There’s been a lot of talk about the rioters in France, and a lot of analysis of why they rioted.

Jocelyn Gecker (2005-11-02), for the Associated Press, reports on the seventh day of rioting. Experts are said to say that Islamic radicals seek to recruit disenchanted youths by telling them that France has abandoned them; sociologist Manuel Boucher suggests that French society is in a bad state … increasingly unequal, increasingly segregated, and increasingly divided along ethnic and racial lines, and that some youths turn to Islam to claim an identity that is not French, to seize on something which gives them back their individual and collective dignity. Gecker says that some said that the unrest — sparked by the accidental deaths of two teenagers last week — is an expression of frustration over grinding unemployment and police harassment in the communities, and cites direct quotes to that effect from the president of the Clichy-sous-Bois mosque, the Socialist mayor of Clichy-sous-Bois, and a 22 year old Moroccan-French resident of Clichy-sous-Bois. On the other hand, there are no direct quotes from any of the rioters as to why they are rioting.

Franck Prevel, reporting for Reuters (2005-11-07), discussed the escalating violence against police. He quoted a statement from the French police union, President Chirac, a police officer, Interior Minister Sarkozy, Prime Minister de Villepin, and mentioned a fatwa against the riots issued by one of France’s largest Muslim organizations in response to official suggestions that Islamist militants might be stoking some of the protests. Prevel mentions that rioting began with the accidental electrocution of two youths fleeing police in Clichy-sous-Bois outside Paris and cites frustration among ethnic minorities over racism, unemployment and harsh treatment by police. On the other hand, he doesn’t cite any direct quotes from any of the rioters as to why they are rioting.

Meryl Yourish (2005-11-03) linked to Gecker’s AP report; she suggested that there is a global war being driven by radical Islamism in European slums, and remarks that first they came for the Jews, and many did not speak out, because they were not Jews. Her post has a lot of analysis, but no direct quotes from any of the rioters on why they are rioting.

She added a later update which links to an article by Paul Belien (2005-11-02) in his Brussels Journal blog. The article cites Theodore Dalrymple’s poignant analysis the crisis faced by British Muslims, and articles from FOX News, the Associated Press and Agence France-Presse, Knack, and a Danish blog called Viking Observer on the dangers faced by police and other emergency workers in Muslim slums in Malmo and Brussells, and rioting by mostly Muslim youths in France and Denmark. Belian suggests that these are problems all across Europe, and that they’ve resulted from a naive belief in universal cultural compatibility, the harsh reality of looming permanent conflict, and weak-kneed appeasement by the government officials in European countries. He suggests that the proximate cause of the French riots was unreasonable resentment over reasonable attempts by the French police to do their job; and that they were exacerbated by the unwillingness of the French government to take a more militant response. He quotes Viking Observer’s translation of some direct quotes from Danish rioters, as reported in the Danish press; on the other hand, he has no direct quotes, and links to no stories with direct quotes, from French rioters on why they are rioting.

At Positive Liberty, Jason Kuznicki (2005-11-07) argues that evidence for radical Islamist involvement is thin at best, and argues that it has much more to do with the material and the cultural conditions faced by young men in communities marked by poverty, dependency, desperation, and ghettoization, in turn caused by the French government’s restrictive economic and social policies. He cites some comments by Mark Brady at Liberty and Power, who in turn cites commentary by British sociologist Frank Furedi, attributing the riots to the exhaustion of national politics in Western Europe, and commentary by British writer James Heartfield, who suggests that It is not that assimilation has failed, but that France only pays lip service to assimilation, while practically refusing it to the descendants of North African migrants. Timothy Sandefur dissents, arguing that there is good reason to believe that at least a large part of the Islamic world does see the situation in France as an Intifada. He offers some subtle comments aimed at demonstrating the ways in which an extremely insular immigrant population and a stagnant, stultified economy can, by producing an an angry mass of economic and social outcasts, which comes to see itself as exploited by another large segment of the community, provide an opportunity for violent, hatred-fueled ideologies such as fascism or terrorist Islamism. He suggests that in such a situation the causal threads tying together the material conditions and the Islamist ideology can intertwine so thoroughly that it may not make any sense to try to separate the one from the other when trying to give causal explanations of the violence that ensues. He cites commentary from the Affordable Housing Institute, which discusses the alienation and insularity created by France’s public housing policy and mentions statements by Interior Minister Sarkozy, President Chirac, Prime Minister de Villepin, Foreign Minister Philippe Douste-Blazy, authorities (who anonymously say that it’s Islamist militants and drug traffickers), and A Clockwork Orange. He also cites two news articles — one on the arrests, back in September, of some suspected members of an Algerian terrorist group living in France; and another from a reporter who seems to have actually found a website in which the rioters make bellicose statements and brag about their martial accomplishments. On the other hand, neither that article nor any of the others, nor Sandefur’s commentary, nor Kuznicki’s, nor Brady’s, nor Furedi’s, nor Heartfield’s, contains any direct quotes from any of the rioters on why they are rioting.

Brad Spangler (2005-11-04) thinks that it’s racialized violence and the ghettoization created by the welfare state, with conditions that have far more in common with the recent riots in Toledo (or in Watts a generation earlier) than they do with events in the Middle East.

French fascist demagogue Jean-Marie Le Pen blames mass immigration, the moral corruption of the country’s leaders, disintegration of the country and social injustice.

David Brooks (2005-11-10) thinks it’s French gangsta rap.

Victor Davis Hanson (2005-11-07) thinks that the riots are a clear example of what happens to a society that doesn’t ask the immigrant to integrate, and the immigrant doesn’t feel that he has to integrate, or to learn the language, or learn the traditions of the West, and further blames the French govement’s appeasement of Muslim immigrants.

Colby Cosh (2005-11-07) argues that France has undeniably been more aggressive than the Anglo-Saxon countries in asserting a unitary national culture and blames the despair and anger created by a government housing policy that amounts to warehousing members of a particular ethnic group in horrible, unsightly, cheaply-made housing projects.

Rox’s friend from Paris says that it’s not an Islamic riot at all, but rather drug dealers defending their turf from the police.

Emma Kate Symons (2005-11-12) thinks it’s the expression of a violently male supremacist adolescent culture.

Mark Steyn (2005-11-10) thinks this is the start of a long Eurabian civil war we’re witnessing here.

On the other hand, none of them cite any direct quotes from any of the rioters as to why they’re rioting.

So why did all those rioters set towns across France afire? Don’t ask me. How would I know? If you want to find out, ask a rioter Pourquoi? You might even wait for the answer before you start offering an analysis.

(I owe the link to Broadsheet 2005-10-27.)

We can start with the headline:

Bush Is Not Expected to Feel Need to Pick Woman Again

And it gets better: another bunch of anonymous professional blowhards, informing us that Bush, having gotten that whole woman thing over with by tossing an ill-considered and ineffective nomination to someone with two X chromosomes, can now get to the important stuff. You know, the politics:

WASHINGTON, Oct. 27 – In choosing a replacement for Harriet E. Miers, President Bush may feel less of a need to select a woman to fill the seat of Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, several lawyers and analysts said Thursday.

The lawyers and analysts, all of whom have been involved in directly or indirectly counseling the White House about Supreme Court selections, also said that because of Mr. Bush’s desire to move quickly, he would probably choose from the roster of candidates whom he has considered before and whose backgrounds and records have been extensively researched.

The consensus among the handful of people who spoke about Mr. Bush’s situation was that in addition to deciding whether he had the leeway to replace Justice O’Connor with a man, Mr. Bush will have to deal with other more pressing political questions in making his selection.

And not a moment too soon. After all, who would want to get hung up on something non-political, like the gender makeup of the most powerful courts? You might as well try to have a political discussion about housework or childcare! What ever would all the analysts and lawyers assert their expertise and insider information on then?

In politics today, the world’s greatest deliberative bodies, under the principled leadership of conservative Republicans, have taken another decisive move to halt a grave and gathering threat to your safety and mine through the benign influence of the therapeutic State. You can rest easier tonight knowing that the federal government will protect you from the dangers of unregulated color contact lenses:

Contact lenses that can change brown eyes to blue, and a host of other colors, would have to be dispensed through eye-care professionals under a bill on its way to President Bush.

The legislation puts cosmetic and novelty contact lenses under the regulating power of the Food and Drug Administration, even in cases when the lenses don’t correct for poor vision.

Rep. John Boozman, R-Ark., who was an optometrist before becoming a lawmaker, said the action comes just before a spike in sales that occurs when Halloween shoppers look to add colored contacts to their costumes.

With Halloween upon us, it is important that we bring attention to the fact that colored contact lenses are being sold without any instruction on how to safely use them, he said in a statement after the House passed the bill on Wednesday.

The legislation, already approved in the Senate, would require people to see an eye-care professional to get fitted for the lenses and to be instructed in their use and care. Customers could purchase the lenses from their eye-care professionals or through online vendors.

Optometrists have warned that misuse or sharing of contacts lenses can lead to infections, abrasions, allergic reaction or blindness.

— BusinessWeek 2005-10-27: Bill would regulate colored contact lenses

A lot of libertarians like to say that Democrats want the government to be your mom, and the Republicans want the government to be your dad. I don’t know if that’s right, but the sight of a bipartisan caucus running behind all of us, shouting You’ll put an eye out with that thing! does tend to obscure my view of the shimmering glory and tremendous seriousness of government in the public interest.

Maybe it’s just my fuzzy vision, but sometimes I have trouble distinguishing these guys from a bunch of bellowing know-it-alls who can think of nothing better to do with their time than boss other people around, and pat themselves on the back over and over again for doing it.

Quick review.

George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Tony Blair, Donald Rumsfeld, and several other senior government officials in the U.S. and U.K. told us that Saddam Hussein’s regime in Iraq had large stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons. They told us that they were actively trying to find nuclear weapons. They told us that they had connections with the al-Qaeda terrorist network, and that therefore Iraq posed an imminent threat to the security of the United States. Therefore pre-emptive war was necessary, and nothing short of regime change would do.

They lied. When Ambassador Joe Wilson told them that their evidence for claiming that Saddam Hussein was trying to acquire nuclear weapons was a forgery, they kept citing that completely spurious, forged evidence in public statements. When the U.S. intelligence apparatus was not giving the answers that they needed to justify their policy, they didn’t change the policy; they set up a new intelligence office to give them the answers they wanted. Questions were left unasked and intelligence was cherry-picked and sexed-up and those who offered cautious, qualified, or dissenting views were were marginalized by the
gang at the top and their political appointees at the top of the intelligence agencies. Needless to say, the caveats and doubts were completely erased in the governments’ public declarations and policy statements. Mysteriously enough, somehow or another, the attitudes of the mad-dog bosses at the top created an environment where groupthink flourished and even though the intelligence community was inundated with evidence that undermined virtually all charges it had made against Iraq (Washington Post 2005-03-31), not one word of this evidence made it past the policy gate-keepers in the President’s cabinet. In other words, they had a goal, they looked for evidence to support that goal, and when they did not find good evidence they repeated evidence that they were informed repeatedly ahead of time was questionable or completely spurious evidence, and they shamelessly bowdlerized the data to in order to hide these opportunities for doubt and hype their war.

And it turns out that what they claimed on nearly every point was false.

Iraq had no stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons.

Iraq had no connections with al-Qaeda.

Iraq was not any threat to the United States whatsoever.

Or to put it another way: they lied through their fucking teeth and, as a result, some 10,000-100,000 Iraqi civilians were murdered, thousands more were brutalized and tortured, and over 1,500 British and American troops have died in a rudderless, pointless bloodbath.

Dead wrong indeed. You fucking assholes.

Now that the latest report on intelligence failures–even while piously avoiding unauthorized inquiries into questions concerning the political use of intelligence in driving war policy, of course–has reiterated these sorry facts yet again, it seems that our august media and government officials are finally turning to serious questions of responsibility and policy, to make sure that something like this never happens again.

For example, The New York Times’ Op-Ed page indignantly blasts the Administration for encouraging the credulous use of shaky testimony from unscrupulous interested parties.

Meanwhile, Kit Bond tells us it’s all Bill Clinton’s fault..

And the commission’s report and Bond and the rest of the blowhard brigade have got an answer. Here it is:

The commission’s report said the principal cause of the intelligence failures was the intelligence community’s inability to collect good information about Iraq’s WMD programs, serious errors in analyzing what information it could gather and a failure to make clear just how much of its analysis was based on assumptions rather than good evidence.

…

The single most prominent recurring theme of its recommendations is stronger and more centralized management of the intelligence community, and, in general, the creation of a genuinely integrated community, instead of a loose confederation of independent agencies.

The panel urged Bush to give broad authority to John Negroponte when he is confirmed as the director of national intelligence.

— CNN 2005-04-01: Report: Iraq intelligence ‘dead wrong’

The problem, you see, is how decentralized intelligence-gathering in the United States is. We’ve got to make sure in the future that we can avoid the politically-driven manipulation of data, that we can prevent dissenting or cautious assessments from being filtered out by hard-charging bosses, that decision-makers get all the information and analysis that they need to make a balanced assessment. And the best way in the world to do this is to consolidate and centralize as much of the intelligence apparatus in the United States government as possible.

Because nothing ensures a wide range of opinion and the integrity of data like making sure that it’s all filtered through a single directorate before it reaches decision-makers.

A single directorate under the control of one all-powerful political appointee, who answers directly to the President.

And that one political appointee should be John Negroponte.

All of this would be really depressing. I’m just glad that it’s nothing more than one sick fucking April Fools’ joke.

Right?

It’s been less than a week since the cataclysm in South Asia, and already the institutionalized economists have started to circle the scene like vultures. Roderick’s mostly-cheerful greeting to the New Year puts it in context:

On July 25, 1993, Lloyd Bentsen, President Clinton’s first Secretary of the Treasury, argued on Meet the Press that recent destructive flooding in the Midwest would stimulate the economy, because lots of concrete will be poured …. You have to look at all the jobs that will be created to repair the damage.

On September 14, 2001, three days after the destruction of the World Trade Towers, economist Paul Krugman wrote in the New York Times that the terror attack could even do some economic good. Now, all of a sudden, we need some new office buildings. … Rebuilding will generate at least some increase in business spending.

And now — on December 29, 2004 — C. Fred Bergsten of the Institute for Ienternational Economics has opined on NPR’s Morning Edition that the recent catastrophic tsunami in South Asia — which by the latest estimates has killed fifty times as many people as the 9/11 attacks — will bring economic benefits to the countries affected:

Like any disaster, you get negative effects through destroying existing property and people’s health, but you do get a burst of new economic activity to replace them, and on balance, that generally turns out to be quite positive.

Over time, properties that have been destroyed will be fully replaced, and probably by better and newer substitutes, so at the end of the reconstruction process, the countries will probably be wealthier.

The jaw simply drops.

Don’t get me wrong: this isn’t intended as a jeremiad against the construction industry or others who will be profiting from the rebuilding effort. Nor am I about to launch into calls for ill-conceived government price controls or anything of the sort. Whatever their motives, people involved in rebuilding (through charity and through business) are making an effort to help people get back homes and livelihoods after an unspeakable horror. Vultures play an important and health role in the ecosystem; what I object to is the Vulture Economists who fabricate reasons to claim that rebuilding somehow, inexplicably, makes for a net gain or a silver lining to this catastrophe. It’s not just that this looks like a lack of decent respect for the dead–although it is that, and especially when we are talking about the catastrophic loss of over 100,000 people. It’s also that it’s just a lie–a particularly atrocious example of the Broken Window Fallacy, uttered by comfortable professional economists who make it very clear what is seen and what is not seen from their comfortable leather chairs.

Roderick finds the spectacle of distinguished experts happily swallow[ing] [The Broken Window Fallacy] in the blatant and naked form of that very absurdum to which Bastiat and Hazlitt sought to reduce the subtler versions appalling; I agree, but I can only add that we have all too much reason to have seen this coming. There’s good reason to think that there’s no catastrophe so hideous that someone won’t try to declare it a net economic good. After all, part of the historical education that we all seem to get–and I don’t doubt this includes the Krugmans and Bergstens of the world–routinely indulges in this sort of sophistry. As the Black Death of 1347 swept across Europe, about one third of the people on the continent died; in the countries worst affected (such as England) the death toll rose to as much as one half of the population. The nearness of death pervaded all life in the second half of the 14th century; entire towns were wiped out in weeks, processions of flagellants wandered from town to town crying out to God to forgive them their sins, and (as one German witness tells us) men and women wandered around as if mad and let their cattle stray because no one had any inclination to concern themselves about the future. Yet how many of us have had Western Civ textbooks confidently and drily report something like this on the alleged macroeconomic effects of the Death:

The declining population at the end of the 14th century had a number of important effects. Many people touched by the plague moved away from medieval cities and towns to unaffected areas. This was the negative impact. On the positive side, some landlords began to concentrate on improving the fertility of the soil. And back in the cities, the declining population of workers meant that masters sought out new ways to produce which required less manpower. That is, they began to construct labor saving machinery. In other words, an act of God produced a greater need for technological innovation.

— The History Guide: In The Wake of the Black Death

Or:

The Black Death greatly helped accelerat social and economic change during the 14th and 15th centuries …. the great population reduction due to the plague brought cheaper land prices, more food for the average peasant, and a relatively large increase in per capita income among the peasantry.

— WikiPedia: Black Death

Or:

The demand for people to work the land was so high that it threatened the manorial holdings. Serfs were no longer tied to one master; if one left the land, another lord would instantly hire them. The lords had to make changes in order to make the situation more profitable for the peasants and so keep them on their land. In general, wages outpaced prices and the standard of living was subsequently raised.

— Decameron Web: Social and Economic Effects of the Plague

Or:

The plagues also brought economic changes. The death of so many people concentrated wealth in the hands of survivors. In many cases those workers who remained alive could earn up to five times what they had earned before the plague. In the towns, plague had the effect of consolidating wealth somewhat, especially among the middle class. As plague destroyed people and not possessions, the drop in population was accompanied by a corresponding rise in per capita wealth. Large increases in spending in the towns at this time are well documented.

— Encarta: Black Death

Parallel remarks could be made, for example, on the (apparently ineradicable) textbook tale of wartime prosperity during the cataclysm of World War II. This is what happens when positivist pseudo-economists run the show: empty manipulation of econometric numbers takes the place of humane concern for the suffering and material conditions that real people face, and since economics is a science about human conditions, the result is not only ethically bankrupt but also bad economics. Écrasez la niaserie.