"A tin of diced carrots was worth practically nothing"

If you have a coffee break today, why not spend it reading this wonderful piece. RA Radford was an economics don who ended up in a POW camp toward the back end of the second world war, and wrote this article in Economica describing the experience from the economic point of view. If you’ve already read it then congratulations; you clearly went to the right kind of university. Otherwise, it’s a treat.

While chasing up the Radford reference, I happened across this blog btw. I happen to know a couple of things about Chavez-era Venezuela, and this news source, pretty uniquely, checks out as honest on all the areas where I was able to check. The author is a bit less charitable toward Chavez than I am inclined to be (so hate me, I’m inclined to cut totalitarian socialist regimes a bit more slack when they’re faced with massive externally-funded subversion), but he gets the big picture right; Chavez, like modern Castro, is a narcissist and a very poor poster-child for Socialism indeed, but his opposition is woefully lacking in any positive policy prescriptions other than handing everything over to foreign vested interests. Rather a long coffee break if you decide to read both of these, I admit.

I'm pretty sure that this isn't what Jesus would do

According to the blog Non Prophet, James Dobson’s socially conservative activist group, Focus on the Family, has included Michael Moore’s home address in their daily email to supporters.

What legitimate purpose could this possibly serve? What have Moore’s neighbors, wife and daughter done to merit the danger that FOTF have foolishly put them in? Simply disgusting.

Jacob speak, you listen

Jacob Levy is doing an admirable job (here, too) of trying to answer the question: Did the Administration veto plans to attack the terrorist Zarqawi, or his base in Kurdish-controlled northern Iraq, prior to the beginning of Gulf War II, because the presence of a genuine terrorist in Iraq was too useful for their case to give up?

It seemed too dark to believe at the time. If there’s any reason not to believe it, I’m sure that Levy will get to it. So far, he hasn’t.

New book on Social Inequality

Shameless plug: there is a new book out on Social Inequality edited by Kathryn Neckerman and published by the Russell Sage Foundation. The volume brings together recent research from the various social sciences on the topic of social stratification. I am often frustrated by how common it is for researchers to ignore papers by others on topics relevant to their work simply - or so it seems - because the researchers are in other fields. One nice aspect of this volume is that it features research by sociologists, political scientists, economists and demographers alike. The shameless plug has to do with the fact that I co-authored (with Paul DiMaggio, Coral Celeste and Steven Shafer) one of the chapters called “Digital Inequality: From Unequal Access to Differentiated Use”.

Science and the Arts

From Mike “M. John.” Harrison:

The difference between Berkeleyism and superstrings is that the latter will eventually test out or be chucked on the rubbish heap of ideas that looked good but weren’t good. The project of science differentiates itself from the projects of philosophy or religion, or even politics, precisely by the size of its rubbish heap.

Discuss.

Like living with a six-year-old

PETER: I, uh, I don’t like my job. I don’t think I’m gonna go anymore.
JOANNA: You’re just not gonna go?

PETER: Yeah.

JOANNA: Won’t you get fired?

PETER: I don’t know. But I really don’t like it so I’m not gonna go…

JOANNA: So what are you going to do about money and bills?

PETER: Y’know, I never really liked paying bills? I don’t think I’ll do that either.

Source: Republican Party Platform

How much room for compromise is there with the legions who lose their minds when they hear this:

“Many of you are well enough off that … the tax cuts may have helped you,” Sen. Clinton said. “We’re saying that for America to get back on track, we’re probably going to cut that short and not give it to you. We’re going to take things away from you on behalf of the common good.”

For this, she’s called a Marxist. Excuse me, but isn’t “taking things away from you on behalf of the common good” an unflowery but straightforward description of taxation? I don’t see why this description should be remotely controversial. I don’t like paying taxes either, but what, exactly, is the other option? Is anarcho-libertarianism on the ballot?

Unfondly Fahrenheit

I saw Fahrenheit 9/11 last night, and like Kevin Drum, wasn’t greatly impressed. Not because it was one-sided or took cheap shots - in fact the cheap shots were pretty good (at least the funny ones were). The problem was that the movie’s underlying premises were completely incoherent and padded out with some pretty weak speculation. There were several conspiracy theories jostling for room - Bush as tool of American big business, Bush as catspaw of Saudi oil interests, Bush as lackey of the security establishment, Bush as cigarette industry flunkey, Bush as dimwitted doofus, and so on. While they weren’t incompatible, precisely, there wasn’t much of an effort to draw them together, or, in most cases to provide real evidence to back them up. The footage, all in all, was vastly more entertaining (and sometimes enlightening) than Michael Moore’s commentary on it.

There’s a real story to be told about how Bush took a country to war on mostly bogus premisses; while bits of that story did come out here and there in the movie, they didn’t properly connect, because the whole was so shoddily put together. As Kevin says, Fahrenheit 9/11 uses innuendo to connect Bush and the Saudis in just the same way that Bush himself used innuendo to connect Iraq and al Qaeda. It reminded me still more of Glenn Reynolds’ blogging - the same weird blend of weakly sourced conspiracy theories and gross political prejudices. I still reckon that the lead-up to the Iraq war deserves a good, savage, biting, funny documentary - but it should be made by someone who’s more honest and intelligent than Michael Moore.

Chucking your grass-cuttings over the fence

Daniel Drezner is busy having his head turned by a book called “The Power of Productivity”, written by someone who used to run the McKinsey Global Institute. I have a number of horses in this race in the form of personal prejudices:

1. “Productivity” is almost always used in economic rhetoric in contexts in which it is, quite strictly, meaningless.
2. The McKinsey organisation has a record as lang’s yer arm when it comes to taking uses of the word productivity from one context (specifically, the context of flogging management consultancy services) and trying to apply them in another (specifically, the making of windy public policy pronouncements).
3. The belief that the collection of lots of anecdotes from individual industries creates a “pointillist picture” which is a substitute for general equilibrium analysis is one which has been the source of large amounts of avoidable error in the past.

And a quick glance at Drezner’s review reveals that this book looks like a fine example of the genre (for example, it appears to be pushing the line that “services” generate “much less pollution than manufacturing”, in which context I note that waste management, airlines, and road freight are all services).

But for the time being, I’m only interested in one particular point on the picture which has been bugging me for a while; the idolatry of Walmart.

In Order to Destroy the Village, We had to Sue it

Eugene Volokh gravely considers the danger that a number of people designated by the government as enemy combatants — or rather, a number of Al Qaeda agents, or rather, 50,000 alleged enemy soliders of some foreign power — might avail of Rasul v Bush and file an avalanche of habeas corpus writs claiming they aren’t really enemy soldiers.¹ Thus, he fears, one of the fundamental tenets of the rule of law, affirmed this week by the Supreme Court, becomes a deadly weapon in the hands of our litigious enemies. I see a mini-series, Stalag Law, set in the not-too-distant future. In a nation suffocated by habeas writs inappropriately filed by malicious captured soldiers from their hotel-like detention centers, a tiny remnant of the 82nd Airborne Paralegal Division fights to clear the appalling backlog of cases …

Brad DeLong and (more appropriately) the Medium Lobster have already given this the treatment it deserves. I just want to add that this is the same Eugene Volokh who declared himself unwilling to discuss the topic of actual lawyers employed by an actual government of the United States searching for a legal rationalization for actual torture that members of that administration actually authorized. Look, like I said, blog about whatever you want. But here’s a hypo for you: Let’s say that you’re a respected legal scholar with strong interests in the protection of individual freedoms from the dead hand of the state. And let’s say that your government is found to have tortured people. And let’s say that its lawyers produce threadbare rationalizations saying that’s no big deal. And let’s say that in response you avoid the topic because it’s disgusting and because “if I had a choice in how to invest my scarce time, I’d rather not invest it here.” And let’s say that, instead, you choose to focus on the possibility that a captured foreign army might sue its way to victory within the U.S. courts. What conclusions might your readers draw given such (admittedly far-fetched) circumstances?

¹ “Your honor, I swear, I have no idea why all 50,000 of us are dressed in similar uniforms.”

Dear Ralph

Please get out of the presidential race.

Visit the site to support one of Nader’s causes if he leaves the race. If he doesn’t, the contributions will be diverted to organizations working directly to defeat Bush (you choose from five options).

On Sovereignty

This question comes via Rob Schaap and a letter to the Guardian, but it’s an issue on which I have a sorta-kinda claim to first publication.

The issue is this; does the current “sovereign” Iraqi government have sufficient sovereignty to enter into financial contracts which would be considered binding on future Iraqi governments? In particular, does it have the power to sell state assets, to allocate telecommunications licenses and to incur debts? And if it does, then given that it is not a democratically elected government, but one appointed by two countries (the US and the UK) with substantial economic interests in Iraq, is this not something of a scandal? I’d be very grateful if any readers who know more about Iraq than me could shed some light on this one.

Heimat soon out on DVD

Good news. I posted a few weeks ago about the availability of Edgar Reitz’s Heimat on DVD and I’ve just found out that Tartan will be releasing it in the UK in August (Region 2 only, though). As some CT readers may have noticed, I’ve been watching rather a lot of German films recently. I’m getting somewhat depressed, though, by the fact that, though German cinema had a golden age in the 1970s and 80s, the last twenty years have seen a sharp decline in quality. Some directors are dead, of course, and others have taken to producing films in English for Hollywood. My local rental shop, which has a very extensive range , has shelves and shelves of French, Italian and Japanese films on DVD but I’ve more or less watched my way through their German holdings. They have some more in store, but mainly on fading VHS tape since there has been no DVD release (at least in Europe). I’d like to think that this is just my perception and that there’s a treasure trove of recent German cinema that I’ve not discovered yet.

Line of the week

The line of the week comes from Scott McLemee; I’ve put it beneath the fold to avoid trampling on the sensibilities of especially delicate CT readers.

Turkey and the European Union

Jacques Chirac lambasted George W. Bush today for suggesting that Turkey should become a member of the European Union. It’s no secret that the French government would prefer, all things considered, that Turkey not become a member of the European Union, or that a fair swathe of political opinion in other powerful EU member states (such as Germany) is at best luke-warm towards the prospect. Nonetheless, if I were a betting man, I’d lay strong odds on Turkey getting the official nod as a candidate for EU membership before Christmas, and becoming a full member seven or eight years after that.

In theory, any one member state can block Turkey’s membership - new entrants to the EU require unanimous consent from all existing members. In practice, even member states that are hostile to Turkey’s candidacy, such as France, have enormous difficulty in articulating their hostility in public. And for good reason - their objections to Turkey are rooted in some pretty offensive notions about what ‘Europe’ should be (Christian, white). Whenever anyone tries to voice these opinions, they’re liable to get blasted from all sides. The result is that the opponents of Turkey’s candidacy find it difficult to justify their stance in public - therefore, they’re liable to find themselves being herded into giving their tacit assent to a decision that they would ideally prefer to oppose.

It’s an interesting case-study for international relations theory. As Frank Schimmelfennig observed in his case study of the EU’s earlier enlargement into Central and Eastern Europe, this sort of phenomenon demonstrates the limits of realist theory. Powerful states such as France may find it difficult, or even impossible, to act upon their preferences if they can’t justify their actions with reference to prevailing community norms. It could also have quite profound consequences for international politics. The prospect of EU membership has already demonstrably pushed Turkey into greater respect for civil rights, and a weakened political role for the military. Expect this to continue, and indeed accelerate if Turkey becomes a full member of the EU, just as it did in Spain, Portugal and Greece. And as John Quiggin said a few months back, a prosperous, stable, fully democratic Turkey within the EU could do wonders for the prospects of democracy in other countries in the same region.

Rawlsian humility

Matthew Yglesias on John Rawls :

A Theory of Justice is a brilliant work in many ways, but it’s also — quite obviously — wrong in a number of ways and employs a variety of arguments that are pretty dubious. Any undergraduate can see this, and dozens — if not hundreds — do so every semester. Now it seems to me that a slightly more scrupulous philosopher might have looked at the manuscript and said to himself, “this is a very interesting argument I’m putting together here, but it doesn’t quite work. Better keep on revising.” But instead Rawls put his thought-provoking work out there in the press, attracting decades worth of criticisms, counter-criticisms, suggestions for improvement, and so forth, thus becoming the major figure in postwar political philosophy.

Someone who all accounts agree was a deeply serious, thinker who cared most of all about getting it right (“scrupulous”), is thus dismissed by a blogger as a careless promoter of his own reputation. Contrast John Rawls on reading the history of philosophy:

I always too for granted that the writers we were studying were much smarter than I was. If they were not, why was I wasting my time and the students’ time by studying them? If I saw a mistake in their arguments, I supposed those writers saw it too and must have dealt with it. But where? I looked for their way out, not mine. Sometimes their way out was historical: in their day the question need not be raised, or wouldn’t arise and so couldn’t then be fruitfully discussed. Or there was a part of the text I had overlooked, or had not read. I assumed there were never plain mistakes, not ones that mattered anyway. (Lectures on the History of Philosophy , p. xvi)

Since my own copy of the first edition of A Theory of Justice is peppered with silly undergraduate marginal sneers, I shouldn’t be too hard on Yglesias. What of Brad DeLong, though, who responds approvingly to Yglesias’s comments by suggesting that David Hume’s Of the Original Contract constitutes an avant la lettre refutation of Rawls? DeLong reveals nothing but his own catastropic misunderstanding (as a number of his commenters point out).

Then Again, He Was Endorsed By The International Iron Worker's Union

Once again, we must turn to Fafblog for thoughtful political analysis. Giblets considers the various Democratic vice-presidential contenders:

Dick Gephardt. Gephardt would have an amazing pull with loser voters, voters who like losing the House to opposing parties, voters who have a long history of being supported by decrepit and dying labor institutions in failing political campaigns, just people who generally like to lose. He could swing loser states, such as Wyoming or Rhode Island, or put states with a large loser population, such as Nevada or Alabama, into play. The upside to having a Kerry-Gephardt ticket is it would take all those people who go into shock in the voting booth thinkin’ “Oh dear god we nominated Kerry?!” and push them just far enough over the edge with “Oh dear god we nominated Kerry and Gephardt?!” that it would sort of jar them into a feeling of complacent somnambulism that would render them susceptible to voting for Kerry-Gephardt anyway. The downside to this is that such a hypthetical waking sleepstate could also get them to vote for Nader.

This is so, so very true. I’m afraid we must all bow down before the superior nous of Giblets. Gephardt? Gephardt??!! Please, God, don’t let the Democratic party snatch certain defeat from the jaws of potential victory by choosing Dick Gephardt as the VP candidate. Pleasepleaseplease. Anybody but Gephardt. If the DP makes me cast a vote for a Kerry/Gephardt ticket I’m going to…well, crap, just put out like a straight-ticket ho. They could put a can of processed cheese food on the ballot against Bush, and I would vote for it. But I’m not going to enjoy it! And no ticket with Gephardt on it is going to win, ever in a million years! How can this blindingly obvious fact be so clear to Giblets yet obscure to Kerry? Maybe they are just toying with us. Maybe. Then when they pick Vilsack, instead of saying, “who the hell?” we will all just be so grateful they didn’t pick Gephardt that we’ll get all fired up, like, “Hey, that Vilsack, he sure does…have a lot of consonants in his name! Frickin’ awesome!”

Maybe Our Fat Chum Chet Could Help!

Courtesy of the now non-blogging (but suspiciously time-wasting-on-the-interweb) Chun the Unavoidable, I present you with the Mayday Mystery. These are a series of mysterious ads which have been running in an Arizona paper since May 1, 1985. It seems to be an erudite, mathematico-historical puzzle of some kind, containing specific Tuscon-area clues (?), but what is the point? Is there a prize? Some of the ads are rebus-like, while others tend to the Dr. Bronner’s label All-One-God-Faith style. Sample text from the May 1, 2004 edition:

1) “Quaerendo invenietis” [1747]}}!!+}The 473rd Anniversary of the Confessio Augustana will again be celebrated in the Riemann Room of the 5)Hotel Californias (non uni fidit antro) where the Founders will be entertained by an in situ demonstration of 17) l’art d’accommoder les restes. The Pigs will be less entertained by le dénoument—and the Hirelings least of all. 29) Alberich has programmed The Symmetry Generator as per I Corinthians 1:28 to serve as the propaedeutic for Ireton’s penetration of [$\omega_{p,n}= i log ˜p^n$] on Trinity Sunday.

Perhaps the brainy CT readership will figure everything out? If there’s lots of money involved, the solver of the puzzle is respectfully encouraged to pass some along to your humble author. Perhaps I will use it to take a vacation in Thailand. I hear Koh Phi Phi is very nice this time of year.

UPDATE: Adam Kotsko has put out a call for posts for a Chun the Unavoidable Festschrift. Suggested topics include: Halitosis in Literature, Cunnilinguis and the Discursive Performance of Class, Richard Clarke, and The blogospheric reception of the verb “to chun.” You know what to do, people.

Kvetching Retrospectively about Analytical Philosophy

Following Chris’s post about topics in philosophy that provoke worries about angels and pinheads, I was going to pitch in with a comment setting out my own pet hates, but realised I was veering off-topic when I began to whine not about the problems themselves but about the values of the discipline itself.