Picture Thinking

Direct from Germany: Art for your college dorm room, inspired by Hegel.

Alternatively, this could be used as a pattern to create the most perplexing quilt ever made.

- posted by Mark at 2:52 PM; link

 
Quirks

The website baseballprospectus.com posts daily odds on different teams reaching the post-season, looking at the chance each team has to win either its division of the wild card. They use variables such as how well the team in question is likely to perform, the quality of its competition, its opponents and the quality of their competition, and whatnot.

Today, September 4, the numbers for the four best teams in the American League look like this:

Boston 71.8%
New York 91.9%
Seattle 52.4%
Oakland 80.3%

Of these four teams, only three can make the playoffs (since Boston and New York are competing for one division-winning slot, Seattle and Oakland are competing for one division-slot, and there’s only one wild card). Now, does it really make sense that all four teams would have a better-than-50% chance of making it? Seems wrong, doesn’t it? But what’s the rule?

If one were to divide the three playoffs spots among the three teams randomly, each would have a 75% chance of picking one up, but it would be certain that one team would not get a slot. Here, the sum is 296.4: that only leaves a 3.6% chance that some other team will win the wild card, which, if you check out the rest of the numbers, adds up.

So while it would be smart to lay down a bet on each individual team making the playoffs, it would be absurd to bet on all of them making it.

The lesson, if phrased generally enough, would also explain why a 56-game hit streak is so rare: the occurrence of a series of events will always be less likely than the occurrence of any individual event in the series, and sometimes of a different order of magnitude. A long enough series of very likely events will be practically impossible.

- posted by Erik at 8:04 PM; link

 
Re: Unemployment

I've been fascinated by this whole unemployment issue, especially with regard to increased prison populations. There was an excellent PBS News Hour on unemployment that really helped me see what a huge problem unemployment has become in the US. The crux is:
"In 1982, about half-a-million Americans were behind bars. Today, the number is above 2 million. And these people, 90 percent of them men, would otherwise have a huge unemployment rate, says Diane Williams, who runs a Chicago program for ex-offenders."

- posted by Ethan at 4:48 PM; link

 
Re: Loose Cannon

Strangely enough, there's an article in the July/August issue of Foreign Affairs that says something interesting about the beltway sniper that I haven't been able to find in any other source. From Jessica Stern's The Protean Enemy p. 34 (I've italicized the relevant portion):

"Meanwhile, John Allen Muhammad, one of the alleged "Washington snipers," reportedly told a friend that he endorsed the September 11 attacks and disapproved of U.S. policy toward Muslim states, but he appears to have been principally motivated by anger at his ex-wife for keeping him from seeing his children, and some of his victims seem to have been personal enemies."

- posted by Mark at 10:02 AM; link

 
A Life for a Life for a Life

Today, the state of Florida killed Paul Hill because he killed an abortionist because he killed unborn children.

Just a quick reflection on this horrible cycle, I believe, shows the foolishness of our culture of death and the need for a profound shift to a culture of life.

Killing Paul Hill does no good. As he has made clear, he considers his execution a boon, merely expediting what he sees as his martyrdom. To others like him, this killing serves as no deterrent. He, in prison, poses no threat to anyone else, and so no one is made safer specifically by his being dead.

His killing abortionist Dr. John Bayard Britton did no good. It likely saved not a single unborn child, and just as Hill's execution will radicalize many abortion opponents, Britton's murder sets back a legitimate pro-life and anti-abortion agenda.

Finally, Britton's killing unborn children did no good. They were innocent and threatened no one.

It almost seems absurd that one should have to say that killing others does no good, but clearly Britton, Hill and now Jeb Bush all think they are doing some good by killing these humans. The methodology of pursuing one's ends by any means necessary has taken over our society, I often suspect, and the fruits are bitter.

- posted by Carney at 8:56 PM; link

 
Re: Loose Cannon

According to this episode of the Forensic Files (unfortunately, there's no transcript), Muhammend's ex-wife believes that all the sniping was to divert the police, so that when he took out his real target - her - they'd think it was just another random shooting.

The Forensic Files and ESPN are the two things I miss about cable. If you have CourtTV I highly recommend checking out FF.

- posted by Erik at 6:42 PM; link

 
Loose Cannon

According to the N.Y. Post last week, John Allen Muhammed thinks "America got what it deserved" on September 11th. This opens up the possibility that the Beltway Sniper saw himself as self-appointed Al-Quaeda-style terrorist.

Except it looks like Muhammed didn't do much of the shooting; he left that up to young Lee Boyd Malvo. And Malvo's ideological underpinnings are, to say the least, less clear. According to an uncoerced conversation with guards he shot the whites because he hates whites, shot the blacks to throw the police off his trail, and shot the kid because he wanted to rattle Chief Moose.

All of these justifications seem preposterous. They're unbelievable in one or another sense of the word.

- posted by Mark at 3:03 PM; link

 
Re: Why France is Alright with Me

Our interpretations of Thucydides don't differ: precisely what I was trying to draw from Thucydides is that French resentment and conflict between us is a necessary consequence of the imbalance of power. I admit it's a strange position to blame France for something I hold to be inevitable, but likewise, it would be difficult to praise them. If we have any hope of judging foreign policy on some moral standard (which may ultimately be wrongheaded, but it's something we do whenever we talk about "respecting," "scolding," or whatever, and if it is wrongheaded, it seems to me too much to give up), we can't just look at what's inevitable.

Here, I think, proximate causes of the war do come into play, especially Athens' own "justification" of its actions (I, 73 - 76) and especially I, 86, where the Spartan leader holds that the speech contained no defense of Athens against charges of injustice. And indeed, on my reading, it does not. America, at the very least, has attempted to argue that its actions are just, and, in terms of praise and blame, this puts them on a different footing than Athens.

The question of fact, needed to establish the appropriateness of the analogy, is the extent to which the US hegemony is like the Athenian. We can say, minimally, that the US holds much softer sway over Europe than Athens did over Greece.

- posted by Erik at 12:39 PM; link

 
Re: Why France is Alright with Me

Traditional balance of power doctrine suggests that the preponderance of any power inevitably provokes a counterbalancing reaction. The remarkable thing about the present "uni-polar moment" is that no rival to American military power has emerged; the E.U. seems content to be an economic rival, and despite widespread anti-Americanism in the rest of the world there seem to be no prospects for the emergence of a serious anti-American military alliance. What I wanted to say was that in spite these appearances, or beneath them, a different kind of balancing is going on. France is trying to monopolize the "soft power" of moral legitimacy to balance the uncontested American supremacy with respect to hard power.

So I do not mean to contrast my explanation for the French refusal to support the last war with Iraq (power-grab) with Erik's (fear). But I do want to defend the political and moral worth of actions done both out of fear and for the sake of power. First, the French cannot be scolded for breaking with the United States and trying to undermine its international ambitions, since no alliance can survive totally disproportionate power. True friendship is only possible between equals (Nicomachean Ethics 1159a3-13, cf. 1158b12-29). This holds true even in the counter-example you mentioned: the Peloponnesian wars. In fact Athens and Sparta were allies, both at the beginning of the war and again in the middle, but that did nothing to prevent the outbreak of war between them. The central claim of the first book of Thucydides history of that war is that one should not look for the war's cause in surface phenomena (like the Athenian involvement with Corcyra or the violation of the terms of their treaties) but in Sparta's legitimate fear that, if unchecked, Athens would grow to be a power it could no longer contend with (The Peloponnesian War, 1. 23. 6). According to Thucydides, this underlying power dynamic made war inevitable.

Second, morally speaking, it is ignoble to cede your ability to rule. Max Weber's defense of German nationalism was based on the prophetic insight that in the 20th Century Europe might lose its political will and fall under the sway of rising Russian and American power. The German nation, and the smaller European countries which depended on the strength of German power, would thus lose something of their freedom of self-determination. Consequently, he believed that leaders had a responsibility to their descendents to maintain or augment the power of their nation, lest (as Chirac warns these days) they become a vassal of a foreign power with no say in international affairs.

Actions out of fear and for the sake of power are thus both politically and morally justifiable.

You also suggest, however, that the power of moral legitimacy in the world today is questionable (so France might be imprudent). It is certainly unproven. But at least twice in the last war America suffered setbacks that could have been avoided if it had more moral legitimacy. Turkey refused to allow a Northern front and Mexico City and Santiago refused to support a second Security council resolution. France will be able to bestow gifts like these if it can become the voice of those who question the legitimacy of American power.

In sum, I think that if you bracket the question of whether the intervention in Iraq was right (which is contestable), there are no political or moral grounds on which to object to France's refusal to be Britain.

- posted by Mark at 11:28 AM; link

 
Specter's Mendacity, NYT's Blindness

A fabulous post on the powerline blog last week demonstrates both Arlen Specter's complete willingness to lie, the New York Times' willingness to believe him.

Bottom line: a NYT Magazine article attacking Specter's conservative enemies parroted Specter's defense of his voting record, "which, he rightly pointed out," the article reads, "is broadly more conservative than Toomey's, according to National Journal's ratings...."

This is just not true. Specter, in National Journal's 2004 Almanac of American Politics, gets for 2001 and 2002, conservative scores of 48% and 49% on economic issues to Toomey's 94% and 69%. Social issues: Specter gets 43% and 56% to Toomey's 69% and 75%. Foreign: Specter, 41% and 47%; Toomey 47% and 56%.

The NYT ran a correction, but the incident should send a message to Pennsylvania's voters about their senior senator's honesty, and to the NYT's readers about the sincerity of the efforts by the Paper of Record to clean things up.

- posted by Carney at 1:45 PM; link

 
re: Why France is Alright with Me

You said that France would not be reneging on any obligations to the US, “even if the US was right to invade Iraq.”

I see two parts to your argument: that France, though sharing our goal of disarming Iraq, had a more moderate approach, and that France had not actually opposed the US (“We cannot honestly know whether the French would have come around, at least to abstain from a UN vote for the use of force against Iraq.”) The second of these seems to me untenable. Not only did Chirac state that France would veto the UN resolution, but they had already vetoed NATO resolutions to try to protect Turkey in the event of a war on Iraq. France unambiguously opposed US interests, and broke any standing alliance we had with them. The question is whether they did so out of moderation and prudence (as you suggested), in order to obtain power (as Mark suggested), out of fear (as I suggested), or for some other reason. Only on your account, I think, could France be justified in opposing its allies, i.e., by having its eye on a higher good.

But, as I’ve indicated plenty of times before, I don’t think their position was prudent, nor that their sights were set high.

First of all, it’s difficult to say that the war on Iraq was rushed; rather, it’s hard to imagine a more telegraphed or more delayed military action than our war against Iraq (perhaps, if we had taken action more swiftly, the US wouldn’t have felt the need to buttress up its case with questionable connections to Al-Qaeda and dubious evidence of attempts to obtain nuclear weapons). It was reasonable to conclude that the only consequence of delaying the war would be to make it more difficult and costly, perhaps to the point where it became prohibitively difficult.

A more consistent position by France might have held that war on Iraq was simply wrong, and that US demands for pervasive weapons inspections were unreasonable. France did not have a principled opposition to the US, but, accepting our goals, nonetheless stifled our attempts to achieve them, with a sort of “moderation” that strikes me more as cowardice than prudence.

- posted by Erik at 1:44 PM; link

 
re: Why France is Alright with Me

Just last weekend I was in a tourist area in Wisconsin where the menu still offers "freedom" fries rather than the French variety.

One possibility is that the French (both politicians and populace) have become tired of paying for the aftermath of military activities initiated by the US when less apparently viable, less expensive alternatives had not yet been exhausted. Now the French are in an excellent position to veto measures in the UN to help pay for post-war Iraq. (And, they have a good point here, since we are looking at a half-trillion dollar deficit this year!).

But we should remember that the French were not outright refusing to vote for the war in the UN, but were rather demanding that the weapons inspectors be given more time and resources. The French also stated that they would send military forces to assist the US, if Saddam used weapons of mass destruction (WMD) against the US. The French did vote for earlier resolutions stating the Iraq was in violation of the WMD agreement, etc. For this we should scold the French? I think not.

The speed with which the Bush administration expected Europe to act was ridiculously fast. We have all seen the failures of the intelligence gathering services both in their estimation of Iraq's WMD capacity and in their vetting of Presidential speech material. We have all seen the pathetic post-war water shortages and so forth in Iraq. We cannot honestly know whether the French would have come around, at least to abstain from a UN vote for the use of force against Iraq. It seems to me that the only reason that the Bush administration was in such a hurry to invade Iraq was that there was risk of losing popular support for the war (and possibly popular support in general, given the state of the economy) in the US. Otherwise, the Iraq issue never seemed to be so urgent.

Whether or not the French have permanently taken up the position of Western Europe's voice of opposition to the US (I predict that Eastern Europe will come around to the French perspective), the US is not really in a position to accurately accuse them of failing to live up to their obligations to the US, even if the US was right to invade Iraq.

- posted by Ethan at 10:15 AM; link

 
re: Why France is Alright with Me

Mark,

I agree with you a little bit: I think that France did intend to become the leader of the nations opposing the US, and picked up the case against them very quickly. I hadn’t thought about that, but it makes sense. But I don’t think it’s the decisive fact in how we judge France: first of all, jumping out in front presupposes that France wanted to oppose the US to begin with, and we should look first at France’s reasons for that.

But before that, suppose France did what you say: that they acted only in the interest of securing the most power. Would that be worthy of our “respect”? Just the opposite, I think: France would be abandoning one of its allies, for the sake of a “power grab.” Wouldn’t it be more worthy of our respect if they made their decision, not with a view to securing the most power, but with a view to standing by their obligations? If not supporting the war was simply a “power grab,” that’s distasteful at best. And it has a very questionable claim to “moral legitimacy,” even if that’s beside the point. (cf. Churchill, The Gathering Storm, Book I, Chapter 17, last two pages)

Still, I don’t think France’s concern was a calculated grab at “moral legitimacy.” I know you described that as a “soft power,” but I have trouble giving it even that much credit. First of all, moral legitimacy may be choiceworthy in itself, but it seldom wields a very powerful influence. And in this case, I’m not so sure this actually makes France more influential. While the opposition of the UN to the US may be much more pronounced, the UN’s power will suffer for it (though it suffers more for failing to enforce its resolutions against Iraq). If the question were just one of grabbing at the most power possible, I think Britain’s approach would be far more effective than France’s: allying oneself with the most influential nation in the world, and trying to ride its coattails to get what it wants.

As to what motivates the French, I think that, primarily, it’s neither a mistake about the need for war nor a shrewd calculation of increasing influence. Rather, I suggest it’s a fear of American dominance, especially in the face of their own military impotence. Thus, they want to rally the world’s nations against the dominant nation, in order to limit its power. Historically, one could look at Sparta and her allies during the Peloponnesian War, who behaved in roughly this way (cf. Thucydides, I, 23 & 88, and I, 122 – 124 & II,8). There is probably no way for a powerful nation to avoid this sort of reaction.

But there’s a decisive difference between the Spartan case, and the one before us: the US and France are supposed to be allies. Here, I think the WWII argument is actually relevant: we protected France the last two times it was invaded, and, per our treaty obligations (NATO), we would presumably protect them in the future. We haven’t invaded France, and there is no reason to think that’s going to change. They should feel obligated to stand by this alliance.

Now, given how strong the US is compared to France, it is hard to hope that they’ll become fond of us, even when we help them (especially when we help them). The reasons for this may be unavoidable, but they are not to France’s credit.

What I haven’t addressed is the possibility that the French position is correct: that the war against Iraq was (is) unjust, or even that the French genuinely believe the war to be unjust. I admit that would recast the issue, and I’m also sure that there are some admirable French folk who hold this position (I know one). However, I doubt that the French policy-makers opposed it from serious conviction, and of course I do think the war is just, so at best, I would say the French are guilty of major error in judgment.

If the question is whether we should respect or scold France, I say, scold away.

- posted by Erik at 12:05 AM; link

 
Why France is Alright with Me

One of the prevalent arguments in the recent popular backlash against the French was that the French were being ungrateful to us. We saved them from the Nazis, so it goes, consequently they should support us against Saddam. The appropriateness of applying this school-yard conception of reciprocity to world politics is, of course, questionable.

There is a more sophisticated version of this argument, however, that finds support in Robert Kagan’s influential article "Power and Weakness". Kagan’s article attempts to characterize the different worldviews of America and Europe in terms of willingness to use power. In his account, Americans, who since the end of WWII have had the responsibility of keeping the peace in Europe and the military power to do it, have found and continue to find force to be an effective and legitimate means of solving international problems. Europeans, on the other hand, precisely because they benefited from this Pax Americana and are so militarily weak, have been enabled to boldly leave their nationalistic and warlike history behind and create a “self-contained world of laws and rules and transnational negotiation and cooperation.” They want not power, but “the transcendence of power.”

Although Kagan’s article tries to be balanced, he clearly considers American policy more appropriate to the real world of international politics than European policy. In his picture, Europeans don’t see the paradox that their conception of a world of international law only has plausibility due to the unquestionable supremacy of American power in Europe through most of the 20th century. Consequently, one could formulate a version of the complaint I began with in Kagan’s terms. It would claim that the principled stand the French (in particular) took against the American invasion of Iraq, was due to their sheltered incapacity to see the need for the use of power in world politics. The French are thus not necessarily ungrateful, just naïve and moralistic.

Though Kagan’s articulation of the different “psychologies of power” seems to accurately pinpoint some of the differences between the standard European position (as you can read it on the placards of protesters) and the Rumsfeldian American one, I feel that it fails to see a recognizable political agenda behind the French embrace of legalistic moralism. I don’t think it’s naïve, nor a complete turn away from power.

This might be hard to see. On the face of it, French intransigence on the Iraq question has done two things, both of which apparently reduce French power in the world. It has made it unambiguously clear that the U.N. (the source of France’s clout) cannot stop the United States, and it undermined the French pretension of speaking on behalf of the E.U. by highlighting the tensions between Eastern and Western Europe governments. What was gained appears to have only been domestic support, since (not unlike the rest of the world) something like 86% of French citizens were against the war. Consequently, it might look like Chirac took what (in terms of power-politics) was a quixotic stand against America, for (at best) votes at home.

I don’t think such an assessment is completely accurate, though. Wolfowitz is fond of saying that the critics of the war who accuse the Bush administration of invading Iraq for oil or vengeance or what have you don’t realize how September 11th changed the administration’s perception of the urgency of invading Iraq. It did this by making fighting terrorism and stabilizing the Middle East imperative national interests. I think something similar can be said about the French foreign policy: it, too, needs to be understood in light of their understanding of the events of 9/11. But the French drew a slightly different lesson than the Bush administration. As Dominique de Villepin put it in a speech on “Law, Force and Justice”, September 11 “changed the meaning of power.” What the French saw was that the kind of power America unquestionably had was not sufficient; it was shown to be vulnerable to threats stemming from the appearance of a lack of legitimacy as a world hegemon. I don’t think it is a stretch to suggest that 9/11 showed France policy-makers that the only reasonable way for it to keep its share of world power was by becoming the representative of the world’s grievances against the U.S. The success of the American invasion of Afghanistan showed them, if there was any doubt, that any further attempt to rival America military power by France or the E.U. would be pointless. And although refusing to compromise in the U.N. made the U.N. a weaker military body, it made it a stronger representative of the world’s discontent with American power since it appeared more independent. The French thus effectively traded part of their share of traditional power (which was already being eroded and compromised by American supremacy) for the soft power of moral legitimacy.

So, by my sights, the French refusal to support the Gulf War was not ingratitude or moral naivete. It was a power grab sensitive to what they perceive as the new reality of power. And it seems that America, of all places, should be able to respect that.

- posted by Mark at 12:54 PM; link