Orientalist Photography · Jul 04, 2008
From TLS
The early Orientalist photographers were heroes. The glass plates they brought out to the East were monstrously heavy and bulky. The developing usually had to be done on the spot in stifling conditions. (Francis Frith’s wickerwork darkroom was mistaken by locals for his harem.) In the heat, collodion was liable to evaporate or bubble over. It was difficult to get hold of clean distilled water. Photographers were making good speed if they managed to take more than half a dozen pictures a day. Often they were stoned by the locals for no other reason than that they were wearing Western dress.
Kissinger · Jul 04, 2008
Niall Ferguson reviews Jeremi Suri’s book Henry Kissinger and the American Century in TLS:
The more books I have read about Henry Kissinger in recent years, the more I have been reminded of the books I used to read about the Rothschild family. When other nineteenth-century banks made loans to conservative regimes or to countries at war, no one seemed to notice. But when the Rothschilds did it, the pamphleteers could scarcely control their indignation. Indeed, it would take a great many shelves to contain all the shrill anti-Rothschild polemics produced by Victorian antecedents of Hitchens and his ilk. Which prompts the question: has the ferocity of the criticism which Kissinger has attracted perhaps got something to do with the fact that he, like the Rothschilds, is Jewish? (Nota bene: this is not to imply that his critics are anti-Semites. Some of the Rothschilds’ most fierce critics were also Jews. So are some of Kissinger’s.)
Quite apart from the distinctly thin documentary foundation of Hitchens’s footnote-free case for the prosecution – which quotes from little more than a few dozen primary documents, all from US archives – The Trial of Henry Kissinger suffers from a strange absence of historical perspective. It would in fact be much easier to implicate a number of Kissinger’s predecessors in civilian bombings, coups d’état and support for murderous regimes. [...] In any case, Richard Nixon was not the first President to seek to influence Chilean domestic politics. Both of his immediate predecessors did so. Yet you will search the bookshops in vain for “The Trial of John Foster Dulles” or “The Trial of Dean Rusk”.
For Suri, Kissinger’s Jewish origins are the key to understanding both the man and the world’s reaction to him. Kissinger, writes Suri in one of his boldest sallies, was like “a hybrid of the Court Jew and the State Jew – what we might tentatively call the ‘policy Jew’”. He portrays his subject as ascending from academia to the corridors of power by doing “grunt work” for the goyim: first his Harvard mentor, William Elliott, then McGeorge Bundy, then Nelson Rockefeller, then Nixon and finally his successor Gerald Ford (about whom, like nearly all writers on Kissinger, Suri says much too little).
“I had seen evil in the world”, Kissinger commented in an interview many years later, “and I knew it was there, and I knew that there are some things you have to fight for, and that you can’t insist that everything be to some ideal construction you have made.” Suri is surely correct to see that an awareness of this searing experience is indispensable to our understanding of the man.
He was also fortunate in his mentors: just as Fritz Kramer had spotted Kissinger’s intellectual potential in the army, so William Elliott soon identified him as “a combination of Kant and Spinoza”, hyperbole that Kissinger almost lived up to by producing a senior thesis so long that it prompted Harvard to impose a maximum word-count.
The obverse of occasional sabre-rattling was Nixon and Kissinger’s shared and unshakeable faith in regular “back channel” negotiations. Beginning in February 1969, Kissinger cultivated a hotline to Moscow via the Soviet ambassador, Anatoly Dobrynin. At first designed primarily (though never exclusively) to bypass the State Department, the back channel gradually evolved into a highly effective and highly sensitive system of superpower communications. Subsequent criticism of the policy of détente (from the Right more than the Left) cannot detract from the tangible achievements of Kissinger’s period in office: the Four-Power Agreement on Berlin, the first Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty, the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty and the Helsinki Accords. Suri also seems to concur with the view that Nixon and Kissinger’s opening to China (or, as Margaret Macmillan would have it, Mao and Zhou Enlai’s opening to America) worked as a way of exerting pressure on the Soviets by shattering the illusion of a homogeneous Communist Second World.
Besides the various Latin American caudillos, the Saudi royal family, the Shah of Iran and the Pakistani military, these unpleasant regimes also included (though the Left seldom acknowledged it) the Maoist regime in Beijing, which was already guilty of many more violations of human rights than all the right-wing dictators put together when Kissinger flew there for the first time in July 1971.
Yet the real revolution Kissinger had to achieve was not so much in the realm of grand strategy as in that of domestic politics. As he himself put it in one of the many “heartland speeches” he delivered in the US in 1975 and 1976, his underlying aim was “to end the self-flagellation that has done so much harm to this nation’s capacity to conduct foreign policy”. In this he was ultimately unsuccessful. Indeed, US self-flagellation reached its zenith during the presidency of Jimmy Carter.
Failed States Index · Jul 03, 2008
Foreign Policy’s Failed State Index
Matrix of failed states:
There clearly is a correlation between parliamentary power and stability, but there is a group of anomalous states, in the right lower quadrant, which do not get the full “bang for the buck” from their parliamentary efforts. The triplet of Bulgaria, Romania and Mongolia probably belong there, too. In a gross simplification, I would think countries in this quadrant (“second world”?) are in a metastable equilibrium and would ultimately either progress to the first world (top right quadrant) or fail.
Germany seems to be a bit of an anomaly, too. Though clearly much better than the “second world” countries, it still has some inefficiency in terms of stability (is this due to the shallow roots of democratic institutions or perhaps the strength of the Far Right? I don’t know).
Relationship to inflation:
World map:
Modern politics is a chapter in the history of religion · Jul 03, 2008
Contemplating the political debates around me, particularly, but not only in this election year, I have been fascinated by the idea of secular religiosity. It strikes me that many ostensibly secular people, with political activists chief amongst them, betray a distinctly premodern religious fervor in their worldview. This secular religiosity comes packaged with a sacred terminology, high priests, social bonding rituals and groups, even clothing, and is complete with a cast of antiheroes.
“Modern politics is a chapter in the history of religion. The greatest of the revolutionary upheavals that have shaped so much of the history of the past two centuries were episodes in the history of faith – moments in the long dissolution of Christianity and the rise of modern political religion”.
Thus begins Black Mass by John Gray, reviewed in TLS.
Gray is a British political philosopher affiliated with the London School of Economics and a regular at the NY Review of Books (paywall), who has, amongst others topics, written on Isaiah Berlin, “the hedgehog of foxiness.”
He reviews the history of Utopianism from the Reformation through the French Revolution and maps how (in his view, at least) it has migrated from left to right, from communism to neo-conservatism. He also focuses on the violence that accompanied the mutation of Christianity into the secular Utopianism such as radical (class and race) politics and modern nationalism.
The review quotes an article from the Times:
“At a time when Islamist terrorism seems to have returned to the centre of London, it is easy to forget that during the 20th century terror was used on a vast scale by secular regimes. Today suicide attacks are automatically linked with a belief in martyrdom followed by paradise in the afterlife. Yet suicide bombing of the kind we now confront is a terrorist technique that was developed by people with no such beliefs . . . . The roots of contemporary terrorism are in radical Western ideology – especially Leninism – far more than in religion.”
and contrasts it with the paragraph I quote at the top of this post.
A few more quotes from the TLS review:
Gray holds to account the Enlightenment and its dependent ideologies, from Liberal Imperialism to Communism, as being simply what T. E. Hulme would have called “spilt religion”, malformed theology in an eschatological mode without the restraints still kept in place by mainstream Christianity. The Enlightenment fused the two cities of Augustine and the two kingdoms of Luther to create, not the heavenly city, but hell on earth. At least (so Gray seems to say) the Christian story is clearly a form of solid poetry, whereas its secular translation fails to recognize its own mythic character, including the utopias envisaged by contemporary scientism.
What poor, hopeful Christianity got right was our inveterate enmity one against another, without exceptions for scientists, liberals, the high-minded and other preachers of secular salvation. This is Pascal’s misère de l’homme without a delusory grandeur de l’homme, or Hamlet’s soliloquy on man with a heavy emphasis on “this quintessence of dust”.
Gray is surely right in his realistic understanding of the nature of political action, national and international. He even goes so far as to argue that the realist approach to relations between nations (which he thinks will remain the essential actors on the global scene for the foreseeable future) is the only morally serious approach to policy. So I guess he’s a difficult man to surprise, for example by the squalor of today’s post-Mandela South African government. Yet the ferocity of his indignation suggests that, occasionally, what is so obvious simply takes his breath away. He is clearly convinced, as am I, that some problems are insoluble, and some paradoxes irresolvable, and the most we can hope for is what Hobbes called “commodious living”, and a commitment to at least some civilized restraints on the use of force.
All our options, including our best aspirations, incur enormous cost, and developed forms of human solidarity, whether universal and inclusive, or particular and exclusive, have been built on mountains of human skulls.
London buildings by grade · Jul 03, 2008
London’s architectural landmarks are grouped into Grade I and Grade II and these lists help the student of London in planning walks or otherwise explore the city.
Welcome to the echo chamber · Apr 26, 2008
Susan Jacoby in the LA Times:
Virtually everywhere I speak, 95% of the audience shares my political and cultural views — and serious conservatives report exactly the same experience on the lecture circuit.
Whether watching television news, consulting political blogs or (more rarely) reading books, Americans today have become a people in search of validation for opinions that they already hold. This absence of curiosity about other points of view is the essence of anti-intellectualism and represents a major departure from the nation’s best cultural traditions.
Genuine fairness does not mean the kind of bogus objectivity that always locates truth equidistant from two points, but it does demand that divergent views be understood and taken into account in approaching public issues.
Top 100 public intellectuals · Apr 24, 2008
Foreign Policy’s list of the Top 100 public intellectuals.
World on Fire · Apr 22, 2008
A review of Amy Chua’s book World on Fire. I heard her (via a podcast) talk on her other book on hyperpowers and was impressed. Her thesis is that “market-dominant minorities“ control a disproportionate (sometimes huge) percentage of the host country’s resources, breeding resentment in the poorer majority. This resentment lingers under the surface and can explode in genocidal violence given the right circumstances. Western calls for rapid switches to democracy in countries without the institutional infrastructure to support the practice of democracy can lead to vicious sectarian strife benefiting majority demagogues at the expense of affluent but vulnerable minorities. Some of Chua’s examples (from the review)
Filipino Chinese comprise just 1 to 2 percent of the Philippines’ population, but control all of the country’s major supermarkets, fast-food restaurants and large department stores, and all but one of the nation’s banks. A similar situation obtains in Indonesia. Jews make up a similarly tiny proportion of Russia’s population, but of the seven “oligarchs” who control virtually all of the country’s business, six are Jewish. Lebanese dominate the economies in Sierra Leone and Gambia, while Indians dominate the economy in Kenya, along with a smaller, indigenous minority tribe called the Kikuyu. Similar examples abound worldwide.
Chua is not blaming the minorities for their succes and does not justify the violence against them. She does not explain why they were successful, either. She is more interested in looking at what happens to the dominant minorities, pointing out that market dominant minorities exist in many countries around the world. She argues that myopic Western policies (Thomas Friedman’s calls of “Hello? Hello? There’s a message here. It’s democracy, stupid! Multi-ethnic, pluralistic, free-market democracy” addressed to the Middle East) are responsible for (or at least, greatly facilitated) the release of pent up resentment which easily channels itself in genocidal murder.
“In the numerous countries around the world that have pervasive poverty and a market-dominant minority, democracy and markets — at least in the form in which they are currently being promoted — can proceed only in deep tension with each other. In such conditions, the combined pursuit of free markets and democratization has repeatedly catalyzed ethnic conflict in highly predictable ways. This has been the sobering lesson of globalization in the last twenty years.”
Paul Lendvai az erosodo magyar szelsojobbrol · Apr 10, 2008
A Der Standard cikkenek ismertetese
valójában nem is a viszonylag kicsi, erőszakra hajló barna tábor a veszélyes, hanem az Orbán körüli politikai jobboldal, s nagyon kevés kivételtől eltekintve a katolikus és a protestáns egyház “finom hallgatása” – jegyezte meg a publicista
TGM valaszol Bayer Zsoltnak · Apr 04, 2008
Tetszett TGM Nepszabadsagbeli cikke. Idezet:
Bayer Zsoltnak egyetlen árva érve sincs a megelőlegezett bírálatok indokoltsága ellen. Csak panaszkodik: annak ellenére bírálják antiszemitizmussal, hogy antiszemita. Alapvetően emögött egy gondolat van: az, hogy antiszemitizmussal senkit se szabad vádolni, mert különben baj lesz. Az antiszemitizmus-vád fegyverét forgatók vigyázzanak, mert tiltakozásukat és kritikájukat (valakik majd) a zsidókon fogják leverni.
Világos beszéd. Hallottuk már.
Beiras az index forumon · Apr 03, 2008
OFF:
Ez alapjabol egy szemelyes es kollektiv izles, preferencia, hagyomany, kultura kerdese. Erre a kerdesre nincs egy empirikusan korrekt valasz; kulonbozo kozossegek a spektrum kulonbozo stacioin helyezkednek el.
En eltem Fr-ban, beszelem a nyelvet, par evtizedes kapcsolatban vagyok avval a kulturaval, amikor etatista etoszrol beszelek, tudom mirol beszelek. Aki soha nem allt szemben egy fonctionnaire-rel, az nem tudja.
Mindezek mellett az allam neni szoknyajaba kapaszkodni es attol varni a megoldast meg olyan elemi kerdesekben is mint egy foto vagy film klub tamogatasa —- szamomra idegen. Az allamfuggoseg bizonyos szinten infantilizalja az embereket, olyan mertekben hogy nem is tudjak meglatni a lehetoseget arra, hogy autonom modon rendezzek az eletuket. Masreszt a piaci onregulacio megkivanja hogy ha valamire nincs erdeklodes azt a kozos penzzel ne tartsak eletbe mestersegesen (azaz ne fecsereljek masok penzet ra). Csak az onfenntartas teszi lehetove hogy megtudjuk, a valosagban mire is van szukseg; maskulonben csak a burokracia erdekeit latjuk es a burokratak biztosan el fogjak osztani a rendelkezesre allo penzt, sot, kovetelnek majd tobbet is.
Amerikaban pld az egyhazak teljesen a hivek altal vannak eltartva es semmi penzt nem kapnak az allamtol; vitalitasuk reszben azzal magyarazhato hogy egymassal versenyeznek es direkt piaci visszjelzeseket kapva azt nyujtjak amit a hivek igenyelnek, nem pedig amit az allamhatalom megkivan. Szamos civil szervezet letezik teljesen onfenntarto modon es ez az amerikai mindennap termeszetes velejaroja. Ennek resze az is hogy az ameriakaiak, europatol elteron, nagyon adakozoak (az egyszeru emberek is!), idot, energiat es penzt nagy mertekben adnak a kozos erdekert, es nem varjak hogy mindenben az allam kontarkodjon bele.
Lehetne ezt folytatni de asszem ennyi eleg volt az off-bol. Lehet mindez idegennek es szokatlannak hangzik. Akit erdekel, olvassa de Tocqueville utielmenyeit.
Vegezetul, Amerika szabad, nem “szabad” fuggetlenul attol hogy teged mivel etetnek be, illetve te mit vagy hajlando elhinni.
/OFF
The economics of envy · Mar 16, 2008
Several new blog posts on The Economist. Starting with Ezra Klein:
[The Economist] made me feel very smart. Except on issues that I actually knew something about, in which case it made me feel very annoyed. And eventually, made me very worried, as The Economist is one of those magazines that’s read aspirationally, by people who want to be wry and knowing and worldly.
He then invites the readers to list their favorite magazines, and this being at the The American Prospect, The NY Review of Books and The Nation pop up with predictable frequency.
James Fallows of The Atlantic talks about how the Ec. exports the image of the English class system to class anxious Americans.
There are certain English products whose quaintness is put on mainly for export purposes — they’re the equivalent of Ye Olde Tea Shoppe-style tourist traps, which the locals avoid. Something similar is going on with The Economist. The Economist now has considerably fewer readers — and is strangely less influential — in England than in America. Indeed, it is disdained by the very Englishmen whom many American readers would most love to emulate: the secure upper and upper middle classes.
Another key to the magazine’s boom in America during the 1980s must lie in its sycophancy toward Ronald Reagan in particular and American culture in general. We are all so used to being sneered at by the French or Swedes. To hear someone who poses as a British aristocrat celebrating American vigor — it’s just irresistible! If it came from the Wall Street Journal or USA Today, we’d consider it plain boosterism, but it works from The Economist, since we imagine we’re overhearing the foreigners’ real views.
The other ugly English trait promoting The Economist’s success in America is the Oxford Union argumentative style. At its epitome, it involves a stance so cocksure of its rightness and superiority that it would be a shame to freight it with mere fact.
American debate contests involve grinding, yearlong concentration on one doughy issue, like arms control. The forte of Oxford-style debate is to be able to sound certain and convincing about a topic pulled out of the air a few minutes before, such as “Resolved: That women are not the fairer sex.”
The complications of Anglophilic snobbery and Oxbridge-style swagger prevent most American readers from realizing that, when they read Economist leaders, they’re essentially reading Wall Street Journal editorials, written with even less self-doubt.
Now this was quite an indictment, wasn’t it?
Fallows quotes Humphrey Greddon
The omniscient tone and pedantry of The Economist must impress the insecure American cousins in its readership.
Jon Friedman in Marketwatch
[T]he publication has the chutzpah to take a global view in its stories. Remember, an international story — outside Iraq, of course — by most U.S. media standards might as well begin and end with a discussion of Yao Ming’s cultural significance. Read related column.
You want another laugh? The Economist specializes in looking at the decidedly anti-hip finance scene (zzz) at a time when American business magazines are searching high and low for buzz (and ad dollars) with the desperation of a kid checking between the couch cushions for loose change. I mean, the publication’s title alone can conjure up visions of the dread dismal science, right?
Now here’s the topper: The Economist tries — hard — to reach smart people, eschewing the kind of broad audience that Time and Newsweek target. In other words, don’t expect to see Britney Spears or her ilk grace the cover of the Economist.
Friedman quotes Ken Auletta, the New Yorker’s media critic:
[The Ec.] covers the world, and it covers it in a way that says, ‘This is what we think is important. We’re not going to put Paris Hilton on the cover. You may not like 20-page reports on Africa or Japan’s economy or free trade. But we’re going to give it to you.’ It’s much more opinionated than Time or Newsweek.
YouNotSneaky! gives advice on how to read The Economist.
The Economist flatters readers who aren’t quite intelligent enough to realize how shallow it is into thinking that they are more intelligent than they are because they read it.
Comments on Henry’s post:
A central function of The Economist is to supply pithily written, snootily Anglo justifications for its middlebrow readership’s prejudices… It’s a bit precious for y’all to be sneering about the Economist when Crooked Timber occupies a similar niche on the intertubes… If a subject you are familiar with is treated in The Economist, you’ll discover that what The Economist has to say about it is in fact nicely wrapped clichés that support their party line... Here in the United States, the New York Times serves the exact same function, particularly amongst academia... The problem with the Economist is that Indonesia will always be at a crossroads. You don’t need to read that article 52 times a year.
I read Time for about a year in the 1990’s then dropped it for good. Too much celebrity coverage, fuzzy human interest stries, infotainment, short attention span, issue of the moment, “let’s not offend middle class sensibilities” and “we remember the world only when there is a catastrophe somewhere far-far away” attitude.
Orwell's genius · Mar 16, 2008
A comment to the moronic post by Chris Bertram in which he praised Fidel Castro struck me as uniquely interesting:
I am reminded of a statement once made by Orwell when, as an MP during Parlimentary debate in which some far left Labour MP’s were citing the virtues of theories of even more deranged French academics, he replied thusly about the spectacle: “Only an intellectual could POSSIBLY believe in such things, no ORDINARY person could ever BE such a fool.”
Bill Buckley and the Jews · Mar 16, 2008
I read and liked Jonathan Tobin’s op-ed on Bill Buckley in the Jewish News of Greater Phoenix (quite possibly published originally in the Jewish Exponent in Philadelphia):
The long-term implications of Buckley’s stands are enormous. By remaking the conservative movement in his own image, in which the emphasis was on anti-Communism and a libertarian skepticism of government power, he ensured that it, and the Republican Party, which it came to dominate, would be a place where Jew-haters were unwelcome.
That enabled liberal Jews, such as Commentary editor Norman Podhoretz, to feel comfortable making common cause with the right on a host of issues. Though expectations that the Jews would ditch liberalism en masse were unrealistic, the birth of an intellectually viable brand of Jewish conservative thought in this country would not have happened had not Buckley first cleaned out the GOP stables.
In terms of practical politics, Buckley’s rout of the anti-Semites made it possible for the bipartisan consensus in favor of support for Israel that we now take for granted. He replaced the Buchanan-like world of American conservatism that existed before National Review with something that is not only more successful, but purged of Jew-hatred.
If “Israel Lobby” authors John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt want to find the real father of the enormous support for Israel in our political system today, they need look no further than the irrepressible Buckley, whose life was a testament to the power of ideas.
His was a political faith that most Jews never embraced, but as we survey a political spectrum in which our enemies are confined to the margins, we should all remember the unique achievements of this American original. May his memory be for a blessing for all who love liberty.
1968 · Mar 15, 2008
Tom Stoppard reminisces about the 1968 student protests
This indeed was one of the things I loved about England. The English version of continental eruptions suggested a national character in control of itself. In France, Germany, Italy and Spain, political activism at its extremes included murder, kidnap and bombs. My Italian publisher, one of the most sophisticated, charming and charismatic people I’d ever met, was later killed by his own explosives while trying to blow up an electricity pylon outside Milan.
A few miles away across the Channel, clashes between protesters and riot police were affairs of burning cars, overturned buses and buildings turned to rubble. Our own street-fighting man was only rock’n’roll.
SASS meeting, Phoenix · Mar 14, 2008
The Single Action Shooting Society held its Winter Cowboy Shooting event North of Phoenix. This is a short video from the event:
A chronology of the housing bubble · Mar 09, 2008
Hat tip: The New York Times.
Alice in the Wonderland-on-the-Danube · Mar 09, 2008
Earlier today, Hungary had a referendum on 3 questions covering copayments to outpatient and inpatient medical care as well as college and university tuition.
Under a system inherited from the Communist regime and which has escaped any meaningful reform over the almost two decades since the collapse of the ancien regime, all these services are ostensibly free. Leaving aside the poor quality provided by unreformed Soviet-era state monopolies, the health care is patently NOT free. High payroll and income taxes are supplemented by bribes patients are expected to pay (and do pay) at the point of care.
The government planned to introduce modest (even by local standards of living) copayments as part of financing reform. For example, the office visit copay would have been HUF 300 ($1.74 at today’s rate); all this in a country with a GDP per head of ~$18,000 PPP, where anecdotal reports suggest a brisk consumption of flat panel TVs and other aspirational electronics. The opposition cried foul and demanded a referendum. A socialistic mindset which expects that every problem be solved by the state, and which in return, surrenders individual autonomy to a bureacratic elite, is highly prevalent in Hungary, and the voters have overwhelmingly rejected all three payments.
The irony is that advocates for market approaches are in the (governing) Socialist party, while the popular upheaval was lead by the center right opposition.
Aside from the state-centric collectivism of the Hungarian public, today’s referendum is part of a pattern of attempted deligitimization of the governing coalition by the opposition, using extraparliamentary means such as fomenting street protests as well as previous (failed) referenda.
Update on Phoenix real estate · Mar 07, 2008
The ASU RSI (resale index) tracks closely the Case Shiller index in its methodology, however
ASU-RSI scrubs the data differently, dropping transactions with sale prices less than $5,000 and where homes increased more than 60 percent annually.
Here is a review of the Phoenix market broken down into its regional subcomponents:
The best performing Valley of the Sun regions in the third quarter were the Northeast, which actually saw a slight increase in housing prices from September 2006 to September 2007, and the Central region, incorporating all of Phoenix, which experienced only a slightly negative hit of –1.3 percent. That wasn‘t bad considering what happened to the rest of the metro area, Guntermann said.
From September 2006 to September 2007, housing prices dropped 7.1 percent in the Southeast region, which stretches from Tempe through Mesa, Gilbert and Chandler to the smaller cities of Apache Junction, Higley, Queen Creek and Sun Lakes; 8.2 percent in the Northwest region — comprising the cities of El Mirage, Glendale, Peoria, Sun City, Sun City West, Surprise and Youngtown; and a painful 10.1 percent in the Southwest region — a grouping of Avondale, Buckeye, Goodyear and Litchfield Park.
The correlation between different asset classes, including the Case Shiller index is here.
A lucid Englishman · Feb 26, 2008
A critique of fascist sympathies among Euro lefties.