The “Washington Post”:http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A34457-2003Sep6.html reports today that

bq. The occupation of Iraq — once the home of the caliph, or universal leader, of Muslims — is a galvanizing symbol for radical Islamic groups. On Internet sites and in mosques across the Islamic world, thousands of potential fighters are hearing — and heeding — calls to go to Iraq to fight the infidel, according to European and Arab intelligence sources who have tracked some of the movements of the recruits.

Dunno how true this is – “Juan Cole”:http://www.juancole.com/2003_09_01_juancole_archive.html#106291558081416707 thinks that the Post is exaggerating wildly – but it got me to thinking about how the “flypaper” theory beloved of “Glenn Reynolds”:http://www.instapundit.com/archives/010343.php and his crowd is based on a fundamental error of logic. If you look at it closely, it distinctly resembles a fundamental mistake that economists call the “lump of labour fallacy”:http://www.vcn.bc.ca/timework/samlson.htm.

Much bad economic punditry starts from the premise that there’s a ‘lump of labour’ – a fixed amount of work to be done in the economy. On this argument, if you want to reduce unemployment, you can do it by lowering people’s working hours, so that work is ‘freed up’ to be shared with the unemployed. Of course, this argument doesn’t hold water – the demand for labour isn’t a fixed constant in real economies. Instead, it varies, depending on a host of other factors (which themselves are likely to be affected, perhaps in perverse ways, by any ham-handed efforts to ‘share the jobs around’).

Similarly, the ‘flypaper’ theory implicitly assumes that there’s a fixed amount of al Qaeda terrorism sloshing around in the international system, so that it’s a good^1^ idea to divert it from the US to Iraq – more terrorists attacking troops in Iraq would mean less terrorists attacking the homeland. But there isn’t a fixed amount – instead, US actions in Iraq are almost certain to affect the ‘supply’ of al Qaeda terrorists. Indeed, the WP article suggests that the US occupation is leading to a substantial increase in the willingness of potential fighters to take up arms, so that the invasion isn’t just drawing existing al Qaeda combatants to Iraq; it’s creating new recruits.

The jury is still out on whether the Post is right or not on the facts – but it’s demonstrably true that the actions of the US (in invading Iraq, in how it behaves within Iraq) are going to affect terrorism on the supply-side. Pro-war types can still try to make the case that the US invasion is going to decrease terrorism in the long run (they have their work cut out for them), but ‘lump of terrorism’ theories like the flypaper argument are bogus, and should be treated with the ridicule that they deserve.

^1^ Of course, ‘Good’ here means ‘good for Americans,’ not ‘good for Iraqis.’

Geoffrey Nunberg has good column in TAP about the strange history of the word liberal in America. Maybe I should have expected the following data, but I was really stunned by how strong the race and class connotations of liberal have become over here.

bq. From a semantic point of view, this negative branding campaign has largely succeeded in changing the meaning of the word liberal itself. In major newspapers, for example, the phrases “middle-class liberals” and “middle-class Democrats” are used with about the same frequency. But the phrase “working-class liberals” is almost nonexistent; it’s outnumbered by “working-class Democrats” by about 30-to-1. And while “white liberals” is used about as frequently as “white Democrats,” the phrase “black Democrats” outnumbers “black liberals” by better than 15-to-1. The patterns are similar if you plug in “African American,” “Latino” and the like.

bq. By contrast, the press refers to working-class conservatives as frequently as it does to working-class Republicans — and far more frequently than it refers to working-class liberals. And there are five times as many references to black conservatives as to black liberals, though references to black Democrats vastly outnumber references to black Republicans. The implication is that unlike conservatives, liberals are rarely found among minorities or the working class. When those groups vote Democratic, it’s presumably out of narrow self-interest or traditional party loyalty rather than because of any underlying ideological commitment. From that point of view, the political attitudes that make someone a liberal are simply the outward expression of a particular social identity, no different from a predilection for granite countertops or bottled water. For all intents and purposes, liberal has become as much a referential term as Bolshevik was.

These days many academics, including I would guess most who read this blog, keep collections of their papers available on their websites. (If you’re interested in seeing some samples, Dave Chalmers keeps a fairly comprehensive list of people with online papers in philosophy.) In the last few years several issues about the relationship between posting something to a webpage and publishing it in a book or journal have become a little pressing.

There’s actually a tangle of inter-related questions here that could use sorting out. For one thing, there are both legal questions (about copyright) and moral questions (about whether such posting is stealing from editors who’ve agreed to publish things) about the practice. For another, the answers to those questions may be different for articles that have been published, or have been accepted but not published, or are as yet homeless. For another, it might make a difference whether the journal in question is electronic or dead tree. So there’s potentially ten or twelve different questions here.

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“Teresa Nielsen Hayden”:http://nielsenhayden.com/makinglight/archives/003424.html#003424 posts on a story that I’ve been interested in the last few days; how some conservative Alabama Christians have come out in favor of higher, less regressive taxes in the state. This may be a flash in the pan; for one thing it’s unlikely that these Christians are going to be successful in persuading Alabama’s public to sign on to tax reform. But it’s potentially important nonetheless. Grover Norquist and his ilk have been uncannily successful in boiling down a rich and complex tradition of thought into a single, sloganistic programme of all tax-cuts, all of the time. It’s nice to see some principled conservatives reacting against this.

The “TAP article”:http://www.prospect.org/webfeatures/2003/08/wilkinson-f-08-28.html that Teresa cites to sees these Christians as reminiscent of Dorothy Day; I think that may be going a step too far. These people aren’t interested in substantial redistribution of wealth so much as in ensuring that the poor have the basic minimum of opportunities which will allow them to look after themselves; decent education, access to justice, perhaps some form of public health care. Still, a “superior moral justification for selfishness”:http://www.able2know.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=3335 it ain’t. I wish them luck.

I watched Pasolini’s The Gospel According to St Matthew yesterday. I’d been meaning to watch it after reading Jerry Cohen’s report of the effect it had had on him (see If You’re an Egalitarian How Come You’re So Rich?). I’m not a religious person, but the film did not disappoint. It is an extraordinarily sparse portrayal of the story, shot in black and white against the Italian countryside. The acting can’t account for the power of the film, because, there really isn’t any. The actors are all non-professionals and, mostly, they just stand around and look (there are many closeups on their faces). The camera often shakes, and the production values are crude. But Pasolini succeeds in creating something of great beauty and emotional power.

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There’s no real need to comment on Michael Meacher’s ravings about 9/11, but the BBC report (as currently displayed – I’m sure they’ll fix it) contains the following:

bq. Mr Meacher told the Today programme he was a conspiracy theorist and said he was simply “in favour of giving people the facts”.

UPDATE: They’ve now inserted the “not”.

We all know that polls taken more than a year before the election are going to have virtually no predictive power. But this analysis caught my eye:

Some 41 percent of all registered voters say they will definitely vote against Bush; just 29 percent say they will definitely vote for him. So Bush must woo about seven in ten swing voters — not a difficult task for a popular incumbent, but far from a certainty.

Does it make sense to call him a “popular incumbent” in the sentence immediately after the one that says that 41% of likely voters will vote against him, and 29% will vote for him?

Tim Dunlop and Jonathon Delacour wonder if some languages are more pleasant to listen to than others, whether you understand them or not. This is certainly true from person to person. When I moved to the U.S., I sometimes found that things I complacently thought were due to my natural wit and charm were in fact explained by my speaking in a pleasant Irish accent. Conversely, these days I am routinely berated by almost everyone for having lost that accent after a mere six or seven years in America.

The more general proposition — that some languages are inherently better-sounding than others — is usually just a step back before taking a kick at the Germans. But Clive James, I think somewhere in his autobiography, makes an elegant case for Italian. As I remember, he quotes this bit from Dante’s Divine Comedy (Inferno, III, 1-3):

Per me si va ne la città dolente,
per me si va ne l’etterno dolore,
per me si va tra la perduta gente.

“Through me you pass to the city of woe / Through me you pass into eternal pain / Through me to amongst the lost people.”

Bitter words, James says, but because it’s Italian you still get to say “tra la.”

As a mere political scientist, I’m leery of going head to head with Eugene Volokh on the law, but I’m going to throw in my tuppence worth on his recent post on “Eric Rasmusen”:http://volokh.com/2003_08_31_volokh_archive.html#106278869634914297. Even if I’m wrong, I think there’s a useful argument to be had.

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I was happy to see the NY Times article on the ferries between the San Juan islands. I was over there this summer for a conference and a group from the conference took one of the ferries to Lopez island. It really was incredibly beautiful. The Times story online has one photo hinting at the kind of views you get, and there are a few more photos in the print version. If you’re anywhere near the San Juans, getting out to the islands is highly recommended.

A word of warning though: if you’re kayaking on the waters between the islands, and it looks like a ferry might be bearing down on you, it probably is a ferry bearing down on you and it will probably get to you quicker than you think. I managed to stay well out of ferry routes the short time I was out there, but friends who were a little more adventurous had some impressive horror stories to tell.

Via “Larry Solum”:http://lsolum.blogspot.com/, two new scholar-blogs that are worth a special mention. As a supplement to his Conspiratorial machinations, Tyler Cowen has started a side-project with Alex Tabarrok, called “Marginal Revolution”:http://marginalrevolution.blogs.com/. As the name suggests, it mostly focuses on economic theory and its applications. Second, Rodger Payne, an international relations scholar at University of Louisville, who’s written some interesting stuff on framing, has started “blogging”:http://rpayne.blogspot.com/ too. Nice to see another IR type in the blogosphere.

Glenn Reynolds asks

“WHY DOES THE EUROPEAN UNION hate the world’s poor so much?”

and links to a Guardian article about Franz Fischler’s rejection of demands from poor countries that the Common Agricultural Policy be reformed. Fair enough, it should be: Europe should abandon its protectionist policies that, as Glenn says, harm the poor. But a more thorough reading of the same article would have led him to this paragraph:

bq. Washington and Brussels have tabled a joint proposal on agriculture that would involve far smaller cuts in protectionism than developing countries want. The proposal has been countered by a blueprint from leading developing countries that would involve far more aggressive reductions.

A joint proposal then? So it isn’t just those cheese-eating surrender-monkeys after all.

OpenDemocracy has a short piece by Paul Barker on the late Cedric Price and the idea of the Non-Plan. Here’s a quote that will delight some and annoy others:

bq. “Architects”, he once said, “are the greatest whores in town. They talk in platitudes about improving the quality of life, and then get out drawings of the prison they’re working on.”

The idea of the non-plan sounds fascinating:

bq. He and I collaborated on Non-Plan, an anti-planning polemic, which infuriated architects, planners and assorted do-gooders. The idea emerged during a conversation I had with Peter Hall, geographer and planner, in the late 1960s. Both of us were appalled at the disasters that urban planning had brought about. We wondered if things could be any worse if there were no planning at all.

bq. What worried our critics, who were many, when the four of us published our Non-Plan issue of New Society (20 March 1969), was their uncertainty about our political stance. Was this anarchism? Or deep-dyed conservatism, a precursor of Thatcherism? Our essential point was that you should always think very hard before telling other people how they ought to live. They had their own preferences, which ought to be respected.

bq. We suggested carrying out a Non-Plan test. Four districts should be freed from all controls, and we could then judge whether the upshot was any worse than what happened with the controls on. To make readers sit up, we chose four much-cherished slices of English countryside for our test. The resultant incandescence was highly satisfactory.

I’m intruiged, and mean to find out more.

Today, EPIC & Privacy International launch ‘Privacy and Human Rights 2003, an international survey of privacy laws and developments’. It is a meaty tome that summarises developments in privacy law and policy in 55 countries during the past year.

This year’s review “finds increased data sharing among government agencies, the use of anti-terrorism laws to suppress political dissent, and the growing use of new technologies of surveillance.” Familiar themes to readers of my entries…

It includes an introductory chapter on the war on terror and a country by country guide. Each country entry is a short essay on the key developments with links to many original sources. Within the introductory essays, there is excellent information and analysis to be found on topics like biometrics, airline passenger data, electronic surveillance, WHOIS, Total/Terrorist Information Awareness, and so on. It really is an indispensable guide to a still rather under-reported field, given the massive erosions of personal liberty in the past couple of years.

By way of disclosure – I did the chapter on Ireland and bits and pieces on the UK, EU and electronic surveillance. A great big tip of the hat to Tiffany Stedman who was the law clerk at EPIC working on my chapter, and of course to Cedric Laurant who pulled the whole thing together.

There’ll be a webcast of today’s launch at the National Press Club (1300 ET) on the EPIC home page.