This Summer I Hear The Drumming, Sixteen Dead in Panjwai

It seems a peculiarly American destiny, hovering over the heads of this nation and its people, to keep on reading, in the morning papers, news paragraphs like the following:

Any accelerated withdrawal would face stiff opposition from military commanders, who want to keep the bulk of the remaining American troops in Afghanistan until the end of 2014, when the NATO mission in Afghanistan is supposed to end. Their resistance puts Mr. Obama in a quandary, as he balances how to hasten what is increasingly becoming a messy withdrawal while still painting a portrait of success for NATO allies and the American people.

A military presence in a foreign land; a seemingly endless, intractable, formless conflict; a political establishment confused about war objectives, tactics, and strategy; military and political commanders at loggerheads; the calculus of troop withdrawal, as always, juggling with face-saving devices as the original provenance of war’s declaration and continued execution fades into a remote past; these are all familiar components of wars persecuted overseas.

And now, it seems, another more gruesomely familiar piece can be fitted into this emerging puzzle: the cold-massacre of innocents, carried out by a member of the military. US Army Sergeant X (we do not know his name as yet), coldly, deliberately, kills sixteen civilians in Panjwai District in the province of Kandahar.  He goes on a deadly walkabout a mile from base, hunting door to door for prey, breaking in to kill at three separate locations. At the end, he collects the bodies of eleven victims, which include four girls, and cremates them.

Assessment of Sergeant X as psychopathic is likely; he is in custody and presumably, the wheels of justice, military and civil will now grind to dispense the appropriate punishment. Well, one can hope; let us not forget that the gentleman whose name sprang to some folks’ lips when they first heard the news of the Panjwai massacre, Second Lieutenant William Calley, was convicted, found guilty of killing twenty-two villagers, given a life sentence, but only served three and a half years under house arrest.

But the policies, mechanisms, and machinery, both political and military that brought Sergeant X to Panjwai, that kept him there, along with thousands of other US troops (and their Afghan henchmen) will not be on trial along with him. Sergeant X will be tried as isolated singularity, as exception, the lens narrowly focused on him and his deeds. Synoptic perspectives on his presence in the midst of his victims will be in short supply; laser-like precision of diagnosis and prescription, discarding broader political views, will be much more popular.

Of course, what makes Panjwai genuinely tragic is that it was foretold: dirty wars like Afghanistan inevitably dehumanize and produce these moral catastrophes. The question was when, how often, where; the genuine curiosity was only directed, perhaps, at the eventual body count. Sergeant X has had a small, walk-on part to play; he has performed it with gruesome efficiency. The rest of the accompanying charade can now be kicked off.

Video Game ‘Cloning’: What Is It Good For?

Cloning of video games is a Bad Thing. Or so sayeth Brian X. Chen and some video game developers (New York Times, March 12th, ” For Creators of Games, A Faint Line on Cloning”). Roughly, the thesis advanced is: ‘cloning’ can be destructive of developer motivation and the video game market, and thus seems to require legal intervention (by the application of patenting protections). I want to raise some questions that I hope will complicate the picture Chen provides us of innovation and its relationship to its legal regulation.

So,

In any commercialized art form, be it movies, literature or fashion, the creators often tread a fine line between inspiration and shameless copying. Some small video game makers say that line seems to have all but disappeared….“When another company takes inspiration from the game and they try to make a different game out of it, that’s when getting imitated turns into a compliment,” said Rami Ismail, a co-founder of Vlambeer. “Getting cloned is like getting punched in the face. It’s like a robbery.” Demoralized, Vlambeer stopped development of Ridiculous Fishing for several months. “It was kind of a motivation black hole,” said Jan Willem Nijman, another founder. “It almost destroyed Vlambeer.”

So, copying is ‘shameless’; the imitated seems to think it is both a ‘compliment’ and ‘like getting punched in the face’ and like ‘robbery;’ it can act as demotivator. Ismail’s statement starts by noting ‘inspiration’ and the creation of ‘different games’, which would seem to be a good thing (for game players at least). But something goes wrong: even though a new game has been created, it has employed ‘cloning’, the copying of  “the soul of a game — its gameplay mechanics, design, characters and storyline — “. And this has demotivated the folks at Vlambeer.

This story raises questions well worth pursuing. What did Vlambeer do? Did it make another game? Did the presence of the new, ‘cloned’ game force them into other innovative avenues of development, rather than just working on a previously explored artistic niche? Did the cloning prevent Vlambeer from staying safely and staidly on the same beaten track? What brought Vlambeer back to working on games? What do they work on now and how? More generally, is it the case that those developers whose games have been ‘cloned’ start working on another game or do they exit the development market? Does cloning produce an arms race with games developers innovating furiously to maintain a cutting edge?

Other questions suggest themselves. Did consumers get more games out of this episode of cloning? Were the ‘cloned’ versions of the game better in any regard? Even if the “gameplay mechanics, characters and storyline” are ‘cloned’ what does it mean to say the ‘design’ was cloned? Was the interface of the cloned version identical, or did the interface work ‘better’ in some interesting dimension? For instance, are any of the ‘cloned’ games faster? Do they load quicker? Do game players indicate their preferences for these new games in any way?

After not raising these questions, Chen turns to possible legal protections and regimes:

One reason that cloning is so frequent in the game industry is that there is no easy way to protect a game. A piece of published writing or a photograph can be copyrighted, but not the mechanics of a game. Small game makers could seek patents protecting software design, but they generally shy away from this because acquiring a patent can be both time-consuming and relatively expensive, said Ellisen Shelton Turner, an intellectual property lawyer at Irell & Manella in Los Angeles.

In addition, because games so often draw inspirations from previous works, many game creators believe that patent protections could stifle creativity in future games, Mr. Turner said. “A lot of them are anti-patents,” he said. “And only in hindsight do they think patents are the proper thing to do when someone has stolen their idea.”

But what are the ‘mechanics’ of a game and why are they kinds of things that could be copyrighted? Turner claims that developers shy away from acquiring patents because of the difficulties of the process but then in the next sentence puts it down to their acknowledgment of the creativity-stifling potential of patent protection. Those same developers might know that their development has drawn freely on the creative output of other developers and that seeking patent protections might be damaging to the ecology of the game development world; developers might be more cognizant of this ecology and its particular constraints, than say, corporate ‘intellectual property’ lawyers.  The belated self-knowledge that Turner ascribes to game developers might rather be their acknowledgment of the particular contours of their development community: that their decision to not seek patents  comes with a price attached while contributing to very particular freedoms enjoyed by game developers.

Finally, the central claim, that cloning results in bad outcomes:

The founders of Vlambeer, the maker of Radical Fishing, said they disagreed that cloning was good for consumers. They said cloning would make it more difficult for small companies to take risks on new ideas, but easy for big companies to succeed by rehashing old ideas. As a result, all new games could look extremely alike and unoriginal.

“If we go into that sort of spiral we’ll end up in a place where there’s only cloners, and there’s a limited amount of creativity happening,” Mr. Ismail said. “That’s the biggest horror scenario.”

This ‘horror scenario’ seems overstated. First, in light of the questions raised above. Second, because, peculiarly, in the scenario envisaged, game players appear to have no agency, no discrimination. They do not grant any game-maker first-mover advantage, they seem not to select between games, they mindlessly take on clones just because they are similar to extant games.

‘Cloning’ suggests the creation of identical copies; but the situation at hand deals with new games that incorporate central features of the older game. This fact, and the nature of the game development process, which draws on a ‘commons’ of code, algorithmic techniques, and a grab-bag of tricks and solutions to game development problems, considerably complicates the picture of the game development world and its possible legal regulation that emerges from Chen’s article.

Statutory Interpretation, the “Nietzsche Rule”, and Stevens and Scalia in Zuni

From Chapter 8, (‘Doctrines of Statutory Interpretation’), Section 1, A. ‘Textual Canons’, 2 ‘Grammar Canons’, (f) ‘The Golden Rule (Against Absurdity) – and the Nietzsche Rule.  of William N. Eskridge, Jr., Philip Fricket, and Elizabeth Garrett, Cases and Materials on Legislation: Statutes and the Creation of Public Policy, Thomson West, American Casebook Series, Saint Paul, MN, 1988:

English-speaking jurisdictions have a few catch-all rules providing a mental check for the technical process of word-parsing and grammar-crunching. The golden rule is that interpreters should “adhere to the ordinary meaning of the words used, and to the grammatical construction, unless that * * * leads to any manifest absurdity or repugnance, in which case the language may be varied or modified, so as to avoid such inconvenience, but no further” Becke v. Smith 150 Eng. Rep. 724, 726 (U.K. Exch. 1836)….

The golden rule is…an absurd results exception to the plain meaning rule….

[C]courts should be willing to revise scrivener’s errors – obvious mistakes in the transcriptions of statutes into the law books….

The golden rule and its corollaries are now subject to academic debate. Although Justice Scalia recognized an absurd results exception to the plain meaning rule in Bock Laundry (concurring opinion) scholars of various persuasions maintain that an absurd results exception to plain meaning is inconsistent with the premises of the textualism. In Zuni Pub. Sch. Dist v. Department of Educ. 127 S.Ct. 1534, 1549-50 (2007), Justice Stevens’ concurring opinion rests the absurd result exception upon notions of probable legislative intent: if a plain meaning interpretation is truly absurd, that is prima facie reason to think Congress did not it (absent evidence to the contrary, of course). Justice Scalia roundly denounced that approach, in absolute language suggesting that he now agrees with his critics that there should be no absurd results exception to the plain meaning rule. Id. at 1555-59 (Scalia, J., dissenting).

Friedrich Nietzsche admonished in Mixed Opinions and Maxims No. 137  (1879): “The worst readers are those who proceed like plundering soldiers: they pick up a few things they can use, soil and confuse the rest, and blaspheme the whole.” All the Justices would agree with this sentiment; indeed, both Stevens and Scalia invoke it in their Zuni debate. We read Nietzsche’s lesson for the statutory interpreter to include the following: Be humble. Consider how other people use language. Be helpful to the project rather than hypertechnical.

(The Nietzsche excerpt is from (as cited): Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals (and Other Works), 175 (Walter Kauffman trans. ed. 1967). The authors also note, “David Krentel, Georgetown Law Center, Class of 1995, brought this maxim to our attention.”)

Brief commentary:

1. The merely obvious: not the first, and not the last, co-occurrence of Scalia and Nietzsche in a legal text or setting.

2. The invocation of “project” in the last sentence is intriguing. Indeed, the authors’ reading of Nietzsche’s “lesson” is interesting all around for its particular deployment of “humble,” “helpful,” and “hypertechnical.” The contrasts drawn and established are stark, all the more distinctive for the irony that Nietzsche  provokes for making us associate the advocacy of humility with him.

Skream’s Where You Should Be, Eight Hours in Brooklyn, and Summer

I’ve written before, on this blog, about the “fine-grained, specific recall” of memories that listening to a song can bring about. I’m inclined to think that any time I pen a note of appreciation here about a particular piece of music, I will do so by also noting and paying attention to its associations; it seems to go with the territory. (A new series, so to speak: Songs and the Things They Make Me Remember.)

Last time, it was BB King’s Thrill is Gone and remembering my time as a bartender in a small jazz bar in Newark. Today, it’s Skream‘s Where You Should Be (featuring Sam Franck) and the summer of 2011. There are two twists in this tale. For one, this song goes hand in hand with a video–but not its official music video, which comes off a distinct second-best–and secondly, the associated memory is very recent.

In August 2011, Next Level Pictures released a video titled Eight Hours in Brooklyn; ostensibly a concept shoot for a commercial, it was shot using a Phantom Flex camera, and featured dizzying, super slo-mo shots of skateboarders carrying out flips and a formation ride down a road next to an elevated subway track, hydrant bathers, pickup basketball games played by tattooed teenagers, break dance moves, and a close-up of a tattoo under construction. As soundtrack, it featured Skream’s Where You Should Be.

Where You Should Be is a sophisticated piece of pop dubstep; and it is too, a breakup song. Its lyrics are simple and plaintive; they don’t aspire to high poetic levels. Consider, for instance:

How can I feel good about this life I’m living//When you’re not here//Right beside me

or,

These lonely days//Turn to lonely nights//Everything’s upside down//And I’ve lost the will to fight

But for all that, set to the bass, melody and slightly spooky vocals of the track, they work well. And Where You Should Be works especially well with Eight Hours in Brooklyn, which of course,  isn’t about breaking up with anyone. But the video’s images immediately taps into a melancholia that always seems to be associated with summers on the East Coast: the knowledge that all this cannot last, that the summer, hot, sticky, humid and kvetch-invoking as it is, is also the time for cool, T-shirted nights, barbecues, beach trips, and cold beer. And in August, the light begins to change, the shadows lengthen, and we are reminded that we had better get on with the business of making the most of it before the change of season, before, once the glories of fall have gone, we’ll be stuck with slush, snow, and the grimy greyness of winter.

In August 2011, I was working on a book, and dealing with all the frustration and self-doubt that that always seems to entail. I tried to stay sane, mostly by lifting weights, and by endlessly bitching and moaning, to anyone that would listen. And sometimes, by diversion. Watching Lost was one particularly undistinguished way, listening to music was another. Eight Hours in Brooklyn was a perfect three-minute break from editing, revising, and worrying whether anyone would give a rat’s ass about my self-indulgent reflections.

So, thank you, Skream; thank you Phantom Flex camera; and thank you, videomakers. You got at least one writer across the finish line.

Pat Robertson Thinks its High Time Marijuana was Legalized

Cliches about broken clocks being right twice a day might need to be dragged out for this one. Pat Robertson wants pot to be made legal. He is on the straight-and-420 for this one. Robertson isn’t indulging in just idle, pass-the-bong, give-me-a-hit, don’t-bogart-that-joint talk. This is a serious policy recommendation, which gives off the aroma of prime bud, and which, if taken seriously, could unclog the legislative pipe, cleanse the bong water of our nation’s ludicrous, drunk-on-bad-beer, whiskey-addled, gin-soaked policy on marijuana, and perhaps, hopefully, cure the nation of its reefer madness.

(Even if it includes the usual disclaimer about not having tried marijuana and not intending to. Really Pat? Not even once? Such a long life, so many interesting experiences, and never a toke? Come on, it’s a sacrament. You should include it in your services. Perhaps everyone would mellow out and you would stop with all that crazy talk you’ve subjected us to over the years. I won’t forgive you just yet for all of it, but with this set of statements you might just have started filling out an application for forgiveness. My un-Christian heart could still be turned around.)

From the New York Times report linked above:

I really believe we should treat marijuana the way we treat beverage alcohol…[T]his war on drugs just hasn’t succeeded….[the US] has gone overboard on this concept of being tough on crime…It’s completely out of control…Prisons are being overcrowded with juvenile offenders having to do with drugs. And the penalties, the maximums, some of them could get 10 years for possession of a joint of marijuana. It makes no sense at all.

And,

Mr. Robertson has now apparently fully embraced the idea of legalizing marijuana, arguing that it is a way to bring down soaring rates of incarceration and reduce the social and financial costs….Mr. Robertson said that he “absolutely” supported the ballot measures, [in Colorado and Washington, intended to roll back marijuana penalties and prohibitions]

Can you dig it? Legalizing marijuana makes so much sense that even Pat Robertson thinks its the right thing to do. Come on legislators. Put away your wine glasses, cancel your meetings with tobacco lobbyists, don’t fill this month’s painkiller prescription, and get to work on drafting drug policy bills that don’t read like they were written by some pothead. Sorry, I meant vodka-martini-head.

Perhaps, years from now, when marijuana is finally legalized, it will be because the sheer hypocrisy of keeping it illegal, punishing its casual users, and virulently opposing any attempt at rationalizing its regulation, while alcohol is glorified, turned into an indispensable companion for dinners, weddings, sports events, White House banquets, St. Patrick Day’s festivities, into a marker of manhood, an indication of sophistication, will finally become too much for the collective psyche of those engaged in maintaining that status. Perhaps.

If not, then at least those in charge of marijuana policy and enforcement can congratulate themselves that when they talk about the pernicious effects of marijuana they are correct in one sense: Pot can drive you insane and make you do really stupid things. Like not legalizing it.

The NYPD as Domestic Intelligence Force: Kelly and Browne Need To Go

The New York City Police Department (NYPD) has a vexed relationship with civil liberties. The department’s long and troubled history with minority populations is perhaps the best indicator of a kind of systematic confusion in its training institutions, its rank-and-file, its leadership, and thus, in its deeply-ingrained institutional culture, about the very notion: “Civil liberties? You talkin’ to me?” Its current whole-hearted embrace of a new role as member of the domestic intelligence apparatus, dedicated to aggressively conducting surveillance on NYC and NJ’s Muslim population, add to the list of its previous achievements such as coerced confessions, stop-and-frisk, over-enthusiastic deployment and use of deadly weapons, corruption, and sometimes even rape. The NYPD is also the police department that shows racist films in its academy and publishes creepy maps showing the locations of Muslim businesses and houses of worship. A rap-sheet this long would condemn most to life without parole; in New York City’s case, we seem to be the ones destined to never receive relief from the NYPD’s policing.

Yesterday, a petition signed by four hundred fifteen faculty members–“the first nationwide faculty response to the AP’s revelations of widespread NYPD surveillance on college campuses”–was sent to Mayor Bloomberg, calling for the resignation of Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly and Deputy Commissioner Paul Browne, in whose reign rights-abusing practices appear to have bloomed. The petition and the list of signatories is available online. Yesterday too, the Chronicle of Higher Education published an Op-Ed by Saskia Sassen and Jeanne Theoharis, which explains why this petition was necessary. Kelly’s response, thus far, to the furore over the NYPD’s malfeasance, has revealed deep ambivalence and confusion and, of course, Mayor Bloomberg’s defense of the surveillance program has been disappointing, especially for a man ostensibly committed to civil rights in other domains.

(On a side note: AP’s ‘revelations’ such as they are, only came about once it became clear that surveillance of Muslim students was not restricted to say, grubby public institutions like the City University of New York, but also extended to ‘prestigious’ Ivy-League campuses such as Penn and Yale. One reaction among CUNY faculty was, “Well if it takes surveillance of the Ivy League to get this to be noticed, then so be it.” But another reaction is a little less sanguine: Had this remained confined to the nation’s less-privileged pockets would it ever have been noticed or cared about?)

The NYPD, perhaps more than any other police force in the nation, does not so much see itself as a part of the community that it polices, as much as it sees itself set over, above, and against it. This aggressively, offensively, and destructively adversarial posture is what contributes to its continued abuses of city resident’s civil rights. Unless its leadership changes, unless it changes its training practices, indeed, unless it engages in a fundamental ‘overcoming’ of itself, it remains destined to be locked into a pattern of behavior that will continue to do damage, sometimes deadly, to the citizens that are controlled and regulated by it.

The first step in this institutional reform should be the resignations of Kelly and Browne.

Update: Alex Vitale, in comments, clarifies that AP’s response came earlier, and that it was the nation-wide faculty response that came later, in response to news of the surveillance taking place all over the North-East. Still, civil liberties violations get noticed more when they take place in pockets of privilege.

Why Write and All That – I: Bargains Struck

Two recent articles about writing, writers, and writing as a job–Tim Parks in the New York Review of Books blog and Seth Godin’s interview at Digital Book World–prompt me to take on the insufferably self-indulgent business of being self-referential. The issues covered in the pieces linked above should be familiar: Why write? Is writing a career? Should you get paid for it? Do you have a right to get paid for the work you make available to your readers? And of course, the modern favorite: In today’s ‘digital economy’ where readers supposedly ‘expect content for free’ how is a writer to be paid?

This set of issues, despite its familiarity, is extraordinarily rich, and I can only make some preliminary remarks here. (I expect to write follow-up posts.) In so doing, I hope I can offer some insight into why it is people write, and why, I think, writing will persist as an ‘occupation’ understood broadly, even if no one is getting ‘paid’ for it.

I write from a curious position in this discussion. I’m an academic and I don’t expect to make money from my writing. Or rather, I do not write for the direct income of royalties, but–initially at least–for the financial security of tenure and promotion, and now, to secure my academic reputation and to circulate my ideas. My two academic books thus far have secured for me a quasi-permanent job in the academy and I am now free to write for the rest of my career on those topics that interest me. As I do so, perhaps I will learn a bit myself and engage in the pursuit of ‘knowledge’ in a way that is of use to others.

My first book was non-academic, and while it neither secured my reputation in the academy nor helped me circulate any particularly significant intellectual ‘ideas,’ it did do a great deal for me. First, I performed an act of personal archaeology by writing about a war in which my father had fought; in so doing, I learned a great deal about him, the times he lived in, and the men who worked with him. Second, I did justice to an older self of mine, one that was obsessed about aircraft and the men who flew them. Third, I learned a bit of history. Thus, I was edified in the emotional, intellectual, and personal dimensions. Fourth, I also made several friends; many of the veterans I interviewed for one, and my co-author. (We did not meet in the flesh until after the book had been published!) Lastly, my writing improved: I learned how to organize chapters, construct a narrative, edit, revise, ruthlessly delete redundancy and irrelevance, all skills that would help me later in writing my academic books.

I made very little money from the sales of the book, but it seemed not to matter, for I hadn’t set out to. When I started work on the book, I was a post-doctoral fellow; when I completed it, I was in a tenure-track position. The two checks I have received thus far have paid for an airfare–for one person–to India, and some books.

So I wrote a book, and got in exchange: Learning, the making of friendships, the honing of a useful skill, the engagement with self-discovery, an airfare, some books. All this seems to add up to a very good bargain.

Surfaces scratched. More later.

Nietzsche on Olympia Snowe’s Departure From the Senate

Olympia Snowe’s announcement that she would not seek reelection in November 2012 and would instead retire when her third term ends in January 2013 has, understandably, been the cause of much gnashing of teeth among those ostensibly committed to a more tolerant politics and to ‘pragmatism’ in legislation. Snowe herself wrote an Op-Ed in the Washington Post, blaming, among other things, “the corrosive trend of winner-take-all politics” and “the dysfunction and political polarization [of the Senate].” (There have been other step-downs like this in the past, most notably, from the Democratic side of the aisle, Evan Bayh in 2010, and more recently, Ben Nelson.)

Snowe’s Post article does not suggest that she is leaving because she is not a Republican any more, and in her diagnosis and prognosis of the ailing legislative branch of this nation, she appears to indict Republicans and Democrats alike. She does not, after all, indicate that she feels her party alone cannot accommodate her ‘centrist’ or ‘moderate’ leanings. (I put those political orientations in quotes because, to be honest, I think I have lost my bearings on what they stand for any more in the American political landscape.) And some of those who commented on her departure incorporated this marching-in lockstep-with-party-orthodoxy-is-the-bane-of-modern-American-politics flavor in their writing. Here, for instance, is Frank Bruni in the New York Times:

Just because you choose a team shouldn’t mean you’re suddenly and miraculously on board with everything in its playbook, on down the line…Rare is the Democrat of plausible national ambition who tangles in a tough, meaningful way with labor unions or environmentalists, groups that President Obama has been loath to cross.

(My reaction to that is “Really?” but I’ll let it pass for now.)

Still, Snowe’s case will be of especial interest to those that view the Republican Party as having become completely unhinged in recent times, and Democrat spinners will only be too keen to use her resignation as exhibit Numero Uno in making this charge. Her decision to not seek reelection certainly appears more interesting when viewed in this light; In the former dimension, one can speculate about iconoclasts and persecution; in the latter, merely about boring institutional fatigue. Charges of “a pox on both your houses” sound better coming from us citizens, fed up with the Confederacy of Dunces on Capitol Hill.

Nietzsche, as usual, has something to say about this situation, and unsurprisingly, he goes for the more interesting option. So, once again, from Human, All Too Human: A Book For Free Spirits (translated by RJ Hollingdale, Cambridge University Press, 1986; this version includes Volume 2: Assorted Opinions and Maxims, from which I quote below.)

So, from Volume 2, Section 305–on page 283–reads:

Party tactics. – When a party notices that a member has changed from being an unconditional adherent to a conditional one, it is so little capable of enduring this that it tries, through incitements and insults of all kinds, to bring him to the point of outright defection and turn him into an opponent: for it has the suspicion that the intention of seeing in their faith something of relative value that admits of a For and Against, a weighing and distinguishing, is more dangerous to it than a wholesale opposition.

Black Money, Parallel Economies, Marxism, Corruption, and All That

Corey Robin heard of the term “black money“–untaxed income from under-the-table transactions–for the first time yesterday. (Unsurprisingly, he heard about it from an Indian friend, because if there is one place in the world where there is a lot of it, it’s India.) He was sufficiently intrigued to write a very interesting post, which, in response to the secretive hoarding that black money holders would have to indulge in to keep it from the attention of the tax authorities, attempts to make the case that:

[C]orruption stands the Marxist theory of capitalism on its head. Or at least two parts of it….the the person who deals in black money [is] similar to a miser, and for Marx, the miser in a capitalist economy is an irrational actor. The proper way to make and accumulate money under capitalism is to put the money one has into circulation.

And this the black money miser supposedly does not do. Corey’s post works off this premise to try and establish his two standings-on-the-head. First, the corrupt, like misers, become irrational actors as even if they were able to put their money into circulation, they would not be able to increase it. And second, contra Marx’s suggestion (in Corey’s words) that “Money…constituted a profound form, or instrument, of untruth”, corruption renders “money…the great instrument of truth….It is the most tangible sign of some ill-gotten gain, of some illicit or criminal activity. That is why its possessor must go to such lengths to hide it by hoarding or laundering it.”

There is a problem with this analysis, at least in the Indian context.

Black money does not just get hoarded in India, it funds and sustains a huge, “parallel economy.” This is the favored turn of phrase used by folks in India to describe the set of financial transactions underwritten by black money, and that nomenclature will tell you why black-money holders aren’t really ‘irrational actors.’  Because in India, those that have black money use it for lots of transactions. Indeed, without exaggeration, real-estate prices in India are astronomic precisely because they are fueled by non-taxed income. The transactions fueled by black money are as real as any other. Black money spenders in India are hardly misers; some of the most conspicuous displays of wealth in India are those of black wealth. And everyone knows so.

So the black money economy is not underground, it is pervasive and visible. Everyone has some black money; everyone spends it; and what this ensures is that if you have black money to spend, you can always find someone–and something–to spend it on because they in turn will find willing partners. Black money only remains hoarded if the hoarder cannot find sellers willing to take his black money from him, because, for instance, they want to be able to record their income from the sale and pay taxes on it. But if they are not interested in paying taxes either, then there isn’t a problem. And so, black money circulates, and you can use it to increase your wealth–by, say, investing in real estate or in businesses comfortable with accepting such funds–and thus, consequently, your material standard of living.

In this situation, the state, without sufficient mechanisms and will for tax-revenue collection and enforcement, can only watch, as independent economic actors freely construct an alternative economy funded by this wealth. This is corruption on a scale so immense that  the potential miser or hoarder does not need to be one. And more importantly, if the corruption is so widespread so as to sustain a ‘parallel economy’ then that economy can be capacious enough to sustain within it the same “untruths” associated with money  that Marx spoke of.

Ann Althouse on Rush Limbaugh: ‘Smart People’ Offer Weak Tea

Some nineteen years ago, I was working at Bell Laboratories in New Jersey, surrounded by a host of seemingly very intelligent men and women. Name the best technical schools in the country and the chances were you would find a graduate from most of them in any average corridor in the five-storied building of the Middletown location. All around me, over-qualified, high-achieving, electrical engineers, computer scientists and mathematicians, did their best to make sure I acquired a gigantic inferiority complex, equipped as I was with merely a puny masters degree in computer and information science from a small technical school in Newark.

Then, one day, suddenly, I didn’t feel like an intellectual midget any more. During my lunch break, as I partook of my three-times-a-week run in the surrounding environs, a car pulled up next to me, and a colleague of mine, one of those absurdly, over-qualified graduates from one of the nation’s best technical schools, popped his head out to ask what I was up to. As we exchanged pleasantries, I could hear Rush Limbaugh on his radio. Puzzled, I asked, “You listen to Limbaugh?”  He replied, “Yeah, he’s great; you should check him out sometime. He’s got lots of smart things to say. Makes a lot of sense.” And then, my colleague drove off, my expression of puzzlement still writ large on my face. But I felt strangely pleased too.  I might not have gone to the schools that these guys had, but by golly, I was smarter than them!

Flash forward. A couple of days ago, Ann Althouse, law professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, NYU Law School graduate, and considered a ‘conservative intellectual’, offered a critique of Limbaugh, which includes: First, the the usual, quaking-at-the-knees qualifier that any ‘critic’ of Limbaugh from the right feels compelled to offer (in Althouse’s case: “I like Rush Limbaugh, and I get his concept of media tweaking, and I get that he’s lampooning government regulation”) and then, after unpacking the various misrepresentations in his analysis, the following:

Quite aside from the lack of a factual basis for his humor, it’s just mean to aim words like “slut” and “prostitute” at a woman, especially a young woman, even if the metaphor is apt. Even when you get the joke and agree with the criticism of the policy she’s advocating, it feels ugly. The humor backfires.

“Even if the metaphor is apt”? If the “metaphor is apt” then why does it feel “ugly”? And why does Althouse then say “Even when you get the joke and agree with the criticism of the policy she’s advocating…The humor backfires.”? What was the joke in there? If I call Althouse a “retard” for liking Rush Limbaugh, is that a joke? No, its a polemical broadside. And why is someone who agrees with Sandra Fluke’s criticism find themselves in a position where they think the non-existent “metaphor” used to describe her is “apt” and “get” the non-existent “joke”?

Really, if Althouse was worried about Limbaugh going after her, or that she would lose her legions of feral commenters, she shouldn’t have bothered writing her post.

Update: I owe a hat-tip to David Auerbach, who directed me to Althouse’s post.