[DM] “On the problems of David Goodhart on immigration in the United Kingdom”

I’ve a brief post reacting to a couple of reviews of a book by David Goodhart on immigration to the United Kingdom, The British Dream, that highlight his problems with facts and the quietly malign way that his interpretations work.

[BLOG] Some Thursday links

• blogTO’s Chris Bateman starts a discussion as to what should be done with the Gardiner Expressway.
• Centauri Dreams takes a look at solar system navigation from the radio signals of pulsars.
• The Dragon’s Tales points to a paper suggesting ways that astronomers could resolve planets in habitable-zone orbits orbiting nearby Sun-like stars, like Alpha Centauri A and B.
• Daniel Drezner considers trust in the state, particularly in the context of PRISM and the surveillance of Internet communications by the American government. (Trust does not seem warranted.)
• Eastern Approaches notes that the intersection of politics with the modernization of Poland’s energy infrastructure does bad things there.
• The Power and the Money’s Noel Maurer takes a look at political procedure in the Colombian congress.
• At The Search, Leslie Johnston takes a look at pre-Internet online communities, like BBSes and Compuserve and Usenet.
• Technosociology’s Zeynep Tukefci writes about how Gezi Park’s demonstrators have organized themselves.
• Window on Eurasia notes polls suggesting that Georgians, despite the more recent wars, are less worried by challenges to their country’s territorial integrity than Azerbaijanis.
• Yorkshire Ranter Alex Harrowell confirms that David Goodhart is not to be trusted when he talks about immigration, not at all.

[BLOG] Some Thursday links

• Centauri Dreams notes that exoplanet discovery of late is still limited.
• Crooked Timber’s Maria Farrell, as wife of a British soldier, opposes the latest initiative of the British panopticon state aimed at protecting soldiers.
• Daniel Drezner thinks that Michelle Obama should have met her Chinese counterpart.
• Eastern Approaches covers the floods in Germany and the Czech Republic.
• The Everyday Sociology Blog examines the question of the Boy Scouts of America and sexual orientation.
• Lawyers, Guns and Money makes the case that the United States has become the energy colony of Canada (more specifically, Alberta).
• Speed River Journal’s Van Waffle considers whether gardeners should pick seeds or seedlings. It depends on their plans and experience.
• Towleroad maps the global acceptance of homosexuality based on a recent survey.
• Window on Eurasia suggests Siberian alienation from Russia, specifically in the Russian Far East, is growing.

[BLOG] Some Thursday links

• Daniel Drezner notes, using as an example the controversial Keystone pipeline, that interest group political movements inevitably become compromised whenever they encounter politicians not beholden to said (here, Kerry’s beliefs).
• Eastern Approaches notes the continued rivalry between contending political factions in Georgia.
• Language Log analyses a recent photo of Vietnamese written in Chinese script. What does the odd character order mean?
• Marginal Revolution notes that poor soil conditions in much of Africa inhibit economic development.
• In a guest post at the Planetary Society Blog, Bill Dunford describes, in photos and words, some of the more evocatively-named features on other worlds.
• The Power and the Money’s Noel Maurer makes the case that there is no such thing as a resource curse, just bad governance.
• Torontoist notes that Fort York’s new visitor centre is under contstruction.
• Understanding Society’s Daniel Little describes an interesting-sounding conference in China on rural economic development, one that features an actual visit to an up-and-coming rural cooperative.
• Yorkshire Ranter Alex Harrowell visits the David Bowie exhibit in London and considers Bowie as pioneering a sort of post-colonial modernity that the United Kingdom hadn’t had until that point.
• Zero Geography’s Mark Graham maps controversial articles in different versions of Wikipedia.

[BLOG] Some Monday links

• Acts of Minor Treason’s Andrew Barton has a photo of the Danforth subway tunnel, looking east from Chester at a point where Pape is barely visible.
• Beyond the Beyond’s Bruce Sterling writes about a Montréal exhibition of the history of computing.
• Crooked Timber’s John Quiggin starts an insightful discussion, inspired by the controversies about same-sex marriage, about the ideological cleavages in France.
• The Dragon’s Tales Will Baird discusses exoplanets: briefly, dim orange and red dwarfs frequently have Earth- and Neptune-sized planets but not larger giants, while there are fewer Earth-sized planets than one would expect from the distribution of discovered ones.
• Eastern Approaches notes that clerical sex abuse scandals are starting to break in Poland.
• Far Outliers’ Joel quotes Chinua Achebe on the anti-Ibo pogroms of Nigeria in 1966.
• Language Hat links to a site examining documentary evidence of the presence of the French language in pre-revolutionary Russia.
• Erik Loomis at Lawyers, Guns and Money writes about the collapsing infrastructure of the United States.
• Peter Rukavina describes how he used a 3-D printer to print replacement parts for his desk. The replicator cometh.
• Torontoist examines the origins of the name of Toronto and points to Andrew Cash’s interest in bolstering the position of precarious urban workers.
• Yorkshire Ranter Alex Harrowell is rightfully unimpressed by the incompetence of British Tory Iain Duncan Smith.

[BLOG] Some Thursday links

• The Burgh Diaspora’s Jim Russell notes that Canadians don’t migrate that much within their country in response to economic stimuli.
• Collide-a-scape’s Keith Kloor wonders why an ostensibly pro-science city like Portland, Oregon, has taken fluoride out of its water.
• Geocurrents notes the rapid fall of fertility rates in Turkey and Iran.
• Itching in Eestimaa’s Palun wonders about future multilingualism in Estonia.
• At Lawyers, Guns and Money, Robert Farley wonders what would have become of Japanese admiral Isoruku Yamamoto had he lived to the end of the Second World War.
• Tyler Cowen at Marginal Revolution disagrees with Paul Krugman on the prospects of the Portuguese economy.
• The Numerati’s Stephen Baker is conflicted about Flickr’s upgrading, not least since they make all his photos available to everyone.
• Strange Maps produces a map where the Dakotas were divided differently, west-east along the Missouri River.
• Van Waffle describes, with photos, how a picture of an exotic pigeon inspired a beautiful shawl.
• Window on Eurasia notes that Circassians are unhappy with Russia.
• Alexander Harrowell notes that once-progressive David Goodhart is now using the language of far-right fascists to describe migrants and immigration.

[BLOG] Some Monday blog links

• Bag News Notes’ Michael Shaw documents in photographs the docking of the Freedom Tower’s spire with the building.
• The Dragon’s Tales links to a paper analyzing the extent to which increased atmospheric carbon dioxide compensate for a planet’s relatively dimmer, or more distant, sun.
• Daniel Drezner approves of Obama’s attempt to lead public opinion by pointing out that there are a lot of good things going on in Mexico.
• Eastern Approaches notes that Polish prime minister Donald Tusk is encountering serious conflict within his Civic Platform party between social liberals and conservatives.
• The Everyday Sociology Blog’s Sally Roskoff notes that correlation is not causation, starting with an amusing graphic purporting to illustrate the connection between falling rates of Internet Explorer browser usage and falling murder rates.
• Marginal Revolution’s Tyler Cowen starts a discussion about which athletes and entertainers are more likely to come out that others.
• The New APPS Blog’s Helen De Cruz argues that there are proportionally many more female academics in Turkey than (for instance) Belgium because, among other things, the modern tradition of women working in academia is strongly implanted and female academics can easily acquire cheap household labour.
• Open the Future’s Jamais Cascio talks about the fuzzy now. If transported backwards or forwards in time, how long would it take for an observer to pick up on the many small and large changes?
• Understanding Future’s Daniel Little introduces people to some discussions on the future of Detroit.
• Window on Eurasia’s Paul Goble notes a Russian analyst claiming that the Russian elite has definitively accepted the independence of the Baltic States in a way that it hasn’t that of the other former Soviet republics.
• Alex Harrowell does not think that Labour need go out of its way to try to attract UKIP voters to its left-wing economic policies, inasmuch as the only change that Labour could make to attract these UKIP voters is become more bigoted.

[LINK] “Margaret Thatcher: European.”

Alex Harrowell’s A Fistful of Euros post making the argument that, as a politician, Margaret Thatcher was much more pro-European integration than her successors in the Conservative Party would have preferred is a great revisionist take. Thatcher as a practitioner of the German doctrine of ordoliberalism? Makes sense.

Margaret Thatcher was underrated as a European politician. As prime minister, she was very much in favour and deeply engaged in the creation of the Single European Act and therefore of the single market. It is a cliche to say that the Brits only think of the European Union as a single market, but this is ahistorical – in the mid-80s, single market completion was the absolute top priority on the European agenda. If Europe is a project under construction, the single market was the phase that was completed in the 80s. The notion of catching up with Europe, competing with Europe, trading across Europe – all of this was ingrained in Thatcherite style, tone, and rhetoric.

British macro-economic policy in the Thatcher years was also driven by European integration. After giving up on monetarism, the UK government decided to establish a fixed exchange rate with the D-Mark, and later formalised this by joining the Exchange Rate Mechanism. In fact, the UK spent as much time under Thatcher tracking the D-Mark as it did targeting the money supply. The notions of “importing credibility” that were used to promote the Euro in the 90s and 00s had an earlier run-out in the UK in the 1980s.

With an open capital account and a currency pegged to the D-Mark at a dramatically high parity, the UK in the late 1980s looks rather like a peripheral European economy of the mid-2000s, with inflows of capital chasing yield, a growing financial sector, a trade deficit, a housing bubble, and a political elite frantically clapping themselves on the back, before the crash.

The UK’s broader foreign and defence policy could have been reduced to the word “NATO”, which is another way of saying that it was focused on Europe. In the early 1980s, UK defence plans were all about the BAOR operational area in Germany and the NATO Northern Flank. In fact, if it hadn’t been for the accident of the Falklands, they would have been much more so, sharply reducing the Navy at the expense of the Army and RAF and the nuclear world. Similarly, Thatcher really didn’t care about the Commonwealth or anything much outside, yes, Europe or the North Atlantic.

[BLOG] Some Monday links

• The Burgh Diaspora writes about the linkages between population and economic change.
• Centauri Dreams examines the discovery of stellar parallax and its use to determine the distance to the stars in the 19th century.
• The Dragon’s Tales examines computer models of the settlement of the Americas. The model of migration across Beringia remains intact, while transpacific migration can’t be excluded but can’t be supported by evidence, either.
• Eastern Approaches chronicles the ongoing ferment in Slovenia and the Czech immigrant history in Texas.
• At A Fistful of Euros, Edward Hugh warns that the seemingly inevitable slow-motion economic slide of Spain, trapped in the Eurozone and with an aging workforce, may be echoed more broadly.
• Language Hat comments on the NHL’s Punjabi-language broadcasts.
• Normblog’s Norman Geras assesses the moral implications of factories in Bangladesh in the light of the recent disaster (1, 2). More subtle and useful responses than a reflex action of shutting them down are needed.
• Torontoist details historical patterns of neglect of the site of Fort York.
• The Volokh Conspiracy’s Eugene Volokh notes a court ruling in Israel which allows Jewish women to pray in front of the Western Wall without being arrested.
• Window on Eurasia notes the ruralization of Dagestan’s cities as the local Russian population leaves and rural migrants arrive, and the transition in Chechnya in the past decade towards a centralized and hierarchical culture under Kadyrov.
• Yorkshire Ranter Alex Harrowell notes UKIP’s desire to not bother researching and developing policy options on its own but rather borrowing them from established think tanks.

[BLOG] Some Friday links

• The Burgh Diaspora notes that although the Bronx might have more incomers than fellow New York City borough Manhattan, Manhattan’s catchment area is global.
• Centauri Dreams takes a look at the study of planetary systems of subgiant stars, relatively aged stars, starting with Kappa Coronae Borealis.
• Eastern Approaches deals with the legal and criminal controversies surrounding a Czech lobbyist.
• In an era of increasingly pervasive and efficient surveillance technologies, the Everyday Sociology Blog’s Tristan Bridges and Tara Tober wonder what privacy actually is these days.
• Geocurrents’ Asya Perelstvaig profiles the Samaritans, a little-known but enduring ethnic group related to–but distinct from–the Jews.
• GNXP’s Razib Khan notes a preliminary genetic study that gives credence to the idea of pre-Columbian Ainu migration to South America six thousand years ago. I want to see more on this.
• Joe. My. God observes that “Ding Dong! The Witch Is Dead” is a hit on the UK pop charts.
• At Lawyers, Guns and Money, Robert Farley notes that much criticism of Margaret Thatcher’s role in the Falklands War is ill-judged, and wonders why so few people blame the Argentine junta.
• Michael in Norfolk notes marriage rights successes in Uruguay and France.
• The Power and the Money’s Noel Maurer outlines the recent history–surprising to me–of fairly loud conflict between Argentina and Uruguay.