I turned on Letterman the other night to find the camera showing the back of his guest's head with Dave in the background. My heart leapt to my throat as I wondered if what I was seeing really was...really was...No, it couldn't be! Is that Chris?!
Turns out the closely shorn pate was not Chris's, but Daniel Tammet, pukka savant. Tammet is autistic, and apparently memorized Pi, in only a few weeks, to an INCREDIBLE twenty-two thousand, five-hundred decimal places. He said it took him something like five hours to recite, which means in those few weeks he couldn't have gone over the number that many times in order to memorize it.
While I know Chris doesn't have those skills to that degree, I think his friends and family ought to cut him some slack. What with blogging and memorizing Pi in his spare time, it's a wonder he's as far as he is with his dissertation. And thus we hope he's relaxing and dancing with wolves up north.
I'm heading back to Ottawa over the weekend to visit friends and family, so blogging (from me) will be even lighter than usual. Apart from the fact that friends and family will doubtless engage in an informal competition to see who can pester me the most about the completion of my dissertation and the question of little ones, the trip should be lots of fun.
Soon my pockets will be heavy with change and I'll be cursing some moron who is driving the speed limit in the left hand lane! (Just to get this out of my system: That's not what the left hand lane is for you stupid farging icehole.)
Oh Canada!
A nuclear weapon that is exploded underground can destroy a deeply buried bunker efficiently and requires significantly less power to do so than a nuclear weapon detonated on the surface would, says a new report from the National Academies' National Research Council. However, such "earth-penetrating" nuclear weapons cannot go deep enough to avoid massive casualties at ground level, and they could still kill up to a million people or more if used in heavily populated areas, said the committee that wrote the report.
The obvious danger of a book like this is that it will trivialize its subject. But I've read the introduction (follow the link for a link to it), and the author seems to have avoided that problem. Indeed, the book looks downright intriguing. Here's the blurb:
Sex after Fascism:That goes right to the top of the list of books that I don't have time to read and so probably won't.
Memory and Morality in Twentieth-Century Germany By Dagmar HerzogWhat is the relationship between sexual and other kinds of politics? Few societies have posed this puzzle as urgently, or as disturbingly, as Nazi Germany. What exactly were Nazism's sexual politics? Were they repressive for everyone, or were some individuals and groups given sexual license while others were persecuted, tormented, and killed? How do we make sense of the evolution of postwar interpretations of Nazism's sexual politics? What do we make of the fact that scholars from the 1960s to the present have routinely asserted that the Third Reich was "sex-hostile"?
In response to these and other questions, Sex after Fascism fundamentally reconceives central topics in twentieth-century German history. Among other things, it changes the way we understand the immense popular appeal of the Nazi regime and the nature of antisemitism, the role of Christianity in the consolidation of postfascist conservatism in the West, the countercultural rebellions of the 1960s-1970s, as well as the negotiations between government and citizenry under East German communism. Beginning with a new interpretation of the Third Reich's sexual politics and ending with the revisions of Germany's past facilitated by communism's collapse, Sex after Fascism examines the intimately intertwined histories of capitalism and communism, pleasure and state policies, religious renewal and secularizing trends.
A history of sexual attitudes and practices in twentieth-century Germany, investigating such issues as contraception, pornography, and theories of sexual orientation, Sex after Fascism also demonstrates how Germans made sexuality a key site for managing the memory and legacies of Nazism and the Holocaust.
With American sovereignty threatened and the Constitution itself under attack, I'm glad that patriotic Americans remain ever vigilant.
I haven't yet commented on the Senatorial kerfuffle over the filibuster, judges, and the "nuke-u-lar" option. I haven't read anything terribly insightful about the whole thing. And I'm not going to offer anything amazingly illuminating here. However, there are a couple of things to keep in mind. First, people should see through the "democracy" rhetoric that some are resorting to instead of good substantive arguments about the filibuster's merits. Rhetoric about democracy and the constitution is cheap, and it doesn't take much reflection to show that making the concept of democracy determinate is no easy task.
On the matter of constitutionality, I don't see a problem with the filibuster. The Constitution seems clear: Article I, Sect. V says (in part) that "Each House may determine the rules of its proceedings..."
Of course, one might argue that while the Constitution gives each chamber the right to determine its rules contrary to the ideals of democracy, they ought--as a matter of civic virtue--to do their best to ensure that their rules are on the democratic up-and-up. I'm inclined to agree here, but it is not clear to me that allowing minorities limited control of legislative actions is undemocratic. It is not obvious that placing certain constraints on the legislative will of simple majorities is undemocratic. Democracy has an interest in reproducing itself, and the conscience of certain (large) minorities should be heard when they believe it is important enough to stand up against the actions of majorities. This of course does not mean that the actions of the minority ought to be political costless; indeed, any minority that invokes such a privilege ought to be willing to suffer the consequences. But if there is reason to allow minorities this privilege, its invocation cannot constitute reason to revoke the privilege. What it can constitute is reason for voters to make a minority even more of a minority in the next election.
As for the history of the use of a filibuster, much of the rhetoric is irrelevant. I'm not going to get into the facts, because I don't have time to learn them. Yet there is one important point that can be made. Many Republicans are claiming that while the filibuster is generally an OK institution, it should not be used on judges. This is a bizarre claim, given that most of the legislation that passes through Congress can be changed or repealed as soon as an opposing majority is convened or elected. Yet judges are appointed for life. It thus seems that if the filibuster has any role at all, its place is in the confirmation of such judges, not in legislation that can be changed by successive majorities.
The final point is the most devastating, in my opinion, for those Republications that invoke the ideals of democracy when opposing the use of the filibuster. The argument is that democracy prevails only when the will of the majority is effective, and the filibuster allows that will to be stymied by a minority. This argument becomes laughable when put in the mouths of Sentors. Robert A. Dahl, the eminent political scientist and historian, calls the very existence of the Senate as we know it "a profound violation of the democratic idea of political equality" (How Democratic is the American Constitution?, p. 49). As you can read in this review of Dahl's book, the Senate's very existence would be a blow to democracy if the current Republican argument is correct:
[H]alf the U.S. population sends 18 senators to Washington while the other half sends 82...California gets two senators; the 20 least populous states, which combined have roughly the same number of people as California, get 40 senators.It is thus possible for a coalition of Senators from relatively small states to pass legislation by simple majority even though the elected representatives of a majority of Americans are against it. Senatorial carping about the undemocratic nature of the filibuster is thus a bit like Prince Charles denouncing the existence of House of Lords.
Or something like that. That's what our DVD player says when we try to fast-forward through the previews or introductory material on a DVD. This never fails to annoy me. I'll bet it's not technologically impossible for the machine to ignore the disk instructions and fast-forward anyway. For the publishers of the DVD to try to force me to watch an ad is merely outrageous - merely because my expectations about this sort of thing are so low now that I'm able to keep my revenge fantasies under control. The serious scandal here is that the DVD machine - our DVD machine - is conspiring with these bastards. It's our damn DVD player. Whose side is it supposed to be on?
John Bolton seems to have lied in his congressional testimony, and no one cares. The Young Bearded One writes:
Bracketing John Bolton and all partisan considerations, this is an odd and distressing development and I think it's genuinely weird that conservatives in general and Senate Republicans in particular are brushing it aside so casually. It's not as if Democrats are such paragons of virtue that the executive branch appointees of the next Democratic administration will be above engaging in such things when it suits them if it's been made clear that dissembling in congressional testimony is now going to be treated on the level of dissembling during a Meet The Press appearance. Our system of government relies, informally but crucially, on the proposition that people will be motivated not only by partisanship, but also by a sort of institutional jealously. Senators are supposed to stand on their privileges. Every member of the body loses a lot of authority when the "don't lie to the committee" norm collapses.But when executive branch appointees of the next Democratic administration dissemble in congressional testimony, it surely won't be treated by anyone as equivalent to dissembling during a Meet The Press appearance. It will surely be treated as a very big deal. Republican casualness about the issue is perfectly comprehensible if we assume that they're assuming the same thing that I'm assuming about American political culture: That consistency will count for nothing and Democrats will be judged on a blatantly unfair double standard.
Some high-quality pick-up lines. Almost every one of them deserves to get laid, I think.
I've been taken to task in the comments section of this post for incessantly recycling Matthew Yglesias posts. Well. Perhaps I should make more of an effort to distinguish myself from The Young Bearded One.
So how's this? Sometimes when Yglesias alludes to his views about normative ethics I wonder if he's smokin' crack. It's like he's Bentham reincarnated or something. (Bentham was famous for smoking crack.) And once in a while that nuttiness creeps into his views of other topics. On the whole, though, I notice that Yglesias manages to be very sensible on most topics in spite of his odd views about normative ethics. I find that both depressing and reassuring, since it seems to suggest that normative ethics is less useful than you might hope (though, of course, something can be valuable without being useful). It's like watching someone win a bike race with a rusty old clunker. You end up looking down at your fancy-schmancy racing bike and wondering if you haven't overpaid.
Also, I have the impression that Yglesias thinks that The Decemberists is a better band than The Arcade Fire - and if I'm right about that, then I think we have our second criticism. The Decemberists have some good stuff all right, but The Arcade Fire is surely the better band.
I admit that this is hardly a Sister Soujah moment. But I'm afraid that I've already used up this year's Sister Souljah moment on mysterious supervillain commenter Kegri. So this will have to do.
Anyway, the main mistake our good commenter seems to be making is to assume that I'm attempting to do anything as grand as blogging. As far as I'm concerned, I sort of gave up blogging as I knew it a while ago. These days I'm more interested in using blogging software to organize an online scrapbook/diary/mass friend email substitute/etc. repository. I'll let Paul handle the blogging.
I'm sure you've all read this by now, but if you haven't, you really should. Very funny, though, as Matthew Yglesias recently noted, not quite as funny as this great New York Press moment. Both pieces have an extremely high giggle-to-word ratio.
Shorter David Brooks: Placing legislative decisions in the hands of a minority is bad, because it robs conservative majorities of their democratic rights. Allowing minorities to control legislative decisions is good, because it enables conservative minorities to stop expansions of federal power.
I've been busy, but it just feels wrong to let another day go by without posting. So I'll just wish you all a happy bowling team shakeup day, and go to bed.
This morning, on the metro from Arlington, VA into DC, a man's voice came over the PA system:
Next stop, Foggy Bottom, George Washington University. This is the first stop in the District of Columbus.I have heard the same thing at least twice before, and have heard testimony that it is a regular phenomenon.
UPDATE: A Google search seems to reveal that the DC d.m.v. has made the same booboo.
Damn, that's hot.
I actually get tingles all over when I think about it.
Anyone catch Meet the Press yesterday? Now I know I have no idea what it must be like to live in Iraq these days, but maybe the New York Times should stop sending its reporters there. What good are they doing? After explaining that the New York Times "has a huge operation" in Iraq, Dexter Filkins, a Times correspondant there, went on to describe the current mood in Iraq:
MR. RUSSERT: Dexter Filkins, you spent the better part of two years in Iraq. What's your sense of how things are going?Compare that with Jim Miklaszewsk's description on the same show of a recent experience in Falluja:MR. DEXTER FILKINS: I think it's better. It feels better. I mean, you know, in the last four or five months, you've had two pretty significant events. One was the recapture of Fallujah, which had become a safe haven for the insurgents, and the other was the election, which I think gave a lot of Iraqis a sense that they were going to get their country back and they were going to be able to control its destiny. And I--just being on the streets there you can feel some of the anger having been drained away...So at the moment, things are feeling a little better.
Again, I'll go back to Fallujah, because I was just there for a couple of days last week. Nine thousand homes and buildings in Fallujah were destroyed when the Marines went in in November. There have been 32,000 claims against the government by homeowners and business owners. Of those 32,000 claims, only 2,400 have been paid off so far. And when you walk in and--let's say your house is worth $10,000. They will only give you 20 percent of the amount of your claim for now. It's because--and those funds are controlled by the Iraqi government. They're husbanding those funds for use in the future. And as I stood next to the line of those claimants, all you have to do is ask them what their complaint is, and within seconds, their rage surfaces, so badly at one point the cameraman said to me, "Mik, we're about to start a riot here. I think we'd better leave."Given what actually happened in Falluja (MSWord; PDF here), I'd say Mik's view is probably the more reliable. I pity the fool who reads the NYT for international news. But I pity even more the fool who braves Iraq's terror in order to bring us such shoddy journalism.And the current president of the temporary council, Sheik Khaled, admitted to me that the people in Fallujah are already growing impatient, and predicted it will take at least another year before reconstruction actually begins to take hold.
The Bush administration on Monday announced its plan to introduce a new initiative to deal with a problem that has plagued the world’s teens for time immemorial. The new initiative, called Porcelain-only Education, will be offered as an amendment to the military-operations supplemental appropriations bill which is now pending in Congress.
The interest in the initiative has been brewing inside conservative circles at least since President George W. Bush was governor of Texas. According to a senior administration official, “We thought now was a good time to put a new face on this Administration. We’ve had a tough go with the Social Security pitch, and the President wanted to make sure the American people knew we could still ‘get results’.” The official spoke on the condition of anonymity, but did confirm that Bush himself had emphasized “get results” by making quotation-marks with his fingers.
Referred to today by White House Spokesman Scott McClellan as Abstinence-Only’s “fairer sibling,” Porcelain-Only Education will stress the importance for teens of having clear and unblemished skin. “It is important for teens’ confidence, self-esteem, and most importantly their self-respect that they are comfortable in their skin,” said Education Secretary Margaret Spellings. “Teen pregnancy is not the only concern this Administration has. Teen hideousness matters too.”
According to Spellings, Porcelain-Only Education will require that health instructors at the nation’s public middle- and high-schools stress the importance of clear skin. Teens will learn that having clear skin is the only “100 percent method for avoiding unsightly blemishes.” One proposed text book, provisionally entitled “The Liberating Force of Acne-Freedom,” includes several worksheets asking students to list the virtues of skin clarity and the “Vicious Vices” of letting oneself succumb to the “ugliness of the unctuous.” Another worksheet, “Pizza-Face or Personal Responsibility?” attempts to get teens out of the “pimple business” by reminding them that employers tend to prefer “the good ones.” Interviews with the creators of the text book have revealed that by “good ones” the book refers to “You know, people without skin problems.”
The proposal has already met with harsh criticism. Opponents point out that the proposed curriculum says nothing about the role that Mother Nature plays in determining the condition of teenagers’ skin. “Ninety percent of teens experience at least some acne. It’s a normal phenomenon during adolescence. Yet these text books foster the myth that teens are doing something wrong if they have imperfect skin,” says Jane P. Forster, who is in charge of the county’s school nurses.
Other opponents point out that there is no mention in the curriculum of prevention. While there are many medications and daily regimens that have been developed over the years to deal with acne, the text books conspicuously leave out any reference to them. When confronted with this allegation, Spellings was remarkably blunt. “Yes, of course we know what’s in the text books. The President believes very strongly in what he calls the Culture of Life, and that culture is inconsistent with the teaching of personal dependency. We had to make a decision: do we teach the virtues of Acne-freedom, or the destructive culture of dependency on the means for achieving that freedom. We believe that the choice is clear, even if that means our children’s skin won’t be.”
British blogging phenomenon Norm Geras is in NYC this week, and we met up for a few hours of lively discussion this afternoon. When Norm first suggested that we grab a coffee, I have to confess that I assumed that he would want to discuss the main issue that divides us, and which we've disagreed about most sharply - towels, of course (1, 2, 3, 4). Instead, we ended up talking quite a bit about the Iraq War, of all things. I'm happy to report that I convinced Norm entirely on every single point we covered. Ha ha, just joking. But it was lots of fun, nonetheless.
Tomorrow night (Saturday) I'm off to see the band Levy play at Tonic (8:30pm).
Does Levy produce generic 80s-sounding pap or are they something fresh and new in rock? Your insolent question bores me. The fact is, they write nice tunes, and I enjoy listening to them. If you want to be snooty, you can just fuck off back to Williamsburg, as far as I'm concerned.
You might go to Levy's site and give 'em a listen, if you're into pop. They offer 6 full free downloads on their site. The best, in my opinion, is "On the Dance Floor." As far as I can make out, it's about the pain of botching a chance at casual sex through a loss of nerve. Since, of course, I never botched a chance at casual sex through a loss of nerve, it's hard to relate. But it sounds very difficult, and I find the song strangely affecting.
Of all the leaders of the nations of the world, surely none has a weaker chin than Bashar Assad.
There has been a hubbub in the left-blogosphere of late about the Democrats and whether they should become more "communitarian". You can find link roundups here and here. I don't have time to comment on all moves by all players, or even to give my considered view of the issue. But I did want to make a couple of points.
The first is to stress the need for more clarity in the content of the communitarian recommendation. As far as I can tell, there are two main possible proposals: (1) Democrats should support public policy that conduces toward a social world more in line with certain liberal "moral values." Such policies might range from requiring V-chips in televisions to banning altogether certain references from television shows during certain (or all) hours of the day. (2) Democrats should not support more or different public policy proposals than they already typically do, but they should get out their bull-horns more often. That is, they should denounce publicly certain forces that contribute to the moral worsening of our society, but they should be steadfast in their opposition to the employment of the coercive aparatus of the state to further these moral ends.
The importance of distinguishing the two should be obvious, though I find that the "communitarians" are reluctant to come right out and say which they mean.
Matt Yglesias seems to reject both proposals. Matt is impressed by the "Rawlsian saw" that the liberal position is to recognize a distinction between the coercive realm of politics and public policy and the idea of a background culture within which various comprehensive moral views vie for the allegiance of a society's individual members. Matt says that it is the job of politicians to "enact a policy environment that allows people of different views to contest values," but that the politicians themselves should not enter into these sorts of contests. Making policy, he says, is "what politicians are for"; they are not supposed to be cultural critics or social commentators. Those jobs are left up to citizens within the background culture.
But it is hard to recognize a clear distinction here. Matt wants Joe Lieberman to keep his mouth shut about the sexual inuendo he might see on Friends, because in making those comments he oversteps the proper bounds of his political role. Yet why would Lieberman be overstepping in this case, but not overstepping when he endorses traditional liberal policy preferences such as a minimum wage or certain welfare policies or the right of a woman to abort a fetus? The idea that there is a clear-cut distinction between the values at stake in either debate is hard to swallow. It seems right to say that liberals endorse a minimum wage (or what have you) because liberals are concerned that some people are not being treated with respect, or because some people need their interests protected, or because some people are exploiting others. These are concerns with the nature of the social world, and it is not obvious that concerns about, say, corporations trying to sell kids video games with graphic violence are not relevantly similar to those that motivate traditional liberal concerns and policy preferences.
In referring to the "Rawlsian saw" Yglesias fails to note one important, yet often ignored, fact about Rawls's position: Rawls's idea of public reason--the idea that there is a sphere of distinctively "political" values which alone are the proper bases of public policy--is fundamentally an idea about which reasons it's permissible to adduce in the political sphere; it is not fundamentally an idea about which political institutions or policies are the right ones for a liberal democracy. The latter question must await an inquiry into the idea of public reason, and it is not at all clear from the outset how that question will be answered.
Rawls's view is that a value is properly introduced into the political sphere when it can be the object of an "overlapping consensus" among reasonable but conflicting comprehensive moral doctrines. This criterion is motivate by what Rawls calls the "duty of civility", the duty citizens have to try in good faith to offer only grounds that others would not be reasonable to reject. Many take away from Rawls that political values thus cannot be controversial--after all, if they were, then people who disagree with them might not be unreasonable to reject them. They then assume that Rawls is saying that political policy can rely only on grounds that all accept.
But if this were so, no public policy would ever be justified. The reason is obvious: there is no such policy that does not find opposition from some person in some social quarter. Fortunately for Rawls, he is not committed to accepting that result, because for him the idea of "reasonable rejection" remains a normative one: there are some moral views that cannot be reasonably rejected, because they are simply too well-grounded in cogent, commonsense moral principles--even if people don't recognize them as such. The wrongness of slavery is one such moral view.
Now, I don't want to get into too much Rawlsian exegesis here. My point is simply that the old "Rawlsian saw" does not so clearly support Yglesias's view that politics is not the place for the promotion, protection, or endorsement of controversial moral values. While the duty of civility does force citizens to question whether or not the values they politically invoke are values that they can rightly expect others to endorse, it does not obviously lead to the conclusion that politics and politicians ought to be neutral with respect to the moral status of the social world we inhabit. Rawls emphasizes this point when he says, in Political Liberalism (p. 192), that the duty of civility requires citizens to seek a reasonable, moral common ground, not some admittedly implausible form of moral neutrality.
Given all this, I do not think it is obvious that the respect for persons that liberals often invoke to defend their preferred economic policies does not also justify the regulation or banning of, say, professional boxing or violent video games. While there are strong constraints on the reasoning that must precede controversial political pronouncements and policy proposals, nothing in the liberally plausible idea of public reason seems to support the sharp distinction between the political and the background culture that Yglesias invokes. This does not mean that the balance of permissible political reasons will not fall every time on the side of Yglesias's preferred policies. The freedoms he's inclined to defend may well be the freedoms that a proper exercise of public reason would lead to. It does mean that liberal neutrality--i.e. neutrality-as-Rawlsian reasonableness--does not threaten, in the way that Yglesias's defense might suggest, to cut off all possible foundation for the traditonal left-liberal policies that are surely near and dear to his heart. That would be an unfortunate result indeed.
David A. Passaro is "the sole CIA worker to be indicted publicly as the result of a detainee's death in the war on terrorism." He is accused of killing Abdul Wali with "with his hands, feet and a dangerous weapon -- a flashlight." In his defense his lawyer "cited an August 2002 Justice Department memo that concluded 'a defendant who had acted pursuant to an exercise of the President's constitutional powers' in conducting an interrogation could not be criminally prosecuted." We all know about those Justice Department memos that argued that there are no Constitutional or Congressional limitations of the President's power when he acts in his "Commander-in-Chief" capacity.
So what does the government have to say in response to Passaro's defense strategy?
[T]he government, in a pleading first unsealed yesterday, said the memo dealt with torture and "expressed no opinion" about federal statutes prohibiting murder or assault.
WaPo:
From inside a vacant building, Sgt. 1st Class Domingo Ruiz watched through a rifle scope as three cars stopped on the other side of the road. A man carrying a machine gun got out and began to transfer weapons into the trunk of one of the cars."Take him down," Ruiz told a sniper.
The sniper fired his powerful M-14 rifle and the man's head exploded, several American soldiers recalled. As he fell, more soldiers opened fire, killing at least one other insurgent. After the ambush, the Americans scooped up a piece of skull and took it back to their base as evidence of the successful mission.
...
Although Ruiz is not the highest-ranking soldier in the unit, his command over the 4th Platoon is absolute. Last fall, commanders transferred a platoon leader just 48 hours after he tangled with Ruiz.When another young platoon leader, Lt. Colin Keating, 23, of Clinton, Md., arrived Feb. 6, Ruiz greeted him warmly and introduced him to every soldier in the platoon, but told him: "Just let me fight my war."
...
Ruiz said the decision to pick up the skull fragment and take it back to the base was a "sarcastic" gesture to confirm the kill to the battalion. [Capt. Rob] Born, who was not present during the attack, said the soldiers picked up the fragment not as a trophy, which is prohibited under military regulations, but to confirm "that we had the remains of a terrorist."
Below the fold is a press release from the National Security Archive about John Negroponte's tenure in Honduras.
National Security Archive Update, April 12, 2005THE NEGROPONTE FILE
John Negroponte's Chron File from Tenure in Honduras PostedClose Relations with Honduran Military, Contra "Special Project" Against Nicaraguan Sandinistas Dominated Cable Traffic
Reporting on Human Rights Violations Nonexistent between 1982 and 1984
For more information:
Peter Kornbluh - 202/994-7116
pkorn@gwu.eduhttp://www.nsarchive.org
Washington, D.C., April 12, 2005: As the Senate Intelligence Committee convenes to consider the nomination of John Negroponte to be Director of National Intelligence, the National Security Archive today posted hundreds of his cables written from the U.S. Embassy in Tegucigalpa between late 1981 and 1984. The majority of his "chron file" -- cables and memos written during his tenure as Ambassador -- was obtained by the Washington Post under the Freedom of Information Act. The documents were actually declassified at Negroponte's request in June 1998, after he had temporarily retired from the Foreign Service.
The 392 cables and memos record Negroponte's daily, and even hourly, activities as the powerful Ambassador to Honduras during the contra war in the early 1980s. They include dozens of cables in which the Ambassador sought to undermine regional peace efforts such as the Contadora initiative that ultimately won Costa Rican president Oscar Arias a Nobel Prize, as well as multiple reports of meetings and conversations with Honduran military officers who were instrumental in providing logistical support and infrastructure for CIA covert operations in support of the contras against Nicaragua -- "our special project" as Negroponte refers to the contra war in the cable traffic. Among the records are special back channel communications with then CIA director William Casey, including a recommendation to increase the number of arms being supplied to the leading contra force, the FDN in mid 1983, and advice on how to rewrite a Presidential finding on covert operations to overthrow the Sandinistas to make it more politically palatable to an increasingly uneasy U.S. Congress.
Conspicuously absent from the cable traffic, however, is reporting on human rights atrocities that were committed by the Honduran military and its secret police unit known as Battalion 316, between 1982 and 1984, under the military leadership of General Gustavo Alvarez, Negroponte's main liaison with the Honduran government. The Honduran human rights ombudsman later found that more than 50 people disappeared at the hands of the military during those years. But Negroponte's cables reflect no protest, or even discussion of these issues during his many meetings with General Alvarez, his deputies and Honduran President Robert Suazo. Nor do the released cables contain any reporting to Washington on the human rights abuses that were taking place.
Today's posting by the National Security Archive includes the complete series of cables released under the Freedom of Information Act. The State Department released another several dozen cables from the series yesterday, and these will be included on the Archive site later today.
Follow the link below to read the complete Negroponte chron file:
http://www.nsarchive.org
From today's NYT:
For the first time since The Times created Op-Ed in 1970, our space has grown...We've always called this section Op-Ed because it appeared in the paper opposite the editorials.I always thought that "Op" stood for "opinion", and that "Op-Ed" denoted the set of opinion pieces and editorials. Was I the only one with this misconception?
In March we had our beagle's birthday party. Friends gathered from all over NYC to pay tribute to his royal handsomeness. Thanks to A. for taking pictures, which I have only now gotten around to posting. Peek below the fold for a few.
Here is Mr. Handsome himself:
Here he is finally getting his birthday meal:
We took turns passing around a Russian hat that a friend of Yoon's brought back from his travels. Here is my darlin' wife, Yoon, looking just outrageously cute in it:
Last week Chris had a great post whose thesis was this:
A lot of political discourse seems to work this way. Facts that are uncontroversial, or ought to be uncontroversial, become politicized. When that happens we (often reasonably) end up paying as much attention to the role that citing them plays in our political discourse as to their truth.Chris's point is not that we start with a stock of truths and then try, in political discourse and debate, to determine their particular relevance for political purposes. That would be a healthy, constructive dialogue that should be welcomed by all parties. Rather, the point is that the truths that one side thinks are true and relevant are taken to be shibboleths by those who either reject the truth or (more likely) reject the views those truths are used to support. Chris notes a few examples, and you should go reread the post for those and his full discussion. But we've all encountered this, whether in the benign, professorial nod one can elicit when a "But what about..." is met with the other's assessment that you haven't yet thought the whole thing through yet, or when in the heat of debate the adducing of a commonly accepted empirical claim sparks a "NOT THAT OLD SAW!" response.
Along similar sociological lines, I want to discuss a phenomenon that can be observed when the ideas of political rights and political virtues are in play. This feature of political discourse can perhaps best be illustrated with an example. Consider Ralph Nader. While I am by and large sympathetic to Nader's political outlook (his defense of Terri Schiavo's parents notwithstanding), I was also sympathetic (at the start of the campaign season) to the view that he should not have run. Nader of course got quite a bit of media attention at the time--not, of course, for his rather reasonable positions on topics from economic justice to Israel, but for his recalcitrance in the face of pleas by many of his most staunch supporters to forego a candidacy. When confronted by journalists for his response to the requests, Nader expressed indignation at the thought that anyone would ask such a thing:
"It's a marvelous demonstration by liberals, if you will, of censorship. Now mind you, running for political office is every American's right. Running for political office means free speech exercise, it means exercising the right of petition, the right of assembly. And so when they say 'Do not run,' they're not just challenging and rebutting; they're crossing that line into censorship, which is completely unacceptable."Why was this response appropriate? As far as I can recall, no person, Democrat or Green or whatever, claimed that Nader did not have a right to run for president. He's older than the requisite age, and he was born in America, and he has not been convicted of treason, and so forth. My guess is that Nader understood that the strict meaning of the sentences he was using did not jibe with the specific claim his detractors were making, but that he also appreciated that rights-talk weighs with people in sometimes knee-jerk ways. "This is America! I have rights!" Perhaps he thought the accusation that people were attempting to infringe upon his rights would distract listeners just long enough for his positive insights to take hold in their minds. And perhaps he was right. The important point was that one of our more intellectually sophisticated politicos was confusing (intentionally or otherwise) claims about rights and virtues.
The distinction between rights and virtues is familiar from daily life. We all believe that persons have some rights to perform actions that ought not be performed. This goes for political rights as well as moral rights. I have a political right to vote for racist candidates, but I ought not vote for him. And--to use an example from Philosopher Joseph Raz's The Morality of Freedom--I may have a moral right to refuse my neighbor access to my telephone when he has locked himself out of his house, but surely a full appreciation of moral virtue, if not decency, would lead me to welcome him into my home (assuming, of course, that I know the guy's not a threat to me).
I believe that a lot of this is pretty evident and not controversial. We all believe that there are political rights and political virtues counseling against certain invocations of those rights in action. It is perhaps just as evident that it can be a difficult task to determine which rights exist, and which virtues we ought to heed when contemplating action in accordance with those rights. It is interesting just how much political disagreement can be accurately described using these two concepts. Consider: pace many Republicans who love to invoke the US Constitution as an argument against liberalism, the US is a liberal constitutional democracy. There is a reason that Milton Friedman in Capitalism and Freedom and F. A. Hayek in The Road to Serfdom refused to cede the term "liberalism" to those who espouse left-liberalism instead of some libertarian version. The US constitution enshrines certain liberal rights guaranteed citizens because of their status as free and equal moral persons. Rights of free speech, expression, association, assembly, the vote, contract, etc. are all liberal rights because they give each citizen a sphere of liberty that cannot be infringed upon because more "good" could be done if some individuals' rights were not as secure as others'. But given that reasonable people can disagree about not only the existence of certain rights, but also about the right way to adjudicate between them when they conflict, political disagreement about rights is inevitable.
Just as inevitable is the failure by some to maintain the important distinction between rights and virtues. Because of the soundness of the distinction, it should be a default position of citizens of a liberal democracy to wonder seriously whether their policy preferences constitute an objectionable predilection to forge virtuous citizens through the use of the coercive apparatus of the state. I think it is a part of most reasonable moral positions that true virtue cannot be engendered using the carrot-and-stick method. To use a phrase of Rawls's, that would not be virtue for the right reasons.
But even that seemingly good reason may not be a good liberal reason so to refrain. For such a view would still have to be motivated by the endorsement by the government that it is the job of governments to make virtuous citizens. That indeed was Aristotle's view, but it seems not to comport with the modern left- and right-liberal view that while government needs to rely upon some idea of what is good for citizens, it should not legislate on the basis of some view of the best-life-for-humans that hopes to answer most moral questions. The liberal view seems to be that those questions ought to be left up to citizens not just in the sense that governments might stymie their goals if they try to legislate virtue by force, but in the sense that those are not the right goals for governments. I shall write more on this idea later.
If anything along these lines is correct, one might reasonably wonder whether this story leaves any room to embrace left-liberalism. Isn't insisting that corporations pay a living wage an objectionable legislating of virtue akin to forcing citizens to give to charities or donate to soup kitchens? That is, which rights can this view of liberalism vindicate, and which (if any) traditional social-democratic policies can it judge permissible for public policy? These are tough questions, and I understand that many politically active persons might refuse to stop to answer them. But I believe a full appreciation of the truth of liberalism must await their answer. Only then will we understand which bare-bones scheme of rights is consistent with the abstract idea of liberalism that most Americans--Republican and Democrat alike--endorse, and which robust left-liberal policies are at home in a liberalism that shies away, on principle, from the legislation of virtue.
I more or less started this thing last night. So with the exception of one last wistful look at the comments sections of Unfogged this morning, I've been successfully abstaining from the Internet for almost 20 hours now (minus the exceptions noted in the original post).
The day somehow seemed longer, slower, more meditative. I took a walk, spontaneously bought flowers for my wife (for the first time in a while), cleaned the apartment, picked up the laundry, vacuumed the apartment, listened to music, exercised, did the grocery shopping, invited friends over for dinner, cleaned up the kitchen, backed up my computer, and am about to start prepping my class for tomorrow, before I make a late dinner for my wife. Not once did I interrupt any of this with repeated visits to Boing Boing, Metafilter, Overheard in New York, or any of the many political sites listed on the blogroll. I have no idea what is going on in the world, since I didn't buy a paper today. It's, like, all Zen and shit, man.
God, what a horrible experiment. I can't wait to get my life back.
I think I'll try to take a break from the Internet for a week. Exceptions:
-- I can still post to Explananda and check up on the site, mostly to despam it, if needed.Everything else is forbidden to me, on pain of doing what is forbidden to me.
-- Anything associated with my teaching is kosher, as is email, financial stuff (online banking, taxes, etc.), quick reference checks (shows, etc.), and maintenance of my wife's website.
Obviously if something of major consequence happens, all bets are off. E.g., if the House of Saud falls, etc. etc. (In that case, I'll be like the guy in Airplane who keeps saying, "I sure picked the wrong week to quit . . .") And don't be fucking with me in the comments section with false developing news, ok?
This is very painful for me, and I can only guess at the awful withdrawal symptoms I'm sure to experience. But don't worry. I'll blog it all as it happens!
Via Boing Boing, I recently discovered some mp3s (steal these mp3s!) of Abbie Hoffman's album "Wake Up America!" from 1969.
I was curious to give it a listen, since I'd heard about this Hoffman fellow, but never had a clear idea of what it was exactly that he did. I haven't listened to the whole thing, but I listened to enough to form an initial impression. I thought he had some nice lines, but I'm afraid my reaction was really . . . square. The whole thing struck me as juvenile, thuggish, simplistic, obnoxiously self-righteous, etc. etc. Now, I'm sure a sociologist, or an old fogey who was young when this stuff was cool, could tell me a long story about why Hoffman was groundbreaking and innovative and influential and tremendously important. And that sociologist might even be able to convince me of all that. But I'm talking first impressions here, and so that's that.
Juan Cole writes:
In Iraq you can't let a thing like foreigners killing your cousin pass without action.But where exactly do people tend to let a thing like that pass without action?
Believe it or not, this description is actually pretty generous:
The song is awful. The singer is awful. The production is awful. The video itself is packed with just about every music video cliche in the book. Utterly, sphincter-puckeringly bad.
I'll bet you thought that A., of sidebar fame, has had nothing to do with Explananda in the year we've been group blogging. How wrong you were, jumping to conclusions like that! A. came up with the name for the site - and it's a very good name, even if over half the people who mention or link to it spell it "explanada" (thereby revealing a shocking ignorance of Latin). She also pops up in the comments section to berate me every time I use the word "kudos," and that's help of a sort. Today I am happy to reveal a third contribution, a photograph she took while strolling about Redhook. In fairness to A., I should mention that she sent me the picture a few weeks ago, so technically all three of these contributions ought to count as first-year contributions, for moral as well as tax purposes.
My wife and I are mulling over a possible move to Redhook, if we can find a place that isn't too far from the subway. This charming picture certainly adds to the allure of the neighbourhood. Now peek below the fold.
If you live in Ann Arbor and you're looking for trouble, my lovely wife has a show there on Saturday. I'm stuck at home taking care of the dog. Wah. Thank goodness for Netflix. And my half-dozen mistresses.
Saturday, April 9th, 2005Yoon Sun Choi and Jacob Sacks Duo
Venue: Kerrytown Concert House
Location: Ann Arbor, Michigan
Time: 8:00pm
Cover: Purchase tickets here.
Well, it's been a year and a few days since we first set up shop here at Explananda and began posting. I've had a great time; the rest of us seem to fall somewhere between indifference and moderate enjoyment. As Scallywag-in-Chief, it's my solemn and proud duty to thank everyone who has helped with the site, especially Nick for hosting it for free. I've enjoyed everyone else's posts, and I've also enjoyed reading the comments people have left on the site. So: Thanks everyone, for reading and writing.
When I started this site, I was fully in the grip of blog-psychosis, which now seems to have worn off. I no longer feel the need to post every few minutes, or even every day. And although I keep up with the news, I'm no longer reading the entire internet every day. Gone are the days when I could brag that my browser was to the internet as Sauron's eye was to Middle Earth. The drop-off in time that I put into the site has no doubt led to a drop-off in quality, but frankly I don't care much. I like having an online scrapbook to put predictions, reflections and funny stuff, and I like sharing it with other people. So I might as well keep going.
I do confess that it is a complete mystery to me why anyone besides friends and family reads Explananda. No knock on my co-writers, but the number of good blogs has risen dramatically even since we've started Explananda, and there's simply no competing with the best of them, or even some of the less-than-best. I've gone from craving links from other bloggers (a symptom of blog-psychosis) to feeling almost apologetic when someone links to us: If a link is a recommendation, then perhaps I've let the linker down by letting the site mutate from a political blog to something much less serious. But whatever. People are as welcome to delink as to link. I'll take the latter as a complement, but not the former as an insult.
So, on that warbling and unsteady note, let us continue . . .
The C.I.A. makes more shocking claims.
I don't think this is a very nice thing to do. Two highlights from the piece:
Israel's construction and operation of the Kedumim dump appears to be in violating the international law, as it involves transferring garbage to territory defined as occupied. Second, experts warn that the dump would jeopardize the Mountain Aquifer, one of the largest freshwater sources in Israel and Palestine. This is because the dump, which was originally used for "dry waste," will receive and absorb household garbage with organic substances.
[. . .]
The Kedumim dump will create an absurd situation. The West Bank is filled with illegal Palestinian garbage dumps, which constitute serious environmental hazards and jeopardize the groundwater, because the civil administration refuses to let Palestinians build modern waste disposal sites. The most modern dump being built there - the Kedumim dump - is intended only for garbage from Israel.
I always thought that this site, devoted entirely to making fun of New York Times Wedding announcements, was hilarious. Such wicked and clever fun! But I actually went to this wedding yesterday, and somehow the joke just isn't as funny when it's people you know.
In a piece for Slate, William Saletan writes:
Half an hour later, Greg Pence, a sleepy-eyed philosopher from the University of Alabama, administers a 15-minute bitch-slap to biotech critics.I've never understood this expression, "bitch-slap." It seems ambiguous between a) slap the way a bitch would; and b) slap someone the way you (typically) slap a bitch. Before I attended to the ambiguity, I had always read it as b). b), I think, is more offensive than a), since b) seems to imply some sort of approval for slapping women, whereas a) is more along the lines of you-throw-like-a-girl sexism - offensive, but not as bad. But neither seems very polite. And yet this phrase has somehow managed to make its way into mainstream speech over the last few years. Am I simply being a humourless dork here, or is there something a bit odd about the popularity of the phrase? Have I misunderstood it? And which is the more natural reading, a) or b)?
Update: OK, I asked my students. None of them found anything offensive about the expression. I pointed out that on either possible interpretation it seemed awfully offensive. One said, "I just never thought about it." They seemed to think that it may have originally been offensive, but that so much time (!) had gone by (these are 18 or 19 year olds) that it wasn't any longer. One student claimed the same thing had happened with the expression, "rule of thumb", but a little googling suggests that that might not be a great example.
So there you go. Kids these days . . .
Just when I thought that the "Breaking News" alerts of the last 24 hours could not get more banal...I stumble on to this: "Schiavo Case Evolved Into Huge News Story." Ding Dong, the media are dead.
Shortly after writing that last snarky post about Zimbabwe's elections, I met a Zimbabwean at my wife's show last night. An interesting woman. She works as a reporter for the U.N. here in NYC, in which capacity she interviewed Mugabe herself a few years ago. She told me that he emphatically declared in the interview that he wouldn't run again. She laughed, a bit bitterly, at how that declaration turned out.
The conversation had an interesting dynamic. When I first mentioned the election, she seemed defensive, and a bit reluctant to criticize Mugabe. Most of her ire seemed directed at the opposition, whom she characterized as feckless and unwilling to address any of the structural problems that had brought Zimbabwe to its current crisis. But it became clear that her reluctance to bash away at Mugabe was a response to the function that Mugabe-bashing often seems to play in the Western media, and certainly not a reflection of any admiration for the man. She felt - and I think there's something to it - that Mugabe-bashing can be entirely truthful and yet still play an objectionable role: that of whitewashing both the deep inequities in landholding in the country and, more importantly, the historical role of the British in the current crisis. It needn't be that way, of course. But it often seems to be. (See this interesting post on Crooked Timber for an interesting take on the matter.) Once it was clear that I had no objection in principle to a view which casts blame more broadly, her reservations about Mugabe-bashing seemed to fall away, and she was quite frank about the terrible damage that he had inflicted on the country without any help from the British or anyone else.
A lot of political discourse seems to work this way. Facts that are uncontroversial, or ought to be uncontroversial, become politicized. When that happens we (often reasonably) end up paying as much attention to the role that citing them plays in our political discourse as to their truth. The most obvious recent example of this is surely the way that many of us have argued over how to understand and represent the depredations of the Ba'ath regime in Iraq. Opponents of the war are often accused to wanting to pass over this awful history in silence, since opposing the war meant, among other things, opposing a war that would finish off the regime responsible for the horrors.
Well, perhaps in some cases. It's a big world, and there are a lot of consciences I can't even hazard a guess about. But in a lot of cases, it seems to me that reluctance to dwell on the sordid history of the Ba'ath regime is more a response to the role that that history has come to play in the political debate about the Iraq War than a reflection of a guilty conscience. Often citing that history really means: Let's not dwell on Western complicity in these or similar horrors. It means: Let's not dwell on what this Western complicity in past horrors suggests for future involvement in the region. So I think I can understand the impatience that some people feel when the conversation is turned, yet again, to selected aspects of the history of Iraq, since the rhetorical force of the move is to push us away from an examination of other facts which are just as relevant to the debate. You can short-circuit a debate with the truth, as well as with lies.
For my part, I prefer another rhetoric about Iraq altogether. I prefer a rhetoric about Iraq and the Iraq War that puts the barbarity of the Ba'ath regime right up front. I think it's a more truthful rhetoric, and also a more effective one. It's more effective in large part because it helps to make the point that you can be perfectly frank about Iraq's awful history and still have opposed the removal of the regime that did so much to make it awful. Skirting over that point can come to seem like an implicit concession that dwelling too much on the character of the Ba'athist regime would lead you to support it's removal. And that's not a concession that I'm willing to make, and not one I would ever want to imply.
Thinking about things this way leads me to wonder if the "other side" downplays certain facts (say, about the history of U.S. involvement in the Middle East) not because they refuse to accept them (as I often assume), but because they object to the role that citing these facts plays in our political discourse about the U.S.'s role in international affairs. Some of our interlocutors might turn out to be more reasonable, and less dishonest, than they seem, if that is the reason for some of the selectivity and silence we see in their rhetoric. It isn't the way I would go myself, but the motive here is less rotten than the one that I typically project on my interlocutors.
Hearty congratulations to Mugabe for what looks like an uncontroversial win in Zimbabwe's elections!
He sure picked the right day for it, didn't he?
I had my cholesterol checked for the first time the other day. The nurse just called with the results: "Everything is absolutely perfect. Whatever you're doing dietarily, just keep it up."
Hot damn! Even though I've been dieting a bit in the last few months, my diet is still pretty cheese and fat heavy. And I've gone through periods of my life in which I ate nachos 5 or 6 times a week. The news that I can continue to do this completely free of guilt makes me giddy with delight.
I'm such a wimp. I was going to play an April Fool's day joke on my roommate, but it would have required me to mislead him for about 15 seconds. Couldn't bring myself to do it. Instead, I told him about the joke I almost played on him.
Someday, though, I will have my revenge on occasional Explananda commenter, Kegri. I've been the victim of too many of his practical jokes to go soft when the sweet day of vengeance comes.