Light posting, and this time I mean it

Barring some totally earthshattering event, there won't be any posting here for the rest of this month. Too many other things to deal with right now. I do have one or two things in the works, so be sure to check back in May, y'all.

And one word to my (very) small group of regular readers: Thanks.

On Britain, France, and border controls

Ten of the twelve suspected terror plotters arrested in the U.K. in the recent raids were in the country on student visas (and were Pakistani nationals), leading to calls to reform the visa system, among other things. Border and immigration controls continue to be contentious, even when the threat of terrorism is not the main issue. In 2003, Britain and France reached an agreement giving each country's border police some limited jurisdiction in the other country: France in a zone in Dover, Britain in a zone in Calais. Now the two countries are working on a controversial plan to build a new center in Calais with the aim of making it easier to deport undocumented asylum-seekers, particularly Afghanis, Iraqis, and migrants from the horn of Africa, who seek entry into Britain by getting on trucks that will cross the Channel (via the tunnel).

Rodrik on Johnson on bankers

I hadn't been over to D. Rodrik's blog in a long time. This post is interesting, plus an exchange in the comments.

Perhaps not a great idea

From James R. Martel's review (in Political Theory, current issue) of Philip Tetlock's Expert Political Judgment:

"Tetlock tells us that we need to filter out a lot of the 'noise' that is out there in the world of expert judgment. His proposal, to expand the anonymous peer reviewing that we have in academic publishing to other kinds of expert predictions...is interesting. He himself concedes it might be a tough sell, however, given the free for all in contemporary punditry."

A tough sell ... um, yes. And it should be.

15th anniversary of Rwandan genocide

Rwandans have held vigils and other ceremonies on the fifteenth anniversary of the 1994 genocide. The Rwandan genocide, tragic in itself, aggravated a simmering war in eastern Congo, helping to turn it into a full-fledged civil and regional conflict. Despite a number of books on the genocide, the full history of its intersection with the conflicts in Congo and the broader region probably has yet to be written.

Update: Gérard Prunier, Africa's World War: Congo, the Rwandan Genocide, and the Making of a Continental Catastrophe (Oxford UP, 2008), may be what I had in mind.

Gold on the floor

From Christopher Hitchens's review (Atlantic, April '09) of Francis Wheen's book on Marx's Capital:

"Sometimes...Marx did manage to illuminate the ways in which the industrial system really functioned. But very often he allowed sheer outrage to guide his pen.... In the first volume of Capital..., he has capitalism speaking in the words of Shylock; includes an extract from Timon of Athens wherein money is described as the 'common whore of mankind'; and offers still another denunciation of the cash nexus, from the Antigone of Sophocles. One of the most famous phrases of Marx's vast correspondence during the writing of the book expresses his hatred for having to work on 'the economic shit,' and one recalls Lenin's revealing opinion about gold -- that it was fit only to supply the flooring for public lavatories."

Light posting

There probably will not be any posting here for the next couple of weeks.

Stand-up comedy and our reptile brains

Note: HC wrote this guest post; LFC furnished the title. The post contains some language that certain readers may find offensive.
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Bro (that’s me) and LFC went to a comedy club (actually a cinema-'n-draft-house doubling as a comedy club) on Saturday night. We originally set out to see a movie but got lost in Arlington (Va.) because I had jotted down the Google directions without looking at the Google map (always a mistake); so, in a decision that would have made André Breton proud, we gave up hope of making the movie (Doubt) and pulled up at a random movie house whose marquis advertised something starting at exactly the time it then was (9:45).

Turned out the thing advertised, Doug Benson, was not a movie at all but a stand-up comic best known for his jokes about pot and his movie about smoking too much of it (Super High Me). We had traded Doubt for Doug, exchanged a highbrow film with some capital-a acting for jokes about jacking off and gays. Whee! Plus everyone was smoking (cigarettes), there was no noticeable ventilation, and it was one of those bars where they had the contract with Heineken not Becks, which is almost as bad as Pepsi not Coke.

Doug himself was highbrow compared to the warm-up acts, which I don’t really remember, but I’ll try. Each guy had his schtick. The black guy talked about sex. Funniest bit was about getting old, which was not affecting his sex drive but was affecting his drive to do the stuff it took to get sex. First white guy talked about sex too, starting off with a joke designed to trigger/allay the anxieties of the guys in the audience. (Does size matter? Of course it does. You gals need to stay small and tight. I don’t want to be f---ing an open car door.) He also made jokes about his weight even though he was not really fat, just as the black guy was not really old. Second white guy did physical comedy about how he was a yellow belt in karate and how those karate moves (like the palm strike) were so gay.

Then came third white guy and main act of the evening, Doug, who seemed smart enough to know the audience, for the most part, probably wasn’t. He acted high, shuffling around the stage and reading jokes from napkins, then putting them either in the right (“yes”) pocket or the left (“no”) pocket of his vinyl windbreaker depending on crowd reaction. He had a patrician manner and occasionally used some big words and even made one joke about politics: McDonald's is a democracy because you get a choice of bacon or sausage on your McGriddles, unlike Florida and Michigan, where you don’t have a vote.

Doug was a method actor inhabiting a role. He probably rubbed his eyes a lot just to make them look bloodshot. Probably not that far from Philip Seymour Hoffmann in Doubt after all. The role allowed Doug to get away with some sophisticated stuff, because among your average kids today (by “kids” I mean anyone under 40 taking a date to a comedy club) being stoned seems to excuse all kinds of things, like word play and caring about politics, that would otherwise just be gay.

All in all it was pretty depressing but I admire any kind of public performance and I also admired the way the comics stood in the lobby afterward next to their CDs and t-shirts (their “merch” as Doug said) while the crowd avoided eye contact and filed by into the drizzly night.

Postscript. Did you see the piece in the NY Times the other day about how it’s hard to remember puns because the act of getting them resolves them so thoroughly that they are wiped out of our memory banks? I wonder if that’s true for jokes in general. Which would mean that comedians are bards, keeping alive an oral tradition that we can’t lodge in our heads. (Have you heard the one about x? Maybe, but tell us again, we can’t remember.) To put it another way, comedians are the collective memory of our reptile brains. Another Heineken please. I like the red star on the label.

-- HC

Megacities

Last fall, UN-Habitat released its annual State of the World's Cities report. As summarized in The Guardian of Oct. 23, '08, the report highlights two trends in particular: (1) growing economic inequality within cities, in both developing and 'developed' countries; and (2) continuing rapid urbanization (and concomitant deruralization) in the global South.

On the first point, according to The Guardian, the report finds New York "to be the ninth most unequal [city] in the world," while inequality levels in Atlanta, New Orleans, Washington, D.C., and Miami match those of Nairobi and Abidjan. The most unequal cities are in South Africa, Namibia, and Latin America.

On the second point, the report predicts that 70 percent of the world's population will live in urban areas by 2050, and of that population, well over half will live in Asian cities. Forty-nine new cities have been built in the past 18 years in China alone. "Urban growth rates are highest in the developing world, which absorbs an average [of] 5 million new urban residents a month and is responsible for 95 percent of world urban growth" [my italics]. At the same time, some older cities in the 'developed' world have been losing population as a result of deindustrialization and other factors.

In 2007, the four most populous cities were Tokyo (35.7 million), Mexico City (19 m.), New York-Newark (19 m.), and Sao Paulo (19 m.). In 2025, the report projects that Tokyo will still be number one (with 36.4 million), but numbers 2, 3, and 4 will be two Indian cities -- Mumbai and Delhi -- and Dhaka (capital of Bangladesh), with 26.4, 22.5, and 22 million, respectively. Dhaka, which had 13.5 million in 2007, will nearly double in population by 2025, according to this projection.

[Hat tip: A post of 10/23/08 at Blue Republic of America.]

ISI's "ambiguous" relation to the Taliban

Yesterday, listening briefly to an excerpt of the confirmation hearings for the lieutenant general who is the Obama administration's nominee for ambassador to Afghanistan, I took particular note of his acknowledgment that Pakistan's security service, the ISI, has an "ambiguous" relation with the Taliban. Was this fairly standard diplo-speak or a way of saying "we aren't really sure," or both?

Update (added 3/28): Adm. Mullen and Gen. Petraeus have spoken recently on ISI links with Taliban and al-Qaeda.

Clouded leopard cubs

Cool.

Soaring Eagles, departing journals

Two notes related to American University:

• Despite my general indifference to basketball and almost total lack of interest in "March madness," I happened to see a bit of the A.U.-Villanova game last week (at least I think it was last week). The A.U. team lost, as expected, but made a surprisingly good showing. At one point a rather overexcited announcer declared that the Eagles represented "a great university" (I'm not saying, definitively, that they don't, I'm just saying the announcer was overexcited). Maybe we should start ranking universities by how many times sports announcers say hyped-up things about them. After all, some website is already ranking schools in terms of their proximity to "pumping surf" (see a recent post on this at The Monkey Cage).
  
  
• The A.U. library is moving all its bound periodicals, with the exception of certain arts journals, off-site to the Washington Research Library Consortium storage facility. The space crunch is the main reason given (the library buys 22,000 new books each year), and the FAQ sheet on the relocation project also says that "our findings show that a little more than 6 percent of our bound-volume collection was used last year...." Of course, what this figure, however arrived at exactly, almost certainly misses is that at least a few people occasionally browse through the bound periodicals (much as others might browse through the book stacks), without photocopying a particular article or even taking a bound volume from the shelf back to a desk. Such browsing obviously will no longer be possible once the relocation is finished.
  

Bach's birthday

Listening to the radio in the car just now, I was reminded by the announcer that J.S. Bach "was born on this day in 1685. Perhaps" -- the announcer added (gratuitously?) -- "the greatest genius in Western music."

I like Bach, but there are moods and times when only Rachmaninoff or Tchaikovsky (or perhaps Dvorák) will do.

Is there a "blogging community"?

I was in a bookstore the other day and happened to look at the jacket flap of Matthew Yglesias' book, which touts his prominence in the Washington, D.C. "blogging community." I know there are a number of bloggers in and around Washington, D.C., but do they/we form a community?

Maybe there's a secret, sinister listserv that I'm not on.

Narco-corruption in Afghanistan

Margaret Warner's report on the PBS Newshour yesterday underlined the severity of the problems.

Bonnie Honig on 'Slumdog Millionaire'

In a remarkable column on 'Slumdog Millionaire' (published in Indian Express last month), political theorist Bonnie Honig reads the movie as "a meditation on the contradictions of democracy and the ideological faces of global capital."

This is the kind of piece that probably should be read on the page not the screen, so, having not yet printed it out but just read it on the computer (and read it somewhat hastily at that), my reactions must be tentative. What Honig says about the movie's peddling a fantasy that the global capitalist economy rewards human singularity, when in fact it doesn't, seems right. But the movie's consciousness of the fantasy-like quality of its plot (among other things) prevents it, I would suggest, from being an apology for capitalism (and I suspect Honig would agree).

Where I am less convinced by the piece is its argument about democracy. What makes Jamal's story a "tale of democracy," Honig says, is its "dependence on chance," and she quotes Jacques Rancière on contingency's link to democracy. I do not really see this, at least not as clearly as she does. It's also telling, I think, that the words "justice" and "injustice" do not appear in the column. If instead of citing Rancière, Lacan, and Hannah Arendt, Honig had quoted, say, Amartya Sen or Thomas Pogge, the column might have had a somewhat different flavor. That said, this piece is still worth reading and, indeed, worth printing out.

[Hat tip: The Virtual Stoa]

Tell it, man

In a rather wild blog post (well, maybe all his posts are like this, I don't know), David Rothkopf at FP reports on a British medical study which concludes that rapid economic transitions (e.g., the ex-USSR's transition to its version of post-Communism) can be quite deadly, literally. In the course of this not-short (and, I must admit, occasionally funny) piece, Rothkopf suggests, inter alia, that Obama & Co. have replaced the bust of Churchill with a sculpture of Trotsky. Ha ha.

Quote of the day

"One of [Orwell's] most enduring interests was in the cultivation of pure and direct English, where his concern almost matched the intensity of Swift's. Sixty years later I remember resolving that the essay 'Politics and the English Language' (1946) should be a kind of touchstone (allowing for some Orwellian quirks) for my own writing, a memory clouded by the necessary admission that I have not used it often enough."

-- Frank Kermode, reviewing Orwell in 'Tribune': 'As I Please' and Other Writings 1943-7, in New York Review of Books, June 14, 2007

FMLN candidate wins in El Salvador

Mauricio Funes, candidate of the FMLN, which fought under a revolutionary banner in El Salvador's long and costly civil war that ended in the early 1990s, has won that country's presidential elections. Funes, 49, did not fight in the civil war but covered it as a TV journalist. Although his opponents depicted him as a clone of Hugo Chavez, Funes ran on what a San Francisco Chronicle piece published yesterday called a "moderate platform."

The SF Chronicle notes:

"Today, Funes avoids wearing the FMLN color - red - and has adopted several positions at odds with the party. He does not support dropping the U.S. dollar as the nation's currency nor legislation that would reverse a 1993 law granting amnesty to army officers accused of war crimes, arguing judicial and financial reforms would be a better way to address past injustices. He also says he is against big government.

'We're not talking about making the state bigger or intervening in the economy,' he said recently. 'We're talking about making a better state.'"

Doesn't sound much like Chavez to me.

Afghanistan update

The last few days have been bad even by the current standards, with a British soldier, a French soldier, four American soldiers, and a number of Afghan civilians killed and injured (the latter in a suicide attack on a NATO patrol in Kabul that killed civilians only). Plus there was a bomb attack on the mayor of Kandahar's convoy, which he survived.