“Kevin”:http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/archives/individual/2004_09/004738.php and “Matthew”:http://yglesias.typepad.com/matthew/2004/09/gerrymandering.html have good posts on redistricting, although like Brian, I’m a little unsure whether intra-party competition is always such a good thing (in Ireland, where we have a PR-STV system, the result is intense localism – politicians perceive their main duty as “bothering civil servants” to get favours for their constituents). There’s another problem though, that’s less often raised by smart centrist Democrats – the enormous institutional barriers that stand in the way of third parties. Ballot access rules in many states are deliberately and systematically skewed to make it difficult for third parties to gain a place on the ballot sheets. In its own way, this is every bit as anti-democratic as gerrymandering – not only does it make it more difficult for third parties to gain elected office, but it also makes the main parties less sensitive to voter dissatisfaction (voters don’t have other political alternatives that they can credibly threaten to vote for). Unlike redistricting, this is the result of a tacit oligopoly between the two main parties, and is thus, I suspect, even less susceptible to reform. This is not to say by any means that these official barriers are the only impediments to third party influence in the US, but they’re surely a significant part of the story.

Not only would I like to see left third parties better able to influence the Democrats, but I suspect it would be a good thing for American politics if there were a viable Libertarian party. Certainly, some of the financial and political excesses of the Bush administration might have been curtailed if there had been a credible likelihood of libertarian-leaning voters going elsewhere. Given all the above, I have mixed feelings when I read about “Nader’s success”:http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A35865-2004Sep20.html in getting on the ballot in various states. I’m hugely unimpressed with him as a candidate, I don’t want him to attract votes, and I’m perfectly aware that the Republicans have probably engaged in as many dodgy manoeuvres to get him on the ballot as the Democrats have to try to get him off. Nonetheless, a small piece of me can’t help feeling happy whenever the courts adopt (as I think they should adopt) a broad and flexible standard as to who should and should not be able to get on the ballot.

“Kevin”:http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/archives/individual/2004_09/004738.php and “Matt”:http://yglesias.typepad.com/matthew/2004/09/gerrymandering.html are talking redistricting, with Matt favouring proportional representation on the grounds that it would introduce intraparty competition into American politics. This is rather odd – it’s only been a few months since the Presidential primaries, which are the most vigorously and open contested intraparty political fights in the world outside of the New South Wales Labor Party. And any experience with internal Labor (or Labour) Party fights does not immediately make one think it would make the world a better place to expand that kind of fighting.

But I didn’t want to make a substantive proposal, just ask a procedural question. To the best of my knowledge there are only two classes of country where the electoral system, from drawing boundaries to determining ballot order to deciding whether there will be recounts and so on, is run by partisan appointees.

bq. Class One: China, Cuba, etc., i.e. countries where it is known in advance how the results will turn out.
Class Two: The United States of America (with the honourable exception of Iowa).

Are there any other countries in Class Two, or is America unique in being a democracy where one of the prizes of victory is getting to be the umpire next time the game is played?

We’ve posted on this one before, but I’m a believer in the vital importance of audit. And it is troubling me somewhat that in carrying out my audit, I cannot find any news reports about atrocities committed by the Sadrists during their period of control of Najaf, which are dated later than 28 August, the day after the siege ended. Reports filed during the course of fast-moving events are often unreliable, and it strikes me as odd that there has been no follow-through at all on this story. Could anyone steer me in the direction of any more information, or is there some obvious reason I’m missing?

The posts on positional goods give me a lame excuse to link to a paper Adam Swift and I have recently posted on the Equality Exchange. The paper tries to think through the significance of positional goods for distributive principles. Here’s the abstract, in case you want to look any further. Comments welcome (though I don’t promise to respond on the thread, and if comments are really substantive you might want just to email me or Adam).

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bq. “If God had wanted us to play football in the clouds, he’d have put grass up there.”

The “BBC reports”:http://news.bbc.co.uk/sport1/hi/football/3673568.stm that “Brian Clough”:http://www.brianclough.com/ has died. A sad loss after a sad decline. But his “achievements”:http://www.brianclough.com/new_page_4.htm — including back-to-back European Cups with an otherwise unexceptional team — speak for themselves. Bill Shankly said of him “He’s worse than the rain in Manchester. At least the rain in Manchester stops occasionally.” Now he’s stopped forever.

For those trying to work out whether the Bush Administration’s stated commitment to democracy in the Middle East reflects Wilsonian idealism or just a tactical choice, reflecting the fact that the Administration’s enemies in the region are mostly not democrats, Venezuela provides a useful data point.

The death of the book, like the paperless office, has been predicted so many times that people have given up paying attention. But, for me, at least, it came a big step closer today, at least in one sense, when I downloaded a PDF version of China Mieville’s Iron Council from Amazon.

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I sometimes wonder about the utility of mentioning films on CT because by the time us Brits get to see them (UK release dates being later than those in the US) they’ve often finished playing in cinemas in the US and elsewhere. But Richard Eyre’s “Stage Beauty”:http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0368658/ , which I caught on Saturday is an exception. Set at the time of the Restoration, it explores the fate of Ned Kynaston, a male actor who specializes in female roles (women being prohibited from performing). When the law is changed, first to allow women on the stage and then to prohibit men from playing them altogether, Kynaston is out of a job. I won’t post spoilers but just say that what we get includes a good deal of exploration of sexual identity and sexuality. And I also laughed out loud (a lot) at some parts and was moved by others. (Sarah from the excellent “Just Another False Alarm”:http://www.rubberring.blogspot.com/ has “more”:http://rubberring.blogspot.com/2004_09_12_rubberring_archive.html#109495045156434120 — but with spoilers).

By way of a break from everything about the US elections in the blogosphere, here’s a post about the US elections.

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With apologies to The Poor Man, an application of this strategy to an issue which appears to be confusing surprisingly many surprisingly intelligent minds in the British Isles:

Why are people so keen to ban fox-hunting when (fishing, battery farming, meat eating in general, mousetraps etc) are responsible for much more animal death and suffering?

Because hunting foxes with dogs is a sadistic pleasure.

Next week, I may tackle the question of why the Beslan siege appalled us more than the ongoing deaths of children through malnutrition and disease in Africa. Or I may not.

“A & L Daily”:http://www.aldaily.com/ is giving prominence to “an article by one Thomas F. Powers”:http://www.legalaffairs.org/issues/September-October-2004/argument_powers_sepoct04.html “an assistant professor of political science at the University of Minnesota Duluth” arguing that a policy of “preventive detention an idea whose time has come”. There’s much that’s worthy of comment in Powers’s piece, not least the fact that he writes that ” we should look to other countries, especially England and Israel, which have crafted preventive detention policies with meaningful safeguards for due process.” England? !! Is this assistant professor of political science’s political geography really that bad? Anyway, he has this to say about the British Government’s internment policy introduced in Northern Ireland in 1971:

bq. Great Britain’s indefinite internment policy, formalized in 1973 following the recommendations of a famous report authored by Lord Diplock on the situation in Northern Ireland, was allowed to lapse in 1980. Lord Diplock was reacting to a legally murky use of police power, one he termed “imprisonment at the arbitrary Diktat of the Executive Government.” Though his reform proposal, incorporated in the 1973 Northern Ireland (Emergency Provisions) Act, made preventive detention a matter of administrative, not judicial, oversight, the new policy reasserted civilian control and included due process safeguards. No less a figure than the secretary of state for Northern Ireland made initial detention determinations. Within a period of 28 days, an administrative official would then review each case with the option to extend the detention. Those detained also had a right to be informed of their status hearing in advance, and they were granted the right to an attorney paid for by the government.

“Mick Fealty”:http://www.sluggerotoole.com/ or “Marc Mulholland”:http://marcmulholland.tripod.com/histor/ (or maybe other Timberites) could comment more authoritatively than I can on the strict accuracy of Powers’s account (1980 seems an odd date to choose for internment to lapse… and those of us who actually remember the period will wince at the rhetorical phrase “no less a figure than”). But it does seem strange to cite the Northern Ireland experience _in support_ of a policy of preventive detention. Here’s “the CAIN summary”:http://cain.ulst.ac.uk/events/intern/chron.htm of the introduction of internment and the political and security effects of the policy:

bq. In a series of raids across Northern Ireland, 342 people were arrested and taken to makeshift camps. There was an immediate upsurge of violence and 17 people were killed during the next 48 hours. Of these 10 were Catholic civilians who were shot dead by the British Army. Hugh Mullan (38) was the first Catholic priest to be killed in the conflict when he was shot dead by the British Army as he was giving the last rites to a wounded man. Winston Donnell (22) became the first Ulster Defence Regiment (UDR) solider to die in ‘the Troubles’ when he was shot by the Irish Republican Army (IRA) near Clady, County Tyrone. [There were more arrests in the following days and months. Internment was to continue until 5 December 1975. During that time 1,981 people were detained; 1,874 were Catholic / Republican, while 107 were Protestant / Loyalist. Internment had been proposed by Unionist politicians as the solution to the security situation in Northern Ireland but was to lead to a very high level of violence over the next few years and to increased support for the IRA. Even members of the security forces remarked on the drawbacks of internment.]

Jon’s post on Big-time college sports draws on work by Robert Frank, who treats high performance in college sports as a positional good.

By an interesting coincidence, Frank gave a seminar here in Brisbane on Friday and stayed for a very interesting chat afterwards. He argued that the growth in inequality in the US has been positively harmful to the middle class, even though their income has been roughly stationary since the 1970s.

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I just posted and (then deleted) a link to the BBC’s On this Day page, which I think is generally well worth a look. The reason for deletion was just that today is 19th September and the BBC were still linking to the 17th from their front page. Still, on _that_ day (the one I first linked to) the major item was the “60th anniversary of the Arnhem drop”:http://news.bbc.co.uk/onthisday/hi/dates/stories/september/17/newsid_3662000/3662264.stm , complete with links to audio footage and an animated map. But what also caught my eye was “a page about the Sabra and Chatila massacres”:http://news.bbc.co.uk/onthisday/hi/dates/stories/september/17/newsid_2519000/2519637.stm (22 years ago) by Lebanese Phalangists, a reminder that the murder of children is not the monopoly of any one faith or political current. Yesterday’s anniversaries were also noteworthy: they include “the arrival of the first Ugandan Asian refugees”:http://news.bbc.co.uk/onthisday/hi/dates/stories/september/18/newsid_2522000/2522627.stm in Britain (a great blow to the viability of Uganda and, as it has turned out, a major bonus for the UK). Today’s page has “the refusal of the US to allow Charlie Chaplin to re-enter the country”:http://news.bbc.co.uk/onthisday/hi/dates/stories/september/19/newsid_3102000/3102179.stm (1952) and the “Southall Rail Crash”:http://news.bbc.co.uk/onthisday/hi/dates/stories/september/19/newsid_2524000/2524283.stm (1997), the consequences of which are still very much with us.

“Matt Yglesias”:http://yglesias.typepad.com/matthew/2004/09/moral_relativis.html and “Kevin Drum”:http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/archives/individual/2004_09/004725.php have been discussing various ethical buzzwords that have been flying around recently, all starting from “this post”:http://volokh.com/archives/archive_2004_09_14.shtml#1095446087 of Eugene Volokh’s. I don’t have enough expertise to helpfully say very much here, but I thought I’d try adding some small points.

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