From chapter 6 of E.M Forster’s _Howard’s End_ (1910):

“Evening, Mr. Bast.”

“Good-evening, Mr. Bast.”

Mario Loyola is quickly emerging as a hack to be reckoned with at The Corner. Here’s something that I find so wrong that I fear I must have completely misunderstood him:

I asked one of Michael’s guests at the AEI event whether anyone in Lebanon talks about the crimes Hezbollah committed against the laws of Lebanon. His response (this was a Lebanese moderate) really brought home for me the vast gulf in political consciousness between the Islamic World and the West. He said, in essence, that if we resolve the issue of the Sebbah Farms, then Hezbollah will not have an excuse to continue armed resistance, because of course everyone has a fundamental right to resist the occupation of their land.

This response seemed to me so strange. Imagine that the Canadians went berserk and occupied Minnesota. Then imagine that a militia formed to “resist the occupation” but the Federal Government ordered it to disband. Would any American say that the right of resistance trumped obedience for the rule of law? No, of course not. Nothing trumps obedience for the rule of law in this country, not even religion.

What now? Seriously, what? Is Loyola one of these cut-rate Canadian or British pundits we keep getting saddled with? Because I am quite certain that every single damn person in America disagrees with him. A foreign country invades a US state and the quisling Feds tell the local militia to stand down? And Loyola thinks people would say, ‘oh well, rule of law and all that. Let’s go turn in our guns at the occupation depot’? This may be the single most wrong-headed thing I have ever read about politics on the internet, and I think we all know that’s saying a lot. Live free or die, baby. Live free or die.

Are you a teacher?
Yes.
What subject?
I am a sociologist.
Then you must be good at making friends.

On my stack of yet-unread 2006 politics books – Thomas Edsall’s Building Red America [amazon]. I cannot help but think events have somewhat overtaken it, though I still plan to read it. (I took particular satisfaction in that NY Times graphic – with the blue and the babyblue and the pink and the red. Red for anywhere that got painted red. And, of course, there was no need to open that can of paint. So it sat there, lonely in the legend.) What politics books do you say will survive the season, in terms of relevance?

I have a semi-scholarly interest in this question because I’m trying – I’ve been trying – to write about the relationship between liberalism, as it gets discussed in political philosophy; and liberalism, in the Democratic party sense. Obviously it is anything but a simple relationship, and I just indicated it in the most approximate fashion, but who has discussed it well? Who has written well about the point where the rubber of liberal political theory meets the road of liberal politics (if indeed there is such a point.) One problem with political philosophy is, of course, the perennial suspicion that its abstractions make it be … well, not about anything. (I don’t really mean it. You know what I mean.) On the other hand, the books about partisan politics – typically journalistic – don’t have a long shelf-life. What books do a good job of splitting the difference in a happy way? Relevant, and they stay that way.

Our own Looking For A Fight – Is There A Republican War On Science? [amazon] is a prime example. Will it still matter in a year? Well, I’ll take this opportunity to report that we have so far sold a grand total of, like, 16 copies. And there were about 110 downloads of the free book. That’s sort of an interesting result. Not wonderful, not terrible. It’s a good sign that paper sales are more than 10% of total distribution, even with free PDF. It means people do value the paper. (More titles coming soon!) One rather curious thing that making the book has caused me to notice: on the Amazon page there are presently 14 new and used copies for sale from third party sellers, including some marked up to $26.79 (from someplace called Best Dictionaries). Amazon is selling it for $11. I’m used to sort of seeing that stuff down the page on any given Amazon page, but in this case I am reasonably certain those copies don’t actually exist. A few could be author copies or sold copies that were promptly resold. But presumably for the most part these sellers have just generated these offers in some automated fashion and marked up the price more than %100. If someone orders it, then they’ll buy a copy from Parlor and simply resell it. It’s like the old Calvin & Hobbes strip where Calvin is sitting at his lemonade stand, suspended between grim and glum. The sign says: lemonade $20. And there are little unsold cups, waiting. “I’ve just got to sell one.” An interesting business model. Of course, in a sense it’s perfectly rational. Find the idiot who doesn’t comparison shop. (Is there a person who always buys from Best Dictionaries?)

I’ve been using Adam Swift’s Political Philosophy: An Beginner’s Guide for Students and Politicians (UK) in my Political Philosophy course this semester, and, having now had several students thank me for assigning it, I should probably recommend it more widely. The book is written at an angle to my course. The course goes through the main ideas of various important contemporary theorists of justice: Rawls, Sen, Nozick, Milton Friedman (ok, he’s the odd-one-out, but my view is that nobody should leave college without reading chapters 1,2 and 6 of Capitalism and Freedom, and I abuse my position as a professor to do my bit), Kymlicka, Okin, Fraser, and G.A. Cohen. The book is more conceptual; it consists of chapters on Social Justice, Equality, Freedom, Community and (in the new, second, edition) Democracy, which go through various distinctions and problems in thinking about those concepts, and it only refers to the work of particular philosophers insofar as it is relevant to the problem at hand. The book also includes a lovely discussion of the division of labour between political philosophers on the one hand and political activists and politicians on the other, and offers a semi-sympathetic diagnosis of the reasons that politicians often seem to be such uncareful thinkers about matters of value. It really is a superb piece of writing, accessible to anyone with an interest in these matters, but somehow achieving the accessibility without compromising the complexity of the issues in question.

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Tyler Cowen launches another round in the long-running EU vs US productivity debate. As regards the productivity issues, I don’t have much to add to this piece from a couple of years ago.

But there’s one point on which Cowen lays a lot of stress in this post from the Sheri Berman seminar – the fact that Europe has low birthrates and therefore, on average, is likely to have lower output per person in the future. As he says, this is an issue on which I and CT commenters have been conspicuously silent.

Yet family life gets plenty of attention here, and it’s certainly an issue I take seriously. So why did I and others ignore this aspect of the argument?

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In many (most? all?) Universities, the research output of the staff is evaluated every couple of years (every 4 or 5 years, for example). This is also done at a more aggregate level, for example in country-wide Research Assessment Excercises. For such evaluations, an unavoidable question is: what determines quality, and how should we weigh publications of different quality levels? In order to simplify matters a little, let us just look at journal articles and not at books. One possibility is to make three categories of journals, A, B, and C, where A would give you double points compared with B, and B double of C. The difficult question then becomes: how should one decide which journals to classify in which group?
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Most humorous wikivandalism ever. (via Dave Moles.)

Perhaps one shouldn’t laugh at such things. It encourages bad behavior. For example, here’s vandalism more genuinely annoying and not creative or delightful in the least. Will Baude emails to inform that somehow Crescat Sententia lost their domain to some search engine optimization outfit. Which then offered to sell it back at an extravagant mark-up. Crescat Sententia has declined their offer and moved here. From org to net. Update bookmarks accordingly, and do not favor the old address with your custom, if possible. Apparently for a while the lovely SEO people were hosting a cache of an old page in the hopes of disguising what had happened. Naughty, naughty.

UPDATE: In defense of wikipedia be it noted that the vandalism only lived for 38 minutes before being reverted. Hmmm, there’s a good idea for a story. An eccentric treasure-hunter is sent off on a months-long quest for a lost tribe in South America, on the unfortunate evidential basis of a vandalized wikipedia page he read in the 12 minutes between when it was posted and reverted by the ever-watchful editors. Of course it turns out that, quite by coincidence, everything the vandalized page said was true. The vandal himself is somehow ensnared in the plot and ends up sacrificed to a giant snake.

UPDATE 2: It’s coming to me, as in a dream. It turns out wikipedia itself is an elaborate plot concocted by the Knights Templar, together with the greatest of their hashhashim enemies, one al-Whikid (!). To ‘hide their greatest treasures in plain sight’, they conspire to create wikipedia. During the Middle Ages it was maintained by monks on scrolls. A specific pattern of reversion edits constitutes … a map! So there is an esoteric as well as an exoteric wiki. Fortunately, Nicholas Cage stumbles on the aforementioned vandalized page. It contains a jpeg of a map to a tribe. The map is part of the true map, but the vandal was just using it as likely mash-up material. So the film will be like National Treasure meets Hackers meets The Da Vinci Code (‘don’t I know you?’). There will be a scene in which the true wiki is surreptitiously handed off in a USB thumb-drive shaped like Quark‘s head.

UPDATE 3: The vandal is played by Steve Buscemi. (Because he and Cage had chemistry in Con Air.)

UPDATE 4: And Ed Harris plays an earnest wikipedia command editor, thus reprising his stern, steady role in Apollo 13. When the Knights realize their plan has failed they attempt to sabotage the entire wiki, reverted every single page to stuff about Buffy the Vampire Slayer Firefly. In the wikipedia command room all the editors (buzz cuts, thin black ties, pocket protectors) are frantically scribbling their corrections to the erroneous Buffy Firefly posts on paper. Harris: “with all due respect, sir, I believe this will be our finest edit.”

UPDATE 5: Who do you think would win in a fight between Wikipedia and Aquaman?

I came across “The Cambridge Companion to Keynes”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1163114559/ref=nosim/kieranhealysw-20 in the bookshop yesterday and went to add it to my Amazon wishlist this morning. When I looked it up in the catalog I saw that it had a rating of only 2 stars and my first thought was: I bet _that_ guy is responsible! And I was right. A while ago I was poking around in the literature on Keynes and Post-Keynesianism and anytime I checked a book on Amazon there would be a review from “Michael E. Brady”:http://www.amazon.com/gp/pdp/profile/A1UI9T8WKJPZN5/ref=cm_cr_auth/002-9644667-3828001. Typically, it would be a long, desnely-written single paragraph of criticism, complete with page references to the literature and especially to Keynes’s works.

In fairness, his “complete list of Amazon reviews”:http://www.amazon.com/gp/cdp/member-reviews/A1UI9T8WKJPZN5/002-9644667-3828001?ie=UTF8&display=public&page=3 (333 of them at current count) shows he is perfectly capable of writing a generous review. But he does have a couple of bees in his bonnet. “He”:http://www.amazon.com/gp/product//B0006C2TOW/ref=cm_aya_asin.title/002-9644667-3828001 “doesn’t”:http://www.amazon.com/gp/product//1858986532/ref=cm_aya_asin.title/002-9644667-3828001 “like”:http://www.amazon.com/gp/product//0802022960/ref=cm_aya_asin.title/002-9644667-3828001 people who Get Keynes’ Macroeconomics Wrong at all. Even beyond the macro stuff, however, he gets very annoyed at critics of Keynes’ “Treatise on Probability”:http://www.amazon.com/gp/product//1596055308/ref=cm_aya_asin.title/002-9644667-3828001, whom he sees as slavishly following the “allegedly mistaken”:http://www.amazon.com/gp/product//0199279551/ref=cm_aya_asin.title/002-9644667-3828001 (and ad hominem) views of Frank Ramsey. In a way, Brady’s own reviews on this topic can be read as an effort to undo the effects of what “he clearly thinks”:http://www.amazon.com/gp/product//9812384081/ref=cm_aya_asin.title/002-9644667-3828001 of as the worst book reviews of all time, namely Ramsey’s 1922 and 1926 comments on Keynes’ _Treatise_, whose malign effects have propagated down through the literature. A true believer. Here is “his own book”:http://www.amazon.com/Essays-Keynes-Michael-Emmett-Brady/dp/141344959X on Keynes.

Though you can sometimes get the same effect by neurotically pressing “refresh” on Soccernet or similar, I know all about “this phenomenon”:http://www.wsc.co.uk/articles/229cfax.html :

bq. Everyone who watches football on Ceefax will have a favourite text moment, even if it’s just the thrill of seeing the screen refresh to reveal, with great dramatic timing, that in fact it’s still 0-0 and you’re staring intently at a black rectangle with some numbers on it. Occasionally I’ve watched the last 20 minutes of a cup tie, or sat through a penalty shoot-out. Sad, perhaps, but surprisingly engrossing. It’s not just football, either. With my four housemates I watched the last 200 runs of Brian Lara’s record-breaking 501 not out for Warwickshire in 1994 on Ceefax. And it was great.

Apparently, Ceefax and Teletext will be phased out from 2008. Life will not be the same.

Ok, so I’m genuinely mystified. The (largely British based) “decent left” seems to “have”:http://hurryupharry.bloghouse.net/archives/2006/11/08/election_observations.php “been”:http://normblog.typepad.com/normblog/2006/11/not_kinky_in_te.html supporting Kinky Friedman for Governor of Texas. As far as I can see, the main reason these advocates of being “morally serious” in politics backed him was that he is a Jewish country singer. His platform seems mainly to have consisted of getting tough on illegal immigration – taking steps to “stem the tide of illegal immigrants penetrating our border” – and moaning about political correctness “gone mad”. Pat Buchanan-lite, if anything. Commenters who can see the positives are invited to enlighten me.

A Fistful of Euros has re-launched with a snazzy, more interactive design and the promise of podcasts. Fistful is always worth a read for its insightful coverage of EU issues, but this week has an interesting take on the French ‘non’ to an expansion of NATO’s role into ‘fighting terrorism’, aka bringing the Echelon countries into a formal cooperation. Worth a read.

A couple of questions, one substantive and one rhetorical

1. What share of the aggregate popular vote did the two major parties receive in the US House elections ?

2. Why isn’t this reported anywhere (at least anywhere I can see) ?

As regards 2, I know that the aggregate popular vote doesn’t determine anything, but that’s true in all constituency systems and for indirect elections like the US Presidential elections, and the popular vote is generally reported in these cases. Also, I know there were some uncontested seats, but there are usually ways to adjust for this kind of problem.

Update Andrew Gelman writes:

Regarding your blog question on votes, you might be interested in our post-election summary here:

The short story is that the Democrats did much better in 2006 (56% of the average district vote) than the Republicans did in 1994 (when they only received 51.3%). In terms of national voting, the Democrats received much more of a mandate in 2006 than the Republicans did twelve years earlier. Our graph is helpful too, I think, both in showing this pattern and putting it into a longer historical context.

I’ve seen a range of estimates of the Democrats’ share of the two-party vote, from 53 to 57, but I’ve generally been impressed with Gelman and his cobloggers, so I’ll take this as the best estimate.

I still wonder that US national media don’t care about this. Even the exit polls reported by the NYT, which had all sorts of breakdowns, didn’t make it easy to get the aggregate result.

Further update Andrew Gelman has written again to advise that a more detailed recalculation produces an estimate of 54.8 per cent.

“Calvin from the outside.”:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zA64g3pi97M It ain’t pretty.