Conrad and Pieter at PeakTalk both make their readers aware of the Indonesian practice of gijzeling, which is apparently often used by Indonesian officials to shake down foreigners. As Pieter points out, not only is gijzeling a Dutch term (which literally means “hostage taking”); it also has its roots in Dutch law. As Pieter writes:

Had this practice not been part of the legal infrastructure that the Dutch left behind in Indonesia, I have little doubt that somehow Indonesian authorities would at some point have discovered this technique of generating additional revenue. However, you can bet your bottom dollar that if ever the country comes under serious international criticism over this practice it will happily point to the old colonial master that introduced the practice in the first place.

It is not just Indonesia that has found this practice, of borrowing from past colonial laws, effective; the neighboring Malaysian government’s notorious Internal Security Act is a direct decendent of British anti-sedition laws enacted under colonial rule to combat communist insurgencies, as are Singapore’s similar internal security laws. In response to criticism, both governments have regularly pointed out that Britain had imposed equally draconian legislation in the past; they have also noted laws such as the Prevention of Terrorism Act that were enacted by Britain to combat the IRA and “loyalist” terrorist groups in Northern Ireland.

I don’t know if there’s an obvious lesson to be drawn from this pattern. To echo Pieter, authoritarian regimes generally don’t need any help figuring out ways cracking down on disfavored groups. But to the extent vague and open-ended laws are used in democracies to crack down on terrorist groups, authoritarian states can point to those laws to justify similar provisions—even if, in practice, they are targeted at their nonviolent political opponents rather than terrorists.

Hell Yeah, Damn Right
Hotty Toddy, Gosh A-Mighty,
Who The Hell Are We?
Hey! Flim-Flam, Bim Bam,
Ole Miss, By Damn.

See you later…

I may or may not have more to say on the game tomorrow. I’m currently dog tired and not particularly sober. In the meantime, you can read Robert Prather’s thoughts on the game, which I generally agree with, and my comments at his place, which I definitely agree with. And Conrad isn’t particularly thrilled with the outcome either.

Venomous Kate has a link to a Honolulu Advertiser piece in which she is interviewed about the continuing disappearance of her back yard at the hands of the Pacific Ocean and the rather callous attitude of the state authorities toward the situation.

At least down in these parts, we’re allowed to do something about the kudzu. Not that you can do much about kudzu over the long term, mind you, but still…

A little earlier than I’d meant, but I imagine I’ll be in a hurry in the morning tomorrow. On to the picks (as always, straight up):

• GEORGIA over Kentucky. The good news for Kentucky: win out and they go to a bowl. The bad news: if the Wildcats can’t beat Vanderbilt in Nashville in front of a half-dozen fans, they certainly can’t win inside the hedges in Athens.
• TENNESSEE over Vanderbilt. Then again, the Commodores are on a one-game conference winning streak…
• ARKANSAS over Mississippi State. Time is running out on the Jackie Sherill farewell tour, and I don’t think the parting gifts will be nice from Fayetteville, particularly with Arkansas trying to sneak into the Cotton Bowl with a late surge.
• Clemson over SOUTH CAROLINA. If Tommy Bowden’s team can stay focused, they should beat their in-state rival. But SC is a dangerous football team nonetheless; ask Florida, who by all rights should have lost to the Gamecocks last week.
• Alabama over AUBURN. Yes, “on paper” Auburn outclasses Alabama in almost every phase of the game. But with Alabama having nothing to play for except punching Auburn’s ticket to the EV1.com Houston Bowl, all the pressure is on Tommy Tuberville, Jason Campbell, and Carnell Williams, who were supposed to be wrapping up the regular season on their way to the Sugar Bowl at this point. Look for Tubby’s squad to find another way to lose.

And, last but not least:

• OLE MISS over Louisiana State. Forget about Eli Manning; the real story is that the 21 other starters around him have battled through adversity, injury, and early-season embarassments. Nobody gave the Rebels a chance to be where they are today at the beginning of the season. Eight weeks ago, most fans thought the best thing that might happen in this season was another trip to Shreveport. At that time, sophomore receiver Taye Biddle, who dropped sure TDs against Memphis and Texas Tech, was less popular in Oxford than Osama Bin Laden. Now I don’t know if the Rebels are a team of destiny. But I do know that this game is for all the marbles. And every time since September 27 when it’s been put-up-or-shut-up time, someone has stepped up and made the key play, whether it’s Eli making a key QB sneak to run out the clock on South Carolina, Lorenzo Townsend—the fullback—catching a 49 yard pass on 3rd and long against Auburn deep in the 4th quarter, or Eric Oliver picking off Chris Leak to stop a late drive by Florida. The Rebels haven’t always won pretty. They haven’t kept the proverbial boot on the neck at times. They’ve been burned on freak plays. But still, somehow, they keep finding a way to win. And I think they’ll do it again Saturday. Not because Ole Miss outmatches LSU in any phase of the game—frankly, they don’t—but because the Rebels are on a mission that they’re not quite done with yet. And they’ll have the largest crowd ever to witness a sporting event in the state of Mississippi on hand to help carry them over the goal line.

What, you were expecting X’s and O’s?

Also of interest: a New York Times profile of Manning.

James Joyner of OTB notes that Matt Drudge is reporting that Howard Dean may have exaggerated a medical condition to avoid serving in Vietnam. Like James, I don’t expect it to have much impact on the election; however, if Dean wins the nomination, it will make it more difficult for relatively scrupulous Democrats to trot out the “Bush went AWOL” rumors.

In general, though, I don’t think people care all that much any more; witness the failure of both John F. “I Served in Vietnam” Kerry and Wes Clark to gain much traction with their military histories. Past military service (or the lack thereof) hasn’t really been a meaningful issue in a presidential contest since 1960.*

John Cole thinks the news is a hit piece orchestrated by Kerry and/or Clark; apparently, Drudge’s scoop is based on this New York Times piece by Rick Lyman and Christopher Drew.

Other reactions: Kevin at Wizbang! thinks it was planted by Kerry, while Steve at Tiny Little Lies thinks Dean is screwed regardless of who planted it (or if, in the immortal words of Andy Sipowicz, Dean’s camp launched “preemptive stink”). And Matt Stinson agrees with James and I that the attack probably won't work, while Poliblogger Steven Taylor makes the point that Dean is well-positioned even if the charge does stick with some voters:

[S]ince he is running as essentially the anti-war candidate, in some ways this simply adds to that position in its own kind of way. In other words, the hard-core Democrats who are currently gung-ho for Dean are hardly going to fault him for not wanting to go to Viet Nam, now are they?

Daniel Drezner, fresh off his 300-comment-inducing disagreement with blogosphere folk hero James Lileks, notes both progress and regress on the trade front by the administration, with regress apparently beating out progress quite handily.

Megan McArdle writes on Howard Dean and his penchant for regulation in her latest piece at TechCentralStation. All I want to know is: when can I get on the VRWC gravy train?

Pejmanesque has more, including links to negative reactions to Dean’s remarks by Tyler Cowen and Stuart Buck.

One Fine Jay administers a brutal fisking to John C. Dvorak, professional crumudgeon/columnist, for his PC Magazine article predicting the demise of blogging.

Let me focus on Dvorak’s stats backing this up:

Let’s start with abandoned blogs. In a white paper released by Perseus Development Corp., the company reveals details of the blogging phenomenon that indicate its foothold in popular culture may already be slipping (www.perseus.com/blogsurvey). According to the survey of bloggers, over half of them are not updating any more. And more than 25 percent of all new blogs are what the researchers call “one-day wonders.” Meanwhile, the abandonment rate appears to be eating into well-established blogs: Over 132,000 blogs are abandoned after a year of constant updating.

Perseus thinks it had a statistical handle on over 4 million blogs, in a universe of perhaps 5 million. Luckily for the blogging community, there is still evidence that the growth rate is faster than the abandonment rate. But growth eventually stops.

The most obvious reason for abandonment is simple boredom. Writing is tiresome. Why anyone would do it voluntarily on a blog mystifies a lot of professional writers. This is compounded by a lack of feedback, positive or otherwise. Perseus thinks that most blogs have an audience of about 12 readers. Leaflets posted on the corkboard at Albertsons attract a larger readership than many blogs. Some people must feel the futility.

Now, there are plenty of reasons why people may be abandoning blogs. Some people may, in fact, be abandoning blogging altogether. Some have decided to take their thoughts private, so they move. Some may join group blogs. Many migrate from Blog*Spot to hosting providers. Many move from one Blog*Spot address to another—heck, Blogger even advocates the practice. Some bloggers have backup blogs hosted elsewhere. Some people—Matt Stinson, Dan Drezner—have done more than one of these. All of these “failure modes” are lumped together, because it’s simply too hard to track what’s going on.

Pronouncing blogging a failure on the basis of these weak statistics would be like noting that DirecTV loses 570,000 customers a year, and arguing this means satellite television is doomed. “Churn”—what business calls the continual cycle of losing customers—is a natural aspect of any phenomenon in which collective preferences are aggregated. Companies lose customers, but they also gain new ones. Citizens move in and out of the voting population. And some people decide blogging isn’t for them—but a lot of others do. If there are really 5 million blogs—that is, one blog for every thousand human beings alive today, and perhaps one for every hundred with Internet access—that’s a truly staggering statistic. But I guess Dvorak’s just the latest in the long line of media dinosaurs that doesn’t “get” that.

Perseus' blog has a response to my post (and, by extension, the Dvorak piece). They note that only 1.6% of abandoned blogs include any forwarding information, and go on to write:

Pronouncing blogging a failure on the basis of these weak statistics…

Better to say its a weak argument to declare blogging a failure in a study that showed the number of hosted blogs growing from 135,000 at the end of 2000 to over five million at the end of 2003.

Via Matthew Stinson.

Larry Sabato has his hokey “crystal ball” schtick, while Steven Taylor again consults his toaster. For what it’s worth, my microwave says Dean has the lead, but the floodlights on my house still think Gephardt and Clark have a chance.

In all seriousness, Steven gets the edge by far, since (a) he’s never injured anyone that got between him and a reporter and (b) he has adopted a metaphor that doesn’t reflect negatively on the discipline.

I’ve already said my piece on this blogospheric navel-gazing exercise in the comments at Dan’s place (in short, I think all the participants are talking past each other); however, Matt Stinson, Robert Garcia Tagorda, James Joyner, and Anticipatory Retaliation have the cream of the reactions—from my POV, at least.

Robert Prather also responds, noting that Salam Pax in particular owes his livelihood to the U.S. forces who liberated Iraq.

Conrad of The Gweilo Diaries notes the latest events in the bizarre Hong Kong Crocodile saga. In Florida, they send out a dude in a truck to wrangle the reptile in question (usually an alligator, mind you), and the problem is solved, at least until another one wanders into the neighborhood. They most certainly don’t dick around for two weeks in the process. Simply amazing.

How big is Ole Miss-LSU?

• Ole Miss SID Langston Rogers says it’s the biggest game since 1952, when Maryland came into Oxford ranked #3.
• At least a third of the GameDay crew wanted to be here. I blame Herbstreit, personally. (I mean, honestly, who in hell would want to freeze their butts off in Ann Arbor when they could be in Oxford? That place is only livable between Memorial Day and Labor Day…)
• LSU gets no R-E-S-P-E-C-T. Yet somehow they’re 6½ point favorites?
• The Matt Mauck NFL speculation has begun.
• There’s a preview at CollegeFootballNews.com too. And lots of stuff at the Clarion-Ledger, while the Shreveport Times has things covered from the LSU perspective.
• If it’s Thursday, it’s time for Steven Godfrey’s Tight End column in the Daily Mississippian.

But at least TigerEducated has his yellow and purple blinders on. Phew; I thought hell had frozen over…

In more game news: Ole Miss had the most pathetic pep rally I’ve ever seen tonight in the square. It lasted all of ten minutes. I’ve been to high school pep rallies that lasted longer. Still, you could have heard the Hotty Toddy that went up from Batesville. Oh, if you’re thinking of coming to Oxford on Saturday—we’re all full up. Sorry. (This is just my lame attempt to avoid having to get out of bed at o-dark-thirty to be able to park closer than my house.)

Elsewhere in college football, the Southern Miss Golden Eagles snuffed out TCU’s BCS hopes. I still think it’d be cool to have the in-state series with all three I-A programs; who knows, it might be a fun new-to-me rivalry. Maybe it’d even raise enough money to get Mississippi State a decent-looking stadium, instead of that butt-ugly monstrosity that makes the entire MSU campus look like a pit.

Mike van Winkle of The Chicago Report is hosting a discussion on the rationality of voting. As I note in the comments, I don’t think Downs’ conception of rational voting is quite inclusive enough to explain why most people vote in the United States and other democracies where voting isn’t compulsory.

Steven Taylor notes the latest setbacks for Bilbo wannabe Roy Moore, late of the Alabama Supreme Court. First the Alabama convention of the Southern Baptist Church distanced itself from Moore, then the perennially irrelevant Constitution Party invited Moore to be its 2004 presidential nominee. Now all that’s left is for Moore to get an MSNBC talk show with Phil Donahue to complete his deserved slide into pathetic obscurity.

James Joyner discovered that he’s an “influential” according to the authors of a new book entitled—you guessed it—The Influentials. Never mind that any first-year grad student in sociology or political science already knew this, because Elihu Katz and Paul Lazarsfeld wrote a book on it called Personal Influence, oh, way back in 1955 (yes, kids, 48 years ago). Now just wait until someone cribs Zaller for the biz-exec audience…

Happy first-year blogiversary to fellow political scientist Brett Marston of Marstonalia (via PoliBlog and OTB).

James Joyner links to a John Fund OpinionJournal piece looking at whether or not John F. Kennedy technically received a minority of the popular vote; in 1960, Alabama’s voters decided between Nixon and a slate of 11 Democratic electors, 6 of whom were unpledged—and voted for Harry Byrd—and 5 of whom pledged votes for Kennedy.

In the same election, Mississippi also elected a slate of unpledged electors who voted for Byrd; however, unlike in Alabama, they beat a slate of electors pledged to Kennedy by 7886 votes, according to Presidential Elections: 1789–1996, published by Congressional Quarterly—which still attributes all of Alabama’s votes to Kennedy, despite CQ’s own reallocation of the votes between Byrd and Kennedy based on the behavior of the Alabama electors.

Matthew Stinson has a photograph of a young Dutch woman eagerly awaiting the kickoff of a soccer match between Scotland and the Netherlands.

The letter of the day is, of course, K for Kate.

Ryan of the Dead Parrots posts an “irregardless considered harmful” memo. My personal all-time language peeve is people who seemingly can’t tell the difference between “it’s” (the contraction for “it is”) and “its” (the possessive form of “it”); the deeply annoying thing is that the rule is incredibly simple: if you can replace the word with the two words “it is,” and the sentence still makes sense, the right word is “it’s“; otherwise, “its.” No sentence diagram neeeded—just a little bit of English any first grader should know.

Virginia Postrel comments on a WaPo interview with Howard Dean that gives her the impression that Dean is “the thinking man’s Cruz Bustamante” (which may actually be an oxymoron). It’s fairly clear that Dean’s still tacking left; quoth Virginia:

Dean is running as a guy who wants to control the economy from Washington and who sees business as fundamentally bad. “Any business that offers stock options” covers a lot of companies, including some of the economy’s most promising and dynamic.

Regulation tends to be relatively invisible to the general public, in part because it’s mind-numbingly technical. That makes it much more difficult to reverse, much easier for interest groups to manipulate, and much more dangerous to the general health of the economy than the taxing and spending that attract attention from pundits.

She also has a challenge for the so-called “libertarians for Dean.” Ultimately (assuming Dean gets the nod) they’re going to have to decide whether being pissed off because Bush knocked off Saddam Hussein is sufficient reason to hand the keys of the economy—namely the federal regulatory apparatus—over to a man who barely pays lip service to capitalism.

One of the classic quotes of politics comes from French neo-fascist Jean-Marie Le Pen. Asked, after losing in the first round of a French presidential contest (in 1988, I believe) to Jacques Chirac and François Mitterand, who he would back in the second round, he described the choice as one between “bad or worse”*; in 2004, hardcore libertarians are going to have to decide which is worse, but for now that honor seems squarely to belong to Dean.

Jacob Levy approvingly notes Joe Lieberman’s response to this nonsense. Like Jacob, I’d hate to see the Democrats return to their bad old protectionist ways, but outside a few DLCers like Clinton, Lieberman, and 1990s-Gore I don’t think the party ever really shed its protectionist bent; when Clinton spearheaded expansion of NAFTA to include Mexico in 1994, he did it with mostly Republican backing on the Hill.

Daniel Drezner comments as well, as does Andrew Sullivan; this is my entry in James’ inaugural Beltway Traffic Jam.

Jeff Taylor and Joy have the latest on our friends at the Santa Cruz Operation; Jeff* characterizes SCO’s business model as “consist[ing] of filing suit against Linux users.” I think he’s being charitable; it’s more like “trying to sell for $200/seat technology written two decades ago by a bunch of kids at Berkeley that’s today worth about 10 cents.”

You know, in 1999 or so, that could have been the basis for a decent IPO. Hell, nobody else back then had a viable business model either…

Steve Verdon explains Arrow’s Impossibility Theorem, one of the most important theorems of economics and “rat choice” political science. Unfortunately, he doesn’t explain one of the key assumptions—the independence of irrelevant alternatives or IIA assumption—in much detail, which is a shame because I’ve never found a good explanation of it that doesn’t talk about the colors of buses. (It’s often called the “red bus, blue bus” problem for that very reason—that’s the classic example used to explain IIA, which leads most people to correctly ask, “but what if my problem has nothing to do with buses?”) Despite that (very insignificant) shortcoming, it’s an interesting post.

I won’t try to round up all of the posts on Massachussetts’ decision today (a sampler: Glenn Reynolds, Andrew Sullivan, Virginia Postrel, One Fine Jay, and James Joyner), but I think Brett Cashman’s post is about the most sensible I’ve seen, in terms of the whole “what happens next” question. However, I can’t see conservatives’ innate desire to use the state as a vehicle for social engineering waning as Cashman (rightly) suggests it should.

Instead, realistically I think we could see a draconian form of the Defense of Marriage Act Federal Marriage Amendment sooner rather than later, because the Democrats in Washington are far too spineless to oppose it, and I reckon you could round up 38 state legislatures—bodies full of people looking for ways to avoid giving voters a good reason to vote them out—to ratify the thing in a big hurry. The bottom line is that conservatives aren’t going to let Roe happen twice, because exactly what Matt Stinson predicted here is just around the corner.

Matthew Stinson has a must-read new post on the topic as well. I think many social moderates would share his viewpoint, expressed here:

For what it's worth, I would be more inclined to support gay marriage nationally (rather than locally) if I believed gays desired marriage for more than just its economic and legal benefits. Yes, one's sense of dignity is benefited by having the right to marry, but what's lost on many gay marriage advocates is that marriage is about fidelity as much as it is sharing resources. Andrew Sullivan, to his credit, has argued that the option of marriage will have a civilizing effect on gay men. But gay men aren't children, and they can choose fidelity now if they want. That the vast majority do not do so suggests to me that gay male marriages, but not necessarily lesbian marriages, will be open marriages.

I’m personally not a big fan of outcome-based arguments for (or against) gay marriage, but this is an argument that will resonate with many fence-sitters. The more it sounds like gay people want marriage for the “free stuff,” like lower taxes* and cheaper healthcare, the more people are going to be turned off by it.

(Nor do I really buy the “civilizing effects” argument articulated by Sullivan; I suspect the number of straight men who’ve actually said, “I’d cheat on my wife with Lulu from the temp pool, but I can’t since I’m married” is within ε of zero. They might say “I’d cheat…, but I can’t since I’m in a committed monogomous relationship,” but you can have one of those without being married. It’s a function of character, not institutions.)

Also, you may enjoy this non-work safe post by Mr. Green, which refers to perennial SN foil Ricky Santorum. (Link via the Wizbang! post trackbacked below.)

Glenn Reynolds has the latest from our friends at the International Society of Political Psychology. He notes this email received from the group’s president by anti-left gadfly John Ray. Both are probably correct that no scholar with a right-wing bias would have written such an email; however, I’d attribute it more to a failed attempt at humor than to ideology per se.

I will note two empirical datapoints: my dissertation, which straddles the boundary of political psychology and mass political behavior, doesn’t have a single citation to a piece that appeared in Political Psychology, the society’s journal, despite citing nearly 250 distinct works—by comparison, the similarly obscure journal Political Behavior, which has significant overlap in scope, received 8 citations. A colleague, whose dissertation was even more explicitly in the political psychology tradition, also had zero citations of Political Psychology.* Since most people who join groups like the ISPP do it to receive the journal, if the society can’t publish a single journal article that would be even tangentially relevant to our dissertation topics (which, basically, is the criterion for a citation), it speaks volumes about the relevance of the ISPP to research in the subfield.

* There is a possible source of bias here: the University of Mississippi library doesn’t subscribe to Political Psychology—which may also speak volumes about the relevance of the journal to the subfield…

The PostgreSQL database that runs Signifying Nothing behind-the-scenes was just upgraded (from 7.3.4 to 7.4). Hopefully the dump-and-restore step went smoothly, and none of the old content should have vanished into thin air.

Allegedly this release of PostgreSQL is faster, although how much improvement will filter through all the junk between your browser and the database (namely the LSblog code, which is hardly a model of efficient coding) is something of an open question.