I suppose I shouldn’t be shocked by any of the garbage that appears on TechCentralStation. Nevertheless, the shameless gall of some of their writers continues to astonish. One of their latest offerings is “My Grandfather and the Gulag”:http://www.techcentralstation.com/062405.html by Ariel Cohen, which – surprise, surprise – is an attack on Amnesty and Senator Durbin for the Guantanamo/Gulag comparison. Cohen’s article can stand as an exemplar of a whole genre of Amnesty-bashing that has been flourishing recently. Since the whole point of the piece is to insist on the virtues of truth and accuracy and to rubbish Amnesty and Durbin for the alleged betrayal of those standards, one might expect Cohen to exhibit at least a minimal level of concern for the correctness of his own claims. But such expectations would be misplaced.

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Over at “Urbandriftuk”:http://urbandriftuk.blogspot.com/2005/06/soz-been-away-for-while.html , Mizmillie has been pondering the recent explosion in commercial operations by the British public sector, so, for example, the “North Wales police have been running a massive driving school for profit”:http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programmes/newsnight/4563161.stm . She writes that “insidious blurring of the public and private is likely to be one of the current [British] government’s enduring legacies” .

She asks:

bq. Are there any principled moral reasons against public bodies carrying out private business?

bq. Or are they mainly consequential concerns, e.g. leads to two-tierism?

bq. If they trade should they be treated as private businesses and have their profits taxed in the same way? Or should they be exempt from tax since the monies get ploughed back into public coffers?

Part of my reaction to this is to look at things in historical perspective. After all, there have been many commercial operations, such as docks and airports, that have, up until recently, been run by local authorities in Britain. But on the matter of tax, I guess there has to be an question of equity. After all if the police are allowed to open an driving school next door to mine but can do so on more favourable terms, I’m going to go out of business pretty quick.

This exchange between “Ivo Daalder and Jolyon Howorth”:http://americaabroad.tpmcafe.com/story/2005/6/22/163115/566 is the most interesting thing I’ve seen on the TPM _America Abroad_ blog so far. The various contributors to the blog are perhaps a little too well-used to the “we must get serious about aspect _x_ of our foreign policy” class of op-ed to take easily to the more freewheeling and dialogic medium of blogging; Daalder is much more lively when he’s engaged in a bit of conversational give-and-take. The subject is a serious one; whether the EU is losing its _raison d’etre_. Daalder is worried that it is; Howorth pooh-poohs these fears. I’m worried that Daalder has the better of the argument.
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Brad DeLong has “two”:http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2005/06/yes_bentham_got.html “posts”:http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2005/06/experience_mach.html up defending Richard Layard’s defence of Benthamism against criticism from Fontana Labs and Will Wilkinson. I think Brad is misinterpreting Bentham, so while his defence might be a defence of something interesting (say, preference utilitarianism) it isn’t much of a defence of Bentham.

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“Go see”:http://nielsenhayden.com/makinglight/archives/006460.html.

“Juan non-Volokh”:http://www.volokh.com/archives/archive_2005_06_19-2005_06_25.shtml#1119376430 quotes one of his correspondents to rebuke Brian Leiter for not understanding that corporatism means government by corporate entities rather than corporations. Non-Volokh’s correspondent is right in stating that corporate entities don’t equal corporations, although apparently disinclined to address Leiter’s main point, which is that business did indeed play a prominent role in the Fascist state (the extent to which the political was “autonomous” from the economic is the subject of considerable historiographical debate, in the German case at least). Unfortunately he then goes on to give a quite distorted and politically loaded account of what corporatism actually was. He tells us that a “corporate is a production planning board made up of workers, owners, and others involved in production advocated by the syndicalist school of socialism,” and then goes on to try to claim that the modern left has a lot more in common with fascism than the modern right. Now it’s true that Giovanni Gentile was influenced by Georges Sorel, who was the most prominent advocate of syndicalist thought. But the two were very different, both in theory and practice. Corporatism, more than anything else, was an attempt to put the conservative and anti-socialist ideas expressed in Leo XIII’s encyclical, “Rerum Novarum”:http://www.vatican.va/holy_father/leo_xiii/encyclicals/documents/hf_l-xiii_enc_15051891_rerum-novarum_en.html ,into practice. Its animating philosophy was the belief that the corporate interests in society – business, workers etc – should work in solidarity to organize economic and political life. It was explicitly conceived as a rejoinder to the twin threats of socialism and democracy. Syndicalism was a very different creature, and argued that politics and economy should be under _trade-union_ control. Philippe Schmitter’s seminal essay, “Still the Century of Corporatism?,” which spurred the revival of the modern study of corporatism (and more particularly of its analogies with post WWII forms of economic organization), discusses the difference between these two social philosophies at length – indeed he predicts tongue-in-cheek that if the twentieth century is the century of corporatism, perhaps the next stage of history will see the rise of syndicalism as a counter-movement. Juan non-Volokh’s correspondent’s spurious historical analogy seems to me to be a rather transparent smear job.

Update: I should make it quite clear that this post is not a broad statement of support for Brian Leiter in his ongoing dispute with Juan non-Volokh. I don’t find his “threat”:http://leiterreports.typepad.com/blog/2005/06/who_is_juan_non.html#more to find out who Juan non-Volokh is, and to out him, any more respectable than Donald Luskin’s somewhat similar effort to use a bogus libel suit to find out who Atrios was, when Duncan Black was an anonymously-blogging non-tenured economics professor.

Update 2: Brian Leiter asks me in correspondence to make it clear that he, unlike Luskin, has not threatened Juan non-Volokh with a lawsuit; instead, he’s relying on someone to tell him who non-Volokh is. While I consider this to be quite irrelevant to the matter at hand (the threatened harm is in the outing, not in the methods used to pursue it), I’m happy to state this for the record.

Update 3: It would appear that Brian Leiter has “reconsidered”:http://www.unfogged.com/archives/week_2005_06_19.html#003635. I’m glad to see it.

We haven’t had a sports thread here on CT for a while, but since we have representatives of at least three of the four nations making up the Lions, and some no-doubt-interested antipodeans, comments are open. Personally, I’m “astonished at the selection”:http://news.bbc.co.uk/sport1/hi/rugby_union/international/4118436.stm : overwhelmingly English. Henson, Shane Williams and Geordan Murphy miss out, and players who’ve done nothing for a while (Robinson, Wilkinson) are included. England, despite being World Cup winners, flopped badly in the Six Nations, and are currently ranked 6th in the world, behind Wales. Stand by for a massacre by the All Blacks on Saturday morning (or later on, depending on your timezone …)

“Chris Bowers”:http://www.mydd.com/story/2005/6/12/17357/3049 has an interesting post trying to explain why left wing blogs are now getting a lot more traffic than right wing ones. Bower’s theory is that this is because the high-traffic blogs in the left-blogosphere make far more use of community based systems such as Scoop and active comments sections than their equivalents on the right. The result, in Bowers’ eyes, is that:

bq. There are swarms of new conservative voices looking to breakout in the right-wing blogosphere, but they are not even allowed to comment, much less post a diary and gain a following, on the high traffic conservative blogs. Instead, without any fanfare, they are forced to start their own blogs. However, because of the top-down nature of right-wing blogs, new conservative blogs remain almost entirely dependent upon the untouchable high traffic blogs for visitors. In short, the anti-community nature of right-wing blogs has resulted in a stagnant aristocracy within the conservative blogosphere that prevents the emergence of new voices and, as a result, new reasons for people to visit conservative blogs.
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“Dan Drezner”:http://www.danieldrezner.com/archives/002131.html on the Downing Street Memos.

bq. The biggest charge is that the president shaped the intelligence to gin up an excuse for the war. On this point, Fred Kaplan’s essay in Slate does a nice job of encapsulating what I think:

bq. _The memos do not show, for instance, that Bush simply invented the notion that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction or that Saddam posed a threat to the region. In fact, the memos reveal quite clearly that the top leaders in the U.S. and British governments genuinely believed their claims…._

bq. _The implicit point of these passages is this: These top officials genuinely believed that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction—and that they constituted a threat. They believed that the international community had to be sold on the matter. But not all sales pitches are consciously deceptive. The salesmen in this case turned out to be wrong; their goods were bunk. But they seemed to believe in their product at the time._

bq. The administration was clearly wrong about the WMD threat — but I think they thought they were right. They deserve any criticism they get about being wrong — but they don’t deserve the meme that they consciously misled the American people.

I don’t think that this claim holds; and there’s an analogy that I think makes this clearer (Kaplan uses a “version”:http://slate.msn.com/id/2120886?nav=wp of this analogy in his article, but doesn’t develop it). In many countries (including my home country, Ireland), police have a reputation for stitching people up; they seem prepared in some instances to commit perjury in order to get people convicted for crimes. Now in some cases, this is a completely cynical exercise – the police have no idea of whether the accused is guilty or not, but need to get a conviction for political or other reasons. But in others, it’s because the police think that they know who committed a crime, but don’t have the necessary evidence to get the person convicted in court. Therefore, they perjure themselves and lie about the evidence in order to get the conviction.

This, it seems to me, is what happened in the lead-up to Iraq. The Bush administration, like others, probably did genuinely believe that Iraq had an active nuclear program. But it didn’t have the necessary evidence to prove this, either to its allies or to its own people. It therefore cooked the evidence that it did have in order to make its claims more convincing. It didn’t deceive the public about its basic belief that there were WMDs in Iraq. But it did deceive the public about the evidence that was there to support this belief, in order to convince them that there was a real problem. In other words, it _did_ “consciously mislead” the American people (and its allies). When the police are caught perjuring themselves to get convictions, they should (and frequently do) suffer serious consequences, even if they believe that they’re perjuring themselves in order to get the guilty convicted. That’s not what the police should be doing; they haven’t been appointed as judges, and for good reason. If the police persistently lie in order to get convictions, the system of criminal law is liable to break down. Similarly, when the administration lies about a major matter in order to get public support, it shouldn’t be excused on the basis that it thought that it was lying in a good cause. It’s still betraying its basic democratic responsibilities.

Dervala has the most beautiful, true and hair-raisingly universal (if you’re Irish) essay on the Leaving Cert, the quintessentially Irish right of passage, the Murder Machine, or, as I knew it at the time, The High Jump. I did the Leaving the same year Dervala did, and I could have written this piece myself. Except that I couldn’t. It’s just so well-written it feels like that, capturing hauntingly what it was to be 17 and have your dreams channelled through the points system and your entire life blocked off by an enormous obstacle/national obsession. And the sheer finality of it all:

“For two years we consumed seven subjects. Over a June fortnight, we regurgitated this knowledge into thirty hours worth of essays and proofs. The first day, we might dispatch Yeats, Scott Fitzgerald, George Eliot, and Shakespeare for good, and then choose from a list of titles the last original essay composition we would ever write. The next day, we would think about calculus, trigonometry, and quadratic equations—intensely, for six hours, and for the very last time.”

The LC marks you for life. I still dream every few months that I’m repeating it, especially when the weather starts to get warm and over-achievers’ happy little thoughts are inexplicably tinged with guilt.

Speaking of the weird things people do when summer finally comes to Belgium, two friends recently went to a community fair in one of Brussels’ rougher communes; Schaerbeek. Instead of jam stalls and face painting, they found tables full of rifles for purchase by all comers. Not Very European! And for family entertainment – one man was covered in heavy padding and put in an enclosure while another goaded a german shepherd with a stick and set him on the first man. Everyone clapped.

The fairs in the city are much nicer, though – and on a Sunday here you can’t walk half a mile without encountering one. Or a tiny, hidden park, or a humbly gorgeous art nouveau facade in an un-prepossessing street. I’m starting to think that Brussels, not Paris, is the true city of the flaneur.

According to “a report in Libération”:http://www.liberation.fr/page.php?Article=305543 , French blogger Christophe Grébert ( “MonPuteaux.com”:http://www.monputeaux.com/ )is being pursued through the courts for defamation by his local authority. His crime? To have set up a blog which centred around the domination of local government in Puteaux (at the edge of Paris) by a single family and their hangers-on and which documented anomalies such as the approval of the budget for a small garden at a cost of 600,000 euros. Grébert seems to have withstood a campaign of personal harrassment, but legal action seems to be the latest means of silencing him. It will be interesting to see how this goes. Grébert appears to have decided (almost certainly correctly) that blogging is a more effective method of pursuing political change than attending section meetings of local Socialist Party. His opponents seem to think he has been all too effective. An interesting case, and one that may set precedents for political blogging in France at least.

We have finalized our list of speakers for next year’s Technology and Social Behavior Colloquium Series at Northwestern. Bruno Latour will be our first visitor followed by other great researchers engaged in fascinating projects representing numerous academic disciplines (in order of their visits): Jeremy Bailenson from Stanford, Anne Holohan from Univ. Trento, Bob Kraut from CMU, David Mindell from MIT, Linda Jackson from Michigan State, Sarah Igo from UPenn and Batya Friedman from Univ. Washington.

You can sign up on our announcement list to receive reminders about these events.

Cory Doctorow’s new novel, “Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town”:http://www.powells.com/cgi-bin/biblio?inkey=72-0765312786-0, is out. Now Cory is a mate, so I’m not sure that I’m entirely unbiased in warmly recommending it. But I can honestly say that while I enjoyed his first two novels, I think that this one is on an entirely different level. It’s matter-of-fact surrealism; the main character’s father is a mountain, his mother is a washing machine, and his brothers are nesting Russian dolls, an island, a prophet and a very unpleasant reanimated corpse. It’s a love poem to Toronto (which is part of why I enjoyed it so much – the house in which much of the novel takes place is about 15 minutes walk from where I used to live). And it’s a warm, funny romance between two flawed, interesting people. Gene Wolfe says it’s a “glorious book, but there are hundreds of those. It is more. It is a glorious book unlike any book you’ve ever read.” And you can read it for yourself before buying; the text is Creative Commoned and available for download at “http://craphound.com/someone/download.php”:http://craphound.com/someone/download.php.

!http://www.henryfarrell.net/cory.jpg!

At first sight, the dispute over Bob Geldof’s attempts to prevent resale of tickets to Live Aid 8, discussed by Henry, looks like a classic dispute between hardheaded economists and soft social scientists. In reality it’s nothing of the kind. The critics have not only ignored the issues raised by sociology and other disciplines, they have got their economics wrong.
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