A.C. -- I wonder if I saw that same docu. Animal Planet ... Focusing on a woman scientist who has worked to save Devils? Anyway, fascinating. And like you I was struck by how semi-realistic the WB Tasmanian Devil really is. Bizarre animals. Weird the way they scavenge, too, isn't it? I mean, they apparently eat everything -- bones, eyes, everything.

The Lock -- That sounds like a great experience for you, it's certainly a great story, thanks. I think the whole "white kid who gets a chance to interact with black people" thing generally is really interesting. I'm sorry people are so touchy about racial matters these days that only comedians are allowed to talk about this stuff. How else are we supposed to learn? As for the lady in the video, I was walking around for hours afterwards trying to figure out what she was talking about. Seemed to make sense, but my poor inadequate mind had a need to translate it into white English. Something like, "Some women who are getting good loving lose their heads, because women are like that, and don't recognize what a dog the guy doing the high-quality banging is," maybe? If so: ain't that the truth? You're reminding me of a funny moment I once encountered. I knew a black guy who was a little paranoid about racial things. He thought he was being picked on by white people. But he got a white girlfriend at one point and spent some real time inside white life, and he came away from it saying something like, "You know, I always thought they were treating me like that [a little chilly and distant by his standards, was my guess] because I was black. In fact, they treat each other that way too. That's just the way white people are." I guess by the standards of many black people, many white people are kind of chilly, reserved, non-demonstrative, uptight, and certainly non-funky. Sometimes I think it's amazing that people manage to get along at all ...

J. Goard -- The whole IQ and the arts question is a ... peculiar one, isn't it? Fun to think about. Yet how seriously should it be taken? My own sorry brain tends to hang up on two points. One is the question of who selects the canon and the greats? Profs, monks, intellectuals, at least in large part. Of course they're going to tend to prefer complicated art that's more intellectual than most -- so of course it's gonna look like the Greats tend to be smart. The other thing I hang up on is: Why this fixation on the timeless greats? That just seems unfair. Why not discuss contempo people who are arts pros? After all, if IQ has anything to do with arts success, they should be smarter than average too. Certainly contempo pro engineers and scientists tend to be IQ-style smarter than average -- they have to be just to get into those fields. If you're talking about IQ and those fields, you don't need to make reference to Newton, you can just refer to any working bridge engineer. But in the contempo arts, I'm not remotely impressed by brains. I'm mostly struck by how many successful artists/writers/etc are quite dim. I once attended a PEN conference, for instance, and spent time listening to and yakking with international writing superstars. It was one of the biggest collections of ninnies I've ever encountered. So my conclusion tends to be that IQ-type brains have nothing to do with art talent, which is an independent function (like athletic or singing talent). If you have talent and you're smart in an IQ sense, you can use your IQ-brains to tease the talent up a little further, or add to complexity of your art -- assuming that (and this is a big assumption) you're able to put the IQ-style brains at the service of the art-talent, something many bright people can't in fact do. (The brains tend to take over, the talent tends to rebel ...) What are your own hunches about these questions? Anyway, I'm glad people wrestle with these topics, just unsure how seriously any of us should take them...

MQ -- I think those are all good points. I'm not sure Yahmdallah intended to put down Sofia, just to characterize her. But maybe not. Anyway, it's an interesting development in movie history, that the pampered trust-fund dandy/princess should be able to make feature films. Used to be that they'd paint a few pictures, or publish a small volume of poetry or stories, or just hang out and look good in bohemia. Now (with the right connections anyway) they can make feature movies instead. Lordy, it's still a lot of work, though. Why on earth would anyone who doesn't have some overwhelming need to make a feature movie bother at all? I wonder if, what with DV and all, the narcissistic aristocratic type wouldn't find it more congenial to videoblog, or at least to do far more modest video-things than full-scale movies ...

Robert -- That's very funny! I wish we could bring Will back and set him loose among the starchitects.

FvB -- That freaked me out too. Infectious cancer? Good lord, it's the end of the world.

Posted by: Michael Blowhard on May 11, 2007 11:15 AM

I was just in Tasmania last week and can say that the possible demise of the Devil is very much on everyone's mind as it was mentioned repeatedly by most everyone I met.

I can say that the island has no lack of kangaroos and/or wallabees as I saw probably more than 20 dead by the side of the road and dozens of others running about as I drove through the country one night and in fact unfortunately killed one myself after it darted in front of my rental car.

Posted by: grandcosmo on May 11, 2007 1:11 PM

Why our military spending is so high relative to other nations. No country enjoys as much freedom and opportunity as we do. To the extent they (Europe, Australia, South America, etc.) have these things, they are beholden to our massive nuclear and convential weapons arsenal. We alone stand in the way of those that would deprive us of these things: Russia, China, Iran, Venezuela, etc. So rather than seeing our budget as a half-empty glass, we should see it as a half-full glass.

On another but related issue, it is undisputable that we have a half-full military budget insofar as Iraq and Iran are concerned. This statement assumes that the use of nuclear weapons is not an option for us.

Posted by: Paul Henri on May 11, 2007 2:06 PM

Mr. Henri:

Your comment reminds me of something I read in "Foreign Affairs", to wit, that the U.S. justifies its global leadership by underwriting (that is, paying for) a number of international public goods, e.g., stable territorial boundaries, freedom of the seas, etc.

My question is, I can see very clearly what the U.S.'s global leadership does for people who want to be president, or more broadly for the people who write and read "Foreign Affairs" (in the way of jobs, prestige, various sinecures) but what does it do for, well, me? Or for many other portions of our population that pay taxes to provide all those international public goods? I sense a massive who-whom problem: who pays for the benefits which accrue to whom?

Remember, there was a time (the Gilded Age) when the U.S. had virtually no armed services and no international entanglements. Was it really a time of fewer liberties, of lower opportunity, or even of lower global capital flows (relative to the size of the economies of the time) than today?

Posted by: Friedrich von Blowhard on May 11, 2007 6:25 PM

Friedrich: I agree 110% with your implicit point, but I suspect most professional foreign affairs types would argue that the international order of the Gilded Age worked well because Britain, rather than the U.S., guaranteed international public goods and the U.S. benefited from that.

Of course, Britain's insistence on being the Top Dog guaranteeing the international order was one factor that helped lead to WWI, and that did not work out well at all. Perhaps it would be best if we did not rely on arrogant, armed-to-the-teeth hegemons to guarantee international public goods. It's not like you need a military anything near the size of the U.S. to, like, prevent piracy these days.

Posted by: MQ on May 12, 2007 3:14 PM

Friedrich: It was Pax Britannia back then, not Pax Americana.

Posted by: Intellectual Pariah on May 12, 2007 5:54 PM

On Devil Facial Tumor Disease

First seen on tasmanian devils in north-east Tasmania in 1996. It's what's known as an immortal cancer line, much like Sticker's Sarcoma (a contagious cancer of domestic dogs). DFTD appears around the head and mouth because tazzies love to bite and mouth. The Tasmanian state government in cooperation with the Australian federal government and zoological associations around the world are setting up breeding colonies in an attempt to save the species.

The is evidence that DFTD is somehow descended from Sticker's Sarcoma. Probably happened when a tazzie scavenged a dead dog.

Posted by: Alan Kellogg on May 13, 2007 9:37 AM

May I suggest we find some sucker to hand Pax Americana off to at the earliest possible opportunity? This is one time I think we'd do well not to hog all the, er, fun.

Seriously, I'd love to see a good history of the selling of the notion that it is America's job-duty-responsibility-burden to run the world. If you took a poll today, I doubt one person in ten would object to this notion, although I think it would be quite hard to justify it on a cost-benefit analysis, at least for most people.

Historically, I think it's overwhelmingly clear that Pax Britannica did NOT pay off well for the U.K., and probably caused more problems over the long haul for the rest of the world as well than if Britain had stuck to its domestic knitting. (I'm not saying it was utterly without any positive impacts, just trying to be clear-eyed about both the benefits and the costs.)

P.S. If anybody seriously disagrees with me, I'd love to hear their arguments.

Posted by: Friedrich von Blowhard on May 14, 2007 2:27 PM

Well, no fun for you FB, because I completely agree with you.

Pax Americana really works for a small, incestuous bunch of foreign policy types who get to be armchair generals.

Also, of course, there's all the people on the military funding teat. On net, excessive military funding is a big economic loss (all that effort could be put to better use somewhere else), but if it's your livelihood then of course you are invested in its continuation.

Posted by: mq on May 14, 2007 2:45 PM

I'm a complete amateur in this field, so I'm jumping into this debate a bit nervously.

My understanding of "pax britannica" was that it began more or less by accident, "in a fit of absence of mind," as an attempt to create conditions favourable for trade.

It went something like this: Britain needed new markets for its manufactured goods; traders went in (to India, for example) and established trading posts in this or that region; the trading companies found that local conditions made trade difficult; they then demanded English firepower to "protect" them, or to remove some impediment to trade. Eventually, the original trading companies found that they had to set up what was in effect a civil service, to carry out the work of administering the government of territories they had originally entered and occupied solely for mercantile reasons.

So I believe the question should be, can any great manufacturing nation continue to function without doing something of the same kind, when either its markets or the raw materials needed for its manufacturing sector are threatened?

I'm inclined to hope that this approach is not necessary, but I don't know. Anyway, I think if you want to consider the whole issue of "America as world policeman," that's the question you need to answer.

Posted by: alias clio on May 14, 2007 7:25 PM

If you believe the "fit of absent-mindedness" line, perhaps you'd also be interested in purchasing the Brooklyn Bridge? Seriously, any inhabitant of North America should be well aware that the British interest in overseas colonies well predates India.

As for manufacturing countries "needing" imperial colonies: the opposite would be closer to the mark. Colonies and imperialism have been money-losers for quite some time, which is one reason why it is a less popular business than it used to be. When you manufacture good products, you don't generally need to force people to purchase them at gunpoint. When you manufacture good products and people purchase them, you then have the money you need to buy necessary raw materials from suppliers on mutually beneficial terms, instead of taking said raw materials at gunpoint.

Posted by: mq on May 15, 2007 4:57 PM

MQ - sorry for responding so late, but, yeah, what I said about Ms. Coppola was not meant to be a slur.

Posted by: yahmdallah on May 15, 2007 5:04 PM

MQ,

The colonies of North America were themselves established by accident, in a manner of speaking. They were discovered when French and English ships were looking for a sea-route to the orient. And they, at least, were not money-losers, as far as I have been able to determine.

As for India, it certainly became a money-loser, but that was later in the history of the relationship between Britain and India. In the beginning, the situation was as I described it: it was settled not by true colonists but by traders seeking first to buy Indian goods not available in Britain (left that out before) and later to establish markets there. The East India Company's initial Crown Charter (1609) was valid only so long as the company was profitable; three years of loss meant loss of the charter.

Did they "need" these goods? Well, perhaps not, but surely they thought they did. They wanted things India had (cotton, silk and spices); they wanted to manufacture luxury goods there and sell them in Britain.

My point was not that English traders had to impose selling or buying at gun point, but that in order to establish trading posts in India, they found that it was necessary to establish a military presence, first to protect them from European rivals and then to administer the chaotic regions in which their new factories were located.

Even then, it was the East Indian Company, and not the English gov't, that handled the administrative work for decades, until the "Indian Mutiny," or Sepoy Rebellion, in 1857.

I'm not defending any of this as either righteous or necessary. I'm simply saying that it grew out of perceived mercantile wants and needs at that time, with gov't support of course, and not out of Britain's wish to protect or police the world. Those were later justifications.

Posted by: alias clio on May 15, 2007 7:34 PM

Whether it grew out of perceived mercantile wants and needs is a separate question from whether it was required by those needs. And as a question of motivations, it is also highly subjective. One can add that Britain's mercantile wants were hopelessly bound up, from the beginning, with its colonialist ones. For Europe, economic and imperial expansion were tied tightly together from the beginning of the age of exploration. Traders were financed by the national government in part for military reasons. The fundamental issue is that Europe prior to a certain point did not understand the concept of gains from trade from free capitalism, and instead had a mercantilist philosophy which emphasized seizing resources and setting the terms of trade by force.

Yes, traders may need protection from militarily hostile natives in order to trade. If one takes the notion of native sovereignty seriously (which Europe did not), one relies on the proper government of that nation to provide such protection, and if they refuse to guarantee it, one still respects their sovereignty.

As for whether imperialism is a money loser or not: I'm curious as to the research you have found or performed on the net gains to Britain of its American colonies. I think it is very probable that the American colonies in particular were a money loser to Britain, when one measures relative to the potential gains from free trade with a sovereign and independent United States. The American Revolution was a protracted war which was quite expensive for Britain to fight.

The key question for whether imperialism is profitable is whether the natives effectively mount violent resistance. When Europe had enough of a technological advantage to dominate militarily, and was willing to commit genocide on native peoples if necessary, then imperialism was cheaper.

Posted by: mq on May 16, 2007 1:16 AM

I agree with the whole of your first paragraph.

I'm not certain I understand the point of your second paragraph, or rather, I think I do, but you seem to be referring to different issues than the ones I spoke of in mentioning India's case. The native peoples there weren't militarily hostile, at least at first. The Mughal emperors actually encouraged the establishment of British trading posts there.

It was the chaos and absence of government in many parts of the sub-continent, as Mughal military power declined, that made it necessary for the East India Co. to become involved in administrative work. Or that's the excuse. I don't know what Indian historians say about this.

There are many modern parallels. Diplomats or company execs make friends with and support a local strongman in order to be able to work in a particular region (Idi Amin? Saddam Hussein?), only to discover in a few years' time that an alliance of local tribes/ethnic groups etc. has arisen against him and is threatening to slaughter your workers for supporting him. What to do?

Your third paragraph, regarding net profitability of North America: in my previous comment, I now realise, I was confusing two separate periods of history. I don't know about the profitability of American colonies prior to 1776. I do know that Canada was a loss for France. It was always expensive to run, as a colony - hostile natives, you know. The habitants here were always greatly outnumbered by Aboriginal peoples, and though some became allies, many did not.

I do know that in the nineteenth century, both Canada (still an English colony until 1867) and the United States were supposed to have been a far greater source of investment profit for Britain than India was. But I believe that the net profits from the East India trade were still quite high.

India gave Britain a place to get rid of middle-class citizens who lacked the business ability or skilled-trade qualifications to succeed in industrializing Britain. Sort of like law school in today's high-tech economy...

Prior to the late 19th century, as you hint in your first paragraph, mercantilist theories of economics led governments to believe that trade was a "zero-sum" game. (Am I using that expression correctly?) Only so much wealth in the world. What one country gains, another loses.

Posted by: alias clio on May 16, 2007 9:27 AM






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