It is always dangerous to start a Middle East thread on CT. But I just wanted to react to the first episode of the BBC’s new series “Israel and the Arabs: The Elusive Peace”:http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programmes/elusive_peace/default.stm , which British viewers saw last night [and some Americans on PBS, it turns out! H/T Nick in comments]. Others will undoubtedly disagree, but I thought nearly everyone depicted in the first episode, which centred on Clinton’s attempt to broker peace, came out of the documentary with credit. Both Barak and Arafat emerged as serious about peace, but as being too limited by their respective constituencies to deliver an agreement: Barak feared electoral defeat, Arafat assassination. The other players, especially Albright and Clinton, came across as the tough, competent and impressive people they are (such a contrast with their successors). And one was left with a sense of how recent all this was, and how distant it now feels (post 9/11).

I said nearly everyone emerged with some credit. There were two exceptions: Chirac and Sharon. Chirac for the way in which he let his absurd vanity interfere with a historic chance for peace, Sharon for his irresponsible and provocative grandstanding at the Temple Mount.

“Yesterday on Normblog”:http://normblog.typepad.com/normblog/2005/10/shock_and_mock.html :

bq. Is it just that, for secular liberals and leftists, all those invoking a line to, or about, God in decisions and actions in the public realm, with far-reaching effects on others, are to be seen as laughable, grotesque, or worse? I guess that must be it. But hold on. This seems to apply only sometimes. Like to the US President; or to Republican voters of devoutly Christian outlook; or to fundamentalist Jews in the occupied territories. It seems not to apply so much, or at all, when Islamists appeal to religious sources as a basis for blowing up themselves and, more particularly, others.

Today in the Guardian, “George Monbiot”:http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,3604,1589101,00.html , who must surely exemplify the Guardian-columnist-in-Norman’s-head (if anyone does):

bq. Are religious societies better than secular ones? It should be an easy question for atheists to answer. Most of those now seeking to blow people up – whether with tanks and missiles or rucksacks and passenger planes – do so in the name of God.

Ascription to a whole group, of the sort Geras engages in here, is now a standard move of the “decent left”. I don’t believe it is dishonest, I think they have constructed an image in their own heads of what most “secular liberals and leftists” believe, an image sharpened by their own sense of embattlement and by every BBC or Guardian story that doesn’t exactly resonate with their own views. In this, of course, they increasingly reproduce the paranoid groupthink of the American right about “liberals”.

Chris Brooke of “the Virtual Stoa has been waiting”:http://users.ox.ac.uk/%7Emagd1368/weblog/2005_10_01_archive.html#112895907444293364 for the “Brick Testament”:http://www.thebricktestament.com/ to get round to its Lego re-enactment of a key Biblical episode for Rousseau scholars, the Levite of Ephraim, a tale of gang rape, murder and dismemberment, and the occasion for one of JJR’s most obscure scribblings. Follow the links from the Stoa.

I must’ve taken an alternate route on the evolutionary path since I still hate beer for the most part. Regardless, I did enjoy watching this Guiness ad. [link to .mov file] You can read a bit about the video creation process here.

UPDATE: Oops, sorry, this is a CT dupe! I knew I had seen “Noitulove” somewhere recently.:) When I saw Kieran’s post I was on a machine that couldn’t deal with a .mov file so I never clicked through and by now it’s off the front page. (As has been noted we’ve been quite busy around here recently. And as has not been noted – because I have been too busy to note – I’m too overwhelmed with deadlines right now to spend much time on CT these days. I shouldn’t have broken my vow to stay away for a few more days. Oh well, at least I made CT history.:)

In case anyone else missed it the first time around, I recommend clicking through now.:-)

I’m looking for ideas of high quality documentaries and musicals (and, if you know any, musical documentaries) to show to 3rd, 4th, and 5th graders. They are socio-economically disadvantaged (about 75% free or reduced school lunch) and about half are white, and half African-American. They’ll watch the films in grade-level-specific groups. Well?

I’m just back from Germany where I’ve been to a very interesting interdisciplinary workshop at the University of Bremen ‘s Sonderforschungsbereich “Staatlichkeit im Wandel”:http://www.staatlichkeit.uni-bremen.de/ on Trade Governance, Democracy and Inequality. As usual in such cases, the bringing together of philosophers and practitioners was both stimulating and revealing of how little we know about one another. Starting my own, basically normative, paper, I asserted that a central purpose of trade rules should be to promote justice. I was informed that “justice” was one word that would never pass the lips of a WTO negotiator. Which, doesn’t show, of course, either that I’m wrong about what should happen or that concerns about justice aren’t lurking in the shadows somewhere. But it suggests a startling disconnect between the public rhetoric about global inequality and the concerns at the negotiating table.

This paragraph from Brian Hinton’s _South by South West: A Road Map to Alternative Country_ could perfectly well do service as a caption to a Far Side cartoon:

bq. Lazily labelled as “folk rock” during their ten-year career together, Richard and Linda were as attuned to Americana as anyone living in a Sufi commune in rural Norfolk could ever hope to be.

Probably the high-point of a book which mainly consists of a long list of obscure band names.

Tom Schelling and Robert Aumann have been awarded this year’s Bank of Sweden Memorial Prize. Tyler Cowen at Marginal Revolution provides some information about both of them (“Schelling”:http://www.marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2005/10/schelling_and_a_1.html, “Aumann”:http://www.marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2005/10/robert_aumann_n.html). Schelling’s work is probably the better known of the two outside of economics, because in addition to being excellent it’s very readable. I use a chunk of his classic “Micromotives and Macrobehavior”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0393090094/kieranhealysw-20/ref=nosim/ in my undergraduate social theory class, for instance. We read a bit of _The Wealth of Nations_ and then we read some Schelling, partly in order to get across the idea that co-ordination can be disaggregated and bottom-up process, and partly to see that markets are also a special case of a bigger class of co-ordination problems.

From an outsider’s perspective, and speculating a bit on the politics of it all, the result seems like an interestingly balanced way to mark the rise of game theory in economics. While Schelling’s work is analytically acute (and the man himself is famously sharp in discussion), it is not presented in a technical mode. You can sit down and read the essays. Aumann, on the other hand, represents a much more mathematized wing of the field, proving theorems and developing new conceptual tools with precise formal properties. So, for instance, while Schelling can write essays like “Strategic Relationships in Dying” and “The Mind as a Consuming Organ”, Aumann’s papers have titles like “The Bargaining Set for Cooperative Games” and “Subjectivity and Correlation in Randomized Strategies.” The prize committee has seemed to make these kind of balanced choices on other dimensions before, sometimes in consecutive years (Merton and Scholes followed by Sen) sometimes in the same year (Kahneman and Vern Smith).

On a side note, I’m not surprised to “learn from Tyler”:http://www.marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2005/10/schelling_and_a_1.html that Schelling was his mentor. You can see it in the way he thinks about problems.

The idea that religion has a major influence on the nature of politics has been getting quite a run lately. There’s this Journal of Religion and Society study claiming that Religious belief can cause damage to a society, contributing towards high murder rates, abortion, sexual promiscuity and suicide. On the other hand, here’s Niall Ferguson claiming that A faith vacuum haunts Europe. And Tom quotes Tory Michael Ancram saying much the same thing.

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If you wanted some evidence that significant strands in the modern British Conservative Party have simply no understanding of the country they aspire to govern, and consequently an explanation of why they’ve deserved to lose out so badly in their last three attempts to be allowed to do so, I suggest you could do worse than having a quick listen to this.

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Being an anti-anti-elitist anti-elitist intellectual is fancy footwork. J-pod shows us how its done:

We shall see what we shall see. From here on in there’s really nothing to be said until the confirmation hearings actually begin (save for the unexpected bit of information). And so, as Wittgenstein said, "Whereof we cannot speak, therefore we must be silent" (I just put that in there to drive the anti-elitists bonkers; I actually hate Wittgenstein).

To put it another way, riding herd on the base is tough these days. Used to be you could toss it culture war red meat at semi-regular intervals. Flag-burning gay marriage. Now you have to drive it mad with quotes from the Tractatus. Presumably when it’s goaded beyond all endurance you aim it at some liberals, release and hope for the best? What’s he got against Wittgenstein, I wonder?

Dan Drezner reports that he’s been “denied tenure”:http://www.danieldrezner.com/archives/002353.html at Chicago. I’m sorry to hear that, and a bit surprised. (It seems as though Dan was, too, which makes it worse for him.) My feeling is that Dan will quickly find another good job: it’s actually not uncommon in cases like this for the national market to disagree with the local decision. Best of luck for the future, Dan.

The DARPA grand challenge is a 175-mile race for autonomous vehicles — cars or trucks that drive themselves. It’s currently underway out in the Mojave desert in Nevada. The teams in charge of the vehicles were told the route early this morning, and the vehicles set off a few hours later. The course is tough, with obstacles and sections (like tunnels) where it’s impossible to use GPS devices. Last year, the challenge was a bit of a disaster, with no team managing more than a few miles, and many vehicles failing completely. This year only a few have dropped out and three have already covered almost 100 miles of the course. The “DARPA Challenge Homepage”:http://www.grandchallenge.org/ has live updates of all the vehicles. There are three main contenders: “H1ghlander”:http://redteamracing.org/index.cfm?method=page.display&page=technology.h1ghlander (a Hummer H1, you see) and “Sandstorm”:http://redteamracing.org/index.cfm?method=page.display&page=technology.sandstorm are both run by “Red Team Racing”:http://redteamracing.org, based at Carnegie Mellon and sponsored in part by some big defense contractors like Boeing and Harris. The other challenger (currently running H1ghlander a close second) is “Stanley”:http://cs.stanford.edu/group/roadrunner/presskit.html, a modified Volkswagen Touareg run by a team from Stanford. Confirming an observation Dave Barry makes somewhere (about how men are able to sit down in front of a TV showing a tennis match between two anonymous Eastern Europeans from the 1980s and instantly begin supporting one of them), it took about 30 seconds for me to become a strong Stanleyite.

Of course, DARPA is kind of a hit-and-miss agency: sometimes it helps invent the Internet, sometimes suitcase nukes or “microwave-based riot-control/torture devices”:http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=mg18725095.600. So the Grand Challenge can be seen either as the precursor of safe autopilot for cars or the embryo form of “one of these”:http://www.sputnik.com.mx/images/upload/terminator.jpg. The technology behind the vehicles is pretty cool. It reminds me (as the film _Apollo 13_ reminded me) of an old _Punch_ cartoon of two hairy, flea-bitten cavemen standing in front of the gorgeous cave paintings of Lascaux. “Art, art, art,” says one to the other. “When are we going to get some engineers?”

Like Tom, I have been away for awhile now. With the kind permission of the other CT’ers, I have taken a leave of absence to work for the federal judiciary. I’m hoping to resume blogging early next fall.