Over at Teekay’s

Eric is no doubt correct that elections do not a democracy make, something about which people in former Yugoslavia know a thing or two.

I am nonetheless extremely pleased with the amazing voter turnout reported for today’s election in Iraq.

Iraqi Voters Turn Out in High Numbers
Despite Attacks Intended to Deter Them
New York Times, 30 January 2004 (free registration required)

Iraqi Turnout Higher Than Expected
Washington Post, 30 January 2004 (free registration required)

Trotz Terror hohe Wahlbeteiligung im Irak
Neue Zürcher Zeitung, 30 January 2004

This is no reason for triumphalism — nothing in today’s Iraq is, amid the shambles of an occupation the loonies in the Pentagon comprehensively fucked up. But I salute those Iraqis who braved the threats by callous terrorists and the condescending lectures by Western hacks observers alike and cast their votes. The latter group will hate them for doing that, because it disproves all their inane theories about why the savages citizens of the Middle East are not ready for democracy, which, you see, is an imported, Western concept. (I do think, though, that it’s fair enough to question not only the timing of the elections but also whether proportional representation, with some group protection thrown in, is the best system under such circumstances.)

A key proponent of the “callous hack” category is Robert Fisk, who started a column last week by equating GWB and UBL. (No link since I read this stuff on Lexis-Nexis — the Independent evidently believes that his excretions columns are among the [few] things on its site worth paying for — but it was titled ONE MAN’S BELIEF IN THE TRIUMPH OF GOOD OVER EVIL SHOULD GIVE US ALL HOPE and published 29 January.)

America has insisted on these elections - which will produce a largely Shia parliament representing Iraq’s largest religious community - because they are supposed to provide an exit strategy for embattled US forces, but they seem set to change the geopolitical map of the Arab world in ways the Americans could never have imagined. For George Bush and Tony Blair this is the law of unintended consequences writ large.
Robert Fisk, THIS ELECTION WILL CHANGE THE WORLD. BUT NOT IN THE WAY THE AMERICANS IMAGINED, The Independent, 29 January 2005

This is nonsense, quite frankly. The elections have from the very beginning been designed precisely to be a motor for wider change in the Middle East. And the Americans, as this passage seems to imply (for with Fisk, you can never be entirely sure what he’s really trying to say), didn’t know that the Shia are a potentially difficult ally? Check this out:

The Kurdish mountains of northern Iraq lie far from the Shia Arab marshlands in the south. Yet while they may be geographically far apart and culturally distinct, recent meetings between leaders of from the two regions indicate closer co-operation in their attempt to agree on the shape of a future Baghdad government.

But, according to diplomats, while the two sides may be working closer together - a meeting is believed to have taken place as recently as last week - the main Kurdish factions and the loose coalition of Islamic Shia parties have so far failed to convince the US that they would hold Iraq together, should Washington succeed in ousting Saddam Hussein, the president.

This is from the Financial Times, via Lexis-Nexis, published on 16 July 2002. Before the war. I could go on and on and on. How about this?

Thousands of Iranian-backed Iraqi Shia forces have crossed into Iraq from Iran after about 20 years of exile, in a move that could increase US worries about Iranian interference in postwar Iraq.

This is from the same source, from 3 May 2003. Hardly sounds like the USG needed Robert Fisk to warn it of the “danger” of Shia domination.

[By the way, anyone heard anything about Muki al-Sadr lately? The “invincible,” “implacable” foe of America who was an “insurmountable obstacle” to the U.S. forces and the interim government?]

So, what’s the “unintended consequences” Fisk is talking about?

But outside Iraq, Arab leaders are talking of a Shia “Crescent” that will run from Iran through Iraq to Lebanon via Syria, whose Alawite leadership forms a branch of Shia Islam. The underdogs of the Middle East, repressed under the Ottomans, the British and then the pro-Western dictators of the region, will be a new and potent political force.

Riiight. Lebanon and Syria run by Shias that are somehow buoyed by successful elections in Iraq? Come again?

Update, 31 January: Head over to the Times while the piece is still available and read Ignatieff’s column. No, you don’t need to be a fan of his or think he’s the most consistent thinker in the world — just read it. (Free registration required.)

This is what “reporting” from Baghdad has come to (from today’s Times, free registration required):

Several Explosions Heard Across Baghdad
By DEXTER FILKINS

I’ve written here before how great NewsFire was. Its wonderfully uncluttered interface lets you focus on what really counts: the feeds you’re reading. It is by far the most intuitive and elegant newsreader, and one of the most elegant Mac applications ever.

Now, its creator wants twenty bucks for it. As of version 0.9, you can no longer add new feeds to the application without registering and paying. (You can still add feeds to an earlier version, however, and when 0.9 starts up it will use them, so that’s a pretty simple way to circumvent that restriction. Keep an older version handy!) Twenty bucks for an app that’s not left Beta status yet and crashes several times a day? (Since you’re not producing anything in it, it doesn’t really matter, except that you also lose what you’ve marked as read.) C’mon!

I guess I’ll wait for the RSS integration in the next version of Safari. I’ve also tried Sage, an extension to Firefox, which I’ve reluctantly promoted to default browser despite some really annoying shortcomings, but I just can’t warm to it, interface- and otherwise.

Interesting discussion over at East Ethnia (spawned by a post on Histologion) about exporting democracy.

Here’s what I wrote:

Let’s not kid ourselves here and acknowledge that most commentary on exporting democracy serves fairly obvious political agendas. Hobsbawm is no exception. (I remember a brief chat I had with him in New York about ten years ago, just after his “Age of Extremes” was published, during which he displayed the most incredible ignorance about events in Yugoslavia — not ignorance about events, in fact, but about what it all meant: the bigger picture. I couldn’t help but feel he was simply nostalgic for the time of Tito and sad that something so wonderful had been destroyed, and full of contempt for those who in his view destroyed it — along the lines of “who do these Slovenians and Croatians think they are.”)

I think some of this is evident from his statement that “’Spreading democracy’ aggravated ethnic conflict and produced the disintegration of states in multinational and multicommunal regions after both 1918 and 1989…”

I’m not sure how he could suggest, with a straight face, that the upheavals of 1989 were a result of democracy export policies by the West. Such policies only started working once the system had crumbled from within, so it’s simply wrong to present this as some sort of Western invasion of the former Soviet Union, its satellites, and Yugoslavia. (Don’t even get me started on 1918.) Plus, he also seems to suggest that dictatorship is fine as long as it keeps those savages under control, because as soon as you give them freedom, you see, they start slaughtering each other.

And in any case, even if correct, wouldn’t his theory on 1989 simply demonstrate that democracy export can and does on occasion, and possibly quite often, coincide with the national interest of the great powers?

But the bigger problem I have with the critics of spreading democracy (and let’s leave out for the moment specific policies, many of which I find as cynical as some of the posters here) is that they want to have it both ways: they accuse the US for not promoting democracy enough in the past, in cases such as Turkey or South Korea, and then proceed to condemn the current US policy of doing precisely that as imperialism, benevolent or otherwise, or cynicism. I honestly don’t think the demonstrators in Tbilisi or Kiev cared too much why exactly the US supported them — they were happy about it and that’s it. Intentions may be an interesting thing for policy wonks to worry about, but for most people who are directly affected by such policies the key question is, does it work.

(Let’s not fragment the debate even further — if you want to comment, please do so at East Ethnia.)

All right, this isn’t of the day really, but it is for me, since I only get the Economist in my mailbox on Tuesdays.

Some dude from Harvard admissions says in a letter to the editor,

Alumni children are admitted at higher rates than average in large measure due to self-selection: weaker candidates tend not to apply.

Hmmm.

I’m honestly not sure what this guy is trying to say. What makes weaker candidates weaker so they don’t apply? Doesn’t it sound like he’s saying that being a alumnus, alumna, or alumni child does make you a stronger candidate? If objectively weaker candidates tend not to apply, shouldn’t that decrease the rejection rate of the non-alumnus group because the weaker ones don’t even apply, while alumnus kids (who certainly think they’re smarter) do? Or is he talking about self-selection among alumni children?

I did study logic, even in graduate school, but my head is spinning right now. Please enlighten me!

As early as this week, we might see the publication of the independent report on the oil-for-food scandal that has hurt the UN.

That last bit is my entry for the understatement of the week contest.

The Times reported last week that the current head of UNDP, Mark Malloch Brown, who’s leaving his post to become Annan’s chief of staff, predicted “an ambitious package of proposed structural and personnel changes” soon after the oil-for-food report would come out.

‘’To achieve its potential and another San Francisco moment,'’ said Mr. Malloch Brown, referring to the site of the creation of the organization, ‘’the United Nations must win back the trust of the American public and world public opinion.'’

Well said. But is it credible? Can anyone think of lost trust being regained by shuffling a bunch of bureaucrats around and changing organization charts?

This is an update on an earlier post about St*rbucks or the absence thereof in these lands. I did a quick check on the St*rbucks locator (yes, it works in old and new Europe alike!) and think — think — that the closest one might be in Vienna (seven or eight of them) and then Thessaloniki (one).

GIves you an idea where I live.

My last address, by contrast, had 146 stores in a 5-mile radius.

There’s an amusing discussion over at kottke.org about density per population — seems that Manhattan is actually not as tightly packed as you might think, and once you include in the head count the people who work there (as opposed to people who just live there) you get an even lower density (I know lots of people living in the outer boroughs who work or study in Manhattan, don’t think I know anyone who does it the other way round).

Graffiti seen on a wall in Vlasenica (some vukojebina near Zvornik):

Srbija do Tokija

Bring it on, baby!

One of the great things about living in the third world the Balkans South-Eastern Europe is that TV programming is as unpredictable as it is eclectic. (I imagine it goes something like this: “Eh, Mujo, we have an hour to fill tonight — hajde, check in the basement what’s lying around!”) You get to see the occasional great movie, and you get to see the original (usually minus the credits…) with subtitles, none of that dubbing crap they show in Germany and France. (Heck, the French even dub their own movies!)

So I saw Wonder Boys last night, for the second time.

What a wonderful movie!

I’m not a critic, and this isn’t a review. But I thought the acting was great, and I don’t particularly like Michael Douglas. It’s all about very grown-up stuff, even though none of the characters (other Frances McDormand’s) is particularly grown-up. In fact, I think they all missed a development stage or two, what with Grady Tripp, the creative writing prof at the center of the story who’s rarely seen without a fatty, or his editor, a hilariously inane Robert Downey Jr. who’s chasing Tripp’s charge, a young student who’s in all sorts of trouble. (The sort of trouble that leaves dead dogs in its wake.) It’s hard to imagine such an adult mixture of motifs — adultery, gay sex, sex with your students (or at least the strong intimation of it), drugs, abortion — in a mainstream Hollywood movie, but of course it does happen every once in a while. (Last time I saw it was in Mike Nichol’s Closer.)

The movie is based on a short novel by Michael Chabon, of whom I’ve only ever read his great, comic (?) novel Mysteries of Pittsburgh. The director is the dude that did L.A. Confidential before, another movie I watched at least three times and liked almost as much as Chinatown.

I should stop before this totally degenerates into a laundry list of books and movies I like, but if you live in a more civilized place, run out and rent it.

Oh, and if you saw the trailer and got turned off by it, ignore it. The screenwriter told Salon.com,

And you couldn’t have gotten me to the movie they [Paramount] seemed to be promoting if you put a gun to my head — and I am this movie’s target audience. Look, it’s their job to sell the movie. I know it can be a hard job, but, hey, our jobs are hard, too.

Well said, pal — and well done!

Is it just me or is there something slightly off about the dude on whose watch Rwanda and Bosnia happened, with the UN standing by (in Srebrenica) or running away (in Rwanda), saying “never again?”

Update, 1/26: Of course, there’s also the issue of Darfur, which gives this whole Auschwitz memo-fest an even more cynical ring. On that, check out the admirable work of the tireless Eric Reeves.

Together with prostitution, a trade with which it shares more than a few characteristics, journalism must be the most over-hyped profession. For some reason, most people seem to regard it as inherently glamorous, something I’ve never understood.

Maybe because I hail from a journalists’ family?

The practice of reporting and editing is inherently unglamorous, as far as I’m concerned. You make a bunch of phone calls, read up on the internet, and the rest of your work is to sit in front of your computer and draft your story. What’s glamorous about that?

Okay, every once in a while, if you’re a big shot, you get to interview a head of state or a movie star (neither of which seems to be particularly exciting, by the way). Or, you travel in exotic places with bullets flying around your head.

Great things to brag about to your buddies, but not so great to go through. And if your buddies are reporters themselves, they’ll know it’s all bull.

I suspect the appeal of the journalist (I even hate the word — you’re either a reporter, or an editor, or a critic, or maybe a columnist) lies elsewhere. It’s one of only a handful of jobs that combines a high-prestige art — in this case, writing — with a regular income. The others that come to mind are theater directors (unless their freelance) and conductors — the sort of conductor that wields a baton, not the sort that takes your ticket on the tram.

Some dude on the TeX for Mac OS X mailing list uses as his sign-off a quote by Donald Knuth that got me thinking, even though it’s Sunday:

Email is a wonderful thing for people whose role in life is to be on top of things. But not for me; my role is to be on the bottom of things. What I do takes long hours of studying and uninterruptible concentration.

Hmmmmm. I do remember doing that — like, fifteen years ago, when I was doing grad work in philosophy. I’d read books for their own sake, for their “intrinsic value” (whatever that is) rather than for their “engagement” in some “arguments.” A while later I switched to political science (and from a Germanic style of teaching, research, and reading to an American one, or as our friends in France would euphemistically call it, an Anglo-Saxon one) and learned how to read books primarily for how they advanced our knowledge through their engagement in some argument.

One effect was that books were no longer taken as coherent units but as a compilation of often rather isolated “arguments” that were often bound up in a variety of incompatible conversations. Books became these multifaceted artifacts that were simultaneously partaking in debates with very different concerns. (Note that this has nothing to do with postmodernism and stuff — quite the opposite: I was doing some of that in my philosophy days since my minor was in comparative literature, in a very small department that was heavily influenced by people like de Man, J. Hillis Miller, and Geoffrey Hartman.) We were making the books less coherent in our quest for more coherent strands of thoughts that advanced the discipline.

I think Knuth might be talking about a similar dichotomy, two types of thinking and working, and I suspect that they fractalize even within individual fields.

I haven’t posted all week because I was busy with difficult issues. I would define those as things that require more than a couple minutes’ thought, and they’re — at least nominally — part of my job.

The first difficult issue was anti-Semitism. Some local hack (quite a well-known “journalist” overall though) wrote a column for a small Islamic youth magazine that “quoted” (without quotation marks or direct quotes) “experts” (all notorious Holocaust deniers) claiming that it was scientifically proven that six million Jews could not have been killed by the Germans. Just in case this wasn’t clear enough — after all, he was just quoting, no? — he added that at most 300,000 died, most of them of disease.

Not surprisingly, the piece caused an uproar. The country’s best-known human rights activist (a man for whom I have much respect) suggested to the media that every time a Jewish cemetery is desecrated, this columnist guy be locked up.

Maybe this is a cultural thing, but I always thought human rights activists were the ones trying to get journalists out of prison, not into it.

In any case, the columnist backtracked when he was put in front of a TV camera with the head of the Jewish community here, a rather formidable character who was both in style and substance a few sizes too big for the hack.

The more important question was, even if this dude is totally marginal (and I’ve been following his stuff — personally, I think he’s nuts), is this a society where anti-Semitism is on the rise — a society that’s all too happy to blame all its woes on outsiders or supposed outsiders? (Jews have been here since they were invited by the Sultan after they were kicked out by us enlightened Western Christians.) Yes to the latter, but I’m not so sure about the former.

You can see why it’d be difficult for someone who has the phrase “I’m not sure” in his vocabulary to draft an editorial that has the necessary self-assured gravitas (but I did it anyway).

No, it wasn’t a Starb*cks cup, but this is still an extraordinary sight.

I have been in this town, on and off, for over five years now. Today was the first time ever that I’ve seen a dude with a paper cup filled with what looked suspiciously like coffee.

In the street.

Some guy with a cuppa joe in the street.

See, the idea of having a quick one in these latitudes is to go to your local cafe and order either an espresso or a Turkish-style (local) coffee. This will take between four and about eight minutes, possibly ten. In the meantime, your buddies drop by as well and you start discussing last night’s game, or the BMW someone parked outside, or you trade jokes. Your coffee arrives and you let it cool down a bit, light up, chat some more. You grab a newspaper and scan the headlines. You trade some more jokes.

You get the picture. By the time you’re done, an hour has passed.

The alternative is to call the local cafe and they’ll deliver coffee to your office, in real cups on a real tray carried by a real waiter. (“Call” here means both to pick up the phone and dial their number, and shouting out the window across the street.)

That’s what makes the dude with the cup so extraordinary.

Heilbroner certainly never cared too much about whether fellow economists thought of him as one of their own or a mere “popularizer.” (In this, he resembles Gailbraith.) He did care, however, about the direction of academic economics away from social concerns — concern for the public good — towards esoteric, abstract models, which he highlighted with this charming line, according to the LA Times obit (via Lexis-Nexis, so no link):

I’ve conned millions of young people into thinking that economics is an interesting subject in tune with their social concerns, he once said.

But does it have to be that way: the more popular you become, the less your peers take you seriously? Sure, there’s a fair share of envy in this. Some guy who’s been working on an esoteric manuscript for the last ten years is not going to take too kindly to some dude who keeps churning out book after book (see what happened to Niall Ferguson). But is that the whole explanation? What do all these academic bloggers out there think — could this be a reason why we tend to stay anonymous (except for brave individuals like Gordy)?

I always thought my brother’s Cube was the coolest computer I’d ever seen, and I’m saying this as the proud owner of a 17“ PowerBook.

But this is cooler — and it comes as the rock-bottom low end of Apple’s product range:

Sure, it’s bare-bones, but I don’t think anyone can complain about that.

Some people still did.

Shares of Apple fell $4.40 Tuesday, to close at $64.56.

The 23-year old kids who ”analyze“ stocks (what’s there to analyze? The values go up, or they go down, or they stay the same) had urged Apple for years to go down-market. They complained about small market share and an image of exclusivity that put many consumers off. (Never mind that a good chunk of Apple’s business was in the high-yield laptop market, where Apple had a great product line-up, introducing WiFi and bluetooth and 17-inch-screens to consumers.)

Now the same guys are complaining Apple’s latest move would devalue its brand value and confuse customers. The money quote comes from some geezer in yesterday’s Times (free registration required):

”This is not going to return Apple to a high level of profitability,“ said David Yoffie, a professor at Harvard Business School. ”The margins on these new machines will be trivial. And I think they will add no more than one or two points of market share.“

So, professor, you’re saying Dell has higher profit margins with the crap they’re selling? But besides the obvious nonsensical content of the quote, today’s Times brought some juice to the quote:

Correction: January 13, 2005, Thursday:

A front-page article yesterday about Apple Computer’s introduction of a low-priced Macintosh, which will compete with personal computers using Windows software and Intel chips, omitted a corporate affiliation of David Yoffie, a Harvard professor who commented on the potential market for the new machine. He is a director of the Intel Corporation.

Go figure.

Update, 1/13: Drunken Batman has looked into the whole mini thing a bit deeper and comes up with some not-so-great things about this little machine — basically, you need to shell out a lot of money to add stuff, and shell out money to have it added by a certified technician (including RAM!), which is ludicrous.

This is re: the comment Eric left to my post about capacity-building and capacity confiscation.

I don’t blame anyone for taking jobs that overpay — it makes perfect economic sense and, hey, I do it all the time (for any clients who may read this — I’m just kidding). But what makes sense individually may not make sense collectively. (I read this beautiful book about Hobbes by the late Jean Hampton ten years ago and I vaguely remember some pretty neat game-theoretical explanations why that is so. Of course, I read it for an exam and forgot most of it right after I had passed.) In fact, the income gap between locals and internationals is replicated right within the group of locals, between those who have international jobs and those who have local (or no) jobs.

I guess it depends whether you operate in the local or in the international economy, and mind you, that has nothing to do with your physical location. (more…)

I didn’t know Heilbroner personally, only saw him a few times around campus (or what passes as such at the New School) and heard him speak at conferences. He was real old school, and I mean that in a good way. Difficult to imagine this sort of gentleman-scholar (I’m not speaking as a Straussian here) being educated today, where all anyone seems to worry about is their own little arcane specialization. We’re missing the wood for the trees, it seems to me, in most modern scholarship — especially in economics, which has become this disembodied science far removed from actual people. That’s the topic of the Crisis of Vision in Modern Economic Thought. In any case, click on more for the New School obit.

Update, 1/13: Here’s a quote from the Times obit, sent in by my dear friend Phil:

Although popular with students and the general reader, he was regarded by mainstream economists as a popularizer and historian whose insights made no great contribution to the study of the field.

Hmm, behind the contorted syntax — what exactly is that “although” doing there, logically speaking? — lurks something rather more important: this insane academic idea that if you have an audience other than your peers, you can’t possibly be saying anything worth saying. Now, where did we encounter that very same prejudice just very recently, in another obit?

In any case, I thought the Times‘ summary of Heilbroner’s rejoinder was rather effective —

He, in turn, saw their reliance on mathematics and computer modeling as narrow in vision and as losing sight of the very purpose of economics — to help improve the well-being of people at work and of the society they work in.

— or at least it would’ve been had the hack obit writer not taken that metaphor to breaking point and too literally. In any case, you get the point.

(more…)

Been busy with a client report for a donor government on local institutes that do policy-relevant research. (That may explain the scarce posting over the last couple weeks — that and the fact that I finally managed to finish my prospectus, though my committee doesn’t know that yet.)

It’s been an interesting job, but the bit of research I did also confirmed some of my worst fears relating to what Ignatieff calls (in Empire Lite)

the contrast between the international rhetoric of capacity building and the reality of capacity confiscation.

He’s talking about many things here: the fact that local UN drivers often make three times as much as high court judges or cabinet ministers in such countries; that the UN and other agencies preach transparency to local government while resolutely refusing to be governed by the same rules and principles; the

illusion of self-government joined to the reality of imperial tutelage;

In short, the whole complex of imperial hypocrisy that Ignatieff says is a necessary of contemporary intervention, or what he calls “Empire lite.”

Here, the international overseer has for the last nine years been the main authority not just politically, but also legislatively: most laws concerning issues that were of interest to the international peace implementation mission were shaped by his office — in fact, very often, the laws were simply drafted by internationals and then submitted to parliament to be rubber stamped. If parliament proved reticent, the law would be imposed.

One effect of this is that there’s almost no serious policy research in the country. There are two international groups that have critically monitored peace implementation, the International Crisis Group and the European Stability Initiative, though the latter are nowhere near the caliber of the former. But in terms of indigenous capacity almost nothing has happened. (I’m not talking about advocacy NGOs or so-called intellectuals, of which there are rather too many here, since they usually don’t do serious research and have a tendency to criticize without proposing feasible alternatives.)

Another effect is that government doesn’t get the concept of outsourcing policy development, or involving outside actors in other capacities. Most laws are not even submitted for consultation to civil society or interest groups.

Unfortunately, Igantieff is rather better on the diagnosis than the therapy. How can a history of passive receiving be overcome and replaced with an attitude of providing and producing?