Probability and Petition

Here's a simple, elegant argument in support of CORD's Presidential petition filing:

(1) The Presidential election took place in 290 constituencies.*

(2) Any Kenyan election that occurs in 290 constituencies is likely to have irregularities (there is no need to assume they're maliciously intended).

(3) Relative to the electorate, Uhuru's 50%+1 margin is small (c 8K votes).

(4) Since the margin is small, it's not unlikely that the irregularities will swamp it.


This reasoning is short. It relies on uncontroversial claims.** Its persuasive power doesn't rely on conspiracy theorising; ethnic hatred; attributions of malice; attributions of incompetence; or the stupidity of the audience. Together, 1-4 seem to render the the intended conclusion credible (or worthy of belief).

To repeat. The argument is thoroughly uncontroversial: even the hardest core of Jubilants will buy it, if they hear it in a quiet moment. In these divided times, we can still agree: high probability buys credibility.


*290 actual constituencies.

**Uncontroversial does not mean true. The likely in (2) and (4) has something like the force of statistically probable but I don't think that statistical probability buys credibility (because, lotteries). I'm still happy to commend the argument to you.

Then, as now

Our country today is in a bad state for its land is full of fools---and fools in a country delay the independence of its people.

Kenyatta, speech at the Kenya African Union Meeting in Nyeri, July 26, 1952 (Transcript from the Corfield report*, presumably via the secret policemen who attended the meeting).

*Corfield, Frank D. (1960). The Origins and Growth of Mau Mau: an Historical Survey (Sessional Paper no. 5) Nairobi: Government of Kenya. ISBN 9780521130905.

Listen to the Gentiles

Many years ago, when I wrote about doing economics, one of my principles was “Listen to the Gentiles”, meaning listen to intelligent people, even if they don’t speak your analytical language.

Paul Krugman, The Conscience of A Liberal, 26.VII.2011.

These friendly skies ain't for you, they for me and mine

In 1981, Robert MacNamara, whom you may remember from hits such as the Vietnam War and Fog of War, discussed Kenya's population growth with Moi. In 1982, the World Bank imposed the following conditions on a new loan to the Kenyan government: it was to surrender control of its population policy and budget to a panel whose members, some of them drawn from NGOs, would be appointed only with donor approval; the panel would henceforth set population policy and control the budget. The Ministry of Health advised against it, as well they might.* Moi overruled his own ministry, and did the deal on the terms offered. The World Bank cash was received on the day he signed. The story, complete with footnoted evidence, is at page 349 of Matthew Connelly's Fatal Misconception. The book, if you haven't already heard about it, is the first global history of the population movement. It is this book which explains why aid needs to end.

*Not the first time the Ministry of Health did well in the Moi era. In the early days of the AIDS epidemic, Moi ordered AIDS patients rounded up and quarantined in some sort of camp, Cuba-style. The Ministry of Health simply refused to carry out the order. (Can't remember the page, but see John Iliffe's The African Aids Epidemic: A History.)

New Black Face

Via Typophile, an interesting history of typographic representations of blackness.

The "Neuland Question" to which Jonathan Hoefler refers involves not just Neuland, a "display" typeface hand-carved in 1923 by Rudolf Koch (Plate 1), but also Lithos, another "display" typeface digitally created in 1989 by Carol Twombly (Plate 2). The Question can be put simply: How did these two typefaces come to signify Africans and African-Americans, regardless of how a designer uses them, and regardless of the purpose for which their creators originally intended them? The investigation of this question has four parts: first, an examination of the environments in which Koch and Twombly created the original typefaces; second, an examination of the graphic culture that surrounded African-Americans prior to the creation of Neuland through a close viewing of tobacco ephemera; third, an examination of the Art Deco (French Modern) style, the graphic culture most prevalent in the United States at the time of Neuland's release; and finally, an examination of the ways designers use Neuland and Lithos today.

The rest of the piece -- which first appeared in Letterspace -- is available here.

Pan-Nigerian Alphabet

Robert Bringhurst (2004, 116) says that Hermann Zapf designed a Pan-Nigerian alphabet in 1983, which:

normalizes the mission orthographies that had been used for Hausa, Igbo, Yoruba, Edo, Fulfulde and several other Nigerian languages.

Wikipedia claims that Zapf finalised the alphabet in 1985, and doesn't refer, as Bringurst does, to the help that Zapf is supposed to have had from Victor Manfredi.

Omtatah's omissions

During the PEV, Omtatah argued that violence was justified: indeed, he invoked Jesus in his piece in the Nation, if memory doesn't fail. (I can no longer find the piece online, but I distinctly remember it: it is difficult to forget a defence of ODM's violence -- which at the time included mass murder and ethnic cleansing -- that calls in divine assistance.)

Imagine my surprise, then, at discovering his defence of the view that violently resisting the police is waging war on the state, which, we must assume, is always wrong. This is both silly and false. There's absolutely no reason to think that resisting the police -- even violently resisting the police -- is waging war on the state: if you violently resist the police who are trying to steal (or, these days, kidnap) you, your clear intention then is simply to prevent an injustice, rather than to take the fight to the state itself.

I'm guessing the comeback here would be that one can wage war against the state without intending to wage war against it -- all that's necessary for an attack to count as an act of war against the state is the attacker's intention to violently attack an agent of the state. But that's unpromising because it doesn't distinguish terrorists from angry drivers: the terrorist's intention in attacking a policeman is to overthrow the state, but the driver who attacks the traffic policeman lacks that intention. The acts are the same in the relevant bit -- they both intend to attack some policeman -- which would make them both acts against the state. It's obvious, though, that only the terrorist fits that description.

Moreover, even if one accepts his claim that violently resisting the police is waging war on the state, it simply doesn't follow that that is always unjustified -- there are clearly imaginable circumstances when it would be legitimate to use force against the state or its agents.

It's clear that some Muslims behaved badly during the protest, and those who did ought to face the legal consequences. It's also clear that violence is almost always unjustified, and that it wasn't justified in this case. But, just as was the case during PEV, that doesn't deprive them of the right to protest an injustice or to have their grievances heard.

Dalrymple and Shitting in Churches

Alexander Martin, reviewing Dominic Lieven's Russia Against Napoleon – The Battle for Europe, 1807 to 1814 in the Nov 30th (I think) issue of the Times Literary Supplement claims that French revolutionary soldiers shat in Orthodox churches (presumably in Moscow). I thought that was an interesting counterpoint to Theodore Dalrymple's story, retold, here and elsewhere, a tad too often for my liking, about the Liberian soldiers shitting on a Steinway.