Bibliographic record
Abstract
This working paper (3000 words, including 19 footnotes) was written on January 29-31, 2011, as events unfolded in Egypt. It was published in the present version as an article on January 31, 2011, by OpenDemocracy, and may be republished with attribution for non-commercial purposes following the Creative Commons guidelines. The article’s sub-title is “From the Shah of Iran to Sri Lanka’s Foreign Minister to Egypt’s Mubarak, cozy relationships in US foreign policy need to be questioned.” Its point of departure is the Thatcher-Pinochet friendship, which is related to Hillary Clinton's interview in Egypt in 2009 when she downplayed the US Department of State's own report of serious human rights violations in Egypt (including a torture apparatus) while emphasizing, "I really consider President and Mrs. Mubarak to be friends of my family." The article then shows how a version of family-ties coziness has plausibly played a role in how Sri Lanka has managed to mute, to the point of near-silence, US criticism. I take the reader through the first joint press conference held by Secretary of State Clinton and the just-appointed Foreign Minister of Sri Lanka G L Peiris, who attended Oxford University as a Rhodes Scholar alongside former US President Bill Clinton. Amongst the notable omissions and elisions in Hillary Clinton’s remarks during that press conference was the complete failure to address her own Department of State’s report on approximately 300 incidents of possible war crimes in Sri Lanka that needed investigating. I return to Egypt in its present crisis by comparing the 30 years of support for Mubarak to the decades of US support for the Shah of Iran, which support then merged with President Jimmy Carter's inability to disentangle a personal rapport with the Shah from Carter's supposed human rights-friendly foreign policy. The piece ends with consideration of the implications for US foreign policy of cozy personal relationships with key politicians in repressive regimes – implications that go beyond adding a layer of complexity, extending to questions of ethical accountability.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.012 | 0.034 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.041 | 0.025 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.023 | 0.031 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.014 |
| Research integrity | 0.017 | 0.028 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.028 | 0.009 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".