1. From my perspective, I don’t trust most of the American news media, so I don’t watch television (I subscribe to a variety of magazines, and get news on-line). I do enjoy the various WAIS perspectives on issues we don’t see in our media. In particular, I like the various Iran correspondents, since they each seem to have their own take on events. Cameron Sawyer’s analysis of the Russia-Georgia tiff of a year ago was extremely informative. And the first person accounts are unique.

2. Concerning the website–how many folks are constrained by access only to phone modems (I suspect most of us have some sort of high-speed access these days)? Several years ago, there were complaints that photos included in posts were very slow to transmit via modem. That could be avoided by the website developing a link to the particular photo, so it could be down-loaded or not, but the photo (or video) itself would then not be part of the post.

3. Administratively, has there been a change in how to make donations? PayPal and I don’t have a friendly relationship–so I’d prefer to send a check.

4. At the WAIS conference, Eric Boehm talked about biographies. Any thought about a WAIS “biography?”

JE comments: Regarding Paul Pitlick’s point #3–funny you should ask! Ever the good sport, Molly Reynick remains our treasurer for the time being, although nominations for her successor are welcome. In the meantime, checks made out to WAIS can be sent in care of me: John Eipper, Goldsmith Hall, Adrian College, Adrian MI 49221 USA. I will forward all donations to Molly. (Remember, Dear WAISers–since we are a 501 (c) (3) organization, donations are fully tax-deductible in the United States.)

Paul’s observation #4 is an excellent one. We should collect information on our own past. I’d especially like to know more about life at WAIS in the early 1990s, when under Prof. Hilton’s guidance, the Forum transitioned to more or less its present on-line form. Who’s been WAISing for this long? (I became a WAISer in 2000.) I’d be grateful for anecdotes, etc., that can be uploaded to our website.

I enjoyed Randy’s post about immigrant labor. Of course immigrant labor as an institution is as old as mankind.

Randy recalled that the Christ the Savior Cathedral in Moscow was built in the 1990s by Turkish workers. In fact since then the hundreds of millions of square feet of various kinds of buildings built in Moscow have been built by the hands of Turks, Poles, Bulgarians, Moldovans, Ukrainians, Chinese and especially, Central Asians. Russia suffers from a demographic crisis and labor shortages, so you can’t really hire Russians to do any kind of manual work. With the economic crisis biting hard and the first unemployment appearing in Moscow in more than a decade, however, there is a big debate going on whether to crack down on illegal alien workers, millions of whom are at work all over Russia. So far it looks like there will be no crackdown; everyone knows that the Russian economy would collapse without these labor forces. But the quota of legal work permits will be cut in half, it was just announced this morning. This is a foolish idea, to my mind, which will simply drive immigrant labor further underground. In order to make this measure politically acceptable, it has been decided to allow every Muscovite family to have work permits outside of the quotas for one housekeeper and one gardener.

JE comments: One housekeeper and one gardener only? Now that’s belt-tightening…

Recently (8 November) we discussed who suffered or benefited from the EU’s Common Agricultural Policy. Last Saturday, Spain’s El País reported that the country’s agricultural sector was mobilising two days of demonstrations with (allegedly) tens of thousands of agricultural workers and business owners demanding government policies that ensured profitable production and the future of the rural world.

With crop and livestock farmers at the forefront, the demonstrators complained about:

1. An average increase of 34% since 2005 in costs of production, machinery, fertilisers, fuel oil and seeds.

2. A steep fall in farm gate prices for cereals, milk, sunflower oil, sheep products, citrus fruits, olive oil and grapes.

3. Suppression of Community mechanisms regulating the markets and the lack of alternative instruments.

4. A 25% drop in profits since 2005 and lack of profit-making potential in the countryside.

5. Questions about the future of CAP beyond 2013.

6. Lack of price transparency in the food chain and the power of large distribution groups to impose farm-gate prices.

7. Low-cost imports from third countries (i.e. dumping).

8. Abandonment of rural life beyond tourism and the lack of measures and services to maintain quality of life (for the rural population).

9. The lack of a (Spanish) Ministry devoted to resolving the problems of the sector, above all as a result of the fusion with the Environment Ministry.

Plus ça change for farmers since 1980!

JE comments: Didn’t French farmers used to complain about lower-priced agricultural products pouring in from Spain? Now Spain is on the receiving end. So where is the really cheap stuff coming from nowadays? Or does the CAP literally benefit nobody?

This is from the Sunday Telegraph of 22 November. WAISers may find it to be of interest:

http://www.pressdisplay.com/pressdisplay/viewer.aspx

JE comments: It takes a bit of work to find the first serialized installment of Boris Volodarsky’s upcoming book, The KGB’s Poison Factory: from Lenin to Litvinenko. Boris sends this roadmap: “After you open the PressDisplay site you must click on ’search’ in the upper right corner, choose Sunday, 22 November from the pop-up menu, and then type ‘Litvinenko’ in the search window. That will open the whole publication, which is a serialization of my Litvinenko book that Nigel Jones mentioned.”

It appears that there is a 99-cent charge to view the article. Canadian or US? I’m not sure, but it doesn’t really matter. If and when a direct link to Boris’s piece in the Telegraph becomes available, I’ll be sure to post it.

The death of Alexander Litvinenko remains one of the highest-profile unresolved political assassinations of the last decade, as well as a source of continued tension between Russia and the UK. I am looking forward to reading Boris’s book, which will appear early in 2010.

What a refreshing thought Sergio Mukherjee expresses here: to research and know Germany more thoroughly from an outsider’s point of view. Yes, my country has committed one of the most horrific crimes in history to a people; yes, we started brutal and long wars in the past; yes, we must never forget what has happened in the last century and keep the memory alive–but we also have to learn to look forward to the future with self-confidence and without arrogance and/or minority complexes. There was resistance during the dictatorship and people still live to tell the tale. But time is running out, and soon the last witnesses will be no longer and we rely on people like Sergio Mukherjee to set the record straight with independent research and a voice that is being heard. Remembering the past and looking self-confidently into the future are not contradictions, and yet it is difficult to find a balance there.

And therefore, if I may say so, Sergio, welcome to WAIS.

JE comments: Perfectly said. Over the last 200 + years, Germans have traveled and explained the world (one need look no further than Humboldt). Eugen Solf reminds us that there will always be a need and a place for outsiders to study Germany and its troubled, fabled history. Once again, welcome to WAIS, Sergio Mukherjee.

Last summer we took a bargain fare airline from Barcelona to Madrid when we visited our relatives in Aranjuez. I think it was called Easyjet. The trip there was fine. However, when we got to the airport for our return, they told us that they had changed our reservation and that we had been informed by email that we had to take an earlier flight. We told them that they had our cell telephone number in the reservation and that we could not check our email. Their answer was “too bad,” and they wanted $159 each to fly us back to Madrid after waiting an hour on a very long line of backpackers. We filled out a complaint form and took the train back. We never heard from them on our grievance.

JE comments: Is anyone listening at Easyjet? Send Hank Levin his refund! Did you know that Cameron Sawyer (23 November) has a different name for you guys?

What a harsh judgement of budget airlines.

I am (unfortunately) a very frequent business traveler, but my judgement of budget airlines, and of air travel in general, is quite different.

First of all, I could hardly get by without budget airlines, as they sell one-way tickets for reasonable cost, unlike the regular airlines. My trips often involve multiple destinations which are not really practical with regular airlines. The transparent and reasonable pricing of budget airlines is far better for consumers than the complex and obscure “yield management” practiced by regular airlines. I believe that eventually the budget airline model will take over the industry, and that will be a good thing.

The best budget airlines are in the US (where you have the worst regular airlines)–Southwest and Jet Blue. Southwest is a superbly run organization; possibly the best airline in the world. In Europe, Easyjet (we like to call it Sleazyjet, but only in good fun) is quite acceptable. I wish they would learn something from Southwest about organization of the boarding process, but at least you can buy the right to priority boarding. Ryan Air is less acceptable, but that is not really typical. In Russia, Sky Express is doing a good job. In more than a million miles of flying over the last ten years, I have not had any serious problems on any budget airline flight.

Among regular airlines, I mostly patronize Aeroflot, which has a fleet of new Airbus aircraft and which is excellent. Aeroflot, like Southwest, has an extremely good on-time performance record, and in decades of flying has never (knock on wood) mishandled a single bag of mine. Aeroflot has a real business class with big seats on European flights, where European airlines merely set up a curtain in the middle of the cabin and serve slightly better food. A disadvantage of Aeroflot is a zero tolerance policy on exceeding baggage weight limits; also it is fairly expensive. I have been perfectly happy with British Airlines, except for the fact that they will refuse to board you if you are even a minute later than one hour prior to the flight in checking in, even when that results from long check-in lines due to too few agents. John Heelan complains that budget airlines are almost as expensive as BA–well, that is because of competition from them. If they did not exist, the pricing would be different. Air France, affectionately called “Air Chance,” is also good always. I avoid Lufthansa and Swiss because of chronic mishandling of luggage.

I think air travel is much better in general than it was a decade or two ago. It seems to me that on-time performance is better and bag mishandling has become rarer. Airports are getting better, too, although in some cases they are getting too big to be convenient. Perfect example of that is Heathrow Terminal 5, where you have to take a train (!) to your gate after checking in–within one terminal! I much prefer the old Terminal 2, used by Aeroflot, which is not very pretty, but is compact and extremely efficient. I don’t understand why so many Londoners curse Heathrow; it’s not at all bad, certainly much better than Gatwick. A really disastrous airport, and the best example of an airport which is too big to be convenient, is Atlanta. This airport, it is true, is a horror. It can take an hour and a half (!) from landing to getting into your car, when you arrive on an international flight. That is because they moved international flights to a new terminal at the very end of the airport so that you have to go through a secure area before getting out to the street. So you stand in line for passport control, then collect your bags and stand in line for customs. Then, you have to re-check your bag, and go through security control, shoes off, laptop out of its bag, no liquids etc., as it you were getting on another flight. After that you take a train to main terminal, and wait to collect your bags yet again. Awful!

In the former Soviet Union, airport development lags behind the rest of the world. Many cities are still served by primitive Soviet-era airports where it is the norm to board by bus and stairs, instead of by jetway. In Krasnoyarsk, a prosperous million-plus population city in Eastern Siberia, there is not even an arrivals terminal at all–the bus dumps you off at a gap in the fence. You go through and collect your bag from a pile on the ground. This is fun when you arrive at 04:00 in the morning after a six-hour flight from Moscow, in the winter when it is -30 Centigrade outside. Notable exceptions are, of all places, Tbilisi and Yerevan, which both have beautiful, state-of-the-art airports complete with jetways, retail plazas, and so forth, and Yekaterinburg in the Urals.

I am pleased that my Community of Scholars posting (19 November) resonated with folks. But there is another level at which the issue should be addressed besides the personal one of loneliness or unsatisfied yearning for recognition by one’s peers. The other dimension is veritas, which is ill served by the division of turf and closed-door policies of academics in some fields.

I am not intending to generalize about the whole of higher education. I firmly believe in sticking to one’s knitting and my observation comes from the area where I have set up shop.

The thrust of the book I am now writing on post-Cold War US thinking about international relations is that there is no real intellectual ferment going on. What I see is a lot of back scratching and mutual exchange of quotes for book dust jackets or, in the opposite case, blanket condemnation without going through the mental exercise of detailed rebuttal.

The net result in the particular field I am investigating is some astonishingly shoddy work by some of the profession’s best-known and best-selling senior scholars, all of whom should know better. I am not talking about typos or factual errors here or there for the nitpickers. I am talking about gross methodological hanky panky, about indiscriminate use of sources, about epistemological over-reach, about the farming out of not only research but also conceptualizing to hired hands.

People at this level are not stupid. On the contrary, I take off my hat to some of the authors I am critiquing and give them full credit for brilliant minds, great erudition and/or vast relevant life experience. But we all can become lazy and complacent. And that is precisely where a genuine community of scholars should keep everyone on his toes and its passing, as confirmed by several of the write-ins thus far, must be lamented.

JE comments: A powerful appeal for veritas, the last of the hallowed “three (Latin) names of WAIS.” Veritas may be even more fundamental than “pax,” as the latter cannot exist without the former.

I was born and raised in Rome, where I completed my Masters in Chinese Studies. Before that I studied classical languages, including Greek and Latin, so my decision to delve into the depths of classical texts and scripts in other linguistic worlds–including Chinese, Arabic and Hindi–should not come as a big surprise. It should be mentioned that my deep aversion to neo-fascist and sexist mindsets which can still be seen within Italian society, or bubbling underneath the surface, encouraged me to break certain rules of my Master’s plans to travel the world in search of more optimal and receptive social paradigms. This brought me to several intriguing corners of Asia such as Nepal, India, China and Egypt (including the African part). In this process, I came to realize that some cultural practices could be interpreted as constraining mechanisms for social behavior, and that one of my missions in life could be to deconstruct them.

This impetus took me to China, where I also spent three years teaching Italian and Latin to students of the Law School of Xiamen University. Along this valuable teaching experience, I published articles and a book on Italian Grammar & Language acquisition, which exposed Chinese students to a rather new pedagogical mode than the one they were used to. Most importantly, I worked side by side with Chinese scholars, a position that helped me better understand their forma mentis. After that I felt ready to sharpen ideas and get greater intellectual exposure by applying for a PhD in Transcultural Studies at Heidelberg University, Germany

For the past few years, my intellectual journey has taken me deeper not only into Confucian studies, but also to the complexities of Islamic studies. So, after two years of Arabic studies and 5 years of training in Chinese plus the working time in China and other journeys around Asia, I found myself intrigued by the existence of a particular minority, the Chinese Muslims, who have struggled, in various forms, for survival in China for the last thousand years. This interest is consistent with my curiosity vis-à-vis minority-related issues.

I grew particularly interested in the Hui community, who epitomize in some ways a unique hybrid cultural development which is sometimes being defined as Confucian Islam. This topic has been the focus of my private research before the PhD (Chinese Muslim architecture being another one) and of my sponsored research as a PhD scholar at Heidelberg.

My research agenda should not overshadow my deep passion and interest for Middle-Eastern and Indian cultural and musical forms. Part of the delight of expanding my intellectual horizons through trips around Asia has been the opportunity to learn more about Middle Eastern and Indian dance and music. I am fluent in Italian, Chinese, English and proficient in German and Arabic.

JE comments: At last month’s conference WAISers were treated to an overview of Roberta’s work on Chinese Muslims. I learned a ton. As the final presenter of the three-day meeting, she closed WAIS ‘09 most impressively. Since I’m a language teacher, I’d be intrigued to know more about Italian studies in China–is there great interest? How about Spanish? The commonly held view out here is that the Chinese are obsessed only with learning English.

Welcome to WAIS, Roberta! I know you’re very busy with your work, your research and finishing your doctorate, but I hope you’ll be able to contribute to WAIS discussions from time to time. China and Islam are two of the Forum’s top-ten topics. Also, with the exception of Roy Domenico’s occasional reports, we publish very little on contemporary Italy. I’d like to change that.

I am Brazilian by birth, Indian by blood and American by citizenship. My life has taken me to these three places multiple times, and I am grateful to the exposure I got from them in addition to other places I have been. After finishing my studies in Political Science at Cornell University, I was determined to learn a new language and to expose myself to a new society. Indeed, earning a research fellowship in Germany proved to be a unique experience much before I set foot in Heidelberg. At the time, once I disclosed to others the wonderful news of my acceptance, the wisdom of my decision was generally questioned first, while my achievement was congratulated second. I had expected, at the very least, the reverse order but I was mistaken. “Congratulations” had consistently lost the race to “Why Germany?” This succinct, seemingly ingenuous question, proved to be so popular and prevalent that after a few attempts of synthesizing my research proposal into a sound-bite, I simply retorted by saying: “Precisely because of your question.”

Never mind that Germany has the strongest economy in Europe, is the largest exporter in the world, plays a key role geo-strategically within the EU as a bridge between Western and Eastern Europe, has the highest number of art galleries, museums and bookshops per square kilometer in the world, or has a fantastically rich intellectual tradition. In the minds of many outsiders, Germany is still a faceless and colorless country, perpetually inclined to remain hostage to its past; but not to the glorious parts of its past. In the case of Germany, and I am afraid only Germany, the general tendency is to shackle it to the darkest of its chapters.

Originally, the central idea of my research agenda involved a study of the relationship between social capital[1] and ethnic diversity. After some reflection, independent investigation and discussion with professors and students at Heidelberg as well as from the US, I extended the scope of my original plan and focused quite heavily on the issue of social integration of immigrants and minority groups in a comparative perspective (mainly between Germany, England, and France). I presented part of my output last December in an invited talk in Austria.

For this reason, I conducted some field work (i.e. mostly interviews) in the neighborhood of Kreuzberg (Berlin), and the city of Bradford (England) and visited suburbs in Paris that were home to violent riots involving many young, disaffected Frenchmen of North African background in 2005. As I explored the pros and cons of different social integration models, I thought it would be instructive to have a 3-case-study comparison.

More recently, but in this spirit, I started looking at India, in order to get a deeper perspective on how different institutional mechanisms can be created and/or adjusted to “manage diversity.” As such, my current research, as a PhD student at the University of Pennsylvania, draws inspiration from my background and previous research, but looks more specifically and systematically at how India has managed to sustain its secular, democratic foundations by institutionalizing a model that accommodates diverse groups, religions, and languages. Contrary to Western perceptions that favor a model of “oneness” (one language, one religion, one culture), India shows the world an alternative model, based on pluralism, which calls for analysis. In sharing my current research interest, I do not mean to idealize any model nor the successes of the Indian case. Challenges do exist and part of my challenge is to uncover the challenges that are often overlooked by casual observers.

In addition to my doctoral work at Penn, I am an editorial assistant to the Heidelberg Papers in South Asian and Comparative Politics (HPSAC), an electronic scholarly journal established by the department of Political Science of the South Asia Institute at the University of Heidelberg. Over the past years, I taught courses at Heidelberg in its Sociology, Political Economy and South Asian Politics departments. Prior to my stay in Europe, I worked for the Carnegie Council on Ethics and International Affairs (2003). I am fluent in English, Spanish, Portuguese, German and Bengali–and am learning how to play the dhoumbek, a Middle-Eastern hand drum!

[1] Defined by Robert Putnam as “features of social organization such as networks, norms and social trust that facilitate coordination and cooperation for mutual benefit.” In other words, social capital can be understood as the levels of trust, tolerance, cooperation and reciprocity among individuals that arise from taking part in networks in a particular social environment.

JE comments: I believe Sergio Mukherjee is the first WAISer to include a footnote in his introductory bio! Great to have you aboard, Sergio: your life embodies the WAISly global ideal, and I am certain you’ll enrich our discussions for many years to come. I’m glad you joined us at WAIS ‘09, and even happier that you’ve joined the Forum.

I share much of Gilbert Doctorow’s opinion about the “community of scholars,” but on the other hand, I must add that much of my research/publications could not have happened without the incredibly knowledgeable, talented, and cooperative partners I accumulated over the years. In some studies of new technologies on which I had practically no prior knowledge, I was totally dependent on an expert partner. At the end of the project, these wonderful people had shared so much knowledge that I was able to understand the technology, its economic/managerial strenghts and limitations, and make practical recommendations for managers and other researchers to proceed. After doing a few projects I learned some critical lessons about team efforts such as the importance of personal “chemistry” in the very early stage of a project. If the “chemistry” is right, trust will develop and team productivity will soar. Poor “chemistry” or none usually lead to stupid behavior sooner or later. After a few projects, I established a strict policy of no engagement if the first few face-to-face meetings with a new partner did not produce good “chemistry.” My great research partners and I have published over 200 research reports regarding business innovation and technology management, mostly in blind-refereed journals. I literally could not have done that without their sharing and cooperation.

JE comments: Chemistry is important, which gets me thinking: why are there so few WAIS collaborative efforts/publications? The Middle East Peace Plan authored by Istvan Simon, Siegfried Ramler, Gene Franklin and Michael Sullivan is the only example from the last two years I can think of. Despite our family bickering, we have established an excellent chemistry–so let’s do more! Thoughts/suggestions?

Whilst I sympathise wholeheartedly with John Heelan, it must be said that the “world’s favourite airline” is no more that and unltimately John is in the driver’s seat, because the airline will have to pay for those pricing issues (see share price). (I realise this is of no help for what happened to him in Madrid…)

Maybe an economist can explain all this better than I can?

John Heelan comments:

My thanks to Eugen for his empathy. He is correct in that if a passenger wants to travel to an airport notionally within a hundred kilometers of a regular airport, wants to travel with no baggage, wants to scramble for seating, wants to pay for inedible in-flight food, wants to risk a no-show of the aircraft “for operational reasons,” wants to accept a “take or leave it” customer service (sic) operation, wants to accept “no refunds ever for whatever reason,” wants to risk that your baggage does not travel with you, wants to be subject to intensive in-flight selling by poorly paid cabin staff part of whose salary has to depend on sales commission, then the (alleged) low-cost airlines are a good option.

“Alleged” in my experience because when you add up all the extra charges the net cost is not much different from that of scheduled airlines. (I recently planned a golfing holiday to northern Italy, but by the time I added up the extra charges for taking baggage, golf clubs, credit card charge, check-in charges and so on the end price was similar to those of Alitalia and British Airways travelling on scheduled flights to major airports from airports near where I live.)

Although not an economist, I do have some experience of substantial worldwide flying over my lifetime, running major businesses and am thus fully conversant with the concept of making additional marginal profits on otherwise unused assets. My experience with BA in Madrid demonstrated that it is apparently prepared to fly with empty seats at a total loss rather than garner a 100% marginal profit on whatever reasonable price it might offer.

The whole concept of “standby fares” was based on the concept that airlines make additional profits from “bottoms on seat” once the break-even point of passenger numbers has been reached. Had BA offered me a standby ticket at 100-200 euros I would have taken it and BA would have made an additional 100-200 euros straight profit. In the end it apparently chose to fly with loss-making empty seats.

My hitherto preferred “favourite airline” has lost its halo (and my future business).

JE comments: One’s “favorite airline” usually works like British football–the least favorite du jour gets relegated to a lower division, and the other carriers move up by default. “Favorite” therefore equates to the one that has offended the least, or even more accurately, the one you haven’t flown in a long time. My present favorite is Continental, as it offers free food on its flights–or at least it still did when we flew Continental to San Francisco in August.

This is a response to David Gress’s post of 12 November:

Much of David Gress’s post is in my view the type of material al-Qaida ideologues utilize to bolster their own arguments. It is interesting to note that the kind of arguments al-Qaida ideologues use to attack or to undermine the positions of the many Muslim intellectuals who disagree with the al-Qaida interpretation of the Qur’an as it relates to non-Muslims and war, Christian/Jewish anti-Muslim polemicists use to attack all of Islam and to undermine Muslim protestations to the contrary. Fascinating and sad indeed. One can read the Raymon Ibrahim-edited The Al Qaeda Reader, which is a collection of al-Qaida justification essays, to have this point driven home. This collection provides grim but enlightening reading. One thing comes clear from this book: Puritanical Salafist intellectuals do read Western anti-Islamic polemic as well as Christian intellectual communications towards the Muslim community in general. Puritanical Salafists use statements similiar to the ones of David Gress for fuel to underpin their murderous activities. David’s post ignores basic principles of interfaith dialogue as well–a fact that increases its problematics. His post is representative of a type of polemic common to Christian/Jewish anti-Islamic polemicists, who fail to study or give credence to the copious amount of Muslim spiritual writings regarding appropriate and highly spiritualized/altruistic views of and approaches to non-Muslims; much of it based in the Qur’an itself.

David’s post is a type of polemic anathema to those of us (to include Catholic scholar Hans Kung, a leading proponent of interfaith dialogue on the global stage) who recognize the necessity to uphold Islamic spirituality and ethics as having deep commonality with and spiritual resonance with the most altruistic of Christian, Jewish, Buddhist, Hindu, Baha’i and other world religions’ teachings. Great writers like Hans Kung, Hindu thinker Sarvapelli Radakrishnan, Sufi Master Frithof Schuon and Baha’i leader Abdu’l-Baha fully support this thinking of Islam’s spiritually high altruism and powerful, life-affirming resonance, a resonance and beauty that embraces all of human kind. There are numerous Christian scholars as well who support this thinking, to include writer on Christian mysticism Richard Smolens, the great scholar of Western mysticism Evelyn Underwood, and Emory University Professor of Religion John Witte Jr. David’s assertion that Muslim focus on compassion only focuses on Muslims is simply outrageous for one who has read so much of Islamic scripture and commentary as I have. Of course Islamic spirituality and high altruism encompasses all humanity. David’s thinking here does dovetail nicely, however, with al-Qaida views on the matter.

To address some of David’s specific points:

DG: I respect Vincent’s very eirenic understanding of Islam and of politics generally. Unfortunately, many people do not share either.

VL: I am glad David respects the concept of an eirenic view of Islam. However I like to think my view is a bit broader than that. I recognize Islam is not pacifistic. It is fortunate however that many millions of people do have an eirenic view of Islam and God in Islam.

DG: It is, in a way, a pointless undertaking to ask if [Ft. Hood shooter] Hasan was acting as a righteous Muslim or not. Fact one: he believed he was. Fact two: he has ample justification for that belief, not only in the Quran and several hadith, but also in many decrees issued by numerous authoritative imams over the past many decades, not to mention centuries.

VL: It is not pointless to reject Hasan’s association of his actions to Islam. I don’t accept that Hasan had ample justification and certainly not proper Qur’anic justification for that belief, though I accept that he had plenty of resources to draw from. The fact that he believed he was in concert with Islam doesn’t mean he was. I reject the notion that the Qur’an supported his behavior and DG’s Hadith comment is indicative of the problem of Hadith credibility and research methodology that has existed in Islam since the Ummayyads. David’s comment about Hadith very much points to the problem of false or extremely weak Hadith being accepted as authoritative at varying levels of the Islamic and non-Muslim worlds, a problem acknowledged by serious scholars of Islam from most backgrounds I’m aware of.

DG: For one thing, when wahhabi-salafi or what you will Muslims appeal to e.g. the verse of the sword or other verses that command the assault on, subjugation of, and murder (unless they convert) of infidels, they cannot be said to be wrong. The peaceful interpretation of the (to Muslims) divine message is unfortunately rather in abeyance these days.

VL: When Muslims refer to the Sword Verses (almost all the experts I’m aware of, and there are many, on the subject agree that puritanical views towards jihadism reside in a minority viewpoint, however these positions are growing and are generally focused on by the Western news media and non-Muslim religionists who engage in anti-Islamic polemic), many recognize that those verses have a specific historical context and must be read in holistic concert or synergy with the multitudes of other verses enjoining tolerance, love, forgiveness, mercy etc. I’ve written on this at length in this Forum before and quoted from the Qur’an. No need to repeat here. I reject the notion that peaceful interpretation of the Qur’an is rather in abeyance these days. Publicity of ignorant and murderous acts in the name of Islam however is rampant to be sure.

DG: When Muslims hear Allah (who has very little indeed in common with the God Jews and Christians worship) declare himself to be the compassionate, the merciful, it is understood that this refers to compassion and mercy to those who believe, that is, Muslims. It is by submission (islam in the true sense of the word) that men deserve the compassion of the otherwise arbitrary and cruel Allah. All others are excluded from this compassion and mercy.

VL: The entirety of this particular statement is to be utterly rejected. I have written at length in this Forum and quoted scholars who provide ample evidence in their treatises on Muslim love and respect for the humanity of the other (non-Muslim). It is this kind of writing that stands opposed to basic principles of necessary interfaith dialogue and is the kind of statement that makes working towards complex problem-solving as it relates to violence and religion a very difficult thing. I could wax poetic and go on and on about the powerful love and moral beauty reflected in the Qur’an, actual Hadith, and centuries of Muslim commentary on Islamic scripture and I will elaborate further here. David Gress’s simplistic commentary in this public Forum on the Qur’an’s depiction of God, resulting in the appellation of “cruel,” is problematic in the extreme and potentially harmful.** There are certainly enough scholars of religion of Jewish, Christian and Muslim backgrounds to credibly reject David’s belief that the God of the Qur’an is not the God of Judaism and Christianity. For that matter the Baha’i doctrine of progressive revelation also runs counter to such a notion.

David Gress’s comment to the effect that God in the Qur’an is cruel is essentially incorrect, though general Muslim understandings of the Qur’an bring forward the well-disseminated idea that God does have 99 names (or attributes), some reflecting what some people might think of as appropriately fearsome (as opposed to cruel) aspects of divine justice. Those who reference God’s cruelty throughout the Qur’an and Hadith don’t paint a correct picture of the many facets to the “naming of God” and descriptive of divine attributes to be found throughout the massive body of scripture and literature associated with multiplicitous strands of Islamic spiritual thought. Moreover, David very much ignores the practically countless references to God’s merciful and benevolent attributes (that are not just focused on Muslims alone) also to be found throughout the Qur’an and Hadith that are the root to countless Muslims’ benevolent and altruistically spiritual understanding and practice of Islam (if, for example, Islam is inherently violent, I’d be interested in an explanation as to why many Sufi, Sufi influenced orthodoxies and Ahmadi interpretations of Qur’anic revelation lean strongly towards pacifism or have strong peace-oriented strands.

It seems to me that David accepts Puritanical Salafism as authority for pointing to what Hadith or Hadith interpretation is credible as authoritative reflection of Islamic thought. For many respected scholars in Islam, what is actually happening is that Puritanical Salafists use “false hadith” to support concepts that are in reality anathema to higher moral thought, which begs the question: Why do so many non-Muslims who are willing to engage in anti-Muslim polemic not give the appellation of “false hadith” to these erroneous constructions of supposed “true” Islamic theology? More widespread education and enlightenment on the subject is a strategic necessity as a coming cornerstone of peace.

Generally speaking, it appears to me David Gress’s comments in WAIS on Islam reflect some Christian clerical anti-Islamic polemic I’ve been exposed to, a common polemic being something like “the Christian God is a God of love, whereas the God of Islam is one of cruelty and power.” In today’s highly interconnected “global village,” such commentary is archaic and unnecessarily provocative, especially because from countless Muslims and others who study Islamic spirituality perspectives, such a statement is incredibly myopic as a descriptive of the Almighty in Islamic thought and scripture. Throughout a massive body of Muslim commentary on the Qur’an and Hadith one finds multitudes of odes to and analysis of God’s loving aspects, and one finds plenty that is respectful and loving towards non-Muslims (see the writings of Jalaluddin Rumi as an example of this, where he prostrates himself before a Christian, not to be outdone in humility because a Muslim’s duty is to be humble).

In the Mathnavi of Jalaladdin Rumi, who is one of the most famous writers and brightest lights of Islamic spiritual thought, it is stated, “Love is the astrolabe of God’s mysteries.” In Letter 53 of the Nahj al Balagha, a document I’ve written about or drawn from several times before in this Forum because it is one of the Islamic world’s most thoughtful treatises reflecting heights of Islamic altruism, Imam Ali (Spiritual successor to Muhammad in Shi’a theology and one of the four “rightly guided” Caliphs of Sunni Islam) states the Qur’an is a code written “ to establish a kind and benevolent rule, throwing light on various aspects of justice, benevolence and mercy, an order based on the ethics of Divine rulership where justice and mercy are shown to human beings irrespective of class, creed and colour, where poverty is neither a stigma nor a disqualification and where justice is not tainted with nepotism, favouritism, provincialism or religious fanaticism; and, on the other hand, it is a thesis on the higher values of morality.” (Ali b. Abi Taalib, Letters from Nahjul Balaagh)

I present the Yusuf Ali Translation of Surah 1:

“Al Fatihah (The Opening)

In the name of Allah, Most Gracious, Most Merciful. Praise be to Allah, the Cherisher and Sustainer of the Worlds; Most Gracious, Most Merciful. Master of the Day of Judgment. Thee do we worship, and Thine aid we seek. Show us the straight way. The way of those on whom Thou hast bestowed Thy Grace, Those whose (portion) is not wrath, and who go not astray.”

I’ve said it before in this Forum, I’ll say it again:

An erudite scholar of Islam once told me (and I paraphrase from memory):

“To understand the Qur’an one must understand the first Surah of the Qur’an, in order to understand the first Surah of the Qur’an one must understand the first line of the first Surah of the Qur’an, which is ‘In the name of God, The Compassionate, The Merciful (or Most Gracious, Most Merciful depending on translation of course—VL). Those who have failed to understand the first line of the first Surah and the first Surah itself will fail to understand the Qur’an.”

Inculcation and internalization of mercy and compassion are integral to full holistic understanding of the Qur’an. How then is God to be labeled as cruel, when the very first Surah which requires comprehension to understand the Qur’an sets the stage for that understanding by underpinning future Qur’anic/scriptural descriptives of divine attributes with the concepts of divine graciousness, mercy, and the cherishing and sustaining of the worlds of creation? When Surah 1 informs the reader that we humans seek God’s aid and asks for Him to show us the straight path, we are not asking for such from a cruel God. An all powerful , all loving, all merciful, absolutely just and supreme Lord of all creation is in part how God is reflected in Islam, and that is who humans ask for guidance from in Islamic thought.

It is always saddening to me that those who reflect abhorrence of evil threads in Puritanical Salafist and even conservative orthodox thought do the Salafists the service of supporting those many furiously erroneous and even cruel interpretations of the Qur’an and Hadith/false Hadith by upholding those same interpretations as reflective of all of Islam; an appellation that might be correctly said to derive from Puritanical Salafist/Kharijite/conservative orthodox interpretations whilst ignoring countless key pointers to high altruism and spirituality (this problem of similarity of Puritanical Salafist and Christian Polemicist interpretation of the Qur’an might be linked to the deeply problematic and much written about divorce of juristic from theologic and of course mystical/spiritual from both juristic and dogmatic thought in Islamic history).

David Gress is certainly not alone in his myopic anti-Islamic polemic, and it is this line of behavior that actually supports Puritanical Salafism because the Salafists can say when they see writings that have the tone David seems to reflect in this Forum. “See our enemies (infidels) know the truth and reject that truth! They deserve to be conquered, to be defeated, and must be forced to submit!” In other words, when al-Qaida ideologues intellectually justify their actions to convince moderate Muslims of the “rightness” of their murderous actions, they draw on Western polemics like David’s here in WAIS to support their arguments and further fuel the fires of violence and war/jihad against “crusaders .” Our enemies do read and quote and incite violence against us from writings in the media and from the Internet. Until responsible-thinking non-Muslims begin to take interest in the concept of ideology/doctring derived from “false hadith”–and can discuss with each other (i.e., interfaith dialogue) the Writings/Divine Directives/Laws to Obey (from our various religions) that enjoin love, peace, justice, tolerance or all–the search for world peace will remain elusive as has been the case to now. Thus, I am repeatedly saying that it is a strategic necessity to accurately and respectfully engage in interfaith dialogue as a necessary and strategic component to “winning the war” against fanaticism and religious based violence…even in this Forum.

**The works listed below provide nice variations on Muslim views towards non-Muslims, human rights, God’s love, power and beauty, rejection of extremism, use of intuitive intellect, phenomenological experience that transcends the confines of human earthly existence and provides insight into spiritual realms also implicitly available to non-Muslims. Works on Muslim views towards pluralism, like Seyyed Hossein Nasr’s The Heart of Islam: Enduring Values For Humanity are important, as well as Reza Shah Kazemi ‘s The Other in the Light of the One: The Universality of the Qur’an and Interfaith Dialogue, Abdullahi Ahmed An-Naim’s Toward an Islamic Reformation: Civil Liberties, Human Rights, and International Law, Roy Mottahedeh’s The Mantle of the Prophet: Religion and Politics in Iran, Sayyid Muhammad Husayn Tabatabai’s Kernel of the Kernel: Concerning The Wayfaring and Spiritual Journey of the People of Intellect, the copious writings of Jalaludin Rumi to be found in English to include the Coleman Barks-translated The Essential Rumi, Khaled Abou El Fadl’s The Great Theft: Wrestling Islam From the Extremists, and Fazlur Rahman’s Major Themes of the Qur’an all in different ways reject Mr. Gress’s myopic statement.

JE comments: Speaking with him at the WAIS ‘09 conference, I was awed by Vincent Littrell’s drive to read every scholarly book published on Islam. In this exhaustive and passionate posting, Vince demonstrates the depths of his erudition. An important rebuttal to those who dismiss Islam as a religion of violence.

(JK) If indeed the countries of origin would be developed on “self-sufficiency” models instead of globalization rooted in draining their resources and keeping them perpetually underdeveloped, then I would agree with the argument some WAISers have advanced against “temporary immigrants.”

(IS) This sounds like Marxist propaganda, which has been around for at least the past 50 years, and is designed to make populations feel like permanent victims of diabolical external forces, thereby freeing them of the responsibility for their own destiny.

Mr. Kofas’s championing of the self-sufficiency model versus globalization seems misplaced. Self-sufficiency was tried by both Mao Zedong in China and Gandhi, Nehru and successors in India, and the attempts failed miserably. What is more interesting than these failures is the fact that more recently both of these countries started a period of sustained and extraordinarily successful development by reversing those policies, and joining the globalized world. So this experience does not support Mr. Kofas’s position: Globalization 2, Self-sufficiency 0 .

But the score actually is much higher if one examines the countries which have been successful in development over a number of years before these latest two examples, and compares them to the countries that have not. Such comparisons were made in the excellent speech delivered by President Oscar Arias of Costa Rica on April 18, 2009 to his Latin American colleagues.:

http://www.boliviabella.com/we-did-something-wrong-speech-by-oscar-arias-president-of-costa-rica.html

or in the original Spanish:

http://mabb.blogspot.com/2009/05/latin-america-oscar-arias-words-to.html

Three months ago WAISer Joe Listo sent me this speech in Spanish in private correspondence. I thought it was a historical watershed speech because one hears far too little of these thoughts articulated in Latin America, where instead the tired, old, obsolete Marxist rhetoric is still quite in vogue. So I translated it into English, and suggested to him that he forward it to WAIS with his comments. He did so, but unfortunately J.E. never published it. This speech also came up during the WAIS ‘09 discussion of the China panel, because I mentioned it, as it fit perfectly with Bill Rattliff’s excellent in-depth paper.

Being an immigrant, I tend to sympathize with them, and feel somewhat uncomfortable with the remarks recently made by David Gress. There are many people in the United States too that blame hard working immigrants for our ills. I do not agree with them. They say that Latin American immigrants do not contribute to our economy, consuming more in government services than they contribute in taxes, which may or may not be true, but in any case the same would be true of non-immigrants in similar situations. For the most part, I see immigrants as working hard just like everyone else, and with many contributions to our economy. The whole building industry is mainly manned by immigrant labor, and so is farm labor. When there are crackdowns on illegal immigration, fruit and produce often are left not harvested, rotting in California fields. This waste seems to show that the economic value of these crops does not support higher wages on the one hand, which might attract other workers to do the hard work necessary that currently only immigrants are willing to take.

But on the other hand, I disagree again with Jon Kofas who said that these workers are “terribly exploited.” If their working conditions are so appalling and they are so exploited, one has to wonder why do they pay large sums to smugglers, and endure the perils of being smuggled into the country, often risking death to come here? It is obvious that farm labor in the United States fills a major need in Mexico and other Latin American countries for jobs, while at the same time produces important economic benefits for the United States. It is a match that produces a win-win situation and it is futile and unwise to try to stop it. The attempts of our government to legalize this migration with temporary work visas unfortunately have been an utter failure so far, because it neither answered the needs of farmers and other employers for the labor, nor has it been able to curb illegal immigration.

However, there is also truth in what David Gress says. Muslim immigrants in Europe might indeed be taking advantage of the welfare state. Worse, there seems to be a major problem of assimilating these immigrants into European culture. Who is to blame for this lack of assimilation for several generations and consequent buildup of resentment on both sides is not my point here. I merely point out that the problem exists and is a dangerous situation that should be addressed. The murder of Theo van Gogh and countless other incidents all throughout Europe point to this. It may be incorrect to fix the blame on either “lazy immigrants” or on “racist natives,” but the problem is very real. Perhaps it would be more productive to try to propose solutions. I have noted before that this problem seems to be much more characteristic of Europe than the United States, so studying this difference may be useful in proposing solutions.

Tor Guimaraes (21 November) mentioned U-6 as a broader measure of unemployment. But this is somewhat inaccurate. The definitions of what the various measures of unemployment and underemployment used by the Bureau of labor Statistics are given in

http://www.bls.gov/lau/stalt.htm

U-6 includes not only the unemployed but also people who are under-employed, that is workers who are employed in two categories of jobs, but which are considered as temporary until they find better ones more suitable as replacements for the jobs they lost. I quote the definitions given by the Bureau of Labor Statistics from the above document:

• U-1, persons unemployed 15 weeks or longer, as a percent of the civilian labor force;
• U-2, job losers and persons who completed temporary jobs, as a percent of the civilian labor force;
• U-3, total unemployed, as a percent of the civilian labor force (this is the definition used for the official unemployment rate);
• U-4, total unemployed plus discouraged workers, as a percent of the civilian labor force plus discouraged workers;
• U-5, total unemployed, plus discouraged workers, plus all other marginally attached workers, as a percent of the civilian labor force plus all marginally attached workers; and
• U-6, total unemployed, plus all marginally attached workers, plus total employed part time for economic reasons, as a percent of the civilian labor force plus all marginally attached workers

I think that Tor is correct in concentrating on jobs, because unemployment causes the most suffering in a recession and no doubt when it starts decreasing significantly consumption, which fuels 2/3 of the economy, will soon follow, further accelerating the recovery. But one should not forget that the unemployment rate tends to decrease last in a recovery, well after the recovery has been under way for many months, because employers quite naturally delay hiring new workers when demand picks up, gaining from the improved productivity that recessions produce. When unemployment starts decreasing the Fed will switch to increasing interest rates, otherwise inflation will result in a superheated accelerating economy. Judging from the graphs of the present and past recessions and recoveries, we seem to be halfway through the current one. Unemployment rates always increase in recessions, and then decrease about approximately the same speeds that the increase occurred, forming a U shaped symmetrical curve. If this is true, that is if we hit the bottom of this U-shaped curve, we will soon see a decrease of unemployment rates. Furthermore, as I said the decrease in unemployment rates tends to occur with the same inverse speeds that the increase occurred, and if this is true in this recession as well, we can expect another two years before the unemployment rates decrease to the levels before the recession started under the Bush administration. This would put it right before the last year of the Obama administration, which perhaps could help re-elect president Obama for a second term.

JE comments: My apologies to Istvan Simon for failing to post the Arias speech; I don’t recall receiving it. (I am occasionally guilty of overlooking a post when the volume is large.)

My youngest son went to the University of California-San Diego, and, perhaps, because of his Spanish heritage and blood was an aficionado de los toros. On Sundays he and three student colleagues would go to Tijuana (the site of one of the larger bullfighting stadiums in the world) to watch the contests. They bought the cheapest seats, and after the first fight the tourists who were disgusted with the gore would leave and the students would descend to the costly seats.

In any event, there was nary a time when they were not stopped by the police as they motored out of Tijuana to return to La Jolla. They were typically accused of having marijuana, which they denied. But, after each was positioned against a wall with hands raised and strip-searched, the police “found” a bag of marijuana in someone’s pocket. Then they were threatened with jail where they would be subject to beatings and gang-rape unless they paid their “fine.” Fortunately, these attentive guardians of peace and justice gave them the convenient option of paying the fine on the spot, and they were released. This became a Sunday ritual which was a bargain at that time of $20 shared four ways, just a cost of going to the bullfights.

JE comments: That’s quite a brush with justice; it takes guts to go back week after week for the same treatment! I’m glad I’m going to spend most of this Sunday WAISing…

Everyone was a migrant. Yes, if you take the very big picture: all modern humans are descended from East Africans of 50-70,000 years ago. But in real history, it matters a lot how long who’s been where. And Buddha and Jesus? To my best knowledge, the first was Indian and the second Jewish, and neither moved outside his homeland.

Tim wrote, “Modern Iberia has been fought over so often there is probably no such thing as someone living there whose ancestors sprang from its earth.” Hmm. Tell that to the Basques, they will disagree, possibly violently.

The matter of Iberia is much simpler, although this is not the place for an extended essay on the subject; see, for example, WAISer Stanley Payne on this in his España: una historia única, available only in Spanish.

Spain is indeed rather unique, in that a clear Spanish identity can be traced to Late Roman times and particularly to the era of St. Isidore of Seville in the early 600s. The Muslim invasion and conquest of much of the peninsula in the following century did not erase this Spanish nationality, but suppressed it. In the course of the Reconquista, the Spanish populations of Muslim-occupied areas returned as a matter of course to their Spanish identity.

Every country has, or had, stories about its origins. Some are true, others legendary. I don’t know what “sin” has to do with any of this, other than to place blame for real or alleged atrocities. But history is full of atrocities, as it is of generosity, sacrifice, nobility, and honor. I never understood this need to blame one’s ancestors for things. Who knows; I have been told that among mine is a First Lady of Virginia, which probably means I have slaveholders in my ancestry. So what? If I were a Sudanese, I might be a slaveholder myself today. I prefer being proud of one’s ancestors to condemning them.

I am in total agreement with Richard Hancock’s 20 November post, where he defends the practice of hiring foreign labor for the jobs in the USA that Americans will not perform. In my years of travel, in the US and abroad, it is the same not only for the United States but elsewhere. There is work that the French won’t do and work that the Russians won’t do too. I am relatively certain that you can find work in nearly all nations that locals will not perform.

In Oregon, as a teenager in the 1960s, while visiting relatives on an extended vacation near Portland, many of the local teenagers, including me, were recruited to pick fields of strawberries because “the local, unemployed white men will not,” according to my kin. We found it great fun, getting up before dawn, working all day and getting home after dark, tired and dirty, but a few dollars richer. But then we were about 14. No one checked ages, green cards or citizenship in those days.

In California in the late 1960s, when socialist Caesar Chavez organized the (mostly Mexican) labor forces to strike the growers from Northern California to the Coachella Valley in the south for higher wages and better conditions, the crops rotted because white people would not do the work. Literally millions of acres of crops of all types were lost and many did not recover for more than a decade.

On the English Channel in the 1980s, I once shared a few pints on the boat from Dover to Calais with several young English couples, perhaps in their early 20s. They were on their way to a paid vacation in France, or so I assumed. In fact, they were on their way to France to pick the wine grapes in the Val d’Loire and in Burgundy. When I asked about why them and not the French, they replied that the “French will not do such menial labor and we like the job because 1) we’re young, on summer break from school and we get to earn some money, 2) it’s in the sunny region of France, 3) they give us a place to rest, and 4) they give us one bottle of wine per person per day to enjoy with the meals they supply!” Talk about a paid vacation.

In Moscow, Mayor Luzhkov raided the Moscow Metro Transit Authority’s maintenance fund for money to rebuild the Orthodox Cathedral during 1991-1995 to appease the then Patriarch Alexi II. This was the church that the Bolsheviks dynamited in the 1930s.

( http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IRpVyqWFGh0&feature=player_embedded )

In Moscow, a city of about ten million in those days, apparently, there were no Russian crews able to perform the difficult and hard work through the first of several winters, at least not on time and on budget. Even the construction cranes and other heavy equipment were imported, I was told.

To Russia’s shame, Turkish firms were contracted and workers came in from Turkey, Bulgaria and elsewhere to build the Cathedral of Christ the Savior, a multi-hundred million dollar project. They even brought their own housing in the form of house trailers that were piled three high on the job site with ladders up to the tops ones. Most Russians saw the Mayor’s project as an ego trip to leave his mark on the Russian landscape like other leaders in Russia’s past had done, and has been previously been written by historians.

At the time in 1994 when the church was first coming out of the ground, my wife lamented that the mayor destroyed the world’s largest outdoor swimming pool that had replaced the cathedral way back when and that she swam in during her youth. The original Soviet plan for the site in 1934, once the cathedral debris was cleared, was for a monument to Lenin, a Palace of Soviets, to be built. It never was and finally, Khrushchev built the world’s largest open air swimming pool in the 1950s.

In Texas, if the Mexican laborers do not pick the citrus crops in the “Valley” (South Texas), the crops will rot, notwithstanding the high unemployment rates among whites in the region.

Sidebar: I just returned from West Texas’s Big Bend region. In Texas’s largest county (6,193 square miles), Brewster, but with the smallest population (est. 8,500), there is a relatively new school, the Terlingua-Study Butte school. Two years ago, the pre-K through 12 school had more than 300 students. This year, the manager of the general store near the school said that they are down to less than 150 students, not because of the economy or a lower birth rate but because of immigration policies being enforced first under President Bush and now under President Obama.

It seems that all of the student body was born in America but at least half of their parents were illegal and those families were deported as recently as this past summer. Many of the illegals worked on ranches, in the very few hotels and cafes or on the only two golf courses in the region. Many were plumbers, electricians, auto mechanics and a couple were physician’s assistants. Hence, there are only 11 students in this year’s senior class versus about 40 two years ago. The same story is happening in Presidio, about 45 miles up the Rio Grande toward El Paso. All along the border, we are throwing Americans, some of whom had less than a year until graduation, out of the USA because their parents are illegally here. Many of those families have been here for decades and have held down jobs, owned homes and have contributed to the local tax base via payroll taxes, property taxes and sales tax revenue.

Back to the matter of immigrants doing work that local natives will not: Current US law requires that all workers, from menial to executive, present a green card (legal residence card) or proof of US citizenship such as a passport or birth certificate in order to go to work. This has been the case for more than a decade. Even as a contractor, I am required to provide my Social Security card and passport to work for anyone. My neighbor is a home builder and he relates that he must keep records of the immigration status of the brick layers, framers, roofers, plumbers, electricians and all of his construction crews and that ICE (the old INS) does unannounced visits to his job sites a couple of times per year. He is the culprit, legally, should anyone be discovered working on his sites, who is not legal, even if the workers provided counterfeit documents. He faces huge fines.

Are there still illegals working in the USA? Of course. But, it’s not as common as it was in the last century.

This is a rather general remark about the cheap airlines (”no frills”), a business that sprang up in Europe maybe 10 years ago and which inevitably will be quoted in the context of rip-offs. And I do not want to let anyone forget that I also have been furious about their business model. I also had to rebook and pay “over the top” in urgent cases.

In simple terms we can describe the example of Ryanair as someone who has completely redefined the art of travel and has created a whole new market and has shaken up existing market participants. This led to the education of customers, people who did not want to be educated and who have had to come to grips with changes in prices according to supply and demand of a product (the seat on a plane that flies today as opposed to tomorrow). Let us not forget that the shelf life of a seat on a plane is one day–today’s flight to somewhere is no longer available tomorrow, the seat tomorrow has to be sold anew.

So someone like Ryanair roughly said the following: I invent a new game and you are invited to play with me but only according to my rules. If you do not like them you are free to go elsewhere (i.e. take some other airline’s seat). So suddenly two groups of people bumped into each other: those whose bottleneck factor was money and not time and who happily spent ages waiting for their planes at far-away airports, euphemistically named after world airports and those who were used to travel on world airlines and suddenly had to pay for all sorts of things which they hitherto had taken for granted. You have to pay for luggage (never heard of this!), you have to pay for a sandwich (same), you have no assigned seat (what a scandal!) and you are subject to advertising in planes for products you probably never heard of.

But look at it from the other side: It is now possible for me, with careful planning, to take my (minor) child to Italy to spend the holidays by plane–fly with her down there, fly back the same day and after two weeks fly down again and pick her up by plane. So a total of six flights (4 for me and 2 for her) cost maybe 200 Euros and are the fastest and safest way to get there and gives me a 2-day holiday in Tuscany.

And somehow the success of some of those airlines confirms that the business model is viable–again look at it from the other side: if it wasn’t viable the share price would reflect this immediately.

Whilst I sympathise wholeheartedly with John Heelan, it must be said that the “world’s favourite airline” is no more that and unltimately John is in the driver’s seat, because the airline will have to pay for those pricing issues (see share price). (I realise this is of no help for what happened to him in Madrid…)

The fact that consumers are being educated (see above) and hence feel ripped off in some cases has ultimately its good sides: consumers are better aware of pricing differences of similar goods in different markets and ultimately can get better deals. I dare say that with the rise of the internet (yes, I am aware that there is fraud too) the consumer gets in the long run the better deal.

Maybe an economist can explain all this better than I can?

JE comments: I think you’ve explained it perfectly, Eugen. I recall just a decade ago telephoning airlines in the hope of getting a good deal on specific flight dates. Now we have Kayak.com and the like. This in itself, it would seem, drags down prices.

I needed to get back urgently from Madrid to London last month for a family matter. As my ticket was a “no-change” variety, I went to Madrid’s Barajas airport to buy a single to Heathrow. I was staggered to find that a ticket for that day would cost me 900 euros (about £890)…

Jordi Molins replies:

This situation sounds familiar to me! However, there is a solution for that problem: Ryanair. Ryanair has prices dependent on how many seats are available, and not depending on how close the departure time is (or at least, this is not a very relevant variable in their pricing). As a consequence, if one needs to fly today or tomorrow, and the date is not a “prime” one (i.e., Friday evening or Sunday evening), there is a very high likelihood one can find a relatively cheap ticket with Ryanair.

JE comments: When I inquired, Jordi assured me off-line that he does not work for Ryanair! Eugen Solf has also sent a posting on cheap airlines (next in queue).

I could write a catalog of being ripped off in Mexico. I will just cite a couple of incidents. When I was a student at New Mexico A & M in the 1940s, I spent a night in a Juarez jail because four of us were out nightclubbing and we got into a fight with taxi drivers over the excessive fares that they claimed that we were committed to pay. A Hispanic member of our group challenged them to come up to the bridge and settle this problem with fisticuffs. We had a large, six-foot-six man on our side so we were fairly confident, but we were no match for taxi drivers who used black jacks. Of course, we were arrested. I was already in the police van nursing an enlarged ear from a black jack when I heard someone say, “Get in there, Shorty,” and our over-sized champion was flung into the van.

The following morning, I had to beg the jailer for 50 cents to call my grandmother who lived in El Paso and whose number was the only one that I could remember. My disgruntled uncle came down the following day and bailed us out. As I recall, we were fined for “insulting the Mexican race.”

This was a good lesson for all of us. Nightclubbing always leads to disagreements over the outlandish bills that the unsuspecting tourist feels compelled to dispute. I think that was the last night-club tour that I ever took in any country. Moreover, it is a good lesson to experience the feeling of being down and out in a strange city. I hesitated to call my aged grandmother but I thanked God that I did have someone to call.

It was January and the drunk tank had a concrete floor and un-glazed, barred windows. We spent a cold, sleepless night. We were the only Gringos among about 100 other prisoners. The Mexican prisoners treated us well. One of them even offered to let me sit on his battered old hat. Of course, I refused with thanks. One prisoner was very ill, and other prisoners kept calling for the guards but no one responded until dawn when they instructed the other prisoners to take him out in the yard and lay him in the sun. He seemed to be paralyzed and we doubted that he survived.

When we were lined up to see the judge, one peasant failed to remove his sombrero, and a hard-looking guard rabbit-punched him, knocking him down. That was an experience that caused each of us to “look at his hole card.” We were greatly relieved to see my uncle arrive on the scene.

I took a great many young people to the University of Oklahoma’s Hacienda El Cobano when I worked for OU. In every group of young people, it seemed that at least one would lose their tourist visa. The standard action to take in this respect was to go to the tourism in Guadalajara to obtain another visa. Of course, the loss of this visa was not discovered until our group was boarding the airplane so there was no chance to go to this office, so a bribe to the Immigration official was the only alternative. This bribe was standardized at 500 pesos per person.

On one occasion, a beautiful sixteen-year-old highschool girl found that she had lost her visa just as we arrived at the Immigration station. I was prepared to pay the bribe when this young lady said, “That’s OK because I really wasn’t ready to leave Mexico, so I will just stay here.” I immediately fell in with this play and asked the official if he could guarantee that this teenager could stay with a reliable family. I told him, “I am personally acquainted with this young lady’s family and they are very high-quality people, I expect you to arrange a home stay for her that is up to their standards.” After about 10 minutes of this type of conversation, he finally told her to just get on the plane. This ploy was totally unrehearsed, and I never would have believed that it would have worked but it did.

JE comments: A WAIS jewel–we’ve never aired “night in jail” postings before. I’m grateful to Richard Hancock for leading off.

I fear that a stay in a Juarez jail these days wouldn’t be as friendly as it was during the 1940s.

I am still fuming about a attempted (but legal) “rip-off” by what claims to be the “World’s Favourite Airline”!

I needed to get back urgently from Madrid to London last month for a family matter. As my ticket was a “no-change” variety, I went to Madrid’s Barajas airport to buy a single to Heathrow. I was staggered to find that a ticket for that day would cost me 900 euros (about £890), although my return ticket booked previously had cost me only £150! I declined the offer.

The same high price would have been demanded on the day I took my originally booked flight to Heathrow. That flight travelled with several empty seats that no doubt could have been filled at 100% marginal profit had a reasonable price been available.

Attempted rip-off? Sharp practice? Or just incompetent business management? BA’s business results tell their own tale.

JE comments: “Legal,” sanctioned, and codified rip-offs make the blood boil more than a rogue taxista trying to squeeze out an extra buck, euro, or dinar. John Heelan’s story reminds me of Cameron Sawyer’s report some months back on the $800 one-way luxury train from Moscow to St. Petersburg. “World’s Favorite Airline”? In this age of non-service and add-on fees, it’s hubris for any carrier to bill itself as such. In our flight to WAIS ‘09, we paid an extra $80 for the privilege of having our bags travel with us.

Mike Bonnie (20 November) brings up a good point. The 10.2% unemployment figure is what economists call U-3. Nationally, the latest figures say U-6 (a broader measure) is 17.5 percent. 30 percent is an educated guess of what the level would be if the US government did not bail out or artificially stimulate the economy.

Regarding leading indicators, there is a large collection besides cardboard box production. A widely used indicator is the level of Baltic shipping, or other measures of transportation activity. I suppose there is nothing better than actual sales. As I said before numerous times, presently I reduce all indicators to one: jobs, jobs, jobs.

JE comments: Jobs, indeed! Many pundits with their slide-rules (so to speak) say the recession is over. Too bad the folks on Main Street haven’t yet noticed…

I was at Stanford from 1968-1999, going from an assistant professor of education and economics to an endowed chair. The faculty that I joined in 1968 was far more convivial than the one that I left in 1999. Oh, don’t get me wrong. Everyone was cordial and friendly in a casual way. But, by the eighties it was clear that culture was highly individualistic. Even when faculty work together, they divide the courses and research into separable modules rather than interacting very much. The reward structure favored individual accomplishment and fame.

I was also a member of the Academic Senate, Chair of the Committee on Graduate Studies of the Graduate School, Chair of Search Committees, and a member of the President’s Advisory Board (an elected member from one of the seven units–mine being Business, Education, and Law), who are the key entity reviewing recommendations for appointments and promotions throughout the university for approval before the President, the final stage.

As I look back, I found more intellectual exchange in these committees than in my role as a faculty member. We also formed the Committee on Social Thought and Social Action to maintain the active intellectual discussions among faculty that had been established during the Vietnam War. These consisted of notable faculty such as Clayborne Carson and Bart Bernstein in History or Martin Perl, Nobelist and discoverer of the Psi particle, Hal Holman, Chair of the Department of Medicine, and other serious thinkers. The 30 or 35 of us would prepare for the meeting by reading a specific article that was sent out in advance and presented by an advocate at a two-hour free-exchange discussion. It was strong and hard-hitting in terms of what was shared, and there were agreements and disagreements. Then we would adjourn to a member’s home to continue discussions at more of a small group level with families over a pot-luck lubricated by spirits. It was the best intellectual exchange that I experienced at Stanford.

But, then there was business as usual which meant back-to-the-silos. At some point I will tell you about the eleven years I have spent at Columbia, in the academic abode of Teachers College, where John Dewey served and dominated intellectual life from 1904 until his death in 1952.

I wonder who that professor at BU was; I am sure I know him. Is he by chance the author of several well-regarded textbooks?

In general, I sympathize with the lament that there is really very little in the way of scholarly culture in most of higher education. In my experience, the comfort, energy, and commitment one might feel in a scholarly community communing outside class hours and faculty meetings is these days mostly found elsewhere, and this is sad. I recall a conversation at Stanford about 20 years ago where the great and lamented Gordon Craig told my wife and me that when he came to Stanford in the 1960s, faculty would often meet socially and talk shop in the best sense of the word. By the ’80s, for some reason, everyone had become too busy. I can imagine several reasons: martini parties went out of fashion; people became too serious; all spouses are employed, taking energy from planning and having cocktail parties; the general over-burdenment of faculty by bureaucracy.

It’s a paradox. Allegedly, we were richer in the ’80s than in the ’60s, yet had less time and energy for socializing intellectually. When I read of the famous martini parties that Benny De Voto and Garrett Mattingly (two of the greatest American historians ever) used to treat their Harvard colleagues to back in the 1950s, I become envious. Nowadays, you have to make appointments weeks in advance to socialize with a colleague, and even then it’s often forced and artificial.

One reason, in addition to those I’ve mentioned, may be that so many academics nowadays are less interested in proclaiming their enthusiasm for their subject than in protecting their little space of turf. I see this as a sign of decadence. If we’re not bursting with desire to tell people why what we do is so fascinating, or in arguing with opponents on a high verbal and mental level, what’s the point of being a scholar?

JE comments: I am reminded of the 1950s academic social scene so amusingly described by Nabokov in Pale Fire. Now the biggest social interaction among academics occurs at conferences, often with near-strangers, who for this reason (I suppose) are no danger to one’s little space of turf. And then there is virtual socializing of the type we have chez WAIS–is WAIS so dear to us because we have little opportunity for face-to-face interaction?

I’d like to hear more views on the “Community of Scholars.” I’m grateful to Gilbert Doctorow for bringing up the topic.

Truth is, at some time in history everyone was a migrant. Even Adam and Eve migrated from the Garden of Eden, Muhammad took off across the Arabian peninsula, Buddha wandered around as did Jesus. Go far enough back in time and there is no such thing as a original American and probably no such thing as an original European or Asian. I fail to see why “first invaders” were more innocent than those that invaded later. How, for example, is a 9th-century Aztec invader of Central America somehow less “guilty” of aggression than a 16th-century Spanish “Conquistador” just because they invaded first? Modern Iberia has been fought over so often there is probably no such thing as someone living there whose ancestors sprang from its earth tabula rasa. I suspect every country/nation/people in the world has or can invent a historical revisionist dialogue that points the finger at “them” as being the bad guys while claiming “we” were the victims. I doubt there is a single member of WAIS whose ancestors are free from sin. So where does that leave us besides stuck in a sterile dialogue in which the pots are busily calling the kettles black?

JE comments: Yes, pointing one finger at sundry “invaders” leaves you with three pointing back at yourself. I speak as an immigrant to Michigan, c. 1986. Like many migrants, I never thought I had come here to stay.

The globalization of the investment banks and about twelve
stock markets is real. The talk about a global religion and a global
state, or a global army is mostly hot air.

Immigration is a second-rate issue. The majority of Americans and
Europeans still believe in the sovereign nation state. The multinational
corporations want immigration to keep their labor costs down and maximize
profits.

NATO is trying to become an “Eurasian Treaty Organization” under the
incoherent plans of the State Department attempted by Clinton and Bush 43.

Obama will probably have less power than Bill Clinton whether he gets
re-elected or not. To elect a know-nothing Republican just because he is
not a Democrat, will only speed up the inevitable decline.

Apparently, Obama is a figurehead President like Ronald Reagan. He is no
second FDR. He has very little power. The Federal Reserve Bank and the
Pentagon tell him his limits.

JE comments: We’ll see how much power Obama holds by the outcome of healthcare reform. The Senate is discussing the issue as we speak. So far, I don’t see him as a figurehead at all.

IS: Tor Guimaraes is not only wrong in continually referring to the
current crisis in emotional, almost hysterical, apocalyptic terms, like
“economic terrorism,” and other similar meaningless rhetoric, but he
fails to account for the fact, as Cameron Sawyer correctly pointed out,
that even in the current crisis, and in spite of the unemployment rate
having reached the very uncomfortable level of 10%, still 90% of the
employable people continues to be employed…

TG: I am pleased that the US unemployment rate is around 10 percent
rather that 30 percent which is where it would probably be without the
enormous American people bailout of the great capitalists, massive
economic stimuli, and crippling government deficits. Unemployment in
building trades

Mike Bonnie: I’m not certain where Istvan and Tor are getting
their numbers or what segment(s) of employment they’re looking at.
Perhaps 10% is a national average unemployment for all workers or a
government number that selectively reports to minimize political damage.
Unemployment is not looking positive from my point of view. Wisconsin
usually has a relatively stable economy in downturns. This year, however,
home and business construction season declined sharply. Here’s a report
from one group of workers in Wisconsin:

“The recession has put the brakes on new construction throughout
Wisconsin and that’s meant a lot of time sitting at home for some of the
state’s 45,000 union tradesmen. Lyle Balistreri says unemployment in the
construction trades is running about 25 percent and will likely go
higher. Balistreri heads up the Milwaukee Building and Construction
Trades Council. It negotiates project agreements on behalf of union
workers. ”

The entire discussion of building trades employment can be found at:
http://www.wuwm.com/programs/news/view_news.php?articleid=5406

Is it still true that to get a true indication of the direction of the
economy, leading economic indicators such as, cardboard used for
shipping appliances to furnish new home construction, is one direction
to look? If shippers are producing materials, that must mean the
refrigerator, washer and dryer manufacturers are planning for increases
in home construction.

JE comments: Current unemployment figures in my hard-luck state: 19% for Lenawee County (Adrian), and a whopping 28% for the city of Detroit.

I disagree with David Gress’s assertation that immigrants do little good in our country. A prime example is seen in the 19 November WSJ, where Neil King Jr. and John Hechinerer report, “D.C. Schools Chief Targets Tenure.” The school chief, Michael Rhee, happens to be a 39-year-old Asian woman. The Washington, D.C. School System is the highest cost school in the US, at $14,000 per student and the drop-out rate is 40%. Ms Rhee has offered teachers a voluntary program featuring much higher wages with performance bonuses in exchange for teachers giving up tenure. “The union, The American Federation of teachers, soundly rejected it and went ballistic.”

Ms. Rhee is Asian, but the article didn’t state from which country or when her ancestors came to the US. In Norman, Oklahoma, whenever the list of honor students comes out, East Asians and Indians (from India) are prominent although their percentage of the population is tiny. It is obvious to me that Ms. Rhee is persuing the level of exelence that we all come to associate with people of her race.

I have never favored tenure in the public schools. I think that the fear that lack of tenure will result in good teachers being fired is overblown. The reason that we have a School Board and newspaper reporters is to prevent such abuses by an overly authoritarian administration.

I have no problem with Latin Americans emigrating to the US. Like any social phenomenon, this immigration should not be left unregulated. Nancy and I rent a small apartment in Norman which backs up to a creek which offers a park-like appearance from our back door. That park is maintained by the neighborhood association. For several years I have watched these 100-per cent American mowers avoid any semblance of common labor. Instead of picking up a fallen limb, they would simply mow around it thereby leaving a wild, over-grown island in the middle of our park. Likewise they failed to mow the banks of the creek, leaving a growing encroachment of a scrub forest.

I complained mightly to the homeowners association and received mostly excuses. This 83-year-old man got out and cleared 130 yards of the creek and picked up all the fallen limbs. I received no acknowledgement of my good work but I noted that the crew of white men had been replaced by a Mexican crew and once again we are enjoying the beautiful park-like quality of the area that encouraged us to rent this property in the first place.

People say that the Mexicans take jobs that patriotic American should have. I have never seen this happen. I am thrilled to have Mexicans replace these lazy scalawags.

JE comments: Pablo Swedberg (18 November) debunked the hoary lament heard everywhere that immigrants “take jobs away” from God-fearing locals. Richard Hancock gives further evidence that this is a myth. It is interesting, however, that the argument will not go away.

We’ve discussed the topic of teacher tenure before. I’ll plead the Fifth for now, except for the comment that teachers are justifiably wary about leaving their job security in the hands of often capricious administrators.

During my travels I have come to the conclusion, especially in far-away countries, that being “ripped off” is part of one’s everyday life and should be factored into any travel budget, especially when using a taxi. Sometimes negotiations or bargaining helps; sometimes it does not. Also given that especially taxi fares are comparatively cheap and one must get used to the fact that foreigners pay over the top. One other lesson to learn is to try to always have small change with you as the taxi driver pretends not to.

In Bahrain the taxi meter was virtually unheard of and the trip suddenly cost double the usual amount, with the argument that the driver had 4 kids (not a good argument since I have 6!). The double however still amounted to 4 USD only.

In Jeddah the fare was 12 USD (in Riyals of course) but only after some negotiations (the hotel receptionist told me later the trip should have amounted to 15 USD!)–nice try!

In Tel Aviv the receptionist told me the fare to the airport would be 120 Shekels if ordered before 6 AM, and 100 after 6 AM. I of course ordered the taxi for 6.05am, it arrived of course at 5.50 am, I waited until 6.10 am, asked him what the fare was, he said 120 shekels–I of course said “no.” He accepted, but only to demand an additional 5 USD (!) for luggage once arrived at the airport. Since we had our luggage in our posession I politely declined which he very unpolitely accepted.

In Santiago de Chile I admired the Stock Exchange when someone came from behind (presumably a kid) and grabbed what was in the pocket of my trousers (200 USD!) and very expertly distracted me while running away. A bit of a frightening experience really and a total loss merely 3 hours after I had entered the country. The Police stood by, watched calmly, assured me of vigurously pursuing the culprits. I of course nodded and that was that as we all knew.

In New York City the driver would only drop me blocks away from my destination (a bit of a problem since I had a flight to catch) and after a shouting argument at least offered to cut the fare by a third. I just caught my bus as I had to walk 2 or 3 blocks.

In Buenos Aires I paid nothing but only because the driver threw me out of his taxi halfway through the trip as I told him I was not prepared to pay a higher fare. Result: nothing paid but an hour late as I had to walk.

In Riyadh I always asked the hotel to write down in Arabic the addresses of my business contacts as well as the hotel. No help since at least one of the taxi drivers could not read nor write, and of course my Arabic is zero. Result: Cost of trip 5 Riyals (1.25 USD), length of trip: 30 minutes, distance from destination: 60 minutes. The good news in that case was I walked into the branch of the bank I wanted to see, spoke to one of the managers who laughed heartily, rang my contact and got me a limousine so I was only about 45 minutes late.

All in all very interesting experiences!

JE comments: Eugen Solf gives us the WAIS World Travel Tip of the Week–always carry small bills. I’ve learned to (politely!) demand fistfulls of the small stuff at the airport currency exchange booths. Perhaps because it’s easier, they like to foist off the largest denomination possible. Since your next stop is the taxi, you’re probably going to face a situation where the driver has insufficient change. My gut instinct in many developing and not-so-developing countries is that the driver honestly doesn’t have change. Mexican cabbies tend to stock no more than 4-5 liters of gasoline in their tanks, and periodically buy additional liters as they go about collecting fares. That’s just-in-time inventory, and since there’s no discount to be had by filling up, a wise business decision.

Once in London, I was still confused about the exchange rate for the dollar and left too much change for the tip. The waiter chased me out of the restaurant to inform me that I had left too much money. That was scarcely a rip-off. On the other hand, at the Mexico City Airport, where I was once waiting for a connection to Yucatán, I was told I owed an airport landing tax (even though I had been told I should pay no such tax since I was merely in transit to another city). An inspector was called who told me I still owed such a tax. “Americans have plenty of money; surely that’s not such a hardship,” I was told. Other than that, I don’t recall any rip-offs abroad. (I assume my experience in the DF was a rip-off.)

JE comments: The dreaded airport tax–I’ve had to cough it over in Australia, Colombia, Nicaragua, Chile and (in the old days) Mexico. Perhaps because it makes tourists angry, Mexico now folds the “tasa de embarque” into the price of your airline ticket. They still pay it, but now they don’t notice. Chile charges an exorbitant $100 “visa fee” for arriving US citizens–I learned from a sympathetic customs official that this is in retaliation for the fee Chileans are charged for US visas. EU citizens are let in for free.

In quite a bit of traveling, the only rip-offs I can think of have
occurred in taxis. In Paris and Quito, drivers took me all the way
around Robin Hood’s barn, claiming that they did not understand where I
wanted to go. I did not sense that they were sincere. I should point
out, however, that you do not have to go abroad: local cabbies in
Burlingame have tried to take me to the airport via freeway, a route
that is more expensive and takes more time than surface streets. In
Bangladesh, “no change” is pretty common.

As an economist, I cannot resist. On the other hand, I have experienced
the anti-ripoff. My wife and I are absent-minded about cameras. In
Paris, we realized that we had left one at the Musee d’ Orsay. Our
cabbie took us back, it had been turned in, and the staff returned it to
us cheerfully and promptly. The cabbie refused to take payment for
returning to the museum and waiting for us. In Nanjing, we left one at a
small dumpling restaurant, not realizing it until we were leaving early
the next morning. We got the owners out of bed (they lived in the
restaurant), and they immediately returned it to us (it was probably
worth several months of their family income) and refused to take a
reward. When we lost another one at the Tech Museum in San Jose, we
never saw it again.

JE comments: Yes, that’s a lot of cameras! I am heartened by how many times WAISers have experienced beyond-the-call-of-duty honesty in different countries. Les Robinson has a similar story from London (next in the queue).

Regarding John Eipper’s call (19 November) for anecdotes of rip-offs experienced by WAISers during their travels, I can truthfully state that I’ve never been knowingly ripped off in more than four decades of travels to about three dozen countries, including most of the Caribbean, most of Mexico, most of Europe and even during the two years that I lived in Russia.

I must qualify: In Paris in 1981, a pal and I ate breakfast in a Left Bank café during a three-week vacation across Europe. We carefully ordered our meal being aware that the French custom even calls for a charge for a small pad of butter, the type that continues to be free in the USA to this day.

At the end of our small meal, I made the usual request for “ l’addition, s’il vous plais .” He brought the little brown plastic tray with the receipt in a fake leather folder and quickly disappeared to the kitchen. We had been charged exactly twice the menu cost for each item. I looked, studied and determined that we’d been overcharged by a level of two. I looked around for the garçon who was nowhere to be seen. I doubled-checked the bill against a menu left on a nearby table. I discussed it with my traveling buddy. We decided to leave the exact amount of the proper charge, plus a very small tip and to leave. I figured that when he saw us leaving, he’d appear and we could question the matter.

Placing the proper money on the table, we slowing rose. We slowing moved toward the door. Still no waiter. We got to the door and opened it. The waiter peeked through a little window in the kitchen door but did not make an attempt to come out. We slowly left and once on the sidewalk, we picked up the pace until around the corner, as if we were guilty of some crime. No one followed and to this day, I’ve wondered what his strategy was. Perhaps he did not know that I spoke his language well enough to read the menu or to count out the proper payment in francs and centimes. But that’s the closest I’ve ever been to being cheated in a foreign transaction.

I once left a tip in a Moscow restaurant and the waitress chased me out to the sidewalk and said, “Sir, you left too much money with your bill.” I wonder if that’s still the case. I can direct Cameron Sawyer to the Georgian-style restaurant if he wants to check it out with his wife.

JE comments: This is a fun, if somewhat “lite,” topic. Still, I’d like to hear more rip-off anecdotes. Who’s next?

A language question for French WAISers–has there been any movement against the word “garçon” for restaurant servers? Any PC-speak substitutes? American sensibilities just wouldn’t tolerate calling the wait staff “boy”…

“Nativist” politics and prejudice of immigration are very old in both US and Europe, as are the arguments against immigration. The irony of all this is that the American colonists were invaders and destroyers of native cultures, as were the European Barbarians who migrated from Central Asia to colonize the continent.

But that is far too distant, far too historical and unemotional to have any relevance in the present. If indeed the countries of origin would be developed on “self-sufficiency” models instead of globalization rooted in draining their resources and keeping them perpetually underdeveloped, then I would agree with the argument some WAISers have advanced against “temporary immigrants.” The fact that there is “permanent and temporary foreign labor” is proof that the countries of origin are not developed in large measure because they exist under exploitative models of integration. This is not to excuse the utterly corrupt public and private sectors of the “countries of origin” (invariably underdeveloped in Africa, Asia, and Latin America), but they do not operate separately and distinctly from the world capitalist economy.

Regarding the impact of private remittances [see Tim Brown's post of 18 November--JE], I agree about their positive value to the country of origin, and thank God remittances are something although they come with the hard work, deplorable living conditions, and exploitative wages of legal and illegal immigrants in the advanced capitalist countries. Be that as it may, are remittances a structural solution to fix the chronic problem? Nor do I believe that trickle-down economics, as the great John Kenneth Galbraith noted during the Reagan-Thatcher decade, works to do much for the lower classes of either poor or rich nations.

And please let us correct the record: I am not one of those who has ever advocated, either in WAIS posts or in my publications on IMF and World Bank, that “trickle down economic development” works. And I think it is an insult to the millions of Mexicans in the US who have helped build the US economy in the past 200 years to dismiss them as gardeners and swimming pool cleaners for the rich, and to limit their vast and multifarious contributions to the US economy and social fabric. I believe kind well-intentioned people–whether politicians and intellectuals, including WAISers–or the corner drug store pharmacist in Cleveland or Paris, feel less secure when they see or hear about waves of immigrants threatening the status quo. I am not sure why people find it extraordinary that the poor–in this case poor immigrants–commit crimes, given that poverty is the real crime that capitalism precipitates. And I am seriously concerned when people single out Muslims, Africans, Latin Americans, Asians, or any other group to prove their point about the evils of immigration, and then they ask for empirical evidence to prove that higher percentage of crime is caused by natives instead of immigrants. All of this implies there is something in the DNA of the immigrant that causes him to commit crimes, and that the environment is free of any responsibility. As an emotionally charged issue, especially in this decade after 9/11 and the US-western-led wars against Muslims, immigration on the surface is an easy target for all calamities people believe befall their country, not realizing that as “established natives” they are descendants of immigrants.

JE comments: Agree with his economics or not, Jon Kofas’s viewpoint has been lacking on WAIS for the year of his “sabbatical.” Jon now joins Alain de Benoist as the principal WAISer non-apologists for globalization. (On a related note, I’ve just realized that the work to redesign the WAIS website is being carried out simultaneously in Germany, China, India and the US. Is there any reality other than globalization these days?)

Glad to have you back, Jon.

Jon’s novels sound most interesting. Am I to understand that you, a Greek, wrote them in English, and that they are now being translated? Or did I misunderstand that? [I believe Jon is a Greek-American; he taught for many years at Indiana University in Kokomo, and moved to Greece upon his retirement--JE.]

This sentence puzzles me:

“An underlying theme of complex rational and irrational motives for human behavior figures prominently just under the surface as the clash of the archons’ ‘gods’ that are necessarily ‘demons’ for the rest in Micropolis revealing the degree to which human freedom and creativity are possible in any society.”

There seems to be a finite verb missing in the second half of the sentence. “as the clash … revealing.” Reveals?

Beyond that detail, I wonder what you mean by “archons’ gods that are necessarily demons” revealing how freedom is possible. Do I detect an echo of Richard Pullman’s trilogy here? That “demons” to some are actually liberators? From what? Bu this is gnosticism. Or not?

Deep matters, and not very WAIS-like. For me, as a Christian, truth is one and shall prevail. Magna est veritas et praevalebit.

I don’t understand your statement that agapê in ancient times was linked to paganism; ancient times were paganism.

I wish I read Modern Greek as I do Ancient; for then I would love to read your novels in the Greek.

JE comments: I’m guessing that I omitted a comma while editing–…”for the rest in Micropolis, revealing…” It reads better this way (I think). In any case, it’s a complicated sentence.

But David–aren’t all deep matters WAIS-like?

Indeed Tim misunderstood and didn’t need to be on the defensive. I am not suggesting that Pilgrims were worse than Spaniards–although I suppose that being a raped Indian is preferable to being a dead Indian, even while surviving under such conditions where one has become a foreigner on one’s own land, be it in North, South or Central America. Perhaps the only thing I could say in favor of the Spaniards is that fortunately they had a Bartolomé de las Casas.

I feel freer talking about Pilgrims, since I descend directly from them, and not from the Spanish conquerors.

The point is, as John Eipper mentioned, giving examples regarding the perception of migrations. We often tend to forget that some generations back, we were all unwelcomed immigrants, guilty of everything that went wrong. The conditions under which migrations take place, has a lot to do with the violence generated. In France for instance, migrant workers could not always bring their families over; even now, the right to come accompanied is not automatic or immediate. In the 1930s, the Spanish Republican families were divided, men in one concentration camp, women and children in another, etc. They couldn’t move about freely even when they had jobs. Of course this would generate anger, not to say violence, and yet they are now totally “integrated” into French culture. Descendants of the French colonies have reacted differently in some cases. They tend to reinforce their original culture, perhaps because they are rejected by what they had considered to be their “own” country. Each situation is different and creates different attitudes, but all in all, diversity is a cultural asset, and not simply a generator of street crime.

JE comments: I’d like to know more about the experiences of Spanish Republican exiles in France, post-1939. It would be an honor to have a note on this topic from Carmen Negrín, who belongs to such an illustrious Republican family. How did the exiles fare after the German invasion of 1940? Not too well, I surmise.

Also, I’m sure a lot of WAISers are curious to know: what is Carmen’s connection to the Pilgrims? (I have no such ancestry, although we are all Pilgrims at Thanksgiving.)

The bubbles and periodic failures of market economies show that they are not perfect. But so do forest fires, and yet they have been shown to be essential in ecosystems. Likewise, periodic failures give opportunities in market economies for the emergence of new technologies and a better and more productive economy. Crisis also equals opportunity.

Rodolfo Neirotti responds:

I believe we should distinguish the efficient controlled fires used by the Native American from the massive forest fires that result from the current policies of the Forest Service, burning large areas with damage to the ecosystem and significant expenses in fire management. I see some similarities with the unregulated market economies (reactive) vis à vis free markets with intelligent regulations (proactive) which are enforced, as suggested by the recent postings of Tor Guimaraes.

I personally never felt unsafe in China either. But feeling safe and being safe are two different things. Clyde McMorrow felt safe in Rio de Janeiro, and statistics show that Rio is one of the most violent cities in the world. Rio is much much less safe than Oakland, California, which is a lot less safe than San Francisco, where Charles tells us he did not feel safe, or Palo Alto, or where I live in Pleasanton. I used to walk at 3 AM in Pleasanton, and never felt threatened or unsafe. In fact the police more than on one occasion stopped to ask me if I was OK and needed help, because walking at that hour is so unusual. But when I explained what I was doing, and offered to identify myself, the policeman politely declined, as he had no suspicion that I was doing anything wrong.

In 2004 when I got married in China I used to walk by myself to the park in Nanning at 6 AM, 2 miles from where we lived, every morning, because that was the only reasonable time to walk, avoiding the intense and very unpleasant heat during the day or evening. There were many many people in the park and on the streets, and I never felt unsafe. But my family members, who knew better, were actually apprehensive about my safety, because there had been several murders in the very same park in which I did my daily walking.

I also participated at the time in a forum where one of the participants wrote several hair-raising stories that he had witnessed personally in China. He had lived in China for three years, and he was living in a neighborhood which was poorer than where we lived, and apparently encountered violence on the streets that he claimed to have witnessed. One involved the savage beating and near-lynching of somebody who had been accused of stealing something from someone. This is hearsay, and I cannot vouch for its veracity, but I assumed that it was true, as I had no reason to doubt the person who made the claim.

I was robbed by a taxi driver in Shanghai, who charged me much more than what he should have to take me from the airport to my hotel. I knew that he was robbing me, because I had taken many taxis in China before, and knew that taxis just did not cost as much as what he was charging me. The meter showed the exorbitant charge, but it was obviously a scam. He gave me a handwritten receipt instead of using the little mechanized machines that print a receipt automatically when the meter is reset. When I returned to the United States, I went to the police at Pudong International Airport before my flight took off, and made a complaint against the driver, and showed them the handwritten receipt. The policeman that took my complaint accompanied me to the area where drivers wait for passengers, to see if I could identify the culprit, as evidently I was not the only one that he had robbed this way, but unfortunately he was not there, so this attempt at catching a thief failed. They told me that it was an illegal taxi, not registered with the authorities, who probably prey on foreigners.

JE comments: A followup question for the Floor: what’s the worst you’ve ever been ripped off as a tourist in a foreign land? My response would be $75 for two local phone calls, totaling about 40 minutes, made from my Buenos Aires hotel in 1994. Actually, I researched the problem with friends after paying the tab, and determined that the calls really did cost $75. That was an expensive time in Bs. As.

One man’s trash (or post) is another man’s treasure.

I might add that I have learned quite a lot from opening uninteresting posts.

JE comments: I second Bob’s observation. I open ‘em all, and often it’s the “boring” ones that enlighten the most.

I thought that the recuitment and selection process used to add WAISers to the fellowship ipso facto established the potential value of each member’s contributions. Making it a “Dancing with the Stars” show open to global evaluation by assigning points to exchanges and contributions is insulting at best. I don’t care what YouTube or My-Tube are doing. One finds in YouTube useful videos and also a lot of porno and perversions. Do we want WAIS to compete with those postings?

What is it, in fact, that you want to do with WAIS as per its mission and raison d’etre? That is to say, do you seek to “add value” as in the business terminology or to “add value” in the sense that you want to attract new qualified members, or in the sense of wishing to improve the quantity and quality of the exchanges, or do you seek to enter the sweepstakes of most visited websites? Remember too our membership list is supposed to be private. Since the postings are penned and obviously open to the whole world, a hard-working researcher could very easily compile a list of active members by reading their contributions. If you were to open us all to a point system ranking you would invite the kooks, haters, and so forth out there to begin the targetting and sniping.

To end on a positive note, Gene Franklin’s suggestion to add an internal search engine is a “valuable” contribution.

JE comments: Francisco Wong-Diaz’s points are well taken. A majority of WAISers who’ve responded seem to be against a ranking system for postings. Shall we nix the idea? I still think it would be valuable to open up the website for outside (non-WAIS) commentary. The editor would vet these comments before they are published. Snipers and haters would go to the trash bin.

I don’t post as regularly as I should these days, but I read others’ posts regularly. Some I skim over because the writings seem to me to be polemic. Others, like those from Alain de Benoist, Cameron Sawyer and Vincent Littrell, I read carefully and am often enlightened. Prof. Hilton invited me to join because I lived abroad for so long and then stayed involved in international affairs of one kind or another. I am not an academic or a scholar (obviously), and I tend to try to bring a grounded, real-life experience point of view to issues.

For example, I was involved for years with working against the KGB in the USSR days, but aside from a couple of brief visits I know little about today’s Russia. Cameron brings a unique insider/outsider viewpoint to affairs in Russia. Alain is one of the most thoughtful critics of US policy, the EU, and world affairs I know of. Vincent brings both a scholar’s voice and personal experience to Middle East affairs. More recent WAISers from the Far East inform me about many happenings from countries I lived in 40-50 years ago. There is no popular publication I have seen that consistently brings such quality writing: I have given up Time and Newsweek, my daily paper and local TV news are awful, and now I am gradually switching to BBC TV news as a better option. But no mass media is equal to the combined force of WAIS posts. Finally, the personal stories of WAISers indeed interest me and often bring fresh perspective to the posts.

I have no suggestions for the website, unfortunately. I do agree that bios and addresses of members is a good idea.

You have done and are doing yeoman’s work, JE, and I appreciate your efforts greatly.

JE comments: Your kind words have made my day, Miles. Should I add “WAIS Yeoman” to my job description? I do get up early each day to milk the e-cows, so to speak, to extract their warm, intellectually nutritious juices. There might be some “value” in this clumsy analogy, but I’ll drop it here…

I echo Miles’s observation that WAISer personal stories are gems. I am reminded of Steve Torok’s stories about Hungary during WWII and through the ‘56 Revolution, Tim Brown’s experiences as a diplomat in a half-dozen or more countries, Michael Sullivan’s recollections of air combat, Richard Hancock’s life in New Mexico and the Mexican borderlands, Marga Jann’s greetings from Korea and Cyprus, the endless travels of the intrepid young Tom Hashimoto, and the list goes on. And on–I’ve certainly enjoyed Miles’s own tales of working for “The Company” in the Middle East and elsewhere.

A thought: should we add a “postcards from WAIS” link to our revamped homepage, where we could post an assortment of first-person nuggets?

Have I missed something? As a specialist in Latin America with particular expertise in the conduct of the Spanish Conquistadores, especially the mass rape that produced those we now call mestizos (literally mixed breeds), wholesale pillage and destruction of entire nations, slaughter and enslavement of tens of millions of “American Indigenous peoples” by the Conquistadores, I’m asked to condemn only the Pilgrims as “invaders” and see the Spanish as victims of the French?

JE comments: I cannot speak on behalf of Carmen Negrín, but I believe she was only citing two (not all) examples of the changing dynamics of who is labeled “foreign” and “native”–and by whom. The Pilgrims in the US are considered the “First Americans” by definition, especially around Thanksgiving, but once upon a time and for a specific population, they were nothing but invaders. Moreover, I am certain Carmen was not implying by omission any apologies for Spanish behavior during the Conquest of the Americas.

IS: Tor Guimaraes is not only wrong in continually referring to the current crisis in emotional, almost hysterical, apocalyptic terms, like “economic terrorism,” and other similar meaningless rhetoric, but he fails to account for the fact, as Cameron Sawyer correctly pointed out, that even in the current crisis, and in spite of the unemployment rate having reached the very uncomfortable level of 10%, still 90% of the employable people continues to be employed…

TG: I am pleased that the US unemployment rate is around 10 percent rather that 30 percent which is where it would probably be without the enormous American people bailout of the great capitalists, massive economic stimuli, and crippling government deficits.

IS: If a system in crisis is able to perform relatively so well, surely it is a system worth greater respect than the excessive rhetoric exhibited by Tor Guimaraes.

TG: I hope in the future Istvan reads other people’s postings more carefully before levelling unfounded criticism. I have great respect for capitalism but have even greater respect for free and orderly markets. As I said several times in previous postings, all parties must ensure free markets through intelligent regulations which are enforced, otherwise capitalism will lead to disasters as we have today. That is not disrespect, it is a fact which has been observed numerous times in history.

IS: The bubbles and periodic failures of market economies show that they are not perfect. But so do forest fires, and yet they have been shown to be essential in ecosystems. Likewise, periodic failures give opportunities in market economies for the emergence of new technologies and a better and more productive economy. Crisis also equals opportunity.

TG: So was the 9/11 terrorist attack. Would you like to have more of those? America had a unique oppotunity to show how tough, brave, and resilient we are. Similarly, market bubbles are created through market manipulation and many times outright fraud such as the latest subprime mortgage disaster. Do you like to see innocent people being hurt financially, losing their homes, their retirement accounts and pensions just before they were planning to retire? Forest fire indeed.

I would like to add a follow-up comment to Charles Ridley’s posting of 18 November. In the broad order of things, the self-imposed isolation Charles describes is merely building walls in a desert. What he is missing is that by and large everyone in the scholarly world, or at least the political sciences and humanities world, is working in isolation like it or not because there is no great community, only private circles and the odd group of activists like WAIS where people do jump into the debate and speak their minds in a reasoned way as opposed to the one-liners, often scatological, that pass for chat in most of the blogosphere.

This is a reality which I knew once upon a time when I was a postgraduate fellow in the mid-1970s at Harvard’s Russian Research Center. Professors were unwelcoming. Fellow fellows were arch competitors for the few teaching or research appointments available. You fell back on spouse and friends outside your field or outside of the university for social contact. And I don’t think it was unique to Harvard. Scholars tend not to be team players. At best they are talented prima donnas.

But we tend to forget. My long sabbatical from the academic world stripped away those painful memories. I was given a friendly reminder of the facts of life last June when I was welcomed for a chat by a professor of diplomatic history at Boston University who came to scholarship fairly late in life from a career where teamwork and getting along with your colleagues was vital. When I said that my objective in writing the book I have now underway and which he expressed a willingness to look over was to gain entry to a community of scholars, he looked at me sympathetically and knowingly. “Forget it,” he told me. And he went on to explain that despite all of his speaking engagements at campuses around the country and his publications, he can count on one hand the people with whom he has real exchange of ideas and fellowship.

My own experience in the half year since then, while my blog on US foreign policy has doubled and tripled in readership, is that I have a total of 3 comments from viewers worth leaving on the site plus a nonsensical one-liner from some Italian screwball and a note in Japanese which no one in a local Japanese store would translate for me because it was just 4-letter words–both entries since deleted.

In this context, I quite enjoyed the well-argued push-back I got at once from WAISers on the several occasions I have written in.

JE comments: I’m always glad when WAIS is of use! And we truly are a community of scholars based on respect and on taking each others’ ideas seriously. I’ll file Gilbert Doctorow’s post in the “WAIS value” drawer. Thank you for your thoughts, Gilbert.

Mr. Kofas misses what for me are two important pieces of the equation–the difference between permanent immigration and temporary foreign labor. Making temporary workers permanent, in the name of compassion for their “plight,” undermines and eventually destroys the best hope to develop of their countries of origin.

Speaking as someone that has both managed foreign aid programs and done in-depth economic studies of direct foreign assistance (ODC–government-to-government) and remittances (people-to-people fund transfers), what I have found is that the economic development impact of remittances sent home by temporary foreign workers is by several orders of magnitude the single biggest and most effective source of bottom-up versus top-down development funds reaching the poor in developing countries. In 2006 remittances were estimated to have totalled $350-400 billion, of which about 90-95% went directly into the hands of the poor in developing countries. By way of contrast, total world-wide ODC via bilateral and multilateral channels totalled about $40 billion, with perhaps 10% of that actually reaching the poor. That makes remittance about 100 times more important to the poor in developing countries than ODC, an extraordinary difference. Further, remittances were used almost entirely to improve the living standards of the poor because their recipients spent them on education, health, housing and to capitalize small businesses.

I find it fascinating that those that condemn trickle-down economics at the national level as a farce are the same people that insist that, overseas, trickle-down economic development is the only possible approach to foreign aid. The kicker comes when, usually in the name of “compassion for poor immigrants,” these same people also demand that temporary migrants be given permanent status by the country where they’re working. At first this may have little or no impact on the level of their remittances to those they left at home. But as they, and later their children, settle in to their new permanent status their ties to their country of origin gradually weaken and their remittances eventually slow and even stop.

Those who actually care about world poverty should oppose not support the mass legalization of temporary workers in favor of harnessing them to the economic development of their countries of origin.

JE comments: For further thoughts on this topic, I refer WAISers to Tim Brown’s article, “A Business Model for Foreign Labor,” which was published in the Hoover Digest (2007) and reprinted some time ago on WAIS:

http://cgi.stanford.edu/group/wais/cgi-bin/wp/wp-content/uploads/2009/04/09timbrownimmigration.pdf

The costs [of immigration] are huge, on the order of several thousand dollars per taxpayer per year. And they grow, yearly. In much of Europe, most immigrants do not contribute to the labor market, but receive benefits provided by productive taxpayers.

Pablo Swedberg responds:

David has been very clever in choosing George Borjas and Michael Mannheimer as a reference for blaming immigrants for the enormous costs derived from the generous welfare systems in Europe. It’s always easy to find research and evidence that supports one’s own thesis on different topics. I have been working on immigration for the last couple of years, and reality proves to be much more complex than a few papers and several anecdotes.

On the labor market consequences of immigration, even Borjas argues that immigration has a weak impact on the employment of natives (I can provide the paper). As long as native workers and firms respond by moving to areas that offer new and better opportunities, the impact of immigration on salaries and employment opportunities will remain small. In fact the literature has proven it very difficult to find evidence that supports the hypothesis that states that an increase in labor supply due to immigration reduces native wages. Empirical evidence seems to be very time- and country-sensitive. The problem is that since production inputs (capital and labor) are mobile across local labor markets, correlations will fail to capture the degree of substitution between immigrant and native workers.

Another important consideration is the effect of immigration on public finances. In other words, it is crucial to determine the impact of immigration on government revenues and expenditures. With regard to government revenues, immigrants pay taxes, and the amount paid will depend on the host country’s tax system and the socio-economic characteristics of the immigrants themselves. The government expenditures will depend on the generosity of the welfare system in the host country, the costs of the services provided by the government, and the proportion of immigrants that use these services determined by their socio-economic status. Of course, the time horizon used becomes very important in determining the net impact of immigration on public finances as well. The evidence shows that more recent immigrants have lower wages and are more likely to be unemployed, and this reduces the taxes paid and increases the expenditures they generate. The costs of education for their children, and an eventual retirement in the host country are important considerations as well. Immigrants may have a negative impact on government finances in the short run, but a positive impact in the medium and long-run. So it always depends on how you analyze these issues.

Another potential cost of immigration that is particularly prominent in the recent policy debate in Europe is the impact of immigration on crime. The immigrants may commit crimes themselves or contribute indirectly by increasing group conflict or social tensions. However, it is an open question whether concerns over the effect of immigration on crime reflect rational calculations, since the literature is not conclusive on this issue according to Card, Dustmann, and Preston.

Of course there are also many positive economic and cultural contributions of immigration that are not mentioned usually (guess why), like the supply of skilled workers in key industries, the relief of strains on tax/funded pension system that threatens an aging population in Europe, and the new artistic, intellectual, gastronomical, and cultural life in the host country.

Finally and according to Dani Rodrik, a prominent economist from Harvard, “the gains from liberalizing labor movements across countries are enormous, and much larger than the likely benefits from further liberalization in the traditional areas of goods and capital. If international policymakers were really interested in maximizing worldwide efficiency, they would spend little of their energies on a new trade round or on the international financial architecture and be busy at work liberalizing immigration restrictions.”

JE comments: I’d like to extend a warm “WAIS welcome back” to Pablo Swedberg. We haven’t heard from him (if memory serves) in over a year. Very informative posting, Pablo: please write us more often!

David’s comments make me think of what American Indigenous peoples must have thought of the Pilgrims invaders when they arrived to what became the USA. Another analogy is the negative reaction of the French when more then half a million Spanish refugees arrived to France in 1939. Nobody remembers them anymore; they certainly don’t refer to them as “les rouges” as some did then; their children and grandchildren have become mayors, writers, singers, politicians, businessmen and businesswomen. If it weren’t for the surnames, nobody would even know or remember that three generations ago they were unwelcomed. The percentage of incest is similar in all social classes. Suprisingly when it comes to rape, figures only denounce foreigners. I wonder why… perhaps, these foreigners should be allowed to come with their wives and families!

I perceive WAIS as a most valuable connection to what others are thinking about a wide variety of topics. For someone like myself who works at home and rarely sees anyone outside of a miniscule group of friends and acquaintances, it serves as a tool of breaking through my (self-imposed) isolation. Vive (or Viva) WAIS!

Street addresses and e-mail addresses of fellow and fellowess WAISers would be helpful in promoting off-posting dialogues, with the proviso of course that any communcations and e-mails in particular not be shared with other WAISers or folk outside the WAIS umbrella without specific permission from the writer to do so.

JE comments: Viva WAIS indeed! And viva Ridley! Charles included three !!! in his original cheer, but I removed two of them. Strunk (and his friend White) taught me not to overdo the emotion.

1) What “value” do you presently receive from being a WAISer?

[JH]: The daily ability to read informed comments on current and past events by experts in their respective fields and to test my own ideas and opinions in front of a knowledgeable and critical audience.

2) What concrete measures could be taken to increase this “value”?

[JE wrote]: Too many, in all honesty, direct their WAIS mail directly to the e-trash. Why is this, and what can we do about it?

[JH]: Does it really matter if some correspondents trash WAIS emails? What is lost? Looking at my own use of WAIS threads, I find the following;

1. Some I find very interesting and attempt to take an active part.

2. Others I find interesting, but feel so totally out-gunned by the erudition of the correspondents that I have nothing of consequence to comment–and thus keep quiet.

3. Some in whose topics I have no interest at all and thus consign them to the trash bin.

The “value” of WAIS is like that claimed for Mount Everest, “because it is there!”

[JE wrote]: I have some disconnected thoughts for question #2–for example, our website would receive more traffic (beyond its present 500-800 hits per day) if it allowed visitors actually to do something–leave a comment, pose a question for our sundry experts, wax eloquently on matters global. At present, visitors can do but one thing–donate! I have no problem with that…

[JH]: IMHO that paradigm should continue. “Trust” in other WAISers is an important part of the overall operation and stems from the process of becoming a WAISer, i.e. recommended by an existing WAISer who knows of one’s work or reputation. Allowing unvetted “visitors” to add comments and take part in discussions would open WAIS up to all kinds of bias and propaganda attempts. Within WAIS any such aberrations are quickly criticised by other WAISers, usually in polite terms. Those few who incessantly do not respect the norms of polite debate (vigorous but not acrimonious) are eventually ejected–I can think of only two or so in recent years.

Unvetted visitors would not necessarily understand or comply with the norms of WAIS debates with the net effect, applying Gresham’s Law to WAIS discussion, that “bad aruguments would drive out good”.

[JE]: Also, both our prestige and our sense of community would be enhanced if profiles and CVs of the WAIS membership could be posted on-line. This would be strictly voluntary, as I suspect some WAISers may prefer to remain semi-anonymous.

[JH]: I disagree profoundly with publishing profiles and CVs on-line. Why make it even easier for identity thieves to construct profiles of some of the eminent WAIsers?

JE comments: I still welcome other responses to these questions. From the responses I’ve received thus far, WAISers are equally divided on whether to publish CVs (some are all for it–see Eugen Solf’s posting of 17 November). It should be stressed that comments from the “non-WAIS community” would never appear on our website without approval from the E-i-C. This would add to my workload, but I hope to find assistance in the form of a bright young WAIS intern (an Adrian College student) in the coming weeks or months.

On 16 November, John Heelan said that capitalism under Salazar, Franco and Pinochet was “rampant” without political freedoms.

I did not say otherwise, and perhaps John misunderstood my argument with this response. I did not say that capitalism cannot co-exist with dictatorial governments, provided some minimum freedoms are allowed, as they had been in the three cases cited by John. Clearly, it still coexists with it in China and Vietnam today. What I said is that economic freedoms lead to political freedoms as well, which is different. Indeed, not only democracy followed the Franco, Salazar and Pinochet governments, but capitalism flourished even better under the subsequent democratic governments in all three cases. Chile is undoubtedly the most prosperous Latin American country. Portugal’s economy is in far better shape than it had been under the “rampant capitalism” of Salazar, and the same can be said about Franco’s Spain. So, notwithstanding the truth of John Heelan’s statement, the there countries are good examples for the argument I made in my previous post.

There is no fear-mongering that I can detect either in the US or Europe, quite the contrary. We are, indeed, often told that economic benefits from immigrants outweigh their costs, but I defy Jon Kofas to provide evidence. That which exists shows a different story. In Oslo, the capital of Norway, only one of more than 40 reported rapes in 2008 was committed by a native; all others by foreigners, i.e. Muslims. And don’t even ask about the tortures and rapes suffered by Swedish girls in the name of multiculturalism; their number is legion.

The German economist Michael Mannheimer has tried to assess the economic costs of immigration to various European countries; his results are here:

http://www.pi-news.net/2009/11/essay-was-die-islamische-migration-europa-kostet/

and following chapters.

The costs are huge, on the order of several thousand dollars per taxpayer per year. And they grow, yearly. In much of Europe, most immigrants do not contribute to the labor market, but receive benefits provided by productive taxpayers. Perhaps Kofas is thinking of Mexicans in the US, who work in construction or gardening or pool services for the rich. But even for the US, as George Borjas of Harvard has shown, the net benefit is nil or negative. See data at www.borjas.com .

Of course there are natives and foreigners on the planet. No one can tell me, a science fiction reader of 50 years’ standing, that there is no human race and that we would not all mobilize against alien attack. On the other hand, nations are enlarged families; national loyalities are not imagined, but biologically rooted. Americans are not Arabs, nor are Danes.

Mainstream media downplay or censor information about perpetrators if they are not white. They have no interest in dramatizing news coverage; quite the contrary. To them, immigrants are always innocent and natives automatically suspect. So they lie, and people die, as the US Army lied or ignored facts before Fort Hood, where minimal common sense would have chucked this Muslim fanatic out of the Army years before he had the chance to kill 14 people.

JE comments: Actually, many Americans are Arabs, from my friend at the corner Citgo who sells me a lot of gas to my new colleague, an Adrian physician from Lebanon, who kindly agreed at the last minute to teach our Arabic class in January. I shudder to think how desolate the Detroit region would be without its Arab population, one of the nation’s largest.

I hasten to respond to JE’s missile question. I mean of course the missiles employed in Paris Saturday: they were mostly oranges and grapefruit, looted from a nearby grocer. The squashed remains are still in evidence today, though most of the mess has been cleared away. The “free money” thing was a failed publicity stunt and the cash now has been given to charity instead.

My latest book, Out of Crisis: Rethinking Our Financial Markets, is
out. The book is based on my years of teaching, and lectures at LSE, in
China (with the sponsorship of the State Department), and elsewhere over
the last year or so.

The book may be ordered from the publisher, website below, from
Amazon (ignore “ships by”), or at better bookstores.

http://www.paradigmpublishers.com/books/BookDetail.aspx?productID=215115

JE comments: Congratulations to one of the most prolific WAIS authors, David Westbrook, on the appearance of this timely book. I already have three of David’s books in the WAIS HQ Library, and plan to get my copy of Out of Crisis in time for the Holiday Season! Hope the book is a huge success.

Sorry to be so long in responding to John’s post. I have watched with great interest how things are going (from the US point of view) in Afghanistan and Iraq, and Pres. Obama’s search for the right strategy.

Someone called Afghanistan the “graveyard of empires” [most recently David Krieger--JE], and I think that probably is still true. I doubt we can “conquer” it in the usual sense, and I doubt we can impose our systems and values on the people. Anyone looking at the terrain will realize we probably can’t make much of a dent in the Taliban influence in the rural and mountain regions. They employ the classic strategy of falling back into the mountains when faced with overwhelming force, and then trickling back into the villages and countryside when that force leaves. It works. In Morocco almost 60 years ago, a Moroccan Army officer I knew told me that if I wanted to understand Morocco, I should go into the Rif mountains and talk to the tribal leaders. The French had never conquered them. It was an eye-opener to say the least, and I tried the same sort of thing in Jordan and Saudi. A very close friend in the Agency did the same thing when stationed in Peshawar.

I do ramble on. My point is that I think we have wasted resources and thousands of brave soldiers in wars I doubt we can ever win in the conventional sense. Even in Iraq after the apparent success of the surge, the bombings and murders go on, I think largely because the Shiites never got their pound of flesh revenge after the Saddam/ Sunni repression.

JE comments: Miles Seeley has also sent some thoughtful comments on “WAIS value.” I’ll post his note tomorrow.

Immigration is an easy target for fear-mongering, as it always has been in the US and Europe. As we move toward an increasingly mobile labor force and open borders under a globalized economy, there will be polarization in this issue precipitated by economic forces. Reviewing stats on the cost/benefit of immigrants, it becomes obvious that the economic benefits from immigrants whether in EU or US are far more significant than the inevitable costs of social crime. American and EU consumers enjoy the benefits of cheaper products and services because of immigrant labor. Crime stats tend to accentuate crime by foreigners, because it makes for more exciting and politically charged news coverage. “Natives” will always feel that they are threatened by foreigners, not realizing there are no natives and no foreigners on this planet.

My own experiences with crime and violence involved me both as a person and consular professional, the latter because a major consular responsibility is the protection and welfare of their country’s citizens. Personally I was most often the object of violence in The Netherlands and France.

In The Netherlands this took two forms. Direct telephonic threats were made against my wife and our children by terrorists that had been convicted of setting bombs then set free by a lenient judge, and anti-Vietnam war mobs that laid siege to our offices. Criminal acts I dealt with as a Consul mostly involved American youth who died from overdoses of drugs.

In Martinique (France) my office was bombed, I made an assassination list written by local terrorists and rarely visited Guadeloupe without seeing a car burning or visiting a hotel that had been fire bombed. The places I served that had the least street crime were Israel, Franco Spain, Somoza Nicaragua and Stroessner Paraguay.

The region I visited that suffered from the most political violence was the post-Contra War Nicaraguan Segovian highlands while investigating violence against the former Contras and their families at the behest of the Organization of American States. During the first six months after the Contras demobilized the OAS carefully documented 994 serious crimes committed against them, including several hundred murders of which none were subsequently investigated or prosecuted by the government. My own later investigations led to an estimate of about 3,000 murders, also not investigated or prosecuted. My sources explained that for the first six months the peasants that reported crimes rather than being provided with protection themselves became targets of retribution so they just stopped reporting.

But perhaps to two most dangerous places where I served were Vietnam during the war, which is understandable, and Washington, DC at night, especially the city’s southwest quadrant.

Conclusions? Not many, really. Violence seems to ebb and flow everywhere, authoritarian governments do seem to manage things more tightly for better or worse, often by restricting civil liberties, and even the most democratic and professionally well-organized countries (in my case France and The Netherlands) still have serious problems.

I am 93 years old and read every one of the WAIS letters. Ronald Hilton
was married to my sister and I have been a member of WAIS almost from day one.
I live in a very nice retirement community and WAIS is my connection with the outside
world. Please just keep it coming.

JE comments: We love you, Maxine! I/we pledge to keep the WAIS content delivered fresh to your door each day–it’s the best way I know to honor Prof. H.

Always great to hear from you–please write from time to time. All the best, and greetings to the Hawkeye State (Iowa).

You are raising many important questions, some overdue, and some implicit points. They deserve a fair answer, even though in my case they may be a bit long and complicated.

First I would like to draw a line between the value of WAIS and the website. This maybe comes because I, too seldom, actually use the website. I would like to concentrate though on WAIS ex-website so to speak.

I receive very high value from WAIS, as it allows me to be part of a group of people who know so much more than me about so many points that I receive more than I give. The variety of members here have ideas which I never have thought of and teach me something new even though quite obviously we may not always be of the same opinion. And then there is as a result of being a member here the possibility of having access to the persons here–by that I mean meeting the persons “in person” if the opportunity arises–either through conferences or off-Forum so to speak. One of the many, many qualities of the late Prof. Hilton was that he would edit and comment on posts in a neutral way even though one knew, or found out later, that he did not share the same opinion.

The term “value” must not be used in quotations marks, as I find it perfectly acceptable in such a situation as it describes exactly what you are trying to achieve and in no case would be misunderstood.

As to the members: I always advocated the publication (on-Forum only, obviously not on the website) and address list of members. I am aware that some members might not like it–I just do not understand why. Surely members have been chosen for some merit or field of study or other achievement and therefore must feel to an extent part of a small group of somehow likeminded people. Why on earth would people like to be anonymous? I would love to know where members are and hence expand my horizon “face to face.” I am happy to publish my contact details here. I would prefer as many contact details as possible on Forum rather than just a few on the website–the more the better even though it would be only “for us” in here.

As to the 80/20 observation JE makes, the most difficult point is what to do about that. [Eugen refers to my observation that probably 80% of WAISers rarely if ever write--JE.] This sounds a bit like the reorganisation of a company: We have a product to sell but only so few buyers. Will you have to delete 80% of your address list to have a 100% “echo-rate”? This is easily done, I assume, but misses the point in that most of them have been invited for the aforementioned reasons and one does not know why the 80% never participate. An important question is if the 80/20 “rule” has changed over time and how so–that might give clues as to a solution. Or maybe JE should write individually to all members, address them personally and gather information? A huge task I assume but maybe not that difficult as all would get more or less the same mail just individually addressed.

Maybe a reason is the sheer number of postings–but then this is a shoe that does not fit me. I could not do the editing job. Some subjects deserve many postings–but maybe WAIS can publish some individual answers bound together in one mail? I don’t know.

As to the website: remember I don’t use it often! Maybe the increase in value by “doing something” could be twofold: you allow people to do something–leave a comment or so–but with an email mask that asks for a sender’s name and email address. In that way you delegate a bit of the work to the members here, as they might be asked by someone about something and will answer, and yet we can keep or small community as it is since someone who asks something must not necessarily become a member and yet cannot remain anynonymous (s/he would have to provide a minimum of information about him or herself). Remember Wikipedia: you can comment on articles but either your IP address will be logged or you will have to register. I am sure someone at WebServiceCenter can design such a comments page. And with this tool you could go fishing for potential new members. Even the members here are registered I assume in that someone, presumably JE, knows who they are. This raises another point: If you had (which of course I do not know) from some members only an email address, nothing else, not even a name, you should try to find out who it is or delete.

JE comments: I am grateful for, and awed by, this thorough commentary from Eugen Solf. Eugen brings up a host of suggestions, beginning with our present membership list: the “members roll” I received years ago from Prof. Hilton was little more than a stream of e-mail addresses separated by commas. So yes, there are some crypto-WAISers whose identities I don’t know at all. Occasionally I receive a “please unsubscribe” e-mail (some have been cold and impersonal, as if I were a machine!), a request with which I promptly comply. The best news is when I hear from a “stealth WAISer” who’s been waiting in the wings for months or years before writing–recent postings from Herb Abrams and Guity Nashat come to mind. And there’s our ever-faithful friend in Iowa, Maxine Thomas (Ronald Hilton’s sister-in-law), who sent me a very kind note yesterday–Maxine’s posting is next in the queue.

About posting CVs and bios–I am in agreement with Eugen, with the caveat that this would always be voluntary. My suggestion would be a brief bio for public consumption, an in-depth CV (possibly with contact info) for WAISers. This would be accomplished by two levels of “signing in”–one for WAISers, one for guests. Only WAISers would have access to the more private information.

First, we hear from Gene Franklin:

(JE asked) 1. What “value” do you presently receive from being a WAISer?

Gene Franklin replies:

Education. My formal Engineering education contained virtually no history, political science, or philosophy although I have always had a great personal interest in these fields. In WAIS I often find a stimulating challenge to my preconceived ideas (and occasionally a reaffirmation!) and many very interesting exchanges between experts on important topics.

2. What concrete measures could be taken to increase this “value”?

If, on the new web site, a “tiny Google” could be installed that would permit me to search key words of topics and essays from the vast WAIS archive. I’d be particularly interested to have as many postings as possible tagged by a geographic label so I can scan at one click those posts about China, or Russia, or Europe, or Utopia. Having a Google-like ranking system that rates the posts from “Very Informative” to “Nothing but Polemic” is desirable but unlikely to happen!

JE comments: Actually, inspired by Gene’s suggestion, I’ve asked Roman Zhovtulya to research the feasibility of a web-based “star system” for readers to evaluate postings. Five stars would suggest “brilliant and informative”; one star would be “uninformative or mainly polemic.” YouTube, Amazon and the like already do this kind of thing. Does anyone think it’s a lousy idea? I do see the risk of hurt feelings, but I also think it would be addictive for many web surfers.

Regarding the “tiny Google,” the WAIS site already has search capabilities. Eat your heart out, Larry Page. (Or better yet, Larry–send a donation of cash or securities!) I just tested our homepage search engine by entering “Elías Castelnuovo,” the subject of my 1995 book. About six postings came up–all, unsurprisingly, by Yrs Truly, except for the one written by Ronald Hilton to introduce me back in August ‘06.

Although I don’t have empirical data to back this up, intuitively, safety has everything to do with levels of poverty and relative income (limits in extremes), more so than the form of government.

Cameron Sawyer responds:

Perhaps, but Moscow would be a counter-example, if not disproof. Moscow has extreme differences in income (until last year, the largest number of billionaires of any city in the world). But low crime rate, especially street crime.

But Moscow has very little poverty, and until the crisis started last fall, Moscow had no unemployment. More importantly, Moscow has no slums. Under Communism, there were not big differences in income, and neighborhoods were not much different from each other, in socio-economic terms. There were, of course, classes of privileged people, people “more equal than others”–nomenklatura, directors of enterprises, and celebrities from culture and sports, and there were always some relatively nicer neighborhoods where these people were concentrated. More importantly, they were concentrated in nicer buildings, not necessarily neighborhoods, so-called “Central Committee” buildings being an example.

This is the city-planning aspect of crime rates I was talking about. The existence of slums, where there is a concentration of poverty and hopelessness, where self-destructive behaviors, like crime and drugs, are shared and reinforced socially, where unemployed people with time on their hands are concentrated together, has surely got to be the most powerful factor in producing high crime rates. All American cities have slums, and most crimes in American cities are committed by slum-dwellers. As one of the (very few) positive legacies from Communism, Moscow does not have any slums (plenty of hideous, formerly state-owned apartment buildings, but that is not the same thing), and probably that is the main reason why Moscow has a low crime rate, despite great differences in income, despite prevalent corruption, and despite other factors which might tend to increase the crime rate.

I’m lecturing today at my small liberal arts university in the Midwest
on the origins of the First World War, and, no expert on WWI, I was
going to present the German militarist perspective, but, having read
the postings of Nigel Jones, Cameron Sawyer, and Alain de Benoist–and
drawing on my discussions with John Eipper following his visits to the
battlefields of the Western Front–I’m going to amend my lecture, and
present the debate as Jones, Sawyer, and de Benoist have helped frame
it.

JE comments: I’m happy my old Ann Arbor friend, historian extraordinaire John Recchiuti, has written the Forum for the first time in over a year. John teaches history at Mount Union College in Alliance, Ohio, which is best known for having the most successful college football team in US history–the fabled Purple Raiders. For years MUC has dominated Division III football (this is the league for the smallest colleges and universities–Adrian also plays in D III), and they have just completed their fourth undefeated regular season in a row. Oh–and I nearly forgot! Mount Union also has an eminent historian of US Progressivism, John Recchiuti, on its faculty.

Great to hear from you, John. Glad to learn that our discussions are going to inform your classroom discussions. That’s WAIS value!

Does widespread cynicism throughout the world in the early 21st century about political, judicial, business, religious, educational, social and cultural institutions widen the gap between the individual and the community, thereby contributing to deteriorating societal conditions and erosion of “humane” individuals in an immoral society?

Superstructures reflecting the interests of the financial, political, and socio-cultural elites in every society mold the individual who must conform to the immoral system out of necessity for survival and thus be a part of substructures. While critical of the corrupt and decadent superstructures, the individual follows similar patterns of behavior in everything from substructure involvement to personal conduct in relationships ranging from personal to business and public transactions. The hypocritical aspect of the individual is a reflection of the hypocrisy in the elite-dominated superstructures held together by the pyramid of decadence.

To many citizens, politicians are unrelentingly deceitful and manipulative because they get away with distortion of reality owing to PR and populist skills, combined with a well-orchestrated media machine behind them. Similarly, individuals in their own microcosm, especially individuals who wield power in the private sector, adopt patterns of behavior intended to achieve success through manipulation and deception, regardless of the impact on individuals and social welfare. Shallowness and superficiality prevalent among guardians of superstructures permeates throughout society and it is the dominant mode of communication between individuals mistrustful and fearful of the other who in turn never goes beyond appearances, beyond fear, beyond the apparent self-interest of survival.

Young people have the option of pursuing the conformist route of decadence as carved out by existing superstructures, or they can suffer the multifarious consequences of socio-political alienation by following a path of idealism intended to create a more humane society. The existing amoral at best and immoral more realistically superstructures reinforce atomism and suppress collective consciousness and communal dynamics.

JE comments: Lots to chew on here. My first response would be: is it really that bad? If so, has it ever been any different? Elites have always run the show, because, well, they’re elites. I would counter with the modest suggestion that Internet access (Pres. Obama’s topic in his China speech yesterday) gives ordinary folks something of a voice. Large parts of the world are protected from the most egregious injustices because the world is watching. Or am I putting too much faith in the egalitarianism of the Information Age?

I think it’s not totalitarianism which determines the level of street crime, but probably more factors like (a) the prevalance of poverty, particularly whether or not there exists some kind of underclass; (b) city planning character of a city–do people live and walk around in the centers of cities? Or do they travel by car and live in suburbs?; (c) general level of order in the country; (d) prevalance of drug problems in the city.

To which JE commented: Hmm, I’m not sure where that leaves Detroit…

David Gress responds:

Nor Copenhagen. Denmark has an unfortunately high rate of burglary and bodily harm. It may be just an impression, but I feel much safer in most areas of New York or any other American city than in some areas of Copenhagen or of my own town, Aarhus, which have been abandoned by the police.

Detroit of course is a town in total implosion, where houses can now be bought for much less than $100K, the legacy of three decades of mismanagement.

Answering Cameron’s questions, I’ll say this:

(a) the prevalance of poverty, particularly whether or not there exists some kind of underclass:

Here in Denmark we have the Muslim underclass; generations subsisting on the welfare state. If you have six-ten kids, the taxpayers will pay enough to allow the men to converse in their meeting-houses and the women to stay at home watching Arabic or Turkish TV.

(b) city planning character of a city–do people live and walk around in the centers of cities?

Denmark used to have good city centers, livable and walkable. This is now vanishing as arrogant and violent young–whether Muslim or local–make night-life unbearable. The city administration does nothing. A small thing: in Stockholm, Sweden, I witnessed cleaners emptying garbage pails in a park at 8 pm on a Saturday evening; in Berlin, I saw a cleaner in a subway station at 11:30 pm, also on a Saturday (the Fehrbelliner Platz, if you must know). In Denmark, they’ve all gone home, and the city claims no resources to keep order. So, on every Sunday morning in Aarhus, the streets are filled with empty pizza boxes, vomit, and other debris.

Or do they travel by car and live in suburbs?; (c) general level of order in the country:

Both. In Danish cities, they arrive and have mates in the center. General level of order: very variable. Most outlying districts see a cop perhaps once a week. I am reminded of a story told me by my daughter, who has a close friend whose mother, a widow (her husband was Danish, professor at Northeastern U. in Boston), lives in Dover, Massachusetts. One night the daughter arrived home without a key. She was trying to break in, a local cop arrived, he knew the family, and let her in. Such a scenario is almost unimaginable in Denmark today; there wouldn’t be any local cop who knows the family.

(d) prevalance of drug problems in the city:

The problem in many European cities is not drugs, but Islamism. There are turf wars between Muslim and native gangs over the drug trade–mostly marijuana, I gather–but I don’t think that Danish cities are particularly affected by drug problems. The problems are much deeper than that and have to do with the will of certain gangs to defy public order out of a sense of grievance–”we poor Muslims are so put upon”–and to demand special treatment, which they often get.

JE comments: It’s no surprise that I’m uncomfortable with some of the points David Gress raises, but I post them in the service of open and frank discussion. Immigrants around here (Michigan) are tougher, and probably harder-working, than us soft native-borns. I’d like to hear more about the claim of “generations subsisting on the welfare state” in Denmark. What per-child allowances are doled out to families? How much opposition in the political arena is there? Being paid to have kids is a foreign notion to Americans, although we do receive a modest tax deduction at year’s end.

David Gress is generous in saying that Detroit homes often sell for “much less than $100K.” My next-door neighbor in Royal Oak has a (quite nice) Detroit condo she purchased as an investment property eight years ago for about that much. She now just wants to get rid of it: asking price: less than $15K. Many livable homes can be had in the city for the price of a good used Honda Civic. The Pontiac Silverdome (former home of the Dt Lions) was sold yesterday for just over half a million dollars–no doubt less than a studio apartment in most European capitals. Anyone in the market for a domed stadium?

I’ve long wondered whether a society’s safety quotient is somehow related to immigration factors. In other words, does a continuing flood of immigrants somehow lower the levels of street safety? More so, in fact, than local politics?

I have no figures on this and would not know where to find them. But broadly speaking here in France street crime seems regularly blamed on Arab and Black African immigrants. In Britain, in the Low Countries and Scandinavia it’s pretty much the same. In Germany, the Turks seem to have escaped their postwar status as blamables and have been replaced by Eastern Europeans (notably Romanians).

In the US, it’s the Hispanics (less and less) and the Blacks (as ever) that draw blame for high street crime levels.

But in Asia, I’ve felt no problems in Japan or China, or Vietnam and Indonesia for that matter. The rest of Southeast Asia is pretty street-safe. And nowhere out there is there any great wave of immigration.

On balance, it would seem that societies untroubled by change are street-safer than those with waves of immigration. Or have I been somehow channeling Lou Dobbs?

In our quiet little corner of Western Paris, for instance, a street riot erupted Saturday over a nutball scheme to give money away! The word, spread by Internet, draw thousands of people from the slums to the supposed distribution point near us and astonished the local folks who had no idea what was happening.

JE comments: No one turns down free money! I saw this item on the news over the weekend. It says the rioters overturned cars and “hurled missiles.” What do they mean by that–rocks?

http://sg.news.yahoo.com/afp/20091115/tts-france-violence-internet-509a08e.html

David Gress has written on immigration and street crime in Denmark. His post is next in the queue.

I agree with Charles Ridley (15 November) about safety in Japan. During my visits to Japan, I have noticed that Tokyo and other Japanese cities are safer than cities in many other countries. However, even in safe Japan there is some crime. I recently heard an interview with American journalist Jake Adelstein about his life in Japan. He worked for a Japanese newspaper for several years. Adelstein has written about crime in Japan in his book Tokyo Vice: An American Reporter on the Police Beat in Japan.

I think it’s not totalitarianism which determines the level of street crime, but probably more factors like (a) the prevalance of poverty, particularly whether or not there exists some kind of underclass; (b) city planning character of a city–do people live and walk around in the centers of cities? Or do they travel by car and live in suburbs?; (c) general level of order in the country; (d) prevalance of drug problems in the city.

Mike Bonnie responds:

I agree with Cameron and believe he is right on each of the points he has made, with one addition. Although I don’t have empirical data to back this up, intuitively, safety has everything to do with levels of poverty and relative income (limits in extremes), more so than the form of government. It was not the intent of my November 15 message to point to any other correlation other than that of content of the media and feelings of safety.

The one thing missing from Cameron’s list, and I believe this to be what sets America apart from other countries, is access to weapons, in conjunction with sizable and increasing discrepancies between the “super rich” and people living below the poverty level. If one wanted to add “financial vehicles” to a list of potential weapons, America has more “hit and run fatalities” than many other countries. As a former licensed life-insurance agent, I know “financial death” may be more painful to some than “death” death, and will drive others to take drastic measures to alleviate the pain.

The ideal society to me is one that provides meaningful employment with sustainable wages, and family/community values (compassion). My favorite quote on this subject is the African saying, “He who does not produce his own food is not free.” The word “food” can be taken literally or figuratively. Let that saying apply to Western media.

President Obama’s visit to China takes place shortly after the 20-year anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall.

At Obama’s speech to college students in Shanghai, several “students” who raised questions in fluent English have been identified as college teachers who are heads of the committee of the Communist Youth League (a sub-division of the Communist Party among youth). Several of these “students” have their own blogs with their real identities.

For example, the first student who asked Obama a question was a female “student,” Cheng Xi. Her true identity is the vice chair of the committee of Communist Youth League at Fudan University. The second one was a male “student”; his true identity was head of the committee of the Communist Youth League at the College of Foreign Languages, Tongji University.

Obama carefully touched the topic of Internet censorship in his speech. (As I wrote before, all posts related to Falun Gong on the Chinese Internet are negative propaganda by the communist regime; one can’t find clearwisdom.net or minghui.org in China.) Some monitoring the Internet revealed that this topic was reported on 55 Chinese Internet sites, but over 50 of them were deleted within a day.

http://www.peacehall.com/news/gb/china/2009/11/200911162239.shtml

向奥巴马提问的内定的所谓学生 都是来头不小的 (博讯 boxun.com)
第一位向奥巴马提问女“学生”程熙，共青团复旦大学委员会研究室常务副主任；第二位男“学生”黄立鹤，同济大学外国语学院团委书记。

http://blog.sina.com.cn/s/blog_5053613d01008zd9.html
访谈中,上海大学生清一色用流利的英语提问奥巴马..每一个用提问的都是“装学生”的老师，本人同济在读~

In his 15 November post, John Heelan corrected my position that Sharia courts in England have judicial powers, when he stated that Britain’s Sharia courts are only arbitration courts and have no real judicial powers. It would appear that John Heelan’s position rests on the definition of the word arbitration. Apparently, the British media’s position is at odds with John’s position.

John Heelan responds:

Perhaps it is better to trust the actual opening words of the Arbitration Act 1996 rather than media interpretations (which might conceal a tinge of bias–none of Randy’s media offerings comments that Sharia Courts will carry out identical functions to those carried out by Jewish Beth Din religious courts for the last 100 years).

General principles

The provisions of this Part are founded on the following principles, and shall be construed accordingly–

(a) the object of arbitration is to obtain the fair resolution of disputes by an impartial tribunal without unnecessary delay or expense;

(b) the parties should be free to agree how their disputes are resolved, subject only to such safeguards as are necessary in the public interest;

(c) in matters governed by this Part the court should not intervene except as provided by this Part.

[Part 1 (1) Arbitration Act 1996- http://www.opsi.gov.uk/Acts/acts1996/]

The arbitration tribunals are limited to civil (not criminal) cases dealing with financial disputes, community matters, divorce and there have been some potentially criminal cases of domestic violence whose victims withdrew their complaints to the police after a tribunal decision. Previously tribunals decisions could not be enforced legally. The Arbitration Act 1996 now permits legal enforcement via the UK court. (A pedant would say that the Tribunals have no “judicial” powers per se, but their decisions can be subsequently enforced via the normal UK courts, with the proviso that the stipulations of the 1996 Act have been complied with.)

On 16 November, John Torok asked me what kind of tribunal I would favor for the 9/11 suspects, and whether I support trying them in the International Court of Justice.

I do not favor trying the 9/11 suspects at the International Court of Justice. They did not commit crimes against humanity; they committed crimes against United States citizens and residents on US soil. Therefore they should be tried by US Courts. I would favor trying them by a US military court. John Torok’s argument that US civilian courts have the most experience in this kind of case is true. But the disadvantages that I cited in my previous post are all there. It can be argued that this case is so important that a US civilian court would be the best venue, and that it does not necessarily open a precedent that all terrorists must be tried the same way. That remains to be seen, and it is unclear to me whether this argument has much merit. My preliminary thoughts on this are that if a conviction results from the trial, it will be used by the defenders of treating terrorism as an ordinary crime to generalize it to every terrorist. And in any case, it is unclear by what method it would be decided which cases to try in US civilian courts and which cases not. Eventually whatever process is decided for that decision will be attacked as arbitrary, or military courts will be attacked as kangaroo courts, which already happened when the Bush administration sought to try terrorists that way. We shall see what happens at the trial to evaluate how much damage trying them in open court will cause to future law enforcement against foreign terrorists.

I have not written WAIS recently because of my novel writing. Besides trying to complete my second novel, I have been working with a Greek translator for the first one to be published mid-2010 and at the same time trying to have it published with a major US publishing company. I am keeping my fingers crossed as far as having an English edition. In any event, I did read the recent WAIS question about the word agape, which of course has undergone different meanings. The modern-day one is losely translated as love in the secular sense. However, the same word has religious connotations and it is used in Greek Orthodox services to mean spiritual love. The word in ancient times is linked with paganism, but it does not have the same meaning as eros.

Here is a brief introduction to my two novels:

Slaves to Gods and Demons

A historical philosophical novel.

It will be published in Greece in late spring-early summer 2010 and in English in 2011.

At the core of the novel are imbedded parallels between pagan mythology and Christian society that help explain common universal aspirations of modern man’s quest for purpose. The thesis of the novel is that all life is indeed a series of illusions on which people base their actions. The novel explores the complex layers of human nature and society based on classical Greek (pagan) thought, Christianity and superstition, Hinduism, and Existentialism. Resting on Jose Ortega y Gasset’s What is Philosophy and Emerson’s Illusions, the novel guides the reader to the conclusion that all reality and all ethical choices are rooted not in duty but in a series of complex illusions–euphoric ones represented as gods throughout the novel, and horrifying ones presented as demons. An underlying theme of complex rational and irrational motives for human behavior figures prominently just under the surface as the clash of the archons’ “gods” that are necessarily “demons” for the rest in Micropolis revealing the degree to which human freedom and creativity are possible in any society.

Phantoms of Apocalypse

Science Fiction in process of completion by spring 2010.

The question of whether the ultimate solution to a better society rests with political revolution that alters the social order or a scientific one that alters human nature is the thesis of this science fiction novel. An underlying theme running through the novel is based in part on the philosophy of Arthur Schopenhauer that life is evil because its basic stimulus is suffering, and on the psychoanalytic theory of Erich Fromm that necrophilia and sadism are at the core of contemporary materialistic-hedonistic culture of violence, especially in the western world where consumerist values transcend humanism. Modern man’s attraction to anything lifeless is rooted in human propensity to control and avoid pain, and in social conditions that glorify necrophilia, sadism, and violence.

The novel takes place in the fictional town of New Heaven, Iowa on the 300th anniversary of July 4th (2076). A plague infects the entire country after a bio-chemical war that may have been caused either by accident, or rogue military elements within the US Defense Dept as a way to end a rebellion in New York and other major cities. In late 21st-century America, the infected segment of the population, which is the majority and has survived a plague caused by biological warfare, behaves as though life is predicated on unrelenting aggression and destruction.

JE comments: I wish Jon the greatest of success with his novels–they certainly have deep philosophical underpinnings! As a bonus, Jon has sent a posting that I’ve added to the long queue in my inbox. (WAIS has been extremely busy for the last several days.) Welcome back, Jon–glad you are well. When you get the chance, can you tell us how you find the motivation to write novels? I have two or three that have languished unfinished for years.

Tom Hashimoto responds:

I can think of Albania. Although I do not have actual data, criminals (big or small) in Albania represented in the movie “Taken” seem to stay in neighboring countries like Greece and Italy, while Albanians who live in Albania are very nice. I feel as safe in Tirana as in Tokyo with the exception of crossing busy streets. Young ladies walk after midnight in Tirana, and they are safe unless attacked by street dogs.

JE comments: Very interesting. Was it different (more dangerous) in Tirana during the Hoxha era?
Stay well, Tom! We miss you.

When commenting Charles Ridley’s post of 15 November, JE posited some kind of correlation between democracy and street crime.

But the safest streets in the world are not in totalitarian countries, but rather in democracies like Switzerland, Denmark, etc. In fact one finds very safe streets almost everywhere in Europe, with the possible exception of southern (not eastern) Europe. Whereas unsafe streets can be found nearly everywhere in America, whether south, north or central.

Speaking of the former Communist world, I think that there was a temporary increase in street crime in cities like Warsaw and Moscow during the chaotic ’90s, but these cities never reached the levels of street crime of American cities. Today they are as safe as any other European cities.

I think it’s not totalitarianism which determines the level of street crime, but probably more factors like (a) the prevalance of poverty, particularly whether or not there exists some kind of underclass; (b) city planning character of a city–do people live and walk around in the centers of cities? Or do they travel by car and live in suburbs?; (c) general level of order in the country; (d) prevalance of drug problems in the city.

JE comments: Hmm, I’m not sure where that leaves Detroit…

I apologise for taking my time to respond to Cameron Sawyer’s post from several days ago, and indeed to that of Alain de Benoist on the same subject.

I don’t see any inherent contradiction between my view that the Great War was primarily and deliberately caused by German militarism and the fact that there were two armed camps of rival alliances in Europe ready primed and all set to explode in 1914, nor to Cameron’s emphasis on the indeed important part played by the bombastic and unstable personality of Kaiser Wilhelm II..

The proof of a deliberate, pre-meditated German plan to go to war in 1914, using the quarrel of its Austrian ally with Serbia as a convenient excuse, is contained in the great German historian Fritz Fischer’s masterpiece Griff Nach der Weltmacht (1961), blandly (and inaccurately) translated into English as Germany’s Aims in the First World War (1967). [A literal translation of the title would be Germany's Grab for World Power.] If Cameron wants a lucid modern American re-statement of Fischer he should read Prof David Fromkin’s Europe’s Last Summer: Why the World Went to War in 1914 (2004) or The Origins of the First World War: Controversies and Consensus by Annika Mombauer (2002).

I admire John Keegan as a military historian, but he is not a political or diplomatic historian, and has no special knowledge–so far as I am aware–of the damning documents used by Fischer that are in the German archives.

Essentially, Wilhelmine Germany was run by a political/ military clique under the Kaiser, rather than by the political parties of the Reichstag. The key members of the clique were the heads of the Army and Navy and the Foreign Office. The Chief of the German General staff, Count Alfred von Schlieffen, conceived his famous plan for an aggressive war to knock out France by invading neutral Belgium (and, in his original conception Holland as well). The plan was modified by Schlieffen’s successor, Moltke, the guard against the threat of a Russian attack from the East, but it remained in essence the same. It was thought by the Germans that Britain would stay out of the war–as it had in 1870–and that even if it did join in, Paris would have fallen and the war would be over within six weeks.

1914 was the optimum date for launching the war, as Germany’s masters were worried by the rapid industrialisation of Russia which it was feared would menace Germany’s European hegemony.

The Kaiser–who in my view was mentally unstable–approved this policy. He did, as Cameron rightly mentions, hold conflicting and contradictory views–literally “doublethink” about Britain, the native country of his hated mother. On the one hand he admired and envied British tradition, British imperialism and above all British naval power. On the other hand he hated British liberalism and was envious of the power and prestige of the Empire. When he realised that Britain would enter the war he had launched he tried in vain to stop the Schlieffen Plan in its tracks! At the end of the war, his first request, on going into Dutch exile, was for a “strong cup of English tea.”

Approriately to this post, I have just returned from an–always moving–visit to the Western Front. I was saddened, however, to find that thieves in search of scrap metal, had chiselled the nameplates off every single soldier’s grave–hundreds of them–in the French war cemetery at Serre on the Somme–which was itself crumbling and neglected before this shocking vandalism, which without being chauvinistic, I think would be unthinkable in the immaculately kept US and British war cemeteries.

I would like to hear Alain’s comments on this interesting difference between “Anglo-Saxon” and French rememberance (or in the latter case non-remembrance) of its war dead.

JE comments: Crass and shocking indeed–how can anyone be so insensitive to the millions who died in the hecatomb of the Great War? More importantly, why is nothing being done? Nearly all the Western Front was on French soil, and France arguably suffered more than any other nation during the conflict. Is this all being forgotten?

Istvan Simon (16 November) wrote interesting comments on the relationship between political and economic freedoms.

[IS] In fact there is ample evidence that economic freedom leads to political freedom. This can be observed in China. No sane person would argue that political freedoms in China today are not far greater than in Mao’s time, or even in Deng Xiao Ping’s time. [...] But China is not the only example where economic freedom and capitalism led to political freedoms as well. A similar evolution happened in Vietnam, Spain, Portugal, Chile, and Brazil.

[John Heelan] I would be interested in the comments of WAIS “China Hands” on Istvan’s comments about China. There are many who suffered under Franco, Salazar and Pinochet regimes who would argue that there was no political freedom despite rampant capitalism under those dictatorships.

In his 15 November post, John Heelan corrected my position that Sharia courts in England have judicial powers, when he stated that Britain’s Sharia courts are only arbitration courts and have no real judicial powers. It would appear that John Heelan’s position rests on the definition of the word arbitration.

Apparently, the British media’s position is at odds with John’s position:

Five sharia courts have been set up in London, Birmingham, Bradford and Manchester and Nuneaton, Warwickshire. The government has quietly sanctioned that their rulings are enforceable with the full power of the judicial system, through the county courts or High Court. Previously, the rulings were not binding and depended on voluntary compliance among Muslims…Dominic Grieve, the shadow home secretary, said: “If it is true that these tribunals are passing binding decisions in the areas of family and criminal law, I would like to know which courts are enforcing them because I would consider such action unlawful. British law is absolute and must remain so.”

Douglas Murray, the director of the Centre for Social Cohesion, added: “I think it’s appalling. I don’t think arbitration that is done by sharia should ever be endorsed or enforced by the British state.” Muslim tribunal courts started passing sharia judgments in August 2007. They have dealt with more than 100 cases that range from Muslim divorce and inheritance to nuisance neighbours. It has also emerged that tribunal courts have settled six cases of domestic violence between married couples, working in tandem with the police investigations.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/2957428/Sharia-law-courts-operating-in-Britain.html

ISLAMIC law has been officially adopted in Britain, with sharia courts given powers to rule on Muslim civil cases. The government has quietly sanctioned the powers for sharia judges to rule on cases ranging from divorce and financial disputes to those involving domestic violence. Rulings issued by a network of five sharia courts are enforceable with the full power of the judicial system, through the county courts or High Court.

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/faith/article4749183.ece

JE comments: Do UK sharia courts have advisory or fully enforceable power? After reading John Heelan’s and Randy Black’s conflicting reports, I am confused.

Timothy McVeigh was a mass murderer who killed 168
people in Oklahoma. Bombing a building may be a separate crime in
addition to murder, as an expansion of the common-law crime of arson.

Bienvenido Macario’s quote, “One question that came up is why Hasan’s
action was not officially called a terrorist act” adds to the problem. Who
“officially” labels certain killings and bombings “acts of terrorism?”

“Terrorism” like “war,” “revolution,” “ethnic cleansing,” “genocide,” are
words of ideologues and propagandists working to spread fear of unknown
enemies. They are not legal or justiciable categories.

Conspiracy is a legal category, but hard to prove in a court of law. Talk
of terrorism and conspiracy does sell newspapers and TV advertising.

JE comments: Who “officially” labels anything? I think that in the Hasan case, it would be some spokesperson in the US government. I am reminded of how the press took note when the Bush White House finally started calling the Iraq violence a “Civil War.” Still, labeling the Hasan rampage “terrorism” (I would) does nothing to change the horror of what took place. The more useful question is whether Hasan acted alone. If so, is it meaningful to speak of a one-man terrorist “cell”?

I have followed the exchange on capitalism and economic and political freedoms with great interest. Cameron Sawyer exposed with great ability and clarity to my mind the essential issues. Alain de Benoist presented a different perspective based on the theoretical writings of Marxists and other philosophers. Alain called Marxist critiques of capitalism an analysis, but it hardly deserves that name. Marxists have always insisted that their theory was science. I am willing to entertain Marxist theories as a scientist, but then they must be evaluated the same way as any scientific theory is evaluated.

A scientific theory is useless if it merely “explains” reality. It only becomes useful when inferences and predictions can be drawn from the theory, and then the validity of those predictions can be tested against reality. Marx’s theories therefore failed on a colossal scale, because his predictions failed. I see no reason to keep citing Marx, any more than citing physicists that proposed theories of the ether. We do not do that in Physics, because we accepted that those theories were wrong, and moved on. It is high time we do the same with Marxism and relegate Marx and Marxism to the giant heap of failed ideas.

Marx’s observations on illimitation are just as false as his predictions that capitalism would collapse and would be replaced by the dictatorship of the proletariat, and Communism will take over as the most perfect stage in the evolution of socialism, in a perfect, ultimate, scientifically unavoidable system. Rubbish. It was clearly Communism which collapsed instead, and capitalism continues to prosper, even in countries that still are governed by nominally Communist regimes like in China. This is what Cameron very ably pointed out. The failures and bubbles in market-oriented economies in no way negate the superiority of markets, because these systems, though far from perfect, have consistently shown to be able to create wealth for a large number of people over hundreds of years now, and continue to do so in spite of such failures. The Great Depression was no doubt terrible, but it was preceded and followed by an unprecedented long period of great prosperity and growth. Tor Guimaraes is not only wrong in continually referring to the current crisis in emotional, almost hysterical, apocalyptic terms, like “economic terrorism,” and other similar meaningless rhetoric, but he fails to account for the fact, as Cameron correctly pointed out, that even in the current crisis, and in spite of the unemployment rate having reached the very uncomfortable level of 10%, still 90% of the employable people continues to be employed, and continues to live at a rather comfortable level. If a system in crisis is able to perform relatively so well, surely it is a system worth greater respect than the excessive rhetoric exhibited by Tor Guimaraes. The bubbles and periodic failures of market economies show that they are not perfect. But so do forest fires, and yet they have been shown to be essential in ecosystems. Likewise, periodic failures give opportunities in market economies for the emergence of new technologies and a better and more productive economy. Crisis also equals opportunity.

Alain is right that democracy is based on equality–one citizen one vote. But though this is one of the essential features of democracy, it is not the only one, and arguably it is not even the most important one. The protection of minorities from the oppression and dictatorship of a majority is also an essential part of democracy. If the “one citizen - one vote” principle were enough, minorities could be easily oppressed by an intolerant majority. So Cameron is quite right in emphasizing political freedom in democracy, because it is political freedom and pluralism which enable it to be a stable and yet dynamic system which is adaptable, and therefore a system that does and can endure. Merely voting would hardly matter if there were no political freedom that would protect the rights of minorities. Without it, the voices of the opposition would be silenced, like they are in so many Islamic countries or left and right wing dictatorships. With the voice of dissent silenced, new ideas could not ever be articulated, making such a “democracy” a static and ultimately dead political system, as it would be unable to evolve with new ideas and adapt to a changing world.

What I would like to add to Cameron’s analysis and further elaborate on Jordi Molins Coronado’s observations is that it is not a coincidence that democracy and Capitalism flourish together. Slavoj Zizek is just plain wrong. We do not have to fear that economic freedom would work better in a dictatorial system, because it does not. In fact there is ample evidence that economic freedom leads to political freedom. This can be observed in China. No sane person would argue that political freedoms in China today are not far greater than in Mao’s time, or even in Deng Xiao Ping’s time. Though the Chinese are nowhere as politically free as we would like them to be, they are much freer than they used to be. One can go to China today and openly criticize Mao Zedong with Chinese citizens. They are not afraid to express criticism themselves, and for example call the “great Helmsman” worse than Saddam Hussein, as indeed two Chinese citizens have independently told me so five years ago. Clearly they would have been afraid to openly voice such criticism in Mao’s time, before and after the turbulence and frenzied insanity of the Cultural Revolution, but they are no longer afraid today . Mao’s feet are today made of clay. Though many still revere him, perhaps an even larger number do not. The regime in China is still far too authoritarian, but it is not a totalitarian system anymore. A great part of the reason for that is the Capitalist economy, because economic opportunities are no longer awarded to only Communist party members, nor conditioned to a slavish support of the Communist party’s rule. But China is not the only example where economic freedom and Capitalism led to political freedoms as well. A similar evolution happened in Vietnam, Spain, Portugal, Chile, and Brazil. Chavez’s Venezuela is perhaps a counter-example of what I am saying here. It would be interesting to try to analyze why, but in any case it is likely to be just a temporary setback, perhaps made possible by an economy excessively dependent on oil.

One could ask in a deeper sense why Slavoj Zizek is wrong. Why should economic freedom lead to political freedom? I think that the reason is that economic freedom always creates an economy which is invariably more and more complex and diversified, where it becomes less and less possible to make easy choices of what is best for the economy, by a few people and a few planners. This is not the only reason why planned economies always failed, but I think it is one of the main reasons. Planners and governments may desire to make the best decisions for the economy, but they cannot do so, even if they are well intentioned, simply because the economy is far too complex and changes far too fast for them to ever understand what is going on. The “best” for the economy is hardly obvious in such a dynamic environment. The markets do a far better job in allocating resources than the planners do. They adapt to changes far better and far faster. So as economies become ever more complex, ever more freedom is needed to successfully keep such a dynamic constantly changing system going. This is I think why political freedom follows economic freedom. If it did not, economic growth would stall, as more and more cases would occur where political considerations override economic ones, undermining the smooth working of the economy. Political and economic freedom also allows entrepreneurs to start businesses without having to consult the political authorities. Without such entrepreneurs no economy can be healthy for long. Capitalism and freedom, both economic and political, are inexorably intertwined and linked.

It will not surprise WAISers to learn that in an imperfect world I think the the Justice Department’s decision to try the cases of the five suspected international terrorists and Guantánamo detainees in Manhattan’s federal court is a good one. If the cases are to be tried in the American non-military judicial system, it is worth noting that no other US court has more experience with such cases, including the defendants convicted of the 1993 WorId Trade Center bombing attack. Moreover, as a former court employee, I can say the security infrastructure needed for such an internationally high profile case is clearly in place. A query to Istvan Simon, and to WAIS: If you do not favor US federal court criminal jurisdiction over the five defendants whose prosecutions were announced last week, what would your alternative be? The International Court of Criminal Justice in the Hague? There is an argument to be made, not only from symmetry, that international crimes should be tried in international courts rather than what international lawyers call municipal (national, domestic) courts. Many nation-states however, including the US, see such international criminal jurisdiction as a derogation from national sovereignty.

JE comments: John Torok, a resident of Oakland, California, has requested that his origin be identified “ex-NYC” in the subject line of his postings. I have no problem with this; there’s an argument to be made that New York City has some of the trappings of a mercantile nation-state. There was even discussion during the US Civil War to turn it into a “free city,” along the lines of medieval and Renaissance Venice. More importantly, we must acknowledge, with Billy Joel, that New York State of Mind…

As part of a major overhaul of our public website, which we hope to have on-line in early 2010, I’ve been in consultation with WAISer Roman Zhovtulya of WebServiceCenter (HQs in San Francisco and Offenburg, Germany). Roman and I are seeking to add “value” to the website (not in the monetary sense–no advertising ever, I think!), and would like to measure WAISer views on the following questions:

1) What “value” do you presently receive from being a WAISer?

2) What concrete measures could be taken to increase this “value”?

“Value” here comes in quotation marks, because part of me fears it is one of the many buzzwords of post-modernity, devoid of concrete meaning. But perhaps reflecting on what the “v-word” means will in itself yield some interesting ideas. Question #1 is self-evident to me, as it was for Professor Hilton (in the Cartesian sense, WAISito ergo sum), but the truth is, probably 80% of our 250 correspondents seldom, if ever, write. And too many, in all honesty, direct their WAIS mail straight to the e-trash. Why is this, and what can we do about it?

I have some disconnected thoughts for question #2–for example, our website would receive more traffic (beyond its present 500-800 hits per day) if it allowed visitors actually to do something–leave a comment, pose a question for our sundry experts, wax eloquently on matters global. At present, visitors can do but one thing–donate! I have no problem with that…

Also, both our prestige and our sense of community would be enhanced if profiles and CVs of the WAIS membership could be posted on-line. This would be strictly voluntary, as I suspect some WAISers may prefer to remain semi-anonymous.

Please be frank with your thoughts, and tell me whether you’d like your responses posted or not. Look forward to hearing from one and all. Pax et lux.

Like Mike Bonnie (15 November) I certainly felt safe in China. One might be cheated in bargaining over the proce of a scarf with a store clerk, but one doesn’t feel in danger amongst the crowds of Beijing or at the popular sightseeing spots.

In Japan, another country in which I always feel safe, one sees young girls bicyling home after dark on the streets of Tokyo and one knows that they will be perfectly safe. One night I was walking along a Tokyo Street and three young men approached me coming the other way. I was nervous for a moment until I realized I was in Tokyo, not San Francisco. I am always apprehensive when I walk down a street in San Francisco in the evening, particularly when not many people are out. I remember one evening when I was walking to the parking lot in Union Square after attending a meeting. There was no one on the street at the time and I was frightened should someone suddenly appear out of a doorway and possibly attack me.

Even in our own seemingly peaceful neighborhood here in residential Palo Alto, people have been killed on the streets in the evening.

Violent crimes in Japan often appear to be crimes of passion against personal enemies or unfaithful lovers. I am sure the same is true in China, as it was in Taiwan when I was there as a student.

JE comments: The more totalitarian the society the safer the streets–truth or poppycock? I cannot but predict that when/should/if China becomes more democratic, its street crime will increase. This was the case in Spain, the USSR/Russia, Iraq, Chile…everywhere that has gone from autocracy to democracy. Japan, which has always seemed safe, doesn’t fit into the formula. A contrary question: has there ever been a nation where a transition to democracy has actually coincided with a lessening of petty crime (muggings, vandalism, thefts, removing tags from couches, etc.)?

Just last week, Islamic leaders in Britain declared their ultimate goal was to turn England’s Buckingham Palace into a mosque and install Sharia law across Britain, where five Sharia courts operating with full judicial authority have existed, with the British government’s approval, since 2008. Additional courts are planned for Glasgow and Edinburgh.

John Heelan (JH) responds:

Randy is mistaken about the role of so-called “Sharia Courts” in the UK. They have no judicial powers within the UK Courts system but limited to an arbitration role under the 1996 Arbitration Act–similar to the Jewish Beth Din “courts” that have existed in England for more than 100 years.

[RB] October 29–all major news organizations: Anjem Choudary–leader of Islam4UK–wants the London residence of Queen Elizabeth to be transformed into a religious centre and renamed “Buckingham Masjid,” the Arabic word for mosque.

[JH] Anjem Choudary is one of the leaders of the extremist Islamist groups, Al-Muhajiroun, banned as a terrorist group in 2004. He is the spokesman for Omar Bakri Muhammad, banned from the UK in 2005 as well as the spokesman for Al Ghurabaa, a group banned in the UK for the glorification of terrorism. He is much a representative of the views of UK Muslims as the views of some fundamentalist Bible Belt preachers represent the views of all US Christians.

I suggest that Randy review his comments about the UK.

Timothy McVeigh was a Christian and a decorated veteran of the United States Army, having served in the first Gulf War, where he was awarded a Bronze Star. He was convicted of bombing the Alfred P. Murrah Building in Oklahoma City on April 19, 1995.

Bienvenido Macario responds:

McVeigh was not in active service on April 19, 1995, unlike Nidal Malik Hasan when he committed mass murder. The only difference I can think of between Hasan and other terrorists attackers is that Hasan did not committ suicide and he lawyered up. Availing oneself of the services of legal counsel is not exactly the decision of a deranged man.

I have made my anti-clerical sentiments and still stand by those criticisms of the Roman Catholic Church in the Philippines. And as far as the over one billion Muslims in the world who are not associated with Jihadists, like Filipino parishioners and clerics alike, they have made no considerable effort to distance themselves from violent Jihadists or predatory priests. For me it is not enough not to be associated with Jihadists or corrupt and sexually predatory priests. Islam and the honor of the Roman Catholic Church should be defended by its respective followers. They ought to take it upon themselves to purge their ranks before some extremists or corrupt priest bring shame and dishonor to the good name of Islam or the Roman Catholic Church.

One question that came up is why Hasan’s action was not officially called a terrorist act.

JE comments: Bienvenido Macario, whose postings so often inspire much discussion, has put forth a tall challenge worth further comment: why don’t Muslims purge their ranks of the very small yet violent minority of Jihadists who through their actions bring the world’s wrath upon the one billion faithful? Given the various branches of Islam, and the lack of a central authority akin to a Pope, how could such a thing even be attempted?

I have read with interest the recent exchange between Tor Guimaraes and Cameron Sawyer about capitalism, its merits and its faults. WAISers will not be surprised that I am more in agreement with Tor’s argumentation. I realize however how difficult it is to criticize capitalism in an “Americanosphere” so closely linked, since its birth, to that system.

Cameron (14 November) wrote: “ The biggest difference between market economics and totalitarian socialism is that market economics does not claim to remake human nature, does not claim to perfect mankind, and does not claim to have all the answers to all human problems.”

This could be debated. I am not sure than any totalitarianism has ever seriously claimed to “have all the answers to all human problems.” Capitalism, on the other hand, does not claim to “remake human nature,” but nonetheless it transforms and shapes this “human nature” by giving priority to exchange and commercial values, therefore to quantity more than quality, which has a clear effect on the collective symbolic imaginary. (In European history, commercial values have been considered during centuries as the lowest values, money being something extremely vile.) Moreover, capitalism is historically linked to the rise of the bourgeoisie and to the ideology of progress, whose main theoreticians (see Condorcet) asserted human nature would be constantly improved as a consequence of “progress” (material progress was supposed to improve the moral nature of mankind, a failed promised among others).

The basic feature of capitalism is illimitation (always more). Marx was very right to say that for capitalism everything which impedes the perpetual expansion of the process of (over)accumulation is an obstacle to suppress. Limits are seen as evil. This kind of illimitation is quite similar to what Heidegger called the “Gestell,” the planetary submission to the forces of technology, calculation and rationalism.

Under capitalism, the relationship between men is slowly evolving on the model of the relationship to things. This is the phenomenon called “reification” (Verdinglichung) of the social relations under the fetichism of merchandise, as analyzed by Marx, Lukács and Heidegger.

About markets: before discussing the merits and faults of the markets, it would be useful to wonder and ask if a “free market” is something which can really exist. Many economists have answered negatively (see for instance the books written by François Perroux). Markets are not abstractions, except in some liberal theoreticians’ writings. In reality, markets have always to take social and cultural specificities, effects of power and domination, influences of all kind, into account. A “free market” is just an idea.

Cameron wrote also that “democracy is nothing but political freedom.” This is the usual liberal and American mantra. For most political scientists, however, democracy has nothing to do with “political freedom,” but rather with equality. But even this view can be discussed. Democracy is actually the regime where the sovereignty belongs to the people (not to its representatives), and where all the citizens have the possibility to contribute to the decisions interesting public affairs (the democratic motto is not “one man, one vote,” but “one citizen, one vote”). Some of these decisions can be orientated toward “political freedom,” some of them can go in very different (even opposite) directions.

JE commented on 14 November that decision to try of the 9/11 suspects in NYC was the biggest news story of the week. (See Istvan Simon’s post from that date.) I actually think a bigger story was Obama’s rejection of the options provided by the military for pursuing the war in Afghanistan and his request for further options. It is just possible that the president may be seeing the folly of continuing to seek a military solution in Afghanistan (the graveyard of empires).

JE comments: Good point; Afghanistan will certainly affect more lives than one trial. Another candidate for “news story of the week/month/year” may be the escalating violence in nuclear-armed Pakistan. A new suicide bombing is reported nearly every day.

President Obama is still in Asia, which will no doubt preclude his reaching any decision on Afghanistan for the time being. Speaking of which, WAISer thoughts on Obama’s visit? We are fortunate to have many “Asia hands” in our ranks.

I wonder if [Mike Bonnie] might reevaluate his statement about race, rank, religion or ethnic background not being part of the equation involved in the attack at Fort Hood?

Mike Bonnie replies:

I’m grateful for Randy Black’s detailed descriptions of connections and Nidal Hasan’s involvement in radical organizations preceding the Ft. Hood slayings. First of all, I share Tor Guimaraes’s and Michael Sullivan’s anger, frustration, and shock from this great tragedy at Fort Hood presented in the original message I was responding to. My explanation for describing Hasan as representing no one, is rather personal, but I’m not opposed to sharing here, as I have done so on more local levels on occasions in my past.

Back in 1989 I was involved in an office shooting. A man walked into business where I was working, shot and killed the manager; two employees were also shot, one died at Craig Hospital in Denver after being paralyzed from the neck down, the other survived. At the time of the shootings I’d stepped out of the building a moment before and re-entered the building a few minutes later. Twenty years later, I still cannot help but feel moved by reports of such incidents. One expects those sort of things to happen in a war zone; 20 years ago those things were not to be expected in relatively peaceful places. Not to be an alarmist however, unfortunately, with the number of work place shootings that are occurring, people “going postal” (please, excuse any reference to USPS) and the number of veterans returning from war who carry some of the same feelings I carry every day in relatively peaceful settings, the belief that anyone is safe anywhere is not living up to reality.

The shooter who walked into the place of business where I was employee in 1989 believed he was being personally attacked by the media in broadcasts and reporting. He had a list of all the televisions stations in the city, a rifle and 200 rounds of ammunition. It so happened, the place where I worked was on the top of the list. Upon entering the building, he only shot at men wearing dress ties, how a news broadcaster might be seen on television. Thanks to an astute secretary, the police were notified as the shootings took place. The perpetrator, as he drove to the next building on his list, was surrounded by police, where he committed suicide.

Since the middle of this past August following my return from China, I’ve shied away from television, the radio, and newspapers. I don’t consider my change of lifestyle a flight from anything, rather as flight to more comfortable thoughts and feelings. In China, I felt safe despite my lack of ability to read local papers and understand news broadcast. Such news of shootings (which are very rare in China), muggings, robberies, rapes and burglaries are seldom reported in English. I don’t consider the filtering of news a restriction of freedom, rather an effort to maintain a “peaceful society.”

My undergraduate senior college paper was written in the “Foreign Corrupt Practices Act of 1977.” I understand the power of the press in attacking and deterring crime. I don’t understand and refuse to be part of the cliche most attributed to reporting today, “If it bleeds–it leads.” I feel balanced and truly well-conducted investigative reporting is rare and nothing I want to expressly look for in daily reading or viewing.

About Nidal Hasan: It’s great to know all the details of his connections and actions leading up to the shootings at Ft. Hood; however, are all the details truly necessary for everyone (children in particular) to know? I’m not a detective or investigator who needs that information to pursue prosecution or connect Hasan to others involved in plotting another such reprehensible act. I’d like to trust the authorities to do their job. That may mean, as in the days of the Old West, a “fair trial and a hanging.” However, only the parties involved and accused of such crimes need be concerned about a rush to judgment. If Hasan weren’t at the scene of Ft. Hood brandishing weapons and firing on his compatriots, there wouldn’t be a crime. Where were the people who should have prevented this? Since there has been a crime (multiple crimes), I’m curious to know what in this world was the shooter thinking as he prepared for his attack? How did he view his potential victims? Were the shootings vengeance, considered a heroic act, or “officer-assisted suicide?” If the answers to those questions are only as shallow as, rank, race, religion, ethnic background, the investigators and media have failed.

Attributing Hasan to any rank, race, religion, ethnic back ground, predisposes motive, creates an potential alibi, empowers and/or promotes discrimination–in a sense perpetuating rumors that may or may not be true.

Massoud wrote that the WAIS forum is leaning towards Muslim bashing. Nothing can be further from the truth.

If Massoud believes that posting the facts about the Fort Hood killer’s leanings is Muslim bashing, then what are we to make of the posts that bash capitalism, democracy and China’s persecution of Falun Gong? This is not Muslim bashing nor are the other posts, in my mind, capitalism bashing. We are, for the most part, uncensored in our precious WAIS forum. If there are those among us in favor of censorship, I invite them to justify their goal of ignoring the First Amendment to the US Constitution.

The facts of these matters is that Tim McVeigh’s twisted thought processes led him to believe that he might start some sort of anti-government movement. Beyond that, he really had no followers or plan beyond the bombing of the federal building in Oklahoma City.

On the opposite end of the spectrum, we have a radical sect/group/club/gang/militant organization within Islam that has openly declared their goals as total domination of the world. That this Muslim group represents only a tiny percentage, some say less than five percent, of the global Muslim community is a fact. Nevertheless, that tiny group has appropriated, stolen really, the world’s attention.

Al-Qaeda, a multinational, yet stateless arm/sect of Islam, has waged attacks on civilian and military targets dating to the early 1990s in dozens of nations. And with only one goal. Al-Qaeda recruits men, women and children as suicide bombers, warriors and drug runners from Afghanistan to Canada to Australia to Pakistan. About the only nation that appears to be immune is China, unless I missed something there.

Such a large, well-financed and decentralized organization, with the ability to attack just about anywhere on the globe and with the tacit approval of more than a few nations that appropriately are majority Muslim, was not within the talents of Tim McVeigh. McVeigh, who was raised Roman Catholic, later wrote that he was agnostic.

Just last week, Islamic leaders in Britain declared their ultimate goal was to turn England’s Buckingham Palace into a mosque and install Sharia law across Britain where five Sharia courts operating with full judicial authority have existed, with the British government’s approval, since 2008. Additional courts are planned for Glasgow and Edinburgh.

October 29–all major news organizations: Anjem Choudary–leader of Islam4UK–wants the London residence of Queen Elizabeth to be transformed into a religious centre and renamed “Buckingham Masjid,” the Arabic word for mosque. He claims to have uncovered secret documents that challenge the 83-year-old monarch’s right to the estate, which has been an official royal residence since 1837.

…Asked if he believes in democracy, he said, “No, I don’t at all.”

“One day, the Sharia will be implemented in Britain. It’s a matter of time.”

In a statement posted on the Islam4UK website, Choudary said: “At present, Buckingham Palace is nothing more than a hollow building exploited by the rich and withheld from any real use.” Under the sharia this would never happen, rather the British community would see it converted into a flourishing mosque which would be of a great benefit, not only for those residing in London but also the country as a whole.”

Choudary is already making plans to renovate Buckingham Palace to install a dome and a loudspeaker system to call followers to prayer. He also plans to use the mansion as a court where Muslim leaders would enforce Islamic sharia law and a detention centre for prisoners of war.

DUBLIN, Ireland (CNN) — At a recent debate over the battle for Islamic ideals in England, a British-born Muslim stood before the crowd and said Prophet Mohammed’s message to nonbelievers is: “I come to slaughter all of you.” “We are the Muslims,” said Omar Brooks, an extremist also known as Abu Izzadeen. “We drink the blood of the enemy, and we can face them anywhere. That is Islam and that is jihad.” …However, another Muslim in the crowd said, “”These people, ladies and gentleman, have a good look at them. They actually believe if you kill women and children, you will go to heaven,” said one young Muslim who waved his finger at the radicals. “This is not ideology. It’s a mental illness.”

http://islamizationwatch.blogspot.com/2009/10/islamic-cleric-calls-for-buckingham.html

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/faith/article4749183.ece

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/1535478/Sharia-law-is-spreading-as-authority-wanes.html

http://www.cnn.com/2007/WORLD/europe/01/17/warwithin.overview/index.html

During my years as a reporter in Vietnam (1959-67) there were plenty of stories about “fragging,” but nothing proved that I knew about. Methods varied: a fragmentation grenade rolled into the tent of a disliked officer, for instance, but also “accidental” wounds during firefights. I’d guess that there were similar incidents during both World Wars, the Civil War and others, but I’ve never read any hard reporting on the subject.

JE comments: Has a comprehensive book ever been written on the topic? One can imagine how difficult it would be to gather any information beyond hearsay.

The Obama administration has announced that it will try the mastermind architect of the September 11 attacks, who also allegedly confessed to personally having brutally murdered journalist Daniel Pearl, and four co-conspirators in an open criminal court in New York City. It is my considered opinion that this is one more mistake of the Obama administration. Though the move will be popular with some European WAISers and also with some Americans who have defended the need to try these terrorists as if they were ordinary criminals, I would like to initiate a thoughtful discussion on the pros and cons of such a move.

Amongst the pros I can see two: 1) that the move will be popular in Europe, where it will be hailed as the “civilized” way to deal with terrorism, and 2) that if the terrorists are convicted, we would have proved to the world that the evidence pointing to their guilt is very strong. But the cons in my opinion far outweigh the pros.

Terrorism, especially foreign-initiated terrorism, is not an ordinary crime. The effects of it are the same as that of ordinary crimes–innocent people get murdered, maimed and injured, and property gets destroyed. But there are enough differences that in my opinion the way to treat it judicially in a proper way is not and should not be the same as the way we treat ordinary criminal cases.

Ordinary criminals are protected by our laws, and properly so, by rules designed to make it very unlikely, though as we well know, even so not impossible, to convict innocent people. Thus all our jurisprudence is geared towards a system in which the burden of proof is on the prosecution, and in which the prosecution is obligated to disclose facts that would point to the possible innocence of the accused, while the defense is not under any such obligation. This is proper because our judicial philosophy is that it is more important to protect the possibly wrongly accused of a crime than to punish a criminal for whom the proof of guilt is not strong enough. Juries are supposed to figure out in our system if the prosecution met the test of having proved guilt beyond reasonable doubt, a very high standard of proof in criminal cases, or proved by a preponderance of the evidence in less important civil cases. Because I agree with this philosophy, I am generally a strong supporter of our judicial procedures as they are.

But should these protections be extended, as now they have been by the Obama administration, to foreign terrorists? This is the key question. If so, why, and if not why not? One reason why I think they should not be extended to terrorists is that law enforcement does not have the same tools available in ordinary criminal cases. Thus the methods of amassing evidence against the accused to prove their guilt in court must be necessarily different. Because the terrorists reside in a foreign country, where we have no jurisdiction, and whose government is often uncooperative with United States law enforcement, many common tools of law enforcement are unavailable. For example, we cannot rely on court-ordered wire taps. Worse, the discovery laws that are in force in our courts, would create the likelihood that the methods by which the evidence was obtained will be disclosed in a public trial. This in turn will make their success in future cases more doubtful, because the enemy, that is the terrorist organizations, will learn how we obtained the evidence, and will hamper our future intelligence operations in foreign lands. They may imperil agents that obtained the evidence, and expose them to assassination. Furthermore the cost of trials is large, while the number of terrorists is also very large. So if every terrorist is accorded the protections of our laws, we will just bankrupt ourselves even if we catch them.

If law enforcement uses methods prohibited by our laws in the gathering of evidence, the accused may go free, even if they are guilty as charged. This protection again is most proper in the case of ordinary criminals, but would be highly inappropriate in the case of terrorists.

All of this points to the need that a separate judicial standard should be imposed on terrorists. The protections against law enforcement need to be weakened, to compensate for the added burden of obtaining evidence in foreign lands, and the standards of proof in court need to be weakened as well. Not eliminated, but weakened. It is still important that the likelihood that we convict a possibly innocent accused terrorist be made small. But the standards of proof need to be less stringent than that for ordinary criminals, the rules of discovery need to be modified, to protect the gathering of intelligence, and so on.

It may be argued that the discovery rules may be interpreted by the rulings of the presiding judge during trial in ways that could eliminate some of the disadvantages enumerated above. But it can be also argued that the disadvantages would be still far better dealt with if the discovery rules themselves were changed to begin with, to make them more adequate to the realities of trying terrorism cases.

We are a sovereign nation. We need not follow something just because it is the popular or the prevalent thought in Europe. They do not ask us about what our opinion is of their judicial procedures, and likewise, we should not be bothered at all if they agree or not with ours.

JE comments: The decision to try the 9-11 suspects in a civilian court in New York City is the biggest news story of the week. It opens up a can of legal worms, as Istvan Simon has pointed out. While I applaud the decision to finally try the suspects (it’s been eight years since the attack), I wonder how an impartial jury can ever be seated. Who in the entire world, much less in New York, isn’t versed on what happened? And what about long-term security for the jurors and their families?

Ernie Hunt (14 November) wrote these lines about God: “We call Him/Her the Lord of history and use that reference in an ultimate way to understand what the Greeks believed, ‘the judgments of God are moral in time.’”

Did the Greeks believe that “the judgments of God are moral in time”? This is quite new to me. Are these words a quotation? Could Ernie be more specific?

Timothy McVeigh was a Christian and a decorated veteran of the United States Army, having served in the first Gulf War, where he was awarded a Bronze Star. He was convicted of bombing the Alfred P. Murrah Building in Oklahoma City on April 19, 1995. The bombing killed 168 people and was the deadliest act of terrorism within the US prior to the September 11, 2001 attacks.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timothy_McVeigh#Religious

Nobody questioned Christianity because of McVeigh’s terrorist act. I feel now that the WAIS Forum is leaning towards Muslim-bashing. There are over a billion Muslims in the world who are not associated with Jihadists. Nidal Malik Hasan was a deranged and lonely man who often visited lap-dancing clubs, but killed innocent friends and colleagues in the name of Allah.

Sura 25, Verse 52 of the Koran states:

“Therefore listen not to the Unbelievers, but strive against them with the utmost strenuousness.”

However there are hundreds of verses in Koran about compassion for humans and animals. I suggest anyone who criticizes Islam in this Forum should first read the Koran. I have no problem with someone pointing out all the shortcomings of a religion, but no one should dismiss it entirely because of a few deranged persons commit terrorist acts while practicing that religion.

Today, there are more Christians than Muslims in the world who kill . A high-minded forum should not embrace prejudice; education teaches us tolerance not hatred for people who do not embrace our ideas and do not worship our God.

JE comments: I do all I can to keep WAIS prejudice-free. Hasan’s act, as Muqtedar Khan pointed out on 12 November, has immeasurably hurt Muslims everywhere.

I believe that all three of the Peoples of the Book: Jew, Christian, and Muslim, worship one God, but how that God is perceived is the issue. We call Him/Her by different names according to our histories and traditions. Yahweh (there are other Jewish references); a personal God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit (omitting the Unitarians); and Allah, but these are all limited because God is much more that our finite conceptions.

For example, some years ago I heard the erudite Dean of Westminster Abbey preach on the Gospel of John in which the text states, “No one comes to the Father but by me,” and he refuted any narrow interpretation of God by saying that the Christian understanding is limited to our concept of His ultimate love, in Christ, but that is not all there is about God.

We can also call Him/Her the Lord of history and use that reference in an ultimate way to understand what the Greeks believed, “the judgments of God are moral in time.”

Theologians wrestle with a proper definition of God but He is beyond us, except for the ways we each know and use to help us in our daily lives and in prayer.

US presidents can no longer be perceived as a couch potatoes. You have to run and hit the gym to be “fit” for office. A good game of hoops makes you even more attractive.

Ed Jajko responds:

En kol hadash tahat ha-shemesh, as Eccleciastes says; there is nothing new under the sun. Rulers have long had to demonstrate their physical fitness. At Saqqarah in Egypt, there is a ritual race course where the pharaoh, after 30 years on the throne, ran the hebsed race almost 5,000 years ago to assert his continuing vigor–dare one say “vigah”–and his right to hold the throne. And on 16 July 1966, Mao Tse-tung took his swim in the Yangtze to demonstrate his own vigor, which may explain his continuing attraction for some.

JE comments: Interesting. Despite today’s ADA-friendly culture in the US, it is doubtful that FDR could make it to the White House in the CNN age. JFK, with his debilitating back pain, probably wouldn’t make it either. (ADA, FDR, CNN, JFK–a lot of acronyms, IMHO!)

The Hasan case is not “fragging” but premeditated murder. There are two penalties: life with no parole or death. Depends on the court.

JE comments: A question for our experts on military law: how many “fragging” incidents have been prosecuted as premeditated murder? Fragging is a crime of opportunity, but unless it results from spur-of-the-moment rage, the perpetrator must wait for the opportunity to occur during the chaos of battle. I would suppose that unless a conspiracy is involved, premeditation would be extremely difficult to prove.

On 13 November, in his response to Tor Guimaraes’s 12 November post, Mike Bonnie stated, “The man (Nidal Hasan) who did the shooting at Fort Hood represents no one but himself; not a rank, race, religion or ethnic background.”

In light of additional facts that are now known, that Mike may not have been aware of when he wrote his post, I wonder if he might reevaluate his statement about race, rank, religion or ethnic background not being part of the equation involved in the attack at Fort Hood?

Last year, Hasan, the Fort Hood killer, sued the US Army for religious discrimination. Today, we know that he wired funds to Muslim extremists groups in Pakistan in the past year. He had no family in Pakistan. We know what that he associated with a mosque in Virginia that was also attended at the same time by several of the 9-11 terrorists. In a public presentation in 2007, he clearly claimed that Muslim suicide bombings were justified and that Sharia law trumped the US Constitution. Even more interesting is the apparent emails between Hasan and a radical Muslim cleric in Yemen who later posted on his own Yemeni website that Hasan was a hero to Muslims everywhere. The American-born killer Hasan described himself as Muslim first, Palestinian second and American last, in that order.

Interestingly, Hasan, carried business cards that identified himself by his name, and underneath that, the abbreviation for Soldier of Allah (SoA), a phrase commonly associated with Muslim extremist groups. The business card makes no mention of his military association or rank. See the link below:

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,574546,00.html

By the way, I called the phone number on the business card and got a message: “This mailbox is full and cannot accept messages, try again later.” I assume that I’m now on some national security watch list. I wonder if AOL has cancelled Hasan’s email account.

Moreover, in the days leading up to the mass murders, Hasan gave away most of his possessions including his furniture. His apartment was virtually empty when investigators arrived after the shooting. Finally, when he began his attack, he jumped up on a desk, and before he began firing with a laser equipped semi-automatic weapon, shouted the phrase, Allahu Akbar, (God is Great), the typical exclamation of most Muslim terrorists and the phrase heard on the airplane black box audio recordings of some of the 9-11 terrorists.

It seems to me that Mike Bonnie has perhaps jumped to the wrong conclusions. It’s apparent that everything about Mr. Hasan’s actions relate to his ethnicity, his race and his religion. Did he act alone? Perhaps.

Personally, I don’t want to see Hasan executed. I would rather that he spend his remaining days at hard labor at Fort Leavenworth, although how much hard labor he can perform as a paraplegic remains to be seen.

http://www.dallasnews.com/sharedcontent/dws/news/texassouthwest/stories/111309dnentcharges.4179b70.html

http://www.dallasnews.com/sharedcontent/dws/news/texassouthwest/stories/111309dntexhooddaily.2b10a33bd.html

http://www.cnn.com/2009/CRIME/11/12/texas.fort.hood.hasan/index.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fort_Hood_shooting

http://atlasshrugs2000.typepad.com/atlas_shrugs/2009/11/major-muslims-calling-card-soa-soldier-of-allah.html

http://directorblue.blogspot.com/2009/11/malik-nadal-hasan-obamas-pet-goat.html

JE comments: The now-famous business card claims that Hasan specializes in “Behavioral Heatlh…Life Skills.” Even leaving the typo aside, this might be the most ironic document of recent memory.

I believe Slavoj Zizek is on to some critical issues. In practice over the years I have reached a few conclusions about capitalism which dovetail with what he is saying. Capitalism can be good or bad depending on what we do with it. Thus any blanket statement that capitalism is evil is as wrong as a blanket statement that we need no market rules and regulations to limit potential abuse. Properly harnessed, capitalist greed can be a wonderful force as an integral part of creating new goods and services which improve people’s lives. Without a doubt, free markets must be constantly protected by all parties. However, in practice free markets are at every opportunity being undermined by capitalists themselves for an unfair advantage and greater profits in the short term. Totalitarianism may provide a great tool for gaining monopoly power if the opportunity arises

A major problem with capitalism in practice stems from its very success.

As corporations grow into huge global companies, their socio/political/economic power grows much larger than the governments of most societies they can manipulate. For example, having these giant global companies making multi billions in profit while families go under financially is not good for anyone in the long run. Presently the Chinese government seems to be striking a reasonable balance between free markets and central control, between capitalism and socialism.

The struggle between capitalists and labor has been going on since Adam and Eve. Since 1945 what kept capitalists from running over labor and the middle class was the Soviet Evil Empire and the threat of Communism looking more appealing than Capitalism. Since Communism has gone to oblivion, Capitalists can now quickly forget their dogmas and really get creative; including using social funds for bailing themselves out of their self-created disasters and refilling their own pockets at taxpayers expenses. The reality is that capitalists with the big money to invest, the controlling power, and the knowledge to position themselves properly, need major dislocations in the markets to really gain great payoffs. That is why periodically we have bubbles and bursts; stable markets are rather boring to most capitalists. The present global financial/economic crisis was not caused by Chinese capitalism but by seasoned American capitalists.

The greed which drives capitalism is an extremely powerful human force. Capitalists don’t have enough wisdom to voluntarily give capital back to the people except as charitable donations. Otherwise, it is a one-way street. Capitalism is like a game, relentless, creative, and difficult to resist. As common people become relatively more ignorant, overworked, stressed out, and complacent, capitalists take over the financial system and the information systems. Once they have these two systems as they do now in the US and most of the world, how long before they have the government? The evidence is clear that they control most of our government. Is there any way to turn this tide back? I doubt it. Just as with any other “ism,” without strong democracy and proper controls, rampant capitalism will accumulate wealth in the hands of the few and to the detriment of the people. Up to now the Chinese government seems to be holding its own managing foreign and indigenous capitalist forces, but for how long? And, what will happen if a powerful totalitarian government becomes driven by capitalist zeal?

In a supposedly democratic nation as the US, what will capitalists do after they own everything? Unfortunately there will be no winners; poorer people will afford less, thus business will spend less and produce less. In turn, government will have lower funding sources, a weaker military, etc. Concepts like free markets, competitiveness, shareholder value are critical for a healthy economy, but are no panacea. Lenin has been proven wrong but, if we capitalists aren’t harnessed by intelligent regulations which promote entrepreneurship and ensure free markets, Karl Marx might eventually be proven right in many ways. In a Marxist country as China, what will happen if the socialist government becomes controlled by capitalist groups?

JE comments: Isn’t the last scenario already the case in China, Inc? WAISer thoughts?

The way market fundamentalists react to the turmoil that ensues when their ideas are implemented is typical of utopian “totalitarians”: they blame the failure on compromise–there is still too much state intervention–and demand an even more radical implementation of market doctrine.

Cameron Sawyer responds:

There is an important difference–totalitarian socialism failed entirely. Market economics have been a very big success which have created a great deal of prosperity over decades and centuries for a very many people. Some convulsions and some failures–some bad years–doesn’t mean that the whole system is a failure. One ought certainly to discern the difference between localized and temporary failure, and systemic and final failure. A failure to make such discernment will lead one to the most horrible mistakes.

And if someone suggests that some particular, local failure of the free market system is due to some deviation from free market principles–why, it might be true. The contrary is not proven by a facile comparison to totalitarian socialism. One must get into the substance of the argument, to know whether it holds any water or not. Speaking as a person who generally advocates more free, rather than less free markets, I would say that these cases are all different. Some failures certainly come from too much regulation, to my mind. Other failures do not.

The biggest difference between market economics and totalitarian socialism is that market economics does not claim to remake human nature, does not claim to perfect mankind, and does not claim to have all the answers to all human problems. And this is an enormous difference. Market economics does not claim (except in a few crackpot versions, not generally accepted) to be perfect. It does not claim to make life better every day for every person in every way. It is not contradicted by compromises, adjustments, and accomodations with other values. It does not cease to work because it is not perfectly implemented. It even worked, in its own very limited way, between the cracks, as it were, in Stalin’s world. And it is certainly working today in the U.S. and Europe, after and despite the financial meltdown of last year. Most people are still working, earning money, feeding their families, and living not too badly.

As to the other point of the author: “What if it shows that democracy, as we understand it, is no longer the condition and engine of economic development, but its obstacle?” I think he is being insincere. He has just said that market economics result in “turmoil” and “failures,” and has accused apologists of market economics for being like Communists–blaming inherent failures on insufficiently perfect implementation. Now he’s talking from a contradictory point of view–he’s asking whether market economics might be such a powerful engine of economic development, but is hindered by democracy, so that it might turn out to be more potently combined with Chinese-style authoritarianism?

I don’t think we have much to worry about. Market economics is nothing but economic freedom. Democracy is nothing but political freedom. They are perhaps not absolutely necessary to each other, but they go hand in hand. Both of them work imperfectly because human beings are imperfect. But they are both civilizing forces, which improve the lives of most people over the long term, at least. Market economics will be a civilizing force in China–wealthier citizens are harder to oppress. Citizens accustomed to econonomic freedom will not tolerate having no political freedom forever.

* Interesting side note–why did the author put quotation marks around the word “totalitarian”? One suspects that the author, a celebrity Marxist-Leninist (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavoj_%C5%BDi%C5%BEek; http://www.britannica.com/bps/additionalcontent/18/28536695/ACTING-UP;http://www.eurozine.com/articles/2008-01-22-clark-en.html), formerly married to a “supermodel and Lacan scholar” Analia Hounie, is not being quite sincere, when he compares capitalism with “totalitarian socialism”–he does not seem to quite accept the “totalitarian” part. Not surprising for someone who wrote a book called Repeating Lenin (http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/ot/zizek1.htm).

Zizek, by the way, is a disciple of the delightful Jacques Lacan. If Lacan didn’t exist, we would have had to invent him. He was a kind of Salvador Dali of philosophy, playing Dali to Derrida’s Picasso, say. His writing is such complete outlandish gibberish, that Lacan himself said famously that he does not write anything so that anyone will understand it. Which did not discourage legions of pious fools like Zizek to devote themselves to the exegesis of those writings.

JE comments: Cameron’s description of Lacan would make card-carrying members of Comp Lit departments cringe! Many a brilliant academic career has been made by explaining and “applying” Lacan. Me? I never found his stuff to be my cup of critical tea–whether this distaste emerges from the imaginary or the symbolic level, I cannot say.

What if it shows that democracy, as we understand it, is no longer the condition and engine of economic development, but its obstacle?

Jordi Molins responds:

The answer is easy: democracy is not the condition and engine of economic development: capitalism is. However, both are intertwined because capitalism and democracy appeared more or less at the same time, in the same places. Probably, this was not a coincidence: capitalism and democracy are non-intuitively positive ideas, and only in a free-thinking environment are they allowed to prosper and flourish.

However, there is even a small negative correlation between democracy and economic growth (but not statistically significant).

But who cares? Democracy is a moral issue (people should be allowed to decide how to govern a country), capitalism is not. Democracy is robust. It could very well be that a very well organized dictatorship is able to accomplish a higher growth for its country than any democracy could. However, this “good” dictatorship would be very unstable: “bad” people would be around power, and they could seize it quite easily, transforming the “good” dictatorship into a “bad” one (the most typical example of dictatorship). Instead, democracy is much more robust: definitely, “bad” people can reach power, but they will ultimately be fired by the people.

Coincidentially, I do not find it surprising that somebody who is anti-capitalist (”The experience of the last few decades has clearly shown that the market is not a benign mechanism that works best when left alone”) has doubts about democracy (”What if it shows that democracy, as we understand it, is no longer the condition and engine of economic development, but its obstacle?”). I don’t.

David Gress (12 November) wrote: “When Muslims hear Allah (who has very little indeed in common with the God Jews and Christians worship) declare himself to be the compassionate, the merciful, it is understood that this refers to compassion and mercy to those who believe, that is, Muslims. It is by submission (islam in the true sense of the word) that men deserve the compassion of the otherwise arbitrary and cruel Allah. All others are excluded from this compassion and mercy. A message diametrically opposed to that of Christianity or, for that matter, Buddhism.”

AdB: Christianity has, of course, nothing to do with Buddhism. David forgets that, during many centuries, Christians theologians and Church authorities repeatedly asserted that killing disbelievers, “heretics” or “infidels” was not murder, but a sacred duty.

I agree that Allah “has very little in common with the God Jews and Christians worship.” But the God that Christians worship is also very different of the God worshipped by Jews.

JE comments: I took the US Foreign Service Exam ten years ago when I was “between jobs.” I remember one of the questions asked whether Judaism, Christianity and Islam worship the same god or different ones. The correct answer was “the same” (I got it right). But when one thinks deeply, the question takes on a metaphysical quality. For those who argue that humans created and continue to create God to serve our sundry needs, the notion that there is but one God for all the “people of the Book” becomes untenable. The exam, which required one to pencil in the correct multiple-choice circle, allowed for no such nuance or reflection.

Did I pass the FS written exam? Yes. The in-person interview? No; but not one of the eight semi-finalists in my group was asked to come aboard. I guess I don’t have the right stuff for diplomacy.

Slavoj Zizek uses Trotsky’s characterisation of Tsarist Russia and asks some uncomfortable questions in an interesting article in the latest London Review of Books. He ends his article with the following:

“In the 1990s, it was believed that humanity had finally found the formula for an optimal socio-economic order. The experience of the last few decades has clearly shown that the market is not a benign mechanism that works best when left alone. It requires violence to create the conditions necessary for it to function. The way market fundamentalists react to the turmoil that ensues when their ideas are implemented is typical of utopian ‘totalitarians’: they blame the failure on compromise–there is still too much state intervention–and demand an even more radical implementation of market doctrine.

“Today we observe the explosion of capitalism in China and ask when it will become a democracy. But what if it never does? What if its authoritarian capitalism isn’t merely a repetition of the process of capitalist accumulation which, in Europe, went on from the 16th to the 18th century, but a sign of what is to come? What if ‘the vicious combination of the Asian knout and the European stock market’ (Trotsky’s characterisation of tsarist Russia) proves economically more efficient than liberal capitalism? What if it shows that democracy, as we understand it, is no longer the condition and engine of economic development, but its obstacle?”

[http://www.lrb.co.uk/v31/n22/slavoj-zizek/post-wall]

Given that recent WAIS discussions have often centred on post-Berlin Wall, democracy, liberal markets, and the rise of Chinese capitalism, perhaps Zizek’s questions might challenge some of the assumptions on which we have been basing our ideas?

JE comments: I’ll leave WAISers for the next several hours with these questions from Zizek–everyone’s favorite Slovenian philosopher. My day job beckons.

I agree with Paul Pitlick. Seymour Hersch was on the NPR radio program Fresh Air on 12 November, and he highlighted some accomplishments of the Obama administration. First, he turned to a more diplomatic approach to all nations, including Israel/Palestine relations with the appointment George Mitchell as special envoy (admittedly, Hillary Clinton threw in a monkey wrench with the most recent accolades for the “slow-down” in settlements, versus a complete stop, leading Abbas to threaten to quit). The Iraq timetable of withdrawal was the direct response to his campaign rhetoric, which GWB eventually joined. Obama’s very reasoned approach to Afghanistan, while frustrating for those who want an immediate solution, shows that he puts principle over politics.

In another NPR segment, the discussion revolved around the “what makes a great President” in the public’s perception. The answer apparently is hope, upward movement, faith in the strength of adversity. Thus the “great” presidents are usually listed as Washington, Lincoln, FDR, Kennedy and Reagan. The latter two did not face great adversity for the nation, but they gave uplifting messages.

By contrast, LBJ and Nixon were cited as curmudgeon-like presidents, both of whom faced large issues and both of whom should be thought of as possibly great. The funniest part of the conversation was that neither exercised (for LBJ, the game of dominoes was his exercise), but also both were afflicted with depressive psyches, at least part of the time.

So, I guess the bottom line is that to be a great president, one has to have crises, a sunny disposition, and a prepensity to work hard on the treadmill in the morning. How uniquely American.

Phyllis (Still an Obama fan)

JE comments: A great observation from Dr. Gardner–US presidents can no longer be perceived as couch potatoes. You have to run and hit the gym to be “fit” for office. A good game of hoops makes you even more attractive.

I share Michael Sullivan’s and others’ anger, frustration, and shock from this great tragedy at Fort Hood.

Mike Bonnie responds:

The man who did the shooting at Fort Hood represents no one but himself; not a rank, race, religion or ethnic background. Perhaps one of our military experts could tell us what the penalty would be for a soldier of any rank “fragging” a superior or fellow soldier while stationed in a combat zone (or anywhere else)?

Wikipedia.org describes “fragging” but does not describe penalties. I feel certain there is a formal protocol for dealing with such incidents. What is it?

“In the US military, fragging refers to the act of attacking a superior officer with a fragmentation grenade. The term originated in the Vietnam War and was most commonly used to mean assassination of an unpopular officer of one’s own fighting unit, often by means of a fragmentation grenade, hence the term. Although the term is derived from the grenade, the act was more commonly committed with firearms during combat in Vietnam. [citation needed]”

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fragging

JE comments: Have any incidents of “fragging” been brought to trial during the latest wars (Afghanistan and Iraq)?