The Howard government’s partial backdown on mandatory detention laws points up a striking feature of the Australian political system, the iron discipline that makes a threat by four backbenchers to cross the floor and vote against the government a major news event in itself. The government was in no danger of being defeated on a vote, with a majority of 27, and in many other countries an event like this would not be news. But in Australia it happens perhaps once in a decade.

Until recently, the US was at the other extreme. I recall a news story saying that Jimmy Carter had copped some flak for refusing to campaign for any Democrat who hadn’t voted for at least half the legislation he proposed. Apocryphal or not, it was a pretty accurate representation of a system in which the parties did little more than ensure that, most of the time, voters had a choice of two candidates, who would, when elected, vote just as they pleased.

I doubt that either alternative is healthy.

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The big news from Australia this weekend was a relaxation of the policy of mandatory detention of asylum seekers, by far the harshest in the developed world. The changes were forced on Prime Minister Howard by a backbench revolt in his own Liberal Party. Four prominent backbenchers threatened to cross the floor, an event that is extremely rare in Australian politics.

This turnaround may have implications well beyond Australia

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“Julian Sanchez”:http://www.reason.com/hitandrun/2005/06/are_there_any_s.shtml and “Lynne Kiesling”:http://www.knowledgeproblem.com/archives/001290.html say very rude things about Bob Geldof’s campaign to stop the sale of tickets to the Live-8 concerts on eBay (BBC story “here”:http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/music/4090774.stm). Julian describes this as “idiotic” and Lynne describes it as “wooly thinking about economics.” It’s neither. There’s an excellent rationale for what Geldof did. The tickets were initially distributed through a lottery, in which people sent instant-text messages to an address for a fee; a small percentage of the two million who sent the messages got tickets. It’s safe to assume that those who participated in this lottery did so for a mix of reasons; partly charitable, partly a desire to go to the concert. But altruistic motivations can be driven out by market mechanisms. Richard Titmuss wrote a famous book a few decades ago, “The Gift Relationship”:http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0FQP/is_n4343_v126/ai_20534517, which provided a fair amount of empirical evidence to show that this was true in the case of blood donations, and that purely voluntary systems of blood donation did better on a variety of counts than did systems where some people were paid to donate blood (see also this “paper”:http://www.kieranhealy.org/files/papers/embed-alt.pdf by Kieran which touches on Titmuss’s arguments). On this logic, Geldof did exactly the right thing. If tickets to the concerts became commodities to be bought and sold on the open market, it’s highly plausible that future participation in lotteries of this kind would be seriously hurt. Geldof’s actions are perfectly defensible.

Let’s see how geographically specific I can make my recommendations.:) (But hey, there are enough Chicagoland CT readers that this may be relevant.) I’ve been so preoccupied with looking up summer events in Chicago proper that I’ve missed things in my own backyard. (Well, technically it’s more in front of the building than behind it, but you get my point.:) This weekend – June 18-19 – is Custer’s Last Stand. I literally ran into the preparation yesterday as I went around the block for dinner. It looks like it will be fun. Then again, Jonathan noted in the comments to the other thread that these neighborhood street fairs can be somewhat disappointing. He suggested we check out the ones in our neighborhood. So this being 100 ft away sounds like a good target. It looks like there will be several other such events in Evanston this summer. Of course, if all else fails, there’s always the beach.

John Cole has tagged me with his own book meme:

What fiction did you read as a teen/young adult that you have re-read as an adult (or would like to)? What pieces of fiction meant something to you? Put up your list, and pass it on to 2-3 people.

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“Katia Papagianni”:http://news.ft.com/cms/s/11f7ca46-decc-11d9-92cd-00000e2511c8.html has a great letter in today’s _FT_ responding to the “Andrew Moravcsik”:http://www.princeton.edu/~amoravcs/library/works_well.doc article that I “criticized”:https://crookedtimber.org/2005/06/16/not-frightening-the-horses/ yesterday. Key section:

bq. The European Union constitutional crisis demonstrates, as Prof Moravcsik writes, that debates over institutional reform do not generate an engaged public because citizens respond only to salient ideals and issues. However, EU debates do not only address opaque institutional reforms, but also salient issues that EU citizens care about such as immigration, foreign policy, development and humanitarian assistance, in addition to monetary and competition policy. The fact that European-level politics has not engaged the public so far and has nevertheless progressed successfully does not mean that the public’s engagement is impossible or detrimental to the EU’s future. The EU’s citizens were asked late to join the constitutional process and to participate briefly in an abstract debate as opposed to engaging in meaningful discussions on concrete policy issues over a long period of time. Europeans should not be asked to decide whether they feel European or whether they aspire to a federal Europe. These are not relevant questions. Europeans should rather be asked what types of policies, combing national and EU-level responsibilities, they prefer.

This is exactly right – and what has been missing from the debate so far. The answer isn’t to shroud the processes of the EU still further in technocratic gobbledygook, or to engage in publicity stunts designed to make European citizens ‘identify’ with a process in which they aren’t making the choices. It’s to have real debate on the fundamentally _political_ choices underlying the specifics of EU integration.

(via Carpetbagger Report.) So, there was a state-sponsored display of the Ten Commandments in front of the Gibson County Courthouse in Princeton, Indiana. Some citizens brought it to court, arguing that it was unconstitutional, and won.

Indiana Republican Representative John Hostettler introduced an amendment to a spending bill that would “prohibit funds in the Act from being used to enforce the judgment of the United States District Court for the Southern District of Indiana in the case of Russelburg v. Gibson County.” Says Benen, “In other words, Hostettler would prevent the federal judiciary from enforcing its own court order. Gibson County could refuse to comply with the law and the judge couldn’t send marshals to resolve the problem.”

WHAT HIS FELLOW REPUBLICANS SHOULD HAVE SAID:

“John, I’m sorry. I agree with you on the merits; that Ten Commandments display isn’t hurting anyone. But this amendment isn’t the way to deal with it. We can’t micromanage in this way, picking court orders that we don’t want enforced. Everyone in this room could point to a court order that they wished had gone another way, but we’re not allowed to make those decisions. It’s a blatant violation of the separation of powers, and a terrible precedent to set. I’m sorry, but I can’t support this.”

WHAT THEY ACTUALLY SAID:

“Aye.”

Yes, the amendment passed. 91% of voting Republican representatives supported the amendment, versus 19% of voting Democratic representatives. I really don’t believe that 91% of the House Republican caucus didn’t know better. I don’t understand these people.

I’ve been reading “Red State”:http://www.redstate.org over the last few days, which I’ve been told is the smarter, more thoughtful side of Republicanism. So far, I’ve been deeply unimpressed, especially when it comes to their coverage of Guantanamo. In the last couple of days, we’ve had Erick’s “modest proposal”:http://www.redstate.org/story/2005/6/15/211325/756 that everyone in the camp should be killed (but no, he’s joking; what he really means is that they should all be locked up in perpetuity as enemies of America). We’ve had Mark Kilmer’s “argument”:http://www.redstate.org/story/2005/6/16/205423/099 that Senator Durbin’s statement on Guantanamo is just another example of Democrats’ hatred for Bush and Republicans. We’ve had Krempasky’s “Chris Muir gets it”:http://www.redstate.org/story/2005/6/17/121922/392, copying one of the most egregiously offensive cartoons I’ve seen in a long while (news for Krempasky and Muir: being “chained hand and foot in a fetal position to the floor” so that you urinate and defecate on yourself is not a choice between orange-glazed chicken and rice pilaff). And that’s not to mention Paul J. Cella’s “doozy”:http://www.redstate.org/story/2005/6/14/205620/932 on why we shouldn’t be letting Muslims come to the US (apparently, Muslims just don’t know how to be Americans).

It’d be easy to use this as a cheap way to accuse everyone on the right side of the blogosphere of being apologists for the inhumane treatment of prisoners, religious hatred etc. It’d also be unfair (it’s clear from the comments sections that a number of right-wingers are pretty disturbed at these posts too). But I can’t understand why, say, Sebastian Holsclaw (who’s nobody’s torture apologist) is happy to be associated as a co-blogger with this particular bunch of yahoos. If the last couple of days are anything to go by, there’s not much real difference between Red State and the hatemongers at LGF.

Update: Is “Pejman Yousefzadeh”:http://www.redstate.org/story/2005/6/18/163230/514 offering some veiled advice to his co-bloggers?

bq. Want to deny lunacy a forum? Great. The best thing to do is to grow up, act responsibly, make your honestly held and believed arguments with as much passion and fervor as you believe appropriate to the occasion and understand that if you step over the bounds of decency, the shadows will come out to embrace you while the rest of society watches in justified revulsion.

Around a million dollars donated in the wake of the Tsunami is being “stolen by the government of Sri Lanka”:http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/south_asia/4103054.stm , reports the BBC:

bq. British charity Oxfam has had to pay the Sri Lankan government $1m in import duty for vehicles used in tsunami reconstruction work.

bq. Paperwork had kept the 25 four-wheel drive vehicles idle in the capital, Colombo, for a month.

bq. The Sri Lankan government told the BBC News website the aid had been duty-free until the end of April but was now needed to prevent “market distortions”.

For those in Chicagoland or those contemplating a visit, here are some fun goings on over the summer. I still consider myself relatively new in the area so I’m still actively on the lookout for what goes on here these months. I’m very impressed.

In the past couple of weeks I’ve already had the opportunity to go see a Gospel Music Festival, an Art Fair and participate in other outdoor celebrations. Much more is ahead. The free Summer Dance program started at Grant Park this past Wednesday. It runs until the end of August. On Wednesdays they have a DJ. On Thu-Sun they first offer free dance lessons and then have a live band for dances ranging from Polka to Swing, from Bachata to Waltzes. Given that I have been spending increasing amounts of time in dance classes, this is an exciting and fun opportunity. A propos dance, this weekend is the annual Chicago Crystal Ball national dance competition. I’ll be there although only for part of it since I’m hosting friends over the weekend and we’ll be exploring numerous areas of town. No, I won’t be competing at Crystal Ball, but I’ll be cheering on friends who will.

Next weekend (24-26th) will be the Wired Nextfest for all of us interested in the latest gadgets. I think from there I’ll head straight to Grant Park for that evening’s ballroom session.

A bit later in the summer will be the Chicago Outdoor Film Festival also in Grant Park. This event it free as well. They will be wrapping up with Star Wars on Aug 23rd. Sounds fun.

I have found the following resources especially helpful in finding out about goings-on and keeping track. I recommend them as sources of additional amusement:

• City of Chicago Events page
• Upcoming.org‘s Events listings (this should be helpful also if you are in another metro area in the US)

I am constantly on the lookout for cool online tools. I just found one. I came upon it through del.icio.us, I think this set. One of these days I’ll get around to posting about what a cool tool that is in its own right.

But right now I want to tell you about YubNub. As its creator Jon Aquino explains, it is “a command-line for the web”. Impressively, it was his submission for a 24-hour programming contest.

What does it do? It helps you access search results on various sites directly. That is, say you want to search for a book on Amazon. As long as a command has already been created for searching on Amazon, you can simply enter the following in YubNub:
amazon booktitle
and you will be redirected to Amazon’s search results for “booktitle”. Or let’s say you want to search for an address on Google Maps, you can just enter:
gmaps address
and YubNub redirects you to the Google Maps result.

What is additionally great about YubNub is that if a command does not yet exist for your preferred search, you can add it.

To try it out, I created a command for searching the archives of Crooked Timber. If you go to YubNub and start your search query by typing in ct and then proceeding with whatever terms are of interest then you will be redirected to the results of your search here on CT.

So now you may be thinking: Well, that’s nice, but why would I bother going to yubnub.org to run the query instead of just going directly to the site where I want to run my search? Because you don’t have to go to yubnub.org. Several people have written Firefox search plugins for YubNub. So assuming you use Firefox and have a search toolbar in your Firefox browser, you can just add this as an additional engine.[1] MOREOVER, because YubNub defaults to Google when you do not enter a specific command, you can just leave YubNub as the default engine in your toolbar and still use Google (assuming that’s of interest) for generic searches without commands.

The service is evolving. Its creator has some suggestions and it sounds like he continues to work on it. Unfortunately, there is no way to make corrections to typos in submitted command lines so for now that has to be handled through emails. It is also easy to see how some people may create numerous commands that are not very interesting to most people. But overall, it’s a great service, I recommend trying it out!

UPDATE: For those of you savvy Firefox users who are wondering how this adds to already existing features in Firefox I should mention Jon Aquino’s inspiration for creating this service: not having to replicate the same keywords on different machines. For those of us who use more than one machine this is very helpful. Thanks to YubNub, it’s enough to add it to the toolbar and you’re ready to go.

1. Far be it from me to assume that you do use Firefox. But this would be a good time to start.

In “the discussion below”:https://crookedtimber.org/2005/06/14/if-youre-a-libertarian-how-come-youre-so-mean/ about charitable giving, foreign aid and so on, I mentioned the figure of 1 per cent of GDP or of first-world person’s income as being enough to make a real difference to third-world poverty. I got that figure from a footnote referencing the Liam Murphy paper, somewhere in Thomas Pogge’s excellent “World Poverty and Human Rights”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0745629954/junius-20 . Whether that’s actually the right figure I don’t know. But anyway, today I came across the new “Pledgebank”:http://www.pledgebank.com/ site. As “Chris Lightfoot”:http://ex-parrot.com/%7Echris/wwwitter/20050613-me_help_you_help_them.html writes:

bq. PledgeBank is designed to solve what I’m told are called `collective action problems’ — things that you want to do, but can only get done if enough other people will help. Why go out on a limb and say you’ll do something difficult or expensive or embarrassing if you don’t know whether enough other people will turn up to make it worthwhile? Anyway, PledgeBank is designed to help you get around that problem by letting people sign up to say they’ll take part, and telling you when enough people have done so for your plan to succeed.

One of the “pledges is from Nicola”:http://www.pledgebank.com/justonepercent and it has this content:

bq. I will give 1% of my gross annual salary to charity but only if 400 other people will too.

To make the link to third-world poverty, the charity would have to be an appropriate one (such as Oxfam, perhaps), but that’s up to individual pledgers.

On any given day, the odds are pretty good that Obsidian Wings will be the best blog in existence. Take this post by hilzoy.

Members of Congress say they receive a negligible number of letters and calls about the (torture) revelations that keep coming. ”You asked whether they want it clear or want it blurry,” Senator Susan Collins, a Maine Republican, said to me about the reaction of her constituents to the torture allegations that alarm her. ”I think they want it blurry.” “

“Wanting it clear” means wanting an honest, open debate about what we want interrogators to do in our name. In the course of that debate, those who favor torture would have a chance to make their case. Is it useful in interrogations? Do ticking time bomb scenarios actually occur, and if so, how often? How much actionable intelligence have our “stress positions” and our “Fear Up Harsh” and “Pride and Ego Down” tactics actually yielded? Those who oppose torture would have a chance to ask: do these benefits, if they exist, outweigh the dangers of adopting a policy that seems to invite abuse? Do they create more terrorists than they allow us to capture or thwart? Have they made enemies of people who might have supported us? And are these methods consistent with our values as a nation, and with our noblest aspirations? When both sides had made their case, we could then decide openly what we want to do, and decide it as a nation.

“Wanting it blurry” means wanting to avoid that debate. It means caring less about considering the extremely serious issues at stake and getting them right than about being able to duck the uncomfortable knowledge that debating those issues might force on us. It means caring less about our country, its ideals, and its honor than about our own peace of mind, even when we have reason to think that that peace of mind might be undeserved. It means being willing to let taxi drivers whom we know to be innocent be beaten to death, detainees be sodomized with chemical lightsticks and have lit cigarettes stuck in their ears, and fourteen year olds be “suspended from hooks in the ceiling for hours at a time” while being beaten, in order to preserve the illusion that our own hands are clean.

Wanting it clear is for adults. Wanting it blurry is for children, who hope that problems they don’t attend to will go away. And it is unworthy of citizens of a great democracy.

Susan Collins thinks that her constituents “want it blurry”. Apparently, other members of Congress agree. As citizens of a democracy, we cannot react to this insulting idea by bemoaning the apathy of some unspecified group of other people. We are the people Collins is talking about, and it is up to us to prove her, and those who agree with her, wrong. So let’s do it.

She goes on to lay out exactly what we ought to do.

Andy Moravcsik had an article in the FT yesterday which provides an interesting counter-argument to Chris’s – claiming, in effect that the French and Dutch should never have been asked to decide upon the technicalities of EU decision making (FT version with sub required “here”:http://news.ft.com/cms/s/1a3fac54-dc39-11d9-819f-00000e2511c8.html, Word version on Moravcsik’s home page “here”:http://www.princeton.edu/~amoravcs/library/works_well.doc ). But Moravcsik goes further even than Giscard – he claims that the very idea of asking people to vote on the text was naive:

bq. The convention, the constitution and the invocation of European ideals were tactics explicitly designed to increase public legitimacy. Enthused by the prospect of re-enacting Philadelphia, Europeans were supposed to educate themselves, swell with idealism, back sensible reform and participate more actively in EU politics. In retrospect, this grand democratic experiment seems naive. Abstract constitutional debates and referendum campaigns gave anti-globalisation, anti-immigrant and anti-establishment discontents of every stripe a perfect forum. EU policies already ratified by national parliaments, such as the recent enlargement, drew fire. Add the suspicion of voters unsure why a new constitution is required at all, and the enterprise was doomed.

Still, he thinks that the voters made the right choice, despite themselves.

bq. In rejecting the resulting document, reasonable though it is, French and Dutch voters may be wiser than they know.

Why? Moravcsik believes that the recent votes demonstrated the impossibility of a ‘political’ integration process. EU leaders should return their attentions to the bread-and-butter business of the European Union, and to incremental, unflashy integration based on technocratic bargains among the big member states.

Moravcsik’s arguments stem both from his basic theoretical claims about the processes driving EU integration (he’s the best-known academic advocate of the argument that the EU is little more than a set of bargains among states) and from his belief that the debate over the EU’s ‘democratic deficit’ is a chimera (see “here”:http://www.princeton.edu/~amoravcs/library/deficit.pdf for the best short version of his arguments). He claims that the kinds of policies that are delegated to the European Union are the kinds of policies that national governments usually delegate – decisions over cross-border trade issues, interest rates, judicial decision making and the like – so that we shouldn’t be especially concerned when they’re delegated to a transnational rather than a national authority. In any event, there are checks and balances that allow for some degree of democratic control (the European Parliament, national parliaments and so on). These arguments can be challenged on both empirical and normative grounds. There’s a lot of evidence that EU decision-making processes do escape the control of nation states (something I’ve posted on frequently before). But more pertinently, the fact that many aspects of economic decision making are delegated and removed from direct democratic controls is by no means necessarily a good thing on normative grounds. Indeed, you could turn Moravcsik’s argument on its head – a fair amount of the animus that led to the “No” votes was less specifically directed at the constitutional text, or even at the EU, than at the general feeling that economic decision making is slipping away from democratic control, and that the EU is one manifestation of this. Indeed, I suspect (and hope) that the ‘No’ votes are the beginning of a wider challenge to the notion that vast areas of economic decision making should not be subject to political control. While I’m broadly in favour of an integrated Europe, I’m not especially keen on a EU like the one we have today, in which the imperative of the free market usually overrides national level social protections.