I almost forgot about this.

Europe's "Christian values" should be enshrined in a new version of the EU constitution, the German chancellor declared yesterday after meeting the Pope.

As Ed Koch said:  "Jesse Helms may hate the Jews, but he loves Israel."
Me. I like Jews just fine.

Palestinian Centre for Human Rights
Weekly Report: On Israeli Human Rights Violations in the Occupied Palestinian Territory. 17 - 23 August 2006

30 Palestinians, including 3 children, a mentally disabled young man and a woman, were killed by IOF.
20 of the victims were killed by IOF in al-Shojaeya neighborhood in Gaza City.
3 of the victims were extra-judicially executed by IOF in the West Bank.
52 Palestinian civilians, including 18 children and a woman, were wounded by the IOF gunfire.
IOF launched a series of air strikes on a number of houses in the Gaza Strip.
3 houses were destroyed in Gaza City and Jabalya.
IOF conducted 40 incursions into Palestinian communities in the West Bank, and invaded al-Shojaeya neighborhood in Gaza City.
IOF arrested 50 Palestinian civilians in the West Bank, including 6 children.
IOF arrested a member of the Palestinian Legislative Council in Ramallah.
IOF arrested 7 Palestinian civilians in the Gaza Strip.
IOF demolished 4 houses in Nablus.
IOF destroyed civilian property in al-Shojaeya neighborhood in Gaza City.
IOF have continued to impose a total siege on the OPT; IOF have imposed a tightened siege on the Gaza Strip and there have been shortages of foodstuffs and fuels; and IOF positioned at a various checkpoints in the West Bank arrested 5 Palestinian civilians.
IOF have continued to construct the Annexation Wall in the West Bank; they razed more areas of land in Hebron for this purpose.
Israeli settlers have continued attacks against Palestinian civilians and property in the OPT; settlers attacked Palestinian civilians and property in Hebron; and a Palestinian child was wounded in Beit Fourik village near Nablus

link from Helena Cobban

The Dead Marat (Magician), 2000, oil on canvas (two panels), total measurement 52" x 135"

Thom Merrick at Susanna Kulli.

Stuyvesant Town

Yes.
The teenager gets it.
a reminder

Radical Islamic Feminism:
“People mistake tradition for religion,” Ms. Kaldi said. “Men are always saying, ‘Women can’t do that because of religion,’ when in fact it is only tradition. It’s important for us to study so that we will know the difference.”

Another example: Morocco.

There's a history of women taking on male roles in modern religious revivals in tradionalist societies: a conservative community's response to modernity that engages modernity.
You could say there's a difference between the two examples above, since Syria is a secular state, but it's not a modern one, any more than Iran was under the Shah.

I hate progressives
It's a stupid fucking country.

The most enlightened most internationalist understanding that any politician in this country could ever hold would be a nationalist realism that nonetheless accepted the full moral equality of the citizens of other countries. The mixture of condescension and ignorance with which Americans respond to the rest of the world never ceases to amaze me.
I don't expect much from conservatives, but I'm ashamed for the liberals.

Other countries have traditions of self-mockery that include mockery of national characteristics, but "That's so American" seems a phrase only spoken by foreigners. "Democracy promotion" sounds like a couple of Jehovah's Witnesses knocking at my door; and I rebel against the self-serving condescension of the faithful.
I've had enough of of the Monroe Doctrine. I want democracy promoted in my own country. When this country becomes an example of what democracy should be, democracy will promote itself. In the meantime our pride goeth.

Internationalism is a personal choice. It's my choice. But it has never been the policy of a nation. To say that it is or ever has been the policy of the United States is to lie, and the world putside our borders is more than willing to say so.

Helena Cobban

If the US attacks Iran, the assholes I read everyday will be as responsible as anyone: from the Times to The American Prospect, to Starbucks.

The lunatics in Israel claim authority over the entire middle east, and they have the bomb.
The piece in the Times today was pathetic, though it contained the first mention of Savak I've read anywhere in the American press in years. Once in a blue moon I read the word Mossadegh.

I'm trying to imagine the educated few in this country who are proud to know the truth about the hostage crisis in '79: that it was the result of the US letting the Shah into the country. [the vast majority of the people in this country think the Iranians were merely in league with the devil.]
But to the rest of the world this was merely the last insult tossed by the US at the people of Iran. When was the last time I read anything that acknowledged that the students in Tehran had a point?

Iran offered years ago to negotiate a settlement that included Israeli nukes. It was rejected.

"SQUEAL 'N' DEAL 'JUNIOR' IS A RAT"
The Front page photo in the NY Post a couple of days ago had a photoshopped image of John Gotti Jr. with whiskers and a snout. It's Stop Snitchin' for white folks.
[update-they've expanded the archives]

The local Palestinian owned supermarket just spent a lot of money installing a new set of refrigerated shelves for fruit and vegetables. The manager said they were also getting more organic produce, since people had asked for it. He seemed proud. I asked him who was pushing for the organics, thinking it might be the manhattanites, though I doubted there were enough yet to drive a market. "No. It's what people want. Everybody wants organic. The immigrants want it." He shrugged: "I want it."
And this is the poorer part of the neighborhood. My block is playing catch-up.

I'm seeing more women in the neighborhood fully covered: Arab women in Abayas, and Bangladeshi women in plain green, but also in colorful silks. This summer on hot days I saw a lot of parasols, carried by women in Salwar Kameez and Dupatta (long scarf), that are not always so demure. I saw a teenage girl in Hijab and a T-shirt that said "Save a Horse, Ride a Cowboy." There was a big Bangladeshi exodus to Detroit a couple of years ago, but a new group has taken their place. The immigrants are holding on. The Brazilians, Mexicans and Ecuadorians are still coming. The Greeks rent but don't sell. Albanians and ex-Yugoslavs (no Serbs) are still here, as are the Spanish (Galician), Japanese, Filipino and on down the list.

What drives the neighborhood is not capitalism but trade. "Trade doesn't eat itself" as a friend says. The logic of capitalism is voracious. It can't stop. As one logic among others, it's constrained. But it can't be constrained by an idea or a plan. It can only be constrained by another need.

American political and economic theorists -across the political spectrum- pay no attention to psychology. They leave that to novelists and pop stars. Chomsky's a believer in some sort of "rational actor theory." Liberals pretend at least. They all follow some form or another of an individualist philosophy that must deny both psychology and culture in order to make any sense. It's either freedom or vulgar determinism; autonomous logic or voodoo tribalism, the shadows of which are used as decoration after it's been overcome. But we aren't defined or constrained by culture. Feh.
Everything begins with psychology, and the psychology of capitalism is changing.

Fucking vulgarian
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Previewing your Comment

The issue is not Marx but DeLong's professed relationship to language, which is not one of respect but fear.
Professor DeLong is afraid of subtext, like a man who doesn't drink because he's terrified of losing control. For every post entitled "Why Oh Why... Can't We Have a Better Press Corps / Are We Ruled By These Idiots?" there are examples that he doesn't link to for reasons not of logic but of bias. It's no sin: he's only human: every man likes to trust his own judgment. But DeLong wouldn't link to anything by Chomsky even if it was a chart at Rand. Sociology is welcome but Cultural Anthropology is off limits; and of course it's a truism -not contradicted here- that the facts of the situation in the middle east are seen more clearly by people in Europe and indeed the rest of the world than they are in this country.

DeLong's definition of moderation is that which has his stamp on it and hat's not logic that's psychology and sensibility. But again that's not a problem. What is a problem is the denial that sense as such even exists, or should exist.
After all these years, still the American delusion.
Why Oh Why Can't We Have a Better Press Corps?
How about a primer on the history of American meddling in Iran
Please?
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In related news:
stupid fucking idiot

note taking/posted elsewhere

In in a passage from one of the Five Lectures on Psychoanalysis Freud says that as the result of a successful treatment repression is replaced by 'a condemning judgment'. He doesn't explain the difference between the two. What's the difference between "I don't want to kill my father and sleep with my mother" and "I don't want to kill my father and sleep with my mother." Is the first, louder and more nervous? More declarative? More cocksure? I don't know but it's a question conceptualists can't answer.

Conceptualists don't/can't understand performance.

The mind of an Originalist.

Record keeping. Same line as the last post, but this from a comment (again) at Balkinization
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I have to complain, again, about the side effects of the tendency to naturalize discussions of social behavior and law. It's something that hangs over this discussion even if it is not its subject.

Professor Balkin seems unwilling or unable to make the case for the what almost any historian would claim as the logical basis for his or her chosen field: we can never know the past, but it's nonetheless our obligation to try.
To say that we have an obligation to argument and debate -as a lawyer's obligation is to his client and the court, and not to his beliefs- is not to say that we are not bound by the the text of a law or of the Constitution. Professor Balkin refers to the logic of text and principle, but principle is a weasel word and you can argue all you want but that won't change. If one wants to argue against the over-simple understanding of language that originalists defend, you have to be prepared to argue not only that such weasel words are inevitable -indeed that discussions of value are inevitable- but that our way of government is better served by them than not.

There will be cases when meanings will be stretched. Hasidic neighborhoods have miles of string tied to all the lampposts that are then run to each house so that families will be able to go outside their houses on the sabbath while still being within a symbolic 'home.' Is that following a law or breaking it?
There is no right answer. There is no naturalized epistemology of how we choose to define ourselves and our society.

Women were not fully vested participants in this country 200 years ago. It was not assumed that they were or needed to be capable of independence. Now whether some people like it or not, women need to look out for themselves as much as men do, and they need the protection of (or from) the law due every citizen. That is an argument from a principle in the Constitution, but it is not the only possible one.

The argument between those who would hold one interpretation over another is an argument not about law but how about we define ourselves, by reference to the words on a page. Protestants and Catholics define themselves in argument over the words in the Bible. Constitutional law is no different (and God should she exist has little to do with either). To refer to 'progress' and other buzzwords of naturalism does nothing but contribute to the weakening of democracy by allowing for the belief that the argument will and should someday end.
It won't and it shouldn't.
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"To refer to 'progress' and other buzzwords of naturalism does nothing but contribute to the weakening of democracy by allowing for the belief not only that this argument is the responsibility of experts, but also that it will and should someday end."

That's better

"The Mushy Middle"

What do we value?

How do we value it?

(and again).

Mainstream politically active liberals are beginning to understand or admit that people are tractable, and that it's a mistake to assume otherwise. But liberal technocrats are still pushing—or otherwise are forced to respond to—theories that if followed through to their conclusion would consider addiction and debilitating depression as natural and 'rational' responses to information or its lack.

The 'naturalization' of the discourse of law, politics, and even culture has resulted in the dumbing down of democracy to the level of polling and passivity. Intellectuals in the mold of Posner do not educate or explain—they have no interest in dumbing down their own discourse by dealing directly with the populace—they collate and presume. And if the first rule of intellectual life is to know oneself, that capacity is the first thing that's lost. The self-absorption of the logician is not too far from that of the autistic child staring at a spinning fan. If the logical system prevails over its creator, there is no need for self to be anything else but the system. Life becomes simple, and perverse.

The result of this definition of democracy and freedom is that in debates with moral conservatives who remain skeptical of modern liberties, liberal intellectuals have lost the ability to refer back to older less determinist and decidedly less vulgar definitions of and arguments for or concerned with freedom. Jack Balkin seems unwilling or unable to make the case for the philosophy that almost any historian would claim as the logical basis for his or her chosen field: "We can never know the past, but it's our obligation to try, and then to try again." From this comes an obligation to argument and debate, to the point that we've developed a legal system wherein a lawyer's obligation is to his client and the court, but not to his personal beliefs about his client's guilt or innocence. The past, like language, is collective. Add to this the general obligation we all have to reflect on what we value and why: to observe and examine not just others but ourselves and our assumptions. Every logic, every choice to follow a specific logic, has a foundation not in facts but in values. Law and Economics tries to render this discussion obsolete by pretense.

In the last century the words of the Constitution were twisted in the name of preserving what many believed and many still believe this country stands for. The process as a whole may have saved us from destruction. I would not want to be a black citizen of Alabama in this century if things had gone otherwise. But times have changed. Perhaps the pendulum will move back. Perhaps it should. But the questions are the same then as now. I think we'd be a lot better off if we stopped dividing the country between those who master abstract logic, often at the expense of any understanding of human behavior, and those who live their lives day to day but who are also capable of describing the stuff of life and of experience far beyond the capacity of an unimaginative Ph.D.

At the very least, common sense and simple logic will tell you that the brittle crystalline structures of academic discourse, the Weimarization of intellectual life, are not a sign of a healthy democracy.

Another one (from '04)
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Faith.

(We have long been uncertain whether or not we should print this article, which we found in an old book. Our respect for St. Peter's see restrained us. But some pious men having convinced us that Pope Alexander VI had nothing in common with St. Peter, we at last decided to bring this little piece into the light, without scruple.)

One day Prince Pico dell Mirandola met Pope Alexander VI at the house of the courtesan Emilia, while Lucretia, the holy father's daughter, was in childbed. No one in Rome knew who the child's father was -the Pope, or his son the Duke of Valentinois, or Lucretia's husband, the Duke of Aragon, who was supposed to be impotent. The conversation was at first very sprightly. Cardinal Bembo records a part of it.
"Little Pic" said the Pope, "who do you think is my grandson's father?"
"Your son in law, I imagine" answered Pic.
"Eh! how can you believe such nonsense?"
"I believe it through faith."
"But don't you know that an impotent man cannot have children?"
"Faith consists," returned Pic, "in believing things because they are impossible. And besides, the honor of your house demands that Lucretia's son shall not be considered the fruit of incest. You make me believe even more incomprehensible mysteries. Do I not have to believe that a serpent spoke -since when all men have been damned- that Balaam's she-ass also spoke very eloquently, and that the walls of Jericho fell at the sound of trumpets?" Pic then ran through a litany of all the admirable things he believed.
Alexander collapsed with laughter on his sofa.
"I believe all that stuff, just as you do," he said, "for I know that only by faith can I be saved, and that I shall not be saved by my works".
"Ah! Holy Father," said Pic, "you have need of neither works nor faith. They are good for poor profane people like us, but you who are God's regent on earth can believe and do whatever you choose. You have the keys of heaven, and there is no chance of St. Peter shutting the door in your face. But for myself, who am only a poor prince, I admit that I should need potent protection if I had slept with my daughter, and if I had used the stiletto and the cantarella as often as your Holiness."
Alexander could take a joke. "Let us talk seriously," he said to Prince della Mirandola. "Tell me what merit one can have in telling God that one is persuaded of things of which in fact one cannot be persuaded? What pleasure can that give God? Between ourselves, saying that one believes what is impossible to believe is lying"
Pico della Mirandola made a great sign of the cross. "Eh! God the father!" he cried. "May your Holiness pardon me, but you are not a Christian"
"No, by my faith," said the Pope.
"I thought as much" said Pico della Mirandola.

-Voltaire.

I just sent off a note to Brian Leiter, with whom I'm on good terms, in spite of everything, and tossed in a question, almost without thinking:
"Am I the only person alive arguing for craft as a methodology and a heuristic?"

That's pretty much it.

There may come a time in any state when it becomes a point of debate whether something as minor as forging a ration card is or is not "giving aid and comfort to the enemy" and therefore treasonous. If the President is charged with leading the country in this strange new kind of war, and some people call it that (though I don't), where is line that divides domestic and foreign policy? More specifically, since any line is artificial, where do we want to draw it? This becomes a discussion not of law but of values. It's bad enough we're already in the position of defending a secret court[!] against those who think it's an impediment to governmental authority.

The terms of debate need to be changed. The best defense we can mount of the Constitution at this point is to ask ourselves what it is we think it represents. This is a question for statesmen, not lawyers.*
And they seem to be in short supply.

*Philosophers seem to have lost interest.
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The above is in response to this, which I mentioned somewhere else and then forgot to post here. Posner is such a dumbfuck.