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Author: Bryant

And some do not

March 5, 2003
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Another one of those “hey, look who’s anti-war” bits here. I find ‘em interesting and in many cases telling. It’s important not to let the right paint all protesters as stupid hippies, much as it’s important to remember that the right isn’t comprised purely of Neanderthals. Anyhow, Warren Langley is getting involved in planning anti-war civil disobedience designed to shut down San Francisco’s Financial District. This is interesting, since Langley used to be president of the Pacific Exchange. More recently, he was almost named CEO of a Nasdaq/Liffe venture, although apparently they couldn’t come to terms on a contract. Langley also served in the U.S. Air Force after graduating from the U.S. Air Force Academy.

Damned pinko.

Wrapped to go

March 5, 2003
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It’s been a busy few days in the Iraq debate. Let’s summarize — no, is not enough! Let’s predict!

Turkey declined the opportunity to help out with the war over the weekend, but now the Turkish military is pushing for a revote. Remember, in Turkey, the military is a political force unto itself. Now, there’s no chance that Abdullah Gul, the current Prime Minister, is going to call that vote this week. Gul has no leverage to push for a revote; he’s a lame duck. There’s a by-election coming on Sunday, in which Recep Tayyip Erdogan will undoubtedly gain a parliamentary seat. As leader of the ruling Justice and Development Party, he’ll be elected Prime Minister immediately. (Up until quite recently, he was banned from running for Parliament, largely because of — wait for it — the Turkish military. Now you know why the government has been in favor of aiding the US; the JDP needs to keep on the military’s good side.)

The US has not shifted troop ships away from Turkey and towards Kuwait as of this writing, which tells you that someone expects there’s still a chance Turkey will change its mind.

Is pushing for a revote undemocratic? It depends. The Turkish Constitution says you can’t allow foreign troops to be based on Turkish soil for a war unless there’s international consensus behind that war. Right now, this means UN approval, like it or not. If a new resolution authorizing war is passed, then the situation has changed and another vote is reasonable. If that happens there’s no doubt that Turkey will OK the northern front. If the situation doesn’t change, there’s no grounds for another vote and we may see another Turkish military coup yet.

Meanwhile, Capitol Hill Blue reports that Colin Powell wants an exit strategy. If the US brings a new resolution to the floor and loses the vote, it’s bad. It means we don’t get a northern front, and it means that Blair’s government very likely falls if the invasion still takes place.

A side note on that last, since there’s some confusion on the topic. A significant portion of Blair’s own party just voted against him despite being told in the strongest possible terms that they should vote yes. Labor Party MPs were afraid that their local parties will de-select them — the rough equivalent of being kicked out of (say) the local Democratic Party — if they voted for the war. Blair did not weather the worst of the storm. He got a warning of very bad weather ahead. He needs UN authorization just as badly as the Turkish government.

Is it any wonder that the US is feeling the utmost urgency regarding the second resolution? Despite the hordes of warmongers (including Bush) who claim that this is really just a chance for the UN to decide whether or not it’s relevant, the second resolution is make or break for the war. The UN has already demonstrated that it’s relevant. There should be no doubt of that after the Turkish vote and the Labor Party revolt. Which, I note tangentially, is pretty interesting. Since when do citizens and politicians care so much about an extranational organization? Since now, I guess.

Another parenthetical: a 9 member majority vote for the resolution is more important than an unvetoed resolution. If the resolution is passed but vetoed, then it can be spun as a success even though three of the permanent members of the Security Council are against it. I would in fact agree with that stance — in the same way as I object to the repeated US vetos of resolutions concerning Israel. Mind you, the results of such a stance would weaken the US’s ability to effectively veto anti-Israeli resolutions, but that’s a smaller problem right now.

So, we’re seeing a lot of propaganda and politics on both sides. France, Russia, and Germany are hanging tough. Meanwhile, the US and England are predicting success. Nothing you wouldn’t expect on either front. The real news this morning is the UN plan to reconstruct Iraq, first revealed by the London Times. The US role in that plan is discussed by the Financial Times (link may expire, read quick!).

Read that as Bush admitting that he needs the UN: it’s a concession. I’m glad he’s making it and I’m not surprised that he was forced to make it. The next week or so will tell us if it’s sufficient. Blix will be reporting again on Friday, and it’s unlikely to be a favorable moment for the pro-war countries, but you won’t see any decisions before then in any case.

And that, my friends, is realpolitik.

School of Athletics

March 4, 2003
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Kevin Drum comments on an excellent post by Eugene Volokh on college sports. The core question: “Why should we be demanding that athletes who are getting an education in athletics pass muster under academic standards, or for that matter engage in academics at all?”

I feel obliged to observe that in many cases, we aren’t. Let’s look at the four major North American professional sports. Neither the NHL or MLB really care much about college educations. Not coincidentally, both of them have very good minor league systems, in which hockey or baseball players respectively can get fine educations in their sport. The NBA doesn’t have much of a farm league, and angsts a fair bit about kids coming straight to the NBA. Since there’s no way for a team to keep the rights to a player while sending him to the minor leagues to mature, this is no big surprise. The NFL is in the same boat.

It can’t be a coincidence that college basketball and football are big money, while college baseball and hockey are not. I think the connection is that the significant talents in the former two sports almost have to go to college; on the flip side, the best baseball players may not wind up in the college game. We Americans like to see the best and the biggest, after all.

This implies that one very practical road to reform for college athletics would be for the NFL and NBA to revise their draft rules such that it was possible to draft a player and keep his rights while he played in another league. Wouldn’t require any significant infrastructure investments, wouldn’t require any changes to NCAA regulations. It wouldn’t be necessary to affiliate minor league teams with the major league teams, although such affiliation is useful for other reasons. Just let teams keep the rights to people they draft for a couple of years.

Two kids enter

March 4, 2003
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I’ve sort of been putting off writing about Battle Royale on account of “Damn, I have no idea what to make of that.” But faint heart never won Oscar, or some such, so let’s see if we can make some sense out of the uber-controversial high school Series 7.

First off, the brief summary: a class of Japanese high school students are brought to an island, given random weapons, and they don’t get to leave till only one is left alive. If they don’t get to that point within a few days, they all die. This is theoretically part of a program to deal with juvenile delinquency. Carnage ensues.

It’s a tremendously bloody movie. I wouldn’t call it gory, but I would certainly call it violent. No worse than your average R-rated horror flick — which is kind of interesting, because those usually contain a hefty slice of violence directed at teenagers, but they don’t provoke the same kind of reaction as Battle Royale. It’s OK when it’s the monsters doing the slicing.

Taking a step back from the subject matter, and thinking of it purely as an action movie, it’s not bad. The tension is good, the acting is good, and the plot is decent. It’s not the be all and end all of action flicks, but it’s solid. Not too surprising, considering the director, Kinji Fukasaku, had been making movies for 40 years. But that’s the easy part of the analysis.

When I get closer to the subject matter, I just hit a wall. Series 7 is a satire and commentary on reality shows. This ain’t that; there’s no hint of the game show to it, although it’s clear the survivor will become a national hero. However, the event isn’t televised. So what can I make of it? What is Fukasaku getting at here?

The 1998 White Paper on Crime may be a relevant reference point. It’s particularly concerned with juvenile delinquency, which is covered beginning here. The crime rate among Japanese youth was up severely in 1998, and the nature of the crimes committed seems to have been fairly disturbing: “The survey results on juvenile offenders also indicated that in bodily injury cases, the number of those with motivations of ‘Passion’ has shown a remarkably higher percentage than ‘Grudge or Revenge’, while the results of the survey on characteristics of juveniles admitted to juvenile classification homes (hereinafter the ‘survey results on juveniles in juvenile classification homes’) showed that the motivation of ‘on the spur of the moment’ has been the highest in homicide cases.”

The White Paper seems to have been fairly prophetic, given this BBC report on the subject. Be sure to read the sidebar titled Japan Teen Attacks, and see also this article. I notice, in particular, that the kids are attacking not just each other but adults — which, understandably, is a matter of some concern. In contrast, the media-driven frenzy in the US focuses on self-directed violence in the form of school shootings.

(This shouldn’t be taken to mean that I think no US teens commit violence against adults, or that all Japanese teen violence is directed towards adults. I’m doing culture analysis here, so I’m interested in how teen violence is depicted.)

I’m thinking that Battle Royale has to be interpreted in the context of both Japanese concerns about juvenile delinquency and the generation gap (a la Speed Tribes). In that light, it’s an expression of angst and fear. It is, perhaps, a horror movie after all, but the monster is the generation gap.

It's all true

March 3, 2003
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I know everybody says this, but man, there are a metric boatload of pretty badly formed RSS feeds out there. I have most of an application written that trawls a blogrolling.com blogroll for RSS feeds and generates a “friends” page from whatever it finds. I even respect “Last-Modified” headers. Unfortunately, everyone kicks out bad RSS. Some people also have pretty flaky RSS autodiscovery bumpf — Atrios, for example, winds up pointing my l’il robot to an RSS feed containing the last few comments on his blog. Weird. I could work around that, though, although it would kind of kill the glorious automation purity I’ve got now.

What really gives me hives is the malformed feeds, though. Yeesh. Maybe I can steal some code from Amphetadesk, or maybe Mark Pilgrim has some useful stuff. Oooh, or wait, mt-rssfeed has a liberal parser module which does not require me to run Python. Hm.

Wayback machine, please

March 2, 2003
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The Observer has a story on US war plans:

America intends to depose Saddam Hussein by giving armed support to Iraqi opposition forces across the country… the plan, opposed by Tony Blair and other European Union leaders, threatens to blow apart the increasingly shaky international consensus behind the US-led ‘war on terrorism’.

It envisages a combined operation with US bombers targeting key military installations while US forces assist opposition groups in the North and South of the country in a stage-managed uprising. One version of the plan would have US forces fighting on the ground.

Despite US suspicions of Iraqi involvement in the 11 September attacks, the trigger for any attack, sources say, would be the anticipated refusal of Iraq to resubmit to inspections for weapons of mass destruction under the United Nations sanctions imposed after the Gulf war.

Well, there you go. Date: 12/2/2001.