Two interesting pieces.

First, “Open Democracy”:http://www.opendemocracy.net/democracy-irandemocracy/jahanbegloo_3867.jsp on the release of Ramin Jahanbegloo from prison in Iran. I blogged about Jahangebloo a couple of months ago; he was finally let out, but gave an interview immediately afterwards “admitting” that foreign agents had attended his seminars, that his work could have been useful to attempts to overthrow the government in Iran etc. According to the article, the authorities threatened to confiscate his house and the house of his mother if he didn’t give an interview of this kind, supporting the authorities’ story to some extent (although notably not confessing to spying). Thanks to my friend Carl Caldwell for the link.

Second, this “piece”:http://chronicle.com/temp/email2.php?id=bgFVfxZxmvXc5pXhzpT9BTtMd2s4cHrC by David Glenn in the Chronicle on an academic who’s landed in some controversy because of her book which argues that the progressive movement’s reliance on paid canvassers is hurting it. The Fund for Public Interest Research, which is the organization described in her book, has sent a certified letter to the academic’s department, alleging that she didn’t protect the organization’s anonymity. It does sound as though the academic should have been more careful to protect the anonymity of the organization than she was (although it perhaps would have been impossible to do this properly), but it also sounds as though the Fund’s real beef with her isn’t that the book revealed who it was, but that it was vigorously critical of the organization. The Fund has a pretty dubious “track record”:http://www.inthesetimes.com/site/main/article/2787/ over issues such as allowing its staff to unionize. For more blogospheric discussion, see “here”:http://www.peterlevine.ws/mt/archives/000883.html, “here”:http://www.peterlevine.ws/mt/archives/000926.html, “here”:http://greg_bloom.mydd.com/story/2006/8/18/111159/225 and “here”:http://larvatusprodeo.net/2006/08/20/unionising-the-idealists/.

Well, now that it looks like Blair has gone, it’s a good time to look back on the performance of the model I made back in April to try and understand the dynamics of the resignation process. I chickened out of making any predictions more specific than “there is some basis for the nebulous feeling that the time has come” and “if he hangs on till September 2008 he will most likely stay on until the next election”, so I don’t think I can claim any bragging rights on the date of departure. However on the qualitative aspects, I think I can claim a decent success.

Recall that the model was based on a “marginal value of grovelling” function for backbench MPs. The idea was that grovelling to Tony might get you a ministerial prize from Tony, but might also get you on Gordon’s shit-list. So there was some time T at which it made more sense to grovel to Gordon rather than Tony, and when that time was reached, Tony would more or less immediately lose the support of the party and have to resign.

I think this fits the qualitiative facts quite well. Blair was holed below the waterline by two round-robin letters from backbench MPs and PPSs, who had been passed over for better jobs in the May reshuffle. My model assumed two possible reshuffles during the life of the Parliament and once Tony had carried out one of them, he had fewer prizes to give out, reducing the value of his grovel function. Allow that nothing happens over the holidays and the September coup can be seen as a fairly immediate reaction to the reshuffle.

But more importantly, the underlying representative agent assumption worked a treat. The final knife was placed by Tom Watson MP. He is a blogger, and thus it is possible to learn quite a lot about him by reading his blog. He has written about his reasons for doing what he did, but I am a long term reader of his blog (I used to enjoy asking questions about postal ballots in the Hodge Hill byelection to see how quickly they were deleted) and as such, I think I can say two things about him with confidence. First, he is a ferocious careerist, and second, right up until the moment he dropped “da bomb”, he was one of the most horrifically arse-kissing Blairites you could wish to meet; if he ever saw a horrific piece of New Labour crap he didn’t like, either he didn’t blog about it or I didn’t read it. In other words, precisely the representative agent of my model. Homo economicus is not aperfect assumption but you’d be surprised how many of them there are out there.

PS: Apologies to all the people I promised a copy of the spreadsheet to; the offer is still there.

PPPS[1]: I have posted a few puerile jokes on the subject on the Guardian website.

[1] There was a “PPS”, but he resigned in protest.

By chance, I had just finished rereading a famous speech by Ronald Reagan when I heard the news that President Bush had confirmed the existence of secret CIA prisons. Yesterday, while looking over it again, I heard the “Judge Advocates General”:http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/08/washington/08detain.html?hp&ex=1157774400&en=fa1da1053abb2a24&ei=5094&partner=homepage strongly resist the White House’s plan for military tribunals that would allow conviction based on secret evidence. When Reagan spoke in 1964 on behalf of Barry Goldwater, he presented TV viewers with a stark choice between those with the courage to make a principled stand for Freedom and Liberty, and those who would capitulate to the global threat of Communism for the sake of a quiet life. He didn’t pull any punches.

bq. Those who would trade our freedom for the soup kitchen of the welfare state have told us that they have a utopian solution of peace without victory. They call their policy ‘accommodation.’ … We cannot buy our security, our freedom from the threat of the bomb by committing and immorality so great as saying to a billion human beings now in slavery behind the Iron Curtain, ‘Give up your dreams of freedom because to save our own skin we are willing to make a deal with your slave masters.’ … Admittedly there is risk in any course we follow other than this, but every lesson in history tells us that the greater risk lies in appeasement, and this is the specter our well-meaning liberal friends refuse to face … When Nikita Khrushchev has told his people [that] we are retreating under the pressure of the cold war, and … our surrender will be voluntary because by that time we will have been weakened from within spiritually, morally, and economically. He believes this because from our side he has heard voices pleading for “peace at any price” or “better Red than dead” … Where then is the road to peace? You and I have the courage to say to our enemies, “There is a price we will not pay.” There is a point beyond which they will not advance! … You and I have a rendezvous with destiny. We will preserve for our children this, the last best hope of man on earth, or we will sentence them to take the last step into a thousand years of darkness.

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I’ve taken up both of Chris’s recent suggestions of non-genre fiction reading, and am glad of it. I suspect I liked On Beauty (a good deal in the UK) less than he did, but I still enjoyed it a good deal (like him I’ll avoid spoilers, and ask commenters to do the same, but warn potential readers that I don’t police comments very well). Discussion on his thread focused on Smith’s ear for dialogue. The book is set in a liberal arts college in or around Boston, but almost all the characters are displaced in some way, and part of what is going on is that most of the characters are putting on a face with most of their interlocutors. So whereas some of the dialogue does sound inauthentic, it reflects the in-authenticity of the characters in the situation. And I love some of the little details – a throwaway sentence about how hard the main male character (a British émigré) finds it to take American bills seriously is exactly right – after 20 years here I am still absurdly pleased to get hold of a 20 pound note, and in my head its worth way more than one of those absurd $50 bills. Two other things to add. First is that, like all campus novels, it makes university life and university politics sound so much more interesting than they really are. Maybe I’m oblivious to this, as well as everything else, but I just never get to hear about these great rivalries and affairs that people have with each other and with their students, or attend the meetings in which people are more than mildly irritated with each other. (This is a complaint about campus novels, not about university life, I hasten to add – I’d hate it if it were the way it is portrayed – or perhaps it is like that and I just wander around with my blinkers on). Second, although Chris says it is loosely based on Howard’s End, I was put constantly in mind of The History Man, whom Howard (the central character) resembles in more than name – and in ways that cannot be accidental. BTW if, like my colleague who has read every other academic novel around, you have somehow missed Bradbury, The History Man is peerless.

The Company You Keep (UK) is, as Chris says, brilliant, and I liked it more than On Beauty.

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A group of prominent American historians is calling on ABC not to broadcast The Path to 9/11. (For a quick reminder of how propaganda-rific it is, see Mark Grimsley’s recent item at Cliopatria. It quotes an endorsement by Michael Medved and provides some pertinent links.)

The list of signatories starts with Arthur Schlesinger — who, whatever else you may think of him, is pretty much the guy to have out in front on this sort of complaint, for rhetorical appeal to the center (rhetorical construct thought “the center” may be).

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We’ll be doing a Crooked Timber seminar around the end of next month on Sheri Berman’s new book on the past and future of social democracy in Europe (now available from “Powells”:http://www.powells.com/partner/29956/s?kw=Sheri%20Berman%20primacy%20politics and Amazon). The book itself is highly recommended, and should make for a fun and interesting discussion.

Tony Blair’s announcement that he will resign within a year, but that he won’t say when, is one of those absurdities that seem to be inevitable in politics, a variant on the Galbraith score. There doesn’t seem to be any satisfactory way of handling this kind of situation, since most leaders want to be seen to be making their own choice to leave, but few are willing make that choice until most of their followers already want them to go.

“Making Light”:http://www.nielsenhayden.com/makinglight/ points us to Wikipedia’s “Lamest Edit Wars”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Lamest_edit_wars which in turn refers to the “epic battle”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Irish_breakfast over what makes an Irish Breakfast an Irish Breakfast. It’s a lovely example of how Wikipedia should work. The bizarre and repulsive heresies of the fried kidneys and the baked beans are duly anathematized and dispatched into limbo. A blatantly political attempt to assimilate the meal that nourished our fathers under the rubric of the entirely inferior morning repast of the Hated Anglo-Saxon Oppressor is vigorously repelled. And a “harmonious consensus”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irish_breakfast finally prevails, which not only correctly identifies the proper constituent parts (sausages, rashers, eggs, mushrooms and black and white puddings), but contains much useful information (e.g. Iarnrod Eireann breakfasts, the great expense of) for the interested inquirer.

These are serious matters. When in Belfast, one of my uncles once spotted a colleague declining to partake of the Ulster Fry that was provided for breakfast, and instead ordering muesli – _with skim milk_. He knew at once that the man wasn’t to be trusted.

Most of us have seen the picture of Rumsfeld shaking hands with Saddam in the mid-1980s, but my recollections of the extent of Republican support for Saddam at that time have always been a bit cloudy.

This piece by Peter Galbraith, a former US ambassador to Croatia, gives chapter and verse.

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Over the weekend, Political Theory Daily Review linked to a recent essay on the Gang of Four. (The band, that is. Not the group in power in China thirty years ago this month, and in jail thirty years ago next month.) The title indicated it would treat the band’s work as Marxist cultural theory. Not in terms of, mind you, but as. Good call: The Gang’s lyrics were always very explicit about reification, class consciousness, and whatnot. No ex post facto Zizekian-epigone hijinks necessary, thank you very much. Makes its own gravy! A critic who understood that from the start might go far.

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Australia rarely attracts much international attention, which is probably a good thing. For the last week or so, things have changed, though not for in a good way. First, there was the Downer-Zombietime fiasco, and then the death of Steve Irwin. Now our (intentional scare quotes) “national newspaper”, the Murdoch-owned Australian, has received international publicity for a report on global warming that (along with an editorial and additional coverage) adds new errors to the denialist case on global warming, while recycling many of the old ones.

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Eric Umansky (via “Laura Rozen”:http://warandpiece.com/) has a great “article”:http://www.cjr.org/issues/2006/5/Umansky.asp in the CJR on how newspapers dealt with stories about torture and murder in Iraq. For example, this story about the _New York Times_.

Gall filed a story, on February 5, 2003, about the deaths of Dilawar and another detainee. It sat for a month, finally appearing two weeks before the U.S. invasion of Iraq. “I very rarely have to wait long for a story to run,” says Gall. “If it’s an investigation, occasionally as long as a week.” Gall’s story, it turns out, had been at the center of an editorial fight. Her piece was “the real deal. It referred to a homicide. Detainees had been killed in custody. I mean, you can’t get much clearer than that,” remembers Roger Cohen, then the Times’s foreign editor. “I pitched it, I don’t know, four times at page-one meetings, with increasing urgency and frustration. I laid awake at night over this story. And I don’t fully understand to this day what happened. It was a really scarring thing. My single greatest frustration as foreign editor was my inability to get that story on page one.”

Doug Frantz, then the Times’s investigative editor and now the managing editor of the Los Angeles Times, says Howell Raines, then the Times’s top editor, and his underlings “insisted that it was improbable; it was just hard to get their mind around. They told Roger to send Carlotta out for more reporting, which she did. Then Roger came back and pitched the story repeatedly. It’s very unusual for an editor to continue to push a story after the powers that be make it clear they’re not interested. Roger, to his credit, pushed.” (Howell Raines declined requests for comment.) “Compare Judy Miller’s WMD stories to Carlotta’s story,” says Frantz. “On a scale of one to ten, Carlotta’s story was nailed down to ten. And if it had run on the front page, it would have sent a strong signal not just to the Bush administration but to other news organizations.” Instead, the story ran on page fourteen under the headline “U.S.Military Investigating Death of Afghan in Custody.” (It later became clear that the investigation began only as a result of Gall’s digging.)

I have the privilege of telling you about our new permanent additions to the roster. You’ll remember that Ingrid Robeyns joined as a guest for a week last month — well, now she’s back, and permanently. Ingrid is a Belgian economist and political theorist working in the Netherlands, and you can find out more about her (and perhaps a bit more about what to expect) at her personal website. Scott McLemee is a journalist of longstanding, formerly at the Chronicle for Higher Education but more recently at Inside Higher Education, and a Texan, of which he is evidently very proud. I’ve known of Scott (though we’ve never met) since the late 1980’s, and suspect that I am one of the earliest admirers of his work, many of his early articles having been published in journals and magazines which I used to sell, and of which I was one of very few readers! I’ve actually met Ingrid several times, and know her pretty well, so for me she won’t just be a virtual presence. 

Welcome aboard both of you, its great to have you on the team!

Loudon Wainwright III is 60 today. I just thought I’d remind the world, because I’m sure he won’t. Belle, you’d better send an e-card or something. He’s the performer I have seen live more than any other, and, as George Cole might say, I have all his albums.

And Al Stewart is 61!