do as I say…?

I generally like Bono, and think that he makes many persuasive arguments when it comes to third-world indebtedness. Interestingly though, while advocating more tax money go to relieve poverty, U2 has [relocated](http://www.slate.com/id/2152580/?nav=tap3) part of its business to avoid Irish taxes. Generally I don’t see a problem with legally avoiding taxes, but in light of Bono’s activism it seems like hypocrisy to me. From the article:

>[Bono said] “Holding children to ransom for the debts of their grandparents … that’s a justice issue. Withholding life-saving medicines out of deference to the Office of Patents … that’s a justice issue.”

>And relocating your business offshore in order to avoid paying taxes to the Republic of Ireland, where poverty is [higher than in almost any other developed nation](http://www.atlanticphilanthropies.org/youth/republic_of_ireland)?

Bono’s hypocrisy seems even more naked when you consider that Ireland is a tax haven for artists. What U2 should do to be morally consistent is announce that they are taking all the money saved in taxes and spending it directly on aid to Africa. Doesn’t help Ireland too much, but it’s ones right to have priorities… (and right now the priority of self is painfully apparent).

Hat tip to [Instapundit](http://instapundit.com/archives/033713.php).

State-building or nation-building?

Via [instapundit](http://www.instapundit.com) I read this fascinating article on [state-building vs. nation-building](http://www.tcsdaily.com/article.aspx?id=110106B). Two things stand out to me in particular. One, I find it fascination how much time that MacArthur spent planning for the occupation of Japan – contrast that with the seeming non-planning in occupying Iraq. Also, the idea of codifying existing informal rule-sets to establish a national identity seems quite reasonable. I’m not sure how this would stand up in the real-world, though, with people bent on destroying things just for the sake of destroying them.

Perhaps the answer is one of momentum. The faster a national identity is established, and the more people that buy into it, the more positive momentum is established. When national identity is vague or diminished, group affiliation is preeminent, and there’s a tacit approval of the violence. Tit-for-tat becomes reasonable when no other options look very good.

Is the balance beginning to shift?

I’ve heard and read so many different opinions on the North Korea problem in the last week. I think it’s really less complicated than many realize. China and South Korea are scared to death of several million refugees pouring across the border and wrecking their economies if Kim’s regime falls. I’ve believed this for a while, as it explains the behavior of both quite nicely.

The recent nuclear test (failed perhaps) may have changed the calculus for China. [This article](http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,20867,20587473-2703,00.html) from an Australian newspaper suggests the tide may be turning, and the economic/refugee problem is shrinking in China’s ‘mind’ relative to the political/stability problem. China has shown that they like stability above all else (human rights, religious freedom, etc…), and Kim’s not high on the ’stable’ list right now.

Tom Tancredo wants to be Bob Fowler

Congressman Tom Tancredo, a Republican from Littleton, CO, recently said that [he thinks bombing Islamic holy sites](http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,162795,00.html) would be a good response to a nuclear terrorist attack by Muslim fundamentalists. And though he didn’t say it in as many words, he clearly implied that he thought nuking Mecca would be a good idea.

Tancredo’s been in other news lately, as he’s been [mulling a run](http://www.boston.com/news/local/new_hampshire/articles/2005/06/12/tancredo_immigration_reform_may_push_him_into_presidential_race/) for president. I first head about his comments on the Hugh Hewitt radio show yesterday (he also is covering the the Tancredo comments on [his blog](http://hughhewitt.com/#postid1815)). I thought they sounded familiar, but I wasn’t sure why. Then, as I was going to sleep last night it hit me. This exact scenario is straight out of Tom Clancy’s 1991 novel, *The Sum of All Fears*. And Clancy deals with it in the sensible way, as usual for him.

The scenario is that Palestinian terrorists have set off a nuclear bomb at the Super Bowl and it’s pushed the world the brink of nuclear war. After being convinced it’s not the Russians, President Fowler decides to bomb Qom, the holy city in Iran, because the Ayatollah there may have been connected in some way. Jack Ryan, the protagonist in the book, convinces everyone that this is a really bad idea, and President Fowler is relieved of duty by his subordinates as unfit for command.

If Tancredo really believes this, I think that he is completely disconnected from reality. But it’s actually disturbing even if it was just an off-the-cuff remark. “Out of the abundance of the heart the mouth speaks”. It is a sign of an emotional response that lacks critical thinking. To me it shades his judgement on other issues, especially his focus on illegal immigration. How much of his railing against illegal immigrants is this same time of emotional response?

A Better Tribute to John Paul II

Nicholas Kristof in the April 6 edition of the [New York Times](http://www.nytimes.com) discusses the ongoing genocide in Darfur and [relates](http://www.nytimes.com/2005/04/06/opinion/06kristof.html?hp) it to the massive outpouring of emotion for John Paul II. He suggests that it is hypocritical of us to stage and support a massive funeral/spectacle for a Pope who stood boldly in the face of evil, while we continue to do nothing to stop the Darfur killings.

I wholeheartedly agree with this concept. I think that it would be fantastic if President Bush, Tony Blair, and other leaders of the democratic world used the venue of the Pope’s funeral to announce a multilateral, comprehensive agreement to act swiftly and aggressively against genocide anywhere in the world. What greater example of morality is there than to defend the poor, weak, and powerless?

The situation is not getting better. Kristof notes that the latest atrocity is that young girls and women who have been raped and impregnated by soldiers and roaming militia are being imprisoned for immorality. I feel physically sick reading this account from a 16 year old girl (via Doctors Without Borders):

>”When I was eight months pregnant from the rape, the police came to my hut and forced me with their guns to go to the police station. They asked me questions, so I told them that I had been raped. They told me that as I was not married, I will deliver this baby illegally.

>”They beat me with a whip on the chest and back and put me in jail.”

What madness is this? We have the means to act, so we must.

Kristof also points to the [Darfur Accoutability Act of 2005](http://corzine.senate.gov/priorities/darfuraccountabilityact.pdf) (and [here](http://www.rocketblog.net/media/DAact2005.pdf)) and urges people to contact their senators and representatives and press for passage of the bill. [Save Darfur](http://www.savedarfur.org) has a mechanism that lets you email all your representatives and the President at the same time.

Academic diversity??

A friend of mine sent me an [article](http://www.nytimes.com/2005/04/05/opinion/05krugman.html?ex=1113364800&en=308b64641f4c3ed4&ei=5070) by Paul Krugman today. I honestly find Krugman obnoxious most of the time, and this article is not any different. His basic premise is that the lack of diversity in academia is a result of self-selection. The people who are really smart are the ones in academia and they aren’t conservatives or religious. And the conservative who want in are a band of Bible-thumping neanderthals.

Needless to say, there’s another viewpoint. Jonah Goldberg disassembles the argument [here](http://www.nationalreview.com/goldberg/goldberg200504051438.asp). Stanley Kurtz in [the Corner](nationalreview.com/thecorner/corner.asp) has [more](http://www.nationalreview.com/thecorner/05_04_03_corner-archive.asp#059974) to add.

It seems that there are a couple of different things going on. Based on the numbers, there is a huge disparity between liberals in English vs. Engineering for example (88% vs. 51%). So it seems reasonable to me that there is a liberal bias at work in the fuzzy subjects, and self-selection in the harder sciences. Goldberg gives [this](http://noleftturns.ashbrook.org/default.asp?archiveID=6437) anecdote, which based on my own experience living on campus at Stanford for six years and counting, is not surprising at all. The end says it all:

>Suffice it to say that at one point I was imprudent enough to let on to a young woman that I had voted for George W. Bush. “And yet you write books,” she responded.

The self-selection seems much more likely to be of the money or normal-life variety than the anti-religious-nut variety. Being a graduate student, I have many friend who have finished or are finishing a Ph.D. Especially in the Bay Area, it’s difficult to have a ‘normal’ family life on the starting salaries for many science positions. You have to give something up, and I’d suggest that conservatives more than liberals value a normal family life over a life of academics. This of course is not universally true, but it may be true enough to have a measurable effect.

UPDATE: More on Tech Central Station [here](http://www.techcentralstation.com/040605B.html) specifically dealing more with the hypocrisy of the argument that Republicans are anti-science, and a personal anecdote of left-wing bias in the academy.

Great essay on gay marriage

[Jane Galt](http://www.janegalt.net) has a fantastic [essay](http://www.janegalt.net/blog/archives/005244.html) on the issue of ‘gay marriage’, and conservatism in general. It’s really long, but well worth the read. Her basic premise is that we all should be more careful in making arguments from personal experience. The basic problem she lays out is that people making arguments may not represent the marginal case – meaning the case where a change is most likely to occur. She discusses three examples:

* The income tax

* Extending welfare to out-of-wedlock women and children

* Relaxing of divorce laws and no-fault divorce

In each of these cases, the ultimate consequences were laughed at by those presenting the reforms (out of good intentions) and underestimated by those opposing the reform. And in all cases the ultimate consequence was much more extreme than anyone guessed.

She claims that we don’t know who the marginal case is, and as a result we should be careful. I would push the argument one step further and say that the people who are making the argument in the public realm are almost certainly *not* the marginal case. Because in many, if not nearly all, policy debates, the people doing the debating are relatively well-adjusted, successful people. It’s self-selecting in many ways. Self-selecting away from being representative of the marginal case. You don’t get to a position of debating something where people actually pay attention to you without some measure of stability and success in your life. So it’s even more of an imperative in debating major shifts in some social/cultural aspect of life that we look well beyond what we think is ‘obviously true’.

She claims agnosticism on the issue of gay marriage because she doesn’t know if it will weaken or strengthen the institution. I respect that, but I would say that the argument she lays out calls for much more restraint and humility than we see in the gay-marriage lobby right now.

Terrible Reporting by CNN

The Zimbabwe elections are nearly counted, and Mugabe has gotten his [2/3 majority in the parliament](http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/n/a/2005/04/02/international/i143322S46.DTL), so he can change Zimbabwe’s constitution however he likes. I am completely stunned at the way [CNN](http://www.cnn,com) is [reporting this](http://www.cnn.com/2005/WORLD/africa/04/02/zimbabwe.earlyresults/index.html). Their headline, as of 3:35 pacific time, is “Mugabe wins big change mandate”. There is no indication in the first 10(!) paragraphs of the story that the election is widely derided as utterly corrupt and rigged by most everyone in the world (see the AP story I linked to in the first line). In fact, this is what their reporter is quoted as saying:

>”Some observers have said they found irregularities on election day — like the electoral centers being based in people’s homes, in chiefs’ homes rather than in neutral places like schools or fields,” said CNN’s Jeff Koinange.

>”But in terms of the counting itself, so far there have been no complaints.”

It makes it sound like it’s Florida!! This is just ridiculous.

For much better reporting, I’ve been following [Publius Pundit](http://www.publiuspundit.com) who keeps up on democratic movements all over the place. His [latest Zimbabwe post](http://www.publiuspundit.com/?p=801) gives so much more information on what is going on there compared to CNN. I am disappointed, but not surprised, to see this kind of reporting from one of the main outlets of the MSM.

What does baffle me is the ‘why?’. What’s the point of this kind of reporting? Is it to make us feel better that we are doing nothing? That doesn’t seem to make a whole lot of sense to me. There are two reasons that do make sense. One is simple laziness. Just bad reporting. If that’s the case, they should just run with the AP reports on this. The other, more conspirational, theory is that they are playing an Eason Jordan Iraq-like game, where they don’t want to get kicked out of the country, so the soft-ball reports. Zimbabweans speak English, so I’m sure those that have internet access look at CNN occasionally. I don’t have any proof of this, but CNN’s track record begs for this kind of speculation.

UN Darfur ICC Resolution – Good or Bad?

The [UN passed](http://www.iht.com/articles/2005/04/01/news/sudan.html) a resolution last night to prosecute war criminals in the Sudan/Darfur region through the International Criminal Court. This is seen by people as a good thing, including the [faction](http://www.sudantribune.com/article.php3?id_article=8824) that represents the people getting killed, and people who seem like they should [know](http://www.democracyarsenal.org/2005/03/long_arm_of_the.html).

What I’m curious about, though, is how much furor has been whipped up to litigate the *after-effects* of the genocide. How’s this any different from Rwanda? We prosecuted the criminals there, too. But it didn’t save any lives. The same is true of the Nuremberg trials as well. Except in both cases there was first a military action to *stop the genocide* that preceded the prosecution. Here, the Sudanese government has [rejected](http://edition.cnn.com/2005/WORLD/africa/04/01/sudan.resolution.reut/) the resolution. Who or what is going to stop the killing and arrest the people responsible? Especially when some of them are still running the country.

I found an [article](http://www.foreignpolicy.com/story/files/story2777.php) that discusses this as well. The author, David Bosco, makes the argument that throwing the issue into the realm of legal prosecution may actually provide a convenient cover for the U.S. government, and others, to pretend like everything is being taken care of:

>But judicial intervention may not be the wisest course—at least not yet. Those clamoring for the ICC to take the lead want to establish the precedent that atrocities will be punished. Instead, they may be handing cautious politicians an excuse for continued inaction while unnecessarily dividing the United States and Europe.

I think that this is a very important point, and that we need to keep pressing our government for some sort of tangible action to change the facts on the ground over there.

Million Voices

The [Bull Moose](http://www.bullmooseblog.com) blog asks if bloggers can [stop the genocide](http://www.bullmooseblog.com/2005/03/blog-for-life.html) in Darfur. I think that it’s worth a try! We need to raise awareness-no we need to scream from the top of a mountain about what is going on.

Wyclef Jean’s theme song for *Hotel Rwanda* is called “Million Voices”:

>They say a man is judged according to his works, so tell me Africa what you’re worth.

A million voices were silenced in Rwanda by genocide. Can a million voices stop a genocide?

Write the president and your congressmen [here](http://www.savedarfur.org). [This](http://www.rocketblog.net/?p=9) is the letter that I wrote.