Month: December 2009

by Chris Bodenner

The three American hikers detained in Iran five months ago will now stand trial for espionage. Ugh.

by Patrick Appel

Yglesias argued a few days ago that the country is ungovernable because the Democratic agenda has been hamstrung by the minority. Ezra Klein has often written a posts along the same lines. Ed Morrissey, among other bloggers on the right, pounced:

Funny, but I don’t recall Yglesias demanding those changes while Democrats were in the minority in the Senate.

Yglesias says he is being misread:

Maybe “ungovernable” was not a good word for this, but I meant to convey the fact that the political system seems incapable of addressing large-scale objective problems. For example, there’s the long-term fiscal deficit. For another example, there’s anthropogenic climate change. For another example, our tax code is a very inefficient means of raising revenue. For a final one, our health care system involves a massive level of waste. These are real problems, not just ideological bugaboos. And I don’t think anything from the Bush administration experience should give us confidence that they’re solvable. Mostly Bush got “a lot done” by dodging those problems. When he did edge toward tackling them—his tax reform commission, for example—he got nowhere.

Weigel offers some support:

When Bush put his weight behind the sort of reforms that [Glenn] Reynolds likes, and that his base wanted — Social Security reform, for example — it died in Congress.

The big exception to all of this, of course, was tax policy. Bush got enormous supply-side tax cuts through Congress. But as Reynolds must know, those tax cuts didn’t need 60 votes to get through the Senate; they went through the budget process and needed 51 votes. I don’t think anyone would make the argument that tax cuts should have to pass a supermajority threshold. I know very few conservatives who are glad that Democratic filibusters, when the party was at an ebb of 45 Senate seats, could kill entitlement reform. But in our current system, cost-shifting policy like that is easy to pass and large-scale policies are tough to pass — note that “deficit hawks” like Sen. Kent Conrad (D-N.D.) are not proposing actual entitlement reforms, but toothless “commissions” to look at those reforms.

by Patrick Appel

A reader writes:

Patrick says that he "doesn't buy" Scott's argument about peasant societies in so-called "Zomia" discarding writing as part of the creation of new forms of social order apart from authoritarian state practice. I haven't read Scott's book yet so can't say what I make of the evidence in his specific case, but Patrick's reaction seems to be based on an implicit theory of the neutral superiority of writing as a functional technology for organizing society. But the history of writing and the state is riddled with examples of writing becoming the location for power struggles. Genghis Khan, for example, as he swept with his illiterate forces across Asia at some point made the decision to introduce certain forms of literacy as the only available technology for coordinating his expanding empire, and as a result a class of scribes from literate tributary states rose to power in his court. He adopted writing because it was the best possible way for him to rule, which is one of Scott's points.

Medieval England after the Conquest provides another historical case that in many ways resembles Scott's claims about Zomia. England's move from unwritten customary law to more codified legal arrangements (Glanvill famously writes in the 12th century, "Although the laws of England are not written, it does not seem absurd to call them laws.") involved a transfer of power from the old martial nobility to a new group of literate state-builders. Often this latter group resisted the demands of the new written social order strongly because writing was not just writing, it was a new basis for power that made their swords and retainers count for less. Clanchy's book "From memory to written record" provides a wonderful history of this transformation, and he relates a nice story from the chronicle of Walter of Guisborough that captures this sense of writing involving the transfer of power:

"The king disturbed some of the great men of the land through his judges wanting to know by what [written, legal] warrant they held their lands, and if they did not have a good warrant, he immediately seized their lands. Among the rest, the Earl Warenne was called before the king's judges. Asked by what warrant he held, he produced in their midst an ancient and rusty sword and said: 'Look at this, my lords, this is my warrant! For my ancestors came with William the Bastard and conquered their lands with the sword, and by the sword I will defend them from anyone intending to seize them. The king did not conquer and subject the land by himself, but our forebears were sharers and partners with him!'"

The point being that these guys also resisted a social order based on writing for very rational reasons. What Scott argues is not that people have chosen to be illiterate, but that they have realized that organizing themselves around writing has important consequences for the consolidation of power and control, that is, of the state. The title of Scott's book is "The Art of Not Being Governed". Whether or not the evidence supports the claim is a different story, but on its face insisting on oral and customary traditions instead of writing is an absolutely plausible element of such an art. Ask Genghis and Henry II.

by Andrew Sprung

Buffalo" (NY) and "beauty" do not normally occur in the same sentence. We're talking about a city 'belted' with derelict factories that's been losing population for a generation. It's struggling to demolish thousands of abandoned houses. It's been known to get snowed on for 100 days in a row (I was there — with a long driveway and no snow-blower).

But Buffalo has elements of beauty dear to a few doughty hearts (e.g., my wife's – she's a native). These include Olmsted-designed boulevards radiating from an Olmsted central park (Delaware Park); a number of early twentieth-century architectural icons; lots of big, boxy beautiful Victorian houses that can be had for a relative song; a handful of long, graceful commercial and residential avenues that make a vital urban enclave; a surprisingly vibrant arts community; and prices that make it almost like living in another country.

In recent years, too, Buffalo has become a site of the triumph of imagination over physical reality in two ways that have caught my heart. The first is the inkpool spread of neighborhoods that have gone mad with gardening.  Really. Gardening, like happiness and obesity, is contagious, and urban pioneers on the West Side have inspired neighbors to garden and so attracted  new urban pioneers. Call it clear, grow and build. The movement has been driven in large part by the mind-blowing Buffalo Garden Walk, America's best event of its kind, held the last weekend in July.

Unlike in most garden walks, any resident can exhibit — and over 340 do. There are no admission fees. There are Japanese gardens, English gardens, Russian gardens (i.e., barely controlled wildernesses) and what I would call Buffalo gardens – eclectic, funky mixes in which found objects and exotic-looking surrounding rooftops figure prominently. There's ubiquitous bee balm, which grows like a weed up there. There's a miniaturist intensity to many of the small back-yard enclosures.   But Buffalo's also got a fair amount of open space, and some entries are more like small parks. A slideshow is here.

The second Buffalo transformation is in the paintings of local artist Peter Fowler, whose richly layered urban fantasias, in his own words, "conjure a parallel world of past and present."

To look at his landscapes (which are proliferating as fast in Buffalo living rooms as bee balm in the yards), you'd think Buffalo was Venice, or Shangri-la. You'd want to go to there. And you should!

by Patrick Appel

Bryan Caplan points to a survey of 438 professional philosophers and PhDs and 210 philosophy graduate students on their feelings about various subjects. This relates to the free will debate (if you don't understand these terms, Wikipedia is there to help)

Free will: compatibilism, libertarianism, or no free will?

Accept: compatibilism	873 / 3226 (27%)
Lean toward: compatibilism	788 / 3226 (24.4%)
Lean toward: libertarianism	303 / 3226 (9.3%)
Accept: libertarianism	288 / 3226 (8.9%)
Lean toward: no free will	255 / 3226 (7.9%)
Accept: no free will	236 / 3226 (7.3%)

by Patrick Appel

Nate Silver finds an interesting correlation:

Earlier this year, the World Bank ranked countries according to their vulnerability to five particular harms from climate change: drought, flooding, storms, sea-level rise, and agricultural impact. Some 20 nations ranked either in the top 12 in at least two categories or the top five in any one category and were included in the Gallup survey.

In those countries, on average, just 47 percent of the residents in the survey said they knew something about climate change at all. This compares to 61 percent for all countries worldwide, and 93 percent in the highly-developed G8 countries.

by Chris Bodenner

Health Insurers Caught Paying Facebook Gamers Virtual Currency To Oppose Reform Bill

(Hat tip: TDW)

by Andrew Sprung

As Chris noted earlier today, Glenn Greenwald extended his grudge match with Joe Klein today:

Over the weekend, Time's Joe Klein, undoubtedly reciting what his hawkish government sources told him, trotted out a brand new "justification" for the war in Afghanistan:  we have to stay in order to prevent India and Pakistan from going to war with each other.  The U.S. government excels at finding brand new Urgent National Security Reasons to continue fighting wars once the original justifications fail or otherwise become inoperative:  no more Al Qaeda in Afghanistan? Still have to stay, otherwise India and Pakistan will fight.  As part of his stenography services, Klein explained:

[S]ome of the best arguments about why this war is necessary must go unspoken by the President.

I can see contesting the swallow-the-spider-to-catch-the-fly logic of the U.S. fighting a war in Afghanistan to keep Pakistan from imploding and to keep it from going to war with India.  But there is nothing new or really covert about this argument, though the Administration is not exactly trumpeting it. It's been aired for some time, and it's central to the Administration's calculus. Here's Steve Coll — a net supporter of the Administration's AfPak policy but no "stenographer" –  testifying before the Senate on Oct. 1:

The success of Pakistan—that is, its emergence as a stable, modernizing, prosperous, pluralistic country, at peace with its neighbors and within its borders, and integrated economically in South and Central Asia—is obviously important, even vital, not only to the United States but to the broader international community.

One obstacle to the emergence of such a Pakistan is the deeply held view within the Pakistani security services that the United States will abandon the region once it has defeated or disabled Al Qaeda. Pakistani generals correctly fear that a precipitous American withdrawal from Afghanistan would be destabilizing, and that it would strengthen Islamist radical networks, including but not limited to the Taliban, who are today destabilizing Pakistan as well as the wider region.

Alternatively or concurrently, sections of the Pakistani military and civilian élite also fear that the United States may collaborate with India, naïvely or deliberately, to weaken Pakistan, by supporting governments in Kabul that at best are hostile to Pakistani interests or at worst facilitate Indian efforts to destabilize, disarm or even destroy the Pakistani state.

The problem lies in how the Taliban and the Pakistan Army will read the explicit use of a calendar. Ahmed Rashid, on NPR’s Morning Edition, speaking from Lahore, voiced the same fear that seized me when I heard the President be so explicit about 2011: No matter how nuanced the invocation, Pakistani liberals fighting against the Army’s hedging strategy of support for the Taliban and Al Qaeda will be demoralized by the use of a specific date. They will interpret it as evidence that the United States has already made a decision to leave the Afghan battlefield and that it will ultimately repeat its past pattern of abandoning Pakistan periodically. This may be unfair, but the perception is inevitable…

The question of Pakistani perception turned Coll's mind toward Rashid because that is Rashid's brief. In November 2008, Rediff India Abroad picked up this bit of transition news:

In fact, Petraeus has reportedly nominated Ahmed Rashid and Shuja Nawaz, author of the recently published book on Pakistani Army called Crossed Swords, as members of a brains trust to advise him on a new strategy towards Afghanistan and Pakistan.

Ahmed Rashid has been arguing for some months now that the Pakistani Army cannot be expected to co-operate wholeheartedly with the US Armed Forces in the war against Al Qaeda and the Taliban unless there is a forward movement in settling the Kashmir issue and India is pressured to cut down its presence in Afghanistan. There were not many takers for his arguments in the Bush Administration. But they have already started influencing the thinking of many who are close to Obama.

Those who worry about Pakistani paranoia over India's intentions in Afghanistan, and the impact of U.S. Afghan policy, are not making it up.  Last week, the Pakistani columnist Mohammad Jamil, who writes regularly for the Daily Times in Pakistan, wrote a sprawling response to Obama's speech that retailed much of the policy discussion in the U.S. but also included this unfamiliar (to us) note:

Obama ordered deployment of an additional 30,000 troops to Afghanistan and defied predictions that in his new strategy, India would be given a pivotal role in Afghanistan. One did not hear a single word about India during his speech; however, it could be a deliberate attempt to keep certain things under wraps on the pretext of addressing Pakistan’s concerns.

 Jamil's piece ended with this burst of blended paranoia:

However, the real threat is from the US, because the Jewish lobby and the Indian lobby have not been able to stomach Pakistan’s nuclear capability.

Klein's reporting is spot-on. Concern about Pakistani-Indian relations is central to the Administration's thinking about Afghanistan.  You can argue with the policy; you can argue, as Greenwald does, that it's unwise to escalate a war without strong domestic support (though Obama's speech seems to have boosted support somewhat); you can argue that the Administration should itself air these concerns more fully.  But it makes no sense to hit Klein simultaneously for airing the "secret" rationale and for implicitly supporting it. If it were secret, and Klein supported it, why would he air it?

by Chris Bodenner

Splicing together Christmas lights and Guitar Hero (it gets better and better):