NYT

The spokesman for President Hamid Karzai said Thursday that the C.I.A. was responsible for calling in an airstrike on April 7 that left 17 Afghan civilians dead, 12 of them children, and that the secret Afghan militias that the agency controls behaved as if they were “responsible to no one.”

“It was a C.I.A. operation using a security structure that was in full service of the C.I.A. and run by the C.I.A.,” said the spokesman, Aimal Faizi, who said his remarks reflected the views of the Afghan president. Mr. Faizi also criticized the agency and American Special Operations troops for running numerous similar militias elsewhere in Afghanistan, with similar problems.

The criticism from Mr. Faizi and other Afghan officials pulled aside a curtain on a clandestine operation that went badly awry in the rugged mountains of eastern Kunar Province, killing an American C.I.A. employee and seriously wounding three other Americans working for the agency. The American who died had been in charge of a group of undercover paramilitaries known as the 0-4 Unit, a so-called Counterterrorist Pursuit Team, according to Afghan investigators.

Afghan reaction to the episode challenges the core assumptions in negotiations with the Afghan government about the nature of the United States’ presence in Afghanistan after 2014. The military wants a mission with two main goals: training Afghan forces and conducting counterterrorism raids against groups like Al Qaeda. Special Operations forces and irregular forces like the militias run by the C.I.A. are a crucial part of the effort, American officials say.

But Mr. Karzai has been deeply suspicious about the activity of irregular forces in his country, and in March he banned American Special Operations forces from operating in Wardak Province. Now, the C.I.A. is the focus of his ire.

A spokesman for the C.I.A. would not comment about the case.

Allan Nairn "The Genocide Trial of General Efrain Rios Montt Has Just Been Suspended: A firsthand behind-the-scenes account of how Guatemala's current President and threats of violence killed the case."

For a while it looked like Guatemala was about to deliver justice.

But the genocide case against General Efrain Rios Montt has just been suspended, hours before a criminal court was poised to deliver a verdict.

The last-second decision to kill the case was technically taken by an appeals court.

But behind the decision stands secret intervention by Guatemala's current president and death threats delivered to judges and prosecutors by associates of Guatemala's army.

Many dozens of Mayan massacre survivors risked their lives to testify. But now the court record they bravely created has been erased from above.

The following account of some of my personal knowledge of the case was written several days ago. I was asked to keep it private until a trial verdict had been reached...

Bahrain "Crackdown Intensifies Before F1 in Bahrain". Also here
India  "U.S. aims to expand India arms trade by 'billions of dollars'"

I'm up for us "All Being Bostonians Today". But then can we all be Yemenis tomorrow & Pakistanis the day after? That's how empathy works.
— Gary Younge (@garyyounge) April 16, 2013

Greenwald is good.

continuing from recently, and earlier.

see also comedians, academics, and "intellectuals", below. 

Krugman 2013, The Antisocial Network

The philosophical misconception, however, seems to me to be even bigger. Goldbugs and bitbugs alike seem to long for a pristine monetary standard, untouched by human frailty. But that’s an impossible dream. Money is, as Paul Samuelson once declared, a “social contrivance,” not something that stands outside society. Even when people relied on gold and silver coins, what made those coins useful wasn’t the precious metals they contained, it was the expectation that other people would accept them as payment. 

Actually, you’d expect the Winklevosses, of all people, to get this, because in a way money is like a social network, which is useful only to the extent that other people use it. But I guess some people are just bothered by the notion that money is a human thing, and want the benefits of the monetary network without the social part. Sorry, it can’t be done.

Krugman in 1996 Ricardo's Difficult Idea

In this essay, I will try to offer answers to these questions. The first thing I need to do is to make clear how few people really do understand Ricardo's difficult idea -- since the response of many intellectuals, challenged on this point, is to insist that of course they understand the concept, but they regard it as oversimplified or invalid in the modern world. Once this point has been established, I will try to defend the following hypothesis: 

(i) At the shallowest level, some intellectuals reject comparative advantage simply out of a desire to be intellectually fashionable. Free trade, they are aware, has some sort of iconic status among economists; so, in a culture that always prizes the avant-garde, attacking that icon is seen as a way to seem daring and unconventional. 

(ii) At a deeper level, comparative advantage is a harder concept than it seems, because like any scientific concept it is actually part of a dense web of linked ideas. A trained economist looks at the simple Ricardian model and sees a story that can be told in a few minutes; but in fact to tell that story so quickly one must presume that one's audience understands a number of other stories involving how competitive markets work, what determines wages, how the balance of payments adds up, and so on. 

(iii) At the deepest level, opposition to comparative advantage -- like opposition to the theory of evolution -- reflects the aversion of many intellectuals to an essentially mathematical way of understanding the world. Both comparative advantage and natural selection are ideas grounded, at base, in mathematical models -- simple models that can be stated without actually writing down any equations, but mathematical models all the same. The hostility that both evolutionary theorists and economists encounter from humanists arises from the fact that both fields lie on the front line of the war between C.P. Snow's two cultures: territory that humanists feel is rightfully theirs, but which has been invaded by aliens armed with equations and computers.

Riverbend, after 6 years

April 9, 2013 marks ten years since the fall of Baghdad. Ten years since the invasion. Since the lives of millions of Iraqis changed forever. It’s difficult to believe. It feels like only yesterday I was sharing day to day activities with the world. I feel obliged today to put my thoughts down on the blog once again, probably for the last time. ...

4/8  AP

Opponents of the late Margaret Thatcher are taking a kind of musical revenge on the former prime minister, pushing the song "Ding Dong! The Witch is Dead" up the British charts in a posthumous protest over her polarizing policies. 

By Friday the online campaign had propelled the "Wizard of Oz" song to No. 1 on British iTunes and into the top five of the music chart used by the BBC to compile its weekly radio countdown. 

David Karpf, who studies online campaigns, said the chart battle was an example of a new kind of protest enabled by social media — "A way for people to signal protest en masse without shouting from the rooftops." 

"It's a form of symbolic protest," he said. 

The unusual campaign has caused a headache for the BBC. With the ditty near the top of the charts, the broadcaster faced the prospect of airing the words "The Wicked Witch is Dead!" on its Sunday countdown show, just days before Thatcher's funeral, scheduled for Wednesday.

4/12 BBC

Nobody at Radio 1 wishes to cause offence but nor do I believe that we can ignore the song in the chart show, which is traditionally a formal record of the biggest selling singles of the week. That in turn means that all songs in the chart become an historic fact.

I’ve therefore decided exceptionally that we should treat the rise of the song, based as it is on a political campaign to denigrate Lady Thatcher’s memory, as a news story. So we will play a brief excerpt of it in a short news report during the show which explains to our audience why a 70-year-old song is at the top of the charts. Most of them are too young to remember Lady Thatcher and many will be baffled by the sound of the Munchkins from the Wizard of Oz.

To ban the record from our airwaves completely would risk giving the campaign the oxygen of further publicity and might inflame an already delicate situation.

Katy Perry's ex.

When I was a kid, Thatcher was the headmistress of our country. Her voice, a bellicose yawn, somehow both boring and boring – I could ignore the content but the intent drilled its way in. She became leader of the Conservatives the year I was born and prime minister when I was four. She remained in power till I was 15. I am, it's safe to say, one of Thatcher's children. How then do I feel on the day of this matriarchal mourning? 

I grew up in Essex with a single mum and a go-getter Dagenham dad. I don't know if they ever voted for her, I don't know if they liked her. My dad, I suspect, did. He had enough Del Boy about him to admire her coiffured virility – but in a way Thatcher was so omnipotent; so omnipresent, so omni-everything that all opinion was redundant.

Brighouse in 2009.

Toward the end of the Miner’s Strike in 1985 I was accompanying some student march to County Hall, shaking a collecting tin, when I was confronted by a balding middle aged man in, I kid you not, a bowler hat and pin stripe suit:
(Angrily) “What are you complaining about now? I’m not going to give money to bloody students, the state already pays for you”
(Cheerfully) “Oh no, I’m not complaining about anything.” (I didn’t go into what I suspected was our agreement on the immorality of the state subsidizing the passage of the most privileged children in society into its elite, but I conveyed that complex message with a grin). “I’m collecting for the striking miners”.
(Surprised) “Oh”. He looked me straight in the eye, with genuine sympathy. “They can’t win you know. But..” he produced a 20 quid note and placed it in my tin “at least they might give this bloody shower in charge a run for their money”. (One of the lessons of collecting for the miners was never to judge a person by the way they dressed.)

The best thing on at CT now is a comment by Ajay

Rich and poor existed alike inside a great framework of British institutions. It was the lower-middle-class who went from their schools to keep shops or manage small businesses; who did not participate, for the most part, in the institutions you’re describing; who therefore saw the state not as the guarantor of the framework in which they lived, but as a constant demander of taxes and producer of paperwork; and whose resentment ultimately produced Margaret Thatcher.

The discussion at CT has devolved to a discussion of popular music, so that makes the following even more appropriate

"This is the Modern World"

Punk wasn't a rebellion against capitalism. It was capitalism, rebelling against both liberalism and the hereditary aristocracy.

Also, comedians

Behind comedians but ahead of academics, unable to distinguish between thoughtful arrogance and arrogant thoughtfulness, the earnest thinkers of the middle American class.
---

Glenda Jackson


Her son responds

...In truth, there was something wonderful about the Twittersphere’s reaction. “Your mother has let you down,” someone informed me. How does that work, then? “Good day at work, Mum?” “Yeah. Had a bit of a go at the recently deceased Baroness Thatcher.” “You what? What are you trying to do to me? In front of all my friends! Do you know how that makes me look? How could you?” [Slams door, storms up to room.] 

“How humiliating for Dan Hodges,” someone else posted. Humiliating? Try walking into school the day after Women in Love has just been repeated on BBC Two. In my part of south London there was scant regard for the watershed. 

“Bet Dan Hodges will have strong words for his mother when he sees her,” a third tweeter offered. Are you mad? Didn’t you see her facing down the massed and enraged ranks of the parliamentary Tory party? Plus, I need her to do some babysitting.

"Plus, I need her to do some babysitting."
Compare as always to "Scatterplot" and Brighouse the theoretician, (not the kid with the tin).
The asocial life of individualists.
Hodges "lost his left eye when a broken beer glass was shoved in his face after he stood up for two black men who were being taunted by whites in a south London pub."

4/12 Guardian

Mohamed Morsi backs Egyptian military after malpractice allegations

Egypt's president, Mohamed Morsi, has promoted several generals in a show of untrammelled support for the embattled military, who have been strongly condemned after this week's leak of a top-level investigation that made damning allegations of malpractice.

4/11 The Guardian

Senior Egyptian army doctors were ordered to operate without anaesthetic on wounded protesters at a military hospital in Cairo during protests against military rule, according to an investigation commissioned by president Mohamed Morsi. The report into military and police malpractice since 2011 also alleges that doctors, soldiers and medics assaulted protesters inside the hospital. 

The findings, which relate to the army's behaviour during the Abbassiya clashes in May 2012, are the latest leak to the Guardian of a suppressed report investigating human rights abuses in Egypt since the start of the 2011 uprising that toppled Hosni Mubarak. Earlier leaks alleged that the military were involved in torture, killings and forced disappearances during the uprising. 

..."I can't overestimate the importance of this report," said Heba Morayef, the director of Human Rights Watch in Egypt. "It's incredibly important. Until today, there has been no official state acknowledgement of excessive force on the part of the police or military. The army always said they took the side of protesters and never fired a bullet against them. This report is the first time that there has been any official condemnation of the military's responsibility for torture, killing, or disappearances."

repeats of repeats of repeats

American military aid and personal relationships between American and Egyptian commanders give the United States great influence, and the two sides are in daily communication formally and informally, Mr. Sullivan said. But American military officials keep their messages private, as they should, he said.

“We should not make it look like we’re deeply involved in trying to solve this,” he said. “Most Egyptians would not appreciate that.”

Corey Robin

One of the reasons the subordinate’s exercise of agency so agitates the conservative imagination is that it takes place in an intimate setting. 

Gary Indiana

I don’t recall the exact wording of the note. It was tacked on a corkboard, obscured by notices and fliers, in a basement corridor of Otis Art School, when Otis was in the Wilshire District. Sheree Rose and Bob Flanagan, who took performance art to a place where it really hurt, had just given a seminar, in the course of which Sheree nailed Bob’s penis to a block of wood. 

Harry Brighouse (repeat)

Human suffering is bad 

"Pain Journal"

Born a Catholic with cystic fibrosis, Bob Flanagan was raised confined and tortured — nuns hit him with rulers, nurses tied him to hospital beds so he wouldn't dislodge the tubes going in and out of his body. He pretty much had to find what was pleasurable and humorous in suffering. At age seven, he'd roll himself up in blankets, wanting to feel mummified. He'd seal himself up in a giant garbage bag until all the air was gone, and claw his way out, gasping. As he grew up, his masochism matured with him.

"One of the reasons the subordinate’s exercise of agency so agitates the conservative imagination is that it takes place in an intimate setting." True enough.

I think I've linked to the obit before.
---
Read on FB:  "I really, really, really want someone to take my free art project idea and Photoshop Femen slogans onto Girls Gone Wild pictures. For freedom, of course…"

I always thought Shulamith Firestone would have agreed with Althouse.  I was surprised when Katha Pollitt, only 5 years younger, defended Valenti, but at the same time she she was writing about stalking an ex-boyfriend. The article links to reviews by Ana Marie Cox and Toni Bentley: "You open your ass and you open your mind and you open your heart." 

Thinking without observing: calling it "counterproductive" would be an understatement.

Greider  on Krugman

As threatening losses and dislocations accumulated for the US, the celebrated economist was like Voltaire’s Dr. Pangloss, assuring everyone not to worry. Pay no attention to those critics dwelling on the dark side of globalization, he said. Economic theory confirms that free trade is the best of all possible policies in this best of all possible worlds. 

A good many Americans did not believe him, mainly working people who saw their jobs and middle-class wages decimated by the processes of globalizing production. Krugman said they didn’t see the big picture. Educated professionals whose own livelihoods were not threatened by globalization were more likely to embrace Krugman’s perspective. While he never won the debate with the broad public, his argument prevailed where it counts – among the political elites who influence government policy-making. Both political parties, every president from Reagan to Obama, embraced the same free-trade strategy: support US multinational corporations in global competition, as their success is bound to lift the rest of the country.

Sandy Levinson:  Scalia v. John Marshall
Marshall, from McCulloch vs Maryland

A constitution, to contain an accurate detail of all the subdivisions of which its great powers will admit, and of all the means by which they may be carried into execution, would partake of the prolixity of a legal code, and could scarcely be embraced by the human mind. It would, probably, never be understood by the public. Its nature, therefore, requires, that only its great outlines should be marked, its important objects designated, and the minor ingredients which compose those objects, be deduced from the nature of the objects themselves. That this idea was entertained by the framers of the American constitution, is not only to be inferred from the nature of the instrument, but from the language. Why else were some of the limitations, found in the 9th section of the 1st article, introduced? It is also, in some degree, warranted, by their having omitted to use any restrictive term which might prevent its receiving a fair and just interpretation. In considering this question, then, we must never forget that it is a constitution we are expounding.

Balkin on Verdi, working too hard to prove what should be an obvious point.

Bourgeois fucking revolution

Brighouse on "Objective Moral Truths"

Interesting to watch the posts on utopia sputter out. In this one at least Brighouse tries to defend the foundations of utopian thought rather than begin with the assumption. Objective moral truths/Utopia/God
Still stupid

Farrell continues his drift towards a realist/culturalist understanding of social order...
referring to Moskos.

Guardian UK

http://register.shelby.tn.us/james_earl_ray/main.php

Lurching Towards War: A Post-Mortem on Strategic Patience
Christine Hong and Hyun Lee

With all eyes on North Korea since its third nuclear test, remarkably little has been said about how we arrived at this crisis point. Inadequately contextualized as North Korea’s response to fortified UN sanctions, the latest nuclear test bespeaks the failure of U.S. diplomacy toward its historic enemy. 

The commonplace U.S. media framing of North Korea as the region’s foremost security threat obscures the disingenuous nature of U.S. President Barack Obama’s policy in the region, specifically the identity between what his advisers dub “strategic patience,” on the one hand, and his forward-deployed military posture and alliance with regional hawks on the other. Examining Obama’s aggressive North Korea policy and its consequences is crucial to understanding why demonstrations of military might—of politics by other means, to borrow from Carl von Clausewitz—are the only avenues of communication North Korea appears to have with the United States at this juncture.

Exhibitions at the Morgan
Degas, Miss La La, and the Cirque Fernando
Marcel Proust and Swann's Way: 100th Anniversary
and the Metropolitan:
Impressionism, Fashion, and Modernity

They made me think that the 19th century marked the final change from an art first of making to an art of the record of observing, the biggest difference between the artists we now call, "old masters" and those we call "Modern".  Modernity, in this sense, is the end of a brief moment. The crisis of "Modern-ism" the hypertrophy of the material, is less a new beginning than the death throws of an ideal, an ideal and thus unstable hybrid.

Literature is observational; it compliments photography. Both fit well alongside the classical material arts of Asia and European antiquity where art objects are the product of cultures based more profoundly in language than in things. The Renaissance and the high material arts of Europe over a 300 odd year period are anomalous.

From 2009

Raphael, Study of Soldiers in The Conversion of Saul, ca. 1515–16

At the MetAn amazing drawing, though it's amazing also how the low resolution almost makes that hard to see. An object lesson, quite literally, in the principles and poetics of the High Renaissance: simultaneously static and full of motion, a perfect but lightly held balance of action and reflection, observation, representation, and free craft. Rigor seemingly without tension, or tension seemingly without its affect. Imagine a performer on a tightrope or balancing on a sphere, and walking with the casual gait of someone on flat solid ground. 

The figures fly off the page, yet they're anchored as solidly in place as they would be seated and face forward in a Byzantine mosaic. And they demonstrate this incongruity, this absolute, categorical, conflict while responding to our anxious questions with courtesy and concern: as if to ask us what is wrong. A Stendhal moment occurs when a work pulls you so strongly at once in both of its directions that your mind is overwhelmed. I went back to this drawing three times over the course of an afternoon and felt dizziness and chills each time.

But what to say about this?  The anomaly is here. The hybrid naturalism and formal order.
These paintings haunted my childhood before anything in Florence.

TPM

The Republican official in Michigan embroiled in controversy over an anti-gay Facebook post said Friday that he won't be heeding the calls to step down and he stands by the content of the inflammatory article. Dave Agema, a Republican National Committeeman and former Michigan state representative, told Newschannel 3 that he has no intention of resigning, despite calls from members of his own party to do so. On Wednesday, Agema posted an article on his Facebook page in which homosexuals were described as "filthy." 

[repeat] Halperin's How to be Gay [paywalled, but also at archive.org ]

Back in 1972 a commentator made an observation with which Halperin makes great play. “At any given homosexual party, there will be two competing . . . people around whom interest and activity swirl: the ‘most beautiful’, most sexually desirable man there, and the ‘campiest’, most dramatic, most verbally entertaining queen.” This image, which he doesn’t find dismal, obsolete or hackneyed, helps him to distinguish the sexual habits of American gay men from their cultural practices: “the ancient antagonism between beauty and camp”, the antithesis between manliness and effete strutting, indicates “why gay culture is so incompatible with gay sex”, and highlights “the polarity of queer sensibility and sexual desire”. He complains that for many American men, homosexuality has been “an unreasoning reflex that was natural and voluntary: a sexual instinct . . . not an ethos”. This emphasis on copulation, together with the lesbian and gay movement’s portrayal of homosexuality as a political category rather than an emotional particularity, discouraged inquiry into the non-sexual techniques of the sub-culture. As a result, “a sanitising blackout” was imposed on effeminacy, “dishing, bitching . . . suavity and wit”.

...Elsewhere he explains that sexual acts between men can be “undignified, filthy, shameful, and perverse (at least if you’re doing it right)”.

NY Times

Has gay pride made gay men boring? Mr. Halperin thinks so. Devilishly, he deposes: “Sometimes I think homosexuality is wasted on gay people.” And, speaking about how gay men make their own uses of popular culture: “What do perverts do, after all, if not pervert?”

  Media Matters

The co-director of Johns Hopkins University's sexuality studies program is speaking out against his colleague Dr. Ben Carson's recent comments comparing supporters of marriage equality to members of NAMBLA and practitioners of bestiality.
"I don't think most people at Hopkins think what he says on this subject matters," Professor Todd Shepard, co-director of the university's Program for the Study of Women, Gender, and Sexuality, said in a statement to Media Matters. "They make him look nasty, petty, and ill-informed. It doesn't tell us anything about his amazing abilities as a surgeon. It does remind us, however, that those abilities do not mean we should listen to what he says in any other domain."
During a March 26 appearance on Fox News, Carson said, "Marriage is between a man and a woman. No group, be they gays, be they NAMBLA, be they people who believe in bestiality, it doesn't matter what they are. They don't get to change the definition."

Atrios

Fabulous
One's experience with this stuff is highly dependent on precisely when (and to a lesser extent, where) one grew up, but when I grew up gay people didn't exist, God had delivered a plague to kill them all, and being gay was the worst possible thing ever. No those things don't make any consistent sense, I'm just trying to deliver up the messages the culture had delivered to my 13-year-old brain. There was a plague. Gay people were almost entirely nonexistent in mainstream popular culture. And being gay was the worst possible thing you could be.
I'm not even sure where I heard that last message. It was certainly true, and everyone knew it. But I actually have no clue where it came from. The nonexistence of gay people to young teenage me is hard to square with the being gay is the worst thing ever message I received. Still I received it.

Duncan Black is 9 years younger than me.

One day when I was 13 years old, at the back of the line at the school lunch counter, a teacher known popularly as "skull-face", standing about ten spaces in front of me, answered the lunch lady's question: "Two hamburgers... Naked, please". His eyes widened as he turned towards his audience of 7th graders, who heaved a quiet, collective sigh.

A few years later a story made the rounds in my circle of two teachers in NY for a weekend, out at a bar the West Village. One of them walked across the room and looked down into the face of someone getting fucked on the floor. He turned back to his friend: " 'D-, isn't this one of your students?" The student told the story.

In college a friend of mine complained about going to see her father out on Fire Island after one of his weekend fist-fucking parties; the place smelled of shit and puke.  She shrugged. A friend living in the West Village years ago described neighbors' scowls when she walked down the street in the morning wearing whatever she had lying around, no makeup, hair a mess, to pick up a pack of cigarettes. She called it fascist. An old girlfriend who grew up in West Hollywood had her beaten-up car towed, twice, by her parents' new next door neighbors who didn't like the sight of an old Toyota in front of their perfect home with it's clean white picket fence.

Moralists are simpletons.  Liberals dream of a utopia of exemplary ideas to make up for their mediocre lives; but if you're unwilling to face the complexity of the world, or even your own life, you're unable to model anything beyond a fantasy.

Technocrats' claims of cosmopolitanism are obscene.

Make it four:
"Tribalism"
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Why would people who defend the notion of a morality without god argue there's no struggle for a better world without a dream of utopia? We're back with Dworkin.

There's a difference between making the logical point that there can be no notion of the good without a notion of the better,  leading further up the slope towards an ideal, and arguing constantly from the necessity of an ideal.  A symposium of middle aged men spouting off on "our relation to the perfect" is much more off-putting than a dying man's admission of a wish for ultimate meaning.
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Why Did Liberals Support the Iraq War?  

Yes, Bush and Cheney sold the war, but why did Americans buy it?

Tony Judt in 2006. I quoted him then too.

Bush’s Middle Eastern policy now tracks so closely to the Israeli precedent that it is very difficult to see daylight between the two. It is this surreal turn of events that helps explain the confusion and silence of American liberal thinking on the subject (as well, perhaps, as Tony Blair’s syntactically sympathetic me-tooism). Historically, liberals have been unsympathetic to ‘wars of choice’ when undertaken or proposed by their own government. War, in the liberal imagination (and not only the liberal one), is a last resort, not a first option. But the United States now has an Israeli-style foreign policy and America’s liberal intellectuals overwhelmingly support it.

Just stupid.

Ideas or Interests?: a not quite run of three

A Profession With an Egalitarian Core

So why report cost-benefit results only for United States citizens or residents, as is sometimes done in analyses of both international trade and migration? The nation-state is a good practical institution, but it does not provide the final moral delineation of which people count and which do not. ... 

Economics evolved as a more moral and more egalitarian approach to policy than prevailed in its surrounding milieu. Let’s cherish and extend that heritage. The real contributions of economics to human welfare might turn out to be very different from what most people — even most economists — expect.

Mark Thoma links to Cowen, and adds the following

I can understand why it might have been advantageous from an evolutionary perspective for nature to make us care most about those who are closest to us.

It seems like there are two ways to get beyond this tribalism. The first is to expand the definition of the tribe to include everyone. According to the column, and to economic theory and evidence more generally, open borders don't just benefit immigrants, they help everyone.

My comment didn't go through. Expanded below:

1-This is Tyler Cowen in 2006 (and repeated here too many times)

An Economist Visits New Orleans
"To be sure, the shantytowns could bring socioeconomic costs. Yet crime, lack of safety, and racial tension were all features of New Orleans ex ante. The city has long thrived as more dangerous than average, more multicultural than average, and more precarious than average for the United States. And people who decide the cheap housing isn't safe enough will be free to look elsewhere—or remain in Utah with their insurance checks. 

Shantytowns might well be more creative than a dead city core. Some of the best Brazilian music came from the favelas of Salvador and Rio. The slums of Kingston, Jamaica, bred reggae. New Orleans experienced its greatest cultural blossoming in the early 20th century, when it was full of shanties. Low rents make it possible to live on a shoestring, while the population density blends cultural influences. Cheap real estate could make the city a desirable place for struggling artists to live. The cultural heyday of New Orleans lies in the past. Katrina rebuilding gives the city a chance to become an innovator once again."

Socioeconomic Darwinism is not egalitarian.

2-If tribalism is dangerous then so is community and so is family. So liberal philosophers debate "Legitimate Parental Partiality"
Harry Brighouse.

These relationships appear inegalitarian in deep ways. The parties to partial relationships [parents and children] may exclude others from the mutual benefits their association yields and have special responsibilities to one another that give them the right, and sometimes the duty, to further one another’s interests in ways that may interrupt equality.

Intimacy is a danger to democracy. Love is unfair.
Now you see the line from hippies to neoliberals, right and left. Both begin with individualism and end with the formalization of all sociability, either in the name of the market or equality.
Either way you end up with this [recent repeat]

Would you have your children go to bed hungry so you could give food to the poor? Would you voluntarily cut your wages by two thirds or donate that two thirds or more to charity? Would you sacrifice your family's safety and security for the safety and security in the aggregate? Have you taken a vow of poverty? If not are you guilty of tribalism?

Cowen will never offer up his own children in sacrifice to the gods of free trade and neither will you.
Others' children are another matter. If immigration had as little effect on employment as they say then Dean Baker wouldn't be almost alone in arguing for an open market in managers and technocrats.

ETC.
G.A. Cohen: "I'm a less good person than I would be if I were as good as I could be."
"It's difficult to expect a person who lives in a particular social niche to depress the circumstances of himself and his family below a certain level even for the sake of principles that he sincerely affirms." 
Bertram: "First, I'm sympathetic, I really am…"

We all agree that moralism is the only option; now, confident in our own superiority and unwilling to change our own behavior,  let's talk more about utopia.

US policy involves weakening its trading partners as much as possible. Immigration is the natural result, It brings fresh meat to the machine. Immigrants beat out the native working class; in my 25 years in and around construction wages were flat or down, and that's ignoring inflation. I keep hearing references to the decline in unionization as if it had no relation to immigrant labor. I worked with and competed against immigrants. I respect them, legal and illegal, but that doesn't change the fact you feed your children first. That people and governments should not make it a policy to beggar their neighbors does not change the fact that "No person is illegal" is an argument from a narcissistic idealism opposed to the very idea of law. We're back to the hippies and (for the second time in this post) what they became.

As I said to a friend, a legal immigrant from a poor country with connections to various UN agencies dealing with immigration, I'm not in favor of changing US immigration laws, I'm in favor of breaking them.  I defend illegal immigration as such.  My friend understood because he understands that governments have a responsibility to their citizens. He knows what American policy has been towards weaker countries, and he knows that immigrants have changed this country for the better.  He's well aware of American ignorance. Americans only travel to go to war; the world has to come to them for them to learn.
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Given the loyalty of academics to their class and tribe, the discussions of politics at CT have gone beyond parody.  David Estlund credits Rawls' predictive abilities, reversing cause and effect.

The title’s term, “Real utopias,” (anticipated by John Rawls’s “realistic utopia”)... 

The Continental and Anglo-American traditions continue their collapse into one another: a unified field/fantasy metaphysics.  [Sloppy.  Not cause and effect but primacy/authority, as if I were to write a sonata in a form anticipated by Mozart.]  

repeat: Henry Farrell, four days ago.

Farrell: "Dani Rodrik published a piece arguing that economists needed to pay less attention to interests, and more to ideas."

Today he links to two economists who "…have new paper arguing that economists need what some of us would call a theory of politics..."

I made a comment under my own name, asking Henry which we should choose, adding that of course experts and academics don't share the interests of the working class, but that democracy, as formalized performance and ritual exchange, is made for handling that discord. It's not a scientific process and focused more on means than ends so therefore unpopular with technocrats, and “science would tend to support democracy, as it supports redundancy rather than ‘efficiency’ in systems.” The comment was gone in minutes but part of it reappeared, quoted by someone else.
I also included a link

Educators around the globe are curious about the consistently high test scores from students in Finland, as measured by OPEC [OECD?]. “Compared with the stereotype of the East Asian model – long hours of exhaustive cramming and rote memorization – Finland's success is especially intriguing because Finnish schools assign less homework and engage children in more creative play,” reports Anu Partenan for the Atlantic. Americans are not particularly receptive to Finnish conclusions about their success: no private schools, no tuition for higher or lower education, no standardized testing except for one test at the end of high school. In Finland, the teaching profession leads to “prestige, decent pay, and a lot of responsibility”; the career is competitive, and a master's degree is required. The Finnish education system focuses on cooperation rather than competition. Finnish experts suggest that giving every child equal opportunity strengthens society and prepares citizens for a new global economy that can no longer rely on manufacturing. 

Some tension in that paragraph:"...the career is competitive"; "...system focuses on cooperation rather than competition".
The Atlantic

During the afternoon that Sahlberg spent at the Dwight School, a photographer from the New York Times jockeyed for position with Dan Rather's TV crew as Sahlberg participated in a roundtable chat with students. The subsequent article in the Times about the event would focus on Finland as an "intriguing school-reform model." 

Yet one of the most significant things Sahlberg said passed practically unnoticed. "Oh," he mentioned at one point, "and there are no private schools in Finland." 

This notion may seem difficult for an American to digest, but it's true. Only a small number of independent schools exist in Finland, and even they are all publicly financed. None is allowed to charge tuition fees. There are no private universities, either. This means that practically every person in Finland attends public school, whether for pre-K or a Ph.D

more confusion and drift from Henry.

Dworkin let me down.

How, then, can we defend a religious attitude if we cannot rely on a god? In the first lecture I offer a godless argument that moral and ethical values are objectively real: They do not depend on god, but neither are they just subjective or relative to cultures. They are objective and universal. 

The same with Balkin. I thought they were better than this.

All that's "objectively real" is enchantment: Do you love your wife, husband, your children, your parents and your dog? Do you treat friends differently than you treat strangers?

We operate on faith, and politics (all social interaction) is exchange among faiths. Democracy is the one form of government where an awareness of absurdity can actually strengthen the process.

The play's the thing: John Mortimer and Joe Jamail.

John Quiggin

Beyond these achievements, the social democratic moment provided space for various kinds of utopian thinking.

Note the past tense. And the "utopian thinking" was either not very utopian, or bullshit.
I hope he's not referring to the hippies.

repeat:

John Quiggin dreams of Shangri-La/ Ecotopia with images of city planning for the People's Republic of China, designed by architects from Singapore. It would be beyond him to recognize the irony. We're back to Shalizi, remembering previous examples of Quiggin's genius. If "Art" is "an enemy of the people", then Henning Mankell has nothing to tell us about social democracy or asocial technocracy: neither Mankell, nor Steig Larsson nor Tim Parks, nor history.

They're all such fucking idiots: white men talking about the white man's experience.  There's no mention of the Arab spring. They haven't experienced it, and don't accept that experience as constitutive of thought.

The Guardian: "World poverty is shrinking rapidly, new index reveals."

Some of the poorest people in the world are becoming significantly less poor, according to a groundbreaking academic study which has taken a new approach to measuring deprivation. The report, by Oxford University's poverty and human development initiative, predicts that countries among the most impoverished in the world could see acute poverty eradicated within 20 years if they continue at present rates. 

It identifies "star performer" nations such as Rwanda, Nepal and Bangladesh as places where deprivation could disappear within the lifetime of present generations. Close on their heels with reductions in poverty levels were Ghana, Tanzania, Cambodia and Bolivia. 

The study comes after the UN's latest development report published last week which stated that poverty reduction drives in the developing world were exceeding all expectations. It says: "The world is witnessing a epochal 'global rebalancing' with higher growth in at least 40 poor countries helping lift hundreds of millions out of poverty and into a new 'global middle class'. Never in history have the living conditions and prospects of so many people changed so dramatically and so fast."

UN 2013 Human Development Report 

For the first time in 150 years, the combined output of the developing world’s three leading economies — Brazil, China and India — is about equal to the combined GDP of the long-standing industrial powers of the North.

The fight for social democracy is on more than ever. Again: Shalizi contra Mankell.
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Corey Robin links to a petition in support of non-academic employees of the academy that only academics can sign. Almost all the recent post are just as bad.

Robin again. "The US Senate: Where Democracy Goes to Die"
I linked to this again a few days ago. The US began as a confederation and is now a federation, but the tension is still there. This fits here an also above. Technocratic liberals are earnest believers in their own best intentions. The narcissism is disgusting.

Farrell: "Dani Rodrik published a piece arguing that economists needed to pay less attention to interests, and more to ideas."

Dani Rodrik defends his interests.

Çetin Dogan, a retired four-star Turkish Army general, was detained and subsequently imprisoned by Turkish prosecutors, accused of masterminding an elaborate plot in 2002 and 2003 to topple the country's newly elected conservative Islamist government. 

...For us, however, this particular arrest comes very close to home: We are Çetin Dogan's daughter and son-in-law.

Ideas follow experience: they come last.

2013: AP

WASHINGTON — Ten years and $60 billion in American taxpayer funds later, Iraq is still so unstable and broken that even its leaders question whether U.S. efforts to rebuild the war-torn nation were worth the cost.

In his final report to Congress, Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction Stuart Bowen’s conclusion was all too clear: Since the invasion a decade ago this month, the U.S. has spent too much money in Iraq for too few results.

Guardian UK "Exclusive: General David Petraeus and 'dirty wars' veteran behind commando units implicated in detainee abuse"

The Pentagon sent a US veteran of the "dirty wars" in Central America to oversee sectarian police commando units in Iraq that set up secret detention and torture centres to get information from insurgents. These units conducted some of the worst acts of torture during the US occupation and accelerated the country's descent into full-scale civil war.

2005: The relevant links here are dead.  Google Iraq "Salvador option".
Dreyfus, Raimondo, Engelhardt

2003: Riverbend, August 28

...Yesterday, I read how it was going to take up to $90 billion to rebuild Iraq. Bremer was shooting out numbers about how much it was going to cost to replace buildings and bridges and electricity, etc.

Listen to this little anecdote. One of my cousins works in a prominent engineering company in Baghdad- we’ll call the company H. This company is well-known for designing and building bridges all over Iraq. My cousin, a structural engineer, is a bridge freak. He spends hours talking about pillars and trusses and steel structures to anyone who’ll listen.

As May was drawing to a close, his manager told him that someone from the CPA wanted the company to estimate the building costs of replacing the New Diyala Bridge on the South East end of Baghdad. He got his team together, they went out and assessed the damage, decided it wasn’t too extensive, but it would be costly. They did the necessary tests and analyses (mumblings about soil composition and water depth, expansion joints and girders) and came up with a number they tentatively put forward- $300,000. This included new plans and designs, raw materials (quite cheap in Iraq), labor, contractors, travel expenses, etc.

Let’s pretend my cousin is a dolt. Let’s pretend he hasn’t been working with bridges for over 17 years. Let’s pretend he didn’t work on replacing at least 20 of the 133 bridges damaged during the first Gulf War. Let’s pretend he’s wrong and the cost of rebuilding this bridge is four times the number they estimated- let’s pretend it will actually cost $1,200,000. Let’s just use our imagination.

A week later, the New Diyala Bridge contract was given to an American company. This particular company estimated the cost of rebuilding the bridge would be around- brace yourselves- $50,000,000 !!

Some of the comments here are good.
The post itself is just sad. The ideological opposition to experience and imagination, and then the discovery that experience surprises you.  The individualist's family dynamic
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Shelby County v. Holder  As I've said before, history is repeating with the court; it's now more conservative than the populace. In the middle of the century it was the reverse and earlier it was in a sense where we are now.  But the elite includes not only the court but the neoliberal elite and academy, and the the culture at large is more liberal, more open to change than the elite as a whole. 5 years ago the right would not have backed off the Woodward story. Woodward didn't just misread his audience he misread the times, and Josh Marshall is misreading the events.

Joey Fishkin at Balkinization makes a mistake in discussing the VRA case (issues explained here)  The VRA is not affirmative action. Josh Marshall posts a note from a reader

Compare and contrast.
1. Justice Scalia today regarding the voting rights act: “This is not the kind of question you can leave to Congress.”

2. The United States Constitution, Amendment XV: “SECTION 1. The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any state on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude. SECTION 2. The Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.” (My emphasis.)

The readership at TPM has always been sharper than the writers.

David Gans, also at Balkinization, focuses on a point similar to the letter writer to TPM: defending the VRA as fair without actively separating it from the history of positive discrimination. To attack rather than defend, the argument would end up weakening the case for positive discrimination itself.
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Gabriel Kolko on the New Deal, a link from a commenter at CT [Rauchway on Menand's perversity in the New Yorker]

Very very, smart.  A scholar's argument relating to my amateur's observations in re: affirmative action and Wickard v. Filburn etc. see (…) above.

Atrios:

The Worst Person In the world
Robert Huber.

At the link:

Philadelphia Magazine just published an article by Robert Huber titled "Being white in Philly: In a city that is largely poor and segregated white people have become afraid to say anything at all about race. Here's what's not being said."

I'll point this out again and again.
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Atrios, a day later. The Missing Empathy Gene

Atrios (see above): "While I think quite often concerns about urban gentrification are a bit misplaced, an exception to that is when the poor get priced out of areas with access to decent mass transit."

The difference between oblivious contempt and condescension. But of course condescension is intellectually justified.

Bradley Manning's statement

note taking. more on Sahlins. comments elsewhere

From Dorothy Thompson’s introduction to The Poverty of Theory

“Of course it produced responses. Some of these emerged at an extraordinary evening at a History Workshop conference in Oxford in December 1979. This was for some reason held in a dimly-lit ruined building, and had been set up as a discussion. It ended up however as an emotionally-charged event whose repercussions continued for months if not for years. 

…At the end of the evening a leading History Workshop character asked whether he would continue to publish relevant material. Edward replied that he thought he would not be publishing much of anything for a while, since he felt that his time would be taken up trying to organize opposition to cruise missiles in Britain. The answer was ‘Cruise what Edward?’”

“The answer was ‘Cruise what Edward?’” Rilly.
The rise of the neoliberal academy.

“I expect pissed-off lefties like Terry Turner to be ready to take the fight to the enemy. What I always find so depressing about these periods of academic blood letting is how poorly the ‘scientists’ behave as they extol an ideal of dispassionate objectivity while simultaneously savaging anyone who suggests to them that they may not be living up to their own ego ideal.”

It’s not just the ‘scientists’ Witness an author on this blog “Sahlins move seems to represent a transformation of the conflict out of the arena of measured debate and into the symbolic.”

Such wounded reasonableness. “Why is Sahlins getting so angry?” A question asked from tribal loyalty, except for the fact that its tribal loyalty while denying even the possibility that that’s what it could be.

Tribal loyalty is human. The model of collaborative reason denies politics, so that arguments from authority and dripping with condescension if not outright contempt are allowed against outsiders. “What do women want?” the concerned men ask each other. “Why are they so angry?” Should it mean something that men are all scientists? Should it help their argument? Should it hurt?

Language is politics. The academy needs more open argument not less. It needs intellectual bloodsport to counter bureaucratic politesse, the intellectual model of the courtroom to counter the model of the lab. Courts aren’t barbaric they’re necessary. The defenders of Chagnon, not only “scientists” but petty bureaucrats, pretend politics are beneath them, but they live by it.

It’s not a “kerfuffle” it’s a fight over the definition of moral responsibility. If you don’t want to argue about that, stop pretending you have any intellectual interests at all. You’re just a happy technician. The model of the neoliberal academy.

---

I’ll add one more point before bowing out, since things are heating up, as they should.

I had arguments with David Graeber 30 years ago and later in Chicago when I realized. putting it bluntly, that anthropologists as academics no longer understand culture because they don’t understand their relation to the culture they’re a part of.

Any filmmaker will tell you that moral questions are the most important ones. To a humanist they’re the most interesting and most fun. They’re the good stuff. Everything else and you’re just a bricklayer or a file clerk of some sort or another. But here the good stuff is treated as a side issue that’s gotten in the way of science.”The Great Kalahari Debate” The moral questions are front and center. But the debate itself makes people uncomfortable.

The offense taken at Zero Dark 30 was that questions had gotten in the way of answers. What if torture works sometimes, as it did in Germany 10 years ago (Magnus Gäfgen) and it’s still wrong? In Lincoln and Argo it was the other way around. Too many answers not enough questions. And the CIA won the oscar for best picture. Chagnon would never have ended up as important as he is if moral questions were seen as interesting in themselves. Obviously they bored him a bit. And obviously also for some there’s a good career to be made in moralism. But reminding people of that is just another way of avoiding the questions of morality itself. And Chagnon is a moralist, isn’t he? The argument is that his moralism made him an incompetent scientist.

If you’re wondering about your relations with the people you study and you know you can’t treat them the way you treat your mother, just as an experiment spend a week treating your mother the way you’d treat the people you study. And when that makes you scared you know you’ve hit the sweet spot, until you get lazy and your subjects or your mother call you an asshole. And then you get scared again, as you should be. Anthropologists are part scholar and part scientist. Scientists are just plumbers. That’s my side of that argument. 

What do I know about science? I’m only an artist, but I know the only anthropological films that are more than visual file clerking are by Wiseman. He’s one of the most important filmmakers alive and he calls his films "fictions". He keeps his eye right in the sweet spot.

I’m with Sahlins. But I’m too young to feel this old.

---

If questions of morality were only practical we wouldn’t need lawyers. As it is, give me the nihilism of lawyers, including and especially underpaid public defenders, over the idealism of philosophers. Lawyers have a formal relation to their clients. They’re paid advocates.
How primitive is that?

Housewives invented feminism, railroad porters started the civil rights movement and teary-eyed drag queens mourning the death of Judy Garland started the public fight for gay rights. No one gave a damn about the Jews and until recently no one gave a damn about the Palestinians.
Practice precedes theory.

I haven’t seen that Downey vid in years, and of course I forgot about Rouch. That was stupid.

“Science is exciting, fun, and joyous…” Enthusiasm is more dangerous than heroin.

The old new Germany

"the biggest comeback in the history of German pop music."

He said many Germans – such as music critic Rainer Moritz, who referred to him as the "vomiting agent of several generations" – had been too snobbish to recognise his success as a cultural figurehead, but that the proof of his talent was in his sales figures, as well as the fact he has a recognisability factor of 99%, even higher than that of the chancellor, Angela Merkel.

"Why should an old oak be bothered by the pig that claws it?" he asked, pointing out – as he likes to – that in 1980 his album Lieder der Berge (Songs of the Mountains) sold 1.2m copies in Germany while John Lennon, who was assassinated in December that year, sold just 200,000. 

"For years I've been the butt of jokes, but to date I've sold 50m records. If anyone from the music scene laughs at me now, all I can do is laugh back," he said. "The day before yesterday four young people passed me on the autobahn, gave me the thumbs up and waved. These are things that make a 74-year-old happy. After all, they could be saying: 'what's that old geezer up to?'" he said.

No one should be surprised.

Written on the fly elsewhere. It's a repeat, but it's short and sweet.

Moralists and technocrats both rely on crutches, one of morality as an idea, and the other on ideas as morality.

The focus either on moralism or technics flattens the experience of selfhood. We’re always of two minds. Consciousness is internal conflict. Democracy is defined by the ability of people to negotiate their own contradictions, and from there to negotiate conflicts with others. Technocrats and moralists denying their own complexity, deny it of others, weakening democracy.

Sahlins and John Horgan on Chagnon.  From Savage Minds

Darkness in El Dorado Archive
Sponsel (2011) responds to Dreger

Graeber on Twitter today: "Marshall Sahlins submits resignation to National Academy of Science objecting to election of Chagnon, mil research projects"

Horgan

I was still working on my review of Darkness when I received emails from five prominent scholars: Richard Dawkins, Edward Wilson, Steven Pinker, Daniel Dennett and Marc Hauser [see below]. Although each wrote separately, the emails were obviously coordinated. All had learned (none said exactly how, although I suspected via a friend of mine with whom I discussed my review) that I was reviewing Darkness for the Times. Warning that a positive review might ruin my career, the group urged me either to denounce Darkness or to withdraw as a reviewer. 

I responded that I could not discuss a review with them prior to publication. (Only Dennett persisted in questioning my intentions, and I finally had to tell him, rudely, to leave me alone. I am reconstructing these exchanges from memory; I did not print them out.) I was so disturbed by the pressure from Dawkins et al—who seemed to be defending not Chagnon per se but the sociobiology paradigm–that I ended up making my review of Darkness more positive. I wanted Darkness to be read and discussed, to get a hearing. After all, Tierney leveled what I found to be credible accusations against not only Chagnon but also other scientists and journalists.

Sept. 2012
Former Harvard Psychologist Fabricated and Falsified, Report Says

Marc Hauser was once among the big, impressive names in psychology, head of the Cognitive Evolution Laboratory at Harvard University, author of popular books like Moral Minds. That reputation unraveled when a university investigation found him responsible for eight counts of scientific misconduct, which led to his resignation last year. 

Now the federal Office of Research Integrity has released its report on Hauser’s actions, determining that he fabricated and falsified results from experiments. Here is a sampling...

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Sahlins interviewed at Counterpunch

Mideastwire "Dexter Filkins and the New Yorker: Was his story fact checked?"

2/24: Dexter Filkins Deceives Andrea Mitchell on MSNBC

posted elsewhere neatened up a bit.

A few suggestions:
A more critical understanding of characters such as Simon Sinek, Danah Boyd and Grant McCracken, and the role of futurism and anti-humanism in intellectual life, inside and outside the academy.

No discussion of Zero Dark 30 without context. If we can refer to race–as a “political technology” we should ask about performative reinforcement in the use of the terminology of machines. What kind of esthetic is manifest?

…can we talk about Palestine?
I read Arabs on the Arab spring, before I read anthropologists. Or I read Arab academics.

Aaron Swartz killed himself facing the risk of six months in a low security federal pen, because “data wants to be free”. Palestinian prisoners in Israeli jails facing open ended sentences are on hunger strike, ready to die because people want to be free.

Palestinians are the next wave of civil right movement: shopkeepers, housewives and husbands. They’re leading themselves just as, in the past, American blacks, women and homosexuals led themselves. When forced to face real engagement Judith Butler became an articulate and plain spoken defender of Palestinians’ claims to basic civil equality. She defended liberalism when liberals who’ve attacked her refused to. That’s the important fact, not the theoretical gobbledygook that came before. Could it be that gobbledygook was emotionally necessary as a way to defend humanism in an anti-humanist age? Maybe “theory” as poetry kept humanism alive: the poetry of technocracy, fighting against itself.

We’re the products of our culture. Our language forms us. The rise of technology and the technological imperative has resulted in a culture of pseudo-objectivity and a language and culture of happy-faced pseudo-autism: the effaced, elided self.

Who watches the watchmen? Who naturalizes the naturalizers?
How about the end of arguments from an assumption of a stable self? Not the idea of instability by the fact of it.

How about a relentless assault on the moral, esthetic, and political foundations of geekdom.

The first paragraph of "The Priority of Democracy: Political Consequences of Pragmatism

Politics, in large part, is a response to diversity. It reflects a seemingly incon­trovertible condition—any imaginable human population is heterogeneous across multiple, overlapping dimensions, including material interests, moral and ethical commitments, and cultural attachments.

"Politics, in large part, is a response to diversity." No. Politics begins with negotiated intimacy, parents and children, and expands out.  System builders start with regulation and end up systematizing familial relations.

Shalizi

This is a book with some important, even profound, ideas about politics, institutions, the virtues of democracy and what it takes to realize them, but it is written so so very, very diffusely that it will will have next to no impact, which is a shame. Let me try to lay out the main path of argument, which is rather lost amid the authors’ digressions and verbiage. 

We live in big, complex societies, which means we are thoroughly interdependent on each other, and that we will naturally have different ideas about how our life in common should go, and will have divergent interests. This means that politics we shall always have with us.

Again, earnest condescension is his métier.

Boettke: "Institutional Problems Demand Institutional Solutions"

Knight and Johnson have produced one of the most profound books in recent memory dealing with the questions of political structure and the processes that are necessary to reconcile our differences and to learn to live better together.

"Peter Boettke is a University Professor of Economics and Philosophy at George Mason University, the BB&T Professor for the Study of Capitalism, and the Director of the F.A. Hayek Program for Advanced Study in Philosophy, Politics, and Economics at the Mercatus Center at GMU."

Vermeule

If democracy is to be justified, it will have to be in consequentialist (or, if we prefer, “pragmatist”) terms; and as it seems prima facie implausible to think that all political and social institutions could or should be democratic in a first-order sense, only a second-order version of the consequentialist case for democracy can succeed.

A review [PDF] of Vermeule's Judging Under Uncertainty

As with statutes, so too with the Constitution. The courts, Vermeule argues, should enforce clear and specific constitutional texts, but should disclaim any role beyond that. Where constitutional texts are ambiguous or open ended, courts should let legislatures interpret them. Under this rule, Vermeule blandly notes, courts would cease enforcing the Bill of Rights and the Fourteenth Amendment. In particular, freedom of speech, due process, and equal protection would all be remitted to legislative enforcement.

Vermeule in 2004, with Eric Posner, defending the OLC torture memo; more here and here, etc. A fascist from a good family.

James Johnson co-author of The Priority of Democracy, on his own site:  "Political Science In The News: They Say Political Science is Arcane and Silly. And They Say That As Though It Is A Bad Thing!"

What are we to make of this essay at The Atlantic? It is easy enough just to be snarky. We could point out that Mr. Ferenstein actually learned something important from his foray into grad school: he was not cut out for the profession. He simply did not like - or was no good at - political science (although it turns out in the comments thread that he had gone off to study political philosophy, which is a whole other thing).  Good! Hopefully his talents are better used elsewhere, although this essay is hardly evidence of that. And we might also point out that he seems to have no idea what he is talking about. Example: "The problem is that modern-day "political science" is rarely related to public policy or diplomacy at all. The scientific study of politics is the hyper-analytic mathematical, psychological, and anthropological study of civic behavior" Let's assume that this final sentence makes sense (it doesn't). Let's issue the same complaint about, say, evolutionary biology, which is not really related to direct practical human purposes either.

The perverse esthetics of systems and system-builders: a vampish defense of political science as the equivalent of biology, as if human beings (those other than the author and his copains) are proteins or cogs. That's not a simple defense of the article in the Atlantic. The question is whether political science and political philosophy are themselves anti-political and anti-humanist.

Cohen: I wrote a book called "If you're an Egalitarian How Come You're so Rich?" And the final chapter discusses fourteen reasons people give for not giving away their money when they're rich but they profess belief in equality, twelve of which are, well, rubbish. I think there are two reasonable answers that a person who doesn't give too much of it away can give and one of them has to do with the burden of depressing yourself below the level of your peer group with whom you're shared a certain way of life; and in particular, depriving your children of things that the children around them favor. And also, and slightly separately, the transition from being wealthy to being not wealthy at all can be extremely burdensome and the person who has tasted wealth will suffer more typically from lack of it than someone who's had quote unquote the good fortune never to be wealthy and therefore has built up the character and the orientation that can cope well with it.

It's so much harder to be powerless if you once had power. Pity the rich ex-Marxist.

The foundation of democracy is not in the ability of any given system to regulate conflicts among citizens, but the willingness and the ability of citizens' to face and then negotiate their own contradictory desires. Negotiation with others extends out from negotiation within a divided self.

The focus on technics and ideal organization weakens social bonds by weakening the ability to understand them. The focus exclusively on the world  beyond the self does not eliminate the self; it elides it, flattening it. Selflessness requires self-awareness. Self-awareness requires an awareness of internal division.   Saying you don't understand why people go to church, watch sports, have a "hometown", is not the same as choosing not to think or behave as they do.  It's self-satisfied, incurious, and it means you're blind to your own reflexes and foibles: blind to your own complexity.

"A focus on the mean puts downward pressure on the mean."  The performative reinforcement of mediocrity.