Political Gene Expression

Yes, I'm 12

2008-02-10T07:13:00.000-08:00

Am I the only one who giggles uncontrollably whenever Chris Matthews refers to momentum as "the Big Mo"?

Just me, then?

Understatement of the Year

2008-02-08T13:23:00.000-08:00

David Frum:

Not so Mr. Romney. Analytic and data-driven, always prepared to change his mind when circumstances change

Have to say it

2005-12-03T02:02:00.000-08:00

Most bloggers are stupid ignorant fucks. Barely more coherent or content generating than their inane commenters. The New York Times is way better than 95% of the blogs on the Truth Laid Bear top 250. But Maureen Dowd doesn't post her hate mail like Michelle Malkin....

California propositions

2005-10-27T01:34:00.000-07:00

If you're staring at the November California ballot, here's a table to help you out.

Proposition	Republican	Democrat	Libertarian
73. Waiting Period and Parental Notification Before Termination of Minor's Pregnancy	Y	N	no position
74. Public School Teachers. Waiting Period for Permanent Status. Dismissal	Y	N	Y
75. Public Employee Union Dues. Restrictions on Political Contributions. Employee Consent Requirement	Y	N	Y
76. State Spending and School Funding Limits	Y	N	Y
77. Redistricting. Initiative Constitutional Amendment	Y	N	Y
78. Discounts on Prescription Drugs	?	N	N
79. Prescription Drug Discounts. State-Negotiated Rebates	?	Y	N
80. Electric Service Providers. Regulation	?	Y	N

NeoNeoliberal = Neoliberal whose bluff was called by GW Bush?

2005-10-24T17:56:00.000-07:00

A generation ago Iriving Kristol declared that a neoconservative was a liberal who'd been "mugged by reality." After the past 4 years I don't know if we can say that anymore. It seems to me that the foreign policy of the hard-core neoconservatives is rather idealistic, a form of muscular Wilsonianism (I find the posturings of some the liberal hawks at The New Republic in the way they try to distinguish themselves from necons on foreign policy rather facile). The neocons descend from a group of intellectuals who were generally supportive of the New Deal, and even the Fair Deal. But they reacted negatively to the Great Society overreach of LBJ, and in the 1970s began formulating a realist response toward the social crises that emerged from the synthesis of The Great Disruption and the welfare state.

In response to the hard-headedness of the Right the Left half of the political spectrum seems to have generated three primary camps. Moderates, typified by the DLC and Bill Clinton in the latter half of the 1990s (i.e., the Welfare Reform Bill Clinton, not the Universal Healthcare Bill Clinton) accepted many of the criticisms of the neocons, and formulated a "Third Way" which attempted to mix & match conservative means with liberal ends. Others retreated into bizarre identity politics or fixed themselves on the political margins and became rather irrelevant (though the Nader campaign of 2000 was not irrelevant at all one could say). And of course there was the old bull post-Great Society liberalism still in play, typified by Ted Kennedy, serving as a counter-weight to the DLC moderates.

For the past generation it seems that many liberals have not only wanted to preserve the welfare state in its Great Society form (note the cries of betrayal during Welfare Reform), but they have fantasized about expanding the scope of government intervention. With no real possibility of implementation, as the moderate Democrats would block them within the party and they would receive no succor from the Republicans, dreams could spin out of control. Some on the Left still seemed to harbor the idea that all humans had infinite potentialities, that job training and universal college educations would free up the native genius of individuals. Skeptics of this panglossian perspective on human nature of course didn't buy into this program.

Then came G.W. Bush. In many ways Bush is a conservative, with his tax breaks and moderate social policies...but, in many ways he is not. The No Child Left Behind Act was to my mind Bush's inadvertant ploy to call the far Left's bluff, and raise them one. I have had personal experiences with many individuals who work in school systems, or around them, who can't believe the expectations that some children, and their teachers, are put under. I even talked to a woman who worked in the adminstrative wing of a school district, who tentatively supported the NCLBA because she told me, "...the students in this school district are doing really well, but a few kids are getting left behind, and they tend to be poor, minority...." In the Best of All Worlds no child can be left behind, no matter that they are drooling on the school carpet and need the special attention of two attendents to make sure that they don't mess their diapers too often.

I joked to a friend that for 25 years some liberals have been dreaming of a program that would send a crew of Down Syndrome adults to the moon, since with the right programs and right mind set, anyone can do anything! G.W. Bush agrees, and now liberals are having to figure out how they will actualize their dreams of Down Syndrome doctors and astronauts, using raw will power to drive themselves forward across the fields of self esteem.

Speaking of the attraction of many liberals pre-March 2003 to the Iraq War, Matthew Yglesias noted:

Packer, like a lot of liberal intellectuals, was essentially swept up in this wave of applause. But how much sense did this line of thinking ever make? Extremely little, it seems to me. Nobody who was actually being asked to put themselves on the line would find this reasonable. As I've said before, it's the equivalent of playing poker with someone else's money. When it's not you who needs to do the fighting, why not choose hope over wisdom?

In many ways the Iraq War project appealed to the idealism of many liberals. Who doesn't want to liberate a nation from a loathesome dictator? Who doesn't want to bring democracy to the masses? The neoconservative project fundamentally appealed to many liberals because of its idealism and high hopes for human nature. I was rather struck how many anti-war liberals had to engage in strange cognitive contortions to remain the idealists, they were the ones who really cared about those brown people. Arguments were made, and have been made, that from a utilitarian angle the Iraqis will have suffered more under the Americans than under the dictatorship. From a short term perspective, this might be true, but over the generation I think the Iraqis have really benefited quite a bit. I suspect that there will be long term The Mouse That Roared impacts. Nevertheless, fundamentally, this is going to be a hard slog. Many Americans have died, and we've spent a lot of money on this project. I'm not going to get into the details of whether the war is good or not, I'm skeptical, but not dogmatic about it, ultimately as long as too many Americans don't die and too much money doesn't get spent I don't care too much. But what I've been seeing, in glimmers and flickers, is that many liberals, like Yglesias, are transforming themselves into realists and rationalists. G.W. Bush's sunny optimism is something that revolts them on a visceral level. They can hate his idealism, ridicule it, express their naked contempt for his world building and policing ambitions, because he is a Republican. They can attack No Child Left Behind, mandatory testing, etc. because he is a Republican.

They've been mugged. Now let's see how this plays out.

Predictions

2005-10-17T11:04:00.000-07:00

1. Harriet Miers will be confirmed.
2. She will turn out to be more hostile to Roe v. Wade than Justice Roberts.

Obviously lots of room to be wrong there.

Update: Over the weekend, the futures market on Meirs went to crap.

Three cheers for the child blogger!

2005-10-03T19:36:00.000-07:00

Steve points me to this response by Matthew Yglesias to those who would question his semi-defense (or non-attack) in regards Bill Bennett's recent statements. This is the important part (for me):

Recent years have seen a frightening rise in right-wing political correctness. If you criticize Israeli policy or the U.S.–Israel relationship, or even use the word "neocon," you're an anti-Semite. If you're against Al Gonzalez you hate Hispanics. If you're against Janice Rogers Brown you hate black people. If you're generally against the social-conservative judicial agenda you hate Christians. If you're against the Iraq War you hate the troops. Most generally, liberalism itself is defined as an anti-American creed, some kind of slur against the Heartland and its delicate sensitivities.
That's all crap, of course, but a defense of rational debate requires some effort at consistency of purpose. The rule that the criterion of acceptibility is not accuracy, but sensitivity merely leads at the end of the day to the hegemony of majority sensibilities, to the most dangerous identity politics of all, those of America's white Christian majority. [italicized bold, my emphasis, -R]

Yglesias is pointing to the big picture here. Garance Franke-Ruta's opinion that Democratic leaning bloggers should get as much mileage out of the Bennett flap as possible, Latin be damned, certainly makes sense in the short term. And in general I don't mind that much when people at Daily Kos admit that they are going to back the Miers nomination on instrumental grounds, Supreme Court nominations are, in this day and age, pure politics. On the other hand, as Brad DeLong's original defense of Bennett implies there are intellectual grounds to not attack him. Granted, for the Left that means ceding some short-term political points. The fact is that the broad majority of Americans probably found Bennett's offhand association somewhat offensive (signalled by the statements put out by the Bush admininstration), and some criticism on those grounds is probably warranted.¹ But some of the hyperboles that Bennett was condoning the genocide of black Americans goes too far, in particular light of the fact that 1 out of 4 detected pregnancies ends in an abortion in the United States in any case, a disproportionate number of them black (it shouldn't surprise us that some black pro-lifers accuse abortion rights folk of aiming for the genocide of their race, something Maggie Sanger would probably not have been totally averse to via negative eugenics).

For a small minority of Americans facts and intellectual consistency matters. The vast majority of Americans are either too stupid or ideologically blinkered to really care, but in a nation that is sliced down the middle, this small minority, often biased toward classical liberalism, might matter a great deal in the overall war.

Addendum: People have different ends for the ideal political order. Myself, an open intellectually vibrant culture is a necessacity for my utopia, so it follows that an instrumentally guided policy with subborns that culture is by definition something I will look askance at, because to uphold the ends of A by the means of !A causes logical difficulties.

1 - I myself don't find it that offensive, the fact is that black Americans and crime have a strong association no matter what people say in public. That being said, even John McWhorter, who isn't know for being particularly sensitive, had a hard time defending Bennett's off the cuff statement. The reductio ad absurdum explanation offered by DeLong, which I think is the most likely primary component (though the association of black people with crime is surely a background assumption), is too complicated and subtle for most Americans to understand. So if you say something that requires several nested layers of concepts, and what you are saying is easily misconstrued by compressing said concepts into one unsubtle layer, don't say it, because the general audience isn't going to be able to decompose the sound bite and place it back in its context.

Libertarian girl revisited....

2005-10-03T17:09:00.000-07:00

Michael of Half Sigma adds more detail to the nature of his various blog hoaxes, including Libertarian Girl. This is what I found most interesting:

Meanwhile, I started my next hoax project, Abigail’s Magic Garden. The beautiful thing here was that Abigail was a liberal/left-wing blogger! I figured that no one would connect the two blogs because Libertarian Girl was right-wing.
How did I manage to create the illusion of being left-wing? At first I thought I would have to write a lot of stupid stuff that I didn’t agree with, but I made a truly amazing discovery. I could actually write about stuff that I agreed with and still create the illusion that I was a left winger!
Here are the secrets to convincingly being left-wing: (1) fill up your blogroll with left-wing blogs; (2) always mention how you hate George Bush and how he's doing a lousy job; (3) always bring up Iraq when something goes wrong there.

This doesn't surprise me too much, as a libertarian Michael did have intersections with liberals, and so as long as he addressed commonalities people would just fill in the dots for everything else. It reminds me of an article in The American Conservative which points the extent to which coalitional/tribal considerations obviate the need for genuine agreemant in reference to Christopher Hitchens' recent alliance with the neoconservatives and shift toward the Right, he still remains virulently anti-religion and a Trotskyphile, and yet right-wingers like theoconservative Ramesh Ponnuru tend to give him slack!

Own worst enemies

2005-09-27T22:56:00.000-07:00

Living in the Portland Metro Area (sorry, that is as about as specific as I am willing to get on my location) I have been priveleged to sample a wide swath of views on both the pro-war and anti-war movement, and am going to comment in length about it. But first, as a jumping-off point, I would like to use Christopher Hitchens new article detailing the recent anti-war protests in DC:

To be against war and militarism, in the tradition of Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht, is one thing(my emphasis added). But to have a record of consistent support for war and militarism, from the Red Army in Eastern Europe to the Serbian ethnic cleansers and the Taliban, is quite another. It is really a disgrace that the liberal press refers to such enemies of liberalism as “antiwar” when in reality they are straight-out pro-war, but on the other side. Was there a single placard saying, “No to Jihad”? Of course not. Or a single placard saying, “Yes to Kurdish self-determination” or “We support Afghan women’s struggle”? Don’t make me laugh. And this in a week when Afghans went back to the polls, and when Iraqis were preparing to do so, under a hail of fire from those who blow up mosques and U.N. buildings, behead aid workers and journalists, proclaim fatwahs against the wrong kind of Muslim, and utter hysterical diatribes against Jews and Hindus.

Some of the leading figures in this “movement,” such as George Galloway and Michael Moore, are obnoxious enough to come right out and say that they support the Baathist-jihadist alliance. Others prefer to declare their sympathy in more surreptitious fashion. The easy way to tell what’s going on is this: Just listen until they start to criticize such gangsters even a little, and then wait a few seconds before the speaker says that, bad as these people are, they were invented or created by the United States. That bad, huh? (You might think that such an accusation - these thugs were cloned by the American empire for God’s sake - would lead to instant condemnation. But if you thought that, gentle reader, you would be wrong.)

I see both attitudes on display in my day-to-day interaction with the people of my city, and I've noticed a broad spectrum of people on both the pro and anti Iraq war sides. However, this is a phenomenom that the far-left seems either unable or unwilling to understand: that they have alliesin the center-left and center-right who, while they don't agree on all leftist issues, they agree on the wrongness of the war. Two anecdotes from my life illustrate this.

The first one happened at around the time of the lead up to the war, I worked for a centerist Catholic man who looked and dressed like your stereotypical young Republican. He wore khakis and nice polo shirts to work, drove a SUV, and was fairly socially conservative (though he did not have strong feelings on this issue). His attitude towards the war? He was against it and felt that diplomacy should reign. This did not matter to the far-leftist Graduate student in our lab though. Don't get me wrong, the Graduate student was a nice guy, but he exposed some truly wacky left-wing beliefs.

So, a conversation on international issues would begin with agreement on the wrongness of attacking Iraq, and of using assasination on terrorists, but would quickly devolve in the PhD candidate flinging out hatred on Israel, supporting the Taliban government, and thowing out truly bizarre comments about Freemasons (his big issue he always came back to). My boss would try to steer the conversation back to the main issue (Iraq) but his student kept wandering off topic. The discussion would end with my boss walking away frustrated over the fact that the Graduate student would either try to convert him to his general way of political thought, or he would chide my boss for not being a "true believer".

Fast forward a year (early '03), I was getting coffee at a local coffee place and was standing in line behind a well-dressed woman with a "don't attack Iraq" pin on her lapel. A young man approached her and praised her for it, she thanked him and started talking about why she was against the war. The young man fell into a screed about global capitalism, Bush, Israel and the usual leftist bromides. The woman lowered her head and meakly said "I'm a conservative Christian who voted for Bush. I support the removal of Saddam, I am just against war since many innocent people will die" The young man smirked, shook his head, and walked off a little peeved.

I also like to point out that many in the anti-war crowd understand this. In the lead up to the war many of the Portland area anti-war demonstrations were organized through local churches and community centers and the lead organizer actually went on public access and asked the more radical elements not to come to his protests. And finally, Markos of Daily Kos has actually laid out a "what not to do list" for protesters on his site, a list that basically boils down to "keep it simple and stay on message"

But the DC protests, among others, show that the far-left are tone deaf on this broad spectrum of the anti-war movement. Either they are ignorant, or are unwilling to associate with people they consider heretics to the leftist cause, and so become their own worst enemies.

Look, the war is unpopular now and the people who are against the war come from many walks of life and have highly varying viewpoints. It would be in their best interest to not alienate these potential allies. But sadly, they will not do this, as the scorpion said to the frog he killed while riding on his back to cross the stream "It is in my nature."

Yes, Virginia, Big Government is stupid

2005-09-19T19:43:00.000-07:00

A story circulating (I’ll place a caveat on whether it is true or not, there have been many false rumors that have come out of this whole Katrina mess) about 400,000 MRE shipped in from England to feed the NO victims are set to be destroyed by the FDA. The reason? Here:

It is perfectly good Nato approved food of the type British servicemen have. Yet the FDA are saying that because there is a meat content and it has come from Britain it must be destroyed.

But that is not the only indignity:

Food from Spain and Italy is also being held because it fails to meet US standards and has been judged unfit for human consumption.

And Israeli relief agencies are furious that thousands of gallons of pear juice are to be destroyed because it has been judged unfit.

Yes, big government is stupid.

Gloria Steinem - Living in a Parallel Universe

2005-09-18T03:42:00.000-07:00

In a newspaper editorial for the Guardian on September 13, 2005 Gloria Steinem writes:

It's hard to travel or send words out of the US now. How can any American expect to be welcomed in the rest of the world when we have imposed the narcissistic and disastrous George Bush on it?

What is she talking about? On Tuesday, either the US became a police state overnight and clamped down on the communication and travel infrastructure or the infrastructure was damaged in some fashion that prevented the proper functioning of communication and transportation, perhaps by Katrina and Ophelia.

Now to the best of my knowledge neither of these conditions is true, so the probability that Gloria is living in a world of her own construction or some parellel universe reaches near certainty.

Ethnic segregation in the UK

2005-09-18T02:51:00.000-07:00

Today's Sunday Times has a major article here about the alleged trend towards self-segregation of ethnic groups in the UK, though as the article points out, it is a bit more complicated than that. The article features the views of Trevor Phillips, the Chairman of the Commission for Racial Equality, who is expected to make a speech later this week urging reversal of the trend. Sorry, Trev, but it's easier said than done.

Lessons Learned?

2005-09-16T17:48:00.000-07:00

So, our Dear Leader made an important announcement last night:

"Republicans said Karl Rove, the White House deputy chief of staff and Mr. Bush's chief political adviser, was in charge of the reconstruction effort."

Many of us have doubts about whether our President can process prior information which led to disasterous outcomes, such as putting a horse show judge in charge of a critical Federal agency.

The lesson that we all would take from such a blatant display of cronyism is that qualified people need to be in charge of critical functions. Has the President learned the same lesson?

Let's see - what is Karl Rove's background that makes him qualified to lead a rebuilding effort? All I see is a political operative extraodinaire. Granted he's better qualified in cronyism that Michael Brown, but I see nothing to indicate expertise in administration, engineering, disaster reconstruction, or anything at all that pertains to rebuilding a city.

So, has the President not learned the lesson about putting unqualified people in critical positions? Perhaps, or it just might be that Rove really is qualified for the task before him and it's the public that hasn't yet learned that the mission isn't rebuilding New Orleans, rather it's strengthening the cronyism network tied to the Republican Party. Really, how plausible is it that a man can repeatedly fail to learn lessons that we all see as elementary. No, the game is deeper - too many of us are simply too innocent, or willfully blind, to even see the lessons that are learned and acted upon.

Dependency Ratios: Don't Panic!

2005-09-11T06:19:00.000-07:00

Population forecasts have a poor track record. For much of the 20th century demographers were predicting doom: either population would explode, or it would collapse; either there would be too many young people, or not enough; too much work to do, or not enough to go round.

None of these scenarios materialised. The population forecasts usually proved wrong; and even when they were right, market economies were flexible enough to adjust to demographic circumstances.

Currently the great scare is about the ageing population. The poor struggling taxpayers will be crushed under the burden of old people, as life expectancy increases, and not enough children are being born to maintain the workforce. In more technical language, the concern is that dependency ratios will rise to unacceptable levels.

I commented on all this a year or two ago, and on re-reading my old post I find little to alter. But some recent discussion on another website has prompted me to do a bit more delving into the statistics. [See note 1 for some useful online sources.]

First, the meaning of dependency ratios. As usually defined, the dependency ratio (DR) is the ratio between the non-working-age population and the working-age population itself (conventionally taken as aged 15-64 inclusive), usually expressed as a percentage. For example, if 10% of the total population is aged 0-14, and 20% is aged 65 and above, then the working age population is 70%, and the DR is [(10+20)/70] x 100 = approx. 43%. In principle, the DR can exceed 100%, though this is rare.

Here are some DR figures from various sources. The figures after 2005 are projections, and therefore not to be entirely trusted, though figures for 2025 are unlikely to be badly wrong:

...............2005 2025 2050
USA......... 51.... 62
UK............52.....59......70
Japan...... 47..... 67..... 87
Germany.. 49...60.....77
France..... 54....64..... 76
World ave. 58...53
SSAfrica.....89...72
LatAmer....59...49

A few points stand out from this table:

a. The major developed countries at present have similar DR’s, slightly above or
below 50%.

b. Contrary to common assumptions, DR’s in Japan and Germany are currently lower than in other developed countries.

c. DR’s in less developed countries are relatively high, especially in Sub-Saharan Africa.

d. DR’s in developed countries are expected to rise over the next 50 years, while DR’s in less developed countries are expected to fall.

The DR reflects previous population history as well as current birth and death rates. A ‘bulge’ of births like the post-war Baby Boom has very long-term effects. Initially the DR is high because there are a lot of dependent children. When the birth rate falls, the DR also falls. But if the low birth rate continues, and life expectancy is high, the DR will eventually rise again as the ‘bulge’ cohorts reach retirement, before falling again as they die off. There are also ‘echo’ effects when the bulge generation itself has children, and so on. In developed countries the post-war Baby Boom generation is now reaching retirement age, so DR’s are rising. The increase in the DR is expected to be especially sharp in Japan, as a high birth rate in the 1960s was followed by a sharp downturn in the 70s. As I pointed out in my previous post, Japan (and to a lesser extent Germany) are facing a triple whammy: low birth rates, high life expectancy, and a large ‘bulge’ working its way through.

But how serious is all this? What level of DR is ‘acceptable’?

Consider a very simplified population model. Suppose each woman has 2 children; infant mortality is zero; and everyone lives to the same fixed age and then dies. Suppose also that the same pattern has always existed and there is no immigration or emigration. The population will therefore be distributed evenly over all age groups up to the fixed age of death, and the DR will be determined by this age. For example, if the fixed death age is 65, the DR will be 15/50 = 30%, if it is 70 the DR will be (15+5)/50 = 40%, if it is 80 the DR will be (15+15)/50 = 60%, and if it is 90 the DR will be (15+25)/50 = 80%.

Although this is a very simplified model, it gives an approximation to what we might expect in developed countries. We expect a reasonably stable population, we want low infant mortality, and we want to live to a ripe old age. In the developed world infant mortality is already very low, and life expectancy at birth is between 70 and 80. Most deaths occur in old age. From the simple model we might therefore expect current DR’s to be between 40% and 60%. If average life expectancy rises to 90, which is probably around its natural limit, the DR would be approaching 80%. [Note 2]

DR’s in less developed countries are generally higher. In traditional agricultural societies infant mortality is high, but women have many children. There are relatively few old people, but at any one time there are likely to be about as many children as adults alive, so DR’s are about 100%. This pattern is still often seen in sub-Saharan Africa.

An intermediate pattern can be seen in early-modern England. Between 1540 and 1850 the DR never fell below 60%, and in the early 19th century rose to about 80%. [Note 2] By 1901 it had fallen to 60%. It declined to a low point of 43% in the 1930s, but rose again to 59% in the 1950s, with the Baby Boom, and has been falling since then, to its present level of 52%. [Note 3]. I don’t have long-term figures for other countries, but in all the major developed countries the DR has fallen since the 1960s. Dependency Ratios in developed countries are now at historically low levels.

The prevailing DR of around 50% is the result of unique historical circumstances, and we should not necessarily expect it to be sustained. In particular, attempting to maintain it by encouraging high immigration would be short-sighted. As immigrants are usually young adults, the immediate effect would be to reduce the DR, but it would soon increase again as the immigrants had children (especially as they tend to have high birth rates). Eventually the immigrants would themselves grow old, and DR’s would be back roughly where they started, but at a higher level of population. In densely populated countries like Japan, the UK, and the Netherlands this would cause serious problems. Even at present rates of immigration and population growth in the UK, the countryside is rapidly disappearing under concrete.

Of course, the DR is based simply on the numbers of people in given age groups, and does not tell us how many people are actually working. The following table, based on ILO figures, shows selected economic activity rates. The EAR shows the proportion of people who are ‘economically active’, which means working or seeking work in the labour market. It therefore excludes those who are in full time education, retired, disabled, housewives not in the labour market, etc. The ILO figures show the proportion of economically active people among all people aged 15 and above, including the elderly. (EARs relative to the entire population, including under-15s, would be lower.)

...................1950 1970 2000
USA............ 43..... 43.... 51
UK.............. 46..... 46.... 50
Japan......... 44...... 51....54
Germany... 48...... 46....50
France........ 46..... 43... 45

It will be seen that these EARs are all within a fairly narrow range. Except in France they have slightly increased between 1950 and 2000. Since the proportion of children (not counted in these figures) has also fallen, the number of ‘dependants’ supported by each ‘worker’ has in fact fallen substantially. Yet over this period the average length of full time education has increased, average retirement ages have fallen, and life expectancy has increased, all of which might be expected to reduce the EAR. So what is going on? Part of the answer may be that the post-war baby boom is distorting the EAR as well as the DR. But the other obvious factor is that the proportion of women who are economically active has increased, for example from 24% to 48% in the case of the US. A lower birth rate means that more women can work.

I have not seen any projections for EARs beyond 2010. What is clear is that there is still scope for EARs to increase. Elderly (but healthy) people are capable of doing some paid work. Even a reversal of the trend towards early (pre-65) retirement would make a significant difference to EARs. For example, in Germany at present less than 30% of men and 10% of women between 60 and 65 are still working. I believe it will be possible without major disruption to maintain EARs at around 50% throughout the period to 2050, [note 5] after which the problem of the elderly ‘bulge’ will begin to ease. So there is no need for panic.

Of course, part of the concern about the ‘ageing population’ is not just about the number of old people, but the cost of supporting them. It seems to be assumed that old people, on average, are a great burden on the taxpayer, and far more expensive than children.

The question of economic transfers between generations raises conceptual, ethical, and statistical problems. I may devote another post to these, but here I will say only that the cost of supporting old people is often overstated. It is not legitimate to assume that the cost of public pensions falls on current taxpayers. This is only justified to the extent that pensions have not been adequately funded by the contributions of the pensioners during their working life, whether explicitly though pension schemes or through equivalent general taxation. So far as the costs of health and social services to old people are concerned, I have been looking at the figures for the UK, and I find that the average cost per head of old people is considerably less than the cost of public expenditure on children and young people. Fifteen years or so of education does not come cheap. But this is a big subject and I may return to it.

Note 1: For European figures see here source

For Japan see here: source.
For the USA and global comparisons see here:
source
For ILO data on EARs see here: source

Note 2: As mortality in old age is bound to be skewed, the median age at death will be somewhat below the mean, so the DR will not quite reach the level implied by mean life expectancy.

Note 3: Based on E. Wrigley and R, Schofield: The Population History of England, 1541-1871, p.443-5. Wrigley and Schofield use a threshold of 60 rather than 65 for old age, so I have deducted 5% from their estimated DR’s for comparability with other figures.

Note 4: Based on D. Coleman and J. Salt, The British Population, p.545.

Note 5: for example, in Japan the projected 2050 DR of 87% corresponds to a population of about 57m aged 15-64, 36m aged 65+, and 14m aged 0-14. With these proportions it would require about 80% of the working age population to be economically active to produce an EAR of 50% (on the ILO basis). This could be achieved for example by an activity rate among the working-age population of 90% for males and 70% for females, which does not seem unfeasibly high. It would allow both men and women to spend on average 5 years in post-15 education, and women to spend a further 10 years in childcare.

Housing the Refugees

2005-09-08T13:41:00.000-07:00

The sense of immediate emergency following the Katrina catastrophe has now subsided a bit and an issue rising to the top of the priority list is where should the refugees go so that they can get on with their lives. I've read two recent posts on this issue. From the Right, comes Rod Dreher's suggestion:

I got to thinking, though, that some smart people ought to look into a government program to resettle willing New Orleanians in the small Plains towns that have been emptying out for more than a generation. It might not be feasible -- after all, what would these folks do for a living? -- but on the other hand, it just might work. Anywhere you have a critical mass of folks, you are going to have a local economy. Hundreds of thousands of people have nowhere to go and nothing to lose. The government is going to have to do something for them anyway -- why not offer to stake willing pioneers with money to buy or renovate a house, and start a small business in one of these dying rural towns?

And from the Left, (well really from Marginal Revolution) comes Kevin Drum's post:

The United States government already operates a program that would enable low-income families to pay the rent for these units. The Section 8 Housing Choice Voucher Program currently serves about two million families throughout the country. It enables participants to occupy privately owned units renting for up to, and somewhat above, the local median rent.

News for Rod, those dying rural towns are dying for a reason - the lack of opportunity. Shipping thousands of urban poor to rural towns and expecting them to buy local businesses and revitalize the town with their urban sophistication and Joie de vivre is a plan completely divorced from reality.

As for the MR/Drum suggestion, there is already a reluctance amongst landlords to accept Section 8 tenants because of the problems they typically cause. Now what's happened in many people's perceptions of the tragedy is an association of all refugees with the horror stories that focused on the Superdome refugees and the transformation of New Orleans into a war zone. However, 80% of the city evacuated without incident and those people have also lost their homes. These refugees are already being associated with the criminal perception as this account makes clear:

I personally overheard employees there stating that they wish they could choose who from New Orleans would be allowed to stay in Baton Rouge. They went on at length about all the "criminals" from New Orleans and that they were happy when they heard some of those in the Astrodome stating they would be staying in Houston.

Let's face it - this is going to be a tangible issue for local communities. A horrible disaster doesn't wipe away the horrible criminals who were a part of the New Orleans community - the nature of these criminals isn't transformed by moving to a new location. Of course there is Razib's point:

my point is that there are higher order effects when you concentrate individuals of type x in a small spatial region. For example, if you have have 9 crack addicts, and 90 non-crack addicts, a situation where you distribute the crack addicts among evenly among 3 groups of 30 (so 30 non-addicts and 3 addicts per group) is I think preferable to throwing the 9 into one group of 30 and leaving the other 2 groups crack-addictless. The synergistic effects of greater numbers of socio and psychopaths is a definite cost.

about dispersal which certainly mitigates against a negative cultural norms developing within a concentrated population of criminals but really, there is little to gain for communities that accept refugees, other than feeding their sense of compassion to those in need, and as more stories like this start to hit the public consciousness:

A Hurricane Katrina evacuee staying with a Plano family was arrested Tuesday and accused of sexually assaulting a 13-year-old girl, police said. . . .

"As heart-wrenching as these evacuees are, and as wonderful as it is to see the outpouring of support, when we invite anybody in our home, we have no idea what their background is," Ms. Donovan said. "As parents, if we open up our home, we need to put up conditions and boundaries. We need to not leave our children alone."

the issue of refugee settlement may likely become a NIMBY issue. Sure, the compassion for these refugees will still exist, but that will be counterbalanced by the baggage many of the refugees bring with them, some have criminal tendancies, others are drug addicts or drug addled, while still others have some form of social dysfunction. What's been fixed in the public mind is the graphic dysfunction we witnessed in New Orleans post-Katrina and the 80% who evacuated are now unable to disassociate themselves with that perception.

I think that both of these plans have as much likelihood of success as having "Compassionate Conservatives" (ie Tom DeLay winning his district by only 38,000 votes) inviting the refugees to settle in their swing congressional districts or of liberals inviting the refugees into their communities, (ie Georgetown residents voting against building a subway stop in their enclave thereby making it more difficult for all of D.C.'s residents to have easy access to the neighborhoods.) I can just imagine liberal pundits going to work at their newspapers and having to be surrounded by new communities of refugees.

The plan with the largest chance of success is for the Feds to buy out the New Orleans property owners for fair marktet value fairly quickly. Those who were smart enough to be insured will be financially restored to pre-Katerina asset levels, and those without insurance will still be compensated to a degree and have to live with the consequences of their insurance decisions. There is no "do over" on this insurance question. On top of the asset payouts I'm sure there will be disaster payouts for all, renters, students, etc, to cover immediate living expenses, like the $2,000 debit cards announced a few days ago. Now, while the balance sheet of the refugees is restored their income statements are in tatters. The absorptive capacity of only a few local cities is not sufficient to provide employment, education, daycare, health care etc for the majority of refugees. Dispersal is the key to getting people on their feet again as quickly as possible. Give the refugees the financial means to restart their lives and let them come to accept that there is no going back. Rather than labeling the refugees and slotting them into special programs give them the means to blend in with their neighbors and to move to which ever cities they prefer.

Finally, the Federal Government should keep title to all of the property it buys in New Orleans and refrain from putting it back on the market after the debris is bulldozed away. Consolidate the property into a park, or better yet, a protected marine environment.

Related: The Economist and Reuters.

If you rebuild it, they will come???

2005-09-07T02:47:00.000-07:00

I knew this shit about New Orelans' population not recovering was going to be popping out of the pipline. The fact is, a half a million people should not be living at the mouth of a delta regularly on the path of hurricanes! The French Quarter can stay, it's above sea level, but the rest shouldn't be propped up for the sake of bureaucrats who have an interest in the perpetuation of particular urban conurbations. Cities aren't alive, people are. The fact is that scattering New Orleans' population is probably good for the people who used to live in that city. First, the culture of the town was nasty, the corruption and murder rates tell the tale. Second, hurricanes aren't going to go away, no matter how sturdily you rebuild. People need to move past this mystical Living Cities mentality, cities come alive from the bottom up, not by executive fiat (as the hundreds of urban renewal projects often find out). The same reality applies to the hollowing out of the heartland, we aren't a nation of family farms anymore. Deal with it.

Addendum: Let me make something clear, I think gene-environment correlation and gene-environment interaction are crucial. I think that New Orleans has problems with social capital (due to a variety of factors) on an individual level, but I also believe that the concentration of these individuals in one place creates an environment that exacerbates the baseline traits. Scattering the poorer residents of the city across the country will at least mitigate some of this. It might result in social headaches in other parts of the country, but since the environmental milieu will not be as favorable to the expression of social pathologies the cost vs. benefit is a no brainer. And from what I can see the impact on most places throughout the country excluding Houston and Baton Rouge will be mild enough that we can neglect it.

Addendum II: People who complain about racial segregation (residential) should also oppose the re-population of New Orelans. The city was 70% black. At least temporarily the scattering will result in more integration in this country.

Related: Jack Shafer agrees. A guy on "Talk of the Nation" on NPR is prattling about the loss of "richness and diversity" if people don't come back. We're going to hear a lot of that in the next few weeks...I don't know if common sense will overwhelm this pap.

Update: OK, the guy who loves richness and diversity edited a book titled Hurricane Andrew: Ethnicity, Gender and the Sociology of Disasters. One caller stated that rebuilding NOLA is "moronic." Hallelujah brother!

Update II: My reference to gene-environment correlation or interaction shouldn't be meant to imply that I think gene-non-gene dynamics are all that is at work, my point is that there are higher order effects when you concentrate individuals of type x in a small spatial region. For example, if you have have 9 crack addicts, and 90 non-crack addicts, a situation where you distribute the crack addicts among evenly among 3 groups of 30 (so 30 non-addicts and 3 addicts per group) is I think preferable to throwing the 9 into one group of 30 and leaving the other 2 groups crack-addictless. The synergistic effects of greater numbers of socio and psychopaths is a definite cost.

Update III: David agrees. Keep spreading the meme!

Update IV: Steve weighs in. Randall from last week.

Catholics are Christian too you know

2005-09-04T20:50:00.000-07:00

The Houston Chronicle has an Astrodome evacuee weblog. Check this out:

Houston-area clergy representing Catholic, Muslim, Jewish and Christian faiths gave mini-sermons today for evacuees in the Houston Astrodome and surrounding shelters, which housed 25,000 people....

Aren't Catholics Christian? Obviously she meant Protestant, but this is an issue I've noted among evangelicals and southerners. It's like contrasting Hindu mythology vs. Christian beliefs. I am stickler for this sort of point because if we lose control of what "Christian" is we'll never be able to really address religious pluralism in this nation in an informed manner because people will just talk past each other. On a basic level this is just sloppiness, people who make this mistake know that Catholics are Christian, but they come from backgrounds where Protestants are the real Christians (I said background because I've talked to atheists of evangelical origin who slip up and make this error).

Since When? - Dogs Before People!

2005-09-04T15:20:00.000-07:00

I can sympathize with animal rights advocates who campaign for the well-being of animals, but when I see a chartered bus transporting dogs out of New Orleans while there are still hungry, ill and suffering people in the Superdome I think that concern for the welfare of animals is misplaced.

On Septermber 1, this bus is transporting dogs out of New Orleans.

Meanwhile, on September 3, we learn:

The last 300 refugees at the Superdome were evacuated Saturday evening, eliciting cheers from members of the Texas National Guard who had been standing watch over the facility for nearly a week as some 20,000 hurricane survivors waited for rescue.

For people to have to endure longer periods of suffering in the hellish environment of the Superdome in order to bring dogs to a more comfortable environment is unconscionable.

Thanks to Randall Parker for the tip.

A matter of interpretation

2005-08-30T18:49:00.000-07:00

CNN says "Scalia blasts 'judge moralists'"

"Now the Senate is looking for moderate judges, mainstream judges. What in the world is a moderate interpretation of a constitutional text? Halfway between what it says and what we'd like it to say?" he said, to laughter and applause.

Now I'm not in any particular way formally educated about matters of law, but it seems pretty obvious to me that the U.S. Constitution was written in a (purposefully?) under-determined language. I dare say that there is legitimate disagreement about the proper interpretation of many aspects of the Constitution. How can there not be room for interpretation over lines like this? -- "The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people."

An aside: I'm partial to the Presumption of liberty

WNs to protest against Bush in Crawford, TX

2005-08-28T23:38:00.000-07:00

Following up on my last post, on the emerging ultra-left/ultra-right alliance, I find this piece about Stormfronters planning to protest the war in Crawford, TX:

I'm driving out to Crawford, Texas tomorrow, Friday August 26th to help put up a White Nationalist voice in the protest against Bush's War for Israel that was started by Cindy Sheehan....We don't want leftist Johnny-come-latelys who are misleadingly protesting this war as if the war is about oil (not true), or as if it's right-wing patriots who launched this war (not true) to hijack the issue from us.

We want to challenge these leftists with the fact that their leftist leaders, like Hillary Clinton, are on the same War for Israel team as the cowardly Republicans who have been bought and paid for in the Senate, House, White House, and Media by the Jewish Neocon political machine.

I know that for any political cause, people look for allies in order to make your cause seem like a popular movement, but I think the anti-war left is making a monumental error in reaching out to the radical right. To put it simply: while the WNs will join them in opposing the war the WNs hate the left and will likely harm them. It is simply in the nature of these zealots to be violent.

But, I am afraid that the ultra-left will not realize this until it is too late.

Strange Bedfellows

2005-08-28T22:33:00.000-07:00

Following political movements one often finds bizarre events that are, individually, part of a greater whole. One of these movements is the forming coalition between the ultra-left and the ultra-right, and can be found by examining this article from the ultra-left wing Portland Indymedia. Got that? Right-wing Racist, David Duke, is writing for a left-wing publication. Now, on the surface, this seems bizarre, but if one remembers Duke's opposition to the war, the fact that he is anti-corporate and anti-capitalist, one can find enough commonalities to make a left-right union believable.

And remember, Pat Buchanan and Ralph Nader ran on the same party's ticket.

Who's Afraid Of Nuclear Waste?

2005-08-28T05:15:00.000-07:00

As global demand for energy increases, serious decisions need to be taken about future energy policy.

The obvious solution to many of the problems is greater use of nuclear energy. The raw materials (uranium and thorium) are abundant; and pollution to the atmosphere is minimal compared with fossil fuels. Global warming could be controlled or reversed. As a bonus, it would reduce dependence on the unstable territories of the Middle East. (Incidentally, as a puzzle for Christian fundamentalists, why did God give all the oil to the Muslims? Does he have a perverse sense of humour?)

Yet environmentalists, with honourable exceptions like James Lovelock, persist in objecting to nuclear energy. The main objection is to the hazards of nuclear waste.

I argue that the dangers of nuclear waste have been greatly exaggerated. Unnecessary fears are delaying urgent decisions, and artificially inflating the costs of the nuclear option, because excessive costs of waste disposal and decommissioning are built into the cost estimates.

Of course, there are risks, but they are relatively easily controlled. (I found a useful source of information on the health risks of radiation here.) I would make the following points:

1. In deciding on energy policy, the risks of all the options should be considered. Fossil fuels create pollution and greenhouse gases. Wind power involves building and maintaining tall structures, which is inherently risky. Or suppose it takes a million solar panels on rooftops to replace one nuclear plant. It is a safe bet that some people will be killed and injured in installing and maintaining them.

2. The dangers of radioactivity itself are not as great as popularly supposed. Monitoring in Hiroshima and Nagasaki has shown that long-term cancer rates are not much higher than normal. No increase at all has been found in birth defects. (Radiation is mutagenic, but many of the mutations are recessive.) The effects of the Chernobyl radiation leaks are also much less than popularly supposed. (To quote one lunatic comment I found on an anti-nuclear website, ‘Chernobyl is the clearest single message to humanity that Nuclear Technology is not an appropriate exercise of human intelligence. It is omnicidal [sic, meaning ‘killing everyone’]’. The reality is that out of some 5 million people seriously exposed to radiation, a few thousand cases of cancer (mainly thyroid) have been attributed to the leak, and most of these have been successfully treated. According to a BBC report. ‘Fortunately, thyroid cancer is a very treatable disease, so few of the 2,000 who have developed it as a result of Chernobyl have died’. It is difficult to get accurate figures, but if we disregard hysterical claims, the true death toll from this worst-ever peacetime nuclear incident is probably less than that of an average air crash. [Added 6 September: The New York Times has a report today here (requires free subscription) on a new study of the Chernobyl disaster. This gives an estimate of 4,000 for the ultimate death toll, mainly due to the expected long-term increase in various cancers. This remains to be seen, but in any case 4,000 deaths, though deplorable, would be far below the hysterical claims of the anti-nuclear nuts, and also below the death toll of a medium-sized natural disaster (earthquake, tsunami, flood, etc). And this is the worst nuclear accident that has ever happened or is ever likely to happen.]

3. Most nuclear waste is ‘low-level’, and practically harmless, unless you sit on top of it for weeks.

4. A small proportion of waste is highly radioactive, but most of the radiation decays quickly, and the waste is only dangerous for a few years or decades, not centuries.

5. There is the threat of terrorists using nuclear waste in ‘dirty’ bombs, and security precautions would be needed to prevent this, but no more than for many other purposes. Again, the experience of Hiroshima and Nagasaki is relevant. The idea that cities could be rendered permanently uninhabitable by a dirty bomb is absurd. Radioactive fallout in urban areas literally goes down the drain after a few days of rainfall. I would be much more worried about terrorists hijacking a fuel tanker and driving it into a crowd.

6. This leaves the problem of plutonium and a few other substances with serious long-lasting radioactivity. Plutonium is not only radioactive but highly toxic. This gives the scaremongers the opportunity to manufacture nightmare scenarios. A tiny particle of plutonium dust in the body can prove fatal. Therefore if a kilo of plutonium were ground into dust and scattered in the atmosphere, thousands of people could be killed. So the lesson is: don’t grind plutonium into dust and scatter it in the atmosphere! Of course, in pure form plutonium can also be used to make nuclear bombs, but nuclear waste contains plutonium only in low concentrations, and could not be used for bombs. One of the absurdities of the present situation is that weapons-grade plutonium has been taken out of bombs (as part of post-cold-war arms reductions) and is being held in storage because politicians cannot decide to build new nuclear plants!

7. But the trump card of the objectors is that plutonium will still be dangerous for millennia (it has a half-life of over 20,000 years). Extraordinary (and costly) measures are therefore needed to ensure that it cannot in any conceivable circumstances leak out, even in the very distant future. This seems to me wholly misconceived. It is absurd to worry about what may happen in future millennia, but there are two broad alternatives. Either civilisation will have collapsed, possibly due to nuclear war, in which case a bit more plutonium will be the least of our descendants’ worries. Or civilisation will have survived, in which case our descendants will be able to look after themselves. In particular, they will know better than we do how to extract plutonium from waste, and to cure cancer and other ailments. The responsible approach is not to bury plutonium inaccessibly deep in the ground, or in the ocean bed, but to keep it securely stored, in such a way that it can be dealt with by the appropriate authorities whenever they wish to, using future technologies we cannot yet imagine.

Well, that’s just my opinion. I don’t claim any expertise on the subject, but most of those who make kneejerk objections to nuclear energy don’t have special knowledge either. They just rely on the public’s ignorance and the prejudice against anything involving the word ‘nuclear’.

The threat of the radical-right [and why we ban them]

2005-08-23T23:40:00.000-07:00

"The existing order in America - today - is intolerable and must be destroyed." - "Geoff Beck" at Majority Rights

I normally despise the Southern Poverty Law Center; no leftist organization today devotes as much energy to slandering and comparing immigration restrictionists to the most vile elements in society, while ignoring extremists on the radical-left, as they do (there is one possible exception: Political Research Associates). However, their recent Intelligence Report on terrorist incidents by the radical-right in the US over the past 10 years is extremely important and should not be ignored. I urge everyone to read it or, at the very least, browse over it.

The report is wrong to understate the threat of animal-rights-extremists like Animal Liberation Front and Earth Liberation Front, simply because none of their attacks have yet resulted in any deaths. Simply because nobody was killed does not mean that it was not a terrorist incident. Many of the incidents mentioned in their report did not result in any deaths, yet they reported them anyways. This is at the height of hypocrisy and they downplayed the threat of them for a simple reason: as a leftist organization, they sympathize with many of the goals of these two groups. You see this sort of thing regularly on leftist blogs (such as this one where the ALF and ELF are simply called "activists," despite the fact that they bomb and burn various targets in order to discourage [read: terrorize] and stop activities they disagree with) and you see none of them mentioning that the ALF and ELF developed out of the Earth First! organization, which publishes materials designed to help followers develop devices to kill people and terrorize the populace. The exact same things happened with some rightists back in the 1990s when the Clinton Administration proceeded to crack down on radical militia groups and white nationalist organizations.

And, contrary to the SPLC report, the FBI and the myriad of law enforcement agencies in the US have not ignored the threat from the radical-right. The most recent Congressional testimony by FBI Director Robert Mueller devotes the same amount of space to the radical-right as they do to animal-rights radicals (three paragraphs; most of the report is focused on Islamist terrorist activity). If law enforcement has been ignoring the radical-right so much, then how come they have stopped so many of the incidents described in their report?

One thing that many have ignored is the moral support and sympathy that the radical-right [and radical-left] has provided to Islamist terrorists. Just to give you a small slice of this phenomenon, here's a quote from Walter Laqueur's article, "What to Read (and Not to Read) about Terrorism," in the Summer 2002 issue of Partisan Review (sorry, not online):

Leaders of the American neo-Nazi scene were full of admiration for the attackers of September 11. Billy Roper of the National Alliance said that he wished his followers had half as much testicular fortitude as the suicide pilots. Tom Metzger of White Aryan Resistance (WAR) declared that 9/11 was a victory for Walhalla, because the enemy of our enemy is our friend; and he also wished that his comrades were as brave as the Arabs. Rocky Suhayda, chairman of the American Nazi Party was quoted saying that a dozen-and-a-half very brave people were willing to die for what they believed and that it was a disgrace that among a hundred and fifty million white Aryans in America, so few were willing to do the same. Martin Lindstedt of the Missouri Militia declared that he wished the Arabs had stolen a hundred jumbo jets full of "Talmudic Khazar mamzers, criminal regimeist whiggers, niggers, gooks, beaners, etc." and crashed them into the Supreme Court, Congress, the FBI building, all fifty state capitols, and the TV stations--he would have called it a damn good start. Other spokesmen of this camp recalled Blitzkrieg and the exploits of Otto Skorzeny, who had been the commander of Hitler's praetorian guard.

There was a little problem. The attackers had not, after all, been pure Aryans. But William Pierce, author of The Turner Diaries, the bible of American neo-Nazis, overcame this difficulty. Not all people in Afghanistan were greasy, black haired, swarthy, and hooknosed. Some of these people were of Aryan origin, following the Aryan conquests and colonization of Central Asia thirty-five hundred years ago. The terrorists were obviously the descendants of the Aryans.

Holocaust deniers such as David Irving and Robert Faurisson in France pleaded that they had been right all along. Irving compared the killing of innocents in New York by "nineteen intelligent and virile young Muslims" to the killing of innocents in World War II by Allied bombings. Like Faurisson, he believed that it was all Israel's fault, with one imaginary Holocaust leading to a real one.

Thus, the great majority of American neo-Nazis took the position that the terrorists had been right. The U.S. government was the guilty party, and they welcomed the attacks. From the superpatriots of forty years ago, they have been moving to nihilism and pan-destructionism. The enemy was not just Washington, but the American people in its majority, because they were either too stupid or too lazy to share Nazi ideas. The primary loyalty of these people was no longer to their country (which was no longer theirs), certainly not to places like Washington and New York. All this would be of limited interest except for the fact that some neo-Nazis have been dabbling in terrorism. In their bookshops they sell things such as the Militiaman's Handbook and handbooks by pseudonymous authors such as "Macaba," and some of them have been trying to obtain biological agents and chemical poisons. This opens perturbing perspectives on homeland defense against future terrorist attacks, at a time when such attacks can be carried out by very small groups of people. The publications of these circles are neither in Arabic nor in Pushtu, and there is a distinct paper trail. The question is whether anyone is paying attention, even though it may amount to group profiling and a violation of human rights.

The European extreme Right and the neo-Nazis reacted similarly. Horst Mahler, once upon a time a pillar of Baader-Meinhof, today the most prominent spokesman of the German extreme Right, congratulated the terrorists and expressed solidarity. So did the Russian neo-fascists--they believed it served the Americans right for having brought about the downfall of the Soviet Union, for interfering in Chechnya, Serbia, and Central Asia. A few European neo-Nazis came out in favor of neutralism--let imperialist America and the crazy Arabs fight it out somewhere. But the consensus of the overwhelming majority of neo-Nazis from Sweden to Italy was solidarity with the terrorists.

Why has so little attention been paid to the reaction of the extreme Right and the neo-fascists? They have little access to the mass media, to be sure, and their numbers are not that great (nor are they as small as often believed). But in the age of easy access to weapons of mass destruction, large armies are not needed to launch deadly attacks. Could it be that there is an uncomfortable resemblance between anti-globalization, antiAmericanism, and anti-Zionism? The Italian Red Brigades also welcomed the attacks. In a long programmatic statement published a day after their murder of a Labour Ministry official they warmly welcomed September 11. If one were to delete certain words such as "armed struggle," "revolutionary strategy," and "permanent offensive," this could have been written by someone on the extreme Right or even one of the jihadists.

This is why these radical-right groups should not be ignored. It's only a matter of time before we start seeing the Islamist terrorists and the radical-right developing mutually beneficial relationships like they did in the past that may develop into outright collaboration in terrorist attacks. Already we see this happening with radical-right black nationalist groups like the New Black Panther Party and the Nation of Islam, Hispanic nationalists like the Nation of Aztlan, and white nationalist groupings like the Aryan Nations, Alhusseini Dynasty, and Divine Right Order.

Read the report. Know thy enemy.

So what next?

2005-08-23T21:53:00.000-07:00

Unlike many (most?) people I don't follow Iraq too closely. So what's up with this about Islam being the official religion have veto power over secular law? The veto power part sounds an awful lot like what the Iranians are trying to throw off (well, the Iranians that matter, the modern secular ones). I'm not particularly surprised...any predictions on what's going to go down in Iraq over the next few years? I mean, is it going to be a real state as opposed to three quasi-states?

Correcting some assumptions about the concept of "Eurabia"

2005-08-22T15:41:00.000-07:00

Due to academic commitments over the past few months I haven't had the chance to write up any replies to any of Randy's prior posts concerning the subject of "Eurabia" or to even begin reading Bat Ye'or's book, which Randy had not read at the time of his postings. Having finally begun reading the book, I feel that it is time to begin to to dispel some of his assertions. The first is this:

For instance, searching on Google for the keywords "Euro-Arab Dialogue" returns a bit over four thousand, up from under a thousand the last time I checked, back in 2002. There's even a two references to the Euro-Arab Dialogue in the top 10 hits returned by Google which aren't Ye'or's endlessly copied articles. This compares to 33.5 million hits for "European Union," 439 thousand for "Commonwealth of Independent States," a bit over three million for "ASEAN," 3.7 million for NAFTA, and almost 1.4 million hits for "Mercosur" or "Mercosul." I'd have expected that such an important group as the Euro-Arab Dialogue--the central body behind Eurabia, after all--would have a bit of a higher presence outside of Ye'or's literature than it does. Surely more people would have noticed by now?

Then again, reading the various non-Ye'or descriptions of what the Euro-Arab Dialogue is supposed to do and what it has actually done, I begin to suspect that accepting Ye'or's thesis about the Euro-Arab Dialogue is something like believing that the Canada-Taiwan Parliamentary Friendship Group is actually a mechanism intended to ensure Canadian military participation in Taiwan's upcoming war of independence against China.

Contrary to what Randy is saying, the Euro-Arab Dialogue is not a formal institution and really has never been used in a formal diplomatic context. Nor is it a fantasy invention of Ye'or, as is implied in his post. Indeed, if he had of read just a few pages of Ye'or's book and looked up her citations before writing his posts, he would have found that Ye'or actually got the term from the title of Saleh al-Mani's book, The Euro-Arab Dialogue: A Study in Associative Diplomacy, published in the early 1980s. Al-Mani used the term to describe the diplomatic proceedings between the EEC/EC/EU, various Arab states, and the Arab League (which was much more prominent at the time than it is now). Ye'or uses it in the same context, citing al-Mani regularly throughout her book. This dialogue between civilizations led to the development of groups such as the Parliamentary Association for Euro-Arab Cooperation.

Next, Randy states that Ye'or "created" the concept of "Eurabia":

Created by Bat Ye'or, "Eurabia" has come into a new vogue among conservatives (particularly Anglophone ones) who blame European reluctance to support United States foreign-policy initiatives (like, say, Iraq) on large and growing Muslim populations which will, in the end, destroy Western (read Judeo-Christian) civilization on the far shores of the Atlantic.

Again, this is simply false, as a simply Google search would have shown. Ye'or actually got the term from a defunct journal titled Eurabia, published by the Association for Franco-Arab Solidarity (another part of the EAD). It is not some Nazi-ish lingual invention.

Randy regularly refers to demographics, but never discusses the question of influence. If he had read the book, he would have known that Ye'or rarely discusses demographics and certainly does not lay out any numbers in her book pretending to show that Europe is going to be dominated by a religiously-Muslim majority within a certain number of years. I know this is the context in which Bernard Lewis has used the term "Eurabia," but it is not the context in which Ye'or uses it. Ye'or's focus is on economic and political influence that has grown since the oil embargos in the 1970s. Randy's post would be a great refutation of Lewis, but it's nothing but a straw man when applied to Ye'or.

This gets me to my final (at least until I finish reading the book) point, Randy equates Ye'or to the Nazis. First, there's the title of one of his posts:

Why "Eurabia" Is Like "Jew York City"

Then there's all this:

Racism is, then, a critical element--perhaps a dominant concept--relative to these concepts. If European Muslims or New York City Jews are inherently subversive, undermining legitimate decisionmaking processes in political and social life, how can anyone who belongs to either category be allowed to participate at all? Eurabia and Jew York City are, at their roots, concepts which demand the ghettoization of the groups from which they take their names, their exclusion from any non-subordinate role. These terms' use is a good marker for some sort of highly exclusionary racism.

Resorting to racist and profoundly exclusionary rhetoric that has little connection with what's actually occurring on the ground only obscures the issues being debated. Worse, racist and profoundly exclusionary rhetoric carries its own serious set of problems. Does anyone remember what happened on the last few occasions when entire national subpopulations were deemed inherently subversive?

He continues on and on following this theme throughout numerous posts... he's basically saying that studying the influence of an ethnic or religious actor is the same as advocating the cleansing and/or genocide of minority populations. This is the exact same rhetoric used to attack those who study psychometrics, population genetics, etc. It's the idea that the study of subjects deemed politically incorrect will inevitably lead to a new Holocaust. This blog regularly discusses how absurd this is, but Randy still had the gall to say all he did. It's ultimately a fallacious argument and a nasty, ad-hominem attack upon Ye'or.

When Randy wrote these posts, he was obviously not "desperately searching" for the truth.