Shortly after September 11th, 2001, Andrew Sullivan wrote:[1]

The terrorists have done the rest. The middle part of the country – the great red zone that voted for Bush – is clearly ready for war. The decadent Left in its enclaves on the coasts is not dead – and may well mount what amounts to a fifth column. But by striking at the heart of New York City, the terrorists ensured that at least one deep segment of the country ill-disposed toward a new president is now the most passionate in his defense. Anyone who has ever tried to get one over on a New Yorker knows what I mean. The demons who started this have no idea about the kind of people they have taken on.

I thought of this quote when I came across something on Lifehacker: a map of US military casualties in Iraq by hometown. From the maps, it didn’t immediately appear that the Democratic-leaning coastal states had avoided their share of casualties. But, of course, the coasts have a heavy share of the population.

Have states with a high percentage of Bush voters suffered a larger share of casualties per capita? If Sullivan’s statement had been true, I might expect to see that I could predict the rate of military casualties per capita by looking at Bush’s support in 2000 and 2004. [click to continue…]

An indubitable Airmiles “classic”:http://www.nytimes.com/2005/07/01/opinion/01friedman.html?ex=1277870400&en=342cb2bd52a44f4e&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss :

bq. There is a huge debate roiling in Europe today over which economic model to follow: the Franco-German shorter-workweek-six-weeks’-vacation-never-fire-anyone-but-high-unemployment social model or the less protected but more innovative, high-employment Anglo-Saxon model preferred by Britain, Ireland and Eastern Europe. It is obvious to me that the Irish-British model is the way of the future, and the only question is when Germany and France will face reality: either they become Ireland or they become museums. That is their real choice over the next few years – it’s either the leprechaun way or the Louvre.

Now those familiar with leprechauns will recall that they’re untrustworthy little bastards, inclined to evaporate along with the pot of gold when given half a chance. The same is true of dodgy generalizations constructed around trite metaphors, especially when they’re employed by someone who clearly doesn’t know what he’s talking about. We’ll leave aside the basic claim that a small post-industrial economy provides the right model for two largish economies with large industrial bases, and concentrate on the glaring material errors in Friedman’s account. Point One: Ireland is _not_ an exemplar of the “Anglo Saxon model.” For evidence, take a look at this recent “paper”:http://www.u.arizona.edu/~lkenwor/institutionalcoherence.pdf by Lane Kenworthy, which argues convincingly that Ireland doesn’t fit well into either the Anglo-Saxon ‘liberal market economy’ or Rhenish ‘coordinated model economy’ models. Point Two: Ireland is an _especially_ poor fit with the Anglo-Saxon model in the area of labour market policy, a fact which rather undercuts the argument Friedman is trying to make. Again, Dr. Kenworthy:

bq. beginning in the late 1980s and continuing throughout the 1990s, [Ireland] has had a highly coordinated system of wage setting (Baccaro and Simoni 2004). In addition, Ireland has higher levels of employment and unemployment protection than other liberal market economies and longer median job tenure (Estevez-Abe et al. 2001, pp. 165, 168, 170).

Finally, there’s a very strong argument to be made that it is _exactly_ the non-Anglo-Saxon features of the Irish economy – and in particular the “systematized concertation”:http://www.ucis.pitt.edu/cwes/papers/work_papers/ODonnell.pdf between trade unions, management, government and other social actors – that was at the heart of Ireland’s economic success in the 1990’s. This system, unbeloved of free market economists, set the broad parameters for wage and income tax policy, and provided Ireland with the necessary stability for economic growth. It’s now coming under strain thanks to growing inequality in Irish society, but that’s another story. As already noted, Ireland isn’t necessarily the best example for big industrial economies to follow; but insofar as it does set an example, it isn’t the kind of example that Friedman thinks it is.

Quite wonderful news; Kelly Link’s short story collection, “Strangers Things Happen,” is being “released under Creative Commons”:http://www.lcrw.net/kellylink/sth/index.htm to celebrate the launch of her new collection, “Magic for Beginners”:http://www.lcrw.net/kellylink/mfb/index.htm. I can’t even start to say how great this is; Link is one of the best short story writers of her generation, and I generally keep a couple of copies of “Stranger Things” in the house so that I can press spares on likely-sounding visitors. The stories make you want to proselytize. I’d recommend starting with “Travels with the Snow Queen,” then “Most of My Friends are Two-Thirds Water,” and then the sublimely disturbing “Water off a Black Dog’s Back” and “The Specialist’s Hat.” But more than that I’d recommend downloading the book, trying it out, and buying it if you like it (it’s a beautiful book, and easier to read on paper).

(via “BoingBoing”:http://www.boingboing.net/2005/07/01/kelly_links_gorgeous.html)

There’s been much huffing and puffing in parts of the blogosphere about how development aid always ends up in the Swiss bank accounts of dictators, etc. etc. It is good to see, therefore, that (Iraqi) money being spent by the US on the reconstruction of Iraq is being properly accounted for to make sure it isn’t pilfered by nefarious types, that there are proper audit trails, etc. Or rather not. As “Ed Harriman explains in the latest LRB”:http://lrb.co.uk/v27/n13/harr04_.html . (Hat tip to “The Virtual Stoa”:http://users.ox.ac.uk/%7Emagd1368/weblog/blogger.html .)

“The Dupe has been sounding-off again”:http://slate.msn.com/id/2121674/ , this time about the inappropriateness of anti-war people asking of pro-war people whether they’d send their kids to fight in Iraq. Like many columns of his, this one has been cited as an example of his perspicacity and genius by his blogospheric admirers. So let’s set them straight.

Correct claims by Hitchens (2)

1. The question of whether the war in Iraq is a good, moral, just, etc. cause is logically independent from the question of whether pro-war advocate X is willing to “send” his or her children to fight there.

2. Talk of whether people should “send” their kids is misplaced where we are dealing with adults whose decision to enlist or not is their own.

Commentary on those claims:

1. It is perfectly reasonable to ask of someone who advocates a policy that involves people in significant personal sacrifice whether they would be willing to incur or risk that sacrifice themselves. A person who says “I favour X, but I want to offload the cost of X onto others because I’m unwilling to bear my share of the burden of realising X” is a hypocrite. Not all pro-war types have children, and arguments for or against the war should be conducted on their merits. But a person who favours the war but would try to dissuade their children (if they had any) from enlisting or who would (if they could) try to exploit connections (family, friends, business associates, etc.) to enable their children to avoid a draft (if there was one) is a despicable hypocrite whose prattlings do not deserve the attention of reasonable people.

2. Rhetorical insistence on the voluntary nature of the choices made by those who do enlist is misleading and disingenuous if not accompanied by due acknowledgement of the circumstances in which such choices are made. No such acknowledgment is made by Hitchens (of course). Those who fight are disproportionately drawn from the poor and the non-white, whose menu of career choices is typically less appetising than that available to the children of politicians and the wealthy members of the commentariat.

Here endeth the lesson.

Update: Matt Yglesias writes to say that the claim I make above that “those who fight as disproportionately drawn from the poor and the non-white” is not accurate. I’m happy to accept that correction in the light of “this”:http://www.americanprogress.org/site/pp.asp?c=biJRJ8OVF&b=700477 . So let me amend that claim to read “Those who fight are disproportionately drawn from layers of the population whose members typically have a menu of career choices less appetising than that available to the children of politicians and the wealthy members of the commentariat.” That I’m fairly confident, remains true.

Brian Leiter “links”:http://leiterreports.typepad.com/blog/2005/06/the_philosophic.html to some “philosophical genealogies”:http://webspace.utexas.edu/deverj/personal/philtree/philtree.html where Josh Dever tries to trace lineages back as far as possible through a sequence of advisers. As David Velleman points out, lineages in mathematics are “much better established”:http://genealogy.math.ndsu.nodak.edu/index.html because the tradition of formal training is much older. There are other limits to tracing lineages, too, notably the different evolutionary paths of academic institutions in various countries. In the philosophical genealogies compiled by Dever the longest chains are for logicians, and go back to Leibniz and beyond (which speaks to the point Velleman makes), but they’re also all German. Academics tracing themselves through English lines have a much harder time, because the “was the doctoral supervisor of” relation was much less institutionalized in that system. So, for instance, “my wife’s”:http://www.u.arizona.edu/~lapaul lineage goes back to “A.N. Whitehead”:http://www-groups.dcs.st-and.ac.uk/~history/Mathematicians/Whitehead.html (via Lewis and Quine), but stops there because I don’t think Whitehead ever had a doctoral adviser in the sense demanded by the lineage-makers. The closest you get (I think) are the examiners of Whitehead’s dissertation (submitted in a successful effort to win a Cambridge Fellowship), one of whom was “Lord Kelvin”:http://www-groups.dcs.st-and.ac.uk/~history/Mathematicians/Thomson.html, or William Thompson as he then was.

A _very_ interesting development for Internet policy geeks. ICANN, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, runs key aspects of the Internet domain name system, mixing together the highly technical with the highly political. It has many opponents, running the gamut from Internet activists through commercial operators like Verisign, to the International Telecommunications Union, which has been ginning up a series of UN conferences to try to grab authority away from ICANN (the ITU is seeing its policy domain disappear from beneath its feet as telcos move _en masse_ to the Internet). One of the key uncertainties surrounding ICANN has been its relationship with the US government. Formally, ICANN runs the Domain Name System under the terms of a Memorandum of Understanding with the US Department of Commerce. While ICANN was supposed in theory to be more-or-less self regulatory, its exact relationship with the US government was both unclear and controversial, leading the US government to suggest that it would renounce control over ICANN when the Memorandum lapses “next year”:http://dcc.syr.edu/miscarticles/MM-Prepcom2.pdf . Now the US government seems to have backtracked on that commitment.
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My “post”:https://crookedtimber.org/2005/06/24/market-making-versus-market-taking-in-politics/ last week about Rick Perlstein’s pamphlet got some “interesting”:http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/archives/individual/2005_06/006592.php “reactions”:http://www.reachm.com/amstreet/archives/2005/06/26/the-next-big-idea/ (and some “wrongheaded”:http://www.janegalt.net/blog/archives/005369.html ones too). I was particularly taken with Matt Yglesias‘s reworking of Perlstein’s argument and suggestions for how it might be applied. This said, I think Matt is wrong when he claims that the argument over market-making versus market-taking isn’t really an argument between the left and the center of the Democratic party. While there’s no reason _in principle_ that the one set of disagreements should map onto the other, there’s an enormous degree of overlap _in practice_. In internecine battles over policy, New Democrat/DLC types have made hay with the claim that leftwing policies simply don’t sell in the marketplace of American politics. As a result, they tend to exaggerate the extent to which these market rules are a given, and to discount the possibility that they might be changed. A case in point, which I’ve just come across, is this “review”:http://www.ndol.org/ndol_ci.cfm?contentid=253353&kaid=127&subid=171 by Ed Kilgore of Perlstein’s “book on Barry Goldwater”:http://www.powells.com/cgi-bin/biblio?inkey=74-0809028581-0 . Kilgore criticizes non-centrists for defying

bq. the commonsense view, based on extensive political experience, that Democrats can best meet the contemporary rightwing challenge by occupying the abandoned political center and peeling off moderate, independent, and even Republican voters.

Kilgore argues that Reagan and his allies won through fortuitous circumstance rather than ideological zeal, and contends that those who believe otherwise are afflicted with a variety of religious messianism

bq. Indeed, the left’s new fascination with the conservative movement, and with politicians like Goldwater and Reagan, can best be understood as reflecting a powerful desire to believe that ultimate success does not require, and may actually prohibit, ideological flexibility, submission to public opinion, or the responsibility to achieve actual results. A period of losing may well precede the day of victory, in this view, and the left’s current leaders may, like Goldwater, never enter the promised land themselves. But someday, if their people remain faithful and refuse compromise with impurity, an Aaron will arise, and redemption will be at hand.

Now, like all caricatures, there’s a little truth to this, but only a little. The “net-roots” whom Kilgore disparages as zealots in fact showed an extraordinary degree of flexibility in embracing a candidate last year whose views they didn’t share, but whom they thought might win. But the problem in Kilgore’s article goes deeper than this. By recasting the debate as one between unrealistic ideological purists (bad) and those who are willing to make political compromises and move towards the center (good), he completely fails to address Perlstein’s underlying argument. Perlstein’s real claim, if I understand it rightly, is that long term political success doesn’t come from adapting your party to a political marketplace in which the enemy has set the rules of competition. It comes from a concerted effort over time to remake those rules yourself. This doesn’t have to be pie-in-the-sky wishful thinking. Nor does it have to be something which is antithetical to ND/DLC types’ policy goals. Matt’s suggestion for a new kind of family and childcare politics is a good example of an initiative that could help remake the rules of debate, and that both leftists and centrists could get behind. But it _does_ require people like Ed Kilgore to stop using the current rules of the political marketplace as a stick to beat the heads of leftists, and to start thinking creatively about how those rules might be changed. So far, I’m not seeing much evidence that they want to do this.

I just got a letter on impressive looking letterhead, from Domain Registry of America, offering to renew my domain name “johnquiggin.info” at fairly exorbitant rates. I don’t actually own this domain: out of a frivolous desire to be a dotcommer, I chose “johnquiggin.com”, rather than the more appropriate “johnquiggin.net” or “johnquiggin.info” when I got my own domain from Dotster.

This looked like an Internet version of the old subscription invoice scam, and sure enough, it was. I was happy to find that one practitioner of this scam has been nailed in Canada

These guys give what looks like a physical address at 189 Queen St., Suite 209, Melbourne, so I’ve written to Consumer Affairs in Victoria, suggesting a visit.

Minor update The Daniel Klemann referred to in the Canadian story mentioned above is, apparently the one behind my solicitation. If any Canadian readers would like to get in touch with the relevant authorities, and point that this guy is still active, despite his commitments, I’d be happy to send along a copy of the notice he sent me. I’ll try myself via email.

My usual few years behind the curve, I picked up Neal Stephenson’s “Cryptonomicon”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0060512806/kieranhealysw-20/ref=nosim/ yesterday. Right now I’m about a hundred pages in, and I’m wondering whether I should keep reading. The prose is flat. Stephenson keeps lathering-in in chunks of his background reading. Much of that material is interesting, but it’s applied with a trowel. Most of all, a strong whiff of “Mary-Sue”:http://nielsenhayden.com/makinglight/archives/004188.html wish-fulfillment pervades the whole thing. Here is the author/soldier in Shanghai on the eve of the second world war, earning the respect of Nipponese soldiers by composing haikus, eating sushi and learning judo. Here is the author/genius talking about computability and mathematics with Alan Turing, impressing the hell out of him with his raw, untutored brilliance. Here is the author/unix nerd putting down a bunch of cardboard-cutout cult-stud poseur academics about the _real_ meaning of the Internet. And so on. Does the book warm up at all, or are the next 800 pages more of the same? If the latter, I think I’d be better off finding some of the stuff Stephenson relies on for detail (like Andrew Hodges’ brilliant _Alan Turing: The Enigma_) and just reading that, instead.

If I had all the time in the world, I’d have more to say about these links that I’ve been sleeping on:

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An interesting story in the “Chronicle”:http://chronicle.com/temp/email.php?id=kvt034h8b46fjlf16jbtzmxjeg9v0e6l (link should work for 5 days or so) on the ethics of scientific research. The National Academy of Sciences has decided to publish a paper describing the vulnerability of the nation’s milk supply to terrorist attack (yes, it’s a serious paper), despite a letter from the Department of Health and Human Services saying that publication would provide”a road map for terrorists” and not be “in the interests of the United States.”

bq. In their paper, Mr. Wein and Mr. Liu describe how the milk industry is vulnerable because individual farmers send their product to central processing facilities, thereby allowing milk from many locations to mix. Terrorists could poison the supply by putting botulinum toxin into one of the 5,500-gallon trucks that picks up milk daily at farms or by dropping the toxin into raw-milk silos, which hold roughly 50,000 gallons each. Pasteurization would destroy some but not all of the toxin, and a millionth of a gram of toxin may be enough to kill a person.

The authors’ reasons for making these findings widely known (and the National Academy’s for publishing them) seem legit. There are safeguard measures that could be taken to make this kind of attack more difficult; for instance the simple step of locking milk trucks and tanks. While the government has issued voluntary guidelines recommending that milk suppliers take these precautions, it’s been unwilling to require them by law. In essence then, the government seems to be relying on voluntary compliance and security-through-obscurity, neither of which provide much protection as any system administrator worth his or her salt will tell you. As one of the paper’s authors notes, “Using Google, … it would take you all of 30 seconds to pull up these things.” It doesn’t seem at all unreasonable to raise a public stink about this, in the hope that it will provoke a serious response.

A propos the spread of social bookmarking and the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision earlier this week that file-sharing programs can be held responsible for copyright infringement, this article in today’s NYTimes does a nice job of summarizing some of the ways in which various new online services are leading to more and more bottom-up creativity and content whose sharing does not necessarily constitute copyright infringement.

But bottom-up creativity may depend on more traditional avenues at times and the article doesn’t address this other side of the issue at all. For an example, take note that some photo labs (e.g. Walmart, like they really needed to come up with more reasons to alienate people) have decided not to print people’s photos if they look too professional. The burden seems to be on the amateur photographer to prove that the picture was really taken in her own back yard. ARGH.

From Slugger O’Toole comes the news that “corporate France appears to be unaware that Ireland is an independent nation”:http://www.sluggerotoole.com/archives/2005/06/ireland_barely.php , and has been since 1922. Regular readers of CT will, of course, be aware that Ireland is indeed separate from Britain, although Irish people who achieve sporting excellence become “British” even faster than “Zola Budd”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zola_Budd .