P&S's Parizeau moment

Matthew Shugart wisely corrects me for saying that Israel has zero sympathy in "Quebec". It is an exaggeration however you slice it, but I clearly was not thinking of English-speaking Montreal, which, as MSS points out, is still one of the great Jewish cities of the world. Despite its decline. Which was not, it must be said, an accidental decline.

There is a very tricky ambiguity in the idea of Quebec, and even more, of the Québécois. Its manifest meaning is resident of the province of Quebec, and yet we all know that its latent meaning is what was once called a French Canadian (although it clearly excludes an Acadian or Franco-Ontarian). One idea behind the change in terminology is that it would be more appealingly liberal to define nationalism on the basis of a territory than of a people, but, as Parizeau blurted out, and everyone knows anyway, there are Québécois and then there are Québécois. The result is paradoxically less liberal. Before, anyone could be Québécois, although not canadien. Now, everyone is Québécois at the manifest level, but not everyone is at the latent level.

The Pithlord appears not to have negotiated this ambiguity any better than Parizeau. By the definition civilized civic nationalists are comfortable with, there are, of course, many Québécois passionately supportive of Israel. By the definition that lurks beneath, not so much.

For a while, Harper did have a plan of making a breakthrough in English Québec only (which would itself be a change, since there have been no loyaller Grits). The last election showed that the old blue coalition was -- at least potentially -- within his grasp. It may still be, or it may not, but it would be quite a retreat to return to the earlier vision.

Part of me wants to apologize for the gaffe. That's the better part, so I do. But Michael Kinsley's not just right about politicians. The gaffe reveals something about how we think in this country, something a bit uncomfortable.

Update: The literatus writes to point out that I can't really pontificate on this subject without reading Mordecai Richler, and asks if I have. As a father of an eight year old, I've read 3 of the Jacob Two Two books, and a fair bit of op-edish ephemera, but that's it. Discount accordingly.

Vomit-Inducing

It's easy to make fun of the Trudeau clan. Easy and fun:

when Michel was around 8 years old, I remember him complaining to my mother that my older brother and I both had more friends than he did. My mother told him that, unlike us, he had the greatest friend of all: he had Fidel.

So writes Sacha of the dying communist dictator. Readers of the Toronto Star are treated to an exercise in a dying prose form, the over-the-top sycophantic tribute to a Stalinist thug. Castro, like Ceaucescu and Kim Il Sung before him, is a "superman", a "monumental intellect" and "an expert on everything."

Pith & Substance declares a winner. Sacha has wrested the title of most-embarrassing-Trudeau from his aging mother and the dim Justin.

Three Words Bob Rae Needs to Say

"Canada's National Interest"

We seem to have two parties of elite opinion in this country. One would have us fight and die for some romantic union of Chosen Peoples - Anglo Saxons and Jews against everybody else. The most rational proponents of this view think they will always enjoy technological superiority. The less rational have read Revelations backwards.

The second party would have us fight and die for universal human rights and reduced carbon gas emissions. We will defeat those who seek to harm us through a special ninja army of earnestness. That will be tres useful in Darfur or whatever other African conflict the do-gooders take interest in (although not enough interest to actually learn anything about it or propose realistic scenarios for what we could do).

I can't support Ignatieff because he seems to combine the worst of both tendencies.

Rae could mark some new ground just by looking at things through the lens of Canadian interest. I suspect there is a lot of hunger for this approach out among the people, who are not really enamored of either George Bush or Kofi Annan.

The trouble is that it goes against Rae's basic instincts. He doesn't like particularistic appeals. The result is that when he opposes Harper/Ignatieff's vision, he comes across sounding like a Grateful Dead groupie.

It's time to ask, "What's in it for us?"

Make Flamewar, Not Nuke War

According to the Financial Times, the Holocaust-denying, ambassador-kidnapping populist President of Iran, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, has started blogging here. English, French, Arabic and Farsi versions are available.

Ahmadinejad definitely needs to work on a pithier prose style. On the other hand, he gets points for not just linking to Sheikh Nasrallah's "classic takedown of the colonialist Zionist entity and its imperialist backers," and commenting "Indeed," "Ouch" or "Heh."

Harper and the Middle East Crisis

Even if today's ceasefire holds, warfare isn't over. Hopefully, some of the world's attention will turn to Gaza and the humanitarian nightmare unfolding there.

But I'm going to use the occasion to comment on Harper and the weaknesses these events have exposed in the Conservative game plan to become a majority government.

A few caveats are in order. Foreign policy is rarely a highly salient issue in Canadian politics. With the economy humming along and the deficit conquered, the Conservatives find themselves on the right side of the remaining domestic issues - crime and kids. They could screw up crime by getting too heavy handed on the drug war. They probably aren't going to come out of another vote on same-sex marriage looking good (I predict SSM is safe in this Parliament). But domestic issues look like winners for them. And domestic issues determine most federal elections.

But a superficial glance at Canadian history shows that foreign affairs - really our relations with Britain and the US - have swung a substantial minority of elections. The Conservatives seem to have backed off on the moribund softwood deal as the basis for an election - wisely, if I'm right that they don't want to fight a referendum on how close we should be to George Bush.

The war on Lebanon showed Harper at his infuriating worst (and I have a soft spot for the man). It wasn't just the position he took, or the fact that it was at odds with his deemphasis of support for the Iraq war in the last election. It was the arrogance of the way he expressed it. It was the overt politicization of external ethnic loyalties (a taboo in Canada since it is a recipe for importing the world's conflicts).

I don't imagine it will make a big difference in English Canada. It plays to one of his weaknesses - the feeling that his loyalties are not with Canada, but with a deracinated and militant neoconservative ideology. But he probably doesn't need the votes of George Grant conservatives. Still, even in English Canada, the Tories need to realize that stealing from the Republican playbook doesn't work when knee-jerk nationalism cuts against you.

But the bigger deal is that this might - I'm not making any firm predictions yet - sour Quebec on reviving the old blue coalition. There is zero sympathy for Israel in Quebec and some cultural ties to Lebanon. Again, people can live with some disagreement, but the arrogance with which Harper has expressed Canada's position on this isn't going to go over well.

Everytime it has been put together, the coalition between Anglo conservatives and Quebec nationalists against the federal government has fallen apart. With the exception of the most recent breakdown on whether to recognize Quebec symbolically in the Constitution, all the previous ones were over our foreign loyalties. Will it happen again?

Seymour Hersh: US Gave the Green Light

Seymour Hersh has a new article providing the not-too-surprising information that the Bush administration pre-authorized Israel's attack on Lebanon.

I may comment more in an update, but I've got something on the boil.

Update while simmering The key passage is the following:

Israel believed that, by targeting Lebanon’s infrastructure, including highways, fuel depots, and even the civilian runways at the main Beirut airport, it could persuade Lebanon’s large Christian and Sunni populations to turn against Hezbollah, according to the former senior intelligence official.

In other words, Israel's plan, approved by the Bushies long before the July 12 kidnappings, was to terrorise the non-Shi'ite population of Lebanon in the hope that this would reignite civil war.

As anyone paying attention could tell, this was not about striking at Hezbollah military capacity and accidentally hitting some bystanders. The bystanders were the target.

Viewed through racist assumptions about Arabs, the idea was that they would react to this punishment by their betters by being docile and doing what Israel and the US wanted. On the more reasonable assumption that Arabs react to being bombed like Israelis or Americans and other humans do, it would have the opposite effect, uniting the Lebanese population.

Well, the experiment has been done. Olmert will try to get what face saving he can before the ceasefire takes effect tomorrow. But no one really thinks Israel has advanced its strategic objectives. And America owes France big time.

Supid and immoral. Stupid and immoral. I'm ashamed at my country's complicity, a complicity only mitigated by the fact that we were never important enough to be given advance notice.

You Can Learn Something From a Paleocon

That was the biggest revelation to me as a result of this whole Iraq war business. The crazed Buchananite nationalists turned out to be more sensible than the people I though of as the reasonable wing of the right. If you don't believe me, you should go read Daniel Larison. If x were to represent how reactionary you were, and you were to take the limit of x as it approaches an arbitrarily large number, you couldn't be as reactionary as Larison. But he's got a whole bunch of good stuff up lately.

Update: This post got me a link on Mr. Larison's blogroll. I'm excited, of course, but I have to warn any Jacobites who show up that we at Pith & Substance aren't going to compromise our firm belief that erecting a Court of Commissioners for Ecclesiastical Causes, and all other commissions and courts of like nature are illegal and pernicious, just for a higher hit count!

Liberal Imperialism: The Flaw

The permanent question raised by the Iraq war is whether and when liberal imperialism is justified. After all, the war proponents were right that Ba'ath Iraq was an unimaginably brutal tyranny. Imagine Ontario run by Bernardo and Homolka. The realist and security-based argument for invading Iraq was always, to my mind, transparently weak. Once the inspectors were in there, and finding nothing, it was without any conceivable merit. But I couldn't dismiss the case for externally imposed armed liberation so easily.

Will Wilkinson has an interesting post in which he spells out the dilemma. Liberalism is rare in the world. It is also a good thing, at least in comparison to the nihilistic tyrannies that seem to be the alternative nowadays.

We cannot be certain how much of this is because of deep-rooted cultural factors, which are resistant to external change, and how much is due to the illiberal countries not obtaining a threshold of widespread non-resource-based wealth. I find both hypotheses plausible, and as a good Anglican (OK, a bad Anglican) imagine the truth is somewhere in the middle.

Wilkinson's dilemma can be stated as follows: to the extent that illiberalism is deep-rooted culturally, external military force will be ineffective at bringing about liberalism; conversely, to the extent illiberalism is the result of a lack of (the right sort) of development, external military force is unnecessary (and, because necessarily internally-generated-wealth-destroying, counter-productive) to bringing about liberalism. Either way, imperial liberalism doesn't work.

If imperial liberalism was prepared to be strictly Singapore-style or Raj-style authoritarian, and internally-generated liberalism was the product of economic development, then this argument might not work. The imperial power wouldn't allow elections, but would guarantee incorruptible justice and free markets.

The difficulty is that nationalist and democratic aspirations of the conquered people would necessarily manifest themselves in armed resistance to the imperial liberal regime. This would have to be met with illiberal force. The occupying army would have trouble distinguishing between resisting and non-resisting members of the conquered people, and, let's face it, would have no motivation to do so. Frankly, the distinction would be dubious -- there might be some who would collaborate with the occupation for personal advantage, but no one is ever going to side with occupiers because they are liberal. As E.O. Wilson, expert on ants, said about communism, "Good theory -- wrong species."

So, in the end, liberal imperialism is never going to work. It is especially not going to work when the members of the imperial army have a recent tribal grievance against the people they are occupying.

It is still possible that economic development will ultimately make the Middle East a more liberal place. It is also possible that nothing will ever do that. But what is never going to happen is that liberalism will come as a present of the US Marine Corps.

Are Yellow Stars taken?

Reason magazine reports on a Gallup poll indicating that 39% of Americans favour requiring Muslims to wear "special ID."

If we are going to "stand with our allies", don't they need to be allies?

Straussian political theorist Clifford Orwin takes to the national newspaper's op ed pages to argue that we should reject the role of "honest broker" and stand with our allies, Israel and the US, war crimes or no.

One problem with this line of thinking is that Israel is not our ally. We have no treaty of alliance with it. Israel has always rejected any security guarantees that could compromise its freedom of action. What is being proposed is not an alliance, but a blank cheque.

Canada and the US are signatories to the North Atlantic Treaty. Of course, so is France, and we are not invited to think of it as an ally to whose judgment in foreign affairs we must always defer. Also Article 5 restricts the alliance to defensive purposes and confines its geographic scope to Europe and North America. This was at the insistence of the Truman Administration, which did not want to defend the European colonial empires. Fair enough... The North Atlantic Treaty also incorporates the principles of the UN Charter, which the Orwins of the world regard as anathema.

NORAD is confined to the air defence of the North American continent.

What is being asked for is not a clear-headed alliance based on mutual interest. What is being asked for is one-sided loyalty, the "Ready, Aye, Ready" attitude that Canadians buried in the Somme along with half a generation.

Vive la France

Looks like France bailed the US and Israel out of a tricky situation.

I hope that Lebanon's politicians can do something with the newfound unity in their country to build the capacity of their state, although I wouldn't count on it. I wish the new UNFIL the best of luck.

Much to worry about -- but for now, it is a triumph of French diplomacy. After all the bullshit in the last five years, the White House had to admit that it needed the Elysée.

Update: Child blogger Matthew Yglesias has earned the right to gloat. He's like, fifteen, and he outstrategized the Israeli cabinet. (I also sympathize with his hastily retracted proposal to eugenically sterilize Mel Gibson, although I have to admit that the doubts about the continuing authority of Buck v. Bell and the non-existence of a "poetic justice" exception to the Fourteenth Amendment might render this constitutionally problematic.

Why give costs in any event of the cause to successful SCC leave applicants?

Canadian costs law generally exists to discourage people from bringing unsuccessful litigation, and, to a lesser degree, to discourage defendants from contesting successful cases. The basic rule therefore is that "costs follow the event" -- if you win, you get costs. Most provinces have additional rules that let people make formal offers to settle which, if they beat, they get their costs when they otherwise wouldn't, or, in the case of plaintiffs, they get extra costs.

Pre-trial applications generally follow a rule where costs go to the successful party "in the cause". In other words, to get your costs of a pre-trial application, you generally have to win both the application and the underlying law suit.

Oddly, though, the Supreme Court of Canada seems to like to give the costs of leave applications (equivalent of certiorari in the SCOTUS) to the successful appellant "in any event of the cause." That means even if they lose the ultimate appeal, the other side has to pay them for (some) of the legal cost of arguing the leave application (which is now done solely in writing).Two successful leave applicants got their costs that way yesterday.

This seems a bit perverse. A leave applicant lost in the Court of Appeal. If they also lose in the SCC, then they are 0-2 in appellate courts. At least half also lost in the trial court. So why do they get some of the costs that were necessitated by bringing the legal process to bear?

The SCC almost never gives reasons for leave decisions (which makes sense), so we don't know what the thinking is. Any former insiders are invited to post anonymously. Uninformed speculation is invited as well.

How many Canuck Creationists?

Science has a chart showing the results of a survey of belief in evolution in 34 countries. The US is second only to Turkey in creationists. What's worse is that creationists are more common now than in 1985. Currently, only 40% of Americans believe human beings descended from an earlier species of animal.This CBS poll gets the same total result for descent from another species (only 17 per cent of Americans thought evolution occurred without divine help).

Unfortunately, this survey didn't include Canada. That is too bad from our parochial point-of-view, but also as a dencent comparator for the U.S.

A COMPAS poll conducted at the behest of the National Post prior to the 2000 election showed Canadians split 47/53 on creation vs. evolution, but its methodology is criticized here. Reading the critique, the question seems to be really bad, and the number of creationists in Canada is probably less than 20%. Unfortunately, the authors of the critique used their own survey of first year undergraduates at Wilfred Laurier, which, while perhaps useful in distinguishing variants of "creationism", is obviously not representative of the Canadian population.

Wondering about school choice

Neil McCluskey makes a decent argument for school choice. Well, he falls into a typically liberal/libertarian fallacies -- for example, that disagreement about whether a proposition is true implies that there is no correct answer to whether the proposition is true. But he's right that parents in a free society disagree about what a good education consists in, and that diversity ought to be respected.

The only logical and liberal solution to the perennial Canadian issue of funding schools for religious, linguistic and ethnic minorities is undoubtedly parental choice. Ontario's solution of funding Catholic schools, but no one else's, isn't defensible. Nor are funded French schools, but not Cantonese schools. Nor the move to fund native schools, but not Afro-Caribbean schools.

But there is a but, here. For all their faults, public schools put the great majority of the society through a common institution for a number of years. They socialize people the same way. Anyone who went to a different kind of school, or was home-schooled, is still a bit weird. Full parental choice means there really are no longer any "public schools."

Does that turn us into Lebanon a couple generations from now? Can someone reassure me about this?

Human Rights Watch on War Crimes in Lebanon

Any real discussion of the issue of the IDF's culpability in Lebanon is going to have to start with this Human Rights Watch report.

Based on investigations on the ground, HRW has documented what should be unsurprising to anyone following the conflict: the IDF is targeting sites with little or no military value with total disregard for civilian casualties. Of the 153 civilian deaths documented by name (the total is undoubtedly much higher), 63 were children.

HRW debunks apologist arguments that most of the attacks are in areas of Hezbollah activity.

There is no doubt that Hezbollah is also violating the laws of war, and therefore deserves the designation of "terrorist group", and HRW makes that point. I haven't been making this point because I suspect it is obvious and uncontroversial to the people who read me. But if we judge matters by sheer magnitude, the deaths Israel is inflicting are greater. Also, I do not live in a country where the Prime Minister is discounting Hezbollah atrocities, let alone attacks on Canadian nationals and soldiers.

(Via Crooked Timber)

An Empire? US? What do you mean?

Rob Farley is decidedly unimpressed with Niall Ferguson's Colossus.

Personally, I didn't hate it as much (although I'm also not convinced). People with actual expertise tend to hate "bigthink" book by people outside their area. But it is a necessary genre, in light of how specialized academic work necessarily has become. Those of us who pontificate on the Internet can hardly get too snooty about fact-checked books.

Still, "bigthink" requires some level of logic, and Farley points out that Ferguson's central thesis -- America is an Empire, and it's a good thing too -- depends fairly crucially on what you mean by "empire." If it just means economic and political influence, then the thesis becomes a "provocative" way of saying America is a really important country. Farley also makes a pretty good point when he suggests Ferguson has an oddly Leninist idea of imperialism, even though he presumably doesn't buy the whole concept of surplus value which makes Lenin/Hobson's theory work. (That theory, in turn, can't survive the elementary point that a consensual transaction generates wealth for both parties to it.)

To some extent, we can just stipulate our definitions: as long as we don't define Rome and Britannia out of the Empire business, we can choose concepts that may keep Athens and the US in or out.

One thing I like about Ferguson, in comparison with the standard American commentator indignantly denying that his country has an empire, is that he knows enough about the British empire to realize that it (and for that matter the Romans) did not eliminate or try to eliminate all self-government for its colonies. He doesn't have a straw Empire in mind. On the other hand, he still needs to do some work to avoid equating influence and imperialism.

To me, the most straightforward definition of Empire centres around sovereignty. You could start with an idealized Weberian sovereign state -- it possesses a monopoly of coercive authority within a defined boundary. Federalism splits that idealized sovereignty in a symmetrical way. Empire, on the other hand, leaves the homeland fully sovereign, but also exercising some jurisdictions in the colonies (without necessarily exercising all of them).

There are types of coercive force that are reserved, in the contemporary world, to the US. There are also forms of sovereignty that only the US can really claim. Much of the liberal Euro-Canadian agenda is to transform these powers into something a bit more federal (at least within the "West") -- much of the Bush agenda is to resist this transformation.

D.B.S.--Case Comment--Concurrence Makes More Sense

One of the vexing issues of family law is whether to award "retroactive" child support. If child support awards don't include back payments, then children are being cheated -- if they do, then it is often difficult for the payor to meet them.

The Pithlord recognizes the need for payment schedules for lump sum back child support, but is otherwise unsympathetic to the payor. In Canada, child support levels are based on a prescribed schedule that depends on the payor parent's income (child support for unmarried parents is within provincial jurisdiction, but most provinces have adopted the same basic system). If your income goes up, you ought to be paying more. If your ass needs to get dragged into court, you shouldn't get the benefit of that.

I'm not particularly sympathetic to judicial discretion in this area, but I recognize that the statutes have retained it. Still, there needs to be some kind of "default rule."

On Monday, the SCC decided a number of related appeals on this issue. Everyone agreed on the disposition of the specific cases, and that there needs to be some discretion, but with a default rule. The court split on what that default rule should be.

Justice Abella, for the minority, thought the default should be to the date the payor parent got the higher income. That makes sense, since that's the date the payor should have been payin'.

The majority, on the other hand, makes the presumptive backdate when the payor got "effective notice" from the other parent. This makes less sense, since we usually know about our own raises before we find out about our exes'. Also, effective notice is a mushy concept, as is the kind of bad behaviour that would justify further backdating.

Case Comment of D.B.S. v. S.R.G.; L.J.W. v. T.A.R.; Henry v. Henry; Hiemstra v. Hiemstra, 2006 SCC 37

Fears of Eurabia -- Grossly Exaggerated

I've said that empirical data that contradicts my prejudices is good for the soul -- but there is no doubt that favourable empirical data is great for the seretonin levels. So I point to data which shows that Muslim/Non-Muslim relations in Europe are fine, and not getting worse, despite the events of the past year (bombs, cartoons and all).

Ought and Is

Joshua Greene has an article in Nature that raises the most interesting question in meta-ethics: what is the relationship between moral psychology and moral philsophy? Unfortunately, the discussion degenerates into a discussion about the least interesting issue in meta-ethics, whether there is a "fact of the matter" about moral judgments.

A few claims (which I may try to justify later):

-The truth that our moral judgments are basically intuitive does not imply anything about their cognitive structure. Our judgments of whether a sentence sounds right are intuitive, but there can still be a science of linguistics inquiring into why we make those judgments.

-Moral psychology can claim to be the proper heir of the Tradition. This is obviously true of Aristotle, Hume and Smith, but it is also true of Kant, Hegel and Mill. The latter all claim that they are theorizing what we instinctively know.

-It is true that a normative conclusion can only be validly drawn from a set of premises if at least one of these premises has a normative element. But this is not that big a deal. It could be that the normative premise is totally uncontroversial or a universal law.

-Anyone who believes that there is at least one act or omission that is impermissible, and accepts the implications of deontic logic (If A is permissible, then not-A is not-obligatory and A is not forbidden, and so on) is as much of a moral realist as anyone needs to be. Such a person is accepting that there are moral truths, just as there are mathematical truths. Further inquiry into the ontological status of moral qualities is about as useful as arguing about the ontology of number. Unfortunately, the former arguments sound relevant to questions like whether Israel has any obligations in war, while the latter don't.

-Normative argument is possible, which seems to me to refute non-cognitivism. It necessarily involves reasoning from premises the interlocutor grants, but neither party to the argument justifies. But it is no different from any other type of argument in that respect.

-Since normative argument relies on the intuitions of interlocutors, it matters what those intuitions are. Therefore, moral psycholgy is relevant to the most normative of moral philosphies.

-Moral psychology holds out the hope of incremental, scientific progress, so it is a better way for academics to spend their professional time.

Massacre at Qana => War Over: Israel Lost, Hezbollah Won

So says Jonathan Edelstein and the Pithlord has no illusions that he can improve on Edelstein's analysis. Just go read it.