“A cameraman for Reuters in Iraq has been ordered by a secret tribunal to be held without charge in Baghdad’s Abu Ghraib prison until his case is reviewed within six months, a U.S. military spokesman said on Wednesday.”

…

“The U.S. military has refused Reuters’ requests to disclose why he is being held. He has not been charged.
“His brother, who was detained with him and then released, said they were arrested after Marines looked at the images on the journalist’s cameras.”

…

“Reuters had also been pressing for the release of cameraman Haider Kadhem, who was detained in Baghdad on Sunday after an incident in which his soundman, Waleed Khaled, was killed as he drove the pair on a news assignment.
“Iraqi police said U.S. troops fired on the Reuters team, both Iraqis.”

What’s there to say?

I’ve written before about the sociological dimension of disasters — the fact that natural disasters are never wholly natural, because some kinds of people will be more likely to suffer and die than others, depending on how life is organized when the disaster hits. As everyone knows, social order is under severe pressure in New Orleans at the moment, and the media coverage is slowly coming around to analyzing the differential impact of the disaster. The fact that those who have been left behind, or turned into refugees, are disproportionately Africian-American, poor, or elderly is simply impossible to ignore from the media coverage. Seeing pundits and commentators react to these facts is, in a way, a barometer of their sociological imagination — their ability to see the systematic relationship between social structure and individual experience. For example, on the conservative side of the fence, the contrast between “David Brooks”:http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/01/opinion/01brooks.html and “Jonah Goldberg”:http://corner.nationalreview.com/05_08_28_corner-archive.asp#074746 (also “here”:http://corner.nationalreview.com/05_08_28_corner-archive.asp#074466) is striking. Brooks is one of nature’s optimists, and his vice is a tendency towards complaceny. But he has a sociological eye, and immediately grasps the social dimensions of the disaster:

Floods wash away the surface of society, the settled way things have been done. They expose the underlying power structures, the injustices, the patterns of corruption and the unacknowledged inequalities. … We’d like to think that the stories of hurricanes and floods are always stories of people rallying together to give aid and comfort. … Amid all the stories that recur with every disaster – tales of sudden death and miraculous survival, the displacement and the disease – there is also the testing. … Civic arrangements work or they fail. Leaders are found worthy or wanting. What’s happening in New Orleans and Mississippi today is a human tragedy. But take a close look at the people you see wandering, devastated, around New Orleans: they are predominantly black and poor. The political disturbances are still to come.

Brooks’ instinct to look at how the disaster exposes power relations and tests the social order is right on target. Contrast this with Goldberg. All _his_ instincts are that talk of class and poverty and refugees are merely rhetorical cards in a never-ending political slanging match, and his goal is to make sure they don’t get played. His immediate concern is to deny that there are any systematic differences in the experience of disaster, and to pretend it’s all just a question of partisan labeling:

bq. Whatever happened to the idea that unity in the face of a calamity is an important value? We’re all in it together, I guess, except for the poor who are extra-special.

And again:

bq. My guess is that it will simply be a really unpleasent time for [Superdome refugees for] the remainder of the day, but hardly so unpleasent as to sanctify them with refugee or some other victim status.

Burkean conservatives may be too sanguine about the virtues of inherited ways of doing things, but, if they have Brooks’ cast of mind they at least understand that there _is_ a social order, and that disasters like Katrina expose its structure and weaknesses. Meanwhile Goldberg — whom I’m sure has never gone a day without a hot meal in his life — is merely vicious.

I really appreciate Ted’s offer to motivate/thank people for donating to relief agencies. I encourage everyone to donate what they can. In case the suggested $100 is too much for some, I thought I’d offer an incentive/thank you for smaller donations. If you give $35 to the Katrina fund of a relief agency then I will send you (restricted to US addresses*, I’m afraid) a copy of my parents’ book Symmetry, a Unifying Concept. It’s a nice book filled with hundreds of wonderful pictures. I will also add a unique thank-you card not available in stores.:)

If you would like both a CD from Ted and the book then why not donate at least $135?

Send me a note at [email address removed and retired due to end of offer & spam] letting me know that you made the donation and when. Be sure to include your mailing address.

Offer ends when I run out of books. I’ll update this post when/if that happens.

UPDATE (9/2/05 4:45pm CST): I can take requests from five more people so if you were inspired by this offer then please act soon.

UPDATE (9/2/05 6:33pm CST): This was quick. I’m afraid I have to end the offer now. I will be shipping 35 books to people across the U.S. next week. Thanks to all for the many generous donations!

*If you live outside the US and make a donation, I can send a book on your behalf to a US address you specify (gift for a friend?).

People are already wondering what effect Hurricane Katrina will have on the US economy. So far, most of the discussion I’ve seen has focused on very simplified Keynesian or GDP-based views of the economy, in which the resources that go into rebuilding New Orleans and the surrounding regions count as a net addition to economic activity.

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If you make a donation of $100 or more to the American Red Cross or another hurricane-relief charity, and you live in the United States, I will burn and send you a custom mix CD.

Email me at ted.barlow+katrina@gmail.com. Include:

– a receipt, or just your word. (If you’ve already donated, that’s fine. If you donated through your employer, and they’re matching funds, even better.)

– your address

– your music preferences. If you hate/ love a certain genre, if you’re hoping for more/less obscure stuff, or you want an uptempo/downtempo mix, I’ll do my best to accomodate you. Left to my own devices, I’ll probably pick a lot of rock, soul, and hip-hop.

Offer ends in the unlikely event that I can’t keep up with the volume.

Numerous people are turning to community site Craig’s List in an effort to find information about family and friends from the New Orleans area and also as a means to reach out to victims with offers of help. People from across the country are offering free housing. If you know of victims who left and are stranded in various parts of the country, the notices on the site may help them out. Of course, as with all such things, one needs to proceed with caution.

It’s sad to see, however, that even these sites are not immune to spam.

In the Washington Post today, humor:

Tierney, of the Institute of World Politics, identified five groups: ANSWER, Not in Our Name, Code Pink, United for Peace and Justice, and MoveOn.org. He said these groups “come from the Workers World Party” and are an “umbrella” for smaller groups, such as the “Communist Party of Kansas City” and the “Socialist Revolutionary Movement of the Upper Mississippi.” Of the last two, he said, “I’m just making these up.” [oh, that’s all right then–ed.]

Tierney singled out Sheehan, whose son died in Iraq and who camped out at President Bush’s ranch this month to protest the war. “I’ve never heard of a woman protesting a war in front of a leader’s home in my life,” he said. “I’ve never heard of anything quite so outrageous.”

Wow, that’s funny, because I’m sure I’ve heard of at least one or two things more outrageous than that, in the history of humankind, ever…wait. Did he say “a woman”? Fuck it: it’s on now, commie. Don’t mess with American Pride.

Unrelatedly, for those who wanted to re-enter the fray, a new post at John and Belle Have a Blog about who, exactly, is a big pussy. Bonus vagina dentata action! (Teeth not included.) Speculations as to my anxiety about how anonymous men on teh intarweb will no longer find me attractive welcomed! (If by “welcomed”, you mean “I’m laughing about the probable size of your penis.”) Post away, kids!

My lovely fiancee alerted me to this, from Houston’s alternative rock station, The Buzz:

Starting at 6 a.m. Wednesday, we’ll be taking song requests for cash to help residents of New Orleans and the Gulf Coast. We’re dusting off ALL our records, ’cause anything goes!

Here’s the price list:
$30 – Buzz Songs
$60 – Non-Buzz Songs
$80 – Way off The Buzz Path (example: Barry Manilow)
$200 – Local Bands

You say it … and pay it … we’ll play it!! Call 713-212-5945 to place your request.

For the first time ever, The Buzz is appointment radio. Assuming that it’s funding a legit charity, I’m so doing this.

No doubt you know this already from many sources, but it is easy to donate money to assist victims of Hurricane Katrina. To donate online to the Red Cross, click here or call 1-800-HELP-NOW. Right now the situation down there continues to deteriorate. I hope “this sort of thing”:http://www.cnn.com/2005/WEATHER/08/30/katrina.neworleans/index.html doesn’t become widespread:

bq. The city had no power, no drinking water, dwindling food supplies, widespread looting, smoke rising on the horizon and the sounds of gunfire. At least one large building was ablaze Tuesday.

My (limited) understanding of the logistics of this thing is that, the Iraq war notwithstanding, the National Guard of Louisiana and Mississippi should in principle still have about 50-60 percent of its manpower available for call-up. It looks like a good chunk of them may well be needed. The more residents they evacuate the better, too. It’s not so much the dead bodies that pose a threat of disease, it’s the waste produced by survivors (and debris) when there’s no clean water to be had.

This semester I’m teaching _Sources of Sociological Theory_ to undergraduate majors, a course I’ve taught several times before. After a crash course on the state of Europe and America prior to 1780 or so (100% guaranteed to make historians come out in at least hives, and possibly trigger fits), we’ve started reading Adam Smith. It’s always a pleasure to teach Smith as a social theorist. For one thing, he’s a clear enough writer (certainly compared to, e.g., Weber) and more importantly his central insight about the possibility of decentralized co-ordination always catches students by surprise. Even though students are all exposed one way or another to the rhetoric of free enterprise, free trade, market capitalism and what have you, in my experience even talented undergraduates have to work a bit to really see the power and elegance of Smith’s vision of a complex, co-ordinated division of labor. I do a few classroom exercises (based on ideas from Mitch Resnick and Tom Schelling, amongst others) to bring out the problem of co-ordination, the many ways it can fail, and the distinctive qualities of markets as a solution. (Though, as Schelling notes, not all cases of distributed co-ordination are markets, just as not all ellipses are circles.)

Although Smith is often presented as the champion of the individual, and opposed to thinkers who emphasize social structure or the state, it’s immediately clear when you read him that Smith was as much a “discoverer of society” — that is, of the idea that the social world is a human product consisting of myriad interlocking relationships dependent on specific institutions and human capacities — as any of the other theorists typically recognized as founders of modern sociology. His treatment of the problem of the division of labor also provides a platform to understand the others. Marx is much easier to understand once you know a bit about Smith, of course, but so are Durkheim’s ideas about social solidarity and the nonrational foundations of contractual exchange. And much of Weber’s work on the origins of capitalism was conceived explicitly with Smith in mind.

I’ve been very busy over at Lifehacker. A friend of mine says it’s like “quirky academic meets Martha Stewart”. I’m not sure how I feel about that, but it’s a reasonable description of what I’ve been up to. Here are some posts I put up in the past couple of days. I will have a roundup of all the free downloads later in the week. If you can’t wait, feel free to check out the site directly.

General tips

• Request hold-mail service online (in the US)
• When to call across time zones
• Turn postcards into wall decorations
• How to fold a shirt
• Tips for public speaking

GMail/Flickr tips

• Grouped email addresses in GMail
• Specifying outgoing addresses in GMail
• Upload to Flickr from your cameraphone
• Cameraphone & Flickr & wine labels

A review of Chris Mooney’s _The Republican War on Science_ available from Powells “here”:http://www.powells.com/partner/29956/biblio/0465046754, and Amazon (deprecated) “here”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/redirect?link_code=ur2&camp=1789&tag=henryfarrell-20&creative=9325&path=tg/detail/-/0465046754/qid=1125410511/sr=8-1/ref=pd_bbs_1?v=glance%26s=books%26n=507846.

Books about the politics of science policy and other complicated policy areas have a hard time doing justice to the politics and the technical aspects both; they usually emphasize one and underplay the other. On the one hand, many journalistic accounts ham up the politics, and underplay the analysis, documenting the atrocities, one after another after another. Raw outrage supported by anecdotes gets partisans’ juices flowing, but it’s not likely to persuade the unpersuaded, or provide any good understanding of how to solve the problem (other than to kick the bums out, which is a start, but only a start). On the other, there are books that do an excellent job of discussing the underlying policy issues, but that lack political zing. Marion Nestle’s _Food Politics_ is a good example; it provides a nuanced (and utterly damning) account of how the technical processes of food regulation have been corrupted by special interests, but it’s written by a policy wonk for policy wonks. There’s lots and lots of technical nitty gritty. The good news is that Chris Mooney’s book pulls off the difficult double act of talking about the politics in a fresh and immediate fashion while paying attention to the underlying issues of institutions and policies, and does it with considerable aplomb. _The Republican War on Science_ is written with an eye for a good story, but it still has a real intellectual punch. There’s an underlying argument as to _why_ the relationship between science and politics is in a parlous state. While I think that there’s an interesting piece missing from this argument (on which more below), it links the very different issues of science politics under the current administration (regulation, intelligent design, global warming, stem cell research) into a more-or-less coherent narrative.
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Wow! Just had my first “Google Talk”:http://www.google.com/talk/ conversation. I’m sure most of you are old hands at this voice-over-internet stuff but it was my first time. Set it up, invited some friends and then up pops a mate from Novosibirsk (equipped with headset) for a chat, as if he was just down the road. It works, it’s simple and easy to use. Fantastic.

My friend Karen Bennett blurbs Jaegwon Kim’s new book, Physicalism, or something near enough. The back cover, though, is careful to introduce Karen’s endorsement by saying only, “Advance praise for _Physicalism_.” Presumably some sharp-eyed editor realised it wouldn’t do for people to read “Advance praise for Physicalism, or something near enough.” Round our way, the title is proving to have all kinds of useful applications: “I was on time, or something near enough”, “Childcare, or something near enough”, “A viable constitution for Iraq, or something near enough.” I think it should catch on.