business before pleasure

good enough

http://www.guardian.co.uk/israel/Story/0,,1794432,00.html
http://www.guardian.co.uk/worldlatest/story/0,,-5876537,00.html

posted without comment.

Leiter on Religion:
A mixture of the obvious and the odd. His radicalism is so bourgeois in it's assumptions; and to be radical is never to assume, yes?

[still a bit rough]
I've always had a visceral sort of distaste for the moral philosophy of contracts and self-interest. Rawlsian logic reminds me of the scene in Monty Python and the Holy Grail, Somewhere in Hull: Apropos the neighboring family of 20 odd children -filthy and unkillable infants of the Catholic poor- an Anglican old dry stick turns to his wife and asks why "they can't they just use birth control like we do when we have sex." To which the wife [Terry Jones?] sheepishly replies: "But darling, we don't have sex."

I don't eat pussy because I want my cock sucked, I eat pussy because there's nothing else I'd rather do. And given a choice between a woman who sucks cock because she feels obliged as payment for a social debt and one who swallows for the love of it, which would you choose? Mix the genders any way you like, the question is the same.

Rather than false neutrality, why not accept the inevitability of bias? Rather than gross generalizations and the intellectual vulgarity of Rawls and John Cleese, why not choose to look down on self-interest itself: why not treat it with the disrespect it deserves?
That's not to say one should ignore it -one cannot disdain what does not understand- but accepting the existence of a lowest common denominator is not the same as celebrating it as such.
Science may teach us that greed is common. It does not preclude the judgement that it is also banal. Nor in fact does it preclude the argument that it's glorious, but such an argument at least is a discussion of value.

I'd have more respect for DeLong and more interest in Leiter's ideas (Leiter has a sense of humor) if they both understood the degree to which they each conform to a type. Their logics are built on sensibilities and values. As I've said before, the argument is not between religion and science but between the values of craft -of skill and artifice- and science. The rule of law is the rule of oratory and interpretation, and the goal is an imperfect justice. Science is the search for facts, described hyperbolically as a search for truth.

Craftsmen are more flexible than bureaucrats. Poets, priests, con-men, and lawyers are craftsmen, and academics are bureaucrats of the imagination, or that's what they become when they start referring to scientific processes as 'values.'

I prefer con-men to bureaucrats (on principle).
---

On a related, and more recent, note Jason Stanley asks what he thinks is a rhetorical question, Why Hire a Philosophy Major?:

"Perhaps because those trained in philosophy are likely to possess a better combination of verbal reasoning, quantitative reasoning, and analytical writing skills than those trained in any other major?"

At the bottom of the PDF he links to, the lowest numbers, alongside Business-Accounting[!] are for Social Work and Early Education.
It seems logical the next test should be for empathy.

Art Basel 2006

record keeping. posted elsewhere

The failures of the scientization of discourse are the same as those of the scientization of newspaper writing as objective journalism and of politics as polling. The point is not to have or cultivate opinions or beliefs but simply to respond to reports of the beliefs of others. This pseudo-autistic intellectualism -the idealism of the observer who pretends he does not exist- is just moral passivity in the guise of moral superiority.

The formal structural of law is predicated on the existence of bias. More than that it is predicated on active and engaged bias. Science seems to be practiced more and more by those who take it on faith that their own objectivity is unquestionable and their sensibilities irrelevent. Such people refuse to engage both the vulgarity and the obligations of democracy.

As a group they are also among the most arrogant -most purblind and intellectually empty- people I have ever met.

What no one seems to want to admit is that a Jewish homeland is not the same thing as a Jewish State.

South Africa was an Afrikaans State. It is now a homeland for Afrikaners and everyone else who was excluded in the past.

The vast majority of Israeli academics defend the notion of a state maintained by and for a subset of the country's population.
I do not talk to people who would agree with such a policy.
Israel is a modern invention formed from a pre-modern, even anti-modern, logic.

LINK

Mark Graber on Law and Political Science

"The Bush administration, heavily influence by the Christian right, is blocking key proposals for a new United Nations package to combat Aids worldwide over the next five years because of its opposition to the distribution of condoms and needle exchanges and references to prostitutes, drug addicts and homosexuals.
The United States is being supported by many Muslim countries, including Egypt, and various conservative African and Latin American nations. "There are a lot of unholy alliances all over the place," said a European official attending UN talks in New York last night.

Fraught negotiations were continuing to try to salvage as much of the package as possible. More than 140 nations are attending the UN summit in New York which began on Wednesday. The meeting is intended to update a 2001 declaration that provided the momentum for a worldwide campaign against Aids. A new declaration is due to be agreed today.
Kofi Annan, the UN secretary-general, told the summit: "The world has been unconscionably slow in meeting one of the most vital aspects of the struggle: measures to fight the spread of Aids among women and girls. These shortcomings are deadly."

A report published on Tuesday by the agency UNAIDS says new figures suggest the infection rate is slowing down globally, but new infections are continuing to increase in certain regions and countries.

The report adds that an estimated 38.6 million people are living with the Aids virus, HIV; 4.1 million were newly infected last year; 2.8 million died of Aids last year; and treatment with medicines is available to less than half of those infected withthe virus.

Of those infected worldwide, almost half - about 17 million - are women, and three-quarters of those are in Africa.

The British government, which has sided with Washington so often over the past decade, is in the progressive bloc at the summit, along with Canada and other European countries, and is diametrically opposed to Washington over its approach to Aids.

Although the US is the world's highest spender in combating the virus, much of the money goes towards sex abstinence campaigns rather than the distribution of condoms or needle-exchange programmes.

Hilary Benn, the international development secretary, who flew to New York last night and will address the UN general assembly today, distanced himself from the US approach.

He said: "We have to take action on the evidence of what works, on what saves people's lives, and not on ideology. That means making condoms available and reducing harm to people at risk: injecting drug-users, sex workers and men having sex with men."

He said he hoped a declaration would be agreed today. "At the moment, one could say negotiations are deadlocked," he said. "I am concerned about that, but I do hope that we'll be able to find a way forward."

Sisonke Msimang, a spokeswoman for the Johannesburg-based Open Society Initiative for South Africa, one of hundreds of civil groups attending the summit, said: "It is not going forward." She added that America was among the key antagonists, saying: "America has been clear that it will oppose global targets. America says any mention of condoms has to be matched by abstinence and faithfulness."

The US is also opposed to increased funding targets. UNAIDS wants spending to be increased from £4.4bn a year on fighting Aids to £12bn by 2010. But Washington has opposed this, preferring individual countries to set targets rather than the UN.

The Washington Post reported yesterday that the US government feared that if the target was set and there were shortfalls, it would be blamed.

The summit overrode the US funding objections yesterday, but negotiations were continuing last night over who will fund the £12bn target. The US wants conditions to be attached to funding, but is being opposed by the Europeans.

The Organisation of the Islamic Conference (OIC), which represents Muslim countries, vehemently opposes references in the declaration to homosexuals, prostitutes and drug addicts, saying these should not appear in a public document. The US is supporting the OIC.

The summit, held to mark the 25th anniversary of the first documented Aids cases, is supposed to flesh out promises made at the G8 summit in Gleneagles last year to combat the virus. Diplomats involved in the negotiations were working late into the night in order to secure agreement for today's meeting, which is due to be attended by a number of heads of government and which is due to be opened by the US first lady, Laura Bush."

In response to a comment here.

It's amazing the number of things from history that we take seriously today that weren't taken seriously when they were made, not taken seriously even by their makers. The last one hundred years exhibited an excess of moral seriousness.
I'm a little tired of it.

Wolcott is the liberal's P.J. O'Rourke. I'll defend him only to the extent that I prefer writers, as craftspeople, to men and women 'of ideas.' But there are far better writers. He's a punk.
---

And speaking of moral seriousness:
What ithe fuck is "cultural content"? The productivist logic/optimism is grotesque. There are so many ways in which this isn't even worthy of mockery. More from CT.
Eszter Hargittai's question to me is just bizarre.

An in joke (from a friend)

"Aye"

Continuing on the theme below:

Read Frank Rich. Don't ignore him just because he's in the Arts and Leisure Section

Eric Alterman wrote those words in a post in 2003.

In the Times today, and not in Arts and Leisure, Rich explains why I'm not going to pay 10 bucks to watch Al Gore's campaign commercial. I may vote for him if I haven't left the country, but that's not the point.

Atrios makes with the pom poms.
Given than politics in this country is more about messenger than message, and that Gore's motives are as self-serving as any other politicians, I find it grotesque, and politically asinine, for Atrios et al. to go out of their way to trumpet the purity of their new hero. Clinton was Big Dog. Gore is Big Guy.
Introspection is foreign to the American political imagination.
And introspection where it exists is manifest as anti-political romance.
Go buy a god damned newspaper.

Another self-absorbed idiot: Kerry soldiers on.

The one book on this list that will be read years from now, by those other than historians going through the garbage of our era, and it's mentioned as an afterthought.

funny

"psst... pass it on"

Congress is Shocked.
Shocked.

I've been waiting for a detailed argument either way. JB has made one, and more.

No wonder Chappelle bugged out.
link

fucking idiots

http://www.guardian.co.uk/international/story/0,,1773002,00.html

They fuck you up, your mum and dad.
They may not mean to, but they do.
They fill you with the faults they had
And add some extra, just for you.

But they were fucked up in their turn
By fools in old-style hats and coats,
Who half the time were soppy-stern
And half at one another's throats.

Man hands on misery to man.
It deepens like a coastal shelf.
Get out as early as you can,
And don't have any kids yourself.


Happy Mother's Day

Dictators begin as sincere and mediocre minds full of high purpose: to protect us from ourselves. Letters:

Thomas Powers writes that the man nominated to be the new director of the Central Intelligence Agency, Gen. Michael V. Hayden, "created and helped to hide from scrutiny a large-scale N.S.A. eavesdropping program aimed at Americans."

Actually, the program is aimed at protecting Americans from foreign terrorists who want to kill us and our families.

The program does not threaten our civil liberties. It enhances them, by increasing our chances of traveling on a train or plane without being blown up or flown into an office building.

Lewis Regenstein
Atlanta, May 10, 2006
The writer was an intelligence officer for the C.I.A. from 1966 to 1971.

Freedom is dangerous, but we choose it. It would be much sImpler if in the service of one or another form of instrumental reason we organized ourselves politically -as corporations do- in semblance of a machine. Certainly that dumb-fuck Posner would prefer it this way. But the point of democracy is that we have chosen not to decide or to define what we value.

Tapped out. I hate Pwogwessives:

"You're responding to something I did not write. I said that punditocracy responded to what they assumed the public wanted to hear.

The "core principle" of any politician is politics, and the democrats suck at it. David Mirzer is right: Kerry hemmed and hawed through various defenses of his vote. It doesn't matter what he "meant to say," His performances were pathetic.

The whole point of this blog is to affirm the moral seriousness the press and of political life. But there is no moral seriousness in political life, there's a moral seriouosness in intellectual life, and in the world outside the dreams of American progressivism there's an acknowledged contradiction between the two.
You should go see The Front Page.

I'd be ashamed to defend Clinton, or Gore, or Kerry, on any principle of my own...
beyond realism."

Added a few comments last week to this bit on Colbert.

She continued to stare at me until finally adding another hint. “We work with the officers.” My powers of reasoning slowly started to kick in. “We serve their needs,” she added. She looked around and sighed, thought for less than half a minute and turned her face back towards mine. “We’re escorts for the high ranking officers.”

Meeting a call girl at the mall in Saudi.

I've been telling her to write about this stuff for years.

I'm amazed.
or sad... or lost, or something.

Dictatorship, etc.

Irish-Bulgarian bartender on Manhattanites moving into the neighborhood* and whether or not they take over the place: "I hope not... I like the diversity." 

*Colombia, Ecuador, Mexico, Cuba, Brazil, The Caribbean, Spain, Ireland, Italy, France, Greece, Albania, Bosnia, Croatia, Montenegro, Poland, Korea, Japan, China, Taiwan, Tibet, Thailand, Bangladesh, Pakistan, Afghanistan, India, Egypt, Lebanon, Morocco, The Czech Republic, Slovakia. [I just found out a neighbor played for The Windies in 1984-5.]

---

Around the same year a European art gallery director in Manhattan said "Astoria is over. The Americans are moving in."

The airspace was closed and the Americans started bombing Iraq on the night of January 17, 1991. The handful of women and children were still being evacuated out of Riyadh that were waiting at the airport were piled into buses and driven around the city until the morning so that they would not be able to tell anyone the airspace had been closed.

We had known for three days that the Americans were serious; the Ballast guys in Dhahran had been reporting that the Americans had been arming the fighter planes.
continued...

"Americans spent as much on 'plastic Santa Clauses,' tinsel and other holiday purchases last year as they will for defense in the coming year, the Army's top general said Wednesday, lamenting complaints about the military's budget requests.

Gen. Peter Schoomaker, the Army chief of staff, told reporters: 'I just don't understand. ... What's the problem?' "

Let's see who reminds us this time of the importance of civilian control of the military.

---

"The CIA has operated more than 1,000 secret flights over EU territory in the past five years, some to transfer terror suspects in a practice known as "extraordinary rendition", an investigation by the European parliament said yesterday."

In 1948 I tore a large sheet of brown paper to get little rectangular pieces that I piled up, and with which I erected a rather unstable column. In 1954 I straightened out a piece of corrugated cardboard with a surface area of a square meter. Since 1957, without interruption, I have been smoothing out the silver paper from cigarette boxes. In 1962 I began to detach the filters from cigarettes, with which I created long strips; in the case of the Murattis I was startled to note an extremely interesting granular stratification. In 1958, under the guidance of Mr. Sergio Vercellino, a resident of Vagliumina (Biella) and an agriculturalist, I cut, with a scythe, about 3 m(3) of grass. In 1950 about twenty small ice cream glasses, which I collected with some difficulty, were inserted one inside the other so as to form an arch. In the same year I filled a little plastic box with some twelve little matchboxes, and with a great deal of difficulty I bought a packet of Marlboro which I soon took apart, flattened and stretched out. In 1949 I had rolled up a meter of yellow fabric and put my little finger in it to form a kind of tower of Babel. In 1953 I took a red or blue rubber band and stretched it with the four fingers of my right hand to form a square. A pile of sand about 30 cm. high was made in 1949, in Alassio, where I also dug a big hole until I found water. The first pile of matches and the first bundle of pencils date back to 1947. There were also countless works either with salt water or aqueduct water, or with other liquids of various kinds. Using a pencil as a ruler I cut up a poster in 1948, and in the same year, if I remember correctly, I poured an inkpot into a glass full of sawdust. In april 1951 I melted tinfoil and other metals and poured them into some water. The first experiments with a sheepskin that I squashed against some glass, not to mention the experiment of of pouring liquid sugar on a marble kitchen table, took place in 1952-53. Bending a piece of rubber between two fingers, rolling a sphere on a plane inclined by myself to this end, rolling up a soft wire inside a pencil, mixing different colored powders, these are the works carried out between March and April 1949. From 1946 onwards, I have continuously poked fires with the help of various materials. In 1954 it took me three days to glue together a manuscript that I had torn into a thousand little pieces; two hours were enough to put in a vertical position, in a line, 342 matches; it took me a moment to put a weight on a spider's web; I took advantage of the early hours of the afternoon to strip off the bark of a tree to see its smooth, moist surface.

Intellectual ghetto motherfuckers

"boetti askes for a bottle of poor. paolini settles into a piece of poverty and depravity cake."

The Lion and the Horse. diptych, from 1999. Oil on Canvas. 86"x 110."
(open the image in a new window to see it @ a larger scale.)

the usual
I made the usual comments:

The absurdity of analytic philosophy as philosophical act is that it operates under the illusion that one can analyze language and experience seemingly from outside of both. It may be possible for computers to describe computation, but consciousness can not describe consciousness apart from acting it. We are creatures of sense before logic, and we must try each day, without ever succeeding, to pick one apart from the other. Analytic philosophy does not teach self-awareness, claiming it is unnecessary. It is the philosophy of autism.

Derrida wanted to argue the primacy of craft and of description- as a novelist would- while maintaining the authorial certainty of the man of ideas. His works fail as philosphy because they fail as literature (and “do as I say not as I do” is no longer accepted as a valid argument) Judith Butler is a student of the moral success of his intellectual failure, but she doesn’t get the point. Still, to say [quoting Jason Stanley] that a university “should seek to promote work that will give that university prestige” either now or in the future sounds so ridiculously anti-modern that I don’t know what anyone has to complain about with either of them.

We separate science and law. We defend the rule of law over the rule of ideas [without thinking!] and then turn around and defend the rule of “truth” and science over the absurdity of “fiction”.
Derrida’s mistake was clumsiness, but what he represented in his clumsy way was a return [in the academy, and years behind the culture at large] to premodern now post-modern acceptance of the primacy of description.

The rule of law is the rule of language not of truth; and narrative is the order of the day, and will be for the forseable future.
---

I was first introduced to modern analytical philosophy in the mid 1980’s when a friend who worked at the Journal of Philosophy gave me a subscription. I remember an article on “morality and self-other asymmetry” that relied entirely, and seemingly as a point of ideology, on absract logic unaided by empiricism.
Why is it permissible to sacrifice one’s own life to save others but not to sacrifice another person’s to obtain the same result? The next question might have been: “why is the militry an exception?” but it was never asked. Questions as to anthropology or history were deemed irrelevent. More recently, on this site, I’ve run into discussions of Donald Davidson and references to his ‘On the Very Idea of a Conceptual Scheme’

The Oxford Dictionary of Philosophy, Simon Blackburn writes this about Donald Davidson:
“Davidson is also known for rejection of the idea of a conceptual scheme, thought of as something peculiar to one language or one way of looking at the world, arguing that where the possibility of translation stops so does the coherence of the idea that there is something to translate.”

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

There is a form of intellectual life that is indebted to people and to forms that are not strictly speaking intellectual, even more than it is those that are. Mozart was not a philosopher, and he is more important than most of those who were.
I prefer craftsmen to philosophs as I prefer lawyers to philosophers of law (and defense attorneys to prosecutors). But if the main question of philosophy remains the relation of action to reflection, I’ll still think it my right to demand of those who call themselves intellectuals that they have an understanding of the importance of craft, action and performance to their ‘intellectual’ preoccupations.
---

Just to wind this up on my end…
john halasz,
My argument is not with analytic or continental philosophy but philosophy itself. The continentals, unlike the analytics, refer to literature as a model but they undermine it by rationalizing it, dealing in a conceptualization of thought that in this country has been used to academicize the arts in ways that I think are absurd.
The question is still: how does one act ‘within’ or through a philosphy? What is the relation of action to reflection?
Academic philosphy is defined by the culture of academe, and exists inside it; but what is the relation of a lawyer in a courtroom, to law, and to society? That relation is not the same as that of a speaker to a language, but a lawyer acts within law in a similar way. A lawyer acts, must act, within a system only as a part; he/she is required not to be fully conscious. But the system itself is considered philosophically valid. Again: the rule of law is not the rule of science. but I’ve gone through this before.

I defend the arts (my chosen field) as a function of culture that similarly is philosphically valid, in that each form is simultaneously a questioning and a documentation of itself and its surroundings, both formal and reflective. Continental philosophy values the arts for this even as it undermines them [artists and critics etc.] Analytic philosophy in it’s latent or not so latent positivism, thinks this is all bunk or otherwise hides from it, and therefore from the most important questions of philosophy.

I hate academic rationalists. I only defend theory to the acolytes of analytic philosphy because at the core of either is the same scholastic formalism. Like I said: the usual. Intellectual ghetto motherfuckers.

a good one

Henry Siegman on Hamas.
---
quibbling
---
fucking idiot

And another, but not my copy

No weathermen no PL (Progressive Labor)!*
*(everybody else welcome)
from the family archives

What's next?: Passivity and fatalism.
---
More of Dear Leader's contempt.
Power corrupts.
---
I phoned Schumer's office in DC and was told "We have oversight."
I read something today about the lawsuit to stop the bombing of Belgrade (I'm trying to remember where).

I was wrong. Now he gets it (sort of).

I'd like to hope with Chris Nelson that the Pentagon's on the side of sanity, and that they're gaming the president. But the president and his crew aren't smart enough to game Iran and Ahmadinejad is no smarter than they are; though I'd have to say he's probably less of a dry drunk. I'm sure Ahmadinejad's minders are worried as well.

It amazes me that people can write about this as if it were a baseball game, played by other people. In a well run democracy we are the players.

Early Warning

Posted by Domenico Ghirlandaio @ 09/19/2002 10:35 AM EST

"I'm still amazed at the degree to which the American press and punditocracy, even in the liberal wing, and including it's junior league in blogistan, can spend so much time debating the usefulness and value of the antiwar American left -often attacking it as being made up of "19 year old anarchists, old quakers and Trotskyites"- when as far as American policy is concerned, the majority of the citizens of the planet seem to agree with its position. And the liberals who are suspicious of our government's 'analysis' feel forced by their own squeamish impotence to look to the Realist school of the American right for confirmation of their doubts, the Realists being the group that more than any other does not care what foreigners think of us unless they pose a danger to what they consider our interests.
I am more interested in the philosophical 'realism' of the members of the european populace who are shaking their heads in disbelief. This is not a debate over farm policy, but over the proposed invasion -proposed apparently by idiots- of a country in the most contested region on the face of the earth.
This debate is shameful."

Early Warning
indeed

Laura Rozen forwards tonight's Nelson Report:

Every paper and magazine of national stature has pieces with increasingly anxious quotes from past and present US officials, increasingly frank about their fears for the future.
Step back, and think about what we are really hearing from the US intelligence and military community: on one level, sure, there is a big psy-war operation being conducted by both Washington and Teheran (see today’s Washington Post) as each seeks to influence the sanctions debate at the United Nations, and whatever comes next.

But if you look at the pattern of stories in recent weeks, examine the details of both anonymous and on-the-record quotes, you see that there’s another game underway, and our sources say it’s called “pre-empting Bush” by laying out contingency plans, including the most bizarre, such as using tactical nuclear weapons on the Natanz reactor complex.

The rising drum beat of revelations, our sources argue, can have only one serious meaning: US military leaders want to force a public debate which makes it difficult for the President to talk himself into ordering a military solution to Iran’s nuclear ambitions. [...]

What terrifies serious US military, intelligence, and diplomatic players is how this Administration can turn a tactical military victory into strategic catastrophe.

Hit Natanz...then what? That’s the big question our sources are asking. After any US air strikes, does Iran meekly fold its nuclear tent and bow to the all-mighty will of George Bush? Or does Iran escalate its intervention in Iraq against US troops and interests...then Jordan...then Turkey...and, always, Israel...not to mention the Asian and European oil lifelines in the Gulf?

It would be nice if this were thing to crush George W. Bush. He deserves it. But the democratic party won't have anything to do with it.

Finally: News of the Late in the Day
JMM gets it.
As does Max (but I'd expect no less)

Marshall pulls this quote from Hersh:

There is a growing conviction among members of the United States military, and in the international community, that President Bush's ultimate goal in the nuclear confrontation with Iran is regime change. Iran's President, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, has challenged the reality of the Holocaust and said that Israel must be wiped off the map.? Bush and others in the White House view him as a potential Adolf Hitler, a former senior intelligence official said. That's the name they're using. They say: "Will Iran get a strategic weapon and threaten another world war?"

I'll blame the liberal foreign palsy types if this thing hits. Cheap and cynical nationalism fueled by ignorance and stupidity abetted by thoughtful [sic] nationalism fueled by ignorance and cowardice.
Lunacy and cowardice. Fucking idiocy all the way around.

A new link: Dean Baker's Beat the Press

(still working on it)
Apropos any discussion of 'enlightenment' and multiculturalism:
Arch defenders of the Enlightenment are most often those who defend the rule of ideas as if it were synonymous with the rule of law and as if both were equally opposed to romanticism. But while the rule of law has never been a romantic ideal, the rule of ideas is little else.

If maintaining this blog has done anything it's giving me a way to work through the defense of my sensibility and give its defense a logical form: The rule of law is the rule of form, not of ideas, and therefore not of any ideal of truth. Scientists tend towards optimism, as prosecutors tend towards moral absolutes. By this logic poets and trial lawyers argue complexity (by description) against the desire to simply name. Science gives us the only valid description of material fact, but is a simplified and vulgar description of experience.
That even scientists agree on the necessity of a rule of law means that they accept its premise.

The historical role of religion was as law. By religious logic -and now by secular legal logic- law must trump science as a description of experience. The recent misunderstandings between both sides of the creationism debate is that the creationists, in defense of the primacy of law (as God's law), are attempting to fight scientists on their own terms. They fail. What PZ Myers et al. fail or refuse to understand is the reason for creationist desperation.
Creationists see scientists equating the rule of science with the rule of law. And as long as defenders of secularism defend the rule of ideas rather than of law, the creationists are right to worry.

So it's nukes and this is the only detailed response I've found.

People must not get the point.

The Fuckers are going to Bomb Iran

Reductio ad Dictatorem

Jack Balkin:
"This theory, taken to its logical conclusions, gives the President the ability to treat anyone living in the United States, including particularly U.S. citizens, as wartime enemies without having to prove their disloyalty to anyone outside the executive branch. In so doing, it offers him what can only be called dictatorial powers-- that is, the power to suspend ordinary civil liberties protections on his say so. The limits on what the President may do under this theory are entirely political-- the question is whether the American people will stand for what the President has done if they discover what he has done in their name. But if the American people don't know what their executive is doing, they can hardly be in a position to object. And so the President has tried to keep secret exactly what he has done under the unreasonable and overreaching theory of Presidential power that his Administration has repeatedly asserted in its legal briefs and public statements.

Attorney General Gonzales' latest admission should hardly surprise us once we understand how much power the President actually thinks he has. Given that we will probably never know what the President has been doing in our name, we can only hope that he has not actually tried to exercise all the power he (wrongfully) thinks he possesses.

Michael Froomkin has more

A comment at Discourse.net

Shyamalan is a lousy filmmaker (and I'm far from alone in thinking that) but what is interesting if only in a small way is that the advertisement is now the tag-line at the end of a 60 second movie. Ads, via the form of rock videos, have become a new form [format] for art. It's not a big move, just a slow evolution (and not an advancement). I said the same thing in a comment in the post you linked to the last time. McCracken tries to make more out of it but there's not much more to say.

Art and economics even as partners are opposed. Art offers description before definition. it doesn't name experience, it merely describes it (though every description has bias) Advertising as illustration names before describing, so that the audience is led passively to a conclusion. That's why TV ads run "between" episodes or scenes. Now that ads have developed their own formal independence, the advertising 'content' comes at the end of 'ads' that have become plays within plays. It's interesting but a new format is not a new kind of art. Old wine in new bottles, no more no less.

Prosecutors and philosophers of law don't understand art but defense attorneys do. Philosophers and prosecutors say" "The accused has committed murder"
The defender says: "What do you mean when you say 'murder'?"
Some may hate them for it but they get people off that way. And McCracken doesn't understand what they do or how they do it. He has engineers' disease: the assumption that all communication, and therefore all art as a subset, is a series of statements and propositions.
And that kind of Posnerite crap pisses me off.
Like all good philosophy, art undermines propositions and then walks away.

explanation later.

And the Burger King ads are much more complex, and much more interesting.

Here's the new Amnesty International report: Below the Radar

My old roommate emailed me to say he's going to be on Charlie Rose tonight.
---
update:
A teacher's authority is naturally self-subverting: teaching is itself the transferral of authority as knowledge.
A doctor retains authority after a patient is cured.

I'm not an anarchist but I'm sympathetic (more some other time).

"For months, I have told interviewers that no senior political or military official was seriously considering a military attack on Iran," Joseph Cirincione, director for non-proliferation at the Carnegie Endowment, writes in Foreign Policy magazine. "In the last few weeks, I have changed my view." Cirincione says his shift was partly triggered by "colleagues with close ties to the Pentagon and the executive branch who have convinced me that some senior officials have already made up their minds: They want to hit Iran." The ramifications of such an attack could be disastrous. Not only would it likely "rally the Iranian public around an otherwise unpopular regime, inflame anti-American anger around the Muslim world, and jeopardize the already fragile U.S. position in Iraq"; most importantly, a military strike would "almost certainly speed up" Iran's nuclear weapons development by sparking a "crash nuclear program that could produce a bomb in a few years." (Longtime U.S. counterrorism chief Richard Clarke also spoke out yesterday against military action in Iran.) Cirincione advises that the key now is to get as much information about the status of Iran's nuclear program "on the table for an open debate."

The link is to Laura Rozen. Her source is here.
I'm speechless.

Direland: On the Thai elections, Polish politics, and Berlusconi.

sin titulo:

I first read Crunchy Cons, by way of Russell Fox. I wouldn't have bothered to if he hadn't mentioned it.
I smiled when I found out that Bill Kauffman writes for Counterpunch. Alex Cockburn is one of the few people who has actually paid attention to the red state anger and more importantly given it the respect it deserves. David Brooks' secret is that he feels as much contempt for people of small town america as the average urban and demi-urbane liberal; but unlike them, he's guilt-ridden and self flagellating. I've always found Atrios' Bobo's World posts offensive.
It's been commented upon often enough, but the perverse populism of Jerry Springer's trash TV show was rooted in the political populism of his past. "Our father the left-handed transvestite dwarf is having an affair with the family hog... We still love him but we still need our bacon and eggs." Springer at his worst was never putting himself above his guests, he just wallowed in the same mud. A child of the Holocaust trying to love and be loved and make a very good living in a world where events are lost to memory after half an hour. There are worse things.

The opinions or red state conservatives are no more or less symptomatic, reactionary in the strictest sense, as those of the majority of liberals. The thought that "we" need to worry about China or the Iranian bomb strikes me as odd; the world needs to worry about Pakistan, and the only reason to worry about Iran isn't Iran, it's Israel and our client state's culture of paranoia. I'm amazed that Brad DeLong and others can go on about logic and rationality, raging against obscurantism and religious gobbledegook while arguing from nationalism as if if were as self-evidently an objective truth as the earth revolving around the sun. But nationalism, like religion, is objectively a political truth. Why secular technocrats can't see faith in their own assumptions I can't claim to know, but it seems to me that like conservatives they prefer their answers neat, tidy, and with a ribbon on top. Maybe that's why they all read science fiction.
Having to decide whether or not to turn in a contractor who brings a crew of 15 and 16 year old Ecuadorian laborers to a job site in Manhattan; wondering whether they're better off here, living without their parents in an apartment in Williamsburg, or if they'd be safer back in the villages they spent so much time and money and blood to escape.
That's not economics or science fiction, that's literature.

And the convergence of Counterpunch and the Crunchy Cons may be seen as relevant to this.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/venezuela/story/0,,1745707,00.html

Henry Farrell quotes the Financial Times quoting Haaretz:

“It would in fact serve Israel if the open and critical debate that takes place over here were exported over there [the US].”

(the Yglesias bit is silly)
And I didn't lnk to this earlier but I'm with Max and Noam on this one.
And of course, here too

I was there for the afternoon session. It was interesting to watch.
note
note.

The interesting question raised by the second piece regards the debate between intellectual history and connoisseurship. I don't pit one ideal against the other (and I don't defend people who own enough to start their own museum). I defend both connoisseurship and history against intellectual ideals of synchronic analysis that render the meanings within rather than behind formalized communication as secondary elements.
There are no ideas outside form.

It's hard to say what work functions as art and what merely as illustration, but it should be easy enough to understand that they do different things.

For the archives:

"I could argue all over the place about any number of comments made here, since I think the most important problems are avoided by assuming that ideas can not be contradictory in themselves.

There is a difference between the authoritariarnism of people and of ideas. Plenty of people are comforted by the thought that God is in control. But they might rise up in arms if a mere person were running things. It mght make sense to think of the relationship of creationism to science as similar to the rise of plain spoken protestantism against the obscurantist ritual of the Catholic liturgy. Why should people trust what they can’t understand?

Also this is the country of Fordism and the myth of mechanics and science: of equating technical and moral progress (and in the silliest possiible ways). And as far as biotech is concerned the fear is the result of memories of that arrogance more than anything, of the fear of unpredictable consequences.
Modern biotechnology is not the same as cross fertilizing corn. What we live with today are end products of evolution over millions of years, of a cone of experience and time narrowing to a point in the present. The desire to expand from a point is one of the most famous fallacies of modernity,”The Year One” being a famous early example.
Modernity prefers theory to history. The recent religious revival is the unintellectuals’ anti-intellectual defense of the moral primacy of history over theory.
The humanities at their best represent the intellectuals’ (secular) defense of the same thing.

And especially in this country people can be on different side of the argument at different times of any given day."
---

I said this before:

Q: What's the best description of constitutional change?
A: 1 is 1 less than 2, which 1 less than 3, which 1 less than 4, which 1 less than 5.
So 1 is 1 less than 5.

"The price of freedom is eternal vigilance," because freedom is not measured in mathematics but in language, and not in language as idea but as speech.

The EPA, trichloroethylene, and the Pentagon.

What the fuck: [a reply to Todd Gitlin at TPM. Link now to archive.org]

I was more saddened by my mother's death than I would be when I read about a stranger's death in a newspaper. This is not an acknowledgment of any moral difference between the two, there is none. The difference is only in the physical and emotional fact of proximity: we care more for what we know. A philosophy of patriotism is the ideology of the morality of proximity, of US and THEM.
Patriotism may be a political necessity of weak states. It is not a moral value, let alone an intellectual one.
And are we weak?

This country has been dealing knowingly with Wahhabism for decades. The world did not change on September 11th. I have no friends who did not expect something to happen at some point in the near future. Airplanes were a surprise. And nobody assumed the terrorists- the neo-Jacobins would be Islamic (or even that they would be neo-Jacobins). But I was not surprised to hear after the fact that a million were cheering.

I was not cheering. Watching the second tower fall, from the Pulaski Bridge between Long Island City and Greenpoint -and thinking the towers were falling together- I thought I was watching the death of 50,000 people. My knees gave out.
I'm sick of protestations of wounded ignorance. I'm sick of the passivity of the morally superior. Gitlins' post is ludicrous.
Think how to communicate to the citizens of the most powerful nation in history that they missed an opportunity when the vast majority of the people in the world were on their side and wishing them well after 9-11. How do you describe the stupidity in the arrogance of the wounded giant, to the giant himself?

If you want to be an intellectual, think.

Imagine how working class people in Brooklyn associate liberals with respect for the working man as idea but contempt for him as flesh, as the workingmens' homes are sold out from under them to gentrifying democrats. Modern liberals are the velvet glove on the iron fist of Reaganomics. Do you think Gitlin's dreamings are any better- to paraphrase the title of a chapter in a book I have not read- than the anti-politics of any professor of cultural studies? 

The American left is made up of priests who talk only to priests, or to the most committed of the faithful. That's nothing more than another form of anti-politics.

I'm sick of idiots.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/worldlatest/story/0,,-5715289,00.html

http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/0,,1741014,00.html

The government of this country is run by people who once thought Francis Fukuyama was a sage, abetted by others who are afraid to admit to each other that they always knew he was an idiot.

I'm beyond amazed. I'm bored.

To the Editor:

The call to Samaritan disobedience in "Called by God to Help" may soon apply to more than Catholic workers. We are on the brink of becoming a nation where torture is legal and helping the needy is not. Disobeying the law may become a moral imperative for all of us.

Glenn Cheney
Sprague, Conn., March 22, 2006
---

Nice comment by someone on NPR this afternoon, comparing recent immigration from Mexico to the "Great Migration".

Michael Lind is an asshole
and here

What is the relationship between this:

A crowd estimated by police at more than 500,000 boisterously marched in Los Angeles on Saturday to protest federal legislation that would crack down on undocumented immigrants, penalize those who help them and build a security wall along the U.S.' southern border.

and this?:

The First Employment Contract - CPE, as the French call it - has triggered a wave of protests spearheaded by the students it purports to help.
Polls suggest that 60% of the population at large opposes it. But one group clearly backs the move - employers.
"It is a good thing," Jean-François Roubaud, president of the French federation of small and medium companies (CGPME), told the BBC News website.

Think fast.
---

And I just found out I've been banned at 2 sites. First DeLong and now Long Sunday. I'm almost proud.

Here's the post; my comment was a link. And here again is the Russell Jacoby piece from this morning.

Sunday, March 26 2006
Laura Rozen reads this shit so you don't have to.
---

This is funny

William Edmundson@Leiter Reports.
Balkin and Levinson
The Puritan fades into the politician technocrat and anti-politics becomes the political defense of democracy.
Next thing I'll be making an intellectual defense of V for Vendetta.
---

Laura Rozen

The Guardian: "United Nations nuclear and health watchdogs have ignored evidence of deaths, cancers, mutations and other conditions after the Chernobyl accident, leading scientists and doctors have claimed in the run-up to the nuclear disaster's 20th anniversary next month. In a series of reports about to be published, they will suggest that at least 30,000 people are expected to die of cancers linked directly to severe radiation exposure in 1986 and up to 500,000 people may have already died as a result of the world's worst environmental catastrophe."

We are at war. Every other function of government is and should be ancillary to the obligations of our national defense. The President in his capacity as commander and chief of the armed forces is our leader in this defense and should face few constraints.

The DoJ:

The Constitution is the supreme law of the land, and any statutes inconsistent with the Constitution must yield. The basic principle of our system of government means that no President, merely by assenting to a piece of legislation, can diminish the scope of the President's constitutional power. . . .

Just as one President may not, through signing legislation, eliminate the Executive Branch's inherent constitutional powers, Congress may not renounce inherent presidential authority. The Constitution grants the President the inherent power to protect the nation from foreign attack, and Congress may not impede the President's ability to perform his constitutional duty.(citations omitted).
From Glenn Greenwald

War is our foreign policy. It is our domestic policy.
1 is 1 less than 2, which 1 less than 3, which 1 less than 4, which 1 less than 5.
1 is 1 less than 5.
It doesn't work with numbers but how about shades of gray?
Black becomes white, freedom becomes slavery, and we have to destroy democracy in order to save it.

Balkin and Levinson
"The New Constitutional Order and the National Surveillance State"

William Arkin will be on "NOW" tonight on PBS.

I agree
---
Lawbreaker. Again.
---
And again!
William Arkin

Current and former members of the 902nd Military Intelligence Group, come forth.

I believe your unit is spying on anti-war, anti-military and environmental organizations under the guise of "force protection."

Ever since Pentagon domestic spying was revealed by yours truly in December, the Defense Department has aggressively tried to assure Congress and the American public that it is not another agency breaking the law.

Tonight, his majesty of force protection David Burtt, Director of the Pentagon's Counterintelligence Field Activity (CIFA), appears on camera for the first time on the PBS "Now" program. He would like to assure America that his agency is purging improper information from its databases.

But Burtt also speaks of the "dots" and of the real world work going on today to find terrorists in America.

902nd warriors: I know you are out there on the front lines, collecting and analyzing dots to find a terrorist enemy. It is activity that on the one hand is less intrusive and politically motivated than anything in the past. Yet, at the same time, it is more diabolical because of its very pervasiveness and promiscuity.

Link from L.R.

Peter Brandt/The Art Workers Coalition, 1970, Photograph by Ronald L. Haeberle

Atrios and others miss the point. Objectivity isn't a sham only because people aren't behaving the way as they should -though that's true enough- but because it's a fantasy. Objectivity is a sham and consensus isn't enough. That's why prosecutors don't double as defense attorneys.

I have little doubt that Liasson thinks she's being "objective", and she may be right that people give the president of the benefit of the doubt in any showdown with the press; but it's not her job to reinforce that behavior. It is, or should be, her job to defend the necessity of debate: to be biased in favor of the principle of adversarial relations, not only in relations of the press or the people to the government but among the people themselves.

The institutional leadership of this country, politically and culturally, Democratic and Republican, left and right, both corruptly and not, believes that democracy is as simple as giving the people what they want. Demagogues want the people ignorant; idealists assume the people already know the truth but are only kept silent by malign forces (Chomskyism is not Chomsky's invention).  Neither people nor politics are so simple.

It's the obligation of every citizen of a democracy to have opinions. Not having any is irresponsible, pretending not to is betrayal.

Laura Rozen

Anton Henning, Interieur No. 287, 2004, Oil on canvas, 30 x 40 cm.

Domenech/Augustine

Pile on ...and on
...and on.
Atrios for March 22 2006 is pretty much all Domenech all the time.
---

"An echo chamber of our own."
The wonks and the populists, two versions of the political class are battling it out.
The popular American political tradition is largely anti-intellectual and anti-political. Activists and political intellectuals mirror this indifference with a commitment to themselves and their own ideas.
Feingold hit the goddamn pitch. Run!

Feingold
And here.
And here.

This too was predictable.

The Guardian A powerful new militia dubbed "the Pakistani Taliban" has effectively seized control of swaths of the country's northern tribal areas in recent months, triggering alarm in Islamabad and marking a big setback in America's "war on terror". The militants are strongest in North and South Waziristan, two of seven tribal agencies on the border with Afghanistan. Strict social edicts have been handed down: shopkeepers may not sell music or films; barbers are instructed not to shave beards. Yesterday a bomb blew up a radio transmitter in Wana, taking the state radio off the air. Militants collect taxes from passing vehicles at new checkpoints, and last week an Islamic court was established in Wana to replace the traditional jirga, or council of elders. Rough justice has already been dispensed elsewhere. A gang of seven alleged bandits were executed in Miran Shah in December and their bodies were hung from a post in the town centre. The violent puritanism is spreading. On Sunday a remote-controlled bomb ripped through a police vehicle in Dera Ismail Khan, near South Waziristan, killing seven people. More than 100 pro-government elders and politicians have been killed in the past nine months, said a diplomat. The Pakistani military deployed 70,000 troops to Waziristan two years ago to rein in the militants. But the campaign is faltering. An army assault against an alleged al-Qaida training camp outside Miran Shah on March 1 left more than 100 dead.

I've never worried about Iran getting the bomb; I've always worried about Pakistan having it. so fucking stupid.

Black Bag Jobs.
link from Laura Rozen.
Jack Balkin's commentary.

And more from Balkin, Lederman and Tamanaha.

In describing or communicating anything beyond brute fact you need to generalize. Ideas are generalizations, and the conflict in any philosophy of action begins with the necessary but troubled equation of ideas and objects. For liberalism, predicated on ideas of individual liberty, this conflict becomes almost a paradox; that my mother, as a reader both of literature and law, could shrug off John Rawls as being "more interested in ideas than people," was not something I took lightly.

Still the desire was not dishonorable in itself, not nearly as much as the claim of success.

Can there be a human being more small minded, vulgar and anti-intellectual than Tyler Cowen? He makes DeLong look like the font of wisdom. What a pathetic little fuck.

On the same theme:

Indecency, as Janet Jackson showed, is all in the context. People complained to the Federal Communications Commission about the performer's wardrobe malfunction because it happened during a Super Bowl halftime show — viewers don't expect lewdness until the commercials.

And fans of procedural crime dramas like CBS's "Without a Trace" expect to see sexual depravity and abuse only in dead people. When an episode showed graphic images of seminaked, promiscuous teenagers who were actually alive, it was something of a shock. It certainly fired up the F.C.C.: that guardian of network morals fined 111 stations that aired that episode a record $3.6 million.

And probably rightly so. For reasons that baffle the rest of the world (in this case, they don't hate us, they pity us), the United States is far more prudish about sex than violence on television. But as long as sexually explicit material is officially taboo, then the episode did seem to meet the test: the scene of teenagers holding an orgy in a suburban house was quite blue. The camera lingered on writhing bodies and sweaty threesomes just a little longer than was strictly necessary to make the point that sexually transmitted diseases are a growing problem in high school.

CBS defended the episode, saying that it had redeeming social value since the story was a cautionary tale about parents who fail to adequately supervise their children.

CBS's defense is no more absurd than Lindsay Beyerstein's earnest attempts to rehabilitate the authors of Go Fug Yourself.

Nice bit of humor in the last line of Jim Hoberman's review of trash cinema of the week, V for Vendetta:

This hero not only has no name but also no actual personality. (Why hire Weaving? The role could have been played by a computer program.) At a key moment in V for Vendetta, the Negri-Hardt multitude—mysteriously networked and absurdly masked like their faceless non-leader—takes to the streets and waits expectantly. Their patience is rewarded by a superbly irresponsible finale that conflates the "1812 Overture," the Rolling Stones, Malcolm X, and Gloria Steinem. Absorbing even in its incoherence,V for Vendetta manages to make an old popular mythology new. Impossible not to break into a grin: It's the thought that counts.

It's the thought that counts. I'm not even sure Hoberman gets his own joke.

"But you have this thing to go to. A fundraiser. For AIDS. And sure, you're totally f'ing depressed and you really don't want to leave the house because, for one thing, there are all those people outside and you know they're all going to want to talk to you and shit, but you're can't ditch an AIDS fundraiser because even though you're really depressed and you just want to stare at the wall and maybe watch a little of the Tyra Banks Show before burying your head in the pillows of the sofa and crying because you're at home watching the Tyra Banks Show, at least you don't have AIDS and you know rationally that you ought to be happy about that, so you manage to get upright and wrap yourself in a sheet you bought at a recent prison auction and go out and try to act like you don't want to die every moment of the day.
Sigh."

A question for Lindsay Beyerstein (comment deleted by her)

How does your appreciation of GFY square with your broader philisophcal viewpoint? Your 'about' page used to make reference to your discovery of Susan Haack, etc. Given that I'm surprised you didn't agree with Ann Bartow.
GFY is basically articulate witty commentary on crap. The 'content', following a form and content divide, is absolute and total dreck. The bitching and insult are predicated on the logic of triumphalist sexism, and as a discourse on sex it's the equivalent of the banter of two drunken drag queens, with all the reactionary implications. 

But here's the question: The history of literature as opposed to philosophy is the history of writing as craft What's the moral or philosophical value of articulate speech as such? 

I added my comment before reading others'. The point is wasted.
The moral and philisophical value of literature and art is that they don't obey the law of contradiction. LB is unwilling to admit that her tastes contradict her ideas. [She's a moralist except when she's not. Rationalists rationalize. Moralists are hypocrites. GFY is honest]

Beyerstein

Feminist law professor Ann Bartow can't understand why anyone is amused by Go Fug Yourself, the celebrity fashion snark blog.
Ann writes

One of the many reasons I’m glad that I am a law professor rather than an actor or musician is that I don’t have to worry much about my hair, make-up or clothes; I’d be unemployed if I did. I grieve for the talented performers who spend inordinate time and money on dieting, plastic surgery, hair styling, and cosmetics applications, and still fall short of “the celebrity look” that must be portrayed before their acting or musical abilities will even be considered by their industries. The most I have to fear is “feedback” on my appearance by students who make observations about my legs, hair and sartorial selections in their course evaluations. Occasionally harsh and inappropriate, none has risen to the level of abject meanness and misogyny I perceive at “Go Fug Yourself,” although the goal of putting the dumb girl in her place is probably the same. I just don’t understand how anyone who identified as a feminist could endorse “Go Fug Yourself” even as a “guilty pleasure.” Maybe this is evidence of my own internalized biases and intolerance, I don’t know. Has my sense of humor atrophied?

Last month, I was walking down the street in Amsterdam with my American blogger buddies and our new Dutch friends. We were talking about whether there were any blogs with truly global appeal. Someone suggested "Go Fug Yourself." We laughed at first, but gradually it dawned on us that there was a lot of truth to that statement. Its appeal transcends age, gender, and sexual orientation. You don't have to follow high fashion or care about celebrity gossip.

Some GFY fans I know: a married Dutch socialist organizer, a Canadian geekboy and fashion agnostic, a bunch of jazz musicians, uber-trendy New York account executives, barely legal DC policy wonks, feminist bloggers from red and blue states, Williamsburg alt culture types, random Brooklyn subway riders ... Basically everyone I know. The fact that the site is popular doesn't mean it isn't misogynist. However, I think the diversity of the site's audience suggests that there's more going on that simple-minded anti-celebrity sniping. First off, the authors, Heather and Jessica are good writers with sharp eyes for absurd detail. They also have good taste in clothes. They don’t just criticize, they inform. They tend to focus on pictures of potentially trendy outfits turned monstrous because of miscalculations in color, cut, fit, or accessories.

This was predictable:

TEHRAN -- Iran's clerical and business establishments, deeply concerned by what they see as reckless spending and needlessly aggressive foreign policies, are increasingly turning against President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

Republicans are the stupid ones...
Right?

Senator Feinstein Proposes Censure.
Link from Atrios

Spring repeat
---
And Glenn Greenwald send us on a trip down right wing memory lane

Forgive me if I laugh (or don't): Are the Israeli's ready to lose a PR war with Hamas?

Jack Balkin is a smart man.
fig.1

"During the hearing Mr Abbasi, originally from Croydon, south London, said he should be accorded prisoner of war status, and demanded his rights under international law and the Geneva conventions. The tribunal president, not named in the documents, says: "Once again, international law does not matter here. Geneva conventions do not matter here. What matters here ... [is] your actions while your were in Afghanistan."
The clash continues, with Mr Abbasi trying to raise the issue of his rights under international law. He and the tribunal president are recorded speaking over each other, until the latter says: "Mr Abbasi, your conduct is unacceptable ... I don't care about international law. I don't want to hear the words international law again. We are not concerned with international law. I am going to give give you one last opportunity..." Mr Abbasi was later removed and his case considered behind closed doors."

"Bush has all along made the mistake of playing to Muslim leaders rather than to Muslim publics. Yet he has at the same time undermined authoritarian leaders with his talk of spreading democracy. So a military dictator like Pervez Musharraf, who intervened to corrupt the 2002 Pakistani parliamentary elections, lacks legitimacy according to Bush's rhetoric even as Bush pals around with him and makes him as an individual the cornerstone of US policy in that part of the world."

What an idiot

Daniel Dennett

Dennett thinks that when we imagine ourselves acting in sympathy with logic we become logic. Such Nietzschean analogical rhetoric endears him to Brian Leiter, but when physics answers Steven Weinberg's final questions life will go on as before.
We are sensory beings; logic may 'make sense' but it has none.

File under: minor coke habit.

"My Pet Goat II" etc.
Dan Froomkin

I quit the job yesterday.
I got a call from F. this morning. He put me on speaker phone and told me that he'd just thrown my super off the job for the third time and told my boss not to, in his words, "mistake my generosity for weakness." Cowboy had been yelling at one of his own carpenters, and F. lost it. I heard laughter in the background; everybody was in the room listening in.

I feel guilty for leaving but at the the same time this is when our boss is going to start asking us to cover our tracks, and I don't really want to have to play the adversarial role with F. He wants us out of there as much as we do and all the shop has to do is build to the right dimensions and out of the right materials. It's a quarter million dollar contract, and the shop work isn't that complex. It's more embarrassing to install something and lie than it is to say "take it back and build it right!" It's also cheaper in the long run, since sooner or later we'd have to rip it out again. At the same time I don't think my boss will ask me back again since he doubts he can trust me to be loyal. Nobody is, but I was the only one left on the crew who could afford to walk away. A luxury I'm grateful for.

"I bought my first fucking building at 17. I got three apartment buildings and a net worth of 3.5 million... and I still work like a pig!. Why!? I don'fuckingknow!"
F is worth more than three million dollars, and he doesn't wear a dust mask on the job. He'll be coughing blood in 20 years.
He's been offering me references to other contractors and I've been turning him down. I tell people I could maintain a low grade coke habit and take a year off without a problem. But I've been sick since the first week; it's the dustiest job I've ever been on. It's a fucking dustmine. And again I'm not like F, I live a different sort of terror.
He says: "Stay Kosher."
"Happy Good Friday, Motherfucker."


One should always try to pay attention.
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Marine Corps block internet access, including email.
And 85 percent of the troops say a major reason for the U.S. mission is "to retaliate for Saddam's role in the 9/11 attacks."