Tiberius and Gaius Speaking...

Disagreement?

   

Matt Yglesias is confused as to why economists who agree on so much seem to get into such massive cat fights. I have found that the vehemence of the disagreement often increases as it becomes narrower. The most incredible, knock-down spitting fights that have really bothered me have been with fellow liberals. I even once, unintentionally, made a woman cry in an argument we had about affirmative action. The crockery broken in the offices of Perspective over Israel was pretty amazing (an office where I, utterly unfairly,was considered the most right-wing member).

    Why is this? I think it has to do with both identity formation  and shared premises. No one wants to be the clone of another person, so we tend to emphasize the differences rather than the similarities in argumentative situations.

    Second, when you agree with the person most of the time, it makes the disagreements more mysterious. I argue with evangelical movement conservatives, but I really can understand our differences: my interlocutor lives in a separate, quasi-delusional world. So, when we agree to disagree, it is due to a kind a kind of inductive indifference. Right wingnut disagreeing with me is not strong evidence that I am wrong, but fellow liberal disagreeing with me is definitely a possible source of discomfort. You can either change your mind or work extra hard to change hers.

Man, I am dumb.

    See, I thought that maybe Bush had a reasonable point about the UAE port thing. I thought it was a tempest in a teapot. I mean, the Coast Guard still handles security, right? We farm out this kind of work to different countries all the time, what could really go wrong?

I am so dumb. You will never go broke betting on the venality and stupidity of the Bush Administration. It turns out that port operators do have significant security responsibilities and that the Coast Guard was (is?) worried about this deal. Notice this quote about port security:

“(7) Ports are often very open and exposed and are susceptible to large scale acts of terrorism that could cause a largeloss of life or economic disruption.

(8) Current inspection levels of containerized cargo are insufficient to counter potential security risks. Technology is currently not adequately deployed to allow for the nonintrusive inspection of containerized cargo.” (my emphasis)

This law was passed in 2002. These findings are, presumably, still true. Who do I see about this? 

(Via Matt Yglesias, who has done yeoman's work on the whole issue.)

A curiousity...

    I find both the post and the comments here to be interesting. At the very least it is a statement of a prima facie case in favor of the wall, and I must admit that I don't take the ICJ (or any body connected to the United Nations) too seriously viz a viz Israel. Two things caught my eye. First:

7. Having acquired the West Bank in a defensive war, Israel later began building settlements on the West Bank. The settlements were built solely on land belonging to the Jordanian government, and not land belonging to individual Arab owners.

    Is this still true? What about settlements in other areas like Gaza? What about non-Jordanian territory seized like the Golan Heights or Gaza more generally? Don't Israelis also confiscate land from the families of suicide bombers? I don't know the answers to these questions, but this comment certainly came as a shock to me. Second:

6. Later in 1967, the United Nations Security Council adopted Resolution 242, Notably, the resolution calls for Israel to withdraw from "territories" (not "all territories" or "the territories") as part of a peace agreement by which Arab states would end their belligerence against Israel. Today, most Arab states remain in a declared state of war against Israel.

    It is my understanding that this is not strictly true. I believe, though I can't point to where I heard it, that the various translations of Resolution 242 either a) use the definite article, b) don't use the definite article, or c) are written in languages that never use the definite article. So, the interpretative puzzle might be more complicated.  I welcome correction on this point.

    The final point is more general. There is a procedural sense in which there is a declared war between Israel and Jordan/Syria etc. But in a substantive sense, does a state of war actually exist? I may have to read up on the Geneva Conventions, but I would think that you need something more substantial than a legal declaration, even as a matter of international law: actual combat operations in the last two decades would be a good place to start.

Back, tanner than before (well, it rained a lot)

        A couple things about air travel in this modern age:

• American had a gate snafu everywhere except for CU, where they had a maximum of two planes at any time and...two gates. I spent almost as much time on the bloody tarmac as I did traveling.
• Still, I made every connection.
• Why on earth are pagers and cell phones allowed to operate when we land but not ipods or cd players? I mean, that's allowing the most dangerous equipment and forbidding the most dangerous, right?
• And why can't I carry my laptop in my lap when we are landing? I would be allowed to carry a large book of equivalent size.

Anyway, American annoys me, but I did enjoy my little break.

Off to Florida for the Weekend: here are some links...

    Blogging pace may be a little slow for a few days, be back on Monday. Anyway, here are some interesting posts around the web:

• Matt Yglesias on Larry Summers
• The least qualified Fed appointment...ever.
• Kieran Healy on morally deficient people.
  
• I think we can officially give Christopher Hitchens "broken clock" status. Someone who is only occasionally correct through no fault of his own. This is not one of those times.
• I am very tempted to get seriously involved in this. I hope there is something I can do.

Sometimes you go wha...?

    I was reading this paean to Larry Summers written by James Traub and trying to think of what to say, and it seems like pretty weak stuff. Consider this paragraph:

He pointed out, for example, that while it was socially unacceptable at a great university to admit that one hadn't read a play by Shakespeare, you could safely joke about not knowing the difference between a gene and a chromosome. Summers instigated a review of Harvard's "core curriculum" with a view to raising the status of science and of quantitative thinking generally, as well as to answer perennial complaints from freshmen that they had little or no contact with senior faculty.

    Quite frankly, I can't thing of a single thing in that paragraph that's correct. I was told flat-out by a friend that she never would read a Shakespeare play, and the only person amongst our group that was shocked by this was me. I don't quite know what "reforms" that Summers instituted on the subject. I know that I was never required to read Shakespeare my entire time at Harvard.

    Further, the supposed "reforms" seem to be incoherent to non-existent. You want to increase freshman participation with senior professors by having the Professors teach huge survey classes? Huh? Or have them teach seminars (which they do, and that was instituted under the previous President, not Summers) which only a small percentage can take? Nota bene, I have never heard a freshman complain about not having contact with senior faculty.

    And again, I'd like to point out that Summers talked a good game about reforming the institution but so very rarely actually walked the walk. And the author mentions that the previous President "took things under advisement for the duration," but doesn't mention that Summers punted on subcontracting non-union labor, a living wage, the finals clubs, the utter lack of transparency in Harvard Corporation decisions,  and reform of the intra-collegiate disciplinary procedure concerning rape. Students often complained (and this was a complaint that I actually heard) about the quality of our undergraduate athletic facilities, which I can personally attest are pretty woeful compared to UIUC's.

    As to "raising the status of science and quantitative reasoning more generally," I can only say: what university were you watching? Harvard is one (if not the) greatest science research institution in the world. How much higher can the status get?

    And then there is this:

You do, of course, have to wonder about professional intellectuals who get so wobbly under cross-examination. Harvard professors appear to be accustomed to a level of deference that few of us on the other side of those Ivy walls could ever expect.

    As opposed to the Washington Post ombudsman who made a mistake, got her hair mussed, and then threw a tantrum? I would think that being a professor (even one at Harvard) leads to your views being formally challenged more than under other circumstances. If you are a journalist, you can hang with your friends and write drivel like the above that will usually passed un-noticed. Even legendary professors have their views in their chosen field challenged all the time. And it isn't like this is merely an "academic" (har) pursuit, this is their life's work. The Harvard professioriate may be insular, but I doubt it is any more insular than any other similar kind of group.

    As for his famous fuckups, I must admit that it is a toss up. He was probably right concerning Cornel West (who always struck me as a better rhetorician than a scholar), about half right concerning Israeli divestment, and not right at all concerning the women in science, so I don't think his record "on the merits" is particularly good either. The last one was especially galling because Harvard has been legendary (though not as bad as some other major institutions, in all fairness) in its refusal to hire and then tenure women in the sciences. That is something that the President can control and fix if he tries hard enough. And while women might be dumber at math (facetious), there are many qualified women scientists that Harvard could hire but doesn't. Summers talking about the genes seemed like an absurd cop-out.

    So, I am not too sorry to see him go.

Humpty-Dumpty

    Someone once told me that the Humpty-Dumpty theory of meaning was "What I want that sentence to mean, that's what it means." I think you would obviously need something like that to make this sentence by Orrin Hatch...

"And, more importantly, we've stopped a mass murderer in Saddam Hussein. Nobody denies that he was supporting al-Qaida," he said, according to The Spectrum newspaper in St. George. "Well, I shouldn't say nobody. Nobody with brains."

...mean anything remotely like this sentence:

"Saddam clearly had a long history of supporting terrorists, but I was not talking about any formal link between Saddam and al-Qaida before the war," Hatch said in a statement. "Instead, I pointed out that the current insurgency in Iraq includes al-Qaida, under the leadership of al-Zarqawi, along with former elements of Saddam's regime."

Sigh.

I change my mind.

    My new jerk reaction with whole port in Dubai thing is that the Bush Administration is fucking up, yet again. And that is probably true. But it is looking more and more like this was a pretty harmless endeavor. Despite the fact that the Dubai port deal was probably standard operating procedure and not particularly dangerous, there are two areas where I think criticism is still justified, but both are a lot more complicated than just "he compromised national security etc":

1. Legal separation of powers: Once again, we see the Bush Administration flaunting the oversight role of Congress. Congress, in 1993, required that all sales like the Dubai port one must undergo a 45 day review before approval. The Bush Administration didn't do the review. This is yet another symptom of the Bush Administration's flagrant disrespect for the Constitution and the rule of law. I can't say it any plainer.
2. A General Foreign Policy and National Security Outlook as "Open for sale": To a dangerous extent, the Bush administration has been exporting key elements of our foreign policy and national security infrastructure to private vendors, whether they be connected with state actors or not. I think this is a dangerous precedent that reverses several centuries of development. There is a reason that the state took over war-making after the 30 Years War: private citizens are bad at it. They still are.
   

Apparently, belittling an entire gender and pissing EVERYONE off might cost you your job...

    Summers resigns. I was never impressed with the guy. One reason that is not mentioned is that Summers often talked about getting Harvard grads to teach high school, but did he do anything to support those (like me) who wanted to do that? Nada, zip, zero. Meh.

The NSA Scandal?

    Glenn Greenwald writes. You read.