The Nuland-Pyatt leak: BBC

Stephen F. Cohen, Democracy Now

Where do you want me to begin? I mean, we are watching history being made, but history of the worst kind. That’s what I’m telling my grandchildren: Watch this. What’s happening there, let’s take the big picture, then we can go to the small picture. The big picture is, people are dying in the streets every day. The number 50 is certainly too few. They’re still finding bodies. Ukraine is splitting apart down the middle, because Ukraine is not one country, contrary to what the American media, which speaks about the Ukraine and the Ukrainian people. Historically, ethnically, religiously, culturally, politically, economically, it’s two countries. One half wants to stay close to Russia; the other wants to go West. We now have reliable reports that the anti-government forces in the streets—and there are some very nasty people among them—are seizing weapons in western Ukrainian military bases. So we have clearly the possibility of a civil war.

Patrick Smith, FPIP

Every time we overhear U.S. diplomats talking when we are not supposed to, the conduct of American foreign policy sounds less imaginative, more reckless, and astonishing in its fidelity to eras many of us thought would never come again. Who would have thought Obama’s conduct abroad would recall so closely Eisenhower’s — the years when the Dulles Brothers, Allen at the CIA and John Foster at State, made sheer havoc in the name of American security — and thus reproduce an eternal state of insecurity?

The Guardian 2004

But while the gains of the orange-bedecked "chestnut revolution" are Ukraine's, the campaign is an American creation, a sophisticated and brilliantly conceived exercise in western branding and mass marketing that, in four countries in four years, has been used to try to salvage rigged elections and topple unsavoury regimes.

repeats 2008

It would have been far wiser for the US to encourage a continued "Eastern Bloc," even if it wouldn't have been immediately as democratic as reformers would wish. Eastern European countries who wanted to join NATO should have been told instead to work with one another. The expansion of NATO has always read like a victory lap, and the reaction of an isolated Russia was predictable. It's logical to think that a less threatened Russia would have become a less threatening one. 

Savage Minds,  Anthropology + Design: Nicolas Nova.

my comment:

Natural language is not designed. Cultures are built but not designed. Myths don’t have authors. The stuff we refer to as ‘art’ is the product of a kind of making that tries to approximate the sense of something between natural and artificial, man made and not, that we find in fables. Artists we think of as great we see as seeming to have the imaginations of many, containing multitudes. The result is stuff we think of as engaging us without command. Art is something to think with, as we think with religious and political texts. The doctrine of “originalism” is a peculiarly American fixation compared with other democracies, but fundamentalism is part of our heritage.
Balkin: "Why are Americans Originalist?" SSRN

“Design” in the sense we use it now is not peculiarly American but it’s peculiarly modern. The art of command economies is command culture; people may enjoy living in a house by Frank Lloyd Wright but it’s considered perverse to follow his diktats for interior design. “Overdetermination” is the enemy of economics because it’s the enemy -social- life, therefore of art. Underdetermination is chaos. We’re awash now in fans of one or the other.

Art is fiction, a place we go to think seriously about things while actually doing nothing. It’s a place to think about teleology while being as close as we ever get to being without a telos. It’s engagement by choice and at leisure. Design is estheticized functionalism glossed with science, a velvet glove for an iron fist. It’s not the possibility of moving in any direction, it’s an arrow, a path, that tries to amuse us while telling us where to go. Art for neoliberalism. We’ve back with Grant McCracken. again [link added]

Short opinion pieces. The crafted description of observed events.
Fiction or non-fiction? Parasitic or no?

In a Station of the Metro
The apparition of these faces in the crowd;
Petals on a wet, black bough.

The Garden
Like a skein of loose silk blown against a wall
She walks by the railing of a path in Kensington Gardens,
And she is dying piece-meal
of a sort of emotional anemia.

And round about there is a rabble
Of the filthy, sturdy, unkillable infants of the very poor.
They shall inherit the earth.

In her is the end of breeding.
Her boredom is exquisite and excessive.

She would like some one to speak to her,
And is almost afraid that I
will commit that indiscretion.

Searle, "Reiterating the Differences"

3. In what is more than simply a misreading of Austin, Derrida supposes that by analyzing serious speech acts before considering the parasitic cases, Austin has somehow denied the very possibility that expressions can be quoted. I find so many confusions in this argument of Derrida that I hardly know where to get started on it. To begin with, the phenomenon of citationality is not the same as the phenomenon of parasitic discourse. A man who composes a novel or a poem is not in general quoting anyone; [HURRY UP PLEASE IT'S TIME] and a man who says his lines on a stage while acting in a play while he is indeed repeating lines composed by someone else, is not in general quoting the lines. There is a basic difference in that in parasitic discourse the expressions are being used and not mentioned. [HURRY UP PLEASE IT'S TIME]

Sonny Rollins, tossing in a few bars of Easter Parade into Night in Tunisia at midnight on Easter morning is an act of quotation, citation, mentioning. O O O O that Shakespeherian Rag. Bad artists borrow; good artists steal. They don't make new things; they make things new. The pleasure felt by a sophisticated audience for philosophy as for music is in knowing the source and what's been done with it.

repeats of repeats of...

Aber etwas fehlt
Sitting in a bar reading Limited Inc.. One table away a young couple were facing a crisis. It would be hard to count the layers of falseness and dissembling, of performing for and lying to each other and themselves, of false confidence, feigned indifference, contempt and self-abasement, all as reflex. It was a less sophisticated version of Derrida and Searle. Ressentiment

A work of art is both fundamentally a thing unto itself—though affected by others and events—and a communicative act. The same was true of the couple's actions, as self-directed formalism and outward-directed performance. And most of the communication was in subtext. The spoken "I love you" was secondary to the unspoken, "I can walk away". And beneath that were all the communicated subtleties, if communicated is the right word, in gestures read by the audience but most likely not by the performers.

A novel is a thing crafted out of a plot, and judged as that. It's less an essay than a house. Language, as event and communication is an aspect of life. Philosophy and theology are parasitic on that. Literature, art, is both descriptive and formal. History, describing both art and the world, is observational and secular.

Derrida wants to replace the historian of art with the philosopher of art. Searle represents those who oppose history itself.
And we're suppose to choose one or the other.

J.L. Austin, Lecture I

Whatever we may think of any particular one of these views and suggestions, and however much we may deplore the initial confusion into which philosophical doctrine and method have been plunged, it cannot be doubted that they are producing a revolution in philosophy.

Lecture II

We were to consider, you will remember, some cases and senses (only some, Heaven help us!) in which to say something is to do something; or in which by saying or in saying something we are doing something. This topic is one development -there are many others- in the recent movement towards questioning an age-old assumption in philosophy- the assumption that to say something, at least in all cases worth considering, i.e. all cases considered, is always and simply to state something. This assumption is no doubt unconscious, no doubt is wrong, but it is wholly natural in philosophy apparently. We must learn to run before we can walk. If we never made mistakes how should we correct them?

Lecture III

So then we may seem to have armed ourselves with two shiny new concepts with which to crack the crib of Reality, or as it may be, of Confusion—two new keys in our hands, and of course, simultaneously two new skids under our feet. In philosophy, forearmed should be forewarned.

Ken Johnson on ‘Re-View: Onnasch Collection’

I want to protest. I think what happened with American and European art in the three or four decades after World War II was not a progressive shutting down of creative possibilities but a great opening up,...

The "opening up" was opening elsewhere.  An old girlfriend of mine taught me that the best way to read late Wittgenstein is to see him as ending where Proust began.

I hadn't read any Austin when I read Derrida and Searle.

update: or Dennett.

repeats

How can you say the cafe revolutionary represents the cafe more than the revolution? He doesn't talk about the cafe, so what relevance can it have to his ideas?

follow the link at the bottom of the page.

repeats

Ai Weiwei

Dropping a Han Dynasty Urn, 1995

Some of the smartest thinkers on problems at home and around the world are university professors, but most of them just don’t matter in today’s great debates.

The huffing and puffing in response to this by academics is as annoying as the piece itself. The older generation of "public intellectuals" were not all academics and those who were were not defined by academic status. Complaints about intellectuals retreating into the ivory tower are not requests for them to come back down from the mountain. Edmund Wilson and Irving Howe were critics, not professors, and certainly not professors of political "science". Chomsky's activism is the activism of a citizen. He's very specific in separating his politics from his day job (more academic public intellectuals here).

Academic discussion of politics as such is left to political scientists and experts in "foreign policy". It's nationalist by definition. The Kennedy school educates new generations of bureaucrats.  Academic leftism, the politics of theory, I've covered enough.  At CT, Rakesh Bhandari in a comment, without mentioning that the majority of posters are from the UK, adds that no one on the site's mentioned the death of Stuart Hall.

"Public Intellectual"

I've asked this before: What's a "private" intellectual?

idea | īˈdēə | noun

-A logic or process common enough in practice to be recognized and articulated in speech, at which time its usefulness begins to fade while becoming even more popular, out of enthusiasm for the new.
-What a description becomes when it's applied to something else.
-An unoriginal thought.

Ludlow again.
Leiter

Kristin Case, Prof. Ludlow's attorney, sent me the statement to which The Daily Northwestern article alludes. I post it below in its entirety, but have replaced the plaintiff's name with "P" for plaintiff.
...Ms. Case may be contacted at The Case Law Firm, LLC here in Chicago, 312-920-0400.

The perquisites of power.

the fish rots from the head

Leiter

And some philosophers think aesthetic judgments are not subjective!
The 1964 reaction to The Beatles. Just to be clear, I enjoy the Beatles and I don't think any of these folks are wrong (or right).

Both Plato and Sophocles wrote dialogues; their words and those of Nietzsche and Goethe describe and make manifest the central issues of their times and places. If they're read now by different audiences that's a matter of contemporary taste, not the words on the page. We order the world according to our preferences.

An old argument, rewritten in a recent note to an editor:

To understand the complexities of Velazquez' portraits of Philip IV, you need to stand in front of one. I like to use Velazquez because he's my favorite painter and because its so obvious that his beliefs and his art are in conflict. He was an arch defender of the divine right of kings but he can't help but paint his king as a nebbish. And his painting technique was a tour de force of open artifice. His highlights are flecks of paint that show themselves as that; they move back and forth from ephemeral -as image- to material in a way that's totally unsuited to absolutism. If his paint handing were rougher or smoother -either way- it would not have the same effect, but his brushstrokes function as fully and amazingly illusionistic while reminding you that's what they are. It's psychologically destabilizing. I like to say about Velazquez that he's the first painter to paint not the glory of kings but the need to believe in the glory of kings. His royal portraits are tragic, and also important for the study of the history of Europe.

Rembrandt,  Aristotle with a Bust of Homer, 1653, Metropolitan  Museum, NY

Charles Simic wasn't born in this country.

It took years of indifference and stupidity to make us as ignorant as we are today. Anyone who has taught college over the last forty years, as I have, can tell you how much less students coming out of high school know every year. At first it was shocking, but it no longer surprises any college instructor that the nice and eager young people enrolled in your classes have no ability to grasp most of the material being taught. Teaching American literature, as I have been doing, has become harder and harder in recent years, since the students read little literature before coming to college and often lack the most basic historical information about the period in which the novel or the poem was written, including what important ideas and issues occupied thinking people at the time.

"I'm not sure why people are surprised and even upset that some teenagers don't know who the hell bin Laden is."

repeats from 2008

Nov 24
Rules and Beer: Law is hard convention Convention is soft law

Between corporate and industrial culture and the cult of individual self-expression there's the culture of community, communication, and language. Nothing that's been made the same way for hundreds of years has actually been made the same way for hundreds of years; that applies to beer as much as law. It’s slow change. You put 20 people in a room you’ll get an argument. You put 3 people in a room followed by 3 more as the first ones leave and 3 more following again on and on for 500 years you might get something interesting, whether it’s or bread or beer or wine or cheese or Homer or the Bible.
Budweiser is not good beer. Microbrewers, by and large, miss the point. Of course they do, they’re beer geeks.

This is the critique from cultural “depth” which some conflate with mysticism or ‘spirituality.’ It’s simpler than that: subtlety takes time.

Nov 29
Time and Consensus
Marcella Hazan in the NY Times.

When my family and I ate out in the Italy of my youth and early decades of my marriage, we would look for any plain trattoria where we could find the kind of cooking that was closest to what my mother and father were putting on the table at home. The person making the meal may have been the owner or his wife or his mother, or someone working in total anonymity. He or she was never referred to as the chef, but as il cuoco or la cuoca, the cook.

This was the old world of Mediterranean family cooking, a world where satisfying flavors had been arrived at over time and by consensus. That world hasn’t disappeared, but it has receded, making room for a parallel world, one where food is often entertainment, spectacle, news, fashion, science, a world in which surprise — whether it’s on the plate or beyond it — is vital. This is the world of chefs.

There's also the subtlety of interpretation that accrues over time to objects or texts of less intrinsic interest. Religious relics and McGuffins, madeleines or urinals (Proust and Duchamp), engage time and range of reference. The references do the work.  And the best artists, like the best chefs -the best minds- all refer back to world of "cooks".

"It is no secret that contemporary philosophy is under the spell of the Other"

Discuss

From Leiter, again.  Peter Ludlow again.

Two months later, Slavin emailed the student, telling her that the university concluded the professor “engaged in unwelcome and inappropriate sexual advances” toward her. The director went on to say that the student was “incapacitated due to the heavy consumption of alcohol” purchased for her by the professor.

According to the suit, the Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences Dean’s Office was made aware of Slavin’s findings, saying they would work with that office on “implementing needed corrective and remedial actions,” the suit stated.

A committee established to decide what kind of disciplinary action should be taken against the professor determined he should be terminated, but “Northwestern ignored its own committee’s decision and recommendation and continues to employ [him] as a professor,” the suit claims.

The student said philosophy Prof. Peter Ludlow sexually assaulted her following a downtown Chicago art show the two attended together in February 2012. According to the suit, filed Monday, Ludlow bought the student alcohol and ignored her repeated requests to return to Evanston, taking her to his apartment where she lost consciousness. The student said she regained consciousness early the next morning in Ludlow’s bed.

The student is suing the University for the payment of all past and future medical bills and education expenses, reparation for emotional distress and appropriate remedial actions, according to the lawsuit. The lawsuit demands resolution through trial by jury.

"‘philosopher’ is an honorific term that we hand out to people whose thinking about foundational issues we admire and approve of. It’s like putting a gold star next to someone’s name. ...I gave myself the gold star."

"No baby... please... I understand you... you're a part of me! I have an extended mind!"

Colin McGinn was raised a Catholic. His arguments follow structures founded in Catholic doctrine: arguments concerning "truth" made from authority. His model is the model of ideal judgment. The same with the rest of them.

Subtext: As recently with Farrell, who couldn't see the meaning of an action that wasn't tied to the internal logic of its form. If I call your mother a whore, knowing that you'll take a swing at me and get thrown out of the game, the truth value of my statement is irrelevant. The statement had another form, the form of insult.

"The lawsuit demands resolution through trial by jury."
All people hate lawyers until they need one.

"Lawyers... are the rule of law." Lawyers, not judges, not philosophy professors.

...A felt need for meant entities may derive from an earlier failure to appreciate that meaning and reference are distinct. Once the theory of meaning is sharply separated from the theory of reference, it is a short step to recognizing as the business of the theory of meaning simply the synonymy of linguistic forms and the analyticity of statements; meanings themselves, as obscure intermediary entities, may well be abandoned.

No. Just no.

It's Rashomon, you idiots

repeats repeats repeats.
It didn't register that Ludlow writes under a pseudonym and is the founder of The Alphaville Herald
It just gets worse, and worse.

Futurism and Data Culture

"What is your secret? Tell me, Mr. Caution."
Men of my type will soon become extinct.
---

Why not?

The Blue Angel

Defendant denies that all of Plaintiffs communications with him were professional. While Defendant admits that some of Plaintiffs communications with him were professional, he affirmatively states that Plaintiff had several unprofessional communicusions with him including telling him Mai she was "real life-broke broke and second life broke," stating several tunes that she wanted to date him, and saying that she was "totally DTF" him which she explained meant "down to fuck"….

ANSWER: Defendant denies talking about his sea life and denies asking Plaintiff about hers. Defendant affirmatively states that Plaintiff told him that she wanted to date him and that when he raised a question shout their age difference she she told him that she had previously dated someone fourteen years older than her. Defendant admits that he told Plaintiff that he had dated one student at another university where he taught when he was younger but affirmatively states that he never violated any university policy in doing so. Defendant denies stating that he had slept with students at other schools….

ANSWER: Defendant denies kissing Plaintiff at the bar. Instead, Defendant states that Plaintiff leaned in and kissed him. Defendant admits that he did not initially pull away but…

It's tawdry and sad, and has no place in the discussion of philosophy if philosophy is designated by hard distinctions between serious and non-serious, or parasitic writing. If you don't make hard distinctions it's a comedy.

Aristophanes may or may not have got Socrates right in taking him to be a dangerous subversive, but Plato was certainly on Aristophanes’ side in thinking that a happy ending was possible only in a polity from which “sophists” were excluded. The difference is that Plato added to Aristophanes’ arsenal of satire, innuendo, drama, slapstick, and verbal pyrotechnics a highly developed variant of one of the sophists’ own weapons, ratiocination.

Who laughs at the the watchmen when the watchmen become voyeurs?

The first video is funny. The second is humorless and frankly tragic. [Justine Tunney, sitting on a bed, ranting about life]

Howard Cohen [archive.org]

Have I got stories for you!
I was there. In New York ad agencies during the Mad Men years of the ‘60s and glitz and glamour of the ‘70s.
I was there. At Woodstock and Fire Island when creativity was naked and so were we.
I was there. In LA, during the drug days and Hollywood haze of the ‘80s and ‘90s. And I’m still here, working with terrific people and loving this meshuggah business.
I’m Howie Cohen, the guy who wrote, “I can’t believe I ate the whole thing” and “Try it, you’ll like it” for Alka Seltzer – both in the Clio Hall of Fame.

The crew was celebrating the wrap of a commercial shoot in London. "There were 20 of us around the table and [director] Milos Forman ordered for everyone — chicken, steaks, lobster. I'm a nice Jewish kid from the Bronx, so I ate everything, until I couldn't fit one more thing in my body. I leaned back in my chair and said, 'I can't believe I ate the whole thing.' And my wife said, 'There's your next Alka-Seltzer commercial.'"

Justine Alexandra Roberts Tunney [original archive.org]

Software engineer & Champagne Tranarchist
Justine is…
Helping Google design and implement some Internet infrastructure.
Pivoting Occupy Wall Street for the American Fall of 2014: Retribution & Exit.
Convincing the tech industry to be more benevolent & less threatening.
Wondering if her CelebDial business will ever make money.

The Nation 

Justine Tunney works for Google. Every day that she feels like it, Tunney goes to a playgroundlike office in Chelsea in Manhattan and eats her meals from the free gourmet rooftop cafeteria. She does her job and little else. On the beach in Puerto Rico this summer, at the wedding of two fellow Occupy veterans, she was working so hard on an algorithm designed to improve cloud computing that she lost track of time and got a sunburn.

“They basically bought my soul,” she says. But Tunney doesn’t seem to mind. “Google is the one company I don’t hate. I think Google is actually doing things that are making the world a better place.”

[update: It makes sense she later ended up a fascist (use google).]
Another leader of OWS

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"this meshuggah business."
Irony is a form of self-awareness; it's a form of sociability. The other two in their narcissism manifest the self-blind collectivism of ants.


"What is your secret? Tell me, Mr. Caution."
"Something which never changes, day or night. The past represents its future. It advances in a straight line, yet it ends by coming full circle."

repeat

Richard Hofstadter, Anti-Intellectualism in American Life

The reciprocal relations of high and low, elite and popular, intellectual and not, or
the condescension of arrogant schoolmen and their students, of the best and the brightest.

The arts are Burkean.
---

Idaho. 1958


---
videos: Debussy plays Debussy, Golliwog's Cakewalk; Motörhead, 1916; The Original Stroll, a television dance show in Idaho in 1958.

Reading fiction as "fiction" is reading for plot. Books read for plot, fiction and non-fiction, are what you see by the checkout counter at the supermarket. The best of these books are read also as serious fiction and non-fiction is read, as form and observation of the world.

Language is formal structure and mimesis.

Any fiction worth reading seriously is not read seriously as "fiction". Any "non-fiction" worth reading seriously is read in the same way serious fiction is read. Both will be read as books. A "textbook" is not read as a book. It's read as a crutch.

The above continuing from previous posts, including Leiter's link to an interview with Philip Kitchner on philosophy of fiction and fiction as philosophy. Kitchner of course can only use the language that he knows, but change is change.

J.L. Austin on fiction: "These are aetiolations, parasitic uses, etc., various ‘non-serious’ and not full normal uses."

It really becomes clear that the relation of Modernism to philosophy was that Modernism as structure or formalism was an attempt to deal with the "parasitic" qualities of mimesis and fiction as forms of "un-truth".

"Plato, we know, looked back with nostalgia at the immobile schemata of Egyptian art."
Gombrich

And formal science looks back to Plato. All so obvious in retrospect.

But now I have to read Riegl, and Clark on Picasso.
Clark is right about the change, from haptic to optic, but he defends Picasso in decline, and misunderstands the work from the start. Picasso's greatest works—also Eliot and Duchamp—were brilliant descriptions of impotence and failure.

From haptic, to optic.
---

I was assuming something about Clark's arguments from what I'd heard. I was wrong.

Oxford Philosophy is Killing the World Part II
Farrell

there’s a quite important difference between saying something is questionably of any moral value, and saying that it’s immoral. My annoyance at the ASA statement is that it seems to me to be an empty gesture that implicitly congratulates itself (and its drafters) for taking a real stance, but is in fact entirely rhetorical – a kind of hier stehe ich, but without the stehe-ing. Obviously the proposed legislation in NYS, Maryland and Pennsylvania is far from rhetorical.

He really is an idiot.
If the "entirely rhetorical" gesture drew a "far from rhetorical" response, then it wasn't "entirely rhetorical", was it?
"Don't think of an elephant!"

My mother once defined communication as "two people looking at the same object". She didn't come up with the line; she didn't announce it as if it were an important observation, and when I first heard her say it I thought of it only as a tidy description of a truism, at most something I took for granted without thinking about it. I'd learned it as my mother had by immersion and osmosis. I'm amazed, more and more, at how much that culture is lost. My parents were at the tail end of a tradition that's now being less rediscovered than rebuilt almost from scratch.

My mother's one sentence response to Rawls was to say that he wasn't interested in people; he was interested in ideas. Reading J.L. Austin I realized he's not interested in communication; he's interested in language. I've made the arguments before, but the line is a tidy description.

Two by Leiter, reposted in order.

George Lakoff: the Right-Wing Wins Because of Oxford Philosophy
This is not a joke, he really said it:

[Liberals] don't understand their own moral system or the other guy's, they don't know what's at stake, they don't know about framing, they don't know about metaphors, they don't understand the extent to which emotion is rational, they don't understand how vital emotion is, they try to hide their emotion. They do everything wrong because they're miseducated. And they're proud of that miseducation. Oxford philosophy reigns supreme, right? Oxford philosophy is killing the world.

Columbia's Philip Kitcher interviewed...
...at 3AM, but not by Richard Marshall. He is mostly discussing his recent work on Thomas Mann.

"Experimental philosophy" is experimental psychology poached by Oxford philosophers desperate for something more solid, and Leiter used to brag that he didn't talk to people from comp lit departments.
Now he's linking to a discussion of fiction as philosophy.

Lakoff's puffery is annoying and his arguments are obvious, or should be.

The model of a critical art, in the sense both of Adorno critique and political performance (why Dukakis lost and Clinton won), is a model or weakness. Criticism is response and response qua response is passivity. The connection between wonkish liberalism and Kafka doesn't run only through Bentham but through the library, the world of books, while most life is in the street. The theory of politics is not the practice of it; the ironizing of authority is not the wielding of it. If your only touchstones are what you're responding to or rebelling against then you're defining yourself as living in someone else's shadow. Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery; the art of critique is minor art and the politics of critique is failure.

Revolution is not a value in itself, though it passed as one, and neither is science, though it too, etc...

"Are you now or have you ever been a member of the Nazi party?"
"A German state for a German people"

Boycotts are a form of discrimination. BDS stands for Boycott Disinvestment and Sanctions, the last being an expression of state power.

The Center for Constitutional Rights: The Legality of Academic Boycott: Frequently Asked Questions [PDF]

2. Does the academic boycott violate anti-discrimination laws? No.

Detractors of the academic boycott allege that singling out Israeli academic institutions amounts to anti-Semitism, that is, discrimination against Jewish people because of their religion or ethnic background. This allegation aims to deflect from the discrimination and racism that Israel practices by mislabeling those who advocate for justice for Palestinians as the offending parties. The academic boycott is politically motivated, targeting institutions. The individuals who could be affected by the boycott are those who directly represent Israeli state institutions in an official capacity. The boycott does not target institutions or individuals based on their Jewish identity or Israeli citizenship. To equate criticism of the Israeli state, or a boycott of Israeli state institutions, with anti-Semitism is as absurd as calling criticism of or sanctions against the Iranian government anti-Muslim or anti-Persian, and as illogical as classifying criticism of the Chinese occupation of Tibet as hateful against people of Chinese ethnicity. Common sense makes clear the distinction between anti-Jewish bias (based on the race, ethnicity or religious identity of Jewish people as individuals or as a group) and criticism of Israeli state institutions. The law also recognizes the distinction.

The law as mind-reader. It doesn't work. The problematics of liberals' fixation on their own original intent.

Crooked Timber

Anti-Boycott Bill Discussion Post
by Henry Farrell And Corey Robin On February 4, 2014

This post has been put up to allow commenters to engage in discussion on the academic freedom issues raised here. We ask commenters to debate the issues here, not there: the comments section for the original post is reserved for signatures to the letter.

The introduction to the linked post, also by Farrell and Robin.

Academics and commentators—including Crooked Timber bloggers—disagree over the American Studies Association’s decision to endorse an academic boycott of Israel. There should be far less disagreement over two bills recently proposed in New York’s and Maryland’s state legislatures. These bills prohibit colleges and universities from using state monies to fund faculty membership in—or travel to—academic organizations that boycott the institutions of another country. Designed to punish the ASA for taking the stance it has, these bills threaten the ability of scholars and scholarly associations to say controversial things in public debate. Because they sanction some speech on the basis of the content of that speech, they run afoul of the US First Amendment.

We write as two academics who disagree on the question of the ASA boycott. One of us is a firm supporter of the boycott who believes that, as part of the larger BDS movement, it has put the Israel-Palestine conflict back on the front burner, offering much needed strategic leverage to those who want to see the conflict justly settled. The other is highly skeptical that the ASA boycott is meaningful or effective, and views it as a tactically foolish and entirely symbolic gesture of questionable strategic and moral value.

This disagreement is real, but is not the issue that faces us today.

Henry Farrell, and Eric Rauchway on academic freedom, in 2008.

Farrell: I’ve suggested that academic freedom is a good thing on pragmatic grounds, but also made clear that it fundamentally depends on public willingness to delegate some degree of self-governance to the academy. If the public decides that academic freedom isn’t working out in terms of the goods it provides, then too bad for academic freedom. 

Rauchway:  Academic freedom predates free speech. Although Prussia gave constitutional protection to Lehrfreiheit in 1850 (“science and its teaching shall be free”) academic freedom generally does not enjoy legal protection outside of contractual guarantees; rather, it rests on the authority and ability of a community of competent scholars to police their own discourse and on the willingness of universities to affirm this authority and ability. ...

[Perhaps Bollinger] knows the history and sources of academic freedom, but he thinks it uncongenial to assert them in this anti-elitist day and age. 

Most of the authors at CT, European liberals, believe in the banning of political parties. They would certainly defend a blacklist of fascists. And Israel was founded on the logic of European nativism.

Meanwhile on Sunday, Israeli daily Maariv published an interview with Interior Minister Eli Yishai, in which he stated that most of the "Muslims that arrive here do not even believe that this country belongs to us, to the white man."

"I will continue the struggle until the end of my term, with no compramises [sic]," Yishai continued, stating that he would use "all the tools to expel the foreigners, until not one infiltrator remains."

Anyone defending the two state solution is defending ethnic separatism. Opponents of BDS should be forced to admit that's that they're doing.

The subtext of the debate in the US and UK is that the morality of Zionism is part of normative assumption. That's changing. Once you accept Zionism for what it is it becomes easier to see that Israeli policy not Palestinian "intransigence" has undermined any chance that the two state solution might succeed.

The one state solution was always the only model that fit the definition of a modern liberal state; the failure of liberals to recognize that fact is responsible more than anything for the last 50 years of conflict. If they had admitted that a Jewish state was both illiberal by definition and a practical necessity then liberals could have bargained from strength. Instead they defended it as liberal, encouraging the right wing to demand even more, leaving liberals to argue from weakness. And of course the opinions of the Palestinians themselves were ignored.  The Likudniks were never the main obstacle to peace. Reactionaries are predictable. Liberals should not be in love with their own brilliance.

"I can't imagine what this is like, but I love my husband. Without your son's heart he will die."
"Then he'll have to die."

Fiction deals with philosophical questions as such. Philosophy qua philosophy deals in fictional solutions.

1
Bhaskar Sunkara, editor and publisher of Hamas, author of Jeremy Lin Is Not Greedy, You're Just Stupid, [repeats], and now of , In defense of Pete Seeger, American Communist.

It’s not that Seeger did a lot of good despite his longtime ties to the Communist Party; he did a lot of good because he was a Communist.

Seeger was in the party for about 10 years, quitting in 1949.

"I read their [communists'] newspaper and there's occasionally some good stories there. And I read the Wall Street Journal and occasionally they have some good stories there. I wish I could get them both in the same room talking together."

Seeger documentary for PBS


Surfwise


The second film expands on the darker subtexts of the first and becomes tragic.

I've always hated Seeger with a passion, hated his singing and his smile. He crafted his voice to demonstrate his sincerity, and sincerity is affect. Commitment is gauged by action. But the fact remains that he was committed, using singing as a form of illustration. As a test, try stripping all political intention from him and his work and see what you end up with. There's something similar in Louis Armstrong's public persona later in life.  'Satchmo' became a facade, but he knew it as much as others did. That's what Billie Holiday meant when she said, "He Toms from the heart". Someone else described Armstrong as the saddest man in the world.

I've always thought of Seeger as shallow, but he took a stand. Others rely only on sincerity and hot air while committing to no action at all. To follow this you need to see the relation of Seeger and other post-war Modernists, whose formal rhetorics were just as hollow, but who were apolitical.

"...someday it will have to be told how 'anti-Stalinism' which started out more or less as 'Trotskyism' turned into art for art’s sake, and thereby cleared the way, heroically, for what was to come."

2

"James’s critical genius comes out most tellingly in his mastery over, his baffling escape from, Ideas; a mastery and an escape which are perhaps the last test of a superior intelligence. He had a mind so fine that no idea could violate it…. In England, ideas run wild and pasture on the emotions; instead of thinking with our feelings (a very different thing) we corrupt our feelings with ideas; we produce the public, the political, the emotional idea, evading sensation and thought…. Mr. Chesterton’s brain swarms with ideas; I see no evidence that it thinks. James in his novels is like the best French critics in maintaining a point of view, a view-point untouched by the parasite idea. He is the most intelligent man of his generation."

But
O O O O that Shakespeherian Rag—
It’s so elegant
So intelligent
“What shall I do now? What shall I do?”
“I shall rush out as I am, and walk the street
“With my hair down, so. What shall we do tomorrow?
“What shall we ever do?”

"This is a historic week because segregation on buses has now been declared unconstitutional. Within a few days the Supreme Court Mandate will reach Montgomery and you will be reboarding integrated buses. This places upon us all a tremendous responsibility of maintaining, in face of what could be some unpleasantness, a calm and loving dignity befitting good citizens and members of our Race. If there is violence in word or deed it must not be our people who commit it.
For your help and convenience the following suggestions are made. Will you read, study and memorize them so that our non-violent determination may not be endangered."

Politics is complex business. Clement Greenberg, T.S. Eliot, Pete Seeger and Tom Lehrer were Modernists. Martin Luther King was not. Louis Armstrong was not a Modernist and in a related sense neither were Eliot or Lehrer. Eliot and Lehrer are ironists, Greenberg, Seeger and King are not, though King would have understood and appreciated ironies in Armstrong that no one else above would catch, and the Letter from Birmingham Jail is dripping with irony, directed at the self-conscious, self-regarding sincerity of the men it was addressed to.

Eliot, Greenberg, and popular culture, here.
or take the slow route.

"cold war liberal"

Jack Balkin

I have posted my latest essay, Why are Americans Originalist?, on SSRN. It is an attempt to explain to non-Americans why originalism has such influence in American federal constitutional argument but lacks a similar degree of influence in the interpretation of the constitutions of other democracies, or even in the interpretation of the fifty American state constitutions. The answer is that originalism is a feature of American national culture, deeply connected to narratives of American national identity. Here is the abstract:

American originalism is primarily a nationalist idea. It arises from distinctive features of American cultural memory -- namely, that in popular imagination the American nation was created by Americans themselves through a self-conscious act of political revolution, and that the American nation, people, and constitution came into being more or less simultaneously through this initial act of self-creation. A similar story is not told in most other political cultures. This story has helped encourage Americans’ special veneration of the founding generation and particular figures within that generation (like George Washington and James Madison) as culture heroes.

...Americans use originalism as a political practice for critiquing the status quo (whether in a liberal or conservative direction) and arguing for change, sometimes quite radical. Appeals to origins serve as a precedent-breaking device -- they help justify a break from current practices by appealing to an even older tradition. This explains a little-understood fact about American originalism. The originators of originalism as a self-conscious approach to interpretation were not movement conservatives -- they were New Deal liberals. The increase in citations to originalist materials in Supreme Court opinions begins with Justice Hugo Black and the Warren Court. New Deal liberals committed to judicial restraint needed a way to justify exercising judicial review to protect individual rights. They turned to history to do so. Movement conservatives, who sought to break from liberal precedents, then flipped the political valence of originalism; they were so successful that originalism's origins as a liberal justificatory device have largely been forgotten.

Exceptionalism. As I've said before, conservatives assume original intent out of the past and liberals assume original intent going forward. Universalism means that others, in the present or the future, will or should see our ideas and actions as we see them. Our children will see us as we see ourselves.

We all become history, and historicized.  Americans prefer to live for the moment, and then generalize about it.

a repeat from 2009. seems apropos. those who don't know history, etc.
---

This smooth and easy assimilation of fact, this air of all-over sophistication, is what Americans have learned more and more to admire in business, in conversation, and on television quiz shows --whether the man in the dock is Charles Van Doren or the President of the United States being questioned mercilessly (and pointlessly) about everything from Laos to Tammany. The quiz show did not die out with the exposure that the contestants had been briefed; the candidates in the 1960 campaign were also briefed, as is the President of the United States today and the show goes on. If the reporters sometimes act as if they wanted to trip the President up, the President knows that he can impress the country by way of the reporters. This overall style, so much like the division of even the arts and sciences into departments of Time magazine became a "research" style among the military during the war, and it has now invaded the big universities and "scientific research and development:' It is our national style, intellect-wise. We now admire it --when it comes unaccompanied by personal stress. A recent article in a liberal weekly on "The Mind of John F. Kennedy" turns out to be an entirely admiring study of Kennedy's range as an administrator. This vocational or psychological use of the word "mind" is so typical of our time and place that it probably never even occurred to the author to extend the word to cover "beliefs." Instead we are told that Kennedy's "marshaling of related considerations" defines Kennedy's mind "as political in the most aflencompassing sense. The whole of politics. in other words is co such a mind a seamless fabric, in which a handshaking session with a delegation of women is in exercise directly related to hearing a report from a task force on Laos." And this ability to assimilate on the jump necessary quantities of fact, to get statements of a problem that carry "action consequences"--this is what we have come to value as the quality of intellectual all-roundedness or savvy.

Alfred Kazin, The President and Other Intellectuals. Most of the above appears in a note in Dwight Macdonald's essay The Triumph of the Fact.

Facts are not a value, but if you assume that the liberalism and liberal values of the American model are based on facts then American values are merely the natural result. "In fact", the relation of the individual to the collective in American liberal theory is a belief -no more, no less- and not one that bears much resemblance to actual social relations. The Scandinavian model is also a model of belief and Swedes acknowledge it as such. The American model, in the imagination of American intellectual technocrats, is not a model of belief but truth: of non-contradictory logic. This being the case intellectuals are able to think of themselves as mechanics.

The 'living tree' of constitutionalism or Catholic doctrine is a fact, not an opinion. It's a fact that the Catholic Church of AD 2009, 1955, 1823, 1664 and 1235 are not the same. An actual tree -coniferous, deciduous- is a non-contradictory thing but the 'living tree' of language is contradictory in essence. The naturalized epistemology predicated as continuous with the hard or formal sciences is founded on analogy rather than logic, and that analogy is quite obviously false.
American liberal technocratic 'instrumental' reason is founded on exceptionalism, defended as rationalism.
---
I forgot I'd linked to it recently

Clyde Haberman, interviewed in Haaretz

After a while it became clear to me, he adds drily, “that if I didn’t want to be accused of hating Israel, I should start every story with: ‘50 years after 6 million Jews died in the Holocaust, Israel yesterday did one thing or the other.’”

“Jews still don’t believe that the world won’t turn on them. It’s hardwired into their systems. They can’t accept that the Holocaust is a distant memory for most of the world’s population and they get upset when they are not perceived as perennial victims, even though they hardly look like victims anymore. But historical memory today is almost an oxymoron. People hardly remember the Vietnam War, and even 9/11 is a starting to be a fading memory for younger Americans.”

Haberman recounts how impressed he was by Yitzhak Rabin’s inaugural speech after his second election as prime minister in 1992, when he told the Knesset that Israelis “have to stop thinking that the whole world is against us." These words, Haberman notes, “were like a large gong for me”, and the phrase even made the front page of the New York Times. “It was such a dose of reality and such a refreshing change from Yitzhak Shamir, who kept insisting that the whole world was against us – all 5 billion of them.”

But that was a brief hiatus, I remind him, and it is Shamir’s view that has prevailed. “I know,” he sighs. “All there is today is ‘we're under siege, we’re under siege.’ Israel has built fences and barriers and walls all around it. It has basically built its own ghetto, its own Warsaw Ghetto, to keep everybody out.” To which he adds, almost instinctively: “I know I’m going to get into trouble over that.”

I have more sympathy for Jewish paranoia than Haberman does, but I'm less sympathetic than he is to the conquest of Palestine by Jews who after the Holocaust now call themselves proudly European and white.  Fascism begins in self-hatred. Right-wing Zionists are self-hating Jews, but Meir Kahane had advantages Louis Farrakhan didn't and could never have.

"But historical memory today is almost an oxymoron. People hardly remember the Vietnam War, and even 9/11 is a starting to be a fading memory for younger Americans."

repeats:

Duncan Black

I'm not sure why people are surprised and even upset that some teenagers don't know who the hell bin Laden is.
...The kids are fine. It's our elite overlords that are all screwed up.

As'ad AbuKhalil:

More students could name the three Kardashian sisters than name the Vice-president of the US in my American Government class (125 students).

---

"Right-wing Zionists are self-hating Jews" Rereading, years later: Zionism has always been predicated on self-hatred.  

Eric Alterman interviewed,  making standard conservative arguments.

What if the critique were that the magazine was not publishing enough black people writing about civil rights? Or enough women writing about abortion? Both, it seems, would be rather uncontroversial critiques in liberal circles. Would not Alterman himself critique a think tank hosting an all-white panel talking about the problems facing “urban America”?

“If the Brookings Institution were having a forum on urban America, would I insist that a black person be in there? No,” said Alterman. “I would insist that people there know what they’re talking about and have good evidence to support their arguments.”

Fox News could always find someone to provide an African-American stamp on a right-wing agenda, no doubt. But is there not something to be said for diversity? Even the hypothetical “best” white person with the most correct of political views has blind spots — and no amount of empathy can replace the experience of, say, growing up wealthy in the suburbs with growing up poor in the city.

The focus should be on views, not backgrounds, according to Alterman, as identities are not “useful signifiers when it comes to intellectual discourse.” Indeed, “I think they are reductive and a means of avoiding the issue. And there’s no better example than Israel-Palestine because of all the Jews who hate Israel and would like to see it disappear.”

Also this: “By essentializing Jewishness rather than a viewpoint, they are calling attention to a person’s identity…”

Zionism is a viewpoint relating to Jewish identity and those who disagree with Zionism should focus on the viewpoint not Jewish identity itself.  Zionists can call themselves Jews but anyone else who calls them Jews is an anti-Semite.

"I'm a Jew" - Kosher
"You're a Jew" - anti-Semitic
"I'm black."- Right on
"You're black." - Cracker motherfucker

Alterman contradicts himself. He opposes diversity but he's made the argument for it: people and groups can not only be spoken about or for, they need to speak and be heard. "Black" and "Jew"mean different things depending on the speaker. The perception of the audience is key.

And, as alway, the politics of the analytic philosophy of language sucks.

@Sarahcarr Cynical and brooding most of the day, but this has made me happy.

— arabist (@arabist) January 15, 2014

Nima Shirazi on Twitter

Biden's eulogy for Sharon never mentions Palestinians. Not even once. Nothing. All Israelis are assumed to be Jews.

Jason Stanley, and Vesla Weaver, a philosopher and a political scientist, a Jew, maybe two judging from photographs, both married to African Americans, in Stanley's care, first generation.  Weaver is co-author of  “Creating a New Racial Order: How Immigration, Multiracialism, Genomics, and the Young Can Remake Race in America”.  Stanley is from a family of refugees from Nazi Germany

The parallels and relevance to too obvious to ignore, but they did.

Is the United States a ‘Racial Democracy’?

Plato’s “Republic” is the wellspring from which all subsequent Western philosophy flows, and political philosophy is no exception. According to Plato, liberty is democracy’s greatest good; it is that which “in a democratic city you will hear … is the most precious of all possessions.” Subsequently, two notions of liberty emerged in the writings of democratic political philosophers. The dispute about which of these two notions of liberty is most central to human dignity is at the heart of Western philosophy. Both are central to American democracy. Indeed, it is best to think of these as two different aspects of the conception of liberty at the heart of American democracy, rather than distinct concepts.

The standard source of the distinction between two senses of “liberty” is a speech in 1819 by the great political theorist Benjamin Constant. The first, “the liberty of the ancients,” consists in having a voice into the policies and representatives that govern us. The second, “the liberty of the moderns,” is the right to pursue our private interests free from state oversight or control. Though the liberty of moderns is more familiar to Americans, it is in fact the liberty of the ancients that provides the fundamental justification for the central political ideals of the American Democratic tradition. For example, we have the freedom of speech so that we can express our interests and political views in deliberations about policies and choice of representatives.

Given the centrality of liberty to democracy, one way to assess the democratic health of a state is by the fairness of the laws governing its removal. The fairness of a system of justice is measured by the degree to which its laws are fairly and consistently applied across all citizens. In a fair system, a group is singled out for punishment only insofar as its propensity for unjustified violations of the laws demands. What we call a racial democracy is one that unfairly applies the laws governing the removal of liberty primarily to citizens of one race, thereby singling out its members as especially unworthy of liberty, the coin of human dignity. 

"Plato’s “Republic” is the wellspring from which all subsequent Western philosophy flows, and political philosophy is no exception. According to Plato, liberty is democracy’s greatest good"

Never trust a fascist for an honest description of democracy, but Stanley's a philosopher and Weaver's a political scientist, so they begin with what they know, with ideas not the facts, even the facts of democracy. There's no real discussion of the contradictions between the liberty of the "ancients" and "moderns" other than to acknowledge they exist.  I'd written there was no discussion "at all", and it's right there in the quote, but I was so shocked by the authors' blindness of the larger view of events I skipped right over it. The piece itself reads as if it were written in a bubble; what kind of imagination can be simultaneously so rigorous and so oblivious? That's a question Freud would ask, and Stanley's father. But Stanley has always been a proud expert, arguing from the modern definition of liberty; his universalism begins in individualism, the conscience of the individual imagination. The rest is lip service.

See also my argument with Eric Schliesser on the need for Israeli racial democracy, with a link to Jason Stanley's post on living in Germany as the heir of German Jews who fled the Nazis.

Stanley

...my own expected happy homecoming into German society wasn't necessarily working out as planned. One of the teachers at the Gymnasium told me that Heinrich Heine wasn't really a "German" poet, but rather was a "European" poet. My absurdly well-meaning and wonderful hostfather regularly repeated that "Deutschland ist kein Einwanderungsland" (which is, as Schneider points out, a common theme among Germans of a certain generation). Whenever I told people I was of German descent, they would argue with me -- then upon discovering that I was Jewish, would say "Oh, so you're not German, you're Jewish" (strangely, I never heard anyone say to someone, upon discovering that they were Christian, "Oh, so you're not German, you're Christian"). Among my German friends, there was a pervasive sense of the strangeness of other cultures, which alternately manifested itself as either irrational disdain or irrational admiration.

Schliesser

...as a German Jew living in the Netherlands and working in Belgium, I really do not need your lectures on these matters.

---
Stanley again, in The Boston Review 8/14. His ignorance of the history of Jewish self-definition as a people is strange.

See also Republicanism and Liberalism from 10/14

see also 1/15

Ariel Sharon was the son of Shmuel Scheinerman; Amiri Baraka was born LeRoi Jones. Uri Avnery was born Helmut Ostermann; Benjamin Netanyahu's father was born Benzion Mileikowsky. Louis Farrakhan was Louis Eugene Wolcott; Malcolm X was Malcolm Little; Muhammad Ali was Cassius Clay.  Martin David (Meir) Kahane passed, as "Michael King". The differences come after.

---

An update I forgot to make.

We are living in a time of exploding nationalisms. The blacks in America are the first to abjure the idea of assimilation, to realize the inherent lie in the concept of melting pot. Through black nationalism has developed a new black pride and hence the ticket to liberation

Today’s young American Jew is a good bit slower. He desperately wants assimilation: Jewishness embarrasses him. He finds the idea of Jewish nationalism, Israel not­ withstanding, laughable. The leftist Jewish student is today’s Uncle Tom.

My father's note: “To be read with the Devil’s Eye, especially those within The Movement, however tangentially. Consider the potentials for barbarism… ‘The movement as Primitive Culture.’ PRIMITIVE CULTURE TOWARDS RATIONAL CULTURE, which has never been tried, never been tried. TOO LATE.”

There is no "rational culture". Culture is rationalized, one way or another. My parents even as self-described and committed humanists were never able to see the anti-humanism at the heart of their own dreams.

COINTELPRO

On the night of the burglary my father left the car parked on the street in front of the house, with the keys in the mailbox. Later my parents stored some boxes in the basement. They didn't ask any questions. I didn't know about it till years later. They didn't tell me who did it, only that it should have been obvious: "Who do you think did it? It was the Christians!" Christians, and the odd secular Jew.

They were not kids acting on impulse; they were adults acting on principle. They weren't students; they were teachers. They were from an earlier generation.

"I happened to read recently a remark by the American nuclear physicist W. Davidson, who noted that the explosion of one hydrogen bomb releases a greater amount of energy than all the explosions set off by all countries in all wars known in the entire history of mankind. And he, apparently, is right," Khrushchev said. 

Reporters for the New York Times traced the quote to Dr. Davidon, and his family enjoyed the mention, even with the misspelled name, for years.

Seeking Justice: The Journey of John C. Raines A festschrift.

I think the last time I saw Bill Davidon was at my father's memorial service. My memories of all of them begin in nursery school. My parents' activities began in Berkeley in the late 50s.

The book that needs to written is on the generation between the old and new left, the generation that never joined the party, or the party.

"Everything that constrains a man, strengthens him." de Maistre

see previous. Gursky and Kubrick

I posted the video before. I'd forgotten it was in reference to Koons.

Varieties of mannerism and anti-humanism; a dark parodic and therefore "critical" but in the end reactionary reversal of the fantasies of the Enlightenment, fantasies which using historians' definition of humanism, were not themselves "humanist". Descartes was not the author of In Praise of Folly. etc., etc. The works themselves brilliant but brittle.

Andreas Gursky, Düsseldorf, Flughafen, 1984

Early works: Kubrick and Gursky; a clear parallel between where they started and what they became; from the observation of people to the observation of systems. One of the few photographs by Gursky where the people in the photograph share our space as observers. Before nihilism.
Is there another scene in Kubrick where we view an audience with such sympathy?
The singing at the end of Strangelove.
New tag: Gursky

Now one of two

I was putting together my crew and they brought me a man named Rolf, who was the guy who pulled the f—ing lever on the gas chamber. And I said the only way I ever allow him near me, no less interview him, would be if he understood that I am concerned about the accuracy of the film and it would be because I need some information. But I said to my production manager, “I’m not sure I can handle it.” After about six weeks of pretty good meditation, I talked to the guy. The question nobody could answer, that the victims couldn’t answer, was: Where were they [when they] were waiting for the ones ahead of them in the gas chambers? How long were they waiting? Where were they standing? Was there an adjacent room? Did they sit? What kind of time was involved? The torture here was waiting! And they couldn’t dull the sound effects, the screaming. Could I get that information from this man? I wanted to wear a mask so he wouldn’t know it was me. When he came into the office and sat down, I thought, This poor human being. I’m sitting there and it was five after nine at night by the time we were done talking and I was…undone. But he gave me the bottom of his f—ing soul! He wanted penance. I kept looking at his right hand. I was going to ask him which hand did you do it with? I couldn’t do it.

Whadaya know?

Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, Harvard Kennedy School
"Lessons from Libya: How Not to Intervene"

• The Conventional Wisdom Is Wrong. Libya's 2011 uprising was never peaceful, but instead was armed and violent from the start. Muammar al-Qaddafi did not target civilians or resort to indiscriminate force. Although inspired by humanitarian impulse, NATO's intervention did not aim mainly to protect civilians, but rather to overthrow Qaddafi's regime, even at the expense of increasing the harm to Libyans.
• The Intervention Backfired. NATO's action magnified the conflict's duration about sixfold and its death toll at least sevenfold, while also exacerbating human rights abuses, humanitarian suffering, Islamic radicalism, and weapons proliferation in Libya and its neighbors. If Libya was a "model intervention," then it was a model of failure.
• Three Lessons. First, beware rebel propaganda that seeks intervention by falsely crying genocide. Second, avoid intervening on humanitarian grounds in ways that reward rebels and thus endanger civilians, unless the state is already targeting noncombatants. Third, resist the tendency of humanitarian intervention to morph into regime change, which amplifies the risk to civilians.

etc.

It's been awhile. unfinished

and again, because they have a lot in common, not all of it good.

Drift

The Republican rejection of libertarianism. And why it probably won’t work. 

Libertarianism isn't all that conservative.
That's the argument former Bush Administration officials Mike Gerson and Pete Wehner offer in a new -- and important -- essay in National Affairs that posted today. Here's the key paragraph from that piece

Responsible, self-governing citizens do not grow wild like blackberries, which is why a conservative political philosophy cannot be reduced to untrammeled libertarianism. Citizens are cultivated by institutions: families, religious communities, neighborhoods, and nations. Parents and spouses, churches and synagogues, teachers and coaches, and the Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts are among the foremost shapers of citizens in our republic. But government has a necessary (if limited) role in reinforcing the social norms and expectations that make the work of these civil institutions both possible and easier. That role can involve everything from enforcing civil-rights laws, to saving the elderly from indigence, to restricting the availability of addictive substances.

Change a few of the secondary terms and it becomes the socialist argument against anarchism. Democracy is self-government of a free people. Individual rights serve the needs of self-goverment not of individuals as such. Freedom of inquiry does not imply freedom of acquisition and possession of material goods. etc. etc.