About Scott Martens

Scott is a US-raised Canadian living in Brussels with his American wife. His political background is well to the left of centre, even for Europe, and is very interested in immigration, cultural integration and language policy issues. He is presently working against a deadline on his doctorate in computational linguistics and is on hiatus. Wrote Pedantry, also on hiatus.

Futility in our time

Posted on June 4, 2004 by Scott Martens

Kevin Drum has an analysis of the recent failures in Iraq that merit some serious consideration. His point is that where many see the Iraq war as a good idea that was ruined by incompetent leadership, there is a more fundamental problem. Setting up the regime people thought they were installing in Iraq would certainly have required the kind of financial resources and force commitment no one has seen since WWII. Was Saddam Hussein really a threat of Hitlerian magnitude? It seems unlikely that many folks would have agreed.

But the more general question is the more interesting one. How do you respond to a world where actually fixing problems is beyond the resources available?

This more general problem goes beyond Iraq to places like Bosnia and Kosovo, where the minimum preconditions for peace – a secure and basically content populace – would stretch the limits of the most generous foreign aid programme. Disrupting peace and security is always far cheaper than establishing it. The economics of insurgency easily favour the insurgents. If vast numbers of troops and truckloads of money can’t bring peace to tiny Kosovo, is there any hope at all for Congo?

Repelling a spam attack

Posted on June 3, 2004 by Scott Martens

There was an enormous spam attack overnight. It came to about 300 posts. I’m trying to install some software to more permanently forstall this problem.

I’ve deleted all the offending posts, but it’s possible that I have deleted non-spam posts as well, although I did my best to avoid that outcome. If I have, I apologise and assure you that no political censorship of comments is intended. I have only once deleted a comment for reasons other than spamming, and that was a clearly personal and offensive attack on a poster.

So, if you have a had a genuine comment of yours removed in the last couple of hours, please feel free to repost it.

Arab minorities in Israel and Europe

Posted on June 1, 2004 by Scott Martens

I note somewhat belatedly, via The Head Heeb, a series of articles in Ha’aretz on the condition of Israeli Arabs. As Jonathan Edelstein notes, there’s good news and bad news and while I disagree with the concept of national minorities and ethnic states in general, I agree entirely with Jonathan, the editors of Ha’aretz, and apparently the not-so-good folks at Shin Bet that the current situation of Israeli Arabs is untenable and continuing neglect is a bad idea. The series is fascinating, but it is long enough that you will have to commit more than a brief glance to reading it.

I have never been to Israel, and the relatively small number of Israeli Arabs I have met over the years are probably not representative. So, I am hard pressed to make any grand statements about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. However, I want to focus on a theme that appears in several articles in the series, something that ought to be a bit surprising and that has considerably more significance for Europe: the degree to which Israeli Arabs have become quite western in outlook and behaviour. This shines through in the article on an Arab language radio talk show abouty sexuality and relationships, in the article on the political attitudes of young Arabs, and in the marketing trivia of the Arab-Israeli consumer. Israeli Arabs remain, by European standards, quite conservative. However, I know of fully mainstream American communities that are a good deal more traditionalist than what is described here. I should think this sort of society would be fairly compatible with European and American social standards.
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The Day After Tomorrow: An Anti-Review

Posted on May 28, 2004 by Scott Martens

Roland Emmerich is the Anti-Tarantino. There is in this notion a Master’s thesis in film theory for somebody, I’m sure of it. But it isn’t going to be me, so I open it up to anyone who want to take the job on. These two men belong to the same generation, and both could be avatars of postmodern film-making. Having grown up on the genre films of the 70s, they are both in the business of making films which are only comprehensible to audiences who share those same cultural signifiers. Just as Tarantino’s Kill Bill can only be understood and enjoyed in the light of a whole generation of martial arts movies and westerns, Roland Emmerich’s latest work – The Day After Tomorrow – is indigestible without the Pepto-Bismal of a lifetime of disaster science fiction.
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Ryanair redefines Communism

Posted on May 27, 2004 by Scott Martens

I note – probably with more amusement than Michael O’Leary intends – Ryanair’s recent defeat at the European Commission. I’m afraid I have never found it terribly surprising to see so-called entrepreneurs who complain about government distorting the markets do a 180 degree when it comes to their own subsidies, but O’Leary’s recent anti-EC tyrade should earn an award for doublethink.

I have never before heard a businessman scream about how the denial of government subsidies was “communist”, and I am hard pressed to understand how a decision to make Ryanair actually compete on the open market could be a “North Korean style” decision leading to a “communist valhalla” of high air travel prices. I realise that some folks set a very low bar for what sort of government intervention they consider legitimate, but this must set a record. Damn socialists, refusing to subsidise the free market! I should think this sort of discourse would have induced a reality check in Mr O’Leary.

This really brings new meaning to the old aphorism Socialism for the rich, capitalism for the poor.
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Die Duckomenta – eine Ausstellung

Posted on May 26, 2004 by Scott Martens

What else can I say? In the words of The Wall Street Journal Europe:

This Exhibit Is No Featherweight, so You Better Duck.

(via Electrolite)

But then, what do I know?

Posted on April 29, 2004 by Scott Martens

Via Desbladet and Libé, I see that the PUF will be releasing, for the first time, a Que sais-je? in English.

The Que sais-je? series is an essential reference title, something missing in the English language market. French reference books on the whole are better than English ones, and there are a number of gaps in the anglophone reference publishing business. But anglo firms have been catching up in recent years, particularly British publishers motivated largely by an enormous demand from English-second language users. In my particular field – lexicography – the British Collins Cobuild dictionary and its copycats at other British firms are well ahead of their French equivalents.

Still, French publishers have two big products with no adequate equivalents in the English-speaking world: the encyclopedic dictionary and the Que sais-je? Although this new English Que sais-je? is written for a francophone market, I do wonder if this doesn’t augur a change in reference publishing. Will French firms now start moving into English reference book publishing? Will Que sais-je? become as indispensable in English as it is in French?

Europe’s most far-flung enclave

Posted on April 29, 2004 by Scott Martens

Apparently, the Pitcairn Islands – famous from the many Mutiny on the Bounty movies – are a part of Europe, or so says the Pitcairn Islands tribunal in New Zealand. The story is up at the Head Heeb (via Crooked Timber). The whole story of the tribunal is long, sordid, and best described in the Head Heeb’s archives, but the salient bit is that the tribunal’s jurisdiction was challenged by the defence on the grounds that the islands have never been annexed by the UK, and are thus not subject to British law. This apparently did not impress the New Zealand tribunal, which will be operating according to UK law.

In fact, it appears that Pitcairn is not only British but also European. The statutory instruments relating to Pitcairn specify that where there is no local law governing a particular issue, British law applies. One area where there is no local legislation is human rights, and Britain has adopted the European Convention on Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms as domestic law. In subsidiary motions, the defense in the Pitcairn case challenged the appointment of magistrates and absence of trial by jury under European human rights instruments and, although the judges found no violation, both the court and the prosecution acknowledged that those instruments apply. When the Pitcairn trial is conducted in New Zealand under British law, it will be measured against a European standard of human rights.

I presume this means that there will be a right to appeal to Strasbourg. Does this mean that the sun never sets on Europe?

Anti-Islamism in France

Posted on April 20, 2004 by Scott Martens

One of the things I looked for during the recent discussion about anti-semitism in France was some statistics about anti-Islamic and anti-Arab violence for comparison. I was shocked that I couldn’t find any. The French government went out of its way to disagregate data about antisemitic attacks, but could not even be bothered to track attacks on mosques. I knew that there had been attacks on mosques – I remembered seeing them on the news – but no figures seemed to be available. All I could find was Tariq Ramadan, a fairly visible European Muslim intellectual, making the same complaint.

Today’s news from AFP leads me to think Ramadan may be on to something:
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A Francophone President in the White House?