For centuries, Europeans viewed the Turk as the most feared, yet least familiar enemy. Twice, the Ottoman hordes threatened Vienna, practically next door to Paris. For hundreds of years French Mediterranean towns and monasteries fortified themselves against Turkish pirates (who mostly never showed up). Algerian pirates, who were thought of generically as “Turks,” occasionally plundered the Irish coast. Once, a bunch of them even raided Iceland! Following his naval debacle at the Bay of Abukir, Napoleon brought Mamelukes, Turkish mercenary troops from Egypt, back to Europe. He used them as a weapon of terror against the insurgent Spaniards, a fact memorialized by Goya in his Tres de Mayo. In this atrocity painting, only the Spanish victims, who seem to be appealing to the viewer, have human faces. The Mameluke execution squad is shown from the rear, like a many-backed beast.
Links
BC’s weekend reads
- The debt of a Pope called Francis to past Syrian refugees, Part 1 (be sure to check out parts 2 and 3, too)
- Ten Things I Want My Children To Learn From 9/11 (and also “Ten (or So) Lessons of 9/11“)
- Hellburners Were the Renaissance’s Tactical Nukes
- The Inevitable Divorce: Secular France and Radical Islam
- How Petty Traffic Fines Ruin Lives in Milwaukee (and Everywhere in America)
- Edwin and Barry both have excellent posts on current events in Europe and the Near East (Jacques has a related post); be sure to scroll through all the comments in their respective threads…
Four of my papers on South Asia
The following two are downloads:
- Water Conflicts in South Asia: India’s Transboundary River Water Conflicts with Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Nepal (docx)
- Radicalism in Bangladesh: Causes, Consequences, and Concerns (docx)
And these two are pdfs that can also be found on my ‘About…‘ page:
- Water Disputes between Punjab and Sindh: A Challenge to Pakistan (pdf)
- Afghanistan Quagmire and India-Pakistan “Strategic” Rivalry: Is Cooperation Possible? (pdf)
I hope they can be widely circulated.
Ian Bremmer’s American Foreign Policy Quiz
Ian Bremmer, a political scientist at NYU (and numerous think tanks), has teamed up with Time to put together this quiz on what you think the proper role for the US (“America”) is in the world today. According to Bremmer, a neoconservative, there are three basic points of view with regard to the US’s role in the world: Independent, Indispensable, and Moneyball (you can read his explanation for these three types, as well as his analysis of how major presidential candidates fit into these categories, here).
I ended up being “caught between Independent and Moneyball America,” just like Rand Paul. Leave your scores in the ‘comments’ thread! Bremmer got his PhD in political science from Stanford back in 1994.
A Different Kind of Pork (in France)
There is a big government crisis in France following the arson of several trucks and blocking of traffic on several main national arteries for several days. The problem is that the French don’t eat enough pork. Pig farmers are angry at the government, of course. (You read this right.)
It’s worth learning French just to read about this, our future under Bernie Sanders.
Silent Majorities: Mass Incarceration Edition
What vexed [political scientist Michael] Fortner was that The New Jim Crow seemed to be two different books. One did a powerful job showing how mass incarceration undermines black communities and perpetuates racial inequality. The other — and this was the vexing part — advanced a political theory about how we got here. That history stressed the resilience of white supremacy. First came slavery; when slavery ended, a white backlash brought Jim Crow segregation; when Jim Crow crumbled, a backlash to the civil-rights movement spawned yet another caste system, mass incarceration. Each time, writes Alexander, an associate professor of law at Ohio State University, proponents of racial hierarchy achieved their goals “largely by appealing to the racism and vulnerability of lower-class whites.”
“I remember feeling like, where are the black folks in this story?” Fortner says. “Where are their voices? They’re constantly victimized. They’re not powerful. And then I thought about, well, who the hell brought down the original Jim Crow? It was black power. It was black folk organizing, mobilizing successfully against racial structures in the South, in the North. And what happened to all that power? What happened to all that agency? It sort of disappeared.”
Except it didn’t. By examining historical records, Fortner found that black people had retained their power when it came to crime policy. At one place, in one moment, their voices were critical: Harlem in the years leading up to the Rockefeller drug laws. It was there that residents were besieged by heroin addiction and social disorder — what a late-1960s NAACP report called a “reign of criminal terror.” And it was there that a “black silent majority” of working- and middle-class residents rallied to reclaim their streets. New York’s ambitious governor seized on their discontent to push for harsh narcotics policies that would enhance his standing within the Republican Party. The result: some of the strictest drug statutes in the country, mandating long minimum sentences for a variety of drug crimes.
More here. By Marc Perry writing in the Chronicle Review.
Around the Web
- GOP Presidential Candidates: The More the Scarier; I didn’t think that political competition could be a bad thing, though. Perhaps it’s only scary to those who are (and especially have been) active, willing participants in GOP machinations…
- Paul’s Gospel
- Sanders is not like Trump. Sanders is like Rand Paul.
- Postcards from Abu Dis: Checking out the Checkpoints (Part Nine); Dr Khawaja has been teaching philosophy in the West Bank this summer, and while I’ve linked to his latest installment, the whole series (nine parts so far) is well worth the read.
- Must religious bakers bake cakes for gay weddings?
Don’t Let Me Design Your Retaining Wall!
The State of California says I’m qualified to practice civil engineering. That means you can trust me to design structures that achieve a high degree of safety, economy, reliability, and maintainability. I even have an official rubber stamp that I can apply to drawings or calculations. It is supposed to guarantee that I know what I’m doing and that I follow generally accepted best practices.
But I haven’t practiced engineering in decades. I used my license perhaps half a dozen times in the 1970s. My rubber stamp has sat idle ever since. More …
Around the Web: Greece Edition
- Tyler Cowen has been owning this debate.
- Unfortunately, Greek citizens have been too fed up with the rest of the world to listen.
- (Perhaps libertarians and their arguments were just late to the party.)
- This is still the best concise sociological analysis of Greece and the EU I’ve come across.
It’s worth noting here that the overwhelming majority of ‘No’ voters – the ones who just rejected the EU after their elected, far Left leader walked out of talks days before said talks were scheduled to end – don’t want to leave the EU. Confused? See the Cowen link.
Matthew and I had a dialogue on Greece awhile back here at NOL that might be of interest.
Fiscal Watch Dog, The Dutch Way
I still have not found a way to make a living out of international political theory that also satisfies my demands as consumer at numerous markets, not least the housing market. At this moment this means I make a living at the Dutch fiscal watchdog. I recently wrote a piece about in Contemporary Social Science, which can be seen here.
Below is the abstract, drop me a mail if you’re interested in the full text.
CPB Netherlands Bureau for Economic Policy Analysis: Dutch (economic) policy-making
As one of the oldest independent fiscal institutions in the world, the CPB Netherlands Bureau for Economic Policy Analysis (CPB) has a long history of providing evidence for policy-making. Uniquely, its activities include the analysis of election manifestos, the national budget and the coalition agreement, as a derivative from its provision of leading macroeconomic forecasts. This paper analyses the CPB’s role within the Dutch political system, its place in public administration and the different methods it employs to provide evidence for policy-makers. It then focuses on two different types of activities, the costing of election manifestos and ageing studies, using a multi-methods approach to illustrate how the CPB’s influence extends to setting policy agendas and policy targets, and to reveal critical factors for success and failure. Although the CPB model cannot easily be transposed to other countries, a number of general principles can be deduced from it for application elsewhere.
The Lowest Levels of Love (with apologies to Dr Amburgey)
Different Types of Love scale
The Different Types of Love scale is a 40-item measure of loving feelings toward four different groups. Participants indicate agreement with statements concerning friends […], family […], generic others […], and their romantic partner […]
Results.
Table 4 shows that libertarians showed the lowest levels of loving feelings toward others, across all four categories (although the difference with conservatives on love for friends was not significant).
Interpretation.
Consistent with the results on the Identification with All of Humanity scale, the libertarian independence from others is associated with weaker loving feelings toward friends, family, romantic partners, and generic others. It is noteworthy that differences between liberals and conservatives were generally small (except toward generic others). Libertarians were the outliers.
You’ll always be my bro, though. These results come from a paper by a bunch of moral psychologists, including Jonathan Haidt. I’ve blogged about the paper before, in regards to intelligence. (Libertarians are smarter than conservatives and liberals, remember? It turns out that we are bigger jerks, too.)
My intuition tells me that this is an incomplete analysis, though (the paper’s authors say as much, up front, in the paper itself). It’s not that libertarians are less loving than conservatives and liberals, it’s simply that we show our love in a different way, most likely in a way that isn’t represented in the sampling process. Libertarians could not, for example, be the ardent internationalists that we are without some measure of “love” for humanity.
Here is an example of what I mean. Suppose I am walking down the street and I see a bum with a cardboard sign and a tip jar (a paper cup from Carl’s Jr). The bum is drunk, and a little stoned. I say to myself, “Damn, that guy is in a crappy situation.” I reach into my pockets to see if I’ve got some change or, better yet, a couple of cigarettes. I am comfortable in claiming that most libertarians – sans those raised on the Atlantic coast of the US – go through the same thought process. If I put myself in that guy’s shoes, anything more than what I spare for him becomes a nuisance to me. Does this make sense? So if I’m panhandling, and somebody tries to do more than give me their change or spare me a couple of smokes, they become a pain in my ass. Why would I want to be a pain in our hypothetical bum’s ass?
This same thought process can be attributed to family, friends, and romantic partners. We’re not being jerks, we’re respecting your autonomy. I know for a fact that this can be a shallow admission of truth for some to hear, but it’s the truth nonetheless.
The libertarian’s outlier-ness in regards to conceptions about love may explain why we have such a tough time politically. (Our superior cognitive skills, which prompts us to be more open to getting at the truth of some matter, also goes some way toward explaining why we fail politically, as politics is emphatically about avoiding the truth.)
Morality (“love”) is simply one of a number of different spheres of conception about how the world works (including, say, economics, history, or sociology). However, morality is often the only sphere that people can afford to use to make judgments about this or that policy or social puzzle. This is because the training that is required to understand more complex topics like economics or sociology is expensive (“time”) and hard to come by. So, for example, there are a number of explanations for why foreign aid to Somalia is bad. You can use historical explanations or sociological ones or economic arguments, but the first – and often only – line of reasoning used by most people is moral in nature. Thus:
Giving money to poor countries is morally wrong.
Not exactly a game-winner, right? Look at what a jerk you are. Should we, as libertarians, be spending more time explaining to others why we think the way we do?
The Fog of Foreign Policy
Sound libertarian analysis, highly recommended!
New issue of Econ Journal Watch is out
For those of you just tuning in to NOL, Fred is an editor for the journal, and Warren is its math reader.
Evolution, moral sentiments, and the welfare state: Many now maintain that multilevel selection created a sympathetic species with yearnings for social solidarity. Several evolutionary authors on the political left suggest that collectivist politics is an appropriate way to meet that yearning. Harrison Searles agrees on evolution and human nature, but faults them for neglecting Hayek’s charge of atavism: The modern polity and the ancestral band are worlds apart, rendering collectivist politics inappropriate and misguided. David Sloan Wilson, Robert Kadar, and Steve Roth respond, suggesting that new evolutionary paradigms promise to transcend old ideological categories.
Evidence of no problem, or a problem of no evidence? In 2009, Laura Langbein and Mark Yost published an empirical study of the relationship between same-sex marriage and social outcomes. Here Douglas Allen and Joseph Price replicate their investigation, insisting that conceptual problems and a lack of empirical power undermine any claim of evidence on outcomes. Langbein and Yost reply.
The progress of replication in economics: Maren Duvendack, Richard W. Palmer-Jones, and W. Robert Reed investigate all Web of Science-indexed economics journals with regard to matters concerning replication of research, including provision of the data and code necessary to make articles replicable and editorial openness to publishing replication studies. They explain the value of replication as well as the challenges, describe its history in economics, and report the results of their investigation, which included corresponding with journal editors.
A Beginner’s Guide to Esoteric Reading: Arthur Melzer describes techniques and devices used in esoteric writing.
Symposium:
Classical Liberalism in Econ, by Country (Part I): Authors from around the world tell us about their country’s culture of political economy, in particular the vitality of liberalism in the original political sense, historically and currently, with special attention to professional economics as practiced in academia, think tanks, and intellectual networks.Chris Berg: Classical Liberalism in Australian Economics
Fernando Hernández Fradejas: Liberal Economics in Spain
Mateusz Machaj: Liberal Economics in Poland
Patrick Mardini: The Endangered Classical Liberal Tradition in Lebanon: A General Description and Survey Results
Miroslav Prokopijević and Slaviša Tasić: Classical Liberal Economics in the Ex-Yugoslav Nations
Josef Šíma and Tomáš Nikodým: Classical Liberalism in the Czech Republic
All the links are pdfs. The website is here.
Secession in Europe (but not the EU)
NOL‘s roster has blogged about secession within the EU before, but what about dissatisfied regions joining Switzerland’s cantons instead of the EU? Read more, from the WSJ, to find out…
Notes On Liberty 