Friday, January 09, 2004
IMF warns on US debtThe New York Times (registration required) is reporting that IMF is warning "the United States is running up a foreign debt of such record-breaking proportions that it threatens the financial stability of the global economy". If the US is really concerned about the IMF's warning (and from the sounds of it, they aren't) they should take Joseph Stiglitz's advice and do the exact opposite of everything the IMF advises them to do.
posted by Dick O'Brien at 11:26 AM | link |
Irish Imperialism
AtlanticBlog condemns 'rabid Irish imperialism', evident in our peacekeeping role in Liberia. Yes, fresh from our neo-colonial adventures in East Timor and Lebanon, the Irish have gone one step further. He shouldn't be so silly. Ireland has a UN mandate to be in Liberia. In otherwords, we leave when the UN tells us to. He also points out that "there is rape and torture and murder all over the world, but do you see Irish troops in the Congo?" That's not for want of trying. Ireland actually volunteered troops for the UN mission to the Congo last year, but was turned down.
Having said all that, we were party to the shameful UN intervention in the Congo in 1960 that certainly was neo-colonial. Don't believe me? Read this.
posted by Dick O'Brien at 11:17 AM |
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Thursday, January 08, 2004
Sand candyI hate to be the one to come between William Sjostrom and his love of Israeli products, but Jewish cuisine is based almost entirely on suffering. Unleavened bread, bitter herbs, salty eggs. Feh! Growing up, we called halva "sand candy" because of its incomparable grainy texture and filthy taste. Sometimes I wonder if the Israelis didn't so much make the desert bloom as package all the sand and ship it off to gullible American Jews. Stick to the Jaffa oranges and Jerusalem artichokes, William, and leave the halva in the ground where it belongs.
posted by Jon Ihle at 1:56 PM | link |
Take that, Jews!
European Commission President Romano Prodi has suspended a European conference on anti-semitism because of the "attitude" of Jewish leaders Edgar Bronfman and Coby Benatoff, who earlier in the week accused the commission of "moral treachery" with regard to European anti-semitism. Glad we're all working together on this problem.
To be fair to Prodi, Benatoff and Bronfman haven't left much room for the commission to do the right thing; indeed, whatever they do seems to be wrong. One the one hand the commission is accused of passive anti-semitism for suppressing a study, while they're condemned as actively anti-semitic for releasing the results of a poll. I agree that there is a contradiction in the commission publicising unfavourable opinions about Jews while hiding research into those unfavourable opinions. But Bronfman and Benatoff seem simply to want the reverse: research into the unfavourable opinions without publicising those opinions. If anything, I think that infamous poll (caution: HUGE file) did a lot to expose the extent in Europe of negative opinions towards Jews and Israel. In other words, the poll supports calls for action on anti-semitism.
posted by Jon Ihle at 12:23 PM |
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Blow for freedom
I see Singapore is considering legalising oral sex, which ought to be great news for the nation's consenting adults. One wonders what the good citizens of Singapore did for fun until now. Still, it ain't all good news. Gay people look likely to be still liable for prosecution if they emulate their straight peers.
posted by Dick O'Brien at 12:33 AM |
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Re: Shoddy Steyn
I see Frank is a little unhappy at my criticism of Mark Steyn. Despite my assertion that it was the quality of his writing and not his opinions that were the source my assessment, Frank seems to think that it really is just because I disagree with him. Ironically, Frank himself is a perfect example of what I'm talking about. Regular readers will no doubt know that I rarely agree with him. Despite that, I still think he's a good writer who often makes a strong case for what he believes in. In otherwords, unlike Steyn, he's worth reading. So here it is: Frank McGahon has more business being on the opinion pages of the Irish Times than Mark Steyn does.
I'm not the only one to share this opinion on Steyn. I see one individual has written to the Times today saying the following:
"May I extend Mark Steyn's list of events (such as heatwave deaths in France) which might never have happened had particular countries been run properly (Opinion, January 5th)? In 2001 almost 3,000 Americans were killed in one single day as a result of virtually non-existent airport security. At that time no self-respecting non-welfare state needed to pay airport security staff anything more than a minimum wage; what was the point in wasting valuable tax dollars in a free market on pampering passengers? They might even turn all soft and French. How ironic that the net result of that particular excess of Steynesque economic theory has been the evolution of the distinctly big-governmental black hole known as the Department of Homeland Security."
Finally, I just want to clarify something with Frank. I don't implicitly support the idea of a welfare state. I explicitly support it.
posted by Dick O'Brien at 12:32 AM |
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Wednesday, January 07, 2004
Second to GodWord up to Paul Murray and his nomination for the Whitbread First Novel Award with An Evening of Long Goodbyes. The award went to Vernon God Little by DBC Pierre.
Bush and Intelligence
Wired News covered a story yesterday that I had missed in the run up to Christmas in relation to the signing of Bush's Intelligence Authorization Act. The act allows the FBI to get information about anyone from banks and other financial institutions without a court order and also prohibits subpoenaed businesses from revealing to anyone, including customers who may be under investigation, that the government has requested records of their transactions.
US blogger Sullivan40 questions the timing of the signing of the bill. Why indeed the lack of publicity and debate?
And I will strike down upon thee with great vengeance
The growth of faith-based delivery of US public services seems to be catching on in both the prison services and more recently in the national park services. It would be interesting to get hold of research into the success or otherwise of this model of service delivery in the US.
The dangers of this model are well documented, relating to the potential for difficulties in regulation and transparency, favoritism in funding allocations, co-mingling of funds, and the possibility of clients not receiving optimal care. Indeed, the shift away from faith or charity based social service delivery has been an important feature of Ireland's struggle for modernisation.
On the issue of the welfare state and the views of world reknowned social scientist, Mark Steyn, I agree strongly with Dick. Steyn should simply reveal himself at this stage as Alan Partridge's terribly intellectual Canadian cousin.
Constructing a spirit
Eic Schlosser's work on the prison industrial complex remains crucial reading. He describes the prevailing economics of the correctional facility.
He concludes that "the spirit of every age is manifest in its public works, in the great construction projects that leave an enduring mark on the landscape" and that "every brand-new prison, becomes another lasting monument, concrete and ringed with deadly razor wire, to the fear and greed and political cowardice that now pervade American society."
It's interesting to ponder what spirit was manifest in the public works of the celtic tiger. The Spire certainly has a vision, but arrived three years after the millenium and still doesn't work. Our gleaming national stadium in Abbotstown is probably the true testament to the glorious vacuity of the boom.
posted by Paul at 7:38 PM | link |
Reflecting Absence?
It's bad enough that the design for WTC site is pretty much a gaping wound with shards of glass sticking out of it, but to tag the memorial with a hollow abstraction like "Reflecting Absence" is such an affront to the forward-moving dynamic of New York City.
An architect friend of mine jokingly suggested the new buildings replicate the old Twin Towers exactly, except one story taller and each with a bullseye and the words "We Dare You" painted on the side. I'd settle for something that lived up to the state's motto: "Excelsior".
posted by Jon Ihle at 1:38 PM |
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Politics and the super-rich
Glenn Reynolds has an argument against income inequality and currency speculators that even George Bush could love.
posted by Jon Ihle at 12:30 PM |
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Re: A threat to national security
Just to clear things up for Dick a little: journalists get fingerprinted because they enter the US with a visa that permits them to work and stay for an extended period. Such an extra requirement is completely consistent with other stricter practices and procedures for visa holders that pre-date fingerprinting. As an Irish citizen, Dick should have the option of travelling to the US as a tourist if he plans just to have a holiday. I see no reason, however, why he shouldn't be treated the same as any other visa holder if he travels as a journalist.
As a resident alien with permission to work in Ireland, I have to adhere to stricter immigration procedures than an American tourist. For a start, I have to present both my passport and my Garda immigration registration card when entering the country. I have had my picture taken at Dublin airport as well. I'm also required to inform the Gardai any time I change address. Tourists, on the other hand, can come here and do pretty much whatever they want for 90 days - no questions asked.
posted by Jon Ihle at 12:24 PM |
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Re: Decentralisation
I almost forgot about this one. In an earlier post, shortly after the annoucement, I speculated that the move might not prove near as popular as the politicians seem to think. This report from the Sunday Independent (registration required) would seem to back this up, with an internal survey in the Department of Agriculture returning poor numbers in favour:
"In the Department of Agriculture, a proposed move to Portlaoise has been virtually ignored. An internal survey found just 36 out of about 1,200 Dublin-based staff want to move to Portlaoise. Outside Dublin, there has been a similarly lacklustre response from agriculture staff. Just 80 out of a total workforce of 4,800 civil servants in the department want to go to the new HQ."
posted by Dick O'Brien at 8:50 AM |
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Shoddy Steyn
I'm continually bemused as to why the Irish Times chose to first hire and then retain Mark Steyn as a columnist. It's not because I disagree with Steyn's opinions, op-ed pages after all ought to represent a healthy range of thought. Rather it's that Steyn rarely produces work worth publishing. Vitriolic rants backed up questionable arguments are rarely going to make you sit back and question your own assumptions, but this seems to be Steyn's stock in trade. Monday's column (subscription required) is a classic case in point.
Under a headline declaring ' Cradle-to-grave welfare state has enfeebled French citizens', Steyn strings together a number of unrelated incidents of real or perceived evils and makes a clumsy attempt at moral equivalence. Striking workers, the Saudi Arabian religious police, China's handling of SARS, Iran's handling of the earthquake and France's heatwave deaths were all bad things according to Steyn. His point seems to be is that 'big government' only creates misery. His closing paragraph states:
"By the standards of the world, Iran, China and France are all wealthy societies. They're vulnerable to 'events' because of their organisational principles - a primitive theocracy which disdains modernity; a modified totalitarianism which thinks you can reap the benefits of capitalism without the institutions of liberty; and a cradle-to-grave welfare state that has so enfeebled its citizens' ability to act as responsible adults that even your dead mum is just one more inconvenience the government should do something about."
Yet the governments of France, China and Iran are very different. Namely, France is a democracy. China isn't. Iran has limited democracy.
What organised labour has to do with this is a little unclear. Yet his piece seems to be at pains to include it into the mix. Is Steyn saying workers shouldn't have a right to join a union? That they shouldn't have the right to strike? We all know that there can be incompetent or corrupt unions. But does the existence of crooked cops justify abolishing the police?
But back to France. We've been here before, and in a lengthy post last summer, I pointed out that the French figure for heatwave deaths wasn't particularly high compared to official figures from Portugal for example. What's more, Spain and Italy never made much of an effort to calculate their own deaths. The French method of calculation compared mortality rates this summer to last and attributed the difference to the heat. It's pretty crude and likely to lead to overstatement.
However, Steyn uses this as stick to bash the French with. There are plenty of things wrong with France, but a welfare state enfeebling its citizens? Give me a break. We've all heard the stories about bodies not being claimed. What I want to know is just how many people were aware their relatives had died while on holiday? How many were contactable? And what kind of relatives were they? There's a big difference between your mother and great uncle Hubert whom you haven't seen since for a decade. And just how many of us non-French citizens bring Granny along when we're going to the Canaries? As I pointed out before, France's supposedly decadent welfare state has lower infant mortality rates and higher life expectancy that many other developed nations, Ireland and the US included. They can't be doing that much wrong. However, in Mark Styen's eyes it means they're no better than Saudi Arabian religious police who won't let girls out of a burning school because they weren't properly dressed.
posted by Dick O'Brien at 12:56 AM |
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Tuesday, January 06, 2004
A threat to National SecurityWhat better way to start the first working day of the new year than to open the paper and find that I'll be finger printed and photographed the next time I enter the United States. As the Irish Times reports (subscription required), anyone requiring a visa to enter the US will now be photographed and finger printed. People travelling under the visa waiver scheme are exempt from this practice. However, as I've pointed out in this post before, journalists aren't entitled to travel under the scheme and we require a special media visa. They're pretty serious about this too. They'll deport you if you don't have one. As the Times reports, media visa holders are subject to the new regime:
"Some 28 countries in the visa waiver system, including Ireland and the UK, are exempt for the present from the new system, known as US Visitor and Immigration Status Indicator Technology (USVISIT). It does, however, apply to all travellers requiring travel documents, according to Mr Asa Hutchinson, Under Secretary of the US Department of Homeland Security. Irish workers, journalists and academics in the US who do not hold green cards require visas for a prolonged stay in the United States."
I'm wondering why journalists can't expect the same treatment as ordinary EU citizens? It might be different if we were in the habit of hijacking aeroplanes or planting car bombs. We're certainly not perfect and some of us have been known to spend far too long in the bar, but surely this can't constitute a risk to national security?
Just as to why this scheme is being introduced at all is a little unclear to me. Media reports I've read so far indicate that the US has no system in place for knowing when or if a visitor has left the country. A quick scan through the pages of my passport show that pretty much every country I've visited has given me an entry and an exit stamp, except the US, which only stamps on entry. Why can't it do this? Of course stamping won't making you leave when you're supposed to leave, but will fingerprinting be any better? Using exit stamps means that if you've overstayed your welcome, you could have some trouble getting in the next time you travel there.
In all fairness though, there probably are some material benefits. First of all, the fingerprint scans mean the system is automated. Scan you're fingerprint on the way out and a database is automatically updated with a record of your exit. It also eliminates the possibility of people entering with one passport and leaving with another. We've written before about the EU's proposed introduction of biometric passports, here and here. As I noted at the time, if they're used solely to prevent forgery, you can't complain too much. However, as Jon pointed out at the time, fingerprinting does have its issues. To be honest, I'd be much more comfortable knowing exactly what the US authorities intend to do with my fingerprints. How long are they going to be kept? Who will be able to access them? Are they going to be made available to other agencies?
Finally, on a lighter note, Brazil has swiftly responded to the new measure. It's announced that from now on all US visitors will be fingerprinted and photographed on entry to Brazil. What's sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander.
posted by Dick O'Brien at 11:52 PM | link |
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Monday, January 05, 2004
Saddam and the death penaltyLike John, I'm against the death penalty. (Unlike John, I don't mind admitting this.) My opposition to capital punishment derives from my views on the just power of the state: no government or state authority should be permitted to determine whether a citizen should live or die. Investing the state with such power is, in my opinion, a total inversion of democracy.
What makes Saddam an interesting case in this regard is that he was not a citizen of Iraq in the conventional sense of the word. In a functioning democracy, the people as a whole are (theoretically) co-extensive with the state. Thus the state is not some separate entity that can apply power to its citizens; the state is the people and government is their instrument for collective action. Capital punishment should be seen as philosophically incompatible with such a political structure.
Where, however, one person acquires for himself the unique powers and privileges properly reserved for the people and their state such that the state and this person are no longer distinguishable from one another, it becomes impossible to treat him as just another citizen. As a totalitarian dictator, Saddam made himself co-extensive with the Ba'athist state to which the Iraqi people were subject. In order for the people of Iraq to lay claim, both politically and psychologically, to their own state, it is probably necessary to kill Saddam, just as it was necessary to destroy the state apparatus that sustained him. Saddam destroyed the concept of citizenship in Iraq; he should not now benefit from its democratic re-animation.
posted by Jon Ihle at 6:00 PM | link |
The EU and anti-semitism
I think 'moral treachery' is an exaggeration; 'moral ambivalence' is probably more accurate.
posted by Jon Ihle at 1:43 PM |
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Grammar?
Who subbed this article?
"The 97-year-old woman rescued on Saturday after nine days in the rubble of Iran's earthquake probably survived because she was wrapped up in bed and had just ate breakfast when the quake struck, officials said yesterday."
posted by Jon Ihle at 1:20 PM |
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The Michael Kelly Award
A fitting tribute to a titanic journalist. Check out his articles from The Atlantic.
posted by Jon Ihle at 12:13 PM |
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Liberal internationalism
David Adesnik lays out the challenge Bush poses to Democratic hopefuls in a long post at OxBlog. Basically, Bush looks more like past Democratic heroes such as Truman and Kennedy than any of the candidates for the Democratic nomination do. His vulnerability, however, is that the Republicans are not natural liberal internationalists. If the Democrats can unite behind someone who takes a robust approach to international security yet attaches intervention to classic American values (liberty, equality, the rule of law, free trade), they've got a chance in November. In other words, if they can jettison the anti-war wing of the party, they might regain the Clintonian centre that Bush has so ably co-opted in the last four years.
posted by Jon Ihle at 12:05 PM |
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Just like a normal country
At the risk of sounding like Instapundit, I'd like to point out how remarkable it is that the Afghan governing council approved a democratic constitution yesterday - after a quarter century of war and warlordism. This is a genuinely positive dividend of US foreign policy and I'm immensely proud of it.
"For the first time, Afghans have set up a democratic presidential system, with a directly elected president and a two-chamber national assembly; elections are to be held in just six months. An independent judiciary is also being organized."
This is what's called moving in the right direction.
posted by Jon Ihle at 9:55 AM |
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