EJ Dionne at the Washington Post discovers right-wing postmodernism, something Australian bloggers have been banging on about for years.

The more this point gets hammered, the better, particularly as there are still some conservatives out there who actually care about old-fashioned things like objective truth.

Via Tim Dunlop and Pandagon. See also Mark Bahnisch

The big news in Australia has been the trial, in Indonesia, of Schapelle Corby, a 27-year old beauty student accused of smuggling marijuana into Bali[1]. In the middle of the trial, in which Corby vigorously asserted her innocence, nine young Australians were caught trying to smuggle heroin out, and now face the death penalty. Corby’s conviction and twenty year sentence has caused major problems in the often fraught relationship between Australia and Indonesia, which had improved in the wake of the tsunami disaster.

Like lots of others, I’m not too happy about the Corby case. But I think most of the complaints from Australia have been misdirected. The problem is not with the trial which, while not as procedurally tight as the Australian equivalent, seemed basically fair[2] to me. The real problem is with the sentence. The likely imposition of the death penalty on the Bali heroin smugglers is even worse.

The reason that attention hasn’t been focused on this issue is that, as a society, we’re fairly hypocritical about the war on drugs. At one level, we recognise that it’s essentially pointless and unwinnable, like most wars. So we’ve gradually backed away from lengthy prison sentences for bit players, and even abandoned the idea that the capture of a few “Mr Big Enoughs” would make any real difference. But it’s still convenient for us that our neighbours should have draconian laws, the burden of which falls mainly on their own citizens. It’s only when a sympathetic figure like Corby gets 20 years for an offence that might have drawn a good behavior bond in Australia, or when some stupid young people end up facing a firing squad that the contradictions are exposed.

fn1. This isn’t as unlikely as it might sound. There’s a big demand among European and Australian tourists in Bali for the type of marijuana in question, and buying from local suppliers is very risky.

fn2. That is, as fair as other drugs trials. The nature of the war on drugs is that normal legal principles have to be suspended if the law is going to be made to work at all. The routine use of procedures bordering on entrapment, and the effective reversal of the onus of proof, once possession is established, are examples of this, in Australia just as much as in Indonesia.

We’ve been talking a bit about interdisciplinary work at CT recently. My favorite observation about this comes from my colleague Ron Breiger, who said to me in passing once that the trouble with interdisciplinarity is that you need disciplines in order for it to happen. There are no borders without heartlands, so to speak. Anyway, I got an email this afternoon from a friend of mine who is searching for a speaker:

bq. We are trying to think of a keynote speaker who represents the idea of learning and scholarship across institutions. Someone who crosses borders and who combines disciplinary perspectives. It could be a novelist who writes about science; or someone like Stanley Fish or William Buckley Jr, or … Can you think of any compelling polymaths (famous or otherwise) that could represent the notion of cross-domain writing/thinking?

Well, CT smarties? Can you?

What PNH says on self-identified “‘liberal hawks'”:http://nielsenhayden.com/makinglight/archives/006368.html#006368.

bq. The reason so many in the Democratic “base” are infuriated over being lectured by the likes of Peter Beinart and Joe Biden about the need to “get serious about national security” is that the people delivering the lectures are precisely those who were wrong about one of the most important national security questions of our time. As a result we’ve spent $172 billion and 1600 American lives, damaged our military immeasurably, trashed America’s global reputation for justice and fair play, and given the bin Ladens of the world a gift that will keep on giving for generations to come. The entire enterprise has made us profoundly less secure. … The fact of the matter is that the supposed distance between self-identified “national security Democrats” and the allegedly dovish party “base” is based on a self-serving slur promulgated by people with something to hide. … Liberal Democrats like Atrios, or me, aren’t remotely opposed to “national security.” We’re strongly in favor of it. Getting killed because I’m an American, at home or overseas: bad. Spending money and resources to protect me from getting killed: good. Maintaining a strong military, at least until planetary utopia breaks out and there are free Jill Johnston posters for everyone: really good. Making all of that far harder, and increasing my likelihood of getting killed, because some politicians and pundits needed to “look tough”: really, really bad. … At times it all seems like some sort of Bizarro World faith-versus-works argument. Liberals wind up being the ones pointing out, endlessly, that national security is provided by actual practices, not just by holding your face right.

“Nathan Newman”:http://www.nathannewman.org/laborblog/archive/002986.shtml writes about union-busting cartels.

bq. For folks who remember the southern California grocery chain strike last year, a key to the grocers breaking the strike was a revenue sharing deal between the big chains– thereby preventing the unions from easily reaching settlement with any of the firms individually.

The L.A. Times “story”:http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-supers26may26,0,6124770.story?coll=la-home-business that he links to has more.

bq. The chains initially refused to disclose the pact’s details and sought to have them sealed after Lockyer sued. But King unsealed the documents in February. They showed that the companies used a formula based on their sales, before and during the dispute, and their regional market shares to figure out what Kroger should pay the others. Kroger later revealed in securities filings that it paid a combined $148 million to Safeway and Albertsons, and Albertsons said it received $63 million of that. That would have left $85 million for Safeway.

Those who have read Adam Smith will remember “his observations”:http://geolib.com/smith.adam/won1-08.html on the tendency of business owners to gang up together against workers.

bq. We rarely hear, it has been said, of the combinations of masters, though frequently of those of workmen. But whoever imagines, upon this account, that masters rarely combine, is as ignorant of the world as of the subject. Masters are always and everywhere in a sort of tacit, but constant and uniform combination, not to raise the wages of labour above their actual rate. To violate this combination is everywhere a most unpopular action, and a sort of reproach to a master among his neighbours and equals. We seldom, indeed, hear of this combination, because it is the usual, and one may say, the natural state of things, which nobody ever hears of. Masters, too, sometimes enter into particular combinations to sink the wages of labour even below this rate. These are always conducted with the utmost silence and secrecy, till the moment of execution, and when the workmen yield, as they sometimes do, without resistance, though severely felt by them, they are never heard of by other people.

(Funnily enough, Smith’s self-appointed intellectual heirs at the Adam Smith Institute don’t seem all that interested in his ideas on combinations of masters, despite their eagerness to “smash trade unions”:http://www.adamsmith.org/80ideas/idea/26.htm. An oversight that I’m sure they’ll be rushing to rectify.)

It may be a bit geeky of me to admit this, but I find the following quite fun/funny. A Peanuts and Charles Schulz enthusiast figured out how the book images are generated on Amazon’s Web site. He has documented it in detail so now we can all create our own images. (It looks like he’s not the first one to play with this, but his discussion of the various options seems more comprehensive than others’ so it’s worth a pointer.) I thought I’d display one of my favorite cartoons with a twist. Enjoy! (Or be amused that some of us do.:) [thanks]

As per Nat Gertler’s ethical considerations listed on the right side of the page linked above, I would like to note that the discount percentages in the image above are being used in a purely decorative fashion and do not reflect any offers on Amazon’s site.

The AUT boycott of Haifa and Bar-Ilan Universities in Israel was overturned at today’s special meeting of AUT council. BBC report “here”:http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/education/4582955.stm.

A long article in New York magazine about “Lawrence Lessig’s participation in a lawsuit”:http://newyorkmetro.com/nymetro/news/features/12061/index.html against “the American Boychoir School”:http://www.americanboychoir.org/movie.html. A teacher at the school molested boys during the 1970s and Lessig, a former head boy at the school, was one of the victims. He’s now arguing the case in front of the New Jersey Supreme Court. The crux of the lawsuit is whether the school can be held responsible for the actions of its abusive employees. (They’ve settled cases in the past.) I remember seeing the American Boychoir tour bus around Princeton quite regularly. The place is is just down the road from campus. The school is arguing that it is in no more responsible for the actions of the abusers it employed than it would be for employee “stopping in a bar after work and slugging someone in the mouth. ‘Is the company responsible?’ [the school’s lawyer] asks. ‘No. Why not? Because they’re not acting within the scope of employment.'” That seems like a weak analogy. In this case the employee was in a position to repeatedly abuse his victims in virtue of his role and the authority it carried. The school’s defence seems to come perilously close to arguing that it can’t be held responsible for _any_ illegal action that a teacher perpetrated on a pupil, because of course illegal actions are not within the scope of the teacher’s employment.

I don’t know about the legal merits, of course, but on the basis of their past experiences, together with the evasions and blame-the-victim insinuations from the school’s President and its chief lawyer, it’s easy to see how the litigants’ could have a desire to raze the institution to the ground.

Eszter’s “post”:https://crookedtimber.org/2005/05/19/isolated-social-networkers/ on physicists, sociologists and network theory has given rise to some interesting responses, and the beginnings of a broader distributed discussion on what disciplinary boundaries mean. Maybe it’s time to tie these threads back into a knot, entangle them further with some arguments from Susanne Lohmann on the functions and problems of academic disciplines, and see how people choose to unravel it all. (warning – lengthy extracts below fold).
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One of the best comebacks ever, dead and buried at half-time, “Champions of Europe….”:http://news.bbc.co.uk/sport1/hi/football/europe/4573159.stm

This weekend I’ll be at the annual meetings of the International Communication Association meetings in New York. All of the members from my research group will be participating in the conference and we’ll be reporting on several of our projects. Sunday midday we will present a poster summarizing some preliminary findings from our project on cross-ideological conversations among bloggers. I thought I would give a little preview here.

Cass Sunstein in his book Republic.com talks about the potential for IT to fragment citizens’ political discussions into isolated conversations. Borrowing from Negroponte, he discusses the potential for people to construct a “Daily Me” of news readings that excludes opposing perspectives. Sunstein argues that for democracy to flourish, it is important that people continue to have conversations with those in disagreement with their positions. However, he is concerned that with the help of filtering out unwanted content people will fragment into enclaves and won’t be exposed to opinions that challenge their positions. The book is an interesting read, but it does not offer any systematic empirical evidence of the claims.

I have been working on a project this past year with Jason Gallo and Sean Zehnder on empirically testing Sunstein’s thesis. We are doing so by analyzing cross-linkages among liberal and political blogs. You may recall that about two months ago Lada Adamic and Natalie Glance came out with a report on “The Political Blogosphere and the 2004 U.S. Election”. My first reaction was one of panic. Here we had been working on our project for months and someone else came out with the results first. However, a closer read made me realize that our project has some unique elements. And if nothing else, seeing that project has made us more careful and critical in our work showing that more research in an area can be fruitful, because hopefully it inspires the agenda to move forward in a productive manner.

[I updated this image on June 1 when I realized the right graph wasn’t displaying exactly what I had described it as.]

Our work has focused on addressing two questions. First, we are interested in seeing the extent to which liberal and conservative bloggers interlink. Second, we want to see what kind of changes we may be able to observe over time. Sunstein’s thesis suggests that we would see very little if any cross-linking among liberal and conservative blogs and the cross-linking would diminish over time. We go about answering these questions using multiple methodologies. We counted links and calculated some measures to see how insular the conversations are within groups of blogs. We also did a content analysis of some of the posts in our sample. We continue to work on this project so these are just preliminary findings.
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But first. The Economist’s new venture is “an inspirational lifestyle magazine which instead of helping readers make decisions in their professional life, helps them do the same in their personal life”.

“Take white-collar boxing – the latest stress reliever for Wall Street and City elite. Tired of punching a bag at the gym, they have now moved on to punching each other in front of a paying audience. If smacking around your colleagues doesn’t sound appealing, how about brushing up on your space travel tips so you can be first in line to book your space flight? If all that sounds too strenuous, check out the dos and don’ts of selecting massage therapy. Other articles include the latest on gadgets, health innovations, luxury items and how to order your own bespoke car.”

I suppose they forgot the first rule, that we don’t talk about fight club. And also the part about status-seeking through rampant consumerism being a bit of a trap. Especially if you just acquire the same crap everyone else has. Which you will if you buy this magazine. Worth noting if you’re one of today’s busy global managers and hoped Intelligent Life would give you an executive summary of all that culture stuff.

The arrival of Andrew Adonis in government has so far gone uncommented upon here, so I feel entitled to say something, however belatedly. Adonis’s presence at #10 made the Education portfolio a poisoned chalice for at least the whole of the second term. Because Number 10 was always interfering in policymaking, no Education Secretary (even Charles Clarke) could pursue his or her own agenda with confidence. Not only were they constantly being second-guessed and scrutinized, but even when they put forward their own initiatives no-one affected could be sure whose they were, or whether, if they truly belonged to the Secretary, they would reach fruition. It seemed to me that Estelle Morris (who was Secretary of State most of the time I lived in the UK) was always in an untenable position. The portion of the Queens Speech on Education has Adonis’s name written all over it.

Ruth Kelly should be delighted, therefore, to have Adonis in her team.

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David Greenberg had two “interesting”:http://www.slate.com/id/2118854/entry/2118924/ “articles”:http://www.slate.com/id/2118854 last week about the gap between academic and popular history, and how to bridge it. This suggests an interesting question. Which academic books are fit for human consumption? Or, to put it less polemically, which books written for academic purposes deserve, should find (or in some cases have found) a more general readership among intelligent people who are either (a) non-academics, or (b) aren’t academic specialists in the discipline that the book is written for. Nominations invited. To start the ball rolling, I’m listing three (fairly obvious imo) contenders myself.

bq. E.P. Thompson, Making of the English Working Class. A classic, which reads more like a novel than a piece of academic history, rescuing organizers, sectaries, pamphleteers and gutter journalists “from the enormous condescension of posterity.” Moving, smart, and wonderfully written.

bq. Albert Hirschman, Exit, Voice and Loyalty. A stunningly simple idea, worked out to its logical conclusions – it creates a new vocabulary for understanding how social institutions work.

bq. James Scott, Seeing Like A State. Libertarians will like the critique of state-led social engineering, but be discomfited by Scott’s account of the totalizing effects of markets. Traditional social democrats and socialists will have the opposite set of reactions. Both should read it (as should anyone else interested in the intersection between political theory and real life).