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.
Tuesday, July 26, 2011
Listen to the Gentiles
Thursday, July 07, 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.)
Tuesday, March 29, 2011
New Black Face
Via Typophile, an interesting history of typographic representations of blackness.
The rest of the piece -- which first appeared in Letterspace -- is available here.
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.
Wednesday, January 26, 2011
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.
Tuesday, January 19, 2010
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.
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.
Thursday, December 03, 2009
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.
Moi, Violence and Land
Kaburwo on Jukwaa:
The story: Moi was corrupted with free land, allowed Gikuyu settlement in the Rift; that post-Moi Gikuyu settlement (or Moi's attempt to reverse it) is the cause of the violence.
That's just false. The bulk of the settlements happened before Moi became VP -- the Gikuyu proportion of the Rift Valley's population has remained more or less the same since 1962 -- and the usual story is that he got masses of land after he became VP. But he only became Vice-President in 1967.
It can't be true that the grants of land to Moi caused the presence of Gikuyu which then caused the violence. If it's the grants of land to Moi that are the trigger, they happened long after there were Gikuyu in the Rift Valley, so it's not obvious why it should have been felt necessary to slaughter Gikuyu peasants. If it's the Gikuyu presence that caused the violence, then that preceded Moi, and therefore his appointment and corruption, so it's unclear why it was felt necessary to blame Moi.
(And the claim about land as the trigger for violence is the reddest of red herrings. Much of the violence in the Rift Valley consisted in the eviction of small businessowners, traders, workers and so on. Those aren't people who own land -- or even the premisses from which they work -- it's hard to think of folk who pick tea or flowers on plantations in the Rift Valley as landowners. If the choice of the victims were determined by land ownership, you wouldn't expect them to be attacked. Nonetheless, they were. Land is the least of the Rift Valley's worries.)
This is the thing that will put a final nail on the political coffin on WSR. Without land reforms, Rift Valley has no future and peace is a mirage. By opting out of the constitution debate by ODM, WSR and the gang will be choosing to side with the forces that undermine the pursuit of long-lasting peace in the RVP.
By either voting against or refusing to support the Orengo land reforms, he will be choosing his friends. Those friend, I am afraid, are not the poor peasants of the RVP. He alone knows their identity.
Ruto is walking down a beaten road to historical oblivion. On that road travelled DTM. DTM befriended Kenyatta, rubbished progressive Kalenjin leaders like Jean-Marie Seroney and Taaita Toweet. As a reward he was corrupted with free land. Consequently, having bent backwards Nyakinyua settled in the RVP's most remote regions. Those regions, like Meteitei in Tinderet, were the first ones to bear the brunt of tribal clashes in 1992, Moi's effort to reverse the settlements. The pain and trauma of those clashes live on to this day, Moi is not bothered.
Ruto is siding with Jomo's son, as did Moi with Jomo, in order to defeat the distribution of land. As said elsewhere on this forum: There is too much idle land in the hands of a few, while so many have little land. That imbalance, even if you use the Pareto Principal, is unjustified.
As MKW would say, the die is cast.
The story: Moi was corrupted with free land, allowed Gikuyu settlement in the Rift; that post-Moi Gikuyu settlement (or Moi's attempt to reverse it) is the cause of the violence.
That's just false. The bulk of the settlements happened before Moi became VP -- the Gikuyu proportion of the Rift Valley's population has remained more or less the same since 1962 -- and the usual story is that he got masses of land after he became VP. But he only became Vice-President in 1967.
It can't be true that the grants of land to Moi caused the presence of Gikuyu which then caused the violence. If it's the grants of land to Moi that are the trigger, they happened long after there were Gikuyu in the Rift Valley, so it's not obvious why it should have been felt necessary to slaughter Gikuyu peasants. If it's the Gikuyu presence that caused the violence, then that preceded Moi, and therefore his appointment and corruption, so it's unclear why it was felt necessary to blame Moi.
(And the claim about land as the trigger for violence is the reddest of red herrings. Much of the violence in the Rift Valley consisted in the eviction of small businessowners, traders, workers and so on. Those aren't people who own land -- or even the premisses from which they work -- it's hard to think of folk who pick tea or flowers on plantations in the Rift Valley as landowners. If the choice of the victims were determined by land ownership, you wouldn't expect them to be attacked. Nonetheless, they were. Land is the least of the Rift Valley's worries.)
Liddle on Apologies
Rod Liddle's recent Spectator piece about apologies is shockingly poor: it gets basic facts badly wrong, and the reasoning looks self-refuting.
Blair didn't, as Liddle claims, apologise for (the British role in) the slave trade: he merely expressed regret. This fell short, quite deliberately, of an apology. The Ashanti didn't control the slave trade: the King of Dahomey's the only plausible candidate there is; there is no reasonable sense of the word control in which even he controlled the slave trade.
Further, there's good empirical evidence of slavery's impact on African economic development.
Annoyingly, Britain wasn't the first nation to declare slavery ethically and morally repulsive. It's been known since whenever that slavery is repulsive: defenders of slavery tend to concede its ugliness, then look for reasons it should continue anyway -- Aristotle concedes that slavery is unpleasant; the master is entitled to treat the slave as a living tool, because the slave isn't really human, lacking as he does the reason that's supposed to be a mark of full humanity.
But if Liddle meant to say Britain was the first country to put an end to slavery or the slave trade, that's false: the first major defender of outright abolition was Jean Bodin, a medieval French lawyer; France, Denmark and Portugal abolished the slave trade and slavery before Britain; the Netherlands, unlike the British, paid reparations on emancipation; even the Act abolishing slavery in the British Empire deliberately exempted territories then owned by the British East India Company.
Educationists, Liddle says, now teach that slavery was an invention of the British, and that it began and ended with British involvement with the trade. That's both false and irrelevant. It's also misleading: he's equivocating on the meaning of 'slavery'. It's certainly true that there's involuntary servitude in the countries he mentions; indeed, there's still involuntary servitude in the UK when people are jailed for crimes. But that's nothing to do with the racial chattel slavery once prevalent in the New World. For the first time in recorded history, one race was declared the perpetual property of another race. There's a nice line in David Eltis' The Rise of African Slavery in the Americas which makes the point: during negotiations between the French and British military commands in 1747, they agreed and committed to paper the claim that any black person, anywhere, was a slave, and was to be treated as merchandise if captured. Racial chattel slavery more or less began and ended with New World slavery. (It's interesting that Eltis thinks even Nazi and Soviet war slavery were distinct from New World slavery in this respect.)
Suppose that Britain had been the first nation to declare that slavery was ethically and morally repulsive. That makes no odds for the apology. Worse, it threatens Liddle's other argument: if Brits should now feel proud of their nation's past deeds, with which they had nothing to do, there's no reason why they shouldn't also feel shame at the less-nice bits of their past -- and no reason why they shouldn't apologise.
The only reason he supplies for not apologising is that one can apologise only for what one has done (as an individual) -- so, presumably, only slave-holders and slave-drivers can apologise for the slave trade. But that's inconsistent: if one can apologise only for what one has done, slave-holders can apologize only for and to those they enslaved, not for the trade itself. And in any case, the view is just false. Individual people can and do represent groups: the Queen represents the nation; the Prime Minister the state (and sometimes the nation); the MP his constituents. When the PM acts in his capacity as PM, those acts are the acts of the nation: when he commits troops to war, it's the nation at war, not the PM. The nation isn't limited to those people alive at the time of the act: this is the same nation that abolished slavery, as he concedes. This is also the nation that fought in the second world war, which is why repayment of the American war loan continued into 2006, when almost all those alive when the loan was granted were dead, and when most of those whose taxes paid for the latter instalments were born long after the loan was taken out. Nations, through their representatives, can and do act freely, seeing as they choose between alternatives. If they can act freely, they can be held responsible when they act wrongly; they can also begin to discharge that responsibility by recognizing their wrongdoing. In apologising, Gordon Brown is speaking for the nation (and the state) which did these terrible things; he's acknowledging the harm they did; as the properly-empowered representative of the nation, he has the power to do so.
One might almost say that Liddle owes his readers an apology.
Blair didn't, as Liddle claims, apologise for (the British role in) the slave trade: he merely expressed regret. This fell short, quite deliberately, of an apology. The Ashanti didn't control the slave trade: the King of Dahomey's the only plausible candidate there is; there is no reasonable sense of the word control in which even he controlled the slave trade.
Further, there's good empirical evidence of slavery's impact on African economic development.
Annoyingly, Britain wasn't the first nation to declare slavery ethically and morally repulsive. It's been known since whenever that slavery is repulsive: defenders of slavery tend to concede its ugliness, then look for reasons it should continue anyway -- Aristotle concedes that slavery is unpleasant; the master is entitled to treat the slave as a living tool, because the slave isn't really human, lacking as he does the reason that's supposed to be a mark of full humanity.
But if Liddle meant to say Britain was the first country to put an end to slavery or the slave trade, that's false: the first major defender of outright abolition was Jean Bodin, a medieval French lawyer; France, Denmark and Portugal abolished the slave trade and slavery before Britain; the Netherlands, unlike the British, paid reparations on emancipation; even the Act abolishing slavery in the British Empire deliberately exempted territories then owned by the British East India Company.
Educationists, Liddle says, now teach that slavery was an invention of the British, and that it began and ended with British involvement with the trade. That's both false and irrelevant. It's also misleading: he's equivocating on the meaning of 'slavery'. It's certainly true that there's involuntary servitude in the countries he mentions; indeed, there's still involuntary servitude in the UK when people are jailed for crimes. But that's nothing to do with the racial chattel slavery once prevalent in the New World. For the first time in recorded history, one race was declared the perpetual property of another race. There's a nice line in David Eltis' The Rise of African Slavery in the Americas which makes the point: during negotiations between the French and British military commands in 1747, they agreed and committed to paper the claim that any black person, anywhere, was a slave, and was to be treated as merchandise if captured. Racial chattel slavery more or less began and ended with New World slavery. (It's interesting that Eltis thinks even Nazi and Soviet war slavery were distinct from New World slavery in this respect.)
Suppose that Britain had been the first nation to declare that slavery was ethically and morally repulsive. That makes no odds for the apology. Worse, it threatens Liddle's other argument: if Brits should now feel proud of their nation's past deeds, with which they had nothing to do, there's no reason why they shouldn't also feel shame at the less-nice bits of their past -- and no reason why they shouldn't apologise.
The only reason he supplies for not apologising is that one can apologise only for what one has done (as an individual) -- so, presumably, only slave-holders and slave-drivers can apologise for the slave trade. But that's inconsistent: if one can apologise only for what one has done, slave-holders can apologize only for and to those they enslaved, not for the trade itself. And in any case, the view is just false. Individual people can and do represent groups: the Queen represents the nation; the Prime Minister the state (and sometimes the nation); the MP his constituents. When the PM acts in his capacity as PM, those acts are the acts of the nation: when he commits troops to war, it's the nation at war, not the PM. The nation isn't limited to those people alive at the time of the act: this is the same nation that abolished slavery, as he concedes. This is also the nation that fought in the second world war, which is why repayment of the American war loan continued into 2006, when almost all those alive when the loan was granted were dead, and when most of those whose taxes paid for the latter instalments were born long after the loan was taken out. Nations, through their representatives, can and do act freely, seeing as they choose between alternatives. If they can act freely, they can be held responsible when they act wrongly; they can also begin to discharge that responsibility by recognizing their wrongdoing. In apologising, Gordon Brown is speaking for the nation (and the state) which did these terrible things; he's acknowledging the harm they did; as the properly-empowered representative of the nation, he has the power to do so.
One might almost say that Liddle owes his readers an apology.
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