Cartoons and burning embassies

Joe Miller has a neat little discussion on the cartoon debate at his blog around the corner. As Joe, I don't have much to add to the raging debate that you can follow at Andrew Sullivan's, signandsight, Volokh Conspiracy, etc. (and don't forget Juan Cole, who makes some interesting comparisons with Northern Ireland). (Nevertheless, I left a longish comment, egg on my face. How do you recognize a professor?)

Anyway, two more things:

First, Chris Bertram has written a *very* useful argument in and for the debate, over there at Crooked Timber.

Second, and seriously now, what strikes me as most important in the whole affair is the sense that this is really an important juncture, definitely for Europe and probably for the rest of the world. Maybe more important than September 11, March 11, or July 7: In those events, foreign terrorists entered the US, Spain, and Britain and committed mass murder. The reaction against such acts is nothing qualitatively new: Destroy the terrorist organizations, keep foreign terrorists out of the country, and prevent those who get in from committing further acts. Difficult but doable.

In the cartoon affair, we are not dealing with terrorism (yet?), but -- possibly worse -- with widespread mass agitation and violent activism against some of our most fundamental values. The activities take place mainly outside Europe and the US, but they are very effective in putting Europeans under pressure. A Danish newspaper publishes some cartoons that offend several Danish Muslim activists, who take the cartoons to a number of Middle Eastern countries to mobilize a mass movement to change Danish laws, they receive support from some Middle Eastern governments, and a world crisis is born. That's globalization, folks, and nobody seems to know how to deal with it! In the past, if immigrants caused trouble in Europe or the US, the common perception was that they could be simply deported. Now the concept of immigrant and foreigner does not even make sense in the conflict, as it does not matter where the demonstrations take place. Sure, in principle Britain could deport many of those guys who demonstrated in London last week, but it would not change the situation. We better get used to such global societal conflicts and find a way to deal with them *and* protect our values.

How should I understand this?

Today at Barnes & Nobles: found Kübler Ross's On Death and Dying -- in the Self-Improvement section.

Humor deficit reduction

From USA Today via Andrew Sullivan:

"Congress approved a $750 million, five-year plan aimed at building healthier marriages Wednesday as part of its deficit reduction bill."

I guess that's the Marriage Deficit Reduction Clause of the Deficit "Reduction" Bill.

Implicit biases and Katrina

I am not surprised that the study on racial bias and partisanship that the WashPost reported on (see here) resonates among partisans (see the comments to my previous post). After all, political elites are pretty polarized these days and grateful for any partisan ammunition.

As an empirical political scientist, however, I should point out that even if Republicans in fact have stronger racial biases than Democrats, this does not explain why the federal government response to Hurricane Katrina was a disaster. Racism may or may not have played a role -- we don't have the evidence to decide one way or the other.

Let's go through the arguments:

First, the type of bias measured by Project Implicit is a cognitive bias, which is different from prejudice, which in turn is different from discrimination. Now, the differential treatment of Katrina victims (those with cars got away and stayed in motels, those without cars ended up in football arenas) constituted discrimination -- those people who were treated badly were predominantly poor and members of racial and ethnic minorities. However, we do not know whether the discrimination was caused by prejudice (i.e., public officials did not make better plans because they did not want to bother about blacks) or inability (i.e., public officials did not make better plans because they couldn't, due to incompetence or missing resources), or other factors such as housing patterns, poverty patterns, and the like. The same outcome could have been caused by different causes.

Second, the post-Katrina criticism of the federal government has centered on President Bush (see "George Bush don't like black people"). However, we do not know whether he in fact participated in the Project Implicit study, and if he did participate, we would not know whether he personally in fact showed more racial bias than most Democrats or not :-) . The study drew conclusions about differences between groups of partisans; it does not allow us to draw conclusions about specific individuals.

Third, in order to draw empirical conclusions about the possible causes of an event, we have to compare the event with other, comparable, events. Assume for argument's sake that the administration in fact was racially biased. Then, to show that the bias translates into discrimination, it would not be enough to show that the Katrina response was discriminatory. We would have to show either that the response of the same administration to other comparable disasters (not involving minorities) was not discriminatory, or that the response of other public officials (with fewer racial biases) to the same disaster was not discriminatory. The first strategy fails. There was not a comparable disaster to which the Bush administration had to react. Hurricane Rita, a month after Katrina, did not create an emergency that was comparable to Katrina. The second strategy is available, as a number of public officials at different levels of government, with different party affiliations, were responsible to protect New Orleans residents. Comparing their reaction, we find that all of them -- federal officials, state officials, Republicans, Democrats, blacks, whites -- failed to perform adequately. Again, no evidence that the administrations low performance was due to racial bias.