Darfur in Light of the Rwandan Genocide

Brian has an informative essay up on his site about the ongoing bloodletting in Darfur, and all the meaningless handwringing to be seen in today's press about Western inaction over Rwanda. I think he gets it exactly right when he says

People in western countries generally aren't that interested in what's going on in non-western countries. Sure, there are a few exceptions. The British and French tend to be moderately interested in the doings in their former African colonies because a) they maintain considerably economic ties in many of them and b) there are many African immigrants in those countries. Western Europeans tend to be disproportionately interested in the Israeli Occupied Territories. But generally speaking, most westerners care little about non-western countries, except in a tangential way. Ask them if 'x' crisis is bad and they will say "Yes, it's awful." It usually doesn't translate into anything more than that.

There are quite a few noticeable exceptions, particularly, it seems, in the blogging world, but where the general populace is concerned, this really is the simple truth. A single child is killed in the Occupied Territories and the Western media blazes with publicity for weeks on end; 1 million people in Northern Africa have their homes scorched and are driven on death-marches, and few do more than shrug and say "how terrible."

Why I PGP-Sign All My Comments

Ever since I've begun PGP-signing the comments I make on blogs other than my own, I've been receiving all sorts of negative responses from people who don't appreciate why I bother, and resent the aesthetic impression made by PGP signatures at the bottom of my comments. This post by Jay Allen ought to dispel for any doubters why I find it worthwhile to go to the trouble.

My Own Private Idiot

Over the last few days, I've been posting a great deal of helpful information both here on my site and elsewhere around the web. For a while, I was going through the Trackbacks on the Six Apart website looking for any places where I might be able to clear up confusion. Someone however, didn't seem to like what I was saying.

This person started following me around and leaving comments after mine, accusing me of attacking people on their own sites and lying on Six Apart's behalf for financial reward. Eventually, he brought it here to my blog. After going back and forth, I had had enough and lost it in Grand Jay Allen style. Of course, I should have recognized a troll for what it was, but I didn't.

Although the lying accusation was ridiculous, I wondered about the attacking part. Things have been rather stressful at times and I admit that when I get stressed or have to repeat the same thing over and over again, I can be short with people. So, I endeavored to look back over all of the places I had commented in order to apologize to anyone who I had attacked.

I didn't find one. However, what I did find was a treasure trove of comments by my troll, sometimes under different pseudonyms, quite often attacking, always vituperative and ill-mannered.

So I called him on it and banned him from commenting on my site.

The Misanthropic Doppelganger

But of course, a troll who can't engage simply gets enraged. In this case, he began posting hateful and wrong-headed comments under my name throughout the blogosphere. Most of his comments are extreme and not even close to what I espouse. He has hit many blogs and as I write this, he is still wasting his time and mine.

Normally, I would not feed the trolls, but in this case, I needed to tell people that if they see my name in their comments with rude, aggresive or hateful comments, it is most certainly not me.

"Idiot" is precisely the term to apply to individuals like the one Jay Allen mentions, and it's because the online world seems to be chock full of idiots that I now insist on signing all my comments unless the site owners have the time to waste checking that the IP address matches my usual one everytime they recieve a post under my name; it's a concession on my part to the aesthetic concerns of those who object most strongly, but even looking up IP addresses isn't perfect, as there's no guarantee that my IP address won't change (as indeed it regularly does), or even that the IP address matching any large collection of posts under my name is actually mine to begin with.

I can certainly appreciate to some extent why a lot of people get annoyed at the sight of PGP signatures at the end of comments, but any sympathy I feel in that direction is more than outweighed by my concern for my own good reputation, which I refuse to allow any malignant little cretin on the web to sully under a false guise. It is also true that not everyone will bother to verify a PGP signature anyway, and to be honest, I expect that very few people will actually take the time to do so; nevertheless, the mere fact that a message comes with one makes it easy enough to determine whether or not some comment was actually posted by me, should a reason come up for anyone to care. An additional benefit of PGP-signed comments is that a blog owner can't alter the message in the slightest without breaking the signature, so one can't get words put into one's mouth without being able to disown them.

To be honest, none of these issues with comment verification would exist were it not for the total lack of concern on the part of blog software writers for issues of identity verification, a failing shared with most software developers in other domains, I hasten to add. Had Movable Type and TypePad come with provision for PGP-signing built-in (as suggested here, for example), the aesthetic impact of signing wouldn't be an issue, and as an added benefit, comment verification would automatically be handled server-side. Instead we're presented with a "solution" that is anything but one, although it has the benefit of giving MT-users a nice warm glow inside that "something is being done!" about identity impersonation and assorted shenanigans.

One benefit of working with a GPL-based system like WordPress is that anyone with the requisite skills can always add in support for a desired feature and distribute a version with the necessary modifications, even if the new code is rejected by the maintainers of the original code. PGP-signed commenting support is definitely one feature I intend on working on for WordPress, once I've learnt my way around the current codebase.

Spam and Stupid German Regulations

This Slashdot article is a case-study in the law of unintended consequences.

"As reported on German news site Heise, the system administrators of the Technical University of Braunschweig have temporarily given up the fight against spam [NB - Article is in German]. Because of the legal obligation to deliver all mail and of the delay time exceeding critical 5 days(!), they decided to switch off all filter mechanisms. Before, the 20 servers dedicated to processing e-mail alone had been breaking down under a load of 100000 unprocessed mail messages, ca. 98% of which had been spam or viruses. ... A similar e-mail jam occurred recently at the IT central of the German Federal Government.

This is the sort of idiocy that comes of legislators leaping to regulate everything under the sun, without any thought in mind that technological change or some unforeseen development might ever render their policies obsolete. In point of fact, the German legislation in place is such a stinker that even the delivery of viruses is a legal obligation! I bet no Bundestag representative ever imagined the dandy new legislation he or she was voting for would some day serve as such a boon to online criminals around the world.

What's most pathetic about this development is that all it would take to get rid of most of the spam Braunschweig TU is receiving would be the combination of a subscription to a real-time blacklist like SPEWS and a server-side filter like SpamAssassin or SpamBayes. Instead cash-strapped German educational institutions are forced to bear unnecessary costs in terms of additional bandwidth and storage requirements, and the endless headaches of dealing with preventable virus outbreaks. Well, I guess German IT support staff are smiling, at least, as it means they'll never be short of emergencies to firefight.

No Takers, Uh?

It seems as if my attempt to satiate the appetites of my very, very clever readers with two additional questions has proven successful - too successful, perhaps, as nobody's bothered to submit an attempted solution! What's going on here? Can't anybody even get off to a start with either one?

Senate Democrats Stall Extension of African Growth and Opportunity Act

The Democratic Party's Senate representatives show how much they care about the welfare of all those poor Africans, not like those mean, racist Republican thugs all those who are sensitive to Third World suffering ought rightfully to despise ...

Amid concern that key provisions of the African Growth and Opportunity Act will expire later this year unless Congress votes an extension, supporters have issued a plea for public pressure on Congress.

U.S. government estimates suggest that hundreds of thousands of current and prospective jobs in some of Africa's poorest countries are at stake. Advocates of the extension say the next few days are critical to extending the legislation in time to prevent erosion of major gains it has fostered.

The legislation, popularly known as Agoa, which has been a centerpiece of U.S. Africa policy under both Presidents Clinton and Bush, enjoys strong bipartisan backing in Congress. But most Senate Democrats have stayed clear of endorsing this year's proposed extension of the law, which now is in serious jeopardy.

"The U.S. national interest is served by a self-sufficient Africa that is prosperous, peaceful, healthy and democratic," says an appeal from a broad coalition of corporations, religious organizations, nongovernmental groups, lobbyists and trade associations formed to press Congress to renew key provisions of the Act that otherwise expire in four months.

"Agoa must be extended" is the message that should be sent by phone, letter and email to members of both Houses of the U.S. Congress, according to the coalition, which is co-chaired by Jack Kemp, a former member of the U.S. House of Representatives and 1996 Republican vice presidential nominee, Coca Cola's Carl Ware, and Rosa Whitaker, who served as assistant trade representative for Africa under both Clinton and Bush and now heads the Washington, DC-based Whitaker Group.

Enhanced revisions of the legislation, known as the Agoa Acceleration Bill, or Agoa3, were introduced in both Houses last year. The bill won unanimous approval by the House Ways and Means Committee on May 5 and is expected to win passage by the full House in early June. Senate action on the message has been snarled by procedural disputes unrelated to the bill itself.

The new bill extends overall application of the law from 2008 to 2015, which supporters say is key to encouraging foreign investment in Africa's manufacturing sector. More immediately, the bill continues duty-free access to the United States for apparel made in Africa from fabrics of another country until September 2007. This provision for "third country fabric" imports ends September 30.

[............]

"I'm calling on my fellow Democrats to stand up on this issue," Whitaker said this week in an interview. "Not one job has gone from North Carolina to Lesotho, or any other place in Africa." Agoa should be seen as a "humanitarian initiative" and not principally a trade measure, said Whitaker, who played a key role in passage and implementation of the legislation, first as an aide to Rep. Charles Rangel (D-New York) and then as the first assistant trade representative for Africa in the White House.

"Where are the Democrats at this critical moment?" she asked, citing specifically Hillary Rodham Clinton, from New York. "Her husband signed Agoa" when it was adopted nearly four years ago. "She should be with us now," Whitaker said.

The only Democrat cosponsoring the current bill, introduced by Richard Lugar (Indiana), chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, is Joseph Lieberman (Connecticut), who ran for vice president on the ticket with Al Gore in 2000 and unsuccessfully sought his party's presidential nomination in 2004. The other cosponsors, all Republicans, include Michael DeWine (Ohio), Peter Fitzgerald (Illinois), Chuck Hagel (Nebraska), John McCain (Arizona) and Rick Santorum (Pennsylvania). Another Democrat, Max Baucus (Montana), ranking member of the Senate Finance Committee, is on record as a supporter, though not cosponsor of Lugar's Agoa3 bill.

In an effort to boost prospects for Agoa's passage, supporters led by Lugar, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee chair, hosted a reception on Capitol Hill Tuesday with Bono, lead singer of the U2 band, who has become a prominent campaigner for debt relief and the fight against HIV/Aids in Africa.

"Trade is the most important thing to our friends in Africa," Bono said, addressing a large Senate hearing room filled with Congressional staff, lobbyists, African diplomats and Agoa supporters. American leadership on Agoa and HIV/Aids "sends a message to the world" at a time when the United States needs support from other countries, the Irish rock star said. Lugar said passage of his Agoa bill is "critical to further bolster the progress Africa already has made."

Ed Royce, Republican from California who chairs the House Africa Subcommittee, said it is important to act because "Agoa has lifted people with export-led growth and has promoted reform." Agoa-related trade and investment has created some 200,000 jobs in Africa and spurred more than $340 million in investments, according to U.S. government figures.

[............]

Congressional inaction on an extension "could have serious impact - losses of jobs, the closing of factories," Assistant U.S. Trade Representative for Africa Florizelle Lister told the House Africa subcommittee on May 11. In one of Africa's smallest nations, Swaziland, with a population of just over one million, whose economy has been hard hit by HIV/Aids, the 28,000 jobs and the livelihood of some 100,000 people would be negatively affected by expiration of Agoa's key provisions this year, Prime Minister A. T. Dlamini told AllAfrica in an interview earlier this month. "This is very important for alleviating poverty in Swaziland," he said.

Like other African leaders who have visited the United States in recent weeks to champion Agoa, the prime minister noted that manufacturers need stable supply lines and investors want dependable environments. Planning for end-of-the-year holiday sales is already underway, and unless retailers are assured of extension of the third-country fabric provision, they may quickly shift apparel production from Africa to Asia. (emphases added)

It's inaction over issues like this one that make me immune to attempts by Democrats to sell themselves as somehow morally superior to Republicans when it comes to foreign policy, but when push comes to shove, they're always missing in action. It's a sure bet that not a single one of the lefties who made such a big hue and cry over Bush's shameful pandering to protectionist interests will raise their voices in concern about this particular issue - if they're even aware that it's an issue to begin with. At best, I expect they'll try to justify Democratic inaction as being in service of "a greater cause"; anything is justifiable if it serves to remove the evil Bushitler™ from service, even the return of 200,000 Africans into the throes of joblessness, and the foreclosure of any prospect of better things for millions more.

Authenticity in Judaism

As anyone who's been reading this blog for some time ought to know, I'm not in the least bit religious. I don't believe in heaven and hell, spirits and gods, and all the other sorts of meta-physical phenomena that seem to be taken as givens by most of the other people in this world. Nevertheless, that I am irreligious doesn't mean that I don't take religion seriously - given its tremendous importance to a lot of other people, I feel a duty on my part to understand the various religious systems that are most historically and culturally important, and to obtain a better appreciation of them both as means of social organization and as bodies of philosophical thought that various individuals have tried to fashion into consistent systems, some with greater success than others.

It is with these ideas in mind that I devote so much of my time to studying the various monotheistic religions, though I am not in the least bit religious myself; but if one is intent on understanding Christianity and Islam, one cannot hope to get far without coming to grips with another religious tradition of which both are offshoots (or heresies, as some might prefer), namely Judaism. Though its adherents are few in number in comparison to the other two religions - and largely because of the competitive antagonism of Christianity and Islam - it's influence on the world at large has been far out of proportion to the number of individuals who have subscribed to it, greater even than Christianity and Islam individually, in so far as both would never have come into being without Judaism as their precursor.

Getting to the main point of this post, one thing that I have noticed in the course of my learning about Judaism has been an unthinking and subconscious bias on my part that I think is shared even by most believers in Judaism itself (and certainly by Israel's legal and political system), which is that while Reform and Conservative Jews may be Jews on a purely ethnic level, in a religious sense, they are somehow less "authentically" Jewish than their Orthodox and Hasidic counterparts, who are the true carriers of a Judaism "unsullied" by compromises with the modern world. It is with this bias in mind that I happened to find the article above by Rabbi Simon Maslin so interesting, as for the first time I found in it a thoughtful articulation of a contrasting viewpoint from the one implicit in the commonplace view of Orthodoxy as being somehow more intrinsically "Jewish" than Conservativism or the Reform school.

As the Rabbi points out, modern Orthodox Judaism is itself a direct descendant of a reformist stream of Judaism, the Pharisaic school that reformulated the religion around the study of the Torah and the synagogue, even as Sadduccee and Maccabean traditionalists continued to insist on the primacy of the sacrifical rites centred on the Temple in Jerusalem. Furthermore, some of the very greatest scholars esteemed by the Orthodox themselves were hardly the unworldly figures many of their admirers aspire to be in our day - men like Maimonides and Judah HaLevi were not merely narrow pedagogues of Talmudic learning, but also individuals who were deeply interested in the contemporary world about them, in its peoples, its literature, its history, its arts and its sciences. Even the Hasidic insistence on such supposedly "Jewish" dress as the black caftan and the round fur hat, and on long sideburns and side-curls, are not in the least rooted in ancient Jewish practice, but relatively modern accretions that have since hardened into symbols of "authenticity" and an imagined antiquity of tradition.

With all of this in mind, the Reform and Conservative schools of Judaism, when looked at objectively, are no less deserving of the mantle of "authenticity" than the Orthodox variety - and in fact, even the very label "Orthodox" slants the playing field from the very start, as if something is "orthodox", it is almost by definition the "right" or "proper" way of doing things. Modern day Orthodox Judaism is in many ways no more "orthodox" than the other two main varieties, and all of these offshoots of the Pharisaic tradition could in their turn be viewed with some justification by the Karaites (who acknowledge only the Tanakh, and reject the Mishna and the Talmud) as so much modernist straying from the path of "true" Judaism to which they alone continue to adhere. It should be clear that my point in mentioning the Karaites is not to alight on yet some other group as being the sole, authoritative bearers of the Jewish religious tradition, but simply to illustrate how the pointless game of religious one-upmanship in the name of "authenticity" can be carried on ad infinitum.

Of course, much that I have said here about "authenticity" and traditionalism also applies to the Christian and Islamic religious traditions, when rephrased in slightly different language - for instance, despite the Vatican's insistence on its primacy as a bearer of the Christian religious tradition, the same claim can be made, with an equal weight of antiquity behind it, by the Eastern Orthodox Church as well, while Protestants are substantially correct in condemning icon-worship and the institution of sainthood as wayward developments away from the path established by the early church. All of these branches of Christianity can in turn be condemned as polytheistic heresies by those who continue to reject a divine trinity of God the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit - and on and on it goes ad nauseum.

I suppose if there's anything to be taken from all this, it is always to resist the temptation to believe that some strain of a religious tradition is more "authentic" simply because it has a more ancient look and feel to it, or claims to have a stricter interpretation of what the religion requires of its believers. If one absolutely must decide upon some single branch of a religion as being authoritative, one might as well go with the branch that has the most members, and in the case of American Judaism at least, that would not be the Orthodox variety (nor would it be Southern Fundamentalism in the Christian case).

Self-Appointed Voices

Samizdata's Perry de Havilland has an amusing piece up about the adventures of he and a couple of other Samizdatistas in Geneva, where they crashed the 57th WHO assembly. A detail mentioned in the piece that I found particularly telling was the following:

Crasher Niger Innes asks why, given that the panel was representing itself as the voice of the poor in Africa, there were no Africans on the panel? Ouch.

As a certain law professor likes to say, indeed. There's something outrageously presumptious of people, most of whom have never so much as stepped foot on African soil, deigning to speak on behalf of the rights of people whose desires they've never bothered to have articulated to them. To hear anti-globalizers go on about the harm done to Africans by capitalism and westernization, one would never know that in a recent worldwide poll, the most favorable attitudes towards these two bogeymen were to be found in ... Africa.

How a Math Nerd became a Pornstar

The things you'll find on the web! Did you know, for instance, that Asia Carrera, of adult film fame (or, depending on your value system, infamy) was a onetime USA Math Olympiad contestant? And that she played Carnegie Hall while she was still in her early teens (performing Bach's 13th Invention), and later went to Rutgers as a National Merit Scholar? At least, so it says in her website's biography section (just in case you're wondering, I did not get there while looking for pr0n - a page that links to it is number one on the actual search I did run - not that there's anything wrong with surfing for pr0n on one's own free time ...).

I know that resume inflation is par for the course on the internet, but reading Carrera's account* of how she got to where she is today, I don't see anything that sticks out as implausible. Certainly, the pushy parents she talks about were characteristic of more than one American student of Asian extraction I knew during my college days. One could say that Ms. Carrera's life just goes to show that the Asian cultural emphasis on academic success cuts both ways, as it is possible to push children too hard to study subjects for which they have no natural affinity, even if they're able to grind out good results nonetheless. That said though, on balance I still think the Asian-American attitude preferable to that of many other American subcultures, in which academic success is either seen as irrelevant, a cunning plot by TheMan™ to keep one down, or else entirely a matter of genetic luck, and nothing one has any ability to exert personal control over.

*I've got to say, though, that for someone who's supposedly so smart, the low-contrast choice of light green text on a white background isn't exactly the best demonstration of the veracity of such a claim.

More Mathematics Puzzles

Since it looks like quite a few of my readers are a lot sharper than the average Joe, I feel liberated to step up the difficulty slightly this time round. Here are three questions that are easy enough to state so that anyone can understand what they're about, but tough to take a bit of effort to solve.

1. The product N of three positive integers is 6 times their sum, and one of the integers is the sum of the other two. Find the sum of all possible values of N.
2. Let N be the greatest integer multiple of 8, no two of whose digits are the same. What is the remainder when N is divided by 1000?
3. Define a good word as a sequence of letters that consists only of the letters A, B and C - not all of these letters need appear in a given sequence - and in which A is never immediately followed by B, B is never immediately followed by C, and C is never immediately followed by A. How many seven-letter good words are there?

Well then, are you tough enough to handle my little challenge? Think you've got what it takes? I promise not to reveal the answers within the next 48 hours, to give everyone interested time enough to put up a decent effort.

ADDENDUM: To quell the appetites of those who feel the problems above were not in the least challenging, here are two more for your consumption. If these ones strike you as being as easy as the previous ones, I'll be extremely impressed!

1. Find, as a function of n, the sum of the digits of
   9 x 99 x 9999 x ... x (10²ⁿ-1),
   where each factor has twice as many digits as the previous one.
   
2. A computer screen shows a 98 x 98 chessboard, colored in the usual way. One can select with a mouse any rectangle with sides on the lines of the chessboard and click the mouse button: as a result, the colors in the selected rectangle switch (black becomes white, white becomes black). Find, with proof, the minimum number of mouse clicks needed to make the chessboard all one color.

Octopus Ink

One of my favorite turns of phrase that I've often been surprised to find raising puzzlement in others has been to describe some obfuscatory or distractive action or other as so much "octopus ink"; as it turns out, PZ Myers has a post up on this very phenomenon at this moment, describing vistigial ink sacs in blue-ringed octopuses in the context of evolutionary theory. From here on out I'll just send anyone who's puzzled by my use of the phrase to this Pharyngula entry - hopefully they'll not only gain an appreciation for a metaphor I think particularly appropriate for describing the evasive techniques of many a public figure, but they'll also learn one or two interesting things about the natural world while they're at it.

Incestuous Navel-Gazing as a Business Strategy

Personally, I can't stand Gawker,Wonkette or any of the other gossip and buzz-driven sites operated by Nick Denton, and this article linked to by Brad DeLong illustrates why.

Call me old-fashioned, but I'm one of those people who still believes in the virtues of technological innovation as a driver of economic progress, and guys like Denton represent for me the sorts of smooth-talking free-riders who did so much to discredit this engine of growth during the great IT bubble of the late 1990s. Denton's success with his stable of blogs indicates that there's clearly a market out there for media properties that cater to the New York and Washington DC elite's penchant for self-referential navel-gazing, but I'm doubtful that this is the sort of stuff of which an entire media empire can be built. Vacuous celebrity-worshippers around the world will shell out $3 for a copy of Hello! or OK! to read about the latest exploits of Gwyneth, Madonna or some other entertainment press darling, but beyond the small circle of megastars of worldwide interest, things get too fractionated for any small stable of writers to cover in the insider style that has worked so well for Denton thus far; for instance, most Americans have probably never heard of Amanda Holden, Ulrika Jonsson or any of the other TV celebrities that are the stuff of daily fodder in the British press, while the average German celebrity could probably spend a month walking the streets of London without ever being recognized by a single stranger.

To be honest, there's something about celebrity chitchat that really gets on my nerves, especially when it's of the self-referential sort so beloved of Manhattanites and DC talking heads (let's be honest here - outside of a small coterie, who really gives a sh*t what Tina Brown's up to?); as such, I wouldn't be in the least aggrieved if I were to learn that the Denton empire had gone belly-up someday. In the meantime, I can at least take solace in the fact that the man's failure to appreciate that good writers aren't quite as repleacable and interchangeable as he imagines, in combination with the virtually non-existent barriers to entry in the niche he's currently attempting to monopolize, ensure that any profits he currently enjoys are likely to be extremely shortlived.

Blah Blah Ginger Blah Blah

The much maligned Jon Katz of former Slashdot infamy is back, this time with an article in Slate, in which he argues that there is no such thing as a perfect dog:

The peddling of Perfect Dogs amounts to a multibillion dollar business in the United States. You'll never see images of ugly dogs vomiting in the living room or terrorizing the letter carrier on dog food commercials. Those dogs—the ones we want—are always adorable. Their happy owners are not holding pooper scoopers.

Because people have such ill-informed and unrealistic expectations, dogs often suffer when their true hungry, messy, and alien natures are revealed. They get yelled at, irritated by studded chains and zapped by electronic collars, tethered to trees, hidden away in basements and back yards, or dumped at shelters and euthanized.

[............]

Some romantics see the match between a human and dog as kismet; If they're "right" for one another, or destined to be together, they'll fall in love at first sight. But most puppies are cute. And few humans like to accept the idea that the affectionate puppy is as drawn by the food he smells on your hands as by some mysterious ethereal connection. (emphasis added)

I'm inclined to agree with Katz, and my agreement with him is why, despite my own fondness for dogs, I can't see myself ever actually getting one of my own. Dogs are basically poop factories with appealing demeanors, and the prospect of spending 10 years or more scooping up some animal's fecal matter doesn't in the least agree with my constitution.

Then there is also the matter of fertility to consider - dogs can be incredibly prolific, given the rapidity with which they reach sexual maturity (within a year of birth), the large size of the average litter, and the fact that female dogs come into heat twice a year, while males are fertile all year round. In light of the sheer number of animals that end up being abandoned or mistreated all over the world, it is incumbent on most dog owners to get their animals "fixed" rather than allow them to bring yet more unwanted puppies into the world. Still, there's something about the notion of adopting an animal with the aim in mind of spaying or neutering it that makes me flinch.

The final point mentioned by Jon Katz, and one that I think especially worth keeping in mind, is that most of us who are fond of domesticated animals tend to project unto them mental qualities they almost certainly don't have. I won't go as far as the Cartesians would, to say that dogs are merely stimulus-response machines, with no real emotions beyond those they project to us in their search for rewards, but I think that this picture of how things work is probably a lot closer to the truth than the sentimental worldview that tends to be prevalent amongst dog-owners. Not to put too fine a point on it, but these animals have evolved to game us into looking after them, and when you're doting on Lassie and mouthing baby words to her about her being such a good doggie, all she's probably really hearing is "snack coming, snack coming, snack coming!"

If one wants a truly reciprocal emotional relationship, one's best off looking for it with another human being. It's a lot more work for most people, it's true, and it's also a fact that dissimulation for the sake of pecuniary or other rewards is hardly unknown amongst our own species; nevertheless, it is genuine often enough that we as a species are still here - how many of us do not love our parents or children, despite the flaws they have? No dog is going to grieve for its owner after his or her passing, even if it shows some frustration that the doggie treats no longer fortuitously appear at the usual hour.

Hell and the Cartel of Good Intentions

Those who aren't looking to pick up a copy of William Easterly's book could do worse than take a look at this Foreign Policy article of his on the foreign aid bureaucracy, which gives a much more critical take on the realities of foreign aid disbursal than one might get reading only the New York Times and assorted advocacy pieces. I think articles like this one ought to be recommended reading for those who tend to mistake the mere fact of having (or, often, simply claiming to have) good intentions for the far too infrequently realized goal of seeing those intentions come to fruition.

One thing that Easterly's article above doesn't get around to mentioning, but which I think important to mention, is that as hard as it may be for a lot of people to believe, it is possible to kill with kindness, even when none of the cynical shenanigans outlined by Easterly come into play. An example of what I'm talking about can be seen in many a historical food aid program. Given a situation in which millions are starving in, say, south-eastern Africa, it is only natural, and thoroughly commendable, that one should seek to help these unfortunate people. Fired up by a genuine and admirable concern for others, activists organize fund-raising efforts, accumulate thousands of tonnes of grain, and ship them off to the starving poor half a world away. The aid is disbursed by yet other selfless souls on the ground in the afflicted region, the immediate problem of mass starvation is solved, and everyone can feel good about what's been achieved. Problem solved, one might think, but one would be wrong, for the end result is that famine returns yet again once the foreigners' attention has waned, and it does so with even greater force than before they arrived!

What rationale could be given for such a development, one might wonder? Is it a matter of fecklessness on the part of the recipients of food aid, or has a curse been laid upon them by some angry deity, which any efforts by men to overcome must ultimately prove futile? No, all that has happened is that the free food aid was so plentiful, and was disbursed for so long, that it completely priced the local farmers out of the market. Fields ceased to be cultivated, farmers drifted off to other occupations or became aid recipients themselves, and all the while no one noticed what was happening behind the photegenic, beaming faces of well-nourished youngsters to be seen in the aid project reports. Once another disaster struck somewhere else in the world, as they always do, and the foreign dole was withdrawn, the destruction of local agriculture that had taken place was suddenly revealed, and - voila! - hunger and desolation returned with a vengeance.

It's tempting for people reading this to imagine that I'm only outlining a hypothetical scenario here, but the truth is far more depressing: just such a chain of events has played itself out not once but several times across the globe. It happened in Somalia in 1992, it happened in India in the 1970s and 1980s, it happened in Guatemala after the earthquake of 1976, and it is still going on in Bangladesh as we speak, with the country's more privileged classes enjoying access to free food (which was given with the intention that it would be destined for the truly indigent) even as native Bangladeshi farmers are deprived of a market for their crops: in a commodity market, how can anyone hope to compete with "free?"

Even as a self-admitted libertarian, I'm not going to claim that all foreign aid is either useless or harmful, as that is clearly not the case, particularly when government participation is excluded to the maximum possible extent on either side; people in rich countries have every right to voluntarily donate their own money and time to helping those who live in poorer nations, while the best and often only way to ensure that foreign aid does any good for those it is ostensibly intended for is to ensure that the assorted political "big men", bureaucratic functionaries and other government parasites looking for baksheesh/cadeaus/dash/mordida have as little say as possible in the means, location and timing of aid dispersal. No, it is a fact that voluntary private party-to-private party foreign aid, if clearly thought through, can do a tremendous amount of good, but the for this to be true, the emphasis must be on the if clearly thought through. In particular, more foreign aid is not always better, at least not for those targeted to benefit from it; for empire-building staffers in aid organizations, the benefits of ever larger sums to play with are not at all in doubt.

Liberals are wont to criticize more tight-fisted types for being "heartless" and "insensitive" to the sufferings of others, but given the way in which most aid is currently being used, it is clear, to me at least, that the greater sin in our day is an excess of "sensitivity" and "compassion", which prevents well-meaning people from holding the distributors of their largesse more to account, and actually demanding a more hard-headed, longer-term accounting of results before agreeing to give more. Any organization that continues returning cap-in-hand, year after year, decade after decade, seeking ever larger sums in aid of the same cause, deserves to be cut off for having failed in the more important mission of attempting to fix the root problem, rather than rewarded for perennial failure with an ever larger budget and an ever higher media profile.

POSTSCRIPT: Here's a link to the actual policy paper on which the Easterly Article that appeared in Foreign Policy was based. Reading through the paper ought to prove an eye-opening experience: contrary to what some might claim, it simply isn't at all "contrary to voluminously documented fact" that "WB projects have a poor record of achieving their project goals." Easterly is a long-time World Bank employee, and as such he's in as good a position as anyone to know the truth about the World Bank's success rate, yet here he is presenting us with detailed evidence, from the World Bank's very own records, that, all spin aside, the successes of that organization have been rare indeed.

It would be nice if alleviating suffering in the developing world were simply a matter of dumping ever larger sums of money into the laps of those who rule them, as that is easy enough to do, provided the necessary political will exists. Unfortunately things aren't that easy - as far as anyone who's looked hard at all the cross-country data can make out, there aren't any cash substitutes for stable government, a functioning judiciary, an honest and tightly-circumscribed bureaucracy, and economic policies that reward entrepreneurial success rather than punish it. All of these things are what make the difference between wealth and poverty, but they're a hell of a lot harder to get right than simply doling out cash.

A Master Salesman of Ideas Which Look Sensible but Aren't

Daniel Davies (aka Dsquared) has a remarkable gift for wrapping terrible ideas up in fetching garb, and it is hard to find a more striking example of this gift on display than in this Crooked Timber post rubbishing World Bank President James Wolfensohn's push for "rights-based lending", i.e, rewarding good government instead of corruption and ineptitude in the lending process.

“Rights Based Lending” is what used to be called “Politicisation of the Aid Process”, but with the cuddly face of a modern humanitiarian intervention. The idea is superficially plausible; that the World Bank should only lend to countries with a good human rights record (or in its stronger form, only to actual democracies). It’s an idea which has a certain amount of support, usually from dissidents in middle-income countries and it appears to be gaining some traction on the soft left in the developed world.

As the title above implies, it’s an idea which looks sensible but isn’t. “Don’t lend to tyrants” is a good slogan, but that fact is that tyrants are the government of a very large proportion of the poorest people in the world. If anyone is seriously advocating rights-based lending, then they have to look through this list and tell us with hand on heart that they think the world would be a better place without some or all of these projects.

In a masterful use of the appeal to emotion, Davies then proceeds to give a laundry list of projects with titles guaranteed to tug at the humanitarian heartstrings of his readers. Nowhere in his writeup do we see any questioning of the notion that just because a project claims as its goal "tuberculosis control in China" or "earthquake-proof houses for the poor" in Algeria, it necessarily means that the money will get used for any such purpose, or that even if it is, the unforeseen negative side-effects of the project won't end up outweighing any good done by it. For Dsquared, one can simply take it for granted that any money lent with good intentions will be used honorably and to good effect. What makes this all the more unfathomable is that he's more than willing to acknowledge that there are severe difficulties in trying to ensure that aid money is responsibly used once disbursed:

The reason that Wolfensohn’s suggestion of a rights-based approach to lending has been opposed by “countries as diverse as the UK and Chile” every time he has mentioned it in the past is that it is a bad idea. In principle, one might be able to design an approach which carried some element of rewards for reforms without making people suffer (although the IMF would be the more obvious vehicle for this, as it makes policy loans to governments rather than project loans). But such an approach would require very careful design of a specific proposal, coupled with the very best possible political will in the world to make it work as a force for human rights rather than an instrument of the foreign policy of the largest World Bank board members. Such a proposal and such political goodwill is entirely lacking at present.

Are we then to proceed on the assumption that such World Bank lending as does presently occur does so without any regard for "the foreign policy of the largest World Bank board members?" This is clearly an absurdly false claim, and we already are living in a state of sin. It is a pipe dream to expect nations with leaders accountable to electorates to lend billions at sub-market rates to other countries, without expecting anything on behalf of their voters in return. Attacking performance-based lending on the basis of a spurious "politicization" is nothing more than a red herring.

The reality of the World Bank's lending, as attested well enough by William Easterly's The Elusive Quest for Growth, is that not only has World Bank lending been underwhelming in its effects on the performance of its recipients, but that the perverse terms under which the World Bank has lent money to poor countries have served to encourage the very unaccountability and tyranny that Davies gives a rhetorical shrug of the shoulders to as simply being one of the givens of life. Nothing is more fungible than raw cash, and when World Bank loans are given to dictators and kleptocrats, they simply free up other funds for looting and for building up the Eternal Leader's state apparatus of terror. Indeed, implicit in Davies' own argument is the idea that rotten Third World governments cannot be counted upon to look after "tuberculosis control", "slum upgrading" and "polio eradication" on their own initiative and without the carrot of aid to prod them into doing so; if Davies believed otherwise, he wouldn't be opposed to rights-based lending. But then the question arises - if you lend General Akasombo $200 million for literacy projects and fail to penalize him for spending it all on marble palaces and whores flown in from Paris, why do you expect that he'll do any better when he comes around asking for the next tranche of $200 million?

William Easterly has done a far more thorough job in his book of outlining the various ways in which institutional lending by the likes of the World Bank have rewarded failure than I could ever do in the space of a single blog entry. I'll make do with saying that the interests of rulers and the ruled aren't always necessarily aligned, and that this is particularly the case when the rulers are tyrants and cliques of thieving oligarchs, and to expect such elites to use foreign loans and aid to pursue policies like mass education and commercial prosperity that might serve to weaken their hold on power is a sign of either extreme stupidity or optimism of a religious quality. If foreign loans were as effective in alleviating suffering as Daniel Davies makes them out to be, Tanzania, Ghana and Nigeria ought to be veritable paradises by now, but nothing of the sort is true. On the contrary, when we look at the histories of these countries, we see that what foreign loans have made possible is the imposition of even more suffering on those who were intended to benefit from them. Foreign loans financed hare-brained economic and social schemes that would have collapsed far earlier, and with much less ruinous consequences, without the borrowed cash to keep them propped up, and when the "visionaries" who launched these crazy schemes were gone from office, it was their impoverished, illiterate masses who had to bear the burden of servicing all those debts that had been accumulated buying Mercedes Benzes and apartments in London's Knightsbridge and Kensington suburbs.

If Daniel Davies had devoted his talents to pleading for the abolition of all subsidized foreign lending, not only would he proffered a far more effective solution to the problem of "politicization" about which he claims to be so concerned, but he also would be advocating on behalf of a policy proposal that stands a chance of doing far more real good for the suffering poor than the status quo, which despite its beneficial effect in salving the consciences of rich Westerners, actually serves to help keep millions of people in misery, in so far as it gives us a situation where perpetual spendthrifts and paupers like Tanzania get far more aid over the decades than more responsible ones like Taiwan. In a commercial situation, a bank manager who gave bigger and more generous loans to the customers who were known defaulters would soon be out of a job, but we are somehow supposed to believe that the normal rules of incentivization are magically suspended once we turn to government-to-government lending. I say abolish the World Bank and be done with it.

New York Times - A New Way to Combat Online Piracy

The method outlined in this article is guaranteed to fail, and the countermeasures required would be trivial to implement. In fact, I believe that most file-sharing systems have already implemented the solution I have in mind - file hashing.

DOWNLOADING music, movies or software illegally might become less appealing if every third song or film scene was suddenly interrupted by white noise or worse, announcements urging "next time, pay for what you take!"

This "gotcha" technique - circulating flawed or reproving digital copies of songs on the Internet - has been tried in some form by a few pop stars hoping to thwart online music piracy. Two weeks ago, a University of Tulsa professor and a former graduate student of his won a patent for software that analyzes and monitors illegal music swapping on file-sharing networks, and then systematically inserts decoy files into the mix.

Prof. John Hale and Gavin Manes invented a system with decoys that appear real but contain either poor-quality recordings, buzzing or advertisements. The friendliest decoy might hold samples of songs for sale, while the most irritating could cause extremely long download times.

The inventors intend them to frustrate people who infringe copyrights when they take artistic content free from peer-to-peer networks, like the music Web site Kazaa. No longer will they get free-and-clear copies of individual songs or CD's. Instead, they will get corrupted songs filled with random noise and interruptions.

I'm surprised that a computer science professor and a PhD in the subject should be pushing such a worthless scheme; how is their method going to deal with the fact that MD5 and SHA-1 hashes of files are integrated into the file-sharing mechanisms that are most popular? The odds of obtaining a collision (i.e., getting two files to hash to the same value) are only 1 in 2⁶⁴ with MD5, and 1 in 2⁸⁰ with SHA-1, and the alteration of a single bit in a file would be enough to ensure that its hash value would be very different from an unaltered file. Consequently, all it would take to get around this antipiracy measure would be some means of disseminating information as to which hash values are those of reliable files, and which ones aren't; the thing is that there are a multitude of ways in which such things can (and already are) being done, whether through email, through online warez sites, or through IRC channels. The patent of Dr. Hale and Dr. Manes is of essentially zero value - though I wouldn't mind them making a few bucks off the ignorance, greed and fear of the big record companies.

POSTSCRIPT: After a little investigation, I've learnt that Kazaa, which is by far the most popular file-sharing system, only bothers to hash the first 300KB or so of any file, making it trivial to corrupt files that are longer than this without anyone catching on. As a result of the Kazaa programmers' boneheadedness, this antipiracy patent isn't quite as worthless as I thought it would be. Nevertheless, any utility it has will only be fleeting, and the more effective the technique turns out to be, the shorter the period in which it will enjoy success: all the more recent file-sharing networks, like eDonkey and Shareaza, carry out full file hashes, and frustration with Kazaa will only drive its users into the arms of these newer alternatives.

POSTSCRIPT 2: Something else just occurred to me - in this age of broadband connections, what is to stop determined Kazaa users from initiating 5 or 10 simultaneous downloads of different versions of the same file at once? What with the typical music file being between 3-5 MB in length, this wouldn't take very long, and as long as even 1 of the lot was the correct item, the goal would be accomplished, and the rest could then safely be deleted. I think the music companies will find that the technique outlined in this patent will prove a lot more expensive to successfully implement than they might have imagined.