Zero Dutch's blog

Bernard Harcourt looks like the sort of guy who, if one were to say “He got a BA from Princeton under Sheldon Wolin, then went on to get a JD and PhD from Harvard and now teaches Foucault and is the chair of the University of Chicago Department of Political Science,” you would nod and say, “Of course,” as if his life could not have taken any other course. Think a non-douchy version of Jeff Goldblum from Jurassic Park. With better hair.

If you want to feel better about yourself, though, 
just google a pic of him with a moustache.

I briefly met Professor Harcourt when I came to visit U of C in the spring of 2010. He kindly let me sit in on a class on critical theory he was teaching at the law school. The class reminded me why I wanted to return to school, I decided to turn down a PhD program elsewhere, and enrolled in U of C’s MA program. And then promptly failed to take any class with Professor Harcourt before I finished. This, I am sure, will be one of those poor life choices that will still result in a facepalm when I am sixty.

Yesterday, Professor Harcourt had a piece up on the New York Times’s Opinionator section of their website discussing the nature of the Occupy Wall Street movement, identifying OWS as a sort of Foucaultian critique in action. Money quote? Money quote:

Occupy Wall Street, which identifies itself as a “leaderless resistance movement with people of many … political persuasions,” is politically disobedient precisely in refusing to articulate policy demands or to embrace old ideologies. Those who incessantly want to impose demands on the movement may show good will and generosity, but fail to understand that the resistance movement is precisely about disobeying that kind of political maneuver.*

In this he agrees with Mike Konczal, who wrote a couple weeks ago about the theory underlying the OWS protests, who further draws on David Graeber’s work to identify the small-a anarchist and small-d democratic theory underlying OWS’s method’s. Konczal quotes a review of Graeber’s Direct Action (sorry for the large blockquote, but it’s kinda important):

And what seemed like a tedious attention to meeting process was the result of a commitment to direct democracy and rejection of a politics of representation in favor of a politics of participation. Instead of focusing solely, or even largely, on ends, the global justice movement focused on means, attempting to live out its ideals in the present and sneak moments of liberation on the sly.

While anarchists formed the avant-garde of the global justice movement, they generally did not try to convert other protesters and sympathizers to an explicit belief system. Instead of pushing a party line, they spread practices, advocating the adoption of affinity groups, consensus-based decision-making and spokescouncils. Graeber argues that the Direct Action Network, the most significant organization of the global justice movement, while short-lived, was extraordinarily successful in diffusing a directly democratic model of organizing.

This rings true, at least to me, given reports of OWS’s operating methodology: their concensus-based General Assembly, complete with complex hand signals, their committee structure, and – more than anything – their complete unwillingness to articulate demands at the organizational level.

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While we all eagerly await Bizzo's long-anticipated response to Warthog on Libya, I wanted to note something that Ezra said today:

Gridlock is supposed to stop the government from acting. That’s what Republicans are hoping will happen, for instance, if they prevent the administration from ever confirming a director for the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. But often, that’s not quite what gridlock does. Like a car forced to take side streets, gridlock can reroute government action, force it to get where it’s going less efficiently, with more waste, and more chance of accidents. Take, for instance, the directorless Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.

Josh Boak has a great story today explaining that, since the agency can’t make rules without a director, “the bureau most likely will set policy by conducting investigations.” He quotes a report by Jaret Seiberg, an analyst for the brokerage firm MF Global, in which Seiberg explains that “the ability of the CFPB to investigate financial firms and then bring enforcement actions for violating existing laws is the most potent weapon the agency has absent a director. It is also one that will garner politically attractive headlines.”

That’s not good for banks. Jeremiah Buckley, a former Republican staff director on the Senate Banking Committee, tells Boak that “it’s very hard to fight an enforcement action. Usually, financial firms with their reputations on the line will settle.”

Ezra's made references to this phenomenon before, and I think he's right on. Stalling on Warren as head of the CFPB isn't good for consumers and isn't good for banks, but it is good for Republicans in Congress. And it's happening everwhere. Try cap-and-trade: carbon-producing industries don't want the EPA regulating carbon in a command-and-control fashion, and it'd be less effective environmentally than cap-and-trade (or, better, a straight up carbon tax). But again, killing cap-and-trade was good for certain members of Congress on both sides of the aisle.

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Every single component of this site is screaming at me, "update me or i'll get herpes!"

Updating now. If the site breaks, well, it was nice knowing you.

EDIT1: I broke everything, and apparently Drupal 7 is out, so I'm going to break everything even more and upgrade to that. RIP, WYSIWYG Editor.

EDIT2: Goddamnit that was horrifying. Drupal 7 can suck an egg; back on 6, and four hours later everything is just the way it was.

Ezra has a post up that asks a question I've been thinking about for a while, and I'm kinda surprised he initially dismissed it as "economic thinking run amok" because this is the sort of stuff he's usually all over. He phrases the question as, "Should we pay members of Congress for performance? Can we?" but I think it's a subset of a broader question, namely, "Why are incentives for elected officials so fucked up?" The comments run the gamut from the knee-jerk partisan to the hopelessly cynical to the (almost) admirably idealistic.

Naturally, if you read this book and fall asleep, you're not cut out for a career in political theory.

Very clever. Curly brackets! Because it's a genealogy!

But what if you read this book and angrily pace around the room because you can't understand half of it? Well, my guess is that you've got the temperament, but the jury is still out on the ability.

Random Numbers does not care for your human concept of "time." Random Numbers is inherently anti-empirical. Random numbers had a bad week, and still did as well as ditriech.

I do not have high hopes for our clueless random number generator this week. But if ditriech does as badly this week as he did during the day games last week, the random number generator can't lose!

So, ditriech beat random chance last week. But not this week (assuming chance rolls a 9 or higher on its lucky d12)

Oh, and ditriech and I would both like to extend a big "fuck you!" to random.org for predicting that both the U of M and the OSU would lose to the odd couple of the coaching community.

Welcome back, ladies and gentlemen, to the finest sports predictions that atmospheric noise can produce. The funny will be in full force next week, when we compare results with the ineffable ditriech, and discuss the application of random number generators to his job application process.

This week: 

I hereby nominate this for ditriech's facebook picture.