Current Affairs

by publius

Unlike Hilzoy, I was more sympathetic to Ezra Klein’s “Down With Values” argument. So at the risk of sparking a rootin-tootin’ ObWi family feud, I’m going to try to defend it.

Maybe I’m expanding it, but I read Klein’s argument as expressing skepticism of abstractions (and policy-by-abstractions), rather than skepticism of the individual abstract values themselves. In this sense, his foreign policy argument seems to be philosophical — he’s skeptical of theory itself. One question it raises is whether theory has any useful role to play in the foreign policy realm.

I recognize that I’m using “theory” a bit loosely. For today, “theory” refers to a comprehensive abstract ideology cited as an animating foreign policy principle. For instance, a foreign policy based on “freedom” or “justice” is what I’m calling “foreign policy by theory.”

With that in mind, the first problem with foreign policy by theory is that it flips empiricism on its head. The idea of empiricism is that you study the individual situation first, and draw abstract conclusions second. An abstraction-based foreign policy — whether democracy-promotion or Communism — reverses this order. It begins with the abstraction (often with excessive epistemological certainty) and applies it to the individual situation.

Consider how these two approaches might play out regarding, say, China and Taiwan. Approaching the dispute with a blank slate would likely lead the US to stay mute and ambiguous. China is very touchy about it, and a military escalation over Taiwan would be disastrous for pretty much everyone (and every market) involved. If we decided, however, that our commitment to the abstract idea of freedom outweighed these pragmatic concerns, we might act in a very unwise way (or interpret events in an inaccurate way). This is a simplified example, but the broader point is that approaching objective reality with a pre-existing theory in mind colors and distorts our perceptions.

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by hilzoy

Atrios picked up on a story that I’ve been watching for a couple of days now: the near-implosion of two Bear Stearns hedge funds. Since this post is long-ish, and has no obvious dividing lines, I’m putting it below the fold.

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by hilzoy

From the Washington Post:

“Army Spec. Jeans Cruz helped capture Saddam Hussein. When he came home to the Bronx, important people called him a war hero and promised to help him start a new life. The mayor of New York, officials of his parents’ home town in Puerto Rico, the borough president and other local dignitaries honored him with plaques and silk parade sashes. They handed him their business cards and urged him to phone.

But a “black shadow” had followed Cruz home from Iraq, he confided to an Army counselor. He was hounded by recurring images of how war really was for him: not the triumphant scene of Hussein in handcuffs, but visions of dead Iraqi children.

In public, the former Army scout stood tall for the cameras and marched in the parades. In private, he slashed his forearms to provoke the pain and adrenaline of combat. He heard voices and smelled stale blood. Soon the offers of help evaporated and he found himself estranged and alone, struggling with financial collapse and a darkening depression.

At a low point, he went to the local Department of Veterans Affairs medical center for help. One VA psychologist diagnosed Cruz with post-traumatic stress disorder. His condition was labeled “severe and chronic.” In a letter supporting his request for PTSD-related disability pay, the psychologist wrote that Cruz was “in need of major help” and that he had provided “more than enough evidence” to back up his PTSD claim. His combat experiences, the letter said, “have been well documented.”

None of that seemed to matter when his case reached VA disability evaluators. They turned him down flat, ruling that he deserved no compensation because his psychological problems existed before he joined the Army. They also said that Cruz had not proved he was ever in combat. “The available evidence is insufficient to confirm that you actually engaged in combat,” his rejection letter stated.

Yet abundant evidence of his year in combat with the 4th Infantry Division covers his family’s living-room wall. The Army Commendation Medal With Valor for “meritorious actions . . . during strategic combat operations” to capture Hussein hangs not far from the combat spurs awarded for his work with the 10th Cavalry “Eye Deep” scouts, attached to an elite unit that caught the Iraqi leader on Dec. 13, 2003, at Ad Dawr.

Veterans Affairs will spend $2.8 billion this year on mental health. But the best it could offer Cruz was group therapy at the Bronx VA medical center. Not a single session is held on the weekends or late enough at night for him to attend. At age 25, Cruz is barely keeping his life together. He supports his disabled parents and 4-year-old son and cannot afford to take time off from his job repairing boilers. The rough, dirty work, with its heat and loud noises, gives him panic attacks and flesh burns but puts $96 in his pocket each day.

Once celebrated by his government, Cruz feels defeated by its bureaucracy.”

Read the whole thing. It’s horrible. More below the fold.

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by Charles

Threatening another TV network that dares to confront a socialist dictator, which is exactly what Hugo Chavez has done.

Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez on Tuesday called opposition news channel Globovision an enemy of the state and said he would do what was needed to stop it from inciting violence, only days after he shut another opposition broadcaster.

Tens of thousands of Venezuelans marched in Caracas in a fourth consecutive day of protests over Chavez’s closure of the RCTV network – a move which has sparked international criticism that the leftist leader’s reforms are undermining democracy.

State television showed hundreds of government supporters marching in downtown Caracas celebrating Chavez’s decision.

"Enemies of the homeland, particularly those behind the scenes, I will give you a name: Globovision. Greetings gentlemen of Globovision, you should watch where you are going," Chavez said in a broadcast all channels had to show.

"I recommend you take a tranquilizer and get into gear, because if not, I am going to do what is necessary."

More below the fold.

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by hilzoy

Just for the heck of it, I thought I’d try to figure out where I stand on immigration reform in general.

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by hilzoy

Turkey has recently been in the throes of a constitutional crisis. The basics are fairly straightforward: Turkey is led by an Islamist party (the AK party.) The Prime Minister, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan nominated his foreign minister, Abdullah Gül, to be Turkey’s next President. (The Turkish Presidency is largely ceremonial.) On April 27, the Turkish army responded by posting a communique on its web site that read, in part:

“Arguments over secularism are becoming a focus during the presidential election process and the Turkish armed forces are following the situation with concern. It must not be forgotten that the armed forces are the determined defenders of secularism.”

This was posted the day before the Turkish constitutional court was set to rule on the first round of parliamentary voting for the Presidency. The court ruled that not enough people had been present (the secularist parties had boycotted the vote), so the vote wasn’t valid. Meanwhile, there were large demonstrations against the AK party and in favor of secularism. Gül then withdrew as a candidate for President. However, the AK Party is moving to change Turkey’s constitution to allow the President to be elected by popular vote, which would allow it to bypass the secularists in the Parliament and the Courts.

***

By far the most serious part of this is the army’s none-too-subtle warning that it might mount a coup. This is not an idle threat. The Turkish military has staged four coups since 1945. The one I’m most familiar with took place in 1980 (with US support), and military rule lasted until 1983, when Turgut Özal, who had been Deputy Prime Minister under the junta. won an election in which many political parties were not allowed to compete. If you count this as the continuation of military rule by other means, it lasted for another decade.

During the three years of military rule, a lot of people were tortured. (Wikipedia cites Amnesty International as saying that “over a quarter of a million people were arrested in Turkey after the coup and that almost all of them were tortured.”) When I was in Turkey, in 1988, every Kurdish man I knew had been tortured, and the clear consensus was that while the government in power in 1988 was not exactly friendly to Kurds, the military government had been orders of magnitude worse.

The general point is: threats of coups by the Turkish military are nothing to sneeze at.

I think we should oppose these threats with all the means we have at our disposal. (And those means are considerable: we sell a lot of weapons to the Turkish army, and we give Turkey a lot of military assistance.) For one thing, Turkey is a democracy, and we should oppose the overthrow of democratically elected governments, absent some extraordinary circumstance that would have to involve at least that government’s suspension of its democratic institutions. For another, as I said, the Turkish army has a pretty dreadful track record when it comes to running the country.

Besides …

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by hilzoy

I’m a little late on this one, but here’s ABC’s The Blotter (via TPM):

“Deputy Secretary of State Randall L. Tobias submitted his resignation Friday, one day after confirming to ABC News that he had been a customer of a Washington, D.C. escort service whose owner has been charged by federal prosecutors with running a prostitution operation.

Tobias, 65, director of U.S. Foreign Assistance and administrator of the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), had previously served as the ambassador for the President’s Emergency Fund for AIDS Relief.

A State Department press release late Friday afternoon said only he was leaving for “personal reasons.”

On Thursday, Tobias told ABC News he had several times called the “Pamela Martin and Associates” escort service “to have gals come over to the condo to give me a massage.” Tobias, who is married, said there had been “no sex,” and that recently he had been using another service “with Central Americans” to provide massages.”

Ah, yes. Whenever I want to not have sex, I hire an escort service. It gets pretty expensive, what with all the time I spend not having sex, and the people at the dry cleaners look at me strangely when I show up to pick up my clothes, not having sex while accompanied by a bevy of hunky “Central Americans” (whose green cards I naturally check first), but hey: it’s my life, and if I want to not have sex while paying not to have it, that’s my business.

Via AmericaBlog, the Kaiser Daily HIV/AIDS Report from April 22, 2004:

“U.S. Global AIDS Coordinator Randall Tobias on Thursday in Berlin defended the use of prevention programs that emphasize sexual abstinence in African and Caribbean countries that are set to receive assistance through the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, Agence France-Presse reports (Agence France-Presse, 4/22). (…) Tobias, who was in Berlin for the Global Business Coalition on HIV/AIDS’ 2004 Awards for Business Excellence, said that promoting abstinence and monogamy are “far more effective” than distributing condoms for preventing the spread of HIV, according to Agence France-Presse. “Statistics show that condoms really have not been very effective,” Tobias said, adding, “It’s been the principal prevention device for the last 20 years, and I think one needs only to look at what’s happening with the infection rates in the world to recognize that has not been working.” PEPFAR has been criticized by AIDS advocates for placing “false hopes” on abstinence and monogamy prevention programs, according to Agence France-Presse.”

Rolling Stone:

“Ambassador Randall Tobias, who serves as Bush’s global AIDS czar, issued written guidelines in January that spell out the administration’s agenda. Groups that receive U.S. funding, Tobias warned, should not target youth with messages that present abstinence and condoms as “equally viable, alternative choices.” Zeitz of Global AIDS Alliance has dubbed the document “Vomitus Maximus.” He says, “I get physically ill when I read it. It has the biggest influence over how people are acting in the field.” And under a proposal being pushed by Republicans on Capitol Hill, Tobias would be given the power to divert even more money toward promoting abstinence. “All Republicans can think about is making Africans abstinent and monogamous,” says a Democratic staffer involved in the negotiations. “It’s the crassest form of international social engineering you could imagine.”

The anti-condom order issued by Tobias is already having a chilling effect among the groups most effective at combating AIDS. Population Services International, a major U.S. contractor with years of experience in HIV prevention, says it can no longer promote condoms to youth in Uganda, Zambia and Namibia because of PEPFAR rules. “That’s worrisome,” says PSI spokesman David Olson. “The evidence shows they’re having sex. You can disapprove of that, but you can’t deny it’s happening.””

That, no doubt, is why Tobias was so busy abstaining from sex with his escorts: he was putting his own body on the line in his efforts to prevent the spread of HIV.

A pity he forgot about one other part of the policies he was in charge of implementing:

“In passing the Bush global AIDS initiative, Congress included a provision requiring that all organizations receiving federal AIDS funds to have a policy “explicitly opposing” prostitution and sex trafficking in order to be eligible for U.S. funds (The Guttmacher Institute, 2003). The policy was originally applied to foreign organizations and was later broadened to a requirement of U.S. organizations receiving federal AIDS funds (Kohn, 2005). As with other ideology-based policies examined here, the implementation of the anti-prostitution pledge has resulted in a distorted environment that sacrifices lifesaving services and places ideology over people’s lives.

As a result of the policy, groups such as Population Services International (PSI), which runs HIV prevention programs targeting sex workers in bars and brothels in Central America, appear to be losing federal support (Kohn, 2005). Last year PSI’s program made contact with 422,000 people in high-risk groups and has demonstrated a significant decrease in HIV infections among sex workers. An official with the UNAIDS office cites the program as one of the best in the region. Other organizations, such as DKT International, refused to sign the clause on free speech grounds and as a result lost funding (Kohn, 2005; Phillips, 2005). DKT International has subsequently filed a lawsuit against the U.S. government. And the country of Brazil has refused $40 million in U.S. HIV/AIDS grants because they are conditioned on the pledge requirement (Phillips, 2005).

The pledge also is having a chilling effect, as groups wary of losing precious funds cut activities that are aimed at assisting sex workers. The ambiguity of the policy, which, for example, does not clearly define what it means by “prostitution,” exacerbates the problem. As a result, for fear of losing funding, nongovernmental organizations in Cambodia discontinued plans to provide English language classes to sex workers — classes which would potentially open opportunities for alternative income generation (CHANGE, 2005b). By forcing service providers to take a position condemning the very people they are seeking to help, the anti-prostitution pledge is yet another example of the Bush administration’s fervent commitment to serving the demands of its social conservative base. And it does so at the cost of the lives of those it purports to help through its HIV/AIDS funding and programs.”

Opposition to prostitution: it’s fine to impose it on others, but don’t ask the members of the Bush administration who defend and implement this policy to practice it themselves.

***

While I’m at it …

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by hilzoy

My heart goes out to everyone who was shot today, and to their friends and families, and to the community at Virginia Tech. I cannot imagine their grief; all my thoughts are with them.

I was out all afternoon and much of the evening, and so it hadn’t occurred to me that anyone would have made this into some sort of political issue. Not so soon. Not now, when kids are probably still in surgery, and their parents are pacing outside the doors of their hospital rooms.

I do not want to get into this, other than to make this one point: the idea that normal deterrent measures will affect people in the state of mind in which they might so much as think of lining people up and shooting them is, I think, completely wrong, at least, if my experience is any guide. Of course, it may not be: we know next to nothing about the shooter at the moment, and it could be that he — the coverage suggests that it is a he — has nothing in common with other people who do, or consider doing, similar things. But questions of policy should not turn on features unique to him in any case, so consider what follows a story that might or might not have any relevance.

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by hilzoy

Via ThinkProgress, Gwen Ifill has one pf the best responses I’ve seen to the whole episode:

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by hilzoy

(1) Did George Will really, truly mean to equate Paul Krugman and Ann Coulter? It sure sounds like it:

“There are the tantrums — sometimes both theatrical and perfunctory — of talking heads on television or commentators writing in vitriol (Paul Krugman’s incessant contempt, Ann Coulter’s equally constant loathing).”

I can’t wait to see what Krugman quotes Will thinks are even remotely comparable to such highlights of the Coulter oeuvre as: “”My only regret with Timothy McVeigh is he did not go to the New York Times Building”, or “We need somebody to put rat poisoning in Justice Stevens’ creme brulee.”

Besides, Paul Krugman is a very, very good economist. As far as I can tell, his attitude towards the Bush administration comes mostly from the fact that they have been systematically mendacious about an area of policy he knows an awful lot about; and the fact that he was angry earlier than most people just reflects the fact that he, unlike a lot of commenters, actually knows a major area of policy well enough to know when people are lying about it. The day Ann Coulter wins the second most prestigious prize in economics (after the Nobel), or any remotely comparable academic award*, I will personally post a video of myself singing a Kyrgyz translation of Bob Dylan’s “Leopard-Skin Pillbox Hat” while wearing a tutu and standing on my head.

I do not own a tutu. Heck, I don’t even own a video recorder. I can’t think, offhand, how I would get “Leopard-Skin Pillbox Hat” translated into Kyrgyz. Yet somehow I’m not too worried. A miracle of composure in the face of danger: that’s me.

(2) Via David Kurtz, writing at TPM, the Las Vegas Sun has the US Attorney scandal quote of the day:

“On Dec. 7, having just returned from Washington, D.C., Bogden took a call of a different kind from Mike Battle, director of the executive office for U.S. attorneys at the Justice Department.

Bogden recalled the conversation Friday: “He says, ‘Dan, it’s time to step down. They want to go in another direction.’

“I say, ‘Well, what direction is that?’

“He says, ‘Dan, I don’t know.’ “

Bogden was blown away.”

“Dan, I don’t know.” Gotta love it.

The LA Times (via Kevin Drum) has another article on Bogden’s firing, and the Washington Post has one on Margaret Chiara. Neither can figure out what they were fired for.

(3) And now for something completely different: the journal Current Biology has an article called ‘Metacognition in the Rat’, arguing that rats are capable of metacognition — the ability to know stuff about what you know. Here’s the abstract:

” Here, we demonstrate for the first time that rats are capable of metacognition — i.e., they know when they do not know the answer in a duration-discrimination test. Before taking the duration test, rats were given the opportunity to decline the test. On other trials, they were not given the option to decline the test. Accurate performance on the duration test yielded a large reward, whereas inaccurate performance resulted in no reward. Declining a test yielded a small but guaranteed reward. If rats possess knowledge regarding whether they know the answer to the test, they would be expected to decline most frequently on difficult tests and show lowest accuracy on difficult tests that cannot be declined. Our data provide evidence for both predictions and suggest that a nonprimate has knowledge of its own cognitive state.”

‘Knowing that X’, in this context, means something like: being able to respond differently depending on whether or not X is true. Thus, for instance, pigeons can be trained to tell the difference between photographs with and without trees, or water, or human beings, and even the difference between paintings by Monet and Picasso. (Great sentence from the abstract: “Furthermore, they showed generalization from Monet’s to Cezanne’s and Renoir’s paintings or from Picasso’s to Braque’s and Matisse’s paintings.”) And they’re quite sophisticated about it:

“Walcott recalls a study by Richard Hernstein at Harvard. The pigeon kept insisting that a slide contained a human face. None of the investigators could see it — just a house with a hedge. “Finally, somebody spotted a small child looking out the hedge!””

In the sense in question, these pigeons know whether or not a picture has a person in it or not, etc. Knowing that you know something, in this sense, just means something like: being able to respond differently depending on whether or not you know something. does not mean anything like: being able to think about this explicitly, still less something like: being able to consider the evidence for X and assess it. Still, metacognition had been thought to be confined to much more complicated animals than rats, so this is quite interesting.

(4) And how are you?

UPDATE: (5) Snark of the Week, If Not the Year: Wolcott on Jonah Goldberg.

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by hilzoy

Mean, bad, ugly things are happening to the subprime mortgage market. (Subprime mortgages are, basically, mortgages made to less creditworthy borrowers.) Things that make normally sedate publications use words like meltdown (Forbes; also AP, Reuters, and WSJ), crisis (WaPo), turmoil, cratering, and imploding. This site maintains a list of subprime lenders that have “imploded” (which it defines to include “bankruptcy filing, possibly-temporary halting of major operations, or a last-ditch acquisition.”) As I write this, there are 41 lenders on the list.

So: what’s going on? (Note: I’ll try to explain this as best I can, but if I make mistakes, please correct them.)

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