WSIS – better late than never

by Maria on December 16, 2003

First off, apologies that the guest blogger I’d promised, Gus Hosein, didn’t manage to post. Gus had trouble logging in from Geneva, and as he’s no slouch with IT, I put it down to the dodgy wireless connections at the conference. (and yes, it’s pretty wild that a World Summit on the Information Society couldn’t get this right.)

Anyway, I’ve been mulling over the world summit for days now, trying to decide for myself what, if anything it all meant. I’ve even checked out the world summit blog by several young journalists imaginatively sponsored by the British Council, and some other accounts of the event. But the disparate nature of all that went on there means attempts at synopsis keep slipping through my fingers.

The difficulty in pinning down a result may be because most parties to the summit went there with the aim of checking the moves of their opponents. And everyone pretty much succeeded.

(Warning; it’s a very long post. Maybe you had to be there…)

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Tis the season to be girly

by Maria on December 16, 2003

These are v. serious days indeed on CT, but I wanted to share with you the most perfect girly evening I have had in a long time.

It started in Le Bon Marche, the frilliest department store in Paris, where I bought gift boxes, tissue paper and ribbons (predominantly pink of course). Le Bon Marche is the place you go to if you absolutely must spend 11.65 euro on glace cherries. Everyone there was much too posh to make me feel out of place in my shabby runners, though I did have to make the walk of shame to the farthest corner of the booze shop after I asked for cooking brandy.

Then home to combine hot cider and brown sugar with currants, candied orange peel, freshly ground almonds, cloves, 3 granny smiths, juice and rind of a lemon, a cinnamon stick and said cherries in a pot over a low heat for 40 minutes*, sipping the remaining fresh cider while stirring as the sauce reduced, and re-reading for the umpteenth time the final two chapters of Persuasion. Result; lovely christmas-y cooking smells and the best mincemeat I’ve ever made.

Tonight, I just have to bake the pies (pastry is ‘resting’ in the fridge as we speak), shake some icing sugar over them, wrap them in the lovely boxes, tie their little ribbons and work out how and when to deliver them, red riding hood style.

And if that’s not girly enough for yiz, you should try a personality quiz courtesy of spacefem, and via the cadetblue Invisible Adjunct. I am blueviolet. I don’t know what you have to answer to be pretty pink.

*Adapted from Nigella Lawson’s recipe in domestic goddess, though I’ve a lot less time for her after hearing via Ophelia of Nigella’s contribution to the MMR debate. Perhaps, as retaliation, those of us who know nothing about cooking should wax outraged about how the tv chef business is driven by uncaring, orthodox, control freaks who are in hock to Sainsburys and don’t care a damn if our children get, um, fat?

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Hoare on the Left on Yugoslavia

by Chris Bertram on December 16, 2003

Marko Attila Hoare has “a review essay”:http://www.bosnia.org.uk/bosrep/report_format.cfm?articleid=1041&reportid=162 in the latest “Bosnia Report”:http://www.bosnia.org.uk/bosrep/default.cfm on books on the left about the NATO intervention in Yugoslavia. I won’t attempt a crisp summary here (Hoare’s judgements won’t secure everyone’s agreement though I largely concur with them). One passage was of particular interest to me though:

bq. The journal _New Left Review_ (NLR) commissioned the present author in October 2000 to travel to Belgrade to write an article on the popular rebellion against MiloÅ¡ević that was then taking place. NLR paid my air-fare and I arrived in Belgrade on the day that MiloÅ¡ević fell. But when I produced my report NLR refused to publish it: editor Susan Watkins [that’s Mrs Tariq Ali by the way – CB] explained to me that the editorial board objected to my article’s implied support for the Hague Tribunal and for Serbia’s integration into European institutions – these views were considered politically unacceptable. I was reminded of this some months later while reading Michael Parenti’s _To kill a nation: The attack on Yugoslavia_ , published by NLR’s sister organization, the publishing house Verso. The book is simply an outright apologia for MiloÅ¡ević and his regime. Period. Thus while it would appear that supporting the prosecution of war-criminals at the Hague Tribunal is unacceptable to NLR/Verso, actually supporting the principal war-criminal himself – orchestrator of the worst acts of imperialist aggression and racial mass-murder in Europe since the death of Stalin – is entirely acceptable. Lest any reader believes I am exaggerating Parenti’s views, his book recently appeared in Serbian translation (Majkl Parenti, _Ubiti Naciju: Napad na Jugoslaviju_ , Mediagraf, Belgrade 2002) – with a foreword by none other than Slobodan MiloÅ¡ević himself.

Full disclosure here: I’m a former member of the NLR editoral committee and resigned along with Hoare’s parents and blogger Norman Geras (and most of the rest of the EC) following an office coup in 1993. I’m also a former employee of Verso. Our resignation statement, heavily self-censored for legal reasons, is “here”:http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=1993Mar5.145426.988%40bristol.ac.uk&output=gplain (the full story might get disclosed to people buying me enough beer in the right circumstances).

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Opportunities and outcomes

by John Q on December 16, 2003

Among the many points raised in the discussion of Chris’s thread on Sen was the old distinction between equality of outcomes (like life expectancy) and equality of opportunity. This distinction has long been a staple of debates between market liberals and social democrats, and now defines a central point of distinction between supporters of a Third Way (such as Blair) and modernising social democrats (such as Gordon Brown), who may be indistinguishable on issues like privatisation that formerly acted as litmus tests.

A look at the evidence suggests that a position supporting equality of opportunity while accepting highly unequal outcomes is not sustainable. The most important observation is that, contrary to popular belief, there is less mobility between income classes in the United States than in European social democracies. A good, and fairly recent study in this is The Real Worlds of Welfare Capitalism by Goodin, Headey Muffels and Dirven, which I reviewed here, along with Barbara Ehrenreich’s Nickel and Dimed.

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Books I Did Not Read This Year

by Kieran Healy on December 16, 2003

As 2003 draws to a close, it’s time for me to reflect on all of the great books I did not read this year. This has been a particularly good year for not reading books. I would go so far as to say that there are more books I did not read this year than in any year in the recent past. Although a significant part of my job consists in sitting somewhere and reading something, I have still managed to find the time not to read a very wide range of material from many different fields. In special cases, I have bought the book and then not read it. Mostly, though, I did not get around to even doing that. I thought I would present my ten favorite nonfiction books I did not read this year. I hope that they will not deepen your knowledge or broaden your mind in 2004, as they didn’t with me.

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The War On (some kinds of) Theory

by Daniel on December 15, 2003

The excerpt from Ophelia Benson’s article which Chris posted below got me thinking about a few particularly egregious examples of the phenomenon I’ve seen over the years. The one which sticks out in my mind was of a teacher proudly boasting that he’d spent half of a class ignoring the subject matter that was meant to be discussed and instead talking about technical arcana which added nothing to our understanding of the subject, made the discussion incomprehensible to the layman, but fitted the students to carry on a discussion among people working in the same field, according to the rules of a trivial formal game.

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Trollbait

by Henry Farrell on December 15, 2003

A couple of the trolls from Chris’s “thread on Sen”:https://www.crookedtimber.org/archives/000987.html might like to check out the most recent issue of the “Onion”:http://www.theonion.com/3948/news1.html; I reckon that “economist Harold Knoep” provides a fairly precise encapsulation of their biases.

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Sample bias

by Henry Farrell on December 15, 2003

I’ve been meaning to blog this ever since I read about it a few days ago on “Marginal Revolution”:http://www.marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2003/12/how_to_conserve.html; it’s one of the neatest ideas that I’ve seen in a while. Given endemic shortages in the availability of some vaccines (viz. flu shots this year), how should one allocate shots so as to prevent the spread of the disease in the general population? Tyler Cowen points to an “article”:http://ojps.aip.org/getabs/servlet/GetabsServlet?prog=normal&id=PRLTAO000091000024247901000001&idtype=cvips&gifs=yes&jsessionid=1910211071503525338 by Reuven Cohen, Shlomo Havlin, and Daniel ben-Avraham that suggests how best to do this. It’s fairly well established that some individuals are a lot more likely to spread viruses than others; these ‘super spreaders’ are exceptionally gregarious people, who have a wide and varied circle of friends with whom they share time, conversation, and unpleasant infections. This means that virus diffusion can be “modelled nicely”:http://xxx.lanl.gov/PS_cache/cond-mat/pdf/0107/0107420.pdf using scale free networks with power law distributions of linkages. Some individuals are much more ‘connected’ than others, and these highly connected individuals are much more likely to be the vectors of contagion. If you can vaccinate these individuals, who are the ‘hubs’ of the network, you can do an awful lot to limit the spread of the disease. The problem is that it’s often hard to figure out who the hubs are. Cohen, Havlin and ben-Avraham have figured out a very clever way of doing this. You randomly sample the population, and ask each person who you sample to nominate one of their acquaintances. You then vaccinate _not_ the initial person who has been sampled, but instead their acquaintance. Because ‘super spreaders’ are likely to know far more people than the average member of the population, they will be heavily over-represented among the ‘acquaintances’ – and thus will be far more likely to be vaccinated. According to Cohen, Havlin and ben-Avraham’s model, you may be able completely to halt the spread of the disease by sampling some 20% of the population, and then vaccinating their acquaintances. This is very clever indeed – insights into the topology of social networks can be used to stop the spread of viruses. It goes to show that the study of power-law distributions may have more uses than securing your bragging rights in the blogosphere.

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Can’t get no satisfaction

by Maria on December 15, 2003

I hope we all savoured yesterday’s sweet taste of success. Because as far as Saddam is concerned, it may be the only satisfaction we get.

Saddam quickly followed his craven capitulation with an unleashing of the barely lucid, self-aggrandising rhetoric we’ve come to expect of him and his ilk. Defiant words and cowardly acts – nothing new there. But Saddam being captured alive means that now that the party is over, the U.S. has to figure out what to do with him. Tricky.

It seems obvious that the next steps are to question Saddam for intelligence purposes and then submit him to a tribunal where he will be made accountable for his deeds. President Bush signalled as much when he said that Saddam would “face the justice he denied to millions.” But the conduct of the war on terror, which blends law enforcement and intelligence gathering in a way that undermines due process, will make forcing Saddam to take responsibility for his actions more difficult than one might expect.

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Can’t get no satisfaction

by Maria on December 15, 2003

Just can’t get no satisfaction

I hope we all savoured yesterday’s sweet taste of success. Because as far as Saddam is concerned, it may be the only satisfaction we get.

Saddam quickly followed his craven capitulation with an unleashing of the barely lucid, self-aggrandising rhetoric we’ve come to expect of him and his ilk. Defiant words and cowardly acts – nothing new there. But Saddam being captured alive means that now that the party is over, the U.S. has to figure out what to do with him. Tricky.

It seems obvious that the next steps are to question Saddam for intelligence purposes and then submit him to a tribunal where he will be made accountable for his deeds. President Bush signalled as much when he said that Saddam would “face the justice he denied to millions.” But the conduct of the war on terror, which blends law enforcement and intelligence gathering in a way that undermines due process, will make forcing Saddam to take responsibility for his actions very difficult indeed.

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I think you think I think

by Daniel on December 15, 2003

So, with reference to the weekend’s big news story, Norman of Normblog writes that a particular pleasure has been

“The sight of some people trying to say ‘hooray’ through gritted teeth.”

If I understand this correctly, Norm is expressing his pleasure in some other people’s displeasure in having to express their pleasure in yet a third group of people’s expression of their pleasure in a separate individual’s displeasure. I don’t know what to think about this at all. Which is just as well, I suppose because at least it means that the chain of meta-levels ends here. I tell, you, this is why expected utility theory will never catch on ….

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Implications

by John Q on December 15, 2003

Saddam’s capture has all sorts of implications.

The biggest is that it will greatly accelerate the withdrawal of US troops from Iraq. This is obvious enough if the resistance fades away and large numbers of troops aren’t needed. But suppose this doesn’t happen. It’s hard to see the US public putting up with a continued stream of casualties when the main objectives on which they were sold the war have either been achieved (get Saddam) or proved illusory (WMDs). The instant reaction Good. Can we go home now, is going to be fairly widely shared as time goes on.

On the Iraqi side, as Juan Cole points out, this will only strengthen the Shia demand for proper elections and a US withdrawal. Now that the fear of Saddam’s return is gone, the dependence of a future Iraqi government on the US is significantly reduced. Shias might well judge that they could do a better (because more ruthless) job of suppressing the insurgency on their own.

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Ozymandias

by John Q on December 15, 2003

From almost any viewpoint, including that of opponents of the war such as myself, the capture of Saddam Hussein, represents good news, made better by the ignominy of his surrender. When the Iraq war and its justifications , spurious and otherwise, are forgotten, the image of the great dictator being dug out of the hole in which he had hidden will remain, along with the inglorious ends of Mussolini, Hitler, Ceausescu, and others, as a warning to those who might plan to follow the same path.

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Guestblogging

by Henry Farrell on December 14, 2003

When we set up this blog, several of us were inspired by the “Volokh Conspiracy”:http://volokh.com/, which has done a quite remarkable job in combining smart political and intellectual commentary. We’re now taking another leaf from the Volokhs’ book; from here on, we hope to invite the occasional guest-blogger to join us for a week or so. We’re all very grateful to “John Quiggin”:http://mentalspace.ranters.net/quiggin/, who has very decently agreed to be our inaugural guest-blogger. We hope that most of you are already reading his blog (if you aren’t, you ought to be) – he’s one of the smartest economic and political commentators out there. We’re pleased to have him on board.

Captured dictators

by Henry Farrell on December 14, 2003

“Atrios”:http://atrios.blogspot.com/2003_12_14_atrios_archive.html#107140956918560290 has further thoughts on Hussein’s capture – as he says, the capture of Hussein doesn’t change the fact that this was a war of choice, and was a mistake. But he then says

bq. it isn’t clear he’s any worse of a guy than some of the folks who are a part of our “Coalition of the Willing.”

which I find quite unconvincing. Even as squalid dictators go, Hussein was quite spectacularly nasty. I don’t know how many other rulers in recent history have deployed poison gas against their civilian population. Hussein’s capture is cause for unalloyed good cheer.

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