Filed under: Israel
It’s become fairly clear over the past couple of decades that the principle that every people deserves political self-determination, i.e. a state of their own, can be taken too far. NATO handled the 1998-99 Kosovo situation as well as could be expected under the circumstances, but it’s not clear to me that a far better outcome than an independent Kosovo that’s really not a viable state might not have been achievable. I don’t understand the point of Flemish, Abkhazian or Ossetian independence, and independent East Timor is not doing too well. In some cases, international commitments to guaranteeing independence to any population that wants it seem guaranteed to generate weak, dependent states that might even be considered neo-colonialist.
That said, there is at least one population in the world that genuinely needs to get an independent state as soon as feasible, even if it doesn’t appear economically viable. So on this July 4, let’s hope the year brings us closer to an independent Palestine with a peaceful relationship with its Israeli neighbor.
John Quiggin Holbo thinks Matthew Yglesias is wrong: the answer to the question on the French Bac exam is that it’s not absurd to desire the impossible. What’s clear is that if French teens consider this question a serious one, it’s because they have quite rightly been listening to plenty of Paris-based Swedish musician Peter Von Poehl.
Filed under: Human Rights and Torture
People seem to have trouble understanding something about the reason why the regimes we think of as extremely evil tortured people. Here’s the thing: they tortured people because they really, honestly believed that those people were mortal threats to the general welfare. So when you, present-day American or anyone else, say “Yes, it’s wrong to torture, but it’s morally excusable if you really believe the victim is a mortal threat to the general welfare…” One sees the problem here.
Why do I bring this up? Because, on Andrew Sullivan’s blog, Chris B. recently got himself in trouble by writing:
Khamenei torture is on a different level than Cheney torture. For the crime of getting caught on camera holding a bloody shirt, Ahmand Batebi was whipped with cables, beat in the genitals, and basically waterboarded in human excrement. But more to the point: he and his fellow students were tortured for their political beliefs, not their perceived ties to terrorism.
A reader countered: “Their perceived ties to terrorism are Cheney’s political beliefs, surely. But that’s beside the point too. Torture is torture is torture is torture.” And Chris responded by digging himself in deeper:
…while I’m firmly anti-torture, I actually think the ticking-time bomb scenario can be justified. But my take is very different from the likes of Krauthammer; I think the TTB scenario can be ethically justified, not legally justified. Torture should always – always – be illegal. But in the infinitesimally small chance that someone is put in the situation where he or she is convinced – convinced – that a captured terrorist will prevent the deaths of countless people, torturing one person would be the lesser of two grave evils.
There are two things to say here. The first is that the Ahmadinejad regime does torture people for “their perceived ties to terrorism”. To them, the demonstrators they face in the streets are traitors, foreign agents, saboteurs, and so forth — mortal threats to the Iranian people. Are such beliefs ludicrous? What then do we call the beliefs of the American officials, up to and including Cheney, who believed that the Uighur detainees at Guantanamo were “tied to terrorism” or in any way posed a threat to the US? More importantly, how can the degree of horror of the act of torture rest on the degree of accuracy of the torturer’s assessments of the victim’s political beliefs? Who is empowered to decide how “convinced — convinced” the torturer is? Do people who are more “convinced” of their own correctness have a greater right to commit acts of violence against others?
The answer is obviously no, which leads us to that second point, which I mentioned earlier: we have to understand that the people we condemn for committing horrific acts usually believed those actions were morally right, and justified in self-defense. Lenin really believed that the tens of thousands of Whites and White sympathizers he and Dzerzhinsky tortured and had put to death during the Civil War were mortal threats to the welfare of Russia and all humankind. Hitler really believed that Jews were parasites who posed a mortal threat to the German people. And many of the police in modern autocracies who proclaim their political opponents to be “terrorists” really believe what they’re saying. That doesn’t give them the right to torture anyone, and no similar reasoning can give us such a right, either.
Filed under: Media
Megan McArdle has an excellent, excellent post up on the very real problem of the death of the business model that supports news reporting. When I say “excellent, excellent,” I may be somewhat influenced by the fact that I just drank two Hoegaarden witbiers while sitting out on the Museumplein watching the 10:30 pm sunset. But even discounting for the witbier factor, it’s an excellent post:
Journalism is not being brought low by excess supply of content; it’s being steadily eroded by insufficient demand for advertising pages….Even if every newspaper and magazine in the country entered into a binding cartel agreement not to put more than a smidgen of free content on their websites, newspapers would still be losing money, and closing by the dozens. It’s the economics, stupid.
We’re not witnessing the breakup of a monopoly, in which more players make more modest incomes providing more stuff, and everyone flourishes (except the monopolist). We’re witnessing the death of a business model. And no one has figured out how to pay for hard news. Hard news stories take a great deal of time to write–more time than most amateurs can afford, which is why blogs tend to do opinion rather than journalism. Moreover, they are at least greatly improved when their authors are not worried about losing their jobs if what they write pisses off a local power broker.
This is a genuine loss for the American public. Cities without newspapers seem to experience a sizeable increase in insider self-dealing and other forms of corruption–one theory as to why the Federal government is less corrupt than state and local governments is simply that it’s more thoroughly covered by the press. I am second to none in my appreciation of new media and its possibilities. But so far, it has proven more effective as a complement to old media than a replacement.
This seems exactly right to me. There are a few types of reporting that still have a solid business model going forward. The first, obviously, is financial news. The WSJ, the FT, The Economist (or at least their Intelligence Unit), Bloomberg, Dow-Jones and Reuters are all on solid footing; wealthy and powerful people need their information to make decisions about how to spend large amounts of money. The second is government-supported news services. The BBC, AFP, VOA, and of course such outfits as Russia Today, Al-Jazeera and so forth will continue to have money. Then we have the non-financial wire services — mainly AP. Their revenue model seems mostly sound for the time being (though I was surprised to learn how much of it comes from the US government as a client). And finally, we have the big-name “national” newspapers — the New York Times, the Guardian, the Washington Post. Their revenue model is not sound, but their brands are so strong that it’s hard to imagine them failing to capitalize somehow if/when the economy returns to prosperity. (Though the Post, which is failing to protect its brand, is looking shaky lately.)
I’m not sure there’s a single other English-language news outlet, certainly not in the US, that’s definitely going to exist in 5 or 10 years. Increasingly, what we think of as “news” today is going to be produced by public relations companies, advocacy organizations, think tanks, and political parties, trying to get their messages out. There will be fewer and fewer impartial news organizations that make money simply by getting people to pay attention to important or juicy news stories. This is a loss for the American public, as Megan says, and it’s really not clear how to overcome it.
Two new contributions on how to save the news from the threat of Free on the internet: Malcolm Gladwell’s New Yorker article and Richard Posner’s blog post of last week. Matthew Yglesias takes Posner to task for this apparently ill-thought-out idea:
Expanding copyright law to bar online access to copyrighted materials without the copyright holder’s consent, or to bar linking to or paraphrasing copyrighted materials without the copyright holder’s consent, might be necessary to keep free riding on content financed by online newspapers…
Yglesias writes:
In my years of blogging, I have never once heard the author of an article or the editor of a publication complain to me about having linked to an article. By contrast, on a daily basis authors and editors ask me to link to their articles… The Posner proposal would make it illegal for me to debate the merits of Posner’s argument without first securing Posner’s specific approval. Online dialogue about political topics would grind to a halt. It would become impossible to review movies, recommend TV shows, praise songs, etc.
What I find flabbergasting is how few people seem to turn first to the obvious solution worked out for these kinds of situations about 80 years ago by the music writing industry in response to the advent of recorded music and “free” content on the radio, viz., compulsory licensing. Yglesias is absolutely right that requiring permission to link or paraphrase content is completely unworkable. The obvious solution would seem to be charging a tiny standard compulsory fee to link, and monitoring the number of hits attracted by the link to award money to the linked-to content on a compulsory flat-fee basis. In the music industry, every time a radio station plays “Beat It”, Michael Jackson’s estate gets a little money, and the amount of money per play is determined by ASCAP or BMI. Solutions based on this principle can be worked out for blogging; they have to be more complicated and the revenue streams are different, but fortunately the incredibly sophisticated architecture of the internet makes such solutions much more feasible than they were for radio. I simply don’t understand why the entire discussion with regard to moving news content out of the Free zone doesn’t revolve around compulsory pay-per-click solutions.
In a related development, here in the Netherlands last week a blue-ribbon government panel (the Commissie Brinkman) issued a report (sorry, Dutch only) on the future of the Dutch newspaper industry. The basic recommendations were for a tax on internet subscriptions with proceeds to subsidize the newspapers, and for government-led initiatives to push broadcasters and newspapers to collaborate. The Dutch situation is different from the US’s because Holland has always subsidized its various broadcasters, and what the Brinkman Report points out is that in an era when the genres of broadcast news and print news have merged on the internet, the subsidy for broadcasters leaves newspapers at an unfair disadvantage.
The internet-subscription tax was met with thunderous critique, and the proposal seems DOA. (Though to me it seems like in principle a non-crazy idea.) But what I’ve missed in the discussion of the Brinkman Report, again, is any discussion of how the new system would incentivize good work on the part of the beneficiaries of the subsidy. It’s all very well to create subsidies for newspapers, but they’re likely to use those subsidies to churn out third-rate junk unless there are competitive incentives. Once again, the compulsory-licensing scheme should be the model: with per-link and per-click payment models, the best work can be rewarded while mediocre work no one ever looks at is not subsidized.
Like Paul Krugman and Ezra Klein, I think the border adjustment amendment to the Waxman-Markey bill, which would impose tariffs on countries that have no carbon emissions limits beginning about a decade from now, makes perfect sense. It seems particularly logical with regard to China and Southeast Asia. The whole anxiety over imposing cap-and-trade carbon emissions limits has been that China will refuse to go along. What better incentive to encourage them to join the rest of the world and impose some limits? The potential tariffs appear to be legal under WTO rules, and economic theory argues they make perfect sense — they simply equalize the playing field by preventing countries from exploiting a lower environmental standard to gain an unfair advantage.
If there’s any reason for the US to fear the idea of border adjustments for carbon reductions, one would think the fear should be directed towards Europe and Japan, rather than China. If Europe and Japan get they idea that they could impose tariffs on US goods based on their much lower carbon emissions per dollar of GDP and the US’s vastly lower gas taxes, that might hurt US exports. But it would also be good for the planet.
I’m now posting from my wife’s home country, the Netherlands, where we’ll be for the next 3 weeks or so.
Nice country they’ve got here. Shame if something were to happen to it.
Filed under: Environment
Andrew Sullivan correctly explains where I am coming from in responding to the reader whose critique is that the specific effects of Waxman-Markey don’t justify its cost. That reader wrote:
By all accounts, the bill’s not nearly radical enough to cause the sorts of changes that would save Venice, or the polar bear, or the snows of Kilimanjaro. If Waxman-Markey is the end of the story, polar bears are still a goner by the end of the century, and probably much sooner than that.
We’re standing here after 30 years of debate over the effects of man-made global warming and what we ought to do about it. We have finally come to a consensus (most of us, anyway) that something has to be done. (I have to restrain myself, each time, from writing “about a problem that threatens to destroy the Earth as we know it.” But that’s not hyperbole. As Joe Romm summarizes, MIT’s mainstream predictions now put CO2 at 866 ppm by the end of the century, while the Copenhagen meeting of 2000 climate scientists last December put it at 1000 ppm – more than double the unacceptable 450 ppm level at which scientists envision an ice-free planet. The ultimate trajectory in such scenarios is for sea levels 250 feet higher than today. Of course it would take centuries for enough ice to melt to raise sea levels by 20 feet or more — or maybe not, according to more recent research.)
Anyway, at this point in this miserable, far-too-slow process, we finally have grudging agreement that something has to be done. And Waxman-Markey is the something that we can get done, at current levels of political willingness. So now, mutatis mutandi, the argument being raised is that Waxman-Markey is insufficient to accomplish the things that need to be done. Of course this argument will always be raised against whatever step we try to take first, no matter what it should be.
And here, that Matthew Yglesias post from a while back is right: this really is precisely one of Parfit’s “Mistakes in Moral Mathematics” — namely, the idea that a measure which, by itself, is insufficient to achieve a moral goal unless everyone else takes similar measures is therefore without moral value. In Parfit’s example, it remains moral for each person to individually try to save a group of trapped coal miners, even if the absence of any one of those individuals would make no difference in the end. To say that there is no point trying to rescue the miners because it will have no effect unless everyone else tries, too, is to embrace an obvious moral monstrosity.
We are trying to arrest global warming before it destroys the planet as we know it. The bill we have is nowhere near sufficient to do that, but it is a first step. It is always possible to argue against taking the first step in a task that appears tremendously difficult. Two familiar arguments of this form are “But no one else will join us, they will abandon us,” and “The task is too great, so better to accept reality and make the best of things while we still can.” In Tolkien, these arguments are respectively illustrated by the characters of Wormwood and Denethor.
Filed under: Environment
This is the summary of a report from a mainstream US Government research body formed by the Department of Energy.
We have examined the principal attempts to simulate the effects of increased atmospheric CO2 on climate. In doing so, we have limited our considerations to the direct climatic effects of steadily rising atmospheric concentrations of CO2 and have assumed a rate of CO2increase that would lead to a doubling of airborne concentrations by some time in the first half of the twenty-first century. As indicated in Chapter 2 of this report, such a rate is consistent with observations of CO2 increases in the recent past and with projections of its future sources and sinks. …When it is assumed that the CO2 content of the atmosphere is doubled and statistical thermal equilibrium is achieved, the more realistic of the modeling efforts predict a global surface warming of between 2°C and 3.5°C, with greater increases at high latitudes.
So there you go. Sounds about par for the course, right? Seems to fit the predictions you see in other studies, like that MIT study published in May that predicts global warming of 5.2 degrees Celsius by 2100, and so on. Probably a middle-of-the-road study from last December or so, eh?
Except in fact the above report dates from 1979. It’s called “Carbon Dioxide and Climate: A Scientific Assessment,” and it’s the report of the Carbon Dioxide Effects Research and Assessment Program, formed by James Schlesinger, who became the first Secretary of Energy after President Carter created the department in 1977. This is well before James Hansen delivered his celebrated warnings to Congress in the mid-1980s.
We’ve known about all this stuff for 30 years now. Everything one might have expected to occur based on the report has, in fact, happened in the subsequent 30 years. The scientific consensus has become overwhelming as the data and models become orders of magnitude more convincing and sophisticated. Yet there are still people wandering around arguing it’s not happening, and it’s taken us 3 decades to even begin to do anything about it. Talk about a procrastination problem.
Here’s the difference between us: even though the things he writes have led to the deaths of American soldiers and have severely harmed the US’s cause abroad, I would never advocate that the US military kill Ralph Peters.
