The Social Production of Libertarians

I swear I had this post ready before all this stuff about positive and negative rights. My appetite for that kind of thing isn’t terribly high, except as an opportunity to think up slogans like “Libertarianism is the Socialism of Lawyers.” But a few months ago I made a passing comment that “Libertarianism has always seemed to me to depend for its realization on features of the social structure that it officially repuditates.” There’s probably a nice theory to be built about how this is true of all programmatic ideologies for social reorganization. For now, Peter Levine sketches some sociological ideas about Libertarianism in particular.

Positive and negative liberty and rights

Much good discussion - from our own Henry and Chris, for example - in the wake of Eugene Volokh’s critique of Steve Bainbridge’s TCS piece in praise of negative rights.

It seems to me clear that Eugene is quite correct in the points he makes. But I am left scratching my head, nonetheless, because I teach J.S. Mill and Isaiah Berlin every semester - for two semester’s now. So I think I’ve got my head tolerably wrapped around the whole negative vs. positive liberty thing. (I mean, they sort of turn into each other if you squint, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t an important distinction to grapple with.) But it would never occur to me to talk about negative vs. positive rights. That seems to me like argle-bargle. But apparently there are grown-ups who talk this way, even write academic papers this way? (I guess these are the hazards of teaching intro political philosophy without being a specialist and actually reading the scholarly literature. I get blindsided by stuff other people are familiar with. But still. What’s this about, eh? If I’m totally wrong about everything that follows, someone take me to school, please.)

Cat Stevens

In his typically up-to-date fashion, Steve Harley devoted last night’s Sounds of the Seventies to Cat Stevens. He doesn’t say whether he’s a CT reader, but now I am starting to have suspicions. Go there and listen.

Picking up the gauntlet

I can never resist a challenge. So when Normblog passed on the folowing put-up-or-shut-up from John Keegan:

I couldn’t resist putting up, even at the cost of perhaps repeating myself

(ahem)

I wish Saddam Hussein was still in power in Baghdad because if this were the case, then about 3,000 Iraqis would have been murdered by his regime and would be dead, the roughly 10,000 Iraqis we killed ourselves would still be alive, and we would most likely be well on our way to formulating a credible, sensible, properly resourced plan for getting rid of him and handling the aftermath.

In other words, this was not a “humanitarian intervention”, in the sense which Human Rights Watch uses the term, and it is entirely defensible to maintain principled opposition to the war without having to be painted as an apologist for mass graves. Norm has his own, somewhat more inclusive standard for what constitutes a humanitarian intervention, which I intend to write something about soon. But I simply don’t believe that this issue is anything like as cut and dried as the Keegan quote suggests; if one is using a standard which makes Saddamites of Human Rights Watch, then one is using a wrong standard.

Euro elections

Euro elections tomorrow, and I, for one, am still at a loss for what to do. Here in the UK’s south-west constituency (bizarrely including Gibraltar!) we have full slates of candidates from all three main parties plus the fascist BNP, the Greens, the “Countryside Party”, UKIP, and RESPECT (the unprincipled alliance of Gorgeous George Galloway, the Socialist Workers Party and the Muslim Association of Britain). I’m definitely not going for any of the fringe parties, nor for the Tories, so it is down to Labour or the Lib Dems. I usually have no time for the Lib Dems, but I’m tempted this time. I’m tempted because Blair has clearly reached his sell-by date, and I think that’s largely independent of how history will judge him. Time for a swift and painless transition to Gordon Brown as party leader, and a bad Euro result may do the trick.

Eve Garrard responds

Eve Garrard has responded to my post suggesting that she had misunderstood some recent statements by Amnesty International. I should like to note, for the record, that my post didn’t amount to an endorsement of the claim that I took Amnesty to be making, namely, that the current attack on principles of human rights is the worst for the last fifty years. Nevertheless, I have some bones to pick with Eve’s latest. The scope of the claim that Eve attributes to Amnesty varies somewhat through her piece. Sometimes Eve seems to be suggesting that Amnesty is restricting blame to America or to the liberal democracies. There may indeed by statements by Amnesty officials with this character, but the most relevant report does refer explicitly to “governments around the world” and explicitly mentions a number of countries not best described as “liberal democracies” (Russia, China, Yemen, to name but three). Additionally, Eve singles out the Patriot Act as being at the centre of any charge that human rights principles are being undermined. No doubt it forms part of any such case, but I’d have thought that such matters as the legal limbo of Guantanamo, the export of a detainee for torture by Syria, and the recent legal advice on the admissibility of torture and the (non) applicability of the Geneva conventions, make up a significant part of the picture. Finally — and I’m picking nits now — Eve writes that “the idea that the force of an argument should be materially altered by an (allegedly) misplaced comma is … delightful and charming.” It may be, but my complaint focused not on the force of the argument but on its meaning , and it is pretty commonplace that commas can and do alter the meaning of sentences: Eats, Shoots & Leaves .

Positive rights

The debate going on between Eugene Volokh and others is worth checking out (as Henry notes), though some of the background assumptions are pretty odd, to my way of thinking. [1] But sticking to the central issue of positive and negative rights, the discussing sent me scurrying to look at Allen Buchanan’s seminal paper Justice and Charity (accessible if you’ve got JSTOR, otherwise, tough). In a small section of the paper, dealing with positive and negative rights, Buchanan points out that — as in this debate — those seeking to argue that all rights are negative attempt to show (or at least claim) that any positive rights will lead to “unacceptably frequent and severe disruptions of individuals’ activities as rational planners or to intrusions that are intuitively unjust.” But, as Buchanan argues, that’s a pretty implausible move to make.

You've got to hand it to the French

They’ve got class. I particularly like the line about “the best red wine I’ve ever tasted.”

On a Wing and a Prayer

A couple of people have emailed me about this story. In 2001, the Journal of Reproductive Medicine published a study in which a group of women who wanted to become pregnant by in vitro fertilization were prayed for, without their knowledge, by others. Astonishingly, the paper found that being prayed for doubled your chances of getting pregnant. We all know that praying for oneself can have positive medical consequences if it makes you happy, relaxed and gives you a positive outlook on life. But this paper got a lot of coverage at the time because, obviously, it went so far beyond this. The authors were Daniel Wirth, a lawyer and believer in the supernatural, Kwang Cha who directs a fertility clinic in L.A., and Rogerio Lobo, chairman of the department of obstetrics and gynecology at Columbia University’s College of Physicians and Surgeons. Lobo is also on the board of the journal. This week, taking time off from his scholarly research, one of the authors pled guilty to federal charges of fraud.

Bremer's last trick

The Guardian reports that US civil administrator Paul Bremer signed an order Monday banning Muqtada al-Sadr and his lieutenants from running for elective office for 3 years because of their membership in an illegal militia. Muqtada and his lieutenants rejected this decree and said that the CPA and the caretaker government had no right to make such decisions.
…

Bremer’s action in excluding the Sadrists from parliament is one final piece of stupidity to cap all the other moronic things he has done in Iraq. The whole beauty of parliamentary governance is that it can hope to draw off the energies of groups like the Sadrists. Look at how parliamentary bargaining moderated the Shiite AMAL party in Lebanon, which had a phase as a terrorist group in the 1980s but gradually outgrew it. AMAL is now a pillar of the Lebanese establishment and a big supporter of a separation of religion and state. The only hope for dealing with the Sadrists nonviolently was to entice them into civil politics, as well. Now that they have been excluded from the political process and made outlaws in the near to medium term, we may expect them to act like outlaws and to be spoilers in the new Iraq. (emphasis added)

Rights and costs

Eugene Volokh has a nice short piece on the incoherence of the distinction between positive and negative liberty. His main argument - that even negative liberties entail government enforcement - is reminiscent of the basic claim of Stephen Holmes and Cass Sunstein’s The Cost of Rights: Why Liberty Depends on Taxes.¹ It’s also a good reminder of why Volokh is a consistently interesting blogger and scholar - he’s willing to follow ideas where they lead him, even if they point in (for him) politically awkward directions.

¹ See here for a short review by Cosma Shalizi.

But I ween this war fire is hot, fierce and poisonous; therefore have I on me shield and byrnie

Perhaps you are unaware - but then you should be made aware - that, in addition to releasing one of the best albums of last year, Quebec, Ween has one of the best band websites on the net. Two of them, actually. Lots of free music and videos and goodies. Not to mention 24-hour a day ween radio. Setlists. Links to weird fansites. At some point even my interest starts to wane.

But before that happens to you …

Yusuf Islam

Daniel’s unfortunate comparison of the great David Icke with the dull and ordinary Yusuf Islam has ignited a bit of irritation from commenters. But Yusuf’s defenders are out-of-date about his doings. Contrary to popular belief he now does allow his old records to be released, donating the proceeds to a variety of charities (including the September 11th fund). I can’t find documentary evidence, but I have heard him retract his support for the Fatwah on Rushdie, and do so in an embarrassed and genuinely apologetic way. Perhaps more importantly, as a leading and respected voice within Islam in the UK he has, since September 11th, put his cards unambiguously on the table as an uncompromising opponent of terrorism, Islamic or otherwise, and is a leading voice for a modern, tolerant, Islam.

In this interview with Bob Harris (recorded before Sept 11th, and which, I now see, you can’t actually hear on the site) he comes across as a modest man who has had a lot of demons to conquer, and has sort of sorted his life out.

I post this just to update people, not to criticise Daniel. I certainly didn’t think the comparison was Islamophobic, just inapt. But the problem is that comparing Icke with just about anybody is inapt! I just thought he deserved to have people know what he’s up to.

Too many graduates, not enough jobs

In case anyone’s suffering a burst of Invisible Adjunct nostalgia, here’s a story about bright-eyed young things being lured into expensive an time-consuming graduate programs with unrealistic hopes of rewarding employment at the far end, and here’s the first rumblings of discontent from “the academy”. Yup, and pace a lot of grass-is-greener talk by commentors on the old IA site, MBA programs are subject to more or less exactly the same supply and demand economics as the fine arts brigade. I would be an avid reader, btw, of an “Invisible Associate” site if a lowly MBA-grunt at a managment consultancy were to set one up to gripe about the vagaries of consultant life and the difficulty of getting on the partner track. But I don’t think there is one … yet.

Dolchstoßlegende

Pejman Yousefzadeh has a Flack Central Station piece that is quite remarkably at odds with the facts, even by Yousefzadeh’s usual standards. He criticizes Matt Yglesias’ comparison of warbloggers with German purveyors of the “Stab in the Back” legend, arguing that if Matt is not “actually accusing those who are critiquing the media of being Nazis, he is accusing them of stealing a page out of the Nazi playbook.”

Update: German spelling correction following comments

Well I can't think of one

It strikes me that there is no antonym for “exceed.”

B-movie

Well, the first thing I want to say is.”Mandate my ass!”

The demise of Ronald Reagan made me dust off my copy of the magnificent Gil Scott-Heron’s B-Movie/R-Ron (double-A-side-single). I’ve not managed to find even the lyrics to Re-Ron anywhere on the web, but B-movie is here (right sidebar) and you can download the music too (with what legality I can’t say).

Compartmentalization

For a few years in graduate school I wrote a regular column for the Daily Princetonian, Princeton’s main student newspaper. I got into a bit of trouble once or twice over it, notably for a piece I wrote out of irritation with the local chapter of the Campus Crusade for Christ.

I was reminded of this when I learned, via Billmon, of the strong Christian beliefs of General Counsel Mary Walker. She led the legal team that wrote the recently leaked memo arguing that there were no legal considerations, domestic or foreign, that prevented the President from authorizing torture. She is also a co-founded of the Professional Women’s Fellowship, an offshoot of the CCC. Philip Carter at Intel Dump has described the memo as ‘a cookbook approach for illegal government conduct’. Here is Walker in an interview about her beliefs, followed by a snippet of her report:

Walker: “Making moral decisions in the workplace where it is easy to go along and get along takes courage. It takes moral strength and courage to say, ‘I’m not going to do this because I don’t think it’s the right thing to do.’”
The report: Officials could escape torture convictions by arguing that they were following superior orders, since such orders “may be inferred to be lawful” and are “disobeyed at the peril of the subordinate.”

With just a little more effort here, we could push through to the world of Jack Lint, the character played by Michael Palin in Brazil.

Update: The Walker interview was yanked from the Professional Women’s Fellowship website, in a Christian act of covering up embarrassing stuff. But Billmon has a copy.

Alan Turing

It’s fifty years since the death of mathematician, code-breaker and computer pioneer Alan Turing. Turing committed suicide after being forced to take estrogen for a year to “cure” him of his homosexuality. I read Andrew Hodges’ excellent biography of Turing when I was in College. I remember Hodges noting that from about 1935 to his death he had a new and basically unprecedented idea about every five or six years. A remarkable character.

Risk and Reagan

Since the obituaries and eulogies for Ronald Reagan have now been read, I think it’s reasonable to take a critical look at his historical contribution. It’s often argued that Reagan accelerated the end of the Cold War by raising US military expenditure, thereby forcing the Soviet Union to increase its own military expenditure and crippling its economy. I think this argument has some plausibility in relation to the dissolution of the Soviet Union itself, though not in relation to the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Communist governments in Eastern Europe¹.

So granting that this analysis is correct, should Reagan be praised? For the argument to work, the buildup must have raised the probability of nuclear war, unless you suppose (improbably) that the Russians were absolutely convinced of the peaceful intentions of the West and responded to Reagan purely to build up their own offensive capability². Let’s suppose that the annual risk of war was raised by one percentage point. Then over the eight years Reagan was in office, there was a cumulative 8 per cent chance of a war that would certainly have produced tens of millions of deaths, probably billions and possibly the extinction of the human race. Against this, the early collapse of the Soviet Union produced benefits (mixed, but still positive on balance) for people in the Soviet Union, and perhaps also a reduction in the likelihood of an accidental nuclear war in the period since 1990. These benefits are small in relation to the potential cost.

As I’ve argued previously, if you think that a good policy is one which, in expectation, has good consequences, Reagan’s policy fails this test. On the other hand, standard accounts of consequentialism say that a good policy is one that has good actual consequences. If you accept this, and the assessment of the facts given above, Reagan’s historical record looks pretty good.

¹ It had been obvious for many years that these governments were sustained only by the threat of Soviet military intervention. Gorbachev still had the military capacity to intervene in 1989 (in fact, on the argument presented above, the Russians had a bigger military than they would have had if Reagan had not been elected), but he chose not to do so. As soon as this became evident, the Communist bloc governments collapsed.

² As an aside, in debate at the time, it was widely asserted that the Soviet government was actively planning an attack on the West, to be undertaken if Western defences could be weakened sufficiently. Has the collapse of Communism produced any archival or similar evidence on this? I would have thought that the Warsaw Pact countries would have had to have had a fair degree of involvement, and, since they are now in NATO, there would be no reason to keep any secrets.

I Don't Licke Icke (all that much anymore)

Structured procrastination, oh yeh. I have an unfinished review of Doug Henwood’s “After the New Economy” on the computer in front of me, which is looking like taking me longer to write than he took to write the book, plus James Surowiecki’s new book is out, covering a couple of areas which he’s argued with us about on CT¹. And what am I reading and reviewing? The latest work by that noted metaphysician, David Icke. “Tales from the Time Loop”. Icke is a bit of a guilty pleasure for many of us here at CT, and a few others. But I’m rather afraid that with this latest one, he’s jumped the shark. See below the fold for my Amazon review, which to be honest I’m not anticipating getting posted. I’ve added a few links so that non-Icke fans can get up to speed. I don’t know why I’m so bright and breezy today btw, it’s actually rather sad.

Update Richard Kahn in comments points me to this forthcoming paper for the Journal of Utopian Studies. Opinions on this kind of free-wheeling, name-dropping postmodern cultural studies writing are somewhat split on CT, but I’m inclined to be a bit softer than the median. When this sort of thing comes off, it’s really good, and I rather think that Richard’s Icke paper comes off pretty well.

D-Day in the Public Mind

With all the hoopla over D-Day remembrances, I found myself wondering whether remembering the anniversary had become more or less important in the last twenty years. To this end, I spent twenty minutes getting LexisNexis to email me New York Times stories mentioning D-Day since 1980, running it through the world’s kludgiest Perl script to clean it and drop irrelevant entries¹, and looking at the data in R.

The result is the figure to the right, which shows the number of stories per year over a 25-year period, though of course the 2004 data only go to June 6th of this year. The number of stories per year varies from zero to 120 with a median of about 17. The two biggest years by far are 1984 and 1994, the 40th and 50th anniversaries respectively. A smoothed regression line picks out a gentle but consistent upward trend in coverage. There are more stories as time goes by. It’s not surprising that the big anniversaries are the most covered. Beyond that, coverage seems to be increasing as the D-Day cohort ages. The contemporary political benefits of making a big deal of such a praiseworthy event probably amplify this trend. This would lead us to expect the D-Day commemorations to decline as time goes by, though on the other hand World War II lives on in our culture (as a good war as well as the biggest one) in a way that most other wars do not.

Of course none of this tells us anything about the substance of the commemoration and whether that’s changing over time. Historical events are remembered in the light of present-day concerns, and very well-commemorated events or major monuments are reinterpreted or forgotten as circumstances change. I wonder how long this upward trend will continue: it’s a question of whether D-Day is tied to the cohort who fought it, or whether its commemoration is attached to its veterans or whether it will become a more general event as time goes by. Probably the former, but it’s hard to say.

¹ Mainly paid death notices of people who had served on D-Day — casual Lexis-Nexis queriers should beware of this kind of thing.

Fellatrix superiore

Eszter’s post has put me in mind of the excellent Financial Times preview of the latin oration on the (hypothetical) occasion of Bill Clinton assuming the Chancellorship of Oxford University:

Sed Eheu! Magnum disastrum suscepit sua maxima culpa. Per noctem, Novembre MCMLXXXXV Alia Occidentalis Domus Albus laborante, sibi pizza donata est a Monica Lewinsky, puella pulchrissima, sensuosa californicante, fellatrix superiore.

‘Non coitus est cum hac femina,’ dixit. Sed, per laborem longus et penetrante Kennethi Starri, procurator independentus, et senatoribus Republicanis agitates, testimonia inculpata; togam maculatam, cigarrus grandus, revelata sunt. Domus Representatis imperator Clinton defenestrare tentavit. Senatus, 50-50 divisa est, absolvit.

The full text is here .

Middle school orals

A post about exams? Not quite. Belle already blogged about this NYTimes Magazine article a few days ago, but I thought it was worth some more discussion. The piece is about how widespread oral sex seems to be among high school students and how casually teens approach the topic. (I should note that it’s not clear how representative the sample on which the author draws is of high school students in general, but the topic is worthy of consideration even if it represents only a fraction of students, I think.) I am certainly not in favor of abstinence-only education and am all in favor of teaching teens about safe sex. My concern is about the one-way approach many teens seem to be taking. In the following sentence, Belle addresses the problem of girls performing oral sex on guys without any reciprocity: “If letting some guy just show up at your house so you can suck his dick is empowering, then I’m Henry Kissinger.” In case that doesn’t make that much sense out of context, be sure to read Belle’s post with a relevant quote from the article. By the way, for an additional reality check, note that this is not only a high school phenomenon, it seems to start in middle school for some. Also, for those (including a commentator on Ogged’s blog) who think that you can’t get STDs through oral sex, this may be worth reading.

UPDATE: I should have mentioned this when I wrote this post. There is a great data set that addresses lots of related issues and has led to lots of publications: Add Health. There’s room for more work on the new data especially, if anyone’s interested.:)

Celebrity sightings

I spent the beginning of last week at my graduation at Princeton. (Although I defended almost exactly a year ago, I had missed the deadline for marching in the ceremonies last year.) I am really glad I went back. I had always envisioned graduation from grad school as a fairly anonymous event where I would be hooded amongst lots of people I did not know. This was not at all the case. It turns out that I knew many of the people finishing at the same time and that made the ceremonies all that much more special. (And as usual, I was hanging out mostly with economists.. go figure.)

Princeton usually does not have a Commencement speaker although the President of the University does say a few words. However, the senior class has a Class Day the day before Commencement to which they do invite a speaker. Last year I got to see Seinfeld this way and this year Jon Stewart gave quite a funny speech kindly sprinkled with local references as he is from that area. The unexpected celebrity sighting had come during Reunions on the Friday before though. I was waiting for the green light to cross Washington Road just in front of the Woodrow Wilson School when I spotted a security guard right next to me. I knew it was Reunions weekend and there are enough big deal Princeton alums that there could be all sorts of reasons for this so I was not that surprised. Nonetheless, it is not too common to see such obvious out-of-a-movie security personnel. So I thought I would glance to his right to see if I could spot someone famous. I did. Donald Rumsfeld was waiting for the green light as well (not something he is necessarily known to do…), back for his 50th I guess. Although Jon Stewart did mention in his Class Day speech that no matter who wins the presidential elections this year we can blame Yale, I’m afraid that doesn’t leave all Princetonians exempt from related responsibilities…

Days Like This

My mom, still right about everything. In a previous post, I explained her immediate skepticism about the Brandon Mayfield arrest. From the NYT today:

…the F.B.I. at one point told federal prosecutors that Spanish officials were “satisfied” with their conclusion. But in interviews this week, Spanish officials vehemently denied ever backing up that assessment, saying they had told American law enforcement officials from the start, after their own tests, that the match was negative. The Spanish officials said their American counterparts relentlessly pressed their case anyway, explaining away stark proof of a flawed link — including what the Spanish described as tell-tale forensic signs — and seemingly refusing to accept the notion that they were mistaken….
Carlos Corrales, a commissioner of the Spanish National Police’s science division, said he was also struck by the F.B.I.’s intense focus on Mr. Mayfield. “It seemed as though they had something against him,” Mr. Corrales said, “and they wanted to involve us.”

The FBI continues to maintain it was just a random mistake by an examiner who didn’t even know Mayfield’s name, much less his religion, that initially led them to focus on Mayfield. I continue to maintain that’s total BS. Finally, does this fingerprint examiner have a family? Because I bet they would really, really like more time to be spent with them.

Statistical Update: This 2001 Washington Post article lists some widely varying estimates as to how many Muslims live in the US. The highest number was produced by a group of Muslim organizations and has been the subject of some doubt (numbers in millions).
Mosque Study Project: 6 to 7
2001 Britannica Book of the Year: 4.1
National Opinion Research Center: 1.5 to 3.4
CUNY Religious Identification Survey: 2.8
Reading the article, the methodology of the Mosque Study Project was obviously pretty bad. The total U.S population, according to the census bureau, is 293, 425, 566. So it seems as if probably more than 1% but substantially fewer than 2% of Americans are Muslims. I think that in the original article the FBI said the computer provided them with 50 close matches, from which Mayfield’s print was chosen as the best by an examiner (again, allegedly, without reference to his personal details).

Down in Cork he'd be known as a Langer

The best-selling song in Ireland at the moment is a strike for local terms of abuse over international ones. A group from Cork — Ireland’s second-largest city, its real capital, and my home town — is dominating the charts with “The Langer,” outselling such international cursers as Eamon and Frankee. “Langer” is a Cork term meaning — well, it can mean a lot of things, but this clip from the song gives you the primary meaning. The song itself isn’t destined to be a classic of contemporary folk music, but seeing as recent political events have caused me to use the word myself a few times to uncomprehending Americans, I can now point them towards this. The song is also notable for being the first with a full verse as Gaeilge to reach number one in Ireland. Appropriately the verse is about langers who think only they can speak Irish. Full lyrics are below the fold, courtesy of The Cork Diaries.