A bizarre new recreation in Las Vegas is provoking widespread outrage. An outfit called "Hunting for Bambi" apparently charges participants up to $10,000 to attempt to shoot a naked woman with a paintball gun as she tries to elude him in the desert near the city. Naturally, women's groups are up in arms. One psychologist suggested that some of the "hunters" may have trouble distinguishing fantasy from reality, and go on to perpetrate further violence against women.

I strongly suspect, however, that what's at work here is not so much misogyny as arrested development. Let's face it--a significant fraction of males of a certain age (perhaps a majority), if confronted with a naked female in the wilderness, would think nothing more fun than attempting to shoot her with a paintball gun.

Then puberty hits, and that attitude changes completely--for most boys, at least.

Volokh Conspirator Tyler Cowen, whom I have criticized before, appears to be some kind of polar opposite to me: no sooner have I defended the music of Barry Manilow than Cowen is comparing it unfavorably with the "minimalist and conceptual art" at the Dia museum. Cowen gives an interesting list of conditions that, in his words, "seem to suffice to establish the merit of an artwork:"

1. More than just a few fans
2. Self-critical fans
3. Artistically well-educated, sophisticated fans
4. Fans who give an account of the art's importance and depth
5. Test of time

Now, I myself consider 1 and 5 to be the prime tests of artistic merit, and while the jury is out on most of Cowen's preferred art as well as mine by standard 5, Manilow easily has the better argument on count 1. Criteria 2 through 4, on the other hand, arouse enormous suspicion in me, because intellectual fashions have been known to cause sudden upsurges in enthusiasm--extremely thoughtful, well-articulated enthusiasm, mind you, from the most authoritative quarters--for bodies of work that subsequently sink into well-deserved obscurity and near-universal contempt.

My favorite example is Woody Allen, whose "serious" films were not so long ago--only a single pseudo-stepdaughter/wife ago, if I'm not mistaken--widely hailed as masterpieces of emotional and intellectual subtlety. Today, I doubt there's a self-important aesthete on the planet who even bothers to watch his stuff any more (apart, that is, from his early comedies, which really were masterpieces).

There are, of course, works of art that have been hailed as masterpieces by the cognoscenti for a century or more, despite evoking either indifference or outright revulsion from the vast majority of the public. (Think of late James Joyce, for instance, or early atonalist music.) I tend to think of those bodies of work as similar to the "cult classics" that manage to establish a small but often fanatically devoted and quite durable following. (H.P. Lovecraft comes to mind, or perhaps Ayn Rand.) They certainly deserve credit for something, but I'm not sure artistic genius is the right attribution.

In any event, the art Cowen describes hasn't even survived long enough to establish itself at that level. I therefore hope I will be forgiven for ignoring the scholars' breathless writeups and waiting at least another couple of intellectual cycles before concluding that minimalist and conceptual art is anything more than its worst critics (including myself) make of it.

Eugene Volokh is mightily incensed over "one of the most appalling judicial decisions [he's] ever seen." Apparently, the Supreme Court of the state of Nevada has ordered the state legislature to pass a budget that increases taxes, despite a provision in the state constitution that requires a two-thirds majority in both houses before a tax increase is passed. (The court cites a separate constitutional provision which requires education to be funded, although, as Volokh points out, that provision makes no mention of what level of funding is required.) Volokh furiously suggests that perhaps a recall of Nevada's Supreme Court justices is in order. Mickey Kaus agrees, and Glenn "Instapundit" Reynolds is appalled as well.

Now, it's certainly gratifying to see all these folks get so riled up over judicial overreaching. Heck, Volokh even refers to it as "judicial nullification of the people's will", noting that the constitutional clause ordered violated was the result of an amendment enacted by voter initiative in 1996. Still, I can't help wondering why this particular case of judicial arrogance has managed to strike such a chord with Volokh et al., when so many others have invited much more temperate criticism--or none at all.

Could it be the fact that in this case the courts were running roughshod over the state's constitution, and not the state's legislature, that has everyone so exercised? In other words, is it possible that the outrage flows more freely this time because it carries no implied defense of representative democracy?

Matthew Yglesias gives some first-hand descriptions of stereotypical behavior on the part of tourists of various nationalities. While there is some truth to at least some of these stereotypes, the behavior of tourists is also greatly affected by (1) the type of tourists visiting a particular locale, and (2) the purpose of their visit. Hardworking, middle-aged non-cosmopolitan types on vacation to relax at the beach with their families are bound to act differently--and thus to reflect differently on their nationality--from, say, graduate students travelling in order to learn about foreign cultures. The same holds for teenagers or young adults vacationing from school or work--not to mention soldiers on leave.

For example, Canadians have a reputation in Europe for quiet politeness (particularly in comparison with their American cousins). That's probably because while Americans seem to view Europe as something of a theme park, Canadians are more likely to see travel there as an enlightening experience. On the other hand, I'm given to understand that in the Dominican Republic (a popular beach destination for budget-conscious Canadians) we're known as loud, obnoxious drunks.

The German and British reputations in Southern Europe no doubt have similar roots. I also once saw a busload of middle-aged French tourists in Seville, Spain, and from a distance I easily identified them--as American. Even up close, I had to listen to them to remind myself they weren't from the Midwest. I don't happen to know the fashionable destinations for broadminded travellers from these countries, but I would bet that wherever they go, their nationality has a pretty good reputation.

An update to the posting below on biological terrorism as a possible more dangerous successor to computer hacking: Ed Felten recounts an interesting conversation he had with "a hotshot mo-bio professor" about just this comparison. "Each of us," he writes, "tried to reassure the other that really large-scale malicious attacks of the type we knew best (cyber- for me, bio- for him) were harder to carry out, and less likely, than commonly believed."

Certainly, it's reassuring that at least one top molecular biologist pooh-poohs the threat of molecular bioterrorism, considering it much more difficult than non-experts like me might expect. And I'm prepared to believe that right now, at least, the professor is right. (That would certainly explain the lack of successful large-scale attacks--despite the ominous example of the anthrax mailings of 2001.)

But then, bringing down the nation's information infrastructure with an Internet worm would have been extremely difficult, too--ten years ago, when very little of it was easily accessible via the Internet. Likewise, my fears center not on bioterrorists using today's techniques, but rather on the terrorists of twenty years from now, when genetic engineering technology may well have matured to the point where Henry C. Kelly's doomsday scenario involving "an inexperienced graduate student with a few thousand dollars worth of equipment" is plausible.

I know just how well-prepared computer scientists were a decade ago for the rise of Internet-related security threats--that is, not at all. And judging by the nonchalance of Felten's interlocutor, biotechnologists are in roughly the same state of denial. This time, though, it's our lives, not just our data, that are in danger.

Having declared the Iranian theocracy dead, bloggers have now moved on to premature eulogies for the BBC. "The battle to reform the BBC is now in full swing," writes Andrew Sullivan. "The BBC is in trouble," notes Glenn "Instapundit" Reynolds, pointing to a London Times article that describes the network as "dangerously exposed".

Well, I'm hardly an expert on the BBC's political fortunes. But I'm a bit more familiar with the history of Canada's CBC, which has persevered through far, far greater ignominy than its British cousin. Its news and public affairs programming (heck, even its comedies and dramas) have long made the BBC's look politically neutral by comparison. It hasn't produced any content worth watching in decades, and consequently Canadians never, ever watch it. They never have to, because in addition to private Canadian Broadcasters, the overwhelming majority of Canadians have ready access the huge smorgasbord of American broadcasting, which does just about everything the CBC does, and much better. In fact, if it weren't for its excellent hockey broadcasts, most Canadians would simply have no clue what on earth the CBC portion of their tax bill is buying them.

Yet the CBC survives, and nobody believes it will disappear anytime soon. It has its own soapbox with which to defend itself, after all, and its passionate supporters on the outside tend also to be heavily microphone-equipped. Moreover, voters are hardly inclined to get all worked up about political bias on a network that nobody they know ever pays the slightest attention to.

If the BBC's opponents are smart, they will immediately stop griping about its alleged political transgressions, and make a case that the public can appreciate. What the anti-BBC forces need is a spate of artfully leaked stories about shocking profligacy in the BBC's corporate offices--the kind of rank irresponsibility in the handling of the license-holder's funds that calls for major cutbacks in license fees and a thorough, top-to-bottom audit of the network's finances.

The BBC being an old, bloated bureaucracy, it should be easy to find enough dirt to justify a massive budget squeeze, which will in turn reduce the number of jobs and contracts it can hand out, the quality and quantity of its output, and its overall prestige relative to private sector media organs. The resulting erosion in the effectiveness of its propaganda would be far greater than any amount of frustrated ranting about bias can ever hope to achieve.

One wonders--hasn't anyone in Tony Blair's office ever watched "Yes, Minister"?

New Volokh Conspirator Randy Barnett ruminates on the philosophical implications of his having greatly enjoyed a concert by a Pink Floyd "cover band". Was it worse than the original recordings, because, though close, it wasn't quite an exact duplicate? Better, because it was a live concert, rather than a recording? Was it worse than a real Pink Floyd concert, because the musicians weren't the originals? Better, because the musicians were the right age to simulate the originals at the time of their greatest recordings?

The answer, of course, is, "it depends on what you're looking for in your aesthetic experience". Music, like all art, can be appreciated on multiple levels. Two of the most popular are the sensual/"pure aesthetic" and the social/symbolic. The first kind involves simply enjoying the pleasing sensory effects, while the second involves deriving satisfaction from the social context and symbolic content of the work. (The same goes for other pleasures, too--food and sex, for instance.)

For various reasons, popular art forms tend to be appreciated predominantly at the social/symbolic level. Pop music fans, for example, are attracted to an artist's style, image or "message" as much as to the actual sound of individual songs. Pop music concerts, certainly, are more about spectacle and crowd behavior than about the sound of the music (which is typically laughably inferior to what can be produced by a CD on a high-quality home sound system).

In the case of a "tribute" band like the one Barnett describes, the audience is obviously attending in order to experience a particular atmospheric effect--that of being at a concert by the original group. If it achieved that effect, then Barnett should be satisfied. If it was really the music itself that mattered to him, then he should have stayed home and listened to the CD.

Personally, I'm much more of a "pure" music aesthete; I've even been known to express appreciation for, say, the superb craftsmanship of a Barry Manilow song, ignoring the devastating social consequences of doing so. [*] But I'm in the minority, and I don't (well, don't necessarily) disparage those who look for something else in their music, such as "authenticity", or "an experience", or the faithful recreation of a long-passed cultural moment.

[*] I hasten to add that Manilow himself is a terrible singer, and didn't even write most of his hits. Still, some of them are true gems of pop schmaltz, if you're willing to consider them within their musical genre, rather than their social context.

It's been a long time since I've read anything as frightening as AFS president Henry C. Kelly's op-ed in the New York Times. "Within a few years," he writes, "it may be possible for an inexperienced graduate student with a few thousand dollars worth of equipment to download the gene structure of smallpox, insert sequences known to increase infectiousness or lethality, and produce enough material to threaten millions of people."

Now, I don't know much about molecular biology, and I don't know if the analogy is accurate, but this scenario sounds an awful lot like one I'm familiar with: computer hacking. In both cases, a system full of vulnerabilities is subject to scrutiny by thousands of imaginative (or simply persistent) attackers. But the worst computer hackers can do is destroy data, and perhaps disrupt communications and other infrastructure. Bio-hackers can potentially kill millions.

There are some differences, of course. A biological superbug would be much more dangerous to handle, and harder to test during development, than a computer attack. (An anthrax-like pathogen that doesn't spread from person to person would be about as easy to target as a computer hack, though.) The human immune system is generally more robust than computer systems, having evolved to deal with a wide variety of pathogens over millions of years. (Of course, it has never had to deal with human ingenuity before.)

The fundamental similarity, though, is that the technology massively favors the attacker, who can choose the time, place and method of attack, over the defender, who must try to react to protect entire populations before they're infected. Frankly, I don't like our odds.

In the Washington Post, David Ignatius heralds the "slow transformation of American innocence", as its "optimistic" culture gives way to a "sense of irony" in the wake of the ugly, messy reality of Iraq. It's hard to see, though, how a nation that has survived an astoundingly bloody civil war, two world wars, two costly far eastern interventions, and forty years of threatened nuclear annihilation would suddenly lose its sunny outlook because of a few dozen military casualties a month in the aftermath of a remarkably short, easy, painless victory. Undaunted, Ignatius argues that "Americans will have to develop a tragic sensibility to survive," emulating Iraq, "where it is always best to assume the worst."

Now, it is true that America's cheeriness is to some extent a product of America's good fortune--which could change at any time (although the Iraqi situation is hardly an indication that that's about to happen). But the converse is also at least partly true. It is surely no accident that Iraqis, who have for decades cynically assumed that they will wake up each morning cringing under the iron rule of a capriciously brutal dictator, have in fact done so, while Americans, who have expected--perhaps sometimes unrealistically--honest, upright, responsive leaders, come much closer to that goal. Culture consists primarily of a set of beliefs shared by consensus within a large population, and to the extent that cultures can be judged by their results, one would be foolish not to choose American naivete--however jarring it can sometimes be--over Iraqi cynicism.

Neophyte Volokh Conspirator Tyler Cowen's one-man campaign to lower the intellectual level of his new blog continues apace. His latest sophomoric argument, borrowed from some idol of his who apparently has a whole slew of such inanities, is that we're most likely all mere simulacra of human beings. The reasoning: suppose there's a non-negligible chance that humans will develop self-aware simulated humans (using, say, computer models) at some point. If we do, then we most likely will construct a huge number of them--until they vastly outnumber real, living humans. At that point, the odds are that any self-aware person (including, say, us) is actually a simulation, rather than a real person.

Of course, if we are all simulations, then there's nothing that prevents us, in the future, from creating innumerable "simulated simulations" of ourselves, given enough simulation time. We would thus prove that we're probably really just simulated simulations, which in turn can create simulations of themselves--and so on, ad infinitum. Presumably this argument has to stop somewhere, but there doesn't seem to be anything capable even of slowing it down, apart from the caprice of the simulators, should they decide to terminate their simulations out of boredom. (And if they're simulating my life, then their tolerance for boredom is clearly near-infinite.)

The problem is that by assuming that there will be lots and lots of simulated people, we are implicitly assuming that simulations of humans will be fairly cheap to generate and run. But simulating a human interacting with an entire world is bound to be an expensive proposition, if the simulation is to capture the world in anything approaching the detail and complexity of the original. On the other hand, the "game observer/directors" running the simulations may have no need for such detailed simulations--their particular motives (and one can think of all sorts of them) may well be satisfied by very crude simulations (say, of a large population of people with simplified intellects and emotional ranges, or full-fledged individual humans in a very simplified environment).

On the other hand, if the simulated world is a grossly simplified version of the real one, then it is foolish to try to predict anything about the latter's long-term evolution (let alone its ultimate technological trajectory) based on the simulation. In fact, it's likely impossible even to make reliable inferences of any kind about the simulators from inside the simulation. Perhaps they're merely conducting fanciful "what if?" simulations ("imagine that we had only two arms and two legs, instead of the usual complement of four of each...."), or running abstract, idealized experiments ("consider a randomly constructed species with adult cognitive capacity equivalent to a normal Xrnapthian toddler..."). In these cases, we can't even begin to speculate fruitfully on the likelihood of the simulators producing simulated worlds like ours, or simulated inhabitants like us. If we are but simulations, then the minds of the G. O/D's are forever hidden from our understanding.

I must say, though, that it feels somewhat odd pondering this kind of argument these days. After all, I don't think I've set foot in a college dorm room for over a decade and a half.

An Oxford professor of molecular medicine recently sent a truly shocking email, turning down an Israeli graduate school applicant on the grounds that the latter had served in the Israeli army. "I have a huge problem," wrote Andrew Wilkie, Nuffield Professor of (appropriately enough) Pathology, "with the way that the Israelis take the moral high ground from their appalling treatment in the Holocaust, and then inflict gross human rights abuses on the Palestinians because they (the Palestinians) wish to live in their own country." (The professor has since issued a formal apology, and the university is investigating the matter.)

Although the professor's action--rejecting an Israeli simply because of his nationality and previous military service--is outrageous in itself, his explanation for it is even more staggering. For in fact the Holocaust plays virtually no role in Israel's or its supporters' justification for its policies or operations involving the West Bank and Gaza or its inhabitants. It would surely be foolish even to try to use it that way, since even the most sympathetic observer would be unlikely to consider the suffering of Jews sixty years ago as some kind of excuse for any misdeeds Israel might commit today.

On the other hand, supporters of the Palestinian side of the conflict (of whom this professor appears to be one) routinely make precisely this kind of argument. Palestinian terrorism, while not (always) fully condoned, is nevertheless "explained" in terms of the Palestinians' endurance of decades of suffering and "humiliation". Why, then, would Professor Wilkie lob such an accusation against, of all people, Israelis?

Roger Simon explains the professor's outburst as an example of Ron Rosenbaum's hypothesis that modern European anti-semitism stems from a desire to purge European guilt for the Holocaust by "blaming the victim." I'm skeptical; a British academic is far more likely, I imagine, to think of himself as an intellectual descendant of, say, the European leftist anti-Fascists of the thirties than of European Nazis.

On the other hand, the Holocaust is occasionally invoked to impute anti-Semitism to European Israel-bashers. I would guess, then, that Wilkie was simply anticipating accusations of anti-Semitism, and decided to strike pre-emptively, by declaring references to the Holocaust to be nothing more than excuses for "gross human rights abuses."

Now, I'm generally reluctant to lob accusations of anti-Semitism against someone who criticizes Israel, however unfairly. But when a fellow's reaction to an ordinary student application for a research position is to respond, in effect, "I hate Israelis--you're always accusing people of anti-Semitism to defend your misdeeds", one has to ask if anti-Semitism isn't just a little bit too much on his mind.

Then again, given the incoherence of his views on Israel, I suppose we can't exactly expect clear thinking from him on the subject of Jews in general, either.

A friend has expressed curiosity about "personal" blogs--blogs (unlike this one) which record the blogger's personal thoughts and impressions about his or her life (rather than pompous pronouncements on public affairs). Not being very familiar with that particular form, I thought I'd harness the power of the medium for information-gathering purposes. I would be most grateful if those readers who can recommend any well-written personal blogs--or listings of them--dropped me an email or left a comment. Think of it as an inexpensive substitute for a tip jar....

An Australian man has committed a copycat self-amputation, slicing off his own arm with a knife after his tractor overturned, pinning it to the ground (the arm, not the knife). The catch (as it were) in this case: according to police, "[a]nother worker discovered the injured miner and sounded an alarm, but he didn’t want to wait for rescue crews." He was apparently rescued within hours, an arm short. (And just in time, too--who knows what he might have applied his overeager knife to, given another hour or so.)

Now, let me repeat the key detail, here: the man decided to lop off his own arm with a knife, rather than wait for a few hours until rescuers could arrive. The mysteries abound: how long, exactly, did he wait? How did he react when the rescuers arrived? If the opportunity had later arisen to reattach his arm, but had required him to stay for a few more hours in his hospital bed, would he have checked out in disgust, rather than wait around for the surgeon?

I've been trying to piece together the hypothetical details of this bizarre story in my mind, the better to understand it. For what it's worth, here's my imagined chronology:

The man's tractor overturns, pinning his arm in the process.

The man panics--perhaps having read the harrowing story of the Coloradan climber who spent several horrible days hemming and hawing before finally doing the necessary thing--and quickly severs the trapped arm.

A few minutes thereafter, a colleague finds him, and summons rescuers. The man smacks his own forehead with his remaining hand and begins mentally composing an acceptance speech for his anticipated Academy of Stupidity Lifetime Achievement Award.

After his rescue, an incredibly tactless journalist asks him, "why did you cut your own arm off so quickly, instead of waiting a bit longer for someone to find you?" Unable to muster the courage to look the world media in the eye and announce, "it's quite simple, really--I'm afraid I'm just a world-champion bonehead," the man puts on his best Paul Hogan sardonic/stoic grin, shrugs with his remaining shoulder, and says, "naah--I couldn't be bothered to wait for 'em."

It doesn't sound like all that plausible a scenario, I admit--but it's the most charitable one I could think of.

It's hard to imagine someone failing more completely to understand the spirit of a particular song.

While we're on the subject of Supreme Court decisions, Glenn "Instapundit" Reynolds and Sasha Volokh both note a New York Times article about a mathematical analysis of Supreme Court decisions. The analysis, by Dr. Lawrence Sirovich, a mathematician at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine in Manhattan, has determined that the justices are not entirely independent in their decision-making. In particular, the nine of them are the effective equivalent of 4.68 completely independent justices.

"Although his refusal to draw any political implications from his analysis may disappoint some people, the neutrality of the approach is what makes it appealing to political and legal scholars," writes Times reporter Nicholas Wade. In fact, one doesn't need to delve into politics to question the interpretation of Sirovitch's result as characterizing the independence of the justices' thinking. It appears to me, in fact, that the analysis says as much about the nature of the lower courts as about the Supreme Court itself.

Cases may reach the Supreme Court for several different reasons. A case may be deemed so important and controversial that a Supreme Court decision is necessary to resolve it. The Supreme Court may be dissatisfied with lower court rulings on the matter, or two different lower courts may have ruled differently on it. Or the Supreme Court itself may be divided enough to want to hear and resolve the case through its own deliberations.

In the first three instances, it would not necessarily be unexpected for the court to rule 9-0--say, if a "rogue circuit" issued a bizarre appeals court ruling that the Supreme Court saw fit to overrule. Thus the ratio of cases from each category (which likely fluctuates considerably over time) can have a significant effect on the "apparent independence" of justices' opinions.

To see this point more clearly, imagine a world without lower courts, in which all cases made it to the Supreme Court. The vast majority of those cases would be easy, and decided 9-0 by the justices. A mathematical analysis would therefore indicate a high court of strongly correlated thinkers--the effective equivalent of not much more than a single justice.

Now imagine that the same Supreme Court were suddenly supplied with a "perfect" lower court system--in the sense of being almost perfectly capable of anticipating the propensities of the higher court. The result would be that only the most difficult, marginal cases would make it to the Supreme Court--the rest would be decided by lower courts and allowed to stand by a satisfied high court. In those cases, the justices' choices would naturally be somewhat arbitrary, hinging on legal niceties that the lower courts couldn't anticipate--the kinds of judgment calls that justices might easily differ on, compared with more straightforward legal decisions. Professor Sirovitch's analysis would therefore suggest strong independence among justices. Nothing would have changed about the justices themselves, of course--only the skill of the lower courts in "filtering" cases for the high court.

I would speculate that certain types of event--say, a period of high turnover in the court system, or a flurry of controversial legal issues, perhaps emanating from a political crisis--would increase the number of cases of the first three types, thus reducing the apparent independence of justices. A more careful analysis of the origins of cases that make it to the Supreme Court, might help determine whether the apparently low "entropy" of Supreme Court opinions is a reflection of polarization within the court or merely an artifact of turmoil in the lower courts.

An update to my previous posting about anticipated reactions to the Supreme Court's recent affirmative action rulings:

Eugene Volokh has explained to me, via email, that he he considers Justice Ginsburg's position different from candidate Gephardt's, because Ginsburg only discussed others' (i.e., university administrators') potential disrespect for the Court's ruling, whereas Gephardt promised to undermine the ruling himself. That's a valid distinction, and certainly explains why Volokh spared Ginsburg the opprobrium he heaped on Gephardt.

But it doesn't explain why he was so easy on the university administrators whose contumacious behavior Ginsburg predicted (and plausibly, in Volokh's eyes). Indeed, Volokh also informed me by email that he does "think it's worse when a President publicly announces his intention to violate his oath than when lower-level decisionmakers break the law" (although he opposes both).

So there we have it: it's bad enough--though sometimes, regrettably, predictable--for a bureaucrat with no accountability to undermine the Supreme Court's authority. But if a president should get elected on a platform that includes a promise to undermine a Court ruling, and then attempt to live up to that promise--that would be really terrible.

In other countries, we sometimes see a populist president trying to dismantle the democratic process and install himself as absolute dictator. Venerable institutions like the judiciary might then intervene to preserve the sovereignty of the citizenry. In America, it seems, things work the other way around: politicians attempt to enhance respect for the people's will, and right-thinking legal minds scold them relentlessly for suggesting that an electoral mandate might entitle them to speak on major matters of public policy.

There seems to be an odd inconsistency among blogging law professors regarding two rather similar recent threats to defy any anti-affirmative action ruling emanating from the Supreme Court. First, Democratic Presidential Candidate Richard Gephardt declared that "We'll do executive orders to overcome any wrong thing the Supreme Court does" with respect to affirmative action. Eugene Volokh calls Gephardt's statement "shocking" and thinks Gephardt "should be taken to task for this, and severely." Fellow law professor Glenn "Instapundit" Reynolds describes the remark as "absolutely pathetic."

Meanwhile, another commentator noted that "[o]ne can reasonably anticipate . . . that colleges and universities will seek to maintain their minority enrollment . . . whether or not they can do so in full candor through adoption of affirmative action plans of the kind here at issue....[i]f honesty is the best policy, surely Michigan’s accurately described, fully disclosed College affirmative action program is preferable to achieving similar numbers through winks, nods, and disguises."

What kind of scoundrel would effectively condone Gephardt-style flouting of the Supreme Court's Constitutional rulings--this time by university admissions officers? Turns out the scoundrel in question is Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, in her majority opinion in Gratz, one of the affirmative action cases decided today by the Supreme Court. In his dissent, Justice Renquist takes his colleague to task for her apparent preference for "changing the Constitution so that it conforms to the conduct of the universities." Volokh leans towards Renquist's position, but concedes that Ginsburg has a point.

Now, why would Volokh be so much gentler on Ginsburg for saying, in effect, that universities are going to adopt racial preferences regardless of the Supreme Court's ruling, than on Gephardt for saying that as president he would have the government adopt racial preferences regardless of the Supreme Court's ruling? The most charitable explanation I can think of is that he considers sneaky, sub rosa disobedience to the Supreme Court's rulings less objectionable than open defiance of them. But this position is pretty hard to defend as a matter of principle. In fact, Volokh himself, in defending Ginsburg, makes the point that "less transparency in the design of race preferences....may lead to less political accountability."

Moreover, Gephardt's words don't necessarily imply that his undermining of a hypothetical Supreme Court ruling would be particularly brazen. In fact, it's perfectly reasonable to interpret Gephardt as saying that he will sign executive orders which will not explicitly contradict the Supreme Court ruling, but will instead lead, guide and encourage civil servants to promote racial preferences in the same way that Ginsburg imagines universities would--that is, surreptitiously.

I'm left with a disturbing speculation as to the underlying difference between the two cases: university administrations, like the Supreme Court, are appointed, (largely) unaccountable, and undemocratic, and we must therefore bear it stoically should they decide to shrug off Supreme Court rulings. Heaven forbid, though, that an elected, accountable, democratic official--say, the President of the United States--ever utter a peep of resistance to a judicial edict. Such effrontery would threaten the very foundations of non-democracy itself. Why, pretty soon, ordinary citizens would be wondering why they have to submit to the arbitrary authority of the Supreme Court in the first place.

Everybody's commenting on the recent New Republic article by Spencer Ackerman and John Judis accusing the Bush administration of deliberate deception regarding the justifications for invading Iraq. Opinions vary (roughly along party lines) as to whether the Ackerman-Judis accusation is justified or overblown. But on one subject, pretty much everyone agrees: the fact that even after weeks of searching the US has failed to find "smoking gun" evidence of an Iraqi WMD (Weapons of mass destruction"--chemical, biological or nuclear weapons) program, casts significant doubt on the claim that there had ever been one in the first place.

Well, consider the following fact: US troops attacked an alleged terrorist training camp in Northwest Iraq, killing more than 70 people and losing a helicopter--about a week ago. Surely such a facility--an armed encampment containing dozens of active, hostile troops--would have been attacked earlier had it been detected. Given that the Iraqis would have had to keep a WMD program--say, a covert nuclear weapons development project--absolutely secret from the entire world for over a decade, wouldn't it likely have been even more carefully hidden than this terrorist camp?

Oxblog's David Adesnik has countered my arguments in defense of Israel's strikes on Hamas leaders by invoking the issue of civilian casualties. Now, I've already conceded that this is a legitimate issue--although not for the reasons Adesnik cites. Rather than expressing moral qualms, he worries about the effect of Palestinian casualties on their willingness to countenance a ceasefire. As I've already pointed out, current Palestinian opinion strongly favors the use of terrorism in any event, and Israel therefore hardly needs to worry about further "provocation". On the other hand, if terrorism appears not to be working--that is, if it leads to Palestinian civilian deaths, rather than Israeli ones--then it's possible that at least some Palestinians will become disillusioned with it.

Regardless, almost as if in response to Adesnik's concerns, Israel has just killed the senior Hamas official in Hebron, during an arrest attempt--and without any civilian casualties. I look forward to seeing if Adesnik sticks to his position, and concedes that this attack is therefore unexceptionable.

Interestingly, Ha'aretz reports that "[i]n recent weeks, ....in the Hebron area [the Israelis] encountered difficulties gathering
intelligence on the cells operating there." Hmm...I wonder who might have tipped them off, then?

Although I'm on record as predicting the endurance of the Ayatollahs' regime beyond the end of the year, nobody would be more pleased than I to be proven wrong in this case. Nevertheless, I note that so far the anti-government demonstrations in Iran seem to lack three crucial criteria for success:

Mass support. Crowds have been reported in the hundreds or thousands, not hundreds of thousands. The regime has been enduring that sort of minor irritation for years now.

Signs of weakness in the regime. The closest the government has come to capitulating to its opponents is its arrest of some of its own thugs, after they rampaged through some universities beating up anti-government students. This could easily be a purely symbolic gesture meant for foreign consumption, rather than a genuine concession to the opposition. And otherwise, the evidence of cracks in the Ayatollahs' power structure is pretty scarce. (Kieran Healy elaborates on this point, adding some scholarly detail.)

An iconic leader. I don't recall a single popular uprising against an indigenous tyrant that has succeeded in recent years without first rallying around a single opposition leadership figure. Nor am I aware of such a figure emerging in Iran. (Of course, I urge any reader with the knowledge to correct me on either of these points to post a comment with details.)

I don't doubt that the Iranian clerical regime is deeply unpopular, that its opposition has been strengthened by the fall of Saddam Hussein, and that its longevity is in doubt. But I also suspect that a great deal more will have to happen before it progresses from just another hated dictatorship to another notch on the belt of democracy. The time scale of that progress is likely to be a lot longer than the Michael Ledeens of the world tend to imply.

Mark Kleiman points out that a Los Angeles County regulation requiring restaurants to post the results of their health inspections appears to have reduced hospital admissions for food-related illnesses by 20 percent. Kleiman challenges libertarians to argue against this type of government regulation, given its obvious positive effects on the county's diners. I would go even further: health codes for restaurants benefit (acceptably hygienic) restaurants themselves, as well as their patrons. With the regulations in place, customers feel safer eating at a restaurant, and especially trying out a new one, and are thus more likely to dine out in general.

Of course, diehard libertarians will argue that private inspection services could substitute for the public authority, enforcing sanitary practices by contract. But that would require restaurant patrons to take the trouble not only to examine each restaurant's private certification, but also to investigate the reliability of various inspection services and the authenticity of the restaurant's claim to have been certified by them.

More generally, the entire libertarian obsession with private contractual alternatives to government regulation is massively inconsistent. In fact, the enforcement of real-world contracts often relies on a rich, complex web of governmentally-determined laws, rules, conventions and institutions that make health department regulations look positively anarchistic by comparison. For example, private restaurant inspection services would inevitably depend on the conventions governing trademark protection and the "implicit contracts" that restaurants are said to make with their customers merely by, say, posting an inspection service logo.

Now, this array of legal constructions is quite defensible on pragmatic grounds. But then, government health regulations are also defensible--indeed, clearly preferable--on pragmatic grounds. (After all, government health regulations don't preclude private inspection services, if the latter happen to offer any practical advantages.) Libertarians therefore tend to justify relying on private solutions by invoking fundamental principles like "non-coercion" and "private, voluntary contract"--principles that they are then happy to fudge when necessary to create feasible contractual solutions to problems like policing restaurant hygiene.

Oxblog's David Adesnik disagrees with my claim that Israel's attacks on Hamas leaders are no worse for peace prospects than was Israel's isolation of Arafat. "[D]estroying credibility is far more difficult [sic] than reinforcing it," he writes. (I think he means, "easier".) "A combination of American and Israeli intransigence forced Arafat to back down. But that same combination cannot persuade Palestinians to embrace Abu Mazen."

Certainly, it's true that Mahmoud Abbas (a.k.a. "Abu Mazen") has yet to be embraced by the Palestinian public. But I don't see how easing the pressure on Hamas could improve his stature any more than easing the pressure on Arafat would. In either case, a long-term competitor to Abbas would win enhanced prestige, having being shown greater "respect" by Israel. By the same token, terrorism as a tactic would also win increased credibility, thereby undercutting Abbas' tentative attempts to persuade Palestinians to abandon it.

Now, some argue that Abbas' status among Palestinians is doomed unless he forcefully defends terrorists like Hamas and Arafat. That may (or may not) be the case; but if so, then lending him more credibility is synonymous with promoting terrorism, and there's thus no good reason for even attempting to prop him up. On the other hand, if Abbas is able to establish himself as a credible non-terrorist leader, it will only be because the Palestinian people perceive the terrorist alternatives as demonstrably worse. And--let's face it--a few helicopter-borne missiles slamming into the cars of terrorist leaders drives home the message that terrorism doesn't work, far better than implicitly giving "do not touch" VIP status to the top eschelon of Hamas.

Meanwhile, Gregory of "Belgravia dispatch" also objects to my defense of the attack on Rantisi, arguing that its timing interferes with the "road map" initiative, and that the resulting incidental Palestinian civilian casualties hurt long-term prospects for peaceful coexistence. Funny--it used to be that ultra-doves like Amram Mitzna would declare that Israel should "fight terror as if there were no negotiations and negotiate as if there were no terror attacks." Gregory is apparently to the left of Mitzna, arguing that attacks on Hamas should be put on hold for the sake of the "road map". Again, this seems completely backwards to me; if one goal of the "road map" is to isolate Israeli-Palestinian peace negotiations from terrorism, then the attacks on Rantisi and his partners in terror couldn't be better timed to assist in that decoupling. And if the Palestinian response is to rise to the defense of Hamas--immediately after the latter has explicitly refused to halt its terrorist attacks--then the "road map" itself is a sham, doomed to collapse in another heap of unfulfilled Palestinian commitments to suppress its own side's terrorists.

The issue of the attack's civilian casualties is, I'll concede, a serious one, and Israel should certainly not be cavalier about it. The concern, pace the ever-clueless Thomas Friedman, is not the effects of such operations on long-term hopes for peaceful coexistence. If Israelis can somehow manage to live peacefully with a population that spent over half a century dedicating itself to their brutal liquidation, then a few accidental deaths in Gaza shouldn't be a formidable obstacle to ultimate reconciliation. Rather, Israelis themselves quite rightly oppose the erosion of their moral standards, which include placing a high value on protecting innocent life. Waging a morally unimpeachable war against a terrorist organization hiding within a civilian population is no easy matter, to be sure, and reasonable individuals can differ on the appropriate boundaries. I don't believe the attack on Rantisi was excessive, but I can understand that others might make a different judgment call

The best solution, of course, would be for the local Palestinian authorities to break up the terrorist organizations themselves, jailing their leaders. (Note, though, that the danger of incidental civilian casualties in such operations is also far from negligible.) However, given that the Palestinian authorities have not yet so acted, or even made a commitment to act, it is therefore up to Israel to fight Hamas as carefully and effectively as it can.

My own strong suspicion, in fact, is that for the moment Abbas et al. actually prefer Israel to take the initiative (and the subsequent blame), feeling their own current political status a bit too precarious for such boldness. If I'm right, then it's hard to make the case that Israel's actions were unwarranted, given that the local authorities had the opportunity to accomplish the same task with less danger to civilians, and nevertheless chose the riskier option.

Steven Landsburg, who appears to be some kind of covert mole in the economics profession, conspiring to make it look unbelievably stupid, is at it again--this time with a just-so story about why Jews don't farm. Landsburg cites a team of "economic historians" who argue that the relative historical paucity of Jewish farmers is an economic consequence of their religious requirement of literacy, which gave them a comparative advantage in other vocations such as commerce and medicine.

Now, if one were actually serious about this theory--not just blithely tossing around silly speculations, mind you, but genuinely proposing an intellectually defensible hypothesis--one would obviously want to look for other test cases to which it might apply. And it would be hard to do so without immediately stumbling upon yet another European ethnic group with a relatively small proportion of farmers: the Roma (colloquially known as "Gypsies"). And--wouldn't you know it--the Roma have a long historical tradition of illiteracy. So much for that theory....

(On the other hand, if one were really a covert mole, trying one's best to discredit the field of economics.... )

Volokh Conspirator Orin Kerr points out Eric Muller's remarks on an interesting jury selection issue. Apparently, "a judge in Pennsylvania is delaying a murder trial until the district's jury selection procedures are changed to produce a jury pool that is ten percent black." According to Muller,

[L]egally speaking, there's really nothing to be outraged about here. It has been settled law for decades that the Sixth Amendment requires a jury pool or "venire" to reflect a fair cross-section of the community. A jury venire is not a fair cross-section if the selection system is calibrated to underrepresent a "distinctive group" in the community. Racial groups are, under the Sixth Amendment, "distinctive." The district where this murder trial is to occur is twelve percent black, but the venire is never more than five percent black. So this ruling strikes me as an elementary application of well settled law.

....

To the extent that people are talking about this story, it is because some people seem to be upset that this area of Sixth Amendment law appears to run counter to the "colorblindness" theory that is all the rage in some constitutional quarters. And, in an important sense, it does do that: this area of the law works from the assumption that race is not completely irrelevant to people's life experiences, perspectives, and perceptions.

So it's worth taking a moment to think: if you're bothered by what this Pennsylvania judge is doing, is it because you think that the assumption underlying this area of law is actually false? Or for some other reason?

Well, if race is "not irrelevant" when creating a pool of jurors, then surely political and legal views are not irrelevant, either. Would it therefore be legitimate for the judge to observe that, say, popular support for legalizing drugs runs at x percent in the polls, and consequently to require every jury pool to contain at least x-2 percent proponents of drug legalization?

The problem with this kind of thinking is not that these human categories are "irrelevant", and therefore should be ignored. On the contrary, precisely because they are relevant--like so many other factors--their inevitably selective inclusion in the jury pool creation process cannot but become a powerful device for "jury pool engineering". As we've already seen in the case of jury selection, increasing the number of tools with which a jury can be painstakingly sculpted in the name of "fairness" or "representativeness" only increases the likelihood that those tools will be wielded so as to undermine, rather than enhance, justice.

Perhaps there really is a bias against African Americans in Philadelphia's jury pool selection process. But whatever that bias may be, it's bound to pale in comparison with those introduced by rules that make it much easier for some categories of people than others to avoid jury duty, and that allow both defense counsel and the prosecution to exclude jurors on the flimsiest of pretexts. It's absurdly naive to think that adding yet another gimmick to the mix will somehow shift the system more towards a fair balance, rather than simply pushing it even further askew.

Consider this recent sequence of events:

Under heavy international pressure, Yasser Arafat appoints a prime minister, Mahmoud Abbas.

Abbas, with Israeli and American support, and despite ferocious opposition from Arafat, insists on naming the PA's former Gaza security chief, Mohammed Dahlan, as minister of state for security affairs. Dahlan was in charge of the PA's crackdown on Hamas in 1996.

Hamas pulls out of talks with Abbas on a proposed ceasefire with Israel.

Israel launches a spate of rather well-scouted missile attacks on high-level Hamas operatives in Gaza.

Hmm....

Was the Israeli attempt on the life of Hamas leader Abdel Aziz Rantisi detrimental to Israel's security, as President Bush has suggested? Bush's implicit argument is that by firing missiles at Rantisi, the Israelis weakened the hand of the new Palestinian prime minister, Mahmoud Abbas, who has been trying to pressure groups such as Hamas to refrain from terrorist attacks. The problem with this argument, however, is that it is refuted by the very existence of the Palestinian prime minister in the first place.

Yasser Arafat appointed Abbas prime minister under heavy international pressure, (only) after Israel had decided to declare its complete refusal to deal with Arafat, confining him to his Ramallah compound and attempting to isolate him from contact with his worldwide diplomatic supporters. When Israeli prime minister Ariel Sharon first made this decision last spring, in the wake of operation Defensive Shield, he was widely and roundly condemned, in exactly the same tone, and with exactly the same argument, that is used today against the Rantisi strike. By attacking Arafat, it was claimed, Israel was only discouraging him from embracing moderation, and spurring moderates to make common cause with him in his defense.

In fact, Palestinian terrorists like Arafat and Rantisi have repeatedly demonstrated their complete unwillingness to abandon extreme demands and murderous methods under any circumstances short of the destruction of Israel. Hence, expecting moderation from them in response to Israeli restraint is (and has been proven time and again to be) an utterly futile approach. Moreover, their power depends not at all on the sympathy of moderates, but rather on their ability to wring concessions from Israel through terrorism. Thus, to the extent that Israel refuses to attempt to mollify them--indeed, that it attempts instead to capture or kill them--their power diminishes, and the credibility and prospects (however slim) of moderates such as Abbas (if, indeed, that is what he is) are significantly enhanced.

This is precisely what has happened with Arafat; once Israel declared him "irrelevant", his support and credibility among "moderates" in the international community quickly began to erode. (His standing among Palestinians has also declined modestly but steadily.) If the world can be (at least partially) persuaded that Yasser Arafat ought to be frozen out of the "road map", then why not Abdel Aziz Rantisi as well?

Several prominent bloggers, basking in the glow of their medium's collective triumph over the New York Times, have decided on a new project: bringing freedom to Burma, where a brutal dictatorship has recently launched a crackdown on its main political opposition. Now, I hold no brief for the Burmese government, which is by all accounts exceedingly nasty. But it's important to remember that the blogosphere's choice of Burma as cause of the moment is not merely a consequence of its being run by a brutal dictatorship--after all, any number of countries fit that description. In fact, to get adopted by sympathetic Westerners, a nation's suffering population must possess one more thing: an opposition leader with enough political support to be a credible alternative to the current despots. (It helps, of course, if the opposition leader is articulate, attractive and Western-educated, like Burmese opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi, whose recent imprisonment set off the latest round of bloggers' outrage.)

Now, I don't deny that this selection criterion makes a certain amount of sense. After all, if the alternative to the current despot is either another despot or complete anarchy--or if there is simply no credible alternative to prefer--then it's hard to muster enthusiasm for deposing the ruling bad guy. But it does mean that the integrity and democratic bona fides of the opposition leader merit careful scrutiny. Corazon Aquino, for example, worked out pretty well--but Robert Mugabe and Jean-Baptiste Aristide (to mention just two cases that come to mind) were both lionized as democratizers in their day, and both were terrible disappointments, arguably every bit as bad as their predecessors.

In fact, it turns out that Aung San Suu Kyi's record is a very promising one. She won an election in 1990, for example, and she has a long history of speaking out on behalf of democracy in general, not just opposition to the current government in particular. Still, because these campaigns are almost always implicitly on behalf of a particular alternative--not just against a particular evil--the details of that alternative should be placed front and center, and examined carefully for plausibility and decency. Western attention is a scarce resource, after all, and should not be squandered on an undeserving politician, however monstrous his or her opponent.

It seems the Times' editorial page editors read the Weekly Standard's Rick Bragg parody, and decided they could do even better....

Michael Kinsley's latest jeremiad against the Republican tax cut plan is, like so many of Paul Krugman's similarly-minded screeds, only ostensibly about how terrible the tax cut is. Its real purpose is to grapple with the most difficult question facing liberal opponents of the plan: if it's such a financial disaster for so many Americans, then why isn't it also a political disaster for the Republicans?

Like Krugman, Kinsley opts for the people-as-duped-sheep explanation. "Campaign contributions are only the crudest way power is transferred from the economic sphere to the political one," he writes. "In addition, there are well-financed lobbying organizations, including some masquerading as research institutes. There is the inherent complexity and boredom of tax and regulatory issues, which repel people who don't have a major financial stake. There is the social milieu of the president and most members of Congress." In other words, the voters are not exploding in righteous outrage at the tax cut because the Republican powers-that-be have conspired to hide the truth of its damaging consequences from them.

Now, I generally share Kinsley's (and Krugman's) skepticism of the wisdom of the tax cut, although perhaps with less intensity and conviction. A stimulative tax cut is at least defensible at the moment, as an anti-deflation measure. But if that is its purpose, it could have been much better designed than this one, with more immediate spending power delivered at less long-term cost to the federal bottom line. And I can understand why Kinsley would be disappointed in the general public's acceptance of a plan that he believes will bankrupt the country, hurt the poor and those of middling income, and benefit only the rich.

Still, it's ridiculous to argue that a wealthy, powerful cabal has managed to fleece an unwilling public. In fact, support for tax cuts in recent years has been quite broad-based, across the income spectrum, with a plurality at all income levels--not just the wealthy--favoring a tax cut. That doesn't mean they're sensible to do so, of course. But it's simply false to decry the tax cut as a robbery of the non-rich by the rich, when the non-rich are willing partners in the transaction.

When foreign populations believe nonsensical things--say, that the September 11th terrorist attack was a CIA plot--pundits tend to blame poor American PR, agressive American foreign policy....anything but a concerted campaign by wealthy, powerful Islamist propagandists. Surely in America, where the likes of Kinsley and Krugman have prominent, popular, accessible soapboxes from which to fulminate, the propaganda conspiracy theory is even harder to defend.

Perhaps, then, it's time for Kinsley and Krugman to consider the implications of the fact that Americans would sooner believe an economic charlatan of a president feeding them ruinous lies, than trust the reasonable warnings of pundits like themselves. In other words, it's time for them to take their cue from their foreign policy colleagues, recognize their own startling lack of credibility among the public, and start asking themselves, "why do they hate us?"

If you thought there was no art in composing hit songs for "boy bands", think again.

Most people would agree that the story of Tucker Max is a cautionary tale, but not everyone will agree on the moral. Max is, judging by his Website, an appalling character, a charming drunk with a knack for getting into trouble, behaving badly and publishing ruthlessly funny accounts of his exploits that are humiliating to all involved--but especially to the women foolish enough to get themselves entangled with him. One of the latter, it seems, is Katy Johnson, a two-time Miss Vermont whose Website advocates, among other things, abstinence and sobriety. Needless to say, Max' posted account of an evening's interaction with Johnson painted a rather different picture of her character. Johnson sued, and has so far won an injunction forbidding Max to mention Johnson or his claims about her on his Website.

Now, I have no idea whether Max' unflattering portrait of Johnson is in any way accurate, but let us assume for the sake of argument that it is. (After all, a defamatory tale about a beauty queen, invented out of whole cloth by a notorious jerk, would make for a rather straightforward, uninteresting libel lawsuit.) One lesson that free-speech enthusiasts such as Eugene Volokh apparently draw is that prohibiting "kiss and tell" writings in the name of protecting women's reputations does great damage to First Amendment rights. He's no doubt correct, but to me the legal aspects of the story are by far the least compelling. An anonymous female correspondent has offered Volokh a somewhat less legalistic, and hence more interesting, perspective: "He was doomed the second his case was assigned to a female judge. I'm not an easily offended woman, but Max is the worst kind of cad. He is every woman's worst nightmare come to life."

Now, I know of some people who would dismiss this reaction as unfairly indulgent towards Max' "victims". And they have a point--after all, if Katy Johnson's behavior was unexceptionable, then why should she complain that Tucker Max is telling the world about it? And conversely, if her behavior was less than exemplary, then whom but herself does she have to blame for the entirely predictable consequences?

Indeed, let us reverse the roles for a moment, and imagine that we are dealing, not with a callous man's humiliating public account of his evening with a naive, vulnerable woman, but rather a callous woman's humiliating public account of her evening with a naive, vulnerable man. (I'll leave the details of the hypothetical humiliation to the reader's imagination.) How many people would feel genuine outrage at his victimization, as opposed to gamely advising him to "chalk it up to experience" and move on?

Being a bit of a softhearted type myself, though, I recognize that people make foolish decisions sometimes, and don't necessarily deserve public humiliation for them. Of course, a glance at Max' Website makes it clear that for a woman, giving this fellow so much as the time of day is more than a run-of-the-mill foolish decision. What could possess any woman, let alone an abstinence activist, to hook up with this guy? An obvious answer--again, one that someone more coldhearted than myself would give--is that the lady doth protest too much, and her advocacy of abstinence and temperance is a hypocritical overcompensation for a shamelessly uninhibited streak. But then, Katy Johnson makes a bad poster child for Max' depredations in any event, since she can apparently take care of herself--winning, for example, a court injunction against him.

Much sadder are the numerous cases of horribly messed-up women whose tales Max recounts with a kind of rubbernecker's detached fascination--even as he himself instigates the accident. It is these women on whom Volokh's correspondent presumably took pity in condemning Max so bitterly. (And I daresay that more than a few otherwise intelligent, sensible women--and men, for that matter--have managed to make fools of themselves at one time or another in their choice of opposite-sex companion.)

But if effectively throwing the book at Max--whether legally or merely socially--is a legitimate means to protect women against his like, then what about, say, the methods proposed by Katy Johnson? Aren't more of the kind of vulnerable women susceptible to Max' charms likely to be protected by social norms that promote abstinence and sobriety than by the occasional court injunction against a cad's Website? Given the existence--indeed, ubiquity--of Tucker Maxes in the world, might it not be more productive for the prevailing culture to fortify people in advance against their lures than to attempt (fecklessly, we can assume) to deter them with social opprobrium?

Something tells me that neither the free speech advocates nor the cad-bashers will think to draw that lesson from the episode.

The Volokh Conspiracy's Orin Kerr reports from his college class' tenth reunion, where he asked his classmates what advice they would give their freshman selves, in retrospect:

[M]any classmates answered that they would have taken better advantage of all that college had to offer. People who partied a lot said that they should have taken their studies more seriously; people who spent all day at the library would have done more extracurricular activities. Classmates would have attended more lectures by famous speakers, tried more new things, and generally attempted to suck the marrow out of the college experience more than they did. I guess that college, like youth, is wasted on the young.

I am reminded of Nathaniel Hawthorne's classic short story, "Dr. Heidegger's Experiment", in which four elderly, dissipated souls are offered a (possibly illusionary) taste of the legendary fountain of youth. Although they all assert in advance that they will behave with the wisdom of their experience the second time around, the euphoria of recovered sprightliness in fact leads them into exactly the same follies that brought them such disaster in the past. The errors of youth, Hawthorne suggests, arise not from ignorance but from innate character flaws, and age only removes the ability to indulge them, not the urge to re-commit them.

Considered in this light, Kerr's classmates' advice to their younger selves sounds less like, "I wish I'd done all these things I had the opportunity to do", than "I wish I'd been a more well-rounded, ambitious, experience-seeking person than I was--the kind of person who would have done all of these things I had the opportunity to do". After all, how many of the opportunities college affords really disappear completely after graduation? One can still take classes, go to wild parties, hear famous speakers, and try new things later in life; those who don't bother are probably at least partly using lack of time or opportunity as an excuse, to cover up for lack of initiative or even lack of inclination.

Certainly I made my share of mistaken choices during college, but if I'm brutally honest with myself, I have to admit that I can't think of a single major one that I made out of ignorance, rather than, say, laziness or timidity. I'd be interested to hear (via comments, perhaps) whether readers see their college years differently.

Apparently this blog's stock has skyrocketed. A Website called "BlogShares" allows users to "invest" in various blogs, buying and selling "shares" in a kind of financial rotisserie league for blogging fans. ICBW's valuation is up by a factor of more than 10 in the last couple of months.

(Now that I think about it, the stock market is itself a kind of financial rotisserie league for investors, particularly when non-dividend-bearing stocks are involved. The only differences are that (1) most rotisserie leagues don't involve real money, and (2) the rotisserie league participants I know are much, much more attentive to baseball statistics than are most of the equity investors I know towards the fundamentals of the corporations they invest in.)

Of course I'm flattered that several blog speculators have decided to pour some of their imaginary savings into my humble enterprise. I can't help suspecting, though, that I'm really just a penny stock being subjected to a "pump and dump" maneuver by some virtual scam artists. I wonder if Blogshares operates an SEC equivalent....

Anyway, I'm sure it's all in good fun--until, that is, the board decides I'm not helping the bottom line enough, and has me replaced with some high-school kid.

He's "a potential ally for America in stabilizing postwar Iraq." He "has advised his followers....to cooperate with the Americans in rebuilding Iraq", and "wants to avoid a violent confrontation, which he believes would benefit only Iranians and other outsiders." His "relatively moderate tone reflects positions he has taken in recent years", and he "has been seen as a voice of reason and restraint in the Islamic world." So writes David Ignatius in what has to be one of the strangest op-eds ever to appear in the Washington Post. Sounds like a great guy, doesn't he? Well, there's a tiny catch: The man in question is Sheikh Mohammed Hussein Fadlallah, the longtime spiritual leader of Hezbollah, who "encouraged the suicide bombers who destroyed the U.S. Embassy and Marine barracks in Beirut in 1983." (He also continues to support suicide bombings in Israel, "spearheaded opposition to the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq", and now urges Iraqis to cooperate with US forces "even as they resist military occupation", whatever that means. During the war in Iraq, he accused the US of committing massacres in several cities.)

Now, far be it from me to suggest that people can't change, and apparently something is prompting Fadlallah to show the Americans a little leg, by repeatedly inviting American journalists to his Southern Beirut digs for vaguely conciliatory interviews. (That something would appear to be a simmering rivalry with the Iranian mullahs over Shia clerical supremacy. It has caused something of an estrangement between Fadlallah and Iran-allied Hezbollah, and it seems to be heating up over the contest to win influence among the rejuvenated Shia clergy of Iraq.)

But murderous fanatics generally live or die by their murderous fanaticism, and see the light of moderation far more rarely than their romanticizers would have the public believe. (Think Yasser Arafat, for instance.) Fadlallah's overtures to the US more likely indicate that either (1) he's such damaged goods, having been stripped of his power base in Hezbollah, that he'll even court the hated Americans, just to get back in the game, or (2) The US position in the Shia world is so powerful right now that even a legendary America-hater, the inspiration for the Beirut truck-bomber, feels the need to play (American) ball. In either case, it's highly unlikely that any kind of American reconciliation with him would be worth the price in enhanced prestige lent to a legendary terrorist leader.

A debate has been raging among Oxblog's David Adesnik, Kevin "Calpundit" Drum, Kieran Healy and Matthew Yglesias about economic inequality. Nobody's really enthusiastic about it, of course, but they differ on the seriousness of the problem. Adesnik is relatively unconcerned, while Drum and Healy suspect that something like societal-level foul play is involved.

I would argue that anyone who supports a progressive income tax should also be quite comfortable with rising economic inequality. The moral basis for progressivity in the tax system is that money, like everything else, has a decreasing marginal utility curve: your millionth dollar, when you have $999,999, is just not as valuable as your first dollar when you're flat broke. (In other words, buying a dollar's worth of food when you're starving is a bigger deal than buying a dollar's worth of anything when you're rich.) Indeed, the claim is even stronger: your tenth dollar, when you have only $10, is worth more to you than your last $100,000, when you have $1,000,000. Hence, taxing the wealthy at a given rate (in this case 10%) hurts them less than taxing the poor at the same rate. (Conversely, there exists some progressive tax scheme--in theory, at least--which causes everyone's sacrifice to be equal.)

Now consider what happens as society's overall wealth increases. If we expect everyone to benefit equally from the additional prosperity, then the rich will have to increase their wealth and income much more, in absolute terms, than the less wealthy, since each new dollar brings them much less benefit. And considered as a pure income or wealth statistic, this result will show up as increased economic inequality.

Of course, I have no idea if the rate at which inequality is rising comes anywhere near matching this ideal trend. In particular, if real wealth or income were falling among the poor while rising among the wealthy, then income inequality would indeed be unquestionably increasing in a meaningful sense. But I would argue that even huge economic gains at the top of the scale are quite harmless as long as they are accompanied by a steady, perceptible overall rise--however small--in wealth and income across the scale. (And conversely, falling incomes across the scale are terrible, even if the wealthy are losing much more than everyone else.)

Volokh co-Conspirator Orin Kerr describes it as "a rather unsavory undercover scheme". Glenn "Instapundit" Reynolds calls it "pathetic". What has them so annoyed? Well, apparently a police officer in Fort Myers, Fla. dressed as an employee at a McDonald's drive-through window and started....looking into people's cars. Whenever he saw something worthy of police attention, he notified his colleagues down the street, who, in the course of a week, made six arrests, handed out 29 citations, and recovered a "significant amount of drugs" and two pistols.

Now, there are several reasons why Profs. Kerr and Reynolds might find fault with this particular police operation. Unfortunately, none of them really makes sense (not that that would ever stop a law professor, mind you).

What the police did was illegal. As a matter of fact, it was not--as both Kerr and Reynolds admit.

What the police did was ineffective. Apparently the police are satisfied with the results of their law enforcement effort, and would be happy to repeat it. No doubt both Kerr and Reynolds disdain at least some of the laws that the police enforced using the McDonald's ploy. (These seem to have included both drug and gun laws, as well as child safety-seat laws.) But objecting to the laws themselves is hardly a reason for objecting to the method used to enforce them. Educated fellows like Kerr and Reynolds should be able to make this distinction.

What the police did outraged the community. Actually, the police were responding to community outrage--specifically, McDonalds employees' frustration at the amount of criminal activity they saw passing by their drive-through window, unhindered.

What the police did was an "invasion of privacy". Again, as a matter of law, it was no such thing. Indeed, it's hard to understand how anyone could think of him- or herself as being "in private" while being served by an anonymous fast-food employee.

What the police did was effective. I'm afraid that this is most likely the problem, in the eyes of our lawyer friends. Americans in general--and American legal academics in particular--tend to be so intensely distrustful of law enforcement officials that any change that increases the latter's effectiveness is immediate grounds for the former's concerned suspicion. Effective law enforcement can be used, for example, to persecute the innocent, by mistake or out of malice. It can end up enforcing unjust laws or imposing draconian punishments for minor offenses. It can be used capriciously or corruptly. All in all, it seems, many Americans would prefer that the police just go away and stop enforcing the law altogether.

As I read about the lawless chaos reigning in Iraq, I feel thankful, for Iraqis' sake, that their country is full of American troops, rather than American law professors.

I trust that loyal ICBW readers will rise to defend this blog against a challenger's spurious claim.

Sparing no expense to inform my readers, I've done a little journalistic legwork to investigate the case of Rick Bragg. Bragg is a New York Times writer who apparently had a habit of getting other people to do his reporting for him, rewriting it with lots of style and local color, and then getting it published under his own name. He has just been suspended for two weeks for having published a long, elegant feature story on oyster fishermen in Apalachicola, Fla.--despite having barely set foot in the place--that relied largely on the notes of an uncredited, unpaid intern named J. Wes Yoder. Knowledgeable journalists suspect that this case is only the tip of the iceberg for Bragg--and the Times.

From his small but comfortable office in Washington, DC, veteran journalist and Slate deputy editor Jack Shafer sips on a coffee and follows the Bragg story mainly via the Internet on his PC. Shafer is one of those who does not believe the Apalachicola case to be an isolated one. "Bragg's unorthodox use of uncredited reporters may explain the number of corrections the Times has appended to other Bragg stories over the years," he says, between sips. He pulls up on the screen a "hilarious extended correction for Bragg's June 1, 1998, story about a small Alabama newspaper's crusade against corruption, in which he appears to have gotten more facts wrong than right." A few keystrokes, and another, similarly odd list of errata appears, this time, says Shafer, regarding "Page One March 14, 2002, Bragg story about a town that allegedly banned Satan." "Every newspaper employs wordsmiths in the newsroom to rewrite breaking news collected by reporters in the field," he points out. "But the rewrite guy never pretends to be at the scene of the story, as Bragg did."

On the other hand, even Shafer admits that Bragg's use of an uncredited stringer is neither unusual nor against Times policy. "Given the facts, I can't imagine how the Times could possibly justify giving Yoder a byline," says Shafer, shrugging. And Yoder himself, speaking from his small, tidy desk at the modest but dignified newsroom of his current employer, The Anniston (Ala.) Star, expresses no resentment. "This is what stringers do, the legwork," he says, munching on his lunch, a takeout sandwich. "I did most of the reporting and Rick wrote it. Nothing’s inaccurate. Rick tried to bring the piece alive, to take the reader there, and he did a darn good job of it."

Meanwhile, Bragg, typing on his laptop computer in an airport departure lounge, waiting for his jam-packed plane to board, dismisses all the criticism as unjustified. "I wouldn’t have done anything different," says Bragg. "J. Wes did great work and we came out with a great story." And he has a point. Media maven Howard Kurtz, grabbing a break between takes of his CNN media analysis show, "Reliable Sources", argues that Bragg is an accidental victim of the recent Jayson Blair controversy. "At another time, Bragg's feature about struggling oystermen on the Gulf Coast would have drawn little notice," he says, before submitting to another round of attention from a quietly efficent makeup artist.

Perhaps the best defense of Bragg's practice, in fact, is his own article. Here's Shafer's description: "The Apalachicola story abounds with Braggian narrative detail....Oysterman 'Bobby Varnes prods the sandy bottom with a worn wooden pole, rhythmically stabbing at the soft sand as the boat idles along, waiting for the pole to strike a hard, brittle shell.' White egrets 'slip like paper airplanes just overhead' and mullet 'belly-flop with a sharp clap into steel-gray water.'" Surely anyone who reads such ornate, impressionistic prose, and then expects it to embody careful, objective reporting, deserves to be equally misled by its assigned byline.

Amidst all the controversy over Annika Sorenstam's abortive attempt to take the PGA tour by storm, I have seen surprisingly few comments on her rather unusual reaction to her weak performance: "I've got to go back to my tour, where I belong....I'm glad I did it, but this is way over my head....I wasn't as tough as I thought I was."

I simply can't imagine any top-level male professional athlete responding this way after failing in his first attempt to break into a new, higher tier of competition. More likely, he'd declare that he'd learned a lot from his defeat, and was looking forward to doing much better in his next try. If he announced that he was way out of his depth and planned in the future just to stick to his proper level, where he "belonged", he'd be derided as a wimp, a quitter, a loser.

Now, the whole point of having a blog is to be able to say whatever you want, so even though I just know I'm going to get pilloried for saying this, I'll say it anyway: I, too, would have looked down on Sorenstam's reaction had it been from a male athlete. But coming from her....well, I thought it was kind of endearing.

So there. Vive la difference!

Apologies for the recent dearth of postings--other responsibilities have conspired with a nasty cold to impede my blogging rate. In the meantime, I'll merely note that Seinfeld fans will be unsurprised at the appallingly nasty record of recently-captured senior Ba'ath party official (and no. 8 wanted Iraqi) Aziz Saleh al-Numan.

In the Washington Post, law professor James Ryan proposes a "sit-in movement" to protest "educational inequality":

Imagine that next fall, all across the country, children forced to attend poorly equipped and failing schools showed up at the doors of good suburban schools and simply sat down. Imagine if they asked why they, too, could not take advantage of the education offered at this public school. Imagine them asking why they are separated from those whose parents have more money, or why white and black students so rarely attend school together.

Although Ryan never actually articulates an answer to these questions, one suspects that his goal is to see even more money poured into failing schools--a solution that has been proven time and time again not to work. On the other hand, the protest Ryan proposes is an interesting one, because it raises in a particularly graphic way a legitimate question: why aren't those students allowed to attend public schools in other neighborhoods, if they choose?

In fact, Toronto, the city where I went to school, allows just such an option: students can register for any school in the city. The system doesn't collapse as a result, and educational opportunities for those in neighborhoods with poor-quality local schools are thus greatly enhanced. However, Ryan's broader complaint is hardly fully addressed, because the Toronto experience suggests that:

school inequality doesn't disappear as a result. Neighborhoods where parents are demanding, and school administrations dedicated, produce excellent schools. These aren't only affluent neighborhoods, either; as in most places, working-class immigrant neighborhoods with a high proportion of Asian students tend to produce good schools. Essentially, parents, teachers and administrations devoted to rigorous education tend to find each other, with mutually reinforcing results.

Relatively few students take advantage of the opportunities given to them. The high school I attended was one of the best in the city, and a steady trickle of students from other neighborhoods flowed to it. And every year, a flood of relatively affluent local students in their final year of high school rushed away to a less demanding school, where they could obtain their minimum cutoff mark for general arts programs at lesser universities without taxing themselves. Meanwhile, many of my friends from other high schools would insist that their own high school--no matter how poorly rated by universities--was in fact an outstanding institution, far better than mine. (Stronger "school spirit" was often cited as a reason.)

Although crusaders like Ryan portray education as commodity piped into neighborhoods--usually in the form of tax dollars--it is in fact, as the Toronto experience demonstrates, a complicated cooperative endeavor involving children, parents, teachers and administrators. And a lack of talent, effort or competence on the part of any of these can undermine the whole project. Hence attempting to ensure equality of supply of education (as of a commodity) is likely to be less successful than aiming to provide all children with an equal opportunity to participate in the endeavor. And if only a modest fraction of children end up seizing their chance--well, that's better than none at all, and perhaps all that can be hoped for, given the reluctance of many families in a large city like Toronto to sacrifice so much as a daily bus ride for the sake of a better education.

To my utter astonishment, Matthew Yglesias, a bona fide liberal blogger, is apparently willing to concede that maybe allowing judges to run roughshod over democracy wasn't necessarily such a great idea after all:

What are we gaining from having such powerful judges? A quick glance at the ugly confirmation wars tells us what we are losing. Are our fundamental liberties really more secure than those of Canadians and Australians?

To my even greater astonishment, the generally liberal contributors to his comments section have reacted, not with scorn and ridicule, but with understanding and even occasional agreement.

A cynic, of course, would make the connection between this deathbed conversion and the Republicans' near-complete control (apart from a filibuster or two) of the federal judicial nominations process. (Perhaps that's why Bush v. Gore didn't open many eyes on the left--at the time, liberals presumably still saw medium-term hope of regaining control of the appointments apparatus.) And in any event, the new status quo has conspicuously muted conservatives' once-virulent resentment of "judicial activism", as they contemplate the exciting new powers they may now be able to wield through their judicial proxies.

Still, a small voice of sanity is a welcome thing, no matter how insignificant its likely effect.

Daniel Drezner has "decidedly mixed feelings" about the US government's "policy" of letting the dollar weaken with respect to other currencies. I wonder how he felt three years ago about the government's "policy" of letting the stock market "weaken" with respect to US currency, or three months ago about its "policy" of letting oil prices "strengthen" during the run-up to the war in Iraq.

As Morgan Stanley's Stephen Roach has been pointing out for months now, there are deep global economic imbalances that point inexorably in the direction of a lower dollar. The only question is whether the dollar's decline will be relatively orderly, as it has been so far, or catastrophic, like the currency crashes felt by many developing countries in 1998. The best way to ensure the latter outcome would be for the government to embrace the fiction that the dollar's relative value is determined primarily by government policy, and therefore to make a series of inevitably feckless, short-lived attempts to defend it against the insurmountable forces of global supply and demand.