Without any hint of irony or humour, The Guardian worries that Western influence within the United Nations is waning — worrisome because it wrecks “efforts to entrench human rights, liberties and multilateralism”.

Drop in influence at UN wrecks western attempts to push human rights agenda

The west’s efforts to use the United Nations to promote its values and shape the global agenda are failing, according to a detailed study published yesterday.

A sea change in the balance of power in favour of China, India, Russia and other emerging states is wrecking European and US efforts to entrench human rights, liberties and multilateralism.

This perhaps belongs in the same category of new-found Republican concerns regarding sexism and the Bush administration’s alarm at Russian unilateralism (vis-à-vis Georgia). Dare we remind them that the United Nations came about as a response to the two disastrous wars that these nations inflicted upon the rest of the unenlightened world? Or would that explicit notice have as little effect as the implicit caution offered by a history of colonialism, political mischief and unilateral intrusion (Iran, Iraq, Latin America, Afghanistan, Africa, India, Pakistan,…)?

A recent article in the New York Times presents an altogether different picture than the one The Guardian offers, when it comes to US interest or respect for other values and thought. The article ends with a quote from Northwestern law professor Steven Calabresi:

In “ ‘A Shining City on a Hill’: American Exceptionalism and the Supreme Court’s Practice of Relying on Foreign Law,” a 2006 article in the Boston University Law Review, Professor Calabresi concluded that the Supreme Court should be wary of citing foreign law in most constitutional cases precisely because the United States is exceptional.

“Like it or not,” he wrote, “Americans really are a special people with a special ideology that sets us apart from all the other peoples.”

Discussing the use of international opinion in judicial analysis, the NYT articles draws a telling contrast:

Judges around the world have long looked to the decisions of the United States Supreme Court for guidance, citing and often following them in hundreds of their own rulings since the Second World War.

[...] American constitutional law has been cited and discussed in countless decisions of courts in Australia, Canada, Germany, India, Israel, Japan, New Zealand, South Africa and elsewhere.

But many judges and legal scholars in this country say that consideration of foreign legal precedents in American judicial decisions is illegitimate, and that there can be no transnational dialogue about the meaning of the United States Constitution.

[...]

The Constitution should be interpreted according to its original meaning, said John O. McGinnis, a law professor at Northwestern, and recent rulings, whether foreign or domestic, cannot aid in that enterprise. Moreover, Professor McGinnis said, decisions applying foreign law to foreign circumstances are not instructive here.

“It may be good in their nation,” he said. “There is no reason to believe necessarily that it’s good in our nation.”

[...]

In any event, said Eric Posner, a law professor at the University of Chicago, many Americans are deeply suspicious of foreign law.

“We are used to encouraging other countries to adopt American constitutional norms,” he wrote in an essay last month, “but we have never accepted the idea that we should adopt theirs.”

“It’s American exceptionalism,” Professor Posner added in an interview. “The view going back 200 years is that we’ve figured it out and people should follow our lead.”

[emphasis mine]

In contrast, the New York Times describes the attitude elsewhere (including in India, a country that The Guardian laments is gaining influence in the UN, and whose UN soldiers are prominently pictured at the top of The Guardian’s piece):

The openness of some legal systems to foreign law is reflected in their constitutions. The South African Constitution, for instance, says that courts interpreting its bill of rights “must consider international law” and “may consider foreign law.” The constitutions of India and Spain have similar provisions.

and explains why a shift away from US standards and opinion is occurring:

Frederick Schauer, a law professor at the University of Virginia, wrote in a 2000 essay that the Canadian Supreme Court had been particularly influential because “Canada, unlike the United States, is seen as reflecting an emerging international consensus rather than existing as an outlier.”

Reviewing a collection of China themed books in the NYRofB, Orville Schell unintentionally offers an insight:

China: Humiliation & the Olympics – The New York Review of Books

So, partly in shock, and partly in disappointment, China responded to the demonstrations against its Olympic torch with incensed outrage, rejecting any suggestion that its own actions could have contributed to, much less have ameliorated, Tibetan demands.

[...]

Instead, at this penultimate moment, as Xu Guoqi, author of the timely new book Olympic Dreams: China And Sports, 1895–2008, has noted, “Through their coverage and handling of the Beijing torch relay, the West seemed to remind the Chinese they were still not equal and they were still not good enough.”

The real problem China faces in its exclusion from the club is that they are not bad enough — they are vulgar and amateur oppressors! So it is the lack of sophistication, rhetorical and philosophical preparation, that permits and compels European nations, with the blood of Africa and Asia on their hands, our own USA, with an ongoing illegal action in Iraq that has cost hundreds of thousands of lives, to lecture China on its deplorable human rights.

[ Link ]

Scratch even a leftist in the West and you will often find a hippie-hating individualist/reductionist. Every since Dawkins and Sokal, Summers and Pinker did a number on their brethren, many leftists have been labouring (no pun intended) hard to distance themselves from any feel good, “new age”, hippie type framework or explanations. This has to be a bit embarrassing:

Shankar Vedantam – When Play Becomes Work – washingtonpost.com

Psychologists have long been interested in what happens when people’s internal drives are replaced by external motivations. A host of experiments have shown that when threats and rewards enter the picture, they tend to destroy the inner drives. Paychecks and pink slips might be powerful reasons to get out of bed each day, but they turn out to be surprisingly ineffective — and even counterproductive — in getting people to perform at their best.

[...]

Deci tracked a bunch of college students who were solving puzzles for fun. He divided them into two groups. One group was allowed to keep solving puzzles as before. People in the other were offered a small financial reward for each puzzle they solved.

The psychologist later evaluated the volunteers: He found that people given a financial incentive were now less interested in solving puzzles on their own time. Although these people had earlier been just as eager as those in the other group, offering an external incentive seemed to kill their internal drive.

Rewards and punishments guide the lives of most Americans. Young children are given stars for putting away their toys, kids earn a few bucks for mowing the lawn, and teens are told they will be grounded if they get in trouble. For adults, stock options, raises, demotions and firings become different kinds of carrots and sticks.

Beliefs about the utility of rewards and punishments in motivating human behavior are deeply ingrained, and most people don’t know that more than 100 research studies have shown that motivating people in this manner can have the unintentional effect of undermining their internal drives.

The striking thing about the research, said Roland Benabou, an economist at the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University, is that it is so starkly at odds with bedrock economic principles.

“A central tenet of economics is that individuals respond to incentives,” Benabou noted in one research study. “For psychologists and sociologists, in contrast, rewards and punishments are often counterproductive, because they undermine intrinsic motivation.”

But wait, there’s more… the killer part, in fact:

But rewards and punishments are not always counterproductive, Benabou said. He drew a distinction between mundane tasks and those that carry meaning for people. In the first case, Benabou argued, rewards and punishments work exactly the way economists predict: They get people to do things.

External rewards and punishments are counterproductive when it comes to activities that are meaningful — tasks that telegraph something about a person’s intellectual abilities, generosity, courage or values.

Killer part because it spells out what any worker knows to be true — rewards and punishments (more often the latter) are employed to get us to do the dirty work of those handing out the rewards and punishments.

[ Link ]

[With apologies to Missy Elliot]

Paul Krugman has been writing a series of excellent blog posts recently that dare question the techno-optimism crowd that sees any questioning of the unsustainability of human overconsumption as a return to Malthusian thinking (population control, etc) that explicitly or implicitly disfavours the poor. Here is Krugman’s latest post:

Limits to growth and related stuff – NYT Blog

[...]

You might say that this is my answer to those who cheerfully assert that human ingenuity and technological progress will solve all our problems. For the last 35 years, progress on energy technologies has consistently fallen below expectations.

I’d actually suggest that this is true not just for energy but for our ability to manipulate the physical world in general: 2001 didn’t look much like 2001, and in general material life has been relatively static. (How do the changes in the way we live between 1958 and 2008 compare with the changes between 1908 and 1958? I think the answer is obvious.)

[...]

I think the fear that responses to human overconsumption (a consequence of human population growth, but not just that — after all the United States with 5% of the world population consumes 20% or more of its resources) target the poor, is a legitimate one. However, techno-utopianism is fast receding as a respectable alternative [attitude] to solving these real problems.

Also see Krugman’s: Running Out of Planet to Exploit (NYT).

[ Link ]

There is an interesting phenomenon to be seen these days, every time there is some controversy. It is quickly morphed into a controversy about the response to the original one! That happened with the Muhammad cartoon issue, where the publication of some silly cartoons aimed at infuriating Muslims (the same populations that are oppressed by the North in real ways) was morphed into outrage over Muslim response to it. Similarly, the clown Imus says something despicable about Rutgers University women’s basketball team members and within a day the “national conversation” is about misogyny in hip-hop and rap lyrics.

In that grand tradition comes the response from professional blowhard and occasional biologist Richard Dawkins on the James Watson controversy (Watson being the famous co-discoverer of the structure of DNA, using data stolen from a female colleague unacknowledged for her contribution, who has stuck an eighth or ninth foot in his mouth with his musings on black people and their capabilities):

Disgrace: How a giant of science was brought low | The Observer

In the end, Watson’s decided to return home, so no meetings occurred, a move that has dismayed many scientists who believed that it was vital Watson confront his critics and his public. ‘What is ethically wrong is the hounding, by what can only be described as an illiberal and intolerant “thought police”, of one of the most distinguished scientists of our time, out of the Science Museum, and maybe out of the laboratory that he has devoted much of his life to, building up a world-class reputation,’ said Richard Dawkins, who been due to conduct a public interview with Watson this week in Oxford.

Dawkins’s stance was supported by Blakemore. ‘Jim Watson is well known for being provocative and politically incorrect. But it would be a sad world if such a distinguished scientist was silenced because of his more unpalatable views.’

In case you are misled by the righteous indignation of Dawkins and Blakemore, Watson is not being “silenced” but ignored, and rightly so for this is what he said by way of justifying his “unpalatable view”:

people who have to deal with black employees find this not true

Even if we are to follow Dawkins’ demand that we lend an ear to a bigot, his reasoning deserves the trashbin given the unscientific nature of it.

When Ralph Nader pointed out that there are no significant differences between the Democrats and Republicans it was met with responses that ranged from insult to false outrage which persists to this day among idle commentors in the blogosphere who challenge Nader’s motives, personality and commitment! One presumes they consider their own hard commenting e-politicking in favour of the Democratic party the better alternative to Nader’s decades of activism. The 2006 Democratic victory, eked out based on a sad mixture of Bush’s unpopularity and a field of ex-Republican and “Blue Dog” candidates, was the crowning achievement of this hyper-cautious citizen politician “liberal”s. The expectation then would be that we would, in quick order, gather evidence of how wrong Nader was about the difference between the two parties. Well, here is Matt Taibbi:

Tension Mounts as Antiwar Movement Challenges Dems’ Commitment to Stop the War

[...]

Neither of these Democratic leaders, after all, are Huey Newton, or even Benjamin Spock. They are not going to get up on a table, shake a shoe in the direction of the White House, shout “Fuck you, pig!” and just turn off the money, consequences be damned. No, these are career bureaucrats, political herd animals who survive year after year by clinging for dear life to the concept of safety in numbers. They will watch the bushes with great big eyes to see what is rustling back there, and when exactly two-thirds of the herd decides to bolt, they all will — not just the Democrats, but the Boehners and McConnells too, leaping over logs, tearing off big chunks of fur against the bark of trees, etc.

[...]

So maybe Reid and Pelosi really are working the phones on this one, who knows. What I do know is this; there are elements of the Democratic-crafted Iraq supplemental that are not only severely regressive but would actually tend to encourage the continuation of the insurgency. Anyone who wants an example of why the areas in which the Democrats and Republicans are in agreement are more significant than the ones in which they differ need only look at the two parties nearly unanimous endorsement of the “Benchmarks” the Iraqi government must meet, according to the supplemental. The key passage reads as follows:

(2) whether the Government of Iraq is making substantial progress in meeting its commitment to pursue reconciliation initiatives, including a hydro-carbon law…

It is notable that the hydrocarbon law comes in first place in this clause, ahead of “legislation necessary for the conduct of provincial and local elections,” reform of de-Baathification laws, amendments to the constitution and allocation of revenues for reconstruction projects. For whether or not it really was “all about oil” at the beginning of the war, the fate of the occupation really does hinge almost entirely upon oil initiatives now, as the continued presence of U.S. troops in the region may depend on whether or not the Iraqi government bites the bullet and decides to eat the proposed hydrocarbon law in question.

The law, endorsed here by the Democrats, is an unusually vicious piece of legislation, an open blueprint for colonial robbery of the Iraqi nation. It is worth pointing out that if you go back far enough in the history of this business, the law actually makes the U.S. an accomplice in the repression of Saddam Hussein, the very thing we claim to be rescuing the country from.

[...]

The proposed Hydrocarbon Law is a result of pressure from the American government on the Iraqis to draft an oil policy that would adhere to the IMF guidelines. It allows foreign companies to take advantage of Iraqi oil fields by allowing regions to pair up with foreigners using what are known as “production-sharing agreements” or PSAs, which guarantee investing companies large shares of the profits for decades into the future. The law also makes it impossible for the Iraqi state to regulate levels of oil production (seriously undermining OPEC), allows oil companies to repatriate profits, and would also allow companies to hire foreign workers to man facilities. Add all the measures up and the Hydrocarbon law not only takes control of the oil industry away from the Iraqi state, but virtually guarantees that the state will profit very little from future oil exploitation.

[...]

Moreover, let’s just say this about the Democratic Party. They can wash their hands of this war as much as they want publicly, but their endorsement of this crude neocolonial exploitation plan makes them accomplices in the occupation, and further legitimizes the insurgency. It is hard to argue with the logic of armed resistance to U.S. forces in Iraq when both American parties, representing the vast majority of the American voting public, endorse the same draconian plan to rob the country’s riches.

Current blogosphere darling (though even that tide is turning) Obama has been on the forefront of the call for the Iraqis to show responsibility. No doubt his righteous scolding will accomplish this bogus goal, more so than the death and disorder that the Iraqis are enduring as a result of our assault. Taibbi addresses such callous nonsense:

But I’ll tell you what I can do without. I can do without having to listen to American journalists, as well as politicians on both sides of the aisle, bitch and moan about how the Iraqi government better start “shaping up” and “taking responsibility” and “showing progress” if they want the continued blessing of American military power. Virtually every major newspaper in the country and every hack in Washington has lumped all the “benchmarks” together, painting them as concrete signs that, if met, would mean the Iraqi government is showing “progress” or “good faith.”

The term offered by the blog-comment-osphere for their hyper-cautious centrism is “gradualism”. Taibbi comments:

Moreover, this endorsement of these neoliberal “benchmarks” by the Democrats makes me believe a lot less in their “gradualist” approach to ending the war. If they viewed the war as much of the world did, as a murderous and profoundly immoral criminal enterprise, they would understand that morally, they really have no choice now but to refuse to send Bush even a dime more for this war.

Howard Zinn wrote recently a timely piece pointing out that we are not politicians but citizens. But for the “progressive” blogosphere, the small bits of power derived from colluding with the Democrats (which they perceive as king-making, or at best productive engagement) perhaps offer greater satisfaction than the uncertainties of citizen activism of the type practised by Nader.

We all remember the Danish cartoon controversy. You remember the one? Where most of the U.S press reported, with barely concealed glee, the horrors of the protests against the cartoons, rather than the cartoons themselves? To be fair they did comment on the cartoons i.e., as a free speech issue, as in the useless freedom to call your mother a whore. Another thing that I do not remember is any mention of the below, in the midst of the criticism of Muslim and Arab nations: It seems that the cartoons were republished in a Muslim country, not as some sort of meaningless statement as some of our press did, but with real consequences and dangers:

BBC | Yemen editor jailed over cartoons

[...]

The editor, Kamal al-Aalafi, said he had reprinted the cartoons to raise awareness, not to insult Muslims.

[...]

It seems two other Yemeni newspapers also published the cartoons.Now, I wonder if our wonderful press, the one that balks at discussing George Bush’s missing years in the military, would publish similar cartoons about say the same George Bush?

[ Link ]

This from The Observer:

Low IQs are Africa’s curse, says lecturer | The Observer

The London School of Economics is embroiled in a row over academic freedom after one of its lecturers published a paper alleging that African states were poor and suffered chronic ill-health because their populations were less intelligent than people in richer countries.

Satoshi Kanazawa, an evolutionary psychologist, is now accused of reviving the politics of eugenics by publishing the research which concludes that low IQ levels, rather than poverty and disease, are the reason why life expectancy is low and infant mortality high. His paper, published in the British Journal of Health Psychology, compares IQ scores with indicators of ill health in 126 countries and claims that nations at the top of the ill health league also have the lowest intelligence ratings.

[...]

Having examined the effects of economic development and income inequality on health, he was ’surprised’ to find that IQ had a much more important impact, he said. ‘Poverty, lack of sanitation, clean water, education and healthcare do not increase health and longevity, and nor does economic development.’

[...]

Assuming for a second that his data are correct, and that IQ measures something significant (what we generally understand by the term “intelligence”), the above seems to suffer from that old precaution about correlation and causality. There is no reason provided (at least stated in the article — I guess I have to hold down the gag reflex and go read the full paper) to justify the use of the results of a particular test (IQ) as a cause, rather than as an effect.

Vint Cerf is making noises that IDN is a huge technical challenge:

“One of the most important aspects is for the user to make unambiguous references to every registered domain name.

“Historically this has been through a small subset of Latin characters.”

[...]

Mr Cerf said that in order for other scripts to be introduced into the domain name system, there needed to be rigorous testing to ensure that users could be certain they will reach their online destination no matter which script they used.

“Domain names are not general natural language expressions. They are simply identifiers,” he said. “They must be unique. Names registered today must be able to work into their distant future no matter what characters are added.”

He warned: “A miss-step could easily and permanently break the internet into non-interoperable components.”

I respect Cerf but this seems like fear-mongering (perhaps to counter international pressures particularly on ICANN, which is today controlled by the USA) rather than a technical argument. Uniqueness of names can be guaranteed in IDN, and talk of “permanent” break of the Internet into non-interoperable components, is a bit irresponsible. Also, phishing/spoofing attacks (the concern brought up above regarding the certainty of users in accessing sites) are not unique to IDN and have been addressed both before and also within IDN. Wikipedia offers a decent introduction to IDN/IDNA that addresses many of these points, and provides information on IDNA support in applications (e.g: Mozilla/Gecko).

The opinion of Viviane Reding of the EC, quoted in the same article, are, I think, a bit more on target:

Viviane Reding, the EC’s information society commissioner, said: “Bridging the digital divide is not just a matter of screens and cables.

“It is equally important to recognise the extent and value of cultural diversity within global village of the internet. That is why multilingualism is important.”

She said that IDN was “sometimes wrongly seen as technical issue”.

“There is legitimate political imperative,” she said. “Users want to be able to use Chinese ideograms and Arabic scripts.

“There is a real danger that a prolonged delay in the introduction of IDN could lead to fragmentation of the internet name space.”

I cannot but draw parallels to the (oft-mentioned) doomsday protestations of car manufacturers regarding everything from seat belts to better mileage.

Great article about the state of things in Australia:

Australia’s Other Great Sport By Haroon Buksh:

[...]

The Australian public is increasingly being served a smorgasbord of politically charged rhetoric, an outpouring of invective masquerading as public debate. From questions of loyalty, discussions over identity, sermons about values, or warnings against extremism, the current discourse surrounding Islam and Muslims is presented in the context of an existential threat to the Australian way of life.

[...]

We should be careful, however, not to disconnect the state of modern Australia from its global context. Since 9/11, Western governments have been relentlessly and unashamedly constructing public opinion in support of their brutal campaigns at home and abroad. A campaign that was ostensibly launched to avenge the attacks on the World Trade Centres has morphed into what George Bush calls ‘the decisive ideological struggle of the 21st century, and the calling of our generation’.

No longer is the objective the capture of Osama bin Laden or the dismantling of terrorist infrastructure. Rather we are told the primary objective of the ‘war on terror’ is now the defeat of ‘Islamo-fascism’, an ‘evil ideology’ that seeks to return the world to a dark 7th century medieval version of Islam – the aims of which are apparently shared by a ‘section’ of the Muslim community in Australia.

[...]

The real and tangible relationship between western foreign policy and its reactionary consequences has yet to be even mildly explored. The Australian government continues to persist in its absolute state of denial and refuses to entertain such a debate. But failing to address the most critical underlying grievances is a stance that sadly threatens the lives of every Australian.

In a speech to the Conference of Australian Imams on the 16th September 2006, Andrew Robb, the Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister for Immigration and Multicultural Affairs, reiterated the government’s official line of holding the Muslim community solely responsible for a set of conditions generated as a consequence of a brutal and oppressive foreign policy. He stated: “And, because it is your faith that is being invoked as justification for these evil acts, it is your problem”.

[...]

It seems what the world desperately needs today is a war on ignorance, not a war on terror. As the current debate serves only to close our minds, we all have a responsibility to keep them open.