It's small, about 3 by 5 inches.

Albrecht Dürer, St. Philip 1526 Engraving, 12.2 x 7.7 mm.

but it's lovely (and I own one).

Christmas Bombings II, and "The Salvador Option" (also here).

The public defense of such actions is new; the proximity to ourselves, the people of the US, is new; the incompetence is new; the crimes and the moral justifications of the actors to themselves are not.

Leftists have always been correct in their critiques of foreign policy; liberals have always been "realists" without the honesty to admit it.

Concerned Alumni of Princeton

When I was a prep school boy, before my fall into oblivion, Princeton was known as the only Ivy League school with an official policy regarding legacy admissions. All the Ivies gave the children of Alumni an advantage, but Princeton was the only one them to give legacy a specific numeric value. I think it was about one third of the total number of points towards admission. Princeton in fact was considered second rate for undergraduate education. Even given east coast snobbery, UVA or Michigan ranked higher.
But this is all just gossip. I hope this hangs the bastard -who's also an idiot- but I'm doubtful.
---
Max cuts to the chase:
"Supreme Court nominee Samuel Alito belonged to an organization of scumbags."

yup

More on law, the mutual antipathy of science and skill, and why lawyers are craftsmen.
The argument is not between science and religion, or about whether or not art represents spirituality or spiritual values—whatever the fuck those word mean. What defines the opposition to science is not religion or illogic but craft (that, and introspection). Lawyers are the only craftsmen Anglo-American philosophers take seriously. [I was wrong about that] But even then the idiot philosophists don't get the fucking point. If cops are not "the law" then what are scientists?
I'm only repeating myself here because when I get a spike in hits like this it's usually because I've made a ruckus on some academic blog, and the theme is always the same. In other words: see above.

Interestingly the second link on the google search is to the archive of Jan 04, which begins on the 31st with this post:

Humanism and good writing both are in limited supply on the web. It's a thing made by and for conceptualists: ideas matter, not the forms they take. It may be important to eat and have a roof over one's head, but it doesn't matter if the roof is made of tin, the walls are made of sheetrock, and the food comes as a pill. So I wander through discussions of technology, linguistic analysis, and economic theory, references to Star Trek and Tolkien, and 'best of' lists that are predicated on such ignorance I can have no response.
People who are interested in, who take pleasure in, the strength and flexibility of language have other things to do and other ways to keep themselves engaged. The only exceptions I've found, the only others more interested in means than ends, for whom the idea of 'content' is implicitly, and in one case explicitly, vulgar are women:
two observant Muslims and a Jewish whore.

What disgusts me even more these days is that the worst, the most purblind of the lot, spend half their time declaiming the depth of their epicureanism. I wouldn't give a shit if Bainbridge were simply an Ultra but he can't make up his mind.

More on Nino at ACSBlog. From comments:

Written By: Swan On November 23, 2005 12:41 AM
There's nothing that Scalia could say that would be surprising. A law prof. who used to clerk for another Justice told us how Scalia one day revealed to a bunch of the clerks that he supports enforcement of the anti-fornication laws.

It was certainly one of the more memorable anecdotes I've heard in law school. Funny to think that the vast majority Scalia-admiring conservative law students don't even realize he's the American Taliban. People like that want to turn the U.S. into a Western Saudia Arabia. It's really shocking that someone so wacko can attain to such a high post.

Written By:Mike On November 23, 2005 01:05 AM
Swan, it is pretty scary. However, that anecdote is not a total surprise. His logic in his dissent in Lawrence v. Texas makes it pretty clear that he believes in all kinds of laws for "morality" as he sees it. Being a hard-core (and very extreme) Catholic, his sense of morality dictates that fornication is wrong. He is also on the record for supporting anti-adultery statutes.

I really have no patience for Scalia. His claims to any authority beyond his title- and he wants to think he represents more- are based on nothing but simple assumptions and hypocrisy. He's the Gay Daddy to Brooks and Will.

"The wackos get their information through the Christian right, Christian radio, mail, the internet and telephone trees," Scanlon wrote in the memo, which was read into the public record at a hearing of the Senate Indian Affairs Committee. "Simply put, we want to bring out the wackos to vote against something and make sure the rest of the public lets the whole thing slip past them."

Steve Clemons:

Gaffney: If it has some truth to it, I'm not sure it is outrageous.
Reporter: Seriously?
Gaffney: I believe that Al-Jazeera is an instrument of enemy propaganda in a war we are obliged to fight and win, not just for Americans and not just for Iraqis but for freedom-loving people everywhere, and I think that, to the extent that Al-Jazeera is actively aiding our foes, it is certainly appropriate to talk about what you do to neutralize it to prevent it from doing that sort of harm to the cause and even to the lives of servicemen fighting this war.

...So, an alert to ALL who attend the next public session with Under Secretary of State for Public Diplomacy Karen Hughes. Please ask her whether she agrees -- at any level -- with Frank Gaffney.

Does Stephen Hadley agree with Frank Gaffney? How about Karl Rove? And of course, make sure that we ask Condoleeza Rice, Deputy Secretary of State Bob Zoellick, and Scott McClellan in the next press gaggle. . .

Clemons's ends with this:

To add one other interesting dimension to this debate about Al-Jazeera, one of my friends asked novelist Tom Clancy what he thought about the mid-term future of the arab network at the major September terrorism conference where Clancy spoke. Tom Clancy replied that he thought that in five years, Al-Jazeera would be just another mouthpiece of American interests.
Fascinating, counter-intuitive statement -- in TWN's view -- that I hope is wrong, but which many inside the Al-Jazeera network feel strikes close to home and the realm of likelihood.

All this assumes that the interests of International markets and US market policy are the same thing.
Stupid assumption.

Yesterday:
1- NY Post:

U.S. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia says the high court did not inject itself into the 2000 presidential election.
Speaking at the Time Warner Center last night, Scalia said: "The election was dragged into the courts by the Gore people. We did not go looking for trouble."
But he said the court had to take the case.
"The issue was whether Florida's Supreme Court or the United States Supreme Court [would decide the election.] What did you expect us to do? Turn the case down because it wasn't important enough?"

LLoyd Grove continues the quote in the Daily News: "...Or give the Florida Supreme Court another couple of weeks in which the United States could look ridiculous?"

2- (today's update) from The Mirror:

The Daily Mirror was yesterday told not to publish further details from a top secret memo, which revealed that President Bush wanted to bomb an Arab TV station.
The gag by the Attorney General Lord Goldsmith came nearly 24 hours after the Mirror informed Downing Street of its intention to reveal how Tony Blair talked Bush out of attacking satellite station al-Jazeera's HQ in friendly Qatar.

3- Murray Waas in the National Journal:

Ten days after the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, President Bush was told in a highly classified briefing that the U.S. intelligence community had no evidence linking the Iraqi regime of Saddam Hussein to the attacks and that there was scant credible evidence that Iraq had any significant collaborative ties with Al Qaeda, according to government records and current and former officials with firsthand knowledge of the matter

Of Course the US Uses Torture:
1, 2
---
"At this rather late stage in life, I'm realizing that the solid America I thought I knew may never have existed. Running very close, under the surface, was a frightened, somewhat hysterical culture that could lose its civilized moorings all at once. I had naively thought that there were some things that Americans would find unthinkable --- torture was one of them."

It's post like this that make me want to stop whining about Chomsky.

"The Eternal Verities"

How many of the stories coming out now under the very broad heading of botched or manipulated intelligence could have been reported and written at more or less any time over the last two years? I suspect the answer is, the great majority of them.

They're getting written now because the president's poor poll numbers make him a readier target.

I know I'm not saying anything most of you don't know. And better late than never, of course. But all working reporters and editors should consider what that says about the profession.

There has been a rightward shift in American policy over the last 30 years which follows from a shift in the attitudes of wonks and pundits. Whether the country itself has moved to the right, or how much, is a different question. But as the poles in elite opinion have moved, the position of being between them, of being neutral has moved as well. I'm not going to argue the difference between neutrality and objectivity; the latter -like Utopia- is impossible to attain, with the former a cheap stand-in for a nonexistent character. And the only way to remove the stand-in is to remove the need for one.

This refers directly to the previous post. American moderates just call themselves liberal, meaning a little to the left of wherever the right-wing is at the moment. And they're afraid even of that. No self-awareness, no real self-criticism, no sense of irony that is not cheap or passive. No sense in fact, of what they are. Social Democrats in every other country at least have the honesty to call themselves... Bourgeois.

"Policies are important, but too often they're spun into the mediastream by politicans and think tanks assuming everyone is operating off the same set of facts. As this poll shows, that's decidedly not the case. Sometimes you have to convince voters of reality before you can persuade them on how to change it."

No, Ezra. Republicans and conservatives in power never assume "everyone is operating off the same set of facts."

Liberals' presumptions concerning themselves or anyone else never cease to amaze me.
Awareness begins with self-awareness etc.

Busy. Spent a little time here Still arguing w/ Nathan a bit in email. I have to admit I'm understanding his point more than I thought I would. The supposed neutrality of the American courts seems a little like the studied objectivity of the American press; and I complain about that enough. Without judicial review of legislation we'd have a bt more rough and tumble. For all our separation of Church and State, we treat the press, academia, and the judiciary as if they were religious orders. At the very least we allow them to think of themselves in that way.

Hilzoy (Hilary Bok)

The press seems to have forgotten until recently[?] that it does not work for but opposite the government, as another representative of the people.
---

"(The fact that committee chairman Ted Stevens had refused to swear in these oil executives doesn't much alter the principle -- as the Post points out, it's still a crime to lie to Congress even when not under oath.)"
Amazing
---

This administration has been uniquely inclined to treat everything as fair game, to spin a terrible terrorist attack against this country as a kind of marketing campaign for a Hollywood story about a president's leadership abilities and an administration's unparalleled right to evade normal Congressional oversight and to savage critics as traitors, to treat even national defense information as raw fungible material for propaganda purposes, for marketing the war and then spinning the post-war and then SwiftBoating critics. The press to varying degrees has tried to maneuver to get at the story through all the various and imperfect ways journalists know how, the front door and the back door, the podium story and the back story, and the triangulated story. There's a kind of agony play at hand now, and I think it demonstrates among other things how very much this administration was willing to manipulate the truth, the press, and ultimately the American public in some sort of never ending campaign that flickered at its most extreme and excessive into the orbit of something I can only describe somewhat ridiculously as fascism. The threat appears to have receded, but the sense one is left with, of a great democracy that is far more vulnerable than many had realized, is one of shock and tragedy, as well as relief.

Laura Rozen

Hagel, a Vietnam War veteran and a potential presidential candidate in 2008, countered in a speech to the Council of Foreign Relations that the Vietnam War "was a national tragedy partly because members of Congress failed their country, remained silent and lacked the courage to challenge the administrations in power until it was too late."

"To question your government is not unpatriotic -- to not question your government is unpatriotic," Hagel said, arguing that 58,000 troops died in Vietnam because of silence by political leaders. "America owes its men and women in uniform a policy worthy of their sacrifices.

That's probably the most simple and direct comment I've ever heard from an Amercan politician, if not political figure, concerning Vietnam. [American politician post-war maybe.]

Not good enough.

"This is an odd business isn't it? Everything is up for grabs.
One rich fool pays double what he should and there's enough time to find 5 more idiots to follow him before stability returns."

Reapportionment:

...For the non-lawyers out there, Alito meant he was against the Supreme Court decisions requiring that all state legislative districts be designed to guarantee "one person, one vote", instead of giving some districts with very few voters the same representation as urban districts with far more voters.

"Formed a band! We formed a band! Look at us, we formed a band!"

At the Met today, in the Fra Angelico exhibit, what fascinated me, what moved me, more than anything else was to experience the relationships between three small panels from the series that made up the predella of the High Altarpiece at San Marco, telling the story of the brothers Saints Cosmas and Damian. Each panel is a wonder of narrative and pictorial design, but to move among them is to see a different beauty, even in the absence of the whole. The greater beauty is not in one or another wooden panel but in the relations among them, and therefore in the imagination of the viewer as s/he is forced simultaneously to look and to remember.
Beauty inseparable from our awareness of time, and of mortality.

Another reason to hate DeLong. He's a fucking futurist.
What assholes.
David Fucking Gelernter
You fucking assholes. You fucking idiots.

"Once upon a time, sociologists and political theorists used to be able to get away with speaking to literary types on their own terms" link

oy

Once upon a time sociologists and political theorists were able to communicate to a wider audience, because they understood, as "literary types"[?] always have, that they themselves were members of that wider audience.

Political/Intellectual and cultural life in the US is divided in ways no other country would want to match, in ways that nearly everyone here takes for granted, and which practically no one understands. A clash of adolescent teleolgies.

The serious UK press is better than our own for the same reason the vulgar press is lower. There is no pretense of objectivity; logic like justice is not treated as a function of debate yet its approximation is understood to be its result!.
Language and politics must remain adversarial within themselves if they are to have any meaning.
Communication involves not only logic but skill and the latter brings with it it's own prerogatives.
Etc. etc.
[update: And, oh yes, it's "Qfwfq." sorry]


I'm off to see Fra Angelico.

Vice President for Torture
Wednesday, October 26, 2005; A18
The Washington Post

VICE PRESIDENT Cheney is aggressively pursuing an initiative that may be unprecedented for an elected official of the executive branch: He is proposing that Congress legally authorize human rights abuses by Americans. "Cruel, inhuman and degrading" treatment of prisoners is banned by an international treaty negotiated by the Reagan administration and ratified by the United States. The State Department annually issues a report criticizing other governments for violating it. Now Mr. Cheney is asking Congress to approve legal language that would allow the CIA to commit such abuses against foreign prisoners it is holding abroad. In other words, this vice president has become an open advocate of torture.

His position is not just some abstract defense of presidential power. The CIA is holding an unknown number of prisoners in secret detention centers abroad. In violation of the Geneva Conventions, it has refused to register those detainees with the International Red Cross or to allow visits by its inspectors. Its prisoners have "disappeared," like the victims of some dictatorships. The Justice Department and the White House are known to have approved harsh interrogation techniques for some of these people, including "waterboarding," or simulated drowning; mock execution; and the deliberate withholding of pain medication. CIA personnel have been implicated in the deaths during interrogation of at least four Afghan and Iraqi detainees. Official investigations have indicated that some aberrant practices by Army personnel in Iraq originated with the CIA. Yet no CIA personnel have been held accountable for this record, and there has never been a public report on the agency's performance.

It's not surprising that Mr. Cheney would be at the forefront of an attempt to ratify and legalize this shameful record. The vice president has been a prime mover behind the Bush administration's decision to violate the Geneva Conventions and the U.N. Convention Against Torture and to break with decades of past practice by the U.S. military. These decisions at the top have led to hundreds of documented cases of abuse, torture and homicide in Iraq and Afghanistan. Mr. Cheney's counsel, David S. Addington, was reportedly one of the principal authors of a legal memo justifying the torture of suspects. This summer Mr. Cheney told several Republican senators that President Bush would veto the annual defense spending bill if it contained language prohibiting the use of cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment by any U.S. personnel.

The senators ignored Mr. Cheney's threats, and the amendment, sponsored by Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), passed this month by a vote of 90 to 9. So now Mr. Cheney is trying to persuade members of a House-Senate conference committee to adopt language that would not just nullify the McCain amendment but would formally adopt cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment as a legal instrument of U.S. policy. The Senate's earlier vote suggests that it will not allow such a betrayal of American values. As for Mr. Cheney: He will be remembered as the vice president who campaigned for torture.

"I'm not a moralist, I'm an art critic."

I finally watched the thing (now here)
I'll make one change: The theme of any of these anti-hero melodramas, whether the main character is aristocratic or merely a man alone is not murder but suicide. The death of anyone else is secondary.
The tragic self-awareness of the noble hero in a world where he is irrelevant. etc.
[In writing and rewriting my last comment at CT I removed a sentence that scrambled the rest, turning it into a code. Not that anyone would care. Just note-taking]

Max and co. and Nathan have been good on the free trade bullshit over at Starbucks book klub

No de Kooning. No Struth.

ZOOM ZOOM
The shallowness of the people at CT never ceases to amaze me.

"...I at first didn't think the Vanguard thing was a big deal. But, it's become a major window into this guy's character. Basically, he's an I'm gonna do what I want and fuck you if you think otherwise kind of guy. Pretty sad if the Senate endorses his particular view of what making under oath promises to them means."

Contempt

White Phosphorus

The second link is not easy to look at.
successiva

Josh Marshall brings us what he calls "a snippet of this evening's Nelson Report."
Laura Rosen often cuts and pastes from it as well.

Here's Cristopher Nelson's page at Samuels International " ...a diversified international consulting firm specializing in business, trade and investment matters, particularly involving policies of American and foreign governments, economic and political risk assessments, investment strategies, and negotiations on trade and investment liberalization."

Chris Nelson is editor of The Nelson Report, a daily briefing on international economic policy issues, foreign and security policy matters and their relationship to politics in Washington. This daily briefing constitutes the core element of relationships with clients who also have direct access to Mr. Nelson for confidential communications in response to their specific needs and policy interests.

Marshall ends the long quote from tonight's report, detailing the Beltway internationalist's take on the Republican policy of self destruction, with the sentence: "They've brought us very, very low."

This is just silly. Realism is what it sounds like it is, if you're tough and intelligent enough to maintain it under adverse conditions. Kissinger was not a realist by any stretch of the imagination, and neither are the idiots running this country. Some people would argue that power brought us low a long time ago, and that stupidity merely brings us lower. My own views aside, I'm not interested in the moralism of the amoral.

"Since we have the former Clintonites arguing that they are pro-growth progressives, let's put some real pro-growth progressive policies on the table."
Dean Baker and Josh Bivens at MaxSpeak
---
Juan Cole on the riots.
---
And: Two cheers for benign monarchy. We're reached or returned to the age when the wealthy are so wealthy and so comfortable with themselves and their authority that the people are grateful for their offers of assistance.

In re almost everything I've been on about recently—whether politics or art collecting: from my parents' and now my own hardback first edition of Richard Roud's Godard.

JLG -"There's no point in having sharp images if you've got fuzzy ideas. Leacock's lack of subjectivity leads him ultimately to a lack of objectivity. He doesn't even know he's a metteur-en-scene, that pure reportage doesn't exist."

I spent some time yesterday browsing over Goffman's Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, and had the same response. If anything I'm reading or looking at—any work of human hand and mind—doesn't manifest some sort of double awareness, I become lost. The pseudo-autism of intellectual life. It's almost painful.

Struth, Sander

No real response to the riots. Does this count?
Not even here. The limits of neoliberalism indeed.

Atrios had the best short response, on Sunday:

INTIFADA 

I bounce back and forth between amusement and disgust at the right wing's bizarre and uninformed reaction to the events in Paris. Without getting into the of course important subtleties, think "60s race riots" as your comparison point, not "al Qaeda terrorists."

France treats its immigrant populations (which include, of course, 2nd and 3rd generation "immigrants") like shit. This isn't a "clash of cultures" it's rebellion by a repressed and marginalized underclass."

And I did it once, but I'll link to Direland again

UPDATE: More from the assholes at Crooked Fucking Timber And I still haven't quite gotten over the Doorman bullshit. The moral superiority of schoolteachers and pedants.

The Independent: "Powerful new evidence emerged yesterday that the United States dropped massive quantities of white phosphorus on the Iraqi city of Fallujah during the attack on the city in November 2004, killing insurgents and civilians with the appalling burns that are the signature of this weapon."

Laura Rozen reads from tonight's Nelson Report

Continuing the last post
Educated liberals are obliged as intellectuals to be internationalists while siding often, as a matter of course, with economically conservative arguments for cheap labor. Social conservatives are allied with economic conservatives in the same way, and the weaker parties on both sides—conservative and liberal—without any spokesmen of their own, end up represented by those with the agendas of their own moneyed class.
"Big deal," you say. "What else is new?"

Americans have no patience for psychology. Out of an unwillingness to become involved and a desire for quick fixes liberals as much as conservatives allow themselves to conflate human care with pity, though liberals are far more willing to indulge. But there's a huge difference between importing labor, whether by force or by recruitment, and the simple opening of doors. It makes perfect sense that new arrivals if given the chance would beat out a native-born underclass, as it makes sense that a country that allows such competition would defend economic globalization. Such a state already has shown an indifference to its native population as forceful as any defense other countries have ever made of theirs. After all, the comparison made most often over the past week has not between the immigrant populations in France and the US but between immigrants in one and a large segment of the native born population in the other.
---

Went to Christie's today. Saw a portrait of Colin by Elizabeth Peyton. (details are here)


It makes some sort of sense that the best description I've read of the man is in a fucking auction catalogue.

Renowned in the New York art scene, Colin De Land and the activities at his galleries, first in the heyday of the 1980's East Village at Vox Populi on East 6th Street, and then from 1988 until 2003 at the American Fine Arts on Wooster Street in SoHo, branded him as a conceptual artist as much as a gallerist. He became an art dealer by accident, when he offered to sell a Warhol painting for a neighbor who needed money for drugs. The milieu at American Fine Arts was characterized by a relaxed work atmosphere. Exhibitions did not always open on time and they often defied convention in installation. They were often critiques--of painting, of video, of institutional authority, of art itself. He permitted an artist to close the gallery for his month long slot in protest of commercialization in the art world. At times he exhibited fictional artists, such as the famous John Dogg, whose work was suspected, though never confirmed, to be a collaboration between Colin and Richard Prince. In addition, he showed many artists early in their careers, including Cady Noland, Jessica Stockholder, Mariko Mori and Alex Bag. On one occasion, when the art market was at its worst in the middle 1990s, Colin held a benefit at and for the gallery, and more than 200 artists donated works, even though most were represented by other dealers. It was precisely this kind of fabulous eccentricity that Peyton found alluring about Colin.

WHY IS FRANCE BURNING? The rebellion of a lost generation.
Doug Ireland.

I want to put something up in the near future about why I like Ireland so much more than almost every other american I read on the web.

The neoliberal imagination and a few points on religion and inquiry.

I'll begin with the latter. The understanding of debate itself as foundational marks the beginning of the secularization of culture. Once one sees one's own beliefs as existing alongside those of others, religious histories of myths and miracles become stories. Once you choose your faith, it ceases to function as a basis of language, becoming merely one of its functions. I left a comment on Russell Fox's page making this point. "Theology as such is irrelevant to intellectual debate in a democracy." Since republican forms of government are those wherein a Christian judge may hear a case argued by a Muslim lawyer concerning a dispute between a Hindu and a Jew, any forms of argument that can not be directed to every party make no sense. What to do with minorities in otherwise homogeneous communities? There's no one answer, but there is a difference between arguing from what one considers Christian principle, using one's own words or memory, and simply reading aloud from a bible.

The neoliberal imagination, the cup calls the saucer white. It's absurd for Henry Farrell to think he represents anything else. I made an only slightly annoyed observation here. Whether or not my first-hand knowledge as a construction worker in Manhattan for 25 years outweighs sociological number crunching my first point still holds, and not one person responded:

"The best way to remain on good terms with a doorman would be to actually spend some of your off hours in the basement."

Perhaps I should separate neoliberalism from post-humanist or anti-humanist post modernism, but what else can I say about those who study others as objects without reference to themselves as observers? What's the origin of this false remove?

We begin with sense; physical awareness of space, light, and motion. We are raised into and by others and by experience. We communicate by means of the collective library of imprecise notation we call language, and live our lives first and foremost as manifestations of predilection and sensibility. Whatever logical structures we build upon that foundation, however internally consistent and formally abstract, our tastes and logics, as we manifest them are inseparable. As policemen are mistaken when the assume they ARE the law, mathematicians are merely indulging in the imaginary synecdoches of autism when they identify themselves with their subject.
---

Corruption is inevitable in every system. A group of people become friends because they share interests and from that interest, respect. They support and protect one another. This, strictly speaking results in a form of corruption, though one that's inevitable, and which doesn't bother me. But what happens when all such people have in common is their interest in one another, when the friendship is no longer based in a third party, a subject or language? And how can we tell the difference one and the other, between the useful, functional corruption and the stifling fearful emptiness that results in the scenario of for the emperor's new clothes?

A repost from 03:
People create and maintain relationships with each other based on the things they have in common; what those interests are doesn't matter. If they share an interest in money, in politics, or in art, the same rules apply. In New York at this point of time, in the cultural milieu of which I am, in one way or another, a part, the one thing most people have in common, though they don't talk about it openly, is fear.

If the overarching logic of the past 30 years of American politics and culture has been to "give the people what they want," the art world has always prided itself on doing the opposite. "Give the people what they should have," is probably a better definition of the logic that defined the scene, or at least defined what the intellectual pitchmen declared the scene was about. Whatever the limitations the logic behind this however old fashioned, was not without a certain nobility. What purpose could there be for the idle rich, who were otherwise removed from the daily life of the people, but to help support those who like themselves felt a distance from the crowd, but who did not have the money to stay that way for long on their own? And did not these people have something to offer in the way of commentary on the run and the rush of capitalism at full throttle? And this after all was the basis of a friendship.

The culture of popular capitalism was always capable of more profundity than the art world allowed. If Roy Lichtenstein said his paintings were among other things an attempt to rescue his influences from banality - he correctly described the romance and military comics he cribbed from as 'fascist'- there were we all admit now more interesting things to look at on the newsstand and at the matinee. The New York Times "Fall Preview" is bigger than ever this year: nearly 70 pages in 3 sections, with only 10 devoted to art, including photography, and most of those dedicated to a list of the season's upcoming exhibits. The other 60 pages are made up of articles on theater, movies and music. Most of the space is taken up with puff pieces of one sort or another, but one still gets a sense of things being at stake, even in popular entertainment: of it being both a craft and a business, and a risky one. You sense effort. It's amazing what you can do under the nose of the aristocracy if no one takes you seriously.

If anti-capitalist criticality and reactionary snobbery, always the strange bedfellows of the art world, are now so obviously in conflict as to be beyond mention in polite society. If they are the couple no one wants to talk to at the party, what it there left for art? The international market is a conservative place. While all cultural activity is conservative by nature –it seeks to conserve, to remember, to memorialize– one of a kind or small batch commodities are at the far end of the spectrum. There is no need to oversimplify. There will always be something called 'Fine' art and it will continue to be a worthy subject of conversation; there will always be a market for the self consciously refined, in art as in literature. But in New York at the moment people are simply lying to themselves while waiting for the ax to fall. From the sense of superiority that once reigned, what we're offered now is a set of lazy references to popular culture, a pale imitation of Hollywood and MTV, without the effort or the intelligence. There's a pretense that by referring to 'popularity' without actually trying to be popular, one can maintain one's social standing.

"After all, I'm only slumming"
"Why?"
"Because I have nowhere else to go"

In this context any rearguard movement by a now reactionary modernism is irrelevant.

Of course there are good shows coming up in the next 9 months. And the largest sums of money will be, mostly, well spent. There will be a few works by younger artists that will shock, because they're bright and good and strange. Those who make them will mostly be foreign born, if not still there. But for the rest who call this place their home, there are friendships based on lies and cowardice. It doesn't matter if one is looking at artists, dealers or critics; it's painful to be around people with so little self respect, scrounging as they are for bread crumbs.

"Right to Wife"

Judge Alito, it's a pleasure to have you before our committee this morning. You're obviously an accomplished jurist, and my colleagues on the other side of the aisle speak very highly of you. I really have only one question for you, and it's my hope that you'll be able to put my mind, and the public's mind, at ease about it. What I'd like to know is, why do you think it's constitutional to treat a pregnant woman like a child?
...Now, in your opinion in Casey, right after that quote from Justice Marshall, you write this: "These harms are almost identical to those that the majority in this case attributes to Section 3209." Section 3209 is Pennsylvania's spousal-notice provision. Then you conclude, "Justice O'Connor's opinions disclose that the practical effect of a law will not amount to an undue burden unless the effect is greater than the burden imposed on minors seeking abortions in Hodgson or Matheson." And you uphold the spousal notice law because its burden doesn't exceed the burdens in those other cases.

Now, here's my question, Judge. Do you really think an undue burden for a grown woman is the same as an undue burden for a teenager? Do you think a woman deserves no more deference than a girl?

Movies and Dreams...

'How much do you want?'
'40...'
(next day)
'I sold it! You said 35 right?'
'No.'
'Oh... But what about my commission?...'
etc..

Today I go over the list with the man who I'm consulting with on this sort of shit. I know what I like, but the market is a different matter. It's not about quality, it's about what people want this week, and betting on what they'll want the next.

"Hey! I bought that piece!"
"From 'X'?"
"Yeah"
"A small one, by 'XXX'?"
"Yeah!"
"No shit!"
"How much?"
no comment

in re: the last sentence of the previous post.

As I've said, my respect for the people in my neighborhood stems from the fact and their awareness of the fact that they have dual allegiences, not to two states or two cultures but to two philosophies: one of self and self-interest and another to community. My neighbors, from all over the world -from 40 different countries- are all both deeply conservative and not.

A tennis player has two allegiances: to the rules of the game and to him or herself and her desire for victory. A lawyer in a court has two allegiances: to his or her client and the the rules of court and of the law. A citizen in a democracy or a republic is required to have the same dual allegiances. There is no freedom without responsibility.

The question for ideologues and theologians is this: to what do I owe my primary allegiance? What are the foundations of my moral philosophy? Is that foundation in myself, in my own sense of what is right and wrong? Or is my sense of right and wrong, my moral compass, inseparable from my respect for the formal process, the rules of the game? And what follows if I say it is the latter? The rules of debate follow from an understanding of the rules such as they are of language: that language is not the invention or property of an individual. Rules of law may belong to, be limited by, the boundaries of a state, but language in its capacities and limitations if not its sounds and syntax, is universal. And from the universals of language, of its ambiguities, and of the relations between and among people, between selves, we end up with nothing but questions.

Freedom of Inquiry: the foundation of my moral code. Not freedom of action, nor even freedom of speech.

This is tenth grade shit. I've got no patience with anyone who does not take it for granted. No, Scalia is not particularly intelligent. No, neither is Scalito
---
The second act of an american life.
Any minute now. Or maybe last week.

The Guardian
AUBERVILLIERS, France (AP) - Widespread riots across impoverished areas of France took a malevolent turn in a ninth night of violence, as youths torched an ambulance and stoned medical workers coming to the aid of a sick person. Authorities arrested more than 200 people, an unprecedented sweep since the beginning of the unrest.

Bands of youths also burned a nursery school, warehouses and more than 750 cars overnight as the violence that spread from the restive Paris suburbs to towns around France. The U.S. warned Americans against taking trains to the airport through the affected areas.

At the nursery school in Acheres, west of Paris, part of the roof was caved in, childrens' photos stuck to blackened walls, and melted plastic toys littered the floor.

The town had been previously untouched by the violence. Some residents demanded that the army be deployed, or that citizens rise up and form militias. At the school gate, the mayor tried to calm tempers.

``We are not going to start militias,'' Mayor Alain Outreman said. ``You would have to be everywhere.''

Fires and other incidents were reported in the northern city of Lille, in Toulouse, in the southwest, Rouen, in the west and elsewhere on the second night of unrest in areas beyond metropolitan Paris. An incendiary device was tossed at the wall of a synagogue in Pierrefitte, northwest of Paris, where electricity went out after a burning car damaged an electrical pole.

``This is dreadful, unfortunate. Who did this? Against whom?'' Naima Mouis, a hospital worker in Suresnes, asked while looking at the hulk of her burned-out car.

On Saturday morning, more than 1,000 people took part in a silent march in one of the worst-hit suburbs, Aulnay-sous-Bois, filing past burned-out cars to demand calm. One banner read: ``No to violence.'' Car torchings have become a daily fact in France's tough suburbs, with about 100 each night.

The Interior Ministry operations center reported 754 vehicles burned throughout France from Friday night to Saturday morning - three-quarters of them in the Paris area.

Arrests were also up sharply, with 203 people detained overnight, the center said. By comparison, Interior Ministry Nicolas Sarkozy said Thursday that police had made 143 arrests during the whole first week of unrest.

The violence - sparked after the Oct. 27 accidental electrocution of two teenagers who believed police were chasing them in Seine-Saint-Denis - has laid bare discontent simmering in France's poor suburbs ringing big cities. Those areas are home to large populations of African Muslim immigrants and their children living in low-income housing projects marked by high unemployment, crime and despair.

Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin oversaw a Cabinet meeting Saturday to evaluate the situation.

The persistence of the violence prompted the American and Russian governments to advise citizens visiting Paris to avoid the suburbs, where authorities were struggling to gain control of the worst rioting in at least a decade.

An attack this week on a woman bus passenger highlighted the savage nature of some of the violence. The woman, in her 50s and on crutches, was doused with an inflammable liquid and set afire after passengers were forced to leave the bus, blocked by burning objects on the road, judicial officials said.

Late Friday in Meaux, east of Paris, youths prevented firefighters from evacuating a sick person from an apartment in a housing project, pelting them with stones and torching the awaiting ambulance, an Interior Ministry officer said. The officer, not authorized to speak publicly, asked not to be named.

``I'm not able to sleep at night because you never know when a fire might break out,'' said Mammed Chukri, 36, a Kurdish immigrant from northern Iraq living near a burned carpet warehouse. ``I have three children and I live in a five-story building. If a fire hit, what would I do?''

A national police spokesman, Patrick Hamon, said there appeared to be no coordination between gangs in the various riot-hit suburbs. He said, however, that neighborhood youths were communicating between themselves using mobile phone text messaging or e-mails to arrange meeting points and alert each other to police

Riots Spread
Nov 3
Seven Nights and Counting

I'm surprised there's been so little comment.

Libby pleads innocent.

The Guardian
BRUSSELS, Belgium (AP) - The European Commission said Thursday it will investigate reports that the CIA set up secret jails in eastern Europe.
European Union spokesman Friso Roscam Abbing said the EU head office would informally question the 25 national governments over the reports.

"We have to find out what is exactly happening. We have all heard about this then we have to see if it is confirmed.'' He said if such secret prisons existed, they would violate EU human rights rules.

I'll fix it later

Ambition Countering Ambition.
It's not the press's  job to be fair, or even honest. It's our job to keep them honest. The paragraphs below, from Balkinization, discuss the tripartite structure of the USG. I've tried to explain a thousand times why I get a headache every when I read or discuss politics in this country. And it is the result precisely of the willed ignorance -denial- by so many of the fact that they represent interests as much or more so than ideas. The assholes at Tapped can not see themselves as representing a middle class intellectuality. The can not see how much their language invariably refers back to a sensibility, a manner and taste; and Yglesias that fathead fuck; and Crooked Timber. When Henry Farrell refers to neo-liberalism in the ideas of others my eyes roll back into my head and my hands begin to shake. I go almost catatonic.
It is a the height of hypocrisy for a man -one who is not fully a living saint, of which the only example I can think of is Fra Angelico- to imagine himself and his perceptions as non-subjective. A better word. Use it as the alternative term and see if you're not immediately embarrassed to claim such philosophical clarity. 'I'm a non-subjective journalist.' Try not to laugh. And don't fucking ask me who Fra Angelico was.

But that reminds me of a story about the great art historian Meyer Schapiro, who in all his wisdom as a socialist and a scholar, attempted to psychoanalyze his own son, for the son's benefit of course. What moral clarity. What non-subjective reason. What blindness. What cruelty.

The pseudo-scientific false neutrality of the modern American press and political intelligencia. 'Political' science: as if the study of human behavior is akin to the study of plant-life. And scientists are plants. Affectations of innocence all around. Good intentions. Sincerity. Willfully vulgar anti-intellectualism. All so fucking American. You want to blame the right wing for this shit? Why DeLong reminds me of Chomsky and Bainbridge reminds me of Delong. Down the fucking food chain from brilliant pedantry to moralizing mediocrity.

Jack Balkin

The American constitutional system divides national powers into three branches, and then allows each branch to check the others while preserving their independence. The purpose is to diffuse power and allow ambition to counter ambition. If the President becomes too monarchical, Congress or the Courts will oppose him and take him down a notch; if Congress tries to concentrate power, the President can veto legislation and the courts can strike it down or read it narrowly. If the courts get out of line, the President and the Senate can appoint new judges and Justices, or threaten to limit the court's jurisdiction, and so on.

Behind this theory is the assumption that the different branches will have different interests premised on their institutional loyalties. The President will seek to protect and extend executive power, the Congress legislative prerogatives, and the courts judicial authority. As Madison explained in Federalist 51, this was the point: "the interest of the man must be connected with the constitutional rights of the place." Presidents, because they were presidents, would always check a Congress that seemed to encroach on their authority; Congress, because it was Congress, would always have incentives to oversee Presidential malfeasance, first because the President was not doing what Congress wanted, and second, because ambitious Congressmen and Senators could make a name for themselves by exposing executive overreaching and corruption.

There was, alas, a fly in the ointment. The framers did not expect a party system; they opposed political parties, thinking them bad for democracy.

...Faced with such a state of affairs, and powerless to use the investigative tools of Congress to check Presidential incompetence and venality, the Democrats in the minority did the only thing left to them. They engaged in a public relations stunt to shame the Republican majority in Congress.

In the short run, it seems to have worked. Congress will now move forward with some sort of investigation into the Administration's use of intelligence. (How serious that investigation proves to be remains to be seen.)

But in the long run, these sorts of ploys won't be an effective substitute for a working system of checks and balances.

If Congress won't perform its assigned function of oversight, the only recourse is the American people. Will they become sufficiently engaged to put our constitutional system back in order, and once again let ambition counter ambition?

Now I know why I don't read Neiwert
"One of the reasons Michelle Malkin fails the test of being an actual journalist lies in the way she conducts her work: There is simply no evidence of any attempt at fairness."

Every man and woman has to make up his or her own mind. The notion of enforced fairness leads to passivity. We're each the guardian of our own imagination.

Try telling a prosecutor or a defense attorney to be fair.
What a fucking idiot.

For part two see above.

Too much time with Bainbridge. As I said, I'm going back to DeLong. A higher level of cognitive dissonance.
---

WaPo

The hidden global internment network is a central element in the CIA's unconventional war on terrorism. It depends on the cooperation of foreign intelligence services, and on keeping even basic information about the system secret from the public, foreign officials and nearly all members of Congress charged with overseeing the CIA's covert actions..."

link from Laura Rozen: "Read that last line again. It clearly means that these activities are not being reported to the Congressional oversight committees. Under whose authority? Isn't that illegal?"

update

http://lefarkins.blogspot.com/2005/10/alitos-casey-dissent.html

I missed all the fun today, didn't I?

I posted a comment last night at Professor Bainbridge and he's responded to me in a post. I've been getting a lot of visitors today.

Conservatives are as philosophically opposed to human empathy are liberals are philosophically predisposed to assuming they themselves exhibit it.

Conservatives aren't that smart and they know it. But they're afraid of being conned and they suspect rightly that most liberals are hypocrites. Bainbridge is a lower-middle-class kid who wants His; and he's a Catholic who believes in old fashioned morality. How he reconciles the philosophical defense of selfishness with Catholic moral teaching I have no idea.

Save the Court

An African American had been convicted of felony murder by an all white jury from which black jurors had been impermissibly struck because of their race. Alito cast the deciding vote and wrote the majority opinion in a 2-1 ruling rejecting the defendant's claims. The full Third Circuit, in a split decision, reversed Alito's ruling, and the majority specifically criticized him for having compared statistical evidence about the prosecution's exclusion of blacks from juries in capital cases to an explanation of why a disproportionate number of recent U.S. Presidents have been left-handed. According to the majority, "[t]o suggest any comparability to the striking of jurors based on their race is to minimize the history of discrimination against prospective black jurors and black defendants . . ."--

From pages 9 and 10 of the full preliminary report, here (PDF)

"Spousal notification – would require a married woman to present a statement signed by her husband, attesting that he knows about her intention to have an abortion, before she could undergo the procedure".

The link is from Tapped, but CBS news put the subject 45 seconds into their report.

It was 1970 - the year Roe came to court. I was a young mother with three daughters under the ages of five. My life was my family. Then one day my husband left. I was terrified. Suddenly I was alone in my responsibility to my children. I was a homemaker with no money, no job, no car. I was quickly forced onto welfare.

Then - almost immediately after my husband left - I found I was pregnant. I was devastated. Physically, financially, emotionally - I couldn't care for another child.

Like most women, I never expected to even consider an abortion. I was a Catholic woman. Abortion was illegal. It was shrouded in shame and wrapped in danger. I couldn't discuss abortion with my mother, my sister or my friends - let alone my priest. I had to struggle with the moral and ethical questions alone - to debate my obligations to my children against my responsibility to the developing life inside me. In the end, I chose my children. I chose abortion.

But in those days, that was not a choice I could make by myself. I had to appear before an all-male hospital board. They asked all the awful questions. They probed into the most intimate details of my life. I felt completely worthless, violated. The only way I could get a safe, legal abortion - the only way I could avoid putting myself at risk - was to convince them that I was unstable - that I was incapable of raising another child - that I was unfit to be a mother.

But the inquisition had a final - and most demeaning - twist. The board finally agreed to grant me an abortion - but, first, I had to get written permission from the man who abandoned me and our daughters.

I found him. He gave me permission. And I had the abortion.
Kate Michelman

update such as it is, from Volokh.

link

I found it at CT, where they seem unable to laugh and think at the same time. But they found it from Andrew Sullivan, where I found this:

"You are right to say that Taranto's comment on menstrual blood was pathetic, and to add the label "homophobic bigot" to the label "religious bigot" and "torture apologist" that he deserves to wear.
As a man who has been a happy heterosexual all my life, I just want to point out that I too find this interrogation tactic utterly repellent and un-American. And not because I find menstrual blood itself repellent--I actually have some very fond memories of being smeared here and there with menstrual blood over the years, and I have found it not the least bit repellent. (Sometimes as part of love-making, sometimes as part of the ordinary inevitable intimacy of living with the wife of twenty years who has given me two children).
But you know, there is this thing about the difference between what we may do consensually, and what the government may order its agents to force on people, which the Bush administration seems to have stopped paying attention to. You'd have thought this distinction was essential to the conservative outlook, but then...

July 20 2004

Desire or Convention
Freedom or Equality

Equality implies a pulling up and/or down depending on one's prior status. This is bourgeois Anglo-Saxonism at it's worst: one is either removed from one's past, history, ritual, custom -one is free- or one is not. But if you follow behavior rather than ideas, actions more than explanations, you realize that this removal is a fiction. Libertarianism is the elevation of this fiction to theology.

What I admire and appreciate about both Lewontin and the man who considers himself his mortal enemy is the sense they share that for all their education, perhaps brilliance, not much divides the two of them with the rest of humanity. Each in their way is believably humble. And if you don't think Trivers has found a way to manufacture his humility out of arrogance you miss the fucking point.

Fucking idiots.
Never trust an auto mechanic on environmental policy.

The urge to 'maximize' is only universal as a tendency, one that has been constrained in many ways over the history of human civilization.
It was not celebrated as a moral good until very recently, and is now only celebrated as such by those who those who would consider themselves realists by considering it an absolute [Darwinian?] universal.
From this they build arguments which are successful if and only if you accept the assumptions that precede their logic.
The wilingness to do that, as a liberal, is what accounts for the absurd structures of division and re-division in Dworkin's last book.

You can't deny the fact of individual conscience but neither can you deny the fact of collective activity and knowledge. One person can not invent language. There are no monads. We are products of our time more than producers of it. In accepting Epstein's pretense of a value-free logic, you abdicate a responsibility to the philosophical humanism of which the common law has played such an important part. The intellectual asks: What do we value? What is the relationship of the individual to the collective? What are the responsibilities of each to the other?

What do we value?
What should we value?

The defeat of Stalinism makes these shitheads so full of hubris they wants to believe, and they want you to believe, that it's dangerous- even a danger to democracy- to ask that last question.

What should we value? That's the question democracies ask of themselves. That's their cause and their reason for being.
The American people abdicated their responsibility in voting for an idiot. Judith Miller abdicated her responsibility. Neocons view that abdication as a moral good.

"Wanker of the Day"
George Packer.

What did you expect?

From Juan Cole:

Tom Lasseter of Knight Ridder says that the passage of the constitution may not halt Iraq's slide into civil war and partition. (Since the Sunni Arabs overwhelmingly rejected it, the charter is at the very least not a force for national unity!) He quotes a US official saying, "Maybe they just have to have their civil war" and commenting that it is a "way of life" "over here."

I see. So the US invades Iraq, overthrows the government, dissolves the army, appoints an ethnically determined government, backs fundamentalist Shiite parties and Kurdish parties against the interests of the Sunni Arabs. And now it is the Iraqis' fault that there is communal violence, because they are just like that "over here." Well, you can't say that Orientalist stereotypes aren't at least useful as fig leafs for imperial SNAFUs.

Shahin M. Cole observed today, "Partition is the consequence of failed colonialism."

Of Models and Descriptions, Ideas and Ideologies, the difference between the 19th and 20th centuries, etc. etc.

I happened to be reading a paper by a friend today and came across a lovely passage by William Morris on the principle of distribution that would obtain in a socialist society. The passage is from Morris’s What Socialists Want and I found it interesting in the light of the arguments that go on today among egalitarian liberal political philosophers. Thus spake Morris:

when a family that is comfortably-off sit down to a leg of mutton how do they act? do they bring in a pair of scales and weigh out to each one his share of the victuals? No that is done in a prison, but not in a family: in a family everybody has what he needs and no one grudges it: Mary has one slice, Jack has two, and Bill has four: but Mary and Jack don’t feel wronged, since they have had as much as they wanted: and the reason for this is that enough has been provided, and that the members of the family trust one another. My friends it is for you to choose whether you will live in a prison or a family: we Socialists beg you to choose the latter.

The important thing for Morris is that everyone have enough, and that everyone trusts one another sufficiently to be assured that others are not taking more than they need. And he contrasts this with an attitude of (suspicious) calculation. I’m not sure whether Morris is enunciating a principle of justice here, or whether he would say that justice is inherently calculative and that these are circumstances of abundance where the watchful attitude of strict justice no longer applies. But if (and it’s a big if) this is taken as a principle of justice, then it is notable that he isn’t endorsing a principle of strict equality, but rather one of sufficiency. Indeed this contrast is even clearer towards the beginning of the text where Morris writes:

So you see whatever inequality I admit among people, I claim this equality – that everybody should have full enough food, clothes, and housing, and full enough leisure, pleasure, and education; and that everybody should have a certainty of these necessaries: in this case we should be equal as Socialists use the word ….

Again, a principle of sufficiency and the suggestion of the dimensions of human existence in which we should have sufficient that prefigures some of the lists of essential capabilites that Martha Nussbaum enumerates in various places.

My two comments:

1- You’ve made the intellectual’s usual mistake of equating description with prescription. Calculating an argument against calculation destroys Morris’ thought.

Literature, unlike philosophy, describes without prescription, and Morris’ is as much a literary as a philosphical statement. The 19th C. was good for that sort of stuff. I’ve made the same point to Henry about Marx.

The question you should be asking is how to construct and communicate in such a way that might attempt to do justice not to the ideas of ‘friendship’ and ‘trust’ but to the facts of them.
I’m not claiming there’s an answer to the problem- strictly speaking there isn’t- only that the problem exists. In fact it’s the central problem of contemporary intellectual life.
What exactly is ‘art’?

2- Again, since no one listens, here's the question: how do you construct a 'model' as complex as what preceded it? Morris is describing family relationships as they exist, using givens and generalities. He is describing a system after its genesis. That's what literature does. A model on the other hand is a precursor.
There's a contradiction here, and if Morris is on one side everyone here is on the other.
I prefer Morris if only because he is more interested in his way in the complexity of things than of ideas.
---

I'm so sick of these assholes. What do you say to people proud to be smarter than David Brooks? So you're not absolute idiots. Now get down off your high-chairs and do something worthwhile.
Idiots like Brooks know enough to be self hating. These fuckheads are too full of themselves to see the contradictions in their own position.

Nathan Newman: [links in original] "If we want to have a U.N. session on Syria's involvement in foreign assassinations, can we also get one on Kissinger's involvement in the coup and potential assassination of Chile's President in the 1970s?
How about the US support for mass murder by allies in Guatemala?
And the US involvement in the mass murders that followed the overthrow of President Suharto of Indonesia in 1965?
Or investigations of any range of illegal foreign adventures by our intelligence services?
I'm happy to see a real look at Syria's dirty dealings in Lebanon. I just hope this is a first step in opening up the books on illegal assassination of foreign leaders by ALL countries."

Syria?

It's going to be an interesting weekend.

July 20 2004

I forwarded the link to the the F.T. piece on Wilkerson to Laura Rozen yesterday without posting it. I should have been paying more attention..

It's going to be an interesting weekend

After Wilson published a book criticizing the administration in April 2004, during the closely fought presidential campaign, Libby became consumed by passages that he believed were inaccurate or unfair to Cheney, former aides said. He ordered up a meticulous catalog of Wilson's claims and public statements going back to early 2003.

The result was a packet that included excerpts from press clips and television transcripts of Wilson's statements that were divided into categories, such as "political ties" or "WMD."

The compendium used boldfaced type to call attention to certain comments by Wilson, such as one in the Daily Iowan, the University of Iowa student newspaper, in which Wilson was quoted as calling Cheney "a lying son of a bitch." It also highlighted Wilson's answers to questions from television journalists about his work with Sen. John F. Kerry, the Democratic presidential nominee.

The intensity with which Libby reacted to Wilson had many senior White House staffers puzzled, and few agreed with his counterattack plan or its rationale, former aides said...

The ax is falling.
The sky may be too, but that's a different issue.

A few day ago courtesy of Prof. Bainbridge I found this defense of Congress' authority by John McGinnis of the Heritage Foundation.
Now, from Jack Balkin we have this from Mike Paulsen and John Yoo.
Also from J.B. just for laughs.
There was always a litmus test. We knew it, and now they admit it.

I'll also repeat (sort of) what I wrote yesterday:
There is no way to resolve once and for all the conflict between authority and indiividual responsibility in a democratic country. It's a moral and philosophical problem that must be faced by each individual every time the question arises.

Conservatives have been trashing the rules of debate for years: dismissing argument as such, lowering everything to the level of insult and equating dissent with disloyalty, all of course while claiming to take the high road. Now they've left themselves no room to move.

The Guardian

Chris McGreal in Jerusalem:
"At the northern edge of Jerusalem, on the main road to the Palestinian city of Ramallah, three towering concrete walls are converging around a rapidly built maze of cages, turnstiles and bomb-proof rooms.
When construction at Qalandiya is completed in the coming weeks, the remaining gaps in the 8m (26ft)-high walls will close and those still permitted to travel between the two cities will be channelled through a warren of identity and security checks reminiscent of an international frontier.

The Israeli military built the crossing without fanfare over recent months, along with other similar posts along the length of the vast new "security barrier" that is enveloping Jerusalem, while the world's attention was focussed on the Israeli prime minister, Ariel Sharon's removal of Jewish settlers from the Gaza Strip.

But these de facto border posts are just one element in a web of construction evidently intended to redraw Israel's borders deep inside the Palestinian territories and secure all of Jerusalem as Israel's capital, and to do it fast so as to put the whole issue beyond negotiation. As foreign leaders, including Tony Blair, praised Mr Sharon for his "courage" in pulling out of Gaza last month, Israel was accelerating construction of the West Bank barrier, expropriating more land in the West Bank than it was surrendering in Gaza, and building thousands of new homes in Jewish settlements."

BIRD FLU, BIRD BRAINS, AND ECONOMISTS

In reference to the links in this post.
Ellipses
Papers by Thomas Nagel (pdf)
and Michael Perry

Perry begins with an extended quote, a reference to a reference:

Richard Rorty, the leading postmodernist liberal theorist . . . concedes that liberalism, once so jealous of its autonomy from Biblical faith, is in fact parasitic upon it. In his essay “Postmodern Bourgeois Liberalism,” he describes secular liberals like himself as “freeloading atheists.” They continue to rely on the Judeo-Christian legacy of concern with human dignity despite their rejection of the revealed truth that alone could support this concern. . . . For Rorty, God is dead but secularized Christian morality continues. This is precisely one of the scenarios envisaged by Nietzsche in The Gay Science: “God is dead, but given the way men are there may still be caves for thousands of years in which [t]his shadow will be shown.” True, only 125 of those years have now passed, but on the evidence of Rorty’s thought, it’s hard to believe that this sort of shadow play still has centuries to run.

Nagel begins straight off:

Analytic philosophy as a historical movement has not done much to provide an alternative to the consolations of religion. This is sometimes made a cause for reproach, and it has led to unfavorable comparisons with the continental tradition of the twentieth century, which did not shirk that task. I believe this is one of the reasons why continental philosophy has been better received by the general public: it is at least trying to provide nourishment for the soul, the job by which philosophy is supposed to earn its keep. Analytic philosophers usually rebuff the complaint by pointing out that their concerns are continuous with the central occupations of Western philosophy from Parmenides onward: metaphysics, epistemology, logic, and ethical theory. Those topics have been pursued in a great tradition of works that are often technical and difficult, and that are not intended for a broad audience. The aim of that tradition is understanding, not edification.

I don't know what to do with this crap. What analytical philosophy fails to do is acknowledge the fact of the thinking subject, of the subject centered nature of all thought as such. The speaking -always rational!- voice seems to eminate from somewhere but no one can say where that place is. Is it the voice of science? Is science a place now?
And what the fuck is all this about the nourishment of the soul?

Freedom of inquiry, and the right -the obligation if you're an adult- to be curious; these are the only grounds for a theory of rights in a godless age. And they're enough from an intellectual standpoint to get the job done. Common sense morality does the rest.   A grouping of people each with a variety of limited understandings, each with his or her own story, each no more valuable than the next if only because we can not predict the outcome of events. Simple. Rorty's got his head up his ass.

And as I've said before concerning religion itself and faith: very few people claim to witness miracles. Most by far hear stories. Faith in miracles as such, absent a compelling story, leaves non-witnesses with kitsch, with unmediated faith which communicates to others again only if at all on faith. For the rest of us the language -art and artifice- convinces, or not.  And theologians like literature professors know, even if they won't admit, that the language comes first.

People believe good stories more than bad ones. Stories are more important than gods.

Mafi Floosh
Mafi Moshkele

In re: McDonalds. A man and his wife in a late model Explorer or some other large SUV, at the drive-through. 11 pm last night.
Breaking the fast.
I was next in line, on foot.

1

Early this autumn, as today's Iranian rulers defied the new Rome by pressing ahead with their nuclear program, I traveled for two weeks through what is now the Islamic Republic of Iran. In the year of their Lord 1384, I talked to mullahs armed with laptops, regime supporters in the religious hotbed of Qom, and Islamic philosophers highly critical of the regime. I met intellectuals of all stripes, artists, farmers, politicians, and businesspeople. Most memorably, I had long, intense conversations with some of the young Iranians who make up the majority of the country's population. I see their earnest faces before me as I write, especially those of the women, framed in the compulsory Islamic head scarf, the hijab, which they somehow manage to convert into an accessory of grace and quiet allure.

2

The cold war ended in 1991, but a continuing flow of books on the subject testifies to our deep fascination with it, and to the contested meaning of its legacy. This is particularly true of its ideological component, the "cultural cold war," for as David Caute has noted, the "mortal 'stroke'" that buried Soviet communism was not just economic and military, but also "moral, intellectual, and cultural." The opening of the archives east and west over the past fifteen years has greatly contributed to the debate over what exactly happened, by allowing commentators to reexamine, for example, the role of the CIA in front organizations in the West, like the Congress for Cultural Freedom, and that of the NKVD/ KGB and its affiliates in Communist fronts of a similar nature.

...they somehow manage to convert into an accessory of grace and quiet allure
...the "mortal 'stroke'" that buried Soviet communism was not just economic and military, but also "moral, intellectual, and cultural."

Thousands of years of philosophies in any language the vast majority declaiming one or another of the varieties of asceticism, and the current descriptions -in this country- of the recent epic, absurd, violent and tragic attempts to impose those values by force on the people at large devolves inevitably into a defense of the moral superiority of sheetrock and McDonalds.

All culture is artificial, be it in the culture of Tehran in 2005 or that of whatever public school Timothy Garton Ash was attending when he first had a cock in his ass.
The hijab becomes 'an accessory of grace and quiet allure' precisely because it is mandatory. Anything that is obligatory becomes used, becomes transformed by use. Please, please, speak of what is gained and lost.

You would consider yourself an intellectual. Act like one.
idiots. idiots idiots idiots idiots idiots...

Nathan Newman makes me laugh

Najibullah, Reza Pahlavi, and Saddam Hussein were all modernizers, but P.Z.Myers doesn't get the joke.
Deal with the boredom, the poverty and the banality of working (or semi-working)- life and fundamentalism will take care of itself. 'The Partnership for a God Free America' won't work any more than its namesake, nor should it.

How mamy times can I say it: puritans and drunks.
And I prefer drunks.

"So the referendum is tomorrow- well, technically speaking, today."

Pakistan is a politically unstable country, WITH NUKES. It is also geologically unstable.

Juan Cole

The Pakistani government is now estimating 30,000 dead in the earthquake, and incidents of civil violence are being reported by AP. CNN is suggesting that 2.5 million are homeless, and perhaps as many as 5 million.

The magnitude of the disaster is only gradually becoming apparent. It will put enormous pressure on Pakistan's government to respond effectively. Its ability to do so is not clear.

The geopolitical outcome could be significant. Governments have been shaken by poor response to smaller catastrophes than this one, e.g. Turkey's in the late 1990s. Gen. Musharraf's future may depend in part on how well he can turn his military and government to disaster relief. Likewise, the future of Kashmir, a global flashpoint, may be affected. If Pakistan cannot show it cares and can come to the aid of the Kashmiris it rules, it will very likely forfeit all claim on the region (in opinion polls, few Kashmiris want to join Pakistan, anyway).

The Bush administration response so far seems to me wholly inadequate to the scale of this problem.

Editing film is like editing language: rearranging sentences you may not have written into paragraphs, building paragraphs into chapters and chapters into books, or movies.
A Glass in the Sink
I posted this a couple of years ago. It's a simple flash movie. I'm working with Final Cut now on a new project. The response has been very good. We'll see.

A couple of men with brown skin sitting and drinking in a book-lined room listening to a white guy play guitar.

"I have cancer and jungle fever, and tonight one of them is going to get cured."

A theater critic discusses politics.

Another academic is denied tunure.

I've never paid much attention to either August Wilson or Oscar Hijuelos. Rightly or wrongly I've always seen Wilson as a representative of the Arthur Miller/ Playhouse 90 school and have no interest. But a friend of mine has done some drinking with Hijuelos and tells good stories. And of course I respect craftspeople on principle. Same goes for this. [Joss Whedon: pro-union.]

I don't give a shit about Drezner. I'm beyond disgust with academia, or at least of the sort that sees ideas over acts -or even worse, a priori as reality. Every definition is de facto a forced isolation, artificial, and the invention of god is merely an attempt to naturalize the man-made definitions of the world. But every word must have one meaning for it to have a thousand implications. And those changing implications are the ground from which future meanings come.

I've just given you a simple description of the process of linguistic, legal and Constitutional change, not how it should or shouldn't happen but how it does. There is no argument that can be made against this. So lets hear it for the craftsmen and women who make life worth living for the vast majority, and whose works and actions make possible the careers who those who think otherwise.
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Hijuelos

He liked the views of the river from my windows, New Jersey twinkling in the distance, and the Victorian club-like atmosphere of certain of my book-lined rooms. He always looked around to see what books I had been reading, and occasionally, if I'd left some pages of a manuscript lying about, he'd give me a sly look as if to say: "Ah, productivity! A good thing!" He didn't talk that way, but that was what his expression conveyed to me.... 

That night in May, as on so many similar nights, we ended up in my study to watch the fight, the sound turned low and some Clifford Brown on the stereo until the main event finally came on. In times past he'd sit in that room with guests ranging from my old, blue-collar neighborhood friends to Lou Reed, who, to August's delight, played a couple of his songs one evening on a nylon string guitar. But whoever had joined us, August always remained somewhat apart from the persona of one who had received so much acclaim.

rereading in 2015. I didn't catch the mannerisms the first time.

Max Smart

"What, if anything, does secular philosophy have to put in the place of religion?"

Here's more from the same same source

I've run into a few things like this recently.  Does a 'village atheist' have a philosophy? Is his morality as such in question? Should it be? Philosophers are either priests or ex-priests: they see the disenchantment of the world is either a tragedy or a goal; they are unwilling or unable to see their truth-seeking in historical context. I'd be amused to see a poll of the religious beliefs, or lack thereof, of novelists or actors. The disenchantment of the world never happened and never will and god has nothing to do with it, just as he or she has nothing to do with religion (except in the minds of a tiny percentage of eccentrics)

The original sin is not curiosity but its opposite as lived and professed by popes, professors and market theorists. And as far as rights are concerned it makes more sense to focus on freedom of inquiry, the right of the people to acquire knowledge, than on freedom of speech, which devolves quickly into the right one man to be stupid. The right to listen is more important, more foundational, than the right to be heard. It's a subtle shift but it's important.

Oh God, why the fuck am I reading this shit? Do neoliberal technocrats and rationalist pedants bore me so much that I have to start mocking conservatives?
They're all the same at this point.

The next generation of intellectual liberals, N+1.  [archive.org]

It's not the anti-intellectualism of this country that drives me nuts, it's the intellectualism that claims so proudly to go against the grain while being consumed with envy. In the Stocks (including 'The Ballad of the Stockholder Intellectual'), full of naive moral confusion and self pity, as if Gore Vidal doesn't have a good broker. Joan Didion in her recent piece in the The Times Magazine on life after her husband's death referred to "Jose. Who was in our household." She and John Gregory Dunne had at least one servant, and he cried.

Didion's clear-sightedness is beyond these teenage idiots. The Chatroom Society:"Though there may not be a great writer left, literature still rules." Radiohead, or the Philosophy of Pop: "I've wondered why there's no philosophy of popular music... Everyone repeats the received idea that music is revolutionary. Well is it? ...Is pop truly of its time, in the sense that it represents some aspect of exterior history apart from the path of its internal development?"
My god, what colossal willed ignorance; the absolute inability to look for oneself, at oneself, at one's tastes and preconceptions, and simply to describe them.

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In the Stocks.  And less than a year later they're publishing a managing partner in private equity, reviewing books and writing about  art collectors.

The democrats should be attacking republicans for even thinking of questioning Bush's choice.

"Not a sexy topic"
You're kidding me, right?

"Senators beginning what ought to be a protracted and exacting scrutiny of Harriet Miers should be guided by three rules. First, it is not important that she be confirmed. Second, it might be very important that she not be. Third, the presumption -- perhaps rebuttable but certainly in need of rebutting -- should be that her nomination is not a defensible exercise of presidential discretion to which senatorial deference is due."
George Will

"To the pure, all things are pure."
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Meanwhile, here's the Democratic agenda: "Don't talk about the War"

both links from Atrios