The International Committee of the Red Cross is very serious indeed about its neutrality. There is an obvious reason for this; neutrality underpins its special status, and if its neutrality is compromised, its personnel may be placed directly in danger and its ability to do its job is reduced. In other words, to impugn the neutrality of the Red Cross is a very serious charge indeed, and ought to only be made on the basis of very strong evidence indeed.

So it is perhaps odd to see Australia’s Foreign Minister, Alexander Downer (who comes across as a hell of a moron; could any Aussie readers confirm this?) merrily asserting that the Lebanese Red Cross conspired with Hezbollah to fake an attack on one of its ambulances, seemingly as collateral damage to a broadside against the media for being biased against Israel.

In fact, his source was a blog, “Zombietime“, which has looked through news agency photos of the ambulance and proved to its own satisfaction that they are fakes. I must say that their case seems pretty unconvincing to me, since it appears to be based on some very strong conditional statements about what “a missile” can and can’t do, and “a missile” is a really quite generic category to be making such statements about.

I think that if I was the Australian foreign minister, I would have considered the pros and cons of undermining the credibility of the Red Cross (particularly as the ICRC is an important provider of the humanitarian aid which supports a lot of the things that the USA, UK and Australia want to do in the sphere of foreign policy) and decided that a political slam on the mainstream media was not worth it, particularly since nobody actually disputes that civilians were killed and ambulances were hit during the Lebanese invasion. Blogosphere triumphalism doesn’t really seem all that important compared to the neutrality of the Red Cross.

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You’d probably like to hear Ross Douthat explain how Margaret Mead, Stanley Fish and a bunch of hippies are responsible for the excesses of racist BMOC frat boys who hire strippers. C’mon, you like that sort of thing in small doses, admit it. It’s a good thing that last month’s secret feminist world-domination meeting involved a solemn pledge by all sexually active women to deny young Mr. Douthat any sexual contact outside of marriage, or going beyond the plain vanilla missionary-position type sanctioned by traditional mores, otherwise all this insufferable priggishness might have a whiff of hypocrisy about it. Best comment: “Yeah, raping strippers is awful, and meaningless sex isn’t great either. Also, some academics are crazy. I guess we should ban birth control.” Roy’s suggestion is bumper stickers reading “If you can eat pussy, thank a liberal.” I am afraid that a cold appraisal of continuing sexism leads me to conclude that advertising to men that they owe liberals a thank-you note for every blowjob would be even more effective. Black ink on white or cream stationery only, please. I suppose you can send them to Norbizness.

I see that “Aaron Swartz”:http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/wikiroads is running for the Wikimedia Foundation’s Board. I’ve known his blog for a little while; he’s an occasional commenter here; he set up Rick Perlstein’s “website”:http://rickperlstein.org/ and he created the “New York Times Link Generator”:http://nytimes.blogspace.com/genlink?q=http://www.nytimes.com/, beloved of bloggers who don’t want their NYT stories to succumb to linkrot. All of which is to say that any of you who qualify as a member of the electorate (400+ edits on Wikipedia; I don’t know about other Wikimedia forums rules), should seriously consider voting for him (note that this is a personal endorsement on my part; CT doesn’t do endorsements as a collective).

The New Republic‘s “Open University”:http://www.tnr.com/blog/openuniversity blog is up and running. While I’m not at all a fan of the magazine itself in its Martin Peretz incarnation, this new venture has some very good people blogging for it, as well as others who’ll be quite interesting to watch from a safe distance.

I was also going to review Glyn Morgan’s The Idea of a European Superstate: Public Justification and European Integration, but it’s fortunate I didn’t, as Henry has done a better job of most of the points I was going to make. So let me make just one more point, about the implications of soft power.

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This NYT piece by Adam Cohen starts with the observation that Americans are feeling pessimistic about the war in Iraq, Hurricane Katrina and so on, then jumps to a recent work on philosophical pessimism by Joshua Dienstag, whose basic argument is summarised in this sample chapter. As Cohen says, pessimism in this sense is not a gloomy disposition, but a worldview that “simply doubts the most basic liberal principle: that applying human reasoning to the world’s problems will have a positive effect.’ Cohen concludes “Part of Mr. Bush’s legacy may well be that he robbed America of its optimism “.

But if optimism holds that applying reasoned analysis will have a positive effect, the experience of the Bush Administration merely illustrates the point that the converse is also true.

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Matthew “Big Number of Blogs”:http://lefarkins.blogspot.com/2006/08/dont-whine-fight.html Yglesias is “consolidating his efforts”:http://yglesias.typepad.com/matthew/2006/08/a_new_hope.html at a revamped “MatthewYglesias.com”:http://www.matthewyglesias.com. Update yer blogrolls accordingly.

This review is a year late – the delay is thanks to the birth of our first-born, the urgency of getting my own book into a fit state to be submitted to publishers, and repeated and extended fits of procrastination. I hope to be starting to review political science books more regularly from here on in, with a particular focus on books that touch upon areas that I do academic work on (EU politics, the politics of the Internet and e-commerce, institutional theory, trust), or that are topical for one reason or another. Some of these books are likely to be of interest to the general CT reader, some not.

Glyn Morgan, _The Idea of a European Superstate: Public Justification and European Integration_ (Princeton University Press 2005), review beneath fold. “Powells”:http://www.powells.com/partner/29956/s?kw=glyn%20morgan%20european%20superstate. Amazon.
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In the course of a “silly piece”:http://www.usatoday.com/printedition/news/20060830/opcom30.art.htm boosting Joe Lieberman against the loud but ineffectual online hordes, Bruce Kluger says:

If this wasn’t enough to drain the effervescence from the blogger bubbly, America’s noisy Web wags were dealt an even more sobering blow 10 days later when Snakes on a Plane opened nationwide to a decidedly flat $15.3 million box office. Before its premiere, Snakes had been the latest blogger darling, as swarms of online film geeks prematurely crowned it the summer’s big sleeper. This hyperventilating fan base even convinced Snakes’ distributor, New Line Cinema, to up the movie’s rating to R, to ensure a gorier, more venomous snake fest. But all that clapping and yapping couldn’t put enough fannies in the seats.

But what’s the right counterfactual here? I think it’s that _Snakes on a Plane_ is a cheap B-Movie that, in the absence of the jokey attention it got online, would have gone straight to DVD and never come close to the top of the box office for even a single weekend. If anyone was suckered by the “mythology of the blogosphere” it was New Line Cinema, who clearly had convinced themselves that they had another _Titanic_ on their hands. (Maybe they had — just the wrong one.)

Within a week of eachother, both my and a younger sister’s re-conditioned ipods have died. This was my third. After a year’s solid service, my first (they’ve all been 20 gig clickwheels) deteriorated over a couple of days before completely crashing. I sent it to a crowd in Kentucky who promised to either fix it or replace the hard drive. But not before they’d posted me an ipod ambulance to send it in, completely mislabelling it so I spent 3 months arguing with DHL over a customs fee of 45 Euro for said empty box. With its new drive, my little ipod zombie struggled on for another two months. Ipod no. 2, a secondhand job, is probably still working. But last time I saw it was tucked into the seat-back pocket on a Singapore Airlines jet. A week ago, ipod no. 3 upped and produced a black screen of death. After a stern talking to and a 24 hour time out, I sat it into its little charger only to pull it out 10 minutes later because of the sharp smell of burning. Now I truly understand what a meltdown is. So, no more ipods for me. Nor for my sister Annaick, who was on no. 2. That is, until the prospect loomed of an 8 month trip with no music.

What to do? I’m leaning towards a SanDisk, hoping the flash memory might be less likely to ignite. And figuring anything that avoids iTunes control-freak closed standards and copy controls is a good thing. Annaick’s considering a nano, but open to something with a non-proprietary format that can be more easily updated while on the road. She’s checked out Zens, but their distinguishing feature seems to be the ability to die the week their 1 year warranty expires.

Then there’s the mp3 player / mobile phone dilemma. Is this a hybrid device whose time has come? I lost my tri-band phone on a trip a few months ago (bit of a pattern, that) and replaced it with a cheap and cheerful Nokia that doesn’t work outside GSM land. If I spend enough $$$ for a posh new phone that works in the US, might I just as well buy something that plays mp3s as well? Might I even be less phone-phobic and likely to turn it on if it did nice things like play music while I run?

Questions, questions. Answers would be welcome, and sneering or ribaldry for a repeat ipod offender will be taken on the chin.

In 1988, Michael Palin set out to travel around the world in 80 days roughly tracing the path of Phileas Fogg and using only modes of transport that had been available to him. He filmed it for a BBC documentary. I vaguely remember seeing and enjoying an episode or two some years ago. I had no idea that he filmed 5 more travel adventures – Pole to Pole; Full Circle; Hemingway; Sahara; Himalaya – and he is now working on one called the “New Europe” about countries that were part of the Soviet Bloc but are now part of or are soon to be part of the EU. I haven’t seen any of them – don’t watch enough TV, I guess. But I did stumble upon his website – Palin’s Travels – complete with lots of texts, maps, pictures, and some video from the travels. It’s worth exploring.

I’ll be attending the APSA conference in Philadelphia, arriving Friday, and leaving Sunday morning. Below the fold is a list of panels that I thought looked interesting on the basis of a quick browse through the APSA website – feel free to add others in comments.

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“Mike Pence”:http://www.nytimes.com/2006/08/29/washington/29pence.html?pagewanted=2&ei=5090&en=b8427076a837addf&ex=1314504000&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss on evidence-based reasoning.

Mr. Pence argued that tax cuts help the poor by revving the economy. That may eventually prove true, but despite large tax cuts the poverty rate has risen in each of the last four years. “That’s anecdotal,” Mr. Pence said in an interview last fall. Then he offered an anecdote — a story President Reagan told about a pipe fitter pleased to see the rich prosper, “because I’ve never been hired by a poor man.”

Googling around in connection with my review of Unspeak, I came across an old LanguageLog post on The apparent deceptiveness of the world, which cites the paradoxical statement

Appearances are not deceptive; it only seems as if they are.

and invites Brian to analyse it (Since this predates both CT and Technorati, I’m not sure if there was any followup), saying

Clearly, if this is true, then it has to be false, and if false, it must be true. Yet it is not a standard liar-paradox sentence like as in classic liar sentences like This statement is false, or Everything I tell you is a lie, including this. It does not mention truth or falsity, or refer to itself. It is a metaphysical claim, as far as I can see. It speaks not about language or truth but about the nature of reality. It says (contrary to the old proverb) that reality does not present itself in a way that deceives our senses, and any perception we may have to the contrary is incorrect.

I think we can extract a coherent claim with the aid of Hamlet’s observation “For there is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so”. I’d read the statement as saying something like “First appearances are not deceptive; it’s thinking about them that leads you astray”.

While this is obviously false as a general statement, it’s arguable that direct perceptions are usually closer to the mark than the results of the kinds of analysis (Freudianism, a lot of marxist and marxisant thinking, most public choice theory) that purport to strip away surface appearances and reveal the underlying truth.