A rather important political development in Italy. Marco Mancini, the second-in-command of SISMI, the Italian intelligence agency has been “arrested”:http://www.repubblica.it/2006/07/sezioni/cronaca/arrestato-mancini/arrestato-mancini/arrestato-mancini.html, along with his former boss, General Gustavo Pignero, for his part in the extraordinary rendition/kidnapping of Abu Omar. The “NYT”:http://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/05/world/europe/05cnd-italy.html?hp&ex=1152158400&en=4d148c71cfab4a33&ei=5094&partner=homepage also has a piece on this, but its focus is on the magistrates’ decisions to issue arrest warrants for four Americans who were allegedly involved. It seems to me that the SISMI part of the story is the more important one. There’s no prospect that the US is going to comply with warrants issued against its agents, but there is a real possibility of substantial political repercussions from the SISMI arrests.

The path to justice in Italy is a long and tortuous one – arrest by magistrates is no guarantee of successful prosecution. But the arrest of a key figure in the Italian intelligence agency suggests that the unwritten rules of Italian politics are changing. SISMI has traditionally been a law unto itself, with many connections to shady right wing groups in Italian politics, and an unstated presumption of judicial immunity. This may not be true any longer. The Italian government has issued a statement which is a quite perfect example of the art of flowery Italian political rhetoric – effusive and entirely meaningless expressions of confidence in the loyalty of the Italian intelligence apparatus to the state, which strongly suggest to me that some of the principals of aforementioned intelligence apparatus are being measured for the chopping block. Readers of “Laura Rozen”:http://warandpiece.com/ and “Josh Marshall”:http://www.talkingpointsmemo.com/ will remember that there are many interesting things that Mancini’s boss, Nicolo Pollari, could reveal about Nigerien uranium and forged documents should he choose to. It’s still unlikely that he’ll be forced to make that choice, but it’s a little more likely than it was yesterday.

Kieran has been complaining about mixed metaphors, but at least the mixer avoids directly contradicting themselves. Which is perhaps more than can be said for Paul Kelso writing in the Guardian blog.

bq. Few would bet with confidence against Scolari coaxing another odds-defying performance from his side.

I’m not as confident as several of the commentators here that prices in betting markets are a good guide to the truth, but even I think they are a decent guide as to what people will bet, and even bet with confidence, on.

Consider this a France v Portugal open thread. Everyone else I know is cheering for France, with good reason, but I still feel a little bad for the Portugese fans after they missed what must have seemed like a golden opportunity to win Euro 2004. So I’m probably going to feel bad for whoever loses, which is always a great way to watch a football game.

Senator Ted Stevens is getting a lot of stick for “his description”:http://blog.wired.com/27BStroke6/index.blog?entry_id=1512499 of how the Internet works:

bq. And again, the internet is not something you just dump something on. It’s not a truck. It’s a series of tubes. And if you don’t understand those tubes can be filled and if they are filled, when you put your message in, it gets in line and its going to be delayed by anyone that puts into that tube enormous amounts of material, enormous amounts of material.

Now, Net Neutrality is great and everything, and Stevens is on the wrong side of that issue (and many others), but why all the snickering? Sure, he rambles a bit, and in the long version he accidentally says “an internet was sent by my staff” when he clearly means “an email.” It seems, though, that it’s his saying “tubes” and “a series of tubes” that’s provoking most of the derision. But network nerds the world over regularly refer to the availability of bandwidth in terms of fat or narrow “pipes”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fat_Pipe, which is essentially the same imagery. Odd.

Just drawing in toward half time. Good game so far. Germany look good. (The Referee has done very well, too.) I hope Germany edge it in regulation.

_Update_: 72nd minute. Very funny incident w/the Italian No. 16, who fell down writhing with the agonies unto death. The Ref ran back to him, clearly said something like “Get up you fucker or I’ll book you,” and the guy jumped up and ran off double-quick.

_Update_: Well, that was a dramatic last two minutes. Fair dues to the Italians.

The kids got a toy food set and … well, here it is:

Click for a larger image. ‘Cleanlily’. Use that in a sentence. ‘The nurse employed the sterilized instruments cleanlily, but her smile said ‘naughtily’.’

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Many thanks to Steven Poole for a very stimulating series of guest posts on topics as diverse as football, religion, Chomsky and torture. Be sure to head over to Steven’s own blog “unspeak.net”:http://unspeak.net/ , from where you can follow the links to buy his excellent book Unspeak in which he dissects the evasive and shameful rhetoric of our many professional apologists for power.

Writing yesterday in the Independent, Alan Dershowitz makes the familiar case that modern terrorism poses such an unprecedented threat to western society that the law needs to be rewritten. He argues, for example, that “we need rules even for such unpleasant practices” as “waterboarding” – or, to speak plainly, water torture. There are currently plenty of rules on interrogation in general, laid out in places like the UN Convention Against Torture, Geneva, and the extant 1992 edition of the US Army’s own Field Manual FM 34-52 on Intelligence Interrogation; it’s just that the US government doesn’t feel like following them. Dershowitz supposes that this might be moot because people suspected of contemporary terrorism “do not fit into the old, anachronistic categories” such as PoWs, and so it is unclear what it is permissible to do to them. In fact, CAT, UDHR and so on leave no possible category of human being unprotected from torture or other inhumane or degrading treatment.

Alternatively, he appears to suppose that it might be moot on the grounds that “waterboarding” is too newfangled to have been explicitly prohibited. I Am Not A Lawyer, but this seems no better an argument.
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It’s not often (well, ever) that I blog about anything directly work related. That’s because I work for an organisation that gets sued every 5 minutes, has a unique (and uniquely exposed) institutional model, deals with complex and controversial issues, and has endless stakeholders from dozens of bloggers to international organisations. That’s all by way of encouraging you to join in the fun!

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An image of a man who is definitely not a college student (certainly not traditionally aged) accompanies an article called “Men Assume Sexual Interest When There May Be None” in a recent piece by a HealthDay reporter, a piece that’s been published on various Web sites. (In case of link rot, I’ve placed a screen shot here.)

In the sixth paragraph of the piece we find out that the study is based on 43 male and 43 female college students aged 18-22. That is the only part of the article where the participants are referred to as college students. Otherwise, the entire piece is about the behavior of men and women generally speaking.

There are several fields that base a good chunk of their empirical research on studies of students.* This is usually done due to convenience. And perhaps regarding some questions, age and educational level do not matter. But the issue is rarely addressed directly. In many instances it seems problematic to assume that a bunch of 20-year-olds in college are representative of the entire rest of the population. So why write it up that way then? At best, in the conclusion of a paper the authors may mention that future studies should/will (?) expand the study to a more representative sample, but these studies rarely seem to materialize.

This is one of my biggest pet peeves when it comes to certain types of scholarship. And I do mean scholarship. Because it is not just the journalistic reports that make the leap. The academic articles themselves use that kind of language. It is part of a larger question that’s been of interest to me for a while now: Historically, how have various fields settled on what is acceptable empirical evidence in their domain and what are the appropriate modes of analysis? Papers that get into top journals in one field wouldn’t even make it off the editor’s desk for review in another field due to the data and methods used. But then when it comes to reporting findings to the public, it all becomes one big general pool of work where the methods and the validity of the findings don’t seem to matter anymore.

[*] Note that recently I have been doing studies on college students myself. First, I have a concrete substantive reason for doing so (they are the most highly network-connected age group, which helps to control for regular use). Second, when I write up the work, I never draw huge generalizations about all users. I always report on “college students” or “study participants”. I do not simply conclude that whatever I find about college students is representative of all Internet users. It would be wrong to do so.

Thomas Scanlon in What We Owe to Each Other:

bq. Suppose that Jones has suffered an accident in the transmitter room of a television station. Electrical equipment has fallen on his arm, and we cannot rescue him without turning off the transmitter for fifteen minutes. A World Cup match is in progress, watched by many people, and it will not be over for an hour. Jones’s injury will not get any worse if we wait, but his hand has been mashed and he is receiving extremely painful shocks. Should we rescue him now or wait until the match is over? (p. 235).

Hmm. I can see that some members of the Harvard philosophy department might act now, but as an appeal to commonly-held moral convictions, I think this one fails. (h/t Martin O’N and a few others.)

Since Noam Chomsky was voted the world’s top public intellectual last year, another backlash has been gathering force. The problem, for anyone who would like to see a substantive conversation, is that Chomsky’s critics too often mix concrete observations with wild, unfocused accusations – exactly, indeed, what they accuse Chomsky himself of doing.

Reviewing Chomsky’s new book, Failed States, in the Observer a couple of weeks ago, for example, foreign editor Peter Beamont congratulated himself on applying “a Chomskian analysis to [Chomsky’s] own writing”. Let’s see some of this Chomskian analysis:

But what I find most noxious about Chomsky’s argument is his desire to create a moral – or rather immoral – equivalence between the US and the greatest criminals in history. Thus on page 129, comparing a somewhat belated US conversion to the case for democracy in Iraq after the failure to find WMD, Chomsky claims: ‘Professions of benign intent by leaders should be dismissed by any rational observer. They are near universal and predictable, and hence carry virtually no information. The worst monsters – Hitler, Stalin, Japanese fascists, Suharto, Saddam Hussein and many others – have produced moving flights of rhetoric about their nobility of purpose.’

Plainly, Chomsky’s use of the superlative “worst”, in calling Hitler, Stalin and Saddam etc “the worst monsters”, is grammatically doing the opposite of creating an “equivalence” between them and other leaders. To note uncontroversially that there is one point of comparison between all leaders – they profess benign intent – is not to assert an overarching “equivalence” between them, any more than it would be to note accurately that they are all human beings. Still, the reactionary narrative of “moral equivalence” is evidently too attractive to abandon.
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Is “this”:http://blogs.guardian.co.uk/worldcup06/2006/07/02/zidane_conjures_up_more_magic.html some kind of record?

bq. France began this tournament saddled with worries about the ageing legs at the heart of their team, but they have changed their tune.

We’re just missing a fascist octopus singing its swan song.

I have an op-ed in the _Financial Times_ tomorrow on Swift and privacy in Europe and the US – link “here”:http://www.ft.com/cms/s/52fc56ba-09f5-11db-ac3b-0000779e2340,_i_email=y.html, but subject to rapid linkrot. NB that a final correction appears not to have made it into the online version – the opening sentences:

bq. In the increasingly bitter dispute over press freedom in America, some Republicans are pressing for The New York Times to be charged with espionage. The editor of The New York Times has claimed for his part that the US government is out of control over the newspaper’s disclosures that the government was monitoring international financial transactions.

should read

bq. In the increasingly bitter dispute over press freedom in America, some Republicans are pressing for the New York Times to be charged with espionage for disclosing that the government was monitoring international financial transactions. The editor of the New York Times has claimed for his part that government surveillance programs are effectively out of control.

It was interesting to watch England’s defeat in a bar in Dublin. The locals were plainly pleased with the result, and so were — on the whole — RTE’s studio panel. But I rather got the impression that the anti-Englishness was more for form and tradition’s sake than based in any deep feelings of hostility. Contrast that with the Scots. I just wouldn’t have felt comfortable (or safe) to cheer England on in Glasgow.

I had a chat with an Estonian philosopher on the subject, which revealed a couple of interesting data points. First, that Estonians don’t feel anything like the degree of sporting antagonism to the Russians that you’d expect (she found the Scottish feeling about the English mystifying). Second, she was rather hoping that the Germans would do well. I’d hypothesized the day before that no-one except the Germans themselves would be supporting their team (with the possible exception of Austrians and the odd relic of a Nietzschean colony in Paraguay). It seems I was wrong: Estonians will happily cheer for the Germans. (The English, on the other hand, backed Argentina against Germany to the last, despite a recentish war and some notable grudge matches between England and Argentina.)

There are clearly some patterns out there reminiscent of those typical of the Eurovision song contest. (Maybe a Finnish team composed of axe-wielding lunatics in latex masks would get widely supported.) So which other countries do your compatriots support? And which do they have an “anyone but X” policy towards?