Discourse.net

SSRN: Legal Studies Research Paper Series University Of Miami School Of Law Vol. 3, No. 7

I'm the 'editor' of this august working paper series, so I think I'll reprint issues here. Some good reading if you are so inclined.

SSRN: Legal Studies Research Paper Series
University Of Miami School Of Law
Vol. 3, No. 7

Table of Contents

Irreconcilable Differences? The Troubled Marriage of Science and Law

Susan Haack, University of Miami - School of Law, University of Miami - Department of Philosophy

A 'Pay or Play' Experiment to Improve Children's Educational Television

Lili Levi, University of Miami - School of Law

Rhetoric and the Regulation of the Global Financial Markets in a Time of Crisis: The Regulation of Credit Ratings

Caroline M. Bradley, University of Miami - School of Law

Toward a True Elements Test: Taylor and the Categorical Analysis of Crimes in Immigration Law

Rebecca A. Sharpless, University of Miami - School of Law

Discovering Identity in Civil Procedure

Anthony Victor Alfieri, University of Miami - School of Law

---

Beer. Pogo Stick. Trampoline. Hospital Visit.

I love these Six Word Stories, many by science fiction writers.

(The story I stole for a title is by LeRoy A Warner Jr., who may or may not be an actor.)

But this one is evil.

The concept is inspired by this Hemingway story,

For sale: baby shoes, never used.

Seth Godin Has Travel Thoughts

Seth's Blog: Random travel thoughts

After inspecting more than twenty million pairs of shoes, have the screeners found even one dangerous pair?

After seven years, why is random yelling still the way that TSA screeners communicate their superstitious rules to people in line? Will this still be true in twenty years?

Why don't we spend some of the time and money we're wasting on security theatre to do things like secure ports or make airport runways safer?

…

It used to be extremely dangerous to give people on planes a metal butter knife and a fork with their meal. Now, it's apparently no longer dangerous. What happened? If this was an overreaction not based on data, should reexamine other possible overreactions?

Watch Editing Happen

Before and after versions of an article; some of the changes I get, others I don't.

Before:

Ann Bartow, Why Hollywood Does Not Require 'Saving' From the Recordkeeping Requirements Imposed by 18 U.S.C. Section 2257 (Feminist Law Profs Blog).

After:

Ann Bartow, Why Hollywood Does Not Require 'Saving' From the Recordkeeping Requirements Imposed by 18 U.S.C. Section 2257, 118 Yale L.J. Pocket Part 43 (2008).

Is this parallel publishing the wave of the future? And which one becomes the canonical version?

Geuss Remembering Rorty

Leiter points us to this affecting and mostly affectionate remembrance of Richard Rorty by Raymond Geuss.

I don't know what it says about me, but I find Geuss's work to be exceptionally clear; it's in a voice that just works for me and its usually about stuff I care about. It sticks. Rorty's voice has always been an effort for me, even when it's about stuff I care about. And then I have to re-read it.

John Scalzi Can Rant

Science fiction writer John Scalzi knows how to write a rant. And what's better, he's on the right side of this one.

See A Gut Check Moment for SFWA for a classic example of the genre. And entertaining comments from a bevy of science fiction luminaries.

Grab the Nearest Book

Eszter does it right. Rather than participate in the electronic equivalent of a chain letter and “tag” five people to spread a dare, she open sources it at Grab the nearest book.

As far as I know, no one has tagged me with this blog meme, but I’m still going to participate as it looks fun.

Instructions:
1. Grab the nearest book (that is at least 123 pages long).
2. Open to p. 123.
3. Go down to the 5th sentence.
4. Type in the following 3 sentences.
5. Tag five people.

Of course it helps that her book is cool.

Nearest book as I sit at my coffee table at home: The Chocolate Connoisseur by Chloé Doutre-Roussel.

…

Since I wasn’t tagged for this meme, I guess I don’t have to tag anyone else either although I invite people to grab the nearest book and post the specified three sentences here or on their own blogs.

Mine is much less cute. The nearest book to hand as I read Eszter's invitation was a collection called Rediscovering Fuller (Willem J. Witteveen and Wibren van der Burg, eds.). It is an impressive set of thoughtful essays by the likes of David Dyzenhaus, Frederick Schauer, David Luban, Joseph Vining and many others. I'm reading it because my Jurisprudence class is heavily influenced by Fuller's work and has several of Fuller's essays among the readings. So far, Rediscovering Fuller is impressively clear, which is never a given in jurisprudence.

Page 123 happens to fall on the concluding page of “Fuller's Faith” by Paul Cliteur. The essay helps flesh out what Fuller was doing in The Morality of Law, characterizing it as a modest but persuasive attempt to deal with the difficulty (impossibility?) of describing a full theory of justice by instead describing what systemic features tend very strongly to injustice. Cliteur paraphrases Fuller as saying, “I do not know exactly what justice is, but I have a clear idea about what it is not. There are some values we have to incorporate in every legal system. If we fail in this respect, justice fails and the system crumbles down.” (p. 115) Some people find this sort of thing to be thin gruel. I find it to be true. (These are not necessarily inconsistent positions.)

The fifth-seventh sentences of page 123 take us within one sentence of the end, so I've included a bonus sentence too. But I have to say that because the ending is in no way a summary, but just a final thought, it fails to capture the spirit of the essay,

He [Bentham] believed that a legislature chosen by the broadest possible electorate was the institution most likely to produce laws that served the public welfare. This would leave judges and commentators little discretion in their interpretation and application.

So everybody has his own faith. I believe that faith as expounded in Fuller's work is certainly neither the most naive nor the least promising as far as the search for the principles of good government is concerned.

Feel free to post yours in the comments, or elsewhere. But don't 'tag' anyone, please.

Read the Review

I recommend this DailyKos review of Ronald Brownstein's “The Second Civil War: How Extreme Partisanship Has Paralyzed Washington and Polarized America.” SusanG writes What Brownstein Gets Wrong: Just About Everything.

It begins as follows:

Nearly everything is wrong with this book, and every one of us should read it.

Only problem is, by the time I'm done with the review I really don't want to read the book…

Attack of the Feral English Professor!

Charlie Stross, the science fiction writer, describes his visit to Japan:

Tokyo left me feeling like an illiterate Albanian shepherd teleported without warning to the UK, staring slack-jawed in wonder at the vast, gleaming, powerful public works of metropolitan Huddersfield, reeking of wealth and efficiency and a goat-free future. From the thirty-seventh floor of a skyscraper I looked out across the high rise skyline, red lights blinking fretfully in the grip of a typhoon as winds strong enough to blow sheets of rain up the glass of the window rumbled around me, and I realized: this future has no place for goats.

…

On our last day in Kyoto, Feorag and I left our hotel and headed for downtown Kyoto. As we descended the steps into Shichijo subway station, an elderly fellow rushed over. “Hello! Remember me?” He called. (Apparently we'd met him a couple of days earlier, in a haze of shrine-going that ended with us both getting templed out.) “Here, please can you help me?” His spoken English was heavily accented. He dug around in his belt pack and pulled out a a sheaf of papers which he thrust under my nose. “Can you proof-read?”

It took us a quarter of an hour to disentangle ourselves from his polite but insistent demands that we check the English vernacular in his papers, which turned out to be part of the second edition of a huge Japanese-English dictionary — which, as Professor of English at Kyoto University, he was editing. Self-effacing politeness is a fearsome weapon: between us we checked at least five pages before we realized escape was possible.

In self-defense I have to admit that I'm not used to being mugged on the subway by feral English professors and forced to proof-read Japanese-English dictionary entries: I have entirely the wrong reflexes for such social situations and so, as one is trained to do when confronted with a situation that promises embarrassment, one tends to go with the flow.

…

In the UK, with a few exceptions — the uniformed services of government, police and military and fire services — we respond poorly to being placed in a uniform; it's a sign of depersonalization, stripping us of individuality. In Japan, however, uniforms are everywhere. Even people who don't have to wear them seem to gravitate towards workwear that's uniform in its appearance: taxi drivers in dark suits, peaked hats, and white gloves. Uniforms confer status — a uniform is a sign that you belong to some greater social context, to a corporation or a shop or a school or something important.

And so, we have an island safe for eccentric English professors: an island where outward conformity provides an ill-fitting disguise for social experimentation and strange subcultures. An island where people live like the crew of a generation starship in flight towards the future, nevertheless dragging the scars of ancient history behind them.

Lots more good stuff where that came from. (Spotted via Boingboing, Charlie Stross on Japan)

Eric Muller on the "American Inquisition"

Erc Muller's new book “American Inquisition”: A New Study of the Inner Workings of the Japanese American Internment is being published today, and he'll be blogging about it all week at Is that Legal? and Prawfsblawg.

Here's a bit from the first post:

I'm happy to announce that Monday, October 15 is the official publication date of my new book “American Inquisition:  The Hunt for Japanese American Disloyalty in World War II.”  It's an account of the secret inner mechanisms of racism within the episode we call the Japanese American internment of World War II.

I ground the book in extensive new archival research in the records of the civilian and military agencies that passed judgment on the loyalties of American citizens of Japanese ancestry.  As historian Roger Daniels says, the book presents a new story of “bad news from the good war.”

I'll be blogging about the book's claims here over the next several days.  Today, I'll start things off by offering a very brief account of how the federal government ended up in the business of passing judgment on the loyalty of more than 40,000 U.S. citizens of Japanese ancestry between 1943 and 1945.

Anyone familiar with Eric's work or his blogging will know that this will be a painstakingly careful book — and a good read. I'm looking forward to it.

Future Imperfect

Ken MacLeod, one of the best science fiction writers out there, blogged a link to this science fiction short-short story because it mentions his name.

I'm linking to the story because it's short and funny.

Meme Watch: "Stink Tanks"

I like this new phrase, “stink tanks” — organizations masquerading as think tanks but which don't pass the smell test.

Bruce Kushnick, Nieman Watchdog, Corporate-funded research designed to influence public policy, It is clear that we are in the age of “stink tanks,” in which corporate-funded think tanks and well-paid, credentialed academics are hired to make corporate arguments and give the appearance of being independent experts.

…

The think tanks often describe themselves as non-partisan, independent, free-market, free-enterprise, limited-government, or market-oriented. Their expert witnesses often bear credentials such as “professor of” or “former” FCC, FTC, state commissioner, Congressman, staffer.

Some have good reputations for serious studies on economic, political and foreign policy issues, albeit perhaps with an ideological slant. But good reputation or no reputation, when it comes to the telecoms and such issues as broadband, often these groups are nothing more than consulting firms that pursue the goals of the large corporations that are their clients and financial supporters.

Word Watch

This was a new one on me, but I like it. In an uncharacteristically grouchy recent post the The Phantom Professor mentions “trustafarians”.

Interestingly, definitions of “trustafarian” vary. I would have guessed a meaning like this one from False Positives:

Trustafarians : trust fund babies who live supported solely by the trust fund income (i.e. they don't work for a living): Paris Hilton, various members of the Kennedy clan, the characters of The Talented Mr. Ripley, or Hugh Grant's character in About a Boy come to mind. Down market Trustafarians would be those with a bohemian lifestyle, but with hipper accessories, living off he money of parents. (ski bums who don't have to wash dishes.)

But apparently, there's other somewhat different meanings about, as seen from these proposed definitions in the Urban Dictionary,

1. trustafarian

a. a spoiled rich white kid who smokes pot.

b. a person who, in an act of rebellion has taken to smoking pot, pan-handling, and following grateful dead rip-off bands during the week, and then returning to his or her parent's cozy home in the suburbs during the weekend.

c. one who lives with poorer people in an attempt to gain credibility, or street-cred, while disguising the trust fund they actually live off

Don't let that guy smoke any of your stash, he's a trustafarian, and never has his own to share.



2. trustafarian

priviliged white kids who subsribe to the hippie lifestyle (because they can) since they have no worries about money, a job etc. They can then devote their lives to eating organic, following Phish, and wearing dreadlocks (no need for job interviews).

Sarah is a trustafarian. It's totally evidenced by the combination of her brand new car and nice digs with her “earthy” clothes and dreadlocks.

He Deserves This

Patrick Nielsen Hayden of Tor fame has won a Hugo.

He deserves it. Thanks in substantial part to him, my eye has been trained to look for the Tor symbol in the bookshop. I may not buy each one, but I think about each one. The only other publisher who's come close to this is Baen, and I buy a lot fewer of those.

Charlie Rangel's "And I Haven't Had a Bad Day Since"

I've long been a fan of autobiographies by second-rank politicians (note that I said second-rank, not second-rate).

First-rank politicians — national leaders — almost always write boring autobiographies. For starters, they often hire someone to ghost-write the book, depriving it of a genuine authorial voice. The traits that made them leaders also tend to make them cautious. They rarely dish the dirt; instead you get somewhat sanitized political biographies of their opposite numbers. They rarely spill the beans; the good stuff leaked a long time ago, or it won't leak for a long time yet. And they are very self-centered: having been the star of the show, they don't usually feel much obligation to tell you a great deal about the supporting cast. There are exceptions to the leaders'-autobiographies-are-boring rule, Julias Caesar and Bill Clinton come to mind, but it's rare.

Far better to read the work of someone who didn't quite make it to the top of the greasy pole. They usually write the book themselves. They understand that they were not the only figure of importance in their times, so they tell us about their bosses (not always in flattering terms), colleagues, and the very good ones paint a portrait of their times.

By this standard, Congressman Charlie Rangel's new book, And I Haven't Had a Bad Day Since: From the Streets of Harlem to the Halls of Congress, by Charles B. Rangel and Leon Wynter, is a good read, but maybe not a great one.

He's at his best telling us about his early life as a silver-tongued near-hoodlum, and his army experiences, including the near-death experience in Korea that changed his life (and won him medals), and inspired the title for his book. He's at his worst describing his love for trade deals which are bad for US workers (he basically doesn't discuss the issue at all).

Rangel’s early history is fascinating, and the story of how an Army veteran and high-school dropout became a law school graduate in record time reflects a breathtaking energy and intellect. The book becomes much less personal as Rangel's life turns more professional. We don't meet his wife until page 179 and we hear nothing about how they met or married. We do hear, in a defensive sort of way, about the defining characteristics of Rangel’s public life: ambition, hard work, playing along with the power structure. It started when he grabbed what had been Adam Clayton Powell’s seat in Congress in part through his relationships with local political bosses. Then followed years playing the game, making friends with New York’s Republicans – to the point where one year Gov. Rockefeller arranged for Rangel to get the GOP as well as Democratic nomination to Congress. Another year, Rockefeller's “birthday present” was a grease pencil and a map – and an invitation to draw whatever lines he liked for his Congressional district.

Rangel is a beneficiary of the seniority system and the boss system, and as he is now at the stage of his career where those things really pay off, he’s a big defender of them. By Rangel’s own admission, most of his personal relationships are professional ones; he writes of Percy Sutton that even though Sutton is one of his best friends, the product of decades of productive political cooperation, they almost never socialize or even eat dinner together. Tip O’Neil is one of Rangel’s heroes, and it’s clear that Tip knew how to keep Rangel sweet

He never, ever took a congressional trip without inviting me.

…

We came from a world where ethnic urban pols come up poor and climb the ladder of opportunity through public service, doing what they have to do to care for their families, and their neighbors’ families, going along to get along and waiting their turn for the power to advance their community’s interest. Except that, in the Congress, I didn’t really have to get into line and wait my turn; Tip kind of pushed me to the front of the line. And even if he didn’t, most people thought he did, and treated me better for it.”

Rangel’s book is great on Iraq – he thinks it’s a crime, and supports a draft in order to make the rich and powerful have a greater stake in war-making which he, quite plausibly, suggests would be less frequent if the sons and daughters of the middle and upper classes were more likely to be be at risk. He’s good on the failures of Bush tax policy, although surprisingly light on details – this is more a personal history than a manifesto As such, the book is great on his early life, and also interesting on the middle of his career; the present is somewhat cagey, being limited by a publication date in which Rangel’s long-coveted chairmanship of the House Ways and Means Committee was in sight but not in hand.

But at the end of the day, Rangel comes off as interesting, driven, and thoughtful about some issues — but also very much and unapologetically a part of the machine. This boy from Harlem made it to the heart of the establishment; he may not have forgotten the people he left behind but he has no interest in rocking the boat too hard either.

Judge Glenn Greenwald's New Book By Its Cover

I can tell that Glenn Greenwald's new book, A Tragic Legacy: How a Good vs. Evil Mentality Destroyed the Bush Presidency, is good without even opening it.

First, it has his name on the cover, and his blog is great.

Second, it has a big blurb from my brother on the back: “Glenn Greenwald has emerged as one of the nation’s most incisive and articulate exponents of the critique of the Bush Administration. In admirably clear prose and with the ferocity of a former litigator, he is day in and day out building a powerful case against an undeniably consequential and radical presidency.”

But if you must look inside, there's a an excerpt online.

.

Book Recommendation

I read a lot of non-fiction in my job, so when I read for fun, I almost invariably choose fiction. And mostly pretty light fiction at that — although I don't as a rule read mysteries or crime fiction. And if I read non-fiction, it's mostly about contemporary politics.

But this weekend I read a really gripping piece of crime non-fiction that isn't political. It's The Birthday Party: A Memoir of Survival by Stanley N. Alpert. This is not a work of literary genius, but rather the harrowing true-life story of an Assistant U.S. Attorney who got snatched off the street one evening in Manhattan by a group of thugs. They wanted money from his ATM, but when they learned the size of his bank account, the mugging turned into a kidnapping, and an ordeal that he survived thanks to luck and amazing sang-froid.

Although blindfolded for most of his captivity, Mr. Alpert did so good job of figuring out details about his captors and the place that they held him that when, after his release, Mr. Alpert went to the cops they at first figured he was making it all up.

A real page-turner.

I Say 'Toh-ma-tow,' You Say 'Huh?'

Over at 'Inside Higher Ed' (a publication with an increasingly odd identity itself), Jewish in Polynesia describes the problem (eh?) of the absence of familiar stereotypes.

Grant McCracken Is Interesting

I suspect that Grant McCracken's deconstruction of marketing blog, This Blog Sits at the (Intersection of Anthropology and Economics) is filled with rare insight interspersed with some small bits of utter nonsense.

But I do not have great confidence in my ability to tell which is which.

Let's look at some recent items:

I think he's got Sony dead to rights.

There's music advice I can't evaluate, although it sounds plausible.

Somehow, I have the feeing that the piece on vicarious adventure is missing something -- rather than there being a new market here waiting to be born, it seems to me that the better "me blogs" already fill the niche. I understand the idea that some rich people might want more tailored experiences, but I suspect they're rich enough to go have them directly themselves. I think what McCracken wants (although he doesn't know it) is better search, or the blog version of what he wants for music.

McCracken's deconstruction of Pink's Stupid Girls video puzzled me. He seemed to be beating up on it, then said he liked it, just didn't like Pink's explanation for it. Personally, I'm fine with the video. It's a little obvious and heavy handed for my taste, but it has two arresting images that I like: one of the little girl flouncing her hair, and one (overused but still good) of Pink in glasses doing a political speech that evokes a cross between Eva Peron and Hillary Clinton.

I fear he's right about clutter, want him to be right about Donald Trump.

The item on the virtues of the small is beautiful marketing strategy of Birkenstock persuaded me, and the one on Australia's national marketing plan charmed (I have a particular interest in branding nations). The piece on the dressing gowns at The Topaz hotel seemed very well observed; a little creepy, yes, but credible. (On the other hand, the item on the "Yalies of Harvard Yard" may or may not describe something real about Harvard, I wouldn't know, but it gets most of Yale horribly wrong.)

But surely the item on M. Night Shyamalan's AmEx commercial is the current tour de force. Not having seen the actual commercial before reading the essay, I can't help but wonder, though, whether anyone less attuned than McCracken (or Roland Barthes) would get all this from the ad.

Whatever it all is, there is a real mind at work here, tackling things I don't often think about and am happy to have explained to me. Plus it's a joy to read.

Note to self: look out for his book.

(Previous posting about McCracken.)

A Story that Gives You Chills

From The Phantom Professor, this chilling story: In the deep freeze.

Life is Tough All Over

The NYT runs a moderately interesting story about a sort of whistle-blower at Pfizer, Dr. Peter Rost, a Vice-President for Marketing, who quite naturally is getting the cold shoulder from the company after saying it charges too much for drugs (some kind of marketing!). I say “sort of” because from what's in the article, At Pfizer, the Isolation Increases for a Whistle-Blower, Dr. Rost is more of a corporate critic of overcharging for drugs than an actual exposer of illegality, which is what I take whistle blowers usually to be.

Pfizer is afraid to fire him, either for fear of bad publicity, or for some murky legal reasons having to do with a Justice Department “investigation into its marketing of genotropin, the growth hormone Dr. Rost was responsible for selling at Pharmacia.” So meanwhile he gets put into corporate Siberia, what we used to call “the office with the dog”. This sort of thing happens; I recall one case in Treasury, long ago, where the politicals tried to get rid of a high civil servant they mistrusted for political reasons by assigning him to log all uses of the photocopier. Didn't work — he said they'd be gone in four years….

But back to the NYT story. The most interesting item is the amazing fact in the next to last paragraph. I would imagine that in these days of title inflation, VP's for Marketing must be quite numerous. I might have guessed that at a major subsidiary of a big drug company, a higher middle manager might pull down $150-200,000, perhaps with some bonus in good years. But no. The NYT reports that Pfizer is paying Dr. Rost $600,000 year — no wonder he's willing to stick it out and do nothing!

$600,000 per year for a Marketing VP. If they can afford that, doesn't it suggest that the drugs must be seriously overpriced?

New Word: 'Backronym'

I encountered a new, perhaps experimental, word today: Backronym (“a reverse acronym, that is, the words of the expanded term were chosen to fit the letters of the acronym”). I'm not sure I like it.

I do like retronym (“a new word or phrase coined for an old object or concept whose original name has become used for something else or is no longer unique”) though. It's nice to have a name for phrases like 'analog clock' or 'rotary phone' or 'dead tree book'.

Uncanny Resemblance

Michael Bérubé Online suggests, surprisingly plausibly, that Ann Coulter and Ward Churchill have much in common.

Needlenose Rediscovers Sinclair Lewis

Needlenose It Can't Happen Here.

PostSecret

More on the theme of Other Lives, a scary/voyeuristic and sometimes touching site called PostSecret (found via the Captology Notebook).

Some of the confessants say they find it therapeutic.

Other People's Shoes

Via Electrolite and Michael Bérubé, one of those Other Lives web postings that … I really can't finish this sentence.

Oh heck, just read Creek Running North, Life and death. And the comments.

Just Don't Send a Brick

The New York Times doesn't quite get the whole story on the front page in A Few Tips to Cope With Life's Annoyances. Ian Urbana reports that,

Wesley A. Williams spent more than a year exacting his revenge against junk mailers. When signing up for a no-junk-mail list failed to stem the flow, he resorted to writing at the top of each unwanted item: “Not at this address. Return to sender.” But the mail kept coming because the envelopes had “or current resident” on them, obligating mail carriers to deliver it, he said.

Next, he began stuffing the mail back into the “business reply” envelope and sending it back so that the mailer would have to pay the postage. “That wasn't exacting a heavy enough cost from them for bothering me,” said Mr. Williams, 35, a middle school science teacher who lives in Melrose, N.Y., near Albany.

After checking with a postal clerk about the legality of stepping up his efforts, he began cutting up magazines, heavy bond paper, and small strips of sheet metal and stuffing them into the business reply envelopes that came with the junk packages.

“You wouldn't believe how heavy I got some of these envelopes to weigh,” said Mr. Williams, who added that he saw an immediate drop in the amount of arriving junk mail.

Mr. Urbina doesn't take this on faith, he tries to check it out,

A spokesman for the United States Postal Service, Gerald McKiernan, said that Mr. Williams's actions sounded legal, as long as the envelope was properly sealed.

Problem is, the issue isn't legality — it's whether the postal service will actually deliver it.

Once upon a time, the rule was the post office would deliver anything with a business reply mail sticker on it. Back in the Vietnam War era, when Nixon was running for re-election, merry pranksters got the idea of mailing the CREEP, the Committee to Re-Elect the President, bricks. That annoyed the Nixionites, and they had the postal regulations changed.

According to the Straight Dope, this change is codified in Rule 917.243(b) in the Domestic Mail Manual: When a business reply card is “improperly used as a label”— such as being affixed to a brick—the package may be treated as “waste” and not delivered, which means no charge to the recipient.

'It Can't Happen Here' Is Online

Sinclair Lewis's under-appreciated novel, It Can't Happen Here is online at Project Gutenberg! Slightly dated though it may be, I think it has something to say to us in an all-too-believable way about creeping home-grown fascism.

One day reading Godwin's Law, by Interent lawyer and provacteur Mike Godwin, and I've already learned something.

New Ken MacLeod Story...In Nature

Ken MacLeod, one of my very favorite science fiction writers, has a story online via of all places Nature. Undead again—short, and mordant.

Eric Muller on Thomas Woods

Fresh from demolishing Michelle Michel Malkin, Eric Muller of UNC Law School turns his attention to the problem of the author of The Politically Incorrect Guide to American History a hack named Thomas E. Woods.

Reading Muller's account, Woods is revealed as an incompetent historian (it's so bad that one has to suspect that its partly deliberate falsification) and retrograde partisan. Yet, he has become a darling of a chunk of the right-wing's media class and the book is a mid-rank bestseller. You'd think the TV types would know better, especially given what Eric reports about Thomas Woods' role as co-founder of the neo-Confederate and secessionist League of the South, and a number of his statements on race relations — statements of the sort that one usually expects people to camouflage behind a white pointy hood.

Eric Muller on Thomas Woods I

Eric Muller on Thomas Woods II

Eric Muller on Thomas Woods III

Eric Muller on Thomas Woods IV

Eric Muller on Thomas Woods V

He Can't Be Serious

Larry Solum's “Legal Theory Bookworm” recommends an article with a most unusual title and topic.

Shabbir in Pakistan

Shabbir Safdar is a progressive activist in DC and, I know from personal observation, anonymous benefactor of good causes.

Part of the Pakistanian diaspora, over the holidays Shabbir revisited the ancestral homeland for the first time in 25 years, and he gives us a few tantalizing glimpses of the nation, and the cultural divides, plus some great photos, in Shabbir's Pakistan Diaries.

Just Break All These Rules

How to write a best selling fantasy novel.

Teresa Nielsen Hayden 1 Newspeak 0

In Making Light, Teresa Nielsen Hayden describes in detail how and why the astroturf organization 'Common Good' is in fact a Common Fraud.

TNH is also, in case you didn't know, the inventor of the disemvowelling concept (“The rule of thumb is that grossly offensive messages and drive-by trollpostings get deleted, but an excessively uncivil tone just makes your vowels disappear. Vigorous argument is appreciated, but a civil tone is required.”) Hmm. Maybe I should say “inventor or at least major popularizer, as apparently a [link fixed] related strategy has been around for a while. Online disemvoweller.

Will the Revolution Be Subsidized?

The BBC calls it Rise of the anoraks (“anoraks” being English slang for people who wear uncool windbreakers and study science or math). Demos, probably the UK's most interesting think tank, calls it The Pro-Am Revolution: How enthusiasts are changing our economy and society.

Demos says that the people it calls “Pro-Ams”—meaning “amateurs who pursue a hobby to a professional standard” including serious amateur astronomers and open source coders—should receive government funding to “promote community cohesion”.

It's nice to see the bottom-up revolution being noticed. Whether it needs subsidizing, though, and how one would do so without distorting it (and without enormous waste), seem like fairly hard questions. But I haven't yet read the full report.

When Fafblog Does It, It's Funny. When Kaus Does It...

Today's Fablog essay transcribes Giblets's rant against Cheap And Tawdry Political Tricks, to wit John Kerry's blasphemous mention of Dick Cheney's daughter's sexual preference.

Ms. Cheney is, among other things, the former gay and lesbian corporate relations manager for Coors Beer and member of the Republican Unity Coalition, a 'a homosexual activist Republican group' according to the CWA — not exactly a closeted role in life.

I can reveal, however, I have proof that Giblets is not the author of most of this essay. Indeed, other than the penultimate paragraph, the satirical part, this “Giblets” essay is materially similar to a rant I heard someone named Mickey Kaus give on NPR this morning.

Unless “Mickey Kaus” is a pseduonym for Giblets we can only conclude that Giblets listens to NPR! While adding a paragraph or two to the end of this rant transforms the meaning — from something offensive and smarmy based on innuendo and the idea that there's something wrong with being gay into a much funnier, indeed subversive, essay — one has to ask whether this sort of substantially derivative work with just a bit tacked on can be defended as parody.

'Tit for Tat' Dethroned as Optimal Prisoner's Dilemma Strategy

Slashdot reports:

“Tit for Tat, the reigning champion of the Iterated Prisoner's Dilemma Competition, has been defeated by a group of cooperating programs from the University of Southampton. The Prisoner's Dilemma is a game with two players and two possible moves: cooperate or defect. If the two players cooperate, they both have small wins. If one player cooperates and the other defects, the cooperator has a big loss and the defector has a big win. If both players defect, they both have small losses. Tit for Tat cooperates in the first round and imitates its opponent's previous move for the rest of the game. Tit for Tat is similar to the Mutual Assured Destruction strategy used by the two nuclear superpowers during the Cold War. Southampton's programs executed a known series of 5 to 10 moves which allowed them to recognize each other. After recognition, the two Southampton programs became 'master and slave': one program would keep defecting and the other would keep cooperating. If a Southampton program determined that another program was non-Southampton, it would defect.”

Haven't read the paper yet, but this sounds like a significant result, as the empircal superiority of 'tit for tat' is received wisdom in most accounts of applied game theory I've ever read. 'Ascription is an Anathema to any Enthusiasm' calls it delightful and suggests that,

This is the classic model of all game theory! And even in this tiny little dishpan model collaborative groups form and once they form they out compete the players that fail to collaborate. As Dave Weinberger once pointed out, we are a species that will form communities even if it means tapping out the alphabet on the wall of our cell.

I wonder if real-life applications may be limited by the difficulty of the earlier game to determine who gets which role…

Moving Essay at Escapable Logic

I commend to you a moving essay by Britt Blaser at Escapable Logic.

I don't know if I agree that “At our nation's birth, most voters were smarter, tougher, better educated and more patriotic than you and me” — that's edging a little in the Straussian direction for my taste — but it's a fine, heartfelt essay about war, heroics, politics, and the next election nonetheless.

WashPo Series on Being a High School Gay in the Bible Belt

The headline to the first article in this Post series seems ill-chosen. Entitled In the Bible Belt, Acceptance Is Hard-Won, the article describes a Kansas Oklahoma that is still very much in Toto's Kansas — one in which acceptance for a gay teenager is in fairly short supply, and the threat of violence in school is all too real.

There's bigotry here. Some of it is well-meaning — Michael Shackelford's mother fears

that Michael's eternal life was at stake. Janice feared that Michael would go to hell and be apart from her in the afterlife. “I'm afraid I won't see him again,” she says, her voice breaking.

But some of the bigotry is not at all well-meaning, and it drives Michael Shackelford out of high school in his sophomore year.

Looks to be a great series.

[Update: sorry about that…I let my Toto's Kansas metaphor run away with me there…]

Magazines Run Mushy Editorial Cartoons

Romenesko points to an LA Times piece arguing that when it comes to editorial cartoons, editors prefer mush:

Week in, week out, editors at these publications, and at many others across the country, fill space with our lamest throwaway stuff. This has gone on so long that an entire generation of readers and, sadly, editors, seem to regard editorial cartoons as just another infotainment medium, something to break up the gray type and give a comforting chuckle. If the cartoon mentions sex, sports or celebrities, so much the better.

The article argues that editors are just scared of angering readers, so they pass on [update: 'pass on' in the sense of 'decline,' not in the sense of 'forward'] the hard-hitting stuff such as this.

John Young, Translated

I've occasionally mentioned the often admirable John Young, noting his 'encrypted neo-Joycean prose style'.

Well, Seth Finkelstein has been kind enough to offer a translation of one of John's only moderately encrypted missives.

Smash The Ticking Time Bomb!

By The Power of Stipulation: I Have The Power!: Belle Warring at Crooked Timber's demolition of the TABNY scenario is much more enthusiastic than mine.

I am sick and tired of hearing about that ticking nuclear bomb in Manhattan. You know the one. Why? Because, if you let me put my thumb on the utilitarian scales, I can get you to agree that you have an affirmative moral duty to torture a three-year-old child to death.

I will utilitze my mighty powers of stipulation, thusly: the earth is invaded by a race of super-intelligent, but malevolent beings.

Go read the rest.

Lawyers vs. Computer Scientists

James Grimmelmann has an interesting pointer to an article purporting to describe the difference between how computer scientists and lawyers think. The core of the article is that legal data has “color”, or provenance.

It's a fun essay, but as someone who often straddles this divide, I think it's missing something important. But darned if I can put my finger on what it is. Maybe that law is often about shades of gray, when computer logic is binary?

IBM Digests Some Indigestible Customer Feedback

It's good to be reminded that it's not just academe where the way that things work are capable of driving you bonkers. Dave Farber, who runs a very widely read IP mailing list, had some troubles with his IBM laptop. Contacting customer support produced nothing helpful, so he wrote about his experience. That produced this reply from an anonymous IBM executive:

I thought you might enjoy knowing that the IP thread about IBM support has already climbed two levels up the IBM management chain from me, and then leapt from there into a similarly rarified level in the PC division. Since this is IBM, one of three things will happen: either it will be completely ignored, or we will start an ad campaign about how good our customer support is, or it will be the straw that breaks some particular camel's back, heads will roll, and everything will get better in a year or two.

Sounds like here, only with more layers.

Patrick O'Brian at Half Mast

I'm a big fan of Patrick O'Brian's seafaring Aubrey-Maturin novels—great stories, great writing. And you might think having devoured the lot I'd want to hurry and read the notes and half-text of the 21st in the series, found in his papers after his death and due to be published soon. But after reading about the manuscript and his condition when he wrote it, I don't think I'm going to rush to do that.

He Gets Paid for This?

William Safire wrote one really great book and a number that are not shabby. (The great book is the one no one reads, “Before The Fall,” his account of the Nixon White House.) Hard to believe it's the same guy who wrote this column, Sarin? What Sarin?.

The column contains the following gem of illogic, purporting to criticize Iraq war defeatists:

… no stockpiles of W.M.D., used to justify the war, were found. With the qualifier “so far” left out, the absence of evidence is taken to be evidence of absence.

Get that? It's wrong to say “no WMD were found”. You have to say, “so far”. Because we know they are out there. And since we KNOW they are out there, it would be quite wrong to take the failure to find them as “evidence” of their not being there at all. Given the intensity of the search, that's almost as illogical as saying 'finding a big stash of WMDs should not be taken as evidence of their presence.”

Although, by this stage, I'd want evidence of provenance if a big stash turned up.

Brad DeLong Asks 'Doesn't Anybody Read Max Weber Anymore?'

Brad DeLong asks, 'Doesn't Anybody Read Max Weber Anymore?' by which he means many things, all interesting but not, perhaps, all equally correct.

That the crew in charge thinks history is bunk, and Weber some damforeigner is all too likely. That tangled lines of command for the military are a bad thing, we can all agree. Whether this is quite as true for civilians in all cases, I'm not as sure; sometimes having criss-crossing lines can be an efficient way to move information around an organization.

But I'm least sure that I am prepared to say that either history or present experience teaches us to adopt the Roman, or British, proconsular model. In an era of modern communications, it's not necessarily wrong to have lines of authority run to HQ, nor is it necessarily wrong not to have the military report to the local viceroy. And it would be especially wrong, I think, to decide that the proconsul must be a military officer in order to unify the commands. Weber also taught us about bureaucratic virtues and there are more to them than clear lines of command and obeying orders, and while the Army has quite a few of these virtues, some of the ones that a civilian reconstruction project ought to care about are likely to go out the window in a theater of operations.

The root problem with the CPA was not, is not, that it lacks the ability to order troops around. The problem with the CPA is its (in)competence, the lack of planning before it started operations, and the very small number of officials who speak the local language or know the local culture.

If we are going to draw lessons from the British Empire — a very very mixed model if you were to ask me, or ask any number of colonized peoples, then the example I would choose to emulate is that of the district magistrate, oxford trained, fluent in three of the local languages.

While this is not time for humor, I can't resist repeating a joke that my father likes to tell about cross-cultural communication, even if it somewhat undercuts my own point:

The story goes that between the wars, the British Ambassador to China was being driven around the Chinese countryside in his shiny Bentley, when the driver got lost. But, no problem, the Ambassador had a double First in Oriental languages from Oxford, so he directed the driver to stop by a rice field where two peasants were working.

The Ambassador rolled down his window, and in his best Mandarin addressed the first Peasant.

“Pardon me, my good man, but could you be so kind as to tell me the way to Tientsin.”

The Peasant, knowing full well that foreigners cannot speak Chinese, ignored the noise from the car and went on working.

“Excuse me, sir, but could you kindly tell me the road to Tientsin?”

No reaction.

“CAN YOU TELL ME HOW TO GET TO TIENTSIN?”

Nothing.

“HOW DO I GET TO TIENTSIN!”

Still they went on working quietly.

Fustrated, the Ambassador rolled up his window and told his driver to drive on.

As he drove off, the second peasant turned to the first and said, “You know, if I didn't know better, I could have sworn that that foreigner was asking us how to get to Tientsin.”

Shorter William Safire

Shorter William Safire

Rumsfeld Should Stay: Rumsfeld should not resign because he symbolizes the Admnistration's willingness to persevere in ignorance of reality; were he to quit it would encourage people to believe that the Bush administration makes mistakes and/or admits them.

Italo Calvino Online

A website devoted to Italo Calvino, author of the magical, wonderful, Invisible Cities and many other books to treasure.

The Great Witch-Burning Debate

Two of my friends are arguing about witch-burning, and thanks to the Internet I get to eavesdrop.

In this corner, longtime friend Eugene Volokh, making arguments of expediency and self-interest rightly understood:

the conventional understanding of witches was that they got their powers through an alliance with satanic forces, and that they acquired those powers partly to use them against innocent people (or else why did they need the powers?). Punishing them is thus no different from punishing someone who got some very nasty weapons by dealing with the Mafia, or someone who has — but has not yet used, and as to whom there is no firm evidence that he is about to use — a radiological bomb that he got from a terrorist organization with which we are at war.

Witches: Reader Paul Forsyth points out that C.S. Lewis beat me to my witches observation by decades (not surprising — my point was pretty obvious). Forsyth quotes Mere Christianity, p. 26:

But surely the reason we do not execute witches is that we do not believe there are such things. If we did — if we really thought that there were people going around who had sold themselves to the devil and received supernatural powers from him in return and were using these powers to kill their neighbors or drive them mad or bring bad weather, surely we would all agree that if anyone deserved the death penalty, then these filthy quislings did.

Indeed.

In this corner, longest time friend Brad DeLong, who has taken on a more mystico-religious cast than he exhibited as a kid, but one tempered by an understanding not just of sin but bounded rationality,

On the contrary, there is a HUGE difference between burning somebody alive because you think she is a witch, and killing the possessor of a radiological bomb acquired from a terrorist organization. THERE ARE NO WITCHES. WHEN YOU BURN A “WITCH,” YOU ARE TORTURING AN INNOCENT, INTELLIGENT BEING TO DEATH SIMPLY BECAUSE YOU HAVE A FALSE CONCEPTION OF THE WORLD.

There are times—like after reading the Rubin-Weisberg book, In an Uncertain World—when I think that the hallmark of true intelligence is to recognize that one may not know everything, and that one should take special care to avoid actions that are impossible or very costly to reverse—like burning a “witch”, or attacking Iraq in the belief that even though you don't know of any links between Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda you're bound to find a piece of paper that will serve as such somewhere in Baghdad. Even if I believed in witches, I wouldn't burn them. Deprive them of the chalk they use to draw pentagrams, yes; separate them from their familiars, yes (sorry kitty); deprive them of the ability to use their knowledge of the magical laws of similarity and contagion, yes; but kill? No.

As Oliver Cromwell said: “I beseech you, in the bowels of Christ, consider that you might be mistaken.”

Often when friends argue, I'm reminded of the southern politician who, when asked about a very controversial issue replied, “Some of my friends are for it, some of my friends are against it, and like any gentleman, I stand with my friends.”

But on this one I think my friends are talking past each other. Eugene offers a lawyer's hypothetical: “suppose we were convinced that the facts were other than we know them to be, what would be the right response?” That's how lawyers talk. That's how we think. That's even how we play with ideas.

Brad's reply in some sense does Eugene the honor of taking the hypothetical too seriously. Brad's reply is of the form, “suppose we were convinced of a set of facts that we should know better than to be convinced of? Well, that shows we're nuts. Don't do radical things like kill people when you are nuts.”

And, in this case, both my friends are right. I think that Eugene expressed his view more elegantly. And indeed, were we faced with incontrovertible proof that evil Satan-powered witches were stalking the earth, it would fit in with our general jurisprudence to punish them for conspiracy even if we were unable to serve the ringleader of the conspiracy.

Brad's reply isn't as elegant as Eugene's, because there's a sort of logical leap from the jurisprudence of 'witches' to economics and politics. And too many caps. But nonetheless, I think Brad is more right: not only is it wrong to kill both “witches” and witches¹ but because current events — running from Guantanamo to the Padilla case perhaps even to Abu Ghraib, not to mention the Innocence Project — do offer very cautionary tales about the dangers of believing your eyes when you start seeing 'witches' in real life.

[1] At this point, every legally trained reader, not to mention readers of fantasy novels, is going to say, “but the whole problem with Satan-powered witches is that you can't lock them up — they escape — so that a prison sentence isn't a meaningful punishment.” To which I, also legally trained, reply that therefore we can't even have a trial, because that requires detention, so our 'kill the witches' policy is now a 'shoot on sight' policy, which since they are too dangerous to get close to, means it is now a 'shoot on suspicion' policy, which means it is time to adjourn this argument and go read up on slippery slopes.

Would You Like Some Politics With that SQL?

Here's an interesting controversy. In I Don't Like Your Examples! Steven Feuerstein explains why he used controversial political examples in a technical O'Reilly book on Oracle PL/SQL Programming and shares some reader reaction.

Obviously there's no legal issue here: in a free country an author can be political even in a technical reference book. And, equally obviously, political examples pose a commercial issue for a publisher: will a reference/instruction book with 'interesting' examples sell better because the reader stays awake (or because people buy it for the notoriety), or sell worse because those who find the examples distasteful will avoid it? (There's also a question of editorial principle—how much freedom should authors be entitled to have? It's not obvious to me that the answer is the same for technical books in a series as for a novelist or a polemicist, although in the hands of an enlightened and brave publisher it might be. I wonder what Theresa Nielsen Hayden thinks about this…)

But there's also a moral, or at least aesthetic, issue as to whether it's meet to introduce suggestions that Henery Kissinger is a war criminal for bombing Cambodia, CEOs are paid too much, or the gun lobby is too strong. And that's the question which really interests me. In his article Mr. Feuerstein quotes feedback from readers, or might-have-been readers, who think inserting politics into programming examples is at least icky, maybe gross.

Having thought hard about it for several seconds, it turns out that on this last question I have no doubt at all: it is proper, even admirable, to witness one's strongly held beliefs about the society we share in any book you write, and in most (but not all¹) daily activities, especially in circumstances where your listener/reader is able to walk away or put down the tome. If this hurts your sales, that's your problem. In general though, I prefer my fellow citizens to be engaged, not passive, committed not apathetic, even if it should happen we don't agree.

¹ Which activities? Depends. Class is a bad time for students (or professors) to stand up and read agitprop, but a good time for students to wear political t-shirts. See also More on Civility.

Shorter William Safire

Shorter William Safire:

The Floo Floo Bird. Please stop asking questions about what the Bush administration has been doing on foreign policy, terrorism, and 9/11 for the past three years because I will not like the answers.

Shorter William Safire

Shorter William Safire, The Bond Across the Pond

Even though the quality of this column is in decline, I have absolutely no intention of retiring. Any editor thinking of firing me better understand that it would kill me.

Brad DeLong vs. the 'Non-Partisan' Press

Brad DeLong pens (keyboards?) another one of his great rants about the failures of our modern press corps in the face of mendacity: Why Oh Why Can't We Have a Better Press Corps? (Special Richard Cheney 'Opinions About Shape of Earth Differ' Issue).

Brad's description of the problem — one offered by most serious students of the press who are not actually members of it — is IMHO spot on: there's something wrong when obvious falsehoods get equal time with obvious truths. But is his solution really what we want?

If Bumiller doesn't feel that at this stage she has enough information to (at least privately) conclude that Cheney is either senile or a liar, she needs to get a different job in a different profession. And once she has reached that (private) conclusion, her duty is clear. She needs to include more quotes from different people contradicting Cheney—people like Tenet, Powell, Armitage, Hadley, and other senior administration officials who are already on record praising the work done by Clarke and his centrality to the Bush administration's pre-911 counterterrorism effort. She needs to signal her readers that Cheney is all alone on this: completely off the reservation, making claims that are so false that nobody else will touch them.

So I called Bumiller, and asked her why she had made it into a “she said, he said” article rather than into a Cheney-said-something-so-bizarre-that-nobody-else-will-endorse-it article. Her replies seemed, to put it politely, incoherent. The reasons that she didn't stack five contradictory quotes from five different sources against Cheney—and so make him look like the liar or idiot that he is (as Dana Milbank would probably have done)—appear to be that she “doesn't write opinion,” that “the news was Rice contradicting what Cheney had said to Rush Limbaugh,” and that she “only had 300 words.” My assertion that whether Clarke was out-of-the-loop or was the loop itself is a matter of fact, and that a reporter has a duty to ascertain and to report to her readers such matters of fact, did not meet with a response.

Here's the problem: I don't think I'm going to be happy in a world in which reporters slant their stories to hint real real hard as to who they think is lying. I am OK with a nakedly partisan press in which reporters wear their biases on their sleeves — I like Brad's rants, don't I? — partly because biases (unlike prejudices) can be the reasoned result of thought and education. But I don't want a norm that says reporters should try to manipulate the reader.

It's bad enough having to read the NYT every morning and Kremlinoligize the stories as it is. It used to be you knew that certain reporters were so-and-so's leak, so that if X had a scoop it probably came from State. But now when I read, say, a Judith Milller or a Katherine Seelye story, I have to be on guard for the slant. I don't like that.

In fact, I wonder if what Brad is advocating wouldn't legitimate what Miller and Seelye do. I bet that Miller believed Chalabi. I bet that Seelye believed all those anti-Gore falsehoods she peddled. (See the Daily Howler for chapter and verse). I think I want LESS of that sort or reporting, not more.

So I guess my vote is to allow more editorializing: “Cheney's comments appear to conflict with every known fact on the subject” or something like that….

Will Men Get Lucky?

Last week I was in the airport for the first time in a while, and with time on my hands had a look at the magazines. I noticed one called “Lucky: The Magazine About Shopping,” and thought that it must be the dumbest idea for a magazine out there. Boy was I wrong. Not only is it selling 900,000 copies per issue, but the dumbest idea for a magazine was just around the corner: Cargo.

Here's how the Post's reviewer describes it:

Cargo is a shopping magazine for men. It contains no stories, just pictures of stuff you can buy — or, as one of Conde Nast's vast army of publicists puts it, “no articles, all products.”

Cargo might be the worst idea for a magazine in human history. It's certainly the worst idea for a magazine since December 2000, when Conde Nast launched Lucky, a shopping magazine for women. …

Lucky's success inspired Conde Nast to launch Cargo, originally dubbed Lucky for Men. That name was accurate: Cargo's premiere issue contains features on such guy-friendly stuff as hot cars and power tools, but it also has plenty of stuff about, yes, shoes and makeup and handbags and hairdos. …

But never fear. There is, yes, actual content in Cargo. The inaugural issue contains … wait for it … “fully illustrated advice on 'How to Roll Up Your Sleeves.' Step one: 'Undo all the buttons on the sleeve.'” Who woulda guessed?

The Libraries That Time (and Budgets) Forgot

Michael Winerip's On Education: At Poor Schools, Time Stops on the Library's Shelves is a deeply depressing story, and the sort of journalism we need but don't get nearly as often as we need.

It seems that in poor neighborhoods — predominantly black neighborhoods — the schools have been starving the libraries. The books in the school library mostly date from before the schools were integrated. Not only do they lack the biographies students need for Black History Month, but they are innocent of four decades of modern technology, politics and literature. They don't even have Harry Potter — the books that are credited with sparking a new generation of readers.

What better example of our national shame of unequal class-based (which often in effect means race-based) public education?

That said, I do have one tiny criticism of the article: do not make fun of Freddy the Pig.

Mr. Winerip pokes gentle fun at the Edward Williams Elementary school library for having a full set of Freddy the Pig books. Perhaps he doesn't know what those books are. While no substitute for modernity, the 26 Freddy books by Walter R. Brooks are one of the great series of American children's literature. Freddy and his friends are gentle and thoughtful. He writes bad poetry, and makes mistakes, but things work out in the end. The books manage to explain a great deal about the world (well, as it was 60 years ago), without ever seeming to do so. And they're fun.

The Freddy books were among my favorite books when I was in elementary school (our school library, in a fancy private school, had a full set…). When we had kids, I was disappointed to learn they were so long out of print that they were hard to find in used books stores. Our local public library only had a few.

Fortunately, the Internet came to the rescue. First I found the Friends of Freddy, a non-profit membership organization dedicated to the preservation and perpetuation of the writings of Walter R. Brooks and his literary alter ego, Freddy the Pig. And through them I learned of the Overlook Press's program of republishing the entire Freddy series. My kids love them — and I enjoyed reading them aloud to them when they were smaller.

The Most Cheerful Thing I've Read In Weeks

Call it schadenfreude if you must, but I was immensely cheered by Brian Leiter's recent post on the sloath and incompetence of the University of Texas academic bureaucracy. It is so, so nice to know that we are not the only place where this sort of thing happens all the time.

Vanity Fair Profiles John Ashcroft As a Vindictive Loon

Spotted via Making Light — Mike's Link Blog - Very Scary Shit About John Ashcroft, which is the copyright-violating full text of Judy Bacharach's Vanity Fair profile of Attorney General John Ashcroft.

I wanted to pick out one bit and suggest it's the weirdest part, but they're all like that.

I'd Like to Read the Rest of This

This editorial, Injustice Unchallenged, in the Washington Post has a great beginning.

THE CONSTITUTION guarantees a right to counsel for criminal defendants and obligates states to provide lawyers to those who cannot pay for them. Virginia, as a recent report prepared for the American Bar Association documents, woefully fails to meet this constitutional duty. The state's failure is so extreme that it cannot be constitutional. Yet it goes unchallenged. To understand why, consider the tale of the last lawyer who tried to raise a challenge.

Unfortunately, it gets a bit odd after that.

Message from the NSAPI plugin:

Internal Server failure, NSAPI plugin. Cannot continue.

Build date/time: Sep 18 2002 16:55:57

Change Number: 208523

Shorter Peggy Noonan

Shorter Peggy Noonan, The Democrats Have Had Their Fun. Now It's Time to Rumble:

Economy? What economy? Look over there: A War!

A Thoughtful Take on Site Finder

People wanting a thoughtful look at the law and policy issues swirling around VeriSign's Site Finder need look no further than Jonathan Weinberg's Site Finder and Internet Governance. I say this even though the conclusion makes me quite uncomfortable.

Here's the abstract:

On September 15, 2003, VeriSign, Inc., the company that operates the databases that allow Internet users to reach any Internet resource ending in .com or .net, introduced a new service it called Site Finder. Less than three weeks later, after widespread protest from the technical community, at least three lawsuits, and a stern demand from ICANN (the Internet Corporation of Assigned Names and Numbers, which has undertaken responsibility for managing the Internet domain name space), VeriSign agreed to shut Site Finder down. In between those dates, the Internet community saw a passionate debate over the roles of ICANN, VeriSign, and the Internet's technical aristocracy in managing the domain name space.

In this paper, I unpack the Site Finder story. Site Finder was highly undesirable from a technical standpoint; it contravened key elements of Internet architecture. ICANN had power to force VeriSign to withdraw it, though, only if VeriSign was violating the terms of its registry contracts. The arguments that Site Finder violated VeriSign's contractual obligations are plausible, but they don't derive their force from Site Finder's architectural or stability consequences. The registry contracts gave ICANN no hook to invoke those concerns; if VeriSign was in breach, it was by happenstance. Part of the lesson of Site Finder is that there needs to be an effective institutional mechanism for protecting the domain name space infrastructure from unilateral, profit-driven change that bypasses the protections and consensus mechanisms of the traditional Internet standards process. Notwithstanding ICANN's flaws, it may be better suited than any other existing institution to protect against that threat. Yet ICANN regulation is itself highly problematic, and so any plan to expand its authority must be approached with care.

I remain dubious about any proposal to strengthen ICANN, so I'm not sure I agree with the bottom line. While there would be a short-term gain to empowering ICANN to kill Site Finder, I think the long-term consequences would not be good at all.

What David Bernstein Doesn't (Want to) Get

It started with a pretty silly post by David Bernstein about why he thinks liberals should love G.W. Bush (because he spends lots of money). It's an argument that can only be made by applying a caricatured, no, a cartoon version of liberalism, in which spending is good per se, regardless of what you spend the money on, balanced budgets are irrelevant at all times in the business cycle, long run economic planning is of no importance, and, oh yes, whatever you do don't mention the war. Oh those silly liberals, caring about our troops, about the damage to our Army and Reserves, worrying about paying back the deficit, the looming pensions crisis, health care, not to mention equity and progressive taxation, the environment, the hinting about amending the Constitution to prevent same-sex marriage (or is it domestic partnerships, it's vague), the crony capitalism, the attack on the rights of labor, Guantanamo Bay, John Ashcroft, and I could go on.

I mean, the post was so silly that I wasn't even going to blog it. Even though I suppose it's possible that some knee-jerk Republicans might not take the trouble to work out what was wrong with it, I think most of them are smarter than that.

But the dang thing has legs.

Matthew Yglesias, who is usually pretty sharp, swallowed it whole.

And Brad DeLong, who is always sharp, swatted back in Matthew Yglesias Misses the Point, but too gently.

There is absolutely no reason a liberal should like GW Bush, and it has very little to do with the atmospherics. (As for the ranch, it would be fine if it weren't so faux.) It's about civil liberties, the environment, the war, the budget, and the continual campaign of routinely lying to the American people (see, e.g. under “Cheney”). The argument is infinitely weaker than when it was applied, only somewhat plausibly, to Nixon.

Kudos

To Eugene Volokh for this.

To Brad DeLong for this.

The Gadflyer: Pretty Lively So Far

New launch: The Gadflyer: The Future State of the Union:

The Gadflyer is a new progressive Internet magazine. As the name implies, The Gadflyer will be provocative, critical, and iconoclastic. It will cover politics and public affairs from a fresh perspective, offering journalism, analysis, and commentary from a new generation of writers. The Gadflyer will bring together the brightest young progressive voices to provide unique and compelling stories that can be found nowhere else.

The Gadflyer will be unabashedly progressive, but not doctrinaire.

Noble ambitions. Fun to read so far. But is it essential?

How to Be a Cad (and Pick Up Beautiful People?)

I post this item with some nervousness, because, kidding aside, I'm not sure I'm totally thrilled with being so highly googleranked for “how to pick up women” (if you don't know what I'm talking about, see the 'stats' in the right column) and this will only make it (much) worse. It seems to me that the Googleranking much more justly belongs to Matthew Yglesias…

But here goes. Today's New York Times contains a somewhat fascinating and repellent first-person article, He Aims! He Shoots! Yes!!, by a guy who wrote a book about a subject clearly near and dear to his own heart—the “seduction industry”, that is guys who are (literally) professional pickup-coaches to other guys.

Researching a book proposed by an editor, I allowed myself to be taken under the wings of the greatest self-proclaimed pickup artists in the world and entered an underground subculture of men dedicated — sometimes to an unhealthy extreme — to figuring out the mystery of the opposite sex.

…

From New York to London to Croatia — places my reporting took me — many of these men meet off line in groups known as lairs to discuss tactics and techniques before going out to bars and clubs to put their theories to practice.

Leaving aside the obvious issues with any exercise of this sort—objectification, strategic behavior, treating people as means rather than ends only head the list, not to mention the one mentioned in the article (“An extraordinary amount of effort seems to be put forth to achieve something so shallow”)—there's also the thinness of the gruel being peddled: Be confident. Don't seem too needy. Be a little unpleasant especially to beautiful people who are used to getting compliments, it gets their attention.

But perhaps these coaches are on to something, the same something that informs the adage, “Nice guys finish last,” and gave the zing to Groucho Marx's best line about not wanting to join any club that would have a person like him as a member. If the coaches are on to something, though, surely it's something that should be resisted, not extended?

'Is That Legal' is on a Roll

Back from hiatus, and just past its anniversary, three posts in a row at Is That Legal that made me go 'yup':

• Eric Muller expresses surprise that the state of California allows peremptory challenges against judges. News to me. And not necessarily a good idea.
• Remarks on the stilletto job the New York Times did on Dr. Steinberg and Dr. Dean in this morning's paper. To which I'd add only that you could make any politician look like a freak if you run one clip over and over again—let's try that on GWB please.
• And Eric, like me, is excited about water on Mars (but what's up with the Rover?)

Great Minds Think Alike: Onion Replicates My Modest Proposal for Iraq

You read it here first, although my Modest Dinner-Party-Based Proposal For An Iraqi Exit Strategy looks better when the Onion does it as U.S. To Give Every Iraqi $3,544.91, Let Free-Market Capitalism Do The Rest.

Spotted (and taken seriously!) at Displacement of Concepts (a great Blog title IMHO).

Reality by Agreement

A short excerpt doesn't do it justice. Have a look at I'm not Toto, and this isn't Kansas, a funny and also thought-provoking entry to an otherwise not-that-interesting Slashdot thread about taboo subjects:

...One of the base rules of the game was "If you're out of your tent, you're in character".

...a couple of wedding party members wandered into the game space....it took less than 2 hours to convince two sane, intelligent, and reasonably successful (possibly mildly inebriated) people that they had been magically transported into another world. All it took was a few score people with absolutely no willingness to admit that any other truth was possible or to act like there was anything wrong with this world.

Read the full original, or see the duplicated version in the extended.

I'm not Toto, and this isn't Kansas.

(Score:5, Interesting)

by darkonc (47285) > on 07:40 PM January 4th, 2004 (#7876768)
(http://bcgreen.com/~samuel | Last Journal: 12:36 PM January 18th, 2003)

If you take the Landmark Forum [landmarkeducation.com] and then take their follow up course -- the ubiquitously named "Advanced Course", they have a section when they talk about types of reality. One is "reality by agreement". It reminded me about one rather extreme case of reality by agreement. (which links solidly into this whole heresy thing).

Back in the '80s, there was a company known as "Sir Unicorn Enterprises". They created a game called "Dreamquest" (which later morphed into the LRPS [incentre.net] Live Role-Playing System). It was based on a D&D type scenario, where you had different character classes with different abilities etc. However it was done live-action and on a commercial scale... For my first game there were about 75 'players' (paying customers) and a dozen, or two, actors (game creatures).

One of the base rules of the game was "If you're out of your tent, you're in character".

Other than the limitations and powers of your character class, there was very little limitation to your character. You got to make up their personality, their costume, their history -- Even the history of how they got to Samiltan (the country in which the game was played). As an extreme, there was one guy on my first quest who was dressed in a (civilian) paratrooper's outfit. His story was that he was on a jump, went through this weird glowing portal thing, and next thing he knew he was fighting dragons.... Character class: Fighter (of course -- completely non-magical).

The venue of my first quest was a country club.. We had one small section of the country club building (basically a large room) and the edges of the property leading down into the river valley. On the Friday night, we were given very explicit instructions to not go beyond the end of the one room, because there was a wedding going on, and we were NOT to go beyond there. Disturbing the 'mundanes' (non-players) could get us booted out.

In game parlance, The world ends there.

Of course the country club didn't warn the wedding party about our presence (why should they? They knew that we wouldn't go past the "end of the world").

And of course, a couple of wedding party members wandered into the game space.

I'm thinking that the first thing that they learned was not to go past "the end of the world".

But they wanted to go home, so they started talking to people, and hearing stories -- stories from past dreamquests and the present one... stories of magic, demons dragons and an impending doom if "the unnamed one" could not be stopped.

At first, they were highly skeptical (of course), but they didn't really care, they just wanted to get home -- unfortunately, nobody could tell them about how to get home -- of course, nobody could, since it made sense that anybody who got home probably {w,c}ouldn't come (willingly) back from a mundane (non-magical) world. Nonetheless, it was possible (but not guaranteed) that a powerful enough wizard might be able to get them home. One thing that they had going for them, though, was that recent events in this corner of Samiltan had resulted in the gathering of some of the most powerful wizards known (and probably the cause of their own troubles). Thus, if anyplace had hope of getting them home, it was likely to be here. About the only thing that they learned for sure, however, was that they should not go past the end of the world... People were adamant about that -- beyond there lay death.

From what I can tell, they were in the game area for at least an hour... maybe two. Word was going around the players that a couple of characters (possibly actors) were playing guests from the wedding, and trying to get people to break character.
but we knew better, right?

Nobody would break character for them. The guy in the parachute outfit probably clinched it for them... If they could expect a straight answer out of anybody, it would be him, since he was dressed "normal" but he seemed to have much the same questions as they did -- and no answers. In fact, he seemed pretty resigned to his fate -- happy even.

"Dressed strange? We're not dressed strange. You're dressed strange."
"Those are the strangest suits of armor I've ever seen!"
"Doesn't look like they'd stop a dagger, much less a sword.... unless they're magical."
"Are they magical?"
"Could I test them?"
"Do they stop magic?"

By the time they got to me, these two unfortunates were down to two possibilities:

1. They were insane
2. They really were in a different world.

Between the two of them, they were able to bounce things off of each other and determine that weren't both insane, so this really only left (2). And if 2 were true, then -- with no magic they had absolutely no way to get home.

They were starting to get scared, and very desperate

How do I know this? They got me to break character. They started their conversation by telling me that they knew that people ended up here by going through portals, and that they guessed that they had probably gone thru a portal of some sort, but they really didn't remember it -- everybody else who had been portaled into the world semed to remember a glowing portal, and they were sure that they would have remembered something like that (they weren't anywhere near that drunk ... In the middle of our conversation, one of them suddenly broke into something of a monologue along the lines of:

I don't know if this is of value to you in this world, but it's the only thing I have on me that's of any value. If you can get any value out of it please do. If we can do anything else for you, just ask, but we just want to get home... Please. Just get us home. That's all I ask.

Then he handed me his wallet.

I looked through his wallet... Not new, but a very good quality wallet. Gold cards (unexpired), cash, driver's license. Yep.. It was a real wallet and he wouldn't take it back. He just wanted me to get them home. That is when I realized that they were for real.

Even so, I wasn't willing to commit the heresy of completely breaking character. I dropped partly out of character for a moment at a time .. long enough to drop a clear hint about the dual nature of "the world". I got their story from them, and told them that if they went beyond "the end of the world" over there, there were rumors of a wedding of some sort, but not for our kind... For us to go there was death -- but if they were truly of another world their passage might be safe.

The guy that had offered me his wallet, wanted me to keep it, but I managed to convince him to accept it back it by taking a $2 bill out of it (yes, there were bigger bills in there).

I never heard from them again. I took that as a sign that they made safely it back to their universe.

My point is that it took less than 2 hours to convince two sane, intelligent, and reasonably successful (possibly mildly inebriated) people that they had been magically transported into another world. All it took was a few score people with absolutely no willingness to admit that any other truth was possible or to act like there was anything wrong with this world. It helped that there was a reasonably consistent (if vague) explanations about how they had probably been transported from 'home'.

There were two key heresies which doomed them to their fate:
One was going beyond 'the end of the world' (toward the wedding).
The other was admitting that we were anywhere but Samiltan.

It turns out that it doesn't take much heresy to lock ourselves into a fantasy world.

A Good Article

Michael D. Birnhack & Niva Elkin-Koren, The Invisible Handshake: The Reemergence of the State in the Digital Envitonment, 8 Virginia J. of L. & T 6 (2003).

This is the sort of article that crystalizes a lot of things you maybe sorta half-knew or half-understood and puts them all together. It's about how the state was always there, even in the supposedly liberarian online environment, and how it turned to new gatekeepers and control nodes to remain dominant, taking advantage of the public/private distinction to use 'private' means to do things that would be much harder if attempted with 'public' tools.

Slashdot and Social Antibodies

I'm behind schedule on finishing a report, so blogging will be light until I'm done. Meanwhile, you might enjoy, as I did, Many-to-Many: Slashdot Troller and Social Antibodies. Like so much on the cool Corante site, it's interesting.

Bob Sommersby Doesn't Pull His Punches: Krauthammer Should Be Fired

Bob Sommersby, the proprietor of the Daily Howler, couldn't be shriller: One question only, for the Washington Post: When will Charles Krauthammer be fired?. Below I'll quote a large chunk of his essay, which demonstrates that Sommersby is shrill for a reason: Krauthammer spliced two divergent quotes with an ellipsis in a manner that makes Howard Dean appear to say almost the exact opposite of what the full transcript suggests he said. (Then, for good measure, Krauthammer suggested Dean was delusional.)

The departure from basic journalistic ethics seems so clear, and the fault so egregious, that I called the Post's ombudsman to discuss it. Unfortunately, I called after 5pm on Friday, and just got voice mail. But I hope to have a chance to discuss it with him next early week. For one thing, I'm curious how much editing columnists are subject to.

My bet is that the Post will say the quotes are not really all that misleading, since Dean's stated desire to reduce media concentration might well effect Fox. I hope I'm wrong, because that would be flim-flam: saying that a candidate wants to break up Fox because he disagrees with it not only suggests the candidate lacks respect for the first amendment but basically paints him as a heavy-handed fascist who would use federal power to harry his ideological opponents. Saying the candidate wants a heightened anti-trust approach to media concentration regardless of ideology reveals a view that may or may not be good policy, but indicates considerably more respect for the importance of free (and diverse) speech, and freedom generally.

[The Krauthammer column was in any case in weirdly poor taste. Krauthammer boasts of his psychiatric training, and then suggests Dean is nuts. It starts with the headline (“The Delusional Dean”), goes on to say that for Dean “it's time to check on thorazine supplies”. Oh yeah: it's just vaguely possible that Krauthammer was joking, as he suggests that another cure for Dean's disease is to donate to the Republican Party. So who knows, maybe making jokes about mental illness is what passes for yuks in the Krauthammer circles.]

Here's a lengthy excerpt from Sommersby (writing yesterday):

For now, though, only one question obtains: When will the Washington Post fire its dissembling columnist, Charles Krauthammer? And one other question obtains: What are the paper’s obligations to its misled readers?

THE POST’S LATEST LYING LIAR: Charles Krauthammer is deeply dishonest. In fact, the Washington Post should fire him, now. In a fire-breathing column in this morning’s Post, Krauthammer tells the world what a crackpot that Howard Dean is. To promote his point, Krauthammer presents a “transcript” from Monday’s night’s Hardball—a “transcript” he has artfully doctored. Here’s how the scribe presents one Q-and-A from Monday night’s Hardball program:

KRAUTHAMMER:

Chris Matthews: “Would you break up Fox?”

Howard Dean: “On ideological grounds, absolutely yes, but….I don’t want to answer whether I would break up Fox or not….What I’m going to do is appoint people to the FCC that believe democracy depends on getting information from all portions of the political spectrum, not just one.”

Wow! “On ideological grounds,” Howard Dean wants to break up Fox! According to Krauthammer, this exchange shows that Dean “is now exhibiting symptoms of a related illness, Murdoch Derangement Syndrome (MDS), in which otherwise normal people believe that their minds are being controlled by a single, very clever Australian.”

Of course, Krauthammer was playing Post readers for fools. Because we’ve dealt with people like Krauthammer for years, our reaction to this “transcript” was virtually preordained; our eyes were drawn to those suspicious ellipses which broke up Krauthammer’s pleasing text. And so we did what we’ve done for years—we checked the official transcript. And yes, we found what we frequently do; Krauthammer was playing Post readers for fools. The key words in the transcript are [LAUGHTER], which Krauthammer deftly removed:

OFFICIAL MSNBC TRANSCRIPT:

MATTHEWS: Rupert Murdoch has the Weekly Standard. It has got a lot of other interests. It has got the New York Post. Would you break it up?

DEAN: On ideological grounds, absolutely yes, but—

(LAUGHTER)

MATTHEWS: No, seriously. As a public policy, would you bring industrial policy to bear and break up these conglomerations of power?

DEAN: I don’t want to answer whether I would break up Fox or not, because, obviously—

MATTHEWS: Well, how about large media enterprises?

DEAN: Let me—yes, let me get—

(LAUGHTER)

DEAN: The answer to that is yes. I would say that there is too much penetration by single corporations in media markets all over this country. We need locally-owned radio stations. There are only two or three radio stations left in the state of Vermont where you can get local news anymore. The rest of it is read and ripped from the AP.

MATTHEWS: So what are you going to do about it? You’re going to be president of the United States, what are you going to do?

DEAN: What I’m going to do is appoint people to the FCC that believe democracy depends on getting information from all portions of the political spectrum, not just one.

So you see what Krauthammer’s ellipses removed—and you see how men like Krauthammer subvert your democracy. As anyone watching this program would know, Dean was joking when he made his statement about wanting to break up Fox. But then, anyone who read the transcript would know that too—the transcript records audience laughter two times, and shows Matthews asking Dean to “be serious.” But men like Krauthammer hate your democracy; they want to reduce you to the status of rubes. So the creative man began cutting-and-pasting, making you think that Dean had been serious. The Washington Post should do the right thing. They should fire Charles Krauthammer—now.

Posted by Michael at 03:01 PM | Link | Comments (1)

Compare and Contrast

In one corner, William Safire, being tactical. In the other corner Joshua Marshall being reasonable. (And, in the background, the Defence Dept. disowning the report Safire is relying on.) You gotta wonder about prundits when they rely on stuff that's already been disowned and refuted. Or just turn to your Daily Howler for a very jaundiced view of the pundit class.

The Safire article is a list of those who he thinks should confess error. Among them,

Former spooks who convinced reporters that there was never any connection between Saddam's Iraqi regime and Osama bin Laden's terror network would forthrightly assert they were uninformed about the decade-long links that were revealed in the classified memo the Senate Intelligence Committee requested from Under Secretary of Defense Douglas Feith. (The secret memo detailing 50 instances has gone relatively uncovered by major media because it surfaced in the current Weekly Standard, but is the subject of an automatic leak investigation — yet another time-wasting mistake.)

It's an especially strange comment to make since the Dept. of Defense — no stranger to the neo-con world view, basically disowned the memo's conclusions, saying “News reports that the Defense Department recently confirmed new information with respect to contacts between al Qaeda and Iraq in a letter to the Senate Intelligence Committee are inaccurate.”

Joshua Marshall has already been there, weighed it, and found it wanting

…is it “case closed”? Not quite. More like, case restated.

What do we already know about the intelligence wars over the Iraq-al Qaida link?

We know that most of the Intelligence Community didn't think there was much there. Some contacts, but nothing substantial. We also know that Doug Feith — along with other administration appointees — didn't agree. And Feith set up his own intelligence shop at the Pentagon to review all the raw data and find what the CIA and others had missed, misinterpreted or buried.

They came up with a raft of purported connections between Saddam and al Qaida. But when they presented their findings to professional analysts in the rest of the Intelligence Community, most notably at the CIA, the consensus was that those findings didn't pass the laugh-test.

And who put together this new memo, the one the Standard article is based on? “The U.S. Government,” as the headline of the article says?

Not exactly. …. This memo is what Doug Feith sent them representing their side of the story. With the exception of some tidbits from interviews with Iraqis now in custody, this is, to all appearances, the same bill of particulars that Feith's shop put together in 2002 and which was panned by the analysts in the rest of the Intel community.

So, the first point to make is that there seems to be little if anything here that the folks in the rest of the Intel Community — outside of Special Plans — did not see before concluding that there were no significant links between Iraq and al Qaida.

Point two is that Feith's shop, the Office of Special Plans, the original source of this memo, gained an apparently richly-deserved reputation for what intel analysts call cherry-picking. That is, culling raw intel data to find all the information that supports the conclusion you want to find and then ignoring all the rest.

Now, of course, Feith's advocates say that everyone else was just doing their own sort of cherry-picking, picking the evidence that supported their preconceived notions, etc. But this is simply another example of a pattern which we see widely in this administration: the inability to recognize that there is such a thing as expertise which is anything more than a cover for ideological predilection (for more on this, see this article.)

More to the point, there's now a record. These are the folks, remember, who had the most outlandish reads on the extent of Iraq's WMD capacities and the most roseate predictions about the ease of the post-war reconstruction. So their record of interpreting raw intelligence is, shall we say, objectively poor.

Spot the dinosaur.

William Safire: Tactics Over Truth

William Safire bought me lunch once.

There. That's a William Safire leed. Has nothing to do with what I'm really going to write about, but it situates me as being a Player. 'Course, when Safire has the personal item it's a signal he's going to be nice to the guy (it's almost always a guy) who was nice to him.

I’ve been reading Safire since he started at the Times. He does have some good qualities as a writer. For example, I think his book on Nixon, Before the Fall, is vastly under-rated. (It begins with meeting Nixon in a Moscow kitchen, the location of the famous Nixon-Khrushchev kitchen debate where Safire was the pitchman for the kitchen-manufacturer. You can see the famous picture Safire took of the debate here.) The book reads like it started out as a piece of puffery, and then took a sharp turn when Safire discovered that Nixon’s Kissinger had bugged his phone.

After all, if Nixon and Kissinger were nuts enough to suspect even true-blue die-hard loyalists like Safire, then maybe there was something wrong with the Nixon administration after all. Not everything, mind, but something.

So the end result is a very readable insider’s book, more balanced than you might think, with plenty of musings on the layercake that was Nixon, and great anecdotes about all the folks who get famous later in the Watergate hearings.

Plus I like his Lincoln book. Not as much as I like Gore Vidal’s, but I like it.

OK. That paid for lunch.

I read Safire’s column regularly. Not because I think it’s accurate. Not because my blood pressure really needs the stimulus. But because it’s so transparently tactical.

Today’s column, Never Love a Stranger is a prime example of the genre. Naturally, no Safire column would be complete without some germ of truth. Here, it's used up in the opening: there doubtlessly are a lot of DC insiders who are not pleased at the idea of a Dean victory. Outsiders can be threatening.

But after that, it's all tactical positioning in which Safire transparently (do you think he thinks we aren't on to him?) tries to define, or mis-define, the folks he dislikes. You know that the Republicans must actually be worried about Dean if Safire feels a need to try to label Dean as McGovernite (pity this meme turns up in more sensible places too). It ought to be tough to paint a balanced-budget guy whom the NRA likes as a McGovernite, but I guess that’s the strategy; or the tryout at least. (Note how Safire subtly denigrates the balanced-budget Democrats as (1) all being for it, so it's not interesting, and (2) worrying that Bush will luck out and there will be a boom.

And of course, there’s yet another outing for that Republican pet dream, Hillary for President. Republicans would love that — run against the candidate with the high negatives. Odd thing is, there are no Democrats supporting this plan, but that doesn’t stop it being a Safire hobbyhorse.

I wish Safire would turn his gifts to actual reporting, instead of constantly trying to (mis)characterize things. But perhaps his formative years as a pitchman for kitchen goods just left too strong a mark.

And even though Mr. Safire bought me a nice lunch at the Army-Navy club, he never wrote the column I was trying to interest him in. Seems the Republicans he called told him ICANN was about privatization, so he couldn't be against it. Tactics, again.

Profile in Courage

You do read some humbling things online. Here's one: t a c i t u s: Failure of nerve.

Impressive as this is essay is, I wonder if the non sequitor with which it concludes is correct: Is it wrong to think that, on average, politicians who have served in the military may be more sensible in their use of force than those for whom combat is an abstraction? And even if that is wrong, does it follow that it's wrong to suspect draft-evaders, again on average, of middle-aged over-compensation?

History is an uncertain guide. For example, both Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon served in the Navy, and both escalated in Vietnam. Clinton had a draft deferment and built a great big military. Current events, however, strongly suggest a conclusion.

John Holbo Deconstructs David Frum

I don't know if this essay by John Holbo [link corrected] deconstructing David Frum's book is right, because I haven't read the book it attacks. (And, if truth be told, I'm especially unwilling to jump to conclusions because I used to know David Frum in college, long ago.) But I will say the Holbo essay is an elegant and very readable piece of writing in itself. Often people who write clearly think clearly too, so I'd bet that if it's wrong, then odds are it is wrong in an interesting way.

“Radical sartorauthoritarianism”? Gotta love it.

Le plus ca change...

I'm behind — very behind — on my pile of NYRB's. In the Oct. 23 issue, already succeeded by another, there is an article by Arthur Schlesinger Jr called “Eyeless in Iraq”. In it he quotes from a letter written by Congressman Abraham Lincoln in 1848, during the US war with Mexico,

Allow the president to invade a neighboring nation whenever he shall deem it necessary to repel an invasion, and you allow him to do so whenever he may choose to say he deems it necessary for such purpose, and you allow him to make war at pleasure…. If to-day he should choose to say he thinks it necessary to invade Canada to prevent the British from invading us, how could you stop him? You may say to him, “I see no probability of the British invading us” but he will say to you, “Be silent: I see it, if you don't.”

Wills on Jefferson

Gary Wills has a sharp and somber honesty that produces a sometimes contrarian clarity of vision and constantly acute prose. His Nixon Agonistes was one of the first serious political books I ever read as a child, and is still, I think, one of the best books on the man who later authored our 'long national nightmare'. His current article in the NYRB is about Jefferson — but unlike the celebratory stuff he's written on Jefferson in the past, this is about Jefferson's dark side. It's about the three-fifths clause, which Wills locates at the center of Jefferson's political strategy and career: lynchpin of the South's power, it was also the but-for cause of the supposed Great Democrat's election, and gave the Southern white establishment enough extra votes to distort national politics until the Civil War.

Wills has written a wonderful essay, again. But this time, instead of shaking my head in awed agreement, I find I have two reactions that he may not have intended.

First, this view of Jefferson supports my impression of him: more opportunist than visionary. A wonderful writer, yes, the source of some of our best and most inspiring political prose, yes, but a man whose life — based on lavish expenditures derived from debt and slave labor — did not just fail to live up to, but gave lie to his ideals. The Louisiana Purchase, Jefferson's great achievement as President, was technically illegal; it also contradicted all of Jefferson's earlier constitutional principles. I had known that it went against the views Jefferson had previously trumpeted; I had not known that one reason for the switch was that westward expansion now meant the three-fifths clause could expand West too, and before it had not.

The size of the slave representation was at issue in each of Jefferson's expansions of what he called “the empire of liberty”—the survey of the West, his purchase of Louisiana, his attempt to add the Floridas and Cuba to America, his support for slavery in Missouri and beyond, even his panic over Burr's attempt to detach part of the Southwest from the Union. In all these matters, the importance of the federal ratio has been overlooked, largely because historians have not listened to the objections to it raised by Federalist critics like Timothy Pickering. Each threatened new addition to the plantation region became for them a flash point in the concern over the federal ratio, several times prompting moves to amend the Constitution by its repeal.

People neglect this aspect when discussing the way Jefferson changed his stand on slavery in the territories between 1784, when there was no three-fifths representation, and 1820, when there was. Even Jefferson's drive to open the University of Virginia as soon as possible was meant to provide educated defenders of the extension of slavery westward, to keep good Southerners away from Harvard or Yale, where men were taught “the sacred principle of our holy alliance of 'restrictionism.'” As David Brion Davis put it, “When the chips were down, as in the Missouri crisis, he threw his weight behind slavery's expansion.”

This had less to do with theories about slavery than with the concrete advantage the three-fifths clause gave to any added slave territory.

My second reaction was that we're still living out the consequences of the other, less disgusting, electoral error in the Constitution—the composition of the Senate. I get grumpy reading about how filibustering Democrats are thwarting the will of the majority when the so-called minority thwarting the so-called majority (which usually cuts them out of key parts of the process) actually represents fewer people; by giving empty states the same two Senators as crowded ones, our electoral system “gives states with small populations — mainly, though not entirely, red states — disproportionate representation in the Senate, and to a lesser extent in the Electoral College. In fact, half the Senate is elected by just 16 percent of the population.” (Krugman) The largest disproportion between the biggest and the smallest state at the time of the Founding was something on the order of 11:1; today it must be nearing 100:1.

Gary Wills's latest Jefferson book, “Negro President” : Jefferson and the Slave Power will be published in November. The excerpt alone gives one lots to think about. It looks to be another winner.

Treasures

National Treasure Russel Baker discusses National Treasure Paul Krugman and the The Awful Truth in the current issue of the The New York Review of Books. A great read, as Russel Baker always is. I miss his weekly columns.

Why We Don't Have A Better Press Corps (Part I)

Since Brad has been so kind as to mention this very young blog as a candidate for his project to subvert the dominant internet link hierarchy, (and what better candidate given my BlogShares market share of either 0.00109649638077873 % or 0.00441336872434729 %!) it's time to dust off and commit to finishing my post on Brad's long-running and no doubt never-ending series on 'Why Oh Why Can't We Have a Better Press Corps?' (See, e.g., Part CCCCLXXVI). My thoughts are also influenced by a steady diet of the incomparable Daily Howler.

On and off I've been thinking a lot about the press question, maybe because I used to love reading the newspaper, maybe because reporting was one of the careers I (very) briefly considered while in college. I was an active student journalist, news editor of the campus paper, and both my mother and brother are journalists. I agree that the state of mass media reporting is terrible—although it bears mention that specialty journalism is flourishing. Not only is the Economist selling well, but so are a plethora of smart high-price, low-circulation publications like the National Journal.

The problem or problems is with the mass media. What explains the cowardice of major newspapers, their focus on the trivial at the expense of the significant, their weird idea that one has to give 'both sides' even if one is demonstrably false and believed by almost no one, and their failure to communicate (to understand?) basic social scientific concepts?

The changes in Big Newspapers seem to me to be driven by the unfortunate coincidence of four factors: economic, sociological, technical and ideological. I'll address the first the two today and the other two in Part Two, which I'll put up Real Soon Now™.

[As to what's wrong with TV I have nothing to offer that hasn't been said often before (partisan ownership, licensing rules that entrench owners and fail to protect the public, the economics of cable access, the 'MTV' approach to soundbite reporting, and so on and so on) , and am in any case handicapped as a TV commentator by my failure to own one.]

Economics. Print newspapers are as a class a slowly shrinking business, although there remain substantial profits for the last paper standing in a big market. There are many fewer newspapers than there used to be, and far, far more owned by newspaper chains. Absentee owners with stockholders demand high profits. The Miami Herald, for example, recently had to trim its staff in order to attain the profit target imposed by Knight Ridder. (And it has recently been redesigned to look like a USA Today McPaper, but that's another issue.)

Even more significantly, there are now almost no cities with two serious daily newspapers. That means fewer newspaper wars, less concern about being “scooped,” and generally a loss of the competitive dynamic that kept news reporting sharp and aggressive. Newspapers now see their competition as TV (and maybe radio). But while these may be fierce competitors for consumer attention, they are rarely competition for news gathering — indeed many TV stations take their agendas from the morning papers.

To the extent that the market for the attention of news consumers could be modeled as Downsian and linear, ranging from serious to fluff (with TV very much on the fluff end of the spectrum), it's not surprising that in the absence of serious print competition, many newspapers have gravitated to the fluffier end of the news provision spectrum. So long as they are a little meatier than the TV, the incentive is to converge towards TV, as the newspapers keep everyone to the meatier side of the spectrum, and reducing poaching from TV.

(As I'll discuss in Part 2, the lack of rivals also has an ideological effect, in that it makes some papers think they have an extra duty to avoid taking sides—or play everthing down the middle—since they are the only game in town.)

Sociology. In Ye Olde Days, many newspaper reporters were in effect the intellectuals of the working classes. Most reporters didn't have a college education. The job did not pay that well. While undoubtedly frequently chummy with some of the power brokers of the day, the press nonetheless identified with readers who were not rich, not powerful, and not necessarily well-educated. The print press today is a profession. The Fourth Estate not only went to college, it went to better colleges than many politicians — or, worse, went to college with the politicians. The print press gets a professional's salary. The print press not only doesn't identify with working people, it often identifies with the politicians, or at least some of them.

This, I think, partly explains why the print press will pile on to a “scandal” when someone casts the first stone but remians curiously reluctant to say, or even suggest, that the emperor has no clothes when it comes to policy issues. Note the word “partly”—

(What the zeitgeist of the TV press is, is harder to say. The salary variance is greater, with some salaries in the showbiz range. At its best it's still journalism, but at its worst it's something lower than the Yellow Press of yore. Indeed, it's all too easy to imagine that the comparison between Fox News (and CNN's) handlilng of the Iraq conflict and the treatment of the sinking—if sinking it was—of the Maine, may become a historian's set-piece.)

In Part Two, I'll discuss the technology of news management, the press's misguided definition of “news”. I hope to conclude with some thoughts about What Can Be Done — if I can find the right note between despair and Utopianism
33