A couple of Australian legal academics have caused a stir by publicising an article they’ve written (so far unpublished), advocating the legalisation of torture (details and links here). Mirko Bagaric and Julie Clarke present a rehash of arguments put forward by Alan Dershowitz, centred on our old and much-refuted friend, the ticking bomb scenario. Their main contribution is to bite the bullet where Dershowitz was not, advocating the torture of innocent people who are suspected of having useful information.

The really startling thing about all this is that, until a few months ago, Bagaric, the senior author, was a member of the Refugee Review Tribunal, part of the apparatus used by the Howard government to implement its highly restrictive policies on refugees. In this context, he had to judge numerous cases in which refugees claimed to be fleeing torture, but never thought it relevant to recuse himself on the basis that he was on the side of the torturers.

The blogospheric reaction has been predictable (at least if you share my priors). Although Bagaric was previously regarded as a mild lefty (he’s advocated higher taxes, for example), anti-war bloggers were uniformly horrified by his and Clarke’s views. By contrast, with less than a handful of exceptions, the pro-war side of the sphere either supported Bagaric and Clarke, defended their right to speak while avoiding the substantive issues, or kept on blogging about Newsweek.

This is a bit disappointing, but it provides a useful lesson. Next time you read one of these guys talking about Saddam and his crimes, remember it’s just a factional brawl within the pro-torture party. If Saddam had stuck to fighting wars against Iran, and torturing Iraqis, instead of invading Kuwait, he’d still be “an SOB, but our SOB”, just like Karimov in Uzbekistan.

Matt Yglesias writes about “philosophical zombies”:http://yglesias.typepad.com/matthew/2005/05/zombie_attack.html which reminds me to mention that this particularly refined class of undead gets a nod in Charles Stross’s Singularity Sky. It’s a nice example of a genre trope getting picked up by the academy, spun around, then yanked back into the popular culture with its references skewed. The few moments in the last couple of days which I haven’t spent grading, I’ve been reading Stross’s The Family Trade, a novel contribution to the somewhat exiguous genre of economic fantasy. Sort of like Roger Zelazny’s _Amber_ but with real feudalism – illiterate peasants, aristocrats who are obsessed with their fishing and mining rights (even if they don’t know much about what fishing and mining actually involve in practice), and a spunky heroine determined to reform the gung-ho mercantilism of her family business. It’s all enormous fun. I don’t usually buy books in hardback, but I couldn’t wait for a year to order a copy of the sequel, which is coming out in June. Good stuff.

I knew they’d make a film of it when I first heard it, one of a few thousand apparently, in my teenage bedroom just outside Slough (ironically, as it turns out, for where would Martin Freeman be without Slough?). So I waited. And waited. And waited. 27 years or thereabouts. There have been months (years, perhaps) in which I haven’t thought about it, and when it finally opened I thought, “well, I can wait a few weeks more”. So yesterday I took my 8 year old and her friend. My hopes were not high — I didn’t even care whether it would be good, I was just fulfilling the wish I had 27 years ago. It couldn’t possibly match the radio series, I knew that, not least because Peter Jones is dead and Simon Jones is…over the hill.

I’m not going to review it: I’m already behind the curve.
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“Savage Minds”:http://savageminds.org/ is an elegantly-designed new blog run by six anthropologists. Its roster includes Alex Golub, whose site I used to read more often in the days before blogs, and who once “wrote a post”:http://alex.golub.name/log/?p=28 containing the following story:

bq. Met with my advisor the other day to go over a conference paper I gave him that would eventually be turned into a chapter. He said that it was ‘better than ok’, which is the most positive comment I’ve ever gotten from him. Much better than when I was writing my MA, when he’d give me back drafts with comments like “don’t ever give anything of this quality to me again ever”.

I sometimes relate this anecdote to graduate students in order to preempt any passive-aggressive whining about my comments on their work being insufficiently kind and appreciative.

From the APSA:

“The American Political Science Association, through action by its Council and its Committee on Professional Ethics, Rights, and Freedoms, supports the views expressed in the May 3, 2005 statement by the AAUP against academic boycotts. We join in condemning the resolutions of the AUT that damage academic freedom and we call for their repeal.”

I am waiting for the American Sociological Association to follow with a similar statement. According to Jeff Weintraub, the ASA Council has taken the matter under consideration, but no outcome so far.

UPDATE: The Middle East Studies Association joins in: “We strongly urge the Association to withdraw or rescind this resolution to boycott these universities and blacklist their faculty at the very earliest opportunity.”

John Sutherland “splutters indignantly”:http://www.guardian.co.uk/g2/story/0,3604,1484604,00.html in _The Guardian_ that Steve Levitt’s Freakonomics, hides “hard-core Reagonism [sic] and Thatcherism” under a mask of playfulness. His evidence for this? First, that Levitt is an economist:

bq. Fun as it is to read, Levitt’s vision of the human condition is cold. The solution to every problem, whether political, moral, social or spiritual, is economics. The human animal is a rational-choice machine, driven by incentives and self-interest.

Second, that Reagan’s tax-cuts were “highly freakonomical” because they were counter-intuitive.

bq. Cut the taxes for the rich, and the poor will benefit. How? Because of trickle-down. And the government will pull in more revenue. Why? Compliance: people don’t mind paying taxes, they mind paying excessive taxes. History has proved Freaky Ron wrong on the first count and perhaps right on the second.

Now fulminating opinion-pieces should perhaps be held to a lower standard of truth than serious journalism. But even so, this is still an exceptionally silly article. First, even if Levitt’s view of the human condition is cold and based on economics, this is by no means evidence that he’s a right-wing jihadist. If Sutherland really wants to see the argument that “the solution to every problem, whether political, moral, social or spiritual, is economics” developed at length, he only needs to go back and read Marx’s _Capital_. Second, Reaganite economics didn’t have much of anything to do with the kinds of arguments that Levitt is putting forward. Indeed, in an important way, they’re antithetical to the kind of social science that Levitt is trying to do. _Contra_ Sutherland, the intellectual justification for Reagan’s tax cuts was, insofar as it was anything, the Laffer curve. To state it politely, the idea behind this curve was not driven by data. Levitt’s work, in contrast, isn’t scrawled down “on the back of a restaurant napkin”:http://www.wanniski.com/showarticle.asp?articleid=2965 ; it’s driven by what the data show. This, I suspect, is why Levitt has some harsh words for John Lott in the book – cooking your numbers is a mortal sin.

I’ve read _Freakonomics_ pretty carefully (you’ll be seeing more on this topic before the end of the week). My guess is that Levitt is somewhere to the right of the political center, but it’s only a guess. His broad political orientation is impossible to discern from his writing on economics. Sutherland’s article is completely off the mark, and is, in a certain way, anti-intellectual. He identifies a particular style of thought that he doesn’t like, and then damns it on the basis of its purported link to a right wing political agenda. And in so doing, he seems to argue that the examination of incentives and what they tell us about how to make policy is fundamentally morally problematic. That’s a far reaching claim, and, I believe, one that is deeply misconceived. Sutherland is usually a good book reviewer, but he’s gotten this one very badly wrong indeed.

(Thanks to Chris for the link).

What’s that sound? Why, it’s the world’s smallest violin playing quietly in the background as the NYT “counsels the neediest cases:”:http://www.nytimes.com/2005/05/15/business/yourmoney/15advi.html

bq. Q. You’re a single worker without children, and your company is very family-friendly. Many colleagues with children take advantage of flextime to attend soccer games or school plays. You feel that you’re constantly picking up the slack because you don’t have family commitments to provide an excuse to leave at 5 p.m. Is this just part of paying your dues, or should you speak up?

A: My heart bleeds for ya, buddy. Speak up! You are the Rosa Parks of corporate America.

bq. Q. What should you do if you feel that you’re being exploited?

Go to bathroom, stick your head in the toilet bowl and flush. There. Things should now be back in perspective.

bq. Q. Won’t declining cast you as a poor team player?

No, because if you’re feeling gypped cheated over all the advantages that co-workers with children enjoy, chances are everyone already thinks you’re a langer.

China Miéville has just won the “Arthur C. Clarke award”:http://www.appomattox.demon.co.uk/acca/News/Winner%2005.htm for _Iron Council_, which we ran a “seminar”:https://crookedtimber.org/category/mieville-seminar on in January. He seems to be on a bit of a roll the last month or two; he’s also interviewed in the “current issue”:http://www.believermag.com/issues/200504/interview_mieville.php of _The Believer_. Look out next month for some more Miéville-related goodness.

After featuring on 60 minutes last night, On Bullshit climbed from #21 (when I checked at the start of the segment) in the Amazon charts to #3 (when I checked 5 minutes ago). I have no idea what this means in terms of numbers, but the commissioning editor must be feeling pretty smug. As must Harry Frankfurt, I’d guess.

It doesn’t seem to me to be unreasonable to guess that there’s an indirect link between this “NYT story”:http://www.nytimes.com/2005/05/15/national/15chaplain.html?hp&ex=1116129600&en=00e6129405ca2b50&ei=5094&partner=homepage on evangelizing Christians making life uncomfortable for non-believers in the armed forces, and the “riots in Afghanistan”:http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/05/13/AR2005051300301.html that followed a _Newsweek_ report that a copy of the Koran had been flushed down the toilet by Guantanamo interrogators. Other services than the Air Force have a spotty track record in the area of Christian-Muslim sensitivities; to the best of my knowledge, “General Boykin”:http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2003/10/16/attack/main578471.shtml was never disciplined for the flagrantly offensive comments that he made in 2003.

This is important stuff; as Robert Kaplan “said”:http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/prem/200307/kaplan in the _Atlantic_ (sub required) a couple of years ago, the US armed forces are what administer the American imperium, such as it is. Kaplan claimed that this was a good thing, pointing to the positive role that army officers could play, and quoting Winston Churchill’s dictum that the Americans were ‘worthy successors’ to the British Empire. However, the inheritance may run in different directions than those that Kaplan highlighted. What’s happening in Afghanistan is reminiscent of the rebellion of 1858 in India, where false rumours that the British were issuing cartridges smeared with the body fat of cows and pigs were lent credibility by the efforts of Company officers from Britain to evangelize among their troops. There’s no evidence whatsoever that fundamentalist Christians were responsible for any decision to flush Korans down the toilet. Indeed, I suspect that they weren’t; if the _Newsweek_ “story”:http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/7693014/site/newsweek/ bears out, this is more likely to be a general cultural problem in the military than something that can be specifically attributed to a sub-group of officers. But still, an organization’s culture is in part a product of the actions that are tacitly encouraged or discouraged by its leaders. A military establishment in which extremists who believe that Allah is a “false idol” can not only survive, but prosper and reach high military rank, and in which non-Christians can experience systematic bullying and intimidation, is likely to have problems when it not only has to deal with “idol worshippers,” but has to take their beliefs seriously. Certainly, I can’t imagine that interrogators in the US military would ever have flushed a Bible down the toilet to shock a Christian prisoner into cooperation, regardless of whether this was likely to have worked or not.

Update: _Newsweek_ is now “saying”:http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/05/15/AR2005051500493.html that it erred in its report.

The news on the massacre in Uzbekistan is sketchy, but it seems clear that troops fired on a protest meeting, killing dozens.

The massacre followed violent protests in which government buildings were taken over, and prisoners, including alleged members of Islamist groups, were set free, but it appears that the protestors were simply listening to speeches when the troops attacked them .

The best information seems to be at Registan, which I found through the relatively new system of Technorati tags

The US currently has an air base and around 1000 troops in Uzbekistan. They can’t be regarded as neutral, and their presence clearly supports the mass murdering and torturing dictator Karimov, someone who appears indistinguishable from Saddam circa 1980. A literal reading of Administration rhetoric would suggest that the US should use its power to overthrow Karimov , but there’s zero possibility that this will happen (the official US response is an appeal for restraint, directed mainly at the protestors). But the troops should be withdrawn immediately, and all ties with this evil regime broken.

The BBC radio news this morning has been dominated by hours of whining about “the takeover of Manchester United by a Michael Moore lookalike”:http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/4542913.stm . Meanwhile the disappearance of hundreds (and possibly thousands) of African children from London schools is relegated to mere mention status. (Some of the children have been killed, many more are probably in some kind of slavery.) The relative importance the BBC assigns to these stories is also reflected on its main news page.

USA Today reports:

About a third of the 152 adult guests who slept at the White House or Camp David last year were fundraisers or donors to President Bush’s campaigns, but at least half of those also are family or old friends.

It’s not surprising that there’s a lot of overlap between a successful politician’s fundraisers/ donors and his old friends, so I appreciate that they tried to break that out. It looks like about 1/2 of 1/3 of the guests were donors or fundraisers who were not family or old friends. That’s probably a little less than 16%.

Most readers will remember that Bill Clinton’s presidency came under continuous assault for inviting donors to stay at the White House, specifically the Lincoln bedroom. In 1997, the White House released a list of all of the guests who had stayed in the Lincoln bedroom. (The Bush administration does not report where guests stayed.) CNN posted the list as of 2/97, which they have divided into five groups. They’ve tried to define donors and fundraisers who were not family or old friends as “friends and supporters”. They make up 13% of the list.

There are obviously several degrees of imprecision here. Most importantly, there’s no great way to discern who’s really the President’s friend and who isn’t without a subpoena of his Trapper Keeper. We’re also looking at different timespans, and comparing the Lincoln bedroom to both the White House and Camp David.

What’s less obvious is how the liberal media allowed one President’s pattern of behavior (about 13%) to become a widely-understood multi-year scandal, whereas another President’s pattern of behavior (about 11-15%) is a page 17 story, if that. But, what do I know.

Brad DeLong revisits the Guenter Grass question.

bq. UPDATE: Well, the original title is wrong: Guenter Grass is not minimizing the holocaust by comparing Nazi Germany to globalization. And I should not call him crypto-Nazi scum.

bq. But there is, still, something very wrong with claiming not that the neoliberal approach to economic reform is wrong, and that the analyses of people like me and my friends are flawed, but that we and I are the standard-bearers of a new totalitarianism. There is something very wrong with claiming that that the decision of the Social Democratic Party to push Harz IV is not a mistake, but rather a reflection of the Social Democratic Party’s subservience to multinational capital.

bq. Chancellor Schroeder is working for the interests of the German people as he sees them, and deserves a better quality of critic.

There aren’t many (any?) political bloggers who haven’t made overly-hasty or sweeping judgments at one point or another. But there’s a lot more rhetoric out there about the “self-correcting blogosphere” than there are selves who are willing to correct where correction is appropriate. More power to Brad for doing this.