And then there were six

Germany, Spain, Italy, England, all gone. And now France! This is getting interesting.

Root causes of terrorism

Do you agree with the proposition that people join terrorist organizations because there’s no hope? Do you disagree? Discuss, with reference to recent developments in current affairs. (Hat tip to Chris).

Making History

Via Bookslut, this account of an interesting dust-up at Foreign Affairs , the influential foreign policy journal run by the Council of Foreign Relations. Kenneth R. Maxwell, who was the journal’s book review editor resigned last month, claiming that the magazine had bowed to pressure from Henry Kissinger, and shut down a debate on its letters page about America’s role in the assassination of former Chilean foreign minister, Orlando Letelier and his wife in Washington DC by “Operation Condor.” Jeremy Adelman, who succeeded Maxwell, has just resigned too after only three weeks in the job. The editor of Foreign Affairs, James Hoge, has admitted receiving at least one phone-call from the head of the Council of Foreign Relations conveying Mr. Kissinger’s displeasure; if Maxwell is to be believed, Hoge also received repeated phone calls from Henry Kissinger. However, Hoge has denied that this had anything to do with his editorial decision to cut short debate.

Henry Kissinger’s historical legacy is very slightly more complicated than it might seem at first glance. Critics like Christopher Hitchens fail to acknowledge his very real contribution to the understanding of international relations - some of his early academic writings (“A World Restored,” “The Troubled Partnership”) are first rate. Nonetheless, his political career seems to have combined a particularly unpleasant variety of Realpolitik with a gruesome eagerness to condone lies, murder, torture and other human rights violations. The greater part of his subsequent writing can be seen as a sustained effort to whitewash the record. Kissinger’s memoirs are mendacious and untrustworthy, even by the usual standards of statesmen’s self-justifications. Like Winston Churchill, he intends to ensure that history is kind to him by writing it. Given Kissinger’s track record, I’m not at all surprised that he seems to have used his clout to try to shut down debate about one of the nastiest aspects of his record as Secretary of State. I am surprised, and disappointed, that Foreign Affairs seems very possibly to have knuckled under.

Bush and Europe

George W. Bush gave an interview to Irish television’s Prime Time that’s worth watching (the interview starts about 15 minutes into the clip). It’s the first time that I’ve seen him subjected to a hostile (if not extraordinarily competent) interviewer, and he clearly didn’t like it - in particular, he got very tetchy whenever he was interrupted. In the course of the interview Bush claims that he had most of Europe’s backing for the war in Iraq.

Most of Europe supported the decision in Iraq: really what you’re talking about is France isn’t it. They didn’t agree with my decision. … Most European countries are very supportive and are participating in the reconstruction of Iraq.

This is misleading in a way in which John Kerry’s much-ballyhooed statement that many foreign leaders preferred him as a potential president to Bush is not. Kerry was undoubtedly correct, even if he wasn’t able to provide public evidence to back up his claim. Everybody knows that most Western European countries (perhaps even including Britain) would prefer a Kerry administration to another round of Bush. Bush, in contrast, does apparently have evidence to back him up - he could point to the various resolutions signed by Western and Eastern European countries on Iraq. However, these statements are for the most part, rhetoric. Most of the Eastern European countries that signed on were less interested in resolving problems in the Middle East than in avoiding punishment by the hegemon, and reaping the political and financial rewards of a friendly relationship with the US. Remarkably few of the so-called “coalition of the willing” were prepared to put their money where their mouth was, by committing substantial numbers of troops to Iraq.

If Bush sincerely believes that the difficult transatlantic relationship is all about France’s posturing, he’s in trouble. Even those governments which nominally signed on last time would have extreme difficulty in doing so again - their voters wouldn’t stand for it. Bush is electoral poison; Irish prime minister, Bertie Ahern will not have been pleased at Bush’s expression of gratitude to him for his help on Iraq. It’s almost certainly a vote-loser. The conventional wisdom among foreign policy wonks is that European leaders will not get much more satisfaction from a Kerry administration than they would from a second round of Bush. I don’t think this is true. Bush has managed to create such distrust among the voting public in Europe that it’s going to be politically impossible for European leaders to sign onto any major new transatlantic foreign policy initiative. Given the important threats (such as proliferation of nuclear weapons) that require decisive multilateral action, this is a very dangerous development indeed.

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The world's oldest mountain guide

The world’s oldest mountain guide, Ulrich Inderbinen, has died at the age of 103, having climbed the Matterhorn more than 370 times (making his final ascent at the age of 90). The Economist has the story . I’m sure what they write of him is true, but anyone who has read the beginning of Ernest Gellner’s best book — Thought and Change — will feel slightly suspicious. Gellner illustrates the idea of a society living against “an unchanging temporal horizon”, where everything stays the same “like a train crossing a featureless landscape” with the story of the Taugwalders, survivors of the first ascent in 1865.

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England crash out

Brian Weatherson watched the England—Croatia game with us the other night, so he can attest to the general level of invective directed towards the television at Chateau Bertram. But, whilst I didn’t watch last night’s proceedings with detachment, I can say that one event followed another with the depressing inevitability all long-term England watchers expect. The early goal (Michael Owen, 6/1 at bluesquare.com — thanks very much!) reminiscent of Germany-England 1996 followed by the Portuguese equalizer just before the 90 minutes. Then the disallowed goal (an exact re-run of England-Argentina 1998), all ending, finally, with the penalty-shoot-out (too many precendents to bother listing here). At least we can enjoy the rest of the tournament free of “Rooneymania” and most of the St George’s crosses will disappear from assorted motor vehicles. Come on the Czech Republic!

What’s the Irish for boondoggle?

It’s not every day that Fine Gael, the Progressive Democrats and Sinn Fein agree on something. But they all say Irish should be an official language of the EU, and complain that the government (which the PDs are part of) hasn’t done enough to make this happen during the Irish presidency. Our presidency of the EU is at best a partial success because we haven’t managed to force the EU to spend an extra 50 million euro a year to translate speeches and documents into a language that no one actually needs them in. It’s the principle, you see.

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Down to Gehenna

I can remember discovering, with something of a shock, that Armageddon was a real place (modern Megiddo). So, I shouldn't have been too surprised to find out today that Gehenna is the name of a valley near Jerusalem, bearing no obvious marks of being on the road to eternal damnation. I also got to see Golgotha and Mount Zion - I don't think my reading of Biblical allusions will be quite the same after this.

Top "British" Public Intellectuals

Prospect Magazine are running a poll to find the top 5 “British” public intellectuals. You can see the whole list here and can vote by email to intellectuals@prospect-magazine.co.uk . I say “British” rather than British because the blurb reads: “Candidates do not need to live here or be British citizens, but they should make their most significant impact here.” So Seamus Heaney, Amartya Sen and Michael Ignatieff end up being “British”. There are some pretty dodgy characters on the list, various low rent talking heads, a Daily Mail columnist, and several people whose public ravings are at the outer limits of sanity (these aren’t meant to be exclusive categories). I’ll avoid mentioning names for fear of a libel suit. I thought about voting for Quentin Skinner as the only person on the list ever to have left a comment on Crooked Timber, and Richard Dawkins irritates me too often. In the end, my choice from their top 100, in no particular order is:

Onora O’Neill (I had to pick a philosopher and the other philosophical options are terrible and she’s done some good stuff over the years. Her Reith lectures are one of the most forthright recent attempts to drive back the “audit culture” that is wrecking Britain’s public services.)

Amartya Sen (his work on democracy and famines alone should get him near the top of any such list.)

Seamus Heaney (the only poet on the list.)

V.S. Naipaul (the only great novelist in their selection.)

W.G. Runciman (manages to be a shipping magnate and a social theorist at the same time.)

Sen and Runciman were also, aeons ago, co-authors of a paper on Rousseau, the general will and the prisoner’s dilemma, all topics close to my heart.

Salty language

More on transatlantic variations of the English language. I’m reading my way through Patrick O’Brian’s Aubrey and Maturin series at the moment, and was intrigued to discover that a “scuttle butt” is some class of a naval water barrel. I presume that this means that the historical origins of the term “scuttlebutt” (rumours, especially of the vexatious variety) are closely analogous with those of the contemporary American term, “water cooler gossip.”

Divided by a common language

Commenter ‘giles’ says:

The most interesting revelation of the night - that Bill thought kerry would make “quite” a good president - was I thought the revelation of the night. The parochial BBC pr department seems to have missed it entirely.

The BBC was probably right not to pick up on it, thanks to a very important difference between British English and American English. “Quite” in British-English, and indeed in its Hibernian variant (which is of course the purest and most supple form of the language) means “reasonably, but not very.” Thus, if Bill Clinton were British, his comment would be an unsubtle put-down. However, in American English, “quite” means “very” or “extremely” - so it’s a considerable compliment. One of my friends experienced this ambiguity at first hand a few years ago, when she invited her (American) boyfriend back to Dublin to meet the family. After eating dinner at my friend’s family home, the boyfriend remarked that the food was “quite good.” He thought he was passing a compliment; my friend’s mother thought he was a snotty Yank making disparaging remarks about her cooking, with predictably unfortunate consequences for familial relationships until it was all explained. So, the odds are that Clinton’s comment was entirely unexceptionable. You could probably still advance a malign interpretation: since Clinton has spent a considerable amount of time in the UK, he might have been aware of this ambiguity, and playing it cute by speaking out of both sides of his mouth at once. Still, an interpretation of this sort would seem a bit forced for what was, after all, one brief comment in a rather long interview.

Update: I’d quite forgotten that Chris has already addressed this point in a post last December.

Cass Sunstein at Volokh

Distinguished legal scholar Cass Sunstein is guest-blogging over at the Volokh Conspiracy (and starts with some useful reflections on the legacy of FDR). What a coup for the Volokhs and what an improvement in the class of their guest-bloggers!

Fun with IT. Fun with IT?

Chicagoland has a lot to offer especially during the summer. Lucky for those not in the area, you can catch some of these without being there. From art made of searches to interesting book signings, the Windy City will keep you busy.

Last Fall, I visited Kris Hammond’s Intelligent Information Laboratory at Northwestern and saw some really neat projects. Luckily, on occasion, these projects are shown in a more public forum as well. Such is the case of graduate student David Ayman Shamma’s Information Environment. While watching a TV broadcast, the viewer sees images that come up as a result of image searches both online and in a picture data base on words mentioned in the broadcast. It can be viewed at Piper’s Alley in Chicago or here.

Another IT-related event tomorrow, Thursday, will be Siva Vaidhyanathan’s book signing of Anarchist in the Library. It looks like Basic Books is putting out some interesting material this year (they published Paul Starr’s The Creation of the Media as well). Siva will be at Old Orchard mall tomorrow at 7:30pm.

Ideas made flesh

I’m a great admirer of Karma Nabulsi’s book Traditions of War . But her piece in the Guardian today is an exercise in wishfully projecting ideals onto real-world people without any critical examination of their claim either to represent those ideals or their chances of realizing them. She makes one point which seems right, namely, that sovereignty rests with the Iraqi people rather than with whoever happens to be exercising de facto authority at any time. But she then makes the astonishing leap to claim that the bearers of popular sovereignty in Palestine and in Iraq are the armed resistance groups there.

The young men who defended Jenin refugee camp in the West Bank and Rafah refugee camp in Gaza, and who recently won back the Iraqi cities of Falluja and Najaf from the occupying power, are not the terrorists - or the enemies of democracy. They are our own past torchbearers, the founding citizens of popular sovereignty and democratic practice, the very tradition that freed Europe and that we honoured on D-day.

Are they? Do they see themselves that way? All of them or some of them? Don’t some of them favour theocracy rather than democracy?

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Big Dog bites Man

You should watch David Dimbleby’s interview with Bill Clinton. After a bunch of Monica questions, Clinton ticks Dimbleby off for being just like every other journalist who were — how to put it? — so obsessed with Lewinsky’s blowjobs that they didn’t realize how they were helping Ken Starr to screw people. (Jump to 28:25 or so in the interview to see this). Dimbo looks a bit shocked:

Clinton: Let me just say this. One of the reasons he [Kenneth Starr] got away with it is because people like you only ask me the questions. You gave him a complete free ride. Any abuse they wanted to do. They indicted all these little people from Arkansas, what did you care about them, they’re not famous, who cares that their life was trampled. Who cares that their children are humiliated … Nobody in your line of work cared a rip about that at the time. Why, because he was helping their story… Now that doesn’t justify any mistake I made. But look how much time you spent asking me these questions, in this time you’ve had. That’s because it’s what you care about, because that’s what you think helps you and helps this interview… And that’s why people like you always help the far-right, because you like to hurt people, and you like to talk about how bad people are and all their personal failings.

Dimbleby: I don’t —

Clinton: Look, you made a decision to allocate your time in a certain way, you should take responsibility for that, you should say ‘Yes, I care much more about this than whether the Bosnian people were saved, and whether he brought a million home from Kosovo … [or] than whether we moved a hundred times as many people out of poverty as Reagan and Bush’.

The BBC’s own write-up write up of the interview quotes some of the best bits, but they try rather too hard to frame it as Bill Goes Ballistic:

Wagging his finger and getting visibly agitated, Mr Clinton expressed anger at the media’s behaviour. … But despite the shaky start, Mr Clinton quickly recovered his composure and was questioned for a further 30 minutes by Mr Dimbleby.

Watch the interview for yourself (starts about 12:00 in) and decide whether Clinton loses his composure, looks shaky or is noticeably agitated. As far as I can see, Clinton hardly raises his voice and does little more than sit up in his chair. It’s also noticeable that he hardly drops a syllable, hems, haws, or mangles a word as he speaks. Say what you like about the guy and his legacy, he knows how to fight his corner. I don’t see the current incumbent being subjected to that kind of persistent questioning in six or seven years — or even right now, come to think of it.

Mosquitos

There’s an interesting article in the New York Times today about Elizabeth Willott’s work on mosquitos and the environmental ethics of wetland restoration. Elizabeth’s in the Entomology department at Arizona. Her other half is the philosopher Dave Schmidtz, and when Arizona were recruiting Laurie and me, we stayed with them. It was the middle of December. The first morning we were there, we picked a grapefruit from one of the trees in their yard and ate it for breakfast. This effective recruitment strategy is not often used by universities on the east coast, for some reason.

It's Amore

As mentioned in an earlier post, Silvio Berlusconi didn’t cover himself in glory during Italy’s Presidency of the European Council. Now, CT can tell you why. Berlusconi spent a big chunk of the Italian presidency reliving his career as a cruise-ship piano-bar singer by co-writing the songs on Mariano Apicella’s recent CD release, Meglio una Canzone. I was in Italy last month, and morbid curiosity drove me to buy a copy - I can now confirm that it’s precisely as dreadful as you might expect. Soft glissandos, cheesy strings, hammy vocals, and inane lyrics (the last are courtesy of Silvio). Popular love songs typically don’t have much in the way of artistic merit, but “Meglio una Canzone” fails to achieve even the usual level of mediocrity. Desperate lovers swooning, happy lovers crooning - all the usual stereotypes in words of three syllables or less.

My copy of the album comes with a special offer form: if you send it in before June 30, Mariano Apicella himself (perhaps with Berlusconi in tow: who knows) may come to perform at your wedding. If there’s any eligible CT reader with impending nuptials in Italy and either (a) a taste for syrupy love-songs, or (b) an unusual sense of humour, I’m happy to pass it on.

Tech Active

There is lots to blog about while in London and Paris, but I am saving most of it for when I’m back in the States. (I really cannot justify sitting at a machine when I could be running around the streets of London and Paris, sorry.) However, this one event will be over by the time I get back to regular blogging so I wanted to post about it.

The Stanhope Centre for Communication Policy Research is sponsoring a panel discussion next Mon (28th) in London on “Tech Active” or the promises, successes and challenges of both using the Internet to change the world and using social policy to change the Internet. Both scholars and activists will engage in this discussion including Cory Doctorow, Gus Hosein, Lisa Nakamura and Bill Thompson. Thanks to Christian Sandvig for organizing the event. I am sure he will have interesting thoughts to add as well. I am sorry to miss it, but my flight leaves London a few hours earlier. The event is free and open to the public so I hope people will take advantage of it!