Night. Dogs. Not Barking.

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It’s still not certain who will lead the government in Germany’s northernmost state of Schleswig-Holstein. Neither the Social Democrat-Green coalition nor the Christian Democrat-Free Democrat coalition won a majority of seats in the election this past Sunday, and talks on all manner of variants are continuing.

What’s certain is that the far-right NPD — which had attracted international attention with electoral gains in the state of Saxony, with a demonstrative desertion of the legislative chambers when the Saxon government commemorated the liberation of Auschwitz, and with backing a protest in Dresden on the anniversary of the city’s destruction in a firebomb raid — is nowhere to be seen. Not present in the legislature. Not playing any role whatsoever in the state.

Watch for a similar non-event after elections in North Rhine-Westfalia, Germany’s most populous state, on May 22 of this year.

Waiting for Extase

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The always readable Timothy Garton Ash has another good column in today’s Guardian discussing how Europe’s inability to speak with one voice on the international stage weakens its impact. As he points out, the sheer number of people waiting to meet with President Bush this week help to show what the problem is:

Who knows what is Europe’s agenda for the world? The question always attributed to Henry Kissinger – “You say Europe, but which number should I call?” – remains posed. The baffling multiplicity of people the American president had to meet in Brussels, including heads of large-minded small countries and small-minded large countries, as well as those of competing institutional parts of the EU, not to mention Nato just up the road, shows how far we still are from an answer.

However, the situation isn’t quite as bad as that might make it seem. On some issues, there is unity and focus of action:
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Old questions reawakened

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Europe’s history is littered with questions, some answered, some left unanswered for centuries. For those of you interested in the Schleswig-Holstein question, Randy McDonald has an interesting post on how the remaining Danish and Frisian minority in Schleswig-Holstein could hold the state’s balance of power after Sunday’s elections and how that could affect the politics of Germany as a whole.

The Value of Learning a Second Language

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What is the value of learning a second language aside from the obvious practical benefits : the fact that you can talk to people who don’t speak your first language, can read things which have not been translated, can politely talk to people who don’t find it easy to speak your first language and can read things in the original.

When I was in high school adults tried to convince me to try to learn a second language by claiming that it broadens the mind. They failed. Since then I have, more or less, learned Italian. What have I gained ?

My impression is that my mind reminds just about as narrow as it was before.

I asked Elisabetta Addis (the woman to whom I am married) what she gained from learning English. She said it was very useful, because by learning a second living language she learned that there is more than one way to structure concepts, that is that the structure of Italian is not the structure of truth, but is rather just one of many equally valid structures developed for historical reasons. I confessed that I have had the impression that Aristotle was not always totally clear on the distinction between his immense contributions to understanding Greek and to understanding thought and logic and would have confidently claimed that true though was only possible in Greek. I was as usual speaking from ignorance.

Trying to understand my different impression, she suggested that math is, for this purpose, like a second language (she learned English and math beyond a fairly elementary level simultaneously and imagine how fun that was).

I said that I suspect that part of the reason is that no one could possible mistake the structure of English for the structure of truth. Partly, of course, English spelling is totally arbitrary and makes no sense. Also English is not logical because it is part German and part French. For example to find if a claim is true one verifies it. Or steer meat is beef and sheep meat is mutton. That is, since English is a weird hybrid, English is its own second language.

If so, this is important, since the only people who have a choice about learning a second language or not are native English speakers.

My unassisted thoughts on the topic below the fold.
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Iberian update

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Only time for a wuick update, but in case you haven’t been paying attention over the weekend, Spanish voters have voted in favour of the Constitution in a non-binding referendum. This now means that Zapatero will put the Constitution up for a vote in the Cortes – he had said he would only do so if the voters approved of it.

And Portugal has a new government after the opposition Socialists won an overall majority in their election at the weekend. As well as meaning that President Sampaio will work alongside a fellow Socialist, it also means that Europe will have a country led by Socrates – Socialist leader Jose Socrates.

fact and value, truth and knowledge

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I would like to comment on an excerpt of a comment by Mike

“We might distinguish questions of fact (e.g. “which way will John vote at the next election?”) from questions of value (e.g. “is Blair’s outlook better than Brown’s?) by noting that the answers to factual questions may be true or false, but that the answers to value questions must always depend on and presuppose a point of view or value. Answers to factual questions do not presuppose a point of view or value – they presuppose the categories of true and false and must be framed in those terms (either we are correct in predicting that John will vote for X or, if he votes for Y we will have been shown to be incorrect).”

I think it will be important to define the word “knwledge” right now. I use “knowldge” to mean “justified true belief”. If we happen to guess right, we do not know. I will place great stress on the word “justified” in that definition.

OK back to the quote “answers to value questions must always depend on and presuppose a point of view or value” is implied by”answers to value questions must always depend on and presuppose a value”. In this post I will assume for the sake of argument that the stronger claim is true so answers to value questions must always depend on and presuppose a value. How does this make them different from claims of fact ?
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Let Us Now Praise Famous Men

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Paul Samuelson is very smart but not always polite. When praising John Kenneth Galbraith he wrote something like “it would be wonderful to write his obituary” which only meant that it was enjoyable to write a encominium on Galbraith and any other more literal interpretation would be incorrect, funny and amusing to Prof Galbraith. Among Prof. Samuelson’s words of praise were, more or less, the following “he understood that economics is to important to leave up to the economists” Which is my effort to recall a translation of Clemenceau.

So the question is: “If you could write an encominium on a famous person in the mass circulation comments to a post in “A Fistful of Euros” who would you praise?”

The question is not “Does Robert Waldmann count how many comments each post gets and treat the number as a measure of his success ?” However, if anyone would like to post the comments “yes”,”that’s obviious”, “what a twit” or “that’s really the most pathetic form of self gratification I have ever heard of,” I will count them all the same.

So who would I like to praise ? Too keep the list under control I praise only people who died after I was born

My Mom should be famous
My Dad is almost famous
George Orwell
Vaclaw Havel
Nelson Mandela
Martin Luther King Jr
Jorge Luis Borges
Alan Turing ?
Larry Summers needs some praise right now and I won’t lie or anything but he was very patient with me.
Brad DeLong
Andrei Shleifer
Michael Kinsley
Graham Walker has tenure at MIT so he is sortof famous
Reinhart Selton is the most humble noble laureate that I have every met and he actually takes teaching undergraduates seriously.
Omigod I forgot to mention what an absolutely wonderful guy Salvatore Luria is.
I’m an economist so I have to talk about Kenneth Arrow even though I wish I could be a bit original.
Bernard Kouchner really deserves a better fate
John McCain should not be electe president of the USA even if he is an admirable person.
Happy is the nation that needs no heroes. Less happy is the nation full of people like me who didn’t appreciate Jimmy Carter
Why the hell was Andrew Young such a bad “permanent” representative at the UN ?
Paul Kafka is the nicest winner of the LA Times best first novel prize that I know
Many admirable and famous people who I know who are not going to get totally pissed at me for not mentioning them.

Click if you have nothing better to do than to read the actual praise.
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EU or USSR ?

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I just read that a 4 year long investigation of Silvio Berlusconi was completed and that the investigating magistrates conclude that he missappropriated and did not pay taxes on “276,9 milioni di dollari, 9,4 miliardi di lire, 13,5 milioni di franchi svizzeri, 2 milioni di franchi francesi, 548.000 fiorini olandesi, a cui si aggiungono altre somme ancora da “quantificare”. ” According to the investigating magistrates the tax evasion continued for a while following a system “”elaborato negli anni ’80, e da allora costantemente seguito, fino al ’95”. (which means that Silvio was cheating on taxes while he was prime minister).

All in all it sounds like a rather important story wouldn’t you say ? However there was no (zero) mention of this on TG1 (main public nightly newscast) nor does any mention appear on televideo (text news on TV also public sector). Evidently the official accusation (based on banking records) that the prime minister is a megacrook isn’t news.

Which brings me to my question. Is this approach to news more typical of the European Union or of the Soviet Union ?