June 28th. A Monday Fix

Is it a sign of maturity or decay when an area of philosophy reaches a stage where virtually every possible view, however implausible, is represented by a treatise-length study written in its defense? Do contemporary debates about modality, properties, causation, or the mind-body problem represent philosophy at its peak of maturity, or are these debates paradigm examples of a subject in decay?

I spent some time with this post on Brian Leiter's page, where he quotes the author of that paragraph. I read the post and looked at one of the articles he cites, and was thinking of responding there (comments are on) but it can wait. I don't want to be accused of trying to hijack the discussion.

Impatience with the long haul of technical reflection is a form of shallowness, often thinly disguised by histrionic advocacy of depth.

How to respond to that?
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Con`nois`seur´ n.
1. One well versed in any subject; a skillful or knowing person; a critical judge of any art, particularly of one of the fine arts.
The connoisseur is "one who knows," as opposed to the dilettante, who only "thinks he knows."
- Fairholt.

My comment

You can compare apples and oranges if you want, the only question is, why? You can argue in favor of intellectually rigorous activities being done for their own sake, but how rigorous is anything without boundaries? What is interesting about science is that in its search for knowledge it is bounded by what can be, or might be at some point, verifiable. That makes it practical but it also makes it a game with rules and limits. Intelligence is tested by an outside force. There are similar boundaries in athletics. You test yourself within a system of rules and regulations. There seems to be no outside force in analytic philosophy. I don't see how structures of pure logic can be applied to behavior, and even as a 'game' of skill philosophy seems limited.

I went recently to the Met, to an exhibition of work by the American Impressionist Childe Hassam, and found myself asking how and why work which was so derivative, such an imitation of the French, could be also so obviously American. The works 'looked like' American paintings. 

What kind of intelligence perceives the clues that mark such a difference? What sort of intelligence says "I know" before it can say why, or how, it knows. I remember years ago commenting on the strangeness of a painting by Hassam when I assumed that it was by a French hand; things didn't fit, but I wasn't sure why. I'm not patting myself on the back. I had help. But this is the argument from "depth" that Timothy Williamson derides, and it has nothing to do with religion or any sort of fuzzy mysticism, but with the perceptual intelligence of the connoisseur. Our intuitions act often through a form of silent logic, with which we play a game of catch-up. Our awareness is trained in such a way that it works in shorthand, preceding understanding. In the same way, 'knowing' how to hit a backhand is not the same as 'being able' to do it. I was able to recognize the oddness of a painting that I supposed to be French. Sometimes such responses (assumptions) are mistaken -in which case there is still a 'logic' behind them- sometimes not. But analytic philosophy will never be able to understand 'imagination' because its unwilling to use it. I've read more than a few articles in which the questions asked, about the logic of certain social activities, could not be answered unless someone chose to look outside the internal logic of the article. And as a matter of intellectual rigor or skill, there are other forms of discourse more rigorous because there's more at stake.

From an old post: In The Oxford Dictionary of Philosophy, Simon Blackburn writes this about Donald Davidson: 

"Davidson is also known for rejection of the idea of s conceptual scheme, thought of as something peculiar to one language or one way of looking at the world, arguing that where the possibility of translation stops so does the coherence of the idea that there is something to translate." 

So if it is impossible to translate the finer points in Mallarmé, then no finer points exist.

I'm listening to 'Anonymous' on NPR.
If all your arguments begin and end with nationalism, you end up paranoid.
Have I ever heard a CIA analyist who was not an idiot?

Sanford Levinson at Balkinization:
More seriously, none of the reporters asked [Gonzales] about the American practices of "rendering" people in our custody to other countries where torture is almost certain to take place. Going back to the end of 2002, a number of articles in the mainstream press, including a stunning article in a January 2003 issue of The Economist, have alluded to the practice. It is crystal clear that it violates the UN convention and calls into question the Administration's insistence that it has not in effect accepted torture as a policy. Gonzales might have said, of course, citing the Senate language, that it doesn't violate US policy to "render" prisoners unless we believe that it is "likely" that torture will occur and, of course, we choose to believe assurances by Jordan, Egypt, and Morocco, among others, that torture won't occur. But, of course, there is no reason whatsoever to believe that we're even asking for such assurances or that anyone should believe them.

Poll: 64% of Israelis want Russians to go home.

US tortured Afghanistan detainees

Duncan Campbell and Suzanne Goldenberg
Wednesday June 23, 2004
The Guardian

Detainees held in Afghanistan by US troops have been routinely tortured and humiliated as part of the interrogation process in the same way as those in Iraq, a Guardian investigation has found.

Five detainees have died in custody, three of them in suspicious circumstances, and survivors have told stories of beatings, strippings, hoodings and sleep deprivation.

The nature of the alleged abuse indicates that what happened at Abu Ghraib was part of a pattern of interrogation that has been common practice since the invasion of Afghanistan.

"The abuses in Afghanistan were no less egregious than at Abu Ghraib, but because there were no photographs - at least to our present knowledge - they have not received enough attention," Senator Patrick Leahy, the Democratic member of the Senate subcommittee on foreign operations, told the Guardian.

"Prisoners in Afghanistan were subjected to cruel and degrading treatment, and some died from it. These abuses were part of a wider pattern stemming from a White House attitude that 'anything goes' in the war against terrorism, even if it crosses the line of illegality."

Syed Nabi Siddiqi, a former police officer, said he had been beaten and stripped. "They took off my uniform. I showed them my identity card from the government of President Karsai. Then they asked me which of those animals - they made the noise of goats, sheep, dogs, cows - have you had sexual activities with?"

A second detainee, Noor Aghah, said he had been forced to drink bottle after bottle of water during his interrogation.

Another prisoner, Wazir Muhammad, was held for nearly two years, firstly in Afghanistan and then in Guantánamo Bay. "At the end of my time in Guantánamo, I had to sign a paper saying I had been captured in battle which was not true," he said. "I was stopped when I was in my taxi with four passengers. But they told me I would have to spend the rest of my life in Guantánamo if I did not sign it, so I did."

Parts of an investigation into allegations of abuse in custody by Brigadier General Chuck Jacoby are to be made public next month by the head of the US forces in Afghanistan, Lieutenant General David Barno.

Gen Barno said: "I will tell you without hesitation that intelligence procedures have got to be done in accordance with the appropriate standards ... all our forces will treat every detainee here with dignity and respect."

Bagram and the network of US detention centres around Afghanistan have largely avoided scrutiny, yet, according to the coalition forces last week, more than 2,000 people have been detained there since the war.

Link

People do not understand what they say. Someone may say he or she believes in a supreme being, but when questioned will be forced to admit that they take comfort in the idea and do not care whether their beliefs are based on truth or fallacy because they serve a purpose. Ronald Dworkin made such an argument about opposition to abortion. Most people who are opposed to abortion, even those who say abortion is murder, are willing to accept it in cases of rape or incest. But if abortion is murder, it should make no difference how a fetus was conceived. Dworkin argues that many of the people who oppose abortion do so because they believe that their opponents don't take abortion seriously enough, that they don't give the moral questions involved enough weight, and that that more than anything is the reason for their oppostion. They don't believe, however, that abortion is murder; they use the word as code for something else.

I've been thinking about this in the context of my response to Brian Leiter's posts on Clarence Thomas. He has a new one here.
This is something I added to my pervious post a day or so ago:

"It is a lovely thing about scholarly life that all kinds of positions can be explored and defended, no matter how contrary to received wisdom, no matter how dangerous in their consequences... Justice X is not, to put the matter gently, a scholar. He is not engaged in scholarly debate or inquiry; he is advocating for a political revolution. On the basis of some scholarly arguments by others (not all of whom even endorse X's preferred result), he would push aside countervailing scholarly and legal considerations (including decades of precedent) ...What would that mean?"

The above is an edited version of one of Leiter's paragraphs, stripped of any reference to the specific case or recent history. It could be a quote from an argument against the Brown decision. Not having followed the case much, and focusing on the decision as a whole rather than Thomas' opinion, I responded to Leiter's text as a text, taken out of context, and it stuck me as odd. it still does. In today's post, quoting others, the tone changes a little. But still, why can't leiter just come out and say that Thomas' opinions go against our notions of fairness? Why can't he just say the country has changed?

"The Rev. Barry Lynn, executive director of Americans United for Separation of Church and State, called Thomas' view 'breathtakingly radical.'
'Mississippi could be officially Baptist, and Utah could be officially Mormon. If his viewpoint ever became the majority on the high court, it would tear our country apart along religious lines,' he said.

There's something wishy-washy about discussions of historical change. Philosophy is logical, not narrative, right? it's not just that Thomas is a radical, it's that he's a radical with no social or popular support, no social reality surrounding and reinforcing his arguments. There is now such a reality surrounding the idea of gay marriage. As I said a few months ago: "The dam broke. It's over." What was once less than normal, has become normal. And this change as regards homosexuality has become more and more clear over the past few months. Leiter's is not a philosophy of historical change, however, which is why he refers to changes in our subjective experience only after the fact, and does so by quoting others. I think there is no way to really understand how out of step, how absurd, Thomas' arguments are without understanding how we have changed and that this change is not only logical but moral and subjective.

Two other qiick points. Leiter links to this blog: Experimental Philosophy, where I've posted a few comments, as I noted below. The authors fall into the same trap he does. Reading the posts is like reading the observations of a sociopath, unable to fathom human emotion. Frankly it's weird.
If you go by the assumption that people do not believe what they say they believe, and that they do not do things for the reasons they claim, then you can begin to examine why they might behave as they do. For there is a logic to it, even if it's not the one they claim. Experimental Philosophy skims the surface.

Read this post, "Puzzling experiment", and see if the outcome of the experiment puzzles you. And remember, don't think about logic, think about how people behave, and why.

For another example, is there perhaps a conflict between Leiter's politics and his obsessive documentation of academic social climbing? See his recent critical comments about the legal star system. I suppose one could argue there is or should be a difference between money and prestige, and that he's only interested in the latter, but that doesn't resolve the conflict.
(More fixes later)

"Did the dogs bite them?"
Yes

Max asks the question:
How long do we have to keep murdering innocent people?

And Jack Balkin is a good read this weekend

In Unrestrained, the Life of a Priest, 77-year-old Mariani tells of his sexual exploits, with both women and men, sometimes in lurid detail: 'She put her arms around my neck and asked: "Do you like the drink?" Then she leaned over me and sucked on my lips, asking: "And don't you like this even more?"'
...
But, far from antagonising the faithful, Mariani has received almost universal praise from his flock in the Villa Belgrano neighbourhood of the city of Cordoba. 'This country has to fight against hypocrisy,' said the mayor, Luis Juez, after attending a mass given by Mariani, during which the priest was cheered and applauded by supporters.

'I challenge any member of the church who claims to have lived correctly to open up his life the way I have done,' Mariani said from his pulpit. 'I don't regret anything. I'm ready to have my head cut off.'
The Guardian

I'm moving to Argentina as soon as I can, but I need money. The link to my paypal account is on the left.
Thank you.

As`ad AbuKhalil is really mad at Tariq Ali.
In the same post: "A Lebanese Shi`ite was beheaded in Iraq last week, and I am told that this was in response to Hizbullah's statement against the gruesome beheading of the American citizen in Iraq last month.".

Iraqi War Casualties

Link from Riverbend

"[W]hen there are legal arguments on both sides of a question--say, whether the Establishment Clause applies to the states--to adopt the side that has repulsive moral and political consequences is lunatic."

Brian Leiter on Justice Thomas, the "Lunatic Fringe," and the Pathology of Originalism And he replies to criticism here, where I first read the quote.

At some point, it comes down to preference. But preference as such is not something Leiter's legal philosophy spends much time discussing. His logic breaks down in the presence of the illogic of others. That's a condescending way to put it, but I can't think of another way. Leiter writes as a secularist but does so as it were, ex cathedra. But the point of democratic government is that in giving the mediocre their due, it keeps great men honest. And the fact is that Leiter should not be able to get away with simple generalizations in a discussion of a matter of law. For such a discussion of preference, and of changes in preference and how that should be reflected in legal interpretation, you need to go elsewhere. I think, for example, that the death penalty has repulsive moral and political consequences; others do not.

It is a lovely thing about scholarly life that all kinds of positions can be explored and defended, no matter how contrary to received wisdom, no matter how dangerous in their consequences... Justice X is not, to put the matter gently, a scholar. He is not engaged in scholarly debate or inquiry; he is advocating for a political revolution. On the basis of some scholarly arguments by others (not all of whom even endorse X's preferred result), he would push aside countervailing scholarly and legal considerations (including decades of precedent) ...What would that mean?
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As for the Lunatic Fringe, Leiter and Thomas are both there, Lieter for his intelligence and (I would say) overly strict and brittle logic, Thomas for his lack of intelligence and his dogmatism.

I'm there too, of course.

"Look at the stars... The stars are a mess!".
Werner Herzog, waste deep in a river in the jungle's of Peru, a European in the Southern Hemisphere.

An Iraqi friend, who feared for his life because he was close to the Americans, used to live inside the Green Zone, the heavily protected area in central Baghdad where the US-led Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) has its headquarters. One day he fell into conversation with an American soldier guarding one of the gates. The soldier said he was of Iraqi origin and could speak Arabic. He added that security was not quite as tight as it looked since prostitutes were regular visitors to the zone.

My friend, a little alarmed, decided to investigate. He went to a house which was being used as a brothel. He says: "In the toilet I found that the women were writing pro-Baath party, anti-American and patriotic slogans with their lipstick on the mirrors." Their clients could not tell what they had written because it was in Arabic. Patrick Cockburn in The Independent

Read the whole thing. It gets worse, or better if you're a fan of black humor.
I laughed my ass off.

Rewritten, and again:

More comments here and one here.

A thought:
The folks at CT, like many people on the web -analytic philosophers, economists, libertarians and tech heads- tend to see the principle of non-contradiction as some sort of universal figure, applying both to those fields they know and those they indulge in on the side. Is that why so many people seem unable to tell the difference between art and illustration (and are so unwilling to respond to my comments)?

"Seth, Whaddaya mean? What's the diffeence between art and illustration?"

Illustration, speculative fiction,'philosophic' art (Baudelaire's term) et al. are based on a principled lack of ambiguity that is definable along the lines of the law of non-contradiction: p and not-p. It may be necessary to ascribe a vulgar simplicity to our complex behavior -econmists do it all the time- but that doesn't mean we can or should ever be defined by those descriptions. And the art championed in so many web posts on so many sites tends to do just that. I've said all this before, but I've never quite in this way. The law of non-contradiction refers to logic, not to people. We live by refuting it.

Illustration as a vulgar subcategory of art, is a modern invention. It is a form of representation in which rhetoric is denied as sophistry or indulged as truth. Anotomical studies and pornographic imagery share the same designation: illustrations. Both posit a direct line from form to content and from dreamer to witness, allowing the latter to become the former.
If I write the equation A=2 on a piece of paper what I write and the what you read will be practically- for practical reasons- identical. But "Rosy fingered dawn." will not work the same way. Religious and political cults argue for the union of self and other, but that's a more dangerous illusion than anything provided by a good work of art. [And of course along with illustration, the other major modern introduction to culture is the notion of life as art. a notion that is equally as reactionary.] it remains an oddity to me that all of this remains so outside the discussion of something called philosophy.

Art attempts to recreate the complexity of the world as we experience it, while still giviing it pattern. And that pattern is the result of rhetoric, of corrupted logic. The patterns of art are the result of smoke and mirrors; art is an illusion that describes our attempts at illusion. It describes the world only in the sense that we experience it. That is its honesty. Philosophic art, art as illustration, dictates which illusions are acceptable and which not, as it dictates the meaning of its particulars. But the law of non-contradiction should not be demanded of our dreams any more than it should be demanded of us.

I'll illustrate my point- this is only a blog after all- with a quote from an article in yesterday's Times. I haven't read much I.B. Singer, but I'm not defending his work, I'm merely laughing at the stupidity of the criticism leveled at it. This in defense of Chaim Grade, a Yiddish author whose works have been overshadowed by Singer's:

"Every fiber of Grade's being and everything he did — every line of poetry, every work of fiction — was animated by a sense of responsibility to the Jews: to their history, to the culture, to the people," said Professor Nadler, who studied with Grade at Harvard. "None of those commitments resonate in my reading of Singer."

Substitute for Jews: Germans, Americans, or Bisexual Hunchbacks; his argument is laughable.

Those engaged in the discussion at Crooked Timber don't consider themselves reactionary, they just like logic and simplicity and appreciate an art that offers it to them; for Nadler on the other hand simplicity and non-contradiction are a matter of political and moral necessity. Their tastes of each, however, are the same: abstract logic over sensibility, intellect and a priori assumptions over curiosity.

"Long ago as a post-adolescent do-gooder I worked in a farmhouse shared by two groups, one a group of murderers who had served their time and the other a group of idiots. (All lovely men, if odd.) One of the former, a defrocked Jesuit who had killed his mother, found me reading Spinoza at night and spoke (as he rarely did): "Ah, the great Spinoza. Only he understood freedom and necessity." A moving statement by a solitary man who had paid his dues."
Ian Hacking on Antonio Damasio, in the NYRB.

That's a great paragraph, if odd, but more often Ian Hacking's literalism is absolutely infuriating. And mentioning one critic of Damasio's -one who "went to town" on Damasio's book- as being " the Oxford author of an invaluable many-volume line-by-line analysis [!?] of Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations" doesn't help.

Hacking:
If you are a skeptical reader you might not make it past the first two sentences:

"Feelings of pain or pleasure or some quality in between are the bedrock of our minds. We often fail to notice this simple reality because the mental images of the objects and events that surround us, along with the images of the words and sentences that describe them, use up so much of our overburdened attention."

Here one wants to say to Damasio, "Hey, wait a minute! To be honest with you, my attention is seldom overburdened, the way it might be if I had to teach primary school and had thirty cacophonous little voices to deal with. And I rarely have images of words, let alone sentences. The schoolteacher is trying to pay attention to her children, their antics, and their wants, and not to mental images of them (unless she shuts her eyes and plugs her ears). And I do not understand your metaphor of mental bedrock, especially if, as we soon gather, you think that the mind is a sort of organ in the brain."

Hey, Wait a minute, Indeed. It's as if Hacking is opposed to the idea let alone the reality of someone actually having an imagination. I haven't read Damasio, but I found nothing offensive in any of the quotes. A little loose perhaps, but reasonable and useful. It's Hacking, as I said above, who's odd.

And how wimsically perverse of the editors to include Charles Simic's review of Borislav Pekic's How to Quiet a Vampire in the same issue

From Buzzflash:
Reagan's Family Criticizes Use Of Reagan In Anti-Kerry Ad.
That speaks volumes about the political realities of this country.
[And Atrios refers to Clinton as "Big Dog."]

Max.

First the entombment, then the resurrection.

For the past half year, 5 days a week, I've walked past Long Island City high school a few times, on the way to and from work and on the way to lunch at the Bel Aire Diner- on the corner of 21st and Broadway. I've wanted to write something about this for a while, and I don't think I'll get very far today, but being as my neighborhood is being swamped by 20 something suburban brats who appear to know nothing either about the world or the streets, 16 year olds from 15 different countries, all of whom know something about survival, either here or in there homelands, make for a pretty impressive crew.
Today the scene was Hindu homegirls, or perhaps Heathers, 5 of them ranging in height from 5'7" to 6', all in saris, walking much too slowly and with staged indifference along the sidewalk, so that everyone had to find a way to walk around them. I ended up walking out into traffic to pass.
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Obviously enough in the absence of major threats minor ones are amplified. I don't have much sympathy with suburban angst or its moneyed urban equivalent, but thinking of my childhood (and I've said this before) I also remember my fear and dislike of working class white kids. I grew up in a neighborhood that was largely lower middle class and black, with a large number of people who were lower, and a few who were in some other category: my parents, the French couple across the street and the commune down the block.

Urban kids understand violence, and black kids understand it more than white. The secret of the streets is to know when and how to back down without losing respect. Backing down is less of an option for kids in white neighborhoods precisely because the stakes are lower.
These days are different. The inner city is more racially diverse; there are plenty of white faces at LIC High School, though many are foreign born, but the behavior, the various responses to social pressure, derive more from black urban culture. One mark is humor, which I've always thought of as a more acceptable -both more popular and respected- rejoinder to strength and power in the black community than in the working class white community, perhaps precisely because of white racial anxiety. After all, you ever heard of 'black trash?"
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But still if you want to scare someone, one thing you do is shoot a gun white pressing it against the side of his face. No one gets hurt, except for an ear ache and a powder burn. I saw a one kid being protected by his girlfriend, who was covering him with her body and pressing him against a wall, asking the 16 year old who pulled the trigger just to leave.

One added point. I remember being really pissed off by this article in the Times last year. [I just looked it up again.] I don't know what annoys me more, Mark Saltzman's ignorance, though he seems to come of well enough at the end, or the author's:
"Even at Central, among dead-end kids destined for the darkest reaches of the criminal justice system, the words still matter.

Words mean a lot when there's a lot at stake.

Josh Marshal was right. Juan Cole was great reading this weekend. If nothing else read this discussion on neocon political and economic theory, and the failures of Iraq policy.
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I heard Janis Karpinski on the BBC this morning. You can listen to it here but I haven't seen a transcript. You don't have to defend her to think that others should be brought up on charges. Miller specifically comes off badly. It's all pretty damning.
"Treat them like dogs"
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I simplified my last post. The link to my earlier comments was enough, there's no need to rewrite them

The Supreme's decision on the pledge of allegiance is fucking brilliant.
What a way to dodge the issue. They got so lucky.

Kast said he was merely following the law, which allows only politicians, political action committees, political parties and government officials to obtain copies. Anyone else can view the list, but cannot make copies or take notes while doing so.
Thomas argued that lawmakers failed to follow a constitutional mandate that requires them to state a specific reason when they pass laws closing public records.
But Joseph Klock, an attorney for the state, said there is no constitutional conflict. Lawmakers weren't creating a public records exemption when they passed the election reforms package, Klock insisted, because the public is still able to view the records, even though it can't make copies of them.
And the law follows the constitutional provision that gives everyone the right to inspect "or" copy public documents, Klock said. He pointed out that the provision does not say inspect "and" copy them.
"People were presumably smart enough to know what they meant by 'or' or 'and,' " when they voted on the constitutional amendment in 1992, Klock said.
[Judge] Clark appeared to agree.
"I can't add words to the constitution," Clark told Thomas.

The Palm Beach Post

Amazing

I found this cartoon on Brian Leiter's page, linked from another blog.
What is it about this country that it continues to produce a criticism predicated on the assumption of its own infallibility. The arrogance is annoying; there's more condescension than anger, as if the debate were not about morality but simple logic. Subtext is for other people.

On a related subject, see my comments here.

I've been reading various responses to the torture memo, Crooked Timber and Punishment Theory, among the others mentioned below. At the same time, I've followed links from these sites to other philosophy blogs:1. 2. As always I'm frustrated and annoyed by discussions of analytical philosophy, for reasons that run from the minor: the willingness to call every grad student a 'philosopher', to the fundamental: the willingness to consider psychological subjects but not the psychology of the speaker.

Any scholasticism is limited by nature. And when it winds to the end, as it moves further and further away from the works of it's founders; when its references are to references of references, its products become those of mere provincialism. A rationalist would dispute that, being a rationalist, and he would be wrong.

The End of Conceptualism.
Formalism by other means.

If conceptual art, like analytical philosophy in its preference for closed systems, has always skirted banality -closed systems after all are imaginary, and fantasy is childsplay- for the past few years it has produced little else. This show, however, should close out the field.
Andrea Fraser's exhibition, like all conceptualist 'projects' is an illustration, and like most recent efforts, an illustration of the obvious. But as it denies the existence of psychological weight; as it mocks emotion, not as ideal or metaphysical truth but as fact; as it denies subtext, the pretense falls into tragedy. The denial of the ambiguities of subjectivity, of the reality of the unquantifiable individuality of perception, has seen its apotheosis in this show. And rationalism has seen its nadir.

The point of craft, of learned skill as a means of enjoyment, is in the act of communication across boundaries of self and other by means of a shared language. Art is the added value of a commodity or category. It defines the degree to which personal experience can become something else. Language allows communication, and limits it. Art is the art of limits; attempts to prove otherwise, to make an art either of ideas or emotions, simply fail. In its understanding of language -of form as human production- art, great, good, or not half bad, is no more or less than our clearest representive of philosophical realism.

This show goes from one end of the spectrum to the other without treading the ground between. It's both coldly, blandly, intellectual and floridly melodramatic in it's desperate need to be anything but.
My only response is pity.

For those few of you who know my relation to Colin and AFA:
Colin's dead, and I miss him, but he wasn't a conceptualist, he was a Catholic; who tried to cure his ills with logic as he tried to cure them with drugs. Neither worked, and I don't blame him for trying, but his brilliance wasn't in the logic any more than the drugs, it was in his confusion. And what a story that was.

There is more in this memo worth discussing, but the import should by now be clear. The stench of corruption permeates the pages of this report. Legal minds, blinded by ideology, and seduced by power, have willingly done the Administration's dirtiest work-- apologizing for torture and justifying violations of the most basic human rights. They have mangled the law and distorted the Constitution, manipulating legal sources to maximize power and minimize accountability. It is the sort of legal reasoning that twists law to destroy the Rule of Law. It is the sort of legal reasoning that brings shame on our nation and our people. It is the sort of legal reasoning that makes me ashamed to be a lawyer.
Jack Balkin

link

impeach

link

Dinesh D'Souza's defense of post-structuralism.
I have no more sympathy for Brights than I do for any other self proclaimed ubermenschen.
I'm a humanist. I'm cognizant of my capacity for error, and of the fact that my awareness will not preclude future mistakes. That doesn't mean I like D'Souza, but if he can puncture holes in an argument, it's not an argument worth making is it?.

Quickly, on Reagan, and later more on Soros.
The only reason not to speak ill of the dead in this case is political, but one gets the sense that many liberals are actually being sincere in their respect. How nice. How civil How absurd.
I hope to god Kerry was lying through his teeth as he performed the politically necessary courtesy of eulogizing The Gipper but somehow I doubt it. Liberals, rich ones especially, live in a world of illusion. Their republican cousins laugh, and Mad King George is one result.

Update: From what I'm listening to on the radio right now, other people agree.
I've said this before in comments on the 'realist' opposition to the war, but the extremism of the Bush agenda means that the fight for the moment is not between the left and right but between the extremist-absurdist right and everyone else. In a crisis, moderates need to learn to fight for moderation, and they become more interesting for the effort. Kerry needs to understand this. The American people need to understand this as well. Otherwise we'll continue along the line of the banalization of democracy...
the democratization of banality.

August Sander. Reading Kimmelman is always frustrating. He gets off to good start this time until he quotes Richard Avedon; that just about killed the vibe. And there's nothing reactionary about Sander's work. It assumes a sort of moral seriousness that can be called conservative; there's a difference, and K. should know it. 

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This was kind of funny. 

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The editor said he likes the piece but doesn't know what to do with it. They're sending me a topic, or something to review. 

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Kimmelman 10 years earlier.

Josh Marshall and Brad Delong are wondering why Chalabi hasn't been arrested in connection with his apparent gift to the Iranians of one of our most precious secrets: that we'd broken the Iranians' codes.
It's a good question, but it has a simple answer: Chalabi didn't break any of our laws." Mark Kleiman

I was just going to give him credit and leave it at that, but then I read the next post:

For those who think the choice between Dean and Kerry was mostly one of style: Kerry's friends are trying to unseat Rep. Jim "we only invaded Iraq because of the Jews" Moran, while Dean is headlining a fundraiser for him. Note that Moran is still defending his remark as "the truth."

If Kleiman were arguing that not telling 'the truth' makes Kerry electable, I might agree. But he's not making that argument.
Dean is no longer running for president, and Moran is right.

Proud to be a Canadian

Jack Balkin on Formalism and High Politics.
I've posted on this a few times, but not for awhile. I'm not sure if I was bred on theories similar to Balkin's or constructed one out of the mess of political, literary, and legal debate overheard as a child in my parents' house. Either way, he's right.

When absolute mediocrity gets into the game, the rules have changed. New York Magazine does a celebrity trashing of Judy Miller The Bitch, bordered on the right side fo the page, at least when I read it, by a column length ad for Victoria's Secret. The backlash has begun.

The underlying problem with this country is not it has produced an absurd culture, but that it continues to produce an intellectual class and a nomenclatura that is almost pathologically unwilling to admit that absurdity. The world is full of con men and fools, but no one who considers him/her self intellectually serious is allowed to admit in public, with tears or laughter or even a bemused shrug, what they they know to be a simple fact of life, confirmed for them by every guilty private pleasure, by every ad and movie. It's not that the piece on Miller turns politics into gossip and public interest, it's that it's done without a nudge or wink. It's done in the same tone of earnest moralism used by Miller and the rest.

The self indulgence of mainstream America, fed by Hollywood and MTV is no more or less shallow, no more or less delusional and self absorbed than Nader, Chomsky, and the rest of the reformist kitsch that populates the history of this country.

Oddly enough I've been developing a fondness for the logic of business, not for the ideological defense of markets but the realist observation of human behavior. The simplest most honest response to I've heard to Bush and his war from anyone who's not a political junkie came from a stock broker, who's disgusted for reasons that are both moral and practical. I can wonder which came first, but there's no conflict this time at least and neither of us are interested in perfection. We get along because neither of us are idealists and we're both willing to admit it.

In the past -but not very often- when enduring periods of boredom I developed the habit of memorizing a poem or two, just to force myself to get up and out of the cellar. I started out with Under Ben Bulben. Soon after, I found myself in a drunken barroom duet of Sally Gardens. Though I'd only read it a few times and was a little sloppy, my partner filled in the gaps, and it just reinforced the habit.
This morning, thanks to a piece in the Times, I remembered, laughing, that when I'm in a lousy mood I still have the habit of mumbling this one as I walk down the street:

Myxomatosis*
Caught in the center of a soundless field
While hot inexplicable hours go by
What trap is this? Where were its teeth concealed?
You seem to ask.
I make a sharp reply,
Then clean my stick. I'm glad I can't explain
Just in what jaws you were to suppurate:
You may have thought things would come right again
If you could only keep quite still and wait.

Philip Larkin.

*My dilapidated copy of the Norton Anthology adds this:
Myxomatosis: An infectious and fatal disease of rabbits, artificially introduced into Great Britain and Australia in recent years to keep down the rabbit population.

Quickly before I go out into the sunshine.
Two from The Nation. How the Other Half Votes: George Scialabba on the strange [sic] phenomenon of working class Republicanism. And Philosophical Convictions: Richard Rorty on foundationalism, anti-foundationalism and politics.
Quickly, because I have errands to run and I don't want to be indoors. Read the articles if you don't understand my response.

Idiots. On Scialabba: Rich conservatives don't move into working class neighborhoods; rich liberals do. What the working class sees in powerful liberals is condescension and hypocrisy. What it sees in rich republicans is what they respect in themselves (if there's anything left to respect). Who would you rather invite into your home, a friendly con man who tells you what you want to hear or a someone who lectures you on how you've got it all wrong? The problem with Kerry is that he can't escape his snobbery. He doesn't know how to deal with the peasantry and he doesn't know how to lie. Liberals are hypocrites, but they lie to themselves first. Beyond that the problem is that with our addiction to individualism, the working class cannot develop its own independent political structures and has to negotiate from the start with liberals who don't share their interests. Working class individualism is counterproductive. So liberals still speak for the working class as men used to speak for women and whites used to speak of their concern for "negroes".

On Rorty. The problem isn't anti-foundationalism it's anti-foundationalist philosophy. Philosophy is foundationalist by nature. Anti-foundationalist philosophy as an independent study as opposed to a philosophy of other subjects, of law, history, literature etc. is predicated on a return to control of an illusory enlightened awareness, as if the recognition somehow resolves the loss. The commingling of rationalism and anti-foundationalism is at the root -is the foundation, relatively speaking- of all the violent metaphysics of the European avant garde, both left and right. And Habermas is a nice guy, but so what?

Charlie Chaplin stands on a stage made of ice. He slips and falls. He gets up. He slips and falls again. He loses control. He negotiates with the inevitable. We laugh at him and at ourselves. Theater is anti-foundationalist, a winking lie. Common law like democracy itself is anti-foundationalist. It's not based on 'Truth' but on getting along.
So why the ridgidity of the British class system? That's for history and literature not philosophy.

How about a study of British Punk as a bourgeois revolution.

This is a modern world - This is the modern world
What kind of a fool do you think I am?
You think I know nothing of the modern world
All my life has been the same
I've learned to live by hate and pain
It's my inspiration drive -
I've learned more than you'll ever know
Even at school I felt quite sure
That one day I would be on top
And I'd look down upon the map
The teachers who said I'd be nothing -
This is the modern world that I've learnt about
This is the modern world, we don't need no one
To tell us what's right or wrong -
Say what you like 'cause I don't care
I know where I am and going too
It's somewhere I won't preview
Don't have to explain myself to you
I don't give two fucks about your review

He changed his mind later but Paul Weller voted for Thatcher, the daughter of a shopkeeper.
Punk wasn't a rebellion against capitalism. It was capitalism, rebelling against both liberalism and the hereditary aristocracy.

Removed post.
I tried to say what I wanted with few words, but without being glib. It didn't work.
This country is in many ways 'the most free,' the place where people have the fewest obligations to their peers. Some people celebrate that. I merely acknowledge it.

I went to the dentist yesterday to complete the finishing touches on a root canal; I am now the owner of a perfect copy of a tooth. Before he began my dentist crossed himself. I hadn't noticed him do it before but I guess I hadn't been paying attention. "I do it all the time" he said, '"just to remind myself that there is something out there greater than I am. It keeps me humble"
I laughed. "My parents were atheist academics. History was their god; memory kept them humble" My dentist nodded and smiled.

I lied. History wasn't my parents' god, it's mine. My parents were children of modernism, too close to their past and too ashamed of it to understand or admit its continuing influence on their lives. Symptoms were for others to present and for them to analyze. They were too afraid and too stupid to be anything but arrogant.
I am an atheist. I worship history because I have no memory of one.
---

I think as a point of moral philosophy that one should never be able to say that someone else, a person or state, gave one permission to kill. But that is the logic behind the military, the logic that allows soldiers to do their duty, and the rest of us to ignore the normal crimes of war. And that's the logic behind the horror of those who are offended by the acts of torture at Abu Ghraib, and we assume by now other places as well. I have no patience with it.
If you are sane, you are responsible for your actions. If you kill it is your own choice. You have the blood on your hands.

Most people don't want that sort of responsibility. It seems a hallmark of our democracy that our leaders don't either.

I have to laugh, though it's not a laugh I'm proud of.
Causing an uproar, an Israeli Cabinet minister and Holocaust survivor said Sunday that Israel's offensive in a Gaza refugee camp - including TV images of displaced Palestinians searching the rubble for their meager belongings - brought back memories of his family's suffering. The Guardian

Training wheels etc.

Taking a break from trying to reconstruct my so called electronic life, just enough to comment on Ben Stein et al.: the various attempts to play down the crimes of our soldiers and our leaders.
Release all the pictures.
I'm sick of references to the 'menacing' of prisoners by guard dogs. A dog bite is not a threat. And rape is not a thought crime.

No. Of course not- it couldn't have been a wedding party. It was a resistance cell of women and children (one deviously dressed in a wedding gown!). It wasn't a wedding party just as mosques aren't mosques and hospitals are never hospitals when they are bombed. Celebrating women and children are not civilians. 'Contractors' traveling with the American army to torture and kill Iraqis ARE civilians. CIA personnel are 'civilians' and the people who planned and executed the war are all civilians. We're not civilians- we are insurgents, criminals and potential collateral damage. Riverbend

My computer crashed for the last time and I'm working now on my new ibook. It'll take some getting used to. My last computer was a 5 year old G3 powerbook.
The screen is tiny, but I can watch movies.
I'll get back to business soon.

A link from Cacoa
Most of the article recaps the Amnesty International report, and the context. But here are the final paragraphs

For four years, Khalil Bashir, a school principal, his wife Souad, their six children and his mother have been under pressure from the Israeli army to leave their home near the Israeli settlement of Kfar Darom in the Gaza strip.

In October 2000, Israeli soldiers took over the upper floors of their house. Since then, the Bashir family have been confined to the ground floor, while the top floor has been turned into an army base accessed by a ladder.

Even though the Israeli army has full control of the house, soldiers have opened fire on the house from a watchtower. The sides of the house are riddled with bullets and the ground floor rooms facing the army position have sustained extensive damage.

Three members of the Bashir family have been injured by Israeli army fire. On 13 October 2000, Mr Bashir's son Yazen, 17, was shot and injured in the leg while he was getting water. On 28 April, 2001 soldiers shot from the watchtower into Mr Bashir's bedroom while he was reading, injuring him in the back of the head and neck.

On 18 February 2004 Israeli soldiers shot and seriously injured Mr Bashir's son Yusuf, 15. At the time Yusuf was outside the house with his father seeing off visitors, including two United Nations staff members. The three visitors had just got into their vehicle, clearly marked with the UN emblem, and were about to leave when a single shot was fired from the Israeli watchtower. Yusuf was hit in the back by a bullet. He is still in hospital and it is not known if he will walk again.

Shortly afterwards, his sister Amira, 18, told Amnesty International: "I am worried for my brother. I don't know if he will walk again; and I am worried about my three little siblings, my parents and my grandmother. I pray that they will be safe. The home should be the safest place but for our family it is not."
The Independent

Practice Practice Practice…
As I've said a few times recently, this country is becoming more sophisticated in its tastes and manners. Interestingly, I'm not referring to the tastes and manners of Manhattanites. As it stands, what has happened is more of a leveling, and the city I live in has if anything become more provincial. New York is still, perhaps more than ever, a place for foreigners who need or want to escape their homelands: Manhattan for the rich, the outer boroughs for everyone else. But things have changed. I've been to quite a few parties, with people from five or six countries, and been the only American. The thriving neighborhoods in Brooklyn and Queens are made up almost entirely of immigrants. There are places in New York where you could imagine yourself not only in a foreign country, but in a small western European city. And none of those places, with small cafes and shops, is in Manhattan. New York is now a place for immigrants to come to mingle with each other, if they're poor, or even if they're not.

Self-consciously serious American culture has always been thin. As often as it's based on the transubstantiation of the popular and vulgar, too often it's based on their denial. This is due partly to the nature of our mediocrities. Criticism of the banalities of the bourgeoisie in this country and others is often shaded -with subtlety or not- as a critique of democracy. You can say this about Greenberg, Foucault or Antonin Scalia. It's fascinating to understand just how much the art world, for example, flooded as it is with works that ape popular culture, still needs to posit itself superior to movies and tv. But broad slatherings of irony can not hide the fact that the central theme of the works is envy.

Israeli war crimes against civilians in Rafah and Gaza

- In the first 10 days of May 2004, Israel's demolition of 131 residential buildings in Gaza left 1,100 Palestinians homeless.

- Five days later, continued Israeli demolition operations doubled the number of homeless since the beginning of May 2004 to 2,197 Palestinians.

- The total number of people to lose their homes in the Gaza Strip is 18,382 since the start of the Second Intifada in September 2000.

- The majority of the demolitions this month have taken place in Rafah in the south of the Gaza Strip, where 12,600 people had already been made homeless by demolitions since the Intifada began.

- On 11 May 2004, Israel killed 15 Palestinians in the al-Zaytoun neighborhood of Gaza City, including 4 children, and injured at least 200 others, including 35 children.

- On 13 May 2004, Israel killed 12 Palestinians in Rafah, including a child, and injured at least 20 others.

- By 15 May 2004, two days after the 13 May invasion began, a total of 14 Palestinian civilians had been killed and 30 injured in Rafah, with 80 homes destroyed, leaving 880 Palestinians homeless.

The Palestinian Centre for Human Rights: "The extensive destruction of civilian property, carried out wantonly and unlawfully, and without military necessity constitutes a grave breach of the Fourth Geneva Convention as defined in article 147, and a war crime as clarified in article 85.5 of the First Additional Protocol to the Geneva Conventions."

Amnesty International: "More than 3,000 homes, vast areas of agricultural land and hundreds of other properties have been destroyed by the Israeli army and security forces in Israel and the Occupied Territories in the past three and a half years," and said that "some of these acts of destruction amount to grave breaches of the Fourth Geneva Convention and are war crimes."

For nearly 12 years, Staff Sgt. Jimmy Massey was a hard-core, some say gung-ho, Marine. For three years he trained fellow Marines in one of the most grueling indoctrination rituals in military life - Marine boot camp.
The Iraq war changed Massey. The brutality, the sheer carnage of the U.S. invasion, touched his conscience and transformed him forever. He was honorably discharged with full severance last Dec. 31 and is now back in his hometown, Waynsville, N.C.
...
Q: What does the public need to know about your experiences as a Marine?

A: The cause of the Iraqi revolt against the American occupation. What they need to know is we killed a lot of innocent people. I think at first the Iraqis had the understanding that casualties are a part of war. But over the course of time, the occupation hurt the Iraqis. And I didn't see any humanitarian support.

Read the whole thing, It's pretty nasty stuff. The Sacramento Bee

Freeway Blogger

AP

Josh Marshall ...irregular methods originally approved for use against al Qaida terrorists who had just recently landed a devastating blow against the US, were later expanded (by which mix of urgency, desperation, reason, bad values or hubris remains to be determined) to the prosecution of the insurgency in Iraq.

In the words recently attributed to Gen. Miller, they Gitmo-ized the counterinsurgency operation in Iraq.

In other words, methods approved for use against the worst and most dangerous terrorists spread -- like ink through tissue paper -- to other military theaters that were, at best, only tangentially related to the war on terror. And this, I think we can say, is tied to the boundless, undefined and ever-expanding definition which the administration has given to the war on terror.

The Observer Dozens of videotapes of American guards allegedly engaged in brutal attacks on Guantanamo Bay detainees have been stored and catalogued at the camp, an investigation by The Observer has revealed.

The disclosures, made in an interview with Tarek Dergoul, the fifth British prisoner freed last March, who has been too traumatised to speak until now, prompted demands last night by senior politicians on both sides of the Atlantic to make the videos available immediately.

They say that if the contents are as shocking as Dergoul claims, they will provide final proof that brutality against detainees has become an institutionalised feature of America's war on terror.


I'm honest. I've made my response as to the questions raised by the ticking bomb problem. But Marshall's 'thoughtfulness' is silly and corrupt.

Hip Hop, Standard destroyer.
Leave a muthafucka open like a foyer.
(I've moved on to "Speakerboxxx")
---
As I, struggle to keep my balance and composure
I'm 'posed ta, propose a toast to players on every coast-a
The lyrical roller coaster, mind-bender
'Stead of watchin these sucker MC's
I'm seein just how they lyin to the general population
Don't be patient, get up and stand up for your life
Don't you agree or understand we lost some rights at 1-1-9?
Come dumb, come young, come blind unwind confined
to the situation, we facin, cause in time, tick tick boom

[singers]
Tick, boom.. tick, tick-boom
Tick, boom.. tick, tick-boom
Tick, boom.. tick, tick-boom
Tick, boom.. tick, tick-boom

[explosion forward and reversed]
[scratched: "You're gonna die here" - 2X]

[Big Boi]
When will we all, awake up out this dream
Come here and smell the Folgers, the soldiers are human beings
Man actin as if he was the supreme bein
Clockin the souls of men out like he was G-O-D and
W-A-Rrah, there'll be no tomorrow but sorrow
and horror will follow the hollow hearts battle for dollars
Politicians, modern day magicians
Physicians of death, more health care for poor health
Who makin us ill, they makin us kill
That's makin me spill my guts (chill Big, lay in the cut)
For what? I refuse to sit in the backseat and get handled
Like I do nuttin all day but sit around watch the Cartoon Channel
I rap about, the Presidential election and the scandal
that followed, and we all watched the nation, as it swallowed

and chalked it up, basically America you got FUCKED
The media shucked and jived now we stuck - damn!

[singing - "can't be heard clearly"]
[scratched: "You're gonna die here" - 2X]

[Big Boi]
Operation Anaconda - ask yourself
was it full of bleeps and blunders, did they ever find Osama?
And why in the fuck did Daniel Pearl have to pay the price
for his life and his wife plead twice?
See Al-Amin got life and Fred got dead, Hampton
To dampen the dream of all the Panthers
They got they answer for ransom
As we read together, as we dream together
Count your blessings whenever you feel that things won't be no better
But it got to, you gave me this microphone so I must rock you
Your brainwaves, airwaves, energized and SHOCKED you
Y'all got me, well I got y'all, long as I know y'all listenin
I'ma always bring food for thought to the table in the kitchen
Now eat nigga!
War

From The New Zealand Herald:
"Almost 10,000 prisoners from President George W. Bush's so-called war on terror are being held around the world in secretive American-run jails and interrogation centres similar to the notorious Abu Ghraib Prison.
Some of these detention centres are so sensitive that even the most senior members of the United States Congress have no idea where they are.
From Iraq to Afghanistan to Cuba, this American gulag is driven by the pressure to obtain 'actionable' intelligence from prisoners captured by US forces.
The systematic practice of holding prisoners without access to lawyers or their families, together with a willingness to use 'coercive interrogation' techniques, suggests the abuse of prisoners at Abu Ghraib now shocking the world could be widespread."
Link courtesy of Buzzflash.

Here was a desert of distance of ways. They were plants and birds there is no.
Here was some mad things in then. It was the one. Who was the rider.
A desert was beautiful, it was a for the dishes, it was a balloon.
In poems into a slides of books.
I've been to the desert with a horse with no name.
Here was a desert of distance of ways. They were plants and birds there is no.
Here was some mad songs of these have notes.
I've been to the desert with a horse with no name.
I've been to the desert with a horse with no name.
I've been to the desert with a h

I got a note yesterday from an old friend. Her brother is having his first show in NY in 15 years. From May 21 to July 1 at Gavin Brown's Enterprise 620 Greenwich Street.

"Everything Christopher Knowles does makes sense but not in the way we are accustomed to." - Robert Wilson.
I feel the earth move. I feel the tumbling down tumbling down...

I've uploaded the press release, here.
You should go.

For Huda Shaker, the humiliation began at a checkpoint on the outskirts of Baghdad. The American soldiers demanded to search her handbag. When she refused one of the soldiers pointed his gun towards her chest.

"He pointed the laser sight directly in the middle of my chest," said Professor Shaker, a political scientist at Baghdad University. "Then he pointed to his penis. He told me, 'Come here, bitch, I'm going to fuck you.'"

Jesus fuck I hate Kristof. He's such a condescending scumbag. Can he write anything about anyone outside of his own group—define it as you wish: American, male, white, heterosexual, pig fucker etc.—that's not merely an excuse to magnify his/their sense of political, social, or moral superiority?
I have contempt for those who make a career of their contempt for others. I don't care if it's Kristof, Safire, or Limbaugh; I don't care if it's George Bush or Brian Leiter or Eric Alterman. A good percentage of the punditocracy speaks to and for the rich. The rest speak to and for themselves. Why should I be impressed by the hypocrisy of the educated middle class?
As my old accountant used to say: "They treat the peasants like shit in this country."

"The Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, where a unit of U.S. soldiers abused prisoners, is just the largest and suddenly most notorious in a worldwide constellation of detention centers -- many of them secret and all off-limits to public scrutiny -- that the U.S. military and CIA have operated in the name of counterterrorism or counterinsurgency operations since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks." The Washington Post: The Secret World of US Interrogation

Also, on Nightline, McCain referred to the difference between Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib, saying that unlike the prisoners in Cuba those in Iraq had rights under the Geneva Convention. In that regard he's chosen to follow the administration's absurd moral logic.

Luc Sante in the Times

Leaving aside the question of how anyone could have perpetrated the horrors depicted in those pictures, you can't help but wonder why American soldiers would incriminate themselves by posing next to their handiwork. Americans don't seem to have a long tradition of that sort of thing. I can't offhand recall having seen comparable images from any recent wars, although before the digital era amateur photographs were harder to spread. There have been many atrocity photographs over the years, of course — the worst I've ever seen were taken in Algeria in 1961, and once when I was a child another kid found and showed off his father's cache of pictures from the Pacific Theater in World War II, which shook me so badly that I can't remember with any certainty what they depicted. I'm pretty sure, though, that they did not show anyone grinning and making self-congratulatory gestures.

The pictures from Abu Ghraib are trophy shots. The American soldiers included in them look exactly as if they were standing next to a gutted buck or a 10-foot marlin. That incongruity is not the least striking aspect of the pictures. The first shot I saw, of Specialist Charles A. Graner and Pfc. Lynndie R. England flashing thumbs up behind a pile of their naked victims, was so jarring that for a few seconds I took it for a montage. When I registered what I was seeing, I was reminded of something. There was something familiar about that jaunty insouciance, that unabashed triumph at having inflicted misery upon other humans. And then I remembered: the last time I had seen that conjunction of elements was in photographs of lynchings.

The citizenry of this country is more sophisticated and more worldly than at any time in our history. That's less true of our elite. But that worldliness has not come naturally; it's being force-fed by the expansion of markets and faces a backlash from a grouping of conservatives and some of those -mostly white- who have been left behind by the cruelties of economic 'modernization.' It's easier after all for white liberals to worry about race, gender, and sexual orientation, than it is for them to worry about class.

In light of the above it's interesting to read articles like this one also from the Times about the transformation of WLIB, until recently the station of NY Caribbean community, and now host to Air America.

"I'm very cordial with them, they're a great bunch of people," Mr. Anderson said of Air America, which is said to have more than $20 million and is now operating in 9 markets (as well as satellite radio and the Web) throughout the country and says it will be in 26 by the end of this month. "I'm a member of the A.C.L.U., so you know where my political leanings are, but I'm conflicted. It's important for Air America to confront the reactionary right, they're doing an incredible job, but it's at the expense of the Caribbean community."

Mark Riley used to host Politics Live, which was probably the best political talk show in NY. I've written about him once before. Riley was the voice of politics on LIB, and as I said last time would debate various topics with callers on the show. It was fascinating to listen, precisely because he was more to the left than a good percentage of the his community. He would defend gay rights to those who thought homosexuality was immoral, or evil, and he was respected by those he argued with because he respected them. He's now on Air America - I double checked to make sure. To do otherwise would have been stupid, but the context is gone, and with it any real sense of a politics for which I can have more than marginal respect. Air America is not designed to entertain and educate an audience, to teach sophistication, but to give the sophisticated a place to talk amongst themselves. It misses the point. And the hosts and audience are less sophisticated than they pretend.

The false populism of liberals will do nothing to counter the false populism of the right.

Remember Falluja.

I linked to this a couple of weeks ago, but Max linked to it today, so I'll do it again:
During the first two weeks of this month, the American army committed war crimes in Falluja on a scale unprecedented for this war. According to the relatively few media reports of what took place there, some 600 Iraqis were killed during these two weeks, among them some 450 elderly people, women and children.

The sight of decapitated children, the rows of dead women and the shocking pictures of the soccer stadium that was turned into a temporary grave for hundreds of the slain - all were broadcast to the world only by the Al Jazeera network. During the operation in Falluja, according to the organization Doctors Without Borders, U.S. Marines even occupied the hospitals and prevented hundreds of the wounded from receiving medical treatment. Snipers fired from the rooftops at anyone who tried to approach.

This was a retaliatory operation, carried out by the Marines, accompanied by F-16 fighter planes and assault helicopters, under the code name "Vigilant Resolve." It was revenge for the killing of four American security guards on March 31. But while the killing of the guards, whose bodies were dragged through the streets of the city and then hung from a bridge, received wide media coverage, and thus prepared hearts and minds for the military revenge, the hundreds of victims of the American retaliation were practically a military secret

War Crimes:
David Kay, the man who led the U.S. search for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, says he repeatedly told people about problems with the interrogation of prisoners, but the military ignored him.
---
Early Iraq Abuse Accounts Met With Silence
"In contrast to suggestions that the photos indicate isolated abuse by a few, these Iraqis told of widespread practices in several camps that would violate the Geneva Conventions and other human rights standards. On Friday, in an unusual public statement, the international Red Cross agreed, disclosing that its inspectors last year found a "broad pattern" of abuse."
---
They knew
---

Moral relativism etc. : The CIA, Valerie Plame's employer, is linked to torture. Was there ever a time when it was not? Is there anything new about this scandal other than the pictures? Marshall's comment, the more I think of it, is grotesque. Does moral responsibility begin and end with the King or his factotum, with the US or its vassals, with the one who does the deed or the one who pays the bill?
How much respect is a civilized human being obliged to have for Wilson, Plame, or Clarke? Clarke is a good servant to a corrupt master. Wilson, and Plame, his glamour girl wife; he with a portrait of George H.W. Bush on his desk and her glamour in the service of... what?

Again, it's not the facts that annoy me, though even that word is a little off -the facts are uncertain- it's the need to oversimplify, to find saints and saviors. Atrios is as annoying to me in some ways as Leiter. Everyone in that little list above is self serving and corrupt. I'm grateful for their honesty as regards recent events, but that doesn't mean I'd enjoy sitting next to any of them at dinner.

Out of the shower and out the door, but first:
Our moral superiority to mass murderers and people who desecrate people's bodies in town squares is, while thankfully true... Bullshit.

Mass murderers like Hussien are bought and paid for, in our "national interest." Marshall is lying to himself.
And: "...a love/hate relationship with Lieberman." ?

Rumsfeld should stay [too many links to count on that subject] and so should Negroponte. The people don't care, [archive.org] so let them learn why they should. American values—read: Capitalism—will always win, but not America itself. The faster the people of this country learn the costs of their own ignorance, the better.

I've said this before as well: I have no respect for the members of our armed forces. I have pity for the desperate and the foolish, and contempt for the rest. The willingness to be led, the need to be in servitude, disgusts me. I suppose it's just result of the education foisted on me by my otherwise Stalinist father. I am the product after all, of a sort of Skinnerian hell that instilled in me a sense of moral responsibility, though whether that was even the intent is still uncertain. Considering the means I'm still surprised it didn't have the opposite effect, but there's still time. Until that day I'm as disgusted as much by those who follow as those who lead.

---

This country is being led by drunken frat boys and their servants.

Is this George Will? David Brooks? Or is it one of the young disciples of Socrates and Allan Bloom who now populate the Federalist society, one of those condescending creeps who masturbates to posters of Antonin Scalia. "Fuck me Master!" These are the bastards who send illiterate white trash, born again bumpkins and niggers to die in Iraq and Afghanistan, all in service to an ideal: that the many should serve the few. 

---

Brian Leiter on poetry Short and sharp: I'm no fan of Helen Vendler. Those who know how best to define great art are most often those least able to define why one would ever try to make the stuff. Art is artifice, is skill, is the ability to communicate ideas with subtlety and grace. What those ideas are is something else. Leiter has no respect for poetry as he has no respect for law, seeing both as merely means to ends. To Vendler ends as such are vulgar. Again to the stupidity of a culture that divides itself, its knowledge and awareness, into categories of "Form" and "Content." No sophistication. None. You can all go to Hell. It's Friday. Time to drink.

Brian Leiter's arrogance, and his defense of technical expertise in all matters -at the expense, I have to think, of wisdom- often gets the better of him, but if he doesn't see how offensive this there's not much I can add.
What next, eugenics jokes?

Maybe it's just academics I'm sick of.

I only end up in these places by accident, or in this case thanks to Brad Delong. But Jesus fucking Christ is Drezner an idiot. And Volokh's not much brighter.

But then Delong continues to go back and forth between realism and idealism. Why else would an economist have any interest in "the just" as anything other than the natural outcome of debate.

Is a good speechwriter somebody who approaches the job as if it were a zero-sum game, in which for the president to win the public must lose--must be misinformed and deluded? Or is a good speechwriter somebody who approaches the job as a task of communication and enlightenment?

To me, it is clear that the second of these is the proper definition of "good speechwriter": for no one seeks to do evil--and to misinform and delude is to do evil--knowingly, and anybody who is ignorant about the nature of the good cannot successfully master their craft.
Say what?

Courtesy of: Max

Last month, the U.S. Army announced 17 soldiers in Iraq, including a brigadier general, had been removed from duty after charges of mistreating Iraqi prisoners. But the details of what happened have been kept secret, until now.
War Crimes Part II

And from The Guardian

"It's insanity," said Robert Baer, a former CIA agent, who has examined the case, and is concerned about the private contractors' free-ranging role. "These are rank amateurs and there is no legally binding law on these guys as far as I could tell. Why did they let them in the prison?"

Ask me again why I'm supposed to give a shit when Mercs get fucking capped.

"I'm just a white boy called the Deputy CC "
The Rapping Policeman.
From Cacoa, in her new home.

Remembering Falluja
During the first two weeks of this month, the American army committed war crimes in Falluja on a scale unprecedented for this war. According to the relatively few media reports of what took place there, some 600 Iraqis were killed during these two weeks, among them some 450 elderly people, women and children.
The sight of decapitated children, the rows of dead women and the shocking pictures of the soccer stadium that was turned into a temporary grave for hundreds of the slain - all were broadcast to the world only by the Al Jazeera network. During the operation in Falluja, according to the organization Doctors Without Borders, U.S. Marines even occupied the hospitals and prevented hundreds of the wounded from receiving medical treatment. Snipers fired from the rooftops at anyone who tried to approach.
Orit Shohat in Haaretz

Through Crooked Timber I found out a few days ago that the woman who was The Invisble Adjunct has thrown in the towel, both as a teacher and a blogger. I thought about mentioning this before but didn't get around to it -decided not to do so- for various reasons, mostly having to do with this post, which as luck would have it turned up in my incoming links today.

There is a conflict, for those who care to think, between this post by Brad DeLong, and this one commenting on Atrios and his critics.
A religious argument for moral behavior -in the context of democracy- if it is to mean anything must operate on the assumption of a need for positive actions or decisions above and beyond those required by law. Delong's liberal/realist argument is based on something else entirely: an assumption of the inevitability and moral, intellectual and economic value of honest greed.
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Terry Eagleton on Edward Said, this week in The Nation (print only):
If Said can sometimes sound like a liberal humanist, he can at times sound rather more discomfortingly like a radical humanist; but he never sounds much like a socialist, in the style of Raymond Williams and E.P. Thompson. Like both these thinkers, however, he never really takes issue with the suspiciously sanguine aspects of humanism. Is there something in a generous faith in human capacities that is also callow and repressive? Does humanism thrive on a certain well-groomed blindness to our apparently inexhaustible ability to be morally obscene?

I didn't know until reccently that Eagleton came out of the Catholic left.
I'm not much on religion but I'm also not much of a liberal. And there's something to be said for the critique of- directed at- freedom by religious thought. But the religious thought I'm refering to of course is conservative or leftist, not liberal.
Liberal religious thought- as both religion and thought- is mostly crap.

If Bush goes into Fallujah, what are the odds Sharon goes after Arafat, trapping the US in a war with Islam?
Bush is an idiot.

Juan Cole

Listening to Outkast and Radiohead. Fascinating how American optimism can still produce real humor and art. The relation of the dream of Time Warner to the self fashioning of Andre 3000. I can slide into Kid A with no effort, though most of the time it's little more than an enervating but gently soothing cheap thrill. Speakerboxxx/The Love Below on the other hand, is hard work and red meat. The Love Below reminds me how important Prince is to the last 25 years of American music.
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In a sense the difference between the two is the difference between the intellectual understanding of the marketplace, described by market theory and economics, and the way the market is lived. It's the difference between an art by intellectuals and the art that intellectuals in the future will look back on and enjoy. It's why Outkast is better than Radiohead and why Belle is more perceptive than anyone at Crooked Timber.
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Spread is the funniest sexiest dance/fuck song I've heard in a long time;
and I'm pretty damn sure it's the first dance/fuck song to include a reference to Shirley Chisholm.

Go spend your money.

Intellectuals discuss the vulgarity and corruption of politics and politicians as if they themselves were immune. That's why I have a hard time taking liberals like Josh Marshall any more seriously than I do Chomsky: the rationalist who doesn't understand that he is worshipped more than emulated. Follow Marshall's logic here as he overintellectualizes his way into, and then out of, a corner. And Brian Leiter spends as much time on the subject of professional bedhopping as he does on law and politics. How appropriately perverse for an expert on Nietzsche.

Escape hatches - a brief consideration (two from a rather long list.):
North America. Pros: charming accent might attract general goodwill, free drinks. Cons: am frightened by the concept of Texas.
Israel. umm, no. Just... no.
Belle.

I made a comment on this post about Vanunu at Crooked Timber, but it's been passed by in the continuing discussion of the specifics of the case.

Q: What is immoral in principle about treason?
If you use relativism as a guide, then the USA and the USSR, or Nazi Germany, are equivalent. If you don't, then 'treason' as such is irrelevant.

Reality television
"Al-Jazeera has a track record of accurate reporting - which is why its journalists have been criminalised and its offices bombed " The Guardian

Kerry fails to gain from Iraq crisis "George Bush emerged relatively unscathed from one of the worst months of his presidency yesterday, holding steady in opinion polls as Iraq experienced a wave of ambushes, kidnappings and bombs."

Oh, and by the way: If they institute a draft lets make damn sure they do it with no college deferment..
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Media and Falloojeh...
There has been a lot of criticism about the way Al-Arabia and Al-Jazeera were covering the riots and fighting in Falloojeh and the south this last week. Some American spokesman for the military was ranting about the "spread of anti-Americanism" through networks like the abovementioned.

Actually, both networks did a phenomenal job of covering the attacks on Falloojeh and the southern provinces. Al-Jazeera had their reporter literally embedded in the middle of the chaos- and I don't mean the lame embedded western journalists type of thing they had going at the beginning of the war (you know- embedded in the Green Zone and embedded in Kuwait, etc.). Ahmed Mansur, I believe his name was, was actually standing there, in the middle of the bombing, shouting to be heard over the F-16s and helicopters blasting away at houses and buildings. It brought back the days of 'shock and awe'... Riverbend

I have been too busy and too caught up in other things.
Early this week maybe.

Baghdad Burning

Juan Cole

Sometimes I rewrite things until they become too artificial, other times I rewrite them and do the reverse. At least the post below is a bit clearer.
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So the US is going to 'capture or kill' Muqtada al-Sadr, and conclude the transformation of a marginal figure into a popular martyr.
...

Fuck the war.
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Twice in the past week I've been told that I need to get off my ass if I'm ever going to get anything done—get whatever it is I'm supposed to want, or grow old safely—both times by someone with an admitted willingness to get on their ass for the same reason.

I have respect for the casual cynicism of women. I grew up around it, but I know it too well for my own good. I have a long memory.
At the Armory show last month, I passed by the booth of a Parisian dealer who recognized me as the man who had made a fool of himself in her presence in Madrid the year before. I'd refused to use the introduction I had to her, gone in cold and left annoyed by her indifferent response, only as I left spitting out that I knew collectors of hers, who had bought two large pieces of mine in NY. Why I behaved this way, I don't know. But now she looked at me from a distance with the mixture of condescension and pity that a teenage girl will reserve for a boy who's missed his chance. The woman's in her 50's and that she would strike that pose with the casual manner of a 16-year-old and pull it off is some sort of a testament to the rightful victory of tradition over pure reason. I was an idiot.

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Killing time: Reviews.

I went to a dance performance Friday night. Never having seen anything by the Living Theater, I'd never imagined a work of choreography could succeed in making male bisexuality seem entirely unattractive. After all, they were dancers, right? Get me Paul Taylor.

Andrea Modica at Edwynn Houk. The narcissism of the pedophile. Worse than Sally Mann, who doesn't really bother me. And worse than Diane Arbus, who does.

Review of art reviewers: Every once in a while I have a fantasy that Vince Aletti, the photography critic of the village Voice, was killed by the same truck that bumped off Roland Barthes. Nostalgia and a momentary aphasia are the two most basic responses to any photograph. The only choice worth making is to go in the opposite direction, as much as possible (which let's face it, for photography, ain't much.) "He is dead, but he will never die." I spent 3 minutes with Camera Lucida before reading those words in the caption to a 19th C. photograph of a man about to be executed. I threw the book away in disgust.

Jeff Wall at Marian Goodman (opens next week.) His work has taught me things I would never have known without it, and there's not much else by anyone alive I can say that about. If you can understand why someone would hate Peter Greenaway and everything he stands for, intellectually, aesthetically, therefore politically, you'll get the point.

In fact that is the size of his formal militia. Muqtada's movement is like the layers of an onion. You have 10,000 militiamen. But then you have tens of thousands of cadres able to mobilize neighborhoods. Then you have hundreds of thousands of Sadrists, followers of Muqtada and other heirs of Muhammad Sadiq al-Sadr. Then you have maybe 5 million Shiite theocrats who sympathize with Muqtada's goals and rhetoric, about a third of the Shiite community. The Sadrists will now try to shift everything so that the 5 million become followers, the hundreds of thousands become cadres, and the tens of thousands become militiamen. Juan Cole

Better yet, read the whole page

Blowing it all to Hell
The Bush administration was last night facing a nightmare scenario in Iraq, fighting on two fronts against Sunni and Shia militants less than three months before it is due to hand over power to an Iraqi government. The Guardian.

And arresting Moqtada al-Sadr is just stupid!

War.
What am I supposed to say about this crap? That this country deserves this president? It's not his job to understand the implications of his actions, that responsibility belongs to everyone. And the fact that he lost the popular vote by an insignificant amount is just that: insignificant. It's called a republic for a reason. The people have the power, and the responsibility. The idiot's approval rating is dropping, but not fast enough.

The political culture of this country is gone to shit. No sense on the left that the people can be at fault. No sense that the situation as such affects all sides: that the Bushie's programmatic idiocy and Chomskian programmatic dreaming are, if not equally at fault, then equally absurd. No sense among mainstream liberals that programmatic logic is itself the problem. The reliance on programs alone is a sign only of this: of a refusal to take responsibility for your actions.

Find me a culture that acknowledges the flawed nature of humanity without demanding the coronation of a king; it's not this one. The choice between Noam Chomsky and George Will is no choice at all. And the people are fools.

I'll neaten up the last post later.

I have to admit I've been losing interest in this thing, if only because I've been losing interest in the commonplace opinions on the web. The intellectual activity here is pretty limited.
Anyway Brian Leiter doesn't understand the logic behind Brad Delong's attack on Chomsky. Well, there is no logic as such. He's simply responding reflexively, and as a realist, to Chomsky's romantic idealism; an idealism that although it seems coolly intellectual to Chomsky is more often associated with the earnest romanticism of his shaggy followers. Delong, however, is not willing [able?] to admit that what disgusts him is simply the idealism itself, so he has to torture logic to attack perfectly logical arguments.

It's not Chomsky's critical observations that offend DeLong; what pisses him off is the argument implicit in Chomsky's writing, and made explicit by his acolytes, that evil can and may yet be eliminated from this world. But for Delong to admit this as the reason behind his anger would be for him to admit the illiberalism behind his liberal philosophy.
Not being a liberal myself I have no such problems.

The note, which acknowledged Gunn suffered post-traumatic stress, said: "After discussion of his case it was determined ... this may be in his best interest mentally to overcome his fear by facing it. Therefore, he has been cleared for redeployment."

Gunn is not the only broken soldier being sent to battle. The Guardian has uncovered more than a dozen instances in which ill or injured soldiers were sent to war by a US military whose resources have been stretched near to breaking point by the simultaneous fronts in Afghanistan and Iraq. In its investigation, the Guardian learned of soldiers who were deployed with almost wilful disregard to their medical histories, and with the most cursory physical examinations.

The Guardian
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And the Clinton papers thing is interesting.
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Crooked Timber
The interesting thing about Gehry at his best is the sense of a narrative experience that is constructed without idealism or cynicism. The work describes a sort of curiosity with no goal beyond itself: an anti-foundationalist rhetoric that is nonetheless formally profound. Of course every architect is a cynic, it's part of the job; but every building has a philosophy behind it and some are more interesting than others, as some buildings are more beautiful than others.
Gehry's successful works are beautiful, and I've described one aspect of that beauty.

I'm paying attention, but not more. I've got to try to get more work done.

WaPo

On Sept. 11, 2001, national security adviser Condoleezza Rice was scheduled to outline a Bush administration policy that would address "the threats and problems of today and the day after, not the world of yesterday" -- but the focus was largely on missile defense, not terrorism from Islamic radicals.

The Guardian

...Bush's radical undermining of the long-established arrangements of Washington, including the demotion of the press's own role by breaking the off-the-record rule in order to have a weapon to use against (Richard) Clarke.

And I don't like mercs.