[Ross] Looking for a way to cram the whole internet into a single magical browser page? Of course you are – and that’s why they invented Netvibes. Reihan explains it all here.
Category: The Dish
Blogging race
[Megan] Also at The Economist this week, we’ve got John McWhorter guestblogging on Democracy in America, our American politics blog. His first two posts are great. On Al Sharpton:
Just where anyone gets the idea that any significant segment of black America takes its cue from Mr Sharpton as to how to vote is unclear. Mr Sharpton always implies that he has some kind of power in this vein a la old-time city bosses, but given that he has no raft of patronage of the kind that those guys did, and given that neither black leaders nor ordinary folk are given to mentioning Mr Sharpton as their bellwether for who to pull the lever for, it would appear that everybody including Mr Sharpton is playing a kind of game for the cameras.
I suppose Mr Sharpton does have a kind of power in the negative sense, in that if Mrs Clinton, in particular, did not go through the motions of kissing Mr Sharpton’s feet, in certain quarters the question would be raised as to whether she were a racist or not. I’m not ecstatic over the idea of measuring one’s feelings about black people according to whether one is a fan of the particular black person known as Reverend Al, but I understand that Senator Clinton doesn’t have time to split hairs.
Mr McWhorter also has a great bit on the "Stop snitching" movement:
Ecce the “stop snitching” Zeitgeist, in which it has become a shibboleth of being “down with” your people in poor black neighborhoods to refuse to give the police information about a black-on-black homicide, even if you witnessed it. This version of black identity has become so entrenched over the past few years that it is making it ever harder for investigators to crack murder cases.
No—tracing this to “racism” doesn’t work. Police brutality was much worse in the past, and the War on Drugs is old news. The current "stop snitching" notion is the latest fashion amidst a larger phenomenon: a sense among black and brown teens and twenty-somethings that to be in aggressive opposition is the soul of being authentic. There has been an element of this in the black community since the sixties. But these days, it is so deeply felt that it is tacitly approved to place anti-authoritarian sentiment over black lives.
What planted the seeds for this new black identity to develop and set in is, ironically, the eclipse of open racism and segregation. When all black people had to make the best of the worst, there was no room for callisthenic acting up. Recordings like Cam’ron’s "Come Home With Me", celebrating gunplay and drug peddling and depicting women as unclean tramps worthy of physical abuse, would have been unthinkable.
But the reason people like Cam’ron have elevated this attitude into an entire sense of place in the world is because the Civil Rights movement freed blacks into an America that had just made the upturned middle finger into an icon of higher awareness.
He’ll be blogging for us all week, so please stop by.
Bomb, Bomb, Bomb Iran
[Ross] Did McCain’s little ditty actually help his campaign? Slate thinks so, and so does Daniel Larison, so it must be true.
The Health of Nations
[Ross] Speaking of domestic policy wonkery, Jonathan Cohn and David Gratzer went back and forth on health care last week in TNR Online, and Yuval Levin chimes in here. (Yuval’s earlier lay-of-the-land essay on the issue, co-written with Eric Cohen, is also worth your while.)
Leave the Gun. Take the New Yorker.
[Ross] If I were to pick the New Yorker writer least likely to convince me that "there is no reason that any private citizen in a democracy should own a handgun," Adam Gopnik would be pretty high on the list. And sure enough, I’m not convinced.
Fortunately, the issue also includes Anthony Lane on Barbara Stanwyck, which is a slightly better match of writer and subject.
Conservatives and Carbon Taxes
[Ross] Matt Yglesias wonders why more right-wingers aren’t singing the praises of a carbon tax:
Every once in a while I wonder why you don’t see a constant, dogmatic drumbeat of enthusiasm for carbon taxes from conservative pundits. You’d say, "we should have a carbon tax and offset it with reductions in income taxes" and split yuppie liberal types who worry about global warming from more traditional populist types. What’s more, since to be effective a carbon tax would need to succeed in reducing carbon emissions you’d also set the federal government on a glide path to reduced revenues. It’s great. But you almost never see people beating this drum.
I can imagine a few explanations. One is that most conservative pundits have allowed that portion of the brain that one uses to analyze a substantive question of national policy to atrophy to the extent that they don’t understand why this is something that conservatives should like. Another is corruption; this proposal would be bad interest group politics and the energy companies are major financiers of the right. A third is hackishness; this proposal would put you in disagreement with George W. Bush and other Republican Party politicians. Last is the politics of resentment; conservative pundits just hate environmentalists too much to see the forest for the trees. Some combination of factors may be at work. And it’s worth saying that several of your better conservative pundits — Andrew Sullivan and David Brooks come to mind — are on the bandwagon.
Well, Matt’s least-favorite conservative pundit is on the bandwagon too. So is David Frum, and so are various right-of-center economists: Greg Mankiw is all for it; Bruce Bartlett has suggested that he’d be amenable; Tyler Cowen is on board; and so on. It’s true that the broader "movement" hasn’t embraced the concept the way they’ve embraced, say, the war against "Islamofascism," and I’m obviously sympathetic to the idea that the Right has let the domestic-policy side of its brain atrophy a bit in the last decade or so, and that conservative intellectuals haven’t pushed back nearly enough against the GOP’s interest groups of late. But I’m not sure that the case of the missing carbon tax is a problem with conservative pundits, in particular, so much as it is a manifestation of a problem with punditry in general. If you were to pick a really good policy idea that liberals ought to be supporting but aren’t, I suspect you wouldn’t find all that many prominent left-of-center pundits championing it, because most prominent pundits just don’t champion innovative domestic policy ideas very often.
Why? Well, because American punditry is geared around horse-race analysis of the kind that dominates most political talk shows (see this Yglesias post, for instance, which highlights a particularly sorry example), and at the higher end it’s filled with writers who have been given columns because their editors like their writing style, not their substance. (Thus Maureen Dowd, thus Frank Rich, thus Anna Quindlen, and so on the down the list of liberals who sound sweet and have almost nothing substantial say.) In addition, foreign policy is much, much sexier than domestic policy, so the smarter pundits tend to gravitate toward writing about war and peace, not VATs and EITCs and all that boring stuff.
All of which is easy to bemoan, but it’s also the case that TV shows and newspapers serve an audience of consumers (a dwindling audience, in the latter case), and to a certain extent they’re just responding to what this audience demands: I’m willing to bet that horse-race talk, foreign-policy arguments, and Dowd-style stylings sell way more newspapers (to the extent that any punditry sells newspapers) than serious proposals for, well, a carbon tax. Which, to bring this post full circle, is also part of the reason the Right has grown so much less interesting, so much staler and so predictable, in recent years – because conservative writers are playing to a mass market in a way that the old NR gang and the ’70s neocons weren’t, and that market doesn’t want new and troubling ideas like a carbon tax with an income tax offset (I’d prefer a payroll tax offset myself, but that of course just makes the idea even more confusing) – it wants, well, this.
Those in the know . . .
[Megan] Daniel Davies and I have been at loggerheads over the Burnham et. al. studies of Iraq casualties published in the Lancet last fall. So it’s probably no surprise that I think his imagination is running away with him on this:
Really rather shameful. Riyadh Lafta, one of the co-authors of the Johns Hopkins/Lancet studies on excess deaths in Iraq, has been refused a transit visa for his flight to Vancouver to make a presentation on alarming increases in child cancer. He was apparently meant to be passing on some documentation to some other medical researchers who are going to write a paper with him on the subject; the presentation was happening in Vancouver because Dr. Lafta had already been refused a visa to visit the USA.
What on earth can be in this data? Presumably the UK and US authorities have reasoned that Dr Lafta is an ex Ba’ath Party member (as he would have had to have been to hold a position in the Iraqi Health Ministry), and thus the data he is carrying is not really about child cancer at all. Perhaps he is involved in some sort of “Boys from Brazil” type plot to clone an army of super-soldiers from Saddam Hussein’s DNA, and for this reason the UK cannot be exposed to this deadly information for even four hours in the Heathrow transit lounge.
The alternative – that Dr Lafta is being intentionally prevented from travelling in order to hush up his research on post-war deaths (research which even the Foreign Office have now more or less given up on trying to pretend isn’t broadly accurate), or to hush up the news about paediatric cancer for political convenience – is too horrible to contemplate. I’d note that there isn’t an election on in the USA at present, so the denialist crowd can shove that little slur up their backsides this time too.
I find them too horrible to contemplate for another reason: it makes absolutely no sense. There are faxes, email, and DHL that could get the data to the conference just fine without Dr Lafta’s presence. In the comments, Mr Davies spins increasingly desperate implausible theories to explain this weird assertion. Here is the exchange:
Theoretically yes . . . but while I’m no scientist, my impression is that things like tabulating the basic data to test your hypothesis is usually done a leetle bit earlier than the night before your conference presenting the results. Since his general schtick involves accusing me of not understanding scientific and statistical procedure, forgive me if I chortle.
Social proof
[Megan] Sorry for all the reader mail, but it’s unusually good this weekend. A reader on the problem of publicising mass killings:
I’m sure that desire for notoriety is a factor is such killings as went on at VA Tech (especially because he sent a video to NBC), but I don’t think that’s usually a driving motivation. The danger of over-reporting (or reporting at all) killings like this is what Cialdini calls "social proof." In his book "Influence," Robert Cialdini details how in the time following most well-publicized suicides, the rate of motor vehicle and small aircraft crashes increase by a factor of 5. He hypothesizes that these are actually suicides, for various reasons that I won’t go in to now. But the point is that social proof is a powerful motivator, even in matters of life and death. Social proof is the idea that if somebody else is doing something, it’s more likely that it’s a good idea. You see it all the time in advertisements (anything that says "over 4 million people use our toothpaste" or other such nonsense). So the more we publicize mass killings like at VA Tech, the more other people might think it’s a good idea and actually do it. It’s a scary thing, and a powerful argument for limiting the amount of facetime we give to mass killers.
Federalism
[Megan] On the legal system, a reader writes:
Generallly, there is a great disparity between the competency of prosecutors and public defenders, and judges in State systems versus those in the Federal system. Federal prosecutors in cities like Chicago, where I am from, Los Angeles, New York etc. are often educated at the best schools in the country and many have clerked for federal judges including Supreme Court judges. Most of the attorneys in Chicago, when I was there, had come from lucrative jobs in the private sector but preferred the work as an Assistant United States Attorney. (In recent years however, many of the best prosecutors have left the offices throughout the United States because, for the first time in anyone’s memory, politics were injected into the system.) Our opponents in the high profile trials are often defended by the “best” defense counsel that money can buy and lose as often or more often then the federal public defenders. The federal public defenders, like their counter parts have similar educational backgrounds and significant resources – and many federal prosecutors recognize that some of the federal defenders do a better job for their client then the high paid well known private counsel.What is true however is that at the State level there are many problems. The prosecutors are often not as well educated, politics is the rule, they are overworked and they, like the public defenders, have limited resources. The state system is dedicated to getting as many cases through it as possible thus the prosecutors and public defenders are not known for writing skills and write few substantive motions before, during or after a case. On the other hand, in cases of any significance, federal prosecutors and defense attorneys spend much of their time writing and responding to thoughtful motions. This is why the legal tragedies over the years emanated from the flawed systems that are found in so many states. High paid defense counsel can overwhelm a state prosecutor with motions and the state judge gives these attorneys leeway and credibility that are not warranted. Additionally public defenders must deal with prosecutors who are not there to see that justice is done but rather to win re-election. In sum the Duke case never would have been brought in federal court, OJ would have been convicted ( the judge would not have been intimidated and awed) and it is very likely all those men who have been released from death row would not have been there in the first place had any of the cases been federal cases.
Vive la France!
[Megan] Wondering what to make of this weekend’s events in France? We have the whole scoop over on Certain Ideas of Europe, The Economist’s new European blog.
As I write, a panel of politicians, including Ms Royal’s partner, François Hollande (who is the Parti Socialiste’s “first secretary”, or boss) is already examining the entrails of today’s vote. Mr Hollande is pouring as much cold water as possible on the victory speech just given to his cheering supporters by Mr Sarkozy—a speech notable for its grace towards Ms Royal and for the message that “Sarko” intends to appeal to all of the French, not just those on the right.
There will, of course, be another two weeks of this, and it is entirely possible that Sarko’s wish for a battle of “ideas” with “Ségo” will evolve into a nasty battle of personalities. But in the meantime, French democracy has performed rather impressively. The turnout is said to be around four-fifths of the electorate. In my local village, the mayor chose to put the voting booths on the top floor of the mairie—but a steady stream of old ladies (proof, surely, that French women have the western world’s longest life expectancy) joined the young and fit to climb the stairs and cast their ballots for France’s future. Having witnessed not just today’s vote but also France’s 2002 election and America’s 2004 election, I have to say that Americans—who love to deride the French, and vice versa—could certainly learn a thing or two from the land of the Gauls: no hanging chads, no dodgy computer systems, no accusations of voting skulduggery. On the other hand, the discussions in the TV studios are just as interminable.
So just to get this straight. Your two leading theories are A: “Boys from Brazil” or B: The US/UK are denying a passport, because without the passport Lafta can not convey the “deadly data”?
Now your B is obviously a joke, given that he could email s-mime/sftp/tor/fax/fed-ex a dvd/etc etc the data to the UK and then video conference for whatever requires his personal apperances.
So now lets get down to business and start figuring out where this dastardly professor is hiding his clone army…..
not necessarily at all – he might have a load of Iraqi medical records which needed to be tabulated and entered into a database, which might be difficult to achieve in Iraq at present as there is a war on.
daniel, so your theory is that he has a load of Iraqi medical records which need to be tabulated in the US or the UK, not in Iraq or, say, any other country in the world?
I think we’re back to the clone army theory.