Without a Traceroute

I hung out with Stefania a bit, but she was sick for the first few days I was there, and then busy trying to get caught up afterwards. She’s kind of amazing in the amount of stuff she does. In addition to her Ph.D. research, she does yoga, soccer, pilates, salsa dancing, bike racing and she’s taking classes to learn German as her fourth language (after Italian, English and Portuguese).

We went to a talk given at EUI by an American sociologist named Kathryn Sikkink from the University of Minnesota. It was fairly interesting stuff, she talked about the impact of criminal trials for war crimes, crimes against humanity and human rights violations on the overall human rights situation in a country. Her work showed a positive correlation between holding such trials and improvements in human rights. It was unclear what metrics she was using as a measure of “human rights”, and I didn’t ask because it seemed like an unbearably n00bish question.

By her accounting, having individual criminal trials for human rights abuses is a relatively new phenomenon. She described three prevailing models for dealing with human rights violations over history.

1. Sovereign immunity model: Basically, the State is a sovereign immune entity and can’t be penalized legally for anything it does as official state actions.
2. State accountability model: States are collectively held accountable through sanctions, payment of reparations, official apologies. No punishment for individual actors.
3. Individual criminal accountability model: The most recent paradigm, and the one she was looking at. Individual military and government officials can be tried in criminal courts and, if convicted, serve time in prison.

According to her work, holding criminal trials has the effect of reducing human rights abuses, even in countries not holding such trials. She noted a cross-border effect, where neighboring nations showed an improvement in their own treatment of human rights when a nearby country held a high-profile human rights trial.

Ms. Sikkink posited two possible reasons for these correlations. Either a direct effect, whereby the real possibility of criminal accountability causes military or government officials to alter their behavior. For example, if a young army officer at the start of his career were to see high-ranking officers sent to jail and their careers ruined, it might lead him to be more contentious of human rights in his future career.
The second, indirect effect was by a mechanism she called a “Justice Cascade”, the term apparently draws from some other guy’s earlier work on a “Norms Cascade”. The basic idea is something like that criminal trials are high profile “theatrical” events wherein a society “acts out its norms”, and that makes people more aware that the society values human rights, or something like that. This second explanation is the sort of fuzzy speculation that makes me a bit uncomfortable with social sciences in general and sociology in particular. Then again, I can’t be too critical because I don’t really know anything about norms theory, and my impression from the talk may be a gross oversimplification.

At one point when going through some of the correlation data, Ms. Sikkink made a comment like, “I can’t answer questions about the statistics here. I have a very very bright grad student who handles the math.” Now, I’m not asking for every social scientist to be an expert statistician, but I do think that statistics should be more than magic numbers that come out of a Black Box labeled “grad student”.

The question-and-answer section also reminded me of a lot of the things I dislike about academia. More than one “question” began with some variation on “As I noted in my 2007 work…” and led into a 10 minute discussion of the questioner’s own work with a question mark tacked onto the end.

On Thursday, I decided to go to EUI to do some reading and use the wireless in the library there. EUI’s campus is absolutely gorgeous, It was once an aristocratic estate in the hills outside Florence. I think America missed out in a big way by not having 18th century European nobility build our campuses for us. If there’s one thing American colleges lack, it’s deer-hunting grounds.

This is all part of EUI

So the campus was beautiful. I assume the library is as well, but I wouldn’t know. Stefania had told me that it should be a simple matter to sign in as a visitor at the library entrance desk. When I got there, there was nobody at the desk (in retrospect, I really should’ve just walked in), so I waited for a few minutes, and then called “Hello” into the back room. A woman came out, and I told her that I wanted to sign in as a visitor; she was like, “Well, what do you want to use the library for?” and I’m like, “Reading, using the wireless internet.” (what else does one do in a library?) and she’s all, “Well, we have serious researchers here, we can’t allow just anyone into the library.” and denied me entry.

First of all, does it really jeopardize the “serious” researchers’ ability to do their work to have less-serious people sitting in the same room with them? Second, and more importantly, I think libraries should be open to anyone who wants to use them for their intended purpose. I understand maybe you don’t want homeless people using your library as a bedroom, or teenagers hooking up in the study rooms, but anyone who’s there to read or acquire information should be able to. Free access to knowledge and all that. Stefania laughed when I told her this story later, “most of those serious researchers are just watching YouTube on their laptops.”

I probably could’ve gone all, “I’m a Thomas J. Watson visiting fellow from the United States and I have to do important research blah blah blah” but I would’ve felt like an ass getting into some kind of academic prestige pissing contest. Instead, I just left and took over a vacant classroom (that from the look of it, had once been some sort of drawing room: high ceiling, massive stone fireplace, chandelier) and did my reading there. Basically EUI is a cool, but very isolated place. It’s literally cloistered academia. No, seriously, there are actual cloisters there.

On Friday, for my birthday, I went out with the Dutch economist-who-isn’t—he has some neigh-unpronounceable Dutch name, so even his housemates usually referred to him as “The Nameless Dutchman,” “That Dutch Guy We Never See,” and so forth. Anyway, we went out with his economist friends for pizza at a restaurant that they frequent. The service was really bad. “I think they know us here and hate us,” suggested one person. Deciding the correct tip at a table full of economists was quite complicated. There was spirited debate over the correct incentive structure to use. It was finally decided to leave no tip, because to leave anything would risk them thinking they had done an acceptable job. This view was put forth most forcefully by a French misanthrope economist who chain-smoked continuously and said things like, “I don’t know why I bother with people.” There’s a reason that economics is known as “the dismal science,” and I suspect that being both French and an economist simultaneously could result in a deep sense of ennui.

After dinner we went to Bar Fiasco, the pub on the EUI campus that was having a “70s Night” theme party that turned out not to be adhered to very strictly in either dress or music. Let’s just say at one point, they played ‘My Humps’. Bar Fiasco was most notable for its incredibly cheap beer and a massive library of absolutely terrible books in several different languages. They appeared to be primarily schlock mystery novels. One person told me that “this is where people abandon books they don’t want.” There was a similar collection of VHS tapes on the same shelves, as well as a 1982 Rowing Championship trophy that had since been used as an ashtray.

The crowd was not large and composed almost entirely of Ph.D. researchers. Not a demographic known for throwing great parties. After about an hour, we beat a retreat to a bar in the city center. This was complicated by the fact that there was a strike that day, and so some of the buses weren’t running. One of the economists tried to explain it, but it didn’t make much sense to me. Apparently in Italy, there are frequently multiple unions representing people who do the same job. So, for example, bus drivers might belong to the Christian Union or the Socialist Union or any of a variety of other unions. On that Friday, some of the unions were on strike, but not others. There were some buses running, but it was impossible to tell which lines were running, and what reduced schedule they might be running on.

The bar in the city center (Max’s, maybe) was nice, and a couple people bought me drinks since it was my birthday. A cute Finnish girl flirted with me, stopping about every 10 minutes to say, “I really shouldn’t be flirting with you. I have a boyfriend, he’s Italian and he doesn’t like me to flirt with guys. What’s up with that?” I eventually met said Italian for like 2 minutes when he came to pick up his girlfriend on his scooter. For the record, he wasn’t that attractive.

Bars in Florence are required to close at 2 am, but there are several institutions that get around this restriction by reconstituting themselves as “Private Social Clubs”. They are not always as mafia-connected as this sounds, however I was told that the particular one we visited is run by the Armenian mob—for this reason, the Finnish girl’s boyfriend was unable to come with us, and so the two of them left when we were leaving Max’s.

Basically, you pay €5 at the door, and they give you a little membership card that you can then use to get in on future visits. So I can report that “Brendon McCollen” (the doorman wrote my name down wrong) is now a proud cardholding member of the “Associazione di Cultura Sport E Tempo Libero di Italia” (Italian Association of Sports, Culture and Free Time?). The EUI kids I was with all seemed to think the place was terrible, and it was small, crowded (that happens when nothing else is open) and too hot. But it was underground, and I felt like it had kind of a cool, speakeasy vibe.

Eventually we left and headed back to somebody’s house. It might’ve been the French guy’s. Rather than try to walk all the way back to Le Cure (it was way past the time busses run, even on non-strike days), I slept on the couch for a few hours and then, bleary eyed, caught a 9am bus up to Le Cure. I was surprisingly un-hungover, and I’m usually extremely suceptible to hangovers. Later that afternoon, Stefania and I drove to Pisa to meet with some hackers.