The Disenchanted Idealist

Professional humor

2006-08-28T14:38:00.000-04:00

Dilbert's Scott Adams showed earlier this week that humor is sometimes best left to the professionals. After mocking the ameteur Pluto humor that's been floating around lately, he wrote the following:

Call me old fashioned, but I don’t think Pluto should be the funniest planet – or even the funniest non-planet. That distinction belongs to another. Uranus, 8th celestial body from the sun, is part miracle of gravity and part bung hole. It has earned its status as the funny man of the cosmos.
Despite anything you have heard, Uranus is not a black hole and there are no Klingons circling it. Nor does it have Venus envy. It is simply the funniest of all planets, be they dwarf or regular. Some things should never change.
Unlike Pluto, I believe there is life on the one true funny planet. I believe there are primates and I believe they have evolved the power of flight. But you probably won’t believe that until winged monkeys fly out of Uranus.

While you're at it, check out his thought experiment for dealing with Iran and his follow-up post.

I don't have an internet connection in my apartment yet, but I should be able to start regular blogging again now (I hope).

Various issues

2006-08-15T14:20:00.000-04:00

I don't have time to write full posts at the moment, but here are some things that have been on my mind.

Jon Swift's defense of Joe Lieberman's refusal to cut and run from the senate race after losing the primary is nearly perfect. "Without Joe Lieberman for Republicans to support, all that will be left in Washington is partisan rancor."
People's faith in religious authority seems to be increasing: religious fraud is growing rapidly. "Often, perpetrators are so successful building an image as good Christians that churchgoers won't cooperate with law enforcement authorities even after the crime is revealed." Bizarrely, the article notes that "Money has a way of blinding objectivity, even for we who are believers" instead of noting that "belief has a way of blinding objectivity, even for those whose money is at stake."
In the wake of the Hamdan decision, it appears that many of the administration's interrogation techniques violate the War Crimes Act. Rather than change the techniques, the administration wants to change the act (which was entirely uncontroversial just ten years ago when it passed almost unanimously in the Republican Congress). Bush has successfully focused the debate on "Humiliating and Degrading Treatment," but that's just a smokescreen; the real issue is whether "cruel treatment" will be allowed.
Onegoodmove has a terrific Daily Show clip on the propaganda we've all been drinking in lately.
The world apparently lacks the resources to feed 800,000,000 people, but has the resources to
overfeed a billion people
. Something is wrong with that.
Good Math, Bad Math has a fascinating history of π and a few strange examples of where it shows up.
This award-winning video clip of famous images mutating is worth seeing. The effort that must have gone into it is hard to imagine.
Crooks and Liars has Keith Olbermann's list of suspiciously-timed terror warnings (quicktime or windows media). On the one hand, there's so much bad news for Bush these days that most days that they could have announced something would have coincided with some politically sensitive issue. On the other hand, most of the terror warnings weren't very credible. Make up your own mind.
The Anonymous Liberal has a very important post about partisanship under Bush and what sane people are forced to do these days. It's very sobering.
Also, if anyone knows anything about connecting Sprint phones to Apple computers, please let me know. As far as I can tell, none of the brands Sprint works with can connect via iSync, and DataPilot looks pretty crappy. Does anyone know of a workaround I can use and/or if it's worth a hundred bucks to upgrade to a phone with a memory card?

Tags: bush, christian, cia, corruption, dave, dems, disenchantedidealist, election, linkdump, military, movie, propaganda, satire, scam, terror, torture

Fundamentalism and bad math

2006-08-14T12:02:00.000-04:00

Mark CC of Good Math, Bad Math just posted this:

Recently on Yahoo, some bozo posted something claiming that the bible was all correct, and that genetics would show that bats were actually birds. But that's not the real prize. The real prize of the discussion was in the ensuing thread.
A doubter posted the following question:
please explain 1 kings 7.23 and how a circle can have a circumference of 30 of a unit and a radiius of 10 of a unit and i will become a christian
23 And he made the Sea of cast bronze, ten cubits from one brim to the other; it was completely round. Its height was five cubits, and a line of thirty cubits measured its circumference. (1 Kings 7:23, NKJV)
And the answer is one of the all-time greats of moronic innumeracy:
Very easy. You are talking about the value of Pi. That is actually 3 not 3.14....... The digits after the decimal forms a geometric series and it will converge to the value zero. So, 3.14.....=3.00=3. Nobody still calculated the precise value of Pi. In future they will and apply advenced Mathematics to prove the value of Pi=3.

Mark CC didn't add anything to that, and neither will I. Even if it's satire, it's too beautiful not to pass on. I'm not sure if it's dumber than this, but it's close.

Tags: christian, dave, disenchantedidealist, ideology, pseudoscience

Status update

2006-08-13T23:15:00.000-04:00

1) David Schraub (whom I mentioned in my previous post about Lebanon) left some thoughtful comments. I've partially written my response, but it's not quite ready.

2) I made a fairly large error in my post on Catholic Legal Theory; I attributed a couple of quotes to the wrong person. I saw Kobayishi Issa's name at the bottom of this post and assumed he had written it even though he had been dead for almost 170 years. The actual author is David Giacalone. Issa wrote the Haiku at the bottom of the post, but not the post itself.

3) I have a couple of half-written posts that I think will turn out quite well, but the next week or three will be very hectic. I just got home from my summer position and I move to a new apartment in about a week. I start school in less than three weeks (!), so blogging may be light.

4) My offer for guest posters is still open. Contact me if you're interested.

5) OneGoodMove had a clip from a show called 30 Days. The clip was okay, but I decided to take a chance and spend two bucks to buy the whole episode on iTunes. An atheist moved in with a hardcore Christian family for a month and we got to see some of their interactions and perspectives on it. It which was fascinating, and the clip there isn't really representative of the episode as a whole. I highly recommend it, if you have time, can spare the two bucks, and don't have any objections to Apple's digital rights management restrictions. If you don't want to spend two bucks, you can download another episode for free and learn about people's reaction to immigrants. I haven't seen it yet, but I expect it to be quite good.

Tags: dave, disenchantedidealist, movie, personal

Game over for the neocons in Lebanon

2006-08-11T19:13:00.000-04:00

Was just talking to a friend who was noting that there is intense anger toward Israel within the administration for botching the war. He thinks the attitude was, "What's the point of giving them more time when they do nothing with it?" He thinks it's the worst defeat for Israel since 1948. He also guesses that the reason that the French flipped against the first resolution wasn't so much the Lebanese reaction as the realization of how poorly Israel was faring militarily. His general rule when it comes to U.N. resolutions in the Middle East is that they either simply reflect the facts on the ground, or make the victor give away a little bit of his victory; they never let someone pull victory out of a hat from defeat. So Israel will utlimately (sic) get from this resoltuon (sic) what they won on the ground, which is to say not much.
--Rich Lowry (hat tip to Glenn Greenwald)

This has been bothering me for weeks. Though they continue to write about how moral Israel's position is, neocons, Israel's more dogmatic supporters, and their allies (including some members of my family) never seem to say what Israel is accomplishing (in spite of repeated inquiries in some cases). Perhaps because the answer is "not much," and they don't want to admit that they're defending Israel's right to bomb civilian and dual-use targets for no reason whatsoever. Israel is less secure than ever. This was in no way inevitable; it could have been avoided if Israel had taken a saner, slower, more reasoned approach. The world (including Israel opponents like Juan Cole) was ready to support some kind of Israeli action against Hezbollah (the U.N. had already said that the group should not exist), and the group's support in Lebanon was precarious.

The next time someone rushes to support Israel's right to continue its bombing campaign, ask them if they can name any successful missions thus far that have been worth the innocent lives lost. Ask them why they have more confidence in the value of the civilian targets the Israeli Air Force is attacking than the pilots flying those missions do. Ask them whether they have captured Hezbollah's leaders and permanently blocked Iranian assets or whether they have only inflamed tensions and made themselves less secure in the long run. At the rate Israel is going, what would be accomplished by continuing? Don't accept analogies to other conflicts unless they can point to a situation where a well-trained guerilla army was defeated by force from across the border without a full occupation. Don't accept the argument that the conflict will only end when Hezbollah is disarmed; Israel's current strategy won't lead to their disarmament. They've suffered little militarily but are now heroes throughout the Arab and Muslim worlds. And their local opponents--the Lebanese government--is in shambles, so they'll be even harder to contain than before. Israel took a great opportunity and countless lives and threw them away in pursuit of an unimaginably risky strategy of turning foes into friends through force. Well, they changed the region all right, but not in the way they had hoped.

I'll conclude by quoting Glenn Greenwald, who just posted on the same subject: the war has been totally "bizarre" because the "ambitions were so grand and sweeping from the start-- the amount of brutality and slaughter required to accomplish them were far in excess of what could be tolerated -- that it was almost designed to fail from the start. One could say exactly that of the general neoconservative view on all matters." And one would be right.

Tags: dave, disenchantedidealist, ideology, incompetence, israel, military, nationalreview, terror, violence, war

More Catholic Legal Theory

2006-08-10T21:30:00.000-04:00

David Schraub responded to my previous post on Catholic Legal theory here, and I responded to part of his response in the comments.

Enjoy.

Update: Mirror of Justice, a Catholic legal blog specializing in CLT, has noticed the discussion. Hopefully they'll put together a "CLT--greatest hits" post and prove me wrong.

Tags: christian, dave, disenchantedidealist, ideology, legal

Pop quiz: what date is September 11?

2006-08-10T00:48:00.000-04:00

Uh....

95 percent of Americans questioned in the poll were able to remember the month and the day of the [September 11] attacks

I wonder how they even phrased that question so that 5% got it wrong. In other news, 30% of Americans surveyed didn't know what year 9/11 happened.

How to respond to AOL's creepy search records release

2006-08-09T17:31:00.000-04:00

If you haven't heard yet, AOL released three months of search data for 650,000 of their subscribers. They hid the names, but they used unique identifiers, so people can still be tracked down. Some of the searches are pretty disturbing, for a variety of reasons, and lives will be ruined because there's enough information to figure out that they had once attempted suicide, cheated on their spouses, or put their private information into the search box. It's such an egregious breach of privacy that AOL's official response was extremely clear: "We're absolutely not defending this. It was a mistake, and we apologize." That doesn't help the victims much, though.

I'm seriously thinking about typing things into Google periodically that will help throw people off if they try to identify me by my search terms (not that it'll help much; most people probably search for enough identifiable information that they could be located).

Any suggestions for who my alter ego should be? Should I be an old woman in Portland that loves to buy gifts for her grandchildren? A Muslim dude in Colorado? A New Jersey secretary worried about her boss's sexual advances? A hardcore Republican from Omaha that wants to see naked pictures of Ann Coulter? Suggestions are welcome in the comments.

Ideally, someone will write a simple program that puts together a list of search terms based on user-specified data and sends a couple of queries in to Google every day at random intervals. That way, I wouldn't have to remember to do it myself. I think everyone should seriously consider doing this. Hopefully someone will release a script or something; it seems like it should be very easy to program. A friend of mine thinks he can throw something together in his free time, but he said he didn't have much experience with that kind of scripting. I bet that someone at Reddit can put a great little search bot together.

Tags: dave, disenchantedidealist, personal, web

The arrogance of Catholic Legal Theory

2006-08-09T10:51:00.000-04:00

My first encounter with Catholic Legal Theory (CLT) last night wasn't particularly inspiring. Citing no evidence whatsoever, Robert Araujo asserts that "Most if not all of the valiant laboring for peace in this troubled region does not seem to acknowledge the fact that both contingents involved in the conflict fear each other." Furthermore, as he understands it,

Fear—particularly the fear of difference—is a compelling driving force that can lead one people, and their respective government, to consider another people as an object—“the other.”... [It is] the sense of difference that fuels the fears underlying the conflict. Rather, the diplomats (guided by the Catholic perspective on the international order) should emphasize what can easily bridge the differences—for example, a common hope in the future that the children of today can look forward to a tomorrow in which the present strife is replaced with cooperation where such things as agricultural and industrial trade, cultural exchange, and regional security become routine. This is possible if each side’s fears of the other are put aside. This course is also demonstrative of the common good, which reveals that the destinies of two peoples are inextricably related. Strife for one will inevitably mean strife for the other; but, peace and prosperity for one will ensure the same for the other.

In response, David Schraub pointed out that

the idea that a foreign conflict might represent a prisoners dilemma--and that thus the route out lies in a restoration of trust--is not exactly a shocking revelation. As for the idea that focusing on the positives of mutual cooperation rather than mutual hate, didn't Golda Meir already comment several decades ago that "Peace will come when the Arabs will love their children more than they hate us"?

Furthermore, to assume that the Israelis/Jews act the way they do because they fear "difference" is to fundamentally miss the point.

Israel reacts the way it does because, from their perspective, losing does not mean that it loses a sliver of territory or more land than they'd like. Losing means getting rounded up and shot, gassed, or otherwise slaughtered. This is the trauma you're dealing with.

This should be clear to anyone that's spoken to Israelis or Jews that hew to the Israeli party line. It's something I've written about before, albeit not on this blog. One could make an argument that the fear of demographic death ("the Arabs are outreproducing us! In 50 years, we'll be a minority in our own state!") boils down to a fear of difference, but I don't think that it's a particularly useful framework for the conflict as a whole. I wrote this in response to David's post:

I think you're basically right that he didn't say anything novel, and I think you correctly identified the source of most Israelis'/Jews' fear. I just think that it's amusing that 1) there's such a thing as "Catholic Legal Theory" and 2) someone thinks it can explain a conflict between Jews and Muslims.

I also doubt that a legal theory based on lowercase-c catholic (i.e. universal) values can really understand difference all that well, since assuming that your values are universally aspired to is a good way to disguise, ignore, and generally misunderstand the other. Uppercase-c Catholicism in particular doesn't deal with diffrence very well (the technical term for differences with the Pope's beliefs is "heresy"). And now that I think about it, the last time the Catholics were heavily involved in that region, it didn't go so well, either. The Crusades arent' exactly anyone's favorite historical period.

Was I a little harsh? Perhaps. But I can't imagine many things that are more arrogant than asserting that International Relations theory, game theory, the entire diplomatic establishment, the political leadership of every country involved, and the citizens on both sides fundamentally misunderstand the conflict because they're analyzing it from the wrong religious perspective. Particularly when the alternative theory which turns out to be totally unoriginal and largely wrong. It would be hard to find a better example of my point that the best way to misunderstand difference is to start from the axiom that one's own beliefs should be universal. I submit that no belief system capable of supporting crusades, inquisitions, and torture as mechanisms for spreading itself can understand difference very well (if those methods are no longer seen as God's will, is it because the infallible Church was wrong before or because God changes his mind?). There's a reason that the best understanding of difference comes from postmodernists and their allies: even if there are universal values, people can't agree on them, so clinging to one's own capital-T Truth is a good way to misunderstand the other. David Schraub didn't address my comments directly, but he did say that "Catholic Legal Theory is actually very vigorous and very interesting." I took his word for it, and so I did a bit of reading and wrote up this response. He didn't point to any specific examples, so it's likely that CLT has said some incredibly brilliant things and I just didn't find them. Still, I think I have a good enough sense of it to write a post on the parts I've seen so far.

CLT definitely seems preferable to the legal theories of the radical evangelical right, but I'm not seeing any brilliant insights, either. Based on my (very limited) research, the key element of CLT seems to be "the dignity of the human person and respect for the common good." I'm all for that, as I've written before. I think it should be fairly uncontroversial that "community [i]s indispensable for human flourishing" and that "authentic freedom" is a good thing. " And I'm an atheist. Thus, I'm not sure what CLT has to add. Like Kobayashi Issa David Giacalone,

I wonder[] what the Church could teach American lawyers, when — due to its reading of Truth and morality — it has structured its own government as an absolute monarchy, with no right to free expression, no admission of women to its leadership positions, and (as with priest pedophilia) the use of coverups to preserve its image and authority, rather than transparency. We now can add to that list the creation of an underclass of Church members, prevented from serving as ministers (and therefore as leaders) due to their God-given “tendencies,” rather than their actions.

Basically, it seems like the good elements of CLT can be found elsewhere, and forcing a distinctively Catholic element onto the ideas I've seen so far has seemed confusing and unproductive at best. That's not to say that they won't have anything interesting or useful to say as a result of their Catholicism. With a few exceptions like the Talmudic tradition and perhaps law itself, there aren't many systems of thought that have struggled more intensely or for a longer period of time with the nature of the law than the Church. In fact, I'd be surprised if Catholicism didn't have something useful to say on the subject, just as I'd be surprised if Buddhism's introspective tradition didn't have anything useful to say about psychology. Still, I'm confident that there are issues on which Catholic teachings are worthless and even dangerous, and people are going to have an extremely difficult time convincing me to adopt a particular position simply because a Catholic theologian or scholar supports it. To quote Issa's Giacalone's response to the Vatican's prejudicial circular reasoning on gay priests,

With all due respect, I do not believe that this mixture of metaphor, mysticism and mystery can in any way help create better lawyers, or has anything to offer legal thinkers — except, perhaps as the sort of extra-legal personal beliefs that ought not to be brought into either legislation or adjudication. In response, Patrick Brennan would surely point out to me -- as he said at MOJ — that the question of who can become a priest is not a matter of law or legal theory, but is a matter of “theology,” and “sources of officia and munera.” That simply doesn’t wash. The Church surely has much to “teach” the American legal system and its lawyers by example, when it is deciding on the rights of its members, the selection of leaders, or the due process to be afforded in deciding the status of individuals. These subjects are surely “distinctively Catholic” applications of Truth and morality...

Unless they can convince other legal thinkers that the Church’s positions on topics such as gay priests do not taint whatever guidance it can give on other topics, CLT advocates are going to have a hard time being taken seriously for having a unique, coherent and useful legal philosophy.

If CLT ends up being (or being seen) as a group of legal professionals espousing nice social theories about how to help the poor and help individuals flourish, it would almost surely be more effective dropping the “Catholic” and working within broader social and academic groups with similar interests — infiltrating, cooperating, rather than preaching. It is a conceit to believe that others do not have an equal commitment to those causes.

And it's a conceit to believe that others--particularly experts and others that believe that they have access to a capital-T Truth that flatly contradicts Catholic teachings--don't understand their own affiars. Like I said earlier, it's quite likely that over the last 1500 years some Catholics have produced tremendously useful ideas that should be given more thought. I'm not going to reject an idea just because it's rooted in Catholic doctrine. But I don't think that people should accept them for that reason, either. And if the posts I looked through are any indication, there's a danger of that with CLT.

I'd be happy if someone can prove me wrong, though. I'm certainly not going to pretend to be an expert on something I hadn't heard of until several hours ago. Am I missing something?

Tags: christian, dave, disenchantedidealist, ideology, israel, legal, terror, violence, war

Joe Lieberman and Max Cleland

2006-08-08T20:50:00.000-04:00

Here's an... interesting perspective:

In a conference call with reporters this morning, Joe Lieberman's campaign announced that former Georgia Senator Max Cleland would be appearing with Lieberman today. This may well be too little too late for Lieberman, but Cleland was a big star during the 2004 campaign and is a hero to anti-war activists (even though he actually voted for the war himself). If nothing else, this is sure to cause some amusing cognitive dissonance for Lamont supporters; it's not exactly easy to write off Cleland as part of the Republican lite Washington Democratic establishment.

I'm no expert, but I don't think that Cleland is "a hero to anti-war activists;" his claim to fame among the netroots is that he was toppled by bogus rhetoric about his softness in the war on terror despite being a triple-amputee and a Vietnam war hero. From what I can tell, the netroots don't care one way or the other about anything Cleland ever did; if he supports them, then he's a war hero that supports them. If he doesn't, then he's just another dude. Nobody, as far as I can tell, sets their priorities according to What Cleland Would Do.

It's possible that Cleland's presence will swing a few votes, but I suspect that the netroots will be so turned off by the following statement from Lieberman about Cleland that his involvement in the campaign will be a wash at best:

Sadly, my opponent has done his best to distort my record, spending at least $4 million of his own money to mislead people into thinking that I am someone I am not. Not unlike what happened to Max Cleland four years ago.

This just reinforces everything the netroots hates about Lieberman. Remember, Cleland lost four years ago because his opponent made hawkish noises and claimed Cleland would let terrorists strike the homeland because only Bush-style hawkishness could work. That comment resulted in Lieberman being called "Wanker of the day" by Atrios, and C&L called it Lieberman's "new low." Commenters thought the whole thing was ridiculous (all typos, etc. original):

and yet joe kisses up to the same kind of people that claimed Cleland supported saddam.
Wow, Joe is missing limbs and has been attacked as a terrorsimp?
yeah, Cleland was destroyed by ReThugs over his opposition to the Department f Homeland SEcurity Bill - the Bill that was championed by JOE LIEBERMAN, who blithely said that he was sure Republicans wouldn't use it to play politics.
WTF? In what way does pointing out, accurately, Joe's enthusiastic and unwavering support for an unnecessary and disastrous war equate to calling someone who left three limbs on the battlefield in the last unnecessary and disastrous war a clone of Osama?
Wow. So tarring Lamot with the ROVE brush. Interesting strategy.
Did Lieberman speak out publicly against the sandbagging of Cleland then??? I think not.
One more reason to vote for Ned Lamont: disgracing the memory of what the Rovians did to Max Cleland.

Good job, Joe. So much for your move that's "sure to cause some amusing cognitive dissonance for Lamont supporters."

Tags: tnr, dems

Buddha rays and traffic jams

2006-08-04T19:05:00.000-04:00

I like it when religion doesn't sound like a get-rich-quick scheme. Here's what one top Buddhist monk said about people staring at an optical illusion:

"If you really want to see Buddha rays, learn the Dhamma (the teachings of the Buddha) and attain enlightenment. That is the only way. Now they are only causing traffic jams."

Perfect.

Tags: buddhism, silly

Quote of the day: "arabic is sooooo gay oh my gahhhhhhd"

2006-07-29T20:08:00.000-04:00

That's what one of my friends said when I showed her this gem from Jon Swift, "a reasonable conservative who likes to write about politics and culture."

the military has discharged 55 Arabic language specialists for being gay (who knew that Arabic was such a gay language?). Sure, it might make it a little more difficult for us to intercept enemy radio communications in Iraq and make interrogations of enemy soldiers a tad more time-consuming, but I think it would be a lot worse if we threw all of our American values out the door for the sake of expediency. What in fact are we fighting for if not our principles and values? Besides, I think our new interrogation methods render the language barrier a non-issue.

Wiser words were never spoken. It's a good thing we're so much more worried about gays in the military than we are about militant neonazi thugs that radicalize the troops and take their military training home with them after the war is over like Timothy McVeigh did.

Swift rivals Fafblog's Medium Lobster for the title of America's most reasonable conservative. His recommendation that we "Declare Supreme Court Justices Enemy Combatants" is a must-read.

Tags: courts, dave, disenchantedidealist, gay, guantanamo, ideology, iraq, military, satire

The supply-side solution

2006-07-29T16:14:00.000-04:00

Best idea ever:

"Some in Washington say we had to choose between cutting taxes and cutting the deficit," President Bush said in a brief appearance at the White House to highlight the new estimates. "Today's numbers show that that was a false choice. The economic growth fueled by tax relief has helped send our tax revenues soaring."

The Republican leadership in Washington decided this week that, as a last-ditch effort to stop the deficit from spiralling out of control, it would eliminate taxes entirely.

"We've seen that tax revenues increase whenever we cut taxes," said Rep. James Sensenbrenner. "It only recently occurred to us that if we got rid of them altogether, we'd end up with a surplus."...

Tax relief evangelist Grover Norquist was more sanguine, however. "I now understand that we'll hardly be able to drown government in the bathtub if we cut taxes. After the enormous flood of revenue that comes in, government will, sadly, be bigger than ever."

Makes sense to me.

Tags: bush, business, dave, disenchantedidealist, gop, ideology, propaganda, satire, scam, silly, tax, wealth

Flies and vinegar meet apples and oranges

2006-07-27T18:31:00.000-04:00

I just read this fascinating scientific piece on The Condimentary Preferences of Drosophila at an excellent blog that can only be described as A Somewhat Old, But Capacious Handbag. Apparently,

In a small-scale survey of the dietary preferences of kitchen Drosophila (species unknown), we find, contrary to received wisdom, that you catch significantly more flies with vinegar than with honey. However, no condiment tested was sufficiently attractive or lethal to comprise a promising direction for future pest control strategies. Further analysis of drosophilan gastronomic leanings suggests they may be middle class.

Popular sentiment overwhelmingly supports the concept that ethanoic acid is unalluring to dipterans (1). However, some academic opinion disagrees (2). We here present results indicating that flies prefer vinegar not only to honey (p<0.01), but to a range of sauces and dressings from various cultural traditions.

While at first glance, this may seem compelling, unfortunately, the study is not without problems. There is no indication that the flies were actually caught. Personal observations indicate that honey is much stickier and viscous than vinegar and that its physical properties could result in more trapped flies even if the dipterans approach it only rarely. Additional research may be necessary to determine if the conventional wisdom is correct (as with the relative viscosities of blood and water or the relative flatnesses of the state of Kansas and a pancake), or not. In the mean time, the question will remain in much the same situation as the ancient chicken/egg question. There is hope, however. Scientists, mathematicians, doctors, linguists and lawyers appear to have finally reached a conclusion about whether apples can be compared to oranges. A discussion of their path to a well-supported conclusion follows.

An implicit assumption in the common expression that someone is "comparing apples and oranges" is that such a comparison would be impossible, or at least highly impractical. There seems to be reason to believe that this is not the case, however. Even the most amateur botanist can tell that pears and apples are highly similar (both are in the subfamily Maloideae), yet the Dutch, Swedes, and Germans apparently consider it impossible to "compare apples with pears," since this is their preferred construction of the same idiom. Is it possible that English speakers are similarly mistaken? Are apples and oranges really comparable or even similar? Several lines of evidence indicate that they may be.

The claims of similarity between apples and oranges appear to be bolstered by their etymological relationships in Afro-Semitic, Uralic, and Indo-European languages. In many of these languages, oranges are described as apples, albeit from a different location or with a different color. For example, the Greek χρυσομηλιά (chrysomelia) and Latin pomum aurantium both literally describe oranges as "golden apples." The German, Finnish, and Russian the terms for the bitter orange (a related species) are derived from the Latin, and the Hebrew תפוז (tapuz) is a shortened form of תפוח זהב(tapuakh zahav), which also means "golden apple." The Dutch, Latvian, Icelandic, Swedish, Finnish, Russian, and North-German words for sweet oranges (often simply called "oranges" in English) are all derived from the phrase "Chinese apple" in their respective tongues. If an apple from China is like an orange, then a comparison between the two is necessary every time an orange is mentioned.

As has been known since at least 1893 when the United States Supreme Court overturned centuries of botanical classification by defining tomatoes as vegetables (see Nix v. Hedden), common names are often biologically meaningless. Still, the large number of comparisons in relatively independent linguistic samples suggests that even if the two fruits shouldnot be compared, they are compared with great frequency, and various scholars from a variety of fields have suggested that apples and oranges can be validly compared by providing logical and empirical counterexamples.

Law professor Eugene Volokh argues that "we compare apples and oranges all the time! We compare them by price, by how much we like the taste, by likely sweetness and ripeness, by how well they'll go in a tasty fruit cocktail, and so on. In fact, every time we go to the store and buy apples rather than oranges — or vice versa — we are necessarily (if implicitly) comparing apples and oranges." He suggested that a better idiom would involve "two items that really are radically dissimilar" like "apples and democracy" or "oranges and the multiplication table." He believes that such "comparisons really would be hard to conduct." Volokh's argument seems valid, but his conclusion is likely inaccurate: one of his readers noted that even such radically dissimilar nouns as apples and the multiplication table can be compared fairly easily, as when one compares the number of syllables in each word or the relative age at which children learn each concept. Volokh's brother Alexander "Sasha" Volokh argued that mathematically, only the properties of apples and oranges can be compared; the fruits themselves cannot be. Mathematically astute bloggers and readers forced him to partially retract his analysis, however, leaving the issue at least partially unresolved.

Perhaps more interestingly, at least two independent scientific studies have been conducted on the subject, each of which concluded that apples can be compared to oranges fairly easily and also the two fruits are quite similar. The first study, conducted by Scott A. Sandford of the NASA Ames Research Center, noted that

there are several problems with dismissing analogies with the comparing apples and oranges defense.
First, the statement that something is like comparing apples and oranges is a kind of analogy itself. That is, denigrating an analogy by accusing it of comparing apples and oranges is, in and of itself, comparing apples and oranges. More importantly, it is not difficult to demonstrate that apples and oranges can, in fact, be compared

Spectrometric analysis showed that apples and oranges could be compared quite easily and that they were actually very similar. He concluded that "the comparing apples and oranges defense should no longer be considered valid. This is a somewhat startling revelation. It can be anticipated to have a dramatic effect on the strategies used in arguments and discussions in the future." Google Trends data is unavailable, but in the field of medical research (the only field where such analysis has, to our knowledge, been done), his influence appears to have been ephemeral at best. While use of the phrase dropped from an all-time high in 1995 back down to 1994 levels in 1996 after the paper was published, it quickly crept back in to use and appeared more often in 1999 (the last year for which data are available) than in any other year save 1995.

The British Medical Journal noted in a study by Stamford Hospital's surgeon-in-chief James Barone that both apples and oranges were sweet (as measured by the Licker scale), similar in size (circumference and diameter), weight (in grams), and shape, that both are grown in orchards, and both may be eaten, juiced, and so on. The only significant differences found were in terms of seeds (the study used seedless oranges), the involvement of Johnny Appleseed (P<0.01), and color (oranges were far more likely to be orange, with P=0.03).

The authors of the first study rejoined that its "earlier investigation was done with more depth, more rigour, and, most importantly, more expensive equipment" than the British Medical Journal study; they appear to be correct. The issue should be settled by now. Still, while this question appears to have been laid to rest, further study may be necessary to determine whether the Serbian construction ( "Поредити бабе и жабе", or "comparing grandmothers and frogs") and the more English exaggerated comparisons such as those between "oranges to orangutans" "apples to dishwashers" and so on are invalid as Professor Volokh suggested.

Note: The above is a heavily modified version of the Wikipedia article on apples and oranges. (I can rewrite it for my blog because I wrote much of the original article and also because it's an Open Document, and Open Documents are awesome like that).

Tags: biology, dave, disenchantedidealist, research, satire, silly

Dehumanizing depictions, breast implants, sugar daddies, and violence against women

2006-07-24T17:48:00.000-04:00

I found the following three websites, and I asked some female friends of mine which one was the most horrible--they were all pretty bad.

With one vote, we have a pageant of "comely mugshots of selected [female] arrestees" from a local prison with instructions for the (male) readers to "review the cavalcade of incarcerated corn country cuties, and vote for the one that sets your heart a-twitter." (hat tip to Feministing). These men are literally gazing at these women through the eyes of the state and participating in their discipline and punishment. It probably says a lot about our society that men choose to gaze at, rank, classify, and mock powerless women kept under lock and key.

Tied for second place, also with one vote, we have "sugar daddie dot com," a dating service that hooks beautiful women up with rich men (and rich women with good-looking men, but they don't really announce that). The problem isn't so much that such a site exists but that we've reached the point where it's "necessary." There are definitely advantages to be found on both sides, and such a relationship can be (or at least seem) empowering for women that get pampered by their "sugar daddy," but it's still... creepy. The other striking aspect of this site is the class issue. Someone could probably write a really insightful research paper on class using this site as Exhibit A. There are dozens of lines like these:

Successful men wanting to be a Sugar Daddy are ultimately caring individuals. Sugar Daddy dating delivers to people who are aware of the finer things in life and understand that good living is not a luxury, but a necessity... Second best is not an option in online dating and we understand the needs of single people when delivering an unrivaled matchmaking service that is admired by many, but equaled by none.

Millionaire dating is exclusive and people nowadays see that, the more exclusive it is, the more of a must have it becomes.

I'm ashamed that members of my species are drawn in by this tripe. The whole site is like a bizarre parody of itself. The page design tries to be classy, extravagant, and elegant, but it tries too hard and ends up looking unprofessional and tacky. Especially when they start adding UPPERCASE FLASHING TEXT. And exclamation points! They scream exclusivity but look like a cheap knockoff. Furthermore,

Sugardaddie.com does not take responsibility in checking the truth or accuracy of any information posted to the website, nor do we undertake to screen the content of any information provided to it, or guarantee the proper use of such information by any party, including its members.

In other words, if you can rent a tuxedo, you can pose as a "millionaire" and hoodwink hot women. Classy. Weirdly, they also ban the terms "mistress," "goddess," and "money slave." I'm not sure how they picked those three, but they did. To top off the weirdness, almost every page is littered with weird word usages, suggesting that they're trying way too hard to sound classy but have no idea what they're talking about (evolvement? setting precedence?). I'm surprised more people's bullshit detectors haven't gone off. Even when there's nothing quite wrong with their diction, their prose often reminds me of Bush's obvious-speak ("Russia's a big country and you're a big country... Russia's big and so is China") or Tom Cruise's writing ("is there anything in a name—J.J.? Look at the Jays we have now—Jay Leno, J. Lo, Jay-Z—but he's got two Js."). Depressing.

But the third site I found really takes first place. And now, with a whopping six votes, I present to you "My Free Implants Dot Com."

Create The Perfect Girl at MyFreeImplants.com!

Your eyes haven't lied to you. That actually is an animated hand dropping coins into the back of a seductively-posed mostly-naked woman whose breasts grow with each coin added, and it really does recommend that you give them money to "create the PERFECT girl." The site really is a place where men pay for women to pay attention to them and the women are required to spend that money on cosmetic surgery so that more men will value their attention because of their appearance. It's like prostitution but without the freedom provided by the money the women earn. They don't get to use that money except to please their viewers even more. The site is pretty up-front about that: "the surgeries are paid for through the network of benefactor members in our community, and they ultimately decide on who gets the procedures they want first." Nice. According to The Houston Press,

Jason Grunstra, 28, launched the site last year. It's free for women, but men have to pay around $1.80 for each e-mail they send. The women make a buck off each e-mail; Grunstra and PayPal take the balance. So far, about 700 women and 2,000 men have joined. Grunstra, who lives in L.A., says he keeps each woman's money in a bank account until they reach their target, and he keeps the interest.

Not only that, but it turns out that once they get fake breasts, they can parlay them for even more money:

In 2003, a fellow calling himself Hugh Jass launched [pimping the poor dot com] as a way to kill two birds with one stone. Hugh and his friends claim to have an annoying boss named Kurt Smith. They also enjoy fake-boob-cyberbegging sites. So they contacted the cyberbeggars and offered them a few bucks if they would model skimpy garments on their own sites that read "Kurt Smith Sucks."

At least that way they get to keep the money.

Still, while these sites are all pretty horrible, they seem to be more symptoms than problems in and of themselves. If women want to earn a dollar every time a creepy guy sends them an email, I don't think anyone should try to stop them. But these things are symptoms of a broader problem, where women are constantly degraded and even attacked. At The Debate Link, I found a story showing how the courts treat battered women they don't like:

In California, a Mexican women [sic] went to court to get a restraining order against her husband, who was abusing her. Instead, the presiding judge asked if she was an illegal immigrant. When she said yes, the judge replied:

"I hate the immigration laws that we have, but I think the bailiff could take you to the immigration services and send you to Mexico.” Then the Judge had a creative idea: he would count to 20 and Gonzalez would disappear by the time he was finished. No trouble for her; no trouble for him. "One. Two. Three. Four. Five. Six. When I get to 20, she gets arrested and goes to Mexico," said the judge according to the court transcript. This week, in an interview with the LA Times, Judge Fink explains his intent to get Gonzalez from trouble with the INS. He also said he saw nothing more than screaming between the husband and wife, although reportedly Gonzalez had moved last month into a domestic violence shelter. The Superior Court is now reviewing the hearing.

There's also a fascinating and almost unbearably depressing comment thread over at Bitch, Ph.D. where women discuss their personal experiences with misogyny, how those experiences fit into the big picture, and how to fight back. Some of the things men do to women (and women do to one another) because of gender are unimaginably horrible, and reading these women's stories and the way they perceived and analyzed male dominance helped me understand sexual politics much better.

Some of the comments from men were enlightening as well. One guy used the analogy of living in a town with a gas chamber, knowing that you don't work there but that you're not all that different from the people that do, and that you're not really doing anything to stop them, and that basically summarizes my reaction as well. I think everyone should read it (despite its length) so more people understand women's continuing subjugation and what we're up against as we challenge male dominance. It's a tricky bastard of a system, it's linked with other systems like racism and statism, and it hurts us all, even those that sometimes benefit from it.

Tags: dave, disenchantedidealist, gender, hate, immigration, rape, sex, violence

Bush: dog feces edition

2006-07-23T17:19:00.000-04:00

I just found this. I can't independently verify any of it, but it's funny whether it's true or not.

Police in Germany are hunting pranksters who have been sticking
miniature flag portraits of US President George W. Bush into piles of
dog poo in public parks. Josef Oettl, parks administrator for Bayreuth,
said: "This has been going on for about a year now, and there must be
2,000 to 3,000 piles of excrement that have been claimed during that
time."

The series of incidents was originally thought to be some sort of
protest against the US-led invasion ofIraq. And then when it continued
it was thought to be a protest against President George W. Bush's
campaign for re-election. But it is still going on and the police say
they are completely baffled as to who is to blame. "We have sent out
extra patrols to try to catch whoever is doing this in the act," said
police spokesman Reiner Kuechler. "But frankly, we don't know what we
would do if we caught them red handed." Legal experts say there is no
law against using feces as a flag stand and the federal legal experts
say there is no law against using feces as a flag stand and the federal
constitution is vague on the issue.

Wonderful. As long as you promise not to send money or pipe bombs, you can have flags mailed to your home by following the instructions here. Better yet, you can make your own flags using a PDF available from the same page and then send in pictures to add to the site's photo gallery. The artist that designed the project says the purpose is simply to provoke thought and emotion. I guess it's very postmodernly avant garde or whatever. I dunno.

Chinese excuses

2006-07-23T02:51:00.000-04:00

My friend Hillary's stay in China (and her trip to Mongolia in particular) is letting her write the best excuses:

"Hi Bess, Sorry for the late reply. I was in Inner Mongolia the past few days and didn't have internet access."
"Hey Reid, Sorry to get back to you so late. I was in the middle of the desert."
Sorry I wasn't in my room earlier, "I was in a riot in Tiananmen."
"Sorry [I missed your call]. I was at dead mao."
I "can't [go to lunch]. I'm on the great wall."

Hope you have a safe trip back, Hillary.

Tags: silly, china, personal, hillary, disenchantedidealist, Dave

Bush's illegal signing statements and the American Bar Association proposals

2006-07-22T17:06:00.000-04:00

One of the more interesting (and effective) weapons in bush's quasi-legal arsenal in his war on the other branches has been the aggressive signing statement (pioneered by now-Justice Samuel Alito). The biggest danger isn't that the president will convince the courts to accept his retroactive reinterpretation of the law, though with Alito on the court, that's more likely than it should be. Instead, the main problem is that executive agencies (i.e. the parts of the government that actually do things) will follow them. That's especially likely when we have quasi-judicial agencies like the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel interpreting the law to suit the president telling those agencies to follow the signing statements as law. At that point, we have the President rewriting the law, his stooges interpreting it, and his stooges' stooges carrying it out. Meanwhile, Congress and the courts are kept in the dark about the actual content of the law, despite their ostensible duty to write and interpret it.

The American Bar Association has a few creative proposals for remedying this. They're on the verge of concluding that Congress should pass a law so that legislators can sue Bush if they think his signing statements misinterpret their law, which is great, at least in theory. It gets all three branches in on the issue, and makes it so the president can't force the courts to discard it. It gives the courts the final say.

There are three problems, though.

Arlen Specter is the chair of the Judiciary Committee (where this would be worked out before being submitted for a floor vote). We can look forward to some inspiring theatrics from him where it really looks like he cares about the issue and will force Bush to uphold the law, but then once he has the upper hand, he'll "compromise" for no reason and rewrite the legislation to make it worse than the status quo.
Nobody knows exactly how Bush's signing statements are being interpreted and used, since they're always extremely broad and vague and Bush is usually smart enough to classify his quasi-legal activity. If the executive does a good job of obfuscating, it'll be hard for Congress to know that they're being hoodwinked and even harder to prove it before a court.
All of this assumes that Congress even wants to be a real live branch of government. There's some depressingly good evidence that they don't. It takes guts to go head-to-head with the president, especially when it might actually change something.

The ABA has three other resolutions relating to signing statements:

The first three ask the president not to use signing statements as a kind of shortcut veto. If the president thinks a bill or part of a bill is unconstitutional, one of these resolution declares, he should feel free to say so—but he should do that before he signs it, not after. The other resolution suggests Congress craft legislation to make signing statements more transparent and more accessible. Currently, signing statements are not sent directly to Congress, and they are often ambiguous in their intent. But a law could require the president to write a report explaining exactly how and why he plans not to enforce a law, if he plans not to enforce it, for every signing statement he issues.

Sounds excellent, especially the last one. In theory, it'll solve the second problem--executive obfuscation--I noted above. Hopefully all these resolutions pass and that they have some influence. Maybe the momentum from debating this could overcome the third issue--Congressional apathy--as well. But We'll be stuck with Arlen Specter no matter what, it seems.

Also, the ABA president has a pretty good speech criticizing Bush and the Specter bill on wiretapping. Crooks and Liars has the video.

Bush in free fall: the flash animation

2006-07-18T22:42:00.000-04:00

I was mesmerized by this. It's so fitting. It never stops. It was even better once I realized you could click and drag to shake him around even more and not just watch passively as he bounced and fell. I sort of with they'd made him a little less flexible and a little less passive, but try it for yourself. It'll feel so good.

Categories: bush, silly, web

Delighting in self-negation: the "culture of life"

2006-07-18T15:15:00.000-04:00

Updated below with criticism of the anti-pro-life article and my response.

Some of my readers may be aware that I find few things more delicious than a clever reversal where someone accidentally dismantles their own argument. One example is what debaters call a "double turn" ("nuh-uh! My idea won't make a bad thing more likely, it'll make a good thing less likely!"). Another example is what The Anonymous Liberal calls a "Noonan Award" nominee; the person sacrifices an important point to prove a minor one (this is one of my favorites). There are lots of other variants ranging from simple hypocrisy to accidentally poisoning one's own well, and they can all be loads of fun, depending on the circumstances.

For some reason, all of these are pretty frequent among National Review columnists (I don't read it often anymore, but in recent months, Rich Lowry deconstructed most of conservatism, Jonah Goldberg convincingly showed that his "principles" are actually mere tools, and David Frum accidentally ridiculed his own arguments). The phenomenon isn't limited to their pages, though. Rumsfeld, for instance, simultaneously believes that intelligence is the future of the military, controls 80% of the intelligence budget, and that it's not his job to do "intelligent [sic]" work. Scalia and Yoo do the same sort of thing to Originalism all the time, though I haven't blogged about it yet. "Intelligent design" proponents likewise ignore their "theory" when it suits them, such as when they're infected with antibiotic-resistant bacteria or try to explain what designed the designer. The most extreme advocates of liberty can find themselves defending child prostitution, a right to drive drunk, and state-sponsored abortions. Some less fun examples are the "traditional values" folks can find themselves defending child molestation, state-sponsored kidnapping, and cancer and the "Patriots" that want to dismantle everything this country stands for. On a less serious note, the makers of the X-Men actually litigated against their characters' interests and won millions of dollars by undermining their own message.

One ideology that seems to get tied up in knots more than most others is "the culture of life." I think part of the reason is that advances in technology and knowledge have made their principles less and less applicable, so they need to broaden the scope of their ideology to cover marginal cases or lose it altogether. Here's a list of 20 great questions that put pro-lifers in uncomfortable positions (with a link to an article filled with real-life situations they create) and here's a spectacular satire from The Onion on the subject. I bring this up because I just found one of the most spectacularly delicious scientific arguments imaginable. Here's the abstract:

Some proponents of the pro-life movement argue against morning after pills, IUDs, and contraceptive pills on grounds of a concern for causing embryonic death. What has gone unnoticed, however, is that the pro-life line of argumentation can be extended to the rhythm method of contraception as well. Given certain plausible empirical assumptions, the rhythm method may well be responsible for a much higher number of embryonic deaths than some other contraceptive techniques.

Pure delight.

Randy Alcorn calculates that "even an infinitesimally low portion(say one hundredth of one per cent) of 780 million pill cyclesper year globally could represent tens of thousands of unbornchildren lost to this form of chemical abortion annually"...

[I]f one is willingto make a few relatively innocent assumptions, then the rhythmmethod may well be responsible for massive embryonic death andthe same logic that turned pro-lifers away from morning afterpills, IUDs and pill usage, should also make them nervous aboutthe rhythm method...

It seems reasonable to assume that anembryo that results from an "old" ovum (that is waiting at theend of the fertile period) or an "old" sperm (that is stilllingering on from before ovulation), and that is trying to implantin a uterine wall that is not at its peak of receptivity, isless viable than an embryo that comes about in the centre intervalof the fertile period... Sotheir success rate [with the rhythm method] is due not only to the fact that they manageto avoid conception, but also to the fact that conceived ovahave reduced survival chances...

[Our assumptions tell us that] on average, for every pregnancy that resultsfrom a conception outside the HF period, there are two to threeembryonic deaths... If all of Alcorn’s 780 millionpill users were to switch to the rhythm method, then these convertswould be causing, in his own words, the deaths not of tens ofthousands, but of millions of unborn children...

Making some reasonable assumptions, we can conclude that

a condom user... can count on one embryonic death foreach unintended pregnancy. A rhythm method user, however, shouldcount on two to three embryonic deaths for each unintended pregnancy.Assuming a success rate of 95% for condom usage, we can counton an expectation of .5 pregnancies in 10 years. Hence, theexpectation of embryonic death is .5 per ten years for a condomuser, which is substantially lower than the expectation of twoto three embryonic deaths per ten years on the rhythm method [estimated elsewhere in the piece].Even a policy of practising condom usage and having an abortionin case of failure would cause less embryonic deaths than therhythm method.

The last couple of paragraphs address some possible counterarguments. If people don't find this argument at least potentially compelling, though, it shows that the "cornerstone of the argumentof the pro-life movement, namely that deaths of early embryosare a matter of grave concern" is bunk. I love it!

Update: The article wasn't very well-recieved in the scientific community, and so I salvaged some of the argument. I'm not prepared to argue that the rhythm method or "natural family planning" (NFP) cause more embryonic deaths than IUDs or the pill, but I have what I think is a very good case for why they might cause more embryonic death than condoms. This was originally written as a response to another internet user here. I've added some modifications so that my readers here can understand my point without necessarily reading the other piece, though it's available in the above link.

Thank you for your thoughtful and well-articulated response.

Regardless of the individual facts of the article (many of which I'm not qualified to comment on), surely you can agree that given the extremely high number of natural embryonic deaths (and the fact that this number rises with age), there are many more fertilizations than births in women using any method. The question is simply how to minimize the number of "wasted" fertilizations to save as many embryos as posssible.

If I grant your contention that older gametes do not produce less viable embryos, then the ratio of fertilizations to deaths is the same for condom users as it is for couples with no contraception and rhythm method users. By happy coincidence, minimizing the number of fertilizations through any of these methods minimizes both embryonic deaths and unwanted pregnancies.

That means that one can simply look up the effectiveness rate for the rhythm method and for condoms; the method most effective at preventing pregnancy is also the method most effective at preventing doomed fertilizations and there is some simple ratio between these (1:1 if 50% of embryos fail to implant).

The numbers I've seen say the following:
Perfect NFP use fails between 1 and 9 percent per year, depending on which studies one looks at
Perfect condom use fails about 3% per year

Let's be slightly generous towards NFP and simplify the issue by saying that the perfect use stats are indistinguishable. One could argue, however, that what matters morally is actual results rather than the ideal results. In that case, various NFP methods fail 14-25% of the time. To keep things simple, let's call NFP failure 20% (the average of 14 and 25 is just under 20). Condoms fail about 14% of the time.

Assuming that my numbers are right so far, and that you're correct that embryos produced by the two methods are equally viable, it appears that typical NFP causes an additional 0.6 unwanted pregnancies per couple per year compared to typical condom use. Then we have to multiply that number times the number of doomed embryos per pregnancy (somewhere between 1 and 50 if between 50% and 98% of embryos are doomed) to find the total number of doomed embryos per couple per year that could have been saved if the couple had used condoms instead of NFP.

If only half of all embryos are doomed, then NFP kills 0.06 embryos per couple per year in a typical setting that would never have been fertilized by condom use.

If 98% of embryos are doomed (as is common in older couples), then NFP kills 3 embryos per couple per year in a typical setting relative to a typical condom user.

75% seems to be the most general figure, so that's 0.18 dead embryos per year, or one dead embryo per five years.

If embryos are human life, then this is the moral equivalent of murdering someone every five years to avoid some latex (up to three murders a year for older couples). That hardly seems ethical.

If reducing embryonic deaths is actually one's goal, he or she should recognize the possibility that NFP isn't the best way of doing it and recognize that these arguments are at least potentially damning. (If one's goal is to promote NFP, they won't matter one way or the other.)

Incidentally, there are several articles that support the aging gametes theory, which would restore much of the credibility of the initial argument.

How are my figures?

Categories: familyvalues, christain, incompetence, abortion, biology, sex, ideology, medical, personal, research

"Interesting" conversation on Bush and sexual harassment

2006-07-18T01:20:00.000-04:00

me: Bush sexually harassed a high-ranking foreign official [German Chancellor Angela Merkel]
her: :-)
her: you only wish you could harass a woman with that much power.
me: uh.
her: cummon
her: okay, fine.
her: she's not that hot, i guess.

When asked to elaborate, the conversation continued:

her i wouldn't do her. what do you want me to say?
me: [but] you're straight.
her this is a very true statement
me: interesting spelling of "come on," by the way.
her it wasn't meant as please ejaculate now, it was like...a slangy, smoother version of the very caucasian 'come on' i could have uttered
me: okay.
her thought i should explain myelf

...

me: any other insights on this international event?
her which international event?
her the G8 or me explaining myself?
me: uh, Bush sexually harassing a foreign leader.
her oh, no. he's just horny. it's not like fucking ~~Laura~~ [Angela Merkel] is any good.

Let's just call it an interesting perspective and leave it at that. I guess she thought it was funny.

Categories: bush, sex, gender, rape, personal,

Blog stuff

2006-07-17T17:27:00.000-04:00

Apparently, India is blocking all Blogger blogs. Fortunately, for now at least, Indian blog readers won't have much trouble circumventing it if they know what they're doing.

Sorry about the light blogging lately; I've been pretty busy with my research and I've also been pretty tired. I've also been making more changes to the categories system to make it more complete and easier to use.

I'm also interested in having co-bloggers join me here. I think it could make the blog much more interesting and easy to maintain. If anyone wants to pitch in (even occasionally), let me know. It should be a fun experience.

Categories: india, censorship, personal, web

Need a date? Just call 911

2006-07-16T14:06:00.001-04:00

I'm glad I'm not this desperate.

it all started with a noise complaint called in last month by neighbors of Lorna Jeanne Dudash. The deputy sent to check on the complaint knocked on her door, then left.
Thompson said Dudash then called 911, asking that the "cutie pie" deputy return.
"He's the cutest cop I've seen in a long time. I just want to know his name," Dudash told the dispatcher. "Heck, it doesn't come very often a good man comes to your doorstep... Honey, I'm just going to be honest with you, OK? I just thought he was cute. I'm 45 years old and I'd just like to meet him again, but I don't know how to go about doing that without calling 911... I know this is absolutely not in any way, shape or form an emergency, but if you would give the officer my phone number and ask him to come back, would you mind?"
The deputy returned, verified that there was no emergency and arrested her for misusing the 911 system, an offense punishable by a fine of up to several thousand dollars and a year in jail.

Awesome.

Categories: silly

Hyperreality, evolution, and faith

2006-07-14T22:09:00.000-04:00

So I was browsing Fundies Say the Darndest Things today and found this gem:

Here are my top three favorite questions to Evolutionists:
Explain evolution in light of a 6000 year universe - (Genesis 1).
Since God pronounced His Creation "very good" in Genesis 1:31 - why the need for Evolution?
Since Jesus didn't believe in Evolution - (Mark 10:6; 13:19) - why should we?

The weird part is that they apparently expect these to influence people that don't interpret Genesis and Mark literally. I've seen such people before. It's literally inconceivable to them that the Bible isn't universally considered an authority on everything. I think this is (related to) what's called "hyperreality." The story this guy grew up with is more real than the actual world, and he cannot imagine anything outside of it.

The author has a signature. Here it is:

If it disagrees with the King James Bible - it's wrong.

Aside from the obvious problems with biblical literalism, does anyone know of a serious argument that the King James Version (more than any other translation) is the Word of God?

People scare me.

Categories: christian, evolution, ideology, philosophy

The Creative Commons Lotus

2006-07-09T17:56:00.000-04:00

Unlike, say, my friend Hillary, I have no esthetic, artistic, or photographic skills whatsoever. Most of the time, I don't even notice or care about the things other people find beautiful (aside from attractive people, but that's different). When I was contemplating my site redesign a while back, I was searching for Creative Commons photographs on everystockphoto.com. While looking around, I stumbled across the picture at below (Creative Commons lisences are great; anyone that wants can use the photo in their own work so long as they credit and notify Greg Kazarian at gpk [at] gpkdesign [dot] com).

There was something about the way it stood alone, tall and unbent against the gloomy background really moved me, and it seemed like the perfect image for my blog. It seemed to me like the lotus was doing what I see as one of the purposes of this blog: maintaining idealistic courage in an awry world. The lotus is an especially appropriate symbol for this because it represents the growth of beauty from the muck and detachment from the contaminated waters of desire below. It's about perseverance and acceptance, improving oneself while recognizing that the world around is chaotic and painful. About hoping for the best but expecting nothing. About disenchantment with the world and about finding a new more subtle and fulfilling way of experiencing it. It would have been ideal for my blog.

Unfortunately, I couldn't find a way to crop it appropriately. I needed something I could stick at the top of the page, and there was no way I could do the picture justice with those constraints. So I made my own logo, and I think it came out pretty well. I still wanted to publicize the photo because I thought other people might find it as meaningful as I did. I hope you'll also check out the photographer's photographer's other work. Some of it is pretty amazing.

Categories: biology, buddhism, personal, photo,

Cindy Sheehan, Phil Donahue, and Bill O'Reilly

2006-07-09T15:54:00.000-04:00

I had never seen or heard Cindy Sheehan until last week. I had assumed that she was pretty fiery, angry, and so on, but she's extremely soft-spoken. That's definitely not something I got out of the stuff I read. The hostility towards her is pretty incredible.

Anyway, I just saw this exchange with former talk show host Phill Donahue and Bill O'Reilly about her and Iraq and the war and stuff. Donahue did a surprisingly good job. I thought he was much more conservative than that. The video below is definitely worth watching.

Categories: bush, iraq, war, military, video, terror

Monkey economics

2006-07-07T15:07:00.000-04:00

''Nobody ever saw a dog make a fair and deliberate exchange of one bone for another with another dog.'' Also, ''Nobody ever saw one animal by its gestures and natural cries signify to another, this is mine, that yours; I am willing to give this for that.'' --Adam Smith

This stuff would blow Smith's mind. The New York Times just published an article on some economics research with monkeys. The first study is pretty basic, and my understanding is that it's done all the time in other animals and with computer programs. One of my professors actually participated in a study just like it when he was an undergrad (25 years ago or something).

The Harvard monkeys were cotton-top tamarins, and the experiments with them concerned altruism. Two monkeys faced each other in adjoining cages, each equipped with a lever that would release a marshmallow into the other monkey's cage. The only way for one monkey to get a marshmallow was for the other monkey to pull its lever. So pulling the lever was to some degree an act of altruism, or at least of strategic cooperation.

The tamarins were fairly cooperative but still showed a healthy amount of self-interest: over repeated encounters with fellow monkeys, the typical tamarin pulled the lever about 40 percent of the time... [Later, a monkey trained as a] stooge blithely pulled her lever over and over, never failing to dump a marshmallow into the other monkey's cage. Initially, the other monkeys responded in kind, pulling their own levers 50 percent of the time. But once they figured out that their partner was a pushover (like a parent who buys her kid a toy on every outing whether the kid is a saint or a devil), their rate of reciprocation dropped to 30 percent -- lower than the original average rate. [A monkey trained as a] selfish jerk [that never pulled the lever], meanwhile, was punished even worse. Once her reputation was established, whenever she was led into the experimenting chamber, the other tamarins ''would just go nuts,'' Chen recalls. ''They'd throw their feces at the wall, walk into the corner and sit on their hands, kind of sulk.''

That sounds a lot like what happens in real life with people. I'll have to ask my professor if he threw his feces when facing off against an uncooperative opponent in the experiment, though. Here's where the article gets really interesting: they did a second experiment with capuchin monkeys. The experimenters trained them to use money to buy different kinds of snacks, and the monkeys respoded the same way people do to price changes.

Chen next introduced a pair of gambling games and set out to determine which one the monkeys preferred. In the first game, the capuchin was given one grape and, dependent on a coin flip, either retained the original grape or won a bonus grape. In the second game, the capuchin started out owning the bonus grape and, once again dependent on a coin flip, either kept the two grapes or lost one. These two games are in fact the same gamble, with identical odds, but one is framed as a potential win and the other as a potential loss... They far preferred to take a gamble on the potential gain than the potential loss... humans tend to make the same type of irrational decision at a nearly identical rate...

They were indistinguishable from stock market investors in that respect, which is pretty cool. I'm not sure if that's surprising or not. Regardless, there's even some evidence that the monkeys "understand" money like we do, though defining "understanding" in monkeys is probably even harder than defining it in people, since we can't ask them directly. Here's what the article says:

During a recent capuchin experiment that used cucumbers as treats, a research assistant happened to slice the cucumber into discs instead of cubes, as was typical. One capuchin picked up a slice, started to eat it and then ran over to a researcher to see if he could ''buy'' something sweeter with it. To the capuchin, a round slice of cucumber bore enough resemblance to Chen's silver tokens to seem like another piece of currency.

Then there is the stealing... Once, a capuchin in the testing chamber picked up an entire tray of tokens, flung them into the main chamber and then scurried in after them -- a combination jailbreak and bank heist -- which led to a chaotic scene in which the human researchers had to rush into the main chamber and offer food bribes for the tokens, a reinforcement that in effect encouraged more stealing.

Something else happened during that chaotic scene, something that convinced Chen of the monkeys' true grasp of money. Perhaps the most distinguishing characteristic of money, after all, is its fungibility, the fact that it can be used to buy not just food but anything... What he witnessed was probably the first observed exchange of money for sex in the history of monkeykind. (Further proof that the monkeys truly understood money: the monkey who was paid for sex immediately traded the token in for a grape.)... [Because] it wouldn't reflect well on anyone involved if the money turned the lab into a brothel... Chen has taken steps to ensure that future monkey sex at Yale occurs as nature intended it.

I love this stuff. Doing this with monkeys is probably no better than doing it in humans except for these two issues:

Humans have been socialized to understand economic interactions in a certain way, which may not be the way we're "wired" to understand them. Short of testing multiple hunter gatherer societies with different customs or human children, monkeys may be the best option for these sorts of studies under certain circumstances.
It's just way cooler to do this with monkeys.

I think experimental behavioral economics is an extremely cool field. Until recently, economists have been studying "Homo economicus" instead of Homo sapiens. In other words, they've been thinking about what people would do if they were as smart as the smartest economist that ever thought about an issue and had all the relevant information instead of what they actually do. That has its place, but it's far more interesting to see how those assumptions hold up in the real world, and that requires experiments. As I noted before, there are crucial ways in which psychologists understand economics better than economists do. Experiments like these should help remedy that.

Categories: econ, biology, research, sex, silly,

NeoNazis are infiltrating the military

2006-07-07T13:15:00.000-04:00

Bad news from the New York Times:

[R]ecruiting shortfalls caused by the war in Iraq have allowed "large numbers of neo-Nazis and skinhead extremists" to infiltrate the military... The Southern Poverty Law Center, which tracks racist and right-wing militia groups, estimated that the numbers could run into the thousands, citing interviews with Defense Department investigators and reports and postings on racist Web sites and magazines...
The report quotes Scott Barfield, a Defense Department investigator, saying, "Recruiters are knowingly allowing neo-Nazis and white supremacists to join the armed forces, and commanders don't remove them from the military even after we positively identify them as extremists or gang members."...
The 1996 crackdown on extremists came after revelations that Mr. McVeigh had espoused far-right ideas when he was in the Army and recruited two fellow soldiers to aid his bomb plot... the rules were meant to leave no room for racist and extremist activities within the military. But the report said Mr. Barfield, who is based at Fort Lewis, Wash., had said that he had provided evidence on 320 extremists there in the past year, but that only two had been discharged... "They're communicating with each other about weapons, about recruiting, about keeping their identities secret, about organizing within the military," he said.
"Light infantry is your branch of choice because the coming race war and the ethnic cleansing to follow will be very much an infantryman's war," [The National Alliance's "military unit coordinator"] wrote. "It will be house-to-house, neighborhood-by-neighborhood until your town or city is cleared and the alien races are driven into the countryside where they can be hunted down and 'cleansed.'"
He concluded: "As a professional soldier, my goal is to fill the ranks of the United States Army with skinheads. As street brawlers, you will be useless in the coming race war. As trained infantrymen, you will join the ranks of the Aryan warrior brotherhood."

Digby nails it, as usual:

I'm not sure there's anything more stupid than hiring a bunch of neo-nazi's [sic] to occupy a foreign country. But it is par for the course with the Bush administration...

But regardless of the strain of racism that already exists in that warzone, putting white supremecists in their midst and allowing them to spew their Nazi propaganda among those frustrated, frightened, bored soldiers is a recipe for disaster. Instead of the sort of common tribal hatred you might see in any dangerous warlike environment, you suddenly have someone providing a whole philosophy and intellectual structure for it. It's the perfect recruiting ground for white supremecy and gives certain types permission to act out their violent fantasies against those they already consider racially inferior. And they are also training them to think of it in ways that are very dangerous when they come back to the US.

I don't know if these any of these atrocities we've recently heard about are related, but I wouldn't be surprised.

Me neither.

And frankly, the way this administration has conducted their war so far, I also wouldn't be surprised if they haven't loosened the rules on this on purpose. I'm sure they think skinheads are tough guys. And we know how the chickenhawks love the tough guys.

I'm usually less cynical than Digby, and I'll choose not to believe that part. But the possibility is really chilling.

As Dave Neiwert has pointed out, the scariest home-grown terrorists of the last ten years were the products of the Gulf war. I'm not looking forward to seeing what comes back home after this longer, more dangerous, more badly mishandled war is over.

Categories: military, war, elimination, race, america, bush, terror, iraq,

Moving Non-Sequitur strip

2006-07-06T21:58:00.000-04:00

We should always remember the dangers of what people are capable of doing to one another.

Categories: elimination, genocide, ideology, torture, totalitarianism, war

Senator Lindsey Graham

2006-07-06T21:06:00.000-04:00

I think I'm going to write a letter to Senator Lindsey Graham. He's sponsored some of the most repugnant legislation of the last few decades (it basically codified Guantánamo as Bush's playground), and he lied to the Supreme Court in a failed effort to deny innocent people trials, but there are occasional glimmers of a really respectable person in a few of the things he's done. I have a fantasy that if I send him something and write it correctly, it'll actually get read and have some kind of impact. I almost feel like he subscribes to enough of the values that make this country (potentially) great that he'd see that what he was doing is wrong if it were framed correctly for him. It's probably a stupid fantasy, but I want to try.

If any readers have any information they think is relevant, I hope they'll send it to me via email, AIM, or the comments section of this thread.

Categories: graham, gop, gitmo, torture, rights, terror, military, war, geneva, courts, executive, america, legal,

Sometimes, diplomacy takes a long time

2006-07-06T17:16:00.000-04:00

My friend says she heard Bush say "diplomacy takes a long time" or something similar on the radio today when discussing some U.N.-related issue. That's interesting because he certainly wasn't willing to give diplomacy a long time back in 2003. Maybe he's learned something since then. Or maybe diplomacy takes as long as the side with the guns wants it too.

Categories: korea, iraq, bush, war, UN,

New look

2006-07-05T17:25:00.000-04:00

[This post has been modified because I kept working on the layout after posting.]

I've spent an inordinate amount of time reworking the blog's look over the last month or so, and I think the new template is finally ready to come out of hiding. As you can probably tell, I like calm blues. It was actually much harder than it would seem because I don't know much HTML and barely know what "cascading style sheets" are. Everything was trial-and-error, and I still don't know what most of the code for the template actually means. Making things worse, there were also 20 images hidden in the page for things like rounded corners and so on, and many of them had to be changed to fit the new color scheme. It's been a cool learning experience, though. And I like a good challenge, so wrestling with the code has been fun.

Aside from the esthetic changes, I'm adding categories to my posts, which should make the site more useful. So far I've tagged (categorized) about 75 posts and have about 50 more to go. You can see my categories in the sidebar here or at http://del.icio.us/didealist, where the categories are organized into bundles like "legal" (which has all my posts on the courts, executive power, the geneva conventions, gitmo, general legal stuff, malpractice, rights, totalitarianism, and wiretapping. See image at right). That's probably the best way to navigate. I'll try to have the remaining fifty or so posts categorized in the next couple of days. The javascript I'm using isn't as automated as I'd like, so errors can creep in, but I think most of the categories are organized correctly.

A second utilitarian benefit of the new layout is that you can easily bookmark my posts by clicking the new bookmark button at the bottom of most of my posts. You can add any posts of mine you find interesting to sites like Digg, Reddit, Del.icio.us, and so on for future reference. Unfortunately, for reasons that I haven't figured out yet, the social bookmarking button below doesn't seem to work correctly in Safari. It should be fixed soon, though. The problem seems to be a result of the javascript in the button interfering with something in the "rounders" blogger template.

I hope everyone likes the new setup. If anything looks out of place, let me know. Positive feedback is appreciated as well.

If anyone else is considering the sort of changes I did, I'd recommend reading Freshblog, and 3Spots, which had great advice on implementing the bookmarking stuff I did and also provided some cool Javascript for that purpose. I'd also recommend this somewhat confusing color wheel thingy; if I'd looked at that at the beginning instead of the end of my blog update, the color scheme probably would have looked better and I definitely would have saved time.

Categories: personal, , web

The decision in Hamdan should be announced today tomorrow

2006-06-28T00:36:00.000-04:00

Unless the Supreme Court punts (which they've done several times with this case in the past), a few hours from now, we'll know whether detainees have any rights at all (i.e. if Bush can assert without evidence that someone is a terrorist, detain them, torture and kill them and their families, etc.), and whether the Supreme Court has abdicated its role as a coordinate branch of government.

[Update: they put it off until tomorrow.]

It's still Torture Awareness Month. I hope you'll take some time to learn what you can.

This case could change everything.

Categories: bush, rights, terror, courts, torture, gitmo, executive, geneva

Rich Lowry deconstructs himself

2006-06-27T16:01:00.000-04:00

Rich Lowry's column today on the role of the media in Our Lord, The Commander in Chief's War On Liberal Terror is a hysterical whine that ironically mirrors, in a grotesque sort of way, all the reasons to oppose National Review-style conservatism.

Let's start with the title: "Government By and For the New York Times." If NYT actually ran our War on a tactic, I doubt we'd see so many atrocities like this. Or obscenities like this. Or absurdities like this. If Lowry doesn't want this sort of thing leaked, he should make sure that it doesn't happen in the first place. (Incidentally, The Anonymous Liberal has a great post on the tension between using abusive policies as a scare tactic on the one hand and keeping those policies secret on the other)

Lowry begins with a silly rhetorical question and moves quickly towards blatant falsehood:

Who made Bill Keller, the executive editor of the New York Times, the nation’s
classification czar? By running the nation’s foremost newspaper, Keller gets to
decide which secrets of the U.S. government are maintained and which aren’t —
and his default position is to expose them all.

Wrong. NYT held the wiretapping story for over a year (until after the election) to appease the administration. They've no doubt held back other stories even longer. Second, NYT continues to withhold sensitive information. They only published when they "could write about this program -- withholding a number of technical details -- in a way that would not expose any intelligence-gathering methods or capabilities that are not already on the public record." There's evidence that they know quite a bit more about U.S. methods (some kind of data mining?) than they published, so Lowry's rhetorical excess has destroyed his credibility within the first two sentences of the piece.

Good job, Rich.

Anyway, his selective outrage is pretty bizarre. Since the details were withheld, the only new information related to whether warrants were sought after the phones were tapped, NYT has published literally nothing with any intelligence value whatsoever for terrorists. The Attorney General's best argument for how the first piece could hurt national security was that terrorists "sometimes forget" that we tap their phones. No terrorist would choose to use a phone only if NSA had to get a warrant after eavesdropping ("Osama, no! Don't make that call! We just found out that the Americans won't have to do paperwork to track you anymore!"). Contrast Lowry's indignation over this nonsense with his silence about the time the Associated Press published an unauthorized leak that discussed the precise location of bin Laden's number 2 and the makeup of his entourage. The difference? One actually matters in the Struggle Against Radical Extremists (Other Than Republicans), and the other doesn't. One matters for Bush's popularity, and the other doesn't. Now that we've seen both scenarios, I think we can tell where Lowry's concerns lie.

The next sentence could have been written by Noam Chomsky:

This amounts to an extraordinary accretion of public power in the hands of
an individual, and a self-interested individual at that.

Since when were Republicans concerned about that? I thought that the dangers of such "accretion" provided good reasons not to have a Vice President jointly owned by the Oil and Arms businesses or to deregulate businesses (what lefties call potential "private tyrannies") to the extent that one individual can, say, own 85% of the media in a given area. It's always really strange when someone desperately picks up an argument to serve his or her immediate needs if that argument undermines their larger project. I suppose the irony of parroting Chomsky is lost on Lowry, though.

Oh, and the "self-interested" part. When it comes to declassification of information that hurts (or helps) Bush, there is probably no one on Earth that is a more "self-interested individual" than Bush himself. As a result, I'm far more inclined to trust NYT's judgment than Bush's. This was actually forseen by the Founders, which is why Jefferson said that, in choosing "government without newspapers or newspapers without government, I should not hesitate for a moment to prefer the latter." Attempts at abuse were forseen, which is why the freedom to expose that abuse was made so broad in the First Amendment.

The rest of Lowry's article is pretty insipid and all its arguments are addressed pretty thoroughly in this post from Glenn. I just want to pause for a moment to savor the ridiculousness of his discussion of the "regnant Imperial Press, which now reflexively adopts an adversarial stance toward our government." I wish I knew what he was smoking and where I could get some.

Anyway, this debate boils down to a single question. It's one the Founders answered unequivocally. Should the government decide what the newspapers publish? Lowry's answer is clearly "yes," though he'd try to find creative ways of not saying it. I wonder if he'd handle that question better than this idiot did (the video is really a masterpiece, if you have time to watch it). Lowry notes that he's aware of the potential problems with that policy, as he mentions all kinds of abuses from past decades, but it doesn't seem to occur to him that they could happen again (or that they are happening again). Likewise, it doesn't seem to occur to him that free speech is the best remedy we have for self-interested abuses of secret government powers.

A wise columnist once accurately described "attempt[s] to set limits on free speech" as transparent "power plays" designed "to give an advantage to those forces" that can no longer be criticized. He also asked, "What else is the First Amendment for if not to protect people's right to attack or support politicians?" Clearly, "a rule that regulated political journalists' speech about politicians" should "obviously" be "toss[ed] out."

Oh, wait. My mistake. I'm not quoting a wise columnist after all. I'm quoting a hypocrite. Those quotes are from Lowry.

Categories: nationalreview, terror, nyt, bush, wiretapping, censorship, leak

Slate's Emily Bazelon, Phillip Carter, and Dahlia Lithwick ask, What Is Torture?

2006-06-19T08:40:00.000-04:00

Slate (formerly of MSN, now of the Washington Post) is one of my favorite news sources. I skim the contents and read a few of their articles every day, more when I have time. There are two things I like about it. First, they print quirky stuff, like this pop psychology analysis of Bush's willful stupidity and explanations of all sorts of weird things like whale hunting (which, incidentally, is a horrible practice). Second, they're one of the better publications when it comes to discussing the abuses of U.S. detention policy. The debate team I coached last year made good use of an article Emily Bazelon wrote on Hamdan v. Rumsfeld, for example.

I haven't had time to read their "interactive primer on American interrogation," but from my brief skim, it looks excellent. If it's as good as I think it will be, it will join Balkinization's "Anti-Torture Memos" as one of the best online resources I know of for this sort of thing (I link to some of my favorite Anti-Torture Memos here). This isn't "just" about detainee rights. It's about whether the president and the military are bound by the laws Congress passes. It's about this country's identity and its place in the world. It's a fundamental moral values (not that "family values" bullshit) and whether this country can be a moral leader or whether we will piss away even more of the cachet we've built over the last fifty years or more. It's about the principles that were established after World War II and adherence to those ideals and the laws that resulted.

I don't want to be part of a country that would have appalled the Founders, a country that, as a matter of policy, considers a common model of Casio watch to be sufficient evidence to throw someone in Guantanamo and then violates its own laws to destroy their lives. I want to live in the country the Founders envisioned, where people actually have rights, where the leader is not a King, where mere assertions of government privilege are insufficient justification for ruining innocent people's lives. The Bill of Rights may be the most important document ever written, and it is being ignored, circumvented, denigrated, abused, and defined out of existence while most of us do nothing. Some heroes are continuing the Founders' project today, but it's becoming harder and harder. We're at a crossroads, and this country could still go either way.

Categories: torture, gitmo, america

"Snail hunting" and my waning interest in biology

2006-06-19T00:10:00.000-04:00

Though most of my posts are about the Bush administration, a few percent are more personal. This is one of those posts.

This summer, I'm doing some research on the ecological effects of snail behavior, and that requires collecting a lot of snails. I once used the phrase "hunting for snails," but I soon thought better of it.

On a scale of one to ten, with ten being successfully killing a whale with nothing but a harpoon and a kayak, and one being shooting caged birds with an internet remote control from your computer at home, snail hunting is about a two.

But I'm actually capturing the offspring of snails that had already been studied in large enclosures, so I don't even have to get my feet wet. For that, I deduct a half-point. Thus, my snail-hunting is about a 1.5 on the scale I invented.

Less humorous but more important (at least to me) is my career path. Biology is surprisingly interesting, and I love reading about it. I'm just not sure that doing it is worth my time. As much as I'd love to convince ten people that the threat of predation can force different species into common physical and behavioral refuges and can thus dampen the effects of niche complementarity, I'd probably do more good by convincing a single person that arbitrary, illegal abuse is the norm in U.S. prisons and by motivating that person to speak out against it. At best, the three months of research I'm doing here will generate a few paragraphs of interesting theory and a few pages of uninteresting discussion about my particular methods. I could probably learn something equally interesting by reading Ecology Letters for fifteen minutes.

True, I'll learn about more than just snails through this experiment, but really, how important is it to develop my research skills if the product of the research isn't worth the effort?

Maybe transferring to a better school this fall will help me remember why it is that I chose this career path in the first place.

If anyone has advice, I'd appreciate it.

Categories: biology, career, personal, silly

The response to the Guantanamo suicides: the parody that writes itself

2006-06-15T01:17:00.000-04:00

I believe this was not an act of desperation, but an act of warfare waged against us

Rear Adm Harry Harris

Camp commander

That's such an absurd statement that the parodies basically write themselves.

I wrote a post on how great our policies at Gitmo are--I mean I "found a memo" saying that. It has about two dozen good links on how we capture, treat, and respond to outrages like broken bones these people inflict on themselves to make the U.S. look bad. Here are steps six and seven:

Ignore months of warnings that the detainees are desperate, hopeless, and suicidal. Dismiss those warnings and "suicide attempts as 'manipulative, self-injurious behavior'... designed to bring pressure for better conditions or for release." Train all the psychologists to torture prisoners so they're too busy to evaluate the psychological health of the detainees and determine if their suicide attempts are genuine. Once they do hang themselves, try to save them so that their interrogations can continue and we don't lose ~~profitable~~ valuable intelligence... Just in case, start "an extraordinary round of global outreach within hours" to make sure the world approves of the War on Terrorism [since we're not going to change our tactics].
Repeat: It is important to make the lives of innocent Muslims into living hells as a warning to others that might oppose the United States. It is equally important that The Liberal Media do not discuss these events so that those same people do not find out about it. They will be most intimidated by U.S. tactics if those tactics are never disclosed.

David Luban's post is a must-read. I was working on a post about him, but then my browser crashed. The short version is that he's one of the clearest thinkers and writers on these issues and that three of the four or so pieces I've read from him should be required reading material.

Recall the important warning in the Pentagon’s National Defense Strategy document: “Our strength as a nation state will continue to be challenged by those who employ a strategy of the weak using international fora, judicial processes, and terrorism.” ‘Strategy of the weak’ is another term for asymmetric warfare. The idea is that the terrorists will ruthlessly manipulate law and public opinion to tie down the American Gulliver with a Lilliputian’s net of rulings and regulations. You might think that there is a difference between, say, protesting before the U.N.’s Committee Against Torture, litigating in the Supreme Court, and blowing up innocent civilians. Or between blowing up innocent civilians and hanging yourself in jail. But it’s just not true. They are alternative faces of the same evil, and we have to be on our guard against all of them.

The argument is this. Nobody can prevail against the United States on the battlefield. So they have to prevail against the United States off the battlefield, by swaying U.S. public opinion, inciting hatred or contempt for the United States around the world, or even getting our own courts – packed, of course, with liberal activist judges – to tie the hands of our military... anything that either makes us look bad, or sways our judges to administer the stab in the back on the home front, is a weapon of the weak. Jailhouse suicides make us look bad – and the three men who killed themselves were hardened Al Qaeda types. Ergo, it was an attack on our forces using a weapon of the weak. Don’t think they killed themselves because they were unhappy about their potential life sentences without charges or a trial. They weren’t unhappy, only strategic and ruthless.

If you don't have time to read his whole post, skip to the very end (the "logic" exercise).

Jon Swift wrote a hilarious post as well:

I think Guantanamo is Kafkaesque in a good way. By not forcing the detainees to contend with the stress of due process, they are being spared the negative outcome of a trial... Although the media has generally been good about not giving these detainees undeserved attention, the failure to prevent this incident, which brings the prison's survival rate from 100% down to a still commendable 99%, has regrettably played right into the terrorists' hands... the more the press delves into stories like Haditha, Abu Ghraib and the conditions at Guantanamo, the more likely it is that regrettable incidents will occur. If people are just going to believe the worst mo matter what we do, why should we bother to behave honorably? On the bright side, this will free up our side from certain restraints that limit our ability to fight back.

Fafblog makes a triumphant return:

"Oh but Giblets there are dozens of innocent prisoners in Guantanamo" you say because you are a namby-pamby appeasenik who suckles at the teat of terror. Well if these Guantanamo prisoners are so innocent then what are they doing in Guantanamo? Sneaking into our secret military prisons as part of an elaborate plot to make it look like we're holding them in our secret military prisons, that's what! And once they get there they can chain themselves to the floor, break their bones on helpless guards' fists, and waterboard themselves to their heart's content to further their sinister Salafi scheme to sully the reputation of secret American torture facilities everywhere!

Jon Stewart had his own interpretation of why they committed suicide (hint: it involves Bill O'Reilley)

Then Mike Farrell chimed in:

Just who the hell do they think they are… or were? How dastardly, how
evil, how utterly asymmetrical!

How low can they stoop… okay, they weren't actually stooping, you have
to stand up to hang yourself. But all the same, it's stooping pretty
damned low to attack a country that's only trying to defend itself
against people who… people who look like the people who we think may be
the ones who attacked us.

If they didn't like it they never should have gone to Guantanamo in the
first place!

No siree Bob, this was an attack. A suicide attack. Not the same as
9/11, maybe, but if you think of it, it sort of is. I mean, these guys
are now dead, too, get it? They're dead and we're left holding the
bag; talk about your "good PR move," which is how the Deputy Assistant
Secretary of State for Public Diplomacy pegged it. And she should
know, you know? You don't get to be a Deputy Assistant Secretary of
State for Public Diplomacy without knowing your PR. So she knew it and
she called it like it was. I mean, how do you get better PR than
offing yourself, you know? Think about it.

Wow.
Categories: gitmo, war, military, torture, satire, executive, propaganda, bush,

My favorite anti-torture memos

2006-06-13T16:04:00.000-04:00

June is Torture Awareness Month.

I previously mentioned the "Anti-Torture Memos" at Balkinization, which is one of the best resources I've seen on the abuses of executive power emphasizing detention policies. It contains everything the law profs there have written on the subject in the last few years. That's probably too much for most people to read, so I picked out a bunch of my favorite pieces and helped make them a bit more identifiable so people can choose the most relevant ones.

Jack Balkin

Jack Summary of the administration's position (based on an article by David Luban)

Why Evidence Obtained From Torture Should Never Be Admissible

Our Legal and Political Culture

Balkin also linked to this hilarious and scary document (.pdf)

A very thoughtful post on the dangers of presidential signing statements

a nice evisceration of Judge Posner's argument for wiretapping

A perfect translation of what Gonzales says

a thoughtful post on separation of powers and party loyalty

A very funny "memo" defending Cheney's authority to make the decision to shoot Harry Whittington in the face

Awesome DOJ "memo" explaining why Bush's new powers make the flag burning amendment unnecessary

Marty Lederman

Four part analysis of the Torture Memos

Must-read piece on abuse at Gitmo and the government's response (this is the piece that made me a regular Balkinization reader)

Must-read article on Common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions

Sourced answers that demolish several administration talking points.

Four-part analysis of the McCain Amendment banning torture the associated amendments, and their implications

Must-read article on how torture policies were forced on the Pentagon from above and a link to a must-read article on Alberto Mora, who may one day be remembered as one of the most important heroes of this era.

David Luban
David Luban's must-read piece on the Hamdan case

Must-read article on the state secrets privilege

Spectacular piece on the administration's "asymetrical war" against reality"

Sandy Levinson
Judge Alito and Executive Power

I'm sure I missed some great ones, either because I didn't recognize the title or forgot about them, but I hope people spread all of these around. If I misremembered what any of these posts are about and mislabeled them, I hope you'll let me know.

Categories: torture, executive, bush, linkdump

Bush, totalitarianism, and "No Longer Enemy Combatants"

2006-06-13T08:07:00.000-04:00

The secret of rulership is to combine a belief in one's own infallibility with the power to learn from past mistakes--Orwell, 1984

For a while, I've wondered how Bush (and by extension, the whole country) could possibly let detainees leave Gitmo after years of detention without charge. Either these people are innocent, in which case we detained them without charge or trial for years for no reason or they actually are "enemy combatants" like our government has claimed and the government chose to let the terrorists run free rather than give them fair trials[*]. The government basically has a choice between looking like a rogue state with no respect for human rights or incompetently (and publicly) endangering its own national security at that point. Until now, I never knew how they could justify it because both of those options looked so bad. Perhaps the media's awe of Our Commander In Chief In A Time Of War has meant that the government never had to justify it publicly, but one would think that the officials themselves would need some kind of pretense of justice and before they became disgusted with the whole affair and demanded changes.

I may have found a piece of the answer. A few weeks ago, I encountered what was, for me, a new phrase: "No Longer Enemy Combatant." That's the designation for people that never were enemy combatants and should be (but probably won't be) released promptly. The government simply chooses not to think about what that Orwellian phrase actually means. They simultaneously believe that the detention and the release are justified, even though justifying one necessarily dejustifies the other. You see, the government didn't make a mistake, the situation just changed. The government doesn't make mistakes, apparently. If you're like Adel Abdu al-Hakim or hundreds of others--trapped in a Guantánamo prison cell despite your obvious (and in some cases, proven) innocence, it is apparently impossible to prove that you never posed a threat to U.S. national security and should never have been detained; at best, you can convince Bush's stooges that you are "No Longer" an "Enemy Combatant." Even that doesn't end your problems, though. Here's what Amnesty International had to say on the subject a few months ago:

once a person is picked up and labeled an 'enemy combatant' by the United States, his life becomes one of constant torment and stigma. This terror does not end when the man is released and sent back to his home country. Many former detainees, even when reunited with their families, continue to be harassed, arbitrarily arrested and ill-treated by their own government.
"Absolutely outrageous," said Dr. William F. Schulz, Executive Director of Amnesty International USA. "If someone is no longer considered an 'enemy combatant,' either he was erroneously detained in the first place or he has undergone a miraculous conversion. In either case, he will never be free from the stigma of being labeled a "terrorist." Moreover, the lives of the detainees' families frequently spiral down into financial and emotional devastation."

These people are paying an enormous price for the government's pretense of infallibility--for no reason other than that the military is incapable of admitting that they probably shouldn't have detained people solely because they owned a popular model of Casio watch.

And that's not the only government hubris we should be worried about. The government can listen to your phone calls with no oversight because they can be trusted not to abuse their power. They can then detain you (even if you're a citizen on American soil) with no chance for review and torture you because "they know what they're doing" and you should trust them. Even if it turns out they detained you by mistake, they can still keep you in detention or destroy your life because they don't make mistakes.

This obsession with executive power and infallibility is (or should be) offensive to both the liberal and conservative traditions in this country. It's anathema to everything conservatives supposedly learned from Burke and Hayek. It's arbitrary, it's unchecked, it's radical, and it's hubristic; it's all the things conservatism is supposed to protect us against through the rule of law, skepticism about governmental effectiveness and suspicion of governmental power. The left, with it's history of muckraking and its emphasis on civil liberties and fairness, should be equally disgusted. The Founders would have been appalled; such actions had been already illegal in the British Empire for hundreds of years in 1776. They had risked their lives and fought a bloody war against that empire to protest affronts against their rights that pale in comparison to everything Bush has done. They would be horrified that their successors intimidated "peaceably to assembl[ing]" protesters at gunpoint. The ways in which this government is "abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press"--through monitoring lawful, private discussions of political opponents and threatening them with paramilitary units and by threatening reporters with espionage charges--would have barely been conceivable when the Bill of Rights was written. The founders would be profoundly disappointed that the requirement that

The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.

was being disregarded entirely in sweeping programs that can monitor nearly every person in the entire country. They would be shocked that our prisoners were being "compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against" themselves through torture techniques regarded by Spanish Inquisitors as more terrifying than being torn apart by the Rack. They would be outraged that citizens could be "deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law" simply because the president wishes it. They would be horrified that the most important trials of the last few years have been neither "speedy" in any sense of the word nor "public," that there has been no "impartial jury," that suspects are neither "informed of the nature [nor the] cause of the accusation," that they have been kept from their own trials, could not examine the evidence against them, and were denied "the assistance of counsel for [their] defense" during their interrogations. They would be ashamed at the creatively "cruel and unusual punishments inflicted" upon those in our custody.

In short, what Bush has done is not offensive to me as a liberal. If I had learned about all of this four years ago, it would not have been offensive to me as a hawkish libertarian conservative. It's totalitarian, and it should be offensive to everyone in this country. Orwell was right that the doctrine of executive infallability and the assault on reality that it requires are just as much a part of totalitarianism as the torture we've been witnessing (and the torture we haven't been allowed to witness) in recent years. This isn't about liberalism or conservatism. Totalitarianism is offensive to me--and should be offensive to all of us--as Americans and as human beings. Amnesty International's spokesperson (quoted above) was exactly right when he said that the "denial of due process we have witnessed at Guantanamo Bay violates... our highest values as a nation." All those bits of the Bill of Rights I just quoted in bold are a part of our identity as Americans. I grew up believing that they made us special, that this was a great nation because we lived up to those values. And I know this country has never lived up to its ideals. But at least it's generally moved in the right direction. This may be the first time in history we've backslid this far.

That's why I think Glenn's book is so important. It tries to reclaim those values. That's why I spent my spare time researching it last spring when I could have been doing other things. That's why I write this blog (although if yesterday's traffic is any indication, I'd get way more hits if I just wrote about the X-Men every day).

June is Torture Awareness Month. I hope you'll check out my post on the subject and take some time to learn about (and maybe even blog about) this issue. We need more heroes to stand up and say "no."

[*]The government actually has a few more options when it extradites the prisoners rather than releasing them. None of those options are good, however, and they all make the initial denial of basic rights like habeas corpus unjustifiable in retrospect--does anyone really believe that thse people were too dangerous to be given lawyers but not dangerous enough to make it a problem if Syria takes over their cases? As I wrote a couple months ago,

If we send these people to be imprisoned in Britain (or wherever) and they get trials there, it could turn out that they were innocent the whole time (in fact, many of them are innocent). That would make the U.S. look pretty bad. If we release them ourselves, that raises the question of why we didn't do it immediately after they were captured. If they are terrorists and we send them to Pakistan or Syria, they could be released and/or serve as anti-US propaganda props, telling everyone about how we tortured them (which we probably did). Alternatively, if we send them to those countries and they get tortured, that could make us look pretty bad, too.

Categories: totalitarianism, gitmo, terror, bush, cheney, executive, torture, rights, ideology, america, courts, war

My military funeral/protest conspiracy theory

2006-06-13T00:43:00.001-04:00

Bush just signed into law the "Respect for America's Fallen Heroes Act." The act makes it a crime to protest near military funerals.

Expect to see military funerals mysteriously coinciding with right-wing events and left-wing marches, protests, and organizations.

Categories: silly, bush

Torture Awareness Month

2006-06-12T00:16:00.000-04:00

I just learned that June is Torture Awareness Month and I'm participating in their blogroll project. I hope you'll check out some of the sites there. From a legal perspective, the best resource I've found is Balkinization's Anti-Torture Memos, which includes everything the law profs there have written on detainee treatment and executive power in the last few years. (I've compiled links to some of my favorite posts here with brief summaries to help people find the best stuff.)

For those that are interested, here's a brief list of my torture-related posts thus far, with the most recent posts at the top. I'll update this list as I add more items.

One of my best posts yet. Discusses detention, doublethink, and how far we've gone along the road to totalitarianism.
A "memo" that I "found" from the Office of the Vice President on how to get military information from al Qaeda. Step one is to pick up a random goat herder. Steps 2-4 are on how to abuse the goat herder to ~~manufacture~~ obtain military intelligence. Steps 5-7 are on how to do damage control after detainees die without ending the abuse. Surprisingly, the "memo" is filled with hyperlinks to a couple dozen great resources for people that oppose torture.
A piece on Hamdan v. Rumsfeld, a critically important Supreme Court decision that will come out this summer and which will determine which rights the President can ignore when he arbitrarily labels someone an enemy combatant. If Bush wins everything in the case, no detainee will ever be able to challenge their detention and the Supreme Court will be transformed into a plaything for the other branches.
A comparison of the anti-terror tactics used in the U.S. and Canada.
A review of Glenn Greenwald's How Would a Patriot Act?, which I helped research. It's about abuses of executive power and it has a fair amount of stuff on detention policy.
A piece I wrote on ethics and injustice, which is tangentially related.
A piece about Adel Abdu al-Hakim--a man that has been imprisoned despite his proven innocence--as well as the implications of the Detainee Treatment Act on detainee rights (it eliminates them) and the Supreme Court case dealing with it.
An indictment of the Bush administration that focuses on detainee treatment and then discusses a few of the heroes that have fought to protect the rights of detainees.

Categories: torture, executive, bush, linkdump

X-Men and equal protection

2006-06-11T17:55:00.000-04:00

Over at Joint Strike Weasel, there's a great discussion of the legal ramifications of mutation in the sense of the X-Men (hat tip to Jonathan Adler, formerly known as Juan Non-Volokh).

JSW contributor Ivan Ludmer begins by arguing that a law requiring mutants to register with the government could be suspect because it would depend on

a classification based on race. But it appears that mutancy, like race and gender, is an immutable status. It further appears that mutants have suffered a history of discrimination in this country, to the point where the children may be unsafe if not spirited off to a purported 'school for the gifted.' This may, however, be based on real differences, such as the ability to derail trains or cause massive fires with a mere flick of the wrist, to which Congress could appropriately respond.

The next step is seeing if Congress has a rational basis for this law. After some great snarks, he concludes that it would probably be upheld. He then tackles the question of whether a law banning mutation could be upheld:

The threshold question is whether the right to mutate is a fundamental right. The lack of historical support would be relevant--it hardly seems implicit in the concept of ordered liberty to allow mutants to mutate... [I]f we framed this not as the right to mutate, but as a mutation (mutated?) facet of the fundamental right to privacy, we may yet see strict scrutiny for laws depriving mutants of the right to mutate freely... [B]anning all mutations--as opposed to, say, [banning the] harming [of] people while mutated or through mutating--hardly seems the least restrictive means to achieve it. It would in fact prevent mutants from using their mutations for the benefit of society.

I was disappointed that the piece never addressed the threshold question of whether mutants are human--he simply asserts that they are a racial group. Unfortunately for the author's thesis, the courts have already determined that the X-Men are not human, and thus equal protection and privacy rights may not apply. From Wikipedia's discussion of Toy Biz v. U.S.:

U.S. law distinguishes between two types of action figures for determining tariffs: dolls, which are defined to include human figures, and toys, which include "nonhuman creatures". Because duties on dolls were higher than on toys, Marvel Comics subsidiary Toy Biz argued before the U.S. Court of International Trade, that their action figures (including the X-Men and Fantastic Four) represented "nonhuman creatures" and were subject to the lower tariff rates for toys instead of the higher ones for dolls. On January 3, 2003, after examining more than 60 action figures, Judge Judith Barzilay ruled in their favor, saving Toy Biz money on future tariffs and granting reimbursement for import taxes on previous toys. [emphasis mine. Incidentally, the article itself is mostly mine, as well]

The ruling, and especially Marvel's decision to pursue it, shocked many fans and at least one comic book author. They felt that it was hypocritical to chronicle the X-Men's fight for civil rights while simultaneously lobbying for oppressive court decisions. Marvel's spin doctors argued that "A decision that the X-Men figures indeed do have 'nonhuman' characteristics further proves our characters have special, out-of-this world powers," which all observers already knew before mutants were legally reclassified.

I can only conclude that if mutants are, in fact "nonhuman creatures," they may be denied the relevant legal protections, rendering the above argument moot. Through sheer luck, however, Ludmer reaches the same conclusion by an entirely different method:

under certain, bold, right-thinking executives, we could declare the mutants a terrorist menace, deprived of civil rights and access to courts in the first place. In that way, we could prevent activist judges from creating new, weird, constitutional "freedoms" that destroy America for the rest of us by, um, by helping people we want to hurt. Or something. In any event, it wouldn't be an issue, and I'm sure all the mutants would be happy at Gitmo. We'd just have to lock up the ones who can fly, tag the ones who can change shape, kill the ones that can teleport (it's a crime, by the way, that Nightcrawler wasn't in the 3rd movie), build the whole thing out of plastic, and avoid the ones with adamantium coming out through their knuckles in horribly painful ways. But if they did somehow get to the courts, we could just have it thrown out on national security grounds, because, y'know, stuff like that is classified

All is as it should be.

Categories: silly, legal, executive

Easy steps for obtaining military intelligence from al Qaeda

2006-06-11T10:46:00.000-04:00

[I found this internal memo from the Office of the Vice President this morning, which is pretty surprising given that I'm in the middle of nowhere in Southwest Michigan today. For some reason that I can't figure out, the memo is littered with hyperlinks to unsympathetic organizations like Amnesty International--Dave

Updated below]

Git 'em, dead or alive: Find a goat herder with a Casio watch and/or pay impoverished Afghanis and Pakistanis to capture drifters and turn them over to the U.S. military.
Bring them to justice: Take them to Guantanamo or another prison that has been sufficiently "Gitmo-ized." This is necessary because they're clearly "the worst of the worst" of the "bad guys." We know this because of the careful measures taken in step one.
Wait for further instructions: Determine what intelligence these people have based on directives from the Office of the Vice President and the Pentagon.
Take the gloves off: Obtain that intelligence. By any means necessary. Whether they posess it or not. It is crucial that we are able to ~~manufacture~~ discover the intelligence that Our Lord, The One True Commander In Chief (praise be upon him) desires. Blame the torture fairy for any harm to the detainees.
Preserve the honor of Our Troops: Quash internal dissenters in the armed forces and the Pentagon's legal department. Fire top-level CIA officials that criticize our tactics and bring in less qualified and more pliant officials to fight terrorism. Convince the courts not to investigate because it might embarrass us. Smear elected officials that describe our techniques. Redefine those techniques as "abusive" and "degrading" rather than "inhumane" so they fit in the Army Field Manual's guidelines. Rewrite the Field Manual to remove even that requirement.
Control the damage: Ignore months of warnings that the detainees are desperate, hopeless, and suicidal. Dismiss those warnings and "suicide attempts as 'manipulative, self-injurious behavior'... designed to bring pressure for better conditions or for release." Train all the psychologists to torture prisoners so they're too busy to evaluate the psychological health of the detainees and determine if their suicide attempts are genuine. Once they do hang themselves, try to save them so that their interrogations can continue and we don't lose ~~profitable~~ valuable intelligence. When that fails, call their suicides "an act of asymmetrical warfare waged against us." Don't worry about their deaths because they "have no regard for life, neither ours nor their own." It's just an attempt by al Qaeda masterminds to manipulate public opinion. Don't identify the detainees so that the public cannot tell if the dead are goat herders with Casio watches and drifters from Afghanistan or al Qaeda masterminds. Just in case, start "an extraordinary round of global outreach within hours" to make sure the world approves of the War on Terrorism.
Repeat: It is important to make the lives of innocent Muslims into living hells as a warning to others that might oppose the United States. It is equally important that The Liberal Media do not discuss these events so that those same people do not find out about it. They will be most intimidated by U.S. tactics if those tactics are never disclosed.

[Update: Steps six and seven are already failing. The names of the three victims have been released, and the Liberal Media are quoting unqualified Muslim extremists like the mothers of the detainees as they criticize Our Troops. Rumors that the three men were murdered are spreading rapidly.]

Categories: cheney, bush, military, terror, gitmo, executive, satire, torture,

Hamdan v. Rumsfeld: Defining America away

2006-06-09T03:03:00.000-04:00

The Anonymous Liberal wrote a very moving post on what is at stake, as the Bush administration brings American values down to their barest minima. He argues that historians will describe today as

the moment when the idea of America lost its resonance in the world, when America became just another country...

America has long been a country dedicated to leading by example. It has been a country that tries to hold itself to its own high standards, regardless of how its enemies behave. That's why there have been countless documented examples over the years of enemy soldiers seeking out American troops in order to surrender, knowing that Americans would not mistreat them. That's the idea of America boiled down to its essence. It's a belief that America, for all its arrogance and annoying self-righteousness, is a country that stands for something important...

Confronted by a particularly brutal and unprincipled enemy, our leaders decided that our principles were the problem...

If America ceases to hold itself to a higher standard than the rest of the world, it will lose any legitimate claim to exceptionalism... it will no longer capture the imaginations or influence the thinking of people outside of its borders. America will become just another country, remarkable only for its size and strength.

While there's a lot of merit in some of Paul Rosenberg's criticism of the post (the U.S. never was as humane as we like to think) A.L.'s addendum and replies in the comments mostly address them.

"Hume's Ghost" throws a heap of specifics on A.L.'s argument, and focuses on one of the key issues: the Orwellian manner in which everything is being defined out of existence. Repeated near-execution by drowning is not torture, it's a "psychological technique." One can simultaneously authorize that "psychological technique" and "lead by example" against torture. And so on. I hope you'll read his post, both for the arguments themselves and for the superb collection of talking points and links. It really does a great job of summarizing what's at stake, and I wouldn't be able to do it justice by just quoting a few pieces of it here.

I only have one quibble with the post. It underestimates the Bush Administration's favorite lawyers and their ability to misread the law. Here's what He writes:

the Pentagon, with Cheney leading the charge, is now seeking to drop Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions from the Army Field Guide Manual which prohibits “humiliating and degrading treatment”. Unlike the other provisions where administration lawyers have sought to argue for the right to treat people cruely and inhumanely on technical grounds, there is no legal argument to be made for this. The provisions they seek to abandon apply to any person detained, regardless of their status as a POW. This is a flat our rebuke of the basic standards of human decency that the world agreed upon after World War II. Basic standards of decency meant to separate us from the people who committed the horrors of the Holocaust.

I agree with all of that, except for these ten words: "there is no legal argument to be made for this." Not only is there a legal "argument" for it, but it's already been accepted by at least one Supreme Court Justice, and could become the Law of the Land within days.

Last summer, two judges on the DC Court of Appeals (incuding a certain John Roberts) ruled that Common Article 3 does not apply to the conflict with al Qaeda. It's been argued before the Supreme Court, and the decision should come out soon. Article 3 is unique in that it applies even when other laws of war don't. We have all the Geneva Conventions dealing with international conflicts plus one article for non-international conflicts that guarantee you get some minimal rights. In David Luban's terms, POWs reside on the "main floor." Article 3 was designed to create a "basement," where any combatant--even illegal ones--can have at least some protection. Seems pretty straightorward, right? Here's the text:

In the case of armed conflict not of an international character occurring in the territory of one of the High Contracting Parties, each Party to the conflict shall be bound to apply, as a minimum, the following provisions:

(1) Persons taking no active part in the hostilities, including [detainees and others] shall in all circumstances be treated humanely...
To this end... outrages upon personal dignity, in particular humiliating and degrading treatment [and a few other things like hostage-taking "shall be prohibited"]

Here's where the lawyering comes in. You see, Article 3 only applies to non-international conflicts. This conflict isn't non-international, the lawyers, insist, because al Qaeda can be found in more than one country. That makes it international, so Article 3 doesn't count. But we're not in a traditional international conflict, either, because then they might get POW status or something like it. Remember the building analogy? If POW status is the main floor and Article 3 is the basement, this decision (Hamdan v. Rumsfeld) "creates a third tier of 'protections,' namely no protections at all, in the War on Terror. Where Geneva creates a main floor and a basement, Hamdan digs beneath the basement and adds a dungeon." As I noted before, this conflict is pretty shifty.

It's not a war when we're lobbing missiles into Pakistan, and so that doesn't violate the laws of war (even though it does). The other guy is supposed to abide by the laws of war, as demonstrated by our charge that Salim Ahmed Hamdan violated those laws (although we had to invent a new law after the fact in order to justify that claim). On the other hand, "suspected terrorists" don't get any of the benefits from the laws of war--we're allowed to detain "enemy combatants" without trial, obtain evidence from them by torture, and so on. Our military contractors aren't required to abide by any laws at all... [because they] by definition cannot be involved in war.

Back to the Hamdan case and Article 3. Article 3 protections are what our soldiers had been following for 50 years; they're clear, and just about the entire world (except John Yoo and John Roberts) knows what they mean. Remember, Article 3 doesn't demand much, just that there are no "outrages upon personal dignity, in particular humiliating and degrading treatment." The kind of outrages one only found in dictatorships until recently. The 9/11 commission, those crazy lefties, recommend using Article 3 for our detainees in the war on terrorism. They think that will be enough to ensure international cooperation, keep our allies happy, prevent the kind of backlash we've seen from Muslims over our detention practices, facilitate effective counterterrorism, and preserve U.S. prestige and international law (see p. 380 of the initial report and the 2005 status report). The administration doesn't want any of that, though. They want their torture.

In fact, they aren't just fighting tooth and nail for the ability to perform "outrages upon personal dignity." True to form, they're trying to prevent court oversight. And not just in the ways we've seen before, either. If the administration wins its jurisdiction claims in Hamdan, 300 lower court cases will instantly be scuttled, and every future case from Guantánamo will be denied on face. If the government wants immunity from the courts, all they'll have to do is take you to Gitmo and it'll be game over thanks to this interpretation of the Detainee Treatment Act. But the war on the courts doesn't even stop there. Not only does Bush want to "reduce to zero 'the number of tribunals authorized to hear and determine'" [.pdf] whether he's right that someone is an "enemy combatant," but he's also asking the court to "open the door to" enough previously unconstitutional jurisdiction-stripping to undermine the Supreme "Court’s constitutional role as head of a coordinate branch." Bush is literally asking the Supreme Court to sacrifice their authority to rule on any issue without Congress's permission. If Congress says no, then no case. Under Bush's interpretation, most of the important judicial precedents in our history never could have been established because the Courts would have been robbed of the jurisdiction to hear any relevant cases.

Some time this summer, we'll find out what the court decides. If the Court holds that it lacks jurisdiction (which I've been told is unlikely), then the due process, judicial review, and protections against torture we have left will evaporate. If Hamdan gets past that hurdle and four or fewer Justices rule that Article 3 applies, we'll merely lose protections against torture and due process for anyone Bush wants to "suspect" of "terrorism." Including protections that were taken for granted long before the U.S. was even a nation.

We need five votes. Hamdan's lawyers are amazingly good, and they are heroes in every sense of the word, but with Roberts out (he declined to rule on the case because he already heard it at the Appellate level), we can only lose three. A lot is at stake here.

(includes minor edits for clarity)

Categories: bush, executive, america, torture, geneva, courts, war, rights

Shocking new evidence that homosexuality is ruining the military

2006-06-07T20:41:00.001-04:00

This video made me laugh.

Categories: silly, gay, military, movie, music

"The family" is threatened by the Vatican

2006-06-07T12:25:00.000-04:00

Dog bites dog food:

The Vatican has released a document... [that] lashes out against contraception, abortion, [in vitro] fertilisation, gay marriage, and feminism, and calls current social trends and "eclipse of God." The document says that "never in history ... has the family been so threatened as in the current culture".

Aside from the standard incoherence, one thing stands out. The author doesn't say that families are threatened. He says that there is an abstraction called "the family" that is threatened. It's probably true that people are beginning to conceptualize "the family" differently. That's not the same as destroying families, though. In many ways, families are much more secure. It's less acceptable now for husbands to beat their wives and for fathers and older brothers to sexually abuse their daughters than it used to be, for example. You still see a lot of that in a surprising amount of that in the most resolutely "traditional" families still around:

To the hordes of tourists who travel to Pennsylvania Dutch country each year to go to quilting bees and shop for crafts, the Gentle People, as the Amish are known, represent innocence... Church members abide by their clergymen; children obey their parents; sisters mind their brothers; and wives defer to their husbands (divorce is taboo)...

Before her father's death, Mary told her mother, Sally, that he was molesting her. At first, Sally didn't believe her daughter. Mary said that her mother told her, "He says he's sorry and you have to forgive him."... When Mary's brothers began raping her, she turned to her mother again. Sally scolded the boys and gave them what Eli described as a light "mother's tap."... "The boys were doing bad things and the mother knew," Kathryn said. "What mother would allow that to happen in her house?"

And yet, it happened in her house as well... "She knew what was going on. It was almost, 'Take my daughter by the hand and let's go to the barn,' " said Sergeant Paul Mills, who helped investigate the case. " 'So sayeth her husband,' and whatever he says is the way it has to be."...

Sally didn't call the police [when her husband beat her] because she'd been taught to defer to the men in her household, even if they were her sons, and because she belongs to a community that believes the greater threat comes from without, not within.

Johnny's punishment for [raping his sister repeatedly] lasted two weeks... Mary's punishment, by contrast, lasts forever... Mary warned the ministers that she would press charges unless something was done. Nothing happened. So Mary went to the police. After the detectives came knocking, the community voted unanimously to excommunicate Mary...

On Saturday nights in Moses Miller's district, teenage boys are allowed to steal into the rooms of girls their age. The teens are supposed to keep their clothes on, but the boy isn't expected to leave until milking time the next morning. Many parents encourage bed courtship because it often leads to early marriages, which make young people less likely to leave the church...

[Because she spoke out against her abuse, Anna's mother had all of her teeth pulled out] "After he had pulled the last tooth," Anna remembered, "my mom looked at me and said, 'I guess you won't be talking anymore.' "... Anna bled for three days. Her family ignored her, except to periodically hand her a drink. She couldn't talk, but that didn't matter, because Anna had nothing left to say. At church, she looked away when other kids pointed at her mouth... her parents threatened... to take her out to the woodpile, or worse, unless she told her lawyer that she took back her accusations against her brothers. Stripped of faith in the state to protect her, Anna did as she was told.

If that's the kind of family that's threatened today, good riddance.

Traditional values don't seem to help Catholics much, either, if the hierarchy's complicity in the child abuse scandal and the abortion rate among Catholics (which is actually higher than the general population because they don't use condoms) are any indication.[*]

Whose family benefits when condoms are prohibited and HIV rates reach 40 percent? Whose family benefits when gay people can't even form a family? Whose family benefits if a woman is ordered by the state (at the urging of the Vatican) to implant sick embryos into her uterus along with the healthy ones, becomes so upset that she suffers a gastric hemmorhage, and miscarries the healthy baby? Whose family benefits if a town gives unwed parents these five options: kick out mommy; kick out daddy; kick out all but one of your kids; get married; get evicted? Whose family benefits if parents can have their children taken away if they share their religious beliefs with them? Whose family benefits if doctors cannot operate on ectopic pregnancies until after the fallopian tube has burst? Whose family benefits if women--mothers, daughters, sisters--die of cervical cancer? Whose families benefit when lactating moms are considered pornographic? Whose families benefit if adoption agencies discriminate, not only based on religion, but based on which sect you're in? Whose families benefit when teens are abandoned by their parents and nearly driven to suicide by "therapy" for their sexual orientation? Sheesh.

let’s drop the caring about the babies bullshit, okay? There are more kids in protective custody in South Dakota than there were abortions last year, so if you’re done pushing bloody photos in Sally’s face when she shows up for her pap smear, how about swinging by children’s services and giving one of those whippersnappers a home. Or do your politics stop at the edge of the vaginal canal?

Oh, and one last thing. Everyone should check out this interview with Bill Bennett on gay marriage. He gets his ass handed to him.

[*]I'm not saying abortion is immoral if it's what the mother wants. I'm saying that it is indisputably more painful, destructive, and dangerous to have an abortion than to prevent pregnancy. Forcing women to use abortion as a form of birth control by denying them condoms and hormonal treatment is what's immoral.

Categories: Christian, familyvalues, sex, gay, feminism, rape

Nazi ties revealed in the latest CIA document dump

2006-06-07T10:03:00.000-04:00

"the CIA kept quiet about the whereabouts of Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann in the 1950s for fear he might expose undercover anticommunist efforts in West Germany"

More here.

Categories: cia

Demonic posession, "The Christian Alternative to Yoga," and lions

2006-06-06T14:55:00.000-04:00

People are insane.

Since yoga is everywhere, it must be okay. Or is it?
Those who think yoga is little more than a series of stress-relieving stretching exercises may be surprised to learn about true foundation of the multi-billion dollar yoga craze in North America... I call yoga “the missionary arm of Hinduism and the New Age movement.”...

Have you noticed how many people – even Christians – believe in reincarnation? One can just keep coming back until they get it right. Sadly, this false teaching leads people away from the necessity for a Savior. And if we progressively get better with each life, why aren’t we all living in Blissville now?

From experience I can say that yoga is a dangerous practice for the Christian and leads seekers away from God rather than to Him. You may say, “Well, I’m not doing any of the meditation stuff. I’m just following the exercises.” It is impossible, however, to separate the subtleties of yoga the technique from yoga the religion...

Before becoming a Christian, I remember numerous instances of “traveling outside my body” during yoga relaxation periods. I wonder who – or what – checked in when I checked out? Whether you believe such phenomena can happen or not, some medical professionals claim such experiences have led to psychosis. (Note: While Christians cannot be “possessed” since the Holy Spirit resides in your re-created human spirit, one may be “oppressed” by demonic influences.)

Clearly, you should give up on yoga and buy Praise Moves, the Christian Alternative To Yoga. I mean, who wouldn't trust this woman (see image at right)?

In other news...

Some guy in Ukraine climbed into a lion cage and began "acting aggressively." He said "he believed God would not allow the lions to hurt him." "God will save me, if he exists," he said.

A lion crushed his throat in its jaws.

My understanding is that the last time Christians tried this (ancient Rome) it didn't work out so well, either. What a senseless waste.

"Zoo officials could not immediately be reached for comment."

Categories: silly, christian

Bush's rhetoric

2006-06-05T21:37:00.000-04:00

So I was reading Hullabaloo, and I came across this quote from Bush.

Ours is an enemy which has embraced an ideology -- an ideology of hatred, an ideology that is totalitarian in nature: they decide... they decide... they decide this, they decide that. They stand exactly the opposite of the United States of America.

Yeah, we Americans definitely don't want a "decider" telling us what's best.

Bush also said that it was important to prove to al Qaeda that "those of us living in democracies are" not "flaccid." A boner a day keeps the terrorists away, so to speak.

Anyway, Digby's analysis is very good, and I hope you read his post. He might go a tad too far (deterrence has its benefits) but he's definitely right that the Bush doctrine has been insane.

The vaunted neo-conservative intellectuals have a simplistic, shoolyard view of the world based on what appears to be a very simplistic, schoolyard psychology that very much appealed to the boy-man that had been installed in the white house when bin Laden struck on 9/11... all threats, no matter how small or insignificant... lest someone taunt you about your small cojones... Yet they also need to maintain a sort of religious fiction about themselves as being purveyors of democracy and freedom --- concepts that don't ordinarily lend themselves to barbaric message sending.
And that is how we found ourselves invading and occupying (and killing and torturing) to prove we are good and they are evil.

Categories: bush, ideology, rhetoric, war

Why libertarians aren't completely useless

2006-06-05T15:37:00.000-04:00

As I've written a few times before, I have some pretty significant disagreements with libertarianism (I'm slowly working on a post about where those disagreements come from), but I don't think they're evil. With a few exceptions, I see them as liberals that take an honorable project so far that "common sense asymptotically approaches zero," rather than as "anarchists who want police protection from their slaves."*

I don't agree with everything in this article at Tech Central Station, but I think that it has some good insights and proposals that are worth thinking about, if not actually implementing. Libertarians are very good at making statements like this one:

a program that was focused on poor people rather than as an indirect way to aid the farming constituency would probably operate rather differently than our existing food stamp program

I think that's almost undoubtedly true. The farm lobby is an abomination, and it's caused enormous suffering around the world. My understanding is that most economists agree that there are better alternatives to food stamps that simply aren't being investigated in Congress. When libertarians aren't in the pocket of corporations, they're exceedingly good at figuring out which policies are just a sop to some faction and sometimes even come up with good alternatives. I'm not sure the following example (from the same article) is a good idea, but it's a good example of libertarians thinking outside the box:

My proposal (which I suspect is not original) is that, on top of the current deduction for charitable contributions, we create a large charitable exemption, of, say $20,000. That would mean that you could donate up to $20,000 and have that amount taken off your taxes. Thus, the after-tax cost of your donation would be zero. For people whose annual tax obligation is less than $20,000, the income tax would essentially be optional. You could pay your taxes, or you could give an equivalent amount to charity.

A charitable exemption would have the effect of shifting resources from government to private charities. I believe that would be a net plus for people in need.

A charitable exemption would increase the proportion of money going to NGO's that comes from private donors rather than government. I think that the effect of this would be to reward NGO's more for effectiveness and less for their ability to work the system to obtain government funding.

The author wants this to accompany cuts in the current entitlement programs and believes that it would result in a net increase in aid to the people that need it because (he claims) charities are more efficient and donors have more control over an NGO than taxpayers do over government entitlement programs. I'm not so sure; it seems like Lockheed Martin would find a creative way of defining itself as a charity. He addresses this by pointing out that it might still be better than most government spending programs, which is probably true. Again, I don't agree with everything he says, but I think that there are a few areas where he's on the right track. Here is his conclusion:

This was once a country in which Alexis de Tocqueville marveled at the spirit with which voluntary associations emerged to solve problems. A libertarian approach to poverty would seek to rekindle that spirit, rather than expand a government that sucks the oxygen out of families, private charities, and the very poor that it purports to help.

This is one area where I think both the far left and the libertarian right are on to something that centrists tend to miss. Social collaboration, whether in the form of markets or collectives like families and co-oops, is really crucial, and provide something much more valuable than direct aid from the government. We should think long and hard about the possibility that a n otherwise good government program could damage the civil society. That's not to say that money isn't important, only that it isn't enough. Hubristic programs like "urban renewal" that literally bulldozed some useful organizations (families, businesses, ect.) to build government projects that didn't always materialize, have had a mixed impact at best. I'm not saying the left should become libertarians, but I think we have something to learn from their ideas about the ineffectiveness of government, the manipulation of policy by special interests, and the short-sighted excesses of uninhibited democracy. We don't want the right to have a monopoly on these arguments like they did in 1994.

*Both quotes are available here. Anyone interested in arguing against libertarians would do well to spend some time browsing there. Mike Huben has a pretty impressive collection of quotes, arguments, and links on the subject.

Categories: wealth, econ, libertarian, ngo, tax

The epic battle

2006-06-05T13:51:00.000-04:00

This cartoon is pretty amazing. It pits a stick figure against the Macromedia Flash cartoonist that made him. I won't tell you who wins, but it gets pretty brutal.

Categories: silly, movie

Good news

2006-06-04T11:35:00.000-04:00

The faux-nuclear weapons test in Nevada has been suspended. This is good news for our relationship with Iran and for the residents of Nevada and nearby states--particularly the Native American groups that have been most affected by our nuclear policy.
Tom DeLay resigns officially on friday.
Angelina Jolie is known for her advocacy in Africa, but now she's putting her money where her mouth is. Wait, no. Actually, she's putting her money where her baby's mouth is with a "$23,000 diamond-studded pacifier." That's enough money to give 23 towns access to clean water.
Some new cancer drugs look promising. They seem to have helped people with lung, kidney, and breast cancers that didn't respond to traditional treatments. Side effects are "mostly mild and reversible," whatever that means. It looks like upstream research on cellular biology is paying off.
Switzerland's liberalization of drug laws since 1991 seems to have paid off. A new report says that "harm reduction measures - such as drug consumption rooms, needle-exchange services, low-threshold methadone programmes and heroin-assisted treatments" have "led to a drop in the number of new heroin addicts... the population of heroin users has remained relatively stable... By contrast, the number of new heroin addicts in Britain, Italy and Australia – which have repressive drugs policies – has continued to increase... '
'We aren't necessarily dealing with new heroin users anymore, but with people who have been dependent for up to 30 years,'"
The BBC is launching a 24-hour news channel in the U.S. I've heard good things.
GOP.com says that there's even good news from Iraq: "Electricity Output Since The Start Of 2006 Is 6 Percent Higher Than It Was For The Same Period In 2005." That brings them up to something like three and a half hours of power per day in Baghdad. (In other news, electricity production for the whole country dropped to zero twice in the last nine months, is still below pre-war levels, and is something like 15% lower than it was 9 months ago*. But only the liberal media will report that, I'm sure.)
Glenn Greenwald's book is on the New York Times Bestseller list. (full disclosure: I helped research and edit the book. I wasn't paid for that and I'm not being paid to promote it).

*visual estimate based on the graph on page 11 of this pdf. I'd guess I'm accurate to within 5 percentage points.

Categories: linkdump

Canada's war on terror

2006-06-03T21:47:00.000-04:00

Why can't the U.S. be more like Canada?

They actually found the materials for three Oklahoma City-sized bombs before they went off (cf. 9/11 and the Oklahoma City Bombing in this country).
The police actually had evidence that these people were involved in wrongdoing and presented it publicly (cf. most of the people the U.S. has detained in recent years. José Padilla is probably the best comparison)
They actually charged the people involved with it and will no doubt give them trials without evidence obtained by torture (cf. U.S. "Black Sites" around the world)
Canada's police are still called "Mounties." How sweet is that?

Incidentally, Aly Hindy, an imam that knew some of them, said "these days when a Muslim commits fraud, it becomes terrorism. When he commits stealing it becomes terrorism." We'll see if that's true in Canada (it may not be), but we know it's true in the U.S.

Lovely.

Categories: canada, terror, executive

ALIEN INVASION: Update

2006-06-03T21:36:00.000-04:00

Last night, I discussed some strange cell-like structures that rained down on India after a meteor exploded in the atmosphere. I've now read the original scientific paper (subscription only), and my tentative conclusion is that, assuming the authors are reporting everything correctly, these things do seem to be from the meteor (i.e. from outer space), and they seem to be living cells. They have an elemental composition that seems reasonable for a cell, though they have very little Phosphorous and some Aluminum, which is pretty unusual for us Earthlings. They're clearly very tough, so it's possible that they could survive in space. Based on the electron micrographs in the article, they seem to be shaped like cells. The researchers say they replicate, which is a key hallmark of life (though the researchers appear not to have had that part of their work peer-reviewed). Interestingly, they also seem to lack DNA; a friend that knows about such things tells me that if these things had DNA, the scientists' procedure would have almost certainly found it.

I would have liked to have seen other kinds of molecular analysis (looking for proteins, sugars, and fats, for example). If these things don't have any of those, they're pretty clearly unrelated to anything we've encountered before. I would have also liked to see some isotope analysis (looking at what form of each element is present) to see if they have the right mix of nuclei to be from Earth. The isotope analysis might not tell us anything useful, but I'm surprised the researchers didn't test for other organic molecules. It's not that hard to find out if something is made of protein, and if they had included a biologist or organic chemist in their team, they could have easily presented more convincing evidence. Still, my tentative conclusion is that the invasion has begun.

Categories: alien, biology,

Was the 2004 election stolen? (part 2)

2006-06-03T16:51:00.000-04:00

New answer: maybe. Tristero found a response to the Kennedy article I cited earlier. My reaction is about what his/hers was:

Assuming Manjoo is, himself, quoting fairly, it doesn't exonerate the ugly behavior of Blackwell, or call into question the crucial necessity of election reforms in the US. But it would mean that RFKjr has been less than honest in presenting all the facts and in the drawing of conclusions.

If that is the case, that RFKjr was wrong or seriously misleading, then naturally I will withdraw my assertion in the previous post that Ohio '04 was stolen. Manjoo's objections to Kennedy seem substantive and require a response from those who are knowlegeable about this issue at a granular level. Kennedy himself should respond, of course.

Hopefully this will get debated out. A few of Manjoo's points seem pretty weak, but some do make Kennedy's article look pretty misleading. I had wondered why such an important article was in Rolling Stone rather than, say, Time. Maybe we know now.

Tristero should get credit for being so open to counterarguments after investing himself in a controversial position.

Categories: election, bush

Alien invasion

2006-06-03T02:27:00.000-04:00

Apparently some respectable scientists think they've found living microorganisms from outer space. They seem to lack DNA, yet can reproduce pretty well--even at extremely high temperatures. That would make them unlike any other known organism (except RNA viruses, and I don't know if they count as "organisms"). The CNN article doesn't rule out RNA as a genetic material for these cell-structures, and it doesn't say anything about their proteins, lipids, or carbohydrates (if they have them). If it doesn't have nucleic acids, doesn't build polypeptides (proteins), and uses something previously unknown for its membrane and energy reserves, that would make it pretty unlikely that it was at all related to anything on Earth.

~~The original scientific paper is apparently not online yet, so I can't judge it for myself. If anyone can find it, I'd be interested.~~ [update: I found the paper. I'll write about what I find after sleeping.]

Categories: alien, biology

Gender, sexuality, and malpractice law

2006-06-02T19:04:00.000-04:00

A woman was sexually disfigured as a result of a botched operation; in court, she won four million dollars in damages and her husband won a million dollars for "past and future loss of companionship, society and sexual relationship."

I don't believe people can receive damages for things that don't belong to them. If someone broke my laptop, I don't think my readers could file a class-action lawsuit for losing their right to my blog. Assuming I know what I'm talking about (which I might not), the court acted on the assumption that the woman's "sexual relationship" with her husband was his (or theirs), not hers.

When the law recognized that women, even married women, had the right to refuse sex--that her sexuality was hers alone--it was hailed as a major achievement. It's probably still among the top ten or so things this country has done during the last few hundred years, along with Abolition and the Bill of Rights and other crucial steps forward.

I don't begrudge the man his money--if he is a good husband, his wife's health problems have weighed heavily on him--but I hope that the his sense of entitlement doesn't cause him to hurt anybody.

Categories: gender, sex, malpractice, rights, rape, legal

Was the 2004 election stolen?

2006-06-02T15:40:00.000-04:00

[Update: I'm no longer so sure. Also, I forgot a hat tip to Tristero, so I'm adding it now.]

Yes. Parenthetical numbers are footnotes; they're available on the article's main site.

A consulting firm called Sproul & Associates, which was hired by the Republican National Committee to register voters in six battleground states,(6) was discovered shredding Democratic registrations.(7) In New Mexico, which was decided by 5,988 votes,(8) malfunctioning machines mysteriously failed to properly register a presidential vote on more than 20,000 ballots.(9) Nationwide, according to the federal commission charged with implementing election reforms, as many as 1 million ballots were spoiled by faulty voting equipment -- roughly one for every 100 cast.(10)
...
But what is most anomalous about the irregularities in 2004 was their decidedly partisan bent: Almost without exception they hurt John Kerry and benefited George Bush... in Ohio alone, at least 357,000 voters, the overwhelming majority of them Democratic, were prevented from casting ballots or did not have their votes counted in 2004(12) -- more than enough to shift the results of an election decided by 118,601 votes.(13) (See Ohio's Missing Votes) In what may be the single most astounding fact from the election, one in every four Ohio citizens who registered to vote in 2004 showed up at the polls only to discover that they were not listed on the rolls, thanks to GOP efforts to stem the unprecedented flood of Democrats eager to cast ballots.(14) And that doesn't even take into account the troubling evidence of outright fraud, which indicates that upwards of 80,000 votes for Kerry were counted instead for Bush. That alone is a swing of more than 160,000 votes -- enough to have put John Kerry in the White House.(15)

In other words, there's evidence of several different layers of problems that just happened to favor Bush; Eliminating any one of them would have swung the election. Read the whole thing; it's pretty ironclad.

Categories: bush, election

New Supreme Court case reduces whistleblowers' rights

2006-05-30T17:14:00.000-04:00

[Updated below]

Government agencies are entitled to discriminate against employees that criticize their policies, the court ruled today in a 5-4 decision (GARCETTI v. CABALLOS). The court had ruled 5-4 the other way on a somewhat similar case, but switching out O'Connor for Alito flipped the majority for this one. My reactions (in the order that they occurred to me):

Ugh. Now it'll be even harder to find out what the government is doing wrong and even easier to maintain a culture where people are supposed to put loyalty to their superiors above loyalty to the law.
Well, it was probably decided correctly. The government should probably be able to decide which of its employees are best suited for promotions etc. based on ideological criteria and past statements. It seems like the court decided correctly, and that we need laws to protect whistleblowers. [but see update below]
Justice Stevens thinks that this case creates "a new rule that provides employees with an incentive to voice their concerns publicly before talking frankly to their superiors." If government employees have protection against retaliation by their employer for their public statements, then it seems like they should have at least as much protection for their private statements. It will be interesting to see how lawyers decide the last few cases on this subject interact.

This is all preliminary, and since I'm not a lawyer, any of it could be incorrect. I'm open to other people's ideas, though.

Update: Marty Lederman and Jack Balkin discuss the issue in more detail. I added a few more thoughts to their comments thread here. The decision is a bit more dangerous than I thought.

Categories: whistleblower, legal, courts

Politics, policy, Al Gore, and Hillary Clinton

2006-05-29T00:46:00.000-04:00

I've always felt that my grasp of politics lagged far behind my grasp of policy. For example, I have a much clearer picture of why Bush's tax cuts (particularly the ones that favor the rich) are harmful than I do of why so many people support them. Still, I like to think that I know a good political point when I see one, and this analysis seems dead on:

Clinton's problem is that everything she does to staunch her perceived ideology problem compounds her perceived character problem. What she says about the issues may be popular, but what the issues say about her is that she's a shameless self-reinventor.
Gore is winning plaudits because he's in the opposite position. A couple of years ago he appeared to be veering too far left when he denounced the Iraq war and the administration's disregard for civil liberties. But now, almost no one can argue with those positions--certainly not any prospective Democratic voter. And his focus on global warming, which may not rank high on the list of voter concerns in Ohio, points to his genuine conviction on the issue. Gore cared about the environment before it was cool (or, as it were, warm.) The issue helps him more as a character issue than a substance one.

More here (free subscription required).

Categories: rhetoric, dems, media

New Rule: Accidental volcano alerts should not be left running for an hour

2006-05-27T14:16:00.000-04:00

This is insane.

Radio station airs volcano alert by mistake (AP)
TACOMA, Wash. - An emergency radio station mistakenly warned that a massive, volcanic-caused mudflow was headed from the flanks of Mount Rainier and that listeners in the valley below should rush to higher ground.
The emergency lahar [the dictionary tells me this word means "a destructive mudflow on the slopes of a volcano--ed] warning was broadcast Wednesday for nearly an hour...
"I was in tears," said Hutchinson, whose 17-month-old son, Ethan, was in the car with his grandmother. "I was shaking."
After Hutchinson warned co-workers, about 30 people started frantically calling loved ones. Some called their children at schools in the Puyallup Valley and told them to leave immediately... 1580 AM picked up the test signal as real and said the lahar was coming.

The West Coast seems to have this sort of problem a lot. Oregon has had two false alarms for tsunamis in the last eighteen months. Pat Robertson tells us there will be a tsunami on the West Coast in the next six months. I don't know if he's right about that, but there will be one eventually. This crap has to be fixed.

Categories: silly, disaster

Vox Day, the Holocaust, and the National Organization for Women

2006-05-26T23:51:00.000-04:00

Vox Day is the illustrious author of a recent World Net Daily column that advocated "enforcement of the national immigration laws" by deporting 12 million immigrants as efficiently as the Nazis "rid" themselves of six million Jews (the column has been redacted by his editor). It's very important to Vox that we keep in mind the "lessons to be learned from the National Socialists." On the other hand, only the "illiterate left" could fail to understand that he "neither favor[s] nor believe necessary" a system of mass deportations. That's obviously not what he wants; he just wants to get rid of them quickly, and he'd never use Nazi tactics. It would be more like "Vichy [which] sent 12,884 Jews to the camps without being occupied, and in the case of more than four thousand children, without even being asked." Day just wants "instant deportation of every illegal... found interacting with state or local authorities... bounties [given] to workers who report [employers] to their local sheriff... [and freedom for] the Minutemen to patrol..." You see, he wants people deported by volunteer paramilitary brownshirts, not by government blackshirts. Really, "[w]ith a few famous exceptions, such as in the case of the Warsaw Ghetto, there was little violence" during the Holocaust, anyway. No Einsatzgruppen or rounding up every Jew they could find, shooting them, and burying them in mass graves or anything like that. And anyway, deporting them that quickly doesn't require killing them, it just means that we can, in the words of one blogger, "implement the same cattle-car transportation system, without worrying about those expensive gas chambers and mass crematoriums at the receiving end." So you see, everything would be fine if his views were implemented. Vox is a Libertarian. And a Christian. So he'd never support state-sponsored murder. Clearly.

More seriously, another blogger noted that

Vox seemed to think that the forced expulsion of 6 million Jews was a success, but did he ever consider this?... one of the reasons that the Nazis resorted to mass murder was because forced expulsion and ghettoization weren't working (even with the brutal methods they used in Poland and the USSR), and their fanatical Jew-hatred made giving up on the whole insane enterprise of trying to make the Reich Judenfrei simply not an option for them.
That just left murder as the only strategy they had left.

Anyway, I did some research on this guy. Here's some of what I learned. His real name is "Theodore Beale," and he works pretty hard to keep his identities separate, even when it probably violates journalistic ethics (Among the less important differences, "'Vox' has a bad Mohawk, Beale does not"). Given that World Net Daily seems not to agree with his largely incoherent rantings, one can only conclude that Day/Beale only has a weekly column there because his daddy is on their board. Here's some information on his assumed name:

[The name] 'Vox Day' is, of course, a play on 'Vox Dei,' that is, 'Voice of God' in Latin. What an arrogant, ignorant, pretentious little wanker. Unless he was thinking of the Argentinian rock band of the same name. In which case he's an arrogant, ignorant, pretentious little wanker.

I couldn't agree more. I'm usually not one for name-calling, but I make exceptions when people compare forced cliterectomies and public education.

One last item. Why did I mention the National Organization for Women in my title? Because he calls himself their "Official Columnist," as you can see at right. I wonder if they can sue. I would just love the irony of money being transferred from World Net Daily's cult financial backers to a good organization like NOW. That would just be delicious.

Categories: elimination, gender, christian, libertarian

The base don't need no education... and more

2006-05-26T22:37:00.000-04:00

The Satirical Political Report, which I discovered fairly recently and am delighted with, has the lyrics to a great new song (to the tune of Pink Floyd's The Wall, Part 2):

His base don’t need no education
They just want more thought control
No evolution in the classroom
Darwin leave their kids alone
Hey! Darwin! Leave their kids alone!

When you're done reading that, I really recommend the top 10 differences between Nixon and Bush (in rhyming couplets), a piece on McCain's reception at graduation ceremonies, a piece on the new Iraqi government, and a spectacular piece on sending the National Guard to the border.

Categories: satire, bush, music

Bill Frist and Tuna

2006-05-26T18:18:00.000-04:00

This little clip from Saturday Night Live is only about ten seconds long, but it's great.

Categories: movie, GOP, christian, silly

Dawkins rips Intelligent Design a new one

2006-05-26T16:15:00.000-04:00

In general, I'm a big fan of the (in no particular order) Richard Dawkins-Matt Ridley-Steven Pinker-Daniel Dennet-Robert Trivers-W.D. Hamilton-Leda Cosmides -John Tooby faction in biological (and sociobiological) debates. Although they're sometimes more ideological than I'd like, they're generally on the right track. My understanding is that they tend to agree on most issues, and that most of their "disagreements" tend to be over who can apply the same principle more consistently. Not really how science is supposed to work, but whatever. They're all very smart people and I love reading them.

Here are some great excerpts from a recent Dawkins piece. It doesn't appear to be available online from the original source, though a few sites appear to have mirrored it without permission:

Creationists mine ignorance... to exploit and abuse Darwin’s challenge. “Bet you can’t tell me how the elbow joint of the lesser spotted weasel frog evolved by slow gradual degrees?” If the scientist fails to give an immediate and comprehensive answer, a default conclusion is drawn: “Right then, the alternative theory, ‘intelligent design’, wins by default.”... Today’s scientist in America dare not say:
“Hm, interesting point. I wonder how the weasel frog’s ancestors did evolve their elbow joint. I’m not a specialist in weasel frogs, I’ll have to go to the University Library and take a look..."
No, the moment a scientist said something like that... the default conclusion would become a headline in a creationist pamphlet: “Weasel frog could only have been designed by God.”
[snip]
The creationists’ fondness for ‘gaps’ in the fossil record is a metaphor for their love of gaps in knowledge generally. Gaps, by default, are filled by God... Is photosynthesis a bafflingly complex process? Wonderful! Please don’t go to work on the problem, just give up, and appeal to God. Dear scientist, don’t work on your mysteries. Bring us your mysteries for we can use them. Don’t squander precious ignorance by researching it away. Ignorance is God’s gift to Kansas.

Perfect.

Categories: evolution, biology, christian, rhetoric,

Sex crimes and sentencing

2006-05-25T22:55:00.000-04:00

An article I read today got me thinking. Sentencing for sex offenders can be tricky, and not just for the reasons advanced by misogynists Michael Savage and Vox Day. Sex crimes are embarrassingly common in what we generally think of as an "enlightened" era, and the damage done, particularly to young women, is incalculable. The primary goal of sentencing policy is obviously to keep people safe from violent sex crimes, but that's not always as straightforward as it seems, and there are some other considerations as well.

Sex offenders have notoriously high recidivism rates. One meta-analysis found that 20% of rapists were re-arrested for a sex offense within four to five years; given the low reporting rate (~16%) for rape, the proportion of released convicts that remain dangerous is much higher. As a result, there are (or could be) good reasons to treat sex crimes differently from most other crimes. It's not hard to argue that an 80% chance (my back-of-the-envelope estimate based on the two figures above) that someone will rape one or more people in the next five years is a good enough reason to keep them locked up. Ditto for child molesters, who have a somewhat lower recidivism rate (75% lifetime chance of a second conviction). On the other hand, prison is usually an unacceptable punishment for preventing future crimes; preventative detention is generally illegal.
Parents, quite understandably, want to know when sex offenders live near their children, and want the government to make that information available. On the other hand, there's a somewhat decent argument that "simply posting [a convict's] name on a list of 'dangerous' sex offenders without affording him an opportunity to prove he was no longer dangerous... impose[s] a stigma on him that violated his right to 'procedural due process,'" and there's no evidence one way or the other on whether such lists actually reduce child molestation. It's possible that many of the more restrictive policies are actually harmful to both the sex offenders (which isn't necessarily a bad thing) and to kids (which definitely is). There are real and complex policy problems involved here. As Michelle Cottle noted,

anyone convicted of a sex crime can, upon their release from prison, look forward to a lifetime of humiliation and restricted freedoms imposed in the name of public safety... Cities and states across the country are rushing to pass legislation barring sex offenders from living within so many feet of schools, day care centers, parks, playgrounds, bus stops, swimming pools, libraries, and any other areas where children congregate... it's not that I'm losing sleep over the emotional pain and suffering of sexual predators, particularly those who target kids. What I do find troubling, however, is the questionable efficacy and even counterproductivity of some of our preferred perv-tracking tools... no-perv zones are constricting predators' living options to the point that some men have taken to sleeping under bridges or in their vehicles--how's that for enhancing public safety?--while others have congregated in trailer parks and motels just beyond the buffer zone, creating predator hot spots. (One 24-room motel near Cedar Rapids, for instance, had 26 registered sex offenders in residence.) This is hardly a comforting development for anyone unfortunate enough to live near such an enclave. Then, of course, there's the ongoing debate about whether residency restrictions provide any real protection rather than just a false sense of security.

Some people get physically attacked and even murdered by vigilantes that find their names on sex offender lists. Perhaps they deserve it, but most people generally agree that vigilantism is a bad thing; if these people deserve such harsh treatment, it should be administered by the state, not by disgruntled citizens. Judges have to keep this sort of thing in mind when sentencing.
A related issue is that sex offenders tend to get beaten up in prison. Again, one can make an argument that they deserve it, but there is some legal obligation to take steps to prevent assault, even if the victim is scum. Judges seem to have a lot of discretion here.

That brings me to the case that made me start thinking about this tonight. Recently, District Judge Kristine Cecava decided that Richard W. Thompson, a very small 50-year-old man convicted of sexually assaulting children probably wouldn't be able to survive in prison, so she put him on probation instead. I don't have all the relevant facts (just what's in this brief newswire piece), so the judge may know something I don't, but based on the news story, her decision doesn't seem to make a whole lot of sense. They'll be watching him for ten years, but I don't know how effective that is at preventing sex crimes. It's certainly less effective than prison--especially since they'll be keeping less of an eye on him after the first four months. Despite this fairly lax stance, Thompson is required to get rid of his pornography, which hardly seems likely to keep the children around him safer (one could make an argument that harmless sexual diversions will keep him from "needing" to abuse children).

It seems like there are better alternatives than probation for such a person. Perhaps he would be safer in an all-sex-offender prison, where he wouldn't be singled out. I've also heard very good things about "chemical castrations," particularly when the sex offender agrees to it. One study concluded that chemical castration "discourages sexual assault better than incarceration [by reducing] aggressive tendencies that lead to rape in males. Castration also discourages sexual fantasies and eradicates sexual obsessions... chemical castration should be encouraged... in order to stop recidivism and decrease instances of sexual assault." Anything that reduces recidivism from 75% to 2% has to be a good thing. I've heard of cases where people are glad to have the drug; it makes it easier for them not to hurt people. On the other hand, the ACLU and other groups that oppose mandatory chemical castration have some very persuasive arguments. I, like some prominent but controversial experts, disagree with the psychological analysis they offer, but I think about five or so of their arguments are reasonably compelling. Like I said, these are tough issues, and it's still not very clear what the best policies are. I'd be interested in hearing what others think about all of this; discussion is often the best way to figure these things out.

Categories: sex, gender, rape, crime, medical,

Clips from The Onion

2006-05-25T20:11:00.000-04:00

Four articles from the last couple of weeks have been really great (though a couple are also pretty upsetting):
Bush Puts National Guard In Charge Of Public Relations

"My fellow Americans, we are at war. I have mobilized our brave troops to a position where they can advance my policy objectives to the press and the American people directly," Bush said during a brief press conference, supervised by the newly created Virginia 82nd Airborne Community Outreach Multimedia Battalion.

Many Native Americans Still Hold Traditional Beliefs About White Man

"Our research revealed that most Native Americans view 'the white man' as a deceitful, avaricious, exploitive mass murderer, just as their ancestors did," BIA Interim Assistant Secretary James Cason said. "It remains unclear why, in an age when so much of their culture has been lost to time, this tradition remains as strong as ever."

Ailing Americans Eagerly Await Summer Organ Harvest

Having made it through another long winter on transplant waiting lists, Americans at risk of organ failure are looking forward to the start of summer, which traditionally provides the most ideal conditions for yielding ripe, tender, life-sustaining organs...
"All signs seem to indicate this will be a truly bountiful year for hearts and small intestines," said third-generation heart surgeon Dr. Thomas Menard, who presides over a five-acre hospital outside Lawrence, KS. "If these intermittent rain showers are sustained through the high-school prom and graduation months, we're likely to see a windfall of perennial car crashes."

"I've already got a large number of vegetables in the intensive-care unit that could be ready for harvesting in as little as two weeks," Menard added. "It's a really good yield this year."

Heroic Computer Dies To Save World From Master's Thesis

"This fearless little machine saved me from unspoken hours of exasperated head-scratching and eyestrain, as well as years of agonizing self-doubt over my decision to devote my life to teaching," said professor John Rebson, who had already read through three drafts of Samoskevich's sprawling, 38,000-word dissertation, titled A Hermeneutical Exploration Of Onomatopoeia In The Works Of William Carlos Williams As It May Or May Not Relate To Post-Agrarian Appalachia. "It was an incredible act of bravery. This laptop sacrificed itself in order to put an end to Jill's senseless rambling."
Added Rebson: "I only wish some of my other students' computers could be as selfless and brave as this one."

Categories: linkdump, silly

Jonah Goldberg and conservative economic ideology

2006-05-25T16:55:00.000-04:00

Update: postscript added below.

A year ago in The New Republic, Jonathan Chait wrote that “Economic conservatism, unlike liberalism, would survive having all its empirical underpinnings knocked out from beneath it.” The ideology claims to determines conservatives' values, in addition to forming their empirical expectations; confronted with irrefutable evicence from God Himself that their economic policies were harmful, conservatives could still support their existing proposals because they protect property rights and other abstract values. Chait paraphrases this argument in a new post at The Plank:

They [conservatives] would like for freedom-expanding policies to have consequences like faster economic growth and the like, but ultimately it's frosting on the cake. So, for instance, they might make all sorts of empirical arguments against Social Security's efficacy, and they surely believe them. But even if those arguments were disproved to them, they would still oppose Social Security on the grounds that it restricts our freedom.

Jonah Goldberg was pretty pissed. At the time, he called Chait's argument "haughtiness not often seen outside 17th-century Versailles," "a very shabby accusation of bad faith," "solipsism," and so on. He countered that it was liberals, not conservatives, that let their moral dispositions overwhelm their better empirical judgment:

On almost every significant area of public policy the Democrats are atrophied, rusty, and calcified. They're dependent upon old (condescending) notions about blacks, the patronage of teacher’s unions which care very little for the facts, and feminists who define liberation almost exclusively as the freedom to abort pregnancies despite all of the new, inconvenient facts science is bringing to bear. Liberals are not the “reality-based community,” they are the status-quo based community. They wish to stand athwart history yelling "Stop" — in some rare cases, even when history is advancing liberalism in tyrannical lands. The Buckleyite formulation of standing athwart history yelling "Stop" was aimed at a world where the rise of Communism abroad and soft-liberalism at home were seen as linked trends. Today, liberals yell "Stop" almost entirely because they don’t enjoy being in the backseat. If they cannot drive, no one can.

The argument went back and forth for a while, and they both gave up eventually; they were just talking past each other.

Now, something like a year later, Goldberg reverses course and points out an "important and overlooked difference between leftism — broadly defined — and various forms of rightism, chiefly most strands of conservatism and libertarianism." His piece takes issue with Matt Yglesias's statement that "Implementing, say, a universal health insurance scheme will either improve most people's lives or it won't. If it will improve people's lives we should do it, and if it won't we shouldn't. And so on and so forth... I'm a liberal because I mostly think the stuff liberals want to do will improve most peoples' lives." Goldberg's argument should sound familiar:

While it is obviously the case that liberalism mostly trumpets policies on the majoritarian, egalitarian and utilitarian grounds that what's best for the "masses" is best, that's not entirely or necessarily true of conservatism and libertarianism... there's a competing consideration... arguments about [the long run] are distinct from a conservative emphasis on justice...
Whenever I write about how I oppose the legalization of narcotics on the grounds that it would increase the number of lives destroyed by drugs, I hear from conservatives saying, in effect, "So what?..." ... [Usually this contradiction doesn't matter because] all but the most wild-eyed libertarians are willing to tolerate some minimal level of social welfare. But [conservatives should be] defending capitalism on the grounds that it is moral and just and not merely more productive.

He even uses Chait's example, more or less:

If someone could prove to you that socialism was better for the masses would you be in favor of socialism? I think some "pragmatic" conservatives would say yes. Others would say, "no" on the (admittedly caricatured) grounds that stealing from the successful to help the unsuccessful is still stealing. Many of us would rather live in a society where the sky's the limit for the most enterprising, even if that meant the floor's the limit for those unable to hack it.

Now, to recap:

When it's politically convenient, Goldberg will admit that conservatives don't care about facts or outcomes because their moral beliefs trump facts and tout this as one of the benefits of conservatism over liberalism. As a result, he eager to pursue policies that will hurt the vast majority of people on strictly ideological grounds.
When it's politically inconvenient, Goldberg will deny this. He will then accuse liberals of doing the same thing and criticize them for it.
Despite his claim to the moral high ground on issues like social security, universal health care, and welfare, there are cases where Goldberg is willing to "tolerate" policies that conflict with his moral ideals, presumably because he thinks they will be beneficial to "the masses" in some way.

To put it even more succinctly, Goldberg will either choose the policy with the best outcome or the one that fits with his moral beliefs, whichever is more convenient. When "wild-eyed libertarians" disagree with him because of their moral beliefs, he will ridicule their empirical shortsightedness and note that their policies will hurt people. When people like Yglesias argue on empirical grounds that Jonah's policies will hurt people, he will condemn their amorality. Criticizing Goldberg on either count, however, is "a very shabby accusation of bad faith."

As I noted before, TNR is really on a roll. Their consistent thrashing of National Review alone is enough to make them worth reading.

Postscript: I don't know much about our options in Darfur (that's my ex-girlfriend's department), and so I don't know if David Rieff's argument against U.S. involvement there is right or not. But I have a lot of respect for a magazine that can invest enormous effort and credibility in an argument and then publish the following:

After having been proved so catastrophically wrong in Iraq, it did not seem unreasonable to hope that liberal idealists like those around the new republic might now be prepared to think with less triumphalism and more sobriety about American military power. Crusades have a way of backfiring and--however good the intentions of those who call for them--causing harm in places where it is least expected. Yes, in the end, some form of international military deployment in Darfur may be necessary, both to protect Darfuri civilians from attacks by the government of Sudan and its Janjaweed surrogates and to enforce the recent Abuja peace agreement. But this does not mean that the deployment of American forces is the most desirable way to achieve this goal, let alone that such a military commitment is a moral imperative. To the contrary, there is a good case to be made that the United States is the last country that should be leading an international operation in Darfur...
Is it really necessary (after Abu Ghraib, and with Guantánamo still serving as a Jihadi recruiting poster) to explain how terribly dangerous a deployment of the U.S. Armed Forces is likely to be, particularly since, were it to occur, this occupation of Darfur--let's call things by their right names--would take place without even the fig leaf of a U.N. Security Council authorization? Do the interventionists truly believe that American power is so irresistible, and the United States so secure, that these questions need not be taken into account? On the evidence--or, more precisely, on the basis of the seeming indifference to the question--the answer would seem to be yes.

To my relatively uninformed ear, Rieff's argument (including sections I didn't quote) sounds pretty persuasive. But whether he's right or wrong, TNR deserves a great deal of credit for publishing something so critical of itself.

Categories: nationalreview, ideology, econ, gop, dems, philosophy, rhetoric, Africa, tnr, genocide

Vox Day, Canada, Mexico, and the border

2006-05-24T12:13:00.000-04:00

Update: The second quote is actually from Vox Populi, not Vox Popoli, so they're unrelated. The incoherence, overdependence on deductive logic (I described it to one of my friends as "Ayn Rand after her tenth beer"), libertarianism, and misogyny, combined with the similar names led me to think that they were the same person. My mistake. The rest of the post stands as written.

I had never heard of Vox Day until recently when I read the following sentence (hat tip to Digby):

If it took the Germans less than four years to rid themselves of 6 million Jews, many of whom spoke German and were fully integrated into German society, it couldn't possibly take more than eight years to deport 12 million illegal aliens, many of whom don't speak English and are not integrated into American society.

I'm not going to address that quote, but I hope you'll stop and let it sink in for a minute or two before moving on if you haven't seen it yet.

Then yesterday, I saw this incoherent gem, coauthored by Day (hat tip to Feministing):

There can only be one assertive influence causing any condition, if there were two, constant conflict would ensue. If darkness were an entity it would constantly fight light. The same conflict would occur if quiet or cold were entities. The attempt by government to legislate the receptive feminine entity into an assertive influence has created such a conflict. The effect of this legislation has produced an effect called feminism...
By removing the power of men the government has done the equivalent of removing the sun from the solar system. Without a sun there will not be any energy for nurturing to take place, the planets will fall out of orbit, chaos will ensue, and the solar system will collapse. Likewise our society has lost its virility, nurturing has decreased, women have lost all sense of propriety, and our society is collapsing. No amount of government intervention can change this condition. Only virile men who will rise up and assume their familial responsibilities can create the conditions where nurturing can take place and good will develop.

I may address that at a later point.

Right now, though, I'm going to address a different issue. Lately, Day has been making the laughably stupid argument that the wall on the Mexican border is actually designed to keep Americans in rather than to keep Mexicans out. Aside from the obvious reasons that this isn't the case, Day's argument misses one important issue:

If the government really wanted to keep us in, they'd be blocking the Canadian border. I have seven lines of argument.

1) No one here would seek out Mexican living conditions.

2) Crossing the southern border is already far more difficult than crossing the northern border due to climate, the larger number of border patrol officers, minutemen, etc. If the goal were to keep people in, they'd want to secure the leakier border.

3) In Canada, Americans would be able to speak their own language, making that trip much more appealling.

4) Canada is more likely than Mexico to provide protection to American dissidents because they're better equipped to stand up to the U.S. government and are already pretty generous with political asylum.

5) If people were worried about being purged, they'd run to the country where they were more likely to fit in.

6) When people talk about leaving the United States for political reasons (at least in my part of the country), it's always Canada that they refer to, never Mexico.

7) Mexico's government respects far fewer rights than Canada's or the U.S.'s. Fleeing political persecution by going to Mexico would be like fleeing religious persecution by going to Iran.

I think that's pretty conclusive.

Categories: elimination, immigration, ideology, gender, libertarian, canada, mexico, crime, econ, genocide, propaganda, rhetoric,

New Planned Parenthood ad: How Pregnancy Happens

2006-05-23T23:28:00.000-04:00

This ad is marginally unsafe for work due to cartoon genital-people, but it's fairly informative. It also entrenches some gender stereotypes; the male co-host (shaped like a giant penis with legs descending from the scrotum, arms protruding from the shaft, and a face on the glans) is a pretty unflattering character, obsessed with sex, unable to control himself, and not all that bright. It's better than the intelligent-host-plus-Vanna-White combo you see most places, but to the extent that Planned Parenthood's goal is to convince unsympathetic men (which may not actually be their goal), it doesn't seem to work all that well.

In fact, I'd wager that Feministing's male audience is among the male groups most likely to be sympathetic to Planned Parenthood, and even we're somewhat annoyed. Planned Parenthood shouldn't want its natural allies to be saying things like:

Mr. Penis is a dumpy-looking pederastic skeezer; while Ms. Vagina is a blond-headed, wasp-waisted, wide-hipped white girl, and you're okay with this?
Boy do I love animalistic male stereotypes. Glad to see that even the folks at Planned Parenthood have no faith in men's ability to control themselves. A great message for the kiddies.....

And we wonder why there aren't more male feminists?
I found it completely insulting Colin.

Stupid dick/man and the vagina/woman is of course in control, I wasn’t the least bit shocked.

Horribly anti-male a very bad choice on the part of planned parent hood.

Even Jessica, who loved the ad and posted it initially, had "to admit the pre-ejaculate on Mr. Penis' head made me cringe." Maybe Planned Parenthood didn't expect this ad to be seen by men, or maybe they don't care what men think. Either way, the ad was a tactical error on their part, because none of the information it carries is all that controversial--and it doesn't even mention emergency contraception. Their presentation may limit its appeal. On the other hand, if this creates controversy and so more people see the ad, that could work in their favor. PR makes my head spin.

Categories: gender, sex, abortion, familyvalues,

Vampires and homosexuals

2006-05-23T23:05:00.000-04:00

Via Captain Dyke, I found this article on vampirism and homosexuality; apparently there have been connections since at least the 19th century. Later, in the early 1970's, "the lesbian vampire represents the threat posed by feminism" and contemporary films "established the image of the female vampire as a ravishing seductress who uses her sexuality to entrap men, even as she preys on innocent women." Here's a piece from the conclusion.

Why are vampires so queer? "When you think of a man who dresses well, stays out late, and has an endless appetite for supple young flesh, admit it: Vampire is the second thing that comes to mind," critic Wenzel Jones once quipped. For lesbians and bisexual women, the vamp resonates as a woman who transgresses patriarchal norms and takes charge of her desires. With the advent of AIDS, vampires became even more relevant to the gay community, as blood and sex became linked with disease and death...
Why are vampires more queer than werewolves or witches, goblins or ghouls? Vampires are characterized by elegance and sensuality; their needs are not dependent on gender or genitals. Their penetrating bite offers a unique form of intimacy – not to mention immortality. The vampire doesn't kill his or her victims, but rather transforms them.

Sounds plausible. I'd never really thought about it before. Very interesting, though.

Categories: gay, gender, silly

What we care about: Pakistan versus the U.S.

2006-05-23T22:30:00.000-04:00

Google Trends is an interesting tool that lets you find out how much people were searching for different things over time and compare them.

Hurricane Katrina killed, at most, 2500 people (if one assumes that all of the "missing" persons are dead). People are still dying as a result of the earthquake that happened shortly afterwards in Kashmir (the territory disputed by India and Pakistan; the damage was mostly on the Pakistani side), and the death total is expected to be as much as 40 times higher. Here is the search volume for "pakistan AND earthquake" (the blue line at the very bottom) and for "katrina" (red line) over the last couple of years (switching in Kashmir for Pakistan yielded even fewer results).

We really should remember that even though they have brown skin and live thousands of miles away and don't have their own media machines, the victims of this disaster are human beings, just like us. They had their own lives, hopes, aspirations, and families. Even though they don't get the same coverage on CNN, their lives matter. I'm personally appalled that the people killed by that earthquake barely registered among those of us privileged enough to have access to Google. Hardly anyone cared.

Incidentally, the death toll directly attributable to the earthquake was "merely" 40,000. The other thirty-to-sixty thousand starved or froze to death over the following months because the world did virtually nothing.

Categories: disaster, ideology

"(Even) The New Republic" is on a roll

2006-05-23T18:00:00.000-04:00

Some liberals love to criticize TNR for being too right-wing. I think they have a point sometimes; they've published more than their fair share of excrement, and they turned out to be very wrong about Iraq. But I also think that it's important to give credit where it's due, and lately TNR has been on a roll.

Check out the headlines at right. They were at the top of the site on Sunday and hardly seem like they're from "a center-right publication... [that] has more in common with the Weekly Standard and National Review than with the Nation or American Prospect." The first article, where the editors stated that the magazine's official position was in favor of a "subpoena-happy Democratic majority" probably wouldn't have looked much different if it had been written by Glenn Greenwald (aside from the first paragraph):

The truth is, it is not impeachment Republicans fear; it's simply oversight. Since 2001, Congress has sat idle as the executive branch gradually proclaimed new powers for itself, and it has aided and abetted Bush's every failure by refusing to operate as a check on his administration... they should be running on the [oversight] issue, not away from it.

The article is superb, and contains some deliciously vicious references to the insanity of the Republican majority of the '90's and eviscerations of the lack of oversight today (e.g. "the sheer delight of watching a congressman solve the Vince Foster 'murder' by shooting a pumpkin" and the fact that "the grave matter of the politicization of the White House Christmas list" required 140 hours of testimony, while Abu Ghraib merited 12).

The second of the three articles I highlighted got some well-deserved praise from The Anonymous Liberal. Here's an excerpt.

For an entire year before Hayden made his plea for a democratic recalibration of the liberty-security balance--and in the three-and-a-half years since--he oversaw a program that made a mockery of that debate... If he recognizes any tension between his simultaneous advocacy of the rule of law and the so-called Terrorism Surveillance Program--which, as many constitutional lawyers in the country have pointed out since the program's disclosure, are incompatible--he didn't indicate it in his testimony.
As CIA Director, Hayden would have the responsibility for setting policy on legally murky practices such as the interrogation of Al Qaeda detainees or their rendition to countries known to torture--meaning his adherence to an elastic standard of lawfulness at NSA has significant implications for how he'll run Langley... without a firm commitment to clear legal guidelines, the potential for abuse in espionage is enormous. Hayden lamented the cloud of suspicion that currently surrounds Langley, yet he didn't at all seem to recognize that his own distortion of the law is more likely to intensify public suspicion of the agency.

I wouldn't have much trouble imagining that coming from The American Prospect.

The thesis for the third article follows:

The House as it currently exists--a place where the leadership operates as a virtual arm of the executive branch and where traditional rules of debate and amendment have been suspended--is a product of Republican control. Evenly distributing the blame for this state of affairs between Democrats and Republicans is to value "objectivity" above reality.

I don't read much from Kos, but it seems to me that those two sentences could easily have been written by him. And that this part of the same article could have been written by Digby:

Yes... Democrats and Republicans alike grew more partisan throughout the 1990s. And yes... the current situation has roots that stretch beyond the 1994 Republican Revolution. But to place Democrats and Republicans on the same plane today, or to describe Republican excesses as natural evolutions of Democratic ones seems to require almost willful distortion. Virtually every aspect of the legislative process... has grown exponentially more corrupt under Republicans. To ignore the question of degree is, in the end, to ignore a question of substance as well. Differentiating between Democratic and Republican stewardship of the House isn't nitpicking or partisan; it's simply honest.

Additionally, yesterday's article by Jon Chait is just a delight to read. After a page or so comparing conservatives' recently discovered complaints about one another (they don't compromise! They're dishonest!) to his own complaints on exactly the same grounds for the last five years, he identifies the core of the discussion:

This outbreak of unflattering conservative insights suggests two possibilities. The first is that, until this moment, Bush never used dishonest tactics to frame his views and those of his critics, and conservative activists never displayed a fanatical aversion to compromise. Somehow, though, Bush and the conservatives are suddenly using tactics against each other that they were too honest and thoughtful to use against the Democrats.

The second possible interpretation is that they've been like this all along, and the conservatives are only starting to notice because for once they're on the receiving end.

I know which interpretation I'm going with.

For all the pissing matches between TNR and the liberal blogs, I think they have more in common than they realize. And while blogs are great, the MSM still has an edge over us on real reporting. For example, it would have been literally impossible for most of us to have written this article on rural Kentucky's political situation from our basements. I'm glad they're around.

Categories: tnr, ideology, bush, wiretapping, cia, dems, gop, terror, media, rhetoric, executive

Straight Rights Watch: Missouri

2006-05-20T02:07:00.000-04:00

Sorry I haven't posted in a while; I'm out of town.

Missouri, which will probably be my home state for most of the next couple of years, has a lot of dumb ideas, and implements many of them at the state and local level.

It is illegal to have same-sex oral sex here (though this can't be enforced thanks to the U.S. Supreme Court since such laws serve no legitimate state purpose). As a result of its invalidation, leaving the law on the books probably doesn't hurt anyone, though it remains offensive.

The state legislature probably wouldn't have hurt anyone if it passed its little resolution noting that Christianity is the state's "majority" religion (Missouri's citizens are apparently too stupid to notice that 83% is a majority unless they are informed by the state legislature. Somewhat more ominously, " The resolution also recognizes that, 'a greater power exists,' and only Christianity receives what the resolution calls, 'justified recognition.'").

Then Missouri voted "by a lopsided 71 percent to 29 percent" margin in favor of discriminating against people that could not or would not marry a member of the opposite sex because of their sexual orientation. Apparently, they thought that the constitutional amendment wouldn't hurt anyone that mattered.

So why did I call this post "straight rights watch?" Missouri is at it again. Not content with keeping those icky gay people out of The Sacred Institution of Marriage, the "pro-family" forces of Black Jack, Missouri have decided to punish us straight people that stay out of it. And not just with one-dollar-a-year fines like the rest of Missouri. With eviction notices. Unwed parents will have five options: kick out mommy; kick out daddy; kick out all but one of your kids; get married; get out. There may be other creative methods of getting out of this (can mommy legally "adopt" daddy, or is he too old?), but I can't think of any. Very pro family. This fetishization of marriage has been hurting gay people--and their kids--and now it's hurting straight people--and their kids. Will this open anyone's eyes? Will people realize that they're inflicting this on gay people all the time and that it hurts them as much as it would hurt us?

Probably not. But with enough press, maybe. In Dan Savage's words (scroll down 2/3), "This is some serious shit, breeders. You're being attacked. It's time to fight back."

Categories: gay, familyvalues, sex, gender, christian, ideology,

The poor, poor 101st Flying Keyboardists with PTSD

2006-05-16T19:18:00.000-04:00

Have we really reached the point where right-wing bloggers have become so absurdly pompous and self-aggrandizing that we have to write something like this?

manning the keyboard against the evil MSM and “irredentist” Democrats is not very much like going out and getting shot at every day, or having a car bomb kill your daughter, or having to go to the morgue to identify your son’s mutilated body. (Let’s keep in mind that there’s likely to be a line at the morgue too, if we’re talking about Baghdad itself.) Not much like it at all. And you know the closer-to-home scrum of domestic politics? Also not like that at all. Not a bit of it... we are talking about some strikingly dissimilar things. I’m not saying that the desire to conflate the rigors of combat with the crushing burden of being, say, Jeff Goldstein means that you’re a dishonest person with an extraordinarily inflated self-regard, I’m just…No, take that back. I am saying that. [first elipsis mine; second original]

Apparently yes (hat tip to Digby). Bruce Kesler of the "Democracy Project" inspired that quote by comparing the following two forms of stress:

being "worn down by defending difficult positions at the forefront of the battle against irredentist Democrats in Congress and their fifth-column in the media" to the point that one feels compelled to break ranks with Bush, and
Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder.

Apparently, breaking ranks with Our Lord, the One True Commander in Chief (Praise Be Upon Him) is now a mental illness.

Categories: war, ideology, gop, satire, bush, iraq, media

"Rigorously proving" that Al Gore is the Messiah

2006-05-15T00:55:00.000-04:00

The Anonymous Liberal was discussing Gore, and I interjected the following comment:

I seriously hope Gore runs. Robert Wright once "rigorously proved" that Al Gore was the messiah, or politics's closest equivalent. It went something like this:

Premise 1: Al Gore has intense psychological reasons to do exactly the opposite of George Bush in almost every area.
a) Gore's experience with the presidency began after crafting an anti-Bush platform in 1992, and it worked for him then: he won and the presidential policies were highly popular.
b) Gore again crafted an anti-Bush agenda in 2000, essentially cementing his identity as the not-Bush. It worked well for everyone but little Jewish ladies in Florida that happened to really like Pat Buchannan.
c) Gore has spent the last five years stewing over his loss and mourning what Bush was doing to this country. He must have taken every bad policy by Bush personally, making a mental note that if he were president, he would have done the exact opposite.
Premise 2: Bush's policies make him something just short of the political equivalent of the AntiChrist.
Conclusion: To the extent that Bush is the AntiChrist and Gore is his opposite, then Gore is the Messiah.

Q.E.D. (or, as Wikipedia prefers for such goofy proofs, Q.E.F.)

The "proof" was in an episode of BloggingHeads.TV with Micky Kaus, but I don't remember which one.

Categories: dems, bush, silly, election,

A quasi-review of Glenn Greenwald's How Would a Patriot Act?

2006-05-14T01:29:00.000-04:00

As I've noted before, the last five years under Bush have rocked my political world. I used to be an extremely hawkish libertarian-type that found Bush's post-9/11 calls to arms extremely compelling and supported the Iraq war pretty vigorously. No longer. Bush's willingness to cast aside, break, ignore, flout, and overpower every law, every check, and every limit on his authority has left me feeling shocked and betrayed. There are seven hundred and fifty new laws that Bush has declined to abide by when he isn't interested in doing so--and countless older laws as well. Since I became interested in the issue, the most important area of lawbreaking has always been detention policy, both in terms of whom the government detains (and for how long) and of what we do to them in custody. Torturing prisoners offends everything I believe in, and I have literally wept over what my country is inflicting on innocents--and on ourselves in the long run. A close runner-up for worst thing I think this government has done--after detention policy--has been lawbreaking by the intelligence services, and that led me to Glenn's blog. Through that blog, I have learned an enormous amount over the last few months and found a community that really seems to understand the important issues facing our country right now--and how Bush's unchecked power can destroy everything this country stands for. It is tremendously painful for me to realize that we live in a country where people's political beliefs are considered the FBI's business--and that innocent people that happen to dislike the ruling party or are in the wrong place at the wrong time are harassed by government paramilitaries or worse. That's not the country I thought I grew up in. We're rapidly becoming something that no American--liberal, conservative, socialist, libertarian, whatever--should be proud of. This country can and should be great but it is falling dangerously short of its own ideals. That's what Glenn's book is about. Because of my respect for what he's doing, and in the interest doing my miniscule part in spreading the word, I am reviewing his book now, a day before it is available to the general public.

Before I go any further, I should add two important disclaimers. First, I didn't read the final manuscript of the book, which is why I'm calling this a "quasi-review." My understanding is that three people spent a whole day fixing up the version I read to make it ready for publication, so my review may be slightly inaccurate in a few areas. I don't think any of what I discuss here will have changed, but I'll obviously fix any errors.

Second, in the interest of full disclosure, I should mention that I helped Glenn research for the book and proposed some changes to the rough draft; that no doubt influenced the way I read the manuscript. I wasn't paid for that and I'm not being paid to review the book; my only compensation (aside from intangibles like bragging rights, a feeling of accomplishment, and a one-line mention in the Acknowlegments) has been a link Glenn's blogroll. Still, I feel that I should mention it because it will likely bias me in favor of the parts where my work was included and against the parts where it was left out. You can make up your own mind about how valuable my opinion is.

First of all, I should say that the analysis is top-notch. Readers of Glenn's blog will absolutely get what they're looking for, as will readers unfamiliar with his online writing. In addition to the important arguments we've seen from the blog, the book covers some important history; much more than the blog format really allows for. He covers the relevant events and reactions from recent decades that led to today's restraints on the executive--and how those restraints have simply been ignored by this administration. Additionally, by showing what the Founders believed about these issues, he how profoundly unAmerican these abuses are in much more detail than we've seen on his blog. Glenn also shows how Bush abused the enormous faith placed in him after September Eleventh by both parties in Congress, the courts, and the American people. This is a critical point but it's one that I've never seen spelled out in such detail. Bush was a spectacularly popular president, and both parties were falling over each other to expand his authority to combat terrorism as quickly as possible, but it apparently wasn't enough for him (or more accurately, for Cheney). The administration decided to seize secret, unreviewable, extralegal powers far beyond what would have been needed to combat terrorism at a time when hardly anybody would have opposed even reasonable limits. Glenn shows convincingly that all the scandals we've seen have not been about protecting the country. They haven't even been about partisan gain in the conventional sense. They are about about balance of powers and whether the President is bound by the law. They are about American values. They're not about not about liberalism or conservatism, they're about our cherished ideals: freedom, rule of law, presumption of innocence, privacy, and civil liberties.

The preface, which is available online, (.pdf) gives a powerful perspective on why this book is so important and gives Glenn more human personality than is available in his blog posts; readers will actually see Glenn spend more than a few sentences at a time talking about his own experiences as he explains what led him to jump in from the political sidelines and begin blogging and writing. Throughout the book, particularly at the beginning and the end, there is at least as much passion as we've come to expect from the blog. He reminds us why we should be proud of what the Founders accomplished and lays out many of the ways in which we are failing their vision today. He covers a lot of ground, from Bush's deception on all sorts of issues to torture to illegal spying to detention and more, and does a great job of it. The length of the book means that he can go into more detail about the legal theories underlying Bush's monarchial expansion of power than he has before on the blog (at least since I started reading)--and he does so in his usual convincing and clear manner.

There are lots of nice editorial touches throughout, including memorable chapter titles like "Fate of the Union" and subchapter titles like "The King and Yoo." The book is filled with crucial talking points and distinctions that don't get enough attention in political debates, but How would a Patriot Act is much more than that. Glenn has a great talent for clearing away ideological detritus and irrelevant conventional wisdom and honing in on the important issues, and it consistently makes his writing more compelling than that of his opponents.

Glenn's publishers made a lot of smart moves. The book is short; I read the manuscript during an afternoon break from studying for my final exams. The book is paperback. These two factors mean that the book is quite cheap: $12 suggested retail value and just over seven bucks on Amazon.com. The book was written extremely quickly, which was another smart move; while the analysis will become increasingly relevant as this administration continues its rampage, some of the examples will likely be dwarfed by what's to come. Because of its low cost, the critical importance of its subject matter, and length, it should be required reading for everyone interested in keeping this country true to its ideals.

The book's brevity and the speed with which it was written aren't unambiguous blessings, of course. Both Glenn and I wish that there had been room for more, because there are literally dozens of critically important issues, anecdotes, and subplots that the book simply couldn't talk about in enough detail. Still, I think the book's brevity makes a good tradeoff for the reasons mentioned above. There were lots of places where my stuff didn't make it in, which bruised my ego a bit at first, but I quickly realized that if Glenn had used everything I sent him in the first batch of items alone, there would have been no room for, you know, the book. Still, I hope--and I think Glenn hopes as well--that people don't just read this book and then stop absorbing new material on the subject. The book isn't supposed to cover everything--it can't. But it can serve as a wake-up call for so people pursue the issues for themselves, which I think is the real goal. If any book can do that, I believe that this one will. Glenn and his minions put together a superb product and I hope the presale boom is indicative of a widespread interest in what he has to say across the political spectrum--not just in the Digby-FiredogLake-CrooksandLiars-Atrios corner of the blogosphere. Because this country needs this book.

Postscript: If people don't mind some level of disorganization, and assuming Glenn has no problem with it, I can make some of my research materials--the stuff that didn't make it into the book--available upon request (if there are lots of requests, I may have to figure out a way putting them online so people can grab them for themselves). Additionally, I have links to a fairly large number of relevant websites and articles on my del.icio.us account here. They're even moderately well organized. Categories are listed on the right sidebar. Click on whichever ones interest you. You can even combine categories to narrow your search. If, for example, you wanted to find my saved talking points on NSA issues, you can click "NSA," then click the plus next to "talkingpoints." The organization is sub-optimal (and includes some personal jargon because I wasn't initially planning on sharing it) but I think many of you will find it to be a great resource for your own blogs, arguments, and personal reading. I'm also pretty good at finding things on request. Please link to me if you use the stuff, though; any publicity will be appreciated.

Update: Paul Rosenberg apparently has the final manuscript; he posted a whole bunch of excerpts at My Left Wing.

Categories: Bush, ideology, executive, america, cheney, cia, courts, fbi, gitmo, hero, legal, military, personal, rights, totalitarianism, wiretapping, yoo

A novel argument about warrantless eavesdropping

2006-05-11T20:09:00.000-04:00

Today I was thinking about the new revelations regarding NSA spying. I've read a few bits of analysis; of the people that have commented so far, everyone seems to agree that Orin Kerr is probably the most qualified to discuss the issue; so far serious commentators with law degrees seem to be keeping their conclusions tentative. (Unserious commentators on the right are not). To the extent that there's any consensus on the previously disclosed wiretapping issue among law professors, it seems to be that it's probably permissible under the 4th amendment (i.e. it's not an unreasonable search or seizure) but that it almost certainly violates a few important laws (especially the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act). The administration wants to trump the law by arguing that the constitution makes Bush immune to such laws when he's acting to defend national security. Since constitutional arguments typically trump arguments about specific laws, that would be game over.

I have what may be a novel argument (at least it's one that I haven't seen before) to revive the 4th Amendment objection, which might act as a constitutional counterweight to the Article II ("commander in chief") argument. I'm not a lawyer, and I only know a small fraction of the facts and legal doctrines required to make this point stick, but I thought I'd float this argument and see what people thought.

My understanding of 4th Amendment caselaw is that its protection from "unreasonable" searches entails that a "reasonable expectation of privacy" not be infringed upon. Kerr identified several plausible reasons that some of the people that were wiretapped might not have a reasonable expectation of privacy when making phone calls abroad; he discussed two of them here. Now, I don't know exactly how "reasonable expectation of privacy" is defined in the relevant caselaw, but it seems to me that unambiguous official statements to the effect that something will not be searched (not to mention laws to that effect) would lead a reasonable person to the conclusion that it wouldn't be searched--and thus produce a reasonable expectation of privacy. Again, I don't know if that's legally relevant, but it seems to me like it should be.

Brendan Nyhan has collected a whole bunch of Bush quotes from roughly an eighteen-month period that would lead a reasonable person to believe that no one in the Federal Government was listening to his or her calls unless a Federal judge had good reason to believe that he or she was engaging in illegal activity (I have altered the bold formatting from Nyhan's version):

President Bush -- April 19, 2004:
For years, law enforcement used so-called roving wire taps to investigate organized crime. You see, what that meant is if you got a wire tap by court order -- and, by the way, everything you hear about requires court order, requires there to be permission from a FISA court, for example.

President Bush -- April 20, 2004:
Secondly, there are such things as roving wiretaps. Now, by the way, any time you hear the United States government talking about wiretap, it requires -- a wiretap requires a court order. Nothing has changed, by the way. When we're talking about chasing down terrorists, we're talking about getting a court order before we do so. It's important for our fellow citizens to understand, when you think Patriot Act, constitutional guarantees are in place when it comes to doing what is necessary to protect our homeland, because we value the Constitution.

President Bush -- June 9, 2005:
One tool that has been especially important to law enforcement is called a roving wiretap. Roving wiretaps allow investigators to follow suspects who frequently change their means of communications. These wiretaps must be approved by a judge, and they have been used for years to catch drug dealers and other criminals. Yet, before the Patriot Act, agents investigating terrorists had to get a separate authorization for each phone they wanted to tap. That means terrorists could elude law enforcement by simply purchasing a new cell phone. The Patriot Act fixed the problem by allowing terrorism investigators to use the same wiretaps that were already being using against drug kingpins and mob bosses.

White House fact sheet - June 9, 2005:
The Patriot Act extended the use of roving wiretaps, which were already permitted against drug kingpins and mob bosses, to international terrorism investigations. They must be approved by a judge. Without roving wiretaps, terrorists could elude law enforcement by simply purchasing a new cell phone.

President Bush -- July 20, 2005:
The Patriot Act helps us defeat our enemies while safeguarding civil liberties for all Americans. The judicial branch has a strong oversight role in the application of the Patriot Act. Law enforcement officers need a federal judge's permission to wiretap a foreign terrorist's phone, or to track his calls, or to search his property. Officers must meet strict standards to use any of the tools we're talking about. And they are fully consistent with the Constitution of the United States.

White House fact sheet -- July 20, 2005:
The judicial branch has a strong oversight role in the application of the Patriot Act. Law enforcement officers must seek a federal judge's permission to wiretap a foreign terrorist's phone, track his calls, or search his property. These strict standards are fully consistent with the Constitution. Congress also oversees the application of the Patriot Act, and in more than three years there has not been a single verified abuse.

President Bush -- December 10, 2005:
The Patriot Act is helping America defeat our enemies while safeguarding civil liberties for all our people. The judicial branch has a strong oversight role in the application of the Patriot Act. Under the act, law enforcement officers need a federal judge's permission to wiretap a foreign terrorist's phone or search his property. Congress also oversees our use of the Patriot Act. Attorney General Gonzales delivers regular reports on the Patriot Act to the House and the Senate.

Given these statements, I don't see how a reasonable person could expect that he or she was being spied upon without a good reason--and judicial oversight.

Now the question becomes whether nobody has made this argument because it's irrelevant (which is entirely possible) or just because no one else thought of it before.

Categories: bush, wiretapping, legal, rights, executive, terror

Rumsfeld lies: The Daily Show

2006-05-10T12:37:00.000-04:00

I love Jon Stewart. Here's what he had to say about Rumsfeld's "incident" last week. He takes a pretty close look at the fairness and balance surrounding the controversy.

Categories: military, media, rumsfeld, ideology, rhetoric, propaganda, iraq, war, cia, dailyshow, fox, video,

UR-86: The Right's ansswer to the abortion pill

2006-05-09T22:32:00.000-04:00

From the source of all good news, The Onion

...the drug is intended only for occasions when the mind-set or politics of the mother threaten the life of the fetus.
"This drug is designed for extreme cases in which the mother cannot or should not be saved, or when her health has been placed before that of her unborn child"... a near-lethal dose of barbiturates is released, which induces a coma in the expectant mother until the child is born, at which point a second, fatal dose is released.
The FDA's approval came after months of clinical trials firmly established that the fetus would be nourished and protected in the womb of the near-deceased UR-86 user.

Gender-equality advocates praised the introduction of the drug, calling it an "innovative solution" to the highly polarizing national abortion debate.

"This is a step forward for equality," men's rights activist Charles Hackett said. "For too long, women have had an unfair advantage in the outcome of a pregnancy. UR-86 levels the playing field for husbands and boyfriends across America."...
Randall Terry, founder of the pro-life organization Operation Rescue, praised the new pharmaceutical for its potential use in cases of rape and incest, saying it could help end the shame and humiliation of such trauma while saving the life of the fetus.
"Victims of sexual assault can feel trapped, like they've got nowhere to turn," Terry said. "Now, they can solve their deep, internal problems once and for all, without unfairly condemning their children."...
"UR-86 should be made available over the counter as soon as possible. It's the husband's right to choose if this drug is right for him, and neither the government nor the medical elite should get in the way of that decision."

Homeland Security Signs

2006-05-09T16:01:00.000-04:00

The Idiots at the Department of Homeland Security have come up with some pretty incomprehensible signs. No Hat Tip interprets them for us with great results.

Categories: terror, incompetence, disaster, silly,

Nice Guys and Bad Boys at Bitch, Ph.D.

2006-05-09T13:35:00.000-04:00

Check out this discussion of teenage male identity at Bitch, Ph.D. The comments are pretty interesting both in terms of personal stories and in terms of what it means for teens and for gender in the next generation. I was the "nice guy," but I was able to contain the needy whiny part long enough to have a really great and fulfilling relationship for the last few years. Now that I'm back on the dating scene, it will be interesting to see how much I've learned since I was in high school.

It seems to me that what girls (to the extent that one can generalize) actually want is the "nice guy" but that they won't take the bait unless they see someone confident and engaging. And it may be easier for "bad boys" to fake their niceness for short periods than it is for "nice guys" to fake confidence and interest. And thus we have legions of girls in unhappy relationships, passing the same few assholes around while the remaining of boys destroy their remaining self-confidence by worrying about how to become confident like the jackasses that get dates.

This is pretty important because it's often the central story in guys' lives at the time when gender norms are being cemented. It seems like we should all hope for a time when girls demand that boys treat them well and the boys that do not are ostracized; a time when it is not a "sacrifice" for boys to treat girls well; a time when violent aggression, power, and traditional masculinity are less intertwined with boys' aspirations and girls' fantasies. Most of the commenters over at Bitch say that self-confidence is the key for both sides to improve this situation. I wonder what else is involved.

Categories: rape, sex, gender, personal, education,

Rumsfeld and the Intelligence Business

2006-05-08T16:34:00.000-04:00

There was a small blogstorm over Rumsfeld's recent WMD truthiness and his defenders' tactics were, per usual, appalling. Unfortunately, in most of the places I've looked, it overshadowed an even clearer (though much less significant) lie: "I'm not in the intelligence business" (Kudos to Lou Dobbs for picking up on this lesser lie and emphasizing it). This isn't the first time Rumsfeld used that excuse, either. Last year, he famously told Congress that he didn't have figures on the number of insurgents in Iraq (!) because "it's not my business to do intelligent work." (Incidentally, he had two estimates right in front of him, but wouldn't reveal them because they were classified).

Let's examine how true that statement is. According to today's Wall Street Journal, Rumsfeld's Department of Defense controls more than 80% of the U.S. intelligence budget; the heads of the National Security Agency and Defense Intelligence Agency (not to mention the man that will likely head the CIA in the future) are active military officers that also answer to Rumsfeld. He also reorganized the entire intelligence bureaucracy so that "the Defense Intelligence Agency, the National Security Agency, each of the armed services' intelligence divisions, and others" would report directly to his undersecretary. Not only is Rumsfeld in the intelligence business, he thought he could do it better than the actual intelligence analysts--which is why he set up his own team to look for (read: manufacture) evidence that the analysts couldn't find. Rumsfeld's "revolution in military affairs" was largely about replacing big troop deployments with small deployments plus excellent intelligence to better "adapt quickly to new challenges and to unexpected circumstances."

I could go on, but I don't see the point.

Postscript: This also reminded me of Bush denying he was in the lumber business: "Need some wood?" I wonder what other businesses members of the administration aren't in. Gay prostitution? Straight prostitution? Fraud? Theft? War profiteering? Nah. I'm sure no one in the administration is in any of those.

Categories: rumsfeld, iraq, cia, sex, bush, military, business

Nancy Pelosi, housewife?

2006-05-08T13:10:00.000-04:00

update: Blogger likes to post things at the time I start writing them, rather than the time I finish writing them, so this got buried under some other posts and I'm moving it up. I apologize if you're reading thsi for the second time.

Gender seems to play a big role in the way people view public figures, particularly politicians (see below*). I bring this up because of something I read today.

Nancy Pelosi apparently said "Maybe it'll take a woman to clean up the House" on "Meet the Press" yesterday. I don't really have anything definitive to say on the subject, but I think it raises a lot of interesting questions.

The most obvious question is how that slogan, if it makes it into the public consciousness, will affect things politically. Will it resonate with the public? Will it be mocked? Will it be mocked precisely because it resonates? I'm not sure. In fact, it may not make it to the public consciousness in the first place, so this question may not matter.

From a more gender-focused perspective, I'm not sure what to make of the comment. Was she reinforcing gender norms that let men run wild and leave women to clean up the messes men make? Or does calling attention to the boys' failings and thus challenging the norms? I'm leaning towards the second, but then, as anyone on my old debate team or the teams that I've coached can tell you, I almost always lean towards the more sympathetic reading. You can usually find a moderately persuasive argument that attempts to challenge a given system in a given fashion actually reinforce it through cooptation, reification, etc. I'm usually pretty sympathetic to people that are trying to break oppressive power structures even if they're methods are less than ideal. On the other hand, Pelosi may have just been cynically exploiting her ovaries for political gain, in which case all these questions are irrelevant as well.

Really, this post is just an excuse for me to create links to all the funny pictures below.

*Articles like this could never be written about a male candidate, for example. Think of how different the media coverage of everything would be if Cheney looked like this, Bush looked like this, Rumsfeld looked like this, Condi looked like this, the Clintons looked like this, and Obama looked like this. The whole perspective on everything they did would change. (Kerry may be a counterexample; if he looked like this, it might not have made much of a difference.) Incidentally, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, and this are among the funniest/creepiest things I've ever seen.

Update: for reasons I can't figure out, some of the links in the above paragraph take you to a page that has the link instead fo the picture. Copy the link into your browser's address bar to get the link to actually work. I apologize for the difficulty, but I assure you it's worth the effort.

Categories: gender, silly, dems

Hayden CIA update

2006-05-08T12:07:00.000-04:00

(Updated below)

I previously wrote about the reasons Michael Hayden would make a terrible director for the CIA and noted that even some Republicans opposed him. According to the New York Times, at least some people get it. Oregon's Ron Wyden (who is on the Senate Intelligence Committee) apparently said "These hearings on Hayden are going to be some of the most important that have been held in a long time, because the Congress has been kept in the dark on a handful of issues," which is manifestly true. "He cannot expect to come to the witness table before our committee and repeat the empty statements the administration has made" about NSA spying, Wyden continued. Unsurprisingly, Arlen Specter is making discontented noises about the issue, but I'm not expecting him to grow a spine any time soon.

In an interesting turn of events, it even spineless bags of pro-Bush nonsense like Senate Intelligence Committee Chair Pat Roberts have some complaints while "mavericks" like John McCain support him. I never thought I'd hear myself say this, but luckily, Pat Roberts and not John McCain is in charge of the Senate Intelligence Committee. I wonder how true this statement is:

Election-year politics will undoubtedly play a part in the confirmation process. With President Bush's low approval ratings, Republicans may try to distance themselves from the White House and demonstrate their independence by subjecting General Hayden to tougher questioning than past nominees.

The real test will be their voting record.

One last thing: as is customary, the NYT ends the article with a long-discredited lie directly quoted from an anonymous "senior administration official" without any verification or critical analysis:

The senior Bush administration official said the White House welcomed a public discussion about the N.S.A. program during General Hayden's confirmation hearings.
"We are very comfortable having a debate on that issue," the official said. "We feel that there is no more qualified person to defend this program."

Wonderful.

Update: Glenn Greenwald has more on the congressional response here.

Categories: media, nyt, cia, gop, wiretapping, military

Krugman on Bush

2006-05-08T11:37:00.000-04:00

I can't read the original article because NYT is stingy, but Hullabaloo quotes the following from Paul Krugman:

But the administration officials who told us that Saddam had an active nuclear program and insinuated that he was responsible for 9/11 weren't part of a covert alliance; they all worked for President Bush. The claim that these officials hyped the case for war isn't a conspiracy theory; it's simply an assertion that people in a position of power abused that position. And that assertion only seems wildly implausible if you take it as axiomatic that Mr. Bush and those around him wouldn't do such a thing.
The truth is that many of the people who throw around terms like 'loopy conspiracy theories' are lazy bullies who, as Zachary Roth put it on CJR Daily, The Columbia Journalism Review's Web site, want to 'confer instant illegitimacy on any argument with which they disagree.' Instead of facing up to hard questions, they try to suggest that anyone who asks those questions is crazy.
Indeed, right-wing pundits have consistently questioned the sanity of Bush critics; 'It looks as if Al Gore has gone off his lithium again,' said Charles Krauthammer, the Washington Post columnist, after Mr. Gore gave a perfectly sensible if hard-hitting speech. Even moderates have tended to dismiss the administration's harsh critics as victims of irrational Bush hatred.
But now those harsh critics have been vindicated. And it turns out that many of the administration supporters can't handle the truth. They won't admit that they built a personality cult around a man who has proved almost pathetically unequal to the job. Nor will they admit that opponents of the Iraq war, whom they called traitors for warning that invading Iraq was a mistake, have been proved right. So they have taken refuge in the belief that a vast conspiracy of America-haters in the media is hiding the good news from the public.
Unlike the crazy conspiracy theories of the left - which do exist, but are supported only by a tiny fringe - the crazy conspiracy theories of the right are supported by important people: powerful politicians, television personalities with large audiences. And we can safely predict that these people will never concede that they were wrong. When the Iraq venture comes to a bad end, they won't blame those who led us into the quagmire; they'll claim that it was all the fault of the liberal media, which stabbed our troops in the back.

This is significant both because it's well-written and accurate and also because it's appearing in a large mainstream print source. Digby and Glenn Greenwald are great, but they don't have the kind of respect the NYT has. Hopefully this argument will become conventional wisdom.

Categories: bush, nyt, war, iraq, ideology, rhetoric, military, cia, propaganda

Bush, Popes, perch, and "moral relevancy"

2006-05-07T17:10:00.000-04:00

"I admire the two Popes. These are strong, capable men who challenge the concept of moral relevancy."--George W. Bush, May 5, 2006 (hat tip to The Plank)

Rock on.

Update: This was a translation into German and then back into English, it's not necessarily a Bushism--it could be a translation error. But what they take with one hand, they give back with the other. From the same interview:

"You know, I've experienced many great moments and it's hard to name the best," Bush told weekly Bild am Sonntag when asked about his high point since becoming president in January 2001.
"I would say the best moment of all was when I caught a 7.5 pound (3.402 kilos) perch in my lake," he told the newspaper in an interview published on Sunday.

Update II: Tristero at Digby's Blog has some great analysis of the perch story.

Categories: bush, christian, incompetence

Michael Hayden, the Central Intelligence Agency, and Iran

2006-05-06T23:00:00.000-04:00

(Updated below)

Porter Goss is out of a job, quite possibly because of hookergate (though the media are largely ignoring that possibility for some reason). Apparently, Michael Hayden is the most likely candidate for his replacement.

For a few interrelated reasons, I have a very low opinion of Hayden.

The first is that a couple months ago, as the person responsible for "overseeing the day-to-day activities of the national intelligence program," he was unaware that the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution mentioned "probable cause" (video).

Second, Hayden literally refused to answer if the NSA was "targeting us and people who politically oppose the Bush government, the Bush administration? Not a fishing net, but are you targeting specifically political opponents of the Bush administration?" (hat tip to Digby) That silence is a pretty clear indication that the answer is "yes."

Third, he vehemently opposed using a probable cause standard for domestic wiretapping even though that's what the law requires. He said that a "reasonable basis" standard was needed to intercept all the important terrorist calls even though the secret FISA Court will retroactively approve almost any wiretap and the Bush Administration (through a thoroughly scrubbed speech given by the man in charge of requesting wiretap warrants from the FISA Court) had sworn under oath that they were unaware of any cases in which a laxer standard would have been necessary. (Incidentally, they also said that a laxer standard could damage "our ability to conduct investigations that are vital to protecting national security [because] If we err in our analysis and courts were ultimately to find a 'reasonable suspicion' standard unconstitutional, we could potentially put at risk ongoing investigations and prosecutions.") In other words, Hayden is willing to tell blatant lies and violate crucial laws to protect the administration.

One of the most important roles for the new CIA director is going to be managing U.S. intelligence on Iran. That intelligence is going to be critical for U.S. security because, frankly, the situation in Iran is pretty scary. The CIA won't be able to do its job of informing the leadership of the actual situation so they can make realistic and effective policies if they have another Bush lackey manipulating the intelligence reports and lying to the media and the rest of the world like we had during the run-up to the Iraq war.

Another important role for the CIA in Iran is not using their covert military and paramilitary power to do something stupid (we all know how well it turned out the last time they tried that in Iran in 1953). Somehow, Hayden's record makes me think that he won't be particularly good in either role.

Update: More evidence that Hayden will militarize the CIA: the chairmain of the House Intelligence Committee agrees that Hayden will make things much worse for some of the same reasons I mentioned above and adds additional perspective. He points out that Hayden is a General and says that will gut the independence of the CIA and lead to bad decisions that favor the military but harm the country in the long term. The whole interview is interesting, but here's one of the most interesting parts: "the military has a very different perspective on the world. They're worried about today. And wars and threats to the United States in the short term. And how we might respond militarily. So they need information that helps them better prepare for fighting and winning future wars or winning the war that we are in today. The CIA's job is to provide us as policy makers better information so that we can make informed policy decisions--of which war and winning a war and the consequences of war are very very different"

Categories: bush, war, iran, iraq, cia, military, propaganda, wiretapping, executive, gop, ideology, legal, nuclear, rumsfeld, whistleblower, rights, terror,

Psychic scams

2006-05-06T21:29:00.000-04:00

One Good Move has some really astonishing MSNBC footage about "psychics" that scam people out of tens of thousands of dollars by preying on them when they're vulnerable. One psychic caught on tape tells her client that his dead wife is "very angry, very upset" with him and that there will be another disaster if he doesn't give her $34,000. Really horrible stuff.

Categories: scam, pseudoscience, psych, video