According to Europol’s 2010 data (PDF) attacks by separatist/nationalist groups far outnumber attacks by Islamists.

I think this is important since the background condition of fairly widespread terrorism on the part of, say, Basque or Corsican terrorists helps us understand the correct context for a lot of Islamist violence, namely nationalism. If you look at Hamas, or the Taliban, or Pakistan-backed radicals in and around Kashmir it should be clear that ethnic nationalism is a major factor in all of these conflicts. It’s true that because Islam is also the dominant religion in the areas in question that the groups have an Islamist ideological orientation that we should construe as sincere. But you also see violence associated with secular nationalism in Europe, with the Tamil Tigers in Sri Lanka. The long (and mercifully waning) conflict in Ireland has tended to break down along sectarian lines, but is normally (and correctly) seen as primarily national in character and not “about” theological disputes between Catholics, Anglicans, and Calvinists—i.e., it’s not a conflict that gets resolved by making people less devoutly religious, and it’s not mediated by compromising over liturgy.

Pam Belluck rounds up the latest for the NYT:

The most studied approach in the United States uses testosterone and progestin hormones, which send the body signals to stop producing sperm. While effective and safe for most men, they have not worked for everyone, and questions about side effects remain.

So scientists are also testing other ways of interrupting sperm production, maturation or mobility.

One potential male birth control pill, gamendazole, derived from an anticancer drug, interrupts sperm maturation so “you’re making nonfunctional sperm,” said Gregory S. Kopf, associate vice chancellor for research administration at the University of Kansas Medical Center. The center has begun discussions with the Food and Drug Administration about the drug, already tested in rats and monkeys.

It seems to me that doesn’t work for everyone and questions about side effect remain characterizes existing methods of contraception for women. That’s one of the reasons why a variety of different methods have been developed. But isn’t the real issue with male contraceptives the question of trust? After all, if something goes wrong, it’s the woman who ends up pregnant and has a lot more on the line.

Jeffrey Sachs unloads a truck full of righteous indignation on Barack Obama and the leaders of the Democratic Party. Some my find it cathartic. I find that while Sachs is a brilliant economist, his model of American politics seems flawed. In particular, the concluding thought that “America needs a third-party movement to break the hammerlock of the financial elites” is badly under-explained.

My counter-proposal, which is boring, goes like this. If you want to move US public policy to the left, what you have to do is to identify incumbent holders of political office and then defeat them on Election Day with alternative candidates who are more left-wing. I think this works pretty reliable. To my mind, the evidence is pretty clear that even the election of fairly conservative pushes policy outcomes to the left as long as the guy they’re replacing was more conservative. And if your specific concern is that the Democratic Party isn’t as left-wing as you’d like it to be, then what you need to do is identify incumbent holders of political office and then defeat them in primaries with alternative candidates who are more left-wing. It’s noteworthy that even failed efforts to do this, such as Ned Lamont’s 2006 run against Joe Lieberman and Bill Halter’s 2010 run against Blanche Lincoln led to meaningful policy shifts simply by being credible. But left-wing critics of the Democrats often seem to me to be somewhat in denial about their poor record of success with these endeavors. “If we can’t beat a Senator in Connecticut, let’s take on an incumbent president who’s substantially more liberal than Lieberman” isn’t a logical program of action. The right lesson to learn from these Senate bids is that they’re worth trying again if circumstances are right, but that even they may be too ambitious. You walk before you run. Maybe you win state legislative and House races before you win Senate elections. Research indicates that previous experience in elective office is one of the main predictors of candidate success, so perhaps it’s only through a concentrated effort to increase progressive representation in state government that a pool of talented primary challenges can be generated. Or maybe there’s a great Senate challenger right around the corner, and if so that would be well worth writing a column about.

This prescription is, I’m afraid, boring. And the solution proposed is, I’m afraid, hard work. But politics is hard work! The Republican Party has become very ideologically rigorous because the conservative movement now has a decades-long record of defeating incumbent officeholders at all levels in primaries, and then of having those winning primary candidates win a general election. This was and is an impressive achievement that required a lot of hard work over a long period of time.

I think this chart from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities about how the United States is a low-tax country does a lot to explain the constant ideological angst that exists inside the progressive camp in this country. The issue is that the United States is a low tax country. In a high-tax country like Austria there’s a relatively narrow range of plausible center-left views about the size and scope of the welfare state. It’s always possible to mount a fairly radical critique of the Austrian status quo. But anyone thinking of themselves as a moderate sensible progressive is going to see a pretty narrow range of options available. “Maybe we should be more like Denmark.” And maybe we should.

The United States is different. This is a country where saying that the state ought to be as large a role in the economy as it did in pre-crisis Ireland counts as a left-wing perspective rather than a right-wing one as it did in most countries. “We ought to be around the OECD average” is an even further left position. But a lot of people look at the Netherlands or even Sweden and see economically and socially dynamic societies with many admirable features. People holding all these views find themselves in the same political coalition. And since people holding all these views are arguing for the United States to imitate actually existing pleasant places (albeit small ones) it’s possible for people holding all these views to deem themselves to be sensible, practical-minded, reformers and not at all pie in the sky radicals. But “we should be like Ireland,” “we should be like the Netherlands,” and “we should be like Sweden” are actually dramatically different policy proposals. And certainly in the Netherlands “we should be like Ireland” and “we should be like Sweden” would be correctly understood as very different agendas, whose adherents would find themselves on opposite sides of the political debate. Here in the United States, a very right-leaning status quo combined with a two party political system means that people with sharply divergent ideas are all “on the same team.”

A related point, very relevant to the ongoing debt ceiling negotiations, is that there’s substantial ambiguity around what the status quo even means going forward. The United States has the option of persisting with some very much like Medicare and Medicaid in their current forms, but doing so would require substantial changes in the level of taxation. Conversely, we have the option of persisting with a level of taxation similar to what we’ve had historically but doing so would require fundamental changes in government health care and retirement programs. Consequently, people proposing fairly dramatic changes on both the tax and health can can plausibly see themselves as defending the status quo.