When someone says of their adversaries that they pay “lip-service” to something, they are trying to devalue some of the substance of what those people say. This may be a claim that their opponents are insincere, or simply that they lack a suitable degree of commitment. The suggestion is that someone is making a merely token acknowledgement of the importance of some matter or value but that it is merely incidental to their view of what matters, a view that is actually focused on other things. It is a charge that the authors of the “Euston Manifesto” have been happy to dish out:

bq. We have no truck, either, with the tendency to pay lip service to these ends [Iraqi democracy], while devoting most of one’s energy to criticism of political opponents at home (supposedly responsible for every difficulty in Iraq), and observing a tactful silence or near silence about the ugly forces of the Iraqi “insurgency”.

(Get the “silence or near silence” there! So if your opponent has actually said that beheading hostages or blowing-up civilians is a monstrous crime but hasn’t said it as often or as loudly as you think fit, you can still point the finger!)

Others can judge how much of the Eustonites’ energies have been devoted to criticism of political opponents at home and how much to the material promotion of Iraqi democracy (writing about it on your blog doesn’t really count, in my book). Anyway, here’s a list of the things that the Euston Manifesto pays “lip service to”, a charge I am as entitled to make, without supporting evidence, about them as they are about others:

Pure lip service, if you ask me, since issues such are rarely mentioned on the blogs in question without some degree of contextualization, minimization, relativization, whatabouterry, and so on. (Of course torture is bad, they acknowledge, but the real outrage is committed by those torture critics who compare Guantanamo to the Gulag.) These are the same verbal manoeuvres that, when applied to acts of terror, are condemned by said blogs as amounting to de facto apology.

Incidentally, it seemed odd to me for the Manifesto to include among the events that have made the democracy-and-human-rights package the heritage of us all, blah blah blah, the “anti-colonial transformations of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries”. “Transformations” is a strangely euphemistic term to describe the various anti-colonial struggles of the last century. Still, I suppose it wouldn’t do to look too closely at the methods employed by the FLN, the Mau Mau, the NLF etc. just in case they resembled the “ugly forces” of the Iraqi insurgency rather more closely than would be comfortable. Some insurgents, it seems, have contributed to the great Enlightenment bundle, and some have not.

You sometimes see a rhetorical device were the author compares himself (or another) to some related group of people, real or fictional, and says that while one might have hoped to be _x_, it turns out one is actually _y_. So, for example, here’s one inspired by reading “Untold Stories”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0374281033/ref=nosim/kieranhealysw-20 the other night. “When I was younger I hoped I might be “Peter Cook”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Cook, or even “Jonathan Miller”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jonathan_Miller, but then I discovered I was really Alan Bennett.” As can be seen from this example, there is usually a strong element of faux-modest self-promotion in the apparent putdown, at least when the author is the subject of the comparison. When there is some other target, this scheme is a vehicle for insult. In these cases, the comparison individuals will be related not by a substantive tie but only by name.

Relatedly, I am genuinely curious about something. Some people claim to fear a future in which citizens of the Western nations are reduced to “dhimmitude” by muscular Islamists. The first act of this tragedy is meant to be the excessive deference to Muslim sensitivities we see in US papers’ craven refusal to print Danish cartoons about The Prophet (now stipulate that I type PBUH in an ironic way) or Cartoon Network’s Comedy Central’s patent lack of cohones (yeah, man, they totally censored Buttercup from the Powerpuff Girls when…oh, no.) Act three includes women from Cleveland being legally required to wear burkas as their impotent menfolk look on. What the hell is act two supposed to be? Lots of suicidal terrorist attacks on US soil? Can anyone, reviewing the recent past in her mind, believe that this would decrease the American appetite for rizziping some shit up? Like, Indonesia is going to invade the US or something? Hitlery turns US soveriegnty over to the UN and they implement Sharia law using unstoppable black helicopters? I’m not being snarky here; I really want to know. Wait, that’s a total lie. I am being snarky, but I also want to know. WTF?

One thing that strikes me as funny about this whole “let’s invade Iran” thing…wait, did I actually just type that? I’m looking at the desk and I don’t see any glass tube with burnt-up brillo pad in it, so I probably didn’t just smoke a glittering rock of yeyo. Probably. OK, nothing about this is funny except in a nervous, “ha ha I’m sure he’s just joking way” that one might employ if locked in a room with a drunk person holding a chainsaw and making jokes about how Texans love real meat. The warmongery is starting up, from Mark Steyn columns to “hawkish” “liberals” pontificating on how no options should be off the table (not even A NUCLEAR FIRST STRIKE ARE THEY INSANE???!!!!), to stop-making-me-commit-genocide wankery to credulous NYT articles to James Lileks relating everything back to this one chick who wouldn’t sleep with him was wrong about Iran in the ’70s. (You should really read the Vodkapundit post and accompanying thread. He says you’ll need a drink, and the man is not kidding at all. The story he links to [by Dan Simmons] takes grave misreadings of Thucydides to a whole new level, a category in which the competition is stiff. Simmons is sure to win this year’s coveted “Golden Hanson”. The trophy features a stern VDH uprooting an olive tree with one hand and hitting himself repeatedly on the head with an axe handle with the other.) [Edited for clarity–thanks tom scudder!]

Any minute now I’ll have to read from K-Lo about how hypocritical western feminists don’t care about women being oppressed in Iran. I can’t be the only one to find the machinery a bit creaky. Are the warbloggers’ hearts in it? The more important question is whether the US will really do something so extraordinarily, supremely crazy, but I’m firmly committed to lowering the tone at CT. If that means ignoring the important issues of the day to make mocking, ad hominem comments, then let the chips fall where they may.

No, the thing that strikes me as funny is that everyone who supports was with Iran is all about the “mad mullahs” and how they can’t be deterred by normal deterrance because they’re crazed jihadis content to incinerate their own country, plus OMG THE HIDDEN IMAM!!! The people making this argument now insist that of course MAD worked back when we faced rational opponents like the USSR or, you know, Mao’s China or whatever. But now, in a new era of crazy people having nukes, all bets are off. It’s like Iran is one big suicide bomber! The limits of the internet and my own laziness prevent me from researching this at all, but I’m going to go out on a limb here and bet that all these people (over a certain age) did not regard the commies as secular rationalists who weighed the costs or war carefully back in the day. Not at all. Much more of the “they’ve got a plan to retreat to their bunkers and sacrifice their own hapless citizens upon the altar of destroying America!!!” Just a theory. (Obligatory on-the-otherhanding: I’m sure some of the liberals now advocating deterrance railed against MAD at the time as an armageddon-hastening nightmare.)

Atrios used to have those fine bits of poetry, threadbare from overuse. "He draweth out the thread of his verbosity finer than the staple of his argument," etc. Now he just says ‘yeah, yeah, another stupid open thread.’ What with timezones, that’s all I ever see at the top of the page when I visit. Let’s see if memory and google can do better.

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I don’t have much more to say about the Mearsheimer/Walt controversy, but I do want to point readers to this “blogpost”:http://jacobtlevy.blogspot.com/2006_04_02_jacobtlevy_archive.html#114437688320082488 by Jacob Levy, who has resumed occasional blogging at his old Blogspot account. Jacob’s critique seems to me to have Mearsheimer and Walt dead to rights – while I don’t believe that Mearsheimer and Walt are guilty of anti-Semitism, I do think that their argument is fundamentally flawed, as Jacob illustrates at length.

The core of the paper’s difficulty has little to do with Israel or Jews and a great deal to do with its core purpose. M&W are committed to the neorealist view that powerful states act in their security interest. They’re also, independently, committed to opposition to the Iraq War and to what they see as U.S. overreach in the Middle East; they think that the U.S. does not effectively pursue its security interests in the region. So there’s a puzzle, an anomaly– of their own making. If you are both committed to a predictive theory and committed to an interpretation of a particular case by which it falsifies your theory, then there’s a puzzle for your views, but not yet a puzzle about the world. They proceed to address this puzzle with a slippery– I do not say sloppy– ambiguity between explanatory and evaluative claims.

bq. The mere existence of the Lobby suggests that unconditional support for Israel is not in the American national interest. If it was, one would not need an organized special interest to bring it about.

This is, I think, the worst paragraph of political science I’ve read in many years. The best, most-justified policies don’t automatically spring into being at the end of the policy-making process. An all-things-considered judgment that X is the best policy is essentially irrelevant to one’s ability to predict whether or not X will be adopted. … The snarky way to put it is: M&W treat their say-so about strategic and moral considerations as if it was naturally entitled to such overwhelming political deference that the fact that the polity hasn’t accepted their say-so is deeply anomalous. The probably-fairer way to put it is: M&W proceed as if the political system has some very strong natural tendency to reach true beliefs and justified policies about strategy and morality– such a strong tendency that, if it fails in some case, there must be an unusual explanation, such as an unusually intense and effective Lobby that includes people willing to deliberately place the interests of a foreign power over that of their own country, and that includes powerful politicians, media figures, and so on who can make their preferred policies come about.

NB – comments that veer into general discussion of the Israel/Palestine debate will be ruthlessly expunged as soon as I see them.

People speaking in some official capacity should always take care what they say, because they aren’t just speaking for themselves. The higher up the ladder you go, the more care you have to take. Most of the time inappropriate comments don’t even raise a laugh. So it’s hard not to feel a twinge of sympathy when someone is — rightly — made to apologize for having said something that’s actually funny. In this case it’s “Police Chief Constable John Vine”:http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/scotland/4913866.stm who, when speaking to the Perth Bar Association in Scotland, told a joke about Al Qaeda fathers chatting about their suicide-bomber sons. One says wistfully to the other, “Kids blow up so quickly these days.”

The peculiar British tendency that is the “decent Left” numbers among its sacred texts Paul Berman’s Terror and Liberalism. One of the most prominent Eustonian thinkers, the columnist Nick Cohen, has even mentioned Berman’s book as the reason for his own epiphany. But is it any good? Over at Aaronovitch Watch the Cous Cous Kid has been directing his attention to Berman’s work and noticing that the accounts Berman gives of other people’s ideas, of religion, and of historical events, ought to have impressed Cohen somewhat less than they did.

CCKs’ review is split into seven parts, so the easiest way to read his text is just to visit the site and scroll down. But for archive purposes, I also give the links to each part below.

1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7

Yale University Press has just released Yochai Benkler’s _The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom_. You can buy it at “Powells”:http://www.powells.com/partner/29956/s?kw=Wealth%20of%20Networks%20Benkler, and Amazon, but it’s also available from Benkler under “Creative Commons”:http://www.benkler.org/wealth_of_networks/index.php/Main_Page with an associated wiki. There’ll be more about this book on CT soon – for the moment, suffice to say that I think that this is a really important book, not only for people interested in the politics of technology, but for people interested in left or liberal politics more generally. It fizzes with ideas.

The _Economist_ gives us “yet another rendition”:http://www.economist.com/opinion/displayStory.cfm?story_id=6800698 of “Western Europeans have it too good to realize how badly they need reform.”

bq. Another great week for Europe: Things must get more hellish in Italy and France before they stand any chance of getting better

bq. THEY are two seemingly unconnected events, but they yield a common, depressing conclusion. The events were the decision by France’s government to tear up its controversial law creating a more flexible job contract for the young, and the razor-edge outcome of Italy’s rancorous election. The conclusion: the core countries of Europe are not ready to make the economic reforms they so desperately need—and that change, alas, will come only after a diabolic economic crisis. … their voters are not yet ready to swallow the nasty medicine of change … too many cosseted insiders … The real problem, not just for Italy and France but also for Germany, is that, so far, life has continued to be too good for too many people: there is not yet a general consensus that their economies are in serious trouble … There is one depressingly certain way to remedy the failings in the core European countries: to bring on a more serious economic crisis. This week will surely have brought that a lot closer.

This combines a few arguments that are true and important (there _are_ problems of equity with sclerotic labour markets that discriminate against the young) with much that is quite bizarre – the claim that Europe’s fundamental difficulty is that “life has continued to be too good for too many people.” Would that we all had such problems. Most interesting, perhaps, is the mode of analysis that the Economist‘s editorial writer employs – the suggestion that what we need is a _really nasty crisis_ to alert people to their real interests. Which is a dolled up version of the old Marxist trope that we need (as David Lodge’s Fulvia Morgana puts it) to ‘eighten ze contradictions’ if we are to bring through the revolution. Keynes famously quipped that those “who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influences, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist.” The _Economist_, which appears to believe that there’s no intellectual debate “to the left of the New Republic”:http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2006/03/brad_setser_is_.html owes rather more to defunct Marxist theorists than it imagines.

Like many a youngish man with a NetFlix subscription, I’ve taken advantage of the enormous NetFlix back catalog to catch up on film classics that I’ve heard about but never seen. Also, like many a youngish man, I’ve had a creeping feeling that I was born too late to get much pleasure out of some of them. Some films have been so influential that they’ve entered the bloodstream of cinema, and their innovations feel like cliches now. Some were made for an audience with different expectations than mine about pace and acting style. (I don’t think we’ll ever see another movie star like Rock Hudson, for example.) Some are just not for me. (Sorry, Gone With The Wind.)

Of course, this is not always true. I’d be interested to hear about movies that were released ten or more years before your birth that you genuinely enjoyed, rather than appreciated. Here are a few of mine:
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I’ve been traveling a lot recently (four locations in the last week), which has given me new opportunities to find interesting gender signs. A twist on the topic I hadn’t explored much before is whether taking care of children is assumed to be a female responsibility. I found a couple of examples recently that suggested inclusivity. At the San Francisco airport, both men’s and women’s restrooms show a diaper-changing image. At JFK, there was a separate area for families.

FYI, the gender signs pool on Flickr has over 100 photos now. Don’t be shy, join in on the fun. Or for a different type of fun, try to figure out what this restroom sign means. (I’ve explained it in the comments to the image so only read that if you’re ready for the solution.)

I linked to a piece by Steven Poole last week, and here he is again with “a terrific review of recent books”:http://unspeak.net/C226827506/E20060412142020/index.html by sages left and right. That whole “Enlightenment” theme is given some attention:

bq. Take your seats, ladies and gentlemen, for a clash of incompatible fantasies. According to the conservative essayists in Decadence, a misty golden age of “genuine virtue” has passed, to be replaced by bogus slogans and psychobabble. This is all the fault of the Enlightenment. But here comes Frank Furedi in Politics of Fear, arguing that conservatives no longer appeal to tradition, and that the problem is that we have turned our back on the Enlightenment. Evidently, both these views cannot be right.

Read the whole thing, as someone-or-other often says.

I admit that I’m not a regular reader of Randy Cohen’s column for the NY Times Magazine, “The Ethicist.” But the hostility that some of my colleagues express is surprising. There are many complaints, some of which are absurd on their face. What to make of the criticism that his column doesn’t give readers the opportunity to engage in a dialogue? As if our books and papers do? (As it happens, the Magazine now has an on-line forum called “You’re the Ethicist” where people can post comments.) Or the complaint that he sets himself up as an expert, instructing others how to act? He gives his opinion. I can’t believe that anyone slavishly lives their lives according to his instructions. His audience knows that they can accept or reject his judgments based on their own assessment of the reasons he gives.
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