That's actually Alex Massie, who's guest blogging.
That first Andrew Sullivan is almost maddening.
Almost all Andrew Sullivan is maddening.
"Some argue that liberty dictates we should immediately wipe from the DNA database everyone who has been arrested but not convicted of an offence. But if we did this, some sickening crimes would have gone unsolved, and many dangerous criminals would have remained at large.the U.K. government seems obsessed with spying on and tracking people.
"Let me give you just one example. In May 1991, a woman confined to a wheelchair was attacked and raped by a man who tricked his way into her home. A DNA sample was recovered, but no suspect was found. In June 2007, South Yorkshire Police's 'cold case team' reinvestigated the case and the DNA sample was re-analysed using new techniques.
"A match was made with a profile from a man named Jeremiah Sheridan who had been arrested in 2005 in Cambridgeshire for a public order offence, but not convicted.
"It proved very difficult to trace Sheridan - but after the case was highlighted on 'Crimewatch' in 2008, South Yorkshire Police got several new leads including one that Sheridan was in Australia. He was arrested on his return at Heathrow airport and, last September, having pleaded guilty, he was sentenced to 16 and a half years."
[...]"The next time you hear somebody question the value of retaining DNA profiles from those who have been arrested but not convicted, remember Jeremiah Sheridan."
The "New World Order" is an American-led, European- and Japanese-influenced attempt to build a single worldwide network of institutions and laws that would govern most aspects of the emerging international system.cf. The Perils of Common Sense - "Theodore Roosevelt may have called him a 'filthy little atheist,' but Tom Paine's pamphlet 'Common Sense' got right to the heart of the American world view... But maybe we can be a little smarter about common sense and think a little more critically about how sometimes the most 'obvious' ideas are the ones that need to be criticized..."
For better or worse, I'm beginning to think that the whole sweeping and daring new world order project may have reached its limits... The BRIC powers aren't nearly as invested in the institutional models of the New World Order as Europe and Japan are. No longer tied to Washington or anybody else by a perceived security threat, and conscious of their growing economic and political clout, the BRICs and other countries around the world are rapidly losing their respect for a system of global governance that does not serve their perceived interests.
Beyond this, the increased small 'd' democratization of the world makes public opinion and cultural and religious politics more important around the world. This makes it harder for elites anywhere to sell international institutions and agreements seen as imposing alien values or interests on domestic society... Developing international agreements on complex topics that intimately affect domestic politics in countries with so many different interests and such different cultural histories is going to keep on getting harder. It may well be that the progress toward a more 'institutionalized' world at the global level has come to a juddering halt.
This is going to cause problems. The Trilateral vision may be out of date, but the problems it sought to address are real. More and more of the world's problems will require international coordination and action, but that international cooperation is going to be harder to get. We have an increasingly volatile economic system and the effect of human activity on the global commons, the air and the sea in particular, continues to grow...
[W]orld politics will revolve less around institution-building and law and more about finding ad-hoc solutions for specific issues. American diplomacy will need more Kissingerian students of power politics and fewer lawyers. Rather than trying to build an enduring global framework that will last until the end of time, we will have to think much more about navigating through stormy seas.
The American foreign policy establishment, essentially bureaucratic and legalistic in its approach, will have a hard time adjusting to a world in which bureaucratic thinking and proper procedure matters less and less. Like an army of peacetime, desk generals suddenly confronted with a war, our technocratic and bureaucratic foreign policy thinkers are going to face a whole new set of challenges. Most of the desk generals fail when they get to the front...
We are living in revolutionary not evolutionary times. I'm not sure that either our foreign policy elite or the broader public is ready for the kind of wrenching changes that a new vision of America's role in the world might entail, but ready or not, they are coming our way.
Keynes ended The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money with the famous words: 'But soon or late, it is ideas, not vested interests which are dangerous for good or evil' (Keynes 1936: 383-4).also see John Maynard Keynes and Ludwig von Mises on Probability & Negative Probabilities in Financial Modeling btw Exotic Probabilities [1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9]
Anyone involved in the production of ideas has to believe this, unless he is being paid by someone to produce the ideas. In today's world, the chief manufactory of ideas is the Academy. Pure research has long been recognised as an independent intellectual pursuit; its hallmark, disinterestedness. Its purpose is the search for truth. The pecuniary interest of scholars is not directly involved in either the direction of their enquiry or its results (Collini 2009).
At the same time, there is what Schumpeter called the 'sociology of success.' Put crudely, why are some ideas acceptable, and others rejected or marginalised? In the natural sciences this question is relatively easy to answer: newer ideas bring us closer to reality* than the older ones. For this reason, quantum physics replaced classical physics (Cartwright 1999:2). Reality is unchanging, only the theory changes as it improves our understanding of reality. Predictive power is the ultimate test of the truth of a scientific hypothesis.
In social sciences this is much less true. The natural world does not interfere with one's observation of it; the social world does. It is the changeability of the object being studied which demarcates social sciences from natural sciences. Social reality is constantly shifting, problems crucial at one time become irrelevant at another. As a result, propositions in social science do not satisfy the 'universality criterion.' They are limited in time and place...
And this, of course, was precisely Marx's contention, when he wrote "What else does the history of ideas prove, than that intellectual production changes in proportion as material production is changed? The ruling ideas of each age have ever been the ideas of its ruling class" (Marx-Engels Selected Works, 1962:52).
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posted by shmegegge at 7:37 AM on March 5, 2010