There were some good arguments for going to war in Iraq, especially those based around the need to remove from power that country’s murderous regime. Other reasons were not so good, and, as is now emerging, not based in particularly good evidence. Reasonable people can differ about which set of reasons were conclusive and also concerning whether it matters if the Bush adminstration’s reasons for fighting the war differ significantly from whatever the best case for fighting was. But the Bush adminstration’s reasons do matter to our evaluation of what is happening now. Is the adminstration’s purpose in invading and occupying to produce, inter alia, a democratic Iraq where human rights are respected, or not?
Anyone who follows football (or “soccer” to some of you people) knows that English club Chelsea have recently been bought by Russian oligarch Roman Abramovich. On top of the price of the club and wiping out its enormous debts, Abramovich’s spending on players has now exceeded £100 million and a club near bankruptcy when the last season ended has become a serious contender for the championship. Naturally, the response of sporting journalists has not been to ask Michael Walzer-like questions about power in one sphere being translated to another, about the corruption of sporting contests (it was bad enough even beforehand) or about where and how this mysterious Russian got his cash (political leverage with the Yeltsin clan). Rather, they’ve fawned uncritically over this rather repulsive character. (I might add that commentary on the subject at Libertarian Samizdata hasn’t exactly focused on Lockean principles of justice in acquisition or anything similar.)
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Nick Kristof discusses the economies of Russia and China today in the Times. He wants to stop you from using the phrase “market democracies” quite so freely. China’s economy is doing very well. The centralised and basically despotic communist state has managed to smoothly introduce market-type institutions in the economy. Meanwhile nominally democratic Russia is a disaster. “I wish I could say that free elections pay better dividends than massacres” Kristof says, “But, although it hurts to say so, in this case it looks the other way around.”
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I’m teaching a freshman seminar on time travel at Brown this year, so I’ve been watching a lot of time travel movies as ‘preparation’. I always knew that many time travel movies don’t make a lot of sense on a bit of reflection. What surprised me on recent re-watchings was that some seemed unintelligible even on relatively generous assumptions.
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David Adesnik doesn’t believe there’s much in the way of Iraqi resistance outside the “Sunni Triangle.” Tacitus disagrees and gives a list of U.S. fatalities. David rebuts him, saying
bq. Tacitus most definitely has a good eye for detail, but are ten or so fatalities supposed to persuade me that there is real resistance outside the Sunni Triangle?
Well, it’d probably convince the hell out of me if I’d been one of the soldiers killed. Except it wouldn’t matter, because I’d be dead.
This is kind of a cheap riposte from me, and the two may have already resolved their differences about the substantive issue. But it’s worth policing the armchair generalship if only because tossing around phrases like “Are ten or so fatalities supposed to persuade me” is not a good habit for a responsible Oxblogger to have. It’s a bit like that Economist article that Daniel picked on recently for casually making a distinction between hunger and “mere uncertainty about where the next meal was coming from.”
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I’m taking a course on election law, and the professor mentioned a proposal today that I hadn’t heard about before. He said there’s a movement in Germany to propose a constitutional amendment that would give children the right to vote from birth. I thought he was pulling our leg at first, but listen to this segment on “NPR”:http://www.npr.org/features/feature.php?wfId=1407861. The idea is that parents (or principal care givers) would act as proxies for children by voting on their behalf. According to proponents, this would have two benefits. First, it would give politicians greater reason to care about family and children’s issues. Second, in an effort to correct for Germany’s declining birth rate and rapidly aging population, it would give people greater incentive to have more children. (A quick search turns up some other proposals of this kind floating around, from the “sophomoric”:http://www.brown.edu/Students/Association_for_Childrens_Suffrage/faq.html to the “more considered”:http://society.guardian.co.uk/print/0,3858,4599961-107865,00.html (by Gillian Thomas at “Demos”:http://www.demos.co.uk/) to the “academic manifesto”:http://www.childwelfare.com/kids/kidsvote.htm (by Duncan Lindsey at UCLA.)
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I imagine most readers have seen Edward Adelson’s checkershadow illusion, because it’s done the rounds of a few blogs. If you haven’t seen it it’s worth looking at, because it’s really quite remarkable.
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Following the good advice on conference going from various parties, I’m off myself for the next couple of days to the annual American Political Science Association conference, where I’ll be sharing a “panel”:http://www.apsanet.org/mtgs/program/program.cfm?event=1414118 with Dan Drezner. Intermittent blogging in the meantime, dependent on access to Internet, and on whether I’m enjoying myself too much to blog (yes, you can have a good time at political science conferences).
Christopher Hitchens has a review of Robert Dallek’s John F. Kennedy biography in the Times Literary Supplement. Hitchens doesn’t exactly hold back from laying into the Kennedy cult, and I would have expected him to be highly critical of Kennedy’s record in office. I have to say, though, that I found the manner of Hitchens’s revelling in Kennedy’s physical ailments somewhat arresting. I won’t go through the whole catalogue here, but Hitchens’s judgement is this:
bq. Obviously, a good deal of “spin” is required to make an Achilles out of such a poxed and suppurating Philoctetes. The difference was supplied by family money in heaping measure, by the canny emphasis on a war record, and by serious attention to the flattery and suborning of the media.
And when I read the following, I was somewhat shocked:
bq. But the furthest that Dallek will go [in agreeing with the Hitchens view that Kennedy’s ailments made him unfit to be President] here is to admit – following Seymour Hersh’s earlier book The Dark Side of Camelot – that Kennedy’s back-brace held him upright in the open car in Dallas, unable to duck the second and devastating bullet from Lee Harvey Oswald. This is almost the only connection between the President’s health and his fitness that is allowable in these pages, and I presume that it is its relative blamelessness which allows the concession.
“Relative blamelessness”? I’m not sure where the “relative” comes into play here. It must mean something like “somewhat blameworthy, but not as blameworthy as some of Kennedy’s other disabilities.” It is, at any rate, a poisonous phrase which would certainly attract Hitchens’s disapprobation in other, all too easily imagined, contexts.
UPDATE: The link above has now become non-functional. The curious had better consult the print edition.
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I’ve just wasted spent an entertaining half-hour or so at www.nationmaster.com, a stats site that allows you to compare nations on just about every dimension, generate graphs etc. I started looking for comparative stats on the UK and Ireland (interesting, Ireland has a higher GDP per capita but scores lower on the Human Development Index). Anyway, there’s lots to play with, though I’m not sure how reliable it all is. Spain seems to be – by a mile – the robbery capital of Europe and North Korea has the world’s highest military expenditure as a percentage of GDP. The “Probability of not reaching [the age of] 40” list makes interesting and sobering reading: you have to get as far as the 35th country in the list (Haiti) to find anywhere outside Africa.
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Dan Drezner blogs some advice for attendees of academic conferences. His suggestions are fine, but I have some of my own.
First, some general perspective for those of you who are lucky enough not to have to go to these things. Attending an academic conference is like being a teenager again. This is why they can be so awful. You hang around trying to attach yourself to a group — preferably the cool kids, but in the end any group will do — and then these groups hang around waiting for something to happen. Groups exist in a permanent state of failing to decide what to do. Where should we go to dinner? Are we still waiting for someone? I heard there was a good party in the Berkeley suite. Where’s Ann, wasn’t she here a minute ago? As with teenagers, attendees secretly (and falsely) believe that other groups are having a much better time. Thus, they scan the area (e.g., the hotel lobby) in case the present group needs to be ditched for an apparently more interesting one. Your conference strategies should therefore be geared towards counteracting the tendency to re-live your teenage years. (I think some of the following suggestions come from a forwarded email I read years ago. They’ve stood up to empirical testing.)
- Arrange to meet people in advance. Don’t rely entirely on bumping into people by accident.
- If you have the option of going to dinner with some people now or hanging around a bit longer in the vague hope of eating with some more famous people later, go to dinner now.
- When you have the opportunity to introduce Bigwig A to Nobody B, do it in that order. Say “Bigwig, do you know Nobody?” rather than the other way around, because otherwise Nobody is forced to stammer “Well, uh, yes of course … um…”
- When talking to someone you do not know, always assume they are a faculty member, even if they do not look old enough to drive. Grad students will be flattered. Prickly professors will not get in a huff and use you in an anecdote later that evening.
- Be careful what you say in elevators. (I find this rule applies in life generally.)
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The Hutton inquiry seems to mark the total dissolution of any boundary between reporting and commentary. (Perhaps this is the counterpart, on the journos side of the dissolution of the boundary between information and spin on the government’s side). A prime example is surely this report of yesterday’s evidence in the Guardian. The report places fantastic weight on one word in one sentence, a word which admits of another quite reasonable and sensible interpretation. To whit:
bq. The dramatic last-minute call to come up with new evidence was contained in an email from an unnamed intelligence official. It said Downing Street wanted the document “to be as strong as possible within the bounds of available intelligence”.
The word “strong” is taken by the Guardian’s reporters as a synonym for – to use the current parlance – “sexy”. But “strong” might just as well mean something like “robust” in this context. It also seems reasonable that the government should wish that its briefings be the opposite of “weak”. (I don’t mean to single out the Guardian especially here, almost every report extrapolates an angle from the tiniest detail.)
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As I said in an earlier post, I’m a bit reluctant to say much of substance about Ireland because, as a mere ten-day visitor I’m bound to get a lot wrong and there are participants on this blog who will notice! So I’ll just restrict myself to two of the many things I found myself thinking about apart from the extraordinary civility and kindness of the Irish people we encountered (as opposed to the harrassment, hurry and rudeness of normal English life – on the English, see Theodore Dalrymple passim).
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Ever wish you could easily see every post a particular CT author has contributed? Me neither. But capitalism is all about the creation of new needs in the mind of the consumer so that afterwards market researchers can give PowerPoint presentations saying this new feature “satisfied a clear demand amongst CT customers.” So now, over there in the left sidebar, you can just click the ∞ symbol next to each contributor’s name to see a list of the titles of all their posts from newest to oldest.
In phase two of the rollout of this technology, we will charge a $10/month subscription fee to users. We are convinced this is an exciting and viable business model and that the world is ready for pay-to-list services of this sort, particularly given that CT is the dominant player in the burgeoning market for eclectic left-leaning quasi-academic online commentary. Prospective investors should see Confidential IPO Memos #7 (“Yglesias Graduates, Sells Out”), #15 (“Semi-Daily Journal Accounting Scandal Ready To Break”) and #27 (“Marshall‘s Head Falls Off When Hand Is Removed“).
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I wasted part of my holiday reading one of the more dreadful books I’ve come across recently, Catherine Salmon and Donald Symon’s _Warrior Lovers: Erotic Fiction, Evolution, and Female Sexuality_ (published in Weidenfeld and Nicholson’s “Darwinism Today” series). It’s a grandiose title for a rather slim volume, which purports to apply Darwinian theory to the understanding of ‘slash fiction,’ fan-written stories in which various characters from popular fiction have passionate sex and declare their undying love for each other (Kirk and Spock are favourites, and have their own subgenre). Not that fan fiction mightn’t be an interesting subject of study, but you won’t find many insights in Salmon and Symon’s mercifully short monograph.
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