something published.

You can maybe tell a functionalist story about why there are some differences in bibliographical styles _between_ disciplines – lawyers likely do have good reason to have those long confusing footnotes bristling with references. Within disciplines however, the continuing differences between journals are perhaps in part the result of path dependence (which in this case is little more than a fancy term for laziness on the part of the publishers; they’ve always done it this way and see no reason to change), in part the result of prestigious journals trying to reduce the flow of submissions by making prospective authors pre-commit some effort to sprucing up the bibliography before they submit a piece, so that they are less likely to submit a bad article on the off-chance. But surely this can’t explain why less prestigious journals too have their own house styles – one would think that those journals towards the lower end of the prestige rankings have an incentive to make it as easy as possible for authors to submit pieces. So I suspect that there is something else going on which isn’t strictly rational – a perception on the part of editors/publishers that to be a ‘real’ journal, one has to have one’s own particular hoops to make authors jump through. But then I’m writing as someone who has never edited an academic journal, nor seen any of the internal politics around these decisions – if anyone out there has more facts, or indeed more fact-free speculations along the lines presented here, comment away.

Last weekend I read Prophet of Innovation, Thomas McGraw’s biography of Joseph Schumpeter. Maybe more on that later: I need to write something about it before I forget the content. Somewhere in there McGraw quotes Schumpeter’s line that “the budget is the skeleton of the state, stripped of all misleading ideologies.” With that in mind, here’s a kind of X-ray of California’s state budget, via “Chris Uggen”:http://chrisuggen.blogspot.com/2007/05/san-francisco-chronicle-offers-well.html.

This is from a “SF Chronicle”:http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2007/05/21/MNG4KPUKV51.DTL article on these trends, which look set to continue.

Over the past few years, sociologists “Bruce Western”:http://www.princeton.edu/~western and “Becky Pettit”:http://faculty.washington.edu/~bpettit/ have shown that incarceration has become a standard feature of the life-course for certain segments of society, especially young, unskilled black men. A “paper by Pettit and Western”:http://www.princeton.edu/~western/ASRv69n2p.pdf provides some estimates, notably the astonishing finding that in the cohort born between 1965 and 1969, thirty percent of black men without a college education — and _sixty_ percent of black men without a high school degree — had been incarcerated by 1999. Recent cohorts of black men “are more likely to have prison records (22.4 percent) than military records (17.4 percent) or bachelor’s degrees (12.5 percent).” Western develops the argument at greater length in a recent book, Punishment And Inequality in America, which you should really go and buy. As these shifts show up in the social patterning of individual biographies, so too will they be reflected in the Schumpeterian skeleton of the state budget.

A “couple”:http://www.talkingpointsmemo.com/archives/week_2007_05_27.php#014334 of “people”:http://matthewyglesias.theatlantic.com/archives/2007/05/cheney_on_geneva.php have commented on “these remarks”:http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2007/05/20070526-1.html, delivered by Dick Cheney to the graduating class at West Point. The piece is full of the usual doubletalk: “We’re fighting a war on terror because the enemy attacked us first, and hit us hard”, etc. Notice he didn’t _quite_ say, “We’re fighting a war in _Iraq_ because the enemy attacked us first,” but this is clearly what he means, because later on he says,

bq. The terrorists … [seek] to establish a totalitarian empire, a caliphate, with Baghdad as its capital. They view the world as a battlefield and they yearn to hit us again. And now they have chosen to make Iraq the central front in their war against civilization.

Nice choice, guys. The bit that’s gotten notice is this:

bq. As Army officers on duty in the war on terror, you will now face enemies who oppose and despise everything you know to be right, every notion of upright conduct and character, and every belief you consider worth fighting for and living for. Capture one of these killers, and he’ll be quick to demand the protections of the Geneva Convention and the Constitution of the United States. Yet when they wage attacks or take captives, their delicate sensibilities seem to fall away.

Yeah, you see, that sort of double standard is what makes them the bad guys. Josh Marshall Steve Benen asks whether it “is it too much to ask the Vice President to refer to the protections of the Geneva Convention and the Constitution of the United States as _good_ things? Perhaps protections that he’s proud of?”

The thing about Cheney’s rhetoric, though, is that the flow from the first to the second sentence strongly implies that he _does_ think of them as good things. From what he says, it’s clear that the U.S. constitution and Geneva Conventions are amongst those things the graduates “know to be right,” that and that they embody ideals of “upright conduct” and express those beliefs they “consider worth fighting for and living for.” It’s just that he doesn’t seem to have any notion that these ideals themselves express rules for how to defend one’s principles without betraying them.

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Not the sort of phrase you associate with Britain, “but this may change.”:http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/6695685.stm

Steven Pinker reviewing Natalie Angier’s _The Canon_:

bq. Though we live in an era of stunning scientific understanding, all too often the average educated person will have none of it. People who would sneer at the vulgarian who has never read Virginia Woolf will insouciantly boast of their ignorance of basic physics.

C.P. Snow, 1959:

bq. A good many times I have been present at gatherings of people who, by the standards of the traditional culture, are thought highly educated and who have with considerable gusto been expressing their incredulity at the illiteracy of scientists. Once or twice I have been provoked and have asked the company how many of them could describe the Second Law of Thermodynamics. The response was cold: it was also negative. Yet I was asking something which is about the scientific equivalent of: Have you read a work of Shakespeare’s? I now believe that if I had asked an even simpler question — such as, What do you mean by mass, or acceleration, which is the scientific equivalent of saying, Can you read?-not more than one in ten of the highly educated would have felt that I was speaking the same language. So the great edifice of modern physics goes up, and the majority of the cleverest people in the western world have about as much insight into it as their neolithic ancestors would have had.

I’ve been feeling a bit guilty about not blogging on the Irish election, but only a bit; unlike Maria, I’ve mostly lost touch with Irish politics. But for those who want to follow what’s happening minute to minute, “Irish Election”:http://www.irishelection.com/ is yer only man (and indeed its level of technological sophistication seems to be “impressing”:http://www.techpresident.com/node/364 the tech-politics folks in the US too).

Update: It looks as though Michael McDowell, who was Deputy Prime Minister (and more to the point, Maria’s and my uncle) has lost his seat and is “leaving public life”:http://www.rte.ie/news/2007/0525/election6.html. While we had very different political positions on a host of things (he’s strongly to the right), I’m very sorry about this, and not only because of my obvious personal affection for him – he brought a level of intellectual and argumentative clarity to a political culture that has all too often been based on ambiguity and obfuscation, and did more than anyone else to hold Sinn Fein’s feet to the fire when they looked likely to enter normal party politics on the nod and the wink.

In a follow-up to John’s post asserting that a minority of Americans are Christians, Lindsey (a young evangelical Christian) at Regardant les nuages elaborates the specifically Christian case against patriotism. Her understanding from the inside accords pretty much with mine (and John’s) from the outside, which is nice to know! An excerpt:

while I love the gifts that I’ve received in virtue of living here, I must realize that they are by no means my own. I am obligated to use them to benefit everyone, and everyone is not limited to my American neighbors. So while I may love this country, I don’t love it in the sense that I’m proud to be American instead of Canadian, French or Japanese. My love is merely an appreciation of the opportunities afforded to me by growing up here. The real problem with love of country is that, while innocent enough on its own, it is often accompanied by neglect of other countries. God did not call us to love and serve America alone. We are here to make an impact on the world. We are called to bring justice, peace, love, and kindness to all peoples.

Comment there (esp colleen, who might like what she finds).

In the most recent issue of the Journal of Religious Ethics, Eric Gregory (a Religion professor at Princeton) has an article (abstract here) discussing John Rawls’s senior undergraduate thesis. Gregory is properly cautious, pointing out: “Few people, I suspect, would welcome the thought of being held accountable to claims made in graduate seminar papers, let alone undergraduate theses.” True enough. And it’s worth remembering what Sam Freeman writes in the preface to Rawls’s Collected Papers: “Rawls has often said that he sees these papers as experimental works, opportunities to try out ideas that later may be developed, revised, or abandoned in his books. For this reason he has long been reluctant to permit the publication of his collected papers in book form.” One can only imagine what he would have thought about a published analysis of his undergraduate thesis.
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Things aren’t looking too good for the rainbow coalition of Fine Gael, Labour and possibly the Greens. Yesterday’s election had a very high turnout and Fianna Fail, the leading party in the most recent coalition has about 41% of the vote.

Right now, all indicators are that the next coalition will be led by Fianna Fail. But who will the junior party be? The Progressive Democrats, Labour (despite their pre-election pact with Fine Gael) or even Sinn Fein.

I’d hoped to get home to vote, but work didn’t permit. In Brussels, only Irish civil servants and their spouses are permitted to use a postal vote. I’ve no serious complaints. If our diaspora was allowed to run the show, the provos would have been in years ago.

By all accounts not any sort of couch potato, Ogged is “understandably distressed”:http://www.unfogged.com/archives/week_2007_05_20.html#006859 to look at the age-group records for his chosen event, the 50 meters freestyle, and find that he has to go all the way up to the 75-79 age group to find a time he would stand a chance of beating.

I have the related experience of having family members who are irritatingly athletic. For instance, my brother was on the Irish cross-country team and won a bunch of stuff in college. My sister-in-law ran the Chicago marathon in 2004 — her first — and finished seventeenth. Worst of all, two years before I was even born my uncle won a marathon in “Kaduna”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kaduna in a time of 2:15:03, then the fastest time ever run in Africa, and now more than thirty five years later still one of the the 20 fastest marathons ever run by any Irishman. (And also, “to my knowledge,”:http://www.arrs.net/AC_Mara.htm still the fastest marathon ever run in Nigeria.)

Elite athletes are different from you and me, and this is true even when, as in my case, you share a significant percentage of their genes. My sister-in-law once told me of the experience — common amongst top women athletes — of being out for a run and getting held up at a stop light. Some regular semi-fit guy out for his evening jog runs up alongside, and glances over. The light changes, and the guy takes off at an unsustainable speed because, obviously, it would be a violation of natural law for a woman to be able to run faster than a guy. Having gone through this one too many times, my sister-in-law adopted the strategy of just tucking in behind the guy and waiting to see what would happen. After a short while he realizes she’s behind him. He tries to go faster. He glances behind. She’s still there. A very short while later the guy, now beginning to boil in a self-made vat of lactic acid, starts making random turns down streets in a desperate effort to shake his pursuer. It doesn’t work. Eventually the guy grinds to a halt, she breezes by, he’s left gasping for air and maybe reflecting on his views on gender.

“Matt Yglesias”:http://matthewyglesias.theatlantic.com/archives/2007/05/visas_for_grads.php agrees for once with Airmiles Friedman.

It’s really baffling that we would give someone a visa to pursue high-level education in the United States and then do anything other than automatically give them a visa to work here. If we’re going to be stingy with anything, it should be with spots at our universities (in practice, there tend not to be Americans clamoring to get graduate schooled in technical disciplines), not spots in our labor force. Unlike the immigration of unskilled workers, immigration of highly skilled people is a totally uncomplicated balance of considerations. It’s good for the immigrant, it boosts the American economy as a whole, and instead of putting mild downward pressure on the wages of the least-fortunate native born people, the costs are borne by better-off Americans. It’s a total no-brainer.

Not so. It may be a total no-brainer for US economic wellbeing. It isn’t a no-brainer for the home country of the workers in question. Cue Dani Rodrik, who thinks that a “guest worker”:http://rodrik.typepad.com/dani_rodriks_weblog/2007/05/the_new_york_ti.html program would be ‘terrific,’ a point that he has developed at greater length in an earlier paper (PDF).

To ensure that labor mobility produces benefits for developing nations it is imperative that the regime be designed in a way that generates incentives for return to home countries.
While remittances can be an important source of income support for poor families, they are generally unable to spark and sustain long-term economic development. Designing contract labor schemes that are truly temporary is tricky, but it can be done.

This is the reason why, for example, people who come to the US to do advanced degrees with support from Fulbright scholarships (such as meself once upon a time) are obliged to return to their home countries (or, in the case of EU citizens, the EU) for a period of two years before they can apply for a proper work visa or permanent residency. Speaking from my personal experience, this can be a considerable pain in the ass, but it has an undeniable logic. The home country in question isn’t going to benefit very much from its most economically productive citizens (which category doesn’t include me; I was always likely to be a net drain on the Irish economy) going to the US to study, if they don’t ever come home. This point applies with _especial_ force to people coming over to study for advanced degrees in technical subjects. I think it’s possible to construct a slightly convoluted cosmopolitanish case against temporary worker programs (this would have to do with labour standards and the need for strong unions in the US to mitigate the global deregulatory impact of US preferences on the world economic regime; I may lay this out in a later post). But I don’t think it’s possible to construct one against the kinds of programs that Matt favors here. So if you are solely concerned with the economic benefit of the US, it’s indeed a no-brainer. If you’re worried about the rest of the world too (or instead), it’s anything but.

The Hollywood Reporter, uh, reports:

Haitian auteur Raoul Peck will direct “Karl Marx,” tracing the young adventures of the German philosopher and revolutionary, producer Jacques Bidou said Thursday.

The picture will cover the period 1830-1848, including Marx’s time in Paris before being expelled to Brussels and culminating with the publication of the Communist Manifesto. “Marx was considered a young genius at the time, but it was also a period marked by the birth of a great movement in thinking,” Bidou said.

The story also will encompass Marx’s love for his aristocratic wife Jenny von Westphalen, and his friendship with Friedrich Engels, with whom he co-authored the Manifesto.

No cast is yet attached, but Bidou said the principal characters will necessarily be young….

Well, yes, that is probably true, given that Marx was 12 years old in 1830.
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