A while ago the Economist ran a special report on corporate social responsibility, or CSR. Their take was the old school line that shareholder value is social value, and that CSR advocates would be wise to ponder the manifest blessings of capitalism in addition to nitpicking about a few companies' or sectors' more malfeasant externalities.

At the time I read the report, I remember thinking that both the Economist and the CSR camp were a bit too extremist. The sole responsibility of companies may well be to return profits to their shareholders, but by no means are pursuing profit and recognizing legitimate social concerns mutually exclusive. Conversely, the idea that companies will always behave irresponsibly unless otherwise prompted seems a bit, well, irresponsible.

I bring this all up because in the latest edition of the Economist, there's a piece on "business and society" by Ian Davis, the worldwide managing director of McKinsey & Company. (Although the title reads "by invitation", my guess is -- if the business news world is anything like the rest of the publishing industry anyway -- that Davis wrote the piece and then asked the Economist to run it.)

Simply put, Davis' article is fantastic. He manages to be both insightful and concise, with the result that his piece is probably the best statement I've come across on what the social role of companies should be. His key point:

Social pressures often indicate the existence of unmet social needs or consumer preferences. Businesses can gain advantage by spotting and supplying these before their competitors.

In other words: there's profit in addressing social concerns. Executives need to realize it's in their interest to anticipate and adapt to social pressure, and (many) CSR proponents need to recognize that capitalism itself is best equipped to deal with its own failings.

There's more to Davis' view than that, of course, but it seems to me to be a rather sensible common ground.

Update: Of course the first news I come across after posting this is the Supreme Court's decision on the Arthur Andersen case. Please rest assured that the timing was coincidental and that I'm not in any way trying to defend Arthur Andersen, let alone Enron.

Since I've already covered the French referendum a fair amount (most recently yesterday morning), I don't really feel the need to get into France's 'non' vote again now that it's actually happened.

Far more interesting to ponder, I think, is what would happen if the U.S. constitution had to be ratified again today. Would the constitution survive? If not, which states would reject it?

I know it's something of a futile excercise to consider hypotheticals like that, but like I said, I find it really interesting to think about.

My own guess is that the voting patterns would be similar to those in France. Richer areas would vote in favor of the constitution both on principle and for the increased wealth that more streamlined markets would generate; poorer areas would vote no both on principle and in fear that it would lead to increased financial insecurity.

That said, the one wildcard would be religion. What would a state like Colorado do? Compared to its neighboring states, it's quite wealthy. But it's also at the epicenter of the evangelical movement. Theoretically, it might vote against a federal constitution on the grounds that it would then have more control to determine issues like abortion, gay marriage, euthenasia, etc.

But what do you think -- would our constitution survive today?

Would all fifty states really ratify it?

Roger Cohen hit the nail on the head yesterday when it comes to the French referendum on the EU constitution.

Each of the ten points that Cohen makes are worth reading, but three in particular caught my eye:

3. Modern capitalism, with its free markets, open borders, mobile labor, and openness to foreign investment, has not been entirely accepted or digested in France. That may seem extraordinary. This is a capitalist country with some of the world's most competitive enterprises. It has been a driving force of the EU, whose effect from the initial merging of the French and Germany steel industries has been to open economies. Yet, lodged in the DNA of the French fonctionnaire and worker are a rejection, or at least a fierce skepticism, of what is called "Anglo-Saxon capitalism" or "neo-liberalism." It is the questionable identification of the constitution with this form of capitalism that has led the French left to reject it in droves. "The conviction remains broad that freedom and free markets are for sharks," said Francois Bayrou, the leader of the center-right Union for French Democracy.

8. The passionate exchanges within French society and (often divided) families provoked by the referendum have revealed the extent to which the EU had evolved in recent years without adequate discussion among the more than 450 million citizens of the EU. Again, the French are to be thanked for igniting this debate.

10. France, a medium-sized power, is unsure of its place in the world. Only such uncertainty can explain the fears inspired by globalization, foreigners, China, the United States and an expanded Europe that have surfaced. Europe was supposed to be a means for France to box above its weight on the international stage. But many now view the EU as undermining France. A frustrated nationalism has been rekindled. "We are living a profoundly irrational moment," said Bayrou.

Regardless of the results from today's referendum, each of these points will still hold true. Many in France will continue to eye "liberalised" capitalism with profound suspicion, to remain unconvinced that there is a shared identity between themselves and those in eastern Europe (let alone Turkey), and to feel deeply unsettled about the relative insignificance of France on a global level.

In this sense, the value of the referendum for France really has less to do with regional unity and more to do with national introspection -- if nothing else, it's opened up popular fears and set them within its political debate.

As bad as things have been for Chirac, his trouble now is that for the foreseeable future that's exactly where they're going to stay.

Just before going on a run this evening, I read the Times article on the federal judge who ruled that the DoD "would have to release perhaps dozens of photographs taken by an American soldier of Iraqi detainees in the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq."

As remarkable as that ruling is, I don't bring it up for the judicial questions it raises. Rather, I mention it because one of the few real consequence those pictures would have would be a renewed call for an American withdrawal from Iraq. And that would be a mistake.

At this point I need to back up a little. As some of you know, I've been teaching here in Austria for the last eight months. And each day when I go for a run, I pass by "The Schloss". Although the building is known most famously as the Von Trapp residence in The Sound of Music, it now houses an American institute for international diplomacy.

As I passed by the Schloss today, I tried to imagine what Austria would be like had the U.S. pulled out too soon. By 'too soon' I mean this: not so soon that Austria would have fallen into the Soviet bloc, but still prior to the point where economic and political conditions had stabilized enough for us to feel comfortable with leaving. The result wouldn't have been pretty. Austria would have remained free in name, but it would likely lack much of what little democratic and capitalistic spirit it currently has.

Now, the comparison of post-war Austria with post-war Iraq is, to say the least, fraught with significant historical differences. But there is at least one general similarity: while Austria shared a lengthy border with communist Europe, Iraq shares a border with several regimes that are non-democratic at best and outright tyrranical at worst.

Again, my concern here is not with security per se. If America pulled out next year or soon thereafter, I don't think there's a risk that Iraq would turn into another Iran. But I do think we'd be leaving a significant cultural void.

The U.S. didn't stay in Austria until it had established a democratic order; it stayed until it had established a democratic culture, a culture embodied by everything from an entrepreneurial spirit to the spirit of debate.

At this point, America's military is not in Iraq to secure political order alone. It is there to secure a democratic culture in an openly anti-democratic region. Abu Ghraib and the atrocities committed by the American military in Iraq have already harmed that culture enough. Withdrawing our troops too soon, I fear, would permanently maim it altogether.

Normally I respectfully disagree with the arguments on Oxblog. Yesterday, however, proved the exception.

I don't respect this post by David Adesnik at all:

MILLIONS DEAD BY ANALOGY: In a bold effort to destroy any pretense of her own detachment or objectivity, the the head of Amnesty International has described the US prison at Guantanamo Bay as "the gulag of our times".

Although the editors of the WaPo have made the right decision to single out this absurd comparison as the dumbest and most offensive remark made by AI's Secretary General, Irene Khan, this single outrage should not obscure how thoroughly offensive her entire speech was.

The purpose of Khan's speech was to introduce and summarize AI's annual report

...I presume that Khan's emphasis on the US (and the UK), reflects her knowledge that exerting pressure on the world's greatest democracies may actually result in a change of behavior, whereas Kim Jong Il and Fidel Castro couldn't care less about what Amnesty International thinks of their behavior.

This, however, is no excuse for Khan's behavior, because there are many, many nations that are susceptible to pressure and which commit atrocities far worse than anything that happened at Abu Ghraib. Let's start with Syria. Just a few months ago, I might have ignorantly said that Bashar would never listen to foreign critics. But now he has no choice, and Amnesty should recognize how much good it might accomplish by emphasizing Syrian brutality.

Of course, there is a chapter on Syria in AI's annual report. The same is true of CubaNorth Korea. But when the head of the organization singles out the US and UK for criticism, she lets the Cubans, Syrians and North Koreans know that they are not her biggest concern. It's exactly the same as when Bush singles out Egypt for criticism but lets Pakistan and Saudi Arabia slide.

At least Bush can say in his own defense that the Saudis and Pakistanis are helping us fight the war on terror. Amnesty could never say that the Cubans, Syrians, or North Koreans are doing anything to make the world a better place.

Admittedly, the "gulag" comment was a bit of a stretch. But the general idea that structural similarities exist between what is happening at Guantanamo Bay and what did happen in some of the more repressive regimes of the past is very much fair game.

More to the point though, what really bothers me is the disputational tack that Adesnik takes. Note that he never outright defends the behavior of the American military. Rather, he tries to direct blame elsewhere. The U.S.? How dare Amnesty International point the finger at the U.S. -- doesn't it know Cuba, Syria, & North Korea are far worse?

Please. That Cuba, Syria, and North Korea are far worse is precisely the point: it is utterly shameful that grounds for comparison should even exist between those countries and a constitutional democracy.

Left or right, Adesnik's argument represents the blogosphere at its worst. Beneath his pedantry lies only the sandbox tactic of deflecting self-criticism by pointing the finger at everyone else. An Oxford student should know better.

Since I've been in Europe for the majority of the last eight months, I'm not sure whether the NYTimes itself has been running John Vinocur's and Roger Cohen's columns for the International Herald Tribune (the IHT is owned by the Times).

If not, it's a shame: their collective coverage of the EU ratification process has been some of the best journalism of the year.

This is typically true of Cohen's piece yesterday, which ends with an irony I hadn't considered before:

Because the [EU] constitution does involve some measure of change, if only that of closer interaction with other systems, it is inherently suspect.

Chirac has been a consistent agent of that conservatism. In this sense, he is merely a potential victim of his own indecisiveness.

If his vision is defeated Sunday, after Schröder's defeat last weekend, the world will face this paradox: The lauded European leaders of resistance to an unpopular war in Iraq punished at the polls after that war's proponents - George Bush and Tony Blair - have been endorsed. That outcome is not inevitable, but it's likely - and worth pondering.

For an American audience, that's a lot to unpack. Chirac a conservative? A liberal like Schroder lost? What is going on in Europe?

The quick answer is that Europe's local politics is conservative in the true sense of the word -- as being averse to change. That reactionary instinct is the reason the EU constitution is in serious trouble, as well as the reason (when extended to a national scale) that the bulk of "old" Europe was against the Iraq war.

Clearly, that doesn't fully explain the paradox of the passage, but it is at least a start. Schroder and Chirac are currently losing because they're violating the very principle on which they protested the invasion of Iraq: the conservation of the status quo.

My father, a congregational pastor, is currently working towards a professional doctorate in educational ministries. So when he caught me readings some Rawls, Habermas, Rorty, etc last summer, he suggested I also try Alasdair MacIntyre -- a professor at Notre Dame who is one of the more prominent moral theologians of the last half-century.

It's taken me a while, but I finally got through After Virtue the other day. Although I disagree with both the starting and end points, along the way there's some really fascinating stuff. The fact that MacIntyre comes at the history and development of modern moral philosophy from an external perspective allows him to offer insights that aren't really available to anyone writing from within that history. In particular, I'm thinking about his chapters on the social sciences at large and on the Rawls-Nozick debate in contemporary philosophy.

Even in more conventional terms, though, MacIntyre is also worth reading. Since he writes in a 'liberal' vocabulary but from a 'conservative' perspective, the result is that both conservative and liberal readers will likely find the ideology of the other camp to be uniquely intelligible.

The best example of this has to do with a passage on patriotism:

Patriotism cannot be what it was because we lack in the fullest sense a patria. The point I am making must not be confused with the commonplace liberal rejection of patriotism. Liberals have often -- not always -- taken a negative or even hostile attitude towards patriotism, partly because their allegiance is to values which they take to be universal and not local and particular, and partly because of a well-justified suspicion that in the modern world patriotism is often a facade behind which chauvinism and imperialism are fostered. But my present point is not that patriotism is good or bad as a sentiment, but that the practice of patriotism as a virtue is in advanced societies no longer possible in the way it once was. In any society where government does not express or represent the moral community of the citizens, but is instead a set of institutional arrangements for imposing a bureaucratized unity on a society which lacks genuine moral consensus, the nature of political obligation becomes systematically unclear. Patriotism is or was a virtue founded on attachment primarily to a political or moral community and only secondarily to the government of that community; but it is characteristically exercised in discharging responsibility to and in such government. When however the relationship of government to the moral community is put in question both by the changed nature of government and the lack of moral consensus in society, it becomes difficult any longer to have any clear, simple and teachable conception of patriotism. Loyalty to my country, to my community -- which remains unalterably a central virtue -- becomes detached from obedience to the government which happens to rule me.

In other words: religious conservatives needs to understand that for structural reasons the government cannot operate as a moral authority in an advanced society, or conversely, that on an economic and political level alone patriotism as truly understood is no longer feasible. The left, meanwhile, needs to recognize that human agency is often contingent on moral agency, and that if the government doesn't authorize the latter, then that contingency doesn't just disappear.

I'm not saying MacIntyre is a must read, but if you're at all interested in the present chasm between secular and theological morality, he provides an interesting intellectual bridge that's worth checking out.

So the filibuster issue is resolved, for now. Personally I would have liked to see everything come to a full head now rather than being left, potentially, for a Supreme Court fight. But the compromise certainly isn't a bad outcome. The Dems let in some judges they don't like; the GOP played a major hand -- the religious conservatives -- and lost.

Plainly, the main fallout here is that the fault line between religious conservatives and political conservatives is now wider -- and more apparent -- than ever before. At the least, Dobson certainly never said anything like this during the Shiavo case:

This Senate agreement represents a complete bailout and betrayal by a cabal of Republicans and a great victory for united Democrats. Only three of President Bush’s nominees will be given the courtesy of an up-or-down vote, and it's business as usual for all the rest...

We are grateful to Majority Leader Frist for courageously fighting to defend the vital principle of basic fairness. That principle has now gone down to defeat. We share the disappointment, outrage and sense of abandonment felt by millions of conservative Americans who helped put Republicans in power last November. I am certain that these voters will remember both Democrats and Republicans who betrayed their trust.

Look at that last paragraph in particular. For anyone still wondering whether Dobson's crew threw itself behind Bush or the GOP, Dobson just came out and said that he and his supporters ally themselves with individuals, not parties.

That, in itself, makes the compromise a huge victory for the Democrats. Frist no longer has a shot in 2008, meaning a good many of Dobson's sympathizers will simply stay home -- and while the size of Dobson's base is generally exaggerated in the press, it is at least around the 3 million that the Dems lost by.

But the biggest victor? Constitutional governance in general, and all those -- left or right -- who favor it.

Still don't have much time. But as I blundered my way through the library this morning, I came across a book -- In the Camps, by the photographer Erich Hartmann -- that proved well worth browsing. As perhaps is obvious, the photographs in the book were all taken in concentration camps throughout Germany and eastern Europe. The twist is that they were all taken fifty years later, when Hartmann -- who fled Germany in 1938 -- visited them in the winter of 1993.

Although the pictures are stunning in and of themselves, when you add the history of the spaces and objects he captures, you suddenly find yourself dazed: how, after all, can a place as horrid as Dachau look so beautiful?

Yet what's most unique about Hartmann's work is that it actually guides you to an answer for the very question it asks. Ultimately, you realize that beauty can still exist in such a place because what happened there is as utterly human as it is evil.

I had meant to write more today on the EU referendums this week in France and the Netherlands, but alas, some things came up at school that got in the way.

So instead I'll just leave you with the second sentence of one student's term paper: "Milosevic is known for the brutality and mascaras of the Serbian war."

For a moment there, I thought the student was about to introduce a bold new historical interpretation. Could it be that Serbodan Milosevic was not in fact the principal architect of ethnic cleansing, but instead the daring CEO behind a hostile takeover in the Balkan cosmetics industry?

If only. After reading on, it seems the student probably just didn't screen his spellchecker carefully enough ... so close, Vladan, so close.

After posting earlier today about an article by Eugene Volokh, I thought it would be interesting to see what Becker and Posner were up to.

Turns out they've been posting on estate taxes. From Becker's take:

I believe taxes on estates should be permanently abolished since they do little to reduce income or wealth inequality, benefit a vast army of lawyers and accountants whose role is to find ways to cut taxes on the estates of the wealthy, create problems for some families with smaller businesses, and do not raise a lot of tax revenue.

Note that the arguments Becker makes pertain solely to praxis and never to principle. For Becker, I imagine this may be a typically pragmatic position; but after hearing Bush and his libertarian cronies crow on and on about how the estate tax is unjust or unconstitutional, an empirical argument comes as something of a shock.

That said, I still disagree with Becker -- justice, I think, demands an estate tax regardless of efficacy.* But it's nice to see someone move away from the libertarian argument all the same.
__
*This would take a book to argue properly, but the brief argument is that cooperative labor -- and the generation of wealth -- is contingent on not only rational incentive, but also a common awareness of redistributive measures designed to alleviate inequitable accretions of wealth. (Update: No, this does not make me a radical socialist. A Rawlsian, maybe, but not that.)

Update: After realizing Volokh was also a Huff Post contributor, I published an emended version of this post there.
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I tend not to argree much with Eugene Volokh, most notably when it comes to torture. But I have to admit, his recent article on "Crime-Facilitating Speech" is fascinating as hell.

Basically, he takes a bunch of disparate cases -- from blinking your lights to let others know of a cop down the road, to posting, say, The Anarchist Cookbook on-line -- and classes them together as a form of speech which, although it does not incite criminal acts, nonetheless facilitates such acts.

The issue is interesting enough in purely theoretical terms, but there are two other factors that make it even more compelling. For one, as Volokh notes, our judicial system has yet to comprehensively address this form of speech. I find that really surprising; I can see how no cases based on the Patriot Act would've made their way through the courts yet, but I'm surprised there weren't any cases based on Cold War or McCarthyite legislation which touched on the issue.

For another though, Volokh also notes that

while crime-facilitating speech cases arise in all sorts of media, and should be treated the same regardless of the medium, the existence of the Internet makes a difference here. Most importantly, by making it easy for people to put up mirror sites of banned material as a protest against such bans, the Internet makes restrictions on crime-facilitating speech less effective, both practically and (if the restrictions are cast in terms of purpose rather than mere knowledge) legally. [emphasis his]

In other words: the infinite distributive capacity of the internet effectively renders the legality of crime-facilitating speech a secondary concern to the practicality of actually trying to enforce any legal definition. That's some pretty heady stuff. As if revolutionizing global commerce weren't enough, it seems the internet is now impacting constitutional law, too.

A few words on conservative rhetoric ...

First, from TAPPED:

Rick Santorum just said that Democrats arguing that the nuclear option is breaking the rules are "the equivalent of Adolf Hitler in 1942 saying, 'I'm in Paris, how dare you invade me, how dare you bomb my city!'"

As atrocious as that comment is, it could have been far worse. Imagine if Santorum had spoken honestly rather than hyperbolically. In that case, he'd have said something like, "Actually, to be perfectly frank, we don't even care about constitutionality. Our sole intent is to perpetuate our power, and we locate our right to do so not in man-made law but divine revelation." The day that Santorum speaks this candidly is the day that all those who oppose him -- on the left or the right -- have become irrelevant. The only solace I can take from the Hitler comment is thus that it indicates he still has some regard for what his opposition can accomplish.

Contrast that with Pat Buchanan. As radical as his views are, he has a remarkable proclivity for being frank; he rarely, if ever, obfuscates. His recent exchange with Catherine Crier is a perfect example:

Crier: “The Republicans, the conservatives, have dominated the courts now for thirty years in this country, and certainly the Supreme Court, so we know we have Conservatives—but that doesn’t seem to be enough.”

Buchanan: “No, that is not enough.”

Crier: “Yeah, the Terri Shiavo case--those were conservative judges, and all of a sudden, we’re saying we want strict constructionists?”

Buchanan: “Exactly. Look, ten of the last twelve justices have been appointed by Republicans. Nixon gave us Blackmon, Gerry Ford gave us John Paul Stevens, Reagan gave us Kennedy and O’Conner, and (Bush Sr.) gave us David Sutter…”

Crier: “Those aren’t good enough?”

Buchanan: “They have been failures. The battle is over the Supreme Court. (It) has become a judicial dictatorship in this country. It dictates racial policy on quotas, affirmative action. It tells us we must have abortion on demand. It’s now into gay rights. It has become a super legislature. Control of it is more important tin the social culture war in America than control of Congress in the United States. That ultimately is what this is all about. The President has got to get those Supreme Court justices…and if that means breaking these ridiculous obstructionist filibusters, he ought to do it.”

The reason I make this comparison? Buchanan is saying what Santorum would say if he considered his political opposition to be too weak to respond.

Or conversely: Santorum believes in Buchanan's agenda enough to push for it but lacks the political courage to just come out and articulate that agenda on the Senate floor. Instead he hides behind political rhetoric of the most appalling kind.

I try not to sling too much mud on this site, but I have to confess that shameful, disgusting, and execrable are just a few of the words currently springing to mind.

Paul Krugman gives some much needed attention to deficit financing today. More specifically, he takes on the current trade imbalance between China and the U.S.:

"Money is pouring into China, both because of its rapidly rising trade surplus and because of investments by Western and Japanese companies. Normally, this inflow of funds would be self-correcting: both China's trade surplus and the foreign investment pouring in would push up the value of the yuan, China's currency, making China's exports less competitive and shrinking its trade surplus.

"But the Chinese government, unwilling to let that happen, has kept the yuan down by shipping the incoming funds right back out again, buying huge quantities of dollar assets - about $200 billion worth in 2004, and possibly as much as $300 billion worth this year. This is economically perverse: China, a poor country where capital is still scarce by Western standards, is lending vast sums at low interest rates to the United States.

"Yet the U.S. has become dependent on this perverse behavior. Dollar purchases by China and other foreign governments have temporarily insulated the U.S. economy from the effects of huge budget deficits. This money flowing in from abroad has kept U.S. interest rates low despite the enormous government borrowing required to cover the budget deficit."

I've talked about this a little before, but I'm not an economist, and I certainly haven't won anything nearly as prestigious as the John Bates Clark medal.

Hopefully people will pay a little more attention to Krugman.

Call me a dork -- or just an English major -- but I try to read Shakespeare at least two or three times a year.

During lunch today I picked up Julius Caesar. From Act II, Scene I:

The abuse of greatness is when it disjoins
Remorse from power.

--Brutus

Do I really need to say who I'm thinking of right now?

One of the reasons I enjoyed reading Orhan Pamuk's Snow a few months ago was that so many of its more contextualized conversations were nonetheless relevant to contemporary affairs at large.

For example, consider the following quote by Pamuk's character Sedar Bey, the owner of Kars' sole local newspaper:

All over the world -- even in America -- newspapers tailor the news to their readers' tastes. And if your readers want nothing but lies from you, who in the world is going to sell papers that tell the truth? If the truth could raise my paper's circulation, why wouldn't I write the truth?

The more I read about the current Newsweek imbroglio, I can't help but think back to this passage.

On the one hand, there are Newsweek's readers themselves, who tend to be well-educated and middle- to upper-class. While those readers may not have wanted the Koran story to be true per se, I imagine they would confess -- if they were truly honest with themselves -- that they read the magazine at least in part because it will deliver to them stories that confirm their suspicions about inherently dogmatic institutions like the American military.

On the other hand, there's the readership which, for a variety of reasons, has eagerly soaked up coverage of the Newsweek mistake. My guess is that these readers too, if they also were truly honest with themselves, would confess that they've followed the story at least in part because it confirms to them the untrustworthy (dare I say 'liberal'?) nature of a major news organization.

Finally, the reason I've raised these points is not to demonstrate that when it comes to the news, we are all guilty of paying for the stories and facts we want to hear rather than paying for the stories and facts as they actually are. As true as that statement may be, it's also a mere platitude in itself -- and worse, tends to lead toward some woefully casuistic conclusions regarding the press as a whole or even the very possibility of truth.

Rather, I've raised those points to demonstrate (hopefully) that some sincere introspection is called for. Very few people would admit that they prefer the media to pander to their preconceptions of the world rather than inform them of the world as it actually is. Even fewer would ever stop to consider whether they can in fact tell the difference. And yet that is exactly what is needed: rather than focusing on the particulars of the Newsweek story, what the national debate should currently be centered on is the criteria with which we judge media reliability. Until some common ground is found in regard to those criteria, then on this issue both sides are only going to continue speaking past each other ad nauseam.

The Boston Globe's website is currently running this pic above its lede on the Isikoff story:

As I see it, the picture is significant for three reasons.

First, it should be tremendously disturbing any time a U.S. flag is burned in a foreign country, let alone an Islamic one.

Second, the picture itself is astonishingly good: the fire frames the protestors themselves, whose outstretched arms in turn mimic the plume in the top right.

Third, the picture contains one rather conspicuous absence: namely, Michael Isikoff.

Now, I can certainly understand the desire to assign blame for the recent violence in Pakistan beyond the perpretrators themselves. But before you get to Isikoff, you need first to mention a host of contextual factors. For one, there's an extremist Islamic culture which is shamefully quick to resort to violence; for another, there's an American foreign policy which is shamefully insensitive to non-extremist Islamic culture; and finally, there's an American military which detains non-state actors at Gitmo in the first place.

Admittedly, Isikoff made a mistake, but nobody -- least of all the White House -- should confuse his erratum with the political and cultural factors which led up to it.

Yesterday's "Tip of the Day" was a post by HedgeFundGuy on soft dollars and hedge funds. I linked to it because I went to school with a lot of people now doing market research and analysis, and what he had to say about soft dollar transactions -- in which, as he puts it, the buy side "pays for things like research, ideas, and IPOs, via overpaying the 'sell side' ... to do their trades" -- seemed like a fairly well-reasoned argument against what many of those classmates do. So sorry guys. For those of you researching for a large brokerage firm, I'm onto you.

That said, the reason I'm writing now is that after thinking a little more about the issue this afternoon, I think the research industry in general is more valuable than HedgeFundGuy lets on. Consider, for example, his conclusion:

As per whether research is worth it, I would say that it has always been a mystery why anyone with profitable investing ideas would sell these ideas rather than just use them. Sure there are those without access to capital (as I was for many years), but in general the best way to profit from proprietary ideas is to approach a capital provider, provide them exclusive access to these ideas, and then after proving yourself and gaining credibility, negotiate a portfolio manager role (which implies direct control and payout link to profits). It just is not credible that much valuable research is being sold. I rather think that most research merely allows fund managers to better articulate their preexisting inchoate ideas, and some research provides ideas for brain-dead portfolio managers that should not be portfolio managers.

Admittedly, he nails it here a) when it comes to those without the capital necessary to directly profit from their research, and b) when it comes to fund managers who either are not qualified for their positions or are using the research they purchase to confirm conclusions rather than form them.

However, there's two huge instances that he leaves out. The first is when research can be used by multiple parties without affecting the profitability for any of them. Whether or not you yourself use your research, there's no reason to sit on it if you can sell it to someone else who's also able to use it.

The second instance, meanwhile, has to do with research whose value is variable. Consider the following example. A fund manager, Mark, pays both Sarah and Dave a marginally higher amount for their research than either would make if they used their research directly. Why does Mark do this? Because when he uses Sarah's and Dave's research jointly, he is able to make a greater profit than if Sarah and Dave each used their research alone and then combined their returns. In this example, then, the research market provides the altogether legitimate service of creating value where it otherwise wouldn't exist.

Of course, that's also an overly simplified example, and worse, it's further true that a market structured in this way will invariably lead to some blind speculation. But my point is that HedgeFundGuy should have brought it up nonetheless because -- provided the interests of the buyer are credible -- it's a perfectly valid role for financial researchers to play.

Finally, a brief disclaimer: for the less numismatic-minded among you, rest assured that this post was just a brief interlude from the normal social and political fare. When I went on a run this afternoon it just seemed like an interesting question to think about.

When it comes to liberals and blogging, I have a terrible confession to make: I haven't really been all that enthused about TPM since it started the Social Security kick. Don't get me wrong; I'm about as diehard as it gets when it comes to preserving the program. The problem is that I've always found Josh's analytical writing far more interesting than his actual reporting, and once he single-handedly took on the Social Security issue he's done far more of the latter.

Today though, he really proved me wrong. After reporting on a local church's program for Social Security in Indiana, he sums up with the following:

But I think the nature of the interchange -- a state party chairman warning a minister that her church might lose its tax-exempt status if she didn't include his phase-out-enthusiast in a program her Church was holding on Social Security -- speaks for itself.

Perhaps I took this story a little too personally -- my father's a minister -- but I really don't think you have to be a PK to recognize just how shameful this is.

Extorting a minister? Are you serious?

How much lower can this fight possibly go?

For those who missed it, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee recently sent the nomination of Richard Bolton to the Senate -- without a recommendation. This is an extremely rare move, and came only after the Republican Senator George Voinovich declared that while he wouldn't stop a nomination vote in the full Senate from happening, he would vote against it there.

Over at The Belgravia Dispatch, Joseph Britt posted his take on the issue yesterday. Britt raises a lot of different points, so rather than presenting a formal counter-argument against the nomination I'm just going to go off his post piecemeal.

To begin with, Britt initially stakes out a broad middle ground:

Bolton, though I recognize his abilities and past accomplishments, would not have been my choice for the UN post. Unlike Voinovich I don't think the case against him is strong enough to justify denying the President his choice....[Bush] is President, and barring something disqualifying in a nominee's background or grounds to believe major damage will result from his appointment I incline toward giving a President the team he wants.

Fair enough. Presidents do indeed deserve broad leeway when it comes to nominating both cabinet members and ambassadors. The question, as Britt himself notes, is just what constitutes either 'something disqualifying' in a nominee's past or 'grounds to believe major damage will result'.

The problem is, Britt doesn't follow through with that question. Instead he shifts his focus onto Voinovich. Part of this has to do with the informal nature of blogging, and part with Britt's own preemptory admission that his impetus for writing about the issue at all is that he once indirectly worked for Voinovich. Regardless, it's part and parcel of a bait-and-switch political strategy that's as old as human history: namely, defending A by attacking B.

To make matters worse, Britt then bungles his attack. His argument against Voinovich has nothing to do with Voinovich's judgment and relies instead only on Voinovich's timing:

I was frankly a little disappointed to see a couple of things about Voinovich's participation in this controversy. The first was the way he sprang his doubts about Bolton on the Foreign Relations Committee just before the scheduled committee vote back on April 19, after not having spoken up in hearings the preceding week. This I thought was less than considerate of committee Chairman Richard Lugar.

The main thing for me, though, is the need for timely decision on important nominations. If Bolton gets blocked in committee, the President can get started on another nominee. If he gets approved, he can get right to work -- provided of course he doesn't run afoul of Sen. Frist's plan to make the Senate more like the House of Representatives, starting next week. How about if Bolton stays in limbo for another month or two, during which time the United States will have no ambassador to the UN? What kind of message does that send about how America regards the United Nations, and if Bolton does finally get confirmed after such a protracted ordeal how effective is he likely to be?

The timing argument thus has two sides. First, Voinovich's delay before raising his doubts was 'disrespectful' to the committee chair. Second, such a delay unnecessarily sends the wrong 'message' to the UN.

Neither of these arguments holds water. With regards to the 'disrespectful' line, it's perfectly plausible that Voinovich, a Republican, went into the committee hearings with the intention of toeing the party line, but that eventually he reached a tipping point where he could no longer support the nomination in good conscience. That his doubts arose towards the close of the proceedings is entirely consistent with any narrative of internal value-conflict.

Meanwhile, with regards to the UN bit I need reply only with a simple question of my own. Which sends a worse message: leaving the UN ambassadorship open for a few months, or sending the UN someone who's on the record as saying "there is no such thing as the United Nations...If the U.N. secretary building in New York lost 10 stories, it wouldn't make a bit of difference"? Only Douglas Feith would be a more offensive choice.

The only thing I do agree with in Britt's post is his conclusion: that if Voinovich really does have doubts about Bolton, then it's his job to block him in the committee rather than letting the matter revert to the Senate without a recommendation. It is, as Britt notes, a committee member's job to make tough decisions like that, and to do so in full view of his peers. If Voinovich doesn't want that responsibility, then he shouldn't be sitting on the SFRC.

To reiterate though, this should never have been about Voinovich in the first place. This should have been about Bolton, and whether 'something disqualifying' lies in either his past actions or present ideology. The only way Voinovich should have entered the picture was if the subject of debate was Voinovich's judgment -- ie, the standard he lays out for determing when 'something disqualifying' exists. That Britt brought Voinovich into the picture only to elide the judgment issue speaks volumes: he didn't want to get into the judgment debate because it's not winnable. Defending a UN nomination when the nominee is on the record as saying the UN doesn't exist is about as tough as making the argument that Hugh Hefner ought to front Bush's abstinence only campaign.

In the end, the only way you can defend Bolton is, as Britt discovered yesterday, to attack those who doubt him. My fear is that when Bolton goes before the full Senate Bolton's more tepid supporters there are going to make the same discovery, too. Senate Democrats -- and opposing Republicans -- need to call them out on it when they do.

From Deutsche-Welle: " German parliamentarians overwhelmingly approved the EU constitution on Thursday ... with 569 yes votes, 23 no votes and two abstentions."

Unlike in France, there hasn't been any significant opposition movement within Germany. Theories about why this is the case abound, but my guess is that it has to do with how radically different Germany's post-War experience was. West Germany was rebuilt almost entirely within an international framework. Foreign troops secured its peace and foreign aid secured its economy. Add to that the re-unification process of the last fifteen years, and Germany as a whole is well aware that internal peace and prosperity is contingent on regional affairs.

France, however, learned a much different lesson: if regional peace and prosperity were the goals, then they were going to have to play a dominant role in providing it. Now that EU expansion has greatly diminished their accustomed role, they're (somewhat) understandably concerned about whether the EU will be able to govern itself effectively.

There are certainly other factors at play, and what little I have said is grossly simplified. But it goes a long why, I think, toward explaining why the EU's two principal members are having such dramatically different experiences with ratifying its constitution.

"Should any political party attempt to abolish social security, unemployment insurance, and eliminate labor laws and farm programs, you would not hear of that party again in our political history. There is a tiny splinter group, of course, that believes you can do these things. Among them are [a] few other Texas oil millionaires, and an occasional politician or business man from other areas. Their number is negligible and they are stupid."

- President Dwight D. Eisenhower, 11/8/54

Unfortunately, Ike was proved wrong on this one. The group's math might be a little funky, but anyone who can land their guy in the White House for two terms and counting is, sadly, neither stupid nor negligible.

Never thought I'd wax nostalgic for the McCarthy years, but thanks to KI for proving me wrong.

It's about time. As Sharon LaFraniere reports in the Times today, the governments of several east and southern African countries have finally started speaking out against the practice of "cleansing" recent widows by forcing them to have sex with one of their late husband's relatives.

I'm all for a healthy dose of cultural relativity, but no matter how you cut it, this practice is despicable. Just consider the case of Fanny Mbewe, as told in the story's lede:

MCHINJI, Malawi - In the hours after James Mbewe was laid to rest three years ago, in an unmarked grave not far from here, his 23-year-old wife, Fanny, neither mourned him nor accepted visits from sympathizers. Instead, she hid in his sister's hut, hoping that the rest of her in-laws would not find her.

Hiding from your in-laws after your spouse has just died, all because you're afraid they'll rape you. Can you imagine?

As for the deeper issues here -- aside from the obvious arguments for why the practice is universally wrong -- the piece itself illustrates just what an awkward position these kinds of rituals put contemporary writers in. For instance, when Sharon contemplates the function her stories are performing, I'm guessing she has two thoughts: a) the stories I publish carry out the necessary social and political tasks of pressuring local governments and societies to end opprobrious "traditional" practices; b) the stories I publish reinforce the prevailing foreign conception of Africans as being excessively lascivious and violent.

In the end, Sharon opts for speech over silence, and I think rightly so. Not only does an article's local impact matter more than its impact abroad, but even within the pieces themselves there are often indications, however subtle, that the mindset which informs a given tragedy or horror should not be generalized to its society as a whole. When it comes to the piece above, for example, anyone who takes the story as yet further proof that Africans are woefully behind the times ought to read between the lines: none of the governments in question would have risked political fallout over this issue if there weren't already a sizeable base of men who were willing to support them -- ie, if there weren't already a ton of guys who find the practice just as reprehensible as you or I.

Unfortunately, I imagine that's of little solace to Fanny Mbewe, but it's enough, at least, for myself to take heart.

First, as you may have noticed, I changed the sidebar on the right. The idea is to make this page as simple as possible. Also, I took the "About the Author" header down and moved it to a postpage. It was really just a desperate attempt for attention anyway.

But back to the main point of this post: it seems the "HuffPo" email I got a while back wasn't a hoax after all; the site is now indisputably up and running.

Should be interesting to see what happens over there -- I'm still not convinced the site is viable in its present form (I'll address why later), but there's also so many impressive people writing over there that I can't imagine it won't adapt itself accordingly.

When I wrote on European liberalism in early April, I'd originally planned to run a lengthy follow-up piece today, the 60th anniversary of V-E Day.

Alas, this post won't be all I'd wanted it to be. I simply haven't had the time, and probably won't for the foreseeable future, either. (Not, at least, until after the 60th anniversary has run its course through the daily news cycle.)

But the gist of what I'd wanted to write is this. The difference between American and European liberalism is one not of degree but direction. Europe is not more liberal than America in the sense that it's further along the same road American liberals are trying to travel; rather, it's on a completely different road altogether. European liberalism is a purely reactive force whose stimulus lay in the abyssal violence wrought by failed pre-War politics. As a result, it protects civil rights not out of idealism but out of fear, and it supports an extensive welfare state not out of compassion but a curious mixture of capitalist guilt (think colonial expansion) and, again, fear (think the rampant industrialism of Weimar Germany). By contrast, American liberalism is a proactive force derived not from a given history but a cultural obsession with self-perfection. It protects civil rights not out of a fear for the alternative but out of its own curious mixture of a relentless idealism and, no less importantly, an economic imperative to make America's internal markets as accessible as possible to as many people as possible. (This latter impetus, furthermore, is why there will never be an American welfare system rivaling those in Europe.)

In other words: to the extent that European and American liberalism bear a resemblance to one another, that similarity masks a fundamental difference of orientation. Europe's liberals move out of the past while American liberals move into the future. A trivial distinction, perhaps, but also one that's yielded significant differences between the two.

UPDATE: A friend just pointed out both that Britain's welfare reform began prior to WWI under Lloyd George and, further, that its post-War building under the Beveridge Report was more proactive in nature than reactionary. To that I plead guilty as charged. Britain's experience both before and after the two world wars was greatly different than that of continental Europe, and I should have specified that in thinking about 'European liberalism' I was thinking of continental Europe only. (For a number of reasons I have terrible tendency to unconsciously exclude Britain when thinking of Europe as a whole.) Furthermore, although my friend didn't cite this specifically, I should never have qualified 'reactive force' above with an absolute term.

Stuart Benjamin -- one of the writers for the conservative / libertarian blog The Volokh Conspiracy -- took a cue from the Cato Institute yesterday and sounded the alarm on Bush's spending increases. This isn't surprising, since many prominent conservatives have done the same, with the most notable example being David Brooks' cover story on the death of small government in the New York Times Magazine.

What's new about Benjamin's take is that he seems utterly baffled about why a larger base hasn't risen up to join the protest:

The [Cato] study suggests that united government is at least partly responsible. It notes (p. 13) that "[s]pending growth picked up steam much more quickly once Republicans gained control of the White House as well as Congress." I am sympathetic to this argument. As I noted last year, Cato President William Niskanen has written a paper demonstrating that divided government yields lower spending (and, perhaps more depressingly, that reductions in taxation produce increases in spending).

But this still leaves me with a nagging question: why aren't more small-government advocates resisting spending increases? Cato has been sounding the alarm for a while (back in March 2003, Cato published an article about Bush's spending entitled "Hey, Big Spender"), but many others have been relatively silent. Why?

Isn't the answer obvious though? Bush may have increased spending, but he's also simultaneously cut taxes -- and done so by citing almost exclusively the numbers and arguments proferred by libertarian thinktanks. As a result he's silenced his own internal opposition by meeting them half-way. Any time someone gets on him about the spending increases, all he has to say is, 'Look, I'm trying. I'm cutting taxes. Aside from the war, the rest I can't control -- just look what's happening with Social Security.'

The one question I have? How someone who is otherwise quite perceptive could be so blind to what in essence is just another instance of political compromise.

Via Lawrence Lessig, good news where free speech is concerned.

In California, a state appeals court ruled in Ampex Corp. v. Cargle that Ampex is obligated to pay for the legal fees Scott Cargle incurred during a previous case with the company. The history here is unusually complicated, but the gist is that after Cargle was laid off from Ampex in 2000, he anonymously posted comments critical of Ampex in an on-line chatroom. In essence Ampex then sued for defamation and lost. However, when Cargle then sued Ampex to recoup his legal fees, a lower court found against him. The decision today overturned that ruling, and rightly so: protecting the content of speech isn't enough. The prospect of legal fees alone can deter someone from exercising their right to free speech.

Meanwhile, in a much more publicized case, the D.C. Court of Appeals ruled that the FCC overreached with its "broadcast flag" regulation. More specifically, the Court ruled that the FCC lacks the authority to regulate television sets "not engaged in the process of receiving a transmission." (Since the flags are meant to protect against digital piracy, the technology behind them had to be available after a digital broadcast occurred.)

If it seems like the Court was just splitting hairs here, imagine if the FCC was able to control how you used your stereo simply because it had a radio, or how you used your computer monitor simply because it also had a broadcast feed. Would you really want our current administration to have that right?

More on this later, but there are two revolutions in criminal justice that are quietly underway.

The first concerns the penal system, and involves the relative cost-benefit of strapping GPS monitors on convicted felons rather than imprisoning them.

However, as William Saletan notes today, the rationale behind using GPS monitors makes it difficult to restrict them for use with convicts alone:

As GPS gets cheaper, politicians will be tempted to order it not just for people who would otherwise be jailed, but for those who wouldn't. Some jurisdictions authorize it for all sex offenders, including teenage boys with underage girlfriends. Others are extending it to abusive husbands, stalkers, and gang members who might intimidate witnesses. Others are using it to enforce curfews on wayward juveniles. In Britain, some auto insurers use it to monitor drivers.

Further, since GPS monitors can still be cut off, the next step will likely be GPS implants:

And just this morning, police in Florida had to hunt down a sexual predator the old-fashioned way after he cut off his ankle bracelet. If anklets can't track sex offenders reliably, the next step may be GPS implants. Just you watch.

Scary stuff, that. Makes you wonder whether the tooth-excision scene in Twelve Monkeys will soon be playing itself out in reality as well.

Meanwhile, the second revolution has to do with determinations of culpability. There's no actual trial evidence of this yet that I know of, but with the advent of fMRI, you're likely to see defendents receiving brain scans in the future. The idea behind it will be to distinguish historical and ethical culpability; whether an individual actually killed someone is a much different matter from whether they chose to do so or were biologically compelled to. At present we make this distinction only in cases of insanity, but as the precision of fMRI imaging increases we're likely to see it applied to a host of other disorders as well.

Like I said, I'll probably get into each of these topics in more depth later. But for now it's certainly something to keep an eye on.

I'm not sure what kind of press the British elections have gotten back in the States, but in Europe it's understandably a huge deal. By siding with the U.S. on Iraq, the U.K. pissed off a fair amount of people here on the mainland, and the elections have been viewed as its one chance for redemption.

To an extent, redeem themselves they did: Blair still won, but his Labour party lost 47 seats. Blair now commands a parliamentary majority with less popular support than any in history.

Predictably, there's been a ton of good commentary on the elections, but the best I've seen comes from Andrew Sullivan:

Tony Blair has barely survived a brutal vote of no confidence by the British public. Yes, the war was a major reason. But it's important to understand that hostility to Blair was not simply about the decision to go to war, but how he did it, how he appeared to have been less than forthright, and how this characterological duplicity reflected broader discontent with his management style on domestic issues as well.

The only thing I would add is that when it comes to "how he did it," the British media were also much more assiduous than their American brethren in terms of documenting the manipulation of Iraqi intelligence.

Why was their press so much more perseverant than ours? Well, there's really only three options, none of which is all that appealing. One is that the American press became too comfortable with or trustful of the Bush administration. The other is that the press did push as hard as the British media, but that the American public simply wasn't willing to listen. The last, and sadly most likely option, is that it was both.

Evidently Natan Sharansky, author of The Case for Democracy and one of the Bush administration's few intellectual supporters, plans to withdraw from Ariel Sharon's government.

Although this story hit the news wire a few days ago, over at Winds of Change I just came across the full letter he wrote announcing his resignation:

Dear Mr. Prime Minister,

I am writing to inform you of my decision to resign as Minister of Diaspora Affairs and Jerusalem.

As you know, I have opposed the disengagement plan from the beginning on the grounds that I believe any concessions in the peace process must be linked to democratic reforms within Palestinian society. Not only does the disengagement plan ignore such reforms, it will in fact weaken the prospects for building a free Palestinian society and at the same time strengthen the forces of terror.

Will our departure from Gaza encourage building a society where freedom of speech is protected, where independent courts protect individual rights, and where free markets enable Palestinians to build an independent economic life beyond government control? Will our departure from Gaza end incitement in the Palestinian media or hate- filled indoctrination in Palestinian schools? Will our departure from Gaza result in the dismantling of terror groups or the dismantling of the refugee camps in which four generations of Palestinians have lived in miserable conditions?

Clearly, the answer to all these questions is no.

The guiding principle behind the disengagement plan is based on the illusion that by leaving Gaza we will leave the problems of Gaza behind us. As the familiar mantra goes, "we will be here, and they will be there". Once again, we are repeating the mistakes of the past by not understanding that the key to building a stable and lasting peace with our Palestinian neighbors lies in encouraging and supporting their efforts to build a democratic society. Obviously, these changes surely will take time, but Israel is not even linking its departure from Gaza upon the initiation of the first steps in this direction. In my view, the disengagement plan is a tragic mistake that will exacerbate the conflict with the Palestinians, increase terrorism, and dim the prospects of forging a genuine peace. Yet what turns this tragic mistake into a missed opportunity of historic proportions is the fact that as a result of changes in the Palestinian leadership and the firm conviction of the leader of the free world that democracy is essential to stability and peace – a conviction that is guiding America's actions in other places around the world – an unprecedented window of opportunity has opened. Recent events across the globe, whether in former Soviet republics like Ukraine or Kyrgyzstan, or in Arab states like Lebanon and Egypt, prove again and again the ability of democratic forces to induce dramatic change. How absurd that Israel, the sole democracy in the Middle East, still refuses to believe in the power of freedom to transform our world.

Alongside my concerns, about the dangers entailed in a unilateral disengagement from Gaza, I am even more concerned about how the government's approach to disengagement is dividing Israeli society. We are heading toward a terrible rift in the nation and to my great chagrin; I feel that the government is making no serious effort to prevent it.

As Minister I share collective responsibility for every government decision. Now when the disengagement plan is in the beginning of its implementation stages and all government institutions are exclusively focused on this process, I no longer feel that I can faithfully serve in a government whose central policy – indeed, sole raison d'etre- has become one to which I am so adamantly opposed.

I would like to thank you for our productive cooperation over the last four years... In particular, your sensitivity toward issues of concern to the Jewish people and the strong backing you gave to my efforts to combat anti-Semitism and to strengthen Israel's connection with the Diaspora made possible for the State of Israel to forge the many successes which we achieved together in these areas.

I would also like to take this opportunity to thank you for the central role you played in integrating Yisrael B'aliya into the Likud, a historic step of great national importance.

As in the past, I will continue my lifelong efforts to contribute to the unity and strength of the Jewish people both in Israel and in the Diaspora. I will also continue to advocate and promote the idea that freedom and democracy are essential to peace and security.

Sincerely,

Natan Sharansky

Never mind Sharansky's implication, among others, that Israeli settlements in Gaza actually have helped end the Palastinian refugee camps.

The more important issue here is, as Sharansky himself notes, that "the key to building a stable and lasting peace with our Palestinian neighbors lies in encouraging and supporting their efforts to build a democratic society." Sharon himself would agree with him on this. No politician in any democratic country wouldn't. The difference is that Sharon thinks that withdrawing from Gaza is encouraging Palestinian democracy, while Sharansky thinks that remaining there does.

Unfortunately I don't have the time now to go into this in the depth it deserves, but my own view is, along with Sharon, to favor withdrawal. As Sharansky has argued, democracy works only through its moral legitimacy; it's hard to see how Palestine will ever recognize that legitimacy while its democratic neighbor continues to protect settlements within its territory.

For those of you not particularly enamored with all things theoretical, rest assured that I'm back in commentary mode now. The blog outline may reappear here later on, but not for the next few days at least. Obviously, thanks to all those who helped out!

At present I just want to draw your attention to an interesting story in Deutsche Welle about interracial dating in Post-War Germany. The few German men who survived the war were against it for obvious reasons, while the U.S. Army discouraged it because they'd been significantly debilitated by veneral disease during the fighting in Italy. Yet German-American dating happened nonetheless, and as a result about 70,000 mixed-nationality children were born.

There's two reasons for why I find this interesting. The first is that having lived in Austria now for eight months, there's an incredibly conflicted attitude towards Americans. Clearly, they're not exactly happy with our foreign policy, and they tend to disdain American 'materialism'. But on the other hand, it's not uncommon to hear American songs on the radio or, at least here in Salzburg, to meet mixed-nationality families. Understanding what exactly happened in the decade or so following the war goes a long way towards explaining its current ambivalence.

As for the second reason: almost always, wherever there have been American soldiers, half-American children (legitimate or not) have soon followed. No doubt Iraqi culture is vastly different than German, Japanese, Vietnamese, etc culture; but given the poverty in large sections in Iraq, I have to imagine there's a material incentive -- if not, on occasion, an outright romantic one -- for Iraqi women to cross what cultural taboos there are and have relationships with American men. Has there been any reporting on this yet? Or are the taboos keeping any interracial relationships there are behind closed doors?

The following is an excerpt from the 'blogging theory' post below:

C) 'Super' Blogs

Form. Each additional blog author increases the number of possible internal conversational pairs by a factor of n+1. For a collective blog of 20 authors this means that there are 400 internal possibilities while for one of 200 there are 40,000. When you add in the possibility of both internal and external group dialogue the conversational possibilities begin to approach infinity. A linear organizational structure is not capable of coherently ordering the stylistic and topical dissonance that would result. In order to be viable, 'super' blogs need to evolve an elastic structure capable of introducing the full breadth of their dialogic content in an immediately accessible way. At present the only software able to accomplish this is Google's email software, but it is not currently available for use in a blogging format.

The latest revision:

I. CONTENT

Abstract. There are three categories of public blogging: commentary blogging, referral blogging, and verification blogging.


A) Commentary Blogging

Function. In a liberal constitutional democracy* the supreme political act is not to vote but to persuade. In a post-industrial society the principle means of persuasion are the various media platforms that generate and distribute commentary. Blogs are uniquely valuable insofar as they offer unprecedented individual access to a means of mass persuasion.

Type 1: Formal. Formal blogging immediately derives from the current op-ed format, but its broader form can be traced back to the 17th and 18th centuries. Formal commentary appeals exlusively to reason and empirical fact in order to convince the reader that its argument is the most legitimate. Formal blog commentary is typically less structured than traditional literary commentary, but is still considered formal insofar as its argument is self-contained and logically consistent.

Type 2: Conversational. Conversational commentary first appeared with the advent of radio in the early 1900s. It expanded dramatically with the introduction of television at mid-century and then grew further following the proliferation of cable television in the 1990s. Conversational commentary is innately unstructured, appeals to emotion as readily as reason, and lacks any deliberate illocutionary axis. Significantly, the emergence of blogging marks the first time that conversational commentary has become viable in literary form.


B) Referral Blogging

Function. The democratic value of a free press is determined by the means with which news-content* is produced and disseminated. At present corporate entities alone have the resources necessary to generate and distribute news-content on a mass scale**. For the print and broadcast media this means that those entities themselves determine which news-content is disseminated most broadly. However, the on-line news marketplace is currently so oversaturated that corporations cannot retain full control over the electronic distribution of their news-content. In the absence of full corporate control blogging has come to serve as an independent distributor of on-line news-content.

Type 1: Non-Intentional. The defining characteristic of a non-intentional referral is that its primary purpose is not to introduce the news-content to which it refers. Rather, a non-intentional referral is introduced only to defend an argument or present a subject for debate or verification. As a result non-intentional referral blogging operates solely according to the implied importance of its news-content. Critically, non-intentional referral blogging constitutes the vast majority of referral blogging overall and is responsible for the bulk of independent news-content dissemination.

Type 2: Intentional. Predictably, the defining characteristic of an intentional referral is that its primary purpose is to introduce the news-content to which it refers. Intentional referral blogging operates solely according to the credibility of the blog in which it appears, and constitutes the only means of both direct and independent news-content dissemination.


C) Verification Blogging

Function. For a liberal constitutional democracy news items are valuable only insofar as they are accurate. For a media corporation news items are valuable only insofar as they are profitable. Verification blogging serves to correct any resultant conflicts between democratic imperative and commercial incentive.

Type 1: Positive. Positive verification confirms or disproves the veracity of a news item that has already been published or aired. Although there is no set pattern for when it will occur, positive verification typically reviews news items only when there is an antecendent conflict of interest between the story or data the item contains and the media corporation that is disseminating it.

Type 2: Negative. Negative verification occurs when a news item has been produced but not disseminated. Since the concern is not that the veracity of a news item has been distorted but that it has been withheld, negative verification tends to take a disputational rather than empirical form. Although this form is similar to that of commentary blogging, negative verification blogging is not a type of commentary blogging because its primary purpose is to verify the legitimacy of the press rather than to be politically persuasive.

II. STRUCTURE

Abstract. The more authors a blog has, the greater its degree of stylistic and topical dissonance. This dissonance can only be resolved by a corresponding shift from a linear structural mode to an elastic one.


A) Single-Author Blogs

Form. The overall style and subject-matter of a single-author blog typically remains consistent. Consequently it can adopt a strictly linear structure while also retaining a high degree of stylistic and topical consonance. Although an elastic structure would only increase the degree of that consonance, a linear structure is clearly sufficient for a single-author blog.


B) Collective Blogs

Form. Collective blogs typically consist of between two and twelve authors. They are also typically self-selecting insofar as authors tend to join only those blogs with which they are familiar and whose style and content they appreciate. Consequently the degree of dissonance is rarely proportional to what one would numerically expect. For this reason a linear structure is at least sufficient for a collective blog. Yet in no way is it preferable: an elastic organizational structure would provide far greater exposure for each individual thread.


C) 'Super' Blogs

Form. Each additional blog author increases the number of possible internal conversational pairs by a factor of n+1. For a collective blog of 20 authors this means that there are 400 internal possibilities while for one of 200 there are 40,000. When you add in the possibility of both internal and external group dialogue the conversational possibilities begin to approach infinity. A linear organizational structure is not capable of coherently ordering the stylistic and topical dissonance that would result. In order to be viable, 'super' blogs need to evolve an elastic structure capable of introducing the full breadth of their dialogic content in an immediately accessible way. At present the only software able to accomplish this is Google's email software, but it is not currently available for use in a blogging format.

Footnotes

I.A. *Liberal here does not derive from partisan politics but political philosophy. Liberal constitutional democracies exist in contradistinction to mere majoritarian democracies which lack the constitutional safeguards that protect minority rights.

I.B. *News-content should not be confused with a news item. Although news-content can refer to a news item, it can also refer to news commentary or news analysis.

I.B. **1) This could change in the near future. Currently commentary and referral blogging alone are viable on a mass scale. If the more popular blogs continue to merge, they may begin to generate enough revenue to conduct their own reporting as well.

I.B. **2) As noted, it is currently possible for one form of news-content to be both generated and distributed without corporate resources. But that form -- news commentary -- is dependent on news items produced by corporate media.

The latest revision:

I. Content

Abstract. There are three categories of public blogging: commentary, referral, and verification.


A) Commentary

Function. The most effective political act in a liberal constitutional democracy is not to vote but to persuade. In modern societies the principle means of persuasion are the various media platforms that generate and distribute commentary. Blogs are uniquely valuable insofar as they offer unprecedented individual access to a means of mass persuasion.

Type 1: Formal. Formal blogging immediately derives from the current op-ed format, but its broader form can be traced back to the 17th and 18th centuries. Formal commentary appeals exlusively to reason and empirical fact in order to convince the reader that its argument is the most legitimate. Formal blog commentary is typically less structured than traditional literary commentary, but it is still formal insofar as its argument is self-contained and logically consistent.

Type 2: Conversational. Conversational commentary first appeared with the advent of radio in the early 1900s. It expanded rapidly with the introduction of television at mid-century and exponentially following the proliferation of cable television in the 1990s. Conversational commentary is innately unstructured, appeals to emotion as readily as reason, and lacks any deliberate illocutionary axis. Significantly, the emergence of blogging marks the first time that conversational commentary has become viable in literary form.


B) Referral

Function. The democratic value of a free press is determined by the means with which news-content* is produced and disseminated. At present corporate entities alone have the resources necessary to generate and distribute news-content on a mass scale**. For the print and broadcast media this means that those entities themselves determine which news-content is disseminated most broadly. However, the on-line news marketplace is currently oversaturated. Blogging dissolves that saturation by serving as an independent arbiter of news-content value.

Type 1: Non-Intentional. The defining characteristic of non-intentional referrals is that their primary purpose is not to introduce their news-content. Rather, non-intentional referrals are introduced only to defend an argument or present a subject for debate or verification. As a result they operate solely according to the implied importance of their news-content. Significantly, non-intentional referrals constitute the vast majority of referrals overall and are responsible for the bulk of independent news-content dissemination.

Type 2: Intentional. The defining characteristic of an intentional referral is that its primary purpose is to introduce its news-content. Intentional referrals operate solely according to the credibility of the blog in which they appear. Although they make up a minority of referrals overall, intentional referrals constitute the only means of both direct and independent news-content dissemination.


C) Verification

Function. For a liberal constitutional democracy news items are valuable only insofar as they are accurate. For a media corporation news items are valuable only insofar as they are profitable. Verification blogging serves to correct any discrepancy between the two.

Type 1: Positive.

Type 2: Negative.

II. Organization

Abstract: greater stylistic diversity, greater elasticity in its visual presentation

A) Individual Blogs - linear

B) Collective Blogs - linear/elastic

C) Super Blogs - elastic

III. Publishing

Footnotes

I.B. *News-content should not be confused with a news item. Although news-content can refer to a news item, it can also refer to news commentary or news analysis.

I.B. **1) This could change in the near future. Currently, commentary and referral blogging alone are viable on a mass scale. If the more popular blogs continue to merge, they may begin generate enough revenue to conduct their own reporting as well.

I.B. **2) As noted, it is currently possible for one form of news-content to be both generated and distributed without corporate resources. But that form is dependent on news items produced by corporate media.

With all the hype about the upcoming TPMCafe and Huffington Post, there's been a fair amount of debate about both what blogging is and what it can do. To that end, I've spent the last week contemplating a kind of schematic theory of blogging.

The catch: this post isn't actually it. Initially I'd planned on composing the theory privately, but it occurred to me it would probably be a more worthwhile endeavor if I opened up the process instead.

Here's how I hope to do that. Below is an outline of three general sections: content, organization, and publishing. Each day I hope to go through any comments or suggestions I've received and incorporate them into a revised draft, which I'll then post anew each night.

In other words: you comment, I revise. It's that simple.

The ultimate goal? To come up with a working conception of blogging that can continue to evolve even as it serves as a reference point for any debates on the subject.

Before that can happen though, I need to develop an outline that's solid enough to put up on the Huffington Post, hopefully by the time it debuts next Monday.

Whether it's a long critique or a brief "that sounds about right", please take the time to let me know what you think. Obviously, I'll really appreciate it. -Chris

(N.B.: Obviously, this outline is just a bare skeleton at present. I hope to fill it in completely over the next day or two.)

I. Content

Abstract. Most public blogging falls into one of three main categories:

--Commentary that analyzes, opines, or rants
--News filtering that re-directs or alerts readers to stories and quotes
--Fact-checking that verifies or discredits the veracity of MSM reporting


A) Commentary

Function. In a constitutional democracy the seminal political act is not to vote but to persuade. The principle means of persuasion are the various media platforms meant to generate and distribute commentary. Blogs are uniquely valuable insofar as they offer unprecedented individual access to a means of mass persuasion.

Form 1: Formal. Formal blogging immediately derives from the op-ed format, but its broader form can be traced back to the 17th and 18th centuries. Formal commentary appeals exlusively to reason and empirical fact in order to convince the reader that its argument is the most legitimate. Formal blog commentary is typically less structured than traditional literary commentary, but is still formal insofar as its argument is both self-contained and logically consistent.

Form 2: Conversational. Conversational commentary was first disseminated to a mass audience following the advent of the radio in the early 1900s, but it didn't acquire its current anarchic form until the profileration of cable television. Whether broadcast or published, conversational commentary is innately unstructured, appeals to emotion as readily as reason, and lacks any deliberate illocutionary axis. Significantly, the emergence of blogs marks the first time that conversational commentary is viable as a literary form.


B) News Filter

C) Fact-Checking


II. Organization

Abstract: greater stylistic diversity, greater elasticity in its visual presentation

A) Individual Blogs - linear

B) Collective Blogs - linear/elastic

C) Super Blogs - elastic


III. Publishing

After posting earlier about an article by Eugene Volokh, I thought it might be interesting to see what Judge Posner is up to.

Turns out he's been thinking about estate taxation:

I believe taxes on estates should be permanently abolished since they do little to reduce income or wealth inequality, benefit a vast army of lawyers and accountants whose role is to find ways to cut taxes on the estates of the wealthy, create problems for some families with smaller businesses, and do not raise a lot of tax revenue.

Note that the arguments Posner makes here pertain solely to praxis and never to principle. For him, I suppose, this is a typically pragmatic approach; but after hearing Bush and his libertarian supporters crow on and on about the estate tax being unjust and unconstitutional, it's almost shocking to see someone support a repeal for solely empirical reasons.

That said, I still disagree with him -- justice, I think, requires an estate tax regardless of its efficacy.* But it's nice to see someone at least give up the libertarian pretense.
__
*This would take a book to explain properly, but the short answer is that for cooperative labor to be entered into at all -- and for wealth to be generated -- then there needs to be a common awareness of redistributive measures designed to correct inequitable accretions of wealth.