Damnit, Crooked Timber should have some sort of nail-biting election material up. (Journalism is the second-hand on the clock of history – basest material, never runs true. What’s a blog without posts that will be obsolete in 6 hours?) Anyway, Hugh Hewitt has a post up with the title ‘exit polls more than 6 pts biased towards Dems‘. There isn’t any explanation. The whole post reads ‘and possibly worse’. I suppose the point could be: exit polls skew Dem, but how could you know – yet – that they skew 6 pts? I take it there is a bit of a comic over-reaching for the term ‘bias’ here. If the Dems win, the election was ‘biased’!

UPDATE: Scott Kaufman has a good, Onionesque report. “Emails obtained by the Associated Press indicate that top Republican officials now believe that the margin of victory will be too high to rig the results. “A four or five percent margin, we can handle,” said one GOP official. “But eight or higher? That’s asking the implausible.”

UPDATE the 2nd: Hewitt is reaching for a silver lining and coming up with … at least the Soviet Union has collapsed. (That’s worth cheering about.) So: three cheers!

I shan’t be voting tomorrow (out of respect for the law, and my non-fellow citizens), but Russell Arben Fox will be pulling the Democratic Party lever. Russell thinks of himself as a left conservative, by which he means he is left-wing on economic issues but conservative on so-called “social” issues. As always with Russell, its long, and all well worth reading. But here’s an excerpt concerning his local choice:

I’ve got a choice before me for Kansas House District 95. On the one hand, an experienced Democrat, Tom Sawyer (yes, that is his name)–an accountant, responsible legislator, predictable Democratic supporter. On the other hand, a nice old fellow put up by the Republicans by the name of Benny Boman. In some ways, I much prefer his direct and hard-line approaches to abortion and casinos in Kansas (basically, “stop abortion” and “no casinos”) over Sawyer’s Democratic boilerplate…yet Boman, if elected, would surely go to Topeka and be lined up with the same evolution-obsessed, tax-bashing Republican machine which has run the state government for decades. Sawyer, besides all the obvious good things he’ll do (like promote decent educational standards), will be part of a minority, and thus will have to be creative, and maybe that’ll even mean he’ll have to be open-minded.

Comment there.

“Glenn Reynolds”:http://www.instapundit.com/archives/009671.php on a speech by Chris Hedges in May 2003.

He recycles the looting lies, too. He sounds like a talk-radio caricature of a liberal, and he’s flat-out racist in his dismissal of Arab prospects for democratic self-government. “Iraq was a cesspool for the British. . . it will be a cesspool for us as well.” Yep. Racist.

“An approvingly blurbed quote”:http://instapundit.com/archives2/2006/11/post_21.php in November 2006 from one of Glenn’s anonymous email correspondents.

The ball is in the Iraqis’ court. We took away the obstacle to their freedom. If they choose to embrace death, corruption, incompetence, lethal religious mania, and stone-age tribalism, then at least we’ll finally know the limitations of the people in that part of the world. The experiment had to be made.

Glenn himself goes on to argue:

On the other hand, it’s also true that if democracy can’t work in Iraq, then we should probably adopt a “more rubble, less trouble” approach to other countries in the region that threaten us. If a comparatively wealthy and secular Arab country can’t make it as a democratic republic, then what hope is there for places that are less wealthy, or less secular?

Is there any reasonable way to read this other than Glenn Reynolds denouncing Glenn Reynolds as a ‘flat-out racist’? Inquiring minds would like to know.

[edited slightly for punchiness]

Education Week is currently hosting an open house; well worth visiting for anyone interested in ed policy issues in the US. It also gives me a chance to link directly to an essay of mine they published a few weeks ago, concerning the role of value considerations in evaluating educational reforms. The essay is a distillation of some of the points I made in a much longer talk I recently gave at the Spencer Foundation conference on Values and Evidence in School Reform, and I’m very interested in what other political and moral philosophers and applied ethicists (whom I’d like to encouage to do more work on education issues) think, especially about the analogy I make with the philosophy of health policy. When I talk to education scholars I often encounter a fair amount of resistance to the project of justifying objective moral values (as I do, with specific reference to education, in On Education). Some low-level variant of moral relativism or, perhaps to put it more fairly, a deep suspicion of moral realism, is quite entrenched among some education scholars, so my guess is there is a bit more resistance to the bigger project I suggest in the essay than philosophers would encounter in medical ethics and health policy.

It’s almost become a ritual; antipodean team plays high-contact sport against a northern team, takes out the best player in a tackle that might have killed him, creams northern team. In a manner reminiscent of the infamous Umaga/Meleamu spear tackle on Brian O’Driscoll during last year’s Lions tour, the Australian team playing the hybrid International Rules (Aussie/Gaelic football) are shrugging off an excessively violent tackle that put the future of the game in jeopardy.

On paper, the hybrid game is as euphemistically ‘physical’ as rugby, but in practice it’s gotten much more violent in the past few years. Last night’s tackle on Graham Geraghty was vicious by any standard, and makes me wonder; is there really a future in our lot continuing to play these games against sides that are bigger and demonstrably more brutal? I enjoy watching the tri nations rugby (Australia / New Zealand / South Africa) as much as the next person, but there’s no way I’d ever want someone I cared about to play against them.

Which of these claims has not been put forward by prominent global warming denialists ?

A Cycle analysis by a well-known astrologer proves that global temperatures will soon decline
B Data supporting global warming was faked by NASA along with the bogus moon landings
C There is no such thing as global average temperature, and therefore the whole idea is meaningless
D A voyage through the Arctic Circle by the Chinese fleet in 1421 proves that temperatures were much higher then

Answer over fold

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I was browsing in the campus bookshop over lunch and saw the “UK/Australia edition”:http://www.amazon.co.uk/Freakonomics-Economist-Explores-Hidden-Everything/dp/0141019018/ of “Freakonomics”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0061234001/ref=nosim/kieranhealysw-20 for sale — this is the recently released revised and expanded version. Looking to see what had changed, I was surprised and gratified to see that the new version incorporates much of Steven Levitt’s “response”:https://crookedtimber.org/2005/05/23/response/ to “our seminar on the first edition”:https://www.crookedtimber.org/category/levitt-seminar. The essay is prefaced by a generous comment from Steve to the effect that the CT seminar is the best available discussion of the book. Unfortunately the new edition doesn’t contain our essays (though it does give the seminar’s URL), and so we won’t be getting any royalties for our efforts. This shows why traditional models of publishing are doomed in the era of free online content.

In her 2002 Locke Lectures, Christine Korsgaard suggests readings of Plato and of Kant that try to make sense of the relationship between “inward justice” and “outward justice”. She asks, for example, “What is the relationship between maintaining unity in your soul, and doing things like telling the truth, keeping your promises, and respecting rights?” In the course of exploring the connection, she observes, “It’s hard to have a free press and lie to the world.” Her point is not limited to freedom of the press. Rather, she thinks that it is hard to have a democratic society that engages in free public deliberation if it lies to the world.

In its recent effort to prevent victims of “alternative interrogation methods” from telling even their own lawyers – let alone the general public – what they endured, the Bush administration seems to agree with Korsgaard.

Actually, they offered two defenses of the prohibition. First:

“Many terrorist operatives are specifically trained in counter-interrogation techniques,” says a declaration by Marilyn A. Dorn, an official at the National Clandestine Service, a part of the C.IA. “If specific alternative techniques were disclosed, it would permit terrorist organizations to adapt their training to counter the tactics that C.I.A. can employ in interrogations.”

It’s hard to take this seriously. What do they imagine they’ll do – practice holding their breath while being waterboarded dunked in water?

Here’s the other defense:

revealing the countries where the prisoners were held could undermine intelligence relationships with those governments. Such disclosures “would put our allies at risk of terrorist retaliation and betray relationships that are built on trust and are vital to our efforts against terrorism,” Ms. Dorn wrote.

The connection seems plausible – only the conclusion is absurd. We need to undermine the rule of law at home so that we can continue to lie to our allies. Not exactly what Korsgaard had in mind, I think. As a lawyer for several Guantanamo detainees observed, the prisoners “can’t even say what our government did to these guys to elicit the statements that are the basis for them being held. Kafka-esque doesn’t do it justice. This is ‘Alice in Wonderland.’”

The Washington Monthly has sort of a fun “Dewey Defeats Truman” gimmick: bunch of folks writing ‘Dems Win’, ‘Reps Hold On’ morning after wrap-ups. All fun and games aside, I have two really rather depressing thoughts about ‘what’s next’, one assuming the Dems win (go Dems!) One not. [click to continue…]

Ooh, this is cool. You can view a tag cloud of the most common words in U.S. presidential speeches, declarations and letters since 1776. Slide the arrows on the bar to move from the representation of one document to another. The bottom of the page has a detailed description of how the tag clouds were generated, it looks like a careful approach. What a neat idea. [thanks]

While we’re linking to blogs that focus on the economic aspects of life, here is a plug for Credit Slips, a group blog focusing on “all things about credit and bankruptcy”. Not only does this blog have a great list of contributors, but they also bring in some star guests.

This week, Viviana Zelizer from Princeton’s Sociology Department has been guest blogging on topics ranging from the importance of personal ties in economic transactions to economic exchange across generations in families, the gendered aspects of spending and the intersection of economic transactions and intimate relations. (The latter is also the topic of her most recent book on The Purchase of Intimacy). She is great at talking about these issues so I highly recommend checking out her posts.

Full disclosure, Viviana was one of my mentors in graduate school. However, I think that makes me particularly qualified to comment on how helpful her work is in understanding questions about how social relations and cultural context influence economic processes. Be sure not to miss out on this treat.

The catastrophe in Iraq has passed the point where there’s much useful to be said about military options, such as immediate withdrawal, phased withdrawal, stickign with the current failed policies or introducing a draft and ramping up the numbers. They’re all bad, and no one can say for sure which will be worse (for the record, I think withdrawal is inevitable and better sooner than later). But having launched this disastrous war on the basis of false premises the US and its allies are morally obliged to make reparations. It’s even possible that paid on an appropriate scale, reparations might do something to improve the situation.

Over the fold is a piece I wrote for the Australian Financial Review.

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I’ve received an email chivvying me into linking to the new “Economist blog”:http://www.economist.com/debate/freeexchange/ with the irresistible hook that now I “can attack [them] directly.” The new blog would appear to be at least in part a subdivision of “Megan McArdle industries”:http://www.janegalt.net/archives/009529.html. Consider it linked.

I’ve been involved with Imprints — once subtitled “A Journal of Analytical Socialism” but now “Egalitarian Theory and Practice” — for about ten years now. And a very friendly venture it is too with regular meetings up and down the UK, long sessions in the pub or in various Indian restaurants, and short but businesslike meetings. And, on the whole it has been a pretty successful project too. I don’t think there’s any other journal of its type with a similar bank of interviews with leading left thinkers. But as we smugly enjoyed our combination of conviviality and intellectual excitement we forgot to renew our web address which was poached from us within days of its lapsing. I sought Maria’s advice on the problem and contacted the friendly UK cyber-police at nominet. Perhaps we had a case against the poacher, perhaps not. Either way it would cost time and money to fight. So I went ahead and registered a new address www.imprintsjournal.com . So adjust your links … and subscribe if you don’t already (generous terms on back-issues available on request).