Another American military view of Iraq

This is slightly old news but worth a read - it's very to the point. Zeyad of Healing Iraq says:

I agree with most of his assessment, except his rosy description of the current security operation. Also, like most U.S. military officials, he is mistaking the recent infighting between tribes in the Anbar Governorate and Al-Qaeda as a turning point in the insurgency and support for the U.S. or the Iraqi government. But he recognises, correctly, that the only road to success in Iraq is through reconciliation.

... and while we're at it, check out the hilariously bad writing. It must be deliberate. Surely noone could seriously type: "The border, slow epoxy, is setting".

Update
God wait, there's more:
"In Dundee, where just 20 years ago the al fresco option of choice was a temazepam sandwich, there are pretty girls in rimless glasses, who write the world's computer games for a living, swapping dried apricots."

A vibrant Scottish dried-fruit-based barter economy has been growing under our noses! Who knew?

Jeez, can't I leave the country for a year without it falling apart?

Best ever distraction

Brits might be interested in...

The mass lone demo in Parliament Square on May 16th. Don't forget to get your permission to protest from Old Bill!

hey you know... this Spanish pop ain't bad

I fixed my computer. The laptop screen had been going dark. When I replaced the screen, I lost the little rubber covers of the screws that hold it in place. They'd been coming a little loose... so I just tightened them up with a little Phillips screwdriver and it all went back to normal.

My Dad used to spend Saturday evenings cursing under the bonnet of his many secondhand cars (all rubbish of course). For me computer hardware fulfils the same role. I (heart) my little Toshiba.

in the Signature Lounge

Watched Grindhouse

A tribute to 70s B-movies, double bill with Tarantino and Rodriguez directing. The Rodriguez one is an extremely schlocky zombie affair. I advise you to throw away the tribute-to-those-great-old-films wrapping and focus on the Tarantino flick inside, which has eight interesting female characters at its centre: four who come to no good at the hands of a rather scary Kurt Russell, and four who are a little bit older and wiser. I think Tarantino wants to be Almodovar and understand women. (But he can't, not really, because he's not Almodovar.) Worth watching.

Peanut butter proves evolution wrong.

work's getting busy...

This term has been fairly quiet so far and I've even managed to take the past two weekends off. Now it's looking hectic again - the problem sets are getting tough - but I am determined to have at least one day off every week.

The EITM summer school accepted me, so I'll be in Los Angeles for a month from late June to late July. And then, home in time for Kemal's stag do.

So after the You Suffer national anthem debacle, here's a continuation of the Heavy Metal meme:

Videoblogging in Baghdad.

MPSA is on and Giorgios is staying with me, which is very nice. Yesterday, me and the other Essex PhDs all went and had the world's most cholesterol-filled breakfast, then I snuck in to the conference and watched a couple of sessions - one excellent theoretical paper on media, showing that even rational consumers who want to be informed could end up purchasing media that confirms their biases.

New textbooks have arrived.

It's been a textbook kind of year. Here are some:

Microeconomic Theory by Mas-Colell, Whinston and Green aka MWG. Square, grey and green like dried sick, unprepossessing and dismally hard to struggle through at first. Gradually it's won my heart by its terseness and seriousness. Only what matters is in this book.

Rudin, Principles of Mathematical Analysis. Like all the best maths book, it looks utterly undistinguished, its lurid brown and orange cover like a pair of 1970s curtains. Inside is Proper Maths from the ground up, written in elegant and lucid mathematical prose.

The latest alluring temptress is Real Analysis: Measure Theory, Integration and Hilbert Spaces from Princeton. This hot little minx comes in a shiny blue jacket with some kind of rocket science diagram on the front. Also excellently written, with less notation and more prose than Rudin.

Just arrived: Fudenberg and Tirole Game Theory. We shall see. At least it's a good size. If thrown correctly, it could kill the biggest rat in my kitchen.

Following that train of thought, I discovered this gem by Banfield on the web: "Policy Science as Metaphysical Madness". I don't agree with it but I do think it is very worth reading if you want to do practically oriented social science.

... and her Mum analyses economic development

http://youngmammy.blogspot.com/2006/11/why-we-are-poor.html
... and ends up agreeing with Edward Banfield.

Sunshine posts on olive-branch-optimism

http://olivebranchoptimism.net/2007/04/06/the-worlds-darkness-cant-blow-my-candle/


"Ok, your questions time: a question I receive a lot asks ” how do you feel about the US presence in your country ? do you want them to stay or leave?”

WELL, 4 years a go I used to feel safe when I see the soldiers in the street, I thought that I will have a free and developed country, that we will live in happiness and will achieve our ambitions. I thought I will have a brighter future and I was so happy that I even bought military clothes and wanted to be a soldier (kid’s dreams!).

Now, when I see a tank I go as far away as possible. When a tank comes the cars go aside, and after they pass we drive as fast as we can so that we don’t get hurt when some one attack the troops. I feel unsafe now. I worry about my family members, relatives and friends. I miss my aunt, I live in a destroyed country full of terrorists, explosions, shootings, and I don’t’ go out as I used to.

I see people I love leaving Iraq, I see my country bleeding and feel I can’t do anything about that, I don’t trust the governments nor the president. I try to keep my spirits high and say all of the darkness in the world can’t blow out my candle, but it is hard. I don’t have an enjoyable life, I miss picnics and fun. I miss the safety and security, I miss a lot of things, I feel like a stranger in my own country.

If the US troops leave, more carnage will happen, they should stay I think and fix my country. But as I say I am too young to talk about policy I might be wrong, that’s just my opinion .."

Katja and Dario

Miami photos

Back from Miami

Where I had a very nice time. Thank you, Katja and Dario.

The Essex lake has ducks. The U of M lake has alligators. I wonder if we could transplant a few.

Term has started and on Friday I have to do my first teaching in formal theory: a refresher class on Nash equilibrium, dominant strategies and subgame perfection. Scary but exciting. (I'm only a TA, by the way - don't get the idea that I am actually lecturing.)

... and a great article by [copy][paste] Zbigniew Brzezinski on the War on Terror. I couldn't agree more:

"Such fear-mongering, reinforced by security entrepreneurs, the mass media and the entertainment industry, generates its own momentum. The terror entrepreneurs, usually described as experts on terrorism, are necessarily engaged in competition to justify their existence. Hence their task is to convince the public that it faces new threats."

The Economist assesses Iraq as a disaster. This is, I guess, the closest we'll ever get to an admission of error. The Economist threw its weight behind the invasion, swallowing the phony "evidence" for Saddam's possession of WMD. It has its own small share of the blame for the subsequent disaster.

Not reading Machiavelli in Iraq

Chikitita talks about how she became a bookworm and why she still hasn't opened her copy of The Prince.

Take the modesty survey you slaaags!!

Progress on the model. I've now managed to prove that if the democracy makes it more costly to immigrate... then fewer people migrate. Never let it be said that formal theory can't generate powerful counter-intuitive predictions.

(Why isn't this trivial? Well, substantively it is trivial of course. Formally, the problem is that migration is partly a collective decision. If you think lots of skilled workers are going to migrate and increase the democratic tax base, then you as an unskilled worker might want to migrate with them. Skilled workers face slightly more ambiguous incentives: if many of them are migrating, the tax base will increase but that might also give the unskilled median voter an incentive to put taxes up. So, before I can say anything about how migration costs affect the game, I have to work out the equilibrium.)

The next step is showing more interesting things. The essential idea is: if there are a lot of unskilled workers in the dictatorship, the democratic median voter will put immigration costs up to deter them from coming (while allowing some skilled workers to come). Then the dictator will take advantage of his subjects' reduced incentives to leave by increasing taxes.

I lost a day this week. I woke up today and wondered why my alarm hadn't gone off. Then my phone told me it was Saturday. Where the hell did Friday go? Apparently it was so like Thursday (and the day before that...) that I didn't even notice it. Give me my day back, dammit!

the sky is falling, grab your nuclear umbrella

It's 11:30 and I am just finishing a lemma, I'm sitting here in the kitchen thinking: "hey, this Bud Light isn't really so bad". That's how low I have sunk.

Brainless chicken-licken cliche of the moment: Europe is being overrun by muslim extremists!

Now for something completely different

I'm tired and working too hard and haven't been sleeping too well. Anyway, term is now finally over - I handed in a not very good paper proposal for my political economy class. Still, it helped germinate some ideas which may bear fruit sooner or later. Now, for the next week, I'm going to work on migration, which will bear fruit.

Something that comes through in the debate between Andrew Sullivan and Sam Harris (see last entry) is the difference in registers. Sam Harris is overwhelmingly focused on a scientific idea of truth, and his problem with religion is that it does not meet these standards. Andrew Sullivan embraces a broader idea of truth, and talks about the emotional resources that religion provides him with. I think this is true of atheists and religious moderates more generally. It is not a criticism of atheists: the criterion of scientific truth is arguably the clearest one we have got, and abandoning it bears heavy cognitive costs. However, I do think that a challenge for the current wave of non-religious and anti-religious thinkers is to give an account of what, in a secular world-view, can replace the ethical framework provided by religion. Atheism's dirty secret is that the extant secular answers to that are not very convincing.

(But then nor are the extant religious justifications for morality. There is a notorious problem in explaining why we ought to obey God's commands unless they are independently justifiable; and if the latter, why bring God in?)

Question for today: what would a modern and unillusioned set of reasons for ethical behaviour look like? Not, I think, very much like a watertight argument that moves from premises to conclusions. I'll stop there and get back to work.

NP: Os Mutantes Le Premier Bonheur du Jour

dinner

Went and had dinner with the Janes' which was nice as usual. This weekend I have mostly been stressing about a not (particularly important) paper proposal I have to write. (This is the cheap talk thing I've mentioned here.) I think overall I haven't found anything particularly profound from the deep economic theory point of view... but maybe I do have a straightforward formal approach to ideological categories, utilising pretty standard cheap talk games. In other words, if I can find some useful applications it might go somewhere. Meanwhile I am just going to write something up and maybe a small example.

This exchange between Sam Harris and Andrew Sullivan on religious faith is worth reading. Sam Harris is hilarious:

"Needless to say, I believe you have given the Supreme Pontiff far too much credit as a champion of reason. The man believes that he is in possession of a magic book, entirely free from error."

I also read Dawkins' The God Delusion over Christmas. I thought it was a bit disappointing: not enough intellectual meat. For example, he takes up a (to me) very interesting argument by a prominent theologian, that the law-governed nature of the universe (as discovered by science) is evidence for a divine creator, and dismisses it too quickly. And he uses probabilistic arguments about the unlikeliness of God, without really going into what probability means when taken out of its normal scientific context - a long-running philosophical question.

ooof

Up late last night (and early this morning) studying for my last exam - analysis 321. I spent most of the evening going over Fourier analysis. Fourier analysis came up in a big way, and I learned that I still don't get it. No matter.

Now I am writing my paper proposal for cheap talk - it's due in on Friday. I can see my way to a simple demonstration game, but I suspect that it is NOT INTERESTING. Boo.

Rolando very kindly took me out for lunch to the Peruvian place in Roger's Park - to "his people" as he might put it ;-) - and we ate ceviche and discussed academic politics - he's about to start teaching a nursing degree. I'm taking care of Bluebell, Rolando and Pilar's dog, over the weekend because they're away. Bluebell is fat, friendly and wholly delightful, although she tends to get excited when she sees me, and pee herself.

It's kind of flattering, I mean, she doesn't pee herself for just anybody. She's never done it for Shyanmei.

Anyway. SPRING BREAAAK! And I will go wild with... completing the migration model. Then Miami in a couple of weeks. If I live that long without any cash to eat. The scumbags at US Bank charged me $90 because a check put me in overdraft for one day. I went to complain and got a lecture about managing my finances. I'll move accounts if I can - all banks are thieves, but at least I can reward them with disloyalty.

homeless

Got talking to a homeless guy on the L-train. He was a very fat black man with a loud cackle and a strongly expressed dislike of Christian Republicans. Turned out to be a fairly thoughtful chap. He touched me for cash and, with queasy inner relief, I told him I was broke this month. (Of course, the definition of "broke" depends on where you are standing.)

A few days ago, while I was walking with the beautiful blondes on the golf course, I came on a little jury-rigged tent by the train track, with an American flag and someone inside. I said hello, what brings you here, to which he murmured "sleeping" so I left him to it - the theory being, by the way, that a rough sleeper probably welcomes his sleep more than he will welcome your company, no matter how well-intentioned you are.

Work with the model continues, nothing to report, though I have stripped it down a bit. Stripping down models, God, that sounds so much better than it actually is. Saw Kemal on Gmail and said hello. Exile has turned me into an internet chat addict, using a combination of Skype and Gmail. It's nice but conversations are dreadfully slow and I tend to end up browsing the web while I chat.

Migration: so I simplified the model a bit, on a suggestion from Guy, and it now looks more tractable. The aim is just to show that the larger the initial difference between a democracy and a dictatorship, in terms of citizens' productivity, the higher the barriers set to migration by the democracy's median voter, and the higher the resulting tax/theft rate of the dictator. I was spending too much time fiddling with the question of whether the dictator might not be better off setting up a Singapore-style tax haven for rich democrats. Sometimes that will happen, but it's not a central concern.

So I'm just going to assume that migration is one way; and I'm going to have only two types of workers (high and low productivity), with different mixes in each country. Then the democracy's median voter always has an incentive to bring in high productivity workers - up until they are just a bare minority, so that the unskilled still control the political outcome. Having only two types makes it easier to parametrize differences in productivity between countries, and that's what I need to get some comparative statics going.

Cheap talk/ideology: still no traction. I need a way for message meanings to be fixed in some sense, and that is hard in a model where players are rational.

Life: I am utterly, utterly skint. I can't even buy myself a coffee at the moment. God knows how I'll survive until hitting Miami (w00t!) at the end of the month.

Trying to post more regularly

Today I've been struggling on with the model. At the moment I am trying to get some comparative statics out of it. I seem to be spending too much time focusing on the decision problem of the dictator (who maximizes revenue with respect to a proportional tax and universal flat rate benefit) and not enough on that of the citizens. It may be time to try a different and simpler approach to getting at the intuitions I want.

Recovered enough from my flu to go swimming again for the first time in 10 days. I've been doing 20 lengths a day - the pool here is huge and free, they even give you a free fluffy towel on your way in, and you never have to share with more than one other person per lane. Came out and the spring evening light reminded me of home: even the people walking had an English look.

Now I have to do something for Marco Battaglini's class - a paper proposal. I'm interested in trying to model ideology, something that economists have had less success with than modelling institutions. (There are actually plenty of models out there but none of them have really "caught" and given us a basis to go forward with.) The basic ideas behind analysis of ideology and discourse seem to be as follows:

1. People describe states of the world in discrete, lumpy categories.
2. These categories influence how they perceive the world.
3. Their categories also influence how they act.
4. Categories are contested - fought over, manipulated for strategic purposes etc.

Most theorists of ideology back these claims up with one of two positions: (A) social reality is created by our ideological categories, and there is no truth beyond them ("social constructivism") or (B) categories inescapably limit our perceptions of reality ("conceptual schemes"). I don't find either of these very appealing. Position (A) is, frankly, mad. Position (B) is not mad, but it has severe difficulties (see Davidson, "On the very idea of a conceptual scheme" - I don't claim to have any thoughts beyond this, so if you still prefer (B) then don't let me stop you). Methodologically, I also dislike the notion that analysing linguistic categories should tie you into any non-trivial metaphysical position. (Science should be unified, of course, but as the programmers say, "think about loose coupling".)

A simpler backup, with less hostages to fortune, would be (C1) finding out about reality is costly; (C2) we find out about reality partly in order to communicate with others; (C3) we can choose what to look for in our perceptions; and (C4) our categories for communication are determined for us beforehand by a general purpose language, rather than worked out ad hoc for every speech act. (C1-4) will, I think, give us what we need to understand that discursive categories influence perception. The rest follows.

A good starting point in modelling terms is cheap talk signalling games. These have 1 and 3 of my four numbered points but not so much 2 and 4. The main problem is that in these games, equilibria are usually conceived of as unique to (and perhaps optimal for, allowing for the different interests of sender and receiver) a particular signalling situation. That's what I want to get away from: political communication is much more stereotyped than that. But it would be nice to find a way to do so simply, without e.g. having to have message categories evolve in some complicated scenario.

My current plan is to let people look at reality (a continuous variable) by specifying a set and in effect asking nature "is it in the set"? That gives you 2. Then they can tell other people what they find, take actions themselves etc. Perhaps it will be enough to find multiple equilibria, which benefit different groups differently. That gives you 4.

Of course, there's a 90% chance that there is nothing interesting to model here, as is so often the way. The key is to find a simple application and show that "categories matter" and that formal analysis can extract some insights. It would be good if, eventually, dialogue between formal theory and applied research could become as productive as it is for the study of institutions. That day is a long way off.

The people spoke

... and Laurence listened.

toxic media

Tara Wilson on Toxic Wives in the Telegraph - this is a classic of its kind. The trick is: invent a phenomenon, give it a catchy name, call your friends for quotes, pretend you've spotted a trend, and hope people pick up on it. It's all good sport and provides us with some small talk.

Then India Knight blatantly nicks the idea. (Also, not as funny.)

Seriously, this is what's wrong with Old Meeja. I read that and feel conned, and not even in a clever way. The same when they take two-day old internet things and pass them off as news. It's like the girl with last week's gossip.

(End of cliched blogger rant. Obviously, it's not like I am a trove of top quality content. By the way, the masses demand BRING BACK HORTONL NOW.)

Our Empire Story

"I had been appointed military attache in Khartoum; it was a pleasant prospect of better pay, promotion and diplomatic privilege in a land which I liked; I was summoned to the War Office to see a staff officer who dealt with such matters. The officer in question was a friend of mine and I was in a buoyant mood; I filled in the normal form, and in the paragraph headed 'Purpose of visit' I wrote, 'To be instructed on how to bite an ostrich in the arse without getting a mouthful of feathers.' A messenger took the form away and after a long wait returned to usher me into the office of an affronted and angry looking general who rose from behind his desk; he looked from me to the piece of paper in his hand and then said sternly: 'It's actually top secret, but I think you do it like this.' Then puffing out his cheeks he blew into the air and his great front 'snappers' clanged together. 'Quite easy but you must be damn quick, what else can I do for you?'

-- Hilary Hook, Home from the Hill

The niqab

A few months ago, a school teacher was banned from wearing a jilbab to teach. The public reaction then was over the top, but the school gave a fair reason for its decision: it made communication difficult with younger children.

Now a young girl wants to wear a full veil (apparently it's called a niqab) at school. Her older sisters did the same thing, but the new headmaster wants to ban the practice.

Some of the arguments floating around, against this girl's right to wear what she wants, are rather feeble:

• The niqab is a sign of separateness.

If you can't deal with other people being different from you, then perhaps you are in the wrong country. The niqab is certainly no more outrageous than, say, punks' garb seemed to be in the 70s.

• It isn't Islamic.

It's up to her to decide what her religious beliefs are. There are plenty of interpretations of Islam. This is like saying, rosary beads aren't Christian.

• Many muslims are against the niqab.

Well, they don't have to wear it then.

• This girl has probably been put up to it by her parents.

She may well have been influenced by her parents. We call this "bringing a child up". Richard Dawkins believes that teaching any religion to your kids is a form of abuse. Perhaps it is, but it is not the kind of abuse it would be sensible to try and ban, in the foolish and unenlightened world we live in.

• It might stop her learning.

It didn't stop her sisters, as far as we can tell. What is your evidence for this claim?

• The school has a right to set its own policies.

This is the best argument and it puts me in two minds. I do understand that headmasters want to create a certain kind of atmosphere. I also think that in an ideal world, there would be a choice of different kinds of school, and accepting one would be like accepting a contract: you have to abide by the rules. But in fact there is not always a choice, the market for education is imperfect. And we don't allow headmasters to set just any rules.

I was made to wear uniform at school, and how I hated it! I used to tear it off as soon as I was allowed to, and change into my proper clothes. (And ever since I've loathed suits and formal wear, which is why I want to be a down-at-heel academic.) So, you see where my instincts lie.

(NB: According to a rather good piece on the Sky News website, even Nick Cohen is sounding vaguely sensible about this.)

(NB2: Occasionally - only very occasionally - I long for the good old well-meaning multiculturalist hegemony. The purveyors of received wisdom of are often unattractive, whatever the current received wisdom is: self-righteous, self-confident, thoughtless and narrow. But some kinds of received wisdom are more toxic than others.)

just another link

http://iraqilgbtuk.blogspot.com/

turns out that among the other people being targeted by death squads in Iraq are gays and lesbians.

more little glimpses

Iraqi konfused kid on the US plan:

"...and also I forgot to mention the lovely incident of Ubada, another college friend of mine who is also a glorious resident in Adhamiya, and precisely at the Sifeena, home of the most glorious freedom fighters - this Ubada is a bearded guy with blue eyes who likes to frequent the mosques and distribute Sunni bloc Accordance Front fliers, and one day his pop tells him to go bring something from his auntie's empty house, as she was a smart woman and left Iraq about a few months ago, little did poor Ubada know, but the house was rigged by the beautiful Iraqi resistance in case the infidels come in to try and search it.

"The limbs that were once Ubada were collected and buried at Abu Haneefa mosque, so long, martyr, too bad you didn't have any pussy in your short 21-years-old life while you were busy doing all that mosque touring, well, maybe in heaven with your 77,000 virgins."

Meanwhile Marshmallow26 posts this Johnny Cash song.


The video's got a lot of pretentious rockers and symbolist twaddle. No doubt Johnny Cash is set to become a post-mortem industry on the Tupac Shakur scale. I prefer to think of the song as dedicated to the political leaders who created the Iraq situation. May the mills of God grind exceeding small.

Maths

Thanks Cica.

7 Friends in Iraq

http://blog.aliraqi.org/2007/01/my_friends_1.html

...Then war bells started tolling and we knew that there is an unknown future waiting for us and our friendships. We were scared we would lose one of us.

We decided to get together again and go out for the last time before the war.
We decided to have quiet lunch and just talk for it might be the last time we would do that. While we were sitting, we all were very serious for most of our talks were on the coming war and what we would do to know about each other or whether we would be staying in Baghdad or leave to a ranch or something out of Baghdad like most of us did in the Gulf War. We used to stop talking and just gaze at each other and if it wasn’t for Z who used to crack a joke every now and then even in the middle of the saddest minutes we would have had a group cry.

After lunch we didn’t want to leave each other just like that and we wished that the day would last forever to prevent this war and to prevent the separation and everything that comes with wars.

D decided to take us to the Amusement Park !!! We all laughed. “Are you crazy?” I asked him. The girls were wearing skirts and even the guys were wearing nice clothes not for that kind of trip.
D said “Since what coming is crazy; let’s spend our last day in a crazy way. We will all remember it. Let’s get this anxiety out of our system and get crazy for a couple of hours to forget”

We rode every game there which made some of us very sick but we forgot the sadness and ended up having a good time despite the dizziness and the unappropriate clothing. We were like a bunch of formals going to a business meeting.

skimming the net instead of working...

... I'll have to update my list of blocked websites.

Anyway:
Israel to UK: don't let your policemen arrest our generals
from Haaretz, which seems like an interesting read

E-petitions call for Tony Blair to sing in a barrel of custard
and for the National Anthem to be changed to "You Suffer" by Napalm Death

On Wikipedia: where I used to live and where I live now
Now is that progress?

George Sand, mistress of the double entendre

A conversation with Tom Segev

Paul Foot debates socialism
back in the day....

Free speech in Iran

The Linux kernel summit is coming to Cambridge
(but why should you care?)

It's been snowing

Beautiful big snowflakes, like the ones on Christmas cards - hexagonal and some about a quarter inch wide. Everywhere is fluffy. Meanwhile, I can hear my flatmate Owen puking spectacularly in the toilet. Hey ho for winter.

Who said...

"...If the United States continues to be bogged down in a protracted bloody involvement in Iraq, the final destination on this downhill track is likely to be a head-on conflict with Iran and with much of the world of Islam at large. A plausible scenario for a military collision with Iran involves Iraqi failure to meet the benchmarks; followed by accusations of Iranian responsibility for the failure; then by some provocation in Iraq or a terrorist act in the U.S. blamed on Iran; culminating in a “defensive” U.S. military action against Iran that plunges a lonely America into a spreading and deepening quagmire eventually ranging across Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, and Pakistan.
"A mythical historical narrative to justify the case for such a protracted and potentially expanding war is already being articulated. Initially justified by false claims about WMD’s in Iraq, the war is now being redefined as the “decisive ideological struggle” of our time, reminiscent of the earlier collisions with Nazism and Stalinism. In that context, Islamist extremism and al Qaeda are presented as the equivalents of the threat posed by Nazi Germany and then Soviet Russia, and 9/11 as the equivalent of the Pearl Harbor attack which precipitated America’s involvement in World War II.
"This simplistic and demagogic narrative overlooks the fact that Nazism was based on the military power of the industrially most advanced European state; and that Stalinism was able to mobilize not only the resources of the victorious and militarily powerful Soviet Union but also had worldwide appeal through its Marxist doctrine. In contrast, most Muslims are not embracing Islamic fundamentalism; al Qaeda is an isolated fundamentalist Islamist aberration; most Iraqis are engaged in strife because the American occupation of Iraq destroyed the Iraqi state; while Iran—though gaining in regional influence—is itself politically divided, economically and militarily weak. To argue that America is already at war in the region with a wider Islamic threat, of which Iran is the epicenter, is to promote a self-fulfilling prophecy.
"Deplorably, the Administration’s foreign policy in the Middle East region has lately relied almost entirely on such sloganeering.....
"One should note here also that practically no country in the world shares the Manichean delusions that the Administration so passionately articulates. The result is growing political isolation of, and pervasive popular antagonism toward the U.S. global posture."

Noam Chomsky?

John Pilger?

Zbigniew Brzezinski.

and this is hilarious.

http://syriaexposed.blogspot.com/ .

7 taxis

Iraqi konfused kollege kid takes 7 taxi rides.

TeXmacs

For a while I've been a faithful user of Lyx for my mathematical word processing needs. But recently I have been seduced by TeXmacs. This is a beautiful program. It's like an antique, in the best sense of the word - a real polished work of art. It's VERY Unixish, so much so that it practically has a beard. You have to download Cygwin to run it - though they bundle a version if you're lazy. It has a very well-designed set of keyboard shortcuts: if you are typing Maths and want to use a Greek letter, you just hit the Latin letter, then tab. Hitting tab again gets you variants. If you want to type a greater than or equals sign, it's just > then = and it will automatically compose them together for you. Similarly, the empty set sign is just @, / and tab.

OK, enough said - if you're the target market, check it out.

Chicago weather

My loyal readers can now have instant-on up-to-the-minute web-2.0 access to a question that I know has been troubling them: how cold is Dave?

The sidebar on the right now features a useful image which will tell you, at a glance, just how very, very cold I am.

You can then use these facts to perform further mental calculations such as: temperature in Illinois DIVIDED BY temperature in Florida TIMES number of hot, scantily-clad models per square inch in Miami DIVIDED BY (monthly pizza acreage consumed by hearty midwestern farmers' daughters of Chicago) SQUARED EQUALS ratio of Katja's to Dave's intelligence and forethought in planning their respective years in America.

The scythians and their grandfathers

This is unaccountably and mysteriously absent from the internet, except for one lonely corner of Project Gutenberg. I feel it deserves more prominence.

The Scythians always ate their grandfathers; they behaved very respectfully to them for a long
time, but as soon as their grandfathers became old and troublesome, and
began to tell long stories, they immediately ate them.

-- Sydney Smith

photos

I put my photos up on Picasa - Flickr won't let me upload any more.

Epigenetics

Epigenetics

new term

I finally decided what courses I want to take this term. The first year PhDs are slaving away at micro, macro and 'metrics, but I have just two courses with serious homework, plus a course with Marco Battaglini on political economy. Then two independent study courses. This is a lot of fun: presenting papers, trying to write down models. Next term I will be slogging again - two or three big, heavy courses and teaching as well. Teaching should be fun, it's a course on rational choice theories of politics.

Light reading: C V Wedgwood's The Thirty Years War. I read history with a social scientist's eye, spotting the kinds of explanations used. Lots of them fit rational choice and game theory - the politics, diplomacy, and military history. Others emphasize character and individual cognitive biases. The big question mark is religion. How do we explain that so many people were prepared to die for their beliefs? Answers on a postcard. (The best answer I've got comes from Dan Sperber's book Explaining Culture. It's a start, at least.)

Anyway, I tend to prefer old history books. Whig history seems a pretty reasonable world view to me, and the old ones are better written and (I can't help thinking) were written by cleverer people: some of the best minds of their time. I suspect that is less true nowadays.

Just had a nice evening playing cards with a multicultural crew. First a strange game a bit like Hearts, then something very simple called Happy King, then Cheat. Cheat is a fabulous game especially when played with inherently dishonest people. Unfortunately we academics are too upright and virtuous. You need a few really expert liars.

Moving to Opportunity: Girls vs Boys

A US program to move poor families out of low-income neighborhoods had surprising results: while poor girls did significantly better in the new neighborhoods, poor boys did significantly worse.

I wonder why. An evol-psych based guess, and it is just a guess, would be: poor males are more likely to suffer discrimination (in some very broad sense) from rich males than poor females.

Christmas in Iraq

At 10 o’clock PM, the 24th of December, Santa and his reindeers were flying over Baghdad. Rather lower than usual, so that the radars will not be able to detect them. Rudolph checked that out thoroughly .
The land beneath them was completely black; no lights, no decorations, no fire works no sign of Christmas at all. Every now and then they would hear bullets sounds and explosions . Rudolph gave instructions to the others to go a little lower, when they reached the local church. The church was closed; no chanting or bells could be heard, just a well locked mute building. The next second a deafening blast ripped the sky and faster than Santa and his reindeers could realize , they plunged down into a filthy water puddle . They lay there in the dark too shocked to move for a while . The first voice was uttered by Rudolph :- Santa are you alive ? answer me .- Arghhhh, ohhhhh, I am ok I think, were we hit ?- I think so . I read that mortar missiles are in fashion now in Baghdad .

Read the whole story at the Iraqi roulette .

Learn SNA, join the marines

The US Army used Social Network Analysis to capture Saddam Hussein:

The capture of Saddam Hussein in December 2003 was the result of hard work
along with continuous intelligence gathering and analysis. Each day another piece of
the puzzle fell into place. Each led to coalition forces identifying and locating more of
the key players in the insurgent network—both highly visible ones like Saddam Hussein and the lesser ones who sustained and supported the insurgency. This process produced detailed diagrams that showed the structure of Hussein’s personal security apparatus and the relationships among the persons identified.
The intelligence analysts and commanders in the 4th Infantry Division spent the
summer of 2003 building link diagrams showing everyone related to Hussein by
blood or tribe. Those family diagrams led counterinsurgents to the lower level, but
nonetheless highly trusted, relatives and clan members harboring Hussein and helping him move around the countryside. The circle of bodyguards and mid-level military officers, drivers, and gardeners protecting Hussein was described as a “Mafia organization,” where access to Hussein controlled relative power within the network.
Over days and months, coalition forces tracked how the enemy operated. Analysts
traced trends and patterns, examined enemy tactics, and related enemy tendencies
to the names and groups on the tracking charts. This process involved making continual adjustments to the network template and constantly determining which critical data points were missing.
Late in the year, a series of operations produced an abundance of new intelligence
about the insurgency and Hussein’s whereabouts. Commanders then designed a series of raids to capture key individuals and leaders of the former regime who could
lead counterinsurgents to him. Each mission gained additional information, which
shaped the next raid. This cycle continued as a number of mid-level leaders of the
former regime were caught, eventually leading coalition forces into Hussein’s most
trusted inner circle and finally to Hussein’s capture.

See Appendix B.
The whole thing is quite interesting reading - it's the US army's counterinsurgency manual.

Quotes

(I'm going to use this post to collect quotes in. The first is a juicy one via the Economist.)

“The only happiness a brave man ever troubled himself with asking much about was, happiness enough to get his work done.” - Carlyle

"It is safest to be moderately base - to be flexible in shame, and to be always ready for what is generous, good, and just, when anything is to be gained by virtue." - Sydney Smith

"They all want to be eagles, but they don't want to act like eagles, so we're going to have to do it ourselves" - Ken Kesey, quoted in Tom Wolfe, The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test

"The mere knowledge of a fact is pale; but when you come to realize your fact, it takes on color." - Mark Twain, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court

"The manipulation of fervor is the germ of bondage" - Milovan Djilas


"It is, therefore, a just political maxim, that every man must be supposed a knave: Though at the same time, it appears somewhat strange, that a maxim should be true in politics, which is false in fact. But to satisfy us on this head, we may consider, that men are generally more honest in their private than in their public capacity, and will go greater lengths to serve a party, than when their own private interest is alone concerned. Honour is a great check upon mankind: But where a considerable body of men act together, this check is, in a great measure, removed; since a man is sure to be approved of by his own party, for what promotes the common interest; and he soon learns to despise the clamours of adversaries." -- Hume, On the Independence of Parliament

Saw Borat the other day

and laughed like a drain. Shyanmei was traumatized by the naked wrestling scene. One of the funniest and most shocking bits is Borat's ludicrously over-the-top anti-semitism. Here's a story of the real life equivalent:

I was like most teenagers whose main source of news was Saddam’s regime’s media outlets and school curricula. They all denounced the “Jews”. None of them clarified what the difference was. Like most of those in my age, I was brain washed. I was taught to hate the “Jews”, all of them, not only the “Zionists”....

The first thing that clarified things to me was when I worked with American journalists. I discovered that some of them were Jews. I didn’t know what to do. I was afraid and confused. I couldn’t even ask for people’s advice. How come I tell them I work with those whom they hated their entire lives? Should I keep working with them or stop? I wondered. I was torn. “These are Zionists,” I thought at the time until I found out the real difference....

It was through the internet that I first recognized that mysterious difference that was hidden and kept away from Iraqis for decades. It was time to ask more about the Iraqi Jews. Who were they? Where did they go? How do they look like? Were they like the Israeli soldiers killing the Palestinians? And more questions were that were held hostage in my mind for a long time. I let them free. I asked everyone knew an Iraqi Jew. I started with my grandmother. I sat on the brown wooden sofa in her kitchen. We talked for hours. Eventually she cried when she remembered her best Jewish friend Clair who was her neighbor as well. She was one of the thousands of Iraqi Jews who were forced to leave Iraq in the 1940s. She told me all about them. They were like us, Iraqis. She told me that they were very famous of the trade of cloths. My grandfather was a wealthy man whose main cloth merchants were Jewish. He owned several factories of sewing clothes. She narrated stories of how my mother, uncles and aunts had so many Jewish friends who used to go together to the same schools.

From Baghdad Treasure.

Fragments of my non-academic life

I’ve been drinking lots of coffee. Here, the smallest size is about a pint. I’ve got addicted to the mochas from downstairs. Oh, the food at Northwestern is great by the way – you can get fresh sushi at the student café. Ha ha ha, Essex students eat your hearts out, deep fried at S Express. The other thing one can do is just steal food. The school of business has all these gatherings for recruitment or, I dunno, “dilemmas of leadership in the salted snack market”. And they leave their delicious buffet food out while they go and discuss these important topics. So starving PhD students come along and snaffle it. You could basically live and eat free at Kellogg. Not so much red wine as Essex though.

I decided to live in Rogers Park which is just over the border in Chicago from Evanston. My flatmate is a standup comedian. The first ten days I moved in the other guys had not yet moved out and were camped out on the sofa. They were nice people but they also invited their mate to come and stay, a chap who did not vastly impress me and who, by his own admission, had spent $10000 filming his girlfriend breaking up with him. It’ll be hitting the box office soon, folks, get queuing. Working title is The Least Heterosexual Man in Chicago and you can imagine the dialogue: “put the videocamera down or I’ll break up with you, gimpwit”. Anyway, eventually they went, taking all the furniture with them, and we ate off polystyrene boxes for the next two weeks until we were given some furniture by a kindly Progressive Catholic (apparently this is not a euphemism for lesbian).

Seems like everyone in Chicago is a playwright or an artist or something equally disgraceful. Decline of the Midwest. As you know, there is nobody as ruthlessly self-interested as an artist – corporate lawyers have nothing on them. Anyway, as I was saying my flatmate is a standup comedian and also a video editor and one of his projects is to do funeral videos for dead people. So his demo is himself. He made a video of himself, with a slow closeup of his smiling face while REM plays in the background, then slow motion pictures of him having fun with his mates. Convincing stuff.

We kitted out the living room with a funky computer-assisted stereo, you can just login remotely and play MP3s through the speakers. Very sweet.

Gosh, I just got my grades. V exciting. I now have an official Grade Point Average. Always wanted one of those.

Right, as you can probably guess we just had the departmental Christmas party so I’m going to review an article. More later.

A'ight

So I promised Mar that I would write and describe how America has been. I thought I'd do it here and point people at it via email.

First of all, sorry I haven't been more talkative before... but work here is intense. The term finished last Friday with a 3 hour exam. Before that I'd had 5 other exams, plus 3 homeworks every week - most of which took at least a day to complete, often more. Not much time for anything but work; I've barely seen Chicago, for example.

The upside is that you learn a lot. I am slowly putting together a toolkit for formal theory. My scorecard so far - this is all on the mathematical side of things, ignoring the economics and political science for the moment:

unconstrained optimization [X]
constrained optimization [X]
linear programming [X]
fixed point theorems [X]
convexity [ ]
differential equations [ ]
probability [ ]
statistics [ ]

Of course there's lots more (and the last two are big gaps which I may not even begin to fill this year). But all these things should help. The next stage is really to get practice in using these things to do social science. So next term I'm taking a credit in independent study with David Austen-Smith. I'm hoping to look at how migration interacts with politics in non-democratic settings. Right now I'm getting a reading list of papers together: the idea is, I present them to him and we discuss them. I also want to try to develop a model myself.

So this is all very exciting. The people I mostly hang around with here are the first year economics PhDs. They are smart, usually straight out of school and with a variety of backgrounds - in particular, different mathematical levels, some are almost as bad as me, and some are going to graduate level algebraic topology courses in the Maths department. (I've had a fabulous course in real analysis from the same place.) Nobody is really sure what they are going to write about - all are too busy doing coursework. Thesis comes later.

I'm also getting to see economics from the inside. It's very interesting. We tend to think of economics as imperialists - well, my preferred metaphor is barbarians from the steppes. In fact they are facing a bit of an internal challenge themselves, from more empirical work in experimental economics which tends to link up with psychology. There is also, as far as I can see, a feeling in the discipline that "economic theory" (i.e. the very abstract mathematical modelling side of things) has got rather out of control and out of touch. (I'm sure the feeling's not universal.) Interesting to see what will happen from here on. Despite all this, my mental map of the discipline is still very unclear. Something like: neoclassical revival 60s-70s [?], then along come game theory and economics of information, plus experimental economics. But I don't know the exact order of events, or how all these pieces fit together, or how they fit with e.g. public choice and political economy.

So that's the academic side. Soon I'll blog about the rest. But in all honesty, the academic side is 80% of it.

(Oh, one footnote... now term has finished I'm doing some of my own work, purely empirical... and I think I have an interesting positive result! w00t.)

Im Falschen gibt es kein rechtes Leben

24stepstoliberty's reaction to the Baker-Hamilton report (via blogiraq.net)

The title is an Adorno quote and means "there is no right living in falsehood", an allusion to an old idea of (medieval?) ethics: once you commit one sin, there may be no right course of action.

Limits of rational ignorance

The theory and evidence that voters are rationally ignorant is probably the single most important discovery in political science.

Nevertheless, it has its limits. (The link takes you to Amazon's top sellers. The Iraq Study Group's report is currently #30 on its first day of release.)

first snow in Chicago

and Owen, my flatmate and multitalented video editor/stand up comedian, has taken a picture of me enjoying it

thanks Owen

only works a small subset of people

The world's greatest chat up line, for economists only:

"In equilibrium, you're coming home with me."

Contributed by Guy Arie.

Petition against government censorship of violent porn

I will be signing this petition. Here's why.

Norman Gall exhibition

Norman Gall, a friend of my Dad's from Sao Paulo, has an exhibition of photographs of Latin America:
http://www.imafotogaleria.com.br/noticias/noticia.php?cdTexto=728

Litvinenko's last statement.

Had a lovely thanksgiving up at Door County, a beautiful peninsula sticking into Lake Michigan on the edge of the world.

Have you coughed blood yet?

I was grumbling to Rolando about how hard the work was. He smiled and told me that during his PhD in Biology, he had to stay up to watch some vital experiments which needed 24 hour monitoring. He didn't sleep for three days. During that time, he caught pneumonia and began to cough up blood.

HAVE YOU COUGHED UP BLOOD FOR YOUR PHD?

Help bring postcodes into the public domain

http://www.npemap.org.uk are trying to create a public domain database of postcodes, so you don't need to buy the info off the Post Office for a few £1000. Go and help them by clicking on the map and entering your postcode.

This seems cool

Language Log.

Milton Friedman died

Bummer. When I was a teenager I remember reading Free to Choose at more or less the same time as Marx. As someone drily remarked, they are rather difficult to reconcile.

More maths

Just a quickie in between preparing for social choice theory midterm.

Guy Arie told me this one.

Suppose you throw a bunch of ants on to a one yard long stick. The ants run along the stick at one yard per minute. When an ant meets another ant, s/he changes direction and runs the other way.

How long before all of the ants run off the stick?

Answer

As Guy said, stop thinking that ants have personality.

If one ant goes on to the stick, he runs off within (at most) one minute.

But if lots of ants are bumping into each other and changing direction, the problem gets much more complex....

Until you stop thinking that ants have personality. When two ants meet, both change direction. So just swap the labels on the ants and imagine that they ran straight through each other. In other words, them meeting doesn't make any difference. All the ants still run off the stick in (at most) one minute.

This is a slightly more advanced version of the famous "what if your dog is running between Donegal and Kerry" question.

maths discourse

I love the rhetoric of maths. You have to write extremely simply, no letting the words get in the way of the concepts. You can talk about "climbing a peak" (getting to an important result). And sometimes unexpectedly, when you think you are halfway through the proof: "and now we're done." And it's like turning a corner and seeing the view. Or another thing: after some difficult proof in the book, they'll toss in some massively important result as a two-line lemma.

Lemma. Proposition. Theorem. Claim. Proof. Hah!

back at school

Just got back from Lucy's fabulous wedding. I thought I would be really glum to be back in the US but actually it hasn't been that bad. Next thing up is the midterm on Thursday. Yes, we have midterm exams!

In fact being here in general is like being back at school. I hand in weekly homework, they mark it with a red pen. And we have exams which you have to do on little A5 exercise books, like when you were 12. The big difference obviously is that the questions have got harder in the meantime. So both us political scientists are quaking in our boots at the thought of being shamed by all those practitioners of the premier social science.

Mum has a robust attitude to all of this, however. A dry comment on the phone to a friend of hers: "David is studying political science, which seems to be nothing but Higher Mathematics". Or as she once said: "but darling, isn't all this mathematical stuff just a fad?"

Before you laugh, note that Ma is usually Right In The End.

Eid mubarak

Eid mubarak to all bloggers in Iraq, and also to my Mum's friends from Pakistan, especially the Zaki family.

Great survey of Iraqi bloggers

From Treasure of Baghdad . Includes a bunch of different answers to the question "Do you think the war was worth it?"

Supermodular, adj.

Of or pertaining to supermodels.

Have we all gone mad?

Some of the top-rated comments on the BBC website about this teaching assistant who wore the veil:

"As citizens we can only reasonably claim rights if we accept the obligation to show consideration to others. In this country the vast majority belong to a culture which is deeply ill at ease with the veil. The onus must be on the small minority who wish to dress this way to accommodate to the prevailing norm, just as western women are expected to dress discretely in Moslem countries."

This was the top rated comment. Actually, rights are inalienable, and we have them whether we are considerate or not. What I find astounding, also, is the implicit idea that we ought to judge ourselves by the standards of Saudi Arabia, or how minorities are tolerated in, say, Iran or Pakistan.

"Yes they should take it off,and when they go on a bus the driver cannot see if it is that person that is on a bus pass, this is never right if they want to live in this way they should go to a country where it is there way of life."

Now this man is really getting to the heart of things. It's the muslims, they only wear the veil to get the free bus passes! I've lived in this country all my life you know...

But my all time favourite:

"Its perfectly simple. No one in Britain should be allowed to put themselves in a position whereby others cannot see them or fully identify them at all times."

Wow.

Just wow.

Words fail me, so I'll cut and paste some John Stuart Mill, and add a few big angry italics:

This, then, is the appropriate region of human liberty. It comprises, first, the inward domain of consciousness; demanding liberty of conscience, in the most comprehensive sense; liberty of thought and feeling; absolute freedom of opinion and sentiment on all subjects, practical or speculative, scientific, moral, or theological. ... Secondly, the principle requires liberty of tastes and pursuits; of framing the plan of our life to suit our own character; of doing as we like, subject to such consequences as may follow; without impediment from our fellow-creatures, so long as what we do does not harm them even though they should think our conduct foolish, perverse, or wrong....

No society in which these liberties are not, on the whole, respected, is free, whatever may be its form of government; and none is completely free in which they do not exist absolute and unqualified. The only freedom which deserves the name, is that of pursuing our own good in our own way, so long as we do not attempt to deprive others of theirs, or impede their efforts to obtain it. Each is the proper guardian of his own health, whether bodily, or mental or spiritual. Mankind are greater gainers by suffering each other to live as seems good to themselves, than by compelling each to live as seems good to the rest."

So anyway, that is the kind of country I want to live in. What kind of country these people want to live in, I don't know. Heaven knows I am no cultural relativist. But this is surely just a straightforward issue of individual freedom. If you can't cope with the fact that people are different from you, if you can't live in society alongside people whose fundamental opinions and values you dislike, fear or despise - then you are not ready to live in a modern society.

Vice Guide to Chicago

Someone gave me a copy of this essential document. For a taster, here's the Art subsection in its entirety:


Art

Art is for dorks.

NWU, Evanston, Illinois, America

Thought I should give you an update. This will probably take a bit of time to write - I have a lot of new impressions, and am also very busy. (Update: very busy.)

Northwestern: the course is good, and very intensive. Essentially I'm with the first year econ PhDs. They work them very hard here. I have about 12 hours of lectures a week. These require doing the reading. If you don't do the reading, in most cases you will get little or nothing out of the lecture. It is complicated mathematical stuff: the foundations of microeconomics, techniques in linear algebra, real analysis in mathematics and so forth. These are books where you read a few pages at a time. Then there are the problem sets: three a week, the fourth course doesn't seem to have them. These can take anything up to a day to do. A typical cycle is: look at them on your own, then meet up with a group to swap ideas, insights and solutions (for most courses this is allowed), then write up solutions and maybe finally another group meeting to talk over what you've got.

End result: most days and evenings, I'm busy. I probably worked harder during my final year at Cambridge, or (in different ways) while at the Simon Community or running my business. But this is the hardest academic work I've done for a long time.

A large part of me loves this. I always liked school, doing exams etc.... I was that kind of kid. Still am. And I find the problems intellectually fascinating, even though they involve no cutting-edge ideas - it's all just "the basics" in terms of what you need to be an economist/mathematician/positive political theorist. I can practically feel my brain expanding. And a lot of the other students are much better than me at this stuff. (Damn!)

Another large part of me is knackered. I need to get into a work rhythm that gives me time for myself. At the moment I find myself waking up and still being tired... coming home late... not having time for exercise... and so forth. This is not really a good or sustainable lifestyle.

More broadly... Evanston. Evanston reminds me of Wimbledon. I am moving across the city limits to Rogers Park in a week. Roger's Park is supposedly a dodgy area but I tend to think that American cities are not that bad.

At the moment I am living in Evanston with two beautiful blondes called Blaze and Cheyenne, who like to run around the house naked. When I get home they lick me all over and one of them puts her head between my legs. I will try and post some HOT NAKED PICTURES of these lovelies.... I can hear one of them panting as I type this. Woof!

America. Mmph. I have got Minima Moralia out of the library.* It's hard to be an immigrant. And me... well, I'm a cultural elitist in the land of Disney, an agnostic among the godly, and a drinker in a place where beer is £4 a pint. But.... Every year a lot of people from the UK come here. They must know something. Maybe I am just grumbling because in the UK I am quite a privileged middle class person and here, it's a stand-on-your-own-two-feet place and you are, as Paddy McAloon would say, only as good as the last great thing you've done. Maybe it's just a curve I'm going through. I left the UK thinking good riddance to smug old Auntie and it's embarrassing how soon I started downloading Radio 4 podcasts....



Random fact: David Austen-Smith does Tae Kwon Do.

* Theodor Adorno wrote Minima Moralia at a particularly bleak time of his life, as a newly arrived exile from Germany during World War II. It's a classic of bitter cultural analysis written by a hypersensitive man who is clearly missing his home very much. But... he stayed on and even, I guess, found some kind of accommodation with mainstream American academia: his empirical work on the authoritarian personality, with Horkheimer, unearthed a fox in social psychology which continued to run for some time.

Not a joke

For real, from the Illinois legal code:

720 ILCS 5/11-7 Adultery
"Any person who has sexual intercourse with another not his spouse commits adultery, if the behavior is open and notorious, and the person is married and the other person involved in such intercourse is not his spouse; or the person is not married and knows that the other person involved in such intercourse is married." Adultery is a class A misdemeanor.

720 ILCS 5/11-8 Fornication
"Any person who has sexual intercourse with another not his spouse commits fornication if the behavior is open and notorious." Fornication is a class B misdemeanor.

Wow. This is the stuff I would expect to see on a "crazy American laws" round robin email. Unmarried sex is illegal here? I guess the laws aren't applied much but, er, wtf?

The Bet

I gave Nick Smith his keys back - thanks for the loan of your apartment dude. Perhaps I ought to take this chance to record a bet me and Nick have. After a year of close observation (we shared an office when he was in Essex) I came to the conclusion that Nick was moving Rightwards. (Hurrah!) So when I was last in Chicago, at MPSA, I bet him that by 2020 [I think?] he would have voted Republican. If I win the bet, he has to buy a year's subscription to Socialist Worker - which by then will obviously be a huge punishment. On the other hand, if I lose, I have to buy the subscription - which is a huge punishment already.

Right now I'm pessimistic about my chances. Bush's strategy for reelection appears to be to use human rights as a wedge issue. That is, not only is he playing the terrorism card; he's also being extreme enough for it to be a defining difference between him and his opponents. They care about human rights for terrorists, while he's focussed on protecting Americans. Nice.

... and just one more.

No more Habeas Corpus for people in Guantanamo if the current administration gets its way.

The dangerous profession of software engineer

On a similar note to the previous post, but a little more clearcut, here's a NY Times story about a Canadian software engineer who, on false information provided by the Mounties, was detained by the CIA as he changed planes in New York, handed over to the Syrians and tortured. The most damning chunk actually comes from a US official:
"American officials have not discussed the case publicly. But in an interview last year, a former official said on condition of anonymity that the decision to send Mr. Arar to Syria had been based chiefly on the desire to get more information about him and the threat he might pose. The official said Canada did not intend to hold him if he returned home."

The Mohammed Salah case

After class I turned up to what seemed an interesting talk. Mohammed Salah is being tried in Chicago for racketeering. A member of his defence team, and his wife, came to describe the case. The headline was "Justifying Torture in American Courts" - the reason being that the prime evidence against Mr Salah was obtained by confession in an Israeli prison, after he was allegedly tortured.

I left the talk with no strong belief in Mr Salah's innocence, despite the defence lawyer's impassioned speech. (He was, incidentally, among several defendants found civilly liable for the death of an American citizen killed in Israel by a Hamas attack. The trial took place 2 weeks after 9/11. ) The question is whether the court will allow evidence gathered under duress. More worrying for me is that the judge has heard prosecution evidence in secret without the defence being allowed to challenge it, and that evidence that supports Salah's claim of torture has been ruled inadmissible. Is this how liberal democracies ought to do things?

I feel so manly

I just replaced the screen in my Portege R100 laptop. I used the instructions from Screentekinc - everything was much as described there. There are four screws under rubber pads at the top of the R100 screen, and six under small square pads around the bottom and the sides. All of these can be removed with a sharp knife - I used a Stanley knife. You'll need a very small Phillips screwdriver to unscrew the screws. (Or you can just use the Stanley knife. But you'll probably damage the screws and your blade. Yeah, that's what I did.)

After that I unclicked the plastic surround to my screen - it requires a bit of a pull and is best started from the bottom left, once you've got the first bit the rest comes easily. Then you are face to face with the screen. The rest is pretty much as in the tutorial. You pull out the data plug (having first removed any sticky tape holding it down), and the inverter plug which provides the power. (You did remove the battery, right?) To remove the inverter plug it's much easier to unscrew the inverter first (it's the long thin circuitry on the right hand side of the screen, held in place by a single screw). Then you have to pull hard and use your fingernails to get the inverter plug out.

Once that is all done you just replace your screen, plug the new screen back into the inverter and the data connection, sticky tape it up, slot your plastic surround back in and screw everything back in place. Pah! Child's play.

Party strategies tournament results

The results from Fowler and Laver's Tournament of Party Strategies (previously blogged) are up here. I was chuffed to see that my strategy (Raptor) came in 8th - just beating Hunter, the pre-submitted strategy on which it was based. They plan to rerun the tournament using only those strategies which beat Hunter. I'm optimistic that with the smaller set of strategies used, Raptor (which uses a predefined step size to recognize and cooperate with conspecifics) will continue to do well.

Interestingly, Fowler and Laver would also like to develop evolutionary rules that allow successful party strategies to evolve and mutate. They worry about how to parametrize party strategies. One option would be to use genetic programming (not to be confused with genetic algorithms): each party strategy is a parse tree of R statements, and each round, the parse tree is set to work on the inputs, and outputs a new location. Mutations could consist of prunings and duplications of the tree, as well as adding new branches.

Cosmic injustice

Term is about to start. Clemency just came on gmail chat and told me she's got a new job working for these guys. I do economic theory. Clemency eats organic chocolate cake. Go figure.

skype

Madly busy - flathunting plus Maths class - but have found time to get Skype. If anyone else has it, drop me a line with your username.

he should be at the Tuesday seminar

He doesn't just fly at dusk, you know...

Chicago

Well, this is the first time I have a few minutes to spare. I arrived hot off the plane and crashed at Nick Smith's place - thanks Nick. The following Monday, Math camp began at Northwestern and my first discovery was that Evanston is a solid 90 minute commute from Southside Chicago - minimum. Often, 2 hours. So I began desperately searching for an apartment. I've found a couple of possible places and meanwhile, a kind couple has agreed to put me up a little closer to Evanston. They have two golden labradors, one of whom has the amiable habit of putting her head through your legs and staying there.

Math camp. As you may know, in Math camp you are not allowed to say your name, instead you have to say "this mathematician":

"SIR! THIS MATHEMATICIAN WOULD APPLY THE KAKUTANI FIXED POINT THEOREM SIR!"

Math camp is quite hardcore. One class from 9 until 12 with a ten minute break, then lunch, then problem set solutions at 1 pm, then you spend the afternoon trying to solve the next day's problems. It's particularly fun when you then have to look for apartments and commute 2 hours home.

I thought that Kellogg would be full of ruthless MBA sharks (yay), but they haven't arrived yet. Instead, everyone is a PhD student, but some of them are kind of business PhDs - a concept that makes my head hurt. You mean, you're a PhD student, but at some point you might make actual money?

Met up with John O'Brien last night. Some of you may remember John from my 29th birthday party - think extremely loud American. We went out with 6 firemen from San Francisco.
Let me rephrase that. We went out heterosexually, with 6 heterosexual firemen from San Francisco. Whenever somebody said "what do you guys do?" they all said "WE'RE FIREMEN" and I just nodded vaguely. Great night.

This mathematician was late for Math camp this morning ("drop and give me 100 definite integrals!")

I've got a temporary office with a computer and (at the moment) nobody else in it. Booya!

APSA is here and I'm missing it. I want to know the results of the Tournament of Party Strategies. Me and Thomas Pluemper both submitted something. I really want to see the complete ranking....

Lucy Reid is getting married. W00t! (Please try not to screw it up like some people we know, Lucy. Thanks. Nothing personal, Tzvi.)

mobile phone protests

protesting via mobile phone in the philippines
(via wired.com, via boingboing.net)

in Chicago and will post more when I have some time.

Counterfactuals

Valéria asked me whether I thought the British empire was a good thing.

There are all sorts of interesting things one can say about the good and bad things the British did. But ultimately to answer a question like this, which is a very reasonable one to ask, we need to compare what actually happened with what would have happened supposing that the Empire had not come into being. Which of these two courses of history would have been better? This is just the same sort of question political scientists are always asking and answering. For example, after performing a logit regression (a piece of statistics where the dependent variable is binary, for example, did a particular person turn out to vote or not?) we may say: if this person had been a woman instead of a man, but everything else had been the same - if she had had the same social class, education, religiosity and so on - she would have been ten per cent more likely to vote. Maybe in some cases the regression will be misspecified or based on inaccurate data or whatever. But in principle this can be valid.

If our historical knowledge - the application of our social science knowledge - is good enough, we can answer counterfactuals about history. For example, we can guess that Hong Kong would have been worse off if it had been colonized by the Portuguese and not by the British. We can make this guess without a deep understanding of history, because Macau, a small island rather like Hong Kong, actually was colonized by the Portuguese, and has not to date been nearly as economically successful as Hong Kong. Again, our guess is not infallible. Perhaps there is something we don't know that is specific to Hong Kong. But it is a reasonable guess.

Can we make the same kind of assessment of the Empire as a whole?

To do that we need to imagine an alternative history in which the British Empire does not come into being. Several problems at once present themselves. First, we need a coherent story. Why do the British fail to colonize large parts of the world in the 19th century? Well, they could have been unable to, if they had not had an industrial revolution. But now we are answering a very different question: what would have happened if the British had not had an industrial revolution? The consequences for human history would have been much broader than the question of empire. Or perhaps, the British simply chose not to pursue their empire. But then we run into a worry about psychological plausibility. For humans not to pursue power and empire when they can runs counter to the general tendency of most of history. If we assume this is what happened, are we assuming a different kind of humanity? Gentler and kinder, or simply more prone to take its own religious ideology (the Sermon on the Mount, say) seriously? Again, that's a different question from Valéria's question about the Empire.

It is not that we cannot coherently imagine histories without a British Empire. We can imagine many. The problem is that none of them will cut the Empire neatly out of the world without cutting a great deal more besides. Another problem is that there are very many of these histories: we do not have a useful criterion for choosing which one to use as a point of moral comparison. And many of these histories will be incomplete (no use for moral evaluation) without answering a lot of questions which, again, are irrelevant to what Valéria wants to know. For example, we could imagine that the French defeat the British in the eighteenth century struggle for power. Then we will need to know whether there is a counterfactual French empire, how far it will extend, and what it will be like. Our answers to these questions will determine how we evaluate the counterfactual history. Finally, when we construct our alternative history, we need to know what the British themselves were doing (instead of having an empire). After all, they were important actors in world history. To keep our counterfactual relevant, we will need them to be doing almost exactly what they actually did, except without having an empire. But this is rather like imagining a vertebrate except without its backbone. The empire was central to what the British were doing at the time. Again, we can always think of other things they might have done, but the problem is that there are too many of these alternative courses of action, all of them with widely differing impacts on history and human happiness.

Small-scale "what ifs" are answerable and important. (That's why I believe in social science and not just in, say, narrative history.) It's easy to believe that large scale "what ifs", which look just the same grammatically, must be equally meaningful. But these considerations lead me to believe they are not. At some point of scale, we lose the ability to construct the right kind of counterfactual.

Fullah dolls

The Middle Eastern barbie. Check out the veil.


From http://healingiraq.blogspot.com/ via http://www.blogiraq.net

Laurence, you weren't ambling, you were flânant.

back in São Paulo

... after 4 days in Rio. Rio is beautiful - Ipanema beach has big green waves which throw up explosions of powdery surf and the whole city has huge hills growing through it. But frankly São Paulo is bigger, and as far as cities go I'm a slut for size.

There seems to be a typical Carioca (Rio inhabitant) face, a kind of pleasant squinting expression. Paulistanos claim that this is a Lamarckian adaptation, from screwing up their faces to figure out more ways to extract money from São Paulo. I'm just repeating what I've heard, you understand.

In Fortaleza

... in an internet cafe, reviewing a Political Science article. Two cubicles down, a couple of teenagers are looking at porn.

OTOH

I am sure that nobody who really knows me could ever describe me as misanthropic. Still, it is only fair to record that shortly after writing my last entry, I had a very delicious pizza with the nice and interesting proprietress of an art shop. So not everything in "Jeri" can be bad. And she also told me that between March and May things are much quieter and the beach is a beautiful white. Your mileage may vary.

Jeri (Not Safe For Work)

Spent the last four days in Jericoacoara. Once an idyllic fishing village on Brazil's Northern coast, it was discovered by the hippies and is now a thriving tourist resort - thriving on its own evil spume, that is. Every evening the visitors to Jericoacoara gather on top of a nearby sand dune to watch the sun set. This is a diluted relic of an earlier tradition in which, after sundown, the hippies would have a communal circle jerk and then kill and eat one of their number in a bonding ritual to prevent outsiders ever learning about "The Beach". Well, it hasn't worked and now the town is full of beach bums, preening fools and creepy older men with their teenage girlfriends. The word Jericoacoara is often shortened to "Jeri" in much the same unspeakably self-satisfied way that Wivenhoe's inhabitants call it Wiv. Coincidentally, "Geri" is also the name of a singer and former Spice Girl who, like Jericoacoara, fucking sucks.

The first people I met in "Jeri" were three American sex tourists who kindly showed me their holiday pictures, of fellatio by some poor godforsaken puta from Fortaleza. Thanks, fuckers. The second person was a gentleman from Sao Paulo who had spent twenty years cycling around Brazil in order to discover his culture. At the end of this process he had worked out that he enjoyed reggae music and smoking dope. I am sure it will surprise you to learn that his conversation had a pecuniary goal: his ultimate aim was to "mend his bicycle" and with this in mind, he attempted to sell me a bracelet made of anaconda skin. I hope that by now a kind of general picture is forming in your mind.

In fairness it must be said that an hour's walk East from the town there is a solid mile of fabulously beautiful beach surrounded by rock formations and beaten by the Atlantic surf. You will have it all to yourself because none of the tourists in Jeri can get the brain cells together to leave the town beach, which, by the way, has been invaded by some kind of black, stinking seaweed, perhaps meant by God as some kind of metaphor.

More insight

I've worked it out: Brazilians are cockneys.

• They pronounce words the same way. Ask a black cab driver to say Costa del Sol and it'll be just the way a Brazilian would pronounce it, i.e. "de'w so'w".
• The Portuguese for "hi" is "oi" which must be short for "Oi oi my son!"
• Brazilians from the Northeast love forro, which is basically just knees-up Mavver Brahn with a funny beat.