There's something wrong here.
I'm amused I guess.

"The first soldiers to arrive on Khalil Bashir's doorstep in Gaza five years ago explained the new geography of his home in terms he understood only too well. His three-storey house was to be like the West Bank, the Israeli officer said, with its areas of divided security and administrative control.
The army designated the living room as "Area A", after the part of the occupied territories where the Palestinians have control, and told all three generations of the Bashirs, from 81-year-old Zanah to her five-year-old granddaughter, that they were confined there for most nights and sometimes for much of the day. It was the only part of the house they could still call their own.

The bathroom, kitchen and bedrooms were "Area B", where Palestinians administer themselves but Israel has security control. In the Bashir home that meant soldiers had priority and the family had to ask permission to cook or go to the toilet.

And then came "Area C", where the Israeli military government runs everything and the Palestinians have no authority. The soldiers warned the Bashirs that all of their home above the ground floor was Area C and if they ventured up the stairs they would be shot."

"The rough consensus seemed to be that China poses at least as serious a medium and long-term threat as Islamic terrorism, but that we need to be careful not to shoot ourselves in the foot by reacting to China in ways that undercut what ought otherwise be major economic benefits we derive from its rise."

The nationalism of the powerful is petty.

Reed Hundt:
"When I was chairman of the Federal Communications Commission (1993-97), I asked Bill Bennett to visit my office so that I could ask him for help in seeking legislation that would pay for internet access in all classrooms and libraries in the country. Eventually Senators Olympia Snowe and Jay Rockefeller, with the White House leadership of President Clinton and Vice President Gore, put that provision in the Telecommunications Law of 1996, and today nearly 90% of all classrooms and libraries do have such access. The schools covered were public and private. So far the federal funding (actually collected from everyone as part of the phone bill) has been matched more or less equally with school district funding to total about $20 billion over the last seven years. More than 90% of all teachers praise the impact of such technology on their work. At any rate, since Mr. Bennett had been Secretary of Education I asked him to support the bill in the crucial stage when we needed Republican allies. He told me he would not help, because he did not want public schools to obtain new funding, new capability, new tools for success. He wanted them, he said, to fail so that they could be replaced with vouchers, charter schools, religious schools, and other forms of private education."

Keep this one for your archives and bring it out whenever you want to end an argument on this subject.

In Defense of Bill Bennett

Numbers have no secondary or implied meanings. Can there be implied meanings in logic? If so how are they acknowledged?
It is logical, indeed required that we recognize implied meanings in verbal communication. Without this any discussion of politics is absurd. That Bennett's construction was 'loaded' is undeniable. DeLong's inability to recognize that this is so -or that implication can be seen to exist without knowing or caring to know intention- marks the limits of his intellectual imagination. The same goes for well off ratonalist idiots who argue with the faithful poor.
What are the implied meanings of a college education? NOT IMPLIED TO YOU, ASSHOLE, BUT TO SOMEONE WITHOUT IT!
update: read the first couple of comments here

oy...

As someone who has spent most of the last 25 years living and working alongside illegals- as a non-union construction worker- this just cracks me up.
My wages have gone flat or dropped even as my skill level has increased. I make up some of the difference in social capital, (and now since my both my parents have died, from stocks and bonds.) I enjoy contradictions. And It's a contradiction of this country that the immigrants are as interesting these days as the natives are lost.

This was pretty funny too.
---
Death
On a darker note I'd like to add that unlike any of the moralizing commentators in this country the assholes posting the photographs have seen their friends' hands, arms, and heads blown off. I don't expect much from people, and I expect less from soldiers. I expect something more from anyone who claims to be a leader; and my father was a believer in the death penalty, for those convicted of betraying the public trust.

Yes
"...you don't repair disorganized or incompetent government by granting it more power. You fix it by making it more organized and more competent. Just so here -- the move to militarize government's domestic responsibilities rather than improve them is a dangerous trend. And it suggests that, functionally, there's little left of conservatism today other than a warped big-government authoritarianism."

Berube v. Brownback
Celebration
---

And Russert's performance this morning was indeed grotesque

Here's the link to the HRW report:
Leadership Failure- Firsthand Accounts of Torture of Iraqi Detainees by the U.S. Army’s 82nd Airborne Division

update: Legal and moral analysis by Scott Horton at Balkinization

I posted this in comments:

This is the difference between corruption by action and corruption by inaction. Torture has 'been allowed.' One doesn't lead, one merely responds to others, even as one relies on assumptions as to how soldiers will act when they're 'let off the leash.'

It's the cynical manipulation of mob rule. In a more general sense you could say the avoidance of responsibility, the reliance on polling as policy -the people should 'get what they want'- and the tendencey towards philosophical naturalism all play a part in this. People are seen as rationally, predictably acting within their limits rather than being asked to see themselves as moral actors with the possibility of transcendng those limits.
Of course in this country it's seen as a choice between egalitarianism or cynicism, and its not that simple; any more than it's there's a simple choice between original intent and some other interpretative mechanism.

There's a problem here, and it bodes ill for the republic. People can't tell the moral/ intellectual difference between flexibility and randomness, dynamism and chaos.

Tell me I'm supposed to give a fuck.

For these "grunts" as Mr. Kaplan calls them, the mission is everything. Political implications and larger strategic thinking they leave to others. As Mr. Kaplan writes of the Green Berets in Colombia: "They lived for the particular technical task at hand, and were willing to die, provided there would be someone behind them to pick up the task where they had left off." Or as Bob Innes, a veteran of the United States Coast Guard, says of Vietnam: "I learned that honor and integrity are personal qualities, not institutional ones, not ones we should expect the state to always have. If you don't like the policy, tough. Bad things happen in this world. You do the best you can in your job, and let the crybabies write the books."In fact, most of the noncom and middle-level officers Mr. Kaplan meets in the Philippines do not speak in terms of "saving" or "improving" the country. Rather, he writes, "these men saw their charge in terms of developing a cadre of Westernized officers and useful contacts in both the Christian and Muslim communities who could be influential even in the event that the state broke up. None of the Americans were cynical [!!?], yet all of them were aware of America's limitations amid vast and roiling cultural and political forces. But they persevered, finding deep personal meaning in their jobs."

---
On a wider note in regards to the nationalism light [cute?] of the idiots at Democracy Arsenal, and my general contempt for the American variety of politicized intellectualism:

Why do science and scientific logic offer such a lousy template for cosmopolitan internationalism?
For the same reason the ideal of an objective journalism is absurd (and the British press is so much better than our own). Cosmopolitanism takes pleasure in disunity and discontinuity, not out of nihilism but out of respect.

The problem (for me) with the majority of self styled "mature' political thinkers in and around the US is not that they have beliefs I'm opposed to but that they pretend they don't have beliefs as such (beliefs of course which are not and can not be rational). It's for others to remind them of the self interest hidden behind their assumptions.
As to the link above: Between impartial morality and nationalism -and given that power tends to corrupt- nationalism wins.
These people are as deluded as the Chomskians with whom they have so little patience.
Again the difference between wanting to be 'right' and wanting to be 'skilled.'

One of the problems of modern art as well of course. but I've only realized recently and by accident, how personally I took this years ago, as I was trying to come to terms with the 'fictive' space of photographs, movies and classical pictorial as opposed to modern 'factual' or 'presentational' painting. One of the wonders of fiction is that it can both describe and invent. It contains/exhibits by it's nature an ironic duality of objective and subjective. And it articulates rather than hides that duality. Modernity as ideology rather than era stood as opposed to this. If power corrupts, politics makes vulgar.

But of course postmodernists- (again: ideology rather than era)- have been most often little more than self indulgent rebels, the angry adolescent offspring of their overbearing and contemptuous teachers.

a bit rough
I gotta go

Pompous idiots

It amuses me no end that gentrification becomes a scandal in the eyes of liberals only when it happens quickly. Is the slow invasion of Williamsburg Brooklyn by liberal Manhattanites somehow more natural than the quick-witted greed of well connected republicans in Louisiana?

Not unrelated.


"Damned if I know" either.

And When They Came For Me...
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"It is now clear that a challenge on this scale requires greater federal authority and a broader role for the armed forces - the institution of our government most capable of massive logistical operations on a moment's notice."
Laura Rozen caught it as well.

And please, no more defense of Richard Clarke.
---

Listening to Hitchens v. Galloway stream on KPFTX. Fun stuff, but the booing when Gorgeous George attacks Sharon is depressing.

I'm being overrun by teenage anthro-slackers?

One last time: DeLong is an asshole. Read the comments by 'David'.

Mark Danner hits the mainstream, or: An Article from the Guardian is Accidentally Published in the NY Times.

The new sincerity of the slumming intellectual. Playing to the masses from the college lecture hall. Midcult made not by design but as the effect of insecure hypocrisy.

Class divides everything in the country, without anyone admitting it. The writers of N+1 are trapped in the urbane ghetto of Manhattan culture; it doesn't mean shit that they live in Brooklyn (where they're hated). The strength of American arts and letters is derived from two sorts: those smart and sophisticated enough to get the fuck out (or rich enough to be able to travel at will) and those with the wise old man's appreciation for honest vulgarity and dishonest skill.
---

update: Henry F. chooses N+1.
It needs to be asked why young intellectual journals published in NYC in 2005 are so provincial.

I tossed this off yesterday and saved it as a draft:
Less intelligent and even more intellectually vulgar than that asshole from Berkeley, it's Alex Tabarrok.

Kozol's argument can be summed up thusly:

"Letting people escape over the Berlin Wall starves the East German system of the presence of well-educated, politically effective people to fight for the equity of all East Germans."

Smart huh? But of course the argument makes perfect sense within limits. I could say just as easily: "Brave men don't run, they stand and fight." It's an old argument.

I'm not going to add to this string of oversimplifications. Anyone who offers up critiques of others' assumptions with no more than their own assumptions is a fool. Tabarrok counters Kozol's moral arguments -arguments about what does and should constitute moral action- by arguing that such arguments amount to an attack on freedom. But there's no such thing as freedom. Swedish social democracy is bounded by the Swedish culture of conformity, just as American politics is bounded by our culture of idealism and self-destruction (and not every country has our reputation for destroying public toilets.) And I speak English not my own variety of Gxzshppsph. So lets dump this 'libertarian' shit once and for all. Libertarians have their heads up their asses when they pretend culture is no more than exotic decorations and strange food.

As I've mentioned before, DeLong tries to have it both ways: to see himself as a man in search of wisdom, in the classical sense, and as the modern social scientist. Isn't the point of rational self-interest that it obviates most discussion of morality? Assuming that everyone behaves the same way and has the same interests -or that what may be universal interests have the same form- leads to the logic that everyone should have the same interests. So Americans are just like Norwegians, and German is just like Swahili.

The world is not made of what we use to measure it. The only logical choice is to use more than one measure and compare the results. Simple. Really fucking simple.

Delong reminds me of Chomsky: rationalist philosophy predicated upon simplistic assumptions as to human motives, desires and capacities. He throws fits about Ch. only because their assumptions are opposed.
Similar problems here
my comment at Pharyngula is here

The end of welfare as we know it.

CNN:

"I am stunned by an interview I conducted with New Orleans Detective Lawrence Dupree. He told me they were trying to rescue people with a helicopter and the people were so poor they were afraid it would cost too much to get a ride and they had no money for a "ticket." Dupree was shaken telling us the story. He just couldn't believe these people were afraid they'd be charged for a rescue."

More ways to miss the point.

The Times-Picayune open letter to the President

Nathan Newman:
"The Bush administration has been actively hostile to the trade unions in Iraq-- even keeping old Saddam Hussein laws in place to restrict union rights -- but a new decree 875 by the new government promises an even worse crackdown or even elimination of labor union independence in that nation." more

I saw this this morning. By about a sentence into the second paragraph, the man was in tears, his voice almost inaudible.
---update: here's the video---

A compilation (from yesterday) by Michael Froomkin

Baghdad on the Bayou

Also from Doug Ireland: Neo-liberal Iraq

Doug Ireland sends readers to Molly Ivins. This throw-away line struck me: "...long-range consequences of long-term policies like letting the Corps of Engineers try to build a better river than God..."

Max speaks, you listen

As a matter of legacy insurance, party politics and what are in fact the best interests of the country, Clinton would do better being seen next to Jimmy Carter than the Bushes.
A cynical move but not a smart one.

The tragedy, the wonder, and the glory of this country are in the anti-politics and stubborn dreams of a certain kind of freedom.
I don't blame the Bush administration any more or less than I blame the people who voted for them. I don't blame Clinton for the short term logic of his scheming then or now. I suppose I blame intellectuals who live in fantasy worlds, neocon, neo-liberal, or neomarxist. I hate economists more than anything for their lack of irony; the same is true for acolytes of Nader or Chomsky. I hate newspapermen who think of themselves as writers.

The beginnings of freedom, of the ability to act with disinterested curiosity, is in the assumption of interest. Begin with doubt, or even fear. A hard row to hoe, and there's no machine either material or intellectual, to do it for you. I'll forgive mass murderers before I forgive those who argue otherwise

"As long as issues of language, health, economics, politics, etc. continue to have a cultural component which cannot easily be reduced to the models used to study those particular phenomenon, there will continue to be a place for anthropology as a discipline." Savage Minds

Over the border.

From a friend: InSite05

Go read Laura Rozen

“This is a national disgrace,” said Terry Ebbert, head of New Orleans’ emergency operations. “FEMA has been here three days, yet there is no command and control,” Ebbert said. “We can send massive amounts of aid to tsunami victims but we can’t bail out the city of New Orleans."

No Homeland Security
---
From Atrios. Jack Cafferty on CNN:

"I'm 62. I remember the riots in Watts. I remember the earthquake in San Francisco, I remember a lot of things. I have never, ever, seen anything as bungled and as poorly handled as this situation in New Orleans. Where the hell is the water for these people? Why can't sandwiches be dropped to those people in the Superdome. What is going on? This is Thursday! This storm happened 5 days ago. This is a disgrace. And don't think the world isn't watching. This is the government that the taxpayers are paying for, and it's fallen right flat on its face as far as I can see, in the way it's handled this thing."

"A fellow shopper, unable to fathom the absurdity of Rice’s timing, went up to the Secretary and reportedly shouted, “How dare you shop for shoes while thousands are dying and homeless!” Never one to have her fashion choices questioned, Rice had security PHYSICALLY REMOVE the woman."

The Democrats don't need any more reformers fighting the good fight against immorality and greed; Chomky is an absurd figure as a politician, and to the extent he imagines otherwise, he's an idiot. Neither do they need more wealthy politicos whose hypocrisy is patent to everyone but themselves. They need a sinner who knows what he is and when enough is enough. Anyone who's read this page for awhile knows I'm thinking of the man I shared a beer with on election night 92, and also that we're not going to get someone like that here. But when a member of the administration gets upbraided by someone with enough money to shop at Ferragamo, I know there's a lot of room to operate, if someone's willing to do it.

"The comparison pinpoints the genetic differences that have arisen in the two species since they split from a common ancestor some six million years ago.".

I don't live in Bobo's World, but then no one lives there. It's a parody and an insult and not just to the idiot Brooks, who's nothing more than a guilty urbanite. You want me to start in on the history of urbane sophistocated criminality? You think there's more hypocrisy in born again Kentucky than the academy? More hypocrisy in Al Sharpton's Brooklyn or Giuliani's Bensonhurst than on the Upper West Side?
I understand why many people hate this country, but if you hate it, you have to hate the whole thing, if you can.

• Abu, Ahmed, Musab and Salar, a cell of Islamic terrorists sent to Chicago by a nefarious network resembling Al Qaeda, are getting chewed out by their murderous boss, just in from Afghanistan. (They have been spending the organization's money like crazy but haven't blown anything up.) Just then, two deliverymen knock on the apartment door, bearing a huge flat-screen TV.

• Ahmed, whose cover is a job as a bike messenger, falls in love with a neighborhood florist - who turns out to be Jewish - but can't get up the nerve to ask her out. "You're bright, you're funny, you're talented," Musab says, urging his comrade on. "Who made the best nail bomb in training camp? You did!"

• Abu blends in by joining a bowling team, and becomes a fanatic: "We will dance in the blood of the losers from Hal's Body and Paint Shop!" he vows. But he is a hapless terrorist. A fertilizer bomb in his trunk accidentally goes off outside when he is bowling for the league championship - toppling his last two pins and clinching victory.

On the situation in New Orleans, Max has been hard nosed, but good.
Scroll down and read around.

Also Doug Merrill @ Fist Full of Euros put's it well:
A Million Refugees in a First World Country
"Imagine the entire population of Munich, of Lyon or of Copenhagen evacuated because of a natural disaster."

I want to blame this on the Whiggish arrogance of reformist American intellectuals who've never understood that it's counterproductive to condescend to the people you say you're trying to help. The hyper-intellectuallism of the liberal elite and the anti-intellectualism of the populace in this country go hand in glove, but I suppose -still- I'd expect or want intellectuals to be more self aware.

I'll repeat what I said a couple of days ago:

"A scientist who operates on what he sees as the ‘necessary truth’ that all people are equally capable of abstract reason is doing little more that proving himself as incapable of reason as his opponent."

I'm not bothered by people who would rather be right than useful only by those who pretend, in order to protect their sense of their own morality, that there's no difference.
---

A lot of people are linking to NRO today. I sent them a note as well. Conservatives, those without the sense of worldweariness that might give their ideas some weight, are simply cynics trying to wish themselves a moral defense for their otherwise immoral, antisocial, behavior.

This is amusing.

The BBC refers to 'refugees' from New Orleans.

V.S. Naipaul on why it's more important to have beliefs and ask small questions than have doubts and ask complex ones:

Naipaul has said he wrote the novel ''Half a Life'' (2001) only to fulfill a publisher's contract, and that ''Magic Seeds'' (2004) would be his last novel. (Over the years, he has often hinted at retirement, only to publish another book soon after.) Yet the fact that Naipaul has continued to write novels does not undercut his acute awareness of the form's limitations; indeed, it amplifies it. His is the lament of a writer who, through a life devoted to his craft, has discovered that the tools at his disposal are no longer adequate. ''If you write a novel alone you sit and you weave a little narrative. And it's O.K., but it's of no account,'' Naipaul said. ''If you're a romantic writer, you write novels about men and women falling in love, etc., give a little narrative here and there. But again, it's of no account.''

What is of account, in Naipaul's view, is the larger global political situation -- in particular, the clash between belief and unbelief in postcolonial societies. ''I became very interested in the Islamic question, and thought I would try to understand it from the roots, ask very simple questions and somehow make a narrative of that discovery,'' he said. To what extent, he wondered, had ''people who lock themselves away in belief . . . shut themselves away from the active busy world''? ''To what extent without knowing it'' were they ''parasitic on that world''? And why did they have ''no thinkers to point out to them where their thoughts and their passion had led them''? Far from simple, the questions brought a laserlike focus to a central paradox of today's situation: that some who have benefited from the blessings of the West now seek to destroy it.

Juan Cole:
Ten Things Congress Could Demand from Bush on Iraq

I like this guy

Even among humans, as Trivers observed, many people will more readily sacrifice themselves for their friends than for their relatives - an observation easy to make among the rebellious youth of the 60s. So a more general kind of rule than Hamilton had supplied was needed. Trivers came up with the notion of reciprocal altruism. In plain language, this said that self-sacrifice could be understood as self-interest providing there was a chance the beneficiary would repay the deed in the future.

When I was a kid and first thinking about these things I understood that in order to understand the social structures behind morality you had to imagine yourself as a sociopath. That's the only way to avoid tautology. So Trivers' writing was revolutionary? I guess I'm surprised.
I found the link at C.T. where I posted a quote from another piece on Trivers from the Boston Globe:

The book on deceit and self-deception that he’s now starting grows out of a brief but widely cited passage from his introduction to Dawkins’s ‘’The Selfish Gene.’’ If deceit, he wrote, ‘’is fundamental to animal communication, then there must be strong selection to spot deception and this ought, in turn, to select for a degree of self-deception, rendering some facts and motives unconscious so as not to betray-by the subtle signs of self-knowledge-the deception being practiced.’’ Thus, the idea that the brain evolved to produce ‘’ever more accurate images of the world must be a very naive view of mental evolution.’’ We’ve evolved, in other words, to delude ourselves so as better to fool others-all in the service of the great game of propagating our genes.

I'm not much interested in science. I haven't been since I was a child- though for years I told myself otherwise. What annoys me of course as I've made clear dozens of times, is the metonymic association of science with its human practitioners. Trivers seems to have bypassed that dilemma rather nicely.

Also from Crooked Timber, a similar problem from the recent past. I've been saving the link.

I am not putting a counter-argument, but merely making an observation, in saying that if Jimmy’s view is correct then much of social science and history rests on a mistake. Economics and psychology, for example, certainly presuppose that one person’s action can figure among the causal antecedents of another’s. And all those books on the “causes” of the First or Second World Wars would have to be pulped or substantially rewritten.

People are both agents and acted upon. It's not an either/situation. That's why we have courtrooms. And that's precisely why we have historians and why history is not a science.

8/29 update on Trivers, Gould, adaptation, and the female orgasm
---


From an old post:

Any tradesman, musician or athlete will tell you that the hand teaches the mind. That's the basis of the verb "to practice." For a writer the process of writing teaches the skill of writing, teaches the use of the imagination. Writing, for the sake of writing, is the mind working as a hand. Categories of experience are created by being 'discovered.' The naming, if it comes to that- there can be recognition without naming- comes after the action is complete.

Philosophical, as opposed to political, liberalism quite literally does not understand the arts because it can not allow that methodologies predicated on such ambiguity can have intellectual, and therefore moral, weight (sports in this context are rule following as mere entertainment).

Philosophical conservatism on the other hand is blatantly hypocritical, defending the pleasures of ambiguity as such only in secret and only as reserved for the elect. That's why there are so many priests in favor of homosexuality... for priests.

ass fucking redux

Nathan's new gig:

Agenda for Justice

Why I am an internationalist:

A war the Intellectuals got wrong.
From what country?

Why are the movies in decline?"
same question

Direland

World Youth Congress: Surfing Without Sin by Lutz Kinkel, Stern

Censorship has been abolished but not in the Press Center of the World Youth Congress. Precisely there, where daily hundreds of journalists sit at computers, Internet access has been limited—an embarrassing attempt at manipulation.

I found out by accident. With Stern photographer Janna Frohnhaus I had planned to do an article on "Homosexuals and the Catholic Church." She got her press pass for the WYC and then went into the enormous exhibition hall on the Auenplatz in Deutz (Koeln suburb, NB) established as the Press Center, sat down at one of the large number of personal computers reserved for journalists.To find Contact Addresses she used Google under the theme and tried to get a web page of the Ecumenical Working Group on Homosexuals and the Church. It was impossible, it was blocked -- quite officially, by the WYC. (Photo, right, shows the blocked page on the WYC computer)

I’ll admit I did not believe it as she told me of it by email. The Catholic Church for centuries burned books and heretics. But putting Homepages on the Index in the 21st Century? And for journalists? It is impossible to impose Catholic policing on the Information Society --even the Vatican must realize that.

Ah yes, the intellectuals. Benny Morris is an ass.
The crimes of the past are not the crimes in yesterday's newspaper, and the Ashkenazim now have a right to a place in the middle east - almost as much as the expatriate Dutch have a right to remain in southern Africa.

And this from the letters:

"With his announcement that we will continue the war in Iraq to pay our debt to those who have sacrificed their lives, President Bush has switched the mission again. Now we're dying for the dead"

Walken in 08

"Louis Feuillade's last crime serial starred Gaston Michel, who achieved overnight fame through his role as Barrabas. Michel's fame was to be short-lived however. Whilst filming in Portugal on a subsequent Feuillade film, Michel ended up being carried through the streets of Lisbon by fans, despite the torrential rain. The actor died of pneumonia a few days later."

E&P

"The San Francisco Chronicle called the speech "impressive in its breadth and eloquence." The Denver Post likened Powell to "Marshal Dillon facing down a gunslinger in Dodge City," adding that he had presented "not just one 'smoking gun' but a battery of them." The Tampa (Fla.) Tribune called Powell's case "overwhelming," while The Oregonian in Portland found it "devastating." To The Hartford (Ct.) Courant it was "masterful." The Plain Dealer in Cleveland deemed it "credible and persuasive."

One can only laugh, darkly, at the San Jose (Ca.) Mercury News asserting that Powell made his case "without resorting to exaggeration, a rhetorical tool he didn't need." The San Antonio Express-News called the speech "irrefutable," adding, "only those ready to believe Iraq and assume that the United States would manufacture false evidence against Saddam would not be persuaded by Powell's case."

And what of the two giants of the East? The Washington Post echoed others who found Powell's evidence "irrefutable." That paper's liberal columnist, Mary McGrory, wrote that Powell "persuaded me, and I was as tough as France to convince." She even likened the Powell report to the day John Dean "unloaded" on Nixon in the Watergate hearings. George Will said Powell's speech would "change all minds open to evidence."

Another Post liberal, Richard Cohen, opined: "The evidence he presented to the United Nations -- some of it circumstantial, some of it absolutely bone-chilling in its detail -- had to prove to anyone that Iraq not only hasn't accounted for its weapons of mass destruction but without a doubt still retains them. Only a fool, or possibly a Frenchman, could conclude otherwise."

Here's the Post's Jim Hoagland: "To continue to say that the Bush administration has not made its case, you must now believe that Colin Powell lied in the most serious statement he will ever make, or was taken in by manufactured evidence. I don't believe that. Today, neither should you."

The New York Times, meanwhile, hailed Powell's "powerful" and "sober, factual case." Like many other papers, the Times' coverage on its news pages — in separate stories by Steven Weisman, Michael Gordon and Adam Clymer — also bent over backward to give Powell the benefit of nearly every doubt. Apparently in thrall to Powell's moderate reputation, no one even mentioned that he was essentially acting as lead prosecutor with every reason to shape, or even create, facts to fit his brief.

Weisman called Powell's evidence "a nearly encyclopedic catalog that reached further than many had expected." He and Clymer both recalled Adlai Stevenson's speech to the U.N. in 1962 exposing Soviet missiles in Cuba. Gordon closed his piece by asserting that "it will be difficult for skeptics to argue that Washington's case against Iraq is based on groundless suspicions and not intelligence information." Try reading that with a straight face today.

One recalls two quotes garnered by Howard Kurtz last year when he took a look back at the Washington Post's pre-war coverage.

"There was an attitude among editors: Look, we're going to war, why do we even worry about all the contrary stuff?" -- Pentagon correspondent Thomas Ricks.

"We are inevitably the mouthpiece for whatever administration is in power." -- Reporter Karen Young.

Why does any of this matter? It's fashionable to suggest that the White House was bent on war and nothing could have stopped them. But until the Powell speech, public opinion, editorial sentiment (as chronicled by E&P at the time) and street protests were all building against the war.

The Powell speech, and the media's swallowing of it, changed all that."

Well. I am busy, and few enough people come around here anyway -except norwegian web bots- but I'm following the debate over judicial review at Balkinization. The various links are here.

Is that what the debate has come to? Which side can corral the saddest crop of widows, parents, and orphans? Call it a harms race. Better: an ache-off. We hope the grimly absurd image of two competing camps of mourners illustrates why it is we've been somewhat reluctant to weigh in on Sheehan's cause: Grief can pull a person in any direction, and whatever "moral authority" it imbues, we can't claim that Sheehan has it and those mothers who still support the war don't. The Bush administration knows all about exploiting tragedy for its own causes, including re-election. Whatever arguments there are against the war in Iraq, let's not make "I have more despairing mothers on my side" one of them. The only way to win a grief contest is for more people to die.
Yeah, yeah, ass-fucking, Jenna, yaboobs, gin, crack. Is that the post you wanted?

How about all of the above?
Wankette
---

The important question concerning Able Danger is whether the decision was seen as mandated by policy or was simply the response to a fear of recrimination.

update: and... Here we go!

E.I. coverage of the Gaza "Disengagement"

The manager is waiting to be paid
Along with priests and deacons of his court
A quartermaster, quite a man, a mistress of the line
Has found a last cent avenue of pain

A Mardi Gras just passed this way a while ago
Making hungry people of us all
Along the Mississippi you can hear the fiddlers play
Fandangos and boleros to the lord

Many times, many tried,
Simple stories are the best
Keep in mind, the wishful kind,
Don't wanna be like all the rest.

My uncle was a vicar in the big parade
Selling fountain pens that never write
San Sebastian gamblers never cheat nor lie
They know good fences make good neighbours

I wish I knew what time of year it was What kind of people will be there When gruesome tales of two cities ran Running all the way Father might have heard his prayers were answered Inhibitions all the way from home Consider now, consider then before the deed is done The blood of consolation runs so true Many times, many tried, Simple stories are the best Keep in mind, the wishful kind, Don't wanna be like all the rest.

big fun Why theory-heads are worse than neo-liberals.

I’m not going to spend much time reading posts by J. Holbo, even the short ones (or the ones I agree with) so I’ll make this short and sweet, and directed not at him but Jodi Dean. It’s not theory itself that’s the problem, kiddo, any more than revolution: it’s the noble cause of permanence: as in permanent revolution. This has its origin in the jealousy of those in the humanities who see themselves as competing with the sciences. Theoretical man is no more or less banal a concept than economic man; except that theory-heads have the habit of pretending by way of their advanced logic that they are not bourgeois. But theory itself IS THE THEORY OF THE ABSOLUTE BOURGEOIS: so contradictory in its essence that it’s best and truest practitioners are nothing more or less than poets of paradox. And I love them for that, honestly. On the other hand, American academics, so desperate to be useful and practical as is the vulgar American can-do way of life, make asses of themselves and end up celebrating an art-as-life theology that leads them to celebrate the demi-fascisms of late romantics like Benjamin. Bore me to hell. And condescend to the middle and the working classes as well, without getting the fucking joke: anti-humanism begins in monarchism not democracy. Literature like law and politics is a craft, not a science. Theory-heads and Timber-ites, both miss the point. But now technocrats defend literature as an enjoyable hobby.

Goodbye to all that

peace

Son of Gone Fishing.
My phone will be on, but not my computer.
Spending some time on a rocky beach reading Edmund Burke's defense of the decision in Bush v. Gore, an old copy from the grad school days of a member of the Johnson Administration.

A.- It's not our mother's handwriting.

John Roberts is a lawyer (see last post)
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update:
"...it might mean that Roberts is exceptionally good at divorcing his personal positions from his legal craftsmanship." :

I think so.

On Emil Jannings:

My primary intellectual interest is the defense of skill, of an idea of mastery over a medium, trade, or craft. Most intellectuals, now, even those who make their living searching for meaning in others' workmanship, are bothered by such arguments.  They associate skill with beauty, but beauty no longer with truth.  I'm not going to explain why this is so any more than I'm going to say they're wrong. They're not.  But lawyers are not legal philosophers for the simple reason that legal philosophers are not craftsmen. They do not see themselves as acting within the theater of communication of which law is an aspect. What Kerim and others are criticizing in Diamond's work strikes me as no more, or less,  than the social ineptitude more common to engineers or philosophers than to practicing lawyers.

Anthropologists study the skills of their subjects. They learn to appreciate the terminology and the terms of distinction peculiar to a given society. They become both intellectuals and connoisseurs.
A con man is a connoisseur; it's part of his job. A mathematician does not need these skills. But mathematicians are as fallible as the rest of us and I prefer the company of those who understand not only their capacity for error but for delusion. All wise men are connoisseurs
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(as if to prove my point)
DeLong the philosopher:

General Vasily Ivanovich Chuikov was an utter bastard: he shot five times as many of his own men for desertion during the Battle of Stalingrad as allied soldiers died on D-Day.

General Vasily Ivanovich Chuikov was a very good general: we all should be very grateful for what his 62nd Army did during the Battle of Stalingrad.

The moral intelligence of a precocious ten year old, who supplements his allowance writng Cliffs Notes.

Last night I posted something and this morning I removed it
I think anyone who reads this page over time understands the degree to which my life is predicated on contradiction. I shouldn't try to explain myself in detail; there's no one description that would work and explanation comes too close to apology. If I want to apologize for my behavior I should change it in the future.
We'll all have to wait and see.
--
About the post below: the only additional comment I would make is that I'm more interested in skill than knowledge. For those who think of Marx as an ideologist I'd respond that he was from the last generation of intellectuals who were torn between the desire to be skilled and to be seen as right.
And I'm never scared of craftsmen. I'm scared of their opposite.

Cultivating I'norance

I've been thinking about the post below on China, and my indifference to American nationalist fears, trying to explain to myself my own glibness. I just don't find nationalism to be moral, and there's a continuing implication in the language of this country that it is.

Anne-Marie Slaughter is Dean of the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University. An international lawyer and expert on international institutions and American foreign policy, Dean Slaughter is the author of numerous academic articles and a frequent contributor to leading newspapers and magazines. She is a former president of the American Society of International Law and serves on the boards of the McDonalds Corporation , the New American Foundation, and the Council on Foreign Relations. Her most recent book is A New World Order. which argues that global networks of national government officials -- regulators, judges, and legislators -- are a vital but under-used tool for addressing threats from terrorism to global epidemics in the 21st century.

I don't associate capitalism with morality any more than I associate nationalism with morality, but I can respect prudence. The Chinese leadership, like smart businessmen, are prudent cynics. America's foreign policy elite continue to live a Panglossian hypocrisy that says the United States represents something more. Nobody else believes them.
Is there a more cynical corporation in this country -excepting those that are simply criminal conspiracies [read:Big Pharma]- than McDonalds?

Fun:
The issues get a bit confused, and a short exchange with Brad DeLong.

I was away, packing up my mother's house. It sold quickly.
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For later: What's wrong with this picture?

Read Nathan Newman and the various posters @ Balkinization on Roberts.

Amateur Hour
I'm rewriting this (again and again).

In the struggle between China and The West [sic] I don't care who wins. I don't know anyone who gives a damn about these things. Artists and stockbrokers, my social circle, are whores: they attach themselves to interesting people- the phrase is Duchamp's- and the men who run the PRC are more interesting than the men who run this country. I'm not afraid of them certainly, renegade nationalism is more of a danger in Moscow or Islamabad than Beijing, but that's not to say I have much respect for those in this country who actively abet censorship. Similarly, if I'm impressed by the struggle in Iran it follows that there are at least a few people there with money or government positions whom I would like or respect whether I would agree with them or not, but all this does is make the Bush Administration's actions in Iraq look even worse.
Juan Cole is right and wrong. Iran won the battle, not the war. The war isn't over. Capitalism will win the war, but not American capitalism.

I wonder what euphemisms and code words will become popular in China thanks to Yahoo? What will be the new slang for 'democracy.' Language under pressure will adapt and those adaptations will be interesting and some beautiful.
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Knud Jensen inherited his father's business as a cheese wholesaler. 12 years later, in 1956, representatives of his biggest client came to him with an offer and a choice: either sell the company to their American employer or they would bypass him and drive him out of business. He sold it, and used the money to found a museum, now the most popular in Denmark. Louisiana

One of the ironies of the Maytag sale is that Haier would have kept jobs in the US in order to expand the American market, while Whirlpool will move the its factories to China.

Duncan Black: "Well, since this confidential but persusasive source fed you a bunch of horseshit in order to let the administration control the nomination spin don't you feel an obligation to inform your listeners who this liar was?
Haha, just kidding, I'd know you'd never burn a source, even one which used you to deceive the public. That would be a betrayal of those in power, and we can't have that."

Safire used to brag that he turned down goverment positions because he liked power and didn't want to lose it. The press has power but they're content to serve. It makes no sense. You want glory? Burn someone big who lies to you; the people will love you. That's power.

The legal genius of John Roberts.

"Ansche Hedgepeth was, at the time of her crime, 12 years old. She was waiting for a friend to buy a Metrocard at the Tenleytown/American University Metrorail station in Washington, DC when she committed the fateful act.

She opened the fast food bag she was carrying and ate one French fry – in plain view of an undercover police officer.

The police officer placed her under arrest, handcuffed her and removed her shoelaces “pursuant to established procedure,” as the opinion tells us. She was held at the local police station for three hours until her mother could come to collect her.

Things of interest to me at least from a couple of days ago.
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Laura Rozen wonders why there's been so little reaction to Hersh's most recent N.Yorker piece.

Hersh: In my reporting for this story, one theme that emerged was the Bush Administration'?s increasing tendency to turn to off-the-books covert actions to accomplish its goals. This allowed the Administration to avoid the kind of stumbling blocks it encountered in the debate about how to handle the elections: bureaucratic infighting, congressional second-guessing, complaints from outsiders.

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Watching the talking heads chatter about the Roberts nomination reminds me again of the absurdities of intellectual conservatism and of arguments from absolute foundations. Scalia is a Hobbesian reactionary. Is it possible to be and brilliant have such opinions? I suppose. But it's impossible to be such a reactionary and be a 'brilliant' interpreter of law. Reactionaries defend the right of the government as such regardless of rules. Can you be a brilliant tennis player if it's your policy to cheat? These idiots bore me. And of course liberals are principled moderates, men standing in the middle of a moving boat.
The only foundation that there can be to democracy and law is the foundation of a skeptical curiosity and the empathy that is its natural result. I'd agree with Brian Leiter, Dennett and the rest of the 'Brights' if it were possible to have a science of self-awareness or a vaccine against false logic and delusion, but there isn't one and there never will be. Brights confuse arrogance with intellect. Consciousness is the conflict between empirical awareness and conditioned response, and Leiter's anger and frustration are more a result of the latter than the former. That he thinks otherwise is unobservant and illogical: since when is it good politics to be anti-political?

Scalia thinks curiosity is dangerous to the state. I think it's a necessity if that state is to be just. He and I at least agree on the issues themselves. And Roberts is another uninteresting man.

"As an economist what I think would be really interesting would be a critical comparison of the rise in theory in the (or one of the) humanities (like literary criticism) with the rise and complete imperial dominance of theory in economics. Why was the former so much less successful and transitory than the latter? Why was the introduction of theory in literary criticism thought to be so transgressive and radical in the humanities both by its proponents and its critics, while theoretical economics was so often viewed as complementary to the status quo (word?) and even reactionary by its critics and (implicitly) by its exponents."

It's not DeLong. Scroll down to the comments.

Summer Repeats:
A major problem, I want to say the major intellectual problem, with liberal American political thinking is an inability to be both intellectual, in the sense of aspiring to reason, and yet be aware of the inevitability of unreason in human actions. As someone who recently for the first time in five years and only by unhappy necessity got behind the wheel of a car, I'm amazed that the roads of the world are not awash in blood and rusted steel. The fact that they aren't is to our credit but that's no justification for Chomsky's idealism or Steven Weinberg's metaphysical arguments for the superiority of hard science and our need for a new Superconducting Supercollider.
I'm more interested in how we perceive the world than in what that world might actually be, more interested in the history of law than the history of rocks. That's not an argument against medicine or medical research, but since Richard Lewontin keeps reminding us that money spent on public health would save more lives than what's spent on research, I don't think my tastes are irrational.
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Two more points on Theory.
American literary theory has its origins, first post-Sputnik and then post Vietnam, in the fears and insecurities of academic readers of literature vis-a-vis the larger academic -technical and scientific- community. What in Europe was a means of ironic self reflection -Before The Revolution and after The War- became first estheticized and depoliticized at Yale, as modern architecture had been 40 years earlier at MoMA, and then in a repeat, as farce, of a simple modernist strategy, repoliticized as defense and self-justification for a younger and even more nervous generation of humanities graduates. This entire process marks the move away from a taste for self-consciously great if eccentric public characters, to the tastes of an equally self-conscious but cloistered academic ghetto. The fantasies of "progress" in the arts qua art, became the fantasy of art as science. I can't begin to calculate the amount of shit I've put up with as a skilled tradesman in the presence of supposedly educated liberals who had no awareness of my double life, and in another context as a painter, a maker of artworks in a supposedly conservative medium, among theory-besotted mediaphiles high on pseudo-Marxism, the faux-aristocratic snobbery of queer theory, and Wall Street cash. 

Paraphrasing something I wrote 20 years ago: After the failures of the sixties, of the last attempt by members of the middle class to associate themselves wholeheartedly with workers and the poor, the next generation, and the same generation grown older, found a way to dedicate themselves to themselves and call it a radical act. All that theory or theory driven art succeeds in doing is documenting its authors' fears and preoccupations. That's fine with me but they pretend it's more than that, and it isn't.

I've been on the scene for a while.

The Letter E

Electronic Intifada
Avi Shlaim in The Guardian
Doug ireland

I'm having a little fun here.
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Descriptions of the Islamic faithful by well meaning liberals, at Starbucks for example, are the same as for conservative Christians, with the same condescension. I'm not making a big deal of it, commenting on it almost as a manner of style. It fits with my comments at the link above and it allows me to add something to them. Philosophy, in the continental sense, is a literary activity. You could almost call it the literature of rationalism. But when continental culture is adapted to American tastes, as Marcel Duchamp's brilliant parlor games and dirty jokes were seen as the beginnings of conceptualism, then we begin to get into trouble. Duchamp himself described one reason for being annoyed at the 'ocular' banality of painting: "No one ever called anyone a dumb poet." I've always thought of him as a conservative, in the sense of a monarchist, and someone who new him told be that's exactly what he was.
It makes sense. But one thing he did not do is hide his tastes behind a facade of false radicalism.

I might as well double up:

"The problem with theory as with much of modernist intellectualism is that it attempts to claim a quasi-scientific authority for its arguments. The deconstructive philosophical defense of literary speech is nothing more than a rationalists' defense of empiricism, made while steadfastly refusing to get your boots muddied. Is this why analytic philosophers, futurists, libertarians and theory-heads all seem to read science and speculative fiction? This is also I imagine why lawyers tend to mock legal philosophers.
Theory and analytic philosophy have too much in common, not the least of which is an inability to understand the difference between experience and idea, or art and illustration.

The most annoying thing about all this is the snobbery. The Europeans, whatever their titles or positions, have acted as public intellectuals; and Sokal and Chomsky ideological dumbasses or not have at least been activist on issues the non academic left are concerned with. But this changes nothing. What we end up with is a debate between those who say the speaking subject is not a worthy topic of discussion and those who say that there's nothing more worthy of discussion than what they wore saturday night: a war between the nerds and narcissists. And the narcissists think they're being radical! What's this, Sarah Bernhardt?

The Europeans know they're bourgeois, they understood that their words have limits. They describe them. They make jokes at their own expense. Americans being incapable of self-reflection only laugh at other people.

...I don't associate theory with post modernism but with a decadent late modernism which claims that through some sort of rationalist argument that we can close the divide between action and reflection, creating a sort of total intellectual/esthetic consciousness: a consciousness by design, hence the popularity of Sci-Fi and other sorts of Stalinist over-determination."

Informed Comment: "All the Muslim governments condemned the bombings of London, including Egypt, Syria, Saudi Arabia, Morocco, along with Iran, as well as Turkey, and even Hamas and Hizbullah. Hamas has long foresworn violence against American and European targets, and has been holding talks with the UK, for which it has been condemned by the al-Qaeda-linked groups. Note that only at ArabicNews.com and the Chinese sites will the unadorned truth of these Arab and Muslim condemnations be reported in detail. The Financial Times mentioned it but then discussed a few negative individual responses in chat rooms, as though the Egyptian foreign minister was only as important as some guy in an internet cafe. All the Muslim governments are as vulnerable as London, and most of the Arab and Muslim capitals have been bombed by radical fundamentalists-- Cairo, Damascus, Baghdad, Riyadh, Tehran, Jakarta, etc. Sometimes it has been the country's second city, as with Casablanca or Istanbul."

Juan Cole
Implications of the London Bombing

"The attack on London is not something it is easy for me to talk about in dry analytical terms. I've lived in London, doing research, have often visited, and have many friends there. I know the tube or subway stops being talked about, and have ridden the double decker bus that plies the area around Russell Square and Bloomsbury. I want all my British readers and friends to know with what horror and solidarity I watched those images.
continue...

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I feel the need to add here that Cole is one of the few people I've read today who understands the difficulty of communicating sadness to an audience of strangers.

Compare the above with the boilerplate of Brad DeLong

We Mourn with the Citizens of London
We pledge to help track down and kill the perpetrators, the planners, and their helpers.

We note that it is 46 months after September 11, 2001, and that Osama bin Laden is still alive and at liberty. That somebody can plan September 11, 2001 and remain alive and at liberty provides powerful encouragement to those who think of following in his footsteps--including those who planned, aided, and carried out today's atrocity in London.

More attention to Osama bin Laden and his ilk, please. And less attention to using Osama bin Laden as a pretext for launching hair-brained neoconservative schemes, please."

I have no disagreement with his larger points; I am not a defender of bin Laden any more than I am of Neocon stupidity. But no, we do not "mourn with the citizens of London" we mourn as people thousands of miles away who were not there, who did not hear the sounds or feel the blasts or see the faces of friends in tears in front of us. And this logical understanding of distance is what prompted Cole to begin with the rhetorical device of introduction, of storytelling, asking permission to be allowed to join those who were nearer. By acknowledging distance, by demonstrating his awareness of the limits of his ability-of his right
- to respond, he demonstrates a reflective awareness that gives his expressions of sadness moral weight.

I feel a little odd using today's events as the springboard for a discussion of literary theory, but the real subject is not literary but political. Cole is an interpreter of language: he understands its form and function, and his relation to both. I have no idea if he's a secularist or religious -Christian? Sunni? Shia?- and readers of this page know I'm an atheist, but they also know by now that my central point has always been the defense of the primacy of the interpretative act, of the subject as intelligence over and opposed to mechanism.
As I wrote a month ago about the woman who watched over my mother in the last days of her life:

"There's a difference between caring for someone, in the sense of emotional attachment, and being attentive to them, to their wishes or their pain. Pain itself is lonely and expressions of sympathy are often theater used to hide incomprehension and fear.
I'm watching the old watch their friend die. They have become professionals at this. They are honest actors: the most aware both of the distances between people, and the similarity of their experience."

Numbers don't teach you the strangeness of seeing yourself in the mirror. They hide it from you.

Russia, China, Central Asia Call for US Withdrawal
Juan Cole

I need to get back in practice.
I found a copy of Denis Donoghue's Speaking of Beauty on the bookshelf near my mother's desk. She spent some time with it, but I'd like to think not much. In any event, I'm going to spend some time tearing it to pieces. It's just this sort of crap that gives vulgar materialists: neo-liberal and conservative economists, political scientists and libertarians (and Randians) an easy target. Donoghue might as well be named Ratzinger for all he takes for granted, and for all he prefers to keep locked up and unsaid. The elisions, graceful and absurd, make my head spin.

"Yes, but what do you mean by beautiful?"
You might try saying several things. The painting thrills me. It must illuminate my life. It provokes in me a semblance of desire, virtual rather than appetitive

That last phrase speaks volumes. Art as 'indirection.' My father, for all his sincere protestations to leftism, spent a good part of his life rereading Henry James. At heart he ws an unreflective lover of symptoms.

In his review of the Donoghue's book on Walter Pater Roger Kimball scores what I would think are easy points. I'm surprised to find out for example that Pater's philosophy has been seen as 'unmodern'. It was attacked by T.S. Eliot? Well of course! But only because Eliot's critique of decadence is little more than a desperate attempt to bar the door against his own tastes. Huysmans predicted such re-turns to the Church.* But being honest to his poetry necessitates being honest to his fear, and Eliot's honesty, and his intelligence and skill are why we read him.

Donoghue has no patience for this. I'm tempted to say he has no respect for interpretation, seeing it as vulgarization of the beautiful. As a Jew, or demi-Jew, I find that particularly annoying. Again to paraphrase, this time Yehudi Menuhin chatting with his friend Marcel Reich-Ranicki: where would German culture be without its Jewish interpreters?


* I was a little surprised that no one went after Rick Santorum more after he tried to blame liberalism for the recent scandals in the Catholic Church. The hypocrisy he condemns has always been a conservative -Pauline- vice.

Leiter sets a trap and dives in. The attack on democracy by "experts" The pretension of/to scientism; the contempt for any claims for the philosophical or moral seriousness of rhetoric: the contempt -of a lawyer!- for 'pursuasion.' . What does this say about the political/cultural life in this country? What does this say about the political/cultural life in this country that no one calls him on it? One of you intellectualkids come back to me on this.

A good one from a year ago.

Nathan Newman (read the last few posts)
Atrios links to a letter at Poynter.
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The photo is a of my father, from the late 60's. My mother was less public, and less interested in theater, but she's listed on Amazon for a 32 page pamphlet (unavailable) she wrote for the ACLU in 1976: Women and the law in Pennsylvania. My father is known in academic circles as the author of one essay in the study of American detective fiction. So far I'm known for one essay on Warhol, written when I was 23, and which seems to get footnoted often, if not reprinted.
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We found the FBI files in the basement, near the Norman Mailer collection, which my mother didn't get rid of after all.
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We are Planning an act of direct creative resistance to the war and the draft on October 20. The locale of our action will be the Department of Justice. We will gather at the First United Congregational Church of Christ, 10th and G Streets, N.W., Washington (near Pennsylvania) Avenue) at 1 P.M. We will appear at the Justice Department together with 30 or 40 young men brought by us to Washington to represent the 24 Resistance groups from all over the country. There we will present to the Attorney General the draft cards turned in locally by these groups on October 16. (Those of us who want to include their own draft cards will be able to do so.) We will, in a clear simple ceremony make concrete our affirmation of support for these young men who are the spearhead of direct resistance to the war and all its machinery.

The draft law commands that we shall not aid, abet or counsel men to refuse the draft. But as a group of the clergy have recently said, when young men refuse to allow their conscience to be violated by an unjust law and a criminal war, then it is necessary for their elders- their teachers, ministers, friends- to make clear their commitment, in conscience, to aid, abet, and counsel them against conscription. Most of us have already done this privately. Now publicly we will demonstrate, side by side with these young men, our determination to continue to do so.

Mitchell Goodman, Henry Braun, Denise Levertov, Noam Chomsky, William Sloan Coffin, Dwight Macdonald

Note: Among the hundreds already committed to this action are Robert Lowell, Norman Mailer, Ashley Montagu, Arthur Waskow, and professors from most of the major colleges and universities in the East.

Reproduced in The Armies of the Night. Henry pointed it out to me with a laugh at my mother's memorial yesterday.

There was another greenhouse and a car-port on the opposite side. The three windows on the second story- on the flat-roofed extension on the left- look into my father's study. Below it was the kitchen. The branches coming into the top of the frame are from the oak tree that dominated the back yard.

Way to go, Max.
Go read his response to the idiot nationalists.
What's next, "Peace with honor?"

And more from Democracy Arsenal.
I don't understand how people can write this way. It's not the ideas that bother me -after all they're mediocre, but so what?- it's the form. This is accountants' language, no more and no less: the complexities of the world supplanted by simple categories expressed with empty adolescent confidence.

According to Susan Rice of the Brookings Institution Iran is " ...a real and urgent threat in the form of a terrorist regime soon to have nukes..."
According to the New York Times today it is a nation where for the first time most of the best selling authors are women.
Who would I rather have tea with, Susan Rice or Riverbend, Laura Rozen or Samira Makhmalbaf, Garance Franke-Ruta or Marjane Satrapi?

Political 'Science' or History: why should there be a conflict between the two?
But there is, and I'll side with the latter, every time.

How Pathetic is Liberal Politics? Progressivism as defined by Josh Marshall is the philosophy of the sincere interest of the strong in the welfare of the weak. A realist would say it should by defined as the defense of workers by themselves. Marshall's progressivism in domestic matters, unlike his nationalism in international ones, is a philosophy of good intentions. I'm amazed again and again by the inability of American liberals to perceive the weakness of their position. The working class in this country, as evinced in its popular culture, is apolitical or anti-political. I have no solution to this problem, especially since I'm a fan, but at least I admit the conflict between my ideas and my tastes. 

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 "...and economists are at the "market fundamentalist" end of the spectrum of people." 

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This is both pathetic and hilarious:

It is a mystery why fans spend almost all of their music money on product of very recent vintage. Until we untangle this puzzle, and we have not yet, we will not understand how Internet music is likely to affect consumer welfare....

Right now we do not even know whether music is being oversupplied or undersupplied, relative to an optimum. Beware of any analysis of this case which does not consider these deeper underlying issues.

 The complete dumbing down of intellectual life. 

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And this courtesy of Laura Rozen [The author is Phil Carter]

On Thursday, I received orders from the Army mobilizing me for Operation Iraqi Freedom. These orders followed an earlier set, cut on Tuesday, which transferred me from the Army's individual ready reserve into the 101st Airborne Division. It's an honor and privilege to deploy with such a storied unit -- a band of warriors who have nearly all deployed at least once since 9/11. I'm scheduled to report for active duty in a little under 3 weeks to Fort Campbell, Kentucky. After some period of pre-deployment training and preparation, I will deploy with my unit to Iraq. It's difficult to describe the swirl of emotions I have now. I'm excited about this opportunity to serve, but also apprehensive about what lies ahead. I'm worried for my family and friends (this will be harder on them than me), and I will miss them terribly; but I'm also comforted by the strength they have displayed over the past few days.

A 'warrior' is a killer, and being 'excited' about an 'opportunity to serve,' is being excited about the opportunity to be a passive agent of abstract authority, in this context to kill, while being absolved of moral responsibility for the act of killing.

I'm packing up books to sell, and I'm still finding things. My own pile of boxes is up to at least ten. Today I was in the basement, with the shelves for American literature, politics, and modern theater. I grabbed 5 issues of Partisan Review from 1950-51, some early printings of British plays known and unknown to me from the 50's and 60's, "The Report of the Cultural and Scientific Conference for World Peace" held in NY in 1949, and some pamphlets of the Weathermen and the Resistance. I also grabbed an old Modern Library Giant of Hawthorne and some things by Eric Bentley. Upstairs earlier I grabbed old editions, from a set, of Marlowe, Webster, and Dryden. Nothing is valuable. My parents were readers in the true sense of the word and I'm not, but there are still things I want. There's an element of nostalgia but less than I had feared. I'm letting a lot of stuff go.

An older post about family history and politics.

In the meantime:
What intellectuals lack in this country is a respect for craft. My parents were part of the history of this transformation. They dedicated their lives to the analysis of the meanings of craft, but were terrified of succumbing to its charms. Later generations are worse off. I'm speaking of course only of intellectuals, or of artists who pretend to have a prescient–predictive–awareness. Again I return to the difference between lawyers and philosophers of law. Lawyers are actors and actors of every other sort are the most anti-intellectual of artists, but I'm finding them less and less annoying as I grow older. My father wrote his dissertation on Nathaniel West and I joke that I want to be happy in the absurdity of Hollywood. Life is only tragic if you take it seriously

What things have we seen
Done at the Mermaid! heard words that have been
So nimble, and so full of subtle flame,
As if that every one from whence they came
Had meant to put his whole wit in a jest,
And resolved to live a fool the rest
of his dull life.

Is it possible to be political, to be engagé and to think the whole thing, politics included, is a joke?
I can't imagine it any other way.

The place where I stand gives way to liquid lino
Underneath the weeping willow lies a weeping whino
The place where I stand gives way to liquid lino
Underneath the weeping willow lies a weeping whino
The mind's a crowd -- search for the the spaces
And turn around time's gone, take ten paces
Been up ahead - can't make head or tale of it
I drink till I'm drunk, and I smoke till I'm senseless
You see in black and white, feel in slow motion
I drown myself in sorrow, until I wake up tomorrow
The illusion of confusion is not from where I am sat
(recycle resemble me)
Different levels of the devil's company

They lead us outside, take us out quietly
To the cage through the bars
You see scars: results of my rage
The place where I stand gives way to liquid lino
Underneath the weeping willow lies a weeping whino
The place where I stand gives way to liquid lino
Underneath the weeping willow lies a weeping whino
the mind's a crowd - search for the the spaces
And turn around time's gone, I take ten paces
Been up ahead - can't make head or tale of it
I drink till I'm drunk, and I smoke till I'm senseless
You see in black and white, feel in slow motion
I drown myself in sorrow, until I wake up tomorrow
(The illusion of...until I wake up....)

Tricky: Ponderosa

Two from 08/03:

On Hobsbawm and things in general

On the same, and the glories of the immigrant middle class

from the first:

People who imagine themselves as adventurous often feel frustrated around those whom they perceive as being static or unimaginative. The rise of liberalism is seen by many as the rise of freedom for the curious, and libertarianism is the most extreme version of this romance. Among the only groups who have seen it as their goal to defend the 'less imaginative,' to defend the people who want nothing more than to be left alone to their small lives, and who made this defense without defending reaction - among the only ones who have promoted the active involvement of such people themselves in their defense- have been those associated with some aspect or another of communism.

It takes a certain kind of intellect to defend the notion that the world is not the playground of intellectuals. My impatience with the hypocrisies of liberalism stems from the sense liberals seem to have that what's good for them is good for the country; but as my old neighbors in Brooklyn will tell you, that isn't true. I have as much contempt for the hierarchy that once existed in the communist party as I do for the hierarchy that still exists in the far older conspiracy that is the Catholic Church. But I have the same respect for the minor, the unobservant, or the casually faithful in both parties.
And of the rest, my kinsmen, I prefer the company of honest machiavels to earnest liars.

Doug Ireland

And he's good on Dean
---

I used to read Ireland in the Village Voice, and I've read him occasionally in the Nation, but I've been paying more attention to him than ever on the web. He's not a technocrat or a defender of technocracy, he's neither a futurist nor a libertarian (and not a technophile) and his internationalism is as matter-of-fact, as assumed, as the middling and puerile -unexamined- nationalism of Laura Rozen, Matthew Yglesias and Josh Marshall. Not for nothing is Marshall's new pet project now on my link list as 'Starbucks'.

Every so often I would find myself arguing with my mother about something or someone that annoyed me, only to realize that the only reason we were yelling at each other was that she couldn't imagine an educated person having the opinions I was ascribing to the people who were pissing me off. Talking to a cousin after my mother's death, a woman from my mother's side of the family who's both older than I am and more familiar with the history, I referred to her late aunt as 'a communist from a good family.' Cindy laughed a laugh of recognition I had not expected.

My mother would be disgusted by the current taste in intellectual life for engineering. The vulgarity mirrors the vulgarity of the rest of the country and adds to it the hypocrisy of pretense. 

More than one person has made the comment that in order to allow even the slightest continuity in human experience, every sensation even or especially the new or anomalous must be 'recognized' or categorized in relation to what we already know and to patterns which we already accept. This defines and problematizes all perception and communication, and I doubt science will ever have an answer. Certainly the illusion of a 'science' of language or politics helps nothing. My experience with cognitive dissonance in the tastes and ideas of Brian Leiter and my headaches reading mainstream moderates like Josh Marshall and Laura Rozen...  What does it mean to say that "Iran is a threat to US interests"? I really have no fucking idea, unless you take for granted things I refuse to.

And as per the NYRB letters section this week, those involved in the philosophy of mind are bogged down by the same problems: the inability to see and accept a solution in ongoing dualism. A mind as opposed to a computer processes information in two ways, as continuation of a process of conditioned response and as sense data that can be responded to by means of logic. These two means of organizing data are in conflict, and whichever wins the fight in any given case, the struggle leaves a mark. Is the mind a computer? Give me an indecisive computer, a neurotic computer, and I'll say yes.

And Brian Leiter says he has no close friends in english departments.
Go back to high school kids. And try growing up this time.

It was very hot this past week, and my mother never owned an air conditioner. I put a bucket of ice in front of the fan in the window and a few of us took turns putting wet towels on her arms, legs and face. Soon before she fell asleep for the last time she sang a short funny lyric. I laughed and asked her what it was from. She said Oklahoma, and I googled it.

"He's lookin' oh so purty and so nice
He looks like he's asleep,
It's a shame that he won't keep
But it's summer and we're running out of ice."

She died the next day; after a crisis that we were told was probably more painful for us than for her.

Jane Edenbaum, née Klingel
Nov 1 1928-June 11 2005.

---
The music is Rosalyn Tureck's performance of the Aria from The Goldberg Variations. My mother had been playing Bach for the past 30 years -my earliest memories were of Debussy, Satie and Scott Joplin- and Tureck's performances were favorites. Her father bought her a baby grand for her 5th birthday, picking it up in a local department store in Minneapolis. She replaced it a few years ago with a Yamaha, donating the old one to a local high school.
If anyone around Portland Maine is interested in a 10 year old grand piano (under 6') with a good sound and in excellent condition, drop me a line.

Pore Jud is Daid

Curly:
Pore Jud is daid,
Pore Jud Fry is daid,
All gather 'round his cawfin now and cry
He had a heart of gold
And he wasn't very old
Oh why did such a feller have to die?

Pore Jud is daid
Pore Jud Fry is daid,
He's lookin' oh so peaceful and serene

Jud: And serene!

Curly:
He's all laid out to rest
With his hands acrost his chest
His fingernails have never been so clean!

(Spoken)
Then the preacher'd get up and he'd say:

(Chanting)
Folks, we are gathered here to moan and groan over our brother Jud Fry, who hung hisself up by a rope in his smokehouse

(Spoken)
Then there'd be weepin' and wailin'... from some of those women. Then he'd say:

(Chanting)
Jud was the most misunderstood man in this here territory. People used to think he was a mean ugly feller and they called
him a dirty skunk and an ornery pig stealer

(Sung)
But the folks that really knowed him.

(Chant)
Knowed that beneath them two dirty shirts he always wore

(Sung)
There beat a heart as big as all outdoors
Jud:
As big as all outdoors.
Curly:
Jud Fry loved his feller man
Jud:
He loved hes feller man

Curly (Spoken):
He loved the birds of the air and the beasts of the field. He loved the mice and the vermin in the barns, and he treated
the rats like equals, which was right. And he loved little children. He loved everybody and everything in the whole world!
Only he never let on, so nobody ever knowed it.

(Sung)
Pore Jud is Daid
Pore Jud Fry is daid
His friends'll weep and wail for miles around

Jud: Miles Around!

Curly:
The daisies in the dell
will give out a different smell
Because Pore Jud is underneath the ground.

Jud:
Pore Jud is daid
A Candle lights his haid
He's layin' in a cawfin made of wood

Curly: Wood...

Jud:
And folks are feelin' sad
Cause they useter treat him bad
But now they know their friend is gone for good

Curly: Good..

Both: Pore Jud is Daid a candle lights his haid!

Curly:
He's lookin' oh so purty and so nice
He looks like he's asleep,
It's a shame that he won't keep
But it's summer and we're running out of ice.

Both: Pore Jud, Pore Jud.

There's a difference between caring for someone, in the sense of emotional attachment, and being attentive to them, to their wishes or their pain. Pain itself is lonely and expressions of sympathy are often theater used to hide incomprehension and fear.
I'm watching the old watch their friend die. They have become professionals at this. They are honest actors: the most aware both of the distances between people, and the similarity of their experience.

Thank you, Max.

"We should also note a bit of revisionism on the liberal side. In a quest to simplify this to a black hat/white hat story, Felt is getting some kind of memorialization. Hear me now, and believe me later: Felt is scum. He was part of the scum-sucking FBI leadership, which had been neglecting real criminals and harrassing innocent persons on the left for decades. One of the more hilarious lines from some righties is that Nixon's people were trying to reform the FBI, and Felt was interfering. As I've said before, this was a dispute between rival crime families."

Places to go and things to do. Life is short.

Still:

Amusing to think -however darkly- that, after all the shit I toss at the academy, in a few months I will be receiving the benefits of full professorship at a major east coast university.
My father had his pension guaranteed for 20 years, and now it seems that neither of my parents are going to make it to that point.

"I've had a pretty good run" she says.