The end of the golden age

A. O. Scott writes (via Christopher Orr) that the super-hero movie may have peaked this summer. I'm inclined to agree, though not quite for Scott's reasons. I've said to several people over the past week that, not only does Dark Knight seem to leave the Batman franchise with nowhere to go but down, but it may also kill off the golden age of comic-book-adaptation movies we've been enjoying for the past several years (clunkers like Catwoman and LXG notwithstanding). With Iron Man, they seem to have just about figured out how to perfect the genre... and then along comes Dark Knight to move out of the genre, and make the prospect of seeing a movie about, say, Green Lantern seem dreary, no matter how well it's done. (Dark Knight busted out of its genre and became other things like "psychological thriller," with one of the best villains that genre's ever had. Green Lantern can only bust out by becoming space opera-- and moving under the shadow of Battlestar Galactica.)

I saw Hellboy II just a few days before DK, and it was great fun-- visually stunning, and a lot more entertaining than the first one. But if I'd seen it a few days after, I think I would have wondered, "what's the point?" And Hellboy's not even a superhero adaptation. For the costumed crowd, I think what we've just seen is as good as it gets.

CFP: International Theory

International Theory
A Journal of International Politics, Law and Philosophy

International Theory invites authors to submit original theoretically oriented articles on the positive, legal, and/or normative aspects of world politics. Because IT is multidisciplinary with a broad intended audience, contributions must be as accessible as possible to readers from a wide range of disciplines and theoretical traditions. Papers that are primarily empirical or policy oriented are not a good fit.

We will not review manuscripts that have already been published, are scheduled for publication elsewhere, or have been simultaneously submitted to another journal; this applies to both print and online formats. All articles will be peer-reviewed by anonymous referees drawn for our Editorial Board and, on their advice, from relevant scholars around the world. Referees for the previous calendar year will be acknowledged in the final issue of each volume.

IT will review articles up to 15,000 words (including notes and bibliography), although authors will be encouraged to trim their papers to fewer than 12,000 words before publication. Brevity is encouraged and shorter papers will be advantaged in acceptance decisions. Please include a word count with submission, along with an abstract of approximately 200 words which is not repeated from the paper itself.

References and citations should follow The Chicago Manual of Style. Citations in the text or footnotes should be limited to author’s family name and date, with complete bibliographic information appearing in a list of references at the end of the article. The one exception is for legal articles; while strongly encouraged to follow the author-date system, if that proves unworkable legal authors may substitute the European Journal of International Law guidelines (available at http://www.ejil.org/info/style-toc.html).

Either way, titles of journals should not be abbreviated in the list of references (author-date system) or in the footnotes (legal articles). Tables and figures should be placed on separate pages at the end of the article with their desired location indicated in the text. Authors should submit their manuscript in electronic form as a MS Word file in an email attachment to it.mershon@osu.edu. (Please do not submit the manuscript in PDF format). Authors should attach both a complete version of the manuscript as well as an anonymous version stripped of all identifying references to the author(s) that can be sent to reviewers.

If an electronic version is not available, one complete version of the paper and three copies of the anonymous version of the manuscript should be sent to:

International Theory
The Mershon Center
Department of Political Science
The Ohio State University
Columbus, OH 43210
USA

Manuscripts will not be returned to authors.

Any questions about these procedures may be directed to the Editors at the address or email above.

There's still...

snow on the ground.

Elsewhere

Via M. LeBlanc, the Bechdel Rule, from Alison Bechdel, the creator of Fun Home.

The rule is that movies should have 1) at least two women, 2) who talk to each other, 3) about something other than a man.

I'd never heard this articulated in this way before, but LeBlanc is right-- it gets at something important, and remarkably few mainstream movies satisfy it. I can't offhand think of any recent genre film besides "Stardust" that qualifies-- not even any of the X-Men movies, even though they had a number of women and weren't romance-focused. (Most conversations in those movies were with Wolverine, Magneto, or to a lesser extent Xavier, weren't they?) I guess the Next Generation Star Trek movies probably did, since Beverly and Deanna had an established friendship, but I can't think of the scenes offhand. If little girls count, then "The Golden Compass" and the Narnia films qualify.

I'm not going to use the Bechdel rule as a way to judge whether to go to a movie, but I do find it (and LeBlanc's discussion of it) immediately helpful as a way to think about what's often missing from movies.

Promoting equality of the sexes...

by excluding women from citizenship. Notice that her husband, who presumably shares her religious views, is already a citizen.

Friday fun links

1) "Why Batman could exist-- but not for long," at Scientific American (HT: Tyler.

2) I've been an absolutely resolute skeptic of the Watchmen movie. Yes, it's a masterpiece, but it's an incredibly formal (that is, form-al, of and within and about the form of the comic book) masterpiece. Frank Miller puts movies onto the comic book page, and when you put the comics onto the movie screen, it works great. (And indeed works better the more you just treat the comics as a shot-for-shot storyboard.) That's not what Alan Moore does, and is not what Watchmen is like, and I've said to all who asked that I thought this movie was a terrible mistake-- something like making a ballet of an e.e. cummings poem, or a comic book of the Ode To Joy.

But reliable geek-taste friend Aeon Skoble sends an e-mail that says, simply, This. Looks. Awesome. and... uh... he's right. Very right. Right enough that I'm officially shutting up in my skepticism for now. (Update: I see that Julian Sanchez, who knows a thing or two about Rorschach, had a similar reaction.)

3) As of yet, there is no... Act 3. But if you haven't caught up yet, now's the time.

Have you watched...

this yet, and if not, why not? What do you think the internet is for, people?

Update: Act 2.

I think...

that I have to differ with Dan's widely praised account of recent events around Dan's and my old haunts.

Dan hypothesizes that "the opposition [of about 100 University of Chicago faculty members to the creation of the new Milton Friedman Institute] is grounded less on ideology and more on an effort to ensure these departments get a bigger slice of the pie." Dan and Jonathan Adler both see this as a Friedmanite explanation of the opposition: ordinary institutional material self-interest. Those who aren't gonna get, want.

But the thing is that that's silly.

I know a lot of the people who signed the letter-- some are friends, some are most decidedly not, some I respect, some not, but almost none are silly or prone to silly mistakes about self-interest. And in terms of absolute self-interest, rising university tides lift a lot of boats. The $200 million in donations the University is planning on for the Institute will include a lot of new money the university wouldn't otherwise get, from people who either want to honor Friedman, from people who are excited about the institutional mission of re-bridging the disparate economics programs at Chicago (where Nobel Laureates in Economics teach in three different divisions-- Social Sciences, Business, and Law), or from people who believe in the future importance of Chicago-style economics and want to invest in the intellectual mission. Those donors aren't likely donors to the Anthropology, Political Science, or English departments.

But if the Institute is created, then there's an inflow of money at one point in the university's budget that at least loosens constraints at other points. That's the way these things work. Some part of the economics department's existing expenses get shuffled over to the Institute. If, as seems likely, Econ physically relocates to the MFI, a whole lot of new office space gets created or opened in the middle of campus. A new group of visiting fellowships and positions mean increased possibilities for matched-spouse hiring and visitorships. Wherever you look, you see ancillary material benefits for departments in a university that gets a $200 million infusion, increased national and international prominence, new positions and buildings and so on and so forth. In the language of neoclassical economics, the creation of the MFI is a Pareto improvement from the university's perspective-- some departments gain a lot, some gain a little, but none will materially lose. It seems to me that a self-interest explanation for the opposition fails, unless the signatories really don't understand the positive-sum dynamic at work. That seems unlikely to me.

But, as has been discussed in this space before, liberal arts academics make very poor homo economici. We've survived several rounds of selection out-- if we were sound calculators of financial self-interest, we wouldn't have gotten PhDs in the first place, and once we had them we would have tried for private-sector employment rather than tenure-track placement, and in any event there ought to be a lot more of us getting science, engineering, and economics degrees and a lot fewer in English lit. And then we chose tenure-- which, on any reasonable bargaining model, means we chose to give up expected-value in dollar terms in exchange for stability. Either we're all very silly, or we optimize on other dimensions.

And a dimension on which we're notoriously strong optimizers is amour propre, status, relative advantage. It more or less has to be so, given the institutional structure. (As I said in the post linked-to above: if you're going to offer people lifetime employment and so make them relatively impervious to financial inducements, you'd better select for people who are so prone to status inducements, or so self-motivated as to believe that what they have to say and write is desperately important to be said and written, that they're going to keep working hard. And they do keep working hard-- fantastically hard, in many cases, and for decades after their jobs no longer depend on it.)

Now, if you model academic behavior as rational, mutually-distinterested self-interest, you find that everyone should welcome an inflow of $200 million into another part of their university. You predict that there will be no opposition.

If, however, you model academic behavior as a status game, more concerned with relative position than with absolute position, and you find that your university is going to take the fields that are already very high-status in the world and relatively even higher status within your institution, and symbolically endow them with even greater status by making them more central to the institution's name and identity and campus and budget, then things look very different. The promise of getting the econ department's leftover offices and the spilloff from the interest on the new endowment pale in comparison to what will be lost. You predict that there will, in fact, be opposition.

It has always been a serious obstacle to economic analyses that persons are not mutually disinterested, that they do care about relative and not merely absolute advantage, that they are willing to suffer material loss so that someone else does not make a positional gain. The models rest on the hope that what Hirschman famously described as the contest between the passions and the interests-- the normative project of trying to persuade people to be self-interested, instead of passionately prideful and vengeful and envious-- has been, to a first approximation, won by the interests. The harmony of interests implied by invisible-hand liberalism is a harmony of absolute interests. There can never be a spontaneous harmony of relative interests-- the prideful and the vainglorious are always engaged in zero-sum games at best, as Hobbes and his successors understood well.

It seems to me that Dan and Jonathan Adler are wrong-- that what we have here is not confirmation of the economist's hope, but its opposite. It's not behavior that fits neatly into any of Milton Friedman's schema; it's behavior that undermines them.

To buy, tout de suite

French Political Thought from Montesquieu to Tocqueville: Liberty in a Levelled Society?

Cambridge University Press, Ideas in Context

Annelien de Dijn

This study makes a major contribution to our understanding of one of the most important and enduring strands of modern political thought. Annelien de Dijn argues that Montesquieu’s aristocratic liberalism - his conviction that the preservation of freedom in a monarchy required the existence of an aristocratic ‘corps intermédiaire’ - had a continued impact on post-revolutionary France. Revisionist historians from Furet to Rosanvallon have emphasised the impact of revolutionary republicanism on post-revolutionary France, with its monist conception of politics and its focus on popular sovereignty. Dr de Dijn, however, highlights the persistence of a pluralist liberalism that was rooted in the Old Regime, and which saw democracy and equality as inherent threats to liberty. She thus provides a new context in which to read the work of Alexis de Tocqueville, who is revealed as the heir not just of Restoration liberals, but also of the Royalists and their hero, Montesquieu.

Dog bites man

New Faculty Members Say Graduate School Left Them Underprepared

Many young faculty members fresh out of graduate school who have been teaching for less than five years feel their graduate educations left them underprepared for faculty positions, according to a recently released survey.

The standard model of sociophysics

at orgtheory. A very important chart!

Really, I love Montreal and all...

for six months a year it's the best city in North America-- but I need my lefty American friends not to keep telling me that what's so wonderful about Canada is the health care system. (Note: this is the hospital nearest my home; in the event of an emergency, that's my relevant emergency room.)

Mac users...

can now force themselves to be free, or bind themselves to the mast with a timed release from their restraints-- chooseyour preferred traditional imagery. Hat tip: aufheben.

American Society for Political and Legal Philosophy, August 2008: "Evolution and Morality"

This year the ASPLP meets in conjunction with the APSA in Boston.

Panel 1
Date: Thursday, Aug 28, 4:15 PM
Author: Philip Kitcher
Paper: "Naturalistic Ethics without Fallacies"
Commentators: Robin B. Kar; Jonathan Beckwith


American Society for Political and Legal Philosophy Evening Reception
Date: Thursday, Aug 28, 7:30 PM


American Society for Political and Legal Philosophy Breakfast Reception)
Date: Friday, Aug 29, 7:00 AM

Panel 2:
Date: Friday, Aug 29, 8:00 AM
Author: Nita Farahany
Commentators: Walter Sinnott-Armstrong; Jennifer Culbert
Chair: Jacob T. Levy

Panel 3:
Date: Friday, Aug 29, 10:15 AM
Author: Larry Arnhart
Paper: "Deep History in Biopolitical Science"
Commentators: Daniel Lord Smail; Richard Richards
Chair: James E. Fleming

Happy Independence Day!

For your viewing pleasure: No more kings!

Declaration of Independence quotes of the day

The history of the present King of Great Britain is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute Tyranny over these States. To prove this, let Facts be submitted to a candid world.

[...]

He has endeavoured to prevent the population of these States; for that purpose obstructing the Laws for Naturalization of Foreigners; refusing to pass others to encourage their migrations hither, and raising the conditions of new Appropriations of Lands.

[...]

He has erected a multitude of New Offices, and sent hither swarms of Officers to harass our people and eat out their substance.

[...]

He has combined with others to subject us to a jurisdiction foreign to our constitution, and unacknowledged by our laws; giving his Assent to their Acts of pretended Legislation:[...] For cutting off our Trade with all parts of the world[...]

The Holiday season, con't

A few hours past the halfway mark between Canada Day and the Fourth, go rent Blue State. A cute little charmer of an indie comedy that has a surprising bite to it, this is tale of two Americans trying to move to Canada in the wake of the 2004 presidential election. It paints with a pretty broad brush sometimes, but it does so in a pretty equal-opportunity way (the annoyingly earnest Kerry activist, the Limbaugh-listening military family president, and O, the Canadians...) and mostly in ways that still provide humor based on recognition and on truth. And if some of the movie is more about Canadian stereotypes of Americans and vice-versa than it really is about either place, well, border-crossings are sometimes like that.

Rogue the kid from The Piano Anna Paquin really shines; I hadn't seen her in a lead role before, and while costar Breckin Mayer gets a majority of the character-establishing rat-a-tat dialogue, her character fully balances his on the strength of Paquin's acting.

To American expats in Canada, it's very funny.

Quote of the day runner-up

from Amber Taylor: "Darwin Award Playoffs Begin: Idiots make pilgrimage to site of other idiot's death; are likely to die idiotically." (Click through to see the context.)

Something I had not realized...

that greatly surprised me.

The Solicitor General filed an amicus brief in Plains Commerce Bank v Long in favor of tribal jurisdiction. (The Court ruled the other way, of course.)

That was the correct position for the federal government to take, in its capacity as trustee for Indian tribes and in line with its official policy of encouraging institution-building for self-determination. But just because it's correct doesn't mean I would have expected it.

The brief is quite good. (The SG's office hires pretty good lawyers, after all.) A pleasant surprise-- the first so far, in my reading of the case and its materials.

Quote of the day

From Julian Sanchez:

I was having a conversation with a couple friends the other night about our own ideological trajectories, and I mentioned how my attitude had shifted toward a semi-famous essay by Robert Nozick called “The Zig-Zag of Politics.” This is the one where Nozick was seen as renouncing his youthful libertarian views—though when I interviewed him in 2001, he claimed that reports of his apostasy had been much exaggerated. I used to think this was a befuddling instance of a thinker who’d made some brilliant and original arguments for the libertarian position backing away from it for some pretty poor reasons. I still think that about some of the arguments floated there: Expressing our symbolic concern for the poor is all well and good, but it is a poor justification if the means of doing so are both ineffective and otherwise morally questionable.

But one of the central ideas there—and a theme in much of his later work—was that no deductive moral or political system could embed as much wisdom as the process of deliberation and reform over time. I wrote about this a couple years back when I said, somewhat anachronistically, that Nozick viewed philosophy as a Wiki. I’m certainly the last one out there to idealize or romanticize the democratic process: It’s a field on which ignorant armies clash by night, afflicted with all the problems so familiar to public choice theorists. I suppose one way to put it is that I’ve become more of a Bayesian about politics: I cannot help but notice that lots of folks who are as smart or smarter than I have rather radically different views about what sort of polity is best, and I cannot quite bring myself to conclude that they’re simply watching shadows dance on the cave walls, while I have glimpsed the Forms. And so I don’t, these days, much find myself thinking about the specific contours of libertopia. Instead, I tend to find myself thinking in terms like: “Well, let’s push in this direction and see how it works.” You have to be careful there too, of course, since depending on the details, a government-market hybrid (say) will just give you the disadvantages of both. (See: Healthcare System, United States.) But I think this is the direction you end up pushed in if you take Hayek’s warnings about “constructivist rationalism” sufficiently seriously. On this model, libertarianism isn’t so much a final picture of a just society as a specific sort of toolkit for working on Neurath’s ship.

Canada Day viewing

What else could it be?

The holiday season

If I've counted correctly, today is halfway between Jean-Baptiste and American Independence Day, which means it's time to go watch Les Invasions Barbares, "The Barbarian Invasions," the widely-honored (including with the best foreign-language film Oscar) Quebec film about death, reconciliation, and retrospective wisdom ("Was there an 'ism' we didn't worship?") that also happens to include some very telling bits about the Quebec health care system and the importance of the exit option into the United States.

Holiday season viewing recommendation #2

We're now halfway between Jean-Baptiste and Canada Day, so get thee to a video store and rent the greatest mismatched-buddy-cop movie about federalism ever made, the sublime Bon Cop, Bad Cop.

More to come!

Plains Commerce comes down

This actually happened yesterday, but I was offline.

The most important Indian Law case of the year came down yesterday, and it was disappointingly but unsurprisingly ugly. In Plains Commerce Bank v Long, a 5-4 majority further restricted tribal court jurisdiction over non-Indians and non-Indian businesses on reservations. The supposed exception to the non-jurisdiction rule that jurisdiction can apply when the non-Indians enter into consensual commercial relations with the tribe or its members appears to be a dead letter.

As I discuss in this paper, the court has been narrowing tribal jurisdiction over non-members on reservation lands for some thirty years, and in counterproductive, destructive ways.

The decision was written by Roberts for the five conservatives. Ginsburg wrote for the dissent. (It's a "concurrence in part," but the part is not the important part.)

Bad news. More commentary to come.

In the meantime, see this post at Turtletalk.

In my view, there are several things to take from this ruling:

1.) We have been reassured that the Montana exceptions, while available in theory, will never be applied, and that tribes can forget about exercising any jurisdiction, no matter how great or small, over non-Indians on fee lands;

2.) We have also been reassured that non-Indian litigants are at a significant advantage against tribes and tribal citizens. Non-Indian parties can choose to litigate in tribal court, at a low-cost, and seek a positive outcome. If they get a desired outcome, it’s game over. If not, they get a second bite at a fresh apple, because they can take their claims to state or federal court and argue that the tribal court has no jurisdiction over them.

There's more. As I put it in the "Perversities" article linked to above:

After twenty years of Montana progeny, the exceptions appear vanishingly small. No unified Supreme Court majority has ever agreed that any regulation fell into either one. Circuit courts have followed the same general rule. The second exception has never been found to be satisfied in a court of appeals. Besides the Tenth Circuit’s finding in favor of the Navajos in Atkinson, later reversed, the consent exception has been triggered twice at the circuit court level, both times on the Ninth Circuit. A non-Indian filing a cross-claim against a fellow defendant in a reservation court does consent to that court’s jurisdiction in that case, and so falls under the first Montana exception —a seemingly minimal proposition that had nonetheless not been accepted by a panel of the court two years before —and a non-Indian contracting to carry out tribally-licensed bingo operations on a reservation is subject to the tribe’s bingo regulations. And the second exception is interpreted without any “aggregation analysis;” that is, the particular non-Indian’s particular activity must imperil the tribe, and it will not suffice to show that many non-Indians engaged in the activity many times over would do so. As one District Court judge asked rhetorically,

What does it mean to have the "ability to enact and be governed by its own laws" if the Navajo Nation cannot extend the scope of its own laws to protect the very lives of its own police officers on its own lands, and in its own courts? When does the exception for "conduct [that] threatens or has some direct effect on the political integrity, the economic security, or the health and welfare of the tribe" apply?

Yesterday "vanisingly small" got yet another step closer to "vanished."

Bonne fete nationale!

And a good Jean-Baptiste. This kicks off the holiday season: Jean-Baptiste, Canada Day, and the Fourth of July in the space of 10 days (along with the Jazz Festival, of course).