The Economic Left

One "economist for Dean" I missed last year. Actually a political scientist. Famous for his work in the 90s (with Pesendorfer) introducing strategic (ie, game theoretic) aspects into voting models, on the analogy with strategic bidding in auctions, and thus showing that abstention is explainable (and rational) without the assumption of costly voting (and that large elections efficienty aggregate information; ie, the right person wins).

Note: Why the cessation in October 03? Blogger burnout? Or was he one of the few to predict the bursting of the Dean bubble?

Taking Rights Seriously

On the radio news this morning a report on the just released Amnesty International Report. If the ABC (the Australian BBC or NPR equivalent, though not in terms of quality) radio reporter is to be believed, the Iraq military intervention was a disaster and other countries are using 9/11 as an excuse to abuse human rights under the guise of 'security'. Regarding China, Azbekistan, Syria et al this is likely true, though whether there has been more 'human rights violations' since then is an interesting empirical question (did these countries need excuses previously?). But let's take their word for it. Later I'll have a look at the sections on countries I have some interest in, like Vietnam, The Phillipines and central America.

Regarding democracies rather than dictatorships however, from the news report it didn't sound like, and we shouldn't expect, much nuance from an organization like Amnesty on the security/civil liberties trade-offs post-9/11. It is a lobby group for human rights and so rightly doesn't acknowledge any trade-off.

Now deontological ethics is all well and good, but in the 'real world', especially for those in genuine positions of responsibility in government, law, public policy, the military, business, health services etc, where decisions, explicitly or implicitly, always affect differently individuals' competing interests, we're all utilitarians by default. The only difference is that some of us are aware of it and some of us are not ('heartless' economic training is useful in this regard).

Not for nothing did Nietzsche call Kant 'that fanatic'. [Ed: Among other epithets!]

Lest We Forget

Contra Bush - Tearing-down Abu Ghraib is a bad idea.

First, because a future free Iraq will need its historical reminder(s) also: Tuol Sleng, Hanoi Hilton, Changi, Esma . . . . Abu Ghraib.

Second, because even after 'consultation with the new Iraqi government', it is not America's act to perform. Iraqis have already for too long been 'spectators of their own history'.

Update: Wonkette (whom I've only just discovered) links to this Globe & Mail article.

Others said the prison should be turned into a museum. "The building is not guilty," said Mahmud Othman, a Kurdish member of the Governing Council. "The building has nothing to do with the crimes. If it was turned into a museum or monument so people do not forget the crimes committed by Saddam Hussein, that would be a better idea."

When Iraqis are sounding more American, democratic, Presidential than the American President . . . . .

End Game

Never in their wildest dreams could the pre-war Iraqi planners have thought that their fall-back/guerrilla counter-punch strategy would have succeeded in only a year.

That was a sad concession speech the President gave. I've been meaning to write an entry on my dissappointment about the end of the dream, and what caused it (because I still believe that ex ante it was doable, regardless of what has transpired ex post), but this melancholic, concessionary article can serve instead. (Also this one. Expect many more over the next month from pro-war humanitarians, left and right.)

It is still easy to justify the outcome of the war on humanitarian reasons when compared to the status quo ante (even a Mubarrak-stongman-style government - as the Jordanian King seems to prefer - is qualitatively better (for the West and for Iraqis) than what went before). It's just that many of us were swinging for the bleachers. Le projet grandiose is finally fini. Let's at least get some sort of democracy in there before it's over.

Fifth Column?

Abu Ghraib has permitted the (liberal dominated) 'big media' in the US to take the gloves off, something they've been itching to do since the war began. But many people sense that the 'grand narratives' they are taling about Iraq is frustratingly off-base. Instead one has to go to the blogosphere, left and right, to try to piece together a more fragmented, post-modern-like, but for all that (or because of that?) closer approximation to the truth on the ground. [Ed: A post-modernist using the word truth? - But non-capitalized! Ok, counter-narrative then: though (I blush to confess) I'm still an old-fashioned, Enlightenment-humanist kinda guy.]

Derridean Memo to Big Media: It is time for the marginal to become centre. [Ed: Translated: Move it from page 6 to the lede! ]

PS: It is time for the US to have an exit strategy. It's called fast-tracked, possibly rolling, elections.

I've said it once, I'll say it again: What is this obsession with security before elections? Does anyone think the security situation will improve anytime soon. Elections should be viewed as part of the solution to the security problem in Iraq. It's the East Timor referendum solution: Let Iraqis start dying for their democracy, not just US soldiers. If Iraqi bloggers are to be believed, ordinary Iraqis are ready to 'step up' . . . . .

Redundant Journalists II

George Johnston described in these two novels the fame he won as a war correspondent, seemingly brave and adventurous to readers back home, when in fact he wrote his dispatches from far-from-the-front watering holes, swapping copy with other war correspondents similarly embedded.

Reading war correspondent diaries makes one realize it was ever thus. It is hard to be too judgmental about that from an armchair, and many journalists have indeed died in this Iraq war. But combined with the well-known military fact that even those at the battle-front are often unreliable as to how it is progressing . . . . .

Bottom Line: At the moment it is almost impossible to know what is going on in Iraq, especially the battle(s) in the south, and especially to know what majority Iraqi opinion is. Start with this good post: read the Iraqi blogs mentioned there.

Quote of the day: "Iraqi's want what we want".

PS: Salaam Pax, currently in Australia, has been telling every interviewer who asks him that he doesn't want the US to leave (yet). I imagine, as a gay man, he would not be too keen on Sadr gaining power.

Update: A good media blog here.

Great Joke

Raj has finished his comps and decided to reward himself with a few weeks in S. E. Asia. He thought he'd be able to blog while travelling . . . .

S. E. Asia was my first visit to the 3rd world (pardon the politically incorrect terminology), and on that first visit as a young man I was in battle-shock for a month. Cascading shock too: depending on which order you do the countries. By the time I arrived in HK through southern China I kissed the earth like the pope on new tarmac, so glad was I to be back in civilization.

Of course, I've been back often since.

PS: The original Lonely Planet book was "S.E. Asia on a Shoestring", which came out in the early 70s. The two poms who wrote that settled in Melbourne, Australia after that first trip, and from there the legend grew.

Redundant Journalists?

Does anyone know what is going on in the war in south Iraq? (See possibly here, here and here.)

Salam Pax, the Iraqi blogger (who acquired prominence just before and during the war) is in Australia for a writer's festival. From an interview with him in the Australian:

Indeed some believe that web diaries like his will eventually replace war reporting.

From a Coetzee essay on this US Civil War novel, The Bride of Texas, by Joseph Skvorecki:

He reminds us that this was a war in which the combatants were for the most part literate, and enjoyed writing home; the letters of ordinary soldiers are in some respects more trustworthy than the reports of journalists.

More on this theme here.

Iraq War PS from the same essay: "Burnside, as military commander of Illinois, has the unenviable task of upholding the Constitution and Bill of Rights - to preserve which the war is after all being fought - while at the same time ensuring that Vallandigham does not get away with sedition."

PPS: Get your Copperhead history here. More on this theme here.

Democracy Now!

Kaus has been lately surveying those 'big media' writers (including himself?) who have belatedly come around to my view (first expressed in January and repeatedly thereafter) that the democratic/idealist solution is in fact the only remaining, pragmatic/realist solution to die Irakfrage. [Ed: That wouldn't be hubris I see in your pocket? - Actually, it's delusion. Writing always presupposes an audience, so you never know!]

Mind you, President Chirac and De Villepin were ahead of us all.

Fear & Trembling

Summer is soon with us and a young man's fancy turns to . . . . . . . economic conferences!

Some academic conferences are so exclusive and prestigious that to be invited to present as a junior, before the very best seniors in one's profession, is often a turning point of one's career.

Congratulatory Junior Academic Economist to Another: Without question it will be a shock to your reputation; the only uncertainty concerns the sign of the mean.

Virginia's heirs

It's a strange phenomenon: someone who was not born to write, but nonetheless thinks she is. Australian readers can sample the species by buying this first novel, which a friend recently gave me when I was passing through Melbourne. I couldn't finish it. But if you liked Yann Martel . . . . . .

PS: That's now two women I went to law school with (one I also worked with at AGs) who have recently come out with first fictions (actually, one is faction) in their early to mid 30s, and on both occasions the results leave something to be desired. This one gave up a very promising law career (MULR editor and all) to pursue her passion. Say what you like about the intellectual demands of legal training, to top your year at least requires lots of hard work for four years; that is, precious formative years not spent reading (as a true writer would) everything you can get your hands on.

PPS: The faction in fact is not so bad - it just would have been much better with the author's ego uninserted, ie, as non-fiction.

Another one bites the dust . . .

In Britain another anti-war publicist gets the knife (how eerily like the editor in McEwan's Amsterdam . . . . ). On both occasions a journalistic over-reaching drew attention away from what were arguably correct and highly news-worthy stories. On both occasions the people involved were too ego-gorged to be willing to do the mature thing of taking one step back so as to advance two steps.

Naive Questions: Why is it so hard to concede what should be conceded so as to get back to the truth of the matter? And why so cavalier about the truth of important details in a prosecutorial brief?

Lowest Common Denominator

There is a golden rule when discovering a disconnect between your prior understanding of a term (like 'torture') and your newly discovered understanding of how that term is defined in international law treaties: any concept that survives multi-lateral negotiation will almost surely be a watered-down, vaguer simulacrum of its domestic law equivalent. This multilateral watering down affect is well known in international relations and cooperative game theory: the more people involved in the bargaining, the harder it is to find agreement. The problem is exacerbated by greater heterogeneity of bargainers' interests. [Ed: Like including dictatorships in deciding what will count as democracy? - Just so.]

Herding and Cheap Talk

I remember many years ago, while still an undergraduate at Melbourne University, attending a dinner party with a variety of guests, among whom was a then Monseignor (now an Australian Cardinal) of the Catholic Church and a Melbourne University philosophy PhD student doing a thesis on "ordinary language" moral philosophy and a rabid (late) Wittgensteinian. The conversation turned to abortion, and the antics of anti-abortion groups. Of course the Monseignor said abortion was murder. Our Wittgenstein wannabe feigned surprise, asking the good clergyman with faux-naivity what he was doing about that fact: was he petitioning parliamentarians, marching down Burke Street, joining anti-abortion groups in picketting clinics? The Monseignor replied that he was doing none of the above. Strange, said our Wittgenstein, because if I genuinely thought that 20,000 innocent Australians were being murdered in my country, and that the government wasn't prosecuting but even funding such activity, as uninterested in public displays of protest though I generally am, I cannot think of a single issue more likely to get me onto the street waving a placard.

There followed awkward silence.

Question: How often has the Teguba report been downloaded I wonder? Is there a way to find out? And what would that number say about the real, as opposed to the costlessly expressed, outrage everyone apparently feels obliged to voice about the Abu Ghraib photos?

Super-ego ascendent

I have a guilty confession to make: I too have reached the limit of my outrage-capacity regarding the Abu Ghraib 'torture' photos. At least the 'torture' trope is beginning to subside as journalists do some hurried research and google the Geneva Conventions. No ordinary, healthy ego can long endure self-loathing, and this regardless of the moral justness of the initial trigger. His highness, my lord the ego (as Freud always referred to it) soon reasserts its rights over the super-ego. For the majority of us who received enough love as infants, it is an involuntary self-correction, necessary for long-term survival.

One senses from conversations and blogoshperic comments that people are finally beginning to turn away from the media frenzy, that proportion is returning amongst the populace even as it continues to be resisted by a 'big media' which continues to push the story with astonishing hypocricy as though no other story existed. Even Andrew Sullivan, who spent a whole week in full 'American Ayatollah' mode (to borrow Gore Vidal's vicious characterization of him last year in the LA Weekly) is finally beginning to turn. [Ed: Perhaps the universal gay condition of internalized homophobia makes it easier for him to sustain the self-loathing longer than most? - Ahem: we don't go there.] A media that was too squeamish to show the inspiringly brave martyrdom of the Italian hostage Quattrochi, and will not now show even stills of the execution of Berg, ought not to have shown the Abu Ghraib photos, especially not with faces revealed.

Let the prosecutions take their course and let the Iraqi people continue to learn the difficult art of self-determination. It is the latter which remains the real story, as future historians will readily aver.