Reuters

Italy's former military intelligence chief was sentenced to 10 years in jail on Tuesday for his role in the kidnapping of an Egyptian Muslim cleric in an operation organized by the United States.
An American former CIA station chief was this month sentenced in absentia to seven years in jail after imam Abu Omar was snatched from a Milan street in 2003 and flown to Egypt for interrogation during the United States' "war on terror".

Spiegel

For the CIA, it is quite clear how explosive the Italian case is for them. At the outset of the investigation, all Spataro had was a list of over 10,000 different cell phone calls. Using that as a basis, and with the help of meticulous research, he produced the entire indictment. At the beginning he believed that only the CIA was involved in the operation -- at the end seven Italian agents also stood in court. 

The length of Spataro's final speech to the court alone showed just how extensive his investigations had been. The first part at the beginning of October lasted seven hours by itself, the second part almost nine. He described the course of the investigation to the court using an elaborate PowerPoint presentation. "Otherwise nobody would have understood it," he said. 

His opponents have repeatedly tried to stop him. Spataro also investigated the actions of his own government. During the trial, he revealed details of the cooperation between Italian and US intelligence. In March, the Italian Constitutional Court ruled, at the behest of Silvio Berlusconi's government, that all the documents which concerned relations between the intelligence services were state secrets. This was a serious blow for Spataro, as it meant he could no longer use much of the evidence relating to the involvement of Italian agents in the operation. That evidence included recorded phone calls and the testimony of several witnesses, including the former SISMI boss Gianfranco Battelli. Battelli had said that Jeff Castelli, the then-CIA station chief in Rome, had asked him in a conversation to cooperate with the kidnapping of terror suspects 

...The defense attorneys had attacked the prosecutor by saying his whole case was inadequate and was based on a permanent violation of state secrets. They had called for acquittals across the board. 

In that respect, Judge Magi did not only decide on Wednesday about the guilt or innocence of the Italian and American agents and not only about the legality of kidnapping in the fight against terrorism. He also delivered a verdict as to whether a European government can use the pretext of state secrets to avoid being accountable before the law.

Spiegel

Prosecutor on Rendition Case: Kidnapping a 'Disgrace And Should Be Prosecuted'

A German prosecutor who investigated the CIA's kidnapping of Egyptian cleric Abu Omar in 2003 under the infamous rendition program tells SPIEGEL how he had to close the case due to a lack of information from US organizations. He says the kidnapping was a "disgrace" and that he would have filed indictments, if he had been able to.

Again: Adrian Vermeule... would have... none of it.
"Experts" do not understand democracy. They don't even understand inquiry.

Roger Cohen op-ed used for an Oscar pitch.

Three senators — Dianne Feinstein, Carl Levin and John McCain — called the movie “grossly inaccurate.” Michael Morell, the acting C.I.A. director, opined: “Whether enhanced interrogation techniques were the only timely and effective way to obtain information from those detainees, as the film suggests, is a matter of debate that cannot and never will be definitively resolved.” 

Watching torture — the C.I.A. should abandon its ghastly euphemism — is profoundly unsettling. But Bigelow and Boal have done an important service in setting before a wide U.S. and global audience images of a traumatized America’s dark side. This happened: the waterboarding, the sleep deprivation, the sexual humiliation, the cruelty. Not exactly as depicted, but yes it did, in places that, as if in a totalitarian world, existed on no map.
And I think the movie’s portrayal of torture is truthful: It helped at times but at others did not. It provided clues that might have been gleaned by other means. And the ultimate success in finding Bin Laden occurred after President Obama had banned the methods “Zero Dark Thirty” portrays so powerfully. 

In the end the case for the unacceptability of torture is not best made by sweeping assertions that it is useless. The nuance of this movie builds a much stronger case that, whatever torture’s marginal usefulness, it is morally indefensible. 

The charge of inaccuracy is a poor thing measured against the potency of truth. “Zero Dark Thirty” is a truthful artistic creation, one reason it has provoked debate. Boal told The New York Times he did not want “to play fast and loose with history” — a statement held against him by several of the movie’s critics, most eloquently Steve Coll in The New York Review of Books. My sense, however, is that Boal has honored those words. 

There were few more minute observers of fact than George Orwell. As Timothy Garton Ash has written, if Orwell had a God it was Kipling’s “God of Things as They are.” Yet, as Garton Ash says of Orwell: “One of his most powerful early essays describes witnessing a hanging in Burma. But he later told three separate people that this was ‘only a story.’ So did he ever witness a hanging? He annotates a copy of “Down and Out in Paris and London” for a girlfriend: this really happened, this happened almost like this, but “this incident is invented.”’ 

Truth is art’s highest calling. For it the facts must sometimes be adjusted. “Zero Dark Thirty” meets the demands of truth.

"Truth" refers to the communication of the details of human experience, not events as such. The events should not be in dispute at this point.

Cohen again, on the new book by Vali Nasir

The White House seemed “more interested in bringing Holbrooke down than getting the policy right.” The pettiness was striking: “The White House kept a dossier on Holbrooke’s misdeeds and Clinton kept a folder on churlish attempts by the White House’s AfPak office to undermine Holbrooke.” 

Diplomacy died. Serious negotiation with the Taliban and involving Iran in talks on Afghanistan’s future — bold steps that carried a domestic political price — were shunned. The use of trade as a bridge got scant attention. Nasr concludes on Afghanistan: “We are just washing our hands of it, hoping there will be a decent interval of calm — a reasonable distance between our departure and the catastrophe to follow.” 

In Pakistan, too nuclear to ignore, the ultimate “frenemy,” Nasr observed policy veering between frustrated confrontation and half-hearted attempts to change the relationship through engagement. “The crucial reality was that the Taliban helped Pakistan face down India in the contest over Afghanistan,” Nasr writes. America was never able to change that equation. Aid poured in to secure those nukes and win hearts and minds: Drones drained away any gratitude. A proposed “strategic dialogue” went nowhere. “Pakistan is a failure of American policy, a failure of the sort that comes from the president handing foreign policy over to the Pentagon and the intelligence agencies.”

2 cheers for a level of sophistication.

The first time I read discusions of "comparative advantage" I thought immediately of the importance of redundancy for stable systems: efficient systems are fragile; stable systems have high levels of redundancy.

I thought these things were truisms. That's why I've had so much trouble (and this is going back years) following arguments predicated on thinking they weren't. [Taleb etc. here]

Economists and philosophers who defend efficiency defend it as a value system, a type of morality that they associate with science and engineering. But they're not engineers.

Writers of financial contracts are called Financial Engineers. And Joseph Yellow Kid Weil was a confidence engineer.

continuing
Leiter, in his post on Dworkin, includes among others a link to a symposium on one of Dworkin's papers [the link to the original paper is dead, but it's available here: pdf], and to his own "review essay" of recent books by and about Dworkin. The Theory of Esoteric Law for me puts the final nails in the coffin of every argument Leiter or Hart could make on the philosophy of law.  Dworkin's evasiveness is part and parcel of the general inability on the part of philosophers to admit to defending an idea to the extent of it being a form of ideological commitment, but besides that Dworkin's arguments describe pretty much the way things actually work. We create and defend narratives and try to find the "right" way to continue them. We try to justify those narratives and those decisions to those around us. Courts may invent new doctrines but the justification of those doctrines is always predicated on them being seen as the continuation of a tradition. They must be recognized, and recognition is a process of situating the unknown among the known. The focus is on continuity not change. Those who pretend that they themselves are not the product of culture will also pretend that their decisions are removed from it. Others will defend their cultural assumptions without being able or willing to articulate them. Scalia won't be remembered as he'd want to be and his desire, and the record of his social interactions, needs to be considered a part of the cultural and linguistic process of law.

Dworkin begins his response to Simon Blackburn by saying "Blackburn doesn't like lawyers…"
Hart was a barrister for 8 years but unlike Dworkin seems not to learned much from it.

"The argument with Balkin is whether we need to sacralize questions in order to avoid sacralizing things."

In honor of Ronald Dworkin.
The importance of getting things "right" [repeats]

Hermann Broch

Although art is no longer a part of the religious system, having become autonomous like all other value-systems since the breakup of that all-encompassing system of religion, reinforcing this autonomy with the principle of l’art pour l’art, nonetheless, art even today has set down its own private theology in a series of aesthetic theories, and continues to hold to its highest value-goal, and this, too, continues to hover in the realm of the infinite, be it called “beauty,” “harmony” or whatever else. And the ethical demand made of the artist is, as always, to produce “good” works, and only the dilettante and the producer of kitsch (whom we meet here for the first time) focus their work on beauty. 

For the esthetic in general as an expression of the supreme ultimate value of a system can influence the result of ethical action only secondarily, just as “wealth” is not the main goal but the side effect of individual commercial activity. And “wealth” itself is an irrational concept. It is an almost mystical process, the setting of ethical values: Arising from the irrational, transforming the irrational to the rational, yet nonetheless it is the irrational that radiates from within the resulting form. 

Chris Bertram

Sometimes, when I’m reading or listening to a paper which excites me with its novelty and brilliance, perhaps because it contains some really elegant move, a mental image comes into my head of Steve McManaman running with the ball, circa 1996. Colin McGinn, writing in the latest Prospect about how he became a philosopher, would see the parallel

The metaphor that best captures my experience with both philosophy and sport is soaring: pole vaulting, gymnastics and windsurfing clearly demonstrate it, but the intellectual highwire act involved in full-throttle philosophical thinking gives me a similar sensation – as if I have taken flight, leaving gravity behind. It is almost like sloughing off mortality. (Plato indeed thought that acquiring abstract knowledge is a return to the prenatal state of the immortal soul.) There is also an impressiveness to these physical and mental skills that appeals to me – they evoke the “wow” reflex. Showing off is an integral part of their exercise; but as I said earlier, I don’t have any objection to showing off. In any case, there is not, for me, the discontinuity between sports and intellectual activities that is often assumed. It is not that you must either be a nerd or a jock; you can be both. It has never surprised me that the ancient Greeks combined a reverence for the mind with a love of sports: both involve an appreciation of the beauties of technique skilfully applied. And both place a high premium on getting it right – exactly right.

[remember that McGinn calls himself an atheist.]

etc.

Once again Brian Leiter defends a jurisprudence of how things ought to be. We "ought" to see things "as they are."   

So what's the difference between the twin and opposed oughts of morality and realism? Ought is a term of morality, you dumb fuck.

We can't escape arguing from foundations, even if they're fictional. And Posner is no more a realist than Kissinger. Powerful minds produce dynamic, (powerful), resilient, complex consistency. The relation of that consistency to the world (of which it is a part) is another question entirely. Relations cannot be assumed.

Leiter, here, discussing Cardozo and MacPherson reminds me of an art historian I knew who argued that van Gogh was ahead of his time, and had no place in the 19th C. tradition. His specialty was Gothic architecture; he was wrong. van Gogh was as much a part of his time as Dante Gabriel Rossetti.

The Constitution is "living" because language is living. Quoting myself. I won't bother linking to it:

Kurt Gödel panicked thinking he'd discovered a flaw in the Constitution that could legitimize dictatorship. Some people wonder what he found. Most people just think he was nuts. But he was a mathematician and logician; the flaw he found was language:
White→Clear→Empty→Void→Black. 

Kurt Gödel, meet David Addington.

We argue from beliefs through the common form of language. We can't not argue from morality.
The question is not how we come to truth but how we come to agreement.

Another award-winning photograph from Paul Hansen


Swedish Photographer Paul Hansen Wins Premier Photo Contest Award

Mayu Mohanna, jury member from Peru, said of Paul Hansen’s winning picture: "The strength of the pictures lies in the way it contrasts the anger and sorrow of the adults with the innocence of the children. It’s a picture I will not forget.”

So who gets the Oscar for best actor, a dead child or a living pallbearer?

Photojournalism is hackwork because journalism is hackwork. Just because journalism is necessary doesn't make it art. Just because bureaucracy is necessary doesn't make it profound.
Zero Dark 30 has the morality of art. The image above is fundamentally corrupt, reducing emotion to artifice, rather than using artifice to communicate emotion.

The same misunderstanding, coming from the opposite direction in Bill Viola below.

“Documentaries are thought to have the same relation to social change as penicillin to syphilis.”

Continuing from the previous post

Wiseman 

The importance of documentaries as political instruments for change is stubbornly clung to, despite the total absence of any supporting evidence. 

Documentaries, like plays, novels, poems, are fictional forms that have no measurable social utility.  

I have no way of determining what is or is not representative in any sequence. It’s enough for me that it occurred while I was present and that it fits into the themes I find in the material. I am not interested in ideological film-making, whether of the right or left. I remember being criticized by some on the left when I made Hospital. They knew from their ideological positions that white middle-class doctors and nurses exploited poor blacks and Hispanics. Therefore a film like Hospital which showed many white doctors and nurses (as well as black and Hispanic doctors and nurses) working hard, long hours to help their patients was ideologically offensive. Film ideologues are not interested in the discovery and surprise aspect of documentary film-making, or in trusting their own or anyone else’s independent judgement, but want documentary film-makers to confirm their own ideological, abstract views which have little or no connection with experience. Some documentary film-makers urged on in their self-generated political fantasies by academics and other ideologues, by film barons and bureaucrats, and by all those who form the parasitic platoons fluttering around film-makers, believe documentaries must educate, expose, inform, reform and effect change in a resistant and otherwise unenlightened world. Documentaries are thought to have the same relation to social change as penicillin to syphilis. The importance of documentaries as political instruments for change is stubbornly clung to, despite the total absence of any supporting evidence.

Sometimes, in his lofty condescension, a film-maker seeks to bring enlightenment to the great unwashed and force feed this or that trendy political pap to an audience which has not had the opportunity, or perhaps even the wish, to participate in either the experience or the mind of the film-maker. This, which might be called the ‘Carlos’ fantasy, suggests to the filmmaker that he is important to the world. Documentaries like plays, novels, poems – are fictional in form and have no measurable social utility.

"Is Art useful? Yes. Why? Because it is art. Is there such a thing as a pernicious form of art? Yes! The form that distorts the underlying conditions of life. Vice is alluring; then show it as alluring; but it brings with its train peculiar moral maladies and suffering; then describe them. Study all the sores, like a doctor in the course of his hospital duties, and the good-sense school, the school dedicated exclusively to morality, will find nothing to bite on. Is crime always punished, virtue always rewarded? No; and yet if your novel, if your play is well put together, no one will take it into his head to break the laws of nature. The first necessary condition for the creation of a vigorous art form is the belief in underlying unity. I defy anyone to find one single work of imagination that satisfies the conditions of beauty and is at the same time a pernicious work."

Wiseman's work has had more impact than most, but that's not the point. There's no contradiction between Wiseman and Baudelaire. Diagnosis is not cure.

working on this, years later. Fixing a few stupid mistakes and some bad writing. It's still a mess.

Gustav Grundgens in Fritz Lang's M (1931)

The conflict between sympathy and justice is as great a subject for art as for philosophy. It's hard to watch people struggling to face responsibility for their actions; it's even harder when the acts are recent, or ongoing. But how should we talk about German books, art, and film, made before, during, and after WW II? How should we talk about European and American art in general? [I wrote this a month after writing about Taruskin and Prokofiev. How did I forget that?]

I love Titian's portraits of Charles V and Philip II, both murderers on an epic scale. The paintings' craft is at odds with absolutist order, and they mark that disjunction with more subtlety than any document. Velazquez' kings are sad; his slaves are proud. He was the first artist to make works that less describe faith than the desire for it, but I wouldn't expect a Protestant, or Jewish, or Amerindian subject of the Spanish crown to admire his portraits of the king. 

I didn't want to see Zero Dark 30.  I'm too close, and too aware of the world outside the American imagination to want to watch a document of American attempts to come to grips with the last 10 years of war. Chomsky is right: "Uncontroversially" George Bush's crimes "vastly exceed bin Laden's". But my hesitation says nothing about the film itself, only about my ability to keep a distance.

Objectivity is impossible. It's tempting to moralize if you know enough, but generalizing from indignation leads to disaster. Zionism is to American liberalism what climate denialism is to the American right. We're creatures of sense and experience, and blind spots are a given. I wasn't shocked to find out Chomsky's still a Zionist. The assumption that only Americans, or men, or whites, or heterosexuals, or people with or without PhDs, are capable of magical thinking is itself magical thinking: absurd. But this country specializes in that absurdity. Americans use soul-searching to pat themselves on the back, celebrating the recognition of error as yet another triumph. It's less American than the product of the sort of individualism this country helped spread to the world: a self-blind confidence, looking out with ironic detachment and lovingly at yourself in the mirror.

How do we acknowledge responsibilities while admitting the frailty of reason? The relation of ideas to acts is a problem of art, not science.

The best defense of journalism I know is by Nir Rosen, responding to accusations of treason, after embedding with the Taliban. The formatting is in the original.

objections to my article have been silly so far. i'm a journalist, not an american journalist. my job is not to serve as a propagandist for anybody, just to tell stories and my advantage is that i can tell stories that are hard to come by[.]
any comparison to WWII or the nazis always shows a lack of imagination, but in this case also a lack of understanding. the whole reason why its important to have people like me, able to hang out with militias in somalia, afghanistan, iraq or lebanon, is because they are not a formal army of a formal state, with clear goals, structure, hierarchy etc. on the contrary, their motives are not known and diverse, often at odds, they take up arms for different reasons and as anybody remotely interested in COIN knows by now (except for sassaman perhaps), they do not put down their arms through force, unless you're willing to use force like the russians in chechnya (and that hasnt worked for the israelis), but instead their goals and motives must be understood, and eventually a political accord must be reached.
moreover, journalists regularly embed with the american military when it is conducting operations, attacks, killing. whats the difference?
imagine if that one taliban commander had not screwed up my plans to go with them when they conducted attacks, and i had seen that too. isnt that interesting? isnt it important to understand who they are? and most importantly, wouldnt it make for a fun read?

That's not a defense of objectivity but of disinterest, verging on amorality. Yet on questions of morality I'd trust Rosen more than most, and the reasons are in the same paragraph. He argues less from superiority than for honesty. He's an adventurer who's arguing for intellectual seriousness. Judgements of his moral seriousness are left to others. But he doesn't deny morality. A good surgeon knows he loves cutting people open. His first responsibility is to be good at his job.

If Rosen defends journalism, so does Baudelaire

It is painful to observe that similar errors are to be found in two opposing schools: the bourgeois school and the socialist school. "Let us moralize! Let  us moralize!" both sides exclaim, with the fervent ardor of missionaries. Of course, one preaches bourgeois morality and the other socialist morality, and, as a result, art is a mere question of propaganda.

Is Art useful? Yes. Why? Because it is art. Is there such a thing as a pernicious form of art? Yes! The form that distorts the underlying conditions of life. Vice is alluring; then show it as alluring; but it brings with its train peculiar moral maladies and suffering; then describe them. Study all the sores, like a doctor in the course of his hospital duties, and the good-sense school, the school dedicated exclusively to morality, will find nothing to bite on. Is crime always punished, virtue always rewarded? No; and yet if your novel, if your play is well put together, no one will take it into his head to break the laws of nature. The first necessary condition for the creation of a vigorous art form is the belief in underlying unity. I defy anyone to find one single work of imagination that satisfies the conditions of beauty and is at the same time a pernicious work. 

Everyone I know who's liked Zero Dark 30 has described is as a sympathetic study of human pathology, something between a film by Frederick Wiseman and De Palma's Scarface. Every criticism by Americans has been colored by a defense of America or its self-image.  Criticism by foreigners is predicated on the fact that it's yet another film by Americans about Americans and its victims are secondary. But that's criticism by refusal not obfuscation.

If it's a victory for feminism that Israeli women are allowed into combat, it's a victory for feminism that women are active members of Hamas. We all live within boundaries, and I'm not going to moralize about a movie that's more honest than its American critics. Spanish painting was about Spain. Russian films about soldiers in Afghanistan or Chechnya are about Russia. Israelis making movies about Palestinians are making movies about Israelis. Men making films about women are making films about men. If they think they're making films about anything else they're lying to themselves. Honesty is all that's required for art. Honesty and the the acceptance of honesty are necessary for real politics.

Contrast Rosen to Steve Coll, in the NY Review

Even if torture worked, it could never be justified because it is immoral. Yet state-sanctioned, formally organized forms of torture recur even in developed democracies because some public leaders have been willing to attach their prestige to an argument that in circumstances of national emergency, torture may be necessary because it will extract timely intelligence relevant to public safety when more humane methods of interrogation will not.

There is no empirical evidence to support this argument. Among other things, no responsible social scientist would condone peer-reviewed experiments to compare torture’s results to those from less coercive questioning. Defenders of torture in the United States therefore argue by issuing a flawed syllogism: the CIA tortured al-Qaeda suspects; those suspects provided information that helped to protect the public; therefore, torture was justified and even essential. In his recent statement to agency employees about Zero Dark Thirty, acting CIA director Morrell gave this argument implicit support when he said that the ongoing debate over the CIA’s treatment of al-Qaeda suspects after 2002 “never will be definitively resolved.” 

That is a timid tautology; it is also evidence of a much wider political failure. As with discourse about climate change policy, the persistence of on-the-one-hand, on-the-other forms of argument about the value of officially sanctioned torture represents a victory for those who would justify such abuse. Zero Dark Thirty has performed no public service by enlarging the acceptability of that form of debate.

"Even if torture worked, it could never be justified because it is immoral…."  It would have helped a bit if Coll had written "should", to remove the implication that he had some authority. As it is the sentence reads as if The School of the Americas or KUBARK never existed, or Henry Kissinger were never born. "Yet state-sanctioned, formally organized forms of torture recur… " because people think it works. "There is no empirical evidence to support this argument…." because as he says,  no "responsible social scientist" would perform the study.

Coll begins with assumptions of moral authority and does what he can to support them. He blusters; he takes the CIA at it's word.  After Julian Assange met with lawmakers in Reykjavik he said Assange was hoping "to transform Iceland... into the "Cayman Islands of First Amendment-inspired subversion." See a good response here.  Unlike Rosen, Coll is an American journalist: the first thing he defends is his own superiority.

Corey Robin likes to mock liberals; whiteness is a recurring theme (search the page for references to Israel, Palestinians or Zionism; there are none) [there were none at the time]. He claims the role of a white[?] defender of the legacy of the American civil rights movement; you think he'd link at least once in the past few years to Philip Weiss. 

Robin's post on Zero Dark 30 linked to Glenn Greenwald, doing what I'd done in the earlier version of this piece, talking about a movie he hasn't seen.

I have not seen this film and thus am obviously not purporting to review it; I am, instead, writing about the reaction to the film: the way in which its fabrications about the benefits of torture seem to be no impediment to its being adored and celebrated.

Now we've both seen it, and neither of us has changed our minds

Greenwald is a moralist, or he's become one, maybe feeling the aftereffects of supporting the invasion of Iraq. His first book received a lot of praise; now it seems to be forgotten.  He's left like Coll to proclaim the inefficacy of torture, while continuing the absurd fixation on bin Laden, still a fetish figure for Americans, rather than focus on larger issues: the ridiculous expenditures following stupid policies that have always and will continue to backfire. Greenwald fits the US model of pundit as scold, a reformed drunk defending America's lost honor. His need to feel superior traps him in an argument he should be smart enough to avoid.

Democratic freedom and democratic responsibility are a duality: obligation to self and other, not to "the other" in the language of hypertrophied rationalism but to human beings other than yourself. Democratic states operate under an extension of this duality: to defend equality under law is to defend equality of all under law—if all people are equal, that must include foreigners—but states are exclusionary by definition, and by necessity. To say "No one is illegal" is a statement of perfect justice, not law, and law must take precedence. In an imperfect world this is a problem without a solution. It's an aporia, something to be dealt with as a recurring element of a political process where there's no opportunity for sainthood. At the same time when I read of American authors' concerns over the extrajudicial killings of American citizens, I'm left wanting to remind them that assassination itself is a problem for a democracy.  Even allowing for the necessities of statehood, it's not enough to defend democracy at home, especially because it's so easy to compartmentalize. "Liberal Zionism" in America means defending equality where you live and institutionalized bigotry in the place you claim your heritage.  Zionism is less the equivalent of Irish nationalism than Garveyism for Jews, but the logically obvious parallel has been ignored. The logic of Zionism in the west is the rhetoric of white and non-white, alternating and simultaneously. African Americans never had that option. The extremity of the disconnect even among the intellectual class seems peculiarly American.  Zionism, like American nationalism, including Greenwald's wounded nationalism, is not an argument from observation and reason but moralism and exceptionalism.

Peter Beinart:

I'm not asking Israel to be Utopian. I'm not asking it to allow Palestinians who were forced out (or fled) in 1948 to return to their homes. I'm not even asking it to allow full, equal citizenship to Arab Israelis, since that would require Israel no longer being a Jewish state. I'm actually pretty willing to compromise my liberalism for Israel's security and for its status as a Jewish state. What I am asking is that Israel not do things that foreclose the possibility of a Palestinian state in the West Bank, because if it is does that it will become--and I'm quoting Ehud Olmert and Ehud Barak here--an "apartheid state."

Beinart is now the editor of Open Zion. His latest book has caused a scandal, a scandal only worth talking seriously because it shows how much Zionists have been forced to admit how conservative they are by definition.  But this is not a license for a new corrected moralism.  If more and more Americans are able to see through the pretensions of  Zionism it's not the result of any advances in political philosophy. It can't be explained using the terms liberals employ that might give credit to the human imagination.  It's not the result of moral progress, it's economics and demographics. We learn from experience and contact. Ideas are secondary; people do not change as much as they are changed. White liberals and academics tend to forget that the civil rights movement wasn't led by social scientists and political philosophers but by lower middle class blacks and their priests.  If the strength of ideas were enough, there'd be less need for Jadaliyya; it would be just another publication in its niche.  As it is it's another aspect of the changes that have produced the international bourgeois revolution of the Arab spring. You don't have to be a determinist full-on to notice that academics have the habit of trying to showing the effect of determinism only on those other than themselves. As'ad AbuKhalil mocks the NY Times Middle East correspondent for not knowing Arabic.  When the Washington post was hiring six months ago the job posting read: "A strong candidate would bring some familiarity with the Arab world and some knowledge of Arabic, but these are not required." But it's not just the mainstream press that's lazy. And it's not just Americans, but Americans as the product of a revolution and now the reigning world power, have a tendency towards self-absorption that at the moment is unparalleled.

The only unthinking internationalism in this country outside the social life of immigrants takes place in the culture of finance and its attendant demimonde.  Club kids in Miami are more internationalist than American students of foreign policy. The romance of educated Americans with Paris or Matisse is little different than a fantasy of Borneo. Absurdities are universal; the absurdity of American political and intellectual life is something else. It's the politics of sincerity. Irony is seen universally as anti-political: reserved for enemies, never for friends, and never for yourself.  Young liberals are part of the gentrifying hordes who move into working class neighborhoods and throw the residents out of their homes.  Has there ever been an educated reformist movement so unaware of the perquisites of its own class? And the preferred art—as entertainment—of young technocrats, as it is for their teachers, is cerebral. The literary saints of American political science departments are Asimov and Tolkien, "speculative" fiction and fantasy. The failure of political thinkers to come to terms with the changes over the past decades have everything to do with a preference for theory over observation. The primacy of ideas—of theories of any sort—connotes that one can be either an idealist or a cynic; the mature politics of action demands principled casuistry.

The stupidity of American politics is the stupidity of the individual and the ideal, which is why the most profound American culture embeds in anti-politics. The anti-political comes by its politics honestly. Public politics in the US has been increasingly artificial; more than half the population has abandoned it and those who haven't float above it. Real politics is the politics of conflict not only between people but within them: people arguing with themselves. Arguments in Lebanon and Syria and Egypt, in Iran and even Israel are politically grounded: people know what it is to be pulled in two directions; they don't have a choice.  I picked those countries because they're places where politically-minded Americans either sound off like idiots or refuse to say anything, because there's no way to simplify the issues enough to allow them to say something their friends couldn't call them on as soon as the winds change. In America you can choose to be political and only people who choose to be political talk about it. And politics has become professionalized. The charm of European "continental" philosophers is that if their politics is a choice it's still a politics of amateurs; they're not philosophers, they're philosophes. The distinction is cultural but culture is key. Americans by comparison are either pedants of technocracy or if they have fantasies of Europe, of jouissance.

The self-described liberal philosopher and Zionist Martha Nussbaum famously launched an attack on the self-described radical philosopher Judith Butler; Butler now is in the position of defending the liberalism that Nussbaum claims to represent. There's nothing radical to her argument; it's a basic defense of civil and legal rights. For another example see Zizek, in Ramallah.  Nussbaum, Butler and Zizek all indulge magical thinking: they lie to themselves. Zizek is the least offensive because he's the most willing to offend. But I saw him speak in NY with the same filmmaker he joined in Ramallah, both of them with Badiou. Philosophers seem always to prefer their art as kitsch. And for radicality none of them match Rosen.

imagine if that one taliban commander had not screwed up my plans to go with them when they conducted attacks, and i had seen that too. isnt that interesting? isnt it important to understand who they are? and most importantly, wouldnt it make for a fun read?

That quote is dark irony, but it describes something central to democracy. Philosophers who defend democracy pretend it began in philosophers' books, but the books came later. First came coexistence. In politics as in life communication comes before grammar. The Greek playwrights were the foundations of democracy; the philosophers preferred kings. Philosophers are utopian by definition; theater can only be anti-utopian. Philosophers identify with judges but lawyers are actors playing roles. And even playing parts they choose, they have reason not to lose their sense of irony.

Bassem Youssef "The Egyptian Jon Stewart" went on Stewart's show and defended the supporters of the Muslim Brotherhood even as he disagrees with them. They're part of his audience. American liberals seem not to have noticed that Stewart and Colbert never get attacked by the right.  Youssef and Stewart are important in their countries for the same reason: as amateurs, they're free to take politics more seriously than they take themselves; Youssef is the more interesting because he's living through his country's crisis. He has skin in the game.  But comedians understand democracy more than philosophers do: comedians and lawyers and novelists and honest journalists. Philosophers offer propositions; comedians show us the subtext.

So are Egyptian liberals now going to follow Turkish liberals and "pray" for the army?

The BBC

"I put it to Leila that the man whose departure she was calling for wasn't a dictator, but a man her compatriots had voted for. We got a slightly troubling answer. "Yes, but the people who voted for him," she said, "are uneducated."

I have heard several similar responses. One of those opposed to President Morsi is the political sociologist Dr Saed Sadak, from the American University in Cairo. "Morsi was rejected by the urban areas," he told me. "It was the rural parts of Egypt that voted for him and his Muslim Brotherhood." "Isn't that how democracy worked all over the world?" I replied. "Not everybody gets who they want, they can always vote him out next time."

Dr Sadek's response was blunt. "It's like you're telling me to keep the babysitters I hired even if they are beating my child, just because we gave them a fixed term contract."

Istanbul in 2008

Covered women, long seen as backward peasants from the countryside, “have started to be everywhere,” said Ms. Simitcioglu, a sales clerk in an Italian clothing store, and it is making women like her more than a little uncomfortable. “We are Turkey’s image. They are ruining it.”

Egypt is divided, like Iran; the sooner Egyptian liberals accept that the better. And the Egyptian Black Bloc are no more political than Ultras, but the Ultras don't pretend. Worldwide, urban liberals see the rest of their homelands as flyover country. The sooner liberals understand how often their self-interest overshadows their principles -the sooner they learn to avoid the pitfalls of American liberalism- the better.  Many are still tempted by libertarianism, while more and more libertarians are willing to admit that freedom and democracy are incompatible. This leads us back to where democracy began: less in the demand for individual freedom than for an individual role in decision-making, with a concomitant acceptance of obligation.  Individualism is an ideology and it's infected every aspect of our politics, "left, right and center"; the phrase describes an object drifting in a sea of signification.  We will never see ourselves as others see us –all consciousness is partial– and others will never know what's in our heads. What's in America's head these days? It's got something to do with Zero Dark 30.

The US has tortured, and trained torturers, and supported states that used torture in furtherance of what are seen as US interests, which have nothing to do with democracy. This didn't begin after 9-11.  Let's stipulate that torture works, not against any and all. It can work as well as any successful raid in the drug war can be said to work, while being just as counterproductive as policy. It solves nothing. It makes more enemies. It's counterproductive in general and specifically for a democracy, as supporting dictatorships and monarchies is counterproductive in absolute terms and for democracies. Only democracy strengthens democracy.  Realism demands an acknowledgement of the existence of dictators and kings, but not more.

Optimists love to think of their successes.  Art remind us of our failures, and in a very real sense of the inevitability of failure, in death. Attacks on Zero Dark 30 are attacks on entartete kunst, as if it were the cause of decadence. The film is either a symptom or a record: as a symptom it's secondary. As a record it will last, as record and as art, because it says more about America than any document. 

Film critic Jim Hoberman in The Guardian, on why Zero Dark 30 will never work as propaganda

Like Zero Dark Thirty, Lincoln was anticipated as a movie that would naturally reflect well on the current president and, indeed, on the eve of the Zero Dark Thirty opening and at the behest of senate majority leader Harry Reid, Spielberg hosted a special screening for a bipartisan senate audience. Zero Dark Thirty was repudiated, Lincoln embraced. The Oscar wars heated up. The Hollywood Reporter found that "negative talk is escalating", along with whispering campaigns: Zero Dark Thirty justifies torture, Lincoln distorts history. Perhaps so. Still, by putting an essentially positive spin on a bloody tragedy, Lincoln provides a history lesson with a happy ending. Zero Dark Thirty, whose chances at winning best picture seem to be nil, is the exact reverse – a success story with intimations of monumental failure. (Meanwhile, Argo – a movie in which movie magic is put to heroic use – emerged from its Golden Globes victory as an exciting feelgood, industry-flattering Oscar alternative.) 

Whereas Obama and his commanders followed the mission to kill Bin Laden in real time, Zero Dark Thirty presents Maya as its author and sole witness. She is the first to get the good news, the only American to greet the returning Seals, the person who unzips the body-bag and IDs the corpse. Maya is so important that she flies home alone in the empty bay of a cargo plane. Once again, she is blank and then, raison d'etre extinguished, she cries. 

Is Maya, like Ishmael, the lone survivor left clinging to the flotsam of the Pequod? Is she condemned, like Ethan Edwards at the end of The Searchers, to "wander forever between the winds"? What did it cost the girl (or Obama) or America to kill Bin Laden? Zero Dark Thirty slakes a thirst for vengeance and leaves an aftertaste of gall.

continuing in the next post
---

"Moralize! Moralize!" both sides exclaim, with the fervent ardor of missionaries. Of course one preaches bourgeois morality and the other socialist morality, and as a result, art is a mere question of propaganda."

"You must look through the surface of American art, and see the inner diabolism of the symbolic meaning. Otherwise it is all mere childishness....

Perception does not know the concept of infinity; from the very outset it is confined within certain spatial limits imposed by our faculty of perception. And in connection with perceptual space we can no more speak of homogeneity than of infinity. The ultimate basis of the homogeneity of geometric space is that aIl its elements, the "points" which are joined in it, are mere determinations of position, possessing no independent content of their own outside of this relation: it is purely functional and not a substantial reality. Because fundamentally these points are devoid of all content, because they have become mere expressions of ideal relations, they can raise no questions of diversity of context. Their homogeneity signifies nothing other than this similarity of structure, grounded in their common logical function, their common ideal purpose and meaning. Hence homogeneous space is never given space, but space produced by construction; and indeed the geometrical concept of homogeneity can be expressed by the postulate that from every point in space it must bc possible to draw similar figures in aIl directions and magnitudes. Nowhere in the space of immediate perception can this postulate be fulfilled. Here there is no strict homogeneity and direction; each space has its own mode and its own value. Visual space and tactical space [Tastraum] are both anisotropic and unhomogenious in contrast to the metric space of Euclidian geometry: "the main directions of organization – before-behind, above-below, right-left – are dissimilar in both physiological spaces." [Ernst Mach] 

Ernst Cassirer, The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms. Quoted in Panofsky, Perspective as Symbolic Form.

"Seminar on The Priority of Democracy" Technocrats are philosophical elitists of ideas: mediocre people in search of the best of all possible rules, which in the end are "devoid of all content, because they have become mere expressions of ideal relations, they can raise no questions of diversity of context".
Adrian Vermeule [history here, then here ] is a participant.

...see also M. Foucault, Liberal Fascism.

William Heckscher on Panofsky. From his memorial essay at the end of Panofsky's Three Essays on Style.

Everything in humanistic scholarship, even the (to him somewhat comical) New Criticism, which he characterized with Pierrot's words, "Je sais bien écrire, mais je ne sais pas lire," he considered acceptable, so long as it was not "institutionalized."

In America, it's always institutionalized, or the author is, if only under sedation.

It's absurd how much is lost when the goal of disinterest devolves into a fiction of objectivity.

But if “using rare words and tropes in place of common words and phrases” is a strategy of “deliberate transgression” of the norms of clear prose characteristic of the dominant classes and is opposed to “the hyper-correction strategies of pretentious outsiders,” then Bourdieu is a master strategist. Words such as lexis, allodoxia, chiastic, askesis, espace hodologique, hysteresis, and of course habitus (and, indeed, hysteresis of habitus) are scattered throughout the text. That a work of social science should—”unlike the sometimes illuminating intuitions of the essay”—require an effort on the part of the reader is fair enough. Here, however, reality disappears into the hypertrophied rhetoric of the Ecole Normale.

---

It's a footnote, and it's glorious.

Hoberman

Like Zero Dark Thirty, Lincoln was anticipated as a movie that would naturally reflect well on the current president and, indeed, on the eve of the Zero Dark Thirty opening and at the behest of senate majority leader Harry Reid, Spielberg hosted a special screening for a bipartisan senate audience. Zero Dark Thirty was repudiated, Lincoln embraced. The Oscar wars heated up. The Hollywood Reporter found that "negative talk is escalating", along with whispering campaigns: Zero Dark Thirty justifies torture, Lincoln distorts history. Perhaps so. Still, by putting an essentially positive spin on a bloody tragedy, Lincoln provides a history lesson with a happy ending. Zero Dark Thirty, whose chances at winning best picture seem to be nil, is the exact reverse – a success story with intimations of monumental failure. (Meanwhile, Argo – a movie in which movie magic is put to heroic use – emerged from its Golden Globes victory as an exciting feelgood, industry-flattering Oscar alternative.) 

Whereas Obama and his commanders followed the mission to kill Bin Laden in real time, Zero Dark Thirty presents Maya as its author and sole witness. She is the first to get the good news, the only American to greet the returning Seals, the person who unzips the body-bag and IDs the corpse. Maya is so important that she flies home alone in the empty bay of a cargo plane. Once again, she is blank and then, raison d'etre extinguished, she cries. 

Is Maya, like Ishmael, the lone survivor left clinging to the flotsam of the Pequod? Is she condemned, like Ethan Edwards at the end of The Searchers, to "wander forever between the winds"? What did it cost the girl (or Obama) or America to kill Bin Laden? Zero Dark Thirty slakes a thirst for vengeance and leaves an aftertaste of gall.

Open letter to President Obama from Bahieddin Hassan, director of the Cairo Institute for Human Rights Studies.

...Mr President, when I spoke with you in 2010, I asked why the US administration condemns repressive practices in Iran while remaining silent when Arab regimes engage in the same violations. Over recent months, statements by your administration have similarly failed to address violations and have even blamed protesters and victims for violence committed in the context of demonstrations. Indeed, the stances of your administration have given political cover to the current authoritarian regime in Egypt and allowed it to fearlessly implement undemocratic policies and commit numerous acts of repression. 

Statements that “Egypt is witnessing a genuine and broad-based process of democratisation” have covered over and indeed legitimised the undemocratic processes by which the Constituent Assembly passed the new constitution, an issue which has in turn led to greatly heightened instability in the country. Calls for “the opposition [to] remain non-violent” and for “the government and security forces [to] exercise self-restraint in the face of protester violence” have allowed the police and the current Egyptian administration to shirk their responsibilities to secure demonstrations and to respond to the demands of the Egyptian people, and have allowed them to place the blame for violence and instability on protesters themselves. Urging “the opposition [to] engage in a national dialogue without preconditions” undermines the ability of the opposition to play a real role in the decision-making processes of the country, as these “dialogues” seldom result in anything more concrete than a photo-op with the president.

...I do not write you today to ask you to condemn the repressive policies of the current regime, or to ask you to urge President Mohamed Morsi to “cease” using excessive force and violence against Egyptians, even as your administration was so eager to achieve a ceasefire with Hamas to stop hostilities in Gaza. I write you not to ask for troops to protect political protesters in Egypt, or to suspend, freeze, or reduce military or economic aid to my country, or even to impose conditions on that aid. My request is quite modest: that spokespeople and officials in your administration stop commenting on developments in Egypt. This will no doubt spare your administration much time and effort, but more importantly, it may spare more bloodshed in Egypt, as the current regime will no longer enjoy the political cover that the US administration now offers them. Certainly, Egypt has seen enough bloodshed over the last two years, and Egyptians are tired of being punished for their uprising.

When in December I met Michael Posner, assistant secretary of state for human rights and that rare person in your administration who is motivated by human rights concerns, I asked that he pass on this modest request to administration spokespeople: that as long as they cannot speak the truth about what is happening in Egypt, they keep silent.

Mr President, only a few days ago Egyptians celebrated the second anniversary of their revolution. Meanwhile, the regime commemorated the occasion differently: by re-enacting the scenes of violence and brutality seen during the 18 days of the 2011 uprising, adding the new phenomenon of gang rapes. In one week, more than 60 people died in several governorates, and there were dozens of reported gang rapes and assaults. Hundreds of people were arrested and an unknown number abducted. One of them — 23-year-old Mohamed Al-Guindi — reappeared a few days later in a hospital, brutally tortured, and soon died.

Mr President, I fear that the gulf I spoke to you about three years ago is fast filling up with blood. In this context, further American statements supporting the current Egyptian regime will only lead to more Egyptians being beaten, raped, tortured, and killed. Please, ask officials with your administration to stop talking about Egypt for a while, at least until we can bury our dead, comfort their grieving families, treat the victims of rape and torture, find the disappeared, and read the wills of a new generation of young people who plan not for their weddings but for their funerals.

From Isandr El Amrani at Arabist. His comment

The Obama administration has the same problem it had with Mubarak: it suffers from acute clientitis, has an ambassador whose embrace of the Muslim Brotherhood has been way too much too fast and is incautious with her praise, it fails to appreciate the seriousness of the current situation and thinks things will just blow over, and has a department of defense whose interest in the status quo consistently overrides other elements of the foreign policy machine. We are back to the Mubarak era where the main concern of the embassy, and large elements of the departments of State and Defense, is how they are going to protect Egypt (whether the generals or the Morsi administration) from Congress. It's a sad state of affairs.

American policymakers are cynics concerned to protect US "interests", but most of the Americans who want to change those policies are still happy to chant "We are the World". They're not.

Schliesser, in July, and now.

In July he removed the passage I quoted (using a pseudonym) from Jason Stanley and and now in another context, he links to him,  blind to the relation. Schliesser and Stanley both continue the modernist cult of reason and the political fantasies of which Israel, Brasilia and North Korea are the last remaining examples.

Schliesser supports Merkel for the same reason he defends the Jewish state. As a European Jew he needs a place to run to if history repeats. He admitted as much in the email telling me he'd deleted my comment: "as a German Jew living in the Netherlands and working in Belgium, I really do not need your lectures on these matters."

Schliesser defends philosophy as science and defends a his own bigotry as a defense against bigotry.

And he defends Stanley's dabblings in arguments against democracy. Stanley has a series of posts, the most recent of which is here.  An earlier one in the series is The Ways of Silencing.

Stanley's blindness to some kinds of pornography proves nothing more than the inevitability of blindness.  But he's a technocrat concerned with policing technocrats, and then policing speech.

Related: John Quiggin has a favorite trope.

What's grotesque in liberalism, seen in Quiggin's use of the terminology of the "Overton Window" is that the term can never be used to refer to the user's own limitations.

Marcus Stanley: "The sociology of modern knowledge production empowers the scholar over the humanist, and the collective/communal enterprise of scholarship over the inspiration of the individual thinker."

When Corey Robin says "We won" he's referring to academics and the principle of academic freedom, but it's a fact that the leader of the American Nazi party would never have been sponsored. Sponsorship is not endorsement but it is engagement. Ten years ago, any Palestinian who dared to argue for sanctions against Israel would have been seen within the academy as unworthy of engagement. The NY Times editorial from 3 days ago would never have been written.  Change begins outside the academy in the society of which the academy is an aspect.

To the small degree that the discussion of the BDS presentation has been about the merits of BDS itself it has been a discussion among Zionists and their friends, and former Zionists, about the appropriate definition of Zionism: another debate among moderate Christian/white/male/heterosexual people of the Jewish/negro/woman/homosexual problem.

American liberals above, American conservatives below.

El Amrani

Link here. So first, frame Palestinian reconciliation as a BAD THING even if it seems peace is pretty unlikely if the Palestinians are divided. Second, only invite Jewish experts from pro-Israel think tanks and advocacy groups. Third, whatever you do, don't invite Palestinians. Got it? Good.

Academics claim to be above it all, a priori, and they're not.  The principle of academic independence allows academics the space to follow intellectual pursuits. Having a degree and a title doesn't make you an intellectual.

The academy talks within and about itself. Those with an interest in larger issues haven't really paid attention. They're discussing drones, assassinations, torture, Egypt, The MB, Israel, Saudi, Tunisia, the murder of Chokri Belaid.

Leiter, a post headline:
"A turning point: the NY Times comes out for academic freedom and repudiates Dershowitz and those who police discourse on Israel"

The integrity of the academy becomes more important than the subject of debate. it would make sense as a defense of proceduralism, but Leiter's not defending due process.

note taking/ comments posted elsewhere

No political science department wants to be seen as licensing or even engaging, arguments that are seen as absolutely outside social norms. if the White Students Union decided to hold a debate between a holocaust denier and a holocaust endorser no department would sign on as a co-sponser. No department would sponsor Farrakhan, Kahane or David Duke, (though a triple bill would be worth it). There wouldn’t even be an argument. Heads of state are in another category.

The only reason the Brooklyn political science department signed on the the BDS presentation is because they take it seriously, as an argument worthy of consideration. Arguments deemed not worthy even of consideration, or worthy of actual contempt, are simply ignored. A BDS event would not have been sponsored ten years ago. The change over that time is political and cultural. Change outside the academy has resulted in change inside the academy.

On the larger issue, academic “freedom” is a misnomer. The better term is academic independence: the independence of the academy in decision-making. Let them handle their own internal politics. Let their struggles with groupthink and lazy assumption remain theirs alone. I know a few people who’ve based their entire careers on where funding was going to be at any given time. That’s not academic freedom it’s academic realpolitik.

It would be interesting to do a study specifically of how the academy separates people whose ideas, works or actions it follows: when the academy comes to them (fieldwork) and when they are invited into the academy and on what terms. Patients are allowed in but have limited autonomy. etc.
---

Robin

City Council Speaker—and leading mayoral candidate—Christine Quinn is a signatory to that “other” letter about the Brooklyn College BDS panel from the “progressive” government officials and politicians. 

…For many years when she was a member of the City Council, Quinn and her office financially supported—to the tune of roughly $4,000 a year—the Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies (CLAGS) at the CUNY Graduate Center. The money, according to one representative request letter from CLAGS that I have seen (from 2004), was supposed to fund publicity and outreach for CLAGS talks, panels, and events. 

Talks like this one (see p. 13 of this newsletter): "Unzipping the Monster Dick: Deconstructing Ableist Penile Representations in Two Ethnic Homoerotic Magazines.”

It says something about the relative situation of Palestinians and homosexuals in our society that Quinn as an out lesbian can take the position she has, so Robin can respond by linking to actual homosexuals rather than simply to their heterosexual supporters.

From Leiter

December 21, 1962 

Dear Sir, 

I wish you hadn't billed the debate between William Buckley and myself as a meeting between a conservative and a liberal. I don't care if people call me a radical, a rebel, a red, a revolutionary, an outsider, an outlaw, a Bolshevik, an anarchist, a nihilist, or even a left conservative, but please don’t ever call me a liberal. 

Yours,
Norman Mailer
---- 

February 22, 1965

Dear Bob, 

Your letter, January 26, invites me to an "essay" of eighteen hundred words on the new Hubert Humphrey. In the last year you have also asked me to review biographies of Johnson (Jack) and George Patton. Since it is not easy to think of three books which could attract me less, I expect I must make my position clear. Forgive me for digging in old ground.

A year and a half ago, you asked me to review The Group. Said you had offered the novel to seven people—all seven were afraid to review it. You appealed to my manhood, my fierce eschatological sword. St. Mary's wrath (according to you) was limned with brimfire. Would I do it, you begged, as a most special favor to you. Perhaps, as you suggested, I was the only man in New York who had the guts to do it. A shrewd appeal. I did it. Two months later my book (The Presidential Papers) came out. You had given the copy to Midge Decter for review. Her submitted piece was, in your opinion—I quote your label—"overinflated." That is to say, it was favorable. Changes were requested. The reviewer refused to make them. The review was not printed. No review of The Presidential Papers appeared in The New York Review of Books. Only a parody. By a mystery guest. Now, we have my new book, An American Dream. I hear you have picked Philip Rahv to review it, Philip Rahv whose detestation of my work has been thundering these last two years into the gravy stains of every literary table on the Eastern Seaboard.

In the name therefore of the sweet gracious Jesus, why expect me to do eight words on your subject? To the contrary, experience now suspects that a state of cordial relations with The Review is congruent to a lack of cordial relations with The Review, and marks you, Bob, on this note: negotiations with your Editorship are, by open measure, inching, tedious, and impoverished as spit. But cheer up, dear Silvers. The letter is for publication, and so should enliven the literary history of your unbloodied rag.

Yours in trust,

Norman Mailer

cc: Barbara Epstein
Elizabeth Hardwick
Eve Auchincloss
Alexandra T. Emmet
A. Whitney Ellsworth
Terry Ehrich
Samuel N. Antupit
George Plimpton
Jason Epstein
Midge Decter
Malcolm Muggeridge

47. Syria   

Syria detained, interrogated, and tortured extraordinarily rendered individuals. It was one of the “most common destinations for rendered suspects.”1496

The CIA extraordinarily rendered at least nine individuals to Syria between December 2001 and October 2002.1497 The case of Maher Arar, a Syrian-born Canadian who was transferred to Syria from New York by the CIA in 2002, is one of the most well-known cases of extraordinary rendition involving Syria.1498 See the detainee list in Section IV. 

Individuals extraordinarily rendered to Syria include Arar, Abdul Halim Dalak, Noor al-Deen, Omar Ghramesh, Bahaa Mustafa Jaghel, Barah Abdul Latif, Mustafa Setmariam Nassar (Abu Musab al-Suri), Yasser Tinawi, and Mohammed Haydar Zammar. See the detainee list in Section IV. 

Known detention facilities where extraordinary rendition victims were held in Syria include the Palestine Branch/Far Falastin Prison (in western Damascus) where detainees were held in communal cells and also in an area called “the Grave,” which consisted of individual cells that were roughly the size of coffins.1499 Detainees report incidents of torture involving a chair frame used to stretch the spine (the “German chair”) and beatings.1500 

There have been no known judicial cases or investigations in Syria relating to its participation in CIA secret detention and extraordinary rendition operations. 

note taking at Jadaliyya

The Boltanski quote in context:

"This process, and only this process, saves suffering from insignificance (from the absurd, from nihilism, etc.). Once the fictional characters of the prosecutors and the benefactor have been dispensed with along with their illusory reflections, the enragé victim and the grateful misérable, suffering is looked at in the face and confronted in its truth, that is to say as pure evil. But it is by watching himself watching evil that the spectator can unmask the truth of evil within himself and thus accomplish the fundamental aesthetic process, aims at the nondiferentiation of objective and subjective."

Zero Dark 30 is about Americans not Iraqis. The subject is American suffering, seen in the imagination of Americans. If it were about Arabs it would be a Spielberg film, which means it would be offensive in its pretense to represent Arabs. But Boltanski misses Baudelaire's point. You can't collapse subjective and objective. If you could there'd be no need for art. ZD30 is an exemplary Baudelaireian artwork in its honest description of Americans by Americans. The question of the relation on 3 thousand dead to 5 hundred thousand dead is beyond the scope of the movie. But it's a much more important question than whether torture "works" No American foreign policy over the past 10 years has "worked." The author also quotes Frank Bruni. Here's the last graph from the article: "In the name of our democracy, we have long done and we continue to do some ruthless cost-benefit analyses and some very ugly things, to which we should never turn a blind eye." In the name of democracy but not in the defense of it.

Protevi

Corey Robin on FB (reprinted with permission) addresses the speech-provoking aspect:

One of the things that amazes me in this whole brouhaha over the BDS event at Brooklyn College is that critics of the event claim it shuts down speech, it silences defenders of Israel, etc. Yet in the past two days I've had more conversations with defenders of Israel on campus, more conversations about Israel in general, and more conversations -- and arguments, in which multiple views are aired -- about BDS. Two weeks ago almost no one on campus was talking about any of this; now everyone is. So remind me how this event shuts down speech?

Robin limits himself to the subject of academic freedom and free speech. In a comment at CT, he links to Chris Hayes:  "No time to get into all this; Chris Hayes did an unbelievably powerful segment on this story this morning. Very strong."

Hayes

What should you know for the week coming up?  Well, you should know that right now there's an organized campaign from a who's who list of prominent and powerful NY politicians, including members of congress, state legislators and mayoral candidates to do everything in their power to stop the horrifying possibility of [pause] a college holding a panel discussion of a controversial issue. No. Really.   

You should know a group of Brooklyn College students organized an even to discuss the The Boycott Disinvestment and Sanctions movement, which is an attempt by activists here and around the world to pressure Israel to end its settlements and occupation through organized boycotts international sanctions and divestments, modeled on those directed at South Africa during apartheid. You should know a whole lot of people, understandably, find any comparison to South Africa offensive. And I myself genuinely wrestle with the justness and efficacy of the BDS movement. But of course the entire point of academic freedom is to discuss ideas that may be held in contempt by the political main stream.[sic]

"Very strong."  "The White Moderate",  "Twilight of the Elites"

The history of CT on academic freedom is of course as bad, one way or the other, as it is on free speech.

Nadler et al.
As a matter of practical politics. or actual politics, the department should fold and invite someone else, even Dershowitz.  The issues are to important to leave to academics. Make it a public forum.

note taking/ posted elsewhere

Should this be a discussion of academic freedom or of BDS and Zionism?
Which is more important? I’m more than a bit disgusted that academics who privately disdain Zionism now revert to passive aggressive defenses of academic freedom while refusing in public to engage the substance of the larger debate. 

Nadler et al are asking for the department to withdraw sponsorship, or invite someone opposed. The department has precedent on it’s side and should make that clear. It wins that argument hands down. 

But there are 1.5 million Jews in NY, including many families of Holocaust survivors. Most of them are Zionist. Politics is bigger than academia, but I’m used to hearing defenses of academic freedom based on the fact that it predates free speech. And more and more often now I’m reading academic arguments against free speech itself.  All obscene. 

Find a larger venue. Invite Dershowitz; invite the public; and bring your A game. Get someone better than Judith Butler.

Robin quoting Arendt is a smart move as a matter of practical politics: don't quote an angry black man to a white moderate when you can quote a quote a white reformer. Unfortunately that's not why he did it.  Zionism is his touchstone; he can't think with/through/by way of the Nakba.  The only parallel for a white man angrily and insistently quoting black leaders about race relations in the US would be for him to be just as insistent in quoting Palestinians about relations in Israel.  He's never done because he can't.  See also the comments on his own page. Robin seems to know very little about the place of fascism as idea or as sensibility in the first half of the 20th century.  One more who can't read for subtext, in books or in his own behavior.

Atrios: "Never quite been able to fully comprehend sports fandom";"I like Hillary Clinton"; "David Duke, president of Americans in Support of Palestinian Freedom…"  The blankness of the first explains the blankness of the second and third. The American, modern, unironic sense of self. Curiosity without second order curiosity.  I hate these assholes.

Atrios "I like Hillary Clinton."

repeat from 2008

I finally watched this yesterday

"It's not easy, and I couldn't do it if I didn't passionately believe it was the right thing to do. You know... I have so many opportunities from this country. I just don't want to see us fall backwards. You know, this is very personal for me. It's not just political it's not just public. I see what's happening, and we have to reverse it. And some people think elections are a game, they think it's like who's up or who's down. It's about our country. It's about our kids' futures, and it's really about all of us together. You know, some of us put ourselves out there and do this against some pretty difficult odds, and we do it, each one of us because we care about our country but some of us are right and some of us are wrong, some of us are ready and some of us are not, some of us know what we will do on day one and some of us haven't thought that through enough.

Dowd: Can Hillary Cry Her Way Back to the White House?

Atrios responding to Dowd: "Because only boys are allowed to cry. Or something. These people are all broken. Complete monsters."

Gitlin: Hillary Teared--and Edwards Blinked

Pollitt: Hillary Shows Feeling, is Slammed

Listen to Clinton's words, and ask yourself what exactly she's crying over. The response has been based on the assumption that Clinton was describing and reacting to the pressure of campaigning itself, but that's not it.

"You know... I have so many opportunities from this country. I just don't want to see us fall backwards."

She's crying because she's scared of what will happen to the country if she doesn't win. Dowd hints at this and no one else even comes close, but it's front and center: "It's not easy" trying to save us from ourselves. The performance and response have been equally embarrassing to watch. Does Clinton even know what she's doing? Does Katha Pollitt?

Leiter

Hillary Clinton suffers from being a Clinton, as well as having one of the most unappealing public personae of a national politician in recent memory. Dick Cheney is creepier and scarier, to be sure, but "fake" is the only word that captures the impression Ms. Clinton makes every time she opens her mouth.

Interesting that Leiter of all people should be so observant. He has an instinctive understanding of psychology, reading performance for subtext, but he's unwilling to read that back into his larger intellectual interests, or his understanding of his own behavior.

The biggest compliment I could think of would be to call her a tragic figure.

Art Market Maneker links the The Guardian

“Art English is something that everyone in the art world bitches about all the time,” says Levine, a 42-year-old American artist based in New York and Berlin. “But we all use it.” Three years ago, Levine and his friend Rule, a 29-year-old critic and sociology PhD student at Columbia university in New York, decided to try to anatomise it. “We wanted to map it out,” says Levine, “to describe its contours, rather than just complain about it.”

…Through Sketch Engine, Rule and Levine found that "the real" – used as a portentous, would-be philosophical abstract noun – occurred "179 times more often" in IAE than in standard English. In fact, in its declarative, multi-clause sentences, and in its odd combination of stiffness and swagger, they argued that IAE "sounds like inexpertly translated French". This was no coincidence, they claimed, having traced the origins of IAE back to French post-structuralism and the introduction of its slippery ideas and prose style into American art writing via October, the New York critical journal founded in 1976. Since then, IAE had spread across the world so thoroughly that there was even, wrote Rule and Levine, an "IAE of the French press release ... written, we can only imagine, by French interns imitating American interns imitating American academics imitating French academics".

A formal analysis, with hints of something more, written in a style as mannered as the writing it follows, but a different kind of mannerism: Tory bureaucrat as social scientist rather than French professor of literature as philosopher.  The authors miss that point as well since the French were explicit in their mixture of intellectualism and art, while the Americans were much more serious. The criticism of October was specifically anti-art; its origins were in the prescriptivism of late Greenberg. The authors here as just as serious, as bitter ironists, but the irony is just as opposed to art itself. "Hypothesis, Vocabulary, Syntax, Genealogy, Authority, Implosion":

If IAE implodes, we probably shouldn’t expect that the globalized art world’s language will become neutral and inclusive. More likely, the elite of that world will opt for something like conventional highbrow English and the reliable distinctions it imposes.

Maybe in the meantime we should enjoy this decadent period of IAE….

"...neutral and inclusive."  Correction: I misread at first. The choice is between arbitrary authority and indifference: the end of judgement.

French and Anglo-American schools of philosophy are collapsing into one another and art is collapsing into fashion. Art critics deny their relation to film and book critics; they deny their relation to art historians: they deny the inevitable transition of their own ideas into artifacts. Philosophy is divided among those who argue that history is bunk and proponents of a new metaphysics.  The former argue from exceptionalism as to their own position, and the latter desire a return to the church.

When the great Japanese filmmaker Ozu was dying of cancer, his films were being forgotten. His producer came to visit him and neither said what they both knew: his home dramas were being overshadowed by Samurai epics.  As he leaving, Ozu called him back. 
"What is this?" he said. "Home drama."